#myth interpretation

[wisdom-devotee]

How do you interpret the myth of Medusa? I interpret this myth as representing the goddess Athena as implacable and blind justice.

Before I get into this I do want to say that I love interpreting myth, so if anyone else has any other myths they want to chat with me about please feel free! That said, I need to clear a few things up on this one.

The commonly referenced Medusa myth is not by a Greek, but by Ovid who was Roman, writing during the Roman Empire while Greece was a colonised state, and they changed the myths to make the Greeks seem barbaric and awful to their Roman standard of morals. Ovid particularly hated Athena — having also written the Arachne myth.

So, my interpretation of the Medusa myth is that she was always a Gorgon, like her sisters, and that Athena had nothing to do with her becoming that way. The tragedy of Medusa is that when she was killed she was pregnant, which none of them knew. What’s also tragic is that she was the only mortal gorgon, and her sisters mourned her. Their mourning in fact haunted Athena so much she created a musical instrument, similar to a flute, to portray their cries.

Perseus and Athena, however, are not villains in this myth. Perseus killed Medusa to save and protect his mother. If you want to portray a feminist side of Greek mythology, don’t use Medusa. Use the fact that Perseus would do anything to protect his mother. Use the fact that Athena, a woman, is the one who taught him. Use the fact that Medusa and her sisters had so much love for each other that their grief moved a goddess.

People often try to make feminist retellings of these stories that just end up feeling flat, because the women of Greek myth are not inherently unfeminist, and by trying to change them into victims and girlbosses, we lose so much nuance.

Sorry for the tangent — but these things are really important to me as an Athena devotee. I don’t mean to come across as angry or anything.

As a final note, i do need to specify that I don’t think there is anything wrong with using Medusa as a symbol to represent surviving SA, and the tattoos and things people get are gorgeous. Symbols can change meaning over time and this is important. But it’s important to at least be aware of the history, especially as a Helpol.

[aphandgflover]

Actually, if we're talking about a new interpretation of the Persephone & Hades myth, I kinda want to see one where nobody's the villain, or depicted as such. Punderworld did something close, but I'd want it even clearer.

Demeter is not an abusive of overbearing mother, in fact she and Persephone are very close, she's understanding and kind. But, as any mother would after her child was taken without warning, she becomes scared, and angry when she learns she was not even told. She demands her daughter back, not out of possessiveness, but out of love, to make sure that she is okay, that she is happy, and that she is treated the way she should as a goddess.

Persephone does not wish to leave her mother without warning either. She didn't know she would be taken, and after she is, and the marriage is official, she's more or less bound by its rules. She wants to go back, and tell her mother what happened. But she's not unhappy. She loves Hades, who is good to her, and she is much more powerful as the Queen of the Dead than she used to be as merely her mother's daughter.

Hades does kidnap Persephone, as was the custom. He asked her father, Zeus, and trusted him to inform Demeter and Perspehone. He does not realize the mistake until after everything was over. He loves Persephone, he's afraid she might not be able to return, for very little beings may come and go as they please between his realm and the Earth. And she loves him back, so why wouldn't she eat the pomegranate seeds?

Zeus thought Hades would tell the goddesses about the arrangement. His history with goddesses is... complicated, at best. It's not until Demeter comes banging at the doors of Olympus that he realizes the miscommunication. Zeus is King of the Gods, he is also bound by the etiquette, it would be improper to come back on the blessing he gave his brother. Demeter's ultimatum is necessary for him to send Hermes down

And once the whole affair is cleared, once Demeter is reassured and Persephone allowed to come and go, it becomes obvious the real problem was miscommunication, as well as those stupid rules that complicate everything x)

[vioofc]

I need more people to talk about the interpretation of Hades that Kaos (from Netflix) made, because you have no idea how much I love this old rag, it’s such a bash of fresh air after all the edgy bad boy evil muahaha interpretations of Hades(which most of them are also cool to be clear) to let him just be a silly old man trying to do things right, I literally love him so much, he’s adorable and made me appreciate Hades a bit more

[s0rr3l]

who’s a good boy?

