By the Gods!

If I follow, what we’re really addressing here is fate; the gods––the other of humanity that we’ve used as a placeholder term for everything incomprehensible that keeps the universe in balance––are the ones who hold the keys to the ideas of destiny and predetermined events, thus attributing humanity no free will or true choice. 

In many pagan mythologies, the idea of predetermined fate was not standard. Think of Greek, Germanic, Celtic, Buddhist mythologies: the gods are capricious and, though powerful, a great deal of what plays out in their stories is beyond even divine control. Many a Greek hero has gone against the will of the Olympians, and while some of these stories end tragically, it’s true, some have been canonized as the eternally glorious champions of humanity. 

The omniscient omnipotence of (some views of) the Christian and Muslim concept of God would cause a great deal of trouble for the world, and the question of free will was the topic of the millennium for theologists. If God is all-knowing, and everything that occurs is a part of his grand, inconceivable plan, how can the choices of men and women truly be their own? There are still inconsistencies and disagreements of this nature in churches/mosques/synagogues today, though the popular answer seems to be “all is part of God’s plan, but every person has the right to choose their own path” which to me seems poorly reasoned.

I’ve gone a bit off track here, but the simple answer is this: gods and heroes are constructed to represent a culture’s perception of the world. For most, the world was a confusing, dangerous, unpredictable place—so too, therefore, were the gods. The heroes of legend would often be crushed beneath the heel of the wild, untamed world and the personalized powers that represented it. 

Stories where a mortal is defeated by the heavens aren’t necessarily cautioning “humans are subordinate, and thus must obey,” but rather are illuminating that “this is is the wildness of nature, the untamed universe.” For every tale of a man being beaten by the gods, there are ten of the gods cracking down on one another, with the outcome anything but predetermined. When the moral of the story is obedience, fate is the tool, and these stories certainly exist. All stories with a religious affiliation, however, were not necessarily woven with submission and conformity in mind.