Screaming crying throwing up

"feminist" greek myth retellings love to talk about how the "poets," by which i assume we are meant to understand ancient male storytellers (who are positioned as the only perspective in ancient stories), always get things wrong and never talk about women. this troubles me because (1) they did. (2) they did, and those stories and their complexity are often overlooked. (3) merely sneering at certain depictions of mythological and ancient women or pointing out that men should not be the sole storytellers of women's experiences does not mean that you are writing about women's experiences, doing a good job, or even saying something interesting or useful. which is a shame, because there is certainly more to say, if one could get past one's feeling of inherent superiority toward old stories and the things they might be saying.

"Perseus was such a coward, he killed Medusa while she was asleep!!!!!" Good for him. Work smarter not harder

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

Inktober.

Day 26 - Athena.

the myth of persephone is about the trauma of the separation of mothers and daughters by marriage and this is the hill i will die on

To be clear I’m not against retellings that reinterpret the relationship between Hades and Persephone and present it as consensual and healthy– I do think there’s something incredibly powerful about looking at a story that’s been passed down to us through millennia about a girl being kidnapped and raped and saying “no. No, that’s not the kind of story I want to hear, that’s not the kind of story I want to tell, and that’s certainly not the kind of story I want my daughters to grow up on.” (Although I think it’s disappointing that these are now the only sorts of Persephone retellings we get, and at this point it’s really not a particularly revolutionary take, given how often it’s been done.)

But I also think we do a great disservice to the women of the ancient world by not remembering how this story, in that form, mirrored their very real pain. I’ve been thinking recently about how we can tell that women participated in the formation of their culture’s folklore because women’s trauma is embedded in it. (In Greek terms, the stories of Leto and Alcmene very clearly come out of women’s traumatic experiences with childbirth, and there are elements of women’s traumatic experiences of sexual assault embedded in, for example, the stories of Daphne or Callisto or Artemis and Actaeon) And the story of Persephone comes out of women’s experiences of being permanently separated from their mothers and daughters at marriage. (See also this post from @gardenvarietycrime.​)

For an ancient woman sending her daughter off to be married, knowing that she will see her only rarely and that the odds of death in childbirth were high, Persephone meant something. For an ancient girl leaving her mother and her entire world for a man she may never have met knowing the same, Persephone meant something. I do think a lot of the conflation of death and marriage in the ancient world comes out of this: that a girl is dead to her mother and her family whether she leaves them to go to a husband’s house or the house of Hades. Maybe it’s a consolation to know that someone else has done this before you, to know that a goddess once lost her daughter and a goddess once lost her mother the same way you are losing yours. And that they survived it.

Essentially I think we need to remember that this myth (like all myths and all folklore) is not necessarily entirely the product of men, that women’s voices and women’s trauma remain embedded in it despite all of our written sources being men’s tellings of the story. And when we retell it we risk losing those voices if we are not careful and if we dismiss the myth as it survives today as solely men’s version of the story.

The Madness of Heracles Due to Zeus' infidelity, Hera has taken it upon herself to make the demi-god Heracles as miserable as she can. After marrying King Creon's daughter Megara and starting a family, the goddess strikes Heracles with insanity, causing him to murder his wife and children.

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some greek pantheon in gold

available as a print

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

Yemoja is a major water deity from the Yoruba religion. Yemoja is associated with the moon, water, and feminine mysteries. She is the protector of women.

this website is REALLY good at circulating mythological misinformation and alternative narratives presented as fact about certain figures (medusa, persephone, cybele/great goddess types) and honestly i think we could afford to spend a little more misinformation energy on arachne

LISTEN UP cause I’m about to teach you something historians DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW the story of Arachne that you think you know is actually INACCURATE the ORIGINAL AUTHENTIC SINGULAR VERSION of the story ACTUALLY features Arachne (whose name translated literally actually means Girlboss) who is MARRIED to the goddess Athena and they spend time weaving collabritively until a man came and told Athena and Arachne that competition breeds innovation so they were forced to weave against each other! But THEN Athena turned Arachne into a spider, which was her favorite animal (it’s what she was named after) so that she could live with Athena for the rest of her life, in hiding as a spider, free from the crushing weight of capitalism! The ORIGINAL actual story was actually MUCH more Marxist than the one they usually teach. It was actually one of the first criticisms of capitalism in fact. Trust me because I have exactly 0 sources and a fuckton of confidence to back up my claims!

oh my god guys i do not know how to explain that there’s a difference between the organic evolution of oral traditions within the culture that produced them and attributed some degree of religious significance to them and someone making stuff up two thousand years removed from the cultures in which those oral traditions circulated organically, after a significant period in which the stories have been widely considered static, fixed, exclusively literary, and wholly non-religious

Apollo and Artemis <3

This is so beautiful!

kirin

Hera, after discovering Zeus’ affair with Io (via demigod-network)

Myths, Creatures, and Folklore

Want to create a religion for your fictional world? Here are some references and resources!

General:

Africa:

The Americas:

Asia:

Europe:

Middle East:

Oceania:

Creating a Fantasy Religion:

Some superstitions:

Read More

Here, I have some more:

Africa:

The Americas:

Asia:

Europe:

Oceanic:

General:

Reblogging because wow. What a resource.