Persephone the goddess of vegetation. I'm all for eating my vegetables if I can rock a goddess gown like this. Yowza.
Ah, mythology: tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. It was a subject I fell in love with in grade school and could not wait to take by time I hit high school, an honors class I busted my tail to get into my junior year.
The appeal for me lies in the storytelling. Dramatic, tumultuous, dashing and daring, the Greeks and Romans had a flair for some serious tabloid-ish yarn-spinning. If the naughty, idle gods had a modern-day equivalent, it would be the Kardashians: vapid, useless, powerful, fascinating.
But what really fascinates me is how these gods and myths were created to explain the unexplained. My favorite, the story of Demeter and Persephone, explains the changing of the seasons, coloring the excitement with kidnapping, famine, sex, desire, dark underworld and exotic fruit. To celebrate this, I routinely eat a pomegranate on December 21, the first day of winter.
I also love the empowering tale of Diana, the goddess of women and virginity. Why empowering? The myths are fraught with tales of goddesses and mortals being claimed, raped, seduced and kidnapped, yet Diana was a strong, beautiful, athletic goddess who called her own shots.
As I reintroduce myself to these magical tales, I'm impressed with not only the craft with which these stories explain our world, but how these tales have colored our vocabulary in these modern times. Will bears such a striking resemblance to me as a baby and toddler, that a flippant comment I make is "it's like he sprang from my thigh," a reference to how some of the gods were borne of Zeus.
As I read on, I'm curious to explore other culture's mythologies, like Norse and Native American. There is one that I read many years ago in grade school that tells of a young Indian girl who so loved the sun she played all day without care for food or drink. The gods answered her prayers and turned her into a sunflower.
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