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Part I
THE AGE OF THE GODDESS
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Introduction
Myth and Ritual: East and West
The geographical divide between the Oriental and Occidental ranges of myth and ritual is the tableland of Iran. Eastward are the two spiritual provinces of India and the Far East; westward, Europe and the Levant.
Throughout the Orient the idea prevails that the ultimate ground of being transcends thought, imaging, and definition. It cannot be qualified. Hence, to argue that God, Man, or Nature is good, just, merciful, or benign, is to fall short of the question. One could as appropriately — or inappropriately — have argued, evil, unjust, merciless, or malignant. All such anthropomorphic predications screen or mask the actual enigma, which is absolutely beyond rational consideration; and yet, according to this view, precisely that enigma is the ultimate ground of being of each and every one of us — and of all things.
The supreme aim of Oriental mythology, consequently, is not to establish as substantial any of its divinities or associated rites, but to render by means of these an experience that goes beyond: of identity with that Being of beings which is both immanent and transcendent; yet neither is nor is not. Prayers and chants, images, temples, gods, sages, definitions, and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for, as the Indian Kena Upaniṣad states: “To know is not to know, not to know is to know”;Note 1 and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: “Those who know are still.”Note 2
“Thou art that,” declares the Vedic sage;Note 3 and the Japanese: “It is your true self.”Note 4
“O thou,” states a basic Buddhist text, “who art gone, who art gone, who art gone to the yonder shore, who at the yonder shore hast disembarked: Enlightenment! Hail!”Note 5
In the Western ranges of mythological thought and imagery, on the other hand, whether in Europe or in the Levant, the ground of being is normally personified as a Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the two are not the same; so that here the function of myth and ritual cannot be to catalyze an experience of ineffable identity. Man alone, turned inward, according to this view can experience only his own creaturely soul, which may or may not be properly related to its Creator. The high function of Occidental myth and ritual, consequently, is to establish a means of relationship — of God to Man and Man to God. Such means are furnished, furthermore, by institutions, the rules of which cannot be learned through any scrutiny of nature, whether inward or without. Supematurally revealed, these have come from God himself, as the myth of each institution tells; and they are administered by his clergy, in the spirit of the myth.
However, certain exclusively Occidental complications result from the fact that, where two such contradictory final terms as God and Man stand against each other, the individual cannot attach his allegiance wholly to both. On the one hand, as in the Book of Job, he may renounce his human judgment in the face of what he takes to be the majesty of God: “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?”Note 6 Or, on the other hand, as in the manner of the Greeks, he may stand by his human values and judge, according to these, the character of his gods. The first type of piety we term religious and recognize in all traditions of the Levant: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The other we term, in the broadest sense, humanistic, and recognize in the native mythologies of Europe: the Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic.
By and large, the recent history of Occidental mythology can be described in terms of a grandiose interplay of these two contrary pieties; specifically, a violent tidal seesaw of exchanges, East to West, West to East, East to West, and West to East again, commencing with the first serious Persian attempt against Greece in 490 b.c. Alexander’s conquest of the Levant turned the Levantine tide and was followed by the victories of Rome. However, even in the earliest Roman period, a counter-current of Levantine mythologies flowing west had begun to make itself felt. During the Carthaginian wars, in 204 b.c., the cult of the Phrygian Magna Mater was introduced formally to the city. Stoicism also carried a Levantine-Oriental strain, and at the height of Roman power, in the period of the Antonines, the Persian syncretic cult of Mithra became the chief religion of the empire. Christianity followed, after which the European empire fell, and Levantine Byzantium assumed both its name and its role as the New or Second Rome. Next, Mohammed’s revelation burst upon the world, in 622 a.d., and through the following millennium bade fair to become the ultimate religion of mankind — until, once again, the tide turned. For as Persia had been stopped at Marathon (490 b.c.), so at Poitiers (732 a.d.) was Islam; and thereafter the stirring desert cry of the muezzin to communal prayer was year by year forced back. Within Christianized Europe itself, furthermore, the absolute authority of the One Church was dissolved through the irresistible return to force of the native European principles of individual judgment and the worth of rational man. The Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and present Age of Science followed, culminating, as of now, in the European spiritual conquest of the world — with, however, the next Levantine tide already on the rise.
