The Age of the Goddess
Hydria Gorgon, Wikimedia Commons
The Serpent's Bride
The Mother Goddess Eve
The ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the character of the master of the mystery of rebirth – of which the moon is the celestial sign. In many cultures, we will find symbolic columns around which serpents are circled. Such columns or poles are symbolic of the pivotal point around which all things turn (the axis mundi), and this may be seen as a counterpart of the Buddhist Tree of Enlightenment (the “Immovable Spot”) at the center of the world. The symbols of the mythic garden of life, where the serpent, the tree, the world axis, sun eternal, and ever-living waters radiate grace to all quarters, towards which the mortal individual is guided (by one divine manifestation or another) to the knowledge of his own immortality, are found in the myths of many cultures.
The spirit is that of the Bronze Age view of the garden of innocence, where the two desirable fruits of enlightenment and of immortal life (through death and rebirth) are central. In the Buddha legend, as in the old Near Eastern renderings, an atmosphere of substantial accord prevails at the cosmic tree, where the goddess and her serpent spouse give support to their worthy son’s quest for release from the bondages of birth, disease, old age, and death.
The patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium B.C. transformed this myth of harmony into one of discord, as expressed in the Old Testament where God cursed the serpent of the Garden of Eden when Adam had been given the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and chased Adam out before he had the chance to also take the fruit of immortality. This distinct separation between God and Man, which is shared by Christianity, Islam and Judaism, introduced a nervous discord with the sense of guilt it entailed.
The Gorgon’s Blood
A similar breach in the image of harmony conveyed by the Bronze Age mythology can be found in the legacy of Greece. In pre-Homeric mythology, the place of honour was held, not by the male gods of the Olympic pantheon, but by a goddess – presented by their successors as darkly ominous – who might appear in many forms and was the mother of both the living and the dead. Her consort was in serpent form. Before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life. In the myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life, had been honored equally and together.
In the later male-oriented patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness – to which also a negative moral judgment now was added. The social as well as the mythic orders of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed, and the new masters made that very clear in the mythic tales they introduced. Hence, the early Iron Age literatures both of Aryan Greece and Rome and of the neighboring Semitic Levant are alive with variants of the conquest by a shining hero of the dark and – for one reason or another – disparaged monster of the earlier order of godhood. The chief biblical example was Yahweh’s victory over the serpent of the cosmic sea, Leviathan. The counterpart for the Greeks was the victory of Zeus over Typhon, the youngest child of Gaea, the goddess Earth (by which deed the reign of the patriarchal gods of Mount Olympus was secured over the earlier Titans of the great goddess mother). The resemblance of this victory to that of Indra, king of the Aryan Vedic pantheon, over the cosmic serpent Vritra is clear.
Against the symbol of this old undying power, the warrior principle of the great deed of the individual who matters flung its bolt, and for a period the old order of belief fell apart. This was at the time when the empire of Minoan Crete disintegrated, just as in India the civilization of the Dravidian twin cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. However, in India the old mythology of the serpent power presently recovered strength, until by the end of the first millennium B.C. it had absorbed the entire pantheon and spirit of the Vedic gods – Indra, Mitra, Vayu, and the rest – transforming all into mere agents of the processes of its own circle of eternal return. In the West, on the other hand, the principle of indeterminacy represented by the freely willing, historically effective hero held the field, and has retained it to the present.
This victory in the West of the principle of free will, together with its moral corollary of individual responsibility, establishes the first distinguishing characteristics of specifically Occidental myth: a self-moving power greater than the force of any earthbound serpent destiny (with its worship of Earth and fertility of Earth). This transformation includes not only the myths of Aryan Europe (Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Germans), but also those of both the Semitic and Aryan peoples of the Levant (Semitic Akkadians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs; Aryan Persians, Armenians, Phrygians, Thraco-Illyrians, and Slavs).
In spite of this victory of the hero myths in the West, there remains a fascination with the dark presences of the cursed yet pregnant earth, which though defeated and subdued, is never totally absorbed. In the legend of Medusa, for instance, the older message can be heard (even though it is told through the Olympian patriarchal system). The hair of Medusa, Queen of Gorgons, was of hissing serpents. The look of her eye turned men to stone. Perseus slew her by device and escaped with her head in his wallet, which Athene then affixed to her shield. But from the Gorgon’s severed neck the winged Pegasus sprang forth, who had been begotten by Poseidon and now is hitched before the chariot of Zeus. And through the ministry of Athene, Asclepius, the god of healing, secured the blood from the veins of Medusa, both from her left side and from her right. With the former he slays, but with the latter he cures and brings back to life. Thus in Medusa the same two powers coexisted as in the black goddess Kali of India, who with her right hand bestows boons and in her left holds a raised sword.
