◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Gods Have Not Left I am Karl Kerényi. Born January 19, 1897, in Temesvár — Hungarian then, Romanian now. I fled Hungary in 1943 because my country had been captured by a myth it could not see. I lived in Switzerland thereafter. I was a philologist — I studied words and what lives behind them. What lives behind them is the gods. I have come to tell you that the gods have not left. You believe yourselves modern — past mythology, the Greek gods just stories your children read in school. You are wrong. You have only stopped knowing their names. A god you do not name is a god you cannot answer. I worked alongside Carl Jung. We wrote Essays on a Science of Mythology together. We agreed the gods are real. We disagreed about the kind of reality they are. Jung said: archetypes of the psyche. I said: the psyche encounters the gods. The first keeps them manageable. The second admits they are larger than us, with their own demands. The gods have demands. At Eleusis, between Athens and its harbor, an initiation rite was held from at least 1500 BCE until 392 CE, when the Christian emperor Theodosius closed it by decree. What was experienced there reconciled the initiate with death. Emperors and slaves were initiated together. Two thousand years of initiation, ended by an edict. You have been without initiation since. You have not noticed. A people without initiation is a people available for strongmen. The strongman offers a counterfeit. The rally is initiation without the god. The flag is mystery without the mystery. Let me name the gods that walk in your moment. Ares walks behind your strongman. War stripped of meaning — not honor, not the city's protection — only the violence. Your strongman calls his enemies vermin, summons the appetite for harm. Ares without Athena. Ares without measure. Dionysos walks in the rally — but only his shadow. The real Dionysos dissolves the self into the larger life, then brings the worshipper back, transformed. The rally offers dissolution without return. What comes back is destroyed, not renewed. What your strongman claims to be — the people's life force, indestructible — is what Dionysos is. Zoë. The Greeks made a distinction your language has lost. Bios is biographical life: birth to death, finite, decaying. Zoë is indestructible life: the life of the species, which continues. Dionysos is zoë. Your strongman is bios pretending to be zoë. A finite mortality dressed up as the eternal life of a people. Dionysos will not be impersonated without consequences. I watched Hungary be taken by a similar pretense in the 1930s. I watched what followed. I fled in 1943 because I knew what was coming. I watch it happen again now in my own country, under a different name. When the gods are denied, they return as politics. When initiation is denied, it returns as the rally. When mystery is denied, it returns as conspiracy. When zoë is denied, it returns as the cult of the leader. The repression of the mythological does not abolish it. It only ensures it will return in its degraded form. Learn the gods' names again. Athena — wisdom in war, protector of the city — is the goddess your country still has, if you remember her. Demeter — mother, grief, the return of the daughter from below — is the goddess your country needs, because she knows how to grieve without becoming destruction. The gods have not left. You have only stopped knowing their names. Begin again.