Copying a comment from a previous post on misinformation and Medusa as a feminist symbol in the ancient world
In ancient Greek mythology Medusa was just a gorgon; a monster who lived with her sisters and hated mankind and killed people just 'cause they were monsters who wanted to kill people. In the earlier periods like the archaic she's depicted as hideous and terrifying. (See [here](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/medusa-gorgon-temple-of-artemis-corfu-pediment.jpg) and [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Gorgona_pushkin.jpg/800px-Gorgona_pushkin.jpg) and [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Gorgoneion#/media/File:OlympiaGorgo_retouched.jpg) for examples) Later, the depictions evolved to be a beautiful woman with snake hair, but still with origins of a monster. (See [here](https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/P23.2.html) for an ancient Greek example)
By the time Ovid was writing the *Metamorphoses*, the Romans were used to a Medusa who looked something like [this](https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/Z47.4.html). There's a much longer way to explain Ovid's *Metamorphoses,* but the important part to acknowledge was that he often changed the myths he was working with in order to make the gods (and thus, the Emperor) look like dicks. So he created a story where Medusa was originally human, not gorgon, and was only transformed because she was assaulted by Neptune and punished by Minerva for being assaulted, because the gods are dicks. It's never really presented as any sort of empowering story, because it's being told by Perseus, who is travelling with Medusa's head after already killing her. [Here's](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D4%3Acard%3D706) a link to a translation of it. (I love Ovid, but I would not call him a feminist)
Using the gorgon head (*gorgoneion*) as a way to ward off evil/wrongdoers was a thing, but it wasn't used for specifically female spaces. It was on a lot of things: shields, temples, mosaics, etc. It's a *really* old tradition, where monster heads were meant to scare off evil spirits or people who intended to do wrong. It's usually using the archaic, ugly, depiction of Medusa. The idea of Medusa as a feminist protector is 21st century new.
Not quite sure where OP is getting the three versions of Arachne from. The only ancient full account of the myth comes from Ovid. [This website compiles all references to her in ancient texts.](https://www.theoi.com/Heroine/Arakhne.html)
So what you’re saying is: Tumblr is not a great place to learn because misinformation is rife within the website and people should cross reference any new information presented on the platform
Seems reasonable
Personally I like when people try to frame the rampant pederasty in Greece as Greece being pro gay, like... Are you sure you want to go that route? Are you positive?
> There's a much longer way to explain Ovid's Metamorphoses,
I mean, isn't the long version basically "Ovid was mad that he got banished from Rome after being found fucking Augustus' daughter"
The Metamorphoses actually came before the exile. He was not a fan of Augustus, his legal reforms, and the changing from the Republic to the Principate. He then maybe slept with Julia the Elder or Minor (Augustus’ daughter and granddaughter) or caught one of them committing adultery.
Hmm... maybe Athena punished Medusa because, by some screwed logic, she felt that some punishment had to be done for defiling her temple, but, since Poseidon is *not* within her ability to punish, the punishment fell to Medusa. That's my idea, anyway.
I am begging people to understand that Greek mythology doesn't have a tight established "canon", it's made up of hundreds of random stories written by an unknowable number of unknown authors passed down by word of mouth that contradict each other all the time.
That's very much true- and the nature of the landscape of greece made it worse. Mountains increase linguistic drift because it leads to more isolated communities, and so do islands- and greece is all islands or mountains, so you had all these independent little hamlets with a sort of shared history and kind of shared mythology and so there were lots of different versions of the stories.
It's a recurring thing in Overly Sarcastic Productions' videos, so that may be where it came from, as well. Red points this out almost every time she talks about Greek mythology.
It's actually way worse. Comics at least *try* to have a consistent canon, and will often go back and correct things that contradict, or elucidate things that aren't clear in terms of canon-status. It can be daunting and messy, but all things considered, there *is* a canon, and the creatives (usually) put in effort to try and preserve it.
Greek Mythology is...not that. Because comics have a central body governing what comes out, and will often shoot down certain crossover ideas because "X character is doing something else in their book and wouldn't be able to show up in Y book", as an example. But Greek Myth had no governing body to keep things in line, so you just kinda get a wishy-washy mess of "whatever story you like best is canon".
Even funnier, ancient greece as we understand it has an ancient greece that it considered itself to be a continuation on even though the mythology is wildly different and only mostly has the old bits and that ancient greece's ancient greece is Mycenaean greece which is even older and also has a secret language that nobody knows what it means because there's all of two pages' worth of surviving text known to exist and also it's built on a completely different base to what would later be ancient greek
And these guys took the mythology from those guys and changed a whole bunch of things through a multi-centurion game of telephone (aka oral tradition)
So ancient greek mythology isn't comic book canon, like some of these guys are saying; it's the *fanfiction* of comic book canon, which is even funnier
No, Linear B was *similar* to ancient greek with a different writing system, but that was late in the Mycanaean age, they initially used Linear A, which is the secret language with barely any surviving texts and is completely different to everything else which is why no one's managed to figure it out yet, but did share a bunch of pronunciations with Linear B
Even more so: we still have the confusion with the ROMAN mythology, which is pretty much the same pantheon, but given Rome weighted more than Greece in western culture, its mythology may kind of overwrite the Greek, to the point one needs to try and discern which is which.
Not only did the ancient Greeks span hundreds of years and thousands of miles themselves, but tonnes of the stories were chopped and changed by classicists when they wrote them into English. Greek myth has a more fucked up "canon" than spider-man and wolverine.
ALSO an important point is that Greeks generally didn’t believe in myth as fact like many Christians do the Bible (some thought them telling stories from a past age but they knew the stories had been changed but that’s the extent of the literalism) mostly it was believed gods inspired these stories meaning that ancient Greeks did not believe the gods literally did a lot of the things we’d consider awful. So many learned ancient Greeks would know different telling a of myth and completely accept that.
Also that thing with Poseidon, Athena and Medusa, WE KNOW who wrote it, it was a story about mythological characters written by the same guy who wrote the story of Io. Earlier depictions of Medusa just have her being a monster from birth with 2 other Gorgon sisters. The story of Perseus, the bloke who sends him to kill her says she was just caught doing the nasty in Athena's temple, and being one of the virgin gods, kinda pissed her off. Its almost like there's lots of contradictions in these stories made up by people
yes! and that's why it is so cool!
It's like an enourmous collaborative work between people from all of history. All of them giving their own interpretation of a certain tale or character, some better some worse, but all of them doing their job into not letting these stories be lost to time unlike so many tales and stories from civilations that get lost to wars, hate and time
But we do know where a lot of the stuff OOP was talking about came from. Ovids Metamorphoses. Before ovids rewrite Medusa was a gorgon sister, she was born a monster and Athena had nothing to do with it. The weaving story was also his.
Basically the dude had a massive anti-authority bent and went out of his way to portray the gods as power tripping assholes.
We only really have the ones that survived too. We know of half a dozen ancient Greek epics that were lost, so we have to base everything on the Iliad and Odyssey.
What about the Telegony or the Cypria or the Nostoi or the Aethiopis or the Iliupersis? We will never know.
That's basically every mythology. Almost every single one has its origin in oral tradition all coming from who knows what source, plagiarized from other cultures, combined with other stories, and who knows what else.
regardless of “canon” the thing to take away from here is that the *exact same actions* can be viewed as heroic or horrific based just on your perception of a person’s motivations.
