Abstract

© Saviour Shirlie. Released for Public Use
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
Tuesday, 5 January 2010

Blood Relations

Women are not as passive as some feminists interested in showing women as perpetual victims of dominant males like to think. Women had a prime role in shaping human culture, behavior, and human history in the late Pleistocene period immediately before humans settled into sedentary agriculture, 40,000 years ago. Anthropologist, Chris Knight, showed that a change in human reproductive strategy was necessary before males could take off as hunters and leave their women behind.

A division of labour of man the hunter and woman the gatherer seems clear, but Knight sees paleowomen as shaping the structure of both hunting and gathering by overthrowing the previously evolved social hierarchy. Women had been the victims of a dominant male hierarchy, but Knight shows that the sex roles and behavior of both men and women then developed together in a dialectic relationship. The loss of oestrus and continuous sexual receptivity in the human female is characteristic but Knight shows the importance that arose of menstruation and its associated marital and other cultural taboos in human society.

The power that women had was the power of sex. Women synchronized their menstrual cycles with one another, allowing them by force of numbers to resist the male need for sex, and to change what had seemed natural. The idea of the sex strike is central to Knight's idea, which explains much. Why do so many religions have taboos on menstruation? Why do they have taboos on eating bloody meat? And not just a few societies, but many societies round the world which seem to have little in common. Blood as a symbol of menstruation is the key to many mysteries of human culture, and it explains many myths and taboos. Because the disruptive effects of sex can be enormous, these controls have played an important role in the development of human culture.

We shall develop Knight's ideas in a later essay, but meanwhile this article, written some time ago, remains restricted to older ideas.

Ancient Goddess Worship

35,000 BC saw the emergence of the Cro-Magnon people, the first recognizable human society. Within a few thousand years, worship of the Great Goddess or Great Mother developed. For these people, deity was female. The importance of fertility in crops, in domesticated animals, in wild animals and in the tribe itself were of paramount importance to their survival. Thus, the Female life-giving principle was considered divine and a great mystery.

This “old European” culture lasted for tens of thousands of years in what is now Europe. They generally lived in peace. Males and females were treated equally. Their society was matrilineal—children took their heritage from their mothers. Life was based on lunar (not solar) calendar—time was experienced as a repetitive cycle, not linearly as we think of it.

Among hunters and gatherers, the power of women to give birth was great magic, but the main concern of males was success in the hunt. Initiation rites of passage into adulthood reflect these differences. Rites for girls focus on teaching and public affirmation of the girls' womanly status. Rites for boys are trials and tests. Girls move into womanhood naturally, proving it through processes over which they have no conscious control—menstruation and childbirth. Their “magic” is inborn and powerful. The role of males in procreation was not clear to these early humans and boys had to prove their manhood through action and conscious self-control. They had to separate themselves from childhood and particularly from the women who until then had had care of them. Their “magic” is based on courage to prepare them for the hunt.

Goddesses have been called by many names by different cultures and ages: Anath, Aphrodite, Arianrhod, Artemis, Aseneth, Astarte, Brighid, Ceres, Cybele, Demeter, Diana, Eostre, Freya, Gaia, Hera, Ishtar, Isis, Juno, Kali, Lilith, Ma'at, Mary, Minerva, Neith, Ostare, Persephone, Venus, Vesta, and many others.

The development of agriculture was the next big cultural step, starting about 11,000 years ago in the Middle East. Life became settled in villages, populations increased, and huntable game dwindled. The focus of religion was on fertility and death. The deity was a Goddess often visualized in three aspects: maiden, mother and crone. The Maiden represented youth, emerging sexuality, the huntress running with her hounds. The Mother symbolized feminine power, fertility, and nurturing. The Crone was wisdom, the compassion which comes from experience, and the one who guided us through the death experience.

But the goddess was triple in three ways. She was also goddess of the earth, the sky and the underworld, and each of these three aspects had the three aspects of maiden, mother and crone. Thus she had nine aspects overall and was depicted often as an ennead rather than a triad. The goddess of the earth was goddess of the three seasons, spring, summer and winter—the ancients not seeing autumn. The sky goddess was the moon in each of its phases, new, full and waning. The goddess of the underworld was the goddess of procreation, birth and death.

Marija Gimbutas, an Eastern European archaeologist, wrote most extensively on goddesses in ancient sites. She aimed to “reconstruct” the religious symbols and iconography of “the Goddess” in Neolithic artefacts (8000-3000 BC). Our ancestors, she says, had “a complex symbolic system formulated around the worship of the Goddess in her various aspects”. These societies were matrilineal, and peaceful.

Paleolithic and Neolithic symbols and images cluster around a self-generating Goddess and her basic functions of Giver-of- Life, Wielder-of-Death, and as Regeneratrix… The religion of the Goddess reflected a matristic, matrilineal, and endogamic social order for most of early human history. This was not necessarily “matriarchy” … The emphasis in these cultures was on technologies that nourished people's lives, in contrast to the androcratic focus on domination…

Marija Gimbutas sees two principal religious systems in human development: the matristic gylanic or peaceful goddess society, and the androcratic or belligerent patriarchies. The matristic gylanic symbols are further divided into subsystems according to the function of the goddess as Life-giving, Renewing and Eternal Earth, Death and Regeneration, or Energy and Unfolding.

As all life flows from water, Gimbutas claims it is the Mother Goddess as the Life-Giver. Gimbutas says the earliest symbol in human history, the zig-zag, drawn by Neanderthals around 40,000 BC is also water. “M” (Mother) and W (Woman) are zig-zags standing originally for water. The “M” is found on water containers. The chevron and “v” symbols, are variants of this and also stand for the Bird Goddess. It is conjectured that the “V” is the pubic triangle and is found on many bird figurines seemingly identifying birds as feminine. It first arose in the 7th millennium BC on painted pottery, and was then found in the 6th millennium.

Bird-shaped vases are found with the “V” and chevron sign, as are bird-woman hybrids with beaks and “V” necklaces, according to Gimbutas. Graves from 3,000 BC on Malta contained bird-woman hybrids. Megalithic monuments, which might have been prayed to and embraced, were possible bird Goddesses. Female figures are sometimes given owl-like eyes suggesting that one of the birds associated with women was the owl. In Hungary and Lemnos, owl-shaped burial urns with umbilical cords or human vulva date back to 3000 BC. Ornithomorphic female figurines are found with their fronts engraved as chevrons and their posteriors as meanders. In “all of Old Europe between Greece, Scandinavia, and Ireland,” the “same symbolism” of the Goddess's “pubic triangle… a symbol of regeneration” is found.

A Paleolithic Pavlovian and a Vincan figurine from 5000-4500 BC shows an apparently female deity with a stream running over her body. A female figurine of about 4000 BC found in a flint shaft in Ireland is parallel to the Vinca Bird Goddess. “The Goddess very likely was patroness of crafts including metallurgy and flint tool making.”

Gimbutas interprets the bull head as the goddess because it is shaped like the uterus, but whether this is the reason or not, the association exists. Gimbutas's critics fail to realize, presumably willfully because they should know better, is that she does not present her claims as facts, but hypotheses for consideration. If she seems more convinced than her critics she would not be alone among scientists in standing up for her beliefs, before they were proved.

Life seemed to be a miracle and women were plainly responsible for it. The Earth Mother or Fertility Goddess is shown as a pregnant woman holding her belly in figurines such as those of Laussel, Dordogne, France, and the Ukraine from 7000-6000 BC. The lozenge containing a dot is also found on pregnant figurines, especially the belly, which Gimbutas interprets as the child within the womb. In the Vincan culture, the pregnant figurines wear sow masks presumably because the sow was fertile and her piglets fast-growing—desirable qualities. Gimbutas observes that the graves of Neolithic Europeans were modelled on the female uterus so that the buried dead could feel like they were in the womb of their Earth Mother ready to be re-born. At some stage they oriented the uterus towards the rising sun as if they realised the purpose of intercourse, and felt the sun was the real fertilising agent. Perhaps they long knew that intercourse was necessary for procreation but because it was such a hit-and-miss affair, they took it that the Goddess or the sun had to give a blessing for it to succeed. Caves were sometimes painted entirely red as if it were meant to stand for the menstrual blood or the afterbirth, perhaps. Animals that shed their skin such as snakes were also seen as standing for women being regeneration.

Artefacts from such as the Sesklo culture of northern Greece (Thessaly, 6500-5500 BC) seem overwhelmingly to be images of goddesses, a bird goddess, a snake goddess and a nurse, seemingly temple or house figurines. Others, such as the pregnant goddess, were worshipped in a courtyard at specially prepared platforms. Pottery had designs of flames, triangles, zigzags, lozenges, and steps on them, all possibly symbols of the Great Goddess. Red ochre is accepted as standing for blood and therefore life, and is associated often with the Goddess artefacts, symbols and images.

Death was not something to be feared in ancient cultures because they had seen that from death comes life. The vulture is an obvious symbol of death. Paintings from temples in Çatal Hütük depict a vulture with human legs and therefore possibly standing for a Goddess, devouring heads of corpses.

The egg is a symbol of regeneration. Most cultures use eggs in some form or another to celebrate the coming of spring and the renewal of growth. The egg can be found on vases, water containers, figurines, and bowls. It is sometimes found in relation to water and the bull. A dish from Malta contains all three of these Goddess symbols, dating back to 3,000 BC.

Snakes, caterpillars, and any animal that sheds a former body or skin are other examples of the Goddess as Regeneration. The spiral is a representation of the snake, which is an archetype for the cyclical mode of life. The spiral first arrived as a symbol on pottery in 7th millennium south-eastern Europe. Spirals will sometimes have life branch out from them in the form of leaves and branches, like those of the megalith temples from Malta (3000 BC). Spirals are often located on feminine parts of the body, such as the breasts and uterus, in figurines. Symbols of the moon and lunar cycle are found with snake coils, owl-shaped figurines, and bull’s horns, linking them all together under the Goddess. Whirls are considered to represent life becoming, as are opposed snakes, both of which can be found on the breasts and abdomen of the female figurine. The opposing snakes are one of the most common motifs on Neolithic vases with a snake on either side of the opening and can be seen especially in Cucuteni vase painting.

Anthropologists are also turning to the so-called “fringe cultures” such as the modern foraging and horticulture societies for proof of the goddess civilization's persistence: “cultures do not seem to be aware of the male role in procreation”. For these cultures life seems to originate within the female alone.

In Çatal Hütük, an alter and temple dating back to 7000 BC with many clay figurines of the Great Goddess, an idol, and wall paintings depicting some of her symbols, such as the bull, provide signs of former goddess worship. The famous statue of a woman giving birth upon a throne with two leopards at her side is also found here, in which form the Great Mother is known in Phrygia as Cybele. Part of the Magna Mater cult was to castrate and sacrifice a bull and be baptized in its blood, which is a basis for the bull as a symbol of the Great Mother.

In northern Europe, triangular or trapezoidal barrows are “symbols of the regenerative triangle of the Goddess herself”. A staff or digging stick with a human head top is a “sculpture probably portraying an Owl Goddess”. Wooden ladles with ducks heads are “religious” objects.

The Goddess is symbolized by “symbols of the uterus,” the frog, toad, bull's head, and triangles, and by insects. Male deities are only 3-5 percent of neolithic sculpture. Gimbutas summarises:

The multiple categories, functions, and symbols used by prehistoric peoples to express the Great Mystery are all aspects of the unbroken unity of one deity.

Old European society was organized around a theacratic, communal temple community, guided by a queen-priestess, her brother or uncle, and a council of women as the governing body.

Evidence for the Goddess culture is not unequivocal, but feminist ideas in archaeology have obliged archaeologists to think on new lines. The patriarchal religions have conditioned thought for so long, it was taken for granted as the basic relgion of mankind, with Goddesses as a sort of aberration. Yet in simple societies based on hunting and gathering, and even into the early agricultural period, generation of surplus was wasteful not beneficial, and so there was no economic basis for priests and warlords to impose their protection rackets. Not only did women provide the basic sustenance of society, they had the time while gathering and cooking to gossip and formulate ideas. Wisdom was a female quality because women did more thinking and exchanging of ideas. Women as mothers, providers and philosophers were looked on with awe. This was the nature of the primitive matriarchy. It was a matriarchy by consent.

The next stage in this history was the discovery of the role of males in procreation and the revolution of men against matriarchy. The plains of Eurasia were the home of nomadic herders, moving their cattle, sheep and horses to the seasonal pastures. Population pressures and technological change accompanied the discovery of male fertilization and led to some of the herders opting to be professional warriors—effectively robber barons who would raid distant tribes or the settled agricultural populations that had recently established themselves to the south.

With the development of technology, particularly the warhorse and chariot, these robber barons realised they could take what was not rightfully theirs, and another breed of bandits realised they could use trickery to take what was not theirs. Soon all the tribes had a class of warriors, the leaders of whom declared themselves to be god-kings, and priests who acted for the gods. Patriarchy was borne and literally conquered the world. The concept of the Stone Age Great Goddess cult being a matriarchy in the sense of women ruling is probably untrue merely because the concept of rule was not valid. No one ruled but women were looked upon for their wisdom in tackling problems in this society and had an especially honoured position.

On these vast and featureless plains, the sky dominated and the first male theology was directed at sky, storm and sun gods who had subjugated the earth-goddess. The struggle against an older female supremacy entered their mythology, and Goddesses were shown as ravished, as daughters and as wives—all subjected to men—the subjugation of women began. Humanity was expelled from the Garden of Eden, began to sweat, fight for supremacy and murder mothers and their sons. Actions that were deliquent for millennia became accepted.

Previously threats to survival had been starvation and disease. Now they were banditry, war and oppression. Natural religions featuring natural events based on a Great Mother were replaced by artificially constructed religions featuring acts of warfare and power, presided over by a stern father god. War, murder, robbery and oppression became virtues that helped maintain the socio-economic order that produced them.

So it has continued since. It has to stop before it stops us. Women must not become surrogate men. If they do, the patriarchs have won the ultimate victory. Amazons are a male fantasy, even if some women were warriors! Women must understand how to control men once more, and stop them from behaving badly—behaving in ways that are no longer appropriate with modern technological power, however progressive their behaviour might once have been.

Boys today have no need to ritually separate themselves from their mothers to become men. The warrior age needs to be killed off for good and all. Women can do it. Men no longer have to hunt wild aurochs or be taught to joust in the lists. If they incline that way their surplus energy can be drained by aggressive sports, sufficient for them to feel “proved,” while otherwise exhausting them and making them feel bruised. If they prefer chess or scholarship, all is well. Men need to realize that heroes no longer have to carry a sword. The modern hero is the healer, the craftsman, the scholar, the gardener—those who discover Nature's kinunity, and keep us connected to the family of life, not the necrophiles that love the technology of war.

