Great Goddesses
ALSO BY NIKITA GILL
Fierce Fairytales: Poems & Stories to Stir Your Soul
Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire, and Beauty
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
First American edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019
First published in 2019 by Ebury Press
Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
Copyright © 2019 by Nikita Gill
Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Nikita Gill
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ISBN 9780593085646
Ebook ISBN 9780593085653
Version_1
For you,
whose iron
is as valuable
as ichor
Contents
Also by Nikita Gill
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. A MORTAL INTERLUDE
Chaos
Eurynome: The Mother of All Things
Chaos to Nyx, Goddess of the Night
Nyx to Erebus
Gaia
A Primordial Love Story
Questions for the Daughters of Nyx
2. A MORTAL INTERLUDE
Gaia’s Golden Children
The Four Stages of a Poisoning
The Unloved Ungods: Hecatoncheires
A Titan Sisterhood
What It Means to Be a Forgotten Magic Maker
The River of the Dead
Rhea, Mother to Gods
Leto, Mother to Sun and the Moon
House of Hyperion, Titan of Light
Gaia Teaches Rhea Retribution
The Titanomachy
3. A MORTAL INTERLUDE
Young Zeus: The Crossroads
Metis and Zeus
Metis, the Forgotten King Maker
The Metamorphoses of Zeus (An Abuser Regrets and Remembers)
The Making of a God-Queen (How Hera Survived Trauma)
Hymn for Hera
Hera, After
Zeus, After
Athena Rises
A Place to Find Purpose
Athena’s Tale
Athena, After
Pallas and Athena
The Birth of Ares
War and Poetry
Ares, After
Craving (A synonym for Aphrodite)
The Goddess of Love: Aphrodite
Love and War
Aphrodite’s Gift
Night Songs to Aphrodite
Aphrodite, After
The Blacksmith God
Lessons from Hephaestus
The Marriage Bed
Haephestus’s Tale
The Sun God
Apollo’s Secret
Apollo to Icarus
The Moon Goddess
The Moon Writes a Love Letter to Artemis
An Interlude with Artemis
Modern Apollo and Artemis
Athena and Artemis’s Contemporary Manifesto
Poseidon, God of the Sea
Myths about the Water Dispelled
Poseidon to Zeus
Amphitrite Chides Poseidon
Amphitrite
Modern-day Sea God(s)
Hestia
Advice from Hestia to Girls
Goddess of Harvest
Garden Walks with Demeter
A Friendship: Demeter and Hestia
Demeter to Hades (A Mother’s Fury)
Persephone to Demeter
Hades to Persephone
Persephone to Hades
Persephone to Theseus and Pirithous
Persephone and Hades, After
The Messenger, the Trickster, Guide of the Dead
The Life of Every Party
Conversations Between Hermes and Dionysus
4. A MORTAL INTERLUDE
Monster Mine
Asterion
Athena to Medusa
Echidna to Typhon
Scylla
Gorgon (A Letter to the Patriarchy)
Lamia and Scylla
The Erinyes: Vengeance-skinned Fury
5. A MORTAL INTERLUDE: TO THE POETS
Defy a God
Danaë, Mother of Perseus
Andromeda, Princess of Ethiopia, Wife of Perseus
Penelope, Wife of Odysseus
Argos, Dog of Odysseus
Helen
Briseis Remembers
Hecuba, Wife of Priam, Mother of Paris
Iphigenia, Daughter of Agamemnon
Megara Laments from the Underworld
Hippolyta Speaks to the Gods
Io Explains Recovery to Europa
Ariadne
AFTERMATH
Atlas, in Our Era
A Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1. A Mortal Interlude
I lost a God once. It’s easier done than people think. Forget a prayer once in a while or simply grow grief in your kitchen window along with the basil and rosemary. Somewhere inside my heart, I misplaced my faith, misunderstood my own origin story, became a person half tragedy, more misery, and I started to relish it. I revelled in this losing of everything that I thought I was, the lack of self-care; the drowning becomes such a needful thing when you think there is nothing left to look forward to. When my faith came back to me, like the forgiving water of a river to the pebbles that it smooths by constant weather and wear, I asked myself, what happens to the Gods when their people forget how to know them? What happens to their fearsome might when the fervent belief fades?
