Hesychia, or Hesykhia, is the Goddess of Silence, of Calm, and Serenity. Ā Pindar tells us She is the daughter of Dike. Statiusās Thebaid pairs Her with Otia (Ease) in the house of Somnus (Roman God of Sleep). Ā She is mentioned in The Golden Ass when Lucius at last finds peace. Euripides places Her as a counterbalance to the madness of Dionysos.
As the power of Tranquility, She rules over civic peace, which carries strength from Her lineage via Justice (Dike).
She is described as noble, and, to my own thought, is a bright light that fills me when I am calm and still inside. For the Hellenic line of thought, She is key to the desire for a peaceful and orderly polis, though scholars debate whether She had a cult presence or if She was purely conceptual.
Yet Pindar wrote an invocation in his Pythian (8.1-4):
Kindly Quiet, daughter of Justice, who makes cities great, you who hold the sovereign keys of councils and of warsā¦
Diogenes says that it was the Pythagorean Ameinias who taught Parmenides to practice Hesychia (stillness). This concept of Hesychia remains in some Christian traditions of prayer, known as hesychasm, though its origin is generally attributed to an circa 8th century book by Pseudo-Hesychius, and is a method of prayer that relies upon the ceaseless repetition of Jesusā name in their minds. Ā
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Clark, Stephen. Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy: An Introduction. A&C Black, 2013.
Gibbons, Reginald. Bakkhai, Oxford, 2000.
Miller, Andrew M. (ed.) Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation, Hackett Pub, 1996.
Ogden, Daniel. A Companion to Greek Religion, Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Scully, Stephen. Hesiodās Theogony: from Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost, Oxford, 2015.
Stoll, Heinrich Wilhelm. Handbook of the Religion and Mythology of the Greeks, trans. R.B. Paul, ed. T.K. Arnold, 1852.
Zaleski, Carol and Philip Zaleski. Prayer: A History, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Ā Image: Tuckerās Wood, Trivia, by Neheti, 2015. One of my most peaceful places.Ā
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