BARBARA WALKER

THE

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 The Woman's
Encyclopedia f

of Myths
and Secrets ^

Honored by the London Times Educational

Supplement as 1986 "Book of the Year"
"Awesomely researched. Walker has distilled 20
. . .

years of research into an absorbing treasure house.

This is a feminist-scholar's gold mine and a
browsers
delight." Los Angeles Times
"Whoever ventures into this . . . book runs the risk of
being totally absorbed."
Shirley Horner, The New York Times
"A mountain of scholarship, a vast mass of
supremely
documented material . .
demonstrating] the dominant
.

role women have played in the cultural evolution of our

species." San Francisco Chronicle
"Barbara Walker upsets the complacent Judeo-
Christian applecart of orthodoxy. [An] outstanding,
endless well of information. Her literary excellence. . .

and the unrelentingly fascinating material . . .redresses

two millennia of cultural and sexual misrepresentation."
East West Journal
"A whopping compendium of history, legend, and
myth. .
Perhaps
. . the first substantial feminist-oriented

encyclopedia of the history of modern society."

The Denver Post
"A vast and detailed resource on women's history . . .

will indeed
offering] a wealth of fascinating detail. It
give a clearer picture of our total cultural heritage."

Yoga Journal
"Walker has written a tribute to the goddess. Like the
witches and wise women of old, Walker has eyes to see
what the of us cannot: the figure of the goddess
rest

hidden behind rites, dogma, fairy tales, nursery rhymes,

She sees the
superstitions, even our very language.
to her rightful place as an
restoring of the goddess
essential healing act for women and our whole
culture ... You can rely on it to
be witty and
readable." The Philadelphia Inquirer
compulsively
 m

t i
 THE
WOMAN'S
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF MYTHS
AND SECRETS

BARBARAG. WALKER

1817

Harper & Row, San Francisco

New York, Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, St. Louis
London, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto
Opposite title page: kore, polychromed marble, Greece, ca.
5 th
century B.C.

Acknowledgments appear on p. Ill 9-20.

THE WOMAN S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS.

Copyright 1983 by Barbara G. Walker.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief

quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information

address Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street,
New York, NY 10022.

Designed by Design Office Bruce Kortebein

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication

Data

Walker, Barbara G.
The women's encyclopedia of myths and secrets.
Bibliography: p.
1. Women Mythology + Dictionaries. 2. Sexism-

Religious aspects Dictionaries. 3. Matriatchy

Dictionaries. Goddesses Dictionaries. I. Title.

BL458.W34 291'. 088042 83-47736

ISBN 0-06-250926-8
ISBN 0-06-250925-X (pbk.)

90 91 92 93 94 16 15 14 13 12
Editor's Note

Cross references. Words printed in the text of this book in bold

face type indicate main-entry treatment of those subjects. Such cross
references have been designated only if the reader might find
additional information pertinent to the subject at hand. Short articles
have been supplemented by generous cross references, to avoid

frequent duplication of material.

Some main entries serve as cross references in themselves: rather
than introducing articles, they refer the reader to treatment
elsewhere. For example, the entries for alphabet, blood, and world egg
indicate the various other articles in which the reader will find
information about these topics. Cross references have also been
included for alternate spellings of main-entry headings Isolde
instead of Iseult, Beelzebub instead of Baal-Zebub, and so on.
The customary differentiation between see and see also does not

appear in this book. The reader can decide to seek further

information either for direct expatiation or simply for general interest.

Marginalia. An unusual aspect of this encyclopedia is its marginal

notations. There are three kinds.

First, since so many terms appear in different languages and

different historical eras, variant spellings are given in the margin to
show their cross-cultural associations.

Second, as an extension of the above, where the etymology is

particularly rich and might tend to interrupt the main story, it has

been put in the margin.

Third, the author has drawn on such an abundance of sources

that all cannot be included in the Bibliography. Hence, those used
in
only once or twice have been given a brief description or definition
the margin.

References. The notes are numbered from 1 for each article.

Information is abbreviated but sufficient to clue the reader to the

full reference in the Bibliography. The sequence is: author's last name
(preceded by distinguishing initials if there is more than one author
with the same last name); title (abbreviated) if there is more than one

work by the same author; volume number if pertinent; and page

reference. For example:

1. Budge, G.E.2, 47.

This indicates that note 1 cites Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Gods of the

Egyptians, volume 2, page 47. The rest of the publication data is in

author.
the Bibliography, which is arranged alphabetically by
...
Introduction

Why did Adam "give birth" to Eve? See Birth-giving, Male.

Who was the original Holy Trinity? See Trinity.
How did the middle finger become a phallic symbol? See Fingers.
Why is it bad luck to break a mirror? See Mirror.
What was the real Easter Bunny? See Easter.
Why did Jesus curse the fig tree? See Fig.
Why do people kiss under the mistletoe? See Mistletoe.
What was meant by Lucifer's fall? See Lucifer.

Why was Jesus's tomb attended only by women? See Mary Magdalene.
Why was Mohammed's daughter called her father's mother? See Fatima.
Why did Rome fall? See Dark Age.
Was there a real Saint Peter? See Peter, Saint.

Why were women made to cover their heads in church? See Hair.
Why did early Christians outlaw marriage? See Marriage.
Why did King Arthur try to kill babies? See Innocents, Slaughter of.
Was there a female pope? See Joan, Pope.

What was the real meaning of fairy tales? See Fairies.

Thousands of popular fantasies and hidden facts are expounded in this

Encyclopedia, where the complex subject of sexism is approached

from both the historical and the mythic viewpoints. Standard encyclope-

dias usually omit such material, or give it a brief, uninformative note.

There is need for a complete study of the many-faceted process of
transition from female-oriented to male-oriented religions in western

civilization.

Our culture has been deeply penetrated by the notion that

"man" nor woman is created in the image of God. This notion
persists, despite the likelihood that the creation goes in the other
direction: that God is a human projection of the image of man. No

known religion, past or present, ever succeeded in establishing a

either a
completely sexless deity. Worship was always accorded
female or a male, occasionally a sexually united couple or an androgy-
nous symbol of them; but deities had a sex just as people have a sex.
The ancient Greeks and others whose culture accepted homosexuality

naturally worshipped homosexual gods. (See Hermes.)

Opposite page: The Goddess maat, bas-relief, Egypt, 19th Dynasty.

vii
Introduction Christians take it for granted that they must revere the
Modern
figures of a Father and a Son, never perceiving divinity in corre-

^^^^^^^^^^ sponding Mother and Daughter figures, as the ancients did. Though
Catholics still worship the Goddess under some of her old pagan

titles, such as Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Blessed Virgin and so

on, their theologians refuse to admit that she is the old Goddess in a
new disguise, and paradoxically insist on her non-divinity. (See Mary.)
The older concept of the female Holy Trinity ruling all cycles of
creation, birth, her Virgin, Mother, and Crone forms,
and death in

was destroyed by Christians' attacks on her temples, scriptures, rituals,

and followers. The church declared from the first that the Great
Goddess "whom Asia and all the world worshippeth" must be despised,
"and her magnificence destroyed" (Acts 19:27). This is
virtually the

only Gospel tenet that churches followed through all their centuries
with no deviation or contradiction. It seemed necessary to hide the
fact that Christianity itself was an offshoot of Middle-Eastern Goddess
worship, skewed by the asceticism of Persia and India. (See Jesus

Christ.)
As a salvation cult, early Christianity based its scheme of redemp-
tionon the premise of female wickedness. Salvation was needed
because there had been a Fall, brought about by archetypal Woman.
Without the myth of Eve's defiance, there would have been no sin,
hence no need for salvation or savior. (See Eve.) Fathers of the church
declared that the original sin was perpetuated through all generations
by every woman, through sexual conception and birth-giving. Woman's
mysterious, devilish sexual magnetism seduced men into the "concu-
piscence" that, even within lawful marriage, transmitted the taint of sin
to every man. (See Sex.) So said St. Augustine, and the church never

altered his opinion.

Throughout history we find clergymen advocating abuse of wom-

en, to express their horror of female sexuality and their conviction
that all women deserve punishment for the primordial crime that
brought death and damnation to man. Adam, representing all men,
was less guilty than Eve, representing all women. St. Paul even
regarded Eve as the only guilty one (1 Timothy 2:14). The tradition
persisted up to the present century, when the clergy, if not advocating
active abuse of women, at least refrained from too much interference
with Some clergymen have been found to be wife-batterers. Many
it.

still counsel women to be subservient to men, in accordance with

"God's will." (See Sexism.)
Man's and God's attack on women was not usually justifiable as
revenge for real injuries. Therefore the mythical injury of the Fall
was essential to the early theological scheme. The practical goal was not
to prevent hurting men, but to prevent women from
women from
acting independently of men: from owning their own property, earning
their own money, making their own sexual choices, or raising their
own children without interference.
Patriarchal religion declared war on pagan societies where mother-
 hood was once considered the
only important parental relationship-
Introduction
where women owned the land and governed its
cultivation; and sexual
attachments were made and unmade at women's
discretion. (See
Matrilineal Inheritance.) From a
biological viewpoint, patriarchal
religion denied women the natural of other
rights every mammalian
female: the right to choose her
stud, to control the circumstances of her
mating, to occupy and govern her own nest, or to refuse all males
when preoccupied with the important business of
raising her young.
(See Motherhood.)
Such basic biological rights of the female were set aside by
patriarchal human societies
although, at the dawn of history, the
social role of male begetters was
very differently conceived, in'a way
alien to modern patriarchal thought. (See Kingship.) Today's schol-
ars habitually call all female and male deities of that ancient world
"gods," as they also call humanity "man." Yet the supreme deity of
that world was usually a Goddess, the creatress or Mother of the gods;
and the very word "man" used to mean
"woman," an incarnation of
the same lunar Mother, in its
original language. (See Man.)
Early Christian thinkers rightly perceived that destruction of the
women's Goddess would mean a crushing blow to women's
pride
and confidence, since men's pride depended
greatly on their vision of a
God like themselves, only better. Women were not called
daughters
of this God, who gave men their souls. In the sixth century, churchmen
even denied that women had any souls.
Forbidden by Christian conquerors to express their own faith, the
women of Europe eventually adopted the men's faith perforce.
Sometimes they were lured by specious concessions, which were
afterward rescinded. (See Convent.) Sometimes
they were coerced
by Christianized husbands or overlords. The myths and secrets of
women's spiritual past were buried, just as men buried the sheila-na-
gig figures of semi-pagan Irish churches, hoping they would never be
found. (See Sheila-Na-Gig.)

However, what Christian histories rarely admit is that, after more

than a thousand years of alternate violence and guile, the western
world still was not truly Christianized. The ancient faith persisted,
because every man was still born of woman and nurtured by woman,
despite the theologians' insistence that a father was the only significant
parent. (See Paganism.) This was mere verbal learning, as contrast-
ed with the direct experience of infantile dependence on the mother.
When it
appeared at all, father-love seems to have been a somewhat
less satisfactory artificial imitation of mother-love. (See Fatherhood.)
In relations between fathers and children the more dominant emo-
tion was fear. Men were enjoined from the pulpit to instill "the fear of
God" into their children through harsh punishments.
Harshest of all were the Heavenly Father's punishments: a terrible
vision of eternal torture developed out of men's fears. The Christian
hell was the most sadistic fantasy ever to masquerade as fact. (See Hell.)
Churchmen used it, not only to terrify naive congregations into
Introduction compliance, but also to excuse the torture and burning of witches.
Inquisitors said the eternal punishment
of such heretics should begin

^^^^^^^^^^ in this life, continuing up to the victim's death. (See Inquisition.)

The Goddess and her sons and lovers, the old gods,
religion of the
came to be called devil worship because these deities were redefined
as devils (when they were not adopted into the Christian canon as
pseiido-saints). The link between "woman" and "devil" in the

patriarchal mind was as old as the Garden of Eden story. (See Serpent.)
It persisted even after the dawn of a more enlightened age brought
the decline of organized persecution. However, the rack and stake were

replaced in the 18th and 19th centuries by more subtle abuses, aimed
at suppressing women legally, politically, economically, and psychologi-
cally. Clergymen helped by opposing women's education and
supporting all physical or legal measures for keeping women "in their
place." As Sir Hermann Bondi accurately observed, men made God
their primary source for "the common and undisguised contempt for

women enshrined in the three great Western religions, the basis for
the cruel, inhuman and wasteful sexism still so rampant." Women's
feelings of unworthiness and insecurity, even aberrations like mas-
ochism and depression, often may be traced to training in a male-
oriented religion, at variance with their own nature.

Recently, some women have begun to seek better understanding

of that feminine nature, buried as it was under western society's

proliferation of masculine images and values. One interesting idea to

emerge from this new research is, if women's religion had continued,
today's world might be less troubled by violence and alienation. Gods,
including Yahweh, tended to order their followers to make war;
whereas the great mother Goddesses advocated peaceful evolution of
civilized skills. Cooperation rather than exploitation was the matriar-

chal rule. (See War.)

Goddess worship usually entailed frank acceptance of the natural
cycles of sexuality, birth,and death; and maternal concern for the
welfare of coming generations. Love was not the abstract principle that

"love of God" was to become. In the very process of worship it could

be directly, intimately, and physically experienced. (See Karuna.)

Certainly there was still a strong element of this Oriental-feminist

concept in the medieval "heresies" that aroused the ire of the church.

(See Romance.)
Perhaps the most important part of any religion is the direction it

gives to interpersonal behavior patterns. The patterns evolved by

women in honor of their ancient Goddess surely deserve close study
today. As one of the Goddess's scriptures pointedly said, "What use
are grand phrases about the soul on the lips of those who hate and injure
one another? . . .
Religion is kindness." (See Atheism.)
Traces of the "kind Goddess" are still to be found in a thousand
hidden pockets of history and custom: myths, superstitions, fairy tales,
folk songs and dances, nursery rhymes, traditional games and holidays,
magic symbols, sagas, and scriptures both original and revised, apoc- Introduction
ryphal and otherwise in addition to the valuable material
recovered by
archeologists, orientalists, and other scholars. Patterns
comparative studies, which can be fitted
from emerge
together like pieces of a jigsaw
^^^^^^
puzzle. The puzzle is far from complete; but
many of its pieces are
here, in this book.
These Myths and Secrets are drawn from more than paganism.
Biblical myths are especially significant, not only
because they shaped
the attitudes of western culture, but also because
they were written and
rewritten during centuries of transition from matriarchal to
patriarchal
systems. The later development of Christian myths contributed much to
sexist thinking. In
Europe, sexism was a primary product of the
Christian church. Patriarchal religions like Judaism and Christianity
established and upheld the "man's world" largely by an elaborate
structure of falsehood. Among the Secrets in this book are many
surprising historical secrets that were covered up, whitewashed, or
otherwise falsified through 500 years when the church maintained a
1

monopoly of literate records, and virtually wrote its own history to its
own order.

Some of the facts concealed by that Christian history have come to

light in recentdecades. Others are being kept secret even now, by

religious organizations still dedicated to preserving a patriarchal society.

Laymen and especially women are theoretically forbidden to investi-

gate them. Nevertheless, they can be found out.

most deeply concealed by Christianized
Naturally, the secret
historywas the many-named Goddess, the original Holy Trinity who
created and governed the world, gave birth to its Saviors, sent her tablets
of divine law to the prophets, and watched over every life from womb
to tomb, according to pre-Christian belief. Today she is viewed as

"mythical," having been replaced by a God (equally mythical, but

more acceptable to a male-dominated culture), who took over most of
her attributes. not usually understood that the spiritual life of
It is

western man, and especially of western woman, was greatly impover-

ished by her violent suppression.
The
unremitting warfare of the church against followers of the
Goddess is a large part of what feminists now call our hidden history.
Even though Christianity itself grew out of the once-universal religion
of the Goddess, it was a matricidal son whose bigotry tinged every

thought and feeling with woman-hatred. In the

end it produced a
society in which members of one sex invariably oppressed members
of the other, and both came to regard this inequity as a natural state of

ordained by a male "Creator." Matters were otherwise in the

affairs,

pre-Christian world where the "Creator" was more

often a "Creatress."

Through making God in his own image, man has almost forgotten

that woman once made the Goddess in hers. This is the deep secret of

secret of this book.

all
mythologies, and the fundamental
B.G.W.
 ) *. **

>}?**'
H

A?
c

rs**..
 artemis, the
Amazonian
Moon-Goddess and
Huntress. Greek, 4th
century b.c.

The "Ludovisi Throne"

marble, long
identified as aphrodite

being born from the

sea, helped by two
Horae. Now
thought
to be Hera in her bath.

Greek, 5th century b.c.

Majestic seven-foot
statue of athene, her
great helmet with owls
and griffins, and
across her chest the
aegis
with the Medusa
head signifying Female
Wisdom. Early 4th
century, bronze.
A
Abaddon
Sacred alphabets of the ancient world signified birth and beginning by
meant the Creatress, who invented alphabets
the letter A. This letter
and gave them to mankind though most traditions said womankind
had them first.
Babylonians called the Great Mother "A", the Beginning; or Aya,
the Mother of All Things. Tantric sages called her birth-letter Alpa
1

Akshara, "the letter A, which is considered the 'mother of all wisdom,'

and therefore of all men of genius; all Bodhisattvas and Buddhas are
said to have been produced by 'A'." 2
The Greeks held similar views about the letter Alpha, which de-
noted the river of birth or creation. Its other name was Styx, the river
of death, for in the cyclic system of the ancients, birth and death merged
in a circular continuum. The river Styx circled seven times through

the earth's womb and emerged again as Alpha.

[Link]. & Bab. Lit, 133-34. 2. Waddell, 161.

Ab
Egyptian word for the heart-soul, most important of the seven souls:
the one that would be "weighed in the balances" by the Goddess Maat
in the underworld Hall of Judgment after death. As in India, the

heart-soul was pictured as a tiny dancer treading a constant rhythm in

the midst of the body, as Dancing Shiva or Dancing Kali kept the
rhythm of life in the midst of the cosmos. The hieroglyphic sign of the
ab was a dancing figure. See Heart. 1

1. Budge, E.L., 44.

var. Abaton Abaddon

The god Apollo was a solar king in heaven during the day, and a
Lord of Death in the underworld at night. His latter form became the
Jewish Apollyon, Spirit of the Pit (Revelation 9:1 1). Apollo-Python
was the serpent deity in the Pit of the Delphic oracle, who inspired the
seeress with mystic vapors from his nether world. The Greek word
for the Pit was abaton, which the Jews corrupted into Abaddon later a

familiar Christian synonym for hell.

Also called a mundus or earth-womb, the abaton was a real pit,

standard equipment in a pagan temple. Those who entered it to

"incubate," or to sleep overnight in magical imitation of the incubatory

sleep in the womb, were thought to be visited by an "incubus" or
spirit who brought prophetic dreams. Novice priests went
1
down into

the pit for longer periods of incubation, pantomiming death, burial,

and rebirth from the womb of Mother Earth. Once initiated in this way,
they were thought to gain the skill of oneiromancy: the ability to

interpret dreams.
 The Old Testament Joseph earned his oneiromantic talent
incubation in a
been fellow
had submitted
from a sojourn
Pit. The "brothers" who

priests. He could
by
put him there seem to have
interpret Pharaoh's
to the ritual. Assyrian priests derived similar

in the Pit. 2
They then assumed the priestly coat of many
communion with the Goddess under her
colors, signifying
oneiromantic name of Nanshe, "Interpreter of Dreams." 5 It seems

likely that Joseph's coat of many colors would have been given
dreams only after

powers

him
he ^
Abishag

originally not before the initiation but afterward, by a "father" who was
4
actually the high priest.
The same burial-and-resurrection ritual is found in the lives of
many ancient sages. It was said of the
Pythagorean philosopher
Thales of Miletus, accounted one of the Seven Wise Men of the
ancient world, that he derived his intellectual skills from communion
with the Goddess of Wisdom in an abaton. 5
1. Bromberg, 11.2. Lethaby, 172. 3. [Link] Bab. Lit, 131. 4. Larousse, 63.
5. de Lys, 336.

Abishag
The Bible claims the maiden Abishag was chosen for her beauty, to

engender "heat" in the aged King David (1 Kings 1:2). This "heat"
was not mere warmth, but the sacred fire of sexual potency, without
which no king could be allowed to rule. If an impotent king were kept in

office, his land would become barren. Hence, when David failed to
"know" Abishag, a more virile prince (Adonijah) immediately prepared
to assume the throne, and "exalted himself, saying, I will be king"

(I Kings 1:5). David's death occurred with suggestive promptness after

his failure of the virility test.

Abishag's related to the Hindu abhiseka ceremony,

name might be
the anointing of kings with the sacred fluid of the Goddess Sarasvati.
1

From China to the Mediterranean, ancient kings derived their

legitimation from a mating with the Goddess through her priestess-
2
surrogate. Mesopotamian kings and their deified souls, the gods,

were constantly described as "beloved" of the Goddess known as

creatress of the earth and "maker of fate, she who decrees the fate of

the men and gods." 5 Like the eastern Goddess, Abishag represented the
land in the same way as Solomon's bride, whose mating was
chronicled in the requisite intimate detail by the Song of Solomon.
After David's death, the queen mother chose between rival candi-
datesSolomon and Adonijah. She crowned Solomon with her own
hands of Solomon 3:11), after the custom of the royal women
(Song
whose business it was to enthrone or depose kings, as in India, Egypt,
and the lands of the Fertile Crescent. 4 However, Adonijah still had
for the hand of
designs on the throne, as shown by his request
Abishag in marriage. To prevent this symbolically and politically signifi-
cant marriage from taking place, Solomon had Adonijah murdered
Abortion (1 Kings 2:17-25). The Bible fails to explain Solomon's strangely
violent reaction to Adonijah's request; but can only have meant that
it

the crown was at stake. This in turn shows that a sexual union with
^^^^^^^^^^^
Abishag was a prerequisite for royal office. See Kingship.
1. Gaster, 514. 2. Boulding, 191. 3. Pritchard, A.N.E. 1, 65; 2, 17, 21, 135, 202.
[Link],210.

Abortion
The ancients generally viewed abortion as a woman's private busi-
which no man had any right to interfere. As Hartley put it,
ness, in
"Each woman must be free to make her own choice; no man may
safely decide for her; she must give life gladly to be able to give it well." 1
But with the rise of patriarchal religions especially among the
Greeks came a belief that a father's semen conveyed the soul to the
fetus. Men feared for the safety of any of their body effluvia (hair

cuttings, fingernail clippings, spittle, blood) lest sorcery might damage

the living man by damaging what was once a part of him. The fear
was particularly pronounced in the case of semen as an extension of the
father's soul. If the fetus he conceived were destroyed, then surely the

man himself would suffer spiritual injury according to the principles of

magic. St. Thomas Aquinas held this same opinion, since he asserted
that semen was the vehicle of souls. 2 It was a logical extension of this
notion that abortion should be outlawed, not because it was danger-
ous to women, but because it was thought (magically) dangerous to
men.
In the east, however, abortion was perfectly legal at any time
before the fifth month, when "quickening" was felt. After that,

according to Brahman scriptures, a woman who

destroyed her fetus was
held guilty of murder, but before that time the fetus was soulless and
could be destroyed with impunity. 3 This opinion was embodied in the
Catholic church's Doctrine of Passive Conception, which contradict-
ed Aquinas in order to prove that the soul comes only from God. Up to
the late 19th century, the Doctrine of Passive Conception declared
that the soul arrives in the fifth month of pregnancy, to quicken the

fetus, which was previously soulless. 4

In 1 869 the church again revised its opinion, tacitly admitting
either that God had misinformed his church about his method of

instilling the soul into the body, or else that he had decided to alter it.

Pope Pius X announced that the soul was received at conception

5
after all.

Actually, the church was only coming around, several decades late,

to follow some new laws made by man, not by God. Abortion was
not classified as a crime in Europe until the 19th century. 6 The United
7
States first defined abortion as a criminal offense in the year 1830.
The church now falsely pretends that it officially "always" opposed
abortion. The medieval church's ire was aroused not by abortions per
se but by the midwives who performed them. The handbook of the Abraham
Inquisition stated:"No one does more harm to the Catholic faith
than midwives." 8 (See Midwifery.) The church was not averse to
^^^^^^^^
killing the unborn, since it burned many pregnant women as witches.
Even the pregnant wife of a city councillor was tortured and burned at

Bamberg in 1630. 9
Recent opposition to legalization of abortion
apparently stemmed
from ignorance of how recently it was illegalized; and also from male
belief that women must be controlled by
forcing childbirth on them.
"Male have laughed at the idea of the legalization of abor-
legislators

tion, hinting at unprecedented promiscuity (on the part of women, not

men) if such a thing were allowed. Meanwhile, thousands of desper-
ate women die each year as the direct result of male laws
making
abortion illegal. Women are learning the meaning of this male

laughter and indifference in the face of the most hazardous and serious
women undertake, willingly or not." 10
biological enterprise
The Catholic church still claims authority over women's repro-
ductive functions. Catholic hospitals will refuse to abort even a fetus
conceived by rape. 11
I. Hartley, 263. 2. Rees, 277. 3. Mahanirvanatantra, 269. 4. Briffault 2, 450.
5. Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 352. 6. Encyc. Brit, "Abortion." 7. Rugoff, 256.
8. Kramer & Sprenger, 66. 9. Robbins, 509. 10. Roszak, 299.
I I . Medea & Thompson, 14. 1

Abraham
This name meaning "Father Brahm" seems to have been a Semitic
version of India's patriarchal god Brahma; he was also the Islamic

Abrama, founder of Mecca. But Islamic legends say Abraham was a

late intruder into the shrine of the Kaaba. He bought it from priestesses
of its original Goddess. Sarah, "the Queen," was one of the God-
1

2
dess's titles, which became a name of Abraham's biblical "wife." Old

Testament writers pretended Sarah's alliances with Egyptian princes

were only love-affairs arranged by Abraham for his own profit which

unfortunately presented him as a pimp (Genesis 12:16) as well as a

would-be murderer of his son (Genesis 22:10).

In the tale of Isaac's near-killing, Abraham assumed the role of
wash Jehovah's sacred trees
sacrificial priest in the druidic style, to

with the Blood of the Son: an ancient custom, of which the sacrifice of

Jesus was only a late variant. Jehovah first appeared to Abraham at

the sacred oak of Shechem, where Abraham built his altar. Later

Abraham built an altar to the oak god of Mamre at Hebron. Even in

the 4th century a.d., Constantine said Abraham's home at the Oak of
Mamre was still a pagan shrine: "It is reported that most damnable
idols are set up beside it, and that an altar stands hard by, and that
3
unclean sacrifices are constantly offered."

1. Briffault 3, 80. 2. Graves, W.G., 163. 3. Frazer, F.O.T., 335.

Abraxas Abraxas
Absalom
Gnostic god identified with both Mithra and Jehovah, called "Our
Father" and "Lord of Hosts" in the early Christian era. Like Mithra,
1

Abraxas represented "the 365 Aeons," 365,000 years allotted to the

present world's life span, based on the Hindu idea that one god-
var. Abrasax
year equals a thousand man-years. Jewish scripturists incorporated this
belief intoPsalms 90:4, and into the First Book ofAdam and Eve,
2
where God said his five and a half days meant 5,500 years for man.
Numerical values of Mithra's and Abraxas's names each totaled 365.
Both were gods of numerology.
Orthodox Christianity came to view Abraxas as a demon, because
he was assimilated to the Gnostic "Lord of This World" whose
attributes were both divine and demonic. As the Creator of the material
universe, he was declared a devil via the Gnostic opinion that all

matter was evil. Thus, he and his works the material world itself
5
would be destroyed at doomsday. Nevertheless, through the Middle
Ages Abraxas was a favorite deityof several heretical sects.
1. Budge, AT., 209. 2. Forgotten Books, 6. 3. Legge 2, 239.

Absalom
The Bible presents Absalom as either David's son or David's neigh-
bor (2 Samuel 12:1 1) because biblical writers couldn't decide just where
he came from. He was important only as a surrogate "king" of the
Jews. His name, Father Salm, was a widely distributed sacred-king
name, also rendered Salma, Salem, Salomon, or Solomon; in Assyria,

Shalmaneser; in Crete, the "son of God" Salmoneus. The name

1

meant Prince of Peace, which was synonymous with Lord of Death

because "Peace" was the Lord's word of farewell as he descended into
the underworld.
Canaanites worshipped Father Salm at the city of Salem, whose
Palestinian counterpart was Jeru-salem, "House of Salem." Kings of
David's ancestral tribe, the Kenites, took the sacred name when ruling
in Jerusalem. Probably several of these kings were called Solomon,
including the biblical one whose real name was Jedidiah, according to 2
Samuel 12:25.
Absalom received the sacred name and died as a surrogate for the

incumbent king, David, whose mourning for him was really a

liturgical formula. He called Absalom "my son, my son," and cried
"Would God I had died for thee" to disguise the fact that the victim

really had died in his place. Among ancient Semites generally, someone
had to die for the king at regular intervals, to preserve the fertility of
thesoil and the people with his blood. See Kingship.

Time-honored precedent dictated the format of the drama. The

chosen victimsat on the throne, and publicly copulated with the royal

women under a marriage canopy (2 Samuel 16:22). See Huppah.

After this, Absalom was declared a god and his phallic spirit was Abtu
immortalized by an erect pillar (2 Samuel 1 8: 1
8). He was hung on a Achilles
sacred oak "between heaven and earth," like all victims offered to
2
^^^^^^^^^m
deities of the air He was pierced through the heart by three
and sky.
darts, like the Egyptian god Set. He was dismembered by ten men in

priests' livery (2 Samuel 18:14-1 5). According to the old custom, pieces
of him were then distributed to the fields and vineyards to
encourage
the growth of crops.
1. Graves, W.G., 363-64. 2. Angus, 173.

Abtu
The "Abyss," sometimes called Fish of Isis, representing her genital
orifice, which "swallowed" the penis of Osiris. Abtu was the Egyptian
name of Abydos, an early yonic shrine where the god died and
entered his Mother's womb, the underworld. See Fish.

Acedia
"Abysmal apathy," ecclesiastical term for the acute depression afflict-
1

ing those in the monastic life. They recognized that acedia

made monks and nuns especially susceptible to demonic possession.

See Possession.
1. Mumford, 302.

Achamoth
Mother Goddess who gave birth to the creator of the material uni-

verse, according to early Gnostic Christians.

1
She was the third

of Sige, Sophia,
person of a primordial female trinity consisting
and Achamoth comparable to northern Europeans' divine Great-

Grandmother, Grandmother, and Mother. The three of them

2

chastised the male creator for excessive hubris and other offenses.
See Sophia, Saint.
1. 2, 69. 2. Turville-Petre, 147.
Legge

Achilles
of the Greek warriors at the siege
Homeric hero of the Iliad, greatest

of Troy. Achilles was a son of the Sea-goddess, here called Thetis,

"She

Who Disposes." Most of his body was invulnerable because his

but
mother dipped him in the holy river Styx when he was an infant;
held was not exposed to
the on his
spot where her
heel, him, fingers
Aciel the magical waters. Therefore he could be, and was, killed by an arrow
Adam in his heel, as was the Hindu Krishna. Hence any area of vulnerability

^^^^^^^^^^^ in an otherwise strong structure or person is known as an Achilles Heel.

Like Heracles, Achilles lived for some time in female disguise,

recalling the priesthoods of Homeric and pre-Homeric times who

wore women's clothing to attain the powers of divinity.

Aciel
Black Sun of the Chaldean underworld; the god of darkness at the
bottom of the sevenfold Pit, exactly mirroring the gods of light at the top
of the seventh heaven. Most underground gods and Lords of Death
were similar to Aciel
Hades, Pluto, Saturn, Ahriman, Apollyon,
Python, Zeus Chthonios, and their later composite, the Judeo-Christian
devil. Jewish writers made Aciel a "prince of Gehenna" and corrupted

his name to Arsiel. He was 1

not always devilish or evil. Oriental religions

generally recognized that a principle of darkness was necessary to life, for

only in the nether darkness could regeneration take place.

1. Budge, G.E. 1,275.

Actaeon
Sacred king of the Artemis cult, impersonator of the Horned God; a
man "turned into a stag" and devoured. His antecedents went back to
"paleolithic paintings in the Spanish caves of Altamira and in the

Caverne des Trois Freres at Ariege dating from at least 20,000 b.c."
l

1. Graves, W.G., 229.

Adah and Zillah

"Brilliance" and "Shadow," biblical wives of Lamech; a trans-
formation of the two-faced Goddess of birth and death, light and dark,

Alpha and Omega known in Anatolia as the Two Ladies, in Egypt

as the Two Mistresses. The Goddess appeared in many light-and-dark,
1

heaven-and-hell, new-moon-and-old-moon combinations, such as

Isis-Nephthys, Ishtar-Ereshkigal, Kore-Persephone.
1 .
Larousse, 29.

Adam
Literally, a man made of blood; in pre-biblical myths, a creature
formed by the Goddess of Earth from her own clay (adamah), given life
by her blood. (See Eve.) The idea of Adam's rib was taken from a Adam-Kadmon
Sumerian Goddess who formed infants' bones from their mothers' ribs.
Adelphos
She was both Lady of the Rib, and Lady of Life. Her name carried
both meanings at
1
once. See Birth-giving, Male.
^^^^^^^^^
[Link].M.E.M., 115.

Adam-Kadmon
Gnostic image of primordial man: an innocent
know-nothing, a brute
Adam made of mud. Probably based on the most ancient Middle-
Eastern view of humanity as a race of peasant-slaves created by the

gods to be farm workers and nothing else. In occult tradition Adam-

Kadmon was the perennial Fool, or Prince of Fools, symbolizing
the unenlightened man. His name was given to the zero-numbered
FooloftheTarot. 1

[Link], 111.

Adamu
Sumero-Babylonian version of the first man; one of the sources for
the biblical figure of Adam. The gods him and his descendants
tricked

out of immortality because they didn't want mere mortals to become

deathless like [Link] lied to the man, telling him the magic food of
eternal life would kill him if he ate it. So he refused it and lost his
1
chance to escape death forevermore.
The biblical God also showed concern lest human beings should
eat the food of eternal life (Genesis 3:22). God told Adam the same

lie that the Babylonian god told Adamu: "Thou shalt not eat of it: for in

the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17).
Adam ate, but he didn't die in the same day. On the contrary, he lived
to the age of 930 years (Genesis 5:5). It was the serpent who told the

truth about the controversial food: "Ye shall not surely die; for God
doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be

opened, and ye shall be as gods" (Genesis 3:4-5).

[Link].M.E.M., 57-58.

Adelphos
Greek word for "brother," dating back to the matriarchal period
when a mother. Its literal meaning is
kinship was reckoned only through
"one from the same womb." 1

[Link] 1,405.
Aditi Aditi
Adonis
Hindu Great Goddess as the Woman Clothed with the Sun, mother
of all the lights of heaven. She gave birth to the twelve zodiacal

spirits called Adityas, "Children

of Aditi," among whom was Aryaman,
the ancestral god of all "Aryans." See Sun Goddess.
'

1 .
O'Flaherty, 339; Mahanirvanatuntrx, x 1 .

Adonis
Greek version of Semitic Adonai, "The Lord," a castrated and
sacrificed savior-god whose love-death united him with Aphrodite, or

Asherah, or Mari. In Jerusalem, his name was Tammuz.

Adonis was born at Bethlehem, in the same sacred cave that
Christians later claimed as the birthplace of Jesus. 1
He was the son of
the Virgin Myrrha, a temple-woman or hierodule, identified with Mary

by early Christians who called Jesus's mother Myrrh of the Sea.

2

Myrrh was a symbol of the Lord's death, in both pagan and Christian
He returned to his Great Mother, the sea, Aphrodite-Mari.
traditions.

Alexandrian priestesses celebrated the event by throwing the god's

3
image into the sea.
Syrian Adonis died at Easter time, with the flowering of the red
anemone, supposedly created from his blood. Its name was derived

from his title, Naaman, "darling." He was also called the Beautiful God,

like other gods of the spring flowering, such as Narcissus, Antheus,

Hyacinthus.
Another form of the same god was Anchises, castrated after his

mating with Aphrodite. Adonis, too, was castrated: "gored in the

groin" by Aphrodite's boar-masked priest. His severed phallus became
his "son," the ithyphallic god Priapus, identified with Eros in Greece
or Osiris-Min in Egypt. Priapus carried a pruning knife in token of the
Lord's necessary castration before new life could appear on earth. 4

Castrating the god was likened to reaping the grain, which Adonis
personified. His rebirth was a sprouting from the womb of the earth.
Each year, sacred pots called kernos or "gardens of Adonis" were
planted with wheat or millet, and allowed to sprout at Easter. The
custom was followed in Mediterranean countries up to the present
century.
5
The clay pot signified the womb. Sometimes in processions

it was a gigantic kernos carried on a chariot, having the special name

of kalanthos. 6
Magic Papyri
Collections of Adonis died and rose again in periodic cycles, like all gods of
exorcisms, invocations, vegetation and fertility. He was also identified with the sun that died
charms, and spells and rose again in heaven. An Orphic hymn said of him: "Thou shining
widely circulated during and vanishing in the beauteous circle of the Horae, dwelling at one
the early Christian
time in gloomy Tartarus, at another elevating thyself to Olympus,
era, used as bases for
later grimoires and giving ripeness to fruits."
7
He was buried in the same cave (womb)
Hermetic texts. that gave him birth. It is now the Milk Grotto, whose dust is
supposed to

10
benefit nursing mothers; it was said
Mary nursed Jesus there. 8 The Adultery
Grotto was sealed as Jesus's sepulchre, for in the cults of both Aeneas
Jesus and
Adonis the virgin womb was the same as the
virgin tomb, "wherein ^^^^^^^^^
never man before was laid" (Luke 23:53).
The Magic Papyri said Jesus and Adonis also shared the same
name-magic. "Adonai" was the highest god, having the True Name
that could work miracles. 9 Centuries later, Christian authorities declared

that "Adonai" was a demon.

1. Doane, 155; Briffault 3, 97. 2. Ashe, 48. 3. Frazer, G.B., 390.
4. Graves, G.M. 1, 69, 72. 5. Frazer, G.B., 400-401. 6. Briffault 3, 126
7. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 286. 8. Budge, A.T., 319-20. 9. M. Smith 124

Adultery
From adalterum se conferre, "to confer (property) upon another." 1

In the age of matrilineal inheritance, female property owners could

leave cast-off husbands destitute by conferring their "matrimony"

(wealth) upon another. Patriarchal societies therefore sought to insure

wives' sexual fidelity for economic reasons. 2
To this end, the Bible commands stoning to death an adulterous
wife or a bride suspected of oremarital affairs (Deuteronomy 22:21).
The latter rule was to invalicate the pagan custom of premarital
defloration by a stranger, lest someone other than the husband might
have a claim on the bride's property. 5 Hebrew patriarchs also considered
"adulterous" a widow who might remarry "unto a stranger" outside
the paternal clan. Widows were ordered to marry the brother of a
deceased husband, so their property would remain under the control
of male in-laws. This law of Levirate Marriage with its apparently divine
sanction caused much trouble in later centuries.
1. Brasch, 125. 2. Hartley, 165, 171. 3. Harding, 135.

Aegis
Goatskin breastplate of the Goddess Athene, ornamented with
oracular serpents and the petrifying head of Medusa. The original

Libyan Athene was herself the Gorgon mask surrounded by serpents,

who wore the aegis as a goatskin apron. It was a
served by priestesses

badge of divine power. Later Homeric myths considered the aegis so

essential to sovereignty that not even Zeus could rule the other gods

without it.

Aeneas
Son of Aphrodite, founder of Rome according to one version of the
story. He saved the sacred fetish called Palladium
from the sack of

11
Aeon Troy, and carried it to the site of Rome, where it was installed in the
Agape, Saint temple of Vesta. Like all sacred kings he visited the underworld,
^^^^^^^^^^^ clutching the magic mistletoe branch that would insure his return to
1
earth.

1. Graves, W.G, 101.

Aeon
"The Year," title of any god annually sacrificed and reborn, such as
the Savior born of the Virgin Kore at Alexandria every January. The 1

classicAeon appears to have been based on Tantric worship of Shiva-

Prajapati, who became a Lord of Death each year to bring about

redemption of human life. According to the Aitareya Brahmana,

"The Year is the same as Death; and whosoever knows this Year to be
Death, his life that year does not destroy." 2
1. Campbell, M.I., 34. 2. Eliade, M.E.R., 79.

Aesir

"Asians," the Norse gods led by Father Odin, who invaded the lands
of the elder deities (Vanir). The Aesir came from Asaland, or Asaheimr,

meaning both "land of gods" and "Asia." Some claimed their home
was Troy. Such myths record the recurrent western migrations of
city

Indo-European or Aryan peoples. The Norse word for a god was

Ass, "Asian." The Egyptian god Osiris was formerly Ausar, "the
Asian." 2 Etruscans also called their ancestral deities Asians. 3 Phoeni-
cian king Cadmus was "the Oriental," from kedem, "the Orient." 4
The Asian invaders were aggressive. The Voluspa said war
occurred "for the first time in the world" when the Aesir attacked the
5
peace-loving people of the Goddess.
1. Turville-Petre, 23. 2. Budge, G.E. 2, 1 13. 3. Keightley, 61. 4. Massa, 40.
5. Dumezil, 71.

Agape, Saint
"Love Feast," first of Aphrodite's holy whores (Horae), was canon-
ized as a Christian saint when icons of the Horae were re-labeled
Agape, Chione, and Irene. Agape
1
"virgin martyrs": Sts. originally

personified the of sexual

communion,
rite as practiced in Aphrodite's

temples and adopted by some early Christian sects as a Tantric type

of "spiritual marriage." By the 7th century a.d. the agape ceremony was
declared heretical, but it continued secretly throughout the Middle
2
Ages. See Menstrual Blood.
1. Attwater, 34. 2. Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 23.

12
Agatha, Saint Agatha, Saint
a spurious saint based
on images of the
Agnes, Saint
"Kindly One," lactating
Goddess offering bared breasts in the usual Ishtar pose. As a fictitious p
"virgin martyr," Agatha refused to marry the king of Sicily, who
vengefully ordered her breasts slicedoff.
Early Christian icons showed
her carrying them on a patera (offering dish) as St.
Lucy carried her
1
eyeballs. Later, the amputated breasts were as so
misinterpreted bells;
Agatha became patroness of bell founders. Her legend may have
2

arisen from the Christian habit of knockingthe breasts off statues of

priestesses and Goddesses. 3

The original Agatha was surnamed Tyche (Fate), and worshipped
at the subterranean womb-oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia. 4 Like
the Goddess of the similar womb-oracle at Delphi, she was
accompa-
nied by a Great Serpent: the oracular spirit named Agathodemon,

god of Kindly Fortune, worshipped by Orphic sects up to the 5th and

6th centuries a.d. Far from tormenting Agatha as her Christian

legend claimed, Sicilian kings won their thrones by way of a sacred

marriage with her. Many of these kings took the name of Agathocles,
"Glory of Agatha," just as Heracles called himself "Glory of Hera." 5
The Golden Legend conferred on St. Agatha the curious title of
Savior of Her Country, saying "She accomplished the deliverance of
her native land." 6 This probably referred to votive images of the
Goddess which were supposed to preserve the land from all external
dangers.
1. Brewster, 95. 2. Attwater, 34. 3 Lamusse, 2\\
. . 4. Guthrie, 225.
5. d'Alviella, 20. 6. de Voragine, 161.

Agnes, Saint
Scholars say "next to the Evangelists and Apostles there is no saint

Agnes. Indeed, she seems to

1
whose effigy is older" than the popular St.

have been much older than evangelists and apostles: a Roman-Jewish

version of the Holy Ewe Lamb (Agna), virgin incarnation of the
Ewe-
goddess Rachel.
Like the virgin Mary, Agnes came from "immaculate" parents.
The Portiforium ad usam Sarum said her mother was a virgin, her
father a purified soul who renounced sexual love. 2 Like all the legend-

ary virgin-martyrs, Agnes was slain because she renounced the love
of a pagan youth. However, her true nature as an orgiastic priestess-
heroine might be guessed from her ineradicable connections with
love and marriage. A priest became her bridegroom by placing a
wedding ring on the finger of her statue, as
if it were the statue of

Aphrodite-Galatea. Bollandus's Acts of the Saints said Agnes founded

3

her nunnery in a house of sacred prostitutes, like priestesses of

4 St. Agnes's
Aphrodite-Salacia. All the way up to the present century,
Eve was the traditional time for girls to divine the names of their
5
future lovers by means of magic mirrors.

13
^
Agni
Ahriman

wmgn
Unfortunately for
fered in the reign of Constantine

persecuted. It was
St.

also falsely
Agnes's credibility,
when
she is

Christians were not

said to have suf-

claimed that Agnes cured Constantine's

daughter of leprosy. Roman Jews were said to have worshipped her in

a church on the Via Nomentana, built in her honor in 350 a.d.; but
Roman Jews didn't worship Christian saints, and
honor of female martyrs in 350 a.d. 6 Roman Jews probably
built in
no churches were
did,

however, worship at least one version of Agna the Holy Lamb.

Though Catholic scholars now say Agnes's legends have been
found "disappointingly" devoid of truth, her relics are still
preserved
in Rome and constantly adored by the faithful. 7

1. Brewster, 76. 2. Hazlitt, 2-3. 3. de Voragine, 113. 4. Seligmann, 157.

5. Brewster, 75. 6. de Voragine, 112. 7. Attwater, 35.

Agni
Vedicfire god wedded to Kali under her name of Ambika, "Little

Mother." She represented the primal ocean of blood from which all
things arose at creation; he represented the fructifying fire from
heaven (lightning); their combination meant vital heat. Vedic sages said
the soul of all the universe, moving and made of a combination
still, is

of blood and fire. Agni also appeared to consume sacrifices that were
burned on their altars. He was a prototype of such
Indo-European
Prometheus, Etana, Hephaestus, and Heracles.
1
fire-bringers as Lucifer,
1.0'Flaherty,97, 148,339.

Ahriman
Great Serpent, Lord of Darkness, and rival of the sun god in Persian

myth; leader of the daevas, whom Zoroastrians called devils, though the

original Indo-Iranian word meant "gods." (See Serpent.)

1

The story of Ahriman's revolt against his twin brother, the Heav-

enly Father, of their war in heaven, and of the daevas'faW to the

underworld, gave western Europe its basic myth of the fall of Lucifer,
and its dualistic division of the universe between forces of good and
evil. Persian prophets predicted the defeat of Ahriman and his dark

angels during the final battle at the end of the world, and Judeo-
Christian prophets adopted the same idea. As the Serpent, Ahriman also

tempted the first man and woman.

But Ahriman was not considered inferior to the Heavenly Father.
On the contrary, they were twins, born simultaneously from the
womb of the primal Crone of Time (Zurvan). Ahriman's influence on
earth was greater than his celestial brother's, because he created the
material world. Persian Magi regarded him as the source of their magic
power, and offered sacrifices to him. Mithraic shrines from Budapest

14
to York were dedicated to "Arimanius" as the Ahura Mazda
underground god of
2
magic arts. Akka
Ahriman was not originally Persian. He was the Vedic
god
Aryaman, maker of "Aryans" the people he created of clay.
Aryaman was one of the twelve zodiacal sons of the Goddess Aditi. 3
He also had a Celtic incarnation, as the divine king Eremon.
[Link], 317. 2. Legge 2, 239. 3. O'Flaherty, 339.

Ahura Mazda var. Ormazd,

Ormizd, Hormizd
Persian sun god born as the twin brother of the dark god Ahriman
from the womb of Infinite Time, the Primal Creatress. The fight
between the brothers, resulting in Ahriman's fall from heaven, had
the same cause as the rivalry between Cain and Abel that is, the
sacrificial offering of one was accepted by the older
deity; that of the
other was rejected. The older deity was Vayu, probably a derivative of
the Vedic celestial androgyne Varuna, or Mitra-Varuna, whose other
name became "Mithra".
The story of the battle and the fall might have been a revision of
the ancient creation myth concerning the Goddess's punishment of
her first-created serpent-consort for his hubris. 1
The name Ahura was
once a feminine name. 2
Middle Persian forms of the name were Ormazd, Ormizd, or
Hormizd. These names were commonly taken by kings who embod-
ied the god's solar spirit, especially kings of the Iranian Sassanian
3
dynasty. Being naturally deified after death, such kings had cult
centers and groups of priests who kept up their worship. One of these
apparently became converted to Christianity and contributed another
apocryphal saint to the Christian canon, usually misspelled "St. Hor-
midz," though Hormizd was obviously meant. This saint was vaguely
placed in the 5th century a.d. and declared a Persian martyr, though his
legend lacked every kind of foundation, even that of common sense.
It was claimed that, for a refusal to renounce Christianity, St. Hormidz
was condemned to serve as a military camel-driver which may not
4
have been precisely a life of luxury, but hardly qualified as martyrdom.
This sun-god-turned-saint was revered through the early Middle
Ages by cult centers located in Persia and Iraq.

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 27. 2. Budge, E.M., 144. 3. Encyc. Brit., "Ormizd."

4. Atrwater, p. 173.

Akka
Eponymous Goddess of Akkad, called the Old Woman, the
ancestral

Grandmother, or the Midwife. She was the "Water-drawer"

who
the feminine prototype
brought gods to birth out of the primal deep

15
Aladdin of Aquarius. A similar Central-American Goddess figure had curiously
names, Acat or Akna.
1
similar

^^^^^^^^^^^ Akka had many related names. Greeks called her Acco or Acca,
"She Who Fashions." 2 To Lapps and Finns in northern Europe, she
was Mader-Akka Mother Akka who created humanity. To Ro- 3

mans, she was Acca Larentia, or Acca the mother of the Lares, which
were archaic ancestral over from pre-Roman Latium.
spirits left
Acca Larentia was variously called the first Vestal Virgin, or a
temple prostitute, or a rich courtesan, or a virgin bride of God roles

thatmay seem mutually contradictory but were not so (see Prostitu-

tion; Vestal Virgins). As the divine midwife, she helped Rhea Silvia
give birth toRomulus and Remus, founders of Rome. She drew the
divine twins out of their floating basket on the river Tiber, just as
Akka of Akkad drew Sargon out of his floating basket on the river Tigris,
and "Pharaoh's daughter" drew Moses from the Nile.
Acca Larentia was honored every year at the Roman festival of the
Larentalia. She was assimilated to the cult of Heracles, who became
one of her husbands. In his Roman temple, Heracles was mated to
4
"Acca, the Maker."
1. Lamusse, 439. 2. Graves, CM. 2, 190. 3. Larousse, 306. 4. Graves, G.M. 2, 190.

Aladdin
Marco Polo described Aladdin quite differently from his mythic

portrait in the Arabian Nights. As the fairy tale said, he was master of a
secret cave of treasures, but the cave was real. It was located in the

of Alamut near Kazvin, headquarters of the fanatical

fortified valley

brotherhood of hashish im or "hashish-takers," which Christians mis-

pronounced "assassins."

Aladdin was an Old Man of the Mountain, hereditary title of the

chief of hashishim, beginning with a Shi'ite leader Hasan ibn al-

Sabbah, whose name meant Son of the Goddess (see Arabia). The later
name of Aladdin was taken by several chieftains. In 1297 the region
of Gujarat was conquered by a warrior called the Bloody One,
1
Ala-ud-den.

By means of drugs and an elaborate "paradise" staffed by human

Houris, initiates into the brotherhood were persuaded that they died
and went to heaven, or Fairyland, where gardens and palaces occupied
the valley of the secret cave. Special conduits flowed with the Four
Rivers of Paradise: water, wine, milk, and honey. Each candidate was

drugged into a stupor, then woke and "perceived himself surrounded

by lovely damsels, singing, playing, and attracting his regards by the
most fascinating caresses, serving him also with delicate foods and
exquisite wines; until intoxicated with excess of enjoyment amidst actual

16
rivulets of milk and wine, he believed himself
assuredly in Paradise, Alako
and felt an unwillingness to relinquish its delights." 2 Alani
After this period of bliss, the warrior was
again drugged and taken
out of the secret place, to fight in the service of the Old Man of the
^^^^^^^^^^
Mountain. He fought fearlessly, in the belief that death in battle would
instantly carry him back to that heaven cleverly made real for him.
Promises of sexual bliss were the real key to the ferocity of Islamic
armies. The Koran said each hero who died in battle would achieve
an eternity of pleasure among heavenly Houris with "big, beautiful,
lustrous eyes." 3

Aladdin's sect worshipped the moon as a symbol of the Goddess,

like the Vessel of Light associated with both the virgin Mary and the

Holy Grail western Europe. 4 Eastern poets said the Vessel of

in
Light
produced djinn, "spirits of ancestors." This Vessel was simultaneous-
ly Aladdin's lamp, source of djinni (a genie), and the moon, source of all
souls according to the most ancient beliefs. The moon was the realm
of the dead, and also the realm of rebirth since all souls were recycled
through many revolutions of the wheels of Fate. The divine Houris
also dwelt in the moon, which probably was the light of Aladdin's secret

cave. See Moon.

The Arabian Nights gavethe password to Aladdin's cave: Open,
Sesame. This was related to Egyptian seshemu, "sexual intercourse."
The hieroglyphic sign of seshemu was a penis inserted into an arched
5
yoni-symbol. Every ancient culture used some form of sexual
symbolism for the idea of man-entering-paradise.
[Link] (
54. 2. Polo 53-54. 3. Campbell, Oc. M, 430. 4. Wilkins, 58.

5. Budge, E.L., 58.

Alako
Gypsy "son of God" who takes the souls of gypsies to the moon after

death. Gypsies said Alako had two enemies: the devil, and Christ. 1

1. Trigg, 202.

Alani

"Hunting dogs," Greek name for the Scythian tribes who

wor-

shipped Artemis as their Divine Huntress. The name

Alan still carried
the original Greek meaning of a hunting dog when it became popular

among the Scots during the Middle Ages. Artemis was often called the
Great Bitch, and her hunting priestesses were the "sacred bitches"
who chased, killed, and consumed boar-gods and stag-gods like Phorcis
or Actaeon. to Christians, "son of a bitch" meant a devil
Thus,
worshipper that is, a pagan devotee of the Goddess. See Dog.

17
Alban, Saint Alban, Saint
Alchemy Fictitious saint called "protomartyr of England," allegedly the first

mmmmtammmatmm Christian martyr in the British isles, slain on Holmhurst Hill in 287 a.d.

However, no writer made any reference to him until two hundred

years later. Gildas finally developed St. Alban's legend in the 6th
century, with some confusion of dates. He claimed St. Alban shel-

tered a Christian fleeing from Diocletian's persecution, twenty years

1
before Diocletian's persecution began.
The real origin of St. Alban probably was nothing more than the
British Goddess's title of Albion, "White Moon." Her shrine at
Holmhurst Hill had a sacred fountain, always shown between the feet of
2
"Alban" in Christian art. In Bede's day the place was still holy, and
someone had to invent a Christianized and preferably masculinized
legend for it.

[Link], 37. 2. Brewster, 293.

Alberich

King of the underworld in Teutonic myth, identified with the Saxon

fairy-king Oberon. Alberich appeared in the Nibelungenlied as a chtho-
nian dwarf master-smith, guardian of the Rhinemaidens' buried
treasure. Likemost versions of the demonic fairy king, he was a shape-
shifter, appearing in such typically diabolic disguises as a toad and a
serpent. He is still familiar to opera fans as a character in Wagner's Ring
of the Nibelung.

Alchemy
In Arabic, alchemy meant "matter of Egypt," Al-Khemeia, from

Khemennu, "Land of the Moon," an old name for Egypt. The Arabs
1

thought alchemy was invented by Egyptians. Christians learned it

from the Arabs and believed it was invented by Thoth, or Hermes, or
2
the virgin Mary.
"Mary the Jewess" was said to have been the first great alchemist.
She discovered distillation of alcohol in the time of the Caliphate, and
invented the double boiler, still called bain-marie (Mary's bath) in

France. During the Renaissance some female alchemists were perse-

cuted as witches. Julius, Duke of Brunswick, roasted one of them alive
in an iron chair in 1 575, because she could not tell him how to make
3
gold out of base metal.
As a system of mysticism, alchemy was permeated by sexual
symbols. So-called "copulations" and "marriages" figured in alchem-
ical procedures. Sexual drawings enlivened the texts. The Alchemical

Rebus was the usual bisexual image of male and female powers in
union, "a Hermaphrodite, born of two mountains, Mercury and

18
Venus." Sun and moon were shown as naked male and female
Alchemy
figures, the moon saying to her spouse, "O Sun, thou dost
nothing
alone if I am not present with my strength, as a cock is helpless - -

without a hen." 4
Alchemists sought the divine female power Sapientia, or
Sophia
(Wisdom), the Gnostics' Great Mother. Valentin's L'Azoth des
philosophes showed her as a crowned, fish-tailed Aphrodite from rising
the sea, spouting streams of milk and blood from her breasts. This
was a direct copy of Hindu representations of the virgin Maya, mother
of the world. 5 Alchemists called her the Siren of the
Philosophers,
"born of our deep Sea (Maria), who pours milk and blood from her
6
paps."
An Italian manuscript showed two bearded sages avidly sucking
her breasts, to absorb the secrets symbolized by her colors, milk white
7
and blood red. The same colors appeared on the Flower of the
Alchemists, a five-petaled red-and-white rose, sometimes called the
womb of the FiJium philosophorum or Glorious Child. The same rose
8
symbolized the virgin Mary.
Mary-Sophia was the Goddess of both Gnosticism and alchemy.
The Philosopher's Stone was sometimes called the Sophistical
Stone. 9 Alchemical writings called the hidden Goddess the Mother of
Wisdom, combining elements of the Madonna with those of the

pagan mother-image:
lam lily of the valleys. lam the mother of
the flower of the fleldand the
fair and offear and ofknowledge and of holy hope. .lam the
love .

mediator of the elements. lam the law in the priest and the word in
. . .

the prophet and the counsel in the wise. I will kill and I will make to
live and there is none that can deliver out ofmy hand. 10

Since the ancient Great Mother was represented by a Holy

Vase, alchemists sought the vas hermeticum (Womb of Hermes), which
resembled the vas spirituale identified with the virgin Mary. Arab
alchemists adopted the rosary from Far-Eastern cults of the Goddess,
whose rosary-symbol was a vase-shaped bead, from which the other
beads were said to "spring up." Rosaries dedicated to Mary also had the

vase-shaped bead. Arabs called the rosary wardija, "rose-garden,"

copying the Hindu japamala, "rose-chaplet," the necklace of Kali Ma,
who ruled the elements as alchemists also hoped to do. A Diirer
506 shows turbanned Arab alchemist with his rosary at his
drawing of 1 a
11
belt.

Many alchemical texts presented obvious sexual allegories, e.g.

from the Turba Philosophorum: "Take the white tree, build him a
round, dark, dew-encircled house, and set in it a hundred-year-old
man
and close it so that no wind or dust can get tohim; then leave him
there eight days. I
you that that man will
tell not cease to eat of the fruit

of that tree till he becomes a youth. O what a wonderful nature, for

12
here is become son and born again."
the father
Similar allegorical references to the mysteries of reproduction were

19
Alchemy common among Chinese alchemists, who spoke of attaining "longev-
itythrough liquid gold," by "a red sulphurous ingredient in
^^^^^^^^^^^ goldmaking" the male and female essences in Taoist and Tantric
symbolism (see Menstrual Blood). One text said:
/ must diligently plant my own field. There is within it a spiritual germ
that may live a thousand years. Its flower is like yellow gold. Its bud is
not large, but its seeds are round and like unto a spotless gem [i.e., the

Jewel in the Lotus]. growth depends upon the soil of the central
Its

place [womb], but its irrigation must proceed from a higher fountain. Alter
nine years [or, months] of cultivation, root and branch may be trans-
n
planted to the heaven of the higher genii.

Churchmen were baffled by alchemical language, and usually

let
practitioners of this particular "devilish art" alone, unless they were

women. Yet the official opposition to the whole science kept many of
the best minds
away from it, thus helping to retard the development of
modern chemistry out of alchemical experimentation. 14
The deep secrecy of the alchemists' operations still puzzles many
modern scholars. Carl Jung wondered why these chemical processes
had to be disguised and distorted by thickets of mythological symbolism;
or, if a mystical sort of enlightenment was being described, why it was
tied to laboratory procedures.
15
The answer could be found in the

alchemists' political environment. "Natural science" was often de-

fined as heresy by the church. In periods when the Inquisition was
active, almost anyone meddling with such matters was at risk. The
best defense was deliberately obscure allegorization, in which theologi-
cal principles if any could be hidden.
Some of the secret is
given away by the preponderance of sexual
symbols in alchemical literature. "Copulation of Athene and Her-
mes" might mean mixing sulfur and mercury in a retort; or it might
mean a sexual "working" of the alchemist and his lady-love. Illustra-
tions in alchemical books suggested sexual mysticism more often than
not. Adam and Eve were shown as naked lovers, halves of the Primal
Androgyne. Adam was pictured as incomplete male, who had to be
pierced by the Arrow of Mercurius to stimulate his passionate desire

for Wisdom. After this, his phallus bloomed into the flowering Tree of
Life, signifying that he was ready for full union with a Goddess-like
16
Eve, who would make him complete.
Mercurius or Hermes was the alchemical hero who fertilized

the Holy Vase, a womb-like sphere or egg from which the films

philosophorum was to be born. This vessel may have been real, a

laboratory flask or retort; more often, it seemed to be a mystical

17
symbol. The Royal Diadem of its offspring was said to appear in
menstruo meretricis, "in the menstrual blood of a whore," who may
have been the Great Whore, an ancient epithet of the Goddess. Her
menstrual blood curdled in her womb to create the universe, including

20
its metals, minerals, and other raw materials of
alchemy. The Rosar- Alchemy
ium Phibsophorum (Rosary of the
Philosophers) said the soul of the
world is made of male and female "matters": Anima est Sol et
human
Luna. ^^^^^^^^^
Similarly a soul was produced
by male and female parents.
Sexual mystics held a theory that every individual person or thing had
but half a soul, which must find its other half in the 18
opposite sex.
At times the alchemists appeared to be a
seeking lost deity, like the
cabalists' Shekina: the Mother in the material matter
{mater) sleeping
of the world, having been separated from the God whose other half she
was. Alchemists usually rejected the church's
teaching that matter
was "evil" or "fallen." As Gnostic animists they
thought the "savior"
destined to emerge from the alchemical matrix
(mother-womb) was
both an anthropomorphic Glorious Child or Hlius
macrocosmi, and a
"miraculous stone" or Philosopher's Stone,
possessing corpus, anima,
spiritus, the "redeemer" of the inanimate universe.
19
As an enlightened
mystic the alchemist hoped to attend the birth of this strange being,
who would teach him to transform base metals into
gold, as eastern
yogis were said to do when they were sufficiently enlightened.
One reasonwhy the church opposed alchemy and identified it

with black magic was that many alchemical texts offered greater
revelations, more simply achieved, than the Bible or the pulpit could
offer, and thus took on the character of a rival. For example, the
Abtala Jurain (1732) presented the whole creation:

Take of common rainwater a good quantity, at least ten quarts; preserve it

well sealed in glass vessels for at least ten days, then it will deposit

matter and feces on the bottom. Pour off the clear liquid and place it in a

wooden vessel that is fashioned round like a ball; cut it in the middle
and Hll the vessel a third full, and set it in the sun about midday in a secret
or secluded spot.
When this has been done, take a drop of the consecrated red wine
and let it fall into the water, and you will instantly perceive a fog and a
thick darkness on top of the water, such as also was at the first creation.

Then put in two drops, and you will see the light coming forth from the
darkness; whereupon little by little put in every half ofeach quarter hour
first three, then four, then live,then six, drops, and no more, and you
will see with your own eyes one thing after another appearing by and by

on top of the water, how God created all things in six days, and how it
all came to pass, and such secrets as are not to be spoken aloud and I also

have not power to reveal. Pall on your knees before you undertake this

operation. Let your eyes judge of it; for thus was the world created. Let all
stand as it is, and in halfan hour after it began it will disappear.

By this you will see clearly the secrets of God, that are at present
hidden from you as from a child. You will understand what Moses has
written concerning the creation; you will see what manner of body Adam
and Eve had before and after the Fall, what the serpent was, what the
tree, and what manner of fruits they ate; where
and what Paradise is, and
in what bodies the righteous shall be resurrected; not in this body that

21
Alcmene we have received from Adam, but in that which we attain through the
Allah Holy Ghost, namely in such body as our Savior brought from
^^_^^__^_^_ Heaven. 20
1. Budge, E.M., 20. 2. Ashe, 213. 3. de Camp, S.S.S., 143, 147.
4. Shumaker, 178, 183. 5. Goldberg, 101. 6. de Givry, 361.
7. Neumann, G.M., pi. 174. 8. Campbell, M.I., 254. 9. Shah, 194.
[Link],M.H.S., 186. 11. Wilkins,44, 50, 56, 58. 12. Silberer, 258.
13. Shah, 201-2. 14. Castiglioni, 286. 15. Campbell, CM., 268.
16. Campbell, M.I., 258. 17. Campbell, CM., 273. 18. Campbell, CM., 289, 295.
19. Campbell, CM., 271-72. 20. Campbell, CM. 268-69.

Alcmene
"Power of the Moon," virgin mother of the solar Savior, Heracles.
She was the Greek form of the Hebrew almah, "moon-woman," who
mothered sacred kings in the Jerusalem cult, and whose title was
bestowed on the virgin Mary. 2 Parallels between earlier myths of
Alcmene and later myths of Mary were too numerous to be coinci-
dental. Alcmene's husband refrained from sexual relations with her until

her god-begotten child was born. The couple went on a journey "so
that the child has a birth place which is pot his parents' home." 3

Heracles also grew up to die a sacrificial death, after which he visited

the underworld and harrowed it, then rose to heaven to be assimilated to
his divine Father and to marry the Goddess's virgin aspect all over

again, to beget himself anew.

1. Knight, S.L., 98. 2. Brasch, 25. 3. H. Smith, 183.

Alecto
She Who May Not Be Named, one of Demeter's triad of Furies,
who supported the ancient laws of the Goddess by punishing
transgressors.

Allah
Late Islamic masculinization of the Arabian Goddess, Al-Lat or Al-
Ilat the Allatu of the Babylonians formerly worshipped at the Kaaba
in Mecca. It has been shown that "the Allah of Islam" was a male
transformation of "the primitive lunar deity of Arabia." 1 Her ancient

symbol the crescent moon still appears on Islamic flags, even though
modern Moslems no longer admit any feminine symbolism whatever
connected with the wholly patriarchal Allah. See Arabia.
l.Briffault3, 106.

22
Alleluia Alleluia

Medieval Christian version of an international word for the funeral ^^

keening that announced a sacred king's passage to the land of death, in mmmihhh^
ancient religious dramas. It was called the "howl," or ululation. The
Akkadian god Alalu was a direct anthropomorphization of the
liturgical
cry. It was houloi in Greek, uluktus in Latin, hulluloo or hulla-baloo
in Old Irish. Herodotus said the "howlings in the
1

temple" were derived

from the cult of Athene in Libya, where "the women do it
very
2
well."
Alleluia was used as a battle cry in the Middle Ages, and credited
with powerful victory-magic. The legend of St. Germain describes its
use in a battle between Saxons and Britons. As the cry of the god
Pan was supposed to cause "pan-ic" in his enemies, so the sound of
alleluia was thought to kill the enemy's fighting spirit.
3

[Link], 341. 2. Herodotus, 270. 3. de Voragine, 399.

Alma Mater
"Soul-Mother," a Roman teaching priestess, especially one empow-
ered to give instruction in the sexual Mysteries. (See Cowrie). The
name was based on Al-Mah, a Middle-Eastern name of the Moon-
goddess, also a title of her temple women, almah the same word that
Mary in the Hebrew versions of the Gospels.
1
described the virgin
The priestess called alma materbore a relationship to the male initiate

similar to that of the Tantric Shakti.

[Link], 25.

Alphabet
See Motherhood.

Altar
The custom of burying relics of saints under an altar began with a
of
misunderstanding of the scripture, "I saw under the altar the souls
them that were slain for the word of God" (Revelation 6:9). This was
based on a pagan teaching, that the souls of the enlightened became
stars in heaven. Those recently deceased stood on the border of the

sky, under the constellation of the Altar, which lies close to the horizon
1
as seen from Mediterranean latitudes.
The Altar was a feminine constellation because the earliest altars

were modeled on the maternal hearth, and altars symbolized the

Mother. The Earth's regenerative womb was often represented as an

23
Al-Uzza altar, which explains why "witch cults" were said to make an altar of
Amazons the belly of a living woman. The Heavenly Virgin was also an altar, Ara
Coeli, "Altar of Heaven," she who received the souls of the dead.
Christians adopted this symbolism from the virgin Mary. One of the
Nativity legends claimed the Cumaean Sybil showed Augustus a
vision of Mary, saying, "This woman is the Altar of Heaven." A church
was built on the spot, and named Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. 2
1 . Rose, 289. 2. de Voragine, 49.

Al-Uzza
"Powerful One," title of the Arabic Goddess as founding mother of
Mohammed's tribe, the Koreshites, hereditary tenders of her sacred
stone in Mecca. See Arabia. 1

l.Briffault3,80.

Amata
"Beloved," the title of a Vestal Virgin as a Bride of God that is,

bride of the spirit of Rome manifested in the phallic Palladium. The 1

title was copied by Christian nuns who called themselves Brides of

Christ.
1. Graves, W.G., 395.

Amazons
Greek name for Goddess-worshipping tribes in north Africa, Anato-

lia, and the Black Sea area. Due to an erroneous belief that Amazon
1

warriors destroyed the right breast to be unhindered in drawing the

bow, some derived the name from a-mazos, "breastless." But Greek rep-
resentations of Amazons showed no such mutilation. The idea may
have arisen from Asiatic icons of the Primal Androgyne with a
male right half and female left half, echoed by a coalescence of the
Amazon Goddess Artemis with her brother-consort Apollo. Scholars
now say the word Amazon meant "moon-woman." 2
Gaius Tranquillus
Suetonius said, "Amazons once ruled over a large part of Asia." As
Suetonius Roman
late as the 5th century a.d., the Black Sea was still known as the
biographer and
historian, ca. 70- Amazon Sea.* Libya which used to mean all of North Africa except
122A.D.
Egypt was also Amazonian. Herodotus spoke of Libyan Amazons.
Diodorus, first century Greek historian, called them "the warlike
women of Libya." To this day, north African Berbers call themselves
Herodotus Greek their common name came from Latin barbari,
Amazigh, though
historian of the 5th
"barbarians." 4
century B.C.
The ancients said Amazons were the first to tame horses, which

24
may well account for their armies' 5
legendary invincibility. In open Amazons
country, mounted
troops whether male or female would have a decided
advantage over foot soldiers.
In Amazonian myths, the Goddess was often
worshipped as a
mare: India's mare-mother Saranyu, mare-headed or Demeter,
Cretan Leukippe the "White Mare," whose priests were castrated and
wore female dress. 6 Among Scythians also, men entered the service
of the Goddess by castrating themselves and
adopting women's cloth-
ing. The only deity shown in Scythian art was the Great Goddess,
whom the Greeks called Artemis, or Hestia, or Gaea (the 7
Earth).
Some of the Scythians settled in Parthia, "Virginland," named after
their They came to be known
Goddess. as Sacae, and their chief city
was Sacastene, now Seistan. 8
Scythians were governed by priestess-queens, usually buried alone
in richly furnished kurgans (queen-graves). Five discov-
kurganswere
ered together at Pasyryk in southern Russia in 1954. Scythian

priestesses were elder women, old enough to have gray hair. They

performed traditional sacrifices, catching the blood in sacred cauldrons

and taking omens from the entrails. They also accompanied their
armies into battle, to cast spells for victory. 9
The moon-sickle used in mythical castrations of gods was a
Scythian weapon. A long-handled form therefore came to be called a
scythe, and was assigned to the Grim Reaper, who was originally Rhea

Kronia in the guise of Mother Time, or Mother Death the Earth

who devoured her own children. Scythian women apparently used such
weapons ceremonies and agriculture.
in battle as well as in religious

Diodorus said Scythian women "fight like the men and are nowise
inferior to them in bravery." 10 A Scythian girl was allowed to marry
11
only after she had killed three enemies in battle.
It wasn't unusual for barbarian armies to include women. Femi-
nine magic power was often considered necessary for victory. The
Bible says Barak commanded an army of 10,000 men, but refused to go
into battle unless the priestess-queen Deborah went along, to cast
him (Judges 4:8). Tacitus told of druidic forces
victory spells for Cornelius Tacitus
Roman
repelling Roman invaders on the island of Mona (Moon) in 61 a.d.:
historian
and rhetorician, ca.
among the soldiers, black-clad women waved swords and cursed the 56-120 a.d.
enemy "like the Furies." 12

Greek myth says Amazon tribes occupied Cappadocia, Samo-

thrace, and Lesbos, and founded the cities of Smyrna, Ephesus,

Cymes, Myrine, and Paphos all leading centers of Goddess-worship.

Amazons came to the aid of matriarchal Troy in the Trojan War.
The Amazon queen Penthesileia fell beneath the sword of Achilles,
who immediately violated her dead body. Homer attributed this
necrophilic act to Achilles's love of her beautiful corpse.
More likely, it

was a magic charm to immobilize her vengeful spirit.

Greeks feared
the ghosts of slain Amazons. They called them Beautiful Ones, built

25
Amazons shrines to them, and offered them propitiatory sacrifices for centuries
13
after the war.

Theseus, king of Attica, violated the Amazons' law of matrilocal

marriage by kidnapping their queen, variously named Hippolyta,
Antiope, or Melanippe (Black Mare). Some said Antiope was the sister

of Hippolyta. The former was slain by Theseus, the latter by

Heracles, who wished to steal her magic girdle. Enraged, the Amazons
invaded Greece, ravaged coastal towns, and besieged Athens. 14
Amazons and Greeks became hereditary enemies. A later Amazon
queen named Artemisia (Spirit of Artemis) joined Xerxes to fight the
Greeks at the battle of Salamis in 480 b.c. not because she loved
15
Persians, but because she hated Greeks.
Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons
lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of
males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children.
Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societ-
ies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of
Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their
shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands
and murdered of them at once. 16 The Greek writers seemed to
all

have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult

males, and there was no effective defense against them.
Northern Europe had mythical Amazons: the Valkyries, warrior-
maidens of Valhalla. There were also real Amazons among the
17
Vikings: female captains and war-chieftainesses. In the 10th century
a.d. a Norwegian fleet invaded Ireland and devastated Ulster and the

northeast, under the command of a warrior queen called the Red

Maiden. 18 Another warrior queen, Olga, was one of the first rulers of
Kiev. 19 Medieval historians said Amazons ruled the city of Ulm from
before the time of Abraham to the time of Alexander the Great. The
city was named for the sacred elms (ulmae) of the grove where they
20
worshipped Diana-Artemis.
Again and again, legends mention the women's magic battle-cries,
which made their enemies helpless. The Valkyrie Kara deprived her
weapons by the sound of her voice. A
21
enemies of power to wield their

Celtic Valkyrie, Nemhain, cursed Cu Chulainn's warriors and made

22
a hundred of them drop dead on the spot.
Lebor Gabala The Lebor Gabala Erenn Book of the Taking ofIreland said
Erenn, also called the 23
the very first expedition of colonists to Ireland was led by a woman.
Book of Conquests:
Ireland had female soldiers up to the 7th century a.d., when Christian
early-medieval Irish
legal reforms forbade women to bear arms. 24 The tradition persisted
history, purporting to
trace the origins of inconnection with weddings. A bride's costume up to the 17th century
the Irish tribes back to included a knife at the belt. 25 But after the 9th century, female
the time of Adam.
warriors in Celtic lands were labeled "witches." 26 In the Amazons'
territory around the Black Sea, women retained certain Amazon

26
customs up to the 18th century: dressing in men's clothes, Ambrosia
riding
horseback astride, and fighting beside the men in war. 27
Amphitrite
1.

5.
Lederer, 103. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 379. 3. Sobol, 153, 155. 4. Wendt, 52, 66.
Lederer, 103. 6. Gaster, 316. 7. Encyc. Brit, "Amazons." 8. Thomson 174
^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^m^^^^^m
9. Wendt, 116, 137. 10. Briffault 1,456. 11.
Knight, S.L., 33
12. Pepper & Wilcock, 216. 13. Graves, G.M. 2, 313; Larousse, 122.
14. Graves, G.M. 2, 126. 15.
Encyc. Brit, "Artemisia." 16. Graves, G.M. 2 224
17. Oxenstiema, 208. 18. Briffault 1, 457. 19. Larousse, 294.
20. Borchardt, 104. 21. Larousse, 279. 22. MacCana, 90. 23.
Rees, 28.
[Link], 1 09; Joyce, 84. 25. Hazlitt, 75. 26. Boulding, 319. [Link], 106.

Ambrosia
"Supernatural red wine" of Mother Hera, which gave the Greek
gods immortality. In the Vedas it was soma, in Persia haoma, in Egypt
1

sa: always associated with the moon and the maternal "blood of life,"

i.e.,menstrual blood. 2 Merlin's older name of Ambrosius suggests a

link with such pagan symbols of immortality achieved through

association with life-giving feminine blood. See Merlin; Thomas

Rhymer.
1. Graves, G.M. 1, 1 18. 2. Budge, G.E. 2, 298; Hartley, 231.

Amen
Magic word interpreted as "let it be" in Hebrew, used to evoke divine

response to a prayer. Such words often began as deities' names. This

may have originally invoked the Egyptian god Amen, "the Hidden
One" the sun in the belly of his Mother before his rebirth at sunrise.
Its hieroglyphic symbol meant a pregnant belly.
1

1. Book of the Dead, 194.

Amma
Norse Grandmother-Goddess who gave birth to the race of karls
(freemen); perhaps derived from Ama, a basic name of the Great
Goddess in Mesopotamia and the east.
1
See Caste.
[Link]-Petre, 147.

Amphitrite
trans-
"All-encircling Triad," the pre-Hellenic Triple Goddess,
formed into a mere sea Hellenic writers. She was forced to
nymph by
marry Poseidon because this god was "greedy of earthly kingdoms,"
which implied that the earthly kingdoms used to be owned by the

27
Anahid nymph herself. Graves says the myth represented encroachment of
Ananke male priesthoods on former feminine control of the fishing industry. 1

1. Graves, G.M. 1,59, 61; 2, 379.

Anahid
This and its variations Anahita and Anaitis were the Persian and
Armenian names for Venus, the star of Ishtar and Astarte, Mother
Goddess of the Zend-Avesta; ruler of waters, stars, and Fate. The
Mithraic Mysteries, though strongly male-oriented, retained Anahita as
the necessary female principle of creation. 1

[Link].M.M., 180.

Ananias
A rabbi who opposed St. Paul. In the Acts of the Apostles, Ananias
was (1) a holy man, Paul's instructor, who accepted Paul's faith; (2) an

enemy, who and publicly shamed him; and finally (3) "a
struck Paul
liar unto God," who held back some of his money from the apostles,

though they seemed to think he must surrender all of it. For this
offense, St. Peter made Ananias "fall down dead" along with his wife

Sapphira, and young men of the apostles' sect buried them. The
apostleswere imprisoned for murder, but "an angel" came secretly at
night and let them out of jail (Acts 5:1-19).
This curious story was much repeated in connection with collec-
tion of church taxes. Withholders of tithes were called "liars" like

the sinful Ananias.

Ananke
"Necessity," a Neoplatonic-Pythagorean title of the Goddess who
governed the world according to karmic law; another name for Fortuna,
or Fate. "What we call causality in the West has its roots in the
Greek images of Ananke (Necessity), Dike (Justice), Heimarmene
Anaximander
(Allotted Fate), and Nemesis (Retribution) all goddesses which
Milesian philosopher,
were feared and respected." Anaximander said itwas according to
astronomer, and
Ananke that the "source of generation for all things is that into which
geographer, 6th
century B.C. their destruction also leads." Stoic philosophers made Ananke or Hei-
marmene the supreme all-ruling world principle, with absolute

authority over even the gods. The Orphics said Ananke was mated to

Chronos (Time), which gave rise to the concept of supernatural

duality known as Time-and-Fate. 1

It might be said there was no Greek

28
idea of "God" that could transcend or overrule the feminine
Ananta
image of
Ananke as the inescapable What-Must-Be. Anath
1. von Franz, 23.

Ananta
"The Infinite," a great serpent in whose coils Hindu gods spent their

periods of sleep or death between periods of activity.

The serpent 1

might be compared to the ancient Egyptian goddess Mehen the

Enveloper, a serpent who enfolded Ra every night when he was "dead"
in the underworld. The sex of the eternal serpent was indeterminate.

Earlier myths tended to see it as female, a cosmic Kundalini. Later

Vedic traditions tended to view Ananta as male.
l.O'Flaherty,221,340.

Anastasia, Saint
"She Who Stands in Heaven," title of Rome's Great Goddess,
personified as a pseudo-saint. Her three "serving-maids" Agapeta,

Theonia, and Irene were originally the three Horae or Graces who
attended the Goddess.
Her Christianized legend associated Agapeta, Theonia, and Irene
with a man who suffered a ceremonial death in the same way as

ancient victims of the pagan Mamuralia or scapegoat-sacrifice. He was

beaten with rods, reviled and spat upon, then shown a vision of the

Triple Goddess in his moment of death, whereupon he "fell into a sleep

so deep" that no further blows could waken him. 1

Hagiographers claimed Anastasia was another one of the "virgin

martyrs" slain by Diocletian's persecution. However, modern schol-
arsadmit that she never existed except as a label on statues of the
2
Goddess, which were re-interpreted as images of a saint. Her holy
day was the same as that of the sun's birth from the Great Mother at the
winter solstice: December 25. By the old lunar calendar, this festival

began with its Eve, December 24, called Matrum Noctem, "Night of
the Mother." 3

[Link] 52. ( 2. Attwater, 44. 3. Turville-Petre, 227.

Anath var. Anatha, Anat,

Neit, or Ath-enna;
Twin of the Goddess Mari as Lady of Birth and Death, worshipped Egyptian: Aynat

by Canaanites, Amorites, Syrians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. Greek-

of Life."
speaking Phoenicians in Cyprus called her "Anat, Strength
An Egyptian stele of the time of Rameses II addressed her as Queen of

29
Anath Heaven and Mistress of All the Gods. Under the Greek Ptolemaic
dynasty she ruled both Egypt and Palestine. Semitic texts named her
Virgin Daughter of Palestine, or Virgin Wisdom Dwelling in Zion.
1

The Jerusalem temple was occupied for centuries by both God

(El) and this Goddess, variously known as Queen of Heaven, Anat,
2
Asherah, Mari, or Miriam. Her sanctuary Beth-Anath (House of
Anath) is mentioned in the 19th chapter of Joshua. Some early
Israelite chieftains called themselves her sons, like Shamgar ben Anath,
who "slew of the Philistines six hundred men
with an ox goad"

(Judges 3:3 1). The ox goad was a magic spell, represented by the letter
lamedh, which means "ox goad." In Sicily, a Phoenician settlement
was named after this Goddess, Mach-Anath. Greeks called it Panorma,
3
meaning Universal Mountain Mother.
Primitive sacrificial rites of Anath or Anat were described in the
Ras Shamra texts Ras Shamra texts. She was fertilized by the blood of men, not by their
Cuneiform tablets semen, because her worship dated all the way back to the Neolithic
discovered in 1929 in
when fatherhood was unknown and blood was considered the only
the Ras Shamra
substance that could transmit life. Hecatombs of men seem to have
mound, northern Syria,
site of the ancient been sacrificed to Anath when her image was reddened with "rouge
Canaanite capital city of and henna" for the occasion. 4 "Violently she smites and gloats, Anat
Ugarit. The texts cuts them down arid gazes; her liver exults in mirth ... for she
reveal Canaanite
plunges her knees in the blood of the soldiers, her loins in the gore of
foundations of biblical
the warriors, till she has had her fill of slaughtering in the house, of
material.
5
cleaving among the tables." In similar rites in Egypt, priestesses hoisted
up their skirts while
dismembering the bull god Apis so his spurting

blood would bathe their loins and fertilize them. 6

Like the Mexican "Lady of the Serpent Skirt," who made new life
from Quetzalcoatl's genital blood, Anath hung the shorn penises of
her victims on her goatskin apron, or aegis. 7 When the Goddess was

transplanted to Greece and permanently virginized as Athene, her

aegis was transformed from the ceremonial apron of Libyan priestesses
into a breastplate. 8
Athene still wore "serpents" (phalli) on her aegis,
along with the Gorgon head of her Destroyer aspect. Gorgon, "Grim
9
One," was Athene's title as a Death-goddess. See Medusa; Metis;
Neith.
Anath annually cast her death-curse, anathema, on the Canaanite
god who became Lord of Death: Mot, the castrated "Sterility" aspect
of the fertile Baal. Like Set in Egypt, Mot stood for the barren season
that slew its own fertile twin, the
god Aleyin. In typical sacred-king
style, Mot- Aleyin was the son of the Virgin Anath and also the
bridegroom of his own mother. Like Jesus too, he was the Lamb of
God. He said, "Iam Aleyin, son of Baal (the Lord). Make ready, then,
the sacrifice. I am the lamb which is made ready with pure wheat to
be sacrificed in expiation." 10

After Aleyin's death, Anath resurrected him and sacrificed Mot in

turn. She told Mot that he was forsaken by his heavenly father El, the
same god who "forsook" Jesus on the cross. The words attributed to

30
Jesus, "My El, my El, why hast thou forsaken me? " (Mark 1
5:34), Anath
apparently were copied from the ancient liturgical formula, which
became part of the Passover ritual at Jerusalem.
The sacred drama included a moment when Anath broke Mot's
reed scepter, to signify his castration again foreshadowing a detail of
the Christian Gospels. The breaking of the
scepter meant severing the
connection of the old, played-out king with the
Earth-goddess after
the harvest of his reign. Anath therefore slew him and used his and body
blood to refresh the the next year's crop. "She seizes
soil for
Mot, the
son divine. With her sickle she cleaves him. With her flail she beats
him." His pieces were scattered on the fields, like pieces of the Savior
Osiris in Egypt. 11

Naturally, the god-killing Anath was much diabolized in later

patriarchal legends. Abyssinian Christians called her Aynat, "the evil

eye of the earth." They said she was an old witch destroyed by Jesus,
who commanded that she must be burned and her ashes scattered on
the wind. 12 The hostility of Jesus probably stemmed from the missionar-
ies' deliberate reversal of his former identification with the
destroyed
god.
In the Christian Gospels, Anath 's death curse Anathema Mara-
natha (1 Corinthians 16:22) has been very loosely translated "the

Bridegroom cometh." It really meant the Bridegroom's imminent

it was the solemn curse
death; pronounced over any sacrificial
victim. 13 It carried the same double meaning as Latin sacer, meaning
both "holy" and "accursed" like all dying gods, who were formerly
H
anathemata, "offerings." Every nation has examples of gods chosen
for the sacred marriage, then accursed and killed. The Celtic God-

dess's fatal words marked for death such heroes as Cu Chulainn and
Diarmuid. The god called Lord of the Hunt became le Chasseur
Maudit, "the Accursed Huntsman."
The origin of accursed heroes in general might be found in
ancient India, where Shiva the Condemned One was chosen by Sati-

Kali for the sacred marriage with her virgin incarnation, followed by his

death and journey to the underworld. 15 As a personification of the

Primordial Abyss, the Goddess was sometimes called Kala-Nath, which
16
might have been related to the name of Anath.
Anath's capacity to curse and kill made even the Heavenly Father
afraid of her. When El seemed reluctant to do her bidding, she

threatened to smash his head and cover his gray hair and beard with

gore. He hastily gave her everything she asked, saying,

"Whoever
17 from Middle-
hinders thee will be crushed." It was a long step this

Eastern tale to the Greek concept of the dread Goddess as the

Heavenly Father's ever-dutiful daughter. See Anne, Saint.

1. Ashe, 30-31, 59. 2. Briffault 3, 1 10. 3. Massa, 48. 4. Hooke, M.E.M., 83.
5. Gray, 80. 6. Graves, G.M. 1,255. 7. Gaster,416. 8. Graves, W.G, 410.
9. Knight, S.L., 130. 10. Larousse, 77. 1 1 Larousse, 78. [Link],63.
.

13. Budge, GE. 2, 253. 14. Hyde, 111. 15. Larousse, 335. 16. Bardo Thodol, 147.

17. Pritchard, A.N.E. 1,124.

31
Anathema Anathema
Androgyne Christian term for a person or thing officially cursed and excommuni-
cated; from the biblical passage "If any man love not the Lord Jesus
Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha"
(1 Corinthians 16:22).

it was the curse pronounced by the Goddess, Marah or Mari-

Originally
Anath, on her dying god; see Anath. In medieval Christian usage, to
be pronounced Anathema was to be cast out of the congregation with
book, and candle, and irrevocably consigned to hell: a curious
bell,

reminiscence of the accursed god's temporary descent into the under-

world, in the ancient religion.

Andrew, Saint

St.
X
Andrew's Cross
From Greek andros, "man"

legend was invented by Byzantine bishops

primacy through
upheld their
own
or "virility," a

Achaea, where the apostle Andrew was supposed to have

Patras, in
been crucified after founding the Byzantine papacy. St. Andrew's

legend of St. Peter. Eastern patriarchs

its

magisterium by calling Andrew the elder brother of Peter,

title of the solar god of

to counter
'

Rome's claim to

to enhance his authority, and declaring him the first apostle to

discover the Messiah. 2
The Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross, the
story that
so-called St. Andrew's Cross, was unknown until the Middle Ages.
Apparently it evolved from a popular symbol of the eastern patri-
archs, a solar cross in an orb. It was also the Cross of Wotan carried by
3

Norse invaders into Scotland, where it became the present Scottish

national symbol.

Patras, the site of Andrew's alleged martyrdom, was an old shrine

of the phallic-solar father-god variously called Pater, Petra, or Peter,
whose name had the same basic meaning as Andrew. Political battles
between the factions of Andrew and Peter in the 4th century a.d.
stimulated canonical disguises for local genii loci in both Byzantium and
4
Rome, and these are still preserved in the calendar of saints.
[Link],45. 2. Brewster, 5. 3. B. Butler, 241. 4. H. Smith, 252.

Androgyne
Many Indo-European religions tried to combine male and female in the
Primal Androgyne, both sexes in one body, often with two heads
and four arms. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad said the Primal Andro-
gyne was "of the same size and kind as man and woman closely
embracing."
1
Some said the male and female elements lived together in
one skin, experiencing constant sexual bliss and spiritual

completeness.

32
 Shiva and Shakti-Kali appeared as the
androgyne Ardhanaris- Androgyne
vara, the right side male, the left side female. 2 Rudra, the older form of

Shiva, was known as "the Lord Who

is Half Woman." 3 Brahma
^_^__^^__
and Vishnu also appeared as bisexual beings united with their Shaktis.
Chinese Taoists held the mandala of Yang and Yin to represent the

androgyne.
Western myths also assigned to the elder
androgyny gods or the
first human beings. The Orphic creation myth said the firstborn deity
was a double-sexed Phanes or Eros, "Carnal Love," whose female half
was Psyche, the soul, Greek equivalent of Shakti. 4 Hermes owed his
phenomenal wisdom to his former androgynous existence with Mother
Aphrodite, as double-sexed Hermaphroditus. 5
Often, the androgyne appeared in myth as male-female twins born
simultaneously, e.g. Isis-Osiris, Jana-Janus, Diana-Dianus, Fauna-
Faunus, Helen-Helenus, or Artemis-Apollo, the "moon and sun"
united in their Mother's womb. Probably an androgynous image on
Apollo's altar at Delos gave
rise to the story that he
copulated with his
sister Artemis on that Several forms of the sun god were
altar.

represented as requiring close physical union with the moon goddess, as

even Brahma was useless without his female counterpart Bhavani,
6
"Being." Egypt's "supreme" sun god was often an androgyne; the sun
was his right eye, the moon his left. 7 The same androgynous being is
still worshipped Dahomey as Nana-Buluku, Moon-Sun, who created
in
8
the world and gave birth to the first pair of human beings.

Many myths model the first human beings on the androgyne.

Persians said the first Heden (Eden) lived
pair in the garden of

together in one body, until Ahura Mazda separated them. Jewish

imitators of the Persians also said Adam and Eve were united in a

bisexual body. Some rabbinical sources said Eve was not "taken out
of" Adam; they were parted from one another by a jealous God who
resented their sexual bliss, which was too Godlike for human beings,
and should be reserved for deities. Casting man out of the "garden"
meant detaching him from the female body, often symbolized by the
Hebrew pardes, "garden." 9 This was another way of saying the
10
original sin that angered God was not disobedience but sex.
Greek myths of the Golden Age told the same tale of a jealous

God: Zeus, who punished humanity's Prometheus with

friend

eternal torture because he tricked the Heavenly Father for human-

of the Golden Age had been
ity's advantage (see Sacrifice). The people

created androgynous by Prometheus, who made their bodies of clay,

and Athene, who gave them life. Father Zeus took out his anger on
them by tearing them apart. A piece of clay was torn out of the
female part and stuck to the male part. That is why women have an
orifice that bleeds, and men have a loose dangling appendage that

seems not to belong to them but always craves to return to the female
body it came from.

33
Androgyne Cruel Zeus permitted human beings to return the male appendage
to its female home sometimes, to sense for a brief moment the bliss of
their former bisexual existence. Some Gnostic mystery cults of the first
centuries a.d. taught Tantric techniques to prolong the moment of
bliss, which angered most forms of the Heavenly Father including the
Christian one, whose bishops denounced this training as schooling
in wickedness. 11 Church fathers especially deplored making or re-
making the Beast with Two Backs, another term for the Primal
Androgyne.
Though orthodox Christianity renounced both sexuality and an-
drogyny in religious images, Gnostic Christians used them. As Kali
was the female half of Shiva, so the Gnostic Great Mother Sophia was
the female half of Christ. This was revealed "in a great light": the
Savior was shown as an androgyne coupled with "Sophia, Mother of
12
All."

Gnostic Christians said those who received the true revelation of

the Father-Mother spirit were the only ones prepared for the secret

sacrament called apolytrosis, "release," a concept identical with Tantric

moksha or "liberation." n Obviously influenced by Tantrism or its
prototype, western Gnostics had made a direct translation of the Hindu
Yab-Yum, "Father-Mother," the sexual union of a sage and his
Shakti at the crucial moment of death. 14 Sexual sacraments were in
effect practicing for that moment, when the enlightened one would
be restored to the condition of primordial bliss as an androgynous
creature.

Naassenes, or The Naassenes said no enlightenment was possible without the

Naassians; from Father-Mother spirit, an androgyne sometimes called Heavenly
Hebrew nahash, "ser-
Horn of the Moon. 15 In the 5th century a.d., Orphic initiations sought
pent." Jewish or
to awaken a female spirit within man, to render him sensitive to the
Christian Gnostic sects
of the early Christian message of the Mysteries. After meeting the deities in a death-and-
era, who worshipped rebirth experience, he carried a bowl, emblem of the womb, and
the serpent god touched his belly like a gravid woman, signifying "a spiritual experience
Ophis (Hermes) as a
uniting the opposed ways of knowledge of the male and female, and
form of the Savior.
fused with this idea is that of a new life conceived within." 16
Such Gnostic subtleties were disliked by the orthodox, who viewed
Mysteries General
term for religious rites
all
mergings of the sexes as unequivocally sinful. After Gnostic sects
of the "secret were crushed, the androgyne was consigned to hell and gave birth to
initiation" type, which many curious devils with both male and female attributes. A 1 6th-
included early
century book showed Satan himself seated on a throne, wearing a papal
Christianity.
tiara, with bird feet, a female face in his genital area, and pendulous

female breasts. 17 The Devil of the Tarot pack was usually androgynous,
as were many of the devils represented in cathedral carvings.

1.0'Flaherty,34. 2. Lamusse, 371. 3. O'Flaherty, 298. 4. Larousse, 90, 1 32.

5. Graves, G.M. 1, 73. 6. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 375. 7. Erman, 301.
8. Hays, 339. 9. Hughes, 47. 10. Cavendish, P.E., 27. 11. J.H. Smith, C.G., 287.

12. Malvern, 53. 13. Pagels, 37. 14. Rawson, A.T., 103.
15. Jung & von Franz, 136. 16. Campbell, M.I., 389. 17. de Givry, 125.

34
Andromeda Andromeda
"Ruler of Men," Greek of the Philistine Ange,s
sea-queen won in
title

marriage by Perseus, who supposedly saved her from the sea-serpent ^m^bm^m^
Yamm. Perseus seems to have been a Greek name for Baal in this

myth, for Baal annually fought Yamm for the love of Mother Astarte,
the Philistines' Goddess, locally named Atargatis. Baal replaced
Yamm, then was himself replaced when the queen tired of him and he
became Yamm in his turn. Andromeda on her rock, in the classic
myth, was transformed from a critical observer of the combat into a
victim.
That Perseus played the role of sacred king in the
original myth
is shown by
his apotheosis and rising to dwell in the stars. So also

Heracles was raised to the stars after performing the same feat
slaying the great sea serpent in order to mate with Hesione, "Queen of
Asia," probably just another name for
Andromeda-Atargatis.
1

1. Graves, CM. 1,224.

Androphonos
"Man-slayer," title of the Goddess Aphrodite as a Destroyer or
death-goddess. She was also the Black One, the Goddess of the Tombs,
and the Queen Bee who killed her lovers as drone bees are killed, by
castration and evisceration. She had "many titles which seem inconsist-
ent with her beauty and complaisance." That was because classic
'

mythographers sought to make her a love goddess only, ignoring her

Goddess (see
earlier character as the creating-and-destroying Triple

Trinity).
1. Graves, CM. 1,71-72.

Angels
The earliest angels were heavenly nymphs, like Hindu apsaras, who
dispensed sensual bliss to the blessed ones. Vikings called them
Valkyries. Greeks called them Horae. Persians called them Houris, or
Peris (fairies). A guardian angel was a personal Shakti who watched
over a man and took him into her ecstatic embrace at the moment
of death. N

Hindu angels were createdprimarily for lovemaking. They

had no

menstruation, pregnancy, birth, or nursing, though they were moth-

ers. Each child miraculously on its mother's knee at the age
of
appeared
without any
Apsaras could copulate endlessly with gods
five years.

emission of fluids or loss of energy. Such a being was "the perfect

1

dispenser of sensual delight and amorous bliss on a divine scale."

Like the queen of the Holy Grail palace in bardic romance, the angel
was a "Dispenser of Joy." (See Grail, Holy.)

35
Angerona There were earthy angels too, the dakinis, "Skywalkers." Tantric

writings said they lived in the Palace of Lotus Light. They were
sometimes called prostitutes' daughters, or yoginis, i.e., yoga-
2
priestesses.

Although such angels seemed to be every man's wish fulfillment,

patriarchal religions denied the sexuality of angels. Moslems rejected

the Houris (heavenly "whores"), and insisted the angels are without
carnal desires. 3 Yet this contradicted the teaching of the Koran, that
after death every hero would receive beautiful girls as heavenly
4
companions.
European Christianity consigned the formerly divine Horae to

Fairyland, the earthly paradise distinguished from the celestial one.

The place was called locus voluptatis terrestis, the Terrestrial Place of
5
Pleasure, or pratum felicitatus, the Paradise of Joy.
Angels were often confused with seraphs and cherubs. The former
were six-winged fiery flying serpents, the lightning-spirits of Chalde-
an myth. The latter were Semitic kerubh, from Sheban mu-karrib,
"priests of the moon"; sometimes they could take the form of birds.

Angels accompanying the Hindu Great Goddess were able to fly on the
6
wings of garuda birds.

Biblical angels were "sons of God" who came to earth to beget

children on mortal women (Genesis 6:4). Later these were called

demons, or incubi, or "fallen" angels. The Book of Enoch blamed

women for the angels' fall. Women had "led astray the angels of

Magic Papyri heaven." 7 In the Magic Papryi, the words angel, spirit, god, and demon
Collections of were interchangeable. 8 When St. Paul said women's heads must be
exorcisms, invocations, covered in church "because of the angels" (1 Corinthians 1 1:10), he
charms, and spells
meant the daemones (demons) supposed to be attracted to women's
widely circulated during
the early Christian [Link] Greeks thought each person had an individual guardian angel
era, used as bases for or daemon which could appear in animal form, and under Christian-
later grimoires and There were no
ity evolved into the "familiar spirit." really well-defined
Hermetic texts.
distinctions between angels, demons, familiars, fairies, elves, saints,
9
genii, ancestral ghosts, or pagan gods. Among supernatural beings one
might always find many hazy areas of overlapping identities, even
"good" or "evil" qualities being blurred.
A Gallup poll showed in 1978 that over half of all Americans still

believe in angels. 10
1. Zimmer, 163. 2. Tat/ & Kent, 84, 148. 3. Budge, G.E. 1, 5.
4. Campbell, Oc.M., 430. 5. Silberer, 212. 6. Tatz & Kent, 146.
7. Tennant, 183-84. 8. M. Smith, 191. 9. Wimberly, 423.
10. Newsweek, June 26, 1978, p. 32.

Angerona
Silent Goddess of Rome, shown holding a finger to her sealed
mouth. Some said Angerona represented the secret name of Rome,
which it was illegal to pronounce. In
1
all probability she was a pre-

36
Roman title of the same primal Creatress whom Gnostics called
Sige, Angurboda
"Silence," personifying the lightless and soundless womb that Ankamma
gave
birth to the first deities. Gnostics said Silence was the mother
of the
Great Goddess herself.

1. Larousse, 214.

Angurboda
Eddaic "Hag of the Iron Wood," mother of Hel and of the Moon-
dogs who bore away the dead. Danaans, or Danes, knew her as
Anu,
Yngona, Nanna, or "Anna of the Angles." She was a "hag" in the
ancient sense of "Holy
One"; the Death-goddess. See Dog. 1

1. Graves, W.G, 409.

Anima
Female soul, from the roots an, "heavenly," and ma, "mother,"
recalling a time when all souls were supposed to emanate from the
Heavenly Mother. In the 16th century a.d. Guillaume Postel said
1

Guillaume Postel
every soul had male and female halves, the animus and anima. The (1510-1581) French
male half had been redeemed by Christ, but the female half was still scholar, teacher, and
mystic, friend of
unredeemed and awaited a female savior. 2 This was a new development
Ignatius Loyola,
of the old Christian view that only males had any souls at all. The
accepted into the Jesuit
third canon of the Council of Nantes in 660 a.d. had decided that all order but later
women are "soulless brutes." 5
expelled for "wrong"

Alchemists applied the word anima to

ideas. He was
all "spirits" considered
imprisoned in Rome by
female: Anima Mercury, Anima Mundi, etc. The Spirit of the World
the Inquisition, until
was connected with the elements of earth and water, like Eleusinian a popular uprising

Demeter, "Mistress of Earth and Sea." One reason alchemists were opened the prisons
and offered him a lucky
suspected of heresy was their notion that the World-Soul was a female
anima. escape.

Carl Jung revived the terms animus and anima to describe reason-

ing and intuitive parts of the mind (i.e., left and right hemispheres).

Every person's anima is "often symbolically connected with both earth

and water. She is pictured as timeless and profoundly wise. Each . . .

man's first and formative experience of the anima is with his mother.
4
Her true function in the mind, according to Jung, is creativity."
1. Graves, W.G., 410. 2. Seligmann, 223. [Link],4. 4. Cavendish, T., 79.

Ankamma
Emanation of Kali the Destroyer as the spirit of cholera. She had
many such emanations, each one specializing in a certain
disease capable of causing death. See Kali Ma.

37
Ankh Ankh
Anne, Saint

^^^^m Egyptian "Cross of Life" representing union of male and female

sexual symbols: a female oval surmounting a male cross.
was Key of the Nile, because the sacred marriage between God and
Its other name

Goddess was supposed to take place at the source of the Nile each year
before the flood. The Christian version of the Cross of Life, which
didn't appear in Christian art until after the 5th century a.d., sig-

nificantly lacked the feminine oval and kept only the masculine part
of the figure. 1
The ankh seems to have evolved from an ancient symbol of the
Goddess in Libya and Phoenicia: a narrow triangle surmounted by
a crossbar and a round or oval head. 2
Egyptians regarded the ankh as a universal life-charm. "The life of
every being, divine or human, depended on his or her possession of

Ankh
t it. From
they gave
first

life

Early Christians also

immortality, calling
to last the gods are seen carrying

to their kings

it an ansated
a certain letter-hieroglyph that "stood for the
cross.
it

They knew the

life
in their right hands,

and servants presenting it to them." 3

used the ankh occasionally as an emblem of

to
Egyptians had
come; and
and

this letter
4
had the form of a cross." In hieroglyphics the ankh stood simply for
5
the word "life."

I. H. Smith, 188. 2. d'Alviella, 186-90. 3. Budge, A.T., 128.

4. de Voragine, 550. 5. Budge, E.L, 83.

Anna-Nin
Sumerian prototype of the many forms of the Great Goddess named
Anna, Ana, or Hannah throughout the Middle East and Mediteranean
lands. The name meant Lady of Heaven. See Anne, Saint.

Annapurna
Himalayan mountain called Great Breast Full of Nourishment; a
manifestation of the Great Goddess as the home and support of the

gods.

Anne, Saint
Mythical mother of the virgin Mary, from the Middle-Eastern
Goddess Anna, or Hannah, or Di-Ana, mother of Mari. From Sumeria
to pre-Roman Latium she was known as Anna, the Grandmother-

Goddess; Anatha in Syria, Anat in Canaan, Ana or Anah in several Old

Testament transformations. Long before the Bible was written, the
Goddess Anna was already known as the Grandmother of God. Hence,

38
the choice of her name for the mother of God's Mother is Anne, Saint
hardly
1

surprising.
Book of James said God's Grandmother was
Syriac versions of the
Anna but Dinah,
^^^^^^^^
not actually the same name, a Semitic Di-Ana or
"Goddess Ana." Dinah was the ancestress of Dinaite tribes who settled
in Sumeria (Ezra 4:9). As Anatha, she was the consort of Yahweh at
2
Elephantine. As Anna Perenna she was Grandmother Time to the
Romans, mother of the Aeons. As Ana or Anu she ruled Celtic
As Nanna, she was an incarnation of Freya in the mother-bride of
tribes.

Balder. In Phrygia too, she was Nana, mother of the Savior. She was
really as old as the oldest civilization. A Sumerian prayer declared:
"Hear O ye regions, the praise of Queen Nana; magnify the
Creatress, exalt the dignified, exalt the Glorious One, draw nigh unto
the Mighty Lady." 3
Romans worshipped the Goddess as Anna Perenna, "Eternal
Anna," mother of the Aeons. She stood at the change of years, a two-
headed Goddess of Time with two faces named Prorsa and Postverta,
looking forward and backward from her heavenly gate among the
stars, where one celestial cycle merged into the next. So she stood for

both Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. Under the name of
Carmenta she invented all the letters in between. 4 She was also Jana, or
Juno, mother of the January New Year. Classical myths masculin-
ized her as the two-faced Janus, god of gateways. Christians may have
confused icons labeled IANA with the mother of the Virgin; for Jana-

Juno was the virgin mother of the savior-god Mars.

Ovid said Anna was the same as the Moon-goddess Minerva.
Sappho named her "the Queen." 5 To the Celts, she was the same as
theirAna, first of the female trinity of the Morrigan, associated with the
Cauldron of Regeneration. Her moon-temple used to stand at Cnoc
Aine in Limerick, now a shrine of "St. Anne." 6 To Irish pagans, Ana
meant "mother." It mean wealth, plenty, treasure. 7
also came to

As Grandmother-goddess, Ana could be a destroying Crone.

Some myths called her Morg-ana, "Invincible Queen Death." Medi-
eval Christians called her Anna of the Angles, or Black Annis, or

Angurboda, the Hag of the Iron Wood, mother of Hel. 8 The magic
pentacle was the sign of Morg-ana. A similar five-pointed
9 star stood for
10 was the
the underworld in Egyptian hieroglyphics. This same star

official sigil of St. Anne. 11

In her Christianized form, Anne had three husbands, gave birth to

many saints, and became the patron of midwives and miners. Neu-
mann says, "All this bears witness to her original fertility aspect as Earth
Mother." n
St. Anne was of crucial importance in the dogma of the virgin
an of faith in
Mary's immaculate conception, adopted as article
13
1854, after seven centuries of controversy. In the official Catholic
so Mary
view, original sin was transmitted by sexual acts. Therefore,

39
Antic Hey could be born without taint of original sin, St. Anne herself had to be in-

Antichrist nocent of sexuality. Accordingly, Johannes Trithemius proclaimed

that Anne "was chosen by God for her appointed services before the

foundation of the world. She conceived 'without the action of man,'

and was H
pure as her daughter."
as

Johannes Trithemius At the church accepted this doctrine, because it seemed to

first

15th-century solve the problem of Mary's sinlessness. Later it was rejected. Two
German scholar, Abbot
virgin births made one too many. In the end, St. Anne was said to have
of Sponheim
conceived Mary in the normal way but the child was freed in the

womb of original sin. Though these intimate matters are supposed to be

known in minute detail, churchmen incongruously admit that "noth-
15
ing whatever is known about the parents of the Virgin Mary."
1. Graves, W.G., 411. 2. Hays, 89. 3. Stone, 219. 4. Larousse, 2 1 0.
5. Graves, W.G., 408. 6. Loomis, 387. 7. Joyce 1, 261. 8. Sturluson, 56.
9. Loomis, 342. 10. Budge, E.L., 75. 11. Brewster, 343.
12. Neumann, A.C.U., 57. 13. Young, 203. 14. Neumann, A.C.U., 59.
15. Attwater, 186.

Antic Hey
Dance step of the medieval Carnival King: antico from Latin
antiquus, "ancient, venerable." Carnival "antics" were connected with
the Old Religions, whose sacred processions were often accompanied
by clowns deliberately making obscene gestures and jokes to heighten
the spirit The "hey" was, and is, a figure-eight pattern
of revelry. 1

paced on the ground, the sign meaning "infinity" in Hindu-Arabic

numeral systems and in their descendant, modern mathematics.
Choruses of old folk songs call for the hey, in nonsense phrases like

"Hey, nonny nonny," or "Hey, deny down." Thus the antic hey was
really a pagan liturgy in song or dance or both, performed at secularized
versions of the ancient rites.

1. Funk, p. 54.

Antichrist

Virgin-born son of the devil, supposed to appear during the world's

Last Days. Christianity never escaped the patterns of dualism, whereby
each god had to have an equal and opposite anti-god. Antichrist was
the Christian equivalent of Chaldean Aciel, lord of the nether world,

counterbalancing the solar god of the heavens.

The coming of Antichrist has been announced and re-announced
throughout the entire Christian era, especially in times of political
and social stress. His title has been laid on Nero, Attila, Genghis Khan,
Merlin, Frederick II, and many others including several popes. More
recently, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler were all nominated for

the position. See Doomsday.

40
Antinomianism Antinomianism

General term for Christian sects that followed the

original doctrine of
apotheosis, believing they could become "one with Christ." Like their
pagan contemporaries, many early Christians thought the only route
to immortality was deification, and the object of their
Mysteries was to
learn how to be deified. The distinction between men and
gods was
that men died and gods didn't. Thus, one's
immortality depended on
becoming a god, often by sacramental procedures such as eating a
god's flesh and blood (see Cannibalism).
Clement of Alexandria said: "That man with whom the Logos Clement of
dwells ... is made like God and is beautiful man becomes
[T]hat Alexandria (Titus
God, for God so wills it [T]he Logos of God became man that from
Flavius Clemens)
Christian presbyter and
man you might learn how man may become God. . . .
[T]he true teacher of the late
Christian Gnostic has already become God." l

2nd century a.d., once

This doctrine of deification was soundly based on pagan prece- reckoned a saint, but
dent. Worshippers of Hermes the Logos believed that "This is the removed from the
who canon of saints in
good end for those have attained knowledge, namely, Deification."
1586 by Pope SixtusV.
They said to Hermes, "Thou art I, and I am thou; thy name is mine,
for I am thy image (eidolon)." Mithraists used the same formula, "I am
Alumbrados,
thou and thou art I," which the Gospels put in the mouth of Jesus,
"Enlightened Ones"
"Abide in me, and I in you" (John 1 5:4). Seneca said, "A holy spirit Spanish heretics of
dwells within us." Epictetus wrote: "You are bearing a God with the 15th to 17th
centuries, recruited
you. ... It is within yourself that you carry him." Cicero said initiation
from reform
into the Mysteries taught a man he could be God, "inferior in no movements among
2
whit to the celestials." the Jesuits and
The theological pitfall in the concept of salvation through apotheo- Franciscans. They

sis was that identification of self and god led to what Tantric sages were eventually
exterminated by the
called Svecchacara, "Do As You Will." In effect, the perfected sage
Inquisition.
could do nothing evil because he was God, and God was incapable of

sinning. Therefore he was above all man-made laws, and could do

3
Illuminati or
as he pleased. "Perfectibilists"

Greek democracy was based on a related idea that through Bavarian secret
founded by
enlightenment and reason each citizen would become capable of self-
society
Adam Weishaupt, a
government and would make no moral errors. This did not apply to former Jesuit. The
slaves, women, or those who owned no property; such were
not
society was banned
classed as [Link] male landowners however could become in 1785.

idiotae, "self-gods." Thus the word "idiot" began in Greek

4 with the

sense of "one who will not be governed," that is, one who believed the Adamites 18th-

century sectaries who

divine will dwelt in himself.
believed nakedness
Numerous medieval Christian sects took the Antinomian route to
represented the natural
salvation, believing that, like eastern sages, they could become one stateof innocence in

with the divine. These mystics "in their identification with God sup- which Adam dwelt
before he "fell" into
posed that upon their conscious union with Him they
were exempt
sin, and began to clothe
like Amalric of Bena,
from the governing ordinary men." Leaders
rules
himself.
Johann Hartmann, sects like the Alumbrados, Illuminates, Adamites,
and others taught that when their flesh was occupied by the holy spirit

41
Anubis they could commit no
sins of the flesh. For them, sexual promiscuity
5
was only "embracing of God."
a natural

^^^^^^^^^^^ Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit undertook to demonstrate

the redemptive virtues of sexuality, nakedness, and scorn of the
conventions. The more openly they displayed their hippie-like beha-
viors, the more
closely they approached the divine essence. Frazer
remarked, "Their progress toward this mystic communion was acceler-
ated by the Inquisition, and they expired in the flames, not merely
with unclouded serenity, but with the most triumphant feelings of
cheerfulness and joy." 6 They had theirown martyr, a literary sister
who wrote the gospel of their sect, The Mirror of Free Souls. She and
7
her book both were excommunicated and burned in 1 3 10 a.d.

Antinomian ideas were often defined as heresy, as in the case of

Simon Morin, who seems to have had fairly standard delusions of

grandeur. He said he was the incarnate second coming of Christ, and

was incapable of committing a sin; anything he did must be wor-
8
shipped. The church disagreed, and burned him as a witch.
The usual Antinomian excuses for sexual self-expression infiltrated
a group of nuns in the Dominican convent of St. Catherine de Prato.

Early in the 19th century, a text of the official inquiry into this case was
published in Brussels, then "withdrawn the insistence of the Papal
at

Court. The second edition is . . . much expurgated." One of the nuns

expounded on her Antinomian teachings: "It is sufficient to elevate
the spirit to God and then no action, whatever it be, is sinful. Love . . .

of God and one's neighbor is the whole of the commandments. Man

who unites with God by means of woman satisfies both command-
ments. So also does he who, lifting his spirit to God, has enjoyment
with a person of the same sex or alone. ... In doing that which we

erroneously call impure is real purity ordained by God, without

9
which man cannot arrive at a knowledge of Him."

Such ideas were typically Oriental, as opposed to the Christian idea

of entering into a relationship with a God who was an external
"other." Though the Gospels said "the kingdom of God is within you"
10
(Luke 17:21), orthodox Christianity treated this as a heretical idea.
1 10, 1 12. 3. Avalon, 624-25.
1. Angus, 106. 2. Angus, 102, 108,
4. Lindsay, Avalon, 636. 6. Frazer, G.B., 117-18. [Link], 317.
O.A., 91. 5.

8. Summers, G.W., 429-30. 9. Avalon, pp. 637-39. 10. Campbell, M.L.B., 79, 95.

Anubis
Jackal-headed Egyptian god of the underworld and of mummifica-
tion; judge of the dead; Egypt's primary psychopomp, like Hermes in
Greece. Mated to Nephthys, the underground aspect of Isis, Anubis
was sometimes known as the Great Dog. He was considered essential to

the worship of Isis and Osiris. Plutarch said he had "a power among

42
the Egyptians much like that of Hecate among the Greeks, he being ter- Anuket
restrial as well as Olympic Those that worship the dog, have a Apep
certain secret meaning that must not be revealed. In the more remote
and ancient times the dog had the highest honor paid to him in
Egypt." Anubis may have been originally a canine incarnation of
Shiva, whose name also meant a jackal.
2

1. Knight, S.L., 113. 2. Mahanirvanatantra, 113.

var. Anukis
Anuket
"The Clasper," an Egyptian Goddess personifying the yonic source
of the Nile flood. Her symbol was the cowrie, always emblematic of
female genitals. Her union with the ithyphallic god was supposed to
bring life-giving Nile waters to the land. She "clasped" a number of
gods, including in the 5 th century b.c. the Hebrew Jehovah. 1
Like Kali Ma
in India, Anuket had four arms, representing union

between male and female principles. The general pattern for such
deities wastwo arms held symbols of the male elements, and two
that
Festival of the
held symbols of the female elements. Yet she was known as "The
Inundation Annual
One." She was "self-begotten and self-produced, and whilst yet a virgin celebration of the
2
gave birth to the sun god." coming of the Nile
At the Festival of the Inundation, Egyptians sang to her: "Thou flood, which brought
art the bringer of food, thou art the mighty one of meat and drink,
the water and fresh silt

Thou the storehouses; thou necessary to the

thou art the creator of all good things. fillest
fertility of the entire
heapest high with corn the granaries, and thou hast care for the poor Nile valley, where
and needy." 3 rain was almost

1. Graves, W.G., 405; Lamusse, 37. 2. Budge, D.N., 159. 3. Budge, D.N., 106. unknown.

var.
Apep Apophis

Egyptian and Greek names of the Great Serpent of the underworld,

who threatened to swallow the sun god every night as he passed through
the realm of darkness, returning from west to east. (See Serpent.)
Ra's priesthood evidently decided at one point that Ra faced danger in

the underworld, so the faithful would be encouraged to help the sun

return with their nightly [Link], the Serpent was a common

personification of the Egyptian underworld or Tuat itself. The realm

of darkness with its various "chambers" was the interior of the serpent's

body, through which the sun god must pass, as he was always
swallowed at each sunset. 1

In medieval alchemy the "Apophis-snake" was confused with the

Hermetic Ouroboros, a hidden world spirit in the form of a serpent,
who might reveal the secret of the Philosopher's Stone.
1. Budge, G.E. 1,266.

43
Apex Apex
Aphrodite Pointed conical cap worn by the Roman Flamen Dialis.
high priest,
When outdoors, he must always have the apex on his head. It was a 1

phallic symbol representing his continual union with the Queen of

Heaven. It has been shown that "In the symbolism of dreams and of
2
myths the hat is usually the phallus."
The Flamen's wife, the Flaminica, represented the Goddess. She
was the more important dignitary of the two. If his marriage was
terminated by her death, the Flamen immediately lost his sacred office
and reverted to a private citizen. Such customs show that the powers
of priests "in Rome as elsewhere, derived in the first instance from an
older priesthood of magical women." 3
The same conical cap belonged to the Lord of the Underworld in

Celtiberian Dating Celtiberian pagan imagery. He was Helman:

belonging to the a man
from the occupation of Goddess Hel. 4 Sometimes he was said to be the god Frey, consort of
the Iberian peninsula
Hel's heavenly or lunar aspect, Freya. 5
by Celtic tribes,
The same conical cap evolved into the traditional headdress of sor-
especially the
loosely-knit empire
cerers and witches; the Fool's Cap (or Dunce Cap) worn by the
known as Brigantia, Carnival King; the bishop's miter; the pope's tiara; and before them all,
ruled by the Goddess the conical crown of Egyptian pharaohs, emblem of the king's union
Brigit. with the Sky-goddess. To the present day, the conical witch-hat is worn
6
by Tantric priests and sorcerers in Tibet.
1. Rose, 209. 2. Silberer, 87. 3. Briffault 3, 20-21. 4. Knight, D.W.P., 73.
5. H.R.E. Davidson, P.S., 134. 6. Waddell, 483.

Aphrodite
Often dismissed as a "Greek goddess of love," Aphrodite was really
much more than that. Like Kali, she was a Virgin-Mother-Crone
trinity. She was once indistinguishable from the Fates (Moirai); her
old name was Moira, and she was said to be older than Time. She gov-
1
erned the world by ius naturale, the natural law of the maternal clan.
She was not only Greek. She was the Dea Syria, also known as
Asherah or Astarte, Goddess of the oldest continuously-occupied
2
temple in the world. She was the ancestral mother of the Romans, for

she gave birth to their founding father, Aeneas. 3 Under the name of

Venus, she was the mother of the Venetii, whose capital city became
Venice, called "Queen of the Sea" after the Goddess herself.
One of Aphrodite's major centers of worship was the city of

Paphos on Cyprus, the island named for its copper mines. Thus, she
was called "the Cyprian" or "the Paphian," and her sacred metal was
copper. She was also called Mari, the Sea. Egyptians referred to her
island as 4
Ay-Mari.
During the Christian era, Aphrodite's temple on Cyprus was
converted into a sanctuary of the virgin Mary, another name of the
same Goddess, but in this sanctuary the virgin Mary is hailed to this day
5
as Panaghia Aphroditessa, "All-holy Aphrodite."

44
 Continued worship of the goddess on Cyprus
probably contributed Apis
to the Christian belief that thewhole population of Cyprus descend-
ed from demons. 6 In reality, Cyprian Aphrodite was like all other
manifestations of the Great Goddess: ruling birth,
^^^^^^^^
life, love, death

time, and fate, reconciling man to all of them through sensual and
sexual mysticism. The Cyprian sage Zenon taught Aphrodite's phi-
losophy: "mankind and the universe were bound together in the
system
of fate Diogenes Laertios tells us that Zenon was the first to
define the end of human existence as 'life in accordance with nature.' " 7

Aphrodite had almost as many "emanations" as Thousand-Named

Kali. She was not only Mari and Moira and Marina and Pelagia and
Stella Maris, all titles related to her control of the sea; she was also
Ilithyia, Goddess of childbirth; Hymen, Goddess of marriage; Venus,
Goddess of sexuality and the hunt; Urania, Queen of Heaven; Andro-
phonos, the Destroyer of Men; and many others. She was often
identified with Isis. Anchises, her lover who begot Aeneas and then was
castrated, had a name meaning "he who mates with Isis." 8 Under
names, Aphrodite mated with Semitic gods. Her cult
several of her

occupied the main temple in Jerusalem after 70 a.d. In the 4th

century it was said that Constantine's mother found the true cross of
Christ buried in Aphrodite's Jerusalem temple. (See Cross.)
One of Aphrodite's greatest shrines in Asia Minor was the city of
Aphrodisias, once dedicated to Ishtar. Up to the 12th century a.d.,
when the city was taken by Seljuk Turks, the Goddess was worshipped
there as the patron of arts and letters, crafts, and culture. 9 Recent
excavations have uncovered exquisite artifacts and statuary, bespeaking
10
a cultivated and sophisticated lifestyle under the Goddess's rule.

The calendar still

keeps the name of Aphrodite on the month
dedicated to her, April (Aphrilis). The ancient Kalendar of Romulus
said this was the month of Venus. 11
1. Encyc. Brit, "Byblos." 3. Graves, G.M. 1, 69.
Bachofen, 57, 192. 2.
4. Graves, W.G., [Link], 192. 6. Cavendish, P.E., 104.
5.

7. Lindsay, O.A., 103. 8. Graves, G.M. 1, 71-72. 9. Lederer, 170.

10. National Geographic, v. 141, n. 6 (June 1972). 11. Brewster, 172.

Apis
Later he was
Egyptian lunar bull god annually sacrificed at Memphis.
combined with Osiris to produce the syncretic god of the Ptolemies,
Osorapis, or Sarapis. Apis was begotten in bull
form when moon-
beams fell on a cow in heat. He was identified by special markings,
his forehead, a flying
notably symbols of the Goddess: a triangle on
vulture on his side, a crescent moon on his flank. After death each Apis

bull was elaborately embalmed and buried in the vastunderground

Egyptian gods, he became
"an
bull-tombs. 1
In mummy form, like all

Osiris."

1 .
Larousse, 44.

45
Apollo Apollo
Greek sun god who took over the powers of his twin sister Artemis,
^^^^^^^^^^^ theMoon. Originally, he was her child, as the sun was born of
the Moon-goddess in Egypt and elsewhere. He was also her totemic
beast in several forms: a wolf (Apollo Lycaeus), a mouse (Apollo
Smintheus), or a golden-maned lion (Apollo Chrysocomes).
The fully anthropomorphized Apollo laid claim to the Goddess's
powers of prophecy, poetry, music, magic, and healing. His priest-
hood adopted the Muses, the Graces, even the Great Serpent who gave
oracles from the earth-womb, Apollo Python, known as Sol Niger

(Black Sun) during his nightly sojourn in the underworld. Egyptians

calledhim Apep or Apophis, the serpent of darkness. In the Bible he
is Apollyon, "Spirit of the Pit" (Revelation 9:1 1).

Apollo's serpent-form inspired the Pythoness, priestess of the

Delphic oracle, Greece's foremost temple of prophecy. This temple
belonged to the Goddess in the beginning; delphi means womb. Even
Apollo's priests admitted that she had owned the oracle in her
trinitarian guise as mother of earth, heaven, and the abyss: the first of all
deities to prophesy, the Earth-mother; and Themis, mother of the sea
and of all Themistes, "oracles"; and the Moon-goddess, Artemis, under
thename of Phoebe another title stolen by Apollo, who became
known as Phoebus. 1

Apollonian priests naturally directed their energies toward con-

quest of the oracles. "The reason why a deity associated with political
conquest and order should take possession of oracular shrines is obvious;
oracleswere the chief means of controlling public opinion and public
action, and to control the oracles was as necessary to a political god as it

2
is to later politicians to control the press or education."

Laurel became Apollo's sacred plant because it was the plant of

inspired poetic frenzy, which is
why Britain's national poet is still

called Laureate, the laurel-crowned one. The Delphic Pythoness

chewed leaves of cherry laurel to induce her poetic-prophetic trances.

Cherry laurel contains traces of cyanide,enough to cause delirium,

foaming at the mouth, and other symptoms of divine possession.
Apollo's priests used the oracles to create new patriarchal laws,

overturning the laws of the matriarchate. Apollo's most notable

judicial act was to absolve Orestes from the crime of killing his mother.

Apollo said it was no crime, because a mother is not a real parent;

only a father truly gives life to a child, the same "Apollonian" opinion
3
lateradopted by Christian theologians. Yet this patriarchal opinion
was negated by Apollo's own surname of Letoides, "son of Leto." 4 He
carried the name of his mother only, after the custom of the matri-
archal Lycians who recognized strictly matrilineal ancestry, and in

whose country Apollo's cult first evolved.

In his earliest manifestations, Apollo was subordinate to the God-
dess as her dog-faced or wolf-faced door-guardian: a "Spirit of the
Pit" like Apollyon, another name for Anubis or Cerberus. Four Hittite

46
 altars found in Anatolia were dedicated to a
god named Apulunas, Apostles
Guardian of Gates, forerunner of Apollo
Lycaeus or "Wolfish Apol-
lo." 5 Once he walked at the Goddess's
heel, like but this Anubis;
was suppressed and forgotten.
To some early Christians, Apollo became a junior God. He was
even said to have fathered on mortal
virgins several pagan sages
6
respected by the church, such as Plato. Healing miracles were
widely
attributed to Apollo. 7 Christians
sought his intervention in certain
illnesses. It was claimed that if a naked virgin touched the afflicted
part,
"Apollo denieth that the heat of the plague can increase
saying,
where a naked virgin quencheth it," the patient would well. 8 get
Under his title of Benedictus, "Good-speaker,"
Apollo was even
canonized, and became St. Benedict. 9
1. Lederer, 149. 2. Briffault 3, 153-54. 3. Bachofen, 159. 4. Guthrie, 83.
5. Guthrie, 86. 6. Shumaker, 152. 7. Graves, W.G., 433. 8. Hazlitt 354
9. Attwater, 62.

Apostles
Describing the religious customs of the Aztecs, Father Acosta unwit- Jose de Acosta
one of the real purposes of Jesus's twelve companions:
tingly gave 16th-century Spanish
Jesuit missionary who
They took a captive and afore they did sacrifice him unto their idols,
. . .

accompanied the
they gave him the name of the idol, saying that he did represent the conquistadores, and
same idol. . . . When he
went through the streets, the people came forth wrote a history of
to worship him, and every one brought him an alms, with children and native cultures in Peru,

sick folks, that he might cure them, and bless them, suffering him to do all Bolivia, and Mexico.

things at his pleasure, only he was accompanied with ten or twelve men
lesthe should fly. The feast being come, and he grown fat, they killed
. . .

him, opened him, and ate him, making a solemn sacrifice ofhim. '

This devoured Savior, closely watched by his ten or twelve

guards, embodied the god Quetzalcoatl, who was born of a virgin, slain

in atonement and whose Second Coming was

for a primal sin,

confidently expected.
2
He was often represented as a trinity signified by
three crosses, a large one between the smaller ones. 5 Father Acosta

naively said, "It is

strange that the devil after his manner hath brought a
4
Trinity into idolatry." His church found it all too familiar, and long

kept his book as one of its secrets.

The Gospels contain hints that Jesus was as reluctant as the
Quetzalcoatl-victim. Once he ran away from his "apostles" and fled
alone into the mountains, fearing men would "come and take him by
force, to make him a king" (John 6:1 5). That is, he didn't want the
fatal honor of being a sacred king of the Jews, the doomed Bridegroom
of Zion. The apostles caught up with him in Capernaum,
and his
subsequent speeches indicate resignation to his fate.
He said he was the bread of God, come down from heaven to give
life to the world: "The bread that I my flesh, which I will
will give is

give for the life of the world Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh

47
Apotheosis my blood, hath eternal life" (John 6:50, 54). On the eve of the
Apple sacrificehe prayed despairingly, "O my Father, if it be possible, let

^^^^^^^^^^^ this cup pass from me; nevertheless thy will be done" (Matthew
. . .

26:39, 42). At least the Gospel narrator claims Jesus said this.

Naturally, any sacred king's guards would become popularizers of

"dining out" on the divine sayings and actions for years.
his cult,

However, the Gospels were not written by the apostles whose names
they bear. They were forgeries, compiled long after Jesus's time,
some as late as the middle of the 2nd century. 5 Even this is scholarly
guesswork, since no authentic manuscript can be dated before the 4th
6
century.
Canonization of the apostles used an ancient Buddhist symbol, the
ushnisha or "flame of invisible light" appearing on top of their heads.
To Buddhists, this flame streaming from the "lotus center" of the skull
7
meant super-intelligence. It appeared over the heads of bodhisattvas.
The same phenomenon appeared over the heads of the apostles (Acts
2:4). The rest of their stories were as mythical as those of the
bodhisattvas. Guignebert says "not one of them is true. . . .
[Tjhere
exists no information really worthy of credence about the life and
work of the immediate Apostles of Jesus." 8
[Link],G.B.,680. 2. Neumann, G.M., 203-8. 3. Briffault 2, 604.
4. Doane, 378. 5. H. Smith, 179, 182; Stanton, 106. 6. Pfeifer, 103.
7. Ross, 126. 8. Guignebert, 61.

Apotheosis
"God-making," the ritual of raising a slain sacrificial savior to heaven,
to become a constellation among the stars or a part of his heavenly
father. It became a custom to apotheosize Roman emperors while

they were still living. Most other ancient kings were also gods on earth.
Their surrogates, the "sacred kings" who died in their place, were
promised immediate godhood after death.
Apotheosis was similarly promised Christian martyrs who perished
in the belief that they would be wholly assimilated to Christ and
would sit "on the right hand of God" like him. The church's ritual of
canonization was a direct copy of pagan ceremonies of apotheosis.
The Roman emperors' souls winging to heaven as eagles contributed
the idea of releasing white doves at the climax of the church's
canonization ceremony. See 1
Drama.
[Link],769.

Apple
Eve's fruit of knowledge used to be the Goddess's sacred heart of

immortality, all over the Indo-European culture complex. The God-

dess's many western paradises grew the apples of eternal life. The

48
Celts called the western paradise Avalon,
"Apple-land," a country ruled Apple
by Morgan, the queen of the dead. Irish kings received the Goddess's
magic apples of immortality and went away to live with her under the ^^^^^_^_^^
[Link] Arthur was taken to Avalon by the Triple Goddess in
person, as three fairy queens.
Scandinavians thought apples essential to
resurrection, and placed
vessels of them in graves. 1 The Norse Goddess Idun kept the magic
apple-land in the west, where the gods received the fruit that kept them
deathless. 2Apples carried souls from one body to the next. Sigurd's
or Siegfried's great-grandmother conceived by
eating an apple. The
3

Yule pig was roasted with an apple in its mouth, to serve as a heart in
the next life (see Boar).
Greeks said Mother Hera kept the magic apple garden in the west,
where the Tree of Life was guarded by her sacred serpent. Graves
points out that the whole story of Eve, Adam, and the serpent in the
tree was deliberately misinterpreted from icons showing the Great
Goddess offering life to her worshipper, in the form of an apple, with
the tree and its serpent in the background. Similarly, Hellenes

misinterpreted icons of the hero-victim receiving an apple from the

Triple Goddess, before his journey to paradise, as the Judgment
of Paris: a picture of a young man receiving the apple from three
4
Goddesses, not vice versa.
Romans gave the apple-mother the name of Pomona, which was
probably inherited from the Etruscans. She symbolized all fruition. A
Roman banquet always progressed ab ovo usque mala, from eggs to
apples beginning with the symbol of creation and ending with the
symbol of completion. It was recorded that King Herod finished every
meal in the Roman style, with an apple. 5
Onereason for the extreme reverence paid to this fruit is revealed

by cutting it transversely, as the gypsies and witches did. Hidden in

the apple's core was the magic pentacle, or sign of Kore (Core). Just as
Kore the Virgin was hidden in the heart of Mother Earth (Demeter)
and represented the World Soul, so her pentacle was hidden in the
apple.
The five-pointed star in a circle was the Egyptian hieroglyph for
the underworld womb, where resurrection was brought about by the
mother-heart of "transformations." 6 In Christian iconography also, this

apple-sign represented the Virgin concealed within the Mother, like

Kore within Demeter. (See Anne, Saint.)
Among gypsies, "occult couples" carefully cut the apple to reveal
its pentacle and ate it
together as magical nourishment during
Tannic
intercourse. 7 A gypsy maiden was supposed to bring about her partner s
mystic union with the soul of the earth through her own body;
thus

she was a Shakti, and the apple was her sexual symbol. It was a custom
for a gypsy girl to choose her lover by tossing an apple at him, just as

Kali-Shakti chose Shiva to be her doomed bridegroom. 8

In Celtic paganism the Goddess's apple similarly signified a sacred

49
Apple marriage and a journey to the land of death. Queen Guinevere, who
was really the Triple Goddess, according to the Welsh Triads, gave a

magic apple to "the Irish knight Sir Patrice," actually St. Patrick,
9
formerly the father-god or Pater. (See Patrick, Saint.) The Irish
knight died; Guinevere was denounced as a witch and condemned to

the stake, from which Lancelot rescued her. Her offense was choosing a
sacred king in the ancient ceremonial style. Pre-Christian legends
show that each king who ruled Britain had to be chosen by the Triple

Goddess, and later slain by her Crone form, Morgan, lady of the
blood-red pentacle and keeper of the Apple-Isle in the west. 10
Halloween apple-games descended from Celtic feasts of Samhain,
the Feast of the Dead at the end of October. Catching at apples
suspended from strings, or bobbing in water, may have invoked hanged
or drowned witches. The games hinted at cheating Death in the form
of Cerridwen, another name for Morgan as a Sow-goddess. At the end
of the game, all players ran away "to escape from the black short-
tailed sow." 11
Halloween apples were also used for divination, as if they were
oracular ghosts calledup from the underworld. Such magic was
especially associated with women, harking back to the pagan tradition of

Volsungs Teutonic female control of the spirits in that world. The Volsung cycle showed
clan of demigods man must be
that a provided with "apples of Hel" by his wife, whose
favored by Odin,
gift had the power to preserve him when he died and descended
who used a magic apple
under the earth. 12 Thus, Halloween apples were often linked with
to impregnate the
mother of the original marriage. One who peeled an apple before a candlelit mirror on
Volsung. His Halloween would see the image of a future spouse. 13
descendant Sigurd is
Apple blossoms were wedding flowers because they represented
better known as
the Virgin form of the Goddess whose maturity produced the fruit.
Siegfried, hero of the
Germanic Ring of
As the pagan symbols were Christianized, Apple-Eve-Mother-Goddess
the Nibelung. was said to be reborn as her own younger aspect, Rose-Mary- Virgin-
Goddess: the five-petaled rose and apple blossom often mystically
combined. The red and white Alchemical Rose was an allegory of the
14
Virgin Mother. Some mystics said Mary, called the Holy Rose,
had invented alchemy. 15
However, the dangerous aspect of apples associated with the
Goddess as Mother Death were never forgotten. Since she was not
only the Virgin and the Mother but also Hel, or Hecate, her apples
were often depicted in Christian folklore as poisoned. Churchmen

declared that a witch could cause demonic possession through her gift of
an apple to her intended victim. 16 Old women were slain for giving
an apple to a child or other person who later became afflicted with fits.
[Link]-Petre, 187. 2. Hollander, 39. 3. Turville-Petre, 200.
4. Graves, G.M. 2, 145-46; 277. 5. de Voragine, 67.
6. Book of the Dead, 454; Budge, E.L., 75. 7. Derlon, 1 57. 8. Groome, xlviii.

9. Malory 2, 274. 10. Loomis, 342. 1 1 Hazlitt, 297.

.

12. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 165. 13. de Lys, 365.

14. Campbell, M.I., 254. 15. Ashe, 213. 16. Haining, 70.

50
Arabia Arabia

Before Islam arrived in the 7th century a.d., Arabia was matriarchal
for over athousand years of recorded history. The Annals of Ashurbani-
pal said Arabia was governed by queens for as long as anyone could
remember. The 1
land's original Allah was Al-Lat,
part of the female
Annals of
along with Kore or Q're, the Virgin, and Al-Uzza, the
trinity
Ashurbanipal Assyrian
Powerful One, the triad known as Manat, the Threefold Moon. 2
royal chronicles on
At Mecca the Goddess was Shaybah or Sheba, the Old Woman, cuneiform tablets,

worshipped as a black aniconic stone like the Goddess of the dating from the 7th
Scyth-
ianAmazons. 3 The same Black Stone now enshrined in the Kaaba century B.C., found in
at
the king's famous
Mecca was her feminine symbol, marked by the sign of the yoni, and Nineveh by
library at
covered like the ancient Mother by a veil. 4 No one seems to know 19th-century
exactly what it is
supposed to represent today. archeologists.

The Black Stone the Haram, "Sanctuary," cognate of

rests in

"harem," which used to mean a Temple of Women: in Babylon, a

shrine of the Goddess Har, mother of harlots. 5 Hereditary guardians
of theHaram were the Koreshites, "Children of Kore," Mohammed's
own tribe. 6 The holy office was originally held by women, before it was
taken over by male priests calling themselves Beni Shaybah, "Sons of
the Old Woman." 7
Mohammed's legends clearly gave him a matriarchal family
background. His parents' marriage was matrilocal. His mother remained
with her own family and received her husband as an occasional
visitor. Mohammed lived with his mother until her death, because she
was parent according to the ancient system; "children
his true

belonged to the woman's family paternity in the biological sense was

. . .

8
relatively unimportant." She may well have been one of the "aged
9
priestesses" who served the temple in Mecca. The traditions of such

priestesses may well date back to Assyro- Babylonian um-mati or

"mothers," the only people permitted to enter the Holy of Holies.
Archaic Arabian shrines were usually served by seven high priest-
esses, recalling the lawgiving Seven Sages, who were women. 10 The Seven Sages Legendary
first collection of the books of law called Koran the Word of Kore, Greek
figures in both

or Q're was attributed to them. and Arabian lore,

identified with a variety
Pre-Islamic Arabia was dominated by the female-centered clans.
of seers and
Marriages were matrilocal, inheritance matrilineal. Polyandry philosophers, the
several husbands to one wife was common. Men lived in their wives' ones usually
earliest

homes. Divorce was initiated by the wife. If she turned her tent to female, confused with
the Seven Sisters, or
face east for three nights in a row, the husband was dismissed and for-
Pleiades.
bidden to enter the tent again. 11
Doctrines attributed to Mohammed simply reversed the ancient
system in favor of men. A Moslem husband could dismiss
his wife by

saying "I divorce thee" three times. Europe, the change from
As in

matriarchate to patriarchate came about only gradually and with

much strife.

SI
Arabia Many Koreshites remained faithful to the Goddess and to their
queen, Hind al-Hunud: the Hind of Hinds, similar to the title of
Lady of Victory. But her victories came to
Artemis. She was also called
an end with one of the last queens, whose husband betrayed her and
surrendered her city of Makkah to the enemy.

Legend claims the step-daughter of the divine Hind married

Mohammed himself. 12 However, the history of early-medieval Arabia
is nearly all legend. Like Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and other founders
of patriarchal religions, Mohammed lacks real verification. There is
no reliable information about his life or teachings. Most stories about
him are as apocryphal as the story that his coffin hangs forever in
mid-air "between heaven and earth," like the bodies of ancient sacred
13
kings.
With or without Mohammed, Islam succeeded in becoming com-
pletely male-dominated, making no place except in
for women
slavery or in the seclusion of the harem. Islamic mosques still bear signs

reading: "Women and dogs and other impure animals are not
H
permitted to enter."
Nevertheless, traces of the Goddess proved ineradicable. Like the
virgin Mary, Arabia's Queen of Heaven received a mortal form and a
subordinate position as Fatima, Mohammed's "daughter." But she was
no daughter. She was known as Mother of her Father, and
real

Source of the Sun: "the illumination that separates Light and Darkness;
the Tree of Paradise; the Red Cow who suckles all the children of the

World; the Moon; the Pure Essence of

earth; Fate; the Night, the
15
Being." Like her western counterpart Mary, she was compared to
the Burning Bush, and the Night of Power; "she personified the center
16
of the genealogical mystery."
Fatima's name means The Creatress. A Shi'a text, Omm-al-Kitab,
said she appeared "at the creation of the material world," crowned,
seated on a throne, holding a sword, and "ornamented with a million
varicolored shimmering lights" which illuminated the entire garden of

Paradise. She was the first to occupy the Seat of Dominion, "the
resting place of Allah, the Most High." 17 Her symbol as Holy Virgin,
18
the crescent moon, still appears on Islamic flags. She is called Al-
Shi'ites Minority sect Zahra, "Bright-Blooming," a former title of the Great Mother. It is
of Islam, tracing said the symbol of her hand, surmounting the solar disc, "represents the
descent of a sacred 19
whole religion of Islam."
caliphate from
Within Islam, deviant sects like Shi'ites or Sufis carried on Tantric
Mohammed's daughter
Fatima and her worship of the female principle, maintaining that the feminine
husband 'Ali. One line powers of sexuality and maternity were the powers that held the
of Shi'ites established universe together. 20 The greatest medieval poet of Sufism, Ibn al-
the powerful Fatimid
Farid, was known as "the sultan of lovers."
21
He said true divinity was
caliphate, now
female, and Mecca was the womb of the earth. As woman-worship-
represented by the
Khojas, Bohras, and ping minstrels of medieval Europe were attacked for their devotion to the
the Druze of Syria. Goddess of Love, so the Sufis were attacked for their "voluptuous

52
libertinism." Ibn El-Arabi, the "greatest master" of Sufi was
mystics, Arabia
accused of blasphemy because he said the godhead is female. 22
Shi'ites split off from

line of imams
orthodox Islam and claimed to follow a
descended from the Fatimids. In the 1 1th
purer ___^_^_^_
directly

century they united under Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, i.e., Hasan ben-
Shaybah, another "son of the Matriarch." Hasan seized the fortress
of Alamut and made it the headquarters of a brotherhood of
warriors,
the hashishim or "Assassins" (see Aladdin). The fortress fell to the
concerted attacks of Mongols and Mamelukes 1256, after having in

waged war on Turks and Christian crusaders alike for more than a
23
century.
Still the Shi'ite sect survived to the present,
awaiting the coming of
the Virgin named Paradise (Pairidaeza), who will give birth to the
Mahdi, the "moon-guided" Redeemer, whose title in Europe was the
Desired Knight. 24
One of the hidden secrets of medieval bardic romance is the
Arabian origin of the Waste Land motif, most prominent in the Holy
Grail cycle of tales. Despite monkish efforts to convert it into a
Christian chalice, the Grail was generally recognized as a female

symbol, whose loss implied fear for the fertility of the earth. Crusad-
ers had seen for themselves the desolation of Arabia Deserta, one of the

most lifeless regions on earth. They heard the Shi'ite heretics'

explanation for it: Islam had offended the Great Goddess, and she
had cursed the land and departed. Now nothing would grow there.
Western mystics thought the same calamity would strike Europe
if the spirit of the Mother were not brought back from the limbo to
which the Christian church consigned her. This may have been a

reason for the frenzy of cathedral-building in honor of "Our Lady," the

Queen of Heaven, during the 12th and 13th centuries. The Waste
Land theme haunted the collective psyche of the early Renaissance with
a threat of conditions actually realized in the land of the infidel.

Traces of the matriarchate survived to the present among some of

25
the Arabs of North Africa, ancient home of "Libyan Amazons."

Targi and Tuareg Berber women remained free of many sexual

restrictions. Virginity was not On remarriage, a woman could
prized.
command twice the bride-price of a young virgin. Men of the
Walad 'Abdi tribe insisted the success of their crops depended on the
sexual freedom of their women, whom the French labeled common
prostitutes. Hassanyeh Arabs of the White Nile allowed
wives to be
unfaithful on certain days of the week, according to the marriage
contract drawn up by the bride's mother who took pride in preserving
27
her daughter's sexual liberties. Most of Islam, however, restricted

women as much as possible. Many Islamic theologians said women

couldn't enter paradise, and must not receive religious instruction
28
because it might bring them "too near their masters."

[Link]. & Bab. Lit, 120. 2. de Riencourt, 193. 3. Sobol, 55. 4. Harding, 41.

53
Arachne 5. Pritchard, S.S., 95. 6. Shah, 390. 7. Briffault 3, 80. 8. de Riencourt, 188.
_ . 9. Briffault 3, 80. 10. Briffault 1, 377. 1 1 . de Riencourt, 187-89.
Ardhanansvara 12. Beard, pp. 293-94. 13. de Camp, A.E., 153. 14. Farb, W.P., 144.

^^^^^^^ 15. Lederer, 181. 16. Campbell, Oc.M., 446. 17. Campbell, Oc.M., 445-46.
18. Briffault 2, 630. 19. Budge, A.T., 469. 20. Bullough, 1 50.
21. Encyc. Brit., "Sufism." 22. Shah, 263, 319. 23. Encyc. Brit, "Assassins."
24. Lederer, 181. 25. Wendt, 52. 26. Briffault 1, 286; 3, 200, 314.
27. Hartley, 166. 28. Crawley 1, 58.

Arachne
c
"Spider" or "Spinner," title and totem of Athene the Fate-weaver.
Man's helplessness in the web of Fate was symbolized by the helpless-
ness of the fly in the spider's web. The fly was a common archaic
symbol of the human even thought to be the actual embodiment
soul,
of the soul in passage from one life to the next; thus divine

psychopomps like Baal-Zebub (Beelzebub) were called "Lord of

Flies" because they conducted souls.
1

Classical writers misinterpreted old images of Athene with her

spider-totem and web, and constructed the legend of Arachne, a

mortal maid whose skill in weaving outshone even that of the Goddess.
Therefore Athene turned her into a spider. 2
1. Spence, 95-96. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 98.

Aradia
Medieval name for the Queen of Witches, called a daughter of the
Goddess Diana. The name may have been a corruption of Herodias.
She represented the moon, and her brother Lucifer the Light-bringer
1

represented the sun.

1. [Link], 215.

Aramaiti
whose language
Iranian Earth-goddess, ancestress of the Aramaeans,
was the language of the Gospels. Ara-ma-iti seems to have
original
meant "mother of the people made of clay."

Ardhanarisvara
Bisexual image of the merging of Kali Ma and Shiva: a body female
on the left side, male on the Other gods followed the same
right side.
1

two-sexed pattern. Sometimes the deity was two-headed and four-

armed, though known as "the One." See Androgyne; Left Hand.
1. Larousse, 371.

54
Ariadne
Ariadne
"Most Holy" or "High Fruitful Mother," the younger form of the Arianism
Cretan Moon-goddess, worshipped
1
Dionysus. Hellenic myth disparaged her and
at Amathus as a consort of

made her a mere mortal

hh^^^
maiden who helped Theseus survive the Cretan
Labyrinth, ran away
with him, and was abandonedwhen he wearied of her. However, her
subsequent mating with the god showed that she was the rightful
bride of gods to begin with. 2
1. Graves, W.G., 93. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 347; 2, 381.

Ariana
Archaic name of Iran and its Great Goddess, sometimes rendered
Mariana.

Arianism
Early Christian heresy founded by Arius in the 4th century a.d. The
basic tenet of Arianismwas that God was not a trinity but a unit or
monad.
Orphics and other mystery-cultists of the early Christian era
maintained the classic trinitarian pattern laid down thousands of years
before by the Triple Goddess. They said: "All things are made by one
godhead in three names, and this god is all
things." From the
mystery-cults, some Christians picked up the idea that their deity too
should be a trinity. Other Christians objected, saying their deity must
be a monad like the Jewish Jehovah. St. Augustine found the notion of a
trinity incomprehensible. He scoffed at his pagan neighbors for
calling their Great Goddess three persons and one person at the same
1
time.
Neither the Old nor the New Testament mentioned a triune God,
so early Pauline Christians worshipped God as one individual. How-
ever, this monotheistic idea was abandoned at the 4th-century Council
of Nicaea. Arian Christians, clinging to the Hebraic belief in an
undivided God, suddenly found themselves labeled heretics. In increas-

ingly acrimonious battles, partisans of one viewpoint or the other

engaged in street fighting with stones and clubs, bloodying their oppo-
nents to prove the nature of their deity. 2
Arius's objections to the Holy Trinity were basically logical. He
insisted that a divine son couldn't have co-existed eternally with his

own divine father. There must have been a time when the father existed

alone, before bringing the son into being. But Arius's opponents
wanted to be assured that, in assimilating the body and blood of Christ

in communion, they partook of an infinite divinity who had existed

55
Arianrhod from the beginning of time. Otherwise they might be robbed of immor-
tality, through unwise identification
with a lesser, finite power.

^^^^^^^^^^^ Therefore they insisted that Christ and God were one and the same.
Besides, pagan traditions universally supported the notion that
divine fathers and sons were identical with each other, cyclically

alternating and united through the Mother. Proponents of the trinitar-

ian theory borrowed myths and symbols from the pagans, and said
when the Magi saw the star in the east announcing Christ's birth, three
suns appeared in the sky and fused into one. 3
The emperor Constantine I at first defended Arius, because he
liked the idea of a singlesupreme deity whom he might identify with
himself. He also disliked the Christians' incessant sectarian strife. He
wrote to Bishop Alexander: "I am sending to you, not simply suggest-
ing, but imploring that you will take these men (the Arians) back . . .

4
that there peace and concord among you all." This was ignored.
is

The Council decided that God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost were
one and the same, forever co-existent, equally potent. Arius was
anathematized and driven into exile. At last he succumbed to a dose of
5
poison, apparently administered by one of his trinitarian opponents.
But the battle was not over. The Arian controversy dragged on for
many centuries, and spilled much blood, as theological arguments
were wont to do in those days.

After 360 a.d., Arianism was carried by missionaries to the Ger-

manic tribes, whose Christianity remained a vaguely Arian semi-
6
paganism up to the time of Charlemagne and beyond. Arianism came
to the surface again in Hungary and Transylvania during the 16th

century. Christian writers then denied the trinity altogether, starting a

movement that led ultimately to the foundation of Unitarian churches. 7
l.Briffault3,90. 2. de Camp, A.E., 282. [Link] Voragine,49.
4. J.H. Smith, C.G., 242. 5. Gibbon 1, 694. 6. Encyc. Brit, "Arianism."

7. Encyc. Brit, "Unitarianism."

Arianrhod
Goddess mother of Celtic "Aryans," keeper of the endlessly circling
Silver Wheel of the Stars, symbol of Time, the same as Kali's kar-

mic wheel. Some gave the Goddess herself the title of "Silver Wheel
That Descends into the Sea."
l

Arianrhod's wheel was also the Wheel of Light, Wheel of Fal, or

Oar Wheel. It was often likened to a vast ship carrying dead warriors
to theMoon-land, called Magonia or Emania or Hy-Many. The wheel
was made by "three druidesses" that is, the Triple Goddess, who
2
created the cosmic wheel of the zodiac or the Milky Way. Arianrhod
seems to have been the same Goddess as Ariadne, another version
of the "mother of Aryans." 3
I. Briffault 3, 71. 2. Spence, 65, 152-53. 3. Graves, W.G., 93.

56
\rinna Arinna
-littite name
of the Great Goddess as "Mother of the Sun." In Ark
Mesopotamia and Egypt, the sun god was generally considered a child
)f the moon-, earth-, sea-, or heaven-goddess.

var. Arinniti

Vrk of the Covenant

)n its earliest appearances in the
Bible, the ark of the covenant was so
acer (taboo, dangerous) that it would kill at a touch. While it was

eing transported on an oxcart, it teetered "because the oxen shook

:" and would have fallen, had not Uzzah
"put forth his hand to the ark
if God, and took hold of it"
(2 Samuel 6:3). In spite of Uzzah's good
itentions, God instantly struck him dead for daring to touch the
loly object.

Again, when Philistia, God perpetrated an

the ark returned from

xtraordinary slaughter of 50,070 well-intentioned people for daring

3 look inside the ark in their
joy: "And he smote the men of

lethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even
e smote of tlfe people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and
le people lamented, because the Lord had smitten many of the
eople with a great slaughter" (1 Samuel 6:19).
Even priests feared the power of the ark, and resorted to ritual

/ashing before approaching it, "that they die not" (Exodus 30:20).
Vater was a common prophylactic charm against the destructive power
f holy things. Philon of Byzantium said all the "ancients" used water
)r ritual purification before entering temples; they also spun prayer-
'heels made of Aphrodite's sacred metal, copper. 1

For some reason God lost interest in his ark by Jeremiah's time:
Saith the Lord, they shall say no more, the ark of the covenant of
le Lord: neither shall it come to mind: neither shall they remember it;

either shall be magnified any more" (Jeremiah 3:16).

it

The probable cause of God's change of heart was a reform

lovement to purge the temple of sexual symbols. The arks or cistae of
le Greeks and Syrians held emblems of the lingam-yoni, such as eggs
nd serpents, clay or dough models of genitalia. Rabbinical tradition
lid the ark contained a
hexagram representing the sexual union of God
2
nd Goddess, the same meaning given to the hexagram in India.
'hus the ark was a female container for a male god. Mary, God's
Dnsort in her later form, often received the title of "Ark."

Semitic Arek, "ark," descended from Hindu Argha, "great ship,"

letaphorically the Great Yoni: a female-sexual vessel bearing seeds

and
f life
through the sea of chaos between destruction of one cosmos
reation of the next. 3 From the same root came "arcane," literally a

ark or crescent phase of the moon. The crescent moon boat symbol-
dancing on her primordial uterine Ocean
ed the Goddess's of
spirit

57
Armathr Blood, whose "clots" would form the lands and creatures of a new
Artemis universe. Noah's version of the Argha came to Palestine via Sumeria
^^^^^^^^^^ and Babylon (see Flood), but was intensively re-interpreted by Jewish
patriarchs anxious to eliminate the female principle.
1. de Camp, A.E., 122. 2. Silberer, 197. 3. Jobes, 121.

Armathr
"Mother of Prosperity," the Goddess incarnate in a sacred stone

revered by Icelandic chieftains, who ignored Christianity until the 1 1th

or 12th century a.d. Remote Iceland was among the last areas to be
1

Christianized; therefore the pagan sagas (Eddas) and other literature

survived the fires of censorship.

[Link]-Petre,230.

Artemidos, Saint
Fictitious Christian saint based on a votive idol of the Goddess
Artemis. In some traditions she remained female, but
1
in others she lost

even her femininity and was described as a holy man.

1. [Link], 227.

Artemis
Amazonian Moon-goddess, worshipped at Ephesus under the Latin
name of Diana or "Goddess-Anna." Like the Hindu Goddess Saranyu
who gave birth to all animals, she was called Mother of Creatures.
Her image at Ephesus had a whole torso covered with breasts, to show
that she nurtured all living things. Yet she was also the Huntress,
1
of the very creatures she brought forth. In Sparta her
killer name was
2
given as Artamis, "Cutter," or "Butcher."
Artemis's myths extend back to Neolithic sacrificial customs. At
Taurus her holy women, under their high priestess Iphigeneia,
sacrificed all men who landed on their shores, nailing the head of each
victim to a cross. 3 At Hierapolis, the Goddess's victims were hung on
her temple. In Attica, Artemis was ritually propitiated
artificial trees in

with drops of blood drawn from a man's neck by a sword, a symbolic

remnant of former beheadings. Human victims were later replaced by
4
bulls, hence the Goddess's title
Tauropolos, "bull-slayer."
Her Huntress aspect was another form of the destroying Crone or
waning moon. Like Hecate, she led the nocturnal hunt; her pries-
wore the masks of hunting dogs. Alani, "hunting dogs," was the
tesses

Greek name for Scythians who revered Artemis. The mythological

hunting dogs who tore the Horned God Actaeon to pieces were really
Artemis's sacred bitches.
Classic mythographers pretended that Actaeon committed the sin
of seeing the chaste virgin Goddess in her bath, and she condemned

Cft
him out of offended modesty. Actually, the bath, the nakedness, and the Artemis
tearing to pieces of the sacred king were all part of the drama. In
barbarian Germany, the Goddess's ritual bath could be witnessed
only
by "men doomed
5
to die." Actaeon's deerskin and antlers marked
him as the pre-Hellenic stag king,
reigning over the sacred hunt for half
a Great Year before he was torn to pieces and replaced
by his tanist
(co-king). In the first century a.d., Artemis's priestesses still pursued and
killed aman dressed as a stag on the Goddess's mountain. 6 Her
groves became the "deer-gardens" (German
Tiergarten, Swedish Djur-
garden), once the scene of venison feasts.
One of Artemis's most popular animal incarnations was the Great
She-Bear, Ursa Major, ruler of the stars and protectress of the axis Ursa Major "Great
mundi, Pole of the World, marked heaven by the Pole Star at the
in Bear," colloquially
center of the small circle described by the constellation Ursa Major. called the Big

Helvetian tribes in the neighborhood of Berne worshipped her as the Dipper, a circumpolar
constellation with
She-Bear, which is still the heraldic symbol of Berne. The city's very seven bright stars
name means "She-Bear." 7 Sometimes the Helvetians called her Artio, including the "north
shortened to Art by Celtic peoples who coupled her with the bear- pole pointers." For a
brief time the
king Arthur. As Artio's Lord of the Hunt, the medieval god of witches
constellation was
came to be known as "Robin son of Art." According to the Irish, Art
renamed Charles's
meant "God," but its earlier connotation was "Goddess" specifically after the chariot
Wain,
the Bear-Goddess. 8 She was also canonized as a Christian saint, of Charlemagne.

Ursula, derived from her Saxon name of Ursel, the She-Bear.

There was a rather sophisticated astronomical reason for worship-

ping the heavenly She-Bear who followed her track around the Pole

by year. It was probably discovered first in the far east. "The

Star, year
months and seasons are determined by the revolution of Ursa Major.
The tail of the constellation pointing to the east at nightfall announces
the arrival of spring, pointing to the south the arrival of summer,

pointing to the west the arrival of autumn, and pointing to the north the
arrival of winter. . . . The Great Bear occupies a prominent position
in the Taoist heavens as the aerial throne of the supreme deity." This
deity in Taoist tradition is the Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother Ma
Tsu P'o, with characteristics similar to those of Artemis. She protects
seafarersand governs the weather; she is called a virgin, and Matron
of the Measure; she is a Mother of Mercy who has been compared to
9
the virgin Mary and to the Buddhist Goddess Maritchi.
The axis mundi was often associated with male gods, as either a
Great Serpent or a World Tree more or less recognized as a phallic
symbol. Similarly the Little Bear within the circle of the Great Bear was
pictured by the Greeks as Areas, her son (see Callisto). Yet among
the oldest traditions may be found hints that this world-supporting tree

or pole was female. Even as Yggdrasil, the World Tree of the

Vikings, showed many parallels with birth-giving, fruit- or milk-
it

producing mother trees of the Near East, under its older

name of
Mjotvidr or Mutvidr, "Mother-Tree." Sometimes it was Mead-Tree,
"the milk-giving tree of the Finno-Ugric peoples, a symbol which
like

must go back to Mesopotamia, and be of great antiquity." It

ultimately

59
Artha was said that "the tree is the source of unborn souls," which would
Arthur
give birth to thenew primal woman, Life (Lif) in the new universe after
the present cycle came to an end. Its fruit could be given to women
in childbirth "that what is within may pass out." The spring at the tree's
root was a fountain of wisdom or of the life-giving fluid aurr, which
may be likened to the "wise blood" of the Mother that much-
mythologized feminine life-source likened to the Kula nectar in the
if the maternal tree upholding the
uterine spring of Kundalini, as
10
universe were the Mother's spine with its many chakras. See
Menstrual Blood.
"Many-breasted" Artemis was always a patroness of nurture,
Tatian 2nd-century fertility, and birth. Male gods turned against these attributes in
Christian apologist of
opposing the cult of the Goddess. Her own twin brother and sometime
Greek education and
consort Apollo made birth illegal on his sacred isle of Delos;
Gnostic leanings. His
doctrine absolutely pregnant women had to be removed from the island lest they offend the
forbade marriage for all god by giving birth there. 11 Christians continued to vilify Artemis.
Christians. Tatian said, "Artemis is a poisoner; Apollo performs cures."
12
The
Gospels demanded destruction of Artemis's Ephesian temple (Acts
[Link] Chrysostom, 19:27). St. John Chrysostom preached against this temple in 406 a.d.
"Golden-mouthed Soon afterward, it was looted and burned. The patriarch of Constan-
John," 4th-century tinople praised Chrysostom's zeal: "In Ephesus he stripped the treasury
Christian orator who
of Artemis; in Phrygia, he left without sons her whom they called the
served as Patriarch of
Mother of the Gods." 13 See Diana.
Constantinople until he
incurred the wrath of 1. Neumann, G.M., 276 (pi. 35). 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 86. 3. Herodotus, 244.
4. G.M. 1, 86; 2, 79.
Graves, 5. Tacitus, 728. 6. Graves, G. M. 1, 85.
the empress Eudoxia,
7 Urousst, 226. 8. Joyce 1, 249. 9. Williams, 30, 336-38, 371-73.
who arranged to 10. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 195. 11. Halliday, 29. 12. Graves, W.G., 433.
have him deposed and 13. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 175.

exiled.

Artha
Sanskrit "Riches" or "Abundance," root of Indo-European names
for Mother The Earth Mother Frigg
Earth: Ertha, Hretha, Eortha, etc.

(Freya) also bore a name meaning Wealth; so did Rhea-Pluto, Ops

Opulentia, and Terra Mater. See Earth.

Arthur

King Arthur was the Welsh Arth Vawr, Heavenly Bear. His prede-
was Uther Pendragon, "Wonderful Head of the
cessor or "father"

Dragon." Where did the dragon's head precede the bear? At the
1

hub of the heavens, which the ancients always anxiously watched.

In the 3rd millenium b.c, the north pole star was not the present
Polaris in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. It was Alpha Draconis, the
Head of the Dragon. 2 Due to precession of the equinoxes, a slow subtle

shift of the celestial pole took place over the course of 5000 years.
However difficult it may have been to observe, the ancients seem to

60
have known about it. India as well as Britain placed the former north Arthur
pole in the constellation of the Dragon. The Mahabharata said the pole
star, to which "the yoke of the world" was fixed, was the head of the

Great Serpent. 3
Greeks said the little bear-god who
replaced the serpent was Areas,
ancestor of the Arcadians. His mother was Artemis Calliste, the Mahabharata
Great She-Bear who used to rule all the stars.
4
As Ursa Major, she still
Indian epic poem,

circles the [Link] Europeans called her Artio, Art, Ursel, or consisting of historical
and legendary
Ercel. 5 Arthur was a Celtic version of her son, spouse, sacred
king. material gathered
Arthur was another humanization of an old pagan god apparent- between the 4th and
ly very old, for he had no credible human parentage but rather many 10th centuries a.d.,

contradictory miraculous-birth myths. Some said he had no father. Like including the famous

the Norse god Heimdall and the Saxon hero Scyld, he was born of Bhagavad-Gita.

the Ninefold Sea-goddess and cast ashore on the ninth wave, to land at
Merlin's feet. 6 Bulfinch's Mythology said Arthur's father was Ambro-
sius, an earlier name for Merlin.
The story of Uther Pendragon's fatherhood of Arthur bears marks
of strained revision. Arthur's royal mother was married to Uther's
rival at the time. Uther was far away, but with Merlin's help he sent his

spirit to her in the guise of her husband, while the latter was being
Arthur was begotten at the instant his official father died. He was
killed.

taken away by Merlin to be raised in a secret place until he came of

age the cliche secret upbringing of every sacred king's career.

Arthur's mother was really the Triple Goddess, incarnate in the

queen as usual. Her three daughters represented herself in triad:

Elaine, the virgin Lily Maid; Margawse, mother of the four Aeons;
Morgan, Queen of the Shades. Arthur later coupled with his sister
Margawse and incestuously begot his own son-nephew-supplanter,
Mordred, who was likewise taken away at birth to be raised in hiding.
As Galahad was the reincarnated Lancelot, so Mordred was the
reincarnated Arthur, destined to succeed him by both matrilineal and

patrilineal right, as both sister's-son and son. Like all kings threatened by
the Oedipal rival, Arthur tried to Mordred by a Slaughter of the
kill

Innocents. He collected all the children born on May Day, the birthday
of his prophesied supplanter, put them on a ship, and sent them out
Welsh Triads
to sea to be wrecked. Of course Mordred survived the wreck and grew Poetic literature of pre-
8
up to return incognito to Arthur's court. Christian Wales, drawn
Arthur lost his sacred mana when he lost his queen, the Triple from the bards' oral

Goddess incarnate in Guinevere, who was really three Guineveres tradition.

9 thus symbolically
according to the Welsh Triads. Mordred seized her,
to his death. Ninefold Goddess
seizing the kingdom, and brought Arthur
When Arthur died, the same Triple Goddess took him back into The triple trinity, as

"Three carried him away to exemplified by the

the sea that gave him birth. fairy queens"
Nine Muses of Greece,
the western isles of paradise, singing his death-song, the kind of song the Nine Sisters of
10
Welsh bards called marwysgafen giving-back-to-the-sea-mother. Scandinavia, the Nine
The of the Ninefold Morgans of the
three fairy queens were really the final triad
alter egos: the Queen of Fortunate Isles, etc.
Goddess, Morgan le Fay and two of her

61
Aryan Northgallis (i.e., North Gaul, or Brittany), and the Queen of the
11
Asceticism Westerlands, which meant the isles of the dead. These isles were
said to be ruled by nine fairy sisters, the leader of whom was Morgan.

Arthur's legends generally suggest no human king, but a Brythonic

god, whom Johnson called a Celtic Zeus.

12
He may have been
BrythonicOfthe incarnate in one or several warrior kings for brief periods, but his basic
Britishbranch of Celts,
story was mythic rather than historical.
including speakers of
1. Hitching, 242. Encyc. Brit, "Precession of the Equinoxes."
2.
the Welsh, Cornish,
3. O'Flaherty, 274, 131.4. Graves, G.M. 1, 86. 5. Joyce 1, 249.
and Breton [Link],L.M.A.,215. 7. Hallet, 388. 8. Malory 1, 35,45. 9. Malory 1 ,
xxiv.

10. Encyc. Brit, "Welsh Literature." 1 1 Guerber, L.M.A., 232.

languages. .

12. Johnson, 85.

Aryan
General name for Indo-European peoples, from Sanskrit arya, a man
of clay(like Adam), or else a man of the land, a farmer or land-
owner. 1
The ancestral god of "Aryans" was Aryaman, one of the
twelve zodiacal sons of the Hindu Great Goddess Aditi. In Persia he
became known as Ahriman, the dark earth god, opponent or
subterranean alter ego of the solar deity Ormazd (Ahura Mazda). In
Celtic Ireland he was Eremon, one of the sacred kings who married
the Earth (Tara).
there was nothing "pure" about either the name or the
Though
far-flung mixture of tribes it was supposed to describe, the term

"pure Aryan" was revived in Nazi Germany to support a mythological

concept of Teutonic stock, the so-called Master Race. Non-Aryans
were all the "inferior" strains: Semites, Negroes, gypsies, Slavs, and
Latinate or "swarthy" people whose blood was said to be polluting
the Nordic superiority of their betters.
1. Potter & Sargent, 33.

Asceticism
The such as practiced by early Christian
religion of self-denial,
eremites, characterized by self-inflicted pain, hunger, and other auster-
ities, and renunciation of sensual pleasures.
Perhaps the earliest sectaries to regard asceticism as the key
to heaven were Jain Buddhists (see Jains), whose theology influenced
Persian patriarchs, who in turn influenced Jewish eremites like the
Essenes. Jain Buddhist monks had already penetrated the courts of
Syria, Egypt, Macedonia, and Epirus by the 4th century B.C., and
were glorified in legend for the alleged magic powers they developed
1
through prodigies of self-denial.
Originally, men's ascetic practices seem to have evolved from a
notion that extreme forms of self-denial would bring them the
magical female capacity to give birth. Oriental myths said the first

62
creator-gods acquired the ability to produce living things by "practic- Asceticism
2
ing fierce asceticism for ten thousand years."
Though men never
achieved the ability to give birth,
they claimed
other miraculous powers developed by asceticism. Perfected eremites
were said to
fly, to walk on
water, to
understand all languages, to turn
base metals into gold, to heal lameness and blindness, and other
miracles that became the common property of all scriptures
including
the Christian ones. 5

Jain Buddhists looked upon women as hopelessly inferior in the

pursuit of asceticism. Their handbook said no woman could achieve
Nirvana, because "in the womb, between the breasts, in their navel and
loins, a subtle emanation of life is continually taking place. How then
can they be fit for self-control? A woman
may be pure in faith and even
occupied with a study of the sutras or the practice of a terrific
4
asceticism; in her case there will be no falling away of karmic matter."
Some of the ascetics openly despised sexuality and motherhood.
The Mahabharata anticipated St. Augustine's remarks about the Mahabharata
nastiness of birth: "-Man emerges mixed with excrement and water, Indian epic poem,

fouled with the impurities of woman. A wise man will avoid the consisting of
historical and legendary
contaminating society of women as he would the touch of bodies material gathered
infested with vermin."
5
Some advertised their renunciation of sex by between the 4th and
castrating themselves or affixing large metal rings in the flesh of the 10th centuries a.d.,

penis.
6
including the famous

Essenic Judaism and early Christianity were offshoots of the Jain Bhagavad-Gita.

tradition, urging abandonment of the family and of all secular

concerns. 7 Like the art of the Jains, Christian art in the early medieval

period showed stiff, crude, doll-like figures, apparently bodiless under

their wooden draperies, even hands and faces badly drawn. Not even
artists were permitted to study the human form. 8 To look at some-
thing attractive especially if it was made of flesh was highly suspect
because the observer might enjoy the act of looking. According to St.

Jerome, a Christian must consider poisonous every act or experience

9
having the smallest hint of sensual pleasure.
Pain, however, was permitted and encouraged throughout the
Christian era. [Link] of Siena was highly praised for whipping
herself three times a day, once for her own sins, once for the sins of the

living, and once for the sins of the dead. St. Simeon Stylites
was
Buddhist
glorified for remaining motionless on top of his pillar, like
10
standing-yogis, until his living flesh rotted.
Fathers of the church constantly urged asceticism upon the faith-
ful. Gregory of Nyssa touted it in terms of both wetness and dryness:
"As the tympanum, from which all moisture has been removed so that it

which
is
exceedingly dry, gives out a loud noise, so also is virginity,
"
receives no life-giving moisture, illustrious
and renowned." Again he
said: "We often see water, contained in a pipe, bursting upward
this which will not let it leak,and this in
through constraining force,
spite of its natural gravitation; in the same way the mind of man,

63
Asceticism enclosed in the compact channel of an habitual continence, and not

having any side issues, will be raised by virtue of its natural powers of
motion an exalted love." n
^B|^B^^^^Bi^^ to

Moral tales told by the Christian fathers concentrated on renuncia-

tion of sexual love, and acceptance of painful martyrdom. The tale of
Sts. Cyprian and Justina is typical. Cyprian, a pagan sorcerer, fell in love

with the Christian maiden Justina and cast a love spell on her.

Though sworn to virginity like all good Christian maidens, Justina was
tortured by desire. Nevertheless she conquered her desire and proved
her piety with such prodigies of asceticism that she impressed even

Cyprian: she fasted almost to death, she slept naked on the stony
13
ground, she mutilated herself to spoil her beauty. Cyprian was so
intrigued by all this he turned Christian too, and was martyred along
with his incorrigible virgin. 14
Human love was anathema to the early Christians who insisted

that families must be abandoned. Sexual impulses were perverted

into unnatural obsessions. 15 The fall of Rome was not entirely unrelated
to Christians' abhorrence of the basic social unit of the state: the
interlocked loyalties and dependencies of the family. Jesus himself
undermined the family in his teaching: "If any man come to me, and
hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and breth-

ren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"
(Luke 14:26). Becker says Christianity stood for "renunciation of this
world and the satisfactions of this life, which is why the pagans thought
Christianity was crazy. It was a sort of anti-heroism by an animal who
16
denied life in order to deny evil."

Principles of asceticism so embedded themselves in Christian

society that nearly every kind of sensual pleasure came to be regarded
aswicked only because it was pleasant. The delights of sacramental
dancing were forbidden. A story from Ramersdorf in the Rhine-
land of a Christian missionary priest who found youths and maidens
tells

dancing together on the Sabbath. He called God's curse on them,

which forced them to go on dancing day and night until they lost their
minds. 17 Some European peasants still abstain from sexual inter-
course during the sowing season, in the church-fostered belief that
sexual activity might call down a curse on the crop. 18
In the 18th century, theologians were still
preaching the wicked-
ness of even the most subtle feelings of pleasure. Beaumont
counseled women especially to attribute any enjoyable bodily sensation
to the devil's influence: "If ye perceive a your sudden sweet taste in

mouths or feel any warmth in any form of

your breasts, like fire, or

pleasure in any part of your body, or ... if ye become aware by

occasion of pleasure or satisfaction derived from such perception, that

your hearts are drawn away from the contemplation of Jesus Christ
and from spiritual exercises then this sensation is very much to be
. . .

suspected of coming from the Enemy; and therefore were it ever so

19
wonderful and striking, still renounce it." Yet the obsessive contem-

64
plation of pain, starting with Jesus's pain on the cross, was always to Asceticism
be encouraged.
The most significant difference between Christianity and its
pagan ^^^^^^^^^_
forerunners was this reversal of the pleasure-pain continuum. Earlier
societies regarded sensual pleasure as a touch of
divinity, and "bliss"
sexual or otherwise as a foretaste of heaven. Woman was a carrier
of the divine spark because of her capacity to give and receive
physical
pleasure. The Christian theory turned this opinion completely
around. Fathers of the church taught that the human race must die out

through universal celibacy, before Jesus could return and establish his
heaven on earth. Reasoning that man fell from grace through woman,
man could return to grace only by renouncing woman. 20 Therefore,
medieval churchmen came to identify sexuality with the worst of

heresies and sins, especially since St. Augustine had labeled it the

pipeline of original sin. Even Protestant theologians adopted this view.

Calvin said that, because of its origin
in sexuality and in a woman's

body, every child was "defiled and polluted" in God's sight even before
it saw the light of the day; a newborn infant is a "seed-bed of sin and
therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God." Martin Luther
married an ex-nun, but still didn't think much of sex. He said, "Had
God consulted me in the matter, I would have advised him to continue

the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay." 21

This note of arrogance, even hubris, in the idea of man issuing
instructions to God, was always a hidden component of asceticism,
despite its outward show of extreme or unnatural humility. "Nothing is

prouder than the humility of the ascetic of other-worldly spirit that

proclaims itself superior to the whole natural world, or than the
mysticism that renounces the self only to commune with God
himself." 22 Here lies the real reason for men's secret delight in ascetic

principles and practices. It must be remembered that the original

purpose of such self-denial was to become identified with a god and to

acquire God's sacred powers for one's self.

Becoming god meant acquiring the ability to perform miracles, as

a

many Christian ascetics were supposed to have done. By definition,

miracles flouted the laws of nature. Thus the ascetic became deliberate-

ly un-natural, confusing the denial of his own instinctual desires with

denial of Mother Nature's observed habits. Ascetic ideals therefore

with each other. "Asceticism the

placed body and
is
spirit in conflict
ethical code which arises inevitably from a dualistic opposition between
the spiritual and the natural. are represented as absolutely irre-
These
concilable and mutually antagonistic; if a man is to escape the natural he
must renounce the rights of his physical nature in the interests of his
25
The much
psychic problem of such dualistic opinion
is still
spiritual."
in evidence.
1. Campbell, CM., 146. 2. 0'Flaherty, 32, 47.
237.
3. Menen, 93; Tatz & Kent, 167; Bardo Thodol, 58. 4. Campbell, Or.M.,
1

8. Zimmer, 56
5. Menen, 17. 6. Rawson, E.A., 48. 7. Campbell, Or.M., 279.
12. Mumford, 139.
[Link], 145. 10. Encyc. Brit, "Simeon." 11. Ashe, 176.

65
Asherah !' Ashe, 178. 14. Attwater, 97. 1 5. H. Smith, 228-29. 16. Becker, E.E., 1 54.

..... . [Link],L.R., 111. 18. Fra/er, G.B., 159. 19. Silherer, 284-85.
Ash Wednesday 2 0. Lederer, 165. 21. Holmes, 35, 71. 22. Muller, 32. 23. Angus, 219.

Asherah
Semitic name of the Great Goddess, possibly from Old Iranian asha,
"Universal Law," a law of the matriarch, like Roman ius naturale. 1
2
Asherah was "in wisdom the Mistress of the Gods." Sumerians
called herAshnan, "strength of all things," and "a kindly and bountiful
maiden." 3 Her sacred city Mar-ash appears in the Bible as Mareshah
(Joshua 15:44).
The Old Testament "Asherah" is translated "grove," without any
explanation that the sacred grove represented the Goddess's genital
center, birthplace of all things. In the matriarchal period, Hebrews
worshipped the Goddess in groves (1 Kings 14:23), later cut down by
patriarchal reformers who burned the bones of Asherah's priests on their
own altars (2 Chronicles 24:4-5).
The Goddess's grove-yoni was Athra qaddisa, "the holy place"
(literally, "divine harlot"). Sometimes she was called simply "Holi-

ness," a word later applied to Yahweh. Canaanites called her Qaniyatu

elima, She Who Gives Birth to the Gods, or Rabbatu athiratu
yammi, Lady Who Traverses the Sea (i.e., the Moon). 4 Rabbatu was an
early female form of rabbi. Athirat, Athra, Aethra, Athyr, and Egypt's
Hathor were all variations of the Goddess. 5 In Egypt
same name for the

she was also a Law-giving Mother, Ashesh, an archaic form of Isis;

the name meant both "pouring out" and "supporting," the functions of
her breasts. Her yonic shrine in Thebes was Asher, Ashrel, or Ashrelt.
Some called her "Great Lady of Ashert, the lady of heaven, the queen
of the gods." 6
For a while, Asherah accepted the Semitic god El as her consort.
She was the Heavenly Cow, he the Bull. 7 After their sacred marriage,
she bore the Heavenly Twins, Shaher and Shalem, the stars of morning
and evening (see Lucifer). The marriage rite seems to have involved
the cooking of a kid in its mother's milk, a procedure later forbidden by
8
Jewish priests (Exodus 23:19).
1. Larousse, 312; Bachofen, 192. 2. Larousse, 76. 3. Hays, 57; Hooke, M.E.M., 27.

4. Albright, 121,210. 5. Hooke, M.E.M., 70. 6. Budge, G.E. 2, 90. 7. Larousse, 74.
8. Hooke, M.E.M., 93

Ash Wednesday
This allegedly Christian festival was taken from Roman paganism,
which in turn took it from Vedic India. Ashes were called the seed of
the fire god Agni, with power to absolve all sins. Even if a man does
"a thousand things that one ought not to do, by bathing in ashes he will
cause all of that to be burnt to ashes as fire burns a forest with its ener-

gy." Another source said ashes stood for the purifying blood of Shiva, in

66
which one could bathe away sins, as Christians bathed in the blood of Asmodeus
the Lamb. 1
Ass
At Rome's New Year Feast of Atonement in March, people wore
and bathed 2
sackcloth in ashes to atone for their sins. Then as now,
New Year's Eve was a carnival of eating, drinking, and sinning, on the
theory that all sins would be wiped out the following day. As the
dying god of March, Mars took his worshippers' sins with him into
death. Therefore the carnival fell on dies martis, the Day of Mars. In

English was Tuesday, because Mars was identified with the Saxon
this

god Tiw. In French the carnival day was Mardi Gras, "Fat Tues-
day," the day of merrymaking before Ash Wednesday.
A
Catholic directory of 1 5 1 1 ordered priests to say to the congre-

gation on Ash Wednesday, "Remember, man, you are ashes and to

ashes will return." Fuller's Church History said the purpose of Ash Fuller's Church
Wednesday was to remind every man that he is "but ashes and earth, History A monumental
and thereto shall return." 5 These maxims oddly contradicted the history of the English
church by Thomas
church's official doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. Their purpose
Fuller (1608-1661).
was to justify with* some Christian gloss the ancient notion that

redemption might be brought about by contact with ashes.

1. O'Flaherty, 148-49, 174. 2. Encyc. Brit., "Ash Wednesday." 3. Hazlitt, 19.

Asmodeus
Christian demon often credited with possessing nuns or young Book of Tobit One
women to make them lustful, because he was portrayed in the Book of of the Apocrypha, once

Tobit as a of lechery. Tobit's Asmodeus was really "the god accepted as part of
spirit
the Judeo-Christian
Asmo," or Aeshma, a Persian deity associated with Ahriman. Zoroastri-
canon of sacred
an may have brought about his original diabolization because
priests scriptures but later elim-
of an archaic connection with the Goddess Ma. 1
inated from the
official canon.
1 . Larousse, 3 1 8.

Ass
The ass-god Pales had an extensive cult throughout the ancient
world. Palestine, Philistia, and the Palatine Hill in Rome were named
for Pales, who was both male and female. 1

The Old Norse word Ass meant both "Asian" and "deity,"
in Asia.
2
The pre-
possibly indicating that the divine ass originated
Vedic sacred king Ravana sported ten crowned human heads
of the ass god
surmounted by one symbolizing the spirit
ass head,

incarnate in ten kings. The long ears of the ass seem to have had
3 the

the horns of the sacred

same significance of virility in ancient India as Cornelius Tacitus
bull or stag. 4 Roman historian
asses were and
Tacitus said the Jews worshipped the ass because wild rhetorician, ca.
5 to Genesis 36:24, 56-120 a.d.
responsible for their survival in the desert. According

67
Ass it was the tribal matriarch Anah, or Hannah, who first found asses in the
wilderness. Balaam's oracular she-ass may have been a manifestation of
the spirit of Anah, as Balaam himself was another name for Baal.
Samson slew the Philistines with an ass's jawbone, the same bone still
6
regarded as a seat of the soul by some African tribes. Jesus entered

Jerusalem on an ass's colt, symbol of the New Year. The lilim or

Children of Lilith were ass-haunched, for they were spirits left over
from the real source of the Jewish ass-cult: Egypt, home of the ass-

headed god Set, or Seth.

Set once ruled the dynastic gods, and in token of his sovereignty

displayed a pair of ass's ears at the tip of a reed scepter. The Hyksos
kings of Egypt revived Set's cult in the 2nd millenium B.C., perhaps
because their own ass-eared Midas was a similar god-king. The annual
alternation of Set and his brother Osiris (or Horus), who murdered each
other in perpetual rivalry for the favors of Isis, reflected constant

replacement of sacred kings in pre-dynastic times. 7

Ass-eared king Midas, a son of Cybele, died of drinking bull's

blood. In other words, he was connected with the Taurobolium or bull-
sacrifice made honor of both Cybele and Isis. Midas has been
in

identified with Mita ("Seed"), a king of the Moschians or "calf-men,"

who invaded the country of the Hittites from Thrace during the second
millenium B.C. Midas's Golden Touch and ass's ears link him with the
cult of Set and the Golden Calf (Horus), whose image was worshipped
by the Israelites (Exodus 32:2-4).
Under Egypt's Hyksos kings, Set was a god of the hot desert wind,
known as the Breath of the Ass. He was "Lord of the Chambers of the
8
South," whence storm winds came. His wind from the desert was
supposed to bring pestilence, i.e., typhus, derived from Set's Greek
name, Typhon. This name was interlingual and world-wide. It meant
both the ass god and the wind called tufan in Arabic and Hindustani; t'ai
9
fung Chinese; and tuffbon or Typhoon in the South Pacific.
in

Ass-headed Set was a sacrificial deity in the cult of Horus and

Osiris. He was crucified on a furka and wounded in the side. 10 He and
Horus were represented as alternating year-gods who fought and
castrated one another, each being baptized in the blood of the other's

Pyramid Texts Col- "phallic eye," as thePyramid Text said: "Horus is purified with the
lections of prayers,
Eye of his brother Set; Set is purified with the Eye of his brother
hymns, and magic Horus." n The Eye or phallus passed from one to the other. A statue
on the
spells inscribed
of Horus at Coptos carried Set's severed phallus in his hand. 12 After
inner walls of the

pyramids at Saqqarah castrating Set, Horus spread his blood on the fields to render them
(Sakkara), dating fertile the usual fructification-by-male-blood found in the oldest sacri-
from the 5 th through ficial
13
Mysteries.
7th dynasties.
Thus, Set and Horus were remnants of a primitive sacred-king
cult, which the Jews adopted. The story of the rival gods appeared in
the Bible as Seth's supplanting of the sacrificed shepherd Abel, evidently

68
 the same "Good Shepherd" as Osiris-Horus
(Genesis 4:25). Their Assassins
rivalry was resolved in
Egypt by having the pharaoh unite both gods in Astarte
himself. Tomb paintings of Rameses IV showed him as both
Set and
Horus, two heads set upon one neck. 14
Similarly, the Jewish God uniting both Father and Son was
sometimes an ass-headed man crucified on a tree. This was one of the
earliest representations of the Messiah's crucifixion. Some said Christ
was the same as the
Jewish ass-god Iao, identified with Set. 15 Jews in
Rome were said to worship an ass's head as their deity. 16
The Roman cult of the ass apparently originated in Libya, home of
the bisexual Pales, whose temple stood on the Palatine Hill and
gave
17
rise to the word "palace." Servius said Pales was a Goddess, the Diva
Palatua, a disguise of Vesta. Others said Pales was either a female

protectress of herd animals, or Vesta's male consort. In the first two

centuries a.d., Pales was worshipped as a
priapic god at the festival of
the Palilia, traditional date of the founding of Rome, when the Palladi-
um was brought to Vesta's temple. 18 Priests of Pales wore ass-head
masks as they danced in honor of the long-eared deity. The Palilia was
taken into the Christian calendar as the Feast of St.
George. One of
its old customs may have given rise to the Halloween game of "Pin the
Tail on the Donkey," which recalls Rome's sacrifices of equine tails
19
triumphantly carried to the temple of Vesta.
I. Lumusse, 209. 2. Turville-Petre, 23.3. Norman, 123. 4. Rawson, E.A., 25.

5. Tacitus, 658. 6. Book of the Dead, 270-71. 7. Graves, G.M. 1, 283-84.

8. Graves, W.G., 301. 9. Encyc. Brit, "Typhoon." 10. Campbell, M.I., 29.
II. Norman, 42. 12. Knight, S.L., 124. 13. Budge, G.E. 2, 59.
14. Norman, 38, 48. 15. M. Smith, 62. [Link], 53. 17. Briffault 3, 18.
1 8. Lumusse, 209. 1 9. Dume/il, 221.

Assassins

European mispronunciation of the Saracenic brotherhood of hash i-

shim, "hashish-takers," who fought Christian crusaders in the

Holy Land. See Aladdin.

Astarte

Lady of Byblos, one of the oldest forms of the Great Goddess in the The Bible calls her
Asherah or Ashtoreth,
Middle East, identified with Egypt's Hathor, Mycenae's Demeter,
the Goddess wor-
Cyprus's Aphrodite.
shipped by Solomon
Her shrineByblos dated back to the Neolithic and flourished
at
(1 Kings 11:5).
Bronze Age. She was the same creating-preserving-
1
throughout the
and
and-destroying Goddess worshipped by all Indo-European cultures,
still
typified by Kali as the symbol of Nature. Astarte was the "true

sovereign of the world," tirelessly creating and destroying, eliminating

69
Aster the old and generating the new. 2 Sidonian kings could not rule
Astraea without her permission. Each king styled himself first and foremost
"Priest of Astarte."
seals from Lagash, ca. 2300 B.C., showed the
Sumerian cylinder
Goddess pose identical with Kali's love-and-death sacramental
in a
To the Arabs the 5
posture, squatting on top of her consort's body.
Goddess was Athtar,
Astarte ruled all the spirits of the dead who lived in heaven wearing
"Venus in the
bodies of light, visible from earth as stars. Hence, she was known as
Morning." In Aramaic
she was Attar-Sa- Astroarche, "Queen of the Stars." 6 She was the mother of all souls in
mayin, "Morning Star heaven, the Moon surrounded by her star-children, to whom she
of Heaven," uniting
gave their "astral" (starry) bodies. Occultists speak of the astral body still
two sexes in herself, like
as an invisible double, having forgotten the word's original connota-
Lucifer the Morning
tion of starlight. 7
Star and Diana Luci-
fera. Her Hurrian Astarte-Ashtoreth was transformed into a devil by Christian writ-
name was Attart, or ers, who
automatically assumed that any deity mentioned in the Bible
sometimes Ishara, other than Yahweh was one of the denizens of hell. She was also
another form of Ishtar,
masculinized. One finds in books of the 1 5th and 16th centuries a
"the Star." 4 To Ca-
demon Ashtoreth or Astaroth, a "duke" or "prince" of hell. 8 Milton
naanites, she was
Celestial Ruler, Mis- knew better; he spoke of "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent
tress of Kingship, horns." 9
mother of all baaJim Scholars who really understood the mystery of Astarte recognized
5
(gods). inher one of the ancient prototypes of the virgin Mary. In Syria and

Egypt her sacred dramas celebrated the rebirth of the solar god from the
Virgin each 25th of December. A newborn child was
celestial

went up that the Virgin had brought forth.

exhibited, while the cry
Frazer says, "No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a
son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess
whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly
10
Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte."
1. Encyc. Brit, "Byblos." 2. Massa, 101. 3. Campbell, Or. M., 42.
4. Albright, 196, [Link], 164. 6. Lindsay, O.A., 327. 7. Cavendish, P.E., 44.
5.

[Link], 132. 9. Cavendish, RE., 237. 10. Frazer, G.B., 416.

Aster

"Star," Plato's name for Lucifer, the biblical god of the Morning
[Link] was perceived as a cyclic deity, attending the sun into the
1

underworld at sunset, and also announcing "He is risen" in the

morning.
1. Lindsay, O.A., 94.

Astraea

"Starry One," a Roman title of the Libyan Goddess of holy law,

Libra or Libera, symbolized by the Scales of Judgment now enshrined

70
in the zodiac as Libra. Like Minerva, Athene, Maat, and other
Astrology
manifestations of the same Goddess, she was characterized as a celestial
Virgin dispensing the fates of men. See Virgo.

Astrology
Study of the stars has been called "the basis of all intellectual
culture." was highly refined by the Chaldeans, who were simulta-
'
It

neously astronomers and astrologers. Unlike modern "Chaldeans,"

they were moon worshippers, basing their system almost entirely on the
movements of the Moon-goddess. Their zodiac was known as
Houses of the Moon. 2
Apparently a majority of moon-watchers were women, the pries-
tesses charged with determining correct seasons for planting and
harvest, drawing up calendars, etc. Pliny said the study of the heavens,
to foretell events such as eclipses, was traditionally the business of
women. He suspected the priestesses' magic didn't cause eclipses, but
rather foresaw them by scientific measurements; yet "the most part
of the common people have been and are of this opinion . . . that all the
same done by enchantments, and that by the means of some
is

sorceries and herbs together, both sun and moon may be charmed, and

enforced both to loose and recover their light: to do which feat,

women are thought to be more skilful and meet than men." He credited
the Goddesses Medea and Circe with special powers over the lights
of heaven. 3
Divination by the lights of heaven was another particular province

sybils, the word cognate

of the Moon-goddess and her with the

Goddess Cybele and possibly derived from Chaldean subultu, the

4
Celestial Virgin (the constellation of Virgo). An archaic term for
was mathesis, "the Learning," literally Mother-
astrological divination
wisdom. Chaldean astrologers were Mathematici, "learned
mothers." 5 Origen (Origenes
As a result of its ancient feminine associations, astrology was Adamantius) Christian
viewed fathers of the Christian church. father, ca. 185-254
as a devilish art by many
a.d., an Egyptian who
Some thoughtindistinguishable from witchcraft.
it Others respected it.

wrote in Greek, ex-

said the stars are able to foresee the future
Origen intelligent spirits,
erting a powerful
and communicate their knowledge by their observed motions. St. influence on the early
Thomas Aquinas agreed with this. He said man's fate is the power Greek church. At
6 first he was accounted a
exerted by the stars in their movements.
saint, but three cen-
Savonarola thought it a disgrace, however, that in his day the
turies after his death he
church was "wholly governed by astrology," as he said. Every was declared a here-
important prelate had his "Chaldean" at his side, determining every tic because of Gnostic
move by the stars. 7 St. Jerome said astrology was idolatry. Sts. Gregory, elements found in

Ambrose, Chrysostom, Eusebius, and Lactantius all condemned it. his writings.

71
Atalanta St. Augustine said astrology must be expelled from all Christian nations.
It was prohibited by the Council of Toledo. 8
Despite all this, the church took astrology to its bosom in the 12th
and 1 3th centuries. Pope Julius II settled the date of his coronation on
the advice of astrologers. Pope Paul III planned the consistory by
Council of Toledo horoscopes. Pope Leo X founded a chair of astrology in a major
The greatest 9
university. Signs of the zodiac were associated with the apostles.
theological
significance was at-
Cathedrals were decorated with astrological symbols. The Zodiacus
tributed to the church
council held in Tole- Christianus compared the zodiac to the stages of Christian life and the
do 675 a.d., though
in twelve virtues. 10
there were seventeen Peter of Abano was one of the few unbelievers. He openly scoffed
other church councils in
atGod, and managed to avoid the Inquisition only by dying at an
the same city be-
tween the 5 th and 8th opportune moment. Toward the end, he remarked that he had devoted
centuries.
his life to three noble arts: philosophy, which made him subtle;
11
medicine, which made him rich; and astrology, which made him a liar.

Protestants were not about astrology as Catholics.

as enthusiastic
Zodiacus Christianas
A curious astrological Queen Elizabeth I of England disapproved of the Chaldean art, fearing
work claiming Jesuit implications of treason against the royal person in prognosticating the
origin. Full title:
length of her life. Toward the latter part of her reign, she imposed
Zodiacus Christianus
severe legal penalties for casting royal horoscopes. 12 Protestant leaflets
locupletatus seu
listed among the "sins of the papists" such as "Observation and choice
Signa XII Divinae
Praedestinationis. of days, of planetary hours, of motions and courses of stars
Totidem Symbolis ex- .
horoscoping, or marking the hours of nativities, witchcrafts, en-
. .

plicata ab Hierem
13
chantments, and all such superstitious trumpery."
Drexilio e Societatis
Yet the common people retained many superstitious beliefs based
Jesu.
on astrology. The idea that the stars are souls in heaven never really
died out. English peasants were sure that a falling star denoted either a
Peter of Abano
conception or a birth some said one, some said the other, for none
(1250-1318) Renais-
sance scholar, were clear about which moment the soul descended from heaven to
physician, geomancer, occupy its new body. 14 Because it represented an essence of new life,
and here-
astrologer, the falling star was and still is "wished on," like any spirit thought to be
an acquaintance of
tic;
passing from one world to another.
Marco Polo.
1. Campbell, Mi, 149. 2. Briffault 2, 600. 3. Hawkins, 138-39.
4. Briffault 2, 600. 5. Rose, 262. [Link],259,261. 7. Lea unabridged, 772.

8. Hazlirt, 22. 9. Seznec, 57. 10. Budge, AT., 414. 1 1 Lea unabridged, 774.
.

12. Robbins, 161. 13. Hazlitt, 376. 14. Elworthy, 424.

Atalanta

Calydon Ancient Amazonian huntress, the best athlete in Calydon. As an infant,

town of Aetolia, site of Atalanta was suckled by Artemis totemic form as a She-Bear.
herself, in
the temple of Arte- When she grew up, she took part in the famous hunt of the Caly-
mis Laphria (Artemis
donian Boar and drew first blood, pausing only to kill two centaurs who
the Forager).
tried to rape her on the hunting field.
She was a faster runner than any man. Her suitors had to beat her

72
in a footrace, or suffer death. Many were killed before one managed Atargatis
to trick her into losing the race
by dropping golden apples to divert her Atheism
attention. Some said she and her bridegroom were turned into lions

and yoked to the chariot of the Great Mother of the Gods. 1

Phrygian
Cybele always rode in a chariot drawn by two lions, male and female.
1. Graves, CM. 1,264-67.

Atargatis
Philistine Fish-goddess, called Tirgata in Syria, identified with
Aph-
rodite. At the temple of Der, in Babylon, she was Derceto, "Whale of
Der." Her daughter, Queen Semiramis, founded the city of Babylon. 1

She gave rebirth to Jonah in his earlier Babylonian form as the fish-god
Oannes. Philistines called him Dagon, Atargatis's mate. At Harran,
the Goddess's sacred fish were credited with oracular powers. In Boeotia
she was identified with Artemis who wore a fish amulet over her
2
genitals. See Fish.
1.
Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 497. 2. Neumann, CM., pi. 134.

Atheism
Greek a-theos, one who denies the existence of any god. Christian
theologians tended to regard atheism as devilish, though atheism im-
plied disbelief in devils as well as all other supernatural entities.

Oriental thinkers were less simplistic about atheism. The more

advanced sages taught that non-belief can be more "religious" than
belief indeed, atheism may make better human beings than faith can
make. In the east not thought impossible that atheism may be as
"it is

profoundly nor is atheism regarded by religious men

religious as theism,
as in itself unspiritual. This is extremely hard for a westerner to

understand he does not see that the essence of religion lies in the
religious experience, and not in any belief at all, and that all so-called

religious beliefs or doctrines are merely theories about the religious

'
experience."
Evans- Wentz called attention to the same Oriental thought: W. Y. Evans- Wentz
" British student of
The Fatherhood of God' as a personal and anthropomorphic deity is

Tibetan Buddhism,
the cornerstone of Christian theology, but in Buddhism although
translator of the
the Buddha neither denied nor affirmed the existence of a Supreme Tibetan Book of the
Deity it has no place, because, as the Buddha maintained, neither Dead, 1927.
believing nor not believing in a Supreme God, but self-exertion in right-
2
doing, is comprehending the true nature of life."
essential to
no
By these standards, no criminal could be considered religious,
matter how much faith he professed. Conversely, no person who

73
Athene treated his fellow-creatures well could be considered irreligious, no
Atlas matter how many gods he denied. Oriental sages viewed theological

mmmm^mj,mam^^ reasoning with a certain contempt, as irrelevant to the behavior that

"Mere talk about religion is only an intellec-
constitutes true religion:
tual exercise. . . . Of what use are grand phrases about Atma

(the soul) on the lips of those who hate and injure one another?
. . .
Religion is kindness." 3
1. Vetter, 320-21. 2. Bardo Thodol, 236. 3. Avalon, 175.

Athene
Mother-goddess of Athens, worshipped as Holy Virgin, Athene
Parthenia, in the Parthenon, her "Virgin-temple." Though classic

writers insisted on her gave her several

chastity, older traditions

consorts, such as Hephaestus and Pan. She was united with the phallic
1

2
Pallas, whose "Palladium" was a lingam, later Rome's greatest fetish.
Athene came from North Africa. She was the Libyan Triple
Goddess Neith, Metis, Medusa, Anath, or Ath-enna. An inscription
3
at Larnax-Lapithou named her Athene in Greek, Anat in Phoenician.

Pre-Hellenic myths said she came from the uterus of Lake Tritonis
4
(Three Queens) in Libya. Egyptians sometimes called Isis Athene,
which meant "I have come from myself." 5
Greeks claimed Athene was born from Zeus's head, after he
swallowed her mother Metis i.e., Medusa, "Female Wisdom,"
Sign of Athene
formerly symbolized by the Gorgoneum, Athene's snake-haired mask,
6
invested with power to turn men to stone. Gorgo, or Gorgon, was
Athene's Destroyer aspect. 7 Funerary statues or phallic pillars were her
"men turned to stone," perhaps even identified with the pillars of the
Parthenon which was seized by Christians at an unknown date in

the 5th or 6th century a.d. and rededicated as a temple of the virgin
8
Mary.
1. Graves, CM. 1, 149. 2. Dumezil, 323. [Link], 104. 4. Graves, G.M. 1,44.
5. Budge, G.E. 1,459. 6. Larousse, 107. 7. Knight, S.L., 130. 8. Hyde, 61.

Atlas
Pre-Hellenic Titan or earth-god, brother of Prometheus, con-
demned to carry the world on his back because he took part in the

Giants' Revolt against the Olympian gods. This was a re-interpreta-

tion of his primary earth-supporting function. As Prometheus was
associated with the Caucasus and Heracles with the "Pillars of

Heracles" in the west, so Atlas was associated with the Atlas Mountains
of Africa indicating that the Titans were originally divine pillars of
the heavens, upholding the world. Atlas might be compared to the

74
Vedic god Vishnu who took the form of a tortoise (Greek Tartarus) Atonement
and supported the world on his back.

Atonement
In ancient Mesopotamia the Day of Atonement corresponded to the

beginning of the New Year, when all sins were collectively purged for a
new time-cycle. The Jews' Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, was
based on the Sumero-Babylonian kupparu, an atonement ceremony in
which a sheep was ceremonially loaded with all the community's sins,
and killed. The sheep was an animal substitute for the man who in
earlier times died as Sin Bearer, Savior, or Good Shepherd that is,
Dumuzi or Tammuz.
A ram played the part of Sin Bearer at atonement festivals of

Egypt, which is why Aries the Ram is still the zodiacal sign of the
New Year that began in March, by ancient reckoning. Egyptians called
him Amon the ram god; the Jews assimilated him to the paschal lamb
and sacrificed him at Passover.
All over the world, the sheep stood for the shepherd as an
atonement-victim. In China the name Ch'iang, "Shepherd," was
given to war prisoners who provided sacrificial victims. The pictograph
"shepherd" was a man with a knife severing his neck. The dead
1
for

shepherd was also called the Son of God. In Samarkand during the 2nd
century B.C., "the Son of God died with the seventh moon ... all the

inhabitants, without distinction, appear dressed in robes of black wool.

They go barefooted, striking their breasts, uttering loud wails and

weeping copious tears. Three hundred persons, both men and women,
go about the fields scattering grass, and looking for the remains of the

Son of God." 2 Such was a Chinese traveler's impression of the rite

known in Greece as the anagnorisis, search and discovery (see

Drama).
Israel's law called for a goat to bear away the sins of the community
to the god Azazel, whom the Syrians called Aziz, "the Lord's
3
Messenger." Having selected the scape-goat, the priest would "confess
over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their

transgressions in all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat"
(Leviticus 16:21). A first goat was driven away, a second one was
killed, for no god would absolve sins without an offering of blood:
"Almost all
things are by the law purged
with blood; and without

shedding of blood there is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22).

As development of the wool industry made it more profitable
to alive for their fleeces than to kill them for their meat, the
keep sheep
more popular The animals were
goat became a sacrificial victim.

sometimes skinned to produce copious shedding of blood for remission

75
Atonement of sins. An incantation from the Shurpu series gives a magic rationale
for flaying a scape-goat:

^^^^^^^^^^^^m As this goat skin is pulled offand thrown into the fire, and the burning
Flame consumes it, and it does not return to its goat, and it is no longer
dyed (with blood), so the oath, the ban, the pain, the misery, the disease,
the sickness, the trespass, the misdeed, the crime, the sin, the disease
which dwells in my body, my flesh, and my joints, may they be pulled off
4
like this goat skin, and may the ban depart and may I see the light.

Early Greek myths evoke primitive totemism with goat gods

flayed inatonement for the sins of others. Athene flayed the goat god
Pan, and made her aegis from his skin. Phrygians called
5
Pallas, or
the same god the satyr Marsyas, nailed to a pine tree and flayed in
atonement for a crime against Apollo. In Rome, goats were flayed at
the purification festival of the Lupercalia, where the dying satyr-god
Faunus was offered to the Sabine mother-goddess Ops. 6
The old Roman New Year was celebrated at the Ides of March
and called the Mamuralia, carrying another trace of scapegoat-
sacrifice. A man dressed in goatskins was led through the city in
procession, beaten with rods, and driven away into exile with the
formula, "Out with hunger, in with health and wealth." 7 Ovid said the
March scapegoat was a legendary smith named Mamurius, who
forged coins representing each month of the year zodiacal sun-
symbols.
Such practices make it clear that scapegoat-sacrifices were formerly
human, and the animals replaced human victims. Liturgical formulae
nearly always sent human sins into oblivion along with the sacrificed
animal. Egyptians, killing the bull that represented Osiris, said the
whole nation's sins were placed on his head. 8 Animal sacrifice took a
more humane form in Tibet: at the New Year ceremony, three
horses and three dogs were smeared with red paint instead of flayed,
then dedicated to the temple. 9
Christian symbolism made Jesus the sacrificial Lamb of God slain

to atone for sin like the paschal lamb. Some early Christian writers
insisted that animal sacrifice came first, and human sacrifice was a later,

"higher" development: "God is a man-eater. For this reason men are

sacrificed to him." 10 Among medieval theologians there was a general

opinion that Jesus's sacrifice was not really effective; only "a few"
were saved by the Savior's death. St. Thomas Aquinas and others
claimed the vast majority of people were still doomed to eternal
11
suffering in hell. Thus the theory of atonement for all time or for all

humanity was actually denied by the same church that propounded

it as a basis for worldly power.
1. Hays, 188. 2. Briffault 3, 100. 3. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 113. 4. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 394.
5. Graves, CM. 1, 81. 6. Lamusse, 208. 7. j.E. Harrison, 196-97; Frazer, G.B., 670.
8. Budge, GE. 2, 349. 9. Waddell, 529, 531. 10. Robinson, 138. [Link], 19.

76
Atropos Atropos
"Cutter," the third of the Greek trinity of Fates
(Moerae). She was
Attis

the Destroyer whose function was to cut the thread of life that the first
sister spun, and the second one wove. She was usually depicted as an
old woman carrying a pair of shears. Like Kali the Destroyer, she was
also worshipped as a Goddess in her own right. In Parthia, the
"Virgin-Land," she had her own holy city, Atropatene. Its modern
name is
Azerbaijan.
1

[Link] 173.

Attis

The cult of Attis strongly influenced early

Christianity.
Attis accompanied Cybele, the Great Mother of the
Gods,
brought to Rome from Phrygia in 204 B.C. They were established in a

temple on the Vatican hill, where they remained for six centuries. At 1

first Attis was separated from, and subordinated

to, the Goddess,
whom the emperor Augustus regarded as the Supreme Mother of
Rome. "The Romans tolerated Attis because, maintaining the tradi-
tion of earlier days, they continued to regard Cybele as a national

Goddess." 2
Attis was a son of the Goddess's earthly incarnation, the virgin
Nana, who miraculously conceived him by eating an almond or a
pomegranate, yonic symbols both. Thus he was a typical "god without a

father," the Virgin's son. He grew up to become a sacrificial victim

and Savior,slain to bring salvation to mankind. His body was eaten by

worshippers in the form of bread. He was resurrected as "The

3
his

Most High God, who holds the universe together." 4 His epiphany was
announced with the words, "Hail, Bridegroom, Hail, new Light." 5
Like his priests he was castrated, then crucified on a pine tree, whence
his holy blood poured down to redeem the earth.

Attis's passion was celebrated on the 25th of March, exactly nine

months before the solstitial festival of his birth, the 25th of Decem-
ber. The
time of his death was also the time of his conception, or

re-conception. To mark the event when Attis entered his mother to

beget his reincarnation, his tree-phallus was carried into her sacred
cavern. Thus the virgin mother Nana was actually the Goddess
herself: who was called Inanna by the Sumerians, Mari-Anna by the
she Tertullian (Quintus

Canaanites, Anna Perenna by the Sabines, and Nanna, mother of the Septimius Florens Ter-
6 tullianus) Influential
dying god Balder, in northern Europe.
early Christian writer
Christians claimed the same dates for the conception and birth of
and father of the
their savior. The usual quarrels ensued. The Christians resorted to
church, ca. 155-220
their favorite argument, that the devil had established pagan Mysteries a.d., born in Car-

in imitation of Christianity before there was a Christianity. Tertullian thage of pagan parents.

77
Attis said, "The devil by the mysteries of his idols, imitates even the main
7
parts of the divine mysteries."

^^^^^^^^^^^ Followers of Attis eventually lost their sacrificial day to the Chris-
tians. Justinian ruled that March 25 would be known as the day of

the Annunciation, or Lady Day. Naturally, the day of the Annunciation

was the day of Jesus's conception, so that he, like Attis, could be born
nine months later at the winter solstice, as were all gods assimilated
to the sun and called Light of the World. 8
March 25 was also the day when Blessed Virgin Juno miraculous-
ly conceived her savior-son Mars by eating her own magic lily, which
is why March was named after this god and why medieval France called

Lady Day Notre Dame de Mars. The date was officially Christian-
ized by the tenth Council of Toledo in 656 a.d. as the Festival of the
9
Mother of God. But its symbol remained a pagan sign of the yoni.

Mars had a Phrygian counterpart, the satyr Marsyas, likewise hung on a

tree, and likewise a son of Cybele. It was said that he and Attis were
the same god. 10
The day of Attis's death was Black Friday, or the Day of Blood.
His image was carried to the temple and bound to the tree, escorted

by "reed-bearers" (cannophori) with the reed scepters representing re-

11
generated phalli and new fertility. During the ceremonies, initiates
castrated themselves in imitation of the castrated god, and presented
their severed genitals to the Goddess along with those of the gelded

bull sacrificed at the Taurobolium. 12 All these male remnants were

15
deposited in the sacred cave of the Great Mother.
The god died and was buried. He descended into the underworld.

On the third day he rose again from the dead. His worshippers were
told: "The god is saved; and for you also will come salvation from your
14
trials." This day was the Carnival or Hilaria, also known as the Day
of Joy. People danced in the streets and went about in disguise,
15
indulging in horseplay and casual love affairs. This was the Sun-
day; thegod arose in glory as the solar deity of a new season. Christians
ever afterward kept Easter Sunday with carnival processions derived
from the mysteries of Attis. Like Christ, Attis arose when "the sun
makes the day for the first time longer than the night." 16
Naassenes of the 3rd century a.d. worshipped Attis as a syncretic
mixture of deities. One of their hymns said, "Of Attis I will sing, of
Rhea's son, not sounding his praises with rolling drums, nor on the reed,
nor with the roar of Ida's Curetes, but as the Muse of Phoebus on the
lyre I will blend the strains. Euhoi, Euhan, he is Pan, he is Bacchus, he
17
is the shepherd of the white constellations."

Inscriptions of the 4th century gave Attis the title of Menotyrannus,

from Greek tyrannos, "lord," plus Men or Mennu, Osiris as the
resurrected, ithyphallic moon-bull, "the Lord Who Impregnates His
18
Mother."

78
 Pagans sometimes celebrated the Hilaria at the end of their Holy August
Week, bringing it to April 1 and the carnival of the April Fool, or
Carnival King, or Prince of Love, all originally synonymous with Attis.
He was also identified with Green George of the old Roman Palilia,
honored on Easter Monday with sacrificial
hanging of the god's effigy
on a sacred tree. People of the 18th century still said the 25th of Green George Spirit of
March used to be New Year's Day, while April 1 stood at the "octaves" spring descended from
19 the hero-sacrifice of
terminating the sacred week.
the Roman Palilia. In
Some Christians claimed Jesus's crucifixion took place on April 1, Balkan countries
so the Fool of the April Fool's Day processions became Christ during the Middle Ages
carrying his cross and enduring the mockery of the mob. But the spring and later, he was rep-
resented by a youth
Holy Week was not really Christian. Its origin was a universal Indo-
dressed in green
European tradition of extreme antiquity, probably traceable to the Holi
branches and symboli-
festivals of India which celebrated the rebirth of spring with joyous
cally "sacrificed."
20
orgies.
1. Clodd, 79. 2. Vermaseren, 177-78. 3. Guignebert, 73. 4. Graves, W.G., 367.
5. Angus, 136. 6. Larousse, 268-69. 7. Robertson, 112. 8. Ashe, 82.
9. Brewster, 144. 10. Graves, G.M. 1, 77. 11. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 56.
12. Guignebert,71-72. 13. Vermaseren, 111. 14. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 59.
15. Frazer.G.B., 405-7. 16. Vermaseren, 182. 17. Vermaseren, 182.
18. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 61. 19. Hazlitt, 13, 548. 20. de Lys, 360.

August
Roman month of the oracular Juno Augusta. Oracles were augustae
in the semi-matriarchal "republican" period. The term was later applied
to male priests, then to emperors. An "august" man was one filled
with the spirit of the Goddess. Augur, the old name for a seer, meant
1

"increaser,"once referring to the mother-priestess. 2 The first emper-

or Augustus took his title from the Great Mother of the Gods,

presumed incarnate in his wife Livia Augusta. Their house stood

opposite the temple of the Great Mother, whom Augustus honored as
the national Goddess. 3

Among European pagans the month of August began with one of

the Goddess's major festivals, Lammas Eve, from Hlaf-mass, "the
Feast of Bread." The secret worship of Ops, Ceres, Demeter, or Juno
Augusta continued throughout the Middle Ages in the rites ad-
dressed to the Lammas corn-mother who ruled the harvest-month.
"For a seventeenth-century Scot to say 'he (or she) was born in
of a well-skilled
August', was to imply high praise and recognition
person'. August, the month of the Lammas towers, the month when
the Irish dancers moved around the female effigy, was the right time for
birth. Then the Lammas moon was at work, on behalf of new

children, and the new harvest." 4

Churchmen the Goddess's connec-
repeatedly tried to obliterate
tions with her harvest month. It was officially claimed that August

79
^
Aurora
Azazel

^___^
had been named
the name had been
was born. 5
1.

4.
for St.

J.H. Smith, C.G.,

Dames, 164-65.
5.

5.
Augustine
given to the month
"prophetically" of course, since
centuries before Augustine

2. Rose, 233. 3. Vermaseren, 83, 86, 126.

Brewster, 349.

Aurora
"Dawn," a Roman name for Eos, or Mater Matuta, the morning-
mother of the sun. In the classic pattern, her child was also her consort,
a sacred kingsometimes entitled Tithonius, "husband of the Queen
of Day." She made him immortal but forgot to give him eternal youth;
so he became gray and shrunken, finally becoming a cicada, the

symbol of the sun's rebirth when cicadas hailed growing warmth.

1
his

1. Graves, G.M. 1,150;W.G., 117.

Avalon
"Apple-isle," the Celtic paradise across the western sea, where gods
and heroes were fed on the apples of immortality. Cognate with
Hindus' Jambu Island, Egyptians' Land of the Westerners, Norse-
men's Faeroisland or Fairyland. See Paradise.

Avatar
Sanskrit word for the same soul reincarnated in a new body; the

opposite of atavism, which meant harking back to an earlier, primitive

state of being.

Axis Mundi
"Axle of the World." Ancient cosmologies pictured the earth as a
globe spinning on a shaft with the ends fastened at the celestial poles.
The axis mundi penetrated the earth at its center, hence it was
usually associated with the cosmic lingam or male principle. Each
nation placed this hub at the center of its own territory. See
Omphalos.

Azazel
"God's Messenger," the deity who received sacrificial goats on the
Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur, New Year). Azazel was not
originally Hebraic, but Syrian.
1
Some rabbinical writings called him Azel,

80
a subversive angel who stole magic secrets from God and gave Azazel
them Eve, thus bringing about the enlightenment of humanity at the
to

cost of God's wrath. Moslems sometimes gave Azazel's name to the mmm^^^hh^hm
rebellious angel who opposed Allah, though this personage was often
called Iblis, or Shaytan (Satan). 2

During the Middle Ages, Azazel was adopted by Christian de-

monologists and made one of the leaders in the pantheon of hell. His
name was often cited by exorcists as that of an active, lively possessor,

befitting his ancient function as a Hermetic-style "messenger."

1. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 1 13. 2. Keightley, 25.

81
 B

baal, in characteristic
JJ dress and stance.
i ID Phoenician bronze, 15th
to 14th century b.c.

Ceremony of baptism in
York, Pennsylvania,
in 1799. Drawing by folk
artist Lewis Miller
(detail).

One of the many

versions of the
buddha. Temple of
Borubudur, Giava,
^my^, India.
Baal Baal
Baalat
"The Lord" among ancient Semites; consort of Mother Astarte,
whose favors he shared with Yamm, the Lord of Death (from Hindu
Yama). Every god was a Baal. The title was introduced into Ireland
via Phoenician colonies in Spain, and became the Irish Bel or Bial, Lord
1
ofBeltain.
Old Testament Jews worshipped many baalim as past or present
consorts of the Goddess Zion (Hosea 2:2-8). Yahweh shared these other

gods' temples for a long time, until his priesthood managed to isolate his

cult and suppress the others. 2 Some of the baalim revered in Israel
The serpent god Le-
viathan (or Levi), the were: Sin, themoon god of Sinai; Molech (Melek), the "king" and sun
elephant god Behe- god of Tyre; Horus, the Egyptian Golden Calf whose image was
moth, and the ass god made by Aaron; Baal-Peor, a phallic "Lord of the Cleft" (or yoni);
who gave his
Pales
name to Palestine, all Nehushtan, the "fiery flying serpent" of lightning, made by Moses (2
emanated from the Kings 18:4); Chemosh, the Babylonian sun god Shamash, incarnate in
Far East, as did Abra- Samson (or Shams-on, the sun); Melchizedek, the god of Salem;
ham or "Father Etana, or Ethan, the Canaanite Eytan who "went up to heaven"; Baal-
Brahm," apparently the Lord of the Pomegranate impersonated by Solomon;
Rimmon,
based on Brahma.
Baal-Berith, the Canaanites'"God of the Covenant"; El, or Elias, the
The Greeks' Adonis
was the Semitic Ado- sun god Helios to whom Jesus called from the cross; Joseph, Jacob,
nai, "the Lord." and Israel, who were not men but tribal gods. 2
Since nearly all gods were sacrificial victims in their earthly

incarnations, Baal may have been derived from Sanskrit Bala or Bali,
a sacrificial offering.
5
The Semitic melek, "king," came from Phoeni-
cian molk, a votive offering, because early kings were not only gods
but also victims. 4 (See Kingship.)
Baal was often used as the title of a mortal king, especially one
whose reign might be terminated by a ritual sacrifice. In the time of
Esarhaddon of Assyria, the king of Tyre was named Baal, or "God." In
the 10th centuryB.C., kings of Byblos bore names like Yehimilk
5
(God-king), Abibaal (Father-god), and Baalshamen (Heavenly Father).
Baal became a favorite Christian name for a devil, because biblical
writers denounced all the baalim indiscriminately as devils (2 Chroni-
cles 1 1:15; 1 Corinthians 10:20; Revelation 9:20). Still, the northern

European cognate Bal, Bel, Bael, or Balder retained the affection of

commoners. 6 Baal was still the patron of the Beltain feast in 18th-
century Scotland. To make the crops thrive, Scandinavians burned
his effigy at midsummer in "Balder's Balefires" throughout Denmark,
7
Norway, and Sweden.
1. Joyce, 279. 2. Reinach, 201; Frazer,G.B., 341. 3. O'Flaherty, 340.
4. Gaster, 588. 5. Pritchard, 22-23. 6. Hallet, 336. 7. Frazer, G.B., 717, 769.

Baalat

"Lady," the feminine equivalent of Baal; common Middle-Eastern

of the Goddess. Also rendered Belit,
title Belit-ili, or Beltis.

84
Baal-Berith Baal-Berith

Baal-Hamman
"God of the Covenant," Canaanite lawgiving deity represented
by
two stone tablets in the at Shechem, later taken over
temple *
by Hebraic
invaders and transferred to the cult of Yahweh. Commandments on
the tablets were based on the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, received
by the Babylonian king from the god Shamash. These, in turn, were
1

based on the tablets of law given the first god by his Great Mother,
Tiamat. 2
Though both tablets and title were claimed by the Judeo-Christian
God, the name of Baal-Berith was attached to a devil, often invoked
by medieval authors on magic, who were apparently unaware that they
called upon the God of the Covenant. Weyer placed Baal-Berith in a

position suiting his ancient function, however. In the royal hierarchy of

3
hell he was Minister of Treaties. Though churchmen had small use

Weyer, yet they used this precedent to assign the de-

for the heretic

monic pact to Baal-Berith. In 1335a witch named Catherine Delort

was burned for signing a pact with "the demon Berit." 4
1. Hooke, M.E.M* 142, 147. 2. Assyr. &Bab. Lit, 287.
3. Waite, B.C.M., 186-87. 4. J.B. Russell, 184.

Baal-Gad
Goat- Lord, a Semitic name of Pan, ancestor of the tribe of Gad; also
identified with Azazel, who received annual scapegoat-sacrifices. He

was worshipped in a cave at the source of the Jordan. It was said he was
fathered by Hermes, and after death he ascended to heaven to become
1
the constellation Capricorn, the Goat.
1. Graves, W.G., 230, 391.

Baal-Hadad
Canaanite Lord of the Hunt, slain by priestesses of Asherah, who
buried him in a bog (earth-womb) and resurrected him after seven years,
the standard term of kingship in primitive Palestine. He was mated to
1

Asherah as Lady of the Pomegranate at Hadad-Rimmon, and his

name was borne by two biblical kings, Ben-hadad and

Hadad-ezer

(Zechariah 12:11).

- 1. Hooke, M.E.M., 87.

Baal-Hamman
"Lord of the Brazier," the Tyrian Heracles who died by fire.
Egyptians called him Ammon. At his cult center in Carthage,
"men
who were gods of light" were said to have died in sacrificial fires as

85
Baal-Peor late as 200 a.d. 1
In Elam, the god was Haman, slain as a surrogate for

Baal-Zebub Marduk (Jewish Mordecai). One version of his sacrificial dramas

appears in the Book of Esther, and eucharistic eating of his body is still

performed through the Purim cakes called hamantaschen.

1. [Link], 136.

Baal-Peor
"Lord of the Cleft," Phoenician phallic god coupled with Asherah's
yonic "cleft." Israelites adopted his cult and celebrated sexual rites in his
honor in the tabernacle, until Yahweh's reformers killed the cele-
brants (Numbers 25). Baal-Peor's symbol was a palm tree between two
stones, a male-genital symbol recalling the phallic god of Egypt, Osiris-

Min, whose worshippers prayed to achieve erections "like a palm

'
tree."

[Link],S\S.

var. Beelzebub Baal-Zebub

"Lord of Flies," a god of Ekron in Philistia, to whose oracle King
Ahaziah of Israel sent messengers in quest of healing magic (2 Kings
1:2). Like Hermes Psychopomp, his title meant the same as Lord of
Death or Conductor of Souls, because flies were common forms taken
by souls in search of rebirth. Mothers of many mythic heroes
miraculously conceived them by swallowing their souls in fly shape.
1

Etain, legendary queen married to Ochy Airem, and

Irish Cu
Chulainn are examples from popular Celtic myth.
The Pharisees called Baal-Zebub a "prince of devils," apparently
because was thought he could cure people possessed by lesser devils
it

(Matthew 12:24). One or two passing references to this "prince of

devils" in the New Testament sufficed to establish Beelzebub as an

alternative name for Satan, and flies as diabolic manifestations in

medieval Christendom.
St. Bernard once exorcised a cloud of flies, which instantly
dropped dead at the sound of his holy words and had to be shoveled
out of his church in heaps. 2

Fly-devils were still firmly believed in during the late 16th century.
When a young Viennese girl suffered from cramps in 1 583, Jesuit
priests diagnosed her case as demonic possession. After eight weeks of

exorcisms, they claimed to have expelled 12,652 demons from the girl.
Her 70-year-old grandmother was accused of harboring these demons
The old lady was dragged at a horse's tail to the
as flies in glass jars.
3
stake and burned alive.

1. Spence, 95-96. 2. White 2, 109, 113. 3. Robbins, 395; Cavendish, P.E., 234.

86
Babel, Tower of Babel, Tower of
Ba-Bel, "God's Gate," was the Babylonian heaven-mountain or
ziggurat where the god descended from the sky to the Holy of Holies,
the genital locus of his mating with Mother Earth. 1

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel "reflects the attitude of

nomads entering the fertile plains of the Delta,
beholding with
wonder and dread the soaring towers of Babylonian cities, and despising
the multitudes speaking all the various tongues of the ancient Near
East." 2 To the ears of the strangers, diversity of
languages was "bab-
ble," a word derived from Ba-Bel or its city of Bab-ilani, named after
its own man-made Holy Mountain. 5
Babylon's famous Hanging Gardens occupied the seven stages of
the ziggurat, to create a Paradise like that of Hindu gods: "Seven
divisions of theworld ... on which the seven separate cities and palaces
of the gods are built, amid green woods and murmuring streams, in
seven circles placed one above another." The ziggurat restored by
Nebuchadnezzar was a "temple of the seven spheres of the world." It

helped established universal belief in the seven heavens, corresponding

to the seven planetary spheres. Christians and Moslems also
adopted
this view of the cosmos. The Koran says Allah made seven heavens and
4
seven underground spheres, the seven hells.

When ziggurats were abandoned and became ruinous, their mud-

brick construction crumbling, later nomadic peoples assumed the
gods were angered by the pride of the elder races and broke down their

heaven-aspiring constructions. The Babel myth is found all over the

world, including India and Mexico. It was familiar in the Greek story of
the giants who piled up mountains to reach heaven. Hindus said it

was not a tower but a great tree that grew up to heaven, angering
Brahma, who cut off its branches and threw them down. From each
branch grew a separate wata tree that gave humanity another separate
5
language.
Berossus said the Babylonian heaven-mountain was destroyed by Berossus Chaldean
of Bel-Marduk,
winds, which blew a diversity of tongues among men. The first part priest
3rd century B.C.; au-
of this premise was certainly not irrational, since drying and wind-
thor of a history of
erosion were major causes of the destruction of mud-brick structures.
Babylonia and Assyr-
Berossus's story surfaced many centuries later in the Armenian myth of ia,written in Greek.

the holy mountain built by giants. It was blown down by winds, while
"unknown words were at the same time blown about among men." 6
The same story was told in the western hemisphere. Choctaw
Indians said their own ancestors piled up stones to build a mountain
that would reach heaven, but it was blown down by winds, whereupon
7
people found themselves speaking different languages. In Central
America the heaven-reaching pyramid of Cholula was built by giants un-
der the leadership of Xelhua. The angry gods broke it down with light-
8
to earth.
ning and sent different, mutually incomprehensible languages
White M.E.R., 14.
1. 2, 170. [Link])ke,M.E.M., 138. 3. Eliade,
4. Lethaby, 24, 124-25, 129. 5. White 2, 173. 6. Doane, 35.
7. Farb, W.P., 309. 8. White 2, 173.

87
Bacchus Bacchus
Balder
Roman name for the sacrificial god Dionysus; also known as Bac-
chus Liber, or Father Liber, consort of the Goddess Libera. He was
worshipped as the orgiastic deity of wine and vintage-festivals wherev-
er wine grapes were grown throughout the Roman empire. The town of
Bacharach in the Rhineland was named for him. Even in the 20th

century, his influence was supposed to ripen the grapes, and omens
still

were taken for the vintage from his ancient stone altar on a river
1
island.

[Link],L.R.,215.

Baetyl
Sacred stone containing a deity, the Greek baitulos, Hebrew beth-el,
"house of the holy one." Two Goddess-wives of Jehovah in the 5th
century were called Ashima Baetyl and Anatha Baetyl. The
B.C.
1

Bible speaks of Anatha's baetyl as Beth-Anath (Joshua 19:38). Medieval

Cathari still held that God had two wives, named Collam and
Colibam. 2
1. Graves, W.G., 405. 2. J.B. Russell, 125.

Balder

Norwegian name for the god Bel, or Baal, sacrificed as a son of

Father Odin. He descended into the womb of Mother Hel, the

Underworld. At doomsday, Ragnarok, he would return to earth in
Dough victims The Second Coming. He would establish a new earth and a new heaven
usual substitute, every-
after the passing of the old destructive gods and their world.
where in the world,
for what used to be can- Balder's effigy is still burned at Beltain fires in Scotland and

nibalistic offerings in Ireland. Scandinavians knew them as Balder's Balefires. His was the
primitive times. Some- spirit inhabiting the Beltain cake, an effigy of god-flesh like the Christian
times the offerings
host, sometimes man-shaped like the symbolic dough "victims" of
were man-shaped cakes,
the Far East. 1
Such pagan hosts probably gave rise to the living
supposed to resemble
a real man in the eyes of Gingerbread Man of the fairy tale. 2
the deity. Sometimes Like Heracles, Siegfried, and other solar heros, Balder stood for
they were ordinary the idea of regeneration through cremation. His funeral was the
cakes marked with a
Viking's dissolution in both fire and water; he was sent to sea on a
symbol of the sacrifice,
like the Christian burning ship. This was arranged by a Goddess called Hyrrokkin,
host (from Latin hostia, "Fire-shrunk," one of the Elder Deities. She was a former giantess who
3
"victim"). lost her stature by passing through a magic fire.

1. Wadddl.531. [Link],G.B.,679,716. 3. Hollander, 51.

Balkis Balkis

The Queen of Sheba, according to the Koran. Solomon stole his Baphomet
throne from Queen Balkis, the Moslems said. Her name was also 1
ihhh^h^h
rendered Bilqis, or Balqama. The temple of the queens of Sheba at
Marib was Mahram Bilqis: Balkis the Moon-Mother. Solomon was
crowned by Bath-sheba, called his "mother" in the Bible; but her
name means Daughter of Sheba, so it's possible that Solomon did
receive his throne from a Sheban queen. See Solomon and Sheba.

[Link],98.

Banshee
From Gaelic bean-sidhe, "woman of the fairy-mounds." The Irish ban-
shee was a ghostly White Lady whose cry brought death to her
hearers. In Brittany she was the Bandrhude, or bane-druid, or
1

dryad of
death. 2 She was identified with Macha, Queen of Phantoms, third

person of the Morrigan's trinity. That is, she was the Crone form of the
Goddess, who summoned her children to death.
3

Some said the shriek of the banshee was really the nocturnal call of
the loon, a bird sacred to the Moon-goddess Luna, as its name
suggests.
Like the Vila or death-priestess of central Europe, and the Dakini
of the Far East, the banshee could be as benevolent as the sacred
women who used to sing the dying gently to sleep. "When the banshee
loves those she calls, the song is a low, soft chant
giving notice,
indeed, of the proximity of death but with a tenderness of tone that
reassures the one destined to die and comforts the survivors; rather a
welcome than a warning." 4 To others, she came like a bad death, full of
horror.
1. Goodrich, 177. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 493. 3. Rees, 36.
4. Pepper & Wilcock, 275.

Baphomet
Bisexual idol or talking head allegedly worshipped by the Knights

Templar when they were accused of heresy in the 14th century.

Several derivations of the name Baphomet have been suggested.
Some said was Arabic abu-fihamat, "Father of Wisdom," the old title
it

of an oracular head. Some said it was a corruption of Mohammed.

1

Some traced Baphe Meteos, "baptism of Metis," that is, of the

it to

Gnostic Goddess as Lady of Wisdom. It was a name well known

among Gnostic sects in the east. Because Baphomet was supposed to

2

be the object of the Templars' "devil worship," it or he or she was

89
Baptism pictured with the common devilish attributes: hoofs, a goat's face, both
male and female genitals, etc.

^^^^_^^^_ 1 . Shah, 225.2. Knight, S.L., 202.

Baptism
In 418 a.d., a Catholic church council decided that every human
child is born demonic as a result of its sexual conception, thus automati-

cally damned unless baptized. 1

During a Catholic baptismal

ceremony the priest still addresses the baby, "I exorcise thee, thou
unclean spirit. . . . Hear thy doom, O Devil accursed, Satan ac-
cursed!" 2 The exorcism is
euphemistically described as "a means to
remove impediments to grace resulting from the effects of original sin
and the power of Satan over fallen nature." 3 But it is obvious from the
folk belief still widespread, that the church's teaching was that every
4
newborn infant before baptism belonged to the devil. St. Augustine's
doctrine of original sin laid the foundation for this idea, and Tertul-
lian said every baby is born evil; its soul is "unclean" and "actively
sinful" before baptism. 5 Medieval theologians held that any infant still
in the womb is doomed to eternal damnation. 6 The Oedipal jealousies
of men apparently developed these ideas, since few women would
have pictured babies screaming in an eternity of torture in hellfire,

simply because no priest had sprinkled them with water before they
perished.
Indeed, priests refused to baptize a child within forty days of its
birth, for both mother and infant were considered impure (hence too

dangerous for touch) during that period. "An unbaptized

priests to

child, as well as a woman between childbirth and churching, was

designated as heathen." 7 The real reason for this "heathenism" appears
in numerous folk beliefs: it was the birth magic of the ancient
Goddess that claimed both women and their infants in the performance
of her Mysteries. In the north it is still said that children dying

unbaptized go to Frau Holda, or Hel, or Perchta, the underground

Mother. 8 In the Hebrides, the Goddess's protective ritual is still used
to preserve children during the perilous pre-baptismal period: a torch is

daily carried around the cradle as in old pre-Christian custom. 9 Some

traditional ballads deny the Catholic doctrine that women dying in

childbed or infants dying unbaptized must go to hell; they claim,

rather, that such individuals pass into a pagan heaven. Mexican peasants
10
still
go to "a place of delight in the temple of the sun."
say they
Thus, paganism was kinder to infants and their mothers than
Christianity, so that theologians often felt called to explain upon
God's apparent cruelty unbaptized, so con-
in allowing infants to die

demning them before they had a chance for salvation. In the 16th
and 17th centuries, churchmen insisted that God's cruelty was perfectly
just. Said Martin Del Rio, S.J.: "If, as is not uncommon, God permits

90
children to be killed before they have been baptized, it is to Barabbas
prevent their
committing in later life those sins which would make their damnation
Barbara, Saint
more severe. In this, God is neither cruel nor unjust, since,
by the mere ^^^^^^^^^^
fact of original the children have already merited death." n
sin,

It was customary to refuse baptism altogether to those

thought to
have been conceived out of wedlock, or sinfully. American church-
men often refused to baptize children born on Sunday, because it was
thought children were always born on the same day of the week as
their conception, and marital relations on Sunday were forbidden. 12
Modern theologians have trouble explaining why baptism should
be necessary. Few educated parents seriously believe their infants are
doomed to eternal torture unless splashed with a little water in a church.

The biblical "fall" that provided the original rationale has long since
13
been relegated to the realm of myth. The primitive notion of the
public name-giving ritual seems to be all that is left to justify the
formalities: no more than an excuse for people to dress up and get
together, to celebrate a new life in the clan. Perhaps it should be
remembered that this function was once the exclusive concern of
mothers and Goddesses.
1. H. Smith, 238. 2. de Givry, 157. 3. Encyc. Brit, "Exorcism."

4. Gifford, 51. 5. Tennant, 333. 6. de Voragine, 585. 7. Wimberly, 372.

8. Miles, 242. 9. Elworthy, 65. 10. Wimberly, p. 409-10. 11. Robbins, 123.
12. Murstein, 319. 13. Campbell, F.W.G., 207.

Barabbas
'Son of the Father," released from prison in Jesus's place, according
toLuke 23:18. But Barabbas was another title of a sacred king, thus
some scholars believe it was applied to Jesus himself, when he was
"released" from the protection of Rome and handed over to Jewish

priests for their Passover sacrifice. See Jesus Christ.

Barbara, Saint
Sancta Barbara, "the Divine Barbarian," a loosely Christianized

pagan Goddess her sacred mountain, either the Venusberg, the

in

Horselberg, or the Round Mountain near Pozzuoli where she

was

worshipped under this particular title. Within the mountain dwelt the

heathen dead, "bewitched men and women" who spent their time in
1
and other pleasures until the day
of doom. In
dancing, lovemaking,
other words, St. Barbara was none other than the Fairy Queen.
As a spurious martyr, Barbara followed the usual pattern: she was a
beautiful virgin, tortured by her evil pagan father to make her
renounce Christianity. She remained steadfast, so her father killed her.
Then God struck the father dead with a lightning bolt, unfortunately
a few minutes too late to save Barbara. This was supposed to have taken

91
Bartholomew, Saint Rome, or perhaps Egypt, or
place in the 3rd century a.d., possibly in
Bassareus maybe Tuscany, or might have
itbeen somewhere else. Accounts vary.

^^^^^^^^^^^^ The legend was not concocted until the 7th century. 2 By a rather
curious association, St. Barbara was invoked to provide protection from
5
lightning.
1. Jung & von Franz, 121. 2. Atrwater, 57. 3. Male, 271.

Bartholomew, Saint
Pseudo-saint based on a sacred king's title: Bar-Tholomeus, "son of

Ptolemy." He was inserted into the Gospels as an apostle, but hagiogra-

phers gave him a different origin. He was called a son of "Prince
Ptolomeus," crucified in Armenia, and flayed like the satyr Marsyas (see
Mars). Icons showed him holding a moon-sickle, the sacrificial knife

of the Middle East. 1

An alternative history made Bartholomew

a missionary to India,

where he overthrew the of the oddly non-Indian deities Astarte

idols

and Baal-Berith. With many miracles, Bartholomew converted the

king of that country to Christianity, but the king's brother was
unaccountably permitted to crucify, flay, and behead the saint
afterward. 2

Spurious relics of the saint were installed in the Roman healing

shrine of Asclepius, which was taken over by Christians and remained
the Hospital of San Bartolommeo up to the 20th century.*

1. Brewster, 379. 2. deVoragine, 481-83. 3. Carter, 42.

Basilisk

"King Serpent," the mythical snake of the poisonous glance, listed as

a real creature inEuropean up 8th century. Like the

bestiaries to the 1

Gorgon head, whose glance was equally poisonous, the basilisk was
closely linked with women's menstrual blood. As the serpent-haired
Gorgon head represented women's "wise blood" and guarded men-
strual mysteries that men were forbidden to behold, so there was a
popular medieval belief that a hair taken from the head of a menstru-
ating woman and buried in the earth would turn into a serpent or
basilisk.
1
Superstitious folk supposed that all the serpents on the
Gorgon's head were basilisks, which derived their evil eyes from her
own deadly glance.
[Link].A.T., 165-66.

Bassareus
Lydian fox god, a totemic form of Orpheus or Dionysus, whose
Maenads were sometimes called Bassarids because they wore fox

92
 [Link] a pagan deity, the fox became the
1

popular trickster-hero of Bast

medieval folklore, where he appeared as
Reynard or Renaud. He was Beans
actually worshipped in Cologne cathedral and in
Westphalia in the
9th century a.d. 2 See Dog.
1. Lamusse, 160. 2. Guerber, L.M.A., 162.

Bast

Egyptian cat goddess, mother of all cats, which were

Egypt's most
sacred animals. Bast's holy city Bubastis was said to
possess the land's
greatest temple. Herodotus said that in
Egypt, "All cats that die are
carried to certain sacred houses, where being first
embalmed, they are
buried in the city of Bubastis." '
The Greeks identified Bast with
Artemis or Diana, also called the mother of cats, and claimed the
great
shrine of Bubastis was built in her honor. 2 The cat's legendary nine
lives stemmed from Artemis mother of the nine Muses, corre-
as the

sponding to the Egyptian Ennead of nine

primordial deities. See Cat.
1.
Budge, G.E. 2, 61, 364. 2. Herodotus, 106.

Beans
Like barley grains in Greece, beans were yonic
symbols in Rome, as
shown by the Italian slang term for female genitals, fava, "bean."
is still *

Along with all other ancient female-genital symbols, beans were cred-
ited with magic power to impregnate, because they enclosed ancestral
spirits, the manes, born in dim prehistory of the Moon-mother Mana.
The Pythagoreans placed a taboo on eating beans because of their
supposed possession of spirits. In Rome, each paterfamilias went
through an annual ceremony of exorcising ancestral spirits by throwing
beans behind him at midnight, nine times enjoining the manes to
leave the house. 2

Another Roman ceremony on the twelfth day after the midwinter

solstice (Epiphany) recalled ancient customs of choosing a sacred
king. It was called the Festival of Kings Created or Elected by Beans,
the beans evidently representing women, the choosing carried out by

drawing black or white beans. Later, dice were used, and a ceremonial
king-for-the-night called Basilicus was chosen by the "Venus" throw.
The ceremony persisted in medieval England, where the Twelfth-

Night plum cake contained one bean, and the man who received the
bean was declared king of the festival. 3
Some overlapping esoteric meanings of beans may be found in the

Sanskrit word mudra, "kidney beans," also "woman," and a "magical

4
gesture," the benevolent spell cast by a Shakti. The influx of Tantric

symbols into medieval Europe probably gave rise to Jack's beanstalk,

resembling the Ladder of Heaven in that it was a soul-bridge: "the myth

93
Beata of the vine that once joined earth and sky," in the paradisal time
Behemoth when men knew the way to heaven or thought they did. 5

^^^^^^^^^^ 1. Young, 74. 2. Lamusse, 213. 3. Ha/litt, 602. 4. Bharati, 41. 5. Eliade, S., 354.

Beata
"Holy woman," Spanish term for a white witch, often a hermitess

distinguished by her visions, trances, stigmata, miraculous cures, etc.

The church didn't know what to do with such people. Sometimes, if
they became famous enough, they were canonized as saints. Sometimes
they were persecuted for heresy and witchcraft.

Beelzebub
See Baal-zebub.

Behemoth
Biblical name of the Indian elephant god Ganesha, the "Lord of
Hosts." '
His title was adopted by the Jewish Jehovah, during the period
when he was married to the Virgin Goddess Anath, or Neith, in the

temple of Elephantine in Egypt. Jewish mercenaries stationed there wor-

shipped the elephant-headed, virgin-born Lord of Hosts as their own
Yahweh). At the time, the Jewish God was a subordinate
2
Yaho (or,

spouse of the Goddess who was hailed as "Queen of Heaven and

3
mistress of all the gods."
The same Virgin Goddess was the mother, as well as the bride, of
the elephant bull-god, according to the standard myth of divine incest
created by identification of Father and Son. In India the mother of
Ganesha was Parvati, virgin form of Kali. She made him from her
own "body-dew" (menstrual blood). A true archetypal son, he guarded
her "gate" (yoni) against the entrance of All-father Shiva. For this
4
Oedipal offense he was slain, but resurrected. Upon the same virgin
mother under her other name of Maya (comparable to Mari, the
othername of Anath), he begot the next incarnation of the Son of the
Lord of Hosts: Buddha, the Enlightened One.
The elephant-god was not forgotten by the Jews, but he was
dissociated from the later concept of Yahweh, and diabolized. He
became the demon Behemoth. In this guise he appeared in medieval

demonologies and grimoires, still

wearing the elephant head of Shiva-
Ganesha. 5
Yet traces of the earlier divine elephant could be found in Jewish
tradition. Rabbinical sources said the Passover feast commemorated
more than one god. The lamb stood for the Firstborn. The fish
represented Leviathan, the original wise serpent-deity of Levites.

94
The hard-boiled egg represented Ziz, or Aziz, or Azazel, the god of Bellerophon
atonement sacrifices. The bread stood for Behemoth. 6 Berserker
1 .
Campbell, Or. M., 307. 2. Graves, W.G., 405. 3. Ashe, 30.
4. Lamusse, 378. 5. de Givry, 137. 6. Hazlitt, 345.

Bellerophon
Corinthian hero, tamer of the Muses' winged horse Pegasus. Grow-

ing too proud of himself, Bellerophon tried to fly to heaven on Pegasus,

and was cast down by Zeus. He died lame, blind, and accursed.

Bendis var. Benthesicyme

Thracian name for the Goddess as Destroyer, the crone of the

waning moon. Christian authorities adopted her

1
into the pantheon of
the underworld as a she-demon.
1. Graves, GM. 1,61.

