I know this is meant as a joke but please, let me scream about Ancient Greek mountain cults for once in my life.
Before I start, two points:
I can attest from personal experience that Olympus is indeed perfectly climbable. I actually laughed at one of the comments on this post that said “but imagine a wacko Ancient Greek going up there in sandals” because that’s literally what I did. I climbed Olympus in a tunic and sandals. Photographic proof here. I’m fairly sure that if I, a skinny Classics student who spends most of her time in the library, could do it (minus a knee injury that meant I had to ride a mule half the way down), then so could an Ancient Greek guy.
Before climbing Olympus, I had to prepare a presentation on its symbolism and religious role in Ancient Greece. This is my source for this post.
Now that’s been said, Olympus as “home of the Gods” is a really, really interesting topic, and the above post highlights one of its core aspects: how come the Gods came to live on Olympus? Many religions place their Gods in the sky (see: Christianity) or in otherwise inaccessible places. Olympus, on the other hand, is clearly accessible: there’s a sanctuary on one of the lower peaks, and an entire Roman army even crossed the mountain range in the 2nd century BC. There seems to have been little interest in reaching the actual summit (more on that later), but people definitely went near and around it.
What’s more, most non-poetic descriptions of Olympus treat it like just another geographical feature, and studying it scientifically doesn’t seem to have been taboo. One Ancient Greek man, Xenagoras, even measured its height. So why did Ancient Greeks point at Olympus and go “yup, there are Gods up there”?
Let’s backtrack a bit and focus on the main God linked to Olympus, that is, Zeus. The name Zeus comes from the Indo-European root *dyew (from which we also get words like deus, Latin for “God”, and šiuš, Hittite for “God”, and týr, Old Norse for, well, you get it). The root *dyew, though, meant “sky”, specifically “bright sky” - meaning Zeus originally was placed in the sky!
Now, let’s fast forward to the Mycenaean Era, when the Greeks start settling on the coast of Anatolia (now Turkey). Rocks and mountains were highly sacred to the Anatolian peoples, especially the Hittites, and one of the most important Anatolian deities, the Stormgod, was associated with mountains (given how clouds gather around them, it’s easy to imagine why). Two of them, Mt Harhawa and Mt Zaliyanu, were considered to be his residence. It’s thought that the Stormgod transferred some of his characteristics to Zeus - this is where Zeus as a weather deity would come from (my Mycenaean lecturer made a convincing case for this). It would make a lot of sense if Zeus’ association with mountains, and later specifically with Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece, also came from here.
We still need definite proof for this theory, of course, but the confusion of “sky God” and “storm/mountain God” is clearly reflected in later Greek literature. Homer uses οὐράνιος (ouranic, i.e. of the sky) and Ὀλύμπιος (Olympian) interchangeably, and opposes them both to χθόνιος (earthly) - which assumes Olympus isn’t earthly. Mortals are also shown consistently praying towards the sky, not towards Olympus. Yet meanwhile, the Gods are shown as living on the actual, physical Olympus (Homer even takes care to describe its geographic location in Iliad 14.225-230).
So that’s how come the Gods ended up living on a perfectly accessible mountain - because in a sense, they also don’t live there. (Again, I find it quite telling that most statements that the Gods live on Olympus are poetic, and also from authors - Homer, Hesiod - who were highly influenced by Anatolian traditions.) That said, for a while the Ancient Greeks seem to have shrugged and gone “sick, no need to fact check that”, but it did eventually cause debate. The author of the Derveni Papyrus (4th century BC), for instance, tried to prove it’s a physical mountain. On the other hand, their arguments suggest other people viewed it as a symbolic/poetic description, or as the sky itself.
Lastly, I said I’d write about why the Greeks weren’t interested in reaching the summit (and I realise 90% of you have scrolled past this post by now, but suck it, you can pry my love for mountains from my cold dead hands). There’s obviously the double-think I explained above, coupled with the idea that just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there in some way - I mean, I climbed Olympus and I’m still a Hellenic polytheist. But there’s also the fact that wanting to reach the summit itself is an incredibly modern, Western idea. It fits right into the context of Europeans conquering the known world, violently but also non-violently, by reaching the highest, deepest, most Northern and most Southern points of the globe (and incidentally, in some cases, proving the superiority of science to the superstitions of local people). The reason Olympus, and so many other mountains, were only climbed in modern times isn’t due to the lack of ability of local people - it’s because these people didn’t want to climb their mountain. Take Kangchenjunga: the first mountaineers to successfully climb it had to promise they wouldn’t “disturb its God” by setting foot on the summit. I’m not saying the Ancient Greeks viewed Olympus the same way, but this attitude is something to consider.
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