Hesiod
So this cat
Hesiod
wrote this book
Theogony
a really long time ago, all about the
origins and births and lifes and loves and stuff of the
various multifarous Gods and stuff.
And the stories in that book were sort of like this stuff
here, except for being written as like a long string
of differential equations, and for Hesiod not having
invented the Piña Colada yet, if you know what I mean.
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One of Hesiod's stories is about this girl, or
Goddess, named Slimtoes, who had the misfortune to be spotted by
Umeric, the God of Inadequate Self-Control, who being smitten with
her great beauty began to persue her hither and yon in the shape
of like a goat or something.
Running away from Umeric, Slimtoes came to the bank of a river,
in fact the same River that her father, the river god
Not-terribly-bright, was the god of.
She stopped at the bank of the river and raised her slim arms
imploringly, asking her father for aid.
As you might expect, the river god turned her into a tree of
some kind, which saved her from the goaty attentions of
Umeric, but was otherwise not particularly satisfactory.
Apparently he didn't turn her back later on, either.
This symbolizes the indifference of nature to human suffering.
In a related story, a human named
Arachne, famous thoughout the tiny archipelago of Greece
for her skill at looming, once boasted that she was a
better loomer than the Goddess Athena (or somebody)
herself.
Rather than instantly destroying Arachne with a crossbow,
Athena challenged her to a looming contest.
Athena's loomation was marvelous and divine and all, as
you'd expect; Arachne's was also incredibly skillful.
But while Athena had loomed the splendors of the Gods,
Arachne had loomed them as brawling bufoons, which was
about right really, and so Athena turned Arachne into
a spider so she could keep it up.
Which is why spiders do that, presumably.
This symbolizes poverty.
You know, I think all these symbolic stories
are really from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a bunch
of stories also written as a system of simultaneous
differential equations, all about stuff turning into
other stuff, not necessarily about the birth of the
Gods at all.
Theogony is probably about Chronos, or Timex,
the really old God who swallowed all of his chilren
(whole, apparently, both because it's less messy and
because it makes the rest of the story work), until
finally his wife (Gaia or somebody) got tired of that
and slipped him a rock (and some Piña Coladas) to
swallow instead, and farmed out the kid Zeus to some
kindly goat-people who raised him until he could
defeat Timex and become just like him.
This preceded American presidential campaigns
by a considerable period.
Athena, as I recall, was born out of
the head of Zeus, him perhaps having swallowed her mother
before she (Athena) was born. One shudders to think of
what became of the mother (hidden, it seems "beneath the
inward parts of Zeus"; eeewww!),
but Athena burst forth fully
grown and armored and stuff, and struck the ground on
a hilltop and a spring of cool fresh water appeared, and they
built a city around it and called it Athens.
Some author (Neal Stephenson, in Cryptonomicon?)
wrote deep and profound stuff about this recently, and
no doubt Hesiod wrote good stuff about it, too, which
you should be reading instead of this, surely.
So much for Hesiod and the births of
the Greek differential-equation Gods; see the links up
above.
The breeze through the windows is cold, the babies are
being put to bed, women of all ages are sitting by
lighted windows combing their hair.
There are Gods and Gods; much to be said about