Page 47 - Kallima Spiritual Centre - Newsletter - June-July 2021

Apollo
The god of prophecy, music, poetry, healing and knowledge. Apollo was known to be very handsome, and though very much loved by the gods, was always unlucky in love. His most famous
failure in respect was King Priam’s daughter Cassandra. Apollo had bestowed on her the gift of prophecy, but when she spurned him, he took away her powers of persuasion. Following that, if her prophecies came true, nobody ever believed her.
Artemis
Apollo’s twin sister was Artemis, the virgin goddess of hunting, animals and protector of children. She is typically depicted with a bow and arrow, longside a deer.
Athena
The goddess of wisdom, war and heroism, the protector of the Acropolis in Athens. Athena’s parents were Zeus and his first wife, the Titan Metis. The tale of Athena’s birth is quite remarkable. An
oracle pronounced that the King of the Olympians would have a daughter, followed by a second child, a son, who would overthrow him (just as Zeus had done to his own father).
In an effort to prevent this from coming true, Zeus devoured his wife when she told him of her first pregnancy. However, after a while, his head began to throb in pain. When the pain became unbearable and he
cried out for help, the other gods gathered around him, Hermes instructed Zeus’s head to be split open and in doing so, he ‘birthed’ the source of the pain – his daughter Athena, fully clothed and armed for battle.
The fact that she had sprung from her father’s head and was the daughter of Metis, who herself was known to be incredibly wise, meant that Athena was destined to be highly intelligent.
One of the older deities, Athena also came to be associated with other skills such as weaving and music, specifically flute- playing. Many scholers have put this down to the progression of time and the fact that her development as a goddess who was brave, wise and accomplished in many arts, reflects the development of Athens itself as a city that began to burgeon as a centre of skill, craft and power.
Aphrodite
The goddess of beauty, love, sexuality and fertility, who played the major roles in some of ancient Greece’s most important events.
There are two differing accounts of this goddess’s birth. The first,
as told in Hesiod’s Theogony, claims that Aphrodite was both in the waters of Paphos, on the island of Cyprus. She supposedly arose from the foam uranus’ castered genitals created when the Titan Cronus threw them into the sea. The second is simple: She was the child of Zeus and Dione.
Ares
Though Ares was a good of war, like his half-sister Athena, he represented the reality of war much more so than the
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