Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?”

“Well, it's a truism that you can't understand a person without knowing something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of a quick Cliff's Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as a sea of white noise—totally random broadband static. And for reasons that we don't really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this—Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of these as crystals—not in the hippy-dippy Californian sense, but in the hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings among such entities, you get Titans. And it's arguably kind of interesting to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods—you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.

“A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one exception I'll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling, either Titan-Titaness or God-Goddess or God-Nymph or God-Woman or basically Zeus and whom– or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day. Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn't even fully a god—he's half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

“Now what I'm getting to here is that Athena was exceptional in every way. To begin with she wasn't created through sexual reproduction in any kind of normal sense; she sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. According to some versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked Metis, about whom we'll hear more in due course. Then he was warned that Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate her, and later Athena came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis story or not, I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar was going on with the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin.”

“Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion.”

“Yes, Randy, you do have a keen eye for virgins. Hephaestus leg fucked her once but did not achieve penetration. She's quite important in the Odyssey, but there are really very few myths, in the usual sense of that term, that involve her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went so far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess of weaving, among other things.

“Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him—the helpless, innocent victim, that is—into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

“But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair-minded of her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw—Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd-raping, interspecies-fucking worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all of those other myths, which makes this into a sort of meta-myth. Athena flew off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might seem kind of like poor anger management until you consider that during the struggle against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in the form of a spider.

“So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts—such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics—why the redundancy? But a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia. So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious—crafts are just the practical application of metis.”

“I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp,” Randy says. “I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?”

“It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology.”

“Okay. Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame, then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with Athena even though—maybe because —they are nominally the god and goddess of the same thing—war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that he's completely incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of Odysseus's drinking buddies during the iliad. Athena knocks him out with a rock at one point. When he's not making a complete idiot of himself in battle, he's screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and—get this—his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.