#Zeus As King contained many aspects and that was part of the worship

[specialagentartemis]

love to log onto tumblr and immediately see neopagan revivalist polytheists defend their religion by spouting a whole load of nonsense about the ancient world when a simpler defense is Right There if they actually knew anything about Ancient Greece

#‘Why worship Zeus?’ like if you’re gonna defend worshipping Zeus you can point to his attributes as King; as All-Father; as Storm-Bringer #as the patron and upholder of hospitality and divine justice #And say that as king he was seen as having leeway and sometimes having understandably uncontrollable temper and desires #Like the thunderstorms do #And the myths where he raped random women weren’t seen as necessarily wrong because he was kind of taking them for a bride #With the power and passion of a god #There’s definitely a dichotomy in ancient sources where those who were sworn virgins it was seen as Awful to try to rape them #Whereas if you’re making them a bride that’s basically normal #Zeus As King contained many aspects and that was part of the worship #As well as—I will give this person credit—a lot of the myths were tales that exemplify the gods’ personalities but not taken as Literal #However. All of that is different from ‘well Zeus didn’t ACTUALLY do any of those bad things. And anyway in Ancient Greece women were seen #as objects for men’s pleasure and not people so the misogynistic men who wrote those Zeus rape myths were just writing their sick fantasies #Like Come The Fuck On #rape tw #rape cw

[thedansemacabres]

A Modern Understanding of Dionysus Hestios

Photo from a vineyard I worked on.

[ID: A close-up image of a Chardonnay white-wine grapevine with three clusters. The clusters are green with some red. Bright green leaves cover the top of the clusters, while below a black irrigation line is visible. The ground below is covered in woodchips, except for a single plant below the clusters].

HESTIOS IS A FUN YET OBSCURE EPITHET OF DIONYSUS.  We can infer some of its context due to Zeus Hestios, that being a protector of the home and hearth. This epithet of Dionysus is a favourite of mine—for my home and hearth, he is a household deity as I am a viticulturist and winemaker. My life and livelihood is partially bound by grapevines as I currently work at an orchard that is establishing a vineyard and my responsibility is to make it happen. 

The context of this epithet is little known beyond a passage in Pausanias’ iconic Description of Greece: 

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 2. 5 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) : "From the gate to the Kerameikos [in Athens] there are porticoes . . . containing shrines of gods, and a gymnasium called that of Hermes. In it is the house of Poulytion . . . [which] in my time it was devoted to the worship of Dionysos. This Dionysos they call Melpomenos (Minstrel) [i.e. of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy], on the same principle as they call Apollon Mousegetes (Leader of the Muses) . . . After the precinct of Apollon is a building that contains earthen ware images, Amphiktyon, king of Athens, Dionysos Hestios (Feasting or Of the Hearth) and other gods. Here also is Pegasos of Eleutherai, who introduced the god [Dionysos] to the Athenians. Herein he was helped by the oracle at Delphoi, which called to mind that the god once dwelt in Athens in the days of Ikarios."

Dionysus Hestios is mentioned in Athens, along with his myth of his devotee Pegasos bringing his cult to the city. Other than references to Zeus Hestios, I have not found any more context for this epithet beyond protecting the home/hearth. Therefore, this aspect of him will be a contender for a strong upg basis. 

In my times in wine, I’ve gathered my own gnosis of Dionysus Hestios. He is a protector of the hearth, but in my personal experience, the table wine aspect of Dionysus.

TABLE WINE IN THE MODERN WORLD

Table wine is named exactly for what it is, a wine that sits at your dinner table and a key part of a meal. Italy especially is famous for its cheap table wines, many of which I’ve had at my own tables and dinners. Most commercial wines these days are made to be drinkable on their own—while table wines are uncomfortable and harsh on the tongue. With food, they transform, turning these harsh and bitter wines into something truly enjoyable. It also makes the food taste better. For anyone unknowing, that’s why wine and food pairing is a thing. Unfortunately, the table wine market is slowly beginning to crumble—most modern wine drinkers enjoy more of a good tasting drink instead of a complement of one’s meal. If you have the chance, I recommend buying some and trying it in pairings—it’s a dying market, sadly, and one that has an ancient history behind it. 

While table wines slowly fade, there is always a place for them in our lives. I myself have fond memories of a terribly bitter wine being served at my family’s table, and while I hated the taste, I’ve come to fall in love with them in recent years. Dionysus Hestios as a god of the home is a god of table wine, the happy smiles and festive memories of people having their Chianti with some steak or pasta. It’s the thrill of a good food pairing, a decanter, and the hundred years history of people making wine for the common folk instead of just for the aristocrats and their “noble” grapes. 

Dionysus Hestios, Hearth warmer, master  Of your craft, joy becoming  Protect our heart and wine, Let us dance and joy,  Under your blessings  Of the woody grapevine. 

References

DIONYSUS CULT 1 - Ancient Greek Religion. (n.d.). https://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult.html

#dragonis.txt #dionysus deity #dionysos deity #dionysus worship #dionysos worship #dionysus devotee #hellenic pagan #hellenic polytheism #hellenic paganism #paganism #witchcraft #witchblr #vinum

[trvgcdiv]

content warnings: mentions of infidelity, emotional affairs, and potential blasphemy towards hellenic polytheism. i am a devotee of Argive Hera and portray several of the theoi in fictional settings as part of my practice.

I think this recontextualization of Hera/Inakhos as an emotional affair between a goddess and a mortal king means that I'll drop the river husband aspect of Hera's myth canon divergence. Still keep the early affair with Imbrassos (might drop it later, but for reasons I'm not getting into rn, I'm attached to the idea of Hera having a romantic life outside of Zeus), but her "marriage" to Inakhos is now wholly contained within his mortal existence... After his apotheosis and later identification with the river, Inakhos no longer has the relationship with Hera, but there's probably lingering attachments that cannot really be explicitly explored as... Well, you can be cool with the Queen of the Heavens, but you cannot make the Most High a cuckold (too blasphemous).

I have a complex relationship with the expectation that Hera maintains a perfect, untarnished fidelity towards Zeus and say that it's because of her position as THE goddess of marriage, because she hates Zeus's cheating, and because there's no myths involving her cheating.

She's A goddess of marriage, of which there are many — including Zeus, Aphrodite, Hebe, etc. — so she's not unique in that aspect. Other gods of marriage can cheat without it impacting their power, so it's ridiculous to say that her power is dependent on her marital fidelity.

She's also a goddess of lineage and bloodlines and inheritance. Of a woman's role throughout her life—the maiden, the bride, the adult woman, the mother, the widow. She is associated with fertility, and, according to some, death. Modern worship equates her to rainfall. She's a multi-faceted god, not limited to her role as Zeus' wife and, to me, part of establishing that includes portraying her outside of her marriage to Zeus.

Yes ofc she's going to hate her husband cheating. Most women resent their partners going astray—particularly if they have children out of wedlock that they then need to provide for, which takes away from the children within the marriage. Like... she's meant to be representative of women.

Zeus isn't just a patriarch, he is THE patriarch. THE Sky Daddy of all Sky Daddies. YOU CANNOT CUCKOLD THE MOST IMPORTANT PATRIARCH FIGURE OF YOUR PATRIARCHAL RELIGION.

It's impossible for Hera to have any affair or cheating or non-Zeus romantic affiliations within traditional/orthodox Hellenic polytheism because to do so disrespects Zeus' position as ultimate patriarch.

To then turn around and say that fidelity is intrinsic to Hera, when in truth it's that Zeus cannot be cheated on, is actually THE insult.

Which isn't to say that you're wrong for portraying Hera as faithful to her spouse—it's traditional and expected, there's not a valid myth I know of portraying otherwise—but it is bad (in my opinion) that it's something imposed on her through the threat of her losing the divine powers that are her birthright.

It should be Hera's CHOICE to be faithful to Zeus, because that is something she finds to be morally correct. Marital fidelity should matter, not just because of the consequences, but because you value your spouse and your family and the life you are building together.

Therefore, depicting Hera as having an emotional affair with a mortal, while playing with blasphemy, could also be construed as a consequence to Zeus' various affairs. A marriage where one partner constantly strays inevitably leaves the cheated on partner both disillusioned and unfulfilled in their marriage. An emotional affair, while bordering or being a betrayal of that marriage, makes perfect sense in this context.

The Greek gods are known and celebrated for their pettiness, their humanity, their mistakes... In my fictional portrayal of the gods, I extend that to the possibility of Hera having emotional affairs in the midst of a tumultuous and unfulfilling partnership.

#* mun talks about muse. #* hera hc. #* hera meta. #[ most of this was written like weeks ago ]

[maryroyale]

The lovely @curiouselfqueen tagged me on this one. (Thank you! I love these things.)

Uh. I have *feelings* about these? I have no idea why I feel so strongly, but... uh... there you go.

deep violet or blood red? Both? Not at the same time, but I love both. Purple and red are both power colors, but they convey very different things. Old ladies are allowed to wear both because they have the power to pull it off.

sunshine or moonlight? Oof. My default answer is moonlight? Some of the medication I’m on makes my eyes super-sensitive to sunlight. I’m like a damn vampire. Even on cloudy days I need sunglasses. I like seeing the sunlight through the trees when I’m in the woods? It’s pretty and far less painful.

Don’t get me wrong—I do love the moonlight. It’s so beautiful. Winter moonlight and summer moonlight are gorgeous.

80s music or 90s music? How dare you! Don’t speak to me or my 874 music genres ever again. Seriously though, I really love music. I listen to a wide variety of genres and some artists span decades. I love new wave and synthpop, but I also love pop punk and the swing revival. I can’t say one decade is better than the other.

orchids or dahlias? I like to garden, and from a gardening standpoint it’s dahlias all the way. Orchids are a wildly diverse species (over 25,000 types), but the pretty, delicate orchids they sell in stores are not hardy and require a lot of intensive, specific support. They’ll die if you plant them outside where I live. And the garden outside is what makes me happy and brings me joy.

garnet or ruby? These are such different stones. It’s almost like asking if I like chocolate milk or cola. Yes, they are both brown and you can drink them—but they’re really not similar.

Garnet— it’s semi-precious, plentiful, in use since antiquity. A decent go-to stone for jewelry. Like any gemstone, the color is determined by the type of impurities, so garnet can be almost any color. Blue garnets are the rarest. The Mohs scale for garnet depends on those same impurities because some can actually strengthen the hardness of the stone. Generally 6 to 7.5 on the Mohs scale.

I like garnets. Depending on the talent of the jeweler you can get lovely pieces set in silver that won’t cost an arm, a leg, and your soul. It was also my mother’s birthstone, so there’s that.

Ruby— Occasionally confused with spinels, rubies are pieces of corundum that contain the impurity chromium. Corundum that contains the impurities iron, titanium, vanadium, or magnesium are usually blue and referred to as sapphires. (Pink sapphires are actually poor quality rubies that the jewelry industry decided to rebrand to dupe the public. Similar to “chocolate diamonds” and other attempts to sell gems that don’t meet the criteria for their type.)

Corundum is a 9 on the Mohs scale. They highly sought after, have a rich mythos surrounding them, and feature prominently in history.

It seems like a lot of hype to me? They’re sturdy pieces of jewelry, not prone to breakage, but they ought to be for the price you pay. They’re pretty, I’ll grant you that.

moths or butterflies? Well, one is nocturnal and one is diurnal. One is fuzzy and stocky and one is smooth and slender. One is drab and one is brightly colored. I feel like I should picks moths on principle. I love Luna Moths. But butterflies are so very, very pretty. Moths I guess?

Aphrodite or Athena? Okay... so, um, here’s where it’s going to get heated. I apologize. I am *specifically* addressing how Athena and Aphrodite were worshipped/treated in Greek myths. I’m not looking at proto versions from Minoa, Mycenae, or Phoenicia. I’m also not looking at later syncretizations with other cultures e.g. Rome. It is the Greek myths that matter here because those are the myths and attitudes that were directly incorporated into Western culture. We’ve learned a lot about their origins, but *those* myths and attitudes were *not* incorporated into mainstream Western culture.

Athena was either born from Zeus’ head or his thigh. Either she has no mother—Zeus is her only parent—or Zeus swallowed her mother Metis (wisdom, prudence, counsel). This is critically important. In Athenian law, the father was the only legal parent. Mothers had no legal rights to their children at all. Athena is a very real symbol of that.

She is often portrayed as the goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and war. She is a goddess of industry (wine and olive oil). The thing we must ask is what kind of wisdom? What kind of war?

Plato argues this in Cratylus— that Athena’s wisdom could be a number of things from divine knowledge to moral intelligence. I think it’s important that Plato, one of Greece’s most celebrated philosophers, and more important one of the philosophers most embraced by Western Culture praised this choice of “moral intelligence.” [see Plato’s stance on poets in The Republic.]

Athena’s war is not the war of Ares, which is tied to passion and emotion. Ares represents the brutal aspects of war where humanity gives way to cruelty and inhumanity. Athena’s warfare is rational and “just.” Athena makes war on behalf of the city-state. Athena makes war to defend the government.

Athena’s purpose in myth and in poetry and song is to support the government. She is the shield of the king. She upholds and enforces the status quo. Look at her role in the Orestes trilogy. She supplants the Erinyes [the furies originally hunted and tormented ppl who committed matricide]. She decides that Iphigenia’s murder didn’t matter. Clytemnestra (Iphigenia’s mother) didn’t have the right to revenge for her daughter. Orestes was *justified* in murdering his mother because she killed his parent, his father.

Aphrodite also has a motherless birth, but it’s more incidental and spontaneous. Kronos cuts off his father Uranus’ genitals ( like you do ) and tosses them into the sea. Aphrodite is born from the sea foam. There’s a different feel to Aphrodite’s myth. An independence almost. Yes, a male god was involved because it’s a Greek requirement for any child, but it’s in such an incidental way. There was no purpose or intent on Uranus’ part. He had no control over her birth.

Aphrodite is an incredibly independent goddess. She owns her own sexuality and has autonomy over her own body. She is often referred to as the wife of Hephaestus, but in both the Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony, Hephaestus has wives with different names and Aphrodite is unmarried.

