Darkthorn’s Blog

- ritual, re-enacts a fairly short sequence of events, commemorating gods/heroes taking place in/around religious locations

- death with birth, death and growth, very secretive

- initiation/mysteries/rites of passage, sexual initiation, resurrection as an adult

- Eros is a creative force, dependant on females, necessity of reproduction, while also showing the dangers of courtship and coupling in temples

- womanhood, governed by Artemis who knows about sex even though she is virginal, the mother goddess.

o Chooses not to marry, so girls must offer her appeasement to avoid her anger when they wed and have children

o Provides a good basic of tragic myth, as she punishes women for premarital sex

o Girls pretended to be bears/deer and hunted/killed each other so that they could be re-born as women. Bears/deer both sacred to Artemis

o Races held in isolation, a lot of danger, rape, abduction etc.

o Not continued after the classical ages, because it was too expensive and dangerous, instead they created myths of women roaming the wild only when mad (needed marital sex to become sane)

- manhood, young men roamed the wilderness presumably in the shape of wild animals

o had to fend for themselves, so that they could then accept and appreciate the bonds of society and marriage (reject the animal within)

o also dressed as women to prove their manhood (by focus and impregnation). Example in Euripides’ Bacchae of King having to dress as a woman and enjoying it, therefore undermining his manhood (he performs a woman’s treachery in spying on the real women)

- underworld myth, sacred to Demeter, Elusian Mysteries

o preliminary rites part of the lesser Elusian mysteries, participated in by anyone who could pay enough

o greater mysteries of the initiation proper, and the epopleia – complete revelation and sigh of holy objects (only for those who had been initiated before)

- Orphic Mysteries, scared to Dionysus

o for embracing death