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Introduction.

I have chosen four ancient religions to illustrate a progression from a matriarchal Goddess-based world view (Crete) through a synthesis with a polytheistic God and Goddess culture with emphasis on the individual here (Greece) to a culture initially Goddess based but with the advent of continual war, excising the Goddess from important roles (Sumer, Babylon and Assyria) and finally a dualistic, good-versus-evil cosmology where the God reigns supreme, eternal enemy to the agent of evil (Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia).

In a single essay, such a task is per force superficial; however I hope to show these religions in a neo-Pagan light and to learn from them lessons for ourselves now. Note well that the first three religions discussed were Pagan, albeit paleo-Pagan. Not all such societies are worthy of emulation today. From this it follows that what is old is not necessarily good; nor what is new necessarily bad. I urge upon all a syncretistic approach (synthesising into a coherent whole) and eclectic attitude (taking what is best) to a Pagan cosmology for the 21st Century.

Introduction.

In the Neolithic village the focal figure of all mythology and worship was the bountiful Goddess Earth as the mother and nourisher of life and receiver of the dead for re-birth. The Great Goddess was the arch personification of the power of space, time and matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die and everything having form or name including God, personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful, was her child within her womb.

Towards the close of the Age of Bronze and particularly at the dawn of the Age of Iron (1250BC) the old cosmology and mythologies of the Goddess Mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted and in a large measure even suppressed by those suddenly intrusive, patriarchal warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to us chiefly in the old and new testaments and the myths of Greece. Two extensive geographical sources provided the warrior hordes; the Syrian and Arabian deserts for the Semites where they herded sheep and goats and later mastered the camel, and broad plains of Europe and South Russian for the Hellenic and Aryan stems where they grazed their herds of cattle and early mastered the horse.

We see the primacy of the Goddess at the beginning of the Bronze Age in various artefacts. There is an ivory plaque in the ruins of Mycenae showing two women seated with a child representing the two queens and a young God. In the earliest recorded mythology of Sumer the dead and resurrected God, Demuzzi, is involved with two mighty Goddesses or one Goddess in dual forms. On the one hand the Goddess Of The Living (Inanna, Queen Of Heaven, who later became Aphrodite) and the Goddess Of The Dead (Erishkigal, dreadful queen of the underworld who later became Persephone). And the God who in death dwelt with the latter but in life was the lover of the former was in the great tradition Adonis.

Of the beautiful ring found in the large beehive tomb of Pylos (1550 BCE) showing the tree of eternal life, Arthur Evans writes:

"The field of the design is divided into zones by the trunk and horizontally spreading boughs of a great tree, old, gnarled and leafless. It stands with spreading roots on the top of a mound with its trunk rising in the centre of the field and with wide-stretching horizontal boughs. The scene that its branches thus divide belong not to the terrestrial sphere but to the Minoan afterworld.

(Upper left)

"In the first compartment may be recognised the Minoan Goddess seated in animated conversation with her wanted companion, while above her head there flutter two butterflies. The symbolic significance of these moreover is emphasised by the appearance above them of two small objects showing traces of heads at the tip and with hook-like projections at the side in which we may reasonably recognise two corresponding chrysalises. It is difficult to explain them otherwise than as an illusion to the resurgence of the human spirit after death.

"It can hardly be doubted, moreover, that they apply to the two youthful figures who appear beside them on the ring and must be taken to be symbolic of their reanimation with new life.

"The youth with long Minoan locks, standing behind the Goddess, raises the lower part of his right arm while the short-skirted damsel who faces him, with her back to the trunk, shows her surprise at the meeting by holding up both hands. We see here, reunited by the life-giving power of the Goddess symbolised by the chrysalises and butterflies, a young couple whom death had parted. The meeting indeed may, in view of the scene of initiation depicted below, be interpreted as the permanent reunion of a wedded pair in the Land Of The Blessed.

(Upper right)

"In the next compartment, right at the trunk, sacred lion of the Goddess crouches in an attitude of vigilant repose on a kind of bench tended by two girl figures in whom he recognised the frequently recurring representation of her two little handmaidens. The religious character of the scene is further enhanced by the bough, the sacred ivy that springs from the trunk.

(Lower left and right)

"The lower zone on either side of the trunk, beneath the spreading branches, unfurls one continuous scene, the whole of which seems to depict initiatory examination of those entering the Halls Of The Just in the Griffin's Court. In the left compartment the young couple reappear, treading as it were the measure of a dance and beckoned forward by a Griffin lady right at the trunk, while another warns off a youth on the extreme left as a profane intruder. Right at the trunk, beyond the first, two more Griffin ladies with hands upraised in adoration, head the procession to the presiding figure of the tribunal which is a ringed Griffin of the milder peacock-plumed variety seated on a high stool or throne, while behind stands a repetition of the Goddess herself. Below the mound at the foot of the tree amidst sheets that seem to stand for herbage is crouched a dog-like monster, the forerunner of Cerberus".

The image of life beyond death represented in this scene differs completely from the dismal Hades of the later Homeric period, while suggesting on the other hand the more genial classical images of the Isle Of The Blessed and the Elysium Plain. A point to be stressed is that neither to the patriarchal Aryans nor to the patriarchal Semites belong the genial, mystic, poetic themes of a lovely world of a paradise neither lost nor regained but ever present in the bosom of the Goddess Mother in whose being we have our death as well as life without fear, rather the honours for this accolade are given unreservedly to the magnificent civilisation of the Minoan Cretans.

And it with this civilisation that we open this account.

Go on to the next part

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