A Hades/Persephone retelling.
How often do you catch yourself wondering how somebody's touch would feel? How soft their hands would be as they caressed your entire form, how sweet their lips would taste when they descended down to yours, how diaboli...
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C O M M O N M I S C O N C E P T I O N S
I'll obviously not go into much detail, since you'll read about everything later on but I think clearing up some things beforehand is good and will save me a migraine or two later on.
Ready?
- What Hades did was perfectly legal. There I said it. In fact back then, only the consent of the father was needed for a marriage to be arranged. (Terrible yes, but we can't judge ancient civilisations with modern morality). The taking of the bride from her home was also a tradition, in case you were wondering.
- "In an older version of the myth. . ." No. Stop right there. Just stop. The oldest written source we have is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Hesiod's Theogony, which mentions the story briefly. There's no older written version of the myth in which Persephone hears the cries of the souls or wanders down there and just likes it and stays. That version comes from a book from the 80's and it was written by a woman that wanted to make the myths more 'feministic'. How did she achieve that? By turning all the male Gods into savage monsters, of course.
You know, if your only way of praising someone is by villainizing another then you're doing something terribly wrong.
- Contrary to popular belief, girlsdid not marry really old men. The thing about marriage in ancient Greece is that in most polis' it was mandatory so that new warriors, politicians, philosophers and mothers could be 'produced'. In Sparta, the men and women were about the same age when they married (about 18-20/24 which was considered to be their prime).
In Athens, the young women were about 14-16when they got married while the men were about thirty years old. The state did not allow them to get married earlier and it also forced them to do it then. Both men and women were prisoners of the law in that regard. If men chose not to marry they had to be ready to face public scrutiny and in some extreme cases loss of political rights and even exile (if their overall behaviour did not conform to the rules of the state, in general).
Don't forget that life expectancies were also quite different back then (most people did not make it past the age of fifty). The reason why I'm telling you this is because a lot of people think that the myth is about some creepy middle aged man lusting after a teenager while many overlook the fact that 1) They are both immortal. 2) Persephone was not young by anyone's standards when Hades stole her - don't forget she was one of the oldest children of Zeus (older than Gods like Ares and Apollo, to name a couple). 3) If anything, they followed the model of their times.
- Kerveros does not, I repeat, does not mean Spot. The 'spot/spotted' definition comes from the Sanskritian Karbarah and while it seems similar, it has no actual connection to it. We do not actually know what the name Kerveros means.
- Hades is not Death nor is he God of Death (that's Thanatos). What he is, is Lord of the Dead. He is simply their ruler.
Also, please don't confuse the Underworld with the Christian Hell or any other sort of equivalent. They are not the same. Hades is not the Devil.
