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Dawn

The Gates of Dawn, Herbert James Draper, 1900. Eos opens the gates of the east prior to riding her chariot through the sky.

Eos

The Greek Goddess of the Dawn, Eos (Roman Aurora), is thought to be an exceedingly ancient divinity, dating back to the early speakers of the Indo-European language which forms the root of most of the languages now spoken in the Western world and in India. Her earliest name has been reconstructed as Hausos, meaning to shine, and she was a chariot riding dawn goddess, daughter of the Sky God Dyeus. Dyeus became Zeus to the Greeks, though they identified Eos as being not his daughter, but a deity of the older generation of divinities they called the Titans.

Hausos’ worship spread with her people as they spread throughout Europe and India. Traveling west from her original home (probably in Eastern Europe), she became the Germanic Goddess of the Spring, Eostre, who gave her name to our Easter (because the Germanic month roughly corresponding to our April was originally named for her). Traveling southward she became Ushas, dawn goddess of India. Traveling southwest with the ancestors of the Greeks, she became Eos, remembered as the rosy fingered, saffron (yellow) robed Titan who opened the gates of the east (a direction which still bears her name) and rode forth in her chariot just before her brother, Helios, the sun, emerged to traverse the sky in his.

According to Greek myth, Eos was ever young and beautiful because she was renewed each morning and she liked to steal away young, handsome men to be her lovers. She was the mother to all the stars and to the winds named for the four directions. The dawn goddess’ name forms the root of our word east, the direction in which the sun rises. So tomorrow, should you rise in time, consider taking the opportunity to face east and when you feel the sun’s rays upon your face remember the divine daughter/mother who never ages and always returns, painting the world anew with her gentle light, giving us each a fresh start.

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Find more information and meditations about Eos here.

Why the Sky God ate his wife

I sometimes think a volume compiling the Greek Myths ought to be labeled Gods Behaving Badly. No heavenly bad boy exhibits worse behavior than does Zeus, King of the Gods, wielder of lightning bolts, ruler of Olympus. Zeus is father to many gods and heroes by multiple wives and, well, other ladies who struck his fancy — whether they were willing or not. One did not say no to Zeus, apparently. His crimes against women included not only rape but cannibalism, as he ended his first marriage by the bizarre act of swallowing his wife.

Zeus

To be fair, Zeus came from a terribly dysfunctional family and it’s possible he just didn’t know any better. Zeus’ father, Cronus, had castrated and deposed his own father, Uranus, who personified the sky in Greek mythology. And Cronus had then topped that act by gobbling up most of his own children. Zeus was rescued from his siblings’ fate when his mother saved him by tricking his father into swallowing a stone instead of her infant son. After he grew up, he rescued his brothers and sisters and went to war against his father. Metis, Zeus’ first wife, gave Cronus a drug which forced him to vomit up Zeus’ siblings. The Gods (Zeus’ generation) defeated the Titans (Cronus’ generation) and Zeus ruled the skies for the remainder of Greek and Roman history.

Since Metis played such a pivotal role in Zeus’ success, why did he repay her so badly? Well, it turns out that just as prophecy had warned Cronus that he would be overthrown by a son, it was foretold of the next generation that Metis would give birth to a son who would overthrow Zeus. So Zeus solved the problem by swallowing Metis when she was still pregnant with their first child, a girl.

Sometime after this unusual act of domestic violence, Zeus woke up with a whopping headache and subsequently gave birth to a daughter, Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. She emerged fully grown and fully dressed in battle gear, from her father’s head. And so, Zeus neatly managed not only to keep his throne, but to steal wisdom from a woman and give birth to it in the form of another.

Who was Metis?

Hylas and the Nymphs, John William Waterhouse, 1896

Metis was a water goddess, a nymph, and a daughter of the Ocean (the Titan Oceanus). Even today, the name nymph is associated with sexuality independent of marriage. In ancient times, these daughters of Ocean were freewheeling nature spirits, often associated with springs.

