Sorry i was going through your tag of greek mythology and in one of them you said apollo was a weird god and i just kept imagining why ?
Hello! Thank you for the question - I’m very happy you’re finding interesting stuff in my mythology tag! Unfortunately, I can’t direct you to any online sources because I’m going to share facts I learned in uni, I finished my degree before the internet started to get useful (our Google was actually this thing -
- and it was a bit slow, but beyond awesome). Still, I know I recced some general books about religion and mythology somewhere, and I’m sure you found those already. Oh, and as a foreword - as I’m sure you know, understanding Greek religion is a bit of a hassle because it’s a ‘natural’ religion, which means no official sacred texts or uniform canon or anything, so remember that what follows should come with a lot of footnotes.
I always liked Apollo, but he’s a bit of a frustrating god to study because he’s very complicated. Here are the three main reasons why I called him weird.
1) He’s very old but also foreign and we don’t know where from
If I remember this right, Apollo already shows up in Linear B, which makes him one of the oldest gods in the Greek pantheon. But: in most texts, he’s considered (and identifies himself as) a foreign god, who came from some other land and is not fully committed to Greece (for instance, in Troy he sided with the Trojans like other ‘exotic’ gods, such as Aphrodite). This would be puzzling enough - but on top of that, we don’t exactly know where he’s from. There are some clear connection to Middle-Eastern gods, but most sources place his origins up North (for instance, in the land of the Hyperboreans), which doesn’t make a lot of sense because most of the borrowed elements in Greek religion (and culture) tend to come from Mesopotamia. It’s also hard to understand why Apollo is still considered a sort of outsider in Classical times, so basically after he’s been ‘part of the family’ for two millennia or so? This isn’t the case with a goddess like Aphrodite, who’s also Middle-Eastern but was fully assimilated much more quickly.
2) He’s very distant but also not
Perhaps because he took over the duties of sun god as Greek religion developed and the more ‘basic’ gods were discarded, Apollo is often presented as the god who strikes from afar and doesn’t mix all that well with humans. This is consistent with general sun mythology (you need the sun but you don’t want it too overpowering because droughts are a catastrophe), but fits together very badly with other jobs assigned to Apollo. For instance, as the god of medicine he does interact with people in an extremely direct way (for instance, by sending dreams to the sick praying to him in his sanctuaries), and despite knowing full well Troy would fall, he chose to enter the fray himself and was very aggressive (and underhanded) in his attempts to delay the inevitable. This duality is also expressed in his relationship with women - most stories in this sense are marked by potential lovers fleeing him and rejecting him (possibly another sun-related metaphor), and there aren’t a lot of families or heroes claiming direct kinship with him. Which, again, is unusual, because Apollo is a very powerful god with a well-established place in the pantheon, so you’d expect more genealogy myths and more people bragging about some kind of relationship with him. And on top of all that, there is a very weird but consistent theme in iconography - Apollo striking the giant Tityos with a sword -
- while his mother, whom Tityos had attacked, veils her head in shame and horror. Here you see again this duality between remote distance and alarming proximity: the bow and arrows (Apollo’s ‘normal’ weapons) vs a sword (note the scabbard across Apollo’s back: the sword is clearly his, not wrestled from Tityos). This contradicts the whole ‘sun’ imagery, but it must have been a popular and well-known tale, because we find it again and again in iconography.
(Plus, it’s one of my all-favourite cups, so I’m always happy for any excuse to share it. I mean, look at how the characters fit inside the circle, at the transparent fabric of Leto’s veil, barely hiding her profile - at the fancy bracelet Apollo’s wearing! Perfection.)
3) Apollo is both cold logic and childlike idiocy
I know that by reading mythology anthologies, you’re left with this feeling all gods are sort of dumbasses and also very changeable, but that’s not so true - except when it comes to Apollo. Like, a very early myth, appearing in the Homeric hymns, is how he gets outwitted again and again by baby Hermes; another story, also incredibly ancient, is Herakles making him look like a fool while storming Delphi. And yet, this is also the god of reason, of logic, of science and moderation. We’re supposed to consider him wise and even-handed, almost Buddha-like - despite the fact he often gets outsmarted and reacts to that in very vengeful, extreme ways (think of Cassandra, or of Marsyas). Again, it’s possible what we see here is simply layers on top of layers - an original sun god, far and indifferent to human emotion, but also the archetype of the Young God, destined to be sacrificed and reborn, and also the conqueror and devourer of the one Grossman beautifully calls ‘Our Lady Underground’ - because Apollo’s powers of prophecy are just him taking over older (and possibly unGreek) rituals.
Ultimately, Apollo’s a kind of ‘everything’ god, embodying things as different as prophecy and rationality, health and pestilence, wolves and mice and dolphins - unlike Zeus, who fits in the mold of the Indo-European gods down to a T, Apollo was clearly a bit of a mystery to the Greeks themselves - so much so that he was given a disjointed mess of odd jobs and tasks. In a way, this always made me like him more - knowing even his people didn’t understand him very well lessened the pressure for me to try and make sense of him. Instead, I sort of chose to consider him the original problematic fave and decided to keep studying in a more relaxed way - to simply read stuff and enjoy.
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