Why the
'Cult of Nyx'?
In which I muse on the usefulness of ancient gods and answer a question that no-one has asked.
'Cult of Nyx': a rather grandiose and baffling name for what amounts, at the moment, to little more than a rarely updated online art gallery and a handful of self-published comics. It’s a bit pretentious really, like calling yourself ‘Antipathy Studios’1 when you don’t have more than one studio. Or any studios. There is, however, reasoning behind the name and I’ve been meaning to explain myself for some time now. So I'll do that here.
Let’s start with the ‘Nyx’ part and move onto the ‘Cult’ later. Nyx was the ancient Greek goddess of night; which is to say that the Greeks considered her ancient. She was primordial, pre-dated the gods and the titans and was pretty much as old as creation. In one account Night is born of Chaos at the beginning of time2; in another she is described as the first creature born3.
Night was old, and powerful, and terrifying. In Homer’s ‘Iliad’, Hypnos, god of sleep, angers Zeus. Hypnos flees to Nyx, his mother, for protection, and the king of the gods backs off for fear of upsetting her4. Night was accorded respect – well, up to a point anyway.
The largest surviving body of work to include information on Nyx is Hesiod's ‘Theogony’. Side-stepping the issue of whether or not Hesiod was himself a literary construct, perhaps created to give an oral tradition of poetry some provenance5, Hesiod's works rather look down on our primordial goddess. Epithets such as 'gloomy', 'awful', and 'deadly' litter any passage that mentions her, and he names Nyx mother of all the world's woes. Literally. Besides Woe she is said to have mothered Death and Doom, Strife and Deceit, Blame, Indignation and Madness. The list goes on, as does that of her ignominious grandchildren6. Indeed, such is his enthusiasm for putting Nyx down that she comes across as more despised than the Titans. The overwhelming impression is one of character assassination.
Other poets were kinder. Hymns attributed to Orpheus, another likely literary construct7, speak of her as the parent goddess and a source of sweet repose and name her the friend of Mirth8. In Aristophanes 'The Birds' she is the first principle, over Chaos, and the mother of Eros, god of sexual love9. Which may seem a little at odds with Hesiod's grim brood - though even he conceded Philotes, goddess of affection, friendship and sexual intercourse10 to her - but which is, on reflection, entirely logical. If people aren't huddled in the darkness for the fear of it, they tend to be huddled for a different reason altogether...
Night – the mother of passionate romance and doomed tragedy. Erotica and horror. Sex and death.
And dreams. Naturally enough, the mother of sleep is also the mother of the Oneiroi, the Tribe of Dreams11, that fill our minds with the imagery of the unreal, arguably making Nyx the mother of artistic inspiration itself. But more on that shortly.
Just as the sun is found as an object of deification throughout history and across the world, so it doesn't come as a huge surprise to discover an abundance of nocturnal gods alongside the lunar deities and star-depicted heroes of mythology. There are several notable gods of night mentioned in the literature of world religion, in faiths both faded and surviving, and while the sun has generally been regarded as male, so the night is often a goddess.
One of the oldest gods in the ancient Egyptian pantheon is Nut, whose name means 'Sky'. While she later came to represent the sky entire, her origin is that of a goddess of the night12. The Egyptian gods got about a bit in their day, culturally speaking. For instance towards the end of the Roman empire there was a temple to Isis in as far flung a city from the Nile Delta as London13. Nut is likely an antecedent of Nyx, from the name upwards. But there are some more interesting parallels that we can draw.
Nut was directly associated with death and the dead, her iconography appearing on sarcophagi and in burial chambers14. A devoted mother, she risked angering Ra, the sun, to birth some of the key figures in the Egyptian pantheon, including Osiris, Isis and Set and, as punishment, was separated forever from her lover Geb, the earth15. Antiquity, motherhood, death and tragic romance; the details and context vary wildly but the motif remains the same.
Speaking of names it's worth noting that while Nut may have become Nyx, Nyx certainly become Nox for the Romans16. It would be interesting to know whether it's her influence that brings us Nott, goddess of night and grandmother of Thor in the Norse pantheon. Though quite what their relationship is with Hine-NUI-te-po (my emphasis), the Maori goddess of night, is anyone's guess.
In the Semitic languages, the tri-consonantal root L-Y-L gives us the names Laila which means night17, and from the same root the name Lilith18. Lilith is the name of a demon from Hebrew folklore who was said to be Adam's first wife, made from the same earth as him. Strong-willed and overtly sexual she refused to be subservient and left Adam and Eden behind to go and become the mother of abominations, another demonised night-goddess19. Different context, same motif.
