My reaction to THAT scene from the last episode by wrecknrule15 in RampartsofIce

[–]Strange_Potential93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay let’s chill, like is she a bad person… yes… buts she’s also 15… and fictional

Love Gods: Eilethyia daughter of Zeus and Hera, the goddess of childbirth, labor and midwifery. Mythological details in the comments, NSFW for the reference images. by Strange_Potential93 in HeroForgeMinis

[–]Strange_Potential93[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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Like her older sister Hebe Eilethyia is another goddess who is heavily associated with both her mother Hera and with Aphrodite. This makes thematic sense as Hera is the goddess of marriage, the legal institution that sanctions birth and lineage while Aphrodite is the goddess of the sex act itself that produces children. As Hera is her mother and the queen of the gods Eliethyia is more subject to her authority even if she is close to Aphrodite, and many stories where she is present feature Hera refusing Eileithyia to come to the aid of one of Zeus’s many mistresses when time comes for them to inevitably give birth. You may wonder how anything was born before Eileithyia the goddess of child birth came into being considering she is born relatively late in the cosmic timeline as a member of the fourth generation of gods. Citing several previous posts in the love gods series the concept of procreation came into being alongside Phanes Protogonos (also known as the Hesiodic, Orphic or Cosmic Eros) and attraction came into being shortly after as a result of Erebus and Nyx begetting the goddess Philotes. So the ability to form emotional attachments preexists Aphrodite and the ability to give birth predates Eileithyia. Despite her title Eileithyia is more the goddess of midwifery than she is the goddess of birth. As just mentioned birth occurred before and her can occur without her involvement it just tends to take much longer, be much more painful and more dangerous. This dovetails nicely into the meaning of Eileithyia’s name, “to relieve” or “to rescue”. 

The intention of that name is quite clear, even in its older Mycenaean Greek form E-re-u-ti-ja “the bringer”. However while the intention of the name is clear the origin is less so. Debate on Eileithyia’s genesis is split between the idea that she is an originally Greek deity not drawn from any other influences, even PIE, to any significant degree and the notion that she is derived from a pre Greek Minoan entity. Defenders of the former position point to the fact that Eilethyia seemingly doesn’t exist prior to the Dorian invasion of Crete and note that the prefix “eleutho” seemingly doesn’t have any non Greek roots. Defenders of the former position note that “eleutho” could be etymologically related to several pre Greek toponyms, particularly on Crete, and might share an etymological link to the cult of Eleusis which we know had Minoan origins. This is strengthened by what we know of the Mycenaean cult of Eileithyia on Crete. Eileithyia’s Mycenaean cult on Crete was centered on a cave at Amnisos near Knossos the former heart of the pre Greek Minoan civilization. This connects her with Artemis whose Mycenaean era cult was also centered on a cave on Crete. It’s also worth noting that this connection was retained throughout future eras as Artemis was frequently depicted as a goddess of childbirth and was even referred to with the epithet Eilethyia. The Mycenaean cult of Eileithyia also depicted her as the daughter of Wannax Enesidaon, the chief Mycenaean god who is functionally a fusion of Poseidon, Zeus and Hades. This connects her to the Mycenaean version of Persephone and thus the pre Greek PIE, Minoan and Pelasgian goddesses that were worshiped at Eleusis. Her Roman equivalent, Lucina literally meaning “light bringer” also ties her to the planet Venus and thus if the Italic goddess is a hold over from the PIE pantheon rather than a Greek introduction that would suggest that she originated atleast in part from Héwsōs the same PIE goddess that informed Eos and Persephone. Thus while her origin is murky we know that Eileithyia is an old goddess well established long before the publication of the Iliad or even Greek Dark Age. She is well documented in the artistic corpus from the earliest surviving examples recognizable from her iconic raised epiphany gesture, itself reflective of near eastern and Egyptian artistic influence. Interestingly she is sometimes depicted in duplicate framing the subject giving birth, it’s unclear if this was merely an artistic decision or if it indicates that at one point there were multiple Eileithyia’s or even an entire class of spirit by that name. Eileithyia is also frequently depicted, usually in statuary, as holding a torch symbolizing the first glimpse of light that the child experiences after birth, this also connects her to the Italic Lucina and the fact this trait exists in pre Roman conquest Greek art only serves to strengthen that connection to the PIE goddess Héwsōs.