A goddess with this kind of freedom and power in her own right—not tied to a husband or male family member (sorry Artemis!)— is almost unheard of. It makes Aphrodite unique and interesting.

TLDR: I prefer Aphrodite.

grapefruit or pomegranate? Pomegranate. For so many reasons, not the least of which is it’s associations with death and fertility. It’s a lovely contrast and a reminder that death brings forth life e.g. Nurse logs.

angel’s halo or devil’s horns? Oof. This is another rant, guys. Horns as a symbol of divine power are used throughout history and throughout the Indo-European culture. From Egyptian gods like Amun and Isis to Hindu gods like Śiva to Canaanite gods like El and Yahweh, horns have been used to show their power and might. Moses has most famously been depicted with horns due to murky/difficult translations of the Hebrew verb keren/qaran, which can mean BOTH “to send forth beams/rays” and “to be horned”.

There was a concerted effort to associate horns with the devil/evil/bad. Horns are also used to imply fertility/abundance, and that may have played into the perception of horns as devilish. Moses with horns was used as a jumping off point to demonize Jewish people during the Medieval period in a variety of European countries and cultures.

Halos, too, have been used across history and cultures as a symbol of divine power. Sumerian literature talks about a bright emanation that appears around gods and heroes. Chinese and Japanese Buddhist art shows Buddhist saints with halos.

I choose horns because I choose to reclaim that divine power. I reject the idea that either symbol is wholly good or wholly evil. I reject the idea that sexuality by itself is evil/wrong.

sirens or banshees? Both!!! I must admit a partiality to Sirens that is based wholly on my preference for the sea/ocean.

lorde or florence + the machine? Both!!! I love both groups and I’ve listened to their albums so many times. I will admit that I end up listening to Lorde more often when writing.

the birth of venus or the starry night? Huh. I’m going to assume that you mean the painting by Boticelli, even though there’s more than one Birth of Venus.

Honestly, Venus Anadyomene (Venus rising from the sea) is my favorite. It’s her origin myth and anyone could paint it, draw it, write about it, and put their own spin on it. It is malleable because it is myth. It lives on and changes and grows with us. Boticelli’s version is particularly lovely.

Starry Night (1889) belongs to VanGogh. No one can really recreate it without copying his style or his vision. Verschuier’s The Great Comet of 1680 Over Rotterdam could never really be confused with Starry Night. Not even Munch’s Starry Night (1893) could be confused for VanGogh. The two paintings are wildly different in subject matter despite the fact that their subject is the night sky.

I doubt any modern painter would dare. O’Keefe called hers Starlight Night, and I can only guess that others would follow that naming pattern of not quite using the title Starry Night.

Boy, I bet @curiouselfqueen is regretting tagging me now... sorry?

[dahloi]

On Wights, Ettin, Elves, Ēse and their Unified Nature

Often within Germanic paganism and Indo-European paganism at large practitioners will focus on a certain group of major divine beings within the faith, and even within that group they will focus on whoever they see as most pleasing or whoever happens to be popular at the time. Even without regard to the very strange custom of ahistorical worship of very specific groups of gods in the format of Astatru (Rökkatru for instance), folks are prone to become overly focused on very narrow worship of whichever major being(s) they see as most important (or most edgy and pop culture relevant) with patron deities and the like (one of the many pollutions present in mainstream Asatru from Wicca, on which it is based).  While it is true that many places and individuals were highly dedicated to the maintenance and service of a particular major deity, most did not practice their paganism in this manner, and I believe modern pagans are missing out on the benefits that come from embracing the diverse and often cyclical nature of  historical worship. Historically when we are examining the nature of daily ritual there are certain deities which show up frequently in the home but of course the most common of these are the Cofgodas, a type of wight, and their cultural equivalents like the Penates, Lares, or Domovoy. These beings are the ones most involved in the normal life of the majority of folks. They live alongside us, sharing our homes and help us in our chores and routines. If any beings are deserving of the status of chosen “patron” deities it is these. Major “patron” deities hold their status as a patron of a profession or societal position by virtue of their role in divine order not because one just arbitraily chooses them. The practice of choosing a certain deity to focus on by regular practitioners as “patrons” or the idea of “working with” them is a carry over into Asatru from Wicca (and in a way from Abrahamic religion). While I would generally not advocate mainstream Asatru as a entry into paganism, any current practitioners should examine their practice and assess how much of it is really “True” to the old custom and how much is modern invention from an unrelated spiritual practice, or worse, Dungeon and Dragons. While advocating the further appreciation of the so called “spirits”, the Land-Wights, we should examine some of the semantic choices when describing divinity and the etymology and historical use of these terms. Differentiating groups of divinities like Ēse (Æsir), Ettin (Jǫtunn), Elves, and Land-wights (Landvaettir) is sometimes useful when examining their roles in relation to us but we should be careful that we do not transform the common nature of these divine personalities in our minds as though they are wholly different types of beings. All of these beings are wights or in a Greco-Roman form they would all be daimons. A wight or daimon is any divine personality no matter their affilated group, position or place of being. Eventually wight would come to refer to living men and then dead ones this was its original meaning and the one we should use today. Despite the common description or translation of Ettin as “giant” they are no more large or small than the Ēse, they are both better thought of as two “kinships” or “tribes” of divinities, as are Elves (which may be equivalent to the Vanir as some scholars have suggested). Just as humans divided in any way are still all human. Similarly speaking the Land-wights, Cofgodas and other “lesser beings” are no less full blown gods than Ēse would be considered, no less than the King of all Humans would still be as human as a the human who sweeps your floors. This is distinct from the way one thinks of most Abrahamic divinity with Yahweh as sole important divine and angels as just his servants. If you really want to stretch the true meaning of the word wight then even animals, including humans, are wights, as we all contain aspects of divinity, each is important, and each has a role in the divine order (one should not take this to mean humans are the equals of the gods but rather we are all part of the greater whole no matter how small).  Despite the shared importance and common nature of divinities one should not see this as an invitation or a validation of practices like Rökkatru or whatever it is “Lokeans” are doing. This narrow focus on these beings was not observed by our forebearers for a reason, but equally the narrow focus on only the Ēse, and within that the focus on a single deity from many practitioners is just as needlessly limiting and not keeping in spirit with the traditional customs.  Major divinities should be worship when their position in divine order calls for such worship, whether that be when one has need of something related to that specific deity, or simply that their cyclical time and place in the cosmos has arrived. The attempt to form some close personal bond with any wight should be with the wight of your home or place of work and not the continued “working with” or patronage of a specific popular divinity like Zeus or Woden. Your first gift cycle with a god (ritual sacrifice and prayer) is just as well received as your last assuming your offering is of the same value.  In short, if one is to form a continued and close relationship with a particular divine personality it should be the maintenance of ones household god(s), just as a priest maintains a major popular god in that god’s home (a temple). All divinities should be regarded as equally important with regards to their sphere and we must take care to remember their common and equally important nature as gods, deities, wights, daimons, or the equivalent in whatever tradition one follows.  Notes: this is not aimed as a jab at Wiccans. Wicca is as distinct from Indo-European religions as Islam or Christianity and has its own ways and customs. Rather it is aimed at those professing to follow the Old Customs while failing to learn of of any traditional ways or the “copy paste” mentality of sticking “Viking” stuff over top of Eclectic Wicca. 

#germanic polytheism #forn sidu #asatru #pagan #paganism #polytheism #religion #heathenism #heathenry #norse paganism #anglo-saxon

[ayearinfaith]

𝗔 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵, 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟮: 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻

Norse religion, also known as Norse mythology, Norse paganism, Heathenry, and other names, is the collection of mystic traditions, folklore, and other such cultural aspects of pre-Christian North Germanic people, the ancestral peoples of modern day Denmark (Faroe Islands included), Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗸𝘀, 𝗦𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗼𝗻

Though Scandinavia was among the last parts of Europe to be Christianized, becoming fully Christian around the 12th Century CE, we have precious little direct evidence of the native traditions. The Old Norse people did have written language, the runic Futhark, but lacked the robust literary tradition of the Greeks and Romans, instead preserving their traditions primarily orally. The very earliest attestation of Germanic religion comes from the Roman historian Tacitus in his 1st century CE book, the 𝘎𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘢. This book was likely compiled based on secondhand information about West Germanic peoples, and as such is not a great source for true Norse religion (or even that of the West Germans). It does give us the Roman interpretations of the Germanic gods, the same interpretation upon which the days are named in all Germanic languages, and as such we do know that by this time Germanic people were already worshiping a distinct pantheon from their sun-worshipping Indo-European ancestors (the Romans, by contrast, still worshiped the sky god Jupiter). Between then and the 13th century the record is sparse, the occasional runic inscription or placename, and a few off topic mentions in 11th century history books. The majority of what we now know as Norse mythology come from two sources, both from 13th century Iceland: the Eddas. The “Poetic” Edda is a collection of poetry compiled from several sources, primarily the 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘹 𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘶𝘴. Neither the Codex nor the additional poetry has a known author, though it is believed to be more or less authentic transcriptions of oral Icelandic folk (i.e. non-Christian) traditions. The “Prose” Edda is a composition by Snorri Sturluson, a prominent Icelandic lawspeaker, historian, poet, and very much a Christian. Snorri purpose in writing the 𝘌𝘥𝘥𝘢 was not to preserve Norse faith but to preserve Icelandic poetic traditions. Snorri believed that without the record of these old fables that the poetic kennings, metaphors, and common sayings would become incomprehensible to future generations. It is Snorri’s Eddic version of Norse mythology that most of us in the modern world have grown up knowing, Snorri’s Thor and Loki that became re-imagined as comic book icons. We do not know how much of his work was authentic, Christianized, or simply made up to fit his fancy, but there is reason to believe a mix of all three. Both Edda’s, and in fact most of the sources listed here, would remain largely unknown and some almost lost until the era or European Romanticism and the “Viking Revival” in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was the culmination of several factors: advances in printing press technology made the spread of books much wider than in prior centuries, the translation of the Eddas into Latin (at the time still the most widespread language of literature in Europe), and a sudden surge of interest in pre-Christian Europe. While this enabled Norse myths to become the pop-culture fixture it is, it also means most “common knowledge” on the subject comes through the lens of enthusiastic but often inaccurate imaginings of what Norse religion was like.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲

Distinctive Germanic faith, at least the version we are familiar with today, probably emerged in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE. We know from linguistic evidence that the familiar figures of Odin, Thor, and others were prominent before the splintering of the Common Germanic language into Western, Northern, and Eastern varieties between the 1st and 3rd century CE. Norse people probably did not think of themselves as having a religion in the Western sense. Instead, they would have viewed their faith in a way quite similar to how many modern Japanese people do with Shinto: their rituals and tales weren’t so much a faith as simply a culture, a definitive feature of Norse-ness and not necessarily incompatible with or exclusionary to other beliefs. This is part of why we have little record; with no centralized houses of worship or canonic texts there was little pressing need for much else than the bardic oral tradition. We do know that Thor has always been popular, from Denmark to Iceland, as his name is a common element in places and personal names and the symbol of his hammer, Mjolnir, is common. Sacrifice was definitely practiced, both of animals and humans. Most attestations we have of ritual human sacrifice come from Christian origins with a clear political agenda, so the specifics can only be guessed at, but archaeological and linguistic evidence definitely supports that it happened. We know that goddesses and other female spirits were important in both North and Western Germanic faith, but the male written histories and male written 𝘌𝘥𝘥𝘢 have largely doomed them to obscurity. The number 3, and by extension 9 (3 squared), were auspicious and came up often, for example gods are often depicted in 3’s and the cosmos was divided into 9 realms. A unique feature of the Norse tradition is the separation of the gods into two rival and eventually allied clans; the Æsir and Vanir. Some historians have theorized that this developed from an ancient memory of migration and conflict, a position that feeds into linguistic theories that Germanic languages were effected by a now extinct non-Indo-European language. The word “Æsir” has been shown to be related to the Hindi word “Asura”, an antagonistic class of gods often equated with Greek Titans. Another peculiarity of Norse religion is the position of Thor in the divine hierarchy. Thor has brothers across the Indo-European spectrum: the Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Slavic Perun, and Hindu Indra. All these gods wield lightning and storms, are very popular in their traditional homelands, and fight with serpents or dragons. All of them, except Thor, are also kings among their kind. The Norse uniquely have demoted their storm god below a “new” king, the enigmatic Odin. Norse rituals typically were outdoor affairs and associated with certain features of the landscape. This may be the origin of the term “heathen” which is itself derived from “heath” meaning an open patch of land, though it may also have been coined to parallel the Latin derived “pagan”, which originally simply meant “rural”.

𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻

Starting with the aforementioned Romantic “Viking Revival” new traditions of faith in the gods of the Old Norse have risen and fallen. Many of these early movements did not start in Scandinavia but nearby Germany and England, where they were often hand in hand with unfortunate conceptions of Germanic racial supremacy. The Nazi’s, though very much Christian, were keen to adopt many Norse symbols that had been popularized by these movements, most of which collapsed with the Nazi regime. To this day the community of “Germanic Neopagans” are deeply divided on the issue of racism. The term “Heathenry” is more commonly used by non-racist organizations, as it contains no explicit relation to German-ness. Racist organizations are more likely to use such explicit language, and especially enjoy use of the word “folk” (either in English or another Germanic language) and terms similar to “Odinism”. The movements also often struggle with sexism and homophobia, an unfortunate side-effect of the perceive hypermasculinity that is more a result of male romantic idealism than actual Norse culture. One of the larger, less problematic, and more well-known organizations is the Ásatrú, originating in Iceland. The name is literally “Æsir-true”, in the sense of loyalty or allegiance to the Æsir, though the practitioners do venerate spirits and divinities outside of the Æsir as well. Few practitioners, even more organized ones like Ásatrú, have an established dogma or set of canon practices. Similar to the ancestors they emulate, they generally believe that learning, telling, and thinking about legends and taking part in rituals are sufficient guidelines for the practitioner to find their own spiritual and ethical path.

