Great Goddesses Read online

  The Four Stages of a Poisoning

  Have you ever watched the sickening of a flawless love? The way it poisons itself and pales what was once pure and pulsating like a crimson clutch of flowers deprived of water, a slow languishing and wilting. How a what if can turn itself into the darkest of self-fulfilling prophecies.

  I.

  It looks like a mother’s worries in the middle of the night, the same ones her children and her chosen husband dismiss as irrational. The way Gaia fretted and paced sleepless, each footstep closer to doubt after doubt that had begun to plague her. She was with child again, forever fertile and a giver, and Ouranos insatiable, could not stop taking. He wanted to fill the world with Titan children who looked like they had been forged in gold, who could invent elements and read water and the universe. To Ouranos, piety and family looked like this, and this alone. But inside Gaia’s womb there grew something different, something he would not understand.

  All she ever wanted was healthy children; it did not matter if they had skin of gold or sand or stone.

  II.

  It looks like a father who places the weight of the impossible on his wife and children’s shoulders. Nothing but perfection will do. Power blurs the lines between father and overlord sometimes. And Ouranos is father to the pristine heavens and all of the skies, and if the skies have never failed him in their beauty, their clouded risings and fallings, then nothing else is allowed to either.

  Not even Gaia, his love, his creator, his everything.

  III.

  It looks like the shattering of every illusion, the pulling apart of smoke and mirrors to reveal the naked truth, where the person you once loved turns into a stranger from one you once knew. Gaia’s newest children are different from their Titan brothers and sisters. Far more powerful, but also petrifying to look at. For all her long and painful birthing of them, they are her medal, her reward. Three one-eyed Cyclopes and three hundred-handed, fifty-headed Hecatoncheires. Gaia sees no difference, she dotes on them from the moment they are born. But their father takes a single look at their tiny arms reaching for him and utters words no parent ever should: You are too hideous to belong in the world of the living, you should live with the dead. Words so unnatural that once spoken they lead to a splitting of the fabric of the earth, revealing the molten innermost sanctum of hell. He tears each wriggling, crying bundle from their exhausted mother’s arms where she still lies bleeding from childbirth, and whilst she screams in shock, in fury, trying to scramble to her feet; he flings their new infants into Tartarus one after the other.

  And as the skies grey with the harshest of his storms, he looks at her defeated form coldly, turns on his heel and leaves.

  IV.

  It looks like something beyond death itself. For the aftermath of an act of such intense cruelty cannot be captured in words. Gaia weeps alone, over what can never be undone, the earth quaking as her swollen body wracks with painful, inconsolable sobs. I promise you, one day he will pay, she vows to her screaming, burning children in red, angry Tartarus as she lifts a furious face to the heavens, one day, the sky will fall.

  Frequently the poisoning looks mortal.

  But occasionally it takes on the malevolent face of the divine.

  They were so very close to what could have been perfection. Yet their love rotted too, like ripened fruit left for too long in the storms and sunshine.

  The Unloved Ungods: Hecatoncheires

  All children are born equally innocent,

  but all children are not born equally loved.

  Even with a mother who was earth and a father sky,

  a meeting between soil below and rain from above,

  nothing could save you from being misunderstood.

  Your monstrous existence challenged your father’s

  fragility in the worst way, he paced the night of your birth,

  muttering about how he had fathered Titans and Gods

  and you, you with your hundred hands, fifty heads,

  you were an abomination in his eyes, even as children.

  No one ever told him monsters aren’t simply born.

  Monsters are made by those who nurture them.

  So when you reached for him, and he flinched away,

  he had decided for you, and your fate was sealed.

  Is there a word for when a father destroys his children?

  Is there a name for the anguish of a mother who becomes venom?

  You had fifty heads and a hundred hands, you could

  barely walk, and he still sentenced you to hell.

  No wonder you were angry, no wonder you raised

  yourself with rage. And when you got the bones of a chance

  you took the hand of the enemy against your own family,

  and learned hatred so well, you taught Gods how to dance to the songs of hell.

  A Titan Sisterhood

  We built an island when we were young.

  We hid it away where no one could find it,

  Carved it in secret inside the Aegean sea,

  whispered it to each other in secret.

  While our brothers feuded for kingdoms

  with each other, we stole away together,

  the six of us walked into the water, which parted

  for us so we could stroll along the sea floor.

  Tethys found where the salt water met sweet,

  and Rhea nurtured the earth until it gave us lilies

  and Theia plucked the moon from the sky,

  and Phoebe clapped her hands and radiance abounded,

  on this island of ours where light was forever.

  Listen, this is the way of sisters.

  We know how to love each other, we do not need

  to speak to know the vastness of emotion between us.

