Is Ares the most misunderstood figure in the school of Greek mythological thought?
I've been drawn to Ares recently while reading and studying these things, and I've come to understand that as much as he was the rabid dog of petty violence and sadistic brutality against men for the sake of his own amusement, he was just as much a sincerely passionate and empowering lover of women who embodied very favorable and romantic ideals of masculinity and mans role in relation to the women in life. He seemed to me to be the defender of women to express themselves in any way that was true to their nature, even if this meant their total disobedience of men and the ordered hierarchy of civilization. He empowered the nature of women from the vain, fleeting playfulness of Aphrodite to the war blooded barbarism of his Amazonian daughters.
He was always viewed within Greek writings as the enemy of man because of his opposition to the patriarchal hierarchy of the Olympian Order, but from an outside perspective we can start to see his complexities. He's a God representing masculinity as a powerful ally and liberator of femininity rather than it's conqueror and subjugator, the opposite of the likes of Zeus and Poseidon
my diary tbqh
Where did you copy this from, you fiend?
>>7808214
You're a fire hearted masculine sex God and an empowerer of women?
>>7808209
>and mans role in relation to the women in his* life
I forgot a word
>>7808216
What do you mean?
>>7808231
yes
For example, one of the definitive myths we see Ares as the central figure in the myth of the Areopagos, a landmark in Attica which is said to be the site in the mythic past in which Ares stood as the first of the Olympians to be put on trial for the murder of one of Olympian blood when he killed the son of Poseidon Halirrhothios for the rape of his daughter Alkippe, earning his exile from the Olympian Order. The site thereafter was where homicide trials were held in Attica.
It was this exile that threw Ares in such a state of rage against the Olympian Order that once he came upon the earth, he ushered in the Bronze Age of man, leading them to savagery and bitter warfare that laid waste to any attempts at uplifting civilization into a long lasting higher ordered form. He ravaged across the lands moving out of central Greece into Thrace and Anatolia, consecrating his sacred groves as bastions of the wild woods of the untamed world that stood in defiance of the encroaching Olympian civilizations, bringing forth primordial dragons to guard them, which would much later become the objects of many heroes great tasks they were set to overcome. He wandered the outer edges of the world of the Olympian civilizations, leading barbarian hordes in tribal warfare against one another, exalting the Amazonian nation as the primary seat of his worship, the Amazon Queens being his loyal and loving Demigod daughters, their followers being a war blooded warrior cult dedicated to his nature.
Ares was the barbarian God who stood opposed to the advancement of civilization into the more primal and ancient world defined by a rural, nomadic existence. While we're often shown depictions of Ares as an abuser and a coward, he was just as much a preserver of the natural world, it's savagery all within, and a liberator of women made to bow to the patriarchal rule of the Olympians, even at the expense of unraveling the hierarchy that kept civilizations from collapse.
So, a crypto-/pol/ "woman's suffrage was a mistake" thread?
>>7808536
How did you come to that conclusion, honestly? I just thought this new understanding of Ares I acquired was interesting
>>7808592
I honestly never thought of Ares this way. He always seemed to be a whiny bitch and the embodiment of some of the worst parts of our civilization. From petty strife, willfulness, bloodlust to plain old lust, I always thought he was rightly held in lower esteem.
I'll have to think about your perspective, though. I may not change my judgment about him at all, but I had never considered what the relationship between him and Aphrodite might be saying about the relationship between their two passions.
>>7808536
we keep giving "rights" to more and more people and meanwhile the standard of living falls off a fucking cliff, might be related?
>>7808209
Ares is not the most misunderstood at all, but you are on to something.
Considering what you say, about Ares being for the woman, gives more meaning to the role he plays in the birthing of Athena. It was the patriarchal Zeus who attempted to contain the feminine within his own mind, and it was Ares who swung the axe which struck Zeus in the brainpan, releasing his sister from containment.
In this way Ares prefigures Athena, although Athena as we know her most likely evolved from the pre-existing Indo-European/African goddess Matron which held the chief position of pagan pantheon prior to civilization's shift away from the chthonic mother diety system to the patriarchal system brought about by Zeus. Therefore, the story of Athena's birth from the mind of Zeus himself was an attempt by the religious leaders to subordinate the pre-existing matron diety, via the subsummation of her cult into that of the Olympian hierarchy.
