PEOPLE OF ATHENS: at last our city is complete
CECROPS: my people
now we must decide which of the gods we will offer our worship to
who among the deities of Olympus will we select to watch over us
shall it be Poseidon? Lord of the sea, creator of the horse, to protect our warships and supply us with battle stallions?
or shall it be Athena, goddess of wisdom and justice?
PRIESTS OF POSEIDON: LET IT BE POSEIDON
PRIESTS OF ATHENA: ATHENA, ATHENA, ATHENA
ATHENA: People of Greece
we are here
POSEIDON: we have heard your questions and are come from Olympus itself to help you decide
ATHENA: We shall each offer the city a gift
and whosoever’s gift you accept, shall become patron and protector of your city
CECROPS: You are both wise and generous, my lords
POSEIDON: I shall go first
Here, I strike the ground with my mighty trident
See the water gush forth
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: A spring!
POSEIDON: I give you SALTY WATER
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: Oh it’s
it’s salty
POSEIDON: well yes
I am Lord of the Sea
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: what are we supposed to do with this
it’s salty water
POSEIDON: I – well
yes
is that a problem
CECROPS: well
we appreciate the gesture
it’s just
we can’t really do much with a salt spring, can we
POSEIDON: it’s
well, I did make it out of nothing
CECROPS: no, I know
it’s just we can’t drink it
POSEIDON: oh, can’t you?
CECROPS: no we drink regular water
so although I don’t want to seem ungrateful
we actually probably could do more with the nothing that was here a minute ago
then a big mess of salty water here in the middle of town
POSEIDON: I just thought
you know, salt water is my favorite thing
and I thought I would share it with –
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: LET US SEE THE GIFT OF ATHENA
ATHENA: My gift is over there
the olive tree
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: ooh
CECROPS: ooh
POSEIDON: well what can you do with it
ATHENA: it grows olives, which you can eat
you can press the olives into oil, which you can use for cooking and storing and to make soap and to light lamps and also –
POSEIDON: well I bet you can’t fill the OCEAN with it
PEOPLE OF ATHENS: HAIL ATHENA
HAIL THE GODDESS OF ATHENS
POSEIDON: I thought it was a good idea
a good salty idea
I’m just going to drown everyone
Tags: dirtbags, greek mythology, history
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For a longer retelling, I freaking adore Mythology Mondays’ version of this story: http://mythologymondays.tumblr.com/post/105901549…
I nearly peed myself laughing, I’m not kidding
Aww POSEIDON! You’ll find a town that loves salt water and appreciates it accordingly! Maybe they’ll invent taffy there! Or boil pasta in it!
You always find a town to worship you when you stop looking for it.
he should have offered a water park.
if he turned that random spring into a lazy river w intertubes he may have had a chance
And pony rides. Who doesn’t love a pony?
Come on, dude, you invented the horse and you didn’t think of using it?
‘Lil Sebastian! If Poseidon would have offered ‘Lil Sebastian he would have won hands down.
I think it’s in Utah.
Brb cross-stitching that last line onto a pillow.
Which is better – a pantheon all powerful stupid gods that interfere with humans, or an all powerful, all-wise god who does nothing?
false dichotomy! the correct answer is “chocolate”.
oooooh. I like that question. I don’t want to answer it, I just want to hold it in my mind for a while.
Definitely the former. That way, when bad stuff happens, it’s because the god(dess) is a douche. And hey, some of the other gods know it as well, and might even help you out.
But when bad stuff happens under the latter, well, you must have deserved it. Or that god is testing you. Or they made a bet with an underling.
because masturbation.
Yup! Under the first system you have a contract. If the gods don’t do their bit you find other ones. Under the second system if God flakes out you just get the book of Job.
This is why I’m a polytheist. Dammit, it just explains why the world is the way it is better. Multiple deities with competing agendas.
It’s a much more free market approach to worship.
I always wondered if Hestia asked that same question as she watched everyone else being dicks to mortals.
Hestia and Demeter, probably (even though Demeter did the whole “that fucker Hades didn’t ask or make sure Persephone was okay with being his hell-queen or even let me host the wedding” land-cursing). They’re much less dickish.
Well, and Hades was fairly neutral, too — and Persephone herself.
So yes, there are the dirtbag deities and the more neutral deities.
truth in advertising would compel most monotheists to admit that there is nothing about their god that is any wiser or more elevated than any pantheon you care to point to. Like specifically, Job is my favorite book of the bible and quite possibly one of my favorite books of anything, but you know how intro to western civ classes always make a big thing of saying how the greco-roman pantheon is all like gods made in the image of man, all mean and petty and basically a bunch of bitches, not at all like the Christian conception of god, and you want to ask the professors who say this if they have ever read this ‘Bible’ they affect such familiarity with. like not just Job even, literally any part of it. even the apocryphal parts have Jesus sticking his fingers in some poor bastard’s ears for kicks, as Mallory taught us yesterday.
so given the choice between Zeus doing it with you normal-style (?) as a swan because of lust and the Holy Spirit doing it with you in the ear as a dove because of (?) and Jesus just fingering your ears and who knows what he even gets out of it, what even is the distinction anymore between pagan and christian, I would like to know. what’s to prefer here.
Not a Christian, but doesn’t Mary specifically give her consent? That’s better than anything with Zeus ever.