Benedict, Saint
An ancient shrine of the sun god Apollo on Monte Cassino was taken
over and converted into a Christian monastery. The "St. Benedict" to
whom it was dedicated was really Apollo Benedictus, the "Good-
Even Catholic scholars say there is no evidence that "St.
'
speaker."
Benedict" was ever a Christian However, his legend did
priest.
assimilate him to the sun god. When
Benedict prayed, "the whole world
seemed to be gathered into one sunbeam and brought thus before his
2
eyes."
1. Rose, 294. 2. Attwater, 62.

Berserker
A wearer of the "bear sark" or bearskin shirt; a Nordic warrior
dedicated to the Goddess Ursel, the She-Bear (see Ursula). Through

wearing the bear's skin, a warrior acquired the bear's fighting spirit
and the grace of the ursine Goddess who was often a teacher of the

martial arts. "Berserk" came to mean one possessed by battle-frenzy,

careless of his own safety, unable to feel fear.

Totemic descent from the She-Bear characterized several old

European clans. The Orsini or Ursini family were "bear's children,"

carrying a bear on their coat of arms. William of Auvergne, bishop of

of the Orsinis
Paris in the 16th century, solemnly explained the origin
was quite
by saying a bear's semen is very like a man's, therefore
it

on a human
possible for a bear to beget human children, presumably

95
Bible mother. 1
The story reflects contemporary theological opinion that only
a male can be a true parent. Nothing was said about a she-bear's
^^^^^^^^^^^m ovum being like a woman's, nor was there a human father who might
have begotten children on a bear mother.
1. Summers, W, 243.

Bible
This word for a holy book came from Byblos, the City of the Great
Mother, the oldest continuously occupied temple in the world. The
Goddess called Astarte, Baalat, Hathor, etc. patronized learning,
and her priestesses collected a library of papyrus scrolls. Therefore,
Greeks called any papyrus byblos, which came to mean any holy
book. Hence the "Bible." '

Scholars have found in the Bible's numerous layers of additions

and corrections a substrate of the former Semitic matriarchy, such as

the Book of Ruth with its matrilineal and matrilocal marriage customs,
and the Book of Judges with its feminine government of Israel
(Judges 4:4). In several books the word translated "God" is really a
feminine plural, "Goddesses," especially in reference to the matriar-

chal functions of lawgiving, avenging crimes, and bestowing the

2
imperium of leadership.
Some of the miracles attributed to biblical heroes were copied from
older myths of the Goddess. Joshua's arrest of the sun was formerly
credited to priestesses of Isis, Hecate, and the Thessalian Great Mother,
who were said to stop heavenly bodies in their courses, and lengthen
3
night or day at will. Moses's flowering rod, river of blood, and tablets of
the law were symbols of the ancient Goddess. His miracle of
all

drawing water from a rock was first performed by Mother Rhea after she
4
gave birth to Zeus, and by Atalanta with the help of Artemis. His
miracle of drying up waters to travel dry-shod was earlier performed by
5
Isis, or Hathor, on her way to Byblos.

The greatest mistake of religious authorities in the western

world was their view of the Bible as intrinsically different from other
ancient scriptures, in that it was dictated word for word by God, not
collected slowly, rewritten and mis-written, revised and worked over by
human beings for a long time. The notion that the Bible did not
evolve haphazardly, like most other holy writings of the same period,

persisted almost up to the present day, even among people who

should have known better.

According to the prevailing myth of biblical origins, the Old

Testament was supposed to have been translated from Hebrew to
Greek by seventy-two translators sent to Ptolemy by Eleazar, a Jewish
high priest, in the 3rd century B.C.,hence its name, Septuagint.
Ptolemy locked the scholars in individual cells on the island Pharos,
where each one made his own Greek version in exactly seventy-two

96
days. Each translation agreed
exactly, in every word, with the other Bible
seventy-one translations.
Of course this never happened. The Bible's real was far less
history
tidy. A collection appeared in the first century b.c. and again in the
first century a.d. to be
accepted by the Jews of the Diaspora as sacred,
and passed on to Christians. In both Jewish and Christian hands the
papyri underwent many changes. In the 4th century a.d., St. Jerome
collected some Hebrew manuscripts and edited them to
produce the
Latin Vulgate, a Bible of considerable
inaccuracy, differing markedly
from Jerome's stem texts.

The King James Bible relied mostly on a Greek text collected and
edited by Erasmus in the16th century, which in turn relied on a

Byzantine collection assembled gradually at

Constantinople between
the 4th and 8th centuries. A few older texts have been discovered: the
Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Alexandrinus, and
the Chester Beatty papyri. All are fragmentary, all differ from one
another and from the King James version. There are no known
portions
of the Bible older than the 4th century a.d. 6
The Revised Version of the New Testament published in 1881
tried to correct some of the more glaring errors. It erased the spurious
final twelve verses of Mark, which were late
interpolations including the
words that caused centuries of suffering: "He that believeth not shall
be damned." It eliminated the fraudulent translation "Joseph and his
mother," intended to preserve the dogma of the virgin birth, and
restored the original "his father and his mother." It omitted the forged
interpolation intended to preserve the dogma of the trinity: "For
there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and
theHoly Ghost: and these three are one." These words appeared
nowhere before the 1 5th century a.d. However, the Catholic church
insisted on retaining the forgery. Churchmen's argument was: "How,
if these verses were an interpolation, could the Holy Spirit, who guides
and directs theChurch, have allowed her to regard this lofty affirma-
tion of the Trinity as authentic, and permitted its insertion in the official
edition of the sacred books?" In 1897 the Congregation of the Index,
with the approval of Pope Leo XIII, forbade any further research into
the origins of this text. 7

Traditionally, the church forbade not only research but even

reading of the Bible by laymen. Throughout the Middle Ages,
possession of a Bible written in the vernacular was a crime punished by
8
burning at the stake. With the Reformation came Bible-reading in
search of a new basis for faith; but in the process were found many new

grounds for skepticism.

Richard Simon's 17th-century Critical History of the Old Testa-
ment exhibited the now well-known internal evidence that the books
of Moses were not written by Moses but were compiled by many hands
at a much Bishop Bossuet pronounced this work of
later date.

scholarship "a mass of impieties," drove its author

out of the Oratory,

97
Bible and ordered the entire first edition burned. Dr. Alexander Geddes, a

Catholic scholar, translated the Old Testament in 1792 with a critical

volume proving that the Pentateuch could not have been written by
Moses, nor at any time prior to the reign of David. He was denounced
9
as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost."

As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the Holy

Ghost needed correcting. Seven clerical scholarspublished Essays
and Reviews in 1860, defining the new science of Bible criticism. They
were denounced, and two were suspended from office; but they took
their case to court, and won. In 1 869 Kuenen's The Religion of Israel

established Bible criticism as a valid field of investigation. He was

followed by many others in Holland, Germany, and France. In 1889
the book of biblical essays called Lux Mundi gave up all pretense of
the scriptures' historicity or divine inspiration, admitting that the Bible is

a confused mass of myth, legend, and garbled history, often contra-

10
dicting provable facts.
Naturally, there was constant opposition to the efforts of the

[Link] 19th-century churchmen insisted that the Bible's only

author was God. Dean Burgon said, "The Bible is the very utterance of
the Eternal; as much God's own word as if high heaven were open
and we heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every book is in-

spired alike, and is inspired entirely." Dr. Baylee said the Bible is

"infallibly accurate; all its histories and narrations of every kind are
without any inaccuracy." Dr. Hodge declared that the books of the
Bible are "one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in substance,
and in work of God, conveying with absolute
form, wholly the
accuracy and divine authority all that God meant to convey without
human additions and admixtures." 11 Apparently none of these gen-
tlemen were familiar with the earlier contradictory texts; nor had they
read the Bible closely enough to see the many passages where God
contradicted himself.
The real point was that organized religions had an economic
interest in maintaining literal interpretation of biblical myths. Guigne-
bert says, "The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible . . .
necessarily

placed theology in an attitude of surly and sanguinary hostility toward

the exact and experimental sciences, which it will not abandon save
most reluctantly and after as much delay as possible. [Mjethods . . .

have changed, the illusions still current have decreased, but its spirit is

12
scarcely altered."
When the theologians began to give in, they complained that
viewing the Bible as myth would destroy the whole structure that
their livelihood and self-respect depended on. After David Straus's
Maurice Jones
Lebenjesu disposed of the historicity of the Gospel stories, and
Author of The New
Renan's Vie de Jesus showed that the Gospels cannot be taken as literal
Testament in the
Twentieth Century, truth but only as romantic symbolism, the Rev. Maurice Jones
1934. exclaimed, "If the Christ-Myth theory is true, and if Jesus never lived,

98
the whole civilized world has for close upon two thousand years lain Bible
13
under the spell of a lie." The Archbishop of Canterbury found it

impossible to deny the Bible's apparent lies, and began to backtrack _.

with his plaintive question, "May not the make use of Holy Spirit myth
and legend?" 14
Obviously the Bible was full of myths and legends, but most
orthodox theologians had no idea of their
meaning. One reason was
that they didn't study the
corresponding myths and legends of other
cultures ancient paganism, modern mysticism, the non-Christian
beliefs of people both civilized and uncivilized
throughout the rest of
the world. Christian missionaries thought theirs was the
only pipeline
to divinity, the deities of all other people
throughout the world were
devils, and the myths of the Bible were absolutely true whereas all

other myths were absolutely false.

Nowadays such crude beliefs seem no less superstitious than the

primitive animisnvthat the missionaries sought to destroy. Yet an
even darker blot on the history of Christian missions was their
arrogant
vandalism burning books and artworks, smashing images, forbid-
ding the songs and poems of heathen tradition instead of listening and
recording them in order to understand the people, to display a decent

respect for what alien races held sacred, as the pagan Romans did in the
days of their empire. It may well have been that, had the missionaries
been willing to listen and learn, they would have discovered the
mythology of the Bible all over again in other offshoots from its

original sources; for all peoples, nearly everywhere in the world, shared
the same fables of the creation, the flood, the
magic garden with its
tree of life and
primal couple, the wise serpent, the heaven-piercing
its

tower, the divided waters, the chosen people, the virgin mothers, the
saviors, and all the rest. It has been said both testaments of the Bible are

only recent and relatively corrupt derivations from a world-wide cycle

of archetypal myths. 15
Least of all were righteous Christians prepared to understand
that their awe of the Bible rested on a foundation of magical supersti-
tion: it was, and is, a fetish. Legal oaths were taken in physical contact
with a Bible because of a very primitive belief in its destructive mana,

which would automatically punish perjurors. Both Jews and Chris-

tians used their Bible for divination, just as a witch might use a crystal

ball, an African might use a thunder-stone, or a Roman augur might

use the sacred chickens. Bibliomancy (taking omens from the Bible) was
sometimes deplored, but from the 4th to the 14th centuries was
16
"repeatedly practiced by Kings, Bishops, and Saints." St. Augustine
frankly recommended taking omens from the Bible "in all cases of
17 both Europe
spiritual difficulty." Even in this "enlightened" age, in
18
and America, the Bible is still used to give omens.
A favorite biblical method for discovering a thief easily lent itself to
conscious legerdemain. The name of the accused was written on a

99
Bible piece of paper and inserted into the hollow end of a key, which was put
into the Bible's pages. The diviner recited Psalm [Link] "When thou

sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him, and hast been partaker
with adulterers." The guilt of the accused was proven if the key was
found turned around afterward. 19
Despite the many discoveries and clarifications made by biblical
scholars in the last century or so, the average Christian's attitude
toward the Bible is still hardly more sophisticated than this simple-
minded magic. Most churchmen see to it that their congregations are

not told the true origins of biblical myths. The most primitive or
unattractive of these are constantly re-interpreted as deep allegories
or metaphorical fables, intended by their divine author to wait two
thousand years or more for a correct explanation. Yet the real
explanation of the sources of these stories, uncovered by the careful
researches of the higher critics, is seldom mentioned. Likewise
ignored are many of the truly awkward passages such as "Thou shalt not

God's frequent commands to wage

suffer a witch to live," or

merciless war, which no amount of exegesis can fit into a more tolerant
ethic. 20

Erroneous but traditional views of Bible origins and meanings are

doggedly preserved by male chauvinists in particular, since the
canonical books were deliberately selected and edited to wipe out all

feminine images of divinity and sanction religious suppression of

Robert Ingersoll women. Robert Ingersoll pointed out that "As long as woman regards
(1833-1899) American the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man." Jo-
lawyer and lecturer,
sephine Henry grumbled, "The Bible records that God created woman
Attorney General of the
by a method different from that employed in bringing into life any
state of Illinois; an
other creature, then cursed her for seeking knowledge." Elizabeth
outspoken popularizer
of Bible criticism. Stanton said there is no escape from the Bible's "degrading teaching"
as to the position of women, and advised women to boycott churches.

Josephine Henry "It is not commendable for women to get up fairs and donation
19th-century Kentucky parties for churches in which the gifted of their sex may neither pray,
and pam-
preach, share in the offices and honors, nor have a voice in the
suffragist

phleteer, active in the

business affairs, creeds and discipline, and from whose altars come forth
women's rights
21
movement. Biblical interpretations in favor of woman's subjection."

One of the erroneous notions that still keep Christian women

Elizabeth Cady shackled to their Bible-based "inferior" image is the notion that
Stanton (1815-1902) Christianity was founded on the New Testament, when in fact the early

One of the leaders of churches had no Gospels but rather created and produced their
thewomen's rights
own. 22 Not only did churchmen falsely pretend an apostolic origin for
movement in the
their scriptures; they also weeded out all references to female author-
U.S.; an associate of
Susan B. Anthony. ity or participation in Christian origins. 23 Only the forbidden Gnostic
Gospels retained hints that Jesus had 12 female disciples correspond-
ing to the 12 male disciples, or that Mary Magdalene was the leader of
them all. Even women's scholarship was denied. St. Jerome openly

admitted that his co-authors of the Vulgate were two learned women;

100
but later scholars erased the women's names and substituted the
Birds
words "venerable brothers." 24
[Link], "Byblos." 2. Mendenhall, 85. 3. Wedeck 231
[Link], CM.1, 264. 5. Budge, G.E. 2, 191. 6. 103.
Pfeifer, 7. Reinach 260
[Link], 123. 9. White
2, 319, 327. 10. White 2, 343-59. 11
White2'368"
[Link],381. H.
13.
Smith, 190,479. 14.White2 359 15 Hallet 328
16. Hazlitt, 47. [Link],O.S., 131. 18.
Cavendish, P.E., 83 19 Maple 39
[Link],91. 21. Stanton, ix, 125, 196, 214. 22. Muller 148 23 Paeels 57
' '
6 ' '

[Link],356,372.

Birds
From very early times there was a universal Indo-European belief
that souls could take the form of birds. Latin aves meant both "birds"
and "ancestral spirits," or ghosts, or angels. Roman emperors
achieved godhood in the form of an eagle which was released above an

emperor's funeral pyre to carry his soul to heaven. Similarly, an

1

Egyptian pharaoh's spirit rode aloft, on, or in, the solar hawk of Horus
released at his funeral. Like Phoenix, he passed
through the Fire and
was reborn with wings. Based on such prototypes, the souls of Christian
saints ascended to heaven in the form of white doves released at the

canonization ceremony. 2

Becoming a bird in a visionary or trance state was a widespread

symbol of initiatory death and rebirth. Shamans and prophets in the
South Pacific, Indonesia, Central Asia, and Siberia claimed to transform
themselves into birds. Buddhist yogis said ecstatic flight was the first

magical power to be developed by the practice of yoga. "Becoming a

bird oneself or being
accompanied by a bird indicates the capacity,
while still undertake the ecstatic journey to the sky and
alive, to
3
beyond." Celtic "fays" or "fairies" could change themselves into
birds,which is why they were depicted with wings like angels, and why
witches "flew" to the Sabbat. 4
The Chinese said women knew the secret of flying before men
did. The emperor Shun first learned it from two princesses. "Down
to a certain date the source of magical power lay in women ... an

indication of an ancient Chinese matriarchy." In northern Europe

also, the Goddess Freya owned
all the magic feather garments that

enabled magicians to fly through the air like birds. 5 The elaborate
feather garments of Mayan and Aztec priesthoods probably had the
same original function, to facilitate their soul-flights.
Because birds traveled freely between the earthly and heavenly
realms, they were everywhere regarded
as angelic messengers, givers

of omens, possessors of occult secrets, as well as soul-carriers. Carrion

crows and vultures took souls to heaven. Storks brought them back to
earth for rebirth. Wise owls told the secrets of the night; lustful doves
and nightingales told the secrets of love. Angelic eagles foretold the
future.

101
Birds Myths repeatedly credit seers with power to understand the lan-
guage of birds, usually because sacred serpents licked their ears to
6
"open" them, as in the case of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra.
Siegfried likewise obtained the power to understand birds, via the

magic blood of the Great Serpent or dragon. A bird call, a magic

formula, and singing were expressed by the same word in Germanic
7
languages.
The magpie was especially revered as an oracle. It was a picus
(pecker) sacred to the Goddess Mag, or Magog, eponymous ances-
tressof Scythian Magnetes, the Amazonian centaurs credited with
8
prophetic powers. In Rome, the magpie or woodpecker was a
totemic form of the god Mars, said to contain his soul between his
incarnations as Maris or Faunus.
In Egypt the hawk represented the soul of Horus and of the
pharaoh who embodied him. Hawks came to stand for that portion of

every soul called the ba, which could come and go at will after death,

flying freely in and out of the tomb. Narrow shafts were left open in pit

graves for the passage of the ba. Similar shafts in pyramids, sometimes
misconstrued as ventilation shafts, were originally intended to let the
bird-soul of the deceased fly in and out. 9

The bird-soul born out of the cremated body entered Egyptian

mythology Phoenix, sometimes a man, sometimes a firebird.

as the

The name was Greek, meaning "the Phoenician," a reference to

sacrificed sacred kings of Astarte at Byblos, where they were frequent-
ly burned. 10 The cult moved to North Africa with Phoenician colonists,
and was carried on atCarthage where sacred kings perished in flames
to a very late date. 11 Their bird-souls, reborn from the flames and flying
myth of the Egyptian Phoenix who
to heaven, gave rise to the

periodically cremated himself and rose again from his ashes. His
worshippers, identified with the god through his sacraments, partook
of the same power of heavenly flight. A
common expression for death
was "flying away."
Philo Judaeus (ca. 30 Philo wrote of the sages' soul-flights: "They accompany in thought
B.c-40 a.d.) Alexandrian the Moon and Sun in their circuitings, the choirs of other planets and
Jewish philosopher, fixed stars, attached below to the ground by their bodies, but giving
strongly influenced by
Hellenistic Platonism, wings to their souls, so that, walking on the ether, they contemplate the

Pythagoreanism, and powers they find there." Still known today as the yogic trance or out-of-
Stoicism; author of body experience, the soul-flight was often described in medieval
biblical commentaries, books on Hermetic magic: "Nothing can obstruct, neither the Sun's fire
tracts, and histories.
nor the Ether nor the heaven's revolution nor the bodies of other
stars;but, cutting across all space, the soul will ascend in its flight up to
the furthest heavenly body." 12 Bird lore has always clearly expressed
man's envy of the power of flight and his longing to know what the
world looks like from high in the sky.

1. Campbell, Oc.M., 334. 2. Gaster, 769. 3. Eliade, S., 98, 367, 409, 481-82.
4. Keightley.421. 5. Eliade, S., 386, 449. 6. Graves, G.M. 2, 263.
7. Eliade, S., 98. 8. Lawson, 244. 9. Budge, A. T., 144-45.
10. Graves, G.M. 1,69. 11. H. Smith, 136. 12. Lindsay, O.A., 191-92.

102
Birth Control Birth Control

Transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies usually

destroyed
the naturalmammalian system of birth control practiced by animals and ""^"^^^^"
primitive people: women
used to refuse sexual relations
during
pregnancy and lactation, a period lasting anywhere from two to six years
for each child. The system is still followed in some parts of the world.

Among the Hunza, pregnant or nursing women do not sleep with their
husbands. The Semai of Malaya think correct to forbid sex during
it

the long nursing period, as this allows parents to space their children and

give adequate care to each one. Even in an aggressive male-

1

dominated society like the Yanomamo, men say they are afraid to have
sexual intercourse with a nursing mother.
Sometimes modern people insult the animals by calling a human
rapist an "animal." Animals don't rape. Sexual intercourse takes place
only when the female is receptive. When she is preoccupied with caring
for her young always her first priority the female shows no sexual
interest in the male. Should he be so ill-advised as to make sexual

displays to her, she drives him away with bared teeth.

There is among animals no question of the use offorce on the part

of the male; the conjunction of the sexes is dependent upon the
willingness of the female. And the female sexual instincts are subject
. . .

to frequent and prolonged natural suspensions which do not always

correspond with the operation of those instincts in the male. Among all
herbivores the females, as soon as they are pregnant, retire from the

company of the males to seek either complete seclusion and solitude, or to

collect in herds from which the males are excluded. Female elephants
drive away all males from the herds of cows and calves not only during the

long pregnancy of nearly two years, but throughout the period of

lactation. The behavior is typical of animal females. Had the primitive

human female admitted the male during menstruation, pregnancy, and

lactation she would have departed from all biological precedents; her
2
behavior would have constituted an abnormality.

Many early records show that human females did not depart

from biological precedent. Hippocrates and Galen supported the an-

cient taboo on sex during pregnancy and lactation. There was a
curious remnant of the taboo even in a popular marriage manual of the
that
early 20th century, part of the vast body of sexual misinformation
our grandparents struggled with. The author declared that marital
3
relations during pregnancy would make the child epileptic.
In most primitive societies it was unthinkable that male sexual
desires should take precedence over the needs of mothers and their
reli-
children. 4 Patriarchy everywhere sought to change this, through
sanction. Women were to serve men's sexual urges even when
gious
the meaning of God's an-
preoccupied with motherhood. This was
nouncement to Eve: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
in sorrow thou shalt forth children; and thy desire
bring
conception;
shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"

103
Birth Control (Genesis 3:16). In this context, "sorrow" meant labor pangs, as well as
the harriedlife of a mother with children too close together, and the

^^^^^^^^^^^m illnesses and injuries caused by spreading a mother's care too thin.

The Christian canon omitted the First Book of Adam and Eve,
which contradicted the canonical scripture by stating that Eve stuck
to the oldsystem of birth control after all. She gave birth to Cain
and twin
his sister Luluwa, another incarnation of the lilu or "lily"

who was also Eve's predecessor Lilith. Then "when the days of
nursing the children were ended" but not until then "Eve again
conceived." She produced Abel and his twin sister. After Abel was
killed at theage of 15 years, Eve produced Seth to replace him.
"After the birth of these, Eve ceased from childbearing." Thus the
5

entire human race descended from these four: Cain, Seth, and their
sisters. According to this version of the story, Eve was not particu-

larly troubled by God's curse.

However, later Judeo-Christian culture insisted on men's con-
trol of women's bodies. Wives were not to initiate sexual relations, but

they were never to deny their husbands. The Catholic church laid
down the law that no wife could accuse her husband of rape even if he
forced her with accompanying brutality. Sexual "release" was his

conjugal right (but not hers).

The church interpreted the fable of Genesis as God's mandate to
compel women to bear as many children as possible, even at the cost
of the children's or the mothers' physical health and welfare. 6 Men
refused to deal with the problem of over-production, and women
were forbidden to do so, by the church's tradition. In pagan times,
women used some fairly effective birth-control devices, ranging from
vaginal sponges to abortifacient drugs. Many churchmen believed the
witches inherited secret knowledge of such things, which contributed
to the vigor of witch- and midwife-persecutions.

Father Dominic Pruemmer recently wrote in American Freedom

and Catholic Power: "Birth control is nothing else than mutual
masturbation or unnatural lust." 7 It is not usual to view the "lust"
of marital partners for each other as unnatural. Nor did the church ever

object to sex as masturbation when it was for a husband's benefit

only that is, not mutually satisfying. In fact church-sanctioned litera-

ture of the 1 7th century said the only purpose of marital sex must be

conception, and if a woman receives too much pleasure she cannot

conceive. 8
The church further taught women that their children belonged
more to God than to themselves, thus eroding the instinctive mater-

nal possessiveness that fosters the best of child care. Not illogically,
mothers often left their unwanted children for God to care for. In the
1 8th century, the hospital of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris reported
9
as many as 5000 infants annually deposited on God's doorstep. Infant

corpses were rather commonly found among the rubbish of western

cities. Foundling hospitals were so busy that they set revolving boxes in

104
their walls, so infants could be passed through. Yet Birth Control
foundling hospi-
tals seldom saved the children they were given. In practice, they solved
the problem of excess births by killing babies by the
the sanction of male-dominated officialdom. 10
thousands, under ^^^^^^^^^
London's first foundling hospital admitted 1 5,000 infants in the
four years between 1756 and 1760. Of these, fewer than a third
survived to adolescence. On the continent, the death rate for children in
foundling institutions ran between 80 and 90 percent during the first
year of life. Parish officers entrusted the care of newborns to women
nicknamed "killing nurses," because they were expected to do the
state's dirty work, and see to it that the unwanted children did not long
11
survive.

In effect, the patriarchal society having outlawed birth control and

abortion could find nothing better to do with the overflow than

destroy it after all. Apparently this was all right, as long as the decision to
give life or withhold it was not
being made by the mothers them-
selves. Vetter found this kind of morality puzzling:

Is there any evidence that religion has provided a superior brand of

wisdom for the guidance of secular affairs, or in the burning social
of the day? With the population of the earth growing by geometric
issues

leaps from unchecked fertility but with epidemics and diseases well
under control, what religious leaders spoke up for the necessity ofplanned
parenthood? Not one! But many did hound Margaret Sanger to prison

for her constructive work in that direction. IZ

An Englishwoman gave the following picture of conventional

morality in regard to reproduction, indicating that religious leaders care
for their own mythology and ceremonial well ahead of the future
welfare of the race:

In a village that I know well a woman, legally married, bore five idiot
children one after the other; her husband was a confirmed drinker and
a mental degenerate. One of the children fortunately died. The text that
was chosen for his funeral card was "Ofsuch is the kingdom of
heaven. "About the same time in the same village a girl gave birth to an il-

legitimate child. She was a beautiful girl; the father, who did not live in
the village, was strong and young; probably the child would have been

healthy. But the girl was sent from her situation and, later, was driven
from her home by her father. At the last she sought refuge in a disused
quarry, and was there for two days without food. When we found her,
her child had been born and was dead. Afterwards the girl went mad.
n

such
Margaret Sanger gave her life to the effort to prevent
and without She believed that "excess
tragedies, both within marriage.

people, not acts of God, created poverty, famine, and war All

society would gain . . . if birth control were allowed to shut off the spigot
that floods the world with weaklings. When sick and unfit mothers
were not forced to breed, there would be an end to unwanted children
14
who grow up to fill our prisons and asylums."
But churches still doggedly opposed the right of women to

105
Birth-Giving, Male determine when, where, and how much they shall breed, largely
because of the deep-seated male desire to control the life-giving miracle
in which men play only a negligible part biologically. It can hardly be
^^^^^^^^^^m
denied that male-dominated religions were everywhere devoted to this
end from their earliest inception. As a result, overpopulation threatens
the world with virtually unthinkable ecological and sociological dis-
15 tend
asters. Even now, in the face of such disasters, religious leaders

to the view that the faithful should multiply forever.

[Link],98. 2. Briffault 2,400-401. 3. Simons, 161. 4. Briffault 2, 48.

141.
[Link] Books, 54. 6. See E.T. Douglas. 7. Ellis, 89. 8. Simons,
[Link],64. 10. M. Harris, 183. 11. M. Harris, 184. 12. Vetter, 513.
13. Hartley, 347. 14. E.T. Douglas, 137. 15. Hallet.411-12.

Birth-Giving, Male
Satapatha Brahmana Since birth-giving was the only true mark of divinity in primitive
The "Brahmana of 100
gods to claim any sort of supremacy had to claim also the
belief, the first
Paths." Brahmanas are
ability to give birth. In fact,usurpation of the feminine power of
prose commentaries on
birth-giving seems to have been the distinguishing mark of the earliest
Vedic scriptures, dated
from 800 to 500 B.C. gods.
Lacking vaginas, many gods gave birth from their mouths. Priests
of Ra claimed their god gave birth to the first couple from his mouth.

Padma Purana The Satapatha Brahmana said the god Prajapati learned to give birth to
"Lotus Purana." Pura- creatures from his mouth; but before he could he had to
manage it,

nas are ancient

make sacrifices toan older, higher power: the Goddess Svaha, Lady of
Sanskrit scriptures in

verse, treating of cos-

Sacrifices. According to the Padma Purana, a god named Sukra
mologies, sacred (Seed) was born from Shiva's penis, after living in Shiva's belly for a
histories, and the na- hundred years. However, this was not a proper maternal-type birth.
ture of the divine. Sukra existed beforehand, and Shiva had to make himself pregnant by
1

swallowing him.
The Rig Veda spoke of a male creator who gave birth to the
Rig Veda Foremost Mother of Creation, then impregnated her, so she brought forth the
of the four Aryan scrip-
rest of the universe. Brahmans tried to claim the Mother of All Gods
tures written in Vedic
(an older form of San-
was born from Brahma's body, even though she was the mother of
skrit), ca. 1500-1200 Brahma too. 2 Brahma was known as Lotus-Born, meaning he sprang
B.C., containing sacred from the primal Yoni, the Goddess Padma ("Lotus"). His first
mythology, hymns, Lotus Throne was located in her lap. The Rig Veda also called her Vac,
and verses; literary
the Great Womb, the Queen, the First, the Greatest of All Deities.
foundations of the
Vedic religion.
She said: "I begot the All-Father on high. I dwell in the waters, the

deep, and thence extend through all creatures, and touch the heavens
with my crown. Like unto the wind I blow, encompassing all creatures;
3
above the heavens and above the earth."
Hellenic Greeks pretended their new Father Zeus gave birth to the
much olderGoddess Athene from his head. But before he could
give birth to Athene, he had to swallow her real mother, Metis
4
(Wisdom), who was pregnant with her at the time. The Hellenes
also claimed Zeus gave birth to Dionysus from his thigh; but again, the

106
 real mother was the Moon-goddess
Selene, whom Zeus killed during Male
Birth-Giving,
her pregnancy. As Conductor of Souls, Hermes took the six-month
fetus from Selene's womb and sewed him
up in Zeus's to
continue his gestation.
thigh
^^^^^^^^ 11

A
Greek carving showed the god Apollo
sitting on a pile of eggs,
trying tocopy the life-giving magic of his mother Leto, or Leda, or
Latona, who gave birth to the World Egg and hatched it. 5 This World
Egg was an old Oriental idea. The Satapatha Brahmana said it
contained "the continents, the oceans, the mountains, the
planets and
the divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons, and 6
humanity."
Thus, birth laying the egg was the image of cosmic creation, and
creator-gods needed to copy it. In Egypt, the mother of the World
Egg was Hathor in the guise of the Nile Goose, later mythologized as
the Goose who laid the Golden Egg. (See
Goose.)
Atum, the local god of Heliopolis, the biblical "City of On,"
claimed to give birth to a primal couple from his penis
by masturbat-
ing. Pyramid Texts of 2000 B.C. said "Atum created in Heliopolis by an
act of masturbation. He took his phallus in his fist, to excite desire

[Link] the twins were born, Shu and Tefnut." 7 However, priests
of Khepera insisted that their god produced Shu and Tefnut
by
masturbation and self-fertilization through his mouth. Yet the oldest
traditions said Shu and Tefnut ("Dryness" and
"Moisture") were
born of the primal Mother, Iusaset. Like the biblical God who copied
her many centuries later, she not only created the first couple, but
8
also brought forth light as her first act of creation.
Before begetting was understood, archaic myth-makers tried all

sortsof ideas for making a male body produce offspring. A Chinese

ancestor-god, Kun, suffered a crude Caesarian section. He was slain and

cut open so Yu, founder of the Hsia dynasty, could emerge from his
stomach. 9 Norsemen said a first male-and-female couple were born
from the sweaty armpit of the giant Ymir, who imitated Mother
Earth in that his flesh became the soil, his blood the sea, his bones the
mountains. 10 Ymir's skull became the dome of the heavens, support-
ed at four corners by four dwarves, Austri, Vestri, Nordri, and Sudri

(East, West, North, and South), northern copies of the Sons of

Horus. Similar cardinal-direction gods became identified with the four
' '

angels of the Apocalypse and four evangelists, whose totems were

the same. 12 Totem Symbol or

The god Loki embodiment of an

gave birth to Odin's horse, after making himself
31 ' ^
pregnant by eating a woman's heart. The
15
usual mythic symbol of a
rationahSrif
woman's heart, from Egypt to northern Europe, was an apple. Thus it
frequently in animal
might be assumed that in some prototypical versions of the Eden form; a divine or

story, Adam ate the apple before, not after, he gave birth to Eve. semi-divine mascot

Adam's numerous local supposed to have

birth-giving was a syncretic product of
esce " e r man
notions of the male mother. A Hittite god, Kumarbi, managed
_
to
animal ancestor,
r ,

become pregnant by eating his rival s penis. His offspring

retused to

come out through his mouth or ears, and having no vagina he was

107
Birth-Giving, Male unable to deliver them. Finally the sea god Ea took them out through
his side, as Adam's God did later. The idea for Adam's magic birth-
^^^^^^^^^^^^ giving rib came from a Sumerian childbirth-goddess, Nin-ti, "Lady of the
Rib." Since ti meant both "rib" and "life," she was also a Lady of

Life. She made infants' bones in utero from their mothers' ribs, which is
14
why biblical writers thought ribs possessed the magic of maternity.
An odd male-birth myth came from Persia's intensely patriarchal

Zoroastrian cult, suggesting a combination of homosexuality and

bestiality. The primal being, the Sole-Created Bull, was castrated and
slain. Its semen went to the moon to be purified; then from this

purified seed two new bulls were formed. From these, "all animals
descended." The hidden feminine element in this phallic fantasy was
the moon, of course; but the two bulls must have procreated homosex-
ually. This idea was not unknown even in Christian Europe.
"Authorities" like Paracelsus taught that a monster may be born of a
man as a result of oral or anal intercourse with another man. 15 No
matter how impossible it seemed, men apparently wished to preserve at

any price the notion that a male could give birth.

Christianity demoted the Goddess to mortal status in both Eve and
Mary, whom mystics regarded as two incarnations of the same
person. In both incarnations she was a Mother of her Father. Gnostic
Gospels said Adam came into being from the virgin Earth, who was
none other than Eve. 16 The story of her birth from Adam was a late,
distorted version of the myth.

Unless the male spirit is able as in mathematics to construct a purely

abstract world, it must make use of the nature symbols originating in

the unconscious. But this brings it into contradiction with the natural
character of the symbols, which it distorts and perverts. Unnatural

symbols and hostility to the nature symbol e.g. Eve taken out of
Adam are characteristic of the patriarchal spirit. But even this attempt
at revaluation usually fails, as an analysis of this symbolism might show,
because the matriarchal character of the nature symbol asserts itself

again and again. ' 7

Throughout the world, men's initiatory dramas enacted birth-

giving to represent even the attainment of man's estate. Apparently

men
could think of no better way to adopt new members into their
fraternities than to make the novices symbolically dead and reborn,
often from a male mother. In New Guinea, initiates into the men's
group crawled out from between the legs of men costumed as the birth

spirit.
18
Australian men opened their veins to bathe a young initiate

into their blood, magically imitating the blood of the womb. 19

Baptismal rebirth from male blood was an idea shared by all
mystery cults of the early Christian era. In the Mithraic Mysteries, an
initiate was showered with the blood of the sacrificial bull and pro-
20
nounced "reborn for eternity." Afterward he was fed on milk, like

an infant. 21 primitive times to the present, men's groups

From devised

theatrical imitations of birth, often claiming the rites were stolen from

108
 women or that women were murdered for them and have sought to Bitch
protect these masquerades with the taboos their all
priesthoods could
invent. 22 In Malekula, men even
applied the name of mara to the place
where male initiations were held; it meant the women's
^^^^__
^^^^^^^_
obstetrical
enclosure or birth-temple. 23
In its determined exclusion of
women, early Christianity evolved
some "birth rites" of a somewhat homosexual cast. Some writers
claimed Christian men could "impregnate" each
other, in the spiritual
sense, by kissing: "For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and
give
birth." 24 But it was hard for men to see themselves as when perfect,
they conspicuously lacked the ability to bring forth and nurture new
members of their race. Thus their endless for quest superiority nearly
always required some travesty of motherhood.
Symbolic motherhood represented authority in the medieval
Russian Orthodox wedding ceremony. The
bridegroom threw the
lap of hisgown over his bride, signifying adoption by the ancient rite of
mock birth. The wearer of the gown was "mother"; the one
emerg-
ing from under it was "child." The Christian idea was to show that a
husband exercised over wife the authority of a mother over her
his

child. It is
strange that, when fatherhood meant authority in practice,
men still
thought it
necessary to clothe that authority in the symbols
of motherhood.

l.O'Flaherty, 32-33, 297. 2. Larousse, 345; O'Flaherty, 26. 3. Briffault 1,7.

4. Graves, G.M. 1, 46. 5. Knight, S.L., 147. 6. Larousse, 346. 7. Lederer, 156.
[Link], G.E. 1, 297, 354, 429. 9. Hallet, 180. 10. Larousse, 248.
11. Branston, 60. 12. Budge, E.M., 89. 13. Turville-Petre, 129.

[Link],M.E.M, 115. 15. Silberer,71, 144. 16. Pagels, 53.

17. Neumann, G.M., 50. 18. Briffault2,687. 19. F. Huxley, 103. 20. Angus, 239.
21. Guignebert, 71-72. 22. Mead, 102-3. 23. Neumann, G.M., 159.
24. Robinson, 135.

Bitch
This became a naughty word in Christian Europe because it was one of
the most sacred titles of the Goddess, Artemis-Diana, leader of the

Scythian alanioi "hunting dogs." The Bitch-goddess of antiquity was

known Indo-European cultures, beginning with the Great Bitch
in all

Sarama who led the Vedic dogs of death. The Old English word for
a hunting dog, bawd, also became a naughty word because it
applied to
1
the divine Huntress's promiscuous priestesses as well as her dogs.
Harlots and "bitches" were identified in the ancient Roman cult of
the Goddess Lupa, the Wolf Bitch, whose priestesses the lupae gave
their name to prostitutes in general. 2 Earthly representatives of the Wolf
Bitch ruled the Roman town of Ira Flavia in Spain, as a queen or
series of queens named Lupa. 3
In Christian terms, "son of a bitch" was considered insulting not
because it meant a dog, but because it meant a devil that is, a

spiritual son of the pagan Goddess.

1. Potter & Sargent, 208. 2. Murstein, 76. 3. Hartley, 237.

109
Blaise, Saint Blaise, Saint
Blessing
Spurious canonization of the Slavic horse-god Vlaise, or Vlas, or
Volos: a consort of the lunar [Link] was Christianized about the 8th
century, but kept his pagan function as a patron of animals.
1
Charms
read aloud in churches claimed he could heal any sick beast. 2 The myth
of his martyrdom was dressed up with the traditional seven pries-
tesses, who 5
gathered up his sacred blood. In England he was known as

Blazey.
1. Attwater, 70. 2. Scot, 197. 3. de Voragine, 155.

Blancheflor
"White Flower," the Lily Maid of Celtic initiation ceremonies,
representing the Virgin aspect of the Goddess the red flower standing
for the Mother, and the black bird for the Crone, according to the

three sacred colors of the Gunas. Celtic romances said Blancheflor

received Perceval into the fairy-religion, before he was converted to

Mabinogion
Accepted title for Christian purity at the hands of literary monks. She was the same as the
eleven Welsh tales Tantric Indian lady-love of Perceval's predecessor, Peredur Paladrhir
from bardic oral
of the Mabinogion. The monks calumniated Blancheflor, as any Shakti
tradition, first
would have been calumniated by ascetics. They described her as a
collected in the Red
Book of Hergest, ca. Jewish witch who coupled with Satan at a sabbat, and gave birth
1
1400 A.D. to Antichrist.

1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 169.

Blessing
From Old English bletsain, earlier bleodswean, "to sanctify with
shedding of blood." It was the custom to consecrate altars by sprinkling
l

them with blood, and to "bless" individuals by marking them with

blood, as is still the custom of foxhunters who "blood" new members of
Cornelius Tacitus the club after a kill. According to Tacitus, the Celts "deemed it
Roman historian indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives." 2 The
and rhetorician, ca. were "blessed" with
Romans did the same in essence, though their altars
56-120 a.d.
the blood of sacrificial animals.
Catholics now bless altars by sprinkling them with salt, an ancient
custom of the Jews, based on the primitive idea that blood and salt
were magical equivalents because they tasted alike. Egyptian altars were
dedicated with salt. In Egypt, dedi was the magic salt that made Nile
water become "as human blood." 3
(See Menstrual Blood; Salt.)
Blessing a person by drawing cross on his head and breast
a
rite of the Taurobolium, when the cross
originated with the Mithraic
(an emblem of Mithra) was marked thus on participants with the bull's
blood, so they became official witnesses of the ceremony of rebirth.

110
 To be blessed meant to be saved, through the magic of blood, as the
Blodeuwedd
Christian Gospels also admitted: "Almost all
things are by the law Boadicea
purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission"
(Hebrews 9:22).
l.M. Harrison, 129. 2. Pepper & Wilcock, 217. 3. Erman,49.

Blodeuwedd
Welsh Virgin Goddess of spring, all made of flower-buds, her
beauty
disguising a personification of the blood-hungry soil waiting to be
fructified with the lifeblood
of the sacred king. She also
personified
the "blood wedding" whereby Llew Llaw GyfFes became her doomed
bridegroom and died from a spear-thrust in the side, according to the
classic pattern seen in Balder, Jesus, Krishna, and
many others. His soul
became an eagle; but he rose again in human form to his challenge
slayer, Gronw, to another
bout the following year. Like Gawain and the
Green Knight, or Frey and Njord in Scandinavia, the two "blood-
gods" (blotgodar) alternately sacrificed each other in seasonal cycles. 1
The reincarnated Llew Llaw killed Gronw with a spear-thrust

through a sacred holed stone.

Blodeuwedd's totemic form was an owl, the same bird of wisdom
and lunar mysteries that accompanied or represented ancient God-
desses like Athene and Owls were almost invariably associated
Lilith.
with witches in medieval folklore. She was also the Ninefold Goddess
of the western isles of paradise, otherwise known as Morgan, the Virgin

blending into the Crone of death. She "Nine powers in me

said:

combined, Nine buds of plant and tree. / Long and white are my fin-
gers, As the ninth wave of the sea." 2
1. Turville-Petre, 163. 2. Graves, W.G., 29, 340.

Blood
See Menstrual Blood.

Boadicea var. Boudicca

Warrior queen of the Iceni who led her tribe against Roman invaders
of Britain in 60 a.d. Tacitus said the Roman soldiers had dared to Cornelius Tacitus
Roman historian
scourge the queen and rape her two daughters, besides plundering
and rhetorician, ca.
the country. Boadicea took her revenge by slaughtering an entire legion;
56-120 a.d.
but an overwhelming number of reinforcements were sent to quell

the revolt. In the end, the Britons were defeated, and Boadicea killed
1
herself to avoid capture and disgrace.
1. Tacitus, 337-41.

Ill
Boar Boar
boar-gods common to both Scandinavian and Middle-
Sacrificial

Eastern traditions began with the Indian cult of Vishnu, who claimed to
create the world by virtue of his self-sacrifice in boar shape. Vishnu
said the blood of his boar incarnation had the creative power that only

the Mother's blood formerly had: "Gods and creatures arise out of
the sacrifice, for the sacrifice is their appointed food. Everything will
from the sacrifice; this whole universe is made of the
always arise
sacrifice." Vishnu dared to copulate with the Earth Goddess while she
was menstruating, and begot three boar-sons who were also sacrificed

by "gods saying Om," the Word of creation.

1

Vishnu the Boar represented an early attempt to re-assign to a

male the holy creative blood of life, the Goddess's menstruum. As the
phallic god who gave his life for humanity, he was worshipped in

conjunction with the Goddess by Germanic Aryans who, Tacitus

said, "worship the mother of the gods, and wear as a religious symbol
the device of a wild boar." 2
This Germanic boar-god became the doomsday-averting Savior
and Lord of Death, in both human and porcine form, "born in the

days of old of the race of gods." He was identified with Heimdall,

. . .

born of the Earth-and-Sea mother, fathered by boar blood. "He was

made strong with the force of the earth, with the cold sea and the blood
of the sacrificial boar." 3 That is, like most gods, in dying he begot
himself again.
The boar-god was sacrificed especially at Yul (Yule), with an apple
in hismouth, symbolizing regenerated heart-soul, according to
his
4
the Scandinavian belief that apples were resurrection charms. Hence
the traditional Yule pig roasted with an apple in its mouth. There was
a mystical meaning behind the pork-eating ritual. "Valhalla's boar" was

cooked in a cauldron, the regenerative womb-symbol, and the skalds

said ofit, "It's prime of pork,
but few men know on what Valhalla's
5
champions feed." If one may hazard a guess, Valhalla's champions
used to feed on human flesh, for which the boar was substituted.
Swedish priests in boar masks were regarded as incarnations of Frey,
and husbands of Freya, indicating an identification with the sacrificial
god who once wedded the Mother and died as both a boar and a
man. 6
The Jews' taboo on pig's flesh was nothing so hygienic or rational
as fear of trichinosis, as some modern apologists have tried to suggest,
showing gross misunderstanding of the biblical mentality. Reinach said,

"In the whole of the Bible there is not a single instance of an epi-
demic or a malady attributed to the eating of unclean meats. ... To the
Biblical writers, as to contemporary savages, illness
supernatural; itis

is an effect of the wrath of spirits. The pious Jew abstains from pork
because his remote ancestors, five or six thousand years before our
era, had the wild boar as their totem." 7
Like their neighbors, the Jews worshipped sacrificial boar-gods:

112
Syrian Adonis, for one. Boars were offered to Astarte in Syria, and to Bogey
her counterpart Demeter in Greece. Demeter's Eleusinian
Mysteries
mythologized the boar sacrifice as "pigs falling into a crevice in the ^^^^^^^^^
earth" at the moment when Pluto, Lord of Death, seized his
virgin
bride Kore. 8 The custom of driving sacrificial pigs into pits, as in the
rites of Demeter and Astarte, appeared in Christian Gospels as the
miracle-tale of the Gadarene swine, whose sacrificial death impelled
by "demons" was re-assigned to the intervention of
Jesus (Mark
5:11-13).
Myths of dying gods like Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis featured the
boar, or boarskin-clad priest, who sacrificed the god in swine form.
Such gods were "gored in the groin" by the boar, an allegory of ritual
9
[Link] lovers of the Goddess, they were chosen from mem-
bers of her priesthood. The sacrificer of Adonis was another of the
Goddess's lovers, Ares, wearer of the boarskin. The sacrificer and
castrater of Attis was his divine alter ego, a boar sent by Zeus, or by the
king of Phrygia these presumed simultaneously incarnate in the
same body. 10 Like Christ, Attis was the dying Son later resurrected as
the Father who decreed his death in the first place. Similarly, Vishnu
the Boar decreed death for his boar-sons. 11 Some myths said Attis died

in the same way as Adonis, being gored by a boar. Others said Attis

himself was the boar, a totemic sign of his kingship. 12

Malekula presents an original primitive view of the sacrificial

animal as savior or surrogate for men. Mother Death guards the gates
of the after-world. A man must pass these gates by distracting her
attention with his sacrificial pig. While she devours the pig, he slips
13
by her. who
After sacrificing and eating on earth the savior-pig
becomes part of himself, the man says, "It is no longer I who live, but
H
my sacrifice who lives in me." Christians similarly ate their god in
communion, and were taught to recite at the gate of heaven, "No
more I, but Christ."
The old cults of the boar were not altogether forgotten. Medieval

fairy tales abound in

magic boars, often figuring as sacrificial animals.
The first French book printed on the subject of witchcraft, de Spina's
Fortress of the Faith, declared that French witches assembled at a
15
certain sacred rock to worship the devil in the shape of a boar.
3. Turville-Petre, 147-48.
l.O'Flaherty, 196-97. 2. Tacitus, 73 1 .

4. Turville-Petre, 187. Sturluson, 63. 6. Gelling

5. &
Davidson, 162.
7. Reinach, 19-20. 8. Graves, G.M. 1, 94. 9. Graves, G.M. 1, 72.
10. Graves, W.G., 198. 11. O'Flaherty, 196. 12. Campbell, P.M., 427.
1 3. P.M., 447. 14.
Campbell, M.I., 456. 15. Robbins, 27.
Campbell,

Bogey
The Bogey-man was a devil derived from Slavic bog, "god." English
which used
cognates were bugabow, bugaboo, bugbear, and boggle-bo,
to signify a pagan image carried in procession to the games of May
or bogey,
Day. "Humbug" came from Norse hum, "night," plus bog
1

113
 2
Bogomils i.e., a night spirit. The word "bug," from Welsh bwg, "spirit," was
Bones applied to insects because of the old belief that insects were souls in

^^^^^^^^^^^^ search of rebirth. 3 A mantis was the soul of a seer or wizard. A

butterflywas Psyche, the Female Soul.
Other derivations of bog were Scottish bogle, Yorkshire boggart,
English Pug, Pouke, and Puck; Icelandic Puki; the Puk of Friesland;
the German Putz
or Butz; Irish Pooka and Welsh Pwcca; Danish
4
Spoge and Swedish Spoka with their English offshoot, "spook." Old
a
English puca, fairy, was applied to the old gods of Beltain. 5
Thus Puck
was the same as the witches' god, Robin.
1. Hazlitt, 80. 2. Leland, 161. 3. Spence, 96. 4. Keightley, 315-16.
5. Potter & Sargent, 295.

Bogomils
"God-lovers," Gnostic Christian heretics in the Balkans, 12th to 14th
Manichean heresies of the
centuries a.d. Allied with the basically
Paulicians of Armenia and the Patarenes of Bosnia, the Bogomils arose
in Bulgaria in revolt against the abuses of the Roman church, rejecting
baptism, the Eucharist, the cross, miracles, church buildings, and the
whole organization of orthodoxy. Like other Manicheans, they held that
the God who created this world of matter was a demon. 1

The Bogomils were highly puritanical but less sexist than the
Roman church. They admitted women to religious offices on an
equal basis with men. The Catholic writer Cosmas condemned as
"deviltry" their custom of appointing women to hear confessions and
2
give absolution tomen. Up to the late 14th century, Bogomilism was
"the most powerful sectarian movement in the history of the Bal-
kans," but Catholic crusades drove many members of the sect into the
arms of Islam, and the movement was crushed. See Bugger.
1. Encyc. Brit, "Bogomils." 2. Spinka, p. 66.

Bones
Many religions tabooed breaking the bones of a sacrificial animal, on
the theory that the gods needed a complete skeleton to resurrect it

anew. 1
On one occasion, the god Thor killed and resurrected two
goats, but the thighbone of one had been damaged, so the new goat was
lame. 2
The same belief is evident in the Bible. Concerning the paschal
lamb, God ordered: "Neither shall ye break a bone thereof" (Exodus
12:46); "They shall leave none of it unto the morning, nor break
any bone of it" (Numbers 9:12); "He keepeth all his bones; not one of
them is broken" (Psalms 34:20). To fulfill all these alleged prophe-
cies, Jesus's bones were left intact to identify him with the Lamb: "That

114
 the scripture should be fulfilled, a bone of him shall not be broken" Brahma
(John 19:36).
Several saints' legends also made use of regenerative bones.
St. Germain calf, on whose flesh he had
resurrected a
just feasted, by
the bones on the hide and
praying over them. A derivative'
3
laying
medieval belief was that every body contains an
incorruptible seed-bone,
"out of which, as they say, as a plant out of the
seed, our animal
bodies shall in the resurrection of the dead 4
spring up."
[Link], 307. 2. Silberer, 82. 3. de Voragine, 398. 4.
Agrippa, 88.

Brahma
India's patriarchal god, whose priests tried to establish wholly male-
dominated society and eliminate the Mother Goddess
who,
nevertheless, remained the parent of Brahma as she was of the other

gods. Though some of Brahma's scriptures tried to dissociate him from

the Mother by him "the Birthless," yet the same scriptures
calling
incongruously referred to him as the Goddess's "Firstborn." 1

The older dharma (holy law) said the worst of crimes was
killing a
woman or female child, because meant
unborn generations. 2
it
killing
However, like most patriarchal systems, Brahmanism lifted the taboo on
male aggression against females, and claimed that it was better to kill
women than to insult Brahmans: "To revile and calumniate a worship-
per of the Supreme Brahman is a sin ten million times worse than
that of killing a woman." 3
Like the medieval Christian church, Brahman priests made rules
for rigid control of wives, and made their deity say any other kind of
marriage was a sin that made the wife a whore and the children
4
illegitimate, disqualified for religious observances.
Brahman marriage reversed the old system of matrilineal inheri-
tance, insisting that property must pass from father to son. A widow
without male children was entitled to inherit only if she "lives under the
control of the relations of her husband, and in their absence under
the control of her father's relations" that is, male relations "then
only is she entitled to inherit. The woman who is even likely to go
astray not entitled to inherit the husband's property." 5 In practice of
is

course, any or all of these male groups could easily declare the widow
and divide the property among themselves.
unfit to inherit

Brahmanism was essentially paternal ancestor-worship, possibly the

root of similar paternal ancestor-worship instituted in Israel by the
legendary Abraham, whose name meant "Father Brahm." There was
the same obsession with record-keeping. At every Brahman wedding,
long lists of paternal ancestors were recited, like the biblical lists of

"begats." Brahman sons were taught "My father my

to recite: is

highest Dharma My father is my Heaven. On my father being

115
Brigit, Saint satisfied, the whole Universe is satisfied." Brahma also displayed the
patriarchal god's usual insistence on exclusivity:"Those who are averse
to My doctrine are unbelievers and sinners, as great as those who slay
a Brahman." 6
It is clear that Jewish patriarchy owed a debt to Brahman prece-
dent. From the Far East came the legend of the Golden Age of
righteousness, when men were free from sin, had great longevity, and
7
grew to gigantic size. Comparable were the long-lived biblical
patriarchs of the antediluvian age when there were "giants in the earth"

(Genesis 6:4). The story of Cain and Abel was Indo-Iranian. Vedic
poets used to beg their god to accept their sacrifices, and reject those of
other arya (men). 8
The legend of Jonah was prefigured by the Indian tale of Candra-
gomin, who endangered the ship he sailed on because a rival
magician caused a storm and took the form of a sea beast to swallow
him. 9
Talmudic tradition adopted the typical Oriental belief in transmi-
gration of souls; Adam's
by transmigration into David,
soul passed

than into the Messiah. 10 Brahmanic revelation seemed to be part of the

Messianic promise also. The Katha Upanishad said Brahma is realized

in one's own soul dimly, as if seen in a mirror; but in the heaven of

Brahma he is realized clearly, "as one distinguishes light from
The New Testament
darkness." 11 repeats the same message copied al-

most word for word: "For now we see through a glass (i.e., mirror)

darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The Brahman
doctrine that a thousand years is one Day of Brahma is repeated in
Psalms 90:4, and again in the First Book ofAdam and Eve, where God
explains that "five days and a half for him means 5,500 years for
men. 12
Brahma no longer popular in his native land. He is described
is as a

"theologian's god, whose worship never struck vital roots in the

popular folk soil." He was used mainly to support the caste system.

"Today Brahma is so relatively unimportant that only one or two

13
temples in all India are reserved for his exclusive worship."
1. Upanishads, 22. 2. O'Flaherty, 293. 3. Mahanirvanatantra, 45 4. Ibid., 45, 58. .

283. 6. Ibid., 215, 236, 16, 242. 7. Ibid., xlvii. 8. Dumezil, 425.
5. Ibid.,

9. Tatz &
Kent, 146. 10. Waddell, 226. 11. Upanishads, 23.
12. Forgotten Books, 6. 13. Ross, 57.

Cormac's Glossary
Compendium of old
Irish terms and leg- Saint
Brigit,
ends, attributed to
Archbishop Cormac Triple Goddess of the great Celtic empire of Brigantia, which
Mac Cullenan (d. 908 included parts of Spain, France, and the British Isles. Before she was a
a.d.), king of Mun- saint, she was a typical feminine trinity. Brigit ruled; her two sisters
ster. However, some arts of healing and smithcraft. Cormac's Glossary called
governed the
scholars believe the
her "Brigit the female sage Brigit the goddess, whom poets
Glossary was compiled
adored, because her protecting care over them was very great and very
later than his
1
lifetime. famous."

116
 Dr. MacCulloch said Brigit
"originated in a period when the Celts Brigit, Saint
worshipped goddesses rather than gods, and when
knowledge
leechcraft, agriculture, inspiration were [sic] women's rather than
men's. She had a female priesthood and men were
perhaps excluded
from her cult, as the tabooed shrine at Kildare 2
suggests." Brigit's
priestesses at Kildare kept an ever-burning sacred fire like that of the J. A. MacCulloch
temple of Vesta in Rome. They called the three personae of Scottish scholar, author
Brigit the
"Three Blessed Ladies of Britain" or the "Three of The Religion of
and Mothers," the Ancient Celts, 1911.
always identified them with the moon. 3

The number of Brigit's priestesses at Kildare

19, representing was
the 19-year cycle of the Celtic "Great Year." Greeks said the sun
god
of the north, whom they called Hyperborean
Apollo, visited the north-
ern "temple of the moon goddess" once
every 19 years, a mythic
expression of the coincidence of solar and lunar calendars. 4 In reality the
period of coincidence was 18.61 years, which meant the smallest
regular unit to give a"mating" of sun and moon was 56 years, two
cycles of 19 and one of 18. This astronomical data was well known to
the builders of Stonehenge, who marked the
span of Great Years with
posts around their circle. 5

Brigit was older than Celtic Ireland, having come with Gaelic
Celts from their original home in Galatia. One of her earliest shrines
was Brigeto in Illyricum. 6 Long before the Christian era, the Goddess
Illyricum (or Illyria)
of the Brigantes was said to be the same as Juno Ancient name for the
Regina, Queen of
Heaven, and Tanit, the Dea Celestis (Heavenly Goddess). 7 northwestern part of
the Balkan peninsula,
Finding the cult of Brigit impossible to eradicate, the Catholic
sometimes including
church rather unwisely canonized her as a saint, calling her Bridget
parts of modern
or Bride. Hagiographers declared she was a nun who founded a convent Serbia, Bulgaria,
at Kildare. But the convent was noted for its heathenish miracles and Austria, and the Tyrol.
evidences of fertility magic. Cows never went dry; flowers and sham-
rocks sprang up in Brigit's footprints; eternal spring reigned in her
bower. Irish writers refused to reduce their Goddess to mere sainthood,
and insisted that she was Queen of Heaven, which meant identifying
her with Mary. She was called "Mother of my Sovereign, Mary of the

Goidels, Queen of the South, Prophetess of Christ, Mother of

8
Jesus."
AnIrish charm against the evil eye suggested collusion between

the pagan and Christian heavenly-mother figures; it was "the Spell

the great white Mary sent to Bride the lovely fair." 9 She was also the

mystic mother-bride of St. Patrick, supposed to have died as one of

her sacrificial victims, and entered the underworld via her sacred grove
at Deny Down. An old distich said, "On the hill of Down, buried in
one tomb, were Bridget and Patricius." 10 Since Patrick's name meant
"father," and he was as apocryphal as other Irish saints, he may have
been a new name for Brigit's old consort the Dagda or "father."

Three churches of "St. Brigit" occupied her Triple-Goddess

formerly Emania or Emain Macha, country

territory of
of
Hy Many,
the Moon. Baptismal fees of those churches belonged to the O'Kelly
tribes, descended from the Goddess's kelles or sacred harlots. Her

117
Brimstone original female trinity was semi-Christianized as a "Wonder-working
Triad" consisting of Brigit, Patrick, and Columba: the Mother, the
Father, and the Holy Dove. St. Brigit's feast day was the first of
February, the first day of spring according to the pagan calendar. It
was called Oimelc, Imolg, or Imbulc, the day of union between God
and Goddess. 11
The same day was celebrated in Rome as the Lupercalia, sacred to
Venus and to women generally. With unconscious irony, the church

transformed it into the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, also called

Candlemas, which kept much of its pagan symbolism and was

regarded as a
major festival of witches. 12
Like other versions of the Celtic Goddess, Brigit was a teacher of
the martial arts, and a patron of warfare or briga. Her soldiers were
15
brigands, or as Christians called them, outlaws. Robin Hood's merry
men were outlaws of the same kind; so were Kali's Thugs and the
"Assassins" who worshipped the Arabian Moon-goddess.
Brigit was canonized more than once. Besides the Irish Brigit there
was a Bridget of Sweden, foundress and supreme ruler of a double
St.

monastery of both sexes, the Order of Brigantines. (See Convent.) A

branch of the ancient "colleges" of Brigit was a Brigantine House of
Sion established in 1420 on the bank of the Thames, where it flourished
14
until 1589 as a center of education for ladies of noble birth.

I. Joyce 1,260-61. 2. Campbell, P.M., 432. 3. Briffault 3, 70. 4. Hitching, 213.

5. Hawkins, 140. 6. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 141. 7. Lindsay, O.A., 328.
8. Graves, W.G., 144. 9. Gifford, 60. 10. Brewster, 140.
II. Joyce 1,379, 507; 2, 388. 12. de Lys, 127. [Link], 252. 14. Brewster, 339.

Brimstone
Old name for sulfur, derived from Brimo, a title of Athene, Hecate,
and Demeter. meant "raging one," the Goddess's Destroyer aspect. 2
1
It

The alchemical symbol for sulfur was the same as the symbol of
Athene, a triangle surmounting a cross: female genital sign over the
3
male, like the symbol of Venus.
Even the raging Brimo appeared as the Virgin Mother, in feasts of
purification at Eleusis, where the advent of the Divine Child was
announced with a cry, "Holy Brimo has borne the Holy Child
Brimus." 4
Because of her magical ability to cleanse and purify, Brimo's stone
was supposed to be proof against disease. Burning sulfur was used
even in medieval times to fumigate sickrooms and avert the plague. The
use of brimstone as an agent of purification accounts for its appear-
ance in the cauldron of Purgatory with its "fire and brimstone" to burn
away sins.

Alchemists tried to "marry Hermes and Athene" by combining

mercury with brimstone, which they thought might create gold.

They never succeeded.
1. Knight, S.L., 102. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 384. 3. Koch, 54, 66. 4. Wilkins, 67.

118
Brisingamen Brisingamen
The Necklace of Freya; in Norse myth, the magic rainbow Broomstick
bridge to
paradise. In Greece, Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Far East, prominent m^h^h^hm^h
features of the after-world were often called "ornaments" of the
Goddess, whose physical being was all existence: underworld, earth, and
heaven. Ishtar too wore the rainbow necklace, which the Persians
converted into the razor-edged bridge to the Mount of Paradise. See
Diakosmos; Ishtar; Rainbow. Odin stole Freya's necklace and
hung it on his own image; but she retrieved it.

Britomartis
"Sweet Virgin," a title of Rhea, the Great Goddess of Bronze Age
Crete and the Aegean islands.
1
The same name was given
an early to
ruler of Gaul, who was probably a queen embodying the Goddess's
2
spirit. Olympian mythology said the mother of Britomartis was the

Cretan virgin Carme, another form of Car, Car-Dia, Carmenta,

Carna, etc. They were really different names for the same deity. The
titles by which she was addressed in prayers and hymns were later mis-

understood as the names of different deities, which is why the

Goddess became "goddesses" in the west, or the Thousand-Named
One in the east.

1 .
Larousse, 86. 2. Briffault 3, 400.

Broceliande
The fairy wood in Brittany where Nimue, or Vivien, or Morgan
enchanted Merlin into his magic sleep within a crystal cave or, some
said, within the trunk of a venerable oak tree. This was one of the
nimidae or moon-groves still used for worship of woodland deities up
to the time of the Renaissance. See Grove, Sacred.
1

1. Joyce 1,359-60.

Bron
Companion of Joseph of Arimathea, keeper of the Christianized
version of the Holy Grail. Bron was really the Celtic god Bran, keeper
of the Cauldron of Regeneration; a popular deity with numerous
'

shrines, patron of "healing and resurrection."

1. Graves, W.G., 39.

Broomstick
Broomsticks were long associated with witches because they figured
in pagan rituals of marriage and birth, the Mysteries of Women. In

Rome broom was who

the a symbol of Hecate's priestess-midwife,

119
Broomstick swept the threshold of a house after each birth to remove evil spirits that

might harm the child.

1

^^^^^^^^^^^ As Hecate was also the Triple Goddess presiding over marriage,
her broomstick signified sexual union. Old wedding customs included

jumping over a broomstick, possibly to represent impregnation. Gypsy

weddings always included the same ritual, though gypsies now say they
2
don't know what it means. Oddly enough, the same broom-jumping
ritual marked the churchless weddings of black slaves in nineteenth-

century America.
Medieval peasant weddings in Europe were also churchless, as a
rule, coming under the jurisdiction of common law rather than canon

law, and using the rites of the old religions rather than the new. The
broom was so closely identified with non-ecclesiastical marriages that

by Renaissance times, when the church began to take over the nuptial
rites, unions "by the broom" were declared illegitimate. English

rustics still say "if a girl strides over a broom-handle, she will be a mother
before she is a wife." A girl who gives birth to a bastard child is said to

have "jumped over the besom." ?

As a horse for witches to ride, the broomstick apparently signified

Tantric-type sexual unions which were primary attractions of the

female-oriented witch cults. Plants genet, the broom plant, was sacred
to witches. This may explain why the ruling family of Anjou in the
12th century was named Plantagenet. Henry II, first Plantagenet king of
England, inherited his throne by matrilineal succession through his
mother Matilda, or Maud names commonly associated with witch-
craft the countess of Anjou. Genet also meant a horse or steed, the

"royal horse" of paganism. This meaning preserved in the word is

jennet, a small horse or the female donkey, and in the names fre-
quently taken by witches: Jenet, Janet, Jeannette, Jean, or Joan.
Such names suggested a witch-child born of a sacred marriage with

god represented by the broom.

a phallic A
Janet or Jenny was a
Daughter of the Horse, and old gods like Volos, Volsi, Waelsi, or Odin
4 seems to have
were called "Horse's Penis." Riding the broomstick

denoted the kind of sexual position viewed as a perversion by the

church, woman above, man below acting as her "horse." This sexual
implication confirmed by the old witch-rhyme, "Ride a cock-horse to
is

Banbury Cross (i.e., crossroads), to see a fine lady on a white horse."

The fine lady was Godiva, "the Goddess." Her white cock-horse
5
signifed her consort.
Children rode the cock-horse as a broomstick with a horse's head,
copied from Sufi mystics who entered Spain in the early Middle

Ages. Besides their organization in groups of thirteen, like covens,

and
their worship of the Rabba or "Lord," later transformed into the
called zamal-
witches' god Robin, Sufi sages rode horse-headed canes
zain, "gala limping horse." The dervish's stick-horse stood for the

Pegasus-like fairy steed that carried him to heaven

and back. 6 Such
customs became prevalent among the Basques, who were frequently
accused en masse of witchcraft.

120
 At times a witch's broomstick seems to have been
nothing more Brother
than a dildo, anointed with the famous "flying ointment" and used
lor genital stimulation. 7 French witches "flew" this
"With an way:
lintment which the Devil had delivered to them
they anointed a
Ivooden rod which was but small, and their
palms and their whole hands
likewise; and so, putting this small
rod between their
legs, straightway
Ihey flew there where they wished to be and the Devil guided
. . .

Ihem." 8 Certainly churchmen were prone to describe

any kind
If masturbation as guided by the devil women's masturbation most
larticularly so, for nothing was more abhorrent to the patriarchal
Inind than the thought that women could experience sexual pleasure
wathout men.
Witches' ointments often incorporated such
drugs as aconite,
leadily absorbable in an oil-based liniment through skin or mucus
Inembrane, producing symptoms like giddiness,
confusion, lethargy,
lingling sensations followed by numbness, and quite possibly the
Illusion of flying. Thus Oldham wrote:

So witches some enchanted wand bestride,

And think they through the airy regions ride. 9

Because of their ancient association with pagan midwives and

Christian counterparts the witches, broomsticks took on an accre-
jheir
ion of similar superstitions. Witches' familiar were said to be spirits
inable to cross
running water; hence, it became "bad luck" to move a
room across running water. It was also "bad luck" to burn a broom,
ince it was certainly bad luck for the witch. 10
1. Dumezil, 616. 2. Trigg, 86-87. 3. Spence, 148. 4. Turville-Petre, 201.
5. Hazlitt, 25. 6. Shah, 210, 223. [Link],78. 8. de Givry, 70. 9. Hazlitt, 655.
[Link],467.

bother
"he Greek word for brother was adelphos, "one from the same
'omb," derived from the matrilineal family when only maternal parent-
ood was recognized. English "brother" stemmed from Sanskrit
hratr,"support." In pre-Vedic India it was the duty of a brother, not a
usband, to help support a woman and her children. Husbands came
nd went, but the matrilineal clan remained stable. As an old proverb of
irab women said: "A husband can be found, a son can be born, but a
rother cannot be replaced." '

A preference for brothers over husbands may be found in many

re-patriarchal cultures. Pagan Slavic women considered "by my
rother" their most binding oath. In pre-Christian Norway, rune stones
n women's graves were raised by their brothers, not their husbands. 2
indent systems of clan loyalty were similar to that of the Nairs, of
horn it was said that no man knew his father, but "every man looks
n his sister's children as his heirs. A man's mother manages his

121
Buana family; and after her death his eldest sister assumes the direction."
Names and property were bequeathed in the female line. 3
The uterine-sibling bond was so much stronger than the marriage
bond in ancient societies that the ultimate endearment of lovers or
4
spouses was to call each other "brother" and "sister." King Solomon
called his bride "my sister, my spouse" (Song of Solomon 4:10) with
"sister" in the place of honor. An Egyptian wife affectionately addresse

her husband as "brother, husband, friend," in that order. 5

Weddings sometimes meant making bride and groom pseudo-

some magical way. Polynesian couples were not
siblings in
considered truly married until their two mothers mingled their blood,

signifying that the married pair were born of a double, or merged,

womb. 6 Often, the bride and groom mingled their own blood; this was
the common rite of gypsy weddings. 7
Brother-sister incest was customary in ancient ruling families,
when it was felt that a king and queen should be offspring of the same
mother, so the true line of succession would not be weakened. Egyptiai
pharaohs married their sisters as a matter of course because their
8
thrones were inherited through the female line. One pharaoh with onl
one son and one daughter suggested to his wife that the children

might marry outside the family. The queen angrily rejected the idea:
"Dost thou wrangle with me? Even if I have no children after those
9
two children, not the law to marry them one to the other?"
is it

Brother-sister incest was everywhere the practice of the elder gods

and goddesses, many of whom were twins who copulated even in
their mother's womb. Examples are Isis and Osiris, Artemis and Apollo

Fauna and Faunus, Diana and Dianus, Zeus and Hera, Yama and
Yami, Freya and Frey. According to Norse skalds, brother-sister incest
was the accepted custom of the Vanir or elder deities. 10
Mythological evidence tends to destroy the modern conception oi

Stone Age man protecting "his" cave with "his" mate and "their"
children. If the home was a cave or anything else, it was probably
selected, furnished, and owned by the female. If there was a male
protecting it, he was more likely to have been a sibling than a mate. In
fact therewere no monogamous families but only family groups,
centering on the women and children with impregnating males a loose
changeable periphery.
1. Briffault 1, 405, 498, 505. 2. Oxenstiema, 212. 3. Hartley, 152. 4. Albright, 128.
5. Hartley, 195. 6. Briffault 1, 559. 7. Trigg, 88. 8. Hooke, S.P., 256.
9. Maspero, 121. 10. Turville-Petre, 172.

var. Buanann Buana

"Good Mother," the Irish Goddess as a cow, recalling Hathor or
Cow-Eyed Hera who was also the Irish Goddess Eriu (Eire). Like
1
all

other versions of the milk-giving Mother she represented wealth or

plenty. Thus, her name Ana came to be synonymous with abundance.'
1. Graves, W.G., 414. 2. Joyce 1, 261.

122
Buddhism Buddhism
Established 500 years before Christianity and widely publicized
throughout the Middle East, Buddhism exerted more influence on
early ^m^bmi^^m
Christianity than church fathers liked to admit, since they viewed
Oriental religions in general as devil worship.

Legends and sayings derived from Buddhism appear in the Gos-

pels, disguised as "typically Christian" precepts, including the
Golden Rule. The Amogha school of Buddhism practiced a severe
morality, a life of poverty and chastity in retirement from secular

concerns, and the expectation of a Savior coming to earth in the near

future. Buddhist sages provided prototypes of Christian miracles.
1

They were said to walk on water, to speak in tongues, and to ascend to

heaven in the flesh. 2 Jains regarded the true Buddhist "hero" (vira) as
"not he who is of great physical strength and prowess, the great eater
and drinker, or man of powerful sexual energy, but he who has
controlled his senses, is a truth-seeker, ever engaged in worship, and
who has sacrificed lust and all other passions." 3
Buddha is more properly the Buddha, since Buddha was not a
name but a title, the "Enlightened or Blessed One," comparable to
Christos, "the Anointed One." Buddha had many other names because
he had already lived through many incarnations on earth. Even the

Buddha supposed to have appeared in the 5 th century B.C. had several

names: Gautama, Sakyamuni, Siddhartha the last, again, not a
name but a title, "Rich in Yogic Power." Buddha was miraculously
begotten by the Lord of Hosts and born of the Virgin Maya, the
same Great Goddess worshipped throughout Asia and having the
4
alternative Near-Eastern names of Maia, Marah, Mari, or Maria.

Many Buddhas who had already come and gone were bodhisattvas
or saints, sometimes simply known as Buddhas. Any sage might
become a bodhisattva through devotion to the holy life. But one true
Buddha remained to come again to earth. He was Maitreya, the
Master, or the Future Buddha, similar to the being known as Kalki, the
last avatar of the god Vishnu who would appear with the approach of
doomsday. The final coming of the Savior would signal the end of the
present world. He would judge the righteous, and annihilate the
wicked, and make everything ready for the ultimate creation of a new
heaven and a new earth. 5
These were basic ideas of Christianity as well as Buddhism: simple,
with arche-
easy to understand, dramatic, and appropriately aligned
typal and fears. The
hopes more subtle teachings of Buddhism, like

those of Christianity, apparently developed out of group thinking of

Yet again, as in
subsequent sectaries, especially the more ascetic sort.
Christianity the ascetics were unable to blot out the rich, colorful
Buddha said
sensuality of "pagan" Hinduism. Although they claimed
the true sage must never see or speak to a woman, must avoid
feminine creatures the plague, yet within a few centuries the
like
the bodhisattvas were
worship of the Goddess reasserted itself and all
them to eternal sexual bliss
provided with Shaktis who would welcome

123
Buddhism in heaven. "Tantric" Buddhism re-assimilated the feminine principle.
Until the advent of Islam, the original Buddhist asceticism was largely

^^^^^^^^^^^^ forgotten except for a few eremitic groups. A well-known aphorism

said: Buddhatvam yosidyonisamsritam, "Buddhahood resides in the

vulva (yoni)." 6
Buddhist legends reveal the constant tension between ascetic and
sensual elements. It was said Buddha wanted his brother Nanda to

become amonk, but Nanda was too much in love with his beautiful
mistress. So Buddha played a trick on him. He took Nanda to heaven
and showed him the nymphs, who were so desirable that Nanda
celestial

woman he had loved. Buddha then told

instantly forgot the mortal
him these nymphs could be won only by a life of rigorous self-denial
and meditation. Nanda agreed to join the monkish order. The ascetic
soon purged him of all desires, and he became as celibate as Buddha
life

had wished but only because of his overwhelming lust for a tran-
scendent sexual experience! 7
Like their western counterparts in later centuries, Buddhist monks

self-consciously threatened the Goddess with destruction, even

though her virgin form had given birth to their Savior. A Buddhist
hymn said, "This time I shall devour thee utterly, Mother Kali; for I

was born under an evil star and one so born becomes, they say, the
8
eater of his mother."
Stories of the Buddha and his many incarnations circulated inces-

santly throughout the ancient world, especially since Buddhist

monks
traveled to Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor four centuries before Christ,
9 were
to spread their doctrines. Ascetics like the Essenes certainly
influenced by them. Christians continued to hear tales of Buddhist

origin, and to relate them rather naively to their own beliefs. Buddha
himself entered the Christian canon as a saint St. Josaphat, a corrup-
tion of Bodhisat when John of Damascus wrote down his life story
10
in the 8th century a.d. Buddha the Christian saint was supplied with
a companion called Barlaam, who converted the Indian prince to a
Christian asceticism despite his royal father's efforts to thwart this
11
purpose.
Many scholars have pointed out that the basic tenets of Christian-
ity were basic tenets of Buddhism first; but it is also true that the

ceremonies and trappings of both religions were more similar than

either has wanted to acknowledge.

Buddhism has much in common with Roman Catholic Christianity,

having its purgatory, Goddess of Mercy, and its elaborate machinery

its

for delivering the dead from pain and misery through the good offices of
the priests. Among other similarities may be mentioned celibacy,

fasting, and flowers on the altar, incense, holy water,

use of candles

worship of relics, canonization ofsaints, use

rosaries, priestly garments,

ofa dead language for the liturgy and ceremonials generally. The trinity of
Buddhas, past, present, and future, is compared by some to the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost. The immaculate mother ofShakyamuni, whose
name Maya is strikingly similar to that ofMary, the mother ofJesus, is

124
 also to be noticed, while Buddha's
temptation on Vulture Peak by Mara
the Evil Bugger
One, may also be contrasted with the similar
temptation of
Our Lord. The worship ofancestors is in some measure
. . .
akin to the
saying of masses for the dead, and at one time the
Jesuits considered it a
^^^^^^""
harmless observance and tolerated it in their converts.
Finally the Dalai
Lama is a spiritual sovereign closely resembling the '2
Pope.
1. Avalon.211. 2. Tatz & Kent,.
167, 200; Waddell, 159.
3. Muhnnirvmwtuntra, cxii. 4.
Larousse, 348. 5. Lx'musse, 374.
6. Campbell, Or. M., 302, 352. 7.
Rawson, E.A., 184. 8 Wilson 257
9. Campbell, CM., 146. 10.
Muller, 313. 11. Attwater, 58. 12. Williams, 355.

Bugger
From "Bulgar," French Bougre. The modern meaning stemmed
from the Roman church's charge that medieval Bulgarians
practiced
sexual perversions in their churches.
Bulgarian Paulicians were
anathematized for disobeying the Roman pope,
setting up their own
churches independent of Rome, and
admitting women to clerical
office on an equal basis with men. 1

Bosnian Patarenes were also called buggers, since

they modeled
their national church on that of
Bulgaria. About 1200 a.d. the papacy
launched "a cruel war against the Bosnian Patarenes, which lasted two
and a half centuries, and finally culminated in the acceptance, on
their part, of the Mohammedan faith and in becoming Turks, rather
than submit to the Roman See." 2
Religious wars led the Balkans into social chaos. Heretics were
hunted down like animals, and tortured. Lands belonging to the
hereticmagnates (nobles) were seized and handed over to their Catholic
enemies. The heretics for their part continued to regard themselves
as the only true Christian nations. Under the anti-Roman Code of
Stephen, Catholic priests who tried to convert Balkan Christians back
to "the Latin faith" were declared criminals. 3
Quarrels and conflicts
persisted up to the present century.
1. Knight, D.W.P., 176. 2. Spinka, 147. 3. Spinka, 167-68.

Bull

The biblical title translated "God" is El, originally the title of the
Phoenician bull-god called Father of Men. As the "supreme god of the
Semitic pantheon, El was worshipped throughout Syria alongside the
" '
local gods, or Ba'als, one of his titles, indeed, being 'the Bull.' Like
Zeus the Bull, consort of Hera-Europa-Io the white Moon-Cow, El
married Asherah, the Semitic sacred Cow. He was identified with Elias

or Helios, the sun. He was still the Semitic Father of Men in the time
of Jesus, who cried to him from the cross, calling him Father (Mark
15:34).
Nearly every god of the ancient world was incarnate sooner or later
in a [Link] Cretan moon-king called Minos inhabited a succession of
Minotaurs (moon-bulls), who were sacrificed as the king's surrogates.

125
Bull Yama, the Hindu Lord of Death, wore a bull's head and became the
underworld judge, like Minos. 2 Shiva was incarnate in the white bull

^^^^^^^^^^^ Nandi. 3 The real reason King Nebuchadnezzar "ate grass" probably
was that his soul temporarily entered into the body of the divine
sacrificial bull (Daniel 4:33). Court prophets of the kings of Israel put
on masks to represent the king while casting
bull spells for his victory
4
over his enemies (1 Kings 22:1 1).
Bull worship was a large part of Mithraism. The bull's blood was
credited with produce all creatures on earth without the aid of
power to

the cow, though her power was implicit in that the bull's blood was
taken up and magically treated by the Moon. The bull was consecrated
to Anahita, a Persian name of the Moon-goddess whom the Greeks
called Artemis Tauropolos, "Bull-Slayer," of whom the bull-slaying
5
savior Mithra was a late, masculinized form. Like most patriarchal

symbols, those of the Mithraic cult were copied from myths of the
Asian Goddess. A
statue of Kali in the Ellora caves shows her in the

pose typical of Mithra, holding up the nose of the sacrificial bull and
6
preparing to slaughter it.

The bull was killed for a baptism of blood at the Roman Taurobo-
lium honor of Attis, Cybele, or Mithra. "A trench was dug over
in

which was erected a platform of planks with perforations and gaps.

Upon the platform the sacrificial bull was slaughtered, whose blood
dripped through upon the initiate in the trench ... he turned round and
held up his neck that the blood might trickle upon his lips, ears, eyes,
and nostrils; he moistened his tongue with the blood, which he
than drank as a sacramental act. Greeted by the spectators, he came
forth from this bloody baptism believing that he was purified from his
"7
sins and 'born again for eternity.' The participant in the Taurobo-
lium acted out literally what Christians called washing in the blood of
the lamb.

Egypt's savior Osiris was worshipped in bull form as Apis-Osiris,

the Moon-bull of Egypt, annually slain in atonement for the sins of the

ceremony of his rebirth, he appeared as the Golden Calf,

realm. 8 In the

Horus, born of Isis whose image was a golden cow. The same Golden

Calf was adored by the Israelites under Aaron (Exodus 32:4).

The Orphic god Dionysus also took the form of a bull; one of his
earlier incarnations was the Cretan bull-god Zagreus, "the Goodly
Bull," a son and reincarnation of Zeus, and another version of the
Minotaur. The god was a bull on earth, and a serpent in his subterra-
nean, regenerating phase. The Orphic formula ran: "The bull is the
9
father of the serpent, and the serpent is the father of the bull."

Dionysus was reincarnated over and over, and there were some who
identified him with the Persian Messiah. In the Book of Enoch,
10
the Messiah represented as a white bull.
is

Athenian legends of the Moerae or Fates compared all men to

the sacrificial bull sentenced to death at the hands of Fate sooner or
later. Medieval superstition called the Fate-goddess Mora, a nocturnal
spirit who roams the world seizing men and crushing them until they

126
"roar like bulls." She was also Christianized as St.
Maura, on whose Buto
sacred day women were forbidden to sew, lest they "cut the thread of Byelobog
life" after the manner of the Moerae. 11 ^^^^-^_^^_^
In medieval England, Twelfth Night games featured remnants of
bull worship. A large cake with a hole in the center was thrown over the

bull's horn, to form a lingam-yoni. The bull was then tickled, "to make
him toss his head." If he threw the cake behind him, it belonged to the
12
mistress; if in front,
it
belonged to the bailiff. This ceremony probably
derived from an ancient custom of divination. Like all sacrificial victims

already dedicated to the supernatural realm, the bull was believed to

have prophetic powers.
1. Larousse, 74. 2. Campbell, ML, 409. 3. Campbell, Or.M, 90.
4. Hooke, S.P., 160. 5. Cumont, M.M., 20, 137. 6. Ross, 40. 7. Angus 94-95
8. Budge, G.E. 2, 349. 9. Legge, 39. 10. Hooke, S.P., 138. 11. Lawson, 175.
12. Hazlitt, 603.

Buto
Greek name for the Egyptian serpent-goddess Per-Uatchet, also
called Uraeus, Anqet, Iusaset, Mehen the Enveloper, etc. With Nekh-
1

bet the vulture-goddess, she co-ruled the Two Lands as the Nebti,
the Two Mistresses. 2 Like the Two Ladies of the ancient Middle East,
they were twin spirits of birth and death. See Serpent.
1. Norman, 48; Budge, G.E. 2, 57. 2. Larousse, 29.

Byblos
Oldest, most famous seat of the Semitic Great Goddess, variously
known as Mari, Astarte, Asherah, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Isis, or Hathor.
"Bibles" were named
her city because the earliest libraries were
after

attached to her temple. (See Bible.) Kings of Byblos received their

mandate from the Goddess before they could rule. King Yehawmilk
for instance said she placed him and his predecessors on the throne.

When invoked as Mistress, "she heard my voice and treated me

kindly." The king begged her to bless him and prolong his years in

Byblos.
Recently it has been found that earlier archeological scholars
misread the words "Lady of Byblos" in Aramaic texts referring to the
1

Goddess, and translated these words "Lord of Byblos" instead. In

reality there was never any god in Byblos whose power equalled
that

of the many-named Lady.

[Link],A.N.E. 1,215,221.

Byelobog
Slavic"White God," a heavenly deity opposed to the Black God,
adversaries in
Chernobog. Both were variants of the ancient Persian
heaven and the underworld, who would engage in the final battle

between forces of good and evil, at the end of the world. See

Doomsday.

127
Caryatids. Carved pillars
from the
Acropolis.
Greek, 2nd century b.c.

St. Catherine, by
Lorenzetti. Sienese,
about 1335 a.d.

Bronze cat with one

earring. Late
Dynastic Egypt (ca. 2000
B.C.).
Cabala Cabala
Cabiria
Medieval Jewish mystical system obviously influenced by Tantrism
and Sufism, like the Christian courtly-love movement of the same
period. The Cabala's basic premise was that all the world's ills

var. Kabbalah
stemmed from God's loss of contact with his female counterpart, the
Shekina, a Hebraic version of Shakti. God is fragmented, and only
the Shekina has power to "put God back together." Universal harmo- '

ny must be restored by making God and his Goddess once more

"one." 2
Sexual union of mortals was thought to create its like on the plane
of the divine. Therefore sexual intercourse was a sacramental act

helpful to God and the Shekina. "The efflorescence of such beliefs into

orgiastic rites suggests itself too readily not to be attempted, and in-

deed, in the further development of Kabbalistic doctrine, such attempts

were made." 5 Generally, however, the cabalist confined his erotic
experiments to his legal wife. The first step in his ascent of the
Sephiroth or Tree of Knowledge was the female sexual power,
Shekina-Malkuth, Queen and Bride, represented by the moon and the
4
spouse. Further steps made use of elaborate systems of numerology,

magic, and scriptural allegory, yielding successive revelations of the

divine nature.
The major cabalistic work was the Sefer ha-Zohar, "Book of
Splendor," composed in the late 1 3th century by Moses de Leon of
Guadalajara, who claimed its real author was the legendary 2nd-century
mystic Simeon ben Yohai. He pretended to have the ancient original
of the book in his possession, but it was never produced. Scholars have
concluded that it never existed, and de Leon wrote the Sefer ha-
Zohar himself. 5
Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola(1463- Despite Jewish orientation, the Cabala exerted a strong appeal
its

1494). Italian for contemporary Christian mystics. It has been much in the favor of
nobleman, philosopher occultists ever since. Pico della Mirandola even professed to find in the
and scholar, declared
Cabala what the Jews themselves denied: the incarnation of full
a heretic for his
godhood in Jesus. He wrote: "No science offers greater assurance of
attempts to unite 6
Christian theology with Christ's divinity than magic and the Cabala." See Hexagram;
Cabalistic doctrine. Shekina.
[Link], 186. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Cabala." 3. Lederer, 188. 4. Cavendish, T., 52, 74.
5. Encyc. Brit, "Cabala." 6. Shumaker, 16.

Cabiria
Title of Demeter as the Goddess of the Cabirian Mysteries in Phrygia
Samothrace, and other areas, second only to the Eleusinian Mysteries
in importance. Her consort was the Young God, variously known as

Dionysus, Ganymede, or Cabirius. In Thebes the Great Goddess

130
wascalled Demeter Cabiria, sometimes a
trinity of "three Cabirian Caduceus
nymphs." Her sexual union with the god was represented by the Caillech
same symbol as in India and Egypt: water poured from a male vessel
1
^^^^^^^^^-i
into a female one. (See Jar-bearer.) Because of its ancient erotic
connotations, Cabiria became a common witch-name in medieval
times.
1. Neumann, G.M., 324-25.

Caduceus
Some Gnostic Christians worshipped the serpent
hung on a cross,
rod, or Tree of Life, calling it Christ the Savior, also a title of Hermes
the Wise Serpent represented by his own holy caduceus, the scepter
of two serpents. This was one of the oldest and most revered holy

symbols. "The usual mythological association of the serpent is not, as

in the Bible, with corruption, but with physical and
spiritual health, as in
theGreek caduceus." To Sumerians it was an emblem of life,
appearing on art works like the Libation Cup of Gudea, ca. 2000 b.c. In

pre-Hellenic Greece the caduceus was displayed on healing temples

like those of Asclepius, Hygeia, and Panacea, which is why it is still an

international symbol of the medical profession. The caduceus is

found also in Aztec sacred art, enthroned like a serpent-deity on an
altar. North American Indians knew it too. A Navaho medicine man
once featured "a stone carving of two
said his people's sacred cave

snakes intertwined, the heads facing east and west." '

Hindu symbolism equated the caduceus with the central spirit of

the human body, the spinal column, with two mystic serpents twined
around it like the genetic double helix: ida-nadiio the left, pingala-nadi

to the right. 2

Moses's brazen serpent on a pole, the mere sight of which cured

the Israelites, was probably a prophylactic caduceus (Numbers 21:9).
It was named Nehushtan, and worshipped in the tabernacle up to the

reign of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4). See Hermes.

1.
Campbell, M. I., 282-84, 286-88, 294-95. 2. Bardo Thodol, 215.

Caillech
Old Celtic name for Kali-the-Crone, the Great Goddess in her

Destroyer aspect. Like Kali, the Caillech was a black Mother

who
founded many races of people and outlived many husbands. She was
also a creatress. She made the world, building mountain ranges of stones
1
that dropped from her apron.
Scotland was once called Caledonia: the land given by Kali, or

131
Cain Cale, or the Caillech. "Scotland" came from Scotia, the same
Goddess, known to Romans as a "dark Aphrodite"; to Celts as Scatha or
2
^^^^^^^^^^^m Scyth; and to Scandinavians as Skadi.
Like the Hindus' destroying Kalika, the Caillech was known as a

spirit of disease. One manifestation of her was a famous idol of carved

and painted wood, kept by an old family in County Cork, and described
as the Goddess of Smallpox. As diseased persons in India sacrificed to

the appropriate incarnation of the Kalika, so in Ireland those afflicted by

3
smallpox sacrificed sheep to this image. It can hardly be doubted that
Kalika and Caillech were the same word.
According to various interpretations, caillech meant either an old
4
woman, or a hag, or a nun, or a 'Veiled one." This last apparently
referred to the Goddess's most mysterious manifestation as the future,

Fate, and Death ever veiled from the sight of men, since no man
could know the manner of his own death.
In medieval legend the Caillech became the Black Queen who
ruled a western paradise in the Indies, where men were used in
Amazonian fashion for breeding purposes only, then slain. Spaniards
called her Califia, whose territory was rich in gold, silver, and gems.
Spanish explorers later gave her name
newly discovered paradise
to their

on the Pacific shore of North America, which is how the state of

California came to be named after Kali.

In the present century, Irish and Scottish descendants of the Celtic

"creatress" still use the word caillech as a synonym for "old

woman." 5
[Link],41. 2. Graves, W. C, 131. 3. Squire, 413. 4. Joyce 1 ,
3 1 6.

[Link],G. B.,467.

Cain
"Smith," Mother Eve's firstborn, begotten by the serpent and not by
Adam, according to rabbinical tradition. The Bible says Cain's murder
of his brother Abel was caused by jealousy, after God accepted Abel's
blood sacrifice but rejected Cain's offering of vegetable firstfruits.

Fearing to depart from this precedent, the Jews offered blood

sacrifices to Yahweh up to the early Christian era.

The Bible story was a Hebraic repetition of the Persian myth of

Ahriman and Ahura Mazda, who offered sacrifices to an elder deity,
Vayu. Ahriman was declared a traitor and devil when his offering was
refused. 1 Indo-Iranian priests used to pray the gods to accept their
own and refuse those of other arya (men). 2 Ahriman was the
sacrifices,
ancestor of those other arya, since his original Hindu name was

Aryaman, father of men.

The myth of Cain was based on primitive sacrificial magic, as
shown by certain internal inconsistencies. God placed a curse on

132
Cain, the same time protecting him with a mark of
at
immunity. Hooke Cain
explains part of the ritual fertility sacrifice:

The sacrificer is defiled by his act. ...It is this which explains

why the
slayer enjoys ritual protection . the most likely explanation of the
. .

mark is that it represents a tattoo mark or other indication that the

fugitive
belonged to a sacred class. We have evidence from Hebrew sources
that the prophets bore such marks.
"
Tammuz, who bears the title of
. . .

"the Shepherd, dies, or is ritually slain,

during the period ofsummer
drought and his official slayer was obliged to flee in order to remove
. . .

the ceremonial guilt of the slaying from the 3

community.

Such comparisons are needed to solve the dilemma of those

theologians who, through the centuries, have been helpless to explain
God's apparent blunder in protecting Cain from nonexistent ene-
mies, when there were as yet no people in the world but Cain and his

parents. Actually, the sacred caste of Cainite smiths worshipped the

Goddess and dedicated sacrifices of the Good Shepherd to her as the
Earth, who "opened her mouth" for Abel's blood (Genesis 4:1 1).
Cain's myth reflects the patriarchs' hostility toward this caste. 4 Eventual-

ly, they drove all the smiths out of their country, and had to send their

tools to the Philistines for repair because "there was no smith found
throughout all the land of Israel" (1 Samuel 13:19). Before the ban
on smithcraft, however, they had the famous Tubal-cain, "instructor of
every artificer in brass and iron" (Genesis 4:22). The fraternity of
smiths was of Midianite origin, and may have inflicted a certain leg

upon initiates, which could have been the mark of Cain. The
injury
Hebrew word for Passover, Pesach, meant "to dance with a limp." 5
The festival of Pesach was associated with the Midianites or Kenites
(Cainites, "children of Cain"), who were famed as miners and smiths,
and worshipped the Great Mother copper mines of Sinai.
in the

According to the Sinai tablets, their Semitic metalworkers called

deity Elath-Yahu, a combination of Yahweh and El-Lat or Allatu, Lady

of the Underworld; but she was also identified with celestial Hathor. 6
The Cainites migrated from northern Syria, where their smith god

formerly occupied the volcanic mountain Jebel-Al-Aqra, a seat of Baal

in the Ras Shamra texts. 7 The Mosaic Yahweh was a volcano-god

like this Midianite Baal, or like limping Hephaestus and Latin Vulcanus,
gods represented by "a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by

night" (Exodus 13:21-22).

Exodus 2:16 says Moses was adopted by the Midianite smiths

through his marriage to their priestess, one of the usual sacred

number of seven sisters. Prominent in the clan were such artisans as

Bezaleel, maker of the ark of the covenant, who was filled "with the

spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all

manner of workmanship; and to devise curious works, to work in

gold, and in silver, and in brass" (Exodus 35:31-32). The word here

133
Callisto translated "God"apparently meant the spirit of Elath-Yahu. But
Candlemas Moses quarreled with Midianite wife, apparently over his attempt to
his

institute the Egyptian custom of circumcision (Exodus 4:25) and

^^^^^^^^^^^
they were divorced (Exodus 18:2). Subsequently, smithcraft dis-
appeared from Israel after a long-remembered feud that imputed the
crime of fratricide to Moses's followers, though their priestly tradition
was to lay it on Cain. The account in Exodus 32 shows that the
victims were not shepherds, but Cainites:

Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord's side?
let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves

together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of
Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate

to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every

man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of
Levi did according to the word ofMoses: and there fell of the people that
day about three thousand men. (Exodus 32:26-28)

In later ages, Cain became a demi-devil, in the view of religious

authorities who failed to notice that the true brother-slayers were Moses's
followers. Or, if they did notice, they regarded the killing of three
thousand as less important than the killing of one. In folklore, Cain
remained attached to the diabolized matriarchal tradition: he was the
man in the moon. 8 A German tale said the man in the moon refused to

keep God's sabbath, the Sun-day. Therefore he was sent to the moon,
and a saint informed him: "As you value not Sunday on earth, yours
shall be a perpetual Moon-day in heaven." 9
[Link], 323. 2. Dume/il.425. 3. Hooke.S.R, 69-71. 4. Hooke, M.E.M., 124.
[Link], W.G., 358. 6. Graves, W.G., 368. 7. Gray, 108. 8. Briffault 2, 629.
9. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 192.

Callisto

"Fairest One," a title of Artemis as totemic She-Bear and mother

of Areas, the Little Bear. Calliste was an old name for Artemis's sacred

island Thera (She-Beast). Hellenic writers said the Attic rites of

Artemis involved young girls dressed as the She-bear, which gave rise to

the myth of Callisto, anymph who lost her virginity to Zeus and gave
birth to the bear-child. They were placed in heaven as Ursa Major and

Ursa Minor. Of course the nymph was the virgin aspect of the
1

Goddess herself.

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 86; W.G, 185.

Candlemas
Because it fell forty days after Christmas, Candlemas became the
Festival of the Purification of the Virgin according to the Judeo-
Christian rule that women must be "purified" forty days after

134
childbirth, an event which the patriarchs claimed rendered a mother Cannibalism
ritually unclean. The
Bible specifies forty days of
impurity following
the birth of a son, and eighty days following the birth of a
since females were supposed to be twice as unclean as males
daughter, ^^^^^^^^^
(Leviticus 12:2-5). The Christian God also considered new mothers
unclean, and would not allow a woman to enter a church until the
proper time had elapsed after her delivery. Her ritual purification was
known as "churching."
The Council of Trullus once tried to abolish the festival of
Candlemas, on the ground that in giving birth to Christ, the Virgin
"suffered no pollution, and therefore needed no purification."
But Candlemas was not originally a Christian festival. To Roman
pagans, was the day honoring Juno Februata as the virgin mother
it

of Mars. Like the Lupercalia two weeks later, the day commemorated
the Goddess who engendered the "fever" (febris) of love. Christian 1

pagan people went about Rome with "candles

authorities said the

burning in worship of this woman Februa." Pope Sergius renamed

the holy day "to undo this foul use and custom, and turn it onto God's

worship and our Lady's ... so that now this feast is

solemnly hal-
lowed through all Christendom." 2 Candlemas was properly
Still,

considered sacred to women and to the Goddess of Love. 5 Among

Celtic pagans it was the Feast of Imbolg, which stood opposite the great
festivalof Lammas in the old sacred year.
Omens were taken on Candlemas Day for the new growing
season, especially its weather. Therefore animals were said to come
out of hibernation to provide helpful predictions for the end of winter;
whichis why it is now
Groundhog Day. An old rhyme said, "If
Candlemas Day be fair and bright, Winter will have another flight; If

Candlemas Day be shower and rain, Winter is gone and will not
4
come again."
[Link], 151. 2. Hazlitt, 85-86. [Link] Lys, 127. 4. Hazlitt, 87.

Cannibalism
The most consistently observed taboo in civilized society is the taboo
taboo against
against eating human flesh, though there is no comparable

killing, which is done regularly, sometimes in enormous volume, as in

the case of war.

Upon human sacrifice but not cannibalism among the

finding
Polynesians, Captain Cook called it a shocking
waste of the human

race, and wrote: "It were much to be wished, that this

deluded people
to entertain the same horror of murdering their fellow-
may learn
creatures ... as they have of feeding, corporeally, on
now human flesh

themselves." Of course that the

good captain failed to notice
1
the
same delusion dwelt among his own countrymen. Eventually the

135
Cannibalism Christians taught the Polynesians not to murder their fellow-creatures

any more, by the simple expedient of murdering large numbers of

Polynesians until they gave up.
Western morality has always allowed and encouraged mass killing,
provided the dead never became meals for the living. It has been
noted that the decline of human sacrifice and cannibalism in antiquity
was not accompanied by a decline in human slaughter generally. On
the contrary, the scale of warfare steadily increased with the growth of

civilization, up to the point where the highly technical civilizations of

today stand ready to exterminate an entire world. Moreover the highest
casualty lists have been accumulated in precisely the same nations
2
that call themselves Christian.

Churches, declaring themselves officially opposed to killing, have

alwaysmanaged to justify it nonetheless, when it seemed expedient.

Even more curious a contradiction may be found on the matter of
cannibalism, which Christian authorities regarded with the utmost
horror. Witches were accused of this crime more than any other, since it

seemed dreadful enough to deserve the merciless punishment its

alleged practitioners received. Yet at the very core of Christian faith lay
the sacrament upon which salvation, redemption, eternal life and all

the rest depended completely: a sacrament of cannibalism, not "sym-

bolic" but according to its theological rationale, absolutely real.
God-eating was a universal custom descended from the earliest
beginnings of civilization, when it was usually a genuine cannibal
As the incarnate god, "the victim is not only slain, but the
feast.

worshippers partake of the body and blood of the victim, so that his

life passes into their life, and knits them to the deity in living

communion." 3
The object was to become flesh of the god's flesh by eating him, so
as to share in the resurrection of the divine flesh. There is no use
pretending that this "Christian" ceremony did not originate in ceremo-
nies of real cannibalism as primitive sympathetic magic. All the

mystery-religions of the early Christian era centered on a pseudo-

cannibalistic sacrament believed to identify the worshipper with the

worshipped. "That there was a firm belief in the earlier stages of

religion, of such participation in the god by eating him in a sacramen-
tal meal cannot be questioned. In the Thracian-Dionysiac Mysteries,
e.g., the celebrants by such a meal obtain a share in the divine life of
the god, and so are called by his name." 4
The same idea underlay Christian sacraments as well as those of
the other Mysteries. Cyril of Jerusalem talked of "partaking of the
Methodius 9th-cen- body and blood of Christ, that you may become con-corporate and con-
Greek missionary
tury sanguineous with Him; for thus we become Christophori, his body
to the Slavs, canon-
and his blood entering into our members." Methodius taught that
ized soon after his death
"every believer must through participation in Christ be born a
by the Greek church,
and a thousand years Christ. ... He was made man that we might be made God." The same
later by the Roman. sacrament in other religions, however, was a diabolic rite: "Evil spirits

136
gain power by means of the food consecrated to them, and are Cannibalism
introduced by your own hands into your own bodies; there they hide
themselves for a long time and unite with the soul." 5
True cannibalism was still overtly associated with Tibetan sacrifices
up to the 7th century a.d., after which the sacred
mystery play
provided symbolic substitutes. A victim made of dough was torn apart,
his "entrails" distributed and devoured. Sometimes, real flesh from
the corpse of an executed criminal was inserted into the
dough image.
At the atonement festival, a bull-masked priest called the Holy
King
of Religion stabbed the sacrificial figure, cut off its limbs,
opened the
breast and extracted artificial lungs, heart, and intestines. The re-
mains were scattered by animal-masked dancers, as the remains of Osiris
and other savior-gods of antiquity were scattered over the earth. 6
Such dancers recall the Sabeans (Shebans) of Ezekiel 24, called
"women that shed blood," who dressed in golden crowns and brace-

lets to make mourning for the dead, and "ate the bread of men." Similar
funerary dancers were the Egyptian muu or "mothers," who wore
vulture feathers to impersonate the Goddess Mut, or Nekhbet, eater of
the dead.

Recently in parts of France it was a custom to make a dough man

of the last sheaves of the harvest to represent the human sacrifice. He
was broken in pieces by the make (an old title of a clan mother) and

given to the people to eat. Similarly inMexico, after human sacrifices

were discontinued, a flint-tipped dart was hurled into the breast of a
dough man. This was known as "killing the god so that his body
might be eaten." In a ceremony called torqualo, "God is eaten," the
image was divided into small pieces and distributed among the
7
people.
This was an obvious survival of Aztec religious ideas. The victim
The original "barbe-
impersonating the god received worship, healed the sick, and blessed cue" was a cannibal
the people, always attended by his keeper-apostles. Then he was killed feast. The word
and butchered in special houses called calpulli, which distributed him. came from barbricot,
the of green
Nursing mothers would smear their nipples with a victim's holy blood so grill

boughs on which Carib

even their infants could partake of it.
Indians used to roast
The Greek omophagia was originally a cannibal orgy that even human flesh.
8

dispensed with cooking. Victims were torn apart with the teeth and Ancient writings often
bare hands of the participants and eaten raw. Greek classical writers speak of the canni-
of elder
balistic habits
preferred to forget the omophagia. They looked down on barbarian
races. The Norse el-
tribes for sexual promiscuity and cannibalizing their family
members. 10
der gods or giants were
What was the relationship between eating sacred kings and saviors jotunn, from an
and eating family members? The answers have been given by canni- Indo-European root
bals themselves: women eat the flesh of dead men and bring them back
word meaning "eat-
ers." They were
to life as new children. Primitive people reasoned that, in order to be
believed to eat men,
born again, one must get inside a woman's body. The simplest way to like jack's giant who
was the original root of
accomplish this was to be eaten by her. This drank the blood of
the world-wide doctrine of reincarnation: literally, re-clothing in flesh. Englishmen and made
9
Before discovery of the mechanism of conception, a dying man bread of their bones.

H7
Cannibalism looked forward to rebirth from one of the tribal mothers who would
convert his flesh and blood into a new baby. Thus the Massagetae
_______________ considered being eaten by clan mothers the only honorable death. A
man could become flesh of their flesh, and live again. 11 Resurrection
was brought about by the mysterious magic of women who, like the
earth, gave life over and over.
Australian native women have been known to eat their infants who
die,then to paint the bones red and hang them about their bodies:
crude magic aimed at returning the child to the matrix and re-coating its

bones with life-giving maternal blood. Women of the Bibinga tribe

dead to give them reincarnation. 12
stated quite plainly that they ate the

In New Guinea, a newborn child would receive the soul-name of a

man who was killed and his flesh given to the mother to eat. 13
In 1852, Dr. Hubsch wrote of the African tribe called Niam-
Niam: "As soon as one of the tribe dies, his relations, instead of

burying him, cut him up and regale themselves upon his remains;
consequently there are no cemeteries in this land." H Baganda
tribesmen said their women sometimes became so hungry that they bit

off their babies' earsprobably a euphemistic way of saying they ate

the whole baby, confident of their ability to give it another birth. 15
The notion that pregnancy is the result of eating is still widespread
among savages. Words for consuming and conceiving are often the
same. There was an ancient Babylonian proverb: "Who grows pregnant
without having conceived? Who grows fat without having eaten?" 16

According to Horace, the real primal scene was not the sexual drama
postulated by Freud, but "A child, by a fell witch devoured, dragged
17
from her entrails, and to life restored." The Bible's term for birth is
"coming forth from the bowels" (Genesis 1
5:4), for, like children, the
ancients were not altogether certain of the distinction between repro-
ductive and digestive systems. The Sanhedrin said a woman may
conceive by drinking or bathing in water used to wash a corpse, an
obvious survival of the primitive idea of a dead soul entering a new
mother. 18
The Chinese in the Shang period thought birth and rebirth were
the samething. The pictogram kuei, meaning both "soul" and
19
"rebirth," was a fetus.

The Yanomamo say they used to practice cannibalism, because

theirmother goddess Mamokoriyoma allowed them to eat dead
parents and children. But they ceased to worship her, and declared
cannibalism a sin. Cremation of the dead was instituted. Yet they still

eat the ashes of the dead, mixed with food. Sharing the ashes of
important ancestors is a sacred ceremony thought to strengthen
20
kinship bonds.
In southeastern Africa, when a woman marries into another

kinship group, she must eat kernels of grain raised on the skull of a
dead ancestor. When she gives birth, elders watch for signs of similarity
between the deceased and the new baby. Kernels of grain were
similarly grown on the mummy of Osiris and the body of Adonis, who

138
was born in Bethlehem, the "House of Bread." The
grain was eaten Canopic Jar
insolemn communion by the god's worshippers, who took it to mean Car
they were like him, and would be reborn like him. Hawaiians had a
god like Osiris, who was dismembered and buried in many earth-
wombs. Foodstuffs grew from the parts of his body. 21
Nearly all religions incorporate hidden hints of cannibalism.
Apart
from the sacrament of god-devouring that
Christianity shared with
paganism, the primitive church was accused of real cannibalism. Ro-
mans claimed the Christians sacrificed and ate children, and
dipped
their host in children's blood. Orthodox authorities didn't deny these
charges, but insisted only the Gnostic sects were to blame. Justin
Martyr said the Marcionites practiced incest and cannibalism. Eusebius
of Caesarea said the Carpocratians did it.
Epiphanius said the
Montanists and Ophites did it. Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and
the 5th-century Presbyter Salvian all blamed heretic Christians for
22
holding anthropophagus brought disgrace on the church.
rites that

Despite powerful taboos, cannibalism was not unknown in medi-

eval Europe. In periods of famine or plague, when many starved to
death in the streets of European towns, bodies sometimes simply

disappeared. In 1435 the Sawney Beane family of Galloway was

accused of having lived on a diet of human flesh for generations; but

they were tortured to death by the court at Edinburgh, which may

render their confessions suspect. 23 In 1661, four Scottish "witches"
were tortured into confessing that they ate an unbaptized child dug up
from the Forfar churchyard. 24 This seems improbable, since the
unbaptized were not buried in churchyards. Next to witches, those
most frequently accused of cannibalism were the Jews. See Jews,
Persecution of.

[Link], M.I., 446-47. 2. M. Harris, 121. 3. Elworthy, 1 12. 4. Angus, 129.

5. Angus, 107, 132. 6. Waddell, 518, 527, 531. 7. Elworthy, 1 1 1.

8. Frazer, G.B., 680; M. Harris, 102-3, 108, 1 18. 9. Branston, 101.

10. Thomson, 64, 145. 11. Herodotus, 83-84. 12. Summers, V, 263-64.

[Link], 15-16. 14. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 158. 15. Briffault, 2,460.

16. Assyr.& Bab. Lit., 448. 17. Summers, V, 227. 18. Gaster, 521.
[Link], 98. 20. Chagnon, 46, 5 1 21. Campbell, P.M., 127, 200.
.

22. J.B. Russell, 89-92. 23. Summers, V, 61. 24. Tannahill, 101.

Canopic Jar

Egyptian tomb vessel for holding the entrails of a mummy. From the

city of Canopis, "Eye of the Dog," Greek name for the star of Anubis,
which Egyptians called Sothis (Sirius), the "eye" of the constellation
Canis Major, the Great Dog. This star was supposed to hold the inward

parts of the god Osiris in his "mummy" phase as Lord of Death. See

Dog.

Car var. Car-Dia,

Cardea, Carmenta,
The Goddess Car, or Kore, or Ker, or Q're, or Cerdo; one of the Carna, etc.
most widespread name-cycles of the Indo-European Goddess. Her

139
Carpet, Magic sacred city in Sardinia was Caralis, the modern Cagliari.
1
Her sacred
Cassandra city in theChersonese was Cardia, "the Goddess Car." Gaulish tribes

called the Carnutes traced their descent from her; Chartres was
^^^^^^^^^^^
named after her. As Carna and Carmenta she became the Etruscan-
Roman mother of "carnivals," of "charms," and of alphabetical
letters.

In the time of Alexander the Great, the land of Persia was known
2
as Carmania, "Car the Moon." legend said from that land three
Irish

powerful magicians came to Erin along with their mother Carman,

evidently an idol of the Goddess. The magicians were later driven
out, but they left their "mother" behind them. 3
1. Massa, 43. 2. B. Butler, 137. 3. Spence, 150.

Carpet, Magic
Eastern tales of the magic flying carpet evolved from shamanic
initiations in which the adept learned to "fly" via the spirit-journey.
Novices undergoing initiation in central Asia were carried on a felt

carpet by four priests called "sons" of the chief shaman, comparable to

the four Sons of Horus carrying the dead Egypt. man in ancient 1

Flying to heaven in trance on the carpet was an

integral part of death-
and-resurrection ceremonies necessary to the would-be shaman's

enlightenment.
[Link],S., 119.

Caryatid
Carved temple pillar representing a woman; in Greek tradition, a
modeled on the moon-priestesses of
priestess of Artemis Caryatis,

Caryae. Matriarchal temples' seven high priestesses were known as

the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The Bible says the Goddess of Wisdom
has "builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars"

(Proverbs 9:1). As early as the 3rd millenium B.C., Moabite temples of

the Goddess were provided with seven menhirs. Each pillar appar- 1

ently became a soul-image of one of the Seven Mothers, the original

"pillars of the church." See Pleiades.

[Link],804.

Cassandra
Trojan prophetess called Daughter of Hecate, that is, of Queen
Hecuba, who embodied the Trojan Goddess. After the fall of Troy,
Cassandra was taken prisoner by King Agamemnon, on whom she
laid her curse. Classical myth said she "prophesied" his doom, which

meant she not only foresaw it but actually invoked it on him with her
magic words. Soon after, Agamemnon was slain by his wife Clytemnes-

140
tra and her new lover. The ritualistic manner of his death showed that Caste
itwas not a simple murder but a replacement of sacred
kings according
to the ancient law of queen's right. See Furies;
Kingship.

Caste
Inventors of the caste system were Indo-European
patrilineal tribes
whose early migrations destroyed many centers of Neolithic matriarchy;

yet they had to attribute their social hierarchy to the

authority of
Mother Earth, the Goddess of final authority. Their eastern offshoots,
calling themselves Aryans, conquered northwestern India and
brought a Dark Age to a formerly flourishing civilization, about the
middle of the 2nd millenium B.C. Like the priests of western Europe
in a later Dark Age, the Aryan priests devised the caste system to
relegate native peoples to a lower status, and to preserve this order
with a claim of divine ordinance.
This doctrine taught that all those born into low rank were living
out a necessary punishment for sin in a previous existence, even

though they may not remember it. Their duty was to accept their lot
without complaint, work hard, and obey their superiors, so as to win a

promotion in the next life. It was perhaps the most effective method of
preserving a hierarchy that human ingenuity has ever produced.
1

Under the rule of the warlike Aryan Aesir, who conquered

Scandinavia's earlier matriarchal tribes, "the castes and professions
are regarded as reflections in the human sphere of the laws of the
natural order." 2 The father of Teutonic castes was Rig-Heimdall,

"King of the Sea-Home." Their mother was the Triple Goddess Earth
in all three of her forms.

Rig-Heimdall lay with Edda the Great-Grandmother, oldest of

Goddesses, and begot a son named Thrall, "Slave." Then he lay with
Amma, the Grandmother, and begot a son named Karl, "Freeman."
They he lay with Modir, the Mother, and begot a son named Jarl,

"Earl, prince." These three were ancestors of the castes.

The same Rig-Heimdall was named Ram, the phallus. He was
sacrificed as a Horned God. Like Scyld, Arthur, and other pagan

heroes he was born of the ninth wave of the sea. His Magic Song said
he was born of nine maidens, daughters of the Elder Race, another
the Mother-
multiplication of the same Triple Goddess, everywhere
Bride. The Nine made him strong with the sea's cold strength and
with sacrificial blood. 3

Rig-Heimdall resembled the Vedic fire god Agni, Son

of the

Waters, who returned to the waters at his death. Some say Agni is
periodically reincarnated in the Dalai Lama, another "Son of the Sea."
The Rig Veda said of Agni, "He with clear flames unfed with wood,
shines in the waters." This was not marine luminescence, but an
4

allegory of the ancient idea that blood was sea

water infused with fire,

the element of living heat (see Elements). As the god in dying fertilized

Mother Earth with blood, so fire dying in water turned the cold brine

141
Castration into warm red blood of life. This was the primitive theory behind the

"mating of fire and water" in both Norse and Vedic myth.

hp^ B^BH Apart from the castes in both eastern and western Aryan societies
were the outcastes: India's Untouchables, or pariahs. Their duties
were "carrying water and chopping firewood." Their virtue consisted of
5
accepting these chores and attending to them faithfully. It is no coincid-
ence, but a tradition of genuine Indo-European origin, that the Bible
speaks of outcasts who could not be touched, but were allowed to live
as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" (Joshua 9:21). Yahweh's
scribes pretended the idea came from their ancestors, but obviously
it was borrowed from Far-Eastern concepts of the caste system.
1. de Camp, A.E., 294. 2. Campbell, Or.M, 416-17. 3. Turville-Petre, 147, 150-53.
4. Branston, 140. 5. Campbell, Or.M., 459.

Castration
All mythologies suggest that, before men understood their reproduc-
tive role, "make women" of themselves in the hope of
they tried to
achieving womanlike fertility. Methods included couvade or imitation
childbirth; mock death and rebirth through artificial male mothers;
ceremonial use of red substances to imitate menstrual blood; and
transvestism. Another method was ceremonial castration. Its primitive

object was to turn a male body into a female one, replacing dangling
genitals with a bleeding hole. (See Birth-giving, Male.)
Many gods became pseudo-mothers by this means. Egypt's solar
god Ra castrated himself to bring forth a race called the Ammiu out
of his blood. The phallus of the Hindu "Great God," Mahadeva, was
1

removed and chopped to pieces by priestesses of the Goddess. The

pieces entered the earthand gave birth to a new race of men, the
2
Lingajas (Men of the lingam, or phallus). In a Chukchi variant, the
Great God Raven acquired feminine secrets of magic for men by
pounding his own penis to a pudding and feeding it to the Goddess

Miti (Mother). 3 In Mexico, the savior Quetzalcoatl made new humans

to repopulate the earth after the Flood by cutting his penis and giving

blood to the Lady of the Serpent Skirt the Goddess with many shorn

phalli dangling about her waist, a figure also

known in the Middle
East, e.g. as Anath. 4
Several forms of the Heavenly Father became creators by a rite of
castration. The god Bel cut his "head" (of the penis) and mixed his

blood with clay to make men and animals, copying the magic of Mother

Ninhursag. Shamin, the Phoenicians' Father Heaven, was castrated

5

by his son El and made the world's rivers from his blood, imitating the

Goddess's menstrual magic. Arabs called this god Shams-on, the sun.

The Bible called him Samson, whose blindness and hair-cutting were
both mythic metaphors of castration.
Shearing the sun god's "hair" (rays) meant emasculating him. His
severed penis represented the son/supplanter; and a penis was often
called "the little blind one," or "the one-eyed god." Greeks' personifica-

142
 tion of the phallus, Priapus, was the son of Aphrodite and her
Castration
castrated consort Adonis. Their Roman counterparts Vesta and Vulcan
produced a phallic god Caeculus, "the little blind one." 6
Uranus, "Father Heaven," was castrated by his son Cronus.
Uranus's severed genitals entered the sea-womb and fertilized
it to

produce a new incarnation of the Virgin Aphrodite Urania, "Celestial

Aphrodite." It was she who ruled the earlier cults of castrated gods,
such Anchises and Adonis. She was the same as the Canaanites'
as
Lady
of the Serpent Skirt: her priests castrated
gods in her honor.
So did the priests of Aphrodite's Nordic counterpart, Freya-Skadi.
The Nordic Father Heaven was Odin, whose twelfth
holy name was
"Eunuch." 7 As a castrated god, Odin was the
Jalkr, son-phallus of an
older Eunuch personifying both father and son; for Odin was also the
One-Eyed God, or Volsi, a "stallion penis." 8 (See Horse.) Like the
stallion of the Vedic horse sacrifice, he was castrated. A late tried
myth
to account for Odin's crude phallic title by saying he could not drink
of the cosmic feminine fountain of wisdom until he had
given up one of
his eyes. 9 Here one might recall the
alternating seasonal castrations
of Set and Horus in Egypt, their severed phalli
mythologically described
as "eyes.' 10

Biblical writers called the penis a "sinew that shrank,"

lying "upon
the hollow of the thigh." This was the sinew that Jacob lost in his
duel with "a man who was a god." Jacob, "the Supplanter," was
another name for Seth, or Set, who was likewise symbolized by the
Ladder of Souls and likewise engaged in a contest with his rival, ending
in his castration. 11 When Set was castrated, his blood was
spread over
the fields in the annual ceremony of sowing so as to fertilize the crops. 12
The Book of Genesis confuses the two aspects of the god-king,
who as Jacob won his battle with the incumbent king and supplanted
him, then as Israel lost his battle with the next supplanter, and was
castrated. Is-Ra-Elmay have been a corruption of Isis-Ra-El, the god
enthroned as the consort of his goddess, awaiting the next challenger. 13
The syllable El meant his deification.
The garbled story of Jacob and the god-man was inserted chiefly to

support the Jews' taboo on eating a penis (Genesis 32:32), formerly a

habit of sacred kings upon their accession to the throne. The genitals of
the defeated antagonist were eaten by the victor, to pass the phallic

spirit from one "god" to the next. A

king's virtu, "manliness," or heill,
"holiness," dwelt in his genitals because that was his point of contact
with the Goddess-queen. Innumerable myths of father-castrating, moth-

er-marrying god-kings arose, not so much from inner Oedipal

jealousies as from actual customs of royal succession in antiquity. See

Kingship; Oedipus.
The Greek King Aegeus died at the very moment when his "son,"

Theseus, arrived from Crete to claim his throne. The key to this
Aegeus was "rendered sterile" by a curse, the same
that ritual
myth is

curse laid on all kings of outworn usefulness, followed very shortly

by castration and death. 14

143
Castration In the sacred dramas of Canaan, the reed scepter of the dying god
15
Mot was broken, to signify his castration. His name, meaning "steril-

^^mmmm^^^^^ ity" or "death," was a title of the fertility god Aleyin (Baal) as he
entered his declining phase, when his rival assumed the sacred throne,
and he became Lord of Death. 16 The custom of eating the defeated
number of Middle-Eastern myths, e.g., that
king's genitals appears in a
of the Hittite god Kumarbi, one of a line of father-castrating kings of
heaven. 17 Kumarbi's assumption of the fertility-spirit was expressed
by the story that he "became pregnant."
Mythic fathers and sons demonstrated remarkable hostility toward
each other's genitals. Scholars tend to regard an expression of
this as

Oedipal aggressions, originating in the jealousy of elder males toward

younger, more virile ones. Though men eventually gave up the

hopeless idea of making one of their number pregnant by redesigning
his body in a feminine customs of castration and crypto-
style,
castration persisted because they offeredan outlet for this male jealousy.
Among savages, men's puberty ceremonies generally provided an
excuse for elder men's attacks on the bodies of youths. Modified
castrations may be inflicted in the form of circumcision, subincision, and
other genital wounds; also a variety of torments such as scarifying
18
flesh, knocking out teeth, beatings, torture, and homosexual rape.
"The dramatized anger of both the father and the circumciser and the

myths of the original initiation in which all the boys were killed,

certainly show the Oedipal aggression of the elder generation as the

19
basic drive behind initiation."
The more patriarchal the society, the more brutal its attacks on
male youth, as a general rule. Notable for brutality was the Moslems' Es-
selkh or scarification ceremony, a complete flaying of skin from a

boy's scrotum, penis, and groin. After enduring this, the victim was
further tormented by application of salt and hot sand, and buried up

making subsequent infection almost inevita-

to the waist in a dunghill,

[Link] commented, "This ordeal was sometimes fatal." 20

Legman pointed out that both Islam and Judaism "share in the surgical
intimidation of the son by the father, just at the threshold of puberty,
either in the psychological castration of circumcision at puberty (Mo-
hammedanism), or this same operation effected at the earlier age of
21
eight days (Judaism), or in a reminiscence of this operation."
Subincision provides an example of transition from a female-
imitative rationale to amale sado-masochistic ritual. As practiced by
the Arunta, it
began with a long sliver of bone inserted into the urethra.

The youth's penis was then sawed open with a sharp flint, down to

the level of the bone. Blood flowing from the wound was directed onto

a sacred fire, like the menstrual blood of girls at menarche. The

22
operation was termed "man's menstruation." The wound was called a
23
"vagina."
The obvious purpose of this unpleasantness was to transform a
male into a pseudo-female. The mutilated youth was even obliged to
urinate by squatting, like a woman. Sometimes, men renewed the

144
 damage several times over, "We are not separat-
repeating the litany: Castration
ed from the mother; for we two are one."' 24 Natives said the
custom
was begun by an ancestral spirit, Mulkari or
Mu-Kari, perhaps a
corrupt form of Mother Kali (Ma-Kali), who was known as Kari
_^^__^^^
^""^^^^
in
25
Malaysia.
Far from supporting the Freudian doctrine of
penis envy, primitive
customs seem to suggest vulva envy as the
original motive behind
ritual castrations. It might be found even in civilized
Bettelheim society.
remarked on the desire of some young men
be circumcised, or to
otherwise subjected to bloodletting, when their
girl friends were starting
to menstruate. 26 Circumcision was
surely a modified form of earlier,
female-imitative castrations.
The institution of circumcision was attributed to the same gods,
such as El, who castrated their fathers. Its object was to feminize. In
India, boys were dressed as girls, nose ring and all, on the eve of the cir-
cumcision ceremony. In ancient Egypt also,
boys on their way to
circumcision wore girls' clothing,and were followed by a woman
sprinkling salt, a common Egyptian symbol of life-giving menstrual
blood. 27
Circumcision took place at the age of thirteen, the number of

months in a year
according to ancient menstrual calendars, and the
traditional age of menarche. After
copying circumcision from the
Egyptians, Jews transferred it to the period of infancy,
leaving the
pubertal ceremony, now called bar mitzvah, awkwardly placed at a point
in a boy's life when nothing really happens, in contrast to the sudden
onset of menarche in a girl.

Infant circumcision was attributed to Moses, who insisted on it

against the will of his Midianite wife Zipporah, who apparently

objected to mutilation of her infant. After performing the operation, she
flung the foreskin at Moses's feet, calling him a bloody husband
(Exodus 4:25).
Other biblical passages show that foreskins were considered appro-
priate offerings to Yahweh. David bought his wife Michal from
Yahweh's representative the king, with 200 Philistine foreskins (1
Samuel 18:27). Other Heavenly Fathers made similar demands for
genital gifts. Male animals sacrificed to Rome's Heavenly Father Jupiter
were gelded. 28 The bull representing the castrated savior Attis was
also castrated. 29 His blood conferred spiritual rebirth on those who
bathed in it, like the blood of the Christian "Lamb," as if it were the
secret blood of the womb, the real source of life according to the oldest
30
beliefs.

Castration as a means of acquiring feminine powers was still evi-

dent among priesthoods of the Great Mother, along with other

female-imitative devices such as transvestism. Self-emasculated priests in

female clothing served the Indian Goddess under her name of

31
Hudigamma. Similar eunuch priests tended Middle-Eastern temples
like Dea Syria at Hierapolis, Artemis-Diana in Anatolia,
those of the
32
and the Magna Mater in Phrygia and Rome. The famous seer of

145
Castration Thebes, Teiresias, got his powers of second sight and prophecy by
becoming a woman, possibly by castration, and living as a temple harlot
for seven years.
^^^^^^^^^^^m
Perhaps the best-known self-emasculators in the ancient world
were priests of Attis and Cybele, the Great Mother. As Attis was
castrated and poured out his lifeblood to fructify her, so his priests in
and gave them to the
imitation of his sacrifice cut off their genitals
Goddess's image. 53 Sometimes, the men's severed members were
thrown into houses, as a special blessing. In return, householders gave
the new eunuchs feminine garments to wear. Sometimes, the severed
genitalia were carried in baskets or cistae to the Mother's innermost
shrine, where they were anointed, even gilded, and solemnly buried in
the Bridal Chamber. 34 The phallus of the god himself was carried
into the sacred cavern in the form of a large pine log, which was also,
like the phallic cross of Middle-Eastern saviors, the instrument on
35 were
which he died. His priests, having copied his self-sacrifice,

distinguished by the androgynous title bestowed on the earliest forms

36
of Shiva; they were "lords who were half woman."
Tertullian admitted that the "divine mysteries" of Christianity
were virtually the as the "devilish mysteries" of pagan saviors
same
like Attis.
37
Popularity of Attis's cult in Rome led to Christian adoption

of some of the older god's ways. One of the best-kept secrets of early
Christianity was its preaching of castration for the special inner circle of
initiates, who won extra grace with this demonstration of chastity.

They taught, following the Wisdom of Solomon, "Blessed is the

38
eunuch, which with his hands hath wrought no iniquity." Jesus
himself advocated castration: "There be eunuchs, which have made
themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able
to receive it, let him receive it" (Matthew 19:12).
Several early fathers of the church did receive it.
Origen was highly
39
praised for having castrated himself. Justin's Apologia said proudly
that Roman surgeons were besieged by faithful Christian men request-

ing the operation. Tertullian declared, "The kingdom of heaven is

thrown open to eunuchs." 40 Justin advised that Christian boys be
emasculated before puberty, so their virtue was permanently protect-
ed. 41 Three Christians who tried to burn Diocletian's palace were
42
described as eunuchs.

Throughout the middle ages, cathedral choirs included castrati,

emasculated before puberty to preserve their virtue and their soprano
voices, which were considered more pleasing to God than the "impure"
female soprano. Women were not allowed to sing in church choirs,
anyway.
Castration was advocated also for monks who could not fend off
the demons of sexual desire. It was forcibly imposed on the monk
Abelard, whose love affair with his pupil Heloise caused a scandal in the
church. But there were others who seem to have accepted surgical

chastity on a voluntary basis. Such men assumed the

title of Hesychasti,

"permanently chaste ones," or "those who are at peace." The title

146
was associated particularly with the monks of Mount Athos, so carefully Castration
ascetic that even to the present day no female creature is allowed on
the holy mountain hens, cows, sows, nanny goats, and women all
43
equally forbidden.
It is likely that Mount Athos was named after Attis, and
may have
been a shrine served by his eunuch priests in pre-Christian times,
situated close to his Phrygian home. There was a Magna Mater figure
connected with Mount Athos up to the early 14th
century. The
monks were labeled heretics for being too
deeply involved with the
nun named Irene "Peace," the
teachings of a certain so-called
thirdpersona of Triple Aphrodite embodied in her priestess-Horae.
Irene, as Crone, would have been the priestess of castrations hinted
in the myths of such lovers of the Goddess as Anchises and Adonis. 44
When the church purged Mount Athos of the influence of Irene, the
abbot Lazarus was expelled. With a companion named Barefooted

Cyril, Lazarus wandered through Bulgaria preaching the redeeming

virtues of nakedness and self-emasculation. 45
It seems the cult of Attis and Cybele continued to influence

Christianity in the Balkans for many centuries. Balkan monastic

communities were organized in groups of fifty, like older "colleges" of
the Great Mother's castrated priests. In Thrace, the Great Mother
had the name of Cottyto, mother of the hundred-handed giant Cottus,
an allegorical figure representing her fifty spiritual sons with two
hands each. 46 Her worship persisted underground, long enough for the
church to define it as witchcraft, and to label Cottyto a demon. In

1619 a booklet published in Paris suggested the same Balkan tradition of

the priest who dedicated himself to God in a manner that was then
considered heretical: "the devil cut off his privy parts." 47
Ritual castration was again revived by 1 8th-century Russian secta-
themselves Skoptsi, "castrated ones." 48 They also called
ries calling

themselves People of God, insisting that removal of their genitals

brought them profound spiritual powers. Russia's "mad monk"

49
Rasputin was a member of this sect. Since Rasputin was famed for his

affairs withwomen, few of his contemporaries would Jiave believed

him a eunuch; but they had forgotten what eastern harem-keepers knew
well enough: that eunuchs are quite capable of providing women
with sexual pleasure. Rasputin's hold over his female devotees was in

any case a curious combination of spiritual and sensual obsession.

[Link],G.E.2,89,100. 2. [Link], 192-93. [Link],412. 4. Campbell, M.I., 156.
5. Lindsay, O.A., 106. [Link],325. 7. Branston, 50. [Link]-Petre,201.
9. Urousse, 257. 10. Norman, 42. 1 1. Graves, W.G., 355. 12. Budge, G.E. 2, 59.

13. Budge, G.E. 1,341-42. 14. Campbell, CM., 305. 15. Urousse,78.

[Link],M.E.M.,107. 1 7. Graves, G.M. 1,39. 18. Hays, 524. 19. Campbell, P.M., 98.
20. Edwardes, 97. 21. Legman, 416. 22. Brasch, 55. 23. Montagu, S.M.S., 243.
24. Campbell, P.M., 103. 25. Montagu, S.M.S., 241. 26. F. Huxley, 104.
[Link],559. [Link],71-72. [Link],239.
27. Gifford, 42; Edwardes, 93.
145.
[Link],317. 32. Frazer, G.B., 403-9. 33. Frazer,G.B.,405. 34. Lederer,
35. Gaster, 609. 36. Vermaseren, 126. 37. Robertson, 1 12. 38. H. Smith, 235.
39. Bullough, 100. 40. Briffault 3, 372. 41. Bullough, 113. 42. Brewster, 402.
43. Castiglioni, 221. 44. Graves, G.M. 1, 72. 45. Spinka, 1 19-20.
46. Graves, G.M. 1, 32; Spinka, 117. 47. Robbins, 127. 48. Lederer, 162.
49. Martello, 175-76.

147
Cat Cat
Along with the owl, the bat, and the wolf, the animal most commonly
^^^mmmmt^mmm^ associated with witches was the cat. Like everything else associated with

witchcraft, this idea dated back to ancient Goddess-worship.

The Teutonic Mother Freya rode in a chariot drawn by cats.
1

Artemis-Diana often appeared in cat form, and was identified with

the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast. The willow sacred to Hecate became a
2
pussy-willow that bore "catkins" in the spring.
Cat worship began in Egypt, where the first domesticated cats
descended from a wild ancestor, felis hbyca? Plutarch said the cat was
carved on Isis's holy sistrum and represented the moon, "[i]ts activity in
the night, and the peculiar circumstances which attend its fecundity

making it a proper emblem of that body. For it is reported of this

creature, that it at first brings forth one, then two, afterwards three,
and so goes on adding one to each former birth till it comes to seven; so

that she brings forth twenty-eight in all, corresponding as it were to the

several degrees of light, which appear during the moon's revolutions." 4

The Egyptian word for cat was Mau, both an imitation of the cat's
cry, and a mother-syllable. Cats were so sacred in Egypt that any man
who killed one was condemned to death. Diodorus, a first-century B.C.
Greek historian, told of a foolish Roman who killed a cat in Egypt and
was slain in his own house by an infuriated mob. 5
Bast, the Cat-mother of the city of Bubastis, was the benevolent

aspect of Hathor, the Lioness. Festivals of Bast were joyful with music,
6
dancing, jokes, and sexual rites. Her dark side was Hathor as the
leonine Sphinx, Sekhmet (Greek Sakhmis), tearer and devourer of
men. 7 "By my life, when I slay men my heart rejoices," she said. Her
day commemorated a massacre once perpetrated by Sekhmet the
feast

Great Cat. The Egyptian calendar of lucky and unlucky days noted for
this one, with inadvertent humor: "Hostile, hostile, hostile is the 12th
8
Tybi. Avoid seeing a mouse on this day."
Medieval belief in the cat's nine lives probably stemmed from the
Egyptian Ennead, via the mythic figure of the Ninefold Goddess. It was
9
often said any witch could assume a cat's shape nine times in her life.
10
She could also assume the shape of a hare. Frazer observed: "Cats are
precisely the animals into which, with the possible exception of hares,
witches were most usually supposed to transform themselves."
n

Brought to England, cats were confused with hares as the Moon-

goddess's totems. The root language of Sanskrit called the moon cacin,
"that marked with the Hare," but some said the lunar animal might be a
12
cat. Queen Boadicea's banners bore the device of the moon-hare,
which was also dedicated to the Saxon Goddess Eostre (Easter) at her
ritesof spring: hence the Easter Bunny. Irish peasants still observe the
matriarchal taboo on hare meat, saying to eat a hare is to eat one's
13
grandmother. Both hares and cats had obviously yonic nicknames:
cunny, pussy. A rabbit warren is still called a cunnary.
14

148
 To the Scots, the Goddess of Witches was Mither o' the Mawkins. Catherine, Saint
"Mawkin" or "malkm" was either a hare or a cat. 15 When the cat
became the primary lunar animal, the traditional witch's familiar was
Greymalkin or Grimalkin, a "gray cat." Gray malkins were also the
^^^^^
^____
on the pussy
"pussies" or "catkins" willow, sacred to witches and
heralding the pagan games of May.
Inquisitor Nicholas Remy said all cats were demons. In 1387,
Lombard witches were said to worship the devil as a cat. 16 Christians
sometimes exposed cats to torture and fire
along with witches. At certain
festivals, such as Midsummer, Easter, and Shrove
Tuesday, it was
customary to burn cats in wicker cages. "The cat, which the represented
devil,could never suffer enough." 17
According to Jewish belief, cats
were not made by God. The first pair of male and female cats were
"snorted forth" from the nostrils of a lion on board Noah's ark. 18
1. Turville-Petre, 107; Branston, 133. 2. Graves, CM. 1,115.
3. Encyc. Brit., "Cat." 4. Budge, G.E. 257. 5.
BudgcG.E. 2, 61, 364.
2,
6. Larousse, 37. 7. Budge, G.E. 517. 8.
Larousse, 36. 9. Hazlitt, 661.
1,

10.Briffault2,618-19. 11. Frazer, G.B., 762. 12. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A 204

13. Graves, W.G., 319. 14. Wainwright, 272. 15. Potter
Sargent 71 &
16. Cavendish, P.E., 223, 247. 17. Frazer, G.B., 760. 18.0chs 106

Catherine, Saint
One of the most popular saints of all time despite the fact that she
never existed. In the hearts of many people she was second only to the

virgin Mary. Yet even Catholic scholars admit her legend is

1

2
"preposterous."
The key to the secret of St. Catherine is her so-called Catherine
Wheel, the wheel of fire on which she was said to have been
martyred. At Sinai, the original center of Catherine's cult, the Asiatic
Goddess was once portrayed as the Dancer on the Fiery Wheel at
the hub of the universe. A Greek convent of priestess-nuns at Sinai in

the 8th century a.d. called themselves kathari, "pure ones," a word
akin to the Kathakali temple-dancers of India, who performed the
Dance of Time in honor of Kali, Goddess of the karmic wheel. 5
The symbol of the wheel figured prominently in beliefs of medi-
eval Gnostics who called themselves Cathari, and revered St.
Catherine almost as afemale counterpart of God. Perhaps for this

reason, in the 1 5 th and 16th centuries, after the Cathari were

exterminated, Catholic prelates made efforts to have St. Catherine
eliminated from the canon. 4
Her Christian myth made her the standard young beauty dedicated
to virginity, and so wise she could demolish the arguments of fifty
philosophers at once. She refused the hand of the emperor in marriage,
whereupon he following the hagiographers' usual curious pat-
essayed to win her love by having her imprisoned and
tern tortured.

Her captors tried to break her on the fiery wheel, but the wheel was

149
Cauldron and she was saved. In the end,
shattered by a sudden bolt of lightning
she had to be beheaded. Milk flowed from her veins instead of blood.

Angels carried her body from Alexandria to Sinai, where her relics were
"discovered" 500 years later. 5 Her divine bones constantly exuded a

healing unguent, which was bottled and sold at great profit to the
convent. 6
1. Brewster, 104. 2. Artwater, 209. 3. Encyc. Brit, "Kathakali." 4. Brewster, 499.
5. Attwater, 209-10; Encyc. Brit., "Catherine." 6. de Voragine, 715.

Cauldron
The symbol commonly opposed to the cross, as the witches' object

of worship; in pagan tradition, the Great Mother's cosmic womb. As the

"pot of blood in the hand of Kali," the cauldron signified cyclic

recurrence, as opposed to the patriarchal view of linear time.
Shakespeare followed the traditional pattern in associating the
cauldron with three witches, since, from its earliest appearances in
Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures, the cauldron stood for the Triple
Goddess of fate, or wyrd in Old English: the three Weird Sisters.
1

The Egyptian hieroglyphic sign of the threefold Creatress, mother

of the sun, the universe, and all the gods, was a design of three
cauldrons. 2 The Norse god Odin stole his divine power from three
cauldrons of Wise Blood in the cave-womb of the earth, where he
entered in the shape of a phallic serpent and beguiled the earth-giantess

by making love to her. Then he drank the magic blood from the
3

cauldrons and became a shape-shifter, turning himself into a bird to

carry the precious blood back to other gods. This myth was based on
that of the Aryan sky-god Indra, who also drank the Goddess's ambrosia
4
from three cauldrons, the three wombs of Kali's trinity. Indra stole
the elixir by allowing himself to be swallowed by a vast serpent

representing female sexuality (Kundalini). He too turned into a bird

to carry the elixir to other gods.

In nearly all mythologies there is a miraculous vessel. Sometimes it

dispenses youth and life, at other times it possesses the power of

healing, and occasionally, as with the mead cauldron of the Nordic Ymir,
inspiring strength and wisdom are to be found in it. Often it effects . . .

transformations. s

The cauldron that effected transformations was the same as the

The Bible called womb that churned out rebirths, changing shapes each time. In Babylon
sappur or
lapis lazuli itwas under the control of the Fate-goddess Siris, mother of stars. Her
"holy blood." It was cauldron was the blue heaven, where she stirred the mead of
the substance of God's
throne (Ezekiel regeneration. "Siris, the wise woman, the mother, who had done what

1:26). The Authorized

was necessary. Her cauldron is of shining lapis lazuli. Her tub is of
6
Version inaccurately pure silver and gold. In mead stands jubilation, in mead sits rejoicing."
translates sappur as Lapis lazuli was the blue heaven stone prized for its power to cause
8
"sapphire." rebirth. The Papyrus of Nekhtu-Amen said an amulet of lapis lazuli

150
stood for the heart (ab), source of mother-blood; therefore the amulet Cauldron
was inserted into a mummy to generate a new heart for the
7
deceased.
Chaldean cosmology saw the sky as a nesting of seven vessels, the
planetary spheres, like inverted bowls or cauldrons. Beneath the earth
lay the mirror image of this celestial realm, seven more spheres some-
times described as cauldrons. A Hittite myth called them the vessels
of Mother Death, dark twin sister of the
heavenly Mother Siris: "The
doorkeeper has opened the seven doors, has unlocked the seven bolts.
Down in the dark earth there stand seven cauldrons, their lids oiabaru
metal, their handles of iron. Whatever goes in there comes not out
9
again."
Egyptians sometimes saw the seven-circled nether womb as a Large cauldrons in

regenerative cauldron called the Lake of Fire. 10 The corresponding Egyptian temples were
celestial vessels were "above heaven." n But the divine cauldron also called shi, the

on earth, within the sacred precincts of the temple. prototype of the brass
appeared right "sea" in Solomon's
King Aeson was resurrected after being boiled in the cauldron of temple, which was
Medea, "Mead of Wisdom," eponymous mother goddess of the certainly a Cauldron
Medes. King Minos too was boiled in the Goddess's cauldron and of Regeneration. 12

where he became a judge and a Lord of Death.

deified in Tartarus, Babylonian temples
had the same vessel,
Under the name of Demeter, the Goddess restored Pelops to life in her
15
called apsu or
cauldron. According to his inscription at Mount Hermon, the
"abyss," for baptism,
Roman emperor Elagabalus was likewise "deified in the cauldron." 16
ceremonial lavage,
and rebirth rituals."
John the Evangelist was oddly assimilated to the pagan myth of
St.
Such a "sea" was
the regenerative cauldron. He was boiled in it and came forth livelier
also called "the Deep,"
than before. His symbols were a bleeding heart and a boiling cauldron. 17
tehom in Hebrew.' *
The syncretism of the "Feast of St. John at the Latin Gate" Like the Christian

eventually became too embarrassing, and the festival was expunged baptismal font
from the Christian calendar in I960. The apocryphal St. George,
18 descended from these
forerunners, the
however, continued to enter the cauldron as one of his alleged tortures.
cauldron or "sea" was a
the of the he rendered it lukewarm and
By making sign cross, womb symbol.
harmless, an example of a matriarchal symbol made subordinate to a Solomon's "sea"
19
patriarchal one. represented his

the Celts of Gaul and Britain, the Cauldron of Regen- Goddess, Ashtoreth
Among It was
(Astarte).
eration was the central religious mystery: reincarnation within the womb decorated with her
of the Goddess. The Irish who worshipped the threefold Morrigan
yonic lilies: "The
called the second person of her trinity Badb, "Boiling," the producer of brim thereof was

life, wisdom, inspiration, and enlightenment.

20
wrought like the
brim of a cup, with
To Welsh bards she was the Goddess Branwen, "one of the three
flowers of lilies"
Matriarchs of the Island," owner of the Cauldron of Regeneration in
(1 Kings 7:26).
which dead men could be resuscitated overnight. 21 As "a powerful fairy
queen," the Lady of the Lake of the Basin, she dwelt in a sacred lake
from which her brother Bran the Blessed raised the cauldron later
known 22
as the Holy Grail. This pagan god was Christianized as

Bron, alleged brother-in-law of Joseph of Arimathea who was supposed

to have brought the Grail to Britain. Actually, the Grail was well

established in British paganism long before its legend was assimilated to

151
 23
Cauldron that of Christ. Branwen, Goddess of the Cauldron, had yet another
incarnation in medieval romance as Brangwain, the wise-woman who
24
^^^^^^^^^^^m gave Tristan and Iseult their love potion.
fatal

The Goddess had earthly incarnations too. Childeric, son of

Merovech or Merovig, founder of the first dynasty of French kings,

married a druidess named Basina (Cauldron), who foretold the future of
25
his dynasty.

Like the "seas" in ancient temples, the Cauldron of Regeneration

also had its counterparts on earth. Each Celtic temple had its sacred

cauldron. Aubrey's A Natural History ofSurrey mentioned a pagan

cauldron preserved in Frensham Church, "an extraordinary great
still
26
kettle or cauldron" brought by the fairies, according to local legend.

An 8th-century Salic Law against priestesses or, as the church

called them, witches prohibited the pagan practice of "bearing the
27
cauldron" in procession to "the places where they cook."
The Welsh bard Taliesin claimed to have received the mead of
wisdom from his mother, the Goddess Cerridwen, "the Celtic Great
28
Mother, the Demeter."

She resolved, according to the arts of the books ofFferyllt (Fairy-wisdom).,

to boil a Cauldron of Inspiration and Science for her son which . . .

from the beginning ofits boiling might not cease to boil for a year and a
day, until three blessed drops were obtained of
the Grace of
29
Inspiration.

Taliesin's poetry contained oblique allusions to the magic caul-

dron, couched in the semi-opaque terms that concealed mystical secrets
from the uninitiated. His "year and a day" was a reference to the
lunar calender of the pagans, a year of thirteen 28-day lunar months,
364 days, with one more day to make 365. The same "year and a
day" occurred in many fairy tales. (See Menstrual Calendar.)
Talie-

sin's Preiddeu Annwn (Harrowings of Hell) spoke of the Nine

Maidens, of the perpetual fire that boiled the symbolic world

priestesses
cauldron; and of the yonic shrine, Hel's gate, to which the king's
sword (or phallus) was lifted:

In Caer Pedryvan (four times revolving)

The Word from the cauldron it would be spoken
By ofnine maidens it would be kindled,
the breath
The head of Hades 's cauldron what is it like?
A rim it has, with pearls round its border;
It boils not a cowards food: it would not be perjured.
The sword ofLlwch Lleawc would be lifted to it.
And in the hand ofLleminawc was it left.
And before the door of Hell's gate lamps were burning,
And when we accompanied Arthur, a brilliant effort,
i0
Seven alone did we return from Caer Veddwit.

Nine sisters were the same as the nine Goddesses of the

Fortunate Morgan Fay, and the nine Muses of Greek
Isles ruled by le

of the
myth, and the pre-Hellenic ninefold Goddess Nonacris, queen

152
 51
Stygian birth-gate. She, or they, came from Oriental traditions almost Cauldron
as old as civilization. During their Bronze
Age Shang period, the
Chinese represented the Great Goddess of birth by nine
tripod caul-
dronslike the mixing-vessels of the Muses. 32

The primitive cult of the cauldron obviously discouraged "cow-

ards" because it was cult of
martyrdom. Like Christian martyrs, the
cauldron's victims were promised immediate resurrection into a life of

glory. Strabo spoke of Cimbrian priestesses who sacrificed men, Strabo Greek
making them divine heroes, and caught their blood in magic cauldrons traveler, geographer,
and read omens in their entrails. 33 and historian of the

Some myths hint at cannibal cauldrons large enough to boil a first

century B.C., a
follower of the Stoic
human body, and beliefs that death in the cauldron was not really faith.
death.A gypsy legend spoke of a hero forced by a mystic Lady to milk
dangerous mares, then bathe in a boiling cauldron of their milk. A
Cimbri Germanic
god in the form of a royal horse promised to breathe frost on the tribesfrom Jutland,
cauldron and render 34
it
comfortably lukewarm. The story recalls the which Romans called
Corinthians' "man-eating mares," or horse-masked priestesses, who the Cimbrian peninsula.

caused Bellerophon to mount to heaven on the royal horse Pegasus, In the 2nd century
35 Cimbrian army
B.C., a
symbol of apotheosis after death. marched against
Horseback riding is a sign of deification on the famous silver Rome and caused great
cauldron recovered from a Gundestrup peat bog. Manufac-
sacrificial consternation in the
tured about 100 B.C., the vessel showed a ceremony of sacrifice. Victims city.

appear to be identified with the Horned God, Cernunnos, seated in a

yogi's lotus position holding male and female symbols, the serpent and
tore.
36
On foot, a row of victims approach the sacred cauldron which
is
shield-shaped and double-lobed, resembling a yoni. A priest or
37
priestess is shown plunging one victim headfirst into the vessel.
Above, the heroes depart glorified, on horseback, riding literally into the
sunset, which represented heaven. Cernunnos himself was dismem-
bered and cooked in a cauldron to rise again, which made him the
obvious god for such rites. 38
A scene similar to that of the Gundestrup Cauldron occurs on a
sacred cista from Palestrina-Praeneste. Rome's Mother of Time,
Anna Perenna, appears to the dying god Mars in the guise of his virgin
bride, Minerva. She stands over her naked lover and pushes his head
down into a boiling cauldron, while the dog of the underworld gate
looks on, as also on the Gundestrup example. 39
Some pagan
Mysteries employed visions of the Cauldron as
symbolic death and rebirth. Before a Siberian shaman could practice,

he was required to undergo hallucinatory experiences of being chopped

to pieces and boiled in a cauldron, sometimes for a period as long as

three years. Yakut, Buryat, and other tribes say the shaman must be
killed by the spirits of ancestors, cooked magic cauldron, then
in their

given new flesh. "Shaman" comes from Tungusic saman, "one who
died," a man assimilated to the Lord of Death called Samana in

Sanskrit. Tibetan shamans made the soul-journey to the "Great Hell"

pictured as an iron cauldron, called House of Iron or Iron Mountain.

153
Cave There the aspirant was dismembered by rakshasas obsolete ancestral
deities and boiled, not in punishment for sin but as an initiatory
40
procedure.
Skald-shamans of Scandinavia made the same soul-journey to
Hvergelmir, the Mighty Roaring Cauldron, source of life-giving
waters at the foundations of the earth. This was another version of the
cauldron in the earth-womb, from which Odin received inspira-
triple
tionand power. Hvergelmir was triple too, accompanied by the fount of
wisdom and memory called Mimir (an archaic "mother"), and the
fount of ongoing life called Urdarbrunner, the stream of Mother Earth.
Founts and cauldrons in the earth were tended by the three Fates
41
(Norns), of whom the first was Mother Earth herself.

Even when the Cauldron of Regeneration entered Christian

tradition as the Holy Grail, supposedly the chalice of Christ's last

supper, it was referred to an escuele or "cauldron." 42 Arthur's knights

as

originally sought the Grail in the underworld of Annwn, receiving

their divine vision of it in the castle of Elaine, or Elen, the virgin aspect

of the triple Moon-goddess. It appeared in her hands, heralded by her

yonic dove. Itmeant death for her chosen one, Galahad, who reigned as

a sacred king, then died at the altar as he saw his vision of the Grail. 43
The Cistercian Estoire del Saint Graal said "two heathen rulers,"
Mordrain and Nascien (Death and Rebirth) were blinded by the
vision of the Grail, but healed by the touch of the lance that pierced
Christ, both of these objects being kept in the same sanctuary. 44 The
motive seems to have been to belittle the female symbol (grail) in favor

of the male symbol (lance).

1. Goodrich, 18.2. Book of the Dead, 1 14. 3. Lamusse, 257.

4. Campbell, Or.M., 182. 5. Jung &

von Franz, 1 14. 6. Assyr. Bab. Lit, 308. &
7. Budge, E.M., 30. 8. Graves, W.G., 290. 9. Hooke, M.E.M., 101.
10. Book of the Dead, 205-6. 11. Budge, G.E. 1, 203. 12. Maspero, 283.

[Link],S.P.,47. 14. Lethaby,219. 15. Graves, G.M. 2,27. 16. Gaster, 587.
17. Brewster, 230. 18. Attwater, 189. 19. de Voragine, 236.
20. Graves, W.G, 409. 21. Rees, 47. 22. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 619.
23. Campbell, CM., 533. 24. Guerber, L.M.A., 240. 25. Guerber, L.R., 147-48.
26. Keightley, 295. 27. J.B. Russell, 69. 28. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 620.
29. Briffault 3,451.30. Malory 1 , xxi. 3 1 .
Graves, W.G, 406.
32. Campbell, Or.M., 397. 33. Wendt, 137. 34. Groome, 107.
35. Graves, G.M. 1, 255-56. 36. Lamusse, 142. 37. Cavendish, V.H.H., 49.
38. Jung &
von Franz, 373. 39. Dumezil, 213, 243.
40. Eliade, S., 41, 159, 237, 439. 41. Branston, 53, 82; Turville-Petre, 246.
42. Campbell, CM., 531. 43. Malory 2, 130, 268. 44. Campbell, CM., 535.

Porphyry (ca. 234- Cave

305 a.d.) Neoplatonist
philosopher, scholar, Porphyry said before there were temples, all religious rites took place
and writer; biographer in caves.
1
The cave was universally identified with the womb of Mother
of Plotinus; an
Earth, the logical place for symbolic birth and regeneration. Etruscan
opponent of the Roman
and temples featured a subterranean mundus, meaning both
Christian church,
which eventually
"earth" and "womb." 2 Similarly, the Sanskrit word for a sanctuary,
3
destroyed most of his garbha-grha, meant "womb."
books. Holy places of Hinduism were caves representing the Great

154

X
Mother's yoni. Many gompas (holy hermitages) were first established Cave
in caves. Like
the^mountain of paradise, home of the gods, the Four
Great Caves of Sikkim were distinguished according to the four
^^^^^___^_
North is the cave of the god's hill; west, the cave of
cardinal points.
great
happiness; south, the cave of occult fairies; east, the secret cave, from
which the sun is born. 4

Among the oldest forms of the Hindu Goddess was Kurukulla, a"
matrikadevi colored red like the womb, and called Mother of Cav-
5
erns. As an emanation of Kali she was worshipped in cave-temple
complexes like Ellora, Ajanta, Elephanta. Her western counterpart
was Phrygian Cybele, "Cavern-dweller," the Great Mother of the
Gods. A Latin form of her name was Sybil, the prophetic spirit in the
cavern-dwelling Cumaean sybils, by whose order the Great Mother of
the Gods was brought to Rome in 204 b.c.

Cybele's castrated priests claimed none of their brotherhood ever

died. Instead, they went "down into the cavern" to be united with
their Goddess. Cybele's cavern-shrines were also called marriage cham-
bers, like the pastos of Eleusis. The Alexandrian poet Nicander called
them "marriage bowers of Rhea Lobrine." 6 They were also the "sacred
subterranean places" where those who had emasculated themselves
in honor of Attis and Cybele used to come to deposit the offering of
7
their genitals.

Rhea was the Cretan name of the same Goddess, during the long
period when fatherhood was unknown or negligible in Cretan soci-
8
ety. All life was supposed to have arisen from her uterine cave on
Mount Dicte, whence came the e-dicts of her holy law; hence her
of Dictynna, Lawgiver. She was also called Britomartis the "sweet
title

virgin," the mother without a spouse. 9 From the same uterine cave
she gave birth to Zeus, who later claimed to be Father of Gods.

Cave-temples of Rhea Dictynna evolved into dicteria, which the

Laws of Solon designated public brothels. In the era of the promiscu-
ous priestesses, words for cave, temple, and brothel were often

interchangeable.
10
To visit the cave and lie with the holy harlot was
an act of worship. During the early Christian era, most pagan mystery
cults celebrated their most sacred rites in caves or underground

chambers.
Followers of Mithra considered the cave so essential to proper

worship that, if the site of a temple had no natural cave, an artificial

one was dug. The cave on the Vatican belonged to Mithra until 376

when a city prefect suppressed the cult of the rival Savior and
a.d.,
seized the shrine in the name of Christ, on the very birthday of the
11
pagan god, December 25.
Despite the church's efforts at suppression, the old deities contin-

ued to be worshipped in sacred caves for many centuries. So many

ideas for cathedral
"grottoes" contained pagan idols that decorative
were from them: hence the grotesques or "grotto-
sculptures copied
creatures" swarming in Gothic art. As late as the 1 5th century, Pope

155
Cave 12
Calixtus II tried to forbid religious ceremonies in sacred caves. As
entrances to the underworld, caves were still associated with the Great

^^^^^^^^^^^^ Mother's yonic gate. A long-revered gate to the womb of the world
was a sea-cave on the southern Peloponnese near the shrine of Mar-
mari Mother Mari, the Sea-goddess whose other names were
13
Aphrodite Marina, Marah, and Mary.
Up to the 1 8th century, a cave called Tangrogo in Denbighshire
was kept by "three fairy sisters" the three Fates whose footprints
were often seen around the edge of its magic pool. The cave was said to
contain "hidden treasures," a term that often meant paraphernalia of
14
the Old Religion.
Spenser said the hidden treasures of the Faery Queen's Bower of
Bliss were the same Mary's secret "enclosed
as those of the virgin

garden": a magic pool of regeneration, a Tree of Life, singing birds,

apples, and roses, including the central Rose of Love. Andreas
Capellanus said the grotto of the pagan Goddess was a Palace of Love
in the center of the earth (in medio mundi), with the male and

female symbols of a Tree of Life and a sacred spring. 15

Sacred caves were still used as "marriage bowers" long after

paganism had been forced underground literally. Bards who adored

the heretical Goddess of Love (Minne) mentioned certain Grottoes of

Love, hewn by heathen giants in the wild mountains, where people

could hide when "they wished privacy to make love." Gottfried von

Strassburg said whenever such a cave was found, it was sealed with a
bronze door inscribed La fossiure a le gent amant, the Grotto for People
in Love. "Above, the vault was finely joined, and on the keystone
there was a crown, embellished beautifully by the goldsmith's art with
an incrustation of gems. The pavement below was of a smooth,
shining and rich marble, green as grass. In the center stood a bed,
handsome and cleanly hewn of crystal, high and wide, well raised
from the ground, and engraved round about with letters which
according to the legend proclaimed its dedication to the goddess
16
Love."
The healing waters of all the sacred springs in Europe acquired
new myths ascribing their virtues to saints or to the Virgin, but their
real traditionssprang from the regenerative caves of the pagan Goddess.
Up to the 19th century a sacred cave near Dunskey, Scotland, was
used for the curative magic of its spring. The sick were brought from
great distances to be bathed change of
in the waters, always "at the

the moon," showing was a matriarchal shrine. Its magic

that the place

baptisms were believed especially beneficial to weak or undernour-

ished children. 17
1. Robertson, 111. 2. Hays, 181. 3. Campbell, CM., 168. 4. Waddell, 256-57.
5. Larousse, 359. 6. Gaster, 609. 7. Vermaseren, 111. 8. Briffault 1, 392.
9. Larousse, 86. 10. Sadock, Kaplan &Freedman, 16.
1
l.J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 146. 12. Jung, M.H.S., 234. 13. Hughes, 159.
14. Hazlitt, 580. 1 5. Wilkins, 128, 139. 16. Campbell, CM., 44. 17. Hazlitt, 420.

156
 Cecilia,' Saint - ...

Cealia, Saint
Mythical saint whose legend was on some bones discovered
Pope Paschal
probably Artemis
I in a

Calliste as the Muse of

built
Roman catacomb bearing the name Calliste
music, which became the
by
__
Centaurs

special province of "St. Cecilia."' Fired by the current mania for relic-
hunting (9th century a.d.), the pope immediately declared that
Cecilia was a virgin martyr of the second or
maybe the third century,
and that she was tortured to death for
rejecting her pagan bridegroom
on the very day of their wedding. He ordered her canonized
at once. 2
The name Cecilia meant Lily of Heaven, another ancient title
of
the Goddess. 3
1. Encyc. Brit, "Cecilia." 2. Attwater, 81.3. Chaucer, 454.

Cemetery
Greek koimeteria was a Place of the Mother, where the dead could
rest as close as possible to the Goddess's temples. The custom was
continued in Christian Europe. The church-yard, home of the dead,
derived from Germanic gard ox garth, meaning "earth" or "world," i.e.,
the world of the dead under the soil.

Tantric dakinis celebrated the rites of the dead in cremation

grounds, "where ordinary people feared to go," because they were
death-priestesses intimately acquainted with necropoli. Their Goddess,
1

Kali Ma the Destroyer, was the same queen of tombs called Kalma in
2
Finno-Ugric myth. Dakinis became European vilas, valas, or wilis,
women associated with the dead, later called witches. The traditional
legend of witches celebrating their sabbats in cemeteries may have had a
real basis in ancient
matriarchy.
1. Rawson, E.A., 152. 2. Larousse, 306.

Centaurs
Greek horse-spirits derived from Hindu asvins and the man-horse
wizards of central Asia. Centaurs were magic shape-shifters, and teach-
ers of the Hellenic
gods. Their most familiar appearance was with
1

the head and shoulders of a man and the body and legs of a horse. Their
other name was Magnetes, "great ones." 2 They have been connect-
ed with Latin centuria, a company of 100 soldiers. 5 Perpetual rivals of
the Centaurs were the Lapiths, "men-who-use-stone-weapons," a
hint of their extreme antiquity. See Horse.
1. Graves, W.G., 255-56. 2. Lawson, 244. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 361.

157
Ceraunos, Saint Ceraunos, Saint
Cernunnos
Canonized form of one of the phallic lightning-gods who descended
into Earth's womb, like Lucifer, to become a lord of the underworld.

Pagans sometimes called the lightning Gemma Cerauniae, the Jewel

of Ceraunos "jewel" in the same sense as the Tantric (male) Jewel in
the (female) Lotus. 1
The Greeks thought when Ceraunos descended
into the underworld, he became Charon, the ferryman of the Styx. 2 As
a saint, he had little purpose other than to attract to Christianity those

who had formerly worshipped him as a psychopomp.

1. Leland, p. 250. 2. H. Smith, p. 227

Ceres
Latin form of the Great Goddess, cognate with Greek Kore or Core,

% identified with Demeter as Mother Earth. As the earth-ruling aspect of

the Goddess's trinity, Ceres combined with Juno
queen of heaven, as

and Proserpine as queen of the underworld. She was called Ceres

Legifera, "Ceres the Lawgiver." Her priestesses were considered the
foundresses of the Roman legal system. 1

Sign of Ceres
Ceres ruled Rome through her sacred matronae, during that lost
period of four centuries before 200 B.C., a period whose written
records were destroyed by later patriarchal historians, leaving only a
residue of myths and religious customs that were only vaguely
2
explained. Farmers viewed her as the source of all food and kept her

of crop failure.
rites faithfully, for fear

This was true not only of Roman farmers but even of Christian
farmers. Ceres's greatest annual festival, the Cerealia, was celebrated
in the British Isles almost to the present day. An account of the Shire of

Murray in the late 19th century said, "In the middle of June, farmers
3
go round their corn with burning torches, in memory of the Cerealia."
1. Bachofen, 192. 2. Dumezil, 10. 3. Hazlitt, 101.

Cernunnos
Celtic version of the Horned God, shown in sacred art with antlers

strapped to his head, seated in lotus position like a yogi.

1
This contem-
plative typical of Gallo-Roman deities in the first millenium
pose was
B.C. Cernunnos was a consort of the Moon-goddess, whose Roman
2

name Diana may have been related to Sanskrit dhyana, "yogic

spoke of pagan heroes who ac-

5
contemplation." Medieval romances
quired godlike powers by falling into a trance of "contemplation" of
the Goddess as lady-love. 4
1 .
Campbell, Or.M., 307. 2. Larousse, 232. 3. Campbell, Or.M., 440.
4. Goodrich, 69.

158
 Cerridwen Cerridwen
Celtic name for the Triple Goddess, especially
fearsome death- as the Chakra
totem, a white, corpse-eating Sow representing the moon. She was the
same as Syrian Astarte or Greek Demeter, both of whom
^^^^^m
appeared as
sows. So did Freya, one of whose titles was a cognate of Cerridwen that
Sow." 1 var. Cerdo
is
Syr, "the
Cerdo is the Spanish word for pig. Harvest dances in the
^ Spanish
Pyrenees were cerdana, "pig-dances," celebrated in honor of the
Goddess who both gave and took away, and harvested souls in her
character as "the source of life, and the 2
A
receptacle of the dead."
rich wheat-growing region in the was dominated
Pyrenees by her sacred
3
town, Puigcerda, or Cerdo's Hill. Her cult probably went back to the
prehistoric temples of Malta, which had images of the Goddess in the

shape of a sow.
Welsh bards who composed funerary elegies called themselves
cerddorion, sons of Cerridwen or Cerdo. Their greatest hero, Talie-
sin, a founder of their craft, was said to have been born of Cerridwen
and specially treated by her to a few precious drops of magical
inspiration from her Cauldron.
[Link]-Petre, 168. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 621. 3. Graves, W.G., 58-60

Chad, Saint
Legendary bishop of Mercia, said to be a follower of the canonized
princess WereburgConvent). He was probably never a real
(see
person. His "brother" St. Cedd was called bishop of London, but
both Chad and Cedd were variants of the pagan god Ceadda, who was
associated with magic healing springs. In the runic calendar, the
emblem of St. Chad was a palm branch, or Tree of Life. 1

A pagan deity named Chaddi is still worshipped by the Samoyeds,

who practice a nominal Christianity as long as all goes well, but in
time of trouble return to their own Chaddi. "Heathen services are
conducted by night within old stone-circles, and all images of Chaddi
are carefully screened from view. [Wjithin these cromlechs were
. . .

formerly offered up those human sacrifices with which the natives

used to propitiate Chaddi." 2
1. Brewster, 122. 2. Johnson, 139.

Chakra
Tantric term for the magic circle of worshippers, alternating men and
women after the manner of the egg-and-dart frieze; also, one of the

"rings" or stages of enlightenment, visualized as steps ascending the

spinalcolumn, as the inner serpent goddess Kundalini uncoils from the

159
Chaldean pelvis upward to the head. This ascent of the chakras was likened to
Chaos different stages of initiatory teaching, each taking place in a magic circle

^HH^^^^HBB^H whose members cooperated in the effort of comprehension.

The chakra was essentially the same as the Sufic halka, "magic

circle," called the heart and basic unit of Sufism. The purpose of a 1

properly conducted chakra was to make each participant feel "as if the
Shakti was their own Mother who had borne them." 2 She was a
mother-bride, compounded of the felt presence of both Goddess and
woman. In the classic chakra, each man had his wife or shakti to his

left, while the Lord of the Chakra with his shakti occupied the center of

the circle. 3 European pagan religions maintained the same arrange-

ment, which eventually became the pattern of the circular folk dance.
1. Shah, 21.2. Avalon, 166. 3. Mahanirvanatantra, cxxi.

Chaldean
"Moon worshipper," a common name for Mesopotamian astrologers
who studied the movements of the moon in relation to the stars. 1

Because the magic powers of the Chaldeans commanded respect

nearly everywhere in the ancient world, biblical writers made Abraham
a Chaldean (Genesis 1 1:28). The same name was still being applied
2
to astrologers and wizards in the 1 5 th century a.d.
1 . Briffault 2, 600. 2. Lea unabridged, 772.

Ch'ang-O
Chinese Moon-goddess, sole keeper of the ambrosia of immortality
(menstrual blood). Her husband, the Excellent Archer, became in-
tensely jealous of her monopoly of life-magic and quarreled with her.
So she left him, as Lilith left Adam, and went to live in the moon
forever, dispensing her precious elixir to women only.
1

1. Larousse, 383.

Chaos
Greek word for the undifferentiated mixture of raw elements sup-

posed to occupy the World-Goddess's womb before creation and after

destruction of each recurrent universe. It meant the Goddess herself
in her state of "eternal flux," when the fluid of her womb was not yet
clotted into the formative state of a solid world. Chaos is expressed in
the Bible as the condition of the earth before creation, "without form"
and "void" (Genesis 1:2). See Doomsday; Tiamat; Tohu Bohu.

160
 ^harites _.
Chantes
"Graces," heavenly dispensers of charts (Latin caritas), the grace of Charlemagne
Mother Aphrodite, which the
(1 Corinthians 13). The
Bible translates either "love" or
"charity"
Charites were ancient manifestations of the
.^^^^
Triple Goddess. Pausanias said they were worshipped at Orchomenos
as three standing stones. The classic 1

myth of their nymph-hood

hardly described them; nor did their Christian form, the mythical St.
Charity. See Grace; Sophia, Saint.
1. Dumezil, 166.

Charlemagne
Frankish emperor, whose reign (768-814) was the second
great
turning-point in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. He was the
second Constantine. He found it useful to be a Christian, since the
church condoned his wars of acquisition as pagan tribal religions

would not and took

share of the spoils, eventually rewarding
its

Charlemagne with the crown of the Empire. He was also allowed a

special status of matrimony, not granted to other men. He had four
wives and innumerable concubines, which the church
tolerantly de-
scribed as "marriages of the second rank." '

Charlemagne's reign was a painful history of aggression against the

matriarchal religions of his ancestors. In 772 he massacred more than
4000 Saxons and destroyed their shrine at Heresburg, an omphalos of
the earth-mother Hera. He cut down the phallic tree trunk Irminsul,
"Column of the World," the same axis mundi that Greeks called the
Great Herm, Norwegians called Yggdrasil, and Christians called the
2
cross.

After destroying shrines to demoralize the pagan clans, Charle-

magne imposed vassalage on them and converted them to

Christianity by the simple offer of a choice between Christ and

immediate death. All who rejected baptism were to be slain at once.
In 33 years of constant war, Charlemagne built the Holy Roman
Empire, at the cost of so many lives that historians have not even
of the slaughter. 3
tried to estimate the extent

Charlemagne's policy of conversion by the sword succeeded so

well that the church backed Christian rulers in this kind of military

activity ever since. As the Song of Roland put it: "The bishops bless the
waters and convert the heathen. If any man protests, he is burned or

4
put to the sword."
Sometimes the blessed waters themselves served to execute the

unregenerate heathen. It was said that converts made under the rule
of St. Goar were held under water until they either accepted Christ, or
drowned. 5
1. Murstein, 143. 2. Reinach, 144. 3. H. Smith, 251.
4. Goodrich, 96. 5. Guerber, L.R., 193.

161
Charm Charm
as '
' e
Old English cyrm, a hymn or choral song, came from Latin carmen,
^^^^^^^^^^" a sacred incantation to the Goddess Carmenta, inventor of alphabets
and "words of power." '
A "charm" reflected men's ancient belief
that womenexerted power over male bodies and souls through their

mastery of sung 01 spoken spells invoking the help of the Goddess.

The belief was not wholly illogical; the Goddess was Nature, and
Nature caused the signs of sexual attraction, including lovesick
behavior and penile erection, that made a man feel helplessly subject to

unknown forces.

Therefore everything that made a man feel attracted to a woman

came to be synonymous with witchcraft: charm, enchantment, be-

witchment, spellbinding, witchery, moon-madness, or glamor in the

old sense of a spell cast by Morgan of "Glamorgan." The British
Parliament passed an odd law in 1 770 that hinted at the same archetypal
fears, making it
illegal for a woman to "betray" any man into

matrimony with such artificialities as false hair, iron stays, high-heeled

shoes, or perfume. If a husband demonstrated that his wife had used

such devices, the marriage would be annulled, and the woman would
"incur the penalty of the law now enforced against witchcraft." 2
Women's singing was also highly suspect, as this was the classic
method of casting spells. "Enchant" came from incantare, "to sing
over" which also meant incantation. 3
1. Potter & Sargent, 49. 2. Murstein, 227. 3. Funk, 254.

Charon
Classic ferryman of the Styx; like Hermes, conductor of souls to the
underworld. The dead were buried with coins in the mouth or on the

eyelids to pay Charon's ferry. The Chinese also used to put money in

it was said a
graves, for crossing the river of death. In the Balkans,
woman could make her husband "blind as a corpse" to her adultery,
if she gave him water that had washed the coins from a corpse's eyes. 1

Charon's fee was Christianized as Peter's Penny: St. Peter's bribe for

opening the heavenly gates.

2
In Greece, Charon found a new Christian

Charus, escort and guardian of souls

identity as St. in the "lower
world," or common home of the dead. 3
[Link],FO.T.,35. 2. Halliday, 50. 3. Hyde, 206, 213.

Chastity Belt
Medieval device for locking a woman's potential lovers out of her
body, while her husband was away from home at wars, pilgrimages, or
crusades. The pelvic fetter had small spiked holes through which

urine, feces, and menstrual effluents might pass in theory. In practice;

162
 it would have been impossible to
keep clean. Vaginal infections, skin Chemosh
eruptions, and ulcers would have been inevitable after
wearing such a
device for only a short time, let alone months or
In 1 889 the skeleton of a woman was
years.
found in a 1
_^ Cherry

^^^^^
5th-century
Austrian graveyard, still
wearing the chastity belt that probably caused
her death. 1

[Link],25.

Chemosh
Hebrew form of Shamash, the sun god of
Sippar and Moab,
worshipped in the temple of Solomon (I Kings 1 1:7). Because Che-
mosh was one of Yahweh's rivals, called an "abomination"
by later
priests attempting to suppress all cults but their own, he was
adopted
into the later Christian
still
pantheon of hell as a demon. He was a fa-
vorite of exorcists, who commonly claimed to have purged the possessed
of the demon Chemosh.

Chernobog
"Black God" of the Slavs,
adversary of the White God, Byelobog;
another version of Ahriman opposed to Ahura
Mazda, or the Black
Sun beneath the earth opposed to the White Sun in heaven. Like
other versions of the chthonian
deity, Chernobog was a Lord of Death,
often invoked for curses. The Ukrainians still
say, "May the Black
God exterminate you!" In the same manner, ancient Persians invoked
l

Ahriman, Chaldeans invoked Aciel, Romans invoked Saturn, and

Christians invoked the devil.
1. Lamusse, 283.

Cherry
Like many slang expressions,the use of "cherry" for "virginity" may
be traced to a mythicpast. Like other red fruits, such as the apple and

pomegranate, the cherry symbolized the Virgin Goddess: bearing her

sacred blood color and bearing its seed within, like a womb.

Maya, the virgin mother of Buddha, embraced the cherry tree Sala
while giving birth to her divine child. Some said the tree recognized
1

her divinity and bent its branches down to offer its fruit. The story was
carried to Europe and spawned the medieval Cherry Tree Carol, in

which Maya became Mary.

Gypsies applied the love-magic of the cherry to many magic
charms, especially those associated with virginity. When a gypsy girl
desired to attract a lover, she drilled holes through fourteen cherry
stones on the fourteen nights of the waxing moon, and wore them on

163
Cherub a cord around her left thigh (the "female" side). 2 The obvious elements
Chimalman of this magic were penetration of the cherry, and building up to the

^^mmmm^m^mmmm full moon, indicating growth or pregnancy.

French traditions of courtly love perhaps made "cherry" (cerise)

synonymous with "beloved" (cherie). Cherry-red was often consid-
ered the color of love.
1. Larousse, 348. 2. Bowness, 22.

Cherub
Hebrew kerubh, the Babylonian totemic animal deities combining

eagle wings, lion feet, bull heads, and serpent tails animal symbols of
the four seasons, cardinal directions, and elements. The cherubim
who guarded the gates of Eden and the throne of God were quite unlike
the naked winged babies that romantic and baroque art later called
cherubs. As animal-masked and costumed priests, the cherubim proba-

bly descended from Sheban mu-karribim, "close kindred," guardians

of the shrine of the Moon-goddess at Marib.

Chicomecoatl
Mexican Goddess similar to Demeter, called Heart of the Earth, and
ancestress of all peoples. No god could equal her in power. She was

usually accompanied by a young savior son, a fertility-sacrifice. Her

1

angelic messengers were seven serpents.

1. Neumann, G.M., 182.

Chidambaram
Tantric Buddhist concept of the Center of the Universe, where Shiva
does his eternal dance of life. The same Center was a mythic model of
the heart as the center of the body, and the heartbeat as the dance; for
Chidambaram existed "within the heart." '
The heart of the whole
cosmos was the same as the Cave of the Heart, "where the true self
2
resides." This was another expression of Oriental belief in the identity
of self and deity. See Antinomianism; Heart.
1. Ross, 32. 2. Menen, 70.

Chimalman
Virgin mother of the Aztec savior Quetzalcoatl; one of "three
She was the same Triple Goddess worshipped around
divine sisters."
the world in Virgin, Mother, and Crone aspects. See Trinity.

164
Chionia Chionia

"Snow Queen," a Greek title of one of the Horae; an untouchable Christina, Saint

virginGoddess of the high mountains, prototype of the medieval

fairy, MttMBMaMai
Virginal the Ice Queen. She was also canonized as a Christian
"virgin martyr."

Chomo-Lung-Ma
"Goddess Mother of the Universe," the real name of the world's
highest mountain, which westernersrenamed Everest after a man. This
masculine name was bestowed on the Goddess Mother in 1863
by
foreign invaders who preferred to attach patriarchal surnames to
1

everything.
1. Encyc. Brit, "Everest, Sir George."

Christina, Saint
Another apocryphal "virgin martyr," whose legend was constructed
on no basis whatever, except the name, meaning "a female Christian."
Her story was one of those sadistic wonder-tales in which Christian
writers delighted, piling torture upon torture in fantasies that quite lost

sight of the natural limitations of human flesh.

For refusing to burn incense to the pagan gods, Christina was

locked up in a tower by her father. She was stripped and beaten with

rods, then torn apart by hooks, and her limbs were broken. Nothing
daunted, she took up pieces of her own flesh and threw them in her
father's face, saying, "Take, tyrant, and eat the flesh thou hast begot-
ten!" So her father then had her sprinkled with oil and roasted on a
fire-wheel. Then she was thrown into the sea with a stone around her
neck. Angels saved her, and she returned to her father, who dropped
dead of frustration.
Christina's torments were continued by a judge named Elius, who
had her rocked in a red-hot iron cradle. Her next judge, Julian, threw
her into a burning furnace, where she walked about unbumed for five

days. Then, poisonous snakes were hung about her neck. Then, her
breasts were cut off, and her tongue cut out. She took a piece of her
tongue and threw it him in the eye and blinding
at Julian, striking

him. Finally, Julian killed her by shooting three arrows into her. This
1

can only have been a magic form of destruction, for Christina had by
time amply demonstrated her
this invulnerability to every ordinary
method of execution.
It de Voragine, 366-68.

165
Christmas Christmas
For its first three centuries, the Christian church knew no birthday
mttmmmmmmKmmm for its savior. During the 4th century there was much argument about
adoption of a date. Some favored the popular date of the Koreion,
when the divine Virgin gave birth to the new Aeon in Alexandria.
1
Now
called Twelfth Night or Epiphany, this date is still the official nativity
in Armenian churches, and celebrated with more pomp than Christmas
2
by the Greek Orthodox.
Roman churchmen tended to favor the Mithraic winter-solstice
festival called Dies Natalis Solis Invictus, Birthday of the Uncon-

quered Sun. blended with the Greek sun-festival of the Helia by the
3

emperor Aurelian, this December 25 nativity also honored such gods

as Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, Syrian Baal, and other versions of the solar
Son of Man who bore such titles as Light of the World, Sun of
4
Righteousness, and Savior. Most pagan Mysteries celebrated the
birth

of the Divine Child at the winter solstice. Norsemen celebrated the

birthday of their Lord, Frey, at the nadir oi the sun in the darkest days
of

winter, known to them as Yule. The night of birth, Christmas Eve,

was called Modranect, Latin matrum noctem, the Night of the Moth-
5
er originally a greater festival than Christmas Day.

Early in the 4th century the Roman church adopted December

25
because the people were used to calling it a god's birthday. But
6
eastern churches refused to honor it until 375 a.d. The fiction that
some record existed in the land of Jesus's alleged birth certainly could
not be upheld, for the church of Jerusalem continued to ignore the
7
official date until the 7th century.

Trappings such as Yule logs, gifts, lights, mistletoe, holly, carols,

feasts, and processions were altogether pagan. They were drawn from
worship of the Goddess as mother of the Divine Child. Christmas
trees

evolved from the pinea silva, pine groves attached to temples of the
Great Mother. On the night before a holy day, Roman priests called
dendrophori or "tree-bearers" cut one of the sacred pines, decorated
8
it, and carried it temple to receive the effigy of Attis. Figures
into the

and fetishes attached to such trees in later centuries seem to have

represented a whole pantheon of pagan deities on the
World Tree.
Christmas celebrations remained so obviously pagan over the years
that many churchmen bitterly denounced their "carnal pomp and
Polydor
jollity." "Dancing, masques, mummeries, stage-
Virgil said:

plays,and other such Christmas disorders now in use with Christians,

were derived from these Roman Saturnalian and Bacchanalian festivals;
which should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate
them." 9 Puritans in 17th-century Massachusetts tried to ban Christmas
10
altogether because of its overt heathenism. Inevitably, the attempt
failed.

A curious mistake in the Christmas mystery play of the Towneley

Mother image not fully assimilated to that of
cycle shows a Great
Mary. Before their attention was arrested by the annunciatory angel,

166
idly chattingshepherds complained of their cruel overlords, and Christos
prayed "Our Lady"
to curse them. 11
Considering that they were not
acquainted with the Mother of Christ, a rather different "Lady" must
have been intended.
^^^^_^_^^
Among many other superstitions connected with Christmas were
some that were typical of
pagan holy days, such as the belief that
animals could speak human words at midnight on Christmas
Eve, or
that divinatory voices could be heard at crossroads at the same time. 12

Also at midnight on Christmas Eve, water in wells and springs was

supposed to turn into blood, or its sacramental equivalent, wine. The
miracle was not to be verified, however; for all who witnessed it would
die within the year. 13
1. Campbell, M.I., 34. 2. Miles, 22. 3. Reinach, 282.
4. H. Smith, 130; Hyde, 92; Miles, 23. 5. Turville-Petre, 227.
6. Frazer,G.B., 416. 7. Miles, 22. 8. Vermaseren, 1 15. 9. Hazlitt, 1 18-19.
10. de Lys, 372. 11. Miles, 135. 12. Summers, V, 157. 13.
Miles, 234.

Christos
"Anointed One," a title of many Middle-Eastern sacrificial gods
Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris derived from Oriental cults of the
sacred marriage. In the east, the god's lingam or the erect penis of his
statue was anointed with holy oil (Greek chrism) for easier penetration

of his bride, the Goddess, impersonated by one of the temple virgins. 1

Before anointing with oil, the god's phallus was often reddened to the
color of life with pigment, wine, or blood specifically, the menstru-
2
al blood of his bride. Because kingship once depended on the sacred
marriage, anointing became the official rite of investiture for surro-

gate kings as well as real kings. It carried a promise of godhood.

The words of the psalmist, "Thou anointest my head with oil,"
evolved from the ancient custom of anointing the god-king's penis,
for common euphemism. At royal weddings the
which "head" was a
king's head was crowned with a wreath of flowers, as in the Hindu

svayamara ceremony and flowers, in biblical language, symbolized

menstrual blood (Leviticus 15:24). Among the pagans, the temple
virgin deflowering herself on the god's carved phallus would place a

wreath of flowers on his head at the same time. 3 Eventually the

anointing of the phallus was displaced to the head because the marriage
rite was omitted from public sacrifices of the Savior, Redeemer, Son

of God, etc. Like the New Testament Christ, he was "anointed" only
for his burying: the marriage with the earth (John 12:7). Jesus

became a Christos when he was christ-ened for burial by Mary, the

magdalene or temple maiden (Matthew 26:12), who also announced

his resurrection (Mark 1 5:47).

Among the Essenes, a Christos was a priest, specifically designated

4
Sin Bearer or Redeemer: one who atoned for others' sins. Among
the Slavs, Christos or Krstnik meant a sacrificial hero and also an

167
Chthonia "accursed one," due to the ancient practice of laying a formal curse
Circe on the Sin Bearer before he was sacrified. 5 See Firstborn; Kingship.
^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^~ 1 .
Rawson, E.A., 29. 2. G.R. Scott, 187; Edwardes, 50.
Leland, 145.
3. Legman, 661. 4. Pfeifer, 133. 5.

Chthonia
"Subterranean," an epithet of Black Demeter, Cybele, and other
underground forms of the Goddess; also applied to gods in their nether,
dark, Lord-of-Death aspect, e.g. Zeus Chthonios, or Chthonian
Apollo.

Cinderella
The of the cinder-maid originated as an anti-ecclesiastical
fairy tale

allegory repeated by real "fairies" that is, pagans. Ella was Hel, or

Helle, daughter of Mother Earth, the Goddess with her regenerative

firesreduced to cinders. Her ugly stepmother was the new church. Her
ugly stepsisters were the church's darlings, the military aristocracy and
the clergy.
An early German version of the story said Cinderella's real mother
the Earth, though dead, sent from her grave a fairy tree in answer to
her daughter's prayer. This tree produced golden apples, fine clothes,
and other gifts. Thus the "fairy godmother" of later versions seems to
have been a ghost of the mother, the dispossessed Great Goddess in
1
retirement underground.
Beautified with her new riches, Cinderella won the "prince"

(mankind), ever easily impressed by the display of finery. Their union

was symbolized by fitting her foot into a shoe, a common sexual
allegory. The Eleusinian Mysteries signified sacred marriage by
in a woman's shoe. The glass slipper perhaps
2
working a phallic object
stood for the Crystal Cave by which pagan heroes entered the uterine
underworld.
Like other secret medieval prophecies of the overthrow of the rich,
powerful theocracy, the downfall of Cinderella's ugly stepmother and
3
stepsisters may have been intended as a prophecy.
1. Jung & von Franz, 127. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 94. 3. Tuchman, 41.

Circe
Homeric "witch" able to transform men into sacrificial swine: a

mythic picture of the transition from human to porcine sacrifices during

the Hellenic period. Circe's isle of Aeaea was a funerary shrine. Its
name meant "Wailing." Circe herself was the death-bird kirkos, falcon.
From the same root came the Latin circus, originally an enclosure for
1

funerary games.

168

m
 As the circle, or cirque, Circe was identical with
Omphale of Lydia Circumcision
with her cosmic spinning wheel: a fate-spinner, weaver of the VII
Cleopatra
destinies of men. Homer called her Circe of the Braided
2
Tresses, ^^__
hinting that, like Oriental goddesses, she manipulated forces of
creation and destruction by the knots and braids in her hair. She ruled
all the stars that determined men's fates.
Pliny said Circe was a
Goddess who "commanded all the lights of heaven." 3
1. Lindsay, O.A., 239. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 358. 3. Hawkins, 139.

Circumcision
Symbolic version of the sacrifice of virility to a deity, as practiced in

Egypt, Persia, and the Middle East. Originally an imitation of menstrua-

tion, performed at puberty on boys who were dressed up as girls for
1
the occasion. Circumcision came to be regarded as a sacrifice pleasing

to a male deity, when it was viewed as a substitute for castration.

[Link],42.

Clare, Saint var. Saint Claire

Mythical saint constructed from the title of the Celtic Goddess,

Sinclair, "Sacred Light." The original form remained, as a popular
'

surname.
1. Hitching, 212.

Cleopatra VII
One of the last Goddess-queens of Egypt, Cleopatra followed the
precedent of Egyptian rulers in general and turned herself into a
divinity. At an Alexandrian festival she "assumed the robe of Isis
and
was addressed as the New Isis." '

Though she was not a native Egyptian, but one of the Macedo-
nian family of Ptolemies, Cleopatra exercised the ancient

prerogatives of Egyptian queens. Julius Caesar became

her lover be-
cause was the only way he could annex Egypt to the Roman
it

provinces. By time-honored law, no man could exercise political power

in Egypt unless he loved its queen.
Some of Cleopatra's less eminent lovers lasted only one night and
paid with their lives for a single taste of her love. The
2
custom seems
tohave been adopted by later male rulers of Arabia, to judge by the
gynocidal sultan of the Arabian Nights. The thinking
behind this
custom remains mysterious. It may be that men who lay with the queen
(and therefore with the Goddess herself) were believed to gain
immortality for any man who coupled with a Goddess would
thereby,
become a God. Sacred marriage, followed by death and deification,

formed the basic pattern of many ancient Mysteries.

169
Clitoris When her son Caesarion was born, Cleopatra built herself a
mammisi or "birth temple" for the worship of her own maternity. In
the shrine she was pictured in the act of giving birth, assisted by the
Seven Hathors. 3 Cleopatra's mammisi stood until the 19th century
a.d., when it was described by travelers, but it
disappeared in the past
4
century.
She also gave birth to the sun and moon, in the form of twins
named Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene Alexander-Sun and
Cleopatra-Moon. Perhaps these children represented her own mating
5

with the solar god of Alexandria.

1. Lindsay, O.A., 132. 2. Lederer, 323. 3. Budge, G.E. I, 161.

4. Encyc. Brit, "Hermonthis." 5. Encyc. Brit, "Cleopatra."

Clitoris

From Greek famous, goddess-like." Greek myth

l

kleitoris, "divine,

personified the phallus as Priapus and the clitoris as an Amazon queen

named Kleite, ancestral mother of the Kleitae, a tribe of warrior
women who founded a city in Italy. 2 In Corinth, Kleite was a princess
"whom Artemis made grow tall and strong," an allegory of her
erection. 3 Or, again, she was a nymph who loved the phallus of the sun

god and always followed his motion with her "head" a transparently
4
sexual metaphor. In a bowdlerized version of the story she was
transformed into a sunflower, turning to follow the motion of the sun
across the sky.
Pausanias said the Arcadian city of Clitor was sacred to Artemis, or
Pausanias Creek
to Demeter, and stood at the genital shrine of the earth, the
traveler and geographer
of the 2nd century headwaters of the Styx (or Alph). 5 The meaning of this geographical
a.d. Living in a time of myth is made by the primitive belief that the Styx represented
clear

declining culture, he Mother Earth's menstrual blood, source and solvent of all things. In
was inspired by a desire
this place, too, the orgiastic priestesses of Artemis were "soothed" out
to describe the
of their frenzies; therefore the local omphalos must have signified the
ancient sacred sites for
Goddess's clitoris instead of her navel.
posterity.
Later patriarchal society managed to ignore the clitoris. Since the

Christian church taught that women should not experience sexual

pleasure but should only endure intercourse for the sake of procreation,
growing girls and boys alike were kept ignorant of female sexuality,
6 came no
insofar as possible. Even physicians to believe that clitoris

would be found on a virtuous woman.

From medieval times onward, virtuous women rarely showed
themselves naked to any man, even a husband; so it was perhaps not

surprising that men should remain ignorant of the female anatomy they
clumsily fumbled with in the dark. Pious married couples wore the
chemise cagoule, a voluminous nightgown with a small hole in front, to

allow impregnation with a minimum of body contact. 7

170
 At a witch trial in 1 593, the investigating gaoler (a married Clitoris
man)
apparently discovered a clitoris for the first time, and identified it as a
devil's teat, sure proof of the witch's guilt. It was "a little

in manner sticking out as if it had been a

lump of flesh, ^^^^^^^^^
teat, to the length of half an
inch," which the gaoler, "perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not
to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not
decent to be seen; yet in the end, not willing to conceal so
strange a
matter," he showed it to various bystanders. 8 The bystanders had
never seen anything like it either. The witch was convicted.
European society certainly knew all about the penis, and never
ceased to worship it, evert in Christian times (see Phallus Worship).
Yet the clitoris was forgotten:

Almost from the very beginning of our lives, we are all taught that the
primary male sex organ is the penis, and the primary female sex organ
is the vagina. These organs are supposed to define the sexes, to be the
difference between boys and girls .... This is a lie ... Woman 's
.

sexual pleasure is often left out of these definitions. Ifpeople considered

that the purpose of the female sex organs is to bring pleasure to

women, then female sex would be defined by, and focused on, a different
organ. Everyone would be taught from infancy that, as the primary
male sex organ is the penis, so the primary female sex organ is the clitoris. 9

Medical authorities in the 19th century seemed anxious to

prevent women from discovering their own sexuality. Girls who learned
to develop orgasmic capacity by masturbation, just as boys learned it,

were regarded as medical problems. Often they were "treated" or

"corrected" by amputation or cautery of the clitoris, or "miniature

sewing the vaginal lips together to put the clitoris out of

chastity belts,
reach, and even castration by surgical removal of the ovaries. But
there are no references medical literature to surgical removal of
in the
10
testicles or amputation of the penis to stop masturbation (in boys)."

In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing

11
masturbation was performed in 1948 on a five-year-old girl.
The Catholic church's definition of masturbation as "a grave
moral disorder" in 1976 may have incorporated fears of the effect of
masturbation on female orgasmic capacity, now well known to evolve
12
through masturbatory experience the same as that of a male. Less
than a century ago, in the Victorian era, priests and doctors realized that

"the totalrepression of woman's sexuality was crucial to ensure her

subjugation." Leading authorities like Dr. Isaac Brown Baker per-

formed many clitoridectomies to cure women's nervousness, hysteria,

catalepsy, insanity, female dementia, and other

catchwords for symp-
toms of sexual frustration. 13
4. Hamilton, 291.
I. Young, 47. 2. Bachofen, 283. 3. Graves, G.M. 2, 26.
5. Graves, W.G., 405-6. 6. Simons, 141. 7. Sadock, Kaplan
& Freedman, 25.
8. Rosen, 296-97. 9. Gornick & Moran, 292-93. [Link]&Moran,293.
I I. Ehrenreich &
1976. 13. Nobile, 223-24.
English, 1 11. 12. Newsweek, Jan. 26,

171
Clotho Clotho
Col urn ba, Saint
"The Spinner," first of the Greek Moerae or Fates; She Who Spins
the Thread of Life. The same name was applied to Isis in her "terrible'
aspect as a creator-destroyer. Clotho's thread was sometimes golden,
1

but more often blood red.

1. Neumann, G.M., 162.

Clytemnestra
"Divine Wooing," or Sacred Marriage; the last matriarchal queen of
Mycenae, slain by her son Orestes, a worshipper of the patriarchal god

Apollo. Clytemnestra claimed a queen's traditional right to choose

her consort, and have each new one slay the old one. Thus she arrangec
to have her husband Agamemnon slain by her latest lover, Aegisthus,
whose name means Strong Goat. 1

Aegisthus had the right mythic prerequisites for a sacred king. He

was born of an incestuous union. His mother Pelopia was a Goddess
of Clytemnestra's clan, the Pelopids. In infancy he was abandoned to
the wild, was rescued, and, like Zeus himself, was nourished by a she-

goat. He was prepared to be a god on earth.

2

Orestes spoiled it by killing his mother and her lover, calling down
on himself the inexpiable curse of miasma for his matricide. The
Furies pursued him, but the god Apollo defended him, on the ground
that motherhood was not real parenthood. "The mother is no parent
of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed

parent is he who mounts." This Apollonian view of

The 3
that grows.

parenthood was also the Christian view, even subsequent to 1827 a.d.
when Karl von Baer first discovered the human ovum, gigantic in
size and complexity as compared to a spermatozoon.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 377. 2. Gaster, 224. 3. Bachofen, 159.

Coatlicue

"Lady of the Serpent Skirt," mother of all Aztec deities as well as of

the sun, the moon, and the stars. She produced all earthly life, and
received the dead back again into her body. She was associated with
volcanic mountains. Like Kali she wore a necklace of skulls, and a skirt
of either serpents or shorn penises of her castrated savior-lovers. Her

daughter Xochiquetzal, the Mexican Aphrodite, was a Goddess of All

Women.

Columba, Saint
"Holy Dove," a spurious canonization of Aphrodite as a "maiden
1
martyr" Columba of Sens. Celtic myth called her Colombe, the yoni-

172
 maiden mated to Lancelot as a
lightning bolt, the 'hallus of Heaven 2
Conscience
See Lightning.
Constantinel
1. Attwater, 92. 2. Malory 1, 377.

Conscience
"Knowing-together," a word coined by Stoic philosophers who said
deity is found only within the human mind. Socrates's famous dictum
"Know thyself" was a Stoic aphorism for knowing God.
Fusing
divinity with self produced "conscience." Thus the
philosophers said
any dictate of one's own conscience was and inevitably holy right.
1

The concept grew from Oriental teachings about the identity of man
with God, woman with Goddess. See Antinomianism.
1. Angus, 207-8.

Constantine I

The Christian emperor" (288?-337), honored for

"first
establishing
Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. Actually,
Constantine didn't do this in his own lifetime; his bishops did it

afterward. Constantine was not so much a worshipper of Christ as he

was a worshipper of himself.

Constantine considered himself the incarnation of "the supreme

god," a combination of Apollo, Mithra, Jupiter, the sun, and Christ.
He called himself "the instrument of the Deity." He said, "I banished
and utterly abolished every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope
that the human race, enlightened through me, might be called to a
proper observance of God's holy laws." He designated for his tomb a
spot in the center of the cruciform Church of the Holy Apostles, saying
he would lie forever with six apostles at his left hand and six at his

right. A contemporary historian said Constantine was "more greedy for

'
praise than it is
possible to tell."
He supported freedom of worship in his empire for the wrong
reason: so that no god would be offended enough to take revenge on
him personally. He issued edicts of toleration for all religions, so that
"we should give to Christians and to everyone else the right freely to
follow whatever religion they chose, so that, whatever divinity is
enthroned in heaven may be well-disposed and propitious towards
me." He tried to restrain Christian fanatics from persecuting pagans,

Jews, and heretics, writing in an encyclical letter to Bishop Eusebius

of Nicomedia that these others must be "assured of the same degree of

peace and tranquility" as orthodox Christians. The orthodox Chris-

2

tians did not agree, and soon after Constantine's death they instituted

extensive persecutions and crusades extending over the next three

centuries.

173
Constantine I Constantine did his best for the church. In one year he obtained

^ mm^^^^^^m
twelve thousand converts by the simple offer of a

twenty gold pieces to each person

as much for other cults too.
who embraced
He didn't become a Christian
when he
new garment and
the faith.
3
But he did
himself
until the final weeks of his life, accepted baptism on his
deathbed, as insurance for his after-life.
Constantine's life was hardly a model of piety. He murdered his

eldest son, his second wife, his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, and
"many others," a chronicler said. His first wife, Minervina evidently a

priestess of the Moon-goddess Minerva mysteriously disappeared.

No one knows what became of her. His second wife Fausta was his
stepping-stone to the throne, according to the ancient rule of the
hieros gamos. Eulogists at the wedding said, "The title of sovereignty
has now accrued to thee, O
Constantine, through thy father-in-
law." 4 There being no law of primogeniture, the throne still passed
through the female line.
To eliminate a potential rival, Constantine killed his eldest son

Crispus, born of the vanished Minervina. Afterward he accused

Fausta of having had a love affair with her now-deceased stepson, along
with other adulterous affairs, and killed her; it seems that any lover
5
the empress took was still a threat to the emperor's political position.

The murdered Crispus might have played the role of savior and
sacred king, for after his death he was virtually canonized as a
"blessed martyr." Churches in Greece were dedicated to him for over a
millenium. "During the period of the Turkish occupation of Greece,
over a thousand years later, he was still remembered as the Caesar, the

hero-prince, the Christian Theseus, as it were, founder of the

modern Greek nation." 6 Yet Crispus was neither a Caesar nor a
Christian.
Christian bishops eventually convinced Constantine that their God
would forgive his crimes and enthrone him in heaven. When he felt
death approaching, he said to them: "The salvation which I have

earnestly desired of God these many years I do now expect. It is time

therefore that we should be sealed and signed in the badge of immortal-
7 of a
ity." So he was baptized, and died in the confident expectation

glorious resurrection.
His literary whitewashing began at once. Despite his two wives and
numerous concubines, Christian panegyrists said he was "wedded to
8
chastity." Eusebius elevated all the emperor's doings into acts of piety,
and invented the legend that Christ had converted him with a holy

vision at the Milvian bridge. Later Christian legend claimed Constan-

tinesaw the sign of the cross in the sky, with the words in hoc signo
vinces (in this sign conquer). However, the holy sign that Constantine

placed on his battle flags was not the cross. It was the labarum, a
monogram of Mithra and a sign of the sun, already in use by several
9
pagan emperors before Constantine.
As an example of Constantine's Christian mercy, Cedrenus re-

174
corded that once when he was ill, he collected a number of children Convent
to kill them and bathe in their blood as a healing charm. However,
moved by their mothers' tears, the emperor spared the children's lives ^^^^^__^^_
after all, and "the saints" restored his health as a reward for this act of

mercy. No one seemed inclined to

10
criticize him for
contemplating
the massacre in the first place.
Constantine's luminous example showed that Christian
magic
could prevent port-mortem punishment for a ruthless life. "Future

tyrantswere encouraged to believe," says Gibbon, "that the innocent

blood which they might shed in a long reign would instantly be
washed away in the waters of regeneration; and the abuse of religion
dangerously undermined the foundations of moral virtue."
n
Christianity served all the emperors after him, with the sole

exception of Julian "the Apostate," much vilified by the church for

suspending the persecutions of pagans and trying to restore the culture
of classicalRome. But Julian died young; some said he was assassinat-
ed by a Christian. 12 The war against paganism proceeded. Beginning
about 330 a.d., pagan shrines were looted and stripped of their gold,
silver, and bronze many of which were carried off to decorate
treasures,
Constantine's greatest monument to himself, the city of Constantino-
1?
ple. As Eusebius gleefully described the process: "The lurking-places
of the heretics were broken up . . . and the savage beasts which they
harbored were put to flight." H
Constantine's edicts of toleration were rescinded after his death.
The new imperial religion attacked its rivals in a show of intolerance
on a grander scale than had ever been seen before. It was a great
success. "Forty years after the death of Constantine, the church had
already acquired a tenth of the whole of the landed property in Rome's
western empire, a figure that in western Europe rose to a third during
the middle ages. The church since the time of Constantine affords
. . .

proof that not spiritual truth that has triumphed with the spread of
it is

Christianity but human power." 15

I. J.H. Smith, C.G., 182, 235-36, 262. 2. Ibid., 123, 183. 3. Gibbon 1, 654-55.
[Link],C.G.,27,71. 5. Ibid., 210. 6. Ibid., 215-16. [Link],446.
8. J.H. Smith, C.G, 39. 9. Encyc. Brit, "Flag." 10. Leland, 240.
I I . Gibbon 1 , 654. 12. de Voragine, 131. 1 3. J.H. Smith, C.G, 232.

14.Legge2,220. 15. Augstein, 299.

Convent
Medieval institution evolved from the pagan "college" of priestesses
or virgines that is, unmarried women (not necessarily physical virgins)
dedicated to divine service.
of male monks united
Early convents were double: a community
with female priestesses under the rule of an abbess, usually a

noblewoman. "Priests and monks together with the nuns

1

landowning
took vows of obedience to the abbess in imitation of the obedience of

A of double
Jesus to his mother." 10th-century Saxon chronicle speaks

175
Convent convents inhabited by "priests of both sexes," although in a transla-
2
tion it was revised to read, "priests of both orders."

m^^^^^^^^^^m As Christian laws encroached on women's property rights, many

women of noble rank took vows to remain single, so as to protect
their wealth from the claims of husbands. Thus originated the so-called
convent of noble ladies, an independent mini-queendom. For exam-

ple, the Saxon convent of Gandersheim in the 9th century held

overlordship directly from the king. The abbess conducted her own
courts of law, kept her own seat in the imperial parliament, and
maintained her own standing army. 3 Culture and learning were
pursued. This convent trained the poetess Hrotswitha of Gandersheim,
called "a Sappho, deserving to rank with the fabled Veleda and
4
Aurinia, ancient German poet-priestesses."
In the 7th century, a papal bull confirmed the rights of freedom
from taxation and from episcopal jurisdiction of the Parthenon of
Beatae Mariae et Sanctae Columbae et Agathae (Virgin-house of
Blessed Marys and Holy Doves and Kindly Ones). Abbesses of Las
Huelgas ruled towns, had the right to license bishops and priests
sixty
within their dioceses, to confer benefices on clergy of their own

choice, to nominate ecclesiastical judges, to hear criminal cases among

their subjects, and to establish new parishes. Bishops and apostolic
delegates were forbidden to visit churches, parishes, clergy, or beneficia-
ries in the abbess's territory. The nuns remained exempt from
episcopal jurisdiction all the way up to 1874. 5
Ancient goddess-queens were described as "abbesses" in Christian

nature of the pagan matriarchate that

histories, to disguise the real
backed them. Such a one was St. Odilia or Ottilia, called the abbess of
Odilienberg (Hohenburg), a pilgrimage shrine of Alsace that was her
own Holy Mountain. 6 Her legend had no documentary basis. 7 She was
fraudulently canonized, only to attract her votaries to Christianity.
Many abbesses retained their pagan title of High Priestess
Sacerdos Maxima especially in the German convents. At Quedlin-

burg the abbess was "in control of the whole town, its people, churches,
hospitals, clergy, canons and canonesses, and all religious orders."
She was not only High Priestess, but also Superior Canoness of the
Cathedral, Metropolitana (mayor), and Matricia (matriarch). At St.

Mary's Uberwasser in Munster, the abbess's title was Prima domna et

matre nostra spirituale, "Mistress-Leader and Our Spiritual Mother."
Cistercian monks at Las Huelgas swore obedience to the abbess as "the
Illustrious Lady ... my Prelate, and my Lady, Superior, Mother and
legitimate administrator in spiritual and temporal affairs of the Royal
8
Monastery and its Hospital."
Some centuries earlier, the Latin title of Sacerdos Maxima meant a

high priestess of the Great Mother of the Gods. She was assisted by
lesser priestesses known as ministra, "ministers." The word "sodality"
came from Latin sodales, a college of dancing priestesses trained in
the Great Mother's temple. 9

176
 That women in convents long retained the sexual freedom of the
Convent
ancient priestesses is shown by interchangeable use of the words
"convent" and "brothel"
the monasteries were not so
in medieval times. Nicholas
Clemangis said
much sanctuaries of God as they were
^^^^^^-^^
10
"abodes of Venus."
The word nun originally meant a nurse, that is, a priestess of a
healing shrine, like the "nymphs" in colleges of Hygeia and Panacea
in pagan Greece. That the convents continued to function as hospitals
is
suggested by medieval romances: wounded, sick, or dying folk were
n The word also
usually cared for by "nuns." meant a virgin mother in
Germanic paganism. A cognate was Nana, virgin mother of the god
Balder.

Sometimes, pagan queens established convents in order to have

themselves canonized, just asRoman emperors were made gods by
virtue of their religious leadership. The canon of saints includes several
pagan queens whose only claim to beatitude was wealth, which
bought the jurisdiction of an abbey and its subject lands. Some of the
queen-saints were even distinctly hostile to churchmen, like Queen
Bathild, foundress of a druidic convent at Chelles in the 7th century.
She was the real ruler of the western Franks, having placed her son
Chlotar on the throne. Certain bishops who tried to interfere with her
were assassinated. In the end she was
"unceremoniously" removed
from power by Christian nobles, and apparently murdered as a heretic,
though her subjects maintained her cult and called her Saint
12
Bathild.

In Bede's time, Queen Ethelreda was ordained High Priestess of

Ely,and was succeeded by other supreme abbesses governing the

monastery's beatarum regimine feminarum (holy order of women) up
to the in 866. The abbey of Wherwell was founded
Danish invasion
by Queen Elfrida in 986; it was exempt from earthly services, and held
many territories and churches. 13
Another pagan princess who founded a convent in the 7th century
and was canonized, was St. Wereburg of the royal house of Mercia,
ruler of the city of Chester. Her establishment was specifically for

"noble women" refusing to give up their property to husbands. St.

Wereburg was canonized centuries later, on the strength of a legend

that her holy bones had extinguished the fires set in the city of
Chester by marauding Danes. 14
St. Hild, or Hilda, of the royal house of Northumberland, estab-

lished one of the most famous double monasteries of Anglo-Saxon

times at Hartlepool, the "Isle of Stags." Her influence extended over all

England. She created bishops and abbots, favoring especially the

poet-missionaries of Celtic background. Bede said "all who knew her

called her Mother." 15

Since she bore the name of the pagan Great
Mother Hild, or Hel, one might wonder about the real basis of her

authority, in a century when a majority of people had not yet heard of

16
Christianity.

177
Convent Even when convents became Christianized, abbesses were still
ordained like bishops, and in some areas held more secular power than

^^^^Bi^^^^M bishops, though church histories have tried to conceal this, sometimes
through deliberate falsification of the records. For instance, a papal bull
said the abbess of the Cassian foundation in Marseilles was "or-
dained"; a later editor changed the word to "blessed." At Jouarre,
Quedlinburg, Conversano, and other places, an abbess held supreme
both clergy and laity in her territory. According to the
jurisdiction over
Rule of St. Donatus, abbesses functioning as Matris Spirituale (Spiri-
tual Mother) regularly heard confessions. French ecclesiastical records

say abbesses gave absolution by imposition of their hands on the

heads of men. 17
The church began to encroach on the rights of convents in the
12th and 13th centuries, devising ways to appropriate the nuns'

property and make them subject to male clergy. At Fontevrault,

canonesses preceded the monks in processions, carried the pastoral
cross, preached, read the Gospel, and heard confessions. Pope Innocent
III deprived them of these privileges. Disagreements arose between

male and female clergy. Monks insisted they would no longer genuflect

every time they passed the abbess. Nuns reacted by refusing to kneel
in the confessional before their brothers. Innocent III also commanded

the abbess of Jouarre, her clergy, and her layfolk to subject them-
selves to the authority of the bishop of Meaux. When the abbess asked

for time to prove her right to independence, she and all her

community were excommunicated. Decrees of the Council of Trent

changed church laws to say women's orders must be taken over and
18
supervised by men's orders.
Considerable bitterness accompanied sexual segregation of the
double convents, judging from the letter of Abbot Conrad of March-
tal, on barring women from his order:

We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness

of women is greater than all other wickedness of the world, and there is
no anger like that of women, and that the poison ofasps and dragons is
more curable and less dangerous for men than the familiarity of
women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than
of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any
for that
more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like
,9
poisonous animals.

Convents had been centers of higher learning for women in an

age when women were forbidden access to schools and universities.

Earlier in the medieval period, girls as well as boys attended ecclesias-

tical schools in Ireland and learned to read and write; but this practice
20
was being kept only for males. Premon-
later forbidden, the schools

stratensian and Cistercian orders were famed as educators of women,

until the Council of Trent ruled that women's orders must be taken
over by men's orders. 21 Then Cistercian nuns were forbidden to
22
establish any more teaching convents.
Nuns were further commanded not to teach or discuss theological

178
matters. This was used as a device for
outlawing their orders and Convent
confiscating their property. It served as an excuse for the Council of
Vienne to deprive the teaching nuns called Beguines of their lands
and houses, in 1 3 1 2 when monks of the Inquisition demanded them:
We have been told that certain women commonly called Beguines,
afflicted by a kind of madness,
discuss the Holy
Trinity and the divine
essence,and express opinions on matters offaith and sacraments.
Since these women promise no obedience to
anyone and do not
renounce property or profess an approved Rule
their
fw]e have there- . . .

fore decided and declared with the approval of the Council that their

way oflife is to be permanently forbidden and altogether excluded from

theChurch of God. 2 *

The Beguines were forced to

integrate into orders approved by
the pope,where they would receive no education. Their properties
were taken over by the Inquisition to provide dwellings and prisons
for the inquisitors' use. 24

From the 1 2th century on, there was increasing pressure on

convents to adopt rules of close confinement, to keep nuns
segregat-
ed from the outside world. The canonesses of St. Mary's Uberwasser
rebelled three times against the imposition of the Benedictine Rule,
which would force them into seclusion. 25 Many convents were threat-
ened with excommunication, dissolution, or even prosecution by the
Inquisition to force them to accept strict seclusion and to cease develop-

ing the sisters' minds.

Early in the 17th century, teacher Mary Ward tried to found a
Catholic order of teaching nuns known as the English Ladies, to

provide education for girls. She and her sisters refused to submit to the
cloister, so Mary was arrested and accused of heresy. Her order was
suppressed in 1629. Pope Urban VIII rebuked them: "Certain women,
taking the name of Jesuitesses, assembled and living together, built
colleges, and appointed superiors and a General, assumed a peculiar

habit without the approbation of the Holy See . . . carried out works

by no means suiting the weakness of their sex, womanly modesty,

26
virginal purity." With typically patriarchal reasoning, the English
Ladies were punished for doing what women were supposed to be
unable to do.
A few convents managed to hold on to their pre-patriarchal
independence. The clergy failed to turn out the canonesses of St.
Waudru, at Mons. Monks of Fontevrault likewise failed to take over the
main church or the nuns' house, and were obliged to continue to vow
27
obedience to the abbesses, up to the French Revolution.
1. Encyc. Brit., "Women in Religious Orders." 2. Morris, 45, 132.
133.
3. Bullough, 158. 4. Borchardt, 107. 5. Morris, 18, 85-86. 6. Gifford,
7. Attwater, 257. 8. Morris, 58-65, 89. 9. Vermaseren, 57, 109.
1 0. Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 24. 11. Funk, 28 1 . 12. Attwater, 60.

13. Morris, 25-26. 14. Brewster, 93. 1 5. Attwater, 170.

16. Brewster, 490; Encyc. Brit, "Hilda." 17. Morris, 19, 71, 142.
18. Morris, 48, 76, 37, 149. 19. Bullough, 160. 20. Joyce 1, 410. 21. Morris, 157.
22. Bullough, 191. 23. Bullough, 163. 24. Lea, 226. 25. Morris, 29.
26. Bullough, 208. 27. Morris, 149.

179
Cornelius, Saint Cornelius, Saint
Cow
"Horned One," fictitious saint said to have given curative magic to
the site of Mont St. counterpart across the English Channel
Michel. Its

[Link]'s Mount, was a shrine of the legendary Trojan hero

Corineus, first ruler of Cornwall. His Breton name was Cornelius. He

1

may have been derived from the Horned God, Cernunnos. Corineus
was conquered the last of the giants, Goemagot (Gog-
said to have

Magog), and thrown him into the Channel.

1. Pepper &Wilcock, 193,203.

Corona, Saint
Spurious canonization of the phrase sancta corona, Divine Crown,
an early Christian term for martyrdom; perhaps confused with the
Goddess Coronis, virgin mother of the physician-god Asclepius.

var. Cottyto, CotyS

Cottytaris
Thracian Moon-goddess whose son, the giant Cottus of the Hundred
Hands, stood for her collegium of fifty priests or priestesses. Theocritu
1

called her "the crone, Cottytaris, that piped of yore to the reapers in
2
Hippocoon's field." Since Christians vilified her Edonian rites as devil

worship, she was listed as one of the demons in medieval texts on

demonology.
1. Graves, CM. 1, 32, 108. 2. Halliday, 36.

Coventina
"Mother of Covens," a popular name for the Celtic Goddess as
patron of healing wells and springs. A coven of thirteen was said to
1

represent the thirteen lunar months. The word may have come from
Moorish-Spanish-Basque kaftan, a ceremonial robe worn at sacred
dances performed in groups of thirteen. 2 Naturally, during witch
persecutions the name Coventina was applied to all forms of the
Goddess.
1. Phillips, 1 12. 2. Ravensdale & Morgan, 153.

Cow
Perhaps the most common manifestation of the Great Mother as

Preserver was the white, horned, milk-giving Moon-cow, still sacred in

India as a symbol of Kali. Egypt revered Mother Hathor as the

heavenly cow whose udder produced the Milky Way, whose body was

180
 the firmament, and who daily gave birth to the sun, Cow
Horus-Ra, her
Golden Calf, the same deity worshipped by Aaron and the Israelites:
"These be thy gods, O
Israel, which brought thee up out of the land
of Egypt" (Exodus 32:4).
The name of Italy meant "calf-land." ! This
country too was the
gift of the Milk-giver, whom Etruscans called Lat, Arabs called Al-

Lat, Greeks called Latona, Lada, Leto, or Leda. She ruled

Latium, and
gave her milk (Jatte) to the world.
All Europe was named after the Goddess as a white Moon-cow,
whom the Greeks mated to the white bull incarnation of Zeus. Her
alternative name was Io, "Moon." Under this name
she was presented
in classic mythology as a rival of
Hera, but patriarchal writers were
always setting different manifestations of the same Goddess at odds with
one another, possibly on the principle of divide and
conquer. Hera
named Io, ancestress of the Ionians. In her temple on the
herself was
of Byzantium she appeared as the same lunar cow, the Horned
site

One, wearing the same crescent headdress as the Egyptian Cow-

2
goddess.
The Cow as creatress was equally prominent in myths of northern Herodotus said the

Europe, where she was named Audumla; she was also Freya, or a milk-giving Mother
Hera-Io-Latona was
Valkyrie taking the form of a "fierce cow." A semi-patriarchal Norse
6
the same as Egypt's
myth tried to attribute the creation of the world to the giant Ymir,
Buto, "an archaic
whose body and blood made the universe. But he was not the first of
queen of the Lower
creatures. The Cow preceded him, for he lived on her milk. 7
Kingdom." The
5

Earlier myths showed the universe being "curdled" into holy city of Buto,
shape
from the Cow's milk. In India, many still believe literally the creation Egypt's oldest
oracular shrine, was
myth known as 8
Churning of the Sea of Milk. The Japanese version known to the Greeks
said the primordial deep went "curdlecurdle" (koworokoworo) when as Latopolis, "city of
stirred by the first deities, to make clumps of land. 9 The ancient Near Lat." 4 Of course
East thought human bodies too were curdled from the Goddess's Buto, or Lat, was only
another name for
milk. One of her liturgies was copied into the Bible: "Has thou not
Hathor, or Isis, or Mut,
poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?" (Job 10:10). or Neith; all

The root of "cow" was Sanskrit Gau, Egyptian kau or kau-t. represented "the great
Goddess-names like Gauri and Kauri also designated the yonic cow which gave birth
10 to Ra, the great
cowrie shell. Brahman rebirth ceremonies used either a
huge golden
goddess, the mother
yoni or an image of the Cow-mother. "When a man has for grave
of all the gods ... the
cause been expelled from his caste, he may be restored to it after passing
Cow, the great lady,
several times under the belly of a cow." u The Egyptian Goddess as lady of the south, the

birth-giver typically wore a cow's head or horns, as she offered her great one who gave
12
As the nursing mother who birth to the sun, who
breasts with both hands. gave each
made germ of
the
Egyptian his secret soul-name (re/7), she was entitled
Lady Renenet, the
gods and men, the
of the Double Granary, a reference to her inexhaustible breasts. 13 mother of Ra, who
The bovine enzyme rennet, used even in antiquity to curdle milk, was raised up Tern in

also sacred to her. primeval time, who

existed when nothing
A favorite Roman emblem of the Goddess was the Cornucopia,
else had being, and
Horn of Plenty: a cow's horn pouring forth all the fruits of the earth.
who created that which
The cow was honored as the wetnurse of humanity, and her image is
exists."
5

181
Cowrie still inadvertently invoked to this day as an expletive Holy Cow, or a

pejorative Sacred Cow.

^^^^^^^^^^_
^^^^^^^^^^ 1. Thomson, 50. 2. Elworthy, 183, 194. 3. Lamusse, 29.
256.
4. Herodotus, 106.
Lamusse, 248.
5. Budge, G.E. 1, 457-58, 463. 6. Turville-Petre, 7.

8. 0'Flaherty, 274. 9. Campbell, Or.M., 467. 10. Waddell, 404.

1 1. Frazer, F.O.T., 220-22. 12. Neumann, G.M., pi. 9.

13. Lamusse, 38; H. Smith, 24.

Cowrie
Its name derived from Kauri, who was the same as Kali-Cunti, Yoni
of the Universe, the cowrie shell everywhere represented the divine
vulva and usually conveyed the idea of rebirth. Skeletons from the
Solutrean period, ca. 20,000 B.C., have been found "lavishly decorated
l
with cowrie shells."

Egyptians decorated sarcophagi with cowrie shells as a rebirth

charm. Cowries are still prized throughout the east for their supposed
healing and regenerative powers. Cowrie necklaces are valued in India
as amulets against the evil eye.
2
Moslem women believe cowries

should be worn on the body during pregnancy. The Japanese keep

cowries in wardrobe cabinets "for luck"; if no cowries are available,
5
pornographic pictures of female genitals serve as a substitute. Gypsies
4
valued a cowrie above all other kinds of protective amulets. Chris-
tianized natives of the Sudan consider a strip of leather stamped with the
sign of the cross a valuable amulet; but it is not "strong magic" unless
5
nine cowrie shells are attached to it.

Romans called the cowrie shell matriculus, "little matrix," symbol

of an Alma Mater (soul-mother) or teaching priestess, which is why a

student still "matriculates" into instruction. The Roman Alma Mater

taught the philosophy of love as well as the love of philosophy. Unlike
Christians, the pagans believed the capacity for heterosexual love

required careful nurture and training.

Sometimes the Romans called a cowrie porcelk, "little sow,"
because it stood for the Goddess who was the Great Sow, like
Demeter, Astarte, Ceres, Freya, Cerridwen, etc. From porcelk came
"porcelain," so called because of its resemblance to the white glazed
surface of the shell. 6 A
Greek word for the cowrie was kteis, which also
7
meant a scallop, a comb, and a vulva.

antiquity of cowrie symbolism in the Middle East

The extreme is

shown by the ancestor-skulls preserved by the people of Jericho in the

7th millenium b.c. These forerunners of the Jewish teraphim were
severed from the body, provided with features of painted plaster, and
8
made to "see" with the eyes of cowrie shells.

Speaking of the Melanesians' and Polynesians' reverence for

cowries, a missionary, Rev. George Brown, wrote, "There is some
sacredness about them, but what it is, is not at all clear. The natives will

not talk about them at all." 9 It seems likely that the natives he

182
 nentioned had already become well aware that there was
no use talking Crab
about sexual symbols to missionaries.
Creation
1.

5.
Campbell, P.M., 376.
Budge AT
9. Briffault 3,
',

275.
2. Gifford, 79.
352. 6. Leland, 102. 7.
3. Briffault
3,

Lindsay, A.W.,
277-78 4 Trigg 43
1 32. 8. Whitehouse, 168.
^^"^^

>ab
ie peculiar significance of Cancer, the
Crab, in ancient astrology
isthat it presaged the coming of the end of the world.
Chaldeans
elieved the world would dissolve and return to its primordial
ements when all the planets lined up in the constellation of the Crab,
iesame doctrine appeared in India,
Egypt, Persia, China, northern
Lurope, and pre-Columbian central America. 1
The sign of the Crab was particularly associated with water and the
m, both typically representative of the Great Goddess who was
apposed to bring all
things to their doom. 2
1. Campbell, M.I., 149. 2. Gertings, 95.

Crann Bethadh
In Celtic myth, the phallic Tree of Life, planted in the
yonic shrine at
the center of the earth; comparable to Yggdrasil, the Stone of Fal,

Irminsul, the axis mundi, and many other versions of the cosmic
phallus.

Creation
Myths of creation generally present a symbolic view of birth. Condi-
tions before creation suggest the uterine environment: darkness, liquid,

stirring or churning movement, the "eternal flux" associated with the

blood of the Mother (Kali's Ocean of Blood, for example). Often there
is a
suggestion of one entity inside another. "When there was neither
the creation, nor the sun, the moon, the planets, and the earth, and
when darkness was enveloped in Darkness, then the Mother, the
Formless One, Maha-Kali, the Great Power, was one with Maha-Kala,
the Absolute." x

The Bible's highly derivative version says "the earth was without
form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the Deep"
(Genesis 1:2). The Deep was the Mother's womb, tehom, derived from
Tiamat, the Babylonian name of the primordial Goddess. In Egypt,
she was Temu, mother of the abyssal elements: Water, Darkness,
2
Night, and Eternity.
Most creation myths speak of a splitting or opening in the dark,
formless Mother. The beginning of the existing world is
signaled by

183
Creation the coming of light. Romans made the connection with birth quite

clear: Juno Lucina was not only a creatress, but also the Mother who
brought "light" to the eyes of the newborn. The biblical God who said
3

"Let there be light" (Fiat lux) copied the word of the Goddess.
The prominence given everywhere to that moment of light sug-
gests archetypal memories of the first impact of light on
newborn eyes
which have never seen light before. Like dreams of the individual
unconscious, myths of the collective unconscious reveal hidden
memories of the birth trauma. "Locked up in the depths of our
unconscious mind is the terrific impact of birth, the violent adventure

that uprooted our pre-natal world." 4 It is also locked up in the symbol-

ism of myths, projected onto a cosmic scale.
Creation/birth was inseparable from the figure of the Mother. The
oldest myths made her the divider of waters, maker of heaven and
earth. When a god came into the picture, he was at first only her
subordinate consort, one of the beings she had created: sometimes a
disembodied phallus, in the form of a serpent. Late Egyptian gods who
claimed to be creators never succeeded in ridding themselves of
feminine imagery. For instance, Khepera insisted that he created the
universe alone, "there was no other being who worked with me." Yet
he had to say, "I laid a foundation in Maa," meaning the Great Womb,
5
the Goddess Maat.
Often it is said when the god was allowed to create, he became
puffed up with pride, and began to ignore his Mother and claim sole
authorship of the universe. This angered the Goddess. She punished
him, bruised his head with her heel, and sent him down to the

underworld. 6 (See Eve.) Sumerian creation myths said when the

Goddess's son-spouse began to show signs of hubris she laid the curse
of exile on him, saying, "Henceforth thou shalt dwell neither in heaven
nor on earth." 7 This raises all kinds of questions about Middle-
Eastern sacrificial gods who died in expiation of a primal sin, hung on
trees or crosses "between heaven and earth."
Gnostic creation myths of the early Christian era were still telling
versions in which the female principle was pre-eminent, which is why
they were declared uncanonical. "In his madness," Jehovah claimed to
be the only God, because he had forgotten the Mother who brought
him into being, according to one source. The Mother of Gods was
angry that he had impiously sinned against her, and against her
other

children, the male and female Immortal Ones. These were the elohim
of the Book of Genesis. God grouped himself with them, calling the
group "us" (Genesis 3:22). But Bible revisions tended to erase earlier
deities, especially female ones. After the centuries of choosing
and
Jean Astruc 1 8th- canonical trace of female had been
revising books, nearly every divinity
century French 8
Catholic physician eliminated from Christian literature.
and scholar. As long ago as 1753, Astruc recognized that the Book of Genesis

184
contains at least two mutually
contradictory versions of the creation Creation
nyth. One version the scholars call E, for
speaks of plural creators,
it

lohim, male and female deities. Another version is J, for

Jehovah _^____^^^_
*^^^^^^^^
tlohim, the God of gods. The two versions disagree in
many points:
E: birds and beasts created before man.

J: man created before birds and beasts.

E: birds made of water, along with fishes.

J: birds made of earth, along with beasts.

E: man given dominion over the whole earth.

J: man placed only in the garden, "to dress and keep it
it," like the
men created to be farmer-slaves in the Sumerian original.

E: man and woman created together, after the beasts: "male and
emale created he (they) them, and God (elohim, the deities) blessed
hem."
J: man created alone, before beasts and birds; woman made from
us rib.

E: creation took place in six days.

J:creation took place in one day.

E: nothing was said about the Fall, which appeared only in the
narrative.

The Fall was all-important. If it never took place, there was no

mginal sin, no necessity for redemption, no Savior. Dean Burgon of
hichester said to deny the literal truth of the Genesis story was to
'cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse." Calvin stood
iquarely behind what he thought the Bible said, and insisted that all

pecies of animals were created at once, in a period of six normal days,

ach with a morning and evening, as stated. Those who disagree with
lim, he said, "basely insult the Creator," and will meet after death "a
udge who will annihilate them." 9
Theclergy's notion of investigating the origins of man consisted
)f studying the Bible to add up the given ages of patriarchs since Adam.

This had been done in the 7th century by Isidore of Seville, who
:ame up with a strange Bible-based view of history: "Joseph lived 105
/ears. Greece
began to cultivate grain. The Jews were in slavery in
Egypt 144 years. Atlas discovered astrology. Joshua ruled for 27 years.
Erichthonius yoked horses together. Othniel, 40 years. Cadmus
ntroduced letters into Greece. Deborah, 40 years. Apollo discovered
he art of medicine and invented the cithara. Gideon, 40 years. Mercury
nvented the lyre and gave it to Orpheus." Reasoning on this level

ind never noticing anything odd about the many consecutive reigns of
K) years Archbishop Usher in 1650 placed the date of creation in
K)04 b.c. Dr. John Lightfoot, 19th-century Vice-Chancellor of the

185
Creiddylad University of Cambridge, carried the calculations even further: "Man
was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., a
nine o'clock in the morning." 10
The absurdity of such reasoning began to be exposed in 1830
when Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology investigated the earth's
long-term changes, showing that creation could not have taken place ii

six days, nor in six years, nor even six thousand years. Geologists were

finding fossils of animals that lived millions of years ago. Bones of

extinct species were found in caves, mingled with human bones.
Archeologists found high civilization flourishing in Egypt in 6000 B.C.,

with evidence of vastly older savage periods. Cuneiform writings

showed that the people of Mesopotamia were telling the same story of
creation that the Bible told and telling it thousands of years earlier.
Christian scholars tried hard to refute the new findings. Gosse's

Omphalos claimed all fossils, marks of retreating glaciers, lava flows,

sedimentary rock strata, etc., were created instantaneously by God witl
an appearance of pre-existence. Chateaubriand said God deliberately
fooled men with the false appearance of pre-existence in order to test

their faith. Others tried to explain fossils by them God's

calling

deceptions, formed of "lapidific juice" or "seminal air." u

Naturally these crude views had to be abandoned in the end.

Upholders of the Bible then tried to call the Genesis creation myth
allegorical,with each "day" corresponding to a large span of prehistori
time. This didn't work either. The Bible brought plants into being
before the sun, on which plant life depends; made fish and birds befon

"creeping things" on land which was hardly the case; and produced
"light" before the only sources of light, sun and moon.
However absurd, these myths still maintain a hold on vast numb(
of people deliberately kept in ignorance by an obsolete fundamentalisr
Even educated adults sometimes insist that an omniscient god created
12
the world for a purpose of his own. Malebranche came up with an
Nicolas original notion, which may have helped the public image of his churcl
Malebranche (1638- but made his God look rather less than grand. He said God "can love
1715) French
only Himself and therefore act only with the ultimate purpose of
metaphysician who
increasing His glory Thus the sole purpose of the creation was the
attempted to n
reconcile Cartesian incarnation and the formation of the Church."

philosophy with I. de Riencourt, 165. 2. Budge, D.N., 211. 3. Larousse, 203. 4. Fodor, 4.
Catholic doctrine. 5. Budge, G.E. 1, 295. 6. Graves, G.M. 1, 27. 7. Campbell, Or. M., 111.
8. Pagels, 29, 57. 9. White 1, 26, 76. 10. White 1, 251, 256.
II. White 1,214. 12. Campbell, P.M., 87. 13. Walker, 204.

Creiddylad
Welsh name for theMay Queen, one of the "three sisters" (Triple
Goddess), in whose honor two heroes fought one another every May
Day until the end of the world; the same as Shakespeare's "Corde-
lia." See Gwyn.

186
 Crispin, Saint Crispin, Saint
Roman tutelary god of shoemakers, transformed into a saint a
Cronus
by
"very late and quite worthless" legend. > October 2 5 , the day of the ^^^aiHHi
shoemakers' feast among the pagans, was
adopted as St. Crispin's
Day. He is still the patron of shoemakers, and his symbol is a shoe.
2

1. Attwater, 94. 2. de Lys, 182.

Crone
General designation of the third of the Triple Goddess's three
aspects, exemplified by such figures as Kali the Destroyer, Cerridwen
the death-dealing Sow, Atropos the Cutter,
Macha, Hecate, Hel,
Eresh-Kigal, Morgan, Queen of the Ghostworld, Queen of the Under-
world,Queen of the Shades, Persephone "the Destroyer," etc. All
such forms represented old age or death, winter,
doomsday, the waning
moon, and other symbols of the inevitable destruction or dissolution
that must precede regeneration.
The "Crone" may have descended from Rhea Kronia as Mother
of Time, though the title has been linked with Coronis, the carrion
crow, since crows and other black creatures were sacred to the Death-
goddess. Her fearsome character often had a "virgin mother" side as
well, because her of appearances was cyclic. It was said in the
trinity
East that true lovers of the Goddess must love her
ugly "destroyer"
images as well as The Crone also represented the
her beautiful ones.
third (post-menopausal) phase of women's lives, and her shrines were

served by priestesses in this stage of life. Because it was believed that

women became very wise when they no longer shed the lunar "wise
blood" but kept itCrone was usually a Goddess of Wisdom.
within, the
Minerva, Athene, Metis, Sophia, and Medusa provide typical
examples.

Cronus
Titan god who castrated his father Uranus (Heaven) and was in turn
deposed by his own son Zeus. Knowing the danger his children posed,

Cronus tried to prevent it by swallowing them all an early version

of the Slaughter of the Innocents but Zeus escaped. Cronus was
confused with Chronos, "Time," because Time swallows up every-
thing it
brings forth actually a characteristic of Cronus's mother-mate,
Rhea Kronia, the Goddess personifying time and fate. She was really
Mother Earth, who gave birth to Cronus; and Rhea, who married him;
and Hera, who married his son Zeus; the three of them comparable
to theMother, Grandmother, and Great-grandmother Goddesses in
1
northern Europe. See Caste.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,37-40.

187
Cross Cross
The "Latin" or "Passion" cross, now the primary symbol of Chris-
^^^^^^^^^ tianity, was not shown in Christian art until six centuries after Christ.
1

But long before the Christian era it was a

pagan religious symbol
2
throughout Europe and western Asia. Early Christians even repudiatec
the cross because it was pagan. A church father of the 3rd century,
Minucius Felix, indignantly denied that Christians worshipped the
"You it is, ye Pagans, who are the most likely people to adore
cross:

+
Latin Cross
wooden crosses ... for what else are your ensigns, flags, and standards,
but crosses gilt and beautiful.

represent a simple cross, but a cross with a

Your victorious trophies not only
man on it." ?
From very ancient times, an effigy of a man hanging on a cross
was set up in fields to protect the crops. The modern scarecrow is a
survival of this sacrificial magic, representing the sacred king whose

blood was supposed to fertilize the earth. He was never abandoned,

even though every farmer knew that no scarecrow ever really scared a
crow. 4
The cross was also a male symbol of the phallic Tree of Life;
therefore it often appeared in conjunction with the female-genital
Male cross and female orb
circle or oval, to signify the sacred marriage.

composed the Egyptian "amulet Nefer," or amulet of blessedness, a

charm of sexual harmony. 5
The so-called Celtic cross, with the crossing of the arms encircled
by a ring, was another lingam-yoni sign of sexual union, known to the
Hindus as Kiakra. 6 Some old Celtic crosses still in existence show
Celtic Cross 7
obvious phallic elements, even to a realistic meatus at the cross's tip.
Crosses signified a god's love-death even in pre-Columbian art of the
western hemisphere, which showed the Savior carrying his cross, an
8
image very similar to the Christian one.
No one knows exactly when the cross became associated with
Christianity. Early images of Jesus represented him not on a cross,
but in the guise of the Osirian or Hermetic "Good Shepherd," carrying

+
a lamb. Later, many different kinds of crosses were used as Christian

symbols. included the Greek cross of equal arms, the X-shaped St

They
Andrew's cross, the swastika, the Gnostic Maltese cross, the solar
cross or Cross of Wotan, and the ansated cross, a development of the
Egyptian ankh, also found as the Cross of Venus. 9
Greeks said this cross was "common to the worship of Christ and
Greek Cross 10
The Goddess Isis is shown on the Isiac Table with the
Sarapis."
one hand, a lotus seed-vessel in the other, signifying male and
cross in
11
female As her consort, the god Sarapis was incarnate in
genitalia.

Ptolemy. The words "Ptolemy the Savior" were followed by a cross on

the Damietta Stone. Pious Christian scholars once tried to pretend
that this phrase was really a prophecy of the future Christ. 12
For a few centuries the emblem of Christ was a headless T-shaped
Tau cross rather than a Latin cross. This may have been copied from

pagan druids, who made Tau crosses of oak trees stripped of their

188
 branches, with two large limbs fastened at the top to
represent a Cross
man's arms. This was the Thau, or god. 13
A Tau was
cross the sign of the holy
day aptly named the
Invention of the Cross, purporting to commemorate the
^^^^^^^^
discovery of
the True Cross by the empress Helena, mother of
Constantine, in a
crypt under the temple of Aphrodite in Jerusalem. 14 After it was
generally replaced by the Latin cross, the Tau cross was to reassigned
St. Philip, supposedly crucified on a Tau cross in Phrygia,
where he
was trying

Maypole.
to exorcise the god Mars
form of a dragon. 15 This
in the
means the Tau cross was the sign of May Day, which the church
adopted as St. Philip's day; and the druidic Thau was confused with the

The Invention of the Cross was first heard of long after the lifetime
T
Tau Cross
of the empress Helena. The
date assigned to her
"discovery" was
328 a.d., though no contemporary chronicler thought fit to mention
such a momentous event. The legend said Helena found three
crosses under Aphrodite's temple, but couldn't decide which
belonged
to Christ, which to the two thieves. She had a corpse and brought,
laid on each cross in turn. When laid on the right one, the dead man
sprang up alive. According to an alternative story, the True Cross
instantly restored the health of "a noble lady who was near to death." 16

Christian authorities also claimed the empress found the

Holy
Nails and the INRI scroll, but the latter somehow disappeared and
was lost for over a thousand years. In 1492 it was miraculously
rediscovered in the Church of the Holy Cross in Rome, where it

seemed to have been all the time. Pope Alexander III published a bull
17
infallibly attesting to its
authenticity.
The
Invention of the Cross proved enormously useful in the
Middle Ages, to account for the veritable forest of splinters of the
True Cross revered in Europe's churches. There was so much miracle-

working wood of the True Cross that Calvin said it would make "a
18
full load for a good ship."
The church claimed the True Cross was made of the same wood
that grew as the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden. It was carried out
by Adam, and preserved by all the patriarchs in turn (even riding the
Flood in Noah's ark), for the sole purpose of crucifying the Savior
when he appeared. Gnostic sources added an Oedipal twist: Jesus's cross

was put together by his father, Joseph the carpenter. Moreover, the
cross was planted on the very spot where the Tree of Life once grew.

The church said it became "the Tree of the Cross, so that whence
came death, thence also life might rise again." These absurdities were
19
implicitly believed through the Middle Ages.
Male genitals are still called "the tree of life" by the Arabs, and a
cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

Among Christians there was at least some recognition of the cross's

phallic significance. An ancient crucifix at Sancreed in Cornwall
was
a spear set upright in a holy vase (the uterine vessel) with two testicle-

189
 20
Crossroads like scrolls appended to its shaft. The cross entering the labyrinth
was one of the oldest symbols of the lingam-yoni in the west, dating

^^^^^^^^^^^_ back to early Neolithic times. Spiral "feminine" labyrinths penetrated

by a cross occur in prehistoric rock carvings from Crete, at Tintagel in
21
Cornwall, Wier Island in Finland, and Chartres Cathedral.
Conscious or not, the phallic connotations of the cross appear even
in the present century. In the 1950's a poem in the magazine Wake

said: "Christ, I have walked around your erection, The Cross, that
22
begot, upon a sky of prayer, a billion men, devoted in humility."
During the so-called Age of Faith, the peasants were perhaps not
so devoted in humility to the cross as churchmen wanted. Certain
brotherhoods of "accursed huntsmen" or "archer wizards" constantly
defaced roadside crosses, believing they could acquire magic skill with
2*
the bow by shooting three arrows in succession at a crucifix. Thus they
opposed the phallic trident of the ancient Lord of the Hunt to
Christ's symbol. (See Trident.) Today, the cross is often an article of

jewelry, attesting an amuletic function virtually indistinguishable

from its magical prophylactic use in antiquity.
1. H. Smith, 188; Cumont, O.R.R.R, 109. 2. Budge, AT., 336. 3. Doane, 345.
4. de Lys, 42. 5. Budge, E.M., 59. 6. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 374.
7. de Paor, pi. 37. 8. Campbell, M.I., 175. 9. Jung, M.S., 43.
10. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 355. 11. Knight, D.W.P., 50. 12. d'Alviella, 15.
13. Elworthy, 103-4. 14. J.H. Smith, C.G., 322. 15. Brewster, 221,226.
16. de Voragine, 274. 17. Budge, A.T., 343-44. 18. Kendall, p. 122.
19. Male, 153. 20. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 613. 21. Hitching, 237.
22. Ellis, 1 12. 23. Kramer & Sprenger, 1 50.

Crossroads
In the Greco-Roman world, crossroads were sacred to the elder
Diana under the name of Hecate Trevia (Hecate of the Three Ways),
mother of the Lares compitales, "spirits of the crossroads." Travelers
made offerings to the Goddess's three-faced images, and regular festivals
1
called Compitalia were celebrated at her roadside shrines.

Four-way crossroads were sometimes dedicated to Hermes, whose

ithyphallic herms stood beside them until replaced by Christians'
roadside crosses. However, the Christian sign of the cross was copied
from Hermes's cult and traced his sacred numeral 4 on the worship-

per's head and breast. Hermetic crosses were left at the crossroads of

10th-century Ireland and simply re-interpreted as Christian symbols,

though they plainly displayed the twin serpents of the pagan caduceus,
another sign of the older deity. 2
Cross, herm, and caduceus merged in northern symbolism with
the gallows tree of Odin/Wotan, "God of the Hanged," which led to
the Christian custom of erecting a gallows at crossroads as well as a
crucifix. The god on the gallows once played the same role as Jesus

dying-god image rendered the crossroad numinous.

on the cross: a Pre-

Christian Europeans held waymeets, or moots, at crossroads to

invoke their deities' attention to the proceedings; hence a moot point

190
used to be one to be decided at a meet. The Goddess as Mother Crow
Earth, dispenser of "natural law" and creatress of birth-and-death

cycles,was always present where the dying god died as the women
long remembered. The English monk Aelfric complained of female
customs dedicating newborn infants to the ancient Mother. Women
would "go to the crossways and drag their children over the
earth, and
thereby give both themselves and their children to the Devil." 3
As the crossroad ceremonies and their deities became diabolized,
theGoddess of the waymeet became the queen of witches, who still
worked magic there. The Key of Solomon said crossroads were the best
Key of Solomon
of all places for magical procedures "during the depth and silence of (Clavicule de Salomon)
the night."
4
Ghosts of the hanged, of the heathen, and of ancient A popular "Black
Book" or magic book
aracles still haunted crossroads. Bernard Ragner said a spirit voice
much used between the
would foretell the future to anyone who went to a crossroad at the last
11th and Bthcentu-
hour of Christmas Eve. As late as the 1920's, English farmers still
relieved witches' sabbats were held at crossroads. Necromantic supersti-
:ionswere encouraged by the custom of burying criminals and Bernard Ragner
unhallowed ground at crossroads; clergymen said anyone so
suicides in Author of Legends and
juried would walk as a ghost. Sometimes, such corpses were pinned Customs of Christmas,
1925
down with a stake: "A stake was driven
through them when deposited at
:he cross-roads in order to keep the ghost from wandering abroad." 5

Presumably, the ghost could be consulted in situ, just as spirits could be

aised from their graves in the churchyard by any necromancer.
Thus Hermes and Hecate, who led the souls of the dead in
antiquity, became dread spirits of "witchcraft" in the same places that

hey once benevolently ruled.

1. Hyde, 137. 2. Campbell, M.I. 337. 3. Briffault 3, 58. 4. Wedeck, 153.
5. Summers, V, 154-57.

Crow
\long with the vulture and raven, the carrion-eating crow was
borthern Europe's common symbol of the Death-goddess. Valkyries,
pometimes described as man-eating women, often took totemic form
1
as ravens or crows.

Anglo-Danish myths spoke of a witch named Krake (Crow),

daughter of the Valkyrie Brunnhilde. Krake was a shape-shifter: at
:imes a beautiful virgin, at other times a hag, monster, or crow. She

named the Danish king Ragnar Lodbrok (Leather-Breeches),

and
Siegfried, whose
2 same
jave birth to the hero Sigurd. Sigurd was the as

nystic lady-love was the Valkyrie Brunnhilde; thus appeared the

ame convoluted incestuous relationships found in the oldest myths of
acred kingship. Again, the Triple Goddess returned as the three
irophetic daughters of Ragnar and Krake, Fate-weavers
who created
he magic banner called Raven (Hraefn). 3
There was a mythological Kraken associated with the sea, pictured

is a serpent or water-monster; but this was only another form of the

191
Crusades same Death-goddess. The Three Ravens (Kraken) in old ballads were
birds of doom perching over the slain hero. Sometimes there were

^^^^^^^^^^m only two of them, as in the ballad of the Twa Corbies (Two Crows),
who proposed to pluck out the bonny blue eyes of the slain knight. 4
Such manifestations of the Goddess as a crow might be linked wit
Coronis, "Crow," a death aspect of the pre-Hellenic earth mother
Rhea. Classical mythographers tended to ignore Coronis, rememberinj
her only as the virgin mother of the healing god Asclepius; but she
seems to have been another of the Virgin-Crone combinations: Rhea
Kronia as Mother Time who brings death to all things. 5
1 .
Woods, 1 56. 2. Guerber, L. M. A., 274-75. 3. Turville-Petre, 59.
4. Sargent & Kittredge, 45. 5. Graves, GM. 1, 175; 2, 387.

