This episode focuses on the Scythians, the nomadic, horse-riding people who lived on the edge of the Greek world and were known as the Amazons.

The Scythians were a proud and powerful matriarchal, cannabis-smoking, Goddess-centric culture with transgender priests whose women rode and fought alongside their men.

We will also discuss Artemis of Ephesus, one of the most important goddesses of the ancient world, whose grand temple the Amazons founded and which also had transgender priests.

Share

Read the full writeup here:

Share Lost Goddess

This week on Goddess Bible Study we reach our third week on the Greeks before returning to the Biblical narrative. This episode focuses on the Scythians, the nomadic, horse-riding people who lived on the edge of the Greek world and were known as the Amazons. The Scythians were a proud and powerful matriarchal, cannabis-smoking, Goddess-centric culture whose women rode and fought alongside their men.

We will also discuss Artemis of Ephesus, one of the most important goddesses of the ancient world, whose grand temple was founded, according to legend, by the Amazons.

Share

Scythian Horse Lords

Farmers and shepherds were not the only communities in the early Bronze Age; there were also the horse lords. Horses were first domesticated and ridden in the same region of Central Asia where cannabis originated.

The original horse lords were tribes of the Eurasian steppe. Tribes such as the Botai, and Yamnaya peoples were among the first to domesticate and ride horses, around 5,000 years ago at the dawn of the Bronze Age.

These people rode horses to help them hunt across the wide ranges of the Eurasian steppe. Their nomadic descendants became the mighty Scythians of classical antiquity, whose Goddess-worshipping warrior women remain famous today as the Amazons.

The Eurasian steppe that gave us horses was also home to native cannabis. There is a deep connection between cannabis, horses, and the Bronze Age horse lords, one that extends into their Goddess-worshipping cultures. The first horse riders likely used hemp ropes to corral the animals, and perhaps horse and rider were sharing the ganja as well. Horses are fond of eating wild cannabis and likely benefit from some of its medicinal properties.

Humans and horses may have formed their first bonds while traversing the vast fields of cannabis they both enjoyed. Hemp ropes were used for reins, and woven hemp may have been used for riding blankets and pants. The horse lords did as much as anyone to spread cannabis seeds across the continent, from Central Asia to India and Europe.

Noble Barbarians

The nomadic Scythians were widely feared and respected in the ancient world, and they cast a forbidding shadow. Picture stampedes of fierce barbarian warriors, men and women riding side by side, covered head to toe in elaborate tattoos, their horses dressed and adorned. The Scythians were an intimidating presence.

The Scythians ranged and raided across Europe and Asia for a thousand years. They offer the clearest example of a culture with strong, independent women, powerful goddesses, and extensive use of cannabis. In the Iron Age, the Scythians were one of the last vestiges of the old tribal matriarchies.

“Scythians” is an umbrella term for a loose confederation of tribes. We do not know what they called themselves, and we know little of their history or of the relations between them. They ranged across the steppes from Siberia and Mongolia to eastern Europe and the Black Sea, periodically fighting the Persians, Mesopotamians, and Greeks.

They were nomads who kept cattle and oxen, which pulled the wagons they lived in as they followed the good grasslands. The Scythians left no writing behind. Most of what we know about them comes from their traditional enemies, the Greeks and Persians, and from archaeological excavations of their graves.

Amazon Warrior Women

In nomadic tribes, it was important that women be mobile and independent. Scythian girls were trained from childhood to ride, fight, and hunt alongside the boys. Scythian women were masters of the bow and arrow and kept birds of prey for hunting. On horseback, a woman with a bow was just as deadly as a man. The Scythians developed powerful recurve bows of their own design.

All young Scythian women took part in hunting and raiding. Women with children could choose to continue as warriors or to stay in the wagons with the children. Of the thousands of Scythian kurgan graves that have been excavated, around twenty percent of the warriors were women, buried with their weapons and some bearing war wounds. Scythian graves also contained censers for burning cannabis and charred cannabis seeds.

The Scythian women were the mighty Amazons of Greek legend, warrior women who fought both with and against men. Greek legends say the Amazons were a women-only society, but that is unlikely, however much troops of beautiful lesbian warriors make for a good fantasy. More realistically, the Amazon warrior women fought alongside their men and lived with them in an egalitarian society. Some Greek legends claimed the Amazons cut off one breast to make it easier to draw a bow, but there is no evidence for this, nor does it make anatomical sense.

Greek History

Herodotus wrote about the Scythians and the Amazons, attempting to explain their origins and culture to his Greek audience. The Greeks knew the Scythians as barbarians who had dwelled in the lands around the Black Sea since the most ancient times. Relations with the Scythians were mainly through trade, but occasional battles fired the Greek imagination, and the Greeks were fascinated by these exotic foreigners whose women were equal to men and fierce in battle.

The Scythians participated in the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE, and raided throughout the Levant in the First Temple period, though precise details are spotty and legendary. We told the story in a previous episode of how the Persian King Cyrus, of Biblical fame, lost his head to Tomyris, the Amazon warrior queen of the Massagetae.

The Greeks thought of the Scythians as noble barbarians, among the most honest and forthright people in their dealings, yet a terrifying enemy. The firmly patriarchal Greeks were both awed by and disdainful of the Amazons. They were a popular motif in art and legend, and Greek children played with Amazon dolls. Heroes of Greek myth, like Hercules, tested themselves against mighty Amazon queens who were skilled slayers of men.

The Greeks saw themselves as masculine in contrast to the Persians, their primary Asiatic rivals, whom they regarded as feminine. The Amazon warriors, on the other hand, challenged Greek masculinity by meeting them head-on and winning many battles.

Greek women were kept on a tight leash, mostly confined indoors to tend the weaving and the children, so the contrast with the tough nomadic warrior women was stark. The Amazons were heroic and beautiful, spirited, courageous, and brave, bold barbarian archers on horseback who gloried in fighting, hunting, and sexual freedom.

The Scythians were known for elaborate tattoos covering their bodies. Their women wielded battle axes, used lassos, and trained eagles and dogs to hunt. The Scythians also dressed in a fashion foreign to the Greeks: they wore pants, which were invented for riding horses. In general, Scythian clothing was made of leather, wool, hemp, and silk.

Subscribe now

Scythian Cannabis

The Scythian horse lords were famous in the ancient world for their love of cannabis. The Persians called the Scythians “haoma drinkers,” which would mean they drank bhang, if you accept that haoma and soma were bhang, a point that is debated.

Herodotus gives us one of the oldest written descriptions of people getting high in his account of the elaborate Scythian funeral rituals. These rituals included honoring the corpse for 40 days, keeping it in a wagon, and holding feasts until the final burial.

The Scythians burned cannabis inside a small tent that filled with intoxicating smoke, causing them to “howl with joy.” Herodotus also mentions the Thracians producing fine hemp fabrics indistinguishable from linen.

Many Scythian tombs contained the burnt remains of cannabis, showing that the Scythians fumigated before and after burials. The Scythians' method of inhaling cannabis smoke inside a small tent or cave is so simple that we can only speculate how far back in time the practice goes.

Archaeological Proof

Herodotus’s descriptions were confirmed when archaeologists found small censers and tents for burning cannabis, along with charred seeds, in the frozen tombs of the Pazyryk culture, dating to the 4th–3rd century BCE. These tombs belonged to a Scythian tribe of the Altai Mountains in Siberia, near the borders of Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan. The tombs were frozen solid in ice, which preserved their contents spectacularly.

Archaeologists found two complete mummies with intricate tattoos, a chief and a maiden, along with numerous textiles, including the oldest known pile rug. Inside one tomb was a small wooden tent frame with bronze cauldrons holding charred stones and charred cannabis seeds. The archaeologists also found a leather pouch containing cannabis seeds and other herbs.

The Pazyryk tombs have been well documented by many scholars.

Source: Rudenko, Sergei I. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Translated by M. W. Thompson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970, pp. 197–200, 284–285, fig. 35.

Herodotus also wrote about another nomadic tribe, neighbors of the Massagetae, who used intoxicating herbs rather than alcohol. The passage does not name cannabis, but the description fits.

Roman writer, Pliny the Elder wrote about Bactrian laughing weed growing along the banks of the Borysthenes River, where the Scythians lived. Scholars have long identified the weed as cannabis, and here we see it mixed with myrrh in wine. This is called “strong drink” in the Bible and antiquity.

Bactria lies in Central Asia, north of the Hindu Kush, in the cannabis homeland. The Borysthenes is the Dnieper River in Ukraine, which flows into the Black Sea. It is one of the great rivers of Europe and was an important agricultural center for the Scythians.

Scythian Goddess Religion

Only limited information about Scythian religion survives, but it was clearly Goddess-centric. The Scythians had a pantheon of eight deities, three female and five male, led by a supreme queen named Tabiti, goddess of fire, the hearth, and primeval heat, whom the Greeks equated with Hestia.

Api was the Earth Mother, equivalent to Gaia, and Papaios was the Heavenly Father, equivalent to Zeus.

Argimpasa was a maiden love goddess, similar to Ishtar/Astarte, and an oracular deity associated with the practice of shamanism. She was served by the Enarees, a class of gender-fluid priests. The Enarees were soothsayers and magicians who practiced fortune-telling and likely used cannabis to induce trance and divination.

Herodotus documented the existence of these shamanic transgender oracles among the Scythians. He records that their condition was a hereditary curse from the goddess for plundering her temple at Ascalon, while the Enarees themselves said Aphrodite had given them the art of divination, which is consistent with Goddess traditions throughout the ancient Near East.

The passage below recounts Herodotus's tale of how some Scythians once sacked the ancient temple of Aphrodite Urania in Ascalon (present-day Ashkelon in Israel) and were punished by being turned, along with their descendants, into Enaree hermaphrodites. This Aphrodite Urania was the great Canaanite and Phoenician goddess Astarte, the same Queen of Heaven the Israelites worshipped, whom we have been discussing throughout GBS.

Tree of Life and Serpents

The Tree of Life was a common motif in Scythian artwork, often with a serpent twining around it. Both symbols appear in the Biblical Garden of Eden story, and both are important and widespread.

Serpents are believed to be very wise and are closely associated with goddesses, especially in the context of oracles, divination, and wisdom. The serpent lives down in the Earth and emerges to shed its skin, continually renewing itself like the cycle of life.

Eurasian shamans carved serpents into the handles of the whips and drums they used on their journeys to the spirit world.

The serpent-entwined staff is a powerful symbol. The Greeks called it the Rod of Asclepius, and it represented doctors and medicine, as it still does today. Moses made a bronze serpent staff for the wandering Hebrews, and later Israelites burned incense to it until King Hezekiah smashed it in his reforms for Yahweh.

In mythical imagery, the good serpent is generally presented standing vertically. A serpent presented horizontally, slithering on the ground, is a negative or evil presentation.

Share Lost Goddess

Artemis of Ephesus

Ancient legends credited the Amazon warrior women with establishing the original worship of Artemis at Ephesus. Ephesus was one of the most important cities in Asia Minor, a wealthy port of 100,000 residents with important roads leading into the interior, which made it a strategic center of government and commerce.

Ephesian Artemis was a great goddess related to Cybele, the Anatolian Mother Goddess. Her famous statues depict her with rows upon rows of breasts, which on closer inspection appear to be a coat of gourds or bull testicles, perhaps of a kind worn by a priestess, though interpretations vary. The roots and early history of Ephesian Artemis remain a mystery, but we know she was one of the most important goddesses in the entire Mediterranean.

Artemis was a midwife who protected fertility and childbirth. Her statue featured many animals, including lions, leopards, goats, griffins, bulls, and bees, and she was called the Lady of the Animals.

