Orphism - Blog Posts

who up studying they orphism ⁉️

rb to piss on picasso's grave

Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning

To all my hoes and nerds out there: what are the best sources for Orphic myth? (@judiejodia?)

What is your favorite obscure Greek mythological fact

Hm, probably the Orphic fragment that says that Persephone was born with a monstrous appearance (fragment 87 according to Athanassakis, fragment 58 in the translation of Otto Kern’s compilation of fragments at HellenicGods.org):

…"of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλη), whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly Phersephoné and Koré"…

It's so totally different from all other versions that only describe her as very beautiful (as goddesses tend to be). Sometimes I regret that I didn't give my Persephone horns.

Source: Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion by Radcliffe G. Edmonds

FASCINATING stuff where this scholar on orphism argues that several texts on persephone explicitly (and the homeric hymn implicitly) claim that mortals pay the recompense (ποινη) for the grief (πενθος) that persephone underwent at her abduction. not hades, but mortals try to appease the goddess for her mistreatment, and in return they earn her favour and a blessed afterlife (or even next life). there's this irreconcilable problem here in that hades was culturally justified, but persephone as a goddess still warrants respect/pity/appeasement, and so mortals through rites and sacrifices console her.