Do you think they are still powerful when they become less than a memory?
Or do you think without the power of prayer everything that makes them immortal is nothing but a façade?
The Primordial Goddesses
‘Verily at the first Khaos (Chaos, the Chasm) [Air] came to be, but next wide-bosomed Gaia (Gaea, Earth), the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos . . .’
—Hesiod, Theogony 116
Chaos
Edward Lorenz, the mathematician,
father of chaos theory, defines chaos as:
‘When the present determines the future,
but the approximate present does not
approximately determine the future.’
Which loosely translated means:
No one knows how the consequences
of our actions will truly play out,
and try as we might, we will never
be the masters of our destiny.
And Chaos, who has been listening, as she
always does to each of her creations,
laughs because what else does the Ancient Being
Who Created Creation do when a small, impatient
primitive species that insists on quantifying everything
tries to quantify the unfathomable by their small terms?
And as she laughs, the cosmos ripples,
And whole galaxies fall apart.
Eurynome: The Mother of All Things
This is a lesser known story.
It is a genesis entirely woman-whispered
in the shadows when we meet
in secret, plotting escapes
from unwanted marriages or to untangle
darker devil-deemed desires.
They murmur, in the beginning of everything;
from the bones of Chaos, rose a girl
who built the universe, the stars,
the planets, all because she was looking
for a place to dance. And she waltzed
the earth awake and the rhythm of her feet
fermented the stars alive,
the synchronised sorcery of her fingers
brought the solar system to life,
and the flow of her arms looped
around the sun and commanded
him to open his eyes –
But of course, the rest of the tale
is broken too. This is the story told
in hushed tones. It is the version
of the tale they do not want you to know.
After all, what is more powerful
than women who know all about
the blessed fires inside them that grow.
Chaos to Nyx, Goddess of the Night
You were so strange and vibrant in your ink-black glory, even I, your own mother, did not know how to name you.
Your siblings, their names came easily because none resonated with the vivid silver purity and vibrant green poison of you. You were named eons after your birth because often names become manifestations, but rarely, do manifestations become their names.
So, instead, I chose to let you fly free and ink the universe with the dark shroud you were born in, your screams echoing into a cosmos that did not know how to be ready for your dark requiem, your cries a warning to prepare for what was to come from your birth.
Oh, Nyx, daughter of mine, mother to both violent death and restful sleep, gentle dreams and putrid nightmares, home to all things both terrifying and glorious, patron saint of murderers and lovers alike, I never told you how to inherit the paradox, or how to make it your birthright.
You, who wove stars into your hair as a girl and equally let them freckle your skin, held the moon up as a looking-glass and bewitched existence for eternity.
You, who turns the nightly view of man-made cities instead into the jewelled throats of queens, hiding evil inside your bosom whilst holding sacred in your womb.
You, who turns children’s sleep into fairytale lands and knows how to make your brother Hell’s innermost sanctum your home.
And yet, lest they forget how to honour the night, they will forever remember that it is from your ribcage they received Hemera and Aether, the miraculous day and the singular light.
Nyx to Erebus
Why are passions prettier in the dark?
I hear mortals ask each other.
Are demons allowed to fall in love?
Children ask their mothers.
Yes. We are. Before their very eyes.
When we sweep through their lands,
I wish they could see the tenderness
in the way the darkness takes the night’s hand.
Gaia
And then there was Gaia.
Chaos baptised her spirit first
inside the glory of her own life
giving: Gaia the purest originator,
creator of fragile, fluid things.
Girlhood came to Gaia in the form
of a woodland nymph who spilled
whole forests from her tongue.
She breathed alive the most verdant
of greens and the warmest
of mahoganies and chestnut
in delicate leaf and sturdy bark.
It was Gaia who first pulled a pin
from her hair and carved out
the hills from her own skin.
The deer were her vowels and the
birds were her consonants, she swore
and predators formed; sharks and lions,
animals were her language
before even the notion of language
was invented, this life bringer who expressed
gentler words in lush grass.
