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Apr. 28th, 2008 05:47 pmToday I finished Lover's Legends: The Gay Greek Myths, Andrew Calimach's attempts to restore at least one version of the more homoerotic Greek stories. Few of them are direct translations -- they're all mixes and matches of different fragments from a wide variety of sources to create possible lost versions.
He uses the Erotes of pseudo-Lucian to frame it. The Erotes is an old debate (1700 years old) over which sexual orientation is best. I've read the Erotes before, and Calimach keeps close to the more popular translation (although his is more poetic).
It's absolutely beautiful, and Calimach puts a lot of his own poetic and spiritual energies into it -- he's especially interested in shamanic ideas underneath some of the mystery faiths and older myths.
One idea he discussed only in one of the footnotes intrigues me -- the idea that the mystery cult of Dionysus may be one of the sources of Christian mythology/religious practice. I've always been quite interested in the roles other religions played in the development of Christianity and Judaism, which have been traditionally portrayed as appearing fully-formed with the arrival of tablets and/or messiahs.
This claim always seemed suspicious to me, and it seems now that Christianity especially arose out of a soup of local religions and traditions in the eastern Empire -- the Cult of Isis (and Horus), Zoroastrianism, Cynic philosophy, and Mithraism. Virgin births were a dime a dozen, as were sons of gods, saviours of humanity, and harrowings of hell. Now we can add Dionysus to the mix, too.
I'm going to read Jim Egan's biography next, and after that -- having read something like five books in a row on gay topics -- I'm going to move on to other subjects. I have Seamus Heaney's Beowulf here, which is probably a good candidate.
After all, nothing less homoerotic than sweaty, muscled men.
He uses the Erotes of pseudo-Lucian to frame it. The Erotes is an old debate (1700 years old) over which sexual orientation is best. I've read the Erotes before, and Calimach keeps close to the more popular translation (although his is more poetic).
It's absolutely beautiful, and Calimach puts a lot of his own poetic and spiritual energies into it -- he's especially interested in shamanic ideas underneath some of the mystery faiths and older myths.
One idea he discussed only in one of the footnotes intrigues me -- the idea that the mystery cult of Dionysus may be one of the sources of Christian mythology/religious practice. I've always been quite interested in the roles other religions played in the development of Christianity and Judaism, which have been traditionally portrayed as appearing fully-formed with the arrival of tablets and/or messiahs.
This claim always seemed suspicious to me, and it seems now that Christianity especially arose out of a soup of local religions and traditions in the eastern Empire -- the Cult of Isis (and Horus), Zoroastrianism, Cynic philosophy, and Mithraism. Virgin births were a dime a dozen, as were sons of gods, saviours of humanity, and harrowings of hell. Now we can add Dionysus to the mix, too.
I'm going to read Jim Egan's biography next, and after that -- having read something like five books in a row on gay topics -- I'm going to move on to other subjects. I have Seamus Heaney's Beowulf here, which is probably a good candidate.
After all, nothing less homoerotic than sweaty, muscled men.