A remarkable pattern runs throughout the Bible of the subverting of the normal line of succession, and its significance. The pastoral imagery of sheep and shepherds in the earlier books of the Bible, and the imagery of animal sacrifice, which we struggle to understand.

The heroic tradition tends to be tragic, its heroes ending in a downfall that is part of the greatness. The Bible is a divine comedy, and its figures are unheroic, often underdog figures. Their God is an invisible Trickster God who subverts the rules and champions those who lack power. Like all Tricksters, he can be troubling in his defiance of conventional morality.

The later exploits of Theseus after the Minotaur, featuring trouble with a succession of women. The Bible distrusts the heroic, which is human pride. Instead of the heroic individualist, the Bible values faith and loyalty to the real hero who achieves the happy ending: God himself.

The tales of the earlier generation of heroes are less realistic and closer to myth and folktale than those of the Trojan generation of heroes. The tragic life and death of Herakles, yet his double fate, taken up to Mt. Olympus. Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Daedalus and Icarus.

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The two generations of Greek heroes. The Trojan War heroes look back, in Homer and elsewhere, to an earlier, greater generation of heroes. The comic or happy-ending myth of Perseus, a Trickster hero. The tragic story of Herakles or Hercules.

There are many hero myths the world over, but they tend to share common features. In Greek mythology and epic, there was an earlier, greater generation of heroes before the Trojan War heroes. The exploits of Perseus, the first of these.

The warrior hero is only one type of hero, one that some people dislike. But historically there have been other models of the heroic: spiritual heroes, romantic heroes, artistic heroes. The tension between the elegiac view that the age of heroes is past and a sense of the heroic as an always-possible idea.

The Bible (unlike medieval Christianity) is not obsessed with sexual sin. The worst sin in the Bible is “idolatry,” which really means the worship of power instead of love. This is unfortunately symbolized by a female figure, the harlot. A typology of female figures in the Bible: ideal, fallen but redeemable, and demonic.

Ovid explores the feminine psychology of love. Loss of the mother in the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Female narcissism. Women alone: Artemis, Diana, the Amazons. Incestuous love: Myrrha seducing her father.

A typology of human erotic psychology in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The feminine male, including the feminine gay male: Adonis, Orpheus (after Eurydice), Ganymede, Hyacinthus. Self-love: Narcissus. Feminine psychology: the mother-daughter relationship. Demeter and Persephone.