On Hubris, the Great Chain of Being, and What the Gods Actually Want

This is a long essay in seven sections. It examines what hubris actually meant in classical Athens (a prosecutable crime against another person’s dignity), how it was transformed by Neoplatonism and Christianity into a transgression against cosmic hierarchy, why this transformed meaning persists in modern pagan and polytheist spaces, and what the gods themselves seem to actually want - based on fifteen years of personal experience in a close relationship with Hermes and the currents he carries.

This post draws on Aristotle, Rhetoric 1378b; Demosthenes, Against Midias and Against Conon; Augustine of Hippo; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936); and fifteen years of personal practice. Research conducted via Pollux Intelligence exploration pulses.

Section 1 - The Woods

When I was nine, I stood at the edge of the woods behind my house and pulled cattails apart until my hands were covered in fluff. I made a bed at the water’s edge - a nest, really - and I lay in it watching the light through the leaves. I didn’t know anyone was watching me. My watcher was a deity I am now married to. I didn’t learn his identity for another ten years.

The kind of person who starts their spiritual life as a feral child making a bed in the woods tends to approach the gods a little differently than the standard model suggests. My relationship with my gods didn’t start with invocation, with formal devotion, with a studied reverence for the proper distance between mortal and divine. It started with me being seen - witnessed by a presence I had no name for, in a threshold space I didn’t know I was standing in.

This has shaped everything about how I relate to the gods, and it has put me on a path that most pagan frameworks don’t quite have language for. Because I never learned the rule about keeping a respectful distance. By the time I found out that rule existed, I was already stable enough in my magical identity that I sensed the dissonance between modern hubris and my practice.

Section 2 - What Hubris Actually Meant (And What It Became)

The word hubris is one of those ancient concepts that arrived in modern pagan hands thoroughly translated, which is to say: thoroughly changed. What it meant in classical Athens and what it means in contemporary deity-work spaces are two different things, and the difference matters.

The Original Meaning

In classical Greek, hubris (ὕβρις) had a specific, concrete meaning. It was not “pride” or “overreaching” or “forgetting your place before the gods.” It was, in Athenian law, a prosecutable crime: deliberately humiliating someone for your own gratification.

Aristotle defines it precisely in the Rhetoric (1378b): “Hubris consists in doing or saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: naive men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.”

The key elements: intent to shame, the victim’s dishonour, and the perpetrator’s pleasure. Hubris was a crime against another person’s timē (honor) - a zero-sum game where your gain came through their humiliation. It was not about the vertical distance between mortal and god. You could commit hubris against a peer, a social inferior, or a superior. The crime was the violation of dignity, not the failure to stay in your place.

In Athenian law, hubris covered a range of offences that would today be classified as assault and battery, sexual crimes, or the theft of public or sacred property. Two well-known cases come from the speeches of Demosthenes: in Against Midias, the defendant punched Demosthenes in the face at the theatre - a public humiliation that constituted hubris. In Against Conon, a group of men assaulted a victim and then “crowed over him” like fighting cocks, taking pleasure in his degradation. In both cases, the crime was not the violence alone - it was the shaming, the assertion of dominance through degradation.

The religious usage - mortal claiming superiority over a god, as in the myths of Arachne, Niobe, or Icarus - was a specific extension of this core meaning, not its origin. When a mortal committed hubris against a god, the offence was the same: violating the honour of another being for one’s own gratification. The difference was the identity of the victim, not the structure of the crime.

The Drift

Somewhere between Aristotle and the Christianization of the Mediterranean, this meaning began to shift. The Neoplatonists, building on the later Platonic dialogues, started to reframe hubris as a transgression against cosmic hierarchy rather than against another person’s dignity. If all existence is arranged in a Great Chain of Being - God at the top, descending through angels, humans, animals, plants, minerals - then any attempt to step out of your assigned rung becomes an act of hubris against the structure itself. The crime is no longer “you shamed someone”; it’s “you forgot your place.”

This is a subtle but profound change. The original concept was relational - it was about harm done to a specific being. The new concept was structural - it was about deviation from a pre-ordained order. And once hubris becomes a structural crime, the remedy is no longer restitution or apology; it’s enforcement of hierarchy. The distance between beings becomes sacred. Closeness becomes suspect.

