Light & Darkness

SirArthur · 04-13-2008, 09:35 PM

Normally the ones call themselves "sons of light" are religious fanatics, it's true, but it also have another meaning which leads us to understanding the principle of Gods.

In the ancient times people used to have many Gods, but each of those Gods are more a metaphor for a specific social behavior than "Gods". It would be quite simple for the Greeks to climb the Olympus and find the obvious; nobody lives there. But even so each city venerates more one deity than other, the Athenians venerate Athena, the Spartans Aries and so on. This then reflects that for each city there were social behaviors more accepted according to the "greater God in town".
On the Egyptian side things were more country-wide, yet the purpose was the same.

Gods were then divided in two big groups, the Gods of life, metaphoric represented by the Light and the Gods of death, metaphoric represented by the Darkness. Normally represented by the Sun (Gods of Light) or by the Moon (Gods of Darkness).
Between this black & white World, there were a gray gradient, where you may find Gods like Aries, which wasn't "good enough" to be a God of Light but also not "bad enough" to be a God of Darkness. War is no life, but isn't death also, it's something in between that some times happens and when it does it kills people in order to protect the life of another people.
It was abnormal to have people venerating Gods of Darkness, no city on Greece venerated Hades or no region on Egypt venerated Nephthys. They simply acknowledge its existence as the Abrahamic religions does about the Devil, then as now death was unavoidable.

When Christianity arrives to Europe it comes to merge the values of the ancient Gods on one single religion. Jesus is them a representation of the Gods of Light under the values of Europe, second to a "Zeus" that acts more like a referee than a field player, punishing those who detours from the "Light".
Obviously make an "All-in-one" God is a titanic task, which is more or less sanitized by the figure of the Saints to fill some gaps or to adapt more to the "Values of Light" of a specific region.

Strangely, or maybe not, we had places on Earth were Gods of Darkness were deliberately venerated, such the Ba'al of Carthage along with many other Death Deities at Middle East and North Africa, the Minoans at Crete, several Inca and Mayan deities, etc. The reasons for a society to turn in to a declared Dark Lord are as obscure as the Dark Lord himself, but I guess the more obvious reason to be fear of such creature.