Artemis also had a retinue of transgender priests, the highly honored Megabyzi. They were similar to the Scythian Enarees, the eunuch Galli priests who tended Cybele in Rome, and to the male qadesh of the First Temple Israelites.

The grand temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the biggest and most magnificent pagan temples ever built. It was four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Worship began there around 800 BCE with a sacred meteorite. Beyond its priceless works of art, the temple held four huge bronze statues of Amazon warrior women, honoring the legend that the Amazons founded Ephesus.

The temple was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. In 356 BCE it was burned down by an arsonist seeking immortal glory, and the Ephesians were so angry that they passed a law forbidding his name ever to be mentioned. It was said that Alexander the Great was born the day the temple burned, and that the great goddess, distracted by attending his safe birth, could not save her own temple from destruction.

The temple was rebuilt grander than ever, and no expense was spared. It was built entirely of marble, with 127 columns 60 feet high.

Apostle Paul’s Visit

The cult of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the most popular in the ancient Near East, and the city was uniquely devoted to her. Pilgrims from all over the Near East bought small statuettes of the goddess as souvenirs, and these have been found all over the Mediterranean.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul visited Ephesus and caused a near riot in the theater. Artemis is the only goddess named in the New Testament, which demonstrates her importance at the time.

The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was sacked by the Goths in 268 CE and ultimately destroyed by a Christian mob in 401 CE. Most of its marble was hauled away for other building projects, and today barely a trace remains of the grandest temple that ever stood in the ancient world.

But the Christians would continue the Goddess traditions at Ephesus in their own fashion. Ephesus became the center of Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary, and it was at Ephesus in 431 CE that Mary was declared the “Mother of God,” a title she holds to this day.

We will have much more to say about the Virgin Mary in Ephesus later on.

Next episode, we return with Alexander the Great, his deification in Egypt, and the founding of Alexandria, a city that played a profound role in Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman religion.

Christian mystic Paul Skorpen has spent decades living the Goddess traditions as a teacher, healer, and guide to the ancient world’s sacred sites. An American based in Germany, Paul leads tours of Goddess temples across Greece, Anatolia, and Egypt, with a special focus on Ephesus, and has made many journeys to Göbekli Tepe, the Pyramids, and Jerusalem. He is also the maker of three German-language films on Christian mysticism.

Share

Paul is a fountain of wisdom, and it was a real pleasure to speak with him. His websites are filled with beautiful photography of sacred Goddess sites.

Gardens of Goddesses

Tas Tepeler Travels

The full crew is here for an excellent discussion.

A striking contrast between Bronze Age and Iron Age religion is the status of the goddesses. Bronze Age goddesses were not submissive to the male gods; they did not take orders from their husbands and fathers. In fact, they held great power over them.

Iron Age religions reordered their pantheons to make the goddesses submissive and, in the case of Judaism, eliminated the goddesses altogether. Some Bronze Age goddess traditions lived on, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, which we will explore below, and the Isis traditions of the Roman era, which we will get to in later episodes.

Share Lost Goddess

Read the writeup here:

This week, Goddess Bible Study continues in the realm of Archaic Greece, whose people were contemporaries of the First Temple Israelites in the early Iron Age. The Hebrews and Christians, the Greeks and Romans, are the four cornerstones of Western civilization, and it is important to track how their ideas and culture developed over time.

I argue that the Greeks and the Hebrews both emerged in the early Iron Age, and both brought major cultural shifts and religious reformations, instituting new religious frameworks that seem ancient to us today but were novel and innovative at the time.

A striking contrast between Bronze Age and Iron Age religion is the status of the goddesses. Bronze Age goddesses, such as Ishtar and Inanna in Mesopotamia or Isis and Sekhmet in Egypt, were not submissive to the male gods; they did not take orders from their husbands and fathers. In fact, they held great power over them.

Iron Age religions reordered their pantheons to make the goddesses submissive and, in the case of Judaism, eliminated the goddesses altogether. Some Bronze Age goddess traditions lived on, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, which we will explore below, and the Isis traditions of the Roman era, which we will get to in later episodes.

First, a brief overview of the Greek Olympian pantheon, first immortalized by Homer and Hesiod — though a brief overview cannot remotely do it justice. Last episode, we discussed Hesiod’s Theogony, the Greek creation story, in which Zeus and his siblings overthrew the Titans, the older generation of gods. I argue that the Bronze Age Titans were equivalent to the Canaanite pantheon of the Bible, where El = Cronus and Rhea = Asherah.

Subscribe now

The Olympian Gods

By Greek tradition, the twelve great gods lived on Mount Olympus, much as the Canaanite storm god Baal dwelt on Mount Zaphon. The six oldest and most important deities were the siblings born to the Titan Mother Goddess Rhea and King Cronus.

Zeus

Zeus was the King of the Gods and the supreme deity of Greek religion. He seized power from the older generation of cruel Titans with the help of his brothers and sisters. He was the prototypical warrior storm god, lord of thunder and master of lightning.

In later periods, Greek philosophers elevated Zeus to something approaching monotheism. In the Hellenistic Isis traditions, Zeus was merged with Osiris to create a new god, Serapis, as the Heavenly Father.

Zeus is notorious for raping many women and goddesses.

Zeus = Baal, Marduk, Thor, Yahweh, Indra, Jupiter, and many others.

Poseidon

Poseidon was the powerful god of the sea. He was Zeus’s brother and among the most ancient of the Greek gods, one of the most prominent deities of Mycenaean times. For a seafaring people like the Greeks, the god of the sea was always vital. Sea gods are favored in goddess traditions, as the Mother Goddess is the ocean.

Poseidon is notorious for the rape of Medusa (in Ovid’s telling).

Poseidon = Yamm (Canaan)

Hades

Hades was the King of the Underworld, the god of the dead (though not Death itself). He was the eldest brother of Zeus and Poseidon, and together the three formed a triad of leading gods. Hades was not counted among the Olympians, since he did not live on the mountaintop with the other gods but ruled from his underworld kingdom of the dead. At his side stood the lovely Queen Persephone, the goddess of spring.

Hades is notorious for the rape of Persephone.

Hades = Mot (Canaan)

Hera

Hera was the Queen of the Gods, the Queen of Heaven, and the sister-wife of Zeus. Hera had roots in older Mycenaean traditions, but Olympian myth rarely showed her in a flattering light. Though obviously powerful, in most stories Hera was reduced to a jealous scold who pursued and tormented the many women with whom Zeus had extramarital affairs.

Hera’s wrath was legendary, and her revenge against Zeus’s lovers was the backbone of many Greek myths. Yet most of these women had been unwilling participants, raped or abducted by Zeus in the first place, only to be persecuted by his wife — a sign of the poor prospects faced by pretty young women in Greek society.

Hera was also the scourge of unfaithful husbands.

Demeter

Demeter was arguably the most popular deity in Greek religion alongside Zeus. The goddess of agriculture and grain had roots reaching back into the Bronze Age, and perhaps the Neolithic, and hers was the most ancient and sustained worship in all of Greek culture.

Demeter and her daughter Persephone were at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the best-attended of all Greek religious festivals. See below.

Hestia

Hestia was the virgin goddess of the hearth and home and the first of the six siblings born to Rhea and Cronus. Hestia was a minor character in Greek myth, mostly worshipped in the home, and in later tradition she gave up her seat to the youngest Olympian, Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and ritual intoxication.

Athena

Athena was the goddess of wisdom, war strategy, the arts, weaving, and civilization. She was among the most highly esteemed of the gods and the most distinctively Greek. Athena most closely represented Classical Greek values, and she was not imported from foreign lands or earlier cultures (though her name was already in use among the Mycenaeans). The city of Athens was named for her, and the Parthenon in Athens was her great temple.

Athena was notably asexual and virginal, dismissing and even punishing would-be suitors, which reflects the parochial Greek attitude toward women’s sexuality. It was Athena who ruled for the father, affirming Apollo’s argument that children belonged to their father alone, the mother being nothing more than an anonymous vessel for the father’s all-important seed. This ruling codified Greek values and patriarchal bloodlines and confirmed women’s subordinate role in society.

Athena was born directly from the skull of Zeus, fully grown and armed. She sat at the right hand of Zeus and gave him counsel. Her mythic birth symbolized an enduring Hellenistic philosophical ideal: that wisdom springs directly from the Godhead, as seen in the ideal of Sophia.

Athena took half the powers of the Bronze Age goddesses of love and war: war, wisdom, and the arts of civilization. Aphrodite took the other half: desire, love, and beauty.

In the Iliad, Athena and Aphrodite are rivals throughout the Trojan War. In Book 21, Athena strikes Aphrodite in the chest and makes her knees buckle.

Aphrodite

Aphrodite was the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and desire. She was the most beautiful of the immortals, the golden one who was always smiling. The Greeks said that Aphrodite had come from Asia, and she was among the oldest deities in their culture. She was born from the sea and protected sailors. She was the patron of prostitutes and, in some eras, was commonly depicted nude. Aphrodite was the patron goddess of Corinth, a wealthy trading city famous for its seaports and brothels.

The Greeks actually recognized two Aphrodites who coexisted. They distinguished the older Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite) from Aphrodite Pandemos (Common Aphrodite), the daughter of Zeus and Dione in Homer, as described in Plato’s Symposium.

Aphrodite Urania was linked to the Near East, and in some of her cults, as on the island of Cythera, she was portrayed in armor. She was the Queen of Heaven, the Greek goddess closest to the full powers of her West Asian counterparts over sex, war, and divination.

Aphrodite Pandemos had the same beauty and symbolism as Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte, such as the planet Venus and the dove, but none of the political significance of her West Asian counterparts. In the popular imagination, Aphrodite Pandemos had no war powers or wisdom; she was weak, nude, and the patron of brothels. The patriarchal Greeks reduced Aphrodite to romance and sexuality and little else. She was not one to lead the generals into battle.

In the Trojan War legends, Aphrodite won the beauty contest judged by Paris and rewarded him with the love of Helen of Troy. During the ensuing war, Aphrodite supported the Trojans but rarely stepped onto the battlefield; on one occasion, she cried and fled after being wounded on the wrist.

For Aphrodite Pandemos, the connection between love and war appears in her illicit romance with Ares, the god of war (Odyssey, Book 8) — another story that diminishes her character, defining her by her promiscuity and unfaithfulness as a wife.

By Greek standards, the Babylonian Ishtar combined the powers of Aphrodite (sex and love), Athena (war strategy and weaving), and Apollo (divination). But Ishtar’s personification of matriarchal power and independence did not fit patriarchal Greek values. The powers of the Bronze Age goddesses were divided among the Iron Age goddesses in order to make them submissive.

The Roman-era Venus restored the goddess’s battle armor and full powers.

Apollo

Apollo, whose origins are still debated, was the highly popular god of divination, music, medicine, and the bow. He was the patron of the civilized arts and the epitome of youth and beauty, a central character in many tales, and widely worshipped.

Apollo was most famously associated with the Oracle at Delphi, the most important center of divination in the ancient world. The oracle at Delphi existed long before the Classical Greeks, and Apollo captured it by killing the serpent that guarded it — another case of the Iron Age Greeks reordering the gods to suit their patriarchal culture.

Pilgrims traveled from all over the Mediterranean to hear the cryptic messages delivered by the Pythia, the female oracle priestess. The Pythia took her title from Pytho, the old name of Delphi, which was named for the serpent Python — yet another link between serpents and divination.

Artemis

The Olympian Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, the virgin goddess of the hunt who protected wildlife and young girls. She was depicted as a maiden huntress with a bow and arrows who guarded her virginity carefully. Artemis was also the patron of midwives and, in some traditions, helped deliver her own twin brother.