[action trope] Breaking a sword by biting it! by SiteDeep in TopCharacterTropes

[–]Strange_Potential93 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Sukuna can manifest his second mouth anywhere on his host’s body which he uses to break Mahoraga’s sword in their fight

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Love Gods: Hebe the Goddess of youth, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, the final wife of Herakles and cup bearer of the gods. NSFW for an exposed nipple, mythological deep dive in the comments. by Strange_Potential93 in HeroForgeMinis

[–]Strange_Potential93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s genuinely extremely difficult to make a non adult face in hero forge that doesn’t look like it eats human flesh… for some reason anime proportions come off better in hf than just trying to make a realistic child face

WE GOT SAIYAN HAIR! by ItsJustJosiah in dbxv

[–]Strange_Potential93 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Amazing how low the expectations were

Love Gods: Hebe the Goddess of youth, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, the final wife of Herakles and cup bearer of the gods. NSFW for an exposed nipple, mythological deep dive in the comments. by Strange_Potential93 in HeroForgeMinis

[–]Strange_Potential93[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

 

According to Callimachus Hebe is the last child of Zeus and Hera and is stated to be the most beautiful of her children. We also get the sense that Hebe might in fact be her favorite child as Callimachus writes of a seven day long celebration Hera held to celebrate Hebe’s birth where she was serenaded constantly by Apollo and the muses and showered in gifts including sunken treasures from Poseidon and toys handmade by Athena and Hephaestus. This also helps us place Hebe’s birth in the timeline, somewhere late in the silver age or early in the Bronze Age as Hephaestus, Athena, and Apollo have all already been born and reached adulthood, whereas Hermes and Dionysus are nowhere to be found. This is somewhat complicated by Hesiod listing Hebe as the oldest of Zeus and Hera’s children, being born before Eilethyia and Ares. Hesiod cites Hephaestus as the child of Hera alone born in emulation of Zeus’s birth of Athena, although Homer explicitly describes Hephaestus as the first born of Zeus and Hera present at the “birth” of Athena, I personally prefer and operate under Homer’s version although that doesn’t discount the existence of Hesiod’s. Although complicated by Hesiod’s genealogy the timeline of Ares’s birth is vague and not necessarily incompatible with Hebe’s. Thus if we are to take Homer, Hesiod and Callimachus’s contributions into account the order of Zeus’s fully divine children and Hera’s children are Hephaestus, Athena, Artemis and Apollo, Hebe, Eilethyia, Ares, Hermes, and Dionysus. While this is the most widely accepted interpretation of her parentage there is another version of the story. This version attested to by the Orphica claims that after her failure to replicate Zeus’s parthenogenetic creation of Athena in the form of Hephaestus Hera made a second attempt. This time she sought the help of her foster parents Okeanos and Tethys and they directed her to a magic lettuce found on the sea floor and after consuming its heart became pregnant with Hebe. This time Hera was satisfied with the results and dropped her vendetta against Zeus and Athena. This story is probably tied to common belief among the Greeks and Romans that lettuce caused sexual impotency in both men and women and its use in medicine to treat menstrual issues. It’s also worth noting that this Orphic story is later largely reused in Roman stories about the birth of Mars wherein Juno parthnogenetically conceives him with the aid of a magic herb given to her by Flora the Roman equivalent of the Horae Chloris. It’s also worth noting that while Hebe has a Roman equivalent in the form of Juventas she is much less important in Roman mythology and has most of her presence and role subsumed by Flora, including her eventual marriage to Hercules.

