Are the Myths Gossip?

I have so much I wanted to write about today. About Ghetto Shamans and Hugin the Bard and a gazillion other things, but the spectre of PSG packing is looming over me. I’m in full panic mode to prepare for 9 days of camping, plus travel.

So I will leave you with two quotes, one modern and one old, on a subject bouncing around in the back of my head, and leave you to examine and ponder them at leisure as I check and double check equipment and supplies.

“When I first started studying Zeus, He told me not to learn about Him from the myths. The comparison He made was that learning about Him from myths was like learning about actors from gossip magazines. There are many purposes to myths but they are not the be all and end of Who a god is.” — Melia Suez from an interview with Galina Krasskova

Compare that to Cicero’s pre-Christian apologetics:

XXVIII. Do you not see, therefore, how, from the productions of nature and the useful inventions of men, have arisen fictitious and imaginary Deities, which have been the foundation of false opinions, pernicious errors, and wretched superstitions? For we know how the different forms of the Gods — their ages, apparel, ornaments; their pedigrees, marriages, relations, and everything belonging to them — are adapted to human weakness and represented with our passions; with lust, sorrow, and anger, according to fabulous history: they have had wars and combats, not only, as Homer relates, when they have interested themselves in two different armies, but when they have fought battles in their own defense against the Titans and giants. These stories, of the greatest weakness and levity, are related and believed with the most implicit folly.

But, rejecting these fables with contempt, a Deity is diffused in every part of nature; in earth under the name of Ceres, in the sea under the name of Neptune, in other parts under other names. Yet whatever they are, and whatever characters and dispositions they have, and whatever name custom has given them, we are bound to worship and adore them. The best, the chastest, the most sacred and pious worship of the Gods is to reverence them always with a pure, perfect, and unpolluted mind and voice; for our ancestors, as well as the philosophers, have separated superstition from religion.

Is Homer’s depiction of the Gods the equivalent to reading about them on TMZ or in the National Enquirer? How critically should we view the myths? Were they popular and survived because they were accurate, or because they were fun?

For more food for thought check out this examination of Old Guard Paganism by Mike Nichols, which I found trying to find his article on the Elder Gods from Pentacle Magazine.