The New Greek Mythology

This website, besides introducing Bardot Books, is both declarative of, and responsive to, the needs of authoritative prehistorical narratives. Ours takes the form entitled, the New Greek Mythology. It is not new, however: Rather, it addresses what was truly prehistorical without the revisionism and adulteration and sometimes expunction of how the early Greeks really were at originating a great opera of myths for a first time. As the suggested composition goes, the Bardot Group and I are proponents of proto-history. No longer a strictly narrative process designed for fictional story-telling, it’s a literary and academic genre for the recreation of historicity, or the latent prehistorical content unique to each myth earliest originated. Unlike legends, fables and other lore, myths are best taught, and prove most useful academically, through our best forms of academic expository fiction. Despite they’re by knowledges without proof by writ, we can be robust about their subjects. Accordingly, proto-history becomes a genre to supplement what history and other social sciences cannot do through rigorous prose. We also think NGM’s practices are especially relevant to the present day survival of Classical Studies, especially its part in the general cultural literacy that our secondary schools and colleges require.

Centuries’ long recitations of Early Greek Mythology, from which we draw, still survives as a copious opera that elucidates great families of great personages by great regions whereby the great culture that they ascended to enjoy. It can be very old stuff that somehow seems fresh and new. Our biographies may be fictional by our drawings from past Greek epochs and eras, but the whole of them, howsoever we know them, originated during the Great Oral Tradition of Greece. The GOT, so-called, has two ranges of dates, each appropriate, (1) the LABA, from 1590 to 1190 BC, a period of cultural ascendancy; and (2) the Last Patriarchal Age, from 1450 to 1234 BC, the span within which the greatest myths and their sagas originated. The greatest myths of all the GOT, or Early Greek Mythology, evolved to Classical Greek Mythology and its much redacted opera that was particular to the Classical Greek Dramatists. Their compositions became masterpieces of staged productions, their greatest post-dating 500 BC.

Our elaborate book projects began with studies by the Bardot Group from 1924 to 1989. They were analyses and reinterpretations of the Ancient Greek versions of CGM. We return to the great myths as they were when originated, restoring them to prehistorical contexts that generated their originations. Out of that prehistory by revival of great myths’ bases in genuine biography, about regionally large power regimes, much that was originated became either adulterated or overly redacted versions are revived from their transmogrified states. We then relate such study as is specific to a book project to the many findings within the greater panoply of Classical Studies concerning the Bronze Age Greeks. They are the ascendant people of our central focus, the denizens of the Greek Peninsula, of the Aegean Archipelago and of west coast Anatolia (modern Turkey). That centrality holds true even when we are studying the Trojans, a clearly alien people, albeit Anatolian. They once and briefly were properly positioned apposite to the Greeks whom they called Pelasgiotës; they were a great people who were too far out of the range of the Greeks’ ascendancy. They were ascendant themselves, however, during the times of their own great liege sovereigns, by the imperial Hatti people whom the Holy Bible called Hittites. The Trojans were the contemporaries to the “Great Fathers” of imperial stature since 1400 BC. They long preceded the entire Great War Era to which we attach the name Trojan. Our first ever book project produced a growing opera that belongs to the New Greek Mythology. It shall have a sequel that addresses a New Anatolian Mythology.

The New Greek Mythology also addresses the enormous flaw of the Pre-Classical tradition of historiography about the Bronze Age Greeks. Among that tradition’s tenets is a ban against the original religious beliefs of a prehistorical people. Those Greeks, the Pre-Classicists impose, must be as though the Ancient Greeks and later Hellenes —regardless they lived so much later than the early Greeks and the forerunning pre-Hellenes. Their stodgy tradition also insists that the Greeks of the LABA, despite all their “local deities,” must have worshipped super omnes the Olympian Pantheon, an orthodox polytheistic religion which emerged from the Greek Dark Age, 1200 to 800 BC, and which all Greeks later than the Ancient Greeks also venerated primarily. And yet, NGM asks, how can a half a millennia of Greeks at worship of their deities be stifled so that they could no longer be known or explained?

It’s all been utter nonsense. Ovid, the greatest of the Roman Classical Mythologists, makes clear that both the religion and the culture of the pre-Hellenes belonged to a robust progeny by the Creatrix, an animus of Great Mother Earth. Her own creation marked the beginning of the Idyllic Age. We have it most likely a cooling period typical of interglacial cycles of climate change recurrent since the last great glacier. The cooling phase of the Bronze Age cycle offered centuries of most blissful seasonal climes from 2100 to 1600 BC. Chilling centuries from 1600 onward brought on the cyclical nadir by Eleventh century BC’s frosty end. As the Greeks then lived and thought of their environments of sea, sky and earth, all of their Mediterranean globe was idyllic and of an easy abundance provided by Gaia the Great Earth Mother. By her the creation of all immortal living things, whose forms were titans and titanesses imbued with all matter of earth’s seas, skies and terrains. They belonged all alone with the Great Mother until mortal living things were created by her. Moreover, the early Greeks knew their first ever pre-Hellenic forebears to have lived for only a few millennia’s duration, and not so long after the First Creation, a Big Bang, by the conception of the Universe through Nyx the Abysmal Void and Chaos All Power and Force, both in coitu.

