Cryptonomicon

the usual sense of that term, that involve her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went so far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess of weaving, among other things.

'Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him-the helpless, innocent victim,that is-into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

'But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair-minded of her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw-Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd-raping, interspecies-fucking worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all of those othermyths, which makes this into a sort of meta-myth. Athena flew off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might seem kind of like poor anger management until you consider that during the struggle against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in the form of a spider.

'So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts-such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics-why the redundancy? But a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dikeby the Greeks. That's notwhat Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia. So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious-crafts are just the practical application of metis.'

'I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp,' Randy says. 'I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?'

'It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology.'

'Okay. Now we're getting somewhere.'

'Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame, then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with Athena even though-maybe because— they are nominally the god and goddess of the same thing-war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that he's completely incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of Odysseus's drinking buddies during the iliad.Athena knocks him out with a rock at one point. When he's not making a complete idiot of himself in battle, he's screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and-get this-his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.

'Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let's not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis.And although both of them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself 'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring-Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares's psychopathic sons. I mean, the records aren't totally clear-it's not like you can go to the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these guys-but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way, personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of Ares.

'So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to Ares.'

'I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?'

'The distinction is overrated. Remember when I said that Athena got leg-fucked by Hephaestus?'

'It generated a clear internal representation in my mind.'

'As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling in that he is another technology god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his specialties-the old-fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him a hard-on! After he ejaculated on Athena's thigh, she's all eeeeeyew!and she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where it somehow combines with the earth and generates Erichthonius. You know who Erichthonius was?'

'No.'

'One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?'

'Tell me.'

'Invented the chariot-and introduced the use of silver as a currency.'

'Oh, Jesus!' Randy clamps his head between his hands and makes moaning noises, only for a little while.

'Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters-creatures full of cunning-like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.'

'Okay,' Randy says, 'so obviously where you're going with this is that there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as gods, heroes, etc.'

'Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that two persons with Root Reps in their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing notes.'

'So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods-which aren't really gods, but it's a nice concise word- all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures.'

'That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil.'

'Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers.'

'That's right.'

'Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper-seated.'

'In somecultures. The Vikings-to judge from their mythology-would instinctively