Tag Archives: Aphrodite

Nemesis: Goddess of Rebalancing

I reblogged an article on Nemesis, the goddess of rebalancing, last week, but I’m still really intrigued by this goddess, so fearsome and yet widely worshipped. The Greeks built temples to honour her, and the Romans took her cult to the ends of the Roman Empire, from Dacia to Scotland.

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Nemesis: Greek Goddess of Punishment (reblog)

Nemesis is a Greek goddess of revenge and retribution. In particular, she is invoked against those whose hubris and arrogance got the better of them, and serves as a force of divine reckoning. Originally, she was a deity who simply doled out what people had coming to them, whether good or bad.

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For the image at the top, click here.

The doves of Aphrodite (Reblog)

Our blessed Goddess Aphrodite intrigues me. She is a Goddess of both love and war, of friendship and hate, of companionship and jealousy. She is one of the Goddesses with the widest range of domains and influence in our world and She is Goddess that touches us personally. She doesn’t control the weather or the sea, She controls us directly.

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For the image at the top, click here.

Dione and the Oracle at Dodona

The oracle at Dodona was the oldest in Greece, with only Delphi rivaling it in prestige. There was a main temple, probably dedicated to Zeus and Dione, with several smaller temples around the site. (At least one, near the theatre, had dedications to Aphrodite, Dione’s daughter by Zeus, according to local myth.)

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Dione: the Divine

Dione, whose name means Divine or Goddess, is mainly known as Aphrodite’s mother, but she had her own cult, centred around the oracle at Dodona. She was probably a Mycenean goddess, but her origin is somewhat mysterious.

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Gullveig: the goddess who wouldn’t die

Considering that she may have started a cosmic war, we know very little about the Norse goddess Gullveig. Her story comes from the Eddic poem Völuspá, which tells how the Aesir riddled her with spears and then burned her three times but couldn’t kill her.

The next event in the poem is the war between the Aesir and Vanir, the two groups of Norse deities, so it’s always been assumed that somehow the attack on Gullveig started it.

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The Melissae: bees and the goddess

A tablet in Linear B from Knossos reads:

To all the gods, honey
To the mistress of the labyrinth, honey.

The civilization at Knossos, on the island of Crete, preceded that of the Greeks. While it is hard to say exactly how much of the later Greek culture reflects that of the Cretans, both considered honey a gift worthy of the gods.

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What exactly is Brisingamen?

This is one of those questions with a short and a long answer. The short answer is that it is the Norse goddess Freyja’s necklace. The longer answer is that the necklace, and its owner, were intimately linked. The jewel and the goddess were linked in the same way as Thor and his hammer: an attribute that could both symbolize the deity and embody their power.

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