Dating the Greek Gods: Empowering Spiritual Messages on Sex and Love, Creativity and Wisdom - Hardcover

Gooch, Brad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743226690 ISBN 13: 9780743226691

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

A guide for homosexual men seeking spiritual fulfillment is a companion to Finding the Boyfriend Within and presents a series of meditations and personal exercises inspiried by the characteristics of Greek god archetypes designed to promote better self-understanding and life satisfaction. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Brad Gooch is the author of Finding the Boyfriend Within, Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, and the acclaimed biography of Frank O'Hara, City Poet, as well as the novels The Golden Age of Promiscuity and Scary Kisses. His poems, stories, and articles have appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Out, and many other periodicals. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Apollo: The God of Wisdom

Profile

Apollo is the Mr. Right of the Greek pantheon. A son of almighty Zeus, the king of the gods, and one of Zeus's many mistresses -- the lovely Leto -- Apollo is generally described as tall, dark, and handsome. A Homeric hymn to Apollo tells us that when the young god with his long, curling black hair first appeared on Mount Olympus and drew his bow, all the gods and goddesses rose from their seats in astonishment.

Gazing at a marble frieze of the gods and goddesses making up the pantheon, Nietzsche, the German philosopher and classicist, wrote of Apollo's special star quality: "We must not be misled by the fact that Apollo stands side by side with the others as an individual deity, without any claim to priority of rank. For the same impulse that embodies itself in Apollo gave birth to this entire Olympian world, and in this sense Apollo is its father."

Apollo was a player. His love life was protean, but his success with women wasn't as stellar as might be expected. Daphne had herself transformed into a laurel tree to escape his advances. Afterward, Apollo would wear a branch of laurel as a wreath on his head -- hence, as he was also the god of poetry, the phrase "poet laureate." When Cassandra remained unimpressed by his attributes, he cursed her with the gift of prophecy, which included a caveat that no one would ever believe her accurate warnings about the future.

He had more luck with handsome young men, whose love for him was at least reciprocal. Yet these romances ended tragically as well. Apollo's great infatuation was Hyacinthus, a divine boy who rode swans instead of horses. Apollo would carry the nets when Hyacinthus went fishing, lead the dogs when he went hunting, and accompany him on hiking trips into the mountains, while neglecting his own practice of the lyre and archery. One day when Hyacinthus and Apollo were throwing the discus, the wind was shifted by the jealous west wind, Zephyrus, who was also in love with the boy. The discus sliced Hyacinthus through the skull. From the drops of his purple blood grew the hyacinth flower.

Apollo's next infatuation, Cyparissus, accidentally speared his own pet stag, a flashy sports car of a creature with gilded antlers and festooned with silver ornaments. Cyparissus was so inconsolable when he discovered his misfire that Apollo turned him into a sorrowing tree, the cypress, an evergreen often planted in cemeteries. For these passionate affairs, Apollo is distinguished as the first god to woo someone of the same sex. He might well be nominated on that basis for the vacant post of god of homosexuality. (In Greek legend, the first mortal to pursue another man was the poet Thamyris, who was also in love with Hyacinthus.)

But Nietzsche didn't single out Apollo as the trophy god because he scored sporadically with young beauties of either sex. As with mortals, a disconnect can exist between a god's love life and his work life. Apollo could be dizzy when he was in pursuit of a long redial list of potential lovers. But when he was at the office, he was all business. His focus was sustained and steady. During the workday, Apollo was the sun, and so his job was the spreading of light. His arc was perfection itself. No quality was finally more crucial for energizing Olympian spirituality than light. As the god of the sun, he was, by extension, the god of all things positive, life-giving, and full of clarity. His light was spiritual as well as solar.

Apollo exhausted many fields in his endeavors as a deity. Exhibiting symptoms resembling attention deficit disorder, he was the god of prophecy, healing and medicine, poetry, music, philosophy, astronomy, archery, youth, wisdom, beauty, intelligence, and moderation. The transformation of so many of his lovers into trees and flowers reveals his closeness with nature. But shooting through all these manifestations is the principle of light. "Light" is the root word in "enlightenment." Hidden in "enlightenment" is the sense of lightening up. His style of music and poetry is likewise illuminating. His mode was never heavy metal. He was much more classical.

