Chaos, Earth & World: Looking at Greek Mythology with Fresh Eyes

Chaos, Earth & World: Looking at Greek Mythology with Fresh Eyes

With PhD. Carlos A. Segovia

Pt. 1: Humans, Gods & Titans Mirroring Each Other

What do you really know about the Greek gods and goddesses?
What if the purpose of the stories told about them was to make us think about ourselves?
What if they were to be, that is, the ever-living forces that make and unmake the worlds we live in?

To explore these questions, we will examine together and discuss:
several images taken from Ancient Greek architecture and statuary; and
several textual excerpts from Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, and Pindar.

And because the Greeks loved enigmas, we will focus on and try to decipher, more specifically:
a fragment by Heraclitus according to which gods and humans die each others’ lives and live each others’ deaths, plus a few verses by Pindar;
Apollo and Dionysus’s single sanctuary at Delphi, from which each one withdraws, however, depending on the time of the year;
a goddess’s cult at Eleusis on life’s limitlessness and the stress of Apollo’s oracle on life’s limit;
Gaia’s double joy, when she feels her body through the sound of Dionysus’s flutes and the roar of lions and wolves, and when she feels instead sung by Apollo’s Muses;
the relation between Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, who can be said to be one and many;
the difference between Olympians and Titans, world and proto-world.

0. Introduction: eyes through which we gaze and through which we are seen
1. Mortals and immortals in the mirror of each other
2. Apollo and Dionysus, or life’s two senses
3. The goddesses and the oracle: Eleusis and Delphi
4. Of wolves and Muses: Gaia’s double joy
5. Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, or how we become what we are
6. Olympians and Titans, world and proto-world

Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent British-born, Spanish contemporary philosopher and diagrammatic artist currently based in Berlin and working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology.

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