Goddess page at the U Texas
Bibliography for this site
Marija Gimbutas
Goddess Revival
Mother Goddess
Basque
feminist spirituality movement
Çatal Hütük
Magna Mater

The “Great Goddess” of Çatal Hütük

Çatal Hütük is a Neolithic site in Turkey. It is considered to have been the first city. The people of Çatal Hütük grew grain and kept domesticated sheep, cows, goats, and dogs, but not pigs. The site was occupied from about 7000 to 6000 BC.

James Mellaart, who was responsible for unearthing the site, wrote in 1964, that he thought the neolithic religion of the city “was created by women” because it “lacks the element of sexual vulgarity and eroticism that is almost automatically associated with fertility and probably is the male’s contribution.”

A plaster relief, dating from about 6200 BC, shows a woman giving birth, her legs spread apart. Underneath her is a row of plaster breasts, moulded over animal skulls, with nipples painted red. Goddess statuettes were found in the grain bins. Women are buried under the platforms in the shrines, sometimes with children. Men have never been found under the platforms. Mellaart guessed the shrines were burial places for their priestesses and the priestesses’s families.

Gimbutas says neolithic “Old Europe” was peaceful because there were “no depictions of arms” or artefactual weapons “used by man against man”. Mellaart reports otherwise from Çatal Hütük. Graves of males contained weapons, stone maceheads, obsidian arrowheads and javelin heads, and daggers. There was no evidence of animal sacrifice, though it is not clear why the bones found in the shrines could not have been sacrificed women and children.

The Anatolian Neolithic was a Goddess civlization characterized by the dominance of the worship of the Goddess imbued with mysterious generative power.

But this Goddess of fertility and reproduction is also the archetype for virgin goddesses and semi-divine virgin figures:

The Goddess of the Paleolithic and Neolithic [creates]... life out of herself. She is the primeval, self-fertilizing “Virgin Goddess” who has survived in numerous culture forms to the present day. The Christian Virgin Mary is a demoted version of this original deity.

Problems with Archeological Interpretations

It seesm the Mother was the goddess of the megalith builders from Malta to Scotland. Megalithic sepulchres were built as wombs with a long vaginal access tunnel because the dead were to be reborn. But the goddess had also long been associated with the serpent, as a symbol of life and death from its phallic shape and its habit of slinking in the grass, in rocks and cavities of the earth. The snake's ability to slough off its skin also impressed the ancients who believed that by so doing it was being resurrected.

Later idols of a presumed Mother Goddess are found in the agricultural valleys of the first civilisations. The veneration of the goddess extends into the earliest historic societies as a goddess centred religion but a goddess in many forms.

• In about 3000 BC in Sumeria was a goddess called Nin-Khursag, She who gives Life to the Dead, or Nintu, the life-giver, the Mother of All and Queen of the Gods, also called Inanna.
• In Babylon the same goddess was Ishtar, simply known as The Goddess,
• in Syria, Ashteroth or Astarte,
• in Canaan she was Asherah,
• in Phoenicia she was Anath,
• in Egypt and Libya, Neith, then Isis, Queen of heaven,
• in central Asia Minor, she was Cybele, the Great Mother of All Nature,
• in Aegean Asia Minor she was Artemis, Lady of the Moon, known to the Romans as Diana,
• in Greece she was Ge or Gaia, the Mother of All Things, and Rhea and Aphrodite or Venus who rose from the sea and was identified with Astarte, the Syrian goddess, and many other names.

The trouble is Gimbutas heavily overeggs the pudding in making her case. There is sufficient sound evidence to support the general idea that goddess religion was widespread in neolithic times but Gimbutas reads into sites and findings speculations that few could support. Among her dubious practices are:

• drawing conclusions with insufficient or even no evidence;
• arguing back from her theory to the meaning of artefacts, thus easing everything into the hypothesis;
• assigning religious significance to almost anything, and even to many abstract designs;
• declaring figurines from different sites to be similar when few others agree;
• using vague qualifiers like “probably” and “may be” to suggest links that she then takes to be assured.

Such faults are used against her conclusions, so that the idea of a single cult devoted to a single goddess all the way from Anatolia to Ireland, and continuing backwards and forwards in time until destroyed by the Indo-Europeans is left open to question. The fact that biblical scholars like Albright and Gray have been forced through lack of evidence of the history of the Hebrews from Moses to the Exile to use the same qualifying adverbs is considered quite acceptable because it suits God's vast army of bullshitters!

Now that Gimbutas has drawn a treasure map of the territory but with many false “Xs” marked on it, a much more hard nosed attitude must be taken to establish with sureness whatever can be. It is not necessary to prove the myth of matriarchy as the historical truth. Evidence that women were respected for their own worth and were also worshipped for it is sufficient to prove the modern inclination of society to be wrong.

Barstow says that at Çatal Hütük women had a status that enabled them “not necessarily to control the society but to express their own values and experiences in it.” She describes her thoughts on seeing the shrine at Çatal Hütük:

The goddess figure above the rows of breasts and bulls’ horns, her legs stretched wide, giving birth, was a symbol of life and creativity such as I had not seen in the Western church. But fertility symbols are no longer a sufficient image for twentieth century women.

She goes on to say we cannot go back to the ancient goddess cults but nor can we ignore these alternatives to the images of Western religions for women today who struggle to find satisfaction in the patriarchal religions however revamped they might get.

In any case, a myth cannot be wrong if it is recognised as a myth. The myth of the universal matriarchal society differs not a whit from the myth of the kingdom of David or the court of King Arthur. It offers an alternative—here an alternative to patriarchy, and the dream that it could be realised.

An Alternative Goddess Interpretation

Frymer-Kensky, an expert in Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and the Hebrew Bible, rejects the idea of a single Great Goddess in antiquity, and the hypothesis of primitive matriarchy. There were many goddesses of particular societies, in particular times, but their nature was complicated and impermanent. Goddesses were more important in ancient religions and could be powerful, but they were not usually the most prominent deities.

In ancient Pagan societies, goddesses accompanied a recognition of complementary male and female power rather than the domination of women. Ancient Near East pantheons reflected the idea that men and women were intrinsically different and, because of this essential difference, they legitimately had different fields of control. There was no matriarchy but the sexes were more equal than they were later.

Sumerian goddesses often had family responsibilities “and cultural functions that the Sumerians associated with women”. Sumerian states were not led by women and their chief deity was never a Goddess. Their goddesses controlled sexuality, fertility and reproduction, roles that did not challenge male power. “The sky and the forces of the heavens” were always in male hands.

The famous goddess of Sumer was Inanna, daughter of the moon god, and chief goddess of the city of Uruk. At first she shared her role in temple worship with a spouse but she gradually displaced him in importance. She is a young and sexual attractive woman, the goddess of sexuality but also of warfare, rainstorms and the storehouse. The Semitic Akkadians worshipped her as Ishtar.

Much of what we know about this goddess comes from religious poetry and hymns written by the daughter of Akkadian King Sargon, Enheduanna. She was a priestess of the moon god in about 2300 BC. Her hymns praised Inanna as a “stout hearted lady.” However, She was fierce and devastated the lands of those that would not worship her:

That you kill—be it known!
That like a dog you eat the corpses—be it known!
That your glance is terrible—be it known!

Inanna brings marital harmony through sensuality but she is also wild, disruptive, and troublesome. She is the very image of Hosea's wife. Yet, Inanna was marginal to the organization of the state, which remained a male hierarchy with a male high god, Enlil, the ultimate authority at the top of the cosmos. Nevertheless, Inanna is a woman not under male control and so is fearsome and dangerous. Later, in Babylonian texts there are contrasting pictures of Ishtar. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, even the gods cannot control her and she is identified with a demon who kills newborn children. Elsewhere, hymns extol her grace, beauty, and kindness.

Frymer-Kensky tells us that from the time of Sumer to the first Babylonian period, about 1600 BC, women and goddesses declined in visibility in the texts, and they effectively disappear in first millennium texts of the Assyrian period.

The world by the end of the second millennium was a male world, above and below; and the ancient goddesses have all but disappeared.

As monotheism advanced, culminating in the Hellenistic period in its extreme form in Judaism, goddesses were marginalized, eliminated, or even transformed into male gods. Though some goddesses remaining prominent, they meant little to judge by the importance of women in the texts. Male gods were always ranked higher than female gods. Goddesses were excluded from political power.

There seems to be no allowance in this analysis for the fact that either 1. the Aryan invasions started before the Sumerian civilisation was established and that it was therefore already influenced by patriarchy when Frymer-Kensky began her study, or 2. the Sumerians themselves were a part of a general movement of Central Asian stocks all with a similar sky god and patriarchal ideas.

The Sumerians were not Indo-Europeans but were Mongoloid and could easily have migrated along the same routes as the Indo-Europeans from the steppes of Eurasia. The habit of invading patriarchal gods of raping, subjugating or marrying the goddesses of people they encounter is well known. It might already have happened by 3000 BC.

Mother and Son

Veneration of the Goddess peaked in the Bronze Age when the purpose of sexual activity was still not clear and lineages were still through the woman. When the role of man in procreation became known, mythology led to stories of gods getting up to all sorts of tricks to penetrate goddesses, but originally they had no such role. Hesiod's Theogony (Birth of the Gods) was the ancient Greek creation myth, designed to show how the patriarchal gods tried several times to replace the matriarchal goddesses before they succeeded.

The earth goddess Gaia formed the male sky, Ouranos, and together they generated the Titans—primitive gods. Ouranos wanted to stop the Titans from being born, by confining them to Gaia's womb, so Gaia gave her youngest son, Kronos, a sickle to castrate his father. Surely Kronos is Chronos, Time—Time castrates all things, but the loss of male virility with time is apt here. The spelling is merely a regional variation of kappa for chi. Kronos impregnated the Titan, Rhea, who began to give birth to the Olympian deities, but Kronos swallowed each of them them on birth. Rhea substituted a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes for her youngest son, Zeus, who then forced Kronos to cough up the Olympians, and set up the Olympian order after they had defeated the Titans. Zeus continued the tradition, but more cleverly, by swallowing his first wife Metis, of “cunning wisdom”, and gave birth to Athena from his head, finally showing that males could reproduce.

The world has declined from the plain reality of the procreative power of the female to the falsehood of male procreative power. With Zeus disguised as Yehouah, it has remained there ever since, largely with the active support of women!

Any creation legend must begin with a mother not a father. Only a solitary mother can give birth—virgin births do occur in Nature even in multicellular animals—but a solitary male never can. One can imagine that by some quirk of nature, such as radiation, a human woman could become pregnant without human intercourse. A male could not experience the same accident.

We are talking definitions. If a creature is able to give life to something which previously did not have it, then that creature is its mother not its father. Of course in the Judaeo-Christian legend, God the father is taken out of it altogether into a transcendental world but that too is a stupid cop out. If that world exists and can influence this one, then it is part of Nature because, again by definition, Nature is everything it is possible to experience. So again we should be talking of a mother, not a father that is merely a product of the warriors and priests.

From the earliest times the goddess was associated with the seasonal and astronomical cycles of the sun and the moon. In probably the earliest tradition, the goddess ruled the calendar as the moon because the lunar cycle could only be associated with womanhood—the moon was naturally a goddess.

She personified birth, growth, decay and death and so had all of these aspects. The flower of the Goddess was considered the five petalled primrose, the petals representing Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose, Death. She begins as a virgin, becomes a mother and ends up a crone. She is the Eonagyne, the perpetual woman. That is why she can be simultaneously a virgin and a mother.

Even when the goddess became much demeaned under the patriarchs, the ambivalence of virgin and mother remains. Diana or Artemis is the chaste and fair huntress, the virgin, but her images made at Ephesus, the centre of her worship, depict her as many breasted—a Great Mother of all Things, like Cybele. As the Eonagyne, she was always both. Furthermore Diana is never given any particular lover, suggesting the primal goddess worship prevalent when fatherhood was unimportant.

In the Martyrdom of Bartholemew, the apostle explains to the king of India:

The first man, then, was called Adam; he was formed out of the earth. And the earth, his mother out of which he was, was virgin, because it had neither been polluted by the blood of man nor opened for the burial of any one. The earth, then, was like the virgin.

This might easily reflect the Jewish legend of the creation of Adam before the Persian priests “returning” from “Exile” mangled it. It properly refers to the earth as the mother of Adam, a fact we can only infer from the patriarchal story, from Adam being made from mud. God was merely a breath or wind, the idea of which has traditionally been translated as spirit, to make it sound more profound for Christians.

Early people thought that women conceived because of the wind. Since the wind is neither here nor there but the earth definitely is here, the only definite thing we can know about birth is the mother. Impregnation was not obviously from sexual intercourse because often no impregnation occurred, so it was uncertain that sex had anything to do with birth. All that was certain was that at irregular intervals women created new life, so women were revered. The first gods were therefore mothers—they were goddesses. We infer this because there are no certain images of gods from the old stone age but figurines of pregnant women dating from before 10,000 BC are found scattered in Europe and Siberia.

The realisation of the result of sexual activity led quite late to the idea of the son being the goddess's lover and ultimately the father of the whole of mankind. Originally the primal goddess had no male equals but somehow had to produce a son who would be her lover with whom she would copulate incestuously to generate the human race.

The earth and the sky were the same cosmic female principle (Nature), so Neith, who was the earth and the sky, gave birth to the sun god. The new god was denoted as son, brother or twin and companion of the primal goddess. He was Ra, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz and Osiris. Neith was the mother of Ra but was also his daughter, reflecting the change of status when patriarchy replaced matriarchy. Cybele also gave form to her son and consort, Attis. Baal was Anath's brother, and Osiris was Isis's twin.

The goddess Anath equals Neith, as one might guess from their names, because Anath was identified with Athene. At the time of Alexander, Greek speaking Phoenicians living on Cyprus identified their goddess Anath with the Greek goddess Athena, the Greek virgin of Wisdom. And an ancient stele of Rameses II declares Anath and Astarte as the same goddess, the Queen of Heaven and mistress of all the gods. At a later date in the 5th century BC, papyri at Elephantine in Upper Egypt show that Jews there worshipped Yeho (Yehouah) and his wife, Anath! Anath, or Asherah as the Israelites called her, by analogy with the other goddesses of the region, must have given birth to her consort, Yehouah.

Herodotus tells us Athene was the Libyan goddess Neith and was always depicted in Libyan costume. Helladic Greeks including the early Athenians were linked racially with a Libyan Berber race called the Garamantians. In the first millennium AD, they crossed the Sahara to Nigeria and interbred with Negroes to form the black West African tribe, the Akan. This tribe was arranged as a number of clans each with a king whose “Okrafo” priest would be sacrificed as a surrogate for the king each year. They worshipped a triple Goddess called Ngame, a moon goddess identical to the European triple goddess.

