The notion of creating a chimaera is an ancient tale: For the ancient Greeks, it was a fire-breathing beast with the heads of a goat, lion and snake, appearing in Homer’s Iliad in Book VI as follows:
“Howbeit when the tenth rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, then at length he questioned him and asked to see whatever token he bare from his daughter’s husband, Proetus. But when he had received from him the evil token of his daughter’s husband, first he bade him slay the raging Chimaera. She was of divine stock, not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire.”
From here, the mythology of the chimaera took on many forms, yet for modern scientistic western man, the dream of blending and bending Nature to fit his own designs took on a whole new meaning. Demythologizing and desacralizing Nature of any divine or sacramental character, the new grand narrative, as I have detailed many times, became that of blind, mechanistic force. Banishing God from Nature through the removal of belief in His immanence, for a time the West was prepared to grant verbal homage to Him as perhaps a blind watchmaker of a universe of sound and fury signifying nothing, and in no wise intimate with His creation.
No comments:
Post a Comment