It’s time we talked about Uranus. It’s not easy to bring up Uranus, but Uranus is an important topic, more than you realize. No, no, not the planet. I mean Uranus. I’m referring to the god of Greek mythology, also known as Father Sky, born out of Chaos by Gaia, Mother Earth. He’s one of the top gods of the lower-case ”g” variety.
The greatest coincidence in word history for any eight year old boy is the collision of modern English with the name of this Greek god, Uranus. By sheer passage of time and happenstance of language, a child can mock and blaspheme a word that the ancient Greeks thought held power. Uranus wasn’t always a funny word. There was a time when the word was spoken with seriousness, as Uranus and his offspring provided meaning in the ancient world. That’s where we’re going in this multi-part episode.
I’m not sure how many people know the story of Uranus. He is also called Ouranos, which is not nearly as funny, but I’m going to switch to using that version now, so I can shove off from the dock of toilet humor before this turns into Captain Underpants fan fiction.
An interesting thing about mythological systems is the order of how creation happened, or what came first. In Greek mythology, as written by Hesiod, the order of creation goes like this: Chaos was the first thing to exist. Followed by Earth (Gaia), then Tartarus (Underworld/Hell), then Love (Eros), and only after all that do we get to Heaven with Father Sky (Ouranos).
So the God of heaven, Ouranos, is the fifth thing to come into existence. Notice that this mythology does not have a pre-existing God. Ouranos is fifth so he didn’t even medal in this contest, or get to stand on the podium. Chaos and the Earth were first and they somehow begat the Heavens. This order of “begetting” is important.
I know what you’re thinking. This probably seems rather unimportant. It certainly did to me. After all there are many world mythology systems. Osiris in Egypt arrives in a similar path. Often the primordial first gods of other mythological systems arrive in a similar pattern.
When I read this years ago, I marveled mostly at how similar concepts seemed to crossover with the creation story of Genesis. In particular, the idea of chaos stood out. As I read more myths, the origin stories use of this idea “chaos” continued to appear and it fascinated me, but led me down a classic path of doubt where I began to see all religions as being the same thing with different names, different recipes of formless chaos mixed with different characters. There is always a flood story, too, in many cultures’ mythology. So like many people exploring our past and origin stories, I came to believe that various cultures arrived at a similar, solid story that satisfied our searching hearts and minds. This pulled me toward classrooms instead of churches, as the project became comparing religions, looking for parallels to explain away the truth claims, rather than looking closely at what the truth claims are saying.
After enough nights of looking up at the stars and wondering, I imagined the ancient peoples found their way to an origin story that helped them sleep at night. I recall doing this myself, leaning on the hood of a car and smoking cigarettes with friends, staring into the Milky Way on humid summer nights. Between drags, we would ponder the depths of the sky, just like any ancient person might. Underneath the billions of distant fiery stars, the cherry red end of the Marlboro would burn brighter than them all, and sooner or later someone would bring up the fact that staring into space makes us seem small, or better yet, “You ever wonder what’s out there?” or worse, “You ever wonder what the purpose of all this is?” That to me seems like the perfect leading question into the beginning of myth. Rather than dig too deep though, we’d move on to talk about something else, usually girls we liked, which was at least a topic closer to earth.
Once I started reading the old stories, perhaps made up by ancient smokers laying on the hood of their chariots, I started to see a remarkable similarity in the stories around the world. So I thought it was all quite simple. We just needed a story to make sense of the unknown.
But as I returned later in life to those stories, some things began to stand out that seemed insignificant as a teenager. Having decided that the stories were nothing more than entertaining fairy tales from ignorant bushwhacking cavemen, I ignored the fact that these stories were told over and over again for thousands of years and these stories did not provide mere entertainment, but actually formed the rock of meaning in their lives. These stories attempted to give people something to stand on and make sense of their thoughts when they peered out onto the vast ocean, or looked into a gaping night sky, or survived a howling storm, or mourned the death of a child.
