The Passion of the Kore

Gods frequently thwart one another’s will in Hellenic theology, and in some cases even suffer violence from one another, perhaps most significantly near the very beginning of the theogony, when Ouranos is castrated. But no such incident in the Hellenic theology is perhaps of quite so much significance for the sort of beings that we are as that suffered by Persephone, except perhaps the dismemberment of Dionysos at the hands of the Titans, which is, of course, far from unrelated.

I speak in the title of a passion in the sense of an experience in which the subject is rendered passive. Passion presents a problem for us in thinking about the Gods, if we wish to free a space in our understanding for the infinite agency of each God, the position of ‘radical’ or polycentric polytheism. One may hold to a particular theology in which the Gods are absolutely limited by fixed relations that are prior to them, or by some force superior to divinity itself, but my effort is to explore the possibilities of a polytheism without such constraint.

More:
http://polytheist.com/noeseis/2015/09/08/the-passion-of-the-kore/