In episode three, we continue to look at the cosmologies around the ancient Mediterranean and review the Greek literary traditions of creation from the writings of Hesiod, Plato, and more.
Do these texts speak to an independent tradition created without any influence of the Egyptian or Sumerian accounts?
As we pointed out in the last episode, there was always a difference between how the common populace viewed religious ideas and the priestly or philosophical classes. Not every Greek was convinced that Zeus took physical form to bed human women and gave birth to a series of demigods and heroes.
Symbol, allegory, double-meanings; all these tools have been used in mythological dramas by the hand of poets, playwrights, and philosophers to convey, it would seem, psychological, historical, and spiritual knowledge.
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