  And this is ours, we tell each other fiercely,

  Ours and not theirs and we will protect it

  from their greedy gazes, so Mnemosyne

  is the one who is entrusted with remembering

  while Themis charms our minds so we forget.

  For this is the only place we are not trembling,

  where it does not matter if we are women,

  or Goddesses, or Titanides meant to be celestial maps.

  Where we find each other by the water,

  where we lay our heads in each other’s laps.

  Where we learn what to call this bond

  whilst the palm trees whisper to us,

  ‘Home. Call yourselves “home”.’

  What It Means to Be a Forgotten Magic Maker

  oracle

  /ˈɒrək(ə)l/

  Asteria

  When she was born, pale, gleaming, constellations woven through her hair, the cosmos clear in her liquid eyes, her father’s gentle prophetic voice blessed her to be the mother of falling stars and nocturnal prophets.

  There was no warning about how painful it was to tell a star of its own ending, a girlhood spent telling exquisite things, that it is their time to die.

  The heartache in being Goddess of prophecy meant to be able to read only dark tea leaves in her own divination and still, still try to love wholly and without restriction.

  Wife of the God of destruction, mother to Goddess of necromancy and still, those arrogant Olympians only saw her as spoils of war, as less than even human.

  They shall not have her, even if they imprison her husband. She handed her daughter over to Styx, asked her to turn her child chthonic, forever make her a being of fear to even ruling Gods like Zeus and Poseidon.

  The only way to escape them all is to turn herself into something they could never have, her choices: island or constellation.

  Prophecy told her to transform into an island, for one day, on her banks, her siste
r will give birth to the sun and the moon.

  When Olympus falls, and it will, she will be waiting for the last of her family, the last sanctified place left, untouched by Gods and by mortal men.

  necromancy

  /ˈnɛkrə(ʊ)mansi/

  Hecate

  The inheritance of a lost mother is sometimes soft and sanctified, and sometimes it is loud and litigious and an act of rebellion, and this is why her mother gave her to the underworld.

  Styx was kind, she showed her how to turn dead waters and dark destinies into resurrections and vivid dreams.

  She learned her alphabet from ghosts and heard bedtime stories from the decaying throats of the dead, and we all know what this kind of nurture does to a girl.

  Befriender of runaway nymphs and broken queens of Troy, she guides them into accepting the graceful darkness she wears so easily.

  When the Gods fail to defeat giants, she smiles softly at Hades: your mistake is thinking Gods can do a Goddess’s job.

  She alchemised the amber yellow of an eternal flame and brought down giant after giant with ease that worried Zeus himself.

  Everyone thinks death is about endings, but it had always been her guide and teacher, her black hounds at her heel in every city she visited, cemetery after cemetery full of ghosts eager to meet her.

  Does a heart that is rotted cease to be called a heart? Is a mortuary truly just full of dead flesh? Or is it simply waiting for you, Hecate, queen of paradox, of crossroads, to breathe it into second life again.

  magic

  /ˈmadʒɪk/

  Circe

  Did the girl choose magic, or does magic choose the girl? An eternal riddle that circles even the fiercest of the divinities.

  Perhaps magic is in the habit of choosing sharp-eyed girls who ask too many questions for their own good. Perhaps it chooses girls who are not unloved, but not fully loved either.

  Or maybe she calls it to her by being immortal, but rejecting her thick, sweet-smelling ichor and naming herself traitor to her kind.

  Who needs a Sun God’s ruthless court of the forever living and bitterly gleaming when one can have an island filled with lions and wolves who adore her for who she is, Goddess of herbs, or poisons, of turning every man who dares step foot here into pigs.

  Some of us prefer the lonely to the glittering, the shaded hoods of trees to the constant glare of burning ochre.

  Why be a half-finished poem in some forgotten poet’s story, when one can be an odyssey in and of herself, part magic, part villain, part Goddess, part lover.

  Magic aids her turn from defenceless nymph to Goddess – deathless majesty of a Titanide, summoner of an army of sharks and scorpions alike that would die to protect her.

  The River of the Dead

  My father, Oceanus, craved terror,

  drifted in and out of the midnight sea.

  A shark’s mouth became his home

  for a while and this is how I was conceived.

  He met something on his travels,

  something treacherous and odious,

  a novelty he had to have, just because

  he had had nothing like it before.

  When he swam back to Tethys with a baby

  my stepmother and sisters recoiled from me.

  Sharp blue teeth, yellow-eyed like a fury,

  shaped less nymph, more Mormolyce,

  they made it clear that whatever I was,

  they did not want me. But my father

  was enchanted, gave me my own river,

  told me I was still Goddess while they

  were simply nymphs, refused to let me

  hear their whispers of monster.

