Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

stop-to-smell-the-dandelions:

shrewreadings:

marisolinspades:

hollowedskin:

battlescarmentality:

allieinarden:

I’ve noticed this revisionist Greek myth is common wherein Persephone loves Hades and eats the pomegranate seeds in order to evade her overbearing mother, and that’s all well and good. You know, sometimes I’m in the mood for it and sometimes I’m not. But hear this: as long as we’re doing this, why is no one wondering whether Aphrodite might really love Hephaestus? 

Think about it. All the gods in their immortal splendor are lining up to marry her, doing everything in their power to impress her, the goddess of love and beauty, and she choses…that guy. A god in technical terms only, a social reject who’s ugly and malformed and um, no fun. Always slaving away in his workshop when everyone else is quaffing nectar and having their eternal beach party up on Mount Olympus. They can’t believe she’d give up all of them for that. 

So, because the gods do not take rejection well (looking at you Apollo), eventually they start to say to each other, well, we all know Zeus made her do it anyway. He’s gotta feel guilty for throwing Hephaestus off Mount Olympus that one time. And it quickly becomes that poor girl, stuck in that workshop full of sweat and dirt and cyclopses when she could have had one of us. Because of course they’ve got love all figured out; it’s entirely technical and dependent on who’s the most charming and good-looking and not at all variable and strange and notoriously unpredictable, right?

Meanwhile Ares, only the most arrogant and brainless of the crew, can’t take a hint and is still showing up wherever Aphrodite goes trying to hit on her, so eventually she and Hephaestus decide to rig up an elaborate mechanical trap for him, using her as bait. When all the gods have laughed at him for getting caught he huffily attempts to regain his dignity by telling them, whatever, guys, you want to know the truth, I was meeting her for an assignation. And they all kind of know he’s full of it but they just accept it as the unvarnished truth from thereon in, because they’d love to believe she’d cheat on Hephaestus with Ares. They’d love it. Come on, Aphrodite, get off your high horse and admit you’re just as shallow as the rest of us. 

So they talk, but Aphrodite doesn’t really care about their collective jealousy because she dotes on her misshapen genius of a husband with his sooty hands and his sweaty brow who always takes her seriously and is always so hard at work inventing astonishing new things to make her happy, and she loves the volcano they live in with its internal pressures so conducive to the formation of precious stones and its passages lit with glowing lava that so gorgeously offsets her cheekbones, and all the cyclopses worship her because even with one eye apiece they’ve still got more depth perception than most men do where she’s concerned. True it is that as a couple the two develop a reputation for not getting out much, because all those Olympian parties bore them to death and they’d rather spend time with each other (poor Aphrodite, she’s such a vivacious young thing and her husband is so grasping and insecure that he won’t let her go out and have fun), but they do all right. 

THIS IS THE KIND OF CONTENT I’M LOOKING FOR

love <3

Ok, ok, wait, but it doesn’t end there. Because Aphrodite features pretty heavily in the story of Eros and Psyche. She’s painted as the villain, her jealousy causing her to send her son to curse the girl, but that’s just not true. She knows what it’s like to be clamored over for your beauty, knows the lies that are spread, the way it sets you up as a target and discredits your mind. Aphrodite hears the mortals whisper that this human girl rivals her in beauty, and one day she gets around to seeing what the fuss is about.

She finds Psyche’s home all but besieged by suitors, but she notices the girl isn’t falling for their flattery, that she is still kind, no matter who she’s dealing with. She sees a bit of herself in this girl who aches to be spoken to, not at, and who wants most of all to be heard.

When she sends her son to the girl, she is less than truthful about her motivations. She knows if she tells him she hopes he will fall for this mortal girl it will make things awkward for him, that true love must be discovered on its own and cannot be forced. When he comes away from the encounter with her name on his lips, searching for excuses to talk to her again, Aphrodite whispers into the soothsayer’s ear to tell Psyche’s father that she is loved by a god. Frees her from the hoards of shallow admirers and gives her son the opportunity he needs to see her again. 

When a year of late-night conversations fails to convince her son that it’s time to reveal himself to his beloved, she puts a bug in Psysche’s ear to ask for her sisters to visit, whispers in their ears to convince Psyche to take matters into her own hands, ensures the two can finally meet face to face. She is saddened when Eros flees, believing Psyche had betrayed him.