These stories had more depth and meaning to them than we tend to understand, because we consider our ancestors to be simpletons, at least until the Enlightenment. Many of us, including me, think that our current generation is the only one that is finally onto the truth. We still have origin stories, like the Big Bang Theory, which seems to be the most solid model that science has found. Science is always trying to chase down new origin stories, like the multiverse, or the idea that we live in a computer simulation like The Matrix. In essence, we are still staring into the sky and wondering the same questions, making us not all that different than the ancient storytellers.
The story of Ouranos being born out of Chaos, however, stopped me in my tracks one day, because I realized how different Hesiod’s Greek creation story actually is from the book of Genesis.
As usual, I’m late to the game. I don’t think I’ve kicked over any new rocks and found treasure but this struck me as significant. The key difference between the Greek story of creation and the Genesis story of creation is what came first. In the Greek story, it’s Chaos. In Genesis, it’s God.
I passed over this various times without thinking it mattered, but it does, because the root of the origin that the universe grows out of results in a different path. The order matters a great deal. If God was made, there is always the question of something before God. If God was first and made everything, including the chaos, then God is the final stop for all questions of existence, meaning, understanding, and purpose in this world. If God is first, then he is the answer to all questions. The buck stops with God, so to speak.
The order of which came first is critical, but so is the life of Ouranos.
Ouranos did not have omnipotent power. Nor did Gaia. Nor did Chaos, or Eros, or Tartarus. None of these gods were omnipotent. Ouranos is treated as the top dog, but he suffers defeat by his own children. He could not withstand a rebellion and is toppled by sub-gods. Ouranos is sat on the bench. A new god, in this case his son Cronus (or Saturn), takes over. The idea of an infallible, omnipotent god fades, because if Father Sky can be beaten, then so can the new god.
Again, you may just hear these stories and think this is minor, that it’s not a big deal, that it has no impact on our lives today, and you will move on. You may think these are just stories like “How the Tiger Got Its Stripes” but they are not. These are much bigger stories because they are foundational for the meaning of life. How the tiger got its stripes doesn’t affect how you feel when you lay back and look at the stars. But if you live in a world where chaos spawned the gods, instead of an omnipotent God creating order out of chaos, the foundation you build your life upon will lead to different patterns of living.
I think we naturally want to respond to these ancient myths like silly fables, like those of Rudyard Kipling or the Brothers Grimm. These old stories seem so distant from us, and even childish, but I think we are fooled about our level of sophistication by our indoor plumbing and iPhones. We are not unlike the ancient storytellers nearly as much as we think, and even the simple fables by Kipling and Grimm and Aesop have far more depth than we’d like to think.
The story of the Bible is different from that of mythology, and it’s also unlike any fable. Why? Because of the origin story. God exists first, and nothing defeats God. It’s actually quite boring in terms of drama, which is why studying mythology is fun. There are more characters, more variety, there’s love, there’s violence, treachery…it’s like the Sopranos or Game of Thrones.
Since the one God of the Bible never suffers defeat, there is never a power struggle at the top. There is a rebellion, but it is squashed and we hear about it only briefly. The books of Ezekial and Isaiah and Revelation discuss this rebellion a bit, but God is never defeated, and seems to never have been in any real danger of defeat. Why? Because he is the omnipotent creator God who created everything out of nothing. He brought all order to the chaos, doing so by his voice alone, and of course if he wanted to he could speak and destroy as well. God created the earth and everything else, and this is unlike the Sumerian, Greek, or Egyptian myths. The famous opening line of the Bible says it best:
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters...” (Gen 1)
God is first, not created from something prior to him. God creates the heavens and earth out of nothing (also called ex nihilo, to sound fancy). The Greeks have it the opposite way. So do the Egyptians and Babylonians, as the gods are born out of chaos. The God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is not born. He just is. He is existence itself. This is why when Moses asks for God’s name, the answer is, “I AM.” There is no name, because he is being itself.
