School of Suspicion

Tag: Mothers of the Sons of God

The women who conceive, bear and protect the sons of gods, mortal and divine: Semele, Leto and Maia, Sarah, Hagar and Rebekah, Isis with the infant Horus, and the daughters of men in Genesis 6.

  • Isis — The Price of a Secret Name

    Isis — The Price of a Secret Name

    Isis makes a serpent from the sun god’s own fallen spittle, then offers to cure the poison on one condition: that Ra give her the name he keeps hidden inside his body. What does knowing a name give you, and what does giving it up cost?

  • Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Apollo forces Creusa in a cave under the Acropolis, has their son raised in his temple at Delphi and hands him to her husband as the husband’s own. Euripides’ Ion beside Joseph and the supposed father of Luke’s genealogy, the boy Jesus in his Father’s house, Rebekah and Jacob, and the question Athens put to…

  • Phaethon — Chariot of the Sun

    Phaethon — Chariot of the Sun

    Epaphus tells Phaethon that his father is a picture his mother made up, and the boy goes to the Sun for proof. Read beside Herod’s oath, the chariots of the sun that Josiah burned, Plato’s Egyptian priest and Peter’s fire, with Lucian’s boatmen on the Eridanus, who had never heard of him.

  • Cain and Abel — The Farmer and the Shepherd

    Cain and Abel — The Farmer and the Shepherd

    Eve says she has gotten a man from the LORD. He ploughs, his brother keeps sheep, and God looks at one offering only. Read beside Josephus on the plough, the Targum’s argument in the field, the smiths called Cain and Romulus at his wall, with the prodigal’s elder brother, seventy times seven and Pilate’s basin.

  • Sons of God, Daughters of Men, and Nephilim – The beginning of Ancient religions

    Genesis 6:4 ends with a phrase that belongs to Homer more than to Moses. The children born to the sons of God by the daughters of men, it says, became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. That is heroic vocabulary. It is the language a poet uses of Achilles or of Gilgamesh,…