Greek myth - divine differences
Dec. 27th, 2020 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sparklightAnyone else like leaning into the parts that, for how (extra-)human the gods are shown in myth, emphasize how they’re not? Like how super-precocial divine babies are born (which Hermes and Apollo gives us various examples for), even if they still need care and minding since they’re young.
Or this bit from Callimachus’ hymn to Apollo; “His locks distil fragrant oils upon the ground; not oil of fat do the locks of Apollo distil but he very Healing of All.”
Which could be Apollo alone of course (and possibly merely a poetic turn as well), though there is a hymn to Hestia that notes she has oil dripping from her hair too but since the ancient Greeks rubbed oil into their hair that could be a reference to that practice alone, it's hard to say. Either way I like the idea that this applies to all of the gods. That this is something their hair just does, if not necessarily with the same effects.
Same as this bit from another hymn of Callimachus (The Bath of Pallas): “It is not I that made thy child blind. […] Whosoever shall behold any of the immortals, when the god himself chooses not, at a heavy price shall he behold.”
The implication that seeing a god who doesn’t want to be seen will just automatically result in some sort of backlash, like a cosmic bitchslap, even if it wasn’t intentional on the mortal’s part is really interesting. It really makes them something other, you know? (And obviously the deity has some choice what sort of form the punishment should take, Artemis, for example is certainly far crueller than Athena is here for the same sort of infraction.)
I just love things like this, completely aside from the gods’ various powers. Like, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love how human they can be in their acting (just that since they are gods, their reactions and emotions have, of course, super-human effects on the world and the mortals caught in their way), but that there are things like this that also have them be something other than human in how they move and act in the world tickles my imagination and love of world-building a lot.
And then you've also got that the gods are (a lot) taller than mortal humans. Some of it of course for exaggeration’s sake (like the length of Ares when he’s felled in the Iliad), but using this you can still shave it down to “taller than humans” and I love it. For the general visual effect whenever the gods aren’t taking a mortal guise, but also just as another angle of difference in general, since buildings meant for humans would then be not quite large enough for a god to move easily in, even if we’re just talking about heights of chairs and tables, not necessarily “tall enough to bonk your head on the roof”.
On the other hand, remembering that humans in the Bronze Age would be (much) shorter than we are now generally, maybe the gods really would be bonking their heads on ceilings even if they aren’t double or triple as tall as humans.
Or this bit from Callimachus’ hymn to Apollo; “His locks distil fragrant oils upon the ground; not oil of fat do the locks of Apollo distil but he very Healing of All.”
Which could be Apollo alone of course (and possibly merely a poetic turn as well), though there is a hymn to Hestia that notes she has oil dripping from her hair too but since the ancient Greeks rubbed oil into their hair that could be a reference to that practice alone, it's hard to say. Either way I like the idea that this applies to all of the gods. That this is something their hair just does, if not necessarily with the same effects.
Same as this bit from another hymn of Callimachus (The Bath of Pallas): “It is not I that made thy child blind. […] Whosoever shall behold any of the immortals, when the god himself chooses not, at a heavy price shall he behold.”
The implication that seeing a god who doesn’t want to be seen will just automatically result in some sort of backlash, like a cosmic bitchslap, even if it wasn’t intentional on the mortal’s part is really interesting. It really makes them something other, you know? (And obviously the deity has some choice what sort of form the punishment should take, Artemis, for example is certainly far crueller than Athena is here for the same sort of infraction.)
I just love things like this, completely aside from the gods’ various powers. Like, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love how human they can be in their acting (just that since they are gods, their reactions and emotions have, of course, super-human effects on the world and the mortals caught in their way), but that there are things like this that also have them be something other than human in how they move and act in the world tickles my imagination and love of world-building a lot.
And then you've also got that the gods are (a lot) taller than mortal humans. Some of it of course for exaggeration’s sake (like the length of Ares when he’s felled in the Iliad), but using this you can still shave it down to “taller than humans” and I love it. For the general visual effect whenever the gods aren’t taking a mortal guise, but also just as another angle of difference in general, since buildings meant for humans would then be not quite large enough for a god to move easily in, even if we’re just talking about heights of chairs and tables, not necessarily “tall enough to bonk your head on the roof”.
On the other hand, remembering that humans in the Bronze Age would be (much) shorter than we are now generally, maybe the gods really would be bonking their heads on ceilings even if they aren’t double or triple as tall as humans.