Image Credit: Viking Age (8th-11th century) Runestone G 181 from Gotland, Sweden

#A Year in Faith #Norse Religion #Norse Mythology #Religion #Mythology #day 22

[graysonfirewolf85-blog]

Queer Positive Deities

Keep in mind that this is NOT a complete list of ALL pantheons and deities that are queer positive. This is a good majority, but by all means it is NOT all of them. Also not all photos would fit.

DISCLAIMER

This wiki will contain sexual terms and other mature items that each deity represented or did in their specific pantheon. If any of it bothers you, please exit the wiki and move on from it. Thank you.

Achilles (Greek)

The Greek hero Achilles was invulnerable excepting his famous weak heel, but a male shieldbearer broke through the warrior’s romantic defenses. While Homer never explicitly states a gay relationship between Achilles and sidekick Patroclus, many scholars read a romantic connection between the two, as only Patroclus ever drew out a compassionate side to the famously arrogant warrior. Patroclus’s death at the hands of Trojan Prince Hector sent Achilles into a rage in which he killed Hector and dragged his body around Troy. Other myths also disclose Achilles was struck by the beauty of Troilus, a Trojan prince.

Adonis/Tammuz (Phoenician/Greco-Roman/Mesopotamian)

The name “Adonis” now refers to a strikingly beautiful male, but the original Adonis is a cross-cultural deity, showing up in Phoenician and Greco-Roman mythology. Adonis is often equated with the Mesopotamian Tammuz, with whom he shares many attributes and stories. Most noted for his relationships with goddesses, including Astarte, Aphrodite, and Persephone, Adonis was also the beloved of the god Dionysus. Adonis and Tammuz are fertility gods, representing the vegetation of the land, in a constant state of life, death, and resurrection. Adonis died from a boar’s attack, which mutilated his genitals. In the much-celebrated descent-of-the-goddess stories known in many cultures, the Goddess travels into the many layers of the underworld to retrieve the spirit of her consort. Adonis is seen not as a king, but as a lover, somewhat effeminate or homoerotic. His priests in Athens were homoerotically inclined, and, along with priestesses, they celebrated his life and death by planting gardens of Adonis, and then uprooted them only a few days after sprouting. In the Greek magical papyri, Adonis is invoked for lesbian love spells.

Antinous (Greco-Roman-Kemetic)

This resurrection figure holds ties to ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures. Antinous was a real historical figure and the male companion of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The pair would take journeys around the Mediterranean. And on one trip, Antinous drowned in the Nile on the same day that Egyptians commemorated the watery death of Osiris. Deeply affected by the death of his lover, Hadrian encouraged the deification of Antinous, and cults sprung up around the Mediterranean honoring him. In some tellings, Antinous rose from the Nile after his death and was then revered as a form of Osiris reborn. Indeed, the god and the Roman cult that followed him still have devotees today.

Apollo and Hyacinth (Greek)

Apollo was initially the Greek god of light and later was associated with the Sun. His twin sister is Artemis. As the god of music, dance, divination, healing, and artistic inspiration, he can grant these gifts to others. Apollo is known for taking many male lovers, most notably, Hyacinthus, or Hyacinth, a mortal youth. When he was tossing the discus with Apollo, it struck Hyacinth with a mortal blow. The western wind god Zephyrus, who desired Hyacinth and was angry and jealous of Apollo, caused the accident with his winds. The Sun god could not save his beloved, but from his wound Apollo created the Hyacinth flowers, a symbol of youth cut too short. Hyacinth later became a divine patron to those pursuing same-sex love.

Aphrodite/Venus (Greco-Roman)

Aphrodite embodies the powers of love on every level, especially romantic love. Known as Venus to the Romans, and associated with the morning and evening star, the planet Venus, she was renowned for her gifts of attraction and beauty. She originated—along with the Furies—from Uranus, the sky god, springing forth from the foamy sea where Uranus’s genitalia had fallen after being castrated by his son Chronos. She is usually displayed as a beautiful woman rising out of the sea, as in Botticellis painting, “The Birth of Venus.” As she walks on land, she trails flowers behind her, even in the most barren of deserts. Her aid Eros is the original archetype for the Valentine’s Day cupid, shooting his arrows and making people fall in love. She had many lovers, most notably Ares the war god and her husband, Hephaestus. She bore Hermaphrodite from her union with Hermes.

Artemis/Diana (Greco-Roman)

Artemis is the huntress, the goddess of wild things, the protector of women and children, and the maiden aspect of the Moon. From her bow, she fires silver arrows, the shafts of moonlight to illuminate her path. In many versions of her myths, she is the archetype of the strong, independent woman, goddess of Amazons and unsympathetic to those of traditional masculinity. After her birth, she immediately got up and helped her mother deliver her twin brother, Apollo. Artemis rejects many traditional roles, such as marriage and conventional society, and feels kinship to those beyond traditional roles. Her festivals included same-sex eroticism involving both females and males. As the Romans’ Diana, she took on a more maternal, universal goddess archetype, and became the mother of Aradia, her avatar in 14th-century Italy, who taught the Goddess’s craft.

Astarte (Phoenician/Canaanite)

Astarte is a manifestation of the Great Mother Goddess of the Paleolithic cultures, identified with the earlier goddesses Ishtar and Inanna, and later the Greco-Roman Aphrodite/Venus. Versions of Astarte were worshiped throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and even across Europe, with the spread of the Roman Empire. She is a Queen of Heaven, and patron of love and war. She, too, is involved in the resurrection and fertility myths of Adonis, also known as Adoni, or lord. Though usually remembered in feminine form, like other goddesses, she does have mixed gender incarnations, sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite, and later the Phoenician records mention King Astarte. Astarte’s temples were served by the kelabim and possibly a gender-variant order of Amazonian women.

Athena/Minerva (Greco-Roman)

Springing fully formed from the head of Zeus, without aid of a goddess, Athena is presented as the wise warrior woman of the Olympians. She has the ability to transform into a young man. Her affairs often end on a tragic note, and most modern myths present her as celibate, though such descriptions were probably added by the patriarchal rise, to demonstrate a strong warrior woman could not have love. In one such myth, her “brother” Hephaestus makes her armor, for “her love.” He means physical love, while she assumes platonic love. I find it hard to believe such a goddess of wisdom and strategy would misunderstand such an offer. Most likely, our modern Athena is a sanitized version of the ancient Minoan snake goddess. Her darker half was shed and cast off as the gorgon Medusa. Modern Athena carries a shield with Medusa’s face on it. Athena is the goddess of strategy, weaving, and invention, who is credited with teaching humans how to graft olive branches onto trees, yielding more harvest. The city of Athens is named after her. She is often called Pallas Athena, in honor of her friend (or possible lover) who died as a youth in a spear throwing accident. Minerva is her Roman name.

Atum (Kemetic)

In the creation story for the Egyptian gods, the first deity, Atum, was both male and female, according to studies by researcher Mark Burstman. The ancestor to all self-produced two offspring, Shu and Tefnut, through either a sneeze or his own semen, and it wasn’t for a few generations that the archetypal male and female gods of Isis and Osiris were born.

Baphomet (Europe)

Baphomet is not a traditional pagan god, but one most noted for its link to the Knights Templar. Pictured as a hermaphrodite, with breasts and a penis, Baphomet was also a mix between human and goat, a perfect mix between male and female, human, and animal, although something akin to the traditional Middle Age view of the devil. Baphomet is a deity of fertility and wealth. To curb their growing power and influence, King Philip IV of France claimed the Knights Templar were worshiping Baphomet and practicing homosexuality, two acts of heresy in the eyes of the Church.

Baron Samedi (Vodoun)

The Voodoo loa (law) named Baron Samedi is a god of the dead and magick, but is also evoked for help in daily life. His place is the cemetery and his symbol, a skull. Samedi is depicted as transgendered, wearing a combination of men’s and women’s clothing of black and purple, possibly representing his walk between two worlds, the living and the dead, in the same way that his sunglasses, with only one lens, do. He sees in both worlds. The Baron is known for his sexually suggestive movements indicating a desire for anal intercourse.

Bona Dea (Roman/Italian)

Bona Dea is the “Good Goddess” about whom little is known. She is a goddess of healing, magick, prosperity, and women. In fact, her cult did not allow the participation of men, and none of her mysteries were to be shared with the outside world. Most of our information on Bona Dea comes to us from the written accounts of male scholars lacking a personal connection to her rites. Her ceremonies possibly included lesbian acts of love as a part of worship.

Bran (Welsh)

Bran the Blessed is a Celtic hero/god of the mystical otherworlds. In many Celtic myths, the line between divine and mortal, spirit and flesh, is less visible than in most other mythologies. The legends were passed on orally, and recorded only much later by Christian writers. To preserve the story, yet not blaspheme, the gods and goddesses were transformed into heroes of folktales as the stories are told and retold. Bran is a patron of magick, battle, and resurrection. His main tale is the rescue of his sister, Branwen, who in many ways seems like his feminine half. She was abused by Matholwch, her husband and king of Ireland. Bran’s army defeated Matholwch’s men and rescued her, but Bran was fatally wounded. His head was eventually severed and continued, after his death, to speak and give magical advice. Eventually it was buried in London. As an interesting note to his history, Robert Craves, the somewhat controversial author of The White Goddess, believed Bran was worshiped by an order of homosexual priests, and Amathon, a version of the Green Man, wrests Bran’s secret magical name by seducing one of Bran’s priests.

Cernunnos/Herne the Hunter (Celtic/Proto-Celtic)

Cernunnos is the fabled Horned God, a central figure in modern witchcraft. He represents the god of the waning year and animal lord, the complement to the Green Man. Usually depicted naked, sitting in a lotus position, with stag antlers and a torc (Celtic neck ring resembling a choker) around his neck and one in his hand, surrounded by the animals of the forest. Some renditions portray the Horned God with an erect penis, surrounded by men with erections as well. Very little of Cernunnos’s original mythos survives, so old are his cults. Worship of him, primarily in Caul and other Celtic territories, is believed to predate the arrival of the Celts. We don’t even know his proper name; Cernunnos is a Roman variation. He has been equated with Herne the Hunter and even the Greek Pan and Dionysus due to their similar associations with nature and shamanic trance work. Herne is a figure of British folklore, the God of the Wild Hunt, appearing at times of crisis. Cernunnos is sometimes associated with the chalk carving of the god figure at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. The figure is not horned, but associated with fertility, due to his depiction with his exaggerated phallus. Cernunnos is an aspect of the Great Father God, a force of nature, like the Goddess—loving, gentle, and receptive, but also fiercely protective and powerful.

Chin (Mayan)

Chin is described as a small child or dwarf, and is a deity of magick, divination, and the destiny of rulers. He introduced homoerotic relationships to the Mayan nobles. The nobles would obtain youths of the lower classes to be the lovers of the nobles’ sons. Such unions were considered legal marriages under Mayan law.

Chrysippus (Greek)

Euripedes wrote that this divine Peloponnesian hero was on the way to compete in the Nemean Games when his Theban tutor Laius ran off with him and raped him. The incident drew a curse upon the city of Thebes.

Damballah (Vodoun)

Damballah is the serpent god of the Voodoo loa and although Damballah is portrayed as a father figure, he has an androgynous nature and can manifest homoerotically or bisexually. Invoked for guidance, peace, and prosperous good fortune, Damballah is the god of rain and rainbows, making a modern connection to the queer rights movement.

Dionysus/Bacchus (Thracian/Greco-Roman)

Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Semele. Myths paint Zeus’s immortal wife, Hera, as the villain, tricking Semele to her death while she was still pregnant. Zeus could not save her, but saved his child, and implanted the unborn child in his thigh, carrying him to term. Thus, in this myth, Dionysus is “twice born” and associated with immortality and Zeus is transgendered and associated with birth. Older myths cite Dionysus’s early death and rebirth, as well as a serpent, perhaps Persephone in disguise, as his mother. Hera plagued him after his birth, so to disguise himself, he learned the art of shape shifting into various plants and animals and dressed in women’s clothing to avoid detection. He kept company with woodland creatures, depicted as soft and feminine, yet virile and strong, Dionysus is a balance of extremes. His myths, too, contain both ends of the spectrum. As a god of ecstasy, wine, and love, he traveled the world with his teachings, before ascending to Olympus as one of the twelve main deities. Like Jesus, but predating him, Dionysus spread his message and gathered followers to his cult. Some expressions were peaceful and loving, while others were more extreme and violent. His female followers of the more extreme rituals were called the Maenads, or Bacchante. Noted for his associations with Aphrodite and Persephone, taking a sacrificial Adonis-like role in several stories, Dionysus was less well known for his love affairs with men, including Adonis and Hermaphrodite. Dionysus is both an upperworld god of light, as a newborn child of innocence, and one who has braved the underworld, in search of his mother’s spirit, to come back with the power the shamanic realms has to offer. As Bacchus to the Romans, this god was depicted less beautiful, and more masculine, yet he retained his softness and sensitivity. Dionysus is quite the example of balancing gender identities as a path to enlightenment.

Ereshkigal (Sumerian)

Sister to Inanna, and Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal is the dark goddess of the dead. She is like the crone, and associated with the power of transformation and destruction, with Greek Kore/Persephone, Hindu Kali, Celtic Morgan, and Norse Hel. In Egypt, Ereshkigal was petitioned for gay male love spells.

Eros (Greek)

Eros is most popularly known as the cupid image of Valentine’s Day cards, and as the aid to Aphrodite, shooting arrows to make mortals and gods alike fall in love. The mythic, truly worshiped god Eros is much different from our conception of him. Like Dionysus, he contained a mixture of feminine and masculine energies, being soft, gentle, loving, effeminate, and childlike on one hand, and ancient, wise, aggressive, and masculine on the other. Eros is the patron and protector of homosexual love. He, along with Hermes and Hercules, could grant blessings upon male couples—the gifts of loyalty, eloquence, and strength, respectively. Eros is a major deity in the Orphic Mystery Schools, associated with the dolphin, flute, lyre, rose, and rooster. As a patron of success in battle, he was called upon by warrior/lovers before a fight, because many in the Greek world believed the love men had for each other would unite and lead them to victory.

