Homeric Hymn 8 to Ares (translated by Evelyn-White):
Ares, exceeding in strength, chariot-rider, golden-helmed, doughty in heart, shield-bearer, Saviour of cities, harnessed in bronze, strong of arm, unwearying, mighty with the spear, O defender of Olympos, father of warlike Nike, ally of Themis, stern governor of the rebellious, leader of the righteous men, sceptred King of manliness, who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aither wherein your blazing steeds ever bear you above the third firmament of heaven; hear me, helper of men, giver of dauntless youth! Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life, and strength of war, that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul. Restrain also the keen fury of my heart which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife. Rather, O blessed one, give you me boldness to abide within the harmless laws of peace, avoiding strife and hatred and the violent fiends of death.
I have been praying to Ares quite a bit lately. This is not a result of some personal mystical experience or powerful gnosis I have had. It’s just a growing understanding of the role that he plays in the human experience and in my life in particular. Ares gets painted in a pretty negative light in Homer, and Ares represents some powerful facets of humanity that are in extreme disfavor in modern liberal western society. But I think that by ignoring or downplaying Ares and the things that he represents, we have done ourselves a terrible disservice.
Ares is a god of war, and war is a part of being human. There has always been war, and there will always be war. Real paganism means dealing on a sacred level with the world as it really is: acknowledging and honoring all of the parts of human existence. War is violent and terrible, but it is part of who we are. By rejecting war entirely, we reject a part of humanity. I realize that this is a statement with strong implications, so I am willing to spell them out: I believe that real Paganism is completely incompatible with pacifism.
I utterly reject the notion that there are “different ways to be a warrior.” Social reformers and crusaders for justice are laudable and praiseworthy, and the struggles they face may well be like war, in a metaphorical sense, but it’s not war. They are warriors, metaphorically, not warriors, period. Ares is not the god of metaphorical wars; he is the god of physical violence, of blood and battle. Ares has no place for pacifists, and while he is also a god of strength and endurance and surely has respect for anyone who exhibits those characteristics, no matter the context, metaphorical warriors are not truly his.
Ares is also a god of manliness, of masculinity. As I said, he is a god of strength, power, and endurance, of mastery and skill. He is a god of those characteristics that men should exemplify at their finest. is a god of properly-channeled aggression, a god that knows anger but knows how to control his anger and save his wrath for the right time and the right place: thus there is nothing unusual about asking the god of war and anger for aid help to “abide within the harmless laws of peace.” Ares is not about being out of control. The experience of being out of control is the realm of his brother, Dionysus.
Ares is a god of courage. Fear and panic may be his children, but he expects us to act with strength and decisiveness even when we are faced with them. He does not expect us to be fearless, but he expects us to do what we have to do anyway.
Ares is a lover and protector of women. He makes women happy and women make him happy: Ares and Aphrodite are lovers for a reason, and their children include Harmony as well as Fear and Panic. While Dionysus teaches us that there is a place for exceptional individuals, unusual circumstances, and value in turning convention on its head, especially when it comes to gender expectations, that’s not what Ares is about. Ares shows us that there are expectations for manly behavior, that there are divine norms–not rigid, inflexible norms, but norms nonetheless–for how a pagan man is supposed to act.
I worship Ares: I pour libations to him, I make offerings to him, I sing his hymns. He inspires me to act with strength and courage, to be decisive, and to be bold. He is a god who is truly worthy of worship–so much more than the hateful, spiteful, unworthy portrayal that we see in the Iliad–and in worshipping him I find fulfillment.
Hail terrible, warlike Ares! Hail bronze-armed, spear-wielding stormer of cities who rallies fighting men and leads them to battle! Hail murderous, manslaying, bloody-handed Ares! Hail Ares the switft, the strong, and the violent! Hal abundant Ares, feasted by women! Hear my prayers and accept my offerings!
(Note: Over at Aspis of Ares, Pete Helms tackles some of this stuff unsurprisingly well)
Sailing to Byzantium 
“Ares is not the god of metaphorical wars; he is the god of physical violence, of blood and battle.”