>>7808634
It was his relationship as the consort of Aphrodite that started me down this path. The Olympians and their complex natures are often defined by the nature of the other Gods they interact with, assimilating and reflected their natures within one another. Through Aphrodite, Ares becomes as much a lover as he is an aggressor. From his very birth, Ares comes into the world as the unification of the natures of Zeus and Hera, taking on the masculine power and virility of his father, and the natural inclination towards acting as the hysterical avenger of women from his mother.
The complexities of his nature though do include his pettiness and bloodlust, as he was most certainly a brutalizer of men, and he did tend to flee from his own suffering into the comforting embrace of the women he loved. Aphrodite was much older as a Goddess than Ares, part of the Matriarchal trinity of the first generation of the Olympians comprised by her, Hera and Demeter. Ares was a God of the younger second generation, so the relationship between him and Aphrodite was that of young man who sought to please his lover who fulfilled an almost maternal role for him emotionally. Ares often was guided and directed by the whims of Aphrodite, such as her sending him to fight along side her son Aeneas in the Trojan War
>>7808639
I wouldn't claim that he's a proud noble savage in the way that you're thinking. He was rightfully villainized at times as he was a significant obstruction in the stability of civilization and the father of monstrous dragons throughout the world. I'd instead claim that he was more of a Conan the Barbarian type of figure, standing as the bastion of a more ancient world he believed to be more natural and true than the Olympian world, if more savage and primitive all the same.
>>7808724
Yes, that's a very interesting expansion upon the relationship between Ares and Athena. It's interesting that Athena as the daughter of Zeus comes to be the most fervent and loyal supporter of his patriarchal Olympian order, while his son comes to be one of it's most vicious enemies and aligned with the liberation of femininity from patriarchal domination. Ares is the savage adversary of man, while Athena is the greatest supporter and ally of man and his endeavors to further the advancement of the patriarchal Olympian order.
I've also heard this conception of the wisdom goddess acting as the council of Zeus originating from Matron, with myths being formed of Zeus consuming her whole, and her transfigured nature emerging as Athena
>>7808724
Just out of curiosity, who would you consider to be the most misunderstood of the Olympians?
How do you feel about the theory of Ares being known by the name Sabazios, the nomadic horse rider God wielding his spear of power that was worshiped throughout Anatolia and Thrace? Later writings align Sabazios with the Phrygian conception of Zeus, and later still with their conception of Dionysus, but I believe it's possible that originally this figure was Ares, who as a God did not maintain long lasting writings or seats of worship.
It's the description of Sabazios's role in leading the horsebacked Amazons against the Phrygian followers of Cybele, an ancient Matriarchal goddess that is for all intents and purposes the same figure as the Titan Rhea, that makes me believe that Sabazio was in fact Ares. Essentially, the constant barbarian raids of Ares throughout Anatolia could be understood as part of the reason there was no long lasting impression of an independent Phrygian culture before being subsumed by Olympian Greece.
>>7808755
Building off of the relationship and unification of natures between them, Ares able to express passionate love through Aphrodite, and Aphrodite having an outlet through which she can express her wrath upon others through Ares, we see greater complexities within their individual characteristics revealed even further in each of their relationships with Adonis as a figure introduced into their mythology. We see in Ares as the principle rival to Adonis, perhaps a certain kind of romantic idealization of oneself that Ares developed over the course of his love affair with Aphrodite within the nature of Adonis. Like Ares, Adonis is a God primarily worshiped by women, with the warrior cults of the Amazons gathered around in worship of the rather vainglorious idol of Ares, depicting him naked and posing powerfully reflecting Adonis's own cult gathering of young women encircling him admiration of his every expression.
This is where I believe the nature of Ares is expanded to reveal the element of tragedy, in his compulsion towards bitter savagery over petty matters that keeps his world and the people within it entrenched in a primitive existence, a bitterness that inevitably divides him from the passionate love between himself and Aphrodite. Adonis being born out of the transfigured form of his mother as a Myrrh tree weaves important symbolic imagery into this notion, as the myrrh tree yielded the preparation of an ointment used in the ritual purification of women, but was known to have the connotation of bitterness. Ares desires the liberation and loving adoration of the women in his life, and he recognizes that the purity of the adoration that Aphrodite and all of the women devoted to the verdurous love of Adonis have is of greater purity than the love Aphrodite has for him. Unable to reconcile his pride with this, he directs his wrath upon Adonis in the form of a wild boar taking bitter contrast to the beauty it was sent to destroy, an expression of the way Ares was made to feel in his comparison.
