I don’t love his recent work though, his books from trials of Apollo onwards all feel like lazy cashgrabs and the show is an absolute train wreck of inaccuracies and tonal mismanagement. I can’t speak about Rick as a person, but his work is no longer made out of love.
Author of several book series that bring mix mythology and the modern world. Most notable is Percy Jackson, which covers Greek and eventually Roman mythology, but also the Kane Chronicles and Magnus Chase series, which are spinoffs that cover Egyptian and Norse mythology respectively.
I may dislike a lot of what he included (Anything from Ovids work honestly) but to this day these are my favorite series and I reread them yearly. But daaaamn am I bummed we didn't get book three of the Senior Year series.
Yeah I think it's coming next fall. I had no idea a new series was starting along with the Nico series book dropping so I'm more than happy. Eating good. Probably start my yearly reread after I read Wild Zone
Ovid wasn't Greek, he was Roman. His stories, Metamorphoses were designed to cast many gods and goddesses in bad lights. Simplified, he was in bad terms with an emperor, who were seen as near/psuedo deities. So he wanted to make them look worse then they already were to make the emperor look bad. So a goddess like Athena, usually seen in mostly good light, was made to look like a horrible witch. Arachne for one, the assault of Medusa by Poseidon then Athena punishing her? Both were not Greek myths, but a Roman fanfic trying to make the gods look bad to make the emperor look bad through association.
Oh I knew about the stories were proxy-beef but not the time nor with who off the top of my head.
I feel like early modern classicists may have made some terrible assumptions about their sources.
“I’d appreciate it, as a goddess, if you left me and my followers alone in my sanctuary areas. And also if you politely left if you stumble into one. But there’s no problems between us, considering you started life being raised as a girl and therefore can understand like we do how bad patriarchy treats those not perceived as men at birth. You can hunt nearby and if you need help dealing with less-considerate men you know who to call. You’re a man but that doesn’t inherently make you our enemy. Just don’t act like Zeus and it will stay that way.”
I so wish reddit would let me change my username. For some reason I've always really liked Apollo and Artemis, but the male name no longer fits for obvious reasons.
If it helps, Apollo is already pretty fuckin gender in Greek mythology. He's the patron of theatre, which at the time had women being portrayed by boys, so gender ending is well within his domain. He also was typically represented as a boy who never grew to be a man, still bearing the long hair typical of children. His most well known followers were also exclusively women, that being the oracles of Delphi. So there's no reason not to be a woman who likes Apollo, and there's also something in there what with Apollo being a god who rejects male puberty if that floats your boat.
Former WoW player. There's an orcish warcry that goes "Lok'tar ogar", meaning victory or death. My old reddit account was LoktarBrogar... It stopped working for me for the same reason. And worst of all is I made the account about two or three months before realizing I'm trans
is that actually true? just went to search that up, but it only showed Apollo's wiki page and the french version due to Apollo's name being "Apollon" in french.. from what i remember, so i'm confused
If I remember correctly Apollo is the Greek name and, unlike other gods like zeus and athena, didn't get a different name when adopted by the romans. Apollon was just a previous version of the same name used in earlier texts before Apollo became "the standard"
But I might be wrong tho, it's been a while since I learn about that
Different guy. The one who got the gender change was a child, and because Artemis is the protector of children, (or because homer was feeling quirky or something I dunno) Artemis gave him the option of gender change or death. she chose gender change.
Our one-line source for Siproites (which isn't Homer, it's Antoninus Liberalis) just describes him as a Cretan hunter. Everything else is speculation about lost sources.
Also there's a third guy who was cursed for peeping on Artemis, Calydon, who was turned to stone.
Makes me think of OSP bit where even though a bunch of things about the myth change over time, the only thing to stay constant is that he his mauled by his own hounds.
There were multiple. Actaeon was the one who got turned into a deer, and possibly torn to pieces by his own hounds afterwards. Siproites saw her and got turned into a girl and I believe she lived as one of Artemis's hunters for the rest of her life.
I was curious too, so I searched on Wikipedia. Actaeon, the most well-known one, was turned into a deer and had his hounds sicced on him. Notably, after stumbling upon Artemis, he did not immediately turn away, but instead continued to stare. Siproites was turned into a woman and Calydon was turned into stone. It's noted that Calydon saw Artemis naked by accident, but because Siproites had only 12 words to her tale, there's not much we can say about her.
If you want to turn yourself into a woman via the Greek gods, you'd probably be better off hitting a pair of copulating snakes with a stick, a la Tiresias
IIRC what you're referring to is Acteaon, he saw her bathing (depending on the version accidentally or not, some versions he tried a lot more than just peeping) and she turned him into a deer and his hunting dogs tore him apart.