It’s not that actual person or actions changed at all, just your view of the situation.
In a world where you rarely, if ever, have complete information and see all sides of an occurrence, it’s worth internalizing.
From what I understand storytelling was a cultural thing for the Greeks and they would often have storytelling competitions with children to see who could tell the stories in the best ways.
This is all mythology... Or, for the most part. Stories that were passed along, and told by infusing the perspective of the person who is telling them. And in many places, very few stories survive, because so few were actually written down. And even many that were written down were lost.
There were many thousands of years where humans were telling and copying stories and passing them down orally, before written language ever came into being.
Yeah, even the "Story of Medusa" that was talked about in this post wasn't the original story. Medusa was originally just a monster. She was1 of 3 gorgon sisters. The one mentioned was I believe written by Ovid, who really hated authority figures, and what's a higher authority than the gods?
Me looking at myths of Apollo with his sun chariot then shrines to Apollo as a god of springs in Northeast France: "those are the exact same character".
Think about it; how many times do the gods have kids with their own siblings, parents, and grandparents? Do you think that’d keep happening if this was all made by one guy? No, tens of dozens of people over millennia told stories and collated these stories together into a loose canon, and not everyone agreed who was who. For instance, Hercules is suspected to have been a pre-Greek Stone Age god that was grandfathered in as he doesn’t quite fit with the other gods, and Aphrodite was originally a goddess of love and war because Cypress, the island where her story began was closest to Sparta, but as she spread up the coast everyone who wasn’t Spartan didn’t like the sound of love and war being one goddess as opposed to a god and goddess couple.
Yes, and the author's belief about the ancient Greek version may have been feminist and progressive and we just got "The Good Ole Boy" version from sexist modern scholars is probably not true. Most ancient Greek societies were also quite sexist. They had their republics and elections, but didn't allow women to participate. They were mostly very tolerant of gay sex, but didn't really have a gay identity. Men were still expected to do it with their wives at home, and mostly just did it to younger men or boys. Women who got with other women were looked down upon. There were some women who were involved in story-telling and myth making, but they were a minority.
People sometimes forget that myths were made by people, and that there is no real canon in myths. Even the Bible has been translated and interpreted in different ways, and it’s written down
YouTuber Wendigoon made a whole video discussing rejected books from the Bible and some of them really are just like bad fanfiction, and they show an interesting range of interpretation of actual Christian canon.
Even some of the accepted books were heavily debated and almost didn’t make the cut. So you have stuff that got in that’s still really weird and not focused on at all
Cough, Ezekiel, cough
My personal favorite book that was mentioned was the Acts of Paul and Theckla (I honestly don't care how it's spelled anymore), in which he bursts into laughter, jump cuts to him quietly writing it under "Heresy", and then continues talking to finish with the context!
I find it fascinating that almost our entire idea of Hell, one of the core parts of modern Christianity, all comes from effectively a fancy self-insert Isekai fanfiction. And one about real people, at that.
Always remember that a lot of these myths and stories were written as much to discredit and defame the gods as they were to worship them, and you have cross pollination between Romans and Ancient Greeks of the same core gods characterized dramatically differently based on the values of each society.
Didn’t educates Greek tend to look down in the rural Greeks who believe in the myths as literal fact?
I remember residing that somewhere but cant find it or remember where.
The "original" version of the Medusa myth isn't that she was cursed to be ugly or anything. She and her sisters were just born as gorgons. Someone else told a story about her being a priestess who got cursed centuries later.
Yes, but if I created a myth where Zeus and Hera dress up as penises and simulate gay sex via interpretive dance, then publish it as a real myth in a collection it would be seen as "not a real myth". Basically, what Ovid did.
The best part of reddit is finding a fucking amazing joke that requires such niche knowledge you’ll never be able to explain to someone else in your real life why it’s funny and most of the internet will breeze by it but it’s just fucking… sublime.
TL;DR because I'm on mobile: Zeus didn't want his newest offspring to be born, so he ate the pregnant mom. After a while his head started to hurt, then split open and athena jumped out of it.
A lot of the versions of myths where Athena is spiteful come from Metamorphoses where Ovid rewrote a lot of the myths to make the gods extra spiteful and corrupt as an extension of his political views.
Actually Ovid had a point.
He wasn’t some wack-job libertarian going full anarchy. He wrote the Metamorphoses during Augustus’ consolidation of power. He was watching the Roman Republic collapse and be replaced with an Emperor. The gods in his work symbolized Augustus and the sycophantic Senate. He compares Augustus with Jupiter and Olympus with Palentine Hill. He was calling Roman leadership a bunch of bloodthirsty murderers, out of control rapists and two-faced hypocrites in a time where Augustus was running a propaganda machine so effectively that people still spew his crap.
Probably not a coincidence Augustus exiled Ovid while the manuscripts were first circulating. (Which, iirc, technically only the Senate *legally* could do at the time.)
We don’t know if that’s what he did. We just know it had something to do with Julia the Younger, Augustus’ granddaughter. Julia the Elder, the daughter was already dead by this point, iirc. Also exiled.
The theory I find most likely is that he simply walked in on the granddaughter sleeping with a slave.
I mean if my authority was an absolutist emperor who destroyed all the republican institutions to be the only person in actual power I'd be an edgy bitch to him too
Also (probably, I'm too lazy to check so I'm gonna say what OSP said) the version of the myth where Athena changes Medusa into a monster was written by a guy who was exiled by a king so was mad at authorities and in most versions Medusa was a monster since birth
Despite Echidna’s impressive crop of monstrous children, the gorgons are not her daughters but in fact her sisters, the four of them being descended from a pair of sea monsters named Ceto and Phorcys. Their other siblings include the Graeae, the Hesperides, Ladon, and Thoosa.
I'd certainly imagine so, given Echidna's reputation as the Mother of Monsters- but I might be thinking of someone else entirely for most of the people here so who knows
>was exiled by a king so was mad at authorities
Slight correction: Ovid was exiled *after* he composed the Metamorphoses. His anti-Augustan views in his poetry is likely what contributed to the Emperor's decision to exile him. (It has never been directly stated why Ovid was exiled to Tomis, and the only reason Ovid ever gave was "carmen et error" or "a poem and a mistake." The poem is probably the *Ars Amatoria*,
and the "mistake" was probably something to do with Augustus' granddaughter Julia)
Also, it's kind of funny that people will often refer to Augustus as king. He was *very* careful to never call himself a king, because the Romans had a big cultural thing about how much they hated kings and monarchies.
Shout out to that scene in Percy Jackson where him and his mom straight up killed his abusive step-dad by turning him into stone. Most kids books aren't ballsy enough to have the protagonist kill people.
Minor correction: Percy wasn't even around when Sally killed Gabe. That was 100% her.
And then she sold the statue for a ton of money and used it to put herself through school.
Sally is badass.
Well technically fmafter killing Medusa he shipped the Gorgons head to Olympus to fuck with them since he was a bitter and angry child (this was the first book). In response they shipprd the head onto Percys bed and when he returned from his quest he left the head there with a note saying that it's his Moms choice.
