Juno: The Wrathful Matron

Hello all!  I hope you had a lovely weekend.  The end of the semester is approaching, so I've been swamped with homework.  I wish all my fellow students luck - hang in there!  The end is in sight!

This week we're going to be talking about Juno, queen of the Roman gods.

Juno is a very interesting character, because she reigns in matters both domestic and militant.  She can be gentle and nurturing, or vengeful and warlike.  It all depends on her mood, and who is involved in any given situation.

Let's start with her gentle nature.

Juno is the wife of Jupiter, king of the gods.  She is viewed as a matron, because she is the mother of many of the rest of the pantheon.  Juno is also considered the goddess of marriage.  Women in particular worship her, and weddings were done with offerings to her in hopes of the goddess' blessing.

One of Juno's titles was "Regina", meaning "beautiful".  This automatically made me think of the character of the Evil Queen in Once Upon a Time...who actually has a lot in common with Juno!

She is also sometimes associated with the moon, considered a light deity.  Her sacred animal was the peacock - in fact, most images of her show her either accompanied by the bird or holding one of its feathers.

Of course, Juno isn't all sweet motherly affection.  The Roman epic The Aeneid refers to her as "baleful Juno in her sleepless rage", and it is accurate.  When vexed, Juno is the embodiment of wrath.  They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Juno is the proof of that!

The Roman equivalent of the Greek Hera, Juno shares her counterpart's vengeful schemes against her husband's mistresses.  However, Juno is also shown to seek revenge on those who have wronged her in other ways...and once her anger is provoked, it takes a lot to quell it.

I'll use the Aeneid as my example for this post.

The story of the Aeneid follows the Greek epic of The Iliad, which covers the events of the Trojan War.  The war began when a man named Paris was told to choose which of three goddesses was the most beautiful.  In the Greek Iliad, the goddesses are Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena.  Each goddess promised him great rewards if he chose her, and in the end Paris picked Aphrodite, for she had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world - Helen.

Now, most mortal women would be angry at a man who said another woman was more beautiful than they.  Take that anger and put it in godly proportions.  Hera was pissed, and she swore revenge upon Paris and all of his people.  Those people happened to be the Trojans, and her anger caused many problems throughout the Trojan War.

In fact, those problems persisted even after the end of the war.  The Aeneid follows a survivor of Troy, Aeneas, as he desperately tries to lead his people to safety and start a new home.  Aeneas was destined to settle a new home in Italy for his people, who would be the ancestors of Rome.  Hera's anger continues in her counterpart, Juno, who knows of his destiny but is determined to fight it out of spite for Aeneas.

His adventures are very long, and the trials Juno puts him through many.  She calls in a favor from a wind god and blows his ships far off course; she teams up with Venus, goddess of love, to make Aeneas fall for and 'marry' a queen in hopes of keeping him from making it to Italy; she incites thoughts of war in both his people and those already in the land he hopes to settle.  There's a lot more problems Juno sends his way, but you get the idea.  She made his life as miserable as she possibly could.

Eventually, Juno accepts the fact that she cannot change destiny.  She dissolves her grudge against Aeneas, on the condition that his people adopt a new name for themselves in their new land, therefore abolishing all traces of Troy and the Trojan people.

Her wish is granted.  Aeneas' descendants (including Romulus and Remus) go on to settle the land, found the city of Rome, and become the Roman people.

What do you guys think of Juno?  I find her dual loving/vengeful nature to be very interesting!

I'll end with this picture.  While it's actually of Zeus and Hera, not Jupiter and Juno, it was just too gorgeous to not share.

Take care, and I'll talk to you guys next week!

Bacchus/Dionysus: Wine and a Good Time...Mostly

Today's post is going to be about both a Roman god and a Greek one, because I realized belatedly that I hadn't talked before about Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.  Most of the stories I know for the Roman god Bacchus apply to his Greek personality, so I thought I'd do a post that covered both.

I believe I've mentioned Dionysus in a few posts, though I never actually talked about just him.  Dionysus is one of what I like to refer to as "the party gods".  My mythology teacher referred to he and Aphrodite as being gods of, essentially, "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."  What I hope you take from this is that Dionysus is primarily the god of a good time.  He rules over the vine and the grape...and, of course, the wine that comes from the grape.

Bacchus is the Roman form of Dionysus, and he is likewise the god of drinking and partying.  Celebrations and festivals in worship of Bacchus were called "bacchanalia", a word which translates to "a drunken revelry".  I've heard it used in various TV shows (usually British in nature) to describe carousing around college campuses.  Minus the hangover in the morning, Dionysus/Bacchus sounds like a pretty good god to worship...right?

Well...kind of.