The four tasks Psyche must overcome to be reunited with her son aren’t laid forth out of spite, but rather to help the girl find herself. Aphrodite knows this girl hasn’t had a choice in the path her life has taken up until this point. Knows that everything was in the hands of her father, and of Aphrodite herself. She wants to make sure Psyche means it, wants Psyche to know what she’s getting into when dealing with the Olympians. Wants, most of all, for Psyche to question her own motivations, fully evaluate the situation, and then make her own choice.

Her frustration at the Olympians aiding the girl isn’t because she hates being tricked. No, she wants Psyche to break out of her shell, wants her to have the option to decide this isn’t worth it and walk away. 

When the final task ends in Psyche laying unconscious on the roadway, Aphrodite searches the girl’s heart and knows her intentions are true. Knows she is ready to join the family. She kicks Eros out of the house to ensure he would find Psyche, to ensure he would come to his senses and forgive her, realize that he had been unfair to her and to ask her forgiveness in turn.

They say Aphrodite was sour about the whole ordeal until her  granddaughter was born, but the truth was she hadn’t stopped smiling from the moment her son had first come home, whispering the girls name in reverence.

I liked before. 

Now I find it awesome. 

will someone please do a different take on icarus too

or medea

or  andromeda

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

slyrider:

lhzthepoet:

How do you kill a God?

Aphrodite laughs, head tossed back with stars in her hair, ‘We are immortal. We are ageless. We will never die.’ 

How do you kill a God?

Hera sighs, ‘You rob them of love and loyalty. They will be alone and unhappy, and eternity will seem like a punishment, but it is not death.’ 

How do you kill a God?

Zeus declares, rather confidently, ‘You deny them their power. Poseidon nods his head in agreement. ‘They will be weak and defeated, perhaps even chopped up into pieces, but it is not death.’ 

How do you kill a God?

Apollo closes his eyes. ‘You strip them of their senses. Their eyes, and they cease to see. Their ears, and they are rendered silent. They will be in the dark, conscious and cut off for millennium, but it is not death.’

How do you kill a God?

Hades whispers, though still his voice carries, ‘With another God. An immortal for an immortal. Era for an Era. A celestial being to strip another’s soul. He pauses, the rest are silent. ‘A God for a God.’

L.H.Z // How do you kill a God?

@words-writ-in-starlight

caffeinewitchcraft:

ohhbobs:

stop checking on them
they don’t miss you

These are the words written on a post-it (a human invention) in Persephone’s bedroom. They’re written in what she fondly calls New English, aka the English that her mother still doesn’t know, even after all these years.

Every morning, when she wakes, she sees this post-it stuck onto the stone wall and makes herself read it out loud.

“Stop checking on him,” she says, arms wrapped tight around her knees. “He doesn’t miss you.” The words bring the familiar sting of pain, the familiar tightness in her chest, the accompanying breathlessness. There’s still a part of her that rebels at the thought, that clings to what he said before and not after.

She thinks she might have been happier loving a mortal, which is so in fashion these days that her mother is gallivanting about Earth like she hadn’t spent centuries chastising Persephone for the same. If she loved a mortal, she could bind them in ways that it’s impossible to bind a god.

She gets up and gets ready for her day. Being an immortal means that she can’t just spend all day in bed. That path leads to centuries of apathy and she’s still young. So very, very young.

“Go back to Olympus. I should have known better than to let a child into my kingdom.”

There was no “letting” about it. She’d been younger still and in chains and in captivity and in love. She’d beguiled and coerced so that he’d take her with him, made him free her. 

She’d thought she was shedding her chains, choosing new ones that better suited her, but she didn’t see the way her discarded shackles slipped onto him. She didn’t see what a burden she was, what a burden she would become to him, how limiting, how heavy, how stupid.

It’s been five years now and she’s still counting seasons like she has a chance of being let back in. Summer and winter, summer and winter, summer and winter, ad nauseum. Her mother had said that she’d stick to the cycle, that the Earth actually benefited from winter, but Persephone sees the way the summers are growing longer and hotter, the way the winters are short but so sharp she could cut her teeth on them.

Spring? She stopped that a long time ago. The melting of winter is good enough for mortals and gods alike. They don’t notice and, therefore, they don’t ask.

