Great Ennead - Tefnut💧

Getting around to finally posting my Great Ennead designs that I’ve been sitting on for a while!

This Tefnut was drawn quite some months ago but was recently updated! My personal notes + full posts for all these are already available on Patreon!

Bull Leaping in ancient Minoan culture

For the boardgame expansion pack "Minos: Dawn of Faith" I was asked to imagine how religious ceremonies in ancient Minoan culture could have looked like. Here, young men demonstrate a dangerous acrobatic stunt. Ritual leaping over bulls is a motif in Middle Bronze Age figurative art, especially in Minoan art.

And yes, this was challenging to draw! I looked at many pictures of gymnasts to figure out the jumper's pose.

Queen of the Dead part 2, 127

In the Hymn, Demeter demands that the people of Eleusis build her a temple and an altar on the rising hill above the Kallichoron well. Keleos summons the people and make sure that this is done. Demeter then withdraws into the temple. I didn't include that part of the story for two reasons. 1. In my comic Demeter already has a temple and cult in Eleusis. 2. Building a temple takes a very long time. In the Hymn it almost sounds like that all it took was a day's work, but building a temple, at least a big one, normally took several years.

While Euripides' The Bacchae presents a Dionysus who's terrifying and morally unsettling, it doesn't make his divinity any less legitimate than that of other gods.

Pentheus doesn't just reject Dionysus' worship, but denies his godhood, mocks his followers, imprisons him, and assumes that his own authority is higher.

And, admittedly, Dionysus doesn't make it easy. He was born to a mortal mother, raised in foreign lands, and returns as a cult-leading stranger.

There is no grand proclamation from Zeus announcing his son, so to Pentheus, he's no more than foreign charlatan.

But Cadmus thinks different. He reminds Pentheus of Actaeon, whose arrogance against Artemis cost him his life, and argues that if Dionysus truly is a god, it is far more dangerous to deny him than it is to honor him.

Mortals don't get to decide which gods deserve reverence.

So when the punishment passes, Cadmus tells Dionysus that he didn't need to punish Pentheus this way.

And he's right.

Dionysus didn't need to come disguised. He didn't need to let Pentheus insult and threaten him. He didn't need to persuade him to dress as a woman before leading him to his death.

But that's exactly the point.

Dionysus wanted Pentheus humiliated.

Pentheus spends the entire play policing boundaries. Men must be men. Women must stay indoors. Foreigners are suspicious. Gods must fit his expectations.

Dionysus dismantles every one of them.

The women of Thebes abandon the city for the mountains. The king who mocked Dionysus' appearance willingly dresses as a woman. The hunter becomes the hunted, torn apart like a wild beast by his own mother.

As he says to the Chorus:

"I want him to be laughed at by the Thebans;

"I'll lead him through the city in a dress, after those dreadful threats he made before. But I will fashion Pentheus in the dress he'll wear to go to death, a trip to slaughter, killed at his mother's hands. He'll recognize the true god, Dionysus, son of Zeus, most dreadful and most gentle to mankind." - Line 854-861

That's what makes The Bacchae so unsettling. Euripides doesn't ask us whether Dionysus is a good god.

After all, Dionysus calls upon his dual nature.

It's what happens when a god is called a fraud, for whether it's from peasant or king, the result is all the same.