Crusades
"Holy wars" designed to wrest property away from the heathen or
heretic enemies of orthodox Christianity. Crusades were usually fough
by vassals of Christian overlords, including the wealthy clergy. War-
riors were promised not only the standard soldiers' spoils, but also

indulgences, like instant remission of sins and admission to heaven

guaranteed no matter what crimes the crusader may have committed.

From the 8th to 10th centuries, the Holy Roman Empire was
harassed byNorsemen, who owned many northern trading centers
and dominated the seas. They also opened negotiations with foreign
powers in North Africa and the Middle East. In 834, Arabian legates
visited Denmark to contract military and trade alliances.
1
The Holy
Roman Empire saw itselftrapped between two anti-Christian forces:
the pagan Normans in the northwest, and the Moslem Saracens in the

southeast. Norsemen controlled trade routes through the Danube

and Black Sea to the Turks, and were acquiring hoards of Arabic silver

coasts down to Gibral-

gold, and gems. They also sailed the Atlantic
tar, and founded colonies in Libya. The Kingdom of God was nearly
encircled.

Pope Urban II tried to solve the problem by initiating crusades in

the east, on the pretext of converting the Saracens' possessions in the
"Holy Land" into Christian fiefs. In 1095 he instigated the People's
Crusade as a combination of penitential pilgrimage and a war of
conquest. It was advertised throughout Europe. All who participated
were placed above restrictions of law, and promised forgiveness of
sins and eternal bliss in heaven without any time spent in purgatory.

A rabble of some 1 50,000 to 300,000 persons, mostly the dregs c

society mixed with military mercenaries, set out across southern

Europe, killing, torturing, and looting as they went. One division

slaughtered 10,000 Jews in the Rhineland, then forgot

about the

Holy Land and dispersed. Two other divisions did so much harm in
Hungary that native soldiers rose up against them and destroyed
them all. Multitudes died along the way, of sickness, hunger, or injurie

192
brought on by their violence. A remnant survived to plunder the too- Crusades
hospitable Greeks, then to enter Constantinople. There, stronger
crusaders sold off the weaker ones as slaves, to finance their own
^^^^^_^_^_
provisions. Finally, a remaining
7,000 or so crossed the Bosporus and
were attacked by the Turks, who soon killed them all. 2
One might think the fate of Pope Urban's crusade would have
discouraged future experiments of this kind. Not so. It seems to have
been an idea whose time had come.
Later crusades were better organized, with more
experienced
soldiers and fewer penitential pilgrims. Their primary motive was
loot. For the next 400 years, Christian knights went forth to astonish the
Saracens with their intellectual naYvete and their military sophistica-
tion, developed in a feudal society based on warfare.

The Crusaders in general, in spite of their sacred cause, behaved like

highway robbers. The first host which set out in 1095, and was
annihilated by the Turks at Nicaea, killed, burned and
pillaged all they
encountered. The army commanded by Godfrey de Bouillon massa-
cred the entire population ofJerusalem (1098). The astuteness of Venice
turned aside the fourth Crusade upon Constantinople, and the sack of
this city is a dark blot on the history of Western Christendom (1204). It

was abominably ravaged, and the very church ofSt. Sophia was the
scene of bloody and sacrilegious orgies. *

A contemporary chronicler said Jerusalem withstood a month's

siege. Upon its fall, crusaders rode into the city with their horses wading

"knee-deep in the blood of disbelievers." Jews were herded into their

synagogues and burned alive. On the next day, the knights slaughtered
"a great multitude of people of every age, old men and women,

maidens, children and mothers with infants, by way of a solemn

4
sacrifice" to [Link] the battle of Acre, Richard Coeur de Lion
violated his pledge of truce, and had his hostages slaughtered and flayed.
"His conduct stands in strong contrast with the dignity and forbear-
ance of Saladin, before whose eyes the outrage was committed, and who
5
would not stoop to retaliate on his dastardly
opponent."
Once the crusading system was established, it was turned on other
enemies of the church closer to home and became the standard
method for dealing with European heathens and heretics. Between
1236 and 1283 was preached against the
a crusade of extermination

pagan Prussians by Pope Honorius, and carried out by the Teutonic

Knights. The Christian Brethren of the Sword similarly converted

Livonia and Courland. Armies of the Christian Dukes of Poland forced
the Wends to accept Christian baptism and vassalage. The Lithua-
nians stubbornly clung to their paganism to the end of the 14th century,
6
but eventually they too were Christianized by the sword.
It was noticed in the 1 3th century that the semi-barbarous Ste-

dingers of the lower Weser river maintained their ancient tribal

system, paid no attention to the church, and contributed no tithes. Pope

Gregory IX sent bulls to the bishops of Minden, Lubeck, and

193
Crusades Verden, ordering crusades against these recalcitrant peasants, whom he
described as heretics because they consulted wise-women, made

^^^^^^^^^^^^ waxen images, and worshipped "demons." Crusaders were promised

blanket pardon for their sins. However, the Stedingers fought back

stubbornly, and several campaigns against them failed. At last in 1234 a

huge army marched into their land, ravaged every home with fire and
sword, and wiped them out. Their property was divided between the
church and the barons. 7
It has been estimated that Europe was Christianized at a cost of
8
about 8 million to 10 million lives. Even after nominal conversion,
there was much residual resistance to the new which was alien and
cult,

unappealing to the people it was imposed on. The clergy claimed

authority from an unfamiliar eastern savior and his God, defaming all

the pagans' local, ancestral deities many worshipped since the

Neolithic age as demons. Moreover, familiar laws and lifestyle were
declared wholly sinful. It's hardly surprising that there arose heresy
after heresy to confront the conquering church, which became increas-

ingly fanatical in its dictatorial policies, yet in the end failed to

9
overcome the people's need to assert their own religious heterodoxy.

Many refused up their pagan Goddess, or their notion that

to give

sexuality contained an element of the divine. Many remembered a time,

not so long before, when "holy communion" was a taste of divine
bliss through sensual pleasures: an idea that was especially prevalent in

the south of France.

Crusades against the Catharan or Albigensian heretics of southern
France were particularly virulent, since these people were prosperous

enough to attract plunderers, and bitterly opposed to the Roman

church, which they called the Synagogue of Satan. They condemned
its worship of holy images as idolatry, denied the power of its sacra-

ments, scoffed at the Trinity, insisted on reading the Bible for

themselves, and revived the old Gnostic belief that the Jehovah wor-
shipped by the Roman church was a demonic demiurge who created
the world of matter to entrap souls in wickedness. Pope Alexander III

anathematized the Catharan communities and sent ecclesiastical

judges to investigate their offenses in 1 163. Of these judges, the word
10
"inquisitor" was used for the first time.
In 1209 Pope Innocent II preached a great crusade against the
French rebels. This has gone down in history as the Albigensian
11
crusade, one of the bloodiest chapters in Christianity's past. Half of
France was exterminated. When the papal legate was asked how
heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, he replied, "Kill
them all; God will know his own." 12
Soon the legate was able to report that in Beziers alone, "nearly

twenty thousand human beings perished by the sword. And after the
massacre the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God
seemed to rage over it in a wonderful manner." The killing of
heretics went on continually for twenty years, and it has been estimated
that more than a million were slaughtered. 13

194
 This was more than a police action against
heresy. It was the Cu Chulainn
destruction of a whole civilization that had the misfortune to be more
advanced than the rest of Europe.

In the twelfth century, the south ofFrance had been the most civilized
land in Europe. There commerce, industry, art, science, had been far
in advance of the age. The cities had won virtual were self-government,
proud of their wealth and strength, of their liberties, and self-
jealous
sacrificing in their patriotism. The nobles, for the most part, were
cultivated men, poets themselves or patrons of
poetry, who had learned
that their prosperity depended on the prosperity of their
subjects, and that
municipal liberties were a safeguard rather than a menace to the wise
ruler. The Crusaders came, and their unfinished work was taken
up and
executed to the bitter end by the Inquisition. It left a ruined and

impoverished country, with shattered industries and a failing commerce.

The native nobles were broken by confiscation and replaced by
strangers A people of rare gifts had been tortured, decimated, humili-
ated, despoiled. . . . The precocious civilization which had promised to
lead Europe in the path of culture was gone, and to Italy was transmitted
the honour of the Renaissance. H

Catholic writers made many efforts to justify the destruction.

Apologists like Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay used vituperation, calling the

Catharan opinions "this detestable pest ... the poison of superstitious
He said Toulouse was "marvelously and miserably infected
infidelity."
with this
plague almost all the barons of Provence had become
. . .

harborers and defenders of heretics." In the 19th century, Abbe

Vacandard said,"The Church, after all, was only defending herself.
The Cathari sought to wound her mortally by attacking her doctrine,
her hierarchy and her apostolicity. She would have been ruined if
their perfidious insinuations,which brought violent disturbance into
15
men's minds, had prevailed in the end." It has ever been the
church's habit to regard any skepticism concerning its pronouncements
as "violent disturbance"; but of course, all the bloodletting was in

vain. Skepticism did prevail in the end.

1.0xenstierna,76. 2. H. Smith, 252-53. 3. Reinach, 295. 4. H. Smith, 253.

392. 6. Reinach, 294. 7. Lea unabridged, 656-60. 8. H. Smith, 251.
5. Briffault 3,

9. CM., 629. 10. [Link], 254-55. [Link], M.M.

Campbell,
[Link], Oc.M., 499. 13. H. Smith, 257. 14. Briffault 3,487-88.
[Link],80,91-92.

Cu Chulainn
Celtic dying god, a son of God, born of a virgin, reincarnated as both
Father and Son. It was said of him that he was "begotten by a man that
was not a man; his father was reared by his mother as a child, a child
which died and did not die." In other words, he was a pre-Christian
J

Christ figure, God-begotten on the "Mother of God," of one

substance with his own Father.
Cu Chulainn received the death-curse of the Goddess Macha, and
died bound to a sacred pillar, pierced by arrows, his blood fertilizing

195
Cuckold the earth. Other Celtic heroes died the same way. Their idols were
sometimes interpreted as images of St. Sebastian, now officially

^^^^^^^^^^^_ viewed as an over-hasty canonization of a Gaulish heathen savior. 2

Cu Chulainn received his education in battle skills from Skadi, or
Scatha, the same northern death-goddess as the Queen of Skye. His
destiny or "weird" was to kill his rival on the "precursor day of spring,"
so the shedding of blood would "allow spring to enter." The same
3

idea of bloodshed to facilitate the return of spring is found in Teutonic

4
myths of Skadi.
Cu means "dog," a common title of Celtic chieftains (as in

Cunobelin) identified with the underworld Lord of Death. Like

Egypt's Anubis, the dead hero might become the canine gatekeeper
charged with admitting souls to paradise, as shown on the Gundes-
trupCauldron. 5 The dog represented reincarnation. So did Cu
Chulainn, who was promised that "his rebirth would be of himself."
He was sent to Emania, the realm of the dead in the moon. 6 He may
have been the original of the British legend that the man in the moon
7
is really a dog, who acts as a messenger of death.
The virgin mother of Cu Chulainn conceived him by eating his

soul in the form of a

fly. This Celtic soul-symbol originated
in the

Middle East, where the Lord of Death was Baal-Zebub (Beelzebub),

Lord of Flies. Like most pagan gods, Cu Chulainn was a shape-
shifter. He could be an insect, animal, or man at different stages in his

life cycle. Such changes from one shape to another were based on the
ancient Indo-European idea of metempsychosis. The Protean hero
even adapted his shape to Christianity; the medieval Irish insisted that
he was an avatar of Christ. 8
Later Irish writers pretended that Cu Chulainn was not ignomini-
ously trussed up to his pillar as a sacrifice, in the manner of the old

gods. They thought it

important to prove that he fell in battle. There-
fore they invented the legend that, wounded and knowing himself

doomed, Cu Chulainn tied himself to the sacred pillar so he couldn't

fall down before his enemies, who were piercing him with arrows, but
rather "died with his honor unimpaired." 9
[Link],235. Spence, 85; Attwater, 304. 3. Goodrich, 187, 216.
2.

4. Oxenstierna, 213.5. Cavendish, V.H.H., 49. 6. Spence, 146.

7. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 197. 8. Spence, 95-96, 108. 9. Larousse, 111.

Cuckold
Derived from "cuckoo," the bird of May, anciently sacred to the
promiscuous May-games that medieval Europe inherited from pagan-
ism. The man who became a cuckoo, or cuckold, was one who
1

didn't care whether his wife was faithful or not, for both of them
attended the Maytime festivities when ritual promiscuity was the
rule or fertility charm as late as the 16th century.
2
The season of
"wearing of the green" in honor of the reborn vegetation was

196
announced by the cuckoo's singing "from every holt and heath," as Cunt
Chaucer put it; and marriage bonds were temporarily in
abeyance.
The cuckold's horns descended from another
the Horned God,
pagan sign, that of ^_^^^^^^^_
sacrificed as a stag, goat, or ram at the
spring feasts.
Pagan priests used to wear the horns of the sacrificed animal on their
heads; and horned masks or headdresses were commonly worn by
participants in the
rite, in the god's honor. 16th-century writer A
therefore described the cuckold as "cornute," that is, "as
soundly
armed for the head, as either Capricorn, or the stoutest horned sign in
3
the Zodiac." See Horns.
1. Potter & Sargent, 80. 2. Frazer, G.B., 142. 3. Hazlitt, 160.

Cunt
Derivative of the Oriental Great Goddess as Cunti, or Kunda, the
Yoni of the Uni-verse. From the same root came county, kin, and kind
1

(Old English cyn, Gothic kuni). Related forms were Latin cunnus,
Middle English cunte, Old Norse and Frisian kunta, Basque cuna.
Other cognates are "cunabula," a cradle, or earliest abode; "Cun-
ina," a Roman Goddess who protected children in the cradle;
"cunctipotent," all-powerful (i.e., having cunt-magic); "cunicle," a
hole or passage; "cuniculate," penetrated by a passage; "cundy," a
coverted culvert; also cunning, kenning, and ken: knowledge, learn-

ing, insight, remembrance, wisdom. Cunt is "not slang, dialect or any

2
marginal form, but a true language word, and of the oldest stock."
"Kin" meant not only matrilineal blood relations, but also a cleft or
crevice, the Goddess's genital opening. A Saharan tribe called Kun-
3
tahs traced their descent holy place. Indian "kundas" were
from this

their mothers' natural children, begotten out of wedlock as gifts of the

Goddess Kunda. 4 Of old the name applied to girls, as in China where

girls were once considered children of their mothers only, having no
natural connection with fathers. 5
In ancient writings, the word for "cunt" was synonymous with
"woman," though not in the insulting modern sense. An Egyptolo-
gist was shocked to find the maxims of Ptah-Hotep "used for 'woman' a
term that was more than blunt," though its indelicacy was not in the
6
eye of the ancient beholder, only in that of the modern scholar.
Medieval clergymen similarly perceived obscenity in female-geni-
tal shrines of the pagans: holy caves, wells, groves. Any such place
was called cunnus diaboli, "devilish cunt." Witches who worshipped
there sometimes assumed the name of the place, like the male witch
7
Johannes Cuntius mentioned by Thomas More. "Under painful
cir-

cumstances" this witch died at the hands of witch hunters, but it was
8
said he was resurrected, and came back to earth as a lecherous incubus.
Sacred places identified with the world-cunt sometimes embar-
rassed Victorian scholars who failed to understand their earlier

197
Cupid meaning. A.H. Clough became a laughing-stock among Gaelic-speak-
Curse, Mother's ing students when he published a poem called Toper-na-Fuosich,

^^^^^^^^^^^m literally "bearded well," a Gaelic place-name for a cunt-shrine. The

synonym "twat" was ignorantly used by another Victorian poet,

Robert Browning, in the closing lines of his
Pippa Passes:

Then, owls and bats,

Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloisters moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary hesitantly asked

Browning where he learned the word. He said it came from a bawdy
broadside poem of 1659: "They talked of his having a Cardinal's Hat;
They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat." Browning thought the
9
word meant a wimple, or other headgear corresponding to "hat."

1. G.R. Scott, 188. 2. Dames, 110-14. 3. Briffault 1, 604.

4. Mahanirvanatantra, 289. 5. Murstein,473. 6. Erman, 61. 7. Summers, V, 179.
8. Hazlitt, 211. [Link],217.

Cupid
Roman name for the god of erotic love, Greek Eros, Hindu Kama.

Cupid was the son of Venus and Mercury (Aphrodite and Hermes),
and was therefore a "Herm-Aphrodite," signifying sexual union.
In Christian usage, the ancient significance of sexual desire was
confused with desire for money, hence the modern "cupidity," which
used to mean "lust" but now means greed. In the same way, Latin
caritas was altered from sensual or sexual giving to the modern
"charity," giving of money.
Renaissance made emanations of Cupid into amoretti, "little
art

loves," shown winged babies. But ancient talismans of Cupid were

as

not babies; they were winged phalli of bronze, ivory, or wood, which
'

gave rise to an Italian slang term for the penis, uccello, "little bird."
1. Young, 74.

Curse, Mother's
In ancient Asiatic belief, a mother's curse meant certain death. All

death was brought about by the Goddess's word of destruction, as all

birth was brought about by her word of creation. By virtue of

motherhood, any woman could tap the verbal power of the Goddess.
The Markandaya Purana says, "for all curses there is some remedy;
but there is nothing anywhere that can dispel the curse of those who
have been cursed by a mother." Similarly, the biblical Hannah
J

rejoiced when she became a mother, saying, "My mouth is enlarged

over mine enemies" (1 Samuel 2:1) because maternity gave her
curses an irresistible power.

198
 Homer tells the story of Meleager, cursed by his mother for Curse, Mother's
murdering her brothers. Falling on her knees, she knocked the earth
with her fists and called upon the underground Goddess. "And the

Fury that walks in the dark and has inexorable thoughts heard her
from Erebus." 2 The Fury told Meleager's mother to burn his soul in
the form of a wand, so he was stricken with a fever, and soon died. 3
Witchcraft of this sort was not even the curse alone
necessary
couldkill. The Greek word for the effect of a mother's
curse was
miasma, a kind of spiritual pollution bringing slow but sure destruction.
Miasma could pursue members of a clan for many generations. The
tragic family history of Orestes might be traced to a curse laid by the
Goddess Artemis herself on his ancestor Atreus, who dared to
withhold the golden fleece of a sacrificial lamb she had sent, using it to
confirm his right to rule. 4
Gods launched curses too, and some of them were spectacular, like
those with which Yahweh threatened all who disobeyed him: a
combination of pestilence, fever, consumption, inflammation, blasting,
mildew, extreme burning, emerods (hemorrhoids), the scab, the itch,
the botch of Egypt, madness, blindness, slavery, great plagues of
long
continuance, and barrenness of the land (Deuteronomy 28). How-
ever, the gods' curses seemed not to arouse as much terror as those of
Goddess or Mother.
The terrible vehicle of the feminine curse was menstrual blood,
still called The Curse. To "damn" has been linked with the Hebrew

dam, "blood," specifically mother-blood, the fluid of the womb, an-

ciently thought to create one's very soul and destroy it. Dam was
also synonymous with "mother" (ma-dam, my mother). Elder women
past menopause were thought to be the most efficient cursers, on the
ancient theory that their "wise blood" was retained in their bodies,

givingthem numinous power to make their words come true. 5 This

was why medieval Europe believed any destructive charm having
menstrual blood as one of its ingredients must be irresistible, and why
elder women were viewed as prototypical witches, their words or even
their glances heavy with dread.
Fathers of the church even wooed converts with the assurance that
the Christian faith was strong enough to overcome a mother's curse,
the most powerful curse known to man. St. Augustine claimed that
some children cursed by their mother were afflicted by constant
weakness and tremors, but St. Stephen converted them to Christianity,
6
and they were completely cured of the effects of the curse.
Eastern believed the feminine power
sages of the curse must be

allayed not somuch by opposing it with a patriarchal religion, as by Laws of Manu

Post-Vedic treatise on
treating women well, so they would not be
inclined to use their

destructive power. The Laws of Manu said: holy law, composed or

collected some time
Women must be honored and adorned by their fathers, brothers, hus- between the 2nd

bands, and brothers-in-law, who desire their own welfare. Where century B.C. and the
women are honored, there the gods are pleased, but where they are not
2nd century a.d.

199
Cut hbert , Saint honored, no sacred rite yields rewards. Where the female relations live
wholly perishes; but that family where they are
in grief, the family soon

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ not unhappy ever prospers. The houses on which female relations, not
being duly honored, pronounce a curse, perish completely, as if destroyed
7
by magic.

This advice came from the place northern Aryans called Mut-
spellheim, the Home of the Mother's Curse, in "the hot lands of the
south." According to the Scandinavian prophecy of doomsday, the

Mutspell would fall upon the violent patriarchal gods who ignored
ancient tribal bonds and rules of morality, and instituted cruel

warfare. The result of the Mother's Curse would be the death of all
gods, theirGotterdammerung or Going-Into-the-Shadow; thus it
seemed the Mother's word of destruction meant the end of the world. 8
Christian Gnostic writings reveal the same belief in a world-

destroying curse from a Great Mother disgusted with the cruel

behavior of the gods she created. In her anger, the Goddess would send
a great power from the place "where the firmament of woman is

situated," the Gnostic equivalent of Mutspellheim. "Then she will drive

out the gods of Chaos whom

she had created together with the first
Father. She will cast them down to the abyss. They will be wiped out by
9
their own injustice."

Myths in general suggest that a mother's curse was the necessary

instrument of destruction for any god, even a Savior-son, most of
whom were solemnly cursed before immolation. 10 Since a mother's
curse was immutable, no guilt accrued to the executioners who
carried out sacrificial killings in ancient dramas of death and resurrec-
tion. Mythology bears out the archetypal idea that one who gives
birth has unlimited power over the life so given, and may retain control

of that life's duration.

As a rule therefore, death curses usually employed female symbol-
ism. Typical was the curse of the "black fast," utilizing a black hen,
once sacred to the Queen of the Shades as destructive twin of the
Mother of the World Egg. The curse was accomplished by the
operator and the black hen fasting together, every Friday for nine weeks
(the Goddess's day and number). After this, an accursed one was sure
11
to die.

1. O'Flaherty, 68. 2. Cavendish, P.E., 122. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 266.

4. Graves, CM. 2, [Link], 26. 6. de Voragine, 57. 7. Bullough, 232-33.
5.

8. Turville-Petre, 281-84. 9. Robinson, 178. 10. Budge, 2, 253. CE.

[Link],137.

Cuthbert, Saint
Once a pagan Lord of the Hunt with a pilgrimage center at Durham,
formerly Duirholm, "Meadow of the Deer."
In 1 104, Durham Cathedral was erected over the god's old shrine.
It housed the undecaying corpse of Cuthbert, whose sainthood was

200
proven by his incorruptibility. He was
periodically displayed, and always Cybele
pronounced remarkably fresh. His remains were last viewed in 1827
and found to be as plump and rosy as ever almost as if he were a
waxwork, if it were possible to suspect the church of
perpetrating
such a hoax.
Oddly enough, while his incorruptible
body lay in Durham Cathe-
dral, St. Cuthbert also lived on at the bottom of the sea, as a marine
smith-god who forged beads for rosaries in his ocean cave. Crinoid shells
washed up on Northumbrian beaches after storms were known as St.
1
Cuthbert's Beads.
There was also a St. Cuthbert's Well, located near the famous
Eden Hall, whose "luck" talisman was a sacred chalice inherited from
2
the fairies. The waters of St. Cuthbert's Well were credited with the
usual miraculous powers of healing and
preserving health.
1. Brewster, 396-97. 2. Hazlitt, 374.

Cybele
Great Mother of the Gods from Ida Magna Mater Deum Idea
brought to Rome from Phrygia in 204 B.C. Her triumphal procession
was "later glorified by marvelous legends, and the poets told of
edifying miracles that had occurred during Cybele's voyage." l

Her holy aniconic image was carried to Rome by order of the

Cumaean Sybil, a personification of the same cave-dwelling Goddess
[Link] the Great Mother of all Asia Minor, she was worshipped
especially on Mt. Ida, Mt. Sipylus, Cyzicus, Sardis, and Pessinus in
Galatia. 2

festivals were called ludi, "games." A highlight of her

Her 3

worship was the Taurobolium, baptism in the blood of a sacred bull,

who represented her dying-god consort, Attis. Her temple stood on the
Vatican, where up to the 4th century
St. Peter's basilica stands today,
4
a.d. when Christians took She was one of the leading deities of
it over.
Rome in the heyday of the mystery cults, along with Hecate and
Demeter of Eleusis. 5
Other names for Cybele assimilated her to every significant form Variations of

of the Great Goddess. She was the Berecynthian Mother (genetrix Cybele's name
Kubaba, Kuba,
Berecynthia). She was Rhea Lobrine, Goddess of sacred caves, known Kube have been
7
as her "marriage bowers." She was called Augusta, the Great One; linked with the

Alma, the Nourishing One; Sanctissima, the Most Holy One. Roman Ka'aba stone at Mecca,

"cube"
emperors like Augustus, Claudius, and Antoninus Pius regarded her
a meteoric
that bore the Goddess's
as thesupreme deity of the empire. Augustus established his home
Livia symbol and was once
facing her temple, and looked upon his wife, the empress known as the Old
8
Augusta, as an earthly incarnation of her. The emperor Julian wrote an Woman. 6
impassioned address to her:

Who is then the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual
and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods; she is both

201
Cyboread the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; she came into being next to

Cynosure and together with the great creator; she is in control of every form of
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ life, and the cause of all generation; she easily brings to perfection all

things that are; she is the motherless maiden, enthroned at the side of
9
Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother ofall the Gods.

Fathers of the Christian church vehemently disagreed. St. Augus-

tine called Cybele a harlot mother, "the mother, not of the gods, but
10
of the demons."
One of her names, Antaea, made her the mythical mother of the
earth-giant Antaeus, who was invincible as long as his feet remained
in contact with his Mother's body, the earth. Heracles conquered him

by holding him up in the air. Churchmen believed the powers of

witches came from the same sort of contact with Mother Earth.

Arresting officers often carried witches to prison in a large basket, so

their feetwould not touch the ground. 11
in the 2nd century a.d. by
There was a Christian sect founded
Montanus (Mountain man), a priest of Cybele, who identified Attis
with Christ. Montanus maintained that women were agents of the

Goddess, and could preach and prophesy as well as men. This

contradicted the orthodox Pauline sect, which followed St. Paul's rule
that women must never speak publicly on holy subjects. 12 During the
4th century, Montanist Christianity was declared a heresy, and many of
its adherents were slain. Some Montanists in Asia Minor were locked

13
in their churches and burned alive.

1. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 47 2. Encyc. Brit., "Great Mother of the Gods."

3. James, 246. 4. Clodd, 79; Fra/.er, G.B., 408. 5. Angus, 143.
6. Vermaseren, 22; Harding, 41.7. Gaster, 609.
8. Vermaseren, 27, 53, 83, 85, 177-78. 9. Vermaseren, 86-87.
10. Vermaseren, 181. 11. Robbins, 334; Lea unabridged, 814. 12. Reinach, 278.
13. Chamberlin, A.M., ch. 1.

Cyboread
"Queen of the North," the mother-bride of Judas, whose myth was
similar to those of Oedipus, Osiris, and other mother-marrying heroes.
See Judas.

Cynosure
"Dog's Tail," the kunos oura, name given by the Greek sect of
Cynics or "Doglike Ones" to the pole star, which they believed would
move from its place at the still
point of the turning heavens when
doomsday was near. 1 This, and the Dog's Tail was the
fact that the

prime navigational star, made it the "Cynosure of all eyes." See Dog.
1 . Potter & Sargent, 174.

202
Cypria Cypria
Cyrene
Epithet of Aphrodite, "the Cyprian," whose temple was founded at
Paphos on the isle of Cyprus. Because of the island's many copper h^^^^bmbh^^^
mines, copper (cypros) was sacred to Aphrodite.

Cyrene
Amazon queen who founded the city bearing her name on the coast
of Libya, in Marmarica, territory named for one of the oldest forms of

Cyrene was the home of seductive

1
the Aryan Sea-goddess. "sirens,"
whose verbal spells Homer described as highly dangerous to sailors.

1. Graves, W.G., 438.

203
 'a-

X
*

St

**

NVJ KL/iB
^r
 D

diana, the Queen of

Heaven, here shown
as the
Many-Breasted
Artemis, as she was
known to her cult at
Ephesus. This
ancient sculpture
appears at the Villa
Albani in Rome.

The demon Pazuzu, one

of the Akkadian evil
spirits, bringer of fierce
storms and malaria,
and terror to pregnant
women. Bronze, 5%
inches high.
Mesopotamia, 500-
100b.c.

The devil, as a cast iron

bootjack, found in
Massachusetts. Mid-
nineteenth century;
lOVi inches high.
Daeira Daeira
Dana
"Goddess," a title of Demeter as the Wise One of the Sea, and
mother of King Eleusis (Advent). The title carried the same connota-
tions as "God" today.

Dagon
Philistine sea god, one of Yahweh's leading enemies (Judges 16:23).
He appeared as a merman, fish-man, or serpent-man. He was mated to
Atargatis, the Philistine form of Astarte. Since she was a Mistress of
Earth and Sea like her Mycenaean twin Demeter, her consort also

patronized both farming and fishing. In Canaan, he was the "grain

god" Dagan, father of Baal, mated to Anath, the Canaanite version of
the same Great Mother. On account of the bad publicity given him
in the Bible, he naturally became a leading demon of the Christian hell.

Dakhma
Iranian topless "tower of silence," once used to dispose of dead

bodies, which were dropped in and left for the vultures to carry to the
sky (see Vulture). Large dakhmas still stand today. The adventure of
Sinbad the Sailor in the charnel valley, where supernatural birds carried
off gobbets of meat, may have descended from a legendary sage's

sojourn in a dakhma as a ceremonial death-and-rebirth.

Dakini
"Skywalker," a Tantric priestess, embodying the spirit of Kali Ma as
an angel of death. Dakinis were usually elder women, but sometimes
1

young women impersonating the divine Shakti who took the last
breath of the enlightened sage with a kiss of peace. Dakinis attended the

dying, embracing and comforting them in their last moments. But

there were also "fierce dakinis," representing violent or painful forms of

death. 2
Like western witches, dakinis held their meetings in cemeteries or

cremation grounds, having charge of funeral rites and the preparation

of dead bodies. See Death.
1. Tatz & Kent, 148. 2. Bardo Thodol, 128.

var. Danu, Danuna, Dana

Danae
Eponymous Great Mother of the Danes and many other peoples,
such as the Danaans, the Danaids, the biblical Danites, and the Irish
Tuatha De Danann, "people of the Goddess Dana." The Russians l

206

H
called her Dennitsa, "Greatest of all Goddesses." A medieval Russian
Daphne
exorcism said: "In the morning let us rise and pray to God and
4
Dennitsa."
As Danu-Ana, or Anu, she led the Irish
trinity of Fates, collective-
the Morrigan. Mountains in Kerry are still named after her
breasts,
the Paps of Anu. 5 Under the name of Don she was masculinized
as a
"king" of Dublin in late Irish legend; but the same "king" was also
calledMother of the Gods. 6 Sometimes the Irish called her
Domnu, a
mother Goddess personifying the Deep. 7 Pre-Hellenic Aegean
Classical Greek mythology humanized the Goddess her
tribes called
Danae, in
much the same way as the Bible humanized Earth Mother Danuna, Universal
the Eve; Mother. 2 The rivers of
two were the same deity, fructified by the Heaven-father's seminal rain. Amazon country
The Hellenic Danae was a virgin princess
by Zeus's
impregnated were named after her
shower of golden rain that
which primitives sometimes
is, urine, to Danube, Don,
attributed the same reproductive power as semen. As result of this Dnieper because she
beneficial moistening, Danae bore represented
the hero Perseus, who annoyed
"Waters." To the
fathers of the Christian
church by being as verifiably god-begotten
Hindus she was
and virgin-born and their own savior. 9 But Danae, like Eve, was "Waters of Heaven,"
really
another name for the universal Triple
Goddess, also called Dam-kina mother of the Vedic
3

by the Sumerians, Dinah by the Hebrews, and Danu or Dunnu in gods.

Babylon. The Greeks knew of three Danaids, known as Telchines or

"Enchanters," who founded the three chief cities of Rhodes. 10 In Saxon myth,

Writers of the Old Testament disliked the Danites, whom they Danu-Ana became
Black Annis, or
called serpents (Genesis 49:17). Nevertheless, they adopted Dan-El Anna of the Angles, or
or Daniel, a Phoenician god of divination, and transformed him into a the Blue Hag, or
Hebrew prophet. His magic powers like those of the Danites emanat- Angurboda, mother of
ed from the Goddess her sacred serpents. He served as court
Dana and Hel. An ancient
cave-shrine at Dane's
astrologer and dream-interpreter for both the Persian king Cyrus, and
Hill in Leicestershire
the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 1:21, 2:1), indicating was her dwelling place,
that"Daniel" was not a personal name but a title, like the Celtic one: known as Black
"a person of the Goddess Dana." Annis's Bower. 8

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 204. Lamusse, 225. 2. Graves, W.G., 54. 3. Rees, 53.

4. Larousse, 285. 5. Graves, W.G., 409. 6. Squire, 372. 7. Squire, 48.

8. Briffault 3, 71. 9. H. Smith, 183. 10. Graves, G.M. 1, 203-4.

Daphne
"Laurel," the plant of prophecy chewed by the Goddess's priestesses
in the vale of Tempe, until Apollo's cult replaced hers, and restricted

laurel-chewing to the Delphic Pythoness. The Goddess's original

1

name was Daphoene, "Bloody One," in early times when her Maenads
were still
performing blood sacrifices.
as a purified virgin
Orgiastic Daphne entered classical mythology
who was saved from rape by Apollo through a transformation into a
laurel tree in the nick of time. The myth seems to have been suggested

by an icon showing the Goddess's face looking down from the

branches of a laurel tree upon the sacred king immolated at her feet.

207
Dark Age Laurel remained the plant of inspiration and poetic frenzy. Laurel
crowns were given to the best poets,who were then called "laureate"-
laurel-crowned.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
1. Graves, G.M. 1,81.

Dark Age
Western histories have put forth many theories about the fall of
Rome and attributed the onset of the Dark Age to a wide variety of

causes, except the one cause that may have had more to do with it

By denying women's
1
than any other: Christianity. spiritual significance

and forbidding Goddess worship, the church alienated both sexes

from their pagan sense of unity with the divine through each other.
Christians said one of the diabolic symptoms of the oncoming end
of the world was "the spread of knowledge," which they endeavored
to check with wholesale book-burnings, destruction of libraries and
2
schools, and opposition to education for laymen. By the end of the
5th century, Christian rulers forcibly abolished the study of philosophy,

mathematics, medicine, and geography. Lactantius said no Christian

should study astronomy. Pope Gregory the Great denounced all secular
education as folly and wickedness, and forbade Christian laymen to
read even the Bible. He burned the library of the Palatine Apollo, "lest

its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of

heaven." 3
In the church's view, every opinion except its own was heretical
and doubts in the minds of believers. There-
devilish, likely to raise

fore, pagan and teachers were persecuted and schools were

intellectuals

closed. Christian emperors commanded the burning of all books of

the philosophers, as Theodosius said, "for we would not suffer any of
those things so much as to come to men's ears, which would tend to

provoke God to wrath and offend the minds of the pious." After years
of
vandalism and destruction, St. John Chrysostom proudly boasted,

"Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world
4
has vanished from the face of the earth."
It was almost true. Christian persecutions left "but few fragments

of a vast liturgy and religious literature of paganism which would have

cast many a ray of light on the origins of our own faith; and demolished

holy places and beautiful temples such as the world shall never rear
again." After temples were destroyed, monks and hermits
5
were settled
in the ruins to defile the site with their excrement, and to prevent
reconstruction. 6
Rulers melted down bronze, gold, and silver artworks for money.

Peasants broke up marble gods and goddesses and fed their pieces
into limekilns for mortar. It is recorded that 4th-century Rome had 424
7

temples, 304 shrines, 80 statues of deities in precious metal, 64

statues of ivory, 3,700 statues in bronze, and thousands in marble. By

208
 the next century, nearlyall of them were
gone. The historian Dark Age
Eunapius, a hierophant of the Eleusinian Mysteries, watched the
destruction and wrote that the empire was
being overwhelmed by a
"fabulous and formless darkness
mastering the loveliness of the world." 8
Roman society was losing its cohesiveness and discipline, with the
usual symptoms of social decline: runaway inflation, shortages, crime,
apathy, and a discouraged middle class taxed to the breaking point to
9
support a top-heavy, stagnant bureaucracy. Most Christians came
not from that middle class, but from the lower elements of
society,
taking advantage of lawless times to grab what they could. Celsus said
the Christians invited into their ranks "whosoever is a sinner or

unintelligent, or a fool, in a word, whosoever is

god-forsaken, him the
kingdom of God will receive. Now whom do you mean by the sinner
but the wicked: thief, housebreaker, poisoner, temple robber, grave
robber?. . .
Jesus, they say, was sent to save sinners; was he not sent to
help thosewho have kept themselves free from sin? They pretend
God will save the unjust man if he repents and humbles himself.
that

The just man who has held steadily from the cradle in the ways of
virtue he not look upon." 10
will

Bertrand Russell described the philosophical outlook of St. Jerome:

"He thinks the preservation of virginity more important than
victory
over the Huns and Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn
toany possible measure of practical statesmanship; never once does
he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an army
composed of barbarians. The same is true of Ambrose and Augus-
tine. ... It is no wonder that the Empire fell into ruin." n

Conventional histories presented a picture of early Christians as

peaceable souls, unjustly persecuted. This picture could only have
arisen because historical writing was monopolized by the church for

many centuries, and there was no compunction about changing or

falsifying records. Pagan Rome didn't persecute religious minorities.
"It never disputed the existence or reality of other deities, and the
addition of a new member to the Pantheon was a matter of indiffer-
ence. .
[A]U deities of all peoples were regarded as but manifestations
. .

of the one supreme deity." Dionysus, Venus, and Priapus were

honored co-residents of the temple of Isis in Pompeii. Italian and Greek
12
deities mixed together in the temple of Mithra at Ostia. All deities

were willing to co-exist except the Christian one. The Christian church

alone "has always held the toleration of others to be the persecution

of itself." 1J As early as 382 a.d., the church officially declared that any

opposition to its own creed in favor of others must be punished by the

death penalty. 14

Contrary to the conventional mythology, Christians were not

prosecuted under Roman law for being Christians but for committing
civil crimes. 15 They caused riots, "often tumultuously interrupted the
16
public worship, and continually railed against the national religion."
They seem to have been guilty of vandalism and arson. The Great Fire

209
Daik Age in 64 a.d. was set by Christians who were "anxiously waiting for the
world to end by fire and who did at times start fires in order to prompt

^^^^^^^^^^^ God." 17 Crying that the world would end at any moment, Christian

fanatics sometimes developed the notion that starting the fires of the
18
final holocaust would redound to their credit in heaven. At least one
saint was canonized for no particular reason other than having been an
arsonist: St. Theodore, whose sole claim to fame was burning down
the temple of the Mother of the Gods. 19
The decline of Roman civilization and the onset of the Dark Age
was the period Gilbert Murray characterized as the western world's
failure of nerve. It marked the transition of the west from a position of

cultural leadership to one of regressed barbarism, and transformed

20
Europe into what is now known
as an "undeveloped area." Intellect,

taste, and imagination disappeared from art and literature. Rather

than broadening the western mind, its church crippled that mind by

allowing childish superstitions to flourish in an atmosphere of igno-

rance and unreason. 21 Suppression of the teaching priestess or alma
materled to an eclipse of education in general.
Many scholars fled from Christian persecutions eastward to Iran,

where the Sassanid king helped them found a school of medicine and
22
science. This was the world's intellectual capital for two centuries.

Already in 529, when Justinian closed the Athenian schools, Helle-

nistic learning had been dispersed to Sassanian Persia, Gupta India, ant
23
Celtic Ireland.
Church historians have claimed nothing of real value was lost in

the destruction of pagan culture. Modern scholars disagree. The

havoc that afflicted art, science, literature, philosophy, engineering,
architecture, and all other fields of achievement has been likened to
the havoc of the Gigantomachia as if the crude giants overthrew the

intelligent gods. Thewidespread literacy of the classical period

disappeared. Aqueducts, harbors, buildings, even the splendid Roman
roads fell into ruin. It has been pointed out that centuries of

devastating war could hardly have shattered Roman civilization as

24
its new obsession with an ascetic monotheism.
effectively as did
Books and artworks were destroyed because they expressed un-
25
christian ideas and images. The study of medicine was forbidden,
on the ground that all diseases were caused by demons and could be
cured only by exorcism. This theory was still extant in the time of
Pope Alexander III, who forbade monks to study any techniques of
26
healing other than verbal charms. Under the Christian emperors,
educated citizens were persecuted by the illiterate who claimed their
books were witchcraft texts. Often, "magical" writings were planted
by Christian magistrates for the sake of the financial rewards they

received when they caught and executed heretics a system the

Inquisition also used to advantage in later centuries. Priestesses were

especially persecuted, because they were female, wealthy, and laid

27
claim to spiritual authority.
Fathers of the church seemed cynically aware that public igno-

210
 ranee worked in their favor. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote
to St. Jerome:
"A Dark Age
little jargon is all that is
necessary to impose upon the people. The
less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and
doctors have often said, not what
they thought, but what circumstances
and necessity dictated." 28
Lactantius declared that pagan
temples should be torn down
because, in them, "The demons are
attempting to destroy the
kingdom of God, and by means of false miracles and lying oracles are
assuming the appearance of real gods." 29 It was dangerous to leave
the temples intact, even when they were converted into Christian
churches. The temple of the Mother of Heaven at Carthage was
made over into a church, but in 440 a.d. the bishop discovered that the

Carthaginians were actually making their devotions to the old God-

dess,and ordered the entire temple area leveled to the 30
ground.
Ignorance was helpful to the spread of the faith; so ignorance
was fostered. Knight says, "Men are superstitious in proportion as
they
are ignorant, and those who know least of the
principles of
. . .

religion are the most earnest and fervent." 31 In keeping western

Europe
as ignorant as possible, however, the church lost much of its history.
Even contemporary events went inaccurately reported, or altogether
unnoted. Events of the past were absurdly garbled. All the public
knew of history was provided by bards, who tried to maintain the druidic
tradition of rote-learning, with indifferent success.
They taught, for

example, that Alexander the Great made an expedition to the Garden

of Eden, where he was instructed by the poet-magician Virgil, by

"Monsignor St. Paul," and by "Tholomeus" (Ptolemy), king of

Egypt.
They taught that Julius Caesar was a king of Hungary and Austria,
and a prince of Constantinople; his mother was the Valkyrie Brunn-
hilde, a daughter of Judas Maccabeus; he married Morgana, the
32
Fairy Queen, and became the father of Oberon and St. George.
The field of natural science was in even worse disorder. Learned
books taught that mice do not reproduce like other mammals but are
generated spontaneously and asexually from "the putrefaction of the
earth"; that wasps produce themselves out of a dead horse and bees
out of a dead calf; that a crab deprived of its legs and buried will turn
into a scorpion; that some mammals, such as hares, can change from

one sex to the other; that a duck dried into powder and placed in water
will generate frogs; that a duck baked and buried will generate toads;
that asparagus is produced from buried shavings of ram's horn; that

scorpions can be created from garden basil rubbed between two

stones; that rain and lightning can be raised by burning a chameleon's
liver a rooftop; that no fleas can breed where a man scatters dust
on
dug up from his right footprint in the place where he heard the first

springtime call of a cuckoo. 33 Because the very idea of experimenta-

tion to test had been replaced by credulous reliance on
hypotheses
theological authority, even notions that would have been simple to

test remained untested.

As for more complex hypotheses, they were beyond the ken of

211
^
David, Saint

^^m
theologians.
earth,
Pagan thinkers long ago understood the shape of the
and even calculated its approximate circumference with only a
small error. But Lactantius and other learned churchmen called this
field of endeavor "bad and senseless," and proved by quoting the Bible

that the earth was flat.

34

The most thoroughly Christianized nations

er from the church's eclipse of learning until the present century. In
hardly began to recov-

Spain for example, the tradition of book-burning became

an integral
of the auto-da-fe in 1 502. It was against the law for any layman
part
any book not approved by the bishops. To own vernacular
35
to read

copies of either Testament of the Bible was punishable by burning at

the stake. 36 Reading declined to almost nothing. What few grammar

schools existed were only "superficial preparation for the priesthood."

Still,many priests were illiterate. General education was attempted only

after the revolutions of 1834 and 1855, when the monasteries were

suppressed. Yet in 18%, more than two-thirds of the population

were
37
still unable to read or write.

Spanish suspicion of books carried over into the New World, and
deprived anthropologists and archeologists of literary treasures that
might have shed much light on pre-Columbian civilizations. Spanish
"converted" the Maya of Yucatan in 1 562, by their usual
friars

forceful methods, such as torture and burning. They fed the fires with
hundreds of Maya sacred books which, had they survived, would
have greatly assisted modern scholars to unravel the mysteries of Mayan

script. The friars said the natives were "greatly afflicted" by

the loss of
their scriptures; but as far as the friars could see, these books "contained

nothing in which there was not to be seensuperstition and lies of the

58
devil, so we burned them all."

1. H. Smith, 254. 2. Male, 355. 3. H. Smhh, 228, 253; de Camp, A.E.. 283, 264.
4. Doane, 436, 447. 5. Angus, 280. 6. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 173.
7. de Camp, A.E., 93. 8. Pepper & Wilcock, 90, 288. 9. Thomson, 352.
10. [Link], 203. 1 1 B. RusseO, 344. 12. Angus, 190-92. 13Couhon,91.
.

[Link].498. 15. Phillips, 152. 16. Knight, D.W.P, 111.

17. Lindsay, O.A., 277. [Link], A.E.,234. 19. de Voragine, 662.
20. Campbell, Oc.M., 247, 455. 21. Cumont, O.R.R.P, 26.
22. de Camp, A.E., 303. 23. Campbell, CM., 133.
24. J.H. Smith. D.C.P., 4; de Camp, A.E.. 135, 264.
25. Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 536. 26. White 1, 386. 27. Sdigmann, 70-73.
28. Doane, 434. 29. Casuglioni, 215. 30. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 229.
3 1 Knight, D.W.P., 31.32. Briffiroh 3, 432.
.

33. Agrippa, 101, 108, 111, 122, 137, 148. 34. de Camp. A.E., 283.
35. H. Smith, 259. 36. Lea, 20. 37. Couhon, 305-6. 38. Von Hagen, 432.

David, Saint
Patron saint of Wales, actually a pagan god Christianized in the 1 1th

century a.d. He was the Welsh sea god worshipped as Dewi, from the
Aryan devior deva, "deity." Though he was called a 6th-century
bishop, nothing was written of him until 1090, more than 500 years
His wholly unreliable biography was composed chiefly to
later.
1
support the Welsh bishops' independence at the time.

212
 The city now called St. David's used to be Menevia, "Way of the Death
Moon," the same as Danish Manavegr and Irish E-Mania, the lunar
2
paradise. ^^^^^^^^^^^_
Symbol of David-Dewi was the Great Red Serpent, now the red
dragon, Wales's national emblem. Like the phallic god Python or
Oceanus encircling the World Egg, he may have been reddened by his
union with the Moon-goddess Mab, who gave sovereignty to all her
3
kings by staining them red.

David's title, the Waterman, was explained by Christian scholars to

mean he was a teetotaler. 4 Welsh sailors knew better; their traditions
placed him in the depths of the sea. They called him Davy Jones, who
like the sea god Mananann kept the souls of drowned seamen in his
5
"locker."
Waterman was a popular title for several ancient gods of waters

Dewi: notably Ceadda, a Mercian god of medicinal

besides springs,
who was canonized twice (see Chad).
Even in Christian disguise, David retained the sacred skills of a
bard. It was claimed that
miraculous talent for harping and singing
his

came from his lineal descent from the virgin Mary, of the ancient house
of King David the Harpist, in the eighteenth generation. Mary was
also identifiedwith the Welsh sea-goddess Marian, Dewi's bride,
receiver of the souls of the dead. Welsh bards called their death songs

marwysgafen, the "giving to Mary," sung to send the funeral boat to the
Isles of the Dead. 6
Sometimes David was confused with Merlin, who allegedly harped
and sang the stones of Stonehenge into their places. Some legends
7
made David a bishop of Merlin's town, Caerleon. Some said David
was King Arthur's uncle. Like many mythical saints, he was given a
long lifetime to demonstrate the health-giving virtues of Christian faith;
he lived to the age of 140 years. 8 His mother was the same virgin

temple-maiden who gave birth to nearly every ancient god; here she was
St. Non (Holy Nun).
9
Two cities claimed his shrine, located not only
at St. David's but also in the city of Chester, which used to be named
Deva or Dewi. 10
1. Attwater, 101-2. 2. Brewster, 121. 3. Rees, 75. 4. Attwater, 102.
5. Phillips, 110. 6. Brewster, 120. 7. Brewster, 121. 8. Hazlitt, 168.
9. Attwater, 102. 10. Cumont, M.M., 57.

Ith

been said that Death came into existence only with the rise of

man's consciousness, a roundabout way of saying death is more real for

only humans foresee it.
1
humans than for any other animal, because

Religions owe their existence to the unique ability of the human animal

to understand that it must die.

Against this realization the forces of imagination are mustered to

deny it. It's hard for any perceiving mind to perceive its own

213
 of Kali managed
Death notbeing, with cessation of all perception. Worshippers
2
to view the beyond-death state as Dreamless Sleep. But most ancient

^^^^^^^^^^^ people couldn't formulate an idea of non-perception.

Even when the land of the dead was minimally stimulating, as in

the Babylonian concept, was perceptible to the senses. It was the

it

House of Dust, and the end of the Road of No Return. The dead
were clothed in feathers, like birds. "Dust is their food and clay their
meat . . .
, they see no light, they sit in darkness." Yet in the same
House of Dust there were priests and kings ruling, and servants to carry
3
the baked meats and pour water from water skins.

Babylonian literature reveals a hope that eventually the right ritual

cure for death will be discovered, rather as modern people hope for a
cure for cancer. The recommended avenue of investigation was necro-
mantic consultation with the dead themselves. "The quest for
immortality was essentially the search for the right ritual, the knowledge
of what to do in order to secure a continued existence of the body
after death. This knowledge is possessed by the ancestors, and can only

be obtained from them." 4

Men have usually believed that knowledge of death can only come
from those who have experienced it. Hence the initiatory procedures

involving mock death, as among Siberian shamans, who experience in

trances being torn apart and reduced to bare bones. "By thus seeing
himself naked, altogether freed from the perishable and transient flesh
and blood, he consecrates himself, in the sacred tongue of the
shamans, to his great task, through that part of his body which will

longest withstand the action of the sun, wind and weather, after he is
dead. [I]n certain Central Asian meditations that are Buddhistic and
. . .

tantric in origin or at least in structure, reduction to the skeleton

condition has . . . an ascetic and metaphysical value anticipating the

work of time, reducing life by thought to what it really is, an
5
ephemeral illusion in perpetual transformation."

So vivid were the fantasies of the death-world that some Oriental

sages prayed for sufficient conscious sense to realize that they were
nothing more than inventions of the mind: "May I
recognize whatever
visions appear, as the reflections of my own consciousness. May I
know them to be of the nature of apparitions in the intermediate State.

May I not fear the troops of my own thought forms, the Peaceful
Deities and the Wrathful May it come that all the Sounds will be
known as one's own sounds; may it come that all the Radiances will . 1
be known as one's own radiances." 6
Tantric Buddhism proposed that the death world or Intermediate
State could be controlled if one were prepared through carefully

guided fantasy memory, consciousness, and the goal of

in life to retain

choosing for one's "womb-door" for a better reincarna-

self the right
7
tion. Living and dying were only complementary aspects of the same

cycle, both requiring proper education. "Material life moves between

two poles," Bachofen says. "Its realm is not that of being but that of

214
becoming and passing away, the eternal alternation of two colors, the Death
Lvhite of life and the black of death. Only through the equal mixture of

!he two is the survival of the material world assured. Without death
ho rejuvenation is possible ... the positive power cannot for one mo-
htient exist without the negative power. Death, then, is not the
8
bpposite but the helper of life."
The Great Goddess was intimately involved in every manifestation
death as she was in those of life, which is why she had an
pf
['emanation" for each fatal disease, such as Mari-Amma, Ankamma,
Mutteyalamma, etc. Her priestesses supported and taught the dying.
'As among the gods, so among the mortals was death everywhere
voman's business. A woman said to have invented the wailing for
is

he dead. . . . Women cradle the infant and the corpse, each to its
^articularnew life." 9
Romans thought death should be kept in mind at all times,
specially when life at its peak might make one forget the other,
qually necessary part of the cycle. When a military hero entered Rome
n triumphal procession, riding in a golden chariot, hailed as a god in
he ancient equivalent of a ticker-tape parade, a person wearing the
nask and costume of Death stood at his shoulder, preserving him
rom the sin of hubris by saying each moment in his ear, "Man,
10
emember you will die."

Paganism fostered the Tantric idea of growth and decline in

ecurrent cycles. "The old fertility gods did not shrink from the fact
>fdeath; they sought no infantile evasion, but promised rebirth and
enewal." u Christianity on the other hand denied that members of
ts sect could die. Early Christians who died were said to have "fallen

sleep," soon to wake up again with the second coming of Christ. A

norbid anxiety often accompanied ritual denial. Kermode says, "Chris-

ianity of all the great religions is the most anxious, is the one which
12
aid the most emphasis on the terror of death."

Sometimes fear became obsession, in a love-hate relationship with

eath. In theSecret Book ofJames, Jesus recommended suicide, Secret Book of

marking that the kingdom of death could only belong to those who James One of the so-
called Gnostic
>ut themselves to death, and no one who avoided this duty could be
Gospels discovered at
aved. 13
Nag Hammadi in
Obsession flowered into a thousand elaborate death customs and Upper Egypt, 1945,
ituals aimed at encapsulating the phenomenon, separating it from purporting to have
been written by the
rdinary life experience so its inevitability need not be fully understood,
apostle James.
n Frazer's opinion such customs and rituals have been the most
wasteful ever seen in any society:

No belief has done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social
progress of mankind as has the belief in the immortality of the soul; for
this belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to sacrifice
the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of the dead. The
waste and destruction oflife and property which this faith has entailed are
4
enormous and incalculable. '

215
Death Pagan philosophers' acceptance of death may have been more
With a somber but
practical than the elaborate denials that arose later.
_ courageous serenity, Euripides stated the pagan idea that opinions on
^________
death are not possible:

But ifany far-offstate there be

Dearer to life than mortality
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof,
And mist is under the mist above;
So we are sick for life, and cling
On earth to this nameless and shining thing,
For other life is a fountain sealed,
And the deeps below are unrevealed,
And we drift on legends for ever. IS
Because they were westerners, the Greek philosophers have
been given more credit for originality than they deserved. Actually, their

opinions of death and its implications for the living were largely taken
from Oriental sages who evolved them first. Greek notions of the
Dreamless Sleep, of reincarnation, of the four ages of man including
the primordial Age of Giants, all were derived from Oriental sources.
Tantric sages spoke of the faraway Golden Age when all men were
giants and lived lifetimes of about a thousand years each, because they
were nearer in time to the world's creation, when the Goddess's

nourishing birth blood was more abundant and the knowledge of her
was more intimate among her children. As the Bible said, there were
16
giants in the earth in those days (Genesis 6:4).
The same long-lived giants were identified with their own ances-
torsby the authors of Genesis. The Hindu concept of human
longevity in the Golden Age was copied into the Bible as a quality of the
early patriarchs not quite a thousand years apiece, but at least more
than nine centuries. Adam lived to be 930 years old; Seth 912 years;
Enos 905 years; and so on, the champion being Methusaleh at 969
years (Genesis 5).
However long delayed, though, death must come, and that was the
thought that patriarchal thinkers found unacceptable. The older
matriarchal religions were more realistic in their acceptance of death,

making it the sage's duty to realize the ugliness, corruption, and

decay in nature as fully as he might realize its beauty: to accord death

the same value as birth. The two were of equal importance, as two
passages through the same Door: one coming out, the other going in.

Different forms of the Goddess represented the idea. On the one

hand she was the beautiful nubile Virgin or the tender nurturing

Mother; on the other hand she was a hideous ghoul, herself corpse-
like and a devourer of corpses and these two forms of her were to be
adored equally. Avalon justly remarked that in the west, "the terrible

beauty of such forms not understood"; missionaries could only

is

describe the Death-goddess as a she-devil. 17 Yet, for the enlightened,

216
 "This fanged and bloody Goddess is the same as the other, the beautiful Deborah
)
mother and lover. To be able to superimpose and adore both images Delilah

perhaps the solidest beginning on the road of sadhana."

one 18
! in is
^^^^^^^^^^^
Some individuals in western culture arrived more or less indepen-
jdently at the
vision of this archetypal female death spirit. Wherever
there was a concept of Mother Nature, it could hardly fail to be noticed
that it was natural to die, and the roots of every flower lay in
organic
Coleridge spoke of the "Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH" as a
rot.

(woman. Keats described himself as "half in love with easeful Death."

iLike the Oriental sages, Alfred de Vigny perceived Death as a maternal

[Goddess:
"O Death divine, at whose recall / Returneth all / To fade
in thy embrace, / Gather thy children to thy bosom starred, / Free us

from time, from number, and from space, / And give us back the rest
19
that life hath marred."
I. von Franz, pi. 7. 2. Campbell, CM., 347. 3. Epic of Gilgamesh, 92.

4. Hooke, S P., 55. 5. Eliade, S., 63. 6. Campbell, M.I., 399; Bardo Thodol, 202.
7. Bardo Thodol, 183. 8. Bachofen, 33-34. 9. Lederer, 126-27.

10. Dumezil, 566. 1 1 Mumford, 267. 1 2. Kermode, 27. 13. Pagels,90.

.

14. Frazer, P.T., 52. [Link], 230-3 1 16. Mahanirvanatantra, xlvii-xlviii.

.

17. Avalon, 171. 18. Rawson, A.T., 1 12, 129. 19. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 94.

Deborah
Queen Bee," a ruler of Israel in the matriarchal period, bearing the
same name as the Goddess incarnate in early Mycenaean and Anatolian
ulers as "the Pure Mother Bee." Deborah lived under a sacred
!

Dalm tree that also bore her name, and was identified with the maternal
Tree of Life, like Xikum, the Tree of Ishtar. The Bible called her a

'prophetess" or "judge" to disguise the fact that she was one of the
governing matriarchs of a former age (Judges 4:4).
One of Deborah's alternate names was Jael, "the Goddess Jah,"

wssibly the same one patriarchal Persians called Jahi the Whore, an
arlier feminine form of Yahweh. 2
1. Sobol, 138; Neumann, CM., 267. 2. Albright, 23.

Delilah

'She Who Makes Weak," a name compounded of De (daleth), the

'onic Door, and lilu, the lotus, another yonic symbol. She was the
Goddess who "weakened" the sun god every day and sent him to his
leath on the wheel that turned him under the earth. In the case of
>amson who was the sun god Shams-On, or Shamash it was the
nill wheel. In the case of Heracles, another name for the same solar

leity, it was Omphale's wheel: the omphalos often represented by the

osmic yoni.

217
Delphi Delphi
Demeter
"Womb"; Greece's oldest, most famous oracle, where Mother Earth
was worshipped under the name of Delphyne, the Womb of Creation,
along with her serpent-son and consort Python. At various times the
1

oracle was said to belong to the Sea-goddess, or the Moon-goddess,

various designations of the same primal Mother, whose priestess-

daughters, the Pythonesses, controlled the Eventually the

rites.

patriarchalgod Apollo took it over, retaining the Pythonesses, but

claiming to have placed the Serpent in his underground uterine cave,

whence came the oracle's inspiration. Apollo murdered the priestess
Delphyne, and held the oracleuntil it was closed by the Christian

emperor Theodosius. After him, Arcadius had the temple entirely

destroyed.
1. Graves, CM. 1,80.

Demeter
Greek meter is "mother." De is the delta, or triangle, a female-

genital sign known as "the letter of the vulva" in the Greek sacred
alphabet, as in India it was the Yoni Yantra, or yantra of the vulva. 1

Corresponding letters Sanskrit dwr, Celtic duir, Hebrew daleth

meant the Door of birth, death, or the sexual paradise. 2 Thus,
Demeter was what Asia called "the Doorway of the Mysterious Femi-
nine ... the root from which Heaven and Earth sprang." ? In

Mycenae, one of Demeter's earliest cult centers, tholos tombs with their

triangular doorways, short vaginal passages and round domes, repre-

sented the womb of the Goddess from which rebirth might come.

Doorways generally were sacred to women. In Sumeria they were

4
painted red, representing the female "blood of life." In Egypt, door-
ways were smeared with real blood for religious ceremonies, a custom
copied by the Jews for their Passover rites.

The triangle-door-yoni symbolized Demeter's trinity. Like all the

oldest forms of the basic Asiatic Goddess she appeared as Virgin,
Mother, and Crone, or Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, like Kali-Cunti
who was the same yoni-mother. Demeter's Virgin form was Kore,
the Maiden, sometimes called her "daughter," as in the classical myth
of the abduction of Kore, which divided the two aspects of the
Goddess into two separate individuals. Demeter's Mother form had
many names and titles, such as Despoena, "the Mistress"; Daeira,

"the Goddess"; the Barley-Mother; the Wise One of Earth and Sea; or
Pluto, "Abundance." This name was transferred to the male
last

underworld god said to have taken the Maiden into the earth-womb
during the dark season when fields lay fallow. But this was a late,
myth. The original Pluto was female, and her "riches" were
artificial
5
poured out on the world from her breasts.
The Crone phase of Demeter, Persephone-the-Destroyer, was

218
 identified with the Virgin in latemyth, so the Maiden abducted into Demeter
the underworld was sometimes Kore, sometimes Persephone. Some of
the Destroyer's other, earlier names were Melaina, the Black One;
Demeter Chthonia, the Subterranean One; or The Avenger (Erinys).
Her black-robed, mare-headed idol, her mane entwined with Gorgon
snakes, appeared inone of her oldest cave-shrines, Mavrospelya, the
Black Cave, in Phigalia (southwest Arcadia). She carried a dolphin
I and a dove, symbols of womb and yoni. Like the devouring death-

goddess everywhere, she was once a cannibal. She ate the flesh of
Pelops, then restored him to life in her cauldron. 6 She was as fearsome
as every other version of the Crone. The legendary medieval Night-
Mare an equine Fury who tormented sinners in their sleep was
based on ancient images of Mare-headed Demeter.
Her cult was already well established at Mycenae in the 1 3th

century B.C. and continued throughout Greece well into the Chris-
tian era, a length of time almost equal to the lifespan of Christianity
7
itself. Her temple at Eleusis, one of the greatest shrines in Greece,

became the center of an elaborate mystery-religion. Sophocles wrote,

"Thrice happy they of men who looked upon these rites ere they go
to Hades's house; for they alone there have true life." Aristides said,

"The benefit of the festival is not merely the cheerfulness of the

moment and the freedom and respite from all previous troubles, but also
the possession of happier hopes concerning the end, hopes that our
life hereafter will be the better, and that we shall not lie in darkness and
filth the fate that is believed to await the uninitiated." Isocrates said:
"Demeter . . .
being graciously minded towards our forefathers because
of their services to her, services of which none but the initiated may
hear, gave us the greatest of all gifts, first, those fruits of the earth which
saved us from living the of beasts, and secondly, that rite which
life

makes happier the hopes of those that participate therein concerning

both the end of life and their whole existence." 8
Eleusis meant "advent." Its principal rites brought about the
advent of the Divine Child or Savior, variously named Brimus,
Dionysus, Triptolemus, Iasion, or Eleuthereos, the Liberator. Like the
corn, he was born of Demeter-the-earth and laid in a manger or

winnowing basket. 9 His flesh was eaten by communicants in the form of

bread, made from the first or sheaves. His blood was drunk in the
last

form of wine. Like Jesus, he entered the Earth and rose again.
Communicants were supposed to partake of his immortality, and
after death they were known as Demetreioi, blessed ones belonging to
Demeter. 10
Revelations were imparted to the initiate through secret "things

heard, things tasted,and things seen." " This formula immediately

calls to mind the three admonitory monkeys covering ears, mouth, and

eyes, supposed to illustrate the maxim, "Hear no evil, speak no evil,

see no evil." Was the "evil" a secret descended from Eleusinian

religion? Demeter was worshipped as "the Goddess" by Greek

219
Demetra, Saint peasants all the way through the Middle Ages, even up to the 19th

century at Eleusis where she was entitled "Mistress of Earth and

^^^^^^^^^^^ Sea." In 1801 two Englishmen named Clarke and Cripps caused a riot

among the peasants by taking the Goddess's image away to a

12
museum in Cambridge.
Early Christians were much opposed to the Eleusinian rites

because of their overt sexuality, even though their goal was "regener-
13
ation and forgiveness of sins." Asterius said, "Is not Eleusis the scene
of descent into the darkness, and of the solemn acts of intercourse
between the hierophant and the priestess, alone together? Are not the
torches extinguished, and does not the large, the numberless assem-

bly of common people believe that their salvation lies in that which is

H Fanatic monks
being done by the two in the darkness?" destroyed
the temple of these sexual mysteries in 396 a.d., but the site remained
holy to the Goddess's votaries, and the ceremonies were carried on
there and elsewhere. 15
Rustics never ceased believing that Demeter's spirit was manifest
in the final sheaf of the harvest, often called the Demeter, the Corn
Mother, the Old Woman, etc. At harvest festivals it was often dressed in

woman's clothing and laid in a manger to make the cattle thrive. 16

Secret anti-Christian doctrines of medieval Freemasonry also drew
some symbolism from the cults of the ancient Mistress of Earth and
Sea, particularly the masonic sacred image of Plenty: "an ear of corn
17
near a fall of water." The ultimate Mystery was revealed at Eleusis
in "an ear of corn reaped in silence" a sacred fetish that the Jews
called shibboleth. 18
1. Mahanirvanatantm, 127. 2. Gaster, 302. 3. de Riencourt, 175. 4. Hays, 68.
5. Graves, W.G., 1 59, 406; CM.
1,61; G.M. 2, 25. 6. Graves, G.M. 2, 30.
7. Encyc. Brit, "Demeter." 8. Lawson, 563-64. 9. Graves, W.G., 159.
10. Angus, 172. 11. H. Smith, 127. 12. Lawson, 79, 89-92. 13. Angus, 97.
14. Lawson, 577. 15. Angus, vii. 16. Frazer,G.B.,473. 17. Elworthy, 105.
18.d'Alviella,2.

Demetra, Saint
As was the rule with other manifestations of the Great Goddess, there
was an attempt to Christianize Demeter by making a saint of her.
Though the church refused to canonize "St. Demetra" officially, yet
she remained a great favorite of the people, who told miracle-tales about
her and prayed to her as fervently as if she were a certified member of
the canon.
The myth of Kore-Persephone and Demeter was retold
classic as a

popular centering on St. Demetra. The saint's daughter

fairy tale

(Kore) was kidnapped by "a wicked Turkish wizard" (Hades) and

locked up in a tower. A young hero rescued her, but perished
miserably, chopped in pieces by the wizard and hung from the tower's
walls "between heaven and earth." Guided by a stork (her ancient

totemic bird of birth), St. Demetra arrived on the scene, reassembled

220
the hero, and brought him back to life. Several elements of this
story Demon
were repeated in the Germanic fairy tale of Rapunzel.
A masculinized version of Demeter or perhaps one of her
Demetreioi was accepted into the canon as a "St. Demetrius," of
no known date, and no real biography. His legend, established in the
late Middle Ages, made him a warrior saint like the equally
mythical
St. George. The basic story was invented to publicize his relics healing
2
preserved at Salonika.
1. Lawson, 80-84. 2. Attwater, 102.

Demon
From Greek daimon, a personal familiar spirit or guardian
angel, like
the Roman genius, roughly synonymous with "soul." The daimon of a
hero could undergo apotheosis, become a god, and rise to heaven to
dwell among the stars.
The medieval concept of the demon evolved from Christians'
blanket condemnation of all pagan daimones, though they continued
to believe implicitly in their existence.
1
Demons were usually consid-
ered messengers and assistants of a single Devil, in the same

relationship to him as angels to God. Yet they were also called "devils"

and their master could be "the Demon." The terms were never

clearly distinguished.
Animals and people could be "demons," or could harbor demons
within their bodies or minds. Sometimes, any alien group of people
could be called demons. Europeans often visualized demons as black,

Negroes. On the other hand, dark-skinned people like the

2
like

Singhalese maintained that demons were white and hairy.*

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, all bad weather and natural

catastrophes were brought about by demons. He said, "It is a dogma
of faith that demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from
heaven." Pope Eugene IV issued a bull against human "agents of
Satan" who controlled weather-demons. Pope John XXII complained
of wizards who tried to kill him through the agency of demons they
4
sent into mirrors and rings.
The church had several mutually contradictory theories about the
origin of demons. One theory said they were the rebellious angels
who with Lucifer, before the creation of Adam and Eve, so the
fell

principle of evil was ready in the garden of Eden to play the tempter's
role. A second, incompatible theory said demons were created after
human beings. They were begotten by the angels on the daughters of
men (Genesis 6:4). "The majority opinion about the fall of the angels,
held by St. Augustine and therefore accepted in the Middle Ages,
was that it had occurred before the creation of Adam, but some of the
old notion that the angels had fallen through lust for the daughters of
5
men persisted to reinforce antifeminine prejudices."

221
Demon Some authorities, familiar with the pagans' animal masks and
animal-headed idols, said demons were an animal-like race created

^^^^^^^^^^^ separately by God, ahd readily incarnate in animal form. Black goats,

dogs could be demons. The Gaelic uile-bheist (Yule-

bulls, cats, or

beast, moon-calf) was called a demonic animal. St. Ambrose told of a

certain priest who exorcised the frogs in a certain marsh to stop them
from croaking during mass. A thirteenth-century bishop of Lausanne
exorcised all the eels in Lake Leman. 6 St. Augustine confidently
asserted that demons help sorcerers to perform their magic, and have
7
the power to assume many animal shapes.
At Basel in 1474, a rooster committed the unnatural crime of
laying an egg. It was decided that the bird possessed a demon, but
exorcism failed to remove it. So the unfortunate rooster was solemnly

sentenced to death by church authorities, and burned at the stake. 8

Greeks still demons, kallikantzari, de-
believe in the half-horse
scended from ancient centaurs and the shape-shifting horse-wizards
of India, the kinnaras, "canterers" who used to live on the holy
moilntain of Mandara. 9 Their descendants perhaps founded the city
of Kallipolis (Gallipoli). Their chief is still called the Lame Devil,

recalling lame Amazonian smith-gods like Hephaestus. Until recently

it was thought any child born on Christmas Day would become a
kalhkantzaros. w A cruel custom arose from this belief. Children born
on Christmas Day were carried to the market square, where their feet

were thrust into a fire until the toenails were singed. 11

magical The
purpose of this may have been to destroy the horse-demons' "hoofs."
Records of witch trials show that almost any kind of animal could
be perceived as a demon. Witches were executed because a neigh-
bor's child was frightened by "the devil in the shape of a dog"; or

because a man saw "a Thing like unto a rat" run out of a woman's
house; or because a woman
kept "two devils in the form of colts"; or be-
cause a neighbor saw "the devil in the form of a toad" in a woman's

garden; or because a traveler saw "a Thing like a black cow" near the
house of the accused; or because children heard a woman "talk to the
form of a frog." One woman was condemned because
devil in the

neighbors heard near her house at night a "foul yelling, like a number
of cats." No one seems to have suggested that the yelling was in fact
done by cats, not demons.
Ursula Kemp was hanged in 1 581 on the evidence of her own 8-

year-old son, who she kept four demons: two cats, a

testified that

toad, and a black lamb. 12 Not once in the recorded trials did authorities
question witnesses' ability to distinguish these demons from ordinary
animals. It was taken for granted that anyone, even a small child, could

recognize His Satanic Majesty no matter how cleverly he disguised

himself as an apparently normal beast.
Several popes were believed to have familiar demons of their own,

particularly the famous Honorius, long remembered as a magician.

During the controversy between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip IV of

222
France, the king held an assembly that formally deposed the pope Demon
and presented evidence to prove that he was a sorcerer with a familiar
13
spirit. ^^_ ^_^____
Sometimes, in the description of demons, imagination failed and
had to fall back on popular make-believe. One poor wretch named
Margot de la Barre was burned at Paris in 1 391 for
calling up a demon
"in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Pressed
to describe the demon under the stimulus of torture she could think
of nothing better to say than that he had "the shape that demons take
14
in Passion plays."

It was often assumed that demons

congregated especially in and
around churches, for some inexplicable reason. Churches had to be
exorcised at their dedication. Crosses were painted on the walls "to
1S
terrify the demons."
Houses were by many crosses and crucifixes
similarly protected

but, nevertheless, harbored many demons, a belief that betrayed little

trust in the alleged powers of the crucifix. The custom of ringing church

bells at the time of a death was supposed to drive away demons "who

stood at the bed's foot,and about the house, ready to seize their prey, or
at least tomolest and terrify the soul in its passage, but by the ringing
of that bell (for Durandus informs us evil spirits are much afraid of

bells), they were kept aloof: and the soul, like a hunted hare, gained
the start." Tolling the church's largest bell commanded a higher price,

"for that, being louder, the evil spirits must go farther off, to be clear
of its sound, by which the poor Soul got so much more the start of
16
them."
Before the witchcraft mania set in about the 12th and 1 3th
was a general understanding that demons were
centuries, there

nothing more than the old gods and goddesses, all of whom had animal
some kind. Christian fathers insisted that the pagan
incarnations of
were not figments of imagination, but real, living demons.
deities

Learned men even in the 19th century still believed this. Rawlinson,
the translator of Herodotus, was sure the oracle at Delphi was an evil

spirit.
17
An early medieval baptismal formula demanded renunciation
of "relations with the demon," defining the old religion as "works of the
demon, and all his words, and Thor, and Odin, and Saxnot, and all
18 were largely ignored.
evil beings that are like them." Such formalities

Centuries later, holiday dancers included personifications of the

Horned God and the Scandinavian Julebuk (Yule Buck), which church-
men denounced as "the devil himself." 19 Monastic writers of the
1 1th
century spoke of many demons who constantly tempted people
away from the church, showing them "delights and secrets, such as
how they become immortal." 20 It was clear that they spoke of a
might
rival religion.

A Spanish Dominican, Raymond of Tarrega, said demons were

useful for punishing sinners in hell; like angels, demons performed
God's will. It was permissible to adore demons "so long as we adore, not

223
Denis, Saint their evil, but their existence, which was given them by God. It is not
Devi desirable to sacrifice to demons, but to do so is no more serious than
21
adoring an image of Christ or of the saints." Later this opinion was
^^^^^^^^^^^
rejected, and the Inquisition burned Raymond's book.
I. Rose, 1 10, 137. 2. J.B. Russell, 1 14. 3. Briffault 3, 283.
4. White 1,337, 351, 384. 5. J.B. Russell, 108-9. 6. White 2, 113.
J.B. Russell, 56. 8. H. Smith, 294. 9. O'Flaherty, 275. 10. Lawson,
7. 190.
II. Summers, V, 184. 12. Ewen, 157. 13. J.B. Russell, 187.

14. J.B. Russell, 214. [Link] Voragine, 776. 16. Ha/litt, 479.
17. Halliday, 119. 18. J.B. Russell, 16, 67. 19. Miles, 202. 20. Joyce 1, 256.
21. J.B. Russell, 206.

Denis, Saint
Christianized form of the god Dionysus in Paris. Like Orphic shrines
of Dionysus, the shrine of St. Denis featured an oracular head. It was
claimed that, having been beheaded at Montmartre (Martyr's
Mount), Denis then carried his own head to his abbey.
1

Some churchmen said Denis-Dionysus died in 250 a.d.; others

assigned him to the 1st century; still others confused him with the
equally mythical Dionysius the Areopagite. His two "companions
in

martyrdom" Rusticus and Eleutherius were only alternate epithets of

the god Dionysus. 2
1. Tuchman, p. 309. 2. Attwater, p. 104.

Derceto
"Whale of Der," a title of the Babylonian Fish-goddess, said to be the
1
mother of Babylon's foundress, Queen Semiramis (Sammuramat).
Derceto was the prototype of Jonah's whale, being the Great Fish
who swallowed and gave rebirth to the solar god Oannes, or Joannes
(Jonah). See Fish.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 497.

Devi
"Goddess," the Sanskrit root word for many Indo-European names
for the Great Mother. The teachings of Krishna or Shiva were ad-

dressed to the Devi as interrogator of the catechism; she was also

addressed as Dearly Beloved, the Shakti, a convention copied by the
New Testament. Krishna's virgin mother was her "maiden" form,
Devaki. The Goddess's title as "the Way leading to the Gods" was

Devayani, the Divine Yoni. As the virgin mother of Mahavira she

was Devananda, "Blessed Goddess." A Czech name for the Moon- '

goddess, Devana, came from the same root, as also the Latin Diana,

224

i%
Minoan Diwija, Serbian Diiwica, and the Roman Diviana all mean- Devil
2
ing "The Divinity."
I. Larousse, 347. 2. Thorsten, 361.

Devil
The words "devil" and "divinity" grew from the same root, Indo-
European devi (Goddess) or deva (God), which became daeva (devil) in
Persian.
1
Old English divell (devil) can be traced to the Roman
2
derivative divus, divi: gods. Thus it seems that, from the beginning,
gods and devils were often confused with one another.
Divine and devilish were relative terms, as the primary sense of
Hebrew words for "good" and "evil" really meant "beneficial" and
3
"hurtful." Gods did "evil" things if angered; devils could do "good"

things if they were pleased. One man's god was his enemy's devil.
Armenians used to sacrifice one sheep to Christ at Easter time and thirty

sheep to the devil, on the theory that the devil's influence in the here
4
and now was greater.
Such thinking was not unusual. Devils were often credited with
beneficent magic. There was a devil who "maketh men witty, turneth
metals into the coin of the dominion, turneth water into wine, and
all

wine into water, and blood into wine, and wine into blood, and a
fool into a wise man and he leads 33 legions of demons." Another
devil "perfectly teaches the virtues of the stars, he transformeth men,

he giveth dignities, prelacies, and confirmations." Another devil "talketh

of divine virtue, he giveth true answers of things present, past, and to

come, and of the divinity, and of the creation,he deceiveth none, nor
5
suffereth any to be tempted; he giveth dignities and prelacies."
Even early Christians admitted that the "devils" worshipped in
6
pagan temples were known to restore the sick to health. Tertullian Tertullian (Quintus

said, Diabolus simia Dei, the Devil imitates God; but in point of Septimius Florens
who was whom. 7 Tertullianus) Influential
chronology there was some doubt about imitating
early Christian writer
Judeo-Christian tradition attributed many "diabolic" acts to God.
and father of the
He was He created a terrible
the sender of pestilence and famine. church, ca. 155-220
hell, and its demons, who tortured human souls on his orders. He a.d., born in Carthage

God." of pagan parents.

caused violent storms, which were (and still are) called "acts of
From the 1 5 th century on, the church sold waxen cakes, the Agnus
Dei, stamped with a cross and advertised as sure protection against

storms and other "acts of God"; thus God was incongruously invoked to
combat himself. 8
God even killed himself in the person of Christ, according to the

pieological dogma that they were one and the same. On the other
Biand, some claimed Christ was killed by "devilish" Jews. Though Jews

(were carrying out God's ordained scheme of salvation, and doing

225
Devil God's will by executing Jesus, nevertheless theology exonerated God

and blamed them. Though the Old Testament God did much "evil,"
^^^^^^^^^^ even destroying many thousands of his own helpless worshippers for

trivial offenses (1 Samuel 6:19), yet churchmen seldom dared to

accept the Bible's own presentation of God as the maker of evil: "I form
the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the
Lord do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). On the basis of this scripture,
some advanced the theory that God had deliberately created the devil
before the beginning of the world, because a pre-existing evil principle
was necessary to "test the faith" of the future human race. 9 Yet
somehow, to make a devil evil if God did
was not it.

The Persians believed God and the devil were twin brothers, born
simultaneously from the womb of the dualistic mother of Infinite

Time, Zurvan. The devil (Ahriman) was cast down from heaven to the

underworld only because his sacrifice, like Cain's, was not acceptable
to the older deity. The heavenly god (Ahura Mazda) continued to reign
in the heights because he knew how to make the right sacrifices.
But the devil, not the god, was the true creator of the earth and all

creatures in the mundane world of matter. Thus the Magi prayed to

him for assistance in all worldly endeavors, and revered him as the
source of their magic powers. Ahriman was worshipped in Roman
times throughout northern Europe, identified with all chthonian gods
10
like Pluto, Saturn, or Dis Pater. In early Christian mystery-plays he

appeared as a wonder-working spirit, one Saint Mahown. 11

The Christian devil became a composite of ancient deities in a
single Protean form. He had the goat-horns and hoofs of satyr-gods
likePan, Marsyas, and Dionysus; the trident of Neptune, Hades, or
Shiva; the reptilian form of Leviathan, Python, or Ouroborus; the
fiery form of Agni or Helios; the female breasts of Astarte-Ishtar; the
wolf face of Dis, Feronius, or Fenrir; the quadruple wings of
Babylonian cherubim; the bird claws of ancestral spirits, the aves; and all

the god-names Christians had ever heard, including many secret

names of their own God: Jupiter, Mercury, Minerva, Venus, Hades,
Pluto, Baal-Zebub, Lucifer, Zeus Chthonios, Sabazius, Belial, Ado-
nis, Sabaoth, Iao, Soter, Emmanuel, Sammael.
12
The devil could take
any shape, even a human one: Pope Gregory IX described him as "a
1?
pale, black-eyed youth with a melancholy aspect." At other times he
was an animal composite, as on the Amulet of Bes:

Naked genius with the head of Bes, flanked by seven heads ofanimals
among whom are bull, lion, and ibis, and surmounted by atef crown
with several horns; four wings; falcon-tail and crocodile-tail; four arms
two arms stretched out along the wings hold lances and serpents, while
the third on the left seizes a lion, the fourth on the right holds sceptre and I

whip. The erect penis ends in a lionhead; there are lionmasks on the
knees, the feet are given the formofjackal-heads with pointed ears and
prolonged as coiled snakes. Bes stands on an ouroboros (cosmic
M I
serpent) which contains various animals: scorpion, crocodile, tortoise.

226
 The devil's popular nickname Old Scratch came from a Germanic Devil
wood-spirit called a Scrat or Waldscrat, sometimes a protector of
households known as Schraetlin or "little Scrat." The spirit inhabited
a phallic amulet based on the bisexual lingam-yoni,
as suggested by

Anglo-Saxon scritta, Old English scrat, a hermaphrodite. Another

nickname of the devil, Deuce, came from Gaulish gods called Dusii, a
variation oldeus, "god." Again there was a hermaphroditic connota-

tion, since "deuce" also meant "two." 15

Some demonologists postulated seven devils, one for each of the
seven deadly sins: Lucifer (pride), Mammon (avarice), Asmodeus

(lechery), Satan (anger), Beelzebub (gluttony), Leviathan (envy) and

Belphegor (sloth). Belial, a slightly less prestigious spirit, governed
such "vessels of iniquity" as playing cards and dice. 16
"Devils" and "the devil" were interchangeable. The devil was
one, and also many: a monotheistic transformation of a polytheistic
concept. Christian nations asserted that all other nations worshipped
"devils" or "the devil"under many names. A
16th-century list of
devil-worshipping countries included: Tartary, China, Lapland, Fin-
land, the Northern Islands, the East Indies, Persia, Arabia, Anatolia,
17
Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, Russia, and Norway. According to the 18th-
century German theologian Johann Beaumont, any person anywhere
in the world who "confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh"
18
belongs to the devils.
As God incarnated himself in earthly flesh, so the devil was
supposed to incarnate himself in earthly flesh shortly before the
coming of doomsday. This demonic being was usually called Antichrist.
He would be known by his Christlike ability to perform healing
19
miracles, such as restoring sight to the blind. It was never explained
how these demonic miracles were to be distinguished from holy ones.
The coming of Antichrist was constantly announced, dozens of times in

j
each century. Canon Moreau and contemporary churchmen report-
ed that Antichrist was born in 1 599 at Babylon, where the Jews
acclaimed him as their Messiah. 20 Apparently he was identified with
the Messianic Elijah for whom the Jews looked each year at Passover.
If there were any devilish attributes on which most myths agreed,

they were the rather godlike qualities of (1) superhuman intelligence,

and (2) superhuman sexuality. Inquisitor Jean Bodin wrote, "It is
have a profound knowledge of all things. No
certain that the devils

theologian can interpret the Holy Scriptures better than they can;
no
lawyer has more detailed knowledge of testaments, contracts and
actions; no physician or philosopher can better understand the composi-
tion of the human body, and the virtues of the heavens, the stars,
birds and fishes, trees and herbs, metals and stones." Inquisitor Nicholas
Remy said the devil had complete knowledge of everything human
beings could not explain. "Everything which is unknown lies
... in the

cursed domain of demonology; for there are no unexplained facts.

21
Whatever is not normal is due to the Devil."

227
Devil No Christian was permitted to disbelieve in the devil. His credibility
rested on the same foundation as that of God. Indeed, the very
^^^^^^^^^^^m concept of salvation depended on the devil. If there had been no
Tempter, there was no original sin, no fall, no hell, no need of a
redeemer or a church. De Givry correctly said, "If the Satanic concept
is tampered with, the whole edifice laboriously erected by the Fathers
22
of the Church crumbles to the ground."
The devil was essential to the dualistic theology that Christianity
copied from Persia. If the world was divided between the forces of
good and evil, an evil deity was necessary, otherwise evil would have to
be blamed on God. Logically, a god couldn't be both all-good and all-
powerful. If God could make a world without evil, and would not, he
couldn't be all-good. If God wanted to make a world without evil,

and could he couldn't be all-powerful. The only solution not a

not,

good one, but the only possible one was to supply God with an
evenly matched adversary, to be responsible for evil. Thus theologians
thought it the worst heresy, "contrary to the true faith," to suggest
23
that devils existed only in the ignorant imagination. The devil was so
real toMartin Luther that he accosted him one evening and threw an
24
inkpot at him.
It was a severe theological problem to account for God's apparent

helplessness to halt the devil's activity. Though Lucifer or Satan was

supposed have been utterly defeated and immobilized during the

to

famous War in Heaven, yet he was so lively that the War seemed to
have caused him nothing more than a momentary inconvenience.
Theologians could only propose that God "permitted" the devil's
freedom of action. They said, "It is not the witch's ointment nor her
incantation that makes her forked stick fly through the air, but the

power of the devil, allowed by God." 25 They never explained why the
church punished what God allowed.
Much semantic hairsplitting went into defining relationships be-
tween the devil, God, and humanity, such as the distinction between
sorcery and witchcraft. Sorcery was evoking spirits to "carry out those
powers which God permitted the Devil." Witchcraft was evoking

spirits to "commit acts against His ruling." In practice, a man who asked
the devil to help him seduce a woman was not guilty of any crime,
because sex was under the devil's jurisdiction, by God's order. Devils
who killed children did nothing sinful, for God permitted them to kill

children "in order to punish their parents."

26
On the other hand, a
woman who her dying child with witch-herbs was
tried to save
27
mortally guilty and deserved the death penalty.
that all works of witches were brought about
Theologians argued
by the devil with God's permission. Even a witch who did only good
works, like healing the sick, must suffer the same death as a witch whose
acts were harmful. 28 Thus witches were placed in a no-win situation.

Once a man beat a witch for casting a spell on his son, and forced her to

remove the spell. Pope Benedict XIV ruled that the witch committed

228
adouble sin by using the devil's power twice, even though she did it
Devil
under coercion the second time. Benedict carefully stipulated that the
man who beat her was entirely innocent of wrongdoing. 29
The church created the idea that witches were the devil's
helpers,
involved in a vast plot to undermine Christian society. This theory
was the real root of the witch mania. The people were generally
indifferent to the priests' witch-hunting until this theory was forced
on them by propaganda from the pulpit, which deliberately played on
their fear of the devil after stimulating it in the first place. 50

It sometimes happened that churchmen themselves consulted the

devil, without paying the same penalties they inflicted on lay persons.

Some miracle-working heretics were convicted by the bishop of Besan-

con in 1 1 70, on the evidence of none other than Satan, interviewed
by the bishop with the help of a priest skilled in necromancy. Satan
assured the bishop that the accused were indeed his servants, so they
31
were sent to the stake.

The devil was useful to clergymen or anyone else seeking an

excuse for lecherous behavior. According to one story:

The devil transformed himselfinto the appearance ofSt. Silvanus, Bishop

ofNazareth, a friend of St. Jerome. And this devil approached a noble
woman by night in her bed and began first to provoke and entice her with
lewd words, and then invited her to perform the sinful act. And when
she called out, the devil in the form of the saintly Bishop hid under the
woman 's bed, and being sought for and found there, he in lickerish
language declared lyingly that he was Bishop Silvanus. On the morrow
therefore, when the devil had disappeared, the holy man was scandal-
32
ously defamed.

Some sly fellows used the devil to defraud. There was a

Cornishman who convinced his neighbors that he had sold his soul to
the devil. Taking a few coins to the tavern each night, he pretended
to receive money from the devil to pay for his drink. He would thrust his
hat up the chimney, calling on his diabolic friend; and the coins
appeared in his hat. The superstitious innkeeper wouldn't touch the
35
devil's money, so the Cornishman drank all evening for free.
The devilish pact was not a joke, however; it was an essential
ingredient of the devil-mythology that killed millions during six
it was
centuries of witch-hunting. Yet logically absurd. If the devil
received the soul of every sinner, as the church taught, he had no
need to secure it with a "pact"; it would be his anyway. As for the

sinners themselves, they seemed to derive little benefit from their side
of the contract, as Scot pointed out: any woman in her right mind would

reject the devil's bargain, saying, "Why should I hearken to you,

when you will me? Did you not promise my neighbor Mother
deceive
34
Dutton to save and rescue her; and yet lo she is hanged?"
Early in the Christian era there were no very severe punishments
for making a pact with the devil. The Golden Legend tells of a young

man who signed over his soul to the devil to win the love of a certain

229
Devil lady. Later, St. Basil prayed over the young man and retrieved his

contract, a piece of paper which dropped from an upper balcony of the

^^^^^^^^^^_ church, "fluttered down through the air and fell into his hands, in the
sight of all." The paper was torn up and
the youth set free. 55
Several popes were said to have made a diabolic pact, including

one who may have genuine pagan tradition:

ideological roots in a
Silvester II. His real name was Gerbert de Aurillac. He grew up in a
France permeated by Dianic and druidic fairy-religion, where
still

Aphrodite was worshipped at Rouen up to the 12th century, and the

Moon-goddess's groves attracted pilgrims up to the 14th. Silvester
chose a papal name meaning "spirit of the grove," and it was said he
had a fairy mistress named Meridiana (Mary-Diana), who taught him
the secrets of magic. 36 According to Cardinal Benno and William of

Malmesbury, Silvester signed a pact with the devil to achieve the

37
papal throne, and the devil gave it to him.

The truth about Pope Silvester was that he had unusually intellec-
tual tastes for his time. He remarked that, for the frustrations and
38
difficulties of his life, "philosophy was the only cure." In his time,

"philosophy" didn't mean Christian theology. It meant pagan litera-

ture, natural science, and Hermetism.

The list ofgreat wen in those centuries charged with magic . . . is

astounding; it includes every man of real mark, and in the midst of

them stands one of the most thoughtful popes, Silvester II (Gerbert), and
the foremost of medieval thinkers on natural science, Albert the Great.
It came to be the accepted idea that, as soon as a man conceived a wish to

study the works of God, his first step must be a league with the devil. 39

Another "devilish" philosopher was Heinrich Cornelius Agrip-

of
pa von Nettesheim, historiographer to Emperor Charles V, author
the famous treatise on Hermetism, De occulta philosophia. The
church execrated his works and severely reprimanded him for trying to
defend accused witches, but his wealthy patrons protected him from
only once he was imprisoned for debt, not heresy. He called
40
arrest:

magic the perfect science, and implied as the Gnostic heretics did
that knowledge came to man not as a gift of God but as a gift of the

devil.

Agrippa's life story contributed to the legend

of Faust, around
which centered many thrilling tales of the devil's pact. The real Faust
was not impressive. As an obscure schoolmaster in Kreuznach, he was
41
dismissed from his post in 1 507 on a charge of sodomy. Six years
later he reappeared as an astrologer and soothsayer calling himself the

Demigod of Heidelberg. Later, citizens of Munster knew him as "the

famous necromancer, Dr. Faustus." Ultimately, his fame rested not on
any of his doings but on the so-called Faustian books, Hb'llenzwange,
works
"Harrowings of Hell," which he didn't write. These anonymous
grew body of literature professing to tell the reader how to
into a large

make a pact with the devil, work magic, find buried treasure, win love
and fortune, and finally renounce the pact in time to save one's soul.

230
Predictably, such bookswere enormously popular. Two books really Devil
written by Agrippa von Nettesheim to win the favor of Margaret of
Austria, The Superiority of Women and The Nobility of the Female

Sex, were declared heretical and forbidden publication by the clergy.

42

Magic books nearly always gave formulae for negotiating with the
devil. Le Dragon Rouge told the aspiring wizard to address Le Dragon Rouge,
"Emper-
or Lucifer, master of all the rebellious spirits," and his ministers ou 1'art de
4B commander les
Lucifuge Rofocale, Prince Beelzebub, and Count Ashtoreth. Mag-
esprits celestes,
ic Papyri that had been early models for these books often confused the
aeriens, terrestres,
names and and Lucifer, speaking of "God the
attributes of Jehovah infernaux A grimoire
light-bringer (Lucifer), invincible, who knoweth what is in the heart of published at
all life, who of the dust hath formed the race of men." 44 We have Avignon, dated 1 522.
The date may have
seen the same kind of confusion in Christian theology itself. Yet in
been a hoax, the actual
14th-century Toulouse, witches were burned for saying what was much
publication
actually a tenet of the church's dualism: that "God and the Devil were later.

completely equal, the former reigning over the sky and the latter the
earth; all souls which the Devil managed to seduce were lost to the
Magic Papyri
Most High God and lived perpetually on earth or in the air." 45 Collections of
Even up to the 20th century, churchmen insisted on the devilish exorcisms,

Thurston wrote: "In the face of Holy Scripture and the invocations, charms,
pact. Father
and spells widely
teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact circulated during the
with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can
early Christian era,
46
hardly be denied." But the Fathers and theologians never explained used as bases for later

how the devil could profit from the pact, other than to receive a grimoires and
Hermetic texts.
"soul" that was his anyway. As Samuel Butler said, no one heard the
47
devil's side of any story, because God wrote all the books.
One Herbert Thurston,
might think an "enlightened" modern society would have
S.J. Early 20th-century
given up the idea of the devil. But a poll taken in 1978 showed "two writer on the subject
out of five Americans believe in devils." 48 The strange viability of devils of occultism.
may arise from their usefulness in assuaging the guilt of God and
man. "Both Judaism and Christianity have maintained that God must
be given the credit for all the goodness in human history, and that
men must take the blame for all the evil." 49 Thus, the real purpose of
the devil was to take some of this heavy responsibility off frail human
shoulders. In short: the devil, not Christ, was the true scapegoat who
assumed the burden of men's sins.

1. Larousse, 317. 2. Scot, 444. 3. Tennant, 13. 4. Briffault 2, 564.

5. Scot, 323-25. 6. J.H. Smith, C.G., 287. 7. Summers, V, 56. 8. H. Smith, 276.
9. J.B. Russell, 121. 10. Reinach, 72. 11. Hazlitt, 176.
12. de Voragine, 670; Wedeck, 95. 13. Haining, 59.
14. Lindsay, O. A., 197. 15. Knight, D.W.P., 152. 16. Robbins, 127.
17. Scot, 521, 523. 18. Silberer, 286. 19. Gifford, 120.
20. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 168. 21. Robbins, 127, 408. 22. de Givry, 49.
23. Cavendish, P.E. 24, 139. 24. de Givry, 139. 25. Robbins, 213.
26. J.B. Russell,146. 27. Haining, 85. 28. Robbins, 213. 29. Summers, 36. W,
30. Robbins, 218. 31. Lea, 2. 32. Kramer &
Sprenger, 134.
33. Hazlitt, 647. 34. Scot. 40. [Link] Voragine, 312. 36. Gaster, 771.
37. Woods, 89. 38. Encyc. Brit, "Silvester." 39. White 1 , 386.
40. Encyc. Brit, "Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius." 41. Encyc. Brit, "Faust."
42. Seligmann, 212. 43. de Givry, 1 17. 44. Barrett, 32.
45. Baroja, 85. 46. Summers, H.W, 63. 47. Ebon, W.T., 86.
48. Newsweek, June 26, 1978, 32. 49. Muller, 87.

231
Diabokis Diabolus
Diamond
Latin name of the devil, "Serpent of the Goddess." Legend said the
Great Mother made her serpent consort from a bolus of clay, rolled
between her hands until it stretched into a snake form. Then she
brought it to life.
1

Egyptians said Isis made a clay serpent in this way,

and also a new clay phallus for Osiris. With this phallus that she
made, she conceived Osiris's reincarnated persona, the infant Horus.
The same bolus gave rise to the papal "bull," through the
derivative bulla, a coiled clay seal on a document, usually stamped
with magical signs to discourage tampering. The bulla was also a
2
protective amulet worn by a Roman child before coming of age.
1. Graves, CM. 1,27. [Link],71.

Diakosmos
"Goddess-Universe," a Pythagorean and Stoic term for the "order"
imposed on the elements in Primal Chaos, to bring about the creation
name of the abyssal Mother, Themis, Kosmos
of the world. Like the
meant "correct order" and was used by Homer to mean an arrange-
ment of woman's ornaments. The philosophers' idea was that the
1

Goddess created manifest forms for her own adornment, giving rise to
all the material world, the beauty of which was her outer garment and

jewels. Her true spirit moved within and behind these things, unseen.

Through the life of the universe she constantly arranged and re-

arranged the outward manifestations of her "order" to make infinite

numbers of different living forms. At doomsday she destroyed them
all, to begin over with the next creation. See Tohu Bohu.
1. Lindsay, O.A., 75, 120.

Diamond
Literally, "World-Goddess." The ancients used to believe gem
stones were solidified drops of the divine essence, embedded in rocks
when the world was created. Diamonds were sacred to the Mother of
the gods because they "ruled" all other stones by their superior
hardness. In Tantric Tibet, the divine essence of the Earth-goddess
Tara is still assumed to inhabit her human incarnation, the Diamond
Sow, traditional consort or feminine counterpart of the Dalai Lama.
Because diamonds were sacred to the supreme Goddess, they were
taken over by the cult of the Virgin; and because of this association
with virginity they came to be considered appropriate betrothal gifts. In
the transition from Tarot cards to modern playing cards, diamonds

replaced the ancient suit of pentacles, which were symbols of

Mother
Earth (Tara) and of the feminine earth element.

232
 Diana Diana

"Queen of Heaven," Roman name for the Triple Goddess as (1)

Lunar Virgin, (2) Mother of Creatures, and (3) the Huntress (Destroy-
er). Her Greek name was Artemis. Her major pilgrimage centers

were Ephesus and Nemi, the Sacred Grove. She was Dione, Diana
Nemorensis, or Nemetona, Goddess of the Moon-grove. In her
sanctuaries, sacred kings periodically
engaged in combat, the loser dying
god Hippolytus, the winner invested as the Goddess's new
as the

favorite, Virbius. See Hippolytus, Saint.

As Diana Egeria, patroness of childbirth, nursing, and healing, the
Goddess made Nemi's holy spring the Lourdes of pagan Rome. The 1

legendary King Numa was said to have derived all his wisdom from a
sacred marriage with her.
Diana's cult was so widespread in the pagan world that early
Christians viewed her as their major rival, which is why she later
became "Queen of Witches." The Gospels commanded total destruc-
tion of all temples of Diana, the Great Goddess worshipped by "Asia

and all the world" (Acts 19:27).

Roman towns all over Europe habitually called the local mother

goddess Diana, as later Christian towns were to call her Madonna.

Fortunatus said Diana was the Goddess worshipped at Vernemeton, Venantius Honorius
"which in the Gaulish language means the Great Shrine." In the 5th Clementianus
Fortunatus 6th-
century a.d., the Gauls regarded her as their supreme deity. Christians
century poet, bishop of
spoke slightingly of their pagan custom of adoring the spirit of Diana
Poitiers, still venerated
in a cut branch or a log of wood. 2 Gozbert, a 7th-century Frankish as a saint in France.
chieftain, doubted the claims of a Christian missionary on the ground
that the Christian God was "no better than our own Diana." 3
At Ephesus, the Goddess was called Mother of Animals, Lady of
Wild Creatures, and Many-Breasted Artemis, shown with her entire
4
torso covered with breasts to nourish the world's creatures. In the 4th

century a.d., the church took over this shrine and re-dedicated it to

the virgin Mary.

5
One of the earliest churches devoted to "Our Lady"
existed at in 43 1 but most of the people believed the Lady
Ephesus ;

was Diana, not Mary. In 432 the Council of Ephesus tried to eliminate
worship of the pagan Goddess, but the bishops were besieged by
crowds demanding, "Give us our Diana of the Ephesians!"6
An excuse for converting Diana's temples into Mary's churches
was provided by a made-to-order legend that Mary lived at Ephesus
in her old age. Her tomb was located there, and some Christians even
7
pointed out the house in which she had lived. But sometimes she
was identified with the sinister Widow of Ephesus, a Crone aspect of
the Goddess showing some primitive features.

Petronius's version of the myth said the Widow hung her hus-
band's dead body on one of the three crosses in front of Diana's

temple, replacing the body of a previously crucified thief. Then she lay
with her new lover at the foot of the cross. 8 The parallel between this

image and that of the

i
triple Mary at the foot of Jesus's cross was too

233
Diana close for comfort, especially since Diana herself was assimilated to the

Christian myth Mary's mother, or elder self, the "Grandmother of

as

^^^^^^^^^^^ God" under the name of either Anna (Hannah) or Di-anna

9
(Dinah).
Gnostic Christians called their Wisdom-goddess Sophia the same
Grandmother of God, and frequently identified her with Diana of
Ephesus. When Diana's temple was finally pulled down, as the Gospels
ordered, its magnificent porphyry pillars were carried to Constantino-
10
ple and built into the church of Holy Sophia.

The magic of Ephesus was remembered through the Middle Ages.

A writer said in 1725: "Itis recorded in divers authors that in the

image of Diana, which was worshipped at Ephesus, there were certain

obscure words or sentences . . . written upon the feet, girdle and
crown of the said Diana: the which, if a man did use, having written

them out, and carrying them about him, he should have good luck in
11
all his businesses."

Some Christians even remembered that Diana was once the triple

deity who ruled the world. A 14th-century poem attributed to the

12
Bishop of Meaux said Diana was an old name for the Trinity.
Officers of the Inquisition however regarded Diana as the "God-
dess of the heathen" with whom witches made their aerial night
journeys or thought they did. 13 The worship of Diana was denounced
wherever it was found, even when the worshippers were members of
the clergy. In the 14th century, a bishop found the monks of Frithel-
stock Priory worshipping a statue of "the unchaste Diana" at an altar
14
in the woods, and made them destroy it. The notorious inquisitor

Torquemada declared bluntly that Diana is the devil. 15

Devil or not, Diana ruled the wild forests of Europe through the
medieval period. As patron of the forest of Ardennes she was Dea
Arduenna; as patron of the Dea Abnoba. 16
Black Forest she was

Serbians, Czechs, and Poles knew her as the woodland Moon-

17
goddess Diiwica, Devana, or Dziewona. She remained the Goddess
of wild woodlands and hunting, all the way up to the 18th century in

England.
Dianic rites were celebrated even
in church, despite objections

from the clergy. A minister wrote against the traditional parade of a

stag's head into St. Paul's Cathedral in London: "bringing in procession

into the church the head of a deer, fixed on the top of a long spear or
pole, with the whole company blowing Hunters Horns in a sort of
hideous manner; and with this rude pomp they go up to the High
Altar, and offer it there. You would think them all the mad Votaries of
Diana." 18
[Link],G.B.,5,10. 2. Graves, W.G., 273-74. 3. Reinach, 153.
4. Neumann, G.M., 35. 5. Ashe, 185. 6. Legman, 661. 7. Ashe, 112, 185.
pi.
8. Legman, 650. 9. Graves, W.G, 411. 10. J.H. Smith, C.G., 234.
11. Hazlitt, 103. 12. Seznec, 92-93. 13. Kramer & Sprenger, 104.
[Link],71. 15. J.B. Russell, 235. 16. Spence, 76. 17. Larousse, 288.
18. Hazlitt, 484.

234
 Dictynna Dictynna
Title of Mother Rhea as the Lawgiving Goddess of Mount Dicte, on Diogenes
Crete, where the tablets of her laws and "e-dicts" were given to Minoan ^^mbm^^hm^m
kings.
1
"Dictate" is an English derivative of the goddess's directives
from Dicte.
1 . Larousse, 86.

Dido
Priestess-queenand foundress of Carthage, identified with Cyprian
Aphrodite and the Goddess Tanit. As Dido-Anna she was the consort
of the Tyrian god Melek-Heracles, who died by fire as a sacrificial
victim each year. According to Roman myth, Dido chose Aeneas as her
sacred king and was going to sacrifice him, but he escaped and fled,

leaving her to perish in his place. He survived to become the founder of

Rome.
Another of Dido's names was Elissa, "the Goddess."

Dike var. Dice

Alternative spelling of the Greek Fate-goddess Tyche, whom the

Orphics called Eurydice, "Universal Dike." To her were dedicated the
oracular knucklebones (dice) used to select sacrificial victims by the
rite of lots, and to prophesy the future, like the Hebrews' sacred urim
and thummim. See Orphism.

Diogenes
Cynic philosopher who lived in an earthen pot at the door of the
Great Mother's temple and constantly looked for one honest man. 1

Cynics were "dogs" or "watchdogs" of the Goddess, as their name

implies (kynikos, doglike ones). They sought an honest man because
they believed they were living in the last age of the world, and the
Goddess would destroy it when there was not one honest man still living
it.

This matched the Oriental concept of the Kali Yuga, last age of
Sin
I the world, when men become callous, violent, disorderly, and dishon-
orable. 2 When these conditions were completely fulfilled, doomsday
was imminent.
The word "cynical" descended from the implication that, despite
I
Diogenes's lifelong search, he never found the one honest man
whose existence still prevented the earth's destruction. See Dog.
1. Campbell, Oc.M., 244. 2. Mahanirvanatantra, 52.

235

IE
Dionysius
Dionysius the Areopagite
One of the most influential Christian writers of the Middle Ages,
^^^^^^^^ revered for his mystical insights, knowledge of heavenly matters, and

holy life. His only fault was that he never existed.

Dionysius's works were forged about the 6th century a.d. and
palmed off as the work of one Dionysius the first bishop of Athens,

supposedly converted to Christianity by St. Paul personally, during the

latter's spirit-visit to Greece as a ghost, after having been "caught up
to the third heaven." Paul told pseudo-Dionysius about heaven, and
pseudo-Dionysius wrote it down and preached it from the Athenian
Hill of Ares; hence his title, Areopagite.

The medieval church based its organization of three sacraments,

three holy orders, and three lower orders on the spurious revelations
of Dionysius, in imitation of the heavenly hierarchy he described,

consisting of (1) Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; (2) Dominions,

Virtues, and Powers; (3) Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The
spirits of heaven remained thus organized all the way up to the 18th

century.
Churchmen reluctantly abandoned their belief in the authenticity

of Dionysius's writings when it was pointed out that, despite earlier

scholars' unquestioning acceptance, they failed the simplest of chrono-

logical tests, constantly referring to events and institutions of much

later datethan the time of the alleged Dionysius. At first the pious tried 1

to pretend these references were miraculous prophecies of the future,

but this defense proved untenable.

1. White 2, 315-16.

Dionysus
Identified with many other savior-gods, Dionysus was also called

Bacchus, Zagreus, Sabazius, Adonis, Antheus, Zalmoxis, Pentheus,

Pan, Liber Pater, or "the Liberator." His totem was a panther (Pan-
l

thereos, the Beast of Pan). His emblem was the thyrsus, a phallic scepter

tipped with a pine cone. His priestesses were the Maenads, or

Bacchantes, who celebrated his orgies with drunkenness, nakedness, and
sacramental feasting.

Dionysus is often presented as a rustic wine-god, inventor of

viniculture. He was more than that. He was a prototype of Christ,

with a cult center at Jerusalem as well as nearly every other major city in
the middle east. Plutarch said the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles was
celebrated in his honor: "I think that the festival of the Sabbath is not

wholly without relation to the festival of Dionysus." He added that

2

the Jews abstain from pork because their god Dionysus-Adonis (Lord

Dionysus) was slain by a boar. In the 1st century B.C. the Jews
themselves claimed to worship Dionysus under his Phrygian name of
Zeus Sabazius. 5
Tacitus said Dionysus Liber was the god of Jerusalem in a former

236
time, but a different god had replaced him, a god with less attractive Dionysus
characteristics: "Liber established a festive and cheerful worship, while
the Jewish religion is tastelessand mean." 4 Dionysus and Jehovah
were two sides of the same coin in the 5th century B.C., when
^'"'^^^^^^^^
literally

coins found near Gaza showed Dionysus on one side, and on the
other a bearded figure labeled JHWH Jehovah.
5

In Lebanon, Dionysus was incarnated in Ampelus, a "beautiful

youth" torn to pieces by a bull and reincarnated as a grapevine. In

Chios, the blood of men murdered by Dionysus's Maenads was used to
fertilize the vines. At Orchomenus, the Triple Goddess appeared in
Dionysian rites as "three princesses" who tore apart a male child and ate

him (the earth absorbing sacrificial blood). In Thebes, a king named

Pentheus dared to oppose the Dionysian cult, perhaps because he didn't
care to die like other Dionysian god-kings. But the women tore him
anyway, led by the king's own mother (or mother-goddess),
to pieces

who wrenched his head off. 6 Later Theban rites of Dionysus cen-
tered on killing and eating a fawn named Pentheus, and the Maenads
wore fawn skins. The god's Lydian totem was a fox, Bassareus,
forerunner of the medieval Reynard. There the Maenads called them-
7
selves Bassarids, and wore fox skins.

These darker legends show Dionysus's typical "savior" pattern:

first and most primitive, a king killed and cannibalized to provide both
the earth and women's wombs with fructifying blood; then a surrogate
for the king, a condemned young man chosen by lot;
criminal or a
then an animal substitute for the man; and finally, "flesh" and "blood"
devoured in the form of bread and wine, the classical Dionysian
sacrament at Eleusis.

In Palestine, Dionysus was identified with Noah, the first biblical

drunk (Genesis 9:21). His Greek title was Deucalion,

patriarch to get
"New-wine sailor," the flood hero in pre-Hellenic myths. 8 Dionysus
was also a form of Adam, offspring of Father Heaven and Mother
Earth (Zeus and Demeter), torn to pieces to make a sin offering of the
"wine" of his blood. 9 His later hero-incarnation Orpheus, star of the

popular Orphic Mysteries, was the same god, torn to pieces by

sacrificial

the Maenads. Proclus said, "Orpheus, because he was the principal in

10
the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god."

Orpheus was a third-generation savior, identified with his divine

[father Dionysus as Dionysus was identified with his divine father

Zeus. Seated on the Heavenly Father's throne, brandishing his light-

ning-scepter, Dionysus was hailed as King of Kings and God

of
Gods. 11 He was also the god-begotten, virgin-born Anointed One
UChristos) whose mother seems to have been all three forms of the

Triple Goddess: the earth mother, Persephone the underworld queen,

Semele the moon-maiden. Hints of a hanging or crucifixion ceremo-
ny appeared in his sacrificial title Dendrites, "Young Man of the
[Tree."
12
He was also a Horned God, with such forms as bull, goat,

and stag.

According to the classic story of his dismemberment, the god took

237
Dionysus such animal forms in rapid succession to avoid the onslaught of the
Titans (pre-Hellenic earth-deities), who eventually caught him, tore
him to pieces, and devoured him. They trapped his soul in a mirror
while he was admiring his reflection, which equates Dionysus with the

spring-flower god Narcissus, another of his many disguises. Accord-

Pausanias Greek
ing to Pausanias, it was Onomakritos who made the Titans into
traveler and
"authors of Dionysus's sufferings," but the orgia had not included
geographer of the 2nd
century a.d. Living in of old. Probably one of the god's oldest forms was Dionysus
this detail

a time of declining Melanaigis, "Dionysus of the Black Goatskin," a scapegoat-satyr like

culture, he was 13
His traditional costume contributed much to the medieval
Marsyas.
inspired by a desire to Christian notion of the devil's habit of appearing in the form of a
describe the ancient
black goat.
sacred sites for

posterity.
At Eleusis, the place of his "Advent," Dionysus appeared as a
newborn Holy Child laid in a winnowing-basket, liknon, from which
he was called Dionysus Liknites. This sacred object, his cradle, was
carried in his processions by a special functionary called a likno-
14
phoros, cradle-bearer. The liknon was the original form of the

"manger" in which the infant Jesus was laid. All grain-gods, whose
flesh was eaten in the form of bread, appeared as newborn babes in a

vessel intended for seed corn.

A long-remembered incarnation of the god was King Dionysus of

Syracuse, who altered the custom of king-sacrifice in the 4th century
B.C. When the time of his immolation approached, King Dionysus
substituted for himself a courtier who was called Damocles, meaning
either "Conquering Glory" or "Glory of Blood." Damocles was said to
have volunteered to take the king's place because he envied the

privileges of kingship. He enjoyed these privileges for a short while, but

soon discovered a sword suspended above his head by a single hair:
symbol of the fate of kings, in a time when they and the gods they
15
embodied were periodically fated to die. See Kingship.
1. James, 198. 2. Graves, W.G., 366-68. 4. Tacitus, 660.
Knight, S.L., 1 56. 3.

5. Graves, W.G, 368. 6. Graves, GM.

1, 105. 7. Larousse, 160.
8. Graves, GM.
2, 388. 9. Knight, S.L., 156. 10. Graves, GM.
1, 114.

[Link],GB.,451. 12. Graves, GM.

1, 107. 13. Guthrie, 169, 320.
14. Guthrie, 161. 15. Encyc. Brit, "Damocles."

Dioscuri
Greek version of the Heavenly Twins, gods of the morning and
evening star, born together out of the World Egg of Leda. Each wore
egg shell as a cap or crown. The twins were named
his half of the

Castor and Polydeuces, the latter meaning "abundant wine," perhaps a

reference to the flowing blood of the solar Savior whom the twins
ushered in and out of the underworld in rites linked with fertility.
1
The
name of Castor has been associated with the of castrating the god,
rite

in classical paganism defined as "the act of offering the phallus to the

Love Goddess." 2

238
 The Love Goddess was called Venus in Rome, and her planet is Diotima
thesame one that appears as both morning and evening "star." Djsj r
Perhaps this was why Christians associated Pollux, the Roman form of
Polydeuces, with "pollution." Like Shaher and Shalem in the land of
Canaan, the Heavenly Twins announced the daily birth of the sun with
the words "He is risen," and sent him into the underworld at his daily

death with the word "Peace" (Shalom, or Salaam). See Lucifer.

To Mithraic sun-worshippers the Dioscuri were symbolized by
two golden stars, which still appear in the heavens as the Alpha and
Beta stars of the constellation Gemini (the Twins). When the Dioscuri
were shown in anthropomorphic form in Mithraic shrines, they held

spears or torches, one upward, the other downward, signifying the rising
and setting directions of the sun. Their pose was standard: one twin
had the right leg crossed over the left, the other had the left leg crossed
right. The same "magic 4" leg position is seen on the
3
over the

Emperor card of the Tarot trumps. The Dioscuri were revered in

Sparta as horsemen, warriors, and war dancers.

1. Graves, CM. 1, 249; 2, 406. 2. Jobes, 179. 3. Cumont, MM., 128.

Diotima
Priestess of Mantinea, famous Pythagorean philosopher, teacher of
Socrates: another once-renowned alma mater later forgotten by patriar-
chal historians. 1

[Link],261.

Di Parentes
"Parental deities," Roman title of the Manes or children of Mother

Mana, the Moon-goddess; ancestral spirits generally. At the founding

1

of every Roman town a hole had to be dug, and covered with the

lapis manalis, as a gate to allow the Di Parentes to pass in and out of the
underworld so they would accept the town's location as their home.
They were honored each year at the festival of Parentalia.
1. Larousse, 213.

Disir

Norse word for the Primal Matriarchs, or Divine Grandmothers, who

ruled the clans before the coming of patriarchal gods. The Goddess
Freya was the Vanadis, leader of the disir.
1
The matriarchs had the
true magic, which the gods had to learn from them.
[Link]-Petre, 176.

239
Dis Pater Dis Pater
^* "Father Dis," a Roman name of the Lord of Death inherited from
^^^^^^^^^^i Etruscan times. On occasion he wore the wolf head of the Etruscan god
of the dead. Like underground Pluto he was called "the rich one,"
because he knew everything about mines, deposits of gem stones, and
buried treasure. Gallic Celts worshipped Dis above every other male
1

deity, claiming he was the "father" of their race in the old way of the
dying god who became
"father" by shedding his blood (see King-

ship). In Britain, Dis was regarded as a universal deity very like Jehovah,
whose later adherents, however, transformed Dis into an alternative
name for the devil. 2

1 .
Umusse, 211. 2. Graves, W.G., 45.

Djinn
Arabic "spirits," or ancestral souls. Djinni was a genie, cognate of the
Roman genius, paternal ghost or begetter. Mohammedans viewed the
djinn as pagan semi-demons because they were connected with the
Old Religion. See Genius.

Dog
No one knows when man first domesticated the dog. Evidence
suggests that at all; woman did it. In myth, dogs
"man" didn't do it

accompanied only the Goddess, guarding the gates of her after-world,

helping her to receive the dead.
Like other carrion eaters e.g., vultures dogs, wolves, and jack-
alswere associated with funerary customs. Dogs carried the dead to
their Mother. In Iran, even after it became usual to bury the dead, it was

thought necessary to let dogs tear the corpse before burial, a survival
of the older practice. 1
The Vendidad said the soul enroute to heaven

would meet the Goddess with her dogs: "Then comes the beautiful,
well-shapen, strong and graceful maid, with the dogs at her sides, one
who can discern, who has many children, happy and of high
2
understanding. She makes the soul of the righteous go up above."
Semitic tradition transformed the Goddess into the Angel of
Death, whose approach can be seen only by dogs which is why
at the moon to announce a death. Devonshire folklore
3
dogs howl still

4
says there is a dog in the moon who acts as a messenger of death.
The Irish say two dogs guard the gate of death, which used to lead to

Emania, the Moon-land; mourners were enjoined not to wail too

loudly, lest they disturb the dogs and cause them to attack the soul at the

gate. This and many other similar images can be traced to the ancient
Vedic concept of the moon as death's gate, ruled by the Goddess and
5
guarded by her two dogs.

240

'*ty
 This Oriental symbol is still seen in an almost pure form on Tarot Dog
trump #18, the card of the Moon. The conventional picture is of two
dogs howling at the full moon in front of a gate, or two pylons, with a
road leading between them to a distant horizon. The scene was
usually interpreted as having to do with death. 6 Sometimes the card was
called Hecate, after the classic death-goddess whose totemic compan-
ionswere dogs. 7 Her gates were guarded by the three-headed hound
8
Cerberus, "Spirit of the Pit." In Celtic myth the gatekeeper was a
9
dog named Dormarth, "Death's Door." The same dog might be seen
on the famous Gundestrup Cauldron, guarding the yonic gate
through which heroes pass on their way to death and transfiguration.
10

According to the Vedic tradition, the Bitch-goddess Sarama was

the mistress of the death dogs, and a divine huntress
Artemis, like
11
Diana, Anath, and other western versions of the lunar maiden.
Ancient Babylon knew her as Gula, the Fate-goddess, whose symbol
was a dog. 12 She was assimilated to Ishtar, whose sacred king Tammuz
was torn to pieces by "dogs." B Under his Greek names of Adonis or
Actaeon, he was torn to pieces by the Dogs of Artemis. As the savior
Orpheus, he was incarnated in Neanthus of Lesbos and torn to pieces
"H
in the Orphic temple by "dogs. When Athene assumed the guise of
the death-goddess, her priestesses filled her temple with canine
15
"howlings" (houloi), like wolves or dogs singing to the moon. Some-
times awhole pack of dogs or priestesses? hunted souls in the
realm of death, like the Celtic Hounds of Annwn, which Christians
soon converted into the Hounds of Hell. 16
Originally this meant the hounds of the Goddess Hel, ruler of the

land of death. Norse myth said she gave birth to lunar wolf-dogs who
ate the flesh of the dead and carried souls to paradise. Their leader was

Managarm, "Moon-Dog." The Prose Edda says Managarm was Prose Edda
Icelandic saga, a
"gorged with the flesh of the death-doomed; and with red blood he
collection of traditional
reddens the dwelling of the gods." 17 In other words, he carried the
stories compiled by
dead away in primitive, carrion-eating canine fashion.
Snorri Sturluson in the
An alternative name for the Norse moon-dogs' mother was Angur- 13 th century a.d.

boda, the Hag of the Iron Wood: an older version of Hel, sometimes
called Hel's mother. 18 Two of Angurboda's canine children, Geri and
Freki, lived in Valhalla and ate the food offered on "Odin's table,"

meaning the This suggests that the Vedic image of the two death
altar.
19

like the
dogs passed into Norse mythology as a pair of canine gods,
many holy dogs, wolves, or jackals of the ancient world in general.
One of the oldest of these gods was Egyptian Anubis, brought
from central Asia at a very early date under the name of Up-Uat,
"Opener of the Way." He was also known as Mates, "He of the
20
Mother," similar to the archaic Irish word for a dog, madra. This
old Asian god was said to be a wolf, but he soon merged with the jackal
Anubis, who was called his twin. The composite was a deity "whose
face is like unto that of a greyhound . . . who feedeth on the dead . . .

who devoureth the bodies of the dead, and swalloweth hearts." In the

241
D8 predynastic period he governed sacrificial priests, "jackal-headed men
21
with slaughtering-knives," in an old section of the underworld.
mhmm^^^^^m Coptic Christians later identified Anubis with Cabriel, who was called a
22
judge of the dead.
As a lord of the land of death, Anubis became the god of
mummification. He was often shown bending solicitously over the
mummy of Osiris, applying the preservative mumiya from which the
word "mummy" descended. When the Osiris cult became astrologi-
cal, much
of its imagery was transposed from the underworld to the
heavens, including the image of Anubis.
The star of Anubis was Sothis (Sirius), the Eye of the Dog, in
Greek, Canopis. Sirius is the star forming the "eye" of Canis Major, the
Great Dog. It is the brightest star in the sky. Egyptians believed it
held the soul of Osiris, whose rebirth coincided with the rising of the
Nile flood, when his star rose in the east. "Three wise men" pointed
the way to the newborn Savior: the three stars in Orion's belt, which
form a The holy city of Anubis on earth was
line pointing to Sirius.

also Canopis, the

Eye of the Dog, origin of the canopic mummy-jar.
Anubis came to Rome as a leading character in the Osirian
Mysteries. He was seen in processions "condescending to walk on
human feet . . . and neck that
rearing terrifically high his dog's head
messenger between heaven and hell displaying alternately a face

black as night, and golden as the day; in his left the caduceus, in his right

waving green palm branch. His steps were closely followed

aloft the

a
by cow, raised into an upright posture the cow being the fruitful
emblem of the Universal Parent, the goddess herself, which one of
the happy train carried with majestic steps, supported on his shoulders.

By another was borne the coffin containing the sacred things, and
23
closely concealing the deep secrets of the holy religion."
Not only Anubis, but many other dog-deities were worshipped
throughout the Roman empire. An early Roman cista from Pales-
trina-Praeneste showed the Moon-virgin Minerva sacrificing a naked
Mars over by her three-headed death dog,
a cauldron, attended
24
clearly the samePersephone's or Hecate's Cerberus. The dog as
as

the keeper of Mother's gate was known everywhere in antiquity,

probably because wild dogs were first domesticated as guardians of the

home threshold, doorways being generally sacred to women who
owned the houses. In Assyria, images of dogs were buried under
thresholds of houses, suggesting similar burials of deceased watchdogs
in former times. 25 The dogs' spirits continued to halt intruders, which
may account for the ancient custom of lifting a new bride over a
threshold, so the guardian spirits beneath would not think her an
intruder but would accept her as a resident.

The Cynic Diogenes made himself a watchdog at the gate of

sage
the Great Mother's temple, where he lived in "a large earthen pot,"
26
representing the terrestrial womb. Cynics were the Goddess's "doglike
ones" (kynikos). Their sect, founded in the 4th century B.C., professed

242
to foretell the end of the world from the circumpolar constellation Ursa
Dog
Minor, which they called the Dog. The
north pole star was the
Dog's
Tail, kunos oura, the Cynosure. 27 When it moved from its place at the
still point of the turning world, according to the Cynics, the end of
the present universe was at hand.
The Cynic idea of the affixed to the north pole is still found in
dog
European folklore. Slavs
spoke of the three Zorya (triple Fate-

goddess), keeping "a dog which is tied by an iron chain to the

constellation of the Little Bear. When the chain breaks it will be the

end of the world." 28 Egyptians similarly believed the Goddess kept

"powers of darkness" fettered by a heavenly chain until the last days
of the world. 29 Northern peoples said the chain held the cosmic

doomsday-wolf Fenrir, who would be released by the Norns (triple

Fate-goddess) to devour the heavenly father at the end of the world; this
would signal the destruction of all the gods. 30 Norsemen therefore
31
called doomsday the Day of the Wolf.
The Great Goddess was herself a wolf, in the very old Roman cult
of the She- Wolf Lupa, whose original consort was Lupus, the Wolf.
He was also Feronius, or Dis Pater, a subterranean wolf god inherited
from the Etruscans, as was the She- Wolf who suckled Rome's
founders, Romulus and Remus. The famous Lupercalian statue of the
She- Wolf was cast in bronze during the 5th century B.C. The two
babies under her belly were not part of the original work but were added
centuries later, to suit the Roman version of the legend. 32
The Lupercalia may have been a corruption of Lupa-Kali; the
Oriental Great Goddess was also a she-wolf. Under her yoni-name of
Cunti she gave birth to a divine son "in the cave of the wolf," like the

Lupercal grotto. Her child was placed in a basket of rushes and set
afloat on the Ganges, as Romulus and Remus were set afloat on the
Tiber, Moses was set afloat on the Nile, and Sargon was set afloat on
the Euphrates. The wolf bitch Lupa was identified with the midwife-
goddess Acca Larentia who took Romulus and Remus from their
basket, just as Akka took Sargon, and "pharaoh's daughter" (another
version of Akka) took Moses. Akka, Acca, or Acco was the same as
Hecate, turned into a wolf bitch in Homeric legend. 33 Lupa (or
who
Acca) disappeared into the sacred spring of the Lupercal grotto,
where her spirit was worshipped every year at the Lupercalian festival.
There were many lupine foster-mothers in Middle-Eastern myths.
Tu Kueh, legendary founder of the Turkish nation, was preserved in
infancy by a holy she-wolf whom he subsequently married: that is, she
was the Goddess of the land in totemic form. 34 A famous Turkish
leader was Ataturk, "the Gray Wolf." 35 Zoroaster was raised by a she-

wolf. Cyrus the Great, born of Mandane (Moon-mother), was

nursed by a woman whose Greek name was Cyno, her Median name
Spako, meaning "Bitch." Siegfried too was a wolf's foster child; his
oldest name was Wolfdietrich. 36
The oldest religion of the Canary Islands was a dog- or wolf-cult,

243
Dog traces of which are still seen in many ancient canine statues. Canary
birds and canary wine took their name from the islands, which were
37
^^mmmmmm^^^^am really named for Canis, the dog.

The same name once applied to the hereditary caste of Jewish

58
priests, Kohen or Cohen, from Greek kuon, "dog." Because dogs
were associated with the old matriarchy, the epithet "dog" became an
insult to Semitic patriarchs; Islam forbids both women and dogs to
59
approach a shrine. Yet Moslems still incongruously believe the gall of
a black dog can serve as a holy amulet to purge an entire household
of evil influences. 40

Early Christians made an effort to assimilate the Gallo-Roman

41
wolf god under the name of St. Lupus or St. Loup, "Holy Wolf."
He was made a legendary bishop of Troyes, credited with miraculously
turning back the invading Huns from his province; but this story was
42
fiction masquerading as history. The church was not wholly comfort-
able with any of the manifestations of Lupus, who was really a

prototype of the werewolf. Saxons used to worship him in the first

month of the sacred year, called Wolf-monath (Wolf Month); but
Christian authorities changed the name of this month to After- Yule, or

Jesu-monath. runic sign was a dot in a circle, the same as the

Its
43
Festival of the Circumcision of Christ (New Year's Day).

Diana the Huntress and her "dogs" had an extensive cult in

England. Some of her legends merged with those of Arthur, Lance-

lot, and other British heroes. One of the tales told how Lancelot, like
Actaeon, trespassed in the Goddess's greenwood and fell asleep at her
secret spring:

There was a Lady dwelt in that forest, and she was a great huntress, and
used to hunt, and ever she bare her bow with her; and no man
daily she
went never with her, but always women, and they were shooters, and
could well kill a deer, both at the stalk and at the trest; and they daily
bare bows and arrows, horns and wood knives, and many good dogs they
had. 44

When the "Lady" caught Lancelot in the forbidden place, she

didn't set her dogs on him as her forerunners had done. She only shot
him he might not sit on no saddle." 45 Thus he
in the buttock, "that

was disgraced, since a warrior was supposed to show wounds only in

front.

Because dogs were natural companions of the housewife as well as

the huntress, they were often cited as witches' familiars. black dog A
seemed even more suspect than a black cat. The dog was frequently
believed to be the animal form of a demon lover, probably because
women were inclined to fondle their dogs; many women were hanged
in England on that count alone. One witch was officially condemned
for having "carnal copulation with the devil in the likeness of a man, but
he removed from her of a black dog." 46
in the likeness

Gypsies told a story based on such witch trials: there was a

beautiful maiden whose lover was her dog. Once each year he

244
transformed himself into a man and lay with
her. In due time, she
gave Dog
birth to a "little white puppy," then she jumped into the river and
drowned popular method of disposing of witches was to drown them
(a
^^^^_^^^__
in the so-called swimming ordeal). The demon lover assumed his
human shape, retrieved the maiden's corpse, and brought her back to
life by placing the puppy-child at her breast to suck. Afterward, as in
fairy tales, they married and lived happily ever after.
all 47

The black
dog was the
witch's helper in
gathering materials for
charms. According to an exceptionally durable superstition, the
miraculous mandrake root could not be pulled out of the
ground except
by a black dog. This curiously formed root, called "the of the phallus
"the devil's genitals," was supposed to emit a scream if
field," or

uprooted by the unwary; and all who heard the sound would go
48
insane, or die.
The Irish remembered the dog's connection with death and
maintained that true curses could be cast with a dog's help.
Among
the Celts, cainte, "dog," denoted a satiric bard with
magic power to
49
speak curses that would come true.

Dogs or wolves played their ancient role of psychopomps in a

number of strange stories about cathedral-building, which
might be
traced all the way back to the Etruscan Lupus or Dis Pater, the wolf-
headed Lord of Death who carried sacrificial victims away. In the very
old rite of the mundus, trenches dug temple foundations were
for

filled with sacrificial blood. It was believed the building would be

unstable if this
blood-magic were omitted; so it was done, from Hindu
India to Latium and Britain. Lupus appeared in sacred art as a wolf-

angel carrying the victim to a blessed after-life. On an Etruscan vase,

the death-god Charon is assimilated to Lupus and wears a wolfskin. 50
This notion that sacred buildings needed to be founded in blood
has been evident in every tradition including the Judeo-Christian
one. The Bible says when Hiel founded the city of Jericho, "he laid the
foundation thereof in (the blood of) Abiram his firstborn and set up
the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of
the Lord" (1 Kings 16:34). British legend said Vortigern's temple
walls kept falling down because the blood sacrifice for their foundation
had been forgotten. 51 Such pagan customs continued in the Middle
Ages. Many skeletons have been found buried in walls, pillars, and
cornerstones of churches and abbeys, placed there as supportive
sacrifices.
52
A
deaf-mute was buried under the cornerstone of a monas-
tery near Gottingen.
53
A parish church at Holsworthy, North Devon,
was found in 1845 to have a skeleton in its southwest wall. 54 Illegitimate
children were frequently buried in building foundations. One St.

Benezet, or Little Bennet, was walled up in the foundation of a bridge

at Avignon in 1 184. Five centuries later his crypt was opened, and
St. Benezet proved his
saintly status by remaining fresh and unde-
55
cayed. So his ecclesiastical press agents claimed, at any rate. "It was
really a common thing among Christians to sacrifice children, maids, or

245
Dog grown-up people by burying them alive under the foundations of
56
castles, etc., to insure their stability."
When St. Columba founded a monastery on the island of Iona, he
called for a volunteer to be buried alive in its foundation. A monk
named Oran, or Odran, earned a later canonization by offering
himself. 57 For some reason perhaps a promise of Christ-like resurrec-
tion he was dug up again he began to
after three days. Still alive,

preach blasphemous was no no

doctrines: there
God, devil, no heaven
or hell. St. Columba therefore had him killed and re-buried. 58 It was
not uncommon for monks infected with Gnostic, agnostic, or atheistic
beliefs to meet with such a fate.

Europe's totemic dog or wolf clans seem to have become involved

in these sacrificial customs, just as they were involved in the ancient
cult of the mundus. For instance, Cologne Cathedral was said to have
been designed by the devil, and its bells were cast under the devil's
direction at the foundry of a mysterious smith named Wolf. After

casting a certain discordant bell, supposed to be rung only in time of

disaster, Wolf was killed by a fall from the bell tower. The architect who
collaborated with the devil was also killed, crushed by a great stone
59
that already had his name engraved on it.

Chansons de gestes Chansons de gestes told a somewhat different version. The build-
Old French epic ers ofCologne Cathedral killed a hero named Renaud (Fox) and
poetry of the 11th to buried him in the foundation. A church was erected to Renaud's
1 3th centuries.

memory in 81 1 a.d.; a chapel stood on the spot in Cologne where he

60
was slain. Some said Renaud was the same as the trickster-hero-

demigod Reynard the Fox; others said he was a great warrior, one of
Charlemagne's paladins.
The devil and the wolf were also linked with Charlemagne's tomb
at Aix-la-Chapelle. The devil contributed money to build the cathe-

dral. In return, he demanded the life of the first creature to enter its

doors. At the dedication ceremony, people thrust a wolf into the

door. The devil took the wolfs life. Then it was safe for people to enter.
Like Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle had a discordant bell for emergencies.
The founder of this bell was crushed to death by the clapper, so the bell
was baptized with his blood.

Similar stories were told of Strasbourg Cathedral, supposedly

designed by a wise witch named Sabine, once a title of Lupa, the

Sabine She- Wolf. The dedication of the cathedral was marked by the
sacrifice of twin brothers, like Romulus and Remus, one of whom
killed the other by pushing him under a cornerstone as it was dropped
into place. (Of the twins nursed by the Sabine She- Wolf, Romulus

killed Remus while digging a furrow for the foundation of Rome's

walls.) The bishop of Strasbourg ordered the cornerstone raised
again, and the second brother was crushed under it also, by his wish. He
61
explained, "My body will serve as a protection to the cathedral."

Remnants of these curious beliefs and customs survived to the

present time. In World War II, the Nazi SS caused human bodies to

246
be "encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as
though such Dolcinists
bodies could give strength to inanimate matter." 62 To this day, Greek
insist on a blood sacrifice at the
peasants building of any bridge, to bathe ^^^^^^^^^^^
the foundation in the lifeblood of a bird or animal to "strengthen"
it."

The notion that a dog's blood is equivalent to the blood of a

human being is still found among the Berbers, who believe that a
murderer is
magically tainted by the blood of his victim for the rest of his
64
life. The killer of a dog is similarly tainted. Nearly everywhere one
can still find the belief that dogs can see ghosts and other spirits, left over
from the formerly universal association of canines with the world of
death and the special preserve of the underground Goddess. 65
1. Herodotus, 56. 2. Robertson, 115. 3. Budge, G.E. 1, 19.
4. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 197. 5. Lethaby, 193. 6. Cavendish, T, 128.
7. A. Douglas, 106. 8. Graves, G.M. 2, 385. 9. Squire, 257.
10. Cavendish, V.H.H. 49. 1 1 .
0'Flaherty, 352. 12. Lamusse, 63.
13. Assyr. & Bab. Lit., 338. 14. Lamusse, 198. 15. Herodotus, 270.
16. Graves, W.G., 36. 1 7. Sturluson, 39. 18. Graves, W.G., 409.
19. Sturluson, 63. 20. Joyce 2, 453. 21. Book of the Dead, 182, 394, 140.
22. Graves, W.G., 153. 23. Budge, G.E. 2, 266. 24. Dumezil, 243.
25. Budge, A.T., 99. 26. Campbell, Oc.M., 244. 27. Potter & Sargent, 174.
28. Lamusse, 285. 29. Budge, G.E. 2, 249. 30. Sturluson, 88.
31. Campbell, M.I., 72. 32. Lamusse, 220. 33. Rank, 18, 45; Graves, G.M. 2, 342.
34. Gaster, 228. 35. Wedeck, 173. 36. Rank, 29, 56-58. 37. Potter & Sargent, 173.
38. Knight, S.L., 114. 39. Farb, W.P., 144. 40. Budge, A.T., 12.
41. Knight, [Link].R, 191. 42. Attwater, 223. 43. Brewster, 50. 44. Malory 2, 307.
45. Malory 2, 308. 46. Robbins, 193, 463. 47. Groome, 139. 48. Simons, 67.
49. Joyce 1, 455. 50. Castiglioni, 201; Summers, W, 69. 51. Guerber, L.M.A., 205.
52. deLys, 380-81. 53. Groome, 13. 54. Elworthy, 80. 55. Brewster, 194.
[Link],241. 57. Joyce 1,285. 58. Holmes, 207. 59. Guerber, L.R., 47-56.
60. Guerber, L.M.A., 162. 61. Guerber, L.R., 85-88, 297-300. 62. Becker, E.E., 104.
63. Lawson, 264. 64. Frazer, F.O.T., 35. 65. Halliday, 59.

Dolcinists
Medieval heretics formerly called the Apostolic Congregation,
founded by a peasant named Segarelli, who tried to join the Franciscan
order and was rejected. Believing himself nevertheless a true spiritual
son of St. Francis, he gathered disciples and preached against the

worldly wealth of the church. He was caught and burned, but the
Congregation continued under Fra Dolcino, who preached the oncom-
ing doomsday, the fall of the sinful church, and the triumph of the
poor and simple over the theocracy.
Dolcinists admitted women to their ranks, and granted their
"sisters in Christ" the same right to preach and lead prayers as the
men, one of the worst manifestations of their heresy. Dolcinists claimed
to renounce sexual relations; so when Dolcino's particular "dearly

beloved sister in Christ" Margherita di Trank bore him a child, it was

brought about through the miraculous agency of the Holy Ghost,

they said.
The Inquisition harassed the Dolcinists until they took refuge
in

the high mountains. Three crusades were preached against them. In

the winter of 1 307 they were finally reduced to starvation, trapped, and

247
Doomsday slaughtered. Dolcino was captured alive, unfortunately
for him. After

watching his Margherita burn, he was torn to pieces by red-hot pincers

on a cart rolling slowly along the roads for all to watch.

Despite this edifying example, Dolcinism persisted for another

century. Two Dolcinist Apostles were captured and burned in

Germany in 1404. 1
1. Lea unabridged, 614-23.

Doomsday
The universal idea of the world's end was rooted in ancient Hindu
belief in the cyclic alternation of universes, brought about by Kali.

Each successive creation was divided into four yugas or ages:

Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali, the fourth and last marking the age
when Mother turns Destroyer because the race of men become violent

and sinful, failing to perceive deity in the feminine principle. "Due to

the limited intelligence and lust of men in the Kali Yuga, they will be
unable to recognize women as manifestations of the Shakti." Only a
few may escape spiritual degeneration: those who are devoted "to the
lotus of their mothers' feet and to their own wives." l

When Kali's doomsday arrived, the gods would slay each other.
Earth would be overwhelmed by fire and flood. The Goddess would
swallow up everything and un-make it, returning to her primordial state
of formless Chaos, as she was before creation. All beings would enter
2
her, because "She devours all existence." After a time that could not
be counted because even Time was destroyed, Kali would give birth

to a new universe.
Puranas are ancient The Matsya Purana said signs of approaching doomsday were to
Sanskrit scriptures in
be found in the breakdown of social structures, the increase in
verse, treating of cos-
violence and crime, and the decline of human intelligence:
mologies, sacred
histories, and the nature There is no one, any more, in whom enlightening goodness (sattva)
of the divine.
prevails; no man, no saint, no one uttering truth and standing
real wise

by his sacred word. The seemingly holy Brahmin is no better than a fool.
Old people, destitute of the true wisdom of old age, try to behave like
the young, and the young lack the candor ofyouth. The social classes
have lost their distinguishing, dignifying virtues. The will to rise to
. . .

supreme heights has failed; the bonds of sympathy and love have dis-

solved; narrow egotism rules. . . . When this calamity has befallen the
once harmoniously ordered City of Man, the substance of the world-
organism had deteriorated beyond salvage, and the universe is ripe for
}
dissolution.

The Vishnu Purana said the world in its last days reaches a stage
where "property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue,
passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife,
falsehood

248
the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and Doomsday
when outer 4
trappings are confused with inner religion."
Asiatic arts of astronomic observation and calculation of calendars

were motivated by an earnest desire to know the exact length of each

^^- ^^^
B

yuga, to foresee the end. An age was supposed to begin when sun,
moon, and planets stood in conjunction at the initial point of the
ecliptic and to end when they returned to the same point. By Hindu
reckoning, the present yuga began in 3 1 02 B.C. The chronology of
'the Central American
Maya began in 3 1 1 3 B.C., only 1 1 years later, "a
discrepancy probably due to some minor miscalculation in
reckoning
backward from the observed movements of the heavenly bodies." 5
Ancient Mesopotamia set the same dates as India and Mexico
between 3113 and 3 1 02 for the
beginning of civilized arts,
b.c.

especially astronomical calculation. The Babylonian sage Berossus said

"the world will burn when all the planets that now move in different
courses come together in the Crab, so that they all stand in a straight
ine in the same sign, and . the future flood will take place when
. .

the same conjunction occurs in Capricorn. For the former is the

constellation of the summer solstice, the latter of the winter solstice;

they are the decisive signs of the zodiac, because the turning points of
the year lie in them." Jeremias commented:

This Babylonian doctrine has spread over the whole world. We find it
again in Egypt, in the religion of the Avesta, and in India; traces ofit
are discovered in China, as well as in Mexico and among the savage
nations ofSouth America. To refer these phenomena back to "elemen-

tary ideas" such as may arise

independently among different peoples, will
not hold good in view of the circumstance that we have to do with ideas
connected with definite facts which rest upon continued astronomical
observations. 6

These remarks shed light on the great Neolithic monuments

piown to be astronomical calculators, suggesting a good reason why
hey were built with so much care and effort. The Stoic philosophers
)f
doomsday drew upon a very ancient tradition in predicting the
vorld's end in terms almost identical with those of Oriental sages: "A
lew sea will overrun everything, and the Ocean, today the boundary
.nd girdle of the world, will occupy its centre. What nature has . . .

nade into separate parts will be confounded into a single mass." This
reed of dissolution into Chaos became "an important part of
itoicism." 7

Northern Europeans drew their myths of doomsday or Ragnarok

rom the same ancient tradition. They said the world's end would be
rought about by the Mutspell (Mother's Curse) when violent gods
eglected the old laws of peace and blood kinship. The angry
Joddess would become Skadi the Destroyer, a great shadow devouring
le world, like her Oriental counterpart Kali. The gods would enter

249
Doomsday that shadow of Gotterdammerung, literally the Going-Into-the-Shadow-
of-the-Gods. They would be consumed, and the heavens and earth
^^^^^aa^ with them. The world would sink back into the womb of primal chaos
which gave it birth in the beginning. 8
This was the prophecy of the sybilline priestess who wrote the
Voluspa. It was echoed by the Babd, one of the three Fate-
Irish sybil

goddesses. She foretold the coming of the Waste Land, "trees without
fruit and seas without fish; old men would give false judgments and

legislators make unjust laws; warriors would betray one another, and
men would be thieves, and there would be no more virtue left in the
world." 9
After destruction of this nonvirtuous world and its cruel gods, there
would be a period of dark nonexistence. Then the Goddess's womb
would bring forth a new universe. A new human race would arise from
a primal couple, a woman named Life one of the Semitic names of
Eve and a man named Desirer-of-Life. 10
Patriarchal Persians made some alterations in the picture. Their
idea of doomsday was as dire as any, with the usual convulsions of the
and fallings of heaven; but they denied the subse-
earth, fires, flood,

quent creation of a new world. Their concept was not cyclic, but
linear. Creation and doomsday could occur only once. After the great

battle Armageddon at the end of the world, "The War of the Sons of
Light with the Sons of Darkness," the heavenly forces of the sun god
would prevail. 11 They would divide the sinful from the virtuous and
assign them to heaven or hell. The aftermath was not another creation, j

but eternal stasis, like the Brahman Nirvana.

Passing through Jewish-Essenic and Roman-Mithraic sects into
Christianity, this Persian doomsday became the familiar one in the west
with numerous details borrowed from the older Aryan paganism. The
last Trump played on Gabriel's horn was originally played on Rig-
Heimdall's "ringing horn" (Gjallarhorn). 12 The Great Serpent slain
13
by Thor in the final battle became identified with Satan. Like
paganism's sacred dramas, the final drama of the earth's dissolution
14
was divided into five acts. Christians even translated the Norse
"Mother's Curse" as "Judgment Day" when they found it variously
15
rendered Mutspell, Muspell, Muspelle, Mudspeller, or Muspilli.
The Savior destined to appear before the world's end had an old I

form inBuddhist scriptures as Kalki Avatara, the Destroyer of Sin,

who would come from heaven to announce doomsday. 16 Persians
copied him, changing his title to Son of Man, or Messiah. Before 1 70
B.C., the Book of Enoch called him Christos, the Anointed One, and

announced that he had already come and gone, and that his Second
17
Coming was expected at any moment.
According to the Gospels, Jesus identified himself with this person

age who would be seen "coming in the clouds with great power and

250
glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his Doomsday
electfrom the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the
uttermost part of heaven" (Mark 13:26-27). Jesus was not the only
^^^^^^^^^^
Messiah of his time. Josephus said before 70 a.d. there were countless
Messiahs and Christs announcing the end of the world. 18
The Gospels promised doomsday almost at once. Jesus said it
would occur in his own generation: "There be some standing here,
which shall not taste of death, till
they see the kingdom of God" (Luke
9:27). Early Christians accordingly expected the world's end so soon
that there was no reason to marry and beget children who would never
grow up, a major reason for Christianity's renunciation of marriage.
Motherhood would only harm women in the convulsions of the last

days: "Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give

suck, in those days!" (Luke 21:23).

Hopeful Christians found thatJesus's generation and many other

generations passed without apocalyptic symptoms. Seeking an expla-

nation, theologians discovered the text saying a thousand years were but
a day in the sight of God (Psalms 90:4), another borrowing from
Oriental sages who said a Day of Brahma lasted a thousand years. On
the basis of this scripture it was decided that the world would end in

the year 1000 a.d. With the approach of that year, Europe was seized
by an apocalyptic mania. Farms and towns were abandoned as
fanatics tramped the countryside announcing the Last Days. In some
areas, agriculture and commerce came virtually to a standstill. The
year passed uneventfully enough, but human society suffered greatly
19
from famines and civil disorders caused by the doomsday belief.
Some Franciscans declared that Christ really had returned to earth
in 1000 a.d., disguised as St. Francis, the new Messiah, who was
"entirely transformed into the person of Christ." Francis was said to
have performed all the Christ-like miracles, cast out devils, turned
water into wine, cured the sick, raised the dead, made the blind see, and
so on. 20 There were those who went so far as to claim that Christ was
21
important only as a precursor of St. Francis.
Not only the Christ figure was supposed to return just before

doomsday, but also Antichrist, his adversary, for the final battle

between good and evil couldn't take place until all the forces were

assembled on either side. According to aGerman legend, Antichrist

could not come to earth as long as the Holy Roman (German) Empire
22
stood. This legend served to keep some of the warring nationlets in
line at times, but the Holy Roman Empire was a rather loose, indefin-
able entity for most of its existence. Antichrist was almost as

constantly anticipated as Christ.

Another who taught that the Last Judgment had already taken
of the
place was Swedenborg; he gave its date as 1757, the date
establishment of his own Church of the New Jerusalem. He wisely

251
^
Doppelganger
Dove
wm
refrained from predicting the world's
others

failed to

ventists.

followers
fell

come.
into this trap,

world in 1867, with resulting injury to

dimming,

A prominent doomsday prophet was William Miller, inadvertent

founder of the sects of Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Ad-
He fixed the date of the
were afire with enthusiasm, but
in
end a short time in advance, but

England, predicted the end of the

his credibility when

millenium on March 21, 1843. His

still
the end

failed to see Christ

descending from the clouds as expected. Miller decided he had miscal-

culated, and fixed a new date on October 21 of the same year. "On
the appointed day of doom frenzied believers donned their robes,
tucked an ultimate lunch in the folds, and took their places on the
housetops, facing east. On the 22nd they ate their lunch and climbed
down. Miller confessed his disappointment, but insisted 'the day of
" 23
the Lord is at the door.' The Millerites never gave up hope. Their
offshoot sects still exist and flourish, though naive displays of credulity
are usually avoided.
1. Mahanirvanatantra, 12, 53, 56, 177. 2. Mahanirvanatantra, 295-96.
3. Zimmer, 35-36. 4. Zimmer, 15. 5. Campbell, M.I., 148-49.
Ross, 66;
6. Campbell, Ml., 149. 7. Lindsay, O.A., 107-8. 8. Larousse, 275.
9. Squire, 1 18. 289-90. 11. Black, 3. 12. Turville-Petre, 154.
10. Branston,
13. Branston, Male, 367. 15. Turville-Petre, 284.
281 . 14.
16. Mahanirvanatantra, xlviii. 17 Reinach, 217. 18. Brandon, 248.
'.

19. Summers, V, 150. 20. de Voragine, 608-10. 21. Reinach, 307.

22. Borchardt, 69. 23. de Lys,435.

Doppelganger
German word for one's "double," corresponding to the Egyptian ka,
or a reflection-soul. Sometimes the afterbirth was said to be an un-

formed twin of the newborn baby; by magic it might assume the

life. Sometimes this was
living twin's shape and follow him through

thought to be the Doppelganger seen in one's reflection.

Dove
Aphrodite's totem, the bird of sexual passion, symbolically equivalent
2
to the yoni. In India, too, the dove was paravata, the symbol of lust.
1

Joined to her consort the phallic serpent, the Dove-goddess stood for
sexual union and "Life."
The phrase attributed to Jesus, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents,
and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16), was no random metaphor

but a traditional invocation of the Syrian God and Goddess. The 3

Oriental meaning was remembered by the gypsies, whose folk tales

magic hollow mountains, the men
said the souls of ancestors lived inside
4
having been changed into serpents and the women into doves.

252
 Christians adopted the feminine dove as a symbol of the Dove
Holy
Ghost, originally the Goddess Sophia, representing God's "Wisdom"
as the Goddess Metis represented the "Wisdom" of Zeus. Gnostic
^^^^^^^^^^^
Christians said Sophia was incarnate in the dove that impregnated the

virgin Mary, the same dove that descended on Jesus at his baptism to

impregnate his mind (Matthew 3:16). Pious admirers of Pope Greg-

ory the Greatmade him even more saintly than Jesus by that reporting
the Holy Ghost in dove shape descended on him not once but many
times. All this was copied from Roman iconography which showed the
5

human soul as a dove that descended from the Dove-goddess's

oversoul to animate the body. 6

Aphrodite as a bringer of death, or "peace," sometimes bore the

name of Irene, Dove of Peace. Another of her death-goddess names
was Epitymbria, "She of the Tombs." 7 Romans called her Venus
Columba, Venus-the-Dove. Her catacombs, mausoleums, and ne-
cropoli were known as columbaria, "dovecotes." Thus the soul
8

Goddess after death was again envisioned as a dove.

returning to the
From image, Christians copied their belief that the souls of saints
this

became white doves that flew out of their mouths at the moment of
death. In the Catholic ceremony of canonization, white doves are
9
released from cages at the crucial moment of the ritual.

Christian iconography showed seven rays emanating from the

dove of the Holy Ghost: an image that went back to some of the most
10
primitive manifestations of the Goddess. In the Orient, the mystic
seven were the Pleiades or "Seven Sisters," whose Greek name
meant "a flock of doves." They were daughters or "rays" of Aphrodite
under her title of Pleione, Queen of the Sea. 11 Herodotus said seven

holy women known as Doves founded the oracles of Dodona, Epirus,

and Theban Amon. 12 They were worshipped in the Middle East as
Seven Sages or Seven Pillars of Wisdom: the seven woman-shaped
had been upholding temples of the Goddess since the
pillars that
13
third millenium
B.C. See Caryatid. Arabs still revere the Seven Sages,
and some remember that they were women, or "doves." H The
Semitic word for "dove," ione, was a cognate of "yoni" and related to
the Goddess Uni, who later became Iune, or Juno.
The cult of the Doves used to incorporate primitive rites of
castration and its modification, circumcision. India called the seven
Sisters "razors" or "cutters" who judged and "critically" wounded men,
the Krittikas, "Seven Mothers of the World," root of the Greek
kritikos, "judge." They killed and gave rebirth to gods who were
castrated to make them fertile, like women. The name of Queen
Semiramis, legendary founder of Babylon, also meant "Dove" in the
15
Syrian tongue. She was said to have castrated all her consorts.
When circumcision replaced castration, the doves were
involved in

that too. Even Christian symbolism made the connection. The

253
Drama officialsymbol of the Festival of the Circumcision of Christ was a dove,
holding in its beak a ring representing the Holy Prepuce. "Christ's

^HMMHHHi^^^^M fructifying blood" was linked with the similar emblem of Pentecost,
which showed the descending dove on a background of blood red,

officially described as a representation of the church fertilized by the

blood of Christ and the martyrs. 16
A certain "maiden martyr" called St. Columba (Holy Dove) was
widely revered, especially in France, although she never existed as a
human being. 17 Another curious survival of pagan dove-lore was the
18
surname given to St. Peter: Bar-Iona, "Son of the Dove." Some
survivals invented to explain the doves appearing on
may have been
ancient coins as symbols of Aphrodite and Astarte. 19
1. Graves, W.G., 123. 2. Waddell, 108. 3. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 118. 4. Trigg, 196.
5. de Voragine, 188. 6. Strong, 136. 7. Graves, G.M. 1, 72. 8. Bachofen, 21.
9. Gaster, 769. 10. de Lys, 13. 1 1. Graves, G.M. 2, 405; W.G., 194.
12. Knight, S.L., 48. 13. Gaster, 804. 14. Briffault 1, 377. [Link],93.
16. Brewster, 50,246-47. 1 7. Attwater, 92. 18. de Voragine, 330.
l9.d'Alviella, 91-92.

Drama
Alldrama began as sacred or magical drama, seasonally performed,
having the same universal theme: the challenge, trial, marriage, sacri-
fice, and resurrection of the hero, or sacred king, or savior. The
audience participated with songs, dances, sexual orgies, laments, eating
the god and rejoicing at his restoration. One object was attainment of

religious ecstasy: entering into the "dream."

It has been shown that every dream bears "a remarkable resem-
blance to drama." Old Norse draumar, related to
1
German Traum
(dream), featured a sacrificial slaying of the god, the "tragic" part of the
2
performance.
Tragedy descended from the "goat-song" enacting the sacred
dramas of Dionysus or Pan. The five-act structure of classical tragic
drama still seen in the plays of Shakespeare was established by the
five-act rites of the god. The acts were: (1) agon, the Contest: the

incumbent incarnation of the god fought his challenger; (2) pathos, the

Passion: the god united with the goddess and sent forth his soul with
his semen (or blood) to fertilize the world anew he died in his own
begetting; (3) threnos, the Lament: a "threnody" of wailings and
gestures of grief, partly to absolve the audience of responsibility for the
god's death; (4) anagnorisis, the Discovery: priestesses returned to the
tomb god was "risen," in much the same ritual enacted
to find that the

by Mary Magdalene and other temple-women at the tomb of Jesus

(Luke 24:10) where, significantly, no men were present; (5) apotheosis,

the Deification: the resurrected victim became God, and rose to

heaven, to be a part of his divine father.

3
On this occasion the

254
worshippers threw themselves into an orgy of rejoicing, such as Droit du Seigneur
distinguished the Roman carnival called Hilaria, "Day of Joy," follow-
ing the death and resurrection of the savior Attis. 4

Dionysus, Pan, Attis, Osiris, Orpheus, and many other gods of the
mystery-cults contributed their dramas to medieval mystery plays,
their linear descendants. The mummers' play, the ceremonies of
Carnival, May Day, Harvest Home and other festivals used parts of
the old sacred drama. Characters of the classic commedia were modeled
on some of the pagan deities. The Dove-goddess became Columbine
(Dove). The Serpent-god became Pierrot (Big Peter, or the Pied One).
The name of Harlequin came from the Hellequins, or Hella cunni,
"kindred of the Goddess Hel," souls of the pagan dead riding forth from
5
her underworld.
Masks were customary in the early medieval drama, just as they
were in the plays of ancient Greece and Rome. From a magical point

of view, the essence of the character lay in the mask, not in the actor
who wore it. This was the primitive theory behind all appearances of
mask and costume in religious ceremonies, from the animal-headed

"gods" of Egypt human bodies wearing the deities' disguises to

modern priestly vestments. Savages still

say that, by putting on the mask
and costume of an animal, spirit, or deity (or all at once), they do not

simply make believe but actually become that creature. 6 See Mask.
[Link], 178. 2. Turville-Petre, 109. 3. J.E. Harrison, 344. 4. Frazer, G.B., 407.
5. Potter & Sargent, 73; J.B. Russell, 146. 6. Jung, M.H.S., 44.

Jroit du Seigneur
The Lord's Right," also called jusprimae noctis, "the law of the first

light." An outgrowth of the feudal system that equated ownership of

and with ownership of women. The droit du seigneur meant that

ivery serf's bride must be deflowered on her wedding night not by her

>ridegroom but by the lord of the land.

As laid down by Ewen III of Scotland in the 9th century, the law
aid wives of common
could be raped by any nobleman at any
folk

ime; and "the lord of the ground shall have the maidenhead of all
dwelling on the same."
'
irgins
The church upheld du seigneur as a God-given right of
the droit
le nobility. For a vassal bridegroom to consummate his marriage
/ithin three nights after the wedding was declared blasphemous "to the
benediction" and tantamount to "carnal lust."
2
The overlord's
however, was right and proper. The eastern church provided legal
lties for a man who tried to consummate his marriage before his
er could rape the bride.*

Droit du seigneur was a general rule throughout the feudal period

4
continued in Russia up to the 19th century.

255
Druids The system also continued in America's slaveholding south before
the civil war, unofficially but generally acknowledged. Every black
woman was the sexual property of her master, whether she was married
5
to another slave or not. Slave marriages could be legally ignored if

plantation owners cared to do so.

In 1757, Peter Fontaine said planta-

tion owners begot so many children on their female slaves that "the

country swarms with mulatto bastards." Thomas Anburey praised the

system, calling it "a pleasant method to procure slaves at cheap
a
6
rate."
4. Fielding, 155.
[Link] 168. [Link],74. 3. Briffault 3, 242.
(

5. Brasch, 72. 6. Bullough, 300; Rugoff, 325-26.

Druids
var. dryads, druides,
druidai, drysidae, Europe's sacred-oak were known by many names. Greek
cultists
Gaulish druvis, Old
Irish drui.
1 myth said the dryads were oak nymphs, each an oracular priestess with
her own personal tree spirit, like the biblical Deborah who lived

under a tree that bore her own name (Judges 4:5). Dryads were called

priestesses of Artemis, whose souls

dwelt in their trees. They could
also assume the shapes of serpents, and were then called Hamadryads,

or Amadryades. 2 In their druidic groves throughout northern Europe,

Strabo said, they practiced rites "similar to the orgies of Samothrace."*

Dryadism and druidism were two phases of the same religion,

matriarchal
evidently restricted to a female priesthood in the earlier,
stage,later to male
open as well. Gaulish
priests and British priests of th<

oak groves formed a class of bardic wizards, keeping a sacred tradition

by memorizing orally transmitted material, the nucleus of medieval

sagas, epics, and ballads.

There no break between the ancient semi-magical formulae chanted b

is 4

the Druids and the later incantation of the wizard and the "wise-
"
woman. They both arose in the Veda-like sacred hymns which formed
the depository of the learning professed by the body of the druidical
teachers and diviners and taught orally in the druidic schools. Most of
them were never written down, and the fragments that we possess in
writing are probably only the remains of
a considerable body of oral
4
literature.

Druids were attacked by the Christian church for their pagan-

ism, but especially for their propensity to include sacred women in their

ranks. Scot said day there were feminine spirits associated

even in his

with trees, called Dryads in Greece and Druids in Scotland. They were

shape-shifters, and could appear as either

birds or women. "They
5
know our thoughts, and can prophesy of things to come."
Despite nominal conversion to Christianity, the Irish clung to
druidism for many centuries. Their revered pagan king Diarmuid was i

256
 called "half a druid and half a Christian." To make St. Patrick's
legend Durga
more palatable to the Irish, monks claimed he had been educated by a
6
churches were known by the old druidic name of dairthech,
druid. Irish
^^^^^^^^^^
"oak-house," formerly applied to the sacred grove. 7
The "colleges" of druidesses, or dryads, passed by almost imper-
ceptible degrees into a new designation of Christian nuns. One of the
three classes of druidesses consisted of secluded sisterhoods, like the

priestesses of Brigit, living in convent-like sanctuaries and

tending
sacred fires that were kept perpetually burning. Another, less secluded
class of druidesses consisted of married women who lived at the
temple and went home occasionally to visit their husbands. A third class
was composed of temple servants who lived with their families. 8 With
the coming of Christianity, the high holy sisterhoods were assimilated as
nuns. The others were usually described as witches.
The druidic religion lasted a surprisingly long time over a surpris-

ingly wide geographical area. Christians continued to worship oak

sacred groves through the 8th century a.d. in Hesse.
deities in their

According to Gildas, Christian monks copied their tonsure from the

druids. Traces of druidism were found as late as 1874 in Russia. 9 Even
clearer traces were found
20th century in the Holy Land,
in the

where the Goddess of the sacred groves was worshipped as Asherah

since pre-biblical times, and was known in Canaan as progenitress of

the gods. 10 Her priestesses the oak-nymphs continued to be venerated

under the of Benat Ya'kob (Daughters of Jacob), said to dwell in
title

their trees near old shrines that were rededicated to mythical Moslem

saints. The trees were taboo. Their wood was never taken for fuel,
11
except for votive purposes.
To some extent the mystical reverence for oak trees persists to this
day. Many British and American towns have their venerable "Char-
ter Oak" or some superannuated tree where seasonal ceremonies take

place. Acorns and oak leaves are still considered appropriate for
wreaths and harvest decorations, even if they no longer crown the
|
Goddess's sacred kings.
1. Piggott, 105-6. 2. Lawson, 153. 3. 4. Spence, 33, 151.
Haining, 23.
5. Scot, 417. 6. Spence, 42, 53, 56. [Link] Paor, 60. 8. Boulding, 319.
9. Spence, 78, 108. 10. Pritchard, A.N.E. 1, 97. 1 1. Frazer, F.O.T., 329.

Durga
Kali's Creating-Preserving-Destroying trinity was said to consist of
Parvati or Maya the Virgin, Durga the Queen-Mother, and Uma or
jPrisni
the Crone. Durga was entitled "The Inaccessible." A crowned
Kmazon, she rode tigers into battle and defeated many demonic
monsters, defending her children the gods. Like other forms of the
1

poddess-as-warrior, such as the Middle-Eastern Ma-Bellona, Durga

257
Dusii drank the blood of her enemies.
2
What this really meant was that her

Dymphna, Saint altars or images were anointed with the blood of war captives, killed as

^^g^^^B^ trophies.
of a
As "The Inaccessible," Durga personified the fighting spirit

mother protecting her young, and perhaps also the nursing mother
sexually "inaccessible" to men, according to
the old Oriental custom.

stood for the basic animal instincts of maternity, for which the
Durga
adult male is no longer significant, and only her offspring claims a
mother's attention.

Durga was sometimes Shasthi, "the Sixth," Leader of the Moth-

ers. This title arose from the custom of invoking her on the sixth day

after childbirth, when the continuous spells for protection of mother and

child could be brought to The seventh day was a day of rest. 3

an end.
This was the true beginning of the common patriarchal legend of gods
who gave birth to the world in six days and rested on the seventh.
Among such gods were Persia's Ahura Mazda, Memphian Ptah, Babylo-
4
nian Marduk, Syrian Baal, and the Hebraic Jehovah.

Durga's titles and character penetrated western ideas of the God-

dess before the first century B.C. Rome's Great Mother Juno had the
same attributes as her Oriental sister; she was Juno the Preserver,

Queen of the Mothers. 5

l.L*rousse,333. 2. O'Flaherty, 249. 3. O'Flaherty, 49, 353.
4. Hooke, M.E.M., 73. 5. Dumezil, 297.

Dusii
Gaulish word for gods, from Latin deus. In medieval Christian

writings, a synonym for incubus.

Dybbuk
Hebrew word for a possessing demon, especially a "clinging" one
who would not leave its human host until thoroughly exorcised.

var. Dympna Dymphna, Saint

A canonization of what seems to have been a bit of graffiti on a brick
found near Antwerp in the 1 3th century. The brick was buried near a
coffin containing the bones of an unidentified man and woman. The
words on the brick were ma dompna, "my lady," the traditional address
of a medieval poet to his lady-love.

Though having no more basis than these words on an old brick,

258

Jk
the cult of St. Dymphna was carefully developed. A large asylum Dymphna, Saint

near Gheel was named after her, so she became the patron saint of the
insane perhaps appropriately. To this day she is still touted as the

intercessor for people with emotional problems.

1

[Link], 108.

259
The Creation of eve, in
the version that says
she was made from one
of Adam's ribs.
Florentine School.
Wood panel; Fra
Bartolommeo, ca. 1510.

europa and the Bull, here

shown on a red-figure
vase, approximately 1 1

1 inches.
by 1
Greek,
ca. 490 b.c.
Eag'e Eagle
Classic soul-bird, symbol of apotheosis associated with the sun god,
^^^^^^^^ fire, and lightning. Greeks thought eagles so closely akin to the lightning
spirit that they nailed eagles to the peaks of temples to serve as magic
lightning rods. Hence the name aetoi, "eagles," for the pediments of
Greek temples. These were ancient forerunners of the "weather-
1

cock" on the rooftree of a barn or house.

Cults of fire and the sun made the eagle a bearer of kingly spirit:
the god's soul returning to heaven after a period of earthly incarna-
tion as the king. 2 It was the Roman custom to release an eagle above the
funeral pyre of each emperor, just as an Egyptian pharoah rose to
heaven on the wings of the solar hawk. 3
Zeus himself took the shape of an eagle to carry his young lover
Ganymede to heaven. This was often interpreted as a symbol of the
father-god's reception of men's souls when they were initiated into the
4
solar Mysteries.

The eagle was connected with rites of calling down "fire from
heaven," probably with a burning-glass, to consume sacrifices on the
altar. Such "fire from heaven" came down from Yahweh to consume
the sons of Aaron (Leviticus 10:2), who died like sacrificial victims to
the solar gods of Tyre. Such victims "passed through the fire" as

offerings, and rose to heaven in the form of eagles.

We must bear in mind that in the East, whence all these beliefs and cults
derive,not only was fire regarded as an all-powerful purifying agent,
but death by fire was looked upon as an apotheosis which raised the victim
to the rank of the gods. . . .
"Fire, "says Iamblichus, "destroys the
material part ofsacrifices, it purifies all things that are brought near it,

releasing them from the bonds ofmatter and, in virtue of the purity of
its nature, making them meet for communion with the gods. So, too, it
releases us from bondage of corruption, it likens us to the gods. 5

The eagle was often identified with the fire bird or phoenix,
who underwent a baptism of the fire that "burns all sins" and was
reborn from his own ashes. The eagle also stood for the soul of
Heracles, who passed through fire into heaven at seasonal festivals of
Tarsus, and inspired St. Paul's belief in the virtue of giving one's
body to be burned (1 Corinthians 13:3). The eagle was the totemic
form of Prometheus, who "stole" fire from heaven, like the eastern
fire-lightning-sun hero, man, or angel embodied in the Garuda bird.
Garuda flew to the mountain of paradise to steal the gods' secret of
immortality. Later, he assumed the golden body of the sun. American
Indians had a similar hero, the thunderbird or lightning bird. 6
As the royal bird of Rome, and the embodiment of deified
emperors, the eagle was worshipped by Roman legionaries. Each
legion had its sacred eagles, carried into battle like banners. If a legion
should lose its eagles, the disgrace was unbearable; another whole
expedition might be mounted to recoverthem. 7

262
 The Roman imperial emblem was inherited by the Germanic E-Anna
"Holy Roman Empire" and its Kaisers, derived from Caesars. Thus Earth
the eagle became a Teutonic symbol of sovereignty.
^^^^^^^^^^^
[Link],90. Strong, 182. 3. Campbell, Oc.M., 334. 4. Strong 187
2.

5. Strong, 194. 6. Hallet, 376. 7. Tacitus, 41.

E-Anna
"Land of Anna," one of the territories of Babylon, named after the

Goddess under one of her most common Mesopotamian names (see

Anne, Saint).

Earth
Herodotus said, "Three different names have been given to the
earth, which is but one, and those derived from the names of women." '
Herodotus miscounted. Thousands of feminine names have been
given to the earth. Continents Asia, Africa, Europe were named
after manifestations of the Goddess. Countries bore the names of
female ancestors or of other manifestations of the Goddess: Libya,

Lydia, Russia, Anatolia, Latium, Holland, China, Ionia, Akkad,

2
Chaldea, Scotland (Scotia), Ireland (Eriu, Hera) were but a few. Every
nation gave its own territory the name of its own Mother Earth.
Tacitus said the tribes of Europe regarded Mother Earth as "the all-

ruling deity, to whom all else is

subject and obedient."
3

Mother Earth received universal worship because she was the

universal parent. American Indians still relate how all peoples and
animals in the beginning emerged from Earth's yonic hole, and "it was

just like a child being born from its mother. The place of emergence
is the womb of the earth." Siberian reindeer hunters say the human race

emerged from a Goddess, whose carved figurines protect the hunter's

hut, when given offerings and prayers: "Help us to keep healthy! Help
4
us to kill much
game!"
The central doctrine of Amerindian religion was reincarnation in a

new body from Mother Earth's womb, the ancient meaning of "born
again." A chief named Smohalla spoke of his moral obligations formed
by this doctrine:

It is a sin to wound or cut, to tear or scratch our common mother by

working at agriculture. You ask me to dig in the earth? Am I to take a
knife and plunge it into the breast ofmy mother? But then, when I die,
she will not gather me again into her bosom. You tell me to dig up and
Must I mutilate her flesh so as to get at her bones?
take away the stones.
5
Then I can never again enter into her body and be born again.

Oriental Indians had much the same idea about entering the

263
Earth Hindu dead man: "Go, seek the earth, that wise and
earth. priests told a
kind mother of all.O Earth, rise up and do not hurt his bones; be
^^^^^^^^m kind and gentle to him. O Earth, cover him as a mother covers her
6
infant with the skirts of her garment."
Ancient Roman philosophers had the same idea too. "The Earth
Mother is the mysterious power that awakes everything to life. ... All
comes from the earth and all ends in the earth ... the earth produces all
things and then enfolds them again the Goddess is the beginning . . .

and end of all life." A Roman writer of the 3rd century a.d. prayed to
"Holy Goddess Earth, Nature's mother, who bringeth all to life, and
revives from day to day. The food of life Thou grantest in eternal
all

And when the soul hath retired we take refuge in Thee. All
fidelity.
7
that Thou grantest falls back somewhere into Thy womb."

Patriarchal Christians might have been expected to speak of Father

Heaven rather than Mother Earth, yet even they found it impossible
to give deity. The epitaph of Pope Gregory the Great said:
up the older
Suscipe Terra tuo de corpore sumptum: "Receive, Earth, what O
was taken from thy body." 8 Even up to the 20th century, tombstones of
German Christians bore the formula: Hier ruht im Mutterschoss der
9
Erde . . .
,
"Here rests in Earth's maternal womb. . . ." In Chaucer's
Pardoner's Tale an old man pleaded with the Goddess:

. . . / walk alone and wait

About the earth, which is my mother's gate,

Knock-knocking with my stafffrom night to noon

And crying, "Mother, open to me soon!
Look at me, Mother, won 'tyou Jet me in?
See how I wither, flesh and bones and skin!
Alas! When will these bones be laid to rest?" 10

This was more than a poetic metaphor. As late as the 1 2th

century, many Europeans still

recognized Mother Earth as a Goddess,
perhaps their only supreme divinity. She was described in an English
herbal of the period with no mention of God at all:

Earth, divine goddess, Mother Nature, who dost generate all things and
bringest forth ever anew the sun which thou hast given to the nations;
Guardian ofsky and sea and ofall Gods and powers; through thy
influence all nature is hushed and sinks to sleep. . . .
Again, when it
pleases thee, thou sendest forth the glad daylight and nurturest
life with

thine eternal surety;and when the spirit ofman passes, to thee it

returns. Thou art indeed rightly named Great Mother of the Gods;
Victory is thy divine name. Thou art the source of the strength of
peoples and gods; without thee nothing can either be born or made
perfect; thou art mighty, Queen of the Gods. Goddess, I adore thee as

divine, I invoke thy name; vouchsafe to grant that which I ask of thee, so
shall I return thanks to thy godhead.
"

Up to the Renaissance, English farmers continued to call upon

12
Erce, eorthan modor (Earth, mother of earth) when planting. Similar-

264
 up to the 20th century, Russian farmers continued to call Earth
ly, upon
Mati-Syra-Zemlya (Moist Mother Earth) for almost everything. Instead
of touching a Bible when taking an oath, a Russian peasant would put
^^^^^^^^^^
a clod of earth on invoking the Mother's curse if he broke his
his head,

word. 13 This perpetuated an ancient Greek habit. Even the patriar-

chal Olympian gods swore their binding oaths by Mother Earth: Gaea,
or Rhea, called Universal Mother, Deep-Breasted One, firmly
13
founded, oldest of divinities. Hesiod admitted that she ruled Olympus
before the coming of the Hellenic deities. She ruled Russia too. The

country bore her ancient name, Rha (Rhea), the Red One, mother of
14
the Volga and all its tribes.

Home and Mother were literally identical to people who combined

both image of the earth-goddess. Many believed they must be
in their

buried in the same soil that supported them in childhood. Threatened

by invaders, the matriarchal Cimmerians could have saved them-

selves by moving away from their homeland; but they chose to face

superior numbers of enemies, and where they were, believing

die
their lives valueless if they couldn't re-unite with the same Earth that
15
gave them birth. The Egyptian traveler Sinuhe felt the approach of
death and hurried home to his motherland "to follow the Lady of All,"
16
hoping that she would "spend eternity by my side."
Post-mortem reunion with the Mother always overlapped with
the idea of marrying her. Man seldom distinguished clearly between his

three roles as the Goddess's child, corpse, and bridegroom. Balkan

peasants still view death as a sacred marriage, and dress corpses as for a

wedding. Formal dirges say: "The black earth for my wife I took."
Ancient Greek epitaphs similarly proclaimed the dead man "admitted to

chamber of Persephone." Artemidorus wrote: "All the

the bridal
17
accompaniments of marriage are exactly the same as those of death."
The archetypal image of the marriage-with-Earth had a curious
mid- Victorian pornography known as pornoto-
revival in the special

which the female body was a landscape, and man

pia, in

correspondingly reduced in fantasy to about the size of a fly:

In the middle distance there looms a large irregular shape. On the horizon
swell two immense snowy white hillocks; these are capped by great,
pink, and as it were prehensile peaks or tips as if the rosy-fingered dawn
itself were playing just behind them. The landscape undulates gently
down smooth, swelling plain, its soft rolling curves broken only
to a broad,

in the lower center by a small volcanic crater or omphalos. Farther

down, the scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and
left jut two smooth snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of

juncture, is a dark wood . . . sometimes it is called a thicket . . .

triangular

in shape. It is also like a cedarn cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic
chasm. In this chasm the wonders ofnature abound. From its top there

depends a large, pink stalactite, which changes shape, size,

and color in
accord with the movement of the tides below and within. Within the

chasm which is roughly pear-shaped there are caverns measureless

265
Earth to man, grottoes, hermits' caves, underground streams a whole internal
and subterranean landscape. The climate is warm but wet. Thunder-

^^__^^___^^^^_ storms are frequent in this region, as are tremors and quakings of the
earth. The walls of the cavern often heave and contract in rhythmic
violence, and when they do the salty streams that run through it double
their flow. The whole place is dark yet visible. This is the center of the

earth and the home of man. IS

Marcus attributes these images of pornotopia to a spiritual loss,

possibly related in a direct way to contemporary denial of the earth-

mother figure in a religious symbolism, as well as Victorian society's
suppression of sexuality:

One gets the distinct impression, after reading a good deal of this
literature, that could only have been written by men who at some
it

point in their lives had been starved. Inside of every pornographer

. . .

there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he has been torn.

Pornography represents an endless and infinitely repeated effort to recap-

'9
ture that breast, and the bliss it offered.

Acquisitiveness seems to have been another manifestation of the

hidden psychic hunger for possession of Mother Earth. Her European
names Urth, Hertha, Eortha, Erda, Hretha, etc. stemmed from
"
Sanskrit Artha, materia] wealth." Among the Hindu-rooted gypsies,
"earth" meant good luck, fortune, money. 20 Latin Mater (Mother)
became English "matter," of which Plutarch said, "Matter hath the
function of mother and nurse . . . and containeth the elements from
21
which everything produced." Tibetans still say the elements are
is

22
produced by the Old Mother. The material body has the special
name of Anna-Maya, variations of which appeared everywhere in the
23
ancient Mediterranean world as names of the Great Goddess. The
"soul manifested in matter" is Anna-Maya self. The sages
defined as the

say, "Mind and matter are at base one asmodes of the same Power.
. . . Mind is the subjective and Matter the objective aspect of the one
24
polarized Consciousness."
Western theology split this former unity into a duality, regarding
matter (or flesh) and mind (or spirit) as intrinsically different from,
and opposed to, one another. Thus, says Jung, "the word 'matter'
remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept, without any

psychic significance for us. How different was the former image of
matter the Great Mother that could encompass and express the
25
profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth."
After the image of Mother Earth as birth-giver, perhaps that of
Mother Earth as receiver of the dead aroused the most profound
emotional responses. When death was viewed as a return to the infantile
state of sleep in the Mother's bosom, it seemed less terrifying. The

Rig Veda says, "Crawl to your Mother Earth. She will save you from
the void." 26 In medieval ballads, the hero's lady-love sometimes

impersonated Mother Earth by covering her lover with her green

266
 him "out of sight" as if buried. Greek peasants 27
mantle, to put Easter

thought the worst kind of curse on an enemy was to wish Mother Earth
would not accept him: "May the earth not digest thee! May the black ^^^^^^^^^^
earth spew thee up! May the ground not consume thee!" 28 Such a one
rejected by the earth would be a revenant or a restless ghost.
In France during the 12th century, a sect of heretics were sent to

the stakeby the Archbishop of Reims, apparently for worshipping

Mother Earth, among other offenses. Led to execution, one of them
"cried again and again, 'O Earth, cleave asunder!'" His hearers

thought he was trying to get the earth to swallow his enemies, but he
may have believed the earth could open and swallow him to save him
29
from the stake. Like the original death aspect of Rhea or Cerridwen,
Mother Earth still was supposed to devour her children.
1. Herodotus, 226. 2. Agrippa, 269. 3. Tacitus, 728. 4. Campbell, P.M., 240, 314.

[Link], 23. 6. Hauswirth, 21. 7. Vermaseren, 10, 49. 8. de Voragine, 187.

9. Lederer, 24. 10. Caucer, 269-70. 11. Graves, W.G., 64. 1 2. Turville-Petre, 1 88.
13. Larousse, 89, 287. 14. Thomson, 252.
15. Mumford,416. 16. Maspero, 83.
17. Lawson, 547,554. Marcus, 271-72. 19. Marcus, 273-74. 20. Leland, 99.
18.
21. Knight, S.L., 22. 22. Bardo Thodol, 15; Waddell, 484. 21. Mahanirvanatantra, 11.
24. Avalon, 49, 318. 25. Jung, M.H.S., 95. 26. H. R. E. Davidson, G.M.V., 92.
27. Wimberly, 390. 28. Summers, V, 161. 29. Coulton, 55.

Easter

Springtime sacrificial festival named for the Saxon Goddess Eostre,

or Ostara, a northern form of Astarte. Her sacred month was Eastre-
monath, the Moon of Eostre. 1
Saxon poets apparently knew Eostre was the same Goddess as
India'sGreat Mother Kali. Beowulf spoke of "Ganges' waters, whose
2
flood waves ride down into an unknown sea near Eostre's far home."
The Easter Bunny was older than Christianity; it was the Moon-
hare sacred to the Goddess in both eastern and western nations.

Recalling the myths of Hathor- Astarte who laid the Golden Egg of the
sun, Germans used to say the hare would lay eggs for good children
on Easter Eve. 3 (See Cat.)
Like all the church's "movable feasts," Easter shows its pagan
origin in a dating system based on the old lunar calendar. It is fixed as

the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox,

formerly the "pregnant" phase of Eostre passing into the fertile

season. The Christian festival wasn't called Easter until the Goddess's
name was given to it in the late Middle Ages. 4 (See Menstrual
Calendar.)
The kept Easter on a different date from that
Irish of the Roman
the date of the festival of Eostre, until the
church, probably original
Roman calendar was on them in 632 a.d. Nevertheless, the
imposed
Columban foundation and their colonies in Britain kept the old date
5
for another fifty years.
The Persians began their solar New Year at the spring equinox,

267
^
Ecclesia

m^^^^m
and up to the middle of the 1 8th century they still followed the old
custom of presenting each other with colored eggs on the occasion.
Eggs were always symbols
usually colored red
sians used to
of rebirth, which is why
the life-color

lay red Easter eggs on graves

Easter eggs were
6

especially in eastern Europe. Rus-

to serve as resurrection

charms. 7 In Bohemia, Christ was duly honored on Easter Sunday and

his pagan rival on Eastern Monday, which was the Moon-day
opposed to the Sun-day. Village girls like ancient priestesses sacrificed
the Lord of Death and threw him into water, singing, "Death swims
in the water, spring comes to visit us, with eggs that are red, with yellow

pancakes, we carried Death out of the village, we are carrying

Summer into the village." 8

Another remnant of the pagan sacred drama was the image of the
god buried in his tomb, then withdrawn and said to live again.
The
church instituted such a custom early in the Middle Ages, apparently in
hopes of a reportable miracle. A small sepulchral building having
been erected and the consecrated host placed within, a priest was set to

watch it from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Then the host was
taken out and displayed, and the congregation was told Christ was
9
risen.

A curious
16th-century Easter custom was known as "creeping to
the cross with eggs and apples," a significant use of the ancient
female of birth and death, beginning and fruition, the opening
symbols
and closing of cycles. The Ceremonial of the Kings of England
ordered carpets to be laid in the church, for the comfort of the king,

queen, and courtiers as they crept down the aisle on

hands and
knees. 10 The penitential implication of the creeping ceremony is clear

enough, but the female-symbolic foodstuffs are a bit mysterious.

Germany applied to Easter the same title formerly given to the
season of the sacred king's love-death, Hoch-Zeit, "the High Time."
n From these
In English too, Easter used to be called "the Hye-Tide."
titles came the colloquial description of any festival holiday as "a high
old time."
1 17. 4. H. Smith, 201.
1. Knight, D.W.P., 157. 2. Goodrich, 18. 3. de Lys,
5. de Paor, 70. 6. Hazlitt, 201. 7. Gaster, 603. 8. Frazer, G.B, 362.
9. Hazlitt, 28 1
. 10. Hazlitt, 153. 11. Hazlitt, 316.

Ecclesia
"The Church," a title of the virgin Mary, who was supposed to
represent the physical body of which Christ
was the spiritual head. Holy
Mother Church was both bride and mother of God, according to
Christian mystics, postulating even an incestuous Sacred Marriage in
the old pagan style. The erotic poetry of Solomon's Song was glossed
as an expression of the love between Christ and "Ecclesia." Irenaeus
said Mary-Ecclesia was "the pure womb which regenerates man unto

268
 God." As in the manner of pagan temples, even the church building Echo
was likened to Mary's body. Eden

Echo
Irenaeus Doctor,
Greek "nymph" at whose reflecting pool Narcissus met his death. saint, and father of the

According to the myth, Echo grieved so sorely

classical for her beloved church, said to have
lived in the 2nd century
flower-god that she pined away until there was nothing left of her but
a.d. as bishop of
her voice.
Lyons. His history is

Originally, she was Acco, the pre-Hellenic birth-goddess, in an obscure, largely

oracular mood as "the last echo of the Voice," meaning the Voice of based on (possibly

Creation, the same as the Goddess Vac

ancient India (see Logos). In
in fraudulent) assertions
of Eusebius, who
Hebrew she was Bath Kol, Daughter of the Voice. 1

claimed to have
Apparently the Word
she spoke to the springtime god Narcissus- letters from Irenaeus,
Antheus-Adonis-Hyacinthus was the death curse heralding the final but none of these

phase of the sacred king's fatal drama; for Narcissus was the same god as were preserved. The
2 story of Irenaeus's
Dionysus with all his flower-titles.
G.M. martyrdom has been
1. Leland, 220. 2. Graves, 1, 288.
proved false.

Ecstasy
Greek ekstasis meant "standing forth naked," a word for the state of
mind ensuing in a religious trance when the consciousness was stripped
I
away, leaving only the essential self. In Greece as in ancient India,

proper worship was sometimes conducted in a state of physical naked-

Iness (Hindu digambara) to symbolize purification from all

distractions, to concentrate on the ecstatic experience.

Edda
"Great-Grandmother," a Norse name for Mother Earth (Erda); also
the word for sacred poetry inspired by her. Icelandic sagas or Eddas
usually opened with an invocation to this Goddess, who gave birth to
the oldest third of the human race.
1

[Link]-Petre, 150.

sbrew "Garden of Delight," based on the Persian Heden or primal

rden where the couple were joined together as a bisexual being in
first

Golden Age. Like all images of the earthly paradise, Eden was
ated in the far west originally, where the sun went each night. That is

ly the Bible says known lands lay "east of Eden" (Genesis 4:16).

269
Edmund, Saint Edmund, Saint
Egg-and-Dart Frieze
Canonized form of the heathen deity worshipped at Bury St. Ed-
munds, where he was seasonally slain, like Shiva, in the shape of a white
bull.

Ritual bull-killing dated back to the Cretan Minotaur cult, through

ritesof Artemis Tauropolos, the Roman Taurobolium, and via
Iberian paganism up to the bullfights of modern Spain. St. Edmund's
shrine was supposedly founded on the tomb of the saint, a young
man who became "chosen king" of the East Angles in the 9th century. 1
But his legend was wholly mythological. Like other Celtic savior-gods
he was tied to a tree and pierced by many arrows: the same fate meted
out to the sacrificial bull, still demonstrated by Spanish picadors. On
Edmund's heraldic crest, the martyr's head was held by a wolf, the
traditionalDoorkeeper of Death, and the Triple Goddess appeared
symbolically in the shape of three Crowns. (See Dog.)
Monastic records reveal the true totemic nature of "St. Edmund."
A white bull was chosen each year to be paraded through the streets,
while women wishing to conceive would caress him, for a doomed god
was usually credited with great fertilizing power. A contract paper
from the monastery said: "This indenture certifies that Master John
Swassham, sacrist, with the consent of the prior of the convent . . .

shall find, or cause to be found, one white bull every year of his term, so
often as it shall happen that any gentlewoman, or any other woman,

from devotion or vows made by them shall visit the tomb of the glorious
martyr St. Edmund to make oblation to the same white bull."
2

1. Attwater, 109. 2. Briffault 3, 190.

E gg

Mystical symbol of the Creatress, whose World Egg contained the

universe in embryo. Orphics said the Great Goddess of darkness,
Mother Night, first brought forth the World Egg which was identi-
fied with the moon. Heaven and earth were made of the two halves of

the eggshell, and the first deity to emerge was the bisexual Eros the
Desired. The Egg was a common Oriental image of creation. Its

western versions "went back to cosmologies of the Tiamat-type and

to early exchanges between Greece and the East." Egyptians' signs for
'

the World Egg was the same as for an embryo in a woman's womb.
1. Lindsay, O. A., 116.

Egg-and-Dart Frieze
Classical architectural decoration sometimes called the Frieze of
Venus and Mars: a symbol of the magic circle alternating men and
women. On the frieze, ovals alternate with trident-shaped darts,

270
female and male genital emblems. Ancient builders carried the frieze all Eide
the way around a building or room without a break, since an El

interruption in the frieze could mean a break in the succession of

i_^^^^^^^^^
human generations.
The same design in Egypt presented even more overtly sexual
hieroglyphs: downward-pointing phalli alternating with narrow man-
dorlas (female almond shapes), each topped by a small triangle
1
representing a clitoris.

The Tantric "magic circle" or chakra was a human equivalent of

the Egg-and-Dart frieze. In pagan Britain, druidic priests also worked
in magic circles alternating with green-robed dignitaries known as
2
Ovates, or Eggs. Wearing the color associated with Life in druidic
religion, these must have been priestesses, like the eastern shaktis, or
else men impersonating women by wearing female dress.
Many counting-games originated with the magic circle, in which
numbers were assigned to men, the odd numbers to
the even
women. Pagan traditions said odd numbers represented "immortality"
because all odd numbers are female. 3 This explains why Roman
religious festivals were scheduled for odd-numbered days, on the theory
that these days were more propitious.
1 . Book of the Dead, 273. 2. Pepper & Wilcock, 203. 3. Wedeck, 66.

ide

"Goddess-within," Greek concept of the female soul, corresponding

i

the Latin Idea. Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to attempt

replacing this ancient notion of Mother-given intelligence with a

1
doctrine of astral theology.
1. Lindsay, O.A., 102.

Eire var. Erin

Celtic name of Ireland, from "the Lady Eriu," or Erinn, the Triple
Goddess. She was a form of Hera, whose apple-isle was located on an
1

island in the western sea. 2

1. Squire, 126. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 93.

El

General Semitic word or name for a deity, especially in combining

forms, as Isra-el, Beth-el, Dani-el, El-ijah. Both El and its plural,

elohim, meaning many deities of both Hebrew words

sexes, are the
rendered "God" by biblical translators. Sometimes "God" is Elias, a
Hebraic version of the sun (Greek Helios); this was the "father" Jesus

271
Elaine addressed (Matthew 27:47-49). In Phoenicia, El was the Heavenly Bull
Elements at the head of the pantheon, spouse of Asherah as Cow-Mother. He

usually appeared as a human figure wearing the head or horns of a bull.

var. Elen, Hel-Aine, Elaine

Eileen
Britain's "Lily Maid," the virgin Moon-goddess bearing the same
name as Helen of Troy; British tradition claimed the islands were
colonized by Trojans. According to the bards, the Roman emperor
acquired Britain only by marrying its queen, Elen. The people agreed to
help build Roman roads because she ordered them, and the roads
were called Roads of Elen of the Hosts: "The men of the Island of
Britain would not have made those great hostings for any save for
1
her."
Elen or Elaine became the mother-bride of Lancelot-Galahad in

Arthurian romance. Lancelot the father begot on her his own

reincarnation, Galahad the son; but Lancelot in his youth had been
named Galahad, and his mother was Queen Elaine. The Lily Maid
gave Lancelot her sexual-symbolic charm to make him invincible: her
pearl-bedewed sleeve of red silk. The womb-symbol of the Holy
Grail was displayed in her castle, tended by her dove-soul, Colombe.
Galahad saw this vision again in his last moments, as he expired at the
2
altar in ancient sacred-king style.
1. Mabinogion, 85. 2. Malory I, 377; 2, 268.

Electra

One of the Seven Sisters (see Pleiades); virgin mother of Dardanus,

founder of Troy, whose name is still borne by the Dardanelles. Electra
was also known as a sea nymph. Myths of the classic period made her
a "daughter" of two queens responsible for their husbands' ritual

murders,Queen Clytemnestra and Queen Jocasta, who brought

Agamemnon and Oedipus, respectively. Electra's name means
death to
"amber," and may have been applied to a priestess who wore certain
amulets of amber as a badge of office.

Elements
On each of the inhabited continents, the same four elements were
distinguished as building-blocks of all substances living or dead, organic
or inorganic: water, fire, earth, and air. Indians of Missouri and New

Mexico, Aztecs, Chinese, Hindus, ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Ro-

mans all had the same idea. The earliest known literate
1

civilization, Sumeria, had already designated the elements water, fire,

2
earth, and air. The "science" of western Europe continued to

272
 same mystic elements up to the 18th century
believe in the when real Elements
elements began to be discovered.
Indo-European tradition said the four elements were created by
Great Mother Kali, who organized them into letter-mantras carved
on her rosary of skulls, to form the Sanskrit alphabet, which she invested
with power to create what it
expressed. Elemental sounds were
divided into four categories: Va, water; Ra, fire; La, earth; and Ya, air.

They were bound together by the Mother-syllable Ma (Kali Ma

3
herself), representing "intelligence." Tibetan Buddhists still
say the
elements are ruled by "Old Mother Khon-Ma," the Great Goddess. 4
The Goddess was addressed in scriptures: "Thou art Earth, Thou
art Water, Thou Thou art Air, Thou art the Void, Thou art
art Fire,

consciousness Thou art life in this world; Thou art the knowledge
itself,

of self, and Thou art the Supreme Divinity." 5 The ancient theory of
the human body's elemental "humors," adopted by the medical profes-
sion in the west up to the 1 9th century, was based on Kali's supposed
distribution of elements in living forms. She gave water to create the
blood stream, fire to make its vital heat, earth to produce the solid

parts of the body, and air to animate it with breath. 6

This theory was earnestly adopted by western philosophers. Firmi-
cus Maternus said man is a microcosm "under the direction of
Nature ... so that within the small compass of his body he might bestow
under the requirements of Nature the whole energy and substance of
the elements." 7
The same elemental symbols shown in the four hands of Kali
appeared in western iconography bowl of blood signified
also. Kali's

water; her scepter or dorje (lightning bolt) was fire; her lotus wheel

stood for earth; and her sword was air. The Greeks assigned their
own versions of these symbols to the Goddess Nemesis (Fate): a cup; an
8
apple-bough or wand; a wheel; and a sword. Later in European
history, the same symbols of the elements gave rise to the four suits of
the Tarot deck: (1) cups; (2) wands, rods, or scepters; (3) pentacles,

coins, or discs; and (4) swords. These in turn evolved into the modern
hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades.
The two colors now allotted to the four suits of cards echo the very
ancient Tantric concept of two sexes expressing themselves as ele-
ments. Female water and earth were paired with male fire and air.
Oriental sages maintained that mantras with a preponderance of fiery
or airy (male) letters are cruel and destructive. Mantras with a prepon-
9
derance of watery or earthy (female) letters are benevolent. Like the

corresponding card suits in red, the life-color, female elements

were said
to possess the active, life-giving energy. Greek philosophers later
Thales of Miletus
reversed this opinion, calling male elements "active" and female ele-
Pythagorean
ments "passive." Yet, even in the Christian Middle Ages, an
philosopher, said to be
aphorism purportedly derived from Moses said, "Only Earth and Water one of the Seven
bring forth a living soul."
10 Wise men of the an-
was the Arche, the of cient world.
According to Thales of Miletus, water first

273

H
Elements the elements, having "mastery" over the others because it represent-
ed the abyssal womb. 11 The combination of water and fire as
h^^^i^^ female-and-male signified a very ancient theory that blood, the basic
essence of life, was made of sea water infused by magic fire from
heaven, which made it warm and red, though it still tasted like sea
water. Vedic sages sometimes called the combination Kali and Agni.
The Goddess, fructified
by Agni's fire, become the Ocean of Blood
at the beginning of the world, source of the vitality of all living things
until the day of destruction. "Sacred fire" symbolized sexual passion,

its heat engendered by fire-from-heaven gods like Agni, Lucifer, He-

phaestus, Syrian Baal, Heracles-Melkart, Thor-Heimdall, etc. The
fire god lost his life when he was swallowed up by the all-encompassing

Mother of Waters; sages said he was in her yoni" like a

"quenched
12
lightning bolt quenched (See Lightning.) This image led
in the sea.

to the Roman belief that the feminine water-element was dangerous

to men. 13
Of the other male-female pair, the air-earth combination obviously

represented Father Heaven and Mother Earth, whose separation was

caused by their firstborn son, the god who "divided heaven from earth,"
an Oedipal myth known throughout southeastern Asia, Oceania, and
ancient Mesopotamia.

Egyptians assigned a male-and-female pair to each of the primordi-

alelements as they arose from the undifferentiated Abyss, or womb
(Ma-Nu). These eight, together with their Great Mother, made up the
14
first Ennead (Nine Great Deities). Their elemental totems were
associated with the four cardinal points, the four winds, the four sides of
a Holy Mountain (pyramid), the four spirits called Sons of Horus
who guarded the corners of a temple. 15 These were like the four Princes
of Heaven revered in China and Japan as guardians of the four
cardinal directions: a blue dragon in the east, a red bird in the south, a
white tiger in the west, a black warrior in the north. Three animal

spirits and one human were the same as Egypt's

"four powers of
16
Amenti." The same elemental totems gave rise to the four angels
of the Apocalypse and the four evangelists, symbolized in Christian

iconography as a bull (earth), lion (fire), serpent (water), and eagle,

angel, or man (air).

American Indians had remarkably similar elemental symbolism.

Villages and camps were divided into four quarters or phratries of
fire, air, water, and earth, each with its colors and totems. For example,

the Zunis associated wind with the north, war, and yellow; fire with
the south, summer, tillage, and red; water with the west, spring, peace,
and blue; earth with theeast, autumn, magic, and white. Aztec
elemental totems were the rabbit (north, black, winter, air); the flint

(south, blue, summer, fire); the house (east, white, autumn, earth);
17
and the cane (west, red, spring, water).
New World mythology postulated four primordial aeons, each
corresponding to an element. Sacred histories of Mexico showed that
each of the former ages was brought to destruction by the same element I

274
 18
that ruled it. "Earth, the world support and base, became the Elements
iswallower of things. Air, the breath of life, became a
devastating wind.
from heaven tempered
Fire that descends as the fire-of-life in
^^__^_^_^_
lifegiving rain came down as a rain of flames. And finally Water, gentle
mothering vehicle of the energies of birth, nourishment, and growth,
19
became a deluge."
These myths provide a clue to the original invention of the

elements. Of all
substances or forces in the world,
why should these
four have been chosen as the basis of all things? The
simple answer is
that theelements represented the only four possible
ways other than
cannibalism to dispose of a dead body, thus
returning it to an "origin."
A body could be buried in the earth, burned with fire, thrown into
water, or given to the birds of theair. Each
funerary practice was viewed
as a return to the same power that engendered birth.
The same four methods of corpse-disposal are still practiced all
together in Tantric Tibet. Common folk are chopped in pieces and
exposed to carrion birds, as are the Parsees of India and Persia.
Wealthier Tibetans are cremated, or buried if death was caused
by
disease. Sometimes, as among the Hindus, corpses are thrown into
rivers or lakes. 20 Vedic peoples followed both
funerary customs of burial
I

and cremation, maintaining that Yama, Lord of Death, received the

soul either way. 21

Some ancient thinkers tried to classify different nations under

elemental categories, possibly on the basis of funeral customs
pre-
dominating in them. It was said that water-worship belonged to Egypt
and the Nilotic Goddess; Phrygians were worshippers of "the earth,
which was to them the Great Mother of everything; the Syrians and
Carthaginians of the air, which they adored under the name of
22
Juno"; and the Persians worshipped fire.
celestial

A few traditions listed a fifth element that the Greeks called ether,
"heavenly," of which the immortal bodies of gods, angels, star-spirits,
or saints were made. It was changeless, having no part in the eternal flux

of other elements constantly combining and re-combining. The idea

of changeless ether was so important to western notions of the immortal
soul that it was never abandoned; even today some occultists call it
the substance of the "astral body." In the 18th and 19th centuries,
astronomers believed ether was a gas filling all of outer space.
Etheric spirits were immortal, but the other elements were also

represented by of a superhuman nature; undines (water),

spirits
salamanders (fire), gnomes (earth), and sylphs (air). Some said these
were pre-human races born of the four rivers that flowed from the
Great Mother's belly in the paradisial age. Elemental colors were
associated with these four rivers of feminine nurturing fluids: water,

blood, honey, and milk. Oriental gemsmiths assigned to them the jewels
of mystical significance: sapphire or lapis lazuli (water), ruby (blood
2'
or fire), gold (earth), and silver, crystal, or diamond (air). According to
biblical symbolism, the female land was made of rivers Milk and
Honey; the male god or ancient Savior contributed blood and water, the

275
Elements very same fluids that flowed from the body of Jesus in the "land of
milk and honey" (John 19:34).
The philosophical sect called Stoics after stoicheia, "the ele-

ments" assigned color symbolism, signs of the zodiac, seasons, and

deities to the elements. 24 Their system passed into the Roman Circus,
which was divided into four elemental regions with their colors: green

for Spring, Earth, Flowers, Terra Mater, and Venus; red for Summer,
Fire, and Mars; blue for Autumn, Water, Heaven, Saturn, and
25
Neptune; white for Winter, Air, Zephyrs, and Jupiter. The same
deities were still connected with the elements in the 16th century

a.d.: Venus (water), Mars (fire), Jove (earth), and Saturn (air).

Compendium The Compendium MaleEcarum quoted Psellus's list of elemental

Malcficarum A
spirits in defining various kinds of devils in the Middle Ages. "The
treatise on witches
first is the fiery, because these dwell in the upper air and will never
and witchcraft compiled
descend .... The second is the aerial, because these dwell in the air
by Guazzo in 1608.
around us. . . .The third is terrestrial some dwell in the fields and
. . .

lead night travelers astray; some dwell in hidden places and caverns.

Michael . . . The fourth is the aqueous, for these dwell under the water in rivers
Constantine Psellus and lakes. . . .
They raise storms at sea, sink ships in the ocean, and . . .

1 lth-century Byzantine are more often women than men." 26 According to Scot, fire-spirits
politician, scholar, the instincts and passions: "Fiery
govern the intellect, water-spirits
philosopher, and 27
courtier; author of a
urge men to contemplation, watery spirits to lust."
spirits Sexual

History, poems, and prejudices entered into these definitions, for the supposed sexual
letters on many polarity of fire and water was never forgotten.
subjects. The human "temperament" came from Latin temperare, "to mix,
to combine"; temperament was a mixture of elemental "humors" or
fluids. These were supposed to be controlled by various gods associated

with the elements. Thus, a character could be Martial, Jovial,

Saturnine, or Mercurial. A predominance of blood gave a sanguine

temperament; of phlegm, a phlegmatic one; of bile, a melancholic
one; of ether, an ethereal one; and so on. The temperamental mixture
was also related to tempor, the time or season, for the elements were

categorized also with the four seasons of the year and various configura-
tions of the stars.
28
These ideas were old even before Rome was built.
The legendary ancestor of the Scythians was said to have arranged all

things in the world under four elemental symbols that came down
from heaven: a plough (earth), a bowl (water), an ax (fire), and a yoke
(air, the "yoke" between heaven and earth, related to the word
19
yoga). In general, the lore of the elements was a prime example of
what may be one of humanity's most characteristic behavior patterns:

classifying.
I. Lindsay, O.A., 20-2 1 Campblell, P.M., 458. 2. Campbell, M.I., 90.
;

3.d'Alviella,240. 4. Waddell, 484. 5. Mahanirvanatantra, 262-63.

6. Bardo Thodol, 15-16; Agrippa, 57. 7. Lindsay, O.A., 122; Wedeck, 236.
[Link], P.E., 71. 9. Rawson, A.T., 70. 10. Agrippa, 43, 49.
II. Campbell, P.M., 64; Oc.M., 181; Agrippa, 49. 12. Rawson, E.A., 57.
13. Dumezil,319. 14. Dumezil,647. 15. Budge, E.M., 89. 16. Lethaby, 58-60.
17. Lindsay,O.A., 20-21. 18. Castiglioni, 134. 19. Campbell, M.I., 154.
20. Bardo Thodol, 25-26. 21. Rose, 63. 22. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 205. 23. Waddell, 81. .

24. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 68. 25. Lindsay, O. A., 240. 26. Robbins, 133. 27. Scot, 419. ^
28. Funk, 301. 29. Jung & von Franz, 1 14.

276
[Elephant Elephant

A totem of Shiva, who took the form of the elephant and also of the

[god who killed the elephant. After dispatching his victim, Shiva put on ^^^^^^^
and turned himself elephantine, while "watched
the elephant's skin
'

|
by the Goddess-spouse." In the erotic poem Song of the Cowherd, the
i

god was incarnated as Krishna and the Goddess-spouse as his sexually

insatiable consort Radha, "She-Elephant." Radha was named for an
elephant because elephants were common symbols of the most
powerful sexual energies. The Kama Sutra designated "elephant men"
and "elephant women"
those with the largest genitals and most
voracious sexual appetites. Yet Radha was entirely human, described as

Woman, "the object of devotion to which even God, the Creator

himself, bows down." 2

A male elephant was often given the title of Begetter, or Father, or
Grandfather. 3 Buddha was begotten on the virgin Maya by the

elephant god under his title of Ganesha, "Lord of Hosts," most

4
probably derived from the use of elephants in warfare. Every history
studentknows North African war leaders considered the magic of
elephants so essential to victory that the Carthaginian general Hanni-

pal
insisted on trying to take them over the Alps to attack Rome from
the north a disastrous tactical misjudgment, resulting in the loss of
all his elephants and his war as well.
The elephant-god "Lord of Hosts" had a flourishing worship in
North Africa and Egypt, which is why this same title was taken by the

[biblical Yahweh,
who was identified with the elephant god at his sacred
5
of
Elephantine during century the 5th B.C. Jewish mercenary
pity
soldiers stationed there insisted that their god was the same as the
klephant-mate of the Virgin Mother Neith, or Anath: the two of
pern were totemized as Cow and Bull Elephant at what was then called
6
pe source of the Nile. Elephants were worshipped as sexual-
pymbolic deities in Egypt from an early date. Totem standards showing
elephants, and artifacts of elephant ivory, appeared in pre-dynastic
7
(times.

Judeo-Christian scholars tended to ignore Yahweh's involvement

In the elephant cult because, as Hooke says, "it is naturally repugnant
to most people [i.e., men] to entertain the suggestion that Jahveh could
ever have been thought of as possessing a female consort like all the

paals
of Canaan"; and for no more reason than this allegedly natural

repugnance, evidence of the sacred marriage at Elephantine was

suppressed. Yet the same author admitted that Jahveh was once one of
8
the very same Baals, and even addressed as Baal in the Bible.

A curious parallel to the Flight into Egypt of Yahweh's son is

found Buddhist iconography. The Virgin Mother was shown

in
in
riding a white bull, led by Shiva in the costume of a peasant, holding
9
tier arms the elephant-headed Divine Child, the reborn Ganesha.
the
Possibly the original Egyptian version of this reborn god entered
Bible under the name of Behemoth, who became an elephant-
lieaded demon in the later mythology of western Europe.

277
Elias, Saint The elephant still symbolizes the sacred marriage in a Buddhist
Elizabeth, Saint Monks lead a painted white elephant in solemn
fertility ritual.

mm^^^ma^^am^m procession, attended by men wearing women's clothes and making

salacious jokes. "Through this ritualistic female disguise they do
honor to the cosmic female principle, the maternal, procreative, feeding
energy of nature, and by the ritualistic utterance of licentious lan-
10
guage stimulate the dormant sexual energy of the living power." The
same transvestism and lewd language can be found in fertility rituals
the world over.
1. Zimmer, 173. 2. Campbell, Or.M., 352. 3. B. Butler, 224.

4. Campbell, Or.M., 307. 5. Graves, W.G., 405. 6. Ashe, 3 1 59. ,

7. Budge, G.E. 1, 22. 8. Hooke, S.P., 104, 182. 9. Ross, 47. 10. Zimmer, 108.

Elias, Saint
Canonized form of Helios, the sun god, called El the solar bull

among Semitic peoples.

1
Elias was the god Jesus addressed from the
cross; his hearers said, "This man calleth for Elias ... let us see

whether Elias will come to save him" (Matthew 27:47-49; Mark

1 5:35). Eusebius built upon the name alone a nonsensical Christian

myth, calling Eliasone of five Egyptians who were "questioned" at the

gate of Caesarea and gave their names and their city, Jerusalem.
"The governor ordered them to be tortured to exhort more precise
information; but they remained mute and were beheaded." 2
[Link], 44. 2. Artwater, 112.

Elizabeth, Saint

Daughter of a 1 3th-century
king of Hungary, Elizabeth was married
at the age of 13 to the Landgrave of Thuringia. She was a mother at 14,
a widow at 20, and a corpse at 24, having died of an excess of

Christianity.
Her spiritual advisor was Conrad von Marburg, who loved to strip

both Elizabeth and her maids and mercilessly whip them for the
slightest infraction of his orders. On one occasion
the young Landgra-
vine was invited to visit a nunnery and went without asking his

permission. He beat her so severely that "for three weeks the marks of
the cords could be seen upon her." After her husband's death, other
nobles robbed her of her estates and left her destitute; von Marburg
ordered her to send away her last few friends and her children. She
said, "I fear a mortal man as much as I should fear the heavenly Judge.
Therefore I have given my obedience to Master Conrad that I . . .

l
might be bereft of every earthly consolation."
She inflicted further austerities on herself, in addition to the abuse
she received from von Marburg, and soon died of these physical

hardships. Conrad von Marburg pulled political strings to

have her

278
 canonized, to enhance his own reputation as her teacher. He busied Elohim
himself in the torture chamber a task plainly suited to his Elves
personal-
ityand was credited with bringing 8000 heretics to the stake in a

single year. Atlast he was assassinated

by a group of irate knights,
against whom he had preached a crusade. 2 He was
promptly canon-
ized as a saint and a martyr. 5
1. de Voragine, 684. 2. Lea unabridged, 41 5-25. 3. H. Smith, 258.

Elohim
Hebrew plural word meaning "the goddesses and the gods," though
I every time it
appeared was translated simply "God." In
in a Bible text it

the original manuscripts of the book of Genesis, Yahweh was

only
one of the elohim. Sometimes the singular form was taken as a
name,
e.g. the Phoenician bull-god called simply El, "the l
god."
Medieval wizards thought Elohim was one of the
magical secret
names of God; or, at times, it was taken to be the name of a devil.
1 .
Lamusse, 74.

Elves

Spenser said the word "elf meant "alive." But there

'
is little doubt The word elf was
that elves were the ancestral dead, still "alive" in their burial mounds; "it related to the helleder,

is well known that in Scandinavia the dead were formerly called people belonging to
"2 Mother Hel as Death-
'elves.' The Kormaks Saga, pagan Icelandic poem of the 10th
goddess. In general it

century, described sacrifices to them for curative purposes: "Redden meant heathen, both
the outside of the mound with bull's blood, and make the elves a feast dead and living.
with the flesh; and you will be healed." 3 Sigvat Thordarson in
the 11th century
The paradise
of Alfaheimr (Elf-land) was always matriarchal,
called heathen people
inhabited by the bright female spirits who made the sun. Like their
alfar, "elves," who
eastern counterparts the dakinis, these Valkyries or fairies could be
worshipped their deities
both beautiful and hideous, representing both birth and death. 5 In the at feasts called

new creation after doomsday, the new female sun would be Glory-of- alfablot (elf-blood) in

6 certain "heathen-
Elves.
holy" houses ruled by
Christianity ancient female-centered theology, as
opposed this

shown by accounts of elf-feasts as demonic sabbats where "cloven-

footed dancers" trod their fairy rings. Henry More, 17th century

English philosopher and poet, said they often appeared in northern

7
England and in Ireland. Ballads merged the demon lover with the "elf-
knight," a wooer from pagan northlands. 8 The custom of the Wild
Hunt or Night Ride, sacred to the elf-king (Odin), was transformed into
a procession of
wind-riding demons, as at Halloween and other
Ipagan festivals. Leader of the night riders was called the Erl King, from
Danish eherkonge, a king of those who belong to Hel. He associated
with the sacred alder tree. 9

279
Elysium Other plants often associated with elves were the holly sacred to

Endymion Hel, the mistletoe, the mandrake, and various witch-herbs including
10
rosemary, known as the Elfin Plant, named after the Goddess herself.
(See Rose.)
[Link],57. 2. Wimberly, 127. 3. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 156.
4. Hollander, 154. [Link]-Petre, 231. 6. Sturluson, 92. 7. Summers, V, 115.
8. Wimberly, 137. 9. Encyc. Brit, "Erl King." 10. Wimberly, 350.

Elysium
Greek paradise, Persephone's heaven for heroes, also called
the Isles

of the Blest; located either in the underworld, or in the far west, like the

Hesperian apple-orchards of Mother Hera. Elysium too was an

"Apple-land," like Avalon and Eden. 1
It became a common synonym
for "paradise."
1. Graves, CM. 1,123.

var. Emain, Hy-Many Emania

"Land of the Moon," where the dead went, ruled by the
Celtic

Queen of Shades called Mania, Mana, Macha, Mene, or Minne: the

Fairy Queen. Like the Norse heaven Manavegr, it was identified

with the moon-path in the sky, and with earthly shrines, too. Macha's

holy city was called Emain Macha. See Moon.

Empyrean
"Heaven of Inner Fire," Greek philosophers' concept of the highest
heaven above the planetary spheres, "empire" of the sun god, or the
divine king of the celestial mountain. "Inner Fire" probably referred
to the divine element ether, supposed to be the substance of spirits. See
Elements; Mountain.

Endymion
"Seduced Moon-man," a Greek hero enchanted into eternal sleep by

the Moon-goddess Selene. He was a God-begotten king of Elis, having

ousted the former king in the usual fashion of ancient heroes. "When
his reign ended he was duly sacrificed and awarded a hero shrine at
Olympia." This was the "sleep put on him" by his Goddess, who
l

nightly kissed him where he lay forever

on the mountainside. See
Kingship.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,211.

280
Ennead Ennead
The Eos
Nine," primal Great Deities of Egypt: a male and female pair
or each of the four elements, plus their Mother, the Creatress called bihi^h^bh
>Iu, Nut, or Night, the Abyss, Chaos: the
Ma-Nu, Temu, Maa,
undifferentiated mixture of elements. See Creation; Elements.

Enthusiasm
>eek enthousiasmos, "having a god within," the concept of posses-

ion by a divine spirit. It was a doctrine set forth in Asia as Svecchacara,

reedom from all sinfulness because all actions are motivated by the
inner divinity.
1
See Antinomianism; Possession.
1 .
Angus, 151.

intrails

Courage, in modern slang, is both "guts" and "balls," a combination

f very ancient precedent. It was once thought that male genitals were

rotruding ends of intestines, literally "testes-within." Egyptian sma

neant both entrails and male
Egyptians prayed to be delivered
genitals.
1

m the day of reckoning from a Kali-like death-goddess Baba, who not

>nly "devoured" men sexually but also "feeds on the entrails of the
2
lead."

Kali devoured her lover genitally and also devoured his entrails at

fie same time. 5 Similarly, Aphrodite in her Crone form as Andro-

ihonos, Man-Slayer, killed her lovers as a queen bee does by ripping
4
ut their intestines along with their genitals. In northern Europe
here was the same ceremony: spring was brought to the world by
pibolically ripping
out the entrails of Loki via a rope tied around his
enitals. His blood bathed the lap (womb) of the Goddess; then she

piled,
and the spring could come. 5 See Skadi.
Because men's "guts" were supposed to possess the spirit of the
hallic god, also mythologized as the underground serpent, it was
sual to take omens from the entrails of sacrificial victims. Among the
Lmazonian tribes of the Black Sea area, the readers of entrails were
old gray-haired women." 6 The Romans called similar diviners haruspi-

"those who gaze into the belly." 7

(es,

1.
Budge, G.E. 1, 43. 2. Cavendish, RE., 1 12. 3. Neumann, CM., pi. 66.
4. Graves, G.M. 1, 72. 5. Oxenstierna, 213. 6. Wendt, 137. 7. Rose, 237.

OS
lomer's "Rosy-fingered Dawn," the same birth-goddess as Mater
latuta, Aurora, or Hebe. Her rosy fingers were usually assumed to

281
Epona represent the pink clouds of sunrise, but the meaning may have been
Erinys more literal, recalling the habit of Egyptian and Asian priestesses of

g^^i^^g,^ staining their fingers red for religious ceremonies. See Henna.

Epona
Celtic-Saxon Horse-goddess of Iron Age Britain, probably modeled
on Cretan Leukippe (White Mare), Mare-headed Demeter, and the
equine deities of central Asia. The cult of Epona "stretched from
Spain to Eastern Europe and Northern Italy to Britain." Irish kings
'

were still
symbolically united with a white mare in the 1 1th century

a.d. See Horse.

1 .
Larousse, 240.

var. Erebus Erebos

Greco- Roman name for the underworld, land of death, described in

Orphic mystery-religion as "the Abysmal Womb." Like other ancient

'

concepts of "hell," it was a place of regeneration. See Hell.

I. Lindsay, O.A., 116.

Eresh-Kigal
Underworld counterpart of the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar; compar-
able toNephthys in Egypt, Persephone in Greece, Kali-Uma in India,
Hel in northern Europe. She was provided with a consort, Nergal,
later transformed by Christian mythographers into a demonic official of

hell.

Erigone
Virgil's name for the constellation of the Virgin, also known as

Astraea, Goddess of Justice, or Libra, Lady of the Scales. She was the 1

same celestial Judge as the Egyptian Goddess Maat.

1. Lindsay, O.A., 277.

Erinys
"Avenger," title of Mother Demeter as the threefold Furies, who
punished trespassers against matriarchal law.
all In her fearsome aveng-

ing aspect, the Goddess sometimes appeared as the Night-mare, with

a black horse head wreathed with snakes. See Demeter; Furies.
1

1. Graves, W.G., 411.

282
Erl King Erl
King

Danish ellerkonge, "king of elves," associated with the sacred alder or Essenes

elder tree, and the underground land of the dead. As Lord of Death, he
was the consort of Hel, Goddess of the elder He was really a trees.
1

form of Odin, leader of the Wild Hunt composed of ghostly riders on

the night wind.

[Link],93.

Eros
Bisexual Greek deity of erotic love, identical with Hindu Kama.
Orphics said Eros was the emerge from the womb of the
first god to

primal creatress, Mother Night, "of whom even Zeus stands in

awe." Plato said Eros was the oldest of deities, the most worthy of
'

honor, the one who gave souls strength to ascend to heaven after
2
death. In short, Eros was a kind of Savior, before cults of asceticism

began to replace the older worship of sexuality as a primary life-force.

1. Graves, CM., 1, 30. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 125.

Erua

Babylonian name for the Queen of Heaven, who chose kings and
married them, and controlled the function of birth among all creatures
in her land. 1 An alternate title of the Goddess Ishtar, or Inanna.
[Link]. & Bab. Lit, 114.

Essenes
Jewish sect of ascetics, based on sun-worshipping Persian anchorites,
who in turn evolved their system from Jain yogis professing to work
miracles by living apart from the world and practicing extreme self-

denial. Jesus, John the and Simon Magus were said to have
Baptist,
been trained in Essenic communities, which formed the bulk of the
first Christians. Epiphanius said, "They who believed on Christ were Epiphanius Sainted
called Essenes before they were called Christians."
l
4th-century father of
the church, friend
An
Essenic hierarchy included a chief priest called Christos
of St. Jerome, writer of
(Anointed One), "head of the entire Congregation of Israel." There many tracts and
were ordinary "sons of Aaron," and another functionary
priests called polemics against
as the Messiah of Israel. The latter was also called Teacher of
2
known paganism.

Righteousness. He suffered physical abuse in atonement

for the sins of

the entire community, enduring "vindictive sentences of scourging

and the terrors of painful sicknesses, and vengeance on his fleshly

body."'
as an but esteem
Josephus said the Essenes "reject pleasures evil,

283
Essenes continence, and the conquest over our passions, to be virtue. They
neglect wedlock, but choose out other persons' children, while they are
^^^^^^^ pliable, and fit for learning; and esteem them
and form them according to their own manners." We are not told
to be of their kindred,

whether these "other persons' children" were abandoned by their

parents, or sold, or given to, or kidnapped by, the Essenes. These harsh
anchorites imposed cruel sentences for the least infraction of rules,

partial starvation being the most common punishment.

Some suffered
punishments lasting two or more years for wavering from the doc-
4
trines of the community.
The doctrines were strikingly similar to those of early Christianity.
Essenes anticipated Augustine in teaching that immortal souls
St.

belonged in
heaven, but were drawn down to earth and entrapped in
corruptible flesh by the "natural enticement" of sex. 5 The soul's

purity might be recovered by ascetic techniques such as mortification

of
the flesh, fasting, renunciation of sensual pleasures, and by solitary
meditation in the wilderness, like the voluntary exiles of John and Jesus.
Essenes called themselves Therapeutae, "healers," claiming their
austere lifestyle gave them power to cast out demons of sickness, even
to restore life to the dead; Jesus's raising of Lazarus was a typical Essenic
miracle. 6
Much of their training as exorcists consisted of learning lists

of spirits' names, and the holy names that would expel them. Like Jesus
in the episode of the Gadarene swine, Essenes always demanded the

demons' names. (See Name.) They were sworn to strictest secrecy

7
regarding the magical names they used in their exorcisms.
Essenes preached giving away all one's worldly goods upon joining
the sect, which meant those who
joined gave away everything they
owned to their superiors. Dire punishments were meted out to those
who lied about their possessions in order to hold something back for
themselves or their families. 8 An
Essenic episode in the Gospels tells of
Ananias and his wife Sapphira, killed by St. Peter for giving the
for a sale of
apostles only a part, but not all, of the money they received
land. Peter and his associates were jailed for murder, but later escaped
(Acts 5:2-10, 18).
Despite their vows of poverty, the Essenes were strangely obsessed
with visions of wealth and power coming to them after Armageddon,
9
"The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness." Sons of

Light of course were the Essenes, and all others outside their
brotherhood were Sons of Darkness, otherwise called "men of the
Pit." The Essenes believed firmly in the imminence of the Last
10

Days, when they would be called upon to fight the forces of evil.
Their
reward would be to rule the world in an oddly materialistic manner,
as envisioned by their scriptures:

Arise, O Warrior, take thy captives, O glorious man! Seize thy plunder, O
doer of mighty deeds! Lay thy hand on the necks of thy enemies and
thy foot on the heaps of the slain; smite the nations, thy adversaries,
and
may thy sword devour guilty flesh Let there be a multitude of

284
 possessions in thy fields, silver and gold and precious stones in thy palaces. Esther
...Let thy gates be continuously open, that the wealth of the nations
may be brought unto thee; and let their kings serve thee, and all the _^^^^__^^___
oppressors bow down to thee and lick the dust of thy feet. "

A large colony of Essenes occupied the Qumran community

from 1 10 B.C. to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. with a
significant period
of vacancy during the reign of Herod, 31-4 B.C. In 31 b.c. the site
had to be abandoned because a severe earthquake cracked the water
cistern and ruined the buildings. 12
Survivors evidently took the earthquake as a sign of the oncoming
Last Days and went forth into the world to preach their message.

Josephus said before 70 a.d. there were many Messiahs and Christs
15
announcing the end of the world. Some were willing to die a
martyr's death, believing this would gain them special privileges in the

world of the hereafter. One such martyr may have been John the

Baptist, who came from the wilderness to call Herod and his court to

repentance, and remained to serve as a sacred king (see Salome).

Early Mandaean
Christians said the true prophet was not Jesus but

John the Baptist. They called themselves Christians of St. John, and
also Nasoraje, or "Nazarenes." H One of the colonies of exiled hermits
from Qumran around Nazareth and took up the craft of
settled

carpentry; hence the craft-brotherhood of Nazorenes, from najjar,

"carpenters," after whom the town may have been named. Some
Christian authorities of the first centuries a.d. wrote that during this
15
period "all Christians were called Nazorenes." Jesus too was called
a Nazorene. The oldest Gospel called him "Jesus the carpenter" (Mark
6:3).

Oddly, what began in the east as a carpenters' metaphor passed

into the Gospels as a masons' metaphor. Essene-like Buddhist her-
16
mits described themselves as logs rejected by the carpenter's craft. The
same words were put mouth, somewhat altered: he
into Jesus's called

himself a stone rejected by the masons (Matthew 21:42).

1. Doane,426. 2. Pfeifer, 133. 3. Augstein, 108. 4. Pfeifer, 59, 138.
5. Pfeifer, 99; Encyc. Brit., "Augustine." 6. Mumford, 146. 7. Legge 1, 158.
8. Pfeifer, 59. 9. Black, 3. 10. Pfeifer, 51. 11. Pfeifer, 82.
12. Pfeifer, 24; Campbell, Oc.M., 285. 13. Brandon, 248. 14. Reinach, 77.
15. Black, 72. 16. Campbell, Or.M., 279.

ther

'Star," the Hebrew rendering of Ishtar or Astarte. The biblical Book

of Esther is a secularized Elamite myth of Ishtar (Esther) and her
consortMarduk (Mordecai), who sacrificed the god Hammon, or
Amon (Haman). Yahweh was never mentioned, because the Jews of
Elam worshipped Marduk, not Yahweh. (See Purim.)
Esther probably was the name given to any priestess chosen to

represent the Goddess on the occasion of the king's sacred marriage.

285
Ethan Even the Bible story admits that Esther-Ishtar was not the real name of
Euphemia, Saint the Elamite-Jewish queen. Her real name was Hadassah (Esther 2:7).

Ethan
Biblical sage almost as wise as Solomon (1 Kings 4:31). His origin
was not really [Link] was the Sumerian god-king Etana, called
Eytan in the land of Canaan. He ascended to heaven on eagle-back,

like Ganymede, to reach the Goddess and learn the secret of eternal life.

He came down again to earth, thrown down by the jealous

some said

sun god for his hubris. Evidently he returned to earth to be reincarnat-

1

ed in the next king. (See Kingship.)

1. Albright, 250.

Eugenia, Saint
"Healer" or "Health," a title of the Goddess converted into a

martyr." Her legend claimed she was one of the

fictitious "virgin

women who entered a Christian sect by "turning herself into a man,"

for some sects would not admit women unless they did this. St.
1

Eugenia accordingly became a monk and called herself Brother

Eugenius. The same story told of all she-monks was told of her: she was
falsely accused of rape and condemned to a life of expiation,
which
she patiently endured. Still, the healing miracles attributed to her shrines
were older than her Christian legend, showing that she was really the
Goddess whose "eugenic" springs were even more popular in the 1st
2
century than Lourdes or Compostela in the 20th.
1 .
Malvern, 33. 2. de Voragine, 537.

Eumenides
"Good Ones," a euphemistic title of the Furies, intended to placate

their wrath and refrain from attracting their attention through invoca-
tion of their real names.

Eunomia
"Order," the first of Aphrodite's three Horae; one of the names of
the Triple Goddess's virgin aspect as the Creatress who first brought
order out of chaos. See Creation; Diakosmos.

Euphemia, Saint
"Good-speaker," a fictitious Christian saint based on a title of the
Goddess as the Muse of mellifluous speech. St. Euphemia's legend

286
shows that she was not ahuman being but a statue. She stood aloft on
Europa
and could not be reached except with ladders; those who
a high place,
Eurynome
climbed up to pull her down were afraid, because the first of their
number had been stricken with paralysis upon touching her and was
borne away half dead. That is, she was a holy image protected by so
1

stern a taboo that even early Christians feared to violate it.

1. de Voragine, 552.
.

Europa
"Full Moon," the Great Goddess as mother of the entire continent.
She was embodied in the same white Moon-cow as Hathor, Hera, Io,
and Kali who "rode" Shiva in the guise of the white bull Nandi,
Europa rode Zeus disguised as a white bull. Her Hellenic legend
1
just as

said Zeus kidnapped and raped her; but it was "deduced from pre-
Hellenic pictures of the Moon-priestess triumphantly riding on the
2
Sun-bull, her victim." Garlanded white bulls were sacrificed to the
lunar cow-goddess in Crete and Mycenae from a very early date.
According to Pausanias, Europa was a surname of the ancient Pausanias Greek
Mycenaean goddess, Demeter.* and geographer
traveler
of the 2nd century
1. Campbell, Or.M., 63. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 197. 3. Guthrie, 225.
a.d. Living in a time of

declining culture, he
was inspired by a desire
to describe the
Eurydice
ancient sacred sites for
"Universal Dike," Mother of Fate, the Orphic name for the under- posterity.
world Goddess who received the soul of Orpheus. Hellenic writers
converted her into Orpheus's wife, sent by a serpent's bite to the land
if death, where he followed her; but this was an artificial myth of very

ate origin. The

icons from which came the apocryphal story of

Eurydice's death seem to have represented Orpheus entering the

anderworld, to be greeted by Hecate with her serpents. Eurydice's
'snake in the grass" was her sacred animal, constant companion of the
jnderworld Goddess. 1

Medieval poets knew the same classic Goddess as a queen of

England, "Heurodis," whose consort was a god-begotten king of
2
Winchester, "Sir Orfeo."
1. Graves, G.M. 1,115. 2. Loomis, 315-19.

Eurynome
'Universal One," the Pelasgian Creatress who danced alone on the
mmordial ocean of Chaos until she brought the elements to "order'

themis, another of her names). Like Isis and Eve, she created the
feat Serpent, a disembodied phallus, to be her first consort. She
>ermitted him to fertilize her womb, but then he began to call

limself the Creator of everything. Angered by his arrogance, she

287
Eve bruised his head with her heel and cast him down to the underworld.
1

Christian Gnostics told much the same story of the Mother of

Creation, whom they called Sophia, and her first consort Jehovah,
who was able to help in the work of creation only because she "infused
him with energy" and implanted in him her own ideas. He too
became too arrogant and had to be punished for forgetting his Mother. 2
See Eve.
Like many titles of the Great Goddess, Eurynome was both
diabolized and masculinized by later Christian writers, who con-

signed her to hell and made her a male "demon Eurynome," sometimes
3
described as a Prince of Death.
1. Graves, CM. 1,27. 2. Pagels, 57-58. [Link], B2, 141.

Eve
One of her Tantric The biblical of Eve, "Mother of All Living," was a translation of
title

names was Adita Eva: Kali Ma's Jaganmata. She was also known in India as Jiva or leva,
title
"the Very
the Creatress of all manifested forms. In Assyrian scriptures she was
1

2
Beginning." In
entitled Mother- Womb, Creatress of Destiny, who made male and
northern Babylonia,
4
Eve was known as "the female human beings out of clay, "in pairs she completed them."
divineLady of The of the Bible's two creation myths gives this Assyrian version,
first

Eden," or "Goddess of significantly changing "she" to "he" (Genesis 1:27).

the Tree of Life." 3
The original Eve had no spouse except the serpent, a living
Assyrians called her
phallus she created for her own sexual pleasure. 5 Some ancient
Nin-Eveh, "Holy 6
Lady Eve," after whom peoples regarded the Goddess and her serpent as their first parents.
their capital city was Sacred icons showed the Goddess giving life to a man, while her
named. 7
serpent coiled around the apple tree behind her. Deliberate misinter-
pretation of such icons produced ideas for revised creation myths like
the one in Genesis. Some Jewish traditions of the first century B.C.,

however, identifiedJehovah with the serpent deity who accompanied

the Mother in her garden. 8 Sometimes she was Eve, sometimes her
name was given as Nahemah, Naama, or Namrael, who gave birth to

Eve and Adam without the help of any male, even the serpent. 9
Because Jehovah arrogantly pretended to be the sole Creator, Eve I

was obliged to punish him, according to Gnostic scriptures. Though

theMother of All Living existed before everything, the God forgot she j

had made him and had given him some of her creative power. "He
was even ignorant of his own Mother. ... It was because he was foolish

and ignorant of his Mother that he said, 'I am God; there is none
beside me.'" Gnostic texts often show the creator reprimanded and
punished for his arrogance by a feminine power greater and older
than himself. 10
The secret of God's "Name of power," the Tetragrammaton,
was that three-quarters of it invoked not God, but Eve. YHWH, yod-
he-vau-he, came from the Hebrew root HWH, meaning both "life"
and "woman" in Latin letters, E-V-E. 16 With the addition of an I

288
(yod), it amounted to the Goddess's invocation of her own name as the Eve
Word of creation, a common idea in Egypt and other ancient lands. 17
Gnostic scriptures said Adam was created by the power of Eve's
word, not God's. She said, "Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!" As
soon as she spoke the word, her word became reality. Adam rose up and
Eve was one of the
opened his eyes. "When he saw her, he said, 'You will be called "the
common Middle-
mother of the living," because you are the one who gave me life.'" 18
Eastern names of the
Adam's name meant he was formed of clay moistened with blood,
superior feminine
the female magic oiadamah or "bloody clay." 19
He didn't produce power. To the
the Mother of All Living from his rib; in earlier Mesopotamian stories, Hittites, she was
11
he was produced from hers. (See Birth-giving, Hawwah, "Life."
Male.) His Babylo-
To the Persians, she
nian predecessor Adapa (or Adamu) was deprived of eternal life not by
was Hvov, "the
the Goddess, but by a hostile God. Earth." 12 Aramaeans
The biblical idea was a reversal of older
myths in which the called her
Hawah,
Goddess brought forth a primal male ancestor, then made him her "Mother of All
13
Living." In
mate the ubiquitous, archetypal divine-incest relationship traceable in
Anatolia she was Hebat
every mythology. The reversal was not even original with biblical or Hepat, with a
authors. was evolved by Aryan patriarchs who called Brahma the
It
Greek derivative Hebe,
primal male ancestor. They claimed their god brought forth the "Virgin Mother
Mother of All Living from his own body, then mated with her, so she Earth," with the same
20
In the Hebraic version, a relationship to the
gave birth to the rest of the universe.
Great Goddess Hera as
wombless God made his offspring with his hands, and the actual birth-
Kore-Persephone to
giving was left to Adam. The Bible as revised by patriarchal scribes
Demeter, and Hebe
said nothing about a divine birth-giving, since the scribes were deter- may have been an
ined to separate the concepts of "deity" and "mother" insofar as eponymous ancestress
of "Hebrews." A
possible.
Semitic root of her
Gnostic scriptures however reverted to the older tradition and
names was hayy, a
said Eve not only created Adam and obtained his admission to heaven; matrilineal kinship
she was the very soul within him, as Shakti was the soul of every group, once
Hindu god and Adam couldn't live without "power from the considered the "life" of
yogi.
every tribe by direct
Mother," so she descended to earth as "the Good Spirit, the
descent from the
Thought of Light called by him 'Life' (Hawwa)." She entered into
Creatress. H The
Adam as his guiding spirit of conscience: "It is she who works at the names of Eve, the
creature, exerts herself on him, setshim in his own perfect temple, Serpent, and "Life"
are still derived from the
nlightens him on the
origin of his deficiency, and shows him his
same root in
(way of) ascent." Through her, Adam was able to rise above the
Arabic. 15
21
gnorance imposed on him by the male God.
By this Gnostic route came the Midrashic assertion that Adam and
Sve were originally androgynous, like Shiva and his Shakti. She dwelt
n him, and he they were two souls united in one body, which
in her;

3od depriving them of their bliss of union. Cabalists

later tore apart,

ook up the idea and said the paradise of Eden can be regained only
rvhen the two sexes are once more united; even God must be united
22
vith his female counterpart, the heavenly Eve called Shekina.
Another Gnostic version of the story made God a true villain, who
ursedAdam and Eve and expelled them from paradise out of
ealousy of their happiness. He also lusted after the Virgin Eve, raped
ler, and begot her sons Jahveh and Elohim, whose other names were

289
Eve Cain and Abel. Here was one of several myths that made Eve the
mother not only of Adam, but also of Jehovah, and of all the
elements as well. The myth went on to say the first of Eve's offspring
ruled the male elements of fire and air; the second ruled the female
23
elements of earth and water.
Like her prototype Kali Jaganmata, Eve brought forth death as
well as life that is, she brought forth all living forms, all of which

were subject to death for the very reason that they were alive. Under

patriarchal systems of belief, the fact that every living thing is doomed

to die was blamed on the Mother who gave it a finite life. Instead of

blaming God for casting Adam out of the paradise where he might
have lived forever, the patriarchs blamed Eve for bringing this about.
The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach said evil began with Woman (Eve):
"because of her we all die." 24 Fathers of the Christian church said Eve
conceived by the serpent and brought forth Death. The seeds of all
[Link] Chrysostom, women already existed in Eve, St. John Chrysostom maintained, so that
25
"Golden-mouthed in her sin "the whole female race transgressed."

John," 4th-century The Book of Enoch said God created death to punish all humanity
Christian orator who God
for Eve's sin, butmany patriarchal thinkers hesitated to blame
served as Patriarch of
even The prevalent opinion was that when Eve disobeyed
indirectly.
Constantinople until he
26
incurred the wrath of the deity, death somehow just happened. St. Paul blamed only Eve,

the empress Eudoxia, absolving Adam from guilt for the apple-eating incident:
"Adam was not
who arranged to deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression" (1
have him deposed and
Timothy 2:14). A church council announced in 418 a.d. that it was
exiled.
result of
heresy to say death was a natural necessity rather than
the
27
Eve's disobedience.
This was the real origin of the church fathers' fear and hatred of

women, which expanded into a sexist attitude that permeated all of

western society: Woman was identified with Death. Her countervailing
was taken away, and the creation of life was
responsibility for birth
of the Father-god, whose priests claimed he could
laid to the credit

remove the curse of death. As every woman was understood to be an

Tertullian (Quintus emanation of Eve, Tertullian said to Everywoman:
Septimius Florens Ter- And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this
tullianus) Influential
sex ofyours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You
early Christian writer
are the devil's gateway the first deserter of the divine law; you are she
. . .

and father of the

who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.
church, ca. 155-220
You destroyed so God's image, man. On account ofyour desert
a.d., born in Car- easily |
28
thage of pagan parents.
that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.

Medieval theologians said Adam was forgiven. Christ descended

into hell and rescued Adam along with other biblical patriarchs. He
escorted Adam into heaven, saying, "Peace be to thee and to all the

just among thy sons."

29
But for Eve there was no forgiveness. No peace
was offered to her or her daughters. Presumably, they were left
behind in hell. Christian theologians espoused the same theory as
Persian patriarchs, that heaven was closed to all women except those
30
who were submissive and worshipped their husbands as gods. Even

290
modern theologians naively blame human death on the Edenic sin. Eve
Rahner said, "Man's death is the demonstration of the fact that he has
fallen away from God Death is guilt made visible." 51 Theolo-
gians have not yet dealt with the question of what "guilt" causes death
among non-human creatures.
Actually, churches depend for their very existence on the orthodox
myth of Eve. "Take the snake, the fruit-tree, and the woman from
the tableau, and we have no fall, no frowning Judge, no Inferno, no

everlasting punishment hence no need of a Savior. Thus the

bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology." 32

Equally destructive to Christian theology would be restoration of

books arbitrarily excluded from the canon, such as the Apocalypse of
Adam, in which Adam stated that he and Eve were created together but
she was his superior. She brought with her "a glory which she had
seen in the aeon from which we had come forth. She taught me a word
of knowledge. . . . And we resembled the great eternal angels, for we
were higher than the God who had created us.""
Some of these once-sacred books made Eve superior to both Adam
and the creator. was she, not God, who gave Adam his soul and
It

brought him to life. It was she, not God, who cast down the evil deities
from heaven and made them demons. And she, as the eternal female
Power, would eventually judge the God she created, find him guilty of
34
injustice, and destroy him.
As an allegory, this might reflect a social truth. Fragile constructs

who ignore
of the collective mind, gods are easily destroyed by those
them. Early Gnostic documents show that most women of the ancient
world were disposed to ignore the God who was said to have cursed
their sex and their descendants forever. Had one of the other versions of
the Eve myth prevailed over the canonical version, sexual behavior
patterns in western civilization almost certainly would have evolved
along very different lines. Christianity managed to project man's fear
of death onto woman, not to respect her as Kali the Destroyer was
respected, but to hate her.
The uncanonical scriptures were no more and no less creditable

than the canonical ones. Their picture of God's stern mother,Eve as

he defender of mankind against a tyrannical demon-deity, had more

adherents in the early Christian centuries than the picture that is now
amiliar. One of Christianity's best-kept secrets was that the Mother of

Ml Living was the Creatress who chastised God.

1. Avalon, 120, 278. 2. Waddell, 126. 3. d'Alviella, 153. 4. Neumann, CM., 136. 5.

Graves, G.M. 1, 54. 6. J.E. Harrison, 129.

27; Tennant, 1

7. d'Alviella, 166-67; Lindsay, O.A., 54. 8. Enslin, C.B., 91. 9. Legge 2, 329.
10. Pagels, 30, 52, 57-8. 11. Hooke, M.E.M., 112. 12. Campbell, Oc.M., 210.

[Link],30. 14. Tennant, 26. 15. Shah, 387.

[Link], 188; Cavendish, T., 116. 17. Brandon, 126-27. 1 8. Pagels, 30.

19. Hooke, M.E.M., 1 10. 20. Larousse, 345. 21. Jonas, 82, 204.
22.0chs, 121. 23. Jonas, 205. 24. Malvern, 30. 25. Ashe, 178-79.
26. Tennant, 207, 244. 27. H. Smith, 238. 28. Bullough, 1 14.
29. de Voragine, 223. 30. Campbell, Oc.M., 196. 3 1 Cavendish, P.E., 28.
.

32. Daly, 69. 33. Robinson, 256-57. 34. Robinson, 172-78.

291
Evolution Evolution
The theory of species development given to the world by Darwin and
his successors had no special religious significance, except that Christian
authorities viewed it as a contradiction of their all-important Eden
myth, just as Galileo's astronomical discoveries contradicted the Bible's

geocentric cosmos. The theory of evolution showed man could not

have "fallen"; there was no original sin and therefore no need of
salvation.

In 1869 a German theologian, Dr. Schund, said, "If Darwin be

right in his view of the development of man out of a brutal condition,

then the Bible teaching in regard to man is utterly annihilated." The
American Episcopal Church said: "If this hypothesis be true, then is

the Bible an unbearable fiction then have Christians for nearly two
. . .

thousand years been duped by a monstrous lie. Darwin requires . . .

us to disbelieve the authoritative word of the Creator." Another theo-

logicalheavyweight declared: "If the Darwinian theory is true,

Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of life falls to pieces,
and the revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a
delusion and a snare." '

These gentlemen were right. The theory of evolution does indeed

contradict the biblical creation myths and the dogma of the Fall. As
the evidence in favor of evolution continued to pile up, fundamentalist
churches desperately sought ways to ignore it, or else reconcile the
irreconcilable. Pope Paul IV spoke on the subject of evolution in 1966:

Such explanations do not agree with the teaching of Sacred Scripture,

Sacred Tradition, and the Church 's magisterium, according to which
the sin of the first man is transmitted to all his descendants not through
imitation but through propagation. . . . The theory of evolution will not
seem acceptable you whenever it is not decisively in accord with the
to

immediate creation of each and every human soul by God, and

Origen (Origenes whenever it does not regard as decisively important for the fate of
Adamantius) Christian mankind the disobedience ofAdam, the universal first parent. 2
father, ca. 185-254
a.d., an Egyptian who Since the theory of evolution can never be "decisively in
wrote in Greek, accord" with the orthodox view, it can never be accepted by the
exerting a powerful "infallible" church. The orthodox view has remained on the 17th-
influence on the
century level of Father Mersenne who "expressed the opinion of the
early Greek church. At
first he was most enlightened theologians when he declared that orthodoxy did
accounted a saint, but not fear either science or reason, and was quite prepared to accept all
three centuries after 3
agreed with the Scriptures.'"
their conclusions, 'provided they
his death he was
Seventeen hundred years ago, Origen wrote of the Garden of
declared a heretic
Eden myth: "No one would be so foolish as take this allegory as a
because of Gnostic
4
elements found in description of actual fact."But Origen was excommunicated, and
his writings. countless millions have been precisely that foolish.
1. White 1, 72, 74, 371. 2. Wickler, xxix. 3. Guignebert, 422. 4. Shirley, 170.