The North African goddess, Neith, had travelled at different times south into Africa and north into Greece to become respectively Ngame and Athene. At earlier times she had travelled further still for this was the primal goddess herself—Nature. You will note that the name of the primal goddess was N-vowel-T(H). Sometimes the T was lost and sometimes the order of consonants was reversed. Sometimes a prefix or suffix would be added, usually just a linguistic variation.

The primal goddess is Nut, Neith or Net, Nat(ure), Nana (still a pet name for a grandmother), Nanna daughter of Nef in Nordic mythology, Nantosuleta, Innana, Nina, Ninanna, Ninella, Ningal, Ninlil, Ninmug and Ninsug (Nin is the Babylonian word for a goddess or a lady), Nephthys the twin sister of Isis, Anat(h), Athene, Aine and Anu (Celtic), Aino (Finnish), Anahita (Persian), Anaitis and Anthat (Ugarit), Angu bodi (Norse), Anit, Anna-Purna (Vedic), Anoukis, Anuket, Anunitum, Etan and Etain (Celtic), Ina (Polynesian), Tanit(h), Tefnut, Turan, Thalna and Thesan (Etruscan), Uni (Etruscan), Unt (or Isis!), Uto (or Uadjit).

Gods too have cognate names either because they took certain qualities of the goddess and part of her name too or more likely because supernatural superbeings were initally female and so the word for the nature of a god came from the name or word for goddess. Ennead and the number nine probably have the same etymology.

As the goddess declined, her companion magnified, becoming a dying and resurrected god when the seasonal cycle was projected on to him. He was constantly associated with the goddess but never an equal until the power of the goddess began to fade with the patriarchal revolution. Even now, all the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the son or the mother.

Having given birth to the Son, the prospects then are for the procreation of the whole human race from the incestuous intercourse of mother and son. In legends like that of Oedipus, the lost son of the mother returns to slay unwittingly his father and marry his mother. That he married his mother to become king shows that society still had matriarchal inheritance like the Pharaohs, and might be an echo of the time when the patriarchs usurped matriarchal society, though the open incest required in the myth by the son and goddess has been excused and the son is shown deposing a father rather than his mother.

The same problem of incest arises with the legend of Adam and Eve. We are not told that they had daughters, only sons. So Eve was the mother of all mankind and must have copulated incestuously with her male offspring. Admittedly these are only creation stories and have nothing to do with how human life arose, but nevertheless we have to accept that as the sophistication of human beings grew, they would puzzle over such problems and add to the legend to try to resolve them.

In the earliest stage, matriarchal society had no such arrangement as marriage and nuclear families. The social arrangement was one of clans or totem groups who “married” each other. The taboo was on having sexual relationships with anyone within your own clan. The paternity of any woman's children was never known—knowledge of fatherhood was unimportant, though high ranking women would plainly prefer high ranking men for their partners. The clan undertook to look after all children born to women of the clan and no children ought to have been neglected.

The square cross whether plain, bent into a swastika or enclosed in a circle shows the four points of the compass and therefore the whole of the earth. It was a symbol of the goddess. Besides the four directions there is another that can be traversed—upwards. The zenith is the fifth direction, yielding a pyramid and denoting the whole of the cosmos. The vertical direction is associated with the sun and fertility—the erect phallus—the son! The four triangular faces of the pyramid represent the triple goddess in her universality—she looks in all directions—and since the pyramids of Egypt for example were tombs for sun-kings, sons of the goddess, she enclosed him from all sides in death.

The son of the Goddess was worshipped as a fertility figure represented by totem poles or phallic stones. The young women and infertile ones danced erotically before them in honour of the goddess, commemorating the annual life of her son, the annual fertility cycle, and hoping the goddess would bless them with the power of her son.

The bard would sing his verses, so called from the Latin versus, a turning, because each one accompanied a complete turn of the sacred stone or grove. The bards were also the professors of their time. Knowledge, the Goddess's gift to humanity, is not fixed in any creed but grows up as a spiral or helix, getting bigger but not repeating itself. “Helice” is the name of the willow tree, sacred to the goddess and therefore to poets who originally were her bards.

The son was the waxing year who brought back the light of the sun, but the waning of the year was a serpent, phallic but spent, and associated with the earth as a dweller close to it and in rocks and crevices. Serpents were the spirits of the dead coming back through their holes into the world from the underworld.

At the midwinter solstice when the son was born he destroyed the serpent of the dying year and won the goddess's love only to die himself in fertilising the earth when he was in his prime at Easter. From his ashes came the annual serpent whose egg was eaten by the goddess and impregnated her with the son of the next winter solstice. Thus the son died at Easter but automatically generated his successor of nine months hence.

The serpent of the waning year represented Wisdom, the knowledge achieved by the Goddess through intercourse and the completion of the annual cycle. The group explained in the story of Adam and Eve is a group of the goddess depicted as the moon, Wisdom shown as a serpent and the son depicted as a star attending a fruit tree, suggesting plenty. The star denoting the son is the morning star and was known as Lucifer because it heralded the light of the sun.

At this early stage the goddess was not the morning star which she became. The change will have been made by the patriarchs who made the sun into the son and made Lucifer into a devil, simultaneously demoting the goddess to the morning star which was previously the son. The annual cycle of the son and the serpent, which alternately scorched and inundated or froze the earth, was considered inferior to the more frequent and regular cycle of the moon which was seen as the over-riding constancy of Nature. For this reason she was also seen as justice.

The Capitoline Trinity, worshipped also at Elephantine and at the Holy City, Hierapolis, was the Sun, the Moon and the Morning Star, Venus or Ishtar. The Orphics brought this trinity to Rome explaining that Ishtar should be identified with physical nature, that the sun should be identified with Zeus, known by the Romans as Jupiter, and was the animating or impregnating principle, and the Moon should be identified with Minerva, the directing wisdom of the universe. The Greeks knew her as Athene.

Here is what was originally the goddess in her triple form but with one aspect displaced by the impregnating father god. The maiden and the mature woman seem to have been rolled into one form representing nature in general and the separate mother replaced by a father figure. Wisdom is represented still by the wise old goddess, the crone.

Eve

The name Eve in Semitic languages is the same as the word for the serpent, “hawwah.” Goddesses were often symbolized or associated with serpents. Saint Brigit, the Irish Saint, had a monastery at Kildare associated with snakes, though there are no snakes in Ireland. Brigit was, of course, a canonized Goddess and she retained the Goddess's characteristics as a Saint.

The origin of the Genesis story seems to have been a story featuring a god, a serpent goddess and a son. When patriarchy became the dominant theology, the serpent Goddess had to be villified while the god had to be raised above it all. The three in the Garden of Eden therefore became Adam—the son, Eve—the Goddess in her female aspect, the serpent—the Goddess in her newly given aspect of the wicked principle. In the Genesis story both aspects of the Goddess are shown as wicked. This suited the authors of Genesis who were urging obedience to a single god called Yehouah upon a formerly polytheistic people who worshipped, among others, a snake god.

This old story originated in Sumeria, and the Babylonians had a story about a snake stealing a plant of renewed life. Snakes, because they sloughed off their dead skins and looked rejuvenated were associated with immortality, an impression increased by their habit of hiberating. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, snakes stood for immortality and, in Sumeria, the Goddess, Ninhursag or Ninta, the Goddess of procreation, was symbolized by a serpent. The switch to patriarchy left serpents with a bad or ambivalent reputation. They had to be demeaned in deference to the father god, yet had desirable connotations as a deity of immortality and creation that were hard simply to dismiss.

Thus we find the elements of the Genesis story. The two aspects of the mother Goddess are both punished. Her symbol, the serpent, is made to crawl on its belly, eat dust and be struck on the head by humankind. The Goddess in her feminine aspect had to bear the pain of childbirth, something Sumerian goddesses never felt, while also being struck on the heel by the crawling serpent. The mother Goddess was disjointed and could no longer give comfort to men or women, while women were made the chattels of men and both were to obey an unforgiving father god!

Serpents were demonized. Dragons were huge fearsome serpents that heroes killed. This is an metaphor of the destruction of the Goddess's shrines by the patriarchal warriors. The hero, depicted latterly as a brave knight in armour jousts and kills the terrible dragon that held the maiden captive. The maiden and the dragon are the Goddess in her feminine and her serpent aspects. The hero frees women from her religion because it is a monster! Women are separated from Nature and put in bondage to patriarchy.

In Babylonia, Marduk murders the earth Goddess, Tiamat, splitting her into two parts which become heaven and earth, proof enough that she was the deity od all things before patriarchy. And this myth leaves the Goddess in charge of the material world, both as Nature or as Cosmothea. This suggests her former great power. She could not just be dismissed by the patriarchs. She was notionally left with her realms but now divided and weakened, to make her subject to the God of Heaven.

Marduk pretends to be the creator by claiming to have made heaven and earth out of the Goddess, but the Goddess is still heaven and earth, so nothing has happened except that humanity now had to worship a patriarchal pretender, who has supposedly subjected, demeaned and sidelined the Goddess, though she remains as everything in the world! The false god is beyond the world, as he has always remained, supposedly superior but an illusion not even done with mirrors but with force and fear.

The same changes happened elsewhere, probably at the instigation of the waves of Indo-European invaders. Male gods could invent fanciful ways of giving birth—Athena from Zeus head and Dionysos from his thigh—but ultimately the prime creative act the priests settled on was appropriately the command—the father god ordered something to happen and Nature, the earthly Goddess, obeyed. Commands uttered by god were “god's Word,” the Creative Word, the “Logos,” later identified with Wisdom then later still with the Son. The identity with Wisdom was an attempt to reassert the Goddess as the creative principleDshe continued to give birth as only women can do in truth—and destroy what she has made too, in her aspect as Time. Wisdom is simply the Goddess personified once again as God's creative thoughts. The Goddess has become the imaginery God's brain, demeaned but still in charge.

The Son was the patriarchal backlash. Wisdom was recognized as feminine, and that was too much for the patriarchal priesthood. They could not tolerate that and some of them devised a way of making Wisdom into the Son.

Instead of people being able to venerate the Goddess in their own way, as individuals, families or communities, the patriarchal priesthood insisted that only they could properly interced with God. Properly executed ritual, they insisted was essential or God would be offended, and only the priesthood could do it properly from a lifetime of training. The “folk” religion of hearth and family was destroyed.

God was cool, rational, emotionless—a hard man elevated to the heavens. People had to forego passion, control their “nature” because Nature, the Goddess, was responsible for such weaknesses. Emotional people were harder to control and less obedient. Sexual love was a dangerous emotion that had to be carefully controlled lest people get more committed to each other than to the state, through the state religion. Loly men themselves were discouraged from indulging and from marrying for the same reason and came to be a huge force of frustrated oppression. Sex, the most essential and natural of pleasures became a sin except under carefully prescribed conditions!

Instead, immortality was the carrot granted by the universal God to his donkeys, those who obeyed Him without question. Immortality that had been the life of the parents in the children, an incentive to good parenthood through the Eternal Chain of Being, became a fraudulent and absurd life after death. They could not get there unless the priests were involved to verify that the dying person had indeed been obedient and could be given the appropriate Rites of Passage to the bosom of Abraham, or whatever.

Brigit must have been a goddess brought into Ireland by the Celts about the middle of the first millennium BC. She was symbolized by a cross, Brigit's Cross (Brent's Cross is the same), but none are found before the Iron Age, suggesting that she came with the Iron Age invaders. The Latinized name of Brigit is Brigantia and it is interesting that Gaulish tribes called the Brigantes were well known. Brigit's monastery in Kildare will have been set up on the site of an Iron Age sanctuary to the Goddess. Kildare was the City of Brigit before the Christians came.

Kildare means Church of the Oak and the oak was also sacred to the Goddess Brigit. The Druid implications are plain, and the Goddess seems to have had a duty to encourage or provide for the training of bards. Kildare seems to have been a school for them, and the head of the school might have had the title Brigit. It is speculated that the Christian Saint Brigit was one of these Druid teachers, canonized because she boldly apostatized from Druidry to Christianity, taking her school with her to make it into a Christian monastery. More probably this is a Christian attempt to hide the truth that a Pagan Goddess was made a saint to bring Pagans into the Church.

The Romans associated Brigit with their own Goddess, Minerva. Sul the Goddess of Bath where people even before the Romans came to take the Waters of Sul (Aqua Sulis) was also seen by the Romans as Minerva. Many of Brigit's symbols were the same as those of Isis and of other Goddesses too, so she seems to have taken on their characteristics by syncretism even before Christianity arrived, though the different Goddesses might have been deliberately confused by the Christians trying to eliminate them. There certainly were other Irish goddesses and Ireland seemed to have been a country of Goddesses before Christianity despite the invasiosn of the Celts who were patriarchal. They seem not to have been able to impose patriarchy, or did so only weakly, leaving Goddess worhsip still influential.

The Sheela-na-gig is a figure of a crouching woman holding open the mouth of her vulva. The old tombs of Ireland were designed as a chamber representing a womb, with a long tunnel-like entrance representing a vagina. The entrance was the vulva. It suggests that the builders of these tombs thought of death as a rebirth or as a preparation for a rebirth.

When the Christians took over, telling people that churches were now the proper preparation for eternal life, the Irish took churches to be the womb of the earth, and they carved on to them their familair symbol of the Goddess holding open her womb to receive. The Priests were perhaps able to explain this as a necessary symbol of the sins of the flesh for a lusty society. So the Sheela-na-gis were carved above the entrances, or in less prominent places, of irish churches. At Lillinaboy, she is carved into the arch above the main door to the church, making the imagery of the entrance as the entrance to a womb plain enough. It is said to be Brigit, the mother Goddess.

The Goddess in Myth and Life

In natural heathen cultures, death was often accepted to be part of life, a necessity. To die meant to become one with the Cosmos again, to return to mother Nature's womb. In many cultures, death was believed to be the beginning of a new form of life and it was fairly natural that people who reached old age decided themselves when it was time for them to part from this world. Some ended their own life, others went into solitude where they prepared themselves to die by allowing the spirit to leave the body.

Halloween for example, is originally the Pagan Celtic festival, Samhain. It was a time to remember the dead and to communicate with them. The dead had the chance to come back to this world and mingle with the living for the night. For this occasion the people would wear masks or paint their faces and bodies to resemble the dead. It was also a reminder that winter is near and Nature is dying again.

The northern nations believed that the dead would find a place either in Asgard or in Niflheim. Brave warriors, who were slain in battle, were believed to go to Asgard after their heroic deaths, where they joined Odin in his palace Valhalla. This might have been the reason why the Teutonic men were such fearless warriors, as they sincerely thought that they would be rewarded with a trip to heaven for their courage, just like modern day Muslim fanatics and the Japanese Kamikaze suicide pilots of the last war.