The victory of the patriarchal deities over the earlier matriarchal ones was not as decisive in the Greco-Roman sphere as in the myths of the Old Testament. This is particularly seen in the mysteries of Demeter and the Orphics. In Greece the patriarchal gods did not exterminate, but married, the goddesses of the land. These ultimately succeeded in regaining influence, whereas in biblical mythology all the goddesses were exterminated.
Ultima Thule
In Ireland, the magic of the goddesses of the land of youth survives in fairy lore to this day. The first inhabitants of Ireland of whom trace remains, arrived on its beaches during that obscure prehistoric time between the Old Stone Age and the New that is known as the mesolithic. The dating of their settlements can be vaguely placed between the end of the glacial ages in the north (around 7800 B.C.) and the appearance around 2500 B.C. of the earliest Copper and Bronze Age remains.
The importance of Ireland in this context is that the period of foundation of its culture was intermediate in time between the twilight of the great European Paleolithic ages and the dawn of the still greater patriarchal ages of the Aryan Celts, Romans, and Germans. This culture was of a radically different order than the two between which it arose. It endured from about 2500 B.C. to as late as 500 - 200 B.C., when the first iron-bearing Celtic tribes arrived. The druids were the masters of the religious lore of these tribes. Its order of mythology and morality was of the Bronze Age, of the mother-goddess and Mother Right. Its relationship to the later, patriarchal, Celtic system was about the same as that of the early Creto-Aegean to the classic Olympian of Greece.
Even in the late Celtic legends many startling traits are revealed of brazen dames who preserved the customs of the Bronze Age up to early Christian times. They were in no sense wives in the patriarchal style. Even at the height of the Celtic heroic age (around 200 B.C. to 450 A.D.) many of the most noted Irish noblewomen still were of pro-Celtic stock, and these bore themselves in the imperious manner of the matriarchs of ancient times.
The ancient literature of Ireland demonstrates that the patriarchal iron-bearing Celts who gained the mastery during the last three or four centuries B.C., overcame, but did not extinguish, an earlier Bronze Age civilization of Mother Right. The circumstance resembled that of the overthrow by the iron-bearing Dorian Greeks of the Bronze Age order of the Cretan-Aegean world. In the epics of ancient Ireland, the Celtic warrior kings and their brilliant chariot fighters move in a landscape beset with invisible fairy forts, wherein abide a race of beings of an earlier mythological age: the Tuatha De Danann, children of the Goddess Dana, who retired – when defeated – into wizard hills of glass. These are the very people of the sídhe or Shee, the Fairy Host, the Fairy Cavalcade of the irish peasant traditions today.
The ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the character of the master of the mystery of rebirth – of which the moon is the celestial sign. In many cultures, we will find symbolic columns around which serpents are circled. Such columns or poles are symbolic of the pivotal point around which all things turn (the axis mundi), and this may be seen as a counterpart of the Buddhist Tree of Enlightenment (the “Immovable Spot”) at the center of the world. The symbols of the mythic garden of life, where the serpent, the tree, the world axis, sun eternal, and ever-living waters radiate grace to all quarters, towards which the mortal individual is guided (by one divine manifestation or another) to the knowledge of his own immortality, are found in the myths of many cultures.
The spirit is that of the Bronze Age view of the garden of innocence, where the two desirable fruits of enlightenment and of immortal life (through death and rebirth) are central. In the Buddha legend, as in the old Near Eastern renderings, an atmosphere of substantial accord prevails at the cosmic tree, where the goddess and her serpent spouse give support to their worthy son’s quest for release from the bondages of birth, disease, old age, and death.
The patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium B.C. transformed this myth of harmony into one of discord, as expressed in the Old Testament where God cursed the serpent of the Garden of Eden when Adam had been given the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and chased Adam out before he had the chance to also take the fruit of immortality. This distinct separation between God and Man, which is shared by Christianity, Islam and Judaism, introduced a nervous discord with the sense of guilt it entailed.
The Gorgon’s Blood
A similar breach in the image of harmony conveyed by the Bronze Age mythology can be found in the legacy of Greece. In pre-Homeric mythology, the place of honour was held, not by the male gods of the Olympic pantheon, but by a goddess – presented by their successors as darkly ominous – who might appear in many forms and was the mother of both the living and the dead. Her consort was in serpent form. Before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life. In the myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life, had been honored equally and together.
In the later male-oriented patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness – to which also a negative moral judgment now was added. The social as well as the mythic orders of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed, and the new masters made that very clear in the mythic tales they introduced. Hence, the early Iron Age literatures both of Aryan Greece and Rome and of the neighboring Semitic Levant are alive with variants of the conquest by a shining hero of the dark and – for one reason or another – disparaged monster of the earlier order of godhood. The chief biblical example was Yahweh’s victory over the serpent of the cosmic sea, Leviathan. The counterpart for the Greeks was the victory of Zeus over Typhon, the youngest child of Gaea, the goddess Earth (by which deed the reign of the patriarchal gods of Mount Olympus was secured over the earlier Titans of the great goddess mother). The resemblance of this victory to that of Indra, king of the Aryan Vedic pantheon, over the cosmic serpent Vritra is clear.
