Pinktober 2024: Week 3
It’s been a busy week around here with Canadian Thanksgiving, a weekend trip to Bellingham to visit my mother and see a childhood friend for the first time in decades, fighting off the first strain of autumn colds that have been hitting everyone (including my partner, who I’ve alternated between caring for and avoiding like the literal plague all week!), interviewing for jobs, doing my current job, and all the usual stuff (recording podcasts, exercise, blah blah blah) and yet I’ve still managed to keep up with my daily Pinktober drawing challenges… yay, me!
I honestly never expected this challenge to go so well… My newfound inspiration and discipline even prompted my mother to ask (quite rightly, I might add), “So, what are you going to do next month??”
For starters, I’m going to take my 12 best drawings from the month, scan them in and clean them up in Photoshop, and create a 2025 calendar. I’ve been using MinuteMan Press, a wonderful local print shop, for my badass goddess calendars for several years. The franchise is family-owned and their work is great; they’re fast, friendly and affordable. When I call them to order calendars, they always remember me and exclaim, “the badass goddesses!”
Day 12. Eris, the goddess of discord
Long before Eris the Kuiper Belt ice dwarf was discovered in 2005, kicking off a planetary shakeup that would oust everybody’s favorite Disney dog of the Underworld from the lineup of A-list planets, demoting him to dwarf planet, there was Eris the goddess.
To hear the full myth of Eris, the planetary discovery and the astrology, listen to our Starzology episode on Eris.
The myth of Eris
Eris was the sister of Aries, the Greek god of war. Whereas he personifies all that is noble and heroic about war, she represents the darker aspects of the martial character; spite, jealousy, cunning and capriciousness in sowing chaos.
Denied an invitation to the royal wedding of Peleus and Thetis due to her troublemaking nature, Eris crashed the party anyway and promptly tossed a golden apple inscribed "For the Fairest" at the feet of Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. This led to a contest between the three goddesses, with Zeus appointing the mortal prince Paris to judge.
The three goddesses stripped naked and offered Paris bribes. Hera offered political power, while Athena promised infinite wisdom. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, promised him the hand of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. Unfortunately, she was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta, and when Paris claimed his prize, the resulting chain of events lead to the Trojan War. Classic “woman scorned” stuff.
Day 13. Pele, the volcano goddess
Pele is the most well-known of the Hawaiian pantheon of deities. Revered as a creator and feared as a destroyer, she rules all the elements associated with volcanoes and earthquakes, including fire, wind, thunder and lightning. Said to have been born in Tahiti, she migrated across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, creating the volcanic island chain one by one along her journey.
When Pele is angry, no one is safe from her fiery wrath. Her fits of rage shake the very foundations of the earth, displacing mountains and liquifying solid ground. Fault lines part like zippers. Pyroclastic explosions send boiling columns of molten rock and smoke into the sky; lightning and thunder rip through the choking clouds. Catastrophic tremors open fissures of red that flow like open wounds; rivers of lava that burn everything in their path.
Day 14. Ixtab, Mayan goddess of suicide
Ixtab is the Mayan goddess of the Moon and patroness of suicides, symbolized by the noose around her neck. She's not a siren, but a Psychopomp, shepherding the fragile souls who die by their own hand to a special realm of the afterlife.
I like to imagine Ixtab as the ultimate superfan, partying in the afterlife with suicidal luminaries from all the arts and sciences, like Kurt Cobain, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anthony Bourdain, Alexander McQueen, Robin Williams, Tony Scott, David Foster Wallace, Socrates, Alan Turing and Marilyn Monroe.
Day 15. Athena, goddess of wisdom
Athena was the quintessential daddy’s girl, born fully grown and armored from the head of Zeus, ready for battle. She was the patroness of ancient Athens, protecting the city from its enemies and championing the arts and sciences. Besides being revered as a warrior and military strategist, she is associated with mathematics, technology and the invention of tools and crafts like weaving. She represents wisdom, justice, learning and civilization.
The inspiration for Athena was none other than my mother, whose photos you can see here. The beautiful owl and peregrine falcon she’s holding in these pictures were part of a rehabilitation program for injured birds of prey that she participated in when she worked at The Nature Company in Baltimore in the 90s.
Day 16. Centaur
I had another funny interaction with Meta AI trying to generate some reference images for the centaur. AI is infamous for not always getting certain things right, like the number of fingers a person should have, etc. For some reason, asking it for a centaur was just super confusing, especially when I asked for it to be running. I got one very muscular woman running and lots of muscular horses running.
I got more specific and asked for a half-woman, half-horse and held my breath anticipating the horrors that awaited me. That got me a woman running in front of a horse, a few women riding horses wearing bizarre costumes that looked like a superhero bargain bin, and one centaur that looked promising but was missing half an arm and had way too many fingers on the other. Yikes. At that point I stopped procrastinating and started drawing.
Day 17. Fairy
Another mother-inspired one, this time based on a photo of her at the tender age of 15 or 16 when she was a ballerina in San Francisco performing in Les Sylphides.
Day 18. Gaeia
Gaeia, or Gaia, is the Greek personification of the earth. Not exactly a goddess, she was one of the first beings to emerge from the void of Chaos, the ancestral mother of all living beings. She and Uranus, the sky god, were the parents of the Titans, among whom were Cronus and Rhea, the parents of Zeus. He grew up to lead a revolt against the Titans, becoming the king of the gods on Mount Olympus. For more on Zeus, see Thor: Love and Thunder. JK
Pinktober continues
Follow me on Instagram to see new drawings every day and, if you’re not already doing so, it’s not too late to take up the challenge!