Others went to Niflheim, a misty underworld ruled by Hel—the origin of our word, Hell—the goddess of death, who personifies misery, hunger and sickness. Niflheim is a cold, icy and misty place, a place of sorrow and regret for those who have not been more heroic. Quite naturally northern peoples saw intense cold as their “Hell” —fire must have been quite comforting to them! But the goddess, Hel, was not all bad, and even her domain was thought to include a peaceful garden with fruit bushes where innocent if none-heroic souls like infants could dwell happily.

The women in the Germanic societies were loved and respected and enjoyed a great deal of freedom and independence. They had a strong influence over society and their work and wisdom was valued. They ran households and farms and they carried the keys to all the doors. A woman could also divorce her husband if he was no worthy partner. Some women joined their husbands and fathers on expeditions and even in battle, where they provided them with new weapons and took care of the wounded.

The northern peoples saw the intuition of women as a positive and natural influence and the women who possessed supernatural abilities were said to have been blessed by the Gods with “the gift”. Witches, the “wise women” were honoured and highly appreciated. They understood the forces of nature, they were the link between folk and gods. Divination was believed to be a gift given to the female sex entirely. Prophetesses were taken very seriously and even demanded respect in the terror of the Christian Middle Ages.

Frigg was the queen of the heavens. She was the protecter of the home and family and thus worshipped frequently. She is believed to know everything, indeed she is said to know more than Odin, but she remains silent and never reveils her secrets.

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.

The Mother Of The Gods

Crete gave Greece its sea god Poseidon, but it also gave the Greeks the archetype of the Great Mother, according to Dr Jane Harrison. Sir Arthur Evans found at Cnossos a clay seal impression showing a high peaked mountain, upon which stood a goddess. She had a sceptre in her outstretched hand, and was guarded by two lions, one to either side in heraldic fashion. Similar heraldic lions protect the great gate of the citadel of Mycenæ on mainland Greece. Between them, at Mycenæ, is a column which is the goddess. In the Cretan seal, she wore a skirt with many flounces. Behind the Mountain Mother on the seal is a Mycenæan shrine with columns and horns, marking a cult whose god was a bull headed man. Before the goddess stands a worshipper rapt in ecstasy.

In another aspect, the goddess is shown rising from the ground, in which she is knee deep. She seems to be the same goddess because she is dressed in an identical Cretan flounced skirt, but here has a short sleeved bodice which conspicuously displays her breasts, perhaps signifying her as mother. To either side of her are two blossoming plants, also rising from the ground. In her left hand, she has three poppy capsules, the poppy, with its countless seeds, being the emblem of fertility. Over her right shoulder are seen the heads of three snakes. Her right wrist is grasped by a male attendant, who lifts her from the ground. She is the Mother goddess rising from the earth in the spring. The scene depicted is what the Greeks called the Anodos—up rising. This Anodos was commonly shown on Greek vases, but here is its source in Crete. At Delphi, at Athens, and at Megara, the Greeks had rites of summoning or calling up the Goddess. One of these rites was called the Bringing up of Semele. Semele is the Thracian form of Gê or Gaia, the Earth.

Zeus, the Olympian patriarchal father god, largely effaced the Great Mother, but could not fully erase her. The priestesses at the ancient oracular shine of Dodona continued to chant her name in their litany:

Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.

And at Delphi the priestess began her formal ritual address to the gods:

First in my prayer before all other gods, I call on Earth, primeval prophetess.

The Great Mother is called upon first, signifying that she was at Delphi before Poseidon, before Dionysos, before Apollo. In Greece the Mother and the Father gods are characteristic of the two main theological strata, the Mother is Pelasgian and Minoan, the Father Indo-European—Hellenic. The Mother is accompanied usually by a subordinate male, a mythical son or lover, who became the heroes protexted by Athena, Hera and Artemis. The author of the Homeric Hymn describes her and her gifts:

Concerning Earth, the mother of all, shall I sing, firm Earth, eldest of gods, that nourishes all things in the world; all things that fare on the sacred land, all things in the sea, all flying things, all are fed out of her store. Through thee, revered goddess, are men happy in their children and fortunate in their harvest. Thine it is to give or to take life from mortal men. Happy is he whom thou honourest with favouring heart, to him all good things are present innumerable—his fertile field is laden, his meadows are rich in cattle, his house filled with all good things. Such men rule righteously in cities of fair women, great wealth and riches are theirs, their children grow glorious in fresh delights, their maidens joyfully dance and sport through the soft meadow flowers in floral revelry. Such are those that thou honourest, holy goddess, kindly spirit. Hail, Mother of the Gods, thou wife of starry Ouranos, and freely in return for my ode give me livelihood sufficient.

The Great Mother preceded Zeus. She was remembered as “Wife of Starry Ouranos”, and Uranus was the grandfather of Zeus. On the Orphic gold tablet buried with him to ensure his safety is inscribed the proud confession:

I am the child of Earth and of Starry Heaven.

More than that, though, Mother Earth, Gaia, had brought forth Uranus by parthenogenesis, virginal birth. So she was the Mother of the Gods.

The change effected by the Patriarchal invaders is illustrated by a vase in the Oxford Ashmolean Museum, in which the uprising figure is marked Pandora. Pandora, the first woman, in Hesiod was made from clay by Hephaestus, the craftsman, then had bequethed a gift from each of the Olympians. She was meant to be beautiful and beguiling to men but meant nothing but trouble. Pandora opened, not a box, but a pithos, a large storage pot, an earthenware jar used in those days for storing almost anything, wine, oil, grain, even bodies—they were large enough to be used for burial—Diogenes lived in a pithos not a barrel. The picture of Pandora and the pithos was originally the image of the Great Mother with her store of gifts to humanity—grain, wine, oil, and so on, her cornucopia, the real horn of plenty, the annual harvest.

Patriarchy reinterpreted the image of the Great Mother, with her pithos full of the gifts of the earth, to suit themselves. They turned her into an empty headed bimbo letting loose the woes of the world, when, as the wife of Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, she opened the pithos she was not supposed to touch. It was ancient propaganda, something scholars can rarely see. An intermediate version of the myth of Pandora proves it. The pithos belongs, in this variant, to Prometheus and stands for the gifts he had brought for humanity. Pandora opened it prematurely and let them all escape except Hope, which was at the bottom and could not get out before the lid was replaced. So, here, Prometheus brings the gifts as a direct patriarchal replacement for the Great Mother. So the older images of the uprising goddess that were everywhere, and the older myth, were explained away. These reinterpretations were not mistakes. They were intended. The god of patriarchal tribes like the Hellenes, Father Zeus, would have no Great Earth Mother in Olympus. She who gave all things quite openly is made into the slave of man, his plaything, his sex object, the brainless, bimbo woman.

The Earth Mother can be followed from Crete to the mainland and her influence on the Pelasgian goddesses revealed, how she gave to Aphrodite her doves, and to Athene her snakes.

Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos—Ceres, Proserpine and Bacchus

Demeter means Grain Mother. She is a type of the earlier Earth Mother. Primitive hunter gatherers saw the earth as a mother before they settled into agriculture. When the hunters settled as herdsmen, then as agriculturalists, the Great Mother evolved into a Grain Mother, Demeter.

It might seem odd that heavy farming work like ploughing, sowing and harvesting grain should be attributed to a mother, but mothers produce children and the earth was always a goddess in that sense. Moreover, women did start agriculture. In the pre-settled existence of hunter gathering, men went off in groups hunting. Woman, responsible for children stayed close to home, gathering roots and fruits. They were the ones who first gathered nutritious seeds from wild grasses and took them home to nibble, inventing pots and baskets to carry them in. They were the ones who noticed that these same grasses began to grow around their huts, and realized why. Always at least two out of three parts of the diet were gathered rather than hunted. Gathering always provided the food staples. Hunting was haphazard, and a bonus when successful. The men accepted it was what the women did that fed them most of the time, and that their own efforts gave them a feast occasionally. They dare not interfere in what they thought must be magical, and had something to do with the women bringing forth children. In Payne’s History of the New World, an Indian explained:

When the women plant maize, the stalk produces two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. Only they know how to plant the corn so as to be sure of it germinating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we do.

It shows precisely the attitude of Stone Age men to women in a suggested matriarchal society, though patriarchal historians and anthropologists cannot bear to hear of it.

Homer will not say anything about the Rape of Persephone and the Mourning of Demeter, of the Kathodos—the “going down” into Hades, and the Anodos, the rising up in spring. He mentions Demeter as dwelling on earth, not on Olympus. She stands with her yellow hair at the sacred threshing floor when men are winnowing, demeaned into dividing grain from chaff. Persephone is for Homer not Korê, not the lovely uprising maiden form of the Grain Mother in the spring, but the dread Queen of the underworld, ruling in Hades. Odysseus, wanting to talk to the dead heroes in Hades was scared that “Persephone the dread from Hades should send up the awful monster’s grisly head’.”

In fact, Demeter did have a dark side, like Kali, the Indian goddess. The Earth yielded her gifts but it also received the dead:

Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life, And rears and takes again into her womb.

Æschylus

Athenians called the dead Demetreioi, Demeter’s People, and the Gorgon’s head is a ritual mask meant to be a ghost or somebody dead. They are commonplace among the rituals of primitive tribes still. The gorgon is a monster invented to account for the ritual mask. The Earth Mother, as guardian of the dead, has a terrifying aspect, that of a gorgon. A Rhodian plate in the British Museum shows the Great Mother grasping in her hands two birds, with human body and feet. She is winged, and has a gorgon’s head with pendent tongue, glaring eyes and great tusks.

Demeter, as guardian of ghosts, is called Demeter Erinys, erinys being an angry ghost. Erinyes, angry ghosts, figures of terror and vengeance, become in the Eumenides of Æschylus, figures of fertility, holy and benign, carrying, in one hand, their underground snakes, in the other, fruit and flowers. Greek religion, as understood by dramatists like Æschylus, was meant to tranform fear and ugliness into beauty and tranquillity.

Hera

Hera is the wife of Zeus, but her sacred marriage with Zeus is not the ideal of human wedlock—it is the typical one. The marriage is turbulent, and brute though Zeus was, Hera is herself tyrannic, literally a termagant woman. At Olympia, where Zeus ruled supreme, Hera had a separate sanctuary, the Heraion, much older than that of Zeus. At Argos, too, was an ancient Heraion sacred to the “ox eyed” goddess. In Thessaly, in the ancient Argonautic legend, Hera is queen and patron of the hero Jason. Of Zeus… nothing. What does it mean? Hera had been forcibly married to vulgar Zeus. She is an ancient Pelasgian divinity, and when Zeus, the god of the immigrant Achaians, conquered her land, the marriage was arranged to signify the submission of the natives, but she always defied him. The original wife of Zeus became a cipher, Dione. Dione is Diana, the female form of Zeus, and therefore his original wife.

So, Hera was the divine Queen in Greece long before the coming of the Achaian Zeus. In those early Pelasgian days, who and what was she? Her name tells us. Hera is “Yara”, the year. Hera is the spirit of the year, who brings the fruits of the year in their season. As such she has a threefold seasonal aspect. Pausanias tells us that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames at Stymphalos in rugged Arcadia,. While yet a girl she was called Child or Maiden, when married she was called Fullgrown, and, separated from her husband, she was called Chera, the desolate one, the Widow. Through her, the three stages of a woman’s life reflect the three seasons of the year—spring, summer, winter, summer and autumn being regarded together as one season of fruit bearing. In the spring she is Child or Maiden, in summer and autumn she is Fullgrown, and in winter she is a Widow. Her winter desolation reminds us of the mourning of Demeter. Her three seasons also reflect the moon, with its waxing, full, and waning moon. Hera is a typically divided Great Mother, for she was all these things and more.

Patriarchal Homer does not want to know any of this. Hera is a queen. The Nature goddess emerges once in Homer. Zeus the Cloud Gatherer is seated on the topmost peak of Mount Ida, and Hera, clad in all her splendour and girt with the cestus of Aphrodite, approaches him. “And as he saw her, love come over his deep heart.” He cast about her a golden cloud and clasped her as his bride within his arms.

And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh, new grass, and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth, thick and soft that raised them aloft from the ground. Therein they lay, and were clad on with a fair golden cloud, whence fell drops of glittering dew.

Homer

Here is the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage which impregnates the earth to give birth in spring. Hebe, the cup-bearer of Olympus, and the daughter of Hera, is her younger aspect as maiden.

Aphrodite—Venus

Aphrodite, in contrast to the local invention, Athena, is an outsider in Olympus. She belongs, as her titles tell, to the southern and eastern islands of the Greek archipelago. Living in islands her way was ever on the sea. She is Cythereia, she of Cythêra, and Cypria, she of Cyprus, where at Paphos she had her great sanctuary.

Love comes at his hour, comes with the flowers in spring, leaving the land of his birth, Kypros, beautiful isle. Love comes scattering seed for man upon earth.

Theognis

Aphrodite is constantly attended by the Horæ, the seasons, and she, like Hera, is herself a seasonal goddess. She is not virginal in the conventional sense, but she is a korê, a maiden, in her eternal youth and radiance. Perhaps the best title for her is Nymphê, Bride. The ancients saw that virginity was not a virtue to be lost once and for all, but a grace to be annually renewed in the spring. Aphrodite is a bride of the pre-patriarchal order, she is not a wife, she can never tolerate permanent patriarchal wedlock. Her will is turned toward love rather than marriage. When she was admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, a foolish and futile attempt was made to marry her off to the craftsman, Hephaistos. Hephaistos in Homer is always contemptible, but it shows the Achaians had conquered asfar as the volcanic island of Lemnos, whose craftsman god they incorporated. As bride of Hephaistos, Aphrodite is also called Charis, Grace—physical charm and beauty incarnate.

In the Iliad, she has only a single prowess, that of one human passion—lusty love. The Homeric Hymn gives her a greater importance. When she was seeking the shepherd Anchises:

To many fountained Ida she came, mother of wild beasts, and made straight for the steading through the mountain, while behind her came fawning the beasts, grey wolves and lions fiery eyed and bears and swift pards, insatiate pursuers of the roe deer. Glad was she at the sight of them and sent desire into their breasts, and they went coupling two by two in the shadowy dells.

She is not merely the goddess of human sexual coupling, but is the earth mother giving all things on the wide earth the impulse of life. She is Lady, too, of the upper air, the sea and land. On a vase painting in the British Museum, she is seated sedately on a swan winging through the air. She is the Venus Genetrix of the Roman Epicurean poet and philosopher, Lucretius.

Three of the local Pelasgian Korai, or Maidens, who became goddesses in Olympus, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite appear together in a myth, the Judgment of Paris. At the wedding of Peleus the gods and goddesses assembled, and Eris, goddess of Strife, threw among them a golden apple inscribed, “Let the fair one take it”. The three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, snatched at the apple in their rivalry, and straightway went to Paris, Priam’s son, the young shepherd prince for judgment.

