It's Complicated

It's about time I unpacked my complicated relationship with Greek heritage, Greek deities, and my personal pagan practice. "The Odyssey" will help me do just that

When I was eight, my bedroom had a small door that led to a little attic room that served as a storage space for a lot of books, and became the hidey hole that every pre-teen girl needs. Among the Black Stallion and Nancy Drew novels were a children’s Bible and a copy of D’Auliere’s Greek Myths. My parents had baptized me Greek Orthodox, but we pretty much never went to church and neither the Christian god nor the Greek pantheon was ever evoked in our daily lives. So these two tomes were pretty much the entire sum of my religious education prior to my setting off to an Episcopal boarding school when I was fourteen.

Being proud of my Greek heritage, I saw no reason at this tender age to place the Greek gods in a separate category of “realness” from the Christian god. They were equal in legitimacy as far as I was concerned.

The many, many Christians I would subsequently encounter would quickly try to disabuse me of this notion, and I won’t lie, for awhile it worked. Until it didn’t. The attic room also had a copy of “The Active Enzyme, Lemon Freshened Junior High School Witch,” by E W Hildick, which was published in 1973 -- YA witch fiction before the genere really existed.

When my latent paganism and witchy side reasserted itself, I was finding myself called not by the Greek gods of my heritage, but rather by the Norse and Celtic gods of my Knotted Ash tradition. I’ll confess my relationship to the gods of my heritage for most of my life has been a lot like how one relates to distant cousins in a typical WASPy family -- cordial and respectful, perfectly willing to engage at a major ritual like a wedding, but lacking the real emotional depth produced by true affinity.

But however much my affinity for the gods of my ancient ancestors may be lacking, my sense of devotion to my ancestors themselves (both modern and ancient) was another matter altogether. My Greek heritage on both sides of my family tree is pretty special. There’s a general who fought the Nazis, an Olympian, and a man who worked as a foreman for Thomas Edison when he was working on the phonograph. I steeped myself not just in the history of Ancient Greece, but of modern Greece.

That said, my relationship with Ancient Greece, like most people of Greek extraction, hits different than it does for most people of European descent. Like a lot of children of the diaspora, my parents would send me to visit relatives in Greece for long sections of the summer, in my case to a town that was at the foot of Mount Parnassus, where Apollo’s Temple at Delphi was. One of my many, many uncles (Greeks have big families) was a tour guide at Delphi, and so I would go up and follow him around on his tours, hearing all the stories of the site and the art and the Pythia over and over and over again. And my brother and I would then wander away from the tour group, and explore the ruins unsupervised. (It was the 1980’s, and there were less protections than there are now.) Sure, it’s a site of deep historical significance to the whole world. And I got to roam it like it was my backyard.

Greeks fought hard for their independence as a nation. The revolution that created the modern nation in 1821 and separated Greece from over 400 years of oppression under the Ottoman Empire lasted nine years and was deeply bloody. It almost didn’t succeed. Greece was overrun during WWII by Hitler and Mussolini, and the country was occupied by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. The resistance was passionate and committed. And because it was split in different factions, the country fell into a civil war during the 1950’s. At one point during the 1970’s Greece was ruled by a military junta. Eventually, it has evolved into the fractious but committed democracy that it is today. (Okay that was the 10,000 foot in the air summary of the history of modern Greece... it is OBVIOUSLY more complicated than that. But we have space concerns, so this wholly inadequate thumbnail is what you get.)

And despite our storied history, both ancient and modern, Greece is fetishized by the rest of Europe, and particularly by the British and also the Americans, as being “the cradle of Western Civilization.” Even during Greece’s revolution in the early 1800’s the British decided to play at being a “savior” and sent money and men to “liberate” the poor, benighted Greeks. Did you know that British poet Lord Byron died in the Greek Revolution? And of course, when the opportunity arose to begin unearthing and studying major archealogical sites in Greece, the British brought their adventurers and their academics and stripped Greece of many of her treasures, carting them off to the British Museum without so much as a by your leave from the Greek government, and certainly without paying anything for the privilege.

Northern Europeans and Americans love to wax poetic about the wonders of Ancient Greek thought and language, mathematics and civics and history, and love to ally their own cultures with the legacies of democracy and medicine and philosophy. But they treat the modern nation of Greece like it’s a second-class junior partner in Europe, one that must be patronized and chided for not having the same culture as them. All while in the same breath lauding their own cultures as being built off of the legacy of Ancient Greece. White fascists in particular love to talk about rescuing the legacy of Ancient Greek culture and ideas, while at the same time treating the Greeks themselves as if they are degenerates and slobs. Ask any child of the Greek diaspora living in America or in Northern Europe about the teasing and the othering. The teachers in my preppy middle school were proud to teach the kids Homer and Plato, but those kids saw my olive skin and different food as markers that made me a suitable target for bullying.

And then Christopher Nolan does his movie that is supposed to be a retelling of Homers “Odyssey,” which does not have a single Greek involved in the cast or in major production roles. On the one hand, the idea that a British man would feel free to take it upon himself to retell an Ancient Greek classic without bothering to involve Greeks in the picture is kinda par for the course really. The British Museum insists to this day that it does not need to repatriate the marbles it stole from the Parthenon, after all.

The Athenian treasury at Delphi, once used to house offerings that would be made to the Oracle on behalf of the City of Athens. It was built around 500 BCE, allegedly using funds obtained from the Battle of Marathon fought against the Persians. Photo by Victor Malyushev on Unsplash

In America and in other places, the pagan community has long felt comfortable constructing a Hellenistic practice, focused on the Greek pantheon, that was not led by people of Greek heritage. Indeed, much of European ritual magic has relied upon Ancient Greek concepts and evoked Greek gods. Hermetic magic gets its name from the god Hermes. I’m not here to say there is anything wrong with those practices, or that working with Greek gods is somehow a “closed practice.” I think that ship has sailed, and the truth is that there isn’t a consistent throughline of historic indigenous Hellenic pagan practices extant in the modern day that is strong enough to support a claim that such practices are proprietary.

