#palaimon

I'm on an artistic mood and seeing everyone's asking through polls this is my take on it

Like Theseus, Melikertes falls into the sea (in his case to avoid death at the hands of his father) and is then carried away by a dolphin. Despite his eventual apotheosis, the Greeks in their worship of him focused on the dead human body delivered to the Isthmos, where nocturnal, mournful rites were instituted in his honor. Like Theseus, his precise age is differently reported or illustrated, with images of him ranging from a baby in his mother’s arms to a large child able to ride a dolphin like a horse. Palaimon, moreover, becomes the focus of an important mystery cult at Isthmia, in a small sanctuary placed alongside the panhellenic sanctuary of Poseidon and Amphitrite. We know that the sanctuary had very high walls to protect the secrecy of the rites and that some kind of mystery cult was celebrated, but as is often the case the precise details elude us, beyond the obvious conjecture that the miraculous sea-change of the mortal boy Melikertes into the god Palaimon most likely provided a model or at least inspiration for the initiates themselves. [...] Although there is no literary or epigraphical evidence for any initiatory immersion ritual during the mysteries of Palaimon, the existence in his Isthmian sanctuary of a waterproof underground chamber with blue painted walls and floor suggests that the initiates may indeed have had some kind of initiatory experience in an ‘underwater environment.’