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’’Cleopatra died more than 2,000 years ago, at the age of 39. Before she was a slot machine, a video game, a cigarette, a condom, a caricature, a cliché or a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor, before she was reincarnated by Shakespeare, Dryden or Shaw, she was a nonfictional Egyptian queen. She ruled for 21 years, mostly alone, which is to say that she was essentially a female king, an incongruity that elicits the kind of double take once reserved for men in drag.

From her point of view there was nothing irregular about the arrangement. Cleopatra arguably had more powerful female role models than any other woman in history. They were not so much paragons of virtue as shrewd political operators. Her antecedents were the rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who routinely poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons. Cleopatra’s great-grandmother waged one civil war against her parents, another against her children. These women were raised to rule’’ – Stacy Schiff, New York Times 

[archetype-of-the-dark-feminine]

The strings on the kithara are of 100% pure silk, which is closest in tone and response to the gut strings of the ancient Greeks. [x]

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“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Satyr and Bacchante by James Pradier, 1834.

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Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1625

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by Benjamin Victor

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maenads in ancient literature: wild unbound hair, crowned in snakes, frenzied, rip animals and people apart with bare hands maenads in neoclassical paintings: immaculately coiffed, soft gaze, vulnerable pose, holding a thyrsus with languid hands

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The Fallen

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Guillaume Geefs (1805-1883) “Le génie du mal” or “The Genius of Evil” (1848) White marble Located in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Liège, Belgium

Geefs’ work replaced an earlier sculpture created by his younger brother Joseph Geefs (L'ange du mal) which was removed from the cathedral because of its distracting allure and “unhealthy beauty.”

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Detail of a neoclassical marble statue of a Naiad or Nymph by Giovanni Battista Lombardi, dated to 1858.

Λεπτομέρεια από ένα νεοκλασικό μαρμάρινο άγαλμα από μια Ναϊάδα ή Νύμφη του Τζιοβάνι Μπατίστα Λομπάρντι , χρονολογείται από το 1858.

[archetype-of-the-dark-feminine]

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

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Moon over the Temple of Poseidon. 1 - 2

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Athens, Greece

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Sculptures at St. Isaak’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia, are silhouetted by the rising full moon. Photo by Dmitry Lovetsky