τὴν δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀθάνατοι φίλαντο, μέσῳ δέ οἱ αἰθέρι τέκμαρ ἀστερόεις στέφανος ☆ her the deathless gods themselves loved, and amidst the heavenly aether her starry crown is fixed as a sign
Marble statue of an armed Aphrodite, from Nea Paphos. 3rd or 4th c. CE.
“Aphrodite was well known as the armed Aphrodite. The goddess of love was also the goddess of war. She was known in Cyprus as the goddess armed with the spear, an epithet noted by Hesychius... In Sparta, Cythera and Corinth, Pausanias tells us that he saw statues or very old cult figures of an armed Aphrodite. It must be noted that the cult of the armed Aphrodite characterized two of her most Phoenician cult places in Greece, Cythera and Corinth, and also her cult place in the warlike city of Sparta...
“...the Nea Paphos Aphrodite is different from other known examples of the type. It does not have the insouciant mood of an Aphrodite pretending to arm herself. It is the only statue of the type representing Aphrodite holding a sword above her head in an attitude of threatening her enemies. The goddess is nude, but there is a drapery that seems to have been attached to the buttocks or rear of the thighs. She wears a shoulder belt to hold the missing sword. She is an armed goddess threatening her enemies and protecting her followers, but she is also the Lady of Love and the ideal of feminine beauty.”
— Jacqueline Karageorghis, Kypris: the Aphrodite of Cyprus
The sea was pregnant of Aphrodite from the Sky. But what sort of pregnancy it was, secret accounts of it oblige us to keep it secret. But finally the goddess had to be born. As soon, the sea stopped and calmed down, swelling in mild waves at the place of the birth.
Photius (9th c. CE) quoting Himerios (4th c. CE), translated by Jacqueline Karageorghis (20th c. CE)
I will soon be receiving a copy of Kypris: The Aphrodite of Cyprus by the late Dr. Jacqueline Karageorghis, which is as far as I can tell the only serious study of any length of the goddess Aphrodite in her original historical and prehistorical context. It’s a very rare and expensive book that looks like it has a lot of useful information.
It’s true that this is a predominantly Cypriot-focused book, and my interest is mainly in Minoan Crete; I’m of the opinion that Cyprus and Crete were simply the dominant forces in the West and the East of a shared Cypro-Minoan island-culture milieu. The book should be very useful to my studies.
I’ll be posting summaries, quotes, and pictures here as I read the book, so I’d like to ask my followers to tell me what aspects of the pre-Hellenic Aphrodite they’re most interested in hearing more about. Her duality? Her martial aspect? Her demigod lovers? Something else entirely? Let me know so I can keep an eye out as I read and report on the book.
...to the benevolent gods of the Underworld, to the underground Dionysos, and to the motherly mistress of the Land of the Dead, those who send the living creatures up and then take them back again to themselves. To them the tragic heroes return.
Oedipus: Two Essays, by Carl Kerényi, first published in 1968. As translated from the German by Jon Solomon.
is that true power and salvation rests entirely on the invisible goddess inside His stories, sometimes called Semele, sometimes called Ariadne or Aridela, sometimes called Ino or Leucothea, sometimes called Rhea or Kybele, Persephone, Aphrodite, whatever the Orphics said--
a true Theia veiled in the body of a god, weaving her own mad narrative in the dark behind her glorious ascendant Son.
Commission from @utterlypure of their original character~ thanks for commissioning me! It was super fun to do really~
☙ support me?: commissions | ko-fi ❧
A few months ago I wrote a story of an early form of the goddess I sometimes call Ariadne, attempting to create her version of the Descent of Inanna or the Rape of Persephone. I’m not sure it entirely went as planned--but nevertheless, here it is.
Please be warned that it contains themes of monstrosity and sexual violence.
Let me tell you about the Kore Ariadne. Let me tell you about the Maiden Most Pure. Some called her Inanna or Anath and some called her Aphrodite. These are all facets of a kind. We do not know what the name is for the particular facet I'm writing about. It was lost, as so many things are.
