MYTHIC HEROINES: HECATE

As our series on MYTHIC HEROINES continues here at HOOKED on HEROINES, I’d like to tell you a little about the goddess HECATE, and why I chose to include her in my cast.

 
In HALLOWED CIRCLE I wanted to bring a deity into the storyline, to show a goddess and Her interaction with the main character Persephone in an undeniable way. According to some tellings of the Persephone abduction story, Hecate helped Persephone escape from Hades; according to other tellings it was Demeter who helped. In addition to that, Hecate is associated with magic, witches, crossroads, and has an affinity for big black dogs. Since my main character has a black Great Dane puppy, and a boyfriend who turns into a big black werewolf…it seemed obvious that there was no other goddess but Hecate who could fit the bill for my fiction.


Still, I kept digging. I read a variety of sources. There were all kinds of facets to explore and, though the sources are too many to list here, and despite Wikipedia being considered a questionable informant for some, allow me to cite here two sentences from the well-known internet encyclopedia:

“Regarding the nature of [Hecate’s] cult, it has been remarked, "she is more at home on the fringes than in the center of Greek polytheism. Intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous, she straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition." ”

What better deity to play with? That last sentence seals it, doesn’t it? If she “eludes definition” then I have room to play. And I like having a lot of room to play. You can consider me a claustrophobic plotter. I don’t want narrow elevator confines to write from. I want a football field of options.

And yet, how does one take a goddess who “eludes definition” and then tie Her to a single description and a character for readers to recognize as She appears throughout the series? How to describe a goddess, really, without taking away Her deism?

I described Her according to how Persephone’s senses discern Her:

SIGHT of HER: “A figure of darkness stood before me. Not dark-clothed. She was darkness alive. Everything else around us was like over-exposed film, as if all color and tone had seeped into creating Her as a living statue of ebony. … These were eyes that had stared, unafraid, into the sun for eons. These were the eyes of the moon.”

SOUND of HER: “My call has been heard by many,” a voice said. It was the voice of every Elder, of the Eldrenne, the voice of Time Eternal, the voice of the Depths of Nothing and Everything. It licked my bones through and tasted my soul, my essence, and my stain. It swallowed my fear and my hope and left me standing there naked and exposed in its sight, a vessel as open and empty as when I lay sobbing in the row of the cornfield as a child.”

SMELL of HER: “…I could smell raisin and currant cakes…”

TOUCH of HER: “…she grabbed my arm, and I hit my meditative sub-alpha like it was a swimming pool I’d just belly flopped into. Not only was the wind knocked from me, but I felt different… cold and wet as if my clothes were soaked and clinging, yet I was dry.”

After their first encounter in HALLOWED CIRCLE, Persephone performs a ritual. Now, I know that in many urban fantasy novels, witches are witches because they have power or knowledge that gives them power. In my novels, that’s not untrue, but it’s more than that too. Persephone’s not a witch simply because she can cast spells. She’s a pagan. Magic is part of her religion. Equate it to that famous line from Spiderman: With great power comes great responsibility. She’s been chosen; she has a destiny. She’s a witch because of what deities she connects to, and showing the readers how her worship actually occurs was important. One, because outside of the story, there are many misconceptions about paganism out there in the general public, so inside the fiction it felt necessary that I qualify Persephone, and show her worshipping. And two, this character takes her religion seriously, and she’s just had that face-to-face awesome religious experience! Of course, the next time she performs a ritual it’s all going to be filled with a renewed sense of purpose.

So what about you? Is it important to you to see characters taking part in some kind of religion? How does that affect the well-roundedness of a character? Necessary or not?

---Linda Robertson; author of VICIOUS CIRCLE and HALLOWED CIRCLE
FATAL CIRCLE available July 2010
ARCANE CIRCLE available January 2011

Mythic Heroines: Why do they matter?

An enchantress? A queen? Sister to the once and future king? A warrior queen? Yes. All of the above and many more. From Morgan leFay to Boudica and so many others, in all cultures of all nations, women have been lauded, worshipped, defiled and reviled. But no matter what their story, they've all left us a rich heritage: an amazing crop of fabulous mythic heroines from which we as writers can use as a springboard for our own stories.

I'm so very glad that so many of us grew up to create our own stories of female heroines; of women who both endure and overcome--whether with guns and leather, with tooth and claw or with magic alone, they give all sorts of readers a heroine they can enjoy. No shrinking violet Penelope Pitstops here. We write women that kick ass and give no quarter.

