Yuku free message boards

Hey Wynsong

I had a look at Athena and Artemis but only on Wiki and I'm not sure that is the best place to look! I must admit they seemed pretty similar to me: with just that distinction of goddesss of war and goddess of the hunt to distinguish them: in other respects (the virginal aspect, associations with the primordial etc) they seemed pretty similar: though Athena reminded me of Queen Elisabeth I of England whist with Artemis being the patron of animals and a huntress spoke to me more of our animal instincts: however, that is putting a modern day mindset on a distant (time-wise) mythos based on a very cursory glance at them. I dont know if it is because there were wide-ranging differences in the attriibutes given to the Greek and Roman gods, depending on where they were worshipped in city states or regions that were connected but often had different values, that has always made if difficult for me to really understand them without looking in greater detail, but I have always struggled to get to grips with them. I have the same problem sometimes with the Celtic pantheon - but in that case its easier for me to understand them as I am more aware of the cultural identities that informed the differences.

But using Queen Elisabeth I, the known as the Virgin Queen, as a model, I can see how she relates to what I am trying to express. She is seen by many (myself included) as one of our greatest monarchs from the perspective of her own reign, but her decision not to marry and bear an heir meant it was the thorn in her side, Mary Queen of Scots, who's child assumed the thrown after her thus creating the Stuart dynasty and ending the reign of her family (Tudor) dynasty. For the monarch to produce an heir had always been an issue in Britain up until the reign of Mary Queen of Scot's great-grandson's generation when the Restoration of the Monarchy after the Civil War created the constitutional monarchy merely as figurehead we have today and ended the Divine Right of Kings. In that respect she not only did not fulfill the dynastic pretentions of her forebears, but rendered futile her father's (King Henry VIII) six-wife search for an heir that generated the split with Rome that in turn led to the internal religious wars of her brother and sister's reigns before her, and brought war with Spain in her reign, but that carried on in terms of persecution of catholics, given the fear of catholic resurgency, in the four kings and the Commonwealth Republic that followed her. That turmoil, home and abroad, gave France the space to expand its powerbase to teh point where it sought to invade England via Ireland, leading to the Battle of the Boyne that, in our modern era, led to the IRA when you add into the heady mix the dynasty of German (Georgian) Kings of the early House of Hanover that followed the Stuarts that created an unwealding self-serving notions of parliament we have today as it was in the Georgian era that the term Prime Minister, in the figure of Robert Walpole, first appeared: a man, not unlike Tony Blair, who became exceedingly rich as a result of his endeavours in parliament and  created the the first stock-market crash in the South-Seas Bubble.

Now no-one could blame Queen Elisabeth for all this: the point I am trying to make is that notion of the law of Unintended Consequences. How, from our lowly position as mere human's we cannot always see the consequences of our actions within the sphere of the wider energies at play and the effects our decisions and actions in one moment could have, with a slight change in circumstances, in the next.

Perhaps the mists/curtains serve as a warning: a caution to remain still at times and not seek to imose our will on a situationn until the mists clear or the curtains fall?

And the barriers have no substance to them...if that makes sense.

It certainly makes sense: I have begun to wonder if that is because they are self-imposed barriers? By that I mean a barrier that we have created by our previous actions: ie the pain Queen Elisabeth is said to have felt when she heard that Mary Queen of Scots had bourne a son, given her own decision not to marry? It some circles it is said that Elisabeth's decision came almost to spite parliament at their decision not to allow her to marry the love of her life because there was some controversy surrounding his wife's death. Others say that it was because of a mistrust of men as king given the Divine Right of the Monarchy that led to her mother's execution by her father, the marriage voided and, for some time, she was considered illegitimate: all to allow her father to marry again. Yet others say it was because of an innate sense of service: she was wed to the British people as Queen. In some cases, our decisions, whilst appearing logical at the time we make them (Elisabeth's decision not to trust a man who would be king to protect herself) can bring us troubles later: particularly when we fail to act based on fear or act out of a sense of duty that inhibits our own happiness and our ability to bring forward the circumstances that create that sense of well-being we call happiness.  These might be the mists or curtains that we bring forward directly but without knowing we have brought them forward.

Perhaps, as in the option that Elisabeth did not marry to spite parliament, our actions create or contribute to creating stronger barriers ie the veils that seperate us from Knowing? Perhaps the longer we hold a view that isnt helpful, the stronger that barrier becomes: the mists become solid, the curtains become veils: ie we can walk through the mist or pull down the curtains ourselves, but the veils require intercession somehow.

One thing that does strike me about Athena coming from the head of Zeus: the masculine is considered the active principal, the femine the recipient of that active principal: seed and vessel. Now regardless of whether you agree with such an analogy, it has informed our culture for thousands of years and refers to a biological state. But, if you look at Athena and Zeus, and turn that around, you get a situation whereby it is actually the feminine that is the active principal: the head in antiquity referred to thought and thought cannot actually contribute to the world of form directly: it needs action to do so. Athena is the action and the head of the Zeus is the thought that, of its own accord, cannot directly influence the world: it needs a medium ie action. To me the Athena/Zeus birth mythos is a reference to ancient societies wherein the notions of male and female we have today did not exist and the notions of active and passive were not seen in the polarised sense we see them today but in a far more co-creational sense: though it is true that that differentiation started to appear in classical Greece, but if one looks below the surface of that differentiation, outwith our modern sense of male and female, the feminine was actually reverred: though from the perspective of our modern era, that reverence appears stifling perhaps due to the associations that have grown up in the years between:  a reverence that is often now distructive rather than creative from both the male and female perspective: another mist/curtain/veil scenario.

What I do find interesting is that with both Athena and Artemis that notion of the feminine as both creative and destructive is there in the mythos. In which point, what part does the masculine play?