Morning Light XXV

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Danger from Above

The larger wild birds of prey everywhere take their toll of hares. In Britain, Brown hares are at risk from the likes of hen harriers, buzzards, and goshawks, while Mountain hares also have golden eagles to contend with. In other countries there are many species of birds of prey, including large owls such as the Great Grey and the Snowy owl in northern regions, and the eagles and buzzards of Africa, India, and the Americas.

– Jill Mason
The Hare
p. 90

Ganymede and Zeus

Following is the first of three excepts from Vittorio Lingiardi’s book Men in Love: Male Homosexualities from Ganymede to Batman.

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Zeus took only one male lover: Ganymede. As soon as Zeus saw him, the god of thunder fell in love, and assuming the shape of an eagle, he flew down from heaven to Mount Ida and took the boy, the beautiful son of King Tros, to Olympus, where he was welcomed among the gods. There he was granted the position of cupbearer, replacing Hebe and making Hera jealous.



Then, Zeus wished to give his beloved an ever greater gift – to spare him the sadness of growing old and dying – so he turned Ganymede into the constellation Aquarius, suspending him forever among the stars. Ganymede, in whose name shines joy (ganusthai) and intelligence (medea), became in this way the heavenly symbol of homosexual eros, and his image has come to be painted by artists and sung by pets since ancient times. . . .

According to Theognis of Megara, the myth of Ganymede acquainted men with the joys of loving a young man. Pinder, in the first Olympic Ode, compares the love of Zeus for Ganymede to another divine homosexual love, that of Poseidon for Pelops, son of Tantalas who was loved and abducted by the god who then became his master and erastes. Both these myths illustrate the initiatory model found in ancient warrior societies, where the abduction of an initiate symbolizes his death, to be followed by a period of time in the andreion (house of men) for homosexual instruction, after which the young man emerges from the andreion, symbolically resurrected. A similar fate awaited Pelop’s son, Chrysippus, who was abducted by the legendary king of Thebes, Laius, Jocasta’s husband and Oedipus’s father, considered the founder of the Theban homosexual warrior tradition.

As celebrated by Callimachus, Alceus, & Melagrus, Zeus’s love for Ganymede was the ancient myth told to account for the origin of homosexuality, and, as such, since that time, has been alternatively honored and reviled. Giambattista Vico did the latter, characterizing Zeus as burning “with iniquitous love for Ganymede,” as did Friedrich Engels who described the ancient Greeks as a people who “sank into the perversion of boy-love, degrading themselves and their gods by the myth of Ganymede.


However, poets have kept alive the shining memory of Ganymede throughout the ages. Hölderlin depicted the sleeping “son of the mountain” in a natural setting, and Verlaine saw him in a country boy who kept the poet company and distracted him from his boredom. Saba sang of the dream of a teenage shepherd, camouflaging the wisdom of his infantile stupor in an aulic literary style. . . .

Zeus and Ganymede as a couple are an image of the coniunctio oppositorum, opposite psychic polarities brought together into a state of balanced tension. In this couple, e became acquainted with the erotic, though not necessarily sexual, valence of the puer-et-senex constellation that so frequently runs through relationships, such as Heracles who is taken to heaven and promoted to the stats of a god following his death or Hyacinth, the extremely handsome mortal youth whom Apollo, protector of boys, fell in love with and made divine, a story likewise used to explain the origins of love between men. Mythic parallels appear in other cultural contexts, among the ancient Germanic people, as well as the people of Melanesia, New Guinea, and medieval Japan. These common motifs of heavenly abduction, mystical flight, and eagles as spirit-animals regularly appear in the dreams, stories, and the legends of shamanic initiation throughout the world.


Image 1: Rick Herold.
Images 2: Collections of the Capitoline Museum; seized by the French, 1798.
Image 3: Anthony Gayton.
Image 4: Dnik.
Image 5: Durand.
Image 6: Bertel Thorvaldsen.
Image 7: Collections of the Capitoline Museum; seized by the French, 1798.
Image 8: Pierre et Gilles.

Autumnal Equinox

September: Time of the darkening equinox, the balance between sun and shadow. Full of the magic of change – not always a comfortable magic. Its twilight empties the heart of its mortal dream. Yet, September is not a bleak month, but a time of transformation. There is no dream as fair as the host rushing “twixt night and day,” a symbol of the continuance of life in the Otherworld. This is the Celtic spiral of life – death and rebirth. This balance . . . it is the mystery of the time of the Autumnal Equinox.

- Cliff Séruntine

Image: “Wolds Hare” by Carry Akroyd.

Glooskap

The ancient myths in which animals were gods were gradually transformed until nothing was left but an anecdote or superstition which had lost much of its meaning, and the stages of this transformation seem to coincide with the development of society. Nomadic peoples, hunting or herding in small groups, have preserved the most ancient forms of mysticism. As people settled down to farming and the group became larger, its life more complex, stories became complex too and began to lose their religious meaning.

This progression can be seen most clearly in the history of the myth of The Great Hare: god to hero or terrestrial giant, hero to unusual specimen of animal or man, unusual specimen to clever fellow who plays tricks on other animals or men.

The Hare that kept men and women in a bag until he had made the world fit for them to live in, remained their benefactor. [Wrote H. R. Schoolcraft in History of the Indian Tribes (1853)] “He taught men how to make aqakwuts (axes), lances and arrow-points, and all implements of bone and stone, and also how to make snares, and traps, and nets, to take animals, and birds, and fishes. . . . He killed the ancient monsters whose bones we now see under the earth.”

. . . Among the North Eastern Algonquins the name for the Great Hare was Glooskap.

– George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
pp. 178-179

Opening image: “The Great Hare” by Nicola Slattery.

Tan Lines XIV

Image: Subject and photographer unknow

Disputed

The subject of hares is a much disputed one. . . . Some early naturalists termed the hare family Dasypoda which in Greek signifies that they are hairy-footed. Until 1912 rabbits and hares were classified as rodents but subsequent study proved them to be of a different order called Lagomorphs. This not only includes hares and rabbits but also pikas. Hares and rabbits belong to the family of Leporidae and pikas to Ochotonidae. Opinion is greatly divided as to how many actual species of Lagomorphs there are. Figures vary from 14 to 25 species of pika and 40 to 53 rabbits and hares.

No doubt this discrepancy can be partially explained by the number of sub-species and whether they are counted separately; and by the fact that there seems to be an overlap in differentiating hares and rabbits. It poses the question: when is a hare not a hare? – and it seems that even the experts are uncertain on that one.

- Jill Mason
The Hare
pp. 11-12

Images: Ena Lund.