The Mythology Minute: Adonis with Thomas Willoughby

One minute on Adonis, by Thomas Willoughby. Mythology Minutes are one-minute (ish) podcasts about Greek and Roman Mythology, brought to you by the students of Dr. Sara Parks' Greek and Roman Mythology class at StFX University. [shared with student permission] StFX Dept of Religious Studies: https://www.stfx.ca/department/religious-studies Transcript: Adonis is regarded as a minor deity in the Greek pantheon and is attributed as the god of several themes: beauty, lust, rebirth, and nature. His name is derived from a Semitic word meaning “lord” because his origins lay earlier than the archaic or Hellenistic periods. Scholars agree that before Europeans had written his story, both the myths of Adonis and Aphrodite originate from ancient Mesopotamia and were exchanged to the Greeks from the Phoenicians (a Semitic group from modern-day Lebanon.) The two divine lovers have sported many names throughout history. Astarte and Adon, Inanna and Dumuzzi, Ishtar and Tummuz. Many variations of the myth exist due to the oral passage spanning many years and many miles and exact details differentiate, deeming it impossible to get a general conscience without making a few contradictions. Paraphrasing solely from Roman author Ovid’s metamorphoses where the gods are mentioned by Roman name: There is some nasty, father- daughter sex. The daughter prays to be punished and gets turned into a tree. Adonis is born from the incest tree and grows up to be the hottest man ever. Venus falls in love with him after Cupid mistakenly pricks her with one of his love arrows. They hang a bit together. She tells him a story that is supposed to warn him about wild animals but is mostly just her bragging about turning a dude into a lion. Adonis pays her a bit of attention but is more focused on hunting. Out on a hunt he gets smoked by a wild boar and dies. In some versions this is punishment from other gods who all have interest in the world's hottest man. Nonetheless Venus turns him into a flower, there is some degree of resurrection, and his likeness as a deity is forever established. Sources: Barry B. Powell. Classical Myth: Ninth Edition. Oxford University Press, 2021. Ovid. Metamorphoses.