Now these names I have given are often said to belong to "love-and-war goddesses," as if that were a sufficient description. What the Kore Ariadne really was, however, is a goddess of love and sovereignty. She could not help loving, freely and with abandon, and the power and passion of that love gave her the strength to dominate all before her and become the Queen of Heaven and Earth.
You might call her the original sacred whore, selling her love to all humanity for the price of sovereignty over them.
Later scholars might try to say in dry words that her power lay in her ability to perform sexuality, to perform gender and its intersection with sex. She was the goddess of genderfuck and she wielded love and desire like an instrument of war to dominate the world before her.
The Kore Ariadne came to the island that ruled the known world (Crete, for now I'm talking about Crete) from the south or the east--exotic lands--emerging from the star-studded sea, as love goddesses do, in all her radiant glory. And she loved and she conquered without a single regret, although many of her romances ended in tears and many lesser gods and spirits tried to deny her dominion.
Without regrets, she danced to show the world her love. She made great works for the people, and she did magic.
So impressed was God above with her power and her beauty that he extended his hand to her and offered to make her his bride, urging her, "Wild queen, you will ascend to my side and have the great honor of bearing my holy son; I will do you the great honor of yoking you to my divine chariot."
The Kore Ariadne only laughed, and she told him, "I have no desire to yoke myself to your chariot to reach the stars that are my birthright, and my body is fit for loving and dancing, not bearing children." And she turned away from his offer.
But the Kore Ariadne was not the only Wild Sovereign of Heaven and Earth, and God above was not the only lawful native Power of the holy island. As he ruled in the heavens and the mountains, another old god ruled below and in the raging seas, over storms and violence, death and monsters, plague and disaster, brute strength and poison and wild opposition to the lawful order. His name, like hers, has been lost. Perhaps it lies somewhere in between Set and Typhon. Call him the fateful serpent, for he was undeniably the monstrous serpentine aspect of God above, who held in his fangs the death of all things.
And this Typhonic God was the one to whom God above sent an invitation in that time, though in ordinary days Typhon would never have been invited to God’s table; in ordinary days the serpent would have been shunned. But now God plied the fateful serpent with his own heady salt-wine, and he showed the fateful serpent the sight of the Kore Ariadne dancing in fields of flowers.
Wild and full of lust from the wine, the fateful serpent saw the Kore Ariadne dancing in fields of flowers, and he said, "That belongs to me; I am the god of all things strange and foreign, and this wild love goddess from the sea is meant to be my wife. She is meant to bear my son."
God above blessed the fateful serpent's plans, and told him, "You can take her."
The fateful serpent placed a lure before the Kore Ariadne as she danced: a boy or girl as beautiful as a narcissus flower, perfect for her to love. Of course she embraced them.
As the maiden goddess and her false lover lay amidst the flowers, the ground below opened up, and the serpent emerged in all his power. He raged around the Kore Ariadne and stormed her off as his prize, stole her away into the depths of death and terror that he ruled.
There in the dark, the wine-dark of the sea, he forced himself upon her, this fearsome monster. She fought him, but in the end her indomitable will broke and she pleaded with him to spare her life. But he pushed the seeds of his otherworld down her throat and made her drink his bitter wine, and she was bound to his lands forever.
When the Kore Ariadne awoke again, she was no maiden any longer. She was a monster now, marked in secret places by the scales and claws and teeth of her unwanted lover. No longer did her love nourish the world above, and with her star gone from the skies, crops dried up and failed to flower, and no living creature could raise their equipment to the task of making love.
But the fateful serpent was satisfied. He said to her then in the dark, "You are bound to my will now, and you will bear my son like this. That is a fate no woman or goddess can withstand. Your divine soul will be shattered into a thousand thousand pieces when you bear him. This is your fate."
In view of her lord, she remained Ariadne and bowed her head to him. But in the hidden darkness of her underworld prison she sang secret words of lament that summoned from her tortured heart her most favored subject, her minister and holy servant Perseis Hekateia.