The twins’ mother was the Titan Leto, a favorite lover of Zeus, who got her pregnant before he married Hera. Hera was extremely jealous, and she pursued and hounded Leto. Leto was protected by her children, Apollo and Artemis, who grew into powerful gods to defend their mother’s honor.

Artemis played a brief but important role in the Trojan War before the Greeks ever set sail for Troy. In many versions, she was angered when King Agamemnon hunted her sacred deer, so she stilled the winds and would not let the Greek fleet sail. To appease the goddess, Agamemnon sacrificed his lovely, chaste daughter Iphigenia. In some versions, Artemis rescues the girl at the last moment; in others, the girl dies.

Artemis is commonly confused with, and was later merged with, Artemis of Ephesus, a West Asian mother goddess; both would later be known as Diana in Roman times. There has long been confusion and debate over the merging of the two goddesses, since they began as very different characters.

Ephesus, on the Anatolian coast, was one of the major centers of goddess worship. Artemis of Ephesus was extremely powerful and popular. Her great temple at Ephesus was one of the largest temples of the ancient world and one of the Seven Wonders. In the New Testament Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul nearly starts a riot in Ephesus over the goddess. The Greek Artemis and the Ephesian Artemis were originally entirely different deities, but they overlapped in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and were eventually combined into one.

The remaining Olympian gods include Hermes the messenger, Hephaestus the blacksmith, and Ares the god of war.

We will discuss Dionysus, who later took Hestia’s place among the twelve Olympians, below. But first, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Share Lost Goddess

The Goddess of the Mysteries

Not all of the gods were cruel to humans; some were very kind, particularly those associated with the Earth and the cycles of life. The Olympian Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, grain, and the harvest, and her daughter Persephone was both the goddess of spring and the Queen of the Underworld.

Demeter and Persephone were the patrons of the Eleusinian Mysteries and were among the most popular and widely worshipped Greek gods. Some scholars describe Greek religion as centered on Zeus and Demeter.

Demeter was highly esteemed and especially popular with women; she was far nobler and more sympathetic than her sister Hera. Their eldest sister, Hestia, the virgin goddess of the hearth, home, and domestic life, was worshipped primarily in the home, not in public.

Demeter was a goddess of childbirth and marriage, and as the patron of the Mysteries, she guided the passage to Elysium, the blessed afterlife. The sacred rites of the nature goddesses Demeter and Persephone speak to the most mysterious experiences in life — birth, sexuality, death, and enduring love. Men and women alike expressed their joy in the beauty and abundance of nature and in the rebirth of the human spirit through suffering and death.

These rituals were the Greek equivalent of West Asian nature goddess worship. Demeter and Persephone’s central myth was the basis for the Mystery festivals and is one of the best-known resurrection cycles. The story parallels Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld and other myths that represent the turning of the seasons through a dying and rising god.

The story is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from the 7th century BCE, but its roots are far older, and like most Greek myths, it exists in many versions.

Persephone

Demeter had only one daughter, fathered by Zeus: the lovely Persephone, maiden of the spring. Zeus promised Persephone to his brother Hades, the god of the underworld, without telling Demeter, since he knew she would oppose the marriage.

One day, while out walking with her nymphs, Persephone was lured by the wondrous bloom of a narcissus flower. While she was distracted, Hades, the King of the Dead, rose up through a chasm in the Earth, seized her by the wrist, and carried her down to his realm to be his wife and queen. Persephone cried out and wept as she was taken away, but the only divinities who heard her cries were Hecate and Helios, the sun.

The Rape of Persephone was one of the most famous motifs in classical Greek art (and beyond). The Persephone myth was also a model for Greek marriage: a girl taken from her mother and carried off to her husband’s house, sometimes against her will.

Hecate

Hecate was the enduring goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, the moon, and ghosts. To the Greeks, she was a Titan who was honored by the Olympians. Hecate was one of the main protective goddesses of the household rather than a goddess of major temples. She was often depicted in triple form, and her shrines stood at three-way crossroads and in doorways, a tradition that lasted into medieval times.

Hecate is thought to have originated in Thrace or Anatolia and was closely associated with Artemis of Ephesus. She is very old and was worshipped across a wide area of Europe and West Asia, a mystical goddess whose character overlapped with many other goddesses in various traditions. For the Greeks, she was the handmaiden of Persephone and central to the Mysteries.

In some traditions, Hecate is a psychopomp, like the Greek Hermes: a guide of souls who can travel back and forth to the underworld and who ushers people across the threshold at the time of their passing.

Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate formed the Greek Triple Goddess, as Robert Graves described them — a view I share, even if contemporary academics seek to minimize it.

Eleusis

Demeter sensed that something was wrong with Persephone, but no one could help her. She wandered the Earth for nine days in grief, taking no food or drink. On the tenth day, she met Hecate, who told her she had heard Persephone’s cries but had not seen what happened. Hecate took torches in both hands and led Demeter on the search until they came to Helios, the watchman of both gods and men. Helios told them that Hades had taken the girl with the consent of Zeus.

Demeter was enraged and avoided Olympus, dwelling on the Earth, where she gave blessings wherever she was welcomed and punished those who did not receive her gifts with proper reverence.

During her wanderings, in the guise of an old woman, Demeter came to the Greek city of Eleusis and was introduced to King Keleos and Queen Metaneira. The queen thought the old woman noble, and they invited her to nurse their infant son. Demeter loved the child, and he grew quickly, anointed with the ambrosia of the Goddess.

Demeter wanted to make the child immortal, so at night she held him in the fire so that he might live like a god. Then one night, Queen Metaneira grew suspicious and crept up on the Goddess. The queen screamed when she saw her baby in the fire. Demeter was angered, and the child lost his chance at immortality.

Demeter then revealed herself in all her power and glory and said:

The king and queen were terrified and dedicated themselves to her, so Demeter taught them her sacred rites, and they built her a temple at Eleusis. This parallels the story of Isis at Byblos with Queen Astarte (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 15–16). Holding infants over a flame may have been a ritual in the Mystery religions.

The Famine

In her anger at losing Persephone, the goddess caused a great famine on Earth, refusing to let the fields bear fruit. Zeus grew gravely concerned that the entire human race might perish and sent the gods to entreat Demeter with gifts, but the goddess would not be appeased. Demeter vowed that she would not restore the Earth’s fertility until she had her daughter back. Zeus finally realized that he must convince Hades to let his bride return to her mother, or else all humanity would perish.

Demeter is one of the very few deities who could counter Zeus’s authority and force him to reverse a decision, symbolizing the latent power of nature and the old matriarchies.

Zeus sent the messenger Hermes to the underworld, where he found Hades and Persephone sitting side by side, the maiden crestfallen, missing her mother as much as she was missed. Hermes delivered Zeus’s message, and Persephone was overjoyed.

Hades knew he must obey Zeus’s command, but he begged Persephone not to think harshly of him and not to be sad that she was married to one of the greatest of the immortals.

But Persephone had taken a fateful step: Hades had slipped her a pomegranate seed, and she had eaten it. Whoever ate food in the underworld was bound to it forever.

Demeter ran to meet her daughter like a maenad rushing down a hillside. They rejoiced to be reunited, but Demeter grieved to learn of the pomegranate seed, knowing what it meant. Zeus sent a revered messenger, none other than his own mother, the Titan Rhea, to deliver his judgment.

For having eaten the seed, Persephone was to return to Hades for one-third of the year, four months (in some versions, six), and remain with her mother the rest of the year. During those months, winter descends and the vegetation dies, to be reborn each spring with Persephone’s return.

Demeter sadly conceded, and every year she watches her daughter return to her husband, where she reigns as Queen of the Underworld. When she returns, Persephone is the goddess of spring and rebirth.

Demeter was kind, and she was sorry for the desolation she had caused. She made the fields rich again with abundant grain and fruit and the world bright with blooming spring. She returned to her temple at Eleusis, where she established the sacred rites that would become known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, and through the Eleusinian prince Triptolemus she taught humanity to sow grain.

Eleusinian Mysteries

There were numerous Mystery religions in other lands with similar precepts, and many were said to have originated with the mythical poet Orpheus. In the best-known versions of his story, told by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, Orpheus was a prince of Thrace so devastated by the death of his beloved wife Eurydice that he followed her to the underworld. He played his lyre before Hades and Persephone and begged them to honor his love for Eurydice.

Persephone was moved to tears, and Hades agreed to let Eurydice leave the underworld. Orpheus was instructed to walk ahead of his love and not turn around until they had returned to the world above. But Orpheus could not help himself; he turned around, and Eurydice was lost to him.

In the Roman era, Orpheus was credited with the Orphic Hymns, and he was said to have traveled widely, singing the great songs of doomed and tragic love and teaching the rites of Demeter, Dionysus, Isis, and the other Mysteries.

Demeter’s chief festival took place in the autumn and became one of the most enduring, sacred, and famous of the Mystery traditions. The Eleusinian Mysteries were among the most popular religions in Greece, a respected state religion attended by the most prominent philosophers and politicians. The Lesser and Greater Mysteries were celebrated for more than a thousand years, and pilgrims flocked from all over to take part.

The Mysteries were open to everyone from slaves to kings; the only requirements were that initiates speak Greek and that their hands be free of the stain of murder. There were large public festivals lasting several days, as well as sacred rites performed inside the temple. The public festivals featured great feasts filled with dancing, drinking, and merriment.

Initiates were sworn to secrecy about the sacred rites, and the vows were enforced by law, so little is known about them despite their long history. The rites spoke to the mysteries of life and the afterlife, and no one knows what the central revelations were.

We do know that initiates drank a mysterious intoxicating drink, the kykeon. Its full recipe has never been revealed, though it is known to have contained barley, water, and pennyroyal. In The Immortality Key, the modern author Brian Muraresku argues, building on the earlier work of R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck in The Road to Eleusis (1978), that the potion was based on ergot. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain; it contains natural psychedelic compounds and is the source from which LSD was first synthesized.

These rituals had their roots in the ancient goddess cultures of Minoan Crete, Anatolia, and Thrace, regions rich in the full apothecary of ancient drugs and psychedelics, such as cannabis, opium, ergot, belladonna, and psilocybin.

For initiates, the rites put them in touch with the divine, helping them recognize their own immortality and divinity. The annual rebirth of Persephone symbolized immortality, and initiates are believed to have glimpsed Elysium, the glorious afterlife, in their ecstasies.

Ritual objects found at Eleusis include images of wheat and barley; pomegranates, a symbol of fertility; poppies, a symbol of sleep and death; and snakes, symbols of rebirth and divination. Snakes protected the grain harvest from rodents and were welcome around granaries and temples, and of course they had long been associated with goddess worship.

Doves, bees, and pigs were also important symbols of Demeter. In the Mystery celebrations of the Goddess, men and women renewed their belief in the fundamentally loving nature of the universe, with regeneration and rebirth as the pathway to overcoming death.

Warlike patriarchal religions, particularly the monotheistic Biblical faiths, denigrated these beliefs and reduced them to mere “fertility cults,” while their jealous God demanded absolute fealty to him alone, leaving no room for any goddess to share in the reverence.

Goddess worship was fundamentally egalitarian and peaceful, with a morality that rejected rape and plunder, the primary means of achieving wealth and power in the ancient world. The requirement that initiates be free of the stain of murder speaks to the emphasis on peace and morality in the Mystery traditions.

An important characteristic of the cycle-of-life festivals in both Babylon and Greece was ritual lamentation over the death of the central figure, whether Persephone or Dumuzi/Tammuz. One part of the ritual was devoted to weeping, followed by joyful celebration of the return from death. The prophet Ezekiel describes women weeping for Tammuz at the Jerusalem Temple.

The Thesmophoria was a separate, women-only festival of Demeter, filled with merriment and laughter. In these ritual communities, older women instructed young women in menstruation, sex, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. These rites created deep bonds of loyalty and friendship among the women.