The funny thing about this is that I felt drawn into the Greek and Egyptian and Norse mythologies because of the characters and the conflicts. For a long time I thought the book of Genesis was boring because it lacked an exciting storyline like other mythological hierarchies, but there is a reason the book of Genesis doesn’t read like the Game of Thrones mythologies of the Greeks. The reason is that the rebellion is smashed. In the Bible, there’s no underdog upset. You might say that Cronus doesn’t win. Why? Well, the sub-gods don’t win, because they were never born. They don’t exist. Whatever rebellion happened, it’s over. God has no problem defeating it. We move on as if God had swatted a mosquito. The rebellion seems more like a nuisance event among God’s created beings, the angels, than something he is ever concerned about.
The great image of this is that God is like an artist, and the characters in the painting or book may attack one another, but they cannot attack the creator, because the creator is not in the painting or book. He’s outside of it, he’s bigger than the work of art. The example I’ve heard told is that you don’t see Shakespeare show up in one of his plays. Macbeth can’t kill Shakespeare, because Macbeth is a creation, not the creator. Macbeth cannot even fathom Shakespeare, let alone attack him. That’s like us with the one God. Fortunately, we are more than words on paper, so we can see hints and breadcrumbs that God has laid down for us, which is more than Macbeth could ever do. We also get to make choices, and Macbeth is stuck.
Rather than disturb God, the angels squash the rebellion. They remove the disgruntled leader, the shiny one, along with his other rebellious snaky friends. The rebels are heaved off the deck of heaven while God relaxes on the patio with some iced tea.
And this, finally, is what I want to discuss in this episode.
Cultures all have a creation story, and ancient mythologies also have a rebellion story among the gods. However, the order of creation is not the same, nor is the result of the rebellion, and these two things make a difference in how you see and interact with the world and other people. These foundational things can change how you find meaning in the world and how you explain events that happen in the world.
There is line from Jesus that is jarring in Luke 12, because only an actual divine being could even say these words: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” So there is a rebellion, but it’s over.
Nothing happened to God when the rebellion occurred. He is still the Most High God, the only God with any power. Now consider what happens to Ouranos in Greek mythology:
Uranus (Ouranos) was Father Sky, the Ancient Greek personification of the heavens and, for a while, the ruler of the known universe. Fatherless, he was conceived by Gaea alone, with whom he formed the primordial couple, thus becoming an ancestor of almost all Greek gods. However, he was a cruel husband, and he didn’t allow any of his children to leave the womb of their mother, which eventually led to a rebellion and his demise at the hands of his son, Cronus.
What is interesting is that Ouranos is mentioned as the ruler of the universe, before we was replaced by sub-deities. His own children replace him. This is common plot in myths. In most mythologies, an initial god, seemingly all-powerful, has his throne usurped by a more youthful and virile god, proving that he never was all-powerful. This is exactly what does not happen in the Old Testament.
Let’s just walk this path quick so we can jump ahead to Zeus and the time of Caesar, when Jesus walked the earth.
The pagan stories of a higher god being replaced by the other gods is a common one. Ouranos is overthrown by Cronus (a.k.a Saturn). In turn, Cronus is eventually overtaken by one of his sons, Zeus. We all know Zeus as the god who threw lightning bolts and acted like the Harvey Weinstein of Mount Olympus. When the Greek epics are written in the heroic age, Zeus is the ruler, and his children rule the cities of mankind (Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Athena, etc). In other words, full-blast polytheism is in place, and the old primordial gods are all on the bench. Ouranos is dead or impotent or just missing in action. A similar story happens in the Sumerian stories with Anu and in the Egyptian stories with Osiris. They get toppled in a coup.
Why am I telling you this? Why on earth do I spend any time thinking of this?
In the story of Greek mythology, the portrayal of the overthrow of the elder gods by Zeus reads as a kind of progress. Zeus’s victory reads like a good thing. The successful rebellion of Zeus reads like a freedom-fighter story, like a Braveheart of the heavens, where William Wallace overthrows the the evil Edward the Longshanks. There’s a sense of propaganda in the stories, and obviously you can argue that for the Bible as well, as it’s advocating for the one God, and we’ll go into this shortly.
