Date 05-12-2008
GMTime 03:35:48
The Goddess and her Enemies
The Subjugation of the Goddess
© Saviour Shirlie. Released for Public Use
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
The Subjugation of the Goddess
Presuming a Goddess culture existed, its disappearance was linked to the Indo-European invasion of war-like patriarchal hierarchical societies. Archaeological evidence, mythology, and comparative linguistics indicate a contrast and conflict of the two cultures in religious and secular life.
Gimbutas avers that neither weapons were found among grave goods nor were hilltop defenses to be found before 4500-4300 BC. Then the Indo-Europeans arrived with metallurgy and weapons such as daggers, spears, and bow and arrows. Some archaeologists deny this finding weapons in non-Indo-European cultures. Mellaart found stone maceheads, obsidian arrowheads and javelin heads, and daggers in male burials at Çatal Hütük. Some critics point out that later cultures which still worshipped the Goddess were warlike, such as the Celts, a criticism that seems to concede that whole cultures did venerate the Goddess, while suggesting that they were obliged to defend themselves against the invaders.
A few thousand years BC, the Indo-Europeans began moving south and west from their homeland somewhere in Russia and invaded Europe from the east. They brought with them aggression, the horse, exploitation of nature and knowledge of the male role in procreation. The nomadic invaders, the Kurgans from southern Russia, first arrived at the Lower Dneiper in 5,000 BC and entered for 2,000 years in three stages. The early Yamna culture of the Volga steppe was about 4300 BC, the Maikop culture of the North Pontic area was 3500 BC, and the late Yamna also of the Volga steppe was after 3000 BC. The earliest example of horses represented in sculpture were found in cemeteries from the Volga region dating back to 5,000 BC when the Kurgans arrived. The Kurgans brought a unique burial style not seen in Neolithic Europe before their arrival, and the replacement of the Goddess by patriarchs seemed to start with these invasions.
The invaders arrived with a belief in male Gods led by a sky god called Dyaus Pitar—Zeus or Jupiter—because they came from the central Asian steppes where the sky creates a deep impression, just as it does in the East African Plateau. The conquests of the indigenous goddess worshippers is combined in myth with the laddish discovery that males could make babies in Zeus's reputation as a great lover—his amorous conquests being his victories over the goddess worshipping tribes on the ground.
The sky god complete with his weaponry of hammers, axes and thunderbolts castrated the son and killed the serpent, leaving the goddess distraught. He forced her into marriage and between them they procreated all the other gods and goddesses which were carried far and wide by the Indo-European migrants. Where alliances were made, the goddesses became daughters of Zeus in mythology. The goddess had not been killed but had been subdued as the wives and daughters of the great gods.
The patriarchs reduced the stature of the goddesses but they proved true to type in being regularly renewed. The goddess had been attenuated, her powers spread among a multitude of goddesses and sirens, her ninefold nature providing a ready means of separating out her characteristics. The Nine Muses, the ennead of goddesses that reflect the original ninefold goddess persist till this day as the inspiration for the artistic. The original power of the Great Mother was thus dispersed among these lesser goddesses and omnipotence was attributed to Zeus who became a sun god in practice or gave birth to them and retired, like Yehouah, to distant spheres. Thus the goddess's son became God.
With the patriarchal revolution, men became the head of nuclear families or households and women ultimately became chattels. The change, though, was not outright. Goddess worship and matriarchal social arrangements persisted in decreasing prominence for several millennia. The Pharaohs always inherited their sun kingship from their mothers or sisters, not their fathers.
However, the old mythologies of the goddess would no longer do for patriarchal society in unaltered form. If the pig clan defeat the bear clan then the mythological story which arises will have a hero of the pig god vanquishing a fearsome monster in the form of a bear, or some such story. With the defeat of the goddess worshipping tribes, it would not normally have been sufficient simply to replace the goddess with a new god—she had to be mythologically vanquished to signify the acute historical change which had occurred.
References of the sacrifice of the goddess to herself, after the fashion of sun gods, arise from the loss of matriarchal society because they illustrate the desecration of shrines to the goddess by invaders, but they are rare. Hercules defeated the nine-headed hydra, Hera and the Amazons. The hydra's heads could only be killed by fire because they grew again when simply lopped off. This indicates that the goddess worshippers returned to their groves despite the threats of the invaders until eventually they burned them down.
The heroines who are saved from monsters by chivalrous heroes are really goddess cults defeated by the patriarchs. For the patriarchs the monster was the evil, false goddess defeated by the saintly god-worshipper, and the princess is the purified but passive goddess released from her bondage to the defeated monster—the Old Religion. Fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White might be mythological relics of the death of the priestesses, representing the goddess, and their subsequent resurrection as the consort of the patriarchal gods and their kings.
Another example is the taming of Pegasus who is really the goddess in her aspect of the White Mare or Leucippe. Having done this Bellerophon killed the three headed Chimaera, the Triple Goddess depicted as a monster. Bellerophon's father had similarly tamed the barley goddess, Demeter, having perused her relentlessly. She changed into a mare, making her again Leucippe, but was covered by Poseidon who shape-shifted into a stallion.
In Babylon, the new patriarchal god, Marduk, destroyed the goddess Tiamat depicted as a sea monster, representing chaos, and created the world as we know it from its bits, a reasonable description of what happened when the goddess cults were destroyed. Snakes were no longer regarded as necessary aspects of the annual cycle but as malign devils. For the Israelites, Eve or Life, the mother goddess, becomes merely an afterthought of God as a companion for the first man, and one who, like Pandora, brings all the trouble into the world. The serpent is there too, but now is the devil.
Eventually the sky god too succumbed to an upstart, the former son elevated above his step-father. The chief feature of the sky is the sun and the sun aspect of the sky god became divine in his own right and effectively usurped the place of his father. He became the earthly saviour, the provider of all on earth, a Dionysus, an Orpheus, a Mythras or a Christ.
