Daughters of Zeus, they were Greek goddesses of fertility, later associated with beauty and love, Aglaia (Brightness), Euphrosyne (Joyfulness), and Thalia (Bloom).
Their collective name, Graces (they were also known as Chorites), referred to the gracious or pleasing appearance of fertile gardens and fields.
The last legal bacchanalia was in the second century B.C. before the Roman senate banned this festival honoring Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Originally a religious rite celebrated only by women, it eventually included men and became an excuse for drunken orgies.
Ragnarok is the day of doom in Norse mythology and corresponds to Gotterdammerung, the Teutonic Twilight of the Gods. On Ragnarok, a battle between good and evil results in the world’s being consumed by fire. Later, a new world, new humans, and new gods spring up around the core of a few survivors.
Nereids were 50 nymphs of the sea, daughters of the sea-god Nereus, often came to the aid of sailors in trouble.
Both Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus were fathered by Zeus, king of the gods. Apollo’s mother was the goddess Leto; Dionysus’s mother was a mortal named Semele. Apollo was the god of light, healing, music, and archery. Dionysus, a darker figure, was the god of wine and fertility.
Priapus, a Greek god of animal and plant fertility, was known for his enormous phallus. He was usually described as the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, though sometimes his mother was said to have been a local nymph. To sophisticated city-dwellers, Priapus often became the subject of racy humor, but rural people adopted him as…
The Grateful Dead does not mean a rock group. It is a folktale in which a young man buries a corpse at great personal risk, then obtains a bride with the help of the grateful deceased. A version of the tale appears in the apocryphal Old Testament book of Tobit.