alexseanchai | (no subject)

You know the wisecrack that the ancient Greeks lived in reach of the eminently climbable mountain they believed their gods lived on and never tried to climb it? I know I have heard it before work tonight, but tonight it's really pissing me off. One, how the fuck do you know nobody tried. (Wiki says nobody reached the top till about a hundred years ago, which I do not disbelieve, but ten to one the successful venture used tech not accessible to the ancient Greeks.) Two, that statement evinces a blatant misunderstanding of how any of this works. Two people could be standing side by side on the mountaintop while one of the pair tours the palace of the gods, and the other one wouldn't necessarily notice a thing. Three, Mount Olympos was and is hardly the only holy ground in Greece! Not even the only holy mountain! Mount Helicon's height is not impressive; I bet people have been up and down it all the time dating back to prehistory, and I refer you back to point two.

I don't even know why this came up.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It was too holy. You couldn't climb it without an invitation, you'd be struck down. And more importantly, it was morally wrong to intrude in that way, just as some random person in the street would not trespass in the Holy of Holies in the Hebrew Temple.

Actually this particularly distresses me because I have actually been on a mountain that was that holy -- or more, not even their gods went there -- to a Native people, in Arizona. I was too young to have any idea, but my father worked in an observatory on that mountain. It's kind of awful in retrospect, though.

Nod. Which just makes the wisecrack more infuriating, really.