The nymph Metis was also a clever trickster with magical abilities who evolved by classical times into a more respectable Goddess of Wisdom. She was said to be an equal to Zeus, unlike his later wife Hera, and Hesiod wrote that she knew more than did all the gods and humans put together. Another of her names was Prudence, but she showed an unfortunate lack of this virtue in one respect: she was the first to tell Zeus that her son would overthrow him. So Zeus turned her into a fly and swallowed her.

Metis kept busy while in Zeus’ interior, hammering away to create Athena’s armor and helmet. It was this hammering which caused Zeus’ terrible headache prior to his daughter’s unconventional birth.

Athena

The daughter of wisdom: Metis’ daughter Athena took over her role as Goddess of Wisdom and became the patron goddess of the city of Athens. The Athenians chose her as patron after she presented them with the olive tree and built the Parthenon in her honor. Athena ruled over all the arts of civilization and was a champion of heroes, leader in battle, and patron of craftsmen. While her mother faded into obscurity, Athena is well remembered. She became one of the 12 Olympians and her symbol, the owl, is still used to represent wisdom today.

It is possible that Athena is deliberately used by patriarchal authors to contain an ancient association of women with wisdom; she is the daughter of one Goddess of Wisdom (Metis) and wears on her shield the head of the Gorgon, who was once her wise priestess Medusa. Notice the similarity of names: Metis/Medusa. The relationship between Athena and Medusa is complex and their ancient connection to each other is suggested by the fact that both entities are much more ancient than the times of classical Greece, both are associated with feminine wisdom and both are connected with the symbolism of snakes, which in ancient days were associated with wisdom rather than wickedness.

In the tragic tale of Oresteia, Athena's meaning as an exemplar of explicitly female wisdom is turned on its head when the author uses her to validate male supremacy. In that sordid tale, she acquits Orestes of the crime of murdering his mother — not because he hasn’t killed her, but because the act is not a crime. How did Athena come to this startling conclusion? She accepted the argument of Apollo (acting as defense attorney) that it is not a crime for a man to kill his mother if she has first killed his father, even if the father started the whole thing by killing the defendant’s sister. (Aren’t these Greek family stories charming?) Part of Apollo’s argument revolved, sadly, around the “fact” that Athena had no mother. Poor Metis, how soon they forgot her!

Theotokos: How the Goddess became Mary

The Theotokos of Vladimir dates from the 12th Century. It is reputed to have been protecting Russia ever since.

Mary becomes Mother of God: The year 431 A.D. was a momentous one in the history of the Queen of Heaven. That's the year the church fathers, meeting in Ephesus in modern day Turkey, officially declared that Mary is Theotokos, literally, in Greek, the one who gave birth to God. More commonly her title is paraphrased as Mother of God. This was an important political step, as it clarified for the theologians that Jesus was both God and man. Perhaps just as importantly, however, it pacified the people, who were demanding that Mary be acknowledged as a divinity.

Technically, the church denied Mary as divine, as a Goddess, but in practical terms, it conveyed a sense of holiness which made her a viable rival to that other popular Roman/Greek/Egyptian hybrid Goddess of the time, represented variously as Diana, Cybele, and Isis. As a result of their decision, Mary's divinity has been able to shine through in art and writing and devotion of those who love her.

Beautiful artwork throughout the world depicts Mary holding her infant son exactly as Isis had done for thousands of years before her. Many a home today displays a Christmas creche with Mary tenderly watching over the babe who is God incarnate. Mary is referred to as Mother of God in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which together represent the majority of the Christian faithful.

Many people pray to this Queen of Heaven to intercede for them and miraculous cures and protections of entire countries in war are attributed to her and to her icons. The Vladimir Madonna, pictured above, is, for example, said to have saved Russia from Tamerlane in 1395, the Tatars in the 15th century, and even from Germany in World War II. A similar icon in Cosenza, Italy, has a spot which is said to represent the icon's having absorbed the plague in the 16th Century and protected the city's residents from that dread disease. And that's just what her icons can do.

