It may not be quite a final draft but I've gone ahead & posted at my
website a preliminary version of a long essay on the Cretan, Greek, &
Indic mythology of the oldest continuously cultivated flower in the world,
the saffron crocus. It's divided into three pages which begin he
http://www.paghat.com/saffronmyth.html
illustrated with photos of the saffron crocuses in my gardens, & with
pictures of numerous "saffron mothers" such as was the usual title of
Dawn-goddesses.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

Very nicely done. Nothing to do with the lore but with reality. We found we
were able to grow saffron crocus extremely well and harvest excellent crops
in southern SC. We also found out that when dried and bottled my wife had a
violent reaction to uncapping the bottle. She immediately stuffed up and
couldn't breathe and then began gasping for air. She had a similiar mucous
membrane reaction upon eating any baked products with the saffron in it with
her throat swelling almost shut. This reaction isn't common but certainly is
possible. Never thought it would happen here. A possible caution you might
want ot add to your list.
Gary

"paghat" wrote in message
news
It may not be quite a final draft but I've gone ahead & posted at my
website a preliminary version of a long essay on the Cretan, Greek, &
Indic mythology of the oldest continuously cultivated flower in the world,
the saffron crocus. It's divided into three pages which begin he
http://www.paghat.com/saffronmyth.html
illustrated with photos of the saffron crocuses in my gardens, & with
pictures of numerous "saffron mothers" such as was the usual title of
Dawn-goddesses.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

Very interesting, and the pics were beautiful. I took it to my circle and the
HP got quite engrossed in it.
zemedelec

(paghat) wrote in
news
It may not be quite a final draft but I've gone ahead & posted at my
website a preliminary version of a long essay on the Cretan, Greek, &
Indic mythology of the oldest continuously cultivated flower in the
world, the saffron crocus. It's divided into three pages which begin
he http://www.paghat.com/saffronmyth.html
illustrated with photos of the saffron crocuses in my gardens, & with
pictures of numerous "saffron mothers" such as was the usual title of
Dawn-goddesses.

-paghat the ratgirl


Hi Paghat,

Very nice of you to share with us. Wonderful pictures, too. However, I
will nitpick, but feel free to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking
about, because I quite possibly don't.

Although the essay is about Crocus, the part about Smilax is somewhat
incongruous. Granted if not much is known about her mythos, in alternate
interpretations it could be that she could be one of fifty sisters, but
traditionally there are only 3 Erinyes - Alecto, Tisiphone and Megera (or
maybe that's just Aeschylus, Robert Graves or Edith Wharton talking).

The incongruity is if the Erinyes were children of Poseidon's blood of
castration, how could Smilax be an Erinnyes whose mother was Nyx?

[Mental note: Don't try to date the wrong girl or your nuts will shrivel
up or get lopped off by a frisbee.]

You spell Dionysos two different ways. The usual Romanization is Dionysus
according to Webster (but i thought it was Dionysius, where is that extra
'i' coming from??). But since you are talking about Greeks, the Greek
spelling given by Liddell and Scott is Delta iota omicron (alternatively
omega) nu upsilon sigma omicron sigma.

I'm not sure but I think Robert Graves also makes the Erinnyes antecede all
Olympians, precluding a birth from Poseidon. I also can't recall reading
any thing about Poseidon getting his nuts chopped off. Are you sure you
don't mean Cronos? Or Cronos' dad (don't remember his name). hmm, but I
don't remember hearing about Poseidon "gettin' it on" with anyone either,
so he's either discreet, missing some parts or gay.

Athene is usually given to have sprung fully formed from Zeus' head,
without the usually wing-wang Zeus is famous for, although it would make
sense for her mom to be Metis. (Could have just been Athenian (the city)
propaganda, though).

Lastly, again Liddell and Scott, Kar [or Ker] (kappa acute eta rho,
feminine) = goddess of dearth, hence doom, fate, Kar [or Ker] (kappa
circumflex eta rho, neuter) = contraction of KEAR (kappa epsilon alpha rho)
= the heart. May not mean anything, as I don't recall a lot of Cretan in
the dictionary (L&S Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon), but to me, they
are two different words; could be the etymologies were similar, but I'm not
qualified to say. [Kar (kappa alpha rho) = a) hair cut off, a lock of hair
and b) a Carian, somebody from Caria].