Harrison noticed that three out of four illustrations of the Judgement of Paris on Greek vases had no judge, no Paris. Moreover, not one had a golden apple. In the fifth and sixth centuries BC, to which these vases belong, the apple was unknown, and the figure of Paris incidental. Commonly, the vases showed the three goddesses walking in procession behind Hermes, in one case coverd by one cloak shared among all three. Other vases barely differentiate them. It seems the three goddesses are the three Graces or Charities, bearing gifts, dominion, wisdom, love, the sêmeia or tokens of the goddesses who bring them. Any young man has to make this choice when chosing a wife.

Artemis—Diana

Homer, in the Odyssey, adds Artemis as a fourth of the Graces, the Gift Givers, and the daughters of Pandareus receive gifts from all four. The activities of Artemis live more among plants, animals and wild things than among people, but, in her aspect of the moon, she watches over women in childbirth.

Artemis, like her brother Apollo, is a Northerner. She was worshipped as Queen in Thrace and in Pæonia, where her aspect as moon goddess is clearest. There, too, she has the title of Hekate, the Far Darter, whose arrows take people in death—the feminine of Apollo Hekatos. As Hekate, as moon goddess, she has her dark and spectral side of magic and spells. The moon being frightening even though she lights up the night, because she stares down in a cold, pitiless way, pale and ghastly, charged with death and magic. As the earth mother, she collects the dead, and in this she shows her gentler and fairer side. When she comes to take people in death, she kills them mercifully, and “with shafts that hurt not, strikes and lays them low”.

Artemis is, of all the divine maidens, austerely virginal. While Athena refuses marriage, she is foster mother, guardian, and friend to many a hero. The relation of these early and husbandless matriarchal goddesses to the male figures who attend them is noble and womanly. It is a relation somewhere between mother and lover, but much like a patron saint. The goddesses do not ask the men they inspire and protect to love and adore them, but that they should do great deeds. It is the relationship of Hera to Jason and of Athena to Perseus, to Herakles, to Theseus. They are to be heroes! The patriarch force the goddesses into a servile amorous and abject domesticity. Artemis alone among the maidens in effect renounced this high companionship with heroes. She dwells apart in lonely mountains and wild, untouched forests. She is most of all the Lady of the Wild Things.

For this reason, the local cults of Artemis retain some of their primitive savagery. The earth mother is like Kali, as we have already noted, and took life as well as gave it. To us, it is no reason why we should do the Goddess's work, but primitive people did not think like us. Pausanias was witness, at Messene, of a horrid ritual in honour of Artemis Laphria. He tells us of…

…a hall of the Kuretes, where they sacrifice without distinction all animals, beginning with oxen and goats and ending with birds. They throw them all into the fire.

The Kuretes were ministrants of the Great Mother, the original Artemis. Pausanias also relates the ritual of the Great Mother at Hierapolis:

In the court of the sanctuary were kept all manner of beasts and birds, consecrated oxen, horses, eagles, bears, and lions who never hurt anybody, but are holy and tame to handle.

But these tame, holy beasts were kept for a holocaust, which Lucian thus describes:

Of all the festivals the greatest that I know of they hold at the beginning of the spring. At this festival they do as follows. They cut down great trees and set them up in the courtyard. Then they bring sheep and goats and other live beasts and hang them upon the trees. They also bring birds and clothes and vessels of gold and silver. When they have made all ready, they carry the victims round the trees and set fire to them, and straightway they are all burned.

Such an holocaust was held in honour of Artemis at Patræ. After describing the altar, surrounded by a circle of green logs of wood and approached by an inclined plane made of earth, he tells of the procession of the virgin priestess in a car drawn by deer. Of the sacrifice itself, he says it was not merely a state affair, but popular among private persons:

For they bring and cast upon the altar living things of all sorts, both edible birds and all manner of victims, also wild boars and deer and fawns, and some even bring the cubs of wolves and bears, and others full grown beasts. I saw, indeed, a bear and other beasts struggling to get out of the first force of the flames and escaping by sheer strength. But those who threw them in dragged them up again on to the fire. I never heard of anyone being wounded by the wild beasts.

The Tauri made human sacrifices to their Artemis. In later days, the conscience of Greece revolted, and Euripides makes Iphigeneia, doomed to sacrifice her brother, cry out against Artemis who “herself doth drink the blood of slaughtered men”. About this same time, the Persians stopped the Western Semites in Syria and the Levant from sacrificing children to the flames of Melekh, an incident symbolized in the bible by the substitution of a lamb for Abraham.

On the Acropolis at Athens was a precinct sacred to Artemis of Brauron. In it was enacted the arkteia or bear service. In one of the comedies of Aristophanes the chorus of women tell how they were reared at the expense of the state. The state wisely took them in hand early:

As soon as I was seven years old I became an Errephoros, when I was ten I was grinder to our Sovereign Lady, then, wearing the saffron robe, I was a bear in the Brauronian festival.

So, in Arcadia, Artemis was a bear, and Pausanias tells us that one of her worshippers was turned into a bear. No doubt in wild Arcadia the bear was a much dreaded creature, whom it was wise to propitiate, but to find at civilized Athens, in the Christian era, a bear-cult is surprising, and shows how tenacious ancient tradition is. The details of the ritual are lost, though no well-born Athenian man dare marry a maiden unless she had been consecrated as a bear to Artemis, for it stood for her virginity. One can imagine little Athenian girls, wrapped in yellow bearskins, dancing and crouching like bears before the goddess Artemis, who would preserve their virginity once more.

The Athenians eventually tamed the bear ritual. A saffron robe was substituted for the bearskin, and from the time of Aristophanes we hear more of the dedication of raiment than of the dancing of bears. An inscription in the British Museum has a long list of offerings. One maiden offers a cloak of carded wool, another her saffron robe, a third her mirror with an ivory handle. On it goes, the goddess disdaining nothing. She must have been well provided for, but sometimes a cloak or shawl is noted down as a “rag”. A young girl, Timaretê, dedicated to her local Artemis, as Lady of the Lake, her clothes and her childish toys and doll before her marriage. Korê is Greek for both maiden and doll.

Though the name Artemis is plainly connected with bears, it is not so clear as that of Hera or Athena. Some think the goddess took her name from a healing herb much in use in antiquity, the artemisia, wormwood or mugwort, known also as the Mother of Herbs and as Tutsan (tout saint) or All Heal. It seems to be an idea that puts thinks on their head. The healing herb was closely associated with the cult of Artemis, and will have been named after the goddess.

In Parkinson’s Herbal, the mugwort or wormwood had the power of dispelling demons. It was called S John’s herb because in midsummer on S John’s Eve girdles were made of it. The herb doctor, Culpepper, says that a hot decoction of the herb was used to promote delivery and to remove tumours. Another herbalist, Gerarde, notes from Pliny that the mugwort “doth properly cure women’s diseases”. It was a woman’s medicine, and was sometimes called parthenium. The mugwort grew in great profusion on Mount Taygetos in Arcadia, the base of Artemis. A manuscript of the eleventh century shows Artemis in the act of giving the mugwort to the centaur Cheiron, the ancient physician who dwelt on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. The reputation of the mugwort has lasted.

So, Artemis, like her twin brother Apollo, was a healer. Apollo, Sophocles tells us, had in the North an “ancient garden”, and this garden, no doubt, was not of flowers, but of healing herbs. Hekate, who was, as we have seen, but the magical moon aspect of Artemis, had a similar garden, which Medea the sorceress visited, and of which we have an account in the Orphic Argonautica. It was shady with leaf-bearing trees, and in it grew many a magic herb, black poppy, smilax, mandragora, aconite, and other “baneful plants”. In the Hippolytus of Euripides, Artemis, all huntress, is worshipped by the huntsman Hippolytus. An ancient treatise on hunting says hunters must pay homage to Artemis Agrotera, She of the Wild. They must pour a libation, sing hymns, and offer first fruits of the game taken, and they must crown the goddess. The hunters must also crown their dogs, and that dogs and huntsmen must feast together. But when Hippolytus comes to pay this service to Artemis, she is not Agrotera on the mountain or in the wilds of the forest, but in a garden, enclosed—a holy magical place. This holy place, this garden enclosed, was the herb garden of Artemis the Healer.

Athena—Minerva

The next most important god for Greeks after Zeus on Olympus is Athena, the Grey Eyed, the Ægis Bearer. Zeus and Athena are always especially close, for she is his motherless daughter, having sprung full grown, fully armed, from the head of her father, though neither the Iliad or the Odyssey says so. The miraculous birth was the subject of one of the Homeric Hymns.

The longer form of Athena’s name, Athenaia, is simply a feminine adjective, “She of Athens”, the maiden of Athens. The other name, Pallas, simply means virgin. Athena is maiden through and through, so her temple is called the maiden sanctuary, the Parthenon. This maiden is singularly of Athens and no other city.

Plato, in the Laws, says Athenaia is but the local Korê, or maiden, the incarnation of Athens. Only after Homer’s epic had come to Athens from Ionia, could the change of Korê to Athena have been made. The rising democracy took Korê and set her as rival and counterpoise to Poseidon, the god of the aristocracy. Of course, a warrior woman is a negation of Korê. She remains unreal because she is an invented goddes, for all her dependence on Korê. Really, she is the Tychè, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not a goddess, but the city, “Based on a crystalline sea of thought and its eternity”.

Athena is an ideal and a mystery—the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion, like, but transcending, the love of man for woman.

Professor Gilbert Murray

She has her ancient snake crouching beneath her shield. This snake was the primeval earth born guardian of the city, and probably the goddess herself was at first imaged as a snake. Herodotus tells us that, when the Persians besieged the citadel, the guardian snake left the honey cake, its monthly sacrificial food, untouched, and when the priestess told this the Athenians the more readily forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had really abandoned it.

The primitive Athenian Korê or maiden had her olive-tree, and Athena had her owl, like those that still hoot by moonlight in the ruined Parthenon on the Acropolis. The goddess herself bore the title Glaukopis, Owl Eyed, and on her coins, current everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean, was stamped the image of her owl. When Athena rose to be the goddess of Light and Reason, the owl got wise with her and became the Bird of Wisdom.

Doing the Right Thing or Obeying the Law

The earliest societies had no written laws—there was no writing! Symbols with meaning on tiny clay disks were first used as accounts—numbers of commodities owned or exchanged. Writing and formal grammar arose as a secret of the patriarchal priesthood and was probably kept as a sacred secret for centuries before escaping into the world at large.

Language was sacred and change was seen as corruption… This threat was countered by making grammatical rules which would petrify language. So sacred was the language of the religious texts, Sanskrit, that the grammar itself acquired a central and almost sacrosanct place in the education system of the Indus Valley Aryans.

Dr Tariq Rahman

Formal religion, like that of the first Greeks, was a way of protecting the tribe against evil. The priesthood were diviners who had to decide what measures were needed to placate the gods and ensure that the tribe had good fortune. The Romans had a College of Augurs right into historic times to teach diviners how to decide what divine beings were doing that might affect the tribe.

The diviners prescribed what was needed for good fortune and if anyone deliberately or inadvertently did something which might bring ill-luck on to the tribe the culprit did the noble thing, the moral thing, the right thing—suicide in serious cases, and they arrived at this moral decision, immense sacrifice as it was, with no assistance from the God of the Christians, the Jews or the Moslems. They had been taught what was the right thing to do. The root of the word “religion” being the Latin expression rem legere meaning to choose a thing—the diviners having to choose whatever might obtain divine favour.

In these times, when a primitive monarchy was held by a king devoted to the Goddess of Wisdom, morals were entirely an individual responsibility but once writing was invented, gradually the growing body of laws took away an individual's ability to choose to do the right thing. The word “law” has the same root as “religion” in legere. It is a “chosen word”, a religious pronouncement, originally of ephemeral or local application. But some were found to be written often and and became laws. In the Greek New Testament, a Jewish expert in the law (the Mosaic law) is described as a grammateus or a nomikos—an expert in writing or an expert in law. So, even then writing and law were so close as to be identical. The written laws were attributed to God and were therefore binding, so were thought, in popular etymology, to be derived from the word ligare meaning to bind.

The actions of the king were restricted by taboos. He had to choose a thing, rem legere, not anything, but the right thing and he had twelve Lictores, or priestly advisors, one for each month, to explain what was the right thing to do, on any occasion. In Roman Republican times the duties of the king passed to the priest of Jupiter and the position of his advisers passed to the consuls, while the Lictores became a guard of honour to the consuls.

The movement from personal responsibility for doing right, inculcated by social or religious mores, to an obligation enforced by law, accompanied the move from goddess orientation to patriarchal society. The goddess society began based on personal morality and intuitive decisions but under the patriarchs evolved into one based on fixed laws. The Goddess drew on the inner person through social and psychological responsibility—awareness of the right thing to do. Patriarchal gods prescribed external laws that often made no sense to individuals, who were therefore inclined to ignore them or deliberately defy them by breaking them.

The Persians, under the infuence of Zoroaster, their prophet of the monotheistic god, Ormuzd, first introduced an extensive list of laws into religion in the form of questions put by the prophet to God. The list produced for the Yehudim by Ezra—who the Persians sent from Babylon to set up an outpost and buffer state in the Palestinian hills to guard the empire against the frequent seditions in Egypt—was no less extensive and identical in many significant ways, but were written as direct commandments rather than answers to endless questions.

Christianity apparently eschewed such lists except that it incorporated the Jewish scriptures into its own and made a principle of obedience to the laws of the secular state, initially Rome, irrespective of their justice. In practice therefore it has hardly been any less legalistic than Judaism, and religious legalism is really the point of all patriarchal religions. It is perfectly moral to respect and obey a caring father, but quite another matter to pretend that some patriarchal “father” in heaven has handed down a long list of dos and don'ts to benefit some “father” on the throne who is in reality a tyrant.

A return to self-sacrifice for others—to a sense of personal duty—would be the right thing for us. Young people must be taught to choose the right thing, and the right thing must be right for all—in other words, based on natural or instinctive feelings of what is good in general. Admittedly, not everyone has a finely honed sense of intuition and guidelines are needed—the duty of parents and teachers—but not endless laws that command no respect and that anyone with a deep enough wallet can pervert anyway.

Serious problems often cannot be solved by appeal to precedent but should be approached completely intuitively. If precedents are used at all they should be merely as historical illustrations of intuitive principles at work. When disputes involve different parties, the arbiters must ask the contending parties to consider the intuitive situation of their opponents. Entrenched positions prevent the intuitive principle from working freely by setting forbidden territory for each party. Intuition must be freed of these constraints.

Politicians might be chosen for loyalty to the whips of a particular party, but they, above all, must do the right thing according to the dictates of the salvation of Nature, and should be commended not castigated for it.