Much of the complexity and vitality of the Occidental heritage must be attributed to the conflicting claims — both of which are accepted — on the one hand, of the advocates of what is offered as the Word of God, and, on the other, of the rational individual. Nothing quite of the kind has ever seriously troubled the mentality of the Orient east of Iran, where the old hieratic Bronze Age cosmology of the ever-circling eons — static yet turning ever, in a round of mathematical impersonality, from everlasting to everlasting — endures to this day as the last word on the universe and the place of man within it. All, according to this vision, though in apparent tumult, is harmony at root, as a manifestation of the all-supporting, all-suffusing mystery of being, which transcends thought, imaging, and definition; that is to say, transcends the search of science. Like a jewel, ever turning facets to the light, apparently in change but actually unchanging, this Bronze Age image of the cosmos, still intact in the Orient, renders a fixed world of fixed duties, roles, and possibilities: not a process, but a state; and the individual, whether man or god, is but a flash among the facets. There is no concept, or even sense, of either will or mind as a creative force. And when the Westerner exhibits these, the sage Oriental simply gazes, baffled, yet with the consoling sense of watching only a devil at work whose time will surely be short, and of himself, meanwhile, as securely rooted in all that is eternally true in man, society, the universe, and the ultimate secret of being. All of which he knows, or at least believes he knows, out of the old, old store of wisdom that both he and we inherit from the Age of Bronze.
For on a deeper level of the past than that of the shuttleplay of Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, and, later, Europe, the legacy of the Bronze Age supplied many of the basic motifs of Occidental, as well as of Oriental, mythological thought. Moreover, the origins of this legacy were neither in India, as many still suppose, nor in China, but in the Near East, the Levant, where the spades of recent archaeological investigation have uncovered a background of preparation going back to c. 7500 b.c. At about that time, in the high, protected mountain valleys of Asia Minor, Syria, northern Iraq, and Iran, the arts of agriculture and stock-breeding were developed, and these produced an epochal mutation in both the character of human existence and its potentialities for development. Whereas earlier mankind had lived only precariously by food-collection (the hunt and vegetable-gathering), men now became substantial tillers of the earth. Self-sustaining villages appeared, and their number, steadily increasing, spread in a broad band eastward and westward, arriving simultaneously at both oceans, about 2500 b.c. Meanwhile, in the developed zone of origin, the nuclear Near East, a second epochal mutation occurred c. 3500 b.c., when in the river land of Mesopotamia the fundamental arts of all high civilization were invented: writing, mathematics, monumental architecture, systematic scientific observation (of the heavens), temple worship, and, dominating all, the kingly art of government. The knowledge and application of these reached Egypt with the first pharaohs of Dynasty I, c. 2850 b.c., Crete and the Indus Valley, c. 2500 b.c., China, c. 1500 b.c., and c. 1000-500 b.c. passed to Mexico and Peru.
Now in the neolithic village stage of this development and dispersal, 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 rebirth. In the earliest period of her cult (perhaps c. 7500-3500 b.c. in the Levant) such a mother-goddess may have been thought of only as a local patroness of fertility, as many anthropologists suppose. However, in the temples even of the first of the higher civilizations (Sumer, c. 3500-2350 b.c.), the Great Goddess of highest concern was certainly much more than that. She was already, as she is now in the Orient, a metaphysical symbol: the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And everything having form or name — including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful — was her child, within her womb. (Compare Figure 31 and Figure 32.)
Toward the close of the Age of Bronze and, more strongly, with the dawn of the Age of Iron (c. 1250 b.c. in the Levant), the old cosmology and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and in 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 in the myths of Greece. Two extensive geographical matrices were the source lands of these insurgent warrior waves: for the Semites, the Syro-Arabian deserts, where, as ranging nomads, they herded sheep and goats and later mastered the camel; and, for the Hellenic-Aryan stems, the broad plains of Europe and south Russia, where they had grazed their herds of cattle and early mastered the horse.
In the following chapters, it will be our pleasure, first, to remark the ubiquity of the goddess, even in myths in which she is not supposed to be playing any part, or indeed even to exist (Chapter 1); next, to glance back for a moment to the period of her dominance (Chapter 2); and then (Chapters 3 to 9), to make a systematic progress down the richly studded vale where stand the temples of the godly visions of the chief creative peoples of the Western World.
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Chapter 1 — THE SERPENT’S BRIDE
I. The Mother Goddess Eve
No one familiar with the mythologies of the goddess of the primitive, ancient, and Oriental worlds can turn to the Bible without recognizing counterparts on every page, transformed, however, to render an argument contrary to the older faiths. In Eve’s scene at the tree, for example, nothing is said to indicate that the serpent who appeared and spoke to her was a deity in his own right, who had been revered in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis. There is in the Louvre a carved green steatite vase, inscribed c. 2025 b.c. by King Gudea of Lagash, dedicated to a late Sumerian manifestation of this consort of the goddess, under his title Ningizzida, “Lord of the Tree of Truth.” Two copulating vipers, entwined along a staff in the manner of the caduceus of the Greek god of mystic knowledge and rebirth, Hermes, are displayed through a pair of opening doors, drawn back by two winged dragons of a type known as the lion-bird (Figure l).Note 1
Figure 1. The Serpent Lord
The wonderful ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the character of the master of the mystery of rebirth — of which the...