Erzulie (Vodoun)

Erzulie is the Voodoo loa of love, seduction, and beauty, who grants the gift of manifesting beauty to those in the creative arts, such as painters, musicians, poets, and designers. Although similar in some ways to the Aphrodite archetypes, Erzulie also contains darker elements akin to the underworld goddesses. Her symbol is the mirror, not only to admire her beauty, but in Voodoo, the mirror is the symbol of the spirit world, the gateway to the realm of the loa. She is sometimes known as a loa of tragic love, for she is Erzulie Ge Rouge, Erzulie of the Red Eyes. She weeps constantly because no man can love her enough. Some practitioners consider her a patron to gay men and lesbians. Men “ridden” by Erzulie often display transgender traits.

Freyja (Norse)

The Norse myths divide the gods into two tribes, the Aseir and Vanir. The Vanir tribe is considered earthier, embodying the natural forces. The Aseir represent the more intellectual aspects demonstrated by sky-god cultures. The two tribes clashed and eventually the Aseir won the conflict. As a sign of peace, the tribes traded members. Freyja and Freyr lived in Asgard with the Aseir as part of the agreement. Freyja is the good goddess of these ancient people who would become the Norse. She is the goddess of the land, fertility, eroticism, and magick. She specialized in a shamanic magick called Seidr, the practice of inducing shamanic states through shivering and shaking, and sex magick acts are also attributed to her. She wears the golden falcon cloak, which carries her into the otherworlds like the bird of prey. Freyja taught her magick to the god Odin, the all-father of the Aseir. This great goddess later became a goddess of battle, and her initiations included the rite of boys becoming men and warriors. Although modern practitioners of the Norse traditions, the Asatru, are often seen as dominantly heterosexual and sometimes even unwelcoming of gays, it appears possible their ancient spiritual ancestors had homoerotic overtones in actuality, or ritually, like most ancient cultures. Becoming a warrior was a form of blood brothering. Ritual anal intercourse may have been a part of that warrior bonding.

Freyr (Norse)

Her brother, the god Freyr, also embodies the earth, like a vegetation king, growing, dying, and then resurrecting. Sharing attributes with the traditional Wiccan horned and green gods, Freyr is sometimes depicted with an erect penis, and fertility icons are present as part of his worship. He is also a patron of magick, shamanism, water, eroticism, love, peace, boars, horses, and stags. Freyr seems to keep his associations with peace, an association many queer men identify with instead of focusing on the more patriarchal and warlike gods, while other gods, including his sister, were directed toward war. His priest may have been homoerotic or transgendered, and well versed in his sister’s form of shamanic magick. In many ways, Freyja and Freyr are like two sides of the same coin, even in name. To modern pagans, they represent the primal Goddess and God of the land, the Lady and Lord seen all over the world

Ganesha (Hindu)

Ganesha, the breaker of obstacles and binder of evil, is usually depicted as a four-armed, plump, elephant-headed man, riding a rat. Ganesha is a benefactor, a wise, gentle, and loving god, acting as an aide and intermediary for other deities of the Hindu faith. He is the son of the goddess Parvati. One myth claims his father is the god Shiva. Another says he was created by Parvati from clay and dust, to be both her son and servant. Lesser-known myths say he sprung from the union of Parvati with the goddess of the Ganges River, Ganga, or another handmaiden goddess. Shiva beheads him in a fit of anger, as Ganesha protects the inner chambers of Parvati. The goddess replaced his fallen human head with an elephant’s head. Shiva later gave control of his armies, his own power, to Ganesha. The inner chambers of the goddess represent the inner, sacred power, and the power of sexuality, as he is said to guard the root chakra, and kundalini. The gates to the kundalini energy are the vagina and anus, and the elephant-headed god has been linked to homoerotic forms of worship involving anal sex. Ganesha is mixed in terms of sexuality, masculine in gender, and as represented with the elephant’s trunk, but also is soft, tender, and portrayed with breasts. He opens the gateways that block our path, removes obstacles, and protects travelers. Speaking from personal experience, Ganesha is a powerful ally to have when overcoming challenges placed before you.

Ganymede (Greek)

The most famous male lover of the Olympian god-king Zeus, Ganymede was a prince whom Zeus coveted. Taking the shape of an eagle, Zeus snatched Ganymede up to Mount Olympus to be his lover and his cupbearer, pourer of the golden ambrosia, the nectar of the gods. Ambrosia, like other sacred liquids, is associated with semen. The sign of Aquarius is associated with Ganymede.

Gwydion (Celtic)

Brother to the Welsh warrior Gilfaethwy, Gwydion is an archetypal magician figure, whose attributes were later absorbed by the Arthurian legends in the figure of Merlin. Gwydion is a trickster, as well as a magician, associated with the Celtic otherworlds and rites similar to shamanism, shape-shifting, and transformation. To woo the lady Goewin from the warrior/magician/king Math, Gilfaethwy asked for Gwydion’s aid. Though greatly skilled, they failed, causing a war with the King Pywll. Math punished them by transforming them into animals of the opposite gender and having them mate, producing a deer, pig, and wolf, who were later transformed by Math into human men, the heroes Hyddwn, Hychtwn, and Bleiden. Gilfaethwy took the female role twice, but Math made them both retain their human consciousness within their animal incarnations, as punishment. The results, however, were quite

wonderful, creating three heroes. Such myths can construe an archetypal reality that preceded events of ritual transgenderism and homoerotic worship among the Celtic people. Only later, as the myth was retold to Christian audiences, does the same-sex union become punishment for misdeeds. Gwydion later guides the development of the warrior Lleu, much like Merlin did with King Arthur.

Hecate (Greco-Roman)

The archetypal goddess of the witches, Hecate is the triple goddess of magick, justice, travel, the night, and the crossroads. She guards the roads of travel, sailors, horses, dogs, and wealth. As Hecate Triformus, she is the one who is three, embodying maiden, mother, and crone, but is most often seen as the crone, the dark goddess of the underworld—the bringer of light or terrible darkness, as a goddess of blessings and curses. Her symbol is the torch, carried into the dark night. As a handmaiden to Aphrodite and Persephone, she is a goddess of love, evoked for gay male love spells going back to the 3rd century C.E. She is also linked with Diana and Proserpina by the Romans, as triple Moon goddesses, and with Artemis, Luna, and Persephone in various triplicies, by the Greeks. Though most typically viewed as a Greek goddess, worshiped by priestesses, her roots trace back to Thrace, and she was honored by gender-variant male priests called semnotatoi. The Romans did not change her name when they assimilated her from the Greek pantheon.

Heracles (Greek)

The famous hero had a number of male companions through his many trials. Among them: Abderos, who kept the mares of Diomedes for Heracles but was eaten by the beasts; Hylas, Heracles’ companion when he sailed on the Argo, who was eventually kidnapped by nymphs in Mysia; and Iolaus, who help cauterize the necks of the hydra when Heracles famously chopped off the beast’s many heads. Indeed, the relationship with Iolaus was enshrined in Thebes, where male couples of the day could be found “exchanging vows and pledges with their beloved at his tomb,” according to historian Louis Crompton.

Hermaphrodite (Greek)

Hermaphrodite is a deity of both genders, having a penis and breasts. One myth states Hermaphrodite is the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, hence the name, and contained the best attributes of them both. Another myth states a nymph named Salmacis pursued a mortal man who spurned her. She asked that she and the mortal be joined forever, and the gods did just that, fulfilling her exact words, and not her intention. The gods melted the two together into one being with both masculine and feminine attributes.

Hermes/Mercury (Greco-Roman)

Although called the messenger god of the Olympians, Hermes has a much greater sphere of influence. True, he is the god of travel, but he is not restricted to any place or role. When speaking to his father, Zeus, he asks to go anywhere he chooses, and takes the role of messenger and psychopomp, traveling between the heavens, Earth, and underworlds. A psychopomp is a guide for souls who takes the dead to the underworld, and new souls to Earth. The psychopomp is the divine archetype of the shaman and magician. As one not bound by traditional roles and obligations, he is free to go and do as he pleases. Hermes took male and female lovers as he desired. With Hercules and Eros, he is part of a homoerotic trinity. His son is the god Pan. Although a male deity, Hermes is androgynous, and carries a lot of boyish charm. Called “Mercury” by the Romans, and associated with Thoth of the Egyptians, Hermes was evoked during the 3rd century in Egypt for gay and lesbian love spells in Hellenistic (Greek) magick. Dill seeds are considered the “semen of Hermes.” Hermes is also credited with giving humans the gifts of writing, mathematics, music, geometry, games, gambling, gymnastics, and wrestling. He is even said to be the inventor of masturbation. Invoked for protection when traveling, Hermes is another Greek patron of the crossroads. He is the god of both intellect and cunning, and as a trickster spirit, he is a patron of thieves. The symbols of Hermes include the winged sandals and cap, the caduceus, and the wand. The caduceus symbolizes the currents of kundalini, rising in a spiral, and later pictured as a double helix, like DNA, or the currents of masculine and feminine energy blending together. Now it is the symbol of modern medicine, as Hermes is a patron of healers. Hermes is a versatile god of many talents, trades, and attributes.

Horus (Egyptian)

Horus is the avenging son and a savior figure, a divine child in the Osirian cults. Horus is the falcon-headed god. One of his eyes is the Sun and the other is the Moon. The son of Osiris and Isis, he revenges himself against his father’s murderer, his uncle Set. Although Horus and Set were in constant conflict until Horus’s eventual victory, one myth relates the story of oral intercourse between Set and Horus, and Set consequently gives birth to Horus’s child. The child is either the Moon god Khonshu or the scribe of the gods, Thoth. Thoth is also associated with the Moon and homosexuality, although in most stories Thoth predates Horus. Homoerotic reproduction is common between divine personages, and their union often signifies birth of a mystical truth rather than a physical child. This particular birth suggests that the child of light and the god of darkness, nephew, and uncle are really two sides of the same deity, much like the cyclical Oak and Holly King of Celtic myth. Unfortunately, many scholars interpret the saga of Horus and Set as the struggle of good versus evil.

Hypnos (Greek)

Popular in mythology is the story of the Moon goddess Selene, who loved the boy Endymion. Most versions tell us she was so distracted by her love that she failed to pull her Moon chariot across the sky, causing darkness and the phases of the Moon. The gods punished her by putting poor Endymion to sleep, yet she still visits, continuing the dark phases of the Moon. The underworld god Hypnos, god of sleep, also loved Endymion, and he put Endymion to sleep, so they may share time together through dreams.

Indra (Hindu)

Indra is the Hindu sky god, with many similarities to Zeus. Both bisexual and transgendered, Indra loves his wife, Indrani. Indrani and Indra are viewed as the feminine and masculine sides to one being. Indra also loves the Moon god Soma, who elicits comparisons to Ganymede. The word soma also refers to the drink of the gods, like the Greek ambrosia, an offering, or potentially a psychotropic substance, real or mythic, which opens the gate to the gods. Soma also forms a union with Agni, the Hindu god of fire.

Isis (Egyptian)

The most beloved of goddesses, Isis is the Great Mother goddess of the Egyptians, the mother of gods and pharaohs. As the goddess of the land, agriculture, Moon, heaven, the underworld, healing, and magick, she is essentially the goddess of life. Her worship started in Stone Age Egypt, but was later incorporated in the more patriarchal myths of Ra, Osiris, and Horus. Even so, she plays a pivotal part in such dramas. Her worship spread into Europe, particularly as a result of Rome’s contact with Egypt, and only diminished with the rise of Christianity and the violent conversions associated with it. Christianized emperor Constantine forbade her worship and rites, desecrated her temples and killed her priests and priestesses. Actually, she was worshiped almost twice as long as Christ has been, and modern pagans are reviving her worship. Her cults and mysteries may have been similar to or even inspired the Eleusian mysteries of Persephone and Demeter. Although associated with homosexuality through her son Horus and brother Set, Isis, like other goddesses of her time and place, is served in ancient times, and today, by gay and transgendered priests and priestesses. Priests of the ancient world grew out their hair and nails, wore skirts, engaged in ritual sex, fertility rites, and possibly ritual castration, all to the dismay of later Christian observers. As the Great Mother, she welcomes all genders, orientations, races, and classes to her worship, and is considered one of the most popular and well-known goddesses in the modern pagan movement.

Kali Ma (Hindu)

Known in Hindu myth as the destroyer, the warrior goddess, and devouring mother is Kali. She is a dark goddess of magick, tantra, thieves, warriors, and death, with many arms carrying weapons, skin like ebony, and wearing a necklace of human heads. She is the destroyer of demons, and the wife/mother of Shiva, the dissolver. In modern practice, Kali is the harsh mother called upon to destroy what does not serve, including our own egos and illusions. She is both beauty and horror personified, forcing us to face our fears. Most people misunderstand the power of Kali. She is not a monster. She is akin to the Celtic war goddesses and crones, like the triple Morgan and the Cailleach. In the Hindu traditions, she is like Mother Nature. Male worshipers sometimes dress as Kali, with fright wigs, masks, and dresses, or ritually cut themselves with swords, as a symbolic castration.

Loki (Norse/Scandinavian/Germanic)

Originally, Loki was a fire god, later absorbed by the Teutonic tribes. In Norse myth, he is adopted as Odin’s blood brother. As his myth changed over time, he was demonized much like the Egyptian Set was. Loki is the trickster, in the positive and negative associations of the word. Although oriented to fire and light, Loki is as much a mercurial figure as Hermes and Thoth, working in words and clever unpredictability, like a combination of The Fool and The Magician of the tarot. Later his words turned to lies and his pranks turned much more malicious, siding with the enemies of the Asgardian gods, causing the death of Balder, the Sun god, son of Odin and brother to Thor. Loki is credited with starting Ragnarok, the Norse Apocalypse the gods desperately tried to prevent. As a shape-shifter, Loki is associated with transgenderism. To help Thor recover his hammer, stolen by the giants, he dresses Thor as Freyja and disguises himself as “her” handmaiden. Later disguised as the giantess Thokk, he prevented Balder’s resurrection by refusing to cry for Balder and defying the goddess Hel’s vow to release Balder from the land of the dead if all would shed a tear for him. Loki also assumed Freyja’s form and cloak, indicating magical and shamanic associations with the goddess, although it appears Loki never had a cult or priesthood exclusively his own. He transforms to a mare, gets pregnant, and gives birth to Odin’s eight-legged magical steed Sleipnir. Because of it, Loki, as a male god, is associated with homosexual union, called “argr” by Odin, an abusive term in old Norse for a sexually receptive male. Related to the word “ergi” that may indicate a sexually receptive male and one versed in Freyja’s magick. Loki also fathered the Midgard Serpent, Fenris Wolf, and Hel, the goddess of death.

