Agent of Chaos

nothing is more frustrating than when I’m leading a serious discussion about the importance of learning how to properly research folklore & cultural stories from reliable sources and someone pipes in like “why does it matter if it’s all made up anyway?”

yeah dude vampires are made up and the whole “vampires couldn’t see their reflections in antique mirrors because of the silver backing” is made up so you can combine those however you want for fun.

but you can’t say “the Victorians believed vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors because of the silver backing, which is why Dracula has no reflection,”

because the author of Dracula was a real man who never said that and the Victorians were real people of a real era and you can’t just make up things about real people because it’s important historically for us to understand what people believed about the world and why.

Making up facts about vampires is folklore & literature. Claiming random people in the past believed that, with no evidence, is just lying.

Am I making sense??

“What if eye of newt is code for mustard seed and witches used strange ingredient names to conceal their spells’ true, more mundane contents?”

Fun, modern take on witches in classic literature.

“In the 16th century, eye of newt was code for mustard seed, and witches used it to disguise their spells. Shakespeare knew this code and used it in Macbeth.”

That’s a lie. Now we’re just lying.

i lowkey ship tumblr ♠ twitter now

the twitter users are coming QUICK post twitblr yaoi

I have never made art faster in my life

it’s because they’re divorced

Man this goes hard feel free to screenshot 💔😰💔💔😰

The mods are asleep, post Tumblr x Twitter art

Okay okay but this is fascinating because it's such a visceral example of how mythology works.

Most characters in mythologies are personifications of concepts, or embody some natural phenomenon - like the story of Hades and Persephone is there to explain why the seasons change, Persephone being spring, Demeter - summer, and the absence of them both resulting in death (Hade's domain) and winter, and so we can't have Persephone stay in underworld all year round or have Demeter steal her back to earth permanently, otherwise they myth would lose its core function.

Interpreting the myth without the lense of the natural phenomena that it explains would make it lose an integral part of itself, and therefore make the plot and characters seem strange or unnatural. Why does Demeter hate Hades so much, seeing how so many mothers are okay with Zeus doing atrocious things to their offspring just because he's Zeus? Does Persephone actually want to stay or not? What's with the bizarre arrangement?

Most modern interpretations strip myths of their natural contexts, making them character-driven instead of phenomena-driven, which just makes them land differently - they can still be fine stories, just not myths, not is the traditional sense.

And now we get to this beauty. This is absolutely a myth, the most classical kind. The relationship between characters, who are personifications of objects, phenomena or concepts (in this case, online platforms) used as an intuitively understood metaphor for an event (the demise of Twitter and the Tumblr userbase being unwilling to accept Twitter's userbase).

It's a story that can work as a so-called "explanation myths". We have seasons because Persephone spends half a yesterday underworld and half a year with her mother. We don't like Twitter because the Twitter God and Tumblr God broke up. Ladies and gents and other assorted respectables, we here are witnessing the creation of a perfect modern myth.

Okay but which of them took the shoelaces in the divorce?

I thought about it way more than a non-feverish me would, and I've come to the conclusion:

The modern myth that is The Divorce of Tumblr and Twitter carries the themes of regression, corruption and downfall. Some of Twitter userbase used to be part of Tumblr userbase, but they left and changed (corruption). Now that Twitter is becoming uninhabitable (downfall), people are trying to return to Tumblr (regression, possible downfall of Tumblr), and to keep them off Tumblr is returning to its old cringe self (regression).

So, if we are to follow the themes, the logical conclusion would be to send the shoelaces back to the president.

This is the fastest I've ever written I think

There once lived a young man, handsome as daylight, bright and strong. He was known as Twitter, beloved by the people, a favorite of the gods. His chosen companion, Tumblr, was not dear to the people or the gods. He, a traveling storyteller, preferred solitude. His tales were strange and often unpleasant to the ears, but enchanting in their vulgarity. 

One day, Tumblr's patron goddess, Yahoo, enraged by his vulgar words, put a curse on him. He was not to utter vulgarities, speak of the pleasures of the flesh. His stories of lycanthrope companions were lost to the sands of time, and with them, his last listeners turned away from him. 

Twitter watched others laugh at his beloved, turn him away from their doors, and a dark thought settled over him. He was perfect in every way, his only fault was the affiliation with the cursed taleweaver. And so, little by little, they drifted apart. 