I don't know about any of the non-Greek stuff.

-- ST

You spell Dionysos two different ways. The usual Romanization is Dionysus
according to Webster (but i thought it was Dionysius, where is that extra
'i' coming from??). But since you are talking about Greeks, the Greek
spelling given by Liddell and Scott is Delta iota omicron (alternatively
omega) nu upsilon sigma omicron sigma.

Read T.E. Lawrence's notes to his editor, prefacing t "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"
on the 6 or 7 alternative ways he spelled a favorite camel's name. (In a
nutshell, if you can read Arabic the Englished spelling doesn't matter, and if
you can't it doesn't help.)
zemedelec

In article , Salty Thumb
wrote:

(paghat) wrote in
news
he http://www.paghat.com/saffronmyth.html
Hi Paghat,

Very nice of you to share with us. Wonderful pictures, too. However, I
will nitpick, but feel free to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking
about, because I quite possibly don't.

Although the essay is about Crocus, the part about Smilax is somewhat
incongruous.

It was indeed the one remnant of myth about the fertility daemon Krokos
that did not fit the overall pattern with obvious ease & required
selective vision to fit it in, but the fact that Smilax was a daughter of
Nyx ("good" nymphs are never anywhere else given such a parent; Nyx's
daughters are rather sinister, & were the sworn enemies of Eos), so I
focused on that clue which would make this myth fit into the rest of the
lore of Eos. As Ovid tells the story though, Smilax does not have any of
the dark qualities all other daughters of Nyx would have. The
flower-transforming nymphs seem to be of two key types. The larger group
consists of those whose stories were important to runner cults & primitive
marriage rituals & who are forever fleeing from unwanted advances, turning
into some plant or another to escape what looks like rape but which may
have originated in a kind of mummed or actual marriage-by-capture. Smilax
does not fit this mode, but is of the type who turns into a plant after
being jilted, then the fellow who rejected her will be punished by
Aphrodite or Artemis or whoever, often at cost of his manhood.

Granted if not much is known about her mythos, in alternate
interpretations it could be that she could be one of fifty sisters, but
traditionally there are only 3 Erinyes - Alecto, Tisiphone and Megera (or
maybe that's just Aeschylus, Robert Graves or Edith Wharton talking).

First, not all ancient authorities agree Gaea is the mother of the Furies
by the blood of Uranos's castration. Lycophron (and a few others0 said
they were daughters of Nyx. Several Latin sources from Ovid to the Aneiad
agree Nox gave birth to the Furies (hence in Ovid Smilax is certainly
their sister). If born of Gaea & Uranos's pecker's blood, then the
Erinyes had many sisters including the Ash Tree nymphs born at the same
time, but if they were daughters of Nyx/Nox, then their sisterhood was
endless in number, every bad thing you can think of associatedwith
darkness is a son or daughter of Nyx.

More curiously, the Orphics said they were daughters of Praxidice (a form
of Persephone who renders harsh judgements). In no other cultic context is
it ever presumed Hades sired children by Persephone, but the Orphics had
many myths unique to their beliefs (in the Illiad, there is an invocation
of the Erinyes, Hades, & Persephone that may have assumed them a family;
but a later verse quotes Athena speaking of the Erynes as belonging to
Hera, in a verse that seems to assume that when a great goddess becomes
angry, she produces Furies on the spot to do her bidding).

The most curious geneology is that given by Valerius Flaccus, who assumes
Poina is their mother, though elsewhere (in Boeotia) Poina is a member of
an alternative trio of Furies serving Nemesis. When I first read Valerius
Flaccus I thought it was a mistranslation; I could not find the origin of
his assumption, but Thebaid agrees that Hades was their father (hence we
can assume Persephone their mother here too). Not all ancient authorities
agree they had divine origins at all; they may have been the "shades" of
unjustly slain women, in service of Hecate avenging women akin to
themselves; this could well have included Smilax who died from the
rejection of her advances to Krokos.

