If you’ve been pagan very long or interested in classical
Greek literature at all you’ve probably run across the myth of Demeter and
Persophone. You have heard how
Demeter’s daughter was joyful in her youth, frolicking with the nymphs when she
was abducted by Hades and dragged down into the underworld. You may have been party to
discussions about how awful abduction was, the symbolic rape themes, or the
attempt to set such a thing within a cultural context where asking the father
for the hand of a woman was more than enough without asking that woman’s
permission. You may have wondered,
like I have wondered: did
Persophone eat those seeds on purpose?
I’m not going to talk about any of that.
I’m going to talk about breaking the cycle. Let’s review. First we had Gaia, the most primordial earth mother of the
Greek pantheon. She gives birth to her husband, Ouranos who was the big boss,
and then has a passel of children by him.
He stuffs them into the earth rather than letting them out, and she aids
her youngest son Cronos, to kill his own father in order to save his siblings.
Next we had Rhea, the earth mother goddess of the next
generation, who also married Cronos, the high king of this generation. She too
has an entire pantheon worth of children but this time her husband eats the
kids, hiding them within his own body, rather than that of his wife. I wonder
if it caused him the kind of pain it caused Gaia. In the end, due to Rhea’s intelligence and cleverness, the
children are again released, and Olympians are finally born.
There’s a pattern laid out here: fear of the children of sky
and earth and the attempt to escape the inevitability of the next generation
where children are hid away and the youngest son, aided by his mother the
earth, must do battle with his own father for the survival of his siblings
But that’s not what happened here at all. Persephone is the Earth’s daughter in
this generation. She’s not stuffed
into some cave or belly, she’s happy.
She’s frolicking with the tree spirits and picking flowers. Demeter isn’t even married to Zeus, the
earth and sky did procreate and create Persephone, but that’s it. Zeus, as we all know, is married to
Hera, Queen of Gods. The son that
was to have overthrow Zeus was in fact not Hera’s child, nor the Earth’s child
at all, but Metis’s. She was a
goddess of crafty thought and wisdom.
Zeus follows in his father’s footsteps, but this time he doesn’t eat all
his offspring (and a good thing he didn’t too, he had a lot of kids) but he did eat Metis. Athena then bursts from his skull to become
the goddess of wisdom, war, and crafts, and swears to have no children
herself. She is the inheritor of
Zeus and chooses the entirely end the progression of generational battle by
simply not having children.
Is this a perfect outcome? Nope, at least by my standards
it’s not okay to eat your siblings, it’s not okay to give your daughter to your
brother in marriage, and it’s not okay to expect your other daughter to not
procreate so that you can stay King-of-All-the-Things forever. But it’s a damn sight better than what
his parents did.
As much as the generational saga of the Greek Gods reminds
me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, thankfully their
tale doesn’t end with their progeny getting eaten by the jungle. (Sorry for the spoiler!) In the end, there is hope within it as
well as all the various encodings of cultural expectations and symbology. There are echoes of self-reliance, the
complicated relationship of parent to child and husband to wife, and most of
all, the power to take action and make change. Sometimes I think change is all there is. Every once in a while I want to go
found a new sci-fi based religion on Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed. (She’s
amazing. Go read her stuff.)
That’s the thing.
We read to understand. We
learn to create a broader framework for our own ethics, values, and
actions. If the myths and the
stories of the ancients don’t help us do that then they are failing. But they do. Each person may get a different lesson to learn, but within
the macrocosm of the monumental upheavals and drama of the deities we see our
own lives writ large.
Recently I came across an article about how the experiencesof our ancestors directly affects our own genetics. Not only does this mean that the pain and success of the
past truly is ours, but the choices that we make directly affect future
generations. Each of is us caught
in our own generational drama, even if we don’t chose to procreate. I hope my retelling of these tales aids
you in your own thoughts about the future and the past, dear reader.
May the blessings of the Gods and Spirits be upon us all.
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