Paul

Season: 5, Episodes: 1, Faction: DHARMA Initiative

Overview

Paul was a member of the DHARMA Initiative who worked as head of security.

Death

War (Hunting)

Fertility (Vegetation)

Fertility (Water)

Sexuality

1977

5×08 – LaFleur

He was killed by a pair of Others while on a picnic with his wife, Amy. The Others were then killed by Juliet and Sawyer. Amy begged that Paul be brought back to the Barracks and Jin volunteered to carry him.

When Richard Alpert confronted Horace about the broken “truce”, they came to an agreement that Paul’s body be handed over to Richard and the Hostiles. Before letting Paul’s corpse be taken away, Amy took Paul’s necklace and kept it. (“LaFleur”)

Image Source | Source

Associated LOST Themes & DHARMA Location

Decoded Family Members

Amy Goodspeed (Wife)

Decoded Season 1 Characters

James Sawyer

Jin-Soo Kwon

Decoded Season 3 Characters

Juliet Burke

Horace Goodspeed

Richard Alpert

Decoded Season 4 Characters

Miles Straume

Daniel Faraday

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

5x08 "LaFleur"

Wiki Info

Adonis, originally a Phoenician god (Phoenicia being modern day Lebanon), also known in Greek mythology as a favourite of Aphrodite (Greek Αδωνις, Adōnis, “lord”) is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central cult figure in various mystery religions, who entered Greek mythology. He is closely related to the Cypriot Gauas or Aos, Egyptian Osiris, the Semitic Tammuz and Baal Hadad, the Etruscan Atunis and the Phrygian Attis, all of whom are deities of rebirth and vegetation. His cult belonged to women: the cult of dying Adonis was fully-developed in the circle of young girls around the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, about 600 BCE, as revealed in a fragment of Sappho’s surviving poetry.

Adonis is one of the most complex figures in classical times. He has had multiple roles, and there has been much scholarship over the centuries concerning his meaning and purpose in Greek religious beliefs. He is an annually-renewed, ever-youthful vegetation god, a life-death-rebirth deity whose nature is tied to the calendar. His name is often applied in modern times to handsome youths, of whom he is the archetype. Adonis if often referred to as the mortal god of Beauty.

Myths of Adonis

In the central myth in its Greek telling, Aphrodite fell in love with the beautiful youth (possibly because she had been wounded by Eros‘ arrow). The most detailed and literary version of the story of Adonis is a late one, in Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Aphrodite sheltered Adonis as a new-born baby and entrusted him to Persephone. The latter was also taken by Adonis’ beauty and refused to give him back to Aphrodite. The dispute between the two goddesses was settled by Zeus (or by Calliope on Zeus’ behalf): Adonis was to spend one-third of every year with each goddess and the last third wherever he chose. He chose to spend two-thirds of the year with Aphrodite.

Adonis was killed by a wild boar, said to have been sent variously by Artemis, jealous of Adonis’ hunting skills or in retaliation for Aphrodite instigating the death of Hippolytus, a favorite of the huntress goddess; or by Aphrodite’s paramour, Ares, who was jealous of Aphrodite’s love for Adonis; or by Apollo, to punish Aphrodite for blinding his son, Erymanthus. Adonis died in Aphrodite’s arms, who came to him when she heard his groans. When he died she sprinkled the blood with nectar, from which sprang the short-lived anemone, which takes its name from the wind which so easily makes its petals fall. And so it is the blood of Adonis that each spring turns to red the torrential river, the Adonis River (also known as Abraham River or Nahr Ibrahim in Arabic) in modern Lebanon. Afqa is the sacred source where the waters of the river emerge from a huge grotto in a cliff 200 meters high. It is there that the myth of Astarte (Venus) and Adonis was born.

Parentage and Birth

Adonis’ birth is shrouded in confusion for those who require a single, authoritative version, for various peripheral stories circulated concerning Adonis’ parentage. The patriarchal Hellenes sought a father for the god, and found him in Byblos and Cyprus, which scholars take to indicate the direction from which Adonis’ had come to the Greeks. Pseudo-Apollodorus, (Bibliotheke, 3.182) considered Adonis to be the son of Cinyras, of Paphos on Cyprus, and Metharme. According to pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke, Hesiod, in an unknown work that does not survive, made of him the son of Phoenix and the otherwise unidentified Aephesiboea. In Cyprus, Adonis gradually superseded that of Cinyras. Hesiod made him the son of Phoenix, eponym of the Phoenicians, thus a figure of Phoenician origin; his association with Cyprus is not attested before the classical era. W. Atallah suggests that the later Hellenistic myth of Adonis represents the conflation of two independent traditions. Alternatively the late source Bibliotheke calls him the son of Cinyras and Metharme. The more widely accepted version, recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is that Aphrodite compelled Myrrha (or Smyrna) to commit incest with her father Theias, the king of Assyria. Fleeing his wrath, Myrrha was turned into a myrrh tree. Theias struck the tree with an arrow, whereupon it burst open and Adonis emerged. Another version has a wild boar tear open the tree with its tusks, thus foreshadowing Adonis’ death.

After the daughter of Adonis and Aphrodite, Beroe, the city Berytos (Beirut) in Lebanon was called. Both Dionysus and Poseidon fell in love with her.

Image & Source