#to spill the essence of poetry in the form of something more human. blood or spit or tears or vomit | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

elegiaques · 3 years

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MUSE AS A DEITY.

RULES : think carefully about your character and their development through their journey (canon or oc ) within their story . fill out the chart and tag whoever you want ! REPOST , DO NOT REBLOG .

DEITY OF : goddess of connections, mysteries, arts, revolutions and death

ASSOCIATED WITH : art, poetry, tragedy, romanticism, bonds, calamity, wings, sadness, and hope

SACRED PLANTS : anemone and red roses

RED ROSES — For the ancient Romans, the rose signified beauty and was associated with goddesses, most famously; Venus and Aphrodite known as the goddesses of love, beauty, and desire. It was also seen as evocative of death and rebirth and often planted on graves. Ancient Romans were also known for placing a rose on the door to a room where confidential matters were being discussed, a custom thought to have derived from the Latin expression “sub rosa” translating as “under the rose” and referring to being told something in confidence.

ANEMONE — The story goes that Adonis, huge crush of goddesses everywhere, was killed by a wild boar while hunting. In keeping with the Greek tradition of blaming flowers in mythology on the deaths of hotties, the anemone is said to have sprung up where Adonis’ blood had spilled. Other versions of the story say the anemone was a white flower already in bloom, but turned red from Adonis’ blood.

SACRED STONES / GEMS : rose quartz and amethyst

ROSE QUARTZ — The ancient civilizations of Rome and Assyria were the first to use this crystal as a bead in rose quartz jewelry. Its use in talismans, however, carried more symbolic weight. To early Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations, rose quartz meaning within a talisman was that of ownership. Rose quartz talisman were used to signify that a deal had been reached. The Egyptians also believe that the stone could prevent wrinkles and the effects of aging. Greek and Roman myths were the first to attach the symbol of love to the rose quartz meaning. According to the myth, Cupid, the Roman god of desire, or Eros, the Greek god of love, bestowed the gift of love to humans in the form of a rose quartz. Another rose quartz myth tells of the stone receiving its color from the blood Aphrodite spilt in trying to save her dying lover Adonis. Both of the lovers bled over the stone, and its lasting stain is meant to represent eternal love. Later in Ancient Native American cultures, the rose quartz stone meaning was the same. They believed that this love stone could be used in amulets to resolve anger and disappointments, and bring love into the newly harmonized emotions.

AMETHYST — Amethyst is a stone of spiritual protection and purification, cleansing one’s energy field of negative influences and attachments, and creating a resonant shield of spiritual Light around the body. It acts as a barrier against lower energies, psychic attack, geopathic stress and unhealthy environments.

SACRED ANIMALS : swans, butterflies and wolves

SWAN — The Swan is a symbol of purity, beauty, grace, love and elegance, but it can also symbolize divination and balance. The swan as an animal totem can also help you understand better spiritual evolution and maintain grace in the communication with other people.

BUTTERFLIES — In general, butterfly symbolism always brings you massive transformation. In essence, this insect is asking you to embrace those changes in your environment and with your emotional body. This physical transformation of energy around you is taking root and expanding in ways that may surprise you. It also behooves you to release any expectations you may have about the outcome of this change. Moreover, do not try to control it. In this case, you must allow it to flow through and around you. Above all, keep your faith.

WOLVES — Not at all the picture of ferocity or terror, the wolf is a creature with a high sense of loyalty and strength. Another misconception is that of the “lone wolf.” To the contrary, the wolf is actually a social creature, friendly, and gregarious with its counterparts. The wolf is an incredible communicator. By using touch, body movements, eye contact as well as many complex vocal expressions – the wolf makes his point understood.

COLORS : purple, pink, lavender, and green.

PURPLE — Royalty, nobility, spirituality, ceremony, mysterious, transformation, wisdom, enlightenment, cruelty, honor, arrogance, mourning, temperance.

LAVENDER — symbolizes femininity, grace and elegance.

PINK — Pink is associated with sexuality, and purity. Pink is symbolic of pure love, for example. It is also the color used for sexual advertisements and such.

GREEN — Green can represent nature, the environment, good luck, youth, vigor, jealousy, envy, and misfortune. According to Henry Dreyfus, green, midori is regarded as the color of eternal life, as seen in evergreens which never change their colour from season to season. In the word midori, both trees and vegetation are implied.

FOOD : vegetables

SCENTS : salt sea, perfumes, and wilting flowers

ACCEPTED OFFERINGS / WAYS TO HONOR : red wine, cupcakes, blood from other gods, a corpse, self-sacrifice, jewelry especially in the form of a pearl/shell/moon.