Adonis expands the individual nature of Aphrodite reveals a similar previous unrealized element of tragedy within her mythology in the same fashion. Adonis, being born out of an abuse of her authority over the fulfillment of finding love in one another, we see a deepening and maturation of the understanding of love one would cultivate from Aphrodite as a figure. We see another perspective of Adonis acting as a romantic idealization of Ares in Aphrodite finding within Adonis the idol of the young lover acting almost as a surrogate son, a wellspring of youth and beauty to replenish her own that she first sought in her affair with Ares. Through his death at the tusks of a boar, Aphrodite is renewed with a more complex understanding of youthful love and the brevity in which it is with the individuals who are chosen to find it's fruition between one another have it with them.
One last bump
This is a neat thread, though I wish there were some sources on some of these claims. I can't really find anything that supports the 'Ares caused the Bronze Age' or that he had any real relation to the natural world. Also everything I see says that Ares was acquitted, not exiled.
On what IS supported though-Ares actually getting mad about rape is actually REALLY interesting for a Greek god, since the prevailing theme in poetry is very pro-rape, to the point where some characters get shit on for NOT raping girls. I wonder, did Ares ever prove himself hypocrite and try to rape anyone himself?
This analysis of his interactions with Aphrodite seem dead on, too.
>>7808647
Yes this is clearly a well-thought out argument that addresses all of the nuances of the issue. Thank god we have /pol/ to enlighten us in ways like this.
>>7808647
>meanwhile the standard of living falls off a fucking cliff
Are they really though, my brother mate comrade?
>>7808836
Not him, but Eris and Eros are up there
>>7810844
Please elaborate
>>7810980
Someone has to put all this disorder here
>>7810130
Ares is given the connotation of being aligned with the natural world through the consecration of his sacred groves, with his dragons being raised to guard them from the encroachment of civilization, for example the dragon slain by Cadmus in the grove that was overtaken to lay the foundations of Thebes upon, and the grove in which the Golden Fleece was kept in Colchis. The sacred groves of Ares were bastions of an ancient untamed world that stood as defining challenges for heroes of the Olympian order to overcome in the rededication of the world to Zeus. As far as I've seen, Ares was conceptualized as exemplifying the men of the Bronze Age.
>>7810980
Eros is most commonly understood as Cupid, via Valentine's day. The image of a miniature ruebenesque cherub baby, sometimes blindfolded, wantonly shooting people with arrows comes to mind.
eros' origins are mysterious
Some hold him as the son of Aphrodite and Ares (which itself should give great insight into his nature) . Parmenides holds him as a primordial God.
Aristophanes relates the following origin of everything:
"Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light."
The ancient Greek image of Eros is of a winged adult male, the epitome of sexual power and a profound artist.
>>7811101
Good observation. It's interesting to think that the Greeks conception of love through Eros was that of an ancient chthonic daimon, among the likes of Thanatos Hypnos and Moros, who consorted with Chaos. They put love in close association with the threefold manifestation of death, as if Eros is not all that dissimilar in his nature
>>7811246
>>7811101
Julius Evola asserted in Eros The Mysteries of Love that the primordial Eros emerging as the unification of cosmic aspects of fertile plentifulness and aspects of desolation and darkness suggested something about the nature of love and it's ability to makes the men and women who engage in it either full or empty within themselves
>>7808836
I would say either Hephaestus or Dionysus.
Hephaestus because he is lame and yet still a god. He was also the original husband of Aphrodite, winning her hand in a competition between the gods. Aphrodite cheated on Hephaestus with Ares, and so Hephaestus crafted magical golden chains which would bind the two lovers to the bed mid-coitus. Then Hephaestus gathered all the other gods and brought them into his room to show them all what his wife was caught doing. As an aside, Hephaestus also attempted to rape Athena and failed to do so, his seed instead fell to the earth and thus Erichthonius the first King of Athens was born.
