In this ancient way of thinking, both humanity and divinity are on a vertical continuum, and these two continuums sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other. By contrast, most modern people, at least in the West, think that God is above us all in every respect and in infinite degree. He is completely Other. And there is no continuum in God. For one thing, there aren’t any other gods that could provide a continuum. There is only one God, and he is infinitely beyond what we can think, not just relatively better in every way. True, some humans are more “godlike” than others—and in some traditions there does appear to be some crossover to the divine (e.g., with Roman Catholic saints). But even there, at the end of the day, God is wholly Other compared with everyone and everything else and is on an entirely different plane, by himself.
But not for most ancient people. Apart from Jews in the ancient world—whom I will address in the next chapter—everyone was a polytheist. There were lots of gods, and they were on graded levels of divinity. This can be seen in the way ancient people talked about divine beings. Consider the following inscription from the city of Mytilene, which wanted to honor the emperor as a god. This decree speaks of those humans who “have attained heavenly glory and possess the eminence and power of gods.”17 But then it goes on to say that the divine status can always be heightened for the divine emperor: “If anything more glorious than these provisions is found hereafter, the enthusiasm and piety of the city will not fail in anything that can further deify him.” It is these last words that are the most important: “can further deify him.” How can they further deify someone who is already a deity? They cannot if being a deity means being at a fixed, certain level of divinity. But they can if being a deity placed a person on a continuum of divinity, say, at the lower end. Then the person could be moved up. And how is the person to be moved up? The decree is quite clear: the reason the emperor has been regarded as divine in the first place is because of what he has done for the people of Mytilene, “the provisions” that he has made for them. If he comes through with even more benefactions, then he will become even more divine.
When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level.
The Divine Pyramid
INSTEAD OF A CONTINUUM, possibly it is helpful to understand the ancient conception of the divine realm as a kind of pyramid of power, grandeur, and deity.18 Some ancient people—for example, some of those more philosophically inclined—thought that at the very pinnacle of the divine realm was one ultimate deity, a god who was over all things, who was infinitely, or virtually infinitely, powerful and who was sometimes thought to be the source of all things. This god—whether Zeus, or Jupiter, or an unknown god—stood at the apex of what we might imagine as the divine pyramid.
Below this god, on the next lower tier, were the great gods known from tales and traditions that had been passed down from antiquity, for example, the twelve gods on Mount Olympus described in the ancient myths and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, gods such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Mercury, and so on. These gods were fantastically powerful, far beyond what we can imagine. The myths about them were entertaining stories, but many people thought these myths were just that, stories—not historical narratives of things that actually happened. Philosophers tried to “demythologize” the myths, that is, to strip them of their obvious literary features to see how, apart from a literal reading, they told deeper truths about the world and reality. At any rate, these gods were worshiped as the most powerful beings in the universe. Many of them were adopted by cities and towns as their patron gods; some were acknowledged and worshiped by the state as a whole, which had clear and compelling reasons to want the mighty gods to look favorably upon it in times of both war and peace.
But they were not the only divine beings. On a lower tier of the pyramid were many, many other gods. Every city and town had its local gods, who protected, defended, and aided the place. There were gods of every imaginable function: gods of war, love, weather, health, childbirth—you name it. There were gods for every locale: gods of forests, meadows, mountains, and rivers. The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots of what we might call religious tolerance.
Below these levels of gods there were still other tiers. There was a group of divine beings known as daimones. Sometimes this word gets translated as “demons,” but that word as we think of it today gives the wrong connotation. Some of these beings could be malevolent, to be sure, but not all of them were; and they were not fallen angels or wicked spirits that could possess people and make them do hurtful things such as fling themselves in harm’s way or twist their heads 360 degrees or projectile vomit (as in the movie The Exorcist). The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions. If displeased, they could do harmful things. It was important to keep them happy by paying them their due in reverence and worship.
In the divine pyramid a yet lower tier, near or at the bottom, would be inhabited by divine humans. This is where the “pyramid” analogy breaks down because we should not think that these divine humans were more numerous than the other deities above them. In fact, it was relatively rare to run across people who were so mighty, wise, or gorgeous that they must in some sense be divine. But it did happen on occasion. A great general, a king, an emperor, a great philosopher, a fantastic beauty—these could be more than human. Such people could be superhuman. They could be divine. Maybe their father was a god. Maybe they were a god temporarily assuming a human body. Maybe because of their own virtue, power, or physical features they were thought to have been accepted into the divine realm. But they were not like the rest of us lowly humans.
We too, as I have pointed out, are on a continuum. Some among us are quite lowly—those whom the likes of Lucian of Samosata, for example, would consider the scum of the earth. Others of us are about average in every way. Others of us think that we, and our entire families, are well above average. Some of us recognize that there are fellows among us who are superior in remarkable ways. For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.