@blackknight-kai @jeminiikrystal @marcu-bug @szynkaaa @dunanana @maiden-of-the-waters @rovobeam

[each-uisge-enthusiast]

the modern villainisation of demeter will never cease to enrage me bc it wasn’t ENOUGH to just take a story of a girl being torn from her home from everyone who loved her and dragged away to be forced into marriage and twist and corrupt it until it was a romance story about female empowerment that wasn’t ENOUGH they HAD to take the original hero of the story the mother who went to every length to find her daughter again to bring her home and demonise her character until she was this horrific overbearing unloving mother. overprotective controlling without love. they turn the story of her grief at her YOUNG daughter being torn from her without her knowledge into the story of a misunderstood bad boy and a horrible cruel mother who won’t give him a chance and i really find it sickening. it’s ironic, that the ever misogynist age of hellenistic greece, has a better grasp of how disgusting and horrifying this situation was that a modern, self proclaimed ‘feminist’ era.

[asvidema]

finally got to sit down and draw my interpretation of Penelope, queen of Ithaca, from epic: the musical

also as a bonus, her namesake duck

[thisischaostragic]

Gatsby: An American Myth is a brilliant literary adaptation. it asks: if we bring to the forefront many of the parts that are implied or hinted at in the text, how does that change how we view it?

if Nick and Jordan are undeniably queer, if Gatsby is actually white-passing and not white, if Myrtle and George’s briefly-possibly-alluded-to lost child is actually talked about, how much sharper does the book’s critique of the “lost” American dream get?

this musical refuses to let you ignore the nuances of these characters that were (more or less) *already present* in the book.

Daisy is absolutely a victim, but she is *also* a wealthy white woman who is willing to (literally) throw a working class woman under the bus (car) for her own safety, and who is willing to let a man of color face the consequences of her actions. Tom tricking George isn’t exclusively about getting rid of Gatsby, but also about a wealthy white man setting two marginalized characters against each other so that he doesn’t have to deal with them.

when we get to the end, when we meet Gatsby’s dad and learn that he’s Indigenous, when we contend with how disproportionately the violence impacts marginalized people, the conclusion is no longer that the American dream is lost or broken, but that it was a stolen thing to begin with.

I am sure there are political critiques I (or others) could / will make, but on first impression, I am blown away by how far it went with displaying the horror of the American machine.

[solifloris]

[baejax-the-great]

The tragedy of Achilles isn't that he got mad and was punished for it through the death of his friend.

The tragedy of Achilles is that it took him ten years and a very stupid argument to realize that dying in a pointless war against people who never wronged him was a complete waste of his life and that he valued living over glory, but at that point it was too late to disentangle himself from the cycle of violence that would claim his best friend/lover and inevitably himself.

[kaetor]

do you ever think about how theyre kind of like orpheus and eurydice

[m1nsur0]

“In Mount Huaguo, a day unlike any other unfolded. The Mandrill Chief was leaping through the mountains when she suddenly saw the celestial stone on the mountaintop explode, producing a stone egg. As the wind blew over it, the stone egg transformed into a stone monkey. The Mandrill Chief approached to observe, and the stone monkey began to mimic, learning to crawl and walk.”

- Mandrill Chief In-Game Journal entry

[wisdom-devotee]

Hi!! I was wondering how you would interpret the myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus?

I also was wondering what Epithets i should use for Apollo! I dont really trust a lot of online resources 🫶

That is fair but honestly theoi.com is actually a really good resource that cites its sources and has a lot of info. Now, I can list for you the epithets Apollo has in the Iliad (my translation is E.V Rieu revised by Peter Jones, the Penguins Classics edition) but the issue is that I don’t know what the Greek words are for these since I don’t worship Apollo myself and I personally prefer using Greek words for epithets. But!

Phoebus (relating to Prophecy, as he was given the gift of prophecy by Phoebe)

Archer God

Lycian-born

He’s also sarcastically referred to as “Most benevolent of the gods” by Achilles

Those are all the Apollo epithets from the Iliad i have written in my notes for my classics course, but there’s probably more

You could also check the Homeric hymn to Apollo? And I’m sure people who worship Apollo may be able to help more with this

Anyway, my interpretation of Apollo and Hyacinthus! Thank you so much for this ask!

