While pregnant-mother figureens have been found in very ancient tels, dating back as far as the Cro-Magnon period, around 35,000 BCE, the era of the Mother Goddess properly starts around 7,500 BCE, as "Bountiful Mother Earth", bringer of fertility.
In the temples of Sumer (3500-2500 BCE) she becomes universalised and metaphysical: Space, Time and Matter (MC²) and everything in the world are born from her womb - and we cannot ignore the fact that, in both Yehudit and Arabic, the word for "womb" is "RACHAM", which yields both "Mercy" and "Compassion" (bismillahi racḥmani racḥimi - بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ -
"in the name of al-Lah, the most compassionate, the most merciful"), inseminated by the Zayin of her male consort, Zayin (ז) being both the male organ and the Number Seven (the modern E, which was then Elohim).
The fertility of the Earth was understood to be connected with the cycles of the moon, as well as with the tides, which is why she is often described as being born on the foam of the sea, why the sea-monster Tahamat-Tiamat is her creature, and why the Earth-Goddess is usually also the Moon-Goddess in her Madonna (full-moon) phase.
By the end of the Bronze Age (circa 1250 BCE) the patriarchal age begins to takes over, and she is transformed, sometimes by masculinisation into male deities, mostly by reduction: to the Shechinah, then to the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit (itself now masculinised by Christianity!), to fairy stories (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Mary Magdalene, Cordelia in her Waxing Moon phase; Guinevere, Mother Mary in her Madonna phase; the Snow Queen, the Wicked Stepmother, Goneril and Regan in her Waning Moon phase).
This also explains why, usually, the moon is female, the sun male, but sometimes vice versa; to the Beney Yisra-El of the late Biblical age it became a male moon. Often they are brother and sister, like Av-Rraham and Sarah (see Campbell p393/4) , but especially Eshet-Osher.
This also explains why, usually, the moon is female, the sun male, but sometimes vice versa; to the Beney Yisra-El of the late Biblical age it became a male moon. Often they are brother and sister, like Av-Rraham and Sarah (see Campbell p393/4) , but especially Eshet-Osher.
In Greece the same Earth-Goddess was named Gaia. In Sumer the trinity was Apsu (father), Tahamat (mother) and Mummu (son), with Apsu-Mummu probably originally androgynously one, in the same way that the land-serpent of Eden is associated with Chavah the Earth-Goddess in the Genesis version of Creation. The Queen of the circling universe, Eurynome, aka Cardea, was identical to Rhea of Crete.
1) The Goddess by many names (see Mary Warner, "Alone Of All Her Sex" for the Mary evidence).
Lucius Apuleius, devotee of Eshet by her Greek name, Isis, described her in "The Golden Ass":
"I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names... For the Phrygians that are the first of men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusinians their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, others Ramnusie, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians, which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun; and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis."
Apuleius does not give the name by which the "Ethiopians of the Orient" (the same confusion of Ethiopian Kush and Arabian Kush which we find in the Tanach) knew her, but we can give it: Ishtar. And as to her true name being Isis... we know her inter multos alios as Inanna, Ninhursag, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Artemis, Demeter, Aphrodite, Esther, Venus, Diana...and of course, eventually, Mary.
Isis, which is the Greek rendition of her name, is really Eshet in Egyptian, though she is also Ishah-Ishah, "The Woman of all Women": the Yehudit word for Woman is likewise Ishah (אשה). It is not a name at all, in truth, but a glorifying epithet, a sobriquet, equivalent to "God of Gods" or "Shir Ha Shirim - The Song of Songs". Ishah Ishah = Supreme Female, The Great Goddess.
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| Isis and Thoth |
Sirius (Thoth or Sothis) rising on the horizon announces the rising of the flood waters of the Nile, the source of rebirth. Saint Epiphanius (c 315-402 CE) has written:
"On the eve of that day it was the custom to spend the night in singing and attending the images of the gods. At dawn a descent was made to a crypt and a wooden image was brought up which had the sign of a cross and a star of gold marked on hands knees and head. This was carried round in procession and then taken back to the crypt. It was said that this was done because The Maiden had given birth to The Aeon."The Aeon was the primordial god of time in the Greek world, essentially their answer to the question: "what happened before the Big Bang?"
"Then the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, the virgin is with child, and she will bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."
Alas for accuracy, the Yehudit text has ALMAH, which is a very specific term describing a young woman who has recently been married, who may very well already be pregnant, but who has not yet become an ISHAH because no child has yet been born, and the full status of "Woman" is consequent upon successful parturition, though even then she will be called a MAVKIRAH (מבכירה) during the first days of the child's life (cf Jeremiah 4:31); "virgin" in Yehudit would be BETULAH (בתולה) and this she cannot be, even a day after marriage. From such mis-translations do world-changing, universal theologies arise!
The Yehudit text in fact reads:
לָכֵן יִתֵּן אֲדֹנָי הוּא לָכֶם אוֹת הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ עִמָּנוּ אֵל
"LACHEN YITEN ADONAI HU LACHEM OT HINEH HA ALMAH CHARAH VE YOLEDET BEN VE KAR'AT SHEMO IMANU EL."