In his travels, Tumblr stumbled into the temple of Apollo, who bestowed upon him the gift of prophecy. He made acquaintance with the trifecta of wise temple maidens who induced visions through hallucinogenic incense. His stories changed, still bizarre and often vulgar, but at times full of wonder and truth. 

At that time, Twitter enjoyed all the luxuries of the mortal world. He was the companion of kings, wealthy merchants, legendary heroes, wise philosophers. 

One day, a man richer than rich, richer than the God of wealth, went to the senate of directors and asked to buy the most precious thing in the entire polis. 

The senate thought long and hard, and said: "do you wish for our finest singer, the most sweet-voiced of the land, Spotifia? I am afraid I cannot part with her. "

"No, " said the rich man, his voice cold and harsh, "I said I have come to buy your most precious thing."

"Have you come for our gambler, the chosen of the god of luck, MAXimil? They earn us more riches than you can offer. I shall not part with them. "

"No," the rich man repeated, "I have come to buy your most precious thing. I have come for Twitter."

The senators laughed, then, for they knew this must be a joke. Twitter was too beloved by the gods to be owned as a servant. But the rich man did not smile. He offered money, then more and more still. As the goddess of hubris clouded his mind, he offered more money than he could afford to spend, more than the senate could afford to refuse, for it was enough gold to form armies five times the size of their polis. 

And so Twitter, the proud Twitter, the untouchable Twitter who laughed at kings and scholars alike, became a servant. 

As he was put onto a gilded ship to be sailed off to the rich man's land, he prayed to the gods that granted him beauty and strength and a sharp tongue, but none answered. His cruelty and vanity made them turn away, and he was too full of his power to notice. 

Finally, the young man remembered one more name. He called for Tumblr, his forgotten companion. 

First time he called, the birds took off and flew in all directions. Second time he called, the animals fled in fear. Gathering all the strength he had, he called a third time.

His call shook the earth and the skies, and in an instant, Apollo's taleweaver stood on the shore. 

Twitter cried in relief. "My love!" he called, "save me! Save me, and I shall be yours for the eternity to come. I shall bask you in glory and riches. I shall make the people love you."

Tumblr looked at the rich old man, at the gilded ship, gilded chains, at the other slaves that were meant to please the rich man during his trip, dressed in the finest clothes fit for kings and immortals. 

"You'll like your new life, dear. " said Tumblr. "You are idle: he shan't make you do much. You are prideful: he shall treat you like a god. You are vain, and so you might fear you might be forgotten, one servant among many. Fear not," he smiled. "I shall sing a song of us."

I AM SORRY I DIDNT KNOW WHAT BEAST I WOULD CREATE WITH THE DIVORCE THING OH MY GOSH

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a

It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.

In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:

One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:

The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.

South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:

What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?

The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.

In North America there is the Piasa Bird

Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as

What fossils could have been found in that region:

Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.

Then we get our European style dragon:

One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus 

which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.

Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.

Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:

A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.

If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.

@spiritspodcast

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

So cool...

This is an absolutely wonderful article and if I could get anyone to read one thing this year, it would be this.

I’ve had many, many discussions about this topic on this blog before with people who have told me that the only true feminist retelling of, say, the Persephone myth is to remove her rape/trauma and make her the architect of her own descent into the Underworld. People have told me on myriad occasions that Persephone and Hades were in love, that she wasn’t raped in the ancient sources, that there are older versions in which she was the original goddess of the Underworld. It’s just not true, and I think we really need to reexamine our motives for feeling the need to remove Persephone’s rape from her narrative. Are we really unvictimising her, as Nikita Gill puts it here, or are we actually invalidating her trauma?

As Aimee Hinds much more eloquently puts it, we do survivors a disservice when we insist on removing them from the narrative on the basis that their experiences aren’t perceived as ‘empowering’ enough. If we tell survivors that the only true feminist retelling of a myth is one in which the woman always has complete agency, then the message we give is that to lose one’s agency is to become unfeminist, unempowered. To be raped, therefore, is to remove you from the conversation about feminism. Best not speak about it; best to only speak of women whose agency was never questioned. It’s a cleaner narrative, after all. An easier sell.

In my opinion, there’s nothing more empowering than seeing your story and experience represented as a victim / survivor. When I read about characters who have been traumatised and have survived, I am empowered in ways that I’m not when I read about characters who have always been in control, who could, perhaps, been said to have had an easy time of it. I don’t find it empowering to be told that my narrative isn’t ‘feminist enough’ because I was not the architect of my own descent into the Underworld.