Thebaid in one passage named the Furies, Tisiphone & Styx. Styx was the
dark nymph who had power even over Zeus (she could destroy him instantly
if he ever broke an oath, as easily as any other divinity). No one else
assumes she was one of the Furies but it isn't absurd; very few divinities
could not be ruled by Zeus, but the Erinyes & Styx happened to be among
the exceptions who on some level outranked him, & whenever they are
invoked to the assistance of Olympos, Hera has to call them (perhaps
explaining why the Iliad makes that reference to "Hera's Erinyes"
punishing Ares).

In Boeotia & Arkadia, one of the Furies was named Telphousia, who lay with
Ares & bore the Ionian dragon that was later slain by Cadmus. Lycophron
refers to the "Telphousia's hunting dog" who dwelt among the streams of
Ladon. I don't know if there are other references to Telphousia possessing
some sort of night-hound but the suggestion is that she ran like Artemis
in moonlight hunts accompanied by her hunting dog. But perhaps it was only
some oddball pun on her dragon offspring, I dunno, I only know that she's
a fairly significant fourth Fury.

Pindar (in Paean 8) speaks of Paris (of the Trojan War) as one of the
Erinyess, which so far as I know is the only time a male is regarded as a
Fury, & no commentary on Pindar that I've seen tries to explain it. But
since it is Hekuba who calls him an "a hundred-handed Erinys" in her womb,
this may be only an extension of the idea that the rage of a Goddess can
bring forth new Erinyes, & Hekuba's anger with the Ilions caused her to
bring forth Paris.

I think Euripedes was the very first to number them three, & no earlier
author does so, & other ancient authors numbered them variously by the
dozens, almost always unnamed, unless the daughters of Nyx are counted,
then they are innumerated endlessly by names; though most have no myths of
their own, the majority behave as furies. The three most common names were
as you stated, but rather late additions to their myth, & only late taken
for granted. Very late, Tisiphone (according to Horace) had a Roman cult
entirely separate from her sisters, & all Tisiophone worshippers were
dykes who performed cruelly satiric versions of bacchante rituals by
night, during which a young man would be beaten to death (Horace likes to
exaggerate so can't be taken too awfully seriously). Yet in the earliest
authorities, the Furies never numbered three. Homer had no idea how many
were their number & ventured no guess. Some assumed there was only one
Fury, the vengeful goddess Erinys, though others named her Black Demeter,
others still thought the key Fury was Black Aphrodite (aka Androphonos or
Malaenis). Some authors thought the Harpies & Erinyes were the same race
& renamed both groups Eumenides to placate them, and their numbers were
legion, with names like Snatcher & Tearer. One myth has the Erinyes
turning into bronze-winged owls (harpies), & in the Argonautica, Phineos
says he was blinded by a Fury, though others say by Harpies.

According to some the Three Furies were Dike, Poena, and Erinys (Justice,
Punishment & Vengeance), & by these names served the underworld goddess
Rhamnusia, or Nemesis. A Latin author, Valerius Flaccus, states that there
was one chief among the Furies, but does not name her, nor indicate how
many lesser furies obeyed her -- he may have meant Hekate herself was the
chief, but maybe not. Different cultic contexts assumed different things
for differing religious reasons; sometimes a divinity's parent changes
from region to region in order to upraise a local divinity; often all we
have are the stories which we read as literal fantasies, without really
knowing the cultic context in which they were originally told.

The methods of Nemesis's punishment included attack behavior like the
Furies, but sometimes she was more subtle -- she would induce ill luck so
that her victims had stories akin to that of Job, losing everything bit by
bit -- & the vining Smilax (if not necessarily its little-known
personification as a nymph) was associated with this withdrawal of luck.