Sculpting volcanoes from what
her siblings thought unremarkable,
she showed them how devastating beauty
was constructed from ordinary things.
A Primordial Love Story
What do you give to Gaia,
the inventor who made the world?
What does she need to
fill her hands that are already
full of bounty beyond
all our wildest dreams?
You make her curious about love.
You ask her if she ever felt an embrace.
You tell her about the wholeness
of a heart that knows
how to beat for itself and another.
You teach her how to
hold molecules and paint them
bold azure and soft cherry blossom,
golds and creams, let them float
upwards into the air high.
You watch her fall in love
as she creates the majestic dome
and names him her perfect mate,
Ouranos the sky.
Questions for the Daughters of Nyx
Apate, how do you bear it? The broken beat of betrayal coming from all the countless hearts you let your deceivers tear to shreds with their lies?
I remind myself that lies are often truth-shaped.
They’re only containers you must turn inside out
and shake till the truth tumbles out, wide eyed and confused,
blinking in a light it never thought it would see.
Nemesis, does revenge ever tire you? Do the cries you craft with your scythe ever soften your heart?
I was born to bring justice.
Not to feel pity for those who felt nothing but glee
while building palaces
out of the tears born from their treachery.
Keres, do you ever wish for a life free of the violent deaths you feed upon from the battlefields to the cities?
Not while people still bring us bodies.
Not while there are still corrupt old men
sending unknowing boys to their deaths.
Not while the truth is a fire everyone sees
and no one puts out.
Not while there is evil that needs eating yet.
Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, does spinning the yarns of fate not tire you? Do your fingers not feel heavy knowing you hold the fates of so many in your hands?
Does the night ever tire of the darkness?
Does the sea ever tire of her own depths?
Do the trees ever tire of their roots?
Do mortals ever tire of looking for other mortals to call home?
Oizys, is it hard knowing we only love you through our misery, and never through our happier days?
Why would you ever believe I want lifelong patrons,
when it is my duty to ease people through their heartache
and guide them through their pain?
It is my duty to help you find
the light at the end of each tunnel,
for she is my sister, Hemera, the day.
2. A Mortal Interlude
Sometimes I see us do what they tell us not to. The instructions we have had tattooed in parental ink on our minds since birth are hidden for a while under rebellious spirit. We lather our bodies in con
fidence as warpaint and wear Goddess instead of Girl at our throats. Ignore the salacious tongues inside our heads that threaten us not to be too full, too ferocious. We turn our spines with the height and thickness of oak trees as they were intended to be, leave our hair wild, let ourselves get lost like rivers in forests. Something ancient beckons us, a haunting that we usually ignore for our fear of the unknown.
Sometimes it whispers, you too can bend life at whim like Gaia, write an obituary to the past version of yourself like Nyx, so why don’t you try it for a while?
Sometimes I see us unwrap ourselves from mortal and turn primordial, just for a little while, as though inside us a soft meadow of magical moly has suddenly grown.
Sometimes I watch Girl become Goddess and the metamorphosis is more magnificent than anything I have ever known.
The Titans
‘Set free the Titans who dared to invade the majesty of Jove [Zeus].’
—Seneca, Hercules Furens 79 ff
Gaia’s Golden Children
Motherhood looks exquisite on you,
declared Ouranos, holding a newborn babe
in his arms, kissing Gaia’s fevered brow
covered in that sacred sweat of life-making,
Look at the wonder that comes from your womb,
each one more radiant than the next.
You are incapable of creating
anything other than masterpieces.
It is true, thought Gaia, a dozen
perfect, golden children now
playing at their feet, in their arms,
ageing both faster and slower than stars.
Can deities be blessed with eternal happiness,
she wondered contentedly,
looking at her bright, buoyant family,
Can anything in existence?
Perhaps that is where the dark thought
came from, settling behind her forest-laden eyes:
Would Ouranos still love these children
if they were not his version of beautiful?
And Tragedy, who had seen the future,
whispered in her ear with necessary cruelty,
‘Take your children and run, my love,
for my brother Destiny says, he will not.’