Running Hare II

“Running Hare” by Harriet Mead.

The Society of Wildlife Artists notes:

Animal and birds inspire Harriet’s work, an interest developed from an early age due to the influence of her late father, Chris Mead, a well known author and broadcaster. His passion for birds gave Harriet an appreciation of the natural beauty of animals and birds.

Most of Harriet’s sculptures use welded steel, a material of versatile strength that enables her to capture movement in the subject, and balance pieces in a way nearly impossible using a more traditional material. Harriet captures the essence of the animal without sentimentality, and uses the steel in a sympathetic way to outline strength and muscle. She seeks to capture something of the quiet presence of the animal and not necessarily the drama.

Tan Lines XVI

Running Hare

Image: “Running Hare” by Kary Fisher (limited edition screen print, 38 x 28 cm).

Antinoüs

Here’s a second excerpt from Vittorio Lingiardi’s excellent book Men in Love: Male Homosexualities from Ganymede to Batman.

For the first excerpt from Lingiardi’s book, click here.

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The Zeus-Ganymede relationship served as a model for many famous love stories in the ancient world, such as the love between the emperor Hadrian and his Greek eromenos Antinoos [or Antinous]. These two met in Bithynia, the younger man’s native country, around 123 B.C. . . . Hadrian abducted the boy and was devoted to him for the rest of his life. Inseparable companions, they always traveled together, and together took part in the Eleusinian mysteries.

Identifying himself with the king of Olympus, the emperor decided to restore all temples and statues dedicated to Zeus, including the Olympieion of Athens, with its huge statue of the god in gold and ivory sculpted by Phidias. In their turn, as a sign of gratitude, the Athenians dedicated a statue in the Parthenon to Hadrian. Throughout Greece, the Roman emperor came to be worshipped as a god in his own right, and thus, the new Greco-Roman religion acquired its own trinity, made up of Zeus, Jupiter, and Hadrian.

Consequently, the process of Antinoo’s divinization began while the young man was still alive and reached its apotheosis after the younger man’s mysterious death by drowning in the Nile.

Antinoos, the last divinity of the ancient Mediterranean world, was revered in ways similar to the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Hermes, and Eros. Innumerable statues, coins, temples, and even a city, Antinoopolis, would bear for all time the name of melancholy Emperor Hadrian’s lost love. Before a bust of Antinoos on exhibit in the British Museum, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson “bent forward a little and said in a deep slow voice: ‘Ah – this is the inscrutable Bithynian.’ There was a pause and then he added, gazing into the eyes of the bust: ‘If we knew what he knew, we should understand the ancient world’” (C. Tennyson 1949, p. 395).

SpiralSea17's portrait of Antinous (2006).

Like Ganymede, Antinoos for centuries stood as a symbol of same-sex love, and also as a platonic ideal of spiritual love. Like Ganymede, Antinoos was transformed into a star: wanting his lover to be remembered for all eternity, Hadrian named a constellation after him. In the Almagest, Ptolemy’s first great compendium of Greek astronomy, the stars of Antinoos are mentioned as part of the Aqila (Eagle) group; in various ancient maps of the heavens.

Andrew Prior’s portrait of Antinous (2008).

Recommended Reading:
Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.

Leaping Hare

Image: “Leaping Hare” (detail), Pontifical, Italy, c.1435-1440 (MS.28 f.135v).

Morning Light XXVI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Eastwards from the Steppes of Asia

The Brown hare is thought to have moved eastwards from the steppes of Asia, as humans cleared the forests for farming during the Neolithic period. One theory put forward is that they arrived in Britain when it was still joined to Europe by a land bridge, before sea levels rose. An opposing story is that they were introduced to Britain by the Romans in the 1st century AD. A third theory put forward makes both the other two plausible: that they died out during the last Ice Age and were re-introduced by the Romans.

– Jill Mason
The Hare
p. 38

Tan Lines XV

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

A Roaming Life

The hunted hare that runs in circles is usually a doe. If the hounds lose her scent she goes back to the place from which they started her. The hare that runs straight for long distances is usually a buck. He leads a roaming life and makes a new form frequently. Like the doe, he is more often alone than in company. Both are promiscuous. The buck serves as many does as he can find and the doe will accept several bucks one after another. But after mating they do not stay together.

- George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
p. 27

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.