In the Blood Lines series, Keira Kelly is her own kind of heroine--a mostly reluctant one. Her supernatural background is lost in centuries of legend and myth. The Kelly family (a name they chose) have no beginning that is known to her. Like as with many mythic women, I wanted to build a strong, intelligent woman character who doesn't know all the answers, yet manages to figure them out, piece by piece, puzzle by puzzle. Keira is one of the youngest of the Kelly clan, still technically adolescent in the start of the series (despite her age in years), still struggling to find her identity. It's kind of a non-YA YA...where the character is physically in her late thirties, but mentally and emotionally, she's pretty much just this side of boy band fetishes and Twi-teendom. Technically (and probably most importantly--in marketing's view), Keira's an adult--so I write books for adult readers. But if you can take a step back and look through the eyes of your own younger self, you'll see a lot of teen behavior in her: she can be whiny, selfish and lazy. What makes her a heroine? Overcoming those impulses and letting the adult part of her self come through. Keira's no dark ages sorceress nor leader of the British revolt against Rome, but she's holding her own sort of rebellion in a very modern age.

What woman in history/mythology/folklore gives you thrills and chills?

-- Maria Lima

MYTHIC HEROINES

First, hello and welcome to HOOKED on HEROINES. At this, our christening moment, allow me to simply say that we are MARIA LIMA, author of Blood Lines series from Pocket/Juno Books, LAURA BICKLE, author of Sparks and Embers from Pocket/Juno Books, ALAYNA WILLIAMS author of Dark Oracle and Rogue Oracle from Pocket/Juno Books, and myself, LINDA ROBERTSON author of the Persephone Alcmedi series. And no, this isn't a JUNO thing. We just happen to like each other. :-)

I'll let the other ladies introduce themselves (and tell you what they want you to know) via their forthcoming posts, but for me...please let my intro suffice with this: I've been chasing this writing dream of mine for over twenty years and I'm jubilant that my dream is coming true.

Now, on to the subject matter the title of this post indicated.

MYTHIC HEROINES. In particular, Persephone.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who are familiar with the mythology behind Persephone, her story of being abducted and taken to the underworld and how she regained freedom. There are probably many who are scarily knowledgeable about it. (You know who you are and I've heard you talk on panels at cons.) I'm not even going to put my toes on your turf. I don't have a degree in mythology and I'm not going to rehash info that we could all google.

Instead, I'd like to veer into the realm of how I'm borrowing from this particular myth and, hopefully, paying homage to my MC's (main character's) namesake without rewriting a predictable and/or modernized version. And no, I'm not knocking the imaginative re-tellings out there. I'm just saying that is not my intention with the Persephone Alcmedi series.

So how did I end up with an MC who was named for a goddess if I didn't intend to link her to that goddess? I guess I came at it backwards. I wanted to create a witch character descended from a long line of witches. I wanted them to all have names for goddesses, muses and the like. I wanted them to be Greek, though not exactly purists on that bloodline issue. In fact, my MC has been told her father was an Egyptian. Hence, she was named Persephone Isis.

At first...I knew that her first name would mess with some people. (I have reminded my mom repeated how to pronounce it.) But that allowed me to contrast the MC's name with a very common name for the hero--Johnny. And he could conveniently decide to give her a nickname, Red...as in Red Riding Hood because she lives with her grandmother and he, being a werewolf, gets to pay them a visit. Thereby I get to give a little nod to the Big, Bad Wolf story as well.

But as I got deeper into the story I wanted to tell, the characters I wanted to create, I saw how giving nods to that mythology was not only fun, but could foreshadow or deepen certain scenes. Now, again, this isn't to say you'll find the Persephone myth retold if you're looking for it. It's not there. But it created room to play and I couldn't resist.

One of those nods to the myth is that my MC was raised by her maternal grandmother, named Demeter. (If you want to play seven degrees of separation...in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the ship that brought the vampire to London was named the Demeter...so she has links to vampires already.)

Other nods to the myth are the involvement of Hecate that you will see as the story grows, and the hints of Tartarus and the Underworld.

So, between the elements of the mythic Persephone's story that I can borrow from, and the inevitable path I've laid before my character, combined with the influence of the cast I've surrounded her with, there's no predicting where she may end up!