A Grace & Fury Assortment

Kicking off with bit of a re-do from years past; then a couple of related cartoons, poems, and vintage "representative" photographs from husband's collection:

Famous 15th century Italian artist Raphael painted The Three Graces (right). The three graces in mythology were goddesses, daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, said to rule beauty and charm in nature and humanity. Other artists and sculptors have depicted the three sisters too. A related damaged sculpture (above left) now in The Louvre, Paris dates from around two centuries before Christ.

The graceful sisters: Aglaia, who represented radiance or splendor. Euphrosyne - joy. Thalia represented fruitfulness or good cheer. If the sisters were to be represented astrologically, I guess the Sun would be obvious to represent radiance and splendor; Venus for joy, and Jupiter for fruitfulness or good cheer - the three graces in planetary form?


Another, contrasting set of three exists in mythology: The Three Furies. This painting is by W. Bouguereau "Orestes and the Furies". The Greeks knew them as Erinyes, daughters of Gaia (Earth) sprung from the blood of Uranus. They were Tisiphone (avenger of blood), Alecto (the implacable), and Megaera (the jealous one). Said to be merciless goddesses of vengeance whose punishments continued after death.

Which planets might carry the attributes of these three lovelies? Mars, Saturn for the first two; but how about "the jealous one"? Moon, perhaps? I tend to give the Moon positive interpretation, but in tarot The Moon card isn't one of the true "goodies". The Moon is changeable, temperamental, could easily become jealous. The Moon might represent "the jealous one".

So then, each planet, except Mercury, would have a Grace or a Fury to its name. Mercury has the job of bouncing around between them all.

Graces and Furies - we all have them all within us, somewhere !

Hauled into the 20th/21st centuries:

Clarifying caption:  Any man who loves and reveres his mother and his country should idolize, if he worship at all, the three graces,  Suffrage, Preparedness and Americanism.

 From a version of Dante's Divine Comedy

A HYMN TO THE GRACES by Robert Herrick

When I love, as some have told
Love I shall, when I am old,
O ye Graces! make me fit
For the welcoming of it!
Clean my rooms, as temples be,
To entertain that deity;
Give me words wherewith to woo,
Suppling and successful too;
Winning postures; and withal,
Manners each way musical;
Sweetness to allay my sour
And unsmooth behaviour:
For I know you have the skill
Vines to prune, though not to kill;
And of any wood ye see,
You can make a Mercury.

SEE HERE.


SONG OF THE FURIES (from "The Eumenides")
by Aeschylus (translated by Henry Hart Milman.)

3 verses - full poem is HERE

Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate!
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth.
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure,
Naught our wrath to dread hath he;
Calm his cloudless days endure.
But the man that seeks to hide
Like him, his gore-bedewèd hands,
Witnesses to them that died,
The blood avengers at his side,
The Furies' troop forever stands.

For light our footsteps are,
And perfect is our might,
Awful remembrances of guilt and crime,
Implacable to mortal prayer,
Far from the gods, unhonored, and heaven's light,
We hold our voiceless dwellings dread,
All unapproached by living or by dead.

What mortal feels not awe,
Nor trembles at our name,
Hearing our fate-appointed power sublime,
Fixed by the eternal law.
For old our office, and our fame,
Might never yet of its due honors fail,
Though 'neath the earth our realm in unsunned regions pale.

The Graces?

 I'm tagging this trio as The Furies!

And...as though we don't have enough to contend with via Graces and Furies, The Fates and The Sirens are determined not to be forgotten!