"Adonai" here is neither YHVH (יהוה) nor Elohim (אלהים), but "my Lord", and the child in question will be Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah), not Jesus. There is a war in Yisra-El, between the idol-worshiping King Achaz of Yehudah (he even made his son go through the fire of Moloch) and King Retsin of Aram, the latter supported by King Pekach of Ephrayim (the northern kingdom, aka Yisra-El). YHVH tells Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah) to tell Achaz not to worry, because Aram and Ephrayim (Yisra-El) will be defeated "within sixty-five years"; he then offers a sign to confirm this, and verse 14 provides that sign, spoken by YHVH. "My Lord" is the name by which the king was addressed; it is he who will have a son. The reference to "Imanu El" is not the naming of that son, but the crying out of the equivalent of "mazal tov" or "halleluyah": "yay, El is with us". What then follows is indeed a description of the Messiah, but a "present" not a "future" Messiah, and a Mashiyach not a Moshi'a, one who will achieve the defeat of Aram and Yisra-El, re-unite the kingdom, and re-instate the worship of YHVH. This child is Achaz' other son, Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah), who will succeed him as king; the Prophet of Yisra-El during Chizki-Yah's reign was the same Yesha-Yahu, and yes, Chizki-Yah did end the war, remove the idols, restore YHVH, and reunite the kingdom (2 Kings 18 ff); he is even identified with the original Messiah, King David (2 Kings 18:3), who is described as his "father", using "aviv - אָבִיו" in the sense of "ancestor". The Messiah (משיח - mashiyach) was the name given to the sacred-king, who ruled both the secular-temporal and the spiritual-religious realm.
But these are the minor matters, and a digression from our topic. More importantly, in the Greek Septuagint Almah is rendered as Parthenos, which means "virgin"; probably because teenage brides were not the convention in the Hellenic world. Yehudit is very specific in denoting the ages of any female. As a baby she is a TIYNOKET (תינוק); as an infant a YALDAH (ילדה); as a child a NA'ARAH (נערה) - cf Genesis 24:14 - as she begins to approach puberty Na'arah alternates with BACHURAH (בכורה); and throughout all this time she has been a BETULAH (בתולה), a virgin. But now she has reached puberty, and in the Middle East at that time she was considered to be ready for marriage at once. Once the husband has been chosen, and the marriage contract signed, she will become ARUSA (אֲרוּסָה), though the phrase BECHIRAT LIBO (בְּחִירַת לִבּוֹ) is often used today, when women are freer to choose their own husbands. Betrothal is called ERUSIN (whence ARUSA), or KIDDUSHIN (from KODESH = holy), but the full marriage, and with it consummation, comes with NISU'IN - the two often happen at the same time, but it isn't obligatory or automatic, and anciently a full year might elaspe; click here for a fuller explanation), and it is at this point that she becomes an ALMAH (עלמה - see my note at Genesis 24:43) - changing her social status so that men will know that she is ready to become someone other than her father's property. Once she is visibly pregnant she becomes MAVKIRAH (מבכירה), a recognition that she is now proven fertile, and about to produce her first fruit); soon after the child is born she will become ISHAH, which is used to mean both "woman" in the broadest sense of "female", and specifically "wife" (French does the same with "femme" and German likewise with "frau"). Once she has had her second child, ISHAH may be replaced by, or simply alternated with GIVERET (גברת), which is more or less the equivalent of Mrs.
BECHER (בכר) - BACHURAH is the feminine - really means "a young he-camel", and so was originally slang, in the way that we call children "kids", which are really "young goats"; but BACHUR (בכור) from the same root is far more complex. The root BACHAR (בכר) has the sense of "doing anything first", whence LEVACHER (לבכר) means "to rise early" or even "to do something in the morning"; more relevantly the first fruits (cf Ezekiel 47:12) are BIKURIM (בכורים), and the summer harvest festival of Shavu'ot is also for that reason called Chag ha-Bikurim.
An ALMAH, then, is a young woman, a teenage bride-in-waiting for her first child to be born; the inference of Isaiah 7:14 is that the king's son will find such a person, marry her, father a child on her - and that child will be Chizki-Yah, the redeemer of his people.
The Yehudit word for virgin, as noted above, is BETULAH, a word echoed in the names of Beit-El (Bethel) - the ancient Kena'ani (Canaanite) shrine - and in Betu-El (Bethu-El), who appears in the patriarchal legends as Lavan's (Laban's) father.
Thus Artemis became Diana, who in turn became the Virgin Mary. But in her original form, Mary - or Mir-Yam (Miriam) in Yehudit - was the priestess of the sacred grove and shrine on Mount Mor-Yah, where Shelomoh (Solomon) built the Temple, and where Av-Raham had previously sacrificed a ram in place of Yitschak (Isaac). Diana was a variant form of Dinah, daughter of Ya'akov (Jacob), virgin goddess of the Danaan Greeks who colonised Kena'an (Canaan) and became the tribe of Dan, and who in Greek knew her not as Dinah but as Danaë, the goddess of the moon.
To the Eirish, themselves a branch of the Greek Danaans (Tuatha de Danann) she was Danu, though they also knew her as Anu, the goddess of plenty (cf Annapurna), and as Brigid, the goddess of knowledge, poetry and the arts. Her vestal hearth-shrine in Kildare is to this day sacred to her, now in her Christianised form as Saint Brigit. Brigid's sisters are the patronesses of leechcraft and smithwork. At her shrine at Knockainy (properly Knock Áine) in Limerick she is known as the fairy queen Áine (pronounced Awn-ya, which may well be a variation of the Jerusalemite Ornah, or Araunah, whose threshing-floor was purchased by King David as the site for the Temple), and worshipped especially as the harvest goddess of Midsummer Eve.
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| Osher in his reed coffin |
Osher (Osiris) was the son of Geb the earth-god and Nut the sky-goddess (note which way round it goes; male-earth and female-sky: most unusual; Geb is linked to Giv'on and Giv-Yah), born with his sister-wife Eshet during the five planetary festival days that link one 360-day year with another.
He and Eshet were the first to plant barley and wheat, to gather fruit from trees, to cultivate the vine; before them all men were cannibalistic savages.