292
Exorcism Exorcism

The time-honored custom of ordering demons away, by verbal

charms and magical gestures, is still practiced by ( 1 ) primitive witch naHHHi^
doctors, and (2) the Catholic church. Protestant churches don't
exorcise. As far back as 1603 the Church of England forbade ministers
to cast out devils,
though a present-day Archbishop of Canterbury
publicly confessed a belief in "genuine demonic possession" in 1974. 1

The Roman church maintains the office of exorcist, whose rite of

ordination states: "An Exorcist must cast out devils." 2 The Official New
Catholic Encyclopedia says, "Today the Church maintains its tradi-
tional attitude toward exorcism. It recognizes the possibility of diabolical

possession, and it
regulates the manner of dealing with it.

... A solemn method of exorcising is

given in the Roman Ritual." 3
This "solemn method" based on name magic and words of
is

power, like exorcisms used by Egyptian wizards thousands of years

ago. It says in part: "I command thee, whosoever thou art, thou unclean

spirit, and all thy companions possessing this servant of God, that by
the Mysteries of the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension
of our Lord Jesus Christ, by the sending of the Holy Ghost, and by
the Coming of the same our Lord to judgment, thou tell me thy name,
the day, and the hour of thy going out, by some sign; and, that to me,
a minister of God, although unworthy, thou be wholly obedient in all

things." Exorcistic power of chastity is invoked: "The continence of

the Confessors commands thee." Inanimate objects can be exorcised in
the same manner, as in the consecration of medals: "I exorcise ye,

medals, through God the Father Almighty. . . .

May the power of the
adversary, all the host of the Devil, attack, every spirit and
all evil

glamour of Satan, be utterly put to flight and driven far away by the
virtue of these medals." 4

The history of exorcism often demonstrates legalistic-theological

buffoonery at its silliest, as in the many instances of insect pests and

other vermin verbally assaulted by the exorcist, though paying no
discernible attention to the anathemas that threatened them. In 1478
the authorities of Berne addressed a plague of crop-eating insects, "I
declare and affirm you are banned and exorcised, and through
that

the power of AlmightyGod shall be called accursed and shall daily

decrease." The insects, however, only continued to increase. In 1516
the Provost of Troyes commanded all caterpillars to "retire within six

days from the vineyards and lands of Villenose, threatening them

with his solemn curse and malediction if they failed to obey." The
caterpillars apparently weren't listening. From the 16th century

onwards, was a Savoyard custom to excommunicate destructive

it

insects, even though they seemed not to care about being banned
from God's congregation. In 1633 the consuls of Strambino summoned
the caterpillars "to appear before the bench of reason to show cause

293
Eye why they should not desist from corroding and destroying, under

penalty of banishment from the place and confiscation." In 1713 the

Friars Minor in Piedade no Maranho, Brazil, claimed that their exor-

cism of ants worked, and "by God's express order the ants departed to
another place." 5

In a process against leeches, which was tried at Lausanne in 1451, a

number of leeches were brought into court to hear the notice served
against them, which admonished all leeches to leave the district within

three days. The leeches, however, proving contumacious and refusing to

quit the country, they were solemnly exorcised. The doctors of . . .

Heidelberg in particular, then a famous seat oflearning, not only expressed

their entire and unanimous approbation of the exorcism, but imposed

silence on all impertinent meddlers who presumed to speak against it. 6

When used against human beings, the process of exorcism

proved rather more baneful than absurd, tending to exacerbate the very
symptoms it was supposed to relieve. Justification is still being sought
for this relic of primitive superstition, because the office exists and a
reason must be given for it. But nowadays, "demonic possession" is

usually treated by psychiatric therapists, not religious ones. (See

Possession.)
1. Robbins, 243; Ebon, ST., 193. 2. Summers, H.W.D. 208. 3. Patai, 139.
4. Summers, H.W.D., 212-13,216, 223. 5. Frazer, F.O.T., 408-11.
6. Fra/.er, F.O.T., 408.

Eye
The All-Seeing Eye of ancient Egypt once belonged to the Goddess
of truth and judgment, Maat. The Mother-syllable Maa meant "to
1

see"; in hieroglyphics it was an eye. 2

Ayin was the "eye" A late text transferred the All-Seeing Eye to a male god, Horus,
in the Hebrew sacred and the common symbol came to be known Eye of Horus, also
as the

alphabet, possibly
representing the phallus as the "One-Eyed God." Yet the same Eye
derived from Aya, the
was incongruously described as a female judge: "I am the all-seeing
Babylonian
Creatress.
5
Islamic Eye of Horus, whose appearance Lady of Slaughter,
strikes terror,
3
The whose terror was the
Arabs diabolized her Mighty One." Eye appearance strikes

and corrupted her name prototype of the evil eye which, like the petrifying glance of
original
into Ayin, spirit of
Medusa, was usually associated with women and was feared by
the evil eye. Moslem
simple folk everywhere, up to the present day.
Syrians called her
Aina Bisha, the eye- Staring idols of the Neolithic "Eye Goddess" have been found
witch. throughout Mesopotamia. In Syria she was known as the Goddess
4
Mari, whose huge eyes searched men's souls.
Like Moslems, Christians diabolized the female spirit of the All-

Seeing Eye. Old women were credited with the ancient Goddess's
to "overlook" to curse someone with a glance. Judges of the
power
Inquisition so greatly feared the evil eyes of their
victims that they

forced accused witches to enter the court backward, to deprive them of

6
the advantage of a first glance.

294
 Oddly enough, remedies for the evil eye were often female Eye
symbols. Necklaces of cowrie shells, those ubiquitous yonic symbols,
were and are valued in India as charms against the The
evil eye.
triangle ^^^^^^^^^^_
or Yoni Yantra, representing the vulva, is
similarly used in India,

Greece, and the Balkans. Northern Indian farmers protect crops from
the evil eye by hanging Kali's symbol of a black pot in the field. In

18th-century England, the classic witch's familiar, a blackcat, was

supposed to afford protection; and sore eyes could be cured by

7
rubbing with a black cat's tail. In addition there were many signs,
gestures, and other kinds of counter-spells to be used as instant
remedies if one suspected having been "overlooked."

It seems men were very much averse to

meeting a direct glance
from a woman. In the most patriarchal societies, from medieval Japan
to Europe, it was customary to insist that "proper" women keep their

eyelids lowered in the presence of men. In 19th-century Islamic Iran,

itwas believed that every woman above the age of menopause possessed
the evil eye. Old women were not permitted in crowds attending

public appearances of the Shah, lest his sacred person be exposed to an

old woman's dangerous look. 8

Any person invested with spiritual powers, however, could be

credited with the power popes were
to curse with a look. Several

reputed to be bearers of the eye ox jettatura. Pope Pius IX (d. 1878)

evil

was a famous jettatore. Pope Leo XIII, his successor, was said to have
the evil eye because so many cardinals died during his reign. 9
I. Budge, G.E. 1, 392. 2. Budge, E.L., 55. 3. Cavendish, RE., 167.
4. Neumann, CM., 11 1-12, pi. 87. 5. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 133-34.
6. Lea unabridged, 831. 7. Gifford, 79-81. 8. Gifford, 47. 9. Budge, A.T., 365.

295
Feet of a Chinese
woman, disfigured by
FOOTBiNDiNc. The
custom of breaking
the bones and binding
the feet was a lifelong
process for many
aristocratic women.
The "dainty" result was
the much-admired
"lotus hook" instead of a
foot. The practice
continued up to the
beginning of the 20th
century.

Arm and hand with

extended index
finger. This "mother"

finger was the most

it
magical guided,
beckoned, blessed
and cursed. Etruscan
bronze.
Fairies Fairies

Pagan gods and goddesses, tribal ancestors, and those who wor-
shipped them all became "fairies" in the traditions of France, Germany,
and the British Isles. The Irish still
say fairies live in the
pagan sidh
(burial mounds and barrow graves), several hundred of which still stand
The Irish called the
in the Irish countryside.
1
The Welsh knew their ancestors had a
fairies' land Tir-nan-og,
Land of Ever-
matriarchal society. Like the Irish, they called fairies The Mothers, or

Youthful Ones; or The Mother's Blessing; and fairyland was always the Land of
Tir-nam-beo, Land Women. 2
of the Ever-Living; or came out of their
Fairies fairy hills at Halloween, Celtic folk said,
Tir-Tairngiri, Land
because the hills themselves weretomb-wombs of rebirth according
of Promise; or Tir-na-
to the ancient belief, and Halloween was only a new name for Samhain,
Sorcha, Land of
Light; or Mag Mell,
when the dead returned to earth with the help of the priestesses
3
Plain of Pleasures; or who, under Christianity, were newly described as witches. Respect for
Mag Mon, Plain of
the pagan dead endured to a remarkably late date, even among
Sports; or I-Bresail, I-
Christians whose church taught them that the old deities were devils.
Brazil, or Hy-Brasil, the
Land of Bresal, Cornish miners refused to make the sign of the cross when down in a

which gave rise to the mine, for fear of offending the fairies in their own subterranean territory
name of Brazil. 7 4
by making a gesture that invoked their enemy.
Fairyland was also the In the Book of the Dun Cow, the fairy queen described her realm
magic "apple-land" as "the land of the ever-living, a place where there is neither death,
of Avalon, or the
Fortunate or
nor sin, nor transgression. We have continual feasts: we practice every
Isles,

Elf-land, Elphame, benevolent work without contention. We dwell in a large Shee

Alfheim, or (sidh); and hence we are called the people of the Fairy-Mound."
5

Elvenhome. Sometimes The pagan

after-world was a golden "dream time" of long ago,
it was the "never-
when heroes were deified by sacred marriage with the Goddess. The
never" land, perhaps
afteran Egyptian
Great God Lug, father of Ireland's dying savior Cu Chulainn, came
word for paradise, "out of the chambered undergrounds of Tara where dwell the fourth
nefemefer, "doubly race of gods who settled Ireland. They are the glorious and golden
beautiful." The Faroe Tuatha De Danann. These people of the goddess Dana first
giants,
Islands were once
used gold and silver in an Age of Bronze. They first cleared the land,
"fairyland" (medieval
Norse Faeroisland)
first drained the swamps. They built the great temples of stone like

because the original the one they sent to Britain Stonehenge. When conquered, they
explorers reached retired to their underground barrows or Sidhe where they still live
them by sailing west 6
today."
and believed them to
Fairy mounds were entrances to the pagan paradise, which might
be the islands of the
dead. 8 be located underground, or under water, or under hills on distant
islands across the western sea where the sun died.

The fairy queen was obviously the ancient fertility-mother, like

Demeter or Ceres. William of Auvergne said in the 1 3th century she
was called Abundia, or Dame Abonde: "Abundance." 9 She was also

called Diana, Venus, Hecate, Sybil, or Titania a title of Cretan

Rhea as ruler of the earth-spirits called Titans, predecessors of the

Olympian gods. (See Titania.) She had all three personae of the
Triple Goddess, including the death-dealing Crone which is
why an
Irish title Bean-Sidhe, "Woman of the Fairy-Mounds," was corrupt-
ed into banshee, the shrieking demoness whose voice brought death. In

298
 the form of the triple Morrigan, she sang of blood sacrifices related to Fairies

springtime renewal of vegetation.

10
A
variation on her title was the

notorious Morgan le Fay or Morgan the Fairy, also known as the

n
death-goddess, "Morgue la faye."
The Romance ofLancelot du Lac spoke of the fairy queen in
another incarnation as Lady of the Lake: "The damsel who carried Book of the Dun
Lancelot to the lake was a fay, and in those times all those women were Cow (Lebar-na-Heera),
so called because the
called fays who had to do with enchantments and charms and there
original manuscript was
were of them then, principally in Great Britain
many and knew the written on vellum
power and virtues of words, of stones, and of herbs." Their
knights made from the skin of a
were forbidden to speak their names, for fear of betraying them to prized cow: a
12 collection of 11th-
Christian persecutors.
century Irish tales
Secrecy attended many aspects of the fairy-religion, for the very and poems, compiled by
reason that it was carried on clandestinely under a dominant religious Mailmuri Mac
system that threatened its practitioners with torture and death. One of Kelleher.

the charges that sent Joan of Arc to the stake was that she "adored the

Fairies and did them reverence." n

A legend repeated by the gypsies said if a man found the statue of a
naked fate (fairy) in the ruins of pagan temples or tombs, he should
embrace it with love and eject semen on it. Then, like Pygmalion's
Galatea, the fate would come to life in his dreams and tell her lover
where to find buried treasure, and she would become his "fortune." He
would be happy with her forevermore, provided he agreed never to
14
set foot in a Christian church again as long as he lived.

This idea of the fairy-fortune might be traced

all the way back to

ancient customs of matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal marriage,

characteristic both of Bronze Age myths and of fairy tales. The fairy-tale

hero rarely brought a bride to his own home; instead, he left home to
seek his "fortune," which usually turned out to be a foreign princess
won by trial and wedded in her own country, which the hero
afterward helped rule. As in the pre-patriarchal system, a woman was
:he "fortune" or "fate" of the young man, words which also meant

'fairy," through such intermediates as Fata, Fay, Le Fee, or the "fey"

:>ne. Fairy and Fate were further related through fear and fair:

nedieval Latin fatare, "to enchant," became French faerox feer. 15

Many believed fairies lived in the deep woods where their sacred
jroves had been hidden from priestly interference. Romanians still

.peak of the Fata Padourii, Girl of the Woods, a fairy similar to the Irish
)anshee. At night she makes eerie sounds that portend death to the
16
|
learer. In Brittany, where there were many groves dedicated to the

VIoon-goddess throughout the middle ages, fairies were sometimes

17
called man-devent, "Moon-goddesses."
It seems the fairy-religion was practiced secretly through most of
he Christian era, especially by women, whose Goddess the patriar-
chalchurch kept trying to take away, giving them no substitute but
Mary, who lacked the old Goddess's powers.
Certain French leaders of the Old Religion were described as

299
 "great princesses who, having refused to embrace Christianity
Fairies . . .

were struck by the curse of God. Hence it is that they are said to be ani-

mated by a violent hatred of [Christian] religion and of the clergy."

Sometimes they were called Korrigen, Korrig, or Korr, perhaps devotees
of the Virgin Kore. A Breton lay said: "There are nine Korrigen,

Tasso's list of Fairy-

who dance, with flowers in their hair, and robes of white wool, around
ladies showed them the fountain, by the light of the full moon." They seem to have been
indistinguishable old women who used masks or makeup: "Seen at night, or in the dusk
from either Goddesses of the evening, their beauty is great; but in the daylight their eyes
or witches, for they
appear red, their hair white, and their faces wrinkled; hence they rarely
had names of both,
letthemselves be seen by day." 18
including the titles of
As late as the 17th century it was said there were shrines kept by "a
Fata, Maga,
Incantatrice, or wise- thousand old women" who taught the rites of Venus to young
woman. They were maidens, and instructed them in fairy feats like shape-shifting and raising
Oriana, She of the storms. 19
They were known as fatuae or fatidicae, "seeresses," or
Mountain; Silvana or 20
sometimes bonnes HUes, "good girls."
She of the
Silvanella,
Norwegian, Scottish, and Irish Christians claimed the fairies were
Wood; Filidea, She
Who Loves the offspring of the fallen angels. Like the non-fallen angels, they carried
Goddess; Mirinda, the Any who happened to die at twilight, the fairies'
off souls of the dead.
Warrior Woman;
hour between day and night, would find themselves in fairyland
Argea, called Queen of
between life and death, or between heaven and hell. 22 Such legends
Fate; Lucina, called
reflect ancient views of the after-world as without either punishment
the Lady of the Lake;
Urganda, called the or reward but only a way-station in the karmic cycle, which is why fairies
Wise One; two Fates or were like the un-dead able to emerge from their tombs at will. As
Fays named Hindu
psychopomps, they were the same as Valkyries or apsaras, the
Dragontina and
heavenly nymphs who became penis, "fairies," in Middle-Eastern
Montana, and
three countries where the Old Religion was also maintained as a sub-current
Morgana with her
"daughters," the in patriarchal culture.
21
Morrigan. Certainly one of the strongest attractions of the fairy-religion was
its permissive view of sexuality, typical of ancient matriarchal societ-
ies, living on in contrast to the harsh anti-sexual attitudes of orthodoxy.
Torquato Tasso
Fairyland was the heaven of sexy angels, as opposed to the Christian
(1554-1595) Italian poet
heaven where "bliss" was specifically not sexual, not even in matrimony
and dramatist, whose
checkered career (Matthew 22:30). The fairyland called Torelore in the romance of
included periods of Aucassin and Nicolette was a home for lovers, as opposed to the
residence in courts, Christian heaven of "old priests, and halt old men and maimed." The
convents, and
fairyking lay in bed pretending to give birth to a child, in the ancient rite
prisons. His major work
of couvade (see Fatherhood); the queen led an army against their
was an epic on the
enemies in a bloodless battle, the combatants pelting each other with
conquest of Jerusalem.
symbolic foods such as apples, eggs, and cheeses. The king said, "it is

nowise our custom to slay each other." 23 (See Paradise.)

Aucassin and Toward this paradise the Fairy Queen led her lovers on a "broad,
Nicolette French broad road across the lea," as Thomas Rhymer's ballad said,
lily
medieval romance
which some called the road to heaven, and others the road to hell: a
based on an Arabian
love story. Aucassin 's prototype of the famous Primrose Path. The Queen herself was
addressed as Queen of Heaven. 24 Sometimes her earthly angels were
original name was Al-
Kasim. more spirit than mortal, like the fairies called Little Wood Women

300
\{wudu-maer) in Bavaria, to whom dumplings and other foodstuffs were Faith, Saint
25
offered. Yet most sources admitted that the fairies were real live Fata Morgana
Prior wrote, "In Danish ballads fairies are full
[women. grown women
iand not the diminutive beings of our Andrew
English tales." Said
Lang, "There seems little in the characteristics of these fairies of

to distinguish them from human R.C. Alexander

jromance beings, except their super-
knowledge and power. They are usually of ordinary stature,
. . .
Prior Author of a three-
natural
iindeed not to be recognized as varying from mankind volume work on
except by their Ancient Danish Ballads,
26
In other words, they were women
[proceedings." practicing heathen 1860.
jrites.

1. MacCana, 65. 2.
MacCana, 123; Rees, 41. 3. Joyce 1, 264-65.
4. Cavendish, P.E., 242.
5. Joyce 1, 494. 6.
Goodrich, 195. 7. Joyce 1 293
[Link], 57. 9. Keightley, 475. 10. Goodrich, 177, 192. 1 1 Keightley 45 .
Andrew Lang
[Link],31,421. 13. Coulton, 252. 14. Leland, 206. 15. Keightley 6-7 (1844-1912) Scottish
16. Cavendish, P.E., 242. 17. Keightley, 427.
1 8.
Keightley, 422 431-32' folklorist,
19. Wedeck, 157. 20. Pepper & Wilcock,
166. 21. Keightley, 453-54.
22. Cavendish, RE., 241. 23. Loomis, 251, 276. 24. anthropologist, and
Wimberly 407 413
25. Frazer, F.O.T., 312. 26. Wimberly, 170-71. collector of fairy
tales. He also authored
a four-volume
History of Scotland and
a History of English
Faith, Saint Literature.

Bpurious "virgin martyr," one of the three sisters Saints Faith, Hope,
bnd Charity, daughters of the equally spurious virgin-mother
martyr St.
Sophia. As one personification of these three Virtues, St. Faith really
briginated as one of the oldest of pagan Goddesses. Her Roman name
Lvas Bona Fides, "Good Faith." She was invoked in all legal con-
Plutarch said her temple was built by the first king of Latium.
tacts.
f/irgil said "hoary Faith and Vesta" were Rome's oldest lawgiving

Goddesses. Bona Fides did have one of Rome's oldest temples, served
1

>y three senior Flamines, the core of the ancient Roman clergy.
2

In her Christianized form, Faith received a crypt in St. Paul's

athedral in London. Letting their imaginations soar, martyrologists
aved over her famous physical beauty. 5 Perhaps because of this, she
came a popular patroness of romance. English girls used to pray for
vision of their future husbands,
addressing St. Faith after passing a
)iece of bread three times through a wedding ring. 4
[Link], 165,202,258. 2. Rose, 250. 3. Brewster, 440.
4. Hazlitt, 373.

ata Morgana
Medieval term for mirages, illusions, or witch-lights over swamps:

magic" created by the Goddess Morgan, evolved from the primitive

dagog and sharing many characteristics with the Hindu Maya,
reator of "magic." Morgan-the-Fate was often said to be still living in

wamps and seacoasts, where she led travelers astray with her illu-
ions. See Maya; Morgan.

301
Fata Scribunda
Fata Scribunda
Fates
"The Fate Who Writes," Roman title of the Goddess who inscribed
each infant's future destiny in her Book of Life shortly after birth.
1

Writing was an attribute of women or Goddesses in the oldest

traditions.

[Link],764.

Fates

Nearly all
mythologies bear traces of the Triple Goddess as three
Fates, rulers of the past, present, and future in the usual personae of
Virgin, Mother, and Crone (or Creator, Preserver, Destroyer). The
female assumed many different guises in western religion: the
trinity
Norns or Weird Sisters of the north (from wyrdf "fate"), the Zorya of
the Slavs, the Morrigan of the Irish, the triple Guinevere or triple Brigi
of the Britons.
Greek myth the three Fates were Horae, Graeae, Muses,
In

Gorgons, Furies, and other trinities as well as the principal trinity of

Moerae or Fates. Nearly always, they were weavers. In Anglo-Saxon

literature, fate is "woven." Latin destino

(destiny) means that which
is woven, or fixed with cords and threads; fate is "bound" to happen,
just as the spells of fairy-women were "binding." '

The Moerae were Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer,

and Atropos the Cutter of life's thread. All were aspects of the archaic
Triple Aphrodite, of whom it was said her real name was Moera, and
she was older than Time. 2 Moera was actually a late name for the

Fate-goddess. In the Mycenaean period it meant a landholding, pos-

sessedby a female property owner according to the old matriarchal
system. Hence, Moera was a lot: later, "allotted Fate."
3

Aphrodite's trinity was sometimes divided into three Horae, or

celestial nymphs: Eunomia, Dike, and Irene, meaning Order, Desti-
ny, and Peace. These referred to the "ordering" of elements to form tr

individual; the destiny established for him by the Mother; and the
"peace" of dissolution as decreed at the end of life by Aphrodite
4
Columba, the Dove of Peace.
If the weaving Fates could be induced not to cut the thread of life
at a perilous moment, the individual would be spared; if not, he
would die. Magic charms were often based on this notion. A Slavic
charm for healing wounds was addressed to the Fate-weaver on the
mystic isle of Bujan, or Buyan, the Goddess's paradise: "In the Ocean-
sea, on the isle of Buyan, a fair maiden was weaving silk; she did not
5
leave off weaving silk; According to RussU
the blood ceased flowing."

myth, maiden was the Virgin of Dawn, equivalent to the Latin

this

Mater Matuta, or the Greek Eos, traditionally the first Fate. The sun
6
god went to rest on her magic isle, and rose again from it each day.
Other Greek names for the Fate-goddess were Tyche, Dike, and

302
Nemesis. Romans called her Fortuna; a trinity or a monad. A Fatherhood
terracotta medallion from Vienne showed her as a tutelary city-goddess,
7
wearing a mural crown, enthroned in a laurel wreath. As the
Babylonian "Mother of Destiny," Fate was named Mammetun, the
8
Creatress. All were based on the primordial Indo-European Mother
of Karma, i.e., Kali Ma.
"Fate" was synonymous with "fairy" in the Middle Ages.
Alphon-
sus de Spina placed "Fates" first on his list of devils,
remarking:
"Some say they have seen Fates, but if so they are not women but
demons." 9 Burchardus of Worms complained that the people hon-
ored the Fates or Weird Sisters at the beginning of every year, putting

offerings of food and drink on a table for them, with three knives for
cutting their meat presumably so the death-dealing Cutter wouldn't
be tempted to use her own knife. 10
Greeks still say the Fates visit the cradle of every newborn, to
determine the child's future as his fairy godmothers. Parents used to
chain up the watchdog, leave the door open, and set out dainty foods to
11
put the Moerae in a good humor. Many fairy tales give stern lessons
in the folly of offending fairy godmothers. Gypsies still say "three ladies
in white" stand at the cradle of each child, and take back the soul
when life has run its course, like the Three Queens of Arthurian legend.
Greek laments for the dead are still called moirologhia, giving the
deceased back to the Moerae. 12
I. Cavendish, P.E., 75. 2. Bachofen, 57. 3. Lindsay, A. W., 32.
4. Urousse, 138. Wedeck, 50. 6. d'Alviella, 168. 7. Lindsay, O.A., 379.
5.

8. EpicofGilgnmesh, 107. 9. Robbins, 127. 10. Miles, 181.

II. Briffault 3, 160. 12. Rose, 40.

Fatherhood
Myths show that, once men understood they could beget children,
they wanted many children, because that was the best and easiest way to

become a god. Ancestral mothers had been deified by their descen-

dants for countless generations. Patriarchs craved similar nations of

descendants, for a tribal ancestor achieved great glory in the after-

world. Men transferred their allegiance from the Great Mother, the
original deified ancestress, to gods Yahweh, on the basis of his
like

promises: "I will make of these and I will bless thee, and
a great nation,

make thy name great I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I
make nations of thee, and kings
will shall come out of thee" (Genesis
12, 17).
Persians said a man who died childless couldn't enter paradise at
Puranas are ancient
[Link] and sacrifices of descendants were essential to blessedness
Sanskrit scriptures in
for the paternal soul. Hindus defined a son as one whose incantations
verse, treating of cos-
and offerings kept a father's spirit from wandering homeless and
mologies, sacred
hungry in the waste spaces of eternity. The Brhaddarma Purana said, and the na-
histories,

"No rituals are performed for the man who has no descendants ture of the divine.

303
^
Fatherhood

h^mm
Sons are useful to give oblations to the ancestors." The Chinese
thought if a man had no son, he cut the continuous line of paternal
ancestor-worship and

nition that
children. The classical
lost his chance of becoming immortal. 2
Fatherhood was largely a ceremonial relationship, with little recog-
men might take an active part in raising their own
Latin term paterfamilias,
'

now connoting a father-

of-a-family and household ruler, didn't convey anything like that to

the Romans who invented the term:

When the ancients invoked Jupiter under that title ofpater ofgods and
men, they did not mean that he was their physical father, for they never
supposed he was, but on the contrary believed that the human race had
existed before he did. The same title was given to Neptune, Apollo,
Bacchus, Vulcan and Pluto, whom men certainly did not suppose to be
their fathers. . . .
Similarly, in legal language, the title o/paterfamilias
could be given to a man who had no children, was not married, was not
even old enough to enter upon a marriage ; pater, the Latin word
. . .

cognate to "father" and closest akin to it in meaning, signifies not so much

him who has begotten a younger person as him who has natural
authority over one inferior in age or status. J

Men or gods began to claim physical fatherhood not so much by

an act of begetting, as by a different, ceremonial act designed to imitate
the motherly act of birth-giving. (See Birth-giving, Male.) In earliest
times the imitation was quite literal, like the rite of couvade practiced by

primitives to establish paternal rights to a child. While the mother

gave birth, the father took to his bed moaning and groaning,
and
pretended to bring forth the child. Couvade was an initiation ritual
for priests of Aphrodite Ariadne at Amathus, where a man dressed in

female clothing went through a pantomime of childbirth, to earn the

priestly title of "father." 4
Christian writers said their religion was sent to convert
Europe to a
patriarchal system which men could
in demand respect from their

offspring. Before Christianity came to Britain, there was a "great sin" in

the structure of the clans: "the father loved not the son, nor the son
5
loved not the father." Early missionaries complained that British tribes
paid no attention to the matter of who begot whom; women
took
lovers as they pleased, and "marital vows are never observed." St. Boni-

face said the English "utterly despise legitimate matrimony," mean-

ing the kind of matrimony that gave husbands control of property

and
children. 6

Eventually, Christianity changed the pagans' casual attitude

toward fatherhood. St. Thomas Aquinas laid down the church's

official opinion that a father is the true parent, a mother only the "soil"
in which the father's "seed" grows. He said a father should be more

loved than a mother, because the father's part in giving life to the child
7
is "active," whereas the mother's part only "passive." is

Emphasis on paternity was characteristic of patriarchal societies,

where men often tried to pretend that begetting a child was more

304
 important than the mother's multi-faceted task of carrying, delivering, Fatherhood
nursing,and teaching it all the basic skills of living. In matriarchal
Arabia, biological paternity meant nothing. After the coming of Islam,
men considered paternity so important that they instituted a year's

waiting period between a woman's divorce or widowhood and her

remarriage, to make
absolutely sure she was not pregnant by the

previous husband, since no man wanted his wife giving birth to another
man's child. 8 The same waiting period was demanded in Christian
Europe, and became so taken for granted that it became "indecent" for
awoman to remarry too soon after an earlier husband's departure or
death.
One reason for the restrictive, authoritarian atmosphere of patriar-
chal societies seems to have been that men didn't readily see their
children as separate persons, but viewed them as extensions of the

father's own ego, therefore requiring strict discipline to make them

conform to the pattern. Zimmer
language of symbols, son
says in the
means "double," "alter ego," "living copy of the father," "the
9
father's essence in another individualization." Thus the father's inter-

est in children was more selfish than the mother's.

Harriet Stanton Blatch wrote, "Men talk of the sacredness of Harriet Stanton
Blatch 20th-century
motherhood, but judging from their acts it is the last thing that is held
American feminist,
sacred. . .sense of obligation to offspring, men possess but feebly;
. The
daughter of Elizabeth
there has not been developed by animal evolution an instinct of
Cady Stanton.
paternity. They are not disinherited fathers; they are simply unevolved

parents. Those who could improve humanity have been hindered by

those who prefer to improve steam engines. . . . The sex which has been

laboriously evolved by nature for the arduous work of race-building is

handicapped." Western patriarchy developed a culture of acquisitive-
ness, aggression, and hierarchy for the very reason that its underlying

philosophy was masculine-selfish, according to Neumann: "This situa-

tion of the patriarchate known to us particularly from its Western
is characterized by a recession of feminine psychology
[development
and its dominants; now feminine existence is almost entirely deter-
10
I mined by the masculine world of consciousness and its values."
The masculine world of consciousness has been characterized as

"barren" and "destructive," insofar as "the fantasies of the single man

n These focus on self-centered greed,
pervade our popular culture."
aggression, or defensiveness on behalf of the self, with little compre-
hension of love, dependence, or responsibility toward future

generations. Behavior patterns of the masculine world

remind one
that the earliest Chinese ideograph for "male" was also a synonym for

"selfish." 12

This culture passes harsh judgment on women who are labeled

unfit mothers, because males however "dominant" identify with the
child, not the mother. Standards for fathers are not so high. Drunkards,

adulterers, child-beaters, even criminals are supposed to have a

"right" to fatherhood, to say nothing of millions
of men who treat their

305
Fatima children with a neglectful indifference that would bring down soci-
Febronia, Saint e ty's wrath on a female parent. Possibly should be taught to regard men
^^mhmhmhhh fatherhood as a privilege to be earned, not as a right to be abused.
1. O'Flaherty, 263. 2. Bullough, 247. 3. Rose, 170. 4. Briffault 2, 534.
5. Malory 2, 179. 6. Briffault 3, 418-19. 7. Tuchman, 214. 8. de Riencourt, 189.
9. Zimmer, 109. 10. Neumann, A.P., 87. 1 1. Gilder, 156. 12. Thorsten, 262.

Fatima
The Arabian Moon-goddess in a Mohammedanized incarnation as
Mohammed's fictitious "daughter," who was nevertheless described as

"Mother of her father." Her name means The Creatress. She was
also known as Source of the Sun, Tree of Paradise, the Moon, and

Fate. She 1
existed from the beginning of the material world. In brief,
she was really none other than the Great Goddess. Like the virgin

Mary, her western counterpart, Fatima was officially demoted to

mortality but still
kept most of her old titles and powers. 2 See Arabia.
1. Campbell, Oc.M., 445-46. 2. Lederer, 181.

Fauna
The Goddess Diana as Mother of Wild Creatures. She had a satyr-

consort, Faunus, androgynous Dianus who

corresponding to the
merged with Diana. The name of Fauna came to mean "animals"
because Many-Breasted Diana was supposed to give birth to all animals
and nourish them with her numerous breasts, as shown on her
famous statue Ephesus. Another
at
1
name for Fauna was Bona Dea, the
"Good Goddess." 2
1. Neumann, G.M., pi. 35. 2. Larousse, 208.

Febronia, Saint
Mythical martyr credited with the same story as all other mythical
female martyrs: rather than impair her virginal purity by marrying a

young nobleman who was in love with her, she steadfastly withstood
incredible tortures and mutilations in order to die virgo intacta. Also like
other female martyrs, she was actually a pseudo-canonization of the
lascivious Great Goddess, purified for Christian consumption. The
original Febronia was Juno Februata, patroness of the passion of love
(febris), and honored by orgiastic rites in February (see Valentine).
Her legend said she was martyred during the reign of Diocletian,
but no one ever heard of her until four centuries later when she
1

began to appear in Christian martyrologies.

[Link], 127.

306
Felix, Saint Mix, Saint
saint with a strange, muddled legend R8
|A requiring considerable inter-

Jxetation.
St. Felix in Pincus
he was sometimes called, St. Felix
or, as ^MiMiMn
lof Nola was
be a schoolmaster, so cruel that his
said to
pupils
(cordially hated him. When it was discovered that he was a Christian,
authorities turned him over to the
pagan schoolboys who had suffered
pt
his hands; and they vindictively stabbed him to death with their
1
styluses.
Another St. Felix was credited like Lucifer with the Power of the
Kir. He blew on the faces of the of Mercury, Diana, and
idols

Kerapis, and they instantly collapsed. Destruction by the power of the

breath was also widely attributed to witches. 2
1. de Voragine, 92. 2. de Voragine, 514; Lea unabridged, 815.

HFenrir

foVolf of the North, a Scandinavian version of the Cynics' north-pole

pog,
who would be loosed at doomsday to swallow the sun. The first

month after the winter solstice was named for the Wolf, indicating
that Fenrir may have been originally a She- Wolf like the Etruscan
Lupa, thought to swallow the old sun and give birth to its reincarna-
tion each year. 1

1. Brewster, 50.

fFeronia

Roman name for the Wolf-mother worshipped by the Sabines before

the foundation of Rome itself. Her consort was the old woodland god

Soranus, cyclically incarnate in the underground Lord of Death, and

:he risen sun in heaven. The Feronia festival in honor of the Wolf-
mother was faithfully kept each year in Rome. The rites were in the
charge of a certain very ancient clan, members of which performed
specific miraculous feats passed on from one generation to the next,
such as walking on burning coals with bare feet. 1

1 .
Larousse, 2 1 0.

The
e Gospels say Jesus cursed the fig tree and made it forever barren

>ecause it refused to produce fruit for him out of its season (Mark
1
1:13-22). The story probably was intended to express hostility to a
veil-known Goddess-symbol. The fig was always female, its heart-
1
shaped leaves representing "the conventional form of the yoni."

307
Fig Romans used to celebrate "a rude and curious rite" in connection with
the fertilization of Juno Caprotina, Goddess of the Fig Tree, by her
lecherous horned goat god. 2

Jesus's rival deity Mithra, whom some called the true Messiah,
also was involved with the maternal fig tree. Shortly after his birth
from the petra genetrix, and his discovery by adoring shepherds, Mithra
was adopted by the fig tree, which provided him with a continuous
3
supply of food (fruit) and clothing (leaves). According to the Book of
Genesis, fig leaves were the world's first clothing, donned by Adam
and Eve as soon as they acquired knowledge. Adoption by a fig tree also

figured prominently in the legend of Buddha, protected by the Bodhi

Tree, or Tree of Wisdom, Ecus religiosa, the Holy Fig, when he
received his enlightenment on Full Moon Day in the month of
4
May.
The fig was a common Indo-Iranian symbol of the Great Mother.

Babylonian Ishtar also took the form of the divine fig tree Xikum, the
"primeval mother at the central place of the earth," protectress of the
savior Tammuz. 5 Patriachal writers of the Koran later turned Ishtar's
tree to Zakkum, the Tree of Hell, growing downward from the earth's
underside. 6
Gaulish gods called Dusii were described in medieval Latin as
ficarii, "fig-eaters," which meant the same as the Homeric "lotus-

eaters," in view of the fact that both the fig and the lotus symbolized

female genitals. 7 Anglo-Saxon "fuck" may have been derived from

Reus, "fig." To this day, Italians make the mano in fica,

"fig-hand," as a
derogatory sexual sign implying, like the raised middle finger, "fuck
you." The mano in fica was of Oriental origin, a lingam-yoni formed by
the thumb projecting between two fingers. Hindus called the fig-
hand a sacred mudra, and Ovid said Roman householders used it as a
8
protection against evil spells. To Christians however, it was manus
9
obscenus, "the obscene hand."
Like other genital symbols, the fig was often incorporated into love
charms together with many other items formerly sacred to Venus.
Some of these items blood, bread, doves, and pentacles joined the
Zekerboni fig in a charm from the Zekerboni, to make bachelors see their future
A treatise on brides in a dream:
oneiromancy (dream
interpretation) by They must have powdered coral and some fine powdered lodestone,
Pierre Mora, which they shall mix together and dilute with the blood ofa white
manuscript #2790 in pigeon, and they shall make a dough of it, which they shall enclose in a
the Bibliotheque de wrapped it in blue taffeta; they shall hang this
large fig after having
l'Arsenal. round their neck, and when they go to bed shall put the pentacle for
w
Saturday under their bolster, saying a special prayer the while.

1. King, 28. 2. Rose, 217. 3. Hooke, S.P., 85. 4. Ross, 88; Wilkins,45.
153.
5. Harding, 48. 6. Campbell, Oc.M., 430. 7. Knight, D.W.R,
8. Dumezil, 367. 9. Gifford, 90. [Link], 325.

308
F mgers Fingers

The Dactyls "Fingers" were spirits born from the fingerprints of

the Goddess Rhea: five males from the print of her right hand, five mhmh^m^mmmb
Females from the print of her left hand. Their Greek
1
name was
ierived from Sanskrit Daksa, "dextrous one," a Hindu god of the hand.
Mano pantea, the Hand of the All-Goddess, was a sacred fetish of
whichmany examples have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and
Herculaneum. 2 It always showed the thumb and first two fingers raised,
the last two fingers folded down. Middle finger, index finger, and
thumb invoked pagan of Father-Mother-Son, such as Jupiter-
trinities

[uno-Mars, or Osiris-Isis-Horus. The same kind of trinity, consisting

jf God, Mary, and Jesus, used to be worshipped by eastern Christians

which may explain why Christianity adopted the mano pantea and
renamed it "the hand of blessing." 3 The gesture was displayed by
hristian priests and by emperors or kings by way of benediction and
expression of their own union with the land. 4
The thumb was the child, or child-soul symbolized in such fables
is Hop-O-My-Thumb. The index finger was the Mother, the one
who pointed, controlled, cast spells. The middle finger was the Father, a
phallic symbol for thousands of years, up to and including the present

day.
Arabs used to cut open a vein of the middle finger with a stone
cnife when making a pledge of faith, invoking a curse of castration if
pledge be broken. Roman male prostitutes used to signal potential
5
:he
6
:ustomers by thrusting the middle finger into the hair of their heads.
Like widely recognized phallic symbols, the middle finger was
all

associated with the devil by Christian authorities, who referred to it as

digitus infamis, "the vile finger." When the torturers asked accused
bitches which finger they raised to take the devil's oath, the only
7
'right" answer they would accept was the middle finger. It
was
:onsidered evil to wear a ring on the middle finger, for reasons plainly
associated with its sexual meanings. 8

Oddly enough, the classic finger-sign of the devil didn't use the
niddle finger at but displayed his "horned head" by pinning
all,

down the middle and fourth fingers with the thumb and extending the
ndex and little fingers. On the well-known magic principle that an
svil sign was prophylactic against evil, this gesture was often used in
Italy and the Balkans as a defense against the evil eye. Like most

European symbols, it seems to who

have originated with Kali Ma,
jhowed it as a mudra (sacred gesture) in her manifestation as
9
[agadamba, "Mother of the World." Probably it was meant to signify
tier own horned head embodied in the sacred cow.
The most revered mudra was the one meaning "infinity" or

'perfection," and most generally associated with female genitalia:

thumb and forefinger pressed together at the tips, the other three fingers

309
Firmament extended our modern OK sign. 10
Tantric yogis and bodhisattvas
11
made gesture in token of contemplative ecstasy.
this Persian sacred

^^^^^^^ amulets of the Sassanian period (3rd century B.C.) showed a hand in
The
this position, flanked by horns of fertility. 12 joined thumb and index

finger formed a vesica piscis, immemorial symbol of the yoni, while

the three extended fingers perhaps referred to the Goddess's trinity.
Western Europe inherited the Egyptian idea that the index and
middle fingers stood for the mother and father, respectively. Egyptian
mummies were buried with a protective amulet invoking both parents,
called the Amulet of the Two Fingers. 15 The index or "mother"
finger was the most magical. This was the finger that guided, showed,
beckoned, called for attention, blessed, and cursed.
Medieval Christians feared the pointing of a witch's index finger,
which is
why children taught that it's rude to point, and why a
are still

woman's characteristic scolding gesture brandishes the index finger like

a weapon. In Tantric tradition, this mother-finger was known as "the
14
threatening finger." All Indo-European traditions knew it was female.
Arabs said the index finger represents the Goddess Fatima, whose
symbolic Hand is still revered as a mystic summary of "the whole
15
religion of Islam."

Jewish patriarchs insisted on fettering a woman's threatening, spell-

casting right index finger with the wedding ring, and orthodox Jewish
women wear a wedding ring on that finger to this day. Christians,

however, copied their wedding-ring custom from the pagans, who

said a mystic "love vein" ran directly from the fourth finger of the left

hand to the heart, therefore this finger should be bound in marriage.

Macrobius wrote that a woman's wedding ring should be placed on that

16
finger "to prevent the sentiments of the heart from escaping."
There was a universal prejudice against cutting fingernails without

careful disposal, lest fingernail pairings be used in malignant spells

against their former owner. Norse myth said the doomsday ship Naglfar
was made of dead men's fingernails, so "if a man dies with his nails

unshorn he adding greatly to the materials for Naglfar" and bringing

is

17
doomsday that much closer. Hence the custom of manicuring
corpses.
1. Graves, G.M.
185. 2. Gifford, 92. 3. Ashe, 206. 4. Strong, 90.
1,
5. Johnson, G.R. Scott, 108. 7. Robbins, 106. 8. Budge, A.T., 304.
1 19. 6.
9. Rawson, A.T., 50. 10. Legman, 526. 11. Larousse, 365. 12. Budge, AT., 126.
13. Budge, E.M., 55. 14. Mahanirvanatantra, 29. 1 5. Budge, A.T., 304.
16. de Lys, 287-88. 17. Branston, 278.

Firmament
The Hebrew word for firmament meant "a sheet of hammered
metal." Sometimes this was called "the heaven of brass." The Bible

gives the ancient notion that the heaven

was the bottom of a vast

310
pistern, holding "the waters which were above the firmament" (Gene- Firstborn
is 1:7) i.e., rain.

According to this primitive notion, the rain fell down when

angels ^^m^^m^mi^^
the "windows of heaven" to let some of the water out of the
ppened
enormous cistern. Canaanite and early Jewish temples had
magic
b/indows in the roof, supposed to be models of the celestial windows,
ince everything about a temple was meant to copy the cosmos, not
only
ymbolically but literally. When rain was needed, the magic windows
ivere opened, and this was believed to cause a
corresponding action in
2
he celestial region. This why the Bible says God sent Noah's
is

flood by opening all the windows of heaven at once (Genesis 7:1 1).
The biblical firmament of brass was based on an ancient Oriental
mage of the house of Varuna, located in the zenith. It was a "house
bf many mansions," corresponding to Jesus's
description of his father's
heaven (John 14:2). It had a thousand doors through which the light
5
bf the celestial regions could shine, forming the stars. These were

iransmuted by biblical writers into the windows of heaven.

1. Gaster, 6. 2. Larousse, 79. 3. Campbell, Or.M., 177.

Firstborn

liost Asiatic gods claimed the title of Firstborn of the Womb, in

anskrit Hiranyagarbha. Each priesthood wanted its own god to be

firstborn" of the Creatress, because her eldest child would wield
atural authority over the others. Since it was impossible for more than
ne god to be the Firstborn, scholars simply used the title and
llaimed each god was the firstborn of one of the Great Mother's virgin
manations.
The classic example was the Buddha, born in many incarnations,
ach time of the Goddess's earthly representative, a
as a "firstborn"

pmple
maiden or devadasi, "Virgin Bride of God," bearing the name
and spirit) of Maya, the virgin aspect of Mother Kali. As in all myths
f divine births, the maiden might have an earthly husband, but he

kln't lie with her until after she brought forth her firstborn child,

|ho
was the son of God, or, in Buddha's case, the son of Ganesha, the
Lord of Hosts. 1
The actual mechanism of these divine impregnations was quite
leral. The virgin mother-to-be deflowered herself by straddling the
2
icred lingam the god's erect penis and allowing it to penetrate her.
i

/hile thus conceiving the god's son, the virgin placed a wreath of
owers on the head of his image, a symbolic act reminiscent of the

svayamara ceremony. The wreath was her own

3
ticient Indian

pnital symbol;
the god's "head" was his. The god's head and the head
This lingam were both anointed with holy oil for the sacred

liarriage, certainly a logical necessity for inserting

a stone shaft into a

agina. The custom and the temple phalli were standard

311

I
Firstborn
throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean world, where the

,^ ^^mwm
holy oil was known as chrism, and the priapic god was therefore a
Christos or "Anointed
In the Middle East,
One."
Maya became Maia, Mari, or Mary, another
God" who served as a temple maiden or kadesha, the
"virgin bride of
equivalent of theHindu devadasi. According to the classic Indo-
European pattern, the angel of the Lord "came in unto" Mary (Luke
1:28), which was the biblical term for sexual intercourse;
and her
husband Joseph "knew her not until she had brought forth her
firstborn son" (Matthew 1:25).
Divinely begotten firstborn children were sacer singled out for a
special fate from the earliest times, when first fruits of all kinds were
same deities supposed to have given them. Firstborn sons
offered to the
embodied the god, became the god, and were offered to the god. A
mass sacrifice of firstborn sons in Egypt, to appease the deities during a
severe drought, was recorded in the Old Testament by Jewish scribes
who revised the legend to claim their own Yahweh was responsible for

killing the Egyptian children (Exodus 12:29).

Actually, Egyptian firstborn-sacrifice came
from very ancient tradi-
tions. The Book of the Dead said, "On the day of hacking in pieces
the firstborn ... the mighty ones in heaven light the fire under the
4
cauldrons where are heaped up the thighs of the firstborn." Under
the later dynasties these may have been animal sacrifices, but the

hieroglyphic sign of the "thighs" showed human legs,

not animal

legs. The Bible says Yahweh copied

the act of Egypt's "mighty ones in

heaven," and sent out fire to consume the sons of Aaron on the altar

(Leviticus 10:2).
Like an Egyptian god, Yahweh told his priests: "Sanctify unto me
allthe firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children
of Israel, both of man and of beast; it is mine" (Exodus 13:2). Firstborn
children were offered on Yahweh's altars until priests began to permit

redemption of the child by offering a lamb instead (Exodus 13:1 5).

Thus the paschal lamb of the Passover legend was really a substitute
ram who replaced Isaac on Yahweh's altar also
for the son, just as the

represented a transition from human to animal sacrifice (Genesis

22:9-13). The story of Isaac and the ram probably was copied from the
Boeotian myth of the king's firstborn son Phrixus, who was to be
on the altar, when the ram of the Golden Fleece miraculoush
sacrificed
5
appeared as a substitute victim.
Yahweh's acceptance of an animal sacrifice in place of a human

one didn't necessarily mean he was more humane than contemporary

gods elsewhere. Long before the period allotted to Abraham, Oriental
6
nations had been offering animals instead of human victims. Indeed,
the Jews seem to have clung to the older custom for a longer time than

most of their contemporaries. They ignored Hadrian's prohibition of

human sacrifice, and continued in secret to sustain their god on humam
7
blood, as in the rites of the Essenic Christos. See Virgin Birth.

312
 Romans may havegiven up human sacrifice, but they had not Fish

riven up the ceremony of firstborn-conception. Roman brides rou-

tinely deflowered themselves on the carved phalli of Hermes, Tutunus,

j-'riapus, or some other "anointed" god before lying with their

bridegrooms, so their firstborn children would be god-begotten. It was
8

tommon everywhere to refer to firstborn children as "born by the

9
trace of God."

Fathers of the Christian church deplored the custom, because it

|nade an everyday event of the birth of a Christos which they

[referred
to consider miraculous. St. Augustine denounced Roman
lomen for encouraging young brides to "come andsit on the

riasculine monstrosity representing Priapus." The women, he said,

riewed this custom honest and religious." 10 Lactantius
as "very Lactantius
that the idea of the ceremony was to render the bride fruitful Firmianus (ca. 250-
jxplained
u 330A.D.)Early
by her communion with the divine nature."
Christian writer and
After the "divine nature" of these priapic gods was declared a
church father; tutor
levilish nature, yet the ceremony may have persisted, as indicated by to Crispus, the eldest

hedieval witches' description of intercourse with the devil. They son of Constantine I.

laimed his penis was hard and cold, and his body was "cold all over,
12
Ike a creature of stone." Such a "devil" could well have been a
that is, a statue of Priapus or one of the
feature of stone
in fact

llther phallic gods, believed to beget Antichrist in the classical manner,

b the firstborn of a virgin mother.

1. Larousse, [Link], E.A., 29. 3. Legman, 661. 4. Book of the Dead, 94.
2.

5. Graves, G.M.
229. 6. Robertson, 36. 7. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 1 19.
1,

8. Simons, 77. 9. Briffault 3, 231. 10. Goldberg, 51. 11. Knight, D.W.P., 103.
12. [Link], 273.

ish

k world-wide symbol of the Great Mother was the pointed-oval sign

f the yoni, known as vesica piscis, Vessel of the Fish. It was associated
dth the "Fishy Smell" that Hindus made a title of the yonic Goddess
because they said women's genitals smelled like fish. The
1

erself,

Chinese Great Mother Kwan-yin ("Yoni of yonis") often appeared

s a fish-goddess. 2 As the swallower of Shiva's penis, Kali became
linaksi the "fish-eyed" one, just as in Egypt, Isis the swallower of Vesica piscis
3
)siris's penis became Abtu, the Great Fish of the Abyss.
4
Fish and womb were synonymous in Greek; delphos meant both.
Tie original Delphic oracle first belonged to the abyssal fish-goddess
nder her pre-Hellenic name of Themis, often incarnate in a great fish,

hale, or dolphin (delphinos). The cycles in which she devoured

and
Kurrected the Father-Son entered all systems of symbolism from the

Ijws' legend of Jonah to the classic "Boy on the Dolphin." Apuleius

m the Goddess playing the part of the Dolphin was Aphrodite Salacia,
with fish-teeming womb." 5
Her "boy" was Palaemon, the reincarnated young sun, made new

313
Flidhais after sinking into the same abyssal womb as the dying god Heracles. 6

The fish-goddess Aphrodite Salacia was said to bring "salacity" through

^^^^^^^^^^^ orgiastic fish-eating on her sacred day, Friday. The Catholic church
inherited the pagan custom of Friday fish-eating and pretended it was a
holy fast; but the disguise was thin. Friday was dies veneris in Latin,
the Day of Venus, or of lovemaking: Freya's Day in Teutonic Europe.
The notion that fish are "aphrodisiac" food is still widespread even
today.
The Celts thought fish-eating could place new life in a mother's 1

womb. Their hero Tuan was eaten in fish form by the Queen of
7
Ireland, who thus re-conceived him and gave him a new birth. In
another myth, fish were associated with the clots of "wise blood"
8
emanating from the Mother-tree with its sacred fountain, in Fairyland.
They were called blood-red nuts of the Goddess Boann, eaten by
"salmon of knowledge" who swam in her sacred fountain. "Poets and
difficult to deal with, often say,
story-tellers, speaking of any subject
'Unless I had eaten the salmon of knowledge I could not describe it.""
The fish symbol of the yonic Goddess was so revered throughout
the Roman empire that Christian authorities insisted on taking it
over, with extensive revision of myths to deny its earlier female-genital

meanings. Some claimed the represented Christ because Greek

fish

ichthys, "fish," was an acronym for "Jesus Christ,

Son of God." But the
Christian fish-sign was the same as that of the Goddess's yoni or
Pearly Gate: two crescent moons forming a vesica piscis. Sometimes the

Christ child was portrayed inside the vesica, which was superimposed
Fish on and obviously represented her womb, just as in the
Mary's belly
ancient symbolism of the Goddess.
A medieval hymn called Jesus "the Little Fish which the Virgin
,0
caught in the Fountain." Mary was equated with the virgin

Aphrodite-Mari, or Marina, who brought forth all the

fish in the sea. Or
the Cyprian site of Aphrodite's greatest temple, Mary is still wor-
11
shipped as Panaghia Aphroditessa. In biblical terms, "Jesus son of
Maria" meant the same as Yeshua son of Marah, or Joshua son of
Nun (Exodus 33:1 1), which also means son of the Fish-mother. Mary's
many Mesopotamian names like Mari, Marriti, Nar-Marratu, Mara, j

were written like the Hebrew Mem with an ideogram meaning both
"sea" and "mother." 12 The next letter in the Hebrew sacred alpha-
bet was Nun, "fish."

Another biblical name for the Goddess was Mehitabel, none other
15
than the Egyptian Fish-mother Mehit in a Hebrew disguise.
1. Campbell, CM., 13. 2. Goldberg, 98. 3. Campbell, Or.M., 149.

4. Briffault 3, 1 50. 5. Neumann, A. P., 6. 6. Graves, G. M. 2, 102.

[Link],94. 8. Briffault 2,631. 9. Joyce 1,439; Squire, 55.

10. Harding, 58. 11. Ashe, 192. 12. Hooke, M.E.M., 24. 13. Budge, D.N., 151.

Flidhais

Celtic name for thewoodland Goddess in the form of a hind or doe;

Diana as the White Hind of numerous early-medieval romances. She

314
nurtured many heroes and led them on mystic adventures. When Hood
they died she took them to the fairyland that the Norse called Hinder-
(Hind-Mountain). Often they grew horns and became stag-gods.
1

fjall

[Link]-Petre, 199.

Flood
The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of
flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of

years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian
Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon
he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In
Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters
subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great
Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros a

corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra whose ark landed on Mount

Ararat. 1

According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was

told byhis god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy

substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of
all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be
Cubit From Latin
600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt
on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters cubitum, "elbow"; the
length of an average
brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's hand and forearm from
immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves the tip of the middle
twice three thousand six hundred chests." 2 It seems that Noah's ark was finger to the elbow
much smaller than earlier heroic proportions. (about 18-21
inches).
As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets
of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered the earlier
version of the flood myth. 5 Ashurbanipai King
Among the details that religious orthodoxy of Assyria ca. 669-630
took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood
leader
B.C., military
was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly and statesman. He
children drowned. Mother Ishtar severely punished the disobedient collected at Nineveh
a large library of
god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic
cuneiform texts,
rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly
rediscovered by
altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my archeologists in the
4
people to destruction." 19th century a.d.

Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood

myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great
Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without
rainbow
supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's
covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by
barrier into a "sign of the

God himself (Genesis 9:13).

The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One
especially was long remembered; geologists
have linked it with the
volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and
was
destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley

315
Flora
excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a mighty flood a layer
Fly of clay without artifacts, eight feet thick. 5 Such a flood may have been
Chaos that all Indo-European peoples be-
identified with the watery

lievedwould swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of
which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless
Mother. 6 The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing

through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the
birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the

Goddess's yonic dove (Genesis 8:12).

Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing
God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its
preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jeho-
vah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess
opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means
of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the
world was again filled with humankind." 7
This Gnostic interpretation had both Babylonian and Hellenic
roots. Greeks said the primal sea-mother Themis gave Deucalion and
his wife occult knowledge ("light") of how to create human beings from
8
stones, "the bones of their Mother," i.e., of the earth. Raising up

livingpeople from stones or bones was a popular miracle. Jesus

mentioned it, and Ezekiel's God claimed to have done it in the valley

of bones (Ezekiel 37).

1. Graves, CM. 1, 142; Hooke, M.E.M., 130. 2. Lethaby, 239. 3. Ceram, 314.
4. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 357; Epic ofGilgamesh, 112. 5. Ceram, 353.

6. Avalon, 233. 7. Pagels, 55. 8. Graves, CM. 1, 139.

Flora
Roman Goddess of spring, "The Flourishing One," annually hon-
Lactantius ored at the May Day festival called Floralia. Lactantius noted with
Firmianus (ca. 250- distaste that Flora was "a Lady of Pleasure," but she was prominent
330 a.d.) early
and important in Roman religion. Some said her name was the secret
Christian writer and
soul-name of Rome itself. 1

church father; tutor to

Crispus, the eldest son

St. Augustine and other fathers of the church abominated Flora
of Constantine I. and her which, they said, was a licentious orgy of nude
festival,
2
dancing and promiscuous behavior.
1. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 225. 2. GR. Scott, 68.

Fly
Popular soul-symbol in many ancient religions, due to a primitive
women could conceive children by swallowing a fly bearing
belief that
the soul of a previously deceased person. Virgin mothers of Celtic
heroes Etain, Cu Chulainn conceived in thisway. Greeks similar-
1

ly believed souls could travel from one life to the next in insect form;

316

m
 the very word for soul, psyche, meant a
butterfly. In the Middle East, Flying Ointment
Baal-Zebub or Beelzebub was "Lord of Flies" because he was a
psychopomp; his title really meant Lord of Souls.

Behind such images can be seen an archaic mode of

thought,
predating the discovery of fatherhood, when men evolved various
crude theories to explain the mystery of how a fetus came to be in a
woman's body. 2
1. Spence, 95-6. 2. Neumann, A.C.U., 11; Stone, 1 1.

Flying Ointment
A drug like aconite was probably responsible for the report that
witches flew through the air with the heathen Goddess
Diana, covering
vast distances between sunset and cockcrow. 1
A Dominican friar,
Father Nider, said two of his brethren witnessed a witch's the
trip to
sabbat, which turned out to be a drug trip only. She rubbed her body
with an ointment, then lay down in a
kneading-trough and passed into a
state of delirium, thrashing about, and
muttering of Venus and the
devil. When she returned to her senses, the friars told her she had been

to a meeting of devils and witches. On another occasion, Pope Julius

Ill's chief astrologer experimentally rubbed a woman's body with witch-
salvecomposed of hemlock, mandrake, henbane, and belladonna.
She went into a coma lasting 36 hours and experienced many
hallucinations. 2

Professor H. S. Clarke recently noted that many drugs used by Professor H. S.

witches were known to cause such effects. Aconite disturbs the Clarke Author of an
heartbeat and produces peculiar sensations, including dizziness or a appendix to

sensation of flying. Belladonna produces delirium. Hemlock causes Margaret Murray's

Witch Cult in
excitement and later paralysis. "Rubbing such ointments into the skin Western Europe, 1 92 1 .

would intensify any physiological properties." These drugs, not the

fat of boiled children that churchmen deemed essential, made the
3
"magic" of witches' flying ointment.
Oil was the vehicle for a flying ointment of Roman witches,

according to Lucian, who described a woman transforming herself

into a night-ravenby rubbing her body with holy oil, then flying away
4
through the window. The flying journey to heaven was the primary
component of any magical initiation; it could be induced by ointment,
or by eating the body of a god. By eating the flesh of Osiris in the

form of bread, an initiate could become an Osiris and ascend to heaven,

and "in one little moment pass over limitless distances which would
need millions and hundreds of thousands of years for a man to pass
over.

Though ascent to heaven via a god's eaten body was certainly a

central Christian doctrine, the church declared it a sin to believe it
could be done by the living, with the help of a non-Christian deity. Up
to the middle of the medieval period, the church said the flights of

317
Focus witches were wholly imaginary, and it was heresy to believe them real.
Footbinding After the Inquisition took shape, the church said the flights of witches

^^^^^^^^^^^ were real, and it was heresy to believe them imaginary.

The opinion appeared in the Canon Episcopi, written by a
earlier

secretary of the Archbishop of Trier about 900 a.d., though it was

passed off as a canon of the 4th-century Council of Ancyra; its
fraudulence was demonstrated centuries later. It told Christians to

reject the "demonic illusions" that made women think they flew

through the night air with the pagan Goddess Diana. When the
6

church's opinion was reversed in the 1 3th century, those who doubted
the witches' flights were said to "sin in the lack of true reverence to
our mother the church." 7
Supported by plenty of "evidence" from the torture chamber, the
useful theory of witches' flights could account for the fact that no one
ever saw the vast assemblages, allegedly coming together from great
8
distances, to the devilish sabbat. It could also account for the prison
suicides of victims who beat their heads against their cell walls until they
died, to avoid further torture. The inquisitor Bodin said witches left
unbound between sessions in the torture chamber often dashed them-
selves against the wall and broke their necks because they tried to fly
9
away with Diana or Minerva.
Many women confessed under torture that they dug up children's

corpses to make their flying [Link] one occasion at Lindheim,

six women confessed to this crime and were sentenced to the stake. The
family of one of the women instituted an investigation of the grave in

question, where the child's body was discovered intact. The inquisitors

smoothly explained that the devil had reassembled the body to cause
confusion. The witches were burned on schedule. 10
1. Kramer & Sprenger, 104. 2. Castiglioni, 249-50. 3. Robbins, 364, 366.
4. Budge, E. M 204. 5. Book of the Dead, 499. 6. J. B. Russell, 76.
7. Robbins, 74, 514. 8. Arens, 185. 9. Scot, 16. 10. Castiglioni, 249.

Focus
Latin for "hearth," the first altar, and center of early tribal life.
1

Goddess of the focus was Vesta (Greek Hestia), whose priestesses

tended a perpetual fire that was bound up with the soul of Rome. It
was believed the altar of Vesta was the center of the universe. The cult
arose from Neolithic views of matrilocal power radiating from the
home center of the clan, with the matriarch as high priestess and

religious ceremonies centering on her hearth. 2

1. Funk, 353. 2. Potter & Sargent, 201.

Footbinding
Strange erotic custom of medieval China, practiced for a thousand
years, up to the beginning of the 20th century, even exerting some

318
influence on western Europe where women were often praised in Forgery
romantic literature for having the tiniest possible feet.
Crippling of the Chinese girl began at the age of five or six.

Footbinding was a lifelong torment that slowly broke bones and

deformed the flesh until the full "beauty" of the atrophied, three-inch
"lotus Many women died of suppuration and
hook" was achieved.
gangrene before the desired effect was complete.

Chinese men were conditioned to intense fetishistic passion for

deformed female feet. Chinese poets sang ecstatic praises of the lotus
feet that aroused their desire to fever pitch. The crippled woman was

considered immeasurably charming by reason of her vulnerability,

her suffering, and her helplessness she couldn't even escape an
1
attackerby running away.
Westerners sometimes imagined that footbinding produced a well-

shaped but miniaturized foot. Actually, it bore little resemblance to a

normal foot. The four smaller toes were folded completely under the

sole; then the whole foot was folded so the underside of the heel and
toes were brought together. The victim had to keep her feet tightly

bandaged forever; letting them spread again would cause even worse
pain.
1 . See Levy.

Forgery
Documentary foundations of the Christian church's temporal powers
were often forged, including the crucial Petrine doctrine of the keys (see
Peter, Saint). Notable among later forgeries were the Decretals of
St. Isidore,alleged canons and decrees of the papacy from apostolic
Index of
times to the 8th century a.d., upholding papal claims to authority
Prohibited Books
over European nations. These documents were first composed in
(Index Librorum
France about the year 850 a.d., though they pretended to date from Prohibitorum) The
the earliest foundations of the church. first official edition

appeared in 1 5 59,
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa patiently investigated the Decretals in
though ecclesiastical
the 1 5 th century and found them to be clumsy forgeries full of
authorities censored,
anachronisms and garbled history. 1
The church refused to acknowledge
condemned, and
that its traditional privileges were founded on false documents. The destroyed various
works of subsequent scholars revealing the deception were banned and kinds of books from the
earliest centuries of
their authors persecuted. Apologists who tried to explain away the
the Christian era.
forgerywere rewarded with ecclesiastical preferments. In 1628, when
Catholics were
Blondel published irrefutable proof of the Decretals' fraudulence, his forbidden to read any
work was promptly placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. books listed on the

False Decretals was the so-called Donation of Con- Index, which was
Among the
regularly updated.
whereby Pope Sylvester I and his successors were granted
stantine,
Observation of this
temporal as well as spiritual dominion over the entire empire,
and the
prohibition was
fiefdoms of the Papal States were established. According to this up to 1966,
obligatory
document, Constantine made the pope the greatest feudal lord in Italy: when Pope Paul VI
[Wherefore, that the pontifical crown may be maintained in dignity, suppressed the Index.

319
fork we hand over and relinquish our palaces, the City of Rome, and all the

provinces, places, and cities of Italy and the regions of the West to the
most blessed pontiff and Universal Pope, Sylvester." But the real

composer of the Donation, a papal official named Christophorus,

made serious historical mistakes. He made Constantine call himself

David Blondel conqueror of the Huns, fifty years before they appeared in Europe.
Theologian who He called the bishop of Rome "pope" two hundred years before the
wrote Pseudo-Isidorus title was used. 2
et Turrianus
Lorenzo Valla proved the spurious nature of the Donation as earl ,
Vapulantes (Geneva,
as 1440. He wrote: "Even if it had been genuine, it would by now
1628) to demonstrate
the spurious nature of
have been rendered void by the crimes alone of the Papacy, through
avarice Italy has been plunged in constant war." The church
3
earlier defenses of whose
the False Decretals. refused to admit the fraud until nearly four centuries later. A Greek
saying was that the chief industry of papal Rome was fabrication of

Lorenzo Valla false documents. After setting the precedent, "Nearly every pontificate
1
5th-century Italian will add its supplement of false documents to this formidable corpus
humanist and critic
whence the theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas among them, will for a
of the church,
employed as a long period confidently derive the justification for whatever the
secretary to King Roman Pontiffs may desire to do or say." 4 The Gospels themselves
Alfonso V of Siciliy, were forged uphold privileges and practices of the early
as required to
who protected Valla church. "We
must never forget that the majority of the writings of the
from the Inquisition.
New Testament were not really written or published by those whose
Later, he was
reconciled to the
names they bear." 5
After burning books and closing pagan schools, the church dealt in
papacy and even
appointed an another kind of forgery: falsification by omission. All European
apostolic secretary by history was extensively edited by a church that managed to make itself

Pope Nicholas V the sole repository of literary and historical records. With all impor-
tant documents assembled in the monasteries, and the lay public
rendered illiterate, Christian history could be forged with impunity.
1. White 2, 314. 2. Chamberlin, B. P., 14-15. 3. Chamberlin, B. P., 166.
4. Guignebert, 249. 5. Stanton, 106.

Fork
"Furka" or "fork" described the so-called lost letter of the Greek

Y having the sound of F. Its Sanskrit

alphabet, digamma, a double gamma
name was forkwas, linguistic root of the two trees on which dying
gods were sacrificed: Norse fyr (fir) and Latin quercus (oak). The
1

Egyptian furka was the Y-shaped cross on which the god Set was
2
crucified. It was also a phallic symbol of the god's sacred marriage. Thej
Furka
"thieves' cross" in Christian iconography had the same shape. Such
crosses flanking Jesus's cross may have represented sacred marriage.
The Y-shaped was sometimes regarded as a female genital
fork
5
symbol, in conjunction with the male trident or three-pronged fork.
The voodoo savior-god Legba characteristically used as his crutch
4
a derivative of the sacred furka of Set.
1 . Potter & Sargent, 230. 2. Campbell, M. I., 29. 3. de Lys, 233.
4. Martello, 164.

320
 tort"" 6 Fortune
The Roman Triple Goddess of Fate had
many "Fortune" titles: Frastrada

Fortuna Primigeneia, the Firstborn; Fortuna Muliebris, Goddess of mmmmhmmm

Women; Fortuna Scribunda, the Fate Who Writes; Fortuna Regia,
Goddess of Rulership; Bona Fortuna or Mala Fortuna, good and bad
fate.

Fortuna Augusti was the foundation of the emperors' right to rule.

Romans swore by the emperor's personal Fortuna, who governed his
[Link] "constantly had before them, even during sleep or on

voyages, a golden statue of the goddess, which on their death they

transmitted to their successor and which they invoked under the name
pi Fortuna Regia, a translation of Tyche Basileos (Fate of the
l
Rulership)."
Greek Tyche was the same as Fortuna. When she was a Fate
attached to an individual, like a guardian angel, she was a psyche

ssoul) or anima (spirit). Her Roman name Fortuna may have descended
from Vortumna, "She Who Turns the Year," the Great Mother
turning the celestial wheel of the stars and also the karmic wheel of
2
fate.

Under the name of Agatha, "Kindly Fortune," the Goddess was

associated with a serpent-consort, Agathodemon, a genius of kindly

rate.
3
On the Orphic Bowl of the 5th century a.d. he appeared next to
her in the guise of the Lord of Death, "halfway around the circle, at
he point of midnight holding in his right hand the poppy stalk of the
. . .

4
Bleep of death, turned downward." In this case Fortuna and her
consort stood for a fortunate life followed by a gentle death. The
Goddess's favored ones went to her paradise in the far west, often

balled the Fortunate Isles.

On the Goddess's magic wheel of time, odd numbers were sacred

|o her,
even numbers to her consort. Roman religious festivals were
Icheduled for the odd-numbered "female" days, because they were
5
[upposed to be more propitious than "male" days.
Fortuna became patroness of gamblers when her fate-wheel was
lecularized as the carnival Wheel of Fortune, and she was renamed

Lady Luck. In England she was transformed into a fairy-creature called

ji
"portune," which might lead horses astray, make travelers lose their
6
Ivay, and other pranks. Like most other forms of the Goddess she was

Converted into a malicious spirit.

1. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 86; MM, 97.
2. Graves, G.M. 1, 126.
3. Elworthy, 384. 4. Campbell, M.I., 388. 5. Rose, 228. 6. Hazlitt, 518.

rastrada

legendary wife of Charlemagne; a fairy or witch from the east. The

athedral of Aix-la-Chapelle was said to have been built over a magic
ool containing Frastrada's ring. Anyone who visited the pool by
loonlight would be seized by its spell and forced to return again and

321
Fravashi again.
1
A similar tale was told of the Trevi Fountain in Rome,
FreeWill formerly sacred to Hecate Trevia.
[Link],L.R.,85.

Fravashi

"Spirit of the Way," a Sufi title of a sacred harlot trained to teach

sexual mysticism; the Arabic equivalent of Shakti.

Frederick II

Holy Roman Emperor who opposed his church, once remarking that
"three have seduced the whole world, that is, Moses the Hebrews,
Christ the Christians, and Mohammed the heathens." Medieval
heretics revered him and made him a legendary hero like Merlin,

similarly hidden in an enchanted sleep, awaiting his Second Coming.

It was believed that Frederick rested in a magic mountain with his

ravens.
sleeping knights around him, guarded by supernatural
The prophecy of Frederick's awakening or reincarnation did not

remain in the realm of folklore. It was taken up by educated writers

and poets, who made it an article of anti-clerical propaganda. Books
German prophecy that another Frederick would
referred to the "old"
come from the seed of the first, to humble the German clergy, and
1

bring peace, prosperity, and freedom to the land..

I. Bernhardt, 245, 257-58, 288,

FreeWill
Theological doctrine stated that God allows human beings to be
tempted into so by a personal decision each individual may "freely"
evil,

elect to resist temptation or not. The doctrine was developed in

answer to the argument that God could prevent sin if he wanted to, and
because he did not prevent it, there was something wrong with him,
Second Book of not with humanity. As 2 Esdras put it: "It had been better not to have
Esdras (also known as
given the earth unto Adam; or else, when it was given him, to have
the Ezra Apocalypse) restrained him from sinning. For what profit is it for men now in this
One of the and after death to look for
present time to live in heaviness,
apocryphal books
eliminated from the punishment?"
English Bible but
The problem was to absolve God from suspicion of a frivolous

appearing as an malice, like that of a child who teases an animal with food, then
appendix to the New punishes it for eating. If God was all-knowing then he
must have known
Testament in the the element of
in advance what man would choose, which would take
Latin Vulgate.
surprise out of human sins. On the other hand, if God couldn't foresee
what man would choose, and could be surprised by human actions,

he wasn't all-knowing.

322
 Scotus Erigena piously tried to thrash his way out of the paradox
Free Will
with a new dogma of "divine ignorance," but unfortunately succeed-
ed in demonstrating that God fails to understand what he created.
Erigena said: "There is another kind of ignorance in God, inasmuch
ashe may be said not to know what things he foreknows and predestines
untilthey have appeared experientially in the course of created Johannes Scotus
events There is a third kind of divine ignorance, in that God may Erigena 9th-century
be said to be ignorant of things not yet made manifest in their effects Irish theologian,

schoolmaster at the
through experience of their action and operation; of which, neverthe-
court of the West
less, he holds the invisible cause in himself, by himself created, and to
Frankish king Charles
himself known." 2 the Bald.
These subtleties added up to a statement that God doesn't know
what he knows, with a hidden conclusion that man is smarter than
God, because man (that is, Erigena) knows all about what God knows
and what God doesn't know.
Theologians who wrote learnedly on
the subject ofGod's ignorance were going out on a limb, claiming that
they could scrutinize and analyze what they themselves declared
inscrutable. So troublesome did the doctrine of free will become that
some Protestant sects, such as Calvinist Presbyterianism, abandoned
it
altogether in favor of predestination, stating that every person was

already saved or damned from birth by God's unalterable decree.

This idea restored God's omniscience, but eroded the incentive to live a

life.
godly
There was an eastern folk tale that allegorized the relationship

between God and humanity as between a wizard-shepherd and his

flock of remarkably intelligent sheep. Knowing that their master would

eventually kill, skin, and eat them, the sheep kept trying to run away,
and proved very troublesome. At last the shepherd used his magic

power to put his sheep into a hypnotic trance and gave them
suggestions that they would internalize as their own beliefs. He told

[them they were immortal, so death could do them

no harm. He
old them to trust in their master's goodness no matter what happened
to them. Finally, he told them not to think about their fate at all,
Decause it wouldn't
happen right away. There was no need to anticipate
it. Then became obedient, and stopped trying to escape.
the sheep
Each one quietly awaited its own death at the master's hand, believing

that it had decided to do so of its own free will. 3

One of the "suppressed" verses of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Iso made nonsense of the doctrine of free will, after the fashion of
he author of Esdras. In this verse, not man but God was made
esponsible for the Fall, since he had foreseen it, planned it, and

supplied the circumstances that made it inevitable:

O Thou, who Man ofbaser Earth didst make,

And even with Paradise devise the Snake;
For all the sin wherewith the Face ofMan
Is blackened, Man 's
forgiveness give and take!
l.H. Smith, 235. 2. Campbell, CM., 343. 3. Wilson, 268.

323
Freya Freya
Great Goddess of northern Europe, leader of the "primal matri-
archs" called Afliae, "powerful ones," or Disk, "divine grandmothers":
the same as the Hindu matrikadevis or mother goddesses. Freya was
the Vanadis, the ruling ancestress (dfs) of the Vanir or elder gods, who
var. Frea, Frigga,
ruled before the arrival of Odin and the patriarchal Aesir ("Asians")
Frigg
from the east. Myths said Odin learned everything he knew about magic
and divine power from Freya. 1

The pagans said nothing could be lucky without Freya's presence.

Even the gods languished and began to decline toward death, like

mortals, when Freya was taken from them. 2

Like all forms of the Goddess, Freya represented sexual love,
which is
why her alternate name Frigg became a colloquialism for
sexual intercourse. Her consort Frey sometimes took the form of a

phallus. In Uppsala his name was Fricco, "Lover," cognate with the

phallic god Priapus, from the Indo-European root prij, to make love
3
which also gave rise to the modern "prick."
Though he was sometimes called Freya's twin brother, like the

Artemis-Apollo, Frey made a lingam-yoni combina-

Isis-Osiris pairs,

tion with Freya. Their names meant "the Lord" and "the Lady." 4
Some writers identified them with Attis and Cybele, tracing Frigga to

"Frigia" or Phrygia, the Magna Mater's home. 5

Frey was the god of Yule, the pagan solstitial festival assimilated to
Christmas. At the turning of the solar year he was born of his virgin-
6
mother-sister-bride. Like other seasonal gods he had a perpetual rival,

Njord, the other half of the year. They were collectively blotgodar
Freya had many (blood-gods), who fought and sacrificed each other over and over. Njord
alternate names. She
was called the first god of the Swedes, having ruled before Odin
was Gerd the Earth
brought alien gods from Asia. Frey was another aspect of him, wor-
Mother, or Eartha;
Godiva, "the shipped in the sacred grove at Uppsala long before it was taken over
7
Goddess"; Syr, "the by Odin's priests. The grove itself stood for the body of the Goddess.
Sow"; Gefn, "the Many of Freya's names were only kennings (metaphors) from the
Giver"; Horn, the holy
hymns composed in her honor by her skalds. Focusing on the theme
harlot; the Vanadis;
of love, and known as mansongr, "woman songs," these compositions
or Mardoll, the Moon jj

11

Shining Over the

were specifically forbidden by the medieval church. Despite the
Sea. 8 Sometimes she opposition of the clergy, Germans persisted in believing that Freya's
12
was simply Lofn, sacred day, Friday, was the luckiest day for weddings.
"Love." 9 She was also
or one of her married each of the early Swedish
Freya equivalents ;

identified with
kings: "They were regarded in heathen times as the husbands of the
Mana, the Moon; or

Hel, the underworld; fertility goddess. . . .

[T]hey suffered a real or symbolic death in that
or Nerthus, the primal capacity when their time of supremacy came to an end." Scandina-
Goddess of the Plow, vian Aryans followed the typical pattern of sacred marriage between
in charge of the fertility Goddess and king, the latter becoming identified with the male
of the earth; she
fertility deity whose function it was "to die for the land and for his
separated the island of
Zealand from people, while the goddess never dies. Her function is to weep over
Sweden by plowing a him, perhaps to help bring about his return, or to give birth to the divine a

10 13
furrow around it. child who is to take his place." (See Kingship.)

324
 After their abrupt sacrificial deaths, Freya kept the spirits of slain Friday
kings and heroes in her Fensalirox Marsh-halls, also called Folk-
14
vangr, the Field of Warriors. They could be reborn after spending a
^^^^^^^^^^
cycle of time in the wet, fertile earth-womb. Freya's Marsh-halls
recall the "bog" where Baal-Hadad lay for seven years before he was
15
resurrected to godhood by priestesses of Asherah. Like the early
Semitic worshippers of the Great Mother, Aryans were "men of

clay" the meaning of their name because their bodies came forth
from Modir. This meant the root of both "mud" and "mother"; she was
the same primal creatress whom the Russians called Moist Mother
Earth. 16 Modir too was another manifestation of Freya.
She was especially linked with the strange archaic god Heimdall,
whose name meant "a ram," undoubtedly one of the ubiquitous
animal substitutes for a human sacrifice. The ram's horn was Heimdall's

ringing Gjallarhorn,on which he blew the Last Trump to announce

the coming of doomsday and the world's destruction. In the Bible,

magic ram's horns were supposed to bring about the destruction of

Jericho in the same manner. 17 The link between Heimdall and Freya
suggested her Kali-like function as a Destroying Goddess, which she
would assume when men and gods displeased her by forgetting her
and peace. She knew more
principles of right living, justice, honor,
magic than the gods. Her knowledge was collectively seidr, cognate of
Sanskrit siddhi, the miraculous powers developed by the practice of

yoga.
Freya had so many incarnations and aspects that the scholars who
tried to characterizeher by only one of them soon ran into a mass of
contradictions. She was called the Goddess of fertility, love, the moon,
the sea, the earth, the underworld, death, birth; virgin, mother,

ancestress, queen of heaven, ruler of fate, of the stars, of magic; the

Great Sow wedded to the sacrificial boar; the Mistress of Cats; the
leader of Valkyries; the Saga or "sayer" who inspired all sacred poetry.
In sum, she was as many-sided as any other version of the Goddess.

[Link]-Petre, 144-59. 2. Branston, 249. 3. Branston, 134, 158.

4. Gelling & Davidson,
163. 5. Borchardt, 222. 6. Oxenstiema, 216.
163, 172. 8. Branston, 133. 9. Sturluson, 59.
7. Turville-Petre,
10. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 113. 11. Turville-Petre, 176.
12. H.R.E. Davidson G.M.V.A., 112. 13. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 97, 110.
14. Turville-Petre, 189. 1 5. Hooke, M.E.M., 87. 16. Larousse, 287.
17. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 173-75.

Friday
Day of the Goddess Freya, called unlucky by Christian monks,
because everything associated with female divinity was so called. Friday
the 13 th was said to be especially unlucky because it combined the
Goddess's sacred day with her sacred number, drawn from the 1 3
months of the pagan lunar year. (See Menstrual Calendar.)
Romans named the day dies Veneris after Venus, their own

325
Frog version of the same Goddess. In modern French, Friday is still

Fuji vendredi,
1
and in Italian, venerdi.

Friday used to be the seventh day of the week. It was the Sabbath
of the Jewish lunar calendar and is still the Sabbath of Islam.
Scandinavian pagans, Hindus, and rural Scots insisted that Friday was
the most propitious day for a marriage because it was the day that

favored fertility.

Fish were eaten on Friday as fertility charms, in honor of Venus

(or Freya) whose totems they were. Fish are still considered "aphro-
because they were sacred to Aphrodite. Thus the Catholic
disiac" food
on Friday was wholly pagan in origin. But the
habit of eating fish
church never acknowledged the debt. In the Middle Ages, when pagan
votaries of Freya continued to celebrate her rites on Friday, church-
2
men designated her day as the day of "devil worship."
1. Funk, 337. 2. de Lys, 375-77.

Frog
Cylinder seals A Medieval totems of witches were frogs because ancient traditions
type of sculpture that Hecate Egypt's Hekat, Queen of the Heaven-
associated the frog with
in
developed
ly midwives. Egyptians made the frog a symbol of the fetus. Hekat's
Mesopotamia during
the protoliterate
sacred Amulet of the Frog bore the words, "I the Resurrection,"Am
1
another phrase of birth-magic copied by early Christians.
period. Cylinder seals
were small stone In Rome, the frog was sacred to Venus, of whom Hecate was one

cylinders with figures aspect. Her triple yoni sometimes was shown as a fleur-de-lis com-
carved in relief, to be 2
To this
posed of three frogs. day, a garment closure of cord shaped like
rolled across a tablet of
a fleur-de-lis is called a "frog." Tailors' folklore said every garment
wet clay which
would then take the should have exactly nine frogs, which might be traced all the way back

impression of a to Babylonian cylinder seals showing nine frogs as a fertility charm:

picture. Subjects were the Ninefold Goddess ruling the nine months of gestation. 3
usually magical or 1. Budge, E.M., 63. 2. de Lys, 139, 141. 3. Budge, A.T.,91.
religious.

Fu-Hi
Chinese patriarchal hero, said to have been the first man to discover

the male role in reproduction, though he was himself conceived without

a father. 1
[Link] 1,366.

Fuji
"Grandmother" or "Ancestress," the holy Mother-mountain of Ja-
pan. Mount Fujiyama was interpreted as a point of contact between
1

326
heaven and the underworld, as were most mountains. (See Furies
Mountain.)
1 .
Campbell, P.M., 336.

Furies

Also called Erinyes or Eumenides, the Furies personified the

venge-
ful moods of the Triple Goddess Demeter, who was also called Erinys
as a punisher of sinners. The three Erinyes were emanations of her.

"Whenever their number is mentioned there are three of them But

they can all be mentioned together as a single being, an Erinys. The
proper meaning of the word is a 'spirit of anger and revenge' Above
allthey represented the Scolding Mother. Whenever a mother was
insulted, or perhaps even murdered, the Erinyes appeared. Like swift
bitches they pursued all who had flouted blood-kinship and the
deference due to it."
'

Greeks believed the blood of a slain mother infected her murderer

with a dread spiritual poison, miasma, the Mother's Curse. It drew
the implacable Furies to their victim, and also infected any who dared
help him. In fear of the Furies' attention, lest they might have
inadvertently assisted a matricide, people called the Furies "Good
Ones" (Eumenides), hoping to divert their wrath.

Aeschylus called the Furies "Children of Eternal Night." Sopho-

cles calledthem "Daughters of Earth and Shadow." Their individual
names were Tisiphone (Retaliation-Destruction), Megaera (Grudge),
and Alecto (the Unnameable). Some said they were born of the
blood of the castrated Heavenly Father, Uranus; others said they were
older than any god. 2 Their antiquity is demonstrated by the fact that

they were invoked against killers of kinfolk in the female line only: a
relic of the matriarchal age, when all genealogies were reckoned

through women.
3

Aeschylus's drama The Eumenides presented the

Furies pursuing
Drestes for killing his mother,
Queen Clytemnestra; but they cared
lothing for the murder of the father. He was not a real member of the
:lan. When Orestes asked them why they didn't punish Clytemnestra

or murdering her husband, they answered, "The man she killed was
lotof blood congenital." Orestes inquired (as if he didn't know),
'But am I then involved with my mother by blood bond?" The Furies

napped, "Murderer, yes. How else could she have nursed you
>eneath her heart? Do you forswear your mother's intimate blood?" 4 In
hort, the Furies harked back to a matriarchal clan system like the one
n pre-Christian Britain, where "the son loved the father no more than a
5
stranger." Indeed the name of the archaic Triple Goddess of
6
Ireland, Erin, or Eriu, has been linked with the triple Erinyes.
The Furies were also "fairies," identified with witches because of

327
Furrow their ability to lay curses on any who transgressed their law. Such
"fairies" may have been real witches who tried to defend the rights of

^^^^^^^^^^ women encroachment by Christian laws. Their modus ope-

against
randi could have been similar to that of the Women's Devil Bush

society in Africa: if a woman

complained to this society that her
7
husband abused her, he soon died of a mysterious dose of poison.

Christianity adopted the Furies, incongruously enough, as servants

of the patriarchal God. They became part of God's penal system in
hell: dog-faced she-demons known as Furies Who Sow Evil, Accusers
8
or Examiners, and Avengers of Crimes. Their duty, as always, was
to punish sinners. As "grotesques" they appeared on the tympanum of

Bourges Cathedral, with large pregnant bellies bearing the full

moon's Gorgon face, and pendulous breasts terminating in dogs'
heads. 9 Greek however, depicted them as stern-faced but beauti-
art,

ful women, bearing torches and scourges, with serpents wreathed in

10
their hair like the Gorgons.
Although classical tradition understood the Fury as a symbol of the

impersonal functioning of justice, yet she came to represent men's

hidden fear of women, an image apparently still viable. Psychiatric
Worldview says:

To those men who are aware of contemporary changes it becomes

abundantly clear that there are a number of openly angry women
around. . . . Men and enhance their own anger and
trained to recognize

aggressiveness in a society where rape and revenge are commonplace

view angry women with alarm. Men see women project onto them the
. . .

full extent of their own potential aggressiveness. The spectre of an

angry Fury or Medusa 's head strikes fear in men, which is then often
awkwardly handled because men are not supposed to display fear. A
woman seeking only reasonable social or vocational equity may be
man as being out to get the kind of revenge that his
perceived by a
pride would require had he experienced the narcissistic and practical
wounds that she has sustained.
"
I. Branston, 191. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 122, 126. 3. Lindsay, A.W., 34.
[Link], 159. 5. Malory 2, 179. 6. Graves, W.G., 317. 7. Briffault 2, 548.
8. Shumaker, 130. 9. de Givry, 27. 10. Cavendish, P.E., 123.
II. Psychiatric Worldview, Lederle Laboratories, July/Sept. 1977.

Furrow
World-wide female-genital symbol, often combined with a male
symbol in agrarian religions. Indian scriptures made the Earth-mother

Sita, "Furrow," the wife of Rama, whose name meant "Enjoyment

of Virility" and who was an incarnation of the phallic Krishna. Ancient 1

Egypt celebrated an important annual rite called "the finding of the

2
scepter of flint in the furrow of [the Goddess] Maat." Similarly,
Rome
kept a sexual-symbolic festival devoted to finding "the flints
of
5
Jupiter" in a sacred furrow representing Ceres
or Ops, Mother Earth.
The city of Rome itself was established by plowing a furrow, an act

328
attributed to the legendary Romulus. A pre-Roman ancestral hero Furrow
called Tages was said to be "born from the furrow" as a son of Mother
Earth.
4

The name of the zodiacal sign of the Virgin originally meant

^^^^^
"Furrow." 5 Its principal star, Spica, was known in Babylon as "the

corn-ear of the Goddess Shala." Corn-ear meant the shibboleth dis-

played at the culmination of the rites of Ishtar, Astarte, and Demeter,

all of whom were also the Furrow. Demeter made Iasion or Iasus her

lover "in a thrice-plowed field," giving him the name of Triptolemus,

"Three Plowings," because he entered the Furrow three times. He was
also surnamed Soter, meaning both "Savior" and "Sower."

Seed entering the furrow was almost invariably likened to semen

entering the womb, as shown by numerous pagan savior-gods who
entered their Mother in the form of seed and were reborn as new
vegetation. The Semo
Sancus, whose name meant both
Latin god
"seed" and "semen," mated thus with Ops and died in her embrace, to
6
regenerate himself.
The classic custom of plowing a furrow for magical protection
around a town was perpetuated by country folk all over Europe.
Even in the 20th century, Russian villages were annually "purified" by
the same ceremony, which remained exclusively in the hands of
women. Nine virgins and three old women (representing the Fate
sisters, or Zorya) plowed a furrow around the village at midnight,

calling on the Moon-goddess. Armed with scythes, clubs, and animal

skulls, they struck down and beat any man they happened to
7
encounter while performing this magic.
1. 0'Flaherty, 554; Avalon, 607. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 420. 3. Dumezil, 28.
4. Dumezil, 636. 5. Lindsay, O.A, 81. 6. Bachofen, 214. 7. Lamusse, 287.

329
The Mother goddess,
seated on a throne,
holding several infants.
This earthy tuff-stone
version is more in the
Italian mode than
earlier Greek renditions.
Italy, 400-300 b.c.

gorcon, a "grim face"

mask of Athene or
Medusa, signifying
female wisdom. The
snake headdress and belt
are traditional.
Greek, limestone
pediment of the
Temple of Artemis;
Corfu, ca. 600-580 b.c.

canesha, Hindu elephant

god, the Lord of
Hosts, said to have begot
Buddha on the virgin
Maya. Haihaya, 11th
century.
Gabriel Gabriel
Galatea
The angel who brought God's seed to the virgin Mary. The Bible

says Gabriel "came in unto her," which meant he had sexual inter-
course with her, in King James terminology (Luke 1:28). Gabriel's
name means "divine husband." There seems to have been a hidden
'

reference to the ancient custom, whereby temple virgins were im-

pregnated by certain priests designated "fathers of the god," as in

2
Egypt. See Mary; Virgin Birth.
1. Augstein, 302. 2. Budge, D.N., 169.

var. Ge Gaea
Greek name for Mother Earth, the "Deep-breasted One," called

Oldest of Divinities. Though Olympian gods under Zeus took over

the
her ancient shrines, yet they swore their binding oaths by her name

because they were subject to her law.

Galahad
Son and reincarnation of Lancelot, by Elaine the Lily Maid, who was
also Lancelot's mother Queen Elaine for Lancelot and Galahad were
mystically identical. Queen Elaine's son Galahad was taken to Mei-
delant, the holyLand of Maidens, where the Lady of the Lake brought
him up and changed his name to Lancelot. Afterward he coupled
with the Lily Maid and begot himself as a new Galahad the same

Oedipal idea running through all mythology, even in Christian

father-son identity (see Incest).

As a sacred king, Galahad ruled his land for a term of one year,
then died "suddenly, at the altar," while experiencing a vision of the

Holy Grail, his Mother-symbol. He was carried to heaven by angels. 1

When the monks rewrote his story, Galahad was viewed as a purer
knight than his father-predecessor Lancelot, whose life was marred by I

"the vile sin of lust." Galahad was chosen to realize the Grail quest
because he was the only knight in the whole company of the Round
Table who was still virgin. 2 This Christianized Galahad was said to have j

descended from Joseph of Arimathea; but another author announced

3
through Guinevere that Galahad was a descendant of Jesus himself.
1. Malory 2, 268. 2. Campbell, CM., 550. 3. Malory 2, 171.

Galatea
"Milk-giving Goddess," a title of White Aphrodite of Paphos, where
her high priest Pygmalion "married" her, by keeping her white image id
his bed.
1
The custom formed a basis for the classical myth of

332
Galatea's marble statue brought to life by Aphrodite for her bridegroom. Galileo
rhe story probably arose from a ritual of invocation, to call down the
Goddess's spirit into her sculptured eidolon. ^^^^^^^^^^^
Galatea was another name not only for Aphrodite but also for

Egyptian Hathor the Celestial Cow, and Phoenician Astarte, the

lame milk-giving Mother. Pygmalion was a Hellenized version of her
2
iigh priest Pumiyathon at Byblos.

Celtic tribes from Galatia named after her also worshipped the

hilk-giving Mother as Galata, from whom Gauls and Gaels traced

3
heir descent. Their early-medieval hero Galahad was one of her sacred
lings. He was a Gaulish form of Heracles, who married the Gauls'
Goddess Galata, sometimes symbolized in Britain as Albion,
ncestral

he White Moon, source of the Milky Way. Heracles also was a

plar hero who lived for a year like Galahad in the palace of the
Goddess, at the hub of the spinning wheel of the galaxy (Milky
Way). In this Lydian story the Goddess was called Omphale, the
center," or omphalos. When the year turned around this hub full
lircle, Heracles too was supposed to die the year-god's death in a fiery
4
Iheel.
All the names of Galatea-Galata-Galatia were based on gala,
mother's milk," for the Goddess was supposed to have made the
Lheel of the stars and constellations from her own milk. 5 Therefore the

Moon-goddess often appeared in ancient iconography as the divine

low, horned like the moon.
1. Graves, CM. 1, 212. 2. Frazer, G.B., 387. 3. Graves, G.M. 2, 136.
4. Graves, G.M. 2, 165. 5. Lawson, 13.

Salileo

[he first Christian man to achieve visual confirmation of the true

lotion of heavenly bodies. Before Galileo, all Christendom accepted

le church's view that man and his works stood at the center of the

niverse, on a fixed earth surrounded by "spheres" of sun, moon,

lanets, and stars. This was the biblical view, supported by such
as Albert the Great, Isidore of Seville, St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Dark Age had destroyed or forgotten ancient astronomers'
rlibles
owledge of the solar system. Aristarchus taught about 275 B.C. that

le earth is a revolving globe in orbit around the sun. Eratosthenes

x>ut 250 b.c. calculated the circumference of the globe at 24,662
than 300 miles short of the true figure, 24,902. About
liles, less

40 b.c, Hipparchus calculated the diameter of the moon, and its

istance from the earth, within a few miles of the correct figures. But
1

cording to Christian authorities, this information was pagan and

lerefore heretical and wrong.
Almost two millenia later, Nicholas Copernicus patiently observed
nd calculated his way back to the knowledge that the earth moves

333
Galileo around the sun. After hesitating and re-checking his results for nearly 1

thirty years, Copernicus published his book in 1 543. It was not well
received by Catholics or Protestants. Martin Luther scoffed at it:

"People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the
earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the
moon. . . . This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astrono-
my; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to
2
standstill, and not the earth."

Index of The Roman church investigated Copernicus's theory by consult-

Prohibited Books
ingthe scriptures, and placed his book on the Index of Prohibited
(Index Librorum
Books, where it remained until 1835. The pope announced, "The first
Prohibitorum) The
first official edition proposition, that the sun is the center and does not revolve about the

appeared in 1559, earth, is foolish, absurd, false in theology and heretical, because express-
though ecclesiastical ly contrary to Holy Scripture. The second proposition, that the earth
authorities censored, revolves about the sun and not the center,
is is absurd, false in
condemned, and
philosophy and . . .
opposed to the true faith."
destroyed various
kinds of books from the Copernicus's calculations nevertheless fascinated Giordano Bruno,
earliest centuries of who accepted the heliocentric theory, attacked St. Thomas Aquinas's I
the Christian era. cosmology of the spheres, published an early elucidation of the nebular
Catholics were
hypothesis, and even developed something like a theory of evolution. I
forbidden to read any
He also doubted the reality of witchcraft and asserted that most women
books listed on the
burned at the stake were innocent. He was silenced in the same way: I
Index, which was
regularly updated.
burned on the Campo dei Fiori in 1600.
Observation of this Ten years later, Galileo's little telescope revealed the phases of
prohibition was Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and the moving spots on the sun. Galileo
obligatory up to 1966,
invited clergymen to look through the telescope for themselves, but
when Pope Paul VI
they refused, saying it would imperil their souls because objects like the
suppressed the Index.
moons of Jupiter were illusions of the devil. The Church said there
could be only seven planets, because scripture presented seven archan-

gels,seven churches of Asia, seven golden candlesticks, and other

such allegories. One of the church's main objections at the time to
Galileo's discoveries was that they upset the received knowledge of

the zodiacal system; learned ecclesiastics leaned heavily on the guidance

of astrology.
In 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue, with overwhelming prod
of the Copernican theory. There was a storm of opposition from the |
church, which went on for many years and involved priests, cardinals, I
and two popes. A document was forged and "found" in the church's I

files, to the effect that Galileo had been previously forbidden to teach or

discuss Copernicanism, on pain of punishment by the Inquisition.

Galileo was arrested, threatened with torture, and forced to abjure on I
his knees, vowing to "curse and detest the error and the heresy of the I

movement of the he went on to whisper

earth." According to legend, I
under his breath,
Eppursimuove does move." Pope Paul
"But it

V closed the subject with a solemn statement: "The doctrine of the

double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false,
3
and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture."

334
 The pope forbade interment of Galileo's remains in his family Galileo
tomb, directing that he be buried without ceremony, monument, or
epitaph. His memory was execrated for two centuries, for what Pope
Urban VIII called "so great a scandal to Christendom." Ecclesiastical
censors ordered that a later scientific work calling Galileo "renowned"
must alter the word to "notorious." In 1846, Monsignor Marini was
given the job of publishing the records of Galileo's trial and falsifying
them to the church's advantage. The deception was uncovered by
4
M. L'Epinois twenty years later. M. L'Epinois Roman
Many books were hurried forth under ecclesiastical auspices to Catholic authority on

confute Galileo. Some contained very quaint reasoning, like the Galileo records.

Chiaramonti's:
Scipio Chiaramonti
Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or Conservative
muscles, therefore it does not move. It is who make Saturn,
angels theologian who
Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round. Ifthe earth revolves, it must also have an dedicated his work
angel in the center to set it in motion; but only devils live there; it confuting Galileo to
would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the earth. 5 Cardinal Barberini.

The naive theology of the time often declared that if the earth

moved, a stonedropped from a height would fall some way behind the
spot directly below. Theology was shackled to the dictum of St.
Augustine: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of the
Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the
human mind." 6 Voetius in 17th-century Utrecht repeated the same
dictum: "Not a word is contained in the Holy Scriptures which is not
7
in the strictest sense inspired, the very punctuation not excepted."
Even in the late 1 9th century, churchmen were still beating the

dead horse of biblical cosmology. A president of the Lutheran

Teachers' Seminary published a book refuting Copernicus, Galileo,

Kepler, Newton, and all subsequent astronomers:

The entire Holy Scripture settles the question that the earth is the

principal body of the universe, that it and that sun and

stands fixed,
moon serve only to light it. . . . God never lies, never makes a mistake; ou
ofhis mouth comes only truth when he speaks of the structure of the
8
universe, of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

In 1885 the Catholic scholar St. George Mivart realized that

God had indeed lied about the structure of the universe, and hypothe-
that God had deliberately led his popes and cardinals into error
sized
order to teach them that astronomy lay outside their jurisdiction. This
jin
9
was a
[became the accepted Catholic view
of the Galileo fiasco. It

that did irreparable damage to the doctrine of papal infallibility, and

(view
lopened the way to future doubts about God's veracity. If he deceived
Ihischosen envoys in one matter, who could be sure he didn't deceive

Ithem in others?
The battle with Galileo set the pattern for three centuries of

[ecclesiastical
condemnation of each new discovery in an Age of

knowledge was found be

Enlightenment when almost all scientific to

335
Ganesha contrary to Holy Writ. Linnaeus's observations of the sexual system
Ganges of plants were banned. The theological faculty of the Sorbonne forced

^^^^^^^^^am Buffon to publish a recantation of his geological discoveries "which

may becontrary to the narrative of Moses." Bernouilli was forced to
expunge from his works the proof that the living body constantly
changes its parts, because this contradicted the church's doctrine of the
resurrection of the flesh. The Egyptologist Sir J. G. Wilkinson had to

"modify" ancient Egyptian chronology because it interfered with the

biblical flood myth. Dr. Franz Gall was forbidden to study the struc-

ture of the human brain on the ground that it was "blasphemous." 10

Nearly every important scientific book of these three centuries
appeared on the Index of Prohibited Books, "infallibly" declared false
because it contradicted the Bible. The biologist Huxley said he encoun-
tered in every path of natural science a barrier reading: "No
thoroughfare. Moses."
11
In 1832, Pope Gregory XVI's encyclical
Mirari vos declared war on (1) all forms of society founded on liberty
of conscience; (2) liberty of the press, "which cannot be sufficiently
execrated and condemned, for by its means all evil doctrines are
12
propagated"; and (3) liberty of scientific research. Stanton says, "All
through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned,
tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict
with a petty text of Scripture."
13
TheGalileo case was the very

beginning of a long retreat.

I. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 15. 2. White 1, 126. 3. White 1, 138.
4. White 1, 162-63. 5. White 1, 145. 6. H. Smith, 297. 7. White 2, 308.
8. White 1,151. 9. White 1, 165-66. 10. Bromberg, 77; White 1, 256.
II. White 2, 312. [Link],452. 13. Stanton, 9.

Ganesha
"Lord of Hosts," Hindu elephant god who begot Buddha on the
Maya. At Elephantine in Egypt he appeared as a form of
1

virgin
Yahweh, consort of the Goddess Anath, or "the Virgin Zion." He
also reappeared in the Bible as Behemoth, who later became a demon.

(See Elephant.)
1. Campbell, Or.M., 307.

Ganges
River of the Goddess Ganga, daughter of the Mountain-mother
Nanda Devi (Blessed Goddess), one of the Himalayas. Ganga's waters
of praise to her
represented baptism and redemption. Shiva's hymn
said:"Heaps of sin, accumulated by a sinner during millions of births,
are destroyed by the mere contact of a wind charged with her vapor.
... As fire consumes fuel, so this stream consumes the sins of the

wicked. Sages mount the staired terrace of the Ganges; on it

they

336
 transcend the high heaven of Brahma himself: free from
danger, riding Ganymede
they go to Shiva's abode. Sinners who expire near
celestial chariots,
Gawain
the water of the
Shiva's attendants
Ganges
and dwell
are released from
at his side.
all their sins: they

They become
become
identical with
^^"^^"
him in shape; they never die not even on the day of the total
dissolution of the universe." '
No wonder millions come from all over
India to bathe in Ganga's magic waters.
[Link], 110.

Ganymede
"Rejoicing in virility," the boy-lover given to Father Zeus by Hellen-
icwriters anxious to create a divine prototype for their cult of

homosexuality. Ganymede was carried to heaven on an eagle's back

to slake Zeus's lust. He became Cupbearer to the Gods, replacing Hebe
who was the virgin aspect of Mother Hera. 1
Thus the dispenser of

immortality was made male instead of female.

1. Graves, CM. 1,116-17.

Garlic

Throughout the Christian era, garlic was considered a protection

against vampires and werewolves, as efficacious as a crucifix if not more
so. The source of this belief might be found in pagan tradition, since

blood-drinking revenants were simply diabolized versions of pagans who

believed they could attain immortality by drinking the blood of gods
other than Christ. Garlic and garlic-eaters were taboo in Greco-Roman

temples of the Mother of the Gods. Probably the Goddess's dislike of

garlic was based on its unsuitability for group contact and sexual
worship, which required sweet-smelling breath.

Gautama
Hindu sage who castrated the god Indra and took his wife from him,

Oedipal myth recounted in the Ramayana. Gautama was

1
in a primitive

one of the many names of Buddha, of whom the archaic sage was
one emanation.
l.O'Flaherty, 94-95.

Gawain var. Gavin

Celtic name of the sun god. While he was fighting Lancelot,

Gawain's strength increased as the morning approached noon, but after

337
Gehenna the sun began to decline from the zenith Gawain's strength waned.
Genevieve, Saint He was conquered just before sunset.
^^m___^^^^^ Another battle story made Gawain symbolize the new sun at the

turning of the year. He beheaded the Green Knight (old year) at the
festival of the winter solstice, and had to submit to a similar fate himself

at the following New Year. 1

Along with his three brothers Gaheris, Gareth, and Agravine,

Gawain represented the Celtic sacred year with its four quarters. All
four were born of the Triple Goddess under the name of Margawse,
Arthur's sister-wife, who also gave birth to Mordred, Arthur's son-
nephew, destined to defeat and replace him. (See Arthur.)
1. Loomis, 324-42.

Gehenna
Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, once the site of a fire-altar
called Tophet, where sacrifices were made to the Tyrian god Moloch,

Molech, or Melek, "the King," worshipped by Solomon

(1 Kings 11:7).
After the Jews gave up passing their firstborn children "through
the fire to Molech" (Leviticus 18:21), the shrine was abandoned.
The valley became a dump where rubbish, including corpses of crimi-
nals and other outcasts, was burned. Thus the stench and
1
fire

associated with Gehenna eventually made its name a synonym for hell.

The Jews elaborated the basic seven-layered Babylonian under-

world into a mystic Gehenna sixty times as big as the world, where
each "palace" had 6,000 houses, and each house had 6,000 vessels of
fire and Prince of Gehenna was Arsiel, copied from the
gall.

Babylonian netherworld god Aciel, "Black Sun," negative aspect of the

sun god. 2 In Gehenna's central pit lived the serpent-angel Apollyon,
another name for the same negative aspect of the sun god Apollo
(Revelation 9:11).
1. Cavendish, P.E., 146. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 275.

Genevieve, Saint
"Generator of Life," a canonized Gallic Diana, patron of Paris. In
her churchat Andernach she was a "queen" who lived in a sacred cave

and bore a holy child. She could take the form of a white hind, like
the Goddess. One King met her while he was hunting,
Siegfried
married her, and became her Lord of the Hunt. 1

The Frankish king Clovis had himself buried in the shrine of

"St. Genevieve," which Gregory of Tours insisted on calling by its
newer name, the Church of the Holy Apostles Saints Peter and Paul;
but in Gregory's time it was still remembered as the temple of the

338
 Goddess. 2 Gregory's history, written over a century later and full of
Genius
legendary material, is the only extant source of information about Clovis George, Saint
or Genevieve.
St. Genevieve's runic emblem was a pentacle raised above a cross:
a strong hint of paganism. 3 The people of Paris still commemorate
the occasion in 1 129 when her holy relics allegedly halted an epidemic
4
in the city.

1. Guerber, L.R., 149-51. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Clovis." 3. Brewster, 52.

4. Attwater, 147.

Genius
"Begetter," a Roman word for a spirit of paternal ancestry, cognate
with Arabic djinni or genie. Each Roman man had his
personal genius
as a guardian angel or familiar; each woman had a
corresponding
female spirit called a juno. In the time of the empire, the word
1

genius
came to be applied to both sexes. Official prayers were addressed to
the "Genius of Rome, whether masculine or feminine, whether
god or
2
goddess."
The meaning of genius changed again in the Middle Ages, when it

was virtually synonymous with "spirit." One could speak of a genius

loci, spirit of a place; or an "evil genius," a demon. The modern
meaning, an exceptionally intelligent or inspired person, was of late
origin. In 1875 a.d., James Hinton defined genius as "the woman in
man." 3 In this sense a genius was very similar to a Muse or a Shakti.
1. Rose, 193. 2. Dumezil, 39. 3. Pearsall, W.B., 490

George, Saint
Fictitious patron saint of England. St. George's Day was known to
the Romans as the Feast of Pales, a fertility festival. Medieval custom
honored St. George on Easter Monday, the Moon-day following the
Sun-day of the Christian hero. Folklore named the pagan savior Green
George, a spirit of spring. His image was common in old church
1

carvings, a human head surrounded by leaves or looking out of a tree

trunk. Some called him the witches' god, "a confused idea of

something between a and a man," or "the

tree devil in the shape of a
trunk of a tree . . . with some form of a human face." 2
St. George the Dragon-slayer apparently evolved from a mythic

meld of Green George with an Arian bishop of Alexandria who

opposed St. Athanasius, and put to death an orthodox Master of the
Mint named Dracontius, "Dragon." ?
St. George's emblem was a vesica piscis, a prime fertility symbol
because it
represented the Goddess's yoni; but Christian authorities
preferred to interpret it as a "shield." Still, George was so shamelessly
involved in fertility rites that the church discredited him and began

339
Ghora calling him "the imaginary saint." An old English ballad said: "Some
Giants say there was no George; some, that there no Dragon was; pray God,
^mmmmmmm^^^^m there was at least a maid." 4
1. Frazer, G.B., 145-46. 2. Knight, D.W.P., 221, 229.
3. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 269. 4. Brewster, 209-10.

Ghora
"Horrible," the third of Vishnu's three boar-children destined for
"energy" (blood) might nourish and uphold the world.
sacrifice so their

Their names probably were based on archaic titles of the Triple

Goddess; the first two meant "Well-Rounded One," and "Golden

One." Ghora personified a primal taboo, as did the Greek Gorgon

who was also "Horrible." Ghora was destructive, therefore sacrificed
with his siblings "for the sake of the three universes," for these boar-
children were capable of destroying even the gods in the highest
1
heaven.
l.O'Flaherty, 193-96.

Ghost
A cognate of "guest," both words rooted in Germanic Geist, original-

ly a spirit of a dead ancestor invited to tribal feasts

on such occasions as

Samhain (Halloween) and other solemn ceremonies. Many Europe-

an peoples preserved the heads or skulls of ancestors, which were set up,
painted, and decorated, in a prominent position at gatherings of the
clan, and were consulted for oracles after being offered their portion of
the collation. Hence the "Death's-head at the feast." During later

Christian times the custom was discouraged, for the church's doctrine of
resurrection of the flesh forbade burial of bodies without heads.

Nevertheless, the visiting ghost was an ineradicable belief. Ghosts were

supposed to haunt all the scenes of their former lives, especially if
they died violently or unhappily, or were buried in unconsecrated
ground, or had possessed evil spirits. The earlier, more benevolent
type of family ghost
is still
suggested by the identical pronunciation of
"ghost" and "guest" in northern England. The anger of ghosts was
1

most feared by people who refused to honor them as guests.

[Link].27.

Giants

Appearing in every mythology as a primal Elder Race, giants

were obvious projections of every child's earliest perceptions of the adult

world. Like grownups seen through the eye of the toddler, giants

340
Itended to be fearsome, sometimes bloodthirsty but sometimes benevo- Giants
Blent; possessors of an arcane ancient wisdom; and adepts of magic.

According to the Bible, giants were like all Savior-figures up to and ^^^^^^^^^^^
of divine fathers and human mothers
(including Jesus: offspring
(Genesis 6:4). Semitic tradition held that all the biblical patriarchs were
of enormous size. Abraham was seventy times as big as a modern
man. Philo maintained that Adam was a giant. 1
Unlettered Arabs still

say the megalithic structures being studied by archeologists were not

so hard for the ancient people to build, because those people were
2
giants.

Long before the Bible was written, Hindus were saying the same
of the people of the Golden Age, in the childhood stage of humanity.
Like parent figures, the earliest races were gigantic, sinless, wise, and

long-lived. They died only when they wished to. They could live a
thousand years because, in their age, life was "centered in the blood"
3
i.e., the immortal blood of the Goddess. (See Menstrual Blood.)
That this life-giving blood was a feminine effluent is suggested by the

story of Thor's journey to Giant-land to learn the secrets of the

giants' ancient magic; he could not find the right way until he crossed a
riverof the giantesses' menstrual blood. 4 In Greece, the similar river

leading to the land of "ancestors" was the Styx.

Greeks called the giants Titans, offspring of Mother Earth and
Father Sky (Uranus). The heavenly Father was jealous of his chil-
dren and tried to smother them by clinging too closely to Mother Earth
to let them breathe air. Earth gave her son Cronus the moon-sickle

and bade him castrate and kill his Father. Later, Cronus married Rhea
the Titaness another incarnation of the same Mother Earth and
feared the same Oedipal fate from the other end. To preserve his own
life, he swallowed his children. The mother saved one of them, Zeus,
who did indeed attack his father and marry the same Mother Earth
under a variety of her names Hera, Olympia, Rhea, Gaea, or
Danae. The Oedipal theme of the father-son rivals almost always
5
appears in connection with the giant-myths.
Greeks assigned to the Titans all the crude religious rites of their

ancestors, such as cannibalistic sacraments and dismemberment of

divine victims like Dionysus or Zagreus. As archaic earth-deities, the

Titans battled the newer Olympian gods in a myth known as the

Giants' Revolt, paralleled and Christian stories of the

by Persian, Jewish,
War in Heaven. 6 of the mythic reasons given for the war was
One
Zeus's punishment of the Titans for eating Dionysus's flesh; but Zeus,

inconsistently, himself devoured Dionysus's

heart.

Legends ofgiant ancestors were used by Christians to defend the

fraudulent miracle-working bones of theHoly Innocents supposedly
slaughtered by King Herod. was When
observed that these profitable
it

bones were too large to have come from children less than two years
of age, churchmen argued that the human frame was bigger in Herod's
8
time, because it was closer to the age of giants.

The Irish said giant people still lived in "the chambered under-

341
^
Giles, Saint

Gilgamesh

^^^^^_
grounds of Tara where dwell the fourth race of gods who settled
Ireland." They were the Tuatha De Danann, people of the Goddess
9
Dana, builders of stone temples. Their Goddess passed
eval folklore as Titania, the Fairy

Titaness and the Tuatha De

10
Queen. Curiously, though she was
Danann were giants, they shrank as
into medi-

popular belief in their powers waned before the encroachment of the

new religion. Eventually they became fairies or elves, not giants but
11
"littlepeople," the size of children or even smaller. This reduction in
their size was surely related to a reduction in awesomeness. Signifi-

cantly, their religious myths became "fairy tales" for children, and many
of their liturgies and sacred songs reappeared in the guise of nursery

rhymes.
1. Tennant, 134. 2. Cavendish, P.E., 128. 3. Mahanirvanatantra, pp. xlvii-xlviii.

4. Turville-Petre, 79. 5. Cavendish, P.E., 124-25. 6. Graves, CM. 1, 1 19, 131.

7. Campbell, P.M., 101. 8. de Voragine, 66. 9. Keightley, 446.
10. Graves, W.G, 476. 1 1 .
Cavendish, P.E., 238.

Giles, Saint
Druidic deity adopted into the Christian canon. His legend originated
atNimes, named after the Dianic moon-grave or nemeton. (See
Grove, Sacred.) He was nurtured in a cave by a magic hind, the
Goddess in deer shape. He was identified with the Celtic hero Oisin,
whose mother was a deer. 1
Like most Celtic Lords of the Hunt, he
was slain by arrows. Enacting the hero's Liebestod, as he died he

clasped the same magic hind in his arms.

Some said St. Giles was a Greek, born in Athens, possibly to
account for connection with such deer-gods as Actaeon, whose
his
2
cult was dedicated to the same Diana. Another such hero was Tele-

phus, king of Mysia. In infancy he was nursed by a doe and

discovered by shepherds. An oracle sent him to Mysia where he married
3
the queen, his own mother Auge, Oedipal [Link] typically

Like the smith-priests of the archaic Diana, St. Giles was lame, and
so became the patron saint of cripples. Because of his enormous

popularity, a fictitious "Life" was composed for him in the 10th

century. More than 1 50 churches were dedicated to him, including

4
St. Giles Cripplegate in London and the high kirk in Edinburgh. Yet
his legend had almost Christian about it, and his sainthood
nothing
was based on forgery.
1. Turville-Petre, 204. 2. Brewster, 391. 3. Rank, 25. 4. Attwater, 155.

Gilgamesh
Hero of a Sumero-Babylonian epic recounting man's vain search for

the immortality guarded by the jealous gods. The principal extant text
came from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 7th century B.C.;
but older fragments reveal the story in Babylon at a much earlier date,
the beginning of the second millenium B.C. 1

342
 Fearful of death, Gilgamesh journeyed in search of
Uta-Napishtim Glory-of-Elves
(Noah), the flood hero who was the only immortal man, to learn his Gnosticism
secret. After many adventures Gilgamesh found the patriarch, who ^^^^^^^^^^^
showed him a magic "rose" of eternal life. Gilgamesh took the
plant,
but it was stolen from him by a serpent. Thus the serpent became the
only immortal creature, capable of shedding its skin and becoming
periodically reborn without any sojourn in the land of death.
On his journey, Gilgamesh met the Goddess disguised as an
innkeeper that is, the dispenser of the Wine of Immortality to the
I
gods. She was called Siduri Sabitu, the Wine-Bearer, later adopted
by
Sufi philosophers as the Goddess Saki, who poured for each man the
2
cup of "reality revealed." In Greek, she was Oenothea, "Wine-
3
goddess."
She revealed reality to Gilgamesh by advising him to abandon the
search for immortality, because the cruel gods decreed that all human

Ibeings must die. She told Gilgamesh to return home, to take pleasure in
the good things of life while he could: to bathe and dress himself, eat
and drink, play with his children, make love to his wife, and "make
a festival." 4
Jevery day
Siduri's live-for-today philosophy was copied into the ninth chapter

of Ecclesiastes, a curiously pagan passage wherein the "word of God"

Idenies the after-life with all its rewards or punishments, and the Judeo-
IChristian deity dispenses no justice.
1. Larousse, 66. 2. Epic of Gilgamesh, 38. 3. Wedeck, 207. 4. Lamusse, 72.

Glory-of-Elves
Norse name for the Sun Goddess, who would give birth to a

to rule the new universe after doomsday. She was

1

daughter sun
probably modeled on the Aryan Sun Goddess Aditi, whose offspring
2
would be "revealed" at doomsday.
1. Sturluson, 92. 2. O'Flaherty, 339.

Gnosticism
"Knowledge." Gnosticism was a general term for mystery cults of the
early Christian era and for derivative heresies of the medieval period.
Their "knowledge" meant secrets of the after-life, spells and words of

power required for advantageous placement in heaven, and revelations

of the true nature of God. Leading Gnostic sects focused on the
Great Mother and her Dying God e.g., Eleusinian, Orphic, and
Osirian mysteries. Angus says Gnosticism was "for over half a
millenium the approach to religion for thoughtful minds."
'

meditation and sexual rites figured in western Gnosti-

Tantric-style
cism, including sects that were fundamentally Christian. As the
ultimate aim of Tantric yoga was to enter the primal realm of Silence, a

343
Gnosticism feminine power enfolding the original Creative Word, the Logos, so
Gnostic Christians sought communion with the Goddess Sige (Silence)
2
who dwelt at the beginning of all She gave birth to Sophia
things.

(Wisdom, or Knowledge), the Gnostic Great Mother, both spouse and

mother of God.
Some Gnostics adopted the Oriental idea of the world soul,
identified with Sophia, sometimes in androgynous communion with
Origen (Origenes God. This was the view of the church father Origen, who was revered
Adamantius) Christian in his time but three centuries later excommunicated for holding
father, ca. 185-254 heretical beliefs.
3
He said, "As our body while consisting of human
a.d.,an Egyptian who
wrote in Greek,
members yet held together by one soul, so the universe is to be
is

thought of as an immense living being which is held together by one

exerting a powerful
influence on the early soul." 4 The trouble with the world soul from the Christian point of
Greek church. At first
view was that it
mingled the blessed with the damned in one divine
he was accounted a
spirit, preventing the separation of sheep and goats that was thought
saint, but three
centuries after his necessary at doomsday.
death he was declared The orthodox church especially objected to Gnostic feminine
a heretic because of imagery. Itwas impossible to see God deserving the Great Mother's
Gnostic elements
punishment, as the Gnostics said he did. Followers of St. Paul de-
found in his writings.
nounced the Gnostics as firstborn of Satan, ravening wolves,
demoniacs, atheists, robbers, pirates, beasts in human shape, and dealers
in deadly poison typical of the insults Christian traded with Chris-
5
tian in those times.

From the 4th to the 8th centuries, the church incessantly persecut
ed Gnostic minorities. Nevertheless, "Secret fraternities perpetuated
Tertullian (Quintus the doctrines of Gnosticism and the illuminism of the Pagan religions
6
Septimius Florens Ter- for many centuries after their supposed disappearance." Gnostic cult
tullianus) Influential
objects have been found throughout Sicily, Spain, and southern France,
early Christian writer
especially the coffrets gnostiques or sacred boxes, like Greek cistae or
and father of the
7
church, ca. 155-220 Semitic "arks," dating from the early Middle Ages.
a.d., born in Car- Church fathers were particularly offended by the Gnostics' pro- i

thage of pagan parents. pensity to admit women to ecclesiastical rank: "All initiates, men and
women alike . . .
might be elected to serve as priest, bishop, or prophet"
Irenaeus Doctor, Tertullian reported with horror that Gnostic women "teach, they
saint, and father of the
engage in discussion; they exorcise; they cure." They even baptized,
church, said to have
showing that they had episcopal status. "They all have access equally,
lived in the 2nd century
a.d. as bishop of they listen equally, they pray equally even pagans, if any happen to
8
Lyons. His history is come. .They
. . also share the kiss of peace with all who come."
obscure, largely Some Gnostic groups went so far as to claim the true revelation ofi
based on (possibly
esoteric Christianity came through a woman, the "apostle to the
fraudulent) assertions
of Eusebius, who apostles," Mary Magdalene, Jesus's beloved. They prayed to a two- *

claimed to have sexed deity addressed as Father and Mother, identified with Jesus and j

letters from Irenaeus, Mary. Irenaeus anathematized such groups, insisting they "repent" anoj
but none of these submit themselves to him, so he could punish them with "advance
were preserved. The would save their souls.
9
discipline" that
story of Irenaeus's
Gnostic principles of enlightenment were incorporated into bardic
martyrdom has been
proved false. romance, mystery plays, and fairy tales early in the medieval period.
Such sources maintained secrets of the heretical religions as allegories i

344
Ibolic drama. Manichean Gnostics founded their own churches, Gnosticism
Separating themselves from Rome which they regarded as hopelessly
They claimed the God of the Roman church was really __^^^_^^^_
[materialistic.
la devilish demiurge who made the material world to entrap human souls
m ^
^^m m^^ m m^
10
Bin evil. See Manicheans.
Gnostic traditions evolved the Catharan
Christianity of southern
and Italy, which stimulated the bloody
prance Albigensian crusade
Crusades). Catharan churches claimed Jesus transmitted to them a
pee
Gnostic doctrine that overrode the dogmas of the Roman
[secret
the "inner man" would
jchurch. Only
rise to heaven, so the
dogma of
ihe resurrection of the flesh was a Baptism was useless. Marriage
lie.

kvas unimportant. No one needed to be celibate except the "perfected"

who renounced the life of the senses as eastern yogis did. The
[ones,
accused the Cathari of calling the Roman church names,
[inquisition
buch as Mother of Fornication, Babylon the Great Whore, the
Devil's Basilica, and Satan's Synagogue.
The story of John the weaver of Toulouse shows opposition
between the Roman church and Catharan principles of ritual purity.
Kccused of following the Gnostic heresy, John proclaimed that he lied,
ate meat, and enjoyed sex with his wife; therefore he
pwore, proved
nimself a faithful Christian and no Catharan heretic. 11
Other strands of Gnosticism ran through astrology, alchemy,
Hermetic magic, and occultism. Insofar as the sought-after knowl-
edge was the natural science that alchemists and sorcerers were
beginning to discover (or rediscover), the church opposed it as
destructive to the faith. St. Augustine had firmly censured "the vain and
curious desire of investigation, known as knowledge and science."
fret Hermes Trismegistus, the half-acknowledged god of medieval
alchemists and occultists, had been praised by Lactantius as the

of "almost the whole verity." Women were involved, too, in

jevealer
:he pursuit of natural science. Women were closely associated with

he origins of alchemical/mystical gnosis: Theosebia, Mary the Jewess,

me who called herself Cleopatra, another who called herself Isis. 12
Rediscovery of pagan writings had brought Isis back into an
nfluential, if secret, prominence. The Hellenistic world identified
13
'Isis of the Myriad Names" with every other female divinity. Medi-
eval occultists in turn found her glorified in the writings of Plutarch
ind identified her with the World Soul, or Sophia. She appeared in
lumerous occult books as the Naked Goddess crowned with stars,

ler dominion over land and sea symbolized by her right foot on the
;arth, her left foot in water. Her vulva was marked by a precisely

X)sitioned crescent moon, which a modern male scholar, with the

airiously typical vague perception of female genitalia, chose to

lescribe as covering her "womb." H

On the whole it was a general rule that wherever the orthodox

lurches found any hint of female divinity or authority, there they at
Mice found heresy. Persecution of various kinds of Gnostics proved the
le over and over. Both natural science and feminine spirituality

345
Goddess came to birth only with great difficulty, against every obstacle that

western patriarchism could devise to throw against them. The latter

^^^hbmi^^^^ *i even now not >' et >^y hrn. m

1. Angus, Campbell, M.T.L.B., 112. 3. Bardo Thodol, 234. 4. Shirley, 46.
vii. 2.

5. Legge 2, 10. 6. Waite, O.S., 195. 7. Jung & von Franz, 137. 8. Pagels, 42.
9. Pagels, 46, 49. 10. Legge 2, 239. [Link],71,77. [Link],80-81,8
13. Boulding, 252. 14. Seligmann, 45.

Goddess
Few words are so revealing of western sexual prejudice as the word
Goddess, word God. Modern connotations vastly
in contrast to the

differ from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-

fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler

of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love,

Birth, Death, etc.

Male writers through the centuries broke the Goddess figure down,'
intoinnumerable "goddesses," using different titles or names she
received from different peoples at different times. If such a system had
been applied to the usual concept of God, there would now be a
multitude of separate "gods" with names like Almighty, Yahweh, Lord,

Holy Ghost, Sun of Righteousness, Christ, Creator, Lawgiver, Jeho-

vah, Providence, Allah, Savior,Redeemer, Paraclete, Heavenly Father,
and so on, ad infinitum, each one assigned a particular function in the j

world pantheon. During the Middle Ages, most of the old names and i

of male deities were amalgamated as "secret names" of the one

titles

God, while the names and titles of the Goddess were ever more
minutely classified, and some were even masculinized, humanized,
or diabolized. Yet such classification tends to disintegrate under deeper

study that reveals the same archetypal characteristics in nearly all the
"goddesses."
Probing ancient views of the Goddess is instructive. It shows a
female figure almost always more powerful than the male. Not only is
\

she his Mother, the author of his being; she is also the deity who infuses
all creation with the vital blood of life. Gods prosper only when they

partake of her wisdom or adopt her powers, until they commit

the

ultimate hubris, symbolic matricide, by setting up an all-masculine

theology. The strength of the Goddess was harnessed to support new
male religions as the strength of women's nurturing, caretaking
instinct was harnessed to a patriarchal marriage system supporting men.
Even today, scholars tend to call all ancient deities "gods" when they
include both male and female; and sometimes the oracular utterances of:
l
the Goddess are said to emanate from a "god."

Perhaps one should take more seriously the ancients' often-

repeated opinion that their Goddess had a thousand names. Every
female divinity in the present Encyclopedia may be correctly regarded
as only another aspect of the core concept of a female Supreme

Being. No modern temples perpetuate this core concept. Men long

346
 down the Goddess's shrines, as Christian Gospels com-
since tore Godiva, Lady
manded them to do (Acts 19:27). Yet even in a society that trivialized
and vilified it, the core concept lives on. Some people believe that a ^^^^^^^^^^^
new feminine theology will emerge from the core concept during the
present century.
[Link].A.N.E. 1,285; 2, 185.

Godiva, Lady
The name of Lady Godiva is simply a combination of three different
ways of saying "Goddess." As Mother Goda, or Gerd, she was the same
as Freya, consort of Godan (Wotan), father of "Gods"(Goths); the

old Teutonic d and th were interchangeable. Diva was a universal 1

Indo-European word for "Goddess" derived from Sanskrit devi.

Tantric scriptures still
speak of a "mother of creation" and a "holy
female river" Godavari, personifying the Western Continent, Apara-
Godaniya, a land of cattle and of rough barbarians who lived on meat
2
apparently the Goths.
The legend of Lady Godiva's naked ride through Coventry
evolved from the Goddess's May-Eve procession, which the clergy
first tried to suppress by ordering the people to stay indoors and refrain
from watching it. In Southam there were two Ladies, white and

black, representing the Virgin and Crone, summer and winter, Love
and Death. 3 The black Goddess appeared with a bull-masked dancer
known as Old Brazen Face: the solar bull mated to the Moon-cow. 4
The "fine lady" on the white horse in the Ride A Cock-Horse
nursery rhyme was the Naked Goddess of the annual pageant. Some
5

6
Iversions of the rhyme called her the "old woman."

Peeping Tom dared to catch a glimpse of her nakedness and was

it, according to the story.
blind for This recalls other men
[stricken
blinded for looking on the Goddess's nakedness, like Teiresias of
iThebes. Such divine punishment, with its accompanying gift of

Igodlike insight, represented a modification of older Gothic customs

[whereby the Naked Goddess could be seen only by "men doomed to

7
die," such as Teiresias's less fortunate forerunner, Actaeon. Blindness
Iwas a common enough result of peeping at forbidden sacred myster-

lies. King Philip of Macedon was blinded for peeping through a crack to
the serpent-god impregnating the queen with the seed of Alexan-
pee
der the Great. 8 Perhaps Godiva's "Tom" was intended to be Thomas
Rhymer, another seer like Teiresias who spent seven years serving
the Goddess.

Lady Godiva's annual was suppressed by Puritans, but after

ride

the fall Commonwealth in 1678 she appeared again,

of the Puritan
naked as before on her white horse. So she remained up to 1826, when
9
new wave of puritanism finally dictated that she must be clothed.
The original purpose of her ride, to renew her virginity, consum-
mate the sacred marriage, and thus provide the blessings of fertility

347
Cog for the coming year, was at last forgotten. An improbable fable was
Golden Rule made up, saying a human Lady of Coventry rode naked alone, only

^^^^^^^^^^^m because her Lord insisted on it. This is all most people now know of the
history of Godiva, the Gothic Goddess.
1 Turville-Petre, 72, 177. 2. Mahanirvanatantra, 67; Tatz
.
Kent, 85. &
3. Graves, W.G., 451. 4. Spence, 111. 5. Knight, D.W.P., 170. 6. Hazlitt, 25.
7. Tacitus, 728. 8. Gifford, 141. 9. Gifford, 142.

Gog
See Magog.

Golden Calf
Horus, the bull-calf representing Osiris reborn from his mother Isis-

Hathor, who appeared

her processions as a golden cow. Israelites in
in

exile considered a Horus-calf so necessary that they permitted Aaron

to melt down their gold jewelry to make one. Aaron presented the
finished calf as the god who brought the people safely out of the land
of Egypt (Exodus 32:4). The sexual worship of Horus was maintained
also. The Israelites made offerings to him, sat down to a feast, then

"rose up to play" (Exodus 32:6). The word here translated "play" really
meant "copulate." '

1. Knight, D.W.P., 62.

Golden Rule
What has been called the essence of Christian teaching was not
Christian at all but a precept common to all the ancient world,

ultimately based on the Tantric law of karma. The Tantric Sadhaka

or Sadhu (yogi) was told to "do good to other beings as if they were his
own self." '
Tantric holy men reached the Middle East at an early
date, and may have been the "Sadducees" mentioned in the New
Testament. TheBuddhist version of the precept was "What ye sow,
that shall ye reap," which was copied into Christian scriptures (Galatians
2
6:7) some 500 years later.
Long before the Bible, Akkadian maxims enjoined the faithful:

"Do not return your adversary; requite with kindness the one
evil to

who does evil to you ... be friendly to your enemy." 3 In the Egyptian
Middle Kingdom, the Golden Rule was a proverb sacred to Maat, the
Mother of Justice; "Do the other good, that he may do good to you." 4
Among the Greeks, the same karmic law became the law of the
Goddess Dike, ruler of Fate, who said, "He who does wrong to another,

does wrong to himself." 5 Jewish writers adopted the principle and

attributed it to the injunctions of Hillel: "Do not unto others what thou

348
 wouldst not they should do unto you, this is the whole of the Law." 6 Goose
Patriarchal writers naturally attributed the Rule to male heroes, but
Gorgon
the older sources nearly always presented
1. Avaloii, 93. 2. Bardo Thodol, 236. 3.
it as the law of the Goddess.
^^____^__
Pritchard, A.N.E.2, 146
4. Erman, 121. 5. Lindsay, A.W., 44. 6. Reinach, 217.

Goose
Mother Goose originated in ancient Egypt, where she was Mother
Hathor, incarnate in the Nile Goose. She laid the Golden
Egg of the
sun, another way of saying she gave birth to Ra. His solar disc was
sometimes called the Goose-egg. Some Egyptian 1

writings called the

goose Creatress of the World because she produced the whole
universe in a primordial World Egg. 2
The fairy tale of Jack who
climbed the beanstalk to find the goose
that laid the
golden egg, dated back to pre-dynastic shamans who
climbed the Heavenly Vine, or Ladder of Set, to the celestial realm of
the solar deity, invoked in prayers as "the
Egg of the Goose
appearing from out of the sycamore."
3

Like Hathor, Mother Goose was the godmother of all children. In

her pictures she always wore the traditional garb of the witch-
midwife: black cloak, pointed hat like the Egyptian crown, and
magic
wand.
1. de Lys, 27. 2. Neumann, CM., 217. 3. Budge, E.M., 132.

iorgon
'rophylactic mask signifying Female Wisdom: a face of Athene or
ledusa surrounded by snake-locks. Gorgo, Gorgon, or Gorgopis,
"Grim Face," was the title of Athene as a death goddess. Athenians 1

tried to explain the Gorgon face on Athene's aegis with the myth that
Perseus cut off Medusa's head and brought it home to his own
Goddess. But this was a late myth designed to conceal Athene's roots in
Libya, where she was herself called Medusa, or Metis.
Like other versions of the archaic Goddess, the Gorgons were a

mythology. Their names were Medusa, Stheino,

trinity in classical
and Euryale: Wisdom, Strength, and Universality. Hellenic writers
pretended they were monsters, but these were not the names of
monsters. They were titles of the triadic Moon Mother. Orphic mystics
continued to call moon "The Gorgon's Head." 2
the
The story that the Gorgon's look could turn men to stone dated
from the use of the Gorgon-face to enforce taboos on secret Myster-
ies of the Goddess,
guarded by stone pillars formerly erected in honor of
her deceased lovers. See Athene; Medusa.
1. Bachofen, 168. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 129.

349
Gossip Gossip
Grace
Archaic word for a woman, especially one past middle age. The
original word was godsib, "one related to the gods," i.e., a god-mother.
In pre-Christian times, elder women were considered divine because
they retained their "wise blood" after menopause. (See Menstrual
Blood.)
In Christian times, "gossip" came to mean any godmother; e.g.

Queen Elizabeth I was the gossip at the baptism of her godson James
VI of Scotland. 1

A group of elder women were called "gossips" as a term of respect

the peasant habit of calling any older woman "mother"
at first, after

or "grandmother." The modern meaning of "gossip" arose from the

conversation of "gossips," or old wives' tales.

1. Funk, 256.

Gotterdammerung
"Going-into-the-Shadow-of-the-Gods," often erroneously called
Twilight of the Gods: the Teutonic doomsday, when all the old gods
would be destroyed and reabsorbed by the Great Goddess Skadi, the
Shadow. Like Kali in the Far East, Skadi stood for the primal womb of
1

darkness that cyclically devoured worlds and gave them new birth.
The Scandinavian and Teutonic concept of cyclic universes, each with
its renewableset of gods, was essentially identical to that of India. See

Doomsday.
[Link]-Petre, 164.

Grace
In a famous New Testament passage, the quality said to be greater
than faith or hope is caritas(\ Corinthians 13), translated sometimes
"charity," sometimes "love." Both translations are inexact. The word
meant "grace," specifically the grace of the Triple Goddess, embodied
in the boon-bestowing Three Graces who dispensed caritas (Latin) or
charis (Greek) and were called the Charites. Julian said their grace was a
gift from heaven: "The threefold gift of the Charites comes to us
l
from heaven, from the circles of the stars."
Romans sometimes called grace venia, the divine correlative of
2
Venus, bringing visible tokens of the goddess's favor. Grace meant
the same as Sanskrit karuna, dispensed by the heavenly nymphs and
their earthly copies, the sacred harlots of Hindu temples (devadasis).
Their "grace" was a combination of beauty, kindness, mother-love,
tenderness, sensual delight, compassion, and care.
Graces were emanations of the Goddess. They danced in her
shrines. They tended to her adornment. They acted as midwives to
3
the gods. They were patrons of music, dance, poetry, and art. They
were shown over and over in the same classic pose as three naked

350
women dancing, in attitudes strongly resembling those of the Heavenly Graeae
Nymphs on the Temple of Love at Khajuraho in India. 4 Grail, Holy
Greek writers called the Graces Aglaia (Brilliant), Thalia (Flower-
Bringer), and Euphrosyne (Heart's Joy); but they had older names
inherited from a dim prehistory. Homer knew only one Grace, named
Cale or Kale, perhaps a cognate of Kali. 5 The Gnostic author Marcus
also used the word Grace or Charis as a title of the Goddess:
"May She
who is before all things, the incomprehensible and indescribable
6
Grace, fill
you her own knowledge."
you within, and increase in

Christians took the pagan concept of charis and struggled to divest

it of sexual meanings for application to an ascetic creed. "Charity"
became a basic tenet of primitive Christianity, as of Buddhism before it,

on the theory that a sure place in heaven could be won by giving

away one's worldly goods to the poor. Jesus listed the blessings prepared
for those who voluntarily made themselves meek, humble, and poor

on earth (Luke 6:20-30). The church's word for these "Beatitudes" was
macarisma, a word of ancient origin, invoking the Triple Goddess as
Ma (birth), Charis (grace), and Ma (death). 7 The cognate word charis-
ma meant Mother-given grace.
Charis merged with "charity" via ancient precedents equating love
and affection with hospitality and gift-giving, the "maternal virtues."
Homeric literature used the word philein, "lovingness," to mean open-
8
handed hospitality. As re-interpreted by Christian theology, the
"graciousness" that used to mean both liberality and warm physical
affection came to suggest liberality alone, practiced to secure one's

own immortality.
1. Lindsay, O.A., 391. 2. Dumezil, 94. 3. Larousse, 132. 4. Elisofon & Watts, 1 18.
5. Graves, CM. 1, 53-55. 6. Pagels, 50. 7. Augstein, 1 15. 8. Lindsay, A.W., 33.

Graeae
The Gray Women of classical myth; like the northern Norns, a
on the personae of the Triple Goddess. Graeae were mothers of
variant

Greece (Graecia). According to the Perseus myth they were less

terrible than the Gorgons, but Graeae and Gorgons were originally the
same triad, the former having more sinister names than the latter.
The Graeae were named Enyo, Pemphredo, and Deino: Warlike One,
Wasp, and Terror. They shared but a single eye and a single tooth
1

among them, showing that they stood for a primitive concept of the
Goddess who was three in one and one in three. See Gorgon;
Trinity.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,129.

Grail, Holy
Christian myth Holy Grail was the chalice used by Christ at
said the

the Last Supper when he poured wine for the disciples to drink, saying,

351
Grail, Holy "this is my blood" (Matthew 26:28). After the crucifixion, Joseph of

Arimathea took the chalice to England and established it in a shrine at

^^^^^M^^M^Hi Glastonbury. Later, it disappeared.
This myth wasn't heard in Europe until the 1 2th century. The real

origins of the Holy Grail were not Christian but pagan. The Grail
1
was first Christianized in Spain from a sacred tradition of the Moors.
Like the Celts' holy Cauldron of Regeneration, which it resembled,
the blood-filled vessel was a womb symbol meaning rebirth in the

Oriental or Gnostic sense of reincarnation. Its connotation was

feminine, not masculine.

The Grail was kept in a magnificent temple governed by a queen
named Repanse de Joie (Dispenser of Joy), an of a holy ancient title

[Link] said her husband was a Moor, and her son John founded
the eastern order of the Knights Templar, a group of warriors
dedicated to the Grail temple and the defense of women. When a lady
needed help, Grail knights like Galahad, Parsifal, or Lohengrin
would receive orders in fiery letters on the rim of the Grail and ride to

the rescue.

Hispano-Moorish tradition located the Grail temple on Montsal-

2
vatch, the "Mount of Salvation" in the Spanish Pyrenees. The
temple was a model of the universe, topped by a gigantic ruby
representing the maternal heart of the world, the Holy Rose. The
pseudo-universe even included a miniature of itself enclosing the sacred
vessel:

The temple itself was one hundred fathoms in diameter. Around it were
seventy-two chapels ofan octagonal shape. To every pair of chapels
there was a tower six stories high, approachable by a winding stair on the
outside. . The vaulting was of blue sapphire, and in the center was a
. .

plate of emerald. All the altar stones were ofsapphire.

. . . Upon the . . .

inside of the cupola surmounting the temple, the sun and moon were
as of day even in
represented in diamonds and topazes, and shed a light
the darkness of the night. The windows were of crystal, beryl, and other

transparent stones. The floor was of translucent crystal,

under which all
the fishes of the sea were carved out of onyx, just like life. The towers

were ofprecious stones inlaid with gold; their roofs ofgold and blue
enamel. Upon every tower there was a crystal cross, and upon it a
to be
golden eagle with expanded wings, which, at a distance, appeared
flying. At the summit of the main
tower was an immense carbuncle,
which served, like a star, to guide the Templars thither at night. In the
center of the building, under the dome, was a miniature representation
'
of the whole, and in this the holy vessel was kept.

Like the Arabian brotherhood oihashishim (see Aladdin), the

or Mahdi, to
legendary Knights Templar waited for the Desired Knight,
rescue the world from tyranny and establish the benevolent rule of
the Grail. The alternative was a dire prediction of the Waste Land,
modeled on the arid wilderness of Arabia Deserta, which some
eastern sages attributed to the departure of the Goddess.
The Grail temple was sometimes called Montjoie, "Mount of

352 M
 Joy," like the castle Joyous Gard to which Queen Guinevere retired Grail, Holy
with her lover. It was the same as the Mons Veneris, or Venusberg. Its

sexual symbolism served to rally heretical uprisings against the anti- ^^^^^^^^^^
sexual church. A 14th-century peasant leader calling himself William
Karle, or Cale, adopted "Montjoie" as a battle cry, and banners
4
showing the Goddess's traditional triple lily. The same battle cry was
used by the legendary soldiers of Roland, supposed to have died in
5
the vicinity of the Grail castle. Even older myths said the battle cry of
the Grail king was Amor (Love). 6
The Grail was first converted into the chalice of Christ's last

supper Joseph d'Arimathie of the Burgundian poet Robert de

in the

between 1 180 and 1 199. The

Borron, origins of the mystic vessel were

yet suspect. It was formerly a jewel in the devil's crown.

Sixty
thousand angels gave it to Satan when he still lived in heaven. During
his descent to hell, the jewel fell from his crown to earth, where it was

found and fashioned into a cup. 7 Joseph of Arimathea acquired the cup
land gave it to Jesus to use at his last meal with his disciples. It was the

jcup
of doom, of which Jesus prayed to God in a weak moment,
"Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" (Matthew
26:39).
The
poet said Joseph was imprisoned by the Jews and left in a
jdungeon and a day without food or drink; but he remained
for a year

alive and well because he had the Grail with him. He was set free by the

emperor Vespasian, who was converted to Christianity after being

cured of leprosy by the veil with which St. Veronica wiped Jesus's face.

Joseph then traveled to England with a group of pilgrims, built the

temple of the Grail at Glastonbury, and installed the Round Table for
(the rite of the holy supper. Among his followers was Bron, the Rich
[Fisher, directly stolen from pagan myths of Bran the Blessed, Welsh
god of the sacred cauldron. For a touch of anti-Semitic propaganda in
this chowder of fantasy, de Borron claimed the vacant Seat Perilous at

the Round Table was the seat of Judas. Another Jew, Moyses

;(Moses) once dared to sit in it, but for his hubris he was swallowed up by
the earth. 8

About 1230 appeared the even more chaotic Vulgate Cycle,

romances in Old French.
jL'Estoire de] Saint Graal, a quintet of prose
The author pretended his book was given by the ghost of Christ himself
to a Cistercian monk on Good
Friday, 717 a.d. This work frankly
called the Grail by its old title, an escuele or "cauldron." The company
colonized the holy city of Sarras, ruled by Mordrain and
Df the Grail

Nascien (Death and Birth). Moys (Moses) was snatched away from the
Seat Perilous by fiery hands. Solomon's ship, which moved by itself

pn the sea, carried Christianity to all lands. Members of the Grail

bompany had various adventures: Bron went to Scotland and sus-
ained a poisoned wound, like Tristan. He was cured by the local

irincess, then he killed her father and married her. Alain the

j
'Hunting Dog" went to a foreign land and built a new castle for the
i
Srail, Castle Corbenic (cors-benoiz, meaning either Horn of Plenty

353
Green, Wearing of or Sacred Heart). The seventh Rich Fisher, Lambor, was slain by a
Saracen with the magic sword from Solomon's ship, and the land of

wmmmmm ^^^m mm the lost Grail became la terregaste the Waste Land. 9
A final step in the transformation of the Grail from a pagan symbol
to a Christian one was taken in La Queste del Saint Graal, written by
a Cistercian monk. Now Galahad was said to be the perfect Desired
Knight, of the lineage of Joseph of Arimathea. Galahad occupied the
Seat Perilous safely, because he was virginally pure. He drew the magic
sword from a stone that floated on the river, for the same reason.

Through him the Grail vision was bestowed on all the Round Table
who promptly left their games, feasts, and tourneys (i.e., their
knights,
paganism) to follow the vision to the ends of the earth in search of the
real thing.

The Queste showed obvious hostility to the contemporary cult of

when the Grail's aura of feminine mystery was
courtly love; but
removed, its romantic appeal declined. If the Grail was nothing more
than the cup of Christ's blood, then there was no reason for the great

Quest at all. The cup of Christ's blood was readily available to all, in
every chapel; and even though it was called a holy sacrament, its
10
discovery somehow lacked thrills. As matters turned out, to Christian-
ize the Grail was to neutralize the magnetism of its secret nature.
The monkish author's real purpose was to tout the virtues of

virginity. All but one of the Round Table knights failed the Grail
quest because they were guilty of sexual sins. Perceval was abandoned
because of his past links with the cult of courtly love. Gawain, who
played the part of Desired Knight in other romances, failed utterly.
Lancelot, having committed adultery with Guinevere, could never
The only chaste knight was Galahad,
see the Grail except in a dream.
the new, purified Lancelot. Galahad's virginity led him to every
Christian treasure, including the shield of Joseph of Arimathea, laid up
in a Cistercian abbey. It was white with a red cross the same "hues
of innocence and blood" on the red-and-white emblem of the Assassins'

brotherhood, borrowed by the crusaders, and later by mystics calling

11
themselves Knights of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians.
The Grail remained secretly pagan formany centuries in isolated
areas. English Grail stories Irish Horn of
were modeled on the
Plenty, containing blood/wine for drinking and named the Vessel of the

Spirit. A festival called a Grail was celebrated every seventh year in

Brunswick, until it was outlawed in 1481. 12
1. Guerber, L.M.A., 182-83. 2. Guerber, L.M.A., 185, 200.
3. Guerber, L.M.A., 186-87. 4. Tuchman, 177. 5. Goodrich, 81.
6. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 163. 7. Guerber, L.M.A., 182-83. 8. Campbell, CM., 534. 9.

Ibid.,535. 10. Ibid., 550, 507. 11. MacKenzie, 117.

12. Jung &
von Franz, 115, 121.

Green, Wearing of
Pagan springtime custom that kept its popularity in Christian Europe,
of
especially through the month of May. By imitative magic, wearing

354
 green was supposed to encourage Mother Earth to clothe herself in Grim
the green of abundant crops. The women described as fairies in
Grotesques
medieval balladry always dressed in green; and their
Thomas Rhymer, wore green
like lovers, ^^_^_^_^_
in the fairy realm. Christians
opposed
these pagan traditions, associating green with the dead and with
witches, developing the "familiar superstition that green is 1
unlucky."
Green was also linked with the sexual promiscuity of old rituals.
[Link], 176.

Grim
"Mask," often a title of Teutonic deities, like Grimhild. Northern
gods as well as those of Egypt and Africa were thought to reside in the
masks worn by their impersonators at religious
pageants. "Grim"
1

came to mean "ominous" because

mask-wearing priests and priestesses
were traditional givers of omens.
1 .
Sturluson, 49.

Griselda

Legendary model for proper wifely behavior in the Christian era.

"Patient Griselda" married a man of superior rank, who abused her,
neglected her, flaunted his adulteries before her, even took away her
babies to kill them and forbade her to shed a single tear because the
sight
of her grief would vex him. Griselda endured everything humbly,
and at last her husband reformed and rewarded her with his true love,
saying she had passed all So they lived happily ever after,
his "tests."

Griselda apparently harboring no resentment for years of mistreatment.

Grotesques
"Creatures of the Grotto," decorative figures in Christian churches,
taken from the animal gods, masques, sirens, gorgons, satyrs, Green

Men, serpent deities, and other idols in the sacred caves of pagan-
1
ism. Early churches were built right over the heathen "grotto" and the
same deities were worshipped side by side with Christian ones, so the
people would continue to come to the church by force of habit, finding
their familiar idols there. 2 Some hardly noticed the change, which
was what authorities of the church counted on. Pope Gregory the Great
ordered missionaries to "accommodate the ceremonies of the Chris-

worship as much as possible to those of the heathen, that the people

tian

may not be much startled at the change." 3

Later, when "grotesques" were re-defined as devils, churches were
with incongruous images of the rival deities, to which people still
left

prayed secretly, or touched for "luck," or gave offerings. Hugo wrote,

"Sometimes a porch, a facade, or a whole church presents a symbolic
4
meaning entirely foreign to worship, even inimical to the Church."

355
Grove, Sacred The Cathedral of Worms for example displayed along one whole side
the gods and heroes of the Nibelungenlied, even though the official
5
theology represented these entities as devils.
Sometimes the traditions of the grotesques were perpetuated by
secret societies among the artisans, especially masons and smiths,
whose fraternities preserved Gnostic symbols like the double-tailed
A common Indo- siren, the double-sexed demiurge, and the Ouroboros or World

European word for the Serpent, also greatly revered by alchemists and Hermetic magicians. See
sacred grove was Smith.
Nemi (Latin nemus), 1. Guerber, L.R., 272. 2. See Sheridan & Ross. 3. M. Harrison, 138.
indicating dedication 4. Male, 395. 5. Guerber, L.R., 272.
to the Moon-goddess
called Nemesis,
Diana Nemorensis, or
Diana Nemetona Grove, Sacred
Lady of the Grove. Next to a cave, a grove was the most popular uterine symbol in
Nemeton was the
ancient religions, even among early biblical Semites, to whom Asherah
druidic oak grove.
Strabo said the was the Mother-Goddess of the Grove. A large tree, pillar, or obelisk
greatest shrine of the within the grove often represented the male god inside the Goddess as
Galatians (Gauls) in both child and lover.
Asia Minor was had a druidic holy wood called
Brittany in the 1 1th century still
Drunemeton, the
Nemet. This may have been the same as the fairy wood Broceliande,
druid-grove. Southern
Scotland had a shrine the grove of Merlin's Nemesis, the lady Nimue, who also bore the name
called Medionemeton. of the fatal Goddess of the grove.
France had another, Patriarchal priesthoods seemed to consider the groves dangerous.
called Nemetodorum
The on the asherim or Groves of
Bible speaks of many attacks
(modern Nanterre).
In Spain, the sacred
Asherah, which were consistently worshipped by both people and kings,

grove of the Moon- despite the prophets' repeated condemnations: Exodus 34:13, Deu-
goddess Brigit was teronomy 16:21, Judges 3:7, 1 Kings 15:13, 16:33; 2 Kings 18:4, 21:7.
1

Nemetobriga. Destroyers of the sacred groves feared the Mother's curse, as

Hungary still has
shown in numerous moralizing myths. Erysichthon dared to cut
Maros-Nemeti, an
down one of Demeter's sacred groves, though the high priestess forbade
old grove-shrine of
Mari-Diana. 2 him with the voice of the Goddess herself. Then angry Demeter
cursed him with perpetual hunger that could never be appeased. He
The 4
Irish called a ended as a wretched beggar, frantically stuffing his mouth with filth.
sanctuary nemed, or Druidic sacred groves were somewhat protected by superstitious
fidnemed, a "forest
fear of similar curses. The oak grove at Derry was one of the most
shrine," established
by the archaic colonists popular shrines of Irish paganism, its magical name still invoked by the
called Nemed or bardic phrase "Hey, Derry Down" in the chorus of old ballads.
Moon-people. Writings attributed to St. Columba said Derry's grove must be pre-
rites
Religious served at all costs. The saint said as much as he feared death and hell,
continued in these 5

forest shrines
he "dreaded still more the sound of an axe in the grove of Derry."
Sacred kings Diana's ancient grove at Nemi were expected to
in
throughout the Middle
challenger who broke a branch from the holy tree. This
5
Ages. Christian fight any rival

writers spoke of
symbolic act occurs so often in medieval romances that it can only
be
"heathen
assumed the custom continued through the Middle Ages. The
abominations" carried
out in forest shrines Vulgate epic of Lancelot said Parsifal challenged a rival knight in the
or nimidae. same manner as the heroes of Nemi: he "found a tree in the grove

356
 6
undefended, and broke a branch from it." Evidence is not lacking to Guignole, Saint
show that breaking a branch from the sacred tree was equivalent to a Guinevere
threat of castration of the god, or the incumbent sacred king who ^^^^^^^^^^^
embodied the god. 7
1. Piggott, 72. 2. Strong, 192. 3. Joyce 1, 359-60. 4. Graves, G.M. 1, 89.
5. Spence, 42. 6. Campbell, CM., 555. 7. Frazer, G.B., 81 5 et seq.

Guignole, Saint
Phallic god of Gaul, probably a French name for Priapus, Christian-
ized and worshipped in his own church at Brest. Even after adoption
into the Christian canon, St. Guignole remained an
ithyphallic
figure, from whose erect penis women scraped splinters to assist in

conception charms. The priests assisted by installing a trick penis in

St. Guignole's statue, which could be lengthened secretly from behind
it was
scraped away in front. See Phallus Worship.
1
as

l.G.R. Scott, 247.

Guinevere
In Germany, Guinevere was Cunneware, "female wisdom." Accord- '

ing to the Welsh Triads, she was the Triple Goddess, Gwenhwyfar,
"the first one queen, at times three
lady of these islands," at times
all named
Gwenhwyfar, all of whom married King Arthur.
2
queens,
Arthur was born of the same Goddess when he was cast ashore on
the ninth [Link] Welsh called breaking waves the Sheep of the
Mermaid, and the Mermaid was Gwenhidwy, or Gwenhwyfar. The
ninth wave represented the "god born of nine maidens," also known
as The Ram. 3 Nine maidens signified the triplicated Triple Goddess,
like the nineMuses in Greek myth.
Guinevere embodied the sovereignty of Britain. No king could
reign without her. Thus, in story after story, she was abducted by
would-be Melwas, Meleagant, Arthur, Lancelot, and Mordred
rulers.

all took Guinevere away from the incumbent ruler when they wished
to make themselves kings. When a king lost Guinevere, he lost the
kingship. Some myths suggest that she was a sacred statue, like the
Fortuna Regia of Roman Caesars. 4 Yet she was also a living woman,
who impersonated the Destroyer when she gave the apple of death to
Patrick, and was nearly burned at the stake when she was accused of
witchcraft. Early legends said she disappeared into the castle of

Joyous Gard, the earthly paradise, where she reigned each spring as
May Queen.
52.
1 .
Campbell, CM., 448. 2. Malory 1 ,
xxiv. 3. Turville-Petre, 1

4. Encyc. Brit., "Guinevere."

357
Gula Gula
Gunas
Babylonian name of the Great Goddess as Lady of Birth and Mother
of Dogs. She also ruled fate, as shown by the plural form Guises, the
Fates Who Write, corresponding to Roman Fata Scribunda, or
Teutonic Schreiberinnen, "Writing- Women." *

[Link] 764.
(

Gunas
"Strands," the threads of Fate, colored white, red, and black. In
Tantric symbolism, the three colors stood for "the divine female
Prakriti" i.e., Kali in her three aspects as Creator, Preserver, and

Destroyer, or giver of birth, and death. The Virgin-Creator was

life,
1

Sattva, white; the Mother-Preserver was Rajas, red; the Crone-

Destroyer was Tamas, black. Together they symbolized the cyclic

succession of "purity, passion, darkness." 2
The Upanishad said white, red, and black were the
Svetasvatara
colors of the Goddess Maya, who was also Kali. Sattva signified
"radiant tranquility"; from sat, that which exists forever. 3 Rajas was the
color of royal blood, the color of a king {raj), and of the Mother as

queen and battle-goddess, like Durga-Kali, in "blazing motion, violence

and passion." Another of her names, Aruna, may have been the
origin of Arum, the Mesopotamian Goddess who made mankind out of
4
clay reddened with her lunar blood. Tamas, the color of the Crone,
stood for "passive weight and darkness," the blackness of the tomb. 5
The Gunas were not only Oriental. The same white, red, and
black "strands" were associated with western forms of the Triple
Goddess also. Theocritus, Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace all said the sacred

were white, red, and black. 6 The Goddesses

colors of the life-threads
who held the threads were the Fates. They were based on Oriental
Mahabharata Indian images such as the three Goddesses depicted in the Mahabharata,
epic poem, consisting the veil of nights and days in an underground "city of
weaving
of historical and
serpents," representing cycles of light and darkness with threads of
legendary material
white and black linked with the blood-red thread of life. 7
gathered between the
4th and 10th centuries Sumerian temples were ornamented with clay-cone mosaics that

A.p, including the always showed the same three colors, 8 which were also used to
famous Bhagavad-Gita. decorate the New World pottery known as Mimbres ware. Celtic myth
assigned them to the Hounds of Annwn or dogs of the underworld,

and to the maidens in the Castle of the Holy Grail, as if they too were
Kalis or, as the Irish said, kelles (see Kelle).
The Gunas are familiar motifs in fairy tales, such as Snow White: a
story of the princess who not only personified the Virgin in combina-
tion with the Mother-queen and the Crone-witch; she also displayed the
Gunas in own person, with "skin white as snow, lips red as blood, |
her
and hair black as ebony." Snow White was a direct descendant of
Peredur's divine lady-love, whose hair was black as jet, her skin white
and red. A vision of the colors alone (crow's feathers and blood in the

358
snow) cast Peredur into a holy trance of meditation upon her image, Gunnlod
from which he couldn't wake. 9 Grimm's fairy tale of Snow White and Gwyn
Rose Red came from the same root, uniting Virgin and Mother as ^^^^^^^^^^^
Eithne the Fair and Fedelim the Rosy, repeated in the lilies and roses
sacred to the virgin Mary. 10 The same Virgin and Mother colors
were combined by the Two Mistresses of ancient Egypt, Nekhbet and
Buto, wearers of the white and red crowns. The same colors were
known to medieval mystics in the Middle East as the Hues of Inno-
cence and Blood. 11
The Crone's color, black, was often
dissociated from the Virgin
and Mother though the three veils laid on Christian altars for
colors,
Christmas Matins retained the hues of the pagan trinity, white, red, and
12
black. Black animals were sacrificed to the underworld Goddess
from Homer's time all the way up to the 18th century a.d. 13 The Slavs
offered black horses to their horse-headed Lord of Death, Volos, who
14
was lightly Christianized as St. Vlas. Gypsy women wore red and
black for funerals, combining the attributes of Mother and Crone. 15
In China however, the funereal color was white, to suggest rebirth. Old
European ballads sometimes associate all three colors with death.
The departure of the dead from Middle-Earth was heralded by "the

crowing of the white, the red, and the black cock."

1<s

So often were the sacred colors displayed in hundreds of myths,

and even Christian customs, that Dante placed them at the
folk tales,

very core of his Inferno, to symbolize the essence of God's adversary:

the three heads of Lucifer were white, red, and black. 17

1. Avalon, 328-29. 2. Silberer, 280. 3. Mahanirvanatantra, p. xxxiii.
4. Avalon, 146. Rawson, E.A., 160. 6. Wedeck, 66. 7. Lethaby, 238.
5.

8. Whitehouse, 60. 9. Goodrich, 63-66. 10. Spence, 56. 1 1 MacKenzie, 1 1 7.

.

12. Miles, 93. 13. Homer, Odyssey, 163. 14. Lamusse, 298. 15. Groome, 144.
16. Wimberly, 104. 17. Campbell, CM., 426.

Gunnlod
Norse name of the Earth-goddess or primal "giantess" from whose
underground cauldron Odin stole the wise blood of immortality,
magic, and feminine mana, to make himself a supreme god. Though
1

her myth underwent several revisions, Gunnlod was another form of

the Triple Goddess, keeping three cauldrons (or wombs) in the
X)wels of the earth, which meant in herself.

1. Lamusse, 257.

Gwyn
'White god" of Wales, sometimes identified with King Arthur; an
Dsiris-like Savior slain by his perpetual rival and alter-ego Gwythur ap

Sreidawl (Set), and buried in a boat-shaped oak-coffin before his

esurrection. He was born of Arianrhod, the Great Goddess as virgin

nother, and became her consort. Like her, he was a trinity: Dylan, a

359
Gyges silver fish; Llew, a white stag; Gwyn, the white rider on a white horse.
Gypsies In these forms he matched the trinity of Arianrhod of the silver

mmmm^^^^^^^^m wheel, Blodeuwedd the white-flower virgin, and Cerridwen the deathly
white sow. Every May Day "until the day of
doom," Gwyn fought
his rival for the royal embodiment of the Goddess on earth, Creiddy-
lad Shakespeare's "Cordelia" who belonged to each contestant
alternately. Gwyn was the origin of the common prefix "Win" in the
names of ancient British towns.
1

1. Graves, W.G., 185,351,430.

Gyges
Ancient king of Lydia, chosen by the queen to kill her former
husband Candaules and then to marry her, according to the archaic

system of kingship by combat. Gyges's potency was first judged by

the ceremony of unveiling the queen and looking on her nakedness,

whereby his physical reaction could be noted and assessed. Since

1

virility was the principal requirement in a king at the time, his sovereign-

ty was contingent on the queen's acceptance of him as a lover. See

Kingship.
1. Herodotus, 5-6.

Gypsies
Among the last active preservers of Goddess- worship in Europe were
the gypsies, who began to migrate westward from Hindustan about
1000 a.d.
1
Because Christians identified their beliefs with witchcraft,

gypsies were popularly known as Minions

of the Moon, or Diana's
Foresters. Some may have adopted the Dianic witch-cult through

assimilation of the lunar Diana to their own Goddess, Sara-Kali (Queen

2
Kali), also called Laki (Hindu Lakshmi),
or Matta the Mother.

Gypsies revered the female principle as the source of life; they said,

"For woman is like the earth. The earth is our mother, and so is
us,
3
woman. The secret of life comes from the ground."
Many Europeans thought the gypsies came from Egypt, hence
4
their name, "Egyptians." Their own traditions, usually kept secret

from non-gypsies, showed that they came of Hindu roots. They be-
lieved in reincarnation and karma. A gypsy fortune teller or
cartomancer was called a Vedavica, reader of the Vedas; for gypsies
5
seem to have regarded Tarot cards as their own Vedas.
Gypsies' Goddess was a trinity: Kali as the
same three sisters of
Fate worshipped by pagans and witches. Like the fairy godmothers,

Moerae, or Fortunae, she came in the form of three mystic ladies to the
cradle of every newborn child. Gypsies' baptismal ceremonies includ-
6
ed three offerings on the infant's bed, "one for each goddess of fate."
The three divine Mothers were symbolized by a triangle, the

Tantric yogis' sacred Yoni Yantra, immemorial sign of woman.

360
Gypsies' informal hieroglyphic system always represented "woman" by Gypsies
7
the Yoni Yantra. A
favorite method of card divination
among gypsies
was to lay out cards in this same "female" shape. Like the Triple Goddess
herself, the triangle's three sides stood for past, present, and future. 8
The matriarch was the center of gypsy tribal life.
"Everything that
went on around a tribalmother resembled the old pagan sex rites."
Her husband was a drone, whose function was to impregnate her. The
tribesupported him in idleness but looked down on him as a non-
productive member. If he failed to beget perfect children, he was
"accidentally" killed, and another stud-chieftain took his place.

"Tribal mothers were often widowed dozen times over." The

half a
male functionary closest to a tribal mother was not her husband but
"the coaxer," a man trained from an early age to control his own sexual

responses and "concentrate completely on his partner's pleasure. He

was taught to know all the sensitive and erotic zones of the female body.
In this curious three-sided relationship, the coaxer gave the mother
her physical fulfillment without ever penetrating her. Instead, by a
combination of caresses, words, and breathing, he made her suffi-
ciently excited to be ready to have an orgasm as soon as her husband
took over." 9
The queen's coaxer was trained like a Tantric yogi in the rite of
maithuna, and so were other "occult couples" revered by the gypsies
for impersonating the Goddess and God in their endless world-sustain-

ing union. For the gypsy, as for the Tantric sadhu and the Sufi
dervish, occult coitus reservatus was "a means of increasing psychic
powers" in accordance with the ancient Oriental belief that all magic
comes from woman. 10
The gypsy word for a fairy, rashani, actually meant "priestess."
The most common gypsy surnames were Smith and Faa: "Fay," or
n
"Fairy." Gypsies were generally practitioners of smithcraft, thus
became involved in the medieval conviction that smiths, wizards, and
12
women conspired together against the Christian church. (See Smith.)
Legends constantly attest to hostility between Christians and
gypsies. Laws against vagrancy were invoked, or even specifically
passed, to enable the Inquisition to seize gypsies and haul them off to
witches' prisons, often without even recording their names. 13 In 1 500
the Diet of Augsburg ruled that Christians could kill gypsies without

legal penalty, whereas a gypsy injured by a Christian might seek no

redress in court. 14 In 1782, forty-five gypsies were tortured, broken on
the wheel, hanged, drawn, and quartered for having murdered a

number of Hungarians who were really alive and well enough to watch
15
the execution of their alleged killers.
There was a popular belief that gypsies were descended from a
union of the first gypsy woman with the devil.
16
An English writer
called gypsies "thieves, rogues, and beggarly rascals known by the . . .

name of Bohemians, Egyptians, and Caramaras." The third of

17

these titles was peculiarly reminiscent of Kauri-Mara, or Mother Kali as

raie Goddess of Death.

361
Gypsies As the epithet "Christ-killers" supported persecutions of Jews, so
various epithets and legends supported persecutions of gypsies. It was

^^^^^^^^^^^ said gypsy smiths forged the nails for Christ's crucifixion. The gypsies
promulgated a counter-legend: they said an ancestor of their race
stole one of the four nails set aside to crucify Jesus, but had no time to

steal the other three. For want of the fourth nail, Jesus's feet had to

be fastened together with a single nail. Oddly, the transition from four
nails to three in Christian art occurred about the same time the

gypsies were telling this story.

18
The gypsies also claimed that Jesus,
grateful for the gypsy's attempt to save him, from the cross granted all
Another legend said gypsies were allowed to
gypsies the right to steal.
because a gypsy woman stole the infant Jesus and hid him from
steal
19
Herod's baby-killers in her basket.
Some gypsies said their race had its own special savior, a Son of
God named Alako, who ascended to the moon. He defends gypsies
and takes their souls to the moon after death. His two enemies are the
devil and Christ. 20 Gypsies also prayed to a spirit from Mother Earth,
the Pchuvus (cognate with Celtic pooka or Puck), who can bestow
"earth" on favored people. In gypsy terms, earth meant luck, fortune,
21
money, like the Hindu artha, riches from the Earth-mother.
Gypsies claimed it was very unlucky to meet a monk or priest first
thing in the morning; nothing would go right for the rest of the day.
This anti-clerical idea caught on even among Christians and was still
found throughout 19th century. 22 Agrippa's Occult
Italy in the

Philosophy said meeting a monk was an evil omen, "because these kind
[sic] of men live for the most by the
sudden death of men, as vultures
do by slaughters." 23 Reginald Scot said when hunters met a priest, they
thought it such bad luck that they would "couple up their hounds,
and go home, being of any further sport that day." 24
in despair

Gypsy myths repeated classical sacred dramas in the guise of fairy

tales. The Horned God sacrificed to the Triple Goddess appeared

frequently. As he ate a magic apple given him by a

a gypsy youth,

woman, and horns grew from his head. He ate a second magic
stag's

apple, and his flesh fell away from his bones. He ate a third magic apple,
25
crossed a stream (the Styx), and was resurrected, fairer than ever.
Here was Dionysus or Actaeon or Pentheus, slain in his stag mask and
reborn from the dead.
in Vedic myth, gypsy gods were often sacrificed in pig form,
As
usually with the all-important apple representing the "heart-soul"

(Egyptian ah). A gypsy maiden reminiscent of Circe was said to have

resurrected her dead lover by replacing all his flesh with pig's flesh, a

image of a god's or man's sacrificial

classic bestialization. When she
squeezed an apple into his mouth to serve as his new heart, he
returned to life.
26
The pig with an apple in its mouth was also known to

worshippers of Vishnu the boar-god, and those of his Norse counter-

part the Yuletide boar (or suckling pig). Egyptians said a dead
man
could be brought back to life when Anubis pushed his heart into his

362
mouth. 27 Gypsies told a similar story of a gypsy witch who brought her Gypsies
dead son to life again by pushing his heart into his mouth. 28 An apple
often represented the heart. ^_^^__^__^_
"giving the heart" in love or marriage frequently
Among gypsies,
took the ceremonial form of giving an apple. "Occult couples" began
the sexual rites with formal cutting of the apple to reveal its
magic
pentacle, feeding it to each other with the formula: "I am your
nourishment, you are mine. We are the feast."
29
South Slavic pagans
also used the apple in their marriage ritual: the bride ate half the

apple, and gave the other half to her bridegroom. It has been surmised
ancient marriage 30
that a similar rite underlay the story of Eve's apple.
Certainly the myths that developed into gypsy folk tales were
extremely old and universal throughout the Indo-European cultures.
Their Goddess Sara-Kali could well have been the original Sarah who
ed her tribe from the matrilineal society of Ur of the Chaldees about
31
1900 B.C. Her alleged consort Abraham was emphasized by biblical
writers, but rabbinic literature said he was only a Chaldean "astrolo-
32
ger," i.e., a priest of the Moon-Goddess. The Goddess appeared as
mother of the solar deity in another gypsy legend, as "an old woman
dressed in white, sitting in a beautiful temple." She explained her
function in terms recalling the Riddle of the Sphinx: "I am the
bother of the Sun King, who daily flies out of this house as a little child,
33
itmid-day becomes a man, and returns of an evening a graybeard."
She also represented the divine Cauldron that daily swallowed him up and

jave him rebirth. The popular gypsy surname Kaldera or Kalderas may
34
lave been derived from Kali-Devi as the same Cauldron.
The Cauldron of the Deep also appeared in gypsy lore as a mirror,
ike the one in which the Titans trapped the soul of Dionysus, who
vas identified with the same sun god. Transylvanian gypsies called him
me Enchanted (or Accursed) Hunter, who loved a witch named
Mara or Mari is, Mother Death. She trapped the
that hunter's soul in

per magic
mirror and took it
away from him, the typical preliminary
35
i:o his cyclic resurrection.

Much of this highly significant gypsy lore was kept from non-

jypsies for many centuries, as it was always viewed as heresy by

Christian authorities, and even folk tales could become excuses for

jersecution. The prejudice against gypsies has lasted even into the
>resent century. The Nazis declared them "subhumans," along with

ews, Slavs, and other "non-Aryans." Over 400,000 gypsies were

36
ailed in the German concentration camps.

I. Trigg, 7. 2. Groome, iv, lxii. 3. Derlon, 135. 4. Trigg, 4. [Link],67.

6. Trigg, 80. 7. Lederer, 141. 8. Trigg, 48-49. 9. Derlon, 132. 10. Derlon, 159.
II. Groome, lxi. 12. Joyce 1, 223. 13. Summers, G.W., 488-91. [Link], 11.
[Link], 103. 16. Trigg, 21. 17. Hazlitt, 113. 18. Groome, xxx.
19. Trigg, 72-73. 20. Trigg, 202. 2 1 Leland, 99. 22. Leland, 129; Gifford, 25.
.

28.
[Link], 172. 24. Scot, 164. 25. Groome, lxvii. 26. Groome,
27. Erman,158. 28. 18. 29. Derlon, 131-32. 30. Crawley 2, 133.
Groome,
[Link],236. 32. Barrett, 183. 33. Groome, 136. [Link],67.
35. Groome, 131-32. 36. Boulding, 328.

363
 H

hygeia, "Health." She

and her sister Panacea
were versions of the
Goddess Rhea or
actually her milk -flowing
breasts. Asclepius,
shown here in his child-

form, was also their

adoptive father, and the
whole clan, snake and
caduceus included,
became the collective

patron of the medicine

men.

hathor, Queen of
Heaven and mother
of all the gods. Her name
was made part of all

early Egyptian royal

names to assure
matrilineal accession.
The Sphinx is one of
her incarnations. This
depiction shows her
with the 19th Dynasty
Pharaoh Sethos I and
is from his tomb.
Hades Hades
Hag Underworld god, Lord of Death, consort of Hecate or Persephone.
In pre-Roman Latium he was known as Eita or Ade, and his bride was

Persipnei. Greek myth converted him into the abductor of the

1

Virgin Persephone, or Kore; but as "Destroyer" she was really the

underworld Death-goddess to begin with. His Greek name, Aidon-
eus, meant "blind one," a common title of the phallic Hidden God in
the womb of the earth. 2
Hades was also known as Pluto, or Pluton, Lord of Riches. He was
supposed to know the location of all gems and precious metals in the
earth. When he was identified with the Christian devil, the belief

persisted that the devil could locate buried treasure for his followers.
Like all underground deities, Hades was thought a leading resident of

hell, which was often called by his name instead of by the name Hel,
the Goddess.
1. Larousse, 211.2. Graves, G.M. 2, 393.

Hag
Originally "Holy Woman," the Hag was a cognate of Egyptian heq,

a predynastic matriarchal ruler who knew the words of power, or

hekau. In Greek she
x
became Hecate, the Crone or Hag as queen of
the dead, incarnate on earth in a series of wise-women or high
Hebrew "wisdom"
in Proverbs 8 is priestesses.

Hokhmah, from In northern Europe, the Hag was the death-goddess corresponding
Egyptian heq-maa or to Hecate, like the Hag of the Iron Wood whose daughter or virgin
Heka-Maat, the form was Hel. 4 Old Norse hagi meant a sacred grove, the Iron Wood, a
underworld Mother of
place of sacrifice. Haggen meant to chop in pieces, which is what
wisdom, law, and
words of power. 2 Greek happened to sacrificial victims dismembered for a feast. "Hags" may
and Roman cognate have been priestesses of sacrifice, like the Scythian matriarchs who
5
hagia meant holy, butchered for their sacred cauldrons and read omens in entrails.
especially as applied Northmen colonized Scotland, where a haggis or "hag's dish" was
to the principle of
made of internal organs. Until the 19th century, people kept the New j
female wisdom,
Year festival of Hagmena, Hag's Moon, going in disguise from house
Hagia Sophia (see j

Sophia, Saint).
to house, begging cakes. A chronicler said: "On the last night of the old
Similarly in Israel, a year (peculiarly called Hagmenai), the visitors and company made a

haggiah was a holy point of not separating till after the clock struck twelve, when they rose,
day. Certain Jewish and mutually wished each other a happy New Year." This is
kissing,
religious literature
still the custom. But a contemporary clergyman said the Hagmena
dating back to Israel's
matriarchal period meant the Devil was in the house. 6
was probably written by Devilish qualities were attributed to stone idols of the Hag, such as ;

wise-women, since it
the famous Stone of Scone, still used at each British monarch's
was called the
coronation. This stone once represented the Hag and her spinning
Haggadah. Later
wheel i.e., Arianrhod, Goddess of the Wheel of Fate. A Danish
patriarchal rabbis
declared this material ballad said theHag of Scone led the "swarthy Elves"; but she was
"not legal." 3 turned to stone by an incantation of the missionary St. Olave: "Thou 1

366
I
Hag of Scone, stand there and turn to granite stone." 7 Helvetian Hair
i converts to Christianity were compelled to batter to pieces sacred
stones in which their Goddess dwelt, reciting her formula, "Once I was ^^^^^^^^^^^
|
the Goddess and now I am nothing at all." 8

In the 16th century, "hag" was 9

Old
synonymous with "fairy."
High German wise-woman Hagazussa, that is, a moon-
called a
10
priestess. Though "hagiology" still means the study of holy matters
and saints, the root word hag declined in its meanings. Shakespeare's
verb bagged meant to be bewitched. His noun haggard meant a hawk, a
I

harpy, or an intractable woman. 11

The Hag as death-goddess, her face veiled to imply that no man
can know the manner of his death, was sometimes re-interpreted as a
nun. Christianized legends were invented for these veiled figures. 12
1 . Book of the Dead, 351. 2. Budge, G.E. 1 296. 3. Encyc. Brit, "Haggadah."
,

4. Sturluson, 39. 5. Wendt, 137. 6. Hazlitt, 296. 7. Wimberly, 36. 8. Thorsten, 336.

9. Scot, 550. 10. J.B. Russell, 16. 11. Potter & Sargent, 70. 12. Graves, W.G., 409.

Hair
As shown by its importance in witch-charms and in the mutual
exchange of talismans between lovers, hair was usually viewed as a
repository of at least a part of the soul. At the ancient temple of
Troezen, youths and maidens dedicated locks of their hair to the savior-
god Hippolytus before marriage; this was "designed to strengthen his
'
union with the Goddess."
When the Goddess-mother became Queen of Shades for each god
or man at the end of his life, his soul was likened to a child seeking

safety in the mother's shadow. The Great Mother's hair cast its shadow
over the approaching soul. An Egyptian found salvation by identify-
ing himself with Osiris, for whom the Goddess made resurrection-magic
with her hair: "He is found with her hair spread over him; it is shaken

put over his brow." 2 When Isis put on mourning garments for Osiris,
(she cut a lock of her hair to preserve his soul. Egyptian widows
similarly buried locks of their hair with deceased husbands,
as a charm of
protection in the after-world.
When Isis restored vitality to the dead Osiris, entitled the Still

Heart, she created his new life with her hair, made his heart beat
again and his penis move so she could conceive his reincarnation,
Horus. She "produced warmth from her hair, she caused air to
come She caused movement to take place in what was inert in the
Still Heart, she drew essence (semen) from him, she made flesh and

blood, she suckled her babe alone."

?
She further protected her Divine
4
Child by "shaking out her hair over him."
Mortal women often claimed the same preservative magic for
their

own hair. Ptolemy III was protected from harm on his Syrian

campaign in 247 b.c. by his wife Berenice, who dedicated locks of her
hair on Aphrodite's altar for this purpose. When the hair vanished

367
 Hair from the temple, it was discovered among the divine figures in heaven,
where it appears to this day as the constellation Coma Berenices,
"Berenice's Hair." 5

Signs and wonders in the heavens were usually interpreted as

significant omens of future catastrophes, particularly a comet, "spirit
of hair." A comet was supposed to be a tendril of the Great Mother's
was slowly overshadowed by
hair appearing in the sky as the world
her twilight shadow of doomsday. Most forms of the Death-goddess
showed masses of hair standing out from her head, sometimes in the
shape of serpents, as in the Gorgoneum of Medusa-Metis-Neith-Anath-
Athene. On the magic principle of "as above, so below," women's
hair partook of the same mystic powers as the Goddess's hair. Tantric

sages declared that the binding or unbinding of women's hair activat-

ed cosmic forces of creation and destruction. 6
The same idea prevailed among prophetic priestesses or witches,
who operated with unbound hair on the theory that their tresses
could control the spirit world. Mother Goddesses like Isis,Cybele, and
many emanations of Kali were said to command the weather by
braiding or releasing their hair. Their corresponding mortal representa-
tives could cause to be bound or loosed in heaven what they bound or
loosed on earth hence the unflagging superstitious belief in Christian

Europe that witches' hair controlled the weather. Churchmen said

witches raised storms, summoned demons, and produced all sorts of
destruction by unbinding their hair. As late as the 1 7th century the
Compendium Compendium Maleficarum said witches could control rain, hail, wind,
Maleficarum A trea-
and lightning such a way. 7 In the Tyrol, it was believed that every
in
tise on witches and
thunderstorm was caused by a woman combing her hair. Scottish girls
witchcraft compiled by
Guazzoin 1608. were forbidden to comb their hair at night while their brothers were
at sea, lest they raise a storm and sink the boats. 8 A Syrian exorcism for
werewolves invoked "that Angel who judged the woman that
combed the hair of her head on the Eve of Holy Sunday," suggesting a
connection between hair-combing women and the "werewolves"
9
mythologized as dogs of doomsday.
St. Paul greatly feared the "angels" (spirits) that women could
command by letting their hair flow loose. He insisted that women's
heads must be covered "because of the angels" (1 Corinthians 11:10).
Thus it became a Christian rule that women's heads must be covered

in church, they draw demons into the building. Modern women

lest

wearing hats or head shawls to church unconsciously defer to this

ancient superstition about their hair. Due to identification of bats with

demons, the erroneous notion that bats tend to tangle themselves in

women's hair arose from the same superstition. 10

The ancients insisted that women needed their hair to work magic
spells; thus women 11
deprived of their hair were harmless. For this
reason, Christian nuns and Jewish wives were compelled to shave their
heads. Inquisitors of the medieval church insisted on shaving the hair
of accused witches before putting them to the torture. 12 Churchmen

368
 claimed Satan told his worshippers that no harm could come to them
j
Hair
"as long as their hair was on." Some inquisitors preferred to shave
j

body hair too; hence the expression "to make a clean breast" that is, _
to confess arose from the custom of
shaving the chest hair of male
witches.

Inconsistently, churchmen apparently thought women should not

(take the initiative and cut off their own hair.
Cutting off her hair was
one of the crimes for which Joan of Arc was condemned to the fire. The
count read: "This woman is
apostate, for the hair which God gave
her for a veil she has untimely cut off." H Had she been
tortured, as the
inquisitors threatened, her hair would have been
untimely cut off
It seemed that men wanted to do it themselves, not to be
[anyway.
anticipated.
Medieval Europe had innumerable superstitions based on the
pagan significance of hair. Children's hair was
left uncut for
many years
on the theory that their strengthwould be impaired if their hair was
cut too soon. 15 Gypsy witches advised the lovelorn to snip a lock of the
beloved's hair secretly and wear it as a ring or locket. Whoever
possessed another's hair had power over his soul. 16 Lovers often traded
hair-locks in token of good faith. If either
I betrayed the other, the hair-
lock could be used to cast a vengeful spell on the betrayer.
Gypsies said a witch could be known by her hair, which grew
straight for three or four inches, then began to wave, like "a waterfall

bouncing over rocks." This was one of the distinctively Hindu ideas the

gypsies brought with them out of Asia. 17 The waterfall effect was
produced when naturally straight hair was kept in braids, a fashion of
both Hindu and gypsy women. During childbirth however, gypsy
women always let their hair flow loose, on the magic principle that
18
braids or knots would "tie up" the birth. European witch-midwives
often shared this belief, but many also braided female hair into amulets
to preserve suckling infants and their nurses. This custom continued
in Ireland up to the 19th century. 19

Homer spoke of "Circe of the Braided Tresses, an awful goddess

of mortal speech": that is, Circe's hair and words like Kali's controlled

creation and dissolution. 20 Circe was another name for the Fate-

spinner, who sat at

her loom weaving the destinies of men and
her 21
singing spells of becoming. Circe's braids symbolized her power
over metempsychosis; she stood for the cosmic Cirque, or karmic
wheel. 22

Braiding the round of Fate was expressed in pagan dances, like the
Maypole dance, with ribbons signifying the rays of sun and moon.
On May Eve, female dancers circled the pole widdershins or moon-
wise the counter-clockwise direction sacred to women while male
dancers progressed in the other direction, sunwise. The resulting braid
25
represented interpenetration of masculine and feminine powers.
This heathen dance survives as the "braiding" figure in square-dancing
known as Grand Right and Left, in which men and women weave

369
Hair
opposite directions around a circle, with or without touching hands as
they pass.
^^^^^^^^^^^ For the sun gods, hair represented both "rays" and virility. Apollo's
phallic function was implied by his epithet Chrysocomes, "He of the
Golden Locks." Ceremonial castration was the meaning of solar gods'
haircuts, like Samson's. A traditional site of the hero's castration or
hair-cutting was Calvary, "Bald Skull," a hill where sacrifices were
performed. Romans sometimes called the Great Goddess Calva,
"Baldness," a name so old that no one knew the reason for it. Like
Moriah, it
may have descended from an altar-crowned hill of
24
sacrifice.

Head hair comes in for special attention in both West and East. Priests
"
who wish to conserve their vitality, to "cut off the outflows, to use a
Buddhist term, shave it off. His long hair was the repository of the Biblical
Samson 's energy. So is the Sikh s. The Indian god Shiva, who is the
personalized representation of the creative and sexual energy of the
universe, is always represented as having a mass of long, tangled, piled-

up hair on his head. Yogis who are his devotees imitate their divine pattern
Abundant hair represents the abundance of divine
in this respect.

energy, in the same way as Shiva 's erect phallus. [EJven today the . . .

ordinary Indian believes that the way to avoid "catching cold" and stay
(i.e., preserve his vital energy) is to wrap up his head, even
healthy if the

rest of the body is practically naked. Hence the turban. 2S

Tantric sadhakas who worshipped hairy Shiva may have been

the original "Sadducees" of the Bible. A related sect of hermits known
as Nazarites or Nazarenes were distinguished like sadhakas by their
never-cut hair, a tradition partly preserved by the uncut ear-locks of the
orthodox Jew. The law of the Oriental holy hermit appears in the
Bible: "He be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head
shall

grow" (Numbers 6:5). But Christians said a man having long hair
was shameful (1 Corinthians 1 1:14).
An opposing myth, relating virility to baldness, was promulgated
by Hippocrates, possibly because he was himself subject to hair loss.
He said bald men are "of an inflammatory habit; and the plasma in their
head being agitated and heated by salacity, coming to the epidermis
26
withers the roots of the hair causing it to fall off." Thanks to

Hippocrates, the mythic relationship between baldness and sexual

potency has lasted up to the present day.
Another durable myth claimed a witch's hair would become a
serpent when buried or placed in water, especially if the hair was
27
plucked while the witch was menstruating. This was another branch
from the root of Gorgon mythology, where the female head with
serpent-hair represented "wisdom" and warned would-be trespassers of
the menstrual taboo.
Hair was so universally associated with paganism that British
churches used to command men to shear their hair and beards on
Maunday Thursday, the day before Good Friday, so they would be

370
 honest" (i.e., "Christian") for Easter. Consequently this day is Hakkni Panki
in old writings as Shear 28
[escribed Thursday. Halloween
1. Frazer, G.B., 8. 2. Book of the Dead,
54, 400. 3. Budge, D.N., 250.
4. Budge, G.E. 1,443. 5. Lindsay, O. A., 131.
[Link],AT 67
7. Wedeck, 152,78. 8. Frazer, G.B., 273. 9. Summers, V 225*
10. Cavendish, P.E., 95. Graves, W.G., 396. 12. Frazer
1 1 .
789 GB
13. Campbell, CM., 595. 14. Coulton, 253. 15. de
Lys, 153.
16. Leland, 134. 1 7. Leland, 1 60. 18.
Trigg, 58. 19. Hazlitt, 341.
20. Homer, Odyssey, 148. 21. Graves, GM.
2, 358. 22. Lindsay, O.A 239
23. de Lys, 374. 24. Dumezil, 422. 25. Rawson, E.A., 25
26. Knight, S.L., 79. 27. Briffault 2, 662. 28. Hazlitt, 541

iakkni Panki

Hfypsy word
for trickery, practiced by gypsies on the
non-gypsy folk to
money
leal and other necessities from them. A
corruption of the
lomany term led to the modern "hanky-panky." See Gypsies. '

1. Leland, 211.

laligmonath
Holy Month," the month of birth, ninth month of the Saxon lunar
plendar
which was based on female biological cycles.

lalja
Jothic name for Hel, Goddess of the underworld, also known as
elga, Helle, Holle, etc. This was the name used to translate Infernus
early translations of the Latin Bible.

lalka

ufi word for the

magic circle, corresponding to the Trantric chakra.
Tie circle of worship, alternating men and women, is called "the basic
nit and very heart of active Sufism." Dancing, worshipping, and
1

ther ritual activities performed in a circle of men and women marked

estern paganism also, as shown by references to circles or rings of
iries, witches, mummers, and Maypole dancers. Circles generally
cpressed cyclic religions; lines, like the rows of pews in a Christian
lurch, expressed patriarchal linearity of ideas.
1. Shah, 21.

lalloween
II Souls' or All Hallows' Day (November 1) was the Christian
jrsion of Samhain, the Celtic feast of the dead, named for the Aryan

371
Ha, Lord of Death, Samana, "the Leveller," or the Grim Reaper, leader
of ancestral ghosts. According to the pagan lunar calendar, festivals wen
HiMHi^HM celebrated on the "eve" rather than the day. Therefore Halloween or
All Hallows' Eve was the original festival, later displaced to the follow-
ing day. The Irish used to call the holy night the Vigil of Saman.
Churchmen described it as a night of magic charms and divinations,
reading the future with witches' mirrors and nutshell ashes, ducking
for apples in tubs of water (representing soul-symbols in the Cauldron o
Regeneration), and other objectionable rites. Even today it is said that
a girl who peels an apple before a mirror on Halloween will see the

image of her future husband in the glass. 1 Christian authorities wrote

of Halloween, "Many other superstitious ceremonies, the remains of
Druidism, are observed on this holiday, which will never be eradicat-
ed while the name of Saman is permitted to remain." 2 The name of the
pagan deity remains in the Bible as Samuel, from the Semitic

Sammael, the same underworld god.

Of course the original divinations were oracular utterances by the
ancestral dead, who came up from their tombs on Halloween,
sometimes bringing gifts to the children of their living descendants. In
Sicilian Halloween tradition, "the dead relations have become the

good fairies of the little ones." 5 Similar customs are observed at

Christmas.
In Lithuania, the last European country to accept Christianity, the

pagans celebrated their New Year feast at Halloween, sacrificing

domestic animals to their god Zimiennik (Samanik; Samana). Their

prayer ran, "Accept our burnt sacrifice, Zimiennik, and kindly O

4
partake thereof." If the lord of the underworld accepted the offering or
behalf of all the dead, the spirits were satisfied and would refrain from
doing harm. If not adequately propitiated, they might descend on the
world as vengeful ghosts, led by demons and "witches" (priestesses)
who summoned them. The witches and ghosts are still associated with
Halloween, together with such soul-symbols as owls, bats, and cats.
The pagan idea used to be that crucial joints between the seasons
opened cracks in the fabric of space-time, allowing contact between

the ghostworld and the mortal one.

1. de Lys, 365. 2. Hazlitt, 340. 3. Miles, 192. 4. Miles, 195.

Halo
Christian symbol of apotheosis deification, or canonization taken
from the Eleusinian Mysteries, where the savior-god was deified at the

Haloa, Festival of the

1
Threshing-Floor (the halos).
The god was variously named Dionysus, Triptolemus, or Iasus.
He represented the grain. At his birth, he was laid in a manger. He

372
Lvas sacrificed, buried, and resurrected: the sequence
representing har- Hannah
lest, re-planting, and new growth. His flesh and blood were
Hapi
bonsumed by
Demeter.
his worshippers in the form of bread and wine. See _^^^__^_^
^^^^^^^^m
The deity was identified with the daily-reborn sun, so the halo was
tlso a solar
symbol, as in Egypt. In Christian hagiography it was
iometimes known as the aura, "circle of gold," which art
Byzantine
Ihowed as a
golden disc rather awkwardly attached at an angle to the
back of the head. Still another variant was based on the Tantric idea of
he "thousand-petaled lotus of light" sprouting from the head of the
Completely enlightened sage. It was called the nimbus or "cloud" of
ight, a symbol of divinity long before there were Christian deities or
2
aints.

1. Potter & Sargent, 185. 2. Budge, A.T., 351.

Hannah
Jiblical version of the Anatolian
Grandmother-goddess Hannahanna,
>r Anna. Hittites called her Hwanhwanar, the Nether
Upsurge, married
o a sacred king at the Puruli festival, shortly before he was sent down
nto her Abyss to become the new Lord of Death. 1

Hannah's biblical son bore the same name as the Lord of Death,
lama-El, Sammael or Samuel, from Samana, a Hindu title of the
eath-god Yama as Conductor of Souls. 2
In Old Iranian, a clan matriarch was the hana, "grandmother."
limilarly, the Mother of the
mother was worshipped through-
virgin
ut the Middle East under such names as Hannah, Anna, Nana,
5
n-anna, or "Queen Nana, the Creatress." In Christian tradition she
vas Anna, the Grandmother of God. 4 Mother of the
virgin Mary was
tona or Hannah, just as Anatolian Hannahanna was the mother of
lie
virgin Mari. Sometimes her virgin aspect was named Inaras, who
also a death-goddess. She annually imprisoned the sacred
f/as
king in
temple tower, mated with him, then killed him. (See Anne, Saint.)
5

[Link],7. 2. Lzrousse, 346. 3. Stone, 219. 4. Graves, W.G., 410.

5. Hooke, M.E.M., 98-99.

lapi
krchaic deity of the Nile, represented as masculine but having

endulous female breasts and a large pregnant belly. Ancestral pre-

ynastic tribes of Egypt were said to be Hapi's children, therefore

lapi was originally a form of the Great Goddess. Like most of the
1
Idest Oriental divinities, "he" was associated with the yonic lotus.
1. Lamusse, 36, 38.

373
Har Har
Hathor
Ishtar as the patroness of temple prostitutes or harines was known as
the Great Goddess Har. Like Greek horae, Persian houris, and other
sacred Aarlots, her priestesses occupied the part of the temple that
came to be called Harem, the Sanctuary. Kings had to prove 1
their
var. Harmonia hence their right to rule, by impregnating the harines, until it
virility,

became a custom to let certain priests take over this duty. (See

Prostitution.)
From the root Aarcame Hara, Hebrew for both a holy mountain
and a pregnant belly; Hariti or Haraiti, the "Lofty Mountain" of
paradise in both pre-Vedic Dravidian and Old Iranian cosmology; and
Harmonia, a "daughter of Aphrodite," a bringer of peace, one of the
functions of the holy harlot. Harmonia was mythologized as an ancient

queen of Boeotia, married to Cadmus, whose name in Phoenician

was kedem, "the Oriental." 2 When Cadmus and Harmonia died and
went to paradise, they were both transformed into serpents. 3 Probably
they were assimilated to the male-and-female, perpetually entwined
serpents of the Hermetic caduceus, whose meaning was "Life." (See
Serpent.)
1. /tor. &Bab. Lit, 170; Briffault 2, 320. 2. Massa, 40. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 199.

Harpies
Female death-spirits from Mount Dicte, home of the Cretan God-
dess, embodied in carrion birds, probably vultures. They had bird bodies
with women's heads and breasts, suggesting the Minoan style of
funerary priestesses in feather costumes with bare necks and bosoms.
Their name meant "snatchers" or "pluckers," perhaps related to
harp in funerary music, since a harp is played with
their use of the

plucking motions. Patriarchal Hellenic myth made the Harpies

1

obnoxious monsters, but they seem to have been once the same as
dakinis or Valkyries. Christian iconography continued to picture
winged angels, who carried souls to heaven, as harp players.

1. Graves, G.M. 1,128; 2, 230.

Hathor
Egyptian Mother of the Gods and Queen of Heaven, originally Het-
Hert, "the House (or Womb) Above"; later Hat-Hor, "the House (or
Womb) of Horus." Hathor was "the mother of every god and

goddess." She "brought forth in primeval time herself, never having

been created." In the earliest dynasties, her name was a component
of all royal Egyptian names, indicating the archaic matrilineal queenship:
1
based on successive incarnations of her spirit.
Hathor was worshipped in Israel in the 1 1th century b.c. at her

374
 of Hazor, which the Old Testament claims Joshua Heart
[wn holy city
1 1:13,
21). The Sinai Tablets show that Hebrew
[estroyed (Joshua
in the Egyptian mines of Sinai about 1 500 B.C.
porkers worshipped _^^^^^^^^^^
Hathor, whom they identified with the Lady of Byblos, Astarte. 2
Some sources said there were seven Hathors: the
Holy Midwives
ssociated with the seven heavenly spheres. They gave each Egyptian
Seven souls at birth. Sevenfold Hathor entered medieval myth as the

dry godmother(s) and Mother Goose, as well as the Mother of the

lun King, the Lady of the Lake, and the Huntress.
In Upper Egypt, Hathor was Sati or Satis, She of the Two River-
lanks, source of the Nile. 3 Her Destroyer aspect was a lion-headed
iuntress, the Sphinx, sometimes called Sekhmet or Sakhmis, "the
Like Kali, she drank the blood of gods and men.
j'owerful."
1.
Budge, G.E. 1, 92-93, 428, 431. 2. Albright, 96, 1%. 3. Erman, 4.

Heart
lb was the Egyptian word for heart-soul, most important of the
even souls bestowed by the seven birth-goddesses (Hathors). The ab
'as the soul that would be weighed in the balances of Maat after
leath, in her underground Hall of Judgment, to see if it was too heavy
rith sins to balance her Feather of Truth. The ab was most

nportant because it was the central blood-soul emanating from the

jsence of the mother.
The maxim that a pregnant woman carries her child "under her
Heart"began with the Egyptians, who believed menstrual blood that
uade the child's life descended from the mother's heart to her womb,
maternal heart, then, was the source of the child's life, which
[he
|
as why a mother called her child "heart's blood." The Book of the

[|)ead
addressed prayers to "My heart of my mother. heart of . . .
My
1
ansformations," meaning the source of rebirths.
Significantly, the meaning of the Egyptian word for the mother-
iven heart was reversed in Hebrew; ab was re-defined as "father."

The Egyptian ab was a dancing figure, and

hieroglyphic sign for as

verb it meant "to dance." 2 This referred to the mystic dance of life
ring on inside the body the heartbeat. The same mystic symbol in
idia was the Dance of Shiva, who was supposed to dwell at the

Kiting heart of thecosmos within the world-body of Kali. Shiva went

irough certain cycles when he was temporarily dead, known as
hava the Corpse, and his dance ceased until his Mother resurrected
im again. Similarly, the Egyptian god Osiris passed through a death
base before the Goddess brought him back to life. In this phase he was
lown as the Still-Heart.'

mummies, Osiris's mummy received a new ab, "heart

Like other
nulet," always made of red stone and placed in the mummy's breast
4
bring back vitality. The custom of removing the mummy's real heart

375
Heart
probably dated back to primitive ritual offerings of human hearts to
the Goddess, who was addressed. in some archaic prayers as "swallower
5
of hearts." As always, the primitive theory was that what a deity gave
must be returned at least in part, to keep up the deity's energy to give
more. The same kind of sacrifices took place on the sacred pyramids
of Mexico. Victims identified with the dying god were cut open quickly,
so the heart could be offered still alive and "dancing." The Egyptian
word ab also meant an offering as well as a heart, suggesting that at
some point in Egyptian history the sacrificial victims were deprived of
their hearts. 6 Juvenal said the Egyptians offered human sacrifices and
ate human flesh. The Egyptian Goddess took an underworld form as
a monster Ab-She, "She Who Eats Hearts." 7 The old texts said the
Goddess devoured what she created, after the manner of Kali, and
Earth, and Time, and Fate: "she taketh possession of hearts, she
swalloweth." 8

Up to the present century, Bantu witches remembered Egyptian

ideas well enough to believe they could cast a death spell by
symbolically eating the intended victim's "heart life," a concept very lik<

the Egyptian ab. 9 English usage date back to the

Many phrases still in

Egyptian idea of the heart as the center of the self, the soul, or the
emotions. One is heavy-hearted or light-hearted; hope brings "new
heart"; grief makes the heart ache or break; love steals the heart away, or

makes the heart absence makes the heart grow fonder; hearts
full;

may be given, or taken, or withered, or gladdened; hearts may be warm

or cold, hard or soft.

So vital was the idea of the heartbeat in Oriental religions that the

very center of the universe was placed "within the heart" by Tantric
10
sages. This place was Chidambaram, where Shiva danced to the basic
rhythm of eternity. The sages said: "Sound (nada) represents the
State of Power. It is experienced by the yogi when he plunges deep into
himself. It is made manifest in the heartbeat. And since the micro-
cosm is
finally identical with the macrocosm, when the yogi hears the
Nada, this Sound of Power, he is listening to the heartbeat of the
11
Absolute."
In this expression of the basic mystical idea that deity is within the
human being, the sages in effect admitted that man creates God. The
heartbeat was also said to establish the fundamental tempo for poetry,

song, music, and dance.

Acts of John The Tantric idea of the heart's dance surfaced in early Gnostic
A famous Gnostic text,
when Jesus was equated with the dancing god-within. In
Christianity, |
never entirely
the Acts ofJohn, Jesus said to his followers: "To the Universe belongs
suppressed although the
orthodox church the dancer. He who does not dance does not know what happens.
repeatedly denounced it Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in Me who am speaking. . . .
\

through the You who dance, consider what do, for yours this passion of Man
I is

centuries for its

which I am to suffer."
n
heretical assertion

that, as a deity, Jesus

Though the church outlawed ecclesiastical dancing early in the ,

could not actually die Christian era, the theme of the dancing god within the heart was not
on the cross. forgotten. Eventually it led to the concept of the Sacred Heart, adopted

376
 s an article of Catholic faith late in the 1 7th century. An
oddly Hebe
bminine symbolism was attached to this re-working of the heart-soul
idea. Jesus's divinity was "the moon dwelling in the heart." His ^^^^^^^^^^^
iacred Heart was described by all the metaphors attached to the ancient
llother-heart: "as 'the temple in which dwells the life of the world,'
b a rose, a cup, a treasure, a spring, as the furnace of divine love ... as a

jridal
chamber." B
The church claimed that the Sacred Heart began with the divine

jisionof St. Margaret Marie Alacoque in 1675. However, the idea

las not original with her. An alchemical textbook published 1 1 years

jefore
her birth depicted the Sacred Heart encircled by a crown of
horns. Several centuries earlier, it was shown on a stained-glass window
f the Convent des Cordeliers on a Jacobin cloister wall; on
in Paris;

J window of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas; and in four places of

he Carmelite church of St. Michael. Some of these "certainly
elonged to the 1 5th and 16th centuries." H And of course, the concept
f the divine heart-soul at the core of the living world that is,

hiva's Sacred Heart, or Osiris's belonged to the millenia, long before

here was a Christian church.
1 Book of the Dead, 454. 2. Budge, E.L., 44. 3. Book of the Dead, 410.
.

4. Budge, AT., 138. 5. Book of the Dead, 416-18. 6. Budge, E.L.,44, 71.
7. Budge, G.E. 1, 232. 8. Neumann, G.M., 161-62. 9. Summers, H.W., 163.

10. Ross, 32. [Link],205. 12. Pagels,74. 13. Jung & von Franz, 100.

[Link],216.

lebe
'irgin form of Hera, the Greek Mother of the Gods; a variant of
!ve, who was Hebat in Anatolia, Heveh or Hawwa in Mesopotamia,
Ivov in Persia. Greek myths said Hebe was cupbearer to the gods,

ispenser of their ambrosia of immortality. Without her, the gods

would
row old and die, the same doom that threatened the Norse gods
1
'hen they lost Freya.
Like Eve, in her Mother aspect Hebe governed the Tree of Life
'ith its magic apples, source of the gods' everlasting life, which they
mankind (Genesis Heroes like Heracles
alously guarded from 3:22).
ould become immortal gods by marrying Hebe and living in her
arden of paradise, where they could feed on the apples of the holy
ee. Such myths show that Hebe was only Hera virginized, for Hera
2

tas owner of the serpent-guarded apple tree in the far-western

the

aradise, known to the Greeks as the garden of the Hesperides.

After Hellenic Greeks introduced a social system of patriarchy and
lie fashion of romantic-homosexual love, Father Zeus evicted Hebe
torn her traditional post and replaced her with his own male concubine,
the Youth,
Janymede. Thus the Virgin Goddess was supplanted by
the stars as
gods' new cupbearer, taken to heaven and dwelling
in
pe
constellation Aquarius. 5
pe
[Link],249. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 203. 3. Graves, G.M. 1, 116.

377
Hecabe Hecabe
Hecate
Matriarchal queen of Troy, embodying the spirit of the Moon-

goddess Hecate, whose name was the same as her own. Hecabe's
"daughters" (priestesses) had divinatory powers, and the ability to cast
spells, as shown by the legend of Cassandra. Hecabe herself laid
var. Hecuba
effective curses. When captured by her enemies, she transformed
herself into Hecate's totemic shape, a black bitch named Maera, Mara,
or Moera, the Destroying Fate. 1 The wanderings of Odysseus were
on him; he was preserved from
attributable to the curse of exile she laid

death only the by the counter-spell of his wife the Goddess Penelope.
1. Graves, CM. 2, 342.

Hecate
One of the oldest Greek versions of the trinitarian Goddess, Hecate
was derived from the Egyptian midwife-goddess Heqit, Heket, or
Hekat, who in turn evolved from the heq or tribal matriarch of pre-
dynastic Egypt: a wise-woman, in command of all the hekau or
"mother's Words of Power." '

As a heavenly midwife amalgamating the Seven Hathors of the

2
birth-chamber, Heqit delivered the sun god every morning. Her
totem was the frog, symbol of the fetus; and this animal was still sacred
to her four thousand years later when she became the Christians'

"queen of witches."
In Greece, Hecate was one of many names for the original

feminine trinity, ruling heaven, earth, and the underworld. Hellenes

tended to emphasize her Crone or underworld aspect, but continued to

worship her at places where three roads met, especially in rites of

magic, divination, or consultation with the dead. Her images guarded
3

three-way crossroads for many centuries; thus she was Hecate Trevia,
"Hecate of the Three Ways." Offerings were left at her roadside shrines
on nights of the full moon. As a deity of magic and prophecy she was
invoked by those who set out on journeys, like the biblical king of

Babylon, who "stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ]

ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he consulted with

images" (Ezekiel 21:21).

Hecate was called "most lovely one," a title of the moon. 4 Like all i

other forms of the Triple Goddess, she was associated with the moon ]
in all three of her aspects. Some said she was Hecate Selene, the Moon,
inheaven; Artemis the Huntress on earth; and Persephone the
Destroyer in the underworld. Ancient texts referred to her as Hecate
5
i

Selene the Far-Shooting Moon, mother of Dionysus though Dio-

nysus was also the son of Persephone, which shows that Hecate and
6
Persephone were often confused with one another. Sometimes
Hecate was considered identical with Diana Ilithyia, the Moon-goddess \

as protectress of parturient women. Sometimes she was part of the

378
Dueen-of-Heaven trinity, Hebe the Virgin, Hera the Mother, Hecate Hecatomb
[he
Crone. Porphyry wrote: Heill

The moon is Hecate, the symbol ofher varying phases. [HJer power . . .

appears in three forms, having as symbol of the new moon the figure in
the white robe and golden sandals, and torches lighted; the basket which
she bears when she has mounted high is the symbol of the cultivation of
Porphyry (ca. 234-305
the crops which she made to grow up according to the increase ofher
a.d.) Neoplatonist
7
light.
philosopher, scholar,
and writer; biographer
Late Hellenic writers devised a rather labored explanation for
of Plotinus; an
Hecate's journey from the sky to the underworld, originally a mythic
opponent of the
rietaphor for the moon's setting. Hecate was in the house of a Christian church,
woman in childbirth. The gods, fearing magical contagion from this, which eventually
Acheron to wash away the traces of birth- destroyed most of his
llunged her into the river
books.
nana. The river carried Hecate underground, where she married
Hades. This was a myth derived from patriarchal anxieties about
lontact with childbearing women, demonstrated especially in the Bible

JLeviticus 12:5).
Ritual bathing of mother and child in a sacred river

Ifter the lying-in period probably gave rise to the story of Hecate's river-

burney.
During the early Middle Ages, Hecate became known as Queen
\{ the Ghostworld, or Queen of Witches. She was especially diabo-
Ized by Catholic authorities who said the people most dangerous to the

pith
were precisely those whom Hecate patronized: the midwives. 8
Her ancient threefold power was copied, however, by priestly writers
l/ho reassigned it to their own deity: "The threefold power of Christ,
9
lamely in Heaven, in earth, and in Hell."

1. Budge, E.M., 196; G.E. 2, 300. 2. Larousse, 38. 3. Graves, G.M 1, 124.
4. Angus, 173. 5. Wedeck, 203. 6. Graves, G.M. 2, 393. 7. Briffault 2, 605.
8. Kramer & Sprenger, 66. 9. de Voragine, 776.

Hecatomb
Jacrificial
festival involving the offering of one hundred victims to
lecate. The later, extended meaning was any slaughter of a group of
ne hundred. Most Middle-Eastern gods (including Yahweh) re-

sived "hecatombs" on special occasions.

kill

-iterally, "virility," the divine force without which Norse kings

ddn't rule. A king's virility was periodically tested, and when it

aned, he was usually killed and replaced. When

King Fjolnir of
weden "became impotent," he was drowned in a vat of mead, the
Dmmon euphemism for the sacred cauldron. A similar custom 1

isposed of biblical kings, like David, who died very soon

after the

laiden Abishag proved him impotent (1 Kings 1:4).

379
Heirmarmene j he Cerne Giant of Dorset was said to represent the Saxon god
e

^^^h Heill, personification of phallic spirit, as

The church
the downfall of this
claimed St.
shown by his erect penis.

Augustine built Cerne Abbey to commemorate

lusty "devil," but it seems the shrine was dedi-
cated to Heill in the first place, and simply taken over by Christian
monks. 2
1. Turville-Petre, 1 19, 191. 2. Johnson, 326.

Heimarmene
Pythagorean name for the Goddess of Allotted Fate, a trinity with
Ananke and Dike. She was another philosophical transformation of the

Triple Goddess.

Heimdall
Archaic Norse god born of the sea, called "king" (rig), and charged
likethe Christian doomsday angel with the duty of sounding the Last

Trump at doomsday on his ringing horn (Gjallarhom)} By virtue of

his sacred marriage with all three persons of Mother Earth's trinity,
Heimdall was also the father of the castes.

1. Turville-Petre, 154.

var. Hekau Heka

Egyptian "Words of Power," evolved by primitive matriarchs under
the birth-goddess Hekat or Heqit (Greek Hecate). In Egyptian salva-

tion-mysteries, rote learning of hekau was necessary to gain admission

to various areas of the after-world. Also useful were amulets like the
Hekat, a uterine "ark" named after the Goddess. See Ship.

Hel
Norse Queen of the Underworld, whose name became the English
"hell." Dead heroes who went to the house of Hel were known as
3
Helleder, "Hel's men." Sometimes they were ancestral ghosts
known as Hella cunni, "kinsmen of Hel," corrupted in the medieval
mystery play to Harlequin, lover of Columbine the Dove-maiden,
who was another version of the Goddess. 4 The Celtic Lord of Death,
wearer of the apex or pointed tiara of divinity, bore the title of
Helman. 5
The early "hell" seems to have been a uterine shrine or sacred
6
cave of rebirth, denoted by the Norse hellir. The notion of Hel as a
cauldron-womb filled with purgative fire may have been related to the
idea of the volcanic Mother-mountain (Latin caldera). In the Pacific,

380
Mother Hell or Mother Death was often a fire-mountain entered by Hel
way of a sacred cave. The Hawaiian volcano-goddess Pele, like Hel,
kept souls of the dead in regenerative fire. Pele and Hel may have had
linguistic connections, as p and h may be interchanged in Indo-
European languages. In Malekula, the dead live in a volcano under the
Goddess'srule: "Abiding in that fire is bliss; there is no fear of
being In various dialects
consumed." Japan's sacred volcano was named for the fire-goddess Fuji,
Hel was Holle, Halja,
"Grandmother" or "Ancestress." 7 Similarly, Hel was a fire-mountain Hild, Helga, Holde,
according to German legend; the emperor Theodoric became immortal Helle, Ella, or Hellenia.

by entering her womb through a volcano. 8 Helgo, Heligoland,

TheInfernus of classical paganism contributed to the Christian Helsinki, Hollingstedt,
Holderness,
amalgam of images of Hel's land. Infernus meant an oven in the Holstein, and Holland
earth; an old Roman proverb said "the oven is the mother." Roman were a few of the
ovens and bakeries were associated with temples of the Goddess, many place names
whose harlot-priestesses were often called Ladies of Bread. Their orgies derived from her.
She was the usual tomb-
were called Fornacalia, "oven-feasts," from fornix, the "oven" which
9
womb of rebirth after
gave us both "furnace" and "fornicate." Naturally, Christian authori- death. Iceland still has a
ties maintained that tasting the sacred fire of eternity through traditional "home of
"fornication" was a sin. the dead" in Helgafell

Medieval legends spoke of Hel as Brunnhilde, "Burning Hel," or Hel's Hill. In1

also

the name of a leader of the Valkyries, otherwise known as Hild the Germany, "Dame
Holle's Well" was
10
Avenger. Another of her names was Matabrune, "Burning Mother," called the source of all

who gave birth to King Oriant, a version of the Oriental sun god born the children on
at dawn from the bowels of the earth.
11 earth. 2

Magic fire surrounding the Valkyrie's castle was an allegory of

cremation through which a hero passed enroute to Hel. Crema-
fire,

tion of the dead was later forbidden by the Christian church, on the
theory that cremation destroyed the body and prevented "resurrec-
tion of the flesh" according to the orthodox dogma. The more practical
reason for outlawing cremation was that, as a pagan ceremony, it

12
brought no revenue to the church. It was profitable, however, to
cremate witches while they still lived; inflated charges were made for
B
every rope, nail, and stick of wood.
Some myths suggest that Hel was originally envisioned as not fiery
but dark: a Crone-goddess like Black Kali, eater of the dead. As the
Nether Moon, she was called Nehellenia. Her ancient altars were found
in Holland at the mouths of the Rhine. 14 Vases and statues from her
15
shrines were discovered in Zealand in 1646. Sometimes, her under-
world was not hot but ice cold, as serving as a model for Dante's
if

innermost circle of the Inferno. The cold, dark Queen of Shades was
Nef-Hel or Nifl.
Hel was supreme and inescapable, seizing even gods in her
embrace. The Swedes said Odin the Heavenly Father was buried in a

barrow known as Hel's Mount. 16 Because she was associated with

mountains, Hel sometimes merged with Mother Freya. A fate-
spinning Goddess called Hel of the Air was worshipped on
the
17
Luftelberg. She was simultaneously diabolized as feminine counter-
part of the Prince of the Power of the Air (Odin-Satan) who led the

381
Helen of Troy Wild Hunt. Tenth-century witchcraft texts said the heathen women
rode forth under the leadership of "the witch Holda." 18

^^^^^^^^^^^^ Like her Greek twin Hecate, Hel sometimes wore all three faces oi

the Triple Goddess. The German poem Gudrun represented her as

the ruler of Holland, incarnate in three virgins living in a mystic cave:

Hild, princess of Isenland, Hilde, princess of India, and Hildburg,

princess of Portugal. All three resembled mermaids or wood nymphs.
The legendary Prince Hagen married all three Hels, after the usual
19
ritual combat with an elder king.
Ballads and sagas depicting such encounters between mortal men
and supernatural women were collectively described as "hellish"
20
that is, hellig, medieval Danish for "holy."

Pliny said all the inhabitants of "Scatinavia" (Scandinavia) were

children of Mother Hel, thus they were called Helleviones. 21 They
considered their Goddess incarnate especially in elder trees, which were
still called Hel-trees or elven-trees in the Middle Ages. Danish

peasants prayed at elder trees to the Hyldemoer, that is, Hel-mother, or

Elder-mother. 22
Hel's ancient connection with fertility was still evident in her
medieval titles, Lady Abundia or
Satia (abundance, satiety). In this

guise she led the "ladies of the night" called Hellequins, who rode forth
to receive offerings of food and drink from common folk, promising

in return to bring prosperity on the house. 23 Apparently these were not

mere legends but real women, carrying on the Goddess's nocturnal
Hel was despised by the church, but the common people seem
festivals.

to have thought her more benevolent than otherwise. Her under-

world was reached by crossing a river, like the Greek Styx; the river was
Gjoll, "Wailing." On the bridge that crossed it stood the Goddess's

emanation, Modgudr (Good Mother), ready like the Orphic Perseph-

24
one to greet the deceased and see him safely into eternity.
Northern shamans believed they could put on the Helkappe, a
magic mask or Hel-met, which would render them invisible like
ghosts, and enable them to visit the underworld and return to earth
again without dying. The Helkappe seems to have represented the
shamanic trance, in which death and resurrection were experienced as a

vision. See Mask.

I. Turville-Petre, 55. 2. Rank, 73. 3. Steenstrup, 149. 4. Potter &

Sargent, 52, 73.
5. Knight, D.W.P., 78. 6. Wainwright, 1 13. 7. Campbell, P.M., 336, 450.
8. Neumann, G.M., 286. 10. Oxenstierna, 191.
Borchardt, 242. 9.
Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 579. 12. Pepper
I I. &
Wilcock, 226. 13. Robbins, 1 1 1-13.
[Link], 138. 15. Johnson, 21 1-12; Hays, 145. 16. Johnson, 165.
[Link],L.R.,99. 18. [Link], 81. 19. Guerber, L.M.A., 23-25.
20. Steenstrup, 186. 21. Ramsay, 23. 22. Keightley, 93. 23. J.B. Russell, 146.
24. Branston,91.

Helen of Troy
Incarnation of the Virgin Moon-goddess, daughter of Queen Hecu-

ba, or Hecate, who embodied the Crone. Helen was also called Helle or

382
I Selene. She was worshipped as an orgiastic deity at the Spartan Helice

|
festival Helenephoria, featuring sexual symbols carried in a special Hell
1
I fetish-basket, the helene. ^^^^^^^^^^^
Trojan Helen married Menelaus, "Moon-king," who was prom-
ised immortality because he made a sacred marriage. 2 However,
I Helen left him and went home with her new Trojan lover Paris, so
i
Menelaus both his immortality and the Trojan fiefs that Helen's
lost

"matrimony" brought. He sailed with his armies to get her back, and
I
thiswas the start of the legendary Trojan War which pitted patriar-
3
chal Greeks against matriarchal Trojans.
As Elen, Elaine, or Hel-Aine, the same Moon-virgin became the
|
queen of pagan Britain, a "Lily Maid" who made the first alliances
with emperors of Rome. (See Elaine.) The oldest British histories said
the first British king was a Trojan named Brutus, Helen's relative. 4
After Troy fell, he sailedwest to the island of Albion and founded a city,
New Troy, later renamed Lugdunum (London) after his descendant,
the god Lug. 5
1. Graves, CM. 1, 208-9. 2. Knight, S.L., 125. 3. Graves, CM. 2, 276.
4. Briffault 3, 431. 5. Guerber, L.M.A., 309.

lice

^illow," a title of Hecate in her virgin form as the new moon and
Helicon or "willow-stream" surrounding the Mountain of the
ss. Like Artemis, Helice the Willow-maid was associated with

th the moon and Ursa Major, eternally circling the pole, known as
slice's Axle. Witches thought
1
a willow wand a microcosmic axis

indi. See Willow.

1. Lindsay, O.A., 251.

II

lough Christian theology gave its underworld the name of the

idess Hel, it was quite a different place from her womb of regenera-
. The ancients didn't view the underworld as primarily a place of
lishment. It was dark, mysterious, and awesome, but not the vast

ire chamber Christians made of it.

Greeks called the underworld Erebus, Hades, or Tartarus, from
"tortoise" incarnation of Vishnu, who was supposed to support
|
earth in the form of a tortoise. Shades of the dead dwelling in
arus endured no torment other than the general cheerlessness of
lg dead. Lacking blood, shadows, voices, and vital energy, they
ted yearningly for rebirth.
Like the realms of earth and heaven, the underworld had its social
lierarchy. Queen Persephone or Hecate, her consort Pluto or Hades,
uled magistrates like Aeacus, Rhadamanthys, and Minos, who were

383
 He"
wizard-kings on earth. There were
spirits like Hypnos (Sleep),

Morpheus (Dreams), and Thanatos (Death). Sometimes, as in 1

the
h^^^hh medieval vision of fairyland, the underworld was a place of sensual

delight. In the Elysian Fields, souls of the enlightened ones were tende

by the Goddess's divine nymphs.

Like the Egyptian nether god, Seker or Amen, Hades was "the
unseen one" the ubiquitous Hidden God in his intra-uterine,

sleeping, or dead Black Sun phase. Lord of the Underworld or Lord of

Death, he was also a phallic deity, holding the "key" to the nether
yonic gate, as his heavenly counterpart Petra (Peter) held the key to th
Pearly Gate of Celestial Aphrodite. The nether god was supposed to
deposit his semen in rocks, where it solidified into precious gems, a
western version of the Jewel in the Lotus. Thus he was Lord of
Riches also. Romans called Hades by the name of Dis, short for Dives,
"the rich god." 2 Most savior-gods who "harrowed hell," or plowed
the earth-womb, were credited with the power to reveal buried treasure
a 5
power by the Christian devil.
inherited

Egyptians called theunderworld Amenti, Khert-Neter, Neter-

Khertet, or the Tuat. It was both a hell and a paradise, a place of
judgment and rebirth. Egyptian religion didn't emphasize punishment
came to save humanity not from
for sin. Egypt's savior Osiris

everlasting torture, butfrom death. 4 Egyptians feared death, which thej

called an "abomination," and devoted most of their religious efforts
5
to avoiding it.

Egyptian pictures of "the wicked" being destroyed in underworld

'

fire-pits were interpreted by Christians as torments of damned souls.

However, these "wicked" were not necessarily human. They were
supernatural enemies of the sun god: spirits of darkness, mist, storm.
The fire-pits seem to have represented the burning clouds of sunrise
and sunset. Even when victims were human, their burning was not
eternal.

Egyptians did not believe in purgatory or everlasting punishment. . . .

[T]he wicked were slaughtered daily and their bodies consumed by fire,
but each day brought its own supply of these, and thus the avenging gods
were kept busy daily, and the fire-pits were filled with victims daily.
There is no evidence in the texts that the Egyptians thought the burning
of the same victims could go on forever. 6

The idea of eternal torture in hell arose with ascetic patriarchal

religions like that of Zoroastrian [Link] preoccupation with

pain stood in contrast to the matriarchies' preoccupation with plea-
sure, a psychic outgrowth of the severities of the ascetic life. There is
reason to believe hell's nastier torments were invented primarily to
intimidate women into obeying new patriarchal laws.
Zoroastrian priests insisted women who were unfaithful to their
husbands would go to hell and have their breasts torn open with iron
combs. Women who scolded would be forced to lick hot stoves with
j

their tongues. Women who showed disloyalty to men would be hung

up by one leg, while scorpions, snakes, ants, and worms dug their way ir.

384
 i
and out of their bodies.
7
A similar vision inspired Grunewald's Hell

|
medieval picture of the hellish torments in store for those who commit-
8
ted the crime of loving. But not even the Persians supposed the
^^^^^-i^^-^_
Itorments of hell would go on forever. That refinement of
cruelty was
(left to the Christians.

The Jews adopted the

Persians' hell as a place for
punishing the
(majority
of women, judged hopelessly unworthy of the Father-god's
jheaven.
Men could be consigned to hell for holding too much unneces-
conversation with their wives, or for taking feminine advice. 9
sary
female creation-river Gihon was converted into Gehenna, the
(The
whose name was sometimes applied to the
Jewish hell's river of fire,
iwhole land. The kingdom of Gehenna was 60 times as large as the
world. Each of its "palaces" had 6000 "houses," and each house had
and gall awaiting the sinner. Prince of Gehenna was
pOOO vessels of fire
(Arsiel, copied from the Chaldean "Black Sun" Aciel, the negative

deity corresponding to the god of light in the celestial realm. 10

Judeo-Christian tradition populated hell with all the biblical baalim,

even those who had been identified with Yahweh himself: Behe-
moth, Leviathan, Baal-Peor, Baal-Zebub, Baal-Rimmon, Belial,

Ksmodeus, Molech, Lucifer, Satan, Tammuz, Dagon, Nehushtan,

Chemosh (Shamash), Apollyon: even Baal-Berith, the "God of the
|3ovenant."
These were joined by gods and goddesses of classical
religions: Hades, Pluto, Diana, Persephone, Hermes, Python, Hecate,

Minerva, Venus, Cybele, Attis, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Adonis,

ran, Lamia, Medusa, Lilith plus all the gods and goddesses of
Oermanic and Celtic paganism. Even those who were artificially

canonized, to convert their old shrines into churches, were often

diabolized and consigned to hell in the guise of
[
[imultaneously
lemons.
There was a curious medieval passion for identifying, classifying,

the demons. Sorcery required knowledge of their

pd naming all

>
lames and titles. An exorcist could do nothing until he learned the

[jiame
of the demon he dealt with. The Gospels said even Jesus
iieeded to learn the names of the Gadarene devils he exorcised (Mark
|>:9). Thus, many sources provided lists of demonic names.
One of the most interesting dissertations on hell was Johann
in the 16th cen-
[Meyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, published
ury when Weyer served the Duke of Cleves as a healer and diviner.
i

Weyer said there were exactly 7,405,926 demons, divided into 72

11
Bompanies. These figures had already been reported in the Talmud.
Miupreme Chief of the Infernal Empire and founder of the Order of
was Beelzebuth (Baal-Zebub), the old Philistine Lord of Flies.
[he Fly
I His lieutenants included Satan, Leader of the Opposition; Pluto,

Moloch, Prince of the Land of Tears and Grand Cross

l*rince of Fire;
If the Order of the Fly; Baal, Commander-in-Chief of the Infernal
Armies and another Grand Cross of the Order of the Fly; and Lucifer,
Lord Chief Justice of hell.
J

Baal-Berith, erstwhile God of the Covenant, filled the post of

385
He" Minister of Treaties. Nergal, husband of the Babylonian under-

ground Goddess Eresh-kigal, became hell's Chief of Secret Police. Th

^^^^^^^^^^h Royal Household included Melchom (Milcom) as Paymaster, and
the Philistine god Dagon as Grand Pantler. The Hebrew elephant god

Behemoth (originally Ganesha, father of Buddha) was Grand Cup-

Bearer. Among the Masters of the Revels, Asmodeus held the post of
Superintendent of Casinos. Antichrist was only an insignificant jug-
12
gler and mimic.
The infernal hierarchy also maintained embassies in various Eurc
pean countries. Thamuz, or Tammuz, was Ambassador to Spain.
Baal-Rimmon, Phoenicia's "Lord of the Pomegranate," was Ambassa-
dor to Russia. England's ambassador was Mammon, whose

appointment reflected continental resentment of the English zeal for

commerce.
Sexual prejudice also extended to the denizens of hell. There wa!

only one token female among hell's governing spirits: Proserpine,

called Arch-she-devil and Sovereign Princess of Mischievous Spirits.
Astaroth (Astarte) was present only in masculine disguise, as a "duke"
of hell and its Grand Treasurer. The Goddess Belili took two male

shapes, as Belial and Belphegor, hell's ambassadors to Turkey and

France.
Masculinized Goddesses appeared also in Collin de Plancy's
Dictionnaire infernal, an imitation of Weyer's Pseudomonarchia,

showing portraits of a male "demon Ashtoreth" and a male "demon

Eurynome." Even Lilith was masculinized as a hellish "prince" in

Alexis de Terreneuve du Thym's list of devils: "Beelzebub, the su-

preme chieftain; Satan, the dethroned prince; Eurinome, prince of

death; Moloch, prince of the Land of Tears; Pluto, prince of fire; Pan,
prince of the incubi; Lilith, prince of the succubae; Leonard, grand
master of the Sabbaths; Daalberith (Baal Berith), high pontiff; and
13
Proserpine, the arch she-devil."
What Weyer's solemn imitators never understood was that the
Pseudomonarchia was really an elaborate joke, invented as a carica-
ture of earthly hierarchies. Humor and skepticism were equally foreign
to the Age of Faith, when the core of learning was credulity. It was a
childlike age. Generations of would-be Magi soberly studied Weyer's
mockery in search of demonic names to use in magic charms.

Weyer not only mocked the Christian hierarchy; he also defendet

witches. As a physician, he was called to examine some of the
Inquisition's victims, and pronounced them harmless, deluded women
who could not be held responsible for the statements wrung from
them by torture. He tried unsuccessfully to halt the tortures and
burnings. For this he was accused of heresy and indecency. Father
Bartolomeo da Spina scorned Weyer with heavy-handed irony: "Re-
went to a Sabbath attired as a great prince, and told the
cently Satan
assembled witches they need not worry since, thanks to Weyer and his i

followers, the affairs of the Devil were brilliantly progressing."

H

386
 But, Weyer aside, hell was not a joke. It was perhaps the most Hell
sadistic fantasy ever conceived by the mind of man. It was described,

painted, and contemplated with incredibly perverse relish. Berthold of

Regensburg said sinful folk must imagine their
punishment in hell as
the pain of a body made white-hot in a white-hot universe. "Let them
count the sands of the sea-shore, or every hair that has grown upon
man and beast since the days of Adam; let them reckon a year of
torment for each of those hairs and, even then, the sinner will be only
atthe outset of his unending agony." 15 Martin of Braga said
anyone
who renounced Christianity would be "put physically into eternal fire
where the inextinguishable flames burn for ever
in hell, and such a . . .

man shall long to die again, and not feel the punishment, but he will
16
not be allowed to."
Churchmen claimed the fires of sexual passion were transmuted
of hell, blown by the breath of God into a heat fiercer
into the fires

than any earthly flame. A single drop of sweat from a damned soul
would pierce living flesh like an arrow and burn like acid. One was
17
told toimagine the pain of being covered with such sweat, forever.
The was often told throughout the Middle
story of sinner's sweat

Ages. It may have been inspired by a passage from the Mahabharata:

"As the lord of gods, whose energy is infinite, became angry, a
terrible drop of sweat came out of his forehead; and as soon as that drop
of sweat had fallen to the earth, an enormous fire like the fire of
18
doomsday appeared."
Perhaps the worst part of the hell-vision was theologians' insistence
that the joy of the blessed ones in heaven couldn't be complete unless

they were permitted to gloat over the sufferings of the damned. St.
Gregory the Great assumed with appalling naturalness that the "good"
people in heaven would be entirely without pity. St. Thomas Aquinas
wrote: "In order that nothing may be wanting to the felicity of the
blessed spirits in heaven, a perfect view is granted to them of the
tortures of the damned." Other fathers of the church proclaimed that,

while the greatest pleasure of the saved would be contemplating the

Divine Essence, their second greatest pleasure would be watching the
damned writhing in hell. They couldn't feel sorry for loved ones or Thomas of
Cantimpre 13th-
friends in torment, because their opinions would always be identical
19 century scholar and
with God's; and God apparently reveled in sinners' pain.
encyclopedist, author of
Thomas of Cantimpre mentioned some "simple folk" who wor- On the Nature of
ried about having to watch former friends or relatives suffering in Things.
hell. He said these worries were foolish, because no one in heaven could
I

grieve for anything. He cited the Blessed Marie d'Oignies, who saw
in a vision that her dead mother was damned, and so stopped mourning St. Bernardino of
j

20 Siena (1380-1444)
for her at once.
Franciscan
Bernardino of Siena argued that heaven must be perfect, and
St.
theologian, writer, and
perfection couldn't be achieved without "due admixture of groans itinerant preacher,
from the Damned." Only few people were good enough to be saved;
a canonized in 1450, six

the vast would to hell. This was the orthodox opinion. years after his death.
majority go

387
 Hell Lull was condemned
Raymond as a heretic for trying to teach that
Christ's mercy would save nearly all men. Christ was not that
merciful; only the mother Mary was that merciful. An Ethiopian
Christian legend said Mary was distressed to see her kinfolk in

hellfire, and asked God to give humanity holy writings that would save

Lull
them. 21
Raymond
(Raimundo Lulio) The sadism implicit in the fantasy of hell was all too graphically
Catalan philosopher enacted by the inquisitors' tortures and burnings. The Inquisition's
of the late 13th century, handbook directed that "eternal damnation should begin in this life, tha
author of numerous
it
might be in some way shown what will be suffered in hell." 22 The
mystical works in
Catalan, Arabic, and inquisitor Bodin considered even slow burning a negligible punishment
Latin. Lull was revered in view of its sequel: "Whatever punishment one can order against
in the Franciscan witches by roasting and cooking them over a slow fire is not really very
order as Doctor
much, and not as bad as the torment which Satan has made for them
Uluminatus and as a
saint in some areas. He
in this world, to say
nothing of the eternal agonies which are prepared
was never
for them in hell, for the fire here cannot last more than an hour or so
officially
canonized, though until the witches have died." 23
Of course, the witches so mercifully slain
Pope Pius IX often had been subjected to unendurable tortures already for weeks,
confirmed his cultus in
months, or even years.
1858.
The inquisitor Nicholas Remy said witches "are justly to be
subjected to every torture and to put to death in the flames; both that
they may expiate their crimes with a fitting punishment and that its
very awfulness may serve as an example and a warning to others." To
help them remember the occasion, witches' children were to be
stripped and beaten with rods around the stakes where their mothers
were burning. 24 Inquisitors obviously disliked children. They burned
"witches" 10 or 12 years of age, or even younger. 25 At Wiirzburg in
1629, children as young as 7 were executed for witchcraft, plus many
others of 10, 12, 14, or 15 years. 26

Up to the 19th century, hell was used as a convenient way to

throw the "fear of God" into children. Father Furniss's Sight ofHell
presented the following edifying fantasies to young people:

Of two little maids ofsixteen, one cared only for dress, and went to a
dancing school, and dared to disport in the park on Sunday instead of
going to mass: that little maid stands now, and forever will stand, with bare
feet upon a red-hot floor. The other walked through the streets at
night, and did very wicked things; now she utters shrieks of agony in a

burning oven. A very severe torment

immersion up to the neck in a
boiling kettle boy who kept bad company, and was too idle to
agitates a
go to mass, and a drunkard; avenging flames now issue from his ears.
For like indecencies, the blood ofa girl, who went to the theatre, boils in
her veins; you can hear it boil, and her marrow is seething in her bones
\
"
and her brain bubbles in her head. "Think, says the compassionate
father, "what a headache that girl must have!" 27

Dutch theologian Dirk Camphuysen opposed such crude train- j

ing of the young, on the theory that it was more disturbing to sensitive (

minds than corrective of sinful ones. Unable to refrain from commit-

388
ting some sins, people developed a personal conviction of doom, "which Hell

necessarily produces such great fear and agony in the soul, that life is

too frightening for them, and they find death by their own hand. Of this
there are not a few examples, and some of them known to me

personally. Others do not go as far as suicide, but fall into fits of

28
melancholy and despair, sometimes ending in madness."

John Wesley was so implacable as to maintain that the whole

Christian religion depended entirely on the horrors of hell. If there

were "no unquenchable fire, no everlasting burnings," then all New

Testament teaching is a lie, and there is no reason to believe in the
29
revelation of heaven. Yetsome theologians disagreed. Johann Clop- Johann Cloppenburg
penburg said in 1682: "It is absurd that God should be angry forever, 1
7th-century
and punish the finite sins of creatures with infinite punishments." 30 theologian, author of
the Compendium
Some thinkers maintained that only an evil God could create a hell
Socinianismi
so savage and deliberately allow human beings to fall into it, when he Confutatum.
had the power to prevent this. The doctrine of free will was invented by
the church to counteract this logic; but, as Bayle showed, "absolute Pierre Bayle. 17th-
free will of no real use in justifying hell or in theodicy in general."
is century French

Man's free will "does not exculpate God from being ultimately theologian of Calvin-
ist or pseudo-Calvinist
responsible for the sins He punishes, unless one takes from Him His
background.
omniscience as well as His omnipotence. . . .
[I]f, before the creation,
He foresaw that most men would abuse their free will and commit sins,
he could have refrained from creating them." 31 The same sentiment
was put forth more than 2000 years ago by the author of 2 Esdras, who Second Book of
demanded why God had bothered to create Adam if he couldn't Esdras (also known as
the Ezra Apocalypse)
restrain Adam from sinning.
One of the
In wrestling with the problem of God's responsibility for hell,
apocryphal books
theologians of the 17th and 18th centuries often found themselves eliminated from the
forced by their own logic into a basically Manichean image of an evil English Bible but
God. Sterry said "an angry, revengeful God is no God at all, but a appearing as an
appendix to the New
projection of men's evil passions. . . . If sin is
part of God's plan, then
Testament in the
the sinner as much as the saint can claim to be fulfilling God's will."
Latin Vulgate.
Jurieu admitted "the absolute impossibility of reconciling God's hatred
of sin with His permission of it." He re-phrased Esdras's question: "If
God has He not
has an infinite hatred of sin, why, having foreseen it,

prevented Why it? He made men

has be born who, He well knew,
"
were to damn themselves? Bayle described God as "a lawgiver who
forbids man commit crime, and who nevertheless pushes man into
to

crime, and then punishes him for it eternally." Thus he must be a God
"in which one could have no trust, a deceiving, cunning, unjust,
32
cruel nature; He is no longer an object of religion." Whiston even
concluded that the very existence of hell must condemn God in the

eyes of humanity:

The exquisite torments of these most numerous and most miserable

creatures, are determined without the least pity, or relenting, or bowels
ofcompassion in their Creator, to be in everlasting fire, and in the flames
ofHell; without abatement, or remission, for endless ages ofages. And

389
Hell all this for the sins of this short life; fallen into generally by the secret
snares of the Devil, and other violent temptations; which they com-

monly could not wholly either prevent, or avoid instances of the

^^^^^^^^^^^^ . . . . . .

absolute and supreme power and dominion of the cruel and inexorable
author of their being. n

Political implications of the "problem" of hell were set forth by

Petersen:

What fruit has the doctrine of eternal damnation borne up till now? Has it
made men more pious? On the contrary, when they have properly
considered the cruel, frightful disproportion between the punishments and
their own finite sins, they have begun to believe nothing at all, and have

thought that these books of Holy Scripture have just been compiled by the
who made up such threats for the common people as they
priests,
3*
thought fit, in order to keep them in check.

Of course blaming the fiendishness of hell on God, or Satan, or

Adam, or any other mythic figure was a way of avoiding recognition of

the fact that its real inventors were men. Eastern sages were more
frank; they said "the torments of hell are morbid creations of the
55
individual's own ideas." The ideas of the individual, however, were
created by the society of hell, by the church. As Chaucer's
in the case

Summoner slyly said, people sometimes thought the friars came by

their familiarity with hell in a direct manner:

This friar boasts his knowledge about Hell,

And if he does, God knows it's little wonder;
J6
Friars and fiends are seldom far asunder.

Though the possibility is seldom recognized, there are many

indications that the Christian vision of hell in its sadistic horror was one

of the leading causes of disillusionment with Christianity itself. Hell

was necessary, otherwise there was nothing for "salvation" to save from;
yet it often seemed people were sent to hell for
no greater sin than
being human. William Blake said, "When thought is closed
in caves,
?7
then love shall show its root in deepest Hell."
In the end, scholars were forced to renounce hell because it made
God look more vindictive than man, though few dared admit that the
vindictiveness sanctioned and stressed by the church was really man's
alone. Shaftesbury said was impossible to adore a God "whose
it

character is to be captious and of high resentment, subject to wrath and

anger, furious, revengeful ... (of) a fraudulent disposition, encourag-

ing deceit and treachery among men, favorable to a few, though for

slight causes, and cruel to the rest." Bayle found it

impossible to
exonerate "a good and omnipotent God" from responsibility for the
world's evils, though he made humanity suffer for them. The
problem became "infinitely more difficult when He has also to be

exonerated from causing the suffering and wickedness of the next

world." 38
19. 3. Rose, 240. 4. Budge, G.E. 264.
1. Larousse, 166. 2. Cavendish, P.E., 1 1,

390
 5. Book of the Dead, 550. 6. Book of the Dead, 161. 7. Campbell ' Oc M 199 H nn .
nenna
8. Hughes, 203. [Link], P.E., 146. 10. Budge, G.E. 1 275 1 1 Wedeck 94
12. Waite, CM., 186-87. 13. de Givry, 132, 141. 14.
[Link], 18. 16.J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 241. [Link] Voragine 649 651
18. O'Flaherty, 121. 19. H. Smith, 206. 20.
Cavendish, P.E., 1*53.
21. Coulton, 18-20; Budge, A.T., 196. 22. Kramer &
24. Cavendish, P.E., 213. 25. R.E.L. Masters, 271;
Castiglioni

Sprenger, 79. 23. Robbins, 179.

253
'

^^i
Hephaestus

Summers, G.W., 488-91

26. Robbins, 554-55. 27. H. Smith, 376. 28. Walker, 90. 29. Cavendish PE 139
30. Walker, 84. 3 1 Walker, 47. 32. Walker, 1 12, 119, 195, 201. 33 Walker
.
99-100
34. Walker, 244. 35. Waddell, 89. 36. Chaucer, 321. 37. Wilson 227
38. Walker, 49, 185.

Henna
Widely used in India and Egypt and by Greek worshippers of Hecate
women's palms and soles the sacred color of the Goddess,
to stain

henna was important in her sacrificial rites. The death-dealing God-

dess Anath was colored red with henna before immolation of human
victims to her image. 1 Gypsy legends preserved something of the
association between henna and the sacrificial ceremonies of Mari-
Anath. They claimed Mary was preparing to redden her hair with
henna at the very moment when her son was crucified; therefore she
laid acurse on the red pigment that was formerly sacred. 2 Jewish

scriptures spoke of "daughters of Cain" i.e., women who didn't

worship Yahweh whose hands and feet were "dyed with color" in

the Oriental fashion. 3

Like all other trappings of women's religions, henna was associated
with witchcraft in the Middle Ages. One of the heretical crimes for
which the Spanish Inquisition arrested women was the use of henna to
4
redden the skin or nails. During the Victorian era, an Essex woman
was charged with witchcraft for no other reason than the discovery in

her house of some "red ochre," or henna. 5

1. Hooke, M.E.M., 83. 2. Esty, 17. 3. Forgotten Books, 78. 4. H. Smith, 259.
5. Maple, 132.

Hephaestus
Pre-Hellenic smith god, cast down from the Olympians' heaven by
Zeus, for trying to protect his mother Hera. Hephaestus was one of the
ancient Amazonian smiths, an opponent of the divine Father. He
took Hera's side in her quarrels with Zeus; he married Aphrodite; he
was on affectionate terms with the primal Sea-goddesses Thetis and
Eurynome; he shared a temple with Athene. He was lame, like all the
Amazonian smiths. He was associated with volcanoes and lightning,
gods who fertilized the Great Mother's "abyss" with
like all early fire.

One of Hephaestus's major shrines was the island of Lemnos, a

matriarchal colony founded by Amazons. 1

1. Graves, CM. 1,87-88.

391
Hera Hera
Hera's name was sometimes rendered "Lady," and may have meant
He Era, the Earth. An earlier version was Rhea, the pre-Hellenic Great
Mother mythologized as the mother of the Greeks' Hera. Both were
forms of the Great Goddess of early Aegean civilization, who predated
the appearance of gods on the scene. 1

Hera's name could

also have been a cognate of Hiera, "Holy

One," a of ancient goddess-queens who ruled in her name. An

title

Amazon queen named Hiera of Mysia led her army against the Greeks
in defense of matriarchal Troy. Philostratus said Homer refused to
mention Hiera in the Iliad because she was so great as to outshine

Homer's heroine, Helen. 2

There were many other, more far-flung cognates and counterparts
of Hera. In Babylon she was "Erua, the queen, who controls birth."
3

She chose kings, gave them sovereignty by marrying them, and deposed
them. As the eponymous Goddess of ancient Ireland she was "the
4
Lady Eire," or Eriu. Like Hera, the Lady Eire controlled the western
apple-garden of immortality.
Hera was the Mother of the Gods, even of the Olympian gods, to
whom she gave the ambrosia of eternal life. Hellenic writers tried to
make her subordinate to Zeus, though she was much older than he, and
had married him against her will. Their constant mythological quar-
rels reflected conflicts between early patriarchal and matriarchal cults.