Yet there is also a budding movement within Greece to explore our pagan history and gods, and to create from within our culture a practice that worships the Greek pantheon of our ancestors. There are a number of incredible scholars, ritualists and priestex both in Greece and in the diaspora that are working in this vein, and I won’t lie, I find this an inspiring development. The idea of being able to join the threads of my Greek heritage and my pagan practice in such a holistic way is exciting.

That said, this situation isn’t much different from the dichotomy between many of the pagan traditions that work with Celtic and Norse gods in the United States, and practices by those native to historically Celtic lands and Nordic countries. The conversation between these modern pagan practices of the last 100 years and the more localized and less prominent indigenous practices, some of which have long histories and others that don’t, is important and necessary. And, as always, we need to be aware of when being focused on the gods connected to our cultural heritage becomes a vehicle for racism or anti-immigrant or anti-inclusion sentiment.

And as much as it sticks in my craw that Nolan’s Odyssey represents yet another example of a Brit feeling perfectly comfortable siezing upon a Greek cultural icon and making it his own without involving any Greeks, I also do think that there is value in retelling the Odyssey to a 21st Century audience, and introducing a new generation to the classic, and particularly to Emily Wilson’s translation, the first published by a woman. Greek culture is built on telling stories as a vehicle for wisdom and community connection. And the Odyssey is one of those stories like the legend of King Arthur and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, that are at once simple stories, but at the same time can be readily adapted to serve as containers for larger meditations on various aspects of the human condition. It is the relatability and adaptability of the story, replete with adventure and magic, that makes it a good vehicle to freight in conversations about weightier subjects. We need tools like that to start conversations that can promote change, and when we can build a cultural event around them, so much the better.

So yeah, I saw Nolan’s version of the Odyssey, and will read Wilson’s translation (I’ve been working on her translation of the Illiad currently). And I’m going to spend more time learning about this resurgent indigenous practice involving the Hellenic pantheon. These relatonships have history, they are complicated, both on the systemic level, and for me personally.

But is there a broader lesson here?

Cross-cultural interaction, especially in this day and age, isn’t simple. But that’s actually a good thing. “Simple’ in these matters typically devolves into the more prominent or dominant cultural identity absorbing and absconding with the other culture’s practices and stories and vision. Simple ends up erasing the experiences and identity of one of the participants, and everyone loses out when that happens. Encouraging the complication of keeping both cultures as truly equal participants in the exchange, letting things be messy and difficult and sometimes uncomfortable is important.

It’s also much more rewarding. Nolan’s Odyssey is entertaining and retains some of the important reference points of Homer’s epic, but with an “auteur” like Nolan, there is no expectation that there will be any other voices in the dialogue than Nolan’s, really. It’s one of the reasons that I am not a fan of auteur directors like Nolan. They tend to become solipsistic. You look over his work, and most of his stories are about troubled men who struggle with guilt about their own bad deeds in a violent/inhumane world, and (with the exception of Tenet), these men are overwhelmingly white. They are very well-constructed, entertaining, visually engaging movies, becauase Nolan is an exceptional visual storyteller. And yet his work is thematically repetitive, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

It’s ironic that there are white supremacists out there who are bellyaching over the diversity that is in the movie, namely the casting of a black woman and a transgender man in secondary roles on the basis that it is “anti-historic.” The Odyssey is, and has always been, a work of mythos, of fantasy. While the geography is based in the real wold, nothing else is. And again, it’s white Northern Europeans claiming Greek culture as their own, asserting they are entitled to police and set standards for how Greek culture should be portrayed, when it has never belonged to them in the first place.

The issues around Western European magical practices and pantheons are equally complex. There are cross cultural issues that need to be acknowledged and explored, and latent practices rooted in specific places and culture that we need to be curious about and respectful of. While a practice might not be closed, it still comes with cultural context that cannot be ignored. This isn’t a chore. It’s added dimension, richer practice, better understanding. We are doing more work, yes, in exchange for more powerful, more complete craft.

The problem with those who want cultural dominance, the ability to have their culture be centered and all other cultures relegated to the role of quaint decoration or provider of exoticism, is that it is ultimately a path to mediocrity. When everything is glossed over with a homogenous sheen, it becomes sanitized, the rough edges are made smooth, the points of contention are papered over. And everything becomes dull and lifeless.

Like it or not, the tension between cultures as they rub up against each other is part of what drives more and better ideas. And the more equally empowered those cultures are as they engage with each other, the better the outcome. Much in the same way that a leader who surrounds themselves with “yes men” who tell them what they want to hear will start making bad decisions, when one culture is permitted to run roughshod over every other culture it encounters, many of the best opportunities for interesting collaborations and innovation are lost.

White people in particular need to stop whining about how hard it is to create cultural dialogues that are not centered on them, that are built on sharing power and space on a more equal basis. Of course it’s hard! But that’s when you get to the good stuff. Operating in a “power over” environment is always going to be more comfortable and require less effort than “power with” situations (but only if you are the one with the most power). But magical practice (just like anything that will make you grow) has never been about taking the easy way out. Good magical practice will challenge you, cause you to become more authentic with your feelings and thoughts, your approach to your life. It demands effort to be successful, and it is anything but comfortable. And that is exactly as it should be.

Blessed be, witches.