Neither law nor the universal availability of Christian salvation in the last 2000 years has stopped crime. Despite the threat of hell fire and eternal torture, Christians soon realised they had to have soldiers and police to maintain order, and secular punishments, usually death, to prevent crime. Modern Christians besotted with their desire to meet Jesus, cannot see that religion has never made any society moral, probably least of all the Christian religion with its appalling history of cruelty and depravity.

Morality is not imposed on people or societies, it is within them. The societies of the Goddess were moral not because they worshipped a goddess but because that goddess was the world in which they lived. When every thing and person in the world is sacred because it is part of the Goddess, then it merits respect, and inculcates the desire to do the right thing.

Patriarchal Monotheism

In a late wave of invasion by the Indo-Europeans, beginning around 1000 BC, the sky god was elevated beyond the sky as a universal god. The sky god was universally seen as the supreme god by the Greeks, the Indians and the Romans, but under the influence of the Aryan prophet, Zoroaster, he was lifted head and shoulders above all the other gods as effectively a monotheistic, transcendental god, Ahura Mazda, later called Ormuzd.

The single all-encompassing god of Zoroaster, like the earlier Goddess, was an ambidextrous god incorporating the opposing principles of Good and Evil, but that was too difficult for the patriarchs to understand and he quickly divided again into opposing principles, which became two separate gods, often twins. We know them as God and Satan.

The ambivalence of the original god gave rise to dualism, the battle of Good and Evil in which good eventually will triumph. This dangerous nonsense has for millennia led people into endless murder and torture, while they fool themselves into believing they are doing good. The right hand of the ambidextrous god tries to lop off his left hand causing untold harm.

Reject the division of Good from Evil. The Goddess is the sower and the reaper, the slayer and the slayed, life and death, love and hate, good and evil. The goddess is the goddess of opposites and therefore everything. She is ambivalent and ambidextrous, and even ambiguous. The central spirit of the universe is a unity and good and evil are as conjoined as the two sides of a coin. Every new creation will have opposing aspects and to speak of trying to have one without the other is madness. It leads to what it seeks to prevent—dissension and hatred. Our aim must be to achieve an acceptable balance, a balance tipped in the direction we prefer, but it is lunacy to pretend that we can be free of everything we wish to classify as evil.

The goddess is ambivalent. Thus she is white because she is pure like newly fallen snow, like flour, like milk, like a teutonic maiden's skin before they all started to use sunbeds. But also white are ghosts, the ill, the consumptive and the leprous. The proper offering for a cleansed leper in Leviticus 14:10 includes an ephah of flour, a relic of goddess worship. The Latin word for white is albus which will be familiar to botanists and gardeners in the names of white plants. The same Greek word is alphos which supplies their word for leprosy and alpiton, from the same root, means barley which was ground into the flour with which priestesses of the goddess whitened their faces to look like the full moon—and Death!

James Mellaart said that bird figures painted on walls at Çatal Hütük are the “Vulture Goddess,” who is identified with the “Goddess of Death.” When Gimbutas finds clay or bone white figurines, she says they are of “the White Death Goddess,” with “terrifying masks.”

The goddess is Truth and truth she defends with death. Eternal life is a lie. It is static not dynamic. It is death not life—life moves. Only the goddess herself lives forever and she is ever moving, ever changing. The promise of a personal everlasting afterlife is an invention of wicked people who desire to control simpler people in this life. Just as a teacher can be thought of as living in his disciples, our life lives on in our children and the changes we have made in our life—we live on in the goddess but not as a personal consciousness. Our future life is much more subtle than the anthropocentric spiritism of Christianity and other spin-offs from post-exilic Judaism, and what is more important we create it in this life!

Goddess worshippers had no fear of death. They saw only continuity in the cycles represented by the goddess—constant birth, constant death and constant renewal as a perpetuum with death simply meaning a new birth. Initially, the male gods knew only of Hades or Sheol, places where the shadows or shades of people who had once lived wandered unaware forever. This form of death was not popular and people feared it. What is there to fear if the shades are aware of nothing? Plainly it was worse for people to imagine an eternity of mindless wandering than it was to look forward to a rebirth.

Cybele was the interest of a minor nation but was taken to Rome on the advice of an oracle and seemed to rescue Rome from Hannibal. She lived there then for over 500 years. The twin of Osiris, Isis also persisted, surging back into favour after Alexander had conquered Egypt. She also lived in Rome until the Christians murdered her. The goddesses of the patriarchal Greeks came to be seen again as aspects of the Great Mother, whether Isis or Cybele, both of whom lived as great mystery religions for over a thousand years.

Earlier the Eleusinian Mysteries had featured the goddess as the earth mother, Demeter, and her younger self as the daughter, the virgin Kore, Proserpine or Persephone, who descended into Hades in death but was resurrected. Bacchus or Dionysos seems to have been involved in this trinity as the son who was resurrected by Cybele and therefore, like Jesus, offered the hope of resurrection to the mystai. For Cybele and Isis, it was clearly their male companion as son or twin who was resurrected—Attis and Osiris respectively—not the goddess herself in her virginal aspect.

In all these mysteries, as in the last of them, Christianity, initiates were promised eternal life for their earthly personality. The patriarchal priests had realised that Sheol and Hades were no rivals to the rebirth of the Goddess, but the eternal life that they had invented was a winner.

Judaism

In the Near East, Judaism was deliberately started as a branch of the universal Persian Religion, and from it Christianity and eventually Islam evolved. The Pagan religions were suppressed and the female principle was gradually driven out of religion, and women reduced to a level inferior to men. The God, King, Priest and Father replaced the Goddess, Queen, Priestess and Mother. A woman's testimony was not considered significant in Jewish courts; women were not allowed to speak in Christian churches; positions of authority in the church were limited to men.

The Hebrews, a nomadic breed that lived in the hill country of Palestine, took to worshipping Canaanite gods and goddesses, Asherah, Baal and Chemosh, rather than their own phallic snake god represented by brazen serpents. Evidence of Yehouah as the impregnating north wind god are found in Isa 14:13; Ezek 1:4; Psalms 48:2; and Job 37:29. God's mansion was in the far north. This god was Baal Zebul, the Lord of the House, (2 Kings 1:2) whose tribe was Zebulon and who was worshipped at Mount Tabor. When Persian officials arrived in the fifth century BC to set up a temple to a universal god whose designated earthly representative and saviour of the peoples was the Persian king, they re-wrote the old myths such that the Israelites had always had only one transcendental god—Yehouah. Baal meant “the Lord” and old habits die hard.

The “restored” priesthood was thoroughly patriarchal, rejecting goddesses totally, even changing the names of goddesses in the ancient myths to make them into gods. Judaism seemed the quintessentially patriarchal religion after the restoration but the goddess still hovered.

The goddess appeared mysteriously as Wisdom in Proverbs where in verse 2 she is the first creation of God and assists him in the creation of everything else. None of this appeared in Genesis and Proverbs is a Hellenistic addition to the scriptures. So only a century or so after she had been expunged from the scriptures by the patriarchal schools of Nehemiah and Ezra, the goddess was easing her way back into the void they had left—as Wisdom. In Ecclesiasticus, also Hellenistic, Ben Sirach expands upon her at length. The goddess of Nature, the goddess of wisdom, kindness and caring made a small step back into Judaism.

Traces of other gods also remained. Biblical editors of all ages seem not to be too efficient, despite the workings of the Holy Ghost, and it is clear in the scriptures that before the exile the hill dwellers of Israel tried out a variety of Canaanite and Philistine gods. Since the main religions of half the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and all their offshoots, depend upon the religion introduced quite cynically by the post-exilic Jewish priesthood to suit the ambitions of the Persian kings, it is not surprising that there is not a proper goddess among them, though the Virgin Mary tries.

The Persian god had seven aspects called Amesha Spentas or angels, each representing a quality, and he created the world in six stages. The new Jewish god completed the act of creation in six “days” and the Jews discovered angels at the same time. Each archangel of Yehouah had a day of the week to overlook, and so there were seven! The archangel Michael was given Wednesday, the day when time was created and so, for many Jews, effectively the first day.

The Gnostic Ophites believed the true god was the god of Wednesday and was represented by a serpent. The pre-exilic Jews had worshipped a brazen serpent and it seems the main focus of their worship was the menorah, the seven branched candlestick, representing the seven days of the week. The central branch of the menorah which rises directly up from the pedestal is Wednesday, the fourth day of the week when Yehouah made the days of the week. It could not possibly be the Sabbath, the seventh day, as the Rabbis tried to pretend.

In the Ophic creation myth, Ophion, the serpent god of Wednesday, had mated with the goddess in the form of a serpent. The badge of office of mercury was a wand with two intertwined serpents, evidently mating. The Genesis story of Adam and Eve was a version of this myth deliberately adapted to depict the discarded serpent god as wicked.

The Chanukah candlestick has eight branches and was used at the winter solstice Feast of Lights. Conventional Judaism pretends that this ancient festival was introduced only in the second century by the Maccabees to commemorate the rededication of the Temple by Judas Maccabee when he freed Judaea from the Greeks.

Really, as is obvious, it was a celebration of the birth of the sun god which Yehouah was before he became hidden. The vision of Ezekiel plainly identifies Yehouah as a sun god, the fiery circle being the sun in its path through the heavens, and the four cherubs the four seasons. In Genesis 3:24, cherubs armed with the whirling sword of Yehouah, a sword of flame, guard the East gate of Eden. The Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes had celebrated the birth of Zeus in the temple only three days before and Zeus who was a sky god naturally had a sun aspect which was born in midwinter.

Maccabees 1:18 suggests this winter festival was celebrated at least in the time of Nehemiah, who will have introduced it to equal the midwinter celebrations that in Persia were the birth of Mithras, another sun god. The eighth branch represents the odd day out at the end of the year which is needed to make 365 days. Thus the week at the midwinter solstice has eight days not seven.

The Persians were one thing but the Greeks quite another for Jews loyal to the god set up by the Persians. From the time of Alexander prophetic pseudepigraphs, disguised as if they were warnings from centuries before against Canaanite gods, were written warning Jews, meaning worshippers of the Persian version of Yehouah, against the gods of the heathen Greeks whom they began to favour.

The Angel of the Lord: Son of God?

Just as the gentile bishops rewrote the story of Jesus to obfuscate parts that told too clear a story, the priests of the second temple “returned” from “exile” and rewrote ancient Canaanite and Babylonian legends as the Jewish scriptures, known to Christians as the Old Testament, with the aim of depicting the Jews as always having been monotheistic worshippers of their favoured God, to whom the temple would be dedicated—Yehouah. In the second century BC, these scriptures were to be destroyed and again rewritten by Hellenised Jews after the Maccabees had revolted.

Today, Christians remain in thrall to the words of these various “reconstructions” (forgeries might be more apt a description) that over 2,000 years ago projected backwards second temple Judaism into the times of Moses and the patriarchs. All of us have been led to believe that Judaism was always monotheistic—or at least from the time of Ramesses the Great—as the people chosen for God's plan to save humanity. In truth, polytheism and “worse,” Goddess worship, was suppressed only by the Persian priests, Magians who believed in one universal god, Ormuzd, who might take on local habits and colour.

In Canaanite religion, the twin of the original Israelite religion, El is the elder high God, while Baal is his son, the virile young warrior who succeeds his father as divine king. Baal is the Adonis or Adonai (the Lord) of the Canaanites of Palestine. In Deuteronomy, Yehouah (here called “the Lord” which is Adonis) is not the most high God, and indeed is distinguished from him as a local god entrusted with Israel as his province. He is simply one of the seventy sons of Elyon, the Most High.

When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance (Deut 32:8-9).

The father-son, El-Baal tradition, appears in Daniel 7 in its Jewish version, picturing Elyon and Yehouah as the Ancient of Days and the “one like unto the son of man” who is given a kingdom.

Just as Baal had his divine consort, Anath, so did Yehouah—the goddess variously known in the Old Testament as Asherah, Ashtoreth, the Queen of Heaven and Wisdom. Baal, the Canaanite god used to “disappear” for seven years at a time. Interestingly, the pre-Celtic goddess carried off to the mystic Island of Elysium, her sacred king after he had reigned for seven years. The king died, so the goddess is representing death. Elysium is Avalon, the place of dead heroes. In the late medieval romance of Ogier the Dane, the hero returns to continue his expoits with a king who reigned 200 years after the one who employed him originally. Avalon received him because he was dead and his return after 200 years implies that he was resurrected.

A resurrection victory made Baal king of the immortals. Why not Yehouah too? Had the priestly editors cut out this aspect of the Yehouah myth to distinguish their Hidden God from Adonis? If Yehouah was in so many ways parallel to Baal, the Son of Elyon, and this concept was still alive, albeit underground as a glowing spark in Palestine, the death and resurrection of a man supposed to have been the messiah might have rekindled, the glowing ember. How then would Jesus differ from Yehouah/Baal?

Early Christians believed the exalted Jesus had become the same as Yehouah, the Son of Elyon, who had been manifest as the lesser God in the Old Testament theophanies. Yehouah or the Angel of Yehouah, who are synonymous even within the same texts, was the second god, later encountered as the “one like unto the son of man” in Daniel and under the names of Metatron, the Memra, the Logos and the archangel Michael.

The doctrine of the Trinity might not have been derived from Hellenistic Mystery Religions but from native Judaism. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is nonsensical. The Trinity was the father or the Most High God, the Son or the second God, Yehouah, and the Mother or Consort or the Queen of Heaven, Ashtaroth or Venus. The Shekinah, the brightness of God, is female but for the Jews had no independent existence, merely a female emanation of God identified with Sophia or Wisdom. Similarly the breath of God or “Ruach” is feminine—it is the Holy Ghost. No Christian will admit that this spirit is a Goddess.

The archangels, as aspects of Yehouah, were also theophanies of the second God. Various Gnostics pictured one of the archangels with the face of a donkey (Origen, Contra celsum 6:30; Apocryphon of John 2:1:11). If the scriptural Yehouah and the exalted Jesus were equivalent to some archangel, here might be the origin of the Pagan belief that Jews worshiped the head of an ass in their temple, and of the Pagan graffito showing the crucified Christ with an ass's head. Could these reflect lost Jewish and Christian beliefs?

The despised “ignoramuses” who had not been selected by their conquerors and remained behind at the time of the exile and preferred to retain the traditional beliefs were given the euphemism “Am ha-Aretz”, supposedly, Men of the Land” but really a derisive pun on “Mother Earth”, suggesting that they were worshippers of the Goddess, perhaps in a Trinity.

Jeremiah (7:18; 44:15,19) supposedly in about 600 BC, berates the people who are devoted to the Queen of Heaven because she gave them prosperity while the God, Yehouah, sent only trouble. Devotees of the Hebrew Goddess, Wisdom, the Queen of Heaven, bemoaned the priests' rejection of her from the pantheon. A multitude of men and women who had “burned incense to other gods” answered the prophet, saying:

As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil, but since we left off to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine. And when we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven, and poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes to worship her, and pour out drink offerings unto her, without our men (Jer 44:15-19)?

