Comment of the Day: Maynard Handley: Ancient Technologies of Organization and Mental Domination, Clerks, Linear B, and the Potnia of Athens: "I think this sort of theorizing about ancient religion is too much based on current monotheic religion which has a very strong us vs them (gods are VERY different from humans) post ~100CE or so vibe. The right way (IMHO) to think of ancient religion (and much of lived medieval European religion vis a vis saints) is that gods played the same role as celebrities in our time. They bigger, better, more outrageous than us. Some of us are lucky enough to be their hairdressers and pool cleaners, a few more maybe saw them one time on the street walking down Rodeo Drive, ad the rest of us have to make do with photos and whatever gossip is being reported right now...
...Celebrities are not expected to be especially rational or moral, or to carve up control of the universe in some scientific fashion. Sure, if you're interested in adopting kids Angelina Jolie is probably your go-to-girl, whereas if you're about famine somewhere-or-other Bono is your guy; but there are not precise lines of delineation. And if you want to be that guy, the school weirdo that no-one else understands, you can adopt Baudelaire, or Byron, as your totem.
Point is, within this context, the fluidity of ancient religion should make much more sense. You get a few stars, like Marilyn, who manage to persist for more than a generation, but there's a constant stream of new celebs. Most of them scratch only a temporary itch, they don't have the it-factor that has them persisting as a lived presence across generations—ut some do...
#shouldread
