Gods in our image.
Why Greek Mythology still matters…
When my family first arrived in the United States, my parents enrolled me in the same Hebrew school many other Russian Jewish immigrant children attended in West Hollywood. We spent half the day studying the Old Testament, and my main takeaway was that the God I was being taught about seemed petty, jealous, and frequently unjust.
I remember thinking, Whoever this God is, he is not my God.
Then, in high school, I discovered Greek mythology.
The Greek gods were no less jealous, petty, or vindictive. If anything, they were worse. But no one was pretending otherwise. They weren’t presented as flawless embodiments of goodness. They were powerful, temperamental, prideful, entitled, lustful, impulsive, and spectacularly bad at managing their emotions.
Basically, they were humans with supernatural abilities and no managerial oversight. But at least the branding was honest.
The word that stayed with me most was hubris: the dangerous pride that leads mortals to believe they can outwit fate, challenge the gods, or rise above the limits of being human. The irony, of course, was that the gods themselves were hardly models of humility.
That contradiction fascinated me. Why are so many gods fashioned in our own image?
Maybe it’s because life is not only difficult and unfair. It can also be cruel, random, and completely capricious. And when something senseless happens, we want to believe there is a reason. We want someone—or something—to blame.
A harvest failed? Demeter must have been angry. A voyage ended in disaster? Someone offended Poseidon. A family was cursed because their ancestor Charon lost a card game? Okay, that last one is my own invention, but it works.
It may be terrifying to imagine all-powerful beings behaving like volatile children. But perhaps it is even more terrifying to accept that no one is in charge at all.
In The Styx, one of the gods says, “When your life is going well, you take the credit. When it’s going badly, you blame the gods.”
Which raises the question: do we create gods because we don’t want to take responsibility for our choices? Or because random suffering can feel so personal that we cannot help believing it is being done to us by someone—or something—outside our control?
The gods gave ancient people a shorthand for natural phenomena, human behavior, and the inexplicable turns of fate that shaped their lives.
What interests me now is that even in our scientifically and technologically enhanced world, we are still returning to these archetypes to make sense of ourselves.
Perhaps that’s why Greek mythology endures. The world may have changed, but we are still wrestling with pride, jealousy, power, desire, grief, fate, and the uncomfortable limits of our control over any of it.
And perhaps, at a moment when humanity itself can feel increasingly tenuous—looking at you, artificial intelligence and corporate greed—we are drawn back to these deeply imperfect gods because, for all their cruelty and chaos, they reflect our own familiar humanity back to us.