Laila (or Layla, or Leila, or... anyway) meanwhile became a hugely popular girl's name in the Arabic world, partly due to the success of a poem with its origins in the seventh century, 'Leyli o Majnun' or 'Layla and The Madman'. This oft-imitated tale of doomed romance has a poet fall obsessively in love with a woman, Layla Aamiriya, and for his obsession he is labelled mad. This stigma keeps the lovers apart and the tragic tale ends in their deaths, their love unrequited20.
Poetry and madness and night – an intoxicating and influential combination...
In the late 18th and early 19th Century a new genre of fiction was busy establishing itself throughout Europe. Influenced perhaps by the beautifully morbid introspections of the so-called 'Graveyard Poets', the Gothic Novel, with its thrilling blend of melodrama, horror and romance, had already made names of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, among others. However it wasn't until the Romantic poets, notably the 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' Lord Byron and his group of intimates dipped their toes into this particularly forbidding pool, that the genre came into its own.
Late one night in 1816, while holidaying at the Villa Diodati near Geneva in Switzerland, Byron and his friends, the poet Percy Shelly and his fiancee the writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Byron's physician John Polidori, held a little competition amongst themselves to see who could write the best horror story21. The results, arguably, were to change modern fiction for ever.
Published in 1818, two years after she and Shelley were married, Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus' has since become an incredibly influential work of gothic, horror and science fiction, with some claiming that it is the first true SF novel22. Steeped in death, romance and tragedy, it casts its protagonist as a grim caricature of a mother, birthing his offspring from dismembered corpses. Tragedy plagues the novel as Frankenstein's child, the nameless creature, pursues his own dreams of love, with terrible results. The novel was almost instantly a popular success, translated into French in 182123 and first adapted for the stage in 182324.
Polidori's effort, in the meantime, may not have been as successful as Shelley's but, with the benefit of hindsight, is equally as significant. 'The Vampyre', first published in 1819 was based on a fragment of a tale that Byron dreamed up for the competition but which Polidori ran with. The protagonist, Lord Ruthven, is a thinly veiled pastiche of Byron himself. The tale is significant both as being the first english language vampire story but also for the characterisation of Ruthven himself. In this swaggering noble, this bastard with a killer smile, we have the prototype for the aristocratic vampire, an archetype that would germinate in the artistic milieu of death-obsessed Victoriana before blossoming 80 years later in Bram Stoker's world-renowned 'Dracula'25. This novel so ingrained its titular character in the public consciousness that the name has become synonymous with the monster; it has been adapted and re imagined into every new artistic medium to appear since its publication and is responsible for over a century of sexual vampirism. Far from the shambling, cursed corpses of folklore and 18th century poetry, the descendants of Ruthven and Dracula are charming, beautiful, erotically charged predators; Nyx's youngest children, sex and death personified.
Polidori's vampyre conforms to a style of character that was relatively fresh at the time of writing but was swiftly assimilated across the fictional board - the Byronic hero. Named for Byron who first created the archetype in his semi-autobiographical epic 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' he is generally, according to the historian and critic Lord Macaulay, "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection"26. The character type often arises in the works of one of the foremost masters of the macabre, famous for his fascination with doomed romance: Edgar Allen Poe27.
Writing in the 1830s and 40s, at the tale end of the Gothic tradition proper, Poe produced a massively influential body of short stories and poetry and is credited with, among other things, creating the detective story28. The author HP Lovecraft, upon whom Poe was a huge influence, devotes an entire chapter of his famous 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" to Poe and wrote "to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state". He also notes that "His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal aesthetic movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists"29.
As Poe was to 19th Century American literature, so Lovecraft was in the 20th. Neither received the recognition within their lifetimes that posterity has gifted them. Lovecraft's uniquely terrifying tales of weird horror, and the pseudo-pantheon of eldritch alien intelligences that peopled them, have been absorbed so successfully into the public consciousness that it would be an effort to name someone working today in the genre of dark fantasy that hasn't been influenced by him30. Lovecraft's shadow looms over the genre of modern horror like one of his star-flung elder gods.
Contemporaneous with Lovecraft, the spawn of Diodati were enjoying a new lease of life in the rapidly evolving medium of cinema. The success of 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula' (both 1931) for Universal studios was to spearhead a new cinematic horror genre that would spend the next 20 years plundering the supernatural literature of the previous century and a half. Adaptations of works by Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells and of course Edgar Allen Poe, among others, played alongside countless sequels and reworkings of the original 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula' tales to the point that, as the horror craze died back in favour of science fiction / fantasy films in the 1950s, the original gothic characters had achieved the status of true archetypes, recognisable at a glance, and constantly imitated31.