As the primordial feminine trinity, Hera appeared as Hebe, Hera, and

Hecate new moon, full moon, old moon otherwise personified as
the Virgin of spring, the Mother of summer, and the destroying

Pausanias Greek Crone of autumn. Pausanias said Hera was worshipped as Child, Bride,
and geographer
traveler and Widow. 5 In her Argive temple, she passed through endless cycles
of the 2nd century was annually renewed, of Aphrodite, by
as her virginity like that
a.d. Living in a time of 6
immersion in a
holy spring.
declining culture, he
was inspired by a desire
Hera received sacrifices of "heroes," or "Hera-sacred men,"
to describe the whose myths dated from a primitive time when men were slain as her
ancient sacred sites for
martyr-bridegrooms. In ancient Greece the term "hero" was synony-
posterity. mous with "ghost" one who had gone to the Goddess. 7 Herodotus
told the story of two of these heroes, Cleobis and Biton, chosen to draw

the Mother's chariot in a procession. Afterward they "fell asleep" in

her temple and never woke again. This holy death reflected great honor
on their family; Solon called Cleobis and Biton "the happiest of
men." 8 Like Christian martyrs, they achieved the "crown."
Hera's cult spread at an early date throughout pagan Europe, the
whole continent having been named after one of her incarnations,
Europa. Saxons worshipped her at Heresburg (Hera's Mount), where
"column of the world" called Hermeseul was planted in
the phallic
the Earth-goddess's yoni. 9 Late in the 8th century a.d., the temple was

destroyed and the phallic pillar overthrown by the armies of Charle-

magne. However, the sanctuary was not forgotten. The Salic Law
referred to "witches" called hereburgium or herburgium, those who

392
worship at the Heresburg. 10 They were equated with those who Heracles
"carried the cauldron" to religious meetings in honor of the God-
desssuch meetings as the clergy styled witches' sabbats.
Legends of
Hera's magic garden in the west, where the apples of
immortality
grew, passed into the medieval lore of Fairyland.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,51. 2. Bachofen, 107. &
3. Assyr. Bab. Lit, 195.
4. Graves, W.G., 317. 5. Graves, G.M. 1, 52, 54. 6. Lamusse, 102. 7. Halliday 47
8. Herodotus, 1 1-12. 9. Borchardt, 122. 10. Baroja, 59.

Heracles
Greek savior, the earthly incarnation of either Zeus or Apollo, the
sun; born of the moon-virgin Alcmene ("Power of the Moon"), whose
consort didn't lie with her until after her Divine Child was born.
His name meant "Glory of Hera," and he was nursed by the Great
Goddess herself on the same milk that spurted from her breasts to
form the Milky Way. His Twelve Labors symbolized the sun's passage
through the twelve houses of the zodiac, the heavenly "way" indicat-
ed for him by the same river of celestial milk. After his course was
finished, he was clothed in the scarlet robe of the sacred king and
killed, to be resurrected as his own divine father, to ascend to heaven, to

marry the virgin form of the Goddess all over again, and to dwell
among the stars, where he is still found.
Pausanias said Heracles's surname was Soter (Savior). Julian said 1
Julian (Flavius
of him, "All the elements obey the demiurgic and perfective power of Claudius Julianus)
Roman emperor
this pure and unmixed spirit, whom the great Zeus has begotten to be from 361 to 363 a.d., the
the Savior of the Universe." He was worshipped everywhere as the only pagan to rule
savior who
"died" and rose again like the sun, which is why a solar Rome after the time of
eclipse was supposed to have attended his death the same mythic Constantine;
2 nicknamed "the
eclipse appended to the deaths of Krishna, Buddha, Osiris, and Jesus.
Apostate" by
The influence of Heracles's cult on early Christianity can hardly Christian historians
be overestimated. St. Paul's home town of Tarsus regularly re- because he tried to
enacted the sacred drama of Heracles's death by fire, which is why Paul re-institute the old

assumed there was great saving virtue in giving one's body to be Roman religion. His
death was mysterious;
burned, like the Heracles-martyrs (1 Corinthians 13:3). Heracles
was
some claimed he was
called Prince of Peace, Sun of Righteousness, Light of the World.
assassinated by a
He was the same sun greeted daily by Persians and Essenes with the Christian.
ritual phrase, "He is risen."' The same formula announced Jesus's

return from the underworld (Mark 16:6).

Heracles also entered the underworld and "harrowed hell," the

King of Glory who "came in" to the

fructifying function of the
womb of the Earth-goddess (Hera). She gave him his second birth and
made him a god hence his title, dedicated to her glory. 4 He was
sacrificed at the spring equinox (Easter), the New Year festival by the
old reckoning. He was born at the winter solstice (Christmas), when
the sun reaches his nadir and the constellation of the Virgin rises in the
east.
5
As Albert the Great put it centuries later, "The sign of the

393
^^
Heracles celestial virgin rises above the horizon, at the moment we find fixed for
6
the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ."
_ The celestial virgin to whom Heracles ascended was sometimes

Hebe, or Hera-as-Maiden, or Eve as she was called in the Middle

East. Like Isis, she said the fruit of her womb became the sun. 7 Often
she was confused with Cyprian Aphrodite, who was really the same
celestial virgin incarnate in the attendant Horae who followed the god

through his risings and settings on the wheel of time: "In twelve
months the silent pacing Horae follow him from the nether-world to

that above, the dwelling of the Cyprian Goddess, and then he

8
declines again to Acheron."
In Lydia, Heracles was bound to the cosmic wheel of Queen

Omphale, the Goddess incarnate, representing the hub of the universe

(omphalos). He was one in a succession of her sacred kings. His
predecessor was the oak-crowned Tmolus, who died by impalement
after coupling with the high priestess. Another earlier model of the

wheel-kings was Ixion of the Lapiths, who died on a fiery wheel

signifying the revolutions of the sun. Such a sacrificial custom
probably underlay the myth of Heracles bound to the wheel and made
to spin for a year that is, to turn through the signs of the zodiac

which decorated the wheel. 9 Hellenic writers re-interpreted the myth to

mean Heracles spent a year as a slave among Omphale's women,

spinning flax on a spinning wheel, wearing female dress, a story
invented to explain the early stage in the evolution of sacred kingship
when a man could be the queen's deputy only when wearing her
10
robes. Priests of Heracles wore female garments up to a fairly late
date.

Another myth said Heracles's predecessor was the centaur Nessus,

who engaged in combat with Heracles for possession of the priestess

Deianira. Heracles won, and married Deianira. Nessus died, bequeath-

ing his blood-red ceremonial robe to the conqueror. Later, when his
priestess-wife ordained that he must wear the robe,
Heracles put it on
and burned as if "wrapped in flames." His pyre was lighted by the
11
next king, Philoctetes, who inherited his emblems of office.
An Egyptian version of the same dying-and-reborn "hero" was
12
Horus, or Heru, firstborn of Isis-Hathor. In his dying aspect he was
the enfeebled form of Ra, named Harakhti, declining toward his

burning pyre in the west, to be devoured by the Mother's under-

ground womb. Greeks called his holy city Herakleopolis, "City of
Heracles." n The same sun-and-fire god was known in the Far East
asone of the Ten Knowledge-Holding Deities, still remembered as "the
most Supreme Heruka." H
Egypt continued to celebrate the fiery death and rebirth of a mock
king up to the 19th century a.d., on the first day of each year by

Coptic reckoning. The god-man was placed on a throne for three days,
crowned with a tall pointed miter like that of pharaohs, May Kings,
Carnival Kings, Lords of Misrule, and other pagan savior figures. Then

394
 he was burned in effigy and crept forth "reborn" from the ashes of his
I
Hermes
royal garment. Frazer says, "The custom points to an old practice of
burning a real king in grim earnest." 15
I
According to Tertullian, as
late as the 3rd century a.d. the people of
Carthage were still annually
burning "men who were gods of light." 16
Having died a martyr's death, Heracles ascended to heaven with-
out delay and received a place on the
right hand of the Crone, or
!

Crown Corona Borealis, the constellation of the martyr's reward.

i\
Christian martyrs were promised the same "crown" in heaven.
Meanwhile, Heracles's reward on earth was claimed by Christian
j

priests: that is, tithes, from the Roman military custom of to

donating
Heracles's temple a tenth part of the 17
I spoils of victory.
As another underworld Lord of Death, Heracles was credited with
1 the same power to reveal buried treasure that was later inherited by
the Christian devil. 18
1.
Knight, S.L., 98. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 333, 316. 3. Briffault 3, 366.
4. Graves, CM. 2, 394. 5. Neumann, CM., 313. 6. Martello, 189.
7. Legge2,63. 8. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 286. 9. Campbell, CM 422
10. Graves, CM. 2, 167. 11. Graves, CM. 2, 163,202. 12. Budge GE 1 9
13. Erman,48, 139. 14. Waddell, 497. 15. Campbell, Or 73M
16. [Link], 135-36, 182. 17. Dumezil,438. 18.Rose240

Hermes
Greek god of magic, letters, medicine, and occult wisdom, identified
with Thoth in Egypt, Mercury in Rome. He was really older than
Greece, one of the Aegean Great Mother's primal serpent-consorts,
of her wisdom because he was once a part of her. Like India's
[partaking
Ardhanarisvara Kali and Shiva united in one body Hermes was
the original "hermaphrodite" united in one body with Aphrodite.
Priests of Hermes wore artificial breasts and female garments to
preside over Aphrodite's Cyprian temple in the guise of the god
1

[Hermaphroditus.
Hermes was a universal Indo-European god. An Enlightened One
born of the virgin Maia, he was the same as the Enlightened One
(Buddha) born of the same virgin Maya in India. The Mahanirvanatan-
tra said Buddha was the same as Mercury (Hermes), the son of the
Moon (Maya).
2

Greeks called Hermes the Psychopomp, Conductor of Souls, the

same title everywhere
given to the Lord of Death in his union with
the Lady of Life. Hermes had greater power over rebirth and reincarna-
tion than the heavenly father Zeus. It was Hermes who transferred

Dionysus from the womb of the Moon-goddess to Zeus's "thigh"

(penis) so he could be born from a male; apparently Zeus couldn't

accomplish this miracle for himself.*

His feminine wisdom credited Hermes with the invention of
civilized arts usually attributed to the Goddess: measuring and weigh-
ing, astronomy and astrology, music, divination by knucklebones. He

395
Hermes 4
helped the three Fates compose the alphabet. He could control the
elements. His caduceus could transform whatever it touched into gold,

n^H^^Hi^ which is
why Hermes became the patron of alchemists. 5
Ovid Hermes was married to the lunar priestess of a sacred
said

fountain in Caria, the Land of the Goddess Car. He was also part of a

trinity with Mother Earth and Father Hades, and a phallic god of the

orgiastic Cabiri who worshipped Demeter Cabiria in the Mysteries of

6
Phrygia and Samothrace.
Hermes's phallic spirit protected crossroads throughout the Greco-
Roman world, in the form of herms, which were either stone phalli or
short pillars with Hermes's head at the top and an erect penis on the
front. During the Christian era, the herms were replaced by roadside
crosses, but the idea of setting these votive erections at crossroads was

pagan rather than Christian.

Saxons worshipped Hermes as the phallic spirit of the Hermeseul,
or Irminsul, planted in the earth at the Mother-mount of Heresburg
(Hera's Mount). It is now known as Eresburg, and a church of St. Petei
standswhere Hermes's ancient sanctuary united the phallic principle
with Mother Earth. Other Germanic tribes worshipped Hermes under
the name of Thot or Teutatis, "Father of Teutons." 7 Hermes-
Mercury was the same as the Germanic father-god Woden, which is
why the Hermetic day, Wednesday, is Woden's Day in English but
Mercury's Day in Latin languages.
The Cross of Woden also represented Hermes as "the only
fourfold god." The sign of the cross traced by Christians on their
heads and breasts originated as one of the crosses of Hermes, the Arabic
numeral down or backward as the Chris-
4, often appearing upside
tians' gesture drew The medieval legend that witches made the sign
it.
8

of the cross upside down or backward may have begun with worship-
pers of Hermes; actually, Christians had reversed the cross-sign made by
the pagans instead of vice versa.
The cross marked Hermes a god of four-way crossroads, the four

quarters of the earth, the four elements, the four divisions of the
sacred year, the four winds, and the solstices and equinoxes represented

by their zodiacal totems Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius the

bull, lion, serpent, and man-angel symbols adopted by Christians to

9
represent the four evangelists. Sometimes, the cross of Hermes was
an ankh, standing on a crescent that signified his mother the moon. This
evolved into the conventional sign of Mercury, a circle with a cross
Sign of Mercury (Hermes) below and a crescent above. 10
Hermes was also represented by the Gnostic "world" sign, a
Maltese cross with a circle at the end of each arm. 11 This seems to
have referred to the four solstitial and equinoctial suns. Gnostics viewed
Hermes as a personification of the World Serpent, ruler of time, who
12
coiled around the terrestrial egg. According to Gnostic Gospels, Jesus i

told Mary that the serpent surrounded the world, with his tail in his

mouth, his body containing the twelve zodiacal halls that is, he was

396
 identified with theEgyptian Tuat (Thoth) and the druidic ouroboros, Hermes
also known Wise Serpent Hermes. 13
as the

Neoplatonic philosophers called Hermes the Logos, or Word of

|
God made flesh. 14 Christian images of Jesus as the Logos were
|
borrowed from the older deity, whose hymns addressed him in terms
I similar to those used in the Gospels:

Lord of Creation, the All and One. . . .He is the light ofmy spirit; his be
the blessing ofmy powers. . . .
Hymn, O Truth, the Truth, O Good-
ness, the Good, Life, and Light, from you comes as to you returns our
thanksgiving. I give thee thanks O Father, thou potency of my powers;
I give thee thanks O God, ofmy potencies. Thine own Word
the power

through me hymns thee. Thou pleroma in us, O Life, save us; O

. . .

Light, enlighten us; O God, make us spiritual. The Spirit guards thy
Word. . . . From the Eternal I received blessing and what I seek. By thy
1S
will have I found rest.

Naturally, Hermes became the "god within" sought by all

religious philosophers of the Gnostic period. (See Antinomianism.)

His traditional bisexuality was interpreted as self-love; some said he
invented the ritual of self-love, that is, masturbation. His caduceus was
a masturbatory symbol, a rod massaged by the serpents that
jcalled
16
embraced it. Masturbation was said to be the hermit's typical act of
self-contemplation, which some claimed would lead to comprehen-
of the God, just as sexual intercourse led to comprehension of the
ision

ilGoddess. A "herm-e\" was literally a little Hermes, with a divine

I

spirit dwelling in the phallus.

Hermes lived on through the Middle Ages in a new disguise as
Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great One, founder of
(systems
of Hermetic magic, astrology, alchemy, and other blends of

[mysticism with natural science. Lazzarelli's Calix Christi et Crater

iHermetis (Chalice of Christ and Cup of Hermes) said all learning came
from Hermes, who gave it to Moses
Egypt. Agrippa von Nette- in

>heim often cited the authority of Hermes, whom he took for a

j

U'randson of Abraham. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy listed Her-

Ines as one of the great philosophers, along with Socrates, Plato,

Plotinus, Seneca, Epictetus, the Magi, and the druids.

17
A 16th-
century treatise said the Hermetic vessel was "a uterus for the spiritual

renewal or rebirth of the individual . . . more to be sought than

18
Icripture."
Hermetic magic was extensively cultivated by the Arabs, who
based much of their numerical and alchemical systems on Hermetic
lore. 19 Sufi mystics and eastern alchemists both claimed Hermes as an
Initiate of their craft. 20 After the crusades, Europeans developed a new
ninterest in what they regarded as the ancient wisdom of the east, and

[became greatly impressed by any philosophy attributable to classical

lantiquity.
About 1460 a Greek manuscript of the eastern Corpus Hermeti-
fum was presented to Cosimo de' Medici by a monk named

397
Hermes Leonardo da Pistoia. Other texts were added later to the growing body
of semi-secret "devilish arts" which commanded more and more of
the attention of European intellectuals. Sir Thomas Browne called
Hermetism "the mystical method of Moses bred up in the Hiero-
glyphical Schools of the Egyptians," stating that the Egyptians
Sir Thomas worshipped Hermes as Mercurius or Anubis, "the Scribe of Saturn,
Browne (1605-1682) and Counsellor of Osiris, the great inventor of their religious rites, and
English physician, Promoter of good unto Egypt." Hermes ascended to heaven in the
author of the famous
form of Sirius, the Great Dog. He was so revered in Italy that the
Religio Medici and
mosaics of Siena Cathedral portrayed him with the inscription,
other works.
"Hermes Mercury Trismegistus, Contemporary of Moses." 21
The Christian mythological figure most often assimilated to Her-
mes was the archangel Michael, Angel of Death, with a function
resembling that of the ancient Psychopomp. "On the ruins of ancient
temples of Mercury, built generally on a hill, rose chapels dedicated
to St. Michael." A hill formerly sacred to Hermes-Mercury in France
still name of Saint Michael-Mont-Mercure. It lies opposite
bears the
another "Michael's Mount" located across the channel in England. 22

Spirits of the two mounts were both called Mercurius in pre-

Christian times, perhaps representing the twin serpents that expressed
Hermes's dual function as lord of death and rebirth. The twin serpents
had many incarnations alchemy and magic. Of them Flamel
in

wrote: "These are snakes and dragons, which the ancient Egyptians

painted in the form of a circle, each biting the other's tail, in order to
teach that they spring of and from one thing. These are dragons that the
old poets represent as guarding sleeplessly the golden apples of the

Hesperian maidens. These are the two serpents that are fastened
. . .

around the herald's staff and the rod of Mercury." 25

Hermetic mysticism usually called the serpents male and female,
for the real secret of Hermetic power was androgyny. Like that of
Oriental gods, Hermes's efficacy depended on his union with the
female soul of the world, like the Aphrodite of his archaic duality. In
medieval texts she was called the Anima Mercury, a naked woman
surrounded by oval mandorla designs like the World card of the
Tarot pack. 24 This card was the last of the Tarot trumps, and the

Magician, identified with Hermes, was the first numbered trump. A

Mantegna Tarot showed the Magician as a classic Mercury with
serpent-twined caduceus, winged helmet, and flute, stepping over a
severed head symbol of oracles toward a cock, the symbol of
annunciation. 25
1. Graves, G.M. 1, 73. 2. Rawson, A.T., 142. 3. Graves, G.M. 1, 56.
4. Graves, G.M. 1, 64-65. 5. d'Alviella, 228.
6. Encyc. Brit, "Hermaphroditus," "Hermes." 7. Borchardt, 145, 122, 216.
8. Koch, 84. 9. Campbell, M.I., 181. 10. Silberer, 189. 11. Koch, 93.
12. Campbell, M.I., 298. 13. Budge, G.E. 1, 266. 14. Doane, 375.
15. Angus, 99. 16. Cavendish, T., 104-5. 17. Shumaker, 232.
18. Jung & von Franz, 143. 19. Encyc. Brit., "Hermes Trismegistus."
20. Shah, 196. 21. Shumaker, 242-43. 22. Male, 378. 23. Silberer, 129.
24. Gettings, pi. 32. 25. Cavendish, T., 67-68.

398
Hero Hero
Greek word for a man sacrificed to Hera, possibly from Sanskrit Hesperides
Heruka, a Knowledge-Holding Deity, via Egyptian Heru or Harakhti, ^^^hmh^mmb
The Greek May Day festival was the
Horus-Osiris as a dying god. 1
2
Heroantheia, "Hero-flowering." The "flower" was the hero's fructify-
ing blood, represented by red or purple flowers, and described by the
same word applied in the Bible to menstrual blood (Leviticus 1 5:24).
The May Day hero was therefore a flower-god: Narcissus, Hyacin-

Antheus, who were all the same deity, sometimes

thus, Adonis, or called

Naaman, "Darling," because he was Aphrodite's beloved. 3

1. BardoThodol, 70. 2. Gaster, 290. 3. Frazer, G.B., 390.

Herodias
Biblical "consort of Herod," literally the Great Lady, whose story was
so extensively revised that she was not even the consort of Herod any
more but the consort of Herod's brother Philip (Matthew 14:3). The
Gospel story says Herodias demanded the head of John the Baptist and
had her dancing daughter obtain it from Herod. This made her a
prime religious villainess, and about the 10th century a.d. her name
began to be taken as a synonym for Hecate, Queen of Witches. Yet
the classic belief that Hecate was that third of the Triple Goddess who
ruled the underworld, while her other personae Hebe and Hera ruled
heaven and earth, came to be applied to Herodias as the new Hecate. In
936 a bishop of Verona formally denounced "those who believe that
!
Herodias rules one-third of the world."
1. [Link], 75.

Hesione
"Queen of Asia," a Syrian title of Atargatis, or Meri-Yamm, the
Great Goddess of the seain conjunction with her serpent. Greeks

claimed Hesione was rescued from a sea serpent by Heracles, another

version of the Perseus-Andromeda myth. The original fight probably
was the one between Baal and the sea serpent Yamm for the sexual
favors of the Asian Goddess. (See Kingship.)

Hesperides
Garden of immortality in the Far West, belonging to Mother Hera

who sometimes took the form of Hespera, the Evening Star (Venus).

Apples of eternal life grew on the Hesperian apple tree, guarded by

Hera's sacred serpent. Like most versions of the earthly paradise or

Eden, this one was located beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Gibraltar).

399
Hestia The Pillars were not only the straits leading to the western sea, but also
Hex the phallic shafts that stood in front of the ancient
temples, the
l^^^mt^ammmmamm Garden being the temple itself, symbol of Hera's regenerative womb.

Hestia
Greek "Hearth," one of the oldest matriarchal Goddesses, in Latin,
She represented the home place, every man's "center of the
Vesta.
world." When the matriarchs ruled, "The hearth was in the midst of
the dwelling; that hearth was to each member of the household, as it

were, an umbilicum orbis, or navel of the earth . . .

[h]earth being
only another form of earth, as in the German erde and herde."
Pythagoras said the fire of Hestia was the center of the earth. 1

Romans had the same idea about the altar of Vesta, with its

perpetual tended by the mystic Vestal Virgins. Cicero said the

fire

power of Vesta extends over all altars and hearths, therefore all prayers
and offerings begin and end with her, "because she is the guardian of
the innermost things." 2
Hestia never had a consort, for no god could share her strictly
matriarchal province, the Prytaneum or public hearth of every town.
It was said of her that "seated in the midst of the celestial
dwelling-place
she receives the richest part of sacrifices, and among men she is of all
the deities the most venerated." i
1. Lethaby, 81-82. 2. Dumezil, 322. 3. Larousse, 136.

Hetaera
"Companion," Greek title of a courtesan, the only kind of woman to
retain full equality with men in the male-dominated Hellenic period.

Like Christian nuns of the early medieval period, Greek hetaerae

remained unmarried to protect their property rights from the depreda-
tions of patriarchal marriage laws. Unlike wives, they were free to
attend schools, establish salons, and take a vital part in social and
intellectual life of the time.

Their title may have been related to Egyptian heter, "friendship,'

whose hieroglyphic sign was two women grasping each other's
hands. 1
1. Budge, E.L., 51.

Hex
This word for a witch's spell had a long history associated with
connotations of the number six
Greek hex, Latin sex, cognate with
Egyptian sexen, "to embrace, to copulate." Six was everywhere the

400
 number of sex, representing the union between the Triple Goddess and
I

Hexagram
I her trident-bearing consort, which is
why Christian authorities called
"the number of sin." Pythagoreans on
'
six the contrary called six the
^^_^^_^_^_
perfect number, or The Mother. One of its Egyptian forms seshemu,
"sexual intercourse" shown in hieroglyphics
by male and female
j

genitals in conjunction survived in the Sufi love-charm

designed to
j

the "cave" of the Goddess: Open, Sesame. 2

To this day, hex signs are hexagonal like the six-pointed Tantric
iopen of love
,yantra (see Hexagram). The name of the sign is from
German Hexen, "witches," who may have been so named because they
"made the six."
A triple six, 666, was the magic number of Triple Aphrodite (or
Ishtar) in the guise of the Fates. The Book of Revelation called it

"the number of the Beast" (Revelation 13:18), apparently the Beast

with Two Backs, the androgyne of carnal love. Solomon the wizard-
king made a sacred marriage with the Goddess and acquired a mystic
666 talents of gold
Kings 10:14). Christians usually called it
(1
Satan's number, yet the recurrences of this number in esoteric traditions
are often surprising. For example, the maze at Chartres Cathedral
was planned so as to be exactly 666 feet long. 5

Egyptians considered 3, 6, and 7 the most sacred numbers. Three

stood for the Triple Goddess; six meant her union with the God;
seven meant the Seven Hathors, seven planetary spheres, seven-gated

holy city, seven-year reigns of kings, etc. Egyptians had an abiding

conviction that the total number of all deities must be exactly 37,
because of this number's magic properties. Not only did it combine
the sacred 3 and 7, but 37 multiplied by any multiple of 3 gave a triple

digit or "trinity": 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, etc. The miraculous
number 666 is a product of 3 X 6 X 37. 4
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 652. 2. Budge, E.L., 57-58.
3. Pepper& Wilcock, 159. 4. Budge, E.M., 174.

Hexagram

#
The familiar design of two interlocked triangles is
generally supposed
to have represented the Jewish faith since the time of David, or

Solomon; therefore this hexagram is known as Magen David (Shield

of David), or the Star of David, or Solomon's Seal. Actually, the

hexagram had nothing to do with either David or Solomon. It was

not mentioned in Jewish literature until the 12th century a.d., and was
1
not adopted as a Jewish emblem until the 17th century. Hexagram
The real history of the hexagram began with Tantric Hinduism,
where it represented union of the sexes. 2 The downward-pointing
triangle was the Female Primordial Image or Yoni Yantra, existing
fore the universe. In the course of infinite time, the Goddess
nceived a spark of life within her triangle, the bindu, which was

401
Hexagram eventually born and developed into a male, symbolized by the
upward-pointing triangle. He united with his Mother to form the Primal
^^h^^^^^mhm Androgyne. The sign of this union was the hexagram, called Sri
3

Yantra or Great Yantra. "The downward-pointing triangle is a female

symbol corresponding to the yoni; it is called 'shakti.' The upward-

pointing triangle is the male, the lingam, and is called 'the fire'
4
(vahni)."
A personification of the Great Yantra was Bindumati, "Mother of
the Bindu," described in myth as a divine harlot. She ruled the forces
of nature. She could command
storms by the power of her magic and
halt rivers in their tracks, a miracle copied by several holy men in

Egyptian myth, and later by Moses.

From the Tantric image of the sexual hexagram arose a Jewish

system of sex worship connected with the medieval Cabala, and a

rabbinical tradition that "a picture is supposed to be placed in the ark of

the covenant alongside of the tables of the laws, which shows a man
and a woman in intimate embrace, in the form of a hexagram." 5
The Cabala was developed by the Jews of Moorish Spain after the

crusades brought eastern Goddess worship into their ken. Cabalists

used the hexagram as Tantric yogis used it, to represent the union of
God with his Female Power, Shekina, the Jewish form of Shakti-Kali.
As Shakti was the essential soul of any Hindu god, so Shekina was the

essential soul of the Cabalistic God. As in all religions of the Divine

Marriage, Cabalistic Judaism discovered man and woman to be earthly
images of God and Goddess; and sexual union of mortals naturally
encouraged its like in the supernatural realm. Therefore sexual inter-
course was "a sacramental act in the service of a God and his consort
(or perhaps vice versa: a Goddess and her consort)." 6
The Zohar identified Shekina with Torah, "the law," as the older
Gnostic Goddess was identified with her own virgin form Maat, "the
law" or "Truth." A man aspiring to mystic wisdom had to become a
"bridegroom of Torah," for the law was embodied in a maiden, like

the enlightening lady-love of contemporary bardic romance, which was

also inspired by eastern Goddess-worship.
For the Torah resembles a beautiful and stately damsel, who is hidden in a

secluded chamber of her palace. . . . She opens the door of her hidden
chamber ever so little, and for a moment reveals her face to her lover, but
hides again forthwith.
it He alone sees
. . . itand he is drawn to her with
his heart and soul and his whole being. . . . When he comes to her, she
begins from behind a curtain to speak words in keeping with his
7
understanding, until very slowly insight comes to him.

The hexagram stood for the complete union of the sage with
Shekina-Torah. Attribution of the hexagram to Solomon as the magic
"Solomon's Seal" probably arose from the popular view of Solomon,

402
 s enlightened by a sacred marriage, suggested by the erotic love poetry Hierophant
If Solomon's Song in the Bible. Hina
I. Encyc. Brit, "Magen David." 2. Jung, M.H.S., 240. 3.
Rawson, A.T., 74, 82.
4. Zimmer, 147. 5. Silberer, 197. 6. Lederer, 188. 7.
Cavendish, T. 73.'

Hierophant
ilmage of the Holy One," title of the Eleusinian high priest who
the role of God in sexual union with the priestess,
jlayed embodying
he Goddess. 1 More recently, the title was applied to the Pope in the

(
rump suit of the Tarot. 2
1. Lawson, 577. 2. Cavendish, T., 82.

lieros Gamos
Sacred Marriage" in Greek, meaning the union of a king or sacred

(surrogate for the real king) with his Goddess, usually in the form
jing
fa priestess-queen impersonating the Goddess. The sacred marriage
once considered essential to the king's right to rule. (See
ps
kingship.)

Maria
koman Easter carnival celebrating the day of resurrection of the
I ivior-god Attis. On this "Day of Joy," people went about in disguise,
Iniversal license prevailed, celebrants were allowed to say and do
I 'hatever they pleased. 1 This took place at the vernal equinox, usually
I;t on the 25 th of March, which Christians later claimed for the
Insurrection day of their savior.

[Link],G.B.,407.

Himalaya
Mountains of Paradise" in Sanskrit, the root language that gave rise

) other Indo-European languages. In German, for instance, paradise

ecame Himmel, originally conceived as a heaven-piercing moun-

1
lin. See Mountain.

[Link], 125.

lesian virgin-mother Goddess, creatress of the world. She was

moon, and also the first woman. 1
All women embody her spirit,

403
Hind AI-HunUd hence the word wahine, "woman." 2 Hina gave birth to every god as

Hiranyagarbha well as the first human beings.

^^^^^^^^^_ 1. Hays, 391. 2. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 43.

Hind Al-Hunud
"Hind of Hinds," the Koreshite queen overthrown by soldiers of
Mohammed (see Arabia). The Great Hind she personified was Kore-
Diana, Mother of Animals, ancestral Goddess of her tribe.

Hippolytus, Saint
One of the pseudo-saints, based on a pagan god worshipped in both
Greece and Rome as a dying-and-resurrected savior. Originally he died

as a surrogate for King Theseus, who retained his throne by sacrific-

ing "sons" who of Hippolytus, "Torn by Horses."

received the title The
manner of sacrifice was that the victim was dragged to death by
chariot horses, a rite apparently initiated in Athens by Theseus's Cretan
queen, Phaedra. Myth says Hippolytus's horses were frightened into
their fatal stampede by a Bull from the Sea, actually a title of the Cretan
high priest whose totemic form was the Minotaur.
Hippolytus was called the son of the Amazon queen, who embod-
ied the spirit of Artemis-Diana. The Roman Hippolytus was slain and
resurrected in Diana's sacred grove of Nemi. He was apotheosized and
raised to heaven as the constellation Auriga, the Charioteer. He
1

married the Goddess's virgin aspect, the nymph Egeria. He was reborn
like all cyclic gods as his own son, Virbius, "the Virile One." Virbius
too was slain by horses in his turn.
"We can hardly doubt," says Frazer, "that the Saint Hippolytus of
the Roman Calendar, who was dragged by horses to death on the
thirteenth of August, Diana's own day, is no other than the Greek hero
of the same name, who, after dying twice over as a heathen sinner,
2
has been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint."
A number of theological writings were brought forth under the
signature of St. Hippolytus, whose "life" was assigned to the 3rd
century a.d. The likelihood is that all these works were forged at a later 1
date and arbitrarily given a canonical authorship, as was the custom of
the early church. 3
1. Graves, G.M. 1, 358. 2. Frazer, G.B., 6. 3. Attwater, 172.

Hiranyagarbha
"Firstborn of the Womb," a title claimed by nearly all Hindu gods,
each of whom insisted on being the eldest son of the primal Creatress.
Modern scholars tend to conceal the true meaning of the word by

404
avoiding its A commentator on the Upanishads
feminine connotation. Hocus Pocus
said any god may be called Hiranyagarbha "when associated with the Hokmah
power calledthe power to evolve the empirical universe."
Maya 1
^^^^__^^^_
This effectively withholds the information that "the power called
Maya" is the Great Goddess, and the "association" between her and the

god is that of mother and child. See Firstborn.

1 .
Upanishads, 2 1 .

Hocus Pocus
Magic phrase evolved from the medieval practice of intoning liturgi-
calwords as invocations and charms. Hocus pocus is a corruption of hoc
est corpus meum, "this is my body," from the sacrament of the
Eucharist. 1
See Magic.
1. Shumaker, 16.

Hod
Norse "blind god" who killed the youthful savior Balder with a thrust
of a spear or arrow of mistletoe. Afterward, Hod took Balder's bride
Nanna. Some myths say Hod was really another name for Odin, who
was blind or half-blind; for Odin contrived the death of his divine son
Balder, much as Yahweh contrived that of his divine son Jesus.
Christians claimed Jesus was pierced by a spear wielded by a blind man,
St. Longinus. Probably Hod was a title of the high priest in charge of
sacrificial killings, embodying Odin's spirit.
1
He may even have been
blindfolded or put into an eyeless mask, the Helmet of Darkness
(Tarnhelm), to enact the sacred drama as a deadly game of Blind Man's
Buff.

[Link]-Petre, 113-18.

Hofgydja
"Priestess of the Temple," Norse title of clan mothers who had
charge of religious rites up to the 1 1th century a.d., when Christian
missionaries began to oust women from their shrines.
1
Women
carried on their traditional festivals in private, as "witches."

[Link]-Petre. 261.

Hokmah
'Wisdom," the Hebrew version of the Gnostic Goddess known in

Latin as Sapientia, in Greek as Sophia. Her name was only a title of the

Great Mother who actively helped God create the world, according

405
Holly to Proverbs 8, and whose symbol was the Aphroditean dove later

mmmmm |^mm
adopted by Christians as a sign of the
Jewish "Wisdom literature" owed
Egyptian sources in which the Goddess was supposed to have
its
Holy Ghost.
origin to ancient Oriental
Much of the
and

inspired clear thinking on all matters of morality and religion. There-

1

fore Hokmah closely resembled Isis. Her praises were inserted into
the mouth of Solomon, one of her most renowned lovers, by the author
of the Wisdom of Solomon:

Her bright shining is never laid to sleep. But with her there came to me all
good things together. And I rejoiced over them all because [Hok-
. . .

mah] leadeth them; though I knew not that she was the mother ofthem. . . .

She that is the artificer ofall things there is in her a spirit quick of
. . .

understanding, holy, alone in kind, manifold, subtle, freely moving . . . all-

powerful, all-surveying, and penetrating through all spirits. . . .

Yea, she

pervadeth and penetrateth all things. . . . And she, though but one, hath
power to do all things; and remaining in herself, reneweth all things. . . .

For she is fairer than the sun, and above all the constellations of the stars;
being compared with light, she is found to be before it. She . . .

reacheth out from one end of the world to the other with full strength, and
2
ordereth all things well.

It may be that the Hebrew name of Hokmah was also of

Egyptian origin, afterof Isis as Heq-Maa, Mother of

an ancient title

Magical Knowledge, dating back to the heq or tribal wise-woman of

pre-dynastic times. The Goddess as Heqit, Hekat, and the Greek
derivative Hecate (the Wise Crone) can be traced to the same
sources.
1. Encyc. Brit, "Wisdom Literature." 2. Barrett, 143, 218-19.

Holly
To the druids, holly was the plant of death and regeneration, sacred
to Mother Holle, or Hel, the underworld Goddess.
1
Germanic witches
who worshipped her favored holly wood for magic wands. Red holly
berries showed the female blood-of-life color, corresponding to white

mistletoe berries associated with male elements of semen and death.

In the divine marriage celebrated at Yule, they were displayed together.
The "holy" holly was linguistically linked with Hel's yonic "hole"

(Germanic Hohle, a cave or grave). It was the most sacred of trees,

according to a carol sung by medieval pagans at Yuletide, saying holly
"bears the crown." 2
In the Dionysian cult, female holly was paired with the god's male
?
symbol, ivy. Green boughs of both were used to adorn doorways at
the Tertullian condemned the custom, saying any
solstitial festival.

Christian who has "renounced temples" should not make a temple of

his own house door. 4 Nevertheless, house-decorating with holly, ivy, or
mistletoe at the solstitial festival went serenely on. The Council of

406
Bracara ruled that no Christian should bring holly into his house for Honey
Christmas, because it was a custom of "heathen 5
people." Heathen
jor not,
it was inextricably linked with Yuletide celebrations and could
not be eradicated.
Even the sexual symbolism of the holly was remembered, in a way,

up 17th century. Christmas games included a mock battle of

to the Bracara Modern
the sexes, in which the master and mistress of the house engaged: Braga, in northern
Portugal, first settled
"Great is the contention of holly and ivy, whether master or dame
6 by Romans under the
wears the breeches." The kiss under the mistletoe originally represent- name of Bracara
ed sexual union, a peaceful resolution of the battle.
Augusta. An early-
1. Goodrich, 54. 2. Graves, W.G, 186. 3. de Lys, 63. 4. Miles, 269. church council was
[Link], 118, 127. 6. Hazlirt, 120. held there in 563 a.d.

Honey
Being one of the few preservatives the ancients knew, along with salt,
loney was widely regarded as a substance of resurrection-magic. In Asia
Minor from 3500 to 1750 b.c. the dead were embalmed in honey
and placed in fetal position in burial vases or pithoi, ready for rebirth.
'To fall into a jar of honey" became a common metaphor for "to

lie."
'
The pithos represented the womb of the Goddess under her
lame of Pandora, "All-giver," and honey became her sacred essence.
Myths present many symbolic assurances that the Goddess would
estore life to the dead through her magic "bee-balm." Worshippers
)f Demeter called her "the pure mother bee," and at her Thesmo-
Dhoria festivals displayed honey-cakes shaped like female genitals.
2
The symbol of Aphrodite at Eryx was a golden honeycomb. Her
)riestess bore the name of Melissa, "Queen Bee," the same as the
ewish Queen Deborah, priestess of Asherah, whose name also meant
3
*bee."

The bee was rightly looked upon as a symbol of the feminine potency of
nature. In the Syracusan Thesmophoria, the participants carried
. . .

mylloi, cakes made of honey and sesame in the shape of the female sex

organ. Menzel draws an apt parallel between this custom and the
. . .

Hindu usage of daubing the woman 's genitals with honey at the marriage
4
feast.

Bees are still called hymenoptera, "veil-winged, after the hy-

nen or veil that covered the inner sanctum of the Goddess's temples,

he veil having its physical counterpart in women's bodies. Deflora-

ion was a ritual penetration of the veil under the "hymeneal" rules of

he Goddess, herself entitled Hymen in the character of patroness of

he wedding night and "honey-moon."
The honeymoon spanned a lunar month, usually in May, the
5
nonth of pairings,named after the Goddess as the Virgin Maya. In
in archaic period, sacred kings seem to have been destroyed after a 28-

lay honeymoon with the Goddess, spanning a lunar cycle, as the

407
Hope, Saint queen bee destroys her drone-bridegroom by tearing out his genitals. 6

As applied to ordinary weddings rather than sacrificial dramas, the

honeymoon of a lunar month would include a menstrual period, the
real source of what was euphemistically called moon-honey. A bride-
groom contacted the source of life by copulating with during his bride

menstruation, according to the oldest Oriental belief. Even the Great

God Shiva was helpless unless his phallus was baptized in blood from
the vagina of Kali-Maya, his Shakti and mother, in the Tantric ritual
7
known as Maharutti.

A combination of honey and menstrual blood was once consid-

ered the universal elixir of life, the "nectar" manufactured by

Aphrodite and her sacred bees, which kept the very gods alive. Similarly,
the great secret of Norse mythology was that the gods' nectar of

wisdom, inspiration, literacy, magic, and eternal life was a combination

of honey and "wise blood" from the great Cauldron in the belly of
Mother Earth though a late patriarchal revision claimed this hydromel
or "honey-liquid" was a mixture of honey with the blood of a male
sacrificial victim known as Wisest of Men. 8
Even the most patriarchal cults seemed unable to dispense with the

life-giving feminine fluids. Celibate priests of Mithra, who excluded

women from worshipped the Moon-goddess
their temples, nevertheless

Diana or Luna who "made the honey which was used in the
9
purifications." Of course it was the Moon-goddess who also made the

Porphyry (ca. 234- "wise blood" of female lunar cycles. Porphyry reported a popular
305 a.d.) Neoplatonist were reincarnations of the lunar nymphs. 10
belief in his day that bees
philosopher, scholar, Finnish myth speaks of the hero Lemminkainen, torn to pieces like
and writer; biographer
and sent to Manala, the underground realm of the
a sacrificial victim
of Plotinus; an
opponent of the death-goddess Mana. His own mother restored him to life with her
11
Christian church, magic honey, assisted by her familiar spirit, Mehilainen the Bee.
which eventually
Early Christian Ophites celebrated a Tantric-style "love feast"
destroyed most of his which included the tasting of menstrual blood, and it was said of them 1
books. 12
that theymingled blood with honey. Thus they combined two of the
three substances the third being salt most often associated with
resurrection or rebirth.
I. Neumann, G.M., G.M. 1, 72. 3. Sobol, 138.
267. 2. Graves,
4. Bachofen, 295-96. Graves, W.G., 179. 6. Graves, G.M. 1, 71.
5.

7. Edwardes, 50. [Link], 257. 9. Cumont, M.M., 1 12. 10. de Lys, 50.
II. Larousse, 301-2. 12. Campbell, CM., 160.

Hope, Saint
According to Hesiod's fable of Pandora's Vase (or, as it was later

erroneously called, Pandora's Box), the spirit called Hope stood for the
refined cruelty of Father Zeus toward helpless mortals. Zeus sent the
vase of Spites to plague humanity with vice, madness, sickness, hard
full

labor, war, famine, and every other ill; he also enclosed Hope, whose i

408
function was to prevent men from killing themselves in despair, to Horae
kscape the miseries Zeus decreed for them. 1
Horns
Hope was thus presented as a spirit of delusion; her ultimate

purpose
was to make men suffer. In Christian scriptures however, she
Ivas combined with Faith and Charity (or Love) as one of the three
essential virtues. Some excessively naive hagiographers even canon-
ized these three virtues as three fictitious virgin martyrs, all
daughters of
he equally fictitious St. Sophia. 2 St. Hope is still listed in the Roman
panon of saints even though scholars have shown that she never existed.
1. Graves, CM. 1, 145. 2. Artwater, 127, 312.

Horae
Kphrodite's celestial nymphs, who performed the Dances of the In Egypt they were

midwives to the gods, and inspired earthly horae "Ladies of the Hour,"
Hours, acted as (harlot-
in Persia houris, in
priestesses) to train men in the sexual Mysteries. The dance still
Babylon harines; among
pilled
hora was based on the priestesses' imitation of the zodiacal
Semites they were
(circling of "hours." Time-keeping is horology because of the systems the "whores" called hor
Devised by these ancient priestesses of the Goddess. See Prostitution. (a hole), ancestresses

iThe Horae were called "fair ones, begetters of all things, who in of the Horites.

Appointed order bring on day and night, summer and winter, so as to

Jnake months and years grow full."
'

1. Jonas, 258.

Horns
Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of a divine being used to be a
lorned head. Masks and crowns of incarnate deities were often those of
lorned animals bulls, goats, stags. Horns were connected with the
Bldest Tantric belief concerning male vitality: that by suppression of
jjaculation, mystic energy
mounts up the spine to the head and
/ers forth in wisdom and magic power, made visible by horns.

Outgrowths from the head are specially significant. The horned animals
are the most sacred, because they carry about upon them visible

evidence that their "head-stuff' is developed to the point of extrusion.

Bulls, rams and he-goats are especially well-endowed. So too
are deer.

There is ample linguistic evidence in the West for the association between
horns and male sexuality. In Indian miniatures and ivories of the
seventeenth and eighteenth century A.D. horned deer are frequently used
'
as symbols for the desire ofa lovely girl in the forest.

The Bible says Yahweh's altar was horned, and he was some-
Imes addressed as a phallic stone, "the Rock that begat thee," as well as

lie phallic "horn of my salvation, my high tower" (2 Samuel 22:3).

lahweh was identified with El, "supreme god of the Semitic pantheon"

409
Horns who wore bull-horns as consort of Mari-Asherah the divine cow. 2
Like Zeus and Apis, he could take the form of the white moon-bull,
of Shiva as the white bull
probably copied from totemic incarnations
Nandi (Blessed One).
The white moon-bull seems to have been one of the forms of the
moon god Sin, whose holy Mount Sinai Moses climbed, and came
down "wearing horns" in token of his encounter with the god of the
mountain. The standard biblical translation says Moses came down
from Sin's mountain with his head "shining," but in Hebrew, the same
word signifies a "horned" or a "radiated" head.
5
Vulgate says The
cornuta fuit fades ejus,he (Moses) wore horns. Michelangelo's famous
figure of Moses is horned like a satyr. 4
The Horned God was as old as the Stone Age. Primitive sacred art
everywhere shows men wearing the horns of bulls, stags, rams, or
5
goats, which distinguished the shaman, sacred king, priest, or victim.
Horned animals were frequently associated with Mother Goddess
6 also combined the Goddess with the
figures. Myths of all later periods
Horned God, who was Actaeon the stag, Pan the goat, Dionysus or
Zeus the bull, Amen the ram, and innumerable combinations of these
with human images. The Teutonic hero Sigurd or Siegfried was
sometimes a man, sometimes a hart, consort of the White Hind who led
men on mysterious adventures. He found his mother-bride in the

form of a Valkyrie sleeping in her secret place, Hinderfjall (Hind-

7
Mountain). Later he died in the forest as a hunted stag, pierced by
arrows, like Actaeon the Lord of the Hunt and his medieval counter-

part, the witches' Horned God.

Medieval folk thought it might be possible for human beings to

grow real horns on their heads for a variety of reasons, from telling
lies (through identification with the devil as Father of Lies) to becoming
a cuckold. Agrippa von Nettesheim offered a pseudo-scientific
explanation for the alleged overnight horning of Cyprus, king of Italy.
The king dreamed all night of a battle of bulls, which stimulated "the
vegetative power, being stirredup by a vehement imagination, elevating
comific humors into his head and producing horns." 8
Of course the principal Horned God was the devil, a composite of
Sir Thomas all the Horned Gods of paganism. Sir Thomas Browne said the
Browne (1605-1682) "devils" of holy scripture were Fauns, Satyrs, and sons of Pan; but the
English physician,
original Hebrew word for them was "goats." 9 In Scotland, the devil
author of the famous
was known as Ould Hornie. His notorious
lustfulness gave rise to the
ReJigio Medici and
other works. modern slang term "horny." The so-called sign of the devil
forefinger and little finger extended was originally a gesture-symbol of
a horned animal head, copied from a sacred mudra of the Great
Goddess in India. 10

1. Rawson, E.A., 25. 2. Lamusse, 74.

3. Elworthy, 185.

4. Encyc. Brit., "Michelangelo." Jung, M.H.S., 235-36. 6. Lamusse,

5. 3.

7. Turville-Petre, 199. 8. Agrippa, 202. 9. Ha/lirt, 176-78.

10. Rawson, AT., 50.

410
 Horse Horse
In the 1 5th century a.d., Pope Calixtus III decreed that no more
religious ceremonies should be held
'
Ancient pagan horse-worship was
in "the cave with the horse-
still common and
MH^n^^
pictures."
acceptable, co-existing with Christianity, only three centuries earlier
when kings of Ireland still underwent symbolic rebirth from the
White Mare. 2 She was Epona, the Celtic version of Cretan Leukippe
("White Mare"), one of many relics of the Amazonian horse-cult
throughout Europe.
The divine horse still stands on a hillside at
Uffington (in Berk-
shire, England), 370 feet long, carved in the chalk by pre-Christian
votaries of Epona, now serving as a notable tourist attraction.
3

Horses were sacred to the Jutes who invaded Kent; their king and

queen bore the titles of Hengist and Horsa, "Stallion and Mare."
Their daughter became the wife of Vortigern. Out of a Christian
prejudice against queens, the Venerable Bede insisted that the
Stallion and Mare were really two brothers ruling jointly, but he never
explained how they managed to become joint parents.
4

Symbolic of the equine deities was a double-headed androgynous

horse still used to decorate the double
projecting rafters of old houses
in Jutland, the original home of the Jutes. Such figures are known as
5
Hengist and Horsa and are put up for "luck."
Another relic of pre-Christian horse worship is the Morris dancer's
traditional horse-headed stick, or "hobby horse" otherwise the
cock-horse ridden to Banbury Cross to see the Goddess make her ritual

ride as Lady Codiva. Similar horse-headed sticks were ridden by

central Asian shamans. "The 'horse' enables the shaman to fly through
the air, to reach the heavens. The dominant aspect of the mythology
of the horse is not infernal but funerary; the horse is a mythical image of
death and hence is
incorporated into the ideologies and techniques of
6
ecstasy." Death symbolism figured in the dream of riding a black

horse, interpreted as a portent of "loss and sorrow." 7

Northern Europeans considered horses essential to the funeral
rites of great warriors. The riderless horse led in a pagan or Christian
procession dated back to primitive belief that his
military officer's funeral

ghost needed to ride to heaven. His empty boots were often fixed
backward in the stirrups because it was thought ghosts wore their feet

backward. In ancient times, the horse was usually sacrificed at the

funeral and buried with the dead hero, just as boats were buried with

Egyptian mummies to carry them over afterworld waters. 8

Death was the significance of Father Odin's eight-legged gray
horse Sleipnir, symbol of the gallows tree, where human sacrifices
were hung in Odin's sacred groves. Skalds called the gallows "high-
chested rope-Sleipnir," the horse on which men rode to the land of

death, Heljar. Recounting Odin's own death-and-resurrectiop drama,

the original nine-day wonder, the Elder Edda said: "In the Norn's

411
Horse seat nine days sat I, thence was I mounted on a horse; there the

the dripping clouds of heaven.

giantess's sun shone grimly through

^hh^^^^h^^h Without and within, I seemed to traverse all the seven nether worlds." 9
10
Old Norse drasil meant both "horse" and "gallows tree." There
fore the World Tree Yggdrasil, on which Odin hung and bled, was
both the Horse of Yggr and the Gallows of Yggr, as well as the axis
mundial the earth's hub. Yggr was another name for Odin as Lord of
Death. When Christians diabolized him, he became the great devil-

rider leading the hosts of the dead through the sky on their

cloud-colored horses, and Yggr evolved into the English "ogre."

"
The horse cult of Odin's Aesir was rooted in Vedic India. Hind
dying gods often assumed horse shape. Hindu queens impersonated
the Goddess as Mare-mother, Saranyu, by inserting the dead horse's

penis between their legs at the end of the sacrificial ceremony, calling

upon "the vigorous male" to "lay seed" for the benefit of the land and
12
its people.
This ancient ceremony explains one of Odin's more puzzling
Volsi, meaning both "Son of God" and "Horse's Penis."
13
titles,

The penis was the "son" worshipped by Iron Age equestrian tribes
calling themselves Volsungs, descendants of Volsi. The cult was not
confined to Scandinavia. The Welsh had the same ancestral horse-goc
Waelsi or Waels. Slavs also worshipped him as Volos, a sacrificed
horse whose entrails and blood were supposed to produce the water of
life. In a Russian folk tale, Volos directed the hero to use him for
resurrection magic: "Open my body, take out my entrails, rub the dead
man with my blood." H This was supposed to restore life to the dead.
Volos was still incarnated in a ritually castrated and slaughtered
15
stallion every spring, up to the 18th century a.d. Since the people
insisted on worshipping him, he was converted into a Christian saint,

Vlas, who had no real existence except as a pagan horse-god.

Ancient Rome knew him October Horse, or curtus equus
as the

("cut horse"). By an elaborate ritual, the animal was divided into

three sections by sacred women known as the Three Queens. After
slaughtering, the horse's amputated tail was carried hastily to the

temple of Vesta the earth's yoni, by Roman reckoning so its bloo

could drip on the altar. 16 In earlier times it probably was the horse's
penis that donated its blood to the Goddess, as in the rites of Saranyu I

and Volsi. Castrated stallions were offered to all equine forms of the
Goddess. The Taurians sacrificed to Artemis horses from whom "the j

member was cut off." I7

The blood-wedding of the Earth Mother and the Horse's Penis
produced the race of horse-gods known in the Aegean as centaurs, in
India as Asvins or Gandharvas. 18 They were great wizards, skilled in
music and dancing, expert healers, lusty lovers of women. They often
stole brides from their bridegrooms, a legend reminiscent of the ancien

412
Driental custom of having brides deflowered by priests or god-penises Horse
19
nstead of by their husbands (see Firstborn).
Western centaurs were similar, born of Mare-headed Demeter in ^^^^^^^^^^^
20
Mycenae, or of Leukippe the White Mare in Crete. Priests of this
21
goddess were castrated and wore female dress. Sometimes they were

Magnetes, "Great Ones." One of their leaders was the magic

ailed

lorse Arion, born of Demeter's union as a mare with the sea god in the
orm of a stallion. 22 A sacred grove in Chios called Tripotamara
:

is said to be still haunted

23
"Three Streams) by ghostly centaur-wizards.
Greeks called Corinthian horse-priestesses "man-eating mares,"
ilso known as the horse-masked Pegae guarding the sacred fountain
jf Pirene, home of Pegasus another name for Arion, the horse who
:arried heroes to heaven. The Pegae-priestesses killed Bellerophon
md his father, a typical father-son combination of the reborn deity.
Diodorus compared the orgies of the Pegae to those of the Egyptian

>ull-god Apis, whose priestesses tore him apart and directed his spurting

Jood onto their genitals to fertilize themselves on behalf of their

24
Goddess, the ea>th.
Customs of the Cretan horse cult produced the myth of Hippoly-
tus (He Who is Torn by Horses), dragged to death by his chariot

porses
after receiving a curse from his father Theseus. The myth
concealed a primitive sacrifice, though Hippolytus was eventually
25
canonized as a Christian saint. In his Christian form, Hippolytus was
26
Bragged to death by horses on the Goddess's holy day in August.
borne said Demeter's Cretan lover Iasion was similarly torn to pieces by
27
norses.

Ancient kings of Sweden were torn to pieces by horse- Valkyries or

lorse-masked priestesses of Freya, known as volvas. 28 Medieval
olklore redefined a volva as a witch able to transform herself into a

nare. She embodied the spirit of the Scandinavian death-goddess

vho rode a winged black horse known as the Valraven (Raven-ridden-
29
Slavs used to pray to her as the virgin battle-queen
y- Valkyries).

Diana, Athene, Bellona, etc.) before setting forth to war: "Unsheathe,

p Virgin, the sacred sword of thy father, take up the breastplate of

30
tiy ancestors, thy doughty helmet, bring out thy black horse."
The myth of King Midas and his ass-ears was dressed in Celtic
hrb for transposition to an Irish horse cult centering on King Lavra

p. 3rd century a.d.). The king was said to have horse's ears, a fact

mown only to his barber until the barber whispered the secret to a
J/illow
tree. The willow was cut down and made into a harp, and the
31
larp sang the truth about the king's ears.
Horse sacrifices were performed in Norway in the 10th century
newly converted Christian kings to discon-
Ld. despite the efforts of
them. King Haakon's rebellious subjects not only continued the
agan feasts of horsemeat but forced the king himself to take part in
Inue

413
 32
Horse! them and drink toasts to the old gods meanwhile.
Horseshoe Traces of the horse sacrifice persisted in England up to the 16th

on
^^^^^^^^m^m century, when it was still customary for all
" The New Year
horses to be bled St.

Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas, for "luck."

sacrifice of a white horse-image known as Old Hob was the same

"hobby-horse" as Germany's Schimmel, made of a horse head animat-

ed by young men covered by white cloths. In Pomerania the New
Year hobby-horse performer Schimmeheiter pantomimed ancient sacri-
ficial dances. 34 Christian opposition to pagan horse sacrifices probably
35
gave rise to the strong prejudice against eating horsemeat.
I. Jung,M.H.S., 234. 2. Graves, W.G. 425; Gelling & Davidson, 92.
3. Larousse, 225. 4. Encyc. Brit, "Hengist & Horsa."
5. Gelling& Davidson, 127; Johnson, 329. 6. Eliade, S., 467. 7. Hazlitt, 191.

[Link],261. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 247. 10. Turville-Petre, 48.

9.

II. [Link], 153. 12. Briffault 3, 188. 13. Turville-Petre, 201. 14. Maspero, xxi.

15. Lamusse, 288. 16. Dumezil, 223-25. 17. Neumann, G.M., 276.

[Link],60. 19. Jobes, 145. 20. Graves, W.G., 425. 21. Gaster, 316.
22. Graves, CM. 1,61. 23. Lawson,217. 24. Graves, G.M. 1,255-56.
25. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 271. 26. Frazer, G.B., 6. 27. Graves, G.M. 1, 89.
28. Lederer, 195; Turville-Petre, 48. 29. Guerber, L.M.A., 255. 30. Larousse, 294.
31. Pepper & Wilcock, 256. 32. Oxenstierna, 67-69, 256. 33. Hazlitt, 57.
34. Miles, 200. 35. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 122.

Horsel
Teutonic Moon-goddess, Venus of the Horselberg; also called Ursel
or Ercel. Her many lovers included Tannhauser in Germany and
Thomas Rhymer (Thomas of Ercel's Down) in England. Accord-
ing to the Thuringian Chronicle, she appeared as a fiery trinity in 1 398,
1
as "three great fires in the air" descending to rest in the Horselberg.

Eventually the Goddess Horsel was canonized as the apocryphal St.

Ursula, with her "eleven thousand virgins" transformations of the
Moon-mother and her daughter stars.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 211.

Horseshoe
Hindus, Arabs, and Celts regarded the yonic shape of the horseshoe
as asymbol of the Goddess's "Great Gate," thus it was always esteemed
as a prophylactic door charm. Druidic temples were constructed in
the shape of a horseshoe. So were some Hindu temples, with the frank
1

intention of representing the yoni. The horseshoe arch of Arabic

sacred architecture developed from the same tradition. 2

Greeks assigned the yonic shape to the last letter of their sacred
alphabet, Omega, literally, "Great Om," the Word of Creation
beginning the next cycle of becoming. The implication of the horseshoe
symbol was that, having entered the yonic Door at the end of life
(Omega), man would be reborn as a new child (Alpha) through the

414
same Door. It was everywhere represented as "a horseshoe, the very Hortus Conclusus

figure that is nailed to so many doors in various parts of the world, as an Horus
emblem of luck. Mighty few of those who live in such houses know ^^^^^^^^^^^
that the horseshoe
only a symbol of the yoni and that by nailing it to
is

their doors, they follow out a custom older than the history of their
3
race."

The God who claimed to be the "Alpha and Omega"

Christian

(Revelation 1:8) was only copying one version of this very ancient
symbolism, whose meaning seems not to have been understood by the
biblical writer.

1. Graves, W.G., 315-16. 2. de Lys, 113. 3. Goldberg, 102.

Hortus Conclusus
"Enclosed Garden," a symbol of the Virgin, whose garden was called
Paradiseand mythologically related to the womb. Virginity meant the
feminine "gate of paradise" was not yet opened. In the erotic

metaphors of Solomon's wedding song, the virgin bride as yet un-

deflowered is not only a hortus conclusus but "a spring shut up, a
fountain sealed" (Song of Solomon 4:12). In medieval art, the virgin
Mary was mystically depicted inside a walled garden representing her
1

virginity.
1. Hughes, 55.

Horus
Egyptian Divine Child, or reborn sun; a son-reincarnation of either
Ra or Osiris, or both. Horus was depicted as a child with a long lock of
nair curled to one side of his head and a finger in his mouth, signifying

dependence. Yet he was also a warrior, avenging his

1
:hildlike

father" or elder-self Osiris by castrating and killing Set, the god of the
barren half of the year.
Some said there was a Horus the Elder, born of Isis immediately
ifter herown birth, for he was conceived by the coupling of Isis and
lertwin-brother-spouse Osiris while they were still in the womb of their
nother Mut. Other myths said Horus was the world's firstborn sun,
vho arose from the primal Mother's lotus-yoni at the beginning of
ime. 2
Horus might be traced to the Far East, as the "Lotus-born"

peruka,
or hero; the original Egyptian form of his name was Hem.
Jreek Gnostics of the philosophical age called him Harpocrates. What-
name, he was another variation on the usual theme of the
ver his

ying-and-reborn god, father-killing son and son-killing father.

1.
Budge, G.E. 1, 484. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 473.

415
Host Host
Hubris
Latin hostia, "victim," became the Host of the Eucharist, indicating
the dead and cannibalized god whose worshippers devoured his flesh
and blood literally in the earliest religious systems, symbolically in

the later Mysteries such as Mithraism, Orphism, and Christianity. Bread

of the deity, and became one with
played "host" to the visiting spirit
the body of the worshipper upon being eaten. See Cannibalism;
Transubstantiation. Another derivative of hostia was "hostage," a
surrogate; and if not ransomed, a victim.

Houri
Persian-Arabian heavenly nymph, sexual angel, or temple prostitute;
Semitic harlot, or
cognate with the Greek hora, Babylonian harine,
"whore." Houris were dancing "Ladies of the Hour" who kept time
in heaven and tended the star-souls. See Angel; Prostitution.

Hsi Wang Mu
"Lady-Queen of the West," Chinese Great Mother who kept the
of immortality in a magic orchard in the Far West, as did Idun,
fruit

Pomona, Hera, Morgan, etc. Instead of apples, Hsi Wang raised Mu

peaches, the Chinese symbol of the yoni. Once every 3000 years she
gave the gods peaches from her Tree of Life.
'
See Peach.
1. Larousse, 382.

Hubris
Greek "lechery," or "pride," both words associated with penile

erection; said to be the sinof Lucifer. Patriarchal gods especially

punished hubris, the sin of any upstart who became in both

'
senses "too big for his breeches."
The original Hubristika was an Argive "Feast of Lechery" featur-
Men broke a specific taboo by wearing
ing orgies and transvestism.
women's and assuming women's magic power. 2 Christianity later
veils

condemned as devil-worship all forms of transvestism, because of its

implication that men acquired power through connection with women,
whether was a sexual connection or a masquerade.
it

From hubrizein, lecherous behavior, came the Roman word

hybrid, describing a child of a Roman father and a foreign mother. A
trace of the old law of matrilineal inheritance dictated that a child was a
slave or a freeman according to the status of his mother, slave or free;

the father's status was irrelevant. Similarly among the Jews, in the case

416
of mixed marriages or hybridization, a child was Jewish only if the Hudigamma
Tiother was the Jewish parent, but gentile if only the father was Jewish. 3 Husband
1. Potter & Sargent, 176. 2. Lederer, 145. 3. Ochs, 96.

Hudigamma
rlindu Mother Goddess served by eunuch priests dressed in women's
lothes. Her western counterparts had similar customs; transvestite
1

;unuch priests served Cybele, Artemis, Heracles as the consort of

ydian Omphale, and Adonis as the consort of Syrian Aphrodite. All
he savior-gods in these cults were castrated. See Castration;
Transvestism.
[Link],317.

-luppah
iebrew "tent," the marriage canopy held above the heads of a bride Egyptians preserved
nd groom in a Jewish wedding, a custom derived from the ancient from their own matriar-
chal period the same
temitic matriarchate when women owned their tents, and a wedding
symbol of the marriage
eremony was in effect a solemnization of the man's permission to enter
tent, called senti, the
le tent of his beloved. 1 The tent and the land it occupied were
canopy under which a
embolic of the woman herself. Before the development of patriarchal pharaoh received his
bride and his crown at
Jes, she had complete control of her property. An Arabian wife
the same time. Mar-
ould divorce her husband without speaking a word, simply by turning
riage with the queen
er tent to face the other direction, which let him know he was
2
gave him formal
>rbidden to enter the door again.
right to rule her land,
When Absalom tried to establish a right to rule Israel, he raised and the senti like the
an awning on a housetop" and beneath its shade he copulated with huppah was a symbol of
5
David's royal concubines "in the sight of all Israel" (2 Samuel permission.
!ing

6:22). Without this rite of sacred marriage, no man could be a king,

bsalom's followers erected the customary phallic pillar in his name, to
anor his virility after he died as a surrogate for the king (2 Samuel
8:18).
The huppah was unknown
an accompaniment to Gentile
not as

carriages. Anglo-Saxon weddings similarly took place "under a veil

'

square piece of cloth, held at each corner by a tall man, over the
4
idegroom and bride." The veil seems to have symbolized the
Oman's dwelling place, for early Anglo-Saxon marriages were
atrilocal.
:

1 . Briffault 1 , 374. 2. de Riencourt, 1 87-89. 3. Book of the Dead, 427.

4. Hazlitt, 90.

usband
)ne bonded to the house (hus)" a steward or majordomo chosen
tend a woman's property, under the old Saxon matriarchate when

417
Husband property rights were matrilineal. A
husband was not considered an

integral part of the maternal

clan but remained a "stranger" in the

^^^^^^^^^^ house, as in early Greece where the men's god Zeus was "god of
'

strangers."
Pre-Islamic Arabian husbands didn't even have names in the

matrilineal clan until they begot children; then a man could call

himself abu, "father of. . ." So-and-so. This part of an Arab's name is

2
still considered the most important part.
In southeast India, a husband was regarded as a more or less

permanent guest in the wife's home, constrained to remain on his

good behavior according to the rules governing guests. In archaic Japan,

husbands were not residents in the wife's home at all, but only
visitors. The old word for "marriage" meant "to slip into the house by
4
night."
5
Patrilocal marriage was unknown
Japan until 1400 a.d. in

The position of a husband in the ancient world was often tempo-

rary, subject to summary divorce. An Arabian wife could dismiss her
husband by turning her tent to face the west for three nights in

succession. 5 After the introduction of Islamic patriarchy, the system

was reversed in favor of men. A husband could turn his wife out of her
home simply by saying "I divorce thee" three times.

Early Latin tribes followed the same rules as Arabians; a woman

could divorce her husband by shutting him out of her house for three
consecutive nights. 6 Even in imperial times, a Roman wife could
maintain her own property free of husbandly claims by passing three
7
nights of each year away from his residence.
Ancient Egypt had several varieties of marriage existing side by
Some, probably the oldest, were governed by premarital agree-
side.

ments that spelled out the wife's property rights and the husband's
comparative powerlessness under the law. For example:

/ bow before thy rights as a wife. From this day on, I shall never oppose
thy claims with a single word. I recognize thee before all others as my
wife, though I do not have the right to say thou must be my wife. Only I
am thy husband and mate. Thou alone hast the right of departure.
From day on that I have become thy husband, I cannot oppose thy
this

wish, wherever thou desirest to go. ... I have no power to interfere in

any of thy transactions. I hereby cede to thee any rights deeded to me in

any document that has been made out in my favor. Thou keepest me
obligated to recognize all these cessions. 8

Egyptian priests advised husbands to remain in their wives' good I

graces, much as Christian priests later advised wives to make themselves!

subservient to husbands:

Keep thy house, love thy wife, and do not dispute with her. She will
withdraw herself before violence. Feed her, adorn her, massage her.
Caress her and make her heart to rejoice as long as thou livest. Attend] . . .

to that her desire and to that which occupies her mind. For in
which is

such manner thou persuadest her to remain with thee. If thou opposest
her, it will be thy ruin. 9

418
 An Egyptian husband was counseled to make glad his wife's Hvov
heart "during the time that thou hast," which might have meant a Hyacinthus
on
earth, or else a shorter period implying a temporary
lifetime
10
^^^^^^^^^^^
marriage. In the matrilocal household, husbands often entered a
servitude to win their brides, as did the biblical
of trial
period Jacob to
win the hand of Rachel (Genesis 29). Hence Sophocles's remark that
"Egyptian men sit indoors all day long, weaving; the women go out
and attend to business." n

Similarly among Anglo-Saxon tribes, "husbandry" meant farm

work as it still does because a husband was usually bonded to
work on his wife's land. Such an agricultural matriarchate is still found

in some areas. Among the Zuni, husbands worked in the fields, but
the land and its harvest belonged to their wives. 12 The old custom of

providing work in compensation for marriage gave rise to the word

bridegroom, literally "the bride's servant." The Koran tells men, "your
wives are your tillage," because by ancient Arabian law a wifeless
man was also landless. 13 See Matrilineal Inheritance.
Tantric sages considered "husbandship" (bhavanan) essential for
another reason: it was
still
indispensable to a man's spiritual develop-
ment. The same notion was found among Aryan Celts. The ancient
Irish said a true bard could have power over poetry and magic only if

he had "purity of husbandship," that 14

is, fidelity to his wife.
1. J.E. Harrison, 519. 2. Briffault 2,90-91. 3. Hartley, 147, 159. 4. Briffault 1, 369.
5. de Riencourt, 187. 6. Briffault 2, 348. 7. Hartley, 232. 8. Diner, 212.
9. Diner, 218; Budge, D.N., 26. 10. Hartley, 196. 11. Bachofen, 180.
12. Farb.M.R.C, 81-83. 13. Fielding, 83. 14. Joyce 1,463.

Hvov
"The Earth," an Iranian form of Eve. Followers of Zoroaster
pretended that she was the wife of their prophet, not a Goddess but only
a mortal woman; yet, like writers of the Bible, they inadvertently gave

away the secret by calling her Mother of All Living. Zoroaster "went
into" her three times, and each time "his seed entered the ground,"
indicating that he impersonated the god who fertilized the Earth.
1

1. Campbell, Oc.M., 210.

Hyacinthus
Spring-flower god worshipped in Crete, Sparta, Rhodes, and Myce-
nae; another name for Narcissus or Antheus or Adonis. In Lacedaemon
his flowers represented phalli, carried at the annual festival of the

Hyacinthia. Classical myth made him a homosexual lover of the god

Apollo, another instance of Apollo's usurpation of the role of his sister
Artemis, whose priestesses the Hyacinthides ruled the archaic rites of
1
the flower god.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,78-82,311.

419
Hygeia Hygeia
Hyperboreans of Mother Rhea Coronis at her healing shrine of
"Health," title

^^^^^^^^^m Titane. The name was applied to one of the Goddess's milk-giving
breasts. The other was Panacea. Later worshippers of the doctor-god

Asclepius made Hygeia and Panacea

his "daughters."

Hymen
Veil of the Temple; the anatomical definition descended from a

concept of the vagina as a sanctuary of Aphrodite, virgin Goddess

presiding over defloration. The veil of her temple was "rent in the
midst" (Luke 23:45) by the Passion of her doomed bridegroom, at the
moment when he entered her chthonian womb, and the sun (male
principle) was darkened all elements borrowed by the Christian cruci-
fixionmyth. (See Honey.) At the sacred marriage as well as at secular
marriages, the Goddess was invoked with the cry Hymen Hymenaie: O
possible origin of the word "hymn." !

1. Rose, 32.

Hypatia
Alexandrian Neoplatonist philosopher, victim of 5th-century Chris-
tian persecutionof intellectual women. While she was driving to the

academy where she taught, a gang of monks dragged her from her
chariot, carried her into a church, stripped her, scraped the flesh from
her bones with oyster shells, then burned what was left: all by order of
St. Cyril, the city Patriarch. By making judicious gifts to civil authorities,

Cyril and his monks managed to halt official investigation of Hypa-

murder. Cyril attained sainthood in 1882
tia's
1
when Pope Leo XIII
canonized him as a "doctor of the church." 2
Hypatia's teachings had been famous throughout the land of
Egypt, and her death signaled the end of pagan learning in that
3
country.
1. Gibbon 2, 816-17. 2. Attwater, 100. 3. Seligmann, 82.

Hyperboreans
Greek name for the tribes of northern Europe and the British isles,
literally "dwellers at the Back of the North Wind." They were supposed
to have miraculous knowledge of the movements of the stars, the

seasons, fate, and reincarnation. Their observatory-temples, such as

Stonehenge, probably contributed to this view.

420
I
Hysteria Hysteria

"Womb," the orgiastic religious festival of Aphrodite in Argos, where

j

the Womb of the World was adored and symbolically fructified. 1

^mmmhm
Hysteria was given itspresent meaning by Renaissance doctors
who explained women's diseases with a theory that the womb

sometimes became detached from its place and wandered about inside
the body, causing uncontrolled behavior.
1. [Link], 126.

421
V"
 I J K

The name kore meant

the Goddess through-
out the ancient Middle
East. The word
means a virgin or maid-
f en, often one in the
service of Athene,
as this one. Polychromed
marble, probably
V from an island of Ionian
Greece, although
found near the Panthe-
on; ca. 5th century
B.C.

The kiss is a limestone

carving by Constan-
ts Brancusi (1912).

This graven image

comes from the pre-
Hellenic era of pagan
idolatry. Nearly three
feet high, stylized yet
with intricate detail;

probably made to hang

on the wall of a tomb.

423
bo lao
Idea
One of the most common and most revered "secret names of God"
for use in spells, charms, and invocations, adopted from Neoplatonic
mystics who called it the essence of the (pagan) Logos. Apparently its

meaning was the deity invoking him- or

occult herself, as "I, the Alpha-
and-Omega." See Name.
Orphics said lao was the same as Dionysus, or else the bisexual
Phanes (Eros), firstborn of the gods. Christians of the Middle Ages
1

claimed lao was Jesus.

1. Graves, W.G., 463.

Iblis

Arabic name for Satan, or Shaytan, the angel who rebelled against

Allah and refused to worship Allah's creation, Man. Iblis was the leader
1

of the djinn, spirits older than Allah. His name seems to have been a
2
corruption of Greek diabolos.
[Link], 289. 2. Jonas, 210.

Ichor
Homer's word for the mystic "blue blood" of gods, which kept them
immortal and gave them a blue skin color such as characterized gods

depicted in the sacred art of India. As the gods were diabolized in the
Middle Ages, so was their magic blood. Ichor now means a watery
purulent discharge, such as medieval churchmen postulated in the
veins of devils; the word has also been applied to the blood of insects.
See Quintessence.

Idea
"Inner-Goddess." Occult tradition said an idea emanated from the
Female Soul of the World (Shakti, Shekina, Psyche, Sophia, etc.). Her
"ideas" were like personal Muses, "which forms she did in the
'
Heavens above the Stars frame to herself."
Medieval theologians disliked the Idea's feminine connotations
and turned away from the ancient theory of the eide to the astral
2
theology of Aristotle, that is, to astrological determination of thoughts.
Feminine "idea" was replaced by masculine "concept," which used
to mean
the same as conception, from Latin concipere semina, a
3
gathering-up of semen.
Early Christian Gnostics however regarded God the Creator as a
mere demiurge, child of the Mother who created in his mind all the

424
"ideas" he used to make things in the material world. His sin was that he Idolatry
arrogantly claimed all these ideas to be his own, because "he was

ignorant of the ideas of whatever he created and of the Mother

4
herself." This notion that God was guilty of the sin of hubris against
the Goddess recurred again and again among early Gnostic sects, until
the orthodox church declared the notion heretical and forcibly
changed the minds of its adherents.
[Link],65. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 102. 3. Potter & Sargent, 224. 4. Jonas, 191.

Idolatry
The pagan habit of making graven images of deities and heroes was
copied by the Catholic church and never abandoned, despite God's
many prohibitions of idolatry in the Bible (Exodus 20:4, Leviticus
19:4, etc.). St. Thomas Aquinas defended the church against the
biblical tradition, and laid down a rule that the same reverence must
be paid to Christ's image as to the deity himself. 1
The issue of idolatry became crucial in the Protestant Reforma-
tion, when heretic sects broke off from Catholicism, claiming that

papal Rome no longer followed the biblical magisterium in this matter

or any other.
John Wyclif declared that holy images were of no use except as John Wyclif (ca.
firewood. For this reason, among others, the church insisted on 1330-1384) English
his heretic bones 30 years death and burning them. 2
after his reforming theologian
digging up
who inspired John
Some Protestant sects, like the Socinians, argued that if Catholics
Huss, the Lollards,
could be saved despite their disobedience of God's clear command and other leaders of the
against idolatry, then Protestants could be saved also, though they Protestant

denied other papal doctrines such as the trinity and the eternity of Reformation. Wyclif
served as rector of
damnation. In renouncing idolatry, they claimed to be following the
Fillingham, prebend of
letter of biblical law more closely than the Roman church did. 3
Aust, warden of
One reason for renunciation of idols was the fear that people Canterbury, and rector
would cease to be suitably impressed by them, for after the decline of of Ludgershall in
Roman became less and less impressive. Lacking
culture holy images Buckinghamshire.
the artistic and training that had flourished under paganism,
skill

Christian image-makers were unable to produce anything comparable

to the classical sculptures and paintings. They created only the
4
crudest sort of painted wooden figures or icons.
Images, no matter how venerable, failed to arouse the proper
reverence when showed, their paint chipped, or the
their cracks

awkward technique of a mediocre artist too obviously proclaimed a

man-made artifact devoid of inspiration. As the Chinese proverb said,
No image-maker worships the gods he knows what stuff they are
made of." 5 So did everyone else know, in the case of crudely
:nceived Some, however, succeeded in fooling the credulous
idols.

faithful for a long time. Boxley Monastery near Maidstone attracted

425
Idolatry many pilgrimages to its famous Rood of Grace, an idol of Christ that

could "come alive": its eyes and lips moved. Cromwell's officers

^^^^^^^^^^m disclosed the deception in 1 536, publicly displaying the wires and rods
6
inside the statue that created the "miracle."
were the many pagan tomb-
Similarly "miraculous" idols, in effect,
carvings and statues taken over by Christian churches and
re-christened martyrs and saints. Where pagan folk were used to visiting
shrines of heroes and demigods for petitions or healing, churches

simply moved into the shrine and created a new tale of martyrdom for
an old god, using his faked "relics" for healing magic. Especially with
medieval monks, "the manufacture of martyrs became a thriving indus-

try." Even the bones of ordinary Roman citizens dug out of ancient
tombs or catacombs became "idols" they were worshipped as
in that

divine containers for the spirits of saints. 7 This kind of idolatry was
not a new Christian invention, but a copy of pagan practice. The
writings of Pliny show magical recipes in classical times using the
relics of slain gladiators, or hair, or pieces of garments, or nails from a
8
cross on which a man had been executed.

The Catholic church changed its collective mind several times

about idols before settling down to permit them. Certainly early sects,

such as the Iconoclasts, adopted a typically Semitic horror of idols and

devoted themselves to smashing every metal or marble god or

goddess. At the Council of Constantinople, the bishops unanimously

decreed that images were inventions of the devil and must be kept
out of Christian churches. Three decades later, the Council of Nicaea
reversed this decision and even anathematized those who refused to

worship images. Two more councils contradicted each other's decisions

on the matter, until in 843 the images were reinstated in the churches
9
once for all.

One way in which the church excused its own idolatry was to
claim that its idols were not real idols but only "symbols." Whatever
this may have meant, the churchmen knew perfectly well that the
average worshipper made no such distinction. The images were as
thoroughly idolized as any African fetish or Phidian Athene:

The instant we ascribe to an image real power to act, we make of it an

. . .

inspired being in and all the sophistry in the world as to its being a
itself,

means offaith, or a symbol, or causing a higher power to act on the

suppliant, is rubbish. The devotee believes tout bonnement that the

image works the cure, and if he did not, any other image of the Virgin or
Saint would answer the same purpose. This chaffhas been thrashed out
a thousand times. . . . And it will last, while one fetish endures, that the
"
hierophant will call it a mere "symbol, and the ignorant worshipper,
absolutely unable to comprehend him, will worship the symbol as the
thing itself as he is really expected to do. w
1. H. Smith, 217. 2. H. Smith, 319.
Walker, 185. 4. H. Smith, 217.
3.
5. Muller, 329. 6. Hazlitt, 524. 7. Midler, 206. 8. Halliday, 49. 9. Muller, 16.

10. Leland, 237.

426
Idun Idun

Norse Goddess called "the Renewing One." '

In her western garden
Coition
she grew the apples of immortality,
When
like mortals.
her apples were stolen,
3
which gave the gods eternal life. 2
the gods began to wither and grow old, ^^m
Idun's name, possibly a feminine forerunner of "Odin," could
have been derived from Greece's mountain-shrine Ida, sacred to

Rhea, or her alter ego Hera, who kept the apples of immortality that

gave the Olympian gods eternal life. Idun was also said to have

invented the runic alphabet. Her consort Bragi became the greatest of
bards, because she engraved the magic runes on his tongue.
1. Sturluson, 54. 2. Larousse, 266. 3. Hollander, 39.

Ignatius, Saint
Also called Theophorus, "God-bearer," Ignatius starred in a trium-

phal procession of Trajan's time, from Antioch to Rome where he was

killed.
1
As his name meant Holy Fire, the cult hero whose spirit he
carried to immolation seems to have been Heracles. Or he may have
been one of the god's idols, carried to Rome with other booty to be
2
displayed at Trajan's triumph. His canonization was only a later myth
on an old title.

1. Attwater, 176. 2. Brewster, 89.

Ilithyia

Surname of many forms of the Goddess Diana, Aphrodite, Arte-

mis, etc. in the role of divine midwife. Women in childbirth prayed to
Ilithyia Eleutho, the Goddess as "Liberator," who freed the infant
from the womb. This mythic personage was even canonized as a (male)

Christian saint, St. Eleutherius. Similarly a church devoted to Mary

as Panaghia Blastike, "Virgin of Fecundity," was built on an old shrine
of Aphrodite Ilithyia, "Mother of Fecundity." The Greeks applied '

the name Ilithyia to many Egyptian goddesses as well, including Isis,

Buto, Hathor, and Nephthys.

1. Hyde, 61, 77.

Immaculate Conception
Often erroneously thought to refer to the conception of Christ, the
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception actually was invented to absolve
the virgin Mary of original sin from the moment of her own
conception. Early fathers of the church said Mary couldn't be Theoto-
kos (God-bearer) if she was human, therefore tainted with the sin of

427
 1
Immanuel Eve; it was heresy to worship her as divine. Nevertheless, people
2
Inanna insisted on worshipping her. By the 1 2th century, Mariolatry even
overshadowed the worship of God and Christ; so the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception was invented to make her uniquely holy.
Many churchmen opposed the doctrine, which was heatedly
argued for the next 700 years. Finally it was adopted as an article of
faith by Pope Pius IX in 1854. Every Catholic was commanded to
3

believe henceforth that Mary "at the first instant of her conception,

was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, by the singular
4
grace and privilege granted to her by Almighty God."
A certain unnamed medieval holy man had been informed by a
divine source that Mary's birthday was September 8, precisely nine
months after the December festival which originally represented the
5
conception of the Virgin Goddess Kore. Apparently the date was
chosen to celebrate Epiphany and the Immaculate Conception at the
same time.
These events being
equally devoid of documentation, their inven-
tionand promulgation sometimes aroused scorn among
non-Catholics. Hazlitt scoffed: "We hear of her immaculate conception
as an afterthought, on the part of the Romanists. . . .
[T]he whole
narrative touching her [Mary] is evidently fabulous, and . . . the immac-
ulate conception by her mother, her own purification ... are
6
absurdities."

How Mary's conception took place was a problem that aroused

some ingenious theological nonsense. Mary's father was not God or a
spirit but a living man, and if he had sexual intercourse with Mary's
mother it would mean using the medium of transmission of original
sin, by the church's own teaching. Some theologians would have it that

his seed was carried magically, as if he were an incubus.

[Link], 150. 2. Daly, 92. 3. Young, 203. 4. Encyc. Brit., "Mary."
[Link] Voragine, 524. 6. Hazlitt, 394.

var. Emanuel Immanuel

Persian title of "the god Immani," or E-mani, venerated in Elam as
a sacred king-martyr. 1 One of his later incarnations was the savior
Mani, allegedly born of a virgin named Mary. 2
Isaiah 7:14 quoted a Persian scripture: "Behold, a virgin shall

conceive, and bear a son, and shall name Immanuel."

call his

Matthew 1:22-23 insisted this was a prophecy of Christ, who was

therefore "Immanuel"; but the name never really stuck.

Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 70, 78. 2. Robertson, 86-88.

1 . 1 1

var. Ininni Inanna

Sumerian name of the Goddess as queen of the land who made every
king her bridegroom. Wedding hymns for the hieros gamos said, "Oh

428
my queen, queen of the universe, the queen who encompasses the Incest
universe, may he [the king] enjoy long days at your holy lap." Some-
times she turned her power against the king's enemies: "My queen, _^_^__^_^__
the foreign lands cower at your cry My queen, you are all-devour-
ing in your power My queen, the great gods fled before you like
fluttering bats." Tradition said the city of Agade was completely
destroyed because Inanna abandoned temple: "Holy Inanna
its

forsook the shrine Agade . . .

; she went forth against the city in battle." '

Inanna was the source of the earth's life blood. She filled the wells,
rivers, and springs with her "blood." As a fertility deity, like her

Babylonian counterpart Ishtar, she annually descended into the under-

world to rescue her consort Dumuzi [Tammuz]. As Nanna, Nana, or
Anna she became the holy virgin mother of Attis, the bride of Balder,
and the elder Virgin Mother whom Christians called "God's
Grandmother." 2
Hittites called her Inaras. In the land of Hatti she renewed her

virginity each year to become the bride of the sacred king at the Purulli
festival, which later passed into the Jewish Purim. The chosen man was
isolated in a royal castle or tower, and slain at the appointed time so his

blood would help the Goddess fertilize the land. Certain writings of
lamentation suggest that the king-martyr regretted his brief glory. 3
1. Pritchard, A.N.E., 127, 202, 207. 2. Graves, W.G., 411. 3. Hoolce, M.E.M., 99.

Incest

Thanks to Freud, King Oedipus is one of the most misinterpreted

figures inmythology. His mother-marrying, father-killing legend arose
not from a wish-fulfillment fantasy but from the ancient system of
succession of sacred kings, whereby every previous king was slain by his

successor, chosen to be the queen's new bridegroom. The killer was

always described as a "son" of the deceased because he was the same
god reincarnated in another consort of the same mother-bride. Such
sacred incest can still be traced even in the Christian image of the divine
Son who is
indistinguishable from his Father, who impregnated his

own Mother (i.e., Mother of God) to beget himself.

When patriarchal invaders overthrew the Theban matriarchate,

they purposely misinterpreted the sacred icons that told the story of
its
royal succession. The name of the deceased "father," Laius, simply
meant "King," and that of the widowed "mother" was the same as
the title of the Moon Goddess. The replacement, Oedipus, was depict-
ed as a stranger from a distant land. To make him the king's true son,

improbable details were added to show he was sent away in infancy and
brought up among foreigners. Freud's rather subjective notion that
all men secretly want to kill their fathers the so-called Oedipus

complex may have had more to do with Freud's own experience of

1
a repressive father than with any mythic archetype.

429
Incest Sacred incest between father-son and mother-bride was usual
among ancient god-kings. It was considered necessary for the god-
^^^^^^^^^^_ dess-queen to be periodically supplied with a young, virile consort who
embodied the same god again as the older consort. Thus Egyptian
gods like Amon and Osiris were respectfully entitled, "Husband of thy
mother." 2 The reborn Savior appeared as Min, or Menu, the Moon-
bull who mated with his sacred Cow-mother. In human form, he was
shown with an abnormally long erect phallus, as an ithyphallic sex
god like Eros or Kama, the Bull "from whom spring the delights of
3
love."

Throughout Egypt generally the company ofgods ofa town or city were
three innumber ; two members of such a triad were gods, one old
. . .

and one young, and the third was a goddess, who was, naturally, the wife,
or female counterpart, of the older god. The younger god was the son
of the older god and goddess, and he was supposed to possess all the
attributes and powers which belonged to his father. . . .
[I]t was as-
sumed that he would succeed to his rank and throne when the older god
had passed away. *

Here was the basis of trinities consisting of Father, Son, and

Holy Spirit (or, Goddess: the third member of the trinity was female, as
she was even in Gnostic Christianity under the name of Sophia). The
same trinity occurs in almost all mythologies, without ever developing
into acomplete family: there is no daughter, only a son. That is, man-
as-youth and man-as-man have their separate projections into divinity;
but woman is always the same.

Unlike Freud, Jung said the meaning of the mother-son incest in

religions was not based on simple eroticism but on the idea of rebirth.
"To mother again in order to be born again by the
get back to the
mother. . . . One
of the simplest ways was to fructify the mother and

procreate oneself again. ... It is not incestuous cohabitation that is

sought, but rebirth. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother
. . .

has good reason; fear of death holds him there. It appears that there is

no concept and no word strong enough to express the meaning of

this conflict. Whole religions are built to give value to the magnitude of
5
this conflict."

Though the myth of Oedipus was not about true "Oedipal"

father-son rivalry but rather about sacred kingship, the theme of male
jealousy was amply demonstrated elsewhere in myths. Rank says, "It is
not necessary to explore the heavens for some process into which this
trait might be laboriously fitted . . .
;
in reality, a certain tension is

frequently, not regularly, revealed between father and son

if . . .

related to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the

mother." 6 It might be a fruitful avenue for psychological investiga-

tion to determine why mother-son love in mythology was nearly always

transmuted into the realm of the erotic.

1. Graves, CM. 2, 12-13. 2. Maspero, lix. 3. Budge, E.M., 140.

4. Budge, G.E. 1, 1 13-14. 5. Silberer, 419-20. 6. Rank, 77.

430
Incubus Incubus

The pagan incubus was a special priest embodying a prophetic spirit

who could come in dreams or visions to those who "incubated" over-
night in the earth-womb or Pit of a temple (see Abaddon). Greeks
practiced incubation especially in the healing temples of Asclepius and
Hygeia. Egyptians' favorite incubus appeared in temples of Imhotep.
1

Undoubtedly, the appearance of the incubus was often carefully staged,

when the sleeper was a figure of political importance, to issue the

"right" prophecies and advice that would benefit the temple.

custom of incubation, which became
Christians copied the

"watching" or "keeping vigil." It was recommended in a time of

troublesome decision to "watch and pray" overnight in a church, to
court a vision of guidance. The incubus, however, was diabolized. He
was no longer the same as a guiding angel. The reason for his fall from

grace was the ancient tradition of midnight sexual relationships between

incubating women and priests, or incubating men and priestesses.
Incubi thus became spirits of lust.
churchmen said incubi were demon lovers of women,
Certain able
to beget children in a demonic version of the Virgin Birth. Father

Ludovico Sinistrari said hedging his bets like every well-trained cler-
ic "Subject to correction by our Holy Mother Church, and as a mere Ludovico Maria
Sinistrari 18th-
expression of private opinion, I say that the Incubus, when having
intercourse with a human from own century Franciscan
woman, begets the fetus his seed."
theologian, author of
As a "well-known" example of a demon-begotten man, Sinistrari cited
Demonality.
"that damnable heresiarch Martin Luther." 2 As for the opinion of the
damnable heresiarch himself, Luther said all odd-looking children
should be destroyed at birth, for they were clearly the offspring of
demons. 3
Other Thomas Aquinas, insisted that demons
authorities, like St.
must be Therefore an incubus could impregnate a woman only
sterile.

by carrying semen from a man with whom the demon previously

copulated in the form of a succubus or she-demon for demons were
4
thought to change their sex at will. Aquinas also asserted that a demon
could use semen lost in a wet dream so a man could be "at one and the
5
same time both a virgin and a father."
Here Aquinas contradicted both the biblical tradition and
[Link], who cited Genesis 6:4 to prove that fallen angels begot
children on mortal women: "The sons of God came in unto the

daughters of men, and they bare children to them." Pope Benedict XIV
announced, "This passage has reference to devils known as incubi and
succubi."The pope declined to decide the question of demonic
conception, however; he simply mentioned both schools of thought:
"Some writers deny that there can be offspring. . . .
Others, however,
asserting that coitus is
possible, maintain that children may result." On
this theory, a woman was burned at Carcassonne in 1275 for bearing a

child to the devil. 6

Churchmen with some classical education pointed out that the

431
Incubus by the church's definition were fa-
gods of the heathen devils,
7
thers. Many legends accepted by the church attributed demonic

parentage to such historical figures as Robert of Normandy, Alexan-

der the Great, Plato, Scipio Africanus, all the Huns, and all the

Cypriots. A 6th-century History of Huns

8 the Goths declared that the
9
were descended from the offspring of women and incubi. Neverthe-
less, the opinion of Aquinas generally overruled
both classical and
biblical precedent.
Whatever the incubus's reproductive potential, his sexual capacity
inspired ill-concealed male envy in an age when nearly all men were
so sexually naive as to confuse penis size with lovemaking skills. Father
Sinistrari said women who lay with incubi found afterward that the

lovemaking of mere men was "paltry and unable to arouse them to any
10
degree." Pico della Mirandola explained why: incubi were hand-
some and notable for "the extraordinary largeness of their members. . . .

The devils can even agitate the thing when it is inside, wherefore the
Pierre de Lancre women derive more pleasure than they do with men." De Lancre
(1553-1601) Trial judge quoted the testimony of an accused witch, who said her devil "had a
for the Inquisition,
member like a mule's ... as long and as thick as an arm. ... He always
who boasted of burning
exposed his instrument, of such beautiful shape and measurements."
hundreds of witches
and charged the entire Despite these unwieldy proportions, incubi were said to seduce very
population of Pays young children. The Chancellor of Wiirzburg declared in August,
de Labourd some 1629, that "There are some 300 children of three or four years who
30,000 persons have had intercourse with devils." ' '

with witchcraft. He
Satyrs, fauns, and the Gaulish dusii (from deus, "god") were cited
wrote several books
on witchcraft, which in an official Inquisition handbook as incubi who had intercourse with
were accepted as witches in front of witnesses. St. Augustine called the Gaulish Dusius
authoritative. an incubus who lay with mortal women; and later churchmen
12
earnestly supported Augustine with what they conceived to be proof.
Women seemed unaccountably willing to copulate with their de-
mons under the eyes of "bystanders"; the latter reported that, while the
demon remained invisible, "it has been apparent from the disposition
of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and

orgasm, [that] have been

. . .
they with Incubus devils." B
copulating
14
Nuns appeared especially vulnerable to the attentions of incubi.
Authorities said nuns often awoke in the morning "to find themselves
15
polluted as they had slept with men."
if Some nuns claimed they slept
with Christ, but this was condemned as blasphemy resulting from
demonic possession, even though the church taught them to think of
themselves as Christ's wives.
There were some Christian saints who functioned as incubi
themselves. At shrines of St. Giles in Normandy and St. Rene in
Anjou, women would lie all
night with the saints' ithyphallic images
16
hoping to conceive children. Christians used to incubate in the

temple of Isis at Canopis, following local custom; so the bishops moved

some bones into the temple and called them relics of two martyrs,
Cyrus of Alexandria and John of Edessa. Incubations continued as

432
before, and any subsequent miracles were credited to the martyrs Indulgence
17
instead of to Isis.

On occasion, women who consorted with incubi seemed to inspire ^^^^^^^^^^

more fear than the demons themselves. An Anglo-Saxon Leechbook
prescribed magic salves for protection, not against incubi but against
"women with whom the Devil had sexual intercourse." At Toulouse
in 1275, a 56-year-old woman of means was robbed of her worldly

goods by ecclesiastical confiscation, and tortured until she confessed

that she had intercourse with an incubus every night for years and gave

birth to the demon's child, which was half wolf and half snake. 18

Perhaps the ultimate irony was the church's official opinion that all

the activities of incubi were performed "with the permission of

God." 19
But what God allowed, men punished.
1. Gilford, 111. 2. R.E.L. Masters, 215, 219. 3. G.R. Scott, 113. 4. H. Smith, 278.
5. Robbins, 28. 6. Robbins,461, 516. 7. H. Smith, 278. 8. Robbins, 465.

9. J.B. Russell, 59. 10. Haining,77. 11. Robbins, 385,462,464. 12. Hazlitt, 176.
13. Kramer & Sprenger, 24, 114. 14. Haining, 70. 15. Robbins, 127.
16. G.R. Scott, 245-50; Knight, D.W.P., 141. 17. Gifford, 123.
18. J.B. Russell, 75, 164. 19. Robbins, 127.

Indulgence
Catholic doctrine most often equated with the sin of simony. By
indulgence, the church reaped enormous profit with no material
selling
investment only a promise that the purchaser would be absolved of
his sins and admitted to heaven after death. No customer ever returned
to complain of being cheated.
It became the rule for popes to promise plenary indulgence
(absolute remission of all sins) to military leaders who fought the
church's crusades. Bills of indulgence became the spiritual carrot

corresponding to the stick of excommunication, which was thought

to sentence the sinner irrevocably to hellfire.
Bills of indulgence were peddled by Renaissance popes to earn

money for their expensive lifestyle. Pope Alexander VI made a

commercial empire out of selling pardons. Pope Leo X sent a Domini-
can,Johann Tetzel, into Germany to sell indulgences for varying
numbers of days' worth of release from purgatory, depending on price.
Tetzel's announcements read:

/ have here the passports . . . to lead the human sou] into Paradise.
Inasmuch as for a single one of the mortal sins, several of which are

committed every day after confession, seven years of expiation either on

earth or in Purgatory are imposed who, for the sake ofa quarter ofa
florin, would hesitate to secure one of these letters which will admit your
divine, immortal soul to the ofParadise? '
celestial joys

One observer wrote in the 1 5th century: "Sinners say nowa-

lays, Icare not what or how many evils I do before God, for I can get at

Mice, without the least difficulty, plenary remission of any guilt or sin

433
Infallibility whatever through an indulgence granted me by the Pope, whose
I have bought for fourpence
written grant for these grantors of
. . .
,

^^^^^^^^^^^ Indulgence run about from place to place and sometimes give a letter

for twopence, sometimes good drink of wine and beer, some-

for a

times to pay their losses at a game of ball, sometimes for the hire of a
2
prostitute, sometimes for fleshly love."

Reginald Scot thought the peddling of indulgences showed the

trivial nature of Catholic doctrine, especially when coupled with the
church's idolatry. He wrote of "the folly of some papists, who seeing
and confessing the pope's absurd religion, in the erection and
maintenance of idolatry and superstition, specially in images, pardons,

and relics of saints, will persevere to think, that the rest of his doctrine
and trumpery is holy and good." 3
But not all Catholics approved of the sale of indulgence. In

Prague, papal bulls ofindulgence were publicly burned at the pillory,

having been carried there strung around the neck of a whore, who
4
enlivened the proceedings with lascivious capering. Minstrels and
other popular entertainers throughout Europe made fun of the doctrine
of indulgence with a satiric couplet:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

The soul from out of the fire springs. 5

[Link],B.P.,241. 2. Murstein, 113. 3. Scot, 12. 4. Lea unabridged, 489.

[Link],B.P,241.

Infallibility
The doctrine of papal infallibility stated that anything the pope said

was invariably true, and anything he did was invariably right, because
God could not permit his pope to speak or act erroneously. The
doctrine first took shape in the 1 5 th century. It was set forth by

implication in the writings of Torquemada. Cardinal Cajetano openly

proclaimed it, inspiring the pope to issue the bull Pastor eternus, which
made the doctrine of infallibility part of canon law. 1

In the 19th-century Age of Enlightenment, one scientific discov-

ery after another demonstrated that the statements of popes on

matters like the solar system, biology, botany, geology, and other earth
sciences to say nothing of witchcraft, diabolism, and the Bible had
been patently fallible. In fact, wrong. So the church decided that the
pope was still certainly infallible but only when he spoke officially, ex
cathedra, for then God protected his words from error if not at other
times. Unfortunately this served for only a short time. It was soon
found that popes were wrong in numerous statements officially en-
shrined in bulls and encyclicals.
The doctrine of infallibility had to be revised again, this time to
state that the pope is infallible only when speaking "on matters of

434
jiith
and morals." Still another revision of the doctrine may be due in Infernus
he near future. Innocents
1. Guignebert, 357. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

kfernus
latin word for the underworld, source of our "Inferno" which
nplies a place of hellish fire and heat; but the Infernus was not
ecessarily hot at all. The name simply meant "the place within." It

as usually pictured as dark, not fiery. There were several entrances,

ake Avernus was one; another was the sacred cave of the Cumaean
tfafl.

iheritance
ee Matrilineal Inheritance.

inocents, Slaughter of
artof the traditional myth of sacred kingship: the incumbent
king is
arned by a prophecy of the birth of his future supplanter and tries to

;cape his fate by killing numbers of recently born infants. Innocents

ere slaughtered in the myths of Sargon, Nimrod, Moses, Jason,
(rishna,
and Mordred as well as in that of Jesus.

Probably the original killer of innocents was Kamsa, king of the

hojas, who tried to kill Krishna along with a batch of other children,
he slaughter is
depicted in the cave-temple at Elephanta, where the
1
loss is the symbol of the king. In this case Krishna escaped because

p
was secretly exchanged with an infant girl, who was killed in his

|[Link] grew up in heaven, and became a Goddess. She prophe-

pd that she would smash Kamsa and drink his blood; and Kamsa

[ealized that she was his own death." 2

TheArthurian version of the Slaughter of the Innocents followed
e typical pagan model. Merlin predicted that Arthur would be

pthrown by a prince born on May Day, the old Celtic New Year as it

reckoned when kings were usually replaced by their tanists or

ps
Mordred was Arthur's son by his sister Margawse, therefore
jons."
a son and a uterine nephew, able to claim the throne by both fa-
pth
er-right and mother-right. Arthur seemed not to realize the obvious
kalifications of Mordred when he ordered the
slaughter of May Day
lildren, according to Malory's account; and the story was further
addled by giving the children various ages, though they were all

bm on the same day ("some four weeks old, and some less"). 3

435
Inquisition Then King Arthur let send for all the children born on May Day,
begotten of lords and born ofladies; for Merlin told King Arthur that
^^^^^^^^^^^^ he that should destroy him should be born on May Day, wherefor he se,
for them all, upon pain of death; and so there were found many lords'

sons, and all were put in a ship to the sea, and some were four weeks oh
and some less. And so by fortune the ship drave unto a castle, and was
all to-riven, and destroyed the most part, save that Mordred was cast up,

and a good man found him, and nourished him till he was fourteen
year old, and then he brought him to court, as it rehearseth afterward,
toward the end of the Death ofArthur. *

The Christian version of the slaughter of the innocents occurs

only Gospel of Matthew. Other Gospels say nothing of it. Marl

in the

and John make no mention of Jesus's early years. As far as Luke is

concerned, Jesus grew up quietly in Galilee after presentation in the
temple of Jerusalem after his birth; there was no king threatening his
Matthew's "slaughter" seems to have been included only to provi
life.

in Egypt, to create fulfillment of a

an excuse to locate the holy child
prophecy, "Out of Egypt have I called my son" (Matthew 2:1 5).
Therefore Herod's attack on the children probably was invented to
provide a link between Jesus and his Egyptian counterpart Osiris.
The infants supposedly slain by King Herod were canonized en
masse, though there are no scriptural records of any of their names,
nor even of their number. A modern Catholic scholar notes that
enormous numbers have been postulated in the past, but "it is

unlikely that there were more than about twenty of them at the most.'

Yet this statement has no more foundation than a statement that

there were two hundred, or two thousand, or none at all perhaps tht

most likely possibility, since this was a universal, not a

myth. specific,
The entire unknown, unnamed group became patrons of childre
and on their feast day, December 28, it was customary in England for
up and go from house to house begging gifts.
children to dress

However, in 1 540 an ecclesiastical proclamation ordered that this

custom must cease. 6 It has not been observed since.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 374. 2. 0'Flaherty, 213. 3. Malory 1, 35.
4. Malory 1, 45. 5. Artwater, 179. 6. Hazlitt, 131.

Inquisition
Until the advent of Nazism in modern Germany, Europe knew no
system of organized terrorism to rival the 500-year reign of the Inquis:

tion. HistorianHenry Charles Lea, recognized as the leading expert

on the medieval period, called the Inquisition "a standing mockery of
justice perhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man
has ever devised. . . . Fanatic zeal, arbitrary cruelty, and insatiable cupj

ity rivalled each other in building up a system unspeakably

atrocious. It was a system which might well seem the invention of
demons." (See Torture.)

436
 It was invented primarily to force public acceptance of a church Inquisition
didn't want. According to a contemporary aphorism, the
[he public
bhurch had not ten commandments but only one: "Bring hither the
money." St. Bernard deplored the church's greed: "Whom can you
2

know me among the prelates who does not seek rather to empty the

pockets
of his flock than to subdue their vices?" 3

Bulgarian writers said the priests of Rome were given to drunken-

ness and robbery, and "there is none to forbid them." The local
presbyter
Cosmas
deny but only insisted that Christians must
didn't it

4
honor even wicked priests. This was an accepted doctrine. Pilichdorf Peter von Pilichdorf
bid, "The worst man, if he be a priest, is more worthy than the holiest Anti-heretical
5 missionary writer of
pf layman."
the early 14th century.
Priests were a privileged class, but their privileges were more and
bore resented. In the 12th century, monasteries made themselves
Into wineshops and gambling houses; nunneries became private whore-

nouses for the clergy; priests used a confessional to seduce female

collectors were depicted in popular stories as the
parishioners. Episcopal
6
worst of all sinners. "The sale of Church offices was constant and
7
unblushing." Even the pope observed that "those charged with divine

race . . .
participate in rapine and despoliation, even in the shedding
8
)f blood."

Pierre de Bruys was burned in 1126 for declaring openly that Pierre de Bruys
'God is no more in the church than in the market-place; the forms Reforming theologian
of the 12th century,
|nd
ceremonies which to so many folk replace true religion are utterly
founder of the heretical
iseless; the Cross should not be prayed to. The priests lie in . . .
Petrobrusian sect.
jretending that they made Christ's body and give it to the people for
heir salvation." 9 According to Tyndale, common folk said of any-

hing that went wrong, "the bishop has blessed it." If the dinner burned, William Tyndale
hey said the bishop has put it, "because
his foot in the bishops burn (ca. 1494-1536) English

yho they list and whosoever displeaseth them." 10 ecclesiastical

reformer, influenced by
Would-be reformers within the church were usually silenced,
Wyclif; translator of -

frere Raymond Jean was executed for preaching against the church's the first English-
Ibuses. He said bitterly, "The enemies of the faith are among ourselves,
language Bibles,
the Great Whore of of which were
fhe Church which governs us is symbolled by many
he Apocalypse, who persecutes the poor and the ministers of Christ."
n seized and burned by
Catholic authorities.
Nicholas de Clamanges, rector of the University of Paris, declared
After a life of
h an open letter that the popes were ravishers, not pastors, of their
preaching and literary
locks: "The priesthood has become a misery reduced to profaning its
activity which helped
ailing. . . . Who do you think can endure, among so many other establish the

of benefices, Reformation,
puses, your mercenary appointments, your multiple sale
Tyndale was arrested
bur elevation of men without honesty or virtue to the most eminent
and executed in
n
fositions?" Pope Alexander VI, one of the men so described, was Brussels.
with the cynical remark, "It is not God's wish that a sinner
pedited
hould die, but that he should live and pay." n
A Franciscan splinter group, the Fraticelli, withdrew from their
rder, claiming the pope and all his successors were tainted with the
In of simony. Therefore the church had been excommunicated by

437
inquisition God, for ignoring Christ's vow of poverty. They called the pope an
Antichrist.
14
These heretics were soon exterminated. One of their

centers, the village of Magnalata, was leveled by order of Pope

Martin V and every resident slain. 15

In 1325 Pope John issued the bull Cum inter nonnullos, which
"infallibly" declared was heresy to say Jesus and his apostles owned
it

no property. Inquisitors were ordered to prosecute those who believed

Jesus was a poor man. The group called Spiritual Franciscans, who
did so believe, were taught an immediate lesson when the pope had 1 14
16
of their number burned alive.

Waldenses Also The offenses of the Waldenses included many "wrong" opinions.
called Valdenses or They said laymen and women had the right to preach; masses, votive
this heretic dead were
Vaudois,
offerings, and prayers for the useless; purgatory did not exist;
sectwas founded in
one could pray to God without setting foot in a church; and a bad
southern France
to administer sacraments "a proposition
2th century priest should be forbidden
during the 1

which does no less than deny lasting grace to the sacrament of

by Peter Waldo, or
Valdes, who preached a Orders, and thus destroys the fundamental privilege of the Church."
life of simplicity and
The Waldenses said priests who demand money for administering
poverty in imitation of communion are lower than Judas, "for they sell for one denarius that
Christ. 17
body for which he demanded thirty."

Along with public disgust at the church's avarice, there was a

growing suspicion sparked by Gnostic philosophies from the east

that the church's myths of the garden of Eden, the fall, original sin,

heaven and hell, the virgin birth, the meaning of salvation, and so on,
were literally untrue. Because people refused to believe the eucharistic
bread and wine were literally flesh and blood, the papacy lost all of
Bohemia, which after many wars and crusades founded its separate
Moravian church. Tenets of the Roman church were widely ques-
tioned. Priests were forbidden to "dispute concerning the faith against
such astute heretics" in public, lest they expose themselves to
18
ridicule. As Becker said, "This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriag<
19
of clumsy lies about reality."

Despite the church's keep the populace in ignorance,

efforts to

even among the peasantry there were individuals astute enough to

recognize theology's clumsy lies. Even the 12th-century passion for

seems to have represented a last-ditch effort to
building cathedrals
hold the wandering attention of the people by giving them splendid

temples of the "Lady," to replace the Mother-shrines previously

destroyed. At length not even the Notre Dames sufficed. The Church
had to fall back on its traditional propensity to maintain a reign of
20
terror.

Guignebert says Christianity was "given to warfare; exclusive,

Jews especially menacing; bristling with
violently intolerant, to the

peremptory dogmas which set reason at defiance; marked by complex

elaborate rites kept up to the mark by a formidable army of monks

. . .

21
and kept check by a quibbling troop of acute theologians."
in The
violence of the Inquisition was its ultimate weapon.

438
 Violence could be invoked under this system by nothing more Inquisition
han ordinary living, just as the doctrine of original sin was invoked by
lothing more than being born. Not only sexual impulses, which were ^^^^^^^^^^^
always labeled corrupt, but almost every other natural impulse was
22
/iewed as evidence of anti-Christian perversity.
Modern apologists say the Inquisition served some good purposes,
23
ike helping secular courts bring criminals to justice. Only a few
lecades ago, even Catholic manuals mendaciously claimed the Inquisi-
24
ion was a purely civil tribunal. Actually, the Inquisition was
ininterested in secular crimes, except insofar as they could provide a
for a charge of heresy or witchcraft. The Inquisition was created
>asis

o win the war between the church and a disillusioned public. Coulton

ays, "The so-called Ages of Faith were only Ages of Acquiescence";

put even the acquiescence was wearing thin. 25
The power of the Inquisition was established and enlarged by a
ieries of papal bulls. Ad extirpanda of Pope Innocent IV, issued May

[5, 1252, was "a terrible measure against heretics in Italy, authorizing
eizure of their goods, imprisonment, torture, and, on conviction,
leath, all on minimal evidence." 26
The Inquisition was the most elaborate extortion racket ever
27
developed for profit. After the arrest, the property
ievised, primarily
accused was instantly confiscated. Nothing seems to have been
if the

^turned. The popes publicly praised the rule of confiscation as a

28
brime weapon against heresy. Confiscation was the organization's
hison d'etre; when the rule of confiscation was not applied, "the
lusiness of defending the faith languished lamentably." Affluent Italy

pade
its
inquisitors incredibly rich in the 14th century. Within two
rears, the inquisitor of Florence amassed "more than seven thousand
lorins, an enormous sum." 29 As the inquisitor Heinrich von Schulth-

jis complacently wrote, "When I have you tortured, and by the severe
neans afforded by the law I bring you to confession, then I
perform a
Lork pleasing in God's sight; and it profiteth me." 30
Confiscation took place before conviction, because it was taken for
ranted that no one escaped. "Officials considered themselves safe in

jcting upon the presumption" of guilt. Sometimes confiscation took

even before confession. In 1 300 a nobleman named Jean
[lace
laudier was arrested and first examined on January 20. He refused to

pnfess
for a long time but finally was broken down by torture and

jonfessed
on February 5. He was condemned on March 7. However,
is
impounded property had been sold on January 29, before the
jonfession. Similarly,
Guillem Garric was arrested at Carcassonne in

284 but not sentenced until 1319. Nevertheless, officials were

31
barreling over his castle in 1301.
Accused persons were expected to pay the expenses of their own
Imprisonment, even of their own torture. This continental custom
followed in Scotland where, for example, torturers charged their
[as
ictims 6 shillings and 8 pence for branding on the cheek. In

439
Inquisition England, accused witches were sometimes acquitted; yet they were kept
in prison until they paid the expenses of their unlawful
32
^^^^^^^^^^^ imprisonment.
The Inquisition's prisoners had to pay for their own food in prison.

Without money they starved. Pope Gregory XI noted that too many
were starving to death before they could be brought to the stake, but it
seems not to have occurred to him to feed them on church funds.
Instead, he offered indulgences to all who would donate food to the
"many hereticsand those defamed for heresy, who in consequence of
their poverty cannot be sustained in prison unless the pious liberality of

the faithful shall assist them as a work of charity." Thus the church
bent its own rules, which said anyone who helped a heretic was to be

suspected of heresy also. Lea commented:

There is something so appallingly grotesque in tearing honest, industrious

folk from their homes by the thousand, in thrusting them into dun-
geons to rot and starve, and then evading the cost offeeding them by
presenting them to the faithful as objects of charity, that the proclama-

tion which Gregory issued August 15th, 1376, is perhaps the most
shameless monument ofa shameless age. n

When an arrested heretic had unpaid debts, the judges simply

canceled the debts on the ground that no heretic could engage in legal
transactions. Thus, "creditors were shamelessly cheated." The entire

financial network of European society was strained by its religious

masters. "In addition to the misery inflicted by these wholesale
confiscations on the thousands of innocent and helpless women and
children thus stripped of everything. ... All safeguards were with-
drawn from every transaction. No creditor or purchaser could be sure of
the orthodoxy of him with whom he was dealing. . . . The practice of

proceeding against the memory of the dead after an interval virtually

unlimited, rendered it impossible for any man to feel secure in the
possession of property, whether it had descended in his family for

generations, or had been acquired within an ordinary lifetime." 34

Property could be seized from the dead, whose bones might be
dug up from their graves and burned as post-mortem heretics; then
the property was taken away from legal heirs. 35 If a person knowing he
was about to be arrested tried to sell or give away his property, or to

commit suicide before the torturers got to him, his property was seized,
because a heretic was forbidden to make any legal transaction, and a
suicide could bequeathe property to no one; it was taken by the church.
If the accused fled the country, he was tried and convicted in
absentia. Families of the accused were left destitute, and no one dared
help them for fear of falling under suspicion. The Inquisition estab-
lished the law of property seizure for suicides, which remained the rule

in most European countries and the British Isles until 1870. 36

Inquisitors could also impose heavy fines. Sometimes it was argued
that fines were useless, since all the property of the accused heretic

disappeared in confiscation anyway; but the inquisitors invented a class

440
 f unwitting miscreants called "defenders," whose heresy might Inquisition
:onsist only of a single thoughtless word overheard or spoken. These
37
ould be fined for their oversight. ^^^^^^^^^^^
The
system of fines often developed into a protection racket,
nquisitors could "exchange the punishment of the body with the
>unishment of the purse," as Scot put it, and there were many who
38
iaid annual fees to escape persecution.

A person who opposed or impeded the inquisitors in any way

iecame at once excommunicate, and after a year in this condition

t "handed over without further ceremony to the secular arm for

-as

>urning, without trial and without forgiveness." No one was acquir-

ed. If a confession could not be obtained which was extremely rare,
banks to the use of torture the sentence was "not proven." Even
ben, the prisoner could be kept indefinitely in prison in case new
vidence should arise, or fresh tortures prove effective. 39 Should a

ictim resist all tortures and survive, which was virtually unheard of, he
till was not released. He could be sentenced to life imprisonment for
obduracy."
The witch's or heretic's
trial was a mockery. The accused had no

iwyer; Pope Boniface directed that trials must be conducted "simply,

40
without the noise and form of lawyers." Evidence was accepted from
'itnesses who could not legally testify in any other kind of trial, such
s condemned criminals, other heretics, and children, even as young as
le age of two. The inquisitor Bodin "valued child witnesses because
[ their tender age they could easily be persuaded or forced to in-
>rm." 41 A witness who withdrew adverse testimony was punished
>r
perjury, but his testimony remained on the record. 42 Inquisitorial
Jes for a trial were as follows:

1 . The procedure was kept secret.

2. "Common report" and hearsay were accepted as proof of guilt.
3. Accused was not told of the nature of the charges nor allowed

legal counsel.
4. Witnesses were kept concealed.
5. Perjurers, excommunicates, or children could give evidence
against witches.
6. No favorable evidence or character witnesses were permitted.
In any case, one who spoke for an accused heretic would be
arrested as an accomplice.
7. Torture was used always, without limit of duration or severity.
Even if the accused confessed before torture, the torture was
applied anyway, to "validate" the confession. If the accused
died under torture, the record stated that the devil broke his
neck in prison.

8. Accused was forced to confirm under torture the names of

"accomplices" suggested to him by the judges.
9. No accused person was found innocent. 43

Officially, the rule was that torture could be applied only once.

441
Inquisition But, by a semantic quibble, it could be "continued" any number of

times, even over a period of years, each pause being considered a

^^^im "suspension," not an end. There are records of some victims tortured
44
over fifty times. The handbook, Malleus Maleficarum,
Inquisition's
said the accused witch must be "often and frequently exposed to
torture. If after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the

truth, he [the inquisitor] should have other engines of torture brought

before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does
not confess. If then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture
must be continued." If she remained obdurate, "she is not to be

altogether released, but must be sent to the squalor of prison for a year,

and be tortured, and be examined very often, especially on the more

45
Holy Days."
Another official rule was that the church did not shed blood.
Therefore, victims were handed over to the secular arm (civil courts)
for execution. This was called relaxing or abandoning them. It was
accompanied by a token plea for mercy: "We cast you forth from this
our ecclesiastical Court, and leave you to be delivered to the secular
arm. But we earnestly pray that the said secular court may temper its
46
justice with mercy, that there be no bloodshed or danger of death."
This plea was the emptiest of formalities, designed only to absolve
the church of responsibility for bloodshed. In fact, "to be delivered to
the secular arm" was an irrevocable death sentence, which the secular
court was compelled to carry out. To temper justice with "mercy"
meant permission to strangle the victim before she was burned, but this

was not often done. 47

History was written to order by church historians who claimed the
church "took no part in the corporal punishment of heretics."

Ecclesiastical euphemism forced on civil authorities a guilt that be-

longed the church's door. Magistrates were commanded to carry

at

out the death penalty by the dire threat of excommunication and

consequent arrest. "The remorseless logic of St. Thomas Aquinas

rendered it self-evident that the secular power could not escape the duty
of putting the heretic to death. [T]he only punishment recog-
. . .

nized by the Church as sufficient for heresy was burning alive. Even if

the ruler was excommunicated and incapable of legally performing

any other function, he was not relieved from the obligation of this
supreme duty, with which nothing was allowed to interfere. The . . .

fact is, the Church not only defined the guilt and forced its punishment,
but created the crime 48
itself."

The fiction of the church's innocence was exposed by a bull of

Pope Leo X in 1 521. The Senate of Venice had refused to sanction
the numerous executions ordered by the Inquisition. The Pope wrote to

his legate, "We declare and order you to exhort and command the

aforesaid Senate of Venice, their Doge and his officials, to intervene no

more kind of trial, but promptly, without changing or inspect-
in this

ing the sentences made by the ecclesiastical judges, to execute the

442
sentences which they are enjoined to carry out. And if they neglect or Inquisition
refuse, compel them with the Church's censure and other
you are to

appropriate legal measures. From this order there is no appeal." A

49
^^^^^^^^^^
directive published in 1 599 said judges were bound under pain of

mortal sin to execute witches; anyone who objected to the death

50
sentence was suspected of complicity.
51
Inquisitors "jealously guarded their records from all outsiders."
On one occasion,
magistrates of Brescia objected to burning a
number of condemned witches without having examined records of
But the inquisitors kept their records sequestered, and the
their trials.

pope declared the magistrates' reluctance a scandal to the faith. "He

ordered the excommunication of the magistrates if within six days

they did not execute the convicts ... a decision which was held to give

the secular courts six days in which to carry out the sentence of

condemnation." 52
Even when kept hidden, records were often falsified. Inquisitors
had special terms for everything they did. For example, torturers said
their victims were "laughing" when they contorted their faces with pain;
or "sleeping" when they fainted. Those who died under torture
either "committed suicide" or were slain by the devil. Having confessed
under torture, the accused was compelled to repeat the confession
outside the torture chamber, knowing he would be returned thereto if

he didn't obey; nevertheless, this was recorded as a confession given

"freely and spontaneously, without the pressure of force or fear," and

court documents often claimed the accused had confessed without
[torture. Sometimes confessions were described as "voluntary" if they
53
jwere
obtained after the first
degree of torture binding and racking.
L\n episcopal scribe at Pamiers naively wrote that a prisoner confessed of
[his own accord "after he was taken down from the torture." 54
Some victims were listed as "confessed without torture" after
exposure to only one instrument, a spiked iron press that crushed the
legs. Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit who acted as confessor for condemned

pitches and developed some compassion for them, wrote of this

practice: they call that 'Confessed without torture' What kind of
"And !

insight can those have who lack all understanding of such pains? How
tan outstandingly learned men judge and discriminate when they
cannot understand the language, the specialists' jargon, of the inquisi-
"
tors? In his Cautio Criminalis, von Spee wrote:

Why do you search so diligently for sorcerers? I will show you at once
where they are. Take the Capuchins, the Jesuits, all the religious
orders, and torture them they will confess. Ifsome deny, repeat it a few
times they will confess. Should a few still be obstinate, exorcise them,
shave them, only keep on torturing they will give in. Ifyou want more,
take the Canons, the Doctors, the Bishops of the Church they will
s$
confess.

Another unusual churchman, Bernard Delicieux, was excom-

443
Inquisition municated, arrested, tortured, and burned alive for expressing the
opinion that St. Peter and St. Paul, if tried by the Inquisition's
56
methods, would certainly be convicted of heresy.
Inquisitors were placed entirely
above the law by Pope Innocent
IV in his bull of 1252, Ad extirpanda. 57 Every ruler and citizen must
assist them on pain of excommunication. Resistance could place the
whole community under interdict, or force payment of heavy fines.

Any individual fined by the Inquisition could be held in prison until he

paid, or died. Torture was officially

sanctioned in 1257 and remained
a legal recourse of the church for five and a half centuries until it was

abolished by Pope Pius VII in 1816. 58

The victims in those five and a half centuries were literally

countless. Official burnings were only a beginning. There were also

the disrupted, starving families; unrecorded suicides; unofficial lynch-

ings; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,

who died unnoticed in
the papal crusades against heretical groups. There were late-Renais-
sance witch hunts in Protestant countries, which had no formal
connection with the Inquisition but certainly took their impetus from it.
The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1 586, the entire
female population of two villages was wiped out by the inquisitors,

except for only two women left alive. Two other villages were
59

destroyed completely and erased from the map.

60
A hundred and
thirty-three persons were burned in a single day at Quedlinburg in

Henri Boguet 1589, out of a town of 12,000. Henri Boguet said Germany in 1590
Highly active was "almost entirely occupied with building fires (for witches); and
inquisitorial judge Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on
whose book, Discours
des sorciers (1590) may see thousands and thousands
their account. Travelers in Lorraine

became a standard of the stakes to which witches are bound." 61

reference. In 1 524, one thousand witches died at Como. 62 Strasbourg burned
five thousand in a period of 20 years. 63 The
Senate of Savoy
condemned 800 witches at one time. Parame stated that over thirty
64
thousand were executed in the 1 5 th century. Nicholas Remy said
he personally sentenced 800 witches in 1 5 years and in one year alone
forced sixteen witches to suicide. A bishop of Bamberg claimed 600
witches in 10 years; a bishop of Nancy, 800 in 16 years; a bishop of

Wurtzburg, 1900 in 5 years. Five hundred were executed within

three months at Geneva and 400 in a single day at Toulouse. The city
of Treves burned 7,000 witches. The Lutheran prelate Benedict
Carpzov, who claimed to have read the Bible 53 times, sentenced

20,000 devil-worshippers. Even

relatively permissive England killed

30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736. The slaughter went on

65
throughout Christian Europe for nearly five centuries.

Mass burnings on the Iberian peninsula were known as autos-de-fe

(acts of faith). They were held once a month on the average, usually
on a Sunday or holiday so all could attend; to stay away was thought
suspicious. Sometimes the spectators were invited to participate, as in
the diversion genially known as "shaving the new Christians." This

444
 meant setting fire to the hair or beards of those waiting their turn at Inquisition
66
the stake.
Wholesale burnings in are suggested by the observation
Germany ^^^^^^^^^^
of a visitor to Wolfenbuttel in 1 590: there were so many stakes to
burn the witches that the place of execution resembled a small forest.
The executioner of Neisse in Silesia invented an oven in which he
roasted to death forty-two women and young girls in one year. Within
nine years he had roasted over a thousand persons, including children

j
two to four years old. 67

Inquisitors were empowered to absolve each other, their offi-

cers, torturers, and executioners, of blood guilt for their victims' deaths,
whether in the prison, in the torture chamber, or at the stake. 68 They
also forced the condemned witches to recite: "I free all men, especially
the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my blood; I take it wholly
upon myself, my blood be upon my own head." Some witches even
were made to repudiate the more impossible confessions extorted by
torture, as a suicidal device: "Through the temptation of the devil I
made up that confessionon purpose to destroy my own life, being
weary of it, and choosing rather to die than live." These abject
recitations preceded the trip to the stake, for it was common practice

|
to silence witches on their way to execution, eitherby wooden gags, or
by cutting out their tongues, to prevent communication with the
crowd. 69

Inquisitors didn't want to give witches a chance to reveal that they

had been raped in prison, the usual practice of torturers and their
70
assistantsduring preliminary "stripping." By the curious morality of
the day, outrage could be excited by sexual "irregularities" although

spectacles of hideous torment were received without serious objection.

The people of Toulouse gathered evidence against an inquisitor
named Foulques de Saint-George to prove he arrested women for the
71
solepurpose of abusing them sexually. Apparently this was consid-
ered worse than torturing them.
Some records hint that executioners could indulge their lusts as

long as they were circumspect. The day in 1 589 at Quedlinburg, 133

witches were burned and four inexplicably disappeared. "Four beautiful

girls were spared by the executioner, who gave out that the devil had

them away." 72 They were never seen again. One can well
spirited

imagine who this "devil" was and what happened to the poor girls
before they were finally murdered.
It can hardly be doubted that a major driving force of all witch

hunts was sadistic sexual perversion. Torturers liked to attack wom-

en's breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers, and red-hot irons. Under

the Inquisition's rules, were prosecuted and tortured for

little girls

at 9 /2, as opposed to 10 Vi for

1
I
witchcraft a year earlier than boys little

wys. Witch hunting generally was directed against the female sex,
and the abject helplessness of imprisoned and tortured women invari-

ably encouraged sexual abuse along with every other kind of abuse.

445
Inquisition Late in the 14th century it became a rule that prisoners in solitary

confinement (usually women) could be visited in their cells by

were not allowed). 73

^^^m^^^^mm "zealous Catholics" (always men; female visitors

One inquisitorial judge, Dietrich Flade, experienced a revulsion

for his lifework and dared to say openly that the confessions wrung
from his victims were false, due only to their agony. His archbishop had

Flade arrested and put on the rack himself until he admitted having
he was burned. 74
sold his soul to Satan; then
Another who ran into trouble for speaking too freely was Peter the
Precentor of Paris, who said the Inquisition blackmailed rich people
and falsely accused and arrested "certain honest matrons" who "refused
75
to consent to the lasciviousness of priests." Civil magistrates who
criticized the Inquisition often found themselves in its dungeons. When
the governor of Albi defended his people against the inquisitors in

1306, letters were forged and "discovered" in church records to remove

him from office on the ground that his grandfather was a convicted
76
heretic.

Predictably, inquisitors often went in fear of their own lives,

appearing in public with escorts of armed guards. Some were attend-

ed by small armies of toughs whose disruptive behavior was absolved by
their masters, so theycould literally get away with murder, robbery,
and rape; they were "above the law." 77 Many inquisitors wore armor
under their habits and tested all their food for poison. Torquemada's
chief protege Pedro Arbues was assassinated by relatives of some of his
victims in a church in Aragon guards and went alone to
as he left his

the altar to receive the sacrament.

During the 19th century, Pedro
Arbues was canonized as a saint by Pope Pius IX. 78
Another inquisitor-saint was Peter Martyr (Piero da Verona),
whose case has never been adequately explained. He was so zealous
in Lombardy as to embarrass even the church; apparently it was decided
that he would be more useful dead than alive. In 1252 he was

assassinated, and within a year he was canonized the fastest creation of

a saint on were captured but not prosecuted. One
record. His killers
of them later became an inquisitor himself. Another entered the
Dominican order, died in old age, and was canonized as St. Acerinus;

his portrait appeared in a stall of Peter Martyr's own church

in 1505. A
third conspirator was arrested and imprisoned by the Inquisition 43
years after the murder, possibly because he was beginning to talk too
much. 79
Another curious case was that of the heretic who nearly became a j

saint, Armanno Pongilupo, a high-ranking official of the Catharan

sect at Ferrara in the 1 3th century. Pretending devout Catholicism,

Pongilupo secretly gave aid to imprisoned heretics. He played the

part of piety so well that after his death, altars and images were dedicated i

to him; he received a magnificent tomb in the cathedral; stories were

told of his miraculous cures of the sick, the lame, and the blind.
Ferrara's citizens demanded his canonization, but the church re-

446
fused, ordering that his remains be exhumed and burned for his heresy. Inquisition
Ferrara would not comply. The cathedral was placed under interdict
and its chapter was excommunicated. Arguments about Pongilupo ^^^^^^^^^^^
dragged on for 33 years. Finally, the inquisitor Guido da Vincenza
ended the matter by having Pongilupo's bones burned, his altars
destroyed, and his heirs deprived of their property which naturally
reverted to the church. Guido was rewarded with the episcopate of
80
Ferrara.
The Inquisition was not organized to administer justice; it was
organized to enrich the church and silence its critics. Lea says, "All
the safeguards which human experience had shown to be necessary in
judicial proceedings of the most trivial character were deliberately cast
aside in these cases, where life and reputation and property through
three generations were involved. Every doubtful point was decided
'in favor of the faith'. Had the proceedings been public, there might
. . .

have been some check upon this hideous system, but the Inquisition
shrouded itself in the awful mystery of secrecy until after sentence had
been awarded and itwas ready to impress the multitude with the
fearful solemnities of the auto da fe." 81
The Inquisition remained active until 1834, especially in Central
and South America, where "heathen" natives were tortured and
burned for crimes against the true faith, such as not believing in it. 82
Mayan scribes in Central America wrote: "Before the coming of the
Spaniards, there was no robbery or violence. The Spanish invasion was
the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning
of strife." 83 Catholic fathers of the mission of San Francisco burned

many Indian "witches" before the tribes were sufficiently subdued to

84
accept God's word. Lea said, "An inquisitor seems to have been
85
regarded as a necessary portion of the missionary outfit."
Even in the present century, Catholic authorities have tried to
present the Inquisition in an undeservedly flattering light. Cardinal
Lepicier, expressly supported by Pope Pius X, declared the church's
reign of terror was right, just because the church did it. "The naked
fact that the Church, of her own authority, has tried heretics and
condemned them to be delivered to death, shows that she truly has

pie right
of killing. . . .
[W]ho dares to say that the Church has erred in a

blatter so grave as this?" 86

In fact, many have dared to say so. Leland wrote: "When people
believe, or make believe, in a thing so very much as to torture like

devils and put to death hundreds of thousands of fellow-beings, mostly

helpless and poor old women, not to mention many children, it
secomes a matter of very serious import to all humanity to determine
:>nce for all whether the system or code according to which this was

done was absolutely right for ever, or not." 87 Anthropologist Jules

Henry said, "Organized religion, which likes to fancy itself the

Tiother of compassion, long ago lost its right to that claim by its

88
jrganized support of organized cruelty." Coulton said of the

447
^
Inquisition

wmmm
Inquisition, "History affords
effects of absolute

dangerous:
power upon
pointed out that the system that created such horrors
few plainer examples of the demoralizing
fairly ordinary men."

Have religious institutions been any more humane in the process of

consolidating their power than has secular machinery similarly occu-
pied? The taste for slaughter exhibited by the sons of the Prophet was
89
And
may be
Vetter
still

more than matched by that of Christians who liquidated heathen and

heretic. . The cultural backgrounds of the past and current generation
. .

ofpolitical dictators provides interesting material for speculation. Mus-

solini, Franco, Salazar, Hitler, Peron and almost without exception the

Latin-American dictators were or are Roman Catholics, at least in their

education and upbringing. And Stalin had considerable training for the
priesthood of an equally dictatorial church. Confronted with such facts
one is compelled at least to ask himself what kind of causal sequences are
here suggested. . . .

In both Islam and Christendom the naive believers have over long
periods been taught that it was their duty to slaughter the unbeliever, or
whoever refused to accept their particular version of divine guidance.
They have not had a change of heart; they have just been shorn of the
powers for mischief.
*

It is unsettling to realize that such powers for mischief could yet

be revived. The edicts that established the Inquisition have never been
repealed. They are "officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were
used as justification for certain practices as recently as 1969." 91

Julian Huxley deplored the "pestilent doctrine on which all the

churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less

astonishing creeds is a moral offense . . .

deserving and involving the
same future murder and robbery." In his opinion, the
retribution as

worst visions of hell would seem pale beside a comprehensive vision of

92
Christianity's gory history. Such history should be remembered, on
the old principle that those who cannot remember their history are
condemned to repeat it.

I. Lea, 60, 97, 257. 2. Tuchman, 327. 3. Lea unabridged, 21. 4. Spinlca, 61.
5. Coulton, 177. 6. Lea unabridged, 10, 16. 7. Coulton, 42. 8. Tuchman, 224.
9. Coulton, 61; H. Smith, 254; Guignebert, 291. 10. Hazlitt, 53.
II. Lea unabridged, 599. 12. Tuchman, 522. 13. Chamberlin, B.P., 167, 170.
14. Coulton, 230. 15. Lea unabridged, 653. 16. Guignebert, 287.
17. Guignebert, 298, 326. 18. Coulton, 81. 19. Becker, D.D., 178.
20. Campbell, CM., 395. 2 1 Guignebert, 184. 22. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 162.
.

23. Encyc. Brit., "Inquisition." 24. White 1, 319. 25. Coulton, 58.
26. J.B. Russell, 155. 27. Lea, 224. 28. Robbins, 229. 29. Lea, 173-75, 225.
[Link],451. 31. Lea, 213-14. 32. Robbins, 116,456. 33. Coulton, 151.
34. Lea, 215, 218, 225. 35. Coulton, 132, 148. 36. H. Smith, 418.
37. Lea, 169. 38. Scot, 27. 39. Lea, 45, 149. 40. H. Smith, 284.
41. Robbins, 229, 554. 42. H. Smith, 284. 43. Robbins, 13-14.
44. H. Smith, 287; Robbins, 304. 45. Kramer Sprenger, 226, 249. &
46. Coulton, 168-69. 47. H. Smith, 290. 48. Lea, 231, 233, 237.
49. Robbins, 305. 50. Pepper &
Wilcock, 1 50. 51. Coulton, 119. 52. Lea, 235.
53. Robbins, 108, 269, 482-83, 540. 54. Coulton, 156.
55. Shumaker, 62; Bromberg, 61 . 56. Lea unabridged, 214; Coulton, 216.
57. Lea, 33. 58. Robbins, 269. 59. Summers, G.W., 486-87. 60. Robbins, 219.
61. Shumaker, 61. 62. W. Scott, 170. 63. Robbins, 219. 64. Coulton, 263.
65. H. Smith, 292-93. 66. Plaidy, 1 57. 67. Robbins, 554-55. 68. Lea, 77.

448
 69. Robbins, 105; Lea, 248. 70. Robbins, 592. 71. Lea unabridged, 302. |q
72. Robbins, 219. 73. Lea, 99, 183. 74. H. Smith, 292. 75. Coulton, 38. _ .

76. Lea, 76. 77. Lea, 77-79; Coulton, 293. 78. Reinach, 3 1 2.
Irene > S^ *

Lea unabridged, 376. 80. Lea unabridged, 390. 81. Lea, 101-2.
79.
82. Plaidy, 165. 83. von Hagen, 61. 84. Briffault 3, 519. 85. Lea, 51.
^^^^^"^^^
86. Coulton, 69. 87. Leland, 250. 88. Henry, 422. 89. Coulton, 129.
[Link],411,510, 518. 91. Holmes, 45. 92. H. Smith, 392-93.

lo

"Moon," the white Cow-goddess who mothered the Ionians. Hers

was another name for "Cow-Eyed" Hera, as Homer called her, al-
though classic mythographers portrayed her as a separate entity, one
of Zeus's many paramours. Io represented the horned, milk-giving,

lunar Triple Goddess, as shown by her sacred colors. She turned

herself from white to red to black, the hues of the Virgin, Mother, and

Crone (see Gunas). 1

The apocryphal story that Hera sent a gadfly to sting Io, to send
over the world, was a Hellenic myth invented to
all
Jher wandering

explain the universality of the worship of the white Moon-cow. Since

Hera was herself the same Goddess, her alleged jealousy of Io was a
Some said Hera placed Io under the guardianship of
patriarchal fiction.

hundred-eyed Argus Panoptes ("All-Eyes"), an allegory of the moon

2
traveling under the many-eyed gaze of the starry sky.
1. Graves, CM. 1,191. [Link],210.

Iphigeneia
'Mother of Strong Ones," high priestess of Artemis at Taurus, where
strangers were sacrificed to the Goddess and their severed heads
all

nailed to crosses. The myth that Iphigeneia was Agamemnon's

by her cruel father, has been called a
daughter, sacrificed to the sea
result of "the mythographers' anxiety to conceal certain barbarous

traditions." One of Iphigeneia's other names was Hecate.

'

1. Graves, CM. 2,78.

Irene, Saint

'Peace," the third of Aphrodite's three Horae; the Dove who

mnounced the coming of death. She also associated with the "peace" to

)e won by ritual castration, even as late as the 14th century a.d. when

(nun or priestess bearing her name was linked to the heretical sect of
Mount Athos monks who emasculated themselves. (See 1

pastration.)
The pagan temple of Irene on the acropolis of Constantinople was
aken over by Christians and renamed the Church of Holy Irene. 2

449
Iris Thus the Byzantine Goddess was canonized, along with her two sisters
3
Ishtar in the same Trinity.
._ l. Spinka, 1 19. 2. J. H. Smith, C.G., 228. 3. Reinach, 312; Attwater, 34.

Iris

Greek Goddess of the rainbow, personifying like the Hindu Maya

the many-colored veils of the world's appearances behind which the

spirit of the Goddess

worked unseen. In many mythologies she
personified the bridge between earth and heaven,
the Rainbow Bridge

of Norse paganism, the Necklace of Ishtar in Mesopotamia, the Road

1
of the Gods Kinvad Bridge in Persia.
in Japan, the

Greeks rainbow symbolized the Goddess Iris, "Source of

said the
2
the waters from on high," mother of Love. Like the part of the eye
named after her, she was the Kore, Virgin, or Female Soul, a form of
the Great Shakti who was both the organ of sight and the visible
world that it saw. Her spectrum spanned all possible colors. The same
seven-color spectrum was shown on the seven-stage ziggurats of

Mesopotamia, signifying the seven planetary spheres, with a symbolic

3
ascent to the Seventh Heaven as part of the initiatory pilgrimage.
1. Eliade, S., 134-35. 2. Cavendish, T., 1 16. 3. Lethaby, 131.

Isolde Iseult

"White Lady" of Welsh romance, a pagan queen who abandoned

one husband in order to take another. With Tristan, her "true-love,"
she became a popular heroine of the typical bardic romance of star-
crossed lovers. The bards maintained that even married ladies should be
free to take lovers, asunder the old pagan system. Because King
Mark of Cornwall, Iseult's jealous husband, imprisoned his wife's lover

and tried to kill him, poets branded King Mark a "felon" and a
"traitor." 1 See Romance.
1. Malory 2, 53.

Ishtar

Babylonian "Star," the Great Goddess who appears in the Bible as

Ashtoreth, Anath, Asherah, or Esther, the Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah
44:19). She was also the Great Whore, described in Revelation 17:5
as Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots. Another of her titles was
the Goddess Har, who called
herself the compassionate prostitute.
Men communed with her through the sexual rites of her harlot-
priestesses. See Prostitution.
1

Babylonian scriptures called Ishtar the Light of the World, Leader

of Hosts, Opener of the Womb, Righteous Judge, Lawgiver, Goddess

450
of Goddesses, Bestower of Strength, Framer of All Decrees, Lady of Ishtar

Victory, Forgiver of Sins, etc.

2
Much of the liturgical flattery addressed
to God in the Old Testament was plagiarized from Babylonian prayers ^^^^^^^^^^m
to Ishtar. One example:

Who dost make the green herb to spring up, mistress ofmankind! Who
hast created everything, who dost guide aright all creatures! Mother
Ishtar, whose power no god can approach! A prayer will I utter; may she
do unto me what seems good unto her O my mistress, make me to
know my deed, establish for me a place of rest! Absolve my sins, lift up my
3
face!

A Babylonian prayer that obviously prefigured the prayers and

psalms of biblical writers, even the biblical theology, said to the Goddess:
"0 Thou art adorable, who givest salvation, life, and justice, vivify
4
my name." Like the Old Testament God, Ishtar was the Mighty One,
winner of battles and overthrower of mountains. 5 She said:

In the brilliant heavens, to give omens in abundance, I appear, I appear in

perfection. With exultation in my supremacy, with exultation do I, a

Goddess, walk supreme; Ishtar, the Goddess of evening, am I; Ishtar, the
Goddess ofmorning, am I; Ishtar, who opens the portals ofheaven, in

my supremacy. The heavens I destroy, the earth I devastate, in my

supremacy. Who rises resplendent on the firmament of heaven, in-
voked above and below, in my supremacy. The mountain I sweep away
altogether, in my supremacy. The great wall of the mountain am I,

their great foundation am in my supremacy. 6

I,

A long Babylonian prayer presents numerous metaphors and

liturgical phrases later copied by Jewish priests on behalf of their god:

I beseech thee, Lady ofladies, Goddess ofgoddesses, Ishtar, queen ofall

cities, leader ofall men. Thou art the light of the world, thou art the
light of heaven . . .
.Supreme is thy might, O Lady, exalted art thou above
all gods. Thou renderest judgment and thy decision is righteous; unto
thee are subject the laws of the earth and the laws of heaven, the laws of
the temple and of the shrine, and the laws of the private apartment and
of the secret chamber. Where is the place where thy name is not, and
where is the spot where thy commandments are not known? At thy
name the earth and the heavens shake, and the gods they tremble; the
spirits of heaven tremble at thy name and the men hold it in awe. Thou
art great, thou art exalted; all the men ofSumer, and all creatures, and all

mankind glorify thy name. With righteousness dost thou judge the
deeds ofmen, even thou; thou lookest upon the oppressed and to the
downtrodden thou bringest justice every day. How long, Queen of
Heaven and Earth, how long, how long, Shepherdess ofpale-faced men,
wilt thou tarry? How long, O Queen whose feet are not weary and

whose knees make haste? How long, Lady ofHosts, Lady ofBattles?
Glorious one whom all the spirits of heaven fear, who subduest all
angry gods; mighty above all rulers, who holdest the reins ofkings.
Opener of the womb of all women, great is thy light. Shining light of
heaven, light of the world, enlightener ofall the places where men dwell,
whogatherest together the hosts of the nations. Goddess of men,

451
Ishtar divinityof women, thy counsel passeth understanding. Where thou
glancest the dead come to life,
and the sick rise and walk; and the mind
distressed is healed when it looks upon thy face. How long, O Lady,
^^_^^____^^_ that is

shall mine enemy triumph over me? Command, and at thy command
the angry god will turn back. Ishtar is great! Ishtar is Queen! My Lady is

7
exalted, my Lady is Queen.
Akkadian sources show that Ishtar was the same Great Goddess
reveredall over the Near East under such names as Dea Syria, Astarte,

etc.:
Cybele, Aphrodite, Kore, Mari,

Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of the Goddesses, revere the queen of
women, the greatest of the deities. She is clothed with pleasure and
vitality, charm, and voluptuousness.
She is laden with
love. In lips she is

sweet; her mouth. At her appearance rejoicing becomes full.

life is in

She is glorious The fate of everything she holds in her hand. . . .

Ishtar to her greatness who can be equal? Strong, exalted, splendid

are her decrees. . . . Ishtar among the gods, extraordinary is her station.

Respected her word; it is supreme over them. She is their queen;

is

they continually cause her commands to be executed. All of them bow

down before her. 8

The powers of the underworld bowed down before her when

she went underground Tammuz, as her Sumeri-
to rescue her son-lover

an forerunner Inanna rescued the same son-lover, Dumuzi. She said

to the seven gatekeepers: "If thou openest not the gate so that I cannot
enter, I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt, I will smash the

doorpost, I will move the doors, I will raise up the dead, eating the
9
living, so that the dead will outnumber the living." This threat was

typical of Ishtar's dark underworld twin, Eresh-kigal, the Death-goddess

who had power to deprive the heavenly gods of their sacrificial
food. 10 Ishtar's temporary departure caused sterility and suspension of
Lady Ishtar has
sexual activities over the whole earth: "After the

descended, the bull no longer mounts the cow, the ass no longer bends

over the she-ass, and the man no longer bends over the woman in the
street: the man in his
slept the woman alone." n
place, slept
This Descent into Hell was a perilous but necessary part of the
sacred drama, lasting three days and culminating in the Day of Joy,
when the god was restored to life.
12
This inaugurated a new year after

penitential atonement and sacrifice. "It is on New Year's Day that

Ishtar lies with Tammuz, and the king reproduces this mythical hiero-

gamy by consummating the ritual union with the Goddess [i.e., with
the hierodule who represents her on earth] in a secret chamber of the
temple, where the nuptial bed of the Goddess stands." n
Gilgamesh said the Goddess was cruel to her lovers, since each in

turn personified the dying god who refreshed the earth's fertility with
his blood. 14 When the god was incarnate in bulls, the animals were

emasculated and their severed genitals thrown to the Goddess's

image, a rite "probably derived from the rite of self-emasculation which

15
had been practiced in honor of Ishtar." Ishtar's priestesses apparently

452
performed some version of the rite each year in the temple of Jerusa- bis

lem, where the virgin form of the Goddess was called Mari, Mari-Anna,
or Miriam, and her holy women annually wailed for the sacrificial death
of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14). See Salome; Mary Magdalene.
I. Harding, 164-65. 3. Assyr.
Briffault 3, 169. 2. & Bab. Lit, 434. 4. d'Alviella, 189. 5.

EpicofCilgamesh, 26. 6. Assyr. Bub. Lit, 434. & 7. Briffault 3, 88-89.

8. Pritchard, A.N.E. 1, 232-33. 9. Hooke, M.E.M., 40. 10. Pritchard, A.N.E. 2, 13.
II. Neumann, A. P., 87. 12. Frazer, G. B., 407. 13. Eliade, M.E.R., 26.
14. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 338-39. 1 5. Jobes, 185.

Isis

Egyptian scriptures said, "In the beginning there was Isis, Oldest of
the Old. She was the Goddess from whom all
becoming arose." '
As the
Creatress, she gave birth to the sun "when he rose upon this earth for

the first time." 2 Her title, "Giver of Life," was applied also to the queen
mother of Egypt. 5
In her Roman mysteries, Isis was addressed as "the One Who is

All." Lucius's hymn to her said: Lucius of Patrae

Author of a lost
O Thou holy and eternal Savior of the human race. . . . Thou bestowest a
Metamorphoses
mother's tender affections on the misfortunes of unhappy mortals. . . .
which furnished a
Thou dispellest the storms oflife and stretchest forth thy right hand of precedent and basic
salvation, by which Thou unravellest even the inextricably tangled web material for the
ofFate. . . . Thou Thou givest light to the sun;
turnest the earth in its orb; Metamorphoses of
Thou rulest the world; Thou treadest Death underfoot. To Thee the Lucius Apuleius, a
stars are responsive; by Thee the seasons turn and the gods rejoice and the devotee of Isis and
Platonic philosopher of
elements are in subjection. lam too feeble to render Thee suffi-
. . .

the 2nd century a.d.

cient praise. . . .
But, a pious though poor worshipper, 1 shall essay to do all

within my power; Thy divine countenance and most holy deity I shall
guard and keep forever hidden in the secret place of my heart. *

Another devout Roman Isis-worshipper, Apuleius, quoted her

response to him, when he addressed her under several other Goddess-
names:

lam Nature, the parent of things, the sovereign of the elements, the
primary progeny of time, the most exalted of the deities, the first of the
heavenly gods and goddesses, the queen of the dead, the uniform
countenance; manifested alone and under one form. .At my will the . .

planetsof the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the mournful
silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored through-
out the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.
For the Phrygians that are the first ofall men call me the Mother of
the gods ofPessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own

soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea,

Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the
Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusinians,
their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate,
others Ramnusie the Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore, worship me
. . .

s
with proper ceremonies, and call me by my true name, Queen Isis.

453
Isis Aristides also was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis, and spoke
of a mystical experience during which he saw, coming from Isis, "a

_^ ^m^BB m Light and other unutterable things conducing

initiated into
to salvation."

her cult brought a privileged status after death (an idea

To be

copied later by Christians): "Isis, the 'eternal savior of the race of

men,' promises her votary: Thou shalt live in blessedness; thou shalt
live glorious under my protection. And when thou hast finished thy
life-course and goest down to the underworld, even there in that lower
world thou shalt see me shedding light gloom of Acheron and in the

reigning in the inmost regions of Styx; thou thyself shalt inhabit the

Elysian Fields and shalt continually offer worship to me, ever

6
gracious.'"
Egyptians addressed her as "Mistress of the gods, thou bearer of
wings, thou lady of the red apparel, queen of the crowns of the South
and North, only One superior to whom the gods cannot be, thou
. . .

mighty one of enchantments (or, Words of Power) thou who art . . .

pre-eminent, mistress and lady of the tomb, Mother in the horizon of

heaven .Praise be unto thee,
. . O
Lady, who art mightier than the
gods, words of adoration unto thee from the Eight Gods of
rise

Hermopolis. The living souls who are in their hidden places praise

the mystery of thee, O thou who art their mother, thou source from
which they sprang, who makest for them a place in the hidden
Underworld, who makest sound their bones and preservest them from
who makest them strong in the abode of everlastingness." Her
terror,
name may have come from Ashesh, meaning both "pouring out" and
"supporting," an implication that her divine essence (blood or milk)
7
kept the gods andall other creatures alive.

Isis was the Egyptian throne. Pharaohs sat on her lap, protected by

her arms or wings. 8 The symbol she carried on her crown was the
mu'at, "foundation of the throne," which also represented her alter ego
Maat, the motherhood-principle called Right, Justice, Truth, or the
9
All-seeing Eye. An Egyptian hymn was copied into the Bible: "Right
and justice are the foundation of thy throne" (Psalms 89:14).
Hermetic of the stars to God,
texts said Isis revealed the mysteries

who was her son. 10 She also provided a model for Moses's miracle of
Sign of his stopping the waters, which she did quite casually on her way to Byblos;
and Joshua's miracle of stopping the sun, which she did while
bringing Horus back to life.
11
Since Horus was the sun Ra or Osiris in
the form of Isis's infant an interruption of his life would naturally
have caused the sun to stand still in heaven.
Isis and her dark twin sister Nephthys were Egyptian versions of
the familiar creating-and-destroying Goddess, Mother of Life and
Crone of Death. Egyptians called her by many names: Mut, Hathor,

Bast,Maat, Heqit, Sekhmet, Sati, Neith, etc. Some of her destructive

functions were described in the Book of the Dead:

Terrible one, lady of the rain-storm, destroyer of the souls of men,

devourer of the bodies of men, orderer, producer, and maker of

454
 slaughter Hewer-in-pieces in blood, Ahibit, lady ofhair.
. . .
Fire-lover, . . .
Isis

pure one, lover ofslaughterings, cutter off ofheads, devoted one, lady
of the Great House her name is Clother, hider of her creations,
. . .

conqueror of hearts, swallower of them Knife which cutteth when

its name is uttered, slayer of those who approach thy flame. 12

Isis swallowed Osiris the savior and brought him back to life. Book of the Dead.
He was reincarnated as the child Horus, or else as the ithvphallic moon- Common name for the
god Min, or Menu, "He who impregnates his mother." n He was collection of

torn to pieces and reassembled except for his lost Egyptian funerary
annually penis. Isis
papyri written
made him a new penis of clay, then gave it and him new life by between 1500 and 1350
invoking her own holy names as life-giver and death-giver: "Behold, I B.C., including
have found thee lying there. Weary is the great one . . . . O Osiris, Vignettes, Hymns,
live, stand up thou unfortunate one that liest there! I am Isis. I am Chapters, and
H
So Osiris stood up, and lived, and mated with his descriptive Rubrics.
Nephthys."
Among the best-
Goddess, and life went on. Osiris-Min's counterpart Adonis was similar-
preserved, and most
ly reborn from the Goddess as Priapus and was similarly associated typical, copies of the
with spring floods. 15 Theban Recension of
the Book of the
Some annual Nile flood was caused by a teardrop from
said the
Dead is the much-
Isis's eyeshe raised her lament for the dead god. The Nile festival
as
studied Papyrus of
took place on the "Night of the Tear-Drop," unwittingly preserved by Ani.
Moslems as the June festival of Lelat al-Nuktah, "Night of the
Drop." Worshippers said to the Goddess: "Thou givest life unto the
and herds, all the land drinks thee when thou descendest
flocks . . .

when thou comest the whole land rejoices.

the bringer of food, Thou art

thou art the mighty one of meat and drink, thou art the creator of all

good things. Thou fillest the storehouses, thou heapest high with corn
the granaries, and thou hast care for the poor and needy." 16
Isis was worshipped
throughout the Greco-Roman world, "from
Alexandria to Aries, from the outskirts of the Sahara to the isle of

Britain, from the mountains of Asturias to the mouths of the Dan-

17
ube." Prevalence of the fairy tale "The Witch in the Stone Boat"
shows how widely Isis's cult traveled, for the "witch" was none other
than she; each of her temples featured a carved stone moon-boat

containing her figure, which Christians called a witch or demoness. In

pagan times, Isis's boat had its own special holiday on the 5th of
18
March, the Navigium Isidis, Blessing of the Vessel of Isis.
Isis's cult came to Rome about 80 B.C., attained great popularity in

the reign of Vespasian,and flourished throughout the empire until it

was ousted by Christianity four centuries later. The Goddess herself was
not so much ousted as absorbed. Her identification with the virgin

Mary was part of the syncretic development of the Madonna cult. Some
early Christians in Rome called themselves Pastophori, a title of
19
"shepherds" or "servants of Isis," which evolved intopa5tors.
The story of Mary's Egyptian journey with her child seems to have
been devised not only to fulfill the scripture, "Out of Egypt have I

called my son" (Matthew 2:1 5), but also to justify the extensive

identifications between Isis and Mary. One legend said Mary and

455
 at Mataria, the sycamore of Isis-
Isra-EI
Jesus took refuge in the holy tree
Hathor, Goddess of Dendera, the Shrine of the Tree. 20 Isis was

"Destiny," and so was Mary the triple Moerae. "The tree is a symbol

of destiny because it is rooted in the depths. But what is more

important is that it grows into time, ramifies its branches like a family
tree."
21
Mataria was long known as an Egyptian name of the
22
Goddess who was also Mata-Meri, or Mari.

Pictures and sculptures wherein [Isis] is represented in the act ofsuckling

her child Horus formed the foundation for the Christian figures and

paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several of the incidents oHhe

wanderings of the Virgin with the Child in Egypt as recorded in the
Apocryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis as described in the
texts found on the Metternich Stele, and many of the attributes ofIsis,
the God-mother, the mother ofHorus, andofNeith, the goddess of Sais,
are identical with those ofMary the Mother of Christ. 23

An Egyptian amulet in the British Museum shows the Goddess

seated under her holy tree, giving birth to her divine child, and holding
the ankh in one hand. On the reverse is another ankh and the legend,
"One God in heaven." Some suggest that the picture might represent
the birth of Buddha, but it is
usually interpreted as the birth of
24
Christ though its original was certainly a picture of Isis.

1. Stone, 219. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 259. 3. Budge, D.N., 265.

4. Angus, 71, 1 19, 240. 5. Knight, S.L., 1 18. 6. Angus, 135, 139.
7. 1, 519; 2, 90. 8. Budge, G.E. 2, 202. 9. Gaster, 769.
Budge, G.E.
O.A., 184. 11. Budge, E.M., 135. 12. Book of the Dead, 416-18.
10. Lindsay,
13. James, 135-39. 14. Brandon, 126-27. 15. Frazer, G.B., 390.
16. Budge, D.N., 105-6. 17. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 83. 18. Angus, 123.
19. Budge, G.E. 2, 217. 20. Budge, G.E. 2, 220. 21. Neumann, 248. CM,
22. Budge, D.N.,160; Graves, W.G, 357. 23. Budge, G.E. 2, 220.
24. Budge, A.T., 129-30.

Isra-EI

Philo Judaeus (ca. 30 Philo said Isra-EI was a Jewish king in Phoenicia, who dressed his
B.a-40 a.d.) Alexandrian
only-begotten son Jeud in royal robes and sacrificed him as a surrogate
Jewish philosopher, for himself. The Bible said Isra-EI was the royal name taken by
1

strongly influenced by
Hellenistic Platonism, Jacob after he battled all night with a man who was God (Genesis 32)
which meant not an angel, as the story is usually interpreted, but an
Pythagoreanism, and
Stoicism; author of incumbent sacred king embodying the divinity. Jacob was the "sup-
biblical commentaries, planter" who next took the name of the same divinity. The suffix El
tracts, and histories.
meant "a deity," male or female though Bible translators invariably
rendered "God" and Is-Ra may have originated as an androgy-
it

nous combination of Isis and Ra, or else a father-and-son combination

of Osiris and Ra. In any event, it was a god-name much older than
the story of Jacob.
1. Frazer, G.B., 341.

456
Istadevata Istadevata

Patron Goddess of the Self: a Tantric name of the Shakti or

,zana8' and '"nami
spiritual
individual guardian angel of the enlightened sage; corresponding to the mbb^^^^^mm
Greek Psyche, Roman Anima, and other manifestations of man's
"female soul."

lus Naturale

"Natural Law," Latin term for the Law of Aphrodite, or of Juno, or

of Demeter: the legal system of the ancient matriarchate. It was related
to "the Aphroditean law which permeates matter and causes it to be
fertilized. It is Aphrodite who fills the two sexes with the urge for

generation, who implants solicitude for the offspring, who forges the
bond between mother and child and secures the freedom and equality
of all the progeny. All special privilege is odious to this goddess.
Hence the equal right of all to the sea, the seashore, the air; and the
communis omnium possessio (common property) may be traced back
to the ius naturale." Laws of the matriarchate were not hierarchical,
'

but democratic; and the authority of women was "natural" because it

was based on archetypal dependence on the moral instruction of the

Mother. See Motherhood.
[Link], 189.

Ixion

"Strong Moon-man," sacred king of the Lapiths, "wielders of stone

weapons." Ixion married the Sky-goddess Dia, and afterward died

spread-eagled on a fiery wheel, symbol of the sun endlessly rolling

through the heavens. Hellenic myth interpreted this as punishment for a

sin against Zeus, but the original story was one of sacred-king
sacrifice, related to "the burning wheels rolled downhill at European
midsummer festivities, as a sign that the sun has reached its zenith
and must now decline again." x

Ixion's name was akin to axis,the same as the Hindu Akshivan

who was an emanation of Shiva personifying the Axle of the World
1
{aksha). Thus Ixion was another of the gods whose death took place at

the hub of the universe, the axis mundi later assimilated to the cross
of Christ.
1. Graves, CM. 1, 209. 2. Jobes, 260.

Izanagi and Izanami

Japanese male-female creators, representing the uterine Deep and
the phallic lightning bolt supposed to have churned it into movement,

457
Jack and Jill so the primal womb went "curdlecurdle" (koworokoworo) and gave
birth to solid matter. One version said the male twin, Izanagi, reached
1

^^^^^^^^^^_ down from heaven and stirred the Deep with his spear.
The pair were known as the Male Who Invites and the Female
Who Invites. Their myth told how they discovered sex and used it to
work their creation magic:

His Augustness, the Male Who Invites,

inquired of Her Augustness, the

Female Who Invites, "In what manner is your body made?" She
replied, "My body in its thriving grows,
but there is one part that does not

grow together. "And His Augustness the Male who Invites said to her:
"My body in its thriving also grows, but there is one part that grows in
excess. Therefore, would it not seem proper that I should introduce the

part of my body in excess into the part ofyour body that does not grow to-
gether, and so procreate territories?"
"
Her Augustness the Who Invites said: "It would be well.
Female
And His Augustness, the Male Who Invites, said to her: "Let us go
round this August Heavenly Pillar, I and you, and when we shall have
"
come together let us in august union join our august parts. She
agreed and where they met, Her Augustness the Female Who Invites
. . .

said:"Ah! What a fair and lovely youth! Whereupon His Augustness

the Male Who Invites said: "Ah! What a fair and lovely maiden!" 2

The myths said Izanami gave birth to all things; but at a

earlier

later date, an imaginative revisionist took the initiative away from her.
The next installment said she was burned to death while giving birth
to Fire; then she went into the underworld and became a Tiamat-like
sea monster. Izanagi followed her, but she couldn't return to the

upper world with him because she had eaten underworld fruit (the same
theme familiar in Greek myths of Persephone and Eurydice).

Izanagi fled, horrified at his female twin's changed appearance.

She pursued him with an army of storm-demons, whom he foiled by
throwing them peaches, the yonic fruit of life, which they couldn't resist
stopping to pick up. Then Izanagi performed magical purifications
and developed the ability to give birth to beings. Amaterasu the sun
goddess was born from his left eye, a moon god from his right eye,
and the dragon-slaying hero Susa-no-wo from his nose. The former
Creatress Izanami, left behind in the underworld, also gave birth to
3
more deities but they were all evil spirits.

[Link],403. 2. Campbell, Or.M., 467-68. 3. Jobes, 172-73.

Jack and Jill

Heavenly Twins of Norse mythology, originally Hjuki and Bil, a boy

and girl taken "up the hill" to heaven by their Moon-mother Mana.
They drew the Water of Life "from the well Byrgir, in the bucket
Soegr, suspended from the pole Simul, which they bore on their
shoulders." Hjuki was derived from jakka, to assemble, to increase;
Bil from bila, to break up or dissolve. Thus the twins signified forces of

458
creation and destruction. 1
It was said their faces could be seen forever Jael
in the markings on the moon. Bil's voice could be heard in the singing Jahi the Whore
wind, and Hjuki sends moonlight to help night-bound skiers find their ^^^^^^^^^^^
2
way down safely to valley towns.
An event reported in 1633 suggests that an esoteric meaning of the

Jack and Jill myth might have been embedded in a ritual recognized

as heresy. A 20-year-old girl named Mary Spencer was convicted of

witchcraft because "on her way to the well for water, she often rolled

her pail down the hill, running before it and in fun calling it to follow
3
her." That such apparently trivial actions invited serious charges,
even death sentences, suggests that they must have been understood in
some way other than mere play.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 201. 2. Jobes, 27. 3. Robbins, 381.

var. Jaala
jjael
alternate name for the Israelite queen Deborah as
f'Wild She-Goat,"
:a mate of the
scapegoat-god, Baal-Gad or Pan. Ja-El was the same as the
primal Goddess Jahi, adopted by tribal queens of the pre-
atriarchal period. Jael sacrificed Sisera in a strange way, nailing his
f'ersians'
ihead to the ground (Judges 4:21), which may be likened to the

of Artemis Tauropolos nailing the heads of their victims to

priestesses
1
crosses.

1. Graves, G.M. 2,78.

lagadamba
title of Kali. She was also called
1
'Mother of the World," a Tantric
'aganmata, "Mother of All Living," which was copied into the Bible as

title of Eve.
[Link].A.T., 50.

lahi the Whore

Persian patriarchal epithet for the Great Mother who brought forth,
hen mated with, the serpent Ahriman, as Lilith or the pre-Adamic Eve
vas supposed to have done with the biblical serpent. Zoroastrian

brought menstruation into the world, for she men-

icriptures said Jahi
time after mating with her serpent. Hence she
itruated for the first

personified the moon, which was everywhere supposed to be the

>riginal source of menstruation. Jahi also brought sex into the world

>y seducing the first man in the primal garden. Jewish patriarchs

>robably derived their notions of the sinfulness of women (by virtue

>f their descentfrom Eve) from Persian ascetics who claimed all women
were "whores" because they were descendants of Jahi.

459
Jains
Oddly enough, some of the earliest forms of the name of the
James of Compostela masculinized versions of the name of
Jewish God seem to have been
Jahi. Variations
included Jahu, Jah, Yahu, Yahweh, Iau, Jaho. Some

myths indicate that this God like Ahriman once

had a serpent form
and may have played the part of the Great Mother's serpent.

Jains
Ascetic sect of Buddhist hermit-yogis who attempted to develop
magical and miraculous powers by severe self-denial. The
founder of
also called Mahavira (Great
Jainism (ca. 6th century B.C.) was Jina,
Hero, or Great Man). He had the usual virgin mother, Devananda, the
"Blessed Goddess." He performed the usual miracles. He walked on
*

water, healed the sick, turned water into wine, exorcised demons, made
These powers were supposed
the blind see, etc. to have come to him

because he renounced all sensual pleasures and retired to a life of

constant meditation in a forest hermitage.

From the time of Alexander the Great, Jain monks traveled

westward to impress and influence Persians, Jewish Essenes, and

later, Christians. See Asceticism.

1 . Larousse, 347.

Jambu Island
Land of the Rose- Apple Tree, a Tantric paradise likened to the

body of a maternal Shakti, identical with western pagan images of the

Blessed Isles in the west, or Fairyland, or the original Eden with its

apple-bearing Tree of Life. The shape of Jambu Island is like a yoni, t

Chariot or Throne of Shiva. In its center is the Diamond Seat

(vajrasana) or clitoris, where the Way of Awakening is demonstrated to
1
the sexually and spiritually enlightened.
[Link]&Kent,84.
The scallop
remained the emblem
of St. James although
it was hardly suitable for
a male saint.
Scallop
James of Compostela, Saint
was derived from the
Compostela on the northwestern corner of Spain was one of the most
Norse skalpr, "a
popular pilgrimage centers of pre-Christian times, later assimilated to
sheath."' The same
word in Latin was Christianity via the rather silly legend that the dead apostle James
vulva* Medieval artists miraculously journeyed there by floating, all alone, in a stone coffin.
knew the scallop was The legend was first heard in the 7th century a.d., when the
a kteis and a symbol of church took over the Compostelan shrine from the Brigantine Sea-
the Goddess.
goddess, Brigit. The sanctuary was formerly named Brigantium. The
1

famous
Botticelli's
Goddess's symbol, a kteis or vulva in the form of a scallop shell or
Venus was born
2
from the same kteis. cowrie, was adopted by the cult of the new saint.

460
 The anonymous bones now advertised at Compostela as those of Janua Coeli
St. James were actually picked up in Galicia during the Middle Ages. Januarius, Saint

Though the Spanish church still insists on the authenticity of St. James
because Compostela brings in a great deal of money annually from
^^^^^^
the faithful, most Catholic scholars now agree that St. James was and is
5
entirely spurious.
1. Graves, G.M. 1, 296. 2. Lindsay, A.W., 132. 3. Potter & Sargent, 108.
[Link], 179. 5. Atrwater, 182.

janua Coeli
'Gate of Heaven," title of the sanctuary screen in Christian

hurches, derived from the yonic "gate" of Juno (Uni, or yoni) veiled
y the hymen in the Goddess's own temples. As a personification of
the Gate, Juno had two faces looking in both directions the outward
of the Gate at birth, the reverse passage at death. At her
passage
Festival in early January she was addressed as Antevorta and Postvorta,
the Goddess Who Looks Forward and Backward, for January was the
of the year, when the god of the Aeon died and was reborn from
lotherTime. 1
(gate"
As Romanreligion became more patriarchal, Juno's gate-keeping

persona became an androgynous Janua-Janus, later was wholly mas-

god Janus to whom all gateways were sacred.
culinized as the two-faced

We was another form of the Petra, Pater, or Peter, keeper of the keys
:o the Goddess's "Pearly Gate."
The Christian version of the janua coeli depicted heaven on one
;ide, hell on the other. The "wrong" or "death" side of the Gate
became known as janua diaboli, "the gate by which the Devil enters."
Since the whole image was that of a yoni to begin with, it was almost

nevitable that Christian fathers used janua diaboli as a common

synonym for "woman." 2
1. Graves, W.G., 184. 2. J.B. Russell, 283.

Saint
januarius,
Canonized version of the Roman god of gateways, Janus of the two

pees.
His old shrine at Naples was converted into a saint's church,
vhere a bottle of dried blood was reverently preserved and said to be
he blood of the saint. This blood would turn liquid when placed beside
he skull of a genuine martyr. Pope Pius II himself "infallibly"
1
I ttested to the reality of this miracle.

Naturally there was no real St. Januarius; he was only another form
if Peter, the "Petra" who guarded the heavenly gate (see Peter,
laint). As guardian of door and gateways he became the janitor
neaning "doorkeeper" of heaven. 2
1. Brewster, 415. 2. Dumezil, 328.

461
jar-Bearer Jar-Bearer
A mysterious man bearing a vessel of water preceded Jesus on his
mmmmmmmmmKmm triumphal promenade to the house of the Last Supper (Luke 22:10).
The meaning of this detail is revealed by the Babylonian cult of the
savior-god Nabu, or Nebo, who also promenaded to the sacred drama of
his immolation Goddess's grove on the third day of the month
in the

of Iyyar, when priests consecrated the god's nuptial couch, and "the god
will enter the bedchamber (or tomb). On the fourth day will take
place the return of Nabu." The man representing the god was always
preceded by a jar-bearer, carrying the vessel of water that stood for
spirit, the medium
the god's seminal of his union with the dread
1
Goddess.
In Egypt, the jar was the menat or moon-charm, represented in

hieroglyphics as fluid pouring from a narrow phallic vessel into a

wider, female pot or vase. As early as the 6th dynasty, the menat
2
signified the restoration of sexual capacities
after rebirth. Unlike

Christians, who denied sexual activity in heaven (Matthew 22:30, Mark

12:25, Luke 20:35), Egyptians believed there could be no heavenly
bliss without sex. Even the Savior Osiris, reborn as "impregnator of his
Mother," followed the menat to his love-death. It was water in a

"male vessel," the phallic jar. 3

Isis were represented by vessels of water, to merge
Both Osiris and
mating as completely as two waters in a single jar. The
in their

concept was the same as the Tantric image of sexual union blessed by
the god of love: a merging of bliss and the void, "like the pouring of
water into water." 4
Similar imagery underlay creation myths like that of Ashurbani-

pal's TwelveTablets, where the male celestial sea Apsu rained down
5
fructifying waters into the sea-womb of Mother Tiamat, the nether sea.

Because the ancients thought rain a kind of celestial semen, mytho-

logical heavenly fathers tended to be rain gods (e.g., Jupiter Pluvius).
Since they weren't sure whether this fertile fluid from heaven should
be called semen or urine, the heavenly father sometimes made "golden
rain," like the urine with which Zeus impregnated Danae, the
Earth. 6 Uranus or "Father Heaven" was an archaic producer of

fertilizing urine.
In India the spirit of love is still represented by a jar of water
serving "in the place of a sacred image. The water is regarded, for the
7
period of the worship, as a residence or seat (pitha) of the god." The
Sanskrit word pitha recalls the Greek pithos or jar signifying rebirth in
Demeter's Eleusinian Mysteries, when she was Mistress of Earth and
Sea and absorbed the substance of gods. 8
Mysteries of the Cabiri in Phrygia and Samothrace worshipped
Demeter Cabiria in conjunction with the Young God (Ganymede,

Dionysus, or Cabirius) in the form of a male jar-bearer, shown pouring

water into a maternal Pot, Vase, Cauldron, or Grail. He was the
9
universal ephebe; the larger vessel was the universal mother. Similar

462
 mysteries of the two vessels were dramatized throughout the Middle Jehovah
I

j East, so the jar-bearer became the symbol of any dying savior-god Jesus ben Pandera
enroute to his Fate.
\.Assyr.&Bab. Lit, 249. 2. Budge, E.M., 60. 3. Elworthy, 187, 301.
4. Tatz & Kent, 140. 5. Lamusse, 49. 6. Graves, W.G., 54. 7. Zimmer, 34.
8. Neumann, G.M., 267. 9. Neumann, G.M., 324-25.

Jehovah
Name of God, artificially constructed from the vowels oiAdonai,
"the Lord," with the Hebrew consonants JHVH, yod-he-vau-he, the
Tetragrammaton. At first the artificial construct was used to avoid

speaking the "real" name of God, which carried a curse. Actually there
were many variations of the name, in many Semitic dialects: Yahu,
Yahweh, Jahveh, Yaho, Iao. Another variation was
1

Jah, Jeud, leu,

Jesus, a Latin form of Yeshua, Joshua, or Jeud. (See Yahweh.)

1. Albright, 262.

Jesus ben Pandera var. Panthera

Celsus and the Talmudic tradition mentioned Jesus, son of Pandera

by a Roman soldier on a Jewish prostitute,

or Panthera, begotten

I
Miriam of Magdala (Mary Magdalene), whose husband was a car-
penter. The word for carpenter, najjar, was applied to a sacred
1

brotherhood, the Nazarites or Nazorenes, who supported themselves

by woodworking. Jesus ben Pandera was called a najjar, a holy man. He
2

|
worked miracles, healed the sick, foretold the world's end. 3 Eventual-
ly he was executed, perhaps by hanging, through his own wish.
Some said this ben Pandera or Bar-Panther was the grandfather of
4
the Virgin Mary. Other Christian authorities, like Epiphanius, said
he was the paternal grandfather of the Christian Jesus which, obvious-
ly, contradicted the Virgin Birth myth. "Son of Pandera" was a title
so firmly attached to Jesus that many Christian writers accepted it and

tried to explain it. The name of Pandera as Jesus's father is traceable

5
I back to the time of the Gospels and has "an equal claim to reliability."
Later Christians said the name was used by the Jews to discredit their
savior by calling him a whore's son who was executed as a criminal.
The "whore" called Miriam of Magdala seems to have been a

sacred hierodule or Virgin Bride of God, dedicated to the temple

{magdala). Since the oldest traditions associated Mary Magdalene with

theHoly Vase that represented Pandora, the Great Goddess entitled
6
"All-Giver," some suggest that Pandera was a corrupt form of this title.
Another theory said Jesus ben Pandera really meant Jesus, son of the

Virgin (Parthenos), the latter being the usual of a temple hiero- title

7
dule. Or again, Pan-Thera could have meant Dionysus the son of

Pan, whose totem animal was a panther, or "all-beast." Jesus was

463
 Jesus Christ assimilated to the Dionysian savior. The story of his miracle at Cana
was directly modeled on of sacred marriage celebrated
a Dionysian rite

at Sidon; even the Gospels' wording was copied from the festival of
the older god. 8
These few garbled hints of Jesus's pagan background may have
been greatly clarified by the hundreds of diverse Gospels extant in the
first few centuries a.d., had not the early church seen fit to
destroy them
9
all.

1. Keller, 341-42. 2. Briffault 3, 367. 3. Robertson, 68. 4. de Voragine, 520.

5. [Link], 61, 65. 6. Graves, G.M. 1, 148. 7. Ashe, 53. 8. M. Smith, 120.
9. M. Smith, 2.

Jesus Christ
Other versions of the The Jesus who was called Christos, "Anointed," took his title from
name were Jaho, Iao, or Middle-Eastern savior-gods Adonis and
like Tammuz, born of the
Ieuw, sometimes
Virgin Sea-goddess Aphrodite-Maria (Myrrha), or Ishtar-Mari (He-
titles of Zeus-Sabazius
brew Mariamne). Earlier biblical versions of the same hero were Joshua
as the nocturnal sun

and Lord of Death in son of Nun (Exodus 33:11), Jehu son of Nimshi, whom Elijah
the underworld. 7 anointed as a sacred king (1 Kings 19:16), and Yeshua son of Marah.
The same god was The Book of Enoch said in the 2nd century B.C. that Yeshua or Jesus
Sabaoth, the Jews' was the secret name given by God to the Son of Man (a Persian title),
"Lord of Hosts." The
and that it meant "Yahweh saves." '

Latin name for this

Heavenly Father came

In northern Israel the name was written leu. 2 It was the same as
from the same root: Ieud or Jeud, the "only-begotten son" dressed in royal robes and
Father leu. 8 3
Iu-piter, sacrificed by the god-king Isra-El. Greek versions of the name were
Iasion, Jason, or Iasus the name of one of Demeter's sacrificed
consorts, killed by Father Zeus after the fertility rite that coupled him
Book of Enoch with his Mother. 4 Iasus signified a healer or Therapeuta, as the
Consisting of three
extant books and a
Greeks called the Essenes, whose cult groups always included a man
lost fourth, the with the title of Christos. 5 The literal meaning of the name was
Enochian works "healing moon-man," fitting the Hebrew version of Jesus as a son of
were written probably 6
Mary, the almah or "moon-maiden." (See Virgin Birth.)
between the
It seems Jesus was not one
person but a composite of many. He
Maccabean age and the
first B.C. The played the role of sacred king of the Jews who periodically died in an
century
chief subject is the atonement ceremony as surrogate for the real king. "The Semitic
coming world's end religions practiced human immolations longer than any other reli-
and the reappearance of
gion, sacrificing children and grown men in order to please sanguinary
Son of
the Messianic
gods. In spite of Hadrian's prohibition of those murderous offerings,
Man, who resembles 9
the predicted final they were maintained in certain clandestine rites." The priesthood of
avatar of Buddha the Jewish God insisted that "one man should die for the people . . .

appearing before that the whole nation perish not" (John 1 1:50). Yahweh forgave no sins
doomsday. without bloodshed: "without shedding blood is no remission" (He-
brews 9:22).
Middle-Eastern traditions presented a long line of slain and canni-
balized Saviors extending back to prehistory. At first kings, they became

king-surrogates or "sacred" kings as the power of real monarchies

464
developed. The Gospels' Jesus was certainly not the first of them, Jesus Christ
though he may have been one of the last. One passage hints at a
holy man's understandable fear of such brief, doomed eminence: ^^^^^^^^-
"When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him
by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain
himself alone" (John 6:15).
This Jesus seems to have made little or no impression on his
contemporaries. No literate person of his own time mentioned him in
any known writing. The Gospels were not written in his own time, nor
were they written by anyone who ever saw him in the flesh. The
names of the apostles attached to these books were fraudulent. The
books were composed after the establishment of the church, some as
the 2nd century a.d. or later, according to the church's require-
late as

ments for a manufactured tradition. 10 Most scholars believe the

earliest book of the New Testament was 1 Thessalonians, written

perhaps 5 1 a.d. by Paul, who never saw Jesus in person and knew no
11
details of his life story.

The details were accumulated through later adoption of the myths

attached to every savior-god throughout the Roman empire. Like
Adonis, Jesus was born of a consecrated temple maiden in the sacred
cave of Bethlehem, "The House of Bread."
12
He was eaten in the
form of bread, as were Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and others; he called
himself the bread of God (John 6:33). Like worshippers of Osiris,
those of Jesus made him part of themselves by eating him, so as to
participate in his resurrection: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh
my blood, dwelleth me, and I in him" (John 6:56).
in

Like
Attis, Jesus was sacrificed at the spring equinox and rose again

from the dead on the third day, when he became God and ascended
to heaven. Like Orpheus and Heracles, he "harrowed hell" and brought
a secret of eternal life, promising to draw all men with him up to glory

(John 12:32). Like Mithra and all the other solar gods, he celebrated a
birthday ninemonths later at the winter solstice, because the day of
his death was also the day of his cyclic re-conception. See Attis.
From the elder gods, Jesus acquired not only his title of Christos
but all his other titles as well. Osiris and Tammuz were called Good
Shepherd. Sarapis was Lord of Death and King of Glory. Mithra and
Heracles were Light of the World, Sun of Righteousness, Helios the

Rising Sun. Dionysus was King of Kings, God of Gods. Hermes was
the Enlightened One and the Logos. Vishnu and Mithra were Son of
Man and Messiah. Adonis was the Lord and the Bridegroom. Mot-
Aleyin was the Lamb of God. "Savior" (Soter) was applied to all of
them.

Mystery cults everywhere taught that ordinary men could be

possessed by the of such gods, and identified with them as
spirits
"sons" or alter egos, as Jesus was. It was the commonly accepted way to
acquire supernatural powers, as shown by some of the charms used
by magicians: "Whatever I
say must happen For I have taken to

465
Jesus Christ
myself the power of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and of the great god-
demon Iao Ablanathanalba ... for 1 am the Son, I surpass the limit. . . .

I am he who is in the seven heavens, who standeth in the seven

sanctuaries; for I am the son of the living God. ... I have been united
with thy sacred form. I have been empowered by thy sacred name. I

have received the effluence of goodness, Lord, God of gods, King,

Demon n
. . .
having attained that nature equal to the God's."
Aulus Cornelius The skeptical Celsus noted that beggars and vagabonds throughout
Celsus the Empire were pretending to work miracles and become gods,
Patrician Roman
throwing fits, prophesying the end of the world, and aspiring to the
scholar of the first
status of saviors:
century a.d., who wrote
"
at length on the Each has the convenient and customary spiel, "I am the god, or "a son of
" "
subjects of medicine, God, or "a divine spirit, and "I have come. For the world is about to
agriculture, be destroyed, and you, men, because ofyour injustice, will go (with it).
philosophy, But I wish to save, and you shall see me again coming back with
jurisprudence, and
heavenly power. Blessed is he who worships me now! On all others, both
religion.
cities and countrysides, I shall cast eternal fire. And men who (now)

ignore their punishments shall repent in vain and groan, but those who
"
believed in me I shall preserve immortal. M

Of course this "conspicuously false" doctrine was the central

message of the Gospels too. Persian eschatology passing through a
Jewish-Essenic filter predicted "the Son of Man coming in a cloud
with power and great glory" (Luke 9:27, 21:27). Jesus promised the end
of the world in his own generation. The rest of the Gospel material
was largely devoted to the miracles supposed to demonstrate his divine
power, since religions generally "adduce revelations, apparitions,
prophecies, miracles, prodigies and sacred mysteries that they may get
themselves valued and accepted." 1S Even these miracles were deriva-
tive. Turning water into wine at Cana was copied from a Dionysian

ritual practiced atSidon and other places. 16 In Alexandria the same

Dionysian miracle was regularly shown before crowds of the faithful,
assisted by an ingenious system of vessels and siphons, invented by a

clever engineer named Heron. 17 Many centuries earlier, priestesses at

Nineveh cured the blind with spittle, and the story was repeated of
18
many different gods and their incarnations. Demeter of Eleusis
multiplied loaves and fishes in her role of Mistress of Earth and Sea.
Healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out devils, handling poisonous

serpents (Mark 16:18), etc., were so commonplace that Celsus

scorned these "Christian" miracles as "nothing more than the common
works of those enchanters who, for a few oboli, will perform greater
deeds in the midst of the Forum. The magicians of Egypt cast out
. . .

cure diseases by a breath, and so influence some uncul-

evil spirits,

tured men, that they produce in them whatever sights and sounds they

please. But because they do such things shall we consider them the
19
sons of God?"

Magicians often claimed that their prayers could bring flocks of

20
supernatural beings to their assistance. Thus Jesus declared that his

466
 1

prayer could summon

twelve legions (72,000) of guardian
angels Jesus Christ
(Matthew 26:53). Magicians also communed with their followers by
the standard mystery-cult sacrament of bread-flesh and wine-blood. In
I texts on magic, "a magician-god gives his own body and blood to a
recipient who, by eating it, will be united with him in love." 21
The ability to walk on water was claimed by Far-Eastern holy men
ever since Buddhist monks praised it as the mark of the true ascetic. 22
J

j
The Magic Papyri said almost anyone could walk on water with the Magic Papyri
I
help of "a powerful demon." 23 Impossibilities have always been the Collections of
exorcisms, invocations,
props of religious credulity, as Tertullian admitted: "It is believable
charms, and spells
because it is absurd; it is certain because it is impossible." 24
widely circulated
However, repetitive miracles were not so believable as original
during the early
ones. Therefore early Christians insisted that all the older deities and Christian era, used as
their miracle-tales were invented by the devil, out of his foreknowledge bases for later

of the true religion, so the faithful would be confused by past grimoires and
25 Hermetic texts.
"imitations." Pagan thinkers countered with the observation that
"The Christian religion contains nothing but what Christians hold in
common with heathens; nothing new, nor truly great." Even St. Augus-

tine, finding the hypothesis of the devil's inventions hard to swallow,

admitted that "the true religion" was known to the ancients, and had
existedfrom the beginning of time, but it began to be called Christian
after "Christ came in the flesh." 26

Nevertheless, adherents of the true religion violently disagreed

as to the circumstances of its foundation. In the first few centuries a.d.

there were many mutually and many mutually

hostile Christian sects,

contradictory Gospels. As 450, Bishop Theodore of Cyrrhus said

late as

there were at least 200 different Gospels revered by the churches of

his own diocese, until he destroyed all but the canonical four. 27 The
other Gospels were lost as stronger sects overwhelmed the weaker,
wrecked their churches, and burned their books. 28

One scripture, thrown out of the canon, said Jesus was not
later

crucified. Simon of Cyrene suffered on the cross in his place, while

Jesus stood by laughing at the executioners, saying, "It was another . . .

who drank the gall and vinegar; it was not I ... it was another,
Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom
they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height. . . .

And I was 29
laughing at their ignorance." Believers in this scripture
were persecuted and forced to sign an abjuration reading: "I anathe-
matize those who say that Our Lord suffered only in appearance, and
that there was a man on the cross and another at a distance who
30
laughed."
Some Christians interpreted Jesus's noli me tangere ("Touch me
not") to mean he came back from death as an incorporeal spirit, after
the manner of other apotheosized heroes, such as the Irish hero
31
Laegaire, who people not to touch him. Later, an
also told his

unknown Gospel writer inserted the story of doubting Thomas, who

insisted on touching Jesus. This was to combat the heretical idea that

467
^
Jesus Christ

m ^^^
there was no resurrection
lem's municipal god

Thomas,
Tammuz
in the flesh,

(Thomas)
and also to subordinate Jerusa-

to the new
Saint). Actually, the most likely source of primary Christian
mythology was the Tammuz cult in Jerusalem. Like Tammuz, Jesus
was the Bridegroom of the Daughter of Zion (John 12:1 5). Therefore
his bride was Anath, "Virgin Wisdom Dwelling in Zion," who was
savior (see

also the Mother of God. 32 Her dove descended on him at his baptism,
signifying (in the old religion) that she chose him for the love-death.
Anath broke her bridegroom's reed scepter, scourged him and pierced
him for fructifying blood. She pronounced his death curse, Mara-
natha Corinthians 16:22). As the Gospels said of Jesus, Anath's
(1
35
bridegroom was "forsaken" by El, his heavenly father. Jesus's cry to
El, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" seems to have

been a line written for the second act of the sacred drama, the pathos
or Passion (Mark 15:34).
Of course this Passion was originally a sexual one. Jesus's last

words "It is consummated" (consummatum est) were interpreted as a

sign that his work was finished, but could equally apply to
marriage his

(John 19:30). As a cross or pillar represented the divine phallus, so a

temple represented the body of the Goddess, whose "veil" (hymen) was
"rent in the midst" as Jesus passed into death (Luke 23:45). As usual
when the god disappeared into the underworld, the sun was eclipsed

(Luke 23:44). In their ignorance of astronomical phenonema, Chris-

tians claimed that the moon was full at the same time Easter is still a

full-moon though an eclipse of the sun can only occur at

festival

the dark of the moon. 34 The full moon really meant impregnation of the
Goddess.
The parting of Jesus's garment recalls the unwrapping of Osiris
when he emerged from thetomb as the ithyphallic Min, "Husband
of his Mother." If Jesus was one with his heavenly father, then he also
married his mother and begot himself. A 4th-century scripture said in
the underworld he confronted his mother as Death, Mu} s She was also
the Bride disguised as Venus, the evening star, presiding over the
death of the sun. Jews still recall her in a ritual greeting to the evening
star, "Come, O friend, let us welcome the Bride." 36
Like pagans, early Christians identified the Bride with the Mother.
They said Jesus "consummated on the cross" his union with Mary-
Ecclesia, his bride the church. Augustine wrote: "Like a bridegroom
Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his

nuptials. ... He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in
mounting it, he consummated
his marriage ,
he lovingly gave
. . .

himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined himself to

the woman for ever." 37 John 19:41 says, "In the place where he was
crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre,
wherein was never man yet laid." A garden was the conventional
symbol for the body of the mother/bride; and a new tomb was the virgin

womb, whence the god would be born again. On the third day, Jesus

468
 rose from the tomb/womb like Attis, whose resurrection was the Hilaria, Jesus Christ
38
orDay of Joy. Jesus's resurrection day was named after Eostre, the
same Goddess as Astarte, whom the Syrians called Mother Mari. 39 ^ -^_^__^__
Three incarnations of Mari, or Mary, stood at the foot of Jesus's
i

cross, like the Moerae of Greece. One was his virgin mother. The
second was his "dearly beloved" (see Mary Magdalene). The third
Mary must have represented Crone (the fatal Moera), so the
the
tableau resembled that of the three Norns at the foot of Odin's sacrificial
tree. The Fates were present at the sacrifices decreed by Heavenly

Fathers, whose victims hung on trees or pillars "between heaven and

I earth." Up to Hadrian's time, victims offered to Zeus at Salamis were

I anointed with sacred ointments thus becoming "Anointed Ones" or
"Christs" then hung up and stabbed through the side with a
40
spear. Nothing in Jesus's myth occurred at random; every detail was

part of a formal sacrificial tradition, even to the "procession of palms"

41
which glorified sacred kings in ancient Babylon.
Far-Eastern traditions were utilized too. The Roman empire was
well aware of the teachings and myths of Buddhism. Buddha images
in classic Greek style were made in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the first
42
century a.d. Buddhist ideas like the "footprints of Buddha" ap-

peared among Christians. Bishop Sulpicius of Jerusalem reported that,

as in India, "In the dust where Christ trod the marks of His step can

|
be seen, and the earth still bears the print of His feet." 43 Buddhist
still

metaphors and phrasing also appeared in the Gospels. Jesus's formu-

la, "Dearly Beloved," was the conventional way for Tantric deities to

address their teachings to Devi, their Goddess. 44

Scholars' efforts to eliminate paganism from the Gospels in order
to find a historical Jesus have proved as hopeless as searching for a
core in an onion. 45 Like a mirage, the Jesus figure looks clear at a
distance but lacks approachable solidity. "His" sayings and parables
came from elsewhere; "his" miracles were old twice-told tales. Even the
Lord's Prayer was a collection of sayings from the Talmud, many
derived from earlier Egyptian prayers to Osiris. 46 The Sermon on the

Mount, sometimes said to contain the essence of Christianity, had no

original material; it was made up of fragments from Psalms, Ecclesiastes,
Isaiah, Secrets of Enoch, and the Shemone Esreh. 47 Moreover, it was
48
unknown to the author of the oldest Gospel, pseudo-Mark.
The discovery that
the Gospels were forged, centuries later than
the events they described, is still not widely known even though the
Catholic Encyclopedia admits, "The idea of a complete and clear-cut
canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning has no . . .

foundation in history." No extant manuscript can be dated earlier than

49
the 4th century a.d.; most were written even later. The oldest

manuscripts contradict one another, as also do even the present canon

of synoptic Gospels.
The church owed its canon to the Gnostic teacher Marcion, who
first collected Pauline epistles about the middle of the 2nd century.

469
Jesus Christ Later he was excommunicated as a heretic because he denied that the

scriptures were mystical allegories full of magic words of power. The

epistles he collected were already over a century old, if indeed they were
written by Paul; much of their material was made up of forged
50
interpolations.
The most Gospels was Pontius Pilate, to
"historical" figure in the

whom Jesus was presented as "king" of the Jews and simultaneously

as a criminal deserving the death penalty for "blasphemy" because he

called himself Christ, Son of the Blessed (Luke 23:3; Mark 14:61-

64). This alleged crime was no real crime. Eastern provinces swarmed
with self-styled Christs and Messiahs, calling themselves Sons of God
and announcing the end of the world. None of them was executed for
51
"blasphemy." The beginning of the story probably lay in the
tradition of sacred-king sacrifice in Jerusalem long before Pilate's admin-

istration, when Rome was trying to discourage such barbarisms.

From 103 to 76 B.C., Jerusalem was governed by Alexander
Janneaus, called the Aeon, who defended his throne by fighting
challengers. One year, on the Day of Atonement, his people attacked
him at the altar, waving palm branches to signify that he should die
for the earth's fertility. Alexander declined the honor and instituted a

persecution of his own subjects. Another king of Jerusalem took the

name of Menelaus, "Moon-king," and practiced the rite of sacred
52
marriage in the temple. Herod also made a sacred marriage, and
had John the Baptist slain as a surrogate for himself.
If there was a Jesus cult in Jerusalem after 30 a.d., it
completely
Porphyry (ca. 234-
305 a.d.) Neoplatonist disappeared forty years later when Titus conquered the city and

philosopher, scholar, outlawed many local customs, including human sacrifice. Jerusalem was
and writer; biographer
wholly Romanized under Hadrian. It was newly named Aelia Capito-
of Plotinus;an
lina and rededicated to the Goddess. The temple became a shrine of
opponent of the
Venus. 53 Tacitus described the siege of Jerusalem, but his writing is
Christian church,
which eventually abruptly cut off at the moment when Roman forces entered the city as

destroyed most of his ifthe final chapters were deliberately destroyed so no one knows
books. what the Romans found there. However, Romans did express disap-
proval of the Jews' or Christians' cannibalistic sacraments. Porphyry
Synoptic Gospels called it "absurd beyond all absurdity, and bestial beyond every sort of
The first three books of man should taste human flesh and drink the blood of
bestiality, that a
the New Testament
men of his own genus and species, and by doing should have eternal
(Matthew, Mark, 54
life."
Luke), which differ
radically from the From the Christians' viewpoint, a real historical Jesus was essential
material in the so- to the basic premise of the faith: the possibility of immortality through
called "Gnostic"
identification with his own
death and resurrection. Wellhausen rightly
Gospel of John. said Jesus would have no place in history unless he died and returned
55
exactly as the Gospels said. "If Christ hath not been raised, your faith
Julius Wellhausen vain"
is (1 Corinthians 15:17). Still, despite centuries of research, no
(1844-1918) German
Old Testament
historical Jesus has come to light. It seems his story was not merely
scholar, a leader of the
overlaid with myth; it was mythic to the core.

"higher criticism" Like all myths, it revealed much about the collective psychology
movement. that created it. In earlier pagan religions, the Mother and Son

470
 ousted the Father from his heavenly throne. The divine son
periodically Jesus Christ
bf Christianity no longer challenged the heavenly king, but tamely
submitted to his fatal command: "Not my will, but thine, be done"
^^^^^^^^^^
([Luke 22:42). Some early sects said the Father who demanded his
kon's blood was cruel, even demonic. 56 These were suppressed, but
Scholars have discerned in Christianity "an original attitude of hostil-

itytoward the father figure, which was changed in the first two Christian
57
penturies into an attitude of passive masochistic docility."
If orthodox Christianity demanded subordination of the Son, it was

feven more determined to subordinate the Mother. The Gospels'

jlesus
showed little respect for his mother, which troubled the church in
Its Renaissance efforts to attract women
Mary. "Any to the cult of

hero who speaks mother only twice, and on both occasions

to his

Addresses her as 'Woman,' is a difficult figure for the sentimental

58
biographers." Together with Jesus's avowed opposition to marriage
ind the family (Matthew 22:30; Luke 14:26), women's primary
concerns, New Testament sexism tended to disgust educated women of

[he pagan world.

But the Jesus who emulated Buddha in advocating poverty and
humility eventually became the mythic figurehead for one of the

world's pre-eminent money-making organizations. The cynical Pope

Leo X exclaimed, "What profit has not that fable of Christ brought
59
Is!"

Modern theologians tend to sidestep the question of whether Jesus

in fact a fable or a real person. In view of the complete dearth of
(vas
hard evidence, and the dubious nature of the soft evidence, it seems
Christianity is based on the ubiquitous social phenomena of credulity:

An idea is able to gain and retain the aura of essentia] truth through telling
and retelling. This process endows a cherished notion with more
veracity than a library offacts. . . .
[DJocumentation plays only a small role
in contrast to the act of re-confirmation by each generation ofscholars.
In addition, the further removed one gets from the period in question, the

greater is the strength of the conviction. Initial incredulousness is soon

converted into beliefin a probability and eventually smug assurance. 60

I. H. Smith, 19V 2. Albright, 262. 3. Fra/er, G.B., 341. 4. Graves, G.M. 1, 89.
5. Rose, 111.6. Graves, G.M. 2, 396. 7. Albright, 262. 8. Knight, D.W.P., 113.
9. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 1 19. 10. H. Smith, 179-80. 11. Enslin, L.C.M., 233-38.
12. Fra/er, G.B., 402; Briffault 3, 97. 13. M. Smith, 102-4. 14. M. Smith, 1 17.

[Link],371. 16. M. Smith, 25, 120. 17. deCamp, A.E., 258.

[Link],63. 19. Doane, 272. 20. M. Smith, 109. 21. M. Smith, 123.
22. Burdo Thodol, 1 58; Tat/ &
Kent, 167. 23. M. Smith, 120. 24. Angus, 268.
25. Robertson, 112. 26. Doane, 409-1 1. 27. M. Smith, 2. 28. H. Smith, 189.
29. Pagels, 72-73. 30. Reinach, 245. 3 1 . Joyce 1 , 298. 32. Ashe, 31.
33. Larowse, 77. 34. Agrippa.71. 35. Brandon, 45. 36. Wilkins, 143.
37. Cavendish, P.E., 54; T., 75. 38. Fra/er, G.B., 407. 39. H. Smith, 201.
40. H. Smith, 135. 41. Pritchard, A.N.E., 204. 42. Ross, 100.
43. de Voragine, 287. 44. Muhnnirvunntuntrn, 173. 45. M. Smith, 4.
46. Budge, E.M. 1 16. 47. H. Smith, 186. 48. Augstein, 260. 49. Pfeifer, 103.
50. Reinach, 256, 277. 51. Brandon, 248. 52. Pfeifer, 72-74, 120.
53. Encyc. Brit., "Jerusalem." 54. M. Smith, 66. 55. Guignebert, 47.
56. Legge 2, 239. 57. Augstein, 309. 58. M. Smith, 25. 59. de Camp, A.E., 399.
60. Arens, 89.

471
jewel in the Lotus Jewel in the Lotus
Jews, Persecution of jantrism> Qm mani padme hum, meaning the
Thg HoJy phrase of
wm^^^mm^a^am Hngam (penis) in the yoni (vulva),
or the fructifying male principle
enclosed within the sustaining, birth-giving, enveloping female

principle. from its purely sexual meaning, there were many

Apart
corollary ideas, such as: (1) the spark
of life, or fetus (bindu)
conceived within the Mother of Creation; (2) the dead body enclosed in

the womb of Mother Earth; (3) the eternal orgasm of Shiva the jewel
and Kali the lotus in their cosmic sexual dance; (4) the sleeping god,
between reincarnations, cradled in the Lotus of his Mother. Another
word for the male "jewel" was vajra, meaning phallus, gem, spark of
1

life, and bolt of lightning.

[Link], E.A.,151.

Jews, Persecution of

Illogically, Christians justified persecutions of Jews by calling them

"Christ-killers," though theology said God had decreed
their own
Christ's death; therefore the Jews only obeyed the will of God.

Gospel passages interpolated after the church's rise to power in Rome

absolved Pilate of guilt because he represented the Holy City. The

Jews were condemned by the ancient liturgical phrase copied into the
Gospel, which used to invoke the fertilizing power of a god's blood
but was later interpreted as an acceptance of blood guilt: "His blood be
on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:23-25).
This pious forgery became the foundation for centuries of persecu-
tions,culminating even in the present century with the extermination
of millions of Jews under the Nazi regime, the latest in a two-thousand-

year history of pogroms.

Up to the middle of the 14th century the free city of Cologne
remained a haven for Jewish merchants, weavers' guilds, and other
commercial enterprises, resisting domination by the church. Then
Catholic forces moved in; Jewish merchants were burned alive in
their houses with their wives and children; those who escaped the
immolation were banished. Their property remained in Christian
1

hands, with 50 percent going to the victorious archbishop.

The great plagues of the 14th century were usually attributed to
the Jews, said to cause the pestilence by poisoning wells and streams
with a combination of holy wafers stolen from the churches and the
menstrual blood of Jewish women. Each wave of plague brought a
wave of massacre of Jewish communities. In 1382, rioters looted and
vandalized the Jewish quarter in Paris. 2 In 1 391 the Archdeacon of
,

Seville instigated a "Holy War against the Jews." Mobs stormed the

ghetto, tore down synagogues, and murdered an estimated 41,000

5
persons. Twelve thousand Jews perished in Bavaria at the time of the ]

'

Black Death; two thousand were burned at Strasbourg for causing the

472
plague of 1 Chinon an immense trench was dug and filled with
348; at Jews, Persecution of
blazing woodburn 160 Jews in a single day. 4
to

The church encouraged persecution of Jews to divert attention ^^^^^^^^^^^

from the developing idea that these terrible plagues, which killed
about half of Europe's population before the end of the century, were
caused by a malicious God. The pope himself referred in a bull to
"the pestilence with which God is afflicting the Christian people." The
horrors of the plague revived Gnostic opinions of the evil Jehovah.

One professor wrote: "The hostility of God is

stronger than the hostility
of man." 5
The real cause of the plagues was the Christian commerce with
the Holy Land. Crusaders' ships carried millions of Oriental black
rats, with their fleas, the true carriers of the plague bacillus. 6 Being

ignorant of this, Christian authorities made no effort to control the

rats but tried to exterminate Jews instead. Jew-killing probably served to
Ivent some of the popular resentment of clergymen, who behaved
padly during
the plagues. Most deserted their flocks in haste to leave

plague-stricken areas. Churchmen generally were accused of "panic

fear and neglect." 7
Persecutions were supported by many made-to-order myths. In
the popular myth of the ritual murder was combined with the
[Spain,
of plague-magic to give Torquemada his excuse to expel the Jews
jmyth
from the country in 1490 and take their property for the enrichment
the church. Some Jews were arrested and tortured until they
pf
confessed having stolen a consecrated host and kidnapped a four-
vear-old boy called Santo Nino (Holy Child) from the doorway of a
church. They gave the child five thousand lashes, crowned him with
thorns, and extracted his heart to make anti-Christian magic. All Jewry
was involved in this plot to destroy Christendom by black magic, the
confessions said. Jews planned to kidnap Christian children and use
meir hearts or blood or ashes to make charms which, thrown into
rivers and wells, would make all Christians sick.
It was said Santo Nino bore his sufferings with great serenity, and

pen directed the Jews in the removal of his heart. The child's blind
pother miraculously recovered her sight at the moment of his death
(an
Interpolated allegory of Judaism receiving enlightenment by the
Heath of Christ, perhaps). The Holy Child went directly to heaven,
which accounted for the authorities' inability to find his remains
where the Jews said they were buried. 8
This mythic porridge started the expulsion of thousands of Jews
from Spain and Christian seizure of their assets. In 1260 the Jewish
of Toledo had built "the largest and most beautiful syna-
population
gogue in Spain." In the 1 5th century the Jews of Toledo were
massacred and the synagogue appropriated by the church. It now bears
Ihe name of the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca. 9 According to

Contemporary theologians, persecution and seizure of property was a

legitimate activity of Catholic powers. In their view, "no illegitimate

473
Jews, Persecution of violence was being done to the Jews, infidels, and heretics put to the
sword at the behest of the Church: these people had no rights to be
"
^mmmmmamm^^^^
'
violated.

The legend of Santo Nino was not even an original invention of

the Spanish Inquisition. The same legend had been used two
centuries earlier to stimulate a persecution of Jews in the Rhineland.
The German child-martyr's name was Werner. He was kidnapped,
tortured, and sacrificed to the Jewish God. His mutilated body was
found in a river, and a church was tomb at Bacharach.
built over his
1 '

In 1322, eighteen Swabian Jews were slain at Ehingen for stealing a

consecrated host from a church. Later it was discovered that the Jews
were innocent, and the real culprit was a Christian woman who was
12
subsequently burned for witchcraft.
Jews and women were almost equally serviceable as scapegoats for
the evils of medieval life; but women were more detested than Jews,
according to a decree of Orvieto in 1 350. This law said if a man and
woman became involved in a love affair, one of them Christian and
the other Jewish, the woman in the case, of whichever faith, must be
13
beheaded or burned alive.

Often, anti-Semitism went to such lengths that Christian authori-

ties even denied the origin of their own religion from a Jewish matrix.

Opposing a papal aspirant of Jewish ancestry, St. Bernard wrote: "It

would be an of a Jew occupied the
insult to Christ if the offspring

throne of Peter." H
Bernard seems to have wholly forgotten his own
church's teaching that Peter himself was a Jew, as were all the other

apostles and Jesus as well. The Jews didn't press the point, since the
former Jewishness of Christ or Peter made no difference in the

political situation.
Anti-Semitism reached an apogee under the rule of Adolf Hitler in

our own century. Hitler made the Jews wear yellow badges, like
medieval heretics. A German Christian organization announced in
1937, "Hitler's word is God's law." 15 Hitler said:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It

points me to the man who once, in loneliness, surrounded by only a
few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned
men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a
sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love, as a Christian and as a man, I
read through the passage which tells us how the Lord rose at last in His
might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of
vipers and adders. How terrific was the fight for the world against the
' 6
Jewish poison.

Evidently Hitler was not much of a reader. He never got to the

part that designated Jesus the Bridegroom of Zion; nor did he seem to

know who owned the Temple.

I. Agrippa, 19. 2. Tuchman, 380. 3. Coulton, 288. 4. White 2, 73.
5. Tuchman, 104, 109. 6. de Camp, S.S.S., 47. 7. Coulton, 202.
8. Plaidy, 171 et seq. 9. Pepper &
Wilcock, 120. 10. J.B. Russell, 148.
I I. Guerber, L.R., 206-7. 12. J.B. Russell, 167. 13. Tuchman, 118.
14. Encyc. Brit., "Bernard." 15. Langer, 63. 16. Langer, 39.

474
iezebel Jezebel

of Israel, maligned in the Bible for J an ' Po Pe

j^idonian queen worshipping
\starte instead of Yahweh. Jezebel and her husband King Ahab were
'

war fomented by Yahweh's devotees. Her

mmmhhm
(nurdered in a civil
jaughter Athaliah became queen, but seven years later she too was
{nurdered by treachery (2 Kings 11:16). Thus, worship of the
2
Goddess was abandoned.
[Link],236. 2. Stone, 188.

ioan of Arc

Joan of the Bow" Joan the Huntress also called La Pucelle, "the
Liaid," a traditional title of a priestess in the fairy-religion. Joan herself 1

that she received her mission "at the tree of the Fairy-ladies," a
pted
2
enter of the Dianic cult at
Domremy. In 1429, ecclesiastical judges
Examined her and announced that holy angels had appointed her to
3
ave France. Later, the Bishop of Beauvais reversed this decision. In

43 1, aged only 19, she was burned as a witch at Rouen, wearing a

lacard that said: "Relapsed, Heretic, Apostate, Idolator." 4 Ecclesiasti-

al authorities never did explain the nature of her "idols." The

xecutioner pretended to find her heart unburned in the ashes, to sell it

5
a holy relic.
p
For 500 years Joan remained a popular national heroine until she

[as finally
canonized by Pope Benedict in 1920. To the church XV
if her own would have been unthinkable. "The Church,
time this

of her pagan authority over pagan soldiers; and jealous, too, of

[alous
er success-based popularity with the masses; needed no urging by the

Inglish to see It was the Church which tried

Joan as 'dispensable.'
[nd
condemned Church which regarded her rightly, of
her; the
6
as an enemy; and the Church was glad to get rid of her."
purse
the same church that pronounced Joan a witch and had her
pnically,
|lled,
now claims her as a saint.

1. Daly, 148. 2. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 109. 3. Attwater, 187. 4. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 9.

5. Encyc. Brit., "Joan of Arc." 6. M. Harrison, 204.

ban, Pope
Catholic scholars now deny that there was ever a female pope, but
lie legend of Pope Joan persists. Even the church accepted Joan's

ipntificate up to the beginning of the 17th century.

as historical fact,

ler portrait appeared in a row of papal busts in Siena Cathedral, labeled

1
lAannes femina ex Anglia: John VIII, an Englishwoman.
VIII,

Pope Joan was first mentioned by her contemporary, Anastasius

je Librarian (d. 886). Scotus's chronicle of the popes listed her:
luD. 854, Lotharii 14, Joanna, a woman, succeeded Leo, and reigned
wo years, five months, and four days." De Gemblours's chronicle

475
Joan, Pope said, "Itis reported that this John was a female, and that she conceived

by one of her servants. The Pope, becoming pregnant, gave birth to a

^^^^^^^^^^_ child, wherefor some do not number her among the Pontiffs." Thomas
de Elmham's official list of the popes said: "a.d. 855, Joannes. This
2
one doesn't count; she was a woman."
Papal historian and Vatican librarian Platina wrote in The Lives of
the Popes that Joan was English, that she knew more of the scriptures
than any man, and that she was elected pope by disguising herself in
men's clothes and making herself a "monk" noted for scholarship.
Her deception was revealed when her labor pains came on her, and she
died in a street between the Lateran and St. Clement's church. 3 She
was dragged into the street and stoned to death and buried there in an
unmarked grave. 4 Martin Polonus said the street was ever afterward
avoided by papal processions, "out of detestation for what happened
there. Nor on that account is she placed in the catalogue of Holy

Pontiffs, not only on account of her sex, but also because of the
5
horribleness of the circumstances."

Joan (or John) was the only pope ever stricken from papal records,
although her pontificate was better documented than many others,
especially the popes before the 4th or 5 th centuries, many of whom had
no contemporary documentation at all but were mere names inserted
into later chronicles to create an illusion of unbroken succession.
story now is that there was an "antipope" named John,
The official
enthroned by popular demand against the will of the clergy, and soon
overthrown. 6 But church historians were seldom trustworthy. In 1 886,
Emmanuel Royidis published Joan's biography, Papissa Joanna, stat-
ing in his introduction: "Every sentence in my book and almost every
phrase is based on the testimony of contemporary authors." The
church immediately banned his book and excommunicated him. 7
Pope Joan may not have been so apocryphal as she is now
portrayed. Part of the church's most carefully hidden history shows
that there were women in high ecclesiastical positions up to the 12th

century, when they began to be deposed. Abbesses in Germany and

France once held episcopal powers and the title of Sacerdos Maxima:
High Priestess. At Quedlinburg, the scene of particularly intense
witch persecutions, the abbesses once controlled all religious orders and
the whole town, having titles of Superior Canoness of the Cathedral,
8
Metropolitana (Mayor), and Matriarch.
In Milan during early Renaissance times, dual cathedrals of the
monks of St. John and the canonesses of St. Maria Maggiore seem to
have been devoted to worship of the female principle after the manner j

of the Order of Fontevrault, whose monks "took vows of obedience

to the abbess in imitation of the obedience of Jesus to his mother." The

Milanese nuns bore the title of Sancta Dei Genetrix Holy Mother
of God. 9
From Milan came an unofficial papess named
a sect devoted to

Guglielma, whose followers "believed she was incarnation of the

476
j Holy Spirit." Her Second Coming was predicted, and she was reincar- Joan, Pope
l nated in a lady named Manfreda or Maifreda, whose votaries said
"the male dominated Papacy would pass away, yielding to a line of
^^^^^^^^_^_
female Popes. In preparation for this event they elected Sister

|
Manfreda the first of the Popesses, and several wealthy families of
Lombardy provided at great cost the sacred vessels they expected her
to use when she said Mass in Rome at the Church of Santa Maria

Maggiore." But the sect was exterminated by the Inquisition, and

Manfreda was burned at the stake in the year 1300. 10 Some die-hards

I claimed she was later reincarnated as the Fairy Queen. 11

There were other women in history close to the papal office who
I

may have contributed to the legends of the Papess. Gibbon suggested

I
1 Oth
the period in the century when Rome was ruled by two women of
thehouse of Theophylact, Theodora and her daughter Marozia, both
queens and sacred harlots, bearing the title oisenatrix. "The most
strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman mitre, and
their reign may have suggested to darker ages the fable of a female pope.

The bastard son, the grandson,and the great grandson of Marozia

a rare genealogy were seated on the Chair of St. Peter."
Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, said it
differently: "A certain
|shameless strumpet called Theodora at one time was sole monarch of
Rome and shame though it is to write it
power like a man.
exercised
She had two daughters, Marozia and Theodora, who were not only
her equals but could surpass her in the exercises that Venus loves."
Theodora's lover, Bishop John of Ravenna, was given the papacy:
"Theodora, like a harlot fearing that she would have few opportunities
lof bedding with her sweetheart, forced him to abandon his bishopric
12
end take for himself O, monstrous crime! the Papacy of Rome."
didn't seem to need forcing. He became Pope John X in 914,
florin

put
Marozia deposed him in 928 and threw him into a dungeon in the
Icastle of Sant' Angelo, where he died. Three years later she gave the

throne to the son she had borne to Pope Sergius. 13

papal
From time to time, other women exerted significant influence on
the papacy. Pope John XXII had so many mistresses that it was said
turned the Lateran palace into a brothel. He made his favorite one of
pe
the most powerful feudal baronesses in Italy, "for he was so blindly in
love with her that he made her governor of cities
; and even gave to her
the golden crosses and cups of St. Peter himself." When Pope
[Klexander VI (Rodrigo
Borgia) Rome to visit his son Cesare, he left
left

pis daughter
|
Lucretia Borgia in charge. Another woman who com-
popes was Catherine Benincasa of Siena, who convinced Pope
jfnanded
Cregory XI that she had a mandate from God to order his papacy
moved from Avignon back to Rome. 14
But the real papess, if there was one, belonged to an earlier era

han these an era of untrustworthy, disconnected records, often

Destroyed by social upheavals and wars. A popular fairy tale, "The
[Flounder in the Sea," began as a hostile allegory of the papess. A

477
 ambitious wife of a fisherman;
Jocasta magic flounder granted the wishes of the
Jonah firstshe wished to become wealthy, then noble; she wanted to be a

king, then a pope. Finally

she wanted to become God, and hubris
caused her downfall. The fisherman in the story was naturally St.

Peter, bridegroom of the church (Lady Ecclesia); the miraculous fish

with the power to create

popes but not God represented Christ.
15

The moral of the story was the common anti-feminist opinion that

women were more easily corrupted by political power than men.

Seventeenth-century England freely circulated the original story of
Pope Joan to cast opprobrium on the "papists." A London pamphlet
showed her in papal robes and tiara, her child appearing from beneath
her skirt, with the verse:

A Woman Pope (as History doth tell)

In High Procession, She in Labour fell,

And was Delivered of a Bastard Son;
6
Thence, Rome some call the Whore of Babylon.
'

The Papess of the Tarot cards was often called Pope Joan.
When the first Tarot decks were being produced, Joan's pontificate was

universally accepted as historical fact. The card-Papess's three-tiered

tiara was the same as the headdress shown on engravings of Pope

Joan.
17
However, less than a century later, French card painters were
afraid to set a woman on the papal throne even symbolically. They
changed the Papess to Juno in a classic chlamys. Belgian Tarot A
18
even transformed her into a man, labeled "the Spaniard."
Whether Pope Joan really existed or not, a curious Vatican custom
arose in the wake of her legend. Candidates for the papacy had to seat
themselves naked on an open stool, to be viewed through a hole in the
floor by cardinals in the room below. The committee had to make its

official announcement: Testiculos habet et bene pendentes, "he has

19
testicles, and they hang all right." It seemed important that "Holy

Mother Church" must never be governed by a Holy Mother.

[Link], B.P., 25. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 172-73. 3. Durrell, 11.
4. Chamberlin, B.P., 25. 5. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 173.
6. Encyc. Brit, "Papacy." 7. Durrell, 8-9. 8. Morris, 19, 58-59.
9. Morris,45, 12. 10. Moakley, 72-73. 1 1 Chamberlin, B.P., 97.
.

12. Chamberlin, B.P., 26. 13. Chamberlin, B.P., 27-35.

14. Chamberlin, B.P., 44, 201, 127. 15. Moakley, 72. 16. Gettings, pi. 56.

[Link],33. 18. Cavendish, T., 15,71-73. 19. Simons, 116.

var. Iocaste Jocasta

"Shining Moon," the mother-wife of Oedipus; another mythic
combination of the Moon-goddess and her sacred king.

Jonah
Biblical version of the Babylonian god Oannes, shown as a man

reborn from the mouth of a great Fish, or whale, symbol of the Goddess

478
 Derceto (Whale of Der). A 1 Oth-century Bible apparently preserved
'

Josaphat, Saint
the ancient meaning of Jonah's story, stating that he lived three days in Joseph
the womb of the whale. Later translations substituted "belly" for
^^^^^^^^^^^
"womb." 2 See Derceto; Fish.
I. Reinach, 209. 2. Potter & Sargent, 180.

Josaphat, Saint
Christian corruption of the title Bodhisat; an inadvertent canonization
of Siddhartha Buddha. Medieval saintmakers adapted the story of
Buddha's early life to their own fictions, calling the father of St. Josa-
phat "an Indian king" who kept the young saint confined to prevent
him from becoming a Christian. 1
He was converted anyway, and
produced the usual assortment of miracles, some of them copied
from incidents in the life story of Buddha. St. Josaphat enjoyed great

popularity in the Middle Ages, an ironical development in a Europe

that abhorred Buddhism as a work of the devil.
[Link], 58.

;eph
ieGospel of Mark, oldest of the synoptic Gospels, never men-
>ned Joseph. Jesus is "the son of Mary" (Mark 6:3), and of Mary only.
The Gospel of Matthew gives a long genealogy of paternal
icestors to prove Jesus a descendant of David through his father

|
[Link], the verses immediately following make nonsense of the
whole genealogy by declaring that Jesus was not Joseph's son at all.
An early translation of the New Testament however, the Codex
'
Sinaiticus, stated: "Joseph begat Jesus."
The Gospel of Luke calls Joseph a son of Heli, i.e., of Helios, the
sun (Luke 3:23). Jesus called Eli, or Elias, his "father" who forsook
him when he was crucified (Matthew 27:46; Mark 1 5:34). Jesus was
later identified with the same "father." A sect of Gaulish Christians
2
worshipped Christ as Helios, calling themselves Heliognosti. The solar
eclipse at Jesus's death, his titles of Light of the World and Sun of

Righteousness, were taken from cults of the solar hero, as were his
and his mortal pseudo-father who didn't lie with his wife
virgin birth
until she brought forth her Divine Child, son of the sun. ?
The Christian legend of Joseph's rod said he was chosen to be
Mary's husband, out of a group of suitors, by a symbolic test of

fertility. All candidates laid their (phallic) rods on the (female-symbolic)

altar. Joseph's rod alone burst into bloom, a proof of magical potency.
The sacred dove of Aphrodite came down from heaven and perched on
4
Joseph's rod, signifying that the Goddess accepted him. The same
dove appeared later over the head of Jesus at his baptism, with the same
I
implication of acceptance.

479
Joseph The story of the flowering rod (virility) was common in Middle-
Eastern mythologies; rods were also interchangeable with serpents,
because of the phallic significance of both (Exodus 7:12). The flowering
rod was also a magic talisman for Tannhauser, who proved the

validity of his pagan faith against

the pope with a rod that burst into

bloom. This rod came from the mountain sanctuary of the Goddess
Venus and represented Tannhauser as her lover. 5
The Goddess was incarnate in a queen in Tannhauser's case,
"Queen Sybil"; in the parallel case of Thomas Rhymer, the Fairy
Queen; in the case of the biblical Joseph, Mariamne, Queen of
Jerusalem, embodiment of the Goddess Mari. There was a Joseph
who espoused temple maidens at Herod's court, but was slain after he

lay with the queen, Mariamne, or Miriam,

or Mary. 6
The priestly name of Joseph may have been bestowed on Jewish
7
counterparts of the priests known in Egypt as "fathers of the god."
The function of such holy men was to beget, on the temple maidens,
children who would be sacer: firstborn "sons of God" dedicated to
Protoevangelium, the service of the [Link] Protoevangelium says the virgin Mary was
also known as the such a temple maiden; she also bore the name of the Queen and the
Revelation of James:
Goddess, as well as the holy harlot who was high priestess of the sacred
a Gospel written in the
drama. 8 The mythic proliferation of Marys and Josephs indicates that
second century A.D.,
these were not personal names but characters in the drama: the chosen
valued by early church
fathers as authentic husband who was yet not a husband; the father-of-God who was yet
but eventually not a father; the virgin-mother-Goddess-priestess-queen who was also a
eliminated from the kadesha or "Bride of God." 9
Itcan be shown that Joseph was indeed a divine name in Israel.
The Egyptian form was Djoser or Tcheser, a deified pharaoh long
associated in both Egyptian and Hebrew tradition with the seven-year

famine along the Nile. 10 Palestine had a town dedicated to Joseph-El,

or "Joseph the God," same Egyptian god-king. 11 Certainly
possibly the
the Old Testament Joseph was "chosen" by the Goddess who

inspired divinatory interpretation of dreams, called Nanshe by the

Babylonians.
12
Dream interpretation was the specialty of the Old
Testament Joseph of Egyptian wizard-priest associated, like
in his role

Djoser, with the seven-year famine. A multicolored vestment was the

mark of oneiromantic wizard-priests in Babylon, which probably ex-
plains Joseph's celebrated coat of many colors (Genesis 37:23).
Joseph's sojourn in the Pit would naturally have taken place
before, not after, he was awarded the coat. His "brothers" (fellow
priests?) lowered him into the abaton for a death-and-rebirth ritual, such
as Assyrian and Babylonian priests underwent before they emerged
from the reborn into a holy life. 13 After such an initiation, Joseph
Pit

was inspired not only to interpret dreams; he also practiced divination |

with the aid of a silver cup (Genesis 44:5), the vessel of the Goddess,
made of moon-metal. (See Abaddon.)
Another biblical Joseph associated with the Christian sacred drama,
and a divine cup, was Joseph of Arimathea, literally "a Joseph

480
belonging to the Goddess-mother Ari," or Mari, she who made men Jove
14
(arya) out of clay. This Joseph was a "counselor" of Jerusalem, that Judas
he supervised
is, a priest; Jesus's burial. Later
myths said the same ^ ^^^^_.^__
Joseph carried toEngland the divine sexual symbols of a (male)
flowering rod and a (female) cup or Grail of sacred blood. Several
women named Mary accompanied him. The holy articles were
enshrined at Glastonbury, formerly named Caer Wydyr, an omphalic
seatof the union between pagan God and Goddess. 15 Rod and cup
were reinterpreted in a Christian context by the legends of the Holy
Grail at Glastonbury. However, mystical systems such as the Tarot
suits of rods and cups suggest that these were none other than male-
female elemental symbols given a Christian gloss (see Grail, Holy).
1. H. Smith, 182. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 333. 3. H. Smith, 183.
4. Guerber, L.R., 340; Graves, W.G., 123. 5. Goodrich, 174. 6. Enslin, C.B., 48-49.
7. Budge, D.N., 169. 8. Ashe, 201. 9. Briffault 3, 169-70.

10. Budge, G.E. 2, 53; de Camp, A.E., 294. 11. Reinach, 201. 12. Lamusse, 63.
13. Lethaby, 172. 14. Potter & Sargent, 33. 1 5. Graves, W.G., 105.

Jove
"The Youth," a title of the god Jupiter as a replacement for Juventas,
"The Maiden," in the originally all-female Capitoline Triad, a Virgin-

Mother-Crone personification of the Etruscan Goddess. Juno the

Mother and Minerva the wise Crone remained; but Juventas the Virgin
gave way to a young god, just as Hebe the virgin form of the Greek
Triple Goddess gave way to the youth Ganymede. See Trinity.

Judas
As the Christian figure of the Betrayer, Judas was poorly understood.
Formerly, Judas was an ancestral god, father of the nation of Judah and
of Jews (Judaei). As Jude, or Jeud, he was the "only-begotten son" of
the Divine Father Isra-El. 1 Judas was a dynastic name for priest-kings of

Judea for a hundred years after Judas Maccabeus restored ancient

2
sacrificial customs to the temple of Jerusalem in 165 B.C. Thus the

kingly name of Judas was commonly given victims sacrificed as

surrogates for a reigning monarch.

Judas's legend parallels those of many Other sacred kings. He was
born of a holy woman named Cyboread, a prophetess or priestess. He
was sent out to sea in a chest (cista), which washed up on the isle of
Scariot hence his name, Judas Iscariot. The queen of the island
raised him, as the princess of Egypt raised Moses. When he came of
age, Judas returned home to take service at Pilate's court. Like

Oedipus, he killed his father and married his mother. Early Christians
said Judas joined the disciples of Jesus in order to be cleansed of this
3
sin.

The Syrian Acts of Thomas declares however that Judas was

481
Judas Jesus's twin brother, whose full name was Judas Thomas, i.e., "Judas

the Tammuz." Passages of the Koran insist that Judas had the same face
4
m^mt^^^^mi^mm as J esus an<^ v/as crucified in his stead. Judas's qualifications as a
sacrificial Savior hint that he might have combined with Jesus at some
an alternate seasonal god, like Horus and
point in early Christianity as
Set in Egypt.
The Gospels are vague and contradictory about Judas's death.
Matthew he hanged himself (27:5). Acts 1:18 says he died of a
says

fall, which made him "burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels

gushed out." Hanging and disemboweling were both common forms

of ritual killing; but the nature of Judas's death is most strongly
ritualistic

suggested by its location: Aceldama, the Field of Blood, dedicated to

"the Potter in the House of the Lord," who received Judas's blood-

money.
The Gospel writer naively admitted that the detail about the

money that bought Jesus was inserted only to fulfill a "prophecy" in

Zechariah 11: "So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And
the Lord said unto me, Cast it unto the potter And I took the
thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the
Lord." The Potter in the temple was an image of the Great Goddess
Arum, "The of Ishtar or Astarte or Ninhursag who made
Potter," a title

mankind of clay moistened with blood. The Potter's Field was clay,
periodically soaked with blood to restore to the Goddess some of the
5
life-essence she bestowed.

Gospel stories contradict each other concerning this field. One

writer said Judas purchased the field with his thirty pieces of silver

(Acts 1:18). Another said he "repented" and took the money back to
the temple, where he flung it down, and the priests used it to buy

"the potter's field, to bury strangers in" (Matthew 27:7).

The story of Judas's "betrayal" of Jesus is particularly confusing;

why would anyone need to point Jesus out, when he had already
entered the city as the central figure in a triumphal procession, playing
the part of the Bridegroom of Zion, calling himself the son of God,

publicly conversing with angels, and publicly promising all men a share

imminent resurrection (John 12: 15, 29, 32)? In fact the

in his

monetary payment and the "betrayal" seem to have been necessary

parts of the traditional drama, devices to absolve the executioners of
guilt.
It might be supposed that when Jesus received Judas's kiss, he
became a sacred king of the Judaei. He was "betrayed" by the spirit
of the eleventh hour, who in the solar cults announced the coming
death of the Light of the World in the twelfth hour which is why
the eleventh hour still presages something dire. Because of the kiss, it

was sometimes assumed that Judas was "the disciple whom Jesus
loved" though Gospels later removed from the canon said Jesus loved
6
Mary Magdalene more than any of his male followers. The much-
discussed passage in John 2 1 was a remnant of sun worship, with which
the Gospel of John was generally permeated:

482
 Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; Juggernaut
which also leaned on and said, Lord, which is he
his breast at supper,

that betrayeth thee? Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall
^^^^^^^^^^^^
this man do? Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he
tarry till I come, what
is that to thee?

Twelve disciples signified the twelve hours of the day: "Are

there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he
stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of the world" (John 1 1:9).
The disciple of the last hour, who leaned on the breast of the sun at his
was the evening star, often called Shalem or Shalom,
setting,

"peace," because he betrayed the solar deity into his nightly death and
spoke the Word of Farewell to him: salaam, Peace. The Jews' solar
king died at Jerusalem, "the House of Peace."
The ancients knew the evening star and morning star were one
and the same, the planet Venus. So the same "disciple" who
betrayed the sun god into the land of death was also the one who tarried
until he rose again in the morning, the last star whose light still shone
as the sun was ascending to heaven. Thus the betrayer was the spirit
closest to the deity; the hour that "loved" him. Hellenization of Israel

converted the dual morning-star and evening-star god into the Dioscuri
or heavenly twins. Mithraic icons showed them turning the torch of
life downward on one side of the sun, upward on the other. 7
There was another interpretation of the mysterious passage em-
bedded in the famous legend of the Wandering Jew. Ignoring the

two accounts of Judas's death, medieval interpreters said Jesus meant

that Judas, for his crime, was condemned never to die until Jesus
"came again" at the end of the world. So Judas wandered through time,

weary but deathless, living many lifetimes in bitterness and regret.

Perhaps this tale of Wandering Jew was intended to mock the pagans'
idea of many reincarnations on earth.
Yet another Christianization of Judas transformed him into St.

Jude, adopted into the Christian canon because the ancient cult of
Judas continued in Judea and couldn't be eradicated. The fictitious St.

Jude became very popular in the Middle Ages. True to his Judaic
character, the saint was called "a powerful intercessor for those in
8
desperate straits."

1. Frazer, G.B., 340. 2. Pfeifer, 39. 3. Rank, 21-22. 4. Augstein, 151, 183.
5. Neumann, CM., 152. 6. Pagels, 64-65. 7. Cumont, M.M., 128.
8. Attwater, 206.

Juggernaut
Corrupt form of Vishnu's epithet Jagganath, "Lord of the World,"
when he was enthroned in a temple constructed to resemble a gigantic

chariot, wheels and all.

1
The temple was planned to represent the
moving world, carrying all its freight of gods, heroes, nymphs, creatures,
human beings, and
plants, all the rest of creation.
Each year at the Puri festival, the god rode with his sister and

483
Julian, Saint brother on a heavy wagon drawn by hundreds of pilgrims, some of
Juno whom were said to court martyrdom and a blessed eternity in heaven by

^^^^^^^^^^ throwing themselves under the wheels of the god's chariort as it

progressed.
2
Thus a "juggernaut" came to mean anything heavy and
unstoppable.
1. Elisofon & Watts, 79. 2. Encyc. Brit., "Juggernaut."

Julian, Saint
Christianized version of the god of travelers and those who served
travelers: innkeepers, ferrymen, strolling entertainers. He was called
1

Julian the Hospitaller.

Julian's Christian legend was hardly very saintly. Returning home
from a he found two people in his bed and killed them
late journey,

both, assuming he had caught his wife with her lover. Instead, the
murdered pair proved to be Julian's own father and mother. 2 As
penance for his error, Julian took his wife and went to live by a ford,
where they gave shelter and assistance to travelers. The legend seems
to have been concocted from nothing more substantial than a votive

figure of the emperor Julian at a roadside shrine, where travelers left

offerings so as to have good fortune on the road. Many of the gods thus
honored by pagan pilgrims were arbitrarily declared saints in order to
provide a Christian motive for the worship given them.
[Link],206. 2. Hazlitt, 351.

S^
^^X
Juno
Roman Great Mother, derived from Sabine-Etruscan Uni, the
Three-in-One deity cognate with "yoni" and "Uni-verse." Juno had
dozens of attributes or emanations which are sometimes erroneously
viewed as separate Goddesses. Juno Fortuna was the Goddess of Fate.
Sign of Juno Juno Sospita was the Preserver. Juno Regina was Queen of Heaven.
Juno Lucina was Goddess of Celestial Light. Juno Moneta was the
Advisor and Admonisher. Juno Martialis was the virgin mother of
Mars. Juno Caprotina, or Februa, was the Goddess of erotic love. Juno
Populonia was Mother of the People. And so on, through many
other Junos. 1

Every Roman woman embodied a bit of Goddess's spirit, her own

soul a juno, corresponding to the genius of a man. 2 Later patriarchal
vocabularies dropped the word juno but retained genius, thus depriving
women which may be why church councils of the
of their souls

early Middle Ages sometimes maintained that women are soulless.

Juno's sacred month of June honored her as patroness of marriages
and the family, which is
why June is still the traditional time for

weddings.

484
 Juno had her formidable aspects too. As a battle-goddess she Jupiter

represented the fighting spirit of a mother defending her offspring, Justice

the epitome of bravery by Roman definition. Therefore Juno Seispitei
^^^^^^^^^^^
Matri Reginae (Juno the Preserver, Queen of the Mothers) was

regarded as the spirit of war. 3 Her title was the same as that of the Hindu
war-goddess Durga the Preserver, Leader of the Mothers. 4 Like all

Indo-European forms of the Goddess, Juno was only another local

manifestation of the same all-encompassing deity.

Among Juno's sacred symbols were the peacock, the cowrie shell,
and of course the lily, or lotus, universal yonic emblem. With her
sacred lily, Juno conceived the god Mars without any assistance from
her consort, Jupiter; thus she became the Blessed Virgin Juno. 5 The
three-lobed lily that used to represent her parthenogenetic power was
inherited by the virgin Mary, who still retains it.

1. Lamusse, 203-4; Rose, 217. 2. Reinach, 102; Rose, 193. 3. Dumezil, 297.
4. O'Flaherty, 49, 353. 5. Lamusse, 202.

Jupiter
Roman Heavenly
Heaven mated
Father, was another

worship spread
to

incarnation
westward with
Father, from Sanskrit Dyauspitar, the basic Father
Mother
Earth. Zeus Pater, the Greek Heavenly
of the same Aryan deity, whose

migrations and invasions of Indo-Euro-

\
Sign of Jupiter

pean patriarchal tribes. Like his counterparts in other nations, Jupiter

was primarily a rain god: hisjnn ctinn was to fertilize the soil wi th
seminal moisture. Thus he was connected also with thunder and

lightning his voice and his weapon. He was commonly known as

Jupiter Pluvius, "the Heavenly- Father- Who- Rains."
Jupiter was added to the originally female Capitoline Triad by
ousting the Virgin form of the Goddess, Juventas, leaving Juno and
Minerva as Jupiter's two female partners. Juno was said 1
to be his wife,

though like Hera she was much older than her spouse.
1. Rose, 116.

Justice
The spirit of justice was female in classic paganism. Ulpian said
justice depended on "the feminine nature principle, which has a
profounder kinship with the natura iustum (that which is
just by
nature) than does the male sex, with its greater susceptibility to the
principle of domination." Pythagoreans taught that iusticia and aequi-
tas (justice and equity) are "innate attributes of the feminine nature
'
principle."
The Roman praetor or judge "gave expression to justice as the
organ and viva vox of Bona Dea-Fauna-Fatua. Through this tie with
the material primordial mother he was enabled to observe the practical

485
Ka justice of the ius naturale, the equity of the left hand, often in

opposition to the strictly formal logic of the civil law. As 'feminine

^^a^^^m^^m^m godhead' Bona Dea became equivalent to Themis, in whose myster-

ies the worship of the feminine kteis, the sporium muliebre (womb),

plays so part. The name 'feminine godhead' takes on its

prominent a
fullmeaning only when the same physical, sensuous implication is

recognized. Thus the cult of the kteis involved not only the idea of
maternal fertility but the maternal mystery of justice." 2
1. Bachofen, 189, 186. 2. Bachofen, 193.

Ka
One of an Egyptian's seven souls, often believed to be a spirit-twin
resident in the afterbirth.
1
The Shilluks of the upper Nile, who in the
present century still worshipped the Cow-mother Hathor as bestower
of the souls, buried afterbirths of their sacred kings in the same tombs
where the kings themselves would be laid on the theory that a man
needed his ka in order to become a god after death. 2 In ancient Egypt,
prayers were addressed to the ka of Osiris and other gods. India knew
the same concept, even the same word. Brahma had a soul-twin named
Ka, which was translated "Who?"
5

The hieroglyphic sign of the ka was a pair of upraised arms with

bent elbows. 4 This arm position evidently invoked the Goddess, and
was connected with the idea of the ka as a mother-given entity, each
baby's unformed twin, made of blood. A Paleolithic painting from
5

Algeria shows a hunter stalking an ostrich while a full-hipped female

figure, larger than he, raises her arms in the position of the ka. The
female figure was either a mother or a sexual partner, as shown by a
6
serpentine connective line running from the hunter's crotch to hers.
Evidently, she made magic to help the hunter in his efforts, even
though she may have been far away.
A vase figure from Amratian times showed a similar /ra-invocation
performed by a priestess, assisted by two men who helped hold her
arms aloft when she became tired. 7 The same magical /ra-invocation was
performed by Moses at the battle between Israelites and Amalekites.
The Israelites won because Moses, with the help of Aaron and Hur,
held up his arms in the Jte-position all day until the battle ended at
sunset (Exodus 17:12).

Egyptians thought the Jta-soul was immortal and dwelt in or near j

the tomb where the body rested. The same notion was common

among Christians, who said a ghost lived in or near the grave. There is
j

in existence a letter written by an ancient Egyptian to his deceased

wife, three years after her death. He attached the letter to the portrait
8
statue in her tomb, confident that her ka would read the letter.
Among northern Aryans the idea of the ka was transposed into the
Doppelganger (double-goer), a hidden twin-soul thought to reside in

486
the placenta or umbilical cord, though sometimes could develop into a
it
Kaaba
full-grown twin. Germanic folklore has many examples of the soul Kala-Nath
preserved in a safer location than the body e.g., the giant who kept his ...

soul in an egg, and so on. German and French peasants used to treat
an umbilical cord or afterbirth with great care, to give magical assistance
to the child's future health or longevity.
Sometimes, as in Greek
myth, mothers preserved their children's umbilical cords in a secret
place, thinking no harm could come to the child as long as the cord
was intact. 9
1. H. Smith, 24. 2. Briffault 3, 192; Frazer, G.B., 310, 345.
3. O'Flaherty, 344. 4. Budge, E.L., 57. 5. Montagu, S.M.S., 271.
6. Neumann, CM., 1 14. 7. Neumann, G.M., 1 16. 8. Budge, E.M., 219.
9. Frazer, G.B., 46.

Kaaba
Shrine of the sacred stone in Mecca, formerly dedicated to the pre-
Islamic Triple Goddess Manat, Al-Lat (Allah), and Al-Uzza, the "Old
Woman" worshipped by Mohammed's tribesmen the Koreshites.
The stone was also called Kubaba, Kuba, or Kube, and has been linked
with thename of Cybele (Kybela), the Great Mother of the Gods. 1

The stone bore the emblem of the yoni, like the Black Stone wor-
shipped by votaries of Artemis. Now it is regarded as the holy center
2

of patriarchal Islam, and its feminine symbolism has been lost, though

priests of the Kaaba are still known as Sons of the Old Woman. See
Arabia; Cybele.
1. Vermaseren, 22. 2. Harding, 41.

Kadi
Babylonian Goddess of Der, a serpent with a woman's head and
Her name was the root oikadishtu, Hebrew kadesha, a temple
breasts.

harlot known Holy One, or Virgin Bride of God (see Prostitu-

as a

tion; Virgin Birth). She may have descended from the Vedic Goddess
Kadru, mother of all Nagas or sacred serpents, who attained immor-
tality through the magic blood she gave them to drink.
1

1. O'Flaherty, 222.

Kala-Nath
Title of the Goddess Kali as the Primordial Abyss or womb of creation. 1

Possible origin of the Middle-Eastern Goddess Anath, worshipped in

Libya as Neith, in Canaan as Anat, who was once the spouse of

Jehovah. See Anath.

\.BadoThodal,Ul.

487
Kalanemi Kalanemi
Kali Ma
"Rim of the Wheel of Time," a pre-Vedic spirit of the zodiac or

Milky Way, viewed as the great star-wheel at the rim of the universe,
also sometimes envisioned as the World Serpent encircling the earth

with its tail in its mouth. Men had to study Kalanemi in order to learn
kalends, the proper order of seasons, sabbaths, and festivals. Kalanemi
was probably an aspect of Kali Ma as the Crone of Time; it is interesting
that the second part of the name, nemi, meant the Moon-grove in

Greco-Roman culture, and according to ancient astrologers the zodiac

was the moon's grove through which she passed in the night (see
Grove, Sacred). Later Vedic priests diabolized Kalanemi as a "demon"
who begot Balarama and Krishna in the underworld before the
1

beginning of time.
l.O'Flaherty.207.

Kalenderees
Wandering dervishes from medieval Hindustan who taught Tantric
doctrines in Persia and Arabia. Their cult of the Goddess Kali may
1

have been the origin of the female-centered Sufi sect which revered
the same feminine Word of Creation (Om, Umm: the Matrix or

Mother-belly), and believed that religious fulfillment for men or

women could be found only in sexual love. 2 See Kali Ma.
[Link],20. 2. Shah, 29, 175.

Kali Ma
"Dark Mother," the Hindu Triple Goddess of creation, preservation,
and destruction; now most commonly known in her Destroyer aspect,
squatting over her dead consort Shiva and devouring his entrails,
while her yoni sexually devours his lingam (penis). Kali is "The hungry

earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses. . . .

It is experience of the Terrible Mother has been given

in India that the

its most grandiose form as Kali. But all this and it should not be
forgotten is an
image not only of the Feminine but particularly and
specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are

always bound up with death and

'
destruction."
Kali was the basic archetypal image of the birth-and-death Mother,
simultaneously womb and tomb, giver of life and devourer of her
children: the same image portrayed in a thousand ancient religions.
Even modern psychologists face this image with uneasy acknowledg-
ment of its power. It seems the image of the angry, punishing, castrating
Father is somehow less
threatening than that of the destructive
Mother perhaps because she symbolized the inexorable reality of
death, whereas he only postulated a problematic post-mortem
2
judgment.

488
 Tantric worshippers of Kali thought it essential to face her Curse, Kali Ma
the terror of death, as willingly as they accepted Blessings from her

beautiful, nurturing, maternal aspect. For them, wisdom meant learning

that no coin has only one side: as death can't exist without life, so also
life can't exist without death. Kali's sages communed with her in the
atmosphere of the cremation ground, to become familiar with
grisly

images of death. They said: "His Goddess, his loving Mother in time,
who gives him birth and loves him in the flesh, also destroys him in

the flesh. His image of Her is

incomplete if he does not know Her as his

tearer and devourer." 3

Few western scholars understood the profound philosophy behind
the hideous images of Kali the Destroyer. The London Museum
displayed such an image with a label saying only, "Kali Destroying
Demon." 4 The Encyclopaedia Britannica devoted five columns to
Christian interpretations of the Logos without ever mentioning its

origin in Kali's Om
or Creative Word; Kali herself was dismissed in a
brief paragraph as the wife of Shiva and "a goddess of disease." 5
Certainly, as the Kalika or Crone she governed every form of death

including disease; but she also ruled every form of life.

Kali stood for Existence, which meant Becoming because all her
world was an eternal living flux from which all things rose and

disappeared again, in endless cycles. The gods, whom she bore and
devoured, addressed her thus:

Thou art the Original ofall the manifestations; Thou art the birthplace of
even Us;Thou knowest the whole world, yet none know Thee. . . .

Thou art both Subtle and Gross, Manifested and Veiled, Formless, yet
with form. Who can understand Thee?. It is Thou who art the
. . .

Supreme Primordial Kalika. Resuming after dissolution Thine own

. . .

form, dark and formless, Thou alone remainest as One ineffable and
inconceivable . . .
though Thy self without beginning, multiform by the
power of Maya, Thou art the Beginning ofall, Creatrix, Protectress,
and Destructress. 6

Brahmans assigned Kali's three functions to three male gods, Tantrasara, Nirvana
Tantra, etc.. Tantras are
lling them Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and
Kali's
basic scriptures of
archaic consort Shiva the destroyer; but many scriptures opposed this Tantrism, many of
male trinity as offensively artificial. A prayer in the Tantrasara said: "O which have yet to be
vlother! Cause and Mother of the World! Thou art the One translated from Sanskrit
'rimordial Being, Mother of innumerable creatures, Creatrix of the or other original

even of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and languages into English.
ry gods;
Extant texts date
Shiva the Destroyer! O Mother, in hymning Thy praise I
purify my back to ca. 600 a.d.,
h!" 7 The Nirvana Tantra treated the claims of male gods with
though the material
contempt: was much older.
Among the most
Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesvara [Shiva], and other gods are born of the body
popular Hindu Tantras
of that beginningless and eternal Kalika, and at the time of dissolution are the
they again disappear in Her. O Devi, for this reason, so long as the living Shaktisamgama,
man does not know the supreme truth in regard to Her . . . his desire
Kularnava,
for liberation can only give rise to ridicule. From a part only of Kalika, the Mahanirvanatantra, and
primordial Shakti, arises Brahma, from a part only arises Vishnu, and Tantraraja.

489
Kali Ma from a part only arises Shiva. O
fair-eyed Devi, just as rivers and lakes are
unable to traverse a vast sea, so Brahma and other gods lose their
separate existence on entering the
uncrossable and infinite being of Great
^^^"^^^^^ Compared with the vast sea of the being of Kali, the existence of
Kali.

Brahma and the other gods is nothing but such a little water as is
contained in the hollow made by a cow's hoof. Just as it is impossible
for a hollowmade by a cow's hoof to form a notion of the unfathomable
depths ofa sea, so it is impossible for Brahma and other gods to have a
8
knowledge of the nature of Kali.