Evidence suggests that the ancient Celts disagreed, according to the research I’ve been able to do. When Ares was introduced into the Romano-Celtic pantheon along with other Roman deities, he was transformed almost entirely into a local “protector of the land” god and associated not with literal battle, but with fertility and fecundity rites. The other male “warrior” god found in Celtic iconography is the “Sky Warrior” on horseback (associated strongly with the celestial/sky realm and the “higher” aims of humanity), wielding not a weapon but often a shield in the shape of a wheel and depicted as riding down a giant, which was already at the time widely held as a symbol of chaos and destruction, not a literal enemy in any sense. Meanwhile, the female war goddesses among the Celts are almost all known for their fickle and mischievous nature, hardly ever supporting war outright but just as often undermining the warriors/leaders and their purposes as supporting them. They also tend to be associated with ravens/crows and other carrion birds that feast on the dead. These two facts together could easily be seen as a statement about the ultimate futility of war to secure life/peace, acknowledging that death gives way to new life. All of this certainly seems very intriguing considering the reputation the ancient Celts had for being “warrior-like” and the evidence, sparse though it is, that their “wars” were just as full of posturing and bravado as actually violence and fighting. Would you suggest that the Celts were not really “Pagan” because this apparent emphasis on the metaphorical aspect of warriorship?
In any case, I have to disagree once again with your belief that striving to become better human beings is somehow a denial of being human. Speaking for myself personally, I do not subscribe to pacifism because I wish to live in denial. On the contrary, I am a committed pacifist because I do not want to live in denial which allows us to believe that war is inevitable and therefore we are excused from striving to prevent or avoid it. That is the real denial that I strive to avoid: one that gets too easily caught up in abstract notions like glory and honor and turns a blind eye to the suffering that inevitably underlies such notions. As a pacifist Pagan, I do not aim to prevent all war — that would be ridiculously beyond my ability as an individual — but I can every day renew my commitment to reach beyond violence through creativity and deeper, more honest engagement with the world. I do not think I will ever be convinced that this somehow disqualifies me from being “Pagan.” It grows directly out of my commitment to witness and engage with the world around me as honestly as possible (which means also ridding myself of fantasies and delusions of grandeur that revel in violence masquerading as “wisdom”).
It’s me again. 🙂
This seems to be an argumentum ab auctoritate. Based on your understanding of the traditional lore surrounding Ares, you assert that a) war is inevitable and honorable and b) there is a standard of manliness to which men should aspire. These assertions lack any support other than mythology.
This is how we misuse religion.
It’s the same way that Joseph Smith justified being “sealed” to so many women. Smith read the (mythical) accounts of Abraham and David marrying more than one wife, and asserted therefrom that God justified polygamy. That’s how Smith got so much action. I don’t see a substantive difference between his chain of logic and yours here.
There’s a real problem in using myth to make statements about what ought to be: myth can justify absolutely anything. Myths are good for helping us to see things as they are, but they can’t bridge the is-ought gap; myth can’t provide an authoritative foundation for ethics.
“Myths are good for helping us to see things as they are, but they can’t bridge the is-ought gap; myth can’t provide an authoritative foundation for ethics.”
I very much like what you say here, Jonathan. This to me is the key issue at stake: what relationship is there between “seeing things as they are” and then choosing how we engage with and respond to the world in light of that knowledge?
Kullervo, you seem to repeatedly puts forward an argument that seems to me to come from a kind of “give up and shut up” mentality: if we see something occur, it must be inevitable and therefore we should accept and even celebrate it (or a related argument, if we have not seen something occur, it must be impossible and there is no point working for it, indeed it would be wrong and/or crazy to do so). I disagree with this approach on a basic level, but I also think it’s a strange one to try to use to reject pacifism, since we see forms of nonviolence and cooperation “working” quite effectively every day… in fact, we see it far more often than we see war and violence accomplishing their self-proclaimed goals. Pacifists are no more blind to violence than anyone else, but I think they tend to be much more aware of the potential that humans possess for compassion and cooperation and the benefits that come from these for everyone involved.
And while you seem to want to define “Paganism” in terms that restrict us to what you personally believe is the most basic aspects of being a human animal, I see around me every day evidence that being human also involves striving, self-improvement, compassion for others and working to realize beauty in the world (whether through mythology, art, religion, science, social justice or the many other pursuits our species has flung itself into for generations upon generations). This same striving is what led you to Paganism to begin with, isn’t it? And what arises from your engagement with the world might be a glorification and worship of literal war… I can’t understand that myself, but I can accept that it’s an aspect of your Paganism. I would appreciate it if you learned to extend to others the same courtesy, rather than blithely dismissing all counter-arguments as inherently flawed from the beginning. Isn’t giving others’ perspectives a fair hearing one of the ways in which we learn to “see the world as it really is”?