Share

Dionysus

Dionysus, known as Bacchus in Roman times, was the god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, ecstatic frenzy, and ritual intoxication. He was widely worshipped as a fertility god and was commonly depicted nude. Phallic images and elaborate processions were common features of his festivals, which also included theatrical performances and drama competitions. Wild Dionysian (Bacchic) orgies were a famous, and at times scandalous, aspect of his rites.

Dionysus was worshipped in many lands and was among the most popular gods, as shown by the Roman temple to Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon, beside those of Jupiter (Zeus) and Venus (Astarte).

Dionysus was worshipped alongside Demeter in the Mystery religions, though the Greeks traced his roots to Thrace, where he was the patron of wine. Thrace was famous for its wine, and the Greeks associated winemaking with the region.

Though considered the youngest Olympian, Dionysus was actually quite old. The Greek myths remember his religion as a foreign import, but his name already appears in the Bronze Age Mycenaean Linear B tablets. There are multiple conflicting myths about his parentage and youth, and his cult had many variations.

Dying and Rising God

In Greece, Dionysus was the last god introduced to the Olympian pantheon and the only one born to a mortal mother. His mother, Semele, was another of the unfortunate women loved by Zeus and tormented by jealous Hera.

While Semele was pregnant, Hera tricked her into asking Zeus to reveal himself in his full glory. Zeus had promised Semele her heart’s desire, but he warned her that no human could survive contact with the Godhead. She insisted, and the moment Semele beheld his full divine splendor, she was consumed. Zeus saved the unborn child by sewing him into his thigh until he came to term, making Dionysus twice-born.

In another set of stories, from the Orphic tradition, Hera has the Titans tear the infant Dionysus to pieces. In some traditions, Demeter restored his body, but there are many versions of the myth. What matters is that Dionysus is a god who dies and is reborn, like so many others we have discussed.

Grapevines represent the dying and rising god because the vine is pruned back to its bare stalk after the harvest and reborn each spring, demonstrating the resurrection cycle to humans in very practical terms.

God of Wine

When Dionysus grew up, he discovered how to cultivate grapes and extract their precious juice, the first to do so. Once again Hera intervened, striking Dionysus with madness and forcing him to wander through foreign lands. In Anatolia, he was cured by the goddess Cybele, whom the Greeks knew as Rhea, and she taught him her religious rites.

Dionysus then traveled through Asia, teaching people to make wine and to worship the Mother, journeying as far as India, where his cult became well established. There are many tales of Dionysus and his travels. Among his legacies, Dionysus is the god who gave King Midas the golden touch. He also had a brief affair with Aphrodite and fathered a child, Priapus, whom Hera cursed with ugliness.

Dionysus eventually returned to Greece in triumph, made peace with Hera, and is considered the originator of the triumphal procession. Wild Dionysian parades were annual drunken festivals featuring sculptures of giant phalluses. Many Dionysus myths depict resistance to his arrival in new towns; in some cases, the king had to be killed before Dionysus was finally welcomed.

In Rome, the Bacchic cults sparked a moral panic and were outlawed throughout Italy by a Senate decree of 186 BCE, the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus. Some 7,000 people were implicated, and many leaders were executed. It was one of the largest religious persecutions in Rome before the persecution of the Christians, but the cult survived, with its more controversial practices moved indoors and out of public view.

Maenads

Dionysus was depicted either as an older, bearded god or as an effeminate, long-haired youth. He was served by maenads, satyrs, and nymphs.

The maenads were the female followers of Dionysus and the most important members of his retinue. Known as the “Raving Ones,” they were inspired by the god to ecstatic frenzy through dance and intoxication. Dressed in animal skins and often handling snakes, they were famous for running wildly through the forests, killing the animals they caught with their bare hands, tearing them apart, and eating the raw flesh, symbolizing the death and rebirth of the god. The maenads were associated with a variety of supernatural women, both historical and mythological.

Nymphs

Nymphs were semi-divine female spirits of the air, seas, woods, and waters who tended nature. Like fairies, they were depicted as beautiful, young, graceful maidens and were popular in art and literature.

Satyrs

Satyrs were male nature spirits, depicted as half-man, half-goat, or as men with horses' tails. They were known for their ribald behavior; typically depicted naked with comically large erections, they were lovers of wine, music, dancing, and women. Satyrs were known for their bawdy humor and their attempts, often unsuccessful, to seduce women and nymphs.

Greek Sex

The Greeks had a sexually open culture. Graphic sexual imagery, nudity, and erect phalluses were common in Greek art and were often displayed in public and in people’s homes. Prostitution was legal, common, and taxed.

Dionysus was also the god of gender-bending and effeminacy. Described as androgynous and soft, he was not shy about perfuming his flowing locks (Euripides, Bacchae 235), his robes gay and shining with gold. Dionysus was known to be receptive in homosexual intercourse, as in the story of Prosymnus (Pausanias 2.37.5; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 2.34). The Greeks had a rather unusual view of homosexuality, even for the times, accepting it only in certain circumstances, which contributed to Dionysus’s scandalous, yet oh-so-popular, reputation, like a modern-day rock star.

In Greek culture, pederasty was normal and accepted, but strict lines of etiquette had to be maintained. Greek culture was chauvinistic and patriarchal, and any behavior that made a masculine man effeminate was frowned upon. Public nudity in athletics and prostitution were common, so there was no shortage of outlets for sexual energy.

Pederastic relationships were honored as a coming-of-age tradition in ancient Greece, though they are obviously not acceptable by modern standards. An adult man mentored an adolescent boy in a relationship that was intimate and affectionate, and that introduced the younger partner to the social and professional networks he would need in adulthood. These relationships were traditional, and the participants were typically family friends. The older man was always dominant and the younger partner passive; these roles mattered because they reflected the cosmic and social order.

K. J. Dover argued in Greek Homosexuality (1978) that in these relationships it was typical to kiss and share a bed, but physical affection stopped short of penetration, a critical line of etiquette. Arousal and orgasm were acceptable so long as neither partner was penetrated, which was considered degrading to a masculine man. Similarly, sexual relationships between adult men of the same age were discouraged, as proper homosexual relationships were understood to be purely pederastic.

Prostitution

The Greeks did not practice sacred temple sex in the manner of the Bronze Age matriarchies, where respectable women played the leading roles. The Greeks placed a much greater emphasis on female chastity than the West Asians did and kept their wives and daughters confined.

Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte stood at the top of their pantheons, and their priestesses, such as the qedesha, were honored in their communities, consecrating the kings in the hieros gamos ceremonies. Aphrodite Pandemos, on the other hand, was primarily the patroness of secular prostitutes and the pleasures of the flesh, with none of the overt political importance of her West Asian counterparts.

Temples to Aphrodite were widely regarded throughout the ancient world as homes of prostitution, and brothel districts were found near them. The famous temple at Corinth was said to have 1,000 prostitutes dedicated to the goddess, spread throughout the town (Strabo 8.6.20). These consecrated women were sometimes called hierodules, and while they were dedicated to the temple and engaged in ritual sex, they did not have the elevated social status of the Bronze Age qedesha.

The truth is that sacred sex in the ancient world remains largely a mystery, since most of it was never written down. We know these various categories of women existed, but we know only fragments of their day-to-day lives and social status.

Prostitution was common, legal, and taxed in ancient Greece and Rome. Secular prostitutes, called pornai, worked in brothels and taverns. Sex slaves may have been owned by both temples and brothels.

Concubines were servant sex partners from a lower social class, or slaves, who were not eligible for respectable marriage to an upper-class man, but they could have warm, romantic relationships, albeit with one-sided power dynamics.

In Greek culture, men were allowed only one legal wife, unlike West Asian kings and patriarchs, who could take several. Married men faced little or no expectation of monogamy, but a married woman’s sexuality belonged to her husband, and girls were expected to remain virgins until marriage.

The Greeks did not have qedesha priestesses or matriarchal families, but they did have many courtesans, called hetairai, usually independent freedwomen or foreigners, who had semi-exclusive sexual relationships with wealthy men. Courtesans were educated and sophisticated; many were artists and musicians who could socialize at the most elite levels of society and support themselves through their relationships.

Artists, actors, and musicians of both sexes often supplemented their income through paid sex. Courtesans were not sacred, but they did have some legal property rights, and some were famous and influential, though they had mixed and somewhat scandalous reputations in Greek society. It is safe to say that married women did not think highly of the courtesans who slept with their husbands and received valuable gifts from them.

Next episode, we will return to the Greeks for part 3, with a discussion of the Scythians, better known as Amazons, Alexander the Great, and anything else I can cram in there. This episode ran long, but there is so much material from the Greeks that even a cursory overview is a lot.

Subscribe now

These stories are important because they show how women’s subordinate role in society was codified in religious myth.

This was the era when the last vestiges of the old Bronze Age matriarchies were subsumed by a series of violent imperial conquests. In the Iron Age, women would no longer be allowed to live independently of patriarchal control. All women inside civilization were forced to submit once and for all, like wild horses forced to take the bridle and saddle.

We review the classic Greek tragedies of Pandora and Clytemnestra, the sister of Helen of Troy, mythical tales that were used to keep women in their place in the new Iron Age cultures.

Share

Read the writeup here:

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we continue with an interview with cannabis historian Chris Bennett. I owe Chris something of a debt: Goddess Bible Study likely would not exist without the historical work he has been doing since the 1990s.

In our conversation, we discuss the cannabis and frankincense found on the altars at Tel Arad, why Yahweh’s priests could never claim he was the only god until the Persians conquered Babylon and Egypt, the Garden of Eden as the divorce papers of the Goddess, the “throne of God” in Revelation as a title of Isis, and why the Mother Goddess is the one threat monotheism can’t absorb. We also discuss current events, including the alarming Third Temple movement in Israel and the possibility of a US push to take Canada.

I have often told the story of how I stumbled onto the Mother Goddess in the Bible while researching marijuana in the Bible. It was Chris who taught me that cannabis is in the Bible but has been mistranslated, so we don’t see it in the text. The idea of qaneh bosm as cannabis comes from the Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, who first proposed it in 1936, and it remains controversial today. But it was Chris who popularized the idea that cannabis is an ingredient in Moses’s holy anointing oil, a recipe given directly by God, and that it was once sacred to the Hebrews.

I wanted to know how cannabis went from being sacred to being rejected. In the course of that research, I first learned about Asherah, the Wife of God, a discovery I owe to Chris.

Chris has written five voluminous books on the role of cannabis in ancient history, religion, spirituality, and politics. He is a longtime cannabis activist and a well-known figure in cannabis culture. His books are wide-ranging, thick with detail, and fully sourced. The research is excellent and deserves to be taken more seriously by academics, but because Chris works outside the academy, he is often overlooked. His most recent book is also his most comprehensive.

Cannabis: Lost Sacrament of the Ancient World - 2021

Liber 420 Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult - 2018

Cannabis and the Soma Solution - 2010

Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible - 2001 (co-written with with Neil McQueen)

Green Gold the Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic & Religion - 1995 (co-written with Lynn and Judy Osburn)

I have been fascinated by cannabis history since 1991, when I first learned that the cannabis plant provides both marijuana and hemp fiber, and that both have played important roles in human societies across many cultures since the Neolithic Revolution. In the ’90s, I tried to write a book on the subject, and Chris’s first book was a crucial reference. I worked diligently on it for a year, but never finished. Twenty-five years later, that abandoned project became A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible.

Today, Chris maintains an active Substack and writes regularly on current events and politics. We are both deeply interested in, and vexed by, the threats to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem posed by the Third Temple movement.

https://substack.com/@chrisbennett420

We are going to spend the next few episodes of Goddess Bible Study focusing on the ancient Greeks of the Archaic and Classical periods, who were contemporaries of the ancient Hebrews in the Iron Age. These two cultures, along with the Romans and Christianity, are the foundation stones of Western civilization. Both adopted alphabetic scripts from the Phoenicians between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE and began writing new stories.