Even the arrogant Vishnu, who claimed to have brought the

whole earth out of the primal abyss, received the grace of enlightenment
concerning Kali and wrote a poem about her: "Material cause of all
change, manifestation and destruction ... the whole Universe
rests upon Her, rises out of Her and melts away into Her. From Her are

elements and qualities which construct

crystallized the original
the apparent worlds. is both mother and grave
She The gods
themselves are merely constructs out of Her maternal substance,
9
which is both consciousness and potential joy."
The Yogini Tantra said of Kali, "Whatever power anything
10
possesses, that is the Goddess." Shakti, "Power," was one of her

important names. Without her, neither man nor god could act at all:

It is She as Power (Shakti) who

and changeful part in
takes the active

generation, as also in conceiving, bearing, and giving birth to the

World-Child. All this is the function of the divine, as it is of the human,
mother. It is thus to the Mother that man owes the World of Forms
. . .

or Universe. Without Her as material cause, Being cannot display itself. It

isbut a corpse primacy is given to the Mother, and it is said,

. . . "What
care I for the Father if I but be on the lap of the Mother?"
''

A Tantric scholar points out that "the poets have found much
more when they spoke of the Deity as their
intimate cries of the heart
'Mother' than they when
addressed themselves to God as Father."
Kali's poets approached her through love: "By feeling is She known.

How then can lack of feeling find Her?" In their view, "All is the
Mother and She is reality herself. 'Sa'ham' (She I Am) the Sakta says,
and all that She in the form in which he perceives her. It
he senses is

is She who in, and as, him drinks the consecrated wine, and She is the

wine." She feeds him as a mother feeds her child, and he becomes
immortal: "Deathless are those who have fed at the breast of the
Mother of the Universe." The Yoginihrdaya Tantra says, "Obei-
sance to Her who is pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss, as Power, who
exists in the form of Time and Space and all that is therein, and who

is the radiant Illuminatrix in all

n
beings."
As a Mother, Kali was called Treasure-House of Compassion
(karuna), Giver of Life to the world, the Life of all lives. Contrary to
the west's idea of her as a purely destructive Goddess, she was the fount
of every kind of love, which flowed into the world only through her
agents on earth, women. Thus it was said a male worshipper of Kali

490
"bows down at the feet of women," regarding them as his rightful Kali Ma
13
teachers.
The name of Eve may have originated with Kali's leva or Jiva, the
primordial female principle of manifestation; she gave birth to her
"first manifested form" and called him Idam (Adam). She also bore the

same title given to Eve in the Old Testament: Mother of All Living
17
(Jaganmata). Western scholars
As the primal Deep, or menstrual Ocean of Blood at creation, Kali
erroneously viewed the
was certainly the same as the biblical tehom, Tiamat, or tohu bohu, various

the "flux" representing her state of formlessness between manifested manifestations and
incarnations of Kali
universes. As Mahanila-Sarasvati the great blue River-Goddess, she
as many different
was probably the original namesake of the River Nile. As Kundalini the
Goddesses,
Female Serpent, she resembled the archaic Egyptian serpent-mother particularly isolating
have created the world. It was said of Kundalini that at the
said to those primitive
matrikadevis (mother-
beginning of the universe, she starts to uncoil in "a spiral line
movement 18 goddesses) grouped
movement which is the of creation." This spiral line was
together as "Dravidian
important in late Paleolithic and Neolithic religious symbolism,
vitally
she-ogres."
H Yet
representing death and rebirth as movement into the disappearing-point Kali's worshippers
of formlessness, and out of it again, to a new world of form. Spirals plainly

therefore appeared on tombs, as one of the world's first

stated that she had
mystical
hundreds of different
symbols.
names, but they were all
Lunar of Sinai, formerly priestesses of the Moon-goddess,
priests the same Goddess:
22
called themselves kafa. Similar priestesses of prehistoric Ireland Sarasvati, Lakshmi,
were kelles, origin of the name Kelly, which meant a hierophantic clan Durga,
Gayatri,

devoted to "the Goddess Kele" (see 23

Kelle). This was cognate with Annapurna, Sati, Uma,
Parvati, Gauri,
the Saxon Kale, or Cale,whose lunar calendar or kalends included the
Bagala, Matangini,
spring month of Sproutkale, when Mother Earth (Kale) put forth Dhumavati, Tara,
new shoots. 24 In antiquity the Phoenicians referred to the strait of Bhairavi, Kundalini,
Gibraltar as Calpe, because was considered the passage to the
it Bharga, Devata, etc.

All were Kali Mahadevi,

western paradise of the Mother. 25
the "Great
Indo-European languages branched from the root of Sanskrit, said
Goddess" the same
to be She created the magic letters of the Sanskrit
Kali's invention. she bore
title among
alphabet and inscribed them on the rosary of skulls around her neck. 27 western pagans. 5 '

The letters were magic because they stood for primordial creative
Some of Kali's
older names found
energy expressed in sound Kali's mantras brought into being the very
their way into the Bible.
things whose names she spoke for the first time, in her holy language. As Tara, the earth,
In short, Kali's worshippers originated the doctrine of the Logos or she became Terah,
creative Word, which Christians later adopted and pretended it was mother of the
their own idea. Kali's letters magically combined the elements, which Hebrew ancestral spirits
called teraphim.
were previously separate as fiery-airy (male) or watery-earthy (fe-
28
The same Kali-Tara
male) forces. The former were "cruel"; the latter "benevolent." This
became the Celts'
distinction seemed to reflect the Tantric view of Kali as Lady of Life Tara, Gauls' Taranis,
and her spouse as Lord of Death. Etruscans' Turan,

called "the Kali was always a trinity: the same and the Latin Terra,
Though One,"
"Mother Earth,"
Virgin-Mother-Crone triad established perhaps nine or ten millenia
said to be
ago, giving the Celts their triple Morrigan; the Greeks their triple interchangeable with
Moerae and all other manifestations of the Threefold Goddess; the Venus. 16

491
Kali Ma Norsemen their triple Norns; the Romans their triple Fates and triadic
Uni Quno); the Egyptians their triple Mut; the Arabs their triple
Moon-goddess she was the same everywhere. Even Christians
mod-
29
eled their threefold God on her archetypal trinity.
Her three forms were manifested in many ways: in the three

divisions of the year, the three phases of the moon, the three sections
Variations of Kali's
basic name occurred of the cosmos (heaven, earth, and the underworld), the three stages of
throughout the life, the three trimesters
of pregnancy, and so on. Women repre-
ancient world. The sented her mortal flesh. "The Divine Mother
first appears in
spirit in
Greeks had a word
and as Her worshipper's
earthly mother, then as his wife; thirdly as
Kalli, meaning 50
Kalika, She reveals Herself in old age, disease and death."
"beautiful," but
applied to things that
Three kinds of priestesses tended her shrines: Yoginis or Shaktis,
were not particularly the "Maidens"; Matri, the "Mothers"; and Dakinis, the
beautiful such as the
"Skywalkers" who attended the dying, governed funerary rites and
demonic centaurs
acted as angels of death. All had their counterparts in the spirit world.
called kallikantzari,
relatives of Kali's To this day, Tantric Buddhism relates the three mortal forms of woman
Asvins. Their city of to the divine female trinity called Three Most Precious Ones. 31
Kallipolis, the Kali's three forms appeared known as Gunas:
in the sacred colors
modern Gallipoli, was white for the Virgin, red for the Mother, black for the Crone,
centered in Amazon 52
symbolizing birth, life, death. Black was Kali's fundamental color as
country formerly ruled
19 the Destroyer, for it meant the formless condition she assumed
by Artemis Kalliste.
The annual birth between creations, when all the elements were dissolved in her primor-

festival at Eleusis was dial substance. "As white, yellow, and other colors all disappear in
Kalligeneia, translatable black, in the same way ... all beings enter Kali." 53
as "coming forth
The Black Goddess was known in Finland as Kalma (Kali Ma), a
from the Beautiful
54
or haunter of tombs and an eater of the dead. European "witches"
One," "coming
forth from Kali." 20 The worshipped her in the same funereal places, for the same reasons, that
temple of the Great Tantric yogis and dakinis worshipped her in cremation grounds, as
Mother of the Gods at 55
Smashana-Kali, Lady of the Dead. Their ceremonies were held in the
Pergamum stood on where ordinary folk feared to go.
56
So were the
Mount Mamurt-Kaleh, places of ghosts

easily transposed into

ceremonies of western "witches" that is, pagans. They adored the

Mount Mother- Kali. 21 Black Mother Earth in cemeteries, where Roman tombstones in-

voked her with the phrase Mater genuit, Mater recepit the Mother
bore me, the Mother took me back. 57
Kali's title Devi Sometimes Kali the Destroyer wore red, suggesting the blood of
(Goddess) was similarly life that she gave and took back: "As She devours all existence, as She
widespread in Indo- mass of blood
chews all
things existing with Her fierce teeth, therefore a
European languages.
She was the Latin is
imagined to be the apparel of the Queen of the Gods at the final
diva (Goddess) and Mi- dissolution." 58 The gypsies, who worshipped Kalika as a disease-causing
noan diwi or Diwija, Goddess they called "the Aunt," clothed her in red, the proper color
the "Goddess" associ- 59
for gypsy funerals.
ated with Zeus at
as much a part of Kali's worship as it was of the
Blood was
Knossos. 26 Dia, Dea,
and Diana were al- worship of the biblical God who said blood must be poured on his altars
ternate forms of the to bring remission of sins (Hebrews 9:22). The difference between
same title.
the western God's demand for blood and Kali's was that Jewish priests
took away the meat and ate it themselves (Numbers 18:9), whereas
devotees of Kali were permitted to eat their own offerings, as in
Calcutta:

492
 The temple serves simply as a slaughterhouse, for those performing the Kali Ma
sacrifice retain their animals, leaving only the head in the temple as a
symbolic gift, while the blood flows to the Goddess. For to the Goddess is
due the lifeblood ofall creatures since it is she who has bestowed it
and that is why the beast must be slaughtered in her temple; that is why
temple and slaughterhouse are one.
This rite is performed amid gruesome filth; in the mud compounded
of blood and earth, the heads of the animals are heaped up like trophies
before the statue of the Goddess, while those sacrificing return home for a

family banquet of the bodies of their animals. The Goddess desires only
the blood of the offerings, hence beheading is the form ofsacrifice, since
the blood drains quickly from the beheaded beasts . . .
; the head
*
signifies the whole, the total sacrifice.

Beheading or throat-cutting were common methods of sacrifi-

the western world, too. "Kosher" killing for Yahweh
cial killing in

consisted, and still consists, of draining the animal's blood, because

blood was the special food of deities. Kali demanded sacrifice of male
animals only, for they were expendable a custom harking back to
the primitive belief that males had no part in the cycles of generation.

Shiva himself, as Kali's sacrificial spouse, commanded that female

41
animals must never be slain at the altar.

Kali was the Ocean of Blood at the beginning and end of the
world, and her ultimate destruction of the universe was prefigured by
destruction of each individual, though her karmic wheel always brought
reincarnation. After death came nothing-at-all, which Tantric sages
called the third of the three states of being; to experience it was like the

experience of Dreamless Sleep. This state was also called "the

Generative Womb
of All, the Beginning and End of Beings." 42 Kali
devoured Time
itself. At the end of Time, she resumed her "dark

formlessness," which appeared in all the myths of before-creation and

after-doomsday as elemental Chaos. 43
The mystical experience of Kali was often described as a preview
of formlessness beyond the veil of death: a psychic return to the

womb, to be united with Kali's oceanic being. Thus Ramakrishna

described it:

/ was suffering from excruciating pain because I had not been blessed with
a vision of the Mother. . . . I feared that it might not be my lot to realize
her in I could not bear the separation any longer; life did not seem
this life.

to be worth living. Then my eyes fell on the sword that was kept in the

Mother's temple. Determined to put an end to my life, I jumped up and

seized it, when suddenly the blessed Mother revealed herself to me.
. .the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a
.

limitless, infinite, shining ocean of consciousness or spirit.

As far as the Ramakrishna (1836
eye could see, its billows were rushing towards me from all sides to . . .
1886) Leading Hindu
swallow me up. I was panting for breath. I was caught in the billows saint of the 19th

and fell down senseless. H century, familiar in the

western world
Ramakrishna revitalized the worship of theMother, as his pupil
through the teachings of
/ivekananda said; "It was no new truths that Ramakrishna came to his famous disciple
45
>reach, though his advent brought old truths to light." Vivekananda Vivekananda.

493
Kama-Mara predicted the resurgence of the Mother into the consciousness of the
Kamsa world's population, after patriarchal religions had forced her into

^^mmt^mim^^^^ concealment in the unconscious: "One vision I see clear as life before

me, that the ancient mother has awakened once more, sitting on her
throne rejuvenated, more glorious than ever. Proclaim her to all the
world with the voice of peace and benediction." 46 Clearly, this
Goddess was much more than the London Museum's "Destroying
Demon."
1. Neumann, G.M., 149-53. 2. Fromm, 363-64. 3. Rawson, AT., 1 12.
4. Wilson, 257. 5. Encyc. Brit., "Kali." 6. Mahanirvanatantra, 47-50.
7. de Riencourt, 167. 8. Rawson, AT., 184. 9. Rawson, E.A., 159.
10. Rawson, AT, 183. 11. Avalon, 419-20.
12. Avalon, 130-31,466,27-31.
13. Avalon, 410, 533. 14. Larousse, 359.
15 Mahanirvanatantra, xxxi.
.

16. Dumezil, 676. 17. Avalon, 120, 277. 18. Avalon, 193, 229, 233.
19. Graves, W.G., 185. 20. Encyc. Brit., "Thesmophoria." 21. Vermaseren, 26.
22. Lindsay, O.A., 40. 23. Joyce, 352. 24. Brewster, 88. [Link],43.
26. Hays, 104. 27. Graves, W.G, 250. 28. Rawson, AT., 70. 29. Stone, 17.
30. Avalon, 171. 31. Waddell, 129, 169. 32. Avalon, 328.
33. Mahanirvanatantra, 295. 34. Larousse, 306. 35. Mahanirvanatantra, 360.
36. Rawson, E.A., 152. 37. Lederer, 22. 38. Mahanirvanatantra, 295-96.
39. Trigg, 1 19, 186. 40. Neumann, G.M., 152. 41 Mahanirvanatantra, 103.
.

42. Campbell, CM., 347. 43. Avalon, 517. 44. Wilson, 254.
45. Encyc. Brit., "Ramakrishna." 46. Menen, 149.

Kama-Mara
"Erotic-desire" plus "Fear-of-death," a dual spirit who tempted
Buddha during his solitary meditation. The Upanishads said Kama-
Mara was the Self, source of both desire and fear. But Mara was 1

once the mother of the Maruts or nature-spirits; Kama was the Vedic
equivalent of Eros; it seems likely that they were combined in an
archaic period as a sexual androgyne. The "demonic" combination
expressed the ascetics' belief that eroticism drew the flesh of men
toward destruction.
A Buddhist legend said the Blessed One met the challenge of
Kama-Mara by touching the earth with his fingers, thus invoking the
2
irresistible power of the universal Mother, who protected him.
1. Campbell, Oc.M., 371. 2. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 131.

Kamsa
Vedic prototype of King Herod. Kamsa, King of the Bhojas, initiated

a Slaughter of Innocents when trying to kill the infant Krishna, his

future conqueror. Kamsa killed only boy babies until Devaki brought
forth a girl. The girl was killed too, and rose to heaven to become a
Goddess. She visited Kamsa and told him, "Kamsa, Kamsa, since you
attackedme to destroy me ... I will smash your body with my own
hands and drink your warm blood." Kamsa realized that she had
become his Death. The myth was intended to support the taboo
1

against killing females.

1.0'Flaherty,213.

494
 Kara Kara

Valkyrie swan-queen who defeated her enemies with magic

songs,
Karuna

flying above them in her dress of swan feathers. Another name for the

Aryan Great Goddess, also rendered Kauri, Cara, Kari, etc., as

mother of the heavenly swan-nymphs or Apsaras. See Swan.

Karezza
Coitus reservatus; Tantric maithuna; probably the same as drudaria in
medieval poems of courtly love: sexual intercourse without male or-
gasm. The object was to increase a man's spiritual powers by keeping
seminal secretions in his body and also absorb the power
engendered by
his partner's multiple orgasms. See Tantrism.

Kari

Malay variation of the Triple Goddess Kali, sometimes identified

with "three grandmothers under the earth" who cause floods that is,

bring about the doomsday-by-water and subsequent re-creation. Kari

was also a primordial creatress, perhaps androgynous, who conceived
the first human beings by means of magic flowers (the yonic lotus)
and gave birth to the human race.
1
Kari's voice spoke in the thunder.
1. Hays, 352.

Karma
Hindu concept of Fate, perhaps derived from Kauri-Ma, i.e., Kali
Ma. The usual symbol was a wheel, representing endless cycles of

becoming, every force or entity in the universe begetting equal and

opposite reactions to its own action, all forces maintaining balance. The
Goddess's law was that any individual evolution must be worked out
by a series of reincarnations through the turnings of the great wheel of
time. Evil actions resulted in rebirth to a more evil life; good actions
brought of increasing virtue and happiness. Ascetic yogis of early
lives

Buddhism instituted the idea that one could take short cuts through
the cycles of time and escape altogether from the inexorable karmic
wheel into a state of Nirvana or cosmic not-being, the individual
dissolved in the infinite.

iruna
rantric term for the basic quality of mother-love, directly experi-

lced in infancy and ramified in adulthood to embrace all forms of love:

aching, tenderness, compassion, sensual enjoyment, and eroticism.

495
Kanjna Many centuries before Freudian psychology recognized "infantile sexu-
ality," Tantric sages called karuna the essence of religion: a gut
___________ feeling of loving-kindness, as opposed to the often cruel or useless
verbalizing of theological principles.
1
It was understood that karuna
must be learned through physical and sexual contact comfort, by adults
and children alike. Thus the identity of infantile, sexual, warmly
loving, and religious behavior patterns was perceived long ago and is just
now being rediscovered by western civilization.
The ancients well knew the experience of being in love recapitu-

lates the mother-child relationship in its intimate physical attachment,

trust, and dependence. Recognition of one particular other as a love

object surely evolved from the instinctive mechanism that binds
together individual mothers and offspring. It has been shown even in

the animal realm that adequate sexual functioning in adulthood

depends on satisfactory relations with the mother in infancy. 2

In ancient times the Goddess's sacred whores were special teachers

of karuna, which may have been the root of modern Italian carogna,
"whore." Pagan Rome gave the Great Goddess the title of Mater Cara,
"Mother Beloved." 3 She combined all the qualities of sexuality,

motherhood, marital bliss, friendship, generosity and mercy, or caritas,

which the Christian church later purged of its sensual implications
and transformed into "charity," the giving of money to earn points in

the after-life. The Greek version of karuna was embodied in the

Charites or Graces, the naked Triple Goddess, whose quality of "grace"

was also altered in the Christian context. In Babylon, the Great
Mother under the name of Ishtar was also the Great Whore and the
lover of all in her self-description, "A
men, expressing karuna
4
prostitute compassionate am I."

The Christian derivative of Mari-Ishtar was Mary Magdalene,

the sacred harlot who said harlots are "compassionate of all the
race of mankind." 5 Gnostic Gospels mentioned Mary Magdalene as the

original female pope, embodying the true Christian spirit kept secret
from male apostles, while it
passed directly from Jesus through
his surpassing love for 6
Mary. Significantly, Christian iconographers
often confused Mary the harlot and Mary the mother. See
Prostitution.

Motherhood, sensual satisfactions, and kindly feelings were associ-

ated with the spirit of the Goddess under all her names, and especially
with women as her earthly representatives. The integrated idea of
karuna with all its ramifications has virtually disappeared from mod-
ern western society, where it is even difficult to explain its older

meanings. Yet "those modes of perceiving the world and organizing

behavior which are more distinctly 'female' can't be thought of as

having sprung into being in the context of the world we now inhabit.
. . . We must think in terms of patterns of behaving that developed over
untold centuries, and which were keyed to survival of the human

group in the primitive environment. Such a way of being would have

496
been predicated upon powerful social bonds, 'bonds of love,' which Kauri
would serve to keep otherwise more vulnerable individuals in close
proximity to protectors." Every individual was to some extent in need ^^^^^^^^^^^
of protectors: "It may be that we feel loneliness to be so potentially
annihilating because, to the lone human and above all, the lone
7
human infant or child being alone was death."
Western culture began to lose sight of the close relationship
between sensuality and loving-kindness when its theology followed
St. Augustine to his conclusion that every child is born tainted with sin

because of its necessarily sexual conception. 8 Nearly all manifesta-

tions of love fell under theological suspicion because nearly all involved

the feminine principle in some way. (See Romance.) "Men's sexual

drive was unacceptable to them and so it was projected onto women. It

was women whose lust was said to be insatiable.

[V]iewing wom- . . .

an as seductress and temptress is still evident, as can be seen by the fact

that prostitutes, but seldom their customers, are arraigned, and the
fact that the rape victim is often seen as having 'asked for' her attack by
9
dressing or behaving seductively."
In a society that lacks any coherent articulation of the concept of
karuna, women mothers, lovers, and caretakers "learn early that
as

they should be ashamed of the very set of qualities which are particularly
theirs. Ironically, at the same time, they are constantly threatened by

the prospect that if they are not affectionate enough and as close and
loving to others as they ought to be, they will have failed in their own
and others' eyes." The result is "a noxious social climate which fosters

too little feeling in men and too much in women." 10

Loss of this all-important concept may create social evils of the
most pervasive sort. "Male public culture gets caught up with
machines and puts emphasis on things that are not alive. The decision-
making of males in power tends to happen in a vacuum with little

reference to the needs of life. Paradoxically, the public leaders who are

supposed to help us deny death become increasingly oblivious to life

and show increasing contempt for it. We have a civilization in which
males in high places imitate a male god in heaven both think
themselves above the petty concerns of simple nurture and delight in
11
generative life."
1. Avalon, 175. 2. Scarf, 178. 3. Potter &
Sargent, 71.
4. Briffault 3, 169. 5. Malvern, 49. 6. Pagels, 64. 7. Scarf, 107, 575.
8. Holmes, 35. 9. Hirsch, 193. 10. Lewis, 242, 292. 1 1 Goldenberg, 107-8.
.

Kauri MW. Gauri

Pre-Vedic name of the Goddess as dispenser of karuna. Kauri was

sometimes translated "Brilliant One," a name Goddess's virgin
for the

gods. Kauri was

1

aspect: she who gave their "Power" (Shakti) to the

also a name for the vulva (yoni), descriptive of the cowrie shell accepted

497
Kelle all over the world as a symbol of the female genital and its curative
Keres and generative properties.

^^^t^m^^^m^^^^^m 1. Larousse, 375.

var. Kelly Kelle

Irish-druidic priest-name, derived from pre-Christian holy harlots of
the Goddess Kelle, Kale, or Kali. Irish writings described the divine
harlot Mary Magdalene as a kelle. 1 The medieval term Kele-De was
considered somewhat mysterious, translated "Bride of God" if a wom-
an, "Servant of God" if a man. 2 These translations were inaccurate.
Kele-De meant literally the spirit of the Goddess Kele, evidently
identical with the Goddess Kali of the original Indo-European Celts.
Votaries of the Goddess Kele stressed the search for inward

perfection through meditation, yogic style.

5
Her gods assumed the
lotus position like eastern yogis. Her
primitive Grail hero, Peredur,
experienced her as the "most beautiful woman in the world,"
represented by the three colors of the Divine Prakriti, still known as the
Gunas, standing for her powers of creation, preservation, and
destruction. 4
The mythical "St. Kilda" seems to have been another version of
the Goddess Kele, dwelling on a remote rocky islet once identified
with the western paradise of the dead. St. Kilda's Isle still exists, but the

origin of its name has been forgotten. The ubiquitous Irish word kill,
a cell or cave, once meant a shrine of Kele, whose holy men called

themselves Culdees, Colidees, Cele-De, Keledio, etc. Some were

described in Christian histories as monks, though they were obviously
married. 5
Kildare was a major shrine of the Goddess Kilda- Kele, or Brigit,
identified with the virgin Mary after Christian monks appropriated
the site. But the guardianship of the sacred fire at Kildare had long been
a prerogative of priestesses; the shrine was forbidden to men. 6
Confusion of Kilda-Kele-Brigit with Mary was not too far-fetched, as
they had been aspects of the same Goddess for thousands of years in
India as Kali-Mari or Kel-Mari, the Pot Goddess who made human
forms out of clay. 7 (See Kali Ma.)
1. Malvern, 1 17. 2.
Joyce, 352. 3. de Paor, 72. 4. Goodrich, 63-66; Avalon, 328.
5. Brewster, 130-31. 6. Briffault 2, 540. 7. Briffault 1, 474.

Keres
Dog-faced Furies of the Earth Mother Demeter, giving rise to the
Latin name of the same Goddess, Ceres. Like most other versions of
the Great Goddess's death-hounds, the Keres visited battlefields and
ate the dead to carry their souls to glory. They were another aspect of

498
he frightening female psychopomps otherwise called Valkyries, da- Kerlescan, Kermario
harpies, Nekhbet-vultures, she-wolves, or sacred bitches. (See
1

iinis, Khenti-Amenti

f)og.)
1. Lumussc, 166.
^^_mm^^

(erlescan, Kermario
Sacred sites in Brittany, with extensive Neolithic temple-complexes
orobably dedicated to the Goddess Ker, or Car, Kore, Q're, Car-Dia,
<auri, etc. Mass sacrifices were offered to her at an Egyptian site
ailed Ker-Ma in the 3rd millenium B.C.
1
The temples of Karnak in

Dgypt and Carnac in Brittany were named alike, not by mere

oincidence.
1. Campbell, Or.M., 61-63.

(ernos
Heart" or "kernel"; the Eleusinian sacred pot, a uterine symbol in
new life could sprout. The kernos evolved into the
vhich seeds of

harden of Adonis, a pot with sprouting seeds of wheat or barley,

ended by women. Ceremonies of the kernos were still observed up to
he 20th century in Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria, and other areas.
1
In

England and Scotland the feast of Harvest Home, Ingathering, Mell

upper, or (in Christian times) the Festival of Our Lady of Mercy
ometimes had the name of kirn. 2
1. Fra/er, G.B., 396-402. 2. Brewster, 424.

(eroessa
Horned One," a Byzantine title of Hera or Io as the Heavenly
4oon-cow, symbolized by the horns of the crescent moon. See
1
also

[Link], 183.

I
(henti-Amenti

Sarly name of Osiris, savior-god of Abydos, ca. 2000 B.C. He was also
ailed King Zer. He entered the underworld (Amenti) and returned as

\n oracular talking head, to inform his worshippers about the after-life

ind the proper techniques of salvation. Wealthy Egyptians paid large

urns to have themselves buried near his tomb, to insure their

*rsonal resurrection. 1
In the same way, Christians later insisted on

499
 Khepera being buried near the "body" of their savior in the church hence
Khnum th e funerary churchyard.

i^i_ 1 . H. Smith, 39.

Khepera
Scarabaeus or dung-beetle god, one of Egypt's sillier attempts at a
male creator without a Goddess. Khepera was adopted by the solar
all dung-beetles were male,
priesthood because of a belief that
reproducing through eggs incubated in their dung balls without the he!

of females. The scarab's dung ball was identified with the sun, which
1

Khepera rolled daily across the sky.

Some
priests said Khepera achieved male motherhood by mastur-
had union with my hand, and ... I poured seed into my
bation. "I
own mouth, and I sent forth from myself issue in the form of Shu . . .

and Tefnut." Khepera insisted he was the sole creator; "there was no
other being who worked with me." Yet like all gods he was forced to

depend on a mother-symbol. He said, "I laid a foundation in Maa,"

the Goddess as primal matter. 2

Finally the mother-symbol re-absorbed him. Some said Khepera

had no reproductive power until he received an eye of the female
moon, which could give birth to plants and animals. He became just
another child of the Goddess: "Tem-Khepera who produced himself

thighs of his divine mother." He was shown emerging from a

3
on the
yonic lotus between the Goddess's two aspects, Isis and Nephthys. 4
1. Book of the Dead, 169. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 295-97.
3. Book of the Dead, 1 19, 435. 4. d'Alviella, 29.

var. Neter-Khertet Khert-Neter

Egyptian name for the underworld, along with Amenti and Tuat.
Khert-Neter was the land of "many mansions," ruled nominally at leas

by the mysterious neter, an archaic "divinity" that seems to have

meant maternal ancestors. See Neter.

Khnum
Egyptian potter god whose priests claimed he made the World Egg
on a potting wheel and gave birth to creatures out of a womb of clay.
This was a late myth, copied from older stories of the Goddess whose
priestesses said she gave birth to the world, also gave women the and art

of working clay, which used to be an exclusively female occupation. 1

See Pottery.
1. Neumann, G.M., 136.

500
 jKhon-Ma Khon-Ma
Tibetan name of Mother Earth, the "old mother" Goddess who rules Kingship

over all spirits emanating from the earth element. See Earth.
1
i^h^hi^mi^hmim
[Link],484.

Kiakra

jVedic name of the so-called Celtic cross, with a wheel in its center,

[signifying
union of male and female principles. When displayed by
iVishnu, this emblem meant the phallic god's "power to penetrate
jheaven and earth." The word was probably related to chakra, the
'

jmagic circle of men and women alternating in Tantric worship.

Kiakra was one of the original combinations of cross and circle (wheel or
that
gave rise to the so-called Cross of Wotan, ankh of Osiris,
jegg)
and other male-female symbols of divine union.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 375.

Kingship
early Asiatic civilizations, kingship depended on the choices of
iln

women. There was no law of primogeniture. Kings were rarely suc-

ceeded by their sons. Kings of Sumeria and Assyria were of unknown
fatherhood. King Esakkuruna was called "the son of Nobody." '

Women were the kingmakers in the lands he ruled. 2

Marriage with the earthly representative of the Goddess, in the
form of the queen, was essential to the position of kingship; this was
fthe original meaning of "holy matrimony" (hieros gamos). Akkadian

kings apparently went on military expeditions chiefly to prove them-

selves worthy of the sacred marriage. 3

Ashurbanipal said he ruled by the grace of the Goddess Ishtar; he

was the king "whom her hands created." Shamash-shum-ukin of

ipabylon
he was chosen for kingship by the same Goddess under
said

tier title of Erua, Queen of the Gods. King Esarhaddon of Assyria

said he was "beloved of Queen Ishtar, the goddess of everything, the

unsparing weapon, who brings destruction to the land of the
4
enemy." Ishme-Dagan, king of Isin in 1860 B.C., said he was "he
whom Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, has chosen for her
t>eloved husband." 5
The Bronze Age king Ixion of Thessalian Lapiths
jmarried the Mother of the Gods after killingher former mate,

flescribed as his father-in-law, because each king's successor was sup-

to call his defeated rival "father." 6 The queens were the same
iposed

|s Goddess,
or Mother of God. The pharaoh Amenhotep III built a
i
temple for his wife Ti, who was worshipped as the Goddess. 7
The goddess-queen's choice largely depended on the candidate's

501
Kingship sex appeal. If she tired of the king's lovemaking, he could be deposed
or killed, for the queen's sexual acceptance of him determined the

^^^^^^^^^^^ of the land. In many early societies the old king was killed by
fertility

the new king, usually called a "son" though he was no blood relative.
Hence the unbroken chain of Oedipal murders that puzzled modern
scholars before it was known that the words "father" and "son" were
used in a different sense. A Babylonian tablet says:

Haharni laid claim for himself to lordship over Dunnu. Earth raised her
"
face to her sonAmakandu. "Come let me make love to you she said
to him. Amakandu took his mother (for a wife) and Haharni his father he

killed; in Dunnu, which he loved, they laid him forest. And Amakandu

took over his father's lordship and Nether Sea, his sister, he took (as wife).
Lahar, son ofAmakandu, came and Amakandu he killed, and in
Dunnu, in the (tomb) of his father he caused him to rest. Nether Sea, his
8
mother, he took (as wife).

After this, Lahar's son killed Lahar and took his sister River as

wife; he in turn was killed by his son, who married his sister Ningesh-
tinna,"Lady of the Vine of Heaven," a shortened name of the
Goddess Nin-gest-inanna. Sovereignty passed from mother to daughter,
beginning with Earth, the Goddess Dunnu herself, foundress of the
line the same as Crete's Danuna, Anatolia's Danu, Greece's Danae,
the Gaulish Diana. Kings were expected to kill their predecessors or

pseudo-fathers. "Son" meant "successor," and "sister" was synonymous

with "wife." 9
The length of a king's reign was often predetermined, because
people thought the Goddess needed the refreshment of a new lover
at stated intervals. Up to 1810 a.d., kings of Zimbabwe were ceremoni-

ally strangled to death by their wives at the moon temple every four
10
years. Kings of ancient Thebes reigned for seven years; so did kings of
Canaan. Myths suggest a similar seven-year period for each king of
Crete. Cretan kings were never allowed to grow old; they always died in
the full bloom of youth. 11 More recently, Nigerian kings were
strangled after the queen's pregnancy was established, which meant
12
each king fulfilled his role in life by begetting one royal offspring.
White explorers in Africa spoke of tribal "kings," but rarely
mentioned that the real rulers of the tribes were queens. "In the
were no reigning princes in Africa, but the negroes
oldest times there
had large kingdoms [sic] which were ruled by goddesses." 1? Ghana
was governed by kings of a matrilineal succession whose divine right
passed through sisters' sons. The Lovedu were ruled by a female
"king" who took a series of lovers but always left the government to one
of the royal princesses. 14 Angola was ruled by women until the

Portuguese invasions. Ashanti was ruled by queens until the British

Protectorate in 1895. Its kings were subject to the queen mother; its

princesses took no husbands but kept a series of lovers. Similar customs

obtained in Loango, Daura, the country of the Abrons, and other

502
\frican nations. The queen of Ubemba was called Mamfumer, Kingship
'Mother of Kings," and did the governing. 15
all

The Gospels' "Candace queen of the Ethiopians" (Acts 8:27) was ^^^^^^^^^^^
lot a single individual but the hereditary title of queen mothers who

the Nubian states. 16 Ethiopian kings were ritually slain from

{governed
he earliest times. Regicide was still the custom of Nubian Kassites of
he Upper Nile in the 1st century b.c. Diodorus said only one Ethiopian
Tionarch escaped this kingly fate because he was educated in Greece
nd dared to disobey tribal law. He led a party of soldiers into the

sanctuary and killed all the priests before they could kill him. 17
The Javanese Singasari dynasty had matriarchal queens similar to

Candace, typified by Queen Dedes whose statues show her as a

Shakti of wisdom. She married a number of new kings after
peautiful
killed her previous consorts, each apparently holding office for a
[hey
18
lieven-year period.

Legends consistently associate kingship with ceremonial death. A

tealfrom Lagash shows the Goddess taking her new king by the
land, while he raises a weapon to slay the old king, prostrate under the
19
queen's feet. King Sennacherib of Assyria was "beaten to death

vith statuettes of the gods" in the temple at Nineveh. Perpetrators of

deed were his "sons," one of whom succeeded him as King
[he
Esarhaddon. Upon his accession, Esarhaddon proclaimed: "I am power-
" 20
ful,
I am omnipotent, I am a hero, I am gigantic, I am colossal!

Sometimes, kings had to proclaim they were embodiments of the

Goddess herself so as to rule with the same authority as queens.
Kntiochus of Commagene announced that he could rule because he
Ue5 the Goddess. 21 A king's investiture used to mean putting on
so the king could be displayed as a transvestite Goddess
female robes,
[see Transvestism).
In the ancient Middle East generally, kings were not so much
governing figures as ceremonial ones, primarily concerned with
22
Dedication of temples and other religious responsibilities. Sometimes

[hey
were also war leaders, able to preserve their lives in time of
danger by convincing the people that no one else could defeat the
be found a real or
pnemy. In such a case, a surrogate victim might
adopted son, a prophet, a condemned criminal, or a divine animal.
A war leader of Carthage "clothed his best and most beloved son
n royal robes and crucified him as a sacrifice" to secure the blessing
23
Baal on his military campaigns. Similarly, the god-king Isra-El
pf
clothed his only-begotten son Ieud in royal robes and sacrificed him
24
to the custom of the Jews," as Philo said. This king
['according
became Jesus, "king" of the Jews (John 18:33). Since a king was
God, any king's real or adopted son was naturally the Son of God; and
"In the early
pahweh himself was embodied in the Jewish king.
period
of the Hebrew monarchy the central element of the annual New
25
festival was the ritual enthronement of Jahveh as King."
pear
Son-killing was a habit, not only of the Jewish god-king but of

503
Kingship many other god-kings who modified the old custom by shedding the
blood of someone else in the proper season. A Swedish king named
^H^^^^^H Aun managed to extend his reign for nine years by sacrificing one of
26
his nine sons each year to ransom his own life.

Another Swedish king named Gunnar Helming simply ran away.

After wrestling with the god Frey, incarnate in the previous king as

biblicalJacob wrestled with "a man who was God" and later received
the king-name of Isra-El Gunnar Helming took the king's place in
the bed of the high priestess (or Goddess). Evidently he pleased her, for
with her help he gathered up all the gold and silver treasures of kingly
office and escaped, taking her with him.
27
A similar story was told of
Theseus's escape from the Minoan sacred king's fate with the help of
the priestess Ariadne, the incarnate Moon-goddess, who had taken a
28
fancy to him.
Seleucus Nicator of Antioch, formerly one of Alexander's gener-
became king of Syria but was forced to abdicate in favor of his
als,

"son" Antiochus, because the queen fell in love with the younger man
and cast off her old spouse. 29 As late as 97 a.d., kings of Antioch were
"chosen for merit" and deposed when their "merit" failed. This "merit'
seemed to have to do with their sexual capacity. 30 That is, it was virtu,
"virility," from vir, "man."
A common method of choosing a king was to test his virility by
having him look on the Goddess's nakedness during the ritual bath that
magically restored her virginity each year. Actaeon, Teiresias, and
lovers of the Germanic Earth Goddess were chosen by so viewing her. 51

Gyges was chosen by the queen of Lydia, who bore the name of the
Goddess Omphale, upon her display of her naked body to him; he was
32
told to kill the incumbent king and marry her. Bath-Sheba, whose
name meant she was the daughter of Arabian queens, married King
David after he saw her naked in her bath, and killed her previous
husband, Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel, 1 1). The Goddess Ishtar pre-
sented herself naked to her would-be lovers, saying, "Let us enjoy thy

manly strength. Let thy hand [or, phallus] come forth and take away my
33
virginity."
Such legends point to a custom of choosing a king by the
promptness of his erection upon the sight of the naked Goddess.
People would follow only a leader of proven sexual potency, as shown
by the transparent sexual metaphors of the 1 10th Psalm: "The Lord
shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of

thine enemies. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in I

the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning; thou hast the
dew of thy youth." Dew was the biblical word for semen, rod meant
phallus, Zion was the Holy Mount, otherwise the body of the Virgin
Israel.

When the king's youth and dew deserted him, so did his people,
who considered it
dangerous to keep an impotent king in office. A

504

*m
[declining birth rate or a poor growing season could bring on a king-
Kingship
ailing. Proverbs 14 says, "In the multitude of people the king's
is

nonor; but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince."

Northern Europeans believed in killing
kings at the failure of their
^^^^^"^
%aefa or heill (virility, divine force), made manifest through failure of
die land's fertility. Crops went bad in the reignof Domaldi; his subjects
oxen, then men, to no avail; finally they fell on the
:ried sacrificing

Bang and butchered him. As late as the 9th century a.d., King Halfdan
bf Norway was slain for the sake of the crops. 34 Writings
falsely
attributed to St. Patrick expressed the Celtic conviction that the reign of
apotent king would be distinguished by fine weather, calm seas,
35
abundant grain, and trees laden with fruit.
Ceremonial killing of kings was an ancient Latin custom, dating
}ack to the obscure period of Roman history that is now virtually
unknown, because later priesthoods destroyed its records. 36 Early Ro-
man kings usually met death by "assassination" in the month of
37
March, beginning the sacred year. King Tatius was slain at the altar

ivith sacred knives: a suspiciously stylized death. Julius Caesar met a

Similarly
ritualistic death at the fatal time, the Ides of March, in the
t>acred inner chamber of the senate, on the very dais of the altar, in
Fulfillment of a prophetic announcement by his wife.

There is some doubt as to whether Caesar's wife was considered a

portal woman or an embodiment of the Goddess whom Caesar wor-

shipped for the sake of his victories in battle: Venus Genetrix. After
defeating Pompey, he built her a marble and gold temple in the
Forum and had his own statue placed before her as her consort. The
drama of his life and death contained elements common to other
sacred kings who were consorts of the Goddess.
At the beginning of his career, Caesar dreamed of copulating with
his own mother, and the seers prophesied from this that he would
rule the earth (Mother). On the eve of his assassination he attended a
Feast or Last Supper and was asked, "What is the best kind of death?"
He replied, "The kind that is least expected." On the following day he
received the kind of death he had chosen. Later, during the funerary

games in honor of Venus Genetrix, a comet was identified as the soul of

Paesar enroute to the company of the gods. 38

Julius Caesar's successor Augustus received his title by marrying
Livia Augusta, who planned the rebuilding programs in Rome and
also revitalized the worship of her Goddess, Juno Augusta. Though
Livia's contributions to the glories of the Augustan Age have been
jelittled by Christian historians, there is no doubt that she was a full co-
"uler and the real author of many of Augustus's legal reforms and
municipal projects. There was a vague understanding, never fully

nvestigated, that like the previous Caesar's wife, Livia somehow

'hastened her husband's end." 39

By Roman law of matrilineal succession, Augustus was succeeded

505
Kingship by Tiberius, Livia's firstborn son by another man. The title of

Augustus passed through the female line even up to the time of

mmmmmmmm^^^mm Constantine, who received his throne through a marriage with the
40
princess Fausta.
The title of Caesar (Kaiser, Czar) passed on to Germanic emper-

ors in the Dark Ages when legends of heroes and sacred kings usually
included the ritual death. Siegfried suffered a typical Caesar's death,

brought on by his wife's prophetic dream. His wife personally

embroidered on his robe the cross marking the spot where the slayer's
41
spear must strike.
St. Caesarius, whose name meant "king," was another fictitious

saintbased on the old custom of king-killing. He was the Kaiser slain

as an embodiment of Apollo at Terracina. The man impersonating the

king would run through lines of spectators and leap from a cliff, as the
42
mythical saint was said to have done. The festival of "St. Caesarius"
was All Hallows, the pagan holy day of ancestral ghosts (see
Halloween).
Similar deification or sainthood seems to have been the purpose ol

the mysterious Liebestod (Love-Death) of Attila the Hun, who

appears in the Germanic Nibelungen saga under the name of Atli or
Etzel, in the company of other heroes such as Siegfried. Attila's last
bride bore the name of Germanic death-goddess, Grimhild or Kriem-
hild. According to Marcellinus, Grimhild killed Attila in their
43
marriage bed on their wedding night. Other sources more euphemisti
cally said he died suddenly in the arms of his bride, smothered by "an
effusion of blood." That his killing might have been deliberately
planned, to make him a god, is suggested by his burial with all the
trappings of a sacred Caesar: a triple coffin of sun, moon, and earth
metals gold, silver, and iron. His gravediggers were all slain so his
44
tomb would be kept secret. His funeral rites consisted of a brief period
of extravagant mourning, followed by a joyful feast representing his

apotheosis. His future Second Coming was expected.

Men who played the fatal role of the king in classic sacred dramas
were often deified (canonized) to induce them to serve as surrogates
for the real king. Like Christian martyrs, they believed that once past th
"veil," they would enjoy blissful immortality, identified like the ruler

with the supreme god himself. Thus, many stories show men willingly

assuming the fatal role. Antinous, a favorite of the emperor Hadrian,

sacrificed himself in a magical ceremony to preserve the emperor's
45
life. Each winter, the Roman festival of the Saturnalia featured a
man who played the part of the Lord of Death, identified with both the
46
emperor and the god Saturn. The latter was the Heavenly Father in
his underground, "slain" aspect, as Shava the Corpse stood for Father

Shiva in the same attitude of death. See Shiva.

The Roman word for a king, rex or reg, descended from Sanskrit
raj, as did the Celtic rig.* 7 Not only the word but the concept of the

506
office migrated all over the Eurasian continent, making a king's sover-
Kingship
eignty dependent on his acceptance by the land, which was
always
embodied in women. The idea is still discernible in a Tartar custom: a
^^^^^^^^^^
chief's son must be carried about to every village and suckled by
48
every nursing mother to validate his later claim to leadership. The land
was a king's eternal mother-bride. King James I of England referred
to a tradition of immemorial antiquity when he said, "I am the husband
and the whole island is my lawful wife." 49 The Welsh long believed
the British isles were annexed to Rome only through a sacred marriage
between the Roman emperor and the British queen, the Lily Maid
Elen. Welsh bards also said their own Llefelys became king of France

by marrying the queen and gaining "the crown of the kingdom along
with her." 50
Like early kings of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, and Rome,

pre-Christian British kings became stewards of the country through a

hieros gamos with the queen. The Danish historian Saxo Grammati-
cus said of Hermutrude, queen of Scotland, that "whomsoever she
thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her
51
kingdom with herself." Pictish kings were selected by the royal
women from a matrilineal blood line. Early Saxon queens governed
their land,and a king could govern only by marrying them. 52 That is
why King Canute married the widow of his predecessor; and Ethelbald,
king of the West Saxons, married his father's widow. Another
Ethelbald, king of Kent, married his stepmother after his father's
53
death.
British romances show kings unable to rule unless they possessed

the queen,whose name was often given as Guinevere also ren-

dered Cunneware, Gwenhwyfar, Jennifer, Ginevra, or Genevieve.
Some early sources say there were three of her (the Triple Goddess).
King Arthur married all three. 54Repeated abductions of her by Melea-
gant, by Lancelot, by Melwas, by Arthur, and by Mordred signified

many would-be kings' claim to sovereignty.

55
The collapse of Arthur's

kingdom was intimately related to his loss of the queen.

In pagan Ireland a king's inaugural greeting announced that he

was wedded to (literally, had copulated with) his land, in the person
of the queen. The legendary Irish Queen Mab, famous in folklore as

the Fairy Queen, chose and invested her kings and changed her
lovers often. 56

Rivalries between kings ruler and tanist, father and son, royal

"dragon" and his dragonslayer preserve in mythology the arche-

typal sexual jealousy that related male power to acceptance by the
female, and male powerlessness to sexual rejection. The myth of
Finn and Diarmuid plainly shows the chieftains' jealous counter-claims
to Queen Grianne (Ygraine), another form of Guinevere. King

Arthur's death scene was prefigured by the story of Finn's three trips to

bring healing waters to the wounded Diarmuid; but each time he

507
Kingu
Kiss

^m ^ mf^
deliberately let the water trickle through his fingers, so
Finn
me,
the
said smugly
O Diarmuid, to
to his younger, handsomer rival: "Well it pleases
see you in this plight, and it grieves me only that
women of Erin are not now gazing on you; for your extraordinary
beauty is now ugliness, and your choice form a deformity."
57

An old English custom of "lifting" the king at Easter time suggests

Diarmuid died.

all

the former importance of women in every aspect of the king's career,

including his selection, approval, love-death, and apotheosis. The king

was heaved up into the air each year by a group of court ladies.

Though piously called an imitation of "our Savior's resurrection," the

custom was obviously older than Christianity; it was pagan, not
Christian, theology that made gods and kings one and the same, both
58
subject to the magic of women.
[Link]. & Bab. Lit, 198. 2. Bachofen, 215. Hooke, S.P., 49.
3.

[Link]. & Bab. Lit,9\,\\4, 130. [Link],59. 6. Campbell, CM., 422.

7. Budge, D.N., 83. 8. Albright, 94. 9. Albright, 94, 128. 10. Lederer, 132.
1 1 Campbell, Oc.M., 59. 1 2. Stone, 132. 13. Briffault 3, 26-32.
.

14. Hays, 296, 312. 15. Hartley, 161. 16. Briffault 3,41.
17. Campbell, P.M., 200. 18. Campbell, M.I., 216-17. 19. Campbell, Or.M., 42.
20. de Camp, A.E., 64. 21. Cumont, M.M.,95. 22. Hooke, S.P., 49.
23. de Lys, 450. 24. Frazer, G.B., 341. 25. Hooke, S.P., 1 10.
26. Frazer, G.B., 337. 27. Oxenstierna, 219. 28. Graves, 1, [Link].
[Link], 180. 30. Thomson, 312. 3 1 Tacitus, 729. 32. Herodotus, 5-6.
.

33. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 338-39. 34. Turville-Petre,

191-92. 35. Joyce 1, 57.
36. Pepper & Wilcock, 84. 37. Graves, W.G, 399.38. Dumezil, 545-48.
39. Beard, 302. 40. J.H. Smith, C.G., 71. 41. Goodrich, 148-49.
42. Brewster, 471. 43. Gibbon 2, 294. 44. Encyc. Brit, "Attila." 45. King, 55.
46. Frazer, G.B., 679. 47. Dumezil, 17. 48. Hazlitt, 112. 49. Daly, 99.
[Link],85,90. 51. Frazer, G.B., 180. 52. Briffault 1,416.
53. Hartley, 127. 54. Malory 1, xxiv. 55. Encyc. Brit, "Guinevere."
56. Briffault 3, 379. 57. Campbell, CM., 302. 58. Hazlitt, 363.

Kingu
Firstborn son of the Sumerian creatress Tiamat. She gave him the
Tablets of Destiny and the authority to rule over all the other gods. But
he was slain by Marduk, Babylon's municipal god, and his blood
made the earth's "living waters."

Kismet
Turkish variant of Qis-Mah, the Arabic "Fate" bestowed by
the Moon-goddess Mah. The meaning was similar to Hindu karma,
Roman fortuna, Greek dike (destiny). See Ma.

Kiss

Like most forms of affectionate contact, the kiss was an adaptation of

primitive mother-child behavior. The original Sanskrit word was cusati,
"he sucks." Gestures of embrace, of clutching to the bosom, began as

508
imitations of the nursing mother. Scholars believe kissing originated Knighthood
with mouth-to-mouth feeding, practiced among ancient Greeks and Knights Templar
others as a form of love play. In Germany and Austria even up to the
^^^^^^^^^^^
19th century a.d. it was common
mothers to premasticate food
for

and feed it to their infants by "kissing." Kissing was most common inl

European countries, where it was supposed to create a bond among

members of a clan (hence, "kissing cousins"). It was virtually
all

unknown in northern Asia (Japan, China, Mongolia). Amerindians

and Eskimos did not kiss but rather inhaled the breath of a loved one by

"rubbing noses."
[Link], 191, 237-38.

Knighthood; Ceremony of
In the Middle Ages, a knight was created by a symbolic imitation of
the ritual that used to make a man into a god: beheading him. Touching
first one shoulder then the other with a sword implied that the sword
had passed through the neck. Celtic tribes especially revered man-gods
who were preserved in the form of severed heads, which were
believed to give oracles. In Greece also, savior-gods like Orpheus spoke
to their followers of the after-life through the mouths of their own
mummified heads. Symbolic beheading also "knighted" men dedicated
to the Goddess Artemis in her Spartan shrines, where the man so

dedicated received a slight cut in his neck from the edge of a sword. 1

1. Graves, CM. 2, 79.

Knights Templar
The Order of Knights of the Temple was founded in the Holy Land
in 1118 [Link] knight, Hugues de Payens or Payns, that
by a

"Hugh of the Pagans." Its organization was based on that of the

'
is,

Saracen fraternity of hashishim, "hashish-takers," whom Christians

2
called Assassins (seeAladdin). The Templars' first headquarters
was a wing of the royal palace of Jerusalem next to the al-Aqsa mosque,
5
revered by the Shi'ites as the central shrine of the Goddess Fatima.
Western romances, inspired by Moorish Shi'ite poets, transformed
this Mother-shrine into the Temple of the Holy Grail, where certain
legendary knights called Templars gathered to offer their service to the
Goddess, to uphold the female principle of divinity and to defend
women. (See Grail, Holy.) These knights became more widely known
as Galahad, Perceval, Lohengrin, etc.

The real Knights Templar, however, professed Christianity and

assumed the duty of protecting Christian pilgrims and merchants
traveling through the Holy Land. They also undertook to protect the
travelers' lands, castles, and other properties back home, where

509
Knights Templar Templars from Jerusalem arrived to take charge. When pilgrims failed

to return from their journeys, the property could pass into the

^^^^^^^^^^m Templars' permanent possession. As a result, like other holy orders

founded on a vow of poverty, the Templars soon became very rich.
At first the Knights Templar had difficulty getting papal sanction

for their military order. The papacy refused to recognize them until a

vindication of their aims was written by St. Bernard, whose uncle joined
the order and becameGrand Master. The Templars' original
a

charter, signed by Pope Innocent II, granted them freedom from papal
claims on their property, even from church taxation. This financial

independence was to prove their downfall.

Having acquired estates and treasure houses throughout France,
Spain, Portugal, and the Levant, the Templars were leading bankers
and moneylenders of the 13 th century. They served kings and mer-
chant princes. Their own treasure ships plied the eastern
Mediterranean coasts. Their reputation for honesty was such that even
Moslems trusted them. Eventually, Pope Clement V and King Philip
IV of France, whose government was nearly bankrupt, joined forces to
deprive the Templars of their money and their lives.
Early in the 14th century, the Templars were accused of orga-
nized heresy, devil worship, ritual sodomy, and blasphemy. It was
claimed they adored an androgynous idol named Baphomet, "having
sometimes three faces, sometimes two, or only one, and sometimes a
bare skull, which they and believed its influence to be
called their savior,
exerted in making them rich, and in making flowers grow and the
4
earth germinate."
The rumor-mongers claimed the Templars' secret rites involved
denial of Christ, treading on the cross, forcing initiates into homosex-
ual acts, kissing the devil's genitals, and similar charges that were to
become monotonously familiar in witch persecutions. Grand Master
Jacques de Molay and other dignitaries of the order were arrested and
confessed under torture that they had indeed done such things, with
the aim of teaching newly initiated Knights unquestioning obedience to
their superiors' commands. Later, Molay and his associates publicly

renounced their confessions, saying they had been forced by torture. In

13l4 they proclaimed their innocence before a large crowd of people
and were burned at the stake as relapsed heretics the same afternoon. 5
The order was suppressed with great cruelty. With the church's
blessing, local barons in France, Cyprus, Castile, and other areas
simply murdered the Knights and took their properties. Captured
Templars were forced to confess to every sort of crime, most
apparently invented by their judges. It was found that each Templar
confessed to one set of sins when tortured by one judge and a
6
completely different set when tortured by a different judge. Trials were

transparently rigged. During the trial of Templars at Paris, the court

repeatedly refused to hear depositions from no fewer than 573 witnesses

for the defense. 7

510
 A few Templars managed to flee to England, where torture was Knot
i not legal. This made it
impossible to obtain what
Pope Clement
called "true evidence," meaning evidence extorted by torture. The
^^^^^^^^^^^
I
pope wrote to King Edward II, demanding that the Templars be
arrested and tortured. Otherwise, Edward and his court would be
;

excommunicated as impeders of the Inquisition. As a bribe, Edward

was offered a Plenary Indulgence for all his past sins. Finally he

j
permitted papal judges to torture the Templars, changing the English
I law "out of reverence for the Holy See." 8 The indispensable utility of
Itorture was thus established, and "the success of the extermination of
the Templars set the patterns for the subsequent persecution of
9
I witches."
Scholars have tried to determine the truth,
if any, of the
charges
Templars. Most agree that the Templars "had adopted
jagainst the
some of the mysterious tenets of the eastern Gnostics." 10 Their alleged
idol Baphomet may have been the Triple Head of Wisdom pictured
ion the arms of the order's founder, in the form of three black Saracen
heads. 11 On the other hand, no idol of Baphomet was ever found in
khe Templars' houses or shrines, though these were seized and sealed
12
immediately.
Templars were accused of "making a fig" at the crucifix with their
but this derisive sexual symbol was not a mockery by eastern
pands;
standards. Orientals called knowledge sign, the feminine counterpart
it a

pf
the phallic cross; in India was a lingam-yoni. 1? If the Templars
it

trampled a crucifix, they may have copied the custom of Arab dervishes
Ivho ceremonially rejected a cross with the words, "You may have the
we have the meaning of the Cross." H As for the charge of
Cross, but
Bodomy, no monastic order was free of that. Men cut off from
Lvomen were no less prone to homosexual behavior in the 13th century
man in the prisons, barracks, lumber and mining camps, and boys'
Schools of the 20th.
I. Shah, xix. 2. MacKenzie, 117. 3. Encyc. Brit., "Templars."

4. Knight, D.W.P., 186. 5. Encyc. Brit, "Templars." 6. Reinach, 310.

7. J.B. Russell, 197. 8. Coulton, 245. 9. Robbins, 208. 10. Knight, D.W.P., 193.
II. Shah, xix. 12. Coulton, 243. 13. Knight, D.W.R, 150. 14. Shah, 233.

Knot
HThe Fate-goddess wove and tied together the threads of life, accord-

ing to the ancients. Marriage is still called "tying the knot" because it
used to be viewed as a binding of two life-threads by the Goddess
Aphrodite, or Juno. Egyptians' Isis-Hathor bound or loosed the lives of
men with Tat, the Knot of Fate, and taught the art of making magic
[Link] she bore the title of the knot itself, Tait. High-ranking
Egyptians were promised she would personally weave their cere-
ments, including "bandages from the hand of Tait." In Egypt, holy
l

2
mysteries in general were shetat, "she-knots."

511
Knot The Knot of Fate came into Greek myth as the famous Gordian
Knot severed by the sword of Alexander, in fulfillment of the
^^^^^^^^^^m prophecy that whoever could "unravel" the knot would become lord of

all Asia. The original knot was the marriage tie of Phrygia's sacred
sons and bridegrooms of the Magna
king, alternately Gordius or Midas,
Mater. The knot was fastened to the yoke of the oxcart on which
Gordius entered into his kingdom, as the oracle announced in terms

similar to the Bible's description of Jesus's triumphal entry into

Jerusalem: "Phrygians, your new king is

approaching with his bride,
3
seated in an ox-cart!"

Pagan religions related the art of knotting

to "binding" and

"loosing" the forces of creation and destruction, the same power

claimed by the papacy for the alleged heirs of St. Peter (Matthew
16:19). (See Peter, Saint.) The windings of Fate
and the mysteries
of Nature were often symbolized by elaborate knotwork, as in the
intricate knot-patterns of Scandinavian and Saracenic monuments.
Witches of Finland, Lapland, and the northern islands bound the
winds in magic knots and sold them to credulous sailors, who would
use the knots to try to control the winds at sea, as Odysseus's sailors did
with Aeolus's bag of winds. Such magic was still common in the late
16th century. 4 Scottish witches were said to raise winds and storms by

soaking a knotted rag in water and beating it on a stone to make drops

fly like rain, saying:

Iknok this rag upone this stane

To raise the wind in the divellis name
It sail not lye till I please againe. 5

In 1814 Sir Walter Scott found one Bessie Millie selling "winds
6
by the help" to sailors in the form of knotted cords. British
devil's

witches claimed to stop nosebleeds by tying knots in red thread, the

classic Fate-weaver's blood symbol. 7 Weaver's thread was also thought
to cure "diseases of the groin" when knotted with a widow's name
pronounced at each knot. 8 On the other hand, witches could make men
impotent with a magic knot called "ligature." Predictably, men said
this was a "detestable impiety" deserving the death penalty. According

to acanon of the church, God's opinion was self-contradictory.

Ligature could occur only with God's permission and could be cured
9
only "with God's help."
The Jews so feared magic knots that rabbinic law forbade tying any
knots on the Sabbath; though one rabbi said it was
legal to tie a knot
that could be untied with one hand. 10 Moslems said Mohammed nearly
died of a sickness prepared by Jewish witches with a "cord of knots,"
which was discovered in time to save his life. The knots were loosened
by speaking verses of the Koran. Moslems still believe that Surah
CXIII of the Koran will stop "the evil of women who are blowers on
11
knots."
Knot magic is
performed by the Mexican recibidora (midwife) in

512
 12
complicated tyings of umbilical cords. Greeks still remember the Kobolds
life-knots of the Moerae, saying of a dead man, "his thread is cut." ,J
Koran
The same triple Fates govern the "Nordic Knot" of three interlock- ^^^^^^^^^^^
14
ing triangles, known as the Knot of the Vala. Formed of three
female-genital symbols, this invoked the Great Vala (Freya) who
wove the fates of men.
1. Erman, 73.2. Budge, D.N., 189. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 282. 4. Robbins, 201.

[Link],G.B.,93-94. 6. Holmes, 207. 7. Maple, 147. 8. Agrippa, 157.

9. Robbins, 306-7. 10. Barrett, 147-48. 1 1 Budge, A.T., 62-67.
.

12. Castiglioni, 139. 13. Hyde, 198. 14. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 147.

Kobolds
Germanic earth-gnomes inhabiting caves and mines, ruled by the
dwarf-king Alberich (British Oberon). Their name descended from
Greek kaballoi, horse-riders, which formerly referred to "Amazo-
nian" tribes led by the Goddess. She was called Oberon's spouse,
Titania, queen of the Titans who were,
of course, the earth-giants

worshipped by pre-Hellenic Pelasgian peoples, who resisted the Olym-

pian gods.
1
Similarly the kobolds lived underground, and resisted the

rule of new celestial deities.

[Link], 315.

Koran
Mohammedan scriptures, often erroneously thought to have been
written by Mohammed. Moslems don't believe this. But many don't
1

I know the Koran was an enlarged, revised version of the ancient

I Word of the Goddess Kore, revered by Mohammed's tribe, the
Koreshites (Children of Kore), who guarded her shrine at Mecca.
The original writing was done long before Mohammed's time by
2
holy imams, a word related to Semitic ima, "mother." Like the

(original
mahatmas or "great mothers" in India, the original imams were
Iprobably priestesses of the old Arabian matriarchate. It was said they

the scriptures from a prototype that existed in heaven from the

(took
of eternity, "Mother of the Book" i.e., the Goddess
(beginning
(herself, wearing
the Book of Fate on her breast as Mother Tiamat wore
the Tablets of Destiny. Sometimes the celestial Koran was called the
Tablet. 3 There was some resemblance between this and other
[(Preserved
legendary books of divine origin, such as the Ur-text, the Book of
Irhoth, and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes.
As in the case of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran was much
liewritten to support new patriarchal laws and to obliterate the figures
the Goddess and her priestesses. See Arabia.
|)f
1. Encyc. Brit., "Mohammed." 2. Campbell, Oc.M., 443. 3. Budge, A.T., 52.

513
Kore Kore
Greek Holy Virgin, inner soul of Mother Earth (Demeter); a name
so widespread, that it must have been one of the earliest designations of
the World Shakti or female spirit of the universe. Variations include

Neolithic Asia knew Ker, Car, Q're, Cara, Kher, Ceres, Core, Sanskrit Kaur or Kauri,
a mysterious Goddess alternate names for the Goddess Kali.
Ker, or Car, Shrines of Karnak in Egypt and Carnac in Brittany were sites of
ancestress of the
Carians. 1
Her gigantic temples and funerary complexes over 5000 years ago,
city in
the Chersonese was dedicated to Kar or Kore. France had similar shrines in similarly-named
4
Cardia, "the locations, Kerlescan, Kercado, Kermario. The last name combined
Goddess Car." Kardia the pagan Virgin with the Goddess Mari, who was sometimes her
became the Greek embodied in Kel-Mari. 5
daughter, her mother, or herself, like Kali
word for "heart," as cor
Inhabitants of Carnac, and of Carnuntum on the Danube, called
became the Latin;
both descended from themselves in Roman times the Carnutes, "people born of the

the Goddess who Goddess Car." 6

was the world-heart. In Egypt's early dynastic period there was a place called Kerma
The same is
A
syllable
(Mother Ker) in Nubia, where mass sacrifices took place. similar
found in words for

maternal blood
name, Kara, was held in reverence by several early Egyptian rulers.
relationships: Gaelic Egyptians spoke of an eastern land called Kher, and called Palestine
7
cairdean, kinship; the country of Kharu.
Turkish kardes, Car or Carna was known to the Romans as "a Goddess of the
maternal siblings. 2
olden time," whose archaic worship was connected with Karneia
The Goddess became 8
festivals of Sparta and the classic Roman Carnival. Sometimes she was
Kardia ton kosmos:
9
"Heart of the World." 5 Carmenta, "the Mind of Car," who invented the Roman alphabet.
An extremely old temple on the Caelian Hill was dedicated to her.
10
A
later variation of her name was Ceres, origin of such words as cereal,
corn, kernel, core, carnal, cardiac.
In the east this ancient Goddess was everywhere. Some said she
was Artemis Caryatis, mother of the Caryatides of the Laconian
temple of Caryae.
11
The Tyrian seaport of Caraalis (modern Cagliari)
was sacred to her. 12 One of Israel's oldest shrines, the "garden" called
13
Mount Carmel, was her place and that of her baalim (gods).
Kore was a great power in Coptic religion, with a flourishing cult at

Alexandria in the 4th century a.d. Her festival, the Koreion, was held
each January 6, later assimilated to Christianity as the feast of Epiphany.
Kore's festival celebrated the birth of the new year god Aeon to the

Virgin, whose naked image was carried seven times around the temple,
decorated with gold stars and the sign of the cross. The priests
14
announced to the public that the Virgin had brought forth the Aeon.
The Koreion passed into British tradition as the Kirn, or Feast of
Ingathering, which the church later changed to the Feast of Our
Lady of Mercy. Kirn was a cognate of the Greek kern or sacred womb-
vase in which the grain god was reborn. 15 Here again the Kore or Ker
was a virgin mother. The Goddess's harvest instrument, a moon-sickle,
16
represented even the Christian version of the festival.
The classic myth of Kore's abduction by Pluto was another

514
instance of a god's usurpation of the Goddess's power, Krake
according to
Gnostic sources. "Plutonius Zeus does not possess the nourishment
. . . Krishna
for all mortal living creatures, for it is Kore who bears the fruit."
17

Kore's resurrection represented the seasonal return of vegetation. She

was also the World Soul animating each human soul, and looking out
of the eyes. Reflection in the pupil of an eye was known as the Kore or
"Maiden" in the eye. To the Arabs, it was the
"baby" in the eye.
The Bible calls either a daughter or a soul "the apple of thine eye"

(Proverbs 7:2); and of course, every apple had a Kore.

1. Graves, W.G, 373. 2. Farb, W.P., 144. 3. Cumont, A.R.R.P., 72.
4. Encyc. Brit, "Carnac." 5. Briffault 1, 474. 6. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 39.
7. Erman, 228, 278. 8. Dumezil, 386, 389. 9. Graves, G.M. 1, 280; 2, 137.
10. Encyc Brit, "Carm." 1 1. Graves, W.G., 372. 12. Massa,43.
13. Encyc. Brit, "Carmel." 14. Campbell, ML, 34. 15. Neumann, G.M., 132.
16. Brewster, 424. 17. Robinson, 305.

Krake
"Crow," the Crone or Death-goddess in Anglo-Danish mythology;

sometimes a of
Queen Witches, identified with the man-eating Kraken;
sometimes a beautiful virgin, spouse of kings. See Crow. 1

[Link].L.M.A., 274-75.

Kriemhild var. Grimhild

Burgundian queen who married and immediately killed Attila the

Hun. In her marriage bed on the wedding night, she bathed in his
blood. Also known as Ildico, she may have represented the Germanic
Goddess who gave immortality to sacred kings through the Liebestod
(Love-Death). See Kingship.

Krishna

Popular incarnation of Shiva, born of Devaki, "the Goddess"; an-

nounced by a star and by angelic voices; presented with gifts by
shepherds and wise men; hailed as Redeemer, Firstborn, Sin Bearer,
Liberator, Universal Word; survivor of a Slaughter of the Innocents,

probably the original one on which the myths of Sargon, Moses,

Nimrod, Cronus, Mordred, and Jesus were based.
1

Unlike the western Christos, however, Krishna was an erotic god.

His adventures with the Gopis (Milkmaids) present a classic of

religious pornography. His favorite mistress was the insatiable Radha,

"Elephant-woman," another form of Maya as the consort of the

elephant-god Ganesha.
Krishna met the sacred king's usual sacrificial death, hanging

515
Kris Kringle "between heaven and earth," and fructifying the soil with his blood.
Kumarbi Like all Hindu gods he had many incarnations or avatars, including
Rama, hero of the Ramayana.
[Link]?.

Ramayana Indian

epic poem based on

Kris Kringle
ancient traditional
stories, first written in "Christ of the Wheel," titleof the Norse year-god born at the winter
Sanskrit about 300
solstice (Christmas) as the sun god born again. His title seems to have
B.C. by Valmiki.
applied to a sacrificial victim on a fiery wheel. Today he is identified
with Santa Claus. See Nicholas, Saint.

Krittikas

"Cutters" or "razors," Hindu name for the seven Pleiadic sisters called
Mothers of the World, who chose, judged, castrated, and killed sacred
kings. Their title gave rise to Greek kritikos, "judge." See Pleiades.

Kteis

Greek word for a comb, cowrie, scallop, or vulva; symbol of the

feminine Gate of Life. Pilgrims to Aphrodite's shrines carried a kteis in
token of a state of grace (chads). The custom continued in the name
of St. James of Compostela.

Kula
Hindu "flower" or "nectar," euphemism for menstrual blood,
corresponding to biblical "flowers" (Leviticus 15). A girl "bore the Kula
flower" menstruation, which assimilated her to the clan spirit
at first

dwelling in maternal bloodlines. In Fiji, the same word described a

1

newly circumcised adolescent boy, whose flow of genital blood was

supposed to connect him to the tribe and give him fertility magic like
2
that of the kula girl.

1. Mahanirvanatantra, 88. 2. Crawley 1, 79.

Kumarbi
Hittite god who made himself pregnant by biting off the genitals of
his predecessor, Father Heaven. Having no vagina, Kumarbi had to be
cut open to deliver his offspring, as in the biblical myth of Adam's
birth-giving. Like Kumarbi, the Chinese ancestor-god Kun managed to

516
 become pregnant but had to be opened to give birth. Many
his belly 1
Kundalini
similar myths suggest constant male experimentation in primitive times, Kupparu
way for envious men or gods to copy the female magic of re-
to find a
^^^^^^^^^^^
production. See Birth-Giving, Male.
[Link], 180.

Kundalini
Tantric image of the female serpent coiled in the lowest chakra of
the human body, in the pelvis. An aim of Tantric yoga was to "realize
Kundalini" by certain exercises and meditations, such as yoni-mudra:
contraction of the perineal muscles, training men to suppress ejacula-

tion. If Kundalini could be induced to uncoil and mount through the

spinal chakras to the brain, the adept would experience the bliss of her

emergence as the "thousand-petaled lotus" from the top of the head,

which meant union of the self with the infinite. Tibetan lamas still
consider the most secret, sacred mantra the one that wakens the

sleeping Kundalini and causes her to

1
rise.

1. BardoThodol, 221.

I
Kupala
Slavonic "Water-Mother" derived from the springtime Aphrodite
who annually renewed her virginity and the vitality of nature with

baptism. Worshippers of Kupala bathed themselves in rivers and

purified their souls with the "dew of Kupala" gathered during the night
of her They would pray:
festival. "I come to thee, little water-mother,
with head bowed and repentant. Forgive me, pardon me and ye, too,
ancestors and forefathers of the water." Kupala was also connected
with the mystic Fire-flower of the fern, supposed to bloom exactly at

midnight once a year, on the night of the Goddess's festival. It was

guarded by demons, but if someone wise and bold enough to outsmart
the demons managed to seize the flower, he would understand the
language of trees. This was a typical shaman's myth of the prize of
1

secret knowledge, obtained at great risk, in the talismanic form of a

female symbol.
1 .
Larousse, 296.

Kupparu
Sumerian-Akkadian forerunner of Yom Kippur: a Festival of Atone-
ment when a New Year victim, usually a sheep, was symbolically loaded
community and killed. The Jewish festival of the
with the sins of the

scapegoat was modeled on the kupparu. See Atonement.

517
Kurgan Kurgan
Kwai-Yin
Tomb of a Scythian queen or high priestess, more elaborately
furnished with ceremonial robes and jewels than the tombs of males.

Many kurgans have been discovered in southern Russia, the territory

of ancient Amazons whose tribes were ruled by divine matriarchs.
1

[Link], 137.

Kurukulla
Dravidian "Goddess of Caverns," one of the primeval matrikadevis

(Mother Goddesses). Prototype of such western forms as Cybele,

Demeter Chthonia, Nertha, Hel, and other underground deities. She
was a red Kali, seated in her cave, with four arms: two that threaten, and
two that soothe.
1
See Kali Ma.
1. Larousse, 359.

Kvaen
"Queen" in Old Norse; title of a Scandinavian tribal ruler, according
to Roman writers, who called northern Europe the "Land of Women"
authority of women in the homes and temples. The
1
because of the
Kvaen of Faeroisland (the Faroe Islands, or the western paradise)
became the Lady of Ancestral Spirits, or Queen of the Ghostworld,
who entered medieval romantic literature as the Fairy Queen.
1. Thomson, 244.

Kvasir
"Wisest of all men" in Scandinavian myth, a sacrificial victim created
by the gods of Asgard for the sole purpose of adding his blood to
the symbolic uterus, the great Triple Cauldron under the earth. Kvasir

represented a masculine effort to take over the "wise blood" of

women, which was thought to create children out of female internal
essence. See Cauldron; Menstrual Blood. Once Kvasir's magic
blood was in the cauldron, Odin stole it from the Earth-giantess and
gave it to the male gods. 1

1. Larousse, 257.

var. Kuan-Yin Kwai-Yin

Eponymous Great Mother of China, known as the Lady Who Brings

Children; embodiment of the y'm principle, as Kali embodied the yoni
principle in India. Kwai-Yin perpetually contemplated the Golden

518
Vial of her own womb, which produced the entire world while her Kyklos Geneseon
consort Shang-te (Father Heaven) lived within her in a Chinese
version of the Jewel in the Lotus. Kwai-Yin and her Japanese counter- wm^^^m^mmmmmm
part Kwannon represented the principle of karuna, Boundless
1

Compassion.
1. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 155.

Kyklos Geneseon
Greek "Wheel of Rebirth," or Wheel of Becomings, identical to the

karmic wheel of Kali in India; symbol of early Greek ideas of reincarna-

tion put forth by such philosophical sects as the Pythagoreans and

Stoics.
1
See Reincarnation; Wheel.
1 . Bardo Thodol, 1 xvii.

519
 Tis said the story of lit
TLE RED RIDINC HOOD IS
based on the trinity of
the Goddess Diana-
virgin, mother, grand-
mother in which
the Lord of the Hunt
and the She-Wolf
also figure. This rendi-
tion is the cover of a
book, itself cut to the
outline of the familiar
little girl.

To the Greeks and Ro-

mans the lion was the
sun-god; but it was much
earlier associated
with the Goddess in
Egypt and the Middle
East. Here the Coddess
Sekhet appears with
the sun-circle around her
lion-head. Black gran-
ite; Temple of the

Goddess Mut at Ker-

nak, Egypt; ca. 14th
century b.c.

Actually, leda was the

Goddess Lat who laid
the Golden Egg, which
made her the Nile
Goose to the Egyptians.
Her friend the swan
was added by medieval
artists to allow some
erotic goings-on without

actually showing an-

other human being.
Here, they are life
sized in limestone by
Michael Anguier;
mid- 17th century.
labarum Labarum
Alleged "monogram of Christ" seen by Constantine
in his vision

mmmmmmmm^am before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, supposed to have brought about
his conversion to Christianity, afterward displayed on his labaron or

standard. Centuries later, some accounts declared it was the sign of the
cross that Constantine saw in the sky. The earliest descriptions

contradict this. The labarum was not the sign of the cross; it didn't

appear in the sky; it was not even a Christian symbol.

W% Lactantius said the emperor was "directed in a dream to cause a

^^JZ^ heavenly sign to be marked on the shields of his soldiers ... the letter
^^^^^ X with a perpendicular line through it, turned over at the top." This was
in fact the emblem of the soldiers' god Mithra, whose worship was
most popular in the legions.
1
Christians struggling to Christianize this
Labarum sign claimed it was formed of the letters chi and rho, for Christos.

However, a series of holy signs from Philae show that the labarum
2
evolved from the Egyptian ankh.
Pious hagiographers of the Middle Ages paid no attention to
Lactantius. They declared that Constantine saw in the sky "the

image of a cross described in shining light; and above the image was
written in letters of gold the legend: 'In this sign shalt thou con-

quer!'" This was the orthodox Christian myth, which survived.

3

There were other forms of the labarum or Chrismon (Christ-

monogram). Most common today is the combination of letters IHS,
often with a cross surmounting the H. This is called a signum dei,

supposed to mean Iesus Hominum Salvator, "Jesus, Savior of Man."

Taylor said the same letters had a mystic meaning in Orphic resurrec-
tion cults, where they were not Latin but Greek letters: iota, eta,

sigma.

IHS are Greek characters, by ignorance taken for Roman letters;

and Yes, which is the proper reading of those letters, is none other than
the very identical name of Bacchus, that is, of the Sun, of which Bacchus
was one of the most distinguished personifications; and Yes, or IES,
with the Latin termination US added to it, is Jesus. The surrounding rays
ofglory, as expressive of the sun 's light, make the identity of Christ and
Bacchus as clear as the sun. *

According to another interpretation, confusing Constantine's

biography with the Mithraic-Christian labarum, the letters meant in hoc

signo (in this sign), and the cross was a magical command: "Con-
quer!" Yet another tradition confused the labarum with the

Alpha-and-Omega cross, with the Greek letters of creation and

destruction on its right and left arms. This was a further adaptation of
5

very ancient matriarchal symbols; for Omega was the letter of the
destroying Moon-goddess, and Alpha was the sacred river of her blood
that gave birth to all things. (See Styx.)
I.J. H. Smith, C.G., 48. 2. d'Alviella, 180.
3. de Voragine, 271.
4. G.R. Scott, 169. 5. Koch, 23, 26.

522
 Labrys Labrys
i The double-bladed ax wielded as a scepter by the ancient Amazonian Labyrinth

: Goddess under her various names of Gaea, Rhea, Demeter, or Artemis.

I
It was a ceremonial weapon, though perhaps originally used as a
battle-ax by Scythian female warriors. When a male priesthood took
over the Goddess's shrine at Delphi, founded by Cretan "Amazons,"
j

they adopted the labrys also and gave themselves the title of Labryadae,
j

I
"ax-bearers." The title was still used in classical times. 1 It
may have
<
been based on a traditional male scepter-bearer in the Goddess's
I processions in earlier centuries, perhaps even the sacred youth
himself, consecrated to the hieros gamos, and displaying a "phallic"
!

symbol of his imminent union and sacrifice.

In modern times the labrys has been adopted by lesbians as a

I
symbol of reminiscence, in jewelry or art, of the all-female com-
munity of Lesbos and its founding mothers who worshipped only the
j
Goddess in nature and in each other.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,181.

Labyrinth
"House of the Double Ax," from labrys, the ceremonial ax used to
sacrifice bulls to the Cretan Moon-goddess. The classic Labyrinth was
the palace of Minos, "Moon-king," whose spirit dwelt in the sacred
bull, the Minotaur or Moon-bull, a Cretan form of Apis, who was

Egypt. Minos was a Lord of Death and an

1
similarly sacrificed in
underworld judge, a western counterpart of the Hindu Moon-bull
Yama, who functioned in the same way.
2

The mystic meaning of a labyrinthine design was a journey into

the otherworld and out again, like the sacred king's cyclic journeys
into death

etc.
and rebirth. Early labyrinthine designs

referred to the earth-womb.

to get lost in;

labyrinths
The classic labyrinth was
had only one path, traversing all parts of the figure. Such
it

were meant for ceremonial walking, "almost always con-

on coins, caves, tombs,
not a maze
us
Labyrinth
nected with a cave. ... In those cases where the ritual has been

preserved, the labyrinth itself, or a drawing of it, is invariably situated

at the entrance of the cave or dwelling." 5

Labyrinth-games were played by witches for ceremonial purposes.

Some descended to the nursery level, like the game Troy Town still

4
played by children on a pattern of seven labyrinthine circles cut in sod.
Some labyrinths were taken over by Christian churches and

incorporated into floor patterns, gardens, or hedges. Some were

insinuated into church designs by masonic brotherhoods as secret
Gnostic symbols. Chartres Cathedral had a labyrinth with the six-
lobed device of Aphrodite at its center. The path of the labyrinth was

exactly 666 feet long, Aphrodite's sacred number. 5 (See Hexagram.)

The central lotus once bore the names of the master builders, who

523
Lachesis perhaps hoped to achieve immortality by the Gnostic name-magic.
6
Ladder But the names have been erased.
1. Graves, CM. 1,255. 2. Lethaby, 156. 3. Norman, 107. 4. Lethaby, 155.
5. Pepper & Wilcock, 159. 6. Norman, 108.

Lachesis
"The Measurer," second of the three Fates or Moerae in Greek
religion; corresponding to the second person of Kali as the Preserver.

She who measured out the life-span of every creature was the same as

the Goddess preserved who

up life to the time when it must end, and
Atropos the Cutter took over from Lachesis.

LaDama
"The Lady," worshipped by Basque witches in a sacred cave of the
Amboto mountains. In Semitic languages, Dama also meant "blood-
1

mother."
1. Pepper & Wilcock, 150.

Ladder
Jacob's a copy of the Egyptian "Ladder of Set," whereby
Ladder was
a king or prophetmight climb up to heaven "when he hath made use ol

Book of the Dead the words of power of Ra." The Book of the Dead said a pharaoh
Common name for the
might become Lord of the Ladder, assisted into heaven by a prayer that
collection of
he was taught: "Homage to thee, O divine Ladder. Homage to thee,
Egyptian funerary
papyri written
O Ladder of Set! Stand thou upright, O divine Ladder. Stand thou
between 1500 and 1350 upright, O Ladder of Set! Stand thou upright, O Ladder of Horus,
B.C., including whereby Osiris appeared in heaven when he used the words of power o
Vignettes, Hymns, Ra." 1

Chapters, and The dead king's subjects were assured that "the gods made a ladder
descriptive Rubrics.
for (him) that he might ascend to heaven on it." The king's funerary
Among the best-
preserved, and most inscriptions said, "I set up a ladder to heaven among the gods." 2
typical, copies of the The ladder to heaven was a relic of shamanistic death-rebirth
Theban Recension of was ascended by
ceremonies. It kings, prophets, sages, bodhisattvas, anc
the Book of the
other Enlightened Ones, the "angels" on the ladder in Jacob's dream
Dead is the much-
studied Papyrus of (Genesis 28:12). Among central Asian tribes the "soul ladder" was a
Ani. post fixed on the grave, with fourteen notches representing the "steps"
or days of the moon in ascent. A similar Heavenly Ladder was made in !

India with wooden sword blades, which the priest must climb to perforrj
sacramental decapitation of a white cock at the top. Chinese shamans ol

high priests ascended a ladder of knives, walking barefoot on the edges

3
as an initiatory ordeal.

Priest-kings in antiquity climbed soul-ladders to meet the Goddess)

524

j&T:
bn the occasion of their hieros gamos and also after death, when their Ladder
returned to the Mother who bore them. Sometimes the ladder was
fcouls

berceived as a familiar passageway between the Goddess in heaven and

the king on earth. Kosingas of Thrace controlled his subjects
per consort
py threatening to ascend his special wooden ladder to the Great
Goddess Hera, to complain to her of their conduct and invoke her
4
Lvrath on them.

As
a rule the soul-ladder passed through the seven heavens, like

me rnundi in Gnostic cosmology. Celsus said initiates into the

axis Aulus Cornelius
Mithraic Mysteries climbed a klimaxox ladder of seven rungs. 5 The first Celsus

for Saturn, the second

Patrician Roman
[ung was lead Venus, the third bronze
tin for for
scholar of the first
lupiter, the fourth iron for Mercury, the fifth "monetary alloy" for who wrote
century a.d.,
Mars, the sixth silver for the moon, and the seventh gold for the sun. At atlength on the
the top, a platform represented the sphere of the fixed stars, the subjects of medicine,
6
Empyrean. agriculture,

As a symbol of ecstatic philosophy,

initiatory ascents in the sacred Mysteries,
jurisprudence, and
ladder was carried over into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
[he religion.
Mohammed's vision like Jacob's was "a ladder rising from the temple in

the 'Center') to heaven, with angels to right

Jerusalem (pre-eminently
7
pnd left; on this ladder the souls of the righteous mounted to God."

Both Jacob's ladder and Mohammed's were based on much earlier

Egyptian representations of the pharaoh being welcomed into heaven

8
by the gods, who helped him up the last rungs of his ascent. Like the
ladders of Set, Osiris, and Buddha, the ladder of the pharaoh had 14

[tteps, alluding to the waxing days of the lunar cycle. Another 14 steps
[represented the descending part of the cycle, into the underworld and

Ipack.
There were many "ladder-saints" in Syria and Persia during the

century a.d., when ladder-sitting or pillar-sitting became a fad

ffth

[among holy hermits. St. Simeon Stylites was a famous Christian pillar-

remaining motionless so long that his living limbs

laint, glorified for

Developed gangrene. One of his followers and admirers was named St.
Badoth (Persian Schiadurte). The legend of this saint said he saw a
i'ision of Simeon at the top of heaven-reaching ladder, calling down to

liim, "Mount up, Sadoth; fear not! I mounted yesterday; it is

your turn

|oday." Shortly afterward,

Sadoth was martyred and climbed up to
10
|ieaven.
The sacred klimax was so popular in Byzantine and Gnostic
conography that it was even canonized as a bogus saint, John Clima-
us. A mystical book supposed to have been written by him appeared at

Vlt. Sinai in the 7th century a.d., the Ladder to Paradise." This St.

ohn was said to have been an abbot at the Sinai monastery, but his
urname suggested a Tantric adept. The klimax was more than a ladder;
modern usage suggests,
is its it was also an ascent to sexual bliss through
narriage with the Goddess. Some Gnostic sects were
still using the

adder as a symbol of the soul's marriage in the Middle Ages.

\.B<x>k<>ftheDead,lO\. 2. Eliade, S., 489. 3. Eliade, S., 283, 426, 442.

525
Lady 4. Eliade, S., 391. 5. Cumont, MM., 144. 6. Eliade, S., 121-22.
7. Eliade, S., 489. 8. Gifford, 78. 9. Campbell, M.I., 169. 10. Brewster, 109.
Lamb
[Link].199.

Lady
1

Anglo-Saxon hkf-dige, "the Giver of Bread." In ancient matriarchal

societies, women had charge of food storehouses and of doling out
harvests to members of their clan. "Lord" came from hlaf-ward, the

guardian of the bread; for the husband of the tribal mother had the job
of protecting food stores against vandalism or unauthorized removal. 2
Thus the God who gave daily bread, as in the Lord's Prayer,
usurped ancient feminine prerogatives. In a way his spouse remained
the "giver," for the Latin Madonna, like "my lady," retained the same
implication of My-Mother- Who-Gives.
1. Brewster, 349. 2. Funk, 257.

Laius
"The King," who preceded Oedipus. He was called the father of his
because kings who were slain by their successors were commonly
killer,

given the title of father to the killer-son, to indicate that the divine
spirit of the god passed from one to the other. See Kingship.

Lakshmi
Hindu Goddess of Sovereignty, by whose authority Indra claimed to
be king of the gods. Lakshmi gave him a drink of Soma or "wise blood"
from her own body, so he could produce the illusion of birth-giving
and wear the many-colored veils of Maya. All the oldest Indo- 1

European gods had similar claims to sovereignty through feminine

essences. See Menstrual Blood.
[Link],75.

Lamb
Totemic symbol of Christ, based on the Jewish custom of sacrificing
lamb to Yahweh at Passover, as a substitute for the primitive
a firstborn

sacrifices of firstborn sons that Yahweh originally demanded (Exodus

13:2).
As the Lamb of God (agnus dei), Jesus was supposed to redeem
Adam, and through him the whole human race,
the firstborn son
which must be "washed in the blood of the Lamb," as the church
taught. Throughout the Middle Ages, orthodox theology insisted that

526
 Adam was buried on Golgotha at the exact spot where Jesus's cross Lamhussu
stood, so the blood of the Lamb-savior ran down into the earth and Lammas
brought salvation to Adam's remains. Eve was not buried there,
1

however; theologians said nothing whatever about her salvation.

The medieval name of Agnus Dei was given to cakes of wax
stamped with the figure of a lamb and sold by the papacy, which
preserved an exclusive monopoly on their sale by a papal bull of 1471.
This charm was in great demand, as it was advertised as sure

protection against all kinds of destructive storms the "acts of God" as

defined by theologians. 2 In effect, the power of the Son was invoked
to protect humanity against the wrath of his Father.

[Link],S.,268. 2. H. Smith, 276.

Lamhussu
Dark-red royal garment of Babylonian kings, the blood-color assumed
their surrogate sacrificial victims in the Sacaea
by festival; the same
"scarlet" (Matthew 27:28) or "purple" (Mark 15:17) color worn by
Jesus as sacred king. See Menstrual Blood; Purple.

Lamia
[
Greek name for the
Libyan serpent-goddess Medusa, Neith,
Athene, Anatha, or Buto. Lamia was probably a variant of Babylonian
1
I

I Lamashtu, "Mother of Gods" worshipped at Der as a serpent with a

woman's head. Though Lamashtu was feared as a Kali-like Destroyer,
|
H yet she was also revered as a
supreme Goddess, called Daughter of
Heaven and Great Lady. 2 Greek myth made her another rival of Hera.
|
The Latin Vulgate Bible gave "Lamia" as a translation of Hebrew
I Lilith, Adam's recalcitrant first wife. The Authorized Version ren-
I dered lamia as a screech owl. The Revised Version translated the same
I word as "night monster." During the Middle Ages, lamia became a
I general term for a witch. A 1 5th-century German professor of theology
I stated authoritatively that lamiae were "demons in the shape of old
I women." ? See Vagina Dentata.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,205. 2. Budge, AT., 117. 3. Robbins, 295-96.

Limmas
>axon Hlaf-mass, the Feast of Bread, was a major summertime
( of the Great Goddess of the grain: Ceres, Ops, Demeter
estival

month of August. Lammas was

or

Juno Augusta, ruler of the harvest

the "Eve" of this month of ripening, often classified with May Eve and
Halloween as a festival of witches, because the church didn't succeed
eradicating its
pagan significance. Sometimes
1
Lammas was identified

527

r
Lancelot with the Celtic midsummer festival of Lugnasad, celebrating the
death and resurrection of Lug as grain god. Churchmen said Lammas
"

mmaammmmmmmm^mm was one or me witches' four annual Great Sabbaths, based on the
four seasonal festivals of the pagan year.
1. Brewster, 349.

Lancelot
Arthurian hero based on early Celtic conceptions of the phallic

lightning god Lanceor, the Golden Lance, mated to Colombe, the

Dove, a northern version of Aphrodite Columba. Like the Oriental
1

vajra, meaning phallus, jewel, or lightning, Lanceor descended into the

Goddess's abyssal womb to fertilize the world. Thus Plutarch stated
that Lightning was the impregnator of the Waters. 2
Though anthropomorphized in romance as a knight of the Round
Table, Lancelot showed signs of his pagan origin: he was still the
lover of the Mother, and the reincarnation of his own elder self. He lay
with Elaine, or Elen, or Helen, or Eileen, or Hel-Aine, the same
3
Goddess worshipped at the Celtic lunar shrine of Cnoc Aine. She was
the Weaver of Fate, and she made Lancelot invincible with her gift

fetish, a red silk sleeve. She was also Lancelot's queen

of a vaginal
mother Elaine, who christened him Galahad, the same name given
his younger reincarnation or "son." The elder hero received the name
Lancelot when he was initiated by the Lady of the Lake in her magic
Land of Women. 4
Like Osiris-Horus, Apollo-Heracles, Zeus-Zagreus, God-Jesus,
and other versions of the ubiquitous father-son deity, Lancelot
became a Lord of Death and a keeper of the paradise-castle, which
appeared in the romances as Joyous Gard, the "Happy World."
Lancelot stole Arthur's queen, living symbol of the land of Britain, after

rescuing her from a fiery death at the stake, on a conviction of

witchcraft. It was she who announced that Lancelot came from Jesus
Christ in the 8th generation, while Galahad was of the 9th genera-
5
tion. Though medieval churchmen insisted that Jesus never begot
children, the heathen bards continued to popularize the contrary
belief because it was the best way to account for the old concept of
successive reincarnations.
Like many other figures of Celtic romance, Lancelot seems to
have developed out of Oriental Tantric traditions. He resembled the
Tantric saint Padma-sambhava, the Lake-Born Vajra, i.e., a phallic
6
lightning-bolt reborn from the Water-Mother as Lady of the Lake.
The Dove of the Sea was his mother-bride, symbol of the Abyss

(Maria). Lancelot's name, "Big Lance," might be compared to the

other primitive Tantric-Celtic hero Peredur Paladrhir, "Spearman with
a Long Shaft," which described the ithyphallic god in union with his

Goddess. 7

528
 Lancelot's origin in Meidelant, "Land of Maidens," also suggests Lapis Manalis
an early date and an Oriental root of his basic myth. 8 He suggested Lat
Krishna who was raised by "holy women" in a sacred grove, and grew ^^^^^^^^^^^m
up to be an eminently sexual god. 9 Lancelot was not a solar deity but
the rival of the sun god, represented by Gawain, with whom Lancelot
fought a great battle, defeating him when his strength ebbed at the

end of the solar day.

1. Malory 1,377. 2. Rawon, E.A., 151; Knight, S.L., 135. 3. Graves, W.G., 409.
4. Malory 1,91. 5. Malory 2, 171. 6. Waddell, 258. 7. Squire, 369.
8. Rees, 293. 9. Lamusse, 367.

Lapis Manalis
"Stone of the Underworld," or of the dead, the sacred stone covering
manes on Rome's Palatine Hill. At the annual festival of
the pit of the

Mania, the Ancestral Moon-mother, the stone was removed and her
children the manes or ghosts-of-ancestors were invited to join the feast.
Sometimes the festival was called Parentalia, since the ghosts in the

underworld were the same as the diparentes or "parent-gods" from past

1

ages.
Northern Europeans celebrated the same kind of festival at Hal-
loween or Samhain, also a feast to which ancestral ghosts were
invited.

1. Lamusse, 213.

Lara

Short name of the Roman Goddess Acca Larentia, mother of the

lares or household spirits. She was honored at the annual Larentalia, a
festival inherited from pre-Roman times. See Akka.

Lat

Italian latte, "milk," descended from the milk-giving Goddess Lat,

eponymous Mother of pre-Roman Latium. She was also Latona, or
Leto, mother of the World Egg and the sun. Arabs knew her as Al-
1

Lat, the Moon, later masculinized as the Islamic Allah. She was well
known in pre-dynastic Egypt. Herodotus called her "an archaic

queen of the Lower Kingdom." Hers was one of Egypt's oldest oracular

shrines, which the Greeks knew as Latopolis. To the Egyptians, this

2

5
place was Menhet, "House of the Moon."
Lat was the Moon because the ancient world regarded the moon
the universal source of nourishment: a celestial Breast that pro-
duced the Milky Way. From the moon came water, milk, blood, plant
sap, and all other life-supporting fluids.

529
Leda Lat was the foundress of Latin matriarchal culture. The old word
Left Hand latifundia meant
parcels of land allotted to clan matriarchs by the

^^^^^i^^ Goddess herself. 4 See Matrilineal Inheritance. The island of Malta

was once Ma Lata, "Mother Lat."
In 1428, the church totally destroyed an Italian town whose
were suspected of heretical opinions. Oddly enough, the
residents
town was named Magnalata: "Great Lat."
1. Graves, W.G., 318. 2. Larousse, 29. 3. Budge, G.E. 2, 50.
4. Cumont, M.M., 74.

Leda
"Lady" or "Woman," another name of the Goddess Lat, who laid
theWorld Egg and hatched Castor and Pollux, the morning and
evening stars; and Helen, the earthly incarnation of the Moon-
goddess; and Clytemnestra, who was to Mycenae as Helen was to Troy.

Mythographers confused Leda with Nemesis, who coupled with

Zeus when he took the form of a swan-king. Thus she became the
famous Goose that Laid the Golden Egg (the sun, Apollo) under her
other name, Leto. 1 To the Egyptians, this was the Nile Goose, Hathor.
A favorite theme of medieval artists was the coupling of Leda with
the swan-god, which permitted an erotic subject to be shown without
involvement of a human male figure.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,207.

Left Hand
Latin sinister, "left," came to mean diabolic, witchlike; dexter,

"right," yielded dextrous, meaning skilful or clever. Ambidextrous is

literally "two right hands." Right-ness is associated with righteous-

ness, rectitude, rectification, good right hand, adroitness (from French a

droite, "to the right"). Left is
gauche, clumsy or stupid, with its
English derivatives gawk, gawky. Italian mancino, "left," means deceit-
ful. German link, "left," means wrong, backward, perverse.
Anglo-Saxon lyft meant weak or worthless. The evil eye was said to be
the one. 1 According to the Brahmans, left-handedness goes
left
2
against the grain of decency. Jewish mystics said God's left hand is the
hand that destroys. Satanael or Sammael the death-god personifies
God's left side. The Gospel of Nicodemus said the thief crucified at
3

Jesus's right hand received the kingdom of heaven; the thief crucified
at his left hand was damned. 4 Superstitious folk still believe it's lucky to

see the new moon over one's right shoulder but disastrous to see it
5
over the left.

Sagan asks, "In the worldwide associations of the words 'right' and
'left' evidence of a rancorous conflict early in the history of
there is

mankind. What could arouse such powerful emotions?" 6

530
 What else, indeed, but patriarchs' battle of the sexes? Left Hand
myths agree that the right side was male, the left side female.
All

Wherever the deity was an androgyne, this arrangement was fol-

owed. Typical was the Hindu bisexual deity Bhava, "Existence," with a
woman's left side and a man's right, signifying "man together with
Mature" and showing that all Existence is made up of two sexes.
7
\ndrogynous idols of Kali and Shiva showed the same arrangement.
Greek Pelopids tattooed themselves with a female symbol on the Pelopids Tribes
left shoulder in honor of maternal ancestry, a male symbol on claiming descent from
the right shoulder for paternal ancestors. Egyptians said the left hand Pelops, a legendary
sacred king sacrificed,
^represented the Goddess Maat, the right hand her consort Thoth.
partly devoured, and
Babylonians prayed: "Let my goddess stand at my left hand! Let my god resurrected by Mother
8
istand at my right hand!" Demeter; inhabitants
The Jews said the seed of female children emanated from a father's of the Peloponnese.

left testicle, while that of male children emanated from his right
9
testicle. This ancient belief persisted among Christians even up to the

present century. In 1891 a book entitled Essentials of Conception

said a man could "progenate a male or female child at will, by putting
an elastic band around the testicle not required. Semen from the right
10
testicle progenates male, whilst that from the left female children."
According to some rabbinical traditions, the left hand of God was
1

which may have been why patriarchs thought it necessary not

{female,
|to let "thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" (Matthew 6:3).
Rabbis taught that"A wise man's heart is at his right hand: but a
(fool's heart is at his left" (Ecclesiastes 10:2). Matriarchal societies
believed the menstrual blood that made a child in a mother's womb
was her heart's blood, engendered on the left side of the body; but the

patriarchs displaced the heart to the right.

In a sense, modern research has found some physical basis for

pelief imagery of the ancients. The left

in the left/female, right/male

hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, is said
to evolve logical thought sequences and suppress sensory input that
might interfere with problem solving. The right hemisphere, governing
the left side of the body, is called the intuitive, creative, or imaginative

part of the brain. It is supposed to generate the more sensitive, broader

awareness and response made manifest in feelings, empathy, fantasy,
art, visual imagery, and inspiration: many of its qualities were belittled by
n
patriarchal thinkers asincomprehensible "women's intuition." This
isan over-simplification, since both hemispheres work together in both
fexes, and their functions are not neatly divisible. One half of a brain
could hardly exist without the other.
India prized intuitive thinking somewhat more than logical think-

ing, and recognized two Ways to religious revelation: the male, solar,

ascetic "way to the known as the Right-Hand Path; and the

gods"
female, lunar, sensual way of the Goddess, known as Varna Marg or
12
literally, the Female Way.
the Left-Hand Path Tantric yogis recog-
nized the left side of the body as the seat of every man's "female
soul" or shakti, with whom he would be united after death. In token of

531
Left Hand reverence for the indwelling female soul, the yogis always entered a
13
place of worship with the left foot forward.
mm^^^mm^^^^m Europe's pagan customs, embodied in "witchcraft," maintained
the virtues of left-sidedness against prevailing patriarchal opinion.
Witches said itching or burning of the left ear betokened joy in the near
future, while the same sensations of the right ear meant sorrow. 14
Witches' dances circled to the left, counterclockwise, moonwise, or
"widdershins" as folk dances still do following the retrograde
motion of the moon instead of the clockwise motion of the sun. The
medieval church said dancing, turning, or circumambulating in this
direction was heresy. During the centuries of persecution, countless

people were burned alive for dancing widdershins, especially if they

turned their backs to the center of the circle. Back-to-back dancing was
15
evidently considered indecent, though widely practiced.
The pagans were firmly in favor of the widdershins direction. Pre-
Christian kings in Scandinavia were expected to lay magic circles of

protection around their cities by circumambulating them widdershins.

Irish druidic law insisted on the same counterclockwise movement
around the holy omphalos at Tara, shrine of Mother Earth: "Thou shalt
not go righthandwise around Tara." 16 Tantric influence also directed

Middle-Eastern Sufis to circumambulate their shrines in the widder-

shins direction. 17
The Christians reversed the direction of all turning charms, such
as the divinatory magic of St. Andrew's Well on the isle of Lewis.
Sick pilgrims were told to float a wooden bowl on the waters. If the bowl
turned sunwise, the patient understood that he would get well. If it

turned moonwise, he would die. 18

Witches were said to make the sign of the cross with their left

hands: another proof of heresy. The left-handed cross in graphic

symbolism was the Oriental moon-swastika, with arms pointing counter-

clockwise, an emblem of Kali, as opposed to the sun-swastika, which
19
represented male gods. See Swastika.
The Scottish rite of handfasting was derived from a pagan-Oriental
marriage custom, incorporating the figure-eight Infinity sign that
represented union of Kali and Shiva among Tantric yogis and yoginis.
The couple joined right hands to unite their "male" souls, then
joined left hands to unite their "female" souls, forming the Infinity sign
with their arms thus crossed. 20 The sign itself is still used in modern

mathematics, but handshakes are now exclusively and significantly

right-handed.
Another Tantric sign of male-and-female unity was pressing the
palms of the hands together, fingers upward: this meant two bodies
joined as one. The gesture is still one of greeting and blessing among
Indians. During the 12th and 13th centuries when Hindu religious
customs were penetrating Europe, the gesture was adopted by Catharan
heretics as the manibus junctis (hand-joining), which the orthodox

church later took to itself.

21
Now it is the standard gesture of prayer,
both east and west.

532
 added still more support to the male-female
Classic traditions Left Hand
images of rightness and leftness. While giving birth to the sun and moon

(Apollo and Artemis), the Goddess Leto grasped a male palm tree
with her right hand and a female olive tree with her left. 22 When
giving
birth to Zeus, the Goddess Rhea placed her hands on the earth to
cause five female spirits to spring up from her left handprint, and five

male spirits from her right handprint (see Fingers). The matriarchal
magic of Medusa was mythically symbolized: blood from her left side
could give rebirth to the dead; blood from her right side instantly
destroyed a human body. 25 The Romans still believed in the benevo-
lence of the left side. Plutarch said it was a good omen to see an
augury, such as a flying eagle, on one's left side; an evil omen to see it

24
on the right.
Men placed wedding rings on women's left hands to fetter their
magic power and hold their hearts. From the most ancient times,
men believed that a certain vessel or vein ran directly from a woman's
heart to the fourth finger of her left hand. This was a remarkably
durable belief; Lemnius mentioned it as late as 1658. 25
According to heraldic symbolism, the bend sinister, a stripe slant-

ing to the left, A warrior bearing

signified bastardy or lack of a father.
the bend sinister on his shield was therefore
mother's son only, after
his

the fashion of the heathen matrilineal clan. Fatherlessness was not

considered a mark of dishonor until Christianity had established the

patriarchal family system throughout Europe.

Related to the symbolism of the left and right hands was the

symbolism of east and west. Rome established the four cardinal points
by a north-south line and an east-west line, decumanus. The eastern
half was familiaris, the area of good omens and of the sun. The
western half was hostilis, the area of evil omens and of the moon. 26
Since it was the custom to face the "still point" of the heavens the
north celestial pole for orientation of buildings and towns, the left
hand was to the west, the right hand to the east, as maps are still

made. To the west lay the Moon-land, home of the ancestral dead,
27
called Westerners by the Chinese, Greeks, Celts, and Egyptians. As
long ago as the Stone Age, the dead were buried facing west. "To go
west" has always been a synonym for "to die." Death meant a

journey to the western gate of the Mother. Aztecs called the west "the
place of women," where human beings once crawled out of the Borsippa Ancient
genital hole of Mother Earth, to which all the dead must return. 28 sister city of Babylon,
located about 5
On the other hand literally the east was the place of male solar
1

miles to the southwest;

gods greeted every morning with the formula, "He is risen." The now known as Birs
eastern sun-temple of Borsippa was known as the Temple of the Right Nimrud. Borsippa
Hand. 29 The main avenue of Alexandria ran from the Gate of the flourished greatly in

Sun on the east to the Gate of the Moon on the west. 30 The eastern abt the 7th and 6th
centuries B.C. It was
of an Egyptian temple was the birthplace of the sun god Ra; the west
destroyed by Xerxes I in
was the place of his dying. 31 This was probably the origin of the eastern the 5th, and partly
apse in a Christian church, which like the Egyptian abt was "orient- restored by Antiochus I

ed" toward the east, birthplace of the sun. in the 3rd.

533
Legba Christians taught that the west was the natural home of "demons."
Lemnos The Bruce Papyrus depicted Jesus revealing to his disciples the magic
words that would make evil Archons "flee away to the West, to the Left

Hand." 32 When the Greek church baptized converts, "they first

turned their faces to the west, and so renounced the devil, and then to

Bruce Papyrus Second- the east, and made their covenant with Christ."" When John Huss
century Gnostic was burned for heresy at Constance in 141 5, he was at first bound to th<

manuscript stake facing east; but the error was noticed in time, and he was shifted
discovered at Nag 54
to face west, the direction "fitting for a heretic."
Hammadi in Upper
Superstition still maintains the male-and-female symbolism of east
Egypt during the 1940s.
and west. The bad luck caused by spilling salt (symbol of blood) can

be averted by throwing the salt over the left shoulder, toward the west,
35
Archons Gnostic relegating the bad luck to the devils.
term for good or evil Gypsies believed they could keep a horse from straying by marking
angels, especially as the right fore hoof with a male cross, the left fore hoof with a female
world-creating or world- 36
The idea was that the sexual symbols would attract one another
ring.
governing spirits who
and tangle the horse's feet like a hobble.
controlled the

phenomena of the customary for rulers to hold the "phallic" scepter in the
It is still

stars, heavens, weather, right hand, the "yonic" orb in the left. This usage descended from
etc. the king's symbolic display of the hieros gamos between himself and
the Goddess of his land. The original meaning was that the ruler

united male and female principles; but the meaning was lost, and only
JohnHuss(ca. 1370- the symbols remained.
1415) Bohemian
I. Elworthy, 138. 2. O'Flaherty, 147. 3. Cavendish, P.E., 259. 4. de Voragine, 208.
religious reformer, 5. Hazlitt, 417. 6. Sagan, 185. 7. O'Flaherty, 148; Knight, S.L., 33; Umusse, 371.
founder of the Hussite 8. Assyr.& Bab. Lit, 420. 9. G.R. Scott, 142-43. 10. Pearsall, W.B., 240.
sectwhich I
Sheehy, 290-91. 12. Campbell, Or.M., 202-3; Avalon, 164.
I.

13. MahynirvanatMitra, 72. 14. de Lys, 162. 1 5. Robbins, 209, 421.

renounced papal
16. Pepper &
Wilcock, 258. 17. Shah, 382. 1 8. Hazlitt, 8. [Link] Lys, 452-53.
indulgences and the 20. de Lys, 168-69. 21. J.B. Russell, 222. 22. Elworthy, 100.
doctrine of 23. Graves, CM.
1, 175, 185. 24. Scot, 163. 25. Hazlitt, 2. 26. Lindsay, O.A., 19.

transubstantiation. 27. H. Smith, 39. 28. Neumann, CM., 184. 29. d'Alviella, 27.

Huss was promised 30. de Camp, A.E., 130. 31. Budge, E.L.,94. 32. Legge 2, 195. 33. Hazlitt, 66.
a
34. Lea, 248. 35. Budge, A.T., 323. 36. Bowness,41.
safe-conduct to
defend his views before
a church council, but
the promise was broken;
he was declared Legba
heretic, arrested, and
Voodoo god similar to the Trickster or Hermes of classical myth.
burned.
Though an ithyphallic god of lust, Legba was also androgynous. In
ceremonial dances his part was taken by a girl wearing an erect
wooden phallus. He was considered an embodiment of the Word or
logos of the Goddess Fa, "Fate."
1

Hays, 341.

Lemnos
Island shrine of the Goddess Myrine, served by an ancient female-
dominant society appearing in Hellenic myth as a race of Amazons
who massacred all their husbands. Afterward, they kept up their

534
numbers by inviting passing mariners to impregnate them. Jason and Lemures
the Argonauts called at Lemnos for this purpose. As a center of pre- 1
Lesbians
Hellenic religion, Lemnos was sacred to such deities as Aphrodite and ^^^^^^^^^^^
Hephaestus, to whom Father Zeus was distinctly hostile.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 223.

Lemures
"Ghosts," Roman term for ancestral spirits who rose from their

graves to attend the annual festival of the Lemuria; a synonym for lares,

larvae, or wanes. 1
The mythic lost continent "Lemuria" literally
meant a ghostworld.

1. Lurousse, 213.

Lent
From Saxon Lenet-monath, the lunar month of "lengthening" (of

days). Fasting and abstention of the Lenten period was copied from the
Roman Matronalia or Feast of Mothers, celebrated during the
Kalends of March and forbidden to men. 1
The women performed their
rites in the sacred grove between the Aventine and Palatine hills,

where Sabine women used to sacrifice their harvest-god Consus each

year.
2
After the Matronalia, Roman women observed a period of

chastity and fasting until the festival of Ceres in April. This custom,

originally intended to insure the fertility and vitality of the crops, was
3
copied by the Christian church and converted into the fast of Lent.

1 .
Larousse, 204. 2. Bachofen, 36. 3. Gaster, 645.

Lesbians
Amazons took the isle of Lesbos and made it one of their "isles of

women," a sacred colony dedicated to worship of the female principle,

1
as later Christian monasteries were dedicated to worship of the male.
In the 6th century B.C., Lesbos was ruled by a group of women devoted
and Artemis, and the practice of charis,
to the service of Aphrodite

"grace," meaning music, art, dancing, poetry, philosophy, and

romantic
"Lesbian" love.
The most famouscolonist was the poet Sappho, whose contempo-
she was even greater than Homer. Her work didn't survive
raries said

the book-burnings of the early Christian era. She was one of the first
classic authors to be attacked because of her homosexual orientation
and her devotion to the Goddess. By the 8th century a.d., nothing
survived of her large corpus of poetry except a few fragments quoted
2
by other authors.
Female homosexuality was generally regarded as a virtually

535
Lethe unthinkable threat in patriarchal societies. Christian Europe regarded
Leto lesbianism as "a crime without a name," and sometimes burned

^a^B^H^a^HH^HI lesbians alive without trial. To this day, female homosexuals are credited

with fearful powers; Frank Caprio said "Lesbianism is capable of

3
influencing the stability of our social structure." Any phallocentric
society would naturally so regard women indifferent to a phallus.
1. Lurousse, 122. 2. Encyc. Brit., "Sappho." 3. Klaich, 89.

Lethe

"Forgetfulness," the Water of Oblivion in the Greek underworld, a

spring giving the River Lethe. According to Orphics and other

rise to

mystery-cultists, the spring of Lethe under a white cypress was the

first thing to be seen in the underworld by a newly dead soul; and the
soul would be made very thirsty, and would be tempted to drink. Part
of the mystery-cultists' training was to learn endurance of thirst, for a

draught of Lethe would wipe out their memories of their previous

incarnations and leave them no wiser than the rest of humanity, always
born again without remembering previous The enlightened
births.

one should seek instead the spring of Memory (Mnemosyne). "Thou

shalt find to the left of the house of Hades a spring, and by the side
thereof standing a white cypress. To this spring approach not near. But
thou shalt find another, from the lake of Memory cold water flowing
forth, and there are guardians before it." l
The location of Lethe in the underworld, in classical and Gnostic
imagery, derived from the ancient oracular cave of the Earth-deities
(Chthonioi) at Lebadeia, where one made elaborate preparations to go
down into the dark pit and learn his fate through "things seen" or
"things heard." Among the preparations, "he has to drink the water

called Lethe, in order to achieve forgetfulness of all that he has

and on top of it another water, the water of
hitherto thought of;

Mnemosyne, which gives him remembrance of what he sees when

he has gone down." 2
Classical writers made Lethe one of the principal rivers of the
3
underworld, along with Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Styx.
1. Guthrie, 229. 2. Guthrie, 225. 3. Larousse, 165.

Leto
Mother of the Sun and Moon (Apollo and Artemis) in Greek myth; a
Greek form of the eastern fertility-goddess Lat, who was called Latona
Queen Lat in pre-Roman Latium, her Italian territory. Her
1
or
Greek myth was confused; she was the mother of the moon (Artemis),
and yet also the daughter of the moon (Phoebe). She was further

536
 nis represented as a mortal "virgin mother" impregnated
by the Heav- Leukippe
nly Father, Zeus. Liber
1 .
Graves, CM. 1,57.

Leukippe
'White Mare," Cretan horse-goddess probably descended from the
-lindus' Saranyu, whom the British called Epona. In
Mycenae, Mare-
leaded Demeter was both Leukippe mare of Life, and
the white

vlelanippe the black mare of Death. Her priests were castrated and
,vore female dress to imitate priestesses. See Horse. 1

1. Garter, 316; Graves, W.G., 425.

Nathan
Giggly One," Hebrew title of the Great Serpent Nehushtan,
lose worship was established by Moses The
a
(2 Kings 18:4). priestly
le Levi meant a son of Leviathan, who was once another form of
lweh even though later centuries converted him into a demon. The
from the headdress of Levite 2
lop's miter evolved priests. See
mt.
1. Gaster, 576. 2. Briffault 3, 108.

me's Father Bacchus was also Liber Pater, consort of the Goddess
:ra, or Libra. Their divine marriage took place at the Liberalia on
irch 17, later Christianized as St. Patrick's Day, since Patrick or
icius was a Celtic form of the same god. 1

His Greek form was Dionysus Liber, annually reborn as the

ine Child laid in a winnowing-basket or manger. This ceremony

adopted into the legend of the infant Christ, called a son of the god
ce worshipped as Liber in Jerusalem. 2 When the Roman temple of
le Great Mother was converted into the church of Santa Maria

aggiore, the manger ceremony remained an essential part of its

istmas observances. Usener claimed the church was founded by
3
Liberius, possibly a confusion with the name of the pagan god.
Dionysus.)
Votaries of Liber were "libertines." The modern meaning still
"Liberty" was also derived from their cult
>kes their orgiastic rites.

of the Liberalia, when, as part of the festivity, slaves were

iporarily free and permitted to behave as if they were masters.

Hiis practice passed into medieval Carnival customs.
1. Umussse, 209. 2. Tacitus, 660. 3. Miles, 107.

537
libra Libra

Astrological Lady of the Scales, from the Goddess Libera worshipped

^^^^^^^^ in Carthage Queen of the Stars. Like the Egyptian
as Astroarche,

Maat she represented the balancing process of karmic law. Her

,

figure-eight glyph of "equilibrium" (now the mathematical symbol of

infinity) signified action and reaction under the rule of Fate. 1
In astrology, Libra is still "ruled by Venus," because she was
identified with the Roman Venus-Aphrodite of the ius naturale
natural law, matriarchal justice. 2 The blindfold on today's Goddess of

Justice was unknown in antiquity. She not only held the scales of

every man's fate; she also had the All-Seeing Eye. See Tanit.
1. Lumusst, 84. 2. Cavendish, T., 104-5; Bachofen, 192.

Liebestod
"Love-Death," the killing of a Germanic sacred king when he
married the Goddess, or a Valkyrie who would bear him to heaven.
Like the Oriental sage, the Nordic hero was united in death with his
female soul (Shakti), a Heavenly Vala. Most pagan thinkers said the bes
death was mystically connected with love. Ovid wrote that he wanted
to die "in the act of coming to Venus." Heavenly "bliss" was often
*

confused with orgasm.

1. Cavendish, RE., 51.

Lif

"Life," the new Eve of the next cycle of existence, according to Norse
mythology, after destruction of the present universe. Her name was

essentially the same as Eve's title, "Mother of All Living" (Genesis

3:20). Lif 's consort was a subordinate male, Lifthrasir, "Desirer-of-
Life." The names indicated a belief that Lif would be the true parent of
'

the new creation, whereas her mate's only purpose was to fertilize her, as
in the oldest known versions of the Adam and Eve myth.
1. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 234.

Lightning
Heavenly-father gods of most Indo-European religions impregnated
Mother Earth, or the sea-womb, with phallic lightning bolts. India's
Dyaus Pitar, "Father Heaven," wielded the lightning in token of his
union with the Goddess; he foreshadowed Greece's Zeus Pater and
Rome's Jupiter, who did the same. Dumuzi, Dionysus, Leviathan,
and many other versions of the "fiery serpent" including Lucifer and
Satan figures, were identified with the descending phallus of Heaven,
whom Jesus claimed to have seen "fall as lightning" (Luke 10:18).

538
 The lightning god's "fall" was not originally a defeat in a celestial Lightning
battle but rather a descent into the womb of the Abyss to fertilize the
world. Plutarch said lightning was the impregnator of the Great God- ^^^mgm^^^^^^
dess of the Waters (Maria), and their union was "the cause of vital
'
heat."

Lightning was the cosmic phallus of the Vedic fire god Agni,
mated to Kali as the Primordial Abyss. She was said to "quench a
2
blazing lingam in her yoni." Through ignorance of its sexual meaning,
Christians inadvertently preserved the same image of Maria-the-
Waters rendered fertile by male fire from heaven. The baptismal font of
a Christian church was likened to the womb of Mary, as the ancient
temples' water-cauldrons called "seas" or "abysses" were likened to the
Goddess's womb (see Cauldron). At the consecration of a Christian
font, the burning paschal candle was quenched in the water like Agni's
lingam, with the words, "May a heavenly offspring, conceived in
holiness and reborn into a new creation, come forth from the stainless

womb of this divine font." Mary was said to be igne sacro inBam-
mata: fecundated by the sacred fire. 3
This universal notion of the male-female connotations of fire and
water was based on the Tantric view of the water element as Shakti,
the primal liquid power that produced "all fiery elements" i.e., male
4
deities and their symbols, the sun, fire, lightning. The Jewel in the

Lotus, primary Tantric image of maleness enclosed by femaleness,

often used for the male element the word vajra, meaning jewel,
5
phallus, and lightning.
The same combination of meanings occurred in Latin Gemma
Cerauniae, lightning literally the Jewel of Ceraunus, the lightning
6
god. Sometimes the "jewel" was a phallic scepter like the Tantric dorje,
"lightning-bolt" or "thunderbolt," also a phallus. The same word
described a phallic scepter made by Hephaestus, forger of lightning bolts
for Father Zeus; it was called doru, a spear. 7 The Indian city of
8
Darjeeling was named for the dorje-lingam, "lightning-phallus."

A lightning-phallus or lightning-scepter was the emblem of sover-

eignty for Greek and Roman heavenly fathers and for their

son-reincarnations also. Dionysus, born of the Earth- or Moon-mother,

became "king of all the gods of the world" when he sat on his father's
9
throne and wielded the lightning-scepter. His father Zeus descended
into the "bridal chambers" of the Mother Goddesses on the Acropo-

lis at Thebes in the form of lightning; therefore, these shrines were

10
taboo and were called Places of Coming. The sky-god also "came"
as lightning to fertilize the maternal rock, Petra Genetrix, that gave birth
11
to the Persian savior Mithra.

A descent of lightning marked many miraculous impregnations

the
and throughout mythology, possibly beginning with
virgin births
Assyro-Babylonian Zeus, called Zu the Storm Bird. Zu was a model
for

the winged lightning-spirits the Bible called seraphim, or fiery flying

serpents. As a Son of God, Zu coveted the Tablets

of the Law, wishing
to rule the oracles and make himself king of heaven.
12
He was

539
Lightning punished for his hubris in the Babylonian myth, but as the Olympian
Zeus he successfully defeated older heaven-gods like Uranus, Cro-
nus, Prometheus, and Hephaestus, and successfully defended his throne

against other challengers.

King Salmoneus of Elis dared impersonate Zeus the Lightning,
Salmoneus of Elis
seeking to become the beloved of the Goddess Salma (Salome) and
Legendary sacred king control the weather. He dragged brazen cauldrons behind his chariot to
bearing the Greek
version of the same
imitate thunder, and threw torches into the air to encourage light-

name as ning. Zeus destroyed him for his hubris. 13 So the later mythographers
Shalmaneser or said; in fact the sacred kings everywhere were made to become God,
Solomon. Elis was an or the Son of God, by such magical means before they were sacrificed
ancient city and state in
to the same God.
the northwest corner
of the Peloponnese;
A Dipylon amphora from the bank of the Ilissos shows a king
now called Ilia. wielding the scepter from which issues a lightning bolt. The figure's
erect penis also shoots a bolt of lightning toward the Delta-symbol of the
14
Goddess on an altar. This was a typical image of the god-king, from
northern Europe to central Asia where chieftains impersonated the

lightning god to mate with the divine swan-Valkyrie Kara, a variant of

Kali or Kauri. 15 Among the Celts, the Goddess's bird form was Co-
lombe, the Dove, bride of Lanceor the "Golden Lance," a lightning

god who evolved into Lancelot. 16

A phallic lightning bolt was the original symbol of the Ugaritic sage
Atyn, Eytan, or Etana, whom the Bible calls Ethan, a king almost as
wise as Solomon (1 Kings 4:3 1). He tried to ascend to Mother Ishtar in
heaven and was cast down like a bolt of lightning by the jealous sun
god Shamash. His Hebrew name meant either "perpetual stream" or
"perpetually firm," both hopeful epithets of the phallic god. Ethan,
or Eytan, was the answer to the riddle in Proverbs 30: "Who hath
ascended up into heaven, and come down?" 17 His totem was the
eagle, symbol of lightning, fire, and the sun. He ascended spread-eagled
on the bird's back in the form of a cross, his fingers "upon the
feathers of the wings" like the Greeks' Ganymede and the Hindus'
Garuda. 18
Quarrels over possession of the lightning-phallus underlay many
stories about god-kings and their rivals. Like God casting down
Lucifer "as lightning," Zeus cast down the older lightning-deity He-
phaestus because he defended his Great Mother Hera against a
patriarchal attack. As a god of the conquered matriarchate, Hephaestus
was imprisoned in a fire-mountain and set to forging lightning bolts

for the new ruler, Zeus. As the archaic Cretan Velchanos, Etruscan
Vulcan, Hephaestus was one of the Amazonian smith gods who
19
opposed the Olympian patriarchy.
The God of Moses copied the ways of other patriarchal deities and
claimed the ability to "cast forth lightning" (Psalms 144:6). In a literal
anthropomorphization this meant he could cast forth the lightning god
Lucifer from heaven. Medieval theologians were never quite sure
who threw the lightning bolts God, or his rival Lucifer, who retained
the title of Prince of the Power of the Air.

540
 German bishops said in 1783 that despite allegedly infallible With
protections such hymns, and holy relics, the devil's
as processions,

400 church towers and killed 1 20 bell-ringers within

lightning damaged ^^^^^^^^^^^
33 years. 20 It was difficult to explain why God so often threw

lightning at his own churches; or, if the destructive bolts were thrown by
the devil, why God didn't protect his churches better. Effective

measures had to wait until the arch-infidel Benjamin Franklin invented

the lightning rod. Even then, many churchmen refused to use the
new invention on the ground that it was one of the devil's artifacts.

With the decline of the devil, the damage inflicted by lightning has
been once more imputed to God. Modern legal documents still
describe lightning-strikes as "acts of God."
[Link], S.L., 135. 2. Rawson, E.A., 57. 3. Neumann, CM., 31 1-12.
4. Mahanirvunatmitra, cxviii. 5. Rawson, E.A., 151. 6. Leland, 250.
7. Gelling &
Davidson, 33. 8. Waddell, 258. 9. Frazer,G.B.,451.
1 1. de Riencourt, 135.
10. J.E. Harrison, 91. 12. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 304.
13. Graves, G.M.
221; 2, 408. 14. J.E. Harrison, 77.
1,

15. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 568. 16. Malory 1, 377. 17. Albright, 250.
18. Campbell, Or.M., 134. 19. Graves, G.M. 1, 87.; W.G., 361.
20. White 1,367.

JHth var. Lilit

i\dam's first wife was a relic of an early rabbinical attempt to assimilate

he Sumero-Babylonian Goddess Belit-ili, or Belili, to Jewish myth-
alogy. To the Canaanites, Lilith was Baalat, the "Divine Lady." On a

ablet from Ur, ca. 2000 B.C., she was addressed as Lillake. 1

Hebraic tradition said Adam married Lilith because he grew tired

af coupling with beasts, a common custom of Middle-Eastern herds-

men, though the Old Testament declared it a sin (Deuteronomy

27:21). Adam tried to force Lilith to lie beneath him in the "missionary
Dosition" favored by male-dominant societies. Moslems were so insis-
ent on the male-superior sexual position that they said, "Accursed be
the man who maketh woman heaven and himself earth." 2 Catholic
authorities said any sexual position other than the male-superior one is
sinful.
3
But Lilith was neither a Moslem nor a Catholic. She sneered at
Adam's sexual crudity, cursed him, and flew away to make her home by
the Red Sea.
God sent angels to fetch Lilith back, but she cursed them too,

ignored God's command, and spent her time coupling with "demons"
(whose lovemaking evidently pleased her better) and giving birth to a
hundred children every day. So God had to produce Eve as Lilith's

more docile replacement.

Lilith's fecundity and sexual preferences show that she was a Great
Mother of settled agricultural tribes, who resisted the invasions of

nomadic herdsmen, represented by Adam. Early Hebrews disliked the

Great Mother who drank the blood of Abel the herdsman, after his
slaying by the elder god of agriculture and smithcraft, Cain (Genesis
4:1 1). Lilith's Red Sea was another version of Kali Ma's Ocean of

541
Lily Blood, which gave birth to all things but needed periodic sacrificial

replenishment.
^mhmm^mmhh^m There may have been a connection between Lilith and the
Etruscan divinity Leinth, who had no face and who waited at the gate
of the underworld along with Eita and Persipnei (Hades and Persepho-
4
ne) to receive the souls of the dead. The underworld gate was a

yoni, and also a lily, which had "no face." Admission into the under-
world was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu
(lotus) was the Great Mother's flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith 's

name.
The story of Lilith disappeared from the canonical Bible, but her
daughters the lilim haunted men for over a thousand years. Well into
the Middle Ages, the Jews were still manufacturing amulets to keep

away the who were lustful she-demons given to copulating with

lilim,

men 5
dreams, causing nocturnal emissions. Naturally, the lilim
in their

squatted on top of their victims in the position favored by ancient

matriarchs.
Greeks adopted the lilim and called them Lamiae, Empusae
(Forcers-In), or Daughters of Hecate. Christians also adopted them
and called them harlots of hell, or succubae, the female counterparts of
incubi. Celibate monks tried to fend them off by sleeping with their
hands crossed over their genitals, clutching a crucifix. It was said that

every time a pious Christian had a wet dream, Lilith laughed. Even if

a male child laughed in his sleep, people said Lilith was fondling him.
To protect baby boys against her, chalk circles were drawn around
cradles with the written names of the three angels God sent to fetch
Lilith back to Adam even though these angels had proved incapa-
ble of dealing with her. Some said men and babies should not be left
alone in a house or Lilith might seize them. 6
Another common name for the Daughters of Lilith was Night-
Hag. This term didn't imply that they were ugly; on the contrary,
7
they were supposed to be very beautiful. As with their brothers the
incubi, they were presumed so expert at lovemaking that after an

experience with a Night-Hag, a man couldn't be satisfied with the love

of a mortal woman.
1. Graves & Patai, 68. 2. Edwardes, 57. 3. Graves & Patai, 67.
1 4. Hays, 183.
5. Graves, CM. 1, 190. 6. Cavendish, P.E., 99. 7. Scot, 512.

Lily
The flower of Lilith, Sumero-Babylonian Goddess of creation; the
lilu or "lotus" of her genital magic. The lily often represented the virgin
aspect of the Triple Goddess, while the rose represented her maternal
aspect. The lily was sacred to Astarte, who was also Lilith; northern

Europeans called her Ostara or Eostre, the Goddess of "Easter"

1
lilies.

Because of its pagan associations with virgin motherhood, the lily

542

M
was used to symbolize impregnation of the virgin Mary. Some Lingam
authorities claimed the lily in Gabriel's hand filtered God's semen which

entered Mary's body through her ear. 2

Mary's cult also inherited the lily of the Blessed Virgin Juno, who
conceived her savior-son Mars with her own magic lily, without any
3
male aid. This myth reflected an early belief in the self-fertilizing

power of the yoni (vulva), which the lily symbolized and Juno
personified. Her name descended from the pre-Roman Uni, a Triple
Goddess represented by the three-lobed lily or fleur-de-lis, her name
stemming from the Sanskrit yoni, source of the Uni-verse.
In 656 a.d., the 10th Council of Toledo officially adopted the holy

day of Juno's miraculous conception of Mars into the Christian

canon, renaming it the Festival of the Mother of God, or Lady Day,
insisting that it commemorated Mary's miraculous conception of
4
Jesus with the aid of a lily. Christian artists showed the angel Gabriel
holding out to Mary scepter surmounted by a fleur-de-lis on a lily
a

A scroll usually issued from Gabriel's mouth, with the words Ave
stalk.

Maria gratia plena, the seminal "Word," which made Mary "full."
Aphrodite's dove, that other yonic symbol, hovered about the scene.
5

Celtic and Gallo-Roman tribes called the virgin mother Lily Maid.
Her yonic emblem appeared not only as the French fleur-de-lis but
also as the Irish shamrock, which was not originally Irish but a sacred

symbol among Indus Valley people some 6000 years before the
Christian era. Christianized France identified the Lily Maid with the

virginMary, but she was never completely dissociated from the pagan
image of Juno. Among the people, Lady Day was known as Notre
Dame de Mars. 6
The Easter was the medieval pas-flower, from Latin passus,
lily to

step or pass over, cognate oipascha, the Passover. The lily was also Sometimes, the
called Pash-flower, Paschal flower, Pasque flower, or Passion flower. Easter flower was not a
white but a
Pagans understood that it
represented the spring passion of the god, lily

scarlet or purple
like Heracles, for union in love-death with the Virgin Queen of
anemone, emblem of
Heaven, Hera-Hebe, or Juno, or Venus, all of whom claimed the lily. Adonis's passion and
When Hera's milk spurted from her breasts to form the Milky Way, the called identical with
7
drops that fell to the ground became lilies. his bride Venus. 8
1. H. Smith, 201. Simons, 103. 3. Larousse, 202. 4. Brewster, 146.
2.
5. Cavendish, V.H.H., 68. 6. Brewster, 146. 7. Guthrie, 71.

8. Agrippa, 103.

Lingam
"Penis," Hindu symbol of any god, usually Shiva. The lingam-yoni is

still the supreme symbol of the vital principle, representing male and
female genitalia in conjunction. 1
Its verbal equivalent is the Jewel in
the Lotus.

Sometimes the lingam appeared as a phallic pillar in the cella or

jHoly of Holies, the core of the temple which stands for the Goddess

543
 2
Lion and is called "womb" (garbha-grha). Shiva bore the name of Sthanu,
Little Red Riding Hood "Pillar," and was shown emerging from a lingam-pillar with his

^^^^^^^^^^^^ "jewel" or phallic eye displayed in the center of his forehead, a graphic
illustration of the transformation of the whole lingam into a man-
3
shape.
It was a Hindu custom to have brides deflowered in the temple by
Shiva's carved lingam to make their firstborn children God-begotten
(see Firstborn). Temple harlots were made "brides of God" by the
same ceremony of the lingam, as was also the custom in the ancient
Middle East, Greece, and Rome. 4 Besides these man-sized examples
there were large pillars, which often became objects of pilgrimage.
Many miracles were said to have taken place in the vicinity of Shiva's
5
lingam.
1. Rawson, AT., 51. 2. Zimmer, 127. 3. OTlaherty, 195.
4. Rawson, E.A., 29, 88. 5. Mahanirvanatantra, 335.

Lion

Usually a symbol of the sun god in Greece and Rome, the lion was
more commonly associated with the Goddess in the Middle East and

Egypt. Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele rode or drove lions. Bast-Hathor

was the Sphinx-lioness, symbolizing the Destroyer. Sometimes she
appeared with two lion heads looking forward and backward, like her
Roman counterpart Janus-Jana. This was a symbol of Time, with the
hieroglyph xerefu and akeru, the Lions of Yesterday and Today.
1

The Dark Age kingdom of the Britons was named after the

"Lyonesse," one of its early queens appearing in Arthurian romance

as theLady Lyonors. Merlin's city was Caerleon, the Lion's Place.
Lions were not native to the British isles, therefore the British lion
was an imported totem. Lion and serpent stood for ascending and
declining spirits of the sacred year, the former following the latter in
the pagan zodiac. 2
The British "Lady who ruled lions"may have arrived on Roman
coins, which since the Augustan period showed the Great Mother of
the Gods (Cybele) enthroned between two lions, wearing the mural
crown that became a Saxon emblem of divinity. She was thus
described in a poem: "The Virgin in her heavenly place rides upon the
Lion; bearer of corn, inventor of law, founder of cities, by whose gift
it is man's
good lot to know the gods; therefore she is the Mother of the
Gods, Peace, Virtue, Ceres, the Syrian Goddess, weighing life and
laws in her balance." 3
1. Budge, E.L., 61. 2. Graves, W.G., 270. 3. Vermaseren, 75, 138.

Little Red Riding Hood

Fairy-tale heroine based on the Virgin aspect of the red-clothed Diana:
in the tale, the usual trinity of maiden, mother, and grandmother. The

544
Hunter was originally le Chasseur Maudit, or pagan Lord of the Hunt; Logos
while the man-eating She- Wolf or grandmother was a western form of
the Kalika. See Werewolf.

Logos
Greek "Word," a theory of creation that passed from Tantrism
through Neoplatonic philosophy to Christianity. The theory was that a
deity could create anything other deities, worlds, creatures by the
power of magic words: when the name was spoken, the thing material-
ized. The Logos, then, was divine essence concentrated in a Word

and made manifest, as Jesus was called "the Word made flesh." The
Gospel of John gave him eternal existence: "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).

Judeo-Christian thinkers defined the Logos in so many ways

that it became virtually without meaning, and so was relegated to the

of a "deep mystery." The Logos was Christ, or the Wisdom of

status

Yahweh, or an archangel, or Truth, or the high priest, or the Law, or

the covenant, or the scriptures, or Moses, or the creative power, or

Orphic, Pythagorean, and

1
the soul of the world, or the sun, etc.

Neoplatonic philosophers who expounded the Logos doctrine were

not well understood by their Christian followers, who struggled vainly
with the subtle semantics of the pagan philosophers.
The pagans' "Word made flesh" was usually Hermes, represent-
Logos spermatikos, seminal Word, proceeding from the
ing the
mouth of Zeus to beget all things through the power of his agent on
earth. 2 The Corpus Hermeticum praised this Word-bearer: "Holy art
thou, who by the Word has created all things that exist! Holy art thou,
of whom all Nature has produced the image!" Justin Martyr's
Apologia earnestly tried to assimilate the attributes of Hermes-the-Word
to Jesus, "on account of his wisdom," claiming that Jesus was exactly

being the Son, Messenger, and Word of God.

3
like Hermes in

One of the reasons for male enthusiasm for the Logos doctrine was
that it
provided male gods with a method of creating, formerly the
exclusive prerogative of the birth-giving Goddess. Hermes-the-Logos
became Hermes-the-Creator, exercising the magic feminine powers
The Perfect Word
he derived from living in androgynous union with Mother Aphrodite. Third-century Greek
The Perfect Word addressed Hermes as not only the Light of the life
text of Hermetic

of man but also "the fruitful Womb of All." 4 revelation-literature,

Hermes's Egyptian counterpart Thoth mastered the discovered by

Similarly,
Reitzenstein in the
Words of Power and assumed the attributes of the Goddess Maat,
Mimaut papyrus.
"whose Word is Truth," sometimes called his spouse. Priests of Thoth's
holy city, which the Greeks called Hermopolis, said Thoth was the
Met, a mother-word
universal demiurge who spoke the Word of creation, met, and "gave related to Maat, Greek
5
birth" to the first gods. metis, Sanskrit
The oldest Oriental father-gods "gave birth" by speech, when they medha, "female
were first conceived by men who didn't know the real physiology of wisdom." 6

545
Logos [Link] Sanskrit word for a father-given or Brahma-given soul
was atman, "air" or "breath," cognate with the German atmen and
Greek atmos, "air." A Brahman father still establishes a paternal claim

to a child by breathing its soul-name three times into its face,

7
pretending to place the soul in the
body.
The biblical Yahweh also claimed to give life by the power of his
breath or "wind," which he used to animate the dry bones of the
dead: "Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live"

(Ezekiel 37:5). This incident was probably copied from the Babylo-
nian Enuma Elish, wherein Marduk established his right to kingship

among the gods by showing he could destroy and re-create by the

8
power of his Word.
Among the oldest Though male gods popularized the idea of the Logos, the ability
Mesopotamian texts to destroy and re-create by Word-power belonged originally to the
there are stories of
Goddess, who created languages, alphabets, and the secret mantras
deities representing
known as Words of Power, Egyptian hekau, creations of Hecate
"the Word." In the
Epic of Gilgamesh, (Maat). Every manifestation of life was brought into being by the Great
Enlil the god of "air" Goddess Kali with her Word, Om, an invocation of her own
or "breath" was also a
"pregnant belly." This was the primordial Logos, "the supreme syllable,
Logos: "The spirit of 10
Kali's creative voice had its own personifi-
the mother of all sound."
the Word is Enlil, the
cation as aGoddess Vac (Voice), engendered in celestial waters, at the
spirit of the heart of
Anu (heaven)." Enlil
summit of the Cosmic Tree. 13 Vac brought forth the god who called
14
embodied "the word himself All-father, as well as everything else in the universe. She
which stilleth the
reappeared in Greek myth as a disembodied voice, the nymph Echo,
heavens above." 9
who brought the flower-god Narcissus to his doom by trapping his soul
in her water-mirror. In Arabic her Om became Umm, meaning
The fifty letters of 15
mother, matrix, source, principle, or prototype: the Logos of the Sufi.
Kali's Sanskrit alphabet
were matrika,
Om was a familiar sound. Celts called their Moon-mother Omh,
"mothers." Hindu "She Who Is." Shebans called their Moon-temple at Marib Aum,
scriptures said: "As the Belly of the World. Lydians placed the same Belly of the World in

from a mother comes their own country as an omphalos or navel-stone, hub of the
birth, so from
universe, "made flesh" in their Goddess-queen Omphale. It was not an
matrika, or sound, the
11 exclusively Lydian custom; every temple in Greece hid an omphalos.
world proceeds."
Om was the Om was Alpha, the letter of creation, repeated again as the final
mantramatrika, letter of destruction, Omega, which means literally "great Om." Its
Mother of Mantras; and Greek form is a horseshoe, based on the Hindu symbol of the yonic
these divine Words am
Gate. When the biblical prophet proclaimed: "I the Alpha and
spoken by Kali created and
Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is,
and destroyed
all which was, and which is yet to come" (Revelation 1 :8), he used words
everything, including
copied from the temple of the Great Mother at Sais, where they were
12
gods.
16
written on stone many centuries before the Bible was compiled.
The Logos idea was virtually identical with the Oriental concept of
the Oversoul, which had been an essence of the Great Mother but
was re-defined as an essence of the Great Father or of his son, the
Savior. Origen "As our body while consisting of human mem-
said,

bers is yet held together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of

as an immense living being which is held together by one soul, the

546
 I7
power of the logos." Christ was only one of many aspirants to the title Logos
of Logos. Before him, Attis was hailed as the Logos "who holds the
18
universe together." But before them all was the Great Mother: "The
supreme Shakti has the form both of the seed and the sprout of the
revealed coming-together of Shiva and Shakti; subtlest of the subtle, She
b contained in all that lies between the first and the last letters of the
alphabet, which contains the original root forms from which the names
19
of everything in the world are compounded."
The Christian idea that Christ was God's "Word made flesh" was
an idea common to all the ancient pagan world. Every king was
literally God manifested in the flesh, whether he was a real ruler or a

sacramental surrogate ruler. Usually he was called Savior, and begot-

ten by the god on a temple virgin. He was chosen and invested by holy
words and name-souls. Antiochus of Syria, for instance, received the
divine surname of Epiphanes, "God Made Manifest (in the flesh)." 20
Not even Christians, however, managed to purge the Logos of all
its original feminine connotations. Clement of Alexandria distorted
hissymbolism to the point of absurdity when trying to connect the
Logos with parenthood: "The Word is everything to the child, both
father and mother, teacher and nurse. The nutriment is the milk of . . .

the Father and the Word alone supplies us children with the milk
. . .

of love. . . . For this reason, seeking is called sucking; to those infants

who seek the Word, the Father's loving breasts supply milk." 21
These odd notions arose from the ancient belief that a mother gave
her child name-soul along with the first breast milk, as she
its

breathed a Word that would henceforth define and personify the child.

In the Old Testament, children were named by their mothers, never

22
by their fathers. Thus a universal Parent would be expected to give
name-souls to all creation along with universal breast milk.
A giver of nourishment was also a giver of Law, derived from the
same root word as Logos. Priest-chieftain of the Icelandic Althing
supreme governing body of the tribes had a title now translated
Lawspeaker. But that is not the literal translation of the Icelandic

word, logsogumathr, which really means Mother- Who-Speaks-the-

Word. 23
The doctrine of the Logos was so widespread that Christians could
hardly be expected to ignore It was one of many pagan ideas that
it.

me church eagerly seized. Medieval Schoolmen tried to make it Schoolmen

reconcile faith with reason, insisting that the two must be identical Philosophical and
theological thinkers
because their root was the same: "that no more than one source of
of the "Scholastic"
truth, the Logos, had ever existed, and that everything of any value in movement, 1 1th to
human wisdom, especially in Greek philosophy, flowed from that sole 15 th centuries,

Bource. Plato himself was reputed to have pilfered from Moses." 24 including such
authorities as Abelard,
The Schoolmen were ignorant of the ancient logoi, sacred writings
Aquinas, Duns
the Orphics, mentioned by Plato and other philosophers as a vast
pf Scotus, Ockham, and
mass of literature amounting to a true "Bible"; these writings had all Albertus Magnus.
been destroyed during the early centuries of Christianity. 25 But there

547
Lohengrin were Christian Gnostic writings that had copied the Orphics and
Loki transmitted the idea of the Logos to Christian dogma even after they
were declared "heresies." The Gospel of Truth said, for example,
"When the Word appeared, the Word which is in the hearts of those
who pronounced It. . . . It was not only a sound, but It had taken on a
26
body as well."Christians gave such assertions a rather simplistic
Gospel of Truth
Gnostic scripture interpretation, assuming the body was Christ's; yet perhaps the more
associated with the
perceptive of the ancient philosophers meant that man, the verbaliz-
early Christian sect of
ing animal, in effect creates all his gods out of his Word.
Valentinians,
I. H. Smith, 218. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Logos." 3. Doane, 375. 4. Angus, 243.
founded about 1 50 a.d.
5. Larousse, 27-28. 6. Budge, E.L., 142. 7. Mahanirvanatantra, 236; Hays, 223.
8. Fromm, 164. 9. EpicofGilgamesh, 24. 10. Upanishads, 53.
II. Mahanirvanatantra, cvii. 12. Wilkins, 201. 13. d'Alviella, 162.
14. Briffault 1,7. Shah, 175. 16. Larousse, 37. 17. Shirley, 46.
15.
18. Graves, W.G., 367. 19. Rawson, AT., 198. 20. Cavendish, P.E., 18.
21. Pagels, 67-68. 22. Briffault 1, 372. 23. Branston, 30.
24. Guignebert, 258. 25. Guthrie, 310, 313. 26. Jonas, 76.

Lohengrin
Medieval version of Zeus the Swan-king, or the Swan-knight Krish-
na, beloved of all the Swan-maidens in heaven (seen as little clouds

sailing over the blue). The holy swan, Leda's lover, was transformed
into a Knight of the Holy Grail, dedicated to helping women maintain
their legal rights under a patriarchal system. See Swan.

Loki
Norse god of complex character and great age. He may have been a
genius loci, of a place." His
"spirit name may have descended from
Sanskrit Loka, a spirit of the seven celestial planes. He was an archaic

form of the "Luck" envisioned as guardian angel of a clan or family,

often embodied in a fetish object.
1
One story said Loki's lips were
Loki was sometimes stitched up with a thong, suggesting that his dwelt in a mummified
spirit
Logi, "Flame," the fire
oracular head. 2 Such heads were used as
also clan-spirits by the early
god identified with
the Celtic Lug, and
Hebrews, who called them teraphim} To lose them was to lose the
probably descended family's "luck."
from the Aryan Agni- Like many of the oldest gods, Loki was bisexual. He even
Shiva as the succeeded in a mother, after he had swal-
becoming though only
lightning-fire lowed a woman's heart to acquire the power of birth-giving. The Greek
"quenched" by his
Zeus resorted to the same feminine magic, for the same reason.
marriage to the
Goddess of the Loki's offspring was the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, spirit of death, a
4
watery abyss. Indeed, symbol of the gallows tree on which Odin rode.
under the name of Loki was also a death spirit in his own right, like Shiva the
Agni, the god was "an
Destroyer who often appeared as Shiva the Destroyed, dead under
early king of
the feet of Kali the Crone, his guts pulled out of his belly and devoured.
Sweden" married to the
Goddess Skialf, or
The same thing happened to Loki as he was periodically sacrificed to
Skadi.
7
Skadi the Crone. 5 Also like the Oriental god, Loki always came back to

548
life. Though the other Aesir chained him up, as the wolf Fenrir and Longinus, Saint
the troublemaking Prometheus were chained, yet Loki's inevitable Lotus
destiny was to break free and initiate the ultimate convulsions of the
6
^^^^^^^^^^
world's doomsday. Aryan belief postulated seven Lokas before the final

paradise of Shiva and Shakti; thus it might be assumed that Loki

would have seven incarnations before the final death of the gods.
[Link].40. Branston, 267. 3. Graves, W.G., 164. 4. Turville-Petre,
2. 1 29.
5. Oxenstierna, 213. 6. Cavendish, P.E., 169.
7. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 227, 234.

Longinus, Saint
Christian legend made Longinus a blind Roman centurion who
thrust the spear into Jesus's side at the crucifixion. Some of Jesus's blood
fell on his eyes and cured his blindness, whereupon Longinus was

converted and spent the rest of his life breaking pagan idols in
1
Cappadocia.
This canonization-story made even less sense than most, as Ro-
man centurions were not blind. Possibly in an original version, now

lost, Longinus was stricken blind after delivering the spear-thrust; but
this would have allowed no time for his conversion.

The true prototype of the legend seems to have been the blind god
Hod, who slew the Norse savior Balder with the thrust of a spear of
mistletoe. Early-medieval missionaries deliberately confused Jesus with
Balder. Some even declared the cross of Jesus's crucifixion was made
of mistletoe. 2
March 1 5, the "Ides of March" when most pagan saviors died, was
the day devoted to Hod by the heathen, and later Christianized as the
3
feast day of the Blessed Longinus.
1. Brewster, 135-36. 2. Turville-Petre, 1 1 9. 3. Brewster, 136.

Lorelei

Famous rock in the Rhine, anciently identified with a Water-siren or

River-goddess who lured men to death by drowning. Possibly it was
once a shrine of the Water-goddess. Early in the 19th century, a

German writer transformed the Lorelei into the usual maiden disap-

pointed in love. She threw herself in the river, and afterward

appeared as a spirit of the rock, singing her fatal songs to passing
boatmen. 1

[Link]. Brit, "Lorelei."

Lotus

primary symbol of the yoni (vulva), often personified as the

Asia's

Goddess Padma, "Lotus," also known as Cunti, Lakshmi, or Shakti.

549
Lotus The central phrase of Tantrism, Om
manipadme hum, meant the
Jewel (male) in the Lotus (female), with interlocking connotations: the
the the womb, the corpse in the earth,
^^^^^^^^^^__ penis in the vagina, fetus in

the God in the Goddess representing all of these. 1

The father-god Brahma claimed to be a universal creator; never-

theless, he was he arose from the primal

styled "Lotus-born," for
Goddess's yoni. Egypt's father-god Ra also claimed to be a creator but
owed his existence to the Goddess called "great world lotus flower,
out of which rose the sun for the first time at the creation." 2

Virtually all Egyptian Goddess-forms were symbolized by the

lotus.
3
Pharaohs were sexually united with the World Lotus to
achieve rebirth after death. The funeral hymn of Unas declared that he
"had union with the goddess Mut, Unas hath drawn unto himself the
4
flame of Isis, Unas hath united himself to the lotus."
One way of uniting oneself to the lotus was the custom of ritual
cunnilingus, widely practiced throughout the east as communion
5
with the feminine life-principle. This was probably the true meaning of
the Land of Lotus-Eaters visited by Odysseus and his crew. The
sensual Land of Lotus-Eaters was described as a tropical place beyond
6
the southern sea, which could apply to any land from Egypt to India.
Ascetic Jain Buddhism tried to eradicate the lotus symbol because
of its erotic implications. Nevertheless, a few centuries after Buddha's
time, the most prominent figure on Buddhist monuments was again
Padma, openly displaying her genital lotus.
7
A similar resurgence of
erotic imagery overtook ascetic Christianity, when "obscene" figures

proliferated in cathedrals and churches, for example the Irish sheila-

na-gig.
Most Oriental mystics held that spiritual knowledge began with

carnal knowledge. The lotus was the Goddess's gate, and sex was the
Way through the gate to her inner mysteries. With proper sexual

exercises, a true sage might achieve the final flowering of revelation

described as the thousand-petaled lotus of invisible light emanating from
the top of the head after ascending the spinal chakras from the pelvis.

Worshippers of Vishnu sometimes painted their god as the source

of the World Lotus, which grew on a long stem from his navel. But
since "the primary reference of the lotus in India has always been the

goddess Padma, 'Lotus,' whose body itself is the universe, the long
stem from navel to lotus should properly connote an umbilical cord
through which the flow of energy would be running from the
goddess to the god, mother to child, not the other way." Some
8
Hindu
cosmogonies saw the whole world as the lotus flower, with seven

petals representing the seven divisions of the heavens where the cities
9
and palaces of the god were located.
10
In the Middle East, the lotus was Hlu, or lily. It was the flower of
Lilith, the Sumero-Babylonian earth mother claimed by the Jews as

Adam's first wife. The three-lobed lily or fleur-de-lis, like the shamrock,
once stood for the Triple Goddess's three yonis, which is why the lily

550
was sacred to the triune Queen of Heaven. The Blessed Virgin Juno Lotus Position
conceived her savior-son Mars by the lily, and the same flower was Lucifer

adopted as a conception-charm of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When Isis

11
^^^^^^^^^^^
was assimilated to the burgeoning legends of the Virgin, her Egyptian
images held the phallic cross in one hand, the female lotus seed-vessel in
the other, like the Goddess shown on the Isiac Table. 12
1 Rawson, E.A., 151. 2. Budge, G.E., 1 473. 3. Angus, 1 39.
.
,

4. Budge, G.E. 2, 32. 5. Rawson, E.A., 103. 6. Thomson, 176.

7. Campbell, Or.M., 301. 8. Campbell, Oc.M., 157. 9.
Lethaby, 124-25.
10. Summers, V, 226. 11. Simons, 103. 12. Knight, D.W.R, 50.

Lotus Position
Meditation pose of Tantric yogis, also shown on icons of early Celtic

Pagan Scandinavia still made artifacts with figures seated in lotus

1

gods.
2
position during the 8th to 10th centuries. The medieval church
denounced this cross-legged pose as a relic of paganism, and declared all

who sat cross-legged were working sorcery.

3

1. Campbell, Or.M., 307. 2. Campbell, MI., 336. 3. Agrippa, 1 59.

Lucifer

"Light-bringer," Latin title of the Morning Star god who announced

the daily birth of the sun. Canaanites called him Shaher. The Jewish
Shaharit (Morning Service) commemorates him. Shaher's twin
still
1

brother Shalem, the Evening Star, announced the daily death of the sun
and spoke to him the Word of Peace (Hebrew shahm, Arabic
2
salaam). Shalem was worshipped along with his brother in Jerusalem,
which means "House of Shalem." Shaher and Shalem were the same
as the Greeks' Dioscuri or Heavenly Twins, Castor and Pollux, born of
Leda's World Egg. They were also prominent in Persian sun worship
as the two torch-bearers, one with his torch ascendant and the other

with his torch directed down. 5

Both Shaher and Shalem were born of the Great Mother Asherah
inher world-womb aspect as Helel, "the Pit." 4 Canaanite myth said
Shaher coveted the superior glory of the sun god and tried to usurp his
throne, but was defeated and cast down from heaven like a lightning

bolt. Pagan scriptures of the 7th century B.C. included a dirge for the
fallen Morning Star:

How hast thou fallen from heaven, Helel's son Shaher! Thou didst say in
thy heart, I will ascend to heaven, above the circumpolar stars I will
raise my throne, and I will dwell on the Mount of Council in the back of
the north; I will mount on the back of a cloud, I will be like unto
s
Elyon.

Centuries later, a Jewish scribe copied this Canaanite scripture into

the Bible and pretended it was written by Isaiah:

551
Lucifer How ar t thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! . . . For
thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend to heaven, I will exalt my
^^^^^^^^^^^ throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the
congregation, in the sides of the north: J will ascend above the heights
of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (Isaiah 14:12-14)

The biblical writer further told Lucifer: "Thou shalt be brought

down to hell, to the sides of the pit" (Isaiah 14:1 5). This "pit" was the
same as Helel, or Asherah, the god's own Mother-bride; and his

descent as a lightning-serpent into her Pit represented fertilization of the

abyss by masculine fire from heaven. In short, the Light-bringer

challenged the supreme solar god by seeking the favors of the Mother.
This divine rivalry explains the so-called sin of Lucifer, hubris, which
church fathers translated "pride" but its real meaning was "sexual
6
passion."
Actually, all sacred kings aspired to the same proud position
Lucifer or Shaher coveted: to be the spouse of the Goddess, to stand
at the hub of the heavens (carried thence on a cloud), to become one
with the supreme deity. Egyptian pharaohs made almost identical
claims to glory, as shown by Pepi's tomb inscription stating that he
"standeth upon the north of heaven with Ra, he becometh lord of the
universe like unto the king of the gods."
7
He also descended into the
earth in the guise of the immortal serpent Sata, father of lightning;
and his Hebrew name Satan merged with the image of Lucifer in

Jesus's words: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke
10:18).
Lucifer continued to be linked with both lust and lightning during
the Christian era. He became the Prince of the Power of the Air
(Ephesians 2:2) who threw his lightning bolts at church towers. He
wielded the trident, in Eastern symbolism a triple lightning-phallus
8
destined to fertilize the Triple Goddess.
Another ancient source of the Lucifer legend was the Assyro-
Babylonian lightning god, Zu the Storm Bird, a forerunner of Zeus;
sometimes he was a seraph or "fiery flying serpent," the lightning bolt
personified. Zu was punished for coveting the power-filled Tablets of
Destiny that Great Mother Tiamat had given her firstborn son, the
father of gods. Zu said to himself, "I will take the tablet of destiny of

the gods, even I; and I will direct all the oracles of the gods; I will

establish a throne, and dispense commands, I will rule over all the

spirits of Heaven!" 9

Egypt called the Morning Star god Bennu, the dying-and-reborn

Phoenix bird known as "Soul of Ra," who died on the World Tree in
order to renew himself, to "shine on the world." His spirit dwelt in the

phallic obelisk, called Bennu or the Benben-stone, which stood for

the god's sexual union with the Mother. Another of his phallic forms
was the mighty serpent Ami-Hemf, "Dweller in his Flame," who
lived on the Mountain of Sunrise and was identified with the morning
10
star. Thus Egypt and Mesopotamia had several versions of light-

552
bringing Lucifer long before scraps of his myth found their way into Lucifer

Judeo-Christian writings.
Plato knew the morning-star god as Aster (Star) and also under-
stood that the same star appeared at evening in a different position
and so became the evening star (actually the planet Venus). Plato
therefore viewed Aster as the dying-and-reborn deity himself: "Aster,

once, as Morning-Star, light on the living you shed. Now, dying, as

u
Evening-Star, you shine among the dead."
Gnostic Christians maintained that the "light" Lucifer brought
was true enlightenment, which he gave humanity against God's will,
as Prometheus stole the fire of heaven to bring civilization to mankind

against the will of Zeus. The Bible's story supported the Gnostic

view. God denied Adam and Eve the

fruit of the tree of knowledge,

desiring tokeep them ignorant; but Lucifer, in the form of the

serpent, gave them the "light" of wisdom.
The Persians, too, said their own Great Serpent Ahriman gave
knowledge to the first couple in the garden of Heden. Ahriman too
was the twin brother of the solar God, cast out of heaven for his hubris;
but the Magi worshipped the Great Serpent as the source of their
occult wisdom. 12 He was often thought more influential in terrestrial
affairs than the Father who cast him down.
Such Persian precedents influenced Gnostic Christians who re-
garded Jehovah as the villain and Lucifer as the hero, savior, and
friend of man, revealer of sacred mysteries that the Heavenly Father

jealously withheld. Medieval secret fraternities perpetuated the Gnos-

tics' respect for Lucifer and sometimes identifiedhim with Hermes, god
of revelation. These Gnostic doctrines persisted through the first half
13
of the Christian era and well into the second half. Meister Eckhart Meister Eckhart
who had perfectly pure von Hochheim Popular
said, "Lucifer, the angel, is in hell, intellect
German
and to this day knows much." H mystical
preacher of the early
a.d. there were Gnostic groups called Lucifer-
In the 14th century
14th century; minister
ans, who
"worship Lucifer and believe him to be the brother of God, of a Dominican
15
wrongly cast out of heaven." Luciferans were first heard of in Austria. order in Saxony. In

Their cult soon spread to Brandenburg, Bohemia, Switzerland, and 1326 he was charged
with heresy and died
Savoy. In 1336 the Inquisition burned fourteen men and women at
soon afterward. A
Magdeburg for holding heretical opinions about Lucifer. In 1384, a
papal bull of 1329
priest at Prenzlau accused his entire congregation of believing that condemned 28
Lucifer was God or the brother of God. 16 propositions from his
One of the medieval Schoolmen was theological works.
among
"great questions"
how many angels fell how many remained in
with Lucifer and
heaven under the command of Michael. Some authorities said "most"
angels fell. Some said "most" remained. Some said a tenth, a ninth,
or a third of the angelic host because "the dragon with his tail
fell,

plucked down with him the third part of the stars." Furious debate
raged also between Thomists, Scotists, and followers of Augustine on
the "great question" of the battle's location and duration. It was said
to have taken place in the air, in the firmament, or in paradise. It lasted

553
Lucy, Saint one instant, two instants, or four instants; the consensus of learned
17
opinion was that it lasted three instants. Thus the theologians sup-
Lucifer. On the
God to subdue
mm^^^^^^^^ posed that it didn't take long for

question of why Lucifer's army rebelled against the supremely benefi-

cent, supremely lovable God in the first place, the theologians were

silent perhaps knowing all too well deep within their minds what
Lucifer really stood for.
I. Patai, 147. 2. Hays, 85. 3. Cumont, M.M., 68, 128. 4. Hooke, M.E.M., 93.
[Link], 232. 6. Potter &
Sargent, 176. 7. Book of the Dead, 86.
8 O'Flaherty, 130. 9. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit., 304. 10. Budge, G.E. 2, 96-97; 1, 24.
II. Lindsay, O.A., 94. 1 2. Legge 2, 239. 13. Waite.O.S., 195.
142. 16. J.B. Russell, 177, 180.
14. Campbell, Oc.M., 513. 15. Wedeck,
17. Scot, 422-23.

Lucy, Saint
A Christianization of Juno Lucina or Lucetia, Mother of Light, the
Sabine Goddess whose temple was built on the Esquiline in 735 B.C.

There she appeared, bearing her symbols, a lamp and a patera,

offering-dish. She bestowed the gifts of light, enlightenment, and

eyesight, especially as the opener of eyes of newborn children.

1

The bogus "St. Lucy" bore the same symbols and was advertised
as a patron of sufferers from eye diseases. Lucy, or Lucia, was one of
the most popular of medieval saints, ranking with Agatha, Catherine,
and Mary Magdalene as a leading ecclesiastical money-maker.
Lucy's legend was the same "virgin martyr" story told of dozens of
other mythical female saints. Her devotion to chastity was so great
that when a
pagan admired her beautiful eyes, she cut them from
suitor

their sockets and sent them to him on a platter, asking to be left in

peace henceforth. This was how Christians interpreted the Goddess's

patera with its offerings.
The legend went on to say the pagans tried to execute St. Lucy for

the alleged crime of keeping her virginity. But they tried to when
drag her out of the temple where she had been imprisoned, she stood
rooted to the floor as heavily as a great statue. She couldn't be moved
even with ropes and pulleys. A fire built on the stone floor around her
2
also failed to destroy her. Finally she was killed by a sword thrust.

Details of this naive legend show that "St. Lucy" really was a
colossal statue of Juno Lucina, whose jeweled eyes were gouged out

by a Christian vandal; but destroying the statue proved difficult, as it was

too heavy to be moved. In the end, Juno was broken up and removed
from her temple in pieces but superstitious dread inspired the awe that
canonized her. The most significant detail in the legend said Lucy
was once very rich, but she distributed all her wealth to poor Christians.
This wealth evidently consisted of the expensive temple furnishings
which were informally distributed among the looters. Robbing temples
and smashing their holy statues was one of the major occupations of
poor Christians in Rome during the 4th and 5th centuries. 3

554
 People whom the church called witches apparently remembered Ludus
bt. Lucy pagan Goddess Lucina, and continued to worship her
as the Lug
With pagan ceremonies even though she was concealed by a Christian
^^^^^^^^^^^
tloak. As late as 1890, Tuscan witches still used Lucina's healing

a wreath of rue tied with red ribbon, making the patient spit
[-harm,
hree times through the wreath calling on "St. Lucy" for protection

the evil eye. 4

jigainst
Other versions of the same Goddess, such as Triduana (Diana
rriformis) and the Irish Medana, were also assimilated to Christianity
is fictitious saints, of whom the same story was told: they were beautiful

[irgins
who gouged out their eyes rather than succumb to the

emptations of love. It seems the new churches inherited from the ruin
5

If the old pagan world a great many eyeless female statues.

Some medieval sources viewed Lucy as a female Christ and

Ittributed to her the same miracles performed by Jesus. She could
estore sight to the blind, and by her magic touch she cured her own
"issue of blood." 6
pother's
In Sicily, St. Lucy continued to rule the Festival of Lights on the
hortest day of the year, recalling the ancient festival of Juno Lucina

(ekindling
the sun. Swedish celebrations of the day still feature a girl

Rearing
a crown of candles, known as the Lussibruden (Lucy
7
feride).

1. Lxrousse, 203-4. 2. Brewster, 21. 3. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 177.

4. Gifford, 76. 5. Gifford, 131. 6. de Voragine, 34. 7. Miles, 221-22.

Ludus
Latin "Game"; the dramas, performances, and contests of a religious

ptival.
The ludi evolved into the commedia, carnivals, circuses, and

pystery plays
of the Middle Ages, with the old gods disguised as
lowns, whose traditional hieratic gestures thus became "ludicrous."

fne ancient rex ludorum, King of the Games, became the medieval
Larnival King, or Prince of Fools. See Antic Hey.

var. Lugd, Lud

"g
ltic god, son or reincarnation of the Dagda, eponymous founder of
le cities of Lyons and London formerly Lugdunum, the stronghold
f Lug. His temple stood on Ludgate Hill.
1
"Lud's Gate" was a great
one called Crom
Cruaich, the Bloody Crescent, apparently a symbol
f the menstruating Moon-goddess to whom Lug was married in
2
uggestively Tantric style.
Lug's special festival was Lammas Eve, formerly Lugnasad, "the
James of Lug." The pagan rites of Lugnasad were kept to a very late
ate at Taillten in Ireland, where the Goddess had been worshipped as a

ical Earth-mother, Tailltiu. At the annual Taillten Fair, men bought

555
Luna brides in a custom reminiscent of the Goddess's ancient rites of sacred
Lupa promiscuity and defloration. The hill where payments were collected
was known as the Hill of the Buying. 4
Taillten was so notorious for promiscuity that any casual sexual
affair came to be known as a Taillten marriage. 5 Taillten marriages

were actually legal up to the 1 3 th century. They were supposed to last

the period specified by the old lunar calendars, a year and a day. 6

Lug's curious name may have come in some remote past time
from Mesopotamia, where the title of a sacred king, the Goddess's
7
Lug was spouse, was lugal.
Christianized as several 1. Squire, 254. 2. Briffault 3, 75. 3. Spence, 66, 102. 4. Joyce, 439.
saints: St. Lugad, St. 5. Spence, 101. 6. Pepper &
Wilcock, 273. 7. Campbell, Or.M., 107.
Luan, St. Eluan, and
St. Lugidus,
depending on local
dialects. Irish Luna
legendary history called
him a
King Lugadius Latin name of the Moon-goddess, coupled
in Gnostic symbolism and

martyred by a lance- magic male

texts with Sol, the
sun. Together they represented fire and
thrust from a druidic
water, whose combination produced the Blood of Life. Luna the
priest a story taken
watery moon used to be considered superior to Sol the fiery sun. Even
quite directly from
ancient cults of the
Chaucer wrote of "Luna the Serene, / Chief goddess of the ocean
sacred-king/dying-
and its queen, / Though Neptune have therein his deity, / Is over him
god. perished after
Lug and empress of the sea." '

marrying the Great Many myths present the Moon-goddess as the Creatress who first
Goddess called "the
drifted alone on the primal ocean of chaos until she decided to bring
Sovereignty of Erin
until the day of orderly forms out of elemental formlessness. Thus she was specifically
doom." 3 "Moon 2
Shining Over the Sea" to Scandinavian pagans. Finns
called her Luonnotar, sometimes loosely translated Daughter of Nature

But she was not the daughter of anything; she existed all alone in
primordial time, until she tired of loneliness and decided to create a
world. 3 See Moon.
Christians claimed the worshippers of Luna were crazy, hence the
word "lunatic," a person moon-touched or moon-struck. To this day,

many people believe lunacy is affected by the moon, being character-

ized by increased psychic disturbance when the moon is full.

1. Chaucer, 435. 2. Briffault 3, 67. 3. Larousse, 304.

Lupa
Sacred She- Wolf of Roman legend, nurse of the foundling twins
Romulus and Remus. Lupa's temple harlots were lupae, sometimes
called Queens (or high priestesses) in outlying towns of the empire.
Lupa's greatest festival was the annual Lupercalia, celebrated in the

Grotto of the She- Wolf, with orgiastic rites to insure the year's

fertility. After participating in the ceremony, naked youths traveled

throughout Palatine towns to "purify" them. Perhaps this was why,

1

556
tfter Lupa's festival was adopted by the Christian church, it was Lupus
the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin. 2 See Dog; Lycaon
|enamed
Werewolf. ^^^^^^^^^i
1. Wedeck, 174. 2. Larousse, 208.

LupUS var. Loup, Saint

saint based on the words Sanctus Lupus (Holy Wolf) on
[Fictitious
Callo-Roman icons, dating back to the worship of Dis Pater as the Holy
IVolf of Gaul. Christian hagiographers pretended Lupus was a

tpishop
of Troyes who saved Gaul from the Huns. This story was

Intirely falsified.
1
See Werewolf.
1. Attwater, 22?.

Lycaon
Orcadian sacred king, ancestor of all "lycanthropes" (werewolves); his
a wolf. He was formerly worshipped in the Lyceum or
|otemic form was
rwolf-temple" where Aristotle taught. Lycaon seems to have been
1

n earthly incarnation of several elder gods able to assume wolf shape,

luch as Apollo Lycaeus or Zeus Lycaeus.
1. Summers, W., 144.

557
 ***^

H
^

il

/,

-. i

fPffitef
^
 M
As law-giver and dis-
penser of justice, the
Egyptian Goddess maat
weighed each man's
soul against a feather
which became the
symbol that she sports
prominently in this
bas-relief. From the
period of the 19th
Dynasty.

One of the maenads who

were Dionysian pries-
tesses. When possessed
by the wine god, they
sacrificed and ate their
victims. Later, in the
classical age, they made
do with just drinking
and carnival processions.
Roman copy of a 5th-

century Greek relief;

near life-size.

Tales of the great mar

tyrs of the Middle
Ages are now generally
thought to have been
made up to impress later
Christians with the
near-preposterous tenac-
ity to believe. Poor
Saint Julitta, for exam-

ple, suffered the

discomfort shown only
after having been
hammered full of nails,
boiled in oil, and
contrary to the evi-
dence decapitated.
Detail, panel painting of
an altar frontal; 12th

century.
Ma Ma
Basic mother-syllable of Indo-European languages, worshipped in
itself as the fundamental name of the Goddess. The universality of the
mother-word (not shared by words for "father") indicates either that

the human race carried the same word from its earliest source to all parts
"Ma-Ma" means
"mother's breasts" in
of the earth at a period previous to the discovery of fatherhood; or

nearly all languages.

'
else that all human beings instinctively say something like "ma" as the

"All around the world, first verbal sound and associate it with the mother's breast, conse-
from Russia to
quently with emotional dependence on a divinity perceived as a
Samoa, and in the
milk-giving mother notwithstanding the absurd reference of Moses
ancient languages of
to a "nursing father" carrying the sucking child in his bosom (Numbers
Egypt, Babylon, India,
and the Americas, 11:12).
the word for 'mother' is In the Far East, the maternal blood bond that joined members of
mama or some the matrilineal clan was mamata, "mine-ness."
4
Its sacred letter Ma,
minor variation of this
2
in pictographic form as the Spark of Life (bindu or vindu), was said to
word." In ancient
Anatolia the Mother be "in the Great Yoni." 5 This scripture referred to a mystic essence
was Ma-Bellona; in unitingall the souls in a matrilineal kinship group. or mamata Ma
Sumer and Akkad the expressed the idea that descendants of the same mother shared the
Great Goddess was same blood and couldn't injure one another without injuring them-
often called Mama,
selves; therefore the concept of the maternal clan was a practical
Mami, Mammitu,
instrument of peace.
etc. In Central and
South America the In Indo-European root languages, Ma was often defined as "intel-
Goddess had such ligence," the maternal force that bound elements together to create
names Mama
as forms at the beginning of the world. 6 Ancient Egypt gave this maternal
Cocha, Mama Quilla, force such names or Maat, the Great Goddess of
Mama Cuna.*
as Ma-Nu, Maa,
the All-Seeing Eye and the spirit of Truth. 7
The primitive Iranian Moon-goddess Mah (or Al-Mah, the Moon)
was another form of the same deity. Arabs called her Qis-Mah,
"Fate," which the Turks corrupted into kismet. She gave birth to a
seriesof Messiahs, each one called the Mahdi, one guided or given

by Mother Mah. Persians made her name a sacred Word, formed of the
letters 8
Mourdad-Ameretat, "Death-Rebirth." The ideogram MA
was said to mean a state of immortality brought about by drinking the
milk of the Goddess's breast, which brings one back to the original
Ma-Ma.
In Hebrew the same sacred letters MA made the Mem-Aleph,
combining ideographs of "fluid" and "birth." This holy sign was
credited with great protective power, and was written on Jewish amulets
9
dating from the early 9th century B.C. It could have been copied
from either the Persians or the Egyptians, whose Mother Isis wore an
"Amulet of Ma," a vase representing her own fountains of nourish-
10
ing fluid. Or again, as Ma-Nu, the Primal Deep, she was symbolized
11
by three cauldrons. Even today the Tantric Goddess as a personifi-
cation of "fertilizing water" is named Mamaki. 12
In Egyptian myth, a reversal of the Ma-Ma of nourishing breasts

produced the female Devourer in the underworld: Am-Am, eater of

560
 In the cyclic fashion of the elder religions, the
Souls.
giver was trans- Maat
I
Formed into the taker. 13

Ma, the Great Goddess of Comana, was "worshipped by a whole

of hierodules in the ravines of the Taurus and
^^^^^^^^^^
j:>eople along the banks
bf the Iris. Like Cybele she was an ancient Anatolian divinity and
H She was taken Rome where she
jjersonified fertile nature." to
with the war goddess Bellona, who personified
jTierged fighting spirit as
ndomitable as that of a mother defending her young.
Today the implications of the syllable Ma are recognized
divine
obscure semi-magical cults like voodooism, where a priestess
bnly in
bmbodies the Goddess's spirit and is known as mamaloiox mambo. ls
However, Ma is still a universal synonym for "mother." See
Motherhood.
1. Potter & Sargent, 229. 2. Farb, W.P., 317. 3. Lamusse, 443.
4. Bardo Thodol, 219; Campbell, Or.M., 216. 5. Mahanirvanatantra, cxx.
6. d'Alviella, 240. 7. Budge, E.L., 55. 8. Lamusse, 31 1, 317. 9.
Albright, 198.
10. Elworthy, 125. 11. Book of the Dead, 205. 12. Tatz & Kent, 164.
13. Budge, E.M., 171. 14. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 54. 15. Martello, 160.

Maat
Egyptian Goddess as personification of "Truth" or "Justice"; the
name based on the universal Indo-European mother-syllable
priginal
meant simply "Mother." Maat's symbol was the feather against
she weighed each man's heart-soul (ab) in her underground Hall
jvhich

pf Judgment.
Thus the Plume of Maat itself became a hieroglyph for
1
'truth."

The same feathers of Truth were worn by other aspects of the

Goddess, such as Isis, who was the same lawgiving Mother. The gods
themselves were constrained to "live by Maat." Her law governed all

hree worlds ruled by her trinity as "Lady of heaven, queen of the

earth, and mistress of the underworld." 2

As the lawgiver of archaic Egypt, Maat was comparable to Babylo-
lian Tiamat who gave king of
the sacred tablets to the
gods. first

jVIaat's
laws were notably benevolent, compared to the harsh commands
later patriarchal gods, backed up by savage threats like those of
pf
Deuteronomy 28:1 5-68. An Egyptian was expected to recite the
Famous Negative Confession in the presence of Maat and Thoth (or
knubis) to show he had obeyed Maat's rules of behavior:

/ have not been a man ofanger. I have done no evil to mankind. I have
not inflicted pain. I have made none to weep. I have done violence to
no man. I have not done harm unto animals. I have not robbed the poor. I
have not fouled water. I have not trampled fields. I have not behaved
with insolence. I have not judged hastily. I have not stirred up strife. I have
not made any man to commit murder for me. I have not insisted that
excessive work be done for me daily. I have not borne false witness. I have
not stolen land. I have not cheated in measuring the bushel. I have

561
Maat allowed no man to suffer hunger. I have not increased my wealth except
with such things as are my own possessions. I have not seized

^^^^^^^^^^^^ wrongfully the property of others. I have not taken milk from the mouths
of babes. *

Those who lived by the laws of Maat took a sacramental drink,

comparable to the Hindus' Soma or its Persian counterpart Haoma,
which conferred ritual purity in the same sense as the Christian
"washing in the blood of the Lamb." Egyptian scribes of the 3rd
millenium B.C. wrote: "My inward parts have been washed in the
liquor of Maat." Like baptismal water of life, Maat's potion brought life-

4
after-death to the peaceful, but death overtook violent persons.

Egyptian moral precepts were of a high order, many of them

turning up centuries later in the Bible:

Take heed not to rob the poor, and be not cruel to the destitute. . . . If
thou canst answer the man who attacks thee, do him no injury. Let the
evildoer alone; he will destroy himself. We must help the sinner, for may
we not become like him? Crusts of bread and a loving heart are
. . .

better than rich food and contention. Learn to be content with what . . .

thou Treasure obtained by fraud

hast. will not stay with thee; thou hast
it today, tomorrow it has departed. . . . The approval ofman is better than
s
riches.

Under the feudal disorders of the 12th dynasty, old rules began
to break down along with
the matrilineal clan system that supported

them, and educated Egyptians deplored the disruptions of society. A

Heliopolitan priest wrote: "Maat is cast out, iniquity is in the midst of

the council hall. . . .

[T]he poor man has no strength to save himself
6
from him that is stronger than he." Sometimes kinsman murdered
kinsman, in violation of the clan's most sacred rule. One writer
unfavorably compared his countrymen to the Maat-worshipping tribes
of Nubia: "The Matoi, who are friendly towards Egypt, say: 'How
"7
could there be a man that would slay his brother?'
Maat was more than a judge of the dead. She was a stand-in for all

Egyptian Goddesses, including Hathor, Mut, Isis, Neith, Nekhbet,

etc. The sun god was told: "The goddess Maat embraceth thee both at

morn and at eve." As a birth-giver, she was sometimes Metet, the

Morning Boat of the Sun, translated "becoming strong" and corre-
8
sponding to the Greco-Roman mother of dawn, Mater Matuta. She
was worshipped in lands other than Egypt. Northern Syria was called by
the Hittites, Mat Hatti: that is, Mother of Hatti. 9 Egyptian priests
drew the Feather of Maat on their tongues in green dye, to give their

words a Logos-like power of Truth so their verbal magic could create

10
reality. Similarly in northern Europe the divine bard Bragi had this
power because of the runes engraved on his tongue by the Goddess
Idun.
African Pygmies still know Maat by the name she bore in Sumeria
as "womb" and "underworld": Matu. She was the first woman, and

562
 he mother of God. Like her Egyptian counterpart she was sometimes Mab, Queen
fat-headed." Macha
I.

4.
Budge, E.L., 68.
H. Smith, 49-51.
Budge, G.E. 1, 418. 3. Budge, D.N., 254; Hallet, 41
2.

5. Budge, D.N., 258-59. 6. H.

Smith, 50.
1
^^^^^^^^
7. Erman, 43, 107. 8. Budge, G.E. 1, 323, 417. 9. Mendenhall, 157
10. Seligmann, 39. 11. Hallet, 95.

Mab, Queen
peltic Fairy Queen, whose name meant "mead" a red drink
representing sovereignty which she gave to each of her many consorts. 1

Like the "claret" in the lap of Thomas Rhymer's Fairy Queen, this
eems to have been a concoction of the queen's own menstrual blood
^s
the feminine wine of wisdom. Mab's legends date from the
natriarchal age, when queens chose and invested their own kings. See
rhomas Rhymer.
[Link],75.

Macabre
Crim Reaper of medieval mystery plays. As Lord of Death, Macabre
led the danse macabre (German Totentanz) wearing a skeleton suit and

tarrying a scythe. Like the "Destroyer" deities of the east, the

Macabre figure represented the Gnostic death-in-life principle. See
Mask.

Macha
H'Great Queen of Phantoms," worshipped in Ireland even before the

coming of the Celts; probably identical with the Central Asian Moon-
feoddess Macha Alia, Mother of Life and Death. She appeared in the

pld Testament as Queen Maachah, whose spirit was worshipped as an

by her "son," King Asa (1 Kings 15:13).
dol in a grove until ousted

mountaintop temple of Machaerus (where John the Baptist met his

[The
lUoom) may have been named for her.
Macha's Irish shrine was Emain Macha, capital of Ulster. Its

heavenly form was Emania, the Moon-goddess's realm of death. As

1

the third person or death-aspect of the triple Morrigan she presided over

in extensive necropolis. Like other versions of the deadly mother

i
Morgan, Durga, Uma, Kara), she haunted battlefields and made magic
the blood of slain men. 2 She was also identified with the Fairy
vith

Queen, Mab. As a trinitarian Goddess, she cast her death curse on Cu

phulainn in the guise of three druidic "sorceresses of Mab." 3
Some said the voice of Macha summoned men to death, and it was
Jhe same as the dread voice of the Banshee, or "woman of the

563
Mader-Akka 4
barrow-graves." Since followers of the Old Religion went to her land
Maera of death, naturally their spirits inhabited the ancient tombs that also

^^^^^^^^^^ represented her womb of rebirth.

1. Lumusse, 229; Spence, 146. 2. Rees, 36. 3. Lamusse, 233. 4. Goodrich, 177.

Mader-Akka
"Mother Akka," a Lapp name of the ancestress of humanity; the
same as the Goddess-mother of Akkad, who was also Acco in Greece,
Acca Larentia in Rome, etc. See Akka.

Madri
"Mother," in Tantric Buddhism a Goddess of Enlightenment who
gave birth to the moon and sun; the Great Mother as a spouse of one
the popular incarnations of the Buddha. 1

[Link],545.

Maenads
Priestesses of Dionysus and Orpheus, named after their original

home, the holy mountain of Maenalus, where Pan also lived as an

Arcadian shepherd. Possessed by the spirit of the wine god, the
Maenads became "wild women" who tore apart their sacrificial victim
and devoured him during their orgies. In the more civilized classical

age, they worshipped their Savior with a drunken feast and carnival

processions. In Rome they were called Bacchantes, dedicated to their

god under his Roman name of Bacchus. See Orphism.

Maera
Black bitch-totem of Hecate, a form assumed by her Trojan incarna-
tion, Queen Hecuba, when she was captured by Odysseus. The cause
of his long wandering exile apparently was the curse Hecuba-Maera
on him. Some said she was killed and buried in "The Bitch's
laid

Tomb." Others said she scared away her enemies with her spells and
curses and ran free.
She was an animal version of the fatal Crone-goddess Moera,

symbolized by the Lesser Dog Star whose rising announced human

sacrifices in Attica. One of her victims was a
king whose daughter
Odysseus married, "and whose fate he will therefore have shared in
the original myth." '
Similar sacrifices were still offered to the Death-

564
goddess and Wolf-mother Maerin in her temple at Trondheim as late Magdala
as the 1 1th century a.d. 2
Magi
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 341-44. 2. Turville-Petre, 91.

Magdala
"High Place," or "Temple"; in Herod's triple-towered palace in
Jerusalem, the sanctuary of Queen Mariamne. Thus "Miriam of
Magdala" (Mary Magdalene) was either the queen herself or a high

priestess impersonating the Goddess Mari. See Mary.

Magen David
"Shield of David," the so-called Star of David or
structed of two interlocked triangles,

Judaism. Actually,
now accepted as
a symbol of
was not associated with Judaism until the late
it

Middle Ages and was not officially accepted as a Jewish symbol until the
17th century.
The original
1

source of the Magen David was the

Yantra," which stood for union of the sexes: the downward-pointing
hexagram con-

Tantric "Great
$
Star of David (Hexagram)

triangle being female, the upward-pointing one male, the two signifying
the eternal union of God and Goddess. 2 Cabalistic sex-worship
brought the Yantra into Jewish tradition, but later puritanical elements
obscured its original meaning.
1. Encyc. Brit, "Magen David." 2. Zimmer, p. 147.

Magi
"Magicians," the Three Wise Men inserted into the Christian birth-
storybecause Persian-Essenic sages taught that the Magi were the only
seers able to read the coming of the Messiah's star and so identify the
Divine Child. This teaching stemmed ultimately from Egypt,
right
where the Three Wise Men were the three stars in the Belt of Orion,
pointing to Osiris's star Sothis (Sirius), which "rose in the east" to
announce the coming of the Savior at the season of the Nile flood.
(See Osiris.) These three Belt stars were still called Magi in the Middle
1

Ages.
In Rome early in the Christian era, Magi meant priests of Mithra

(the original Persian"Messiah"), or astrologers, or miscellaneous

healers and miracle-workers; it was a term for magicians in general.

Roman Christians were hostile to the Magi but were forced to retain

565
 story because their presence was empha-
Magic the three Magi of the Gospel
sized as evidence of Jesus's divinity.

[Link],221.

Giovanni della
Porta's list said ancient Magic
magicians were the church condemned magic as a devilish art, the Ages of
called
Though
magos by
Faith were filled with magical beliefs Magic was legal
and practices. in
Persians; sapientes by
the Latins; philosophes Roman times; this tolerance continued through the early Middle

by the Greeks; Ages, in some areas much longer than that. Sir Walter Raleigh praised
Brachmanes or
magic as a route to "virtues hidden in the center of the center." He
gymnosophistas by said to light the inmost virtues, and draweth them out
magic "bringeth
the Indians; Chaldaeos
of Nature's hidden bosom to human use." '

by the Babylonians
and Assyrians; Drydas, The nobility including princes of the church supported court
Bardos, and magicians, astrologers, and diviners who helped them conduct their

Semnothesby the affairs.

2
Scholars carefully classified different types of magicians, as if to
Celts; sacerdotesby The "ancients" were
distinguish the heretical from the acceptable.
the Egyptians; and
respected for their great magical wisdom.
prophetes by the
Cabalists. History's Mixtures of tradition and confusion characterized nearly all the

leading magicians manifestations of magic, especially the verbal charms and holy names
were Persia's Zoroaster, to the
popularly supposed to invoke supernatural powers necessary
Rome's Numa A magician must recite defensive charms while enroute
"working."
Pompilius, Thrace's
to the scene of a magical operation, such as: "Zazaii, Zamaii, Puidamon
Zalmoxis, Babylon's
Buddha, and Egypt's most powerful, Sedon most strong, El, Yod He Vau He (the
Hermes. 3 tetragrammaton), Iah, Agla, assist me an unworthy sinner who have
had the boldness to pronounce these Holy Names which no man
Giovanni della should invoke save in very great danger. Therefore have I
name and
Porta (1535-1615) recourse unto these Most Holy Names, being in great peril both of
Neapolitan philosopher soul and of body. Pardon me if I have sinned in any manner, for I trust
and author, who
in Thy protection alone, especially on this journey." Proceedings
wrote comedies as well
as scientific treatises were usually opened with an "evocation," often involving a sacrifice to

on magnetism, be performed in a specific manner. The Grand Grimoire gives a

agriculture, optical sample:
phenomena,
On the third day of the moon, the witch or sorcerer will sever the head of
cryptography, steam
engines, chemistry, a virgin kid with one stroke, a clean cut. The kid will be garlanded with

astrology, and verbena and green ribbon beforehand and the sacrifice must take place far
demonology. He away from habitation. A clean, new knife is used; the celebrant must
founded the bare the right shoulder and keep a willow wood lire brightly aflame.
Accademia dei Segreti,
Saying: "I offer this creature to three, O
great Adonai, Elohim, Ariel
which the Inquisition the resplendence of The Name,
andjehovas, in the honor and power and
later suppressed.
which is greater than all the spirits. O Great Adonai: agree to accept it

as agreeable."*

Magic books were full of charms in series, with assurances that if

one charm failed to call up the dread spirits, then surely the next one,
bearing even more powerful names, would work. Demons who
torments.
stubbornly refused to appear were threatened with eternal

566
 I he frustrated magician played God and enchanted recalcitrant
Magic
into deeper circles of hell. The silliness of the grimoires can
Ipirits only
je appreciated through their own words; here in a series of invoca-

pns from the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon:

O mighty and potent prince Samael, who art the ruler and governor of the
first hour of the day by the decree of the Most High God, King of Grand Grimoire
Glory; I, the servant of the Most High, do desire and entreat you by three One of the most
great and potentnames of God, Adonai, Aglaon, Tetragrammaton, popular Renaissance
and by the power and virtue thereof, to assist me in my affairs, and by your collections of spells,

power and authority to send me, causing to appear before me, all or exorcisms,
whom I shall call by name, invocations, and
any of the angels same being resident
the
under your government. I do further entreat and require that they shall magical recipes.

help me in all matters which accord with their office, even as I shall desire,
and that they shall act for me as for the servant of the Most High.
Amen.

If this legalistic contract failed to bind the demons, the magician

resorted to threats:
pmmonly
Because thou and obeyst not my commandments nor the
art disobedient,

precepts of theLord thy God, now I, who am the servant of the Most
High and Imperial Lord God ofHosts, Jehovah, having His celestial
power and permission, for this thine averseness and contempt, thy great
disobedience and rebellion, will excommunicate thee, will destroy thy
name and seal, and bury them in unending oblivion, unless thou
comest immediately, visibly and affably, here before this circle, within this
assuming a fair and comely form, without doing harm unto
triangle,

myself any creature whatsoever, but giving reasonable answer to my

or

requests and performing my desire in all things.

Solemn magicians seem not to have realized the absurdity of

[(communicating demon, who
!
a was hardly likely to be distressed by
bvering relations with the church, since he had presumably severed
clations with God already. Nevertheless, wizards were supplied with

:pe following curse for excommunication:

Thou art still pernicious and disobedient, willing not to appear and inform
me upon that which I desire to know; now therefore, in the Name and
by the power and dignity of the Omnipotent and Immortal Lord God of
Hosts, Jehovah Tetragrammaton, sole Creator of Heaven, Earth, and
Hell, with all contained therein, the marvellous Disposer ofall things
visible and invisible, I do hereby curse and deprive thee ofall thine
office, power and place; I bind thee in the depth of the Bottomless Pit,

there to remain unto the Day ofJudgment, in the Lake of Fire and

Brimstone, prepared for the rebellious Spirits. May all the Company of
Heaven curse thee; may the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Light of the
Hosts of heaven, curse thee into lire unquenchable, into torments un-
speakable; and even as thy name and seal are bound up in this box, to
be choked with sulphureous and stinking substances and to burn in this

material fire, so, in the name ofJehovah, and by the power and dignity
of the three names, Tetragrammaton, Anexhexeton, Primematum, may
all these drive thee, O thou disobedient Spirit N., into the Lake ofFire.

567
Magic The grimoires provided many excuses for failure. They required
infinite care in the manufacture of tools, with complicated charms and

^^^^^^^^^^ debilitating purifications, fasting, and penance. Their lists of holy

names and words of power were lengthy and hard to remember and
was essential. The practice of magic was
letter-perfect recitation

clearly beyond the grasp of the lazy, stupid, or illiterate. Unfortunately i

was also beyond the grasp of the credulous educated as well.

A grimoire called the Little Albert gave an infallible formula for
making a ring of invisibility, but the ring had to be plaited with three
from the head of a hyena. 6 Hyenas were scarce in Europe, but
hairs

even if one could be found, its head hairs would prove too short to be
plaited in a ring. Similarly impossible prescriptions appeared in all magi<
books. The more infallible the charm, the more outrageously difficult

its execution.
Faith in magic was identical with faith in religion. Both depended
on hieratic ceremony and verbal incantation. Both involved prayer to
a superior power even the same power in both cases. Both used the
name and coercion. The pious practiced magic
as a vehicle of appeal

no less than the impious by way of a thousand informal charms like the
following, advocated in 1785 to learn winning numbers in the
French national lottery:

Lord Jesus Christ, Who hast said, "lam

the Way, the Truth, and the

Life, "for Thou and hast shown me the secrets of

hast cherished truth

Thy wisdom whereby again this night the unknown things which are not
revealed save to the lowly shall be revealed to me, send me the angels

Uriel, Rubiel, and Barachiel to teach me which numbers I must choose k

win, by Him Who will come to judge the quick and the dead and the
7
times by fire.

Peasant magic was usually crude, without the secret names and
verbose invocations requiring a written recipe. Illiterate witches simply

performed acts of magic, like this rude country charm to cure

lameness:

Take hog's dung and charnell, and put them together and hold them in

your left hand, and take in the other hand a knife, and prick the
medicine three times, then cast the same into the tire, and take the said
knifeand make three pricks under a table, and let the knife stick there;
and after that take three leaves ofsage, and as many ofherb John, and pui
them into ale, and drink it last at night and first in the morning. 8

A witch's patient testified that this procedure did indeed give her
"ease of her lameness." We may laugh, but equally crude magic has
been promulgated for profit in our own time, often by churches
themselves. In 1880, one of the leading churches in Philadelphia sold

blessed candles with the guarantee that the purchaser would be

preserved for one year from all disorders of the throat. sermon was A
preached and seven examples given of miraculous
to this effect,

cures. 9 The mass of exploitable believers was still evident a century latei

568
 in 1970, when an enterprising seer sold healing cloths by radio Magic
:

advertising: "I lay hands on a cloth," he said. "Thehealing power of

God which I received four years ago is
passed on to the cloth which I
^^^^^^^^^^^
10
isend to you."
Christians practiced magic from the very beginning of the church.
Isaac of Antioch complained in the 5 th century that not only the

people but clergymen also "carry about the incantations of the magi-
and instead of the holy cross, lo, they carry the books of devils
icians; . . .
;

i b child carries about devils' names and comes to church." u In other

words, pagan amulets were credited with as much protective power as

jChristian
amulets. St. Jerome himself affirmed that a sapphire amulet
a favor with princes, pacifies enemies, and obtains freedom
['procures
12
ifrom captivity."
Christian authorities said an amulet containing many secret names
f
31 God was sure to keep the bearer from any evil death. The cake of
ax called Agnus Dei
vVi (Lamb of God) was advertised by Pope Urban V
as a sure protection against lightning, fire, and water; also a charm for
childbirth and remittance of sins. Various charms were sold by the
|sasy
: church to preserve horses' hoofs from cracks, to prevent disease, to
enhance sexual potency. Girls wishing to grow long hair were told to
hang locks of their hair before an image of St. Urbane. Christians had
malevolent charms too. It was believed that any man would die within a

year if the 108th Psalm was "said against" him by a priest. 13 The

,
Mass was credited with potent magical force for both good and evil uses.
Masses were said for healing, for fertility, for magical protection of
r
livestock, houses, boats, etc.; they were also said to kill enemies. From

the 7th to the1 5 th

century, church literature spoke of priests who
could cause death by saying the Mass for the Dead against living
14

frsons.
Up to the 17th century it was still written that a dream revealing
:he whereabouts of any stolen article could be obtained by placing
jnder one's pillow a wax tablet with the names of the Magi Jasper,

(sic), and Balthasar. Another kind

Melchisor of magical dream, to see
the face of one's future mate, couldbe had by putting a Bible under the
15
with a sixpence inserted in the Book of Ruth. Many magic
jpillow
:harms invoked the names of apostles:

The devil is tying a knot in my leg!

Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it, I beg;
Crosses three we make to ease us:
16
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!

by teaching them magic

Priests often tried to impress simple folk

charm to make butter come in the

:harms. Ady's maid was given a

:hurn, by an old woman who said her mother had it from "a learned
Church man in Queen Maries days, when as church men had more
cunning, and could teach people many a trick, that our Ministers
17
now a days know not." Typical Christian magic included verbal

569
Magna Dea charms to exorcise, heal, bless, or excommunicate; the wearing of
Magog amulets such as crucifixes, Christopher medals, and scraps of the
St.

the use of holy water; the invocation of saints; and of

^^^^^^^^^^^m scriptural texts;
course the belief in miracles generally for "magic" and "miracle"

were but different words for the same idea.

1. [Link], 55, 143. 2. Lea unabridged, 772. 3. Shumaker, 235.
4. Ravensdale & Morgan, 72. 5. Waite, CM., 77 et seq. 6. Waite, CM., 310.
[Link], 310. Rosen, 114. 9. Leland,42. 10. Bromberg, 179. 11. Angus, 51.
8.

12. Hazlitt, 6. 13. Scot, 165, 186, 188, 201, 216. 14. Cavendish, RE., 224.
15. Hazlitt, 22, 189. 16. Hazlitt, 363. 17. Hazlitt, 84.

Magna Dea
"Great Goddess" of Syria, worshipped especially at Hierapolis,
"Holy City." The same title was applied to all Goddesses throughout
the Roman empire, which was verging on a concept of female mono-
theism when Jewish, Persian, and Christian patriarchy intervened.

Magnates
"Landowners," medieval noblemen, whose title in the Balkans prob-

ably descended from the Magnetes or Centaurs. Equestrian warriors

were the model of every military aristocracy in Europe: Spanish
caballeros, French chevaliers, English cavaliers, all meant "riders of
horses."

Magog
"Mother of Gog," biblical name of the Scythian-Amazonian God-
dess and her land in the north, whence came equestrian warriors greatly
feared by the Semites, to judge from the prophets' lengthy cursings
and invocations for their defeat (Ezekiel 38).

Authors of Genesis made Magog a "son" of Japheth (Genesis

10:2), though Japheth himself was not a Hebraic hero but a borrowed
form of the titan Iapetus in Greek myth. From this bit of syncretic
1

confusion arose the impression that Magog was a male, and a giant,
for a titan's offspring would naturally be another titan.

Though tribes of western Asia continued to worship Magog as a

Goddess, in Europe "Gogmagog" was usually envisioned as a de-

monic colossus. "Ma"

was merged with the Celtic mac to yield an
interpretation of "Gog, son of Gog." Gog and Magog were com-
monly used names for any pair of colossal figures, especially figures of
pagan deities. Yet, curiously, "Gog and Magog" appeared in Renais-
sance magic books as two of the Ineffable Names of God. 2
1. Graves, W.G., 253. 2. Waite, CM., 277.

570
 Maha- N la-Saras vati
i Maha-Nila-Sarasvati

('Great Blue
|From which
River Goddess," Hindu name of the Mother of Waters,
the name of the Nile may have been derived. The waters
bf the Goddess Sarasvati were once considered essential to the
1
^^b Mahdi

jfanointing of kings, purification, and baptism.

[Link],193.

Maharis
the basic social unit of clans in Assam, where
["Motherhoods,"
families were matrilineal. See Motherhood.

Maharutti
P
"Great Rite," the sexual union between the menstruating
(Tantric
Goddess and her chosen bridegroom Shiva the Condemned One, who
afterward and became Shava, the Corpse. Thus mahar-
pied shortly
utti was both a hieros gamos and a love-death. See Sex; Tantrism.

Mahatma
Hindu sage, a word literally meaning "Great Mother," masculinized
In much the same way as the Semitic ima, "mother," became imam, a
male sage. The original mahatmas were the Primal Matriarchs, or

jnatrikadevis.

Mahdi
Arabic-
]One guided by, sent by, or given by the Moon-goddess Mah;
iMoslem title of the promised Messiah, who became the Desired Knight
medieval European romance. He was essentially the same as the
pf
final avatar of Buddha, the Kalki yet to appear on earth; or the Persian

Messiah, or the Christian Christ in his Second Coming. The Mahdi

[would
be born of "the Virgin Paradise" (Pairidaeza), who embodied the
(spirit of the Moon-goddess
on earth. His coming was so eagerly
that many historical Islamic leaders claimed to personify him.
pvaited
After Arabia was converted to Islam, was usually supposed that
it

the Mahdi would be sent by Allah. But he was older than Islam. As

jhis title suggests, he was a Son of the Moon in the most primitive times,
when all Arabia was the territory of the lunar Goddess, one of whose
oldest names was Mah. See Ma. 1

1 .
Lumusse, 311.

571
Maia Maia
Mama
"Grandmother of Magic," mother of the Greeks' Enlightened One,
Hermes; the western version of Maya, "Magic," mother of the Hindus'
Enlightened One, Buddha. She personified the powers of transfor-
mation and material "appearances," the same powers attributed to
Maya-Kali, who made the universe by her magic. Greek writers

called Maia one of the Pleiades, but also understood that she was the
Great Goddess of Maytime festivals, of the renewal and rebirth of the
dead. She made her son Hermes the Conductor of Souls in the
underworld, just as the Hindu Maya made her masculine counterpart
Ya-Ma into a Conductor of Souls and Lord of Death. 1

1. Graves, W.G., 179.

Maira
Gnostic name of the Star of Isis, or Venus, or Stella Maris, a title of
the virgin Mary. The star represented a World Soul.

Maithuna
Tantric term for coitus reservatus, sexual intercourse performed as
one of the Five Boons given to humanity by Kali. The other four were

madya, wine; mamsa, meat; matsya, fish; and mudra, woman.

1

Maithuna was the sexual technique for allowing man to assimilate into
himself the innate magical wisdom of woman. See Tantrism.
1. Campbell, Or.M, 359.

Malinalxochitl
Primal Mother of Aztec mythology, ruler of all men and beasts until

she was overthrown by her brother, the divine leader of the patriarchal
Aztecs. After her defeat, she was diabolized.

var. Mamaki, Mama

Mamata
Title of the Great Goddess Ma, or Mama, the world's basic name for

"mother's breasts." Mother Kali was sometimes Mamaki, spirit of the

world's "Fertilizing Waters." She was also Mamata, spirit of "mine-
ness" or belonging, binding members of the same matrilineal clan
together through the blood of mothers. In Mesopotamia, she was
1

Mami or Mammitu or Mama, the Creatress who made mankind of clay

2
and nourished her creatures with her own magic fluids.

1. Campbell, Or.M., 216. 2. Neumann, CM., 136.

572
 Mammisi Mammisi
Mamom
Egyptian "motherhood temple" usually built to honor the queen's
maternity, after she gave birth to her first child and so became assimilat- ^^^mmmmi^m
ed to the Goddess. Queen Cleopatra had a mammisi built for

worship of her own motherhood after the birth of her first child. It was
still standing in the 19th century a.d. but has since vanished. See
Cleopatra VII.

|
Mammon
Medieval demon of commercial acquisitiveness, whose name meant
"riches." In theMiddle East, the original meaning of this name was the
rich outpouring of the Great Goddess's inexhaustible breasts (mam-

mae), which nourished all her children; Babylon named her Mami or
Mammitu (Mother), the biblical Mamre. Some Sumero-Babylonian
scriptures called her "Mammetun the mother of destinies." '

Jesus's precept, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon" (Luke

16: 1 3) meant a choice between God and Goddess, in a time when

I her temples were richer and more magnificent than his. The Gospels
demanded that her shrines be destroyed and her wealth taken away,

in an obviously jealous attack on the "Many-breasted" Goddess "whom

all Asia and the world worshippeth" (Acts 19:27). Like the Oriental

Goddess Earth (Artha, "riches"), she stood for material wealth because
I her temples had a great deal of it and her soil was the ultimate source
of all. 2
It was the habit of demonologists to masculinize even Goddesses
when they were diabolized and consigned to hell. Even Ashtoreth, or

Astarte, was a male in hell. Much the same thing seems to have

happened to Mammetun: she became a "lord" of riches. Weyer

made her/him a dignitary of hell and an ambassador from hell to

England, probably a reflection of resentment of English

commercialism. 3
1. EpicofGilgamesh, 107. 2. Cavendish. P.E., 238. 3. Waite, CM., 186-87.

Mamokoriyoma
Primal Mother of the Yanomamo tribes, who gave birth to the first

people and instituted ritual cannibalism.

Mamom
"Grandmother," the oldest style of Maya pottery, designed and
executed by women, to whom the art of pottery was sacred. See Potter.

573
Man Man
In the original Old Norse, man meant "woman." The word 1
for

"man" was not man but wer, from the Sanskrit root viras in wer-wulf,
the man-wolf. 2 The name Man meant the Moon, creatress of all
creatures according to Scandinavian and other tribes throughout Eu-
rope. Even in imperial Rome, Man or Mana was the mother of all
manes or ancestral spirits. The Sanskrit root man meant "moon" and
3
"wisdom," both the primary attributes of the Great Goddess.
Heathen skalds composed a class of sacred love songs to the
feminine principle of the Moon and her earthly incarnation, woman;
these were mansongr, "woman-songs." They were expressly prohibited
4
by the Catholic church.
The Isle of Man was formerly sacred to the Moon-goddess, who
was sometimes a mermaid or an androgynous Aphrodite who kept
men's souls turned upside down"
in "pots i.e., grave mounds and
5
beehive tombs. Passage graves in East Jutland were full of upturned
pots, an Iron Age burial custom. 6 The same custom was mentioned in

South America where the Moon carries soulsaway and places them
under upturned pots. 7 Apparently the Isle of Man used to be a sacred
Isle of the Dead. The name of its deity was variously rendered Man,

Mana, Mana-Anna, or Manannan.

The island used to have an "enchanted palace" with a crypt or
chapel of thirteen pillars, the sacred number of the old lunar year.

Every visitor was expected to count the pillars. If the counting ceremo-
ny was omitted, the visitor would be imprisoned in the crypt, which
indicates a burial place sacred to the Moon. The site was later destroyed
by on the ground," a reference to Christians' habit of
"salt spilled

leveling pagan shrines and sowing the ground with salt to make it
The Goddess-or- infertile.

God Mana-Anna, or The Moon-goddess appeared in Manx legend as a Fairy Queen

Mannanan, was who sometimes led the whole male population "into the sea, where
masculinized as a "son
they perished." Most probably they perished first and were given to the
of Lir" of Sidh
sea-wornb as in the ancient Norse funeral rite. The Fairy Queen
Finnaha. Lir however
was the same as escaped annihilation by the priests when she took the form of a wren.

Shakespeare's King But pious Manxmen organized wren hunts, a custom followed every
Lear, who had three New Year's Day thereafter, killing scores of the little birds in an effort to
10
daughters but no son. the Feathers of the slain wrens were said to
kill "Jenny Wren," fairy.
Thus, Shakespeare's
preserve sailors from shipwreck, and noManx sailor would go to sea
source seems to indicate
that this child of Lir without one. 8 The wren
hunts possibly were pre-Christian, with the
was originally the Triple legend of the Fairy Queen invented for a new rationale. Before the
Goddess, for one of missionaries came, wrens probably were the "soul-birds" sacrificed to
the so-called daughters,
the Goddess. Vallancey said the druids considered the wren supreme
Cordelia, was really
among all birds. "The superstitious respect shown to this bird gave
Creiddylad, another
name for the Fairy offense to our first Christian missionaries, and by their commands he is

hunted and by the peasants on Christmas Day, and on the

11
Queen. still killed

574
 following (St. Stephen's Day) he is carried about hung by the leg, in the Mana
I

center of two hoops crossing each other at right angles." 9 Managarm

[Link], 105. 2. J.B. Russell, 55. 3. Avalon, 178. 4. Turville-Petre, 1 76.
5. Spence, 126, 1 58; Keightley, 259. 6. H. R. E. Davidson, P.S., 34. 7. Eliade, S., 327.
8. Hazlitt, 387-90. 9. Hazlitt, 666. 10. Goodrich, 177. 11. Graves, W.G., 183.

var. Mania

Mana
Mana may be
Nearly languages had a cognate of this word, the basic meaning of
all
compared to Hindu
which was maternal power, moon-spirit, magic, supernatural force, and
Maya, the Virgin
a title of the Goddess. Mana came back into English via anthropolog- Goddess whose name
ical studies in the South Pacific, where the word was described as was "power," and
Arabic Manat, the
follows:
Virgin Goddess
Mana is the stuff through which magic works
proceeding immediately
. . . whose name was "fate"
from the nature of the sacred person or thing, or mediately because a and who represented
The cult of the relics the Triple Moon. 1
In
ghost or spirit has put it into the person or thing. . . .

archaic Europe,
ofsaints springs from the belief that their bodies, whether living or
3 Mana was the Moon-
dead, possessed Mana.
mother who gave
Mana also ruled the underworld, which the Finns called Man- birth to the race of

ala.
6
The Romans knew her as a very ancient Goddess Mana or Mania, man that is, of
woman, which is what
| governing the underground land of the long dead: the ancestral spirits man originally
called manes, her children. They dwelt in a pit under the lapis manalis meant. 2
in the Forum, emerging to receive their offerings on the annual feast

I
day of the Maniae.
7
On this occasion the Goddess Mania appeared in a Mana or Mania
fright mask, like the terrifying Crone-face of Medusa or Destroying became a common
Kali.
8 name for the Great
Mania was not Goddess as Creatress
solely a spirit of death or madness, however, in
and Queen of
classical times. Her "moon-madness" or "lunacy" was viewed as a
Heaven (moon),
revelation of the divine, to be received with gratitude. Socrates said, because it was
"The greatest of our blessings come to us through mania. . . .
intimately connected
Madness coming from [the deity] is
superior to sanity of human with the mysterious
9
In other words, Mana-Mania was the Muse. Gnostics said powers of women, like
origin."
the moon itself.
Mana is "the divine spirit in man"; and the Great Mana, or Mana of Scandinavians called
10
I Glory, is "the highest godhead." the Goddess's sky-
1. Briffault 2, Steenstrup, 105. 3. Budge, A.T., 24-26.
602. 2. realm Manavegr, "the
4. Turville-Petre, 76. 5. Joyce 1, 285, 370. 6. Larousse, 305. 7. James, 183.
Moon's Way."4
8. Lamusse, 213. 9. Angus, 264. 10. Jonas, 98.
Celts called it E-Mania,
or Hy Many, the
land ruled by the Triple
Goddess. Sometimes
- anagarm it was Emain Macha,
the moon-land of
"Moon-Dog," firstborn wolf-son of Angurboda, the Danish death-
Mother Macha.
idess called Hag of the Iron Wood, mother of Hel. Managarm and Cormac's Glossary
brother wolves carried the bodies of the dead to Valhalla by
g them. See Dog.

575
 Manasa-Devi Manasa-Devi
Manicheans
Serpent Goddess of Bengal, identified with the moon, bearing the
moon's magic name Mana.

Mana . . .

said ema meant "blood' Manat

(compare the
Semitic ima, "mother,"
Arabic Moon-goddess, ruler of Fate: thus her name is still a synonym
and dam, meaning for Luck or Fortune. She was venerated in a sacred stone at Kodaid in
both "mother" and pre-Islamic times, and was one of the trinity of Fates worshipped at

"blood"). Emain, Mecca. See Arabia.

therefore, was the
country of the Great
Mother's regenerative
5
lunar blood.
Mandala
Oriental sacred diagram or meditation symbol, usually circular, some-
times square, sometimes another regular shape, such as the

Eight- Petaled Lotus of Smashana-Kali. Contemplation of the manda-

la was supposed to lead to mystical insight.

Mandorla
"Almond," the pointed-oval sign of the yoni, used in Oriental art to

signify the divine female genital; also called vesica piscis, the Vessel of
the Fish. Almonds were holy symbols because of their female, yonic
connotations. Almonds had the power of virgin motherhood, as shown
by the myth of Nana, who conceived the god Attis with her own
almond. The candlestick of the Jews' tabernacle of the Ark was
1

Vesica piscis decorated with almonds for their fertility magic (Exodus 25:33-34).
Christian art similarly used the mandorla as a frame for figures of God,

Jesus, and saints, because the artists forgot what it

formerly meant.
[Link].G.B.,403.

Manicheans
Gnostic Christian sect, a leading rival of the early orthodoxy.
[Link] was a Manichean for over a decade, before he was
converted to orthodoxy and began writing arguments against the
1

precepts of his former teachers.

Founder of the Manichean sect was the third-century Persian
prophet Manes or Mani, whose legend claimed he was another
incarnation of Christ. He was born of a holy virgin named Mariham, or

Mar Mariam, "the Lady Mary," whose title was "Mother of the Life
of the Whole World." 2 He performed the usual feats of every Savior:

preached, healed the sick, exorcised demons, collected twelve disci

576
 I
pies, and eventually suffered martyrdom. He was crucified and flayed by Manifest Destiny
jthe Persian king, perhaps as a ritual surrogate. 3

Mani's central doctrine was puritanical. The material world was

I the work of thedevil, who invented sex to entrap ethereal souls in the

prison of flesh: the same view was held by the Essenes. Mani's
'followers abstained from sex, and also from animal food, even eggs,

|believing
that all flesh was evil if begotten by copulation. They ate fish,
I
pretending that fish do not reproduce sexually but are spontaneously
from "living water." Christians' adoption of the Aphrodi-
Ijengendered
jtean fish symbol for Christ may have been a Manichean idea. 4

According to Mani, the devil who created this world of gross

was the Jewish Jehovah. He said: "It is the Prince of Darkness
[matter
Iwho spoke with Moses, the Jews, and their priests. Thus the Christians,
ithe Jews, and the Pagans are involved in the same error when
they
worship this God. For he led them astray in the lusts that he taught

pern."
5
Like Jesus, Mani faced this same demon-god on a moun-
fltaintop and resisted his temptation. The demon-god offered Jesus "all

flthe kingdoms of the earth" in return for a single act of worship,

mplying that all the kingdoms of the earth belonged to the devil, who
could dispose of them as he pleased (Matthew 4:9). Jesus refused the

bffer, and so did Mani.

Manicheans naturally aroused the ire of orthodox Christians by

balling their God a devil. Eusebius fairly frothed with indignation at Eusebius Bishop of
heretics: "Mani presumed to represent the person of Christ; he Caesarea, active in the
jpese
Arian controversy
himself to be the Comforter, and the Holy Ghost, and
(proclaimed
during the reign of
being puffed up with this frantic pride, chose, as if he were Christ, Constantine I; a
twelve partners of his new-found doctrine, patching into one heap voluminous writer,
felse and detestable doctrines of old, rotten, and rooted out heresies, the apologist, exegete,
he brought out of Persia." 6 and "corrector" of
|*rhich
biblical texts to suit
This was wishful thinking on Eusebius's part. The heresy was not
the theology of his sect.
looted out. The Manichean idea of the Catholic demon-Jehovah was
o recur again and again through the Middle Ages, in sects like the

3athari, Paulicians, Albigensians, Bogomils, and many others. In

/iew of the sufferings of these people at the hands of Catholic Rome,
heir premise seemed not unfounded. One historian said the Mani-
:hean heresy was conquered only by "massacre and violence at first,
ind afterward by organized terrorism." 7 So terrible were the persecu-
ions that Lea said, "If the blood of the martyrs were really the seed of
Church, Manicheism would now be the dominant religion of
8
rope."
[Link],76. 2. Legge 2, 279-86, 300-301. 3. Robertson, 86-88. 4. Legge 2, 1 53.
5. Legge 2, 239. 6. Doane, 429. 7. Guignebert, 296. 8. Campbell, Oc.M., 496.

inifest Destiny
itch-phrase invented by white settlers in North America to prove

at God appointed them to destroy the Indians. When the Indians

577
Mante objected and even fought back, there arose
what General Philip
Mantra Sheridan called "the vexed Indian question." The general's solution to

,^^__^^^^^^ the question was to exterminate the buffalo, on whom the Plains
Indians depended for food, shelter, and clothing. When the great herds
were killed and left to rot, many Indian tribes died of famine. This
1
was hailed as aworking of Manifest Destiny.
It was also part of Manifest Destiny that the Indians must be
converted to the conquerors' religion. They didn't like that either. In

1805 Seneca chief told a missionary: "Brother, we do not wish to

a

destroy your religion, or take it from you; we only want to enjoy our
own. Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to white people
in this place . .
.; we will wait a little while and see what effect your

preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them

honest, and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again
2
what you have said."

1 . National Geographic, v. 1 5 1 , n. 3, 427. 2. Starkloff, 1 22.

Mante
"Prophetess," or "One Inspired by the Moon"; title of oracular
priestesses in ancient Thebes. In patriarchal myth,
Mante was a "daugh-
ter" of the Theban sage Teiresias, daughter being the usual
replacement for mother, as in the reversed story of Adam and Eve. The
myth signified priestesses' functions of magic
male usurpation of the
and prophecy, at first by transvestism and/or castration to turn men into
pseudo-women; Teiresias was made female and lived for seven years

powers. The Mantes

1
as a temple harlot, which gave him his divinatory

eventually came to include male priests, then to consist of a wholly

male priesthood. Souls of such magical folk were thought to take the
form of insects between incarnations, hence the "praying mantis."
The same Greek root word meant a method of divination, as in

etc.
necromancy, geomancy, oneiromancy, pyromancy,
1. Graves, CM. 1,258; 2, 396.

Mantra
Sanskrit term for a spoken formula incorporating "words of power,"
like hekau or the Neoplatonic Logos. The root word man
Egyptian
meant feminine "wise blood" emanating from the moon; it was

usually defined as Intelligence. Like the Muses who gave

Greek poets1

the gift of words, the Mother Goddesses or matrikadevis gave

Sanskrit poets the secret of mantras, by which the gods themselves coul<
2
be controlled.
The matrikamantra or Mother of Mantras was Kali's Word of

Creation Om, meaning her own "pregnant belly" and perhaps

578
 stemming from the grunting exhalation of a woman in childbirth; for Mantra
Om was the word Kali uttered in giving birth to the universe. 3 The
second most famous Tantric mantra, manipadme hum, Jewel inOm ^^^^^^^^^^^
the Lotus, referred to the Lord of the universe contained within the
Goddess.
Hindus believed anything could be accomplished
if one
only knew
the correct mantras.
Compendia the Tantrasara like
gave "prayers,
Mantras and Dharanis to protect against every form of evil, against the
bad Spirits, wild beasts, natural calamities, human enemies, and so
forth which were said to be effective,provided that they were applied in
the proper disposition and at the right time and in the right manner."
To produce the desired effect, "the Mantra must be intoned in the

proper way, according to both sound (Varna) and rhythm (Svara)."

Therefore a Mantra loses its efficacy when translated into another
4
language.
The same belief led the Catholic church to retain Latin as its

liturgical tongue, 1 500 years after Latin ceased to exist in the mouths
of ordinary Brahman priests with their God-controlling
folk. Like

mantras, church fathers thought the very sound of the words had
been invested with magic power at the see of St. Peter; so translation of
the Latin would rob the words of their power to make God act. 5 This

superstition forced Christian

laymen to listen, century after century, to
church services of which they couldn't understand a single word.
The idea of the mantra wasn't introduced into Rome by Chris-
tians; it was there already. Pagan Romans believed, as Virgil said, that

the right words, rightly spoken, could draw the moon down from the

sky. A ritual of "drawing down the moon" is still

practiced by modern
"witches." 6 By the power of her words, a Roman priestess could "arrest
the flow of rivers and turn back the stars in their courses; she
summons the nocturnal spirits; you will see the ground rumble beneath
her feet; and the ash trees descend from the mountains." 7
All liturgies were basically mantras, evolved from the primitive
I
theory that human words could make things happen in the supernat-

ural realm, which in turn influenced the natural one. An example is the

|
idea of praying souls out of Purgatory, where "mantras" alone
produce the result even though the result is unverifiable. This also had
Tantric precedents. Tibetan lamas still circumvent their own law

against eating animal flesh by eating anyway, to the accompaniment

it

8
of a mantra that will assure the eaten animal's rebirth in heaven.
Thus the offended creature is placed, by human words, in a blessed

situation where he can no longer take offense. Naturally, mantras of

such marvelous power are revealed only with great care, by qualified

gurus to tested candidates worthy to become Guardians of the

9
Mysteries.
[Link],493. 2. Frazer, G.B., 60. 3. Wilkins,201. 4. Avalon, 208-9, 487.
5. Woods, 149. 6. Agrippa, 217. 7. Wedeck, 144. 8. Waddell, 216.

9. BardoThodol, 221.

579
Manu Manu
ara
The Vedic Noah, who rode out the Deluge in his ark with the
MamiHHai assistance of theGreat Serpent, Vasuki. Manu's ark, loaded with the
seeds of every plant and a pair of every kind of animal, tied up to the

Serpent's horn and so survived the watery chaos between the destruc-
tion of one universe and the creation of the next. 1

Manu's ark was the cosmic seed-vessel, in pre- Vedic myth the
womb of the Goddess, which preserved the spark of life through
cycles of destruction and renewal. It seems Manu was a masculinized
form of Ma-Nu or Mother Night, the name she bore in Egypt, as the
spirit of the primordial abyss that gave birth to the cosmos. Sumerians
2
knew her as Nammu, "the primeval ocean, the mother of the gods."

The archaic notion of Manu as a Creatress also attributed to her

the foundation of morality and law; hence the scriptures that Vedic

sages called the Laws of Manu, frequently rewritten and augmented by

patriarchal Brahman and Buddhist philosophies. However, Manu
remained sexually ambiguous, like Egypt's Ma-Nu or Nu or Nun, who
sometimes took the form of a great Fish who gave birth to the gods. 3
Nu was translated into Hebrew as Noah. Significantly, this name was
the "Fish" without the sexually definitive mother-syllable Ma.
Vedic sages came to believe in Manu as a kind of Adam, the
progenitor of the human race, incestuously begotten by the Brahman
creator upon his own daughter a reversal of the archaic myth of the
primal creatress who made, then mated with, her Great Serpent. So
many different acts, myths, laws, and customs were attributed to the
authority of Manu that this personage multiplied into 14 different
Manus, avatars or reincarnations of the same Manu in different ages of
the world. 4 This may have been a re-interpretation of the original
idea of successive universes, with the dark mother-womb bridging the
periods of watery chaos between them by preserving the seeds of
future life.

\. Lamusse, 162. 2. Hooke, M.E.M., 29. [Link],252. 4. O'Flaherty, 25, 347.

var. Marah Mara

Exceedingly ancient name of the Goddess-as-Crone, the death-
bringer. The name and
its variants may be found from India to northern

Europe. Buddhists translated the name as Fear-of-Death, and com-

bined it with Kama, Erotic-Desire, to create the demon who tempted
Buddha to abandon his meditation before he achieved true knowl-
edge of Nirvana. This "temptation in the wilderness" scene was
1

replayed over and over in subsequent legends of ascetic Saviors, such

as Mani and Jesus.
The gypsies, with their traditions rooted in Hinduism, knew Mara
to be the death goddess who trapped the soul of the Enchanted

580
Huntsman in a mirror, and caused his death a myth that paralleled Mardoll
ancient Pelasgian stories of the death of Dionysus. 2 Marduk
The Slavs said Mara or Mora was a destructive female spirit who ^^^^^^^^^^^
"drank the blood of men" by night. 3 She became the mare or Night-
mare, "A monstrous hag squatting upon the breast mute, motionless
and malignant; an incarnation of the evil spirit whose intolerable
4
weight crushes the breath out of the body." This was the same image
assumed by black Kali the Destroyer, whose death aspect meant
"passive weight and darkness." 5
Semitic peoples associated Mara or Marah with the "passive

weight and darkness" of the deep sea-womb; thus the name was
sometimes translated "briny" or "bitter." Marah was the name assumed
by the matriarch Naomi (Ruth 1
:20) as she passed into the Crone
stage of her life. An old shrine of the goddess Mara was the Old
Testament's Maralah, "a place of trembling" (Joshua 19:1 1), possibly
a necropolis. The biblical death-curse Maranatha (1 Corinthians 16:22)

also invoked the destroying Goddess. Mari was another version of

her name, as in Kel-Mari (Kali the Pot Goddess, who made mankind
out of clay), Marici the Goddess "clothed with the sun," Yamamari,
a combination of Mari with Yama or "Death," and Mari-Amma the

Death-giver, in Hebrew Mariamne, Miriam, or Mary.

1. Campbell, Or.M., 17. 2. Groome, 131-32. 3. R.E.L. Masters, 188.
4. Robbins, 340. 5. Rawson, E.A., 160.

Mardoll
"Moon Shining Over the Sea," an epithet of the Goddess Freya as
the Creatress brooding over the primal waters. 1
Her biblical form,
derived from older Sumero-Babylonian sources, was the (female)

Spirit of God moving "on the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). See
Tiamat.
1. Branston, 133.

Marduk
Babylonian municipal god whose legends strongly influenced Jewish
ideas of Yahweh. Marduk claimed to have created the world by

separating the celestial and the abyssal waters, as Yahweh did (Gene-

:7); actually, Marduk did it by cleaving the body of his mother

sis 1

Tiamat, who personified all "Waters." Marduk also killed the first-
born God, Kingu, and created the first man from Kingu's blood a

myth remembered by the Arabs, who said Allah made man from
flowing blood.
1
Marduk also inherited the tablets of sacred law that the

Mother Goddess had given her elder, favorite son. These same
tablets were entrusted to Babylonian kings by presentation on the holy

581
Marea "mountain" of the ziggurat. This tradition, too, was copied by the
Margaret, Saint God of Moses.
^^^^_^^^^_ 1 . Gaster, 20.

Marea
City in western Egypt, sacred to the Goddess Mari, possibly the so-
called Land of Goshen occupied by Israelites before their expulsion
from Egypt (see Moses). Mari was the same Goddess later wor-
consort of Yahweh.
1

shipped in Israel as a

1. Graves, W.G, 439.

Mare Nostrum
"Our sea," or "Our mother"; Roman title of the Mediterranean, or
"Middle-of-the-Earth Sea." All seas were maria, "Marys," symbolized

by the Goddess in her blue robe, sometimes a mer-maid (literally,

Sea- Virgin), often named Aphrodite Marina. See Mary.

Margaret, Saint
Mythical "virgin martyr" who never existed as a Christian but was a
canonized form of Aphrodite Marina, Pelagia, or Margarita, called Pearl
of the Sea. Originally she was a yonic Goddess representing Aphro-
1

"Pearly Gate," which, like the Jade Gate of the Chinese Great
dite's

Mother, meant the genital entrance to paradise. The name Margaret

may be traced to Sanskrit Marga, "the Gate" or "the Way," i.e., the
yonic gate of Kali-Shakti leading through ritual sexuality to the
2
paradise of Tantric sages.
Hagiographers invented several legends of Margaret-Pelagia-Mari-
na, all names of the pagan Sea-goddess. Sometimes she was a virgin
who suddenly turned Christian on her wedding day and so renounced
her bridegroom, the "sinful riotings" of the wedding feast, and the

joys of married life which she decided were worthless as "dung."

Sometimes she was a divine harlot, the wealthiest and most beautiful
woman Antioch, covered with gold, silver, and gems, who suddenly
in

turned Christian and gave away all her possessions to poor folk
(Christians, of course), and allowed a bishop to impose on her a hard life
of penance. 3 This legend was a favorite of early saint-makers, who

particularly resented promiscuous women and invariably coveted their

ill-gotten gains.
One legend made St. Margaret the daughter of a pagan priest. She
spurned her rich suitor, Olybrius, governor of Antioch, and devoted
herself to Christian virginity. She was subjected to amazing tortures to =

582
 overcome her determination. "All her bones were laid bare, and the Margawse
blood poured forth from her body as from a pure spring." 4 But she still

had strength enough to conquer the devil, who took the form of a
^^^^^^^^^^
great dragon and swallowed whereupon she caused his body to
her,
burst and stepped forth "unharmed" except of course for the harm
that had already been done by her various tortures. After this she was

burned, drowned, and beheaded: St. Margaret was very hard to kill.
Another legend of St. Margaret said she fled from her suitor to
become a holy hermit. She joined a monastery of ascetics,
disguising
herself as a monk, "Brother Pelagius." In this connection one
might
recall the rule of early Syrian churches, that no women would be

become Christians unless they "made themselves male." 5

permitted to
Margaret made herself male so successfully that she was accused of
seducing a nun, subjected to severe penances which she accepted
humbly, and finally vindicated only after death, when those who
came to prepare her body for burial discovered that she had been a
woman.
Under her other name of Pelagia, before she became the monk
Pelagius, Margaret devoted her early life to "lewd" worship of
Aphrodite as a temple harlot. On being converted to Christianity, she
called herself "a sea of wickedness overflowing with the waves of sin
6
... an abyss of perdition ... a quagmire and pitfall of souls." The feast

day of this Margaret- Pelagia was the same as that of St. Thais,
another mythical version of the same courtesan-turned-Christian, the
second most popular type of female saint, after the "virgin martyr."
Since Margaret was fundamentally an incarnation of Aphrodite,

spouse of Adonis "the Lord" at Bethlehem, it would be expected that

she remain the spouse of "the Lord"; and accordingly her worshippers
said, "Blessed art thou O
Margaret the spouse of Christ."
7

Through all her appearances as virgin, harlot, monk, and so on,

however, Margaret remained what the pagan Goddess always was:
the primary patron of childbearing women.

[Link],228. 2. Campbell, CM., 661. 3. deVoragine, 611-14.

[Link] Voragine, 352. 5. Bullough, 113. 6. de Voragine, 611. 7. Scot, 384.

Margawse
Second person of the Celtic female trinity in Arthurian legend:
Elaine the virgin, Margawse the mother, Morgan the crone. Margawse
was the same as the Latin Anna, the Mother of the Year: she gave
birth to the four Aeons, named Gareth, Gaheris, Agravine, and Ga-
wain. She mated with her brother Arthur and brought forth
also

[Arthur's nemesis, sister-son, son, tanist,

and supplanter: Mordred,
whom Arthur tried to kill in his infancy. As Fate or perhaps
[Margawse herself decreed, Mordred lived to grow up and destroy
[Arthur.

583
Man Mari
Basic name of the Goddess known to the Chaldeans as Marratu, to
the Jews as Marah, to the Persians as Mariham, to the Christians as

Mary: as well as
Marian, Miriam, Mariamne, Myrrhine, Myrtea,
Myrrha, Maria, and Marina. Her blue robe and pearl necklace were
Many place names classic symbols of the sea, edged with pearly foam.
1

evolved from Marian

shrines. The Goddess's Amorite city of Mari was one of the wonders of the
Among
them were Amari or ancient world. Its six-acre temple-palace astonished archeologists who
Ay-Mari, the uncovered it in the 1930s. Mari dominated the area now known as the
Cyprian home of
Hammurabi 4
Holy Land until it fell to the armies of in 1700 b.c.
Aphrodite Marina;
Semites worshipped an androgynous combination of Goddess and
Marib, City of the
Moon, seat of the God called Mari-El (Mary-God), corresponding to the Egyptian

queens of Sheba; Marea Meri-Ra which combined the feminine principle of water with the
in western Egypt; masculine principle of the sun. 5
Maronea near Lake The Syrian version of Mari or Meri was worshipped in combina-
Ismaris; Maru,
tion with her serpent-consort Yamm, derived from Yama, the Hindu
mother-city of the
Medes; Sa-Maria, a
Lord of Death. Yamm alternated with Baal, "the Lord," as the
country whose name Goddess's favorite and a sovereign over heaven and the abyss. Indian
meant literally "holy Yama was one of the consorts of Kel-Mari, as Kali was called in the
blood of Mary." 2 One
south. 8 Tantric Buddhists still speak of the "Slayer of the Death
of the entrances to
King," Yama-Mari, who was Lama. 9 Jews and
identified with the Dalai
her underworld womb,
a sacred cave early Christians used the same combination of names, Mari- Yamm or
accessible only by sea, Mariam, for the mother of Jesus. 10
was Mar-Mari, The spirit of the archaic Mari entered into Babylonian diviners
"Mother Sea." 3
known as mare baruti, sea-mothers, who operated in the bit mummu
or womb-chamber, where statues of the gods were said to be "born"
Sometimes the deity 11
(made animate). In similar womb-chambers the Hindu goddess was
was named simply Mer, 12
an Egyptian word for worshipped as Kau-Mari or Kel-Mari. She is still invoked as Marici-
both "waters" and Tara, the Diamond Sow on the Lotus Throne, "Glorious One, the
"mother-love." 6 sun of happiness." She is the Goddess "whose mayik vesture is the
Mer was also a sun," forerunner of the Gospels' "woman clothed with the sun"
component of the (Revelation 12:1), who was identified with the virgin Mary.
13

names of Egyptian
She was also the Great Fish who gave birth to the gods, later the
queens in the first

dynasty. One of Egypt's Mermaid, Mare-mynd, mareminde, marraminde, maraeman, or

oldest names was Ta- mereminne. 20
Mera, Land of the In short, she was always Mother Sea. Her Latin name was Maria,
Waters, which could "the Seas." Peter Chrysologus called her Christian incarnation,
St.
also be interpreted as a
the virgin Mary, "the gathering together of the waters." 21 But she was
Land of the Great
Mothers. 7 also the earth and heavens, since her earliest form was a trinity. She
was worshipped in pre- Roman Latium as Marica, mother of the first

king Latinus, who was also her priapic goat-footed consort Faunus.
Northern Europe
knew the same Goddess She was probably the same Goddess worshipped by the Slavs under the
as Maerin, wedded name of Marzanna (Mari-Anna), who "fostered the growth of
to Thor at her shrine in 22
fruits."
Trondheim. H To Mari and her pagan consort were incongruously canonized as a
the Saxons she was
Addai and Mari (Adonis and Aphrodite-
pair of Christian saints,
Wudu-Maer:
Mari). Their legends called them "bishops" dispatched to Aphrodite's

584
cult center at Edessa, probably because their portraits appeared there, Marriage
and itwas easier to Christianize them than to destroy them.
Their cult began with Nestorian Christians who called them "Holy
23
Apostles Addai and Mari." Another Christianization was St.
Maura, from the Goddess's Fate-name Moera, "older than Time." 24
As the Fate-spinner who held men's destinies in her hand, she literally, a Wood-Mary,
or Goddess of the
generated a taboo: on St. Maura'a day, women were forbidden to spin
25 Grove. To the Celts she
or sew.
was Maid Marian,
Medieval Spain knew the Goddess Mari as a "Lady" or "Mistress" beloved by Robin, the
who lived in a magic cave and rode through the night sky as a ball of witches'Horned
26 God. Their greenwood
fire. This may have meant the red harvest moon, or possibly the moon
cult caused church
in eclipse always a dire omen. The Goddess Mari was said to give
authorities considerable
gifts of fairy gold and precious stones, which might turn into worthless
trouble in the 14th
27
lumps of coal by the light of day. In later centuries, the same century.
15

worthless gifts were given to "bad" children by St. Nicholas at

Christmas.
Mari was the same
The island of Inis Maree had a ruined temple, sacred to a certain Merian or Merjan
"St. Mourie" none other than the Goddess Mari for whom the worshipped in Persia as

island was named. In 1678 the Presbytery of Dingwall "disciplined" Queen of the Peris
16
Iran had its
some people who sacrified bulls to the divinity of Loch Maree on the (Fairies).
mother goddess
25th of August, a day dedicated to Aphrodite-Mari for more than 1 500 Mariana from very
years. ancient times. 17 She
1. Graves, W.G., 438. might be traced to the
2. Graves, W.G., 410-11; Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 1 79; Herodotus, 4 400.
1 , land of Akkad,
3. Hughes, 1 59. 4. Keller, 46-49. 5. Budge, G.E. 1 86; Book of the Dead, 602.
,
created by a Goddess
6. Budge, E.L., 76. 7. Budge, D.N., 160. 8. Briffault 1, 474. 9. Waddell, 364.
called the Lady
10. Ashe, 48. 11. Lindsay, O.A., 41. 12. Mahanirvanatantra, 149.
13. Waddell, 218, 361; Mahanirvanatantra, xl. 14. Turville-Petre, 91. Marri, Mother of the
15. Graves, W.G., 441. 16. Keightley, 22. 17. Thomson, 135. World. 18 A king of
18. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 287. 20. Steenstrup, 105. 21. Ashe, 147.
19. Albright, 98.
Mari in 2500 B.C.,
22. Laro'usee, 208, 291. 23. Attwater, 31. 24. Bachofen, 57. 25. Lawson, 175.
26. Lederer,210. 27. Baroja, 238. 28. Spence, 37.
united with the
Goddess, took the royal
name of Lamki-
Mari. 19

Marriage St. Peter

The word marriage came from Latin
maritare, union under the Chrysologus (Peter
Golden-word) Fifth-
auspices of the Goddess Aphrodite-Mari. Because the Goddess's pa-
century bishop of
tronage was constantly invoked in every aspect of marriage, Christian
Ravenna, friend of
fatherswere opposed to the institution. Origen declared, "Matrimony is
Pope Leo the Great.
impure and unholy, a means of sexual passion." St. Jerome said the Three centuries after
of
primary purpose of a man of God was to "cut down with an ax of
his death, a collection

176 sermons was

Virginity thewood of Marriage." St. Ambrose said marriage was a
l

produced, and
crime against God, because it changed the state of virginity that God attributed to him,
2
gave every man and woman at birth. Marriage was prostitution of though mostly spurious.
e members of Christ, and "married people ought to blush at the state He was made a
which they are was a moral crime, doctor of the church in
living." Tertullian said marriage
1729.
more dreadful than any punishment or any death." It was spurcitiae,

5
obscenity," or "filth."
St. Augustine flatly stated that marriage is a sin. Tatian said

585
Marriage marriage is corruption, "a polluted and foul way of life." Influenced
by him, Syrian churches ruled that no person could become Christian
except celibate men, and no man who had ever been married could
be baptized. Saturninus said God made only two kinds of people, good
men and evil women. Marriage perpetuated the deviltry of women,
4
Origen (Origenes who dominated men through the magic of sex. Centuries later, St. Ber-
Adamantius) Christian nard it was easier for a man to
bring the dead
still proclaimed that
father, ca. 185-254
back to life than to live with a woman without endangering his soul.
5

a.d.,an Egyptian who

wrote in Greek, ex-
St. Paul damned marriage with faint praise, remarking that to

erting a powerful marry was only better than to burn (1 Corinthians 7:9); but later
influence on the early followers of Pauline Christianity damned marriage altogether, according
Greek church. At word of Jesus: man come
to the "If any me, and hate not his
to
first he was accounted a
father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters,
saint, but three cen-
turies after his death he yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26).
was declared a here- Jesus renounced his family, declaring that he had no relatives except the
tic because of Gnostic faithful(Mark 3:31-35). Jerome interpreted this as a mandate to
elements found in
He was disgusted by motherhood:
destroy marriage and the family. "the
his writings.
tumefaction of the uterus, the care of yelling infants, all those fond

feelings which death at last cuts short." He said every man who loves
6
Tertullian (Quintus
his wife passionately was guilty of adultery. 7 Augustine also expressed
Septimius Florens
disgust at feminine sexual and maternal functions. He coined the saying
Tertullianus)
influential early that birth is demonstrably accursed because every child emerges
Christian writer and "between feces and urine." 8
father of the church, ca.
An example of anti-family virtue was made of one of the artificial
1 5 5-220 a.d., born in
saints built on a title of the pro-family Goddess, Perpetua, "the
Carthage of pagan
Eternal One." In her new Christian disguise as St. Perpetua, she was so
parents.
devoted to single blessedness that she not only faced martyrdom with

equanimity but also renounced her parents, her husband, and her
suckling infant in order to become Christian. Her pagan relatives

tried to soften her heart by putting the infant to her breast, but she threw
it aside and said to them, "Begone from me, enemies of God, for I
know you not!" 9
This was the early Christian notion of a "good" woman: one who
placed faith before family. Church customs reflected this view. There
10
was no Christian sacrament of marriage until the 16th century.

Catholic scholars say the wedding ceremony was "imposed on" a

reluctant church, and "nothing is more remarkable than the tardiness
with which liturgical forms for the marriage ceremony were
evolved." It is perhaps not remarkable to find that these liturgical forms
were not evolved by the church at all, but borrowed from pagans'
common law. 11
The Anglican marriage service came from Anglo-Saxon deeds
used to transfer a woman's land to the stewardship of her "house-
man" (husband). The original wording had the bridegroom say: "With
this ring I thee wed and this gold and silver I give thee and with
my
body I thee worship, and with my worldly chattels I thee honor."
all

The bride responded: "I take thee to my wedded husband, to have

586
bnd to hold, for fairer for fouler, for better for worse, for richer for
Marriage
poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonny and buxom in bed and
board, till death us depart [sic]."
jat
A
curious clerical note made in the
^^^^^^^^^^^
margin at a later date, explained that "bonny and buxom" really
meant "meek and obedient." 12
About wedding ceremonies in Greece and the Balkans, an author-
ity on Greek religion wrote: "With the modern Greeks as with other
Europeans, the religious service of their church is intrusive, no real part
of marriage, but an elaborate way of calling down a
pf the ceremony
plessing on the ceremonial, or what is left of it, which constitutes the
13
real wedding."
The Christian priesthood was fighting ancient traditions in which it

was remembered that male spiritual authority was dependent on

marriage: either a hieros gamos between the ruler of a land and his
Goddess, or the mandatory husbandship of priests who were not
allowed to contact the deities unless they had wives. In Asia, the gods
themselves had to be married. Even patriarchal figures like Vishnu
and Brahma needed who embodied their power,
their Shaktis or wives

and "without whom H Brahman

they
nothing." avail priests couldn't
15
perform certain ceremonies without wives. Oriental mystics taught
that any man was spiritually incomplete until he experienced bha-

vanan, "husbandship," which linked him to the Goddess as Bhavani or

16
I
Existence." The implication was that an unmarried man does not

truly exist. Tantric

hymns women are goddesses because they
said all

17
embody the spirit of the Goddess; thus "women are Life itself."
Early Israelites also barred unmarried men from the priesthood.
They thought a priest's spells and invocations would be powerless if
he had no wife. 18 Jewish scriptures said, "The man who has neither wife
nor children is
disgraced in the world and is hated by them, like a
19
leafless and fruitless tree." Similarly, the spiritual authority of Rome's

[ligh priest the Flamen Dialis depended on his marriage to the

plaminica, high priestess of Juno. If she died or left him, he immediately
20
his holy office.
jost
So much depended on a man's ability to remain married, in the

:t ancient times, that the first rules of marriage invented by men

m to have been rules for insuring permanent monogamy. Thus a
iband could hold on to a woman's property and children by
ding the woman herself. Matriarchal societies seldom permitted
ual jealousy. Women were free to change lovers or husbands, to
ake polyandrous or group marriages. Myths record the transition from

oose, flexible marital arrangements favored by Goddesses to the rigid

nonogamy favored by Gods.

The pre-Hellenic Mother of God, Rhea, condemned monogamy
isa sin and insisted on her ancient law of group marriage. Her son

eus defied her, on behalf of patriarchal invaders of her lands. He

o reed Rhea's "daughter" Hera actually another form of Rhea
erself into a monogamous union, though he never stuck to his own

587
Marriage side of the bargain. He was constantly adulterous, and Hera detested
him. On one occasion she roused the other gods in a rebellion against

^^^^^^^^^^^ him. Zeus punished her by hanging her from the sky with anvils
attached to her ankles perhaps the first divine precedent permitting
men to torture wives into submission. 21
Hellenic Greeks believed that men should seize every possible

advantage wives to be obedient and (especially) faithful.

in forcing

Aristotle taught that a husband should be more than twice his bride's

age he 37, she 18 so he could dominate her: "The elder and full
grown is superior to the younger and more immature." 22 Greek
patriarchy foreshadowed the patriarchal religion which, "in the form
seen in Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, is basically noth-

ing other than a formalization, by means of a projection upon deities,

and the demand for obedience to their revealed command, of the
father's desired sexual control of his wives and of their female

children, and the forcible exclusion of male children from sexual

23
activity."
The Greeks' contempt for wives eventually led to their cult of
homosexual romance, ignoring their families and taking young boys
for true-love relationships. Some scholars say this belittling of marriage
was founded on fear of women:

The Greek male's contempt for women was not only compatible with, but
bound to, an intense fear of them, and to an underly-
also indissolubly

ing suspicion of male inferiority. Why else would such extreme measures
be necessary? Customs such as the rule that a woman should not be
older than her husband, or of higher social status, or more educated, or

paid the same as a male for the same work, or be in a position of

authority betray an assumption that males are incapable of competing
with females on an equal basis; the cards must first be stacked, the
female given a handicap. 24

Observing group marriages among their neighbors, the Greeks

regarded such customs as barbaric or unusual. In an age when the
Greeks were almost the only people with a patriarchal-monogamous
social structure, a Greek said to the Spartan wife of Leonidas: "You of
Lacedaemon women in the world that rule the men."
are the only
She retorted: "We are the only women who bring forth men." 25
Despite their pretense that their own system was the only normal
one, Greek writers like Herodotus knew the Arabs were polyandrous,
the Scythians shared spouses and children communally, the Lycians

recognized only matrilineal inheritance, and the Agathyrsi "cohabit

in common with the women, in order that they should all be blood kin
and that their family relationships should prevent them from harbor-
ing envy and hostility toward one another." 26
Caesar said group marriage was the rule in Britain. An indicator of
the group-marriage system among the Celts was the multiple paterni-
tyof many of their mythic heroes. Clothru, queen of Connaught,
married three brothers at once, the same kind of fraternal polyandry

588
 27
I

practiced by such eastern peoples as the Todas and the Singhalese. Marriage
The Nairs practiced group marriage up to the 19th century. Hindu
literature speaks of a princess who married five brothers at once, and was
28
^^^^^^^^^^^
blessedby the Goddess Cunti, and promised many children. In the
I
Mahabharata, a speech to the same Goddess Cunti told of "the practice
of old indicated by illustrious Rishis fully acquainted with every rule
of morality":

Women were not formerly immured in houses and dependent on hus-

bands and relatives. They used to go about freely, enjoying themselves
as best they pleased. They did not then adhere to their husbands
. . .

faithfully; and yet they were not regarded as sinful, for that was the
. . .

sanctioned usage of the times. Indeed, that usage, so lenient to

. . .

women, hath the sanction of antiquity. The present practice, however,

of women being confined to one husband for life hath been established
but lately. 29

After Brahmanism established monogamy in some parts of

India, the rules of marriage were greatly changed: "No act is to be done
according to her own will by a young girl, a young woman, though
she be in her own house. In her childhood a girl should be under the
willof her father; in her youth under that of her husband; her
husband being dead, under the will of her sons. A woman should never
enjoy her own will. Though of bad conduct or debauched, a husband
must always be worshipped like a god by a good wife." ?0
Rules similar to those of the Brahmans were established in

western Europe by Christian authorities, insofar as possible. Some

churches even insisted that a bride at her wedding must kneel and

place her bridegroom's foot on her head in token of abject obedience. 51

Christianity accepted marriage only on condition that the partners

form a slave-and-master relationship. This meant getting rid of the

Goddess whose many forms and avatars protected the married
woman in all phases of matrimony and motherhood.