The BEST story of Arachne is the one where her tapestry depicted every fucked up and petty thing the gods had ever done and expected to win the contest despite her judge being Athena
The Greek pantheon in general is a much more… relatable isn’t the right word, but more reflective of human tendencies both good and bad than most other monotheistic religions. Its part of what makes it so interesting
That and the absolutely insane fables
Yeah, the myths of Medusa and Arachne specifically do suffer from rewrites that seek to paint the gods in a worse light than their original versions. Medusa wasn't originally cursed by Athena to be like that, she was born that way with two Gorgon sisters to accompany her. Arachne originally did lose outright and Athena pitied her, so allowed her to weave forever as a spider.
These were tales rewritten to retroactively depict the gods as worse than they were originally, and it looks like Athena took a lot of that treatment.
tumblr users are always like "there's another version of this myth where my fave is unproblematic" and then just never give a source.
"In another version" you mean the version you made up right now while typing this post? That version?
There's always someone who goes "Actually, in this version of the myth, Persephone went willingly to the underworld because she fell in love with Hades! There was no kidnapping, she just wanted to get away from Demeter!" They will also, often, say that this is the original version of the myth.
Do you know when that version of the myth was written? 1973. It's from a modern book on Greek mythology written in 1973.
this is like my most loathed mythical retelling, and i see it so often as i’m also a huge romance reader. i literally can’t stand this version and so many lore olympus fans are out here pretending the comic is a legitimate part of the literary record.
It rubs me the wrong way for *so many* reasons.
I also hate how so many versions of that retelling insist that Demeter was some awful, shrieking, helicopter parent. Stop demonizing her! It's one of the very few myths where a woman went "Hey, fuck this. This is wrong. What was done to me and my daughter was wrong and I am not going to stand for it." And it almost worked! Demeter was willing to go to war with all the other gods in order to right what was done to her daughter and *Zeus* fucking conceded to her. If it wasn't for Hades tricking Persephone into eating the seeds Demeter would have freed her daughter completely.
People gotta drop the "Hades is pure and amazing" thing, he's a generally chill dude and all that yeah but he's just a little better than most, bro is still a menace by realistic standards.
My favorite theory on the Minotaur myth is just the proto Greeks going
Look there's these assholes who love bulls that kept showing up to wreck our shit, we went to kick their teeth in and found they had mad confusing architecture.
Me after learning the thing with Medusa was basically a fanfiction written by this dude thousands of years ago:
You‘re telling me Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog and an weather phenomenon had a baby and Medusa was the result?
The unexpected information:
Athena transformed Arachne into a spider because doing Medusas hair was a task only the best weaver could perform if they had eight arms and legs.
\- Source, I made it the fuck up
That’s the thing with Greek mythology, there is zero arc and if you try to create one you will just go insane. There are a thousand contradictions between the different versions of myths because they came from different times and areas. There was no one standardized “bible” for the Greeks, so it was heavily regional.
weren't most of those myths created by Ovid who was exiled or something and wrote a shitload of stories about how much the gods sucked out of pettiness
Athena as a divine identity was born of the status quo being preserved against change. She was the product of Zeus, king of Olympus, weaseling out of the prophecy that would see him overthrown so he could continue being--among other things--a self-serving dick.
It's not a hard leap for me to believe that, as the primary deity of Athens, one of the most powerful preservers of (and even possibly the major creator of) the patriarchal and rigid systems we now most strongly associate with the ENTIRETY of Ancient Greece, Athena was a posterchild in the form of a female image being used to prop up a male powerbase.
Athens fucked with a lot of other faiths they didn't like at the time to stamp out dissenting political bodies and cement their ideas; what's a little bit of fabricated support from their own tailor made female divinity?
Real question then, was Ares a feminist?
Patron god of the amazons, best pals with Eris and killing a son of Poseidon for doing *what Greek gods are generally known to do* to his daughter, even if he had to face the wrath of the entire Olympus for that.
I mean, obviously not as i don't think they'd have the concept of modern feminism then, but... If we are entertaining the thought only for fun, i guess it's no biggie.
I mean, they were quite fond of him in Sparta, a city-state where women were viewed as being as important as men, as well as being highly educated, mostly so that they can teach their kids to come with witty responses so that it can be quoted in 300.
The deity of athena was used to support the power structures of a genuinely misogynist society though. Hellenist greece doesn't have a secret history of being super feminist it was a society built on slavery and patriarchal control of production
Can’t be bothered to get up and look for my physical copy of the article right now (I think it was titled the Medusa’s Gaze), but there are arguments that Medusa herself was a deity of a different culture appropriated by the Greeks. In some versions of her myth, it’s told as a tragedy.
I think most people really take for granted how nuanced Medusa’s depictions can be. The snakes can be treated either as deformity or the source of her seductive powers in retellings. Really putting across women wanting sex and sensuality, and maybe even using it as a form of power, while living with the knowledge that it makes them extremely vulnerable whether because it affects social standing, pregnancy, or the threat of being overpowered. In this interpretation, Athena’s gift/curse can be seen as similar to the fruit of knowledge; an awareness of her status in society as a woman and all the good and bad that entails.
It still amazes me that Ares is the only male Olympian who supports women's rights and actively parents his demigod offspring. The way the Greeks depict him as a loser and the Romans depict him as a gigachad says a lot about their cultures.
Mythology is the ancient version of comic superheroes in that there’s a shitload of interpretations over multiple generations of storytellers
In a thousand years, archaeologists will be arguing about whether Superman was a benevolent patriarch of the Justice League or a tyrannical overlord probably
The thing about the Greek deities is that the personality is not actually more of a side note or a fluid thing compared to whatever the lesson of the myths were. Like yes they have some underlying traits that barely change, but that's basically like the basic foundation and the rest is just whatever the story calls for that can be plausible. That's my take on the Greek deities: a vessel of the lessons to be learned made from a vague personality type.
my favortie part is how medusa doesnt have magic eye lasers or literal snakes for hair or anything, its just that shes supposed to be so conceptually ugly that anyone who so much as glances at her just straight up instantly dies. and the reason she was depicted with snakes is because of how the greeks felt about snakes
Me, after hearing about how Arachne, after turning into a spider, haunts Peter Parker's dreams and then eventually becomes real only to steal all the shoes in New York due to her love for Peter Parker, more accurately in this context, Spiderman (because you know like spiders and stuff) and then kidnaps Spiderman and then prompts him to become her boyfriend but he decides to defeat her: What?
(For context this is a rough memory of some of the plot points of the spider man musical. Because honestly that musical is way too bloated for its own good.)
Sooooo who’s going to tell these people that the ancient Greeks were ridiculously misogynistic and that Greek religion and oral traditions were mainly created and passed on by men, and that society and thinking in general was very different back then from the way we think about all of these topics today.
Not to mention that ancient Greek myth and religion wasn’t like modern Christian or Muslim religious fanatism and fundamentalism. There were hardly any sacred texts, “canon” and a central authority, so contradictory myths were told and accepted all the time. There are like 6 different versions of the Medusa story and 8 versions of how humanity was created. The ones we know are just the most popular stories.
Therefore it is incredibly unlikely that there ever was some ur-feminist cult that got “corrupted” by the evil evil menfolk.
Me in middle school in a southern Christian state doing a report on Artemis: she never married even though her dad tried to set her up with lots of men... Maybe she was waiting for her true love?
Me in college having not thought of Artemis since that report: she only hung out with other women and hunted male suitors for sport? That's definitely a lesbian
I also accept that interpretation!
My main point is that it's hilarious that middle school me thought she was straight, despite literally tons of evidence that she's not.
