Thread: Scene from the trojan war: Cassandra clings to the Xoanon, the wooden cult image of Athene, while Ajax the Lesser is about to drag her away in front of her father Priam (standing on the left) and rape her. Roman fresco from the atrium of the Casa del Menandro, Pompeii.
Cassandra was a Trojan priestess of Apollo. According to the legend, Apollo fell in love with her, and sought to win her by giving Cassandra the gift of prophecy...
Some sources say that she promised Apollo her favors, some say that she promised nothing. Regardless, after receiving the gift, she refused the god, which as you can imagine pissed him off...A lot...
The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her prophecies...
Her cursed gift from Apollo became an endless pain and frustration to her. She was seen as a liar and a madwoman by her family and by the Trojan people...
Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy, she warned the Trojans about the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse, Agamemnon's death, her own demise at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, her mother Hecuba's fate...Everything...However, her warnings were all disregarded...
So far, a classic Greek tragedy...But here is the interesting bit (for me):
In some versions of the myth, it wasn't Apollo who gave her the prophetic powers directly. She was asleep in the Apollo's temple, where the snakes licked (or whispered in) her ears so that she could hear the future...
And this is even better. In some versions of the myth, Apollo curses her by spitting into her mouth...

Well well well...
This is really interesting. Why? Because this is the third case of "spitting into someone's mouth" was used to either transmit sacred knowledge, ability to see (know) things others don't, or to revoke this knowledge or to mess it up...And that snakes are somehow involved...
The other two examples can be found in this tread from last night

I think that the full version of this belief was preserved in the Serbian story and that only bits are preserved in the two Greek legends. Here is the full Serbian version in English pitt.edu/~dash/type0670…

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More from @serbiaireland

16 Jan
Thread: A magnificent animal (Siberian Ibex) killed for fun 😠 in Kazakstan...I am posting this picture so people can get the idea of how huge and imposing these animals are. And how difficult it is "not to notice" their behavior if they live near you... Image
Ibex mating, marked by mad male goat fights, happens every year at the same time, at the beginning of winter (Oct/Nov). Which is why Ibex became a calendar marker for Oct/Nov with the meaning: When Ibex goats mate... Image
Hence they are found as the symbol of winter in Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, Arabia, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, Indian Subcontinent, possibly even Northern China (looking into this at the moment)...
Read 6 tweets
15 Jan
Thread: One of the side panels of the Standard of Ur (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_…) "depicting mythological scenes"...Of unknown meaning...Found at the Royal Cemetery of Ur, dated to the Early Dynastic (ED) Period (c. 2900–2350 BCE) cnx.org/contents/uLBVv… Image
Of course these are not mythological scenes. These are animal calendar markers for the major climate periods in Mesopotamia:

Symbols of the seasons.

oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2019/10/symbol…

Replace goat with gazelle as they are interchangeable

oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2020/07/pissin…

So from the bottom: Image
Bottom: Autumn: symbolised by a bull (summer) being killed by a winged lion (autumn)

I talked about the winged lions killing bulls (well chewing bull's butts to be more precise 🙂) in this thread:

Read 6 tweets
14 Jan
Thread: This is a white-ground kylix (drinking-cup), made in Attica in the mid 5th c. BC by The Sotades Painter (Potter)...Currently in the British Museum. britishmuseum.org/collection/obj… Image
The scene depicts Glaucos, a young son of the king Minos of Crete, on the right, and Polyeidos, a famous seer from Corinth, on the left. They are inside what looks like a beehive shaped tumulus tomb. Or a wine-cellar???
As Glaucos watches, Polyeidos raises himself on his knees, uplifting in his right hand a spear, with which he thrusts downwards at one of two snakes which lie at the bottom of the scene below the centre of the tumulus (wine-cellar)...
Read 11 tweets
14 Jan
#FolkloreThursday "Dožinjalica" is a cock which is slaughtered at the end of the harvest. Among the Serbs from Croatia it was believed that "grain will yield plentifully next year only where dožinjalica is eaten"... Image
On Tobolić, at the end of the harvest, the harvesters would tie the housewife with ropes. They would then light up a fire in the field where the last sheaf of grain was cut, and would "pretend to burn her in the fire"...
They would let her go only after "she promised them a dožinjalica". Similar customs were also recorded among Serbs from from Northern Dalmatia...
Read 6 tweets
1 Jan
Thread (longish): During the excavations of the the Temple Repositories at Knossos, among many early 2nd millennium BC faience (glazed ceramic) objects, Arthur Evans unearthed ceramic crocuses and models of female garments decorated with crocuses...
I found this image in the "Bronze Age Flower Power: The Minoan Use and Social Significance of Saffron and Crocus Flowers" (researchgate.net/publication/32…). Really cool article...
In it the author, Rachel Dewan, states that: "...If Evans’ interpretation of the faience models as votive offerings is correct, than here again is evidence for significant links between women, textiles, crocuses, and the divine"...
Read 48 tweets
31 Dec 20
Thread: Romanian bear dancers...At the end of the year, boys and men in eastern Romania put on heavy bear costumes, often made of real fur, and dance through the streets of towns and villages...
They dance to the rhythm of drums. In the end a ritual scene is performed in which the bear collapses because a demon is inside him. The "Gypsy" comes with a knife and bleeds the bear, lets the demon out and the bear gets resurrected

via @YouTube
In some versions of the tradition, the bear, the Gypsy and the drummers also go from house to house in the village, singing and dancing to ward off evil and bring good luck...
Read 26 tweets

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