Poena: She Who Brings Punishment

In this little shop, there are hundreds of gods.

It is a dusty, dimly lit place, an antique shop with no name. The shop sits tucked into the corner of a narrow brick alleyway, with a sign that is too faded to read hanging outside the door. Inside, the shelves stretch for rows and rows, too far for anyone to see the end. There aren’t many people here, though. This shop has very few visitors. Who really, has any use for forgotten gods?

Here your footsteps echo, and every once in a while a brush of fabric or a slight hum make a tiny break in the silence. But not often. It really is remarkably deserted. The shopkeeper is friendly, but always out of sight. Sometimes a quick greeting or a quick flash of colors let you know that he’s there. Sometimes not. I imagine that he takes good care of each of the items, dusting them, polishing them, keeping them organized and cataloged. He never talks to me, he certainly doesn’t make any small talk. He is perpetually in motion. There is much work for him to do. Someone has to maintain all of these forgotten things.

There are days when I peruse for hours, looking through the shelves to decide who I’ll write be researching and writing about. Today though, I know exactly where it is that I’m going. Even though I try to write and learn about many different mythological beings, I’ve been here many times before, to see this same goddess. In my imaginary shop of forgotten gods, she stands out. She is, like most of these forgotten gods, someone who used to be honored, but no longer is. Even though the ideal she represents is still very important, she is simply…no longer called upon. Not by name, anyway. Who would remember her name, after so much time? We call the forces she wields other things now. Even in her own time, she wasn’t tremendously prolific, or mentioned very often in texts. She’s certainly not Zeus, or Athena.

Poena, the Greek daimona of retribution, stares back at me from her lonely shelf, her face very, very still. A daimona is a personification of a spirit, and Poena is the embodiment of retribution and punishment. Her weapon is pain, and she wields it for vengeance. Penalty incarnate. She is depicted with wings, and they bear her to her destination quickly, allowing her to carry out her justice with great swiftness. If she were fighting for you, you would watch her in awe. If she were against you, she would be a miserable foe. She is the fury and justice of revenge made into a physical creature, and in Greek mythology she was closely associated with the Erinyes, goddesses who dealt with the avenging of filial crimes.

What she represents in these myths is critical, even if she’s not a deity we remember much about today. She is justice made real, capable of visiting anywhere and anyone and exacting revenge. But what can you write about a being like her, whose sole purpose, indeed the whole reason for her existence, is to bring penalty and pain? What would it be like to be Poena? If for millennia, your purpose was to extract enough pain to count as a true punishment– your fiery eyes witness to countless atrocities, to suffering, and to crimes avenged, what would you be like? I often wondered what that would do to a soul. Would that fire of revenge eventually burn too hot, extinguishing and consuming itself? What would take its place? In my mind I imagine a pile of ash, dead and grey. A fire of rage can only burn for so long. Eventually it must transform into something else. Though the fire has extinguished, what has replaced it is worse. Cold. Something that watches. And waits. It strikes when the moment is just right.

I turn away from the spirit, leaving her on the shelf, her face still inscrutable. Her eyes to me seem dead, the emotion smothered by the brutal nature of her work. I know that I’ll be back, these questions are what keep me coming back to this particular place. The emotions and impulses we feel as human beings—the desire for justice, the need to make things right, our need to obtain a penalty to avenge wrongs, those needs haven’t changed. They’ve simply evolved into something else. We may no longer call on Poena, but we still have those same qualities that we had in the times of the ancient Greeks. Poena will forever represent something capable of driving a human to destruction. Retribution.