Macha (Celtic)

Macha is an aspect of the Celtic triplicity known as the Morgan. Her name means “battle” and she is associated with both the crow and the horse. Three Machas have appeared in Celtic myth. The first is the wife of Nemed. Another is Cimbeath’s wife, who becomes a war chief, herself. The last, and most unusual, is Macha, the wife of Crunnchu. She came to Crunnchu as a fairy lover, making him promise never to reveal her identity. She becomes pregnant with his child. Foolishly, Crunnchu brags to the King in Ulster that his wife can outrun any of the king’s horses. The king accepts his challenge, demanding Crunnchu’s head should the latter lose the bet. Macha, in her mortal guise, is forced to run the race, and she wins, immediately gives birth to twins, and reveals her divine nature, cursing the men of Ulster for their treatment of her. For nine generations, in times of great crisis, all the men of Ulster experience a feminine transformation, living the pains of childbirth. Such androgynous transformation could signify a strong goddess cult influence in Ulster, originally demonstrating not a punishment, but an understanding of the goddess Macha. Although a goddess of war, she is also a goddess of life and sovereignty, giving birth under harsh conditions. Both Emain Macha, Ulster’s capital, and Ard Macha are named after her.

Morrigu/Morrigan/Morgan (Celtic)

The Celtic trinity of war goddesses are known by the name Morrigu. One version contains the goddesses Anu, Babd Catha, and Macha. Another version consists of Babd, Macha, and Nemain. All are associated with battle and death, but also with life. On Samhain, the Morrigan mates with the Dagda, with one foot in the river and one on land, symbolizing the veil between the worlds opening as spirits pass through it. In the revival of modern witchcraft, she is one of the most popular Celtic goddesses, associated with the Great Mother of the Earth, sea, and cosmos. In later myths, she was transformed into Morgan Le Fey of the Arthurian legend, sometimes ally and sometimes villain.

Narcissus (Greek)

A figure mostly known for his obsessive vanity, this son of a nymph and a river god would spend his last days gazing at his own reflection, but the first man he showed affection for was not himself. A myth traced in origin to the Boeotia region mentions a relationship between Narcissus and the smitten Ameinias, whom Narcissus would eventually grow tired of before sending him a sword as a kiss-off. Ameinias, desperately depressed over the rejection, killed himself.

Nephthys (Kemetic)

While there are fewer tales in Egyptian history and mythology about female than male homosexuality, many considered the goddess Nephthys to be a lesbian. The sister and constant companion of Isis, she married brother Seth but bore him no children. Scholars have debated whether the stories of Nephthys, who did bear one son by Osiris, show that the culture held lesbians in greater esteem than gay men, because they could still be fertile despite their sexual orientation. Then again, others express skepticism about her lesbianism altogether.

Odin/Wotan (Norse/German/Scandinavian)

Known as Wotan the Wanderer in Germanic myth, Odin is the all father and king of the Aseir, the warrior gods of the Norse pantheon. Credited with creating, with his brothers, the nine worlds of the Norse cosmology Odin, is a god king and mercurial figure, a traveler, binder, and inspirer. Odin is very shamanic, hanging himself from the world tree to gain knowledge of the runes and giving his eye for knowledge. He is attended by two ravens—Thought and Memory—the head of Mimir who granted him knowledge, and the spirits of the warriors of Valhalla and the Valkyries. (“Valkyrie” means “choosers of the slain,” a group comprising of Amazon-like warrior goddesses acting as psychopomps to the souls of heroes, leading them to Valhalla.) He is the god of nobles, leaders, warriors, poets, magicians, and mad men, evoking a frenzy or fury for battlers. His son Thor is the chief god of the common folk. Odin is known to have assumed feminine dress and identity when it suited his purpose. Freyja initiated him into Seidr shamanic magick, a form traditionally reserved for women and transgendered/homosexual men. He is blood brother to Loki, and their bonding has homoerotic overtones, much like the process of warriors bonding in the rites of Freyja.

Orpheus (Greek)

The legendary poet and musician may be best known for the story of his journey to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice; he failed to do so when he succumbed to temptation and looked at her before both had returned to the world of the living. According to Ovid, he never took another female lover after that — but did love other young men in Thrace. Spurned, Ciconian women would eventually tear Orpheus apart during a Bacchic orgy.

Osiris (Egyptian)

Osiris is one of the few fertility gods of the ancient pagan world not specifically associated with homosexual relationships, as Adonis and Dionysus are. His only association comes from his brother Set and his son Horus. Originally a god of fertility, he is killed by his brother Set, and resurrected by his wife, Isis. Angered by his resurrection, Set dismembers him. Isis finds all the pieces, except his penis. She resurrects him, placing a symbolic phallus in the correct position. Because of his inability to create new life, Osiris becomes lord of the dead. Either prior to his second death, or through the magical workings of Isis after his second resurrection, he conceives a child with Isis, named Horus, who continues his battle against Set, with the aid of Anubis, Nephthys, and Thoth, and eventually wins, becoming the new pharaoh, ruling in Osiris’s name. The flooding of the Nile River is said to be the semen of Osiris, the life-giving waters resulting from his acts of self-pleasure in the realms below. Pharaohs may have imitated Osiris during their enthronement rituals, masturbating before the image of the gods. These rituals later led to public masturbation as religious worship in Egypt. Such acts of religious sexuality can be found also in ancient Phoenicia, Babylon, and Assyria.

Pan/Faunus (Greco-Roman)

The horned god Pan incarnates the power of the land and animals, the power of wild things, into an archetype of immense power. Often viewed as the primary representation of the Wiccan godforce, Pan is the goat-legged god of music, creativity, poetry, nature, animals, sexuality, and even terror. He is the god of life and death, though not often portrayed as a lord or king, but somewhat as a trickster or nature spirit, cavorting with nymphs and satyrs. Originating the term “pansexual,” Pan loves both men and women. Artwork depicts him playing the panpipes, penis erect and chasing after men and maidens, particularly shepherds and young men to whom he is teaching music. He has been associated with Dionysus and Ganymede. Unfortunately, his visage was partially adopted by Christians to embody the devil, or Satan, though Pan’s pagan historical worship had absolutely nothing to do with Satan.

Poseidon (Greek)

According to Pindar’s First Olympian Ode, Pelops, the king of Pisa, once shared “Aphrodite’s sweet gifts” with the ocean god himself. Pelops for a time was taken to Olympus by Poseidon and trained to drive the divine chariot.

Quan Yin (Asian)

Quan Yin, or Kuan Yin, is the Chinese goddess of compassion. She sits on an island and listens to the prayers of the world, particularly those of women, children, and sailors. In Buddhists terms, she is a bodhisattva, one who forsakes her own union with divinity to remain behind on a spiritual plane, to guide and help the people of the world. She could be thought of as an ascended master or saint. Quite possibly Quan Yin was once depicted as male, from Indian origin, as Avalokiteshvara, and later viewed as a female figure, since union with the divine reconciles the female and male aspects. The Buddha is generally shown as male, so his companion, Quan Yin, was depicted as female in the 8th century. As a bodhisattva, Quan Yin is seen as beyond this world’s concept of gender, and can change gender at will, as needed.

Ra (Kemetic)

While the sun god Ra in most mythological accounts was regarded as the father to the major gods, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge wrote of clear indications of a double-gender nature to the deity. As early as the fifth dynasty, Budge wrote of Ra’s female counterpart Rat, who was considered the mother of the gods.

Rama (Hindu)

Another origin story for the hijras comes from the Ramayana, which tells the tale of Rama gathering his subjects in the forest before his 14-year adventure. He tells the men and women to return to their appropriate places in Ayodhya, but upon his return from his epic journey, Rama finds some have not left the place of that speech and instead merged together in an intersex fashion. He grants hijras the ability to confer certain blessings, the beginning of the badhai tradition.

Sedna (Native American/Inuit)

Several myths paint Sedna has a gynandromorphous creation deity, served by two-spirit shamans. Others depict her as a young woman who lived with her female partner at the bottom of the ocean. She is a mother goddess of life and death, of animals, particularly sea creatures, hunting, heaven, and destiny.

Set (Egyptian)

Set, or Seth to some, is the brother to Isis and Osiris, the divine mother and father of dominant Egyptian myth. He is also husband to his sister Nephthys, a dark goddess who lacked Set’s association with evil and later defected to her sister Isis’s cause. Set is considered the god of evil by the Osirian cults of Egypt, but more rightly he is the god of the harsh forces, the desert, the tests of the world, and the mysteries of death and sacrifice. He is distinguished by his red hair and fair skin—a far cry from the other Egyptian gods—suggesting a previous incarnation and set of associations from another people that were later absorbed into the Egyptian pantheon. His redness is reminiscent of the red sands and dust storms. He is also considered pansexual. Much later he was connected with Typhon, the serpent chaos god and nemesis of Zeus. Typhon is associated with the watery chaos serpent creation goddess Tiamat of Sumeria. In modern mythology, Set slays his brother Osiris twice out of jealousy and twice Isis returns him to life, though finally as a god of the dead. The two begot Horus, who continues the fight. Though Set himself was Horus’s nemesis, the two have oral sex, Set swallows Horus’s seed, and gives birth to a child.

Teiresias (Greek)

The blind prophet of Apollo was most famous in Greek myth for being transformed from a man into a woman for seven years. During his female years, Teiresias became a priestess of Hera, married, and even had children, according to Hesiod. Call him mythology’s original transgender person. After the gods changed him back, Zeus asked who enjoyed sex more, men or women. Teiresias revealed the ladies had it roughly 10 times better than the lads. Reporting this earned him a blinding by Hera.

Tezcatlipoca (Aztec)

As the Father of Witches, Tezcatlipoca walks the jungles in many forms, including a jaguar, coyote, monkey, or woman. He is the patron of sorcery and divination, often depicted holding his namesake, a black obsidian, or “smoking,” mirror. Seen as a dark solar figure at times, he is the mirror image of Quetzalcoatl, with whom he battled often. As a magician and shaman, Tezcatlipoca grants miraculous healings, although he is associated with death and sacrifice. Tezcatlipoca and his priests are associated with transgenderism, homosexuality, and ritual prostitution similar to the cults of the Middle Eastern goddesses.

Thoth (Egyptian)

The myths surrounding Thoth are numerous and varied, ranging from his role as a primal creation god to that of guide and aide to the ruling god, or son of Set and Horus’s homosexual union. His is pictured variously as a man with an ape or ibis head. Thoth’s title, “shepard of the anus,” comes from his association with the ibis, which fastidiously cleans its anus with its beak. He is primarily a god of writing, communication, magick, invention, justice, and the Moon.

Tlazoteotl (Aztec)

Tlazoteotl is the “Eater of Filth,” “Dirt Goddess,” or the “Shit Goddess” who takes all the darkness of the world, all the horrors, pain, and suffering and transforms it to purest gold. With these attributes in mind, Tlazoteotl can be viewed as an underworld, dark goddess figure, bringing the wisdom of the shadow to her people. She is a powerful goddess of life and death. Viewed as the archetypal witch, even in the Americas, she is seen partially nude, with either horns or a conical hat, holding a snake and riding a broom. The rabbit is her animal. Along with Xochiquetzal, she is mother and protector of the huastecs, transgendered, lesbian priestess. She is also linked with male homosexuality in her form as “Goddess of the Anus.” In most recent times, in a pop-culture, graphic story called The Invisibles by Grant Morrison (Vertigo/DC), she is associated with a shamanic drag queen named Lord Fanny.

Xochilpilli (Aztec)

Known as “the prince of flowers,” Xochilpilli is the Aztec patron god of flowers, physical pleasure, fine food, dancing, singing, games, entertaining, and perfumes. Although he is a giver of curses as well as blessings, his festivals are known for their lack of human sacrifice. Xochilpilli is a corn or grain god, partaking in the fertility mysteries of the spring equinox, much like a New World Adonis, with his mother and lover, Xochiquetzal. He is a patron of gay men, gender variance, and male prostitution. As a form of the god Naxcit-Xuchitl, he is said to have introduced homosexuality to his people. As Naxcit-Xuchitl, he ruled the Age of Flowers, or the Cosmic Cycle of the Four-Petaled Flower. Though most records of this time are derogatory, the general, less hostile position marks it as a time ruled by women warriors, where a form of Xochiquetzal was prevalent, and men focused on the arts and possibly same-sex relationships. Perhaps the Four-Petaled Flower age was a New World matriarchal age.

Xochiquetzal (Aztec)

An Aztec goddess of the underworld and of spring flowers, Xochiquetzal is somewhat akin to the Greek Persephone in that regard, though others relate her to the biblical Eve. The rain god Tlaloc is her husband, though Tezcatlipoca fell in love with her and took her away. Tlaloc then brought the great flood. Xochiquetzal is the mother of Quetzalcoatl and Xochilpilli. Marigolds, the Moon, red serpents, deer, spiders, butterfly wings, and thorns are her symbols, as she is a goddess of weavers, painters, sculptors, craftsmen, smiths, poets, and those engaging in nonreproductive sex. She is a protector of lesbians, along with Tlazolteotl, and is strongly linked to gay and transgendered men.

Vishnu/Mohini (Hindu)

A major deity of the religion regarded as protector of the world, Vishnu is clearly depicted in the faith as gender-fluid. This major Hindu deity frequently took on the female avatar of Mohini. Vishnu even procreated with Shiva in the Mohini form, resulting in the birth of Ayyappa, a major figure still worshipped by millions who make pilgrimages to shrines in India. The avatar Mohini frequently gets describes as an enchantress who maddens lovers.

