Page 49 - Kallima Spiritual Centre - Newsletter - June-July 2021

physical and mental attributes that were needed on the battlefield.
Ares was the lover of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and together, they had a daughter, Harmonia, who
represented the balance of both her mother and her father’s opposing attributes (i.e. love and war). In some myths, he is also said to have fathered the Amazons.
Demeter
The goddess of agriculture and the harvest, it was thanks to Demeter that the ancients Greeks were taught to grow corn and make bread. It’s for this reason that she’s often shown with a sheaf of corn
next to her.
Though she had several lovers and bore numerous children, her favourite child was her daughter Persephone. When Hades abducted Persephone, Demeter’s distress caused the crops to wither and die.
Dionysus
The son of Zeus and Semele, a morter daughter of Harmonia and princes of Thebes. On discovering that Zeus had coupled with Semele, Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera,
persuaded the pregnant Semele to prove her lover’s divinity by requesting that he review himself in all his godly splendor.
Zeus had already promised to grant his young lover her every wish, so he did so. However, as the god of thunder, his power was too great for the mortal Semele, she was blasted with the fire bolts that
emanated from him and died. He couldn’t save Semele, but did save his unborn son, sewing him up in his thigh until he was ready to be born.
The last god to enter Olympus, he is known as the god of wine, winemaking, fertility, religious ecstacy and the arts. He was often depicted as a mature bearded male in early images and writings, though later art shows him as a beardless, sensuous, naked or semi-naked androgynous youth.
Hephaistos
The god of fire, metalworking and sculpture, Hephaistos was the only god truly considered to be ugly and somewhat deformed. His mother, Hera, was thought to have created
him without the aid of a man or his supposed father, Zeus.
He made all the weapons of the Olympians, at one stage, he was also cast out of Olympus. In one account, it was his own mother, Hera, who ejected him because she couldn’t bear the sight of his deformed foot. In another retelling, it is Zeus himself who ejects him after Hepaistos tries to prevent him from seducing his mother. Finally, he does return to Olympus.
Helpalstos, a patron of the arts as well as a god beloved of those in the manufacturing and smithing industries, was known to be gentle and kind. He was married to Aphrodite, a union arranged by Zeus. Although they had a child, Erictonius, a half-man half-serphant hybrid, Aphrodite was not the faithful sort and took many lovers, Ares among them.
49