The gods of myth are seen as heroic. Some, like Hercules, are even called heroes, so of course the rebellion that brought the heroes must have been a righteous act. Heroes are to be worshiped because they are righteous.
But there is a story in here about the gods and heroes that is easily missed amid the victory champagne and backslapping hoopla. The ancient people, somewhere along the way, seem to have changed from worshiping one God to worshiping many gods. This is the opposite of the story of Abraham and his descendants, because they are going from many gods back to the one God.
This results in a major issue and fundamental discrepancy between cultures. To this day it impacts individual and national interactions. The difference is staring us in the face through the stories of the cultures themselves. The defeat of the rebellion makes the original God all-powerful for Jews and Christians. Conversely, the success of the rebellion in other mythologies makes the original God or gods weak.
In the case of Jews and Christians, this belief in one undefeated true God results in a different morality and expectations for life and the afterlife than that of the defeatable Ouranos.
Once I realized this, much of the Christian story started to fall into place and make sense, even the difficult parts.
The rebellion of the gods is actually a rebellion of the people, because the moment the people kill off the creator God in their stories, then you have a vacuum of meaning that must be filled with a sub-story. The lower gods are inventions, stories to explain away the uncertainties and unknowns of life. The reason we shrug off myth today is because its so apparent that these gods are invented. A child who laughs at the word “Uranus” doesn’t concern us, because we know that the myth was just a powerless invention of the past, like Zeus or any other deity. Uranus is a joke today, just like Zeus, because they never had any power to begin with.
When we kill the idea of “one God,” humans get creative. We pull the idea of god close to us, just like the people were attempting to do in the Tower of Babel. They wanted to reach god, but what they really wanted, the real goal, was to become gods. They wanted to make the one true God serve man, and if that was not possible, then they would make new gods. And that is what happened. It’s what happens today, in more subtle ways, less obvious ways.
When those building the Tower of Babel could not bring the Most High God down to the people, God “scattered” the people. Another way of saying this is that when they failed to control the one God, they withdrew from God and invented their own gods.
The reason why the Tower of Babel failed is not because of engineering limitations. The whole “tower” idea of a metaphor, but the meaning of the story is an explanation of how humans rejected the idea of a single God to rule them all.
The problem for people was that God doesn’t bow to human will. He carries out his will. Being human, that’s not a satisfactory answer to us. Thus, learning that we could not become God or make him do our will, we created new gods, ones that serve us. These gods don’t care what is in our heart. No, these gods only want sacrifice and we want control.
The problem with one God, with only one, is that not everyone can get what they want. If the one God made everyone happy, he would be a constant contradiction. Consider it this way: if two children are arguing over the same cookie, only one can eat it. Both cannot eat the cookie. They could split the cookie, but let’s just say it’s a small cookie, or if you want, change it to a paper dollar bill, which is something that cannot be split apart.
One will leave happy and the other will leave pouting. To take this into religious terms, one will win and presume God loves him. The other will lose and assume that God loathes him or has cursed him. One will feel righteous. One will feel victimized and abandoned. And both are wrong.
The history of the Yankees and Red Sox franchises illustrate this, as Boston fans assumed for 86 years that the team was under the “curse of the Bambino,” as it was believed that the baseball gods had smiled on New York and abandoned Boston after the trade of Babe Ruth in 1920. The Yankees received the cookie; Boston received a “curse.” While this was mostly considered a joke, people believed it and even asked modern witches to reverse the curse, and I would guess millions of prayers went up to God from Boston in those years. If any franchise appears to have been chosen, it is the New York Yankees, which is why many fans across America loathe the Yankees, because the Yankees have won the cookie (known as the World Series) twenty-seven times, with the next closest team, the St. Louis Cardinals, being at a mere eleven cookies.
We spend a great deal of time praying for sports teams to win, not unlike the ancient prayers and sacrifices in cities where they worshiped gods and goddesses. Interestingly enough, the ancient gods often had a mascot or animal representation like our sports teams do. Since sports is a way of life in America, when my team wins, I feel satisfied, as if the world is somehow right and just, as if God had directed things correctly. But that is not how I am supposed to understand the world if I believe in one God. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. This is how pagan gods worked, where they received prayers and answered them.