Yemaya (Santeria)

Yemaya is the orisha of oceans, rivers, and water, a divine mother. The orisha are like the loa of Voodoo, but Santeria practices have a particularly Spanish flair. Yemaya is a great sorceress, a powerful patron of magick, and is known to shapeshift into a man at times. As a warrior woman, Yemaya is linked to transgendered and lesbian women. Water is generally associated with healing, cleansing, and emotion, so Yemaya is appealed to for healing, particularly now, to wash away HIV/AIDS, as she is also seen as a patron to gay, bisexual, and transgendered men.

Zeus/Jupiter (Greco-Roman)

Zeus is a sky and storm god, the carrier of lightning and rain, and the leader of the Olympians. The son of Chronos the Titan and grandson of the sky god Uranus, Zeus led his siblings to victory against the Titans. He divided creation among his brothers. He gained the heavens, Poseidon the seas, and Hades the underworld. Zeus is both a beneficent father figure and a stern patriarch, but always the supreme god. Zeus is associated with the planet Jupiter, which is his Roman name, and the granter of fortune, blessings, and prosperity. His wife is the sky goddess Hera, although he is known for his liaisons with both men and women, siring numerous offspring. Zeus is a shape-shifter and often uses the ability to seduce unsuspecting young men and women. In the Orphic mythology, he is transgendered as Zeus Arrhenothelus, being both mother and father. Later myths completely abandon Zeus’s transgendered aspects, but he retains some motherly attributes. Zeus gave birth to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, directly from his brow, as he did Dionysus from his thigh. This ability to carry a child to term echoes Zeus’s older attributes and we should not forget Them.

https://www.pride.com/entertainment/2017/9/11/52-queer-gods-who-ruled-ancient-history

Christopher Penczak’s Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe

#queer positivity #pantheons #lgbttqqiaap #magick #witchcraft

[whileiamdying]

The Dreamboat With No Name By

Jonathan Rosenbaum @jonathanrosenbaum

It's amazing what an Oscar can do. Clint Eastwood's career as a filmmaker was viewed by many as a cranky, uneven enterprise until he was anointed by the academy for Unforgiven. Now it's clear that in many quarters he can do no wrong, even though A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County show no particular improvement in his work. (For starters, both films are longer than they need to be.) His skill in realizing and giving shape to the scripts of others is sometimes praised so highly it's as if people thought the movie had emerged full-blown from his Zeus-like head. Whatever the achievements of The Bridges of Madison County (and they aren't to be sneezed at), there's a strong temptation to credit Eastwood with resuscitating the star system, the Hollywood tearjerker, and classical mise en scene (as I've done in my own capsule review). Yet at best he's performing yeoman service on a so-so adaptation of a lousy novel, plunking his customary persona in the middle of it as if that were all it needed to achieve greatness.

Let's face it, the danger of the star system is that it's predicated to some degree on a blind worship of power; we're encouraged to rationalize imperfections, slide over contradictions, and go with the oceanic flow. And when the star in question is wearing more hats, as producer-director, one has to ask whether this mythicizing is simply being encouraged. When we applaud the director for his supposedly untrammeled artistry, aren't we responding in part to the power of the star's persona rather than to Eastwood himself?

If we look at Charlie Chaplin — the best-known star persona in the world from the teens through much of the 30s — we initially see a one-hat auteur devoted to showing himself off, then a more complex, conscience-stricken writer-director-producer who's increasingly preoccupied with reflecting upon and ultimately questioning and undermining aspects of his own charisma. After making his tramp figure even more universally beloved than Mickey Mouse, Chaplin transformed his star persona into Hitler (The Great Dictator), a calculating bourgeois bluebeard capitalizing on his sex appeal (Monsieur Verdoux), an alcoholic failure (Limelight), and then, after being barred from reentering the U.S. in 1952, deposed royalty (A King in New York) — all of which complicated or diminished his status as a cherished love object.

If we look at stars who never functioned as directors or writers, such as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe (Monroe functioned as a producer only once, on The Prince and the Showgirl), we see a form of rebellious self-assertion that's rather different from Chaplin's. Monroe's Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, created just before she became a star, has certain parallels with Chaplin's Verdoux, but the canvas containing her charismatic predator is ultimately controlled by Howard Hawks and the executive brass at 20th Century-Fox.

Chaplin remained his own boss, and Monroe and Dean were at least partial collaborators in the creation of their own star personas. But Eastwood seems to have been mainly the passive recipient of his persona, having starred in three Sergio Leone westerns in the mid-60s as the Man With No Name and then being introduced as Dirty Harry by director Don Siegel, his second mentor, in the early 70s. Siegel also directed Eastwood in other pictures, including his first art movie, the underrated The Beguiled (1971) — released the same year as Dirty Harry and Eastwood's first feature as a director, Play Misty for Me — and probably had an even greater influence on Eastwood's directorial career than Leone had on his acting career.

The Man With No Name was a man of few words, and the same could be said for Eastwood's work as a filmmaker, insofar as he has never become a screenwriter; he remains a producer who develops, supervises, shapes, and then directs the scripts of others. This places him in a somewhat ambiguous position as both a so-called auteur (at the mercy of the material he receives) and as a star (at the mercy of a persona not of his own making), especially when these two positions are combined in the same picture. In at least two such pictures — The Dead Pool (1988), the last of the Dirty Harrys, which he produced but didn't direct, and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) — one finds him, like Chaplin, critiquing aspects of his star image, with varying degrees of success. The Deal Pool is a commercial chore he was required to perform by Warners in order to make Bird, and one can deduce his lack of enthusiasm for the project from references in the dialogue to the sickness of media exploitation of violence — the basis for the enormous success of the Dirty Harry cycle. Unfortunately, this did not make the film an attack on or send-up of the Dirty Harry movies, only a lackluster version of one that was obscurely turned against itself. (Eastwood evidently learned his lesson, because his next exploitation of sicko violence, which he took the trouble to direct himself — The Rookie (1990), made so that Warners would allow him to make White Hunter, Black Heart — carries no such disclaimers.) Much more successful artistically — and much less successful commercially — was his critique of John Huston and movie macho in general in White Hunter, Black Heart, which entailed what may well have been Eastwood's riskiest performance to date in its ridiculing of the kind of male-fantasy power trips that made most of his other movies so popular.

Recently Eastwood stopped alternating between making movies for the studio and turning out chancier efforts for himself and started trying to combine these conflicting endeavors. This has involved scaling down his 30-year-old star persona, rather than critiquing or dismantling it, and experimenting with new kinds of material (perhaps significantly, his two most recent pictures have both been set during the 60s). In A Perfect World most of the star emphasis was put on Kevin Costner, and Dirty Harry was turned into a sadder-but-wiser father figure. In The Bridges of Madison County Eastwood has attempted something similar by allowing Meryl Streep to occupy the center of the movie and making himself a dream-boat version of the Man With No Name — the sort of mythic figure who turns up in town, changes history, and then rides off again.

A friend informed me that she took The Bridges of Madison County seriously for roughly the first 75 minutes, then "lost it" when she heard Meryl Streep's narration on the sound track: "I was lying [in the bathtub] where the water had been running down his body, and that seemed to me intensely erotic." Another friend told me he and his wife found the whole thing utterly phony — Eastwood, Streep, script, direction — while several others bought most of the package. None of these responses corresponded precisely with mine, but a second look at the movie convinced me that the false and the genuine rub shoulders on a fairly regular basis, which could account for such a diversity of opinion.

I can accept and even admire the picture as a progressive Republican defense of adultery, in which adultery is seen as a practical means of keeping certain families together. But I have a much rougher time accepting the picture's truth or falsity moment by moment. Some of this problem is ascribable to Eastwood's limitations, some of it to the script by Richard LaGravenese, whose other scripts — including The Fisher King, Unstrung Heroes (recently shown in Cannes), and even A Little Princess — have a disconcerting tendency to oscillate between the genuine and the artificial.

I tend to prefer everything in the movie leading up to and including the first physical contact between Streep and Eastwood to just about everything that comes after it. Why? Because the long prelude to the brief affair between Francesca Johnson, an Italian-American housewife and mother in rural Iowa, and Robert Kincaid, a photographer for National Geographic, consists of subtle inflections of the everyday, while the remainder of the film leaps between ellipses and platitudes, both convenient ways to avoid explaining what actually happens between Francesca and Robert, sexually and emotionally. (Here are two platitudes that come in swift succession: "We are the choices that we have made, Robert." And "I'll only say this once, and I've never said it before: this kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime," which figures as Eastwood's highly implausible exit line.) But I could readily understand someone else responding to these platitudes and balking at the scenes I took seriously.

Take the grown children of Francesca, Michael (Victor Slezak) and Caroline (Annie Corley), returning home as the film opens to deal with their mother's final wishes and posthumous confession, and returning periodically between the flashback installments to ruminate on the state of their own marriages. A lot of people I know simply reject these characters and scenes as badly written and acted, and though I can certainly see what they mean — and am even reminded of the embarrassing, equally starless family scenes at the beginning of Chaplin's Verdoux — I think the problem goes much deeper than casting choices or dialogue. Ultimately it points to a limitation some might argue Eastwood shares with Chaplin — an inability to deal adequately with more than one character in any of his films.

As critic Bill Krohn recently put it, "The Bridges of Madison County is a melodrama in the tradition of Douglas Sirk and Leo McCarey, but whereas the films of those directors weave (in Serge Daney's words) a network of characters, and the spectator identifies not with one character, but with that network, in Bridges there is really only one character," Francesca, and "the other characters serve as surrogates for the audience." (One might argue that Kevin Costner's runaway convict in A Perfect World is similarly the only real character in that film, which functions as a showcase for Costner much as Bridges serves as a showcase for Streep.)

Whether one can accept Michael and Caroline as audience surrogates depends on whether one can accept Robert Kincaid on any level. All three characters are standard soap-opera figures without much shading or detail; to try to imagine their lives beyond the events shown in the film is to stare into a void. And as beautifully textured and detailed as Streep's performance is — obviously assisted by LaGravenese's writing — one might argue that it's limited at every turn because it's surrounded by a void. (One reason Robert functions as an audience surrogate is that the Eastwood persona belongs to the audience; it was nurtured and preserved by their responses to his previous features rather than by his own predilections, which seem to figure more in his work as a producer and director.) Apart from the arguable issue of whether Eastwood is too old to play Robert, his mythical status rubs uneasily against Francesca's status as a relatively three-dimensional character. It's almost as if she falls in love with a ghost.

The film also has a more covert subtext I'm less certain about. Here too I'm ignoring the issue of whether the original Robert James Waller novel, which I haven't read, has the same ideological focus.

The four-day affair between Francesca and Robert — more precisely a three-day affair preceded by a day of uneasy courtship — takes place during the summer of 1965. This is the same summer as the Watts riot in Los Angeles, and only a few months after the assassination of Malcolm X and the famous Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King from Selma. Of course none of these things is mentioned in the movie. Given the concerns of the characters there's no particular reason they should be, but given all the references to Robert's adventures in Africa and all the jazz that's heard — either on a Chicago jazz station or in a black roadside club where the two go when their affair is in full swing — one begins to wonder whether such omissions are entirely innocent, even if they're unconscious.

When these details are examined it becomes obvious that the significations of both Africa and jazz are nearly all tied to sex, and one thing that makes these details stand out is the film's extremely chaste handling of the sex between the couple. During their first evening together Robert entertains Francesca with a tale of a female gorilla that was sexually attracted to him ("We became engaged....we still write"), and she responds with gales of laughter — all while Ahmad Jamal's "Poinciana" is heard over the radio (at another point Robert expounds on the predatory and sensual aspects of Africa). The next night Johnny Hartman's "I See Your Face Before Me" comes over the radio; this is the first time the radio jazz is so prominent on the sound track that it seems to be coming out of the spectator's head, and the couple's mutual seduction, including their slow dancing, is choreographed to it. The following day Francesca looks at Robert's photographs of Africans and suggests that he's really an artist and should have them published, and that night we find them hiding out in another county at the Blue Note, where all the other customers are black and where the sweaty jazz combo is overtaken on the sound track by Hartman's "For All We Know" just before they start to dance again; the song continues over their lovemaking in the extreme darkness of what one presumes is a nearby motel or roadhouse.

As a jazz buff, I certainly can't object to any use of the music that suggests sensual awakening; indeed, any good linguist can tell you that one of the original meanings of the word "jazz" was "sex." And I suppose the references to Africa could be justified in plenty of other ways; the gorilla gags might be allusions to Eastwood's appearances in Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can, and one could trace the jazz back to Bird and the allusions to Africa back to White Hunter, Black Heart.

#the bridges of madison county #clint eastwood #meryl streep #making of #the chicago reader

[craftaesthetic]

Polytheism VS Monotheism,

In Jan Assmann’s essay “Monotheism and Polytheism,” he defined monotheism as confessing to or worship one god (17). Later he states that monotheism asserts its identity by opposing polytheism, “defining what god is not and how god should not be worshiped” (28). While Assamnn has a straightforward definition for monotheism, there is “no such self-description exists for polytheistic religions” (17) because polytheism is older and monotheism is newer and thus must assert itself as different from polytheism by opposing it. This can lead to a thinking that Judaism and Christianity “represent the rather unique end of the line, [and] consequently, the more morally and ethically advanced of the two systems” which is simply untrue (Ogden 35). Modern scholars often think that polytheism is barbaric, when referring to sacrifices, or unintelligent, because they are worshiping gods that, in the mind of a scholar, do not exist. However, belief in these deities does not discount the mathematical and philosophical advancements made by the Arabs and Greeks for example, but go hand in hand with their superstitions. One must remember that belief in  supernatural figures was part of the average day in those times, even if someone was not actively worshiping them.

The “most cogent theory of polytheism” is Varro’s Tripartite theology which refers general structure applicable to many polytheistic religions. The three spheres of divine presence and religious experience are as follows:

Cosmic theology: cosmic dimension of divine manifestation

Political Theory: cultic dimension

Mythical/narrative theology: stories about the gods (names/epithets/genealogies)

With monotheism, the cosmos comes to be seen as a creation of God. The geographical and cultic dimension is reduced, and Jerusalem does not reflect the pluralistic identity of various religious centers. Stories told about gods to talk about their characteristics is changed to talk about God and his chosen people. Concern with human affairs becomes YHWH’s dominant trait.

