In this third part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I explore the relevance of several goddesses of ancient Greek mythology to digital technology. The first two posts focused on the techies; this one and the next will focus on the myths.
Athena
Aeschylus’s Eumenides and the story of Arachne (my favorite character in myth) got me thinking about Athena. She’s a fascinating amalgam: a woman who’s devoted to the patriarchy; the wise one, who’s also a warrior; Zeus’s favorite daughter but also a trickster and shapeshifter, Odysseus’s BFF. Like Apollo, I find her very hard to pin down. Her resonance with technology isn’t obvious at first blush.
While Athena is a shapeshifter and trickster, Petri points out that she’s not a Loki-type trickster, but more of a lonely cowboy, or perhaps better, a lonely philosopher. She plays her own game, even against Zeus (e.g. opposing him in the Trojan war), and has an independence similar to the primordial goddesses discussed below.
(One of the complicating factors with Athena is Athens, the city. Since so much of the Greek canon was written in Athens, the extant mythology about Athena probably includes a lot of the city’s self-image and propaganda.)
Petri argues that Apollo and Athena represent knowledge and wisdom, respectively. He sees her as representing scholarship and fundamental scientific/technological progress, while Apollo just does things without considering the implications – a stereotypical engineer, if you will. While Athena could and did use force, Petri invokes the distinction between Minerva and Mars in the Roman pantheon: Minerva was the patron of defensive war, whereas Mars represented fighting in general, and particularly wars of aggression.
I’m not sure I would make the Athena vs. Apollo distinction along the lines of scientific vs. technological progress. I see Hephaestus as the technologist and think of Apollo as the patron of the “purer” arts. Athena’s certainly associated with wisdom, symbolized by her mother, Metis (wisdom), and thus with scholarship. I see her combination of warfare with wisdom as representing the ideal general (strategos in Greek). More generally she functions as the protector of the state and social institutions. As with all gods, though, Athena’s accreted many attributes (different ones in different local cults) that complicate the picture, such as being patron of crafts like weaving and pottery. Like Hermes, she’s associated with many inventions that require thought rather than accident, including the plough, numbers, the chariot, and navigation. As Petri observes, she would certainly have no trouble getting a job in Silicon Valley.
Petri points out that while Athena loves to show up in full armor, she is very much like her favorite human, Odysseus. She can fight, and very well, but she isn’t bloodthirsty (for an ancient Greek) and takes pleasure in finding peaceful or semi-peaceful resolutions to problems. Petri cites this example from Samuel Butler’s translation of Book XXIV of the Odyssey, where Athena stops the slaughter of the suitors:
Meantime Odysseus and his son fell upon the front line of the foe and smote them with their swords and spears; indeed, they would have killed every one of them, and prevented them from ever getting home again, only Athena raised her voice aloud, and made everyone pause. “Men of Ithaca,” she cried, “cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed. …. Then the son of Cronus sent a thunderbolt of fire that fell just in front of Athena, so she said to Odysseus, “Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you.”
This, to me, is a perfect example of Athena as a strategic strategos, rather different from most of the strategoi in the Iliad who just worried about tactics. Odysseus is going to have to live with all these families around him after all this is over, and given vendetta culture, it’s better not to have all the other clans gunning for you.
(Petri pointed out that we may even have some Trickster in this anecdote. Was Zeus really angry, or was Athena just saying so? She was the only one Zeus allowed to use his thunderbolts…)
The primordial goddesses
The Moirai
Petri proposed that I look at the Moirai. They are associated with destiny, lots and allotments, and ensuring that the fate assigned to every being by eternal laws took their course. Even Zeus had to yield the Moirai. The gods do not seem to be able to foretell their decisions (though in the case of Hector vs. Achilles, Zeus was able to discern their destinies). At least in the Homeric texts, the Moirai act independently of the other gods. Petri notes that they are the fatherless daughters of Nyx (at least in one telling) – who is the only primeval deity that even Zeus is afraid of. He notes that one of their defining characteristics is that the Moirai don’t prophesy; they declare a destiny that cannot be changed even by the gods. The oracles of the gods are prophecies, and they cannot foretell a destiny unless the Moirai allow it.
Where are they in today’s world, especially in big tech & politics? Since the Moirai are the context in which the other gods and humans act, the “natural order,” I think they probably correspond to larger forces like the state and the market. These two are not givens and themselves change, but technology has to operate in their terms. What’s different these days is that technology has the power to influence governments and perhaps markets – power that Zeus didn’t have over the Moirai.