God’s will is not like this. His will is done regardless of which team wins, and it has nothing to do with my feelings on the matter. Whether I get the cookie or someone else gets the cookie, God’s will is done. That’s the way to understand the world and universe that has only one God. The correct response is to give thanks whether you receive the cookie or not, which can be difficult to do but is critical in understanding how the one God differs from the many gods.
To praise God for getting what I want is to slip into a worship of the slot-machine God, which is as false as Zeus. On the other hand, if I blame God for not getting what I want, then I’ve moved into rejection mode. I can slip into a passive-aggressive mode in order to fix or justify hurt feelings. When I perceive suffering, or perceive abandonment of God, I might reject God, wanting to hurt him by turning away from him, but it only ends in self-harm to me. Or I may go in search of a new or a different god that will support my desires. One way or another, I want satisfaction, which is not the same as praying for the one true God’s will to be done.
This split happens in Lord of the Flies, as the boy Ralph keeps order on the island initially with the symbol of the shell, the conch, holding it up as a representation of authority. The conch, beautiful in itself, represents the old world that the boys came from before their plane crashed on the island. This old world seems to be a kind of heaven in their minds, where adult authority held a stabilizing, centralized force in their lives. They have this past civilized world represented in the conch. The conch is like a sacred object, but it is only an object. Yet it seems to have power as when it’s produced, order is brought to the meetings. However, as soon as division begins, Jack and his pack of choir-boy hunters decide that they want to live by a different set of rules. They want new rules, but really, they just want to rule, to win, to be in charge. They don’t want Ralph and his appeal to an empty authority that no longer exists or has any teeth. The weakness of Ralph is exposed, as his authority has no actual power to discipline or enforce rules. In other words, the conch is exposed as a mere symbol, or idol, with no real power, and soon it’s tossed onto rocks where it shatters into pieces.
Jack and his hunters move away to the other side of the island and create a new god, a god that encourages competition and hunting, mainly because Jack likes hunting. Whatever Jack likes becomes what the god likes. He has created a new god out of thin air, without having so much as a online bachelor’s degree in theology. By the mere speech of Jack, the power of Ralph’s side of the island is declared dead. If Jack cannot break the rules, then he will make the rules. His power is ensured by making sacrifices to the new god. Of course, Jack’s god also has no power, because as soon as someone else wants to break the rules, they can go and create their own god. This is how gods come to be. They are power moves. They take power by force. What Jack offers the young boys is safety and strength, through the willingness to commit violence to retain power. This calms the fears. His idol is a dead pig’s head placed on a stick that has been “sharpened at both ends” which is emblematic of what Jack will do to anyone that crosses him.
This is how gods of myth come into existence. This is also how organized crime comes into existence. Weakness and fear and rejection of existing authority leads to an overthrow. The old authority must be replaced, so human or divine gods are invented, conjured naturally by our desires and fears, in order to explain the universe and the world we live in. Most of all, we want something to restore a sense of order to calm our nerves about the unknown. This is why chaos is at the beginning of all creation stories. Chaos scares the hell out of us.
These gods have no power, except in our minds, because they only exist in our minds, with perhaps an object that we venerate as the embodiment or personification of the idea, like a golden calf or bull that we read about in the Bible. But like the golden calf or bull, the conch shell and the pig’s head are objects that have no actual power. They work for a while, until the next disgruntled group or tribe or nation takes over by force. The void cannot be stared into for long without a guardrail, or you will fall into the chaos and die. We need a story, a reason, a meaning, a vision, a protector. You can choose the one God, or you can choose invented gods. People will choose that which serves their desires and assuages their fears.
These guardrails, these minor gods, are still with us today, perhaps even more so than they were in ancient times. We just don’t use golden statues or bloody sacrifices. (Well, we do actually, but that’s for another day).
