Halia: Nymph of the Salt Sea

By E. L. Hunter

A grieving mother waded into the sea to drown herself, and rose from it as a goddess who saves the drowning.

That mother was Halia, the sea nymph of Rhodes, whose name is simply the Greek word for salt. She bore seven children to Poseidon, and the island is named for her daughter, Rhode. But her six sons were struck with madness, whether by Poseidon's anger or Aphrodite's, and assailed Aphrodite when the love goddess came ashore. Poseidon buried them beneath the earth, and in some tellings the submerged rocks off the Rhodian coast are their bodies. Unable to bear it, Halia threw herself into the waves and became Leucothea, the White Goddess.

She was not the only one. In faraway Boeotia, another grieving mother named Ino drowned herself and rose under the very same name. This book gathers Halia's scattered fragments and asks what one island made of her: reading Rhodian coins and shrines for her cult, and setting her small local worship against the distant Olympian gods.

What surfaces is Greek religion as it was really lived: not among the Olympians, but at the water's edge, at the mercy of the sea.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F9KHRVQF
• ISBN13: 9798284741641
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"