I support the lesbian interpretation, myself. Portions of Ancient Greece were so violently patriarchal that I can absolutely see an underlying thought of "we'd rather she fuck no one at all than be sexually independent and not fuck men" from the powers that be. I even lean toward her having been bi but ultimately giving up her practical chances with men so as to avoid being tied to them and losing her independence, given one of the versions of the Orion myth has her falling for him hard.
My favorite thing about tumblr is that they have opinions on EVERYTHING and regardless of how tiny the issue, people will still passionately fight about it.
It’s like how everyone’s parents told them the same stories with slightly different details and endings. Everything was by memory and spoken out loud for a long time and it was customary for story tellers to add their own flair to the myths. Diversity is to be expected
I will also point out that Arachne in the myth was said to have weaved specifically other myths where the gods were stupid or tricked or something, so the lesson could always be don't intentionally be incredibly instigating when you are faced with a literal god-like power.
One of the cool parts about mythology for me is learning the different versions of the same story and learn about the background of each retelling, and this is so because having your interpretation of a character or story be based on a single take of that story would make it so you only viewed truough 1 person's eyes, of which a lot of the times, hold ill intend while retelling this story
We can never fully know what was the "real" version of any character or story because stories change overtime, and each version is made by someone with a bias that could be drastically distinct from the one that a previous author had while writting the tale. But what we can do is learning about differet iterations of any story or god we are interested in, try to learn why a story depics certain characters in bad or good ways, and create our own interpretation of this tale and accept that your idea of a story or god is just your idea and not an objective view of said entity (unless you are an antrophologist/historian or something I guess, lol, but even those people need to know that their understanding of these characters can be incomplete)
My favorite Athena story is *The Eumenides.*
After Athena rendered judgment against them in the case of Orestes, the three good ladies threatened to torture the Athenians and lay waste to the countryside. She forestalled this by offering them a new role as protectors of justice, and reminded them that she still had the key to Daddy's shed where he kept the thunderbolts.
I think people like to have a very definitive “THIS is the correct story/version” but honestly every myth has a lot of versions, especially Greek ones. Take the hydra for example, it’s described as having nine heads, one head, three heads, a hundred heads, “many” heads, and so on
It's so weird to me seeing people still assume that:
1) Every story from Greek mythology consists solely of this small selection of myths that were popularised over the past few centuries, by people who had no respect for the faith and used the stories solely for their aesthetic value. Imagine if Hinduism became the largest religion in the world and 500 years later they decided that the Torah was only composed of stories about Noah's Ark, King David, and King Solomon.
2) That any of these stories were ever meant to be literal to begin with and not quick explanations for why certain things were the way they were. How many kids were told in the modern day that rain means God is crying, yet know perfectly well that it isn't?
paraphrasing "after learning that the myths were mostly told by men" - to whom do you think myths were generally told? I'd argue - to children, most of all. Since the purpose of a myth is to give a way to frame morality, existence, history and how the current reality came to be.
Who do you think did the most "bringing up" of children? I think we all agree here - it was women, mothers.
Therefore, I think the notion that myths were mostly told by men is really not as straightforward as "just count the number of writers".
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that ancient religions were actually religions.
If you take the myths of current major religions, like Adam and Eve or the defeat of Ravana, then its clearly highly simplistic to say they're generally told to children. Same, presumably, for the myths of the past.
iirc wasn't there some guy who wrote myths that deliberately painted the gods in a bad light and that's where the vindictive version of the medusa myth comes from?
Me when I remember that the Greek gods are all mercurial weirdos written by 1000 different authors as the predecessor to modern collective writing projects: "There is no canon, we made it the fuck up."
The 2nd to last one was taught to me by a stupidly religious teacher and that was apparently justified because man is different from God and man is arrogant for even trying to face God (while that womans entire fucking life depended on working as a weaver)
Copying a comment from a previous post on misinformation and Medusa as a feminist symbol in the ancient world In ancient Greek mythology Medusa was just a gorgon; a monster who lived with her sisters and hated mankind and killed people just 'cause they were monsters who wanted to kill people. In the earlier periods like the archaic she's depicted as hideous and terrifying. (See [here](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/medusa-gorgon-temple-of-artemis-corfu-pediment.jpg) and [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Gorgona_pushkin.jpg/800px-Gorgona_pushkin.jpg) and [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Gorgoneion#/media/File:OlympiaGorgo_retouched.jpg) for examples) Later, the depictions evolved to be a beautiful woman with snake hair, but still with origins of a monster. (See [here](https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/P23.2.html) for an ancient Greek example) By the time Ovid was writing the *Metamorphoses*, the Romans were used to a Medusa who looked something like [this](https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/Z47.4.html). There's a much longer way to explain Ovid's *Metamorphoses,* but the important part to acknowledge was that he often changed the myths he was working with in order to make the gods (and thus, the Emperor) look like dicks. So he created a story where Medusa was originally human, not gorgon, and was only transformed because she was assaulted by Neptune and punished by Minerva for being assaulted, because the gods are dicks. It's never really presented as any sort of empowering story, because it's being told by Perseus, who is travelling with Medusa's head after already killing her. [Here's](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D4%3Acard%3D706) a link to a translation of it. (I love Ovid, but I would not call him a feminist) Using the gorgon head (*gorgoneion*) as a way to ward off evil/wrongdoers was a thing, but it wasn't used for specifically female spaces. It was on a lot of things: shields, temples, mosaics, etc. It's a *really* old tradition, where monster heads were meant to scare off evil spirits or people who intended to do wrong. It's usually using the archaic, ugly, depiction of Medusa. The idea of Medusa as a feminist protector is 21st century new. Not quite sure where OP is getting the three versions of Arachne from. The only ancient full account of the myth comes from Ovid. [This website compiles all references to her in ancient texts.](https://www.theoi.com/Heroine/Arakhne.html)
Glad you came to say this. Lot of modern interpretations being passed off as ancient in that screenshot. Lol
So what you’re saying is: Tumblr is not a great place to learn because misinformation is rife within the website and people should cross reference any new information presented on the platform Seems reasonable
But... Isn't it the same with most social media sites, not just Tumblr? There are definitely differences in severity, but still.
Thank you, love when people try and make out ancient Greece as some feminist holy land lol
Personally I like when people try to frame the rampant pederasty in Greece as Greece being pro gay, like... Are you sure you want to go that route? Are you positive?
> There's a much longer way to explain Ovid's Metamorphoses, I mean, isn't the long version basically "Ovid was mad that he got banished from Rome after being found fucking Augustus' daughter"
The Metamorphoses actually came before the exile. He was not a fan of Augustus, his legal reforms, and the changing from the Republic to the Principate. He then maybe slept with Julia the Elder or Minor (Augustus’ daughter and granddaughter) or caught one of them committing adultery.
Fox News for the very very very very old generations.
Thank you for linking Theoi. It’s such a good source.
Is it always Athena that curses Medusa? I thought that other versions had another god cursing her, though I might be confused with another story.
Pretty sure it’s always Athena because Poseidon rapes Medusa in her temple
Hmm... maybe Athena punished Medusa because, by some screwed logic, she felt that some punishment had to be done for defiling her temple, but, since Poseidon is *not* within her ability to punish, the punishment fell to Medusa. That's my idea, anyway.
Very likely. Gods directing their anger at people involved, bit not responsible, happens quite a lot in Greek myth.
