Ares
I feel, and am condemned.
I feel rage, and am looked down upon.
I am powerful, and I am feared.
I fight with all the lust of a long denied lover.
I am the anger and frustration of youth.
I am the drive to survival, though violent it may be.
I am God, ever emotional and vigilant.
I am your defender and your soldier.
I am he who has made you what you are.
I am he you hate for it.
I am disturbance and war.
Fighting for a chance at life and free will.
Ares the God
Ares the god is seen as a great many things. As a personification of war, as Mars he can be seen as a god of agriculture, as a warrior and protector, and as a lover. The godhead of Ares is one that revolves, most interestingly, upon instinct and evolution. The violence of the cosmos can be seen from the turbulent and violent reactions of fusion and fission to the violent actions of feeding in the animal kingdom and the violence of war among peoples of the Earth. One would think that such baseness would be part of the lower realms rather than that of Olympus, but how would that make sense when the lower realms of death are still and calm. Violence may lead to death, but death is itself not a violent thing.
Ares is a forceful figure that forces change into being. Man and animal evolve, but they do not evolve out of simple needs, rather out of dire need. Out of violent and serious upheaval in environment and population. Life evolves to protect itself from death, to survive in a turbulent world where life is not so much a given right, but an earned one. You live if you can survive the horrors of life, otherwise you die.
Ares the Warrior
Updated August 4. 2002
Greece was a culture of warriors. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Greece was the child of a warrior culture, the Mycenaean culture, which of course never called itself that.
Greece was a culture in growth and transition from one kind of culture to another, drawing from ancient memory, legend, and myth about the glories of their forefathers whose end came as a result of their greatest moment of glory, the great and legendary Trojan War.
A culture so influenced and even fashioned from the ashes of war as the Greeks were would in all likelihood choose to honor a god of war above all others, yet Zeus was not the war god of the Greeks, he was a hero, a
conqueror, a father, but not a god 'of war.'
The God of War is preeminently Ares, though he certainly wasn't the only one. One could label Athena a goddess of war, but in truth she was a warrior goddess rather than a goddess of war, or she tempered war with wisdom, planning, and forethought.
Enyo too was a goddess of war, but she was a minor deity rather than a great Olympian Goddess, and one might even view her as an angelos, a helper entity, rather than a goddess, perhaps even an aspect of Ares
himself. It is also an interesting point that of the many allies Ares possessed in myth, most were female rather than male.
Ares, you see, was not an adored figure in Hellenic religion. Oh, he had a few temples and a few festivals in his homeland, but in general, it was not until Roman times and his association with Mars, his Roman counterpart, that Ares, god of war, became a figure of great importance in the Graeco-Roman world.
Ares was seen as a disturbing figure. He could, when viewed from certain perspectives, come to represent the worst aspects of humanity, and of men in particular. Civilized as they were, the Greeks still lived in a
very barbaric time, when war was intimately bloody and a warrior did not have the luxury of long range missiles that allowed him to completely objectify his enemies.
For people of that time, the opposite was true, and a warrior had to harden himself to the horrendous damage and pain he would inflict with his sword because he would be there to witness it first hand.
Ares exemplified this aspect of humanity, this ability of men to fight brutally and most bloodily and even come to enjoy it in a way that must have been disturbing to a people who were also embracing philosophy and democracy.
For a people turning from warriors to philosophers, the stuff of nightmares that was war must have truly been fear inducing, and those who sought to worship Ares likely found what many of us must see today, the necessity of him in a world ruled by survival.
Ares can very well be seen as the god of evolution, a concept not yet in existence then as it is today, but one that has always been with us. We, humanity, strive with strength and reason to fight the violent urges that brought our animal ancestors to this point, violent instincts that allowed us to survive long enough as a species for reason to take hold.
Reason, however, is the purview of other deities. Instinct, brutality, and a strong survival instinct are Ares' domains, and so, interestingly enough, is sex.
No, Ares is not a god of love or even sex, but there is in his character a strongly erotic component that makes even the beauteous goddess of love fall for him. He is that strong, macho man that is so seriously
irresistible to those of us fortunate enough to find the male form sexually attractive.
