Walter Friedrich Otto and the Greek Gods

"Warrior" is getting further shaping with my reading of another book, "The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion" by Walter Friedrich Otto. The issue I - and most others - have had with those gods is that they seem so silly, light and irrational in contrast with the powerful realism of most Greek thought. It is easier to ignore them and go back to pre-deistic beliefs, as I did with "Peryton" rather than have to try to take them seriously.

But Otto says that this is wrong. In fact he writes. "The ancient Greek religion comprehended the things of this world with the most powerful sense of reality possible, and nevertheless - nay, for that very reason - recognized in them the marvelous delineations of the divine. It does not revolve upon the anxieties, longings, and spiritual broodings of the human soul: its temple is the world, from whose vitality and movement emanates its knowledge of the divine."

Well, okay then. Let's try that.