Deep Ties

                                                                                                             Demeter In Greek mythology, the myth of Demeter and Persephone brings out the love of a mother for her daughter. Demeter was the Olympian goddess of harvests and agriculture, with total control over grains, plants, food and the fertility of the earth. She was also considered the goddess of health, birth and death. Demeter was the second child of the Titans, Rhea and Cronus, and lived in Mount Olympus. Her siblings were Hestia, Hera, Zeus and Poseidon. When Zeus overthrew Cronus and became the King of the gods, Demeter turned into one of the major goddesses in Mount Olympus. Demeter’s beautiful daughter, Pe...

   Image by  u_0xqcqp9f6q  from  Pixabay Charon is known as the Ferryman of Hades (the Underworld) whose duty was to carry the souls of the dead after they had completed their funeral rites across the Acheron and Styx, the rivers that were a boundary between the living and the dead worlds. Legend goes that those souls who could not pay the fee, or had not received their funeral rites, would have to wander along the shores of the Styx for a hundred years before they could cross the river. Charon was the son of Erebus and Nyx (Night). He was often depicted as a rough Athenian seaman dressed in a foul reddish-brown garb, haggard cheeks and an unkempt beard. Dante referred to him in his Divine Comedy as having “eyes of fire”. He held his ferryman’s pole or oar in his right hand and used his left hand to receive the souls that he needed to ferry. Charon is not evil, just gloomy, which was not surprising given the atmosphere in the Underworld. His cloak was adorned ...

  Bellerophon Vanquishing the Chimera - Wikipedia Commons - Wikimedia.org Bellerophon was the divine Corinthian hero best known as the one who tamed the winged horse, Pegasus, and slew the dreadful Chimera. He was second only to the mighty Hercules. Born to the sea god, Poseidon, and Euronome, Bellerophon was also considered a demigod. While practising knife throwing with his friends, he killed his brother, Deliades, by mistake. To atone for fratricide, he made a plea to King Proetus, whose wife, Queen Anteia tried to seduce him. When he rejected her advances, she turned the tables on him, and accused him of having tried to seduce her instead. Proetus was aware that he could not harm Bellerophon as he was a guest. Hence, he exiled him to his father-in-law, King Iobates’ kingdom, along with a sealed letter in a tablet in which he asked him to kill Bellerophon for his misdemeanour. King Iobates took care of Bellerophon for many days before he opened the letter. Since he too did...

                                 Thetis dipping the baby Achilles into the river Styx - World History Encyclopaedia Greek mythology can never be complete without the mention of Achilles, the hero of the Trojan war, who was the son of the Nereid (sea nymph) Thetis and the mortal King Peleus, the head of the Myrmidons, which made him a demigod. The legend goes that when Achilles was an infant, his mother, Thetis, dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal. However, she held him by the ankle, and hence, that part remained untouched, and proved to be his vulnerable area. This is where the term ‘Achilles’ Heel’ comes from, which means a point of weakness despite overall strength, which could lead to downfall. Thetis foretold her son’s fate which could go in two ways… he could either attain glory and die young or live a long mundane life doing nothing remarkable. Achilles chose the former. Achilles...

  The Process of Writing - #BlogchatterA2Z When I was young, (literally, and not just at heart!) the stories that fascinated me the most were the Greek legends that were replete with adventure, fantasy and magic realism. The Greek heroes and heroines appeared larger than life, their monsters horrific, and the jealousy and the passion of their gods made them seem more childish than humans. The Iliad and the Odyssey were replete with adventure and action, but what drew my eye was the little back stories and the myths that came alive within the lines of the two epics, just as intriguing as those within our own epics – The Ramayana and The Mahabharata.                                                                                 The New York Public Library - Unsplash When I was prepa...

  My Book World I still remember the first time in my life I could not put a book down. It was my Enid Blyton phase, and the book was ‘The Secret of Moon Castle’. Eerie dim lit rooms, clanking suits of armour, paintings flying off the wall and eyes moving within portraits… all designed to leave me awake, my heart in my mouth all night.  The next morning would find me racoon-eyed, yet desperately needing to go and scare my friends with the story that had left me so.                                                                                               World of Blyton   Of course, I was no stranger to tales that sent a chill up my little spine. Before I began to decipher words on my own, my maternal grandfather, a litterateur in his own...