All Hail the Queen: The Orphic Hymn of Hera
My new translation & Part 1 of the Commentary
CW: Some very brief references to physical abuse in the context of Greek myth.
Bend Your Knee
So Hera’s been talking to me. Insistently. Mostly when I take my walks and my Long Covid gets me panting and a little short of breath. That’s when I feel her most, tugging at my lungs, telling me to SIT TF DOWN.
In those moments when Hera grabs me and shakes me a little—like literally when I get shaky from the heavy breathing—she wants me to tell you She is NOT THAT B*TCH you’ve heard about in the stories.
She is intimately connected with Aquarius, She wants you to know. Of the Air, but also a Water-Bearer.
But She is no Ganymede, abducted by Zeus to serve as cupbearer to the gods. She is Primal. She is REGAL.
Her rules are simple:
Do not cross Mother.
Do not play with the Queen.
And She wants you to know She is closer than you imagined—as close as your nearest breath— and if you ever turn away from Her, you will die.
Put your hand in front of your mouth. Breathe in, breathe out.
Do you feel that condensation on your palm?
That is Hera.
Who She’s Not (at least, not entirely)
We all know those misogynistic tales of Hera that pepper Greek and Roman myth (in Her Roman form She was known as Juno). You know the one I mean: the nagging wife, the jealous lover, the vindictive hater of all Zeus’ many f*ck-bois, girls, nymphs, gods, goddesses, whathaveyou.
And I have to say that as a moderately very-niche-internet-famous Scholar of Ancient Myth(TM), one of the most frequently asked questions I get is: “What’s the deal with Hera? I want to like her, but She’s just so damned angry and vindictive to Zeus’ other lovers. These folks were victims of Zeus, not Her enemies.” Like, what gives?
The short and obvious answer is misogyny. Greek culture was 100% horribly (and horrifically) misogynistic in pretty much every way you can imagine. I don’t feel the need to detail the ways here—go read up on it elsewhere (like here or here) if you want. It’s easy to find stories of Hera that conform to every possible variety of messed up ancient ideas of sexuality, slavery, coercion, and punishment. (For example: Synodinou, Katerina. “The Threats of Physical Abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien 100 (1987): 13–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24747703.)
Let’s just leave it at this: Hera’s nagging, vindictive ways are first and foremost, a reflection on parts of Greek society that we would NEVER WANT to reproduce in our modern times. Finding meaning and spiritual inspiration in Greek gods and myths NEVER (to my mind) means adopting the culture whole-hog. We ALWAYS need to keep our hearts and minds open to what type of world we want to create for ourselves and those to come, as well as what Spirit is telling us directly.
So. Enough about that. What I DO want to talk about is how to understand Hera in a way that both acknowledges the role misogyny has played in shaping the stories we’ve inherited about her, WHILE ALSO looking behind the myths at the philosophical or ontological truths of who She is as a Being.
The Orphic Hera (and a brief recap of Orphic Cosmology & History)
Notably, we don’t find any of the traditional nagging, vindictive Hera stories in Her Orphic Hymn. Rather, the hymn focuses on Her roles as cosmic force and saving, sustaining power.
As you probably know from my other posts, the Ancient Orphics understood everything—stars, plants, animals, humans, gods, natural forces—as fractal faces of the All, simultaneously separate AND the same. Most of us can intuitively understand the idea by using analogies like my favorite image of the faces of gaming dice, which are neither the same as the whole die nor entirely separate from it.
For us, as for the Orphics, this fundamental non-dual nature of reality raises some questions, not least of which is, “Ok, so if we’re all not separate from the All, how did we get here, in this apparent body?” In other words, “How did I come to be?”
The Orphics answered this question by mapping how the soul moves through and with the cosmos—how it seems to emerge out of the All, comes into the particular shape we know as “us,” and then ultimately either returns to the Earth to be reborn, or remembers its true nature and returns to the endless bliss that is its home: the All.
This overall cosmic scheme integrated the cutting edge philosophies (medical, astronomical, physical, religious, ethical) popular in Southern Italy and Sicily (as well as other parts of the Mediterranean) during the 6th-5th centuries BCE. (This period of philosophy is generally called “pre-Socratic,” because it pre-dates the work of Plato and his teacher Socrates, who pioneered a somewhat more dualistic view of the world than the previous philosophers.)
Why is this important? Because in order to understand the Orphic Hera, we need to understand a bit about the four elements. Not as they’ve come to be understood today, or even in later ancient and medieval times (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and after), but at the very beginning of the so-called “Western tradition”, when the elements were not understood as separate from the gods themselves.
Air
Let’s start with Hera’s name.
Both ancient and modern scholars have associated the name Hēra with the Greek word for “air” (aēr). Personally, I love that in the transition from noun to name, She received the addition of a little puff of aspiration by way of that initial “H.”
*With apologies to Nabokov’s opening lines of Lolita, I feel compelled to riff…*
H-era: the puff of air as “H” exiting the back of the throat, traveling the tongue as a wide “eh,” to be stopped short by the roll of the “r” and exit, again, as “ah.”
Her name alone says it all. She is wind. She is wide. She rolls. She releases.