Keep reading

My Classical Mythology Professor

booksarebetterthanpeople:

“Hephaestus is really great. I mean, he only ever really does that one little thing of molesting his newly born sister, but other than that he’s cool.”

“Apollo’s just a sociopath, and a loser version of Zeus, really.”

“So either Helen falls in love with Paris, which she doesn’t want to do, or Aphrodite ships her off to Egypt to get a master’s degree in pharmacology.”

“Whenever Achilles had a problem, he’d just run home crying to his mom. His mom always had the same advice: stop fighting, eat, have sex with a woman. He only ever did the first thing, which is probably why he got killed.”

“Basically, Apollo got mad at a bunch of people for not having sex with him and they ended up worse off - mostly turned into plants, for some reason.”

“Cassandra turned Apollo down since she held a vow of chastity, but of course Apollo took it personally and cursed her.”

“You can always pick out Odysseus in pictures ‘cause he’s always wearing a stupid little hat.”

“The gods tend to have these conflicting powers or personality types. Ares, super feared by mortals and always bloody and angry, is basically the fool of the gods. Zeus, almighty king of the gods, is completely helpless when it comes to his libido.”

“So Brad Pitt spends nine years in the harem - you’ve all seen 300 right? I always picture Achilles as Brad Pitt now. Anyway, Brad Pitt’s in the harem, bored out of his mind for 9 years cause he’s already been trained for hero stuff at Charon’s hero academy…”

“So Orlando Bloom is just moping in his room while the Greeks are camping outside of Troy, and Hector finds him and is like, ‘Come on, Paris, this whole war is because of you!’”

“Have you all seen the Disney version of Hercules, where Hades is super evil and angry? Yeah, that’s not really right. Hades was more like the weird, basically harmless brother of Poseidon and Zeus.”

“I love this vase of the Underworld, it really shows the relationship between Hades and Persephone. I mean, Persephone’s standing there like ‘Whip that guy more! Punish him less! Stop slacking!” and Hades’ is just lounging on the chair like, “Darling, how about a roast for dinner?”

“The thing is, Oedipus tried really hard not to kill his father and marry his mother!”

(via windbladess)

awed-frog:

Honestly, though, the best part of teaching Greek mythology is that soft ‘huh’ coming from behind you as you’re finishing up a diagram of the gods and the relationships they have between them.

“Is something wrong?” you ask, turning around while you try, and fail, to clean white chalk off your fingers.

“It’s just,” the boy says, and then he blushes a bit, because people taking Latin are usually good and shy and the last thing they want is to get into a fight with a teacher. “Those two characters here - aren’t they both men?”

And okay, at this point everybody’s paying attention except the resident class child - that one girl who still has to uses four different colours for everything she writes and will get upset if you point out she should only use black or blue when filling in exams. So, yeah, you look at the boy, and then at everybody else, and then you turn back, pretend to check.

“Yes, they are,” you say, frowning, as if you never had to answer that question before.

“So why is there a double line between them?”

“Because they were in a relationship at some point. Double lines are for sex, remember? Single lines are kids and parents, and double lines are lovers.”

Someone giggles. The two kids whose parents bring them along to weird art exhibitions - the ones who’ve grown up hearing frank political discussions and the occasional dirty joke - are now looking collected and a bit smug. The others are losing it, and fast - they look at the board, as if only just noticing the thing, and then at you.

“So, they were like, gay?” someone else asks, and it’s always a girl asking this question, because ‘gay’ is just something boys aged 14 and a half never use - a Voldemort word, something that’s on your lips today and on everybody else’s tomorrow.

And this, of course, is the moment you’ve been waiting for - what the lesson was actually about. You wouldn’t plan a lesson around that, but you will mention the subject if it comes up, and so you start talking, about all of it - about sexual orientation being a cultural construct, about the Greek language not even having a term for ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, about warriors falling in love with each other and neglecting their teenage wives, about the fact our society is still coming to terms with something people have known in their hearts for millennia - that there’s no choosing and no free will, not about this. About how the most important thing is to respect yourself and each other, and the rest doesn’t matter all that much.

Statistically, in every class there’s a kid who’s struggling with this. Maybe two. Here things are not as bad as they could be, but it’s still hard, especially when you’re fourteen and you think you may be the only one and you don’t want to be different and how the hell can you even have a conversation about these things, with anyone?