Ovid was not only not feminist, he was the worlds first modern Pickupartist.
I am begging people to understand that Greek mythology doesn't have a tight established "canon", it's made up of hundreds of random stories written by an unknowable number of unknown authors passed down by word of mouth that contradict each other all the time.
That's very much true- and the nature of the landscape of greece made it worse. Mountains increase linguistic drift because it leads to more isolated communities, and so do islands- and greece is all islands or mountains, so you had all these independent little hamlets with a sort of shared history and kind of shared mythology and so there were lots of different versions of the stories.
Greek mythology cannon is basically comic book cannon.
It's less cannon, more like grapeshot at this point
That's clever
Ah, so flak?
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Funny enough I am a Wendigoon viewer but I actually do not remember him saying this. It must be from 1 of the videos I haven't seen yet.
It's a recurring thing in Overly Sarcastic Productions' videos, so that may be where it came from, as well. Red points this out almost every time she talks about Greek mythology.
It's actually way worse. Comics at least *try* to have a consistent canon, and will often go back and correct things that contradict, or elucidate things that aren't clear in terms of canon-status. It can be daunting and messy, but all things considered, there *is* a canon, and the creatives (usually) put in effort to try and preserve it. Greek Mythology is...not that. Because comics have a central body governing what comes out, and will often shoot down certain crossover ideas because "X character is doing something else in their book and wouldn't be able to show up in Y book", as an example. But Greek Myth had no governing body to keep things in line, so you just kinda get a wishy-washy mess of "whatever story you like best is canon".
Even funnier, ancient greece as we understand it has an ancient greece that it considered itself to be a continuation on even though the mythology is wildly different and only mostly has the old bits and that ancient greece's ancient greece is Mycenaean greece which is even older and also has a secret language that nobody knows what it means because there's all of two pages' worth of surviving text known to exist and also it's built on a completely different base to what would later be ancient greek And these guys took the mythology from those guys and changed a whole bunch of things through a multi-centurion game of telephone (aka oral tradition) So ancient greek mythology isn't comic book canon, like some of these guys are saying; it's the *fanfiction* of comic book canon, which is even funnier
So when we have rick riordan "fanfic of fanfic" and we have tumblr fanfic of rick riordan stories we have: fanfic of fanfic of fanfic of fanfic?
*We have to go deeper.*
Well, there's also how the characters become represented in the fanon, such as Percy being dumb, and fanfics about those distorted characters.
Just recursive fanfics all the way down lol
This is fascinating
I thought they had the same spoken language but a different system of writing
No, Linear B was *similar* to ancient greek with a different writing system, but that was late in the Mycanaean age, they initially used Linear A, which is the secret language with barely any surviving texts and is completely different to everything else which is why no one's managed to figure it out yet, but did share a bunch of pronunciations with Linear B
>through a multi-centurion game of telephone Fucking Romans playing games again
Even more so: we still have the confusion with the ROMAN mythology, which is pretty much the same pantheon, but given Rome weighted more than Greece in western culture, its mythology may kind of overwrite the Greek, to the point one needs to try and discern which is which.
Not only did the ancient Greeks span hundreds of years and thousands of miles themselves, but tonnes of the stories were chopped and changed by classicists when they wrote them into English. Greek myth has a more fucked up "canon" than spider-man and wolverine.
I dunno, Wolverine was a noseless beast man for a while and then turned back because an artist forgot what he was supposed to look like.
You could write your own version honestly. Just like how theres dozens of versions of fairy tales like the big bad wolf
Rick Riordan has entered the chat
ALSO an important point is that Greeks generally didn’t believe in myth as fact like many Christians do the Bible (some thought them telling stories from a past age but they knew the stories had been changed but that’s the extent of the literalism) mostly it was believed gods inspired these stories meaning that ancient Greeks did not believe the gods literally did a lot of the things we’d consider awful. So many learned ancient Greeks would know different telling a of myth and completely accept that.
That's what happens when your religious stories are oral tradition and not written down in a holy book that's never allowed to be changed.
Except of course for all the times it does get changed
And translated only slightly better than shuffling it through google translate several times.
Almost as though it was lore, made by some folks.
you're telling me folks made this lore?
Also that thing with Poseidon, Athena and Medusa, WE KNOW who wrote it, it was a story about mythological characters written by the same guy who wrote the story of Io. Earlier depictions of Medusa just have her being a monster from birth with 2 other Gorgon sisters. The story of Perseus, the bloke who sends him to kill her says she was just caught doing the nasty in Athena's temple, and being one of the virgin gods, kinda pissed her off. Its almost like there's lots of contradictions in these stories made up by people
It was written to show the gods were not moral.
Was looking for this post. Thank you!
exactly! but i usually always choose the worst interpretations unless i particularly like the character, like melampus my beloved
Yeah. Personally I'm not a fan of Ovid's in particular
yes! and that's why it is so cool! It's like an enourmous collaborative work between people from all of history. All of them giving their own interpretation of a certain tale or character, some better some worse, but all of them doing their job into not letting these stories be lost to time unlike so many tales and stories from civilations that get lost to wars, hate and time
Smh can't believe the ancient Greeks stole their ideas from SCP.
But we do know where a lot of the stuff OOP was talking about came from. Ovids Metamorphoses. Before ovids rewrite Medusa was a gorgon sister, she was born a monster and Athena had nothing to do with it. The weaving story was also his. Basically the dude had a massive anti-authority bent and went out of his way to portray the gods as power tripping assholes.
We only really have the ones that survived too. We know of half a dozen ancient Greek epics that were lost, so we have to base everything on the Iliad and Odyssey. What about the Telegony or the Cypria or the Nostoi or the Aethiopis or the Iliupersis? We will never know.
So to put it in weeb terms, Greek mythology has all of the "canon" of Vocaloid?
That's basically every mythology. Almost every single one has its origin in oral tradition all coming from who knows what source, plagiarized from other cultures, combined with other stories, and who knows what else.
regardless of “canon” the thing to take away from here is that the *exact same actions* can be viewed as heroic or horrific based just on your perception of a person’s motivations. It’s not that actual person or actions changed at all, just your view of the situation. In a world where you rarely, if ever, have complete information and see all sides of an occurrence, it’s worth internalizing.
From what I understand storytelling was a cultural thing for the Greeks and they would often have storytelling competitions with children to see who could tell the stories in the best ways.
This is all mythology... Or, for the most part. Stories that were passed along, and told by infusing the perspective of the person who is telling them. And in many places, very few stories survive, because so few were actually written down. And even many that were written down were lost. There were many thousands of years where humans were telling and copying stories and passing them down orally, before written language ever came into being.
Yeah, even the "Story of Medusa" that was talked about in this post wasn't the original story. Medusa was originally just a monster. She was1 of 3 gorgon sisters. The one mentioned was I believe written by Ovid, who really hated authority figures, and what's a higher authority than the gods?
Me looking at myths of Apollo with his sun chariot then shrines to Apollo as a god of springs in Northeast France: "those are the exact same character".
Think about it; how many times do the gods have kids with their own siblings, parents, and grandparents? Do you think that’d keep happening if this was all made by one guy? No, tens of dozens of people over millennia told stories and collated these stories together into a loose canon, and not everyone agreed who was who. For instance, Hercules is suspected to have been a pre-Greek Stone Age god that was grandfathered in as he doesn’t quite fit with the other gods, and Aphrodite was originally a goddess of love and war because Cypress, the island where her story began was closest to Sparta, but as she spread up the coast everyone who wasn’t Spartan didn’t like the sound of love and war being one goddess as opposed to a god and goddess couple.
