"Do not neglect or forget the gods. This was the essential commandment of the Hellenic world. We humans were not asked to have faith as with the Christians or to obey the law as with the Hebrews. We were asked not to forget or neglect the gods. Surely this caution has some relation with the role of beauty in Hellenic culture. But how? Perhaps it means that art, as anything else we humans do, remembers the non-human and immortal powers - as the gods were defined in antiquity.
Then, we could lift the repression from beauty by anchoring the mind in nonhuman values. For surely the humanist program is not enough: Social protest and political concern, the exploration of self-expression and the full exploitation of the materials, the reaction of one school or movement to another school or movement, to say nothing of the drive for fame, career, and money, are not satisfactory anchors of the mind's intention in making art. Beauty cannot enter art unless the mind in the work is anchored beyond itself so that in some way the finished work reflects the sacred and the doing of the work, ritual."
James Hillman The Practice of Beauty
in Uncontrollable Beauty - Toward a New Aesthetics (1998) p.273