In the end of the book, Ralph is the only boy who has not converted to the new idol on Jack’s side of the island. Ralph is the only believer in the old system who is willing to stand up for the world symbolized by the conch, the rightly ordered world, as he sees it. He ends up being hated and hunted because he will not join Jack’s side. Most interesting in the end is that he is saved by a Navy ship, an officer, and while this seems to vindicate his appeal to the authority of the old world, the author makes this closing scene a masterful conclusion, because the larger world is in a nuclear war, a world war. The same battle that is happening in microcosm on the island is playing out in the larger world. The conclusion shows us that the island is no different from the adult world, because the Navy ship is on its way to destroy other people, other nations, when it stops to save the boys on the island. The naval officer seems to bring back civilization, but in reality he is doing exactly what Jack was doing to Ralph, which is hunting other men, just in a more polished and “civilized” way. Power justifies itself through whatever means necessary.
Of course, everyone who ever read this book in middle school or high school is told that the weak boy, Simon, is the Christ character, and before Simon is killed, Jack tells him, “You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island.”
That’s exactly what rejection of God sounds like, from the Garden of Eden to the death of Christ in the Gospels. Adam and Eve reject God because it’s more fun to eat the fruit. The Pharisees and the Romans reject God because it’s more fun to be in power than to surrender. The cold reality is that to have “fun” and to eat all the fruit, the one true God must be rejected or killed off, even though in reality God can never be killed off. God doesn’t go away or diminish because we pretend he’s not there.
To believe in the one true God leads to a different set of rules, ones that are not as fun, which is exactly why it irritates us so much. It chafes us to know that there is only one answer, one truth, because then we can’t always get what we want.
The rules of the one God disallow the “fun” things, calling them “sins,” but the rules are all there for good reason and not arbitrarily. This is the root difference between worshiping one God versus many. The one God has specific rules, while the invented gods can have whatever rules the inventors choose, and even then the rules are malleable.
The invented gods can spin off into many new versions, like spinoffs that get worse and worse. We have all seen how spinoffs devolve into madness. Anyone that watches TV knows this. Think of the shows that flung out like radioactive isotopes from Law and Order and All in the Family and Happy Days. They become progressively worse, further from the inspired original, with only a profit motive as the muse for the writers. This is what it feels like when you read some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stories, but you can’t take it seriously as coming from the heavens. By the time you get to Arachne, the spider, goddess of weaving and sewing, you have then entered into the same realm as Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood. I’m not making fun of the story of Arachne, I’m just saying that the mythology is so obviously invented that the whole tree is poisoned if you are trying to sell it as divinely inspired. This is what makes the Gospels so different, because there is no sense of fairy tale or fable about it. The Gospels are not written like tales, they do not read like fables, and in the overarching story of the whole Bible, the more you read it, the more strange and more connected it becomes.
This has an enormous impact on how you interpret what is truth. The response from Pontius Pilate to Jesus is the great example of this difference in cultures and worldviews. After Jesus states that he has come to testify the truth, Pilate’s response is the perfect summary of someone living under the pantheon of Rome. Pilate says to Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:29-38)
This line could be the thesis statement of a culture that worships many gods. A better line could not more fully describe the Roman worldview of Pilate’s era. Really, most Americans today might give the same response. Pilate speaks “his truth” in that the truth is kind of gray, kind of movable, kind of like a Protean and shape-shifting god of ancient mythology. For Pilate, there is no truth but what power declares it to be. Truth is the first casualty as soon as we rule against the one God in favor of many gods. There is no truth except what we decide, and who decides? He who holds power. But, for those that believe, there is truth. There is one undeniable truth. And Pilate is looking at that truth when he tosses off this line. It’s so rich in meaning. Pilate is staring at the truth. He’s telling the truth that truth doesn’t exist. There is a sense of comedy and tragedy all at once here. Pilate is lost, but he’s so close to the answer. For Christians who believe in the one true God, Jesus is the truth. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the complete and total truth. But Pilate cannot see it, because he is spiritually blind. He is blind not only because he dwells in the indoctrination of a Roman world with many gods, but more likely because he is blinded by his own ambition and earthly power.
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