#Communing with the gods in greek myth always necessitates some kind of sacrifice
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Hi!! I don't know if you remember me, but I'm the person you explained the Castalia thing to a few days ago. I've been following you for a while now, but I just managed to go through your blog well and proper, and I'm here to express both my gratitude for the amount of info and links you've shared (I did NOT know about the hepatoscopy and haruspicy, and I'm about to go down a lengthy rabbit hole) and my horror at once again being given a new hyperfixation (I didn't imagine wanting to read about liver-divination help).
Also, also, are you the author of Exeunt Phoebus Apollo on AO3 because that was the fic that sent me on this greek mythology spree, and it's so good I got obsessed with Apollo, and he's everywhere around me now. Thank you for writing it!
AAAAAA THIS IS SO SWEET?? THANK YOU!! I do remember you and hey man, I'm always happy to help <33
I'm so glad to recruit someone else to my hepatoscopy group because it is a long and storied tradition with many many different types of study and schools of thought dating all the way back to the Sumerians! It's an extremely underrated bit of study when it comes to sketching portraits of divination and prophecy when it comes to adaptations of imaginings of greek myth works - similar to bird augury (which was such a widespread skill that most people had some level of understanding of the basics of what the omens of common birds meant the way people now can look at the clouds over head and know if it'll rain and when approximately that rain'll happen).
It's a great and common misunderstanding that things like prophecy and magic were these fantastic elements that had no tangible features to their practices and while there's nothing wrong with interpreting things as more fantastical for the sake of coolness or aesthetic, I personally think these elements are interesting enough to be worth looking into and portraying!
Also yes, I did write Exeunt 😳I'm very very honoured that you enjoyed my work so much and I'm even more grateful that it could let you see the Apollo in everything 💖 Thank you for reading it!!
#ginger answers asks#HAPPY HARUSPICING!!#Idk man this stuff is just super interesting#I know the Argonauts aren't a very popular tale (for some reason)#But Medea's works of magic are also some of the clearest we get to see descriptions of in text#And part of why the morality of Medea is something that's so widely debated even now is because of what her magic entailed#I personally love stuff like that#Communing with the gods in greek myth always necessitates some kind of sacrifice#The link must literally be made in blood and when mistakes are made or ceremony is ignored#those prices are also paid in blood#now to modern sensibilities it seems cruel or unusual#but many religions in antiquity worked on these bases and the spilling of blood meant more than violence or death or ill omen#There were so many other nuances to it in terms of honour in death or divine death etc etc#One can be very cynical and say 'oh well it doesn't matter they were still killing things and there's nothing cool about that'#And to that I say buddy you're in the wrong hobby#If you can only perceive the spilling of blood whether human or animal as gross/murder/etc etc then you REALLY shouldn't be consuming#pagan culture and tradition LMFAO#Apollo was like#The Butcher God#There's no point is erasing half of his identity to make him some sterile always nice positive good god#He was a hunter a butcher blood stained a sacrificer#Of course blood would be but a language to him#Anyway all of that is to say hepatoscopy is cool and there's a ton of reading to do about it#Fly free my liver brethren!! Fly free!!!!
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