Here is a copy of what is claimed to be a very ancient prayer to Mary, dating to perhaps the 2^nd or 3^rd century:

We turn to you for protection,
Holy Mother of God
Listen to our prayers
and help us in our needs.
Save us from every danger,
glorious and blessed Virgin

Historical context of the year Mary was named Mother of God: The Roman Empire was in decline in 431 A.D. In just over 40 years, according to many historians, the Western Roman Empire, based in Rome, would fall. The West and East had split into separate empires by this time and the Eastern Empire would be ruled for another thousand years from Constantinople (now called Istanbul) in Turkey. We don't hear as much about the Eastern half in school these days, but when we do, it's usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire. The people who lived there, however, didn't call themselves Byzantines. They called themselves Romans. Culture and learning continued there as the West sank into the Dark Ages and then developed the Medieval culture celebrated so often in legend and fairy tales. As the West declined, though, Christianity was on the rise. Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity about 100 years before and was also responsible for creating the Eastern capital of Constantinople (hence the name). By the 11th century, the religion of this region was to become the Eastern Orthodox Church. Orthodox worshipers, like Catholics, venerate Mary.

In the year 431, though, the church was still more or less united and the church fathers met for the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus. Every time they met like this, theological ideas would be made into official dogma, churches with different theological ideas would be declared heretics and some churches would peel off from "mainstream" Christianity and generally fade into obscurity. This time, 250 bishops showed up to vote on whether Jesus was God and man both at the same time and, hence, whether Mary was literally the Mother of God. The pro-Theotokos faction was backed, not surprisingly, by the Egyptians, who venerated images of Mary reminiscent of those of Isis. Bribes were given and fighting ensued in the streets in the lead-up to the bishops' vote on this question. They voted yes, a group called the Nestorians went home really mad (also, heretics), and the crowds went wild, cheering in the streets when the vote was announced.

Model of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Photo by Zee Prime

Why the people loved it: To understand why church decisions are made and how they are received, it's often very important to step outside the official documents and take a look at what else was going on at the time. It's no coincidence, surely, that Ephesus was home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis. Artemis (Roman Diana) was a powerful Greek Goddess, one of the 12 Olympians, a Virgin who protected mothers and children, a huntress often associated with the Moon. Her beautiful temple at Ephesus was reputedly torn down stone for stone by a Christian mob about 30 years before the Third Ecumenical Council met.

This statue of Artemis/Cybele shows her torso covered with breasts and her skirt covered with animals. It is from her temple at Ephesus and dates to the 1st century.

Artemis was, in Ephesus, merged, rather strangely, with the Earth Mother Goddess Cybele, who is the source of both the many breasted image of the Goddess and her association with animals. Perhaps most significantly, Cybele was the mother of a god-hero son Attis, who died and was resurrected by her. Cybele's worship in Turkey may have been very ancient indeed. The Greeks considered her the Mother of the Gods, Magna Mater, and her symbolic images are consistent with those of a prehistoric Goddess worshiped in Turkey as early as 6,000 B.C. (That's 2,000 years before some Biblical literalists believe the world began, and 4,000 years before Abraham became father of the Jewish people. Also, obviously, 6,000 years before the beginnings of Christianity.)

The simple fact of the matter, I believe, is that the people needed a divine mother. They had worshiped one for thousands of years here and with the church becoming increasingly male, patriarchal, monotheistic and intolerant of other religions, the people needed an outlet for their deeply felt desire to venerate the feminine divine. So it is perhaps no surprise that the people demanded that Mary be called Mother of God. And so she was. From 431 on, devotion to Mother Mary would grow in art and architecture, song and hymn. Prayers would go up to the Queen of Heaven, as they had for millennia, but increasingly it was by her new name, Mary, that the Great Mother would be called upon by the faithful.

Isis

Isis,a very ancient Queen of Heaven (above)

Mary, Queen of Heaven, standing on the moon and crowned with stars(below)