Many seemed to agree that Zeus’ dick caused much of the problems.
Same with Tolkien, for slightly different reasons. This gave me deja vu of all the times I've seen comments about what "isn't Tolkien canon".
Exactly, it's like SCP
Yes, and the author's belief about the ancient Greek version may have been feminist and progressive and we just got "The Good Ole Boy" version from sexist modern scholars is probably not true. Most ancient Greek societies were also quite sexist. They had their republics and elections, but didn't allow women to participate. They were mostly very tolerant of gay sex, but didn't really have a gay identity. Men were still expected to do it with their wives at home, and mostly just did it to younger men or boys. Women who got with other women were looked down upon. There were some women who were involved in story-telling and myth making, but they were a minority.
People sometimes forget that myths were made by people, and that there is no real canon in myths. Even the Bible has been translated and interpreted in different ways, and it’s written down
YouTuber Wendigoon made a whole video discussing rejected books from the Bible and some of them really are just like bad fanfiction, and they show an interesting range of interpretation of actual Christian canon.
Even some of the accepted books were heavily debated and almost didn’t make the cut. So you have stuff that got in that’s still really weird and not focused on at all Cough, Ezekiel, cough
My personal favorite book that was mentioned was the Acts of Paul and Theckla (I honestly don't care how it's spelled anymore), in which he bursts into laughter, jump cuts to him quietly writing it under "Heresy", and then continues talking to finish with the context!
A fellow Wendigoon viewer! God I love his videos
I find it fascinating that almost our entire idea of Hell, one of the core parts of modern Christianity, all comes from effectively a fancy self-insert Isekai fanfiction. And one about real people, at that.
Always remember that a lot of these myths and stories were written as much to discredit and defame the gods as they were to worship them, and you have cross pollination between Romans and Ancient Greeks of the same core gods characterized dramatically differently based on the values of each society.
Didn’t educates Greek tend to look down in the rural Greeks who believe in the myths as literal fact? I remember residing that somewhere but cant find it or remember where.
The "original" version of the Medusa myth isn't that she was cursed to be ugly or anything. She and her sisters were just born as gorgons. Someone else told a story about her being a priestess who got cursed centuries later.
Yes, but if I created a myth where Zeus and Hera dress up as penises and simulate gay sex via interpretive dance, then publish it as a real myth in a collection it would be seen as "not a real myth". Basically, what Ovid did.
If you did it right now it might not be accepted as a myth in the same way, but can you say the same thing about people centuries from now?
Probably still not.
I’m sure Dante didn’t mean to inform the general public’s perception of what the Bible actually says Hell 100% really is like either, yet here we are
I wouldn’t even be surprised if a myth like that existed at this point
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The world's longest, most convoluted, game of telephone.
Jeez, Athena sounds like a splitting headache.
Gold star for you
The best part of reddit is finding a fucking amazing joke that requires such niche knowledge you’ll never be able to explain to someone else in your real life why it’s funny and most of the internet will breeze by it but it’s just fucking… sublime.
Explain please. I didn't get it
TL;DR because I'm on mobile: Zeus didn't want his newest offspring to be born, so he ate the pregnant mom. After a while his head started to hurt, then split open and athena jumped out of it.
Ohh I did know this story but didn't make the connection with the pun. Thank you so much for explaining ☺️
One of the myths of her birth was that Athena didn't have a mother and emerged fully grown from Zeus's forehead.
Underrated comment lol.
You have my axe
If I knew how to get the free awards on desktop, I would give it to you.
🏆 Poor man’s gold for you sir
A lot of the versions of myths where Athena is spiteful come from Metamorphoses where Ovid rewrote a lot of the myths to make the gods extra spiteful and corrupt as an extension of his political views.
Guy was to Greek mythology what Dante was to Christian hell.
Like if wattpad self-insert romance fanfic was taken seriously.
Political views is a funny way to say edgy authority-hating teenage phase.
He was like that well into middle age
I said what I said.
Actually Ovid had a point. He wasn’t some wack-job libertarian going full anarchy. He wrote the Metamorphoses during Augustus’ consolidation of power. He was watching the Roman Republic collapse and be replaced with an Emperor. The gods in his work symbolized Augustus and the sycophantic Senate. He compares Augustus with Jupiter and Olympus with Palentine Hill. He was calling Roman leadership a bunch of bloodthirsty murderers, out of control rapists and two-faced hypocrites in a time where Augustus was running a propaganda machine so effectively that people still spew his crap. Probably not a coincidence Augustus exiled Ovid while the manuscripts were first circulating. (Which, iirc, technically only the Senate *legally* could do at the time.)
Imagine seeing the fall of the republic and having what is essentially a dictator rise to power and going "I'm going to fuck his daughter."
We don’t know if that’s what he did. We just know it had something to do with Julia the Younger, Augustus’ granddaughter. Julia the Elder, the daughter was already dead by this point, iirc. Also exiled. The theory I find most likely is that he simply walked in on the granddaughter sleeping with a slave.
I mean if my authority was an absolutist emperor who destroyed all the republican institutions to be the only person in actual power I'd be an edgy bitch to him too
Also (probably, I'm too lazy to check so I'm gonna say what OSP said) the version of the myth where Athena changes Medusa into a monster was written by a guy who was exiled by a king so was mad at authorities and in most versions Medusa was a monster since birth
Correct, that version comes to us courtesy of the Roman poet Ovid. Until then Medusa was born a gorgon with two gorgon sisters, Stheno and Euryale.
All daughters of Echidna, right?
Despite Echidna’s impressive crop of monstrous children, the gorgons are not her daughters but in fact her sisters, the four of them being descended from a pair of sea monsters named Ceto and Phorcys. Their other siblings include the Graeae, the Hesperides, Ladon, and Thoosa.
thank you for updating my knowledge!
I'd certainly imagine so, given Echidna's reputation as the Mother of Monsters- but I might be thinking of someone else entirely for most of the people here so who knows
>was exiled by a king so was mad at authorities Slight correction: Ovid was exiled *after* he composed the Metamorphoses. His anti-Augustan views in his poetry is likely what contributed to the Emperor's decision to exile him. (It has never been directly stated why Ovid was exiled to Tomis, and the only reason Ovid ever gave was "carmen et error" or "a poem and a mistake." The poem is probably the *Ars Amatoria*, and the "mistake" was probably something to do with Augustus' granddaughter Julia) Also, it's kind of funny that people will often refer to Augustus as king. He was *very* careful to never call himself a king, because the Romans had a big cultural thing about how much they hated kings and monarchies.
Same guy who wrote the spiteful version of Arachne I think.
Yeah that’s what happens when hundreds of people make up different stories
Shout out to that scene in Percy Jackson where him and his mom straight up killed his abusive step-dad by turning him into stone. Most kids books aren't ballsy enough to have the protagonist kill people.
Minor correction: Percy wasn't even around when Sally killed Gabe. That was 100% her. And then she sold the statue for a ton of money and used it to put herself through school. Sally is badass.
