The Two Powers: When Eros and Eris Shaped the World

The War Beneath Every War

Troy did not fall because of strategy or deception. It fell because two primordial forces—Eros and Eris—moved through mortal events like currents beneath the surface of history. These were not metaphors the ancient Greeks employed to make sense of human psychology. They were powers the Greeks experienced directly, forces that drove gods and mortals alike.

Eris, daughter of Zeus and sister to Ares, scattered beings apart. She is Strife personified—the force that divides, alienates, sets one against another. In her train followed Deimos (Terror), Phobos (Fear), Enyo (Battle Cry), and sometimes Lethe (Forgetting) and Atè (Delusion).

Eros worked oppositely. Though Homer does not name him directly, he manifests through Aphrodite, also Zeus’s daughter. Eros draws beings together, awakens longing, creates connection across distance. He generates the desire that pulls separate things toward union.

Every war since Troy—every conflict, every human drama—has been their war. Not as symbols, but as actual forces working through circumstance and flesh.

What Modernity Cannot See

The modern historian, observing the Trojan War, sees economic interests dressed in mythology. A struggle for control of the Dardanelles becomes elaborated into epic poetry. Helena’s abduction provides narrative justification for what was “really” about trade routes and regional dominance.

This reduction reveals our fundamental inability to perceive what the ancients saw plainly: that events do not originate in human will. We undergo passions; we do not generate them. Powers beyond our comprehension move through us, and we are their instruments far more than they are our projections.

The modern mind, trained in materialist reduction, cannot admit this. It must explain away what it cannot control. Yet consider the paradox: as our knowledge increases, the world grows more incomprehensible. As our power expands, we find ourselves at the mercy of systems no one commands.

We have entered what Kafka called the Castle—or perhaps the labyrinth, far more intricate than the one King Minos built on Crete. Unlike that labyrinth, which Theseus navigated with Ariadne’s thread to slay the Minotaur, our labyrinth has no thread, no center, no monster to defeat. It simply is.

The Postmodern Misunderstanding

Sensing this impasse, postmodern thinkers rediscovered polytheism. Not as religion but as philosophical stance. Gianni Vattimo spoke of il pensiero debole—weak thought that refuses grand syntheses, embraces contradictions, remains open to the incomprehensible and uncontrollable.

This represents both insight and evasion.

The insight: that monotheistic certainties have collapsed, that scientific reductionism cannot account for reality’s fullness, that the promised “grand synthesis” will never arrive. The world resists totalization. Apollo, god of knowledge, is not the only god.

The evasion: treating this multiplicity as philosophical choice rather than experiential reality. The ancient polytheist did not “believe in” multiple perspectives as one might hold a theory. The gods were real—as real as language, as present as the land itself. They manifested in specific places, through bloodlines, in the actual substance of territory and tribe.

Postmodernism offers the skeleton without the flesh. It preserves the form—multiplicity, contradiction, deferral—while evacuating the content. Its characteristic word is perhaps (peut-être). Its stance is perpetual suspension, endless postponement of judgment.

But the gods never asked for suspension. They demanded recognition, propitiation, sacrifice. And they were never, ever trustworthy.

The System of Non-Knowledge

Georges Bataille spoke of un système du non-savoir—a system of non-knowledge. Not ignorance awaiting enlightenment, not gaps in current understanding that future generations might fill, but a dimension of reality belonging to an order other than knowledge itself.

This is crucial. Modernity assumes that the limits of knowledge are epistemological—either the object is too vast to be known (the universe, God) or the subject lacks adequate tools (human reason is finite). The solution is always more knowledge: better instruments, refined methods, accumulated data.

But what if the problem is ontological? What if reality itself, in its very nature, withdraws even as it reveals? What if Being is such that onthulling (revealing) is inseparable from verhulling (concealing)—that showing itself requires hiding itself?

Heidegger glimpsed this. So did the ancients, though they understood it differently. Apollo governs the realm of knowledge, but Dionysus represents something knowledge cannot grasp. Not because Dionysus is mysterious in the sense of “not yet explained,” but because he belongs to another order entirely.

The labyrinth we inhabit may not be solvable because it was never meant to be solved. It may be reality’s structure—not a problem to overcome but a condition to inhabit.

What the Gods Actually Were

When we say the ancient Greeks “believed in” their gods, we commit a category error. Belief implies faith in something uncertain, acceptance of propositions that might be false. The gods required no such faith.

They belonged to another order of being. Homer divided reality into two realms: mortal and immortal. But notice the difference was not merely quantitative (gods live longer, are more powerful). It was qualitative, ontological.

