How are Greek gods and goddesses reflections of humanity and the human condition? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

The Greek gods and goddesses are like projections of aspects of our characters. For instance, Apollo is the god of art and medicine and other things that take a lot of discipline, but he is not always in charge. That is, the Apollonian spirit is not always uppermost in our souls. Dionysus, the god of drink, is the opposite of Apollo: he is all about release, abandon. Apollo and Dionysus are both gods of the theater, of drama. It is the interaction between them, the conflict and the attempts at resolving the conflict, that creates art.

Another example of polarities would be, on the one hand, Athena, who is the goddess of wisdom, and Aphrodite, who represents beauty and desire and love and sex—things that wisdom might get in the way of. So we all need a bit of both in our lives. Zeus is all-powerful, the father of the gods, and he is sexually promiscuous; Hera, his wife (and sister—the gods intermarried a lot), is often jealous, angry, and vengeful. It must have been reassuring to the ancients who were at the mercy of their impulses to feel that they weren’t alone—it was so even for the gods. I am fascinated by the god Hephaestus, the lame smith god. There is a story of how he got to be lame—flung from Olympus onto Lemnos, he was injured when he crash-landed—but why is a god lame? Shouldn’t the gods be perfect? I suspect that Hephaestus is a good god for anyone who has some kind of physical deformity—a lesson that you can still do things. Hephaestus made jewelry and armor—he was an artist. Being a smith built up the upper body, so though his legs were not very good, the strength in his arms and his torso made up for it. There are a lot of dichotomies like this between gods and in their characters. They account for the complexity of mortals.

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