Hymen
In Greek mythology, the god of the marriage ceremony; personification of the refrain of a wedding song. In art, he is represented as a boy crowned with flowers, carrying a burning bridal torch.
As a youth in Attica, he disguised himself as a woman in order to accompany a girl on a procession to Eleusis, and saved the party from a band of thieves. Hymen married her and became the embodiment of matrimonial bliss.
| His parents were represented as either the god Apollo and a Muse or, in support of his capacity as a fertility deity, Dionysus, god of mystic ecstacy and orgiastic excess, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. |