By a few next creations, all synergetic with each other, Gaia was created from the Sea and Sky Goddesses, whereby her vested powers a Creatrix of All Living Things. All immortal and mortal things, therefore, were born as virgin procreation (by parthenogenesis) by Gaia until she chose to cohabitate at last with her male offspring to spawn the latter day titans and titanesses. Such deities were celebrated for their cause of the Idyll until 1800 BC, as though they were secretly pet masters and mistresses over humankind. Such then was the Golden Age about which the poet Hesiod expounded through his Theogony. Men and woman who lived very long lifetimes within it were mostly demi-gods, or human of most special contributions to the state of humanity.

1800 BC brought on a Great Silver Age of humanity, over whom Gaia’s foremost mortal daughters governed daily existence. This was likewise, therefore, the Great Age of Matriarchs, all so powerful and attractive that they could beckon any Titan or Titaness to their service. Ranked as supreme crones, matrons and maidens, their safeguard by their outstanding and yet powerless sons was intrinsic to the Age. For prime male offspring were fully capable and yet only useful for collecting the bounteous bounties of Nature, or for occasionally combatting mightily with each other by organized Trials-at-Bridal for their mating with maidens, presumptively matriarchs.

By 1600 BC there had begun the Great Bronze Age of superheroes, both men and women. The first Olympian Goddess was Demeter: She institutionalized the Sanctuary of Eleusis. That place name means Advent, in the sense of whole new beginnings that empowered humanity with self-determination. The next was Themis, the most intellectual mother of Athena, whose seat lay west and enjoined the far west to her veneration upon the slopes of Mount Parnassos. There a prophetic cult of Phoibai became the famous Oracle of Parnassos. These first two Olympians were consistent with their parthenogenesis (virginal conception) that had created them and humankind. Their pair was joined by Hestia the Hearth Goddess into a trinity of divine provision — good governance (Eunomia) and harmonious community born of peace and prosperity.  Very early they chose to become transcendent deities, but they were willing to grant their offspring immanence as the original matriarchs who ruled over humanity in any way constitutionally.

By 1400 BC, though, the Fates had made clear that all the centuries so easy going by the blanketing Earth of warmth and perfect creature comforts were over – done. Existence became constant human Toil and Striving by assimilation of means to overcome the deep frosting months of Winter Blight. The soil had to be tossed into a tilth best cultivating of crops by seed of prior crop yields. Animals had to be tamed and retained in some manner of enclosure, fenced or guarded grassland. Even orchards so plentiful and indulgent of their fruits had to be tended after the adversities of winter climate. Although Earth was becoming obviously colder over the Thirteenth BC and Twelfth BC, southern maritime climes were still good; but Hyperborean Frosts had been sweeping down upon once hardy crops. They had first destroyed and then compelled northern peoples to nomadic wanderings, from high latitudes to those offering acceptable habitat.

Enough said for robust openers about what the New Greek Mythology can make us aware of, both with respect to earliest Greek religion and to cultural adaptation to inexorable climate change. I will not go through the Bronze, Dark and Iron Age conditions imposed upon humanity, including the assimilated arts of warfare that still were under constant new innovations as the Fifteenth century BC ended in 1400 BC. NGM shall also square the centuries of the Idyll with both the risings and falls of climate change. For the consecutive creation myths of the pre-Hellenes show their awareness of the Idyll as long before first forbear’s memories and imparted wisdoms. They know that it extended into a long period of cooling centuries which proved ideal to the creation of all living things.

So NGM is also far more reasoned mythography than the Pre-Classical Tradition of the Ancient Greeks ever endeavored of the existential realities of their prehistory. For the good climes actually happened, because of a particularly long interglacial climate warming cycle that lasted until 2100 BC. Thereafter the cooling of even the warmest latitudes began, those highest of “hyperborean” latitudes suffering calamitous crop failures, the starvation of livestock and the gross depletion caused my mass hunts and gatherings from the abundance of land and wildlife. Whether or not our theory of interglacial period climate cycles holds up as my precisely offered dates, the most part of the cooling duration passed before the Greek Dark Age ended any Idyllic Age of easiest accessible plenty. As humans lived the final centuries of deep chilling, they did so with utmost veneration for the Great Mother Gaia and her titanic offspring. Once the GOT began and passed it greatest span of originated myths and sagas by 1400 BC, so then the rationalizing Age that followed the Dark Age which compelled the Olympian Gods and Goddesses as a religion of dominance over the offspring minions of the Great Mother. Gaia became a most aloof, fully transcendent deity ever afterwards. The New Greek Mythology even has a date for that asserted dominance, 1301 BC:  The Greeks called that achieved dominance the Tëlemacheia, whereas Classical Studies dubs “the Final Battles,” instead, “The Clash of the Olympians and the Titans.”