The motif of night, an aesthetic meme transmitted across millennia in folklore, poetry, literature, art and music, dispersed throughout the twentieth century in the new mediums of cinema and television, cartoons and comic books and the downbeat, experimental music that sprang up as an offshoot from the British punk scene of the late 1970s. In the sub-cultural morass of the late twentieth century, the foundations had been laid for aesthetic to become lifestyle, distinctive in dress, interests and ideology, steeped in a heady fusion of 19th century gothic sensibilities, Decadent nihilism and the increasingly garish and gory mindset of modern horror, all played out in shadow haunted night clubs, beneath a star strewn midnight sky32.
Poetry and madness. Sex and death.
And Night.
Which would ordinarily be the kind of place you'd leave something like this; argument presented, nice build towards the climax, please don't think about it too hard. Except it's all very... tenuous, isn't it? I mean, I'm clearly a massive hypocrite, criticising Hesiod for putting Nyx down and then basing most of my work on his text. And that stuff about Nyx being the mother of artistic inspiration so that I could get the poets on board, that was just a monumental fudge, wasn't it? For the Greeks, dreams were mainly associated with prophecies33; artistic creation was the realm of the muses to whom Nyx had pretty much no connection34.
Besides, what on earth is a big old atheist like me doing invoking ancient gods in the first place? If it doesn't try your patience too much, allow me to explain, by returning to my original question. Why the Cult of Nyx?
The word cult has picked up some regrettable connotations over the years but back in the day it simply referred to the rituals and ceremonies of religious practice. It derives from the Latin 'cultus' which translates to mean habitation, tilling, refinement, worship - in short the act of working to care for something. In the religious sense, caring for a god and their shrine and working to continue said rituals and ceremonies35. So, within a cult of Nyx, what form would those rituals and ceremonies take?
The fact that there never was a cult of Nyx among the Greeks doesn’t help much – or rather it does because it frees us up considerably, as does the dearth of information about her that’s survived. I’ve played rather fast and loose with my interpretation of the goddess of night, cherry picking the elements that I want to keep, combining passages from separate interpretations and largely ignoring things that don’t fit. This may look like a bit of a cheat but in the context of the Greek pantheon it really, really isn’t.
The Greek gods (any gods, arguably) are less well-defined personalities and more like broad archetypes. This is symptomatic of any fictional character that is handled over a long period of time by a variety of creators, and tellingly the majority of surviving works that feature the Greek pantheon are narrative-based epic poems. As these would have been part of an oral tradition before ever being written down, the stories would have been passed between storytellers for generations with each adding embellishments, new characters and situations, even entirely new plot lines into the works36. The recurring characters, chiefly the gods who always seem to have a part to play in this literature, would be distilled to the essence of their personalities, into functioning archetypes, in order to be instantly recognizable37.
The reason that the Greek gods are still utilised in our art and our stories, still have their tales retold even now, is that versatility. It isn't down to the characters but rather to the lack of them; tellingly you can summarise any god's motivations and drives in a single line. Zeus for instance would be “The warrior-king of Olympus, this sky god is renowned for his amorous conquests amongst gods and mortals”. Which is simplifying the matter somewhat but seems to be the jumping off point for most depictions of him. As long as the audience recognises the gods by their core attributes, then Zeus or Poseidon or Aphrodite can be dropped into your tale, off-the-peg, and behave in pretty much any way the artist chooses, without consideration for millenia of continuity or motivation.
It doesn't take the hugest of leaps to assume that this has always been the case. Indeed there is a school of thought that sees certain of the surviving epic poems as being little more than propaganda of a sort, elevating the worship of Zeus in particular above that of his wife Hera and actively attempting to make her look foolish and comedic, ineffectual and spiteful. Homer was all over that38. A goddess, powerful and widely worshiped as early as the 8th century BCE, brought low in the only arena in which gods have any power at all - stories. As suggested above, a similar campaign may have been targeted against our venerable night goddess.
Just to clarify, I don't believe the night to be anything more than the result of planetary rotation. I don't actually consider it to be a sentient entity, with any desires or needs. Not objectively. I agree with Alan Moore's observation that the only place gods have any reality is in our minds39. The only influence they have on the world is through human works, in their names. Gods are creatures of imagination and they thrive in stories. Subjectively then, and with the greatest awareness, the night can be Nyx...