Google the name Queen of Heaven today and you will discover a multitude of sites for churches named for Mary, with information about Mary and gorgeous images of Mary, Mother of God. However, if the citizens of the Roman Empire had access to the same technology, they would have seen a plethora of sites for temples to Isis, information about Isis, and gorgeous images of a tremendous female figure who was associated, like Mary, with the heavens, and often depicted bearing a son, who was a God, sitting upon her lap. This is because Mary absorbed Isis’ characteristics in the European imagination, just as Isis had absorbed those of a great many other Mediterranean goddesses before her. The human need for images of a divine mother is very ancient indeed.
Isis was a very old Goddess by the time Rome ruled the world. She pre-dates the pharaohs and the historic record in ancient Egypt, and that’s saying something. She was first a local goddess in Northern Egypt beginning to be worshiped some time before 3100 B.C. Over time she increased in popularity and absorbed characteristics of other Egyptian goddesses, such as the cow goddess Hathor and and the cat goddess Bast. She was said to be the daughter of the Sky Goddess Nut and the Earth God Geb. She was the wife of Osiris, who died and was reborn, and became God of the Afterlife. And she was often depicted with the child god Horus sitting on her lap. Mother, Queen of Heaven, and often invoked as a protector, a kind goddess who protected mothers, sailors and the dead, among others, her popularity in Egypt foreshadowed an even larger following in later times. By the second century A.D., she had absorbed the traits of many Greco-Roman Goddesses as well, and her worship was so common throughout the Roman Empire that she was known as Isis of Ten Thousand names. About that time, Lucius Apuleius wrote of a visitation by Isis to Lucius in his novel The Golden Ass, describing her like this:

When I had ended this prayer, and made known my needs to the Goddess, I fell asleep, and by and by appeared unto me a divine and venerable face, worshiped even by the Gods themselves. Then by little and little I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, mounting out of the sea and standing before me, and so I shall describe her divine appearance, if the poverty of my human speech will allow me, or her divine power give me eloquence to do so.
First she had a great abundance of hair, dispersed and scattered about her neck, on the crown of her head she wore many garlands interlaced with flowers, just above her brow was a disk in the form of a mirror, or resembling the light of the Moon, in one of her hands she bore serpents, in the other, blades of corn, her robe was of fine silk shimmering in divers colors, sometime yellow, sometime rose, sometime flamy, and sometimes (which sore troubled my spirit) dark and obscure, covered with a black robe in manner of a shield, and pleated in most subtle fashion at the skirts of her garments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the stars peaked out, and in the middle of them was placed the Moon, which shone like a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland made with flowers and fruits. In her right hand she had a timbrel of brass, which gave a pleasant sound, in her left hand she bore a cup of gold, out of the mouth whereof the serpent Aspis lifted up his head, with a swelling throat, her sweet feet were covered with shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palm.
Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertile Arabia, disdained not with her divine voice to utter these words unto me:
"Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers has moved me to succor thee. I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of powers divine, Queen of heaven, the principal of the Gods celestial, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the air, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customs and in many names, for the Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods: the Athenians call me Cecropian Artemis: the Cyprians, Paphian Aphrodite: the Candians, Dictyanna: the Sicilians , Stygian Proserpine: and the Eleusians call me Mother of the Corn. Some call me Juno, others Bellona of the Battles, and still others Hecate. Principally the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Egyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me Queen Isis."

Mary Queen of Heaven

In this beautiful work by French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) we see Mary enthroned in the Heavens and crowned with the stars. In every way (except the way of official theology) she is the same radiant Queen of Heaven known to the ancients before Christianity began.

Queen of Heaven

Many people believe the ubiquitous feminine, often pregnant figurines found throughout Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in ancient Europe and the Middle East represented Mother Earth, out of which are born the plants and animals and people which are her children, but the myths of her successors in early historic times suggest we may be thinking too small.

It has been popular since the days of the Renaissance to believe that goddesses always represent the earth and moon in a complementary role to gods of sky and sun. But as the image of the ancient Egyptian Goddess Nut (pictured above) shows us, the Heavens were once thought of as ruled over by the feminine aspect of the divine.

In more recent history, many have attempted to bring back a more recent Goddess, aligned with earth and moon, and mated to a God of the sky. It isn't hard to see why. Our sky God has been ruling alone for an awfully long time. All that is seen as "good" and "powerful" is associated with him and the rest is relegated to the shadows. In Western culture we have long exalted the“heroic” and “masculine” activities of conquest, power and wealth, over “passive” and “feminine” valuation of nature. This golden chariot ride is unsustainable in the 21^st century and is fast approaching the cliff. Many fear this worldview will result in the destruction not only of an undervalued natural world, but also ourselves, since we are sustained by that world. So it has been natural that, as women have begun to demand equal power, many would also seek to restore the undervalued half of everything which has been relegated to subordinate status along with them. However, in our eagerness to champion the values of the “feminine,” many of us have been too quick to buy into a duality of male/female attributes which may in itself be false.

