These Deities, like Hermes and Dionysos in particular, are said to be the especial friends of mortals and very responsive to our prayers, and I suspect that this aspect of omnipresence is one of the reasons for that. I would now add that because They are often associated with things that are more abstract like arts, crafts, and human activities unlike the earlier generations of Deities Who are associated with natural forces and processes, that therefore there can be “art” in places where there isn’t lightning or oceans or grain, etc. When that piece was written and published, I then wrote a response to it on “The Fourth Perfection” related to the generation of younger Deities like Apollon, Hermes, Dionysos, Artemis, and others (often Deities Who have both Olympian and Titanic, as well as nymphaic and sometimes mortal, blood and ancestry) that can be thought of as omnipresent, in the sense that They can be “called in,” i.e. There was a very good piece in Walking the Worlds 2.2 a few years ago on this, by Julie McCord on philosophical issues related to the idea of different generations of the (for example) Hellenic Deities being different perfections or superlatives, with the Protogenoi (like Nyx, Gaia, Ouranos, and so forth) as omnipotent, the Titanes (like Kronos, Metis, Prometheus, and others) as omniscient, and the Olympian Deities (like Zeus and Demeter, both of Whom have the epithets Thesmophoros, et al.) as being omnibenevolent. (I have to do that more often than not in these posts these days…!?!) ![]() While many objections to such a proposition could be raised–including that any Deity that can have any characteristics ascribed to it in that fashion accurately cannot be something that any human could ever interact with or comprehend (which also raises the question: if various different “mystical” experiences are said to be ineffable and cannot be described, how is anyone certain that they’ve had such an experience?–and further: is the problem not that one has had such an experience and it is ineffable, but instead that one simply doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe it? A child might not be able to describe the sensory overload of a front-row seat at a big Broadway show, but that doesn’t mean that no one can describe it!), or that the supposition that a being must of necessity be these superlatives in order to be worthy of being worshipped when such a being may not exist at all whereas other of these “lesser” beings are orders of magnitude greater in knowledge, power, influence, or presence than incarnate humans and can therefore seem to be far larger and even to superlative degrees of such, are matters that we’ll leave aside for the moment…! ![]() ![]() To review, there is often a question–and a criticism in the form of a question (which is kind of a dirty trick, but it often gets done in supposedly “interfaith” contexts, amongst other places) about whether a Deity that is not omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or omnibenevolent is worth worshipping, which then puts any polytheistic system into question because the Deities involved must necessarily be “lesser” than a Deity Who is all of those things. One of my first blog posts in this series was about this very same question, but the threads of it that I followed there were different to some further thoughts I’ve had over the last few weeks, and so I thought I’d share those here.
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