#❝ ✧ █ ┊ i. ` . ♡ ❪ info ❫ let me go mad in my own way.#long post //

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the-knights-who-say-book · 6 years

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The myths will tell you that the affairs of goddesses ended in tragedy, or shame, or were simply doomed from the beginning.

But there are stories that shine unspoken between the myths told and retold, there are shadows under and between the gaping, mismatched timeframes of the pieced-together myths that hide more words than we can excavate. There is time and space enough, anyway, to imagine that —

yes, Athena is a virgin goddess, but not wanting sex is something altogether different from never falling in love (and Athena in particular knows it is so easy to fall in love with creators). The whirring, spinning, clacking, scraping, cacophony of the workroom; the careful assembling and weaving and pressing and sculpting. The creating and crafting of all things draws Athena near. Enough talent and skill in one place will pull at her essence, draw molecules of her into the workroom until she appears there all at once.

Like a statue opening her eyes, she is suddenly there as if she has always been, and yet different. Unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable. In the workroom her divine aura fades: there is clay caked on her calloused hands, or a paintbrush tucked behind her ear, and the artisans who catch sight of her wandering through the room can only blink and half-realize they should recognize her. The projects she wanders past seem to gleam with potential and strike new inspiration in their eyes, and she loves it there, loves the way hard work and skill call to her and set her immortal heart pounding.

It is in one of these workrooms that she wanders past a weaver and then wanders past her again — cannot seem to leave her alone, drawn to the relentless rhythm of the weaver’s hands against the deep blue half-formed cloth. Stands behind her shoulder breathing in a barely noticeable perfume and itching to tuck away a loose strand of curling hair against the weaver’s cheek. Stands for so long and so intently that the weaver finally blinks against the protective confusion that clouds Athena’s presence and looks over her shoulder, coming face to face with her goddess.

I know you, she says, and she is not scared, as any mortal should be to find a god watching their every move. She is reverent. She is looking up at Athena the way she’d look at the most perfectly woven cloth: in pleased awe, in pride. In the joy every true artisan takes in their craft.

In the myths we know, a dawn goddess is foiled because her love may live forever, but he cannot be young forever; in another, a mortal man may be young forever, but he will sleep to the end of time. Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She thinks ahead the way an architect plans the entire building before designing a facade. She does not try to make her weaver immortal; she does not invite tragedy in.

They work side by side for years. They kiss in the sunset shadows and whisper to each other about the new colors they’d invent to dye their wedding dresses. They know that nothing lasts forever except the gods.

When the weaver has grown several years older than Athena’s face appears, she finally kisses her forehead one last time — not in the way of two girls in love as they have for years, but in the way of a goddess bestowing a blessing, and leaves her workroom for the last time.

And they will miss each other, and it will be painful, and the memories will come back in the red-stained light of the sunset and haunt both of them with the softest scent of a perfume several years lost. But there will be happiness in the memories, and a fierce refusal to let the pain corrupt the time they had together, and neither will regret it — the half-lit kisses, the new colors they invented.

It is brief but it is worth it, as all mortal lives are.

yes, Aphrodite fell for the god of war once, or perhaps many times. But there is someone else — a girl. A poet. A singer of peace.

That is when Aphrodite finds her. As the poet stands on the shore where the goddess of love first touched land, foam washing around her bare feet and pale hair burnished silver in the moonlight. The starlight haloes her as if she too is immortal, and she sings as if she will never die. Her voice is low and pure and ripples like the ocean the goddess came from, and she sings her own poetry as a sacrifice.

Aphrodite sees her from up in the highest clouds, shining like her own source of light down below, and accepts.

It is dizzying and intoxicating; one moment she is surrounded by the damp, misty coldness of the starry clouds, the next she is rising from the ocean, waves rolling off her shoulders, as the poet’s warm hands help her out of the water. They are the two most beautiful things in the moonlight, just then; in the entire soft, enveloping night.

I’ve prayed to you, the poet says, voice trembling but no less beautiful when she speaks. Aphrodite knows. She can feel every prayer for love she has ever received; they hum and murmur in her bones. The prayers of the poet vibrate in the ribs over her heart, trapped in her marrow.

She takes the poet’s hand and places it over her heart so she can feel the trembling quiver there. It’s more than a heartbeat; it’s a feeling that pounds underneath the poet’s hand and wrecks her own pulse, wriggles inside her ribcage and makes a home there. It’s frightening and enthralling, calling her own heart in line with the goddess’s, a power far deeper and bloodier than any she’s heard of or worshipped or called on.

It’s the kind of force that reshapes your life with a touch, the kind of need that would drive you into the underworld to rescue your love, the kind of desire that makes tears rise and air taste like pulped flowers and blood in your mouth. Against death, against life, against reason.

