• krellor@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    Maybe it’s splitting hairs, but I recall the “chaste goddess of the hunt” and one of the three goddesses whom Aphrodite had no power. Additionally, goddess of healing, midwifery, and children. So I don’t know if the contemporary understanding of Ace matches that or not, as she is unaffected by love or lust.

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      experiencing no sexual attraction no matter if one is sex-repulsed or sex-positive still lands you somewhere in the ace spectrum. and tbh you don’t need to have kids of your own to be a midwife, or just in general care about them

      • krellor@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Yes, but what about love? As in, the emotion? Because Artemis is supposed to be unaffected by love, hence one of the three the goddess of love, Aphrodite, had no power over. But being ace doesn’t preclude someone from being in love.

          • krellor@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            Right. It just seems worth pointing out specifically rather than just using the term ace like the thread OP, because lumping those together doesn’t seem fair to ace folks. And at least for people like me who have read a lot of the Greek mythology, her aromantic nature is at least, if not more prominent in her personality than her chaste nature.

    • squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      To add to what krellor already mentioned: It’s hard to find one definitive image of a specific Greek deities, because they were worshipped over hundreds of years and not only in Greece, but also in Greek colonies (for example Sicily) and places that were heavily influenced by Greek culture (for example around the Black Sea). Most of these places had their own particular interpretation of what a Greek deity was or wasn’t.

      So it was no contradiction that Artemis could be a “man hating, out lesbian” in one place and an “aro-ace ascetic” in another. Unlike in modern monotheism, there was no overarching dogma people could refer to and places often had their very own myths and stories about the deities. Only some of those have survived until today.

      So our modern interpretation of Greek deities is something of a puzzle with many pieces missing and no way to confirm if the pieces that we have ever were part of the same picture in the first place.