Beyond That One Coin Replica and the Belvedere: The Diversity of Apollon’s Images and Symbols

One of the more important things to do when you are exploring devotion to a deity is to look at the images that various artists have made of them, insofar as is possible to you. As I was cleaning my shrine this morning in anticipation of the new moon celebration tomorrow morning (and cleaned my doors yesterday) and thinking forward to the first holiday travel since 2019 — the need of checking in to make sure that my travel shrine is all set and the way I need it to be in almost-2024 because some elements of my practice are different — I started thinking about the trials and struggles of finding appropriate agalmata and how exploring art sooner could have improved things dramatically when it comes to being confident about the way I see Apollon.

One of my struggles had historically been how the way that I intuit the God in prayer and the dancing-light glow-light-club moments therein is how wretchedly dissatisfied I was with images of him to use in devotional worship. How can I love the unity-from-what-is-scattered singularity of bright melody dancing, the God whose lyre of light plays out every color through the plucking of electrons in their nuclei, if I cannot find an image that seems to capture enough of him to resonate with the epithets I go for?

For example, almost all of the iconographic necklaces are either replicas of that one coin of the God or the Apollo Belvedere. Most statuettes of him (with the exception of a really good one recently created by Blagowood on Etsy and some of the art by Lykeia) draw from a very limited array of nude or semi-nude agalmata and art that does not contain the symbolic resonance that I am after (usually; this one, for example, is really good!) when I want to drop into contemplation mode. The possibility of eye contact is also hit or miss. (And don’t even get me started on the weird Percy Jackson fan art, which I am even more resentful of now that the AI search in Google is telling me that fictional events in the Percy Jackson series are original Greek myths when they are not. This offends me both as a devotee and as a librarian.) It’s a very limited diet of images, with a very limited breadth of the God’s epithets, when in actuality doing a search for icons of him should be like taking a bite of the most complexly-flavored chocolate cake and then realizing that cake is the entirety of all that is in and of itself.

One of the first images I saw of the God that I loved and that started to capture what is resonant about him was something that a devotee posted to her group’s blog. It was such an awe-striking image, and while the eyes were covered with gilded leaves and it bore some semblance to some of the iconography already out there, it approached — and landed — on the richness of possibility. It cut through me like an arrow, which is what we want in effective iconography.

Seeing that image sparked a desire in me to see more of them. And there’s a unity within many of these images beyond the fact that many of them are apparently the Citharoedus style of image, held hostage in the Vatican, and are detailed in this paper. So go check out the paper if you have JSTOR access, alum or current, because I’m not reprinting all of those images. What follows is a bit of a broader set.

First, I gravitate towards images where he’s fully clothed and where the artist is taking a lot of delight in the folds and flows of fabric. It definitely gives me a tactile memory of high school art class studies of how fabrics drape, but within an iconographic context, this gets close to both the hidden nature of his inner sanctum and the idea of an event horizon, surrounded by material that is being brought together, and it highlights (for me) his relationship to the fiction I write when I realized in a dream that the Saämatsra Who Holds the Steep Cliffs in my fiction and Apollon were the same and that’s why their iconography blurred together. There is also a less gendered aspect to them, reminiscent of how one of Apollon’s points of visibility in the procession from the One is in the Truth-Bearing Triad, where Aletheia-Apollon-Helios make a triad together — the Goddess in the first (masculinized) position; him in the second (feminized) position; and Helios in the third (masculinized) position. The draped fabrics are also almost a Hadean cloak, but not quite, and I think that’s what makes this work so much, as Apollon has hints of Chthonic associations with his associations with singularities/black holes/celestial graveyards that I saw vindicated when I read Lykeia’s work about him (note: Lykeia’s images of him are very good) and uncovered some more terrestrial precursors of those symbols.

Second, lyres and laurel. These are so central to how I see the God, especially in how the Platonic passages discuss him and in what I intuit in moments of meditation after prayer. Stringed instruments are absolutely one of those symbols that cannot be divorced from him.

Third, I love images where he is offering libations. This speaks to his providential care for the posterior members of his series and the way in which the libation proceeds forward towards nature, given without jealousy to all of the Gods just as they give their own libations to him in return.

These images of the God are present within ancient vase art, temple images, and more. They progress forward from there to the present day. Perhaps the iconographers creating contemporary images are vibeing with a different set of divine symbols from the God (because you do want the artist creating agalmata to be pious rather than copying an image; the creation of an agalma is a theurgic process), an effect that is amplified when the community/sample size is small; perhaps they’re responding to what they already see in the market and are restricted without knowing why; or perhaps a combination. And maybe fabric folds are just hard. But this is why we search in online museum archives (usually under a tab that says “collections” or “research” or similar) — because the slim slice of what we see available commercially often pales in comparison to what is actually out there.

🖼