Juno, the Roman Queen of Heaven, regulated every aspect of

marriage through her priestesses. Juno Pronuba arranged marriages.
Juno Domiduca conducted the bride across the threshold of her new
I
home. Juno Nuxia perfumed the doorposts. Juno Cinxia untied the
bride's virgin-girdle. Juno Lucina watched over the pregnant woman.

Juno Ossipago strengthened her infant's bones. Juno Rumina provid-

32
ed mother's milk. Juno Sospita took care of women in childbed. So it

went: in marriage and family matters, women ignored God and

appealed to their own Goddess. The idea that a male priest should

preside alone over a marriage ceremony was unthinkable which is

one reason why Christians didn't think of it. many centuries, For

marriage existed in a limbo without a deity to solemnize it, having

no
place in canon law, which is why marriage remained so long under the

jurisdictionof common law.

The Council of Trent decreed that a person who even hinted that

matrimony might be more blessed than celibacy would

the state of be

589
j^
Marriage

^
m
declared anathema accursed and excommunicated. 33
form of Christian marriage was a simple blessing of the newly wedded
pair, in facie ecclesiae outside the church's closed doors

pollution of lust out of God's house. This blessing was a technical

violation of canon law, but
it became
popular and gradually won
The earliest

to keep the

acceptance. In 1215 the fourth Lateran Council granted it legal

34
status. Still, the church maintained that there were no marriages in

heaven, according to Christ's statement in the scriptures (Mark

12:25; Luke 20:35). St. Thomas Aquinas assigned a "goodness value"
of 30 to marriage, as compared with 60 for widowhood, and 100 for
35
lifelong virginity.
Medieval folk tales convey a distinct impression that the Christian

God opposed marriage. One story said a pure youth and maiden
agreed never to marry, "for love of God." But their heathen parents
forced them into a wedding. By God's grace, the ground opened
under their feet and swallowed them before they could spoil their
virginity. A priest who dared officiate at the wedding was found dead
next day. Another young couple eloped, being forced to defy God, who
"did not sanction earthly marriages." Gebhard, archbishop of Co-

logne, was said to have blessed married couples illegally, and even toi
wife himself. He was excommunicated, besieged by Catholic forces
in Godesberg Castle, caught, and killed. The ruins of his castle are sti!
36
shown to travelers.

Common-law marriages were often informal. Mere cohabitation

could constitute a valid marriage. 37 Temporary trial marriages were

legal up to the early 17th century. Peasant "betrothals" were often trial

marriages, incorporating such customs as "tarrying," night-visiting,

and courting-on-the-bed. Pregnancy might make the union permanent,
but not necessarily. Bastardy was a commonplace in all social classes

of medieval society. 38
The church displayed remarkable reluctance to deal with the
matter of marriage at all.
During the Middle Ages there was no
ecclesiastical definition of a valid marriage nor of any contract to validate
one. Churchmen seemed to have no ideas at all on the subject. 39
They ignored marriage, leaving it
largely in the realm of the common
law.

Under Roman and barbarian laws, marriages "could be freely

initiated and could be terminated without formality by either party
40
and at any time." This system persisted among common folk until
1 563. Finally the church declared the priestly blessing indispensable
to a legal marriage, refusing to recognize any more marriages made by
the common law. Still, the church's rule remained invalid in many
areas for several centuries more. 41
In 1753 Lord Harwicke's Act made
clerical blessing a requirement

England, but the Act didn't apply to Scotland.

for legal marriage in

Therefore Scotland became a mecca for elopements, because legal

marriages could be made there by the old pagan custom of "handfast-

590
ling" simply joining the couple's hands in the presence of witnesses, Marriage
i without benefit of clergy. 42 All the way up to 1939,
I
English lovers
il could travel across the Scottish border to the
"marriage town" of Gretna
I Green for an instant wedding.
When Christian authorities revised pagan marriage laws, they were
I
primarily concerned with placing a wife's property in her husband's
|
control and keeping it there. Women
owned the land under the pagan
{system, and their husbands could acquire an interest in only it

through matrimony. This system was reversed in husbands' favor.

ICommon-law and Morganatic marriages were provisionally accepted Morganatic
I
by Christian churches only after many restrictions had been imposed on marriage A form of
the wife's rights of ownership and inheritance. Christian marital legalized
concubinage, first
f

morality amounted to taking the means of independence from women

instituted in
fland turning
it over to men.
Germany to allow high-
Celibacy was strictly enforced among the clergy when new laws ranking noblemen
Mpermitted men to
bequeathe their property (and their wives' proper- and princes to "marry"
to their children. When priests were forbidden to make valid women of low rank,
ty) directly
or commoners, with the
Dmarriages, they couldn't have heirs. Thus all property they owned or
proviso that neither
I
gained would revert to the church when they died. 43 Clerical marriages, wife nor children of the
'on the other hand, meant a loss of ecclesiastical income. marriage would ever
abandoned the have any legal claim on
Priests early church's rule of celibacy and began to
the husband's
i take wives during the 5th and 6th centuries. This continued to the
property.
f
1 lth century, when papal decretals commanded married clergymen to
their wives out of their homes and sell their children as slaves. 44
|tum
flThese new laws brought much more wealth to the church. Though
Isome ex-wives stayed on as the concubines of their former husbands,
I
they were disinherited in the church's favor. (See Matrilineal
Inheritance.)
Churchmen revered St. Hilary, who was married and the father of
a daughter. When his daughter wished to marry, however, Hilary
forbade her. Fearing she might weaken and lose her virginity, he asked
to kill her. God complied with a little help from Hilary
|God
ihimself. After burying the daughter, "by his prayer" Hilary sent his wife

Ito heaven also. The

legend claims the wife voluntarily begged Hilary
Ito "obtain for her the same grace which he had obtained for her
45
(daughter."
Besides popularizing the peculiar morality of a saint who killed his

family, the church fostered "chastisement" of wives by husbands,

Iciting St. Paul's teaching that "the head of every man is Christ; and the
head of the woman is the man" (1 Corinthians 1
1:3). In practice,
under the pretext of discipline a man could torture his wife with
I
impunity, and no legal or religious agency would defend her. A mild
protest in the 13th-century Laws and Customs of Beauvais noted that
Jan
excessive number of women were dying of marital chastisement,
46
so husbands were advised to beat their wives "only within reason."
The theological view of the time was that "woman has sinned
more than man" and should therefore be unhappier; her suffering

591
Marriage must be doubled on earth, even in the womb, which is why female
embryos did not receive their souls from God as early as male
^^^^^mma^^^^ embryos. Men were only doing God's will when they made
47
women
suffer.

The Oriental heathen, whom Christians thought barbaric, were

teaching different rules:"The householder should never punish his
wife, but should cherish her like a mother. ... By riches, clothes, love,

respect, and pleasing words should one's wife be satisfied. The

husband should never do anything displeasing to her." 48 Westerners
simply condemned as obscene the passages in the Brhadaranyaka
Upanishad describing as a sacrament a husband's sexual worship of his
wife as "House-Goddess (Grhadevata)." 49

Physical abuse and sexual coercion were so often the lot of a

Christian wife that it came to be an accepted idea that no woman
could love a husband. A "lover" meant a man outside the marriage.
The Countess of Narbonne, ruler of France's celebrated Court of
Love, said the relation between husband and wife and "the true love
between lovers are two absolutely different things which have noth-
ing in common. . . . We say definitely and considerately that love
cannot between married people." 50 One good reason was the
exist

master-slave relationship. "Men were exhorted from the pulpit to beat

their wives and wives to kiss the rod that beat them." 51
Medieval society was so accustomed to the idea that all wives were
battered by their husbands, that churchmen used this as an argument
for women to renounce marriage in favor of the cloister. They told
young girls that "the wife was subject to her husband, that often she
was exposed to blows and kicks, and often brought forth misshapen
offspring. . . . While men are betrothed they seem filled with gentle-
52
ness, whereas marriage they rule as cruel masters."
after

It has been recently shown that, "Although omitted from most

church historical accounts, the Christian church has had a record . . .

of practicing and recommending physical abuse to women." The

Decretum of 1 140 said: "It is right that he whom woman led into
wrongdoing should have her under his direction so that he may not fail

a second time through female levity." Friar Cherubino's 1 5th-

century Rules ofMarriage made a husband his wife's sole judge: "Scold
her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still doesn't work take . . .

up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and
correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body. . . .

Then readily beat her, not in rage but out of charity and concern for her

soul, so that the beating will redound "

to your merit."
A Russian pope recommended the use of a whip rather than a rod
of wood or iron, which was more likely to cripple or kill. "Keep to a

whip," said the pontiff, "and choose carefully where to strike: a whip is

54
painful and effective."

Martin Luther thought himself an unusually kind husband. He

592
 said when his wife "gets saucy, she gets nothing but a box on the
Marriage

English jurisprudence applied to marital "disagreement" the fam-

ous Rule of Thumb elucidated by Blackstone: a husband was free to
|

|
beat his wife with a whip or rod no thicker than his thumb, "in order to
enforce the salutary restraints of domestic discipline." British law Sir William
up
t to the late 19th century decreed that acts which would amount to an Blackstone (1723-1780)
if committed against a stranger were innocent when Famous English
(assault legally
jurist, author of the
committed by a husband against a wife. 56 Wives had little help from the
Commentaries
Ijlaw; they were legally classified with minors and idiots, and were which became the
57
consigned to the custody of their husbands. standard reference
When John Adams was helping to draw up the Constitution of the authority of both British
United States in 1777, his wife Abigail wrote to him, "Do not put and American law

Isuch unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men through the 19th
century.
twould be tyrants if they could." 58 Abigail's plea went unheard. The
American husband was no less tyrannical than his British forebear. It has
been said that among the Puritans especially, the husband "exercised
the authority of God" over his wife. 59
In 1848 feminist Emily Collins described a typical example of the
abused American wife: a woman who mothered seven children,
cooked, cleaned, washed, spun, wove, sewed and mended the family
clothing, milked the cows, and took the multiple responsibilities for
the welfare of nine persons, including her husband, who beat her
because she sometimes "scolded" that is, nagged, or complained.
This was accepted as sufficient reason for violent attacks on his hard-
60
I
working spouse.
Up to the middle of the 20th century, American law upheld the
so-called doctrine of immunity, which meant the "sanctity of the

home" could not be invaded to stop husbandly violence. A man's home

was his castle, even if it was also his wife's prison. The law denied
women the right to sue their husbands for assault because the suit

"might destroy the peace of the home." Only in 1962 did a judge
rule that the peace of the home was already destroyed by a wife-beating
61
husband, therefore the doctrine of immunity was legally unsound.

J
Even now, the law may refuse to recognize a woman's right to
protection within her home.
Wife-beating was a by-product of the Christian view of woman
las man's property. Napoleon remarked, "Woman is given us to bear

jchildren.
She is
property. our . . . She is our possession, as the fruit

tree is that of the gardener." 62 St. Thomas Aquinas said a wife is lower
than a slave because a slave may be freed, but "Woman is in

subjection according to the law of nature, but a slave is not." 63 Josephine Henry
"The ownership of the wife estab- 19th-century Kentucky
Josephine Henry reported that
suffragist and
lished and perpetuated through Bible teaching is responsible for the
pamphleteer, active in
domestic pandemonium and the carnival of wife murder which reigns thewomen's rights

throughout Christendom. In the United States alone, in the eighteen movement.

593
Marriage hundred and ninety-seventh year of the Christian era, 3,482 wives,
many with unborn children in their bodies, have been murdered in
^^^^^^^^^^^m co 'd blood by their husbands. The by-paths of ecclesiastical history
. . .

are fetid with the records of crimes against women; and 'the half has
never been told.'" 64
From feudal times onward, Christian systems of slavery placed
similar powers in the hands of slaveowners and husbands, often
combining the two functions. A sister of President Madison wrote: "We
southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives: but we are

only the mistresses of seraglios." A southern planter's wife described

herself as "the chief slave of the harem." The wife of a Confederate

general wrote: "God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system. . . .

Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their

wives and their concubines. . . .

Any lady is
ready totell you who is the

father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her

own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds." 65
Southern ladies' doublethink about their roles was an expected,
even mandatory, social response. The first edition of Emily Post's

Etiquette described "The Lady: As an unhappy wife, her

Instincts of a

dignity demands that she never show her disapproval of her husband,
no matter how publicly he slights or outrages her." 66
Though the rule obviously served the man's dignity, not the

woman's, unhappy wives tried to obey it. Patriarchal society managed

to convince them that if they failed to make their marriages "happy,"

they failed as women and as human beings. Hence, battered wives

often accepted the guilt for their own victimization. Recent investigators
report that battered wives go to great lengths to conceal the crime
because of their own embarrassment and shame. 67
Churches helped develop this secret embarrassment. One clergy-
man's routine advice to brides was: "Your duty is submission. . . .

Your husband is, by the laws of God and of man, your superior; do not
ever give him cause to remind you of it." 68 Of all professional groups,
clergymen have proved least able or willing to help battered wives.
One abused wife from a "nice suburban neighborhood" wrote of
her appeal to her clergyman and the reprimand she received. The
minister demanded to know what she was doing wrong to bring her
husband's violence down upon herself, and advised her only to search

her own and discover how she might behave better to relieve the
soul
tension. She had a husband so violent that she feared for her life. Yet
her spiritual leader and alleged comforter gave her less than no comfort.
He tried rather to increase her suffering with a specious burden of
69
guilt.
In 1977 Ellen Kirby of the Board of Global Ministries of the
United Methodist Church wrote: "The institutional church either
through its blatant sexist theology, which has blessed the subordination
of women, or through its silence, blindness, or lack of courage, has
allowed itself to be one of the leading actors in the continuing tragedy of

594
 70
i." Under the circumstances it seems unrealistic for Pope Paul
Marriage
to have observed in 1966 that "a true contradiction cannot exist

/een the divine laws pertaining to the transmission of life and

71
pertaining to the fostering of authentic conjugal love." Translat-
I from theologese, the "divine laws" meant simply the church's
id on birth control and "authentic conjugal love" meant
husbandly
linance over the wife.
Patriarchal religions developed many rules for male
maintaining
linance in marriage, but the structure was inherently unstable:

The patriarchal "family" of academic social science is but a euphemism

for the individualistic male with his subordinate dependents. As a social
unit the family means the (male) individual activated by his most
aggressively individualistic instincts; it is not the foundation, but the
negation of society. . . .

Human society did not arise as an organization of adjusted interests.

It arose out ofan extra-rational sentiment; it has never existed in any
form except through the binding force ofsuch sentiments. n

The patriarchal family was at bottom unnatural, a reversal of the

ogical authority of the female over her dependents. "Economic man
icis in perfect self-interest; a woman cannot base her
relationships
the family on the principle of quid pro quo: she gives. It appears,
[vithin
rom a masculinist perspective, that woman might be a more primi-
tive version of a man not because there is prima facie evidence of her
ower intelligence, but because of her loving and giving nature, which
Is itself taken as evidence of lower intelligence. Rousseau's 'noble

jiavage'
woman was compassionate and nurturing." 75
like his ideal

As a rule, women were driven into marriage by social pressures

pat
made spinsterhood even economically. When
less attractive

patriarchal laws took property out of women's hands and placed it in the

lands of men, unmarried women became as helpless to support

as wives were. In the 7th century, a "spinster" was any
1
pemselves
woman imprisoned in a "spin-house" without money or male protec-
John Evelyn described a spin-house as a place where "incorrigible
tors. John Evelyn (1620-
bid lewd women are kept in discipline and labor." 74 It was seldom 1706) English

noticed that spinsters had become "incorrigible and lewd" in an effort to gentleman of letters,
author of about 30
parn a living, in a society that allowed them to learn no skills other books including a
(than trying to please men. famous diary.

Though patriarchal marriage typically existed for the service of

man, there was usually a pretense of male autonomy and leadership;
and the discovery of its mythical quality caused the wife's "basic

trauma," according to Jessie Bernard: Jessie Bernard

Modern American fem-
There are few traumas greater . . . than the wife's discovery of her inist author and
husband's dependencies; than the discovery of her own gut-superiority
sociological researcher.
in a thousand hidden crannies of the relationship; than the realization that

in many situations his judgment is no better than hers; that he does not
really know more than she; that he is not the calm, rational, nonemotional
dealer in facts and relevant arguments; that he is, in brief, not at all the

595
Marriage kind ofperson the male stereotype pictures him to be. Equally, ifnot
more, serious is her recognition that she is not really the weaker vessel,
that she is often called upon to be the strong one in the relationship. 75

Marc Feigen Fastau also pointed out that false commitment to

themyth of masculine steadiness and objectivity brings on disillusion-
ment among wives:

Nothing contrasts more sharply with the masculine image ofself-confi-

dence, rationality, and control than men's sulky, obtuse, and, often
virtually total, dependence on their wives to articulate and deal with their
own unhappy feelings and their own insensitivity, fear, and passivity in
helping their wives to deal with theirs. This, more than anything else,
disillusions women about their men. Bromides like 'Men are just
overgrown little boys' are both a description of the phenomenon and an
attempt, by labeling it innocuously, to ease the pain of disillusionment:
disillusionment at having subordinated yourself to a person who isn 't,
it

turns out, special enough to justify the sacrifice, who is probably not
much smarter than you are in most ways and in some very important ways
is a lot less perceptive, more dependent and more childlike. 76

Though wives provide an essential support system, without

which few men would be capable of carrying on productive careers, the

"job" of a wife is the last relic of slavery in that it earns nothing. A

woman unemployment insurance for losing this non-paid
can't collect

job, even when it means financial hardship for herself and her
children. As a widow she is taxed at the highest level because she is not
considered a contributor to her husband's estate. Yet a conservative
estimate of the market value of a wife's services amounts to over

$1,000,000. Nor is the job an easy one. Data collected by the

Department of Health and Human Services show that housewives

suffer more from symptoms of stress than do working women. 77
Marlene Dixon Marlene Dixon said marriage is "the chief vehicle for the perpetu-
Modern feminist, ation of the oppression of women; it is
through the role of wife that
writer,and teacher of
that subjugation of women is maintained." 78 To a large extent it was th<
sociology at a Canadian
Christian concept of marriage in the western world that brought this
university.
about, since the church declared women socially, politically, and intel-

lectually inferior and made them their husband's chattels. 79

Wife-beating was so routine in Christian Europe that the standard

symbol of "marriage" in Alsatian New Year decorations was a
miniature man beating his miniature wife. 80

Nineteenth-century clergymen in both Europe and America con-

sistently upheld a husband's right to abuse his wife and to use

"salutary restraints in every case of misbehavior," without the interfer-

ence of what some court records of 1824 referred to as "vexatious

prosecutions." In other words, it was vexatious for a battered wife to

seek redress, but not vexatious for her husband to beat her in the first

place. Many clergymen still have this attitude. A battered wife recently
said: "My husband repeatedly spoke scripture at me about what a
wife's responsibility was. . . . She was supposed to be submissive, and he

596

m
ivould quote Paul, verse after verse after verse. I didn't feel like I had Mars
lery much to fight with. ... I don't recall any clergy person I went to
knd I went to more than one
being supportive of my feelings about ^^^^^^^^^^^
hot continuing the marriage, of not wanting the abuse to continue. I got
81
|io support from any clergyman."
Only recently, and grudgingly, did the clergy of some denomina-
tions remove the word "obey" from the bride's responses in the

[narriage
service. Many clergymen still believe a wife should bow to her
husband's wishes more than he bows to hers not the best attitude in

fnen
who think themselves qualified to act as marriage counselors.
1. Fielding, 82, 114. 2. Briffault 3, 373. 3. Lederer, 162-63. 4. Bullough, 103, 112.
5. Campbell, M.I., 95. 6. Briffault 3, 373. 7. Sadock, Kaplan &
Freedman, 22.
8. Simons, 99. 9. de Voragine, 736. 10. Fielding, 233. 11. Briffault 3, 248-49.
12. Hazlitt, 447. 13. Rose, 144. 1 4. Mahanirvanatantra, xxiv. 15.
Bullough, 234.
16. Waddell, 1 17. 17. Avalon, 172. 18. Brasch, 70. 19. Forgotten Books, 201.
20. Briffault 3, 20. 21. Graves, CM. 1, 54. 22. Bullough, 64. 23. Legman, 416.

24. Bullough, 309. 25. Hartley, 219. 26. Bachofen, 140, 145.
27. Briffault 3, 378; Hauswirth, 88. 28. Briffault 1,712, 683. 29. Briffault 1, 346.
30. Briffault 1,345. 31. Hazlitt, 453. 32. Larousse, 203. 33. Briffault 3, 375.
34. Encyc. Brit., "Marriage." 35. Murstein, 115. 36. Guerber, L.R., 77, 1 10, 121.
37. Briffault 3, 249. 38. Fielding, 233-34. 39. Pearsall, W.B., 166-67.
40. Encyc. Brit, "Marriage." 41. Briffault 3, 249. 42. Encyc. Brit, "Marriage."
43. M. Harrison, 197. 44. H. Smith, 263. 45. de Voragine, 90-91.
46. de Riencourt, 228. 47. de Voragine, 150. 48. Mahanirvanatantra, 162-63.
49. Avalon, 596. 50. Briffault 3,428. 5 1 T. Davidson, 98-99. 52. de Voragine, 282.
.

53. T. Davidson, 99. 54. Murstein, 445. 55. T. Davidson, 100.

56. Langley & Levy, 34-36. 57. Crow, 147. 58. Rugoff, 169-70.
59. Ehrenreich & English, 7. 60. Stone, 233. 61. Langley & Levy, 40.
62. E. Douglas, 137. 63. de Riencourt, 219. 64. Stanton, 196-98.
65. Bullough, 300; Rugoff, 325-26. 66. Wolff, 346. 67. Langley & Levy, 1 17.
68. Ehrenreich & English, 7. 69. Langley & Levy, 21. 70. T. Davidson, 211.
[Link],xxx. 72. Briffault 3, 511-13. 73. Ehrenreich & English, 17. 74. Funk, 260.
75. Gornick & Moran, 154-55. 76. Feigen Fastau, 82. 77. Sheehy, 313-14.
78. Roszak, 193. 79. H. Smith, 228. 80. Miles, 270. 81. Hirsch, 173,354.

Mars
lome's "red" war-god Mars was once anEtruscan fertility-savior
Claris, worshipped at an ancient shrine in the Apennines,
Matiene. At 1

i similar shrine in northwestern Iran, Matiane (Mother Ana), the

Vledes worshipped the same god who became Martiya to the Persians, a

loly "martyr" also called Immanuel or Imanisi. The inscription of

Darius at Behistun says the god was incarnate in a sacred king slain by Sign of Mars
2
lis people. His spirit ruled what Sufis still call the "fulfilling" death-

irjdriebirth process, known as mardiyya or martyrdom.

3
An early

Phrygian version of the same sacrificial god Greek myth

appears in as

he flayed satyr Marsyas, slain on a pine tree "between heaven and

jarth" by order of the heavenly father.

Mars was "red" because Indo-European prototype was

his basic

he pre-Vedic flayed god Rudra, father of the Maruts or sacrificial

victims, red with their own blood. Rudra "the red one" was born
of the

hree-faced virgin-mother Marici, Goddess of birth, dawn, and the

^ew Year, a manifestation of the ancient feminine Trinity. Thus,
ludra bore the title of Tryambaka, "He Who Belongs to Three

597
Martin, Saint Mother Goddesses." In Japan this Goddess was known as Marici-deva

or Marishi-ten, whom later patriarchal writers masculinized as a

^^^^^^^^^^_ Buddhist monk. However, this alleged monk always wore the garments
of a woman. 4
The same Goddess was Marica to the Latins. She gave birth to the
god-king Latinus, ancestor of all Latin tribes. Her consort was the
flayed goat god of the Lupercalia, Faunus, another incarnation of Mars,
who also appeared in bird-soul form as the sacred woodpecker Picus,
giving oracles from the top of a phallic pillar in his shrine. 5
The Martian New Year sacrifices took place in the god's month of
March, which once began the Roman year; this is why the "Ides of
March" were considered dangerous to kings. In the Babylonian sacred
calendar, the same New Year month of atonement sacrifices was
Marcheshvan. 6 The astrological sign of this month still begins the year,
according to astrologers' tradition.
In northern Europe, Mars was identified with Tiw, Tyr, or Tig:
names derived from Indo-Germanic dieus, "God." 7 Just as Mars was
often confused with the sky-father Jupiter, so Tiw was another name for

the sky-father Odin. Tiw's sign was a lingam-yoni arrangement of a

phallic spear attached to a female disc. As wielder of the spear or

lightning bolt of fertility, Mars-Tiw became a god of battle. He was

the patron of Roman warriors, who called him Marspiter (Father Mars)

and honored him with "martial" exercises on the Campus Martius,

site of a temple of Maris in Etruscan times. His sacred day was Tuesday,

named Tiw in English, though it is still dies martis in Latin and

after

similarly named in Latinate languages (French mardi).

To account for the inevitable story that the Queen of Heaven as
Celestial Virgin gave birth to the sacrificial god, Romans claimed the

Blessed Virgin Juno spurned the love of her spouse, Jupiter, and to spite
him conceived Mars by her own unaided feminine fertility magic, the
8
lily blossom that represented her own yoni.
1. Hays, 182; J.E. Harrison, 101. 2. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 178. 3. Shah, B94.
4. Lamusse, 342, 422. 5. Lamusse, 207-8. 6. Assr. &
Bab. Lit, 170.
7. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 57. 8. Lamusse, 202.

Martin, Saint
Christian version of the March sacrificial god Mars, said to have

come riding on the pale horse of death in the manner of Woden.

Ireland preserved the custom of killing the god incarnate in an ox, the
Mart-beast. It was claimed that the saint himself was cut up and eaten in

the form of an ox. Every household killed some domestic animal and
sprinkled the threshold with the animal's blood. St.
Martin as "martyr"
came to be regarded as "one of the very chief of the saints. The . . .

tradition of slaughter is
preserved in the British custom of killing cattle
on St. Martin's Day." 1
The holy day was a continuation of the Roman festival of Martina-

598
 /hen the god Bacchus prefigured Jesus by turning water into
Martyrs
at his sacred marriage (the Christian adaptation
!

appearing in the
of John). By British folk custom down to the 19th century

[d., schoolboys filled vessels of water on St. Martin's Night so the water
Id be turned into wine before morning. By a benevolent decep-
lon like that of the Tooth Fairy, parents sometimes replaced the water

kith wine during the night. 2

1. Miles, 204-6. 2. Hazlitt, 393.

Martyrs
ince the 9th century, when martyr-legends became wildly popular,
[ne church listed countless bogus saints said to have died in "persecu-

of the 4th and 5th centuries. With more imagination than

Jons"
istoricity, martyrologists created a church history out of fictions. Rec-
rds of the alleged martyrs slain in "persecutions" are virtually
bnexistent. The gory fantasies reported by such sources as the Golden The Golden
Collection of
legend were invented from six to nine centuries after the time of the Legend
the "lives" of various
!
leged events. Even Catholic scholars say martyrologists' tales are so
with emphasis on
saints,
nildishly naive that when reading them "it is often difficult to refrain
'
martyrdoms and
pm smiling." miracle tales, written by
Still,one might wonder why a smile should be the response to Jacobus de Voragine,
a 13th-century
hese grisly fantasies of torture and butchery, which hint at a sadistic
Dominican bishop in
lirn of mind in those who invented such tales for the edification of their
Lombardy, later
[How Christians.
i

archbishop of
Most of the martyrs were assigned to the persecution of
classic Genoa.
Piocletian, which Christian tradition greatly exaggerated. Diocletian
Lade no objection to Christians until 298 a.d., when his priests claimed
thristian unbelievers, present at an official sacrifice, prevented the Diocletian (Gaius
The emperor ordered Christians to honor Aurelius Valerius
ception of favorable omens.
Diocletianus)
e gods by burning a pinch of incense on the imperial altars. For
Roman emperor from
lose in the army or civil service, refusal to comply with this rule could 284 to 305 a.d. Of
[lean discharge.
Five years later, quarrels between Christian and military background,
ligan priesthoods escalated to the point where official oracles began to Diocletian was noted

llsist on the closing of Christian churches. Some Christian zealots for his economic and
administrative
Itok on themselves to strike back by attacking the emperor himself.
it
reforms.
Two fires were set in Diocletian's palace at Nicomedia. Three
lihristian eunuchs, residents in the palace, were accused of arson and
Icecuted. Centuries later they were canonized as Saints Dorotheus,

jtorgonius,
and Peter. 2 After the fires, Diocletian also ordered the
Itest of some Christian priests. Martin Jones says "Some months later,
Hieimprisoned clergy were all forced to sacrifice, and then, with the
Icception of a few obstinate reclusants, released." Some of the
obstinate

Hies were executed. But the "persecution" was never more than
Hilf-hearted. Though it continued intermittently for a while, it was
Intirely abandoned by 3 1 3 a.d.*

599
Martyrs These ten years and comparatively few deaths were blown up into

a legendary reign of terror, after the teachings of the primitive church

^^^^^^^^^^^m were forgotten. One of these teachings was that martyrdom, called "the
Crown," automatically brought Christlike apotheosis and made the
soul of the martyr one with Jesus, as the soul of an Egyptian could
become one with Osiris. In pursuit of this "imitation of Christ," so

many Christians purposely broke laws and clamored for the death

penalty that Antoninus of Antioch irritably inquired whether Chris-

tians had no ropes or precipices to kill themselves, without constantly
4
making trouble for the authorities.

Some of the early churches taught that martyrdom was required t(

be among the blessed in heaven. Apocryphal Gospels quoted Jesus:

"Truly I
say to you, none of those who fear death will be saved; for the

kingdom of death belongs to those who put themselves to death."

Tertullian said he longed for martyrdom, "that he may obtain from Go

complete forgiveness, by exchange giving in his blood." Gnostics
however ridiculed martyrdom, saying it made God a cannibal who
desired human blood; and the advocates of martyrdom were said to
inflict it on each other all too often. Some Gnostic writings denounced
other Christians for "oppressing their brothers" and even making
children suffer, to save their souls. 5 This was one of the sources of the
6
charge that Christians sacrificed children to their deity. Centuries
later, Christians used the same charge of child sacrifice to justify
7
persecution of the Jews.
In reality, Rome embraced many diverse faiths, Christianity

among them, with far more tolerance than Christians showed. Angus
says, "In the matter of intolerance Christianity differed from all pagan

religions, and surpassed Judaism; in that respect it stood in direct

opposition to the spirit of the age." 8 Some of the so-called persecutors

were actually trying to stop the fighting between different factions of

emperor Maxentius who arrested the rival popes

Christians, like the
Marcellus and Eusebius to prevent further street battles between their
followers. Another pair of rival popes, Damasus and Ursinus, precipitat
ed such bloody fighting that 137 corpses were left in the basilica of
Sicininus in only one day. Ammianus reported that "It was only with

difficulty that the people, having been roused to such ferocity, could
be brought back to order." 9
A persecution, rich
in martyrdoms, was expected from the "Apos-

tate" emperor Julian, an urbane pagan who disliked fanatical

Christians. But Julian disappointed them by leaving them alone. Greg-

ory of Nazianzus held even Julian's tolerance against him: "He

begrudged to our soldiers the honor of martyrdom. ... In order that wc

might suffer, and yet not win honor as we should, suffering for
Christ's sake ... he attacked our religion in a very villainous and
ungenerous way, introducing into his persecution the traps and snares
of argument." Julian was killed in a military camp, under odd circum-
stances. According to Libanius, the emperor was assassinated by a

600
christian less inclined to argue, more inclined to destroy the
Martyrs
10
(pponent.
There no
are verifiable contemporary records of individual Chris- ^^^^^^^^^^^
tans "slain for their faith" under the Roman empire. Eusebius
U. 371 a.d.) mentioned a letter, supposedly from the churches of Lyons
nd Vienne churches of Asia and Phrygia, listing the names of
to the

Christians executed in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, 177 a.d., nearly

[8
wo hundred years earlier. 11 Eusebius probably wrote the letter
^imself. It was he who adopted the principle of "holy lying" on the
hurch's behalf. Ever afterward, churchmen cited Eusebius to prove
12
nat any lie is permissible if it glorifies the Christian faith.

Aside from of "holy lying" and his dubious letter, no

this father

nartyrs' names were heard of until the 7th to 9th centuries. A

pajority
were only names or titles of old pagan deities whose shrines had
centers since pre-Christian times.
|een pilgrimage
The real martyrs of the early Christian era were not made by the

lagans so much as by their fellow Christians. Diocletian's persecution

las negligible compared to the violent warfare of Christian against

Christian in those centuries. Zealots in Asia Minor destroyed whole

pwns and villages and massacred thousands of "heretics." Women and
hildren were tortured until they agreed to receive the Host of the
rue faith. Ammianus said "no wild beasts are so hostile to man as

Christian sects in general are to one another." 1? Toleration itself was

[unishable.
At Trier in the 4th century two bishops, Priscillian and

pstantius,
with two other men and a woman, were illegally tortured
nd executed by their fellow Christians for being too tolerant of their
14
lagan neighbors.
In the 5th century, Innocent I proclaimed that God gave the
hurch the right to kill. Its military might "had been granted by God
nd the sword had been permitted for the punishment of the guilty"
anyone holding unorthodox opinions. A letter attributed
15
(leaning
of Rome, said whoever refuses to "bow the neck" to
p Clement, bishop
God's bishops, priests, and deacons is guilty of insubordination
16
{gainst
God and must suffer the death penalty.
Once in power, the church attacked both pagans and non-ortho-
px By a conservative estimate, pagan
Christians in a reign of terror.

mperors spilled less than one ten-thousandth of the amount of Chris-

an blood later shed by other Christians. 17 The persecutions in Asia
Minor were thus described in 386 a.d.:

The monks say they are making war on the temples but their warfare
is i

way pillaging what little poor unfortunates do have, the produce of

of
the fields and the cattle they feed. . . .
They grab people's land, claiming
the place is sacred. Many have been robbed of their patrimony on such
are
a pretext. They who (as they say) give honor to their god by fasting
getting fat on the wretchedness of others.
And as for those others, the victims ofsuch a sack, if they go to

town, to a "shepherd" he will be called that, though he may not be a

601
Mary good shepherd precisely and tell him, weeping, of their injustices suf-
fered, the shepherd will approve of the pillagers, and chase their victims
away, saying that they should count a gain that they have not suffered
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ it

worse.
If they hear of a place with something worth raping away, they

immediately claim that someone is making sacrifices and committing

'8
abominations, and pay the place a visit.

Christian zealots sometimes tortured pagan women to make

them renounce theirGoddess. 19 This may have been the real origin of
the many fictitious "virgin martyrs" said to have renounced love and
marriage to embrace Christian celibacy, retaining their virginity despite
the most horrendous tortures. Catholic writers now call the church's

virgin-martyr horror tales only "edifying romance" though why these

sadistic fantasies should seem edifying is not made clear. 20 Christian
tales of the pagans' execution of virgins made no sense in any case; for
under Roman law, no virgin could be executed. If sentenced to
death, a virgin had to be legally deflowered before sentence could be
carried out.
21
No Roman law made virginity perse a crime.
The real reason why the church demanded martyr-myths was that

it was the best traditional way to achieve union with a deity and
consequent immortality. From the earliest ideas of sacred kingship, he
who died in agony could become at once one with his God. The very
word martyr was the name of the ancient sacred king in Persia, Martiya-
Immanuel (see Mars). 22 The Fourth Book of Maccabees, written
about the 1st century B.C., provided a typical scriptural model for
Christian martyrologists. It described the sufferings of the Jew Elea-
zar and his companions, who endured the usual sequence of flayings,

burnings, scourgings, disembowellings, etc., couched in loftily meta-

phorical prose: "Eleazar, like a fine steersman steering the ship of

sanctity on the sea of the passions, though buffeted by the threats of

the tyrant and swept by the swelling waves of the tortures, never shifted
for one moment the helm of sancity until he sailed into the haven of
2?
victory over death."
1. Attwater, 13. 2. Brewster, 402. 3. Encyc. Brit, "Diocletian." 4. H. Smith, 211.
5. 90-93. 6. Robertson, 1 16. 7. Lindsay, O.A., 219. 8. Angus, 277.
Pagels,
9. [Link], D.C.P., 40, 131. 10. Ibid., 102, 115. 1 1 Attwater, 224.
.

12. Knight, S.L., 164. 13. Gibbon 1, 719-22. 14. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 155.
15. Bullough, 122. 16. Pagels, 34. 17. H. Smith, 210. 18. J.H. Smith, D.C.P, 166.
19. Gibbon 1, 720. 20. Attwater, 210. 21. Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 17.
22. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 178. 23. Forgotten Books, 185.

Mary
Fathers of the Christian church strongly opposed the worship of

Mary because they were well aware that she was only a composite of
Mariamne, the Semitic God-Mother and Queen of Heaven; Aphro-
dite-Mari, the Syrian version of Ishtar; Juno the Blessed Virgin; Isis as
Stella Maris, Star of the Sea; Maya the Oriental Virgin Mother of the

602
i
Redeemer; the Moerae or trinity of Fates; and many other versions of Mary
the Great Goddess. Even Diana Lucifera the Morning-Star God-
1

was assimilated to the Christian myth as Mary's "mother," Anna or

jdess
Dinah. Churchmen knew the same titles were applied to Mary as to
her pagan forerunners: "queen of heaven, empress of hell, lady of all
world." 2
[the
The Speculum beatae Mariae said Mary was like the Juno- Speculum beatae
Urtemis-Hecate "queen of heaven where she is enthroned in
trinity:
Mariae A book of
Ithe midst of the angels, queen of earth where she constantly manifests praise attributed to
St. Bonaventura (13th
jher power,
and queen of hell where she has authority over the
century), but
to the Office of the Virgin, she was the
jdemons." According primordial probably written
being, "created from the beginning and before the centuries."
3
anonymously some
Christian patriarchs therefore sought to humanize and belittle centuries later.

to prove her unworthy of adoration. Epiphanius ordered: "Let

(Mary,
ithe Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be worshipped, but let no one
4
I

[worshipMary." Anastasius said, "Let no one call Mary the Mother

pf God, for Mary was but a woman, and it is impossible that God should
be born of a woman." 5 Ambrose called Mary the "temple" of God,
end "only he is to be adored who worked within the temple." 6 Up to
1

the 5th century the church persecuted as heretics a sect calling

(themselves Marianites, who claimed that Mary possessed the true

7
quality of divinity. Mariolatry has plagued Christian patriarchy

throughout its history, as the popular need to worship the Mother-figure

always arose unbidden.
Some
early church fathers sought a way out of the dilemma by
\

attacking Mary's motherhood, to prove her neither divine nor really

naternal. Some claimed Jesus wasn't born in the ordinary way but
8
!
suddenly materialized before Mary. Marcionites said Jesus could
[never
touch vulgar female flesh, therefore he was never born at all. He
descended from heaven as a fully formed adult. 9 Some church fathers

rejected Mary's motherhood on the ground that she was not only a
\ mere mortal, but even a sinful woman. 10
There was ecclesiastical opposition to Mary throughout the Chris-
i
lian era. Pope Nicholas III ordered Jean d'Olive, a friar

for learning and piety," to burn with his own hands a Isidore Glabas
{'distinguished
Tact he had written in praise of Mary because it expressed excessive 14th-century Greek
|
Marianist theologian.
Hevotion to her. 11
When it was permitted, Marian devotion did appear

|o
on an Oriental extravagance.
take

Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople in 717, called Mary "Lady St. Bernardine of

Ipll-holy"
and "Lady most venerable," maintaining that no one could Siena (1380-1444)
i be saved or receive theof grace except through her, since God
gift Franciscan
her "through and in all things, as his true mother." Henri theologian and reformer
Ipbeys
archdeacon of Evreux, said his people thought Mary "as much
who preached
|
poudon,
against the moral
is, or more than, God himself." Isidore Glabas said Mary ruled in
breakdown
leaven before her earthly birth; like a creatress she brought all things
consequent upon the
I nto being, the angels obeyed her. Bernardine of Siena said
and all papacy's Great

Mary's birth of the Savior through her own mystic powers was more
Schism.
(

603
Mary miraculous than God's generation of him. "Even if she had not been
theMother of God, she would nevertheless have been the mistress of
the world." Louis-Marie de Montfort declared that Mary had abso-
12
power over God.
lute
St. Louis-Marie People of the Middle Ages often viewed God as their persecutor,
Crignion de Montfort as their defender. Early 16th-century woodcuts showed God
Mary
(1673-1716) French
shooting arrows of pestilence, war, and inflation at the world, while the
priest who founded two 13
inscription pleaded with Mary to restrain him. It was said that
congregations and
wrote True Devotion to "Mary stands for Mercy, and it is
only because of her influence at cour
the Blessed Virgin. not because of love or goodwill on God's part, that heaven is within

He was canonized in MA
reach." 14th-century Franciscan wrote:
1947.
When we have offended Christ, we should go Erst to the Queen of
Heaven and offer her . . .
prayers, fasting, vigils, and alms; then she, like
a mother, will come between thee and Christ, the father who wishes to

beat us, and she will throw the cloak of mercy between the rod of
1S
punishment and us, and soften the king's anger against us.

Ashe says, "Christian scripture and doctrine totally preclude

placing Mary above Christ. Yet the vitality of Christ's own Church has
often seemed to depend on her rather than him. . . .
[Wjithout her he
would probably have lost his kingdom." 16 During its first five centuries,
Christ's church discovered that no amount of force would make

people renounce their Mother Goddess. She had to be preserved in

some form:

The church seemed doomed to failure, destined to go down to bloody

death amidst the bleeding corpses of its victims, when the people
discovered Mary. And only when Mary, against the stern decrees of the

church, was dug out of the oblivion to which Constantine had assigned
her and became identified with the Great Goddess was Christianity finally
tolerated by the people. The only reality in Christianity is Mary, the
. . .

Female Principle, the ancient goddess reborn. l7

In the eastern empire it was said the mark of true Christian faith
was to "confess the holy Ever-Virgin Mary, truly and properly the
Mother of God, to be higher than every creature whether visible or

invisible." Ephraem of Syria called Mary the bride or spouse of Jesus as

well as his mother, after the fashion of the pagan Goddess and her
son-consort; she was also Gate of Heaven, Ark, and Garden of Paradise.
Mary personally sprinkled the face of Adam with life-giving rain,
which placed her in the creation myth as "co-redemptress." Ephraem's
Protoevangelium,
also known as the opinions were called heretical by some, but after a lapse of 1 600
Revelation of James: years in the year 1920 he was declared a Doctor of the Universal
a Gospel written in the Church by papal decree. 18
second century a.d., The Christian figure of Mary was gradually created during the first
valued by early church
four centuries of the Christian era, out of bits and pieces of the Great
fathers as authentic
but eventually
Goddess who conceived "sons of God" and Saviors in all the temples of

eliminated from the the ancient world. The

Protoevangelium Mary said served as a

temple hierodule, and received God's seed as she was beginning to spin

604
a blood-red thread in the temple the work of the Fate-virgin, first of Mary
the Moerae or "Marys," who spun the thread of destiny. 19 At this
mystically crucial moment the angel Gabriel "came in unto her"
(Luke 1:28), the biblical phrase for sexual intercourse.
Other sources also identified Mary with the Fate-spinner, whom
the Greeks called Clotho, youngest of the trinity of Moerae. The
Coptic Discourse on Mary, attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem, represented
Mary as the same triple Goddess of Fate, incarnate in the three
Marys who stood atthe foot of Jesus's cross. 20 In like manner, the three
Fates of Nordic myth stood at the foot of Odin's tree of sacrifice; their
virgin aspect was sometimes Freya, "the Lady." The Swedes called the
constellation of Orion the distaff of the virgin Mary, because it was
21
formerly the distaff used by Freya to spin the destinies of men.
Greek myth presented an image of the Virgin Persephone almost
identical to that of fate-spinning
Mary. Persephone sat in a sacred
cave or temple, starting to spin a web with a great picture of the
universe the magic picture which the Mother made into reality. At
that moment the Heavenly Father appeared in the form of a phallic
22
serpent and begot the savior Dionysus on her.

In an effort to make Mary's impregnation as sexless as possible,

some Christian ascetics invented very peculiar mechanisms for it.

Sacred art showed semen emanating from God's mouth and passing
through a long tube that led under Mary's skirts. Some theologians
claimed God's seed was carried to Mary in the beak of the Holy Dove.
Others said it came from Gabriel's mouth, to be filtered through the
sacred before entering Mary's body by way of her ear. 23
lily

Though the Christian God took over the Triple Goddess's ancient
trinitarian character at the Council of Nicaea, there is some evidence
that early Christians perceived Mary as a trinity. Like the Buddhists'
Mara, she was sometimes a spirit of death. 24 The Gospel ofMary Gospel of Mary One
identified three of the at Jesus's crucifixion with one another, of the early Gnostic
all Marys
who Gospels, once
as if they were the same Triple Goddess attended the death of
included with the books
25
the pagan Savior.
of the New
For some centuries, eastern churches worshipped a Father-Mother- Testament but later
Son trinity modeled on such pagan triads as Osiris-Isis-Horus, eliminated from the
canon. A copy was
Zeus-Rhea-Zagreus, Apollo-Artemis-Heracles, etc. This idea was so
rediscovered in the
commonplace that even writers of the Koran felt compelled to deny
26
1940s at Nag Hammadi.
the divine trinity of God, Mary, and Jesus. Moslem sources also

preserved another manifestation of the Virgin Goddess as Mar

Mariam or Sancta Maria, mother of the Persian savior Mani. 27 As "the
Sea" (Maria), the Triple Goddess swallowed up the god she gave
solemn imitation, the women of Alexandria threw images of
birth to. In
28
Osiris into the sea after his Passion [Link] copies of this rite

probably account for Plutarch's report that the chief city of Palestine
Jerusalem was built in honor of a child whom Isis killed and threw
into the sea. 29

Mary was also closely associated with the Great Goddess of

605
Mary Ephesus, whose temples she took over. In the 5th century an
Ephesian priest named Proclus delivered a sermon on the multiform
nature of Mary, calling her "the living bush, which was not burnt by
the fire of the divine birth virgin and heaven, the only bridge
. . .

between God and men, the awesome loom ... on which the gar-
ment of union was woven." 30
Much was made of the reversal of Mary's Latin Ave and the name
of Eve (Eva). Mystics said Mary was Eve's purified reincarnation, as
31
Jesus was the similar reincarnation of Adam. Somehow, theologians
failed to recognize that the new incarnations apparently reversed the
parent-child relationship. Then again, as Adam and Eve were spouses,
so the relationship of Mary and Jesus sometimes verged on the sexual
or conjugal. In a legend ascribed to St. John, Jesus welcomed Mary into
heaven with the words, "Come, my chosen, and I shall set thee in my
32
I have coveted the
seat, for beauty of thee."
The church's doctrine of the assumption of Mary was explained in
a number of ways. Early churchmen declared that Jesus visited
Mary's tomb variously located in Ephesus, Bethlehem, Gethsemane,
or Josaphat and raised up her corpse, which he made to live again;
then he personally escorted her into heaven as a live woman. 33 She was
not a soul or a spirit but an immortal person in her own original body.
This became the official modern view when the doctrine of the
assumption was declared an article of faith in 1950, when Pope Pius
XII pronounced that "the immaculate mother of God, the ever Virgin
Mary, when the course of her earthly life was run, was assumed in
34
body and in soul to
heavenly glory." But the point had already been
argued for more than a thousand years.
The church's problem was to take advantage of popular reverence
for Mary but at the same time prevent her literal deification. Some
theologians of the 13 th century claimed Mary's mortality should bring
more women to obey the church, because the king of heaven "is no
mere man but a mere woman is its queen. It is not a mere man who is
set above the angels and all the rest of the heavenly court, but a mere

woman is; nor is anyone who is merely man as powerful there as a mere
woman." 35
Always the theologians feared to impute too much power and
glory to Mary. Pope John XXIII, presuming toknow Mary's inner
Mariale Common
thoughts, announced: "The Madonna is not pleased when she is put
name of two Marianist
above her Son," though in fact it was the church who was not
handbooks, the first

written by an pleased. Catholic doctrines themselves attributed to her two of the three
anonymous author basic characteristics of divinity: she was immortal by reason of the
and falsely ascribed to assumption, and sinless by reason of the Immaculate Conception.
Albertus Magnus;
The third requirement of divinity, omniscience, was conceded to her
the second written in
1478 by the by popular belief. A 1
3th-century Mariale said she had perfect knowl-
Franciscan friar edge of divine mysteries, understood all scriptures, foresaw the future,
Bernardine of Busti. and knew everything about mathematics, geography, astronomy, alche-

606
my, and canon law even in her earthly life, when there was no Mary
canon and therefore no canon law. 36 A French manuscript illustration
showed Mary enthroned beside God on Judgment Day, weighing ^^^^^^^^^^^
souls in her balances like her prototype the Goddess Maat 3000 years
37
earlier. (See Alchemy.)
The Welsh confused Mary with the triadic White Goddess, and
seldom asked the blessing of God without also imploring the favor of
"the white Mary." 38 Saints' tales implied that Mary's was the true touch
of canonization. St. Bernard was ennobled by three drops of milk that
the Virgin pressed from her own breast for him. 39 St. Catherine of
Siena also claimed to have been nourished by Mary's milk. 40

Many legends depicted Mary as the only true source of the milk of
human kindness. At Mainz Cathedral she gave away one of her
image's gold shoes to a starving beggar, who had pleased her by playing
his fiddle for her. He was caught with the shoe, arrested, and
sentenced to death. On the way to the scaffold he paused to pray to the
Virgin, and she exonerated him by publicly giving him her other
[Link] beggar was released, but the priests took away the gold shoes
and locked them in the treasury, "lest the Virgin should again be
tempted to bestow them upon some penniless beggar who prayed for
her aid." 41

Mary's mercy often proved superior to that of God or Jesus. She

was occasionally represented leaning on the balance that weighed a
sinner's few good deeds, to make them heavier than his evil deeds

and save him from damnation. Her mercy extended even to the Jews,

despite her priests' detestation of them. On Easter Day in Bourges, a

Jewish child took Holy Communion along with his Christian friends.

For this offense, the boy's father threw him into a furnace; but he lay
unharmed by the fire, saying the Lady who stood on the Christians'
was protecting him. "Then the Christians, understanding that
altar

he meant the statue of the Blessed Mary, took the aged Jew and threw
him into the furnace, and he was burnt and consumed." 42
Ethiopian Christians' Lefafa Sedek, "Bandlet of Righteousness,"
said God gave
the secrets of salvation to humanity only because Mary

requested it, when she began to grieve for her relatives writhing in hell's
River of Fire. Egyptian paganism was the real source of this "Chris-
tian" scripture, copiedfrom the Book of the Dead with the name of
God substituted for Ra, of Christ for that of Thoth, and of Mary for
43
that of All-Merciful Isis.

Some theologians said even the worst of sinners could win a sure
salvation by doing some special service for Mary. Two scribes pleased
her by making copies of the Book of the Miracles of the Virgin Mary.
Afterward they committed many sins, and when they died, devils
came for their souls. But the Virgin pulled them away from the devils,
saving them on account of their devotion to her. 44
At times it seemed that Mary, not God, was the real opponent of

607
Mary evil forces. Spengler said this was "one of the maxima of the Gothic,
one of its unfathomable creations one that the present day forgets and
not possible to exaggerate either the
^^^^^^^^-^m deliberately forgets It is

of sincerity with
grandeur of this forceful, insistent picture or the depth
which it was believed in. The Mary-myths and the Devil-myths
formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other.
Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of

prayer, and and exorcisms." 45 Historian Henry

a Devil-cult of spells

Adams noted: "Without Mary, man had no hope except in atheism,

and for atheism the world was not ready The thirteenth century
could not afford to admit a doubt. Society had staked its existence, in
6
this world and the next, on the reality and power of the Virgin.""*

Caesarius of Heisterbach told a story showing that Mary was more

revered than God. A knight of Liege needed money and so made a

pact with Satan. When asked to curse and renounce God,

he did so

[Link], when the demon required him to renounce the

Virgin, he refused, horrified. Therefore the Virgin later intervened to
save him from damnation. 47

Mary dispensed compassion (Hindu karuna) more effectively than

Christ, for this very quality had been associated with the feminine
image from the beginning. Compassion was the chads of sacred harlots,
which contributed much to Mary's consistent patronage of prosti-
tutes. The "whore" Mary Magdalene was one of the original Marian
48
[Link] says Mariolatry evolved because "the people need-
ed a queen of heaven, as the Israelites needed one in Jeremiah's time,
one for whomthey could bake cakes, a great mother, a fertility-
prostitute; but she was half shown to them, half withheld, and Freud
only gives us half the truth when he says that the Christian religion
49
recreated the mother-god." Actually, the people recreated the

mother-god out of their own pagan heritage.

Churchmen claimed that all women lay under a threefold curse. j

They were they were barren. They were accursed also if

accursed if

they conceived, since conception was of the nature of original

sin. They

were accursed by the pains of childbirth, in fulfillment of God's curse

on Eve. But Mary escaped all three curses. "Mary alone of all women is
blessed, because she is virgin and fruitful, she conceives in holiness,
and gives birth without pain." 50 Of course this view of Mary did little to

improve the lot of ordinary women, presenting them with a wholly

impossible ideal, yet implying that they fell short of the

ideal only

because of their sinfulness. 51 The ancients saw no incongruity in a

Goddess who was both virgin and mother (as well as lover and crone),
because she represented all women in all phases of life. Christians
however insisted on taking the "miracle" literally, having lost sight of its

subtle allegory.
A hidden reason for the church's adoption of Mary was the

608
 uccessful amputation of her pre-Christian sexuality. Of all the Mary
she inherited from the ancient Goddess,
Attributes Mary's virginity was
emphasized. She was called "the Virgin," not "the Mother."
Tiost
m^mmmhmmmm
Church fathers insisted that she never engaged in sexual intercourse in
her life, even though the Bible plainly spoke of Jesus's brothers and
52
isters. Ambrose demanded, "Would the Lord Jesus have chosen
St.

a woman who would defile the

mother
tor his
heavenly chamber with
he seed of a man, that is to say one incapable of preserving her virginal
53
thastity intact?" Marian legends insisted that, although Mary was
no man could ever look on her with desire. 54
[mazingly beautiful,
Yet some monasteries institutionalized desire for Mary, who "mar-
the monks as Christ "married" nuns. If a knight placed his
ked" ring
the finger of Mary's image, she would grip it firmly so it couldn't be
j>n

temoved. At this, the knight considered himself a Bridegroom of the

nrgin and entered a monastery. The same tales were told of pagan
of Venus, who "married" any man who placed a ring on her
ftatues

narble finger. 55 In 1470 a Breton Black Friar, Alain de la Roche,

laimed the Virgin married him in the presence of many saints and
56
ngels, placing on his finger a ring woven of her hair.
Cistercians styled themselves "Knights of Our Lady," associating
heir Lady with the pagan May Queen. Aegidus's 1 3th-century
istory of the order said it was the custom in the time of Bishop Albero
the clergy of Liege to choose "from among their concubines" a
pr
and Pentecostal Queen, who was robed in purple, crowned,
faschal
nroned, and worshipped with drums and music, "revered almost
57
nth idolatry as if she were an idol." She also manifested herself as the

[airy Queen who watched

over a monastery near Laach as the
nonks' divine Bride. She announced each man's death three days in
58
pvance by placing a lily in his stall at midnight.
Gothic cathedrals were dedicated not to God or Jesus but to Notre
Uame; they were collectively called "Our Ladies" or "Palaces of the
59
Queen of Heaven." Many of them were built over pagan shrines of
pe
Great Goddess. Rome's cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore was
'kiilt over the sacred cave of the Magna Mater. Santa Maria in Aracoeli

p the Capitoline Hill was formerly a temple of Tanit.

Mary's
hurches throughout Italy were founded on shrines of Juno, Isis,
Minerva, Diana, Hecate. One church was even naively named Santa
60
_Haria sopra Minerva: Holy Mary over (the shrine of) Minerva.
the 6th century, the great temple of Isis at Philae was re-
kin icated to Mary.
61
Aphrodite's sanctuaries on Cyprus became
iurches of Mary, whom the Cypriots continued to address by Aphro-
ite'sname. 62 At Chartres, the heathen idol of the virgo paritura (Virgin
living Birth) was preserved in the so-called Druid Grotto under-
63
th the cathedral. It was said to be a black statue of Mary.
Ecclesia, "the Church," was one of Mary's titles. She was identi-

609
Mary fied with both the buildings and the organization of Holy Mother
Church as brideand mother of God. Yet this pseudo-female church

^^^^^^^^^^^ remained the exclusive property of men. As late as February 1977

Pope Paul VI again forbade ordination of women, saying the church
"does not consider herself [sic] authorized to admit women to priestly
ordination." The pope maintained that priests must have a "natural
resemblance" to Christ, and if they were women "it would be
64
image of Christ." There was no
difficult to see in the minister the

mention that a priestess might present a resemblance to Mary, who

symbolized the church itself. The modern church prefers
to forget that
65
early churches of Mary were staffed by priestesses, not priests.
Above all, Christian authorities feared Mary might be the channel
for she
through which Goddess-worship could reestablish itself,

inspired utterances similar to those the

ancient Mother inspired, like
Goethe's: "Supreme and sovereign Mistress of the World! ... Oh
Virgin, in the highest sense most pure, oh Mother, worthy of all our
66
worship, our chosen Queen, equal with the gods." The secret,
ineradicable heresies ofMarian worship received graphic form in the
famous Vierge Ouvrante Mary as a statue that opened up to show
God, Jesus, angels, and saints contained inside her.
In the generating and nourishing, protective and transformative, feminine
power of the unconscious, a wisdom is at work that is infinitely superior
to the wisdom of man 's waking consciousness, and that, as source of vision

and symbol, of ritual and law, poetry and vision, intervenes, summoned
or unsummoned, to save man and give direction to his life.
This feminine-maternal wisdom is no abstract, disinterested knowl-

edge, but a wisdom ofloving participation. . . . In the patriarchal

development of the Judeo-Christian West, with its masculine, monotheis-

tic trend toward abstraction, the goddess, as a feminine figure of

wisdom, was disenthroned and repressed. She survived only secretly, for
the most part in heretical and revolutionary bypaths. . . .

Seen from the outside, the "Vierge Ouvrante" is the familiar and
unassuming mother with child. But when opened she reveals the
heretical secret within her. God the Father and God the Son, usually

represented as heavenly lords who in an act ofpure grace raise up the

humble, earth-bound mother to abide with them, prove to be contained in

67
her; prove to be the "contents" of her all-sheltering body.

Mary represented the second of the two expedients men used to

overcome their fear of women, according to Homey: disparagement
68 had to be apotheo-
and idealization. But she was so ideal that she

sized just as unmistakably as Jesus himself. So she rose bodily from the

earth and ascended to glory. Unfortunately, those who formulated

this idea were quite ignorant of the vastness of the universe, and their
in which such
simplistic "rising to the sky" no longer serves an age
information is
readily available. Even assuming that Mary's body could
travel at the speed of light an impossible idea to begin with it

would be only two thousand light-years away at the present time, about

610

ftM i
one-fiftieth of the distance across our own galaxy, let alone plunged Mary
into the unthinkable immensity of intergalactic space. And yet in an era
when the absurdity of the idea is
perfectly plain to the educated, to be ^^^^^^^^^^^
exact on June 30, 1968, the Credo of Pope Paul VI reconfirmed the
dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary though God
apparently didn't take the trouble to inform him about the method of its
69
accompl ish ment.
But not all minds in the modern age are modern minds.
Many
remain ignorant of what has been discovered about the physical
universe. Many are ignorant of the theories and doctrines professed by
their own religion. They worship Mary only because their inner

being demands a mother-archetype, and she is the only one presented

to them. They don't know how many "Marys" there were before

Christianity. But educated churchmen know. Canon John de Satge

wrote: "The
evangelical has a strong suspicion that the deepest roots
of the Marian cultus are not to be found in the Christian tradition at all.

The religious history of mankind shows a recurring tendency to

worship a mother-goddess. May it not be the case, the evangelical

. . .

wonders, that what we have here is in reality an older religion, a

paganism which has been too lightly baptized into Christ and whose
ancient features persist under a thin Christian veil?" 70

However, Mary wasn't "lightly" adopted by Christianity. She was

opposed, attacked, and accepted only with many theological
finally

misgivings and restrictions. Early Gospels that dwelt on the divinity of

71
Mary were labeled "poisonous" by the orthodox church. Christian
mystics who coveted the female role and spoke of "becoming Mary and

bearing God from within," did so in defiance of the church's earlier

edict that Mary couldn't claim the title of Theotokos (God-bearer),
because God couldn't be born of a mortal woman. 72 The edict was
abandoned only because Christians wished to
after several centuries

emulate the pagan Mystery-cults whose Savior-gods were invariably

born of mortal virgins. (See Virgin Birth.)
Christian art of the first five centuries showed Mary in a position

lower than Jesus, even lower than the Magi, who wore haloes while
she wore none. In the 6th century she acquired a halo and rose to the
central position in a group of non-haloed apostles. By the 9th century
she reigned as Queen of Heaven in the middle of the apse in two
73
cathedrals.
the 14th century, Wyclif was writing: "It seems to me
By
impossible that we should obtain the reward without the help of Mary.
There is no sex or age, no rank or position, of anyone in the
whole
human race, which has no need to call for the help of the Holy Virgin."
The Te Deum Laudamus declared, "All the earth doth worship
74
thee, Spouse of the Eternal Father."
When Mary appeared in a subordinate position, it was in the role

o f Daughter like the Virgin Kore on the lap of the Elder Goddess

611
Mary represented by "God's grandmother," the ancient Anna (St. Anne,
called Mary's mother). In some painted or sculpted groupings, the

^^^^^^^^^^^ two Goddesses and the male infant seem to form a trinity quite

exclusive of God. 75
An observer might be reminded of the Egyptian
god-king on the laps of his Two Mothers, they who would nurse him
forever and thus give him eternal life. The mythical history of St.
Anne reveals that she, even more directly than Mary, descended from
the image of that fertile Creatress, Mother Earth. 76

Legends and images of Mary exerted an uncanny appeal even in

the "scientific"modern age with its professed skepticism about the

supernatural. In 1945, a young boy named Joseph Vitolo was greatly
impressed by the film Song of Bernadette, and subsequently conjured

up a vision of the Virgin for himself. He conversed with her for sixteen
consecutive nights at a certain rock in the Bronx. She told him to

have a chapel built on the spot, and promised the appearance of a

healing spring within a short time.

Though the site received the popular name of the Bronx Lourdes,
and credulous folk hurried there in astonishingto pray for numbers
miraculous cures, the spring never appeared. Eventually, young Joseph
became embarrassed by the fuss he had caused. He then said the
Virgin told him she wouldn't come any more to that place. Despite this

disappointment, for many years the faithful continued to gather and

77
dig in the mud, seeking the holy spring.
But it was not only the simple-minded who sought help from
Mary. Historian Henry Adams thought Christianity's divine mother,
however attenuated, offered the only hope of spiritual comfort in an
alienated technological society. He saw that "the males of his society,
who had transferred so many of their once autonomous activities to

machines and automatons, did not have sufficient life-sense to save

the race. In their blind pride over their scientific facilities, they would
cling to the insensate mechanisms they had created, making them go
faster and faster, though incapable of applying the brakes. . . .
Henry
Adams, at the end of his own
career, turned to another countervailing
form of energy, the energy of life, the energy of erotic love, reproduc-
tion, and creation; he sought a counterpoise to chaos by invoking
woman's faith in her own creativity, in all the ramifying, formative

processes of life, above all those of sex, love, and motherhood." In a

poetic address to the Virgin he said: "I feel the energy of faith, not in
the future science but in you." 78
Once more it seemed that God (or man) depended on his Mother
(or woman) to straighten up the mess he had made, even if it meant
ceding supreme power to her. An 1 8th-century theologian wrote, "At
the command of Mary all obey, even God." Today it is widely

recognized even by laymen that "two rivers of common source, Mary

and Maya, the Virgin and Shakti, once again run into one: and the

612
 idess is once more, as she ever was, the creatrix of the
universe, the Mary Magdalene
79
self-revealing energy of the unknowable God."
1. Campbell, P.M., 140. 2. Scot, 348. 3. Male, 235,238. 4. Ashe, 151.
5. de Riencourt, 150. 6. Lederer, 173. 7. Briffault 3, 183. 8. Ashe 134
9. Bullough, 112. 10. Encyc. Brit, "Mary." 1 1. Coulton, 215.
12. Ashe, 203, 215, 223. 13. Wilkins, 193. 14. Ashe, 203. 15.
Bullough 169-70
16. Ashe, 236. 17. Daly, 92. 18. Ashe, 173, 203. 19. Ashe, 201. 20. Ashe 135
21. Briffault 2, 625. 22. Campbell, P.M., 101. 23. Simons, 103.
24. Campbell, Or.M., 352. 25. Malvern, 39. 26. Ashe, 206. 27. Robertson 88
28. Frazer, G.B., 390. 29. Budge, G.E. 2, 191. 30. Ashe, 188. 31. Wilkins, 1 16.
32. Male, 249-50. 33. Ashe, 208. 34. Encyc. Brit, "Mary." 35. 178.
Bullough,
36. Ashe, 213, 228. 37. Robbins, 131. 38. Hazlitt, 630. 39. 170
Bullough
40. Reinach, 308. 41. Guerber, L.R., 255. 42. de Voragine,461.
43. Budge, A.T., 196. 44. Budge, A.T., 477-78. 45. Campbell, CM., 49.
46. Beard, 222. 47. J.B. Russell, 118-19. 48. Malvern, 39. 49. 302. Augstein,
[Link],205. 51. Daly, 62. 52. Coulton, 308. 53. Ashe, 182.
54. de Voragine, 152. 55. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 224, 226. 56. Wilkins, 40.
57. Wilkins, 63, 168. 58. Guerber, L.R., 147. 59. Ashe, 217. 60. Wilkins, 69.
61. Lamusse, 19. 62. Ashe, 192. 63. Swaan, 1 18. 64. Time, Feb. 7, 1977, 65.
65. Ashe, 231. 66. de Riencourt, 250-51. 67. Neumann, G.M., 330-31.
68. Bullough, 53. 69. Campbell, F.W.G., 125. 70. Ashe, 7-8. 71. Ochs, 72.
72. Cavendish, T., 74; de Riencourt 1 50. 73. Ochs, 76. 74. Ochs, 72, 74-75.
75. Neumann, CM., pis. 180-81. 76. Neumann, A.C.U., 13, 57.
77. Castiglioni, 356. 78. Mumford, 363. 79. Lederer, 179.

Mary Magdalene
The Gospels say Jesus cast seven devils out of the sacred harlot Mary
Magdalene, and appeared first to her after his resurrection (Mark 16:9).
Books later eliminated from the canon by Christian censors gave
further curious details about the relationship: Jesus loved Mary Magda-
lene more than all other apostles, called her Apostle to the Apostles
and "the Woman Who Knew the All," and often kissed her. He said 1

she would excel every other disciple in the coming Kingdom of

2
Light, where she would rule.

Before Gnostic Gospels were cut out of the canon, they were

accepted as the Word of God, as much as the synoptic Gospels and

other New Testament writings. Therefore medieval traditions concern-

ing Mary Magdalene hark back to her early mystical supremacy. She
was called Mary Lucifer, "Mary the Light-giver." It was said Jesus
raised Lazarus from the dead solely for love of her. "There was no
grace that He refused her, nor any mark of affection that He withheld
from her." 5
The Pistis Sophia made Mary Magdalene the questioner of Jesus, Pistis Sophia (Faith-

in the Oriental manner of the catechism applied to the god by his Wisdom) A Gnostic
scr 'P^e of the 3rd
Shakti or Devi (Goddess). The female questioner then was addressed as
ccnturv a O trcinsritccl
4
"Dearly Beloved." Jesus used the same form of address, though later from q^i^
editors eliminated all traces of the identity of his questioner; but it was Coptic, setting forth the
5
apparent that his "dearly beloved" was Mary Magdalene. teachings of Jesus
u Pon his return to earth,
Origen showed a mystic devotion to Mary Magdalene, confusing
] 2 y ears after his
her with the Goddess by
1 calling
<*
her "the mother of all of us," and
resurrection.

613
Mary Magdalene sometimes Jerusalem, and sometimes The Church (Ecclesia, another
title of the Virgin). Origen claimed Mary Magdalene was immortal,
6
having lived from the beginning of time.
Thus it seems Mary the Whore was only another form of Mary
the otherwise the Triple Goddess Mari-Anna-Ishtar, the
Virgin,
Origen (Origenes Great Whore of Babylon who was worshipped along with her savior-son

Jerusalem temple. The Gospel ofMary said

7
Adamantius) Christian in the all three Marys of
father, ca. 185-254 8
the canonical books were one and the same.
a.d., an Egyptian who
wrote in Greek, Indeed, the Virgin and Whore were still confused with one

exerting a powerful
another in the 7th century a.d. when, on the day of the Nativity of
influence on the the Blessed Virgin, Pope Sergius instituted an annual procession to the
early Greek church. At old temple of the prostitute-goddess Libera, changing the temple's
first he was 9
name to Santa Maria Maggiore: Most-Great Holy Mary. It was not
accounted a saint, but
made clear which Holy Mary was meant. A Gnostic poem merged
three centuries after
his death he was the two of them as a primal feminine power: "I am the first and the last.
declared a heretic I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the
because of Gnostic 10
holy one."
elements found in

his writings.
Magdalene means "she of the temple-tower." The Jerusalem
temple had a triple tower representing the triple deity, one tower
bearing the name of the queen, Mariamne, an earthly incarnation
of the
Gospel of Mary
One of the early Goddess Mari. 11 This was the same Mariamne, Miriam, or Mary
12
Gnostic Gospels, who took Joseph for her lover. Priestesses of this temple apparently
once included with the subsidized Jesus and his companions, according to Luke 8:1-3,
books of the New which says Jesus and "the twelve" were financially supported by Mary
Testament but later
eliminated from the Magdalene and a group of women. Latin texts say the women
n
canon. A copy was provided for "him" (Jesus), but Greek texts make it "them."
rediscovered in the The seven "devils" exorcised from Mary Magdalene seem to have

1940s at Nag Hammadi. been the seven Maskim, or Anunnaki, Sumero-Akkadian spirits of

the seven nether spheres, born of the Goddess Mari. Their multiple
birth was represented in her sacred dramas, which may account for

their alleged emergence from Mary Magdalene. An Akkadian tablet

said of them: "They are seven! In the depths of the ocean, they are

seven! In the brilliancy of the heavens, they are seven!

They proceed
from the ocean depths [Maria], from the hidden retreat."
H
The Gospels say no men attended Jesus's tomb, but only Mary j

Magdalene and her women. Only women announced Jesus's

resur-

rection. This was because men were barred from the central mysteries

of the Goddess. Priestesses announced the successful conclusion of

the rites, and the Savior's resurrection. The Bible says the male apostles

knew nothing of Jesus's resurrection, and had to take the women's

word for it (Luke 24:10-1 1). The apostles were ignorant of the sacred
tradition and didn't even realize a resurrection was expected: "They
knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead"

(John 20:9).
Mari-Ishtar the Great Whore anointed or christ-ened her

doomed god when he went into the underworld, whence he would

614
rise again at her bidding. That is, she made him a Christ. Her priestess Mary Magdalene
raised the lament for him when he died in the flesh, as a sacrificial

victim. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, victims were told: "The harlot who ^^^^^^^^^^^
anointed you with fragrant oil laments for you now." 15 Temple-
women of Jerusalem raised the same lament for Tammuz (Ezekiel
8:14), with whom Jesus was identified. Jesus himself said Mary
Magdalene anointed him for his burial,
pouring a precious unguent on
his head in the time-honored manner of the sacred king's crowning
(Matthew 26:7-12). The christening-vase of holy oil was the ubiquitous

symbol of Mary Magdalene in Christian art though the virgin Mary

16
also bore the harlot's title of Holy Vase. See Jesus Ben Pandera.
Virgin and Whore constantly exchanged attributes through the
Middle Ages; the virgin Mary was consistently a special patron of
prostitutes.
17
A Christian magic ring, now in the London museum,
bears the legend, "Holy Mary Magdalene pray for me." 18
Pope Julius by II a papal bull established a "sacred" brothel in

Rome, which flourished under his successors Leo X and Clement

VII. The earnings of this brothel supported the Holy Sisters of the
Order of St. Mary Magdalene, indicating that the Holy Sisters and
the magdalenes (whores) were one and the same. Pope Innocent III
also favored Rome's collegia of prostitutes, called virgines, "unmar-
ried women." He publicly announced that any man who married one of
19
them would be specially praised in heaven.
Much Christian myth-making went into the later history of Mary
Magdalene. She was said to have lived for a while with the virgin
Mary at Ephesus. This story probably was invented to account for the
name Maria associated with the Ephesian Goddess. Afterward, Mary
Magdalene went to Marseilles, another town named after the ancient

sea-mother Mari. Her cult centered there. Bones were found at

Vezelay and declared to be hers. Her dwelling was a cave formerly

sacred to the pagans, at St. Baume (Holy Tree). 20 For thirty years she
lived there without eating or drinking, her only nourishment the sweet

songs of the angels, a "delightful repast" she daily took in through her
ears.
21
A church was built over her grotto. Local winegrowers still offer
votive candles to her for a good vintage, as if the ancient fertility-
22
mother still
occupied the site.

St. Martha accompanied Mary to Provence and worked a number

of miracles there. Meeting a dragon named Tarasque (i.e., the Celtic

deity Taranis), Martha destroyed him by tying him up with her girdle
and pouring holy water on his head. 23 Old images of the Twofold
Goddess with her Great Serpent seem to have been renamed Mary and
Martha. More often, Mary appeared as the typical feminine trinity
and death. As Holy Mary at the Cradle, she was the
ruling birth, love,
24
midwife (or birth-goddess) who delivered Jesus. As harlot and
funerary priestess she was linked with sex and death. Finally there
was
the Gnostic suggestion that she was the original "pope," foundress of

615
Mascot Christ's church, according to the Oriental idea that spiritual authority

Mashya and Mashyoi must pass from male to female and vice versa (see Peter, Saint).
25
^^^^^^^^^^^ Some John the Evangelist. In 1 2th-century Milan
said she married St.

they were worshipped together in a dual cathedral built and adminis-

tered by the monks of St. John jointly with the virgines of St. Maria

Maggiore, also entitled Sancta Dei Genetrix (Holy Mother of God).

The androgynous cathedral was excavated in 1943-44, but its discovery
26
was kept secret.

During the 1 3th century a Dianic temple was rededicated to Mary

Magdalene. At Easter, the story of her conversion of the rulers of
Marseilles was chanted at the altar. Later the sacred song was sup-

pressed. Later Mary's devotees were forbidden to hold mass. In

still,
27
1781, the Magdalene temple was demolished.
[Link],22,64. 2. Malvern, 47-49. 3. de Voragine, 355.
4. Mahanirvanatantra, 173. 5. Malvern, 12. 6. Malvern, 60. 7. Briffault 3, 169.
8. Malvern, 39. 9. Brewster, 401. 10. Malvern, 55. 11. Keller, 371.
12. Enslin, C.B., 48-49. 1 3. Morris, 1 14. 14. Wedeck, 23. 15. Malvern, 16.
16. Brewster, 338. 17. Briffault 3, 216. 18. Budge, AT., 297.
19. Briffault 3, 216; Encyc. Brit, "Prostitution." 20. Attwater, 237; Brewster, 338.
21. de Voragine, 361. 22. Malvern, 77. 23. Brewster, 345. 24. Miles, 107.
25. de Voragine, 363; Attwater, 237. 26. Morris, 12. 27. Malvern, 75-76.

Mascot
Originally a familiar spirit in animal form, like a witch's traditional
black cat or black dog. Mascoto meant "witchcraft," from Provencal
French masco, (i.e., "masked one"). The mascot of a
1
a sorceress

pagan totemic clan was its animal mask, worn on ceremonial occasions.
By Christian definition this became an animal-headed demon.
[Link],94.

Mashu
"Twin Peaks," the holy mountain of Akkadian myth into which the
sun god daily sank; corresponding to the Bosom of Hathor, Ma-Nu, into
which the Egyptian sun sank prior to his rebirth each dawn. This 1

twin-peaked mountain-mother may be related to the Celtic death

goddess Macha, slayer of heroes; or even to the twin-peaked moun-
2
tain Macchu Picchu, "Hitching Post of the Sun," in distant Peru.
1 .
Epic of Gilgamesh, 123. 2. Lamusse, 443.

Mashya and Mashyoi

Persian prototypes of Adam and Eve, the first human couple born
together from the womb of Earth, in which the seed of Gayomart, the
primal man, had been buried for "forty years" a mythic augmenta-
tion of the sacred forty weeks, normal term of human gestation. God

616
(Ahura Mazda) told them not to listen to the lies of the devil Mask
(Ahriman). But they disobeyed, and came to regard Ahriman as the
creator of the feminine elements, water, earth, and fruit. This
couple ^^^^^^^^^^
gave birth to seven other couples, from whom descended all the races of
humanity.
1
The same sevenfold pattern of racial "roots" reappeared
in Simonian Gnosticism as the seven powers born of the primordial
female source, from whom came even God the Father. 2 See Simon
Magus.
1. Lamusse, 319. 2. Legge 1, 183.

Mask
It is a commonplace of primitive religion that deity resides in a sacred
mask. A wearer of the mask is possessed by the spirit. He or she is the
God or Goddess, at least for participation in the sacred drama or
procession. Paleolithic rock drawings show divine creatures as human
beings wearing the masks of animals. Egyptian animal-headed deities
were obviously human beings wearing elaborate animal heads. 1
Modern
Africans, Melanesians, Australians, and many others maintain the
same belief. A witch doctor in a lion mask "isn't pretending to be a lion;
he is convinced that he is a lion. . . .
[H]e shares a 'psychic identity'
with the animal." 2 Similarly in pre-Christian Europe, anyone wearing
the mask or headdress of a god would become the god or, as
Christians put it, would be possessed by the devil.

The word mask occurs in many Indo-European languages and

might be traced to the maskim of Sumer and Akkad: of the
spirits

nether spheres, or ancestral ghosts. Initiated Sufi magicians of the

Middle Ages wore spirit masks and became maskhara, "revelers," at
their sabbats; this probably gave rise to the French designation of a

mystery play as a masque}

The Scandinavian word for a mask was grim} This word was often
a component of gods' names, like Grimnir (Masked One, a title of
5
Odin). In some legends the mask became a magic helmet that gave
admission to the spirit The most famous magic helmet was
world.
called Hildegrim, or Helkappe, or Tarnkappe, or Cap of Darkness. It

was given by Mother Hel (Hilde) to her favored heroes. It made

them invisible so they could enter the rose gardens of paradise as if they
were dead, yet return alive to the earth. The wearer of the mask
became like the Lord of Death, able to reincarnate himself.
The Book of Heroes and the Wilkina saga named Hel's perennial
consort Grim. He lived with the Goddess inher secret cave until
6
another hero came to challenge and kill him and inherit the mask.

Some said this magic Helkappe was made of dog skin, since dogs
were sacred to the death-goddess, and it was the same mask worn by
7
Hades, the Lord of Death.
In medieval France the same Lord of Death was Macabre, the

617
Mass Grim Reaper that is, the masked reaper, wielding his scythe as a
Mater reaper of souls. He performed the danse macabre, Dance of Death, in
the mystery plays and folk festivals so frequently featured in medieval
art. Like Dancing Shiva in Kali's cosmic yoni, Macabre reminded his
audience that the dance of life is also a dance of death; that the two

8
are mutually dependent, neither possible without the other. Tibetan

mystery plays still present the death-masquerader in his skull mask

and skeleton costume. 9 Evans-Wentz said medieval mystery plays

contained "symbolism so much akin to that found in mystery plays

still
flourishing under patronage throughout Tibet and the
ecclesiastical

neighboring territories of Northern Buddhism as to point to another

stream of Orientalism having come into Europe." 10
Animal-headed deities of Egypt and the Middle East also found
new medieval mystery plays, some of which may have
incarnations in
been rooted in Neolithic rites when sacred dancers wore the heads of
sacrificed beasts. At the ineradicably popular Carnival, "Mummers
went about dressed as various kinds of beasts, probably a remnant of
some seasonal festival of native gods, Gaulish or other, for in Gaul at

all events gods often were represented under forms other than
human." 11
Pagan mask-wearing at religious festivals continued in the secular
Carnival. After having denounced it as unlawful for many centuries,
the church finally capitulated and declared it "lawful" to wear masks in
Carnival season. 12 However, the word masca remained one of the
15
church's official words for a witch.

1. Larousse, 32. 2. Jung, M.H.S.,45. 3. Shah, 208. 4. Sturluson, 49.

5. Turville-Petre, 39. 6. Guerber, L.M.A., 1 10, 1 19. 7. Cavendish, P.E., 88.

8. Campbell, ML, 358. 9. Waddell, 524-25. 10. Bardo Thodol, 3.11. Rose, 298.
12. Moakley, 56. 13. J.B. Russell, 15.

Mass
Latin missa, from the Persian-Mithraic communion cake called mizd,

thought to embody the divine flesh and blood of the Sole-Created Bull
sacrificed by Mithra. Another Latin name
1
for the communion cake
was hostia (host), meaning "victim."
1. [Link], 201.

Matabrune
"Burning Mother," a bardic name for the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, or
Burning Hel, mother of the sun king Oriant. See Hel.
1

1.
Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 579.

var. Matra, Meter Mater

Aryan root word for both "Mother" and "Measurement," giving rise

to such English derivatives as matrix, matter, metric, material, maternal,

618
Imatron, etc. Matres meant the Celtic Triple Goddess, or Three Mater Matuta
Fates. Matri or "mothers" was a Tantric word for all benevolent
'

Matrikadevis

[female Matta, "Mother," the gypsies' supreme Goddess, was

spirits.
2
^^^^^^^^^^
[Ian amalgam of many matriarchal titles. The Gnostic, Hermetic, or
term for the Womb of Matter, matrix, was actually a
jpagical
Iredundant form meaning "she-mother" mater with a feminine

ending.
[Link], 224. 2. Groome, lxii.

M ater Matuta
'Mother of Dawn," the Birth-goddess who daily brought forth the
feun; same as the Goddess Eos
Greek myth, or Hebe, or Ilithyia, or
in

the Egyptian Goddess Matet, whose name meant "growth" or

'waxing in strength." She produced the sun in the morning and

supported him as he rose in the sky.
1

1.
Budge, G.E. 1,323.

iti-Syra-Zemlya
loist Mother Earth," worshipped by Slavic peasants even under
Orthodox Christianity. Her ceremonies take place outside the church,
>n the anniversaries of old pagan festivals. In August, for example,
he is invoked with libations of hemp oil. In the fields, her votary faces
:ast and prays to her for protection from evil spells; then faces west
nd prays for her control of devils in the underworld; then faces south

nd prays for her control of sandstorms and whirlwinds; then faces

orth and prays for relief from snowstorms and cold. Thus Mother
iarth is supposed to rule the same forces that fell under the
jrisdiction of witches: that is, the weather, and the spirits of the
inderworld. 1
See Earth.
1 .
Larousse, 287.

itrikadevis

loly Mothers," or "Mother Goddesses," Hindu term for the primal

riarchs who governed ancestral tribes. Matrikadevis corresponded to
le disk ox Divine Grandmothers of Norse myth, the Celtic fairies,
he pre-Hellenic Goddess-worshipping titans, etc. According to Tantric
jradition, the matrikadevis were the true parents
of humanity. The
mis, "fathers," were products of an entirely different creation.
1
See
lotherhood.
1 .
Mahanirvanatantra, xli.

619
Matrikamanta Matrikamantra
Matrilineal Inheritance word Om,
"Mother of Mantras," the Great Goddess's creative a

^^mhh^^^mmb reference to her own primordial pregnancy which gave birth to the
universe.
1
This was known as the Supreme Syllable, Mother of All
magic the Goddess brought forth everything
2 that exists.
Sound. By its

See Logos.
1 . Wilkins, 20 1 . 2. Upanishads, 53.

Matrilineal Inheritance

During the Neolithic age, the matrilineal clan system and the
rule of

from
mother-right were followed almost everywhere. Early writings
Egypt depict the woman in complete control of herself
and her
home, with property descending from mother to daughter. The most
in Greece was the transition from matrilineal to
significant revolution

patrilineal succession
and the resulting destruction of clan loyalties. In

many other areas, the matrilineal system survived to a late date. The
Venerable Bede mentioned rules of matrilineal succession still
existing
1
in parts of the British Isles up to the 9th century.

Matrilineal inheritance was the rule among British tribes until the

coming of Christianity. The Picts inherited all property, even "king-

2
doms," through the female line. With the coming of Christianity, the
old laws of mother-right began to decline. Sixth-century England still
had laws of equal inheritance, but a wife who decided to leave her
husband could carry off half the property and all the children. Later

in the Christian era, the wife was deprived of everything. The English
"heir" came from heres, cognate with the Greek word for a female
landowner, here or "Hera." The Magna Carta referred to a here as a

person of either sex. Later church laws listed heres as exclusively

male. 3

Among pagan Celts, men bequeathed nothing to their children;

were inherited by their sisters or their sisters'
their possessions

children. According to old laws of Burgundy and Thuringia, property

4 for
passed only in the female line. Charlemagne opposed marriage
his daughters, because under old Frankish laws of matrilineal inheri-
5
tance this would have meant division of his kingdom.
In pre-Roman Latium a landholding was called latifundia, founded

by the Goddess Lat, after whom the country was named; thus each
6
parcel of land belonged originally to a matriarch. Even in the later

Roman empire, husbands had no legal claim on their wives' land or

possessions as long as the wife was careful to spend three consecutive
7
nights each year away from home. This was a remnant of an earlier
custom like that of pre-Islamic Arabs, whereby a wife divorced her
husband by shutting him out of the home for three consecutive
8
nights.
In Greece, a parcel of property was temenos, "land belonging to

620
t :
moon," i.e., to woman. 9 This came to mean specifically the land Matrilineal Inheritance
10
rounding temple of the Goddess. In primitive times however,
a

fcry matriarch's hearth was a temple of the Goddess. The popula-

in and land unit in Attica was a demos, derived from De that is, the
11
xldess De-Mother, or Demeter. Chieftains ruled only through
rriage with the resident matriarch. Harking back to this same system
India, the Mahabharata says the leading attributes of a queen were Mahabharata
h intelligence, sacred knowledge, and property. 12 Indian epic poem,

In most ancient societies, young men went forth from their consisting of historical
and legendary
Mternal homes to seek their fortune elsewhere, because their sisters
material gathered
merited the family home. was a fixed habit of Greek men, and also
It
between the 4th and
the pagan heroes depicted in fairy tales, to leave home and seek a 10th centuries a.d.,
including the famous
13
trilocal marriage with an heiress in a distant land.
Bhagavad-Gita.
"Matrimony" used to mean the feminine equivalent of "patrimo-
: inheritance of property, in the maternal line. Matrimony came
|
be synonymous with marriage only because marriage was a way for

In to gain control of property.

In Lydia, women owned the land, governed the communities, and
14
|>k the initiative in love affairs. The same was true in Egypt.
Inheritance passed through the mother rather than through the fa-

ftr," says Professor Gordon. "This system may well hark back to
ehistoric times when
only the obvious relationship between mother
ad child was recognized, but not the less apparent relationship
ween father and child." For many centuries, patriarchal marriages in

lypt existed side by side with old-style matriarchal unions, initiated

15
the wife and terminated by her will alone. Since daughters, not

Ins, inherited property, it was the duty of an Egyptian daughter (not

16
1) to care for
aged parents.
Male scholars have been reluctant to describe ancient systems of
trilineal inheritance. After translation of early Babylonian texts,
I Boscawen wrote, "The freedom granted [my italics] to women in

ibylonia allowed them to hold and manage their own estates. . . .

fjhe mother here is always represented by a sign which means

fcddess of the house.'" 17
The implication was that women held
A-ir property only through men's lenience, which was not the case,
lbmen held property by the ironclad law of mother-right, and a

Ibylonian wife had the same title as a matriarch in India, grhadevata,

flouse-Goddess."
Even Mohammed, a leading opponent of matriarchal principles,
ftas enabled to carry out his mission thanks only to the wealth which

acquired from his first wife Khadija, who was engaged in lucrative
18
BBc and owned landed estates."

Landed property developed in the hands of women because

men were the first to farm the land, thereby establishing ownership
lit. Some primitives still believe only the life-magic inherent in women

II make plants grow: "Women know how to bring forth, and how
19
Inake the seed bring forth; men don't understand these things."

621
Matrilineal Inheritance Amerindians universally attributed the invention of agriculture to
women, sole owners of the cultivated fields. Matrilocal marriage and

^^^^^^^^^^^ matrilineal ownership of the home place were customary among the
Algonquin, Sioux, Seneca, Pawnee, Seminole, Kiowa, and Cree tribes.

As Greece, fathers were "strangers" in the clan. Women

in ancient

were "mistresses of the soil." 20 "The women were the great power
among the clans as everywhere else [T]he original nomination of
the chiefs always rested with them/' 21 When the Iroquois conveyed
lands to the U.S. government, documents had to be marked by their

women, because the marks of men had no validity among the tribes.
22

Payuga women owned everything, as one missionary found to his

astonishment: "If the husband gives his wife any cause, real or

fancied, of offense, she packs up the tent and its furniture, appropriates
even the canoe, and takes everything away; the children follow her,
and the husband and father is left with the clothes he stands in and his
23
weapons as his only possession." The laws of this missionary's
homeland insisted on the contrary: a divorced husband retained every-
thing including the children, the wife having no legal right even to
her clothes. Hence, the missionaries' surprise at Indian customs and
their expectation of men's resentment. Yet Indian men didn't resent
the prerogatives of mother-right. They considered the mother's author-
ity natural, as Christians considered the father's authority natural.
Indian husbands were known to take forty- or fifty-mile hikes only to
24
procure some special food craved by a pregnant wife.
In Africa, women owned the land and other property connected
with the home place, and transmitted ownership to their daughters or i

their brothers' daughters. European governments and missions in Africa

loosed a torrent of propaganda against matrilineal customs among the

natives. In most African nations, European land reforms consisted of

taking land away from the women and allocating to their hus-
it

bands. 25 This tended to make the women paupers and destroy their

self-respect, as the tribes looked down on a woman who couldn't

support her children.
Patriarchal religious authorities everywhere changed ancient sys- I

terns of matrilineal inheritance to put property in the hands of men.

Medieval Christian kings commonly endowed their barons with the
phrase,"Take that woman and her fief." 26 The early centuries of the
'

Christian conquest of Europe were largely occupied with acquisition of

lands from the pagan women. The monastic Order of Teutonic

Knights got the island of Mainau from its owner, the Fair Maid of
Mainau, on condition that her lover be made head of the order. 27
The Bible contains traces of former matrilineal inheritance and
matrilocal marriage, e.g., a man shall "leave his father and his
mother, and cleave unto his wife" (Genesis 2:24). Naomi told her
daughters-in-law to "return each to her mother's house" (Ruth 1:8)
because houses were owned by mothers, not fathers. A marriage
agreement permitting removal of a woman from her maternal home

622
was a violation of ancient laws. Therefore Abraham, seeking a bride for Matrilineal Inheritance
his son, had to give many gifts to the bride, to her mother, and to her
brother (not to her father) as compensation for taking her away from her
^^^^^^^^^^^
iiome (Genesis 24:53).
Retention of property in the hands of a patrilineal clan was the

purpose of the so-called Levirate marriage commanded by God

(Deuteronomy 25:5). If a man died, his brother must marry the widow
rather than allow her to take her propertyand depart from the family.
from an early era when nomadic Israelites began to
rule dated
[This
acquire lands and possessions by intermarrying with pagan women of
Canaan, Moab, Phoenicia, etc. Modern laws play the same trick on
|women. If a husband and wife die together in an accident, it is
(assumed that the wife dies first, so the man's family will inherit. 28

People who maintained the matrilocal marriage tradition, like the

American Indians, developed no wedding laments, mock battles,
or displays of coyness. 29 But in patrilocal marriages,
pseudo-kidnappings,
jthe
bride's relatives usually put on a show of resistance. Matrilocal

marriage appeared in the Norse myth of Ragnar Lodbrok (Leather-

breeches), who married a foreign warrior-princess, but could not
induce her to leave her own country. When he wished to return to his
30
homeland, he was forced to leave her behind.
Even the peripatetic gypsies had matrilocal marriage traditions. In
gypsy folklore, heroines never left their maternal homes. After death
pey were buried under the family threshold a custom of the early
31
Hindus, the gypsies' forebears.
The aim of European Christianity was acquisition of property,
Which meant overturning pagan systems of matrilineal inheritance.
By forcible seizure and warfare, the church managed to acquire fully a

fthird of all the landed property on the continent by the early Middle
32
Ages. The rest was more difficult. In some parts of Europe up to 1200
U.D., women were still listed as the landowners, and men identified

themselves by their mothers' clan names. Until the 10th century, priests
married to gain property, claiming that without their wives they
would succumb to "hunger and nakedness." Church laws revised the
Jjystem; then a series of papal decretals between 103 1 and 105 1
their wives and their children into
prdered priests to abandon
sell

33
klavery. Naturally, the property and monies thus acquired by a priest
would revert to the church upon his death, since he no longer had legal
heirs.

The legal/ecclesiastical war on female property ownership went on

Icentury after century, until women were so hamstrung by the laws of
Cod and man that they had almost nothing left that they could call their

own. By the end of the 19th century, English wives could not
administer their own property even if they had any, nor make a will
34 1930
disposing of it, without their husbands' consent. As late as in

France, a woman was forbidden to do any business with a bank, not

35
even to make small deposits, without her husband's permission. Up

623
Matronalia to the present time, lack of control over money and property is still the

May greatest obstacle for women who wish to take their children and leave
abusive or violent husbands. In this respect the centuries of patriarchal
effort achieved their goal.
Stone, 15, 37, 52; Boulding, 318. 2. Johnson, 157. 3. Beard, 194, 199-200.
I.

415-16, 419. 5. de Voragine, 759. 6. Cumont, M.M., 74.

4. Briffault 1,
7. Hartley, 232. 8. Briffault 2, 348. 9. Campbell, Oc.M., 47. 10. Knight, D.W.P., 64.
II. Rose, 34. 12. Campbell, Or.M., 197. 13. Angus, 183. 14. Fielding, 145-46.
15. Stone, 37. 16. Bachofen,71. 17. Stone, 43. 18. Briffault 1, 375.
19. Frazer, G.B., 33. 20. Briffault 3, 2; 1, 269, 275, 316-17. 21. Hartley, 133.
22. Farb, M.R.C., 97-100. 23. 1,318. 24. Montagu, S.M.S., 153.
Briffault

[Link]&Moran,411. 26. Briffault 3, 407. 27. Guerber, L.R., 326.

28. Kermode, 41. 29. Briffault 1, 307, 422. 30. Guerber, L.M.A., 23.
[Link], 19. 32. Augstein, 298. 33. H. Smith, 263; Boulding, 399.
34. Pearsall, N.B.A., 40. 35. Hauswirth, ch. 1.

Matronalia
"Feast of the Mothers," a Roman holy day celebrated in spring by
women only, at the sacred grove established in pre-Roman times by the
Sabine matriarchate. The women's subsequent period of asceticism
and fasting up to the festival of Ceres in April was the forerunner of the
Christian fast of Lent. 1
Rites of the Matronalia were kept secret from
men and remain obscure to this day, though their purpose undoubtedly
was to make the Earth Mother ready for springtime regeneration.

[Link],645.

May
In Scandinavia, May The month of Maya or Maia, the Virgin Goddess of Spring; in
was dedicated to Maj, northern Europe, Maj or Mai, the Maiden. 1 This was the traditional
the Virgin, either Mary
or the pagans' Virgin
month of "wearing of the green" in honor of the Earth Mother's new
Mother, interchange- garment, and of fornicating in plowed fields to encourage the crops.
ably. In Saxon England May was a "honey-moon" of sexual freedom throughout rural
the month was called to the 16th century. 2
Europe up Marriage bonds were temporarily in
Sproutkale: the sprout- The maxim
abeyance. that "only bad women" marry in the month of
ing time of virgin-
mother Earth with her May probably was a relic of earlier taboos on all marriages during the
archaic Aryan name of month of license. 3
Kale, Kelle, or Kali. Yet there were traces of a divine marriage ritual in the "May
Another name for the
riding," when knights and ladies rode in pairs into the wood, led by
month was Tri-Milchi,
theQueen of the May on a white horse and her male companion on a
improbably derived by
the Venerable Bede They impersonated Frey and Freya, "the Lord" and "the
dark one.
4
from a theory that the Lady" whose union made fertility magic each spring.
Saxon cows gave milk May Eve was the great springtime festival of "witches," corre-
three times a day in at the opposite pole of the year. May Eve was
8
sponding to Halloween
May. Alternatively, known
it meant the Triple
Germany as Walpurgisnacht, in Ireland and Scotland as
in

Goddess's appearance
Beltaine or Baltein, when the god Baal, Bel, or Balder was burned in
in the form of three effigy. Sometimes a man chosen by lot represented him, and leaped
through the May fires still called "Balder's balefires" in rural Scandi-

624
 5
Bavia. Clearly, these were customs dating back to real burning of the May
pan who represented the god in his love-death (Liebestod).
The May King of medieval romance inherited the customs of
^^^^^^^^^^
Diana's sacred kings. He won the "queen of a magic wood" (the

Ipoddess) by combat with her previous king on the festival of Ascension

Day in May. Le Chevalier de la Charrette named him Meleagant,
jlrince
of the land of no return (he was a Lord of Death). Le Morte
WArthur corrupted his name to "Mellyagaunce," a lascivious May
png who became the ritual lover of Queen Guinevere and led the
lexual games of May Day.
6
A 1
5th-century poet identified the same
May King with Christ, who was like the Holy Rose of May: "the red

lower that Mary bore." 7

The god's phallus was planted in the earth's womb in the guise of
he Maypole, which was not originally European but a direct borrow-
9
ng from India where the Maypole is still "the great lingam." In
6th-century England its phallic symbolism was understood perfectly
shown by the diatribe of the Puritan writer Philip Stubbes:
veil, as

Young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding overnight to the
hills, and mountains, where they spend all night in
woods, groves,
pleasant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing with them
birch and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no

marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent

and Lord over their pastimes and sports; namely, Satan, prince of hell.
But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which
they bring home with great veneration, as thus. They have twenty or
forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nose-gay offlowers placed on
the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this May-pole (this
stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs,
bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and
sometimes painted with variable colors, with two or three hundred men,
women and children following it with great devotion. And this being
reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew
the ground round about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer
halls, bowers, and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to dance about it,

like as the heathen people did at the dedication ofIdols, whereof this is

a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. w

Young men and maids went into the woods, and few returned
me "undefiled," as the observer said. According to Spelman, the
ic fellows and their girl friends fell "into ditches upon one
nother," for the odd were "enveloped with a mist of
reason that they

wandering out of their ways." Douce had no doubt of the festival's

>agan origin: "The Queen of the May is the legitimate representative of
Roman n
he Goddess Flora in the Festival." Stuckeley described
day celebrations in 1 724:

There is a May Pole near Horn Castle, Lincolnshire, where probably

stood an Hermes (herm, phallic pillar) in Roman times. The boys
annually keep up the festival of the Floralia on May Day, making a
hill with May gads (as they call them) in their hands.
procession to this

625
Maya This is a white willow wand, the bark peeled off, tied round with cowslips,
a thyrsus of the Bacchanals. At night they have a bonehre, and other
'2
merriment, which is really a sacrifice, a religious festival.

Naturally the church was opposed to this religious festival.

Bishop Eligius of Noyons begged his converts in the 7th century to stop
observing the sexual rites of May without success. 15 A thousand
month was still given over to "witches."
years later the Church bells in

1
7-century Treves were rung all night throughout the month of
May, to "protect the city from flying witches."
H
There were a few voices raised against ecclesiastical restrictions on
the activities of the Merry Month. William Fennor's Pasquil's Palino-
dia (\6\9) lamented the new puritanical laws against the rites of May:

When no capricious constables disturb them,

Nor justice of the peace did seek to curb them,
Nor peevish puritan, in railing sort,
Nor over-wise church-warden, spoiled the sport,
Happy the age, and harmless were the days

(For then true love and amity were found),

When every village did a Maypole raise,
And Witson-ales and May-games did abound . . .

But since the Summer poles were over-thrown,

And all good sports and merriments decay'd,
How times and men are chang'd, so well is known,
It were but labor lost if more were said.

Alas,poor May Poles; what should be the cause

That you were almost banish 'd from the earth ?
Who never were rebellious to the laws;
Your greatest crime was harmless, honest mirth . . .

Some fiery, zealous brother, full ofspleen,

That all the world in his deep wisdom scorns,
Could not endure the May-pole should be seen
To wear a cox-comb higher than his horns:
He took it for an idol, and the feast
For sacrifice unto that painted beast.' 5

1. Steenstrup, 32. 2. Briffault 3, 198. 3. W. Scott, 84. 4. Gelling & Davidson, 163.
5. Frazer, G.B., 717, 769. 6. Rees, 285. 7. Wilkins, 155.8. Brewster, 220.
9. Avalon, 517. 10. Frazer, G.B., 142. 11. Hazlitt, 399-401. 12. Hazlitt, 402.
13. Spence, 104. 14. Robbins, 512. 15. Hazlitt, 404.

Maya
"Magic," title of the Virgin Kali as the creatress of earthly appear-
ances, i.e., all things made of matter and perceptible to the senses. She
gave birth to the Enlightened One, Buddha.
1
also

The same Goddess, Maia by the Greeks, was the virgin

called

mother of Hermes the Enlightened One, who had as many reincar-

nations as the Buddha. Sometimes Maia's partner was Volcanus (Greek

Hephaestus, the divine smith and fire-god). This was another mythic

626
 nating of male fire and female water. 2 Hindus said Agni the fire-god Maya
vas the consort of Kali-Maya, though he was
periodically swallowed
lp and "quenched" by her. According to the Tantric phrase, the ^^^^^^
Goddess quenched a blazing lingam in her yoni. 3
As the virgin mother of Buddha, Maya embarrassed ascetic Bud-
Ihists and was soon written out of the script. Like ascetic Christians

peaking of Christ's birth, some Buddhists claimed the Enlightened One

uld not touch his mother's "parts of shame" and so was born

hrough an opening in her side. This mythic Caesarian section seems to

lavebeen bungled, for a few days later Maya died "of joy," as
4
Juddhist scriptures rather fatuously put it.

Nevertheless, Maya remained very much alive as one of Kali's

nost revered manifestations, because the very fact of "Existence"
le material cosmos demanded her presence. As Zimmer analyzed
ler:

Maya-Shakti is personified as the world-protecting, feminine, maternal

side of the Ultimate Being, and as such, stands for the spontaneous,
loving acceptance oflife's tangible reality. [S]he affirms, she is, she
. . .

represents and enjoys, the delirium of the manifested forms. . . .

Maya-
"
Shakti is Eve, "the Eternal Feminine, das Ewig- Weibliche: she who ate,
and tempted her consort to eat, and was herself the apple. From the
point of view of the masculine principle of the Spirit (which is in quest of
the enduring, eternally valid, and absolutely divine) she is the pre-
eminent enigma. s

In herself Maya embodied all three aspects of the maternal

Trinity. Her colors were white, red, and black, the colors of the Gunas,
>r the Virgin-Mother-Crone. 6 Like every other form of Kali, she was

Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. She was also a spirit dwelling perpetually

n women. A Mahayana text says, "Of all the forms of Maya, woman
s the most important." 7

Maya's son Buddha was surrounded by her symbols. He entered

listrance of meditation under her sacred fig tree, which protected
lim from the weather. On his return from the soul-journey, his first

ymbolic act was to accept a dish of curds from a maiden on Full

vloon Day in the month of May, the greatest of Buddhist festivals. 8
Not only the month but many other traditions, names, and
ncepts the great age and wide distribution of the Goddess
attest to

ifaya. She was more than the Maia who mothered Hermes; she was
ilso Maga the Grandmother-goddess who bore Cu Chulainn's

nother; and the Mandaean Christians' Almaya, called "Eternity," or

'the World," or "Beings"; and Maga or Maj the May-maiden in
Scandinavia. 9 Like the Hindu Maya who brought forth earthly appear-
inces at creation, the Scandinavian one personified the pregnant
vomb of chaos before the beginning: Ginnungagap. In this the World-

nrgin was associated with the idea of magical illusion, creating

10
'appearances" like her Hindu counterpart.
This universal Creatress-name may have reached the western

627
Me hemisphere also. The Maya people of Yucatan offered sacrifices in

Medea the same way as in northern India, at the same seasons, determined by
the same stars. Mayan "scorpion stars" were the same as the
1 '

^^^^^^^^^^^
constellation Scorpio on Hindu and Greek charts. As in India, Mayan
divine images were painted blue and Mayan woman pierced the left
of a jewel. 12 Another version of the Creatress seems
nostril for insertion

to have been the Mother Goddess Mayauel of the Mexican Agave,

called "Woman with Four Hundred Breasts," with a strong resem-

blance to the world-nurturing Many-Breasted Artemis and other
eastern forms of the deity who mothered all the world's creatures.
I. Larousse, 348. 2. Rose, 229. 3. Rawson, E.A., 57. 4. Larousse, 348.
5. Lederer, 136. 6. Upanishads, 124. 7. Campbell, Or.M., 320. 8. Ross, 88.
9. Squire, 1 56; Goodrich, 181; Jonas, 54. 10. Davidson, G.M.V., 197.
I I. Von Hagen, 137; Tannahill, 82. 12. Von Hagen, 178, 38.

Me
Babylonian word for "mother-wisdom" enshrined on the Tablets of
Destiny, given by the Great Goddess to her firstborn son; cognate of
Sanskrit medha, feminine wisdom, and Egyptian met, with the same

meaning, as well as a decimal numbering system, like the Greek meter

(mother).
1
Me also meant the magic power of Fate, religious inspira-
tion, and healing magic (medicine). Goddess names derived from this

root include Medea, Medusa, Metis, Mene, Maat, and Demeter.

1. Budge, E.L., 93.

Mearah
Hebrew "Cave," a title of the Goddess Cybele, Great Mother of the
Gods; also applied to the holy cavern where Adonis was born in
Bethlehem. (See Cave.)

Medea
"Wise One," eponymous Mother Goddess of the Medes. Like
Medusa and Metis, she was named from the Sanskrit concept of medha,
"female wisdom." '
She was a fount of the feminine art of healing,
and her name was related to "medicine." 2
She could restore the dead to

life in her magic cauldron, as shown by the myth of Aeson, who was
so restored. Pliny called Medea a Goddess whose magic arts could
5
control the sun, moon, and stars. She rode in a chariot drawn by

serpents; it also had wings, to show that she ruled both earth and
heaven. 4

According to Herodotus, Medea was the Great Goddess of all the

5
Aryan tribes of Parthia. She was all- wise, and never died, but dwelt

forever in heaven. 6

628
 She seems to have been remembered in Ireland as the Goddess Medusa
Medana, associated with a sacred tree and a regenerative well, whose
waters were reputed to cure sore eyes. She was artificially canonized as a ^^^^^^^^^^^
saint, and her Christian legend was copied from that of the equally
7
bogus St. Lucy.
The classic story of Medea's ill-starred marriage to Jason apparent-
lywas based on a captured idol of the Goddess. Her rites were
imported into Greece but proved too sanguinary for Hellenic taste.
1. Larousse, 312. 2. Briffault 1, 486. 3. Hawkins, 139. 4. Graves, CM. 2, 253.
5. Herodotus, 390. 6. Graves, G.M. 2, 252, 257. 7. Gifford, 131.

Medusa
Classic myth made Medusa the terrible Gorgon whose look turned

men to stone. The Argives said Medusa was a Libyan queen beheaded
by their ancestral hero Perseus, who brought her head (or ceremonial
mask) back to Athens.
1

Actually, Medusa was the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Ama-

zons, representing "female wisdom" (Sanskrit medha, Greek metis,
Egyptian met ox Maat). She was the Destroyer aspect of the Triple
Goddess called Neith in Egypt, Ath-enna or Athene in North Africa.
Her inscription at Sais called her "mother of all the gods, whom she
bore before childbirth existed." She was the past, present, and future:
"All that has been, that is, and that will be." 2 So famous was this

description of her that Christians later copied it on behalf of Jehovah

(Revelation 1:8).
She said: "No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil that covers

me," because she was Death, and to see her face to face was to die
that is, to be "turned to stone" as a funerary statue. She was veiled also

because she was the Future, which always wears a veil. Another

meaning of her hidden, dangerous face was the menstrual taboo.

Primitive folk often believe the look of a menstruous woman can turn
a man to stone. 3 Medusa had magic blood that could create and destroy
life; thus she represented the dreaded life- and death-giving moon-
blood of women (see Menstrual Blood). 4
The Perseus story was invented to account for the appearance of
Medusa's face on Athene's aegis, inherited from the pre-Hellenic

period when Athene was

actually the same Goddess (also mythologized
as Metis,her alleged "mother"). The Athenians pretended their

municipal Goddess was the "wisdom" of Zeus, born from his head. But
older myths said Athene was born of the Three Queens of Libya
that is, the Triple Goddess, of whom Metis-Medusa was the Destroyer

aspect.
5
A
female face surrounded by serpent-hair was an ancient,
widely recognized symbol of divine female wisdom, and equally of the
"wise blood" that supposedly gave women their divine powers.
1. Graves, W.G., 244. 2. Larousse, 37. 3. Frazer, G.B., 695, 699.
4. Graves, G.M. 1, 175. 5. Graves, G.M. 1,244; 2, 399.

629
Megaera Megaera
Melaina
"Grudge," one of Demeter's three Furies or Dogs of Law; possibly
^M^^BMHHi Megara, "Cave/' the black cavern of Demeter Chthonia,
related to

whence her spirits of law issued forth to punish evildoers. Megaera or

1

Megara was also a mythical wife of Heracles. See Furies.

1. Graves, CM. 2, 399.

Mehen the Enveloper

Egyptian serpent-goddess who enclosed the Phallus of Ra every

night, as phallic gods were enveloped in

Hindu their sleep cycles by the
serpent-goddess called Infinity. See Serpent.

Mehitabel
Hebrew version of the Lady Mehit, a lion-headed Goddess in Egypt,
one of the aspects of Bast or the Sphinx (Hathor). The Bible made her a

"daughter of Matred" (Genesis 36:39), that is, of Maat, or Mater,

indicating a priestess of the Goddess in her lion mask. Mehit was also
described at times as a fish goddess.
1
The "Bel" part of her Hebrew
name simply meant a deity.
1. Budge, D.N., 151.

Mehurt
Title of the EgyptianGoddess Nut, or Neit, as the primordial
heavenly waters; probably a variant of Mehit.

Meidelant
"Land of Maidens" or Land of Women, the matriarchal fairyland

Lady of the Lake. Heroes of

1
where Lancelot was brought up by the
Celtic romance usually returned to this same paradise of "maidens"
after death. See Lancelot.
[Link],293.

var. Melanie Melaina

"Black One," a title of Black Demeter the Underground Goddess.
She was also Mare-headed Melanippe, "Black Mare," worshipped in

her Black Cave (Mavrospelya) with her mane entwined with

snakes all images similar to those of Kali the "Black Mother" of

630
 jidia.
1
These dark aspects of Demeter evolved into the Night-Mare Melchizedek
'ho punished sinners with dreams of terror. See Demeter. Melusine
1. Encyc. Brit., "Demeter."

Melchizedek

avior-god accepted by Christian Gnostics as a deity greater than

Melchizedek was the savior for angels, while Christ was
Christ.
only the
for men. Melchizedek was an emanation of the Five Trees of
pvior
he Treasure House of Light, according to the Pistis Sophia: the hand of
he Goddess Sophia herself. It was claimed that Melchizedek's brief
in the Old Testament as a purveyor of "bread and wine"
ppearance
flesh and blood) was a prophecy of his Second
Coming as the true
pvior (Genesis 14:18). Psalm 1 10 said Christ himself was only a priest
after the order of Melchizedek."

Ilelchom var. Milcom

Christian demon based on the Tyrian fire-god Moloch, Melek, or
Melkart, whose name meant "king," and whose sacrifices were made by
assing through fire, like those of Heracles. In fact, this god and
leracles were often said to be one and the same.

Aeliae

Ash-Tree Nymphs," a Greek name for the three Fates, identified

the Germanic Norns. Germanic tribes said the Fates were three
/ith

hystic women who dwelt at the root of the World Ash Tree.

Melissa

I
Bee," title of Aphrodite's high priestess the honeycomb-shrine of
at

Mount Eryx, where the Goddess's was a golden honeycomb,

fetish

porresponding to Israel's priestess Deborah, whose name also means

Bee." See Aphrodite; Honey.

elusine
Medieval version of fish-tailed Aphrodite, with an ancient shrine at
Lusinia (modern Lusignan), named after her as "Lady of Light."
the church's crusades against the cults of love in southern
puring
'ranee, Melusine's legend made her the mystic bride of Raymond,
pount of Poitou. She consented to marry him only on condition
that

631
Mem-Aleph each Sabbath day she must remain in seclusion, alone in her own castle
Mena of Lusinia. There she became a fish-tailed mermaid and spent the

day reclining in her bath. (According to classic myths, it was fatally

dangerous for men to see the Goddess in her bath. Whether she was

Aphrodite, Artemis, Athene, or Ertha, she could be seen bathing only

by "men doomed
1
to die.")

Churchmen discovered Melusine and either killed her, or, accord-

ing to another version, drove her out of her castle. The legend says
she still returns every night, like the moon, to suckle her "children,"

probably meaning the people themselves. She had a prophetic death-

goddess form also. It was said when Melusine appeared wailing over th<
2
ramparts of Lusignan, the king would die.
1. Tacitus, 728. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 478.

Mem-Aleph
Hebrew letters MA, the Mother-charm signifying "water" and "the
beginning," written on protective amulets of the 9th century B.C. The
1

magic name of the Great Goddess Ma. A concept borrowed from

the Persians, who called the maternal spirit Mourdad-Ameretat (MA:
2
Death-Rebirth).
1. Albright, 198. 2. Lxrousse, 317.

Memra
Mystical term for "the Word" in Middle-Eastern mystery-religions; a
secret name or Logos of several Mesopotamian gods.

var. Menes Mena

First dynastic Egyptian ruler to unify the Two Lands, ca. 3000 B.C.

Egyptologists call this person a "pharaoh"; but the hieroglyphic symbol

of Mena means both "moon" and "milk-giving mother's breast,"
improbable symbols for a male. More recent scholars admit that this so
1

called first pharaoh may have been a matriarchal queen, or a titulary

2
king ruling in her name.
Upper Egypt once belonged exclusively to the lunar Goddess. It
was called Khemennu, "Land of the Moon." 3 One of Egypt's oldest
oracular shrines was Menhet, "House of the Moon," which Greeks
4
called Latopolis, City of the Milk-Giving Mother.
The first
mother-city of Egypt was Memphis, seat of first-dynasty
rulers. Its Egyptian name was Men-nefer, "Beautiful Moon-virgin."
Another variation of the Egyptian Moon-goddess was Menos, credited
with the invention of hieroglyphic writing. See Moon.
1. Budge, E.L., 57. 2. Brandon, 134. 3. Hallet, 1 1 5. 4. Budge, G.E. 2, 50.

632
 Hiander Menander
Menelaus
loon-man," an Indo-Greek king of Bactria in the 1 st century B.C.,
known as Soter (Savior). After he died, pieces of his body were sent
i
"""^^^""i
lifferent parts of the lands he ruled, in the manner of an Osiris or
of the Moon-bulls. 1

1. Encyc. Brit, "Menander."

lenat

Egyptian "Moon charm," an amulet representing sexual intercourse,

.vith a narrow male vessel pouring fluid into a broad female vessel. The 1

VIenat was once an immense constellation in the heavens as

Egyp-
:ians saw them, extending from Arcturus in Bootes in the northern sky,
all the way to Antares in Scorpio in the south. As an astrological sign
t
"gave strength to the reproductive organs, promoted fruitfulness and
2
iealth."

As a sacred amulet for gods, priests, and mummies, the Menat

tie nsured sexual potency in the after-life and magical fertility in earthly
existence. See Jar-Bearer.
II 1 .
Budge, E.M., 60. 2. Jobes, 208.

Mene
Throughout the ancient Middle East this word meant Moon, though
onits
appearance in the Old Testament (Daniel 5:25) it was translated
'numbered," because the moon was the basis for calendars and the
measurer of time. King Belshazzar was frightened by the dire inscription
- written on the wall at his feast, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHAR-
SIN, which Daniel interpreted as follows: (1) your days are numbered;
(2) you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; (3)

/our kingdom will be taken by the Medes and Persians. The original
nscription probably language the Hebrew editor didn't
appeared in a

i
Know, and Daniel's speech was loosely interpreted from an old icon
representing the Moon-goddess as Destroyer, announcing the end of
a
king's term of office. See Kingship.

lenec

["Moon-shrine," a Neolithic menhir system near Carnac, in Brittany;

>ne of the many stone "temples of the Moon" that once dotted

European lands.

Menelaus
"Moon-king," husband of Helen the Moon-princess from Homer's
Troy. The gods told him he would be immortal because he had Helen

633
Menevia for his wife. 1
When he lost her, he was deprived of both immortality
Mensa and property. See Helen of Troy.
1. Knight, S.L., 125.

Menevia
"Moon-Way," the Romano-British name for the Welsh town of St.
David's, actually named after the god Dewi, or Devi (see David,
Saint). Menevia was the same as the Scandinavian Manavegr, the
heavenly paradise ruled by the Moon-mother Mana.

Menorah
Seven-branched candlestick of the Jewish tabernacle, probably repre-
senting the Seven Sisters or
Moon-Horae, since it was decorated with
yonic symbols (Exodus 25:33-35).

Menos
Egyptian title of the Moon-goddess credited with the invention of

writing.

var. Menarva Menrva

Etruscan version of the name of Minerva, Roman Goddess of
wisdom, war, and the lunar calendar; the Crone of the original Capito-
line Triad. She was a Latin form of Athene. A bronze statue of the

6th century B.C. depicts her with an Athenian aegis covering her breast,
a helmet with a gigantic crest on her head, and in her hand a spear or

javelin poised for throwing. She was also connected with the death
1

scene of the archaic savior Mars.

1 .
Larousse, 206.

Mensa
Roman Goddess of measurement, numbers, calendars, calculations,

tables,and record-keeping; derived from the Moon-goddess as inventor

of numerical systems. Probably a title for the archaic Minerva as the

moon, "measurer of Time."

634
 enstrual Blood Menstrual Blood

m the earliest human cultures, the mysterious magic of creation

was thought to reside in the blood women gave forth in apparent mi^m^^^^m
harmony with the moon, and which was sometimes retained in the
womb to "coagulate" into a baby. Men regarded this blood with holy
dread, as the life-essence, inexplicably shed without pain, wholly

foreign to male experience.

Most words for menstruation also meant such things as incompre-
hensible, supernatural, sacred, spirit, deity. Like the Latin sacer, old
Arabian words for "pure" and "impure" both applied to menstrual
blood and to that only. The Maoris stated explicitly that human souls
are made of menstrual blood, which when retained in the womb

"assumes human form and grows man." Africans said

into a '

menstrual blood "congealed to

is fashion a man." 2 Aristotle said the
same: human made of a "coagulum" of menstrual blood. Pliny
life is

. icalled menstrual blood "the material substance of generation," capable

which afterwards in process of time quickeneth
of forming "a curd,
and groweth to the form of a body." This primitive notion of the
-
prenatal function of menstrual blood was still taught in European
;

I medical schools up to the 18th century. 3

Basic ideas about menstrual blood came from the Hindu theory
Great Mother creates, her substance becomes thickened
that as the

and forms a curd or clot; solid matter is produced as a "crust." 4 This was
the way she gave birth to the cosmos, and women employ the same
- method on a smaller scale.
According to Daustenius, "The fruit in the
womb is nourished only by the mother's blood. . . .
[T]he menstruum
does not fail the fruit for nourishment, till it at the proper time comes to
5
the light of day."
Indians of South America said all mankind was made of "moon
blood" in the beginning. 6 The same idea prevailed in ancient

Mesopotamia, where the Great Goddess Ninhursag made mankind out

... it with her "blood of life." Under her alternate
of clay and infused
names of Mammetun or Aruru the Great, the Potter, she taught
women to form clay dolls and smear them with menstrual blood as a

conception-charm, a piece of magic that underlay the name of Adam,

from the feminine adamah, meaning "bloody clay," though scholars
- more 7
delicately translate it "red earth."
The Bible's story of Adam was lifted from an older female-oriented
creation myth recounting the creation of man from clay and moon-
blood. So was the Koran's creation story, which said Allah "made man
out of flowing blood"; but in pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was the
Goddess of creation, Al-Lat. 8 The Romans also had traces of the
01

original creation myth. Plutarch said man was made of earth, but the
power that made a human body grow was the moon, source of
menstrual blood. 9

635
Menstrual Blood The lives of the very gods were dependent on the miraculous
power of menstrual blood. In Greece it was euphemistically called
the "supernatural red wine" given to the gods by Mother Hera in her
^^^^^^^^^^^m 10
virgin form, as Hebe. The root myths of Hinduism reveal the
nature of this "wine." At one time all gods recognized the supremacy of
the Great Mother, manifesting herself as the spirit of creation (Kali-

Maya). She "invited them to bathe in the bloody flow of her womb and
it; and the gods, in holy communion, drank of the fountain
to drink of

of life (hie est sanguis meusl) and bathed in it, and rose blessed to

the heavens." '

To this day, cloths allegedly stained with the God-
menstrual blood are greatly prized as healing charms. 12
dess's

W.R. Smith reported that the value of the gum acacia as an amulet "is

connected with the idea that it is a clot of menstrous blood, i.e., that

the tree is a woman." For religious ceremonies, Australian aborigines

painted their sacred stones, churingas, and themselves with red ochre,
13
declaring that it was really women's menstrual blood.
The esoteric secret of the gods was that their mystical powers of
longevity, authority, and creativity came from the same female
essence. The Norse god Thor for example reached the magic land of
enlightenment and eternal life by bathing in a river filled with the
menstrual blood of "giantesses" that is, of the Primal Matriarchs,

"Powerful Ones" who governed the elder gods before Odin brought
his "Asians" (Aesir) out of the east. 14 Odin acquired supremacy by

stealing and drinking the "wise blood" from the triple cauldron in the
womb of Mother-Earth, the same Triple Goddess known as Kali-Maya
in southeast Asia.

Odin's theft of menstrual magic paralleled that of Indra, who stole

the ambrosia of immortality in the same way. Indian myth called the
sacred fluid Soma in Greek, "the body," because the word's eastern
root referred to a mystical substance of the body. Soma was the object
of somuch holy dread that its interpretations were many.
Soma was produced by the churning of the primal sea (Kali's
"ocean of blood" or sometimes "sea of milk"). Or Soma was secreted
by the Moon-Cow. Or Soma was carried in the "white pot" (belly) of
Mohini the Enchantress. Or the source of Soma was the moon. Or
from Soma all the gods were born. Or Soma was a secret name of the
15
Mother Goddess and the active part of the "soul of the world."

Soma was drunk by priests at sacrificial ceremonies and mixed with

milk as a healing charm; therefore it was not milk. Soma was

especially revered on somvara, Monday, the day of the moon. In an

ancient ceremony called Soma-vati, women of Maharashtra circum-
ambulated the sacred female-symbolic fig tree whenever the new moon
16
fell on a Monday.
Some myths claimed the Goddess under her name of Lakshmi,
"Fortune" or "Sovereignty," gave Soma to Indra to make him king
of the gods. His wisdom, power, and curiously feminine capacity for

pregnancy, came from Lakshmi's mystic drink, "of which none tastes

636
who dwells on earth." 17
On drinking it
straight from the Goddess, Indra Menstrual Blood
became like her, the Mount of Paradise with its four rivers, "many-
hued" like the Goddess's rainbow veils, rich in cattle and fruiting ^^^^^^^^^^^
vegetation.
18
The Goddess's blood became his wisdom. Similarly,
Greeks believed the wisdom of man or god was centered in his blood,
19
the soul-stuff given by his mother.

Egyptian pharaohs became divine by ingesting "the blood of Isis,"

a soma-like ambrosia called sa. zo Its hieroglyphic sign was the same as
the sign of the vulva, a yonic loop like the one on the ankh or Cross of
21
Life. Painted red, loop signified the female genital and the Gate
this
22
of Heaven. Amulets buried with the dead specifically prayed Isis to
magic blood. A special amulet called
23
deify the deceased with her
the Tjet represented Isis's vulva and was formed of red substance

jasper, carnelian, red porcelain, red glass, or red wood. This amulet
24
was said to carry the redeeming power of the blood of Isis.
The same elixir of immortality received the name of amrita in
Persia. it was called the milk of a mother Goddess,
Sometimes
sometimes fermented drink, sometimes sacred blood. Always it was
a

associated with the moon. "Dew and rain becoming vegetable sap,

sap becoming the milk of the cow, and the milk then becoming
converted into blood: Amrita, water, sap, milk, and blood represent
but differing states of the one elixir. The vessel or cup of this immortal
25
fluid is the moon."

became gods by drinking the "red mead" dispensed by

Celtic kings
the FairyQueen, Mab, whose name was formerly Medhbh or
"mead." 26 Thus she gave a drink of herself, like Lakshmi. A Celtic
name of this fluid was dergflaith, meaning either "red ale" or "red

sovereignty." In Celtic Britain, to be stained with red meant to be

27
chosen by the Goddess as a king. Celtic ruadh meant both "red"
and "royal." 28
The same blood color implied apotheosis after death. The pagan

paradise or Fairyland was at the uterine center of the earth, site of the

magic Fountain of Life. An old manuscript in the British Museum said

the dying-and-resurrected Phoenix lives there forever. The central
Holy Mountain or mons veneris contains both male and female sym-
bols: theTree of Life and the Fountain of Eternal Youth, the latter
obviously menstrual, as it was said to overflow once every lunar
month. 29
Medieval churchmen insisted that the communion wine drunk by
witches was menstrual blood, and they may have been right. The
famous wizard Thomas Rhymer joined a witch cult under the tutelage
of the Fairy Queen, who told him she had "a bottle of claret wine . . .

50
here in my lap," and invited him to lay his head in her lap. Claret
was the also a synonym for blood; its name
traditional drink of kings and
meant literally "enlightenment." There was a saying, "The man in
the moon drinks claret," connected with the idea that the wine repre-
sented lunar blood. 31

637
Menstrual Blood Medieval romance and the courtly-love movement, later related to

witch cults, were strongly influenced by the Tantric tradition, in

which menstrual blood was indeed the wine of poets and sages. It is still

specified in the Left Hand Rite of Tantra that the priestess imperson-

ating the Goddess must be menstruating, and after contact with her a
man may perform rites that will make him "a great poet, a Lord of
the World" who travels on elephant-back like a rajah. 32
In ancient societies both east and west, menstrual blood carried the

spirit of sovereign authority because it was the medium of transmis-

sion of the life of clan or tribe. Among the Ashanti, girl children are still

more prized than boys because a girl is the carrier of "blood"

(mogya). The concept is also clearly defined in India, where menstru-

alblood is known as the Kula flower or Kula nectar, which has an
intimate connection with the life of the family. When a girl first
menstruates, she is said to have "borne the Flower." 34 The corre-
sponding English word flower has the significant literal meaning of
"that which flows."
The British Goddess of flowers was Blodeuwedd, a form of the
Triple Goddess associated with sacrifices of ancient kings. Welsh
The Hebrew word
legend said her whole body was made of flowers as any body was,
dam, means
for blood,
"mother" or according to the ancient theory of body formation from the blood
"woman" in other "flower." Her name suggests the Blood Wedding, and myth made her

Indo-European the spouse of several murdered heroes, recalling the old idea that the
languages (e.g. dam, Goddess's divine blood had to be periodically refreshed by human
damsel, madam, la
sacrifice.
35

dama, dame) and also

"the curse" (damn).
The Bible also calls menstrual blood the flower (Leviticus

The Sumerian Great 1 5:24), precursor of the "fruit" of the womb (a child). As any flower
Mother represented mysteriously contained its future fruit, so uterine blood was the
maternal blood and moon-flower supposed to contain the soul of future generations. This
bore names like
was a central idea in the matrilineal concept of the clan. 36
Dam-kina,
The Chinese religion of Tao, "the Way," taught Tantric doctrines
Damgalnunna.
From her belly flowed later supplanted by patriarchal-ascetic Confucianism. Taoists said a
the Four Rivers of man could become immortal (or at least long-lived) by absorbing
Paradise, sometimes menstrual blood, called red yin juice, from a woman's Mysterious
called rivers of blood
Gateway, otherwise known as the Grotto of the White Tiger, symbol of
which is the "life" of all
life-givingfemale energy. Chinese sages called this red juice the
flesh. Her firstborn

child, the Savior, was

essence of Mother Earth, the yin principle that gives life to all things.
Damu, a "child of They claimed the Yellow Emperor became a god by absorbing the
the blood." 37 Damos or hundred women. 40
yin juice of twelve
"mother-blood" was
A Chinese myth said the Moon-goddess Chang-O, who controlled
the word for "the
menstruation, was offended by male jealousy of her powers. She left
people" in
matriarchal 58 her husband, who quarreled with her because she had all the elixir of
Mycenae.
Another common immortality, and he had none, and was resentful. She turned her back
ancient symbol of the on him and went to live in the moon forever, in much the same way
blood-river of life was
that Lilith left Adam by herself at the "Red Sea." Chang-0
to live
the red carpet,
forbade men to attend Chinese moon festivals, which were afterward
traditionally trod by
sacred kings, heroes, celebrated by women only, at the full moon of the autumnal
9 41
and brides.' equinox.

638
 Taoist China considered red a sacred color associated with women, Menstrual Blood
blood, sexual potency, and creative power. White was the color of
men, semen, negative influences, passivity, and death. 42 This was the ^^^^^^^^^^
male and female essences: the male principle
basic Tantric idea of

was seen as "passive" and "quiescent"; the female principle as "active"

and "creative," the reverse of later patriarchal views. 43
Female blood color alone was often considered a potent magic
charm. The Maori rendered anything sacred by coloring it red,
and calling the red color menstrual blood. 44 Andaman Islanders thought
blood-red paint a powerful medicine, and painted sick people red all
over in an effort to cure them. 45 Hottentots addressed their Mother
Goddess as one "who has painted thy body red"; she was divine
because she never dropped or wasted menstrual blood. 46 Some African
tribes believed that menstrual blood alone, kept in a covered
pot for
nine months, had the power to turn itself into a baby. 47
Easter eggs, classic womb-symbols of the Goddess Eostre, were

traditionally colored red and laid on graves to strengthen the dead.

This habit, common in Greece and southern
Russia, might be traced all
the way back and funeral furnishings reddened
to Paleolithic graves

with ochre, for a closer resemblance to the Earth Mother's womb from
which the dead could be "born again." Ancient tombs everywhere
have shown the bones of the dead covered with red ochre. Sometimes

everything in the tomb, including the walls, had the red color.
J.D. Evans described a well tomb on Malta filled with reddened bones,
which struck fear into the workmen who insisted the bones were
covered with "fresh blood." 48
A born-again ceremony from Australia showed that the Aborigines
linked rebirth with the blood of the womb. The chant performed at

Ankota, the "vulva of the earth," emphasized the redness surrounding

the worshipper: "A straight track is gaping open before me. An

underground hollow is gaping before me. A cavernous pathway is

gaping before me. An underground pathway is gaping before me.
Red I am like the heart of a flame of fire. Red, too, is the hollow in
49
I am
which resting." Images like these help explain why some of
the oldest images of the Goddess, like Kurukulla in the east and her

counterpart Cybele in the west, were associated with both caverns

and redness. 50
Greek mystics were "born again" out of the river Styx, otherwise

known as Alpha, "the Beginning." This river wound seven times

through the earth's interior and emerged at a yonic shrine near the city
51
of Clitor (Greek kleitoris) sacred to the Great Mother. Styx was the
blood-stream from the earth's vagina; its waters were credited with the
same dread powers as menstrual blood. Olympian gods swore their
absolutely binding oaths by the waters of Styx, as men on earth swore by

the blood of their mothers. Symbolic death and rebirth were linked
with baptism in the waters of Styx, as in many other sacred rivers the
world over. Jesus himself was baptized in Palestine's version of the
Styx, the river Jordan. When a man bathed seven times in this river,

639
Menstrual Blood "his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child" (2 Kings
5:14). In Greek tradition the journey to the land of death meant

^^^^^^^^^^^ crossing the Styx; in Judeo-Christian tradition it was crossing the

Jordan. This was the same "river of blood" crossed by Thomas Rhymei
on his way to Fairyland.

Tantric worship of menstrual blood penetrated the Greco-Roman

world before the Christian era and was well established in the Gnostic
period. This worship provided the agape "love-feast" or "spiritual

marriage" practiced by Gnostic Christians like the Ophites. Anoth-

er name for the agape was synesaktism, "the Way of Shaktism,"
52
meaning Tantric yoni-worship. Synesaktism was declared a heresy
53
before the 7th century a.d. Subsequently the "love-feast" disappearec
and women were forbidden direct participation in Christian worship,
according to St. Paul's rule (1 Timothy 2:1 1-12).

Epiphanius described the agape practiced by Ophite Christians,

while making it clear that these heretical sexual activities filled him
with horror:

Their women they share in common; and when anyone arrives who
might be alien to their doctrine, the men and women have a sign by
which they make themselves known to each other. When they extend
their hands, apparently in greeting, they tickle the other's palm in a

certainway and so discover whether the new arrival belongs to their cult.
. Husbands separate from their wives, and a man will say to his own
. .

"
spouse, "Arise and celebrate the love feast (agape,) with thy
brother.

And the wretches mingle with each other . . . after they have consorted

together in a passionate debauch The woman and the man take

the man s ejaculation into their hands, stand up . . .

offering to the Fathei
the Primal Being ofAll Nature, what is on their hands, with the words,
"
"We bring to Thee this oblation, which is the very Body of Christ.
.
They consume it, take housel of their shame and say: "This is the
. .

Body of Christ, the Paschal Sacrifice through which our bodies suffer
and are forced to confess to the sufferings of Christ. "And when the
woman is in her period, they do likewise with her menstruation. The
unclean flow of blood, which they garner, they take up in the same way
and eat together. And that, they say, is Christ's Blood. For when they
read in Revelation, "I saw the tree oflife with its twelve kinds offruit,
"
yielding its fruit each month (Rev. 22:2), they interpret this as an
M
allusion to the monthly incidence of the female period.

The meaning of this Ophite sacrament to its practitioners is

easily recovered from Tantric Eating the living substances of

parallels.

reproduction was considered more "spiritual" than eating the dead

body of the god, even in the transmuted form of bread and wine,
though the color symbolism was the same:
When the semen, made molten by the fire ofgreat passion, falls into the

lotusof the "mother" and mixes with her red element, he achieves
"
"the conventional mandala of the thought of enlightenment. The
resultant mixture is tasted by the united "father-mother" [Yab- Yum],
and when it reaches the throat they can generate concretely a special bin

640
 the bodhicitta the drop resulting from union ofsemen and
. . .
Menstrual Blood
menstrual blood is transferred to the yogi This empowers his
corresponding mystic veins and centers to accomplish the Buddha's
function
"
ofspeech. The term "secret initiation comes from the tasting of ^^^^^^^^^
the secret substance. yy

In the occult language of the Tantras, two ingredients of the

Great Rite were sukra, semen, and rakta, menstrual blood. The officiat-
had to be menstruous so her lunar energies were at flood
ing priestess
56
tide. She embodied the power of rakta, sometimes rendered rukh or
ruq, cognate with the Hebrew ruach, "spirit," and the Arabic ruh,
which meant both "spirit" and "red color." Throughout all Tantric and
related faiths, the merging of female red and male white was "a
::c

57
profoundly important symbolic conjunction."
The Sufis, who practiced their own brand of Tantrism, said ruh
was female and red. Its male counterpart sin, "consciousness," was
white. Red and white colors alternated in the Sufi halka or magic circle,

corresponding to the Tantric chakra and called "the basic unit and
very heart of active Sufism." The Arab rosary of alternating red and
white beads had the same meaning: men and women coupled around
the circle, as in most European folk dances. 58
Red and white were the colors worn by alternating female-and-
male dancers in the witches' "fairy ring" of pagan Ireland, where the
Goddess was worshipped under the same name as the Tantric earth
59
mother, Tara. With men and women alternating as in a Tantric
chakra, the dance moved counterclockwise or moonwise, as nearly all

dances still do. Red and white colors

circle "represented the fairy
world." 60
The rites were often governed by old women, due to the ancient
belief that post-menopausal women were the wisest of mortals be-
cause they permanently retained their "wise blood." In the 17th century

a.d.,Christian writers still insisted that old women were filled with
61
magic power because their menstrual blood remained in their veins.
This was the real reason why old women were constantly persecuted
for witchcraft. The same "magic blood" that made them leaders in the

ancient clan system made them objects of fear under the new
patriarchal faith.
Because menstrual blood occupied a central position in matriar-

chal theologies, and was already sacer holy-dreadful

patriarchal-ascetic thinkers showed almost hysterical fear of The
it.

Laws of Manu said if a man even approached a menstruating woman he

would lose his wisdom, energy, sight, strength, and vitality. The
Talmud said if a menstruating woman walked between two men, one of
the men would Brahmans ruled that a man who lay with
surely die.
62

a menstruating woman must suffer a punishment one-quarter as severe

as the punishment for Brahmanicide, which was the worst crime a
Brahman could imagine. Vedic myths were designed to support the law,
jj iuch as the myth that Vishnu dared copulate with the Goddess Earth

641
Menstrual Blood while she was menstruating, which caused her to give birth to monsters
who nearly destroyed the world. 63
^^^^^^^^^^^m This was patriarchal propaganda against the Tantric Maharutti
("Great Rite"), in which menstrual blood was the essential ingredi-
ent. In Kali's cave-temple, her image spouted the blood of sacrifices

from its vaginal orifice to bathe Shiva's holy phallus while the two
deitiesformed the lingam-yoni, and worshippers followed suit, in an
orgy designed to support the cosmic life-force generated by union of
male and female, white and red. 64 In this Great Rite, Shiva became the
Anointed One, as were his many Middle-Eastern counterparts. The
Greek translation of Anointed One was Christos.
Persian patriarchs followed the Brahman lead in maintaining that
menstruous women must be avoided like poison. They belonged to
the devil; they were forbidden to look at the sun, to sit in water, to speal
65
man, or to behold an altar fire. The glance of a menstruous
to a

woman was feared like the glance of the Gorgon. Zoroastrians held tha

any man who lay with a menstruating woman would beget a demon,
and would be punished in hell by having filth poured into his mouth. 66
Persian religion incorporated the common primitive belief that th<
first onset of menses must be caused by copulation with a supernatu-
ral snake. People not yet aware of fatherhood have supposed the same
snake renders each woman fertileand helps her conceive children. 67
Some such belief prevailed in Minoan Crete, where women and snake!
were sacred, but men were not. Tube-shaped Cretan vessels for
6
pouring oblations represented a vagina, with a serpent crawling inside.
Ancient languages gave the serpent the same name as Eve, a name
meaning "Life"; and the most ancient myths made the primal couple
not a Goddess and a God, but a Goddess and a Serpent. 69 The
Goddess's womb was a garden of paradise in which the serpent lived.
Phrygian Ophiogeneis, "Snake-born People," said their first male
ancestor was the Great Serpent who dwelt in the garden of para-
70
dise. Paradise was a name of the Goddess-as- Virgin, identified with
Mother Hera (Earth), whose virgin form was Hebe, a Greek spelling
of Eve. Virgin Hera parthenogenetically conceived the oracular serpen
71
Python, of the "Womb-temple," Delphi. Snakes living in the
womb of Mother Earth were supposed to possess all wisdom, being in
contact with the "wise blood" of the world.
secrets shared by the primordial woman and her
One of the
serpent was the secret of menstruation. Persians claimed menstrua-
tion was brought into the world by the first mother, whom they called

Jahi theWhore, a Lilith-like defier of the Heavenly Father. She

began to menstruate for the first time after coupling with Ahriman, the
Great Serpent. Afterward she seduced "the first righteous man," who
had previously lived alone in the garden of paradise with only the divin<
sacrificial bull for company. He knew nothing of sex until Jahi taught

him. 72

642

V.'jfc
 The Jews borrowed many from these Persian myths.
details Menstrual Blood
Rabbinical tradition said Eve began to menstruate only
after she had

copulated with the serpent in Eden, and Adam was ignorant of sex until ^^^^^^^^^^^
Eve taught him. 75 It was widely believed that Eve's firstborn son Cain
was not begotten by Adam but by the serpent. 74 Beliefs connecting
serpents with pregnancy and menstruation appeared throughout
Europe for many centuries. Up to modern times, German peasants still

held that women

could be impregnated by snakes. 75
Whether initiated by a serpent or not, menstrual bleeding inspired
deadly fear among both Persian and Jewish patriarchs (Leviticus 1 5).
Rachel successfully stole her father's teraphim (household gods) by

hiding them under a camel saddle and sitting on it, telling her father
she was menstruating so he dared not approach her (Genesis 3 1). To
this day, orthodox Jews refuse to shake hands with a woman because

she might be menstruating. Jews also adopted a rule apparently laid

down by Hesiod, that a man must never wash in the same water
previously used by a woman, lest it
might contain a trace of menstrual
blood. 76
There were many similar taboos. The ancient world's most dread-
ed poison was the "moon-dew" collected by Thessalian witches, said
77
to be a girl's first menstrual blood shed during an eclipse of the moon.

Pliny said a menstruous woman's touch could blast the fruits of the
78
field, sour wine, cloud mirrors, rust iron, and blunt the edges of knives.

If a menstruous woman so much as laid a finger on a beehive, the

79
bees would away and never return. If a man lay with a menstruous
fly
woman during an eclipse, he would soon fall sick and die. 80
Christians inherited all the ancient patriarchs' superstitious horrors.
is so unclean as a woman in her periods;
[Link] wrote: "Nothing
what she touches she causes to become unclean." Penitential regula-

tions laid down in the 7th century by Theodore, Bishop of

Canterbury, forbade menstruating women to take communion or even
enter a church. At the French Synod of Meaux, menstruous women
were specifically forbidden to come to church. From the 8th to the 11th

centuries, many church laws denied menstruating women any access

to church buildings. As late as 1684 it was still ordered that women in

their "fluxes" must remain outside the church door. 81 In 1298 the
Synod of Wiirzburg commanded men not to approach a menstruating
woman. 82 The superstition came down to the 20th century, when a
Scottish medical text quoted an old rhyme to the effect that menstrual

blood could destroy the entire world:

Oh! Menstruating woman, thou 'rt a fiend

83
From which all nature should be closely screened.

Christian women were commanded to despise the "unclean-

ness" of their own bodies, as in the Rule for Anchoresses: "Art thou not
84
formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness?"

643
Menstrual Blood Medical authorities of the 16th century were still repeating the old belief
that "demons were produced from menstrual flux." 85 One of the

"demons" born of menstrual blood was the legendary basilisk with its
86
poisonous glance. The legend evidently arose from the classic myth
of the Gorgon with her serpent-hair and wise blood, petrifying men
with her glance. The Gorgon and the red cross of menstrual blood
once marked the most potent taboos. 87 The very word taboo, from
Polynesian tupua, "sacred, magical," applied specifically to menstrual
blood. 88

Just as primitives attributed beneficial powers to menstrual blood

along with its fearfulness, so medieval peasants thought it could heal,

89
nourish, and fertilize. Some believed a menstruating woman could
protect a crop by walking around the field, or exposing her genitals in
90
it. Peasant women carried seed to the fields in rags stained with their
menstrual blood: a continuation of the custom of Eleusinian fertility-
91
priestesses. Even doctors thought menstrual blood could cure leprosy,
or act as a powerful aphrodisiac. Madame de Montespan used it to en-
92
courage the ardor of her royal lover, Louis XIV. Gypsies said a woman
could win any man's love with a potion of her own menstrual blood. 93
As the former medium of reincarnation, menstrual blood was
sometimes called a remedy for death itself. In the tale of Childe Roland,
the elven-king roused men from
the magic sleep of death with a "bright
red liquor." 94 Early romances associated this universal heal-all with "the
blood of a noble virgin," as a wise-woman revealed to Galahad. 95 The
same belief impelled Louis XI to try to stave off death by drinking
young girls' blood.
Victorian superstition taught that a child conceived during a
menstrual period would be born with a caul, and would have occult
96
powers. Nineteenth-century doctors inherited their predecessors' no-
tions of witchcraft and evil, and so maintained that menstruating

women are not healthy; copulation with them could infect a man with
Dr. Augustus Kins- gonorrhea. Dr. Augustus Gardner said venereal diseases
urethritis or

ley Gardner Eminent were usually communicated from women to men, not vice versa. 97
physician of the late
19th century, opponent
Speaking of savages' menstrual taboos, anthropologists described the
of all forms of birth
women as "out of order," "suffering from monthly illness," or "stricken

control, which he with the malady common to their sex." 98 A doctor wrote even in the
claimed led "directly present century: "We cannot too emphatically urge the importance of
and indisputably" to when
regarding these monthly returns as periods of ill health, as days
nervous diseases and
the ordinary occupations are to be suspended or modified." 99
debilities.
At the present time just as in the Middle Ages, the Catholic church
still considers itself on firm theological ground by advancing, as an

argument against ordination of women, the notion that a menstruating

priestess would "pollute" the altar. This would not preclude ordination
of post-menopausal women, but different excuses are found for those.
The holy "blood of life" used to be feminine and real; now it is

masculine and symbolic.

644
 1. Briffault 2, 412-13, 444. 2. Fra/.er, G.B., 243. 444-45.
3. Briffault 2, Menstrual Calendar
4. Avalon, 305. 5. Silberer, 136. 6. Chagnon, 38. 7. Hooke, M.E.M., 110.
8. Gaster, 20. 9. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 107. 10. Graves, G.M. 1,118;
'

[Link], 139. 12. Harding, 62. 13. Briffault 2, 416,631.

14. Turville-Petre, 79. 15. O'Flaherty, 148. 16. d'Alviella, xvii. [Link],75.
m*^^^^^^^^m
18. Hays, 214. 19. Knight, S.L., 119.
20. Budge, G.E. 1,43; 2, 298.
21. [Link], 39. 22. Jung, M.H.S., 55. 23. Budge, E.M., 127.
24. Budge, A.T., 137. 25. Zimmer, 60. 26. Rees, 75. 27. Graves, W.G., 354.
28. Joyce 2, 90. 29. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 256.
30. Sargent &
Kittredge, 64; Gaster, 31. 31. Hazlitt, 384. 32. Rawson, A.T., 32.
33. Stone, 60. 34. Mahanirvanatantra, 88. 35. Graves, W.G., 28-29. 36. Stone 26
37. Briffault 3, 91. 38. Lindsay, A.W., 49. 39. Brasch, 33.
40. Rawson, E.A., 149, 234. 41. Larousse, 383. 42. Bullough, 244.
43. Encyc. Brit., "Shaktism." 44. Briffault 2, 413. 45. Hays, 351.
46. Briffault 2, 417. 47. Silberer, 143. 48. Pepper &
Wilcock, 76. 49. Hays, 373.
50. Larousse, 359. 51. Graves, W.G., 406. 52. Bullough, 105.
53. Sadock, Kaplan &
Freedman, 23. 54. Campbell, CM., 159.
55. Tat/. &
Kent, 128-29. 56. Rawson, A.T., 32. 57. Rawson, A.T., 33.
58. Shah, 21, 380. 59. Keightley, 367. 60. Jung &
von Franz, 272. 61. Gifford, 26.
62. Frazer, G.B., 700. 63. O'Flaherty, 90, 196. 64. Goldberg, 70; Edwardes, 50.
65. Edwardes, 8. 66. Campbell, Oc.M., 199. 67. Briffault 2, 669. 68. Hays, 101.
69. Potter &
Sargent, 224; Graves, G.M. 1, 27. 70. J.E. Harrison, 129.
71. Graves, G.M. 1, 80. 72. Larousse, 318. 73. Briffault 2, 666.
74. Tennant, 1 54. 75. Briffault 2, 664. 76. Briffault 2, 337. 77. Graves, W. G., 170.
78. Simons, 39. 79. de Lys, 46. 80. Morris, 106. 81. Morris, 1 10.
82. Briffault 2, 396. 83. Pearsall, W.B., 209. 84. Bullough, 176.
85. Robbins, 357. 86. Silberer, 139. 87. Harding, 57. 88. Spretnak, 270.
89. Crawley, 241 90. Briffault 2, 41 1 91 Spretnak, 269. 92. Montagu, S.M.S., 1 1 3.
. . .

93. Trigg, 44. 94. Wimberly, 214. 95. Gaster, 514. 96. Hazlitt, 99.
97. Barker-Benfield, 278, 298. 98. Briffault 2, 369, 382. 99. Ehrenreich English, 100. &

Menstrual Calendar
Two conflicting calendars were used through most of the Christian
era in Europe: the church's official, solar, "Julian" calendar, and the
peasants' unofficial, lunar, Goddess-given menstrual calendar. The
thirteen annual lunations of the latter produced one of the contrasting
answers to the nursery-rhyme riddle: "How many months be in the
year? There be thirteen, produced another answer:
I
say." Christians
"There be but twelve, I say." The lunar calendar's thirteen 28-day
months had four 7-day weeks apiece, marking new, waxing, full, and
waning moon-sabbaths in the ancient form. Weeks are still lunar, but
they no longer fit neatly into the solar month system. Thirteen lunar
months gave 364 days per year (1 3 X 28), with one extra day to

make 365. Nursery rhymes, fairy tales, witch charms, ballads and other

repositories of pagan tradition nearly always describe the full annual

cycle as "a year and a day."

It has been shown developed first in

that calendar consciousness

women, because of their natural menstrual body calendar, correlated

with observations of the moon's phases. Chinese women established a
3000 into 28
lunar calendar years ago, dividing the celestial sphere
stellar "mansions" through which the moon passed. Among the
Maya of central America, every woman knew "the great Maya calendar
had first been based on her menstrual cycles."
*
Romans called the

645
Menstrual Calendar calculation of time mensuration, i.e., knowledge of the menses. Gaelic
words for "menstruation" and "calendar" are the same: miosach and

^^^^^^^^^^^ miosachan. The new-moon sabbaths of ancient Latium were kalends,

possibly related to the Aryan name of Kali. For fear of disrupting the

Goddess's transitions, activities of some kinds were forbidden on the

seventh day of each lunar phase; thus sabbaths became "unlucky" or
taboo. Because it was the time-honored custom, even the biblical God
was forced to "rest" on the seventh day.
One of the prototypes of Yahweh was the Babylonian god Mar-
duk, who divided the maternal "waters" into those above and below
the firmament (Genesis 1:7). Marduk claimed to be the creator, but was
not yet so patriarchal as to abandon his Mother's lunar calendar.

Babylonian priests said Marduk established holy days and seasons by the
moon. 2 Yet older traditions said the menstrual calendar was instituted
in Babylon by the god Nabu-Rimmani, the biblical Baal-Rimmon, a
phallic deity united with theGreat Mother's yoni in the form of a
3
pomegranate.
The Chinese explained their menstrual calendar with the myth of
the holy calendar plant, lik-kiep,on which a pod grew every day for
14 days, then a pod fell off every day for 14 days. When the months be-
came confused by solar reckoning, the Chinese added extra days
when "a pod withered without falling off." 4
According to another story, the menstrual calendar was called
Hsiu, "Houses." The Moon Mother rested each night of the lunar
month one of her 28 houses, which were kept by the 28
in a different

warrior-hero consorts she had placed in heaven to attend her. 5

The ancient Hebrews took their calendar from Chaldea, legendary
home of Abraham, whose older name was Ab-sin, "Moon-father." 6
Chaldeans were credited with the invention of astrology, now largely
based on the movements of the sun; but the Chaldeans didn't study
the sun. They were "Moon-worshippers," believing the moon deter-
mined the fates of men by her movements through various "houses"

of the [Link] same lunar myths were found in Egypt, northern

Europe, Greece, and Rome. Latin kings were sacrificed at the three-
day dark of the moon period called ides, to insure the Goddess's safe
return from the underworld. Greeks similarly made offerings at the
Great Sabbath called Noumenia (New Moon). The other Great Sab-
bath was Dichomenia (Full Moon), when the Goddess stood at the
7
peak of her cycle.
Early attempts at calendar reform left Greek city-states quarreling

among themselves about sabbaths and intercalary days. Aristopha-

nes's The Clouds makes the Moon-goddess complain that her
8
reckoning of the days was not being correctly followed. Time-spans
in myths became confused. Adonis was born after "ten months' gesta-

tion," which reallymeant ten lunar months, the normal 280 days. 9
According to the Book of Maccabees, every gestation lasted ten
months. 10 This wasn't ignorance; it was just lunar reckoning.

646
 the saints' days of the medieval church were established Menstrual Calendar
by
LEven
enology, literally"knowledge of the moon." The church's so-called
were movable because they were determined by lunar
movable feasts
^^^^^^^^^^^
cycles, not solar ones; thus they drifted erratically
through the months
of the canonical calendar. The most important of them, Easter, is still
determined by the moon (first Sunday after the first full moon after
the spring equinox), at a time when the Goddess slew and re-conceived
the Savior or vegetation god for a new season. 11
More confusion was created by the fact that menstrual calendars
reckoned the day from noon to noon, with the midnight hour in the
central position; but solar calendars reckoned the day from
midnight to
midnight. The Saxon word den (day) really meant "night." In
Shakespeare's time, people said goodnight by wishing each other good
den, literally good moon-day. Old French nursery rhymes greeted
themoon rising in the evening with "Good morning, Madame
Moon." n The meridian or of noon used to indicate the
high point
full moon overhead at midnight: hence its name Meri-Dia or Mary-
Diana, the Moon-goddess. Superstitious folk talked of the
daemonium meridianum, devil of the meridian, a diabolization of the
Goddess. 13 She was probably the second of the Slavic trinity of Fates
(Zorya), called "She of the Evening, She of Midnight, and She of
Morning," in that order. 14

Pagans held their festivals at night, by moonlight: a custom that

might be traced as far back as ancient Egypt, where major religious
ceremonies were nocturnal, as listed in the Book of the Dead:

The night of the battle and of the overthrow of the Sebau-Beld in Tattu
.
, the night of waking to stand up the double Tet in Sekhem
. . . . .
, the

night of establishing Horus in the heritage of the things of his father in

Rekhti , the night when Isis maketh lamentation at the side of her
. . .

brother Osiris in Abtu , the night of the Haker festival when a division
. . .

is made between the dead and the spirits who are on the path of the dead
. . .
, the night of the judgment of those who are to be annihilated at the
great festival of the ploughing and the turning up of the earth. ls

Pre-Christian Europe also gave night precedence over day.

Germanic tribes, Celts, Gauls, druids, the ancient Irish calculated

"months, years, and birthdays in such a way as to make the night

16
precede the day." Caesar noted that the Celts measured time by
17
nights instead of by days.
Christian holy days were copied from pagan ones, displaced by 12
hours in their solar reckoning; therefore the older, heathen version of
each festival was celebrated on the "Eve" of its Christian counterpart.
From this arose the so-called devilish rites of May Eve, Midsummer
Eve, Lammas Eve, All Hallow's Eve, and Christmas Eve which was
taken from the pagan Yule, and to a late date was still called the
18
Night of the Mother.
Witch persecutors pretended the witches copied their sabbats from
mockery of the church; but in fact
Christian feast days in deliberate

647
Menstrual Calendar the copying had gone in the other direction. The church took over the
pagan feasts of Halloween, Imbolg, Midsum-
May Day, Lammas,
^^^^^^^^^^^ mer, Easter, Yule, and so on, then claimed to have invented them.
However, of the two rival festivals on the same day, the Christian one
was invariably the newcomer. 19
May Eve was the Saxons' Walpurgisnacht, the Celts' Beltain,

announcing the opening of the Merry Month of sexual license and

"wearing of the green" in honor of the earth's new spring garment. The
occasion was still marked by pagan ceremonies in the late 16th
20
century. Midsummer Eve merged with St. John's Day,
(See May.)
but the remained more pagan than Christian. Lammas
solstitial rites

Eve was a witches' Great Sabbat because it was formerly the pagan
Feast of Bread (Hlaf-mass) in honor of the Corn-mother. 21 Hallow-
een was All Hallows' or All Souls' eve, from the Celtic Samhain or
Feast of the Dead, when pagan ancestors came forth from their fairy-

mounds, and Christians called them "demons" who attended the

witches' feasts. 22
The thirteen months of the menstrual calendar also led to

pagan reverence for the number 13, and Christian detestation of it.
Witches' "covens" were supposed to be groups of 1 3 like the moon-
worshipping dancers of the Moorish zabat (sabbat), to whom thirteen
23
expressed the three-in-one nature of the lunar Goddess.
Some said thirteen was a bad number because Christ was the
thirteenth in the group of apostles, thus the thirteenth member of any
group would be condemned to death. Actually, it was the church's
opposition to pagan symbolism that brought opprobrium on the
number 1 3. Some even feared to speak name, and it was
its true

euphemized as a "baker's dozen," or sometimes "devil's dozen." 24

The heathen tradition persisted in such symbols as the Thirteen

Treasures of Britain, probably lunar-month signs taken from a primi-

tive list of zodiacal constellations. They were defined as a sword, basket,

drinking horn, chariot, halter, knife, cauldron, whetstone, garment,

25
pan, platter, chessboard, and mantle. The thirteen menstrual months
were symbolized in the Tarxien temple on Malta as a sow with 1 3
the Celts' Sow-goddess Cerridwen. 26 Thirteen "moons" of
teats, like
the menstrual calendar were suggested also by the English Twelfth

Night custom of kindling twelve small fires and one large one, to
represent the moon of the New Year. 27
In general, the symbols of ancient matriarchy came to be known as

night, the moon, and thenumber 13, while those of patriarchy were
day, the sun, and the number 12.
1. Von Hagen, 62. 2. Hooke, M.E.M., 45. 3. Lindsay, O.A., 40. 4. d'Alvieila, 160.
5. Jobes, 37. 6. Briffault 3, 79, 108. 7. Briffault 2, 439, 599. 8. Von Hagen, 176.
9. Frazer, G.B., 391 10. Forgotten Books, 145. 1 1 de Lys, 362. 12. Briffault 2, 589.
. .

13. Summers, V, 171. 14. Larousse, 285. 15. Budge, G.E. 1,410. 16. Joyce 2, 391.
17. Phillips, 112. 18. Turville-Petre, 227. 19. J.B. Russell, 50. 20. Frazer, G.B., 142.
21. Brewster, 349. 22. Joyce 1, 265. 23. Shah, 218. 24. Hazlitt, 24. 25. Squire, 339.
26. Pepper &
Wilcock, 75. 27. Hazlitt, 602.

648
 Menu Menu
(Osiris reborn as the ithyphallic Moon-god, called "He Who Meriamlik
Impreg-
[nates
his Mother," or sometimes "Bull of his Mother." As the ^^m^^mhhhm
^Goddess's bridegroom, he became an Eros-like sex-god "from whom

spring the delights of love." The same lunar title was sometimes
'

var
tjapplied
to his Goddess, as Mena or Meny, which became a cabalistic
'

[name of Venus-Aphrodite-Isis. See Osiris.

1. Budge, E.M. 140.

era

Egyptian "Waters," a primitive Mother-goddess of the Nile, and the

divine ancestress of the Locrians. See Mari.

Mercury, Saint
iK canonized Mercury (Hermes), whose Cappadocian temple was
converted into a church in the 6th century.
St. Basil had a dream which
1

'
nformed him that St. Mercury was a Christian soldier sent by the
Urgin Mary to assassinate the emperor Julian in 363 a.d. in revenge for
fulian's
toleration of the pagan faiths in Rome. 2 Other sources said
3
i[ulian
was not assassinated but died in battle. In this case, there could

|iot
have been even a fictitious St. Mercury, but only the pagan god
I with a new halo.

1. Attwater, 243. 2. de Voragine, 131. 3. Encyc. Brit, "Julian."

iMeriah
Sacrificial victim "bought for a price" and hung on a tree or cross

a'between heaven and earth" in northern India, as an offering to the

BEarth-goddess Tara, or her spouse, Father Heaven. The title recalls

1

j:he
Old Testament mount of sacrifice, Moriah, where Abraham went to

pfFer
his son Isaac to Yahweh; or the place of sacrifice known as
2
ynorai among Polynesians.
1. Robertson, 25-26. 2. Campbell, M.I., 439.

Meriamlik
"Miriam's Stone," the original shrine of the spurious Christian saint
Thekla or Thecla, actually a priestess of Diana (see Thecla, Saint).
Meriamlik would have been a beth-el embodying the spirit of the

649
Meridiana Goddess Mari, or Mariamne, another name for Diana, who often
Merlin occupied sacred aniconic stones.

Meridiana
Title of the Moon-goddess at the zenith (meridian), at the height of
her powers; also Mary-Diana. Meridiana was the alleged fairy mistress
of Pope Silvester II, who made a pact with the devil to gain the

pontificate, according to legend.

1
See Devil.
[Link],771.

Meri-Ra
Androgynous combination of the Egyptian Goddess of "Waters"
(Meri) with the sun god Ra; same as the combination of Kali and Agni
in India. See Mari.

Meri-Yamm
Miriam, Mari, or Mary as the consort of the Philistine serpent god
Yamm, Lord of Death, cognate of the Hindu Yama. The name of
Miriam apparently began as as androgynous form of Mari-Ishtar with
a masculine half known as Yamm, the eternal rival and alter ego of Baal

(God). See Yama.

Merlin
Druidic wizard associated with the fairy-religion, later thinly Chris-
tianized as the resident wise-man of King Arthur's court. Old Welsh
traditions called man of the woods" with prophetic or
Merlin a "wild
shamanistic skills; he was named either Lailoken or Myrrdin. Geoffrey
of Monmouth said Merlin's earlier name was Ambrosius, associating
him with the female-symbolic "ambrosia" given by the Fairy Queen to
her chosen bards and magicians. In medieval falconry, a merlin was
1

2
a kind of hawk that could be flown only by a lady.

Merlin learned all his magic from the Goddess, in the guise of

Morgan le Fay, or Viviane (She Who Lives), or the Lady of the

Lake. At the end of his life she took him back into her magic cave and

wrapped him in deathless sleep until his Second Coming. Here she
was called Nimue, or Fate, the same as the Moon-goddess Diana
Nemorensis, or the Nemesis of the Greeks. Pagan Britons believed
Merlin would return from his enchanted sleep to announce the coming
of a new age of peace and fertility.

Christian writers however made Merlin a child of the powers of

650
 According to Robert de Borron, Merlin was deliberately con- Mermaid
[hell.

ceived to become Antichrist; he was fathered on a virgin by a devil. He

possessed a benevolent nature because of his mother's goodness,
which prevailed over his demonic nature.

When King Vortigern's temple was being built on Salisbury Plain,

Ithe structure persisted in falling down because so the astrologers

jsaid
its foundations needed the blood of a child who had no human
jfather. Young Merlin the description and was brought to be
fitted

isacrificed; but his magical X-ray vision discovered the real cause of the
trouble. A red and a white dragon were fighting in a mystic pool
under the temple's foundations. Merlin prophesied from this that
iVortigern, the Welsh red dragon, would be slain by Uther Pendrag-

pn,
the British white dragon; and it so happened. Afterward, Merlin
built Stonehenge by himself, in one night calling all its massive stones
3
from Ireland with his magic songs.
Merlin was also He forged King Arthur's
an artisan and a smith.

magic armor and a wonderful cup identified with the Holy Grail. He
built the palace at Camelot. He made the Round Table, symbol of the
4

pagan lunar calendar. The first tally of its knights made up the
28.
5 Index of
(moon's number,
Prohibited Books
The Round Table seems to have been derived from the sacred
(Index Librorum
mensa, calendar-table, of Vesta. Petronius said it was a Round Table The
Prohibitorum)
with the Goddess's image in its center. It represented the earth, which first official edition
t
Anaximenes described as "like a Table in form." Plato's Symposium appeared in 1559,

said the table stood for Mother Earth because "besides feeding us it is though ecclesiastical

authorities censored,
round in shape, it is fixed, and very suitably it has been given by some
6 condemned, and
i me name of Hestia."
destroyed various
Merlin's secret cave was located either in the Breton fairy-wood of kinds of books from the

Broceliande, or in the British druidic shrine of Mount Ambrosius. earliest centuries of

Some said this was Chislehurst, a chalk with caves, the Christian era.
cliff honeycombed
7 Catholics were
||ong occupied by a college of druidesses. Merlin was associated with forbidden to read any
:he druidic Goddess under many of her names: Morgan, Viviane,
books listed on the
of the Lake the Celtic Water-goddess Index, which was
[Nimue, Fairy Queen, Lady
Muirgen, often called boine clergesse (the Good Priestess). Because regularly updated.
VIerlin was connected with Goddess worship and the mass of Observation of this
clearly
prohibition was
Merlin literature was for centuries a vehicle for criticism of the church,
up to 1966,
obligatory
in the 16th century the Council of Trent placed the Book of Merlin's when Pope Paul VI
8
[Predictions on the Index of Prohibited Books. suppressed the Index.
1. Encyc. Brit, "Merlin." 2. Potter & Sargent, 89. 3. Guerber, L.M.A., 205.
4. Guerber, L.M.A., 211. 5. Malory 1, 72. 6. Lindsay, O.A., 287.
7. Spence, 57. 8. Jung & von Franz, 393, 367.

. ermaid
ill
"Virgin of the Sea," the mermaid was an image offish-tailed
Literally

Aphrodite, the medieval Minne, Maerin, Mari, Marina, mereminne,

nare-mynd, mareminde, marraminde, or maraeman. Her Death-
1

651
Mesmerism goddess aspect, sometimes named Ran, received the souls of those put
Messiah to sea in funeral boats; or, she might trap living men in her fish net.

^^^^^^^^^^^m Teutons said drowned men went to dwell in the house of Ran. 2
An English law, still on the books in the 19th century, officially
claimed for the Crown "all mermaids found in British waters." 3

1. Steenstrup, 105; Branston, 133. 2. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 129. 3. Holmes, 228.

Mesmerism
When Mesmer excited popular interest with his new cult of "animal
magnetism" and began performing miraculous cures, the Vatican
approved it in 1840. Then in 1847 it was discovered that "mesmer-
ized" people tended to have religious experiences, and to claim powers
of clairvoyance and prophecy. Therefore the church declared hereti-
cal "those who profess to see things which are invisible ... or apply

purely physical principles to things which are in reality supernatural."

Finally in 1856 an encyclical letter warned the clergy that mesmerism
was dangerous "error." It was a good example of the church's
'
a

refusal to admit any source of spiritual illumination or mythic imagery

other than its own.

1. Bromberg, 164.

Messiah
Persian title One (Greek Christos) supposed to come
of the Anointed

doomsday; based on the Kalki Avatara, final

to earth just before

incarnation of Buddha, due to appear in time to save the virtuous,

before destruction of this universe. 1
Persians sometimes identified the Messiah with the virgin-born

prophet Zoroaster, who would return as his own reincarnation or

"son" just before the final battle of the God of Light and the God of
Darkness (Ahura Mazda and Ahriman). 2
The Jews called
the Messiah "Mashiach," and identified him with

Elijah. Passoverceremonies required four cups of wine, one left

untasted. This was the Cup of Elijah which would be mysteriously
drained before the Second Coming. During the Middle Ages, the

hopes of oppressed Jewry were raised from time to time by a report that
3
someone's Cup of Elijah had been emptied by a miracle.
The Talmud spoke of two Messiahs; Messiah ben David and
Messiah ben Joseph. For this reason, Christian genealogies tried to
make Jesus both of them at
once, through his mother Mary of the house
of David, and through his father Joseph. Some versions of the

Gospels said Joseph was Jesus's natural father, other versions said he war

652
 4
not. Like the Persian Messiah he was also the
I

mutually contradictory Metis

Son of Man and Son of God.
Michael, Saint

3.
1. Mahanirvanatantra, xlviii.

Hooke, M.E.M., 158-59.

2.

4.
Campbell, Oc.M., 210
H. Smith, 182; Pfeifer, 131. hihhmhm
Metis
'Wisdom," mythical mother of Athene, assimilated to the Zeus cult
Zeus impregnated her, then swallowed her, so her
by the claim that
wisdom-principle became part of himself. Thus he was able to give
irth to Metis's child Athene from his own head. Older versions of the

nyth show that Metis was

really Medusa, whose Gorgon face and
Female Wisdom. Athene was the virgin form of
;nake hair symbolized
he same Goddess, born not from Zeus's head but from the triple
Gorgon in the land of Libyan Amazons, who worshipped Medusa-
vletis as the Mother of Fate. 1
A later, Gnostic-Christian version of
:he same Goddess was Sophia, whose name also meant "Wisdom."
1. Graves, W.G., 245-46.

Vtezuzah
ewish door-charm, supposed to protect the house from entry by evil

Originally, an imitation of Egyptian door-charms known as

spirits.

'illars of Horus: small tablets engraved with hieroglyphic spells to

spirits. Touching or kissing the door-charm when passing

1

epel evil
:hrough dates back to the Hindu custom of touching
the yoni of the
2
Joor-post Kali-figure "for luck," entering her when
temple. Similar
obscene" yonic door-charms were used in early Irish churches; see
Sheila-Na-Gig.
1 .
Budge, D.N., 247. 2. Rawson, E.A., 30.

Miasma
Greek "spiritual pollution," a highly contagious evil fate brought on

>y crimes against a mother or against the Mother Goddess's traditional

aw. Orestes, having committed the unforgivable crime of matricide,
ould find no one to defend him against the Furies because miasma cut
off from human contact. See Curse, Mother's.

Michael, Saint
udeo-Christian archangel who inherited the myths and attributes of

Hermes and Heimdall, including the trumpet of the Last Trump and

653
Mictecaciuatl the two sacred Mounts of Mercury on either side of the English
Midwifery Channel, now known as Michael's Mounts (in France, Mont St.

^^^^^^^^^^^ Michel).
Michael was said to have been the leader of God's angelic army
during the War in Heaven, and God delegated to Michael the divine
"words of power" that would defeat the rebellious troops and propel
them down to the underworld. 1
Michael-the- Warrior was a favorite
subject of Christian artists, who usually showed him in golden armor,
with a long spear.

[Link] 1,169.

Mictecaciuatl

"Lady of the Place of the Dead," eponymous Mother Goddess of

Mexico. Very similar to Kali, she represented the earth's yonic hole
from which all things were born, and she was shown also in the
trappings of death, thrusting a corpse into the earth.
1
See Kali Ma.
1. Summers, V, 263-64.

Midas
Ass-eared king of Phrygia, credited with the Golden Touch that later

passed into the lore of alchemy as a magical ability to turn base metals
into gold. Hellenic myths made fun of his ears, evidently shown on
icons because they were once a sign of divine power, as in the cult of
Ass-eared Set. See Ass.

Middle-Earth
Scandinavian Midgard, the world of men, located between the spirit-
worlds above and below. Old Norse gard meant earth, place, home: the
modern yard. Like all ancient people, the Scandinavians regarded
1

their own land as the geographical center of the universe. See

Omphalos.
[Link], 62.

Midwifery
From Anglo-Saxon med-wyf, "wise-woman" or "witch." Even in the

Christian era, priestesses of the Great Mother maintained their monop-

oly of obstetrics, for most men were afraid of the taboo mysteries of

birth. The Bible declared a new mother sacer or untouchable for as long
as66 days after giving birth (Leviticus 12:5); and by canon law, a
mother was not allowed to enter a church until 40 days after childbed.

654
 For the first half of the Christian era, the arts of medicine
Midwifery
temained almost exclusively in the hands of "wise-women" because
indent healing shrines had been devoted almost exclusively to the
1
^_^^^_^___
In ancient Egypt, midwifery was the
goddess's priestesses. province
>f Sevenfold Hathor who gave each infant its seven souls. The
Malayan
Semai still midwives are holy, partaking of the spirit of the First
say all

Vlidwife who lives in the highest of the seven heavens, each one of
vhich is ruled by one of the Seven Celestial Midwives, identical with
he Hathors. An earthly midwife is a sort of
fairy godmother, with a

piritual tie to each child she brings into the world. 2

Mexican peasants attribute similar powers to the recibidora who
ombines the functions of obstetrician, godmother, priestess, and
vitch. She performs complicated knot-magic in
binding and tying the
imbilical cord and casts spells for the future fate of the newborn. 3
Pagan Rome recognized several kinds of midwives, who received
;eparate offerings after a successful birth. There was the obstetrix
vho performed the delivery; the nutrix or "nurturer" who encouraged
mother's milk and taught techniques of nursing; and the ceraria,
[he
of Ceres charged with birth rituals. 4 All were connected with
jxiestess
women's temple, like the Greek Horae who were temple-women
[he

pn
earth and ascended to heaven as midwives to the gods.
Medieval Christianity detested midwives for their connections with

Dagan matriarchy and Goddess-worship. Churchmen viewed them as

mplacable enemies of the Catholic faith. Handbooks of the Inquisition

irtated: "No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than mid-

lives," because they invariably offered newborn children to the service

by the kitchen fire. The real

5
)f the devil with a magical baptism
reason for ecclesiastical hostility seems to have been the notion that
midwives could help women control their own fate, learn secrets of
;ex and birth control, or procure abortions. The pagan women of
antiquity had considerable knowledge of such matters, which were
:onsidered women's own business, not subject to male authority. 6
Patriarchal religion however forbade midwives to assist their patients

n preventing conception, relieving themselves of unwanted pregnan-

es, or easing their birth-pangs.

In 591 a Scottish noblewoman, Eufame Macalyne, was burned

1

7
alive for asking a witch-midwife for drugs to ease her labor pains.

Parliamentary Articles of Enquiry in 1559 ordered churchwardens to

jreport any use of "charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations,

circles, witchcrafts, soothsaying," or any like procedures "especially in
khe time of women's travails." 8
Some charms and sorceries were allowed as long as they were of
the Christian variety: that is, with Christian names substituted for

pagan ones in the formulae. Women in childbed were officially advised

bind around their thighs a long charm in Latin, beginning In
ito

nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus SanctiAmen, followed by invocations

of saints and secret names of God. If the names were not Christian,

655
Midwifery however, the charm was devilish. An episcopal injunction of 1 5 54 said
midwives must not "use or exercise any witchcraft, charms, sorcery,

^^^^^^^^^^^^ invocations, or prayers other than such as be allowable and may stand
with the laws and ordinances of the Catholic church." 9

Christianity's official view was that to relieve women's sufferings in

any aspect of reproduction was to oppose God's will in the matter of

the curse on Eve. God decreed that she and all her female descendants
must bring forth children with "sorrow" (pain). Consequently, up to
the beginning of the 20th century, doctors refused to consider treatment
of the major cause of women's deaths, childbed (puerperal) fever.
The clergy held such deaths to be either a just reward for an immoral
or the expression of God's continuing judgment I0
life, on "the sex."
When James Simpson proposed to relieve women's labor pains
with the newly discovered anesthetics, chloroform and ether, there
was a great outcry from the clergy, who called it a sinful denial of God's
wishes. According to Scottish clergymen, to relieve labor pains would
be "vitiating the primal curse against woman." n A New England
minister wrote: "Chloroform is
decoy of Satan, apparently offering
a
itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God
of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble, for help." 12
With the usual half-concealed sadism of patriarchal morality, he was
really saying that female screams of pain gave God pleasure, and men
must see to it thatGod was not deprived of this.
The matter was resolved when Queen Victoria allowed her doctor
to give her chloroform during delivery of her eighth child, and
publicly hailed the new pain-reliever as a great blessing. All at once the
clergymen were silenced, in effect conceding to the Queen the right
to overrule God. 13
Toward the end of the 19th century, male doctors moved in on
the remaining area of exclusively female medicine, and took the
last

midwifery-trade away from women. At the instigation of the American

Medical Association, the U.S. Congress outlawed midwives, and the
new male "obstetricians" replaced them. Frequently, an elder midwife
found herself out of work, or even in jail for illegal practice, in a
14
community most of whose members she had brought into the world!
The effects of the new male professionalism were not always
beneficial:

Our mechanized civilization, in the interest of a speedy delivery, at the

convenience, even at the timed participation of the physician, often

endangered mother and child with impatient interference in the natural
process, and too often compounded this mistake by anesthetizing the
mother completely. All too soon, as a result ofscientific pride over
inventing a formula for feeding independent of the natural source of
milk, the child was parted from its mother and deprived not only of
mother's milk, but of the experience ofa warm, loving, commensal
,s
relationship with her, the kind we must have also with Mother Earth.

The male-dominated medical profession not only took up delivering

656
Lvomen's babies, but even presumed to teach women how to "mother" Milky Way
i:hem which often led to terrible mistakes like the
tum-of-the-century
minimal-handling theory, which assumed that crying children must not ^^^^^^^^^^^
3e "spoiled" by cuddling them but should be picked up only at

predetermined infrequent intervals. Perhaps the ultimate hubris was

attained by L.K. Frank who wrote: "The psychiatrist is uniquely

Competent to tell us how to practice the Christian injunction to love

16
little children." Here is modern "education" ignorant of the histori-
cal truth that the very existence of the human race depended for

bountless thousands of years long before either Christianity or

psychiatry were heard of on the unique ability of mothers to love little

Ichildren and of "wise-women" to assist the instincts of motherhood.

1. Briffault 1, 488. 2. Dentan, 96-98. 3. Castiglioni, 139. 4. Dumezil, 37.
5. Kramer & Sprenger, 66, 141. 6. Encyc. Brit, "Abortion." 7. White 2, 63.
8. Robbins, 1 57. 9. Hazlitt, 379. 10. Pearsall, N.B.A., 85. 11. White 1, 319.
12. Vetter, 355. 13. Encyc. Brit, "Anesthesia." 14. See Barker-Benfield.
15. Mumford, 469. 16. Torrey, 109.

Milky Way
The Milky Way is our galaxy, from the Greek gala, "mother's milk."
The ancients believed this heavenly star-stream issued from the breasts
of Argive Hera said the stars
pf the Queen of Heaven. Worshippers
1

were made of milk from Hera's Moon-Cow incarnation. Ionians said

the stars came from the udder of their own Moon-Cow, Io, "the
Moon." 2 Others said the Moon-Cow was Europa, consort of Zeus as a
totemic white bull. All white Moon-Cows were the same Goddess,
known from India to Scandinavia as the nourisher of the world and the
3
mother of the star-spirits. See Cow.
The Four Rivers of Paradise were supposed to pour from the four

(teats
of the Moon-Cow's udder. Norsemen said these rivers came
from the udder of Audumla, the Nourisher, a divine cow who existed
before any other creature. 4 She was identified with Mana, the Moon
Mother. Scandinavian mythology knew the Milky Way as Manavegr,
"Moon-Way." To the Celts, it was Bothar-bo finne, Track of the
5

White Cow. 6 The primordial white cow whose udder produced the
star-rivers was almost certainly the same cow who "jumped over the

moon" in the nursery rhyme, because she was shown hovering over the
moon in pre-Christian icons.

Akkadians called the Milky Way River-of-the-Divine-Lady, or

Hiddagal, the Great River, which the Bible rendered
Hiddekel

(Genesis 2:14). Arabians called the Milky Way alSama, Umm Mother
of the Sky. 7 Egyptians called the Milky Way the "Nile in the Sky,"
which poured from the udder of the Moon-Cow, Hathor-Isis, who thus
her "true
gave rain to the rest of the world, though she reserved
Nile" for Egypt.
Classic mythology made the galactic mother Gala-Tea, "Milk

Goddess," a white statue of Aphrodite carved by her priest-consort

657
Mimemata Pygmalion, whose name was a Greek form of Pumiyathon, priest-
8
Miniato, Saint consort of Astarte-Hathor at Byblos. Alternatively, the galaxy spurted

^^^^^^^^^^^m from the breasts of Hera when she suckled Heracles; or else it came
from the breasts of Rhea when she suckled Zeus. 9 Names differed,
but everywhere the Milky Way was regarded as the Goddess's star-milk,
which formed curds to create worlds and creatures.
The Rabelaisian statement that the moon is made of green cheese
dates back to old legends of the moon's creation as a ball of cheese
curdled from the Milky Way. 10 Sometimes it was the earth that was
made of green cheese from the Goddess's milk. The Bible copied a
former address to the Goddess: "Hast thou not poured me out as milk,
and curdled me like cheese?" (Job 10:10).
Anglo-Saxon names for the Milky Way suggested that it was not
only river but also a main street of heaven. It was called Irmin's
a

Way, Waetlinga Straet, Vaelinga, Vaetlinga, or Watlingastrete, Wadlyn

11
Street, and Watling Street.

1. Lawson, 13. 2. Graves, G.M.190, 196. 3. Elworthy, 183, 194.

1,
4. Branston, 57. 5. W.G, 175. 7. Jobes, 103.
Turville-Petre, 76. 6. Graves,
8. Graves, G.M. 1,212. 9. Graves, W.G, 78. 10. Jobes, 27. 1 1. Jobes, 103.

Mimemata
"Imitations of the Mother," old name for models of the movements
of the heavenly bodies, a reference to the Celestial Goddess who was
1

formerly supposed to direct the stars.

1. Lindsay, O. A., 96.

Minaksi
"Fish-Eyed One," title of Kali as the yonic Eye: possible origin of the

European bards' Love-goddess Minne.

Minerva
Roman Goddess of wisdom and the moon derived from the Etruscan
Goddess Menarva or Menrva, probably Crone aspect of the original
a

Capitoline Triad: a Latinized Athene. Her totem was the same as

that of Athene, Lilith, and the Welsh Goddess Blodeuwedd: an owl,

which consequently became known as the bird of wisdom and of

1
witches.
1 . Larousse, 207.

Miniato, Saint
Spurious Christian saint worshipped at Florence, constructed out of
an old Roman title for any god painted with minium, a red pigment

658
 ring holy blood and divine sovereignty. The faces of gods were Minne
lened during sacred processions and festivals. Military heroes at their Miriam
lphal parades also had their faces painted with minium. "Min- 1

I meant simply one who was so reddened. The same custom of

jmonial face-reddening was found among the ancient Celts, and
i
in traditional Chinese drama, where a reddened face betokened a
2
person. See Menstrual Blood.
1. Rose, 294. 2. Williams, 79.

4inne
jLove," the medieval Aphrodite worshipped by M/nnesingers and
dinstreh; perhaps the Moon-goddess Mene or Mana, or the erotic
ish-goddess Minaksi-Kali of India. Minne often appeared as a

lermaid, like Aphrodite. But the Minnesingers said of her, "She

xembles nothing imaginable. Her name is known; her self, howev-
r, ungrasped. . . . She comes never to a false heart." l

Norse Minne a Goddess of Memory, like Mnemos-

skalds called

ne, the Muses who gave poets their inspiration. 2

first of the

pmetimes she was called simply Lofn, "Love." The Edda said she was
pagan Goddess who gave men and women permission to make
3
>ve, as opposed to the Christian church which called lovemaking evil.

ee Romance.
1. Campbell, CM., 181-82. [Link]-Petre,251. 3. Sturluson, 59.

Bnos
Moon's Creature," of Cretan kings, who were incarnate in
title
!
bull-gods cyclically reborn as the Minotaur or "Moon-bull."
icrificial

I Tie Cretan cult probably stemmed from Egyptian pre-dynastic Apis-

conceived by the moon. Minos was the name of a dynasty

ull-kings
the 2nd millenium B.C., when each king married the
lling early in
2
loon-goddess. She was either Mother Rhea Dictynna, or the Daugh-
;r of Crete called Pasiphae, the Shining One. Late mythographers
p-interpreted her ritual coupling with the bull-god as a strange perver-
on and her son the bull-masked Minotaur as a monster. However, it

as the custom of ancient Oriental queens to pantomime intercourse

ith the severed genitals of sacrificial animals. 3
1. Graves, CM. 2, 400. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 293-95. 3. Briffault 3, 188.

Miriam var. Mariamne,

Miriamne
lemitic name for the Goddess Mari, meaning "Fruitful Mother."
he was canonized in many forms, notably Mary; she was also a

659
Mirror St. Miriamne said to be a daughter of St. Philip, himself once the pagan
god of May Day. See Mari; Mary.
1

^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 . Brewster, 221.

Mirror
The ancients attributed mystic powers to any reflective surface, solid
or liquid, because the reflection was considered part of the soul. Heavy
taboos were laid on the act of disturbing water into which a person
was gazing, because shattering the image meant danger to the soul.
Hence the similar taboo on breaking a mirror, now said to bring
seven years' bad luck.

Damage to the reflection-soul was the real basis of the myth of

Narcissus, usually misinterpreted as a fable of excessive self-love.
Narcissus couldn't bear to leave the reflection of his beautiful face in th<

magic pool of the nymph Echo, and so he pined away and died, and
turned into a flower on the bank. Echo also pined until nothing
remained of her but a voice. Actually, Echo was the Goddess of
death-by-water, who lay in wait to seize one's reflection-soul,
according
to beliefs still current among Africans and Melanesians. Narcissus
1

was another name of the sacrificed springtime-flower hero also called

Antheus, Adonis, Hyacinthus, or Dionysus, who died at the May

Day Heroantheia (Hero-flowering) in Crete, Mycenae, and
Lacedaemon. 2
A mirror meant the god's death in the Pelasgian myth of Dionysus
The Titans trapped his soul in a mirror, as the soul of Narcissus was

trapped in reflective water. Then Dionysus was torn to pieces in the rite

of the omophagy (see Cannibalism). Many centuries later, the

gypsies repeated a tale of Dionysus transformed into the Enchanted or

Accursed Hunter, whose soul was trapped in a mirror by a "witch"
3
Mara, the same as the Hindu death-spirit Mara. Among Slavic gypsies,
Mara or Mora was a destroying Fate-goddess who rode the night
winds and "drank the blood of men." 4
The tragically deceased Narcissus was taken into the Christian
canon have been a "bishop" of Jerusalem in the first
as a saint, said to

century (when there were no bishops of Jerusalem). Instead of dying

like his ephebic namesake at the pinnacle of youth and beauty, St.

Narcissus lived to be 116 years old. 5 He was one of the pseudosaints

whose legend was supposed to convince the pagans that the Christian
faith could grant the gift of longevity.
Mirrors were connected with death in many Christian supersti- i

Demons, werewolves, vampires, and such "soulless" creatures

tions.

showed no reflection in a mirror. Many Europeans still turn mirrors to

the wall after a death in the house, in the belief that mirrors trap the
souls of the living or detain the souls of the dead on their journey. 6

Some say one who looks in a mirror in a house of death will see not

660
his own

him through
The
face but the face of the deceased. 7 Pope John XXII had an
inordinate fear of mirrors; he claimed wizards sent devils to attack
mirrors. 8

be made of polished stone, a

so-called witch's mirror could

sheet of metal, a crystal, or a bowl of water or ink. Water represented

the Abyss, the numinous hidden spirit world; its reflections therefore
could be read as shadows cast ahead by future events. In fairy tales,
^
Mistletoe

^^

the land of souls often appeared as a hall of mirrors. 9

Cabalists professed to read the will of the seven planetary spirits in
seven mirrors, each made of the appropriate metal for its day, its
deity, and its subject matter. Questions about the great folk of the earth
were addressed to a golden mirror on Sun-day. Dreams and mystic
enlightenment were observed on Monday (Moon-day) with a mirror of
silver. Enmities and lawsuits were resolved on Tuesday with a Mars
mirror of iron. A Mercury mirror of quicksilver in glass was consulted
on Wednesday about money matters. A Jupiter mirror of tin was
questioned on Thursday about worldly successes. Questions of love
were resolved on Friday with a Venus mirror of copper. Lost articles
and secrets could be discovered on Saturday by a Saturn mirror of
10
lead.

The esoteric meaning of the mirror was explained long ago by

Plotinus, who connected it with the Hindu concept of Maya, crea-
tress of the "reflections" of spiritual reality in the mirror of the material
world. "Matter serves as a mirror upon which the Universal Soul

projects the images or reflections of its creations, and thus gives rise to

the phenomena of the sensible universe."

n
Oriental mystics were close to the conclusion that the Universal
Soul really meant one's own soul, where reality was perceived as in a

mirror, darkly. A Buddhist aphorism said: "All existence is like a

reflection in a mirror, without substance, only a phantom of the
mind. When the finite mind acts, then all kinds of things arise; when the
12
finite mind ceases to act, then all kinds of things cease." In other

words, the world exists only for those who live and perceive it. This was
an idea that Western philosophers played with endlessly, even to the
logical but irrational idea that if there were no intelligent beings to

perceive it, the universe would not exist at all.

1. Frazer, G.B., 223. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 1 13. 3. Groome, 131-32.

4. R.E.L. Masters, 188. 5. Brewster, 467. 6. Clodd, 33-34.
[Link], P.E., 36. 8. White 1, 384. 9. Guerber, L.R., 219.
[Link],90. 11. Shirley, 42. 12. BardoThodol, 111.

Mistletoe
Mistletoe was the Golden Bough that gave access to the underworld,

according to pagan belief. The gold color of dry mistletoe was seen as a
symbol of apotheosis, as was gold metal. The living plant was viewed
as the genitalia of the oak god, Zeus or Jupiter or Dianus of Dodona,

661
Mistletoe consort of the Moon-mother Diana Nemetona, Lady of the Grove.
At the season of sacrifice, druidic priests ceremonially castrated the oak
^^^^^^^^^^^ god by cutting off his mistletoe with a golden moon-sickle, catching it

in a white cloth before could touch the ground, so it remained like

it

every sacrificial deity "between heaven and earth." '

The phallic significance of mistletoe probably stemmed from the

notion that its whitish berries were semen-drops, as the red berries of

itsfeminine counterpart, holly, were equated with the Goddess's men-

strual blood. Among Indo-European peoples generally, castration of

the god was customary before his immolation.

Sacred-oak cults continued throughout the Christian era. In the
8th century a.d., the Hessians worshipped the oak god at Geismar
and gave hjs holy tree the name of Jove (Jupiter). As late as 1874, an an-
cient oak-tree shrine in Russia was worshipped by a congregation led
by an Orthodox priest. Wax candles were affixed to the tree,and the
celebrants prayed,"Holy Oak Hallelujah, pray for us." A drunken
2
orgy ensued. Modern customs of kissing under the mistletoe are pale
shadows of the sexual orgies that once accompanied the rites of the
oak god.
To Nordic pagans, mistletoe symbolized the death of the savior-

god Balder, son of Odin, whose Second Coming was expected after
doomsday, when he would return to earth to establish the new creation.
Balder was slain by a spear of mistletoe wielded by Hod, the Blind

God, another name for Odin himself. Or, some said Hod was Balder's
dark twin, corresponding to the light-and-dark year-gods Set and
3
Horus in Egypt.
Some derive the Saxon mis-el-tu from Mas, the Sanskrit "Messi-
ah" (Vishnu), and tal, a pit, metaphorically the earth's womb. Thus it

stood for the god's entry into his Mother-bride. Norsemen's word for
mistletoe was Guidhel, the same "guide to hell" as Virgil's Golden
4
Bough.
After they were converted to Christianity, Saxons claimed the
mistletoe was "the forbidden tree in the middle of the trees of Eden,"

i.e., the Tree of Knowledge, which was Ropularly supposed to have

furnished the wood for Jesus's cross. 5
The phallic meaning of the mistletoe made it the "key" that

opened the underworld womb, key and phallus being interchange-

able in mystical writings. Some treatises said, "All locks are opened by
the herb Missell toe." Combined with the "feminine" herb Alcyone,
it "makes a man do often the act of generation." 6
The pagan's interpretations of mistletoe were still understood in
Renaissance times, when it was adopted as an emblem of the new
Messiah and "carried to the high altar" of English churches on
Christmas Eve. But some Christian writers insisted that the mistletoe
"never entered those sacred edifices but by mistake, or ignorance of the

662
jjxtons;
for it was the heathenish and profane plant, as having been of Mithra
bch distinction in the pagan rites of Druidism." 7

1. Frazer, G.B., 763-73, 816. 2. Spence, 78, 108. 3. de Lys, 60.

4. Hazlitt, 412. 5. Male, 153. 6. Wedeck, 189. 7. Hazlitt, 413. ^^^^^^^^

Aithra

j'ersian savior,
whose cult was the leading rival of
Christianity in
lome, and more successful than Christianity for the first four centuries

If the "Christian" era. In 307 a.d. the emperor officially designated

l
Mithra "Protector of the Empire."
Christians copied many details of the Mithraic mystery-religion,

xplaining the resemblance later with their favorite argument, that

le devil had anticipated the true faith by imitating it before Christ's
irth. Some resemblances between Christianity and Mithraism were
3 close that even St. Augustine declared the priests of Mithra wor-
2
lipped the same deity as he did.
Mithra was born on the 25th of December, called "Birthday of the
le Unconquered Sun," which was finally taken over by Christians in
le 4th century a.d. as the birthday of Christ. 3 Some said Mithra sprang
om an incestuous union between the sun god and his own mother,
ist as Jesus, who was God, was born of the Mother of God. Some
laimed Mithra's mother was a mortal virgin. Others said Mithra had
o mother, but was miraculously born of a female Rock, the petra
4
enetrix, fertilized by the Heavenly Father's phallic lightning.
Mithra's birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi who
5
jrought gifts to his sacred birth-cave of the Rock. Mithra performed
ne usual assortment of miracles: raising the dead, healing the sick,

laking the blind see and the lame walk, casting out devils. As a

leter, son of the petra, he carried the keys of the kingdom of heaven
6
lee Peter, Saint). His triumph and ascension to heaven were
deb rated at the spring equinox (Easter), when the sun rises toward its

pogee.
Before returning to heaven, Mithra celebrated a Last Supper with
is twelve disciples,who represented the twelve signs of the zodiac,
i memory of this, his worshippers partook of a sacramental meal of
7
read marked with a cross. This was one of seven Mithraic sacra-
8
lents, the models for the Christians' seven sacraments. It was called
lizd, Latin missa, English mass. Mithra's image was buried in a rock

>mb, the same sacred cave that represented his Mother's womb. He
9
'as withdrawn from it and said to live again.

Like early Christianity, Mithraism was an ascetic, anti-female

iligion. Its priesthood consisted of celibate

men only. 10 Women
-ere forbidden to enter Mithraic temples.
11
The women of Mithraic

663
Mithra families had nothing to do with the men's cult, but attended services
of the Great Mother in their own temples of Isis, Diana, or Juno. 12

mm^^^^mmg^ ^m
l
To eliminate the female principle from their creation myth,
Mithraists replaced the Mother of All Living in the primal garden of
paradise (Pairidaeza) with the bull named Sole-Created. Instead of Eve
this bull was the partner of the first man. All creatures were born
from the bull's blood. Yet the bull's birth-giving was oddly female-
imitative. The animal was castrated and sacrificed, and its blood was
delivered to the moon for magical fructification, the moon being the
source of women's magic lunar "blood of life" that produced real
children on earth. 13

Persians have been called the Puritans of the heathen world. The]
developed Mithraism out of an earlier Aryan religion that was not so
14
puritanical or so exclusively male-oriented. Mithra seems to have bee
the Indo-Iranian sun god Mitra, or Mitravaruna, one of the the
twelve zodiacal sons of the Infinity-goddess Aditi. Another of Aditi's
sons was Aryaman, eponymous ancestor of "Aryans," whom the
Persians transformed into Ahriman, the Great Serpent of Darkness,
Mithra's enemy. 15

Early on, there seems to have been a feminine Mithra. Herodotus

said the Persians used to have a sky-goddess Mitra, the same as
Mylitta, Assyria's Great Mother. 16 Lydians combined Mithra with his
archaic spouse Anahita as an androgynous Mithra-Anahita, identified
with Sabazius-Anaitis, the Serpent and Dove of Anatolian mystery
17
cults.

Anahita was the Mother of Waters, traditional spouse of the solar

god whom she bore, loved, and swallowed up. She was identified
with the Anatolian Great Goddess Ma. Mithra was naturally coupled
with her, as her opposite, a spirit of fire, light, and the sun. 18 Her
"element," water, overwhelmed the world in the primordial flood,

when one man built an and saved himself, together with his cattle,
ark
19
according to Mithraic myth. The story seems to have been based on
the Hindu Flood of Manu, transmitted through Persian and Babylo-
nian scriptures to appear in a late, rather corrupt version in the Old
Testament. See Flood.
What began in water would end in fire, according to Mithraic
eschatology. The great battle between the forces of light and darkness
in the Last Days would destroy the earth with its upheavals and
burnings. Virtuous ones who followed the teachings of the Mithraic
priesthood would join the spirits of light and be saved. Sinful ones who v
followed other teachings would be cast into hell with Ahriman and
the fallen angels. The Christian notion of salvation was almost wholly a

product of this Persian eschatology, adopted by Semitic eremites and

sun-cultists like the Essenes, and by Roman military men who thought
the rigid discipline and vivid battle-imagery of Mithraism appropriate
]

664
 for warriors. Under emperors like Julian and Commodus, Mithra Mffi
became the supreme patron of Roman armies. 20 Mnemosyne
After extensive contact with Mithraism, Christians also
began to _^^__^^____
describe themselves as soldiers for Christ; to call their savior Light of
the World, Helios the Rising Sun, and Sun of Righteousness; to
celebrate their feasts on Sun-day rather than the Jewish sabbath; to
claim their savior's death was marked by an eclipse of the sun; and to
adopt the seven Mithraic sacraments. Like Mithraists, Christians
practiced baptism to ascend after death through the planetary spheres to
the highest heaven, while the wicked (unbaptized) would be dragged
down to darkness. 21

Mithra's cave-temple on the Vatican Hill was seized by Christians

22
n 376 ad. Christian bishops of Rome pre-empted even the Mithraic
23
nigh priest's title of Pater Patrum, which became Papa, or Pope.
ft

Mithraism entered into many doctrines of Manichean Christianity

jnd continued to influence its old rival for over a thousand years. 24 The
Mithraic festival of Epiphany, marking the arrival of sun-priests or
at the Savior's birthplace, was adopted by the Christian church

ly as late as 8 1 3 a.d. 25
Pagi
I. Legge 2, 271; Angus, 168. 2. Reinach, 73.
3. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 146; Campbell, M.I., 33. 4. de Riencourt, 135.
5. H. Smith, 129; Hooke, S.P., 85; Cumont, M.M., 131. 6. H. Smith, 129.
7. Hooke, S.P., 89; 160. 8. James, 250. 9. H. Smith, 130, 201.
Cumont, M.M.,
10. Legge 2, 261.
Lederer, 36. 12. Angus, 205. 13. Campbell, Oc.M., 204.
1 1 .

14. Knight, D.W.P, 63. 15. OTlaherty, 339. 16. Larousse, 314.
17. Cumont, M.M., 17. 18. Cumont, O.R.R.R, 54, 65. 19. Cumont, M.M., 138.
20. Cumont, MM., 87-89. 21. Cumont, M.M., 144-45. 22. J.H. Smith, D.C.R, 146.
23. H. Smith, 252. 24. Cumont, O.R.R.R, 154. 25. Brewster, 55.

riiti

Mother," the Great Goddess of the Chukchi. She gave the secrets
f magic to men, in return for the sacrifice of her consort's penis, which
pudding and given to her to eat. She was
1
ras pounded into a
entified with the moon, to which Chukchi men showed their genitals
hen begging for the gift of power. See Castration.
1. Hays, 412.

Inemosyne
i Memory," first of the Muses, an old version of the Ninefold
kxldess. Poets called on Mnemosyne to help them avoid errors in
citing the sacred sagas, learned by rote in pre-literate cultures.
1
She
as linked with Mother Earth, whom Nordic bards invoked under the
ime of Erda.
1. Graves, CM. 2, 400.

665
Modir Modir
Mola
"Mother," the Norse Goddess who gave birth to the ruling caste of
jarls (earls), or landowners. See Caste. Her name was related to
Germanic Moder, meaning not only "mother" but also clay, mud, a
mixture of the two feminine elements: earth-and-water. Thus, Modir
was the same as the Moist-Mother-Earth worshipped by the Slavs,
and called Mati-Syra-Zemlya.

Modranect
"Night of the Mother," Old Saxon term for Christmas Eve, the
pagan winter-solstice festival, when the sun god was reborn
traditional

from the Great Goddess. Mary replaced the pagan Mother, but the
1

Christmas Eve rituals remained much the same. See Christmas.

[Link]-Petre,227.

Mohini
"The Enchantress," a Vedic nymph whose "white bowl" or belly-
cauldron was said to be the source of Soma, the gods' elixir of

immortality. See Cauldron; Menstrual Blood.

van Moerae Moirai

The Three Fates of Greek myth: Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the

Measurer, Atropos the Cutter, western versions of the Oriental Triple

Goddess as Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. All nations of the ancient
world knew the theory thatlife was a mystical thread spun by the Virgin

measured and sustained by the Mother, and cut by the Crone.

The Goddess Aphrodite took trinitarian form as the Great Moira,
said to be older than Time. Greek funerary hymns consigning the
1

dead to her care were known as Moirologhia, invocations of the Fates.

[Link],57.

var. Moly Mola

Salted flour prepared by Vestal Virgins to sprinkle over every animal
Rome. Mola was credited with miraculous!
offered in public sacrifice in
1

powers, as was the salt that Christians later used to dedicate altars.

[Link].318.

666
Molech Molech
based on Hindu Agni. His name meant Monotheism
I'yrian fire god, probably

king," like the Semitic mekk or melkart. He was assimilated to the

llreek's Heracles, whose sacrificial victims were slain by fire.
var. Moloch
Molech was worshipped by the Jews in the time of Solomon,
ihose famous temple was actually built by the king of Tyre (1 Kings
ll-l 1). Jews seem to have identified Molech with Yahweh when they
Ijere passing their firstborn children through the fire to Molech
Leviticus 18:21); Yahweh also demanded sacrifice of firstborn children
ixodus 13:2).
The shrine of Molech near Jerusalem was Gehenna. Christians

dopted this word out of the Bible as a synonym for hell, and also

ave Molech a prominent position among the demons. 1

[Link], CM, 186-87.

Money
The so-called "root of all evil" took its name from a title of Rome's
treatMother, Juno Moneta (Juno the Admonisher), whose Capitoline
bmple included the Roman mint. Silver and gold coins manufac-
ured there were valuable not only by reason of their precious metal but
Isoby the blessing of the Goddess herself, which could effect good
Later popes carried on the pagan tradition
prtune and healing magic.
\y blessing Christian amulets and holy medals which were also used
1
like money.
p trade,
The attendant spirit of Juno Moneta was the erotic Cupid,

^responding to the Greeks' Eros, who was both child and compan-
used to mean erotic desire, but in
pn of Aphrodite. Thus, "cupidity"
Christian times its meaning was changed to greed for money.

1 . Larousse, 204.

Monotheism
Though in practice they worshipped three gods, one goddess, and
nnumerable demigods (angels and saints), Christian theologians insist-
xl their religion was monotheism, and monotheism was the highest

brm of religion. Vetter comments:

One might well ask, where is the evidence that the worship ofone
supreme god is so superior to the worship of several gods? that
is

unless one takes the position that it is difficult enough to furnish proof of
the existence of one god, and that each additional god assumed to exist
would simply double the problem faced. If the reduction in numbers of
deities of itself has merit, then why are not those religions in which no

gods whatever are worshipped the "highest" ofall?'

667
 Mons Veneris There was nothing about the original impulse toward
lofty
who identified themselves with a god
monotheism: the conceit of kings
i^^^HBM and demanded that god's supremacy. One of the earliest self-
worshipping monotheists was the Egyptian pharaoh Ikhnaton
(Akhenaten), who reigned from 1379 to 1362 B.C.
Ikhnaton decided that the sole supreme deity was Aton, symbol-
ized by the sun disc and incarnate on earth in himself. He moved his
family and court an earthly paradise 300 miles north of Thebes,
to to a
site now called Tell el Amarna, a great city and temple-palace. He
ordered even the word "gods" removed from inscriptions
throughout
own divine alter ego reigned alone. Jewish monothe-
the land, so his
ism probably originated in Egypt. The Old Testament contains
writings
copied from the cult of Aton, especially the 104th Psalm, thought to
have been written by Ikhnaton himself.
Egyptian priesthoods of the old deities refused to tolerate the royal i

monotheism. Ikhnaton died mysteriously. His body disappeared, and

wasn't buried in the tomb prepared for it. His name was erased from

king lists. He was described as a criminal. The Egyptians plainly

2

were not disposed to call monotheism a "higher" religion.

Another self- worshipper was the Roman emperor Elagabalus (He--
liogabalus), who identified himself with the solar god El Gabal, and
tried to absorb all other deities into a single faith. He built a temple on
the Palatine, "and he desired to bring into that temple the
image of
the Magna Mater and the fire of Vesta and the Palladium and the
shields and all were sacred to the Romans; and he strove to
things that
bring it no god save El Gabal should be worshipped in
to pass that

Rome." 3 But the Roman people were not ready to limit themselves
to El Gabal or any other single god.

Fifty years later, Aurelian erected in the Campus Martius his greati
temple to the Mithraic sun god, Deus Sol Invictus, the only god.
Diocletian also declared this god Rome's sole ruling deity. Mithraism
almost succeeded in establishing Roman monotheism. Mithra was
adored "from the mouth of the Danube to Hadrian's Wall in Britain,
from Hadrian's Wall to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the Pillars of
Hercules to the Desert of Sahara." Moesia, Dacia, Pannonia, and
Noricum adopted the cult, as did southern France, especially Lyons. I

Mithraic inscriptions and sanctuaries have been found at Ostia, Naples,

4
Palermo, Syracuse, Spoleto, and other sites. See Mithra.
[Link], 206-7. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Ikhnaton." 3. Carter, 81. 4. Carter, 91-92.

Mons Veneris
"Mount of Venus," simultaneously a mountain shrine and a figura-
tive reference to female genitals. Medical terminology still calls the
pubic area mons veneris. Medieval Europe had mountains of the

668
same name. Pope Pius II said witchesmet by night on Mons Veneris Montanism
(German Venusberg) to consult demons and learn magic. 1

Moon
[Link], 160.

Montanism
sect founded by Montanus, a former priest of Cybele.
jChristian
Because it allowed women to prophesy and preach, Montanism was
declared a heresy and suppressed.
1

[Link],278.

Montsalvatch
'Mount of Salvation," the Temple of the Holy Grail vaguely located
n the Pyrenees. This was probably an alternate name for the fortress of
he heretical Cathari at Montsegur in the Pyrenees, where members
)f the sect were trapped and beseiged for years by papal armies, until the

was finally captured and destroyed in 1244. The Grail

1
brtress

emple was supposed to be the residence of Knights Templar who rode

2
orth to the assistance of ladies in distress. See Grail, Holy.
1. See Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montsegur. 2. Guerber, L.M.A., 200.

Boon
'Egyptian priests style the

ructification

Land of the Moon." 2

/as
of plants."

always assigned to the

l
moon the Mother of the Universe,"
because the moon, "having the light which makes moist
'lutarch said,

nd pregnant, is promotive of the generation of living beings and the

Upper Egypt used to be called Khemennu,
In worship of the heavenly bodies, primacy
moon. 3 Babylonians gave the moon prece-
Moon
D
lence over the sun. Oriental nations in general worshipped the moon
the sun. 4 Moses Maimonides said moon worship was the religion
pore
|f Adam.
5
The Gnostic sect of Naassians believed in a primordial
6
eing known as "the heavenly horn of the moon." The moon was the

ternal Great Mother. In central Asia it was said the moon is the
Joddess's mirror reflecting everything in the world, like the mirror of
|

7
laya.

Many savages revere the moon more than the sun, reasoning that
le Moon-mother gives her light at night, when it is needed, whereas
iesun shines only by day. This belief presupposes that sunlight and
8
aylight are not the same, a common idea among primitives.
Writers
the Bible made this same mistake. They said God created "light"

laylight) before the sun and moon (Genesis 1:5, 16).

669
Moon Ashanti people had a generic term for all deities, Boshun,
"Moon." In the Basque language, the words for "deity" and "moon"
were the same. Sioux Indians called the moon "The Old Woman Who
Never Dies." Iroquois called her "The Eternal One." 9 Rulers in the
Eritrean zone of South Africa bore the Goddess's name, "Moon." 10
Ancient rulers of the Tutsi tribe were named Mwezi, "Moon." n
The Gaelic name of the moon, gealach, came from Gala or Galata,
original Moon-mother of Gaelic and Gaulish tribes. Britain used to
be called Albion, the Milk-white Moon-goddess. Persians called the
moon Metra (Matra, mother), "whose love penetrated
12
everywhere."
The root word for both "moon" and "mind" was the Indo-
Mana or men gave European manas, mana, or men, representing the Great Mother's
thename of the pre- "wise blood" in women, governed by the moon. 13 Its derivative mania
Roman Latin
Goddess Menrva
used to mearl ecstatic revelation, just as lunacy used to mean
possession by the spirit of Luna, the moon. 14 To be "moon-touched" 01
(Minerva), and such
words as mentality, "moon-struck" meant to be chosen by the Goddess; a "moon-calf"
menstrual, menol- was one carried away by love of her. When patriarchal thinkers belittled
ogy, mensuration, the Goddess, these words came to mean mere craziness. The
mentor, menage (a
moonstruck person was described as "silly," a word that formerly meant
matrilineal household),
15
omen "blessed," possibly derived from Selene, the Moon.
(a revelation
from the moon), and To the Greeks, menos meant both "moon" and "power." To the
amen (the moon of Romans, the morality of the Moon-goddess was superior to that of
rebirth). the Sun-god. Plutarch said, "The effects of the moon are similar to the
of reason and wisdom, whereas those of the sun appear to be
effects
16
brought about by physical force and violence."
In many cultures, the Moon-goddess and the Creatress were one
and the same. Polynesians called the Creatress Hina, "Moon." She
was the first woman, and every woman is a wahine, made in the image
of Hina. 17
To the Finns, the Creatress was Luonnotar (Luna, the
Moon). She brooded over the sea until she brought forth the World
18
Egg, heaven, and earth. Scandinavians sometimes called the Crea- j

tress Mardoll, "MoonShining Over the Sea."

19

The Moon-goddess created time, with all its cycles of creation,

growth, decline, and destruction, which is why ancient calendars
were based on phases of the moon and menstrual cycles (see Men-
strual Calendar). The moon still determines agricultural work in
20
some parts of India. Indonesian moon priestesses were responsible for I

finding the right phase of the moon for every undertaking. The

Dayaks prayed to the moon for children, increase of cattle, and

abundant crops; they said she was the cause and measurer of time. 21
Greeks said the same of Demeter, whose priests were called Sons of the j

Moon. 22
Peruvians called the moon either Mama Quilla or Mama Ogllo, ;

sometimes identifying the two as mother and daughter, like Demeter I

and Kore. Mama Quilla married the sun and gave birth to Mama Ogllol
"Egg," the moon-maiden and her brother the sun-man. These two

670
mated and founded the Inca royal line on the site of Cuzco, "the Moon
Navel," in Inca cosmology the center of the world. 23
Because the Moon-goddess was threefold, the Destroyer as well as
the Creator, she was the devourer of the dead as well as the
^_.^_^^^_
giver of
life. In Mexico her Destroyer aspect was Mictecaciuatl, who roamed the
skies at night, seeking victims to devour. She was called Lady of the
Place of the Dead, in appearance like Kali the Destroyer. She was not

only the moon but also the All-mother from whose genital hole in the
earth humanity crawled in the beginning, and to which humanity would
24
return.

The Vedas say all souls return to the moon after death, to be
devoured by maternal spirits. 25 Trobriand Islanders spoke of these
spirits as "female sorcerers" associated with the moon, eaters of the

dead. 26 Maoris called the Moon Mother "man-eater." Tartars of

central Asia worshipped the moon as Macha Alia, Queen of Life and
Death, said to be an eater of men. Africans said the moon searched
for men to devour. 27

Orphic and Pythagorean sects viewed the moon as the home of

the dead, a female Gate (yoni) through which souls passed on the way
to the paradise-fields of the stars. 28 Greeks often located the Elysian
Fields,home of the blessed dead, in the moon. 29 Kastor of Rhodes said
the shoes of Roman senators were decorated with ivory lunules

(crescents) to show that after death they would inhabit the moon. 30
Roman religion taught that "the souls of the just are purified in the
moon." 31 Wearing the crescent was "visible worship" of the Goddess. 32
That was why the prophet Isaiah denounced the women of Zion for
wearing lunar amulets (Isaiah 3:18). "The crescent moon worn by
Diana and used in the worship of other Goddesses is said to be the

Ark or vessel of boat-like shape, symbol of fertility or the Container of

33
jthe Germ of all life." The same Ark carried gods, like Osiris, into

death; which may account for Jeremiah's hostility to the Ark's symbol-

fern(Jeremiah 3:16).
Semites feared the devouring Old Moon as Hindus feared the

devouring Kalika. Her dual nature may account for the correlation
between Semitic ima, "mother," and e-mah, "terror." 34 Superstitious
Christians sometimes refused to sleep where moonlight might touch

jthem. According to Roger Bacon, "Many have died from not protecting
themselves from the rays of the moon." 35 There was always an
issociation with death:

The idea of the journey to the moon after death is one which has been
preserved in the more advanced cultures. It is not difficult to find . . .

. themes of the moon as the Land of the Dead or the regenerating

. .

receptacle ofsouls. . . . This is one reason why the moon presides over
the formations oforganisms, and also over their decomposition. i6

Because the moon was the receptacle of souls between reincar-

nations, it sheltered both the dead and the unborn, who were one and

671
Moon if a man dreamed of his
the same. Believers in prophetic dreams said
own image in the moon, he would become the father of a son. If a
woman dreamed of her own image in the moon, she would give birth
to a daughter. 57

Most important for its association with birth, the moon was
supposed to be the receptacle of menstrual blood by which each
mother formed the life of her child. This sacer, taboo moon-fluid kep
even the gods alive. The moon was "the cup of the fluid of life
immortal, quickening the vegetable realm and whatsoever grows in the
sub-lunar sphere, quickening also the immortals on high." 38

Many myths of the moon-journey bore witness to the ancient

belief in lunar heavens. Gypsies opposed the Christian savior with
their own Romany savior who carried souls to the moon, like Hermes
39
Psychopomp. Strangest of all myths of the moon-journey was one
Digby mystery play involving Jesus himself. The Digby mystery play of the 1 6th century
English Renaissance quoted "Jesus's hymn to the Moon, his mother, the vessel ... in
passion play, Mary whom he rested before he ascended to the Sun." 40
Magdalene, by an
Peasants in France and Portugal confused Jesus's mother with thi
anonymous author
tentatively identified as Moon-goddess, whom they called "Our Lady" and "Mother of
Miles Blomefylde. God." 41 Scottish women curtsied to the moon when they saw her,

saying "It is a fine moon, God bless her." 42 In the Loire district,
children's rhymes spoke of Madame Moon, giver of babies.
43
A medi-
eval German sect of Cathari worshipped the moon as Heva (Eve),
Mother of All 44
Living, an older incarnation of the virgin Mary. Even
the orthodox church held that, as Jesus was the second Adam, so

Mary was the second Eve; and Mary was associated with both the moon
and the sea.

As the moon governs the sea's tides, so she was supposed to goverr
the tides of life and death. Shore dwellers had an ineradicable
conviction that a baby can be born only on an incoming tide, and a

dying person cannot expire until the tide goes out. As a corollary, it
was often said birth at a full tide or a full moon betokens a lucky life.
45

The soul may ride the tide in lunar form, according to Caesarius of
Heisterbach: "The soul is a spiritual substance of spherical nature, like
the globe of the moon." 46
Scottish girls refused to schedule a wedding day for any time othei
than the full moon, the most fortunate time for women. 47 Scandina-
vian women particularly prized amulets made of silver, the moon metal.
The moon was the special deity of women even during the Renais-
sance, when it was said if a woman wanted anything she should not ask
God but should pray instead to the moon. 48
Witches invoked their Goddess by "drawing down the moon," a
ritedating back to moon-worshipping Thessaly, centuries before the
Christian era. 49 Thessalian priestesses also prefigured "witchcraft" by

laying curses with "moon-dew," said to be the first menstrual blood

of girls gathered during a lunar eclipse. 50 Medieval folk believed such a

672
curse incurable. St. Augustine and other fathers of the church Moon
jbelieved
whatVirgil said about moon-priestesses, that they could draw
down the moon, stop rivers in their courses, turn back the wheel of
^^^^^^^^^^
the stars, or bring trees marching downhill. 51 St. Augustine berated
women for dancing "impudently and filthily all the day long upon the
|days of the new moon." 52
Few religious symbols occurred in so many diverse contexts as
symbols of the moon. In the runic menological calendar the moon-
sickle stood for the festival of Harvest Home, which the Scots called

Kirn from Koreion, moon-virgin Kore which Christians renamed

55
!the Feast of Our Lady of Mercy. In Gaul the crescent moon stood for
the druidic Diana. Crescere meant "to grow," a form of Latin creare,
54
to produce, to create. Hence the crescent. Gauls made communion
bakes in crescent shape. Modern France still makes them, and calls
colloquially known as "moon-teeth."
55
jrhem croissants, "crescents,"
The moon ruled the sexuality of women, and sometimes made
them scornful of the male-dominated society's notions of hierarchy.
An astrological book of 1688 warned: "The double conjunction of
Venus and the Moon produces extreme lubricity, brings venereal
disease, and causes women of quality to become enamored of
menservants." 56

Despite all the church's condemnations, rural folk continued to

[rust
the Moon-mother in all their most important activities. A
Ipopular almanac said: "Kill fat swine for bacon about the full moon. . . .

iJhear sheep at the moon's increase: fell hand timber from the full to

jhe change . . .
;
horses and mares must be put together in the increase

|f
the moon, for foals got in the wane are not accounted strong . . .
;

should be gathered, and cattle gelded, in the wane of the moon."

fruit

Most of all, the moon always governed magic. Melton said in 1620
mat no sorcerer ever drew a circle of protection without observing the
lime of the moon. 57
1. Knight, S.L., 99. 2. Hallet, 115. 3. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 19, 69.
4. Budge, G.E. 2, 34. 5. Briffault 3, 78. 6. Jung & von Franz, 136.
7. Jobes, 32. 8. Briffault 2, 677. 9. Briffault 2, 436, 601, 670; 3, 76.
10. Campbell, P.M., 166. 11. Hallet, 152. 12. Jobes, 29.
13. Avalon, 178; Mahanirvanatantra, liii. 14. de Lys, 414.
15. Cavendish, T, 62. 16. Briffault 3,2. 17. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 43.
18. Larousse, 304. 19. Briffault 3,67. 20. O'Flaherty, 89.
21. Briffault 2, 711. 22. Castiglioni, 192. 23. Jobes, 41, 58.
24. Summers, V, 263-64. 25. Briffault 3, 132. 26. Hays, 400.
27. Briffault 2, 576. 28. Lindsay, O.A., 92. 29. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 96, 107.
30. Lindsay, O.A., 222. 31. Gettings, 91. 32. Elworthy, 194.
33. Avalon, 423. 34. Brasch, 25. 35. Gifford, 31. 36. Gettings, 95.
37. Hazlitt, 191. [Link], 167. 39. Trigg, 202. 40. Malvern, 121.
41. Harding, 100. 42. Hazlitt, 417. 43. Briffault 2, 589.
44. Knight, D.W.P., 179. 45. de Lys, 398. 46. Jung von Franz, 1 38. &
47. Briffault 2, 587-88. 48. de Lys, 458. 49. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 186.
50. Graves, W.G., 170. 51. Cavendish. P.E., 97. 52. Hazlitt, 417.
53. Brewster, 424. 54. Potter & Sargent, 278. 55. Jung, M.H.S., 276.
56. de Givry, 224. 57. Hazlitt, 418, 143.

673
Mordrain Mordrain and Nascien
"Death and Birth," two heathen rulers of the holy city of Sarras, the
^^^^^^^ New Jerusalem, according to Holy Grail legends. They seem to have
represented the Lady of Life and Lord of Death common to most
pagan traditions.

Mordred
"The Killer," who was a son, a uterine nephew, supplanter, and
Oedipal rival of King Arthur, who tried to escape Fate by destroying
Mordred as soon as he was born, and failed. Mordred survived an
intended Slaughter of the Innocents, grew up, and lived to betray and
Like other supplanter-gods he was born of a
slay his father-king.
version of the Triple Goddess, Margawse, the middle one of Arthur's
three "sisters" who really represented the Virgin, Mother, and
Crone. See Arthur.

Morgan Le Fay
Celtic death-goddess: Morgan the Fate, or Fata Morgana, or the
Triple Morrigan, or "Morgue la Faye." Sometimes she was a Ninefok
Goddess, the Nine Sisters called Morgen ruling the Fortunate Isles in \

the far west, where dead heroes went. 2 Sometimes she, or they, became
mermaids. Morgans or "sea-women" could "draw down to their

palaces of gold and crystal at the bottom of the sea or of ponds, those
who venture imprudently too near the water."
3

Like Macha, the Crone aspect of the Morrigan, Morgan as

Mother Death cast the destroying curse on every man. Even Arthuri- ,

an romances which presented her as a human being, Arthur's sister,

inconsistently admitted: "Morgan the Goddess is her name, and

there is never a man so high and proud but she can humble and tame :

him." 4
Sometimes she kindly promised immortality to her favored lovers,
like Ogier the Dane, who accompanied her to her paradise. As the

Morrigan, she stage-managed the contest between Cu Chulainn and a

giantnamed Terrible. She presided over Cu Chulainn's killing of his

springtime rival, in a tale based on the Celtic legend of Gawain and the
Green Knight. 5
Morgan sat at the head of the table in the Green Knight's castle,

presiding over the death and resurrection of the rival year-gods as

they beheaded one another in their proper seasons. Gawain was
obviously a solar hero, his strength waxing in the morning and
waning in the afternoon; he was one of four brothers representing the 1

four solar seasons. The Green Knight was his perpetual antagonist.

674
Like Njord and Frey, Horus and Set, Gwynn ap Nudd and

blood-red shield.

ceremony of knighthood,
rival seem
a symbolic decapitation, which
transformed a victim into a god at the year's end. 6
Gwythyr
son of Greidawl, they rose again and killed each other at the turning
of the year. Gawain bore Morgan's pentacle as a heraldic device on his
He and his to

formerly

Late romances deprived Morgan of her divinity and made her

have established the
^ Moras
Morrigan
__

human, just as the Great Goddess Mari became a mortal virgin

Mary. Morgan became Arthur's sister, yet "a great clerk of necroman-
7
cy," a prototypical witch. She received a fictitious husband, King
Uriens of Gore, probably a corrupt form of the classic castrated heaven-

god Uranus. Her name was applied to anything magical, miraculous,

or misleading, as the Fata Morgana. An old word for witches' spells,

glamor, came from Glamorgan, the Goddess's sacred territory in

Wales.

Morgan's mysterious Fortunate Isles continued to appear in Irish

folklore up to the present time. It was claimed that off the coast of
Galway nine islands rose out of the sea every seven years; but if anyone
tried to reach them by boat, they would vanish. 8
1. Keightley, 45. 2. Rees, 193. 3. Keightley, 433. 4. Loomis, 387.
5. Goodrich, 188, 216. 6. Loomis, 107, 324-42. 7. Malory 1,8. 8. Ramsay, 90.

Moras
"Doom," in Orphic creation myths a divine child of the primal
Goddess Night. See Orphism.

Morrigan
The Triple Goddess Morgan in Ireland: the virgin Ana, flowering
fertility-goddess; the mother Babd, "Boiling," the cauldron perpetually

producing life; and the crone Macha, "Great Queen of Phantoms,"

or Mother Death. Sometimes she was Mugain, the ruling Goddess of

1

Munster.
Like Hecate the triple Mooh-goddess, Macha sometimes stood for

all three personae. Queens of Ulster governed her shrine, Emain

Macha, or Macha's Emania, land of the moon. 2 She laid the death
curse on Cu Chulainn, and haunted battlefields,
making magic with
men. 3 In the form of a raven she emerged from her
the blood of slain

fairy-mound and perched on a standing-stone, singing of her Myster-

ies: "I have a secret that you shall learn. The grasses wave. The flowers
glow golden. The goddesses three low like kine. The raven Morrigan
herself is wild for blood." 4 See Trinity.
1. Rees, 36; Graves, W.G., 409. 2. Larousse, 229. 3. Rees, 36, 58. 4. Goodrich, 192.

675
Moses Moses
Sir Flinders Petrie said the name Moses was Egyptian, as in Thut-
mose, Ahmoses, etc., meaning "unfathered son of a princess." An
Egyptian model for Moses's myth was the demigod Heracles of
Canopus, drawn from an ark in the Nile bulrushes. When he grew up,
he performed great deeds, and finally died on a mountaintop. 1

The myth was not only Egyptian. It was applied to many heroes
and god-kings. King Sargon of Akkad, 2242-2186 B.C., was a virgin-
born son of a temple maiden, whose title enitum meant Virgin Bride of
God, like the Semitic kadesha. She set Sargon afloat on the river in a

Akki the Water- basket of rushes. He was rescued by the divine midwife, Akki the Water
Drawer, or breaker of Drawer, now transformed into Aquarius. He passed through the
the waters, may be sacred king's customary adventures: an early threat of destruction from
related to Hekat in
the incumbent monarch, a period of exile in the wilderness, tempta-
Egypt, Acco the
tionby evil spirits, finally elevation to the throne as the spouse of the
childbirth-goddess in
Greece, "Acca the Goddess Ishtar. 2
Maker" in the Roman The fatherless hero born of "waters" (Maria) was a universal
cult of Heracles, and
image of the sacred king, repeated in the myths of Perseus, Horus,
Akka the eponymous
mother of Akkad.' Jason, Oedipus, Trakhan of Gilgit, Joshua son of Nun, and others
Finns and Lapps said including conceptually at least Jesus. Most were based on the
she was Mader Akka ancient myth of the Goddess Cunti (Kali-the-cosmic-yoni), who gave
(Mother Akka) who birth to thesun god and placed him in a basket of rushes on the river
gave birth to all hu-
Ganges. The same sun god was reborn in Athens, fathered by Apollo
manity. This Akkadian
Great Mother was
on the virgin Creusa, and left in a woven basket. 5
associated with Moses's miracles were equally derivative, drawn chiefly from
many
tales of heroes float- Egyptian myths. The drying up of a body of water, to cross dry-shod,
ing on rivers in infancy who parted the waters of the river Phaedrus on her
was a miracle of Isis,
for this was a mythic 6
journey to Byblos. The same tale was told of Bindumati (Kali as
symbol of birth-waters.
Rome's Acca Laren-
mother of the bindu or Spark of Life) when she crossed the Ganges.
tia drew Romulus and Moses's extraction of water from a rock was performed long before
Remus from their by a guru at Lhasa; his rock is still called "the water of the god's
floating basket on the vessel." 7 Atalanta of Calydon also brought forth water from a rock by
Tiber, in the same
4 strikingwith her spear and calling on her Goddess. 8 Mother Rhea
it

myth-cycle. Egypt's
version of her was performed the same miracle; and she was also the giver of law tablets
the "pharaoh's daugh- on a holy mountain.
ter" of the Moses The historical basis of Moses myths seems to have been the
myth, i.e., Hekat the expulsion of Jews from Egypt during an outbreak of "pestilence,"
Midwife, or Heka- The
possibly leprosy. historian Choeremen said the oracles blamed the
Akka.
infection on foreign workers called Children of Israel. The priest
Manetho said in the 3rd century b.c. that alien tribes in northwestern

Egypt were lepers and unclean. Lysimachus stated that the oracle of
Amon ordered the alien workers to be collected and driven out of
9
Egypt.
Tacitus's account called the Jews "a race detested by the gods,"
whose presence in
Egypt was responsible for an outbreak of disfigur-
ing disease. The offenders were evicted from Egypt and sent into the
desert:

676
 The people, who had been collected after diligent search,
finding them- Moses
most part in a stupor ofgrief, till one of
selves left in a desert, sat for the

the exiles, Moyses by name, warned them not to look for

any relieffrom
god or man, forsaken as they were of both, but to trust to themselves, ^^^^^^^m
taking for their heaven-sent leader that man who should first help them to
be quit of their present misery. They agreed, and in utter ignorance
began to advance at random. Nothing, however, distressed them so much
as the scarcity of water, and they had sunk ready to perish in all
directions over the plain, when a herd of wild asses was seen to retire from
their pasture to a rock shaded by trees. Moyses followed them, and,

guided by the appearance ofa grassy spot, discovered an abundant spring

of water. This furnished relief. After a continuous journey for six days,
on the seventh day they possessed themselves ofa country, from which
they expelled the inhabitants, and in which they founded a city and a
l0
temple.

Jewish history begins with this expulsion from Egypt. Every-

thing previous to this in the Bible was syncretic mythology gathered
from non-Jewish sources. 11 Moses's encounter with the god of

pinai
the Chaldean moon-god Sin shows that the Jews tried to settle

n this god's territory, the Cainite-Midianite mining community on

he Sinai peninsula.
The whole peninsula was the Land of Sinim, i.e., "Land of the
Vloon." Its god Sin was a consort of Mother Inanna, or Nanna, who
innually turned the waters of Sumer into blood. Sin dwelt in a holy

nountain, which Moses climbed, and Moses reported that he was the
ame as the god of Abraham, though Abraham didn't know him by the
ame name (Exodus 6:3). In very ancient documents, the name of
12
Abraham himself appeared synonym for Ab-Sin, "Moon-father."
as a

The "God of Abraham" whose name meant Father Brahm

ntroduced himself to Moses as "I Am That I Am," in imitation of
le Brahmanic Tat sat, "I Am That that Is." 1? (See Tetragramma-

on.) The god also commanded, "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet,
ar the place whereon thou standest holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). This
is

/as an ancient Hindu custom. In India it is still proper to go barefoot

itemple precincts, on the theory that subtle emanations from the holy
round can enter the body through the feet. Ancient Egyptians and
loman witches had the same custom. 14
Another Brahma-like habit of Moses's god was to view a thousand
ears of man as one day in his own sight (Psalms 90:4). This was
from the "Day of Brahma" made up of a thousand years, or
rapied
aeons." 15
pmetimes a thousand mahayugas or "great
The stone tablets of law supposedly given to Moses were copied
fom the Canaanite god Baal-Berith, "God of the Covenant." Their
[en
Commandments were similar to the commandments of the Bud-
hist Decalogue.
16
In the ancient world, laws generally came from a

eity on a mountaintop. Zoroaster received the tablets of law from

Lhura Mazda on a mountaintop.
17
An earlier lawgiving mountain-
eity was Mother Rhea of Mount Dicte, or Ninhursag, probably a

677
Moses model for the masculine lawgivers. Moses's god provided laws re-

markably similar to those handed down from the Babylonian god to

18
^^^^^^^^^^^ King Hammurabi.
Moses took over another matriarchal myth in the tale of the
plagues of Egypt. This came from the third-dynasty reign of Tcheser '

(or Joser, whom the Hebrews called Joseph). The Nile flood failed for
seven years, and Egyptians starved to death by thousands. The
pharaoh sent a desperate message to Mater (Mother), ruler of Nubia, to

ask how the Goddess might be propitiated. Mater's reply described

"the couch of the Nile," a double cavern called Qerti or Khert, the
underworld, likened to "two breasts from which all good
things
I9
poured forth." Mater was caused by a jealous male
said the trouble

god, who wished to be called "father of gods" and to hold the Key of
the Nile. As usual, the god's practical demands boiled down to gifts and
tithes for his priesthood.

When the story was written down many centuries afterward, in the
latePtolemaic period, priests of Ra pretended their god had ended
the drought, by spreading a "red beer" over Egypt's fields to distract the
Mother Hathor, who was killing the people. 20 This
attention of
"beer" was said to be "as human blood." What transformed it into
blood was a holy substance from the Nile's source, called dedi. 21 This
was sometimes said to be a salty red earth, like ochre, likened to
menstrual blood. Or again, the red color was pomegranate juice,
another symbol of menstrual blood. 22 The pomegranate represented the
vulva in biblical times, and was worshipped as an emblem of the
23
Goddess on her holy mount Rimmon
("Pomegranate").
What really turned the Nile into blood was not Moses's magic
wand, but the red silt of flood time, supposed to be the Goddess's life-
giving uterine blood bathing the land in the substance of life. The
mythic killing probably referred to hecatombs of firstborn sons, sacri-
j

ficed in the attempt to blood spread on the

end the drought, their

fields to encourage the flood by sympathetic magic. See Firstborn.

Moses's followers pretended that Yahweh had caused the slaughter

of Egyptian firstborn sons (Exodus 12:29), while the Israelites were

permitted to redeem their sons with the blood of lambs (Exodus 13:15).
However, Yahweh had long copied the Egyptian custom of firstborn-
He said, "Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever
sacrifice.

openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of
beast; it is mine" (Exodus 13:2). Like early Egyptian gods, Yahweh

forgave sins only when his altars were soaked in blood: "without

shedding of blood there no remission" (Hebrews 9:22).

is

The Lord rather unnecessarily toldMoses to instruct his people to

smear sacrificial blood on their doorposts, a custom that would have

been perfectly familiar to any people living in Egypt where it was done
at most religious festivals since the earliest times. Again it seems to
have originated in the Far East. At New Year sacrifices in China,

doorposts were smeared with blood of sacrificial lambs just as in the

678

A
Passover myth. 24 Upper Nigerian tribes still sacrifice to ancestral Mot
ghosts
on the threshold of the house and smear the blood on doorposts. 25 Mother Carey
Many laymen are still led to believe that a real Moses wrote the ^^^^^^^^^^
Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament), even
though
scholars have known for a long time that these books were first written
in the late post-exilic period 26
by priestly scribes in Jerusalem. Their
purpose was to create a mythic history for their nation out of customs,
and legends mostly borrowed from others. The figure of
sayings,
Moses remains mysterious because it was largely a framework of myth
hung on a non-Jewish name.
1. Graves, W.G., 151, 161. 2. Gray, 55. 3. Graves, G.M. 2, 190.
4. Lamusse, 214, 308. 5. Rank, 18. 6. Budge, G.E. 2, 191. 7. Waddell, 384.
8. Graves, G.M. 1,264. 9. Doane, 52. 10. Tacitus, 658. 11.
Reinach, 182.
12. Briffault 3, 106-8. 13. Mahanirvanatantra, xix. 14. Wedeck, 152
15. Campbell, M.I., 143. 16. Waddell, 134. 17. Reinach, 66.
[Link],M.E.M., 147. 19. Budge, G.E. 2, 53. 20. Hays, 256.
[Link],49. 22. Lamusse, 36. 23. Graves, W.G., 410. 24. Williams, 78.
25. Frazer, F.O.T., 322. 26. White 2, 328-29.

Mot
Canaanite god representing "Death" or "Sterility"; the rival, tanist,
twin, and alter ego of the fertility god Aleyin or Baal. Mot may be

compared to Shiva in his "dead" phase as Shava the Corpse, or to

Osiris in his "mummy" phase as the Still-Heart. In other words, he was
the vegetation-god in the fallow season.
Like the dying Jesus, Mot was "forsaken" by his heavenly Father
(El) and symbolically castrated by the breaking of his reed scepter.
Like the harvested grain, he was cut with a sickle, beaten with a flail,

ground in a mill, and scattered in pieces over the fields by his

Goddess, Anat (Anatha). He was also assimilated to the pre-Christian

figure of the Lamb of God, calling himself the sacrificial lamb made
ready with pure wheat to atone for the sins of the people. After each of
1

his annual ceremonial "deaths" he was always resurrected by the

Goddess, who caused him to be reborn as the new crop, Aleyin. He was
worshipped in Babylon and also in Jerusalem under the name of
Tammuz.
1 .
Lamusse, 76-78.

Mother Carey
English sailors' version of Mater Cara, "Beloved Mother," the Latin

Sea-goddess. The petrels, "Mother Carey's chickens," were her soul-

birds; thus the French called them Birds of Our Lady. Their other1

name meant "little peters." See Peter, Saint.

1. Potter &
Sargent, 71, 117.

679
Motherhood Motherhood
During the human race, motherhood was the
early evolution of the

only recognized bond of relationship. Like any mammalian family, the

primitive human family consisted of mother and offspring.

The animal family is the product of the maternal instincts and of those
mother is the sole centre and bond ofit.
alone; the The male has no. . .

share in forming the animal family; he is not an essential member of it; he

may join commonly does not do so. When he

the maternal group, but
attaches himself to the animal family his association with it is loose and

precarious. Where the female can derive no benefit from associa-

. . .

tion with the male, no such association takes place. Where male

cooperation is useful, the male seeks out or follows the female, and it is
the latter who determines the segregation of the group and selects its
abode.'

The root of civilization was the kinship bond that kept groups
together to evolve mutual cooperation. The bond was maternal because
no paternal were perceived, or even guessed, by such
relationships

early groups with their shifting, temporary sexual attachments. "The

connection between sexuality and childbearing was unknown to

primitive men." 2
People in primitive circumstances still show ignorance of the
connection between sexuality and childbearing. Trobriand Islanders
attributed pregnancy to spirits, not sex. A woman's husband might help
care for her children, but he thought of them as "the children of my
wife." The islanders laughed at white men who first tried to tell them
about impregnation. Chukchi female shamans said they made their
children by their sacred stones, not by intercourse with men. Australian

aborigines thought women became pregnant by eating some special

foods, or by embracing a sacred tree hung with umbilical cords from

previous births. Bataks believed no woman could become pregnant

3
unless umbilical cords and placentae were buried under her house.
Primitives not only attributed pregnancy to a variety of causes, but
also assigned to it a variety of different durations, showing that they
4
were not sure when began. Most authorities now agree that not only
it

the uncivilized races today, but certainly all the world's people in the

prehistoric period, knew nothing of man's part in the process of

reproduction. It was believed that only women held the divine power
5
to give life. All the most ancient mythologies speak of a Creatress rather
than a Creator because living things could be made only by a female,

according to primitive beliefs. Men believed themselves unnecessary to 1

the process. 6
The most primitive hunting cultures have legends of still earlier
ages, when women possessed all magical arts and men had none. As
childbearers and nurturers, women took charge of growing things
generally. They became the producers, storers, and distributors of

vegetable foodstuffs, hence the owners of the land they used for cultiva-
tion. They made the earth valuable and equated it with themselves.

680
 Their economic and social power thus evolved the early village commu- Motherhood
nities in matriarchal form. The men saw themselves as almost
entirely
superfluous, except for the labor they could contribute as hunters or ^^^^^^^^^^
defenders of the matriarchal group. 7
The secret of fatherhood can only have been revealed to men by
the women themselves, because women were the keepers of calendri-
cal records, another traditionally female skill that most men thought

j
beyond their comprehension. Before the advent of monogamous
marriage, a late development in human history, there would have been
no reason or inclination to correlate copulations with births. Even if

[
were suspected, there were many negative cases to disprove
the truth it:

i some women could copulate frequently and never become pregnant,

I others could remain "barren" when living with one man but conceive
I when living with another. Women past menopause or before menar-
che could take any number of lovers without conceiving, which tended
to suggest that menstruation was the crucial factor rather than sexual

activity.
As may be found still in many groups of people, motherhood alone
was the foundation of clan loyalties. In Assam, the social unit of tribes

jwas maharis,
"motherhoods." The Malay family was a sa-mandei,
"motherhood." Among the Garos and Khasis, mothers headed the
family groups and bequeathed all property in the female line; men could
inherit [Link] everywhere, kinship bonds also passed only
through the female line, as in the ancient system deliberately reversed
Sby the Bible's "begats," which recognized only male ancestors. Seri
Indian tribes called themselves Kunkak, "womanhood," or "mother-
8
iihood." The earliest religious works of art "are figures of the solitary
Great Goddess the Paleolithic image of Mother, before there was any
iFather either on earth or in heaven." 9 The idea of fatherhood was
10
blien to the religious or social thinking of the earliest civilizations.

"Home and mother" are written over every phase ofneolithic agricul-
ture. It was the woman who wielded the digging stick and the hoe;
. . .

she who tended the garden crops and accomplished those masterpieces of
selection and cross-fertilization which turned raw wild species into the
prolific and richly nutritious domestic varieties: it was woman who made
the first containers, weaving baskets and coiling the first clay pots. . . .

In form, the village, too, is her creation: for whatever else the
might village

be, it was a collective nest for the care and nurture of the young. Here
she lengthened the period of child-care and playful irresponsibility, on
which so much ofman 's higher development depends. House and
village, eventually the town itself, are woman writ large. In Egyptian

hieroglyphics, "house" or "town" may stand as symbols for "mother,"

as if to confirm the similarity of the individual and the collective nurturing

function. In line with this, the more primitive structures houses,

rooms, tombs are usually round ones: like the original bowl described in
Greek myth, which was modeled on Aphrodite's breast. "

Ancient civilizations show ample evidence of the matriarchal

matrix in which they grew. Egyptians traced their descent through

681
 Motherhood mothers, calling themselves "X, born of the Lady Y," omitting their
name. 12 On Egyptian funerary stelae, the mother's name was
father's
13
^^^^^^^^^^^ given but the father's was omitted. Diodorus said Egyptian queens
14
received more respect than kings. In the Ramesseum, the queen
15
mother was addressed as "mighty mistress of the world." Pharaohs
ruled by matrilineal succession, and styled themselves "Rulers from the
16
Womb." The name of the Goddess was always a component part
of royal names in the earliest dynasties. A pharaoh's title was originally

per aa, Great Gate or Great House, symbol of the cosmic womb.
Rulers of the Egyptians' Nubian neighbors had an even more mother-
17
centered title: Mater.

Egyptian men were awed by maternal behavior patterns, won-

dering why women did what they did to maintain the race. Maxims
written about 1500 B.C. said:

Thou shalt never forget thy mother and what she has done for thee.
. . . For she carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and
after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years
she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy mouth,
and as thy size increased her heart never once allowed her to say,
>8
"Why should I do this?"

Egyptian scriptures emphasized the honor due "thy mother,

who bore thee with much suffering. She placed thee in the Chamber of
Instruction that thou mightest acquire instruction in books. She was
unremitting in her care for thee, and had loaves and beer for thee in her
house. When thou art grown cast thine eyes upon her that gave
. . .

thee birth and provided all

good things for thee, thy mother. Let her
19
never reproach thee."
An Ethiopian woman expressed to Frobenius the basic psychologi-
cal attitude of primitive mothers:

How can a man know what a woman 's life is? . . . The man spends a night
by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The
woman conceives. As a mother she is another person from the woman
without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her

body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again
departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even
though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she
carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart
ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this the man does not know; he
knows nothing. He does not know the difference before love and after
love, before motherhood and after motherhood. He can know nothing.

Only a woman can know that and speak of that. That is why we won 't
to do by our husbands. 20
be told what

In Old Iranian, the head of a clan or family was the hana,

"grandmother." Among the Medes, genealogies were based on the
female line. In Babylon, the ideogram for "mother" combined the
elements of "house" and "deity," like the Hindu grhadevata or "house-
goddess." The female sex received precedence in all forms of

682
 address. The descending order of beings began with "Goddess and Motherhood
gods, women and men." 21 By Babylonian law, "any sin against the
mother, any repudiation against the mother was punished by banish- ^^^^^^^^^^
ment from the community." The Lycians too kept track of female
ancestors only. Heraclides Ponticus said of them, "From of old they
have been ruled by the women." 22 Phoenicians wrote of recent past
when people didn't know their fathers, but took the names of their
25
mothers.
Etruscan tomb inscriptions also disregarded fathers. When married

couples were buried together, only the wife's name was written. Late
j
Roman texts reversed this usage, writing the name of the husband and
24
omitting that of the wife. But before the founding of Rome, Italy
was governed by the Sabine matriarchate, when not even kings knew
I Romulus, Ancus Marcus, and Servius Tullius had only
their fathers.

!
mothers. Indeed, fatherhood was not always noticed even in the classical

period; Roman plebeians didn't know their fathers. When the myth

jof Romulus and his men was written down, it was said Romulus made
j
his followers marry Sabine women, because, as men, they lacked
25
\

sanguis ac genus, the blood of the race. This could come only from
the female owners of the land.
Patriarchal writers claimed that Romulus named each of the early
Roman curiae (clans) after one of the Sabine women. 26 The story

[was invented to disguise the fact that these curiae were "motherhoods,"
27
[bearing the names of maternal ancestresses. The mother of all clans
Dwas Juno Curitis, the Queen of Heaven whom the Romans adopted
land presented with a new spouse, Jupiter. 28

Among barbarian tribes of northern Europe, women were proper-

Ity owners, clan heads, and religious leaders. Roman writers called the
nations "lands of women" governed by kvaens (queens). 29
[(northern
HPrehistoric Irish queens were mentioned in old writings, but their

'spouses were left nameless. The Lombards claimed their ancestors

[descended from a primal virgin mother, Gambara,

who had no
Mothers, not fathers, gave their names to children in pagan
|spouse.
['Britain and Scandinavia. Old German documents designate persons
30
i
by their mothers' names only.
It was the same in the Far East. Chinese family names are always

[formed from a sign meaning "woman." The

custom is said to date

[from when people knew their mothers but not their

a past time
bathers. 51 The Man-Tseu of southern China had a system of heredi-
32
tary queenship passing through a sacred female clan. Chinese writings
call Tibet "the land of women" and Japan "the land of queens."