So as a classicist I do need to talk about what homosexual relationships between men in the ancient world looked like because that’s really important for this myth. But for this I need to say that there’s a bit of a content warning in regards to discussions of things that would have been considered consensual in the ancient world, but by modern standards, no.

The Ancient Greeks had this thing called paiderastia, where you’d have an ‘erastes’ (usually translated as ‘lover’) and an ‘eromenos’ (usually translated as ‘beloved’). People usually simplify this by saying it’s the ‘top and bottom’ in the relationship but things go a bit deeper than that because in paiderastia, the erastes acts as a mentor as well as a lover. The eromenos was usually younger, I don’t want to say always because you never know but that is a large part of this social custom. By modern standards the eromenos would be considered underage (I believe the youngest they’d be is 14)

As far as I’m aware, Hyacinthus is not underage, but he is described in the myths as being very beautiful and he is the youngest of the Spartan princes at this time, AND the festival at Amyclae based on him and Apollo is a coming of age ritual which is also suggestive of paiderastia. And Apollo himself, while being a depiction of ideal beauty in a young man, has a mentoring role over him. So symbolically, yeah. Pretty similar.

Now, Plutarch writes in Life of Lycurgus that paiderastia “was not competitive: instead it became the basis for genuine friendship between those who had the same object of their affections, and helped to sustain a long-term shared determination to mould the character of their beloved to the highest level of perfection.”

Which is where we get into the actual myth interpretation I have. Because I think Apollo and Hyacinthus is a depiction of this kind of relationship going… very tragically wrong. Not because of any abuse, of course, but still wrong.

Apollo and Zephyr both have the same ‘object of their affections’ — this being Hyacinthus, but instead of forming a ‘genuine friendship’ over their love for him, but instead Zephyr let his jealousy get the best of him and this resulted in Hyacinthus dying tragically. It’s interesting that Apollo is not always presented as being a completely innocent party. While it is always maintained that it was an accident, it is suggested that the fact the accident was able to occur at all was due to Apollo being careless. Both of Hyacinthus’s lovers absolutely failed him. The end result was devastating for Apollo.

Paiderastia is kind of uncomfortable to talk about but it’s necessary when discussing the social and cultural context that these myths were trying to explain and describe. I think in a modern day the myth can be taken to a wider interpretation of just the fact that jealousy and recklessness have no place in a relationship and only lead to suffering for all involved parties. Apollo and Zephyr truly loved Hyacinthus. They still managed to hurt him.

Hyacinthus is also one of a few mortal lovers of gods who are turned into flowers upon their deaths (another example being Adonis with Aphrodite) and I don’t remember who said it but I’ve heard someone mention how it could be in relation to flowers being seen as very delicate, as mortal lives are to the gods. However they’re also beautiful, as Apollo saw Hyacinthus and Aphrodite saw Adonis.

Additionally it has similarities to the myth of Hades and Persephone and the myth of Zeus and Ganymedes (that one specifically being another paiderastic relationship) in that it’s a death myth, supposed to represent the tragedy of a youth dying before they reasonably should have. Grief is as central to it as love is.

I hope this makes sense, it’s late here lol

[sincerely-sofie]

It’s Narilamb fankid hours.

[skeptiiciizm]

My wife said Aphrodite and Hermes are gelphie coded bcus of their colors so thats what inspired me to draw Apollo(employed theatre kid) referencing Wicked. Also Aphrodite x Ares and Hermes and Ares

[ephemeral-roses]

Okeanos and Tethys really dodged an actual bomb because if the Greek myth community didn't focus on the Olympians and their cheating habits so much, they would have been deemed the most horniest and joked about for it all of the time by the fact that they have 3,000 daughters and an undetermined amount of sons (their sons personify rivers around the world, so you can only imagine how many sons they got) easily surpassing Zeus and Poseidon, who are often joked about being the most horniest of the gods.

[huntseric]

When does a comet become a meteor? When does a candle become a blaze? // I can take the suffering from you.