Enyalios And Christ-Praying While Greece Burns

Cartoon by Ilias Makris (Ekathimerini)

I have a strange idea that we are now in the period of history repeating itself in a big way in Greece. The whole damn country is up in flames, or at least the whole southern part. I mean, this is something that is on a level that is unprecedented. We’ve had the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Fire, the Great Fire of London, The Fire of Rome-all child’s play. This makes all of them together, in terms of area affected, look like a small brush fire.

My question is, has this happened before? Something happened in Greece, more than three thousand years ago, that brought about the end of the Mychaenaean Era, and ushered in a period of roughly five hundred years duration known as “The Dark Ages”.

Here’s the thing-no one seems to know for sure what it was, or who or what caused it. Tablets written in what has been termed “Linear B” Greek gives only vague clues that something horrific was transpiring. They contained orders for sacrificial rites to Poseidon, Hera, Zeus, and a multitude of other deities. In fact, the Mychaenaean Greeks, it turns out, worshipped almost all of the major deities we know today, and did so before the actual arrival of the ancestors of the modern Greeks (known them as Argives and Achaeans), who adopted the Mychenaean deities as well as the language.

Some of the Linear B tablets were degraded, and seemed to have been scribbled on as though in a great hurry, as in the midst of a dire multi-city state calamity. Yet, there is no written record of what that emergency was. Some of the tablets had even been erased, and written over, with specific instructions for sacrificial rites and offerings of incense, animals, and what might have even been human sacrifices.

One of the deities predominant in these ritual instructions was a god named Enyalios-technically, the true original name of Ares. Why? I asked a Greek friend the meaning of the name once, but he was unknowledgeable about ancient Greek paganism-even classical Greek religions. He seemed to think the name Enyalios denoted peace, calm, and had something to do with water. I assumed his unfamiliarity with the subject merely led him to the wrong interpretation.

Still, he may have been on to something. Could Enyalios have originally been invoked as a deity that brought peace by way of total destruction and annihilation of the enemy? That leads to the question-what, in this case, was the enemy? Could it have actually been, not a human invading force-but a fire, a great conflagration that swept the whole of the Greek mainland, or a very substantial portion of it?

Maybe there is just something about the Greek mainland, or perhaps a combination of factors, that lends itself to this phenomenon. It’s position at the Mediterranean and from the equator, the overall make-up of the land, it’s physical features and plant life, etc., under the further combination of the right atmospheric conditions, might encourage such a conflagration on a fairly regular basis-every three thousand years or so. If this is correct, it might also go some way toward verifying that the period of global warming we are going through now might in fact be to at least a large degree cyclical.

One thing is known about this period concerning the destruction of Mychaenaea-there was a fire involved. A great many of the ruins dating from the era verify this. That is all that anyone really knows. Who would have thought it might well turn out to be that the fire in question was nothing but a completely natural phenomenon, with no other apparent causes or reasons, or any intentional provocation on the part of any potential adversary? The fire consumed an entire region. It brought such devastation and despair even the deities seemed helpless in the face of it, or possibly culpable. I should point out that, in this latest fire, there was an accompanying earthquake on an island some 185 miles southwest of Athens. Could this as well have been a factor?

Now, fortunately, it seems the remaining major fire in the region finally seems to be under control. As the government teeters on the brink of collapse for their weak response to the disaster, the EU has stepped in and has in fact supplied most of the aid Greece has received. The English language Greek newspaper Ekathimerini heralds this in its editorial pages as proof of the wisdom of Greek affiliation with the EU.

What, they would not have lifted a finger to help in such a disaster if Greece was not a member of the EU? The US could not help, or would not? It would seem to be the case that politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits the world over cannot resist using even tragedies of this proportion to help further their agendas. Who knows, it is even possible the US has been discouraged from giving assistance in order to further the willingness of the overall Greek population to throw in with the EU.

The first step seems to be working. Understandably, Greeks are calling for accountability from their government, whose response to the disaster has been tepid at best. To their credit, arguably, the fires did no damage to ancient sites and artifacts. Otherwise, and for the most part, it seems to have been too much for them, other than going around the country arresting some individuals for arson. True, this might have been somewhat of a factor. Yet, in the meantime, while the EU is fighting fires, the Greek government seems mainly preoccupied with hunting boogey men.

As might be expected, the fires and the resultant smoke have been declared an overall danger to the world, due to the carbon factor. Yes, somebody somewhere decided this would be a perfect opportunity to ratchet up the Chicken Little Global Warming rhetoric yet another notch.

I guess the European Union could easily be compared to the Argive invasion. In the meantime, Greek Orthodox Priests stand around waving incense censors while they piously pray, though to no effect-as did Pagan Priests in days of old.