I say Dionysus because he was a foreign god even to the Olympians. Dionysus came to Olympus from the East, although some sources do attempt to incorporate him into the Olympian pantheon as the son of Zeus. However, the common modern conception of Dionysus as merely the god of wine and drunkenness is the real misunderstanding here. The parallels to Christ aside, Dionysus embodies so much more than just drunkenness.
To elaborate further on the nature of Ares built here, let's look at the conception of the different spiritual races as conceived by the Greeks, which can be loosely defined as the Solar race of the Olympians and the mortals under them, the Telluric or earth born race of the Titans and their mortals, and the Lunar race of chthonic Matriarchal deities and their mortals. The Solar race and it's relation to the others is best illustrated through the imagery of Uranus and Gaia, the Solar race given the connotation of a paternal uniting centrality expressed through the sun and sky giving form to the passive earth below it, it's central light illuminating the moon of the Lunar race, which is given a feminine connotation, who lacking the centrality of the Solar race resolve to passive contemplation, a dynamic which is reflected in Apollo and Artemis.
While the Solar race is defined by a calm self assured dominance in it's unity with the celestial and transcendent, the Telluric race exhibits and impulsiveness and irrationality adhering only to an instinctual immediacy of thought and action, it's civilizations taking a primitive form opposed to the higher ordered Solar civilizations. The Telluric race also exhibits a virile sexuality, a sexuality which is differentiated from the purely phallic sexuality of the Solar race, and in fact appears more easily in women. In this, we see the Titans of the Telluric race aligned with the Matriarchs of the Lunar race, the Telluric type when appearing in Olympian civilizations bringing about an usurpation of Solar dignity and liberation of the types oppressed under Solar rule, including the feminine Lunar race. Though liberated and renewed from this usurpation, the inner instability of the Telluric allows only for restless upheaval, and the Lunar race unable to return to it's previous form with the absence of the guiding principle of the Solar light to illuminate it's moon materializes as the Amazonian race to assert itself in a masculine fashion in the process of Solar usurpation or to face the instability of the Telluric race.
We see this dynamic between the Solar Olympian Zeus against the Telluric Ares and his liberation of the Lunar transfigured as the Amazons. I'll expand upon the relationship between Ares and Aphrodite next
>>7812781
The usurpation of the Solar race and the liberation of the Lunar race resulting from the Telluric upheaval leads way to the Aphroditian, an extreme form of the materialism brought forth from the Telluric taking shape as the development of luxury and opulence in civilization while maintaining an inner Lunar quality of femininity.
Unable to withstand the Matriarchal assault of the Telluric and Lunar races, the Apollonian Solar paternalism returns to a maternalism as the Dionysian race in an attempt to reassert a type of Solarity in preparation of the victories of the new Maternal principles. The original Apollonian Solarity was that of an immutable heavenly light in contrast with this new Dionysian Solarity which is of an earth bound rising and setting nature, exhibiting a cycle of birth and death of form rather than the eternal and celestial Apollonian form. The Dionysian man and the Titanic man of the Telluric race in this stage can reform as the Romantic man standing in opposition of the Olympian order in their attempt to restore the luminosity of the feminine Lunar race by materializing their own Solar luminosity. Where the Apollonian man exhibited his Solar virility in a calm, knowing alignment with the divine, the Dionysian man is lost between the purity of the divine and the material ecstasies, unable to maintain his Solar virility, ;leading endlessly to the destruction of form and return to promiscuity and Telluric instability
>>7812986
The collapse of a paternal Solar civilization sees woman assert herself as the masculine Amazon challenging and overcoming the Solar masculinity of the Olympian man in her rededication of the Lunar principle, and parallel to this within the Aphroditic race, the masculine is reduced to it's most base phallic form and men are enslaved to the sensuality of Aphroditic materialism and opulence. As the decline of the Solar principle continues, promiscuity takes hold and the compulsion towards inner Heroic transcendence is lost in the gratification of various sexual perversions.
The Amazonian and the Aphroditic as extremes of the Lunar race newly liberated on either side of the Telluric Titan usurper emerging against the centrality of the Solar race signifies the desecration and collapse of the Olympian order, unless these forces are able to be overcome by the Heroic race given the task by the divine Solar. If this Heroic race is defeated, the Solar and Lunar come to coexist in a material cycle of life, death and rebirth consecrated to the maternal principle through the Dionysian.
