notes on Greek mythology in the Thirstverse

[phallicsymbull]

• Nio's canon is a mythic-fantasy mystery take on mostly Greek mythology (with a lot of Egyptian influence and some other stuff as well).
• As such, he will react to people claiming to be or know Greek (and some other) gods and heroes.
• The known myths that have survived to the present day are not literal truths in his world, but rather unreliable accounts of memories, rumors, and visions.
• In general, the gods people remember in this world were created in two ways:
• From the psychic aftershocks of ancient magical utopias falling into ruin
• From the collective unconscious and the subconscious wishes of entire societies of human beings
• They also usually have conflicting memories and views of reality, all of which are true in one fashion or another.
• The Greek gods were mostly born from the aftershocks of the fall of Atlantis, which was a fantasy version of Minoan Crete based on a combination of Egyptian mythology and ancient Greek mystery religion. They also were influenced by a combination of the yearnings of their people, the sacred rules of nature, and visitations from nearby nations and their gods.

THE GODS OF OLYMPUS
Zeus is not actually real--he is the collective memory of a primeval sky-father god of Atlantis, called Deos. His various children generally have real memories of him regardless, and convincing both other gods and mortal worshippers of the veracity of these memories became a major aim for them. Despite not ever existing in this reality, Zeus remained an important political tool. To call yourself the child of Zeus--and be recognized as such--was a way for the actual gods to consolidate power. Mortals sometimes tried it too, to varying results.

Hera pretty much exists to be the wife of Zeus, but her true identity is Pasiphae, the last Queen of Atlantis, who managed to survive its fall by summoning Deos's divine power into her own body. Unfortunately, the process (along with the trauma and her grief at losing Ariadne, her best friend and lover) exacerbated her existing tendencies towards bipolar disorder and unhealthy thought patterns in general. She is initially friendly with the other gods but becomes more paranoid and jealous from stress, grief, and loneliness as time goes on. It doesn't help that Athene, who sees her as a threat to her power, sometimes manipulates and gaslights her. Dionysos, in particular, never met her directly but was tormented by her from afar. He does not know she is Pasiphae--at least not consciously. He may have some suspicions deep down.

Demeter is a direct echo of the Atlantean mother-queen goddess Damatei, and as such she has very fragmented memories of her own past. She doesn't care so long as she has her daughter. Dionysos tended to avoid her out of guilt, grief, and (later) self-preservation--see below on Persephone.

Poseidon is a minor echo of the primeval Atlantean god of the sea; this association leaves him with a connection to Demeter that neither of them ever satisfactorily explains. He was later empowered by the worship of coastal and seafaring peoples, as well as horse-worshiping cults related to them. Due to his association with Aidon, Dionysos largely avoided him.

Hades, like Zeus, was mostly never a real god in this setting, but rather a collective memory of one of the two opposing primeval Atlantean gods--in his case, Aidon, the god of wealth, the underworld, and the sea. However, his surviving stories also often reflect actions taken by Dionysos in his guise as an underworld god--which themselves were influenced by the stories of Atlantis. The most notable example is below.

Persephone is an echo of the Atlantean star goddess, Asasara, in her underworld aspect, but she remembers herself as a daughter of Demeter and Zeus. She was a cute happy flower goddess until Dionysos, under the influence of madness sent by Hera, kidnapped and tortured her in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of Ariadne, who had been the high priestess of the aforementioned Atlantean star goddess. Afterwards, he gave her dominion over the underworld (essentially sacrificing, or at least attenuating the power of, his own underworld aspect to do so) by way of apology. Then, rather than deal with the fallout, he just avoided her.

Hephaistos was born from Hera's negative feelings in general about the fall of Atlantis and her own past. He does his best despite these inauspicious beginnings. Nio as Dionysos was not very familiar with him because of the connection with Hera, but they did generally get along on a superficial level.

Athene was originally a visiting manifestation of a foreign love-and-war goddess from the same cluster as Ishtar-Inanna who fell so deeply and purely in love with early Greek civilization that she sacrificed her love aspect to become its virginal patron. With Zeus nonexistant, she was the single most politically active, powerful, and beloved deity in the Classical pantheon--its de facto leader in many ways, a position she did her ruthless political best to maintain (see above on Hera). She did not get along with Dionysos for various reasons--in part because she had been one of the Kore's friends before she became Persephone, and in part because she was always a goddess of civilization and he a god of wildness. So he tended to avoid her.

Although this was not common knowledge, Aphrodite was born from proto-Athene's discarded aspect of love and sex. She did get along with Dionysos for the most part, although he shied away from getting too close to her because her association with stars reminded him of Asasara and Ariadne. This was exacerbated after he let slip a secret name of his--Adoni, Ariadne's pet name for him, meaning my lord--and Aphrodite proceeded to impulsively start calling her latest boytoy by that name. It then became associated with him in myth, for which Nio has not entirely forgiven her.

Ares, like Hephaistos, was born of Hera: he was her bloodthirsty aspect from whom she severed herself in an attempt to reform and cope. It didn't work--mostly because Athene had manipulated her into doing it to reduce her own power. Nobody liked him except Aphrodite.

Hestia was born entirely from the yearning of the Greek people for a deity with some chill. She became a quiet, sensible protector of the home.

When Nio in his original guise as the Bull of Heaven, Asterion, finally refused to be sacrificed in the last cycle of Atlantis, the panicked people instead sacrificed the pair of fraternal twins who had been appointed the Prince and Princess of the festival: two teenage siblings who always represented the hopes and dreams of the people for the future. They were reincarnated as children of Zeus after the fall, and in this form they came to embody the powerful energy of adolescence and everything it represented to the ancient Greeks.

Artemis was the patron of teenage and preteen girls. She resented how horrible Greek society was to them, but being on some level by her very nature a troubled and angry adolescent girl herself, she rarely expressed this maturely. Dionysos was initially a casual friend of hers until he flew off the handle and kidnapped and tortured her best friend the Kore, for which she never forgave him.

Few cultures have ever obsessed over teenage boys like Classical Greece, so by far the most active and powerful god, second in importance only to Athene herself, was Apollo. His initial adventures at the dawn of Greek civilization gave rise to an enormous number of myths and legends. He didn't actually do a whole lot of productive work for society--just slew monsters, chased paramours, and played the lyre. Athene only tolerated him because everyone else loved him. He healed Dionysos's first bout of madness upon discovering him hiding in the caves of Delphi, and the two were thereafter good friends for the most part.

And finally, no one knows where Hermes came from. In fact he was born of the secret sacred law that every pantheon must have a trickster figure. He gets along with everybody and as a result became a kind of mediator for the whole pantheon.

OTHER GODS
♦ A lot of the more minor gods, heroes, and monsters never actually existed, being instead aspects of more major gods under local names--e.g. Asterion the Minotaur being an early form of Dionysos, Britomartis being a Cretan epithet for Artemis, and something like half of Apollo's boyfriends being echoes of the god himself.
♦ A good chunk of the stories of Dionysos dishing out horrors upon those who refused to worship him are garbled memories of his own suffering. Which isn't to say he didn't dish out horrors upon those who refused to worship him--he just didn't literally have anybody torn to pieces. Probably.
♦ More later, I'm done for now.