Posts

Orphic Theogony: Thanes and the Great Cosmic Egg

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While Hesiod’ Theogony remains the standard, orthodox version of theogony (i.e. the story of the origin and genealogy of the gods) to the ancient Greeks, there exists an alternate tradition attributed to pseudo-historical and somewhat mythical…

Classic Hellenic Theogony: Chaos, Chronos and Eros

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One of the nice things that you found as you studied more advanced civilizations, as you got further into the first millennium BCE, you had better material and source texts to work with.  You no longer had to rely on texts and tablets that…

From Language to Writing: The Dawn of History

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The development of alphabet based language systems in general, a development that occurs in the Mediterranean at around the end of the second millennium BCE or so, represents a major evolution in the history of mankind.  It’s invention, if…

Plato’s Metaphysics: Being and Becoming

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Perhaps Plato’s greatest contribution to Western philosophy is the idealism embedded in his Theory of Forms, which in essence breaks down existence itself as not only a physical world of inanimate and animate objects, but a theory of knowledge…

Orpheus and Dionysus: The Mystery Cults of Ancient Greece

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While Hesiod’ Theogony remains the standard, orthodox version of Theogony, the origin and genealogy of the gods, from Greek antiquity, there exists an alternate tradition attributed to pseudo-historical and somewhat mythical figure of Orpheus,…

The Theogony of Hesiod: Order (Cronos) from Chaos

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One of the nice things that you found as you studied more advanced civilizations, as you got further into the first millennium BCE, you had better material and source texts to work with.  You no longer had to rely on texts and tablets that…

Creation Mythology in Antiquity: Order out of Chaos

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Introduction: Creation Myths in Antiquity Any cursory study of Egyptian and Sumer-Babylonian creation mythology yielded parallels and similarities, but was much less clear and open to debate was whether or not these similarities, these mythemes…

Egyptian Mythology: The Bedrock of Western Theology

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Judaism and Zoroastrianism clearly represented some of the earliest forms of monotheism in the civilized world, and both faiths had their respective prophets which each set of followers believed had had their respective laws, or truths, handed…