Subscribe now

The Hebrews and the Greeks emerged from the Bronze Age Collapse with dramatic histories, fresh mythologies, and reordered pantheons. The new Iron Age religions of Yahweh and the Olympians shared a desire to subvert the independence and power of the Bronze Age goddesses and make them submissive to their new Iron Age lords, just as human women were being forced to submit to their husbands.

This was the era when the last vestiges of the old Bronze Age matriarchies were subsumed by a series of violent imperial conquests. In the Iron Age, women would no longer be allowed to live independently of patriarchal control. All women inside civilization were forced to submit once and for all, like wild horses forced to take the bridle and saddle.

Previously, we discussed Helen of Troy and the Bronze Age Collapse, including the events of the Trojan War. Helen and her sister Clytemnestra represent the older Mycenaean civilization, with its matriarchal lineages, which collapsed along with Troy. These legends were foundational to Greek literature and myth.

In this episode, we will focus on two major writers, Hesiod and Aeschylus, with particular attention to the goddesses and the reordered Iron Age cosmos the Greeks introduced.

The Theogony

Hesiod was the most significant Greek poet after Homer. He recorded many of the classical Greek myths in his poems, the Theogony and Works and Days, composed around 700 BCE. In Works and Days, Hesiod presents himself as a small farmer in Boeotia, far removed from the royal courts and their lives of luxury, writing from the perspective of a humble countryman living in a harsh world.

Hesiod's works exalted justice and disdained hubris. He believed that man should earn his livelihood through strenuous and persistent work. For Hesiod, hard work was the only path to prosperity and distinction, in contrast to the ideals of glory and immortality portrayed by Homer.

The Theogony is an account of the creation of the universe and the gods. In the beginning, four primordial beings came into existence spontaneously: first came Chaos (the Void), then Earth (Gaia), Tartarus (the Abyss), and Eros (Desire), "the fairest of the deathless gods." For the Greeks, the universe was born from the primordial mother, Gaia, who gave birth to the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and most of the gods. (Chaos produced its own separate line, beginning with Darkness and Night.)

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of poems dedicated to the various Greek gods. By tradition they are credited to Homer, but their actual authors are unknown, and most were composed in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE or later. Hesiod's Theogony was also widely adapted by later Greek writers, and here I present some of those later, more robust retellings.

Share Lost Goddess

Cronus and Gaia

Gaia, the primordial Earth Mother, gave birth to her own husband, Uranus, the Heavenly Father. Uranus mated with Gaia, and she gave birth to the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes (giant one-eyed monsters), and the three Hecatoncheires (monsters with a hundred hands and fifty heads). Uranus was cruel and hated his children from the start. As each one was born, he hid it away inside the Earth — inside Gaia's own body — and would not let it come into the light, greatly angering their mother.

Gaia, groaning with pain, appealed to her children for help, and her youngest, the Titan Cronus, answered. Cronus hated his lusty father and took up the sickle his mother had made for him. Gaia hid Cronus in ambush, and when Uranus came to lie with her, Cronus reached out with the sickle, castrated his father, and threw the severed genitals over his shoulder. From the drops of blood were born the Furies, the Giants, and the ash-tree nymphs. The genitals fell into the sea, and a foam formed around them, out of which was born Aphrodite, the goddess of the foam (the foam is widely read as semen).

Gaia gave birth to many children — gods, monsters, and forces of nature — and she remained an active character in Greek myth, while Uranus retreated into the background of the Greek imagination.

Cronus ruled the universe with his sister-queen Rhea, mother of the Olympians. The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos, written in Greek, explicitly identifies Cronus with the Canaanite El and names Rhea among El's wives, which suggests an identification of Rhea with Asherah (Rhea was also identified with the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele). In the Canaanite texts from Ugarit, El is called the Creator of Creatures and the Father of Years, and Cronus was later associated with Time (Chronos).

Cronus learned that one of his children was destined to overthrow him, so he swallowed each of his children as soon as they were born. When Rhea gave birth to her sixth child, Zeus, she hid him away safely on Crete and tricked Cronus with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he swallowed instead.

When Zeus was grown, he led a rebellion against Cronus and forced him to disgorge the stone and his five siblings: Hera, Hestia, Demeter, Poseidon, and Hades. Zeus set the stone at Delphi, where the priests there anointed it with oil every day. Zeus and his brothers and sisters waged a mighty war against Cronus and the Titans that shook the universe to its core. Zeus and the gods prevailed, and he punished his enemies terribly, binding them in chains deep in Tartarus, the abyss. Among the Titans was Atlas, who was punished by having to hold up the sky on his shoulders.

I argue that this mythological trope, in which a young god or gods overthrow and conquer an older generation of gods, reflects actual historical shifts in religion, as when a new empire conquers an older one and replaces its gods. The Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, in which Marduk becomes king of the gods, is a memory of the newer Babylonian pantheon displacing the older Sumerian one. Likewise, the Iron Age Greeks reordered the earlier Bronze Age Mycenaean pantheon, while the Iron Age Yahwists overthrew the Bronze Age Baal cult.

Prometheus

In later versions of the myth, some Titans sided with Zeus and were rewarded for their loyalty. In the retelling by Plato, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were given the task of equipping man and the animals. Absent-minded Epimetheus gave all the great gifts to the animals — speed, strength, and flight — leaving nothing for man. It was wise Prometheus who made man noble, upright, and intelligent. And to make up for man's lack of physical gifts, Prometheus gave him fire, stolen from the gods.

Greek writers celebrated man as the noblest of creatures — "Many wonders there are, but none more wondrous than man," sings the chorus in Sophocles' Antigone — in contrast to the Mesopotamians, who believed humans were lowly creatures created to serve the gods. The Greeks also pictured their gods in fully human form, unlike the Egyptians, whose gods often had the heads of animals.

Zeus was greatly angered at Prometheus. Not only had Prometheus given man fire, but he had also arranged a trick sacrifice, offering the gods bones wrapped in glistening fat and leaving the good meat for men to eat — the origin of the Greek custom of burning the bones for the gods. (Hesiod says Zeus saw through the trick but chose the bones anyway.)

Zeus swore revenge. Prometheus was taken away and chained to a rock, where an eagle swooped down every day to eat his liver, only to have it grow back every night. Prometheus endured this torture for a long time until Heracles killed the eagle and freed him, as Hesiod tells it.

Pandora, the First Woman

At this time there were no women: in the Greek Golden Age, men lived on the earth without women. Hesiod's writings were deeply misogynistic, reflecting Greek culture and its regressive attitudes. Hesiod was the first to tell a story similar to that of Eve in the Garden of Eden: how the first woman brought ill upon the men of the world. The story of Pandora was retold by many writers.

Zeus, in his anger with Prometheus, created the cleverest punishment of all for man: the first woman, Pandora. Hephaestus shaped her into a lovely young maiden, with a face like the immortal goddesses. All the gods gave her gifts. Athena dressed her and taught her weaving; Aphrodite poured grace upon her; the Graces and Persuasion hung golden necklaces on her; the Seasons crowned her with spring flowers; and Hephaestus made her a golden crown. But Hermes gave her lies, crafty words, and a deceitful nature. Her name, Pandora, means "all-gifted," because all the gods gave her a gift. Zeus, delighted with his stratagem, brought her out, and gods and men alike were struck with wonder. From Pandora was born the race of women, who, according to Hesiod, are an evil to men, with a nature to do evil.

Zeus had Pandora delivered to Epimetheus, who accepted her despite Prometheus's warning never to accept a gift from Zeus. Pandora brought with her a great storage jar (a pithos, often mistranslated as a "box"). Hesiod says only that she lifted its lid; later retellings added that Zeus gave her the jar as a wedding present and warned her not to open it.

In those later tellings, Pandora was curious. She could not help herself; she tried to resist temptation, but in the end she opened the jar, unleashing Zeus's curses on humanity. Out of the jar streamed all of life's miseries: greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death. Pandora was terrified by all the evil spirits and closed the jar as fast as she could, but it was too late.

Only one spirit remained inside the jar: hope. Hesiod says Pandora closed the lid by the will of Zeus, and whether hope was a final boon to humanity or one more trap has been debated since antiquity. In the popular reading, against the onslaught of life's unending suffering, there remains the constant flickering candle of hope, and as long as hope burns, humans still stand a chance.

Share

The Oresteia

Greek literature and mythology served a role similar to that of the Hebrew Bible in codifying the diminished status of women and the Goddess in their society. In 458 BCE — by traditional reckoning the same year Ezra brought the Book of the Law to Jerusalem — the famous Greek playwright Aeschylus won first prize at the Athens Dionysia festival for his trilogy, the Oresteia.

The Oresteia tells the story of an escalating cycle of family violence that culminates in matricide, and of a trial in which the god Apollo argues that killing one's mother is no crime because the child belongs solely to the father, and the goddess Athena casts the vote that acquits the son.

Aeschylus was deeply religious and was born in Eleusis, home of the Mystery religion of Demeter. The playwright was very influential, and by having a god argue that matricide is not a blasphemous crime because no blood relationship exists between mother and child, he implicitly argued in favor of exclusive patrilineal descent, just as the Hebrew Bible does.

This story codifies the moment in Greek culture when the ancient ways of the Goddess were finally overthrown by male dominance. It depicts the clash between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures and tells the story of the founding of the Greek legal system, which sought to bring order out of chaos by ending the cycles of clan vengeance for family murders that had existed for millennia.

The story begins with the return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War. Agamemnon was the thuggish leader of the Greeks, who had defeated Troy but, in doing so, had committed sacrilege by desecrating the Trojan temples, women, and people. His wife, Queen Clytemnestra, is the sister of Helen (and their husbands are brothers). She is shown eagerly awaiting his return after ten long years of absence. But Clytemnestra does not love Agamemnon; she has murder on her mind.

Before leaving for Troy a decade earlier, Agamemnon had angered the goddess Artemis. The angry goddess becalmed the winds, which prevented the Greek armada from setting sail for Troy. To appease her, Agamemnon arranged to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.

There are many versions of this story. All of the Trojan War legends lived long in oral tradition and were retold by many poets with varying details. In some versions, Agamemnon offended Artemis by killing her sacred deer; in Aeschylus, the goddess is angered by an omen of two eagles tearing apart a pregnant hare. In Euripides' version, Agamemnon lures Iphigenia to the altar by telling his wife and daughter that she is to marry the hero Achilles; in Aeschylus, she is gagged so she cannot curse her family and is lifted over the altar like a sacrificial goat. In some versions, Artemis rescues the maiden, but in Aeschylus's influential version, the girl dies. The winds then returned, and the ships sailed to Troy.

Queen Clytemnestra never forgave her husband for killing their daughter, her matriarchal heir, and in her role as matriarch, she was obligated to avenge her. Clytemnestra is a dominant figure who represents the old ways, the primal traditions of the Goddess, and Aeschylus portrays her as deceitful and murderous. She is a character similar to Queen Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible, who is likewise portrayed as a villain.

In the play, Clytemnestra greets Agamemnon with fulsome praise and invites him into the palace. Agamemnon has brought along his war prize, the slave concubine Cassandra, a tragic figure who was given the divine gift of prophecy but cursed so that no one would ever believe her. Cassandra foresees the murder, but no one listens. Clytemnestra draws Agamemnon a warm bath, and while he is in it, she entangles him in a robe like a fishing net and strikes him down. She kills Cassandra as well and publicly proclaims the deed, declaring her tribal right to revenge.

