vovat: (Bast)
Actually, this post could be about a lot of different Greek deities, as there seem to be an inordinate amount of them who have names starting with A (or, to be more accurate, alpha). Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Amphitrite, Aeolus...even more if you throw in minor gods. Today, however, I'm focusing on the twins Apollo and Artemis. Apollo is one of the few gods to have the same name in both Greek and Roman mythology, but the Romans changed Artemis' name to Diana, hence ruining the alliteration.


Traditionally, Apollo has many functions, being the god of prophecy, music, medicine, archery, and the arts. Artemis is the perpetually virginal goddess of the hunt and the wilds, protector of children, and a master archer like her brother. Later, however, the twins came to be associated with the sun and the moon, respectively. Why was this the case, when the Greeks already had Helios and Selene to represent those heavenly bodies? Maybe they wanted to streamline their already packed pantheon. I don't know. I've seen some myths that were sometimes about Helios and sometimes Apollo, depending on the version. For instance, whose son is Phaeton, the careless boy who drove the solar chariot too close to the ground and ended up creating the Sahara Desert? Usually Helios, but I'm pretty sure I've seen both. In their celestial roles, Apollo was known as Phoebus, and Artemis less commonly as Phoebe.


Due to their similar functions, Artemis was sometimes also combined with Hecate, the most likely pre-Olympian goddess of witchcraft and the underworld. She's the one who appears twice in Macbeth to converse with the Wyrd Sisters, in scenes that don't really move the story forward.


Apollo and Artemis are children of Zeus, with their mother being the Titaness Leto. When Zeus's wife Hera found out that Leto was pregnant with her husband's children, who were due to change the natural order of things, she forbade the Titaness to give birth anywhere on the mainland or an island. She finally overcame this by giving birth on the floating land of Delos, which didn't technically count as an island. While wandering to try to find such a place, various monsters attacked her. These included the Python, whose story I addressed in this post. I've seen it suggested that the story of the pregnant woman and the dragon from Revelation 12 is essentially a Christianized version of the tale of Leto's pregnancy, which makes sense, considering the Greek influence on the New Testament.
vovat: (Bast)
One theme that comes up in a lot of Greek myths is that of the inevitability of fate. If something is destined to happen, it's going to happen, regardless of how many children you eat or leave on mountaintops. While the concept of fate personified as spinning women seems to have been a pretty early one, it was a little while before the specific idea of the three Moirai developed. I suppose it's not surprising that they ended up being a group of three, as that's a natural number for women in Greek mythology. The most common versions of the myths also refer to three Gorgons and three Graeae (the witches who share one eye and one tooth between them). The three Fates are generally regarded as children of some of the primordial deities, with Nyx (Night) and Erebus (Darkness) being perhaps their most commonly identified parents. Some myths made them the daughters of Zeus and Thetis, but this kind of goes against the idea that the Fates predate the Olympians and operate independently of them. Indeed, how much power Zeus and his ilk had to sway the decisions of the Fates, and how much they were subject to the Moirai themselves, was a matter of some contention among the poets.


The three Fates are named Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; and each one deals with a different part of life. Since there are three, they inevitably came to be associated with past, present, and future; but I don't think that's entirely accurate. The descriptions I've seen generally refer to Clotho as the one who spins the thread for each mortal, Lachesis as the one who determines the length of a person's life, and Atropos as the bringer of death by means of her thread-cutting shears. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that they represent the beginning, middle, and end of life; rather than past, present, and future specifically.


The idea of three spinning women who determine destinies appears in some other mythologies as well. Norse mythology has the Norns, who serve a similar purpose. Actually, sources refer to an entire race of Norns, female deities who have the power to influence the lives of humans. It's possible that the specific idea of three spinning Norns was borrowed from the Greeks, but it's hard to tell. Latvian mythology has Laima, Kārta and Dēkla, another three sisters who determine the fates of mankind, but I don't know that they were ever associated with spinning. And the three wyrd sisters from Shakespeare's Macbeth were obviously a continuation of the same theme, and they really DO specifically reference the past, present, and future.
vovat: (Polychrome)
Continuing the fairy theme from last week, I'm sure you know that the rulers of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream are Oberon and Titania. But what was Shakespeare's own source for these characters? Well, "Oberon" is a French variation on the Germanic name "Alberich," which translates as "king of the elves." Alberich was a dwarf (the difference between elves and dwarves wasn't as distinct as it would become in Tolkien's work) who showed up in the Niebelungenlied, which told the story of the legendary hero Siegfried, and would eventually provide the basis for Wagner's Ring Cycle. The first known literary appearance of the French version of the dwarf's name was in the thirteenth-century epic of Huon de Bordeaux, in which the elf is the diminutive son of Morgan le Fay and Julius Caesar. So the name had a significant history by the time Shakespeare used it for his own fairy king.

The name of Shakespeare's elvish queen, on the other hand, does not have the same literary background as her husband's. In fact, it was almost certainly the first time the name had been used for a fairy. Spencer's Faerie Queene (who, from what I've read, was an allegorical version of Queen Elizabeth I) was named Gloriana, and the Bard himself had made brief mention of a fairy queen named Mab in Romeo and Juliet (in the form of a speech by Mercutio). Shakespeare actually took the name "Titania" from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which it referred to the descendants of Titans. Kind of an odd choice for a fairy queen, but some think that it was because of the similarity between the monarch and Diana, identified by Ovid as one of the Titania. Incidentally, because Saturn's moons are named after figures from classical Greco-Roman mythology and Uranus' after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, our solar system ended up with moons named both Titan and Titania.



From this picture by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, we can tell that Oberon was known to don a party hat on occasion, while Titania regularly walked around topless. And I assume that dark-skinned kid with the pageboy haircut is Puck?
vovat: (Polychrome)
Well, summer is, as they say, icumen in. I believe the actual solstice is tomorrow, but I'm not sure it really matters in the modern United States, where businesses usually use Memorial Day as the beginning of the season. But for the English of the Middle Ages, the beginning of summer was May Day, and Midsummer's Eve was celebrated on the night of 23 June. This was the time that the fairies would meet, and of course fairies were an integral part of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the most prominent fairies, whom I address in this post, is Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow.



The term "puck" or "pooka" had been used for some time prior to the Bard's time to refer to mischievous fairies or devils, but Shakespeare's use of "Puck" to refer specifically to the name of this one particular fairy pretty much solidified the use of Puck as a proper name in popular culture. Within the play, he's the jester at Oberon's court. "Robin Goodfellow" is sort of a nickname, which most likely came from the tradition of not referring to fairies by their proper names, so as not to attract their attention. The euphemistic names usually included some reference to the fay as "good" or "fair," even though they were really often quite nasty, presumably so as not to get their dander up. Puck himself was held responsible for many acts of mischief, including changing his own form to deceive travellers, and making milk sour. He was also occasionally said to do helpful tasks, however, like sewing and housecleaning, and people would sometimes leave out milk for him. In such a role, he's basically a variation on all the stories of hobgoblins, kobolds, and other house-spirits who perform household tasks.

The legendary bandit Robin Hood (appropriate for a mention today, I suppose, seeing as how it's Errol Flynn's birthday) is sometimes viewed as a humanized version of Robin Goodfellow. Robin Hood doesn't have any magical powers, but he DOES live in the forest, dress in green, and have a sense of mischief. Wikipedia says that this is unlikely to have been the source of the outlaw's origins, but it's still an interesting thought.

June 2025

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