My 12 year old daughter just came to me with a concern about an assignment she has. She has to write a report on a Greek god/goddess and then dress up as that figure for class to read her report.
I told her that it is perfectly OK to learn about the subject and even to write the report but she is well within her rights to go to her teacher and share her concerns about the dressing up part.
How do you all think I should handle this if the teacher pushes this? Am I overreacting in thinking that this is an inappropriate assignment? Like I said, I don’t have an issue with them learning about the subject, but the dressing up part is taking it too far, imo. It should at least be completely voluntary. I don’t see this as anything different than requiring students to dress up as Jesus or Muhammad.
Thoughts?
A few years ago, my teenage daughter did Halloween as Athene (often spelled “Athena”). Sheet for a robe, tinfoil helmet, tinfoil covered cardboard shield and one of those plastic owls people put on their houses to (supposedly) scare birds, under her arm.
Only two households she visited knew who she was portraying, and I was a bit surprised that even two did. She did enjoy it, though.
Greek mythology, to me, matters, not because we believe in those gods and goddesses, but because it’s part of western heritage. A person needs to know that those gods and goddesses are almost always “archetypes” of some human trait or combination thereof, or even some force in the universe. They’re not just what they seem to be on the surface. Possibly in more primitive times they were taken literally, but in later years in the Greek world, they were almost psychological personifications, both in their own traits and in the traits of those who called upon particular ones for this or that.
Some of that is very complex and sophisticated, and in my mind, it’s worth knowing about. So, for example, Apollo’s characteristic literary epithet is “Smintheus”, which means “mouse god”. Why mouse? Well, it’s multi-layered, but because notwithstanding the fairly primitive nature of medical knowledge in ancient Greece, it was known that there can be an association between rodents and disease. Apollo, then, was the “healer” (the Hippocratic oath used to begin with “I swear before Apollo the healer, and all the gods and goddesses…”) but he was also the bearer of the opposite. The ancients knew, apparently, that there is not a strict dichotomy between health and illness, but that oftentimes healthy things can result in illness. (Think, for example, of an immune system run wild; autoimmune disorders and many disease manifestations.)
Greeks had a keen sense of the merits and benefits of “balance”. It was they, after all, who so often employed the “golden mean” in art and architecture; a relationship among parts that pleases the aesthetic sense without our quite knowing why. But they also knew the causes and consequences of “imbalance” in the human psyche its many manifestations. The Greek tragedies are almost always about “imbalance” and its potential for irremediable loss. That’s why, for example, literary people sometimes ask, rhetorically, whether it’s even possible to have true “Christian tragedy” within this life, because the consequences of “imbalance” are never finally irremediable while we are still on this earth. We are not doomed, inexorably, by “Ate” (fate) because we have a Redeemer who is ultimately merciful.
It is no accident that, while Christianity had its beginnings in the Levant, its real explosion was in the Greek world. It answered so many things the Greeks had pondered, unresolved. It still does, but we often don’t quite understand why.
There is a lot of wisdom in all of that “Greek stuff”, and one doesn’t have to take those gods and goddesses literally (shouldn’t, really) to delve into it.
I recommend Athene for a girl. Modest, easily costumed, wise, strong, and a perpetual virgin.