Respect for Mother Earth along with a reclaiming of “lunar” values, often identified with receptivity, intuition and natural cycles, is in fact essential, but it is only part of the story. The dichotomy of sky/earth, sun/moon, and masculine/feminine, as well as the overvaluation of the first word in each of these pairs is influenced greatly by our borrowing of Greco-Roman ideas. In Greek myth, Gaia is a female earth and Uranus her sky god mate. These early characters were later replaced in their roles by more active gods and goddesses. Uranus was deposed by his son, Cronus, who was in turn deposed by his own son, the sky god Zeus. With his white beard and lightning bolt, Zeus bears more than a little resemblance to our own image of God the Father (who art in Heaven).

Unlike our God, however, who rules alone over Heaven and Earth, the Greek Zeus headed a pantheon of gods in whom moon and earth were associated with goddesses and the sun with the god Apollo. But the classically inspired view that moon and earth are feminine and sun and heaven are masculine has warped our understanding of the mother whose earliest written records make her much, much more.

In cultures far more ancient than that of classical Greece, the Goddess was known as the Queen of Heaven, the starlit sky, the great primordial ocean which preceded heaven and earth, and a mother to humans and the gods. Among her children were goddesses of the sun and gods of the moon, too, the distinctions of which orb held which gender varying with place and time.

Does a belief in the Goddess Mother of All as queen of the stars above contradict her role as an earth mother? Maybe, maybe not. To understand why imagine yourself standing on an ocean shore in the moonlight. It is a clear night and a starry canopy arches above you and stretches as far out before you as you can see. At the very edge, the sky appears to touch the sea, whose waves travel inward until they lap against the sandy shore on which you stand. This was the entire universe to the ancient inhabitants of the earliest civilizations. The starlit sky above, the land underfoot, and an ocean circling all around the Fertile Crescent and the unknown lands beyond were the sum total of the universe as far as they knew and all of it was once the body of the mother.

More than 1,000 years before the classical age in Greece, the Babylonian God Marduk was claimed to have created heaven and earth from the body of the primordial sea goddess Tiamat. He had to kill her first, but Marduk, ancient god though he was, was a late interloper into world creation. Two thousand years before his time, Tiamat, also known as Nammu, created heaven and earth from her own body and with the help of her son Enki, created humans out of clay. Her stories are thousands of years older than either those of the Greeks, or those of the Bible. The priests of Sumer and Babylon wrote down her tales before Abraham, father of the three great monotheistic faiths of today, was even a twinkle in Jehovah’s eye. She was the source of everything, including our own stories of “In the beginning…” although we have long since forgotten her names. One of her most powerful grandchildren was the Goddess Inanna, who was known by the title Queen of Heaven and worshipped for her dominion over love and war, and for alone having conquered death and returned to tell the tale. Her stories are also told in some of the oldest recorded documents known to humankind.

In ancient Egypt, Nut (pictured above) was the night sky arching overhead and Geb her mate the earth below, directly the opposite of the Greek ordering of the universe. Nut was the mother of all the gods and goddesses. Among her children were both gods and goddesses of the sun.

Nut’s longest lived daughter, Isis, was, like Inanna, a sky goddess associated with tales of death and resurrection, though in her case it was her husband whom she helped bring back from the dead. This tremendously popular Goddess grew in power over time and continued to rule the heavens, even after Alexander conquered the Egyptians for Greece. When Rome in its turn took over the lands once held by Greece, the Romans learned to love Isis as well.

A Hellenized (Greek influenced) version of Isis, the Queen of Heaven, was in fact one of Christianity’s strongest competitors in late Roman times until her role and title were taken over by the Christian Mary, who is still called Queen of Heaven today. Mary is a shining example of the love of a mother radiating from heaven to ease the burden of we creatures below, and though her divinity is no longer officially recognized as such, she bears the titles and receives the prayers once addressed to the Goddess, whose body is not just the earth but the universe, and whose children we are.