Sacred Bride

by Sacred Bride (retail) (epub)

  Eirēnē: Peace, binding together, unity.

  Elysian Fields: Also known as ‘Elysium’. A place of eternal happiness in Erebus, the Underworld, reserved for the Blessed Dead – heroes, and others who have won the blessings of the gods for living a virtuous and noble life.

  Erebus: The Underworld, where the souls of the departed go after death.

  Hamazan: Amazon, a member of one of the woman warrior cults in the nomadic (Scythian) tribes who live by or near the Axeinos or Black Sea, at the outer edges of the Greek known world.

  Hubris: Wanton disregard for the feelings or rights of others; overbearing arrogance; a spirit of wanton violence; excessive and foolish pride, especially in defiance of the gods.

  Keryx: A herald serving a royal master, discharging important public functions such as making proclamations, undergoing missions, summoning assemblies and conducting ceremonies.

  Kopros: Dung, shit, dunghill. Koprologos: shit-gatherer.

  Kunopes: Bitch, shameless one, slut (from Greek ‘kuon’: a dog).

  Labyrinth: A confusing complex of pathways through which it is almost impossible to find one’s way.

  Labyrinth of Minos: The original labyrinth, built under the palace of King Minos, of Crete to house the Minotaur, a monstrous half-man, half-bull which was slain by the Athenian hero Theseus.

  Laertiades, Sisyphiades, Atreiades, Heraclid etc: These are patronyms, the equivalent of our modern surnames, except that they always refer back to the father’s given name. They translate as ‘son of Laertes’, ‘son of Sisyphus’, ‘son of Atreus’ and so on. This form parallels Scandinavian and Scottish names like ‘Anderson’, which initially meant ‘Son of Anders’.

  Magus: A sorcerer; a theios or theia with magical powers, who can bend reality.

  Megaron: The main hall of a palace or important stately house. It is either broadly rectangular or square-shaped, with a large circular hearth in the middle surrounded by four pillars, and is often reached via a large vestibule and perhaps a porch opening onto a courtyard. A royal megaron will have its throne against one wall and will have brightly painted walls, ceiling and floor.

  Mulas: A cock-sucker.

  Mycenaean, Mycenae: On a specific level, it refers to the kingdom, city and people of Mycenae, seat of the Achaean High King, in the north-eastern corner of the Peloponnese. The term is also used nowadays by archaeologists to describe the whole of Late Bronze Age Greece and its culture.

  Nymph, naiad, dryad: Female daemons associated with nature, presiding over various natural phenomena such as springs, clouds, trees, caves and fields.

  Obol: A unit of everyday currency. Before coinage was introduced in the 7th century BC, an obol was a bronze skewer which was used as a form of exchange. A ‘fist’ of six obols was as many as a grown man could be expected to hold in one hand, and was called a drachma, after the Ancient Greek word ‘to grasp’. Later, obols and drachmas became coins.

  Olympians: The select group of powerful Greek gods who dwell on the mythic Mt Olympus. The physical Mt Olympus is in northern Greece.

  Oracle: A seer or seeress capable of delivering prophecies.

  Pankration: A form of unarmed combat sport, using a mixture of boxing and wrestling. Almost anything is allowed, apart from biting and eye-gouging.

  Pantheon: This word translates literally as ‘all the gods’. In later times it was also a building, which we anticipated in its basic form and function by many hundreds of years in Book One of the Olympus series, Athena’s Champion, by creating an open-sided building in Erebus with a roof supported only by pillars, intended as a meeting place for the Olympians.

  Phallos, (pl.) phalli: Penis, prick.

  Ploistos: A festival celebrating the start of spring; the name of the first sailing month of the year, after the winter storms.

  Pornos: Male prostitute.

  Priapos: Penis, prick.

  Proktos: Arse hole.

  Pythia: The high priestess and prophetess of the oracular shrine of Pytho. When prophesying, she sits on a stool straddling a deep cleft in the rock from which vapours arise, sending her into a prophetic trance.

  Pytho: A major oracular site high on the slopes of Mt Parnassus, and later known as Delphi. It has been sacred to a series of Earth goddesses – Gaia, Themis and now Hera.