And sometimes when you talk about these things - and dedicated teachers will find a way to include this speech somehow, because you never know who might need an ally, and who might need to hear it said out loud - teachers who loves their kids will mention the issue when discussing Michelangelo and Leonardo and Shakespeare and the Iliad - sometimes you see exactly who these kids are. Sometimes you see them looking at you, wide-eyed and fearful and yet full to the brim with that Go on look that’s so endearing on any kind of student. And sometimes all you see is their floppy hair, because they will keep scribbling in their notebooks and pretending like this is uninteresting and embarrassing and Oh my God, but the tips of their ears are getting red, and you find yourself hoping they’ll get a hug today, because they really need it.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

achillvs:

garnetthefirst:

dusty-purple:

I just love the myth of Persephone, i mean the real, original version of it, because it’s not like she got kidnapped, no, this bitch was la-de-da-ing in a meadow and she just happened to find an entrance to the Underworld and she was like “Imma check this out”. And she just wanders into the Underworld and discovers that hey this place ain’t too bad.

Meanwhile Hades is in the background “????? UM??? PRETTY GIRL??? WHY ARE YOU HERE?????? YOU AREN’T DEAD???” 

And Persephone (who was originally called Kore just a little fyi) just looked at him and said “I like it here. I’m staying.”

And Hades kinda just went with it, until Demeter started throwing the temper tantrum of the millenium upstairs and Zeus had to intervene because this shit was getting out of hand and its actually his job to be admistrator of justice. Which considering the shit he gets up to is kinda histerical but that’s another story there. 

And basically Persephone wasn’t a prisoner or kidnap victim at all she just really loved the Underworld and her (eventual) husband, and the Greeks feared her arguably more than her husband because Hades could be reasoned with but Persephone was the one laying the smack down on sinners, and really, who wouldn’t be at least a little scared of someone who’s name means something along the lines of “the destroyer”

Basically, Persephone is amazing and everbody needs to get on her level

i think the best part of that myth is that Zeus decided to change Kore’s name to Persephone (basically “the one who brings chaos”) only because she wanted to stay in the underworld and SHE WOULDN’T FUCKING LISTEN then Zeus, all-mighty king of the gods, kinda gives up and goes “fine, but you’re going to visit your mom” “also, I changed your name” “get rekt”

Also, if I’m not mistaken, Kore means “little girl” so imagine going from that to “chaos bringer”

(via punkrockpatroclus)

feistiest:

i’ve been thinking about why exactly i’m so attached to the story of icarus, the boy who’s been used again and again to teach us a lesson about hubris; the boy we were told as disobedient, as prideful, as reckless, as ignorant; the boy we’ve been warned to never follow, as if we did, we would end up burning our own wings and drowning in the sea along with him. i looked at the various texts and translations about his story, searching over and over for what it was that made me so drawn to it.

and then it hit me: icarus was told to not fly too high, nor to fly too low. he was told to remain in the middle, to follow his father’s path of flight—because daedalus knew of what it was like out there, of how cruel the world can be to dreamers, and he wanted his son to be wary of it. it reminded me of how parents are like nowadays (or, really, are like since the beginning of time): of how they say “dream big, but not too big”; of how they tell children to not get their hopes up too high; of how they remind their child to be realistic; of how they warn and they caution and they forcefully plant our feet on the ground and make sure our roots grow thick enough beneath it to hold us firmly down.

it’s understandable, if not twisted, the way they’re protecting us. because while it’s true, most of the time it leads to crushed dreams, dampened hopes, watered down ideas. it leads to the acceptance of things as it is, and not of things as they could be; it steals our idealism and turns it into doubt, into disbelief, into hopelessness.

maybe that’s why i’m very fond of icarus; because the thought of having this boy reach for the sky, for the sun, for the exhilaration of his freedom by going through such extreme lengths tells me a story of hope, not hubris. it tells me the story of a boy who was willing to risk everything for what he desperately wanted, it tells me the story of a boy who had the nerve to grasp at the liberation he craved, it tells me the story of a boy who loved so much he let himself be consumed by its violent, brutal wake.

and if icarus dared enough to chase after his dream, then let me burn along with him.

(via dyinghistoric)