“Sometimes she would close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely, though his face remained a shifting shadow”
Io, greatest Youth (kouros), welcome, son of Kronos, all-powerful Brightness, here now present, leading the gods (daimones), come for the New Year to Dikte, and rejoice in this song.
“The hymn was inscribed at a late date, but its content and style show that it goes back to the Classical period or earlier. It tells how, with the coming of Rhea’s divine child, Justice and Peace attend the earth, and it urges the Kouros to “leap into” the herds, fields, and cities. Diktaian Zeus appears to be primarily a god of vegetative and procreative energies who is “born anew” every year.”
“Another famous cult site of Zeus was the cave below the summit of Mt. Ida in central Krete, which served as a sanctuary for over a thousand years. […] The cult here, as at Dikte, was concerned with the youthful Zeus and his band of protective warriors, the Kouretes, who clashed their shields to conceal the infant’s cries from his hostile father. Idaian Zeus was a mysterious god into whose rites young men were initiated on the model of the Kouretes, according to a fragment of Euripides’ Cretans.”
“There is a story that the philosopher Pythagoras was initiated into this cult: after strenuous preparations, he descended into the cave for twenty-seven days and viewed the “tomb of Zeus”. This concept of a tomb for Zeus would have seemed reasonable to Egyptians or Syrians, who were familiar with dying gods, but it was alien to other Greeks, who never questioned that the gods were immortal. The poet Callimachus, commenting on the tomb in his Hymn to Zeus (1.8-9), concluded: “Kretans always lie.”
Favorite thing about renaissance faires is that they have fuck all to to with the renaissance. This thang is not about historical anything this is about dressing up like a fairy and watching a joust
