Even Death has a price to pay. Nivian has lost the will to reap, but with the clock ticking down on the survival of all realms, she is tasked with becoming the new Fate Keeper. When something goes wrong during the transfer of powers ceremony, Nivian seeks out the Moirai for the answers she so desperately needs. But everything comes with a price. Nivian will descend into the belly of the underworld to retrieve the man she loves. But if she fails, she’ll be doomed to live a half life and her soul will belong to Hades. He died for her. Now she will tear the Underworld apart for a chance to save him.
'A really thrilling and totally original story of Greek mythology that I can't recommend highly enough' JENNIFER SAINT Before Gods and mortals, there were The Fates . . . You've heard the legends: three sisters born out of Nyx's darkness, destined to weave the lives, and deaths, of humankind for eternity. But immortality is a heavy burden, and Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos are captivated by the gloriously human lives of the mortals below, especially those of the great warrior Atalanta and her ill-fated lover, Meleager. However, being a Goddess of Fate doesn't make you a master of it. Will these three sisters find a way to free the couple, and themselves, from their destinies? Or will they be bound by Fate forever? READERS LOVE THE FATES 'An absolutely stunning read!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW 'Out of everything I have ever read, I honestly think this has been my favourite book' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW ''Fresh and welcoming . . . reading this felt like how listening to a new beautiful song feels' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW 'I absolutely adored this book' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW 'Exquisitely written with relatable and likable characters and beautiful world building' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW 'Had me hooked from the first page and is one of the most unique books inspired by mythology that I have read' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ READER REVIEW
As the daughter of Zeus and the goddess in charge of ending human lives, Sophie must blend in as a normal teenager and avoid relationships with mortals at all costs.
This book puts the hymns by the Neoplatonist Proclus in the context of his philosophy and offers a detailed commentary together with a new translation of them.
The belief that the earliest humans worshipped a sovereign, nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a popular one. It has been taken up as fact by the media, who routinely depict modern goddess-worshippers as "reviving" the ancient religions of our ancestors. Feminist scholars contend that, in the primordial religions, the Great Mother was honored as the primary, creative force, giving birth to the world, granting fertility to both crops and humans, and ruling supreme over her family pantheon. The peaceful, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her were eventually wiped out or subjugated by nomadic, patriarchal warrior tribes such as the early Hebrews, who brought their male God to overthrow the Great Mother: the first step in the creation and perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant oppression and degradation of women. In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz sets out to test this hypothesis by examining the real female deities of early human cultures. She finds no trace of the Great Mother in their myths or in their worship. From the Eskimos of the arctic wasteland, whose harsh life even today most closely mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the rich cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz looks at a wide range of goddesses who are called Mother, or who give birth in their myths. She finds that these goddesses have varying origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and other divinities, rather than stemming from a common Mother Goddess archetype. For instance, Sedna, the powerful goddess whose chopped-off fingers became the seals and fish that were the Eskimos' chief source of food, had nothing to do with human fertility. Indeed, human motherhood was held in such low esteem that Eskimo women were forced to give birth completely alone, with no human companionship and no helpful deities of childbirth. Likewise, while various Mexican goddesses ruled over healing, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them either embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the crops: for that the Mexicans looked to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor were the rituals of these goddesses nurturing or peaceful. The goddess Cihuacoatl, who nurtured the creator god Quetzalcoatl and helped him create humanity, was worshipped with human sacrifices who were pushed into a fire, removed while still alive, and their hearts were cut out. And Motz closely examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the "Magna Mater" most often cited as an example of a powerful mother goddess. Hers were the last of the great pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall before Christianity. But Cybele herself never gives birth, nor does she concern herself with aiding women in childbirth or childrearing. She is not herself a mother, and the male character figuring most prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste companion. Tellingly, Cybele's priests dedicate themselves to her by castrating themselves, thus mimicking Attis's death--a very odd way to venerate a goddess of fertility. To depict these earlier goddesses as peaceful and nurturing mothers, as is often done, is to deny them their own complex and sophisticated nature as beings who were often violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who reveled in their eroticism and were worshipped as harlots. The idea of a nurturing Mother Goddess is very powerful. In this challenging book, however, Motz shows that She is a product of our own age, not of earlier ones. By discarding this simplistic and worn-out paradigm, we can open the door to a new way of thinking about feminine spirituality and religious experience.
