Talbott, David by The Saturn Myth (1980)

Author:The Saturn Myth (1980) [Myth, The Saturn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Greece And Rome

When the Greeks speak of Mount Olympus as the home of the gods, one customarily thinks of the famous Macedonian peak, the highest mountain in Greece. Yet numerous peaks in Greece and Asia Minor competed for the title “Olympus.” Arcadia and Thessaly had their own Olympus, as did Laconia. Mountains in Attica, in Euboea, and in Skyros are still called Olympus today. Four different peaks of Mount Ida bore the name, while there was another Olympus in Galatia, another in Lydia, another in Lycia, another in Celicia. So also did Lesbos and Cyprus possess a sacred Olympus.

For an explanation of the many locations one must look to the cosmic prototype. Each hill entitled Olympus commemorated the original resting place of the great father Kronos (later Zeus), just as the hill which the Romans called the Capitoline symbolized the “Mount of Saturn.”[1017] Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus reports a complete assimilation of the Capitoline or Saturnian hill and the Greek Olympus or Mount Kronos.[1018] Both hills signified the primordial mount on which the old god Saturn founded his celestial residence.

The mythical Olympus, which gave its name to so many sacred peaks, was the “wholly-shining” summit, the “aetherial” height or “burning sky.” The author of the Platonic Epinomis refers to Olympus as “the Cosmos.”[1019]

Plato tells us that Olympus was the omphalos or navel of the earth,[1020] a fact of vital significance, since the Greeks knew the omphalos as the “axis.”

Moreover, the tradition of Olympus cannot be divorced from that of Ida, another mythical mountain possessing more than one localization. That Mount Ida bore the name Olympus and, like Olympus, was said to rise into the aether,[1021] reveals the underlying identity of the two heaven’s pillars. Ida was the birthplace:

In the centre of the Sea is the White Isle of Zeus

There is Mount Ida, and our race’s cradle.[1022]

So declares Aeneas. To anyone aware of the general tradition, this mountain in the middle of the sea can only be the primeval hill, the cosmic peak to which every race on earth traces its ancestry.

Also conceived as the centre of the world was the famous Mount Parnassus, from which, according to local myths, the human race descended. On the slope of Parnassus stood Delphi, Apollo’s popular shrine, esteemed as “the navel.” But here too we must look beyond the commemorative terrestrial mount to comprehend its symbolism. The mythical Parnassus is doubtless the same as the Sanskrit Parnasa, which the Hindu Puranas call Meru, the polar mountain.

One of those to perceive the Greek sacred mountain as the copy of the cosmic mount was Warren, who concluded: “Olympus was simply the Atlantean pillar [the “pillar of heaven”] pictured as a lofty mountain, and supporting the sky at its northern Pole. In fact, many writers now affirm that the Olympus of Greek mythology was simply the north polar ‘World-mountain’ of the Asiatic nations.”[1023] But the point is only rarely acknowledged today, and most treatments of the subject still ask the Macedonian mount to explain its own mythical image.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.