WE don't know the exact reasons or the way precisely that Antinous died, we just know he drowned in the Nile.
Yet his death is laden with meaning, its significance reverberates through time, across centuries to captivate us even to this day!
Antinous may never have deliberately taken his own life, he might simply have underestimated the river as certainly many a young man has underestimated what would then claim his life.
But today I am going to say that Antinous was most likely aware that his death would not be inconsequential and it might even have occurred to him in a flash as he slipped under the water.
Antinous might have wished to have his life spared if he had been given the choice, but what I feel certain of is that Antinous approved of all his death would come to inspire ... the two contradictory possibilities co-exist.
Antinous became a god, the last of the Graeco-Roman and Egyptian gods of antiquity and the one who has most successfully endured since then to re-enter the modern world.
Antinous would and does not disapprove of the spiritual hunger amongst people that was sated by his death, by his deification that it led to and by the founding of a religion in his name that it had inspired.
Not as a young man, or as he died or after his death would he have wished it any other way ... leading me to believe that at some point before or even during the event, Antinous embraced his death and today we know by communing with him that he accepts his fate and is actually in command of and directing events that still stem from his death.
We can't say exactly to exactly what extent he did then, but his death was or came to be his chosen fate. As our god also in this day and age, he uses the powers vested in him by his death.
It is point zero from which so much have departed, from which ancient and modern Antinous worship proceeded, a solemn yet joyous occasion. His death came to be unlike any other, immense of consequence.
And we believers thank him for his gift, his sacrifice, for what it inspired and enabled him to be: Our Beloved God, Antinous.
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