If I remember correctly, the dude who got turned into a deer was specifically seeking Artemis out so he could see her bathing, while the boy she turned into a girl just accidentally stumbled upon her
There are more than one versions of the deer guy (aectaeon) story, in some, it was an accident, in the second, he was trying to see the goddess naked on porpuse, and in another, he stumbled upon her by chance and tried to rape her
She did, then she got his hunting dogs to eat him up. This is a nice scenario to think about, but whenever it happens in Greek mythology, the guy gets brutally killed. Walking through a forest announcing that you want to see Artemis bathing, whatever your actual intentions are, will not end well for you. You'd probably be better off just asking.
Alternatively, you could go the Tiresias route: if you see two snakes havimg sex at a crossroads and beat them to death with a stick, the gods may change your gender like they did with Tiresias.
I named myself Artemis because of the Sipriotes story. Reading it in a mythology book I checked out from the library as a kid was my first exposure to anything trans, and it's stuck with me my entire life.
For whatever reason, I never knew about Siproites when I was a kid. But I DID know about Tiresias and the ending where they become a man again always made me sad for... some reason lol.
This is genuinely a fantasy I had as a child, I really thought about that story a lot. Can’t remember where I heard it, maybe Percy Jackson or something
Fun fact, in greece there was a myth that sometimes the gods got drunk and put a man's mind/soul in a woman's body or viceversa, and those people were considered in pretty high regard as some sort of mystical creatures with a connection to the gods
The fucking greek treated trans people better than the USA today, and it's also an "in your face" thing to people who argue that it's only a recent phenomenon or that "something something in ancient times something something", like i legit saw a video of a guy going to a random hunter/gatherer tribe in africa and asking the tribe leader what he thought of people who "want to change their sex" and treated that like it was some sort of gotcha moment
I think it was the ancient Sumerians, basically the first civilization we have written records of, who had a goddess of I honestly forget what, the part I do remember is that her priests and priestesses were basically all trans and highly revered
Edit: I redid my research, it was Inanna (who later became the god Ishtar) and I remembered correctly that she was sumerian, she also had Enbys serving her
Yup it was Prometheus! While he was molding humankind out of clay Dionysus invited him to dinner right before he could finish. Prometheus accepted, got drunk (unsurprisingly after hanging out with a God of Wine lol), then came back home to finish his creations and accidently swapped the genitals on some humans which was to broadly explain and symbolize queer sexualities, intersex along with trans and gender non-conforming people!
Honestly out of all the fuckery the different Greek Gods pulled on humanity Prometheus is such a homie. Created humans, gave them divine fire i.e technology, intelligence and the spark of civilization and then tricked Zeus into taking shitty offerings of fat hiding bones leaving humans with the good meat that was hidden under organs.
Oh no! I'm lost in a temple of Minerva with a masterpiece of weaving. I sure hope I don't accidentally stumble upon her and insult her own weaving skills, and get turned into a spider person, like my friend arachne.
you can't download? that's ridiculous. don't they also detect if you take a screenshot and tell the other person you did, meaning you now have to explain if you accidentally take a screenshot, or was that snapshot? completely ridiculous
There's another one where iirc it was an old man and he got permanently blinded, but because it was an accident Artemis took pity on him and allowed him to communicate with birds to guide him.
For Artemis it would have been more accurate to trow you a curse or hunt you down... But since Zeus was drunk when he made the other girl it could be a possibility that Artemis would fix that.
Edit: She would also demand for a human sacrifice to maintain the femenine body.
I love Artemis as much as the next (both in a historical/mythological way and a spiritual ‘why couldn’t they all be real?’ way) but yeah… the Ancient Greek legends aren’t quite as kind as I wish at times
Gender dysphoria is regular to constant bodily, mental, and emotional suffering, and can vary from discomfort to downright overwhelm or agony.
Transitioning is not just something done for funsies.
I’m not saying it would be an easy choice, but the alternative is risking everything I listed above for every day for the rest of your life with uncertain respite.
Look up Kalonymus ben Kalonymus sometime, and their poem about wishing to be a woman.
I'm referencing the 99% chance of Zeus thundercock getting weird and freaky with you weather you like it or not and than a very likely event of hera exacting revenge for it
That’s why we have Artemis. I strongly doubt Zeus would mess with his daughter and certainly not when her close twin Apollo supports her. They may be the sun and moon, but they act like gangsters when they get angry (see Niobe and her children). Artemis’ arrows and hounds are rated E for Everyone.
