When You Think Of Persephone You Think Of The Lost Girl Who Was Tricked By The Lord Of The Underworld.

Hades ascended in his war chariot to confront her, wreathed in shadows and flame, pulled by dark horses.  The dryads of the poplar and willow trees fled before him, and the grasses shriveled to ash under obsidian hooves. “BRIGHT LADY. I OFFER A THRONE. A KINGDOM. A CROWN. DESCEND WITH ME. RULE OVER THE HALLS OF THE DEAD” His voice echoed with centuries of stone, his eyes bright with black flames.   Persephone eyed the tall and terrible Lord thoughtfully. “You’re scorching my violets.”

The Illustrated Hades and Persephone, Megan C. Lloyd (via thirdchildart)

The excavation of the ancient city of Ur led by archeologist C. Leonard Woolley in Tell al-Muqayyar, Iraq, 1934 [859x611]

you were my world and now i can’t imagine you in it

funny how memories can become so distant

you were once the love of my life

now you’re just someone i knew once upon a time

every now and then i see you in my dreams

it doesn’t hurt; i don’t cry or wish you were here

i hope you’re happy. i hope you’ve found someone who makes all your problems disappear

sometimes love doesn’t last

sometimes our first isn’t our last

sometimes there’s better to come

and one day we’ll once again believe in love

— i’m drunk and this is what i want u to know

One of my favorite stories about Artemis is that after she required Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, she stole her away at the last moment and left a white deer in her place. After that, people disagree on what happened, but I like the story where Artemis transforms her into Hecate, because can you imagine them in the modern era?

Artemis, protector of young women and goddess of the hunt turned vigilante, hunting down the ones who attack girls in dark alleys, the ones with beer-hard hands and no sense of decency even if they’d been sober anyway.

But when Artemis finds the girls, she takes them to Hecate–Hecate, who was mortal once, led like a lamb to an altar by a man who was supposed to protect her. And sure, Artemis is the one who makes them pay, who delights in their screams and dances in the moonlight once she knows those men will be scared of the dark forever, spend their entire lives looking over their shoulders fearing her.

But Hecate… Hecate is good with herbs and potions and she understands the nightmares, the heart-pounding, sweaty hands panic that wakes them up screaming in the middle of the night, and she makes them herbal draughts to help them sleep, because unlike Artemis, Hecate understands. She isn’t vengeful, an angry older sister out for blood like Artemis. She’s the best friend, the mother, and the sister rolled all into one.

So Artemis avenges them and Hecate cares for them and the moon-goddess Selene shines her absolute brightest for them, fills every shadow with bright silver so they don’t need to be afraid of the dark anymore, and the three goddesses call these their Lost Girls, and at first Apollo was sort of skeptical but there’s no stopping Artemis when she sets her mind on something, and before Apollo quite realizes it, he’s running beside his sister, chasing a boy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and he’s never felt more right.

“No one has ever made you feel this way, how I am loving you now: remember, remember because nobody else remembers. I remember, I do. Imagine for example, how we tread the pavements with your leather shoes, when we cross the bridge when you suddenly hum a song you have heard from nearby folks. It is quite so lovely how you do it. You do it in your own way, that I am moonstruck, as if the moonbeam is coming from your voice, that spontaneous illumination with your movements, your hands that are vital to your nails– transparent, colorless, like spring water in the brooks. If it is with you, these memories, arise, gently opening my heart to take you in– and you will eat me whole, because I feel so small, so small that I am melting, melting and caramelized. We are here, we are here, and nothing has escaped between us, as if the earth and sky meets halfway to give us space: the momentary pause of this liquid ether we hold in our hands, the palpitation in your chest, that is, how I know, time stand still.”

— Chuck Akot, from The Color of Charcoal and Other Essays, IF THE EARTH AND SKY MEETS HALFWAY 

Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (via quotespile)

Aubrey Plaza Explores ASMR with W Magazine

Bringing sexy back - Vikki Dougan walking down the street, 1950.