Mountain Witch @crowgoddess - Tumblr Blog

trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

witchesversuspatriarchy

Working Towards Those #CrowGoals

commas-and-ampersands

@keyofjetwolf

alsojetwolf

Crow Goals are Best Goals.

thewindowofthesummerhouse

Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos

twoweeks

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDTdl2Yjevk

blennie

woah woah ladies, settle down...... (talking to my digestive organs)

#me @ my stomach #thanks for the anxiety

ashleykaneharper

outdoormagic

Walk the Path by Karen_Chappell

sixpenceee

Snow flakes falls softly into crystal clear water. Beautiful. Source

thatdamnokie

psa: if your magical “tool kit” doesn’t also include critical thinking skills and common sense, it’s useless.

witchyfashion

https://amzn.to/2LF7Znz

finelythreadedsky

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

finelythreadedsky

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

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

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

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

wordsmithic

This myth from my culture teaches us how strongly mothers love their children and how marriage without the consent of the daughter and the mother (generally the important female figures in the family) can bring catastrophy - because women had power and nothing is more powerful than the wrath of a wronged mother. OP’s take isn’t hypothetical. THIS IS HOW THE TALE IS INTERPRETED IN THE CULTURE. Millions of Greek women have been in arranged marriages and this has only stopped recently. This tale gave strength to my female ancestors and the trauma they had to endure. I won’t have any of “this is a myth made entirely for men“ bullshit.

(I don’t have any problem with the retellings, of course. People can get inspired by anything they want and they can write whatever they want).

heydeliah-deactivated20220520

Yes finally someone says it! To be frank. This is the version of the myth us Greeks are taught. The name of the myth is “Η αρπαγή της Περσεφόνης” which translates too “The kidnapping/taking of Pershephone.”

Arranged marriage where the daughter had to go miles away from her family (and would be lucky to see them once a year!) only started to stop at our grandparents time. Many of our grandparents are in arranged mariagges.

The taking of Pershephone is a myth about the strong bond of a mother and her daughter, and how she took power in her hands. And I am thankful to my mother and grandmothers for teaching it to me.

And this myth still affects today’s women!

It’s the custom in Greece to name your children after your parents. First children take the father’s parents name, and the second son and second daughter can be named after the mother’s parents.

But when my mother gave birth to me, the first daughet, she chose to name me after her mother because, and I quote: “I re-read an old mythology book when I was pregnant with you, and I remembered the myth of Demeter and Pershephone. And I thought that I didn’t have to sit do what the men want, because you are my daughet, and I want to honor my mother first.”

What I try to say is that, retalling can be nice, but the original myth was supposed to empower women. And it still does today.

#persephone #mythology