I’m fortunate enough to have been consulted and mentioned by Aimee in this article as the author of Here the World Entire, which is a retelling of the Ovid version of the Medusa myth in which Medusa is the central character and narrator. The whole book is essentially an allegory for trauma, victim blaming and internalised misogyny. Not to draw focus away from this article, but it’s a book I wrote specifically to reflect the experiences of rape and trauma survivors. Medusa has sequestered herself away from the world because she views herself as untouchable, unspeakable; every time she attempts to connect with the world after her rape, the world rejects her because she is perceived as tarnished, monstrous. It was an empowering experience to write it and to read a story that spoke to my own survivorhood. I’ve been told the same thing by a few people (which is a commentary on the power of such representative narratives, not the quality of my own book!).

Again, to quote Aimee, who will always be more eloquent on this than me:

I take to mean that when we deny the existence of rape in the classical sources, we’re really not doing anything too different from the people who deny the existence of instances of rape today, even if our agenda is superficially different and could be described as feminist in intent. I completely agree with Aimee that this is easy, ineffective feminism. Ignoring rape or erasing it in narrative does not make it go away. Telling trauma survivors that their experiences are not empowering to read about does not prevent people from being traumatised.

We need to actually confront these topics, not push them to the side and hope that they’ll vanish. They won’t, and those of us who have experienced sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment or rape don’t deserve to be removed from the narrative and have the stories that make us feel heard cast aside in favour of tidier stories in which agency is taken for granted. We deserve to be empowered, too.

I was always a bit conflicted about that. Because it’s nice, isn’t it, it’s very nice to imagine what it would be like if things were different, if something did or did not happen. That’s fanfiction- and fanfiction is okay, it’s great- as long as you don’t claim it’s canon. So while I personally am not strongly condemning such retellings, I think it’s very important to remember the source material, and what happened in it. And it’s important to tell stories about it, new and old- however painful it may be. I don’t like reading these stories. It hurts. But it’s important that we have them.

Idea:

Medusa wasn’t Cursed with Snake Hair and Scales.

She Already had Snake Hair and Scales and was still the hottest lady the Gods have ever seen.

To be fair Medusa is supposedly one of the three Gorgon sisters, so it makes sense that there would be a family resemblance

Yeah that’s why I had to post this

I’ve read too many stories where it’s like “she’s a Gorgon” then near the end of the story they say “she was cursed with snake hair and features”

And I’m just like “…Wait.”

I think the only thing she was truly cursed with were the eyes that turn people to stone

someone draw beautiful medusa with scales and snake hair before being cursed p le a s e

I already had a little idea in my head so…

The men yell, “she’s a monster! She should be hunted down and killed”. They’ve said it before, they’ve tried it before. She steals women and devours them, the men yell. “She comes in the night and takes women away when they’re on a half-awake wander to the chamber pot or a drink of water. She steals them away to her lair and devours them whole. Why else do women not return?”

The women whisper, “she’s a savior. She should be sought for sanctuary and love.” They whisper it around the well whenever they see the shadows of a bruise on their friends’ bodies. Whenever someone who once was vivacious and bright is now dull and flinches from friendly touches. “Go in the night,” they say, “when he’s so drunk he sleeps heavily. Take only what he won’t notice is missing. Don’t worry about clothes or food, she will provide. You will be cared for. Why would you want to return?”

She says, “welcome home. You will be safe here,” with a soft smile and softer eyes. The snakes that curl around her head are more colors than you’ve ever seen in your life. She tilts her head as she takes in your bundle of precious items, the bruises on your arm, your face, around your neck. A cloud passes over her face and the sun, and you see the snakes are black. The look passes, the cloud moves away, the sun strikes the snakes again and they’re a shifting array of colors again. “Come, meet your sisters,” she says, gesturing as she turns and you look to see dozens of women coming out of the cave, smiling and happy. The group comes forward, splitting to either side of you, leaving a path to the cave and a path behind you leading back. “Welcome, you’re safe.” You step forward, peace settling into your heart. You will never return.

I love these stories about Medusa that go against the common myths

@monochromatic-stardust

The men at the drinking party sat around laughing at the younger man. “You mean to tell us that a woman was beating her husband? Ha! What a jokester you are.”