  Perhaps he should have. Perhaps

  he should have paid attention

  to the snakes coiled inside me

  waiting to strike, when Zeus asked

  for the aid of Titans, this is why

  I took his side. Whatever mothered me

  had a cast iron womb from hell.

  Even Hades knows better than to test me.

  For it is my waters that the Gods swear oaths to,

  where their eternity or diminishment swells.

  I am the reason why Semele burned,

  why Phaeton fell, why a God can never

  break a pact to another. Some call it madness,

  I call it balance: one cannot exist without the other.

  People think Achilles lived by my waters.

  They are wrong. My waters are what ensured

  that he would die. You too will meet me one day.

  My name is Styx and I am hatred personified.

  Rhea, Mother to Gods

  The birth of a God is a lot

  like the birth of a mortal,

  except the sweat from our brow is silver

  and the blood is gold.

  The second way we are different

  is that we are given our purpose

  when our father holds us, and this

  is when our fate is foretold.

  His large blue hands blessed

  each of my siblings with gifts of prophecy

  and intelligence and justice and the power

  to control summer’s heat and winter’s cold.

  For me, there was no story.

  No divination at his lips.

  So my mother taught me

  the act of nurture.

  ‘In our home,’ she told me gently, ‘no one

  should ever go hungry. This is your only duty.’

  It is why I made sure every bowl was filled

  from when I was a little girl as I supposed

  it was my purpose to satisfy appetite,

  to obediently feed everything that came

  to me hungry. I believed I was the Goddess

  of Satiation. That this was my only true role.

  Now he stands before me. My husband,

  my lover, and demands all our infant children,

  for his ambition is hungry and only

  the blood of our own will quench it.

  No one taught me

  how to challenge hunger

  nor how to deny power.

  ‘Goddess of Satiation,’ he goads,

  ‘Goddess of Appetite, isn’t

  this your only purpose and power?’

  So I close my eyes, hold my child out,

  and turn away, weeping,

  as his greedy mouth devours.

  Leto, Mother to Sun and the Moon

  How do you prevent a God from loving you?

  You learn to veil your beauty through the powers of the oblivion from the magical lotus, take whole meadows and turn them into hiding places, find a secret oasis inside forests to make your own – you have learned early, and wisely, that even the daughters of Titans do not get to escape a God’s unwanted attention. Look at what Zeus and Poseidon did to Asteria, your only sister: one sent her racing into the water, the other, it is said, held her prisoner underwater forever. The kindest rumours say she turned into an island plagued by storms and thunder – no, it is better to try to outrun him, even if in the end it is futile. At least try – maybe, just maybe you will be the exception.

  How do you stop a Goddess from hunting you, from trying to turn you into an ending?

  Her ire has turned every land against you, you feel her eyes upon you as you struggle out at sea. You turn the ache in your bones from rowing into love and ferocity for your tightening stomach. Yes, what is growing inside you may have been his fault, but you are so tender-hearted you cannot help but love them. A part of you has always known motherhood is your destiny, you are Goddess of it after all. Your ch
ildren make you stronger, you are sure of it, they make you driven enough to face chthonic, unbeatable creatures, and even the wrath of Goddesses that make every land across the world shun you in your pregnancy. You were Mary long before the world knew Jesus would be born.

  How do you become the mother of the most fearsome Gods?

  You use your gift for seeing what is hidden, you learn to stand over oceans, you shake open the heavens, you follow the signs in a dream to the island that was once your own dear sister, know that nothing mortal or divine can touch you here, she was always your greatest protector. Nine days you spend here in toil, lionesses watch over you, and your sister whispers to her birds to bring you water. You do this for your children, for if there is anyone who can avenge your humiliation, it is them, so you tame the pain within you till it delivers their glory. When they are born you understand why it took all of your body and soul to defend them. After all, it was only your chosen womb that could carry the sun and his sister the moon.

  House of Hyperion, Titan of Light

  Helios, the Sun

  ‘You make my mouth burn for you,’ murmurs Apollo to me softly, touching my warm, golden skin. His own shines brightly next to mine. My light, I am only kindling. Do not fall so deep in love with me.

  He laughs, covers my mouth with his, forgets how I am a burning building and always have been.

  He will remember soon. When I cost him a son who he loves more than he could ever love me. We will stop looking each other in the eye one day. Strange what happens to love when it becomes a chore. Something we are forced to do together. Until one day one of you asks to do it alone.

  And the next day, and the next day and the day after that.

  I warned him I was kindling.

  I suppose he didn’t taste the burning when we kissed, or maybe he tasted it and didn’t think it would burn him, that because the ashes didn’t leave my mouth, they were never there at all, but they were. They were.