sdi

The notion that "the gods are unchanging" was a surprising one to me. If the gods do not change, they may never converse with us, for to converse with us would imply a change in state. Raised as I was in fundamentalist Christianity (which emphasizes the imminence of the Holy Spirit) and with Greek mythology (where every Odysseus has his Athena), and given that I regularly converse with such a god, when I first read Sallustius a year or so ago, I couldn’t conceive of how this could possibly be. Lately, I've read Apuleius, who says that what we usually think of as "gods" are technically "dæmons"—in his scheme, actually one of several kinds, a sort we would simply call "angels"—acting in the service of the gods, and these are the beings with which we humans interact and which are described in myth and folklore; the true gods are as far above dæmons as the dæmons are above us. So the "gods" Sallustius here refers to seem more like "foundational principles" than "beings" in the sense we usually think of "beings?"