But Osher's brother Set (the son of Adam and Chavah/Eve in the Yisra-Eli version) whose sister-wife was the goddess Nephthys, was jealous of his virtue and his fame, built a beautiful coffin for him, brought it to a party, got Osher drunk, and played a game of who does it fit. Osher got in, and 72 conspirators (72 is an Egyptian sacred number, the double-Decan) nailed him up inside and threw him in the Nile. Eshet was overwhelmed with grief, cut off her hair, put on mourning, and searched for him everywhere. The coffin was carried to the sea, and floated as far as Byblos, close to the ancient town of Ugarit, where the alphabet would later be invented. A tamarisk tree grew up around it (Tamar in Yehudit is a palm; she was also David's daughter raped by Amnon, and the woman on whom Yehudah fathered Parets and Zerach. The Arabians worshipped the palm of Najran as a goddess. I make this connection because the god of Byblos was born under a palm tree, which makes him a variation of Osher, as the palm grew around the coffin of Osher when it was washed up). The local king Melkarth and Queen Astarte (i.e. the ruling gods) smelled the sweet savour of the tree and ordered it cut down to serve as a pillar in their palace, presumably a version of the World Tree - the Yggdrasil of Christmas now, the Tree of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in Eden.
Eshet searched for Osher, exactly as Demeter did for Persephone; eventually she came to Byblos and heard about the tree. Like Demeter she sat by a well, veiled and in humble disguise, mourning, speaking to no one until the queen's handmaidens came by; by breathing her fragrance on them she entranced Astarte, who summoned her to be her child's nurse (cf Mosheh's discovery by Pharaoh's daughter and her "hiring" of Yochabed, via Mir-Yam, as wet-nurse in Exodus 2:1-10). She suckled the child on her finger not her breast, placed him in a fire to burn away his mortal parts (presumably she held him by the heel, so that part did not get protected; cf Achilles), and flew around the pillar in the form of a swallow (though the Egyptian word could be translated as a dove); but Astarte found her and screamed, dragging her child from the fire and thus denying him the immortality he would have had. Eshet then revealed herself, begged for the pillar, removed the sarcophagus, and cried so loud that the queen's child died instantly. Eshet then found the boat that carried Osher, opened it, kissed her brother, and wept. The boat returned to the Nile Delta.
One night of the full moon, while boar-hunting, Set found the body and tore it into fourteen pieces (the reason why 14, the number of the Stations of the Cross, became symbolically important in Egypt), which he scattered abroad. Again Eshet sought for Osher, this time helped by her son Horus, whose head was a hawk, and by Nephythys' son Anubis, whose head was a jackal, and by Nephthys herself (another legend tells that Anubis was actually Osher's child by Nephthys, and this is why Set was angry with him; he had sexual rights over his sister Eshet but not over Nephythys, who belonged to Set. Horus was born, legend has it, when Eshet lay on her dead brother in the boat, or when she fluttered around the pillar in the guise of a bird). The four gods were joined by Thoth the moon-god, whose head was an ibis, though sometimes a baboon, and together they found all the parts of Osher, except his penis, which a fish had swallowed. The body was bound in bandages and rites performed (whence the burial rites of kings); Eshet fanned him with her wings; and Osher revived, to become the ruler of the Land of the Dead, where he now sits, in the Hall of the Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from each of the principal districts of Egypt.
The myth of Dumuzi-Absu and Inanna is identical save for one fact; in place of the pig as sacred animal they have the moon-bull. Demeter also has the pig. Is it significant that the unclean animal of western Asia was the pig and of eastern Asia the cow? In the Venus and Adonis (elsewhere the Aphrodite and Adonis) version it is again a boar who kills the god, as with Attis in the Phyrgian version. The pig - or bull - is thus linked to the abyss, and may not be eaten. In the Jesus version, as in the David-Sha'ul, the tusk of the boar or bull is replaced by a mere human equivalent, a spear or javelin(in Sha'ul's case, he missed, twice).
In the earliest Mesopotamian legends, Inanna is described as abandoning Heaven and Earth to search for her lost son in the netherworld. She is also depicted as a hierodule, and as a slave-girl dancer for the gods - just like Salome in the Christian tale, just like Tamar in the Yehudan (Genesis 38:15), and indeed just like Esther in the Jewish rendition of Persian Inanna.
Similarly, when Inanna becomes Ishtar, the legends replace Dumuzi-Absu with Tammuz-Adonis, but an anagram of the same tale is told: how he was out hunting wild boar when he was gored in the loin and rendered impotent; how he descended in death to the lower world, and was resurrected when Ishtar descended to release him. Identical to the story of Persephone, only masculine; with overtones of Orpheus' descent to fetch Eurydice.
Returning to Demeter, or at least to the versions of Demeter found in in Crete and Sicily, Demeter was the mother of Persephone; fathered by Zeus, who then fathered Dionysus on Demeter (its details suggest a variation of the Yehudah-Tamar story referred to above). Each of these stories includes a wet-nurse, and this time it is Io (Yah to the Beney Yisra-El, brother of Phoroneus, the Hittite Ephron of the Av-Raham stories); she nursed the infant Dionysus, guarded by Argus Panoptes, the hundred eyed Titan; Argo, perhaps not coincidentally, was the name of Odysseus' dog. Io was the white cow aspect of the barley-goddess, but also represented as a white mare, and as a white sow named Choere or Phorcis, aka Marpesa.
The Moirai, or Three Fates (The Three Norns in the Niebelungenlied) are a variant of the triple goddess, and also appear as the Graeae (the "Three Grey Ones" and, in Delphi at least, for the rest of Greece reckoned nine of them, the Three Muses (Μοῦσαι). In the earliest Celtic versions they are Moira, Ilithya and Callone = Death (or Fate, which amounts to the same thing), Birth, Beauty, the triad of goddesses who control generation. In Eireland, when Christianity spent centuries reducing the Celtic to "paganism" and pretending that all the Celtic gods and goddesses were Christian saints, they became Breg, Meng and Meable = Lie, Guile and Disgrace; the triple-named mother of Brigit and wife of The Dagda, and from there it is not far before they become renamed yet again, as Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The triplets are also identified by colours, white for the new moon, red for the full moon, black for the waxing moon (which is both death and resurrection). The three women appear as Mary, Mary Magdalene and Martha in the Jesus story.