The passage concludes as if only the women were answering, implying that the men were being led astray by the women, but it began with all of the people answering. The patriarchal priests are placing the blame for worshipping the Goddess on the women, but all were in fact worshipping her and the statement shows that the tradition was widespread and long-lived in Judah and Jerusalem. This is one of the fossil passages left in error or retained as a warning against Cybele that gives us glimpses of the suppressed truth.

The attraction of the Goddess survived into Apocalyptic Wisdom traditions as the myth of the descent and reascent of rejected Wisdom, unable to find a dwelling among men who stubbornly rejected her. Was this also the origin of the Gnostic myth of the Fall of Wisdom, poised between an Unknown Father (the old Elyon “unknown” to monotheistic orthodoxy) and an arrogant demiurge who created the world and lied to his creations?

The Goddess was also hidden in the form of the nation of Israel, personified as the betrothed of God (Hosea 2:19) and the Daughter of Zion (Amos 5:2; Isaiah 1:8, etc). She was a virgin (Jer 31:2) but at the same time a wanton and faithless harlot (Hosea). God expressed his love of her in the erotic Song of Songs, according to tradition.

The narrowing of Israelite polytheism into monotheism appears in passages like the Shema:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord (Deut 6:4),

correcting a belief in many gods, and :

I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no saviour (Isa 43:11),

apparently correcting those within Judaism who were already advocating a saviour god, and a passage that Christians might mull over. The priests of Yehouah were keen to nip this trend in the bud—Yehouah was the one and only saviour—but, in Christianity, they failed.

Even at the time of the gospel events, almost 500 years after Judaism had been set up by the Persian officials, there was no clear orthodoxy in the religion. Rabbinic Judaism was not the unchallenged mainstream of Jewish religion, as the Dead Sea discoveries prove. The claim of Josephus and the rabbis that prophecy had ceased in Israel was to suppress the constant arising of new prophets claiming to be “That Prophet” or Messiahs of Israel and causing endless grief. The popular belief seems still to have been in prophecy, and a great prophet was still awaited eagerly.

The priests had conflated Yehouah and Elyon so Pentateuchal traditions of a single god are late priestly innovations. The old traditions had taken the forms of apocalyptic, embryonic Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Philonic Logos philosophising. All seemed to conjure instant complex mythologies out of the air, when they were really drawing on old traditions—those of ancient Israel outside Deuteronomic orthodoxy—and and their effort was in modifying them and giving them new meaning.

In Merkabah mysticism, the fusing of Yehouah with Elyon survived as the punishment of Metatron, the Little Yehouah, when mystics confused him with the ultimate deity, and it survived in Gnosticism as the rebuke of Saklas, the demiurge, whose conceit fooled him into thinking he was the highest god. Perhaps the myth of the fall of Satan who aspired to be like Elyon and ascend to the mount of the divine assembly is another relic of the priestly tampering with popular belief. Satan, Saklas, and Metatron are all the upstart fostered by the priests over the older High God and his court.

Gnosticism might have been a mutation not of early Christianity or even of disillusioned Jewish apocalyptic, but of pre-Deuteronomic Israelite polytheism, the religion of the Am ha-Eretz, driven underground by the foreigners—the Yehudim from Persia. Gnosticism could have a pedigree in suppressed undercurrents in Judaism.

Judaism and Hellenism are artificially distinguished in these mythical matters. Judaism was part of Oriental Hellenism, and despite the efforts of the post-exilic priesthood and their latter day equivalents, to expunge gods other than Yehouah, the interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus as akin to Hellenistic religions of Attis, Osiris, Adonis, and so on, might have their roots firmly in unrecorded and forgotten Judaism. All of these religions had Near-Eastern roots and might have been a common plant, but vigorous pruning over the years has left only a few robust but untypical sports remaining.

Christianity

Jesus is the Christian god. The only reason that the Hebrew God as Father is still remembered is because of the Bible, which preserves in fixed form the Jewish scriptures and depicts the Son as totally loyal to his father. Without this, the father would have gone the way of Ormuzd and Zeus, replaced by the son—Mithras, Apollo, Jesus—as the god to be worshipped by the masses.

Jesus, who in the gospels clearly and explicitly denied he was god, has been worshipped as God Incarnate for 2000 years. Furthermore Jesus preached that obedience of the laws of Moses were essential to salvation, saying that nothing of them should be changed—yet the church has abandoned them. A mish-mash of Pagan ideas and festivals have been attached to the base of the Jewish scriptures with their idea of God's plan for his people. Jesus has been honoured with the pre-Christian title of the Incarnate Word and the prehistoric role of the Sun of Righteousness—the crucified divine man. Since God had cursed those who were crucified, Jesus was rejected by later Jews but welcomed by Pagans who loved dying and resurrected gods such as Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, Hercules, Orpheus and many others.

The triumph of Christianity was assured when Constantine, pressed by his army largely of the ignorant underclass that Christianity appealed to, and his civil service who had noticed that the church hierarchy assiduously modelled itself on and supported the Roman state, unenthusiastically made Christianity the state religion. He was not to become a Christian himself until years later, just before his death.

Christians have accepted literally that Jesus said he was the Good Shepherd and the Truth when he could only have said: “Saith the Lord: I am the Truth”, and so on. Jesus was an Essene and their sine qua non was humility. Neither as a Jew nor as an Essene could Jesus have claimed for himself what was rightly God's.

One of the problems with Christianity is that it has been predicting an immediate end to the world for 2000 years, leaving any true believer with little incentive to do anything about the world as it is. They are taught to despise the world as evil and with no future because of the expected supernatural intervention of God. The actions of Christians and similar believers in transcendental gods will bring about the end of the world, but not in the way they imagine.

Now that we can see that the world is showing distinct signs of collapsing under the strain of human irresponsibility, we have a strong incentive to ignore Christian pessimism about the world and to do something to stop its decay. Zarathustran eschatology, artificially foisted on to Jews and thence gentiles, is a totally inadequate way to view the world as it suffers. We have to realise that we are giving the world burdens it cannot bear. Should we enslave and neglect our mother in this way?

The Roman Empire

The Essenes were organised hierarchically, though their seniority depended on humility. The asceticism of the Essenes was to be the main feature of ordinary Christian life for over a thousand years, though the higher ranks saw no need for it. After 70 AD many Sadduccess joined the new Christian religion and they obviously favoured a proper priesthood with the privileges they considered proper.

The early Catholic Church altered the principle of equality implicit in every man's personal access to god by affirming a new priesthood led by the bishops and eventually by a High Priest called the Pope. A watered down version of the Goddess was admitted via Marianism and the duties and attributes of old gods given to lesser gods called saints. To make sure the populace knew its own position and role, priests were placed in control of their souls, receiving their confessions.

Christians took from the Persian authors of the Jewish scriptures, two concepts previously unknown in the west:

• a patriarchal single god with no associated goddesses, who is all-wise;
• a theocratic society in which every man is a son-of-god and capable of salvation.

Belief in a patriarchal god, who arbitrarily rewarded people with an eternal after-life in heaven for no other reason than that they believed, created anarchy in the Roman world. It left no place for chosing the right thing, for individual public endeavour, besides accumulating wealth. Wealth was anathema to Jesus and the first Christians who were the Poor Ones who held poverty to be a virtue but it was easy for the developing gentile church to abandon.

Sir James Frazer goes further saying the “selfish and immoral doctrine of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with god and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for” was the cause of the defects of European civilisation. It replaced the classical ideal of individual self-sacrifice for the common good with selfishness.

In 363 AD Julian the Apostate died fighting the Persians and Christians praised God but, it seemed through the retribution of the discarded gods, in 367 AD Britain was lost to the Barbarians. It was won back in 378 AD but the Goths won a huge battle at Adrianople not far from Constantinople. Despite these setbacks, Theodosius made Catholicism the only religion and Christian mobs vandalised Pagan temples and terrorised other Christians they considered heretical for the next quarter century.

In 406 AD the Barbarians overran Gaul and in 410 Britain was again lost this time never to be recovered. The Goths sacked Rome. The internal collapse continued apace, with cities abandoned even when not attacked and the clueless urbanites returning to the land which they then mismanaged. Typically of Catholic clergy, rather than face the practical problems of civilisation, they debated ways of making sure maidens remained virgins.

It was hard for people not to blame the collapse on to Christianity. Pagans noted that the Rome of the Pagan gods had been prosperous but the Christian Rome had been wrecked by fellow worshippers of the Christian God, though they were Arian not Catholic. Augustine felt it necessary to write the City of God in reply.

Throughout the 5th century the Roman Empire continued collapsing, while the Christian clergy and bureacracy still firmly stuck their heads in the clouds. Cyril of Alexandria, an imposing and fanatical ex-monk had an Hitlerian style of persuasion. He stage managed his performances so that his sermons were rapturously applauded by packing sections of his congregations with his monastic pals.

The same monks he turned out as brownshirts against his opponents, as he did against the Pagan philosopher, Hypatia. Cyril was an impressive speaker but Hypatia was more so. She taught in her own academy and attracted large audiences from far and wide. She was the daughter of a mathematician and had all the intelligence and more of her father and was beautiful and glamorous too. The church led by Cyril was not impressed.

She was a Pagan at a time when the church had declared Paganism “unfashionable”. Cyril eventually got fed up and in 415 AD arranged for a gang of his monkish thugs to waylay Hypatia in her carriage on the way to her lecturing. They stripped her naked, cruelly abused and murdered her, then destroyed her body by stripping it of all its flesh with sharp tiles or shells and burning the remains in front of Cyril's church.

The church was not interested in knowledge but in ignorance. Hypatia and the doctors of the Pagan schools were too clever. The church obliterated them.

Veneration of the Virgin

The cult of the Virgin Mary arose in the fourth century as a result of the Christian triumph under Constantine, and blossomed about 100 years later in the fifth.

The Collyridians were, according to Epiphanius in his Panarion, a Christian heretical sect which began in Thrace and, by the time he wrote in 375 AD, had spread to the whole of the area north of the Black Sea and also to Arabia. It was mainly a female sect whose priestesses led the worship of Mary as Queen of Heaven. Their ritual was to cover a throne with a linen cloth, place bread upon it and consecrate it to Mary, then consume the bread as a communion.

Epiphanius castigated them for their presumption because God had not given Mary any rights of blessing or baptism. His protests show the Collyridian women must have been claiming these rights.

The goddess began powerfully reasserting herself in the fifth century. A feminine presence was added to Christianity by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD when the Virgin Mary was named Theotokos the Mother of God. The Emperor Zeno rededicated the temple of Rhea at Byzantium, not to the son or a saint, but to the Virgin Mary. Gradually she was to be heaped with all the titles of the goddess of old, including that of Queen of Heaven.

When the church began to suppress the cults of the Goddess, Roman goddess worshippers turned to the cult of the Virgin to replace Isis and Cybele. Cybele's son was hung on a pine tree, and the husband and brother of Isis, Osiris, was found in a tree in his myth. These images, together with the huge sense of loss of civilisation and growth of pessimism with the fall of Rome and the barbarity of Christianity, promoted the crucifixion images, and so the cult of the Virgin.

From this time, pictures of Christ on the cross began to appear. Earlier, Jesus had been shown as the Good Shepherd—an androgynous youth carrying a lamb in his arms or across his shoulders. The Western Empire fell to the Goths in 476 AD and the northern tribes were fond of the cross as a magic symbol. From then on, the Jesus typical of Catholic crucifixes became increasingly common.

Paradoxically Bishop Cyril, murderer of Hypatia, was a passionate advocate of the reverencing of the Virgin Mary and 15 years after the butchery of Hypatia was instrumental in defeating Nestorius and asserting Mary worship within the church. Theoretically the outsome was a compromise but in practice the Nestorians were outlawed and became a deviant sect of Christianity which gradually lost ground. Nestorians believed that Jesus was a man who served as a container for the god, Christ. Jesus died and corrupted but the god ascended to heaven where he had dwelt for all eternity.

Cyril was canonized for his efforts and the Ephesians rejoiced, able once more to worship a goddess but now Mary instead of Diana. The Church of Mary was opened in Ephesus for the flourishing cult of Theotokos. Ephesus had been the home of the cult of Cybele the Great Mother in the guise of Diana or Artemis. But the role of the new Mother Goddess was heavily restricted and included none of the fertility component present in Pagan religions.

Once the veneration of the Virgin was accepted, the old temples and shrines devoted to goddesses were given over to churches dedicated to Mary. The church of Santa Maria Maggiore replaced the temple of Cybele on the Esquiline hill. Another church to Santa Maria replaced the temple of Tanit, a Phoenician goddess, on the Capitoline hill. Temples to Isis near the Pantheon and to Minerva (Athena) also became churches to Mary.

Elsewhere the temple of Athena at Athens had the same fate and another at Syracuse. Lesser shrines everywhere were converted and re-dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Mary Theotokos, Mater Dei, Mother of God. And in the process Mary took the attributes of the goddesses she replaced. Like Juno she was the patron of pregnant women and their unborn children, like Isis, the Stella Maris, she protected sailors.

An edict of 754 AD from Constantinople condemns any orthodox Christian who does not:

confess the holy Ever-Virgin Mary, truly and properly the Mother of God, to be higher than every creature whether visible or invisible and does not with sincere faith seek her intercessions, as one having confidence in her access to our God.

The Pagan sea goddess was called Marian and wore the blue cloak and pearl necklace which gave the normal artistic inspiration to painters of the mother and child and such pictures.

The sea goddess by then was Aphrodite who rose from the surf in a scallop shell. Aphrodite was the Babylonian Ishtar and she was probably the Phoenician mermaid goddess, depicted as a sea goddess. The moon goddess Eurynome was depicted at Phigalia in Arcadia as a mermaid. Aphrodite is Venus and therefore the morning and evening stars, and as the sea goddess she is the Stella Maris or Star of the Sea. A pun on this is Stilla Maris which is Myrrh of the Sea—myrrh is sacred to the goddess and to Mary.

Ishtar is Ashtaroth and the Collyridians of Arabia used to make the same offerings to the Virgin Mary as they had made to Ashtaroth. Revelation 12 depicts a woman, symbolically Israel, escaping into the desert where she remains for a time, times and half a time or 1260 days. Revelations makes the woman into a female Elijah who was in the desert nourished by ravens. James declares Elijah to be of “like nature to ourselves” meaning an Essene since James surely was one. Indeed in 1 Kings 19, Elijah is the sole representative of the faithful remnant of Israel holding out against Baal, and is told to anoint a new king, Jehu, but leaves it to Elisha.