  Satyr: A male daemon, a nature spirit associated with fertility who consorts with nymphs, naiads and the like.

  Scree: A steep mountain slope made up of small stones or rock fragments.

  Serpent’s Path: A prophetic process or ‘journey’ undertaken by an oracle, a person with oracular powers.

  Signet: A small, lens-shaped object, often of gold or silver but also of agate, chalcedony or a similarly hard stone. These are carved with intricately-detailed images – ritual or combat scenes are common – and are used as seals, creating the reversed image in relief, to identify a particular person in the same way a hand-written signature would.

  Suagros: A person with a romantic attachment to wild pigs; a pig-fucker.

  Theios, theia, theioi, theiae: A human who has some measure of divine blood; the Greek word translates literally as ‘god-touched’. They are born of a union between a god and a human, or of a union between their god-touched descendants. A man or boy is a ‘theios’, a woman or girl is a ‘theia’, and the plural forms are ‘theioi’ (m) and ‘theiae’ (f). A person’s theios nature is latent until it is awakened; this awakening can be carried out either by their ancestral god or by another god whose nature is in tune with that of the latent theios or theia, allowing gods to claim the descendants of other gods. In rare instances, a theios or theia can have affiliations with more than one god. Theioi, once awakened, can switch their allegiance to another god, but this is perilous, for it invokes the extreme anger of their original awakening god and usually leads to their death.

  There are four types of theioi: seer, champion, avatar and magus. The seer has prophetic powers; the champion has superior physical strength and talent; the avatar can become the physical vessel of their god, who is otherwise invisible; and the magus is a sorcerer, with magical powers. Sometimes a theios or theia can be more than one type, though usually one aspect is dominant, and generally each aspect is weaker than it would be in a theios or theia who has only one attribute. In later generations, theios blood can become too diluted to give theios powers to new offspring. How long this takes depends on the power of the ancestral god, and on the mutual theios strength of the theios couple who produce the child.

  Wraith: A ghost, phantom or spirit.

  Xenia: The sacred Ancient Greek customs of guest friendship: the respect and ties of obligation between host and guest, which not only bind people who share that relationship, but their family and their descendants as well.

  Xiphos: A sword. Achaean swords of the Late Bronze Age, around the time of the Trojan War, were broad, straight and relatively short. They were made of bronze, as were all weapons of the time.

  The Gods

  Around 1300BC, religious worship in the western Aegean region is dominated by the gods of the Achaean peoples. They are worshipped throughout Achaea (geographically equivalent to modern Greece); and their influence has recently begun to extend as far as the kingdom of Troy, on the Anatolian coast (modern western Turkey).

  These Achaean deities are divided into the Olympian gods (those aligned to Zeus, the Skyfather and head of a pantheon of allied sects); and the unaligned gods whose worship is independent of the Olympic pantheon.

  However, in Troy, a client-kingdom of the Hittite Empire (modern central and eastern Turkey), worship is dominated by the Hittite gods, with some Achaean influences through settlement and trade. As Troy’s influence grows, so too does the influence of their gods; especially Apaliunas (known in Achaea as Apollo).

  The Olympian Gods

  Zeus is the senior god of the Achaean peoples, but his worship has spread well beyond the Achaean kingdoms. As a sky god, he is actively aligning himself with other such deities as his p
riests seek to make his worship universal. The Zeus cult is now questioning their alliance with the primary Achaean goddess, Hera, whose worship is limited to Achaean lands.

  Hera is Achaea’s strongest goddess, aggressively absorbing other fertility goddesses (such as Leto, Gaia, Themis, Hestia and others) into her cult to increase her worship. Most of her followers are women, though she is still the dominant deity at the Achaean High King’s capital of Mycenae, and her priestesses control the main oracular site of Pytho. As a purely Achaean deity, her cult faces challenges in a changing world.

  Athena is a lesser goddess whose cult promotes wisdom and skill in war and peace, and whose primary power base is Athens, capital city of Attica. Outside that kingdom, her cult is in conflict with Ares the traditional war god. Like Hera, she is worshipped only in Achaea, and is even more vulnerable if Achaean culture were to fail.