Examines women whose influence was positive, as well as those whose reputations were more notoriousSupremely well researched from many different historical sourcesSuperbly illustrated with photographs and drawings Women in Ancient Greece is a much-needed analysis of how women behaved in Greek society, how they were regarded, and the restrictions imposed on their actions. Given that ancient Greece was very much a man’s world, most books on ancient Greek society tend to focus on men; this book redresses the imbalance by shining the spotlight on that neglected other half. Women had significant roles to play in Greek society and culture – this book illuminates those roles. Women in Ancient Greece asks the controversial question: how far is the assumption that women were secluded and excluded just an illusion? It answers it by exploring the treatment of women in Greek myth and epic; their treatment by playwrights, poets and philosophers; and the actions of liberated women in Minoan Crete, Sparta and the Hellenistic era when some elite women were politically prominent. It covers women in Athens, Sparta and in other city states; describes women writers, philosophers, artists and scientists; it explores love, marriage and adultery, the virtuous and the meretricious; and the roles women played in death and religion. Crucially, the book is people-based, drawing much of its evidence and many of its conclusions from lives lived by historical Greek women.
When the night settles, And the wolf howls at its moon, The murk shall devour the sky, The Lands shall cry, A forever midnight will besiege the ticking of time, For the Devils only come out at midnight. Angels will fall, And the Devils will rise. For every end shall have a new beginning. - Aeon, Ruler of the Great Beyond “Everyone believes that there are two kinds of devils – ones that come from above and the ones that come from below. The ones that come from below seek vengeance upon the mortal world. The ones that come from above seek redemption amongst the living. But I personally believe in the third kind of devils, who seek both – redemption and vengeance. These devils are us – the living creatures.”: SPAR 84 “You were brave to enact and try to bring things in order, but you messed up. Someone needed to clean up that mess of yours: Destiny chose me”: Yanat “Evil cannot be suppressed, it can only be delayed”: VEH 8462
Preliminary material /Otto J. Brendel -- THE PHILOSOPHER MOSAIC IN NAPLES /Otto J. Brendel -- A RIDDLE OF THE SEVEN SAGES /Otto J. Brendel -- THALES /Otto J. Brendel -- WORLD SPINDLE AND CELESTIAL SPHERE /Otto J. Brendel -- THE CELESTIAL SPHERE OF THE MOIRAI /Otto J. Brendel -- INDEX /Otto J. Brendel -- LIST OF PLATES /Otto J. Brendel -- PLATE I-XXX /Otto J. Brendel.
This novel, ground-breaking study aims to define Hesiod's place in early Greek intellectual history by exploring his conception of language and the ways in which it represents reality. Divided into three parts, it addresses a network of issues related to etymology, word-play, and semantics, and examines how these contribute to the development of the argument and the concepts of knowledge and authority in the Theogony and the Works and Days. Part I demonstrates how much we can learn about the poet's craft and his relation to the poetic tradition if we read his etymologies carefully, while Part II takes the discussion of the 'correctness of language' further - this correctness does not amount to a naïvely assumed one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified. Correct names and correct language are 'true' because they reveal something particular about the concept or entity named, as numerous examples show; more importantly, however, correct language is imitative of reality, in that language becomes more opaque, ambiguous, and indeterminate as we delve deeper into the exploration of the condicio humana and the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize it in the Works and Days. Part III addresses three moments of Hesiodic reception, with individual chapters comparing Hesiod's implicit theory of language and cognition with the more explicit statements found in early mythographers and genealogists, demonstrating the importance of Hesiod's poetry for Plato's etymological project in the Cratylus, and discussing the ways in which some ancient philologists treat Hesiod as one of their own. What emerges is a new and invaluable perspective on a hitherto under-explored chapter in early Greek linguistic thought which ascertains more clearly Hesiod's place in Greek intellectual history as a serious thinker who introduced some of the questions that occupied early Greek philosophy.
This interdisciplinary study investigates the divine personas in the so-called magical hymns of the Greek magical papyri which, in a corpus usually seen as a significant expression of religious syncretism with strong Egyptian influence, were long considered to be the 'most authentically Greek' contribution. Fifteen hymns receive a line-by-line commentary focusing on religious concepts, ritual practice, language and style. The overarching aim is to categorise the nature of divinity according to its Greek or Egyptian elements, examining earlier Greek and Egyptian sources and religious-magical traditions in order to find textual or conceptual parallels. Are the gods of the magical hymns Greek or Egyptian in nature? Did the magical hymns originate in a Greek or Egyptian cultural background? The book tries to answer these questions and to shed light on the religious plurality and/or fusion of the two cultures in the treatment of divinity in the Greek magical papyri.