In his wonderful Hymn/Prayer to Venus, Lucretius tells us another good reason why Ares and Aphrodite (or, in Lucretius’ case, Mars and Venus) are lovers. Lucretius tells us that only Venus is able to calm the ragings of Mars and to being Peace. And by Peace Lucretius does not mean metaphorical Peace, but a literal absence of warfare.
But a look at ancient warfare and politics reveals that no sharp dividing line can be drawn between military conflict and social/political strife. Open violence always lies just beneath surface, if that, whenever there is political conflict. In modern western society we have (but only very recently) become complacent in assuming that our political differences will be settled peacefully and “constitutionally”. But Clausewitz was right: “Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.” (War is only a continuation of politics by other means.)
Hail Ares!! Hail Aphrodite!!
Beautiful and impassioned, as befits such a noble god. Hail Ares!
There’s a world of difference between “honoring” and “glorifying,” Ali.
There’s a world of difference between “honoring” and “glorifying,” Ali.
Kullervo, Yes, there is. And one can honor (or come face to face with the reality of) violence without worshipping a god of violence and literal warfare, as you claim Ares to be. But I do not see how elevating war and violence to the level of deification doesn’t qualify as “glorifying.”
Ares is a god of war and violence. Worshipping Ares is worshipping Ares, not worshipping war. Worshipping Aphrodite is not the same thing as worshipping the concept of love. worshipping Zeus is not the same thing a worshipping fatherhood or lightining.
The gods are deeply connected to these different aspects of human existence, but they are not mere personifications of these aspects of human existence.
My religion does include a lot of personified concepts. But the Olympians are not among them. The Olympians are gods.
If you need to sanitize your gods to make them acceptable to you, then I don’t think you are worshipping real gods.
Again with the real word. 😉 From what you say, I get the impression that you believe the Olympians have some objective reality that should hold some authority about the right way and the wrong way to relate to them. Care to offer any evidence for their reality? 🙂
Your form of Hellenismos imbibes of so many patterns in common with Mormonism that the irony lies waist-deep around here. I’m glad that you’ve found a fulfilling spiritual niche, but I’ve yet to see a reason why you moved from Mormonism to Hellenismos other than as a matter of personal taste. Yet you write as though Hellenismos is more objectively authentic than Mormonism.
Do you see Mormonism as a legitimate religious choice if someone has a spiritual experience with the Mormon god similar to the ones that convinced you to believe in the Olympians? If not, why not?
I realize that you’re not out to convince me, and it’s off topic from this post, but I know you’re an intelligent, logical person with a similar background to my own. I honestly wonder how you justify your new belief to yourself when it seems obvious to me to be a distinction without a difference.
If you need to sanitize your gods to make them acceptable to you, then I don’t think you are worshipping real gods.
That’s a huge presumption to make, and it’s one made in ignorance and not a small amount of arrogance. (Even if it wasn’t directed at me, though I suspect it was.)
I made this choice once before when leaving the Christian faith I was raised in, and I stick by it now: I would rather go godless than worship a god of violence, jealousy, war, hatred or fear. That goes for Ares as well as Yaweh, if that’s the real nature of Ares (I’m not so sure it is, though I do not have a personal relationship with him myself and so couldn’t say… but I certainly don’t intend to take your word alone for it). You seem awfully certain, and awfully defensive, and in my experience that’s a bad combination and often a sign that a person is more interested in intimidating others into agreement than in having an honest theological discussion about the nature of deity. Short of Ares himself descending to drape me in robes of glory and favor, I wonder what could possibly get you to believe that someone who disagrees with you might actually have a point? It’s so easy to say that anyone with a different opinion is watering down or in denial about “the real [insert god here]”… but that’s a weak and insulting argument, and incidentally the kind of thing people start wars over. Plus, it makes everything else you claim to “know” about the gods come across as unexamined and uninformed by the wealth of other people’s experiences. What reason do I have to believe you have any special insight into Ares, better even than Homer? Because he makes you feel better about being a white male in a patriarchal, militaristic society? That’s a pretty self-justifying, watered-down reason itself, it seems to me.
False dichotomy. Perhaps I’m not actually interested in having an honest theological discussion about the nature of deity with you. But maybe I’m not interested in intimidating you into agreement either.
It doesn’t bother me much if you don’t agree. I don’t expect you to, and I don’t need you to. I don’t think that you and I are in the same religion at all, so of course you are going to object to my premises, the same as I object to yours. I don’t expect my Mormon relatives to agree with me either, and I am also not trying to convince them. Honestly, you’re just some person on the internet. I don’t win a prize or something for convincing you.
