Earth is shouting out,
In anguish and in pain.
Begging without ceasing,
Not to do it again.
It's weeping
Uncontrollable tears.
Pleading with generations
For plenty of years.
Its lands are barren,
Its water filled with drought.
Its forests and its seas
Are constantly in doubt.
Earth's weather patterns,
Baptized in confusion.
Earth's fragile atmosphere,
Hammered with pollution.
Earth's environments,
Frantically seeking a solution.
It's shocked and disgusted
At human activities' contribution.
Atlas Holding our World -- Karim Fakhoury
Atlas ("hard, enduring") and his brother Menoitios ("doomed might," the god of anger and rash action) sided with their fellow Titans in the war against the Olympian gods, while their brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus remained neutral. Zeus felled Menoitios with a flash of lightning and banished him to Tartaros, but he condemned Atlas to hold the sky on his shoulders to prevent Gaia (the Earth) and Aether (the upper atmosphere) from resuming their primordial embrace. (The Roman writer Gaius Julius Hyginus claimed that Atlas was their son, but most sources identified his parents as the god of craftsmanship Iapetos ["the Piercer," the son of Uranus and Gaia and thus the brother of Kronus, "time," so he has also been regarded as the god of mortality] and Clymene or Asia, a daughter of Okeanos [the divine personification of the sea, an enormous river encircling the world] and his sister/consort Tethys; Okeanos and Tethys were the parents of the 3,000 ocean nymphs and all the world's rivers, fountains, and lakes and the foster parents of Hera, the chief consort of Zeus; Tethys was eventually identified with the sea her name was used in Hellenistic and Roman literature as a poetic synonym for the sea. Each of the four sons of Iapetos and Clymene were depicted as having a particular moral fault that led to this own downfall and, since they were mankind's ancestors, the sources of some of humanity's worst qualities: Atlas represented excessive daring, Menoitios rash violence, Prometheus crafty scheming, and Epimetheus foolish stupidity).
ReplyDeleteBy different consorts, Atlas had many children, including (by Hesperius,"evening," the daughter of Hesperos the evening star who, with his half-brother Phosphorus the morning star [both of them wer aspects of the planet Venus], was the son of the dawn goddess Eos) the Hesperides, the nymphs of evening and of the golden light of sunset who tended a blissful garden near the Atlas mountains; (by his aunt the Oceanid nymph Pleione the protectress of sailing, or by a different aunt the Oceanid nymph Aethra "bright sky") a son Hyas, whose death caused his sisters the Hyades to die of grief; the Hyades (the nymphs who bring rain and were the tutors of Dionysus, who asked Medea to restore their youth in gratitude; after thir death Zeus changed them into a cluster of stars in the head of Taurus); and the seven Pleiades (companions of Artemis who were also transformed into a cluster of stars; they included Maia, who bore Hermes the son of Zeus, and Merope the wife of Sisyphus; the others bore various heroes, the sons of Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, and Prometheus); (and by other, anonymous wives) Kalypso (who detained Odysseus on Ogygia for several years), Dione (the husband of Tantalus), and Maera (the wife of Tegeates, whose father Lycaon served the roasted flesh of his own son Nyctimus to Zeus in order to test the god's omniscience; Zeus transformed Lycaon and his offspring into wolfish creatures and restored Nyctimus to life). When Herakles was tasked with retrieving golden apples from Hera's garden, tended by the Hesperides, he offered to hold up the heavens while Atlas got the apples. After accomplishing the task Atlas volunteered to deliver the apples himself, leaving Herakles to permanently shoulder the burden. Herakles agreed but asked Atlas to let him rearrange his cloak as padding on his shoulders; when Atlas complied Herakes retrieved the apples and left. In the 6th century BCE, Pindaros claimed that Heracles built the two Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to hold the sky away and thus liberated Atlas much as he had liberated Prometheus, according to Hesiodus in the late 8th century BCE: Prometheus had given fire to humanking, whom he had created from clay; in retaliation, Zeus had Hephaestus fashion Pandora, the first woman, out of clay as a gift to Epimetheus along with a jar which was not to be opened (naturally, Pandora opened it, releasing various ailments and discontents upon mankind) and sentenced Prometheus to be eternally chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains and to have his liver devoured every day by an eagle; however, in time Herakles slew the eagle and freed Prometheus from torment. Although associated with various places, Atlas became especially identified with the Atlas Mountains in northwest Africa; "Atlantic ocean" means "sea of Atlas," and "Atlantis" means "island of Atlas," though, according to Platon, who first promulgated the Atlantis story, its first king was a different Atlas, the son of Poseidon and a mortal woman Cleito. According to 20th-century poet/mythographer Robert Graves, the Pelasgians believed the creator goddess Eurynome assigned Atlas and Phoebe (a sister of Tethys) to govern the moon. The first atlas, in the sense of a book of systematically arranged maps of uniform size, was Pietro Coppo's "De Summa totius Orbis" (1524–26). In Antonio Lafreri's 1572 ad hoc assemblage of maps he included a picture of Atlas on its engraved title-page. In 1595, 100 of Gerardus Mercator's maps were bound into his posthumous treatise on the creation, history, and description of the universe, "Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura;" he coined "atlas" as a neologism to commemorate the Titan's son, a mythical king of Mauretania who was renowned as a philosopher, mathematician, geographer, and astronomer, but in the 1636 edition it was the Titan in the frontispiece image.
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