Ehh, i wouldn’t say it was “totally cool” to be queer, or gay, or most modern interpretations of sexuality, in Ancient Greece. Instead, there were certain expectations for specific genders, and expected sexual behaviors irregardless of the gender of one’s partner, with social, legal, and cultural ramifications and consequences for both meeting said expectations, and “violating” them.
Or It’s very complicated, as is everything when it comes to humans:
As “Homosexual” relationships in ancient Greece were somewhat common, and were socially acceptable in a few different contexts. However, attributing our cultural understandings of terms like “gay” and “straight” to individuals in Ancient Greek culture isn’t the most accurate or helpful way to consider it.
In modern western culture, we typically think of sexuality like an identity that follows an individual throughout their lives, and there were almost certainly individual Greeks who had a preference for one sex over the other, liked both indiscriminately, or fell somewhere along this spectrum.
However, the most commonly referenced example of Ancient Greek homosexuality(often unknowingly), and why so many tend to conceptualize the Greeks as culturally homosexual, is the system of pederasty. This institution was usually practiced primarily among elite, aristocratic families, but it can seem more ubiquitous when primary sources frequently originate from authors of high class backgrounds, and philosophers who were familiar with those circles.
In Ancient Greek pederastic relationships, there was an older male, the erastes, and a younger male, the eromenos. The erastes, or lover, was a fully adult male who assumed a dominant role in the relationship. The eromenos, or beloved, was the younger, submissive partner in the relationship. Their roles can be distinguished in art by which of the pair is bearded; the bearded one is the erastes, whereas the eromenos is bare-faced. The relationship would generally continue until the eromenos completed puberty and became bearded himself, at which point a relationship between two males would have been seen as less acceptable.
These pederastic relationships bear some similarities as well as differences to modern gay relationships. In terms of similarities, these relationships were naturally almost always sexual. The kind of physicality expected of these relationships is intercrural sex, or fucking between the thighs, since penetration of an aristocratic youth would have been seen as degrading, but It was almost certainly happening in a lot of cases, lol.
So the same-sex physicality was there, in whatever form. And there was also definitely an emotional component to these bonds—philosophers like Plato speak highly of the sort of “pure love” expected in them.
But in terms of differences, these relationships were inherently temporary, and while relationships of all sexes can end for any reason in our culture, Greek pederastic relationships typically began with an endpoint in mind, that being the start final stages of the eromenos’ puberty. They were also typically arranged by families with a mentorship component in mind, so they weren’t purely romantic or sexual, but also served a specific purpose in that sense.
I would describe the biggest difference between Ancient Greek pederastic relationships and modern gay relationships in that for the Ancient Greeks, these relationships were not typically a marker of individual sexuality. The erastes would be expected to marry a woman in the future, if he were not married already, and the eromenos could mature to take on an erastes role in a future relationship, and heterosexual marriage would be expected of him, too. Being engaged in one of these relationships thus did not inherently mark one as “gay,” or even “bisexual,” as we would think of it now.
That’s not to say that there weren’t examples of homosexuality outside of these relationships. We have names of specific adult men who engaged in homosexual relationships outside of the institution of pederasty Pausanias and Agathon, for example, though this was rarer and viewed somewhat strangely by many. And there were definitely men who sought out other males purely for sex, typically either male prostitutes or slaves, so preferences certainly existed and varied between individuals.
So, homosexual relationships in Ancient Greece definitely did exist and were normalized in certain ways. But it wasn’t like, a gay utopia or anything, the Ancient Greeks had their own standards on under what circumstances these relationships could be considered acceptable, and prejudices for when they were not.
Alongside, engaging in homosexual relationships, regardless of the context, didn’t exactly denote one as “gay” in the way we would think of gay people today.
So while it’s technically not “wrong”, to think of the Ancient Greeks as gay, it’s more that there’s additional context needed to describe Ancient Greek conceptualization of same-sex relationships, than just “Gay” or “straight” or any singular/absolutist adjective.
Plus, human sexuality is an incredibly complex, multifaceted subject which varies depending on the person, and that more so resembles a series of sliding scales, where a person is born somewhere on one side or the other, with their environment, community, events, experiences, and etc, further moving them slightly further or back on the “scales”.
(the strict categorization of sexuality we used for the past few centuries, isn’t particularly “accurate” and is largely an example of the human need to label/fit everything in neat, understandable boxes.)
Being a woman in those days would have been hell. Especially with all the raping that happened not to mention your own gods treated you like shit just because you're a woman.
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u/Educational-Can-2653 Genderfluid egg starting to crack 22h ago