But before they were able to act, their father Hypnos had to do the work, putting people to sleep. The latter was believed to be the gate for the false dreams. The cave had two gates – one made of the buckhorn the other of the ivory – so that they could choose what dreams to send. The myth says that Oneiroi lived at the shores of the Ocean in the West, in the cave close to Hades. Oneiroi, The Dream-Bearing Sons Of Hypnos The most significant appearance that Hypnos makes in Greek myth is in connection with the Trojan war in The Iliad by Homer. Their sons – Oneiroi (meaning “dreams” in Greek) were: Morpheus, Ikelos, Phobetor, and Phantasos. Hypnos, the Greek god of and personification of sleep, was the son of Nyx and Erebus who lived in the underworld with his brother Thanatos. There were rumors (well, they exist even in mythology!) that Hypnos and Pasithea had even a thousand children, but the most common belief is that they had four sons. Their marriage was a direct result of Hypnos’s blackmail to Hera – in order to do her a very tricky favor regarding the Trojan War, Hypnos asked for Pasithea and Hera had no choice so she offered her to Hypnos. Hypnos was married to the youngest of the Graces – Pasithea (or Pasithee), a deity of hallucination or relaxation, depending on the interpretation. One version suggests that Hypnos lived in the cave under one Greek island, Lemnos, and that through his cave the river of forgetfulness, Lethe, used to flow. Hypnos lived in the dark cave, in the Hades (Underworld), whose entrance was full of poppies and other hypnotic plants. In Hesiod’s version though, Hypnos had no father. Hypnos was the son of goddess Nyx (meaning “night”) and Erebus (deep darkness, or shadow). Ikelos: He was the one creating the true dreams, making them more realistic. Phantasus: He was the one creating the fake and illusional dreams, and had no animus form. He was the personification of nightmare, taking the form of huge and scary animals. Phobetor: He was the one who created the scary dreams. Morpheus: The Winged God of Dreams, able to take any human form in dreams. ISBN 069022608X.Wife: Pasithea, the deity of hallucinations Crowell's Handbook of Classical Mythology (First ed.). Online version at Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1916. Spawforth (eds.), Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd rev. ed.), Oxford, ISBN 9780198661726. Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, ISBN 9780631201021.(1997), A Commentary on Ovid, Metamorphoses XI, Hermathena, vol. 162/163, Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, pp. 1–290, JSTOR 23041237. However, Griffin suggests that this division of dream forms between Morpheus and his brothers, possibly including their names, may have been of Hellenistic origin. Tripp calls these three figures "literary, not mythical concepts". The three brothers' names are found nowhere earlier than Ovid, and are perhaps Ovidian inventions. One called Icelos ('Like'), by the gods, but Phobetor ('Frightener') by men, "takes the form of beast or bird or the long serpent", and Phantasos ('Fantasy'), who "puts on deceptive shapes of earth, rocks, water, trees, all lifeless things". Ovid gives names to two more of these sons of Sleep. Ovid called Morpheus and his brothers, the other sons of Somnus, the Somnia ("dream shapes"), saying that they appear in dreams "mimicking many forms". According to Ovid "no other is more skilled than he in representing the gait, the features, and the speech of men the clothing also and the accustomed words of each he represents." Like other gods associated with sleep, Ovid presents Morpheus as winged. His name derives from the Greek word for form (μορφή), and his function was apparently to appear in dreams in human guise. Hypnus was depicted as a young man with wings on his shoulders or brow. His godly symbol is a branch of a poplar tree dipped into the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness located in the Underworld. Ovid makes Morpheus one of the thousand sons of Somnus (Sleep). Hypnos (), also known as Hypnus (hippopotamuses) is the god of sleep daddy, a son of Erebos and Nyx, and twin of Thanatos. In Ovid's account Juno (via the messenger goddess Iris) send Morpheus to appear to Alcyone in a dream, as her husband Ceyx, to tell her of his death. The only mention of Morpheus occurs in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Ovid tells of the story of Ceyx and his wife Alcyone who were transformed into birds. From the Middle Ages, the name began to stand more generally for the god of dreams, or of sleep. In Ovid's Metamorphoses he is the son of Somnus and appears in dreams in human form. Morpheus ('Fashioner', derived from the Ancient Greek: μορφή meaning 'form, shape') is a god associated with sleep and dreams. Morpheus, painted by Jean-Bernard Restout
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |