A god
Apollo
Music, plague, healing, prophecy, and a list of lovers that includes young men and women. Not a boyfriend archetype.
Apollo is a god: bow, lyre, the oracle at Delphi, sudden plague and sudden healing. He is not safe just because the statues are pretty. The Iliad opens, in a sense, under his arrows.
Lovers
Greek myth gives Apollo many female lovers and several male ones. Hyacinthus and Cyparissus are the names most often repeated in later poetry, especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Those stories are told on their own pages. They are flower-etiologies and grief stories as much as love stories, and they sit inside a Greek convention of desire between an adult man and a youth — a convention modern ethics does not adopt, even when the poetry is beautiful.
A modern reading, marked as modern
Queer men have long taken Apollo as a figure of unapologetic male beauty and art. That is a possible devotion. It is not what the Homeric hymns were for. If you pray to him, pray also with a spine: art is not an excuse to repeat the age structure of the myths in your actual life.
A modern devotion, clearly labeled
A practice for makers
- 1Set out an instrument, a pen, or the tool of your actual craft.
- 2Name one piece of work you have been pretending is waiting for inspiration.
- 3Say: “Apollo, if you are the clarity and not the plague, sit long enough for me to begin. I will stop when the time I set is done.”
- 4Work for twenty minutes. Then stop, even if it is going well. Stopping proves you are not possessed.