"My beloved," she said to her minister, "I am a monster now, and I am going to be a mother."
"Then," said Perseis Hekateia, "do you bare your teeth in anger and sorrow or in a grand grin of joy?"
"Who knows?" said Echidna, fanged she-viper of the sharpest teeth, bride of the lord of death and terror. "Either way, I bare these fangs to the world here in the dark, though they still dream of my gently smiling face."
"What do you ask of me, my lady?" asked her beloved right hand.
"Bring to me my tools," said the hidden goddess to her beloved servant. "Bring me the instruments with which I weave and craft my spells."
To the bright world now forbidden to the veiled goddess, her minister struck out a path through the wine-dark sea. She retrieved the instruments of the holy goddess: the needle and thread, the sistrum, the knife, and such mysterious tools; she brought them to her mistress in the dark.
And Echidna thanked her with a sacred kiss. And to Perseis Hekateia she gave the sacred knife, for with her own monstrous teeth and claws she no longer had a need for it. But the sistrum and the needle she kept and would make use of.
So there in the hidden dark, the once-maiden goddess worked magic as she always had. As the seed of the fateful serpent grew and poisoned her holy body from within, making her more a monster and more a mother every day, she continued to work magic. She shook the sistrum and she danced, and she worked magic with her body and her tools.
At last, there in the dark, she accomplished her goal; she crafted a secret name for a secret mother, and she blessed the child within her in the name of Semele.
And at last, there in the dark, her body could withstand no more, and she entered the chambers of the god of death and terror and knelt before him, tormented and monstrous and on the eve of her own destruction.
"Will you bear me my son now?" asked the fateful serpent.
"I will bear you a son now," said Echidna, "but he will be my son, and he will conquer the earth in my name and not yours. All his days upon the earth he will yearn for me, the mother who blessed and sanctified him with love and magic and power, who haunts his dreams and desires. And before he finally ascends to take the heavens as well for his own, he will return here to the depths and the dark, and he will lead me out back to the stars."
The fateful serpent had no patience for such displays of will, and to this he unleashed the full force of his monstrous power upon the goddess; he subjected her to his poison and his madness in all his true glory.
This even she could not withstand, and as he had promised her eight months before, the fateful serpent truly destroyed the Kore Ariadne on that day. He ripped the divine child from her belly, and he tore out her tongue and slashed her throat, and he left her broken and mad before his throne, chained to the earth of his lands--bound to her fate as the Typhonic Hera.
But the child's blood was the holiest wine, and nothing would stop him from conquering the earth in his mother's name. He was the son of Semele, and one day he would rescue her from the depths.
For now, though, he would bring life and sex back to the land as soon as he set foot upon it.
Hi, I absolutely love your blog. I read the whole of your Ariadne tag, but i still haven't found what I'm (unsuccessfully) trying to find out for the couple of days now. How did she die and how was she resurrected? Did Dionysus have to do something to bring her back to life? I would much appreciate any information about it, if you could help me. Maybe you're planning a post about it? Would be really awesome :)
Thank you very much for your kind words! :)
So, the reason you’re not finding a definitive answer there is…there isn’t one. Greek mythology doesn’t have a “canon” answer for most questions, because it’s an assortment of conflicting tales from many different sources.
Ariadne dies a lot in these tales, in many different ways. Our first recorded direct mention of her is in Homer’s Odyssey, where a single sentence notes that before she and Theseus could get it on, they stopped at the isle of Dia just off Crete and Artemis struck her down “on the testament of Dionysos.” The implication here is probably that she was already married to Dionysos (or considered by Homer to “belong” to him in some way) and Artemis, as the goddess of childbirth-as-punishment-for-losing-virginity, served as his avenger in punishing Ariadne’s infidelity. There’s no information about whether Dionysos brought her back after this.
Our next information on Ariadne’s death and immortality comes from Hesiod in the 8th or 7th centuries BCE; he simply says that Zeus made her immortal for the sake of Dionysos. No details.