The second play, The Libation Bearers, tells the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Orestes has been ordered by the god Apollo to return to his homeland and take revenge on his mother. He joins his sister Electra, who shares his desire to avenge their father. At the fateful moment, Clytemnestra begs her son to spare her life, and Orestes hesitates, knowing that killing his mother is a great crime. But Orestes follows Apollo's instructions and cuts his mother down. No sooner has he slain her than Orestes begins to see visions of the Furies, the ancient goddesses of vengeance and justice who punish evildoers, particularly those who murder their own kin. Driven by madness, Orestes flees, ending the second play.

The third play, The Eumenides, opens at Apollo's temple at Delphi, famous to this day as the home of the Pythia, the oracle and prophetess of Apollo. The Pythia finds Orestes clinging to the sacred center stone of the temple, his hands still dripping with blood. Around him sit the fearsome, terrifying Furies. Apollo tells Orestes that he will protect him and that he should go to the temple of Athena in Athens. Apollo argues with the Furies, who express their disgust with this new and unjust god who would both encourage Orestes to murder a parent and then offer him sanctuary in his temple. The Furies vow revenge on Orestes for his blood crime — it is the ancient way.

The scene shifts to the temple of Athena, where Orestes begs the goddess for protection. Athena arrives and listens to both Orestes and the Furies plead their cases. She announces that the matter is too grave for her to decide alone, so she institutes the first homicide court and holds a trial with a jury of oath-bound citizens to render a verdict. The play thus mythologizes the origins of the Greek legal system, which was established to replace the traditional path of tribal blood vengeance. Orestes is the defendant, Athena presides, and a group of Athenian citizens serves as the jury. The Furies, despite their misgivings, act as the prosecutors, while Apollo serves as Orestes' defense advocate.

Apollo makes an unusual argument in Orestes' defense, one that would be as profound in establishing the role of women in society as Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Furies are charged with avenging the murder of kin, but Apollo argues that the mother cannot be considered kin, because she merely safeguards the father's seed; the child belongs to the father alone. "The mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo," says Apollo (Eumenides 658–659, trans. H. W. Smyth). A child has only a father, and the mother is of no significance, so Orestes has not committed the grave sin of murdering his kin.

Apollo offers as proof none other than the goddess Athena, who was born fully grown from the head of Zeus, with no birth mother. The jury’s votes come out evenly split, and Athena announces her own vote for Orestes, declaring that she is wholly on the side of the male, except in marriage.

Orestes is acquitted and returns to his city of Argos as the new king. The Furies are shocked and dismayed, and they vow vengeance on the entire city of Athens. But Athena dissuades them by offering them a place in the new order: from now on, they will defend Athenian justice and bless the city. She gives them a cave to dwell in beneath the city, symbolizing how they were driven underground.

This marks the Axial Age shift from the ancient ways of superstition to something more philosophical and institutional. From the Greek perspective, this was a just and ethical correction of society's moral structure, marked by the advent of formal legal systems. Athenian democracy and its legal system laid the foundation for the best aspects of liberal governance in the Western tradition. But like so many things, it comes as a paradox: the advance toward democracy was directly tied to the repression of women and the denial of their most sacred role, as mothers.

Clytemnestra was defending her clan by killing Agamemnon, but she was denied the right to take revenge because a tribal matriarch held no standing in Greek society. The original killing of Iphigenia was completely forgotten, her murder dismissed.

Athena and Apollo were not foreign imports in this period, like Aphrodite; both were native Greek deities (the name Athena appears in the Bronze Age Mycenaean Linear B tablets).

Athena in particular represents the idealized Greek view of femininity. She is wisdom, civilization, and the patron of weaving; she is chaste and celebrates her virginity and restrained sexuality. Her birth from the head of Zeus represents wisdom derived directly from the godhead, and she sits at his right hand.

Apollo held the role of oracle and master of divination, which was generally a goddess's role — even as the Pythia who served in his temple was always a woman.

Next episode, we will dive into the Olympian pantheon, the crossovers with the Canaanites, and discuss how the powers of the Bronze Age goddess of Love and War were divided across Athena and Aphrodite in the Iron Age.

Share Lost Goddess

Read the full writeup here:

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we examine the Deuteronomic Law Codes (Deuteronomy 12–26), which embody the divorce of Yahweh from the Mother Goddess Asherah. These laws are believed to originate during the Yahwist reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE, shortly before the Temple's destruction at the hands of the Babylonians.

2 Kings 22 recounts the discovery of a “Book of the Law” in the Temple, and the code’s focus on worship at a single central sanctuary matches Josiah’s religious centralization reforms of around 621 BCE.

While some Deuteronomic laws are unremarkable or unobjectionable, focusing on common morality or on dietary restrictions that signify tribal allegiance, many of the laws exhibit extreme misogyny, religious intolerance, and ultraviolence toward neighboring cultures.

This is the period when, I argue, the last vestiges of the old Bronze Age matriarchal traditions were being shut down throughout the region. In the Deuteronomic laws, we see the Asherah poles representing the Mother Goddess torn down, the male and female qedeshas banned, and women's sexuality tightly policed.

We also see the prohibition on blending wool and linen. It is a rule that seems very strange by modern standards (though observant Jews still follow it), but it makes perfect sense once you recognize that wool and linen represent the shepherds and the farmers — the patriarchal clans and the matriarchal clans — who had once been joined in the sacred marriage traditions but were now being torn apart in the monotheistic divorce.

The Garden of Eden story, with its denunciations of goddess symbols (serpents, farming, the tree of knowledge, female submissiveness, etc.), was likely written in the same general period as these laws of Deuteronomy (perhaps before or after the Exile).

Subscribe now

Let’s dive into the Laws of Deuteronomy…

Follow my laws, and the Promised Land will be yours.

Yahweh promises that if the Israelites follow his laws, he will deliver the Promised Land to them. The other nations will be driven out, and Israel’s territory will extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River — essentially the same maximalist Zionist vision as Greater Israel today.

Tear down the altars and burn up the Asherah poles.

Centralize the worship of Yahweh in a single temple, and do not serve other gods. The implication is that the people were doing exactly what is being prohibited here — installing Asherah poles next to the altar of Yahweh and worshipping on the high places. During the First Temple period, Yahweh was worshipped alongside Asherah, as seen in the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions (”Yahweh and his Asherah”) and in the Asherah poles installed in the Jerusalem Temple, as documented in the Bible itself.

Kill any prophet who encourages you to worship other gods.

Do not set up a wooden Asherah pole next to the altar of Yahweh.

Put pagan Israelites to death.

Do not engage in pagan practices: no child sacrifice, divination, sorcery, spells, mediums, or consulting the dead.

Offer peace, or plunder and kill.

If you attack a city, you must first offer peace and take the people as slaves. If they refuse, you are free to plunder the city, kill the men, and kidnap the women, children, and livestock. The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, however, must be completely destroyed.

Captive brides, firstborn sons, and rebellious sons.

If you see a beautiful woman among your enemies, you can kidnap her and make her your wife, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

A man must honor his firstborn son, even if he despises the boy’s mother.

And if a son is disrespectful, he can be taken to the elders and stoned to death.

No wool and linen woven together.

Wool and linen woven together represent the blending of farmers and shepherds: linen comes from a farmed plant, and wool comes from sheep. This law is directly contradicted by Moses’s instructions for building the Tabernacle, which command that wool and linen be blended in the priests’ holy vestments and in the Tabernacle curtains.

Traditionally, this is explained as a way of distinguishing the sacred from the secular: the blend of wool and linen is said to be reserved for the priesthood alone.

I would like to offer an alternative explanation.

Blending wool and linen represents the sacred marriage between the shepherd kings — of Mesopotamia and of the Hyksos — and the peasant farmers who worshipped the Mother Goddess. We see the origins of this myth in the Sumerian epic poem The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi.

Separating wool from linen accompanies the divorce of God from the Goddess.

The Cain and Abel story reflects this divorce: Yahweh rejects the farmer Cain’s offerings of vegetables but accepts the shepherd Abel’s offerings of meat. The treacherous farmer Cain then brutally murders his good shepherd brother Abel in revenge, staining his reputation forever.

The monotheists are shepherds only, and they intentionally eliminate the sacred marriage ritual and ban the blending of wool and linen that represents it.

Share Lost Goddess

It is extremely important to control women’s sex lives to preserve patriarchal bloodlines.

No cross-dressing. No eunuchs or people of illegitimate birth may enter the assembly of Yahweh.

No qedeshas.

The law below specifically bans the qedesha priestesses and the qadesh priests, calling them a whore and a dog, respectively. The qadesh were transgender people or eunuchs, like the Galli priests of the Mother Goddess Cybele in Rome, and they were clearly despised by the patriarchal Yahwists who chased them away.

Many contemporary scholars, such as Stephanie Budin, reject the association of the qedesha with sacred sex, even though that translation has been consistent since at least the Septuagint in the third century BCE. It is true that we don't know the finer points of these traditions, and specific sex rituals have not been documented for the qedesha, but scholars are too quick (in my opinion) to dismiss the accounts of ritual prostitution recorded by Herodotus, Strabo, and Lucian in the centuries following the Exile. Scholars also give short shrift to the story of Judah and Tamar, in which Tamar is explicitly identified as a qedesha after sex, and to the idea that Gomer, wife of the prophet Hosea, was likely a qedesha.

Sacred sex was common in goddess cultures and remains so today. Many of these practices continue in the Shakti goddess traditions of India, which include the devadasis (temple prostitution, banned in the 20th century but still practiced illegally), ritualized Tantric sex, and the transgender community known as the hijras.

My argument is that the Israelites, the Canaanites, and neighboring cultures were originally matriarchal and celebrated women's sexuality. They believed that sex makes the flowers grow and encouraged it as a benefit to agriculture. Farming metaphors for sex are extremely common in the literature of Inanna, Ishtar, and related Bronze Age goddesses.

Matriarchal family lines allowed women sexual freedom, and the transition to patriarchal families in the Iron Age required that these old sex traditions be constrained or shut down.

Public ritual sex was well known in the Dionysian and Bacchic traditions of Greece and Rome. The Romans finally banned the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE because the rites were sexually licentious and politically seditious. The Hebrews were simply ahead of the Romans by some 500 years.

A man can divorce his wife for almost any reason.

A man can divorce his wife for basically any reason and send her away. In a patriarchal world, this is very harmful to women, who are left with no resources and may have children to care for. In matriarchies, it is the man who is sent away in a divorce, while the woman stays in her home with her children and her wealth.

And finally, perhaps the weirdest of all the Old Testament laws — and not a great one for women either.

Next episode, we will return to the Greeks and show how their mythology, contemporary with that of the Hebrews, exhibits the same transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The Iron Age Greeks reordered their pantheon to make most of the goddesses submissive to Zeus, and wives submissive to their husbands.

This week, panel member Joshua Vander Plaats tells how teenage spiritual experiences led him to the Orthodox priesthood, out of the church, and finally to the Mother Goddess.

Subscribe now

In this talk, I lay out the God-Goddess Cosmological Model — a framework for understanding the cosmos as Mind and Matter, where the Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother are eternal, co-equal partners. Many polytheistic cultures see the world this way.

Monotheism is the exception: a worldview where the Heavenly Father rules alone, with no partner or rival, omnipotent and unlimited. This required divorcing the Mother Goddess and pushing her out of the way.

Share Lost Goddess

I trace the divorce of God from Goddess through the Hebrew Bible and the Koran and into the modern day.

This is the subject we explore in Goddess Bible Study — here is the full slide deck summary of the argument.

I’m happy to give this presentation on podcasts or in person.

Subscribe now

You can find Lisa at:
therenegademystic.com

Read the write-up here:

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, the scene shifts to the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. This is the critical moment when monotheism finally emerged as a coherent intellectual concept. The divorce of the Mother Goddess was final, and Yahweh declared in 2nd Isaiah, “there are no other gods.”