Is this an allegory of the Essenes escaping into the wilderness pursued by the wicked priest? The period quoted is interesting, coming apparently from Daniel but harking back to 1 Kings 17:1-6 (echoed in Luke 4:25, in Jas 5:17 and in Rev 11:6). Elijah, like Enoch, did not die but was taken up in a sun chariot like Mithras. The Jewish patriarchs and prophets might well be gods reduced to human form to leave only Yehouah in the elevated place. Curiously Elijah was considered forever a virgin and was often linked in the Middle Ages with Mary, even by the Moslems. Herodotus mistook Mithras for the goddess Anahita, the Persian name for Ashtaroth. These brief glimpses are tantalising.

The crusaders found some heretical Christian sects in the Middle East and tolerated by the Moslems, perhaps because they were respected for having influenced Mohammed. The Ebionites might have been among them. Some of them had a cult of Mary and it was brought back to Europe via Santiago de Compostela in Spain and ultimately to Britain as the cult of St Mary of Egypt, or Mary Gypsy. She was dark skinned and dressed in the blue robe of Marian, the sea goddess. She appears often in the ballads of Robin Hood because she was adopted by Richard Lion Heart.

The Protestant revolution was a call to reject Pagan additions to the old Essenic base of Christianity and this plainly meant the rejection of the Virgin as a goddess.

The Church's Suppression of Paganism

Many North-Europeans are unaware that they are still practising ancient Pagan traditions. Even more people are ignorant about the Church's cruelty towards Pagans. Pagans like the Vikings are depicted as brutal monsters but schoolbooks are silent about the enormity of Christianity.

Christianity was welcomed in northern Europe by kings seeking security from their own subjects. Christianity adopted the policy as early as Paul of accepting the secular power and law and, although it would not accept the deification of kings, it readily accepted their divine right to rule. In practice, the king was God's representative on earth, the very basis for Cyrus and his successors setting up temples to the universal god.

The Norwegian king Olav, the “holy one”, joined with the Roman Church to christianise the people of Norway. Parties consisting of soldiers promised the possessions of those who refused to convert and Roman priests, went out to the villages. They destroyed the symbols of the old religions, and plundered and burnt their temples.

Tthe people were forced to kneel before a cross held aloft bearing the image of a hanging man. Many refused and were driven from their farms, which immediately were commandeered by the mercenaries, or were killed or blinded by having their eyes poked out. These are effective ways of conversion.

The Church demonised old gods and goddesses, sacred symbols and sacred animals. The new patriarchal faith was particularly bad for women who had been influential in Pagan religions. Now, there was no place for wise women. No ritual not part of church ritual was permitted, so all folk medicines and ritual cures, nowadays seen as having genuine value in the power of plants or psychology, were forbidden. The wooden steam-bath houses of the Scandinavians were also banned. Mixed bathing was sinful and keeping clean was vanity—another misinterpretation of Essene humility. Filth was considered holy and the world was blasted with plague and disease.

After a district was christianised, a priest was left behind in all villages to watch the people, so that they would not practise the old traditions, bathe together or contact a wise woman for advice. Singing the old tunes and dancing Pagan dances was also forbidden. The people had to come to holy mass on their leisure day, a day formerly of sports, bathing and enjoyment. Exercise was work and work only. Major festivals and important customs, hard to erase because they were deeply entrenched, were themselves given a Christian spin.

Believers found they had to buy salvation from priests and monks. It was not long before churches and monasteries were extremely wealthy. Why would Viking raiders want to plunder monasteries if the monks were, like the original Essenes, devoted to poverty? The clergy were paid by peasants to save their souls in the best protection racket ever conceived. They also received the patronage of the nobility, just as concerned about their immortal souls, for perpetual prayers and intercessions for their noble houses.

The crusaders were not on a mission to save the Holy Land of God from the Saracens but on a mission to plunder the east for their own pockets. Many returned extremely rich men, having slaughtered and plundered entire Muslim villages and plenty of Christian ones for good measure.

Nobody can deny the gruesome crimes of the “holy inquisition,” though it has become fashionable to play them down as propaganda. Even children and animals were tried and tortured, and even if it is true that it was not as extensive as the propagndists make out, remember, this is the church of God we are speaking about. Christians with their “missionary” acivities continue to this day to rob simpler people of their cultural birthright.

The Later Church

Modern Christians claim that these earlier “Christians” were unsophisticated people who did not understand the bible message. It is a popular lie of the church, used even of the original disciples of Jesus who had to be discredited to allow the make-belief Christ of the gentile church to be built. The Christian bible includes the Old Testament which is murderous, obscene, immoral and intolerant. Women are the enemies of men and God commands witches to be killed; rapine and child abuse is sanctioned by God; the menfolk of defeated people are put to the sword at the command of God and the women and children taken as slaves; homosexuals are wicked; noble kings murder rivals for their wives and patriarchs sleep with their maids; there is only one God!

The modern Christian ignores much of this. “Don't do as I do, do as I say!” is the slogan of the Judaeo-Christian God. He says we must love one another, so that is what modern Christians preach. And homosexuals? Well, that's another matter. Communists or Muslims? Naturally, they are the “Evil Empire” and must be destroyed. Yawn! Why go on?

Why are many of the most intolerant, prejudiced, bitter and dissatisfied people among us bible-bashing Christians? Why do they not want to love and forgive, as they are supposed to? One can only deduce that Christianity appeals to people like this—people who want the approval of God to be obnoxious to everyone else. If they only wanted to kill each other, perhaps we could all sit back and let them get on with it, but some Christian somewhere wants to kill each one of us, Christian or not, for some reason.

Like the originators of their false and synthetic religion, they see the world as fighting a battle between Good and Evil. They are Good and everyone else is Evil. Pagans were tolerant of each other's religions, and even of Atheism. Religious wars in Pagan times were unknown and impossible. There were wars and savagery even then but all gods were respected. The Roman cult of Emperor worship for most people was no different to modern Christian Americans swearing an oath of allegiance before the American flag. The first Christians would have seen this as idolatrous.

Return to Religion is the perpetual call of a disintegrating society. But those who make the call in our society never stop to consider whether a religion which is split into innumerable sects, which is based on blatantly contradictory holy texts, and whose supreme god has a history in those texts of unthinkable cruelty cannot be the religion to turn to because it propagates the faults they seek to correct.

Indeed, the fact that so much of the teaching of the son of God, who is really God himself in his aspect of the Saviour of sinful humanity, is plainly ignored by Christians—including professional ones—can hardly be expected to put the fear of God into sinners, if that is what is thought to be needed. Sinners today are educated enough to see that priests and preachers ignore whole chunks of the New Testament on the grounds that it does not apply to the modern world. They will turn and say: “You do not believe a great deal yourself, do you?”

In crisis people seek odd solutions. A new pseudo-Christian cult has begun to grow in the last 20 years—the cult of Elvis.

Elvis Presley was a poor white boy blessed with good looks and a good voice. He became the focus of the newly promoted musical style called rock and roll after Southern black slang for vigorously sexual activity. Elvis made the most of this, moving his limbs about provocatively for the time which was the mid-fifties of the twentieth century and created a sensation. He became the first and perhaps the best known rock and roll idol before killing himself with excess food and drugs at the young age of 42 in 1977.

Elvis worshippers delight that their god has been among them and his friends and assistants now vie with each other to come up with new proofs of his divine awareness. He is identified as a latter day incarnation of Christ or an equivalent avatar of God and if the church does not canonise him there is little doubt that his cult will become another rival to Christianity.

What people really want is a new ethics, yet we have been taught always that ethics were brought down from Jehovah by Moses on tables of stone. The implication seems to be that without the commandments of God no one would ever be good. But even Paul the Apostle knew that people could be good without commandments. Paul attributed it to faith, but we can be sure that there are plenty of people, perhaps even a majority, who are good without any religious blackmail or threats.

Today, despite the lack of interest of most people in western society in Christianity, we are obliged by convention to put up with its continuing excesses. It has even become fashionable for scientists, led by Steven Hawkin, to talk about god, to give their screeds a cache of mystery they do not need. History is seen only in terms of Christianity even by those who neither understand Christianity or Paganism. Football managers claim to be “Christian” then employ mediums and start spouting about reincarnation! A liitle girl is savagely murdered by a pervert and who is first to appear on TV—the local vicar assuring his flocks that God is still with us! 95 per cent of people are not church goers but do we get a Pagan, Muslim or even Atheist view? Not a chance. The media pretend we are still all Christians.

The later history of the church was often that of movements to re-assert what were considered the original ascetic priciples of Christianity—a return to Essenism. From time to time Christians see that they have slipped from the original Essene ideal and demand to return to it. The Protestant revolution tried to re-establish the original Essene values of Jesus—direct access to God by reforming or abolishing the priesthood and setting up a kingdom of God or theocracy obliging everyone to think the same way.

The idea of equal access to God led to social equality, democracy and ultimately secular communism. At an earlier date Mohammed had similar ideas certainly culled from Christians of the Nazarene sect who had escaped Roman oppression by going into the desert. Reversions to pre-Christian forms continue. The Seventh Day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons all emphasise the Old rather than the New Testaments.

Women and Christianity

Women were always suppressed and sidelined by Christian believers in Eve as true history. The reaction of the Protestants after the Reformation was to exterminate independent women in the witch trials of the Reformation. Hundreds of thousands of suspected witches were burnt, drowned and hung. The inference to be drawn from such savagery is that goddess worship survived underground at least until then, for otherwise why were the vigorous new Protestant churches so worried?

Male witnesses cited the Queen of Elphane or Elfland who came to them and literally seduced them from the salvation of Christianity. The Queen of Elphane had many of the characteristics of the Goddess. It seems that some witches would have been priestesses of the underground religion, though doubtless many were innocent victims of scorned lovers or cowards.

Women have been liberated in many ways in the twentieth century and often they are even the principal wage earners in their families. The trouble is the patriarchs have taught women to despise themselves. Despite the feminist movement they still do. Some feminists have sought ways of liberating women by making them more masculine not by making men more feminine, the ultimate patriarchal victory.

Women think they must model themselves on men. They have adopted the authoritarian, patriarchal, vulgar, urban manners of modern industrialism and aimed to outperform men at their own game. Feminists hailed the contraceptive pill because women could now behave as young men did traditionally and sow their wild oats in the same way. Western societies are now obsessed with sex.

As a victory for women, did this set men back on their heels in amazement. Not a bit! Men hailed it even more than the feminists. Previously only a few women had made themselves into sex objects and these few fulfilled all the fantasies and supplied all the wild oats to all young men who were not simply fantasising anyway, as many always were. Now all women are sex objects and indeed all men are sex objects for women. Women have been masculinised.

Women today are coarse, vulgar, swear like mariners, smoke and smell like gasworks, vie with men for drunkenness and lose their looks before middle age unless they can pay for cosmetic surgery. They have surrendered totally to the patriarchs. Is it surprising that creative and caring men turn to homosexuality to find sympathy and love.

Perhaps it was necessary initially to allow them to achieve liberation, but now they should be looking for ways of changing the whole set up by returning to matriarchal, egalitarian, gentle, sharing and natural values. Men should be judged by the standards of the Goddess, not women by the patriarchal God’s. Chivalrous behaviour needs to be revived but not based on the patriarchal, patronising, hypocritical standard of God but on the matriarchal, respectful, honest standard of the Goddess.

Women should rediscover the mystery of the goddess—regard themselves as human representatives of the goddess whose purpose is to arouse in their menfolk love and passion for the goddess as they once did. Women should make men woo them with chivalry, honour, dignity, respect—with poems and songs, and still be unsure whether their courting has succeeded, rather than yielding to the offer of a cig and a few bacardis and pretending to be liberated. Naturally women have to worthy of it and must therefore think of themselves as goddesses rather than satyrs. What hope is their for the world if women cannot even succeed in that?

Men should again become chivalrous towards women, respect them as lovers and mothers not as pseudo men and treat Nature in the same way. Everyone must learn to love Nature, the goddess, as a lover—a perpetual object of love and devotion. It is essential that people come to think of her in this way if she is to be saved.

According to Lucius in his address to Isis in Apuleius's Golden Ass: “Her service is perfect freedom”. The Protestant churches stole this and it is now in their liturgy. It is up to mankind to serve the Goddess in a proper fashion and give her gifts of their own choosing. She will react to them as appropriate. A grossly wrong gift is an insult or even a smack in the face. These are just the gifts mankind has been giving the Goddess and it is getting worse. She will have her revenge.

The Proper Relation of Mother and Son

Separation of Jesus of Nazareth, prince of Israel, from the dying and resurrected saviour god known as Christ might allow the god, Christ, to assume a proper relation with the Goddess as his mother rather than the cruel God as his father. It can be viewed as pure mythology involving no anti-scientific stances while satisfying the long felt psychological need for a mother figure and expressing psychological truths, not literal truths.

A problem with the mother and son concept is that it is closely linked with the cycle of the seasons which are scarcely any longer in the consciousness of urban dwellers. “The Goddess is no townswoman” as Robert Graves puts it. The Goddess does not keep 9.00 to 5.00 hours and it is a fault of society and a cause of the present crisis that she is ignored by those who are cocooned against Nature’s fluctuations. With the end of mankind, the creatures which survive will again have a clear view of Nature. If civilisation is not to end, capitalism had better find ways of saving Nature and allowing her to be clearly seen again and venerated by everyone. God is urbanizing the country: the Goddess will ruralize the towns.

What the ignorant have learned about Pagans are Christian lies. The essential culture, history and identity of the West is Pagan—Christianity has been stuck on the surface of it but with a strong glue made of fear of eternal damnation. Our ancestors learned to understand the natural environment, it's plants and animals and it's mysteries and passed their wisdom to their children until the Christians stopped it. We need to rediscover our roots and throw off the inventions of the Zarthust-Judaeo-Christian priesthood.

The patriarchal God has given Nature to mankind as steward. The earth and its animals and plants are therefore provided by God for mankind to use as it likes. Nothing could be more wrong! All plants and animals are part of a complex ecological balance that can only put up with so much abuse, tough as it is. Unless we see Nature as sacred we shall destroy her. What then shall we be stewarding? Since we are part of Nature, we shall never know—we too will be extinct.

Understanding NeoPaganism, we can appreciate that men and women are complementary and build a unity between them again. Women must accentuate feminine values to balance out the male, not adopt masculine values and behave like yobos. Women must speak up and decide on issues that concern them, issues like children, natural child-birth, the environmental, GM foods, education and future health. Men must respect them as women, enjoy the company of strong women and cut out the barbarism that has become fashionable as being macho, and they must accept that some men have feminine qualities and prefer to emphasise them to the exclusion of the masculine. All must be tolerant and creative in seeking to improve the world.

Yehouah for modern Christians is a new trinity of gods: the god of money and wealth; the god of science divorced from Nature; the god of dishonesty, evolved out of the belief of Christians that pious lying is acceptable. As Robert Graves says: “This is a cockney civilisation.” Cockney? A poor mishapen thing—a thing that should never have happened!

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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