Why do that? As Douglas Adams observed, isn't it enough to gaze at the beauty of a garden without needing there to be fairies at the bottom of it40? Aren't the natural wonders of a night sky, and the astonishing advances humanity has made in understanding what we're actually looking at, the staggering implications held therein; isn't that enough without resurrecting this dead and buried tale to cloud our vision again? What's the point?
There's a certain type of story, a certain type of music, a certain type of image that appeals to me. I'm not going to say 'that has always appealed to me' because that's probably not true. Certainly since it's mattered, mattered enough to inform my world view, my mindset and my own work. These are melancholy stories, filled with sacrifice, love and loss, adrift without the safe guarantee of a happy ending; it's a downbeat kind of tune, balancing hopelessness with flashes of beauty and searing power; these are dark and intricate images, subdued yet awesome, imbued with the thrill of the fantastic and yet whispering with a very real humanity. This is the art that speaks to me. For ease I tend to think of it all as gothic, though that's certainly inaccurate.
When I first read of Nyx I was both thrilled and amused at the thought of the Greeks personifying something so immense, abstract and primal as night itself. The idea captured my imagination which, for an artist, can lead to all kinds of trouble.
The first thing that struck me about Nyx was how entirely she embodies that aesthetic that I love. You can tell how Hesiod and co. viewed her from the children that they attribute to her, to the horrors that they lay at her door. Other night goddesses have elements of that gothic ideal attached to them, as mentioned above with Nut, but they lack the sense of doom and woe that shrouds Nyx. Combining this with the separate but entirely logical association of her with love, primarily sexual love, adds an element that strongly evokes the poetry of the Romantics, which helped influence much of the late gothic literature, and in turn the 20th century goth movement.
It was around about the time of making this association that I wondered to myself, "Wouldn't it be fantastic if there were a direct lineage from the Greek poets who wrote of Nyx, to the 19th Century Romantics that she inspired and from there to the thriving dark fantasy genres that we enjoy today?" And of course there is. The Romantic poets were presumably educated in the classics, which included the study of ancient literature, certainly Homer at least, as well as Greek mythology41. Byron, in fact, so loved Greece that he died fighting in its war of independence against the Ottoman empire42. So there, pretty much, was my short answer.
It wasn't quite what I was after though. I wanted to know if they had been as enchanted by the idea of this gloomy nocturnal goddess as I had. If her name had jumped out at them as an embodiment of every morbidly romantic idea the night had ever inspired in them.
I've no idea. When met with this impasse, I did what any artist would do when burdened with an idea that simply won't shift itself - I made something up.
It's a two-fold creation, the goddess and her worshipers, Nyx and the cult of Nyx.
The lineage for my 'cult' is that detailed above, an attempt to suggest an influence dating from antiquity, reaching into the present. From our dizzying vantage point at the pinnacle of history, everything and everyone become available for our little game of pareidolia dot-to-dot; we can link Hesiod to Poe, Majnun to Polidori to Lovecraft; Boris Karloff under the same umbrella as Orpheus. Wherever there's the hint of a connection, we make it our connection. It’s a sleight of hand and it isn’t the only one. As mentioned earlier, dreams did not carry the same implications for the ancient Greeks as they have today, where we like to see them as a source of creativity. I doubt that the ancient Greeks would agree with my association of Nyx with the arts, but then I doubt they’d recognise the version of Nyx that I've put forward anyway so I feel justified in updating this aspect.
The overall impression that I want to give is of a broad and diverse group, separated by time and distance, yet united in celebration of the aesthetic that we've embodied in Nyx. A cult that never was, for a goddess of our own creation.
My vision for the goddess is based on the attributes described, attributes that were there from the beginning, in Hesiod and the Orphic poems. I've elevated them to become defining characteristics based on the aesthetic which primarily interests me and which drew me to the idea of Nyx to begin with. My intention is to craft an archetype who represents entirely the bleak melancholy and tragic romance of a certain artistic movement. As a brief algebraic formula can convey deep and often staggering truths about the nature of reality to a physicist, so invoking Nyx should convey layers of imaginative cues and aesthetic principles to the artist.
This document will hardly do it alone but let's call it a first step. An ancient deity transformed into an archetypal muse; a cult whose ceremonies and rituals comprise not only of reading her tales, basking in her visuals, dancing to her music; but in the act of creation itself, in taking inspiration from the motif, sustaining and sharing it.
This is my contribution, small though it is. An artistic dedication to an aesthetic principle. This site, a votive offering to the gothic goddess of night and a welcoming hand out to those who feel compelled by her presence.
