So last week I told a wildly slanted version of the story of Oedipus, the man who had a complex named for him long before we started naming complexes for banks and telecomms.

As you’ve guessed if you’ve read my blistering attack on the tale of the man who killed his father and married his mother, I don’t go looking for reasons to talk about Oedipus. I try not to think about him, because, “Eew.” But I recently read a book called The Wisdom of the Myths by a philosopher named Luc Ferry. Mr. Ferry’s goal was nothing less than to bring us better living through mythology. He dug into the philosophical underpinnings of the stories that, to the rest of us, are fodder for Disney movies and Ray Harryhausen films; and he came up with some advice for living.

His main point was that the ancient Greeks accepted man’s mortality in a way no cultures did. They didn’t really believe in an afterlife. People just died. Oh, yeah, their shades (ghosts) went to the Underworld, ruled by Hades. But as soon as Charon the ferryman rowed them across the River Styx, they drank from the River Lethe and they forgot who they were. And then they just sort of… milled about down there. Like the opening chapter of The Wizard of Oz, everything was just gray. (I in no way mean to imply that Kansas is Hell. Superman comes from Kansas, and I refuse to insult Superman.)

A few special souls got to live in the Elysian Fields. Sort of the upper floors of Hades, where you have to have a room key to make the elevators go there. Presumably these souls remember their lives, and thus achieve immortality. But they are special. The world of the Greek myths was elitist above all. There were also other special souls who remembered very well who they were: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion… The people–kings all–who pissed off the gods and were tortured for eternity.

Oh, and one or two mortals got made into gods. And a few got plastered into the heavens as constellations. The stories never weighed in on whether, as constellations, they were self-aware and had memories. I sense not.

Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks believed you got one life, you died, and that was that. No mystical path to immortality. Mr. Ferry finds in this advice for us all: stop trying to bribe the gods into letting you have more life. Accept that one life is what you get, and make the most of it.

Keep your place. It’s very Greek. Damn it’s Greek. Ancient Greek, of course.

To not keep your place, to try to go beyond the bounds of mortality, that is hubris. And hubris is bad. Tantalus showed hubris when he tried to serve the gods human flesh. Minos showed hubris when he asked to turn all he touched to gold. Aesculapius showed hubris when he dared to raise the dead.

But Oedipus was not guilty of hubris… only of road rage. His father was guilty of hubris… and rape, child abuse, attempted murder… but not Oed. So where’s the justice in his story?

There ain’t any. Ferry does not dispute that. The gods were not dispensers of justice. The gods were assholes. If you insulted them or interfered with their plans, they tended to kill you in horrible ways. Actaeon happened upon the goddess Artemis bathing in the woods. Now, look, you get naked in a public place, you take the chance of being seen. You see a naked goddess in front of you, you don’t look away. How could you? And yet, for the sin of seeing her naked, Artemis turn Actaeon into a stag and had him devoured by his own hounds. (If he had looked away from her naked form, she might have done worse!) Niobe was stupid enough to say her seven sons were more handsome than Apollo, her seven daughters more beautiful than Artemis. Leto, the mother of the twin gods, sent her boy and girl to slaughter Niobe’s fourteen children. Well… that’s one way of settling a slander suit. The whole Trojan War happened because three bitchy goddesses asked poor, dumb Prince Paris to judge which of them was most beautiful. A good attorney would have advised Paris to volunteer himself in service as Zeus’s cupbearer so he could get out of the whole thing. But, no, he accepted a bribe from Aphrodite, one of the three, and chose her. And she delivered unto him the hand of Helen, fairest woman on Earth.

Who was already married to the King of Sparta. War ensued. And that doesn’t even include the wrath worked on Paris by the two goddesses who he didn’t choose!

Even Athena, my favorite goddess, the reasonable, wise one, turned a girl into a spider for claiming to be a better weaver.

Assholes.

