“Angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of man.”
Ibn Arabi
Jupiter looked down from his throne on Mount Olympus and stroked his beard. He was looking at the flanks of a nymph clambering over rocks beneath a sacred waterfall. Io had come on since he last looked. Her skin was white and soft and with his godly telescope-like vision he could see it flecked with spray. He licked his lips.
Gods flew through the air as fast as thought itself.
As Jupiter appeared beside her, the nymph turned to slip among the trees and hide. But she heard a great booming laugh immediately behind her.
As he pinned her to the sacred grass, the muscles on his neck stood out.
Jupiter’s wife, Juno, could always see what he was thinking. In fact she could see what he was seeing, and when he closed his eyes with pleasure, she took her revenge. She who was called “the cow-eyed” because her eyes were large and lovely, transformed the nymph into a white cow.
Jupiter opened his eyes and looked at Io in amazement. Even as a cow, she was lovely.
In the jovial age when Jupiter ruled the world, he and his fellow Olympians flew across the clear blue sky, and every tree, every rock, every river, every stream had its god and its spirit. Things were constantly morphing into other things. It was a magical time when creation was not yet fixed. It was a time of clear vision clouded never by doubt, never by hesitation, only by desire.
From an engraving taken from Jupiter and Europa (by the initiate painter Paolo Veronese). The bull looks out of the picture and asks, “Wouldn’t you?”
If Io had been placid and gentle, Daphne was more of a tomboy. This young nymph liked to play in the woods, to gather berries and make bows and arrows. She had no thoughts of a man, but she was too beautiful to escape.
Apollo wanted her as soon as he saw her. He imagined rearranging the hair that was at that moment falling about her neck and back.
Alighting on the ground next to her, he wanted to tell her he loved her. But, perhaps knowing better than he did what he was after, she turned to run.
He called after her, “Don’t run away! I won’t hurt you!”
Now she was scrambling up a hill.
“Be careful!” he called. He worried she might scratch herself on brambles.
Just then a gust of wind blew her dress aside and the sight of her straining thighs made him move faster.
She could feel his breath on her neck. She cried out to her father, a river god, to protect her, and as Apollo grasped her hair he felt only leaves. As he put his hand round her waist to turn her and pull her toward him, her stomach became enclosed in bark and her feet took root in the earth. She had been transformed into a laurel tree.
The Afro-Roman poet Ovid, who preserved this story, told us that even now Apollo still loved Daphne. He looked at the tree he was clasping and saw that it was good.
Being very beautiful is like being the only sober one at a party: your beauty makes everyone else delirious.
And they don’t care if you feel left out. They just want to bend you to their will.
Adonis had two older women after him, Venus and Persephone. He had been put in Persephone’s care when he was orphaned as a young child, and then, when he had grown into a beautiful youth, her attentions had begun to make him feel very uncomfortable. He was starting to loathe her coming anywhere near him, and when she touched him it was as if everything faded to gray.
From an engraving taken from Venus and Adonis (by the initiate painter Titian)
But now, as beautiful slim-hipped Venus came toward him, smiling, her arms outstretched, a blur around her like the flapping of evanescent wings, he felt as if he were being dragged under. She was talking to him and he wasn’t listening to what she was saying, but he knew she was offering him a thousand honeyed secrets.
It was hot, midday in a clearing in the woods. There were primroses on the ground and he could hear a droning like a million bees. It was true what they said—Venus was very, very beautiful. She was as beautiful as he was.
She seized his sweating palm and tried to smother him with kisses and Adonis could feel the sap rising in his veins too—so why not?
Because he was being overwhelmed, and he turned and ran from her.
“Flint-hearted boy!” she called after him. “Thou art not a man!”
The last thing he heard was her screaming as he speared himself on the horns of a wild boar that was at that moment charging out of the undergrowth.
As he lay outstretched, blood flowed from his side onto the ground, and where the ground was soaked, anemones began to grow.
Venus knelt to smell the flowers and caught a trace of the boy’s sweet breath.1
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If Jupiter and Apollo and the other gods of the planets were angels, isn’t it odd that they behaved in such an immoral way? We expect higher moral standards from our angels.
There is a key passage in the Bible that may well be glossed over at Sunday school—and you may not hear many sermons on it either. Genesis, Chapter 6, reads: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took wives which they chose . . . when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became the mighty men of which were of old.” The phrase “the sons of God” is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to mean the angels. The Bible is here alluding to the stories of the loves of the gods.