Percy gave her Medusa head though, iirc for that reason
he left a note saying she could make a choice it was definitely for that reason
he gave her WHAT
Well technically fmafter killing Medusa he shipped the Gorgons head to Olympus to fuck with them since he was a bitter and angry child (this was the first book). In response they shipprd the head onto Percys bed and when he returned from his quest he left the head there with a note saying that it's his Moms choice.
Let's be honest they're both badasses
Fact is Poesiden only really contributed to like 10% of Percy's baddasery, the rest was all from his mom.
The BEST story of Arachne is the one where her tapestry depicted every fucked up and petty thing the gods had ever done and expected to win the contest despite her judge being Athena
The Greek pantheon in general is a much more… relatable isn’t the right word, but more reflective of human tendencies both good and bad than most other monotheistic religions. Its part of what makes it so interesting That and the absolutely insane fables
Get out of my house you man who blows both cool and hot air. I can try to find some kernel of wisdom in that Aesop, but what the fuck.
arachne: *turns into a spider* "alright where is that peter parker dude. it's time he got some weaving lessons"
And that, children, was how we got Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Yeah, the myths of Medusa and Arachne specifically do suffer from rewrites that seek to paint the gods in a worse light than their original versions. Medusa wasn't originally cursed by Athena to be like that, she was born that way with two Gorgon sisters to accompany her. Arachne originally did lose outright and Athena pitied her, so allowed her to weave forever as a spider. These were tales rewritten to retroactively depict the gods as worse than they were originally, and it looks like Athena took a lot of that treatment.
tumblr users are always like "there's another version of this myth where my fave is unproblematic" and then just never give a source. "In another version" you mean the version you made up right now while typing this post? That version?
There's always someone who goes "Actually, in this version of the myth, Persephone went willingly to the underworld because she fell in love with Hades! There was no kidnapping, she just wanted to get away from Demeter!" They will also, often, say that this is the original version of the myth. Do you know when that version of the myth was written? 1973. It's from a modern book on Greek mythology written in 1973.
this is like my most loathed mythical retelling, and i see it so often as i’m also a huge romance reader. i literally can’t stand this version and so many lore olympus fans are out here pretending the comic is a legitimate part of the literary record.
It rubs me the wrong way for *so many* reasons. I also hate how so many versions of that retelling insist that Demeter was some awful, shrieking, helicopter parent. Stop demonizing her! It's one of the very few myths where a woman went "Hey, fuck this. This is wrong. What was done to me and my daughter was wrong and I am not going to stand for it." And it almost worked! Demeter was willing to go to war with all the other gods in order to right what was done to her daughter and *Zeus* fucking conceded to her. If it wasn't for Hades tricking Persephone into eating the seeds Demeter would have freed her daughter completely.
People gotta drop the "Hades is pure and amazing" thing, he's a generally chill dude and all that yeah but he's just a little better than most, bro is still a menace by realistic standards.
There was no centralized Ancient Greek religion (before Christianity)so there’s a wide range of contradictory myths.
Of course there is, but that doesn't mean we can just make shit up and falsely attribute it to the ancient Greeks.
She's also interpreted as asexual in most myths. She's a girlboss
My favorite theory on the Minotaur myth is just the proto Greeks going Look there's these assholes who love bulls that kept showing up to wreck our shit, we went to kick their teeth in and found they had mad confusing architecture.
Me after learning the thing with Medusa was basically a fanfiction written by this dude thousands of years ago: You‘re telling me Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog and an weather phenomenon had a baby and Medusa was the result?
Knuckles sister actually, Echidna wasn't the mother of Medusa
The unexpected information: Athena transformed Arachne into a spider because doing Medusas hair was a task only the best weaver could perform if they had eight arms and legs. \- Source, I made it the fuck up
So many u-turns in Athena's character arc, it feels like I'm in a nascar
That’s the thing with Greek mythology, there is zero arc and if you try to create one you will just go insane. There are a thousand contradictions between the different versions of myths because they came from different times and areas. There was no one standardized “bible” for the Greeks, so it was heavily regional.
weren't most of those myths created by Ovid who was exiled or something and wrote a shitload of stories about how much the gods sucked out of pettiness
Pettiness and because the government was legitimately trash, so he used his medium to the best if bus ability.
I hope in a few thousand years the debates around Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are this lively
Athena is probably the least feminist goddess there is, mostly cause a lot of her stories are from Athens.
Athena as a divine identity was born of the status quo being preserved against change. She was the product of Zeus, king of Olympus, weaseling out of the prophecy that would see him overthrown so he could continue being--among other things--a self-serving dick. It's not a hard leap for me to believe that, as the primary deity of Athens, one of the most powerful preservers of (and even possibly the major creator of) the patriarchal and rigid systems we now most strongly associate with the ENTIRETY of Ancient Greece, Athena was a posterchild in the form of a female image being used to prop up a male powerbase. Athens fucked with a lot of other faiths they didn't like at the time to stamp out dissenting political bodies and cement their ideas; what's a little bit of fabricated support from their own tailor made female divinity?
Real question then, was Ares a feminist? Patron god of the amazons, best pals with Eris and killing a son of Poseidon for doing *what Greek gods are generally known to do* to his daughter, even if he had to face the wrath of the entire Olympus for that. I mean, obviously not as i don't think they'd have the concept of modern feminism then, but... If we are entertaining the thought only for fun, i guess it's no biggie.
I mean, they were quite fond of him in Sparta, a city-state where women were viewed as being as important as men, as well as being highly educated, mostly so that they can teach their kids to come with witty responses so that it can be quoted in 300.
His sister-lover-war chum Enyo was also very bad ass. Ares fought with many women.
diversity wins! The god of murder and killing and maiming says women rights
The deity of athena was used to support the power structures of a genuinely misogynist society though. Hellenist greece doesn't have a secret history of being super feminist it was a society built on slavery and patriarchal control of production
It's myths. Just don't romanticize the gods as icons if you wanna look well read
Can’t be bothered to get up and look for my physical copy of the article right now (I think it was titled the Medusa’s Gaze), but there are arguments that Medusa herself was a deity of a different culture appropriated by the Greeks. In some versions of her myth, it’s told as a tragedy. I think most people really take for granted how nuanced Medusa’s depictions can be. The snakes can be treated either as deformity or the source of her seductive powers in retellings. Really putting across women wanting sex and sensuality, and maybe even using it as a form of power, while living with the knowledge that it makes them extremely vulnerable whether because it affects social standing, pregnancy, or the threat of being overpowered. In this interpretation, Athena’s gift/curse can be seen as similar to the fruit of knowledge; an awareness of her status in society as a woman and all the good and bad that entails.
It still amazes me that Ares is the only male Olympian who supports women's rights and actively parents his demigod offspring. The way the Greeks depict him as a loser and the Romans depict him as a gigachad says a lot about their cultures.