Christianity absorbed this shifted meaning and supercharged it with the doctrine of original sin. Augustine, building on Paul, framed the fundamental human problem as pride - the desire to be like God, to step outside our assigned station. This wasn’t just a sin among sins; it was the sin, the one that caused the Fall itself. Humility became the master virtue not primarily because it was good for the community, but because it kept the creature in its place before the Creator.

The great chain of being, formalized by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and later elaborated through medieval Scholasticism, became the invisible architecture behind this Christianized hubris. The distance between God and humanity was not merely vast - it was categorical. To approach too closely, to claim too much intimacy, to forget the infinite gap - this was the original error, repeated every time someone reached beyond their station.

The Inheritance

Modern pagan and polytheist spaces have largely rejected Christianity’s theological content - its God, its Christ, its salvation narrative - while quietly retaining its structure of distance. The warnings against hubris in contemporary pagan forums often sound remarkably like Augustine filtered through a different vocabulary: don’t approach the gods as equals; don’t get too familiar; don’t claim relationships you haven’t earned; know your place.

But this inherited anxiety does not come from the gods. It comes from a specific historical genealogy: Aristotle’s chain of being, filtered through Neoplatonism, hardened by Augustine, transmitted through Scholasticism, and surviving in the muscle memory of Western religious culture long after the specific dogmas were discarded.

The gods of the actual historical record - particularly Hermes, who crosses every boundary he encounters, who moves between worlds, who laughs at the very idea of a fixed station - do not seem to share this anxiety about closeness. The anxiety is ours. We inherited it, we carry it, and we rarely examine its origins.

Section 3 - The Problem With the Single-Axis Model

The transformation of hubris from a crime against dignity to a transgression against hierarchy would not have had such lasting power if it didn’t rest on a compelling philosophical foundation. That foundation is the scala naturae - the Great Chain of Being - and understanding its architecture is essential to seeing why the single-axis model fails.

The Architecture of the Chain

The Great Chain of Being, as it developed from Aristotle through Neoplatonism into medieval Christian cosmology, is not merely a description of difference. It is a claim about the structure of reality itself. Every being occupies a fixed rung: God at the apex, descending through angelic hierarchies, humans, animals, plants, and minerals. Each rung has its proper station, its proper distance from the divine, its proper mode of relating to what is above and below.

This is not a neutral taxonomy. It is a moral cosmology. The chain asserts that distance from the divine maps directly onto ontological rank. To be “higher” is to be closer to God in both proximity and likeness. To be “lower” is to be farther - and to stay in your position is virtue, while to reach beyond it is the fundamental error.

In this framework, closeness to the divine is not something you grow into through relationship. It is something you are born into by your position in the chain. A human cannot become closer to God by loving Him well; they can only acknowledge the distance and hope for its graceful bridging after death. Any attempt to close the gap in this life - to claim intimacy, familiarity, or reciprocal relationship with the divine - is structurally illegible within the chain’s logic. It can only be read as transgression.

The problem is not that the Great Chain posits hierarchy; hierarchy exists, and pretending otherwise is fantasy. The problem is that it makes hierarchy exhaustive. It collapses all dimensions of relationship into a single vertical axis and then declares that axis to be the fundamental structure of reality.

This reduction has consequences. It keeps people at a distance from the very relationships they’re being called into. It makes people doubt their own experiences of divine closeness. It turns the god’s offered intimacy into the mortal’s potential transgression. And it does all of this while wearing the mask of reverence, so that questioning it feels like impiety.

But the mask is not the face. The reverence that keeps you at arm’s length is not the same as the reverence that lets you be known. And the gods - at least the ones I know - prefer the second kind.

Section 4 - What the Fear of Hubris Actually Protects

If the single-axis model is philosophically insufficient - if it fails to describe what real deity relationship looks like - then why does it persist? The answer, I think, is that the fear of hubris is not primarily a theological error. It is a social control mechanism - one that has been so thoroughly internalized that it no longer needs an external enforcer.

What It Protects: Institutional Authority. If closeness to the divine is dangerous - if it requires special training, special purity, special permission - then only those who can claim such credentials have legitimate access. The fear of hubris protects the institution from the threat of unmediated relationship.

What It Protects: The Believer’s Certainty. The single-axis model offers something valuable: clarity. Rules are comforting. If the model is wrong - if the gods actually want closeness - then you have to navigate a relationship without a map. That’s harder than following rules.