In polytheistic religions, “translating gods” became popular. Though the deities are different and personalized by nameand function, the “highly differentiated members of poly pantheons lend themselves easily to cross-cultural translation” (24). Translation works were a reference to the god’s specific character. Thus, these traits make two different gods seem comparable. These translations were important because treaties had to be sealed by solemn oaths, and the gods invoked in these oaths had to be recognized by both parties. The list of gods closes the treaty by having the gods be equivalent in function and rank.

The growing political and commercial interconnectedness of the ancient world and the practice of cross-cultural translation gradually led to the concept of a common religion. The names, rites differ but the gods are the same. This way of translating everything led to the late hellenistic mentality: the names of the gods didn’t matter in the view of overwhelming natural evidence for their existence in the world. This led further to a thinking by some that “all gods are one” (26). For example, there are hierarchies in Mesopotamia and thus in their society there are ideas of deep structural identity. The main god, Marduk, takes all the names of the lesser gods because they are a part of him now,  becoming his subordinates.

This belief in a Supreme Being led to the idea that all gods are actually part of the same god leading to the “One-God” idea. Even Oracles would proclaim gods to be the same as other gods (27). The name by which you call god (the supreme god) doesn’t matter because they are all the same. One idea by the Stoics was “that there is only one god, whose names merely differ according to actions and offices” (27-28). This argument could be applied to how Mikalson says Zeus had many different names which each indicated a different function in his book Ancient Greek Religion (48). Mikalson seems to be implying that because the tacked on ‘epithets’ or function is different, that Zeus Herkeios and Zeus Ktesios are worshiped differently because they were seen by their worshipers as different gods, and thus they are given different sacrifices and different specific worship days. However, if the reader takes into account what Assmann is saying in his essay on monotheism and polytheism, then it is unlikely that the worshipers saw these Zeus’ as completely different gods. More likely it is that the worshipers simply wished to invoke and worship certain aspects of Zeus’ functions on the appropriate days and appeasing different aspects of him.

Some argue that polytheism grows into monotheism when someone is particularly devoted to a certain god or goddess. An example of this is from the book “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius for at the end of the novel one reads of the narrator’s love and devotion to Isis, where he joins her priesthood and goes to Rome to worship her under Isis’ local name of Campensis. Though this is written later in history, this is not an uncommon thought. In Mikalson’s book, he describes how Isis could fulfil virtually all the religious needs of Greek citizens because her devotees would credit her with “power over and protection of virtually all aspects of human life and even with the initial structuring of the cosmos and all elements in it” (189) shown with Isidorus’ First Hymn to Isis. Therefore, “Isis alone [opened] the way to concepts of monotheism for her worshipers,” though some may call that henotheism or monolatry instead, as belief in Isis didn’t necessarily mean the rejection or nonbelief of other gods. However, the main idea is the supremeness of one god.

This elevation did not just happen with Isis, but other gods as well. A major example of a shift from polytheism to monotheism is when the prophet Zarathustra  elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of supremacy that approaches monotheism (201). The mythos has a savior figure, the Saoshyant, who would redeem the world in the future. This eventually became Zarathustrianism, or Zoroastrianism, which can be seen as either monotheistic or dualistic as there is a sharp contrast between the battles of good and evil, Ahura Mazda, and Aura Mainyu, respectively.. Though this religion is not as monotheistic as say, Judaism, the world was still made up of only two supernatural forces: one good, one evil and the people would have rituals to help the good side and also to help lead them into a good afterlife.

Zoroastrianism scholars as well as others, point to “some affinity between YHWH and Aten in the Bible” (Iran 203, Israel 182). However, Akhenaten’s monotheism was said to based on the physical discovery that sun generates light, warmth, and time. The sun provided helped the crops to grow, while light and time explained the existence of the universe to them, thus the traditional pantheon was superfluous. Abolition was the consequence of a new cosmology. Biblical monotheism is based on non-scientific revelations: Revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai of the Commandments, Enoch and Daniel who received revelations of the end of history for example and judgement of the dead (Israel 181, 187).

Drawing especially and directly from the posted texts of Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and “Aesop,” discuss what literature tells us about early Greek religion.  Then, explain how Jon Mikalson (in Ancient Greek Religion) draws on other sources—especially art and archaeology—to round out or understanding of Greek religion during the classical (i.e. pre-Hellenistic) age.

In Greek myths, an underlying theme is that the earth is eternal while gods have a beginning and end. This can be seen with the transition from the Titans to Zeus and his pantheon. Different cities that celebrated different gods had different religious calendars with different festivals. Cults were usually not practiced in the same way by all Greeks. In Greek civilization, polytheistic religions are about actions: what a person does, and the rituals they engage in. Today, American Christianity is about belief in the heart and mind, and the person practicing that religion doesn’t have an obvious outward component all the time. However, in early Greek religion, it wasn’t about belief because their deities couldn’t read minds. Elements of Greek religion reach back into the Mycenaean period. For example, Zeus is Indo-European and linked with Roman Jupiter, and Mycenaean Linear B tablets contain familiar names of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hera, Hermes, and Dionysus with other, unknown, deities.

In the Iliad, the translation is prose where it was originally poem and the role of the gods in this work portrays them as petty, just like humans. The notion by many modern historians is that though Greeks had religion, they were rational and guided by reason. However, this is not necessarily true. It is often preached by people who do not like religion or do not understand it because the gods are everywhere in these stories. For example, in the Iliad, a Priest of Apollo Shootafar named Chryses calls upon Apollo to make “the Danaans pay for [his] tears” in a good example of Do Ut Des which means ‘I give so that you might give’ (Homer 12). Ancient people thought there was a divine element, and they believed someone who was sick was being punished. They also believed that if one person was wicked, it could bring the wrath upon a whole village or people. This is why Achilles is angry with the King, because by not giving back the daughter of Chryses, the King was tempting the wrath of the gods to fall upon the military camp. This did indeed occur for Apollo shot “deadly shafts… all over [the] camp [and] the people died in heaps” (Homer 18). The relationship between human and divine was that the Greeks wanted fertility of crops, animals, and selves in return for the rituals and sacrifices they gave to the gods. The idea was a mutual exchange of favors and gifts to be the center of human/divine relationships with gifts reflecting honor, not love or fear. Humans like deities because of the power they have and gifts they give and the gods rejoice in honoring those gifts. When relationships are fractured, via impieties by humans or unjust divine behavior, the chaos can ensue and punishment will rain down. Greeks normally had a good relationship with the gods but if there was pollution or religious oversights they could be corrected via rituals and additional gifts. Thus the idea that the gods will punish those they are displeased with through pestilence and illness is strengthened and perpetuated.

Hesiod and Homer created a divine genealogy for Greek by distributing their named via their offices, skills, and outward appearances. They would do this by picking out the gods that they wanted to focus on, making the greek pantheon as it is known today. Many rituals, mythology, etc were oral and local though, and not necessarily contained to what was written about the gods. However, as Jon Mikalson discusses in his essay about Greece religious cults were not limited to worshiping the gods, Heroes also received public cults after death, and became a second class of deification. In Hesiod’s Story of the Ages of Man, there is a golden, silver and bronze age. The theme here is gradual deterioration, for ancient people didn’t believe in progress like modern Americans do. They thought if someone was born a poor man then they would be that poor man for the entirety of their life, and didn’t expect progress or improvement. In fact, the default assumption was that things get worse. For example, in The Story of the Ages of Man first people were gold and then they deteriorate though Hesiod does throw in race of heroes that momentary breaks the trend. The real development of these cults may have actually influenced by the increasing spread and popularity of the Homeric epics. Many cults were not devoted to Homeric heroes and some were even nameless. Hero cults were often very localized, and closely bound to the presumed tomb of the hero.

Humans relationships with the gods is severed by death. Individuals were not rewarded or punished in the afterlife for religious behavior unless really good or really bad. Usually rewards and punishments fell on descendants. The Greek didn’t praise death, for example, Odysseus would “rather be plowman to a yeoman farmer on a small holding than lord Paramount in the kingdom of the dead (Odyssey 134). Life is of utmost importance to the Greeks and is thus humanistic in this way. Odysseus has talked to Circe who says he must perform a ritual a certain way in order to speak Teiresias. In Book 11 Odysseus slits animal's throats so he would be able to understand the dead. A reason for this could be because blood is life in liquid form and thus gives the dead back a sense of life.  Odysseus also makes the dead come to him one at a time, and they don’t like the point of his sword that he has. This may be because Odysseus is afraid the dead may overwhelm him, and take his blood or life.  When the first person to come is Elpenor, a man who had just died and had not buried, it shows how doing the right burial rites in Greek society and religion was important. Additionally, Elpenor didn’t take the blood, this is likely because he had recently died and didn’t need it whereas older shades needed the blood to be able to communicate with the living. These scenes show the restlessness of the dead when their body has not buried properly.

#heathenism #paganism #hellinism #Hellenistic magick #magick history #history #academia #magick #mine

[celticpagans]

