Authors Electric

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

16th Century tapestry of the Fates  In Greek Myth, the Fates were the three goddesses who decided, well, our fate. They were imagined as spinners and weavers, since, in the past, the making of cloth from wool or flax, was a job that occupied most women for most of their days. Clotho spun the thread of our lives, on a spindle. Her name means 'the Spinner.' What she spun the thread from, I'm not sure. Dreams? Time? She was especially associated with the present. That's her, in red, on the right, holding her spindle. Lachesis, in the centre, measured the length of each individual life. Her name has been translated as 'the Allotter' and she concerned herself mostly with the future. When Lachesis had decided on the length of a life, it was Atropos who ended it, snipping through its thread with her shears. She's on the left, an older woman in sober black. Her name meant 'the Unturning' or 'the Inflexible' and her special concern was the past. I sup...