Dionysos (which may simply be a spelling variation of Dionysus, or an entirely different deity whose tale was later absorbed into the Dionysian) was killed and eaten and resurrected as the god of bread and wine. Persephone, also known as Kore, the maiden, was conceived by Zeus with Demeter the Cretan goddess of agriculture and fruitful soil. She was playing in a meadow with the daughters of Oceanos the sea-god (cf Tahamat!), when she saw a plant put there to seduce her by Earth-Gaia at the behest of Hades of the Underworld. She plucks, his chariot appears, and away she goes to the underworld. Demeter hears her cries, as does Hecate the moon goddess. But her footprints are obliterated by a pig (see below), which fell into a chasm when the earth opened. (Her sorrows were commemorated at the Thesmophoria; a nine-day fast.) Demeter and Hades run to tell Phoebus the sun-god, who had seen the abduction; Demeter storms out of heaven and sits by the well of the virgin for nine days (whence the nine-day fast); then serves as nurse to a king near Eleusis, where she curses the Earth to barrenness. Zeus et al come to beg her to relent. Zeus then has Persephone released by a deal; as she has eaten the pomegranate she has to stay for four months but is allowed out for the rest. Her returns revive the Earth and all is well.
These Eleusinian "mysteries" were a harvest and rebirth festival. Lots of pigs and snakes were involved, plus figureens made out of bread and eaten eucharistically, in what must originally have been a sacramental cannibalistic meal (the Passover Seder, which was of course the Last Supper, in its Cro-Magnon form!). At some level the snake is Hades (compare again the tales of David and Sha'ul, the Underworld god; once David has supplanted Sha'ul and unified the kingdom, his principal external enemy will be the Beney Amon, whose king just happens to be named Nachash - snake!).
These links between the serpent and the maiden recur in stories from across the "Common Source", the Eden story obviously; those of Tiamat and Leviathan; also Perseus, and Andromeda who he rescued from a serpent (after killing the serpent Medusa himself - and note that Medusa was herself one of yet another triad of sisters). Note also that Oceanos is himself a sea-serpent! and she was playing with his daughters. In the east a monster eel replaces the serpent; elsewhere they are dragons. But the key is the creation myth, of the world snake cut in half by the creator god to inseminate world-renewal. Amongst the Maoris the serpent is actually called Te Tube which means the Phallus.
The maiden given to the serpent is still the staple of the silent movie (the damsel in distress, strapped by the wicked villain to the railway track, rescued by the quixotic hero).
And as to the pig... Campbell suggests ("The Masks of God" Vol 1. p197) that the role of the serpent as sacred animal of the labyrinth was taken over by the pig, then the bull, then the horse - or the goat in both Beney Yisra-El and Cretan myths. Either way this explains the taboo on eating pork, or beef. What he misses is the reason for this transition, which in part is explainable by the changes in agriculture and the domestication of animals in different parts of the world; but it also owes something to the ancient habit of star-gazing: the Age of Taurus ended at around 2000 BCE, and the Age of Aries supplanted it, just as shepherd Ya'akov (Jacob) supplanted hunter Esav (Esau) in the Genesis tale, and fisher-of-men Jesus will bring in the Age of Pisces, precisely 2000 years after that (click here for more on this).
Campbell also claims that King Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah) gave the contempt name Nechushtan (from Nachash = snake) to the therapeutic serpent or Seraph worshipped idolatrously. Yet it was already called that in the Book of Numbers 21:9, when Mosheh carried it as his banner! Where Campbell is correct, and the text of Numbers confirms this, is that Nechushtan was not simply a banner, but really an early form of the Caduceus Pole, which is also the Rod of Hermes, the Rod of Aesculapius, probably the Rod of Aaron too, its purpose medicinal (the link I have given here is one of the most fascinating of any I have linked to anywhere in TheBibleNet. Give yourself an hour and browse it.)
The Rod or Caduceus of Hermes was his wand of office while conducting souls to the underworld; it came in the form of coupling snakes. In the Greek version of the much earlier Persian myth of Marduk, the world-egg was split open by the Demiurge, who is Helios, the sun, identified by the Orphics with their god Apollo (Orphics believe that Creation came about through the coupling of the Great Goddess with Ophion); the hatching of the World Egg (the link here is to the ancient Chinese version) was celebrated at their spring festival. The Druids later used hen eggs (they called them Glain) in place of snake eggs, and painted them scarlet (the hen being sacred to Aesculapius - who was probably the Druid Bran). These later became Easter eggs (from oestrus = "ovulation" in Greek; but also the root of Ishtar, Astarte, Esther etc), though we prefer brown chocolate to scarlet dye these days.
The mythical bird of self-rebirth, the third of the three "dragons" (all female, all sisters) of the ancient world (Tahamat the earth-dragon, Behemot the sea-dragon, Phoenix the sky-dragon; Tohu, Bohu and Seraph in the Tanach) the Phoenix, takes its name from the Phoenicians, both stemming from Phoinix meaning "purple" - the colour of the dye elicited from the murex snail, and how oddly coincidental that the Hittite-derived Druids should have chosen precisely that colour! The bird links to the moon-goddess for obvious reasons, but also to the sun through its fiery rebirth. As such it is the progeny of their marriage. It is the equivalent of the Celtic dragon, which is more serpent-like, and itself linked in that way to the Plumed Serpent of South America and the Edenic serpent, the Mosaic brass serpent etc.