Empedocles, the 5th c. BCE philosopher who first named the four “roots” (aka the elements), proclaimed Hera as one of the fundamental building blocks of EVERYTHING:
Listen, four are the first roots (rhizōmata) of everything:
Shining Zeus and Life-bearing Hera, then Aidoneus [i.e. Hades]
and Nestis [literally, “the fasting one,” an epithet of Persephone], who wets the mortal watercourse with tears.
(That’s my translation of Empedocles, Fragment 6.)
We see here the familiar four elements: Fire (Zeus), Air (Hera), Earth (Aidoneus/Hades), Water (Nestis/Persephone). Two are skyward/celestial (Zeus & Hera); one is fully chthonic (Hades), one travels in between (Persephone).
Most importantly, unlike in English, where the material substances and the names of the gods are separate, in early Greek philosophy, they are not. The elements are both ALIVE and DIVINE. They have not only physical presence, but also personalities, propensities, qualities that we can get to know.
The Orphics drew on and assimilated the teachings of Empedocles and other pre-Socratic philosophers into their Mystery texts. Theirs was a fully animate cosmos, one in which even the act of breathing itself involves an intimate communion with the body of a God.
So what type of God(dess) are we taking into and out of our own body every moment we are alive?
The most obvious attribute of Hera/Air is portrayed mythologically in her role as the “blessed bedmate of Zeus” (as the hymn puts it), where we see Her as the open, endless ground in which Cosmic Fire plays—as twinkling stars, as the moon and sun, as lightning storms. Conceived of as Sky, Hera/Air is almost invisible, a backdrop for Zeus’ brilliance.
But of course there’s another side to Her.
For when Zeus/Fire unleashes His most visible and audible effects as Lightning and Thunder, in that moment we can also feel and see Hera/Air in very palpable ways—as whipping winds, scudding along the clouds and stirring up the waves. Hence the epithet given to her within the first few lines of the Orphic Hymn: “Wind-Raiser” (anemōn trophe).
The hymn goes on to give us some vivid visuals of Hera/Air at work:
aeriois roizoisi tinassomenē kata xeuma
quaking, with whipping winds upon the waters,
stirring whistling breaths down into the stream
I’ve double-translated the Greek to get the full image conveyed in the original—the spinning, shaking, whistling sound that whips air into a stream of water. A good image might be a milk frother of the sort you’d use when making a cappuccino.
That’s Hera’s role as Storm Mother.
Hera’s stormy powers were familiar to Greeks from myth. According to the lost epic poem Cypria (which told the story of the lead-up to the Trojan War), Hera sent a raging storm to punish Paris for stealing Helen of Troy. Another ancient author (Pseudo-Apollodorus) tells us that she sent a storm against Herakles as he was leaving the Trojan city.
Even Hera’s famous jealous wrath can be read as a euhermeristic extension of her elemental nature: is it any wonder, we might ask, that She is portrayed in myth as tempestuous, given that one of the most powerful manifestations of air is as a literal tempest?
But here’s one of the many things I love about the Orphics: not only do they NOT connect Hera’s whistling winds with “Hera as a jealous, tempestuous b*tch” myths, they actually present us with another, older and WAY less misogynistic way of understanding the goddess.
For the Orphics, Hera is not so much STORM mother as Storm MOTHER.
That same phrase I translated above as “Wind-Raiser” (anemōn trophe) could just as easily be translated “wind nurse/nurturer.” The image here is maternal, even breast-centric—as in a mother or perhaps wet-nurse who nurtures and “raises” (as in grows) the air.
We see this imagery of the nurse reinforced when the hymn describes Hera’s psychotrophous auras, which can be translated as either “life-nurturing breezes” or “soul-nursing breaths.” Either way, the predominant image is of Hera/Air as nurse or nurturer, bringing Movement and Life. We saw this in the very first lines of the hymn, which introduced us to Hera as “Airy One / Seated in the glistening deep cavities of the womb.”
So what, exactly, does it mean for the Air to “mother” or “nurse” a soul?
Soul-Nurse (Part 1)
If you’ve been reading my stuff for awhile, you may remember that the nurse, or nanny, is an important figure for the Orphics. Specifically, the kourotrophos, or child-rearer/nanny has appeared in the Hymns of Selene (Moon) and Ares (Mars). If you need a refresher, I’ve written or spoken extensively about the importance of this figure for Orphic ideas of soul travel:
here (Commentary on the Orphic Hymn of Selene)
here (Live Chat, Jan 2023, minutes 29 and 48)
here (Orphic Hymn of Ares).
But in the Hymn of Hera, we see the image of nursing extended from childbirth and the ushering of a physical baby into the world BACKWARDS in space-time to the moment of the SOUL’S birth, before it is “clothed” in a physical form.
✨✨Esoterica Alert!✨✨
Take a deep breath, darlings, because in Part II we’re about to get ESOTERIC AF!
But first, read the Hymn of Hera below and work with it for a week or so. Be forewarned: when I’ve recited it, I tend to experience windy days or see red-tail hawks circling overhead. And I feel my pulse quickening and thoughts darting around. I can’t promise exactly the same for you, but let’s just say I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reciting this on a sailboat out at sea.
Until next time, when we dive truly deep into Hera’s Mysteries,
I remain yours in Earth and Starry Sky,
Kristin