The Epic Of Gilgamesh And The Holy Of Heaven - 1502 Words

Though separated by geography and beliefs, ancient peoples worshipped gods and idealized systems which created the basis of their cultures. Ancient works and writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew Scriptures, and the Bhagavad Gita, preserve the interactions of gods and mortal religious figures. While fragmented and lost to time, the remnants of Mediterranean, Hebrew, and Hindu writings, like many other religions, show the relationship between the divine and their worshippers, through the importance of humans, their actions, and the roles of their gods. Mediterranean polytheism, which consists of the Greek and Mesopotamian pantheons, argues that mortals who are not strong enough to stand at least equal to the gods, are at the mercy†¦show more content†¦The interactions between the Greek gods and their worshippers also denote the relationship between the gods and mortals. In the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the Minotaur is the son of Pasiphae, the queen of Crete, conceived after the gods punished Pasiphae into falling in love and sleeping with a bull. However, the gods punished her after Minos, the king of Crete and her husband, refused to sacrifice the bull to the gods, leading to the events of the myth. The result of both mortal and divine meddling, the Minotaur, the half human and half bull offspring of the union between Pasiphae and the bull, is responsible for the deaths of many Athenians until Theseus defeated it. While the gods might not have known the consequences of their actions, they still disregarded the wi ll of a mortal, Pasiphae, when they decided to punish her for Minos’s crime. The creation of the Minotaur shows the callousness that the Greek gods approach human will and that the divine have the power to force the desires of mortals. Hebrew Monotheism, shows that Yahweh, their one god, cares the most about his chosen people, the Israelites, but is capable of manipulating both them and other peoples who do not worship him. When Abraham first forms a covenant with Yahweh, Yahweh tells him that his descendants will be enslaved, but â€Å"this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations... I will make you very