I light a candle for all the versions of me that helped me get this far. The weary, the wild, and the ones who didn't even know they were magical all along.
I think we need to bring local shrines back. Not in the sense of like, a church, but somewhere in a local community where offerings to the spirits, fae, deceased loved ones, can be left. not too dissimilar to community shrines to local spirits in Japan.
Ime (I live and do local land-based magical practice in the south of England, have also lived in France and a few places around the US) these exist in loads of contexts, they’re just rarely Designated As Such – expanding my perspective on this has been a joy! And you can set one up, or make your local one A Thing, way easier than you might think.
I probably notice one at least once a day when I leave the house these days – I think when you start looking for them they start popping up everywhere. There are at least three or four working communal shrines/altars in my nearest big public park that’ve been there for years; someone left petition candles to Oshun and St Michael at the base of a local oak tree a few weeks ago; there’s a DIY memorial with names of babies who died in infancy hanging from a tree in my old neighbourhood; my current neighbourhood’s got a Luigi-Mangione-As-Saint street mural that’s pulled in loads of associated graffiti, lots with explicitly spiritual messages or symbols.
Most common ones I notice are: stone piles/cairns left at crossing places, roadside memorials, wishing wells and fountains, statues that’ve acquired their own good luck rituals from visibly rubbed spots, padlock bridges, people leaving photos or messages in mini free libraries/food cupboards, graffiti and street sticker hotspots that take on their own lives and specific purposes/vibes, memorials/sigils/spiritual symbols carved into specific trees and park benches, statues or displays in community gardens/allotments, clooties/stones/flowers/misc stuff decorating big or communally placed trees.
If you leave a few ribbons tied around a tree you like, or some flowers by a forgotten statue, that’s as good as a sign that says ‘leave a stone here to remember someone you love’ (which also works). People love a DIY shrine and still 100% have instincts for it even if they’re not thinking of it as spiritual/religious.
Kneeling down to pray is unusual. The gesture of entreaty is outstretched arms. To invoke the heavenly gods, both hands are raised to the sky with upturned palms; to call on the gods of the sea, the arms are extended out to the sea; the hands are also stretched towards the cult image. A cult image or sanctuary must always be given a friendly greeting – a chaire – even if one is simply passing by without any special reason, or else the gesture of a kiss may be made by raising a hand to one’s lips; a short, simply prayer may always be added. Socrates greets the rising sun also in this way. Simple apostrophes invoking the gods punctuate everyday life; in excitement, fear, amazement, or anger, the ‘gods’ or some fitting divine name are invoked. Often names of local gods trip off the tongue, or else Zeus and Apollo and especially Heracles, the averter of all that is evil; Herakleis – mehercule in Latin – is almost as overworn as the exclamation, ‘Jesus!’. Women have their own special goddesses, Artemis, Pandrosos, and so on. Special measures are required, however, if the dead or the gods of the underworld are to be reached. Poets describe how the suppliant hurls himself on the ground and hammers the earth with his fists.
Tetradrachm (Coin) Depicting the Goddess Persephone
310-307 BCE; Greek, minted in Syracuse, Sicily
The front (obverse) of this coin depicts the head of Persephone facing right with a crown of grain. The back (reverse) depicts Nike seminude holding a hammer and facing a trophy.
"In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don't, then it doesn't." -- Brennan Lee Mulligan, D20, Fantasy High
I pray to you, St. Guinefort,
saintly hound, sweetest friend:
protect me from all evil,
assist me and heal me
when I have to fight the snake alone.
St. Guinefort, faithful guardian,
you gave your life to protect an innocent,
and became a martyr because of your virtue;
most precious among the dogs,
mirabilis, stay by my side
and with the help of God
grant me a peaceful life.
Amen.
The myth of Hades at Pylos has always been one of my favorites because it’s so counterintuitive; having the god of the dead protect people from dying.