  Ares, an Achaean god of war, personifies the belligerent warrior culture of Achaea. Recently, his sect has joined forces with that of Aphrodite, the goddess of love; a deliberate alignment to match the cult of Ishtar, the Trojan/Hittite goddess of love and war. Ares is the particular rival of Athena, who inhibits his worship in Attica.

  Aphrodite, the Achaean goddess of love, promotes an alternative view of femininity to the Hera cult, idealising beauty, love and marriage in an outwardly submissive context, compared to Hera’s traditions of strong womanhood. The cult of Aphrodite is in the process of breaking from the failing cult of the smith, Hephaestus, and partnering with that of Ares, leading to a spate of new ‘legends’ that depict Hephaestus as being a crippled lecher. Aphrodite’s cult follows that of her new ally Ares in seeking alignment with Ishtar (in the hope that they will usurp the eastern deity in due course).

  Hephaestus is the smith-god, harking back to an earlier time when smiths were community leaders venerated for their ‘magical’ skill in metal-work. But society has changed, the smith is now just an artisan, and their cult is in decline. Tales now portray this failing deity as crippled and cuckolded; the first step in a process designed to erase him from human worship.

  Apollo is revered already by the Trojans as their patron god Apaliunas, and his cult is aggressively expanding into Achaea, aligning him with the Achaean hunter goddess Artemis to capture the next generation. He is worshipped by the Trojans as a source of light, which brings him in conflict with Helios, the Achaean god of the sun, whose cult is collapsing in the face of his more sophisticated rival.

  Artemis, the Huntress, is the traditional goddess of young Achaean maidens, and for centuries has dovetailed with Hera’s cult, though in a subservient role. However, threatened by Hera’s dominance, the cult has aligned with that of the new shooting star, Apollo/Apaliunas. The next generation, they believe, belongs to them.

  Leto, like Gaia, Themis, Eileithya and Hestia, is now a minor goddess. Her cult is seeking to regain their earlier influence by putting her forward as ‘mother’ to Apollo and Artemis, hoping to be instated as Zeus’s consort if or when the Skyfather’s cult renounces that of Hera.

  Hermes is a nature deity from the Achaean mountain region, Arcadia, whose cult has been subordinated by that of Zeus, and is tolerated by the Skyfather’s priests as it gives them access to the Achaean heartland. With Hermes personified as Zeus’s herald, his cult exemplifies masculine cunning, in the grey area where skill morphs into trickery, and functions as a ‘political’ wing of the Zeus cult.

  Demeter is an Achaean goddess of fertility and harvests, the latest to find her cult overwhelmed by that of Hera. To survive, the cult of Demeter has built an alliance with Hades, god of the Underworld, personified by the figure of her ‘daughter’ Persephone, a subordinate deity ‘married’ during winter to Hades. As an Achaean alliance, it is threatened by eastern expansion, but believes the universality of death will enable it to survive any circumstance.

  Dionysus is god of wine and the intoxicating power of nature. His cult has – like that of Apollo – pushed westwards into Achaea from the east. While appearing to align with Apollo and Zeus, the core rites are highly secretive, and the cult’s true allegiances remain unknown.

  The Unaligned Achaean Deities

  Prometheus is a Titan who aligned himself with the Olympian gods in their battle against his fellow Titans, but was punished for stealing fire, which – out of pity for their miserable state – he gave to mortals against the wishes of the gods. For this, he was chained to a rock, where, every day, an eagle rips out his liver; the liver then grows back so that he can be tormented all over again. Known as a clever trickster, he also gave mankind the gift of metalwork and other skilled crafts. ‘Prometheus’ translates as ‘forethinker’.

  Poseidon claims mastery of the sea and as a result gains worshippers throughout Achaea, primarily those involved in sea-born trade and travel, a vital part of life in such a mountainous, sea-girt country. His equivalent god in the mostly-landlocked East (Aruna) is a minor deity, so any foreign invasion of Achaea will diminish Poseidon’s cult. As a result, he is in potential conflict with Zeus, but his cult believes his worship is universal and unassailable.