The devotees of this god are shown in the story to be a little crazy.  In fact, I seem to recall some comments in my mythology class about them acting like they were on PCP, and it's not far off.  This is best shown by an old Greek play about Dionysus called The Bacchae, which I shall try to highlight below.

Dionysus was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Semele.  Zeus, up to his usual tricks, had taken a different form when he bedded the human.  He was quite fond of Semele, and one day when she begged him for a favor he promised one to her without waiting to hear what it was.

Big mistake.

Semele desired to look upon Zeus' true face - a desire fanned by a jealous Hera, wife of Zeus, who was unamused to see her husband keeping yet another mistress.  The true forms of the gods are too much for any mortal to behold.  Zeus was compelled to keep his word, but doing so caused Semele to spontaneously burst into flame.

The child in Semele's womb, Dionysus, was saved, and Zeus sent him to be raised by a group of nymphs.  However, the boy god always remembered his mother fondly.

The main premise of The Bacchae is Dionysius returning for vengeance upon his mother's family, none of whom believed her when she said she had become pregnant by Zeus.

Now, the female followers of Dionysus are called maenads.  They are the ones who miiight be on drugs.  Their devotion to the god makes them insanely strong, fast, and willing to do anything in his name.

For the first part of his vengeance, Dionysus makes his three aunts his loyal servants, turning the naysayers into maenads.  These women are royalty, supposed to be quite haughty and civilized...but in the name of the god they quite literally tear animals to pieces with their bare hands.

But wait!  There's more!

The current king of the city is Pentheus, the son of one of Dionysus' aunts.  He doubts in the stories of Dionysus' divinity, and of the wooing of Semele (if it can be called that) by Zeus.

The story of vengeance is long and complicated, for Dionysus plays mind games with Pentheus throughout the play to attempt to make him recognize the god as divinity.  In the end, as Pentheus is beginning to realize that maybe Dionysus truly is a god, Dionysus sics his female relatives upon him.

Pentheus is torn limb from limb by his own mother, who then proudly carries her son's decapitated head back to her own father.  She presents her "trophy" to him and is confused when he is horrified instead of pleased - besotted in her devotion to Dionysus, the woman thinks the head is that of a mountain lion she has slain.

Still confused, she hangs it up on display and calls for Pentheus to come and marvel at her kill...at which point Dionysus allows his powers to wear off of her, so that the woman can see that she murdered her own son in the most violent fashion imaginable.

The story ends with Dionysus' three aunts being sent off into exile.  Dionysus declares that his grandfather and his wife shall be turned into snakes to complete their punishment.

The god's vengeance is complete.

Most people think of Dionysus - and, by extension, Bacchus - as being the god of a good time.  This is accurate.  However...neither one is a god you want to cross.

If you get a chance, I'd hugely recommend reading The Bacchae.  It's a fascinating play, very well written, and I quite enjoyed it.

I'll see you guys next week!

Vesta: The Fires of Rome

Hey all!  I hope you had a fantastic weekend!

This is somewhat off-topic for this blog, but I stumbled across a fantastic short science-fiction story today called The Governess with a Mechanical Womb, by Leena Likitalo.  It's a haunting story that I think will stick with me for some time.  If you're a sci-fi fan, I hugely recommend it.  You can read the whole thing here.

Now, on with my post!

One of my favorite gods in the Greek pantheon is Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home.  If you didn't read my post about her, Hestia is a rarely mentioned deity in the Greek myths who is nonetheless powerful enough to stand up to the gods.  She ruled over the hearth and the home, which sounds innocuous but was incredibly important.

Vesta is essentially Hestia made even more powerful.

I've mentioned that honor and duty were incredibly important to the Romans.  So too was home - in fact, those three were inexplicably intertwined, with a sense of duty to home, whose family's honor was to be preserved.

I'm doing a very lousy job of explaining this, but home was even more important to the Romans than it was to the Greeks.  The way they viewed home was also rather different.  Rome itself was viewed as the ultimate home, to which every person belonged.  Duty came first and foremost to Rome, and then to an individual's house.

Vesta represented Rome.

Much like her Greek counterpart, Vesta was represented by the hearth fire of every home.  One such fire was kept going at a temple in Rome, and was not extinguished all year.  Every year in March the fire was rekindled, and it was serviced all year long to keep the blaze going in honor of the goddess.  So long as it burned, Vesta was thought to be protecting Rome.

This fire was tended to by a group called the Vestal Virgins.  Vesta herself was a virgin goddess, and so any women who were sworn to her servitude were to be virgins as well.  It was a very powerful position for a woman to have, but the consequences could be deadly if they went back on their oaths.  A woman found to have lost her virginity while a servant of Vesta could be buried alive as punishment.

