To be married to a mystery
Reflections on BEFORE OLYMPUS, my latest substack series
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I’m not sure how I came to write about the gods. In a revealing interview with music journalist and songwriter Paul Zollo, Leonard Cohen was asked about the art of songwriting.
‘If I knew where good songs came from,’ he said, ‘I would go there more often.’
He continued: ‘It’s a mysterious condition. Much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.’
Sometimes, another human being is capable of naming the secrets within us; those previously formless beings that reside somewhere deep in the cavernous darkness of the psyche, and that direct the course of our lives.
Leonard Cohen’s recognition that the origin of ideas is beyond human, and that accessing them is transcendental and requires a union with the numinous, gives voice to my own experience of creativity.
To be married to a mystery, from the religious perspective, is to become an initiate: one who chooses to live in apprenticeship to something larger than themselves. Whether an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a Sufi dervish, or a Catholic nun, it is the work of a lifelong commitment to whatever one deems sacred.
When applied to the act of creativity in a more secular setting, I would propose that there continues to be nothing secular about creativity. It doesn’t belong to us, and though filtered through our own palette of experience and knowledge, it is impersonal. The work of the writer, the artist, the poet, is to get out of the way.
The Greeks themselves understood creative inspiration as external to the self, locating artistic impulse in the Muses—the divine intermediaries between the human and the ineffable. The act involved receptivity, the capacity for a form of deep listening.
As well as a devotee, the creative, then, is also a hunter, tracking the paws of the sacred to its den, and returning with something capable of warming the village against the cold.
And it would seem that the greatest works are those funnelled through a wound. The deepest acts of creation rarely emerge from wholeness, but from longing; from some fracture in the self seeking form, meaning, or repair.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that creativity is, in part, what we choose to do with our pain.
And perhaps this particular project, like much creative work, emerged from one of my own.
The origins of creativity (may I be so bold to propose!), if traced back long enough, seem to stem from a perennial wound: that is, the felt separation from something larger than ourselves, and the longing to return to it.
There is, it seems to me, a primordial puncture in the tapestry of existence, and it stirs an ancient longing.
It asks—and has always asked—who am I, and why am I here? Where did I come from, and where am I going?
These are gnostic questions, and I’m not convinced they can be answered through rationality alone. They seem to require a response that borders on religiosity. By this I don’t mean creed and dogma, but an orientation of devotion to an intelligence beyond our own—even if we don’t have a name for it, perhaps especially then.
It is the human condition to wrestle with longing. And creativity may be our attempt to re-braid ourselves back towards the centre of things; a reaching for meaning, belonging, and purpose; humanity’s way of calling out to the great mystery, and hearing it respond.
Creativity is perhaps also a tempering, the maturation of our personal pain. If we stay with it long enough, bearing witness to its fermentation in the hidden caverns of the self, it changes us.
And so to the question at hand: why Before Olympus?
Because I don’t believe a culture can survive without knowing its gods.
If we are involved in the creative arts, in other words, the work of culture-making, we might ask ourselves what our personal wound is—as it seems the perennial wound has tendrils, and it works on each of us distinctively.
When I trace the root system of my own pain down to the initial seed from which it grew, I arrive at the absence of spirituality, myth and eldership in the culture I inherited.
My personal wound emerged from a landscape that felt either overly scientific and agnostic, or institutionally religious—neither of which I have ever felt fully at home in.
And it deepened further through my attempts to recover something sacred via the pathways offered by the modern West, many of which revealed themselves to be a wellness industry generally more interested in self-aggrandisement than actual healing.
This is the fuel that drove me to write about the origins of religious thought, prehistory, mythology, and women’s ancient wisdom traditions.
It set me out in my early twenties to find ways of recovering a sincere form of spirituality, both for myself and for anyone else who shared a similar concern and hunger.
My attempt at repair has taken shape through both academic scholarship and lived experience equally; through the study and practice of myth, ritual, and the refinement of a poetic imagination capable of communing with the numinous directly.
The culture I belong to has—outside of the Abrahamic cosmogony—forgotten how to pray. And I think the absence of prayer is a very dangerous thing.
What became the Western imagination was largely informed by the Greek world. But ancient Greece was not born fully formed. It was not the first civilisation of the West. The limestone temples so well known to us through high school history books were built on the ruins of a much older, wilder sacred order.
Before Olympus, there were older gods, older stories, older ways of relating to the sacred—many of which still call to us beneath the foundations of the modern world.
