Eris' Golden Apple
We must go all the way back to the beginning of our civilization's glittering Being
Our most urgent need is to learn to think again.
The image above represents the beginning of everything we are in Western Civilization - the moment the goddess Eris (Conflict) tossed the golden apple inscribed with "To the Fairest" before the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.
It began when Zeus and his brother Poseiden both fell in love with the beautiful sea goddess Thetis. However, trouble emerged when they learned that a prophecy declared that Thetis' child would be greater than his father. Neither Zeus nor Poseiden could have that, so they married her to a Peleus, a mortal king. Peleus and Thetis gave birth to Achilles, the heroic Greek warrior.
All the gods and goddesses of Olympus were invited to Thetis' wedding banquet except one - Eris, the goddess of discord. Angered by her exclusion, she cloaked herself in disguise and slipped into the festivities, tossing the golden apple before Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. "To the Fairest." Not surprisingly, each goddess assumed the apple was hers, which led to - of course - conflict.
To resolve the dispute, Zeus ordered that the mortal Paris, a prince of Troy, should decide which goddess would receive the apple. Zeus would have nothing to do with it. Hera was his wife, Athena his daughter, and Aphrodite a proven troublemaker. Each goddess offered Paris a bribe for his favor. Hera offered him power and kingdoms. Athena offered glorious victory in war. Aphrodite, however, offered him the most beautiful woman in the world - Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus (Helen herself was a demigod, whose father was Zeus).
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Paris took no time in choosing Aphrodite, who quickly took him to Sparta where, by Aphrodite's powers, he seduced Helen and took her to Troy. There we have the beginning of the Trojan War, the epic tale that would define the West for millennia. Aphrodite sided with the Trojans, while Hera and Athena supported the Greeks.
Without Eris' golden apple and the "Judgment of Paris," as it has come to be known, there would be no Homer's Iliad or Odyssey of antiquity, no Virgil's Aeneid in the classical era just prior to the arrival of Christ, no Dante's Divine Comedy, or most classical literature that built the "mind" of the West. After Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 AD and especially after Christianity became the official state religion of the empire in 380 AD, Christianity became the soul of this civilization, but the visible manifestation was that built by Eris' apple. The apple of Eris faded before the apple of Eden in the 4th century, but its vestiges marked the culture forever. This is why Dante believed that God ordained the Roman empire as the earthly environment in which His Church would reach the ends of the earth.
These vestiges remain intrinsically part of us to this day. The gleaming aurora of Eris' golden apple still shimmers around the civilization of Eden's apple that emerged through the Church. The aftermath of Eris' apple built our classical literature. We gaze nightly at the planets named after the gods and goddesses. Even Hollywood's superficial red carpet "walk of the stars" is a ritual originating centuries before Christ, back to ancient Greek stories of king Agamemnon's return from the Trojan war. We are immersed in this aurora but no longer see it. We no longer think about it. We no longer think.
Our most urgent need is to learn to think again. To do that, we must go all the way back to the beginning of our civilization's glittering Being - not back to a particular moment, but to our civilization's Being. We can only do this by thinking.
Out of the conflict between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, we must reinvigorate our minds according to their language, imagery, and archetypes. As our minds are healed, we will begin to experience a "renewed" Edict of Milan and Christianity's resurrected cultural freedom from the grip of the prince of this world.
I write the lyrics to my albums. Music and vocals are by Suno.com