Against the symbol of this old undying power, the warrior principle of the great deed of the individual who matters flung its bolt, and for a period the old order of belief fell apart. This was at the time when the empire of Minoan Crete disintegrated, just as in India the civilization of the Dravidian twin cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. However, in India the old mythology of the serpent power presently recovered strength, until by the end of the first millennium B.C. it had absorbed the entire pantheon and spirit of the Vedic gods – Indra, Mitra, Vayu, and the rest – transforming all into mere agents of the processes of its own circle of eternal return. In the West, on the other hand, the principle of indeterminacy represented by the freely willing, historically effective hero held the field, and has retained it to the present.
This victory in the West of the principle of free will, together with its moral corollary of individual responsibility, establishes the first distinguishing characteristics of specifically Occidental myth: a self-moving power greater than the force of any earthbound serpent destiny (with its worship of Earth and fertility of Earth). This transformation includes not only the myths of Aryan Europe (Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Germans), but also those of both the Semitic and Aryan peoples of the Levant (Semitic Akkadians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs; Aryan Persians, Armenians, Phrygians, Thraco-Illyrians, and Slavs).
In spite of this victory of the hero myths in the West, there remains a fascination with the dark presences of the cursed yet pregnant earth, which though defeated and subdued, is never totally absorbed. In the legend of Medusa, for instance, the older message can be heard (even though it is told through the Olympian patriarchal system). The hair of Medusa, Queen of Gorgons, was of hissing serpents. The look of her eye turned men to stone. Perseus slew her by device and escaped with her head in his wallet, which Athene then affixed to her shield. But from the Gorgon’s severed neck the winged Pegasus sprang forth, who had been begotten by Poseidon and now is hitched before the chariot of Zeus. And through the ministry of Athene, Asclepius, the god of healing, secured the blood from the veins of Medusa, both from her left side and from her right. With the former he slays, but with the latter he cures and brings back to life. Thus in Medusa the same two powers coexisted as in the black goddess Kali of India, who with her right hand bestows boons and in her left holds a raised sword.
The victory of the patriarchal deities over the earlier matriarchal ones was not as decisive in the Greco-Roman sphere as in the myths of the Old Testament. This is particularly seen in the mysteries of Demeter and the Orphics. In Greece the patriarchal gods did not exterminate, but married, the goddesses of the land. These ultimately succeeded in regaining influence, whereas in biblical mythology all the goddesses were exterminated.
Ultima Thule
In Ireland, the magic of the goddesses of the land of youth survives in fairy lore to this day. The first inhabitants of Ireland of whom trace remains, arrived on its beaches during that obscure prehistoric time between the Old Stone Age and the New that is known as the mesolithic. The dating of their settlements can be vaguely placed between the end of the glacial ages in the north (around 7800 B.C.) and the appearance around 2500 B.C. of the earliest Copper and Bronze Age remains.
The importance of Ireland in this context is that the period of foundation of its culture was intermediate in time between the twilight of the great European Paleolithic ages and the dawn of the still greater patriarchal ages of the Aryan Celts, Romans, and Germans. This culture was of a radically different order than the two between which it arose. It endured from about 2500 B.C. to as late as 500 - 200 B.C., when the first iron-bearing Celtic tribes arrived. The druids were the masters of the religious lore of these tribes. Its order of mythology and morality was of the Bronze Age, of the mother-goddess and Mother Right. Its relationship to the later, patriarchal, Celtic system was about the same as that of the early Creto-Aegean to the classic Olympian of Greece.
Even in the late Celtic legends many startling traits are revealed of brazen dames who preserved the customs of the Bronze Age up to early Christian times. They were in no sense wives in the patriarchal style. Even at the height of the Celtic heroic age (around 200 B.C. to 450 A.D.) many of the most noted Irish noblewomen still were of pro-Celtic stock, and these bore themselves in the imperious manner of the matriarchs of ancient times.
The ancient literature of Ireland demonstrates that the patriarchal iron-bearing Celts who gained the mastery during the last three or four centuries B.C., overcame, but did not extinguish, an earlier Bronze Age civilization of Mother Right. The circumstance resembled that of the overthrow by the iron-bearing Dorian Greeks of the Bronze Age order of the Cretan-Aegean world. In the epics of ancient Ireland, the Celtic warrior kings and their brilliant chariot fighters move in a landscape beset with invisible fairy forts, wherein abide a race of beings of an earlier mythological age: the Tuatha De Danann, children of the Goddess Dana, who retired – when defeated – into wizard hills of glass. These are the very people of the sídhe or Shee, the Fairy Host, the Fairy Cavalcade of the irish peasant traditions today.