I am not a Christian either but I am widely enough read in theology to cite the Doctrine of the Three Nopes, which goes as follows
A. NOPE cause based on what I think is called the Reasonable Person Standard in law, if you consent to either bearing godly seed or doing It with God, however you choose to imagine the announcement was phrased, a Reasonable Woman would not expect that to mean a bird or a ghost or a bird-ghost is going to fly down your ear.
B. NOPE cause the angel comes over (UNINVITED) and says, hi, this and this and this is going to happen. no “if it’s OK with you,” just a bunch of absolute statements of fact. that is why they call it the annunciation and not the polite request. her saying Yes to it is as meaningful as Noah saying Yes to the flood.
C. also NOPE cause if you can’t give meaningful consent to sleeping with your therapist or professor or arresting officer (and you can’t), still less can you give meaningful consent to boning A GOD.
I like this a lot.
…not all of us believe every part of the bible is literally true, and the point of biblical scholarship, such as I have been taught it, is that exploration of the texts leads us to not only understanding past conceptions of God and the people who wrote them, but also discussions about whether the stories and perspectives told in the texts are useful to understanding God and ourselves now. But none of that gets talked about in mainstream culture, Christian or otherwise, because doing something thoughtful and well that involves ambuguity is not nearly as entertaining or attention-getting or galvanizing as doing something loudly, like Westboro Baptist or the Duggars or Michele Bachmann. Nor is it something that is profitable.
But none of that gets talked about in mainstream culture
perhaps I am less in the mainstream than I know, because in my experience it is talked about all of the time, it is pretty much the definition of respectable and socially permissible religion. What I don’t see as much of as I would like is really rigorous textual criticism, but of course I am biased because that’s pretty much all that interests me.
Maybe more to the point, though – or maybe to wander from the point, I can never be sure – it again does a great disservice to the peoples of the ancient world to treat Christians as the first people to understand parables and metaphors (and I don’t mean by that that you are doing so, only that it is done a lot.) People feel very free to be dismissive about dead religions and their followers’ intelligence, far more so than they are with living ones, or ones that are only mostly dead. Nobody really troubles to make the case for why ancient stories aren’t really as bad or as literally intended as they look on their faces unless it is in the service of jokes (which I appreciate), but it’s easy to do if you have the training and inclination.
I can definitely see how people are encouraged not to stray far from the realm of respectability, even in the protected realm of scholarship. Though maybe it’s because my professors come from more marginal perspectives themselves that they encourage us to find and use such scholarship as exists that isn’t necessarily respectable.
I think that there is a pretty big splintering among monotheistically religious people regarding what they think about their deity: some cleave directly to scriptural characterization (where the cognitive dissonance you describe happens), some rebel against it and choose to see other ways, and I think probably a lot of people just don’t think about it much at all. At least, from what I can see from the pews.
And I do agree that it is unfair to dismiss dead religions and their viewpoint on things. It would behoove those investigating to look for the cultural links and similarities between dead and living religions, really, for insight into human construction of stories and meaning.
I love literally everything about this, thank you v v much
Love how Athena is like yeah sit down, little god-man.
The town is named Athens! The fix was in from the start!!!
She changed her name to Athena after they picked the olive tree. She was kind of rubbing it in.
I love how diplomatic Cecrops is! Like, “We need to choose one god to worship, but let’s not hurt any feelings here!”
I think Athena is misspelled Athens in the eighth line there
Mallory’s Poseidon is amazing.
Actually, he reminds me a lot of Kate Beaton’s Aquaman:
Aquaman has always seemed to have a credibility problem. Why is that? I think he just hangs with the wrong crowd. If he spent all his time in the company of other hereditary monarchs, he’d be in a lot better shape. Ruler of Atlantis! Buff and handsome! Dolphins like him! But no, he has to hang around with superheroes, where his virtues aren’t as apparent. Then again, maybe he does it on purpose. Like, a humility thing? These are the only people who are confident enough to interact with him without awe, and indeed with mild contempt.
Those ancient Greeks sure did love their god-contests.
“Hey fellow mortals, let’s mediate a situation between extremely thin-skinned, volatile deities, which is certain to result in at least one of them feeling publicly humiliated and vengeful. This should end well.”
They set the trap
and lie in wait to get their feelings hurt
and then they act surprised
“how did that get there”
“why does everybody haaaate me”
Frankly, Poseidon’s claim to have invented the horse smacks of résumé padding.
Like how Al Gore “invented” the internet? I never thought of it that way, but what you say makes sense.
It does sort of spring out of nowhere, doesn’t it? “Ruler of the sea, bringer of sea-related things, lord of all the things that live in the sea, also I invented the horse.”
/Tom Baker voice
“… also I invented the horse, because you ride them like the crests of waves, and the stupid humans kept insisting on something that worked on land, too.”
this way, when you’re done plowing the ocean waves, you can go plow some land too
I read the Percy Jackson books as a teen and his love interest is a daughter of Athena, meanwhile he is the son of Poseidon, so this specific story is used to establish a bit of enmity between the two gods (is this enmity something that Rick Riordan made up?) thus making the romance _star-crossed_ :O
I’ll be honest, because the main character of those books was Percy (and I tend to be most attached to the main character no matter what I’m reading/watching) I have a bit of a soft spot for Poseidon. It doesn’t really make sense, but I guess it kind of does??
Poor guy, thought everyone would love to drink from his salty spring.
Poor guy, thought everyone would love to drink from his salty spring.