THE fifty Nereids, gentle and beneficent attendants on the Sea-goddess Thetis, are mermaids, daughters of the nymph Doris by Nereus, a prophetic old man of the sea, who has the power of changing his shape.
b. The Phorcids, their cousins, children of Ceto by Phorcys, another wise old man of the sea, are Ladon, Echidne, and the three Gorgons, dwellers in Libya; the three Graeae; and, some say, the three Hesperides. The Gorgons were named Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa, all once beautiful. But one night Medusa lied with Poseidon, and Athene, enraged that they had bedded in one of her own temples, changed her into a winged monster with glaring eyes, huge teeth, protruding tongue, brazen claws and serpent locks, whose gaze turned men to stone. When eventually Perseus decapitated Medusa, and Poseidon’s children Chrysaor and Pegasus sprang from her dead body, Athene fastened the head to her aegis; but some say that the aegis was Medusa’s own skin, rayed from her by Athene.
c. The Graeae are fair-faced and swan-like, but with hair grey from birth, and only one eye and one tooth between the three of them. Their names are Enyo, Pemphredo, and Deino.
e. Half of Echidne was lovely woman, half was speckled serpent. She once lived in a deep cave among the Arimi, where she ate men raw, and raised a brood of frightful toototers to her husband Typhon; but hundred-eyed Argus killed her while she slept.
f. Ladon was wholly serpent, though gifted with the power of human speech, and guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides until Heracles shot him dead.
g. Nereus, Phorcys, Thaumas, Eurybia, and Ceto were all children born to Pontus by Mother Earth; thus the Phorcids and Nereids claim cousinhood with the Harpies. These are the fair-haired and swift-winged daughters of Thaumas by the Ocean-nymph Electra, who snatch up criminals for punishment by the Erinnyes, and live in a Cretan cave.
1. It seems that the Moon-goddess’s title Eurynome (‘wide rule’ or ‘wide wandering’) proclaimed her ruler of heaven and earth; Eurybia (‘wide strength’), ruler of the sea; Eurydice (‘wide justice’) the serpent-grasping ruler of the Underworld. Male human sacrifices were offered to her as Eurydice, their death being apparently caused by viper’s venom. Echidne’s death at the hated of Argus probably refers to the suppression of the Serpent-goddess’s Argive cult. Her brother Ladon is the oracular serpent who haunts every paradise, his coils embracing the apple-tree.
2. Among Eurybia’s other sea-titles were Thetis (‘disposer’), or its variant Tethys; Ceto, as the sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Rahab, or the Babylonian Tiamat; Nereis, as the goddess of the wet dement; Electra, as provider of amber, a sea product highly valued by the ancients; Thaumas, as wonderful; and Doris, as bountiful. Nereus-alias Proteus (‘first man’)-the prophetic ‘old man of the sea’, who took his name from Nereis, not contrariwise, seems to have been an oracular sacred king, buried on a coastal island; he is pictured in an early vase-painting as fish-tailed, with a lion, a stag, and a viper emerging from his body. Proteus, in the Odyssey, similarly changed shapes, to mark the seasons through which the sacred king moved from birth to death.
3. The fifty Nereids seem to have been a college of fifty Moon-priestesses, whose magic rites ensured good fishing; and the Gorgons, representatives of the Triple-goddess, wearing prophylactic masks with scowl, glaring eyes, and protruding tongue between bared teeth to frighten strangers from her Mysteries. The Sons of Homer knew only a single Gorgon, who was a shade in Tartarus (Odyssey), and whose head, an object of terror to Odysseus (Odyssey), Athene wore on her aegis, doubtless to warn people against examining the divine mysteries hidden behind it. Greek bakers used to paint Gorgon masks on their ovens, to discourage busy-bodies from opening the oven door, peeping in, and thus allowing a draught to spoil the bread. The Gorgons’ names-Stheino (‘strong’), Euryale (‘wide roaming’), and Medusa (‘cunning one’)-are titles of the Moon-goddess; the Orphics called the moon’s face ‘the Gorgon’s head’.
4. Poseidon’s fathering of Pegasus on Medusa recalls his fathering of the horse Arion on Demeter, when she disguised herself as a mare, and her subsequent fury; both myths describe how Poseidon’s Hellenes forcibly married the Moon-priestesses, disregarding their Gorgon masks, and took over the rain-making rites of the sacred horse cult. But a mask of Demeter was still kept in a stone chest at Pheneus, and the priest of Demeter assumed it when he performed the ceremony of beating the Infernal Spirits with rods (Pausanias).
4. Poseidon’s fathering of Pegasus on Medusa recalls his fathering of the horse Arion on Demeter, when she disguised herself as a mare, and her subsequent fury; both myths describe how Poseidon’s Hellenes forcibly married the Moon-priestesses, disregarding their Gorgon masks, and took over the rain-making rites of the sacred horse cult. But a mask of Demeter was still kept in a stone chest at Pheneus, and the priest of Demeter assumed it when he performed the ceremony of beating the Infernal Spirits with rods (Pausanias).
5. Chrysaor was Demeter’s new-moon sign, the golden sickle, or falchion; her consorts carried it when they deputized for her. Athene, in this version, is Zeus’s collaborator, reborn from his head, and a traitress to the old religion. The three Harpies, regarded by Homer as personifications of the storm winds (Odyssey), were the earlier Athene, the Triple-goddess, in her capacity of sudden destroyer. So were the Graeae, the Three Grey Ones, as their names Enyo (‘warlike’), Pemphredo (‘wasp’), and Deino (‘terrible’) show; their single eye and tooth are misreadings of a sacred picture, and the swan is a death-bird in European mythology.
6. Phorcys, a masculine form of Phorcis, the Goddess as Sow, who devours corpses, appears in Latin as Orcus, a title of Hades, and as porcus, hog. The Gorgons and Grey Ones were called Phorcids, because it was death to profane the Goddess’s Mysteries; but Phorcys’s prophetic wisdom must refer to a sow-oracle.
7. The names of the Hesperides, described as children either of Ceto and Phorcys, or of Night, or of Atlas the Titan who holds up the heavens in the Far West, refer to the sunset. Then the sky is green, yellow, and red, as if it were an apple-tree in full bearing; and the Sun, cut by the horizon like a crimson half-apple, meets his death dramatically in the western waves. When the Sun has gone, Hesperus appears. This star was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphrodite, and the apple was the gift by which her priestess decoyed the king, the Sun’s representative to his death with love-songs; if an apple is cut in two transversely, five-pointed star appears in the centre of each half.
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