The most famous of all the ancient temples was Apollo's temple at Delphi, believed by the Greeks to be the center of the world, its exact site marked with a large conical stone, the omphalos, or navel. The two guiding principles engraved on the temple in the sixth century B.C. were KNOW THYSELF and ALL THINGS IN MODERATION. (Both commands were later accepted by the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the basis of morality.) The light of wisdom that produces intuition and healing balance is the shining logo of the Olympian brand. The Athenian Greeks roved freely through all experience in their integration of life with wisdom. They didn't leave any dark closets in their psyches unexposed. But even at their most garish and violent, they maintained a glow of sanity about them. This glow was the halo of the Apollonian principle of wisdom.

Meditations and Exercises

Street Wisdom

Apollo's wisdom can sound like the most abstract of principles, the most far-off and Olympian. The Greek word for wisdom, sophia, possesses some lofty connotations. The early Greek-speaking Christians even identified the word with Jesus Christ, as the wisdom of God. (Hence Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, was the soaring Byzantine church in Istanbul.)

But sophia in ancient Greek had more practical definitions, too. The word could denote skill, craft, cleverness, know-how, cunning, smartness, even expedience. These meanings are closer to our own sense of "streetwise."

The best way to extract wisdom with a capital W from our street experiences is to practice formulating what we've learned -- to exercise wisdom. The most productive place to start is with our relationships past and present. We grow wise from our relationships. Nothing speeds up the process of wisdom more than passion -- whether sexual, romantic, or deriving from a deep friendship. Wisdom isn't a purely intellectual quality. The Greek goddess Psyche -- her name means "Soul" -- was in love, after all, with Eros, the god of romantic love. The soul needs juice from which to distill wisdom.

APOLLONIAN EXERCISE #1

List significant relationships that you've had in your life: trysts, friends, lovers, or partners. Try for five. Then write down lessons you have learned about yourself and life from these relationships.

Each of us has his own quotient of wisdom gained from a personal supply of experiences. I'm going to share my findings. Hopefully, these results will resonate with yours, but you will certainly have conclusions that are entirely your own. Depending on how our particular hand of cards is dealt, we arrive at different insights in different orders and at different times.

My list:

· Sally

· Howard

· Dirk

· The Boyfriend Within

· The two Larrys

Sally and I began our romance in college. I was already experimenting with guys. But the comfort of bubble baths and nights shared with her under a patchwork quilt made for an invaluable home base. Yet Dionysus, the god of sexual energy, soon demanded his due.

Lesson: I was gay.

Howard was a lucky stumble into love. This eleven-year relationship had many of the traits I've since come to think of as wise for the long term, but didn't even know I was looking for at the time.

Lesson: Shared interests, parity of mind and body, and brotherly love all contribute to long-lasting relationships.

Dirk, with his long black hair and heavy Southern accent, resembled Apollo. (Although he didn't sound like Apollo.) He told me everything I wanted to hear: "I'm the one you've been waiting for." Six months later, he eloped with a plastic surgeon.

Lesson: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is." (Borrowed from an online-profile quotation, a great source of folk wisdom.)

If your lessons begin sounding disgruntled, like mine directly above, another bit of wisdom found online is useful: "Don't judge others, evaluate yourself."

The Boyfriend Within, after our two years of dating, left me much lighter, happier, and more relaxed. Much of what passes for love and romance is disguised insecurity.

Lesson: Happiness comes from within. By going within, you mysteriously get outside yourself.

The two Larrys, with whom I recently experienced romantic sparks, are two of my longtime friends, one on the East Coast, the other on the West. For over a decade, I'd found both to be stimulating company. In both cases, we just went to the next step: sleepovers.

Lesson: Having demythologized obsessive love in time spent with the Boyfriend Within, I now find certain friendships to be more passionate affairs.

During the early 1980s, I was employed as the porn critic for the New York Native, a now-defunct gay newspaper. My beat was the Adonis movie theater, a baroque pile in midtown Manhattan long since demolished. While taking notes on a mangled little pad, I would often drift from appraising the antics on-screen to staring through the living lust of shadows of men traipsing up and down the center aisle.

One evening I found myself in the singular position of weeping as the credits rolled at the end of a film: Tom de Simone's The Idol. This prevideo production began with an unlikely (for porn) sequence in which we witness the death in a car accident of the main character, a golden high school idol of a track star, very much Apollo's type. The conceit was that we were at graveside and given access to the heads of each of the mourners as they replayed their memories of the deceased. The first romantic interest, acted by a transvestite, was his girlfriend, with whom he made out in the backseat of a car. She was followed by the coach, who massaged his star athlete in an overly attentive manner following an injury. Next was a teammate who had joined him in a masturbation duet in the shower.