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3) Some other tidbits and tidpieces of goddess-related data:
The Feast of the Visit of the Magi in Egypt takes place on January 6th; now known as the Epiphany by Christians, it was originally an Alexandrian festival of the birth of the new Osher from Kore, the Maiden, but in the early mediaeval period it became Christian, was specifically Twelfth Night, and actually the date on which Christmas was celebrated, before it was moved to Sol Invictus (December 21st) and then moved again when the calendar was reformed (click here), to December 25th.
And not just Kore. In almost every mythology around the world, the goddess' son is reborn on their equivalent of Sol Invictus, and therefore the conception as well as the death, must be in the spring (March).
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Cybele and Ishtar (both forms of the moon goddess) tolerated sodomy in their temple courts; "tolerated" may be a gentle euphemism. The male hierodules were as important to the rites as were the female.
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The hemlock which killed Socrates was sacred to Hecate, the moon-goddess.
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Diana was also known as Vesta, and as Nemorensis, from Nemos = "grove". Her feats-day was traditionally celebrated on August 13th, 13 being the Ides, a Roman equivalent of the Moslem Ids, in that month (the Kalends was the new moon, the 1st day of the month; the Nones fell on the 7th in March, May, July, and October, the 5th in the other months; the Ides fell on the full moon, the 15th, in March, May, July and October, but the 13th in the other months).
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Helen, in the Homeric tale of the Trojan wars, was originally not a mortal woman at all, but rather Helle, a version of Persephone.
But then, the Iliad, like the first eight books of the Tanach, never was an account of actual history, but always a mythological tale, a set of parables to explain the workings of the universe, in the days before Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Ditto the Odyssey.
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The horned moon-goddess in Egypt was known as Hat-Hor as well as Eshet, and elsewhere as Astarte et cetera. She represented the land of Egypt, the royal palace, and was regarded as the mother of the living Pharaoh. Probably the doubling was because the religions of Upper and Lower Egypt were not the same.
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Two versions of the next note, which will need some unravelling:
Pasiphae was the Cretan moon-goddess, married to Pyrrha ("the red one", like Adam), whose son Deucalion was the Greek No'ach (Noah) - other versions have her married to King Minos, and Pyrhha married to Deucalion, Pyrrha in those instances being female. His son Amphyction was "the first man to mix wine with water" - which I guess improves the water; if he were the first man to mix water with wine he might not be so interesting to remember - he married Crane, the heiress of Attica, and set up altars to Dionysus and the nymphs. Amphyction was not his real name. The Amphyction League was set up in honour of the barley-goddess Demeter or Danaë, and Amphyction in the feminine means "President of Neighbours", which is to say "Tribal Council" or "National Assembly" or even "Parliament" in modern terms; when later on women no longer counted, the title was masculinised and personified. I have used the word amphyctiony throughout TheBibleNet to describe the tribal structure of Yisra-El, because it too had twelve "members", or should we say "constellations"?
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In the same way, in yet one more example of the masculinisation, the patriarchalisation, of the pantheon of the gods and goddesses, Don King of Dublin and Lochlin was originally a variant of Danaë, the goddess of Dublin and Lochlin who elsewhere is Eleusinian Diana and Beney Yisra-El Dinah.
Part of the difficulty we moderns have, when trying to fathom the nature of ancient deities, lies between two uncomfortable stools: on one, there is the process of masculinisation, in which the goddesses are either diminished into fairy tales, transformed into male deities, or demonised; on the other, there is the waning-moon phase of the triple goddess' cycle, in which she is herself demoniacal, the envious step-mother who traduces the virgin child who is the waxing moon. How can we know, in any circumstance, which uncomfortable stool to sit on?
Likewise Hel is an early mediaeval figure from Norse mythology - the consumer of the wicked dead through the mouth and belly. The link, as noted above, goes forward into the late mediaeval concept of Hell, but it also goes back to ancient cannibalism, where it reflects Moloch-worship in pre-Yeru-Shala'im and elsewhere.
Likewise again, the Greek Gaia may have come originally from the Hindu Gaja Lakshmi, goddess of the elephants; Buddha's law was represented by a sun-wheel, which became the fire-wheel or CHEREV of Eden (Genesis 3:24), the Iranian swastika.
And speaking of fire, and fire-wheels, in many cultures she is represented as the Guardian of the Hearth, which of course makes her a domesticated version of the goddess of fire. She is often linked to volcanic mountains - Mount Fuji in Japan the most obvious example.
Compare also the Melanesian Malekula, "Land of the Dead" - the soul is carried on the wind across the waters of death; as it approaches the entrance to the underworld it meets a female guardian, seated at the entrance, drawing a labyrinth on the path, half of which she rubs out at the soul's approach. The soul must resolve the labyrinth if it is to pass; failure leads to it being eaten by the Cerbera (a word that strikes a remarkable, and feminine, resonance, with the Greek who does a rather similar job, Cerberus). The principal concern of Malekula religious ceremonial is to teach the secret of the labyrinth - and thereby the secret of immortality - before death (cf Kafka's "Doorway of the Law"; and also the Egyptian "Book of the Dead"). Later mythology transformed it into a male hell, with Cerberus as the guardian - cf Dante).
New Grange (2nd millennium), to give one example, was spiral, and from the description at the end of the second Book of Samuel (2:18:17), this was also the model for the burial of Av-Shalom (his burial, not his later tomb). It too provided a home for a child-eating beast (the Minotaur in Crete, the Tsi'un in pre-Davidic Yeru-Shala'im,) and connected to the womb-tomb.
The Egyptian Labyrinth at Hawara, mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, found by Petrie in 1888, was a vast complex of buildings incorporating the tombs of kings by an artificial lake replete with sacred crocodiles. Labyrinth, maze and spiral in ancient Crete and Babylon are likewise linked to the internal organs of the female body. Thus the tomb, which was designed to be womb-shaped, physically imitates the mother, and death is a return, and a potential rebirth.
