"A man is a god in ruins..."

"A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Plato's 'Republic', the philosopher lays down his idea that in all men and women there swirls a stark duality between a 'higher self' and a 'lower self'. Plato reasons the single, simple key to a life both fulfilling and worthwhile sits in the individual's ability to overcome the base, animalistic wants of the lower self (greed, gluttony, lust, and so on) to achieve the goals and desires of the higher self (your [hopefully] noble life goals, etc).
This maxim strikes so true to we as a collective humanity because we are just that: we are flawed, we are filled with bestial thoughts and actions, we are, to put to metaphor, a mix of animals and gods.
But if this is the case, shouldn't the gods and goddesses sit in perfect poise at the opposite end of the spectrum? By all accounts, they shouldn't be forced to battle the same urges and sins as we. Calasso writes,

"(The gods) look down at the world when they plan to strike it, but otherwise their eyes are elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where they find their own images detached from all else." (51)

But are they really looking elsewhere for their own pleasure? Or, perhaps, as we have gazed upon the pantheons of gods throughout the ages for the humanity within their immortal veins. We are thrilled and empowered by the fact that we, whether through direct seed or sculpted from wet clay by white hands, come from these beings and share so much with them, mistakes and accomplishments, shames and virtues alike.

Which leads, of course, to the inevitable tragedy of the gods; they can never quite escape us. Though seemingly born in perfect radiance—Apollo turning the dreary Delos all to gold with the first touch of his infant skin, his sister Artemis with her flawless and crystalline vision of her whole life to come when nothing more than a baby on Zeus' knee—they as all the gods fall prey to the beasts of human souls alongside us. Apollo as an adult, god of the dawn, the sun, the light: with one glance at the human Coronis bathing with dark hair unbound in Lake Boebeis has uncontrollable desire him, and he "descended upon Coronis like the night." Later, when the white crow he charged to keep a jealous watch over Coronis returned to him with the news of her unfaithfulness, his inner light was once again smeared away, however momentarily, by the dark and flawed storms of the spirit that feel much more human than divine; losing his temper, refusing to believe he could be thus scorned by a human woman, he cursed the crow until its feathers blackened from his oaths, and with it all crows across the earth.
His sister Artemis, goddess of purity, virginity, the untamed wild, was not without her own threads of human blackness. Scorned by Aura, the human huntress, the goddess, with almost unimaginable barbarity, sends forth Dionysus to rape her, and mocks her with open savagery afterward.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that, on the other side of the mirror, the gods are looking anywhere but back at us. Whenever they glance our way, they find themselves embroiled in the animal blood that rivers this earth. Out of shame, or disgust, or simple denial, they turn their marble faces away from we imperfect beings—created in their likeness, and thus imperfect as they—in shame. 

Perhaps this, as Calasso hints, is why we as a culture have largely dismissed the old gods; we have realized the distinction between ourselves and they is as smoke amid branches. If they are as men, then we are as gods, and make of the earth our own ruined heaven.

"The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and, hence, if they are indifferent in our regard, we can be indifferent as to their existence, or otherwise.'
(53)