“You are probably just too embarrassed to admit you got that black eye from doing something stupid.”

“Besides even if you were telling the truth, just be a man and fight back! Or have you no guts at all? We all know your wife is a spitfire but she is still a woman, and you are a man.”

The young man was used to these responses from the older men of the village, to the point that his heart was turned to stone from it. His wife, whom he had been arranged to marry, was not like most of the other women he had met in his life. She was cruel and truly wicked and often drunk. She took advantage of the young man’s youth and lack of experience. Even if the people thought that she was a weak woman, she knew that she was stronger than her young husband, who had less strength than a hungry dog. And of course, no one would believe that a woman could overpower a young man like that.

On this day however, the young man decided to take a chance. He approached the well where he had often seen one woman in particular talking to the women who had vanished only a day or two before then, and she was there today.

“Excuse me. I have a quick question for you.”

The woman, who was just pulling her bucket out of the well turned to him somewhat surprised. “Yes?”

“Is…is it true…what the women whisper about the Gorgon in the woods…that…she helps women whose husbands beat them?”

The woman seemed suspicious of him at first, “Where did you hear that?”

“I just…” the man looked around nervously before removing the bandages from his face to show her his purple-ringed eye and swollen lip.

The woman hesitated before repeating the words she often did to many others, “ Go in the night,” she said, “when he-…she is so drunk he sleeps heavily. Take only what she won’t notice is missing. Don’t worry about clothes or food, she will provide. You will be cared for. Why would you want to return?”

Before the young man could even thank her, his wife stormed up behind him, “What are you doing talking to another woman!?”

The young man hesitated before the woman at the well said, “He saw me struggling with my bucket and came to help me. Nothing more.”

“I see.” his wife grumbled, clearly still skeptical.

A few nights later, the young man fled. He was quiet and stealthy, until he got to the forest, where he quickly pushed forward into a sprint. He ran and ran, doing his best to remember the directions to the place that promised safety.

Once at last he came across the cave, he stood panting at its mouth before taking his first steps in. He soon found himself in a big lit chamber, women whom he had recognized as from his same village sat around. Some drinking and eating, others playing games, others braiding each other’s hair. But when he entered, they all looked up at him, some in surprise, others in shock, or fear.

“What is a man doing here?” they whispered, “Has the village sent a mercenary after Medusa?” “Are we no longer safe here?” the whispers grew into an almost deafening cacophony of the same hopelessness he felt back in the village. Surely, he thought, these women who are fearful of their husbands would not want to welcome a man among them. Perhaps I should have stayed at home, and let them be.

However, when he turned to leave, he found himself face to face with the gorgon woman. Her eyes seemed to pierce deep into his very soul, as if to weed through the annals of his true self.

His mind raced, trying to think of what to say to defend himself against this protector of women, to justify his entrance into this blessed sanctuary for the broken and beaten. But before he could part his lips, she spoke.

“Fear not my sisters. Look upon the wounds on his face. He too has come hear for safety from violence. Look into his eyes. He is afraid and hurt, as many of you were when you first came to me. Young man, you are welcome here, for this is a place of safety from cruelty. I know all too well that the hardships of life do not discriminate those of whom they strike against. Come, to your new home, and meet your sisters. Come and be safe.”

She gently took his bundles and began to carry them away, and when she looked back at him to see if he was following, he felt her eyes peer deep inside him, and begin to shed away the stone that had encased his heart.

(I hope you like this addition because male abuse victims also need happy endings.)

Oh my gosh…

This is such a beautiful and tearjerking addition

Thank you

This makes the "official" story that much more heartbreaking.

“Heracles, they’re lesbians”.

Note that the concept of “virginity” in Ancient times merely meant “unmarried”, and had nothing to do with sexual activity. Some priestesses were “virgins” because they chose (or were committed to) a life of worship, but it was merely a question of social status, not of personal choice or practice. Of course, one can suppose that this lifestyle would be rather attractive for lesbians. So when Artemis is said to be the Goddess of Virgins, it is meant to be understood as “Goddess of Unmarried Women”, or, quite possibly literally, of lesbians.  (It’s only Christianity that reframed the concept of virginity to mean “never had sex”. Many ancient religions has “Virgin goddesses”, which symbolized feminine power, and in this case too it meant “untied to a man”, or “whole for herself”)

Hmmmmm, @glitchybuck