Tati Seol

What are the sources?

We push every written piece roughly from 800 BCE to 500 CE under the umbrella of “Greek Mythology”.

And I mean, every single piece.

It’s a huge chunk of time (1300 years!), with different cultural and political situations. We don't think the same as folks from 1920s, why do we assume people from the 5th century CE would have the same views and values as people from the 8th century BCE.

Not only this, but we start to judge Gods on comedies, on satires, on tragedies, on all kinds of pieces of fiction. Yes, some of these were written by actual practitioners of Greek religion (who knew what their Gods were and were not), but somewhere on the way we all got very unlucky and the most popularized versions of myths turned out to be by a Roman guy who just wanted to cash out on lewd (and sometimes very gross) stories.

Also, people usually read (or watch) summaries. And here's the thing. Summaries are mostly based on that Roman guy's versions.

Moreover, there is this another guy, who had enough confidence to write "Read only my retellings of myths". Guess what? We do! I've seen tons of summaries of his versions and they're treated like the only versions in existence.

If you read his versions of myths side by side with earlier sources, you’ll quickly start to guess what he wrote in the other myth retelling.

Theoi website is very good for this since they have a lot of sources and fragments sorted by a specific theme and divine figure.

Here is a selection of posts I’ve made on topics pertaining to LGBT+ history. Bear in mind that some of these were written quite some time ago, when I was less well informed than I am now, and I might word them differently in hindsight. I hope they’re still interesting enough and show that LGBT+ people existed in the ancient world too.

On Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s relationship

Homosexuality in the Ancient Near East (including a link to a conference)

Lesbian and bisexual Ancient Greek poetry

An Ancient Greek transgender person (cw: potential misgendering due to contradictions in how the person refers to themself)

Inanna’s genderqueer priesthood

How to write your name in cuneiform as a nonbinary person

Artemis as an aromantic asexual in ancient texts

For the Ancient Near East specifically, I highly recommend @mostlydeadlanguages​ who has a queer history tag full of interesting content.

Also, here are a few novels set in the Late Bronze Age, and one in the Iron Age, which feature same-sex attracted characters. Sadly, I’m not aware of any with characters of other LGBT+ identities (let me know if you have some recommendations!). Note that I haven’t read all of them, so I can’t vouch for their quality.

The Troy series by David Gemmell (two women, one man)

The Boudica series by Manda Scott (apparently multiple men)

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (two men)

Circe by Madeline Miller (multiple men)

I The Sun by Janet Morris (two men; cw for sexual abuse of women)

Oh no, they definitely were!

I think one of the big misconceptions people have about Hellenic polytheism is that it is functionally dodekatheism*, that is, the worship of twelve deities. The Twelve are portrayed as central to the religion, with all others being less significant or even forgotten. But this overlooks several elements of Ancient Greek cult.

The first is that, even in Antiquity, nobody could quite agree on who the Twelve were. Was Hestia among them? Was Dionysos? Was Herakles? A lot of the time, “the Twelve Olympians” weren’t even named; so this may have been more of an expression, a nice round number to designate the most important deities while leaving room for local interpretations of who was among them.

It’s certainly true that there are some deities who received more worship than others, and who are better known nowadays because of it. If I were to write an approximate list, it would be the following:

Zeus

Hera

Poseidon

Demeter

Hades

Hestia

Persephone

Hermes

Dionysos

Hephaistos

Athena

Ares

Artemis

Apollon

Aphrodite

Hekate

Herakles

Asklepios

Pan

You’ll notice immediately that there are far more than twelve - nineteen, in fact - and the list could be expanded even further to include deities like the Muses or Eros. My point here is that, while “the Twelve Olympians” was shorthand for the major Gods, to limit cultic importance to just twelve, or even to just Olympians, is disregarding the broadness of the Hellenic pantheon - and the fact that it is polytheism, not dodekatheism. The Ancient Greeks may have called on the Twelve when necessary**, but their worship included many more deities than that.

And this leads on to my second point: the Ancient Greek religion was not orthodox. Each city, town or even village had its own pantheon, composed of the major Olympians, locally important deities, like Aphrodite in Kythera or Artemis in Ephesos, and deities specific to the area, like nymphs and river Gods. This means that Sparta’s pantheon was not the same as Thebes’, Thebes’ pantheon was not the same as Corinth’s, and so on.

As a result, deities that were given minor importance in one place could be given major importance in another. Take Ares, for example: though he had a sanctuary in Athens, he didn’t play a particularly large rule in the local cult outside of war times - but he was highly worshipped in northern Greece. Other than deities, heroes also need to be taken into account: Helen and Menelaus were revered as Gods in Sparta (likely as the remnant of an early cult), though practically everywhere else they were viewed as human and not worshipped. So while it would be accurate to say that Athenians paid far more attention to the Twelve than to Helen, a Spartan would bristle at the thought!