No offense Ali, but you’re a hippie, and these gods are not good gods for hippies. Yeah, I think you’re missing out by refusing to come to terms spiritually with the parts of human existence that you find unpalatable, but as you and I pretty much disagree on whether or not that is a fundamental part of religion, I don’t think we’re going to get much traction there.
It is off topic, but I think it warrants a short diversion.
I am fully aware that a lot of my reasons for choosing Hellenismos are similar to the reasons that Mormons use to explain their faith. I think about it a lot.
I think there are two fundamental differences:
When I was Mormon, I had other people trying to convince me that I should have spiritual experiences, trying to convince me that I had already had said spiritual experiences, and then trying to tell me what I should think those spiritual experiences meant. It was a cultural fast-talk con game. At every point, I was accepting premises that other people handed me which were designed to lead me by the nose to the conclusion that I was supposed to reach.
Furthermore, once I had reached the conclusion I was supposed to reach, I was then told that I should therefore accept their authority and obey them.
That’s what it boiled down to. I accepted the authority of an oppressive hierarchical organization based on a program of spiritual experiences designed to lead me to believe that I should accept the organization’s authority.
That’s a world away from what I’m doing now.
Yeah, I think that the gods are real (though I am not sure that “objective” and “subjective” can be meaningfully applied to them–or to anything really, since there is no way to experience objective reality in a non-subjective way). But I think it because I had experiences that nobody was trying to talk me into having, and I concluded it based on my own reason and intuition, not because someone else told me that a+b=c.
I think mysticism is a perfectly legitimate road to spiritual truth, even if other peopels’ mysticism leads them to different conclusions than mine does. What I do not think is valid is a system whereby your mystical experiences are deliberately manufactured and used by an organization to exploit you.
Re: Jonathan
Having followed Kullervo’s blog, and your replies, over the last few months, I can’t help noticing that you put the word “objective” in his mouth every time he says “real.” I think there’s a reason he’s not using the word objective; Mormons, who you compare him to, have no problem boiling down their belief in a literal flesh-and-blood god(s) in extremely unambiguous terms, yet Kullervo does not. “Real” can mean a lot of things, objective, subjective, or constructive. Something can be “real” to me, and not to you, the same way we can talk about “truths” (lower-case ‘t’) being transcendent yet in a sense, subjective.
Re: Ali
I hesitated to comment on your first few frantic posts. Although it seemed like you were just delivering a prepackaged political attack on Kullervo’s somewhat edgy, politically nonconforming recognition of Ares as a god of literal war, for all I knew you weren’t. But then, with the “Because he makes you feel better about being a white male in a patriarchal, militaristic society?” I know I needn’t have bent over backwards giving you the benefit of the doubt. What’s white got to do with it? Male privilege? Patriarchy? The “militaristic” jab is the only one that is even coherent, but I think it’s weak. You have stooped to throwing out a salvo of personal attacks designed to incite postcolonial guilt over a very unrelated topic. Please, grow the fuck up. When you stop seeing every white male person as someone who could only be interested in protecting white, male hegemony, you might find out that they are saying different things from each other, and that some of them might have merit.
Kullervo, thanks for replying. And if our mystical experiences are used by a single guru to tell us how to believe and to act?
Racticas, granted that there are many ways of looking at what is real. In my defense, I’ve asked in the past for clarification on this point, but I’m still not sure what Kullervo means when he says his gods are real. It seems to be an important point to him that the gods are real and he seems to want that to be persuasive. (Kullervo, sorry for talking as if you weren’t in the room.)
Mormonism could also be real in those other senses of the word. Yet many of us who have left Mormonism do it because we come to believe that it is objectively false. I seem to remember Kullervo expressed this during his exit. The same tools that destroyed our belief in Mormonism threaten a belief in the Olympians.
I struggle to understand why those tools don’t apply to Hellenismos. I feel like I must be missing something.
Jonathan, to be fair, you didn’t know me when I was leaving Mormonism. By the time I started blogging, I was already out.
I did not leave because I discovered that Mormonism was objectively false. I left because I realized that Mormonism was not objectively true.
I left because I realized that what I had experienced did not actually add up to what the Church insists it adds up to, and without that trump card, Mormonism wasn’t even compelling, much less the exclusive, objective, absolute truth that it claims to be.
ooh, coming in late to a good conversation… I am entertained by the fact that a post about Ares has turned into such a contentious discussion.