Gods and Goddesses

Pachamama - Pachi Mama, Patchi-Mama or Pachimama is the Quechan or Inca word for “Mother Earth” or more accurately “our mother in space and time”. Most cultures have an EarthMother concept and those of South America are no exception. But the word “Pachamama” goes beyond the name of a single Goddess, it encompasses a entire world view and way of life. It involves the belief that the Earth is a living being and the mother of all of Earth's life. In traditional societies, grown children were expected to take care of their parents and thus, it should be expected that we all care for Pachamama. Pachamama cares for her children as a mother cares for her young and does not turn away from them. If she fails to provide, it is because she is not well. Pomona - Pomona is a wood nymph, one of the Numia or place spirit, and the Roman Goddess of orchard fruit. Her name comes from the Latin word for fruit, the French word for apple is pomme (derived from the Latin). Quetzalcoatl - Quetzalcoatl (pronounced Keh-tzal-coh-AH-tl) is the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs and Toltecs. He is a powerful and benevolent dragon-type entity associated with harvests, wild animals, the morning star (Venus), wind and rain. He is also a god of learning, reading, and books. Ra - Ra is the ancient Egyptian God of the sun. He is swallowed every night by Nut and reborn again every morning. Alternatively he travels through the underworld at night. In the Underworld he is imaged as a man with the head of a ram. In the upper world he is imaged as a man with the head of a hawk crowned by a sun disk. Saturn - Saturn or Saturnus is the ancient Roman God of agriculture, the sowing of seeds, wealth, the seasons, cycles of decay and renewal and the passage of time. Sekhmet - Sekhmet is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of war. She is imaged as a woman with the head of a lioness. Her name means "powerful one". Selene - Selene (suh LEE nee) Σελήνη is the ancient Greek Titan Goddess and personification of the Moon. Selene drives her chariot silver drawn by two white winged horses or bulls across the sky each night. Sometimes she is riding a bull or a horse. Seshat - Seshat is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of writing and measurement. She is imaged as a woman wearing a panther skin with a star on her headdress. Seth - Seth or Set is the ancient Egyption God of disharmony and destruction. He murdered Osiris and battled with Horus for the throne of Egypt. In earlier times He was associated with Eygptian royalty. He is imaged as a man with the head of a strange animal, known as the Set animal. (It looks a little like an ant eater to me.) Shu - Shu is the ancient Egyptian God who holds up the arch of the sky (Nut) so that the Earth and Sky are separate. Sobek - Sobek is the personification of the Nile crocodile. He is pictured either as a crocodile or as a powerful man with the head of a crocodile. Temples to him were located throughout Egypt where crocodiles were common. Some of the temples kept pools where sacred temple crocodiles were offered the best cuts of meat. These crocodiles became tame and were mummified after their deaths. Tammuz - Tammuz is the name of the ancient Sumerian God of food and vegetation. The name means "faithful son". He was the consort of Innana. Tawaret - Tawaret is an ancient Egyptian Goddess associated with women and childbirth. Her appearance is a composite with the head of a hippopotamus, the tail of a crocodile and the body of a lion, with features of a heavily pregnant woman. Like Bes images of Tawaret were often kept in the home as protective amulets. Tefnut - Tefnut is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of moisture. She is the wife of Shu and mother of Nut and Geb. She is often depicted with the head of a lioness. The Charities - The Charities or Kharities are the ancient Greek Goddesses of charm, beauty, creativity and fertility, but more specifically, they seem to be the Goddesses of pleasant things that result from peaceful gatherings of people, especially festivities. The Dioscuri - The Dioscuri (sons of Zeus in Greek) is the name given to the twins Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces) who were the brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen of Sparta featured in The Illiad and The Odyssey. Their mother was Leda, Queen of Sparta and wife of Tyndareus. It is said the Leda was seduced by Zeus in the shape of a swan and gave birth to an egg which held her children. Some stories say she laid two eggs, one containing Helen and Pollux and the other containing Clytemnestra and Castor and that Helen and Pollux are the children of Zeus and Clytemnestra and Castor the children of Tyndareus born a more traditional way. Other sources say that Castor and Pollux were born of the egg and Clytemnestra and Helen are the daughters of Tyndareus. Whatever their paternity, the brothers were very close and went everywhere together. The Graces - The Graces, from the Latin Gratiae, or Charities (from the Greek Charis pronounced kh á ris) are the Goddesses of harmony and accord. The Holly King - The Holly King is a masculine neopagan deity who holds court from midsummer to midwinter. His twin and adversary, the Oak King, rules the opposite half of the year. Thoth - Thoth is the ancient Egyptian God of writing and knowledge. He provided the gift of hieroglyphic writing to the people. He is also associated with alchemy and magick and is associated with the moon. He is depicted as a man with the head of an ibis and is also symbolized by the baboon. Turms - Turms is the Etruscan God of boundaries, trade and commerce, psychopomp and a messanger between mortals and Gods. Turms was associated with the Greek God Hermes and the Roman God Mercury. Demeter - Demeter is a Hellenic Mother Goddess, Grain and Harvest Goddess and founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Devana - Devana is the name of a Russian Goddess of the hunt who is said to roam the Carpathian forest. Diana - The name Diana comes from Latin divios meaning "heavenly" or "divine". Dionysus - Dionysus or Dionysos is the Greek God of the grape harvest, wine, revelry, festivity, processions, religious ecstasy, madness, drunken violence, epiphany, androgyny, homosexuality, transformation and rebirth after death. He brought viticulture to humanity and this was a major leap in the progress of civilization. Eostre - Eostre is the name of a Tuetonic Goddess about whom we know very little. It is only noted in the writings of Venerable Bede that the Germanic name for the month of April, Eosturmōnaþ (Northumbrian), Ēastermōnaþ (West Saxon), Ôstarmânoth (Old High German), was named for a Goddess called Eostre or Ostara whose feast day was celebrated in the spring and further speculated by the writings of Jacob Grimm . There is little to no additional information about the Goddess, though there is quite a bit about the feast day called Eostre or more commonly Ostara. There are no stories about her and she doesn't appear as part of the family of Gods in any Germanic pantheon. Erzulie - Erzuli or Erzulie is a family of Voodou Goddess/spirits or Lwa. Some believe all the Goddesses are aspects of one Goddess collectively known as Erzulie, while others hold that they are independent Goddesses all representing different aspects of the same idea similar to the Charities or the Fates. Estsanatlehi - Estsanatlehi is a Navaho Goddess from the Arizona area. Her name means "The woman who changes" or maybe "She who renews herself". She is also called "Changing Woman" by modern worshipers and has also been called "Turquoise Woman", and "Painted Woman". Estsanatlehi ages, but then grows young again. How this occurs varies by story but many view her as the personification of the changing seasons and the eternal cycle of life. She is the sister of Yolkai Estsan. Freyja - Freyja is the Norse Goddess of love, beauty, magic (seidhr), fertility, war and death. Her name means "The Lady". She is one of the Vanir, sister to Freyr, daughter to Njörðr and mother to Hnoss and Gersemi by Óðr. Geb - Geb is the husband and brother of the sky Goddess Nut and father by Her of Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nepthys. He is imaged as a man with a goose on his head, or as a man lying beneath the arch of the sky. Hades - Hades is the Greek God of the Underworld. The name relates to the Doric word Aidas meaning “unseen”. He was also known as Plouton meaning “rich one” as his domain also includes all of the minerals that can be found beneath the ground and the riches they represent. Hapy - Hapy is the ancient Egyptian God of seasonal flooding which allowed the people along the Nile to grow crops. Hathor - Hathor is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of happiness and protectress of the hearth. She is the wife of Horus and sometimes considered to be the mother of the Pharoah. Her name means "house of Horus". Hebe - Hebe is the ancient Greek Goddess of youth, the daughter of Hera and Zeus, as well as the wife to Heracles. Hebe was the Cupbearer of Olympus, serving nectar and ambrosia to the Gods and Goddesses, until she was married to Heracles. Her successor was Zeus' lover Ganymede. Hecate - For many modern witchcraft traditions, Hecate is the Dark Goddess and associated with the spirits of the dead, ghosts, the dark of the moon, baneful herbs, curses and black magic. For others, Hecate is the Crone Goddess, ruling over the third stage of a woman's life, that beyond her childbearing years when she can focus on deepening the skills and information collected throughout her lifetime, when knowledge and experience is refined into wisdom. Historically, Hecate has served many roles. She is an incredibly ancient Goddess with origins lost in the mists of time. Heqet - Heqet (Or Heket, Hekit, Hequat) is the ancient Egyptian frog Goddess of fertility. She is imaged as a frog, a frog-headed woman or a frog at the end of a phallus. She is the wife of Khnum and is associated with the flooding of the nile. it is Heqet who breathes life into a newborn baby. Some claim that Her priestesses were trained in midwifery, though there is scant evidence of such. Women wore amulets of a frog sitting on a lotus during the last stages of pregnancy to encourage Her blessings. Hera - Hera, Queen of Heaven Hera ( Ἥρα), Hēra is one of the Olympian Gods, the Greek Sky Goddess of women and marriage and the wife of Zeus, the King of the Gods. Hera is associated with the Roman Goddess Juno. Hermes - Hermes is the multifaceted messenger of the Gods. He is the Watcher at the Gates, a Thief in the Night, the mischievous God of Luck and the Psychopomp who guides souls to the afterworld, and also guides us through dream space. Horus - Horus is the ancient Egyptian protector of the ruler of Egypt. The Pharaoh was considered to be the living incarnation of Horus. After Osiris was murdered by Seth, Horus fought with Seth for the rule of Egypt. In the battle he lost an eye. This Eye of Horus became an important symbol of protection. After the battle, Geb proclaimed Horus the ruler of the living. Isis - Isis is the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. She is a powerful protective Goddess associated with the rulers of ancient Egypt. She is imaged as a woman with a headdress in the shape of a throne and is often depicted nursing the infant Horus. Iusaaset - Iusaaset was the consort and "shadow" of Atum in some stories about Him. She is the mother and grandmother of all the Gods by Atum. Her name means the great one who comes forth. Janus - The ancient Roman God Janus, or more properly Ianus, is the God of beginnings, endings, transitions, times, doorways, gateways, passageways, movement and travelling. He is depicted as having two faces because he sees both the past and the future and is looking both and where you've been and where you're going. He was ritually invoked by the priests at the beginning of each ceremony for all the other Gods as he reigns as guardian of the gates between worlds and thus intermediary between mortals and the divine. Juno - Juno is the Roman Queen of the Gods, Goddess of women and protectress of the state. She is often associated with the Greek Hera and the Etruscan Goddesses Uni or Cupra. Together with Jupiter and Minerva she was part of the Capitoline Triad of the primary Gods of Rome and is the mother of Mars the tutelary God of Rome. The month June is named for Her and the first day of each month, the Kalends, is dedicated to Her. Jupiter - In Roman mythology, Jupiter or Jove is the King of the Gods and the God of the sky and thunder. He has been associated with zeus of the Greek Pantheon. Khepri - Khepri is an ancient Egyptian God associated with creation, rebirth and the movement of the sun. He is often connected with Atum or Ra. His symbol is the scarab. Khnum - Khnum was a creator God who molded the first people out of clay from the Nile. He was originally the God of the source of the Nile river, but Hapy took over that role. Khnum makes infants out of clay and places them in their mothers' wombs. Then his wife Heqet breathes life into them when they emerge. Lucifer - Few names stir up as much controversy as that of Lucifer, a minor Latin God associated with the dawn star, or Venus, herald of the Goddess of the Dawn whose singular appearance in the Bible in Isaiah 14:12 which says "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!" has forever branded His equivalent to the Christian Devil. This misunderstanding, as so many in the Christian Bible, comes from a translation issue from the Hebrew to Greek to Latin1. Footnotes 1. See commentary for Mormons at http://www.lds-mormon.com/lucifer.shtml Ma'at - Ma'at is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of balance, truth, justice and harmony. She is the daugher of Ra. Maia - According to ancient Hellenic Lore, Maia was the eldest and most beautiful of the Pleides, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. She is the mother of Hermes. In Roman lore she is identified with Maia Maiestas. Mars - Mars was the Tutelary God of ancient Rome, the Roman God of war, and one of the most important Gods in ancient Rome, second only to his father Jupiter. The month of March is named for Him and His feast days are Feriae Marti on March 1st and Armilustrium on October 19 Mary - Mary, the virgin mother of the man-God Jesus of Christian lore is honored by many Christo-Pagans and Christian witches as a mother Goddess. She is often referred to as The Madonna. She is the Queen of Heaven, the Bride of God and the Mother of God. Mercury - The Roman God Mercury, or Mercurius, is a messenger God concerned with trade and profit. His name derives from the Latin word merx which means ''merchandise''. Nabu - Nabu is the Babylonian God of wisdom and writing. Nabu writes the will of the Gods on the tablet of each human life. Neit - Neit, Nit, Net, or Neith was a war Goddess honored in the town of Sais. She was the patroness and protector of Egyptian soldiers and virgins. She was also associated with weaving. New Kingdom traditions say that she is the mother of Sobek and the protector of the royal crown. She is shown wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, or a headpiece showing a shield with two crossed arrows and she carries a bow and arrow in one hand and an ankh in the other. Nephthys - Nephthys is the ancient Egyptian protectress of the dead, sister of Isis and Osiris, wife of Seth and mother of Anubis. Her name means "Lady of the Mansion". Nuada - Nuada Airgetlám of the Silver Hand (Also spelled Nuadu, Nuadha, Airgeadlámh) was the God-King of the Tuatha Dé Danann before they came to Ireland and for some time after. Nun - Nun or Nu is the eldest of the Egyptian Gods. He is the primordial waters of chaos and all that existed before the first land rose out of the sea. He is imaged as a man carrying a bark canoe. Nut - Nut is the sky Goddess whose body forms the vault of sky over the earth. She is the sister and wife of Geb and mother of Isis, Osiris, Seth and Nephthys. At the end of each day, she swallows Ra and every morning gives birth to Him again. Odin - Odin is the one-eyed All-Father of the Norse pantheon. His wife is Frigg, the Goddess of Wisdom. Odin carries out war and gives strength to his enemies. Thor was actually more typically associated with peace and abundance than Odin was, and tended to be a more primary god for the living. Osiris - The name Osiris is a Greek translation of the Egyptian word which may have been pronounced Us-iri, which means "Throne of the Eye". Ostara - The Goddess Ostara is a Germanic Goddess of springtime and the dawn. Her name is believed to be related to the word East, from which the light of dawn emerges. Pachamama - Pachi Mama, Patchi-Mama or Pachimama is the Quechan or Inca word for “Mother Earth” or more accurately “our mother in space and time”. Most cultures have an EarthMother concept and those of South America are no exception. But the word “Pachamama” goes beyond the name of a single Goddess, it encompasses a entire world view and way of life. It involves the belief that the Earth is a living being and the mother of all of Earth's life. In traditional societies, grown children were expected to take care of their parents and thus, it should be expected that we all care for Pachamama. Pachamama cares for her children as a mother cares for her young and does not turn away from them. If she fails to provide, it is because she is not well. Pomona - Pomona is a wood nymph, one of the Numia or place spirit, and the Roman Goddess of orchard fruit. Her name comes from the Latin word for fruit, the French word for apple is pomme (derived from the Latin). Quetzalcoatl - Quetzalcoatl (pronounced Keh-tzal-coh-AH-tl) is the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs and Toltecs. He is a powerful and benevolent dragon-type entity associated with harvests, wild animals, the morning star (Venus), wind and rain. He is also a god of learning, reading, and books. Ra - Ra is the ancient Egyptian God of the sun. He is swallowed every night by Nut and reborn again every morning. Alternatively he travels through the underworld at night. In the Underworld he is imaged as a man with the head of a ram. In the upper world he is imaged as a man with the head of a hawk crowned by a sun disk. Saturn - Saturn or Saturnus is the ancient Roman God of agriculture, the sowing of seeds, wealth, the seasons, cycles of decay and renewal and the passage of time. Sekhmet - Sekhmet is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of war. She is imaged as a woman with the head of a lioness. Her name means "powerful one". Selene - Selene (suh LEE nee) Σελήνη is the ancient Greek Titan Goddess and personification of the Moon. Selene drives her chariot silver drawn by two white winged horses or bulls across the sky each night. Sometimes she is riding a bull or a horse. Seshat - Seshat is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of writing and measurement. She is imaged as a woman wearing a panther skin with a star on her headdress. Seth - Seth or Set is the ancient Egyption God of disharmony and destruction. He murdered Osiris and battled with Horus for the throne of Egypt. In earlier times He was associated with Eygptian royalty. He is imaged as a man with the head of a strange animal, known as the Set animal. (It looks a little like an ant eater to me.) Shu - Shu is the ancient Egyptian God who holds up the arch of the sky (Nut) so that the Earth and Sky are separate. Sobek - Sobek is the personification of the Nile crocodile. He is pictured either as a crocodile or as a powerful man with the head of a crocodile. Temples to him were located throughout Egypt where crocodiles were common. Some of the temples kept pools where sacred temple crocodiles were offered the best cuts of meat. These crocodiles became tame and were mummified after their deaths. Tammuz - Tammuz is the name of the ancient Sumerian God of food and vegetation. The name means "faithful son". He was the consort of Innana. Tawaret - Tawaret is an ancient Egyptian Goddess associated with women and childbirth. Her appearance is a composite with the head of a hippopotamus, the tail of a crocodile and the body of a lion, with features of a heavily pregnant woman. Like Bes images of Tawaret were often kept in the home as protective amulets. Tefnut - Tefnut is the ancient Egyptian Goddess of moisture. She is the wife of Shu and mother of Nut and Geb. She is often depicted with the head of a lioness. The Charities - The Charities or Kharities are the ancient Greek Goddesses of charm, beauty, creativity and fertility, but more specifically, they seem to be the Goddesses of pleasant things that result from peaceful gatherings of people, especially festivities. The Dioscuri - The Dioscuri (sons of Zeus in Greek) is the name given to the twins Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces) who were the brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen of Sparta featured in The Illiad and The Odyssey. Their mother was Leda, Queen of Sparta and wife of Tyndareus. It is said the Leda was seduced by Zeus in the shape of a swan and gave birth to an egg which held her children. Some stories say she laid two eggs, one containing Helen and Pollux and the other containing Clytemnestra and Castor and that Helen and Pollux are the children of Zeus and Clytemnestra and Castor the children of Tyndareus born a more traditional way. Other sources say that Castor and Pollux were born of the egg and Clytemnestra and Helen are the daughters of Tyndareus. Whatever their paternity, the brothers were very close and went everywhere together. The Graces - The Graces, from the Latin Gratiae, or Charities (from the Greek Charis pronounced kh á ris) are the Goddesses of harmony and accord. The Holly King - The Holly King is a masculine neopagan deity who holds court from midsummer to midwinter. His twin and adversary, the Oak King, rules the opposite half of the year. Thoth - Thoth is the ancient Egyptian God of writing and knowledge. He provided the gift of hieroglyphic writing to the people. He is also associated with alchemy and magick and is associated with the moon. He is depicted as a man with the head of an ibis and is also symbolized by the baboon. Turms - Turms is the Etruscan God of boundaries, trade and commerce, psychopomp and a messanger between mortals and Gods. Turms was associated with the Greek God Hermes and the Roman God Mercury.