But, Ferry illustrates, the gods are assholes who imposed order on the cosmos. They defeated the Titans, the giants, and monsters like Typhon and Echidna. They put a stop to chaos. So, just or not, assholic or not, we need the gods. So there will be order. Hubris threatens that order. Like misinformation, it’s got to be wiped out at all costs. Punishing hubris in spectacular ways reminds the rest of us how important it is to cleave to order.

We humans need to accept that our lives are lived most satisfyingly if we accept our place in the order of things, be grateful that chaos does not rule, and basically find our home.

Odysseus is an example. Odysseus was the Greek general who, possibly more than any other, won the stupid Trojan War. And he didn’t even want to be there. He wanted to stay home with his wife, his son, his aging father and his dog.  But he had pledged to fight anyone who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand… I mean who tried to steal away Helen, aforementioned wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Which the aforementioned Paris had done… because Aphrodite told him he could.

See? Assholes.

But Odysseus goes where the natural order says he must. He goes to Troy. He fights. He starts for home… and because the gods are territorial and jealous, it’s impossible to both keep to your place and also not offend at least one of them. So he pisses of Poseidon, who makes life miserable for him. It takes him ten years to get home, and his whole crew dies; but he returns to his place. That is his claim to immortality. A life well-lived in the cause of order… unlike Oedipus, who did nothing wrong, but still couldn’t live his life well.

Except, Ferry maintains, Oedipus did live well… for a while. Encapsulated in his short life was a shorter period of happiness. And he should have been content with that. It would be hubris not to be.

Ferry’s message is mixed. Contradictory. What’s clear is that he recommends dismissing the promises of an afterlife that are made by Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. He doesn’t say if he includes the concept of attaining Nirvana in this list, but I would think a case can be made. Man must accept that he is mortal, not fear death, and make the most of what he has. Cosmic order is more important than his whims, after all, even if cosmic order sometimes dedicates that his life be misery.

What’s unclear is that, right at the end, he seems to give mankind an out, via the story of Oedipus and Antigone:

Here we can sense the early ferment of a humanism to come. In the same way as Prometheus… revolts against the gods in the name of men, the spectator… cannot but start thinking… that this world must be changed, improved, transformed… there is a glitch in the scheme of things… this pebble in the shoe, this ghost in the machine, is none other than man himself. Far more than… a mere surrender to the way of the world, [Antigone] incites us to an interrogation of things as they are. And it is this that is properly human in her character: that it is not reducible to order, not assimilable either by gods or by the cosmos.

… it was, indeed, Prometheus, who… was the first to see humankind as starting from nothing but capable of achieving everything, including a rejection of the appointed order of things… for the first time, and from deep inside the closed system of Greek cosmology, it pertains to the idea of a humanity with virtually unlimited subversive potential.

Luc Ferry – The Wisdom of the myths

So man can disrupt. Man can be a force for… chaos? Or is there a third option (Ferry suggests there is) that is neither strict order nor chaos. Is that third option human free will? That question goes unanswered. I wish Ferry had explored this point more. 99 per cent of the book is just a paean to how wonderful is the authoritarian order of the gods. Chaos replaced with the order of the strongman. Only at the bitter end does he suggest any sort of cosmic middle ground.

In his conclusion, Ferry does say that, in the West, philosophy secularizes religion and takes over its function. Modern philosophers are the heirs to the Greek myths, as well as many of the teachings of other religions. Religion has almost universally preached the path of salvation from the pitiable human condition. In most cases, that has meant salvation from death: a promise of immortality. In one notable case, salvation has promised deliverance from ignorance and fear, the perfection of Nirvana. Ferry suggests that a secular salvation, advised by the myths, tells us rather how to conquer our fear of mortality: To accept that our life is all we get, that that isn’t that bad a deal, and that we have a role as disruptors and innovators.

I’m not sold, though, that Ferry’s interpretation delivers salvation to the stories of Oedipus and Antigone. They’re still overall boring in presentation and depressing in affect. What Ferry has done for me is reveal them as propaganda. They’re a slanted account of how awful is the authoritarian rule of fate, as symbolized by the Greek gods. And, let’s face it, at best, propaganda can be unintentionally funny.

But, mostly, it’s just tiresome and unsettling.