One relevant aspect of fate, Petri suggested, is that all technologies are eventually superseded. Like mortal humans, each has its age and time: Clotho spins them into life, Lachesis measures out the length of their span, and Atropos cuts it when the time comes.
I couldn’t easily find good data on technology life cycles (but see the TLC), so I used companies as a proxy. The components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 large companies listed in the U.S. have changed 57 times since its inception, on May 26, 1896. The companies don’t die at this point, but it’s a marker of their decline. A few instantly recognizable names that have been dropped, according to Wikipedia: Exxon Mobile and Raytheon (2020); General Electric (2018); AT&T and Hewlett-Packard (2013); General Motors (2009); Eastman Kodak (2004); Texaco (1997); Chrysler (1979); IBM (1939); Coca-Cola (1935); RCA (1932); Western Union (1928); Standard Oil (1925). Some of these, and many more of those that were dropped before 1925, no longer exist.
Another interpretation, Petri ventured, was that technology itself was the Moirai, and specific companies and CEOs merely younger gods. That’s a bit close to technological determinism for my taste; I see the Moirai as the technical and social constraints under which not only CEOs and companies but technologies themselves operate.
Randomness/Chance
Petri also pointed towards randomness. I wrote about chaos in mythology in January 2019 (Second thoughts on statistics and chaos).
As I understand it, Petri means randomness in the sense of chance. In a commercial contest, even with all the fundamentals pushing in one direction, a small random nudge (a seemingly harmless choice, missing information, or personality quirk) can change the winning company from A to B, or radically delay or accelerate some technological development. Petri observed that he’s found it very difficult to get students, and people even beyond students, to agree that such randomness has a lot to do with how important aspects of technology have evolved.
Because we Moderns – given statistics, quantum mechanics and complexity theory – have a different understanding of randomness than the ancients, the Greek Tyche, the goddess of fortune, chance, providence, doesn’t really suit as a divinity of uncertainty these days. One of the interesting aspects of Tyche, however, is that her lineage (at least according to Hesiod) goes back to the Titans. Like the Fates and the Furies, she’s an older god than the Olympians.
In the same vein, we shouldn’t forget Nemesis, the divinity who punishes hubris. According to theoi.com she was regarded as the downside of Tyche, providing a check on extravagant favors conferred by fortune. Given the exorbitant rewards reaped by the digital elite, it’s surprising that she isn’t more visible. (In an exception that proves the rule, she was probably behind the recent shut-down of Quibi, the mobile video streaming start-up. According to the WSJ, “Investors who poured $1.75 billion into this idea did so largely because they trusted the gut instincts and vision of [Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman]. Instead, they witnessed one of the fastest collapses in the entertainment business [because] the duo’s famed instincts proved wrong.”)
From theoi.com, here’s a lovely 5th B.C. Athenian red-figure amphora depicting Nemesis (pointing accusingly at Helen) and Tyche, from the Antikensammlung Berlin.
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| theoi.com |
Other primordial goddesses
Ananke, the personification of necessity, is a related divine force. According to theoi.com, she emerged self-formed at the dawn of creation. Ananke and her mate, Chronos (Time) created the ordered universe, and were beyond the reach of the younger gods. Unsurprisingly, she’s sometimes said to be the mother of the Moirai (Wikipedia).
With our strong belief in self-determination, we Moderns don’t pay much heed to Ananke and the Moirai. (“You can be whatever you want!”) Given the uncertainty we take to be intrinsic to all complex systems, the notion of a fixed allotment ineluctably playing itself out also seems strange. Those with a more fatalistic bent, however, may well see the Moirai acting in their lives. At the very least, one can see them in the constraints under which life operates. The more optimistic believe technology can fix all problems, even death. As a pessimist, I would advise them to look out for Nemesis.
Another ancient female figure feared even by Zeus was Nyx (Britannica), the personification of night. She was the daughter of Chaos, and mother not only of Nemesis and the Moirai, but also Sleep, Old Age, and Death (among others). Britannica notes that “[t]hroughout antiquity Nyx caught the imagination of poets and artists, but she was seldom worshipped.” Perhaps that’s because, like her progeny, she is to be feared but cannot be appeased. A contemporary resonance is that our culture largely downplays the power of destiny, death, and old age. Nyx and Nemesis may be lying in wait for the transhumanists.
All the posts in the Techies & Myth series
- Part 1: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Entrepreneurs
- Part 2: Mythical entrepreneurs
- Part 3: Goddesses and Tech
- Part 4: More Gods as Tech
Update, Oct 2020
- Added links to other posts in the series
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