  Hades is the Achaean god of death and the afterlife, conceived by Achaeans either as an eternal limbo or as a reward or punishment, as appropriate. This universal concept affords the cult great durability, but dread of death is not worship of death: the cult has therefore limited influence in daily life. As a consequence, it has sought alliance with Demeter, goddess of fertile life (as personified by a ‘marriage’ to Demeter’s “daughter” Persephone), as a direct challenge to the Zeus/Hera hegemony.

  Persephone, a seasonal harvest deity, has become ‘daughter’ of Demeter and ‘wife’ of Hades, enabling followers of both sects to bridge the divide between life and death, fecundity and sterile extinction, and make their worship more universal. Persephone’s worship is growing as this duality of life and death in harmony gains appeal in Achaea.

  Helios, the ancient god of the sun, has suffered from the growing worship of Zeus, who claims dominance over all the heavens; and more recently by the emergence of Apollo/Apaliunas, the Trojan god of light. As a consequence, the cult of Helios is collapsing almost unnoticed.

  Eileithya is the Achaean goddess of childbirth, appealed to by pregnant women, and by men who fail to get their wives with child. Once a much-worshipped fertility goddess, she and other primal goddesses have seen their worship eaten up by Hera, whose worshippers now claim she governs every aspect of an adult woman’s life, from unmarried virgin through to wife/mother and aged crone.

  Eros is a primal god of procreation. Recently his worshippers have been increasingly lured away by Aphrodite, forcing the cult of Eros to subordinate itself to the rival cult to survive.

  Hercules was originally a powerful ‘theios’ – a god-touched human gifted with extraordinary powers. Such was his strength and ruthlessness that he has become a subject of worship among Achaean warriors after his death; which has seen his spirit (‘daemon’) elevated to godhead by the Zeus cult. He is now seen as a powerful figure in Achaean religion, closely aligned to Zeus – and a potential rival to both Athena and Ares.

  Hecate is a goddess of magic, a personification of the mysteries of womanhood and born of a time when women’s cults excluded men and handed down secrets and traditions only to their own gender. Hecate is therefore primarily a ‘household’ deity with few temples, but with widespread allegiance among women.

  The Moirae: The Fates, three daughters of Nyx, Goddess of Night, who spin people’s destinies from birth onwards, and supposedly even the gods cannot overturn their decisions. ‘Moira’ is the Greek word for a share or portion.

  Notable Trojan and Hittite Gods

  There are many Hittite and Trojan deities – these are the ones who impact on this tale (so far).

  Tarhum is the Trojan sky god, the most important deity in the Hittite pantheon, who is placated to gain favourable weather and therefore crops. The priests of Tarhum foresee the dominance of the Hittite Empire over the entire A
egean region through their client kingdom of Troy, and are more than willing to merge their cult with that of their Achaean equivalent Zeus, to undermine the Achaean people and extend their own dominance.

  Ishtar is a goddess of love and war, who personifies a union of warrior-man and fecund-woman that has captured the imagination of the Trojan and Hittite peoples. This powerful notion has forced the Achaean cults of Ares and Aphrodite to seek alignment: the priests of Ishtar are happy to swallow up both, and foresee a time when they, not Zeus-Tarhum, dominate the Aegean.

  Apaliunas is the patron god of the Trojans, who worship him as a source of light. In Achaea, he is now called Apollo and revered as the son of Zeus and Leto, and the brother of Artemis.

  Kamrusepa is goddess of magic, the equivalent of the Achaean cult of Hecate: her cult however enjoys the powerful patronage of many influential women in the eastern kingdoms, especially Queen Hekuba of Troy, and is therefore a powerful cult among women.

  Lelwani is the Hittite and Trojan goddess of death, believed by her followers to preside over the Underworld in much the same way that Hades rules over Erebus. Her priests also attribute her with the power not only to induce sickness but the ability to heal it.

  Hanwasuit: The ‘throne-goddess’ of the Hittites.

  The Olympus Series

  Athena’s Champion

  Oralce’s War

  Sacred Bride

  Find out more

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Canelo

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  Third Floor, 20 Mortimer Street

  London W1T 3JW

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © David Hair and Cath Mayo, 2019

  The moral right of David Hair and Cath Mayo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.