We have inherited the impression that Greek religion begins and ends with the twelve Olympians, enthroned atop a mountain in an orderly hierarchy. But Olympus was never the whole story. The Olympians were, in many ways, a selective theological imagination: gods of civic order, palace religion, visible hierarchy, and public cult. They formed the divine architecture of an emerging state.
But lived religion is always stranger than official religion.
Beneath Olympus, there were older presences: Gaia beneath the earth, Persephone as queen of seasons, local nymphs in springs and groves, river gods, snake spirits, daimones, ancestors tending the household dead, and mystery cults promising forms of knowledge unavailable to public life.
The sacred world of pre-Hellenic Greece did not exist only in temples, it lived in caves, beehives, thresholds, hearths, rivers, dreams, and women’s rites. Olympus was not the beginning of the story, only the visible summit of a much older sacred landscape.
For years I have been tracking the footprints of the old gods. It’s been incredibly stimulating to condense that search into this series and receive such rich, stimulating reflections from you. I never could have imagined such a positive response, and have felt deeply touched by the ways so many of you have fed something back into the pot.
There has also been an incredibly generous number of you who have upgraded your subscriptions to follow the series along, and your contributions are truly what make this work possible. My small publication is fully reader-funded. Without your support it simply wouldn’t be possible to keep it going. So a really special thanks to the paid readers among you!
After six months of tracing the Greek gods backwards—through Homer and Hesiod, beneath the polished marble of Olympus, into Bronze Age shrines, cave sanctuaries, Neolithic mountain cults, figurines, bull rites, hearths, and forgotten ecologies—I find myself returning to the intuition that began this whole journey: that many of us are searching for older roots beneath the exhausted spiritual and political imaginaries of the present.
The attempt to grasp a scent of some of the old gods of what later became Europe is not a retreat into the past, nor a romanticisation of prehistory, but an effort to recover something of the ancestral traditions slowly marginalised beneath waves of empire, conversion, conquest, and theological consolidation over the last roughly five thousand years.
This is not an attempt to return there, but to remember that other ways of being human once existed: ways shaped by reciprocity, ecological intimacy, ritual participation, and a sense that the sacred was encountered through the land itself.
What we call “Greek mythology” is not a fixed inheritance but a layered remembering. Beneath Zeus stood older sky-beings; beneath Artemis, the bear-mothers and mountain guardians; beneath Demeter, the grain mysteries of agrarian worlds; beneath Aphrodite, the sea-born powers of a beauty that terrorises us enough to change.
The deeper I travelled into prehistory, the more I realised that Before Olympus was not simply about reconstructing the religious imagination of the ancient Mediterranean. It was also about remembering a way of being in relationship to the world that feels, in our own time, profoundly endangered. The world beneath Olympus was not perfect, nor was it untouched by violence or uncertainty. But it did offer a cosmological orientation in which the earth was alive, rivers and mountains possessed presence, ritual was woven into seasonality, and the sacred was encountered not above the world but within its very fabric.
When I began this series, I described it as a descent into the mycelial root systems of the gods. What we uncover in tracing the gods backwards is not only the origins of religion, but fragments of our own ecological and mythic inheritance—an older conversation with the more-than-human world that still waits for us beneath the noise of modernity.
Beneath the hierarchical cosmologies, anthropocentric assumptions, and severed relationship to land inherited through later traditions, there once existed worlds shaped by reciprocity, seasonality, animacy, and deep ecological belonging. To follow the old gods backwards is to glimpse alternative ways of being human in a living world increasingly imperilled by our forgetting.
Thank you as ever for being here. You can now find the complete archive of Before Olympus here. Three of the essays are free, and to access the rest you can upgrade your subscription, which will also give you access to my now 150+ essays and audios (and which I am forever grateful for!).
I look forward to sharing the next essay series I have up my sleeve next week!
Until then, sending my love from a sleepy Sunday morning in the Australian outback,
xo Gabriela
I’m deeply grateful for this series, Gabriela! In addition to reorienting my relationships to the gods to something more personal and meaningful, it has helped to reveal much to me about my own psyche. With each new god you wrote about, I felt I had a new favorite! But, truly, the last two on Hermes were profoundly impactful. How else can we keep our relationship with Mystery except through sincere curiosity? I’m looking forward to your next series and to your book!
This series resonated deeply with me. For me it feels like a reconnecting, a re-membering, of a part of me I didn’t realize I wasn’t seeing. I loved the term “mycelial” as it feels so spot on. Mycelium connects the forest in ways we’re only starting to understand. Without it, the forest doesn’t exist. Our human mycelium has always been there too. Through your insights I see my connection to it. And like the forest, without it we don’t survive. Thank you! ❤️