On the nature of Hera, continued... Conclusions and future ideas...

So, as I have sought to get closer to Hera I have been rebuffed. Hera has reminded me that she is not my friend, not my lover, not my mother. She is Queen of Heaven and the boundaries between us are rather absolute. Not that I cannot seek her out, mind you, but that I need to start showing some more proper respect toward her position and power. That I need to try to see the boundaries she has set for us and respectfully approach them rather than trample up to them like a petulant child.

I have learned to that Hera is not done with me, that while my understanding of her role has been somewhat clarified, my understanding of her underlying nature has not, and until I come to a better understanding of that nature I must continue my meditations on what she means to me and why.

Hera is not like Athena, who moves like wind through the world, touching and affecting almost everything she comes across in an almost playful yet always purposeful way. Hera is more like the wall that prevents the wind from toppling you. She is protector and avenger of wrongs because she sets the very boundaries that are a "sin" to trespass upon. Hers is a power beyond my current ability to comprehend, perhaps because I tread lightly when it comes to the Gods, or because I fear that running too far afield of the accepted forms will label me something I am not, an eclectic.

But if I am to approach the limits of my own understanding of Hera, I must also seek to push a little on the boundaries I perceive between myself and the Gods. After all, even with the enormous walls between us, between the mortal and the divine, we are all part of the same cosmos. We are all part of the whole that makes the cosmos run, and that being the case, perhaps I can claim a certain right to know. A certain right to understand even as I seek to understand the limits of that knowledge, for knowing the limits is in itself a form of knowledge.

Apollo tells us to know ourselves. Hera tells us to know our limits. Athena tells us to fight up to those limits even as Dionysos tells us to rage with our power, our grace, and our very beings against the status quo. Contradictions? I don't think so...

So, come the future, I must allow myself to perceive her with a certain eye toward what she wants me to see rather than what I want to see in her.