The folktale can be summarized as follows: Heracles wants to sack the city of Pylos, Hades exits the underworld to defend it, Heracles wounds Hades and conquers the city. This story was used to explain why the people of the region of Elis worshipped Hades—an unusual practice. Honoring Pluto, the agricultural deity, was relatively common, but having a temple dedicated to Hades, the dreaded king of the dead, was unheard of. I decided to compile all the sources that recount this myth.
1) "Dione, the majestic goddess, answered, “My child, be strong and bear your suffering. Many of us who live on Mount Olympus have suffered at the hands of men, when gods and humans have been injuring each other. […] Along with these, among the dead in Pylos, gigantic Hades suffered when that same Heracles, son of Zeus who bears the aegis, shot a swift arrow, struck him, and consigned him to pain. In his distress, pierced through by torment, he went to high Olympus and the house of Zeus. His heart was troubled by the arrow impaled in his strong shoulder. Paean smeared some anesthetic ointments over it and cured him—since of course he was not mortal.”" - Homer, Iliad (C8th B.C)
2) “For how could Heracles have wielded his club against the trident, when Poseidon took his stand to guard Pylos, and pressed him hard, and Phoebus pressed him hard, attacking with his silver bow; nor did Hades keep his staff unmoved, with which he leads mortal bodies down to the hollow path of the dead.”- Pindar, Olympian Ode 9 (C5th B.C)
3) "Homer says that even Hades (Aidoneus) was shot by Heracles, and Panyassis recounts that it was the Eleian Hades. And this same Panyassis also recounts that Hera, his wife, was wounded by the same Heracles “in bloody Pylos.”"
“Is not Panyassis one of your own, who recounts that both Dis (Hades), the father, and the queen (i.e., Juno = Hera), were wounded by Hercules?”
-Panyassis Fragments (C5th B.C)
4) “He [Hades] who as king lords it o'er countless peoples, what time thou [Heracles] wast making war on Pylos, Nestor's land, brought to combat with thee his plague-dealing hands, brandishing his three-forked spear, yet fled away, with but a slight wound smitten, and, though lord of death, feared he would die.”- Seneca, Hercules Furens (C1st A.D)
5) “After the capture of Elis, he [Heracles] marched against Pylos. He took the city and killed Periclymenos, the bravest of Neleus' sons, who used to change shape as he fought. He killed Neleus too, and all his sons, except for Nestor, who was still a boy and was being brought up amongst the Gerenians. During the battle, he also wounded Hades, who came to the aid of the Pylians.”- Apollodorus, Bibliotheca (C2nd A.D)
6) “It is said that, when Heracles was leading an expedition against Pylos in Elis, Athena was one of his allies. Now among those who came to fight on the side of the Pylians was Hades, who was the foe of Heracles but worshipped at Pylos. Homer is quoted in support of the story, who says in the Iliad : And among them huge Hades suffered a wound from a swift arrow, when the same man, the son of aegis-bearing Zeus, hit him in Pylos among the dead, and gave him over to pains.”- Pausanias, Description of Greece (C2nd A.D)
7) “Heracles plunders Elis, then, and kills Augeas, and Cteatus and Eurytus, sons of Actor, he kills in treachery. And he has even plundered Pylos and wounds Hades; And he gives the kingdom of the Laconians to Tyndareus having killed Hippocoon, who was allied to Neleus.”- John Tzetzes, Chiliades (C12th A.D)
i love how gracelessly, painfully awkward corpses are. i love that the dead inevitably soil themselves with the waste products of living. i love that they rot with a stench that permeates even the strongest barriers; bloat and putrefy and take up space just to lie there, decaying and stinking. i love how uncooperative they are, flopping out of carefully arranged positions or having to be pried apart from rigor mortis death grips one stiff joint at a time; a literal dead weight to carry and entirely unhelpful and ungrateful throughout the whole process. i love that they refuse to stay buried, after all the toil of digging a grave and interring them within, returning in the form of grief and other hauntings so significant and ubiquitous that we have a specific word to articulate it. i love how death refuses to be easy on the living, in body or in mind.