Kullervo, have you noticed that prayers to Ares are often prayers for peace? Including the Homeric hymn you quoted at the beginning. They take the form of “Hail Ares, blood-soaked god of slaughter – could you please cut it out? we’d like some peace, thanks.” Praying to Ares seems to have been a fairly pacifist sort of thing to do. It’s also not unusual to see him called on for the metaphorical kind of battle – the kind you specficially say here that he’s not about – “give me courage to stay within the secure laws of peace” is a prayer for restraint, not aggression.
It sounds almost like you’re mapping your own values onto the god – what you call in others “sanitizing” – and not looking at his full complexity. If what you see in the god is merely a reflection of what’s already in yourself, that is perhaps something to look at a little more closely. Ares is challenging; it’s his nature to be so.
Thank you, I really liked the text.
I worship Ares, not war, but He is a war God.
I would just like to point out:
“Evidence suggests that the ancient Celts disagreed, according to the research I’ve been able to do. When Ares was introduced into the Romano-Celtic pantheon along with other Roman deities, he was transformed almost entirely into a local “protector of the land” god and associated not with literal battle, but with fertility and fecundity rites.”
The Roman Ares (Mars) was actually a God of agriculture long before Greek influence forever blurred the lines between the Roman and Greek mythologies. The Romano-Celtic pantheon may just have been focusing on Mars’ more ancient traits as such, or it could be that they engaging with a totally different God who they saw as being like Ares. The Greeks and Romans were known for going into areas, learning about the local Gods and then proclaiming one of them “the Celtic Mercury” etc.
Not that is matters months after the original post…
That statue just doesn’t seem to look exactly like Kevin Smith, does he? lol
Kevin Smith acted Ares he did great job doing so, that doesn’t give him Ares Worship. God of War the 3 Letters Says ‘Everything’ @ Améthysta Eleuthera Kunoloverna u Worship Ares But not War Just Stop.. w believing in what u won’t Worship. ‘i say u need be Born with it, like its apart of You since birth’
That was so awesomely incoherent, I’m not even going to delete it.
plzs tell me what u think is right, plzs correct me!
u mean my comment or Améthysta Eleuthera Kunoloverna. if me plzs correct me if im wrong?
Delete my previous 2 comments & this 1 thank u? if you do
Nope!
Sure, but I don’t think that’s mutually exclusive with anything I have said about Ares.
Or maybe I am focusing on a particular aspect of Ares at a particular moment? As you say, the gods are complex and challenging. Accepting that means taking the gods as they are, full of contradictions and paradox, but never ignoring or downplaying the parts that simply do not suit us.
Subverting Ares by changing him from a god of war into merely a god of struggle or merely a got to whom you pray for peace is not taking Ares as he is. He may also be a god of struggle, and as a god of war it makes sense to pray to him for peace (just as one might pray to Zeus for good weather), but flipping Ares on his head and imagining that he is secretly really a god of peace despite the clear evidence to the contrary is not being wise or nuanced. Its just rearraging Ares to suit you, and that doesn’t fly with real gods.
Maybe thinking of Ares as a god of struggle or an averter of war is a good way for you to begin to grapple with him, but it can’t be the end. At some point, if you want to entreat with the real Ares, you need to come to terms with Manslaying, Blood-Stained Ares, the Stormer of Cities, Insatiate of Fighting, and Lord of War.
A prayer for peace is not pacifist. Hoping that war won’t ruin your life and the lives of your loved ones is an extremely far cry from taking a principled stance against violence.
I’m not sure why a prayer to properly channel your aggression has anything at all to do with metaphorical struggle.
Belief creates reality.
In the end, one’s own perspective, will outweigh what others have suggested, unless the suggestion is truly the same as the original perspective.
The Gods watch from above, below, and as the followers of Christ, Allah, Yahweh, etc… have pointed out time and time again, from within.
Ares is war and also lack thereof, for it is his, and any other entity that has ascribed itself or been ascribed to that particular “domain”, hand that guides the spear and raises the shield, in order to create “Peace”, by acts of “War”. You see, one isn’t possible without the other, those who find themselves believing so, aren’t capable warriors, and thusly form their beliefs around safety and shared weaknesses.
“Blood for Ares, mine own and that of my enemy, for without conflict, there is no personal growth… and without growth, there is no reason to live.”