Chrystalla Thoma: Satyrs, Silenes and Other Forces of Nature

Today I am SUPER excited to have Chrystalla Thoma on my blog, Adventures of a Sci-Fi Writer, to talk about Greek mythology. Here's a snippet, for the whole post stop by.

Hi dear Amber! Thank you for hosting me today.

Greeks have a love-and-hate relation with their history and mythology. Lucky for me, I am a lover of such things, so I had a happy time at school learning about ancient history and Homer.

Therefore it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I like writing about Greek myths and legends. My upcoming novella, to be released by MuseItUp Publishing next month, is called Dioscuri. It is a retelling of the ancient myth of the twin brothers Kastor and Polydeukes, Zeus’ sons with Leda, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal. The story is set in modern-day Athens where the ancient gods have woken again, and there is war. The two brothers fight against the monsters. When the mortal brother, Kastor, dies in battle, his immortal sibling Polydeukes takes things in his own hands and makes a dark deal with the Underworld. A deal Zeus will sooner or later discover and all hell will break loose.

In this war against the monsters crawling out of the underground passages and the construction sites, and the complicated games of the higher gods of Olympus, certain lesser immortals take the mortals’ side: nature sprites, the satyrs, silenes, nymphs and the griffins, aid Kastor and Polydeukes not only in hand to hand battle, but also in figuring out the mystery of Kastor’s return to life and the deal his brother made with Hades.

In my post for Six Sentence Sunday (a project where each Sunday authors post on their blogs six sentence from a published or unpublished story they wrote), I have an excerpt with the Satyr of the Temple. He is an authoritative figure in the story, and demands to know of Kastor what the heck is going on:

“Listen, Satyr, I appreciate the time you’re taking for me, but I’ve got to meet
someone, I—”

“Because it cannot be someone playing games with the Underworld, can it?” The Satyr leaned closer, his long, flat face driving fear like a dagger into Kast, nailing him to his seat, driving his breath out. “That would cause the wrath of the higher immortals; call them down to punish us all. One doesn’t toy with the boundaries between the dead and the living.”

Kast drew back, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

Much has been said about the Greek gods’ anthropomorphism, which simply means that their gods look and behave just like us mere mortals. Oh they do have powers, but their human appearance and petty quarrels don’t differ much from ours. This is taken to be an advance on, say, the grotesque gods of other ancient cultures like the Babylonian and the Egyptian, composites of men and animals. The Greek gods left behind their animalistic side.

But did they, really?

Among ancient Greek findings, we encounter statuettes of bird-headed goddesses and horse-bodied men (perhaps centaurs, i.e. impressions of the first appearance of men riding horses in Greece). But then what happened?...

Stop by for the rest of the post and to learn more about Chrystalla, click here.