To complicate things further, there’s the matter of epithets. Gods were worshipped under different aspects in different areas, and those aspects were sometimes so different that they blurred the line between “same God, different epithet” and “actually a different God”. For example, Apollon Smitheus was widely worshipped in Anatolia (modern Turkey), and his cult was full of native Anatolian elements. So while it would be factually true to say Apollon was important both in Delphi and in Anatolia, it would be missing the fact that Apollon Smintheus was not important in Delphi.

Lastly, the state cult wasn’t the only influence on how much a deity was worshipped. Circumstances also mattered: the Agathos Daimon was central to the household cult, a sailor might give special honours to Nereus, a pregnant woman might give most of her offerings to Eileithyia, and any individual could love a specific deity above others, like Hippolytos with Artemis. These may not have left as many traces as state-sponsored temples, but in everyday life, they were no less significant.

In conclusion, there was a concept of twelve particularly powerful and important deities, and it did somewhat correspond to which deities were worshipped most in practise, but reality was a lot more nuanced. Any God could be more or less important depending on who you were, where you were, and in which circumstances. Ultimately, the Hellenic cult was - and still is - as rich in variety as it was in deities.

*Some modern worshippers choose to call the religion Dodekatheism, which I’m not criticising. This isn’t about the term but about its interpretation as  “worship of exactly twelve deities” being incorrect. 

If somebody wanted to have sex with a young girl, her father/uncle/brother/or other male tutor should decide about it, otherwise that’d be considered rape. It doesn’t matter what the woman wanted, ‘cause who cares about what a woman wants anyway, right?

Going straight to the point, if a single woman wanted to have sex with a man, it wasn’t seen as consensual, 'cause her father could claim that he didn’t agree on that and call the man out for rape.

Considering this, think about those myths where Zeus is pointed out for having sex with many women, who were seduced by him. Have you heard before that Zeus “raped” them?

The same situation is seen when we talk about Hades and Persephone myth. There’s the famous statue named “The Rape of Persephone”, but let’s try to see this with different eyes knowing about this vision that the greeks had about “rape”. Hades took Persephone away from Demeter, that was the one person responsible for the young goddess of spring, and that didn’t know or gave consent for him to take her.

I know this is a very sensitive subject and I don’t wanna offend or make anyone feel bad (I’ll delete this reply if that’s the case). What I’m trying to point out is the different perspective that Ancient Greek society had and how they are weird compared to the way we see things. Perhaps we judge a god or goddess for acting in a certain way, but not necessarily or interpretation is 100% correct.

Yes, he features in many. He makes appearances in myths.  Providing aid to the hero, consulting with Zeus, ferrying souls. But always in the background, always a supporting character.

If he’s in a mood to joke– and he usually is – he’ll point to the Nords, say “now there’s a culture that knows how to treat their trickster God.”

 But he loves it, really. He loves that space between tales. He loves the image of himself slipping through scrolls, living on the edges of stories.

There are fewer stories about Hermes, because Hermes does not tell them.

He prefers to be all-purpose. Hermes, the God of whatever needs divinity. Hermes, God of thieves and merchants, God of tortoises and Hawks, God of contradictions.

The joke, on Earth. A woman might be complaining about everyday troubles, and someone will say “take it to the Gods.”

“Oh really?” She’ll say. “The God of aching feet? The God of belly fat? I’ll just send a prayer to the God of spoilt milk.”

And someone will say, “just give it to Hermes.”

And everyone will laugh. Hermes, God of whatever.

But in those small moments, those small hurts, it is Hermes that they pray to. Because the messenger God listens, the messenger God carries every prayer, and sometimes that’s all that is needed.

Hermes cares about humanity because he cares about stories. He cares about the flicker of words from mouths, about the way information travels in haphazard lightning across continents.

He thinks himself the start of every tale, and often he is. The figure by the fire, the rich whisper of the narrator, the heat on enraptured faces. Hermes thinks himself the one to carry stories from reality to legend. He thinks himself the one who creates heroes. And it’s true, in a way. A hero is created only when stories are told about them.

And Hermes’ reward is the stories he doesn’t tell. The one God privy to playground myths, to bedtime legends, to the way people narrate the Gods when they aren’t in temple.

Hermes finds himself, there in the background, along the edges of stories he didn’t make. People add him in for that trace of humor, for that wicked smile. He’s delighted every time. The only God to take actors aside, to whisper congratulations on their portrayal of him.

If there is a story about Hermes, he didn’t tell it. It came, instead, from the storyteller being asked to repeat “the part where Hermes…” from children asking their mother to “do the Hermes voice again.” Even the Gods can’t reckon for how tales take on a new life down below. Even the God of messengers can’t contain the flow of a story from person to person.

If there is a story about Hermes, he has been in the audience every time, has heard it over and over.