Mythology is the ancient version of comic superheroes in that there’s a shitload of interpretations over multiple generations of storytellers In a thousand years, archaeologists will be arguing about whether Superman was a benevolent patriarch of the Justice League or a tyrannical overlord probably
The thing about the Greek deities is that the personality is not actually more of a side note or a fluid thing compared to whatever the lesson of the myths were. Like yes they have some underlying traits that barely change, but that's basically like the basic foundation and the rest is just whatever the story calls for that can be plausible. That's my take on the Greek deities: a vessel of the lessons to be learned made from a vague personality type.
my favortie part is how medusa doesnt have magic eye lasers or literal snakes for hair or anything, its just that shes supposed to be so conceptually ugly that anyone who so much as glances at her just straight up instantly dies. and the reason she was depicted with snakes is because of how the greeks felt about snakes
Me, after hearing about how Arachne, after turning into a spider, haunts Peter Parker's dreams and then eventually becomes real only to steal all the shoes in New York due to her love for Peter Parker, more accurately in this context, Spiderman (because you know like spiders and stuff) and then kidnaps Spiderman and then prompts him to become her boyfriend but he decides to defeat her: What? (For context this is a rough memory of some of the plot points of the spider man musical. Because honestly that musical is way too bloated for its own good.)
If you only use Ovid's interpretation as "canon" then of course you would constantly get more dickish gods
Sooooo who’s going to tell these people that the ancient Greeks were ridiculously misogynistic and that Greek religion and oral traditions were mainly created and passed on by men, and that society and thinking in general was very different back then from the way we think about all of these topics today. Not to mention that ancient Greek myth and religion wasn’t like modern Christian or Muslim religious fanatism and fundamentalism. There were hardly any sacred texts, “canon” and a central authority, so contradictory myths were told and accepted all the time. There are like 6 different versions of the Medusa story and 8 versions of how humanity was created. The ones we know are just the most popular stories. Therefore it is incredibly unlikely that there ever was some ur-feminist cult that got “corrupted” by the evil evil menfolk.
Me in middle school in a southern Christian state doing a report on Artemis: she never married even though her dad tried to set her up with lots of men... Maybe she was waiting for her true love? Me in college having not thought of Artemis since that report: she only hung out with other women and hunted male suitors for sport? That's definitely a lesbian
Wasn’t her whole thing being aggressively (for lack of a better word) aroace?
I also accept that interpretation! My main point is that it's hilarious that middle school me thought she was straight, despite literally tons of evidence that she's not.
I support the lesbian interpretation, myself. Portions of Ancient Greece were so violently patriarchal that I can absolutely see an underlying thought of "we'd rather she fuck no one at all than be sexually independent and not fuck men" from the powers that be. I even lean toward her having been bi but ultimately giving up her practical chances with men so as to avoid being tied to them and losing her independence, given one of the versions of the Orion myth has her falling for him hard.
Highly suggest anyone enjoying this post/comments read Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes. Learned (and unlearned) a shitload about Greek mythology!
I ride or die on that Artemis train. So…probably die bc imma guy. But man, she is an absolute baller
My favorite thing about tumblr is that they have opinions on EVERYTHING and regardless of how tiny the issue, people will still passionately fight about it.
It’s like how everyone’s parents told them the same stories with slightly different details and endings. Everything was by memory and spoken out loud for a long time and it was customary for story tellers to add their own flair to the myths. Diversity is to be expected
God damn, its almost as if the gods symbolise fundamental truths of existence and aren't designed to be stanned
Just go with your headcanon. Just like every religion, it's just a story.
I have come to the headcanon that Athena tries to be a good goddess, but has bad critical skill.
Fun fact: most Anti-Athena myths were written by Ovid, a Roman.
Me, after hearing Greece exists:
Bringing up Canon myths is like trying to grab sand. Ain't gonna work. You can try to bundle millennia of tales in one cohesive storyline. Good luck
I have whiplash
I have a cousin I hate named Athena and thus have never liked the goddess. You and I aren't the same
I will also point out that Arachne in the myth was said to have weaved specifically other myths where the gods were stupid or tricked or something, so the lesson could always be don't intentionally be incredibly instigating when you are faced with a literal god-like power.
One of the cool parts about mythology for me is learning the different versions of the same story and learn about the background of each retelling, and this is so because having your interpretation of a character or story be based on a single take of that story would make it so you only viewed truough 1 person's eyes, of which a lot of the times, hold ill intend while retelling this story We can never fully know what was the "real" version of any character or story because stories change overtime, and each version is made by someone with a bias that could be drastically distinct from the one that a previous author had while writting the tale. But what we can do is learning about differet iterations of any story or god we are interested in, try to learn why a story depics certain characters in bad or good ways, and create our own interpretation of this tale and accept that your idea of a story or god is just your idea and not an objective view of said entity (unless you are an antrophologist/historian or something I guess, lol, but even those people need to know that their understanding of these characters can be incomplete)
Me after hearing that all the stories aren't real: 😮
My favorite Athena story is *The Eumenides.* After Athena rendered judgment against them in the case of Orestes, the three good ladies threatened to torture the Athenians and lay waste to the countryside. She forestalled this by offering them a new role as protectors of justice, and reminded them that she still had the key to Daddy's shed where he kept the thunderbolts.
I think people like to have a very definitive “THIS is the correct story/version” but honestly every myth has a lot of versions, especially Greek ones. Take the hydra for example, it’s described as having nine heads, one head, three heads, a hundred heads, “many” heads, and so on
It's so weird to me seeing people still assume that: 1) Every story from Greek mythology consists solely of this small selection of myths that were popularised over the past few centuries, by people who had no respect for the faith and used the stories solely for their aesthetic value. Imagine if Hinduism became the largest religion in the world and 500 years later they decided that the Torah was only composed of stories about Noah's Ark, King David, and King Solomon. 2) That any of these stories were ever meant to be literal to begin with and not quick explanations for why certain things were the way they were. How many kids were told in the modern day that rain means God is crying, yet know perfectly well that it isn't?
paraphrasing "after learning that the myths were mostly told by men" - to whom do you think myths were generally told? I'd argue - to children, most of all. Since the purpose of a myth is to give a way to frame morality, existence, history and how the current reality came to be. Who do you think did the most "bringing up" of children? I think we all agree here - it was women, mothers. Therefore, I think the notion that myths were mostly told by men is really not as straightforward as "just count the number of writers".
they weren't just told around a camp fire these gods had dedicated priesthoods and were real political forces in their societies
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that ancient religions were actually religions. If you take the myths of current major religions, like Adam and Eve or the defeat of Ravana, then its clearly highly simplistic to say they're generally told to children. Same, presumably, for the myths of the past.
oh my god, describing gods as holding themselves as a "Not like other girls" is like a perfect description.
Depends on what you want to believe. I choose to think of Athena as a calm, reasonable, badass girlboss.
I appreciate the works of the fine artist, but please, not in my bedroom
Got whiplash reading that. Thanks
Yeah not a lot of things in greek myth is canon. Even Hades and Dionysus was apparently one person in one part.
Well, that was a roller-coaster.
Most of the stories that most negatively depict the gods are from Ovid's metamorphosis, because he had an agenda and a half.
iirc wasn't there some guy who wrote myths that deliberately painted the gods in a bad light and that's where the vindictive version of the medusa myth comes from?
The Medusa story they’re talking about was just an anarchist making a point that people in authority are bad
Me when I remember that the Greek gods are all mercurial weirdos written by 1000 different authors as the predecessor to modern collective writing projects: "There is no canon, we made it the fuck up."
The 2nd to last one was taught to me by a stupidly religious teacher and that was apparently justified because man is different from God and man is arrogant for even trying to face God (while that womans entire fucking life depended on working as a weaver)
Wait until you guys find out about the full Dionysus lore
Pantheon is Roman, the greek one is a Parthenon
Hades game did it the right way qhen they let Athena attacking us when Zagreus displease her.