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your mythology and you select out, oh I don’t know, the rape of persephone, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think maturation and sexual development are a kind of death and rebirth. But what you don’t know is that that narrative is not from claudian, it's not from ovid, it's not from callimachus, it’s actually from the oral tradition. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in the seventh century BC, Hesiod the rhapsode composed "Αὐτὰρ ὁ Δήμητρος πολυφόρβης ἐς λέχος ἦλθεν, ἣ τέκε Περσεφόνην λευκώλενον, ἣν Ἀιδωνεὺς ἥρπασε ἧς παρὰ μητρός· ἔδωκε δὲ μητίετα Ζεύς." And then I think it was a certain homeric hymnist, wasn’t it, who elaborated on it with an added narrative of Demeter's wrath? And then demeter's sorrow showed up in the choral odes of several different greek tragedies. Then it filtered down through the Alexandrians and then trickled on down into some tragic augustan vates where you, no doubt, fished it out of some georgic. However, that myth represents thousands of years and countless poets and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from poetry when, in fact, you’re rehashing the "subversions" that were selected for you by the people in that poetic tradition. From a pile of “mythology”.
@not-tyrranosaurus-lex #so like i agree in theory but i do think its interesting that folks choose the like. one greek myth.#that centres the archaic greek female experience of oppression and ownership from men#and “reinterprets” it “feministly” to mean that the grieving mother trying to protect her child from predation & rape is the REAL villain#and in fact the rapist was the good guy all along & liberating the child from her evil shrew relatives who don't want her to FUCK#and its funny that this was the key facet of the myth for millenia even until “modern feminists” were like.#but what if hades was like dramione/zutara/reylo#so i genuinely wonder why there's such a push to reframe this myth to eulogise the rapist & demonise the resisters#and also there's no “true” version of the myth bc *gestures to OP who's right*#but you CAN say that the myth has a defined framework of focus that pretty much every iteration before the 1980s has adhered to#its like if someone rewrote the oedipus myth except jocasta was just a random unconnected unrelated woman#and it's just a regular romcom where the characters are called oedipus and jocasta and there's nothing tragic or taboo at all#in like. yea you can do that. nothing wrong with it. but also are you actually drawing on this myth anymore#like what is the reason you've chosen this specific myth as the basis for this specific kind of story#cuz you've excised its defining element
hiiii OP here (this is my main lol)
my take on the main question you pose here (why did feminist writers/romance writers in recent decades reframe the story as a romance instead of a tragedy) is that the act of reframing it this way was meant to be a form of resistance. that's a very meta way to treat the story, and i think this metapoetic/metatextual purpose is lost on many new authors retelling the story: the act of writing Persephone as a (young) woman who has agency over her sexuality, marriage and romantic prospects liberates her from playing the role of the quintessential victim. so instead of trapping her in an eternal telling and retelling of her violation, those feminist authors chose to liberate her by erasing the abuse and letting the origin of Persephone's power be her choice, rather than her father's or uncle's (knowing that this does not actually erase the older version, but that the contrast between the two has meaning). it's about the agency of the author as much as persephone's agency.
but as you point out, this is not a perfect solution or a universal solution, since it very easily casts demeter as the antagonist, pitting the two women against each other as old vs. young, conservative vs. progressive, prudeish vs. sexually liberated etc. etc., and it somewhat absolves Hades and Zeus. ESPECIALLY when the metatextual purpose of the subversion is not acknowledged, as it often is nowadays- the subversion itself has become derivative and sexist, casting persephone as a sexy young ingenue who abandons her frigid bitch of a mother for tall dark&handsome. while still claiming the feminist badge for writing rape out of the story. yay persephone consents so it's feminist (we will ignore everything else about the interrelationships of the story for convenience).
so my original post was trying to acknowledge that flip- that without actually interacting with what you SO beautifully call a defined framework of focus (on Demeter's wrath and justice), the subversive reiteration has no real meaning. any romantic version of the persephone myth that does not write it as the author's choice to give persephone a choice in the face of an age-old tragedy is actually just a denial of women's suffering. Hence, it’s sort of comical how they think that they've made a choice that exempts them from sexism when, in fact, they’re rehashing the narrative that was selected for them: young hot girl bound to old powerful guy.
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