We meet the legendary Persian King Cyrus, who liberated the Hebrews from exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple. Persian Zoroastrianism had a major theological influence on the development of pure monotheism.

We also meet Ezra the Scribe, who brought the Book of the Law back to Jerusalem early in the Second Temple period. Ezra condemned mixed marriages between Israelites and Canaanites, forcing Jewish men to divorce and banish their foreign wives and children, completing the divorce of the Mother Goddess.

We have solid archaeological evidence for this period. The Al-Yahudu Texts ca. 572-477 BCE), roughly 200 tablets discovered in Iraq, provide a window into the life of the Judean exilic community in Babylonia, where they lived as tenant farmers. In exchange for the land, they had to pay taxes and were expected to provide some labor and military service, but were generally free to integrate into the broader society.

Subscribe now

The Babylonian empire fell apart quickly after Nebuchadnezzar II died. Cyrus II of Persia, also known as Cyrus the Great, defeated the Babylonians and created the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, the largest empire the world had known at that time. The Persian Empire stretched from India to Egypt and dominated the Near East for two centuries, until its defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great.

Cyrus marched into Babylon in 539 BCE and was welcomed with open gates and celebrations: the previous king, Nabonidus, was an apostate who had ignored Marduk and the other traditional gods in favor of worshipping the moon god Sin alone.

Cyrus was hailed in his time as a wise and benevolent ruler. He earned the goodwill and loyalty of local populations by rejecting the raw brutality of the Assyrians and Babylonians, promoting religious tolerance, and returning exiles to their homes.

For the Jews, Cyrus was a near-messianic figure who freed them from exile, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and re-establish their community and temple.

After the Persian Empire came to power, the Israelite priests in Babylon were sponsored by a series of Persian kings to return to Jerusalem, restore the temple, and compile their sacred texts. King Cyrus kindly returned the golden treasures that had been seized by Nebuchadnezzar.

Cyrus established Babylon as his administrative center. He made a great declaration of peace and demonstrated his commitment to religious tolerance. Cyrus allowed for all the gods to be restored to their temples, not just Yahweh. The proclamation was written in cuneiform text on a large cylinder and put on public display in Babylon.

Archaeologists found the Cyrus Cylinder. It uses language remarkably similar to the Bible’s, except where the Bible credits Yahweh, Cyrus credits Marduk.

Share Lost Goddess

Cyrus Loses his Head to an Amazon Queen

In an ironic twist of fate, King Cyrus was reportedly killed in 530 BCE by the Massagetae Scythian Queen Tomyris; she took his head as a war prize, in revenge for the death of her son. The Scythians are the Amazons of Greek legend, nomadic horse-riding people whose women fought alongside the men.

The account comes only from Herodotus, and it is controversial, since other ancient historians give different accounts of Cyrus’s death. Nonetheless, it’s a fun tale for Goddess Bible Study.

Cyrus, after conquering most of the Near East, turned his ambitions toward the Massagetae — a nomadic, Scythian-related people living beyond the Jaxartes River in Central Asia, ruled at the time by Queen Tomyris, a widow who had taken over from her late husband. Herodotus says Cyrus first tried simply to marry her and absorb her kingdom that way; she saw through it and refused, so he invaded instead.

The campaign turned on a piece of trickery: Cyrus left a lavishly stocked camp of food and wine undefended as bait. The Massagetae weren’t wine-drinkers — Herodotus says they favored getting intoxicated on fermented mare’s milk and cannabis, which they burned in enclosed tents while inhaling the smoke. A detachment under Tomyris’s son Spargapises took the bait, got drunk, and was slaughtered; Spargapises was captured and, once sober and disgraced, killed himself.

Tomyris then sent Cyrus a warning that she’d give him his fill of blood. She met him in open battle and won decisively. She had Cyrus’s corpse decapitated, and his head thrust into a wineskin filled with blood, saying, “Now I make good my threat: you have your fill of blood.”

Subscribe now

Monotheism, Finally!

The Persians allowed the Israelites to practice their religion and encouraged their return to Judea (renamed from Judah), where they became “the Jews.” Until then, they had been Israelites and Hebrews — never Jews.

A succession of Persian kings sponsored the Jews to write their sacred texts and provided gold to build the second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were heavily influenced by the Persians and their Zoroastrian traditions, which feature the nearly-monotheistic god Ahura Mazda.

I argue that the Jews could not possibly have developed the full concept of monotheism until the arrival of the Zoroastrians, whose religion was based on a completely different worldview than the nature-based paganism that was the norm across the region. It also helped that the Persians completely defeated the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, giving weight to the idea that those ancient pantheons could be overcome.

I personally find it hard to believe that anyone would have taken seriously the argument that Yahweh was more powerful than Isis, Ashur, or Marduk before the Persians came through.

Zoroastrianism is widely recognized as a predecessor to monotheism because it frames the cosmos as a dualistic battle between the forces of light, represented by the god Ahura Mazda, and the forces of darkness, led by Angra Mainyu, the “spiritual enemy.” This moral framework is carried through in Christianity, where we’re told that one is either with God or with the Devil.

This black-and-white framing of the cosmos replaced the nature-based, cycle-of-life traditions rooted in the Mother Goddess, in effect, pushing her out of the conversation. The Biblical text makes it clear that up until this point, the debate over the Queen of Heaven was at a fever pitch, but the introduction of this new spiritual framework enabled the Yahwists to finally get over the hump and establish their god as the one and only.

2nd Isaiah

The identities of Yahweh and El were formally fused into the single monotheistic God of the Bible in Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55). This secondary section of the book of Isaiah is widely understood by scholars to be the work of a later, anonymous author, appended to the original Isaiah. The original prophet was writing in Jerusalem, while this author wrote in Babylon.

This is the first time we see Yahweh clearly claim that there are no other gods in existence. It is no longer monolatry (one god among many); the prophets are proclaiming monotheism. Culturally speaking, though, the Jews remained polytheistic for centuries, until the Hasmonean kingdom in the 2nd century BCE.

In the following passage, El and Yahweh are merged in the Hebrew phrase “ha-El Yahweh” (God the LORD). In the Hebrew Bible, the direct compound title ha-El Yahweh, or the explicit juxtaposition of El and Yahweh, is quite rare. There are only three primary passages where they appear back-to-back as a direct compound title: Isaiah 42:5, Psalm 85:8, and Psalm 118:27. The Garden of Eden story also uses Yahweh-Elohim throughout, which is otherwise rare, though it is seen in the Book of Chronicles, which is a later text.

The next couple of passages mention Cyrus, and by Biblical tradition they are read as prophecies written before the Persians’ arrival. I read these as classic ex-post-facto prophecies — meaning they were written after the events occurred and later added to the text as though they were prophetic.

I am Yahweh, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.

Yahweh says,

The following passage mentions the gods Bel and Nebo. Bel is another name for Marduk, the great Babylonian king of the gods. This passage was obviously written after Cyrus had conquered Babylon. After this section, other gods are no longer (or rarely) named in the Bible, while in the earlier First Temple period many other gods are commonly named. Never again in the Biblical text do we see the names Asherah and Astarte.

Yahweh claims here that he is responsible for sending Cyrus, his “bird of prey from the east,” to conquer Babylon. Once again, we see the Biblical writers playing historical judo, claiming that foreign invading armies are actually following Yahweh’s call rather than their own gods.

The Humiliation of Babylon

Here we find another passage with a double meaning, addressing both the city of Babylon and the great goddess, presumably Ishtar. We see many attributes of the goddess — virgin, queen, sorcerer, spells, wisdom, and knowledge — and we hear more of the rough misogyny we heard from Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

I gave your mother a certificate of divorce. Send her away. The divorce is final.

Here we see the imagery of the deep waters and the leviathan, who is named Rahab. The word for “sea” is “Yamm,” the same as the Canaanite god of the seas. The “waters of the great deep” is “tehom,” understood to be a cognate of Tiamat, the salt waters of creation, the great Babylonian mother goddess. This word and imagery also appear in Genesis 1. Yahweh is demonstrating his mastery over the chaotic waters of creation, the source mother, and her pet serpent monster, symbols that appear across many cultures.

Here is the fifth, and final, cannabis reference. Cannabis and its associated imagery never appear in Second Temple or later Jewish traditions. Cannabis went with the goddesses and was thrown out with them.

Scholarly commentaries, such as this commentary from Bible Hub on Exodus 30:23, have long noted that the word “qaneh” in these five passages is unclear. Qaneh is mentioned as a spice in Exodus 30:23; Song of Solomon 4:14; Isaiah 43:24; Jeremiah 6:20; and Ezekiel 27:17, but the term “aromatic cane” is vague, and it is not at all clear what plant species is meant. Most Biblical scholars have agreed on calamus; I and others argue that it is cannabis.

Share

Ezra the Scribe and the Return to Jerusalem

The Jews slowly began returning to Jerusalem after an exile of 70 years. In 516 BCE, they began construction of the Second Temple.

There were actually multiple temples to Yahweh outside of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period. We mentioned the temple on Elephantine Island in Egypt last episode. There was also the Samaritan temple to Yahweh on Mount Gerizim, which the Hasmoneans eventually destroyed, and scholars have suggested there were others.

The returning exiles rebuilt the altar on the foundation of Solomon’s Temple, despite their fear of the local people. There was a great deal of resistance and subterfuge from locals who remembered the Yahwists and did not want them to return.

Ezra the Scribe was sent from Babylon by King Artaxerxes with a treasury full of gold and silver and a royal proclamation of his authority to re-establish worship at the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Ezra is very important to the Jews — even a second Moses — because he brought the Book of the Law to Jerusalem and is the father of many Jewish traditions. Ezra grew up among the Israelites in Babylon who had been there for generations and had good relations with the Persians. There are many legends and myths about Ezra, but we don’t have space to get into them here.

By Jewish tradition, Ezra the Scribe is thought to have edited and compiled the final draft of the Hebrew Bible (the Torah) that we read today, bringing it to Jerusalem from Babylon in 458 BCE (though this dating is subject to scholarly debate).

This is the same year that Aeschylus debuted the Oresteia in Athens; both works of mythology celebrate the introduction of patriarchal law and the end of matriarchal tribal traditions. We will have a dedicated episode on the Oresteia.

I am persuaded by the modern scholarship of Russell Gmirkin and others who argue that the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, was actually written in Alexandria some 200 years later, in the third century BCE — but we will get to that in a later episode.

In the text of the Hebrew Bible, it does not actually say that Ezra brought the completed Torah; it says that he brought the “Book of the Law.” Scholars debate precisely what was included in the Book of the Law. Ezra read it aloud to the community in a single day, implying it was not the full 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, which is far too long to read in one sitting.

Nonetheless, the message was clear to the people. The Jews were to withdraw completely from the broader pagan world and live by their own laws and customs. They were not to mix with the locals, not to share customs or festivals, and nature worship was strictly forbidden.

Divorce the Pagan Women

But then Ezra discovered that the Jewish men had been marrying local Canaanite women with their detestable customs and having families with them. Ezra was outraged. Ezra prayed in despair. He forced the men to choose between their families and their God.

Ezra forced the Jewish men who had married pagan women to divorce their wives and children and abandon them. The pagan women continued their goddess worship and nature-based traditions, which was unacceptable to Ezra and the Jewish leaders. It is doubtful that much matriarchy remained at this stage of history; all the imperial cultures were fully patriarchal by the 5th century BCE. Matriarchy only continued among tribal peoples outside the walls of civilization.

The physical divorce of the Jewish men from their pagan wives was the final act in the divorce between the Hebrew God and the Mother Goddess that began centuries earlier, when King Asa first removed the Asherah pole from the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem.

