Eros Is a Deathless God
A hawk glides along the rugged mountain slope, spying on nightingales as they sing. Near the summit, light gray limestone juts out of the lush green forest which is torn like a weathered canvas tarp by cliffs and ravines. In the foothills, gnarled olive trees guard the grassy meadows where pink and purple windflowers dot the ground and a potpourri of thyme and oregano and sage perfumes the air. Nearby a farmer plows his fields and plants his crops.
One day, while waiting for harvest, out pasturing his sheep, this hardscrabble farmer—graced by the Muses—transforms into a poet. “They plucked and gave me a rod,” he says, describing a staff made of sturdy laurel, “and breathed into me a divine voice.”
Then the Muses taught this now-poet a song about how “the first gods and earth came to be,” a song about creation and the beginning of time, about mortals and immortals.
Hesiod (8th-7th century BCE) was an epic poet whose father fled poverty in search of economic opportunity, migrating from modern-day Turkey to mainland Greece, settling near Thespiae on the eastern slopes of Mount Helicon. Due to its inland, elevated location, the region swung between cold, wet winters and hot, dry summers, seasonal extremes that—in addition to poor soil, rocky terrain, and lack of irrigation—made farming difficult. Ascra, the poet’s village-home, was “a wretched place,” according to Hesiod, “bad in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant.”
But the Muses of Mount Helicon made Hesiod a poet and beckoned him to sing unforgettable things. Nearly three millennia later, we still remember his mythic poem Theogony.
“Verily at the first Chaos came to be,” he declares, “but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.”
In this telling, Chaos (originally a void, not disorder) was the initial state of the universe. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the cave-like pit under Earth), and Eros (Love), described as deathless gods because they emerged spontaneously, self-formed.
Some scholars suggest that Eros, given his position among this first generation of uncreated, eternal gods, was the driving force behind the generation of new life in the cosmos. Through his uniting power of love, he caused the first entities to reproduce and thus fashioned the material world. This transcendental Eros is the prime mover that moves us with its initiating energy.
“And with [Aphrodite] went Eros,” Hesiod goes on to say, “and comely Desire (Himeros) followed her at her birth at the first and as she went into the assembly of the gods.”
Whereas Eros represents passionate love and attraction, Himeros stands in for the kind of sexual craving which is sometimes destructive. Eros and Himeros are often entangled. Both are there to greet Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, when she was born from the sea-foam.
Hesiod has described the co-arising of love and sex and beauty, of Eros and Himeros and Aphrodite, at the dawn of creation, the factors that come together to conceive new life.
2500 years later, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted, spewing massive amounts of ash and sulfur into the atmosphere, creating a global veil of aerosols that blocked sunlight and cooled the climate, resulting in worldwide weather anomalies, including The Year Without a Summer, which devastated New England farmers in 1816. Snowfall in June and frosts in July and August ruined crops in places like Vermont. Many farms produced no usable harvest that year.
Ten-year-old Joseph Smith soon migrated with his farming family from Vermont to western New York, where the land was cheaper and the climate was milder.
The area was also on fire for religion. Within four years the teenage farm boy had started to go to revival meetings where he observed that the competing faiths “created no small stir and division amongst the people… when the converts began to file off [to different denominations]… a scene of great confusion and bad feeling ensued—priest contending against priest, and convert against convert.”
He felt confused and unable to conclude which religion was right or wrong. He decided, rather than appeal to the Bible or other authorities, to ask God himself.
So on a clear spring morning in 1820, he stepped out of his family’s log home and headed towards the woods, crossing a babbling brook and entering the tall trees through a clearing.
The rising sun beamed through the branches of the bare canopy, filling the forest with light. He passed sugar maples whose grayish brown trunks were thick with flaky bark. He walked until he arrived at his planned spot in a grove. There, “having looked around me, and finding myself alone,” he said, “I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God.” He’d never, in his life, prayed aloud before.
Immediately an unseen force shut down his capacity to speak. “Thick darkness gathered around me,” he said, “and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.”
Just as he was about to give in, “at this moment of great alarm,” he said, “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me… When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”
God the Father and Jesus Christ had appeared to him. He composed himself and asked his question: which sect is right? They told him he “must join none of them, for they were all wrong.”
After the light departed he went home and told his mother what he learned.
Thus marks the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement. Eighteen years later Joseph dictated the official version of the story, and mused, “I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of [the adversary’s] kingdom.” He’d seen Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ as separate beings with glorified bodies of flesh and bone and went on to teach that—unlike the Protestant Christianity of his day, which viewed the body as fallen and corrupt—embodied life in all its delights prepares us to become like God.
Brigham Young, who succeeded Joseph as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called him a poet, “and poets are not like other men,” he remarked, “their gaze is deeper, and reaches the roots of the soul; it is like that of the searching eyes of angels, they catch the swift thought of God and reveal it to us.”
Joseph, like Hesiod, was a poet-farmer who revealed to us the divine role of Eros.
But this knowledge has been lost and for that reason the only true revolutionary act, according to James P. Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, is to restore soul to our sexuality.
Whether in the Valley of the Muses or the Burned-Over District of New York, the revolution grows from the soil we tend everyday. It happens at home.