Unicorn Goddess Eris (click on her name to download her coloring page for free!) is the Goddess of Strife and Chaos. That sounds pretty gnarly, and perhaps in one regard it may be, but read on.
In ancient Greece she was regarded as capricious, acting on whims that weren’t always well-intentioned and sometimes downright cruel. To be sure, she has a nasty side, but if you were in charge of the primordial void that everything comes from and everything returns to perhaps some of the things you would do aren’t understood by our puny human minds. Just sayin’.
One of my favorite stories of her from Greek mythology is the story of Eris and the Golden Apple. She had been snubbed an invitation to the wedding of Thetus and Peleus because of her trouble-making inclinations. Clearly, she wasn’t going to take that sitting down so she went anyway. In the middle of the celebrating, she tossed a golden apple between several of the goddesses with the word “kalliste” (or “the most beautiful one” in Greek) written on it. It landed between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena and they instantly started squabbling about which of them deserved the apple. Discordia stepped in to try and settle the conflict by passing the judging off to Zues, who wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole and selected poor Paris to be the judge. Hera offered him political power if he chose her, Athena offered him eternal wisdom and Aphrodite offered him the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Oh, and they all stripped down naked for him to really judge which one is the fairest of them all.
Paris, not too bright obviously, chose to give the apple to Aphrodite. He set in motion the events that would bring his city to ruin and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the Trojan War.
Discordia also became the patron goddess of Discordianism, a modern religion founded in the 1950s that used her as a foil of Western philosophy to constantly create order out of chaos.
A quote from the Principia Discordia, the first holy book of Discordianism, attempts to clear up the matter:
One day Mal-2 consulted his Pineal Gland and asked Eris if She really created all of those terrible things. She told him that She had always liked the Old Greeks, but that they cannot be trusted with historic matters. “They were,” She added, “victims of indigestion, you know.
She is chaos, the substance from which artists and poets congeal their creations.
In my version, Unicron Goddess Eris Discordia holds the golden apple of chaos with the letter “K” for Kalliste. She definitely has a mischievous smile on her face and her posture shows some attitude. Around her neck she wears the symbol of Chaos, an occult symbol as well as the symbol used for the Eight of Wands in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. Her waving mane contains the known universe as she is always just outside of the realm of Being and her locks morph into tentacles, because well, she is a creature of the great primordial depths beyond time.
Enjoy coloring Unicorn Goddess Eris!