The gods spoke a different language. Different substances flowed through their veins—not blood but something else. They used metals in ways mortals could not (bronze for houses, gold for furniture). They moved faster than time, changed shapes, revealed and concealed themselves at will.

They were not super-humans. They were other than human.

And they were dangerous. The Greeks did not trust their gods. They kept them appeased through sacrifice and ritual, maintained proper boundaries, acknowledged their own limits. The idea of divine providence—that everything works out for the best, that a benevolent God watches over creation—would have struck them as insane.

The gods had their own conflicts, their own agendas. Mortals were often their pawns, sometimes their lovers, occasionally their victims. Trust was never warranted.

Why the Sacred Sites Mattered

Understanding this helps explain what seems otherwise inexplicable: why destroying sacred sites was more strategically important than defeating armies.

These were not merely symbolic locations. They were actual focal points where divine powers could be contacted. Caves radiated subterranean energies. Mountain peaks channeled stellar influences. Great trees stood where elements converged—earth and water rising to meet air and light descending from above.

At these locations, destiny could be heard more clearly. Particularly through those who had cultivated the necessary perception—often women like Veleda at Lippe Spring, whom Germanic tribes consulted at crucial moments.

The Romans understood this. Charlemagne understood it. When you destroy Irminsul or Teutoburger Forest, you do not merely eliminate religious sites. You sever a people’s connection to the powers that gave them coherence, strength, identity.

Once robbed of their divinities and sacred geography, a people may soldier on for generations. But they have become, in the conqueror’s view, “meaningless nomadic peoples.” They have lost access to the sources that made them real.

The Christians did this systematically. They destroyed sacred groves and built churches with the wood. They taught populations to see “only dead wood in the trees”—preparing the way for modernity’s complete hostility toward nature, which now appears merely as raw material for human purposes.

What Never Grows Old

Schiller wrote: “What was never and nowhere can never grow old.”

This is the key to understanding mythology’s persistence. Myths do not belong to the past, awaiting recovery through archaeology or textual analysis. They constitute “the ongoing and hidden strength of history, which reflects in events what mythology has already symbolized.”

The more a figure or event approaches mythical dimensions, the more real it becomes. Not less real, as modernity assumes, but more—because it transcends the accidents of particular times and places to reveal the patterns that recur endlessly.

This is why the Trojan War remains the ur-conflict. Not because it was first chronologically, but because it reveals the essential structure: Eros and Eris moving through mortal circumstances, gods withdrawing at crucial moments, abstraction entering where ritual once governed.

Every subsequent war is mimetic repetition of this pattern. We fight Troy again and again, though the names change and the weapons evolve.

The Darker Recognition

Here is what postmodernism cannot face: the gods were not benevolent. They did not care about human flourishing. They pursued their own conflicts, using mortals as instruments.

The older dispensation—the one Christianity partially replaced—offered no comfort. No promise that suffering serves a purpose, that history bends toward justice, that the good will be rewarded and the wicked punished.

The Greeks and Germans knew this. They did not trust divine providence because they had no such concept. What they had was acknowledgment—of powers greater than themselves, of forces they could not control, of realities that preceded and exceeded them.

This is harder than either Christian faith or scientific materialism. Both offer forms of mastery: Christianity through divine grace, science through technical control. Ancient polytheism offered no mastery at all. Only the discipline of proper relationship with powers that remained ultimately opaque.

Perhaps this is why it cannot be truly recovered. We have tasted the promise of control—divine or technical—and cannot return to a world where control was never expected.

What Remains

The old sites still exist. The convergences of force have not ceased because we no longer recognize them. Certain places still concentrate power. Certain bloodlines maintain connection to specific territories across generations. Some people still remember what they could not possibly know.

But we approach these phenomena as problems to be solved rather than realities to be inhabited. We want explanations: genetic memory, morphic resonance, collective unconscious. We want mechanisms.

The ancients wanted no such thing. They wanted right relationship. They knew Eros would draw and Eris would scatter, regardless of human preference. They knew powers moved through events that cared nothing for mortal understanding.

They built their lives around this recognition—not as resignation but as orientation. They knew where to go to hear destiny speak. They knew which forces to appease and which to avoid. They knew the world was not theirs to command.

We have lost this. Not because we stopped believing in gods—belief was never the point—but because we stopped experiencing reality as having orders we do not control.

The question that remains is whether this loss was necessary for what came after, or whether something essential has been irretrievably damaged. Whether modernity’s labyrinth can still be inhabited with dignity, or whether we wander it as the last generation that remembers there was once a thread, a center, a way through.

The gods do not answer such questions. They never did.

But Eros still draws, and Eris still scatters. The forces themselves have not withdrawn—only our ability to recognize them.