A gathering.
Footnotes.
1. Yes, I did. Covers my output to around about 2009 or so. Have a look for www.antipathystudios.co.uk and see where it takes you.
2. Hesiod's 'Theogeny' (Hugh G. Evelyn-White trans.) ll 116 - 138 http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm
3. Aristophenes 'The Birds': "At the start, 920
there was Chaos, and Night, and pitch-black Erebus,
and spacious Tartarus. There was no earth, no heaven,
no atmosphere. Then in the wide womb of Erebus,
that boundless space, black-winged Night, first creature born,
made pregnant by the wind, once laid an egg. It hatched,
when seasons came around, and out of it sprang Love—
the source of all desire, on his back the glitter
of his golden wings, just like the swirling whirlwind."
Trans. Ian Johnston https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/birds.htm
4.Homer's Iliad, bk 14.249 - "But Zeus, when he awakened, was wroth, and flung the gods hither and thither about his palace, and me above all he sought, and would have hurled me from heaven into the deep to be no more seen, had Night not saved me—Night that bends to her sway both gods and men. To her I came in my flight, and besought her, and Zeus refrained him, albeit he was wroth, for he had awe lest he do aught displeasing to swift Night".
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom. Il. 14.249&lang=original
5. See for instance, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/12249
6. 'Theogeny', ll 211 - 232 particularly.
7. See note 5.
9. As quoted in 3. above.
10 and 11. See note 6.
12. See http://www.touregypt.net/nut.htm for this and more.
14. See note 12 and also http://www.touregypt.net/nut.htm
15. There are a number of versions of this story and of Nut's seperation from Geb. This specific version, alas, comes from an uncited entry on wikipedia. After much debate i've left the reference alone in the spirit of the main body of the article. Yes, i'm cheating again.
17. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_(name) Yes, I know it's Wikipedia but at least it's cited this time.
18 and 19. This is a rather good article on an enduringly popular mythic figure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith
21. See http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/19/1816 for an interesting summary of this well worn tale.
22. Brian Aldiss, for instance. See The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy by Brian Aldiss (1995), page 78.
25. As explained here http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/louxsie/polidori.html
26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero for a concise summary.
27. "His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connexion; since his gloomy, ambitious, and anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios." From Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', chapter VII, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx
28. Ibid, and also ""Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as quoted in Frank, Frederick S.; Magistrale, Anthony (1997). The Poe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-27768-9, pg 103.
29. See note 27.
30. Pure hyperbole that I cannot remotely back up. Betcha though.
31. See this excellent article for details http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-guide-to-the-universal-studios-monster-movies-19,87883/
32. I'm being deliberately brief here. Much and more has been written on the post-punk, goth and general alternative movements of the late twentieth century and to attempt to touch on these would carry me too far from the intent of this article. Suffice to say that for those who are interested, I can recommend the work of Mick Mercer http://www.mickmercer.com/index.html and Gavin Baddely http://www.gavinbaddeley.com/ whose excellent 'Gospel of Filth' is an essential read for those with a broad interest in the subject.
33. "Hypnos was also known as Lord of the Two Gates, these being the Gates of Ivory and the Gates of Horn. Through the Gates of Ivory thronged those false visions which teased folk at night, tempting them into foolish ways. Through the Gates of Horn flew forth true dreams of prophecy and inspiration." Bernard Evslin: Gods, Demigods & Demons An Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology pg 106. Also Homer's Odyssey, book 19, lines 560-569 "Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfilment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them. But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came." trans from the Loeb Classical Library edition.
34. Hesiod's Theogony, ll 53 - 103.
35. Cult: noun
1. a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology . a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
Definition from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cult?s=t
36. "Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry,[50] that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions; even entire verses are at times repeated. Parry and his student Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in a predominantly oral cultural milieu, the key words being "oral" and "traditional". Parry started with "traditional": the repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry called these repetitive chunks "formulas"." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer
37. "Archetypes are likewise supposed to have been present in folklore and literature for thousands of years, including prehistoric artwork. The use of archetypes to illuminate personality and literature was advanced by Carl Jung early in the 20th century, who suggested the existence of universal contentless forms that channel experiences and emotions, resulting in recognizable and typical patterns of behavior with certain probable outcomes. Archetypes are cited as important to both ancient mythology and modern narratives." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetypes
38. See the Cult of Hera section here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hera
39. “The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” Alan Moore, 'From Hell'
40. "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Douglas Adams, 'Last Chance To See'