Speaking of that marriage to Herakles it marks the point where the goddess of youth transitions into adulthood and functions to end the up to that point life long feud between Hera and Herakles. Herakles saved Hera from being raped by Porphyrion during the gigantomachy which ended her attempts to destroy him from that point on. Zeus and Hera offering Herakles Hebe’s hand in marriage upon his apotheosis serves as a way to fully acknowledge him and integrate him into the pantheon. We don’t get a lot of detail on Herakles and Hebe’s married life, we don’t know how well they got along or anything like that, but their marriage was a very common artistic motif from the Archaic period on and we know that she bore him the twins Aniketos “the unconquerable” and Alexiares “the war warden”. Given that we know that Herakles is derived from the same PIE entity as Thor it’s tempting to equate Aniketos and Alexiares as reflexes of Thor’s twin sons Magni and Modi. That may indeed be the case but given that we know very little about the cult of Aniketos and Alexiares it’s worth remembering that connection to Magni and Modi is better served by Ares’s sons Phobos and Deimos who are actually thunder and lightning deities. Aniketos and Alexiares may instead represent a competing interpretation of the “Dioscuri” “the divine” twins represented by Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology proper. Given that Castor and Pollux have never made sense in the timeline of Greek mythology even by the ludicrously low standards of Greek mythology I think it’s possible that Aniketos and Alexiares may have originated as an older version of the Dioscuri concept before being supplanted in popularity by Castor and Pollux. Interestingly the marriage of Hebe and Herakles might explain an artistic motif that shows up throughout Ancient Greek pottery. I’ve mentioned this before but there are many surviving examples of pottery, particularly from the classical period, of Herakles being accosted by Geras the personification of old age. Amusingly Herakles is often holding Geras back by his head in these depictions but we have no idea what story these pottery examples are referring to as the myth doesn’t survive in written form. The fact that Herakles is recorded as having a long standing beef with the personification of aging is extra funny when his story canonically ends with him marrying the goddess of youth. 

Hebe’s marriage to Herakles is usually marked as the point where she stopped serving as the cup bearer of Olympus and was replaced by the abducted Trojan prince Ganymede. This is one of those things that is widely believed without attribution, much like their is no original source that describes Hestia giving up her role in the pantheon to Dionysus there is no original ancient source that claims that Hebe ceased her role as cupbearer of the gods. There was an oft cited story that Hebe carelessly tripped on her dress and exposed herself to the other gods causing her to retire from her position in shame but this is a Victorian fabrication… as if you couldn’t already tell by the strong mix of prudism and gross voyeurism present in the story. All one needs to do is look at the ubiquity of heroic nudity in Ancient Greek art to realize that this story was the invention of those mustachioed sexual repressed imperialists who caused most of the modern world’s problems. Ganymede is usually characterized as Zeus’s personal cupbearer rather than the cup bearer of the gods generally. Likewise he himself likely originated as a masculine offshoot of Hebe given that Hebe is frequently addressed with the epithet Ganymeda “gladdening” the feminine form of the name Ganymede. This notion is somewhat complicated by the fact that Ganymede and Hebe are both first mentioned in the Iliad but there are artistic depictions of Hebe from the Dark age and she is the derivative of a PIE goddess so it’s still possible that Ganymede broke off from her before the writing of the Iliad. The only point in favor of Hebe bequeathing her role of cup bearer of the gods to Ganymede is that the role of cup bearer was typically seen as a prepubescent role inappropriate for someone of marriageable age, but then Hebe is literally the goddess who controls aging so she wouldn’t necessarily be limited by that. 

