Ancient and old gods and heroes

kw: book reviews, fiction, fantasy, contemporary mythology, poetry

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" —Euripides.

I think we're all a little mad. Why else the intoxicating pull of tales of gods, demons and heroes; of titans and mad tyrants; of deals made with—or without—the Devil? It makes me think of Mao's aphorism on the Dragon: "You pray for the True Dragon to come/When the True Dragon comes, you don't like it" (my own translation of his overly-stylized Chinese).

Sonya Taaffe writes in Singing Innocence and Experience of modern lives colliding with the mythology of Greek and Jew. Orpheus, dismembered now a trilennium, sings still of Euridike; the Devil keeps a hard school (moreso than Franklin's "nature") and still takes the hindmost; a golem, Pinocchio-like, wonders about being human; a unicorn must still submit to an Innocent...but what if the hunters don't accompany her, and he moves in?

I'm reminded of a song by Terri Gibbs:

"Somebody's knockin', should I let him in?
Lord, it's the Devil, would you look at him!
I've heard about him, but I never dreamed
He'd have blue eyes and blue jeans..."

Ms Taaffe's summers on the dissected Maine coast, so like the island-studded Aegean, engendered a unique voice for the seacoast setting of most of her stories. I used to wonder why Greece and Rome had such similar mythologies (I once learned quite a long table of name correspondences: Zeus=Jove, Hera=Juno, Hermes=Mercury...). How the Greek island and seacoast culture could spawn myths so similar to those of the malarial, miasmal swamps that surrounded the "seven hills." Certainly the Norse myths suited their landscape, as the Hebrew myths and Kabbalah did theirs.

Then I learned that their old stories descended, through the Etruscans, from family legends of the exploits of Nimrod, his mother/consort Semiramis, and their offspring. The more I learn of mythologies in any culture, the themes are the same, and devolve to a single principle: Ask yourself, "If I had the power of a god, what would I do?" Answer: you'd behave very childishly, as do the gods of every myth system, and godlike emperors and dictators everywhere. Responsible behavior is found in myths only among mortals, and is darn rare even there.

So it is with the author's immortals the the mortals who encounter them. Capricious, amoral (or better, nonmoral), unheeding, planless. If you have forever, can deadlines (and how apt the term is!) matter? The mortals in such stories are young, young enough to think they'll live forever, which attitude I recognize in every teen (and all too many alleged adults) I know.

The themes are ageless, nothing new under the sun, as Solomon was not the first to note. The modern twist is often arresting, but what makes these stories and poems compelling is the style, the use of language, of a classicist learning to breathe new life into old themes. She succeeds.