One famous Vestal Virgin was Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus - another way in which the two men were tied to the deities of Rome.

Now, Vesta is often represented in mythology as an unimportant, domestically centered goddess.  After all, her domain was the fireplace - a place around which cooking was done, meals were eaten, and family time was spent.  How powerful could such a goddess truly be?  Isn't she more of a deity for women?

Let me clear this up for you:  everyone in Rome worshipped Vesta.  I do mean everyone.  One of the most famous characters in Roman literature is Aeneas, hero of the Aenead.  Aeneas is one of the great heroes of Roman history/mythology - he is the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, one of the survivors of the battle of Troy.  He has been called the Roman equivalent of Odysseus and Achilles.

Aeneas offered prayers to Vesta.

A male, a strong, virile warrior, prayed to the goddess many think of as being domestic.

I'll end with a quote from one of my source books, which also refers to Vesta as a guardian deity of the Roman state:

"...this goddess of the family hearth-fire was adopted as guardian of the holy fire in the city of Rome...the holy fire of Vesta was the hearth-fire of the city and, indeed of the Empire.  Eventually temples in her honour, containing her undying fire, were set up in cities throughout the Roman world.  If the fire ever went out the Romans recognized it as a very serious portent and expected disaster to follow, for her cult came to symbolize the undying power of Rome."

Take care, and I'll see you guys next week!

Pluto (The God, Not the Planet)

Pluto is an interesting character in Roman mythology.  He has been equated to Hades, the Greek god of the dead - and, while the two certainly have similarities and tales in common, there are also quite a few distinctions.  For starters, Hades is usually portrayed as solely the god of the dead in the Greek myths.  Pluto maintains this duty, but is also given rule over all things beneath the earth...which includes a lot of gemstones and precious minerals.  As such, Pluto is the god of wealth.

 

 

Pluto shares Hades' story of taking a bride.  You can read the full Greek version here, but the Roman myths change the names to Pluto, who takes Proserpina (Greek: Persephone) for his wife, whose mother Ceres (Greek: Demeter) then searches the world for her.

One of the things that intrigues me the most about Pluto are the number of names he bears in Roman mythology.  Pluto is also often referred to as Dis, or as Orcus.  I have read works that state that these are actually three distinctive gods, with each ruling over a certain thing - Pluto ruling over the underworld, Dis the god of wealth, and Orcus the bringer of death.  Others say that these three names each refer to the same being, simply representing a different aspect of the god.

I have also read theories that Pluto was not actually the name of the god of the underworld, but the name people applied to him so that they could speak it out loud.  You see, talking about the god of death by name was considered very unlucky.

 

 

 

(Not particularly relevant to the post, but I had to.)

 

This is part of why there are not as many depictions of Pluto - or of Hades, for that matter - in ancient art.  Death was something that people didn't want to talk about and didn't want to depict.  It's entirely possible that Pluto was a name they used to refer to death without actually using his name...in modern terms, much like saying "You-Know-Who" instead of "Voldemort".

Whatever the case, Pluto is definitely intriguing.

One of my favorite stories about Pluto is actually shared in both Greek and Roman mythology.  It involves the poet Orpheus, who was the finest musician of his age.

Orpheus had recently been married to a beautiful woman named Eurydice, with whom he was very much in love.  All was well for a short time, but one day while out in the woods she happened to step on a snake.  She was bitten, and the poison very quickly killed her.

The man was crushed by the death of his beloved.  He mourned her through his music, and soon an idea struck him.  Orpheus sought out the gates of the underworld and descended to the palace of Pluto.  He took up his lyre and began to play and sing, beseeching Pluto to release his beloved's spirit and return her to life.

 



I'll let Ovid take over:

"These words, accompanied on the plucked string, so moved the bloodless spirits that they wept...Then, for the first time ever, overcome by the effects of the song, the Furies wept, nor could Persephone reject his prayer, nor he who rules the underworld deny him; Eurydice was called up from her place among the newly dead..."

(I find it very interesting to note that Pluto is not mentioned by name.  Instead, he is "he who rules the underworld".)

The story ends in tragedy, of course.  It's actually quite similar to the Japanese tale of Izanagi and Izanami.  Orpheus was given strict instructions to not look back at his wife's spirit until they had ascended from the underworld.  Right before they exited he began to doubt and glanced back, and she was forced to remain dead due to his lack of faith.

 

Still, I think it's a beautiful story. I love that Pluto, god of the dead, a deity most people find fearful, was moved to tears by the power of love and willing to return a woman to life to be with her beloved.

I'll end my post with that, and see you guys next week!