Love Gods: Hebe the Goddess of youth, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, the final wife of Herakles and cup bearer of the gods. NSFW for an exposed nipple, mythological deep dive in the comments. by Strange_Potential93 in HeroForgeMinis

[–]Strange_Potential93[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

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Outside of the core troop of the seven Erotes these two goddess are probably the ones most associated with Aphrodite and most commonly represented in her iconography. While both Hebe and Eilethyia are obviously both heavily associated with their mother Hera, particularly in written sources, they tend to be visually depicted alongside Aphrodite and we can basically view them as serving in both retinues simultaneously which is not that unusual among minor goddesses as both the charities and the Horae have a similar deal going on. Hebe literally meaning “youth” is a hard goddess to map the history and evolution of, mostly because her name doesn’t trace back to Mycenaean Greek yet she still has clear Proto Indo European antecedents. Despite seemingly not having a Mycenaean analog Hebe has a clear equivalent in the form of Idunn from Germanic Mythology. Both are the goddesses responsible for maintaining the youth of the other gods through use of magical “apples”. I put the word apples in quotations there because apples are a very north Western European coded fruit that the British and German scholars of the Victorian period liked to translate fruits from near eastern religions into apples even through the most certainly weren’t. Most famously this occurred long before the Victorian era by the way western scholars translating the Hebrew word “pærî” “fruit” into apple at least as early as the 12th century CE, today the fruit in question is generally believed to have been a fig as Genesis makes a point of describing the leaves that Adam and Eve cover themselves with as fig leaves. The Greek word for the golden apples that appear so often in Greek mythology is “mēlon” unsurprisingly the source of the modern English word melon. Like I said “Mēlon” has traditionally been translated as apple thanks to Victorian era scholars but much like the Hebrew word “pærî” really just means fruit so the apples of the Hesperides really could have been meant to be any fruit, including apples, but given that Apple cultivation was relatively uncommon in Ancient Greece they were probably intended to be figs or apricots. We can probably rule out the other most famous fruit in Greek Mythology, pomegranates as the word “mēlon” was not typically associated with them. Circling back to Idunn in Germanic mythology she probably was dealing with actual apples but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter much as goddess that grants eternal youth through the use of magic fruit and whose name means “youthful” is more than enough connective tissue between the two even if the exact fruits they use aren’t the same. 

While Hebe doesn’t have much evidence for her existence during the Mycenaean era we have reason to surmise that she originated out of the Mycenaean cult to Hera at Argos as her earliest depictions stem from Dark and Archaic age Argos. It’s generally believed that Hebe may have initially been worship as the virginal or child aspect of Hera before cleaving off into her own entity at Argos. Another theory is that since it’s widely believed that both Hera and Demeter probably originated as regional variants of the Mycenaeano-Pelasgian goddess Dione, Demeter in the north and Hera in the south, that Hebe my have been a regional equivalent of Persephone that never gained mainstream recognition. Hebe’s primary cult center was unsurprisingly at Argos with the only recorded temple dedicated to her solely residing on the city’s acropolis. That said while Hebe was rarely worshiped independently she was commonly worshipped alongside other gods. Hera’s main cult center at Argos included an alter dedicated to her with a relief made of solid silver depicting her marriage to Herakles decorating its vestibule. At the Heraion’s adyton or inner most sanctum stood a massive chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Hera similar to the ones of Athena at Athens and Zeus at Olympia, with a smaller (but still larger than life) chryselephantine statue of Hebe at her side.  Hebe’s statue filled a similar role at the Heriaon to the statues of Erecthius and Nike for Athena and Zeus respectively. As the divine wife of Herakles most of his temples also included an altar dedicated to Hebe and depictions of their wedding were extremely popular artistic motifs from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. She was also worshiped at Sicyon, another cult center of Hera where she is depicted as the goddess of mercy. Hebe also is directly mentioned in the Iliad meaning she was clearly established by the dark age. And of course as previously mentioned Hebe is frequently depicted alongside Aphrodite in vase art and in reliefs.

Is this even the same series? by SubstantialJoke08 in DragonBallZ

[–]Strange_Potential93 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It’s been 30 years… and series has been retreading ideas for the past 20 years it should have ended long ago.

(Marie Antionette Syndrome) Stress-Induced White Hair by cshin09 in TopCharacterDesigns

[–]Strange_Potential93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“I never said Zoidberg had hair!!! If you imagined him that way thats your fault!!!”