Aphrodite falters. She can see the path of her power finding its way into the poet through the channels of her blood, as natural as it has always been, but this time something is different. Something is... right. She can feel something that begins where the poet’s hand rests over her heart and races into her ichor-blood soaking through her skin. It ripples, stirs, sings out, as if the poet’s voice is trapped inside her — no, not trapped. Exultant at being welcomed in. Singing out in victory.

You are mine, and we are each other’s.

The force and rush as it builds feels like the sea. The rightness of it, the unity of it, is something she has not felt since she was born from these waves.

Love feels like drowning, like dying, like being born, the endless rush of it all cradled into this new spot beneath her heart. When the poet kisses her she tastes the ocean.

yes, we know little of Iris, but that does not mean we should believe her unimportant. The drawer of rainbows. The cupbearer of gods. The carrier of messages.

Iris, carry my message to the nymph. It does not matter what god speaks these words. It never matters. The stories of gods and nymphs are all the same.

Iris, tell her I love her and will come to her soon. It does not matter whether he means it. The results are always the same.

Iris, creator of illusions, empty vessel for the gods, carrier of others’ words, run down from Olympus for me.

What is one trip or twelve for a messenger so light-footed, skipping on clouds and gliding on acres of sky? The clouds, the domain of her mother, sing her goodbye; the sea, the domain her father, welcomes her to earth. So quickly she flies it seems as though her path stretches in an uninterrupted stream of color from the sky to the sea.

It’s a water nymph who waits for her. Half-substantial, closest to human of the gods. Her hair is a waterfall and her hands stretched out to Iris drip pearls of water from her fingertips. Queen of this single river whose tributaries wind down her spine, flashing silver in the sunlight, crowning and clothing her in jewels more precious than any humans know.

Her laugh is the voice of water, her smile blinds the sun. Iris, what does he say?

Iris tips out the emptiness of her and spills the words of the Olympian god at the nymph’s feet. A puddle of inadequacy the nymph must kneel to examine.

What is a puddle to a river-queen? Iris cannot stand the way she cups the god’s words to her mouth, drinks them down like ambrosia. How can they be sweet and not bitter with shallowness?

Iris, my darling, will you carry my message?

The answer is yes. It is always yes to her.

Iris does not truly know if what she does is flying or leaping or floating or dancing, what miracle of lightness carries her from earth to mountain-top. But with the nymph’s eyes on her, always, it feels the most like flying.

Iris, isn’t she wonderful, isn’t she beautiful, he says, and Iris could choke on all the words that come bubbling up in response.

She says nothing. She carries the god’s words down.

Iris, don’t you think he’s different, don’t you think he’s sweet, she says, and Iris could drown in all the words that fill up in her lungs.

She says nothing. She carries the nymph’s words up.

Is it the length of one spring or a hundred years? Time stretches like silk blowing in the wind, rippling lazily without end or beginning. The gods mark time only in eras of their own power, so in that way, perhaps no time has passed at all.

Iris carries more messages than a mortal could count; she counts time by the nymph’s smiles. It is not months and years but Iris tell her and Iris, darling, will you and the stretches of flight in between, pure color dancing from her feet.

She looks forward to her time with the nymph. Sitting on the banks of her river, hands twined together, speaking softly and laughing loudly. It always ends with a new message to carry up to Olympus, but at least first there is teasing and confiding in each other. It is unintentional, how long these meetings begin to last, how eventually it becomes a full day spent together before Iris returns with the nymph’s message, and then two days, three.

What takes so long? he asks with a god’s temper when she begins to return so late. Iris says nothing.

He can wait, the nymph says, when Iris relays his impatience.

And I don’t care, when Iris tells her he will become angry.

And Then tell him we’re done, when Iris explains his demand.

And Iris, I love you.

Isn’t that just how love works? The comfort of closeness, the draw of familiarity. You fall in love with the one who sees and comforts you. Can Iris help it that the nymph sees her face so much more often than she sees the god’s?

His voice swells with fury and indignation when Iris dumps the nymph’s final message at his feet. Iris, you will carry this message to her—

And Iris smiles brilliantly as she says no.

There are stories that shine unspoken between the myths told and retold, stories buried in the silence but ever gleaming. A kiss in the sunset, a heartbeat in the waves, a rainbow stretching between sea and sky. Sing me these stories, for a moment, and forget the others.

#the loves of goddesses #greek gods #greek goddesses #mythology #wlw #short story #My writing #long post #THIS IS THE LAST STORY I'M POSTING IN 2017 AND IT TOOK SO GODDAMN LONG I THOUGHT I WASN'T GOING TO MAKE IT #i can't even reread the entire thing again if it sucks i dont want to know

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