And so the ‘God’ particle may have been discovered. Or not. Ancient Greeks would have thought it a waste of time, since the rational intellect could deal only with what was humanly intelligible, and gods barely fitted that category. Anyway, as the philosopher Heraclitus said, everything was full of gods. So why bother?
When the farmer-poet Hesiod described how the world began, there was only Chaos, ‘Emptiness’. Then Earth appeared, then the dark Underworld. Rather surprisingly, Eros, sexual desire, pops up next. It soon becomes clear why. These basic elements start producing other elements, some by mating, some not. But none would mate unless they felt the desire to. So Eros must be in there at the beginning. QED. Night and Day emerge, and Earth then bears Heaven to mate with herself. These produce Mountains, Nymphs, Sea, and assorted Giants. Meanwhile Night gets to work and produces among much else Doom, Fate, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Misery, Resentment, Deceit, Old Age. So abstracts were divinities too. Among all this mating, powerful deities emerge who fight between themselves for supremacy. The eventual winners are Zeus and the Olympian gods.
‘In the beginning God created …’. The Christian god remains outside the universe. For Greeks, divinities were created by the universe, through a process of mating, so the universe was one vast (un)happy, highly competitive family, divinity immanent in every aspect of it. There were gods of everything from natural features, like rivers, to human instincts, like sex. Indeed, the only being not created by this process was — man, formed out of earth and water. Even so, when Homer envisaged the Olympian gods at work among men, the heroes mingle easily with them, and are themselves described as ‘godlike’.
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