All these could be likened "daughters of Nyx" though not all literally
were her daughters, but all were night-demonesses whom Eos chased from the
sky each dawn, so taht they withdrew along with Nyx into the underworld
until the following nightfall; they were not necessarily literally Nyx's
daughters, but when one tries to track their mythological parentage,
ancient sources almost never agree. In Athens where the usual Three Furies
had a very elaborate cult, there was a secondary pair of Furies called the
Semnai Theai worshipped in the cave of Areopagus, & were highly beneficent
versions. Much of my essay regards a Cretan goddess named Kar, who is
probably the seen in a diminished form in the Iliad as Ker, a Fury who
drags the dead from the field of battle; she was described with claws & a
red cloak (saffron colored actually). This Ker had a college of furies in
her service called the Keres or Destructions, but I had to cut some of
this out of the article which was way too long. Hesiod called this same
Ker the daughter of Nyx, virgin-born with no father.

I could have included the Erynes among the Saffron Mothers on the evidence
of black vases depicting the Erinyes as reddish yellow, but I couldn't
track down any literary source & left that out.

The incongruity is if the Erinyes were children of Poseidon's blood of
castration, how could Smilax be an Erinnyes whose mother was Nyx?

Perhaps I should revise all that a bit (& not just the typo/slip-up with
Poseidon's name where Uranos belongs). Most of the nymphs transformed into
flowers, reeds, & suchlike, are daughters of moon & river divinities, but
that Smilax was a daughter of Nyx (or descendant of Nyx) identifies her as
rather more demonic than the usual transformed sorts & more almost
certainly more like the Erinys than a river nymph or flower nymph. A huge
number of Erinyes-like demi-goddesses were born of Nyx, including most
important Nemesis & Eris, both of whom are sometimes likened Furies, but
also many very minor ones which are personifications of ideas rather than
fullfledged gods & goddesses, with names that are really just the Greek
words for Terror, Manslayer, Broken Oath, & so on, though the dark nymph
Lethe was also Nyx's kid, all in service of Hecate & in no way beholden to
Zeus. The children of Nyx included no one pleasant, & that's the only
lingering clue that her daughter Smilax was some sort of death-dealer, &
so her plant syumbolized death & bad luck. But not enough of Smilax's
personal myth survives to know whether or not she had any real cult of her
own anywhere.

[Mental note: Don't try to date the wrong girl or your nuts will shrivel
up or get lopped off by a frisbee.]

You spell Dionysos two different ways. The usual Romanization is Dionysus
according to Webster (but i thought it was Dionysius, where is that extra
'i' coming from??). But since you are talking about Greeks, the Greek
spelling given by Liddell and Scott is Delta iota omicron (alternatively
omega) nu upsilon sigma omicron sigma.

I'm not sure but I think Robert Graves also makes the Erinnyes antecede all
Olympians, precluding a birth from Poseidon. I also can't recall reading
any thing about Poseidon getting his nuts chopped off.
[clips]

That was a very bad slip & I will change it to Uranos quickly. I knew I
had several errors in the text but went ahead & posted it early deciding
to revise it a tiny bit now & then until I'm satisfied with the
discussions & weed out any outright errors.

Thanks for all the comments it will help on the next read-through for revisions.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

pamfree (Zemedelec) wrote in
:

You spell Dionysos two different ways. The usual Romanization is
Dionysus according to Webster (but i thought it was Dionysius, where
is that extra 'i' coming from??). But since you are talking about
Greeks, the Greek spelling given by Liddell and Scott is Delta iota
omicron (alternatively omega) nu upsilon sigma omicron sigma.

Read T.E. Lawrence's notes to his editor, prefacing t "Seven Pillars
of Wisdom" on the 6 or 7 alternative ways he spelled a favorite
camel's name. (In a nutshell, if you can read Arabic the Englished
spelling doesn't matter, and if you can't it doesn't help.)
zemedelec

hehe, Arabic is a whole 'nuther ball game. I think the problem with
transliterating Arabic is that in the written script, they don't always
write the vowels (or that could be Hebrew, I don't remember). Plus there
isn't the more-or-less 1-1 correspondence of sounds and letters to the
Roman alphabet, compounded by a lack of standard pronounciations (I'm
assuming that Arabic has all sorts of regional and national dialects that
while mutually intelligible, don't sound the same to the unaccustomed ear).

(paghat) wrote in
news
Thanks for all the comments it will help on the next read-through for
revisions.

whew! You're just a writing machine, paghat. Thanks for the update, very
interesting.

- ST