Engraving taken from the vase of Salpion. It is easy to underestimate the intellectual sophistication of the Greeks when it came to the gods. According to Macrobius, the Orphic initiates saw Dionysus as being the principle of Mind which was divided up into individual minds. The intellectual élite considered Apollo and Dionysus to be different aspects of one divine principle. Their view was by no means crudely anthropomorphic. The Greek gods of the planets are agents of the perfect fit between humanity and the cosmos. We have seen this expressed in storytelling but it was also expressed by them in numerical terms. The ancient Greeks attributed numerical values to the letters of their alphabet. Adding up the numbers attributed to letters in a word or name could yield a significant number, and it is astonishing but demonstrably true that the names of Apollo, Zeus and Mercury yield mathematical constants according to which the natural forms of the world are constructed. The numerical values of these names are the numbers that describe the shapes of equilateral triangles, squares, cubes, pyramids, octahedrons and tetrahedrons. Musical harmony is in proportion to these numbers too. (For a fuller explanation and a demonstration of the maths, see Jesus Christ, Sun of God by the brilliant David Fideler.) In modern times we make a distinction between quality and quantity, with mathematics being a description of quantity that is indifferent to human concerns. This is very far from the ancient way of thinking based on idealism. The ancients lived in a cosmos concerned for humanity, and higher mathematics was one way of describing that concern. Some people are hostile to mysticism because they see it as a lapse into lazy or infantile thinking. That is not the case here. The thinking is extraordinarily complex and insightful—but it is not empirical thinking. It is the thinking of idealism working itself out in the world and discovering the way the world works by means of this way of thinking.
Another thing to bear in mind is that these stories, whichever part of the world they come from, describe things that happened long before humanity devised any notions of morality. They describe what have come to be known as natural forces—and this is a clue to the historical events that lie behind these particular myths.
We’ve seen how the Bible and various myths may be seen to be not inconsistent with the scientific history of creation, but as giving an account of the same series of events from a different perspective. Io is transformed into a cow, Daphne into a laurel tree, the beautiful youths Adonis and Hyacinth into flowers, Arachne into a spider, Callisto into a bear . . . What these stories are telling us about is the proliferation of biological forms. They describe the coming into being of the many different species we know today—the plants, the flowers, the trees, the animals, the burgeoning of the world’s biodiversity.2 Because matter was not fixed and bodies were soft and phantomlike, we see the proliferation of biological forms taking place with dizzying rapidity and magical ease.3
* * *
The Greek stories may be the most familiar versions, but essentially the same stories have been told all over the world. The Celtic tradition, influential on Tolkien and much modern fantasy, includes a Welsh story about a boy called Gwion:
* * *
Gwion was employed by a witch to stir a cauldron. She was brewing a transformative elixir for her ugly stupid son.
One day, as Gwion was stirring this brew, it suddenly bubbled up. Three drops spat out of the pot and landed on his hand, scalding it. Without thinking, he put his hand to his mouth.
The witch saw this and came rushing toward him. “That’s not for you!” she screamed in a rage.
Gwion shape-shifted into a rabbit to flee, but she instantly changed into a greyhound and soon gained on him. Reaching a river, he turned himself into a salmon, but she leapt in after him in the form of an otter. Suddenly he soared out of the water as a bird, but she transformed herself into a hawk, snapping at his tail.
In a panic he looked far down below and spotted a pile of wheat. He threw himself downward and landed in it, transforming himself into a grain of wheat. It will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, he thought.
But the witch turned herself into a hen and pecked and pecked at the pile until she had eaten every last grain.
After a while the witch found she was pregnant, even though she had found no one willing to impregnate her. It seemed the grain had grown inside her, and when Gwion was reborn it was as a baby with all the beauty and wisdom that the witch had wished for her son.
Someone cried out, “Tal iesin!” which means “How radiant his brow is!”
And that is how a great spirit was incarnated as Taliesin, the famous Welsh bard.
* * *
We love stories that involve flying, don’t we? On a recent weekend with some old friends, including the one who had introduced me to the Welsh myths and legends, we were sitting around discussing scenes in films that make you cry. Of course there’s the death of Bambi’s mother. Someone suggested the moment when Baloo the Bear turns out not to be dead in The Jungle Book.
Someone else said, “When ET turns out not be dead.”
I thought of the end of that film, where the boy is cycling along with ET in the basket on the handlebars and they suddenly lift off and fly through the sky. It’s like in pantomime when Peter Pan suddenly takes off and flies over the audience—that makes us want to cry too. I think there is something deeply moving about human flight, perhaps because we all carry within us memories of the time before our material bodies were fully formed, the time when we could fly, when we were spirits living freely among spirits in a world bathed in the ineffable light of a spiritual sun. We are, I believe, deeply nostalgic about that time, and we long, too, for a time when we will be purely spiritual beings again.
That is the arc of human history as it is told in all the world’s religions. We are dipped briefly into matter and one day we will rise again and fly free of it.
The time is coming when we will soar once more.4
