Prayer to Zeus and Hera

A modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001) — the couple's joint prayer.

The pair is rightly chosen, and by ancient custom: Zeus Teleios and Hera Teleia were at Athens the marriage gods proper. Teleios means both "perfect" and "pertaining to the telos", to completion: marriage was reckoned the completion of a life's course, the thing it was arranged for — and so the gods of that threshold bore the name.

What is curious is what did not trouble the Greeks in the least. The exemplary marriage invoked at every wedding was a bad marriage: Zeus and Hera quarrel throughout the Iliad, and her jealousy drives half of mythology. What they sanctified was not conjugal harmony but wedlock as an institution; a resemblance to one's own life was not expected.

Hera is called "queen of all, blessed consort of Zeus, mistress of marriage". This is the Hera of the Homeric hymn, defined by kinship and rank alone (homeric-hera-001), not the Orphic Hera who is air (orphic-hera-001). The LABRYS book takes Orphic texts almost everywhere; here it did not — because at a wedding one needs a wife, not an element.

The request matches: health, nourishing peace, mutual devotion. After the Orphic chains of epithets, such moderation is itself worth noting.