The Dawn of the Gods

Aurora, the Roman ‘Goddess of the Dawn’
Guercino, 1621 CE, Ludovisi, Rome

The Rig Vedic Ushas, ‘Goddess of the Dawn’, parallel to the Latin Aurora and the Greek Eos, born of Sky [Dyaus, cognate with Zeus] and Earth [Prithvi] and sister to Night. The progeny of the divine dual, the first divide.

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Humans were to Gods, Shakespeare noted, ‘as flies to wanton boys’. Self-absorbed, rank-obsessed, occasionally generous, frequently malevolent, they would throw you a crumb if in the right mood. But most of the time they just ignored you.

So one of the Wise-Men finally spoke-up:

‘You know, I’ve been thinking’. We’ve been doing this for over a thousand years and we’ve gotten nowhere. We’ve tried everything; made the Gods look like us, look different from us, tolerated their tantrums, their strange ways. Even allowed them to go immortal on us. And we are still exactly where we started.

And it struck me that in all these years we have never really sat down and said: ‘O.K. Let’s pause just for a second and ask ourselves: ‘So who or what is the Subject in search of this Object?”

Where is the ‘Man’ in search of the ‘God’?