Eventually the camera circled upward to reveal a boy on his bicycle, surveying the burial from an overlook. Entering into his brunette head, we found that he and the track star had been boyfriends. The "idol" had progressed in his sentimental education through more and more authentic liaisons, discovering simultaneously his sexuality and his capacity for love. Together these two cavorted in a swimming pool, and then on a king-size mattress in an anonymous bedroom while the sound track "Love Is in the Air" played like aural soap bubbles. At the film's conclusion, with the bereft boyfriend leaning against what might as well have been a cypress, the lesson of love had been imparted.

This film could be exhibit A in street wisdom. Through its mixture of sexuality, romance, love, and death, a spiral is set in motion that illustrates how lessons learned from relationships eventually allow the main character to find love and identity. Without the disco music and mythological dye jobs, our own lives can follow just such a spiral if we grow in wisdom through our experiences. If we don't assimilate wisdom, then we will repeat ourselves, and our lives will likely remain a revolving circle.

INTUITIVE WISDOM

Apollo was big box office in the ancient world mostly because of his association with prophecy.

He was said to have learned the art of prophecy at a very young age. Gods grew quite fast, so he might have been just a few weeks old. By the time he was four days old, after all, he had already killed the dragon Python with his bow and arrow in the temple of Delphi, which at that time was still the temple of the earth mother, Gaia. Apollo's teacher in prophecy was Pan, a goat-legged god on the island of Crete. Importing this gift to his oracle at Delphi, who chewed a leaf of Apollo's bay laurel during her oracular trances, he became so identified with prophecy that most soothsayers claimed some connection to him.

The ancients were as titillated as we are by hearing prophecies of the future. They delighted in many varieties of sortilege, or divination, including the reading of entrails of birds. Lots of popular contemporary activities are their descendants: Ouija boards, tarot cards, horoscopes, I Ching, runes, palm reading, and crystal balls.

Skill in all of these activities could be filed under prophetic intuition. The forms of intuition that continue to amaze are such bright tricks as predicting the future or having psychic abilities. A friend swore to me that he'd been playing a game of guessing unseen cards from a pile with a partner and became so expert as the night wore on that the partner insisted on stopping, claiming to be spooked by his ability. Another friend uncharacteristically turned off her computer before leaving her loft one summer morning, thinking to herself that there would be a power failure. An hour later a Con Edison substation exploded and all Lower Manhattan lost electrical power. (In her case, though, her downstairs neighbor had commented the day before on brownouts. Many cases of psychic foreshadowing involve just such a dose of knowledge subtly assimilated.)

More transformative, if less flashy, is the application of intuition in daily life. Intuitions are basically felt thoughts. They don't arrive as actual verbal messages. They arrive more in a form such as "I have a good feeling about that guy." Some people are more intuitive than others. Or perhaps some simply have practiced more -- like the friend with the playing cards. "I think people who have good intuitions tend not to be as needy," a friend recently conjectured between puffs of a late-night cigarette. "It means being open...being able to read the tea leaves. Being able to look at what's there even if it doesn't conform to what you want to be there...even if it doesn't feed your ego. You have to be able to face down your fears to be truly intuitive."

His theory sounded good to me. But theory bought or not, intuition can be tested until you discover its benefits. Gods and goddesses come with attributes, like superheroes, and with props that symbolize those attributes. Apollo's wreath of bay laurel marks him as a poet and a champion athlete -- victorious athletes were graced with a crown of laurel for winning competitions -- but also as one gifted with good prophetic intuitions. Such an Apollonian gift can be developed and tested in the interpersonal world.

APOLLONIAN EXERCISE #2

List friends and acquaintances who elicit a positive feeling. Then list those who elicit a negative feeling. Over the next week, spend time only with those on the positive list.

The premise behind this exercise is that your intuitions, if followed, will change your life for the better. You already have a built-in monitor that will guide you more wisely than any oracle or guru. Crucial to benefiting from this exercise is being able to identify a positive feeling about someone. This skill might sound obvious. But too often our sense of positive feeling becomes garbled on its way from the gut throu...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743226690
• ISBN 13: 9780743226691
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176