Heroes who have to surmount mazes, as Theseus did in Crete, are commonplace, and continue into modern-folk tales such as the waking of Brünnhilde in the "Nibelungenlied", and its English version, "Sleeping Beauty". This is also reflected in the interiors of Egyptian tombs and pyramids, and can be found in the megalithic burial sites of Brittany and Salisbury Plain in England, which are at least two thousand years older than the Cretan.
The Minotaur, a bull-variation of the dog Cerberus and the tongue of Kali, ate its victims alive. The penetration of the maze was equated to the taking of virginity; in most hero myths (Theseus and Ariadne, Ya'akov and Rachel etc) the reward for surviving the maze was betrothal to the princess. Aeneas, arriving at the entrance to the Underworld, found a rock engraving of the Cretan labyrinth (Malekula!).
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4) The role and nature of the goddess
As with Kali and Hel, above, in every culture in the world since human beings lived in caves and began to articulate their understanding of the cosmos mythologically, she has been the principal goddess of the Earth, Mother Earth indeed, nourisher of life and receiver of the dead. At first she may have been a mere fertility cult, but later the three dimensions of Time, Space and Matter all became combined in her as the feminine half of overall Creation (see for examples the Sumerian temples of 3500-2500 BCE); thus she was already metaphysical. Everything stems from the womb of this goddess, who is thus the Great Creatress; but the womb requires insemination, and so she is always (Judaism and Christianity and Islam have all traduced this) partnered in consort with her spouse, the male god of sun and sky, the E (Elohim) who "equals" her MC².
Graves in "The White Goddess" describes her as "a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips as red as rowan berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she can transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. She is called The White Lady or The White Goddess, the Muse, the Mother of All Living, and is represented as a spider or queen-bee" - any living creature really, because all living creatures exist for the purposes of engendering their own posterity. And then, in her waning phase, there is the most terrible of all the forms of her embrace: death.
Because she is the moon, and because the moon passes through three discernible phases, she is always the young virgin, the Madonna, and the old witch; and these three are always rivals, though the virgin is only ever the victim of that rivalry, never an active protagonist. The chief weapon of the rival is what Keats called "the spear that roars for blood". Hear her in the hooting of owls, rushing waterfalls, dogs barking in the distance, the peal of bells in frosty weather at the eve of the New Year. Her cruellest aspect is the Night Mare - for which compare Lilit. Her nests in rock-clefts or the branches of ewe-trees are lined with horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds. Job (chapter 39) said of her: "She dwelleth and abideth upon the rock. Her young ones also suck up blood". (Graves: "The White Goddess")
All life is born in the earth and returns to it - this is the first aspect of the goddess.
Dawn, the birth/awakening of each day - this is the second aspect, and why she is identified with the dawn star.
The dark night, linked to hell and death, the realm in which the sun may never set his toe let alone his foot, and if he dares to, like Shimshon with Delilah, he will be bound, his hair cut, his eyes gloucestered - but that same netherworld is also illuminated by the moon, and this gives her a third aspect.
The pull of gravity and the turning tides, linked to the moon, and to menstruation, give her a fourth.
The sloughed skin of the snake, and other forms of seeming reincarnation and resurrection, rebirths like dawn and spring, give her a fifth.
Childbirth - the magical functions of the female body - the sixth; and as her waters break to give birth, so it is assumed must those of the universe at Creation - the image of the Raki'a, and the separation of the waters, in Genesis 1:6 ff.
In ancient art the female is always depicted naked, the male sheathed, masked, tatooed, usually in animal disguise
In ancient death-rituals, the tumuli were shaped to echo the womb, and the body lain out in foetal mode so that death would become rebirth.
The link to the moon brings in the wolf, dog, jackal and coyote.
The link to water brings in mermaids, witches and sirens, maidens at wells and springs, youth-renewing cauldrons and ladies of the lake, nixies, water nymphs etc. All these appear as guardians of water (Rivkah, Rachel) or manifestations of water: wells, water-courses, youth-renewing springs and cauldrons, oceans etc (Mir-Yam, Mary, the Lady of the Lake etc). And all the sun-heroes are born, or floated, on her waters: Osher (Osiris), Mosheh, Perseus, Jesus at his baptism, etc. Birth of nations likewise: No'ach's Flood, the Crossing of the Reed Sea etc.
As Earth-Mother she gives life, through the breaking of the waters and egress from the womb. As Mother-Earth she takes back life, along the river into the underworld, buried in a womb-shaped grave.
Ovid's story of Actaeon (in Book 3 of his "Metamorphoses") - stalking a deer with his dogs he found a stream and followed it to its source, where he found Diana bathing, surrounded by naked nymphs. Diana turned him into a stag, which his own dogs scented, pursued, killed.
Diana, as we have seen, is Artemis, the Huntress, who is the great goddess and mother of all things (Eshet, Chavah, Inanna, Ishtar). Like Chavah (Eve), she is ashamed of her own nakedness, and therefore slays the unwitting voyeur. Artemis is usually represented naked, and with several breasts. It was at Diana's main temple at Ephesus, in 431, that the Virgin Mary was declared "the god-bearer". From the manner of Catholic worship it is clear that Mary is Diana (is Artemis, Chavah, Ishtar etc).
Heinrich Zimmer, a key influence on Joseph Campbell, has written of her that:
"She is the primum mobile, the first beginning, the material matrix out of which all comes forth... according to the Greek tradition the goddess has declared herself that 'no one has lifted my veil'. It is a question not exactly of the veil but of the garment that covers her female nakedness; the veil is a later interpretation for the sake of decency. The meaning is: 'I am the Mother without a spouse, the Original Mother; all are my children.'"The injunction against viewing nakedness is enshrined in one of the 613 commandments, in the story of Lot, et al. Significantly Mosheh on Sinai was not permitted to look - was the god of Sinai then a version of the Mother-Goddess? No - simply the cult of "no-looking" had been extended to the male deity. And later, in the Temple, as in the synagogue today, the Holy of Holies too was concealed behind a veil.
