GABBLER: The Narrator and I will be selecting one deity per post to examine and rate base don a 0-5 star rating. The criteria we use for the scale is subject to change and Their ability to smite us. We’ll be starting with Vulcan. Big daddy V.
BLA: Oh, so it’s OK for you to call Him that but not me in my own book?
GABBLER: I’m hoping it will soften the blow because we ALL know how you’re going to rate Him… But back to the audience: Let us know if you want us two “Cogs in the Machine” to cover a specific divinity in the comments below or send me a tweet at @Circofootnotes. There’s no set schedule yet, but you can subscribe to this blog to never miss a post!
BLA: This should really be a podcast. Everyone has a podcast.
GABBLER: You literally don’t speak, though. How would that work?
BLA: I could get a robot voice or something to read what I’m typing.
GABBLER: Great, another thing for me to edit… Let’s just see how this goes first.
BLA: I’m already regretting this.
GABBLER: Stay tuned!
Lévy-Bruhl helps us to understand why statues and figurines were treated in this way, without resorting to a notion of irrationality defined (in our Western manner) by a failure to draw the proper dividing line between animate and inanimate objects. In Greece in particular, matter itself could have an ambiguous status. To give a specific example, or some highly educated thinkers such as the late seventh/early sixth-century BCE philosopher Thales of Miletus, stones that had magnetic properties were thought to contain souls…It is not hard to see how magnetic stones that attracted to iron fillings, in the absence of an available electromagnetic theory, could be thought to be animate – in other words to contain a soul. Reality as we know it in the mechanical, casual Western view, with its sharp dividing line between organic and inorganic matter, is collapsed in Thales’ view of the magnet…”