In the Sentence divinity is multifaceted. The gods amalgamate many religious traditions or, contrariwise, from a post-cultural perspective, empty themselves of their religious significance. Nonetheless, they are enduringly important, their origins and original functions of interest to both author and exegete. Four of my gods are Greek (Ares, Hermes, Hera and Aphrodite); two (Sol and Luna), though they bear Roman names, have Greek origins. Only one (El) is older than the Greeks, reaching back to the Babylonians and Assyrians, with other Middle Eastern affiliations that are Judaic, Phoenician, even Arabic.
I will speak here only of the seven gods as they appear in Greek tradition, not much concerned to differentiate pre-Homeric, Homeric, Classical and Hellenistic identities. The representations, of Helios, Selene, Ares and Hermes, are roughly contemporaneous and display a wonderfully divine but also human vitality. Helios (in Latin, Sol), is an athletic charioteer, youthfully constraining four wingèd steeds. Selene (in Latin, Luna), is likewise part of an equestrian culture that has largely been lost to the modern world. She also is young and stylish, like my solar and lunar phases, perennial but also contemporaneous.
Ares too is a young god, muscular and murderous. In the Sentence he presides over A (with Luna), over Revolution, Each and Second (with Hermes, who dominates its later parts as Ares its first), all tumultuous, unprecedented works, Greek in spirit, not Roman (cp. Mars). Hermes traverses the human, divine and infernal realms. Originally, as here, associated with animals, he is still phallic but also refined. Hera, goddess of marriage and family, is rarely seen alone. Hers is a wifely compatibility, as here with her husband Zeus, and sisterly, as elsewhere with Poseidon and Hades, or here again with her brother Zeus.
Aphrodite deserves almost a paragraph to herself, for this most complex of goddesses is sensuous but maternal, soothing but dangerous. By turns erotic (see her with Pan) and glamorous (as Venus de Milo), she first was worshipped as the Hearth. The modern goddess of adultery, she has always been poly-perverse. Praxiteles represents her as composed and powerful ― she even resembles a man. A goddess of civility and civilization, she nonetheless has taken her clothes off in public! El is the odd man out: seated like a king or sage. Excelling ― like Biblical Jehovah, Greek Cronos and Roman Saturnus, El is also lively.