He is a manly man. A man of action. A man unafraid to do battle and bloody himself in the service of his country. A soldier and a lover. He is also, however, a weak man, for his authority is that of his own person. The aggression and blood lust that is his foments distrust, and it makes of him a coward, in many ways.
A man so caught up in his more primal instincts, in war and destruction must find it difficult to deal with a world of philosophy, farming, and life at home. But Ares is not a man, is he? He is a god, with all that that implies. He is thus a part of all of us, even those who would seek to deny him in their lives out of some misguided idea that he is in fact war.
But war is something we do. War is a crime committed by humanity, not by the gods. We are too often willing to blame the gods for the things we do, and our misuse of Ares' gift of aggression is one such instance of misplaced guilt upon the divine.
What we do not find in Ares, however, is a balanced view of him as we do of others, like Athena, who is both virgin and mother figure, warrior and giver of wisdom, both weaver and wise in the ways of arms. She is both defender and destroyer of cities.
In Ares we see rage and aggression brought to the very point of murder, but we do not really see in him the self contained balancing of these aspects. That balancing, it appears, is left to his companions, most especially Aphrodite, goddess of love.
The affair between Ares and Aphrodite in myth is a scandal. Aphrodite, you see, is married to the brother of Ares, Hephaestos, who is the lame child of Hera and the architect and builder of the splendors of Olympus.
Aphrodite was given to him by Zeus, as such would have been in the rights of the father to do in ancient Greek culture, but Ares loved her, and would not be apart from her. Hephaestos, though lame, was quick of
mind and was suspicious so that he hatched a plan to prove his wife's betrayal.
Ares entered the home of Hephaestos and Aphrodite that fateful morning, and he and the beautiful Aphrodite were immediately upon each other. Their love making setting off the trap that Hephaestos had set, and so they were, caught in a most compromising situation for the whole of the day until Hephaestos came home and found them.
He called out to all the gods, who rushed on over to see, while the goddesses stayed modestly at home. They were belittled and laughed at as Hephaestos made his emotional speech denouncing his wife and Ares their actions.
The story is, of course, myth, but myth is a teacher, and here we see many a lesson worth learning. The simplest being of trust, while a range of others, such as the idea that a woman could simply be given over to a man she did not love and having the expectation that she would not stray is not only illogical, but absurd. Then there is Ares, who despite his rage and horror is beguiled by love, and indeed rendered powerless to resist its allure and suggestion.
Ares is, in this instance, balanced by love. He is pacified by it and led to a softer and ever more prevalent aspect of masculinity and aggression, sexuality. He is, for lack of a better phrase, lead to his downfall by his cock. But what man has not lost part of himself, or given it freely, for the sake of love and sex.
Mythologically, of course, is only one way in which Ares is viewed, and the bigger challenge resides in how such a god can be viewed, adored, worshipped, and honored in a modern religion.
Modern religionists, be they Pagan or not, are for the most part a people who see value in peace, not war, and our modern sensibilities would lead us to forget such deities as Ares and the warrior aspects of Athena, for example, but that would, to my way of thinking anyway, lead astray from the aggressions that we use on a daily basis to lead, to be artistic, to seek out new things in life, and that would indeed be a pity.
I believe we must learn to understand the more subtle yet more profound ways in which the warrior gods, and especially the war god himself, affect our lives, and make of them a thing worth having, worth doing. The tenacity of life is, after all, one of the gifts of aggression. One of the gifts of Ares, god of war.
The Hero
Like Zeus, who is a conqueror hero, Ares is also a hero in the modern sense. The warriors in our own world, the soldiers, are today given much more status as heroes and icons than they were even 35 or 40 years ago. Today we afix a respect and honor to them that is remarkable in the face of much turmoil in the world. And so here too is Ares, for if he is a warrior and killer, so too is he a defender and hero of the people. Take ever tomb of the unknown soldier as his tomb, take every war memorial as his temple, take every battlefield as his sanctuary, for not only were people killed and mutilated there, but so too were freedoms defended and heroes born in the minds of those who supported the warriors who fought there.