This divorce was mythologically confirmed in the Garden of Eden story, which is the divorce papers signed, sealed, and delivered. No longer would the Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother be husband and wife.

For the next few episodes, we will shift our view to the ancient Greeks, who were operating in parallel to the Hebrews and also reordering the cosmos, making the goddesses submissive to Zeus, and wives submissive to their husbands. We will meet back up with the Jews in Alexandria in the third century BCE.

Read the write-up here:

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we have reached the end of the First Temple period; it’s a big, important moment in the timeline. For nearly 400 years, the Hebrew temple dedicated to Yahweh had stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem before it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The followers of Yahweh were radical reformists who had worked hard to overthrow existing religious traditions, centralize worship around one god, and institute enormous cultural changes, with varying degrees of success.

The Yahwists objected to child sacrifice (among other things) and fought against the gods, particularly Baal, who demanded it. Baal had been the incumbent king of the gods for the Israelites and Canaanites going back centuries to the time of the Hyksos. Yahweh and Baal competed for the love of the northern kingdom of Israel, and in the 9th century BCE, Yahweh won the fight for the throne, but the broader pantheon of gods remained intact. Yahweh never ruled Israel alone; it was always a pagan nation until its destruction by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.

Yahweh’s home was in the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital of Jerusalem. Yahweh had more success consolidating worship in Judah, but for most of its history, Judah remained stubbornly pagan as well. At no point were the Hebrews monotheists in the First Temple. Yahweh had not yet been merged with his father, the creator, El Elyon, “God Most High,” and the goddesses Asherah, Astarte, and Anat remained as popular as ever.

The Yahwists also objected to the goddesses and particularly the ritual sex traditions, rooted in farming, that were thought to make the flowers grow. The goddesses and the qedesha priestesses, along with the transgender qadesh priests, represented the old Bronze Age tribal matriarchies that built families around mothers and celebrated women’s sexuality. The Yahwists were firmly patriarchal, so they needed to shut these traditions down and make the women submit to the new Iron Age order.

King Josiah (discussed in the last episode) attempted to push through the most dramatic reforms, shutting down all pagan religious practices and moving hard against the goddesses, but he was killed in battle in 609 BCE, and his reforms died with him. Judah immediately returned to its pagan ways, much to the chagrin of the Hebrew prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Nebuchadnezzar II became the king of Babylon in 605 BCE; he was the greatest emperor of his era and looms large in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar led a great renaissance of Babylon and made many renovations and restorations to the city, including reconstruction of the great walls, the grand processional boulevard, and the lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate. At this time, Babylon was the biggest, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan city in the world.

At the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his allies completely devastated the combined armies of Egypt and the remaining Assyrians, leaving the Babylonians as the undisputed power in the region.

Prophet Jeremiah

Jeremiah was a prophet in Judea during the time of Josiah. He was the son of the high priest Hilkiah and may have been one of the Deuteronomist writers. Jeremiah witnessed the fall of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, and the exile to Babylon. Jeremiah was the chief mourner for King Josiah and was deeply troubled by the prompt return to pagan practices the moment Josiah passed.

Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet; he preached that Judah would be destroyed by invaders from the north because they had forsaken Yahweh by worshipping adulterous goddesses, committing idolatry, and all the rest of the sins of the Canaanites. Jeremiah preached social justice and advocated for the poor against the depredations of the rich and powerful.

Scholarly consensus is that there was a historical Jeremiah, and that some of the writings in his book were by him, but the overall book was edited and redacted numerous times.

The prophet frequently used the metaphor of divorce to describe the fealty Yahweh demands.

Jeremiah preached that the Babylonians would defeat Judah, which was an unpopular message with the king and considered treasonous.

Subscribe now

Cannabis Mentioned as a Burnt Offering in the Temple

This passage suggests that burnt offerings of cannabis were made to Yahweh in the Hebrew temple. The typical translation of calamus or sweet cane does not fit the context as a burnt offering, but cannabis does perfectly.

Yahweh was angry and rejected the Israelite offerings as too little and too late; they were too far gone in their sins. Cannabis from a distant land implies that they were not growing cannabis in Judah – but were trading for it.

Judah persisted in worshipping the Goddess; they made offerings to Astarte, the Queen of Heaven.

Yahweh’s disgust with child sacrifice is again stated by Jeremiah. Here it says that Yahweh never commanded child sacrifice, a claim debated by scholars. Arguably, in earlier centuries the Yahweh cult had also participated in the practice, but by this time, they were firmly opposed.

597 - 586 BCE - Destruction of Jerusalem

During the time of imperial unrest, Judah rebelled against Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar answered in 597 BCE by invading Judah and laying siege to Jerusalem, turning it into a vassal state.

Nebuchadnezzar marched up to the gates of Jerusalem, and the king and the entire royal family surrendered. Nebuchadnezzar stripped the Temple of its valuables and sent 10,000 elites into exile in Babylon, including the soon-to-be prophet Ezekiel.

The last king of Judah was Zedekiah; he was installed by Nebuchadnezzar and ruled for 11 years. Zedekiah was pagan and of no value to the Yahwists. Against the warnings of Jeremiah and other advisors, Zedekiah rebelled against Babylon in his ninth year and allied with Egypt.

Jeremiah warned Zedekiah that Babylon would defeat Judah and the Egyptians would not be able to save them. Jeremiah was arrested, accused of being a traitor in favor of the Babylonians. Jeremiah was then thrown into a mud-filled cistern in an attempt to kill him, but he was rescued by allies.

Nebuchadnezzar responded by invading Judah again and laying siege to Jerusalem in 588 BCE. The siege lasted 30 months, and great suffering befell the people. Jerusalem fell for good in 586 BCE.

When Nebuchadnezzar finally succeeded in taking Jerusalem, Zedekiah and his family attempted to flee but were captured on the plains of Jericho. The last thing Zedekiah ever saw was the execution of his sons – his eyes were then put out, and the last king of Judah was taken as a blind captive to Babylon and imprisoned.

Share

Solomon’s Temple Burned

The Hebrew Temple was burned, and the rest of the people were exiled, leaving behind only the poorest of the poor. All of the valuables that remained were brought back to Babylon.

The destruction of the Temple was the ultimate loss for the Israelites; Solomon’s Temple was the heart and center of Hebrew spiritual life.

Solomon’s Temple had also been the center of a spiritual conflict over fundamentally contradictory worldviews. Traditional folk beliefs held that the Heavenly Father and the Earthly Mother were husband and wife. King Solomon understood this, but the Yahwists preached that the Heavenly Father ruled alone.

Of the 373 years that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem, an Asherah pole stood by the altar for roughly two-thirds of the time, worshipped by the traditional farming people, according to Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai. The Mother Goddess Asherah was El’s wife, but the Yahwists wanted a divorce, and they got it.

Monotheism leaves no room for the Goddess. The Yahwist reformers pushed her worship out of the Temple and condemned it. Yahweh then took all the powers of nature and reproduction for himself. The women in the community who were dedicated to the Goddess were neither consulted nor did they approve; monotheism was forced upon them.

Jeremiah Argues with the Women about Astarte

Jeremiah was freed by the Babylonians and told that he was free to live wherever he wanted. He could go to Babylon with royal support, but Jeremiah chose to stay behind in Judah. There were disputes and conflicts among the remaining Judeans, and the group decided to go to Egypt.

Jeremiah counseled strongly against leaving Judah but was taken against his will with the group of exiles. In Egypt, Jeremiah had a big public dispute with the exiles, particularly with the women whom he blamed for worshipping Astarte, the Queen of Heaven.

The women responded to Jeremiah with great anger and indignation. They argued that life was good when they made their offerings to the Queen of Heaven; they had plenty of food and suffered no evil. It was only after they stopped making offerings to Astarte that they began suffering from sword and famine.

The women clearly believed that Astarte offered them more protection than Yahweh.

This following passage from Jeremiah 44 is one of the most important references to the Israelite goddesses in the entire Bible, highlighting disputes that had been playing out for centuries and offering important details about how they baked cakes in the image of the Goddess and poured out drink offerings to her — practices also seen in Babylon.

The women angrily made clear that they had no intention of abandoning the great Goddess. Jeremiah was angry but conceded, saying, “Do what you want, but Yahweh will do you harm.”

The archaeological record shows that the Israelites in Egypt continued their polytheistic ways. Letters from a 5th century BCE Jewish temple on Elephantine Island in Egypt reference Anat-Yahu and are thought to be a pairing of Yahweh and Anat.

Prophet Ezekiel

The prophet Ezekiel lived in Judah during the Babylonian defeat of Jerusalem, and he departed with the first wave of exiles, a decade before the final destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Five years later, Ezekiel had a divine encounter by the rivers of Babylon and began his prophetic work.

Ezekiel’s vision is famous and awe-inspiring; some say it was drug-induced.

Yahweh called Ezekiel to prophesy against the exiled Israelites for their stubborn and obstinate behavior. Ezekiel accused Israel of breaking the covenant, saying Jerusalem would be attacked again and the Temple destroyed.

Ezekiel had a vision of pagan worship in Solomon’s Temple. He saw women weeping for Tammuz, the dying-and-rising god, Astarte’s husband. Tammuz was the equivalent of the Sumerian Dumuzi, and the Greeks knew him as Adonis. One of the months in the Hebrew calendar is the month of Tammuz.

A day of mourning and weeping was an important part of the dying-and-rising god rituals celebrated throughout the Ancient Near East.

In Ezekiel’s vision, Yahweh orders that the idolaters be killed with impunity in an act of mass murder.

Ezekiel condemned the women prophets, who can be understood to be the qedesha, with their magic charms and veils of anonymity. Ezekiel says the qedesha had the powers of life itself, killing those who should not have died and sparing those who should not have lived, in defiance of Yahweh’s judgment.

These prophets were continuing in the spirit of Gilgamesh, who rejected the goddess Ishtar’s seductions in his famous epic. Gilgamesh recounts her mistreatment of past lovers and also reaches for bird imagery, describing how she broke the wing of a former lover whom she turned into a bird, leaving him crying in the woods.

Through Ezekiel, Yahweh chastises Jerusalem for her unfaithfulness, but the words can be read as God speaking angrily to his wife, the Goddess, exerting his dominance and authority.

Yahweh talks like an abusive husband.

In this long passage, Ezekiel uses sexual language and imagery similar to Hosea. The prophet heaps blame and scorn on the Judeans for practicing their traditional religions, and then claims that Yahweh is responsible for getting foreign kingdoms to punish them.

Greek and Roman writers described the custom of Near Eastern women giving gifts to their lovers.

In a separate story, Ezekiel describes the behavior of two promiscuous sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, and Yahweh’s judgment against them. To Ezekiel, the entire city of Jerusalem was a prostitute, and his profound misogyny is on full display.

The First Temple has been destroyed, and the people have been scattered. The first crucial era of attempted pagan reforms is over, and the next chapter begins.

Next episode, we will be in Babylon, where we will meet the legendary Persian King Cyrus, who liberated the Hebrews from their exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple, now known as the Jews. Under the influence of the Persian Zoroastrians, pure monotheism emerged and was crystallized in 2nd Isaiah, the first time it is said that “there are no other gods.”

We will also meet Ezra the Scribe, who brought the Book of the Law back to Jerusalem early in the Second Temple period. Ezra condemned mixed marriages between Israelites and Canaanites, forcing the Jewish men to divorce and banish their foreign wives and children, completing the divorce of the Mother Goddess.

Subscribe now

Share Lost Goddess

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study we dig into one of the most turbulent periods in the long fight against the Mother Goddess. The dramatic reforms of King Hezekiah.

See the full write-up here:

Share Lost Goddess