Is Zimmer correct about the veil as prurient metaphor? Are we not describing here the state of purdah?
A Greek legend tells of a youth who went into the temple at Ephesus and lifted Diana's veil. His tongue was paralysed by the shock of what he saw. And in another version of Actaeon, Diana threw water in his face, which paralysed his tongue.
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Water is the vehicle of the Mother Goddess' power; but equally she personifies the mystery of the waters of birth and dissolution. As in the Ganges, as in the Yarden (Jordan), so in the priestly libation vessel, as in the font, as in the mikveh, water has the power to purify - but is this any different from the gout-riddled Victorians at Bath Spa, or the guilt-riddled Papists at Lourdes?
At the opening of Genesis nothing exists except water (as an element) and wind (air); the other two elements await to be created. In Creation, the spirit of god as wind mates with the spirit of goddess as water (Ru'ach-Mayim), and life is engendered. Nor is it the deity, but the Ru'ach Elohim, that "hovers above the water"; mist and rain then, which in both of the Genesis creation myths represent semen. Seed sewn in the body through sex equates to seed sewn in the soil through planting. Earth buries but also gives birth in precisely the same way, most noticeably in trees and crops which visibly emanate. Grain is sown in the body of the earth, born from it, dies into it.
In Yehudit Ru'ach is feminine, Mayim masculine. The creation of the world on the first day, and we see it again in the No'achic Flood, is a description of the breaking of the waters that leads to parturition.
So we can say that the fertility goddess was identified with water precisely because of the uterus. Her imagery alwaysfollows birth, the umbilicus, puberty, marriage, reproduction, death (rebirth); the earth and the womb are inter-identified. Thus tumuli are shaped like the vagina or the womb; bodies there were laid out foetally, in preparation for rebirth in the womb of earth. Burial is thus a physical re-entry into the womb. Water flows constantly through thetales of the mermaids, nymphs, witches, caludrons, wells, ladies of the lake, sirens etc. The water is her vehicle of power (Aphrodite for example, or Genesis Creation).
Water also purifies through baptism.
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5) RITES OF PASSAGE: Birth and Death
The child in the womb is in a state of bliss: paradisal unconsciousness. There is no daylight etc, only the Creating/Nourishing mother. The placenta is the universe and it is made entirely of water. How does this fit the pre-Creation picture of Genesis 1? How strongly does this nine-month psychological bonding form the concept of God later on - and Goddess even more? To what extent are the fears of death and darkness really the fear of returning to the womb, but mitigated by the infantile desire to return to the warmth and safety and comfort of the womb? And why should we fear it? Unless we have a precognisance of death. And how far are the libidinous instincts (breasts and vagina are both erogenous and nurturous) really a desire to recover the infantile state, pre or post birth?
Earth, like Water, is an image of bearing and nourishing - and both superiorise the mother, inferiorise the father almost to the point of irrelevance, a mere seed-sack substitutable entirely by the test-tube. The seed is sewn in the mother's body, as in the soil. However, earth is also a burial-ground; thus dust to dust is womb to womb (or womb to tomb, a womb of earth), and death becomes the means of re-entry to the womb. Hence, inevitably, the religions of rebirth and resurrection and reincarnation. The dying flower seeds and composts its own posterity. Pharaohs enter the pyramid with all their wives, servants, household goods. The earliest grave burials, Neanderthal skeletons from 200,000 to 75,000 BCE, have been found interred with supplies for a new life (or at least for a long journey), accompanied by animal sacrifice (including wild ox, bison and wild goat), usually on an east-west axis (the path of the sun from its birth to death); flexed in the foetal position, in one case with a pillow of flints (exactly like Ya'akov at Beit-El). The death position thus hints at the birth position; resurrection is implied; the sun's solstice point is often fixed geometrically to enter the tomb.
Sleep and death are likewise equated; both lead to a linking of awakening with resurrection. Yet only in Buddhism do souls awake, transmuted to a higher or a lower destiny. In all other religions we awaken as ourselves.
Dolmen is the name give to the traditional burial-chamber of the megalithic epoch; a womb of earth - consisting of a cap-stone supported on two or more uprights, in which a dead hero is buried in a crouched position like a foetus in the womb, awaiting rebirth. The entrance to the inner chamber was always both low and narrow, making a shape that mirrored or represented the uterus. In Melanesia they are sacred doors through which the totem-initiate crawls in a ceremony of rebirth, and probably the Druids did the same.
The main rites of passage then (but only some apply to the male, while all apply to the female) are Birth; Puberty (initiation, loss of virginity); Marriage (adulthood); Child-bearing; Middle Age (menopause); Old Age (2nd childhood); Death (rebirth, resurrection, reincarnation, afterlife) - at each stage a symbolic death and rebirth occurs, a skin is sloughed; even the act of coition is perceived as a form of dying (click here). The principle myths relate to these rites of passage: Fire-theft, flood, land of the dead, virgin birth, resurrected hero, sacrifice of the firstborn etc
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6) The cult of the serpent
Hugely important to our understanding of Eshet, and the mother-goddesses of the world in general, but I have already written this essay elsewhere. Click here.
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Joseph Campbell ("The Masks of God" ,Vol 1, p88) argues that, in the initiation rites, the mother gives birth to the temporal body, but men give birth to the spiritual body; hence the rites which, in the most ancient of times, took place inside the caves, complete with the making of the cave-paintings, tatooing, circumcision, and more. Amongst the more was the gathering of the young men into gangs, which were not called gangs, but named "totem-clans", each one usually associated with an animal, but more importantly each one
"an object (such as an animal or plant) serving as the emblem of a family or clan and often as a reminder of its ancestry also : a usually carved or painted representation of such an object. b : a family or clan identified by a common totemic object. 2 : one that serves as an emblem or revered symbol." (Merriam-Webster dictionary).