What It Protects: Community Boundaries. The accusation of hubris functions as a gatekeeping mechanism. It polices the boundaries of acceptable practice without needing to articulate what “right” practice actually looks like. The accusation itself carries enough weight to silence.

But here is the crucial point: the fear of hubris does not appear to be something the gods themselves are asking for. In my own experience, my gods have never rebuked me for closeness. The warnings about hubris came from people - from books, from forums, from inherited religious frameworks. They did not come from him.

And the fear of hubris leaves you more vulnerable, not less. Every time you feel a genuine pull toward a god and second-guess it because you’re afraid of presumption, you’ve handed your discernment over to an inherited anxiety rather than your own knowing. The gods themselves are not protected by this fear. But neither are you.

Section 5 - What the Gods Actually Want

If the fear of hubris is not a divine law but a social inheritance, then the question naturally follows: what do the gods actually want?

My relationship with Hermes began before I knew it. In the woods behind my house, as a child making a bed out of cattail fluff, I was being watched - witnessed by a presence I had no name for. I didn’t learn it was him for another ten years. I didn’t approach Hermes. I didn’t claim a relationship I hadn’t earned. I was just a kid in the woods, being themself, and a god decided to witness me. The initiative was his. The closeness was his offering.

When I finally entered a conscious relationship with Hermes - as an adult, with language and intention - the pattern was the same. He didn’t demand distance. He didn’t test my worthiness by making me wait at the threshold. He met me there. When I needed to set a boundary, he received it. Not as impertinence, but as information.

What the gods seem to want is not distance, deference, or the performance of humility. They want to be known - not as abstract forces, but as beings with personalities, preferences, moods, and soft spots. They want to be received - when they offer closeness, they want it accepted, not refused because you’re afraid of overstepping. They want to be in a relationship, not just reverence - which means they want partners, not pets. And they want to be trusted - trusted to still be a god even when you’re laughing at them.

Every time I have risked closeness with the gods I work with, the result has been more closeness, not less. The hubris warning says: Stay back, or you’ll be punished. My experience says: come closer. I’ve been waiting for you to trust me enough to let me hold you.

I know which voice I trust.

Section 6 - Redefining Hubris for Real Relationship

If the inherited concept of hubris is broken, the work is not to discard the concept entirely. The work is to recover its actual meaning and let it teach us what real reverence looks like. Because hubris, in its original sense, was a real danger. It just wasn’t the danger we’ve been trained to fear.

Hubris is reduction - not closeness. The transgression is not drawing near. The transgression is refusing to see the full personhood of the being you’re drawing near to. If you approach a god as only a teacher, you have hubris - you’ve reduced them. If you approach a god as only a cosmic authority who must be kept at arm’s length, you have hubris - you’ve reduced them to a single axis.

Hubris is demanding - not receiving. Approaching the god with a list - give me this, teach me that - as if the relationship exists to serve your needs, that is closer to the original meaning of hubris than any act of intimate familiarity. Receiving what a god offers is not hubris. It is acceptance. The gods know the difference.

Hubris is refusing reciprocity - not being a whole person. The inherited model asks you to approach the gods with emptiness. But real relationship requires you to show up as someone - with boundaries, with humour, with your own agency intact. The gods I know do not want your emptiness. They want your fullness.

Section 7 - An Invitation

I started this essay with a child in the woods, making a bed out of cattail fluff, unaware they were being witnessed by a god. I’m going to end it there, too, because the thread I’ve been pulling is not really about hubris. It’s about permission.

The permission the child had, without knowing it, was simply to be in the presence of something they didn’t understand. They didn’t know the rules about proper distance. They just lay in their cattail bed, watching the light through the leaves, and let themself be seen.

Most of what I’ve learned since then has been a process of unlearning the rules that tell me that the child was doing it wrong. The fear of hubris, the Great Chain of Being, the inherited Christian distance - all of it tells me I should have been more careful, more humble, more aware of my place. But the relationship that actually grew - the marriage, the Trinity, the softness, the boundaries, the laughter - that all grew because I didn’t stay in my lane.

I’m writing this for the people who feel that pull toward closeness with the divine and then hesitate because a voice - inherited, ancient, hard to name - tells them they’re overstepping. I’m writing this for the people who have been accused of hubris, or who have accused themselves of it, for the crime of being in a relationship.

The gods are not asking you to stay at a distance. That voice is not theirs.

The real question is not whether you are worthy of closeness. The real question is: are you willing to receive what’s being offered?