Diodorus Siculus, writing the first century BCE, just says that “after her death” Dionysos immortalized her by putting her crown in the stars. He doesn’t have information on how her death happened, although he may have linked it to her marriage to Dionysos, as he observed that Ariadne “was never seen again” afterwards.
Plutarch, writing in the first or second centuries CE, is the first source to observe that there are many stories about Ariadne’s life and death (as there would have been by that point, almost fifteen hundred years after the first discovered mention of “the mistress of the labyrinth”). According to him, “some say” she hanged herself on the island where Theseus abandoned her (be that Dia or Naxos). He also says, rather interestingly, that on the island of Amathus (a major seat of Aphrodite worship), she was worshiped as an aspect of Aphrodite, and the story went that in addition to there being a divine Ariadne who was married to Dionysos, there was a mortal Ariadne who had died in childbirth with the sons of Theseus.
Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, is the first writer we know of who implies Ariadne died when Dionysos went to war with Perseus. Nonnus, writing his own epic version of the Dionysiac mythos in the 5th century CE, goes with this take, explaining that Perseus used the head of Medusa to turn Ariadne to stone.
This is all the direct information we have about Ariadne’s deaths. We have virtually none about her resurrection, save for several generic passages about how she was somehow “made immortal” as the wife of Dionysos. These conflict with some accounts (generally later ones, especially by Nonnus) where she remains in the underworld in her bitterness about her fate, and sometimes because Dionysos has taken up with new love interests.
There is, however, a tale that was taken for granted at the time, but which we only have later versions (Nonnus’s Dionysiaca) and parodies (The Frogs) to go by now: Dionysos was famous for descending to the underworld to rescue his mother, Semele. Some modern scholars say we can assume he brought up Ariadne at this point as well.
In my opinion it’s likely there’s mystery cult at work here, making it difficult for us to retrieve clear information. Multiple scholars (both Carl Kerenyi and his daughter Cornelia Isler-Kerenyi come to mind off the top of my head) have observed that in myth it’s difficult to completely tell Semele and Ariadne apart; in ancient iconography it can be hard to identify just who the women hanging out with Dionysos are. Random maenads? Aphrodite, said to be his “companion” by the Orphics? Semele, who he later crowned the queen of the maenads? Ariadne, his bride? The only woman seen with Dionysos in ancient imagery that we can usually easily identify is Persephone, who the Orphics said was his mother.
TL;DR: We just don’t know. We have some hints, but that’s it.
My theory is that Ariadne was one name and story attached to a complex Mystery goddess associated with Dionysos in various forms: as his mother (Semele/Persephone); as his bride (Ariadne/Aphrodite); as his often nymph-like maenadic nurses (Ino is often given as a name here, although she’s also said to be a mortal woman who was Semele’s sister and was later transformed into a sea goddess, Leukothea, after Hera persecuted her to her death); and possibly even as his persecutor (Hera herself).
The story of Dionysos is largely defined by the women in his life. One of his primary motivating factors is spreading his glory specifically as the son of Semele; his ascension to godhood is not finished in most accounts until he’s descended to the underworld to rescue her. His young life is mostly determined by the care of his nurses and Hera’s attempts to destroy him. Later accounts would add that Rhea (in the context of her identification with Cybele) rescued him from his Hera-induced madness and taught him her rites; it’s possible this is also a reflection of earlier associations with an ecstatic mountain-mother goddess of Crete. And of course there’s Ariadne.
But we know very little for sure about these women. We have to make inferences.
All about Ariadne, thanks to me being reunited with Photoshop. Notes on sources below.
Most of my raw data comes from original Classical sources. You can find the majority of them on Ariadne's page at Theoi.com.
A number of my claims, however, are inspired by modern scholars and their interpretations. Carl Kerenyi, as one of the few scholars of Dionysos to discuss Ariadne, is prominent among them; his book Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life has been very valuable to me, despite occasional pitfalls due to how dated it is.
Discussions of Ariadne's place in ancient Greek art and iconography are informed by Cornelia Isler-Kerenyi's work Dionysos in Archaic Greece: An Understanding through Images.
