Athena

"Peaceable Athena," Louvre Museum From Outcyclopedia, the free and queer encyclopedia. Athena was an ancient Greek deity. She was the goddess of wisdom, intellect, arts and crafts, achievement, health, civilization, invention, and justice tempered with reason.  She was also the goddess of righteous, defensive warfare, distinguished from her half-sister Enyo, goddess of aggressive warfare, and her half-brother Ares, god of war for war's sake.  Together with Hestia, goddess of the household, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt, she formed the great trinity of virgin goddesses in the Greek pantheon.  The owl, long a symbol of wisdom, was her sacred bird.  In addition to creating the olive tree, she was credited with inventing the plow, the loom, horse bridle, chariot, and ship, and to have taught humanity the arts of cooking and weaving and the science of mathematics.  She also invented the flute, but disliked the instrument because playing it made her cheeks puff out.  Athena cast the deciding vote in criminal trials when juries were deadlocked, and arbitrated disputes and guided the negotiation of treaties.  She also had the power of prophecy. Athena was always accompanied by Nike, goddess of victory, and the two were sometimes merged into the single deity of Athena Nike.  She was also known as Pallas Athena, the derivation of which is attributed to two different myths. In one, Pallas was one of the Titans and the original god of wisdom. When he tried to rape Athena, she killed him and stretched his skin over her shield as a trophy. In another, Pallas was a warrior maiden loved by the goddess with whom she often sparred. During one of these mock battles, Athena accidentally killed the girl. In mourning Athena created a statue of her dead love, the Palladium, and added the girl's name to her own. Most scholars believe that in fact Pallas was an Indo-European warrior goddess whom the Greeks merged with Athena, giving the goddess her more warlike attributes.  Other names which Athena bore included Athena Polias(Athena of the city), Athena Ergane (Athena the worker), Athena Hygeia (Athena of health), Athena Glaukopis (Athena the gleaming or gray eyed), and Athena Parthenos (Athena the virgin). This last avatar of Athena was the one to whom the Parthenon, the great temple overlooking Athens, was dedicated. Prior to 500 BCE, she was known as Athene.  The Romans synchretized her with their own goddess, Minerva. Athena was the favorite of the many children of Zeus, the result of a liasion with Metis, the shape-shifting goddess of prudence.  Fearing that Metis's child would grow powerful enough to overthrow him, Zeus tricked Metis into turning herself into a fly and swallowed her.  Metis gave birth to Athena while inside Zeus and the young goddess began to grow, manifesting as a huge lump in the god's forehead.  As the lump became larger, Zeus found himself in so much pain that he begged the Titan Prometheus for help.  Prometheus split Zeus's head open with an ax, whereupon Athena sprung from her father's head full-grown and in battle armor.  Alone among Zeus's children, only she could wear his breastplate, the Aegis, or weild his thunderbolts. The city of Athens was named for Athena and was under her special protection.  Erichthonios, the half-man, half-serpent king and founder of the city, formed from semen which Athena wiped from her thigh and threw upon the ground after a failed attempt at rape by Hephaestus, god of smithing.  Athena later raised and instructed Erichthonius, making her essentially a virgin mother goddess.  She gained dominion over Athens in a contest with her uncle Poseidon, god of the sea, after her gift to the city of the olive tree was chosen over his gift of a fountain spring.  The Parthenon, perhaps the greatest achievement of ancient Greek architecture, was a temple constructed in her honor by Phidias under the instruction of Pericles between 447 to 432 BCE.  The Panathenaea, a festival in Athena's honor, was celebrated in Athens every fourth year.  Her birthday was celebrated every August. Athena figures prominently in many of the Greek myths and epics.  She assisted Perseus in his quest to take the head of Medusa, giving him her shield to use as a mirror so he would not see Medusa's face head on, which would have turned him to stone.  Afterwards, the head of Medusa graced Athena's shield and breastplate.  She also helped Herakles in his quest for the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.  Athena especially favored Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War, helping him steal the Palladium, her special idol from the city of Troy.  At one point in the war, she tried and failed to end the conflict by placing herself between the Greek and Trojan armies.  She also intervened in the case of Orestes, casting the vote which absolved him of the killing of his mother and uncle as vengeance for the murder of his father. But Athena had her dark side as well.  The maiden Arachne was transformed into a spider after foolishly challenging Athena to a weaving contest and losing.  Tiresias, a young hunter, was struck blind after spying on Athena as she bathed.  Athena's siding with the Greeks in the Trojan War was motivated not only by her favoritism for Odysseus but also anger at the Trojan prince Paris for choosing Aphrodite over her as the fairest of all the goddesses.  To get even with Aphrodite, Athena enabled the Greek warior Diomedes to see the gods on the battlefield, and encouraged him to attack Aphrodite, wounding her.  Because Ares had joined Aphrodite in siding with the Trojans, Athena struck him in the back with a stone, breaking his spine and crippling him. Based partly on her close association with the snake-headed Medusa, Athena is believed descended from the snake goddess worshipped by the Minoans of the Aegean.  Images of a helmet wearing, spear thrusting warrior goddess called Pallas date back to the Indo-Eurpoean culture which settled Greece around 1300 BCE.  The classical image of Athena resulted from a merging of the gentle, intellectual goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean with the fierce goddesses of the war-like tribes which settled the region shortly after the fall of the Minoan culture. Athena's gentleness, wisdom, compassion, courage and inventiveness have made her a popular role model among all women, lesbian and straight.  Perhaps for this reason she is one of the principle deities of the Amazons in the Wonder Woman comic books. External links: The Shrine of the Goddess Athena Athena, Greek Mythology Link. Wisdom - Athena.Org Home of Pallas Athena Wikipedia Entry Classical Myth: Athene: Images Athena, goddess of wisdom The Parthenon, Nashville, TN Athene Entry revised 17 December, 2004. All text is available for use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (see Copyrights for details).