chironomy:Mixing Vessel with Hades and Persephone Watching a Fury Bind Theseus and Perithoös, S
chironomy:Mixing Vessel with Hades and Persephone Watching a Fury Bind Theseus and Perithoös, South Italian, made in Apulia, 365–350 BC, terracotta. Red-figure volute krater attributed to the Suckling-Salting Group. Museo Archeologico Nazionale “G. Jatta,” Ruvo, 1094. I have a photo I took of this vase yesterday but I decided to replace it with the image from the Getty’s website. I wanted to make a post about why this vase and this image is so important to me.I’ve alluded to this before, but I’m a survivor of intimate partner rape and an anti-sexual-violence activist. I’m also a devotee of Hades (and, increasingly, Persephone). These two come up as archetypes or metaphors in a lot of rape recovery literature, and it’s always as a negative — he’s literally the creep hiding in the bushes, or the exciting “bad boy” partner who turns into an abusive monster as soon as everyone else isn’t looking, or the controlling asshole who uses every underhanded weapon at his disposal to keep her in line. (Needless to say, when I started having Hades experiences, I was very afraid of him and it took me a long time to trust him.) She’s often portrayed as an innocent, oppressed, tricked victim, or as the PTSD sufferer who keeps getting yanked back into the Bad Place, or as the poor deluded woman who keeps going back to the bad man because she doesn’t think she deserves better. Her journey gets reduced to a parable about the will to survive.So, here’s this vase. Persephone is standing, holding the torches, and, I feel it’s implied, giving the orders. Hades is sitting faithfully by her side. These two idiots, a pair of actual would-be rapists who broke into the Underworld to kidnap her, are getting what’s rightfully coming to them. She’s the tallest figure in the scene, the person at the center of it all, the one controlling the action.To me, it seems so clear that this is her world, and she wants to be there.Plus, look at that fucking Fury. That’s so kickass.This vase perfectly illustrates an epithet applied to Persephone: Praxidikê, “Exacter of Justice”. -- source link
#persephone#hades#greek mythology#cw: rape#tw: rape