I'm gonna necro an old thread rather than start a new one...
here's a nifty little piece about okeanos and ancient Greek art
I'm gonna necro an old thread rather than start a new one...
here's a nifty little piece about okeanos and ancient Greek art
“You have never answered but you did not need to. If I stand at the ocean I can hear you with your thousand voices. Sometimes you shout, hilarious laughter that taunts all questions. Other nights you are silent as death, a mirror in which the stars show themselves. Then I think you want to tell me something, but you never do. Of course I know I have written letters to no-one. But what if I find a trident tomorrow?" ~~Letters to Poseidon, Cees Nooteboom
“We still carry this primal relationship to the Earth within our consciousness, even if we have long forgotten it. It is a primal recognition of the wonder, beauty, and divine nature of the Earth. It is a felt reverence for all that exists. Once we bring this foundational quality into our consciousness, we will be able to respond to our present man-made crisis from a place of balance, in which our actions will be grounded in an attitude of respect for all of life. This is the nature of real sustainability.”
~~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
"We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes--one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way."
~~Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
"Humans are not rational creatures. Now, logic and rationality are very helpful tools, but there’s also a place for embracing our subjectivity and thinking symbolically. Sometimes what our so-called higher thinking can’t or won’t see, our older, more primitive intuition will." John Beckett
Pagan Devotionals, because the wind and the rain is our Bible
I was going to send you a link to that, but I only got half through reading it before I got called away to do homework
damn it! while I was typing that, the dog found and ate my hotdog.
Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.
What's interesting to me about that vase is Oceanus's horns. How many sea creatures have horns? The horned cap is a distinctive head-dress of Mesopotamian gods and it's often said that Homer's statement that Oceanus is the father of the gods is one of the many ideas he got from the east. In Mesopotamia, the parents of the gods are the primal waters, Apsu and Tiamat who emerge from nothingness. The Orphic teachings of Hieronymos kept that idea, with Oceanus and Tethys. Pherecydes (whose father came from Asia Minor) also started with Oceanus.
Herodotus made Oceanus a child of Gaia and Ouranos, which is probably the original Greek idea. That view was adopted by the Orphic teacher Eudemos and it became standard Orphism. Plato takes the Hieronyman line in the Cratylus and the Eudemian one in the Timaeus, but he took myths very flexibly.
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