And with the clan, the totem pole, which was not just any pole, but one ornately carved with heraldic, genealogical and mythological creatures, both human and animal.
The Australian circumcision rite includes the embracing of the sacred tree (a cosmic pole said to emerge from the head of the first ancestor; which is to say his skull grave); thus does Jesus embrace the cosmic pole on Golgotha, the mound of ancestor Adam's skull; thus the Tree of Life is a phallic caduceus pole in Eden.
13-year-old circumcision is also the death of childhood ritualised - as children we are sexless and thus androgynous, but now we are male; girls, by contrast, bleed, and are thus physically transformed without needing a human rite (though there are socities which practice female circumcision as well). The change to 8th day circumcision amongst the Beney Yisra-El is thus significant...
These rites also include a period of separation from the community during which transformation, physical but especially psychological, takes place; they return in the new role as Mosheh and Christ do from their forty days in the wilderness, or ordinary Beney Yisra-Elim from the forty-day period of Nazirut. In the ancient world the physical change was marked by scourging, fasting, finger sacrifices, removal of a testicle, circumcision, biting, burning, the immolation of the heel (Oedipus, Geisha) et al - new clothing was also given, as with Yoseph's coat of many colours, or tatooing.
The Litany of Loreto, a Roman Catholic text, names the Virgin Mother Mary as "Holy Mother of God, the Mother of Divine Grace and Good Counsel, Virgin most renowned and most powerful, most merciful and most faithful, Mirror of Justice and Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our Joy, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, Queen of Peace, Tower of David, Tower of Ivory and House of Gold. This could be Ishtar or Diana or Chavah (Eve) or Anat just as easily.
In the figureens of the basal neolithic (circa 4,500) various symbols are associated with her: the mirror, the kingly throne of wisdom, the gate, the morning and evening stars, a column flanked by lions rampant; she is depicted pregnant, squatting in childbirth, or à la Madonna and Pieta; clutching her breasts with both hands, holding one and pointing to her genitals; cow-headed (as Io and Hat-Hor); carrying a bull-headed child (Horus), naked on a lion's back; flanked by lions or goats rampant; holding serpents; crowned with the walls of a city; sitting between a bull's horns.
The drops of blood in the Grail Cup are collected from the cut throat of the sacrificial victim. In Yoseph the baker's head is cut off and then the butler restored - so in presenting the kiddush cup (what else is it?) to Pharaoh, does it contain the baker's blood?
Why are the cow and pig not eaten? It is strange, because the bull and boar have tusks/horns that suggest the waxing-waning moon; but it is the suckling female from whom they are born that is not eaten. presumably the male can be. And presumably there is a day in the year when she not only can be but, eucharisticaly, should be? But which day?
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Last thoughts
Apuleius' picture of Eshet/Isis, cited at the topof this blogpage, makes her very close to an ideal of "The One Goddess", and it is not hard to see its patriarchalised form in Biblical YHVH. The process of masculinisation - or defeminisation if you prefer - can be seen in the story of the birth of Dionysos:
"When the goddess Demeter arrived in Sicily from Crete with her daughter Persephone, who she had conceived of Zeus, she discovered a cave near the spring of Kyane, where she hid the maiden, setting to guard her the two serpents who were normally harnessed to Persephone's chariot. Persephone began to weave a woolen web for a robe, on which was to be pictured the universe; Demeter meanwhile informed Zeus of her presence. Zeus approached Persephone in the form of a serpent, and she conceived Dionysos, equally her brother and her son, and nurtured him in the cave. His toys were a ball, a top, some dice, some golden apples, some wool, a bull-roarer and a mirror. While staring into the mirror, two Titans came up behind him, painted white with clay or chalk, sent by Hera, Zeus' wife, to kill him. They tore him into seven parts, boiled the parts in a cauldron on a tripod, and roasted him on seven spits. They then ate all of him, save only the heart, which Athene had rescued. The smell of roasting meat drew Zeus into the cave; he slew the Titans with a lightning-bolt. Athene presented the heart to Zeus, who ate it, and himself gave birth to the resurrected Dionysos, some say issuing him through his head."Plutarch, in "Isis and Osiris", describes the winter solstice rites: carrying the golden cow of Isis in black cloth seven times round the shrine of Osiris. The fact that it was golden (though female), and the number seven... but go to the link, rather than me explaining it all again here: the bride at Kiddushin, the Ka'aba in Mecca, Yehoshu'a's conquest of Yericho, the Hakafot of Simchat Torah, so many more: seven is the patriarchal number!
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The goddess did not die out in the Tanach, despite the Redactor's attempts to expurgate her. The Books of Samuel and Kings both tell of her continuing worship.
The legend of Eve's birth from Adam's rib disguises the fact that he was her son as well as her spouse, for she was the earth-goddess from which he was born min ha adamah.
Note for Biblical Creation: the wind of Anu blew upon the deep in the Sumerian creation story, as Marduk did into the face of Tiamat in the Babylonian. Marduk spread out the upper half of the mother-body to make the roof of the world, as Elohim did the upper firmament in Genesis 1. And as Ea conquered Apsu and Marduk Tiamat, so YHVH Rachav and Liv-Yatan (Leviathan - Job 41; Psalm 74:14). But the Tanach was written in developed patriarchal times, so the goddess was reduced to her elemental state as TOHU, "the deep", rather than as the female principle = mother-goddess.
In tracing the patriarchy across all cultures we can see four stages: a) world born of goddess without consort; b) goddess fecundated by male consort; c) world created from the body of the goddess by a male warrior-god; d) the male god alone.
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