Sublime

By the 6th century BCE large numbers of Greeks were living and working in Egypt and a fully Greek city, Naucratis, had been founded on the Nile river, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from the open sea. Three hundred years later the Greek general Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, which effectively became part of the Greek world. It is fair to conclude

• Eidolon (εἴδωλον): A ghostly phantom or illusory double in Greek mythology, reflecting an unreal or idealized image of a person or thing.


• Daemon (δαίμων): A divine or spiritual being in Greek philosophy, acting as a guiding force or moral conscience between gods and humans.

Mythology is the authentic record of those periods of transition when the diviner sparks were gradually assuming the bodies of mortality.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over