Apollo and the Shadow of Greekness

Abstract

The paper tries to shed light on the "symbolic core" of the god Apollo, in the sense of a dynamic complex of structural themes loosely guiding the logic of local and historical developments of the god's myths and cults. Starting from three 20th-century accounts of Apollo by Otto, Detienne, and Versnel, I will try to show that it is precisely by taking them into account all together that the symbolic structural core of Apollo may be grasped in an interesting manner which takes into account both his brighter and his darker aspects. I further relate this pattern to a general theory which sees polytheistic gods as the symbolic focal points that embody the basic norms of a given sociocultural system, but at the same time transgress these categories themselves, expressing the various tensions any ordering of reality is bound to generate and offering a cultural mechanism that allows to turn these tensions into a source of power with which the norms may be supported in turn.