Japanese imperial families traced their descent from the supreme sun
i
goddess, Omikami Amaterasu, mother of the world. Japanese legend-
lary "chiefs" of ancestral tribes were usually women. 33
The Chinese said the first man to understand fatherhood and

[institute monogamous marriage

was Fu-Hi who, however, had no
Mather but only a mother. 34 The same first discoverer of paternity in

683
Motherhood Greek myth was Cecrops, a high priest of Athene and one of her
55
serpent-consorts. Athene however was a name of the Aegean Great
^^^^^^^^^^^ Goddess and Universal Mother, who ruled alone and supreme
56
during the Bronze Age. In the whole Aegean area, religious rites were
in the hands of priestesses, regarded as emanations or embodiments

of the Goddess, who was simply woman deified, as the later God was
man deified. Men didn't participate in public worship until a fairly
late date, then only as priestesses' helpers, as the male deity was
subordinate to the female. 57
In also, the Great Goddess was thought the sole omnipo-
Europe
Fatherhood was not incorporated into religious thinking,
tent deity.
because in clan life it was a very frail bond, even if recognized. 58
Scholars know that "in the beginning the Goddess everywhere
antedated, or at least was predominant over, the God. It has been
affirmed that in all countries from the Euphrates to the Adriatic, the
Chief Divinity was at first in woman form." 59

Recent researches into the history of the family render it in the highest
degree improbable that the physical kinship between the god and his
[sic] worshippers, of which traces are found all over the Semitic area, was
originally conceived as fatherhood. It was the mother's, not the father's
blood which formed the original bond ofkinship among the Semites as
among other early people and in this stage ofsociety, if the tribal deity
was thought ofas the parent of the stock, a goddess, not a god, would
*
necessarily have been the object of worship.

Modern male scholars often tried to conceal or deny the

evidence of the ancient matriarchate. Whenever some auto-
possible,
matically converted references to the Great Mother into the word
"God," as was done in translating the Bible. Even so responsible a
scholar as Cumont, translating Apuleius's description of the Syrian
Goddess as omnipotens et omniparens, "all-powerful and all-produc-
ing," glossed the description as a "conception of the absolute,
unlimited authority of God [sic] over the earth." 41
Frankfort said the Goddess was supreme in Mesopotamia
"because the source of all life is seen in the female." Saggs said she
was "the central figure in Neolithic religion." 42 In Egypt, she was "the I

Being eternal and infinite, the creative and ruling power of heaven,
earth,and the underworld, and of every creature and thing in them. .1 . .

Mother-goddess, lady of heaven, queen of the gods who raised up . . .

Tern in primeval time, who existed when nothing else had being, and
who created that which exists . . . the greatest power on earth, who
commandest all that is in the universe, and who preservest all the gods
... the God-mother, giver of life All that has been, that is, and that
will be." 45
Besides creating the world and everything in it, the Goddess
created the civilized arts: agriculture, building, weaving, potting,

writing, poetry, music, the graphic arts, calendars, and mathematics.

These seem to have developed mostly in the hands of women as

684
 outgrowths of the maternal nest-building, communication, and play Motherhood
behavior."Woman was the creator of the primordial elements of
civilization

the actualities of life,

[A]ll the richer perceptions and
all art, all
interpretations that color ^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^
poetic sentiment, are irradiations of
those extra-individualistic, racial interests which are
represented by the
reproductive instincts, and are the dominant interests of the female.
They have their source in the race-regarding feminine impulses." 44
Hindu scriptures say the Goddess invented alphabets,
pictographs,
mandalas and other magical signs, hence her title of Samjna
(sign,
name, image). The Brahmavaivarta Purana says under another of her
the Goddess gave birth to the Vedas, the
[titles, Savitri, rhythms of the
Ragas, day and night, the year, the month, the seasons, the inch, the
second, and all other units of measurement; also logic, grammar, the
of the week, Time, Death, Nourishment,
[days Memory, Victory,
i

religious rituals, the trinity of aeons, and all the gods. 45

As Great Mother Kali Ma, she wore on her necklace of skulls the
;
sacred Sanskrit letters, which she invented, and invested with such

magic power that she could create things simply by pronouncing their
names in this language. 46 The notion led to the
Neoplatonic, and
later Christian, concept of the Creative Word or Logos.
Sanskrit matra, like the Greek meter, meant both "mother" and
"measurement." Mathematics is, by derivation, "mother-wisdom."

Root words motherhood produced many words for calculation:

for

metric, mensuration, mete, mens, mark, mentality; geo-metry, tri-

gono-metry, hydro-metry, etc. Women did temporal and spatial

calculations for so long that, according to the Vayu Purana, men
once thought women were able to give birth because they had superior
skill in Men imagined that if they could
measuring and figuring.
master these feminine they could give birth, too. "Male ances-
skills,

tors" told one another that if they could only learn to measure the

would "happily create progeny." 47

earth, they
In the Middle East also,
numbers and letters were inventions of
the Goddess and the special concern of her priestesses. Ashurbanipal

proudly declared that he was the first Babylonian king to learn "the
noble art of tablet- writing," which belonged to the special scribes
called maryanu.** A similar Egyptian word for a scribe was Maryen or
49
Mahir, "great one" or "mother." No one was permitted to enter
the Holy of Holies in Babylon's municipal temple except women who
had given birth; thus it seems likely that the maryanu were originally
mothers, dedicated to the Semitic Goddess Mari-Anna, otherwise
knownas Ishtar. 50 Among the Hittites, priestesses known as Elderly

Women taught the art of writing, kept records, advised kings, and
practiced medicine.
51
The Triple Goddess of Fate was incarnate in
three Guises or "writers," corresponding to the Germanic Fates called
Die Schreiberinnen, the Writing- Women, and the Roman mother of
destiny Fata Scribunda, "the Fate who writes." 52
In pre-Hellenic Greece the alphabet was attributed to the original

685
Motherhood three Muses, who were identical with the Fates or Graeae, epony-
mous mothers of Greek The
Latin alphabet was created by the
tribes.

archaic Goddess Carmenta, mother of carmens or "charms." Or,

^^^^^^^^^^^^
according to Isidore of Seville, the alphabet was created by the Moon- i

5J
goddess Io under her Egyptian name of Isis.
Egyptians revered the Goddess as measurer of time, mistress of
the house of books, mistress of the house of architects. 54 As foundress of
the science of architecture she was named Seshat, "Lady of the
Builder's Measure." She built "the abode of a king in the next world," a
pyramid. She Golden Calf, Horus, familiar in the
also created the

Bible as the idol worshipped by Aaron and the Israelites. 55

Ancient beliefs linking motherhood with superior intelligence,
reasoning power, and magical knowledge made it hard for men to
oppose the matriarchate, even when they discovered paternity and
personified it in gods. Fathers' claim to children's respect seemed
by comparison with the mothers' gestation, birth-giving,
relatively trivial

nursing, supporting, and daily teaching. The Book of Maccabees said

56
a mother's sympathy with her children is
deeper than a father's. The
Mahanirvanatantra said, "Mother is superior to father on account of
her bearing and also nourishing the child." 57 Menander wrote, "A
mother loves her child more than a father does." 58 Therefore the
childis more hers than his; as the old Irish
proverb put it, "To every
cow belongs her calf." 59 The Laws of Manu stated that "A spiritual
teacher exceeds a worldly teacher ten times, a father exceeds a spiritual
teacher one hundred times, but a mother exceeds one thousand times
a father's claim to honor on the part of a child and as its educator." 60
There may have been a real biological advantage underlying

ancient views of the female's superior intelligence. As mothers or

potential mothers, female mammals have more need of naturally

responsive alertness than males. "Girls' more mature skills enable

them to attend to stimuli, especially from other people, more swiftly and
accurately than boys. Girls are better at analyzing and anticipating
environmental demands; in addition, they have greater verbal facility.

. . . The perceptual, cognitive, and verbal skills which for unknown

reasons are more characteristic of girls enable them to analyze and
anticipate adult demands." 61 As a modern woman said, "After the birth <

of children that enormous thing you do everything else seems

kind of a breeze. But so many of us lock the doors of the mind. We nev-
er bother to penetrate below the surface of that bottomless sea of
resources that may be nature's gift to women." 62
For a long time men feared to oppose women because they were
convinced women were more closely allied with the forces of nature.
West African tribesmen testified that "women were more powerful than

men, for to them alone the mysteries of the gods and of secret things
were known." Women founded the magical Egbo society, but after
men learned the secret rites, they kept women from participating any
more. In Queensland also, once men learned magic, they forbade

686
women to practice, on the ground that women had too much natural Motherhood
63
aptitude for it.

In northern Europe, the Vanir or Elder

Earth and the Goddess Freya, were overthrown
Gods, led by Mother ^^^^^^^^^
by new patriarchal
deities from Asia, the Aesir led by Father Odin. In the
Aegean,
followers of Father Zeus fought the pre-Hellenic worshippers of
Mother Rhea or Hera. In Babylon, worshippers of Marduk rebelled
against the primal mother Tiamat, whose own son killed her to take
Dver her world-creating function. In Mexico, the
legendary leader of the
\ztecs overthrew his sister Malinalxochitl, former ruler of men and
64
Deasts, afterward described as "a bad witch."

In Australia, the Goddess named Marm

(Mother) was diabolized
>y men who resented the advantages she bestowed on women. She
nade women in her own image, and gave them "magic fruit" (off-
that she denied to men. 65 In Malekula, men
spring) frankly admitted
:hat their religious rites were stolen from the women, who invented

but ceased to practice them. 66 Tierra del Fuegan men said

[hem
vomen used to rule the world by witchcraft, and all
religious mysteries
Goddess, the moon. Men adopted the cult of the
to their 67
pelonged
^un god, and under his leadership they murdered all the adult women of
the tribe, leaving only not yet initiated. 68
immature girls
A transparently mendacious Iatmul legend said women invented
acred objects and secrets of magic, then "gave" these things to men,
and "asked" the men
murder them so no woman would have the
to
69
secrets Many similar examples show that the defeat of
any more.
he matriarchate was mythologized as a violent attack of men upon
vomen. Such myths of leadership forcibly wrested from women
>ccur throughout the world and cannot be overlooked. 70 As Engels

loted, "The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historical

lownfall of the female sex." 71
In some ways, it
may have meant the downfall of all humanity
rom a basically peaceful social order to a hierarchical structure
stablished and maintained by aggression. Patriarchal societies insisted
m pecking orders; matriarchal ones tended to be more egalitarian. 72
Neolithic village cultures with their matriarchal family-based govern-
nents were cooperative, unwarlike, and nonviolent. Their lack of
lestructiveness has been attributed to the life-loving spirit of affirmation
hat scholars find at the core of most matriarchal societies. 73
The same spirit of affirmation has been found in matriarchal or
iemi-matriarchal societies of the recent past. American Indians who
vorshipped the female principle, and were ruled by tribal chiefs elected

>y Female Governesses, surprised Christian

the real leaders, called
nissionaries with behavior more "Christian" than that of white men. A

nissionary said, "What is extremely surprising in men whose external

ippearance is
wholly barbarous, is to see them treat one another with a
jentleness and consideration which one does not find among com-
non people in the most civilized countries." Indian women were

687
Motherhood known as the Life of the Nation, and Mistresses of the 74
Soil. In
answer to a white questioner who couldn't understand the Indian

^^^^^^^^^^^^ reverence for women, one Indian man said, "Of course the men
follow the wishes of the women; they are our mothers." 75
Even aggressive savages like the Dobu Islanders regarded mother-
hood as the only possible antidote to warfare. Mutual trust was
maintained exclusively among members of a matrilineal kinship group
known as "mother's milk." 76 Societies where women set the stan-
dards of behavior and morality were found generally kinder than
male-dominated societies. Children grew up without harsh punish-

ments, expecting kindness from others as a matter of course and

consequently developing into nonhostile, nonviolent adults. Envy,
greed, and exploitiveness were minimal; depression almost unknown;
crime almost unheard-of. People were generally good-humored,
trustful, and confident. Women were treated as the equals of men.
Attitudes toward sexuality tended to be positive and permissive.
People seemed to feel sure Mother Nature would provide for their
needs, even in cases where a harsh environment demanded hard
work for the sake of survival. 77

Societies dominated by men tended to introduce cruel punish-

ments, hostility toward the young, formalized rivalry, and sadistic

elements replacing easy, affectionate sexuality. Some of this may have

been biologically based. Among animals, females care for the young,
males fight for mates, and care only for themselves. The primitive
human female "nourished, reared and protected the more feeble
than herself, while her mate, a terrible savage, knew only how to pursue
78
and kill."

When new-born humanity was learning to stand upright, it depended

much on its mother and stood close to her protecting side. Then
women were goddesses, they conducted divine worship, women 's voice I

was heard in council, she was loved and revered and genealogies were
reckoned through her. What broke into this feminine Elysium and robbed
it ofliberty and happiness? The male of the species. As the race grew
expense ofmoral sense.
older, rationality flourished at the . . .
Man,
unmindful of the mother's contributions to racial uplift and welfare,

thought only of bending every energy and forcing tribute from everything^
and every one who could elevate himselfand give him dominating
power. There's no more reason for not killing humans who oppose
. . .

you than for sparing the lives ofmosquitoes, in the mind ofa man
whose self-seeking emotions are permitted to run rampant. And the
average "normal" male's personality balance tends definitely in the
same direction.

Bachofen said,"The idea of motherhood produces a sense of

universal fraternity among all men, which dies with the development of ^

paternity." Ancient societies believed that those related by mother-

blood shared a common soul, so no member of the group could hurt
another without doing injury to himself. Egyptians and other folk

688
carefully distinguished between children of the same mother and
Motherhood
children of the same father; theformer were the "real" siblings,
constrained to care for each other as for their own selves. As Telema-
chus remarked, a person must be told who his father is; the mother is
^^^^^^^^"
the parent every child knows "of himself." 80

Psychologists agree that the images of Mother and Father affect

:he psyche in different ways. Feelings of connectedness are more closely
associated with the mother; feelings of dissociation or alienation with
the father. In spiritual terms, outer and inner worlds of nature and the
elf were not separated under a matriarchal order, whereas patriarchy
insisted on their absolute severance. 81

Past societies dreaded even a

temporary loss of the mother image.
\puleius spoke of the period when the Goddess departed from the
vorld for her season of self-renewal: "There has been no
pleasure, no
oy, no merriment anywhere, but all things lie in rude unkempt
leglect; wedlock and true friendship and parents' love for their children
lave vanished from the earth; there is one vast disorder, one hateful

oathing and foul disregard of all the bonds of love."

82
When the
[goddess permanently disappeared from theological imagery, the
ense of alienation became universal:

The earlier, neolithic order was of the female above the male, the cosmic
mother above the father . . . with the progressive devaluation of the
mother-goddess in favor of the father, which everywhere accompanied the
maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy. A sense of essential
. . .

separation from the supreme value symbol became in time the characteris-
tic religious sentiment of the entire Near East. 83

G. R. Taylor's classification of "matrist" and "patrist" societies

showed guilt, negativism, and fear in the latter, as opposed to a more
:onfident outlook in the former. Matrist societies were typified by: ( 1 )
>ermissive attitude toward sex; (2) freedom for women; (3) high
eminine status; (4) welfare more valued than chastity; (5) democratic
litical principles; (6) progressive views; (7) spontaneity, exhibition; (8)
ex differences minimized; (9) hedonism, pleasure welcomed; (10)
nother worship. Patrist societies displayed opposite tendencies: (1)
estrictive attitude toward sex; (2) restriction of women; (3) women

een as inferior, sinful; (4) chastity more valued than welfare; (5)
luthoritarian politics; (6) conservative, against innovation; (7) inhibi-

ion, fear of spontaneity; (8) sex differences maximized, e.g. in dress; (9)
ear of pleasure, ascetic self-denial; (10) father worship. 84

Worshippers of the Great Mother celebrated rites of "love,"

ncluding sexual love, which was often taken as a symbol for all loves,
jxpressed in gestures and acts similar to those of mother-child behavior:
cuddling, breast-sucking, and so on. Conversely, votaries of the
r
were ordered to "fear" him (Deuteronomy 6:13). St. Paul
ather
eclared that those who had no fear of God were automatically
inners (Romans 3:18). Christianity gave its followers much to fear,
ncluding one of the most sadistic hells ever devised by the human

689
Motherhood imagination, and an implacable God who consigned "most" human
beings to that hell forever, according to his theologians (see Hell).

^^^^^^^m^^^m But the primitive Mother gave comfort and reassurance. Eskimo sha-
mans still call her the soul of the universe, never seen, but her voice
can be heard: "a gentle voice, like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle
that even children cannot become afraid. What it says is 'Be not
" 85
afraid of the universe.'

Montagu says the mother image is still used to alleviate terror.

"When the male's defenses are down, when he is in extremis, when

he is
dying, his last, like his first word, isbe 'mother,' in a
likely to

resurgence of his feeling for the mother he has never repudiated, but
from whom he had been forced, at the overt level, to disengage

himself." 86 Eugene O'Neill expressed the secret longing in a dramat-

ic speech:

The mistake began when God was created in a male image. . . . That
makes life so perverted, and death so unnatural. We should have
imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God the Mother. Then we
would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we
would know that our life's rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with
the agony oflove and birth. And we would feel that death meant
reunion with Her, a passing back into her substance, blood ofHer blood

again, peace of Her peace! Now wouldn 't that be more logical and
satisfying than having God a male whose chest thunders with egotism and \

is too hard for tired heads and thoroughly comfortless? 87

The Kagaba Indians expressed the same sentiments in a less

sophisticated but equally forceful song describing their Goddess:

The Mother ofSongs, the mother of our whole seed, bore us in the
beginning. She is the mother of all races of men and the mother of all
tribes. She is the mother of thunder, the mother of the rivers, the mother

of trees and ofall kinds of things. She is the mother ofsongs and
dances. She is the mother of the older brother stones. She is the mother of
the grain and the mother of all things. She is the mother of the
. . .

dance paraphernalia and ofall temples, and the only mother we have. She
is the mother of the animals, the only one, and the mother of the Milky

Way. It was the mother herself who began to baptize. She gave us the
limestone coca dish. She is the mother of the rain, the only one we
have. She alone is the mother of things, she alone. And the mother has
left a memory in all the temples. With her sons, the saviors, she left
88
songs and dances as a reminder.

Psychologists often regard the universal myth of the Golden

Age symbol of childhood. Yet when Plato wrote of the Golden
as a

Age, he apparently took some details from matriarchal societies

familiar to the Greeks as either contemporary or belonging to the recent

past. He said there was "no wildness nor eating of each other, nor any
war, nor revolt amongst them. . . . There were no governments nor

690
wrate possessions of women and children. For all men rose
again Motherhood
im the earth remembering nothing of their past. And such
things as
vate property and families did not exist." 89 This was regarded as a
^^^^^^^^^
ment of Plato's imagination until research discovered the pre-urban
mmunity of the Neolithic cultivator:
There was no ruling class to exploit the
villagers, no compulsion to work
for a surplus the local community was not allowed to consume, no taste
for idle luxury, no jealous claim to private property, no exorbitant desire
for power, no institutional war. Though scholars have long contemptu-
"
ously dismissed the "myth of the Golden Age, it is their scholarship,
rather than the myth, that must now be questioned.
Such a society had indeed come into existence at the end of the last
when the long process of domestication had
Ice Age, if not before,
come to a head in the establishment ofsmall, stable communities with an
abundant and varied food supply: communities whose capacity to
produce a surplus ofstorable grain gave security and adequate nurture to
the young. The rise in vitality was enhanced by vivid biological
90
insight.

At Catal Huyuk, in what is now southern Turkey, a matriarchal

nmunity of the 7th millenium B.C., there was no evidence of
eftainship or rivalry, though there were many priestesses. Children
re buried in the tombs of their mothers. Art and handicrafts flour-
ed, producing obsidian mirrors, copper and lead jewelry and tools,
ollen textiles, artistically carvedwooden vessels. For 1 500 years
en times long as the existence of the United States of Ameri-
as

the community seemed free of massacre or war. Though many

ndreds of skeletons have been found, none showed any sign of
ilent death. 91
Matriarchal Sumeria dominated the Fertile Crescent for 3000
irs with virtually no evidence of warfare. 92 Neolithic foundations of
h peaceful societies have been unearthed at Hassuna, Tell Halaf,
marra, and Ubaid where there were no gods. Holy icons showed
93
ly naked women
holding or nursing infants. Patriarchal religions
idually ousted the ancient matriarchies, chiefly by violence; but
ne scholars have suggested that this revolution was neither satisfac-
y nor final. The Great Mother, ostensibly overthrown by her sons,
in ineradicable archetype dwelling somewhere in the psyche of every

man being born of woman which means, of course, every

man being. The more emphatically she is denied, the more threaten-
5
her images appear. 94 Ancient myths were not merely allegorizing
len they spoke of the furious wrath of a neglected deity.

Even scholars refrain from noticing the everyday words for ances-

that clearly indicated matrilineal descent: "forebears," for

imple, a short form of "fore-bearers." Ancestry is called extraction,

d obvious reference to what one came out of; similarly descent is

691
Motherhood the "descending" from the womb. From the beginning, it was materr
spirit that fostered cooperation and togetherness in work or worship.

^^^^^^i The maternal totemic clan was by far the most successful form that
human association has assumed it may indeed be said that it has been
the only successful one. . . . Political organizations, religious theocracies

States, nations, have endeavored in vain to achieve real and complete

social solidarity. They are artificial structures; social humanity has nevei
succeeded in adequately replacing the primitive bond to which it owes
its existence. 9S

Medieval ballads depict a pagan world where mothers were the

ultimate authority in every household. Sons appealed to mothers, not

fathers, in times of crisis, as the ballad-hero Johnie Cock asked the

help of his mother, and through her, of the Goddess. Christianity

however was devoted to destruction of the Goddess and her temples
(Acts 19:27). Clement of Alexandria quoted Christ: "I have come to
96
destroy the works of the female." Christ ordered his followers to
renounce their families (Luke 14:26) and said to his own mother,
"Woman, what have I do with thee?" (John 2:4). Fathers of the
to

church wrote diatribes against motherhood. 97 Western religion conse-

quently became an exercise in male-dominated power-seeking. 98

Many male scholars still try to pretend there never was a

Goddess, or if there was, she was only a "cult" figure vaguely associab
with sexual promiscuity and/or "fertility." It is not recognized that
religious feeling for the Mother was, if anything, much deeper and
more passionate than feelings for a divine patriarch. Deities of both
sexes are styled "gods." Egyptian sacred art showing divine persons w
obvious dangling breasts, is described as a picture of "gods." 99
Scholars carefully avoid quoting ancient texts that say the Primordial

Being was a Creatress, not a Creator. Though she was the central
unifying concept of ancient civilizations, the Great Mother isn't men-
tioned in ancient-history texts. Scholars' violent denial of the
evidence for the prehistoric matriarchate causes one to suspect that thi

prejudices often blind their eyes, as if a patriarchal culture prevents its

members from comprehending any foreign viewpoint.

100

Freud's ignorance of feminine values left him incapable of undei

standing humanity's most basic bonds. He gave sexuality a primary
significance that probably should have been relegated to the mother-
child bond instead. Freud admitted that thirty years of practice never

taught him what women really want because, of course, he had

already convinced himself that what every woman wanted was a
penis.
101
He even went so far as to imagine that a mother loved her
child only because it was, for her, a penis-substitute.

The reason for Freud's failure of insight here should by now be plain: in

his analysis of the development of the self, he left out ofaccount the

692
 positive influenceof the other member of the family, the mother. Motherhood
Overemphasizing, ifanything, the rule of the father, the/ovean,
power-seeking, repressive, organizing element in the personality, he
played down the function of the mother, with her life-bestowing gifts,
^^^^^^ammm^^m
her relaxing and yielding attitudes, her life-transmitting and life-nurturing
functions: the mother's sympathy and responsiveness, her giving of the
breast to her infant, her special effort to establish an I-and-thou intimacy
W2
through language, her endless ways of expressing love.

Freudian phallocentrism added to Christian devaluation of the

female tended to perpetuate the common pattern of troubled families,
as described by a social worker: "There's always a husband who's

witholding his emotional support and a wife who's unhappy, whose

10?
eeling of personal worth has been damaged." Mumford points
aut that devaluation of motherhood leaves children of both sexes cut off
rom a vital experience, the essential basis of all future commitments
to "In repressing the
cooperative functioning in the social context.
mothering and nurturing impulses, in the personality, the scientist has
ilso lost the normal parental concern for the future life it cherishes. One

lardly knows whether to characterize this attitude as innocence or

104
atalism; it
certainly indicates a failure to reach maturity."
Gilder theorizes that few men can attain psychological maturity at

ill without a connection with the sense of futurity through

vital

ntimate association with a woman. She has, "as part of her very

xuality, a sense of the future: a sense of evolution and growth, a

lotion of deferring pleasures for future gains, a sense of the phases and
leasons of life, a devotion to the value of the individual human being.
These sentiments are the very source of human morality." 105 Indeed
hese are precisely the sentiments embodied in matriarchal religions'

cyclic, future-oriented view of life. Such religions were

free of the

leurotic quest for indefinable "meaning" in life, since they never

issumed that lifewould be required to justify itself. They were also
jenerally free of the anxiety, guilt, and sense of sin imposed by
>atriarchal religions, evolved by males made insecure from earliest
hildhood by a social order based on male intimidation and
lominance.

Might-is-right morality was typical of the linear, hierarchical mas-

culine theology. Feminine morality seems to have been both more
iubtle and more affirmative, fostering the same spirit of close coopera-
ion that enabled humanity to become civilized in the first place.
the
Despite the basic male need to take part in feminine values,
>atriarchal society be organized the other way: women are
seems to

breed to attain a sense of personal worth by taking part in masculine

values. Instead of aspiring happily to the worthy estate of mother-

lood, many women are taught to think it unworthy while they are still

n the "bosom" of the patriarchal family:

693
Motherhood The upwardly mobile career of every go-getting woman seems to have
been her father's gift to her. As a sop to his male guilt, Daddy may have
goaded daughter to achievements he willfully denied his wife; or as a sop
to his male vanity, he may have engendered in her such hurtful feelings

offemale worthlessness that only the adoption of a male-style existence

could appease. But always, it seems, daughter has been vicariously

wounded by damage the maternal ego suffered at paternal hands. She may
contempt that "Mama let
feel compassion for her mother's plight, or
"
Papa get away with it, or a mixture ofboth emotions, but she invariably
grows up with an almost pathologic horror of "living out Mom 's life all
over again."106

Briffault and other scholars believed devaluation of the maternal

role inflicted injury on males as well as females: "Men have much more
of the 'patriarchal theory' to unlearn. Women have to learn that all
racial ideals that are worth while are ultimately identical with their own

elemental instincts, and are the outcome of them. . . . The compro-

mises that govern the relations between the sexes are those that
condition all true human values. ... It is, as of old, the part of the
Vestal Mothers to tend the Sacred Fires. Upon women falls the task not

only of throwing off their economic dependence, but of rescuing

from the like thraldom the deepest realities of which they were the first

mothers." 107
Even Buddha reached back to basic maternal imagery in his
Discourse on Universal Love: "As a mother, even at the risk of her
own life, protects and loves her child, her only child, so let a man
cultivate love without measure toward the whole world, above,
below, and around, unstinted, unmixed with any feeling of differing or
108
opposing interests. . . . This state of mind is the best in the world."
But no man could achieve it without Motherhood as a model.
I. Briffault 1,191. 2. Neumann, A.C.U.,
1 1. 3. Frazer, G.B., 45-46, 138.

4. Briffault 2, 445-47. Stone, 11. 6. Mead, 102. 7. Campbell, P.M., 315, 320-21.
5.

8. Briffault 1, 275, 288, 300. 9. Neumann, G.M., 94. 10. Graves, 1,11. GM.
I I. Lederer, 87. 12. Maspero, 3. 13. Budge, D.N., 20. 14. Hartley, 188.
15. Briffault 3, [Link],83. 17. Budge, GE. 1, 52,93. 18. Hartley, 197.
19. Briffault 1, 374. [Link] & Kerenyi, 141-42. 21. Hartley, 201-3.
22. Stone, 43, 46. 23. Larousse, 83. 24. Briffault 1,245,426. [Link],68.
26. M. Harris, 80. 27. Briffault 1, 422, 427. 28. Dumezil, 296.
29. Thomson, 244. 30. Briffault 1, 414, 419. 31. de Riencourt, 170.
32. Briffault 3, 23. 33. Larousse, 403. 34. Briffault 1,366. 35. Graves, GM. 1, 97.
36. Larousse, 85. 37. Stone, 47. 38. Graves, GM. 1,11. 39. Avalon, 409.
40. Stone, 26. 41. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 64. 42. Stone, 1 5, 26.
43. Budge, GE. 1, 93, 213-14, 459, 463; Maspero, 286-87; Larousse, 37.
44. Briffault 1, 432; 2, 442. 45. 0'Flaherty, 65, 352, 49. 46. Graves, W.G, 250.
47. 0'Flaherty, 48. 48. Assyr. &Bab. Lit, 387. 49. Erman, 227-30.
50. Briffault 2, 515. 51. Stone, 131. 52. Gaster, 764. 53. Graves, W.G, 240, 248.
54. Larousse, 28. 55. Budge, GE.
1, 426. 56. Forgotten Books, 194.
57. Mahanirvanatantra, 161. 58. Bachofen, 133. 59. Brewster, 280.
60. Hauswirth, 30. 61. Gornick& Moran, 226. 62. Gittelson, 26.
63. Briffault 2, 545, 551-52. 64. F Huxley, 215. 65. Hallet, 183.
66. F. Huxley, 207. 67. de Riencourt, 20. 68. Neumann, G.M., 290.
69. Mead, 94. 70. Campbell, P.M., 318. 71. Beard, 1 13. 72. Daly, 94.
[Link], 158. 74. Briffault 2,497; 1,316-17. 75. Hartley, 142.
76. Fromm, 174. 77. Fromm, 168. 78. Briffault 1,432. 79. Beard, 40-41, 55-56.

694
 80. Bachofen, 80, 133. 81. Campbell, Oc.M., 70. 82.
Neumann, A.P., 31. Sundav
Motherinc Sunday
83. Mumford, 242-43. 84. Bullough, 13-14. 85. MOinenng
Campbell, M.T.L.B., 206.
86. Montagu, T., 273. 87. O'Neill, Strange Interlude. 88. Neumann GM85 Mountain
89. J.E. Harrison, 496. 90. Mumford, 242-43. 91.
Fromm, 155. 92. Hays, 63.
93. Encyc. Brit, "Babylonia and Assyria." 94.
Campbell, Oc M
86 153 i^B^PBJBBMPBB
95.Briffault2,493-94. 96. Stone, 194. 97. Simons, 99.
[Link] 200
99. Larousse, 13, 36. 100. Daly, 94. 101. Lederer, 238. 102. Mumford
' 341

103. Gittelson, 87. 104. Mumford, 469, 347-48. 105. Gilder 144-52
[Link],66. 107. Briffault 3, 519-20. 108. Ross 123

Mothering Sunday
nglish pagan Mother's Day honored up to the 18th century a.d.
3n the 4th Sunday of Lent, each person visited his or her mother with
in offering of simnel-cake (Latin simila, "fine flour"), to receive her

Jessing. This was "going a-mothering." Herrick mentioned the custom

n his canzonet to the nymph Dianeme, probably Diana of Nemi.
The simnel was a manikin, Gingerbread Man, similitude, or Host: a god
1
eremonially eaten.
1. Brewster, 144.

Mountain
'erhaps more than any other natural objects, mountains most often

epresented the Great Mother. In every land the mountains were

dentified with breasts, belly, or mons veneris of the Earth, as well as

he paradise where gods live.

Chomo-Lung-Ma, "Goddess-Mother of the Universe," is the

world's highest mountain, known in the west, typically, by the name

)f a man: Mount Everest.

Nearby rises Annapurna, "Great Breast Full
>f Nourishment." There is also Nanda Devi, "Blessed Goddess,"
1

nother of the river-goddess Ganga (Ganges). These mountains are

ome of the Primal Mothers called Himalaya, "Mountains of Heav-
:n," which gave rise to the Germanic Himmel, "heaven." 2
Northern Europeans called the home of the gods Himinbjorg,
leaven-Mountain. 3 The gods lived on the "lap" of the Great
Mother. "This notion of a mountainous situation of the home of the
;ods one shared by other Indo-European races such as the Greeks
is

vho settled their pantheon on Mount Olympus; it is surely behind the

walmist's 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh
4
ny help.'"
Snow-covered, breast-shaped mountains were considered the
ource of "help" (or food) from the benevolent Goddess whose white
nilk was really water: glacier-fed streams whose waters were often white

vith suspended rock dust. The Mountain Mother was both a source
)f
life-giving waters, One of the oldest titles
and a Queen of Heaven. of

695
Mountain the Hindu triple Goddess Parvati-Kali-Uma was Daughter of Heaven j

(Himalaya). According to the Greeks, the Goddess formerly ruled not

5
I

only Mount Olympus, home of the classic gods, but all mountains;
6
hence her title Panorma, "Universal Mountain Mother."
One of the archaic Goddesses was Niobe, "Snowy One," identi- \

fied with Mount Sipylus, where a water-streaming crag still bears the
7
carved image of a Hittite mother goddess. Mountainous breasts rise in i

County Kerry, Ireland, as double peaks called the Paps of Anu that
the ancestral Goddess Anu, or Danu, mother of the Tuatha De
is,

Danann. 8 Samoyed shamans believe they must experience a vision of

climbing a magic mountain, where they will meet the Lady of Waters.
She is a naked Goddess who accepts the shaman by allowing him to

feed at her breast, saying, "You are my child; that is why I let you suckle
9
at my breast."
Sumero-Babylonian texts spoke of the Mother-mountain where
the sun god was daily born and nightly swallowed up. This was
Mashu, "Twin Peaks," as high as the walls of heaven, dwelling in the
western garden of paradise by the shores of Ocean. 10 The twin peaks
were breasts nourishing heaven, and the mountain had another set of 3

"paps" reaching downward to nourish the underworld, as if it were

the two-faced Goddess of life and death. The way into the land of death

was into the Mother-mountain's body, via the Road of the Chariot,
or Road of No Return. 1 '

There was a curious resemblance between Mashu of the Sumeri-

ans and Macchu Picchu
of the Peruvian Incas, another twin-peaked

holy mountain where the sun rose and set, tended by priestesses. There
as in distant Sumeria, the common name of the Goddess was

Mama. 12
The Hindu pantheon was settled on Mount Meru, or Sumeru, the
"Good Mountain" located in the north, pointing to an archaic
connection between India and Sumeria. 13 The Chinese located their 1
Mount of Paradise in the same general vicinity as Sumeria, in the
west. It produced the usual four rivers and was surrounded by "red
Dravidian Referring water" like the River of Blood that surrounded ancient Fairylands. 14
to the cultures of the See Menstrual Blood.
Dravidian language Iranians said the Lofty Mountain-Mother stood at the center of trK
group in southern and earth. She was called Haraiti. At her summit was the Navel of
central India, now High
Waters, "for the fountain of all waters springs there, guarded by a
ranging from highly
civilized people to majestic and beneficent Goddess." The Vedas say Yama, Lord of
preliterate forest primi- Death, sits in the midst of the celestial ocean in her highest heaven, oni
tives. Dravidian the Navel of Waters, where "matter first took form." 15 The Japanese
languages were rooted combined him with the Mountain-Mother Fuji the Ancestress, and the
in pre-Aryan Indus
16
Valley civilization, the
magic mountain came to be called Fujiyama.
earliest known in A very old Dravidian form of the mountain-Mother was Hariti,
India. who nursed five hundred supernatural beings at once. 17 The gods she I

696
upported on her lap recall archetypal images of the infant enthroned on Mountain
he mother's body, which is simultaneously "earth" and "paradise."
indications of the child-parent relationship between
dyths hold many ^^^^^^^^^^^
he god and his feminine support. One of the emblems of Isis was
he Mu'at, "foundation of the throne," meaning hers was the lap the
iharaoh and his divine alter ego sat on, on earth as well as in heaven.
The Persian sun god Ahura Mazda lived in a glowing palace on
he summit of Mount Hara, a derivative of Hariti. 18 In Hebrew, hara
tieant both "mountain" and "pregnant belly." 19 In Latin the word
escribed the official diviners called haruspices, those who gaze into
!ie belly that is, entrail-readers. 20

The idea of the Mount of Paradise as the Goddess's belly or vulva

pd to the widespread belief that life-giving rivers of blood emanated
rom it, the "four rivers of paradise" common to Asiatic traditions,

ientified with real rivers by the Bible with lofty disregard for their

eography (Genesis 2:10-14). One of these rivers was Gihon, the

lebrew name for the Nile, coming from "the whole land of
The name was a corruption of Gehenna or Ge-enna, the
Ethiopia."
of Ge (Gaea), or of Mother Earth. Or again, the Nile was
liver

upposed to emanate from the Mountain of the Moon (Ruwenzori)

(eyond Ethiopia.
This was one of the universal female-symbolic images in mytholo-
y: the lunar mountain, located in a garden of paradise, containing a
reat cave or labyrinth, producing the rivers of life. Its genital connota-
on could hardly be overlooked. Arabs called Ka-Mar, the
it
Jebel
Mother-mountain. Even in medieval European romances it was the
aurce of wisdom; Merlin learned his magic by drinking of its
mbrosia. Anointed knights of Charlemagne, searching for the same

Durce, traveled to a great cavern under a Mountain of the Moon at

21
le headwaters of the Nile.

Egyptians eventually transferred the mystic source of the Nile

fom the remote Mountains of the Moon to the handier first cataract
t
Elephantine (modern Jazirat Aswan). This was regarded as the earth's
Dni, where the God mated with the Goddess, to produce the annual
utpouring of the Nile. The genital metaphor of the mountain is still
jggested by the word mons, meaning both a mountain and a female
22
enital.

Pyramids and ziggurats were artificial mountains built where the

in d was flat, to serve as thrones of the Lord, "high places" for his
cred marriage to the Goddess, earth-wombs for his regeneration, and
lrines. Like the Celtic tumulus, a Buddhist reliquary mound or
iipa was also an imitation of the holy mountain, often likened to the

lother's belly. 25 Similar tombs on a larger scale were the Mycenaean

24
whs tombs, covered with tons of earth to make artificial hills.

Eastern lamas were interred in domes or pyramids plated with gold

697
Mountain whenever possible, because imperishable gold was the metal of
25
apotheosis and immortality, making the body imperishable also. In the

^^^^^^^^^^_ west, where gold was not plentiful, the magic mountain was said to be
made of glass or crystal, in imitation of the seven crystalline spheres of
heaven. The Celtic after-world centered on a glass castle, perhaps a
misunderstanding of the old word glas, meaning "the blue of heav-
en." 26 But the crystal mountain was sometimes taken literally. At the
Celtic burial mound of New Grange, the surface of the earth-womb wa
once covered by quartz fragments to make it sparkle in the sun like a
mound of crystal. 27 The Slavs believed in a crystalline mountain of
heaven, and used to bury bear's claws with the dead, to help them
28
scramble up the slippery glass.
The expression "in seventh heaven" came from the ancient
belief that the seven celestial spheres were arranged like a seven-story

mountain, as shown by the Babylonian ziggurat of seven stages. 29

Below ground, seven concentric "hells" or "pits" reflected the celestial

realm in Sheol, its mirror image in the Abyss, ruled by the queen of
the underworld, who had many names Allatu, Eresh-kigal, Persepho-

ne, Hel, Hecate, Nephthys, or the earlier female Pluto but always a
dark alter ego of the celestial Goddess. 30
The Babylonian netherworld was "divided into seven zones, like

those of Dante's Inferno, upon the model of the seven planetary

spheres. . . . Seven gates gave admission, each guarded by a porter
This idea of the circles of the underworld is also found in the

Egyptian mythology of the ritual of the dead." Like the biblical Joseph,

Assyrian priests went down into the Pit as part of their death-rebirth

initiations. There at the base of the celestial mountain in the land of the
Black Sun, stood "the foundations of the earth, the meeting of the
51
mighty waters."
Initiations everywhere enacted a journey through the nether and
celestial spheres, a symbolic ascent of the mountain. The Norse
father-god Odin himself had to win his wisdom by traversing the "seven
nether spheres" of death. 32 Apuleius described his own initiation into
the Mysteries of Isis as a journey to the land of death, where he beheld
the Black Sun, and saw the deities of the upper and lower worlds
"face to face." Then he rose to the heights, and was exhibited to the

congregation in the costume of the sun god. Mithraic initiates

similarly rose through seven spheres, winning the ranks of Raven,

Bridegroom, Warrior, Lion, Persian, Sun-runner, and Pater (high

33
priest).
Arabs perpetuated the basic Chaldean notion of the cosmos as a
magic mountain with seven ascending spheres and seven under-
ground ones; this in turn was based on the Hindu image of Purusha, the

universe personified. "According to the common opinion of the

Arabs, there are seven heavens, one above the other, and seven earths,

698
 one beneath another. . . . This is explained by a passage of the Koran Mountain
I
in which it is said that God created seven heavens and as many earths or
34
Medieval Christians inherited the same
i

storeys of the earth." idea, ^^^^^^^^^^^

|
modeling their cosmos on that of ancient Chaldea. The church officially
(listed the heavens as aerial, ethereal, Olympian, the heaven of fire,

the heaven of stars, the crystalline, and the Empyrean. In the seventh
"Christ dwells, and this is the especial and proper dwelling
jheaven
iplace of Christ and the angels and saints." 35
Thus the magic mountain was taken over by Christianity, but at

the same time the church vigorously condemned all the magic
imountains where "witchcraft" carried on worship of the Goddess. Puy-
de-D6me in Auvergne was a famous witch-mountain; so was the
Brocken or Blocksberg in the Hartz Mountains. Puy-de-D6me had a

(temple
served by women called fatuae, "fairies" or "fates," and
\fatidicae, "seeresses." Young were periodically
girls initiated into the

sect, under the novice-title of bonnes EUes} 6

A map made of the Brocken in 175 1 noted that its summit was a

witches' ground, where sabbats were celebrated before an altar by a

magic spring, "formerly consecrated to some false deity of the pa-

37
gans." This may have been the mountain Pope Pius II called Mons

j
Veneris, where one could meet witches and demons, "address them and
38
learn the magic arts."

The story of Tannhauser's sojourn in the Mons Veneris or Mount

of Venus (Venusberg) was another relic of fairy-religion, hinting at
the existence of a real high priestess powerful enough to defy the pope,
and serving the Goddess under the name of Queen Sybil. The
Goddess "still resided in the megalithic temples of western Europe,
which were old before the Greeks invaded Greece. Although her
rites were officially forbidden, her worship was celebrated on magical

mountains throughout Europe. She came to be confused with the

goddess Venus, and her magic mountains were called Venus-
classical

Germany, where the written versions of the Tannhauser

bergs in
myth seem to have originated. Her worship was celebrated at several
iireal mountains: Horselberg, Waldsee, Freiburg, and Wolkenstein, as
well as at peaks in Italy and Scotland In all the Tannhauser myths,
the Queen Sybil is the Goddess Venus." ?9

Sybil was a Latinization of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods,

whose worship actually continued in secret up to the 20th century on
Iwild mountaintops in her native Anatolia. Her rites "contained primitive
usages of the religion of Anatolia, some of which have survived to this
in spite of Christianity and Islam. Like the Kizil-Bash peasants of
jday
loday, the ancient inhabitants of the peninsula met on the summits
of

jjmountains covered with woods no ax had desecrated, and celebrated

their festal days." 40

Throughout the Middle Ages, men believed the Goddess could

699
 Mourdad-Ameretat invite them magic mountain, as shown by
into the interior of her

Mudra many Tannha*user

tales was not the only Venus-loving hero. The

^^^^^^^^^^ Danish ballad of The Elfen Hill speaks of a youth enchanted by an

41
elf-maid's dancing, and invited by her to the interior of her hill. There '

were even indications Mountain-goddess was still a trinity.

that the

According to the Thuringian Chronicle of 1 398, she appeared at mid- j

day as three great flames in the air, "which presently ran together in
one great globe of flame, parted again and finally sank into the
42
Horselbcrg."
The Mother-mountains continued to shelter pagan gods, who
were thought to be not dead but sleeping in the terrestrial womb,
awaiting rebirth like Hindu gods between their incarnations. Merlin,

William Tell, Barbarossa, Frederick, and others slept in magic moun-

tains. Many were assimilated to "the figure of Wotan, which survi

these legends of emperors and empires. It is Wotan who is

awaiting
to reappear in this world ... a dark heathen god-image that has not been
"
taken into account by the prevailing attitude of consciousness. 4 *
I, Neumann. CM., 152. 2. [Link], 125. ). Ellade. M.E.R.. 12. 4. Rranaton. 8$.

J. R.m. 62. 6. Ma**a. 48. 7. Gravw, CM. 1, 260. 8. Cram, W.G.. 409.

[Link]..v> iii M....I- mi M.f ii // fC0gmtmhZ7,V,%

[Link] IS [Link], M llalln.245. 15. Uthaby. 74-75.
16. Campbell. P.M.. 116. 17. Uvtmc.W. 18. Stone. 77. 19. Fodor,290.
[Link].2)7 21. Mallet. 115.401. 22. Dumf/ll. 64. [Link]..|.l-ll.( >i M..40.

[Link] Camp. A [Link]. 25. Wadded. 24). 271 26. Joyce 2. 160.
27. Campbell. P.M., 4 10. 28. Raring Could. C M M A 5)9. .

29. [Link], 1.275. 10. Campbell. (>i M . MX, )| 1-rlhaby. 129. 162. 172.
)2. Raring^ WM.I.I. CM MA. 247 1). Rme. 28). 288 )4. Lethaby. 24.
15. de Voraglnc. 291 , 16. Pepper 4 Wilms. 166. 17. de Clvry. 74.
*s Wcdeck.160, 19. Goodrich, 155-57. 40. Cumont, A.R.C.R.. 47.
4 1 Sieemtrup. 62. 42. Baring-Could,
. C.M.M A . 211.
41. Jung eV von Frarw, 197.

Mourdad-Ameretat
Persian spirit of "Death-Rebirth" whose name was constructed of
two sucrcd letters corresponding to the Jewish Mem-Aleph, or Amulet
of Ma. The original
1

reference was to the Mother-Goddess Ma as

mlcr of reincarnations.
[Link]. 117.

Mudra
Tantric term for ( 1 ) "woman," one of the five boons bestowed on
man by the Goddess "kidney bean," a female-genital symbol
Kali; (2)
associated with transmigration of souls (see Beans); (3) a
mystical
gesture, in temple dancers' hand-sign language.
1

l.(iimpbell.()r.M..)[Link]..4l

700
Viulkari Mulkari
*u*
hustralian primordial spirit who taught men to mutilate their genitals

|ii imitation of female menstrual bleeding. 1

Probably a corruption of hh^^hui^

Ma-Kali (Mother Kali). See Kali Ma.
var. Mu-Kari
1. Montague, S.M.S., 241.

Mummy
From mumiya, preservative bitumen used to coat corpses; probably

pcred
to the Goddess of rebirth still called Mumi or Muzem-Mumi,
1
Earth Mother, by the Votyaks.
1 .
Lurousse, 307.

Muses
Ninefold Goddess as the source of "in-spiration," literally breathing

i "I-deas" or Goddess-spirits within. The Muses were originally a

riad the primordial Triple Goddess. First of them was Mnemos-
"Memory," who made poets able to remember sacred sagas.
1
ne,
The seven-tone musical scale was the Muses' invention, supposed-
Ibased on their "music" of the seven spheres. Scipio the Elder said
he spheres "produce seven distinct tones; the septenary number is the
lucleus of all that exists. And men, who know how to imitate this

elestial harmony with the lyre, have traced their way back to the
ublime realm." 2 Led by Thalia, who governed music in general, the
lassical Muses were Clio (history), Calliope (heroic poetry), Terpsicho-
e (dance), Melpomene (tragedy), Erato (erotic poetry), Euterpe
flute accompaniments), Polyhymnia (sacred songs), and Urania, the
Celestial Aphrodite of the plane of the fixed stars. The Alexandrian

hrine of the Muses was the Museum, "the nearest thing to a modern
miversity that the ancient world experienced." 3 It was destroyed by
christians, who detested pagan learning.
1. Graves, W.G., 377; G.M. 1, 66. 2. Seligmann, 245. 3. de Camp, A.E., 136.

lilt

Mother," archaic name for the Egyptian Goddess as a trinity. The

irstof Mut's three heads was the Virgin Maat, wearing the plumes of
""ruth. The second was Hathor, Mother of the World,
wearing the
ed-and-white crowns of the Two Lands. The third, painted black and
rearing vulture feathers, was Nekhbet, the Crone of Death. The 1

!Joddess's trinitarian name may have been a cognate of Kali's name

701
 Mutspell Mutteyalamma, one of her manifestations as a disease-causing

Myrrh Destroyer.

^^^^^^^^^^^ Mut mothered all the gods of Egypt. Though some myths said Isis

was the oldest deity in the world, others claimed was born along
Isis

with Osiris from the womb of Mut. Her hieroglyphic sign was a design
of three cauldrons, representing the Triple Womb. 2 See Cauldron;
Trinity.
1. Budge, E.M., 121. 2. Book of the Dead, 205.

Mutspell
"Mother's Curse," the Norse idea of the fate that would overtake the
world at doomsday, as a result of the Goddess's disgust at the actions of
men and gods. As the Crone-mother Skadi, she would lay her doom
on the world, and spirits from the hot southern lands of Mutspellheim
would begin to destroy the earth, a mythic reminder of Kali the
Destroyer in her original territory. See Doomsday.

Mylitta
"Birth-producer," a Carthaginian name for the Goddess who, He-
rodotus said, was Alitta in Arabia, Venus Mylitta in Assyria, and Mitra

Carthage had a province named after her, Magasmelita,

1
in Persia.

"Shrine of Mylitta." Like the fish-mother Atargatis or Tirgata, she

personified the primal womb of the Abyss. She espoused the sun god
2

and "quenched the blazing lingam" in the waters of her womb, like all

Deep. The ancient

5
personifications of the female city of Mdina on
Malta used to bear her name. 4
1. Herodotus, 54. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 497-98. 3. Rawson, E.A., 57.
4. Pepper & Wilcock, 78.

Myrrh
Appearing at two crucial points in Christian mythology, at Jesus 's
birth (Matthew and again at his death (Mark 15:23), myrrh
2:1 1)

represented the mystic virgin mother who was also Mother Death,
called Mary, or Miriam, or Mari, or Myrrha, or as the Christians
called the virgin Mary "Myrrh of the Sea."
1

The pagans' version of Mary was the temple-maiden Myrrha, who

gave birth to Adonis, "the Lord," in the same cave at Bethlehem that
Christians claimed as Jesus's birthplace. 2 Myrrh was used as aphrodisiac
incense in Adonis's rites, and its
thorny twigs probably formed the
mock crown of the sacred king, still called the Crown of Thorns. Myrrh
was an emblem of Mara, a common Oriental name for the spirit of
death. 5

702
 Some scholars have myrrh was given Jesus on
offered a theory that Myrrh
(the
cross to deaden because of a Jewish tradition that "the
his pain,

jkindly
women of Jerusalem" used to give myrrh to "those who were led
4
jout to execution." The
theory cannot be supported, since myrrh has
|no analgesic properties. The women
of Jerusalem apparently had
another, less kindly reason for giving myrrh to those executed; even
early Christians remembered that myrrh meant the death and rebirth of

ja god and was identified with his holy mother.

In the lore of magic, myrrh was credited with power to cause

a relic of ancient legends of the castrated god's
[menstruation: perhaps
5
ihedding of the "blood of life."
1. Ashe, 48. 2. Doane, 1 55. 3. Frazer, G.B., 390; Campbell, Or.M., 219.
4. Keller, 376. 5. Pritchard, S.S., 47.

703
 vv5

,^

mgg
J ^ h
mm
 N O

The Victory of Samo-

thrace is
probably
better known
today than
her inspiration, the
pre-
Hellenic Goddess nike,
was in her day. Her
name means "victory" or
"dominance," and this
heroic statue, found on
the island of Samothrace
in the middle of the 19th

century, forcefully dem-

onstrates this character-
istic. Marble, 98 inches
high; 5th century b.c.

osiris was the most

ancient and durable of
Egyptian gods, well
established by 2000 b.c.
and so strong an influ-
ence at the
beginning of
the Christian era that
many of his characteris-
ticswere reflected in
(some say assumed by)
the new Messiah.
Shown here with his
wife-mother-goddess
Isis and the vulture-

headed Anubis, rulers

of Egypt for centuries.

oedipus, mythical King of

Thebes, in addition
to killing his father, mar-

rying his mother, and

gouging out his eyes,
also broke the God-
dess's image, the
Sphinx,
by throwing her off a
cliff.
J.
A. Ingres cap-
turedhim in a calmer
moment, explaining the
Enigma to the famil-
iar incarnation.
Naamah Naamah
Nakedness
Christian name for a demon, derived from a title of Adonis, Naaman,
"Darling." As the "darling" of the Goddess Aphrodite, he also gave h
*

name to the anemone, supposed to be the "flower" of his blood. See

Adonis.
[Link],G.B.,390.

Nagas
Vedic serpent-people, children of the Goddess Kadru. The Nagas
guarded treasure in underwater palaces and kept books of mystic

knowledge.
1
The real Nagas of southern India were tribes who
retained matriarchal customs, practiced matrilineal inheritance, and laid

no sexual or marital restrictions on women. 2 In return for their proper

reverence for her, their Goddess was supposed to bestow long life on
them.
1. Tatz & Kent, 79. 2. Graves, G.M. 1,13.

Nakedness
Tantric sages said one should participate in religious rites "sky clad"

(digambara) or naked, because in the eyes of the Goddess all distinction:

of rank, caste, or class should be put off along with the clothing that

expressed them. The Goddess herself appeared naked, under the nam<
1

of Nagna, "Nudity." 2 It was widely recognized that the

magic of the
Goddess dwelt more in the reality of her flesh than in her garments,
was a function of the female body, not of any external
since creation
accouterments. 3 Moreover, it was her nakedness that exerted its mysteri
ous power over the bodies of men. Images of the Naked Goddess
even decorated churches until 1 1th and 12th centuries a.d., especially
in the British Isles.
Though many were destroyed, some of these
images still survive. 4

By contrast to this earlier emphasis on nakedness, the magic of

men and their gods usually dwelt in their garments. Odin's sayings in
the Havamal show that he gave men clothes by which they would put
on "nobility" i.e., power for "the naked man is naught."
5
Patriar-
chal societies generally made much of uniforms, vestments, badges of
rank, and other decorations by which men defined themselves.
Perhaps out of this same sense that nakedness enhanced the power
of women and reduced that of men, Christians were
usually opposed
to nakedness even when it was
practical, as among tropical peoples.
Australian missionaries refused to give food to
hungry natives until

they put on clothes. A missionary in the Orinoco regretted that the

natives had not really accepted Christianity, but he confessed himself

706
I

I
"greatly consoled" at having taught native
they would no longer remove

tic
their clothes

Early Christians condemned nakedness because it was characteris-

of worship of the Goddess. The legend of St. Barnabas tells of the
miraculous destruction of the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos,
saint's

were he saw "a multitude of men and women celebrating a feast, and
running about naked. So wroth was he that he cursed the temple of
and instantly the
women such
even in bed.

in ruins,
6
modesty that

^
Nakedness

^^

these pagans, temple fell

crushing a large
7
number of pagans in its fall."

A 4th-century Christian bishop named Priscillian seems to have

I
participated inpagan rites. He gave himself to "abominable studies,
and held nightly meetings with immodest women and had been
accustomed to pray stark naked." 8
Medieval books on sorcery taught that spirits can be raised by

I
ceremonial nudity, but this kind of magic is a degradation which "the
foolish dotage of women is subject to fall into." Women continued to
9

believe in the power of nakedness. Scottish maidens stripped them-

I
selvesnaked on the Eve of St. Andrew and recited a prayer "to learn
what sort of husbands they shall have." 10 Pierre de Lancre wrote that
"witches in their accursed assemblies are either entirely naked or en
11
I chemise." Up to the 17th century, ancient fertility rites dictated the

grinding of grain for cakes in Ireland with "certain stones," by

festival
12
girls who had to be completely naked at the time.

At the Bulgarian ceremony of the need-fire, "two young men

'whose names must not be spoken' marched in front of the flocks and
herds which were to be driven through the flames, and afterwards

stripped themselves naked and kindled the new fire in a wood." At a

i similar ceremony in Serbia, "a naked boy and girl lit the fire by rubbing
rollers of wood together." n Even in the present century, Balkan
j

i
peasants and gypsies performed ceremonies requiring them to go naked
14
I in moonlight. Witches sometimes maintain the "sky-clad" tradition,
I
as in the Middle Ages they were often accused of worshipping the

j "great Devil" in the form of a large star when they went out naked at
; night. Some medieval heretics called "shepherds" insisted on saying
I
Mass while naked, on the theory that "this was the way our father
Adam sacrificed." The Inquisition condemned them, on the ground
:

that Adam didn't say Mass at all. 15

St. Jerome established the church's policy on female nakedness by

saying women should be so ashamed of their own bodies that they
should "blush and feel overcome" at the sight of themselves. For this

reason, no "virgin of full age" should bathe. If she was good-looking,

a woman must try to spoil her appearance by "a deliberate squalor" so
16
she wouldn't distract saintly men from their pure thoughts. Among
medieval nuns therefore, clothing was seldom changed, and dirtiness
i was thought next to godliness.
In the 1 5th century, the Adamites of Bohemia associated naked-

707
Name ness with humanity's pristine purity, quoting the Bible (Genesis 3:7)
to prove that garments were worn only after the first sin was committed.
They advocated nudity and free love to liberate the flesh from
sinfulness. Their sect was exterminated in 1421. 17
Nakedness often figured in secret initiations, as advised in a Frencl
mystical book: "The aspirant should become stark naked, should
empty himself completely, should be stripped of all his faculties,
renouncing all his own predilections, his own thoughts, his own
18
will in a word, his whole self." Even here the "self" seemed to be
closely identified with the clothes which, as the world knows,
"make the man."
1.
Campbell, Cfr.M., 219. 2. Avalon, 111. 3. Campbell, P.M., 389. 4. Branston, 22.
5. Branston, 64. 6. Briffault 3, 298, 306. 7. de Voragine, 307. 8. Coulton, 24.
[Link], 128. 10. Hazlitt, 8. 11. Leland, 158. 12. Johnson, 103.
13. Gelling &Davidson, 179. 14. Leland, 134. 15. J. B. Russell, 181,210.
16. Muller, 160. 17. J. B. Russell, 224. 18. Waite, O.S., 234.

Name
For the purposes of magic and religion, the name of anything was
considered identical with the thing itself, a spiritual "handle" by which
the thing or the supernatural being could be manipulated. Children
and primitives seldom distinguish clearly between the reality and the
name of an object. The childlike mind of the Middle Ages couched
1

the same thought in pseudo-rational terms: "The proper names of

things are certain rays of things, everywhere present at all times,
2
keeping the power of things, as the essence of the thing signified."
Words "name"
for Like other Europeans, ancient Britons believed the name and the
were virtually the same soul were the same. 4
as words for "soul":
Each Egyptian's soul-name, the ren, was breathed by a mother on
Irish ainm, Old Welsh
her child as it was first put to her breast; therefore the Goddess of
anu, Old Bulgarian
/men, Sanskrit naman,
soul-names was Renenet, who governed lactation. Without its ren, the
Greek onoma, Latin child would have no identity and would not be allowed to eat. Even
anima, nomen, and the gods needed mothers to give them names, otherwise they would
numen. "Irish ainm
pine away and die.
5
The same belief is found in India: the "thousand-
is 'name' and anim is

'soul, anima.' In cer-

eyed god" named Existence cried immediately after he was born, "Give
tain cases they are me a name, for without a name I will not eat food." 6
declined alike and Name-giving was often connected with food-giving. The French
therefore often con- still
give a child a nom de kit, milk-name, obviously recalling the pre-
?
fused by students."
Christian matriarchy where only mothers could give names. 7 Chinese
children received a "rice-name" with the first rice; it was supposed to

embody the soul and was kept secret. 8 According to the Bible, infants
were named by their mothers, not their fathers. 9 Adam's naming of
the animals, however, was a magical means of making Adam their

father, after the manner of Shiva under his title of Prajapati, "Father
of the Animals."
Transitions from matriarchy to patriarchy were marked by fathers'

708
 takeover of the name-giving function. Brahmans insisted that fathers, Name
not mothers, breathed the essential soul-name into children; thus the
soul of aBrahman was called Atman, "the Breath," from which came m^mmm^^m^^^
Greek atmos and German atmen. At each Brahman wedding, long lists
i of "begats" were recited to establish paternal ancestry. Imitators of

S
this eastern custom contributed the lists of spurious "begats" in the Old
i
Testament. 10
Ancestor worship was instituted in matriarchal times, when tribal
mothers became goddesses who gave their children names. When

patriarchs became synonymous with gods, the system was copied for the
other sex. Egyptian priests of Ra claimed their deity created all other

gods by naming them: "It is Ra who made his own names into his

i members, and these became the gods who are in his following. . . .

i Ra created the Company of the Gods out of his own names." This l '

;
was intended to uphold the priests' contention that any god one cared
to name was really Ra in disguise. But in a primeval time, Ra himself ex-

isted only as a name within the being of his Mother, Ma-Nu, the
cosmic abyss. 12
Egyptians remembered that the secret name embodying the soul
jwas mother-given. So
did the Phoenicians, Babylonians, Scythians,
Iand Celtic and Germanic tribes who called themselves by mother's
names, which encompassed the tribal soul. "Ask a Lycian who he
13
j

jis,"
Herodotus wrote, "and he answers by giving his own name, that of
his mother, and so on in the female line." H
Despite Brahmanism, most of India retained the ancient system of
maternal name-giving. Distribution of family names was governed by
the Goddess under her title of Samjna or Saranyu, "the Name," or
15
"Sign." Chinese family names similarly incorporated the Mother-
sign, a custom known to date back to the matriarchal age, before people
knew their fathers. 16 The Japanese didn't use patronymics until 1400
|a.d. Previously,
children took their mothers' names. 17 See
Motherhood.
Hellenic Greeks dated their transition from mother-names to
\
father-names back to a quarrel between the god Poseidon and the

goddess Athene. She won, but he oppressed the people to enforce his
demands. Athenian women were deprived of the vote, and men were
forbidden to take their mother's names as they had done before. 18
Even when calling themselves "patrician" (father-descended), Ro-
tman names originating in the pre- Roman
clans kept the feminine
19
matriarchate, where only mothers embodied clan spirit. The fact that
iRoman women bore clan names like Julia, Claudia, Cornelia, Lucre-
Itia, etc., has been misunderstood as evidence of social oppression.

Bullough said, "Until fairly late in Roman history women even

lacked individual names in the proper sense of the term . . .
;
mothers
i and daughters would have the same name." 20 He missed the point:
!
women bore the clan name because they embodied the clan soul,
lipassed in matrilineal succession from mother to daughter.

709
^
Name

because
The wholly patriarchal
throughout. In nomenclature,
Christian system maintained patronymics
women hardly existed at all. The only
name a woman kept for herself was her baptismal name, sacrosanct
it was ratified by a male god. Christian baptism didn't

mention surnames, because in the middle ages there were still common-
law rules providing for maternal surnames. Christian women received
the surnames of their fathers, but after marriage even these were given

up, so the children inherited no name from the female line. Christian
fathers like Brahman fathers gave children their names by speaking or
sometimes writing them; hence the term "author of my being." Yet
the matronymic survived in some places, such as Spain, even though
21
church councils declared maternal surnames illegal. Scandinavia
remained pagan up to the 1 1th century and retained older systems of
nomenclature. Scandinavian women didn't take their husbands' sur-
names until the 8th century. 22
1

The great importance attached to names goes back to the

earliest ages, and probably bears a profound psychological relationship t(

the human animal's unique ability to verbalize. Names were con-

fused with souls almost everywhere. Egyptians said "To speak the name
of the dead is to make them live again." Tomb inscriptions begged
passers-by to speak the name of the entombed, to give "the breath of life
to him who has vanished." 25 No greater harm could be done to an

Egyptian than to erase the carving or writing of his name. To destroy

24
the very letters meant destruction of the soul.
Romans also wanted to preserve the name-soul after death. Romar
epitaphs asked the passer-by to read the name aloud. Wealthy
Romans often establishedendowments for a guild of friends and their
successors to celebrate their names at a banquet, at stated intervals on
the anniversary of death. 25 The Christian practice of writing names on
tombstones developed from the Roman practice of re-creating the
soul in speech.
Some said a major purpose of the epitaph was to induce deities to
speak the name, which would insure immortality because any word
spoken by a god became reality. The spoken name in a divine mouth
would man. The pharaoh Sesostris I (1965-1934
re-create the actual

B.C.) had his name inscribed on the benben-stone (obelisk), remarking

that "A name that standeth thereupon is mentioned [by the gods] and
26
perisheth not in eternity." For the same reason, Babylonian kings
prayed to the Goddess Ishtar to give life to their names. 27
On the other hand, a man or god could be cursed if his secret,
magical name was learned by an enemy and spoken in the wrong
context. spoke the secret soul-name of Ra to destroy him at the end
Isis

of his daily cycle, making him an old man tottering feebly toward his
death at sunset. 28 Knowledge of his name brought destruction to

Rumpelstiltzkin in the fairy tale, which may have been a late version

of the myth of Ra and Isis.

At times the Goddess invoked the power of her own name, or

710
 several of her names, to release forces of creation or destruction. Isis Name
29
I
brought Osiris back to life by invoking herself as Isis and Nephthys.
I
She fought the dragon of darkness and "obtained mastery over him in ^^^mmm^^^^^
|
her name of Sekhet, she overpowered him in her name of Khut-nebat
50
I
(Eye of Flame)." Names of the Goddess of creation and destruc-
I tion were incongruously applied to Yahweh under his pagan-inspired
i
title El Schadaj related to schadajim, "milk-giving breasts," and
31
I
schadaj, "to destroy."
Precedents older than civilization evolved the idea that forces of
creation and destruction could be activated by pronouncing a divine

j
name. The Mother of Gods controlled her offspring by knowledge of

I
their secret names. Early priestly theory proposed that these secret
j
names could be learned by human beings, who could then control the
gods with them. Brahman priests claimed to control the gods' actions
with mantras incorporating the divine names. Some of their lore was
32
|
embodied in the Upanishads, which means "secret names." The
j
name of the Amida Buddha was so powerful that a priest could send
himself or any other man to the Western Paradise immediately only
33
| by uttering it.

Naturally, priesthoods kept the knowledge of these dread names to

{
themselves, as it would never do to let ordinary folk use them for free.
Hence the Jews' taboo on taking the name of the Lord in vain.

; Common people of the Semitic tribes didn't know their gods' real

I
names; they called them simply El or Baal or Adonai, "the Lord."
i

When the name of the Jewish God became more widely known, the
rabbis said its magic lay in its correct pronunciation, which could be

communicated only once every seven years from an elder priest to a

34
younger. The name was written on phylacteries which were said to
keep the bearer from every evil after many repetitions of the syllables.
Learned Jews said "God brought Israel out of Egypt by means of a
Name which consisted of seventy-two Names." 35
The Islamic Allah was even better equipped, with ninety-nine
secret names. Moslems claimed he would be compelled to answer
any prayer if all these names were pronounced. Allah himself was called
"the Essential Name," originally the milk-giving Goddess Al-Lat. 36
Pious Moslems invoked Allah's name before sexual intercourse so no
evil spirit could enter the womb and beget an evil child.
37

Both Moslems and Christians inherited Jewish name-magic and

believed that all sorts of miracles could be worked by invoking the
name of God or the name of Christ, to say nothing of their secret
names. In the Middle Ages it was believed that
any priest could
absolutely compel God to do whatever was asked, by conducting a Mass
of the Holy Spirit which mentioned God's secret name. 38 The

powers of God's name were explained by Henry Morley as follows:

Whoever knows the true pronunciation of the name Jehovah the name
from which all other divine names in the world spring as the branches
from a tree, the name that binds together the sephiroth whoever has that

711
Name in his mouth has the world in his mouth. When it is spoken angels are
by the waves ofsound. It rules ail creatures, works all miracles,
stirred it

commands all the inferior names of deity which are borne by the
J9
several angels that in heaven govern the respective nations of the earth.

Early in the Christian era, when Christians were struggling to

separate their sect from Judaism, many stories were invented to prove

the name of Christ superior inmagic efficacy to the name of God.

One such story from the Life of Pope Silvester told of a duel of holy
names performed by the pope and a Jewish rabbi, in the presence of

the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. The Jew said God's secret
name was so powerful that no unprepared creature could hear it and
live. To prove his point, he whispered the name into the ear of a bull,
which immediately fell dead. Then the pope pronounced the secret
name of Christ in the dead bull's other ear, saying, "Bull, arise; go back
to thy herd"; and the bull got up and went. 40 Silvester scoffed at the
Jew's claim to mastery of the divine name's fatal power, asking him,
"How is it, then, that thou thyself hast heard this Name and hast not
died?" 41 The Jew didn't answer.
Both Jewish and Christian Gnostics focused on the power of
divine names to bring about healing, exorcism, absolution, and
salvation. In the Pistis Sophia, Jesus told his disciples to "hide the

mystery" of a great Name that could dissolve evil and "blot out all

sins,done knowing or not knowing." 42 According to the Gospels, this

was the esoteric secret that Jesus concealed from all but his intimates.
The masses were not told, "lest at any time they should be converted,
and their sins should be forgiven them" (Mark 4:1 1), indicating that
Origen (Origenes
Adamantius) Christian early Christianity like other mystery-religions addressed itself to a
father, ca. 185-254 favored few. Jesus gave the disciples his secret name, which had
a.d.,an Egyptian who
power to exorcise, when he said "In my name shall they cast out devils"
wrote in Greek,
(Mark 16:17). Seventy of his followerstold him, "Lord, even the
exerting a powerful
influence on the early unto us through thy name" (Luke 10:17). Origen said
devils are subject

Greek church. At first

Jesus's name had "expelled myriads of evil spirits from the souls and
he was accounted a bodies of men." 45 According to the Enchiridion, the powers of Jesus's
saint, but three
name were so far-reaching that it was hard to see how anything could
centuries after his
death he was declared possibly go wrong in a world where it was spoken:
a heretic because of
Gnostic elements
O sacred Name, Name which strengthens the heart ofman, Name of life,

found in his writings.

ofsalvation, ofjoy, precious Name, resplendent, glorious, agreeable
Name, which fortifies the sinner, Name which saves, conserves, leads and
rules all . . . wheresoever the most sweet Name ofJesus is pronounced
Enchiridion A book . . . the demons take flight, every knee is bent, all temptations, even the
of magic charms,
spells,
worst, are scattered, all infirmities are healed, all disputes and conflicts
and secret names
between the world, the flesh and the devil are ended, and the soul is rilled
allegedly written
with every heavenly delight. H
by
Pope Leo the Great,
who presented it to
to in-
The esoteric secrets of Judeo-Christian name-magic were bor-
Charlemagne
sure his continuing rowed from Egypt, where the angels of light baffled the forces of
good luck. darkness with words of power, and set forth in works like the Book of

712
lEnoch, which depicted the archangel Michael battling dark angels with Name
Isimilar words:

This is the number ofKesbeel, who showed the head of the oath to the

holy ones when he dwelt high above in glory, and its name is Beqa.
And this angel requested Michael to show him the hidden name, that they
might mention it in the oath, so that those who revealed all that was
hidden to the children of men might quake before that name and oath.
And this is the power of that oath, for it is powerful and strong, and he
4t
placed this oath Akae in the hand of Michael. .

This passage was garbled Egyptian resurrection-magic. "Those

revealed all that was hidden" were the serpent deities who gave
jwho
imankind holy secrets, against the will of heaven. "The oath Akae"
jwas Aqa, the rudder of the boat of the dead, "shiner in the water,
hidden beam." The name of Aqa had to be spoken before a dead
46
Iman could enter the boat that plied the heavenly Lake of Reeds. It was
among the words of power by which Ra's angels battled the dragon of
night: "When these gods rich in, magic spoke, it was the very spirit (ka)

Df magic, for they were ordered to annihilate my enemies by the

effective charms of their speech." 47
Ethiopian and Abyssinian Christians retained the notions of
Egyptian paganism in regard to words of power (hekau). Their vision of

pie War in Heaven was simply the battle between Ra and the serpent
bf darkness. They said God's armies were twice overthrown, and Satan
was about to assume control of the universe, when God sent his

angels one last time into the fight, armed with a cross of light bearing

the three secret names of the trinity. "When Satan saw the Cross and
the Three Names of Power, his boldness and courage forsook him, his
arms lost their strength and the weapons which he was wielding fell

from them and he and his hosts turned their backs and were hurled
down into the abyss of hell by the now invincible angels of God."
The same trinity, however, came into being from the same abyss, the
Great Mother Ma-Nu, within whom the triple male god "at first
existed in name only." 48 That is, he/they came into being because the

[Mother spoke his/their name(s). It was believed that the very exis-

tence of this trinitydepended on continual mention of its/their holy

name mouths of men.
in the

Egyptian faith in the efficacy of speaking the trinitarian name was

laken over by Christians, who viewed "In the name of the Father, of
ihe Son, and of the Holy Ghost" as a magic formula second to none. It

could cure disease, chase away vermin, protect worldly goods and
49
acquire more of them. Pope Alexander III forbade monks to study
medicine, on the ground that all sickness was caused by demonic

and the only proper remedy was exorcism by the trinity's

([possession
50
oly names.
Holy names constituted theeffective portion of any Christian

remony. Absolution gave typical formula: "I absolve thee from

a all

y sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy

713
Name Spirit." Extreme unction was a string of invocations; 'in the Name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, may there be
extinguished in thee every power of the
Devil by the imposition of
our hands, and by the invocation of all the holy Angels, Archangels,
Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, and all

the Saints." Even longer lines of holy names marched through the
"Go
litany for the dying: forth, Christian soul, from this world in the

Name of God the Father Almighty, who created thee; in the Name of
the Holy Spirit, out upon thee; in the Name of the
who was poured
holy and glorious Mother of God, the Virgin Mary," and so on,

through long lists. Holy water for dedicating a church was exorcised
with the formula: "I conjure thee thou creature of water, in the name oi
the father, and of the son, and of the Holy-ghost, that thou drive the
devil out of every corner and hole of this church, and altar; so as he
remain not within our precincts." 51
The holy names were not merely symbols. Words spoken "in the
name of Jesus" or "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost"
were supposed to have absolute efficacy in expelling demons from
altars, candles, fonts, even church hassocks, just as Egyptian hekau

could expel demons from a pyramid. 52 Certainly man never invented a

weapon easier to use against the evil powers that he felt threatening
him on all sides. Nothing could induce him to abandon it, then or now.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim tried to explain the efficacy of holy name
Agrippa von Nette- in pseudo-rational style, ending with a wholly irrational description of
sheim (1486-1535)
such names as "vehicles of Divine omnipotence, not fixed by men or by
Austrian military officer,
angels but by the great God himself in a certain way according to a
scholar, court histori-

ographer, and magus;

number and figure which are unchangeable by reason of their eternal
author of the famous stability; they breathe the harmony of Divinity and are sanctified by
Occult Philosophy, God's help. The
. . .
heavenly powers fear these Divine names, Hell
which attempted to
trembles at them, the angels worship them, the bad demons dread
reconcile magic, theol-
53
them, all creatures revere them."
ogy, physics,
mathematics, alchemy,
Yet infernal names were considered just as effective as divine ones.
and cabalism. Romanians converted the pagan Mother Death into a witch from the
Mount of Olives, "Wing of Satan." She was
called Avestitza, or

dangerous to most human beings, but could not harm anyone who
learned and wrote down her nineteen secret names. 54
Priests and magicians, Christian or pagan, operated on the same
premise that the names of supernatural beings would call them and
compel them to perform the required task. Magic books and church
liturgies were near akin in intention. One typical book of necromancy

provided impressive lists of secret names, guaranteed to work.

This is the earliest name ofTyphon, at which tremble the earth, the abyss,

Hades, heaven, the sun, the moon, the place of the stars and the whole
phenomenal universe. When this name is spoken, it carries along with its

force gods and demons. It is the hundred-lettered name, the same

name as last written. And when thou hast uttered the god or the dead it,

person who hears it will appear to thee and will answer concerning the

714
 things you ask. And when you have learned all things, dismiss the god only Name
with the strongname, the one of the hundred letters, saying "Begone,
Lord, for thus wills and commands the great god!" Say the name and he
ss
will depart.

Another source mixed Jewish and Greek gods in a spell for

a spirit of divination into a vessel of water, also for

jailing breaking
mains, blinding enemies, bringing dreams and divine favors.

I invoke thee who created the earth and the bones (rocks) and all flesh and
spirit and established the sea, and shakes the heavens and did divide the
light from the darkness, the great ordering mind, who disposes all, the
everlasting eye, Demon ofDemons, God of Gods, the Lord of Spirits,
the unwandering Aeon. Iao ouei, hearken unto my voice. I invoke thee
the ruler of the gods, high-thundering Zeus, O king Zeus Adonai, O
Lord Jehovah. lam he who invokes thee in the Syrian tongue as the great
god Zaaler iphphou (Baal-zephon), and do not disregard the sound in
Hebrew ablanathanalba abrasiloa. S6

The longer and more sonorous the spell, the more holy or
jly names it mentioned, the more effective it was supposed to be. A
al love-charm invoked Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian under-
ld deities, as it was placed on a grave to carry the message down to
i via the deceased.

I place this charm down beside you, subterranean gods, Kore, Persepho-
ne, Ereshkigal and Adonis, Hermes the subterranean, Thoth and the
who hold the keys of those in Hades, the gods of the
strong Anubis,
underworld and the daimons, those untimely reft away, men, women,
youths and maidens, year by year, month by month, day by day, hour by
hour. I conjure you, all daimons assembled here. Betake yourself to . . .

that place and that street and that house and bring her hither, and bind
her. . . . Let her sleep with none other, let her have no pleasurable
intercourse with any other man, save with me alone. Let her neither drink
nor eat, nor love, nor be strong nor well, let her have no sleep except
with me, because I conjure you by the terrible terror-striking name of him,

who, when his name is heard, will cause the earth hearing it to open;
the daimons, hearing his fearful name, will be afraid, the rivers and the
rocks, hearing his name, will burst. S7 Rituale Romanum
Catholic handbook of
The Christian church taught that no demon could be exorcised rites and ceremonies,

efore his own name was known, following the example of Jesus with prescribed phrases

'ho demanded the names of the devils he cast out of the Gadarene and gestures for every
occasion.
Mark 5:9). The Rituale Romanum printed in 1947 prescribed that a
riest must demand the devil's name and rank, "and the devil, like a
risoner of war, was in honor bound to respond." 58
Precedents dated Magic Papyri
Collections of
ack, not only to the Gospels, but also to the Magic Papyri where secret
exorcisms, invocations,
ames of God were multiplied endlessly in the effort to learn a spirit's charms, and spells
ame: widely circulated during
the early Christian
/ conjure thee by the God of the Hebrews, Jesus, Jaba, Jae, Abraoth, Aia, era, used as bases for
Thoth, Ele, Elo, Aeo, Eu, Jiibaech, Abarmas, Jabarau, Abelbel, Lona, later grimoires and
Abra, Maroia, Arm, appearing in fire, thou, Tannetis, in the midst of Hermetic texts.

715
Name plains, and snow, and mists; let thine inexorable angel descend and put
into safe keeping the wandering demon of this creature whom God has
_^____ created in his holy Paradise. For I pray to the Holy God, putting my
reliance in Ammonipsentancho. I conjure thee with a flood of bold wore

Jakuth, Ablanathanalba, Akramm. Thou art Abrasiloth, Allelu, Jelo-

. . .

sai, Jael: I conjure thee by him who manifested himself to Osrael by nigh

in a pillar ofAre and in a cloud by day and who has saved his people

from the hard tasks ofPharaoh and brought down on Pharaoh the Ten
Plagues because he would not hearken. I conjure thee, demoniac spirit,
to say who thou art. For I conjure thee by the seal Solomon placed upon
the tongue ofJeremiah that he might speak. Say therefore who thou
art, a celestial being or a spirit of the airs. S9

One rabbinical tradition anathematized Christian use of holy

names to bring about everything from exorcism to resurrection; but

Christianity could hardly have existed withoutJesus said, "I have it.

manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me. And . . . I

have declared unto them thy name" (John 17:6, 26), copying the
Egyptian magician's secret communication of a divine name: "I am he
whom you [the god] met under the holy mountain and to whom you

gave the knowledge of your greatest Name, which I shall keep holy,
communicating it to none save to your fellow initiates in your holy
60
rites." Magic books attributed to Pope Honorius, famed as a wizard
despite his pontifical rank, plainly listed the seventy-two secret names
of God and demonstrated their use in conjurations. For any modern \

reader who may wish to test their efficacy, they are: Trinitas, Sother,

Messias, Emmanuel, Sabahot, Adonay, Athanatos, Jesu, Pentagna,

Agragon, Ischiros, Eleyson, Otheos, Tetragrammaton, Ely, Saday,
Aquila, Magnus Homo, Visio, Flos, Origo, Salvator, Alpha et Omega,
Primus, Novissimus, Principium et Finis, Primogenitus, Sapientia,
Virtus, Paraclitus, Veritas, Via, Mediator, Medicus, Salus, Agnus, Ovis
Vitulus, Spes, Aries, Leo, Lux, Imago, Panis, Janua, Petra, Sponsa,
Pastor, Propheta, Sacerdos, Sanctus, Immortalitas, Jesus, Christus, Pa-

ter, Filius Hominis, Pater Omnipotens, Deus, Agios, Resurrectio,

Mischiros, Charitas, Aeternas, Creator, Redemptor, Unitas, Summum
61
Bonum, Jehovah, Agla, Sady, Gog and Magog.
Infinitas,
Christians maintained even up to the present day the old pagan
belief that to speak the name of a dead person could call up his ghost,

therefore such aname must be accompanied by the formula "God rest

him," to keep him in the grave where he belonged. Pliny said Roman
62
pagans used the same formula for speaking of the dead. It was also
thought a disaster to have a dying person carry one's name in his

mouth through the passage into death. If a dying man cursed his enem;
by name, the enemy would also die, obviously in accord with the
ancient belief that a name was a vital part of the soul. 65
One however, was the
tradition Christians deliberately forgot,

oldest of all: that

mothers gave children their name-souls while
baptizing them with milk from their breasts. Pagan mothers continued

716
D do this, well into the Middle Ages; but it was specifically stated that Nammu
bch a matriarchal baptism was never given to the Christ child. 64 Nana
I. Campbell, P.M., 85. Agrippa, 217. 3. Jung
2. & von Franz, 185.
4. Squire, 263. 5. Erman, 296. 6. 0'Flaherty, 3 1 .
[Link],429. 8. Clodd, 65.
9. Briffault 1, 372. 10. Hays, 223; Mahanirvanatantra, 215, 236.
I I . Book of the Dead, 266. 1 2. Budge, A.T., xix.

13. Briffault 1, 419; Larousse, 83; Maspero, 3. 14. Stone, 46.

15. 0'Flaherty, 65, 352. 16. de Riencourt, 170. 17. Briffault 1, 369.
18. Graves, G.M.
60. 19. Dumezil, 68; Briffault 1, 422. 20. Bullough, 82.
1,

21. Hartley, 287. 22. Oxenstierna, 207. 23. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 122.
24. Book of the Dead, 280. 25. Angus, 199. 26. Erman, 51. 27. d'Alviella, 189.
28. Larousse, 11. 29. Brandon, 126-27. 30. Budge, G.E. 1, 447.
31. Castiglioni, 177. 32. Campbell, Or.M., 200. 33. Ross, 111. 34. Campbell, P.M., 85.
35. Budge, A.T., 270, 378. 36. Budge, A.T., 48, 50. 37. Fielding, 84.
[Link],G.B.,61. 39. Agrippa, 248. 40. J.H. Smith, C.G., 314-15.
[Link],80. 42. Malvern, 51. 43. Robbins, 181. 44. Waite, CM., 51-52.
45. Legge 1, 169. 46. Budge, E.M., 169. 47. Hooke, M.E.M., 74.
48. Budge, A.T., xx, xxi, xxii. 49. Frazer, G.B, 615, 632; de Voragine, 770.
50. White 1, 386. 51. Scot, 191. 52. H. Smith, 200. 53. Shumaker, 149.
54. Leland, 64. 55. Legge 1, 104. 56. Legge 1, 106-07; Budge, E.M., 177.
57. E.M. Butler. 58. Robbins, 128. 59. E.M. Butler. 60. M. Smith, 49, 132.
61. Waite, CM., 275-77. 62. Halliday, 47. 63. Wimberly, 352. 64. Wimberly, 373.

Jammu var. Nar-Marratu

lumerian name for the Mother

of the Universe, represented by an

jleogram meaning She appears to have been identical with

"sea."
riamat or the primal mother called Ma-Nu in both India and Egypt,
e., the Deep that existed before creation. According to Sumerian

briptures, she "gave birth to heaven and earth."

1

1. Hooke, M.E.M., 24.

nunrael
4anichean name for the mother of Adam and Eve. Jews also called
terNahemah or Naama, a serpent-mother classified with Lilith as a
eing who gave birth to demons. She was an esoteric remnant of the
1

'rimal Goddess who gave birth to the first couple in her magic garden.

1. Legge 2, 329.

niana

virgin mother of Attis, cognate with Norse Nanna, Anatolian Anna,

bumerian Inanna; a priestess-incarnation of the Goddess, like Adonis's
'irgin mother Myrrha. In ancient Uruk, the name of Nana meant

'Moon." The same name was applied to the same deity in Dahomey,
first man and woman were born of Nana-Buluku, the
vhere the
'Moon-Sun." 1

1. Hays, 339.

717
Nanda Devi Nanda Devi
Nave
"Blessed Goddess," the mountain-mother who gave birth to the

Ganges; one of the holiest mountains of the Himalayan chain (see

Mountain). The nearly inaccessible peak of Nanda Devi lay beyond
walls of rock and ice, none less than 18,000 feet high. The Blessed
Goddess was finally approached by climbers in 1936.

Nanshe
"Interpreter of Dreams," Babylonian title of the Goddess who gave
her priests the ability to interpret and prophesy from other men's
dreams. To acquire this ability, priests underwent an initiation cere-

mony of descent into her "pit," a symbolic death and resurrection, like
that of the Old Testament Joseph who interpreted Pharaoh's dreams
afterward. Nanshe was also a Goddess of water and fertility, her symbol

a vessel of water with a fish in it, signifying the gravid womb. Joseph
1

by means of his "cup," which was probably

practiced divination a Vess<
of Nanshe (Genesis 44:5, 15). See Abaddon.
1. Larousse, 61,63.

Narcissus
Greek flower-god who died looking at this own reflection in the pool
of thenymph Echo. As a deity of spring vegetation he was an alternate
form of Dionysus (Antheus), who was caught by the Titans with a
magic mirror or reflecting pool inhabited by water nymphs who seized
Once his soul was caught, the god died and sprang up again
his soul. 1

as spring flowers. The Hellenic myth that Narcissus pined away for lov<
of his own reflection was an imaginative revision of the older story of
a human sacrifice at the springtime Heroantheia, or "Hero-Flowering/
Graves, CM. 1,288.
1.

Natron
"Birth fluid," the brine in which Egyptian mummies were pickled.
Curing water was a magical imitation of fetal existence. The
in salt

mummy was supposed to be awaiting rebirth from the Goddess's

womb.

Nave
Central aisle of a church, from navis, a ship; medieval churches

copied the ship shape of Norman burial mounds. Nave also meant the
1

718
 inavel or omphalos, since both ship and shrine were symbols of the Necromancy
Goddess's womb to which Northmen returned at death.
1 . Oxenstierna, 34. ^^^^____^^^^^^^_

Necromancy
.

Divination by the dead," one of the world's most popular forms of

still widely practiced under the new name of
magic, spiritualism or
mediumship. The basic idea was (and is) direct communication with
the dead, to discover the secrets of the after-life and the future.
The idea of necromancy underlay every salvation cult. Every
Savior came back from the land of death to tell his followers how to
avoid its pitfalls and attain blissful immortality. Such information consti-
tuted the Mystery-teachings of Orphism, of Eleusis, of Samothrace,
I land of the Dionysian cults as well as those of Osiris, Pan, Adonis,

| Tammuz, Krishna, Balder, Zalmoxis, and Christ. But not only

.
Saviors and sacred kings returned from the land of death. Any ghost
I
could do so, if properly summoned.
Homer depicts Odysseus performing necromancy with sheep's
t
jblood,
to call the dead from Hades and speak with them. A gift of 1

blood was always most welcome to the "shades" who were bloodless.
This idea led on to medieval terrors like vampires and revenants who
i came back from the grave in search of blood.
The Bible shows Saul incapable of practicing necromancy for

I himself, as
Odysseus did. To consult the
ghost of Samuel, Saul
needed the help of the wise-woman miscalled the "witch" of Endor.
The text does not describe her as a witch, but as a "woman that hath

|
a familiar spirit" (1 Samuel 28:7). She
an obvious fraud, presenting to
is

Saul under cover of darkness an obscure figure hidden in a mantle,

speaking in whispers, as ghosts were supposed to do. Saul, overcome by

superstitious terror, bows his face to the ground and never even tries
i to get a good look at the apparition (1 Samuel 28:14).
Romans also had necromantic
though the ordinary
specialists,
>
citizen could deal in a smallway with ancestral ghosts, making
2
i

offerings to them on the nights of the Lemuria. Once each year, priests
i called up the ghosts dwelling in the pit under the lapis manalis or

"soul stone" in the Forum, to consult them for omens. 3

Northern tribes had similar customs, consulting ancestral ghosts at

Samhain, the Feast of the Dead, which became Christians' All

Hallows or Halloween. "Ghost" and "guest" both descended from
BGermanic Geist because the death's-heads really did attend the feasts
4
las honored guests.
Christians also believed in, and practiced, necromancy. St. Clem-
|ent
the Roman, called the third pope after Peter, paid a necromancer
[

a large sum of money to call up a spirit from the underworld and

5
(question it
concerning the after-life. Raising the dead Lazarus to life

719
Nehellenia
again for a while was one of the miracles that defined the divinity ol;

Nehushtan Christ; yet, Scot asked, how is that "witches do the same, and it is

6
called necromancy?"
Necromancy came to be known as "black magic" through a
linguistic blunder.
The Greek root nekros, a corpse, was corrupted to j

Rituale Romanum Latin niger, "black"; this gave nigromancy, the "black art."
7

Catholic handbook of
A curious necromantic notion of the resurrection of the flesh
rites and ceremonies,
with prescribed phrases underlay the church's procedure for canceling excommunication of a
and gestures for every corpse. The Rituale Romanum said:

If the body be not yet buried, let it be lightly beaten with a rod or small
cords after which it shall be absolved. . . . But ifit hath been already
buried in unconsecrated ground, ifit may be conveniently done, let the
body be exhumed, and after it hath been lightly beaten in like manner
and then absolved let it be buried in consecrated ground; but if the body
cannot conveniently be disinterred, then the grave shall be beaten
And if the body be already buried in consecrated ground, it shall not be
disinterred, but the grave shall be lightly beaten. 8

As a rule, Christian authorities reserved for themselves all

dealings with the dead and regarded any lay necromantic or spiritualist
activities as heresy, if not diabolism. In 1866 the Second Plenary

Council of Baltimore forbade the faithful to attend seances, even if

motivated only by some, at least, of the manifesta-
idle curiosity; "for

tions must necessarily be ascribed to Satanic intervention since in no

other manner can they be understood or explained."
1. Homer, Book XI. 2. Larousse, 213. 3. James, 183. 4. Hazlitt, 27.

5. Castiglioni, 165. 6. Scot, 141. 7. J.B. Russell, 9. 8. Summers, V, 101.

Nehellenia
"Nether Moon," a variant of the Goddess Hel, or Holle, after whom
Holland was named. Altars and artifacts dedicated to her were found in
Holland after a great storm in 1 646 washed away the soil that had
buried them. 1
1. Johnson, 21 1-12; Reinach, 138.

Nehushtan
Semitic serpent god whose idol was made by Moses (2 Kings 18:4).
Hebrew Nehushtan or Nahash, "serpent," descended from the Vedic
serpent-king Nahusha, once ruler of all the gods, later cast down to
the underworld by Indra. Gnostic Jews worshipped Nehushtan in the
1

first few centuries ad. and were known as Naassians, "snake-worship-

pers," counterparts of the Ophites (see Serpent).

1.0'Flaherty,348.

720
 Meith Neith
Nemesis
Triple Goddess of Sais, also called Anatha, Ath-enna, Athene,
Medusa. Egyptians said her name meant "I have come from myself."
She was the World Body, the Primal Abyss from which the sun first
ose, and "the Cow, who gave birth to Ra." She was the Spirit Behind '

:he Veil, whom no mortal could see face to face. She called herself
'all that has been, that is, and that will be," a phrase copied
by the
Christian Gospels (Revelation 1:8). She was older than dynastic
Egypt. Her symbol was borne by a prehistoric clan, and her name by
yvo queens of the first dynasty. Greeks knew her as Nete, one of the
2
Driginal trinity of Muses at Delphi.
In the Bible she was called Asenath (Isis-Neith), Great Goddess of
the cityof Aun, which the Jews rendered "On." Her high priest

Potiphar was made her "father," as Teiresias was made the "father" of
the Goddess Mante, and Brahma was made the "father" of the
The Goddess herself was made the
oddess Sarasvati (Genesis 41:45).

spouse of Joseph, whose Egyptian name meant "he who was brought
?
to life by the word of the Goddess (neter)."
1. Budge, G.E. 1, 451, 459; 2, 299. 2. Larousse, 37, 1 18. 3. Budge, D.N., 34-35.

Nekhbet
Archaic Egyptian name for Mut, the Vulture-goddess of death and
rebirth. Her necropolis at Nekhen was an original City of the Dead and
ione of Egypt's oldest oracular shrines. Nekhbet has been recognized
as "the representative of an ancient matriarchal stratum" in Egyptian

religion.
1
See Vulture.
1. Neumann, A.C.U., 12.

Nemean Lion
Mother Nemea as a destroying Moon-goddess gave birth to the
Nemean lion, who was slain by Heracles, as also by his Jewish counter-
Samson, a similar
ipart sun-hero. The lion was Leo, whom the
1

sun-man encountered at midsummer, in the season of honey-making, as

shown by the honeycomb appearing in the body of Samson's lion

.(Judges 14:8).
1. Lurousse, 143.

Nemesis
"Due Enactment," the Time-goddess also called Dike or Tyche,

"Destiny." She was probably derived from Kala-Nemi, the Mother of

*

i
Karma and of the wheel of time. 2 Many versions of the Moon and

721
Nephthys her holy groves were cognates: Nemea, Diana Nemetona, the Celtic
Nereus, Saint Nemhain, Merlin's Nimue, the Mother of the ancient Nemed or
"moon-people."
Ovid called Nemesis "the Goddess that abhors boastful words,"

because she brought all kings and heroes down to destruction in the
end, no matter how arrogant they might become. The Stoics wor-
5

shipped her as the world-governing principle of Nature, which in

time reduced all things to their component elements. Even Zeus feared
Nemesis, for she was once his destroyer and devourer, the Goddess
4
who gave both birth and death to all gods. She was sometimes entitled

Adrasteia, the Inescapable One. 5

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 126. 2. O'Flaherty, 344. 3. Gifford, 55. 4. Angus, 12.
5. Graves, G.M. 1,126.

var. Nebthet Nephthys

Egypt's underground Goddess called the Egyptian Hecate. Plutarch
1

also said she was the same as Aphrodite, having the names Finality and

Victory.
2
With Isis, she made up the divine Two Ladies, representing
death and life.

1 .
Graves, W.G., 153. 2. Barrett, 92.

Nereids
Greek catchall term for fairies, nymphs, mermaids, female nature
spirits. Mount Parnassus has Nereid Pits and a Nereid Spring; a whole
mountain on Crete is the Nereid Castle. As shape-shifters, Nereids

appeared sometimes as beautiful women, sometimes as animals. Chris-

tians called them "she-devils" and their leader a Lamia. 1

1. Hyde, 143-46.

Nereus, Saint
Spurious canonization of the pagan god Nereus, an "old man of the
sea" born of the Goddess under her name of Nereis, queen of Nereids.
The original Nereus was confused with Proteus, the "first man," and
probably with Noah. Christian legend
1
made him one of a pair of
eunuchs, Nereus and Achilleus, whose claim to sainthood was that
they convinced a rich woman to remain a virgin for the sake of her soul.

The story may have begun with a funerary portrait of the woman,
Flavia Domitilla, flanked by her family deities Nereus and Achilles. 2

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 128. 2. de Voragine, 282.

722
 Jergal Nergal
Neter
kkkadian underworld god, consort of Eresh-kigal, the queen of the
iiades. The Bible says the men of Cuth made Nergal's image (2 Kings
7:30). A prince of Babylon was named "Nergal-Preserves-Me"
eremiah 39:3). Since Nergal represented another form of the nether

[lack
Sun like Hades, Pluto, and Saturn he was assimilated to
legend as a demon.
1
Christian

[Link].C.M., 186.

Jeter var. Nether, Nuter,

Nu
.gyptologists found in ancient Egypt a concept they could equate
[ith
their own notions of a supreme did so only by
God, though they
;noring the matter of gender since evidence suggests that this
all

rimal being was female. Mariette Bey wrote: "At the head of the Auguste Mariette
gyptian pantheon soars a God who is one, immortal, uncreated, (1821-1881) French

jvisible and hidden in the inaccessible depths of his [sic] essence; he Egyptologist, discov-
erer of the ruins of the
ic] is the creator of the heavens and of the earth; he [sic] has made at Mem-
Serapeum
verything which and nothing has been made without him [sic]."
exists
phis, excavator at
be Rouge gushed: "The unity of a supreme and self-existent being, Karnak and other
is [sic] eternity, his [sic] almightiness, and eternal reproduction thereby sites. He achieved the
Egyptian ranks of
i God; the immortality of the soul, completed by the dogma of
Bey and Pasha.
unishments and rewards; such is the sublime and persistent base which
1 must secure for the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians a most
.

onorable place among the religions of antiquity." '

De Rouge and Mariette spoke of the concept of neter (also

indered nether, nuter, or Nu), usually translated "God" or "gods"

liough several of the seven Hathors had the name of Neter. They ruled
ie womb of rebirth, the seven-layered after-world known as Khert-

jleter
or Neter-Khertet. 2 Male gods were called neter only when they
tore artificial breasts.
3
Neteritox nutrit, "nurturer," was a common
/nonym for "Goddess." 4 She-nit or She-neterv/ere Fate-goddesses
who form the conditions of the lives of men." 5

The Book of the Dead distinguished between gods and the netriox
'utri: "I am devoted in my heart without feigning, O thou netri more
nan gods." A king was told that in his after-life he lived "by the side of a
Hindu god with his shakti. Every king was warned that
ieter" like a

|e
was "only the guardian of goods and provisions which belonged to
he neter." She provided all subsistence, and property, and children;
6
hid she opposed would-be tyrants.
Neter netri was defined as "self-produced, primeval matter," the
>cean of uterine blood before creation, holding future forms in the

ondition of formlessness or Chaos. Scholars actually translated this

7
oncept "Lake of God." Its real meaning lay in the root syllable Nu,

723
^Neter

^^
ma
or Nut, "an ocean infinite in extent and of fathomless depth, bearing
the germs of all kinds of life," like Kali's primordial womb. The

power of Nu was "the self-created," "maker of the gods," and "creato:

of men." She existed before the sky, the earth, mortals, or gods.
From Nu
one and the same. 8
the sun was born; therefore

The sun went back into

Nu and the Great Mother were

Mother Nu's "great gate" in the west

when he Nu was also the hieroglyphic symbol of water that the
died.

Goddess Nut carried on her crown. Nu was the Triple Goddess, show
in tomb carvings as three cauldrons. Nu "maketh fertile the watery

mass of heaven, and maketh to come forth water on the mountains to

give life to men." 9 Nu became the Semitic nun, primal sea personi-
fied as the Fish-mother (see Fish). She was incarnate in the sacred
harlots of Erech, known as nu-gig. 10

This primal sea was likened to the menstrual blood of the Great
Mother Goddess Tiamat, the creatress, who menstruated for three
years and three months to produce enough life-giving essence to give
birth to the universe. 11This flow was the Nether Upsurge, or
Fountain of the Deep, emanating from her "holy door" designated by
the letter dahth or delta, the sign of the yoni. (See Demeter;

Triangle.)
With a vowel point, dahth formed the Hebrew word ed, errone-
ously translated "mist" in Genesis [Link] "But there went up a mist
from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground." The origin
meaning was not "mist" but something like a mighty fountain or
spring, an unexplained upwelling of fluid from the bowels of the earth,
which soaked the ground (adamah) to make it fertile, before the
sending of rain from Father Heaven. This was what other Middle-
Eastern scriptures called the Nether Upsurge: female fluid from the

deeps, bursting forth to meet a male fluid from the clouds. 12 Other
Oriental sources show that the original sacrament of creation called
for a meeting of semen and menstrual blood "like the pouring of water
into water," as in the meeting and
mingling of the powers of Kali and
Shiva, or of Tiamat and Apsu. Subsequently, adamah brought forth lift
Adamah really meant "blood-red soil," and other myths clearly
state that the Nether Upsurge from the interior of Mother Earth was
not mist but life-giving uterine blood. The ancients often likened blood
which was regarded as the arche, the first of all elements
to salt water,

from which the others were born. 13 Salt water was "birth fluid"
(natron), representing regenerative Mother-blood. And Mother-
blood was the vehicle of that world-creating spirit called neter, nether,

etc.,which Egyptologists insisted on confusing with their own con-

cept of God.

To the great and supreme Power which made the heavens, the gods, the
earth, the sea, the sky, men and women, animals and creeping things,
all that is and all that is yet to come into being, the Egyptians gave the
name of neter or nether, a word which survives in Coptic under the
form nuti . . . Dr. Brugsch defined neter to mean "the active power whic

724
 produces and creates things in regular recurrence; which bestows new Nicholas, Saint
"
life upon them, and gives back to them their youthful [T]he .
vigor. .

innate conception of the word completely covers the Latin natura . . .

^^^^^^_^^^^_
. . . the great cosmic powers, and the beings who although held to be
"divine" were yet finite and mortal . . . were called neteru, and the
word is translated "gods" by Egyptologists. H

Itseems, however, that "gods" didn't even begin to cover the

ue meaning of the ancient word neter, a relic of primitive matriarchal
ligion. Budge says:

One knows not exactly the meaning of the verb nuter, which forms the
"
radical of the word neter, "god. It is an idea analogous to "to
" "
become, or "to renew oneself. ... In other words, it has the meaning of
god, but it teaches us nothing as to the primitive value of this word. We
must be careful . . . not to let it suggest the modern religious or philosophi-
cal definitions ofgod which are current today . . .
; neter appears to
mean a being who has the power to generate life, and to maintain it when
IS
generated.

Naturally, at the time when this crucial word was coined, the
ower to generate life was believed to be solelyfemale (see Mother-
:ood). It was the Goddess only who was "self-renewing" and the

jnirce of all "becoming." 16 Moreover, Egyptian writings contradict

Egyptologists who want to call neterit "gods." The gods in the train

r Ra were strongly differentiated from neterit, whom Ra's priests called

17
Wemptible beings. In the time of Queen Hatshepsut, the neterit
ere not contemptible but divine beings; however, they "ruled without
a" and paid no attention to his commands. In some way they had
een "made distant" and their footprints were gone from the earth. 18
lere it seems the neterit were nothing more nor less than deified
iiaternal ancestresses, like the matrikadevis of ancient India and the disk
i Scandinavia.
After the 20th dynasty the early religion of Egypt was fragmented
hd lost in confusion under the rule of new patriarchal gods, like Ra.

fudge says, "Knowledge of the early dynastic religion of Egypt pos-

ted by the priestsin general after, let us say 1 200 B.C., was

xtremely vague and uncertain. The result of this was to create in their
19
jligion a confusion which is
practically unbounded."
1. Budge, G.E. 1, 138-39. 2. Book of the Dead, 126. 3. Larousse, 36.
4. Maspero, 267. 5. Budge, E.M., 34. 6. Budge, G.E. 1, 72, 120, 125, 127.
7. Budge, G.E. 1,74,481. 8. Book of the Dead, 161, 163.

[Link],G.E. 1,203, 511; 2, 103. 10. Stone, 158. [Link]. Bub. Lit, 301. &
12. Hooke, M.E.M., 110-11. [Link], P.M., 64. 14. Bookofthe Dea d, 99- 100.
1 5
Budge, G.E. 1 69-70. 1 6. Stone, 219. 17. Book of the Dead, 161.
.
,

18. Campbell, Or.M, 103. 19. Briffault 2, 773.

Nicholas, Saint
{
bogus evolved from the pagan sea god who replaced Artemis
saint

s patron of sailors and harlots. Temples of Poseidon became shrines of

1

725
Nicholas, Saint St. Nicholas, who also inherited Poseidon's popular title, "the
2
Sailor."

^^^^^^^^^^ Nicholas's Christian name was the same as Old Nick, or Hold
Nickar, the Teutonic sea god known as king of the nixies (sea

nymphs). Nicholas was also equated with Woden. As European pagan

were Christianized, the benevolent aspect of Woden became
deities

St. Nicholas (Santa Claus), who galloped over housetops during the

winter solstice as the elder god did, granting boons to his worshippers
below. 3
In Italy, St. Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity calta
The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, or Befana, who used to fill
4
the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted
from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of St. Nicholas's
cult. Christian sailors carried the saint's image out to sea on his feast da
5
as pagan sailors formerly carried the image of the sea god or goddess.
Some bones were collected in the 1 1th century a.d., installed in a
church built at Bari to house them, and labeled the bones of
St. Nicholas. 6
This was the real beginning of St. Nicholas's cult, though his

Christian legend claimed (quite without foundation) that he had been

a bishop of Myra in the 4th century. His official biography was
preposterous. As an infant he fasted, said the hagiographers, taking
his mother's breast only once on Wednesdays and Fridays. He became
a bishop on account of his predecessor's prophetic dream, because he
was the first man to enter the church next day. He resurrected the dea*
from a magic cauldron. He instantly halted a violent storm at sea to
save three drowning sailors. He miraculously multiplied a shipment of
grain to feed a whole diocese fortwo years, with enough seed left
over for future crops vastly surpassing Christ's miracle of the loaves
and fishes. After his death he achieved even greater feats. His bones
exuded a fountain of holy oil that could cure every disease. 7
The original pagan god Nicholas gave rise to a Gnostic sect of
Nicolaites who worshipped him with his cauldron of regeneration as a

fertility figure. They "held that the only way to salvation lay through
8
frequent intercourse between the sexes." Like other worshippers of
the sexual fertility principle, pagan or Christian, the Nicolaites were

surpressed; but sexual symbolism persisted in the sigil of St. Nicho-

las's Day almanac: a furka combined with a yonic mandorl
in the runic

In ancient Egypt, this was a sign of the phallus of Set in conjunction

with the goddess's genital oval. 9 Another symbol of St. Nicholas was th
cluster of three golden balls, adopted as a crest of the Medici family
and later as a sign of pawnbrokers. 10
The Dutch called St. Nicholas Sinte Klaas, and carried his cult to
the New World where the name was corrupted to Santa Claus.
1. Miles, 218. 2. Hyde, 82-83. [Link], 186. 4. Miles, 343. 5. Miles, 221.
6. Male, 329. 7. de Voragine, 17-21. 8. Knight, D.W.P., 173. 9. Brewster, 13.
10. Attwater, 251.

726
 lifl Nifl

lternate name for the Teutonic underground Goddess Hel, ruler of Ninhursag

ie dead. She was the Creek Nephele, a shadow-twin of Mother Hera. mmhmmbmmmmb
oth names, Nifl and Nephele, meant darkness, clouds, obscurity
)ld High German nebul, Old Saxon nebal, German Nebel). Children
Nifl were the Niflungar or Nibelungs, the Burgundians' designa-
m of their dead ancestors, who lived in the womb of Nifl-Hel and
ere turned black, like shadows. Their sagas became the
1

Hbelungenlied.
In the Bible, the same ancestral ghosts are called nephilim,

;hildren of Nephele." By Jewish tradition, the nephilim were giants,

>rung from a great dark mother named Nephesh, "Soul of the Earthly
2
/orld." See Shadow.
1. Turville-Petre, 202. 2. Campbell, Oc.M., 398.

like

Dominance" or "Victory," a pre-Hellenic Goddess born of Styx,

ie personification of the birth-stream. Her begetter was Pallas, the
1

pallus.
1. [Link], 72-73.

Jimrod
iblical "mighty hunter before the Lord" (Genesis 10:9), that is, a
)py of the Lord of the Hunt, whom the Greeks called Orion and the
lanaanites called Baal-Hadad.

L
Jeltic

ie
Moon-goddess, cognate with Greek Nemesis and the Diana of
Groves (nimidae). Medieval romances made her the witch-maid
'ho enchanted Merlin into his crystal cave of sleep at the heart of
er fairy-wood, Broceliande. Her name meant Fate. She was also called
7
ivien, "She Who Lives," or Morgan, the Goddess of death, for she
'as the archetypal Death-in-Life duality, as even Tennyson described
er: "How from the rosy lips of life and love / Flash'd the bare-

rinning skeleton of death!"

Jinhursag
lumerian name of the Mountain Mother, "She Who Gives Life to
ie Dead." She was the Creatress of the
1
first human beings, whom she

727
Ninian, Saint made out of clay, copied by the biblical God.
a special magic later
2
Ninti She was Like her Egyptian counterpai
associated with sacred serpents.

Hathor, she sometimes appeared as a divine cow. "Holy milk" from

temple dairy farm at Lagash nurtured Assyrian kings five thousand year
ago. Many Mesopotamian kings included among their qualifications
for thethrone the assertion that they had been "fed with the holy milk
3
of Ninhursag." Calves were sacrificed to her, in the role of
4
"firstborn."
The Todas of southern India still sacrifice a calf to the Cow-
mother who represents the earth, with a prayer that includes the word
Ninkurshag. They say the meaning of the word is unknown, but it is a
]
5
very holy word.
1. Ashe, 15. 2. Stone, 83. 3. Whitehouse, 62. 4. Neumann, G.M., 124-25.
5. Campbell, Or.M, 38.

Ninian, Saint
Mythical missionary, said to have converted the southern Picts to
2nd century a.d., many centuries before Christianity
Christianity in the
actually touched the British Isles. The spurious Life ofSt Ninian,
"Apostle to the Southern Picts," was written in the 12th century a.d. b]

a Cistercian monk. This imaginative document claimed St. Ninian

was worshipped by a tribe called Novantae, at the Candida Casa (Whit

House), a temple built "after the Roman manner." An Irish Life of

St. Ninian claimed that he founded a church in Leinster, and identified

him with the god Monenni. The Martyrology of Talsnacht said

Monenni was another name for the pagan goddess Nenn, or Nynia,
cognate with the Danes' Nanna. Thus "Ninian" seems to have been
1

a legend built around a pagan idol of indeterminate sex, worshipped in

Roman-style temple.
1. Attwater, 255; Brewster, 409-10.

Ninsun
Akkadian title of the Goddess who "knew all knowledge" in her role
of queen mother of every sacred king. She was the mother of Gilga-
mesh. She was the divine mother of Ur-Nammu (21 12-2095 B.C.),
1

founder of the third dynasty of Ur. She was the mother of King Shulgi,
who also married her virgin form Inanna, "the vulva of heaven and
2
earth." Ninsun was all-wise, and made rules for the contests of sacred

kings.
1. Larousse, 66. 2. Pritchard, A.N.E., 31, 132, 135.

van Nintu Ninti

"Lady of Life" or "Lady of the Rib"; Sumerian birth-goddess who

enabled pregnant women to make their babies' bones out of their own

728
 iits.
1
This idea was copied by biblical writers for the pseudo-birth of Niobe

]|/e
from Adam's rib. Even modern scholars have misrepresented Ninti Nixies
2
1'
describing her devotees adoring "the god." ^^^^^^^^^^^^
1. Hooke, M.E.M., 115. 2. Pritchard, A.N.E., 285.

liobe 1

llnowy Qje," Anatolian Mountain-goddess whose worshippers

vre destroyed by patriarchal Hellenic tribes. Greek myth therefore
rade her a mother forever mourning her "children" slain by the

tlympian gods.
1
Greek writers pretended "she was a woman too proud
( her children, so the gods killed them to punish her hubris.
1. Graves, CM. 1,260.

Iirvana

Itantrary to the popular western belief that Nirvana meant paradise, it

ms really quite the opposite: an eternal not-being, with cessation of all

feling, the ascetic ideal of disappearance of the self into the infinite.
Irvana meant final escape from the karmic wheel of earthly reincarna-
tes ruled by the cyclic Mother. It was supposed to lie beyond all

phse perceptions, memories, loves, hates, fears, joys, or will; it was like

Tantric idea of Dreamless Sleep, forever. It could be achieved

Ip
tily by holy men after many cycles of reincarnation taught them to
tinquer all desires.

iu-Kua

jjgendary Chinese empress who reigned 1 30 years and had the

lagical ability to command the movements of the heavenly bodies; a

ythic remnant of China's matriarchal age.

ixies

ermanic water-fairies similar to Greek nereids, children of Mother

Ight, whose name in Norse was Nott; in Greek, Nyx. As a personifi-

1

jtion
of the dark Chaos at the beginning and end of the universe,
e gave rise to the word nix, negation or nothingness. Pre-Christian

ligions viewed the Goddess Nyx-Selene (Night-Moon) as the agent

deification after death, which made her a direct rival of the Christian

yior figure.
2
Her nixies were abyssal angels who kept the souls of

e dead an underwater fairyland, in "pots turned upside down,"

in after

e manner of all Teutonic death-spirits. 3 In the Middle Ages, the

ater-fairies assumed the same characteristics as their close relatives, the

729
Noah mermaids, sirens, wilis, and water-witches: that is, they lured hapless
Norm sailors into the water and magically devoured their souls.
1. Branston, 145, 1 52. 2. Strong, 108. 3. Keightley, 259.

Noah
Hebrew version of Nu, or Nun, the "Fish" in the Hebrew sacred
alphabet; originally thegod born of Ma-Nu or Ma-Nun, Egyptian
Goddess of the primordial deep. The name of Ma-Nu was associ-
1

ated with the creation-flood in both Egypt and India. "Ma" was the
Womb of Chaos, often personified as a cosmic fish; "Nu" or Noah
was the embryonic seed of life floating into a new birth. See Creation;
Flood; Tiamat. The flood-heroes of India, Sumeria, and Babylonia
also rode out the deluge of birth-fluid in amoon-vessel called argha or
ark, carrying with them the pairs of all creatures to populate the new

creation. From the same root came arc, a crescent; for the vessel of
1

creation was always identified with the moon.

[Link], 121.

Norns
The female trinity of Fates as she/they appeared in Scandinavia: also
known as Weird Sisters, from Teutonic wyrd, "fate." The Prose Edda
called them "three mysterious beings," High One, Just-As-High, and
Third, who revealed the secrets of the universe and wrote the book of
destiny; hence their other title, Die Schreiberinnen, "women who
write." More common names for the Norns were Urth (Earth),
Verthandi, and Skuld, variously translated Fate, Being, and Necessi-
ty, or like the ancient Egyptian Goddess of past, present, and future, ,

"Become, Becoming, and Shall-Be."

1

The original, single, eldest Norn was Mother Earth, Ertha, Urth,
Urdr,etc., who represented Fate and the Word of creation. She was

Wurd in Old High German, Wyrd in Anglo-Saxon, Weird in English:

She/they lived in the cave at the source of the Fountain of Life,
Urdarbrunnr, the cosmic womb under the root of the World Tree. She
they were older than the oldest "heavenly father" and had power
over every god. ?
The death-Norn Skuld was a variant of Skadi, an eponymous
mother of Scandinavia and a typical Destroyer. Norse poet-shamans
were servants of Skuld and called themselves skalds; Christians said the

indulged in witchcraft, or "skulduggery." Skuld would lay the death-

curse on the whole universe at doomsday. Her name apparently gave
rise to "scold," meaning gifteda woman
with the power of cursing.
Like the third of the Moirai, Skuld cut the thread of every life.
The Norns became "fairies" in romantic traditions of pagan
balladry:

730
 And lo! Reclining on their runic shields Numa
The mighty Nomas now the portal fill; Nut
Three rosebuds fair which the same garden yields,
With aspect serious, but charming still.
Whilst Urda points upon the blackened fields,
The fairy temple Skulda doth 4
reveal.

1. Larousse, 37. 2. Campbell, CM., 121. 3. Branston, 208.

4. Guerber, L.M.A., 267.

Numa
Legendary Latin king who became very wise, through his sacred
marriage with the Goddess of creation and birth, Diana Egeria, the
Virgin of Nemi's sacred healing spring. Numa probably never existed,
but "his" name recalls the Oriental custom of creating some of the
Goddess's spouses by reversing the syllables of her own name, e.g.,
Ya-ma, Lord of Death, a reversal of Ma-ya, Lady of Life. Ma-Nu was a
Goddess of Creation in some of the oldest Indo-European traditions,
and Nu-Ma seems to have been her male counterpart.

Nun
Egyptian word for the primal ocean, origin of the Hebrew letter nun
kneaning "fish"; it was also a sacred name, as in "Joshua son of Nun"
|(Joshua 1:1). As applied to a religious woman, "nun" descended
from nonne, a nurse, because in antiquity priestesses were practjtioners
pf the healing arts.

var. Nuit

tian Great Mother personifying the night sky. Sometimes she

the Cow whose udder gave forth the Milky Way; or sometimes she
was a woman arched over the earth, touching the "ends of the earth"
with her toes andfingertips; or again, her figure was painted inside
her arms stretching down to embrace the deceased. Her
coffin lids, 1

iconsort Geb was an earth-bound god who lay on his back and tried to
reach her with his erect penis, signified by the obelisk. 2
Pharaohs were sons and consorts of Nut. Pepi II said he was living
"between the thighs of Nut." Men-Kau-Ra (Mycerinus) knew he
was "born of Nut, conceived of Nut spreadeth herself thy mother
. . .

Nut over thee name of 'mystery of Nut,' she granteth that thou
in her
mayest exist without enemies, O king of the South and North, Men-
3
Kau-Ra, living for ever!" Egyptians said every woman was a nutrit,
Little Goddess (see Neter).
1. Neumann, CM., pis. 36, 90-92. 2. F. Huxley, 69. 3. Book of the Dead, 22, 17.

731
Nymph Nymph
Occulta
Greek nymphe, Latin nympha, a bride or a nubile young woman.
The same word was applied to female-genital symbols like the lotus
flower, water lilies, and certain shells. "Nymphs" served as priestesses
in ancient temples of the Goddess, especially in sexual ceremonies,

where they represented the divine principle of flowering fertility and

were sometimes known as Brides of God. See Virgin Birth.
In medieval times the word nymph was applied to either a witch 01

a fairy, since both descended from the pre-Christian priestess. As

spirits of nature, the "nymphs"
were believed to embed their souls
forever in certain parts of the natural world that the Goddess had
were water nymphs, tree nymphs, mountain
ruled in antiquity: there

nymphs, and nymphs who dwelt in the earth, the sea, or Fairyland.
Their ancient connection with sexuality was more or less consistently
maintained. Even now, "nymphomania" connotes sexual obsession,
like the moon-madness supposed to motivate the ancient nymphs in
their seasons of mating.

Obelisk
Egyptians knew the obelisk was intended to represent a giant phallus.
It was called the benben-stone, or begetter-stone, similar to the Petra,
"the Rock that begat thee," as the Bible says. (See Peter, Saint.)

Usually the obelisk was regarded as an erection of the earth god Geb in
his perpetual eagerness to mate with the Goddess of Heaven. 1

1. [Link], 69.

Oberon
Anglo-Saxon King of the Fairies; derived from German Alberich, the
underworld dwarf king who kept buried treasure in the earth, which was
also a function of the devil. Oberon was married to Titania, the

Fairy Queen, the ancients' "Mother of Titans."

Occulta
"Hidden things," the secret ceremonies of the mystery cults which
taught their own esoteric secrets of salvation in the early Christian era.
Primitive Christianity had its own occulta, but in medieval times the
word was applied to every religion other than Christian orthodoxy.
Thus occulta became almost synonymous with witchcraft, magic,
heresy, Hermetism, etc.

732
Oceanus Oceanus
Odin
Greco-Roman water-serpent deity supposed to surround the earth
with his vast body, holding his tail in his mouth to form a continuous

barrier of water at the outer limits of the world. Oceanus was often
confused with Neptune, Poseidon, Ouroboros, Taaut, or Python.
var. Okeanos
Oceanus was married to the primal Sea-goddess Tethys, or Thetis.
His name meant "He who belongs to the Swift Queen."
*

1. Graves, G.M. 1,27; 2, 402.

Odin
Norse All-father, called God of the Hanged because the trees of his
sacred grove at Uppsala were laden with hanged human sacrifices even
as late as the10th century. Each victim's draumar (drama) recapitu-
1

lated the death-rebirth of Odin himself, when he acquired his divine

powers by giving himself up to immolation on the World Tree,

wounded in the side with a spear. He said: "I know that I
hung on the

windy tree for nine whole nights, wounded with the spear, dedicated
2
to Odin, myself to myself."
The occult significance of nine nights was pseudo-feminization for
the sake of creativity; it was the period sacred to women in childbirth.
*
Latins called it the nundinum (nine-day). Celts called it the nofnden

(nine-night). On occasion the Goddess Macha inflicted a nine-night

period of helplessness on men, which probably arose as a ceremonial
couvade whereby in primitive times the men tried to partake of
4
women's powers. The
purpose of Odin's nine-night ordeal was to learn
the secret of the "wise blood" in the Earth-mother's uterine caul-

dron, and to command the magic power of the runes, invented by his

feminine prototype Idun (Freya). After he traversed all the realms of

death, he said, "I got a drink of the precious mead, I was sprinkled with
Odrerir. Then I began to be fruitful and to be fertile, to grow and to

prosper; one word sought another word from me." 5

By his sacrifice Odin won for men the female secrets of the saga

(speaking-woman, prophetess, priestess). He learned the runes, words

of power, and sacred poetry, which his skalds called "the sea of Odin's
6
breast," meaning the blood he shed on the earth. His myth evidently

predated the discovery of fatherhood, for Erda or Urth was refreshed

and fructified by his blood, not his semen.
Sometimes the tree of his martyrdom was represented by the Tau
7
cross, also known as the Cross of St. Anthony or the Gibbet Cross.
At other times, his gallows was door-shaped, with two upright tree
trunks and a crossbeam. This matched the poets' description of
Odin's gallows, Yggdrasil the "Terrible Horse," for the gallows was
8
both a tree and a horse on which men rode to the land of death. The

733
Odin same form of the horse-gallows appeared on the Tarot card of the
Hanged Man, whose number is twelve; he is the twelfth of the
m^^^mi^^m^^mm numbered Major Arcana or trump suit. Thus the Tarot Hanged Man
revealed Odin's secret of the Twelfth Rune, a mystery specifically
mentioned in the Edda as a necromantic sign, with power to make a

hanged man answer any question put to him. 9 This was one of the
sources of the divinatory magic attributed to the pictures of the Tarot
cards. It has been noted that the Hanged Man is a pagan figure, and
"one of the Tarot trumps were designed to
clearest indications that the
10
illustrate some non-Christian system of belief." The card of the
Hanged Man was followed by the card of Death, number 13, showing
that the victim like Odin was intended to traverse the nether worlds

of the dead.
Scandinavian sacred kings were identified with Odin and suffered
the same kind of holy death, probably followed by apotheosis as was
usual for sacrificial victims. Vikarr, legendary ancestor of the Vikings,
was killed by a spear-thrust from one of Odin's priests during such a

ceremony. Medieval Swedes periodically "reddened the earth with the

blood of their lord," enacting the love-death of king and god. The
blood Odin poured forth begot his reincarnation or son, Balder, the
northern Adonis or Attis, whose consort had the same name as Attis's

virgin mother. She was Nanna or Nan, a Valkyrie name, probably

derived from the archaic Middle-Eastern Moon-goddess Inanna. 11
Balder seems to have been the same dying-and-reborn god as Baal.

By the decree of his Heavenly Father, Balder too was slain and
sent to theunderground realm of the Goddess Hel. He was restored
by the "tears of red gold" shed over him by Hel's celestial aspect, Freya;
but he would not return to this world. Balder's Second Coming
would take place in the next universe, after the destruction of the
current gods and the present world. He would rise again and establish
a new kingdom of more virtuous gods in another creation. 12 See

Doomsday.
Pagan saviors like Odin-Balder were naturally regarded as demons
by followers of their Christian rival. Therefore Odin became an
"ogre" via his Lord-of-Death title Yggr, "Terrible One."
n Medieval
necromancers were believed to use the things that belonged to Odin's
realm: gallows wood, gallows earth, parts of bodies of the hanged. At
Toulouse in 1335 a woman named Anne-Marie de Georgel was
accused of witchcraft, on the charge of having used clothing, hair, nails,
or fat of hanged criminals to make her magic ointments. 14

Though Odin was called All-father, he was not regarded as a

Greek counterpart Zeus, he was strictly limited in
creator. Like his

power. Both Odin and Zeus were helpless in the hands of the Fates wh.
were Norns in Scandinavia and Moirai (Moerae) in Greece. "The
ancestresses of the Nornir were those beings who also gave rise to the
Greek Moirai, the goddesses of Fate. According to Greek myth the
Moirai were amongst the children of Night; and Night, as we know, was

734
3ne of the more ancient beings of Northern myth older at any rate Odor of Sanctity
:han the vikinggod Odin." Nevertheless, Odin's worshippers eventually
divided him into a trinity named Twilight, Midnight, and Dawn, mmmm^^^^^^^^
:opied from the trinitarian Mother Night to whom he was mated, just as

:he Hindu Lord of Death became a trinity to mate with Triple Kali. 15
Odin was an Aryan god, descended from the Vedic lord of winds,
vata, as shown by several other variations of his name: Voten,

Wuotan, Woden. He was also Godan, in Hindu tradition a lord of

16

vestern barbarians, consort of the Goddess Godiva whose name was

eally a redundant "Goddess-Goddess."
As a lord of winds, Odin was identified with the Prince of the

Power of the Air, one of the titles of the Christian devil. Odin led the
vVild Hunt, a nocturnal ceremony originally representing ghost-ridden
itorm clouds galloping through the sky: another form of the Gray
Morse that Odin rode. An
English chronicle of 1 127 described the Wild
Hunt celebrated on the 6th of February by a group of black-clad
lorsemen, riding black horses, following black hounds with "eyes like

saucers." Twenty or thirty men galloped through the woods between

Peterborough and Stamford, "and all through the night the monks
leard them sounding and winding their horns." 17
Sometimes Odin appeared on earth as a one-eyed, gray-bearded
bid wizard leaning on a staff, wearing either a hood or a broad-
brimmed witch-hat. Odin's other common title was "the one-eyed
18

jjod," derived from several mythological sources including the an-

cient metaphor for the penis. As a nonsexual explanation of the
tnetaphor, one myth claimed that Odin gave up one of his eyes for
jhe privilege
of drinking from the feminine Fount of Wisdom, called
either Mimir (Mother of Memory) or Urdarbrunnr (Stream of Urd,
Le., of the eldest Norn). Still another explanation for his acquisition of
feminine wisdom was that he stole the "wise blood" from the
pauldron Odrerir, which was in the keeping of the Earth-goddess in her
acred uterine cave. 19 A similar story was told of the Aryan god Indra,
vho stole the Great Mother's lunar blood Soma, and assumed the form
!>f a bird to fly away with it to the home of the patriarchal gods. Both
Ddin and Indra were revered by men for having obtained formerly
Sorbidden secrets of magic and bestowed them on their favored
hamans.
1.0xenstiema,223. 2. Frazer,G.B.,412. 3. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 91. 4. Rees, 58.
5. Turville-Petre, 42. 6. Turville-Petre, 39. 7. d'Alviella, 15. 8. Branston, 114.
9. [Link], 154. 10. A. Douglas, 85. 11. Turville-Petre, 40, 113, 118.
12. Turville-Petre, 115; Lederer, 109. 13. Branston, 1 14. 14. J.B. Russell, 183.
15. Branston, 66, 208. 16. Branston, 109, 126. 17. Branston, 108. 18. Branston, 113.
19. Larousse, 257.

Ddor of Sanctity
Kn alleged recognition sign for bodies or tombs of Christian saints
vas a sweet odor, as opposed to the expected odor of decay. This was

735
Odor of Sanctity emphasized in legends of many saints' relics, for example the remains
of St. Mark allegedly discovered by some Venetian merchants in

^^^^^^^^^^^ Alexandria during the 5th century. "When they lifted the stone from
the tomb, so strong a perfume spread throughout the city of Alexandria

everybody wondered whence sweet odor might come." '

that this

According to the conventional phrase, every true saint died "in th

odor of sanctity," for the sweet smell was taken as a symbolic
assurance of undecaying immortality, tied to the church's doctrine of
resurrection of the flesh. If a saint or martyr achieved heaven at once,
as was the orthodox teaching, then his flesh could not decay and would
therefore smell as sweet as the airs of heaven, which were generally

supposed to be perfumed.
This was not an originally Christian notion. It was copied from
Egyptian ritual and theory of mummification. A corpse must smell
sweet in order to be accepted by the Egyptian deities; that was the
reason for embalming mummies with sweet-smelling spices, resins,
and aromatic oils. Anubis guarded the gates of the after-world and
checked each newcomer with his keen canine nose. If the scent was

acceptable, Anubis declared the dead man reconciled to the gods by his

Odor of Sanctity, and admitted him to the blessed realm. 2

Though the Christian Dark Age lost the art of mummification
which was not to be revived until 20th-century embalmers improved
on it still the same spices were sometimes clumsily applied to dead
bodies in an effort to preserve them. The precious virtue of frankin-
cense was that it served as a key to heaven by counteracting "the ill
smells" of a corpse. 3 Churchmen claimed the bodies of those who
were excommunicated would not decompose, but they lacked the Odo
of Sanctity that characterized 4
saints.

The perfume allegedly exuded by saints' remains could work

miracles and cure diseases. The
corpse of St. Stephen instantly
healed 70 sick men who smelled its odor when it was first exhumed.
Earth from the grave of St. Dominic was said to smell sweet and
5
possess miraculous powers.
An effort was made to canonize the 1
3th-century inquisitor
Bernard de Caux with a legend of incorruptibility, because he was "a
persecutor and hammer of heretics, a holy man wonderful in extir-
. . .

pating heresy," Bernard Gui wrote. His body was exhumed 28 years
after hisdeath and said to be perfectly fresh and sweet-smelling, except
that part of its nose was missing. 6

The gypsies mocked Christian legends of nondecaying saints,

claiming that bodies which fail to undergo normal decomposition are
not holy spirits but vampires. 7 The church accepted stories about the
"un-dead" but insisted on undecaying saints also.
[Link],241. 2. Book of the Dead, 569. 3. Hazlitt, 250. 4. Robbins, 523.
[Link] Voragine, 409, 427. 6. Lea, 246. 7. Trigg, 1 56.

736
Oedipus Oedipus

Mythical king of Thebes at a point in time when kings were

^
beginning to oppose matriarchal rule. Oedipus killed his father/prede-
^^^^^^^^i
cessor and married his mother/queen in the conventional way, but he
caused the Goddess's image (the Sphinx) to be thrown from a cliff and
broken.
His mother/queen was Jocasta or Iocaste, "Shining Moon," who
apparently called down the wrath of the Goddess on her consort.
Some said he was banished from Thebes, others said he was slain by the
Goddess's Furies in her sacred grove. Most stories agree that he was
1

blinded by a "clasp" taken from Jocasta's garment.

Jocasta's "clasp" may have been a euphemism for the castrating

moon-sickle. Herodotus said the women of Athens killed a man with

their "clasps," but a new patriarchal law afterward forbade women to
any such weapons. Blindness was a common mythic symbol of
2

astration, as shown by the tales of Samson, Odin, and Teiresias of

Thebes. In Egypt also, a penis was called an Eye; to cut it off was to
?
put out the "light" of the One-Eyed God.
The allegedly
incestuous marriage between Oedipus and his

mother/queen was no more than the conventional alternation of

sacred kings, each one chosen by the queen and declared the "son" or

reincarnation of his slain predecessor. Oedipus's "father" bore the

name of Laius, not a name at all but simply a title: "the king." As in an-

iquity every king was a god, so every queen was a Mother of God,
md the god's virgin bride as well. See Incest; Kingship.
1 .
Graves, G.M. 2, 10, 1 5, 396. 2. Herodotus, 303-4. 3. Norman, 42.

Denothea
'Wine Goddess," title of a priestess mentioned by Apuleius. She
epresented the Goddess as Dispenser of Immortality, keeping gods and
nen alivewith her magic ambrosia. 1 Among her many other names
vere Hebe, Ariadne, Siduri, or Saki.
[Link],207.

Dgier the Dane

5
oet-king of medieval romance, a patron of bards, who attained

mmortality by Morgan Fay. When he was

a sacred marriage with le

>orn, she cast his fate and said he would dwell with her in Avalon.
Vhen he attained the age of 100 years, she gave him a Crown of
)blivion to erase the put a magic ring on
memory of his former life,
tis
finger, and took him to her western paradise where he joined the

737
Old Nick heroes Arthur, Oberon, Tristan, and Lancelot in eternal bliss under
Omen the auspices of the Goddess.
'

^^_^^____ 1. Guerber, L.M.A., 135-58.

Old Nick
Popular English name of the devil, probably derived from the Danish

god Hold Nickar, leader of the nickers, or nixies (water-fairies).

1
sea
The same sea god evolved into the mythical St. Nicholas as might
be told by the saint's association with the cauldron of regeneration and
the symbols of the Triple Goddess. "Hold" was a variant of the

Goddess's name Holde, Hild, Hel "Old Nick" may have been
so
another instance of the masculinization of the personified Sea-womb.
[Link].459.

var. Volga Olga

Legendary Amazonian warrior-queen of Kiev, so revered by the
of southern Russia that the orthodox church was forced to adopt
tribes

and canonize her as one of its spurious saints.

1

According to an old
chronicle, she led her soldiers into battle after invoking the protection c

2
Pyerun, the pagan thunder-god.
1 .
Leland, 36. 2. Lamusse, 294.

Om
Universal "Word of Creation" spoken by the Oriental Great God-
dessupon her bringing forth the world of material existences; an
invocation of her own pregnant belly. Om
was called the Mother of
Mantras (matrikamantra), the supreme Word. See Logos.

Omen
Literally, a sign from the Moon. Arts of divination were generally
under the aegis of the ancient Moon-goddess. Cicero listed four types <

omens. Ostenta were those that "make clear," yielding our word
ostensible. Portenta were those that foreshadow or "portend." Monstn
were those that demonstrate or show, like dreams and visions.
Prodigia were the "prodigies" that give signs of future events through
miraculous happenings. 1

Any omen was numinous, a word derived from nu-rnen, another

Latin rendition of Moon-spirit. Nu-men was the Roman counterpart

738
 oimana. 2 Both words meant revelation emanating from the Moon- Omikami Amaterasu
mother. See Mana. Omphale
1 . Wedeck, 230. 2. Rose, 1 9.
^^^^^^^^^^

Omikami Amaterasu
Japanese sun goddess from whom the imperial family traced descent,
l
at first through a line of queens, later through the male line, after

Japanese society instituted patriarchal customs about the 14th

century a.d.
1
Her name meant Mother Creation-Spirit. See Sun
Goddess.
[Link] 1,369.

Omophagia
Eating-into-the-Belly, Greek ritual of holy communion by eating the
flesh of sacrificial victims, human or animal. (See Cannibalism.)

According to the primitive tradition, worshippers were expected to

tear apart the victim with bare hands and teeth, devouring him raw, as in

the earliest cults of Dionysus, Orpheus, Zagreus, and other gods torn
to pieces in their myths. "The communicants rushed madly upon the
sacrificial animal, tore it to pieces and ate it raw, believing that the

god was resident in the offering. ... It was believed that thus there took
place an identification with the god himself, together with a participa-
tion in his substance and qualities." His immortality was eaten too
'

both in the omophagia and its descendant, the Christian sacrament of

god-eating though his body was no longer meat but a tiny fragment of

bread.
1. Angus, 129.

Omphale
Lydian name of the Goddess of the Hub omphalos, the navel-stone
marking the center of the universal womb. Greek myth describes her as
a queen of Lydia, who enslaved Heracles and set him to work at her

spinning wheel. Heracles was the sun, and he performed his twelve
Labors on the spinning wheel of the zodiac. Each "labor" was really
one of the zodiacal houses through which the sun passed during
Heracles's one-year servitude in Omphale's palace. This year marked
bis reign as the Aeon. He wore the queen's robes, in memory of which
the priests of Heracles wore female garments and pretended to
command feminine powers of magic. It was characteristic of transitional

739
Omphalos periods between matriarchy and patriarchy that the king wore the
queen's robes when acting as her deputy.
1

^^^^^^^^^__ Omphale represented the Goddess as a consumer of sun-kings,

each one annually killed and replaced by another who was born at the

Roman Goddess Anna Perenna she was

winter solstice; like the archaic
a Mother of Time. 2 One of her consorts before Heracles was the oak-
god Tmolus, who fathered his own reincarnation, the sacred king
drowned at the Oschophoria to represent the
Tantalus, cermonially
sun sinking into the sea. ? Tmolus as a human victim was wreathed in

the oak garland of the god and tossed by a bull onto sharp stakes,

indicating that the Goddess's bull-masked priests impaled him in a pit

where his blood could fertilize the ground.

The divine Father of Heracles-the-Savior was the sun god Apollo,

thought to have originated in Lydia although he later became one of

the most typically Greek of gods. In his earliest forms, Apollo was

subject to the rule of his sister-bride Artemis, the Moon, who was
sometimes incarnate in a sacred navel-stone and therefore bore the title

of Omphale.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 167. 2. Herodotus, 5-6. 3. Graves, GM. 2, 29.

Omphalos
Greek transliteration of Latin umbilicus, the navel or hub of the
world, center of the Goddess's body, source of all things. As every
ancient nation regarded its own version of the Great Mother as the
cosmic spirit, so its own capital or chief temple was located at the center
of the earth, marked by the stone omphalos that concentrated the
Mother's essence. Hebrews called it the beth-elox "dwelling place of

deity." As a male god, incarnate in the king, this deity was always
located at the Goddess's middle because he was her child.
In 710 B.C. a king of Susa said, "The Susian land, which is the first

of the earth, is in the center of all mankind." Iranians said, "The

country of Iran is better than all other places, for it is in the middle."
China called itself "the Middle Kingdom." So did Scandinavia,
known to its inhabitants as Middle-Earth (Midgard). Old Japanese

poems called Japan the Middle Kingdom of Earth. Romans called

the sea at the center of their empire mare nostrum, "our sea," and gave
it the name of Mediterranean,
1
literally Middle-of-the-Earth.
Romans placed the world's navel or omphalos at the round hearth
of the temple of Vesta. Greeks placed it at the omphalos of Delphi,

"Temple of the Womb." Jews placed it at the temple of Zion.

Christianity inherited a Jewish cosmogony wherein Jerusalem was
regarded of
as the center
the earth, where Jesus died on the identical
spot where the Tree of Life once grew in the primal garden. It was
said a spear standing upright at the tomb of Christ would cast no shadow

at midday, because it marked the center point of

everything under

740
 |the
sun. When Pope Urban preached the first crusade at Clermont, he Onuphris, Saint
declared "infallibly" that "Jerusalem is the middle point of the Ophion
2
Hearth."
^^^^^^^^^^^^
By pre-Christian reckoning, this middle point was the Virgin Zion,
the yonic temple of Mari-Anat. Feminine symbolism was preva-
for
lent in all omphalic shrines, which generally represented the body of the
;
Goddess with the God present as a sexual partner a phallic serpent,
tree, cross, or sacrificed male bleeding the Blood of Life. Even medieval
romances spoke of the Palace of Love where God and Goddess
(joined
in medio mundi, at the center of the world. It was equipped with
jtheusual sexual symbols: a sacred spring in the garden, which also
i contained the Tree of Life. 5
Christian theologians were amply supplied with the kind of hubris
made men call their own home place the center of the earth,
[that
their own lifetimes the ultimate end of time, their own
religion the only

(permissible one, and their own selves the focal point of the cosmic
|drama of good and evil. Indeed, the whole universe was viewed as a
mere backdrop for man's probation. Peter Lombard said, "Just as

jman
is made for the sake of God that is, that he may serve Him so
the universe is made for the sake of man that is, that it
may serve
him; therefore is man 4
placed at the middle point of the universe." If
man couldn't think of himself as somehow vitally connected with the
\omphalos, hisworld-view was threatened. Such a threat underlay the
church's opposition to the discoveries of Galileo, which tended to

prove that the earth was not the center of God's universe.
1. Lethaby, 73. 2. White 1, 99. 3. Wilkins, 139. 4. H. Smith, 329.

Onuphris, Saint
lArtifical canonization of the god Osiris, taken from his epithet Un-
nefer, the Beneficent One. 1 Onuphris was accepted into the canon of
saints even though his original Egyptian form was usually viewed as a
pagan "devil."
1. [Link], 227.

Ophion var. Ophis

Serpent consort of the Creatress Eurynome, in the Pelasgian creation

myth; in Gnostic sexual symbolism he was the World Serpent
mated to the World Egg. According to an ancient Phrygian tradition
he was the Father of mankind: a divine serpent who lived in the
Tree of Life in the primal garden, and begot the tribes called Ophiogen-
is, "serpent-born."
!
He was assimilated to Christ by
be Gnostic Christian sect of Ophites, and to Jehovah by their Jewish

counterparts the Naassians or "serpent-worshippers." Ophion the

741
 Ops Serpent was a heavenly king who revealed the sacred Mysteries, even
Orgy against the will of the jealous god. See Serpent.
^^^^^^^^^_ 1. J.E. Harrison, 129.

Ops
Pre-Roman name of Ceres, Bona Dea, etc.; the Goddess who
invented Roman law. Her secret rites were forbidden to men; but on
her December festival, the Opalia, there was a general ceremony

involving sexual orgies and touching the earth. The powers of Jupiter
1

were believed ineffective unless he was united with her, as Jove

2
Opulentia. Like Pluto, he became Lord of Abundance, or Lord of
Riches. Macrobius said the secret name of Rome was Ops Consivia.
Sacred gem of the Opalia was the opal, representing the Goddess':
many-colored veils. Because of its feminine connotation, Christians
declared it an unlucky stone. As a witch charm it was said to blind

prying eyes and make its bearer invisible. Arab alchemists identified
3

it with the because the latter was believed to

Philosopher's Stone,
contain all basic colors red, blue, yellow, green, and white. 4
1. Lurousse, 208. 2. Dumezil, 689. 3. Wedeck, 189. 4. Seligmann, 94.

Orcus
Greco-Roman death god, also known as Phorcys or Porcus, a
In the Middle Ages he was made demon
1
sacrificial boar. a with a
human body and a pig's head.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 107.

Orestes
Classic Greek mother-slayer, pursued by the Furies for violation of
the ultimate matriarchal law. The Furies maintained that no crime is
worse than killing the mother whose "intimate blood" made one's
own life. Apollo however defended Orestes on the ground that even if
he did murder his mother, Queen Clytemnestra, she wasn't his true
parent because the only true parent
1
is a father.
[Link], 159.

Orgy
From Greek orgia, "secret worship."
1
Most secret worship involved
sexual rites, as in the Sacred Mysteries of Eleusis, Cabiria, Shaktism,

Sufism, Ophite Christianity, etc. Wilkins says, "Even when religion

742
no longer tends towards the orgiastic as all cults in close touch with Orgy
nature do ... it always has its erotic aspect. The further back one . . .

goes the less possible it is to distinguish between the erotic and the
sacral. And 'the further back' means not only in time, but also into
2
the depths of experience."
Our "holiday" derives from the Holi festivals of the east, described
by a pious western observer as a Saturnalia, featuring "the most
licentious debauchery." The participants invariably saw their "de-
3

bauchery" as a holy act, redolent of blessedness. Hindu texts said,

"To have carnal intercourse with the goddess Parvati is a virtue which
4
destroys all sin." The I Ching speaks of the mystical value of sexual
5
intercourse, which "gives life to all
things." According to Iwan Bloch, Iwan Bloch Author
ofThe Sexual Life of
"Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the
Our Times;
sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of
contemporary of
life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally Havelock Ellis.
6
blessed union." For such reasons, words like passion, bliss, trance,

ecstasy, glory were interchangeably applied to religious and sexual

experience.
paganism used sexual orgia to represent the central
Classical

Mystery, which is
why Christian ascetics condemned the Great Rite
as "the unnameable rites of the mysteries" or "the whoredoms of

Eleusis." The Goddess promised eternal life to those who "privily

entered the bedchamber," meaning the pastos or bridal chamber where Strabo Greek traveler,

the hieros gamos between the Goddess and her worshipper was geographer, and
historian of the first
consummated. 7 The same sort of orgia took place among the northern
century B.C., a follower
barbarians. Strabo said the druid enchanters in Ireland practiced
of the Stoic faith.
8
sexual worship "similar to the orgies of Samothrace."

Despite the extreme asceticism of its early centuries, Christianity

too became an orgiastic religion in some of its manifestations. An
1 lth-century Christian community at Orleans met on certain nights of
the year to indulge in promiscuous behavior. A contemporary ac-
count said when the lights were put out, "every man grabs whatever
woman comes to hand, even though she may be his own mother, his

sister, or a nun, without thought of sin; for such tumbling is regarded by

9 manifes-
them as holiness and religion." Defining such behavior as a

tation of devil-worship was not very effective in preventing it, however.

Communal mating was a standard accompaniment to religious cere-
monies the world over, since before any Bibles were written. It was part
of the surge of group feeling often characterizing the religious

experience. The medieval peasant had long been familiar with the
phenomenon, and liked it well enough to cling to it even if it was
called Satanism. 10

Few orgiasts deliberately viewed themselves as devil worshippers.

As they thought themselves exceptionally holy. Rasputin's sect,
a rule

the "Men of God,"claimed their naked dances imitated those of the

heavenly angels. After singing and dancing to induce an ecstatic state,

743
 Oriant they engaged in sexual orgies which sometimes resulted in the birth of
Oimazd children, all of whom were said to have been begotten by the Holy

^^^^^^_ Ghost. 11
A Methodist preacher in Indiana once said, "Religious passion
includes all other passions: you cannot excite one without stirring up
the others." 12 American revivalism certainly proved this, so consistent!'
that any child born nine months after a revivalist meeting was
known as a "camp-meeting child." Outwardly puritanical,
generally
American Protestantism nevertheless "revived" a mode of religious
behavior that would have been perfectly familiar to the ancient Greeks
with their Samothracian orgies and their lecherous satyrs. 15 It just
wasn't called by its real name.
1. Funk, 174. 2. Wilkins, 127. 3. Briffault 3, 198. 4. Edwardes, 52.
5. Rawson, E.A.,231. 6. Hartley, 3 1 7. 7. Lawson, 570, 586. 8. Haining, 23.
9. Campbell, CM., 165. 10. Seligmann, 177. 11. Campbell, CM., 163.
12. Rugoff,337. [Link], 12.

Oriant
Medieval sun king born of the legendary Matabrune, "Burning
Mother," who probably personified the red clouds of dawn. She was
alsoembodied in Brunnhilde, leader of the Valkyries; so her name
meant both Burning Mother and Burning Hel. As his name suggests, 1

Oriant was Lord of the East, like Ra, born every day from the womb
of the Goddess.
1. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 579.

Orion
"Moon-man of the Mountain," Greek version of the Lord of the
Huntritually slain by Artemis, the Huntress. Some Hellenic stories
claimed the Goddess killed Orion by mistake while he was swimming
in the sea, too far away to be
clearly seen. She shot arrows into a floatin
object that turned out tobe Orion's head. Other stories said Orion
was by a scorpion sent by Apollo, and Artemis placed his soul-
killed

image among the stars. Even in heaven, Orion is perpetually pursued

by the Scorpion. According to Graves, this arrangement of constella-
tions referred to the scorpion sent 1
by the god Set to slay Horus. In
any event, Orion was another deified sacrificial victim.

1. Graves, CM. 1,152-53.

Ormazd
Variant name of Ahura Mazda, the Persian sun god who opposed
his twin brother Ahriman, the Serpent of Darkness. Hormazd, Hor-
mizd, and Ormuzd are further common variations. Persian

744
Manicheans of the early Christian era gave the name Ormuzd to a Orpheus
being called Primal Man, "an emanation of the highest God," who
contributed to the Gnostic idea that man and God are identical, since
^^^^^^^^^^^
Adam was God's essential self "made flesh." 1

1. Jonas, 217.

Orpheus
Orphism was one of the most popular mystery-religions of the early
It was a development of the cult of
Christian era. Dionysus together
with Orpheus, his earthly prophet and savior-son.

Orphism introduced a theology of redemption. It taught a doctrine of

Man s nature was dualistic, composed of the titanic
original sin.
elements closely associated with the body, and the dionysiac elements
which were allied with the soul. By an ascetic morality the former must
be repressed and the latter cultivated, to the end that the soul may escape
from the body as from a tomb, and may cease to be subject to the weary
"
kyklos genesios, "cycle of reincarnation. "I have flown out of the
sorrowful wheel, "says the Orphic initiate on the Compagno tablet. . . .

On the Dionysiac type of Greek religion it laid hold and remodelled it to

purpose. This Dionysiac religion, like Orphism, was of northern
its

Thracian provenance, and was fraught with orgiastic-mystic elements, on

which Orphism fastened, adopting its emotionalism, its doctrine of
Enthousiasmos, and ofpossession by the deity, rejecting its wild frenzy,
and transforming its savage ritual into a sacramental religion. '

Orphism was a kind of western Buddhism, with escape from the

karmic wheel effected by ascetic contemplation, spiritual journeys of the

astral-projection type, and elaborate revelations. "Orphism was

steeped in sacramentalism, which flooded the later Mysteries and flowed
into Christianity. Salvation was by sacrament, by initiatory rites, and
by an esoteric doctrine. . . .
Orphism was the most potent solvent ever
introduced into Greek religious life. .
[T]he Orphics sowed the
. .

seeds of distrust toward the national and hereditary principle in religion,

and made the salvation of the individual soul of first importance. In
this way Orphism had enormous influence upon the subsequent history

of religion." 2

Orphism was the principal vehicle for Oriental mysticism in

Greece. Its teachings were those of mystics everywhere: "Grasping in

your mind that nothing is impossible for you, consider yourself immortal
and capable of understanding everything. Ascend beyond all . . .

height, descend beyond all depth. Gather into yourself the sensations of
creation, of fire and of water, of dryness and of humidity, imagining
that you areone and the same moment everywhere, on earth, in the
at

sea, in you have not yet been born, that you are
the heaven, that

beyond death." Like an initiated yogi, the Orphic sage could repeat: "I
represent things to myself, not by the sight of my eyes, but by the

745
Orpheus spiritual energy I draw from the Powers. I am inheaven, in earth, in
water. I am in air, in animals, in plants, in the womb, before the
3

^^_^ --mamIMB womb, after the womb, everywhere."

An Orphic dug up near Sybaris alluded to Buddha-
funerary tablet
like escape from the karmic wheel (kyklos genesion, cycles of

becoming), essentially identical to the Oriental sangsara.

An Orphic sacramental bowl of gold, with carved figures, dating
from the 5th century, was unearthed in Romania in 1837. The
figures showed the Orphic initiate's death-and-rebirth journey, the
deities to be met in the upper and nether worlds, who also appeared
in person as masked temple personnel when the novice was led through
the stages of initiation. These figures were arranged on the bowl in

thesame way as the deities of the Intermediate State, between death

and rebirth, were arranged on mandalas of Tibetan holy books. 4
In Orphic belief as in the Orient, the power behind all forces of
manifestation was the Great Mother, whose free-standing image
appeared in the center of the Orphic bowl with other goddesses and
5
gods ranged around her in the formation of a wheel. She was the
Black Mother Night, from whom were born Sleep, Love, Dreams, the
Fates, Nemesis, Old Age, and Death. Even Zeus feared her, "which
may reflectan old belief in Night as one of the great primeval powers of
the universe." 6
Mother Night was equated with Persephone, the "Destroyer"
linked with both Dionysus and Orpheus. Once initiated, the Orphic
mystic could announce: "I have sunk beneath the bosom of Persepho-
ne, Queen of the Underworld." Upon his post-mortem descent into
hell, Persephone would personally greet him and promise to make him
7
"god instead of mortal."
The Descent Into Hades was the title of the Orphic manual and
the essential of Orphic initiation, because the god himself
rite

descended into hell and returned, bringing with him the revelation on
which the Mysteries were founded. 8 According to the classic myth,
Orpheus descended to retrieve his bride Eurydice, who had died after
being bitten by a snake in the grass. This was a late revision of a
primitive Thracian dying-god myth, onto which the doctrines of Orph-
ism were grafted later. Eurydice was actually "Universal Dike," or

Tyche, Goddess of Fate, lady of the karmic wheel. She was originally
one of Demeter's matriarchal Furies, converted by Hellenic writers
into a daughter of Zeus. 9 In the underworld she was herself Persepho-
ne, the Death-goddess; and her "snake in the grass" was her own
totem.
The oldest Orphic myth said Orpheus was torn to pieces by the
Maenads, who worshipped Dionysus, Orpheus's divine alter ego.
Mythographers gave various excuses for the Maenads' act, designed to
conceal the true sacrificial motive. Some said the Maenads killed

746
Drpheus because he denounced their sexual orgies and advocated male Orpheus
lomosexual love instead of the heterosexual kind. The Maenads
yere so angry at Orpheus that in Macedonia they killed all their ^^^^^^^^^^^
lusbands for listening to his teachings. It has been suggested that
jatriarchal-ascetic ideas came to Orphism from Egyptian priests of Ra,
>ecause Orphic priests wore Egyptian dress. 10
Other stories said Orpheus was killed not by the Maenads but by
Zeus's lightning bolt as punishment for his revelation of the gods'
iecrets to mankind. After he descended into hell and returned, his

disembodied head was laid in a cave sacred to Dionysus, where it

continued to sing and speak, like the head of Osiris at Abydos. As a
eacher of the mysteries of the after-life, Orpheus became a god of
He was said to have founded the oracles of Hecate in Aegina
jracles.

md of Demeter Chthonia in Sparta, two examples of Hellenic

syncretism, as these oracles were formerly the property of the God-
desses whose names they bore. 11 Some derived Orpheus's name from
Jrphi, a popular oracular shrine in Edessa, though others linked his

lame with Erebus, the land of the dead. 12 Aristotle insisted that
13
Drpheus had never lived at all.
The common legend said Orpheus was a famous poet and lyre-
)layer, like Cinyras the ancestor of Adonis (Greek cinyra, "lyre,"

:ognate with Semitic kinnor, "lyre") and like David the ancestor of
[Link]'s lyre was kept as a holy relic in the temple at Lesbos,
intouchable and taboo. Neanthus, son of the Tyrant of Lesbos, once

jlayed the Orphic lyre and shortly afterward was torn to pieces by a
>ack of "dogs," which might have meant dog-masked Maenad-pries-
esses. Later, the lyre was set in the stars, where it still
appears as the
14
:onstellation Lyra.

One of the mysteriously significant phrases of Orphic initiation was

'I a kid have fallen into my mother's milk," possibly a reference to

ieath under Persephone's bosom followed by rebirth as her nursling.

\n ancient ritual was involved, one that was specifically forbidden by

ewish laws: "Thou

shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk" (Exodus

3:19). So was the Jews' fear of this ceremony that they even
great
nsisted on using different sets of dishes for milk and meat products. Yet

heir god was once mated to Mother Asherah as the "Pit," like

'ersephone, in a sacred-marriage rite that included cooking a kid in its

nother's milk. 15 No one now knows what the phrase meant to

jiblical writers. Certainly the prohibition was not motivated by kindness
o animals or reverence for goat-motherhood; there was a mystical
reason for it.

Orphism became one of the most serious rivals of Christianity in

:he first few centuries a.d., until the church devised ways to identify

:he Orphic savior with Christ. Fourth-century Christian art showed

Christ in the guise of Orpheus, wearing a Phrygian cap, playing the

747
 16
Osculum Infame lamb under his foot. Alexander Severus kept holy
lyre, a sacrificial
Osiris images of Christ and Orpheus side by side in his private chapel. 17

^^^^^^^^^^^ The Orphic Gospel was preached throughout the Mediterranear

world for at least twelve centuries. 18 It contributed much to Christian

theology, and even reappeared in medieval bardic romance. The poets

transformed Orpheus into Sir Orfeo, a king of England, son of King
Pluto and the Goddess Juno. Orfeo's wife was Heurodis (Eurydice).
entered the underworld through a rocky cleft, and found the pagan

fairyland of groves and gardens surrounding the queen's crystal palace,

with its pillars of gold and gems. The place was inhabited by "people

supposed to be dead, but they were not so." Orfeo returned to his
capital city, Winchester, which "used to be called Thrace" or so
the bard said. 19 So much for medieval notions of geography.
Orphism gave Christian Europe more than muddled geography
and romantic legends, however. The Orphic revelation was virtually
indistinguishable from the Christian one, especially in its later "puri-
fied" form among ascetics who abstained from meat and from sensual

pleasures in order to win eternal blessedness. With the introduction of

system of post-mortem punishment, the resemblance to Christianity

was striking. Adeimantos, a character in Plato's Republic, said the
Orphic revelation was "misused" by unscrupulous teachers, who
"hold out the bribe of a happy immortality to the good and threaten
eternalpunishment to the bad, so that men turn to goodness not for
own 20
its sake, but in fear." The difficulty was not restricted to Orphisi

(see Hell).
1. Angus, 151. 2. Angus, 154,202. 3. Lindsay, O.A., 121-22.
4. Campbell, M.I., 389; Bardo Thodol, frontispeice. 5. Campbell, M.I., 391.
6. Cavendish, P.E., 88. 7. Angus, 1 10, 1 54. 8. Bardo Thodol, lxvi. 9. Hays, 1 14.
10. Graves, CM. 1, 1 12, 1 14. 1 1. Graves, G.M. 1,113.
12. Baring-Gould,C.M.M.A., 436. 13. Knight, S.L., xxii. 14. Graves, G.M. 1,113.
[Link],S.P.,225;M.E.M.,93. 16. d'Alviella, 89. 17. Rose, 292. 1 8. Angus, vii. 1
19. Loomis, 315-19. 20. Guthrie, 320-21.

Osculum Infame
"Infamous supposedly bestowed on the devil's anus by his
kiss,"

worshippers as an act of homage. Pagan rituals, however, contained no

such act; it seems to have been one of the inventions of the
inquisitors. Scatological fantasies and excrement often figured in

churchmen's visions of the activities of witches.

Osiris
Of all savior-gods worshipped at the beginning of the Christian era,
Osirismay have contributed more details to the evolving Christ figure
than any other. Already very old in Egypt, Osiris was identified with

748
 iarly every other Egyptian god and was on the way to absorbing them Osiris

||. He had well over 200 divine names. 1 He was called Lord of
|ords,
God of Gods. 2 He was the Resurrection and the
King of Kings, ^^^^^^^^^^^
ife, Good
the Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, the god who
jnade
men and women to be born again." Budge says, "From first to
st, Osiris was to the Egyptians the god-man who suffered, and died,

jid
rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They believed that they
jould inherit eternal life, just as he had done." 5
According to Egyptian scriptures, "As truly as Osiris lives, so truly
tall his follower live; as truly as Osiris is not dead he shall die no

!ore; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated he shall not be annihilated." 4

Osiris's coming was announced by Three Wise Men: the three

ars Mintaka, Anilam, and Alnitak in the belt of Orion, which point
;rectly to Osiris's star in the east, Sirius (Sothis), significator of his birth,

'ngelic voices hailed the coming of the Universal Lord on this

xasion, which marked the rising of the Nile flood. Oriental paths of
le Osirian "tradition may be traced in Tibet, where the rising of the

.me star in the east marks the annual festival of "setting free the waters

"springs," as the Egyptian festival set free the waters of the Nile,
'ibetans named the star Rishi-Agastya, after a holy king of "a very

jicient time." 5 Ancient Hebrews called the same star Ephraim, or

le Star of Jacob. In Syrian, Arabian, and Persian astrology it was

lessaeil the Messiah. 6

Certainly Osiris was a prototypical Messiah, as well as a devoured

lost. His flesh was eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat,
fce
"plant of Truth." Osiris was Truth, and those who ate him became

[ruth also,
each of them another Son of God, a "Light-god,
Osiris, a
dweller in the Light-god." Egyptians came to believe that no god

Kcept Osiris could bestow eternal life on mortals. He alone was the
7

javior, Un-nefer, the "Good One." Under this title he was even
monized as a Christian saint. 8

Egyptians were much afraid of death's corruption awaiting them

ithout the kindly intervention of Osiris: "When the soul hath

sparted, a man seeth corruption, and the bones of his body crumble
vay and become stinking things, and the members decay one after
le other, the bones crumble into a helpless mass, and the flesh turneth

Thus a man becometh a brother unto the decay

ito fetid liquid.

hich cometh upon him, and he turneth into a myriad of worms, and
e becometh nothing but worms, and an end is made of him, and he
isheth in the sight of the god of day." 9 But Osiris could prevent all
nastiness:

Homage to thee, O my divine father Osiris, thou hast thy being with thy
members. Thou didst not decay, thou didst not become worms, thou
didstnot diminish, thou didst not become corruption, thou didst not

putrefy, and thou didst not turn into worms I shall not decay, and I
shall not rot, I shall not putrefy, I shall not turn into worms, and I shall not

749
Osiris see corruption before the eye of the god Shu. I shall have my being, I
shall have my being; I shall live, I shall live; I shall germinate, I shall

^^^ germinate, I shall germinate; I shall wake up in peace; I shall not

putrefy, my intestines shall not perish;
I shall not surfer injury; mine eye
j

shall not decay; the form of my visage shall not disappear. body . . .
My
shall be stablished, and it shall neither fall into ruin nor be destroyed on I

10
this earth.

The cult of Osiris contributed a number of ideas and phrases to

the Bible. The 23 rd Psalm copied an Egyptian text appealing to Osiris
the Good Shepherd to lead the deceased to the "green pastures" and
"still waters" of the ne/er-ne/erland, to restore the soul to the body, an
to give protection in the valley of the shadow of death (the Tuat).
The Lord's Prayer was prefigured by an Egyptian hymn to Osiris-Ame

beginning "O Amen, Amen, who art in heaven." 11 Amen was also
invoked at the end of every prayer.

Jesus's words, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit" (John
12:24), were taken from an Osirian doctrine that a dying man is like a

corn of wheat "which falls into the earth in order to draw from its

12
bosom a new life." Jesus's words, "In my Father's house are many
mansions" (John 14:2) came from an Osirian text telling of numer-
ous Arits ("Mansions") in the blessed land of Father Osiris. 13 Stories
about Osiris turned up in Christian legends. Jesus's healing of a
nobleman's daughter was based on a tale of an Osirian priest who curec
a princess. 14 Worshippers of Osiris were promised that they would
rule the spirit-souls (angels) in heaven, foreshadowing St. Paul's promis
to his followers that they would rule even angels (1 Corinthians 6:3).
The bishop's crozier was the Osirian shepherd-crook. The Christian
cross itself was a variant of the Egyptian ankh, symbolizing "the Life
to Come." 15
One significant difference between Osiris and Christ was that
Osiris was restored to life not by his divine father but by his divine
mother who was Isis. She put his dismembered body
also his bride,

back together and raised him from the dead. She married him and
conceived his reincarnation, the Divine Child Horus who became
Osiris again. She also took him to heaven where he reigned as Father
Ra. Sometimes Ra was called Osiris's father, sometimes Osiris was
called Ra's father, sometimes they were the same god, named Osiris- ,

Ra. They were cyclically reincarnated as father-son and son-father,

dwelling in the Mother as fetus, lover, corpse. 16

Thus Osiris's cult centered on the theme of divine incest, apparen

also in a Christianity that declared the Father and Son identical, and
the Mother of God the same individual as God's bride. Osiris plainly

expressed the archetypal wish for union with the mother, found in all

men's religions. He was restored to life as the ithyphallic Min, Men, or

Menu, "Moon-god," hailed as a Bull of lust, "the mummy with a

long member," or "the Lord Who impregnates his Mother." 17

750
 A symbol of Osiris's sacred marriage was the menat, "moon- Osiris

harm," in hieroglyphics a phallus-shaped jar pouring fluid into a

vider pot or vase, signifying sexual intercourse with a deity.

18
The ^MHH^HH
Haaa
menat amulet was borne by nearly every Egyptian god; it was also a
jitle of Isis.
19
The same sexual image of the two vessels was found in the
20
;ombs and temples of Babylon and Assyria. The male water-jar
resented the seminal spirit of the Savior in all the lands of the Middle

plast and Egypt. In his processions, the god was preceded by a jar-

bearer like the man with a jar of water who preceded Jesus in the

Passover procession (Luke 22:10).

The Jews' Passover meal called Seder may have descended from
the Egyptian Sed, the oldest festival of Osirian regeneration and
21
fertility. At the Sed, Osiris's masculinity was erected in the form of the
Djed column, originally a simple phallic obelisk, later a representation
Osiris's sacrum, the "sacred bone" so called because it was once
pf
regarded as the source of seminal fluid. When Isis brought Osiris
to life, her first care was to make him "stand up," which meant
pack
22
restoration of his phallic spirit.

Primitive elements in Osirian myth show its extreme antiquity,

Bating back to Neolithic Egypt. Before re-conceiving Osiris, the

Goddess apparently devoured him as she hovered over his corpse in the
2*
buise of the archaic Vulture-mother (see Vulture). Like similar

images of devouring Kali, this points to an age predating even the

discovery of fatherhood, when reincarnations were believed to be
brought about by cannibalism. Indeed, Osiris may have begun as one of
the numerous forms of Shiva, for his name came from Ausar or Asar,
meaning "the Asian" just like the Aesir or "Asian" gods of northern
24
Europe.
About 4000 yearsago, Osiris's cult was established at Abydos,
|where he was called Osiris Khenti-Amenti, Lord of Death or Lord of
me Westerners, meaning those who had "gone west" into death's
sunset land. He was incarnate in a succession of sacred kings who
seem to have served as sacrificial victims. Their bodies were divided up
bnd distributed to different parts of the country to assist fertility as in
Norway, up to the 9th century, where kings' bodies used to be quartered
and sent to the four provinces for burial, so each locality would have
25 be
royal flesh to assist the crops. As Christian churches used to

founded on spurious relics of apostles and saints, so Egyptian temples

were founded on bits of Osiris's body. 26
Like the head of Orpheus on Lesbos, the head of Osiris was
preserved in the temple at Abydos to serve as an oracle, providing
|much of the Egyptians' detailed knowledge of the after-world. The
shrine had a sacred well calledPeq or Pega, the original home of the
27
Pega-nymphs who guarded the oracular well of Pirene in Corinth.
Like Christians seeking burial in consecrated ground by a church,

wealthy Egyptians bought burial space near the Osirian temple, so as to

share the god's resurrection. Abydos therefore became the center of a

751
 28
Osiris great necropolis. The faithful claimed on their epitaphs that "I have
become a divine being by the side of the birthchamber of Osiris; I am
with him, I renew my youth." 29
^^^^^^^^^^^ brought forth
When human
sacrifices were replaced by animals, Osiris obligingly

incarnated himself in a variety of beasts, notably the Apis bull who

ascended to glory, carrying away the sins of all Egypt as he died in

atonement. 30 Osiris-Apis later became the composite deity Sarapis,
31
monotheistic god of Alexandria for six centuries.
There were several Osirian trinities. One consisted of Osiris the
mother, and Horus the son. Another was Ra the father,
father, Isis the
Osiris the son on earth, and Horus the son rising in heaven. Another

was (1) Ptah, "Opener of the Way," a phallic consort of the Virgin and
the opener of her matrix; (2) Seker, representing the male spent,

dead, and hidden within the female tomb-womb; and (3) Osiris, newly
incarnate as the Min-phallus and standing for resurrection. 32
The sacred lunar numbers seven, fourteen, and twenty-eight were
prominent in Osiris's cult. The lunar cycle of twenty-eight days
corresponded to his descent into the underworld and ascent to heaven:
fourteen days each way, or fourteen steps on his mystic Ladder.
Buddha's ladder of descent to earth and return to heaven also had
fourteen steps. 33 Like Buddha and Osiris, the Tibetan sage is still

supposed to pass fourteen days in the after-world before

encountering
enlightenment in the form of "the mandala of the animal-headed
deities," reminiscent of the Egyptian gods. Some of these deities were
named Heruka, a possible cognate of Osiris the sun, Heru-Harakhti. 34
Like Hindu sacred dramas, the cycle of Osirian drama seems to
have been keyed to the menstrual cycle of the Goddess, incarnate in
who bore the title of Divine Mother. In the month of
the priestess

Athyr (Hathor), Egyptian women made clay phalli as images of Osiris

and threw them into the Nile when it "turned to blood" in flood time
35
(seeMoses). This custom recalled the Oriental conviction that the
Goddess must be menstruating at the time of her sacred marriage to the
dying god. Later accounts explained Osirian lunar numbers by saying
he was 28 years old at the time of his passion, or else that it took place in

the 28th year of his reign on earth. 36

As Lord of Death, Osiris was sometimes identified with the Great

Serpent of the underworld, and sometimes painted in the same
37
serpentine form, bent around so his toes touched his head. In
Ptolemaic times the whole underworld became Osiris's province, its

seven halls collectively called the House of Osiris. 38

Between 1450 and 1400 B.C. the Osirian mystery-cult took form,
with hundreds of verbal formulae for making the worshipper become
an Osiris. He would be born of Isis and nursed by Nephthys. He would
ride across the sky "side by side with the gods of the stars." He would
be as virile as Osiris-Menu: "My palm tree (penis) standeth upright and
is like Menu Therefore the Phallus of Ra, which is the head of

752
 jsiris, shall not be swallowed up." When he was in heaven, the gods Osiris
59
jemselves
would bring offerings to him.
The Osirian Mysteries taught words of power for bringing about
|ese desirable effects. Such words of power were "keys" to heaven,
40
! be concealed from non-initiates as "a great mystery." The Saite

iecension said with such keys, a soul could pass freely through the Saite Recension A
htes, gatekeepers, guardians, heralds, inspectors, and other spirits of the portion of the

know Egyptian Book of the

l;avenly mansions, for he would all their names.
Dead in vogue from
the XXVI dynasty to
And the Majesty ofAnpu shall say unto me, "Knowest thou the name of
" the Ptolemaic period,
this door, and canst thou tell it? ... And the Majesty of the god Anpu
ca. 600-30 B.C.
shall sayunto me, "Knowest thou the name of the upper leaf, and the
name of the lower leaf?" On receiving the proper answers, the Majesty
" 4I
of the god Anpu shall say, "Pass on, for thou hast knowledge, Osiris. O

During the first century B.C. the Osirian religion was established
42
ii all parts of the Roman Empire. Its popularity declined in the end
ecause it became too complicated for the average mind. Necessary
words of power" developed into lengthy catechisms of divine names of
oorposts, lintels, bolts, panels, doorkeepers, spirits of the hour,
iiresholds, gods' right and left feet, etc. Egyptians invented even a
nemory-god to bring back the spells and holy names if they were

iolen by a spirit of forgetfulness. 43 The important ceremony of "Open-

Mouth" was performed to let
the the dead person speak charms
fig

nd words of power freely. 44 Still, the catechisms became too long and

jomplex to be remembered.
Budge remarks that the Egyptians believed in "the resurrection of
liebody in a changed and glorified form, which would live to all
ternity in the company of the spirits and souls of the righteous
in a

ingdom ruled by a being who was of divine origin, but who had lived
pon the earth, and had suffered a cruel death at the hands of his
Inemies, and had risen from the dead, and had become the God and

ing of the world which is beyond the grave Although they believed
,i all these things and proclaimed their belief with almost passionate

arnestness, they seem never to have freed themselves from a hankering

fter amulets and talismans, and magical names, and words of power,
nd seem to have trusted in these to save their souls and bodies, both liv-

ng and dead, with something of the same confidence which they

and resurrection of Osiris. A matter for surprise
ilaced in the death is

hat they seem to see nothing incongruous in such a mixture of magic

45
[nd religion."
It is a matter for even more surprise that a scholar of Budge's
|tature failed to see exactly the same mixture of magic and religion in

hristianity; for indeed he could have been talking about Christians as

(veil as Egyptians. To this day, simple Christian folk still display the

lame hankering after crucifixes and medals, agnus del, incantations,

" vocations of holy names and other formulae, saints' relics, holy

753
Ouroboros water, images, even rosaries which they copied from the Egyptians.
Owl Christian formulae of exorcism, baptism, extreme unction, absolu-

^^^^_^^^^^_ tion, etc., were words of power under different names. The notion of
resurrection through identification with a resurrected god (by eating
his flesh) was in itself magical rather than religious and this was the
basis of the Christian salvation-idea no less than for that of Osiris's
votaries. Moreover it seems the concept of Christ was no less syncretic

than the concept of Osiris. If anything, the older god had more right
to claim an original system of worship or of superstition, depending on
one's point of view.
1. Budge, G.E. 2, 178. 2. Book of the Dead, 650; Martello, 189.
3. Budge, G.E. 2, 126, 141. 4. Angus, 139. 5. Waddell, 509-10. 6. Martello, 190.
7. Book of the Dead, 1 56, 268, 459, 5 5 1 8. H. Smith, 227. "9. Book of the Dead, 462.
.

10. Neumann, G.M., 166. 11. Budge, E.M., 1 16. 12. Pepper & Wilcock, 50.
13. Book of the Dead, 269. 14. Budge, G.E. 2, 41. 15. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 355.
16. Budge, G.E. 1, 256. 17. Erman, 304. 18. Book of the Dead, 170.
19. Budge, G.E. 2, 55. 20. James, 169. 21. James, 135-39. 22. Brandon, 126-27.
23. Hays, 257. 24. Budge, G.E. 2, 1 13. 25. Turville-Petre, 192.
26. Budge, G.E. 2, 192. 27. Budge, G.E. 2, 1 18; D.N., 276. 28. Larousse, 17.
29. Robertson, 48. 30. Budge, G.E. 2, 127. 31. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 80.
32. Budge, E.M. 84. 33. Campbell, M.I., 169. 34. Bardo Thodol, 70-71.
35. Hooke, M.E.M., 70. 36. Budge, G.E. 1, 101; 2, 188. 37. Budge, G.E. 1, 172.
38. Lethaby, 1 57. 39. Book of the Dead, 297, 469, 509-10, 518. 40. Budge, E.M., 1 16.
41. Book of the Dead, 571. 42. Angus, 197. 43. Book of the Dead, 279-80, 591-94.
]
44. Budge, E.M., 196. 45. Budge, E.M., xii-xiv.

Ouroboros
Greek name of the Hermetic World Serpent, sometimes the Sea-
serpent Oceanus encircling the earth; sometimes the underground
Python coiled in the earth's womb; otherwise known as Sata, Levia-

than, Taaut, Tuat, Thoth, Ophion, etc. See Serpent.

Owl
Romans called the owl strix (pi. striges), the same word that meant
"witch." I
Greeks said the owl was sacred to Athene, their own version
of the ancient Mesopotamian "Eye-Goddess" whose staring owl-

eyed images have been found throughout the Middle East, especially
around the Mother-city of Mari. 2 The owl was also the totem of
Lilith, Blodeuwedd, Anath, and other versions of the Triple Goddess of
the moon. See Trinity.
According the Christian legend, the owl was one of "three
disobedient sisters"who defied God and was transformed into a bird
who never looked at the sun. 3 It is easy enough to see in this idea the

shape of the Goddess herself, and the church's hostility to her. One
of the medieval names for the owl was "night hag"; it was said to be a
witch in bird form. 4 The owl is still associated with witches in the

symbols of Halloween.
The owl is also a bird of wisdom because it used to embody the

754
/isdom of the Goddess. Certain medieval magic charms apparently Owl
ought to use the bird's oracular power against its former mistress,
/oman. If an owl could be slain and its heart pulled out and laid on
ne left breast of a sleeping woman, the woman would talk
her sleepin

nd reveal all her secrets. 5 This seems to have been a basis of the

xpression, "heart-to-heart talk," which meant a woman's secret conver-

ation with her familiar.

1. Trigg, 96. 2. Neumann, G.M., pi. 87. 3. de Lys, 37. 4. Cavendish, P.E., 100.
5. Agrippa, 76.

755
'*Jfc

if

t
 Like the Hindu Shakti,
psyche was
classical
the female soul who
sought completion
with the body in union
with Eros. This is a
detail from an antique
Greek sculpture in
the Capitoline Museum,
Rome.

s Queen of the Under-

world, PROSERPINA WaS
prominent in both
Roman and (as Perseph-
one) Greek
mythology. The Chris-
tians had to deal with
her somehow, so turned
her into the "arch
she-devil." Shown here
with Ceres, her some-
time mother, and Pluto,
her consort in Hades.
Rome; Museo Laterano.

Daughter of Heaven,
bride of Shiva,
parvati was the virgin

aspect of the Hindu

goddess, Kali Ma.
Bronze; Southern
India, Chola period, 10th
century.
 ^
Paganism Paganism
Latin pagan i meant country-dwellers, the rural people whose reli-

gious conservatism caused them to cling to old gods and goddesses even
when Christianity
aristocracy. "It has

gradually
was well established
now been demonstrated

becomes general in the second

in cities and among the
that the hostility of the

peasantry to Christianity gave the meaning of 'pagan' to paganus.

This seems to date from the first half of the fourth
century and it
half." 1

"Heathen" came from Germanic heiden, that which is hidden,

because the church officially forbade the rites of the old deities, and
2
the pagan people continued their rites in secret.

Through the first half of the Christian era, paganism was overt and
more or less acceptable. Christianity and paganism existed side by
side in uneasy proximity long enough for Christians to take over as
many pagan deities, holy places, customs, and holidays as possible.
Noting that the people wouldn't accept Christianity unless it could be
considered an extension of their paganism, Pope Gregory the Great
directed that Christian relics must be placed in the inner shrines of
pagan temples, and the people converted gradually to the idea that
their deity was a saint instead of an un-Christian 3
spirit. Pagan feast days
were to be Christianized. For example, at Christmas the people were
to be allowed to sacrifice and eat "a great number of oxen to the
glory of
4
God, they had formerly done to the Devil."
as

Though the old deities were re-defined as devils, nominal Chris-

tians continued to believe in them as firmly as they believed in Christ, .1

if not more so. 5 They were quite willing to consult "devils" for guidance*
in their daily lives. The Venerable Bede said Redwald, king of the
East Saxons, kept in the same temple an altar to offer sacrifices to Christ
and another altar to offer sacrifices to "devils." 6 Gothic converts to
the church simply added the name of Christ to their own lists of native I

gods but dropped it with equal readiness if its magic proved

ineffective. 7

This dual religious system persisted even through periods when

the "fairy-religion" was persecuted as witchcraft. It could be said that

Christianity and paganism co-exist even

now, for the greater part of
Christian worship, sacraments, and basic theology came from the
pagan heritage. "The lamb, the dragon (or serpent), the dove above the!
altar, the triangle enclosing the all-seeing eye (common to Freema-

sonry as well), the sacred fish-symbol, the ever-burning fire, or the

image of the risen sun upon the receptacle for the consecrated wafer
in the Roman Mass, the architectural
symbols and the orientation of
church and cathedral, the cross itself, and even the colors and designs
of the robes of priest and bishop and pope, are a few of the silent
witnesses of the survival in the modern Christian churches of the
8
symbolism of paganism." Even such essential doctrines as the virgin

birth, Incarnation, Logos, resurrection, salvation, purgatory, baptism,

758
 nd holy communion were products of paganism, developed many Paganism
enturies before the Christian era.
Giraldus Cambrensis complained in the 1 2th century that the
__^^^^^^^^_
I
eople of Ireland were still given over to "old, barbaric and obscene
I
ustoms." 9 The cult of Diana co-existed with Christianity in Devon as
lite as the 14th century, when the Goddess was worshipped in
'oodland shrines even by monks. 10 At Cologne in 1333, Petrarch saw
Ijwomen conjuring the Rhine" in what was described as "a rite of the
11
I eople."
The people's religion had been largely in the hands of women
'

ince Caesar's day, and so itremained up to the 12th and 13 th

i enturies when active persecution of "witches" began. 12 Martin of
i 6th-century Portuguese missionary father, noted that wom-
iraga, a
In not only maintained their own un-Christian temples, but also
i
erformed domestic acts of worship like decorating tables, wearing
I iurels, taking omens, offering bread to water spirits and wine to the
I
upon Minerva when spinning, and invoking Venus
[ule log, calling
it weddings and on the public road. "What is that but worship of the

jevil?"
he asked. Moreover, he believed in the women's pagan
I himself. He said the rivers, springs, and woods were filled with
pities
i Lamias,
Nymphs, and Dianas; "and they were all malign devils and
lefarious spirits." 13
A 10th-century Penitential tried to forbid women to present their
Inildren to Mother Earth at the crossroads in their ancient manner,
Jior
this is A 16th-century Finnish bishop observed
great paganism."
14

[pat
"when people they seek help from the devil by laying wax
fall ill,

I
gures, candles, squirrel skins and other things on the altars, and on
lertain days sacrifice sheep and coins." 15 The 9th-century Synod of

home recorded pagan worship in the churches: "Many people, mostly

iKomen, come church on Sundays and holy days not to attend the
to
i but to dance, sing broad songs, and do other such pagan things." 16
[lass
Of course the churches had deliberately lured women by taking
the shrines of their Goddess, with the promise that the rites
[wer
continue as usual. Churches were built over shrines of Syrian
jpuld
llstarte at Corbridge in Northumberland, of Diana Nemetona at

Uath, and of Sarapis and Mithra at York. 17 At Cangas de Onis,

and other places in Spain, churches were built around
[Lrrichinaga,
18
I
agan dolmens and sacred mounds, still in existence today. Church
I recessions featured carnival mummers in the masks and costumes of
Indent beast-gods, such as the four totems of the pagan sacred year
on, bull, eagle, and serpent adopted as symbols of the evange-
19
[kts. Pagan deities appeared in the very carvings and decorations of
hurches. As late as 1 576 a British church employed workmen to pull

own and destroy "sundry superstitious things tending to the mainte-

ance of idolatry." 20
The Christian church had no holidays of its own; every feast in the

christian calendar was borrowed from the pagans, including Easter

759
Paganism an d Christmas. Roman festivals were particularly tenacious, until they
had to be given Christian names to excuse the people's continued
^^^^^m^^b^ celebration of them. The Hilaria became the Feast of Annunciation; i

Robigalia became the Feast of St. Mark; the Quinquatrus became the
21
Feast of St. Joseph; St. Cyprian's replaced the day of Jupiter. '7
Day
thousand years ago, old and young assembled in woods or on plains

to bring gifts to their gods, and celebrated with dances, games, and
offerings the festival of spring, or of awaking and blooming Nature.
These celebrations have taken Christian names, but innumerable old
heathen rites and customs are still to be found in them." 22
Christian historians often give an impression that Europe's barba
ians welcomed the new faith, which held out a hope of immortality
and a more kindly ethic. The The people didn't
impression is false.

willingly give up theof their ancestors, which they considered

faith

essential to proper functioning of the earth's cycles. They had their ov

hope of immortality and their own ethic, in many ways a kinder ethic
than that of Christianity which was imposed on them by force. 25

Justinian obtained 70,000 conversions in Asia Minor by methods that

were so cruel that the subject populations eventually adopted Islam in

order to rid themselves of the rigors of Christian rule. 24

As a rule, heathen folk resisted Christianity as long as they could,
even after their rulers had gone over to the new faith for its material
rewards. Louis the Pious baptized a Danish chieftain named Harald
Klak, and gave him a large fief on the Weser river, on the under-
standing that he would convert his people; but the people rejected bot
Christianity and Harald. In the 10th century, King Haakon of
Norway was fiercely opposed when he tried to institute Christianity. .

people rebelled, burned the new Christian churches, and forced

Haakon to eat the horse-liver sacrifices and drink New Year toasts to

Woden, Frey, Bragi, and the totemic clan. Some rulers themselves
rejected the new faith out of hand. Alcuin announced in the 8th
century that there would never be any hope of Christianizing the
Danes. Their king was "harder than a stone and wilder than any beast
and would have none of Rome's God. 25
Certain words reveal by their derivation some of the opposition
met by missionaries. The pagan Savoyards called Christians "idiots,"
hence cretin, "idiot," descended from Chretien, "Christian." Germai

pagans coined the term bigot, from bei Gott, an expression constantly
used by the monks. 26 Christians were the first to insist that there was
only one god, and it was theirs. This attitude tended to produce
resentment among worshippers of other gods.
The Roman Empire tolerated all religions within its far-flung
borders, so long as Rome's received due lip-service,
official deities

and the deified emperors were properly honored. This policy of reli-
gious freedom was soon abandoned by the Roman church, which
began to insist that all non-Christian faiths be destroyed; then that eve
Christians of non-orthodox sects must give up their heretical "errors,"

760
 die. The beginning of organized
Christianity marked the true end of Paganism
e ancient world's polytheisticfreedom of worship. The new Gospels
:came the sole authority. Other scriptures were burned. Yet, despite ^^^^^^^^^^^
the destruction, there was no real end to paganism. 27 The people
membered it and practiced
it
throughout the Christian era.
The third Councilof Constantinople decreed in the 7th century
at the people must stop kindling bonfires and leaping over them on

ights
of the new moon. 28 St. Eligius wrote: "Let no Christian place

^hts at the temples, or the stones, or at fountains, or at trees, or

lclosures, or at places where three ways meet. . . . Let no one presume

make lustrations, or to enchant herbs, or to make flocks pass through
hollow tree or an aperture in the earth; for by doing so he seems to
nsecrate them to the devil." 29 Nevertheless, these activities

ntinued.
In vain the Council of Toledo condemned "worshippers of
lols, those who venerate stones, who kindle torches, who celebrate the
tes of springs and trees . . . men who go about in the mask of a stag
r bull-calf, who dress in the skin of a herd animal, or put
on the heads
50
f beasts." At Ephesus, twelve centuries after the time of Christ,
icient fertility rites were still performed though Christian writers

sported that "men took delight in unholy things as if they were pious
;eds."
51
To the pagans, they were pious deeds.
Slavs never ceased to worship Kupala, the Water-mother Va-kul,
bios the horse god, Yarilo the fertility-savior, and the rest of their
antheon. Bulgarian penitential books tried again and again to abolish

orship of the sun and moon without success. As late as the 18th
jntury, the bishop of Voronezh denounced the "satanic games"
)nnected with the sacrifice of Yarilo; and the Bulgarian monk

piridon complained that most of his countrymen still

worshipped
yerun the thunder god instead of Jesus. 32
The old customs were preserved especially by women, who were
at welcome in the new church, and
preferred paganism for the
)iritual authority it could confer on them. A 10th-century Ecclesiastical
anon appealed to fathers, not mothers, to instruct their children in

Christian ways. Men must "forbid well-worshippings, necromancies and

vinations; enchantments and man-worshippings, and all the other
lin practices which are carried out with various spells. . . . And we
ijoin that every Christian man zealously accustom his children to
Christianity and teach them the Paternoster and the Creed. And we

ljoin that on feast-days, they abstain from heathen songs and devil's

imes." 33
But the songs and games went on, gradually taking on the guise of
icular carnivals, harvest-homes, May dances, Oktoberfests, Midsum-
ler feasts, and so on. Women maintained many of these traditions, not
;cause they were more rebellious than men but because they were
lore conservative. Priestesses came tobe called "witches" by their
Christian enemies. "Pagan folk practices and beliefs, whether Greco-

761
 Paganism Roman, Teutonic, or Celtic, did not die out with the introduction of

Christianity but rather remained and constituted the fundamental

i^^^^^^^^^^^ substratum of witchcraft." 34

After centuries of denunciation and suppression, the church fou
that many pagan ceremonies were too tenacious to be stamped out
and had to be assimilated by the Christian system. At the end of the

18th century, Irish clergymen "artfully yielded to the superstitions of

the natives, in order to gain and keep up an establishment, grafting

Christianity on Pagan rites." Bourne said "The monks, in the dark

unlearned ages of Popery, copied after the heathens, and dreamed

themselves into the like superstitions." 35 Sometimes Christ and the
old gods were incongruously blended, as at a 1
5th-century temple at

Istein dedicated to "Jupiter Christus." 36 To this day, the pagan

ceremony of the New Fire is enacted each Easter on Mount Lycabet-
tus, where it used to commemorate the rebirth of Apollo.

Many pagan deities were remade into saints. Others were vagu<
Christianized by interpreting them as prophetic figures. "Aescula-
pius, who suffered death because he had raised the dead, is a type of
Christ. . . .
Jupiter, changed into a bull and carrying Europa on his
back, also typifies Christ, the sacrificial ox who bore the burden of the
sin of the world. Theseus who forsook Ariadne for Phaedra prefigures
the choice which Christ made between the Church and the Synagogu
Thetis who gave her son Achilles arms with which to triumph over
Hector, is no other than the Virgin Mary who gave a body to the Son
God." 37
With a combination of syncretism, reinterpretation and exeges
Christianity managed to absorb nearly all of paganism except its

Goddess. According to Guignebert:

Western peoples in the early centuries of the Christian era never really
understood the Christian dogmas, nor have they understood them
since. The religion which they have constructed upon these dogmas :

through their own efforts was something different it was cast in . . .

formulas ill able to contain it. The Western peoples have, strictly speakir
never been Christians Bearing the impress only of the Christian
legend and nourished upon formulas passively repeated, these men th
vast majority ofprofessed Christians remained actually pagans, and \
still do so within the folds of the Catholic commonwealth. }S
1.
Guignebert, 175. 2. Borchardt, 290. Hitching, 210; Guignebert, 214.
3.
4. M. Harrison, 139. 5. Coulton, 27. 6. M.
Harrison, 42. 7. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 238.
[Link],4. 9. M. Harrison, 181. 10. Lethbridge, 71. 1 1 Borchardt, 282. 1
.

12. Turville-Petre, 261. 13. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 238-41. 14. Hitching, 210.
[Link], 199. 16. J.B. Russell, 75. 17. Squire, 275. 18. Hitching, 216.
19. Rose, 298. 20. Ha/.litt, 335. 21. Rose, 295. 22.
Leland, 142.
23. Campbell, CM., 390. 24. H. Smith, 228. 25. Oxenstierna,
67-69, 221.
26. Potter &
Sargent, 202. 27. Phillips, 152. 28. Ha/.litt, 63. 29. Hitching, 209.
30. H. Smith, 270. 3 1 Lawson, 223. 32. Larousse, 294;
.
Spinka, 34.
33. M. Harrison, 143. 34. J.B. Russell, 37. 35. Hazlitt, 336, 374. 36. Borchardt, 117i
37. Male, 339-40. 38. Guignebert, 500, 502.

762
Paivatar Paivatar
Palladium
"inno-Ugric version of the Aryan Goddess Parvati, or Prithivi, the
/irginwho spun the threads of fate. She was sometimes described as h^hmmmh
Ihe younger form of the same deity.
Daughter of the Sun, or a

Northern Europeans generally regarded the sun as female. 1

1. Larousse, 308.

Palaemon
Heracles the Sun, swallowed by the Sea-mother in totemic form as a
jreat fish, and reborn of the same mother as the Boy on the Dolphin.
Palaemon was a Greco-Roman counterpart of Jonah. His mother
vas Venus Salacia, the womb of the sea, named Delphinos which
neant both "dolphin" and "womb." Biblical writers transformed the
1

dolphin into Jonah's whale, and the "boy" born of the fish-mouth into a
prophet.
1. Neumann, A. P., 6.

ales

\rchaic ass-god after whom both Palestine and Philistia were named;
ilso the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the ancient festival of Palilia

innually celebrated the rites of Pales, or Pallas. (See Palladium.)

There was some disagreement as to Pales's sex. Some said he was a

jriapic ass-headed fertility spirit like Set, or Pan; others said Pales was
i
female, one of the disguises of Vesta under the name of Diva Palatua
the Palatine Goddess). 1
The temple of this androgynous deity was
he origin of the word "palace." His/her festivals were celebrated
egularly, several centuries into the Christian era, by priests wearing
iss-faced masks. See Ass.
l.Briffault3,18.

alladium
This mysterious fetish occupied the Holy of Holies in the Roman
:emple of Vesta on the Palatine Hill, and was said to embody the
essential spirit of Rome, as had previously embodied the spirit of
it

Troy. Roman legend said Aeneas carried off the Palladium from the
ivreckage of Troy and founded Rome with its help. It was a symbol of
i
protean, androgynous deity usually called Pallas, whose name meant
ither "maiden" or "youth." 1

Some said Pallas was identical with the Goddess Athene. Some

763
Palladius said Pallas was a Pan-like goat god slain by Athene. Some said Pallas
Palm Tree was a giant. Some said was a wooden image of a female warrior.
Pallas

^^^^^^^^^^_ Some said Pallas was a thunder-stone. A majority believed Pallas was
a phallic god and his Palladium was "the scepter of Priam, in the

likeness of a male sex organ." 2

Greek myth, Pallas had offspring, the Pallantids, who wor-
In

shipped an Amazonian fighting Goddess, the enemy of the

patriarchal Hellenic hero Theseus. 5 This may account for the notion
was a female warrior, once a companion of Athene who
that Pallas

took her name and became Pallas Athene after accidentally killing her in

a mock battle. This classic myth bears the marks of revision, a story
invented to account for Athene's androgynous idol represented by a

lingam-yoni, showing her union with Pallas, Pales, or Pan.

The Vestal Virgins were married to the spirit of Rome by means of
an artificial phallus in the Palladian shrine; thus it seems probable that
Pallas was a sacred lingam signifying AMOR, the secret name of
ROMA in reverse.
Constantine moved the Palladium to Constantinople and made it a

symbol of his own masculinity. It was buried under a huge red

4
porphyry pillar topped by an image of himself in the guise of Apollo.
1. Graves, CM. 2, 403. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 261, 266; Dumezil, 323, 583.
3. Graves, G.M. 2, 1 5. 4. Seznec, 43; J.H. Smith, C.G., 226.

Palladius
Roman name for the phallic god represented by the Palladium; a

name given to the Pater, or Patricius, a spirit of begetting. Palladius was

assimilated to the Celtic pater, "Patrick," in a Christian legend that
claimed one Bishop Palladius was a missionary to the pagan Irish before
St. Patrick. Both bishop and saint seem to have been purely
1

imaginary (see Patrick, Saint).

1. Encyc. Brit., "Patrick."

Palm Tree
In the Babylonian myth of the primal garden, the palm tree was the
Tree of Life, Goddess Astarte. The Hebrew
a dwelling-place of the
version of her name was Tamar, "Palm Tree." 1

Her male counterpart was Baal-Peor, or Phoenix, the god of

Phoenicia whose name meant "Land of the Palm." As a phallic deity,
Baal-Peor was symbolized by a palm tree between two large stones.
Sexual orgies in the temple celebrated his union with the Goddess in
Phoenicia and in Israel until priests of Yahweh killed the celebrants in

the midst of their rites (Numbers 25:8).

the feminine connotations of the palm tree remained. The
Still,

Goddess was often embodied in a Mother-palm, giving the food of

764
life in the form of coconut milk or dates. A complicated biblical Pan
myth
shows Tamar the Palm-tree as the mother of a slain "firstborn of
Judah"; and as a veiled sacred harlot decorated with the signet, staff, and
bracelets of the nation of Judah; and as a widow (Crone) to whom

offerings of goats were made; and as an idol "by the wayside," whom

priests of Yahweh wanted to burn (Genesis 38). She gave birth to the
rival twins Pharez and Zarah, Hebrew counterparts of Osiris and Set.
The spirit of the palm tree was still the Great Mother in the tradition
of early Christians, who gave the title of Holy Palm (Ta-Mari) to the
2
virgin Mary. Yet Egyptians continued to call a man's penis his
3
"palm tree."

1. Graves, W.G., 197. 2. Hughes, 55. 3. Book ofthe Dead, 518.

Pan
King of Arcadian satyrs, the horned and hoofed woodland god par Pan's name has been
excellence. Pan was one of the oldest gods in Greece, associated with derived from paein,

the cult of Dionysus and sometimes identified with him. Pan was said "pasture"; it was also
the word for "all" and
to have all the Dionysian Maenads. In addition, he was
coupled with for "bread," recalling
mated Athene, Penelope, Selene, and many archaic forms of the
to various All-fathers who
1
Great Goddess. were gods of divine
solar god Amon-Ra was the same as
Greeks claimed the Egyptian bread, such as Osiris,

Pan. Amon-Ra's Adonis, and Tam-

They called holy city Panopolis, "City of Pan,"
muz. Like them, Pan
saying it was inhabited
by "Pans and satyrs." The panoply (ceremonial
was a sacred king
dress and decoration) derives from holy processions in the City of who died in fertilizing
Pan. 2 Other words connected with Pan's cult are caper, caprice, and the earth. The ritual

capriccio, from Latin caper, the goat. Pan's sacred drama of death
all phrase "Great Pan is
dead" seems to have
and resurrection was the original "tragedy," from Greek tragoidos,
been taken from the
"Goat Song." 3 The word "panic" was originally the terrible cry of
rites of Tammuz; it

Pan, who dispersed his enemies with a magic yell that filled them with was also understood as
fear and took away all their strength. Thamus Pan-megas
It may be that Pan's legend began with the Hindu god
fertility
Tethnece, "All-great
Tammuz is dead."
Pancika, consort of one of the primal Mother-goddesses, many-
breasted Hariti, who suckled hundreds of pre- Vedic animal spirits as

many-breasted Diana suckled the woodland beasts, whose king Pan

4
was.
Pan was an important model for medieval pagans' Horned God,
whom the church called Satan. The devil always displayed Pan's
attributes of goat-hoofs, horns, and unremitting lust; sometimes also a
goat head and an attendant throng of satyrs (demons). Yet the new
romanticism of the 19th century laid aside the demonic nature attribut-
ed to Pan only a few centuries previously and made him a gentle
image of the lost Arcadia populated by shepherds and nymphs. Roman-
tic poets adopted Pan as their wildwood god.
In 1821, Shelley wrote to his friend Thomas J. Hogg: "I am glad
to hear that you do not neglect the rites of the true religion. Your

765
Panacea letterawoke my sleeping devotion, and the same evening I ascended
alone the high mountain behind my house, and suspended a garland,

^^^^^^^^^ and raised a small turf-altar to the mountain-walking Pan." Oscar Wilde
wrote wistfully: "O goat-foot god of Arcady! This modern world hath
need of thee!" 5 Byron wrote a regretful ode on the passing of Pan:

The Gods of old are silent on their shore

Since the great Pan expired, and through the roar

Of the Ionian waters broke a dread
"
Voice which proclaimed "the mighty Pan is dead.
How much died with him! false or true the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Ofgods brought forth the high heroic race
Whose names are on the hills and o 'er the seas. 6
1. Graves, CM. 1,103. 2. Budge, G.E. 2, 22. 3. Funk, 253, 302.
4. Lamusse, 359. 5. Merivale, 64, 119. 6. Merivale, 72.

Panacea
"All-healer," one of the divine daughters of Mother Rhea Coronis at \

her Pelasgian sanctuary of Titane. Another daughter was Hygeia,

"Health." To this day, both Goddesses are invoked in the medical

Hippocratic Oath.
1
The two seem to have been personifications of the
Great Mother's breasts, source of the Milk of Kindness and the balm
of healing.

Egyptians said the remedy for almost every ill was "the milk of a
woman who has given birth to a child: such is the sweet perfume"
that could expeldemons of sickness. 2 Panacea and Hygeia were
comparable to Egypt's Two Mistresses, Buto and Nekhbet, whose
milk bestowed divinity on pharaohs and health on everyone. 3 Buto was
the same nursing-mother Goddess called Latona, Lada, Leto or

Leda, the Babylonians' Allatu, the Arabs' Al-Lat (who later became
Allah). Etruscans called her Lat, mother of Latium and giver of
moon-milk. Latopolis, "Milk-City," was the Greek name for Buto's
oracular shrine, the oldest in Egypt. 4
Medieval Europe continued to believe in the curative virtues of
mother's [Link] was said that any mother could cure her infant's sore i

eyes by squirting her milk into them.

5
Male doctors often recommended
woman-milk for the sick.
Ironically, one of the last superstitious believers in Panacea was

Pope Innocent VIII, author of the infamous bull Summis Desider-

antes, which laid the legal foundations for persecution of witches and
caused the torture and death of millions of women. In his last illness,

766
'ope Innocent tried to fend off his own death by living on a woman's Pandemonium
6
reast milk. The magic didn't work; he died. Pandora
1.

5.
Lamusse, 170. 2. Castiglioni, 162.
de Lys, 159. 6. H. Smith, 291.
3. Lamusse, 29. 4. Herodotus, 106.
^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

'andemonium
Home of All Demons," Christian term for the underworld, to which
very non-Christian deity was consigned because the church claimed all
ods and goddesses of the heathen were devils ( 1 Corinthians 1 0:20-2 1 ).

During Rome's long decline, almost the last thinking believers in the
Idgods were their Christian enemies. A pagan might laugh at Apollo
s a fable. A Christian would shudder at him as a malignant spirit." '

First of the demons in Pandemonium were the rival gods men-

oned in the Bible. To these were added the Celtic, Teutonic, and
axon-Scandinavian deities; the deities of Greece and Asia Minor; and

le Roman gods and goddesses. Specifically listed among the

classical

evils were Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, and Minerva. 2 Ruler of Pandemo-

ium was the underground god: Pluto, Hades, Zeus Chthonios, Saturn,
.ucifer.

1. Ashe, 145. 2. de Voragine, 670.

andia

All-Goddess," one of "three daughters of the Moon" in Greek

lyth; a title of the female trinity. Her two sisters were called Erse and
1

lemea. See Moon.

1. Lamusse, 143.

andora
All-giver," title of the Earth-goddess Rhea, personified as the first

'Oman in an anti-feminist fable by Hesiod, who tried to blame war,

eath, disease, and all other ills on women. 1

Pandora's vessel was not a box but a honey-vase, pithos, from

hich she poured out blessings: a womb-symbol like the Cornucopia,
2
nciently used as a vessel of death and rebirth. Pandora's Vase became
andora's Box only in the late medieval period, when Erasmus
listakenly translated pithos as pyxis}
Hesiod claimed Zeus sent Pandora to earth to punish men, who
ad offended him. She bore a vase filled not with blessings but with
urses: strife, pain, death, sickness, and all other afflictions. Pandora in

767
 Pangaea her curiosity opened the vase, as Zeus knew she would, and released
Paradise them among men. In a refinement of cruelty, Zeus also supplied
mi^mm^m^a^^mm delusive Hope, to prevent men from killing themselves in despair and

escaping the full meed of suffering their Heavenly Father intended for

them. 4 The basic theme is also familiar in the myth of Eve.

Hesiod's story was further adapted to the legend of King Solomon
who was said to keep a horde of demons in a vase. After his death,
greedy men broke the vase in seeking treasure and let the demons out
5
into the world.

1. Graves, G.M. 1, 148. 2. Neumann, CM., 267. 3. Larousse, 93.

4. Graves, G.M. 1, 145. 5. de Voragine, 353.

Pangaea
"Universal Gaea," title of the Earth Mother at her mountain shrine
in Thrace. She was also called Ida, Olympia, and Panorma, Universal
Mountain Mother. See Mountain. 1

[Link],48.

Pantaloon
Stock character in Italian commedia, an amorous old rake in dancing
j

[Link] evolved from an artificially created saint, St. Pantaleone, \

of Venice, as he appeared in medieval mystery plays. St.

1
patron
Pantaleone was actually the totemic lion, steed of Venus, after whom J
Venice was named. This animal was doubly canonized as the Lion of I
St. Mark, who replaced Venus as the city's patron and whose "relics"

occupied the former Shrine of the Lion, now converted into St.
Mark's cathedral.
Because the character St. Pantaleone wore flowing trousers in the

eastern fashion, his costume came to be called "pantaloons," later

shortened to "pants."
1. Funk, 85-86.

Paradise
The Persian Pairidaeza (Paradise) was a magic garden surrounding
the holy mountain of the gods, where the Tree of Life bore the fruit of

immortality. Pairidaeza was also the divine Virgin who would give
birth to the future Redeemer: the Mahdi, or Messiah, or Savior, or
Desired Knight of Saracenic Grail myths. Shi'ite Arabs still look for
the coming of the Virgin Paradise, the next Holy Mother. 1

Hebrew pardes, "garden," was derived from the same Virgin

Paradise. 2 InSolomon's Song the "enclosed garden" is the virgin

768
mde whose fountain of life-giving fluid is not yet opened (Song of Paradise
Solomon 4:12). A dual vision of paradise as a living garden and the
ivinggarden as a female body runs through all religious symbolism. ^^^^^^^^^^^
Lorenzo the Magnificent stated the same ancient theme in his
lescription of heaven: "Nothing other than a pleasant garden, abundant
vith all pleasing and delightful things, of trees, apples, flowers, vivid
unning waters, song of birds, and in effect all the amenities dreamed of
>y the heart
of man; and by this one can affirm that Paradise was
vhere there was a beautiful woman, for here was a copy of every
amenity and sweetness that a kind heart might desire."
3

The psychological model of paradise was life's first experience of

romforting love, the mother who warmed and fed the infant right
Ifter its terrifying birth trauma. Having "fallen" from the comfort of the
bomb into a world of painful stimuli, if the child is not embraced and
lulled into the illusion that the lost paradise has nearly been regained,
ne foundations for later neurosis will be laid." 4 Often the dweller in

paradise
was in a state of pseudo-infancy. When an Egyptian pharaoh
ame to his two divine mothers "They draw their
in the after-world,

to his mouth, and never more do they wean him." 5

[reasts Egyptian
unerary priestesses bared their breasts when escorting a dead man to
lis tomb, probably as a magical promise of the nursing Goddess's tender
6
pre.
As further insurance, she was painted inside the sarcophagus
d, reaching down with her arms to clasp the deceased against her bared
reast, like a mother reaching for her baby. 7

Primitive notions of paradise as land flowing with milk and honey

/ere clearly representative of the mother's body in the earliest
riemories. An elderly Kikuyu chief spoke of these memories, still vivid
his mind:

She was always there; I can remember the comforting feel of her body as
she carried me on her back and the smell ofher skin in the hot sun. Ev-

erything came from her. When I was hungry or thirsty she would swing

me around to where I could reach her full breasts; now when I shut my
eyes I feel again with gratitude the sense of well-being that I had when I
buried my head in their softness and drank the sweet milk that they

[Link] night when there was no sun to warm me, her arms, her body,
took place; and as I grew older and more interested in other things,
its

from my safe place on her back I could watch without fear as I wanted and
when sleep overcame me I had only to close my eyes. 8

Western culture made this paradise the birthright of every

rimitive child a paradise lost. Dr. Henry pointed out that "No other
ulture has invented so many excuses for keeping a mother away
rom her infant." 9 Wickler
said a human baby is, like a monkey baby, by
ature "a mother-hugger and should be carried against the mother's

ody continuously in the early days of its life, as is still the custom

mong primitive races today. The entire behavior repertory of the

lewborn baby is
adapted for this. ... It is not biological for us to place

769
 Paradise our babies in cribs. Symptomatic of this is that the babies cry out of
loneliness with abnormal frequency in our culture, while one scarcely
10
^^^^^^^^^^^ ever finds among the children of primitive peoples."
this

Psychologists know the image of the lost mother is projected ontc

the sexual partner, which accounts for the extraordinary sexual

significance attached to women's breasts. Erasmus Darwin noted that

the symbolism even goes beyond the breast per se: "When any object
of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any
similitude to the form of the female bosom ... we experience an
attraction to embrace it with our arms, and to salute it with our lips, as
we did in our early infancy the bosom of our mother." " Man often
sees himself in an infantile relationship to a woman who may be
embraced and kissed that is, a wife or mistress. The Bengali poet
Chandidas addressed himself to a loved woman as if he were her infanl

"I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. . . . You are to me as a

n
parent to a helpless child."
A
psychiatrist notes that most sexual fantasies of adult males "seei

appropriate for a naive four-year-old, whose most important gratifica-

tions primarily depend on mother. ... He shows unacknowledged sign
of longing for her with the same fervor he did when she was all the
world to him, the holy center of his child's universe. His desire seems
unmodified by his conscious perception and understanding of the
realities of life and the limited possibilities for gratification with his
13
mother."
Similarly, the desire to return to the perfect comfort of the womb
in a post-mortem paradise seems unmodified by conscious recogni-
tion of its
improbability. Hidden prenatal memory surfaces in many
religious visions of the bliss of paradise, expressing a powerful wish
that what was may be regained after death. To those traine<
lost at birth

in interpretation of unconscious symbolism it is clear that the meta-

phors of eternity represent a return to the womb. When death is neai

14

the mind may even present vivid fantasies reminiscent of the mater-
nalcomfort that followed the birth trauma and soothed away the first

experiences of pain and fear.

Thus we find that the garden-paradise from which humanity "fell

beginning was a genital symbol: garden, gate, grove, holy

in the

mount (mons veneris). This was suggested by the word Eden, meaning
in Hebrew "a 15
In the Middle Ages the usual
place of delight."
metaphor was the Garden of Delights, a term less charac-
for paradise

teristic of the Christian heaven than of the other

paradise, Fairyland
or Avalon, where sexuality was permitted. Christian tradition forbade
sexual love and marriage in heaven (Matthew 22:30), but the pagan
tradition continued to view paradise as the epitome of all sensual
gratifications and the satisfaction of all sexual-romantic yearnings.
Christians adopted the word paradise as a synonym for their own

heaven, and insisted that the pagans' paradise was really hell, with a
false appearance of beauty to lure sinners. In rebellion against this

770
 theory, bards openly expressed a preference for hell. Aucassin gives Paradise
an example:

For into Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go
these same old priests, and halt old wen and maimed, who all day and
night cower continually before the altars, and in the crypts; and such folk
as wear old mantles and old tattered frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, Aucassin Hero of
the French medieval
and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of little ease.
romantic poem
These be they that go into Paradise; with them have I naught to do.
Aucassin et Nicolette,
But into Hell would I fain go thither pass the sweet ladies and
. . .

based on the character

courteous that have two lovers, or three, and their lords also thereto. of an earlier Arabic
Thither go the gold, and the silver, and cloth ofvair, and cloth ofgris, and
lover-hero, Al-Kasim.
harpers, and makers, and the prince of this world. With these I would
gladly go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady. l6
Other ballads and early medieval romances rejected the Chris-
tian paradise for its lack of feminine company. The Irish Fenians, whose
rule was never to insult a woman, were
have gone to hell for said to

denying Christian anti-feminist doctrines. The heathen sage Oisin

(Ossian) rejected St. Patrick's heaven on the ground that it had no
hunting, no bardic poetry, and no love of fair women. Oisin said he
17
would rather join the Fenians in hell.

Most people refused to believe that hell was identical with their
beloved Fairyland, Avalon, Cockaigne, Torelore, Valhalla, Isles of
the Blest, or whatever pagan paradise they professed; so it came to be
called the earthly paradise, as opposed to the heavenly one. This
realm of the Fairy Queen was usually placed in the Far West. Revered

popular heroes dwelt there: Oberon, Lancelot, Tristan, Arthur,

18
Ogier the Dane, and many others. Since these heroes lived forever,
the Irish called their paradise Thierna na Oge, the country of eternal
youth. A wonderful fountain at its heart dispensed the Water of Life
that made old men young again.
Belief in this ancient idea may have inspired the westward voyages
of Leif Ericson, Columbus, and the legendary St. Brendan the
Voyager, who was really a canonized form of the sea-god Bran,
discoverer of the Cauldron of Regeneration. St. Brendan was said to
have discovered it too, on magic isle in the west. But "St. Brendan's
a
Isle" was never found. 19 Ponce de Leon went looking for it, and
claimed to have discovered the Fountain of Youth in Florida, which he
called Bimini. 20

Churchmen also believed in this earthly paradise. St. Thomas

Aquinas was sure it existed and stated that Elijah and Esdras still lived
there. 21 The
13th-century Hereford Map showed it as a circular island
off the coast of India, which Columbus thought he could reach by

sailing west. Hugo de St. Victor said the island of paradise was "a spot in
the Orient productive of all kinds of woods and pomiferous trees. It

contains the Tree of Life: there is neither cold nor heat there, but

perpetual equable temperature. It contains a fountain which flows

forth in four rivers." A Danish hero was said to have reached it
by

771
Pariah
traveling to India and entering the mouth of a dragon who guarded
Partridge the bridge to the mystic island. 22

^^^^^^^^^^^m The bridge to paradise appeared in nearly all Indo-European

myths. It was sometimes a dragon or serpent, but most often a
rainbow. Persians called it the Kinvad Bridge. Babylonians called it the
Necklace of Ishtar. Norsemen called it Bifrost, or sometimes Brisin-

gamen, the Necklace of Freya. Beyond it, the gods dwelt in Asgard or
Valhalla, in a castle called Gladsheim (Joyous Home). In Grail

myths, this was the Grail Castle on Mount Joy; in the Arthurian cycle, il

was Lancelot's fortress, Joyous Gard. The pagan paradises had many
"mansions," like the paradise of Osiris which Jesus claimed for his own
23
deity (John 14:2).
1. Lederer, 181. 2. Hughes, 47. 3. Hughes, 99. 4. Fodor, 33. 5. Erman, 9.
6. Book of the Dead, frontispiece. 7. Neumann, G.M.,
pis. 90-91. 8. Montagu, T., 79.
9. Henry, 288. 10. Wickler, 266. 1 1. Montagu, T., 78. 1 2. Elisofon & Watts, 82.
[Link],27. 14. Campbell, P.M., 65. 15. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 26.
16. Loomis,251. 17. Squire, 206, 226. 18. Guerber, L.M.A., 135.
19. Encyc. Brit., "Brendan." 20. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 539-40. 21. Wilkins, 1 19.
22. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 258-59, 263. 23. Branston, 120.

Pariah
Hindu out-caste,one belonging to none of the divine orders of
society; an Untouchable. Such people were assigned to the dirty chores,
both in India and in biblical lands, as "hewers of wood and drawers of
water" (Joshua 9:21). See Caste.

Parnassus
Ancient Mount of the Muses, taken over by the god Apollo who
usurped the Muses' function of creative inspiration. See Mountain.

Parthenon
"Virgin-temple," the shrine of Athene still
standing on the Acropolis
above Athens. The was Athene Parthenia (Virgin
Goddess's title

Athene), which also designated many other versions of the Goddess.

An old name for Magdeburg was Parthenopolis, "City of the Virgin,"
dedicated to Venus Parthenia. Parthia, "Virgin-land," was the home
1

of Scythians who worshipped the Virgin Artemis. Parthians ruled Persia

from 250 b.c. to 191 a.d.
[Link],85.

Partridge in a Pear Tree

Middle English pertriche, "partridge," was derived from Perdix, one
of Athene's sacred kings, thrown into the seas from a tower, and carried

772
to heaven form of a bird by his Goddess. He was the partridge,
in the 1
Parvati
she the pear tree. Athene was worshipped in Boeotia as Once, the Pear Pastos
Tree, mother of all pear trees. Perdix's name originally meant "the ^^^^^^^^^^^
Lost One." He was a form of Vishnu-Narayana, called Lord of Pear
Trees holy city of Badrinath in the Himalayas (from badri,
at his

"pear tree"). The pear tree had feminine-maternal significance through

Eurasia. It was also sacred to Hera, whose oldest image at the

Mycenae was made of pear wood. European

2
Heraeum in
peasants
considered the pear a favorite "life-tree" for a girl. In Russia it was a

protective charm for cows. The partridge in the tree was evidently
3

taken as a symbol for Christ, instead of Perdix, when the image was

transposed into a Christmas carol.

1. Potter & Sargent, 123. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 252. 3. B. Butler, 238.

Parvati

Virgin aspect of Kali Ma, called Daughter of the Mountain, or

Daughter of Heaven, both titles meaning the same since "heaven" was
Himalaya, the Mountains. Parvati was Shiva's bride under other
1

names as well, such as Maya, Sati, Durga, or Shakti. Often she was
identified with Prithivi, an archaic Mother Earth.
1.0'Flaherty,349.

Pasht

"Tearer," an alternate name for the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast,

probably in the role of Destroyer or devouring Sphinx. See Cat.

Pasiphae
"She Who Shines for All," the Cretan Moon-goddess embodied in a
queen who coupled with the sacred bull and brought forth the Minotaur
(Minos-the-Bull). Her offspring represented the line of Minoan kings
who wore the bull mask and mated with the Goddess every seven years
1
at a ritual hieros gamos, followed by a ritual bull-killing. It is

believed that Cretan colonists carried the cult of Pasiphae and Minos to

Spain and instituted sacred games that have come down to the

present day as the bullfight.

1. Graves, G.M. 2, 403.

Pastos
Inner "bridal chamber" of pagan temples, where male initiates could
mate with the Goddess or female initiates with her divine consort to

773
Pathos insure their redemption after death; comparable to the abaton or
Patrick, Saint sacred "pit." See Abaddon.

Pathos
"Passion," the Dionysian ceremony of love-death, forerunner of the
"Passion" of Christ. In the earlier version, the god mated with the

goddess and sent forth his seed along with his soul, to bring rebirth to
the world. 1
See Drama.
1 .
J.E. Harrison, 344.

Patrick, Saint
Patron saint of Ireland, probably a fictitious figure built on Roman

pater or patricius, a The only evidence for the existence of a

priest.
Christian St. Patrick was his own autobiography, supposedly written

in the 5th century but not heard of until 400 years later.
1
Thus it seems
that Patrick's purported writings were forged by monks wishing to

pretend Ireland was Christianized earlier than it actually was. It is highly

unlikely that the Irish were converted as early as the 5th century. In
the 12th century, St. Bernard complained that the Irish were still given
over to "barbarous rites," Christianity having failed to take root
2
among them.
Like many other saints evolved by 9th- and 10th-century hagiogra-

phy, Patrick had pagan precedents. One was the Irish god of the
shamrock, Trefuilngid Tre-eochair, "Triple Bearer of the Triple Key,"
whose sacred plant bore all edible fruits including the apples of
immortality. He was a son-consort of the Triple Goddess whose triple
yoni was represented by shamrock designs from the earliest civiliza-

tions of the Indus valley. The story that St. Patrick explained the
Christian trinity to the Irish by exhibiting the shamrock was entirely

apocryphal. The Irish worshipped the shamrock as a sign of their triple

Book of Leinster A pagan deities. The Book of Leinster said Patrick's mother was the
Goddess Macha: she of the feminine trinity who gave birth to the
1 2th-century Irish
3
codex containing shamrock-god.
stories and poems from
Many other stories suggested Patrick's true paganism. He was
the pagan tradition.
educated by a druid. 4 In Wales he bore the title of Maenwyn,

meaning one dedicated to the moon. The legend of his martyrdom

5

was sacrificed to the Moon-goddess, but like a pagan

indicated that he

god he was united with her Virgin incarnation, Brigit. The funerary
6
temple at Downpatrick was dedicated to both Brigit and Patricius.
The Welsh form of the Triple Goddess, Guinevere, was said to have
slain "the Irish knight Sir Patrice" with her magic apple, recalling the
7
Goddess's gift of an apple of immortality to each of her doomed lovers.

774
 With all his pagan precedent, it is not surprising to find the Paul, Saint
monkish version of Patrick declaring himself "a sinner despised . . .

8
by many." ^^^^^^^^^^^
St. Patrick's Day was known throughout the Roman empire as the

day of apotheosis of the god slain during the Ides of March: Liber
Pater or Mars who would have been known as Patricius or
Pater,
9
Patrick in Britain. At his Roman festival on March 1 7, a gigantic

phallus was paraded through the streets, and solemnly crowned with a
garland representing the divine yoni, by the hands of a specially
10
selected matron. The phallus of Liber Pater was also known as the
Palladium, planted in the womb-temple of Vesta. The priest who
represented this god's power was the pater patrum, "father of fathers,"
or else the Peter (the phallic stone pillar), or else Palladius. An old
chronicle mentioned a Roman-Irish martyr called Bishop Palladius,
"the bishop to the Irish who believe in Christ," sacrificed to the
first
11
Irish Moon-goddess before Patrick appeared. Evidently both Palladius
and Patrick were the same pagan god, adopted into the canon after
12
his old shrines were taken over by Christians.

1. Encyc. Brit, "Patrick." 2. de Paor, 174. 3. Graves, W.G., 130, 518.

4. Spence, 56. 5. Hazlitt, 483. 6. Brewster, 140. 7. Malory 2, 274. 8. Attwater, 266.
9. G.R. Scott, 165; Rose, 212. 10. Knight, D.W.P., 1 54. 11. Encyc. Brit, "Patrick."
12. Graves, W.G., 152.

'aul, Saint

The true founder of orthodox Christianity was Paul, who either

composed or inspired the earliest identifiably Christian writings, predat-
ing the Gospels.
1
Paul laid down the basic orthodox doctrines: hope
of high rank in heaven for the pure; avoidance of women and sexuality;

separation of body and soul. "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit,

and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the
other" (Galatians 5:17). Paul copied the more ascetic Gnostic sects
when "a gulf never completely to be closed again is opened:
of his time,

God and world, God and nature, spirit and nature, become divorced,
alien to each other, even contraries." 2
One key to this process was separation of male and female

principles in religion. Father Heaven and Mother Earth were no

onger wedded. Women were no longer participants in sacred mysteries
according to Paul. The church must be entirely patriarchal; women
were forbidden to teach or preach in it. Paul also laid the guilt of original
sin on woman alone, absolving man from responsibility: "Adam was
not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression"

(1 Timothy 2:1 1-14).

Paul's antipathy toward women and sexuality leads to a suspicion
doctrine was linked with the early Christian practice
that his esoteric

of voluntary castration, recommended by Jesus for "the kingdom of

775
 Paul, Saint heaven's sake" (Matthew 1 9: 1 2). In Paul's
day, Rome revered the
self-castrated god Attis and Paul was an earnest admirer of Roman

wm^^^mmi^^^^m culture, as shown by the fact that he Romanized his name, changing
it from Saul to Paul. Roman Christians later used self-castration as an
automatic ticket to heaven, in the manner of Attis's priests.
3
Tertul-
4
lian said the heavenly gates were always thrown open to eunuchs.
In a secretive, elliptical style typical of contemporary mystical

writings, Paul suggested that he was among the divinely favored

eunuchs. He often
mentioned, but never described, his mysterious
"infirmity" which he called a "light affliction, which is but for a
moment" though it would bring him eternal glory (2 Corinthians 4:17'

It assimilated him to Christ, and "They that are Christ's have

crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts" (Galatians 5:24).
Paul hinted that he was one of the "new creatures" in Christ,
neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. A man would have to be one c
the other, unless he altogether lacked a penis. Paul made an oblique
reference to a mutilation: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord

Jesus" (Galatians 6:17). He scorned the "natural" (unmutilated) man

for his lack of spirituality: "The natural man receiveth not the things of
the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him" (1 Corinthians
2:14). Nevertheless, Paul recognized that some men might prefer to
remain natural. Although "it is good for a man not to touch a
woman," he proposed that such men be allowed to take wives, "to avoii

fornication." Yet this was a grudging concession, given "by permis-

sion, and not of commandment. For I would that all men were even as

myself" (1 Corinthians 7:1-7).

Paul wrote to the Galatians: "I would they were even cut off whic!
trouble you" (Galatians 5:12). The word rendered "cut off" also
5
meant "castrated." Paul said those who "bite and devour one anoth
er" terms often applied to sexual behavior may be consumed. But
those who are in the Spirit "shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh"
(Galatians 5:1 5-16). In his addresses to the Romans, Paul seemed to
offer himself and some of his followers as examples of the virtue of
sexlessness:

How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Our old . . .

man is crucified with him Jesus], that the body ofsin might be
destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead j

freed from sin. . . . Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that

ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as

instruments of unrighteousness unto sin. I speak after the manner
. . .

ofmen because of the infirmity ofyour flesh: for as ye have yielded your
members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so
now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. (Roman
6:2-19)

Paul spoke "after the manner of men," as if he were not one,

because had an "infirmity" that he didn't share. He
his hearers' flesh

asked them to crucify and destroy "our old man," a common Middle-

776
 Eastern epithet for the phallus. "He that is dead is freed from sin" Paul, Saint
because he could no longer serve the "uncleanness" of women.
The Jews would naturally have argued that sterility
of divine law, since Yahweh's
was a violation ^^^^^^^^^^
commandment was to be fruitful and
multiply. Paul insisted that this commandment was obsolete. God had
changed his mind. Paul declared that fruitfulness of the flesh now
meant death rather than life:

For when we were in the flesh, the motions ofsins . . . did work in our
members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered
from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve
innewness ofspirit. Sin, taking occasion by the commandment,
. . .

wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. Fori was alive without . . .

the law once: but when the commandment came, sin

revived, and I
died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be
death. (Romans 7:4-10)

Paul found the divine law of reproduction outdated and distaste-

ful because it
brought forth "fruit unto death" i.e., more life doomed

to die. Therefore he "died" from the carnal life and acquired new
spirituality. "The carnal mind (or, minding of the flesh) is
enmity
against God ... so then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
... For if ye the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit
live after

do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live" (Romans 8:7-1 3).
Paul used the parable of the wild olive tree, whose branches must
be lopped off, to be grafted onto a fruitful tree. To those whose
"branches" were lopped off for the kingdom of heaven's sake, he
promised better replacements in the hereafter, for "God is able to
graff them in [Link] if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is

wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature to a good olive

tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be
graffed onto their own olive tree?" (Romans 1 1:23-25).
This parable, Paul said, was an important "mystery" of which his

followers must not be ignorant. He pleaded for cutting of the sinful

branch: "I beseech you therefore, brethren that ye present your . . .

bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your

reasonable service" (Romans 12:1). Paul's "living sacrifice" may well
have been like those of Buddhist ascetics and Aztec holy men who
habitually practiced penile mutilations to win the favor of the gods.
John the Baptist used arboreal symbolism like Paul's: "the ax is laid

to the root of the trees" (Matthew 3:10). In pagan context, this

meant castration of the fertility king. The wild olive, "castrated" with a
golden of Dodona, figured in the myths
sickle like the oracular oaks

of Heracles and his Tyrian counterparts. 6 The genital blood of a

castrated king was the food of immortality, according to the Book of
the Dead; the soul of man was nourished on the food "shed upon the
olive tree." 7 The olive branch was, and is, a sign of Peace; and

Peace" meant the death of a phallic god, who received the Word of
Peace at his departing. Here is a parable of which modern scholars

777
Pazuzu should not be ignorant. The lopped-off olive branch was carried in the
Peacock oeak f the Dove, emblem of Aphrodite, who castrated sacred kings.
8

^^^^hm^^hh 1. Enslin,
4. Briffault 3,
L.C.M, 233-38.
372. 5. Enslin,
2. Jonas, 251.
L.C.M., 223.
3.

6.
Bullough, 100-1 13.
Graves, CM. 2, 178.
7. Book of the Dead, 89. 8. Graves, G.M. 1,71.

Pazuzu
The only Babylonian deity to become a movie star: Pazuzu was the
"demon" of the film The Exorcist His name really came from an

ancient Sumerian title of the flood-hero-king Ziusudra, "the pa-

Babylonian myths supplied him with a serpent-penis and made

l
susu."
him the consort of the serpent-mother Lamashtu, or Lamia, the Jews'
Lilith.

[Link],A.N.E.,29.

Peach
Female genital symbol, in China regarded as the source of the
ambrosia of life which gave gods their immortality; corresponding to the
apple in western Europe. Great Mother Hsi Wang ruled the Mu
magic peach garden in the west, where the gods were reborn.
1

Peach Blossom meant a virgin in Taoist symbolism, while the fruit

stood for a mature woman whose juices were essential to man's

health. China's patron saint of longevity Shou Lou was an old man with
a high bulging forehead, bursting with "yin juice" he had absorbed
and sent up to his head through sexual coupling with many women. To
reveal his mystical secret, Shou Lou always held up a peach with one
of his fingers stuck into its cleft. 2
Chinese wizards made magic wands from peach twigs. These
might be compared to magic wands made in the west from other
woods sacred to the Goddess, such as witch hazel, witch-willow, apple
3
boughs, or holly.
Western writers sometimes confused the Oriental peach with the

apricot,because abricot was once a European word for the vulva.

Sculptures from the pagan period at Nimes showed examples of this
4
fruit in conjunction with phalli.
1. Larousse, 382. 2. Rawson, E.A., 234. [Link], 397.
4. Knight, D.W.P., 136, pis. XV, XVI.

Peacock
Bird of Juno, mother of the Roman
gods. The peacock's iridescent
tail-feather"eyes" symbolized the Goddess's watchfulness, her many-
colored veils, and her plumes of justice, against which the hearts of

778
[nen were weighed, plumes of Maat in Egypt. The
as against the
Pearly Gate
>eacock belonged to Juno when she was still the Etruscan Goddess
Great Yoni.
Jni, the It also belonged to the Hindu Goddesses Sarasvati ^^^^^^^^^^
md Maya, and their Argive counterpart Hera.
1

Juno's priests and priestesses in their sacred processions carried tall

>eacock-feather fans called flabelh. These articles were taken over by

Christian popes and are still displayed at papal Easter services. They are
low said to represent "the many-eyed vigilance of the church." 2
Because it was a matriarchal totem originally, the peacock tended
o attract the same opprobrium as black cats, opals, ladders, pentacles,
nirrors, owls, and moonlight. Christian superstition generally viewed
he peacock as a bird of doom. St. James's Gazette reported in 1888:

'Nobody who has not gone exhaustively into the subject can have any
dequate idea of the amount of general inconvenience
diffused by a
>eacock. Broken broken limbs, pecuniary reverses, and various
hearts,
orms of infectious disease have all been traced to the presence of a
>eacock." According to some legends, the peacock became a bad-luck
ird because it was the only one who consented to show Satan the

vay to paradise an echo of the pagan belief that the peacock was
5
uno's psychopomp.
In the Orient, however, the peacock remained a Bird of Paradise,
'eacocks were encouraged to wander about the precincts of any
iindu temple and in the royal gardens. Like doves in western Europe,
eacocks were considered soul-birds and emblems of good fortune,
ometimes even oracles.

1. Jobes, 224. 2. Brewster, 166. 3. Leland, 1 54.

'early Gate
Entrance to heaven; a Christian borrowing from the cult of Aphrodite

Carina, or the Sea-mother Mari, to whom pearls were sacred. Her own
>ody was the Gate of Heaven, like the Jade Gate of the Chinese
oddess, through which all men passed at birth (outward) and again at

eath (inward). Various yonic symbols of the Goddess were said to be

ordered with pearls, including even the Celts' sacred Cauldron of

Regeneration. (See Cauldron.)

When the Goddess appeared in the guise of the moon, she was
ailed Pearl of the Sea, or Pearl of Wisdom; her seven high
>riestesses were the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (see Pleiades). As the

noon was the gate of paradise, so was the Goddess. Early Christian
ectaries copied the pagans in claiming that the souls of the dead

mount up by the pillar of dawn to the sphere of the moon, and the
noon receives them incessantly from the first to the middle of the
nonth, so that it waxes and gets full, and then it
guides them to the
un until the end of the month, and thus effects its waning in that it is

ightened of its burden."

'

779
Pegasus The pearly moon-gate like Mother Earth made no distinctions j

between those who could be admitted and those who could not; as all
^^m^^^^^ammm living things were her own children, so all dead things were her charg<
also. When Christian mythology supplied a gatekeeper in the form of
St. Peter, then the Pearly Gate became a barrier where a judgment w
made on the worthiness or unworthiness of the soul.
The ancients gave all pearls the feminine connotation, saying the
were made of two female powers, the moon and water. It was
believed that pearls should be worn only at night, for moonlight woulc
enhance their luster whereas sunlight would spoil them. 2
1. Jonas, 233. 2. de Lys, 284-85.

Pegasus
Winged horse of Greek myth, symbol of the sacred king's or hero's

journey to heaven; an image of death and apotheosis, like the mythic

death-horses of northern Europe. Pegasus had archaic, matriarchal
1

origins. He sprang from the "wise blood" of the Moon-goddess Me-

dusa, who embodied the principle oimedha, the Indo-European root

word female wisdom. Or, alternatively, he was the magic horse
for

Arion, "moon creature on high," born of the Goddess Demeter and

ridden by Heracles in his role of sacred king in Elis. There was an earl
female Pegasus named Aganippe, "the Mare Who destroys merci-
fully," actually a title of Demeter herself as the destroying lunar
2
Night-Mare.
Pegasus was named for the Pegae, water-priestesses who tended
the sacred spring of Pirene in Corinth. The cult seems to have been
rooted in Egypt. The oldest shrine of Osiris at Abydos (ca. 2000 b.c.)
centered on on a sacred spring called Pega. 3
The Greek Pegae preserved an ancient dying-god cult, as shown
by the myth of Bellerophon, who mounted Pegasus and tried to ride
to heaven "as though he were an immortal." He failed, and fell.
Bellerophon's predecessor (mythologized as his "father") also failed,
and was devoured by wild man-eating mares. This was not meant to
suggest that human flesh ever became incorporated into an equine
diet. It meant rather that "the pre-Hellenic sacred king was torn in

pieces at the close of his reign by women disguised as mares." 4

Pegasus represented divine inspiration as well as godlike apotheo

sis. A man who rode him could become a great poet. Pegasus's
crescent-moon-shaped hoof stamped the ground and dug the Hippo-
crene (Horse- Well), a spring of poetic inspiration on Mount Helicon,
the home of the Muses. This was another kind of immortality; the rid<

of Pegasus could figuratively "fly through the air, to reach the

heavens." 5
1. Eliade, S., 467. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 239, 255; W.G., 425. 3. Budge, D.N., 276.
4. Graves, G.M. 1,232,254. 5. Eliade, S., 467.

780
 elagia, Saint Pelagia, Saint
Pelican
everal St. Pelagias were invented during the era of
saint-making (ca.
th century a.d.) Pelagia the Penitent, Pelagia of Antioch, Pelagia of MMMMMni
arsus, et al. All were fictions built on the epithet of
Aphrodite
elagia, "Sea." They were identified also with St.
Margaret or St.

larina, other "pelagic" titles of the same Goddess.

Sometimes Pelagia was a beautiful dancing girl, converted by a
Christian preacher and made to repent. Sometimes she was a
eautiful virgin who threw herself from a housetop to avoid losing her

irginity. Sometimes she was a beautiful Christian maiden who

xirned a royal lover, the son of Diocletian (or, in some versions, the
mperor himself), and for this she was roasted to death in a brazen
ull.
1
The stories
apparently were inspired by statues of the Goddess
ibeled "Pelagia," and some of the methods of destroying them.

Another legend showed Pelagia differently, as a temptress trying to

arrupt a male saint. He was St. Hilary, who wandered into a remote
Jpine villagewhen the people were celebrating pagan rites of Midsum-
lerunder the guidance of their chatelaine, Lady Pelagia. She
'elcomed the holy man to her palace and asked him many deep
uestions. When she asked, "What is the distance from heaven to
ell?," a heavenly voice commanded St. Hilary to breathe on her in the

ame of Christ. He did so, and she suddenly turned into a statue of

phrodite. In the morning the statue fell to pieces, and the magic palace
as revealed as a ruin of an old Roman city.
2

The same riddle was asked again in the legend of St. Andrew, who
xplained that only Satan could know the distance from heaven to
3
ell because he had measured it in his fall.

Another legend of Pelagia repeated the same tale told of many

ther fictitious she-saints, namely that she disguised herself as a man
id spent some time community of monks, under the name
living in a
4
f Pelagius. This may have been connected with the early apocry-
halGospels that forbade women to be Christians unless they "made
lemselves male." 5
1. Attwater, 272. 2. Summers, V, 243-45. 3. de Voragine, 15. 4. Attwater, 272.
5. Malvern, 38.

elican

)ften stork, another baby-bringing totem of the

confused with the
irth-goddess, the pelican was an early symbol of the Sacred Heart.
Egyptians believed that a mother nourished her infant in utero with

er heart's blood; similarly a mother pelican nourished her young by

rounding or "vulning" her own breast with her beak to let her
eart'sblood flow into the mouths of her nestlings. The legend probably
rose from the pelican's habit of resting with its bill sunk in its breast

athers.

781
Penates Augustine accepted this ancient fantasy of the mother pelican>j
St.
Pentacle as fact,and so did subsequent churchmen, for no one dared contra-
dict Augustine even though no pelican had ever been seen opening j

own breast. The self-sacrificing mother pelican became a popular

1

motif on both ecclesiastical and secular coats of arms.

1. Potter & Sargent, 179.

Penates
Roman household gods who protected the penus, a grain-storage
chamber, once associated with the family tomb. Like Jewish teraphim,
the Penates seem to have been preserved skulls of ancestors, set in
niches around the storeroom. 1
1. Neumann, CM., 283.

Penelope
"She Whose Face is Veiled," a title of the weaving Fate-goddess,
miscast in the Odyssey as Odysseus's wife, though she was probably his

personal guardian angel in an earlier story. She was once an orgiastic

fertility-mother, as shown by the legend that she took all her "suitors"
into her bed, and she was both the mother and the consort of Pan. 1

Her function in the Odyssey was to account for Odysseus's

charmed As long as Penelope refrained from cutting her thread,
life.

Odysseus couldn't die. So he survived many dangerous adventures

while she wove and unwove the tapestry of his life, never cutting it
off. He even overcame the death-curse cast on him by Hecuba. 2
1. Graves, W.G., 392. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 341.

Pentacle
Based on the symbol of the Goddess Kore in the apple core, the

pentacle or pentagram was worshipped by Pythagorean mystics who

1
called it
Pentalpha: the birth-letter interlaced five times. Its meaning
was given as "life" or "health." 2 Some called it the star of Ishtar or of

Isis, or of Isis's underworld twin, Nephthys. In Egypt the five-pointed

Pentacle
5
star represented the underground womb.
Use of the pentacle as an amulet of protection or healing was
common in Babylon, where it was often drawn on pots to preserve
their contents. The amulet known as The Seven Seals shows a pentack
as the first of its holy signs. According to Judeo-Christian tradition,
the Seals were supposed to represent the secret names of God, and
the pentacle was the chief of them, inscribed on King Solomon's

782
 4
magic ring. Thus it was sometimes
erroneously called Solomon's Seal. Penthesileia
However, it was more closely connected with pagan deities than
with the Jewish one. A pentacle with one point straight down __.

represented the Horned God, whom Neoplatonic philosophers called

Pentamorph, "He of the Five Shapes." He appeared in human
5

form as well as the four horned animals, bull, ram, goat, and stag.
Pagan Celts like the Egyptians revered the pentacle as a sign of the
underground Goddess, whom they called Morgan. In her honor, the
solar hero Gawain carried a pentacle on his blood-red shield. 6
Hermetic magicians used the pentacle for their model of Man the
Microcosm. A male figure was placed inside a circle representing the
cosmos: his hands,feet, and
head touched the circle at the points
designated by the inscribed pentacle, his genitals being located exactly
in its center. 7 This image was related to Firmicus Maternus's remark
that man is a microcosm ruled by "the five stars." 8
Like other figures constructed of a single unbroken line, the
pentacle was believed to afford protection from spirits, who needed
the "gates"formed by a broken line. Therefore the pentacle was often
used to mark off magical enclosures, especially for invocation. Medi-
eval churchmen consequently took to calling it by such names as Devil's

Sign, Witch's Cross, Wizard's Star, Goblin's Cross, or Witch's

Foot. 9 It was thought that
a vampire or werewolf would show a pentacle

on the palm of the hand. This notion may be compared

foot sole or
with the five-petaled Lotus that appeared on the hands of Buddha. 10
Continuous appearances of the pentacle in magic books probably
influenced Slavic witches who tried to cure diseases by "measuring
the pentacle" on the patient. A string was stretched from feet to chin,
from the middle finger of each hand to the other, from each hand to
the opposite foot, while the sufferer stood in the position of Microcos-
mic Man. "Differences in measurement give diagnosis and
prognosis, and cutting the twine with a knife after each measurement

cuts away the sickness. The bits of twine are burned so that the
patient may inhale the fumes, and the ashes are placed in fresh water, of
which the patient drinks a portion." u
Magic charms using the pentacle are still extant. Gypsies still cut
the apple to reveal the Kore, the Pentacle of the Virgin, which they
12
call Star of Knowledge.
[Link],212. Pepper & Wilcock, 23. 3. Budge, E.L.,75. 4. Budge, A.T., 40.
2.

[Link], 121. 6. Loomis, 342. 7. Lehner,77. 8. Wedeck, 236. [Link],478.

10. Ross, 104. [Link], 87-88. 12. Derlon, 157.

Penthesileia

"Man-griever," Amazon queen slain in battle by Achilles during the

Trojan War. Some said she killed Achilles first but Zeus restored him to
life. Various sources
agree that when she was dead, Achilles raped

783
Perceval her corpse. Some stories say her eyes were gouged out and she was

dragged by one foot and thrown into a river. Others say she was taken
up respectfully and buried with honor as a great heroine.
1

[Link],G.M.2,3B.

Perceval
Also known as Parsifal, Percival, Persevelle, and other variations, this

protean hero of medieval romance united many myths both pagan and
Christian.
He was first manifested as the Welsh
ithyphallic demigod Peredur
Paladrhir,whose name meant "Spearman with a Long Shaft,"
carrying the same sexual implication as Osiris's title, "Mummy with a
Long Member." His later name, Perceval, also meant a phallus,
'

literally "He Who Pierces (or penetrates) the Valley."

2

The original myth of Peredur was an allegory of druidic initiation.

His adventures were staged as secret examinations, and he had to take

an oath not to speak a single word to any Christian a detail that surely
indicates pagan Mysteries. Peredur passed 21 days in the castle of the

witches of Caer Loyw to women's "great

receive his instruction. In the
court" he saw the Cauldron of Regeneration performing resurrec-
tions of the Sons of the King of Suffering, near a sacred cave with a

phallic pillar at its entrance. A man was killed each day. The women
anointed the corpse and bathed it in the magic cauldron, and the man's
life was restored. Two sisters resembling the Gospels' Mary and
Martha gave Peredur bread and wine to serve the banquet table. This
scene was not a copy of the Christian Last Supper; it came from older
sources. It presaged primitive rites of the death and rebirth of the

vegetation god, for whom the women wailed and in whose absence
the earth became a Waste Land.'
Peredur's chief instructress was his lady-love, "the most beautiful
damsel in the world," whose colors were those of the Triple Goddess
in India: virgin white, maternal red, and the black of death. These
remained the colors of the Maiden many romances and fairy tales,
in

such as "Snow White." (See Gunas.) The colors alone put Peredur
into a "trance of meditation" on his mysterious Shakti, for that was
what she was. On saying farewell, she told him: "When thou seekest for
me, seek in the direction of India." 4
Similar instruction at the hands of a Shakti figured in the 12th-
Roman de Perceval century Roman de Perceval, where the Welsh hero metamorphosed
Alternate name for the into the Desired Knight sent to cure the world's ills, like a Saracen
Conte del Graal
Mahdi. It was claimed that Perceval would heal the lame Fisher King
written by Chretien de
and restore the Waste Land to fertility.
Troyes about 1185,
finished later Perceval was hidden, like most versions of the Divine Child, and

by other hands. brought up in secret by his mother. He happened to meet some

knights, assumed they were angels, and followed them to King Arthur's

784
 :ourt. Despite his appearance as a clownish rustic, a lady prophesied Perceval
i
great destiny for him. ("Ladies" were the court seeresses.) Perceval

|>f
isited the Grail castle and saw a vision of the holy vessel in the hands

Queen Repanse de Joie (Dispenser of Joy).

^^^^^
Perceval's instructress Blancheflor (White Flower) undertook to
eveal to him the secret meanings of chivalry, or the mysticism of
iove. Spiritual/sexual union with her made him invincible in battle,
German versions of the legend recounted a battle between
however,
he old pagan Perceval sustained by the power of sexual love and a new
5
Christian Perceval sustained by celibacy. Monkish authors worked

>n the unfinished Roman de Perceval from before 1200 a.d. to about
230, Christianizing the hero, who then discovered that the true
neaning of chivalry was not what his lady-love taught at all but rather
he doctrines of the church. Blancheflor fell on hard times, mythically
ipeaking. She was vilified as "a Jewess named Blanchefleure" who
6
toupled with Satan at a witches' sabbat and gave birth to Antichrist.
The new Perceval was no longer a champion of women. He even
tastrated himself in order to become one of the pure knights who
'believed in God perfectly." On one occasion he offered assistance to a
lagan noblewoman whose property had been stolen. She served him
. feast and invited him into her bed. Though sorely tempted, he caught

ight of the cross formed by his sword hilt and thrust away the
:nchantress. She vanished in a puff of black smoke. Perceval "rove
kimself through the thigh" a classic metaphor for castration

aying, "Sithen my flesh will be my master I shall punish it. ... O

good
_,ord, take this in recompensation of that which I have done against
"7
hee.
In this way the phallic hero called Piercer of the Valley became the
burest of pure knights, the only one worthy to see the Holy Grail
tecause all other knights were polluted by love affairs or marriage. In
Perceval's vision, "the old law" was represented as a woman riding a
erpent, who a priest told him was a fiend. The woman asked Perceval
b serve her, as the priest said, "to make thee believe on her and leave
py baptism." Perceval refused. He made the sign of the cross and killed
8
(he serpent.
In a Cistercian romance, Perceval met the Queen of the Waste
jand, his aunt, living in poverty in the Waste Forest, though she had
>nce been "the richest woman in the world." This indicates the

ikxldess, her temples robbed, and only her woodland groves left to

ler. Another female relative, Perceval's sister, arrived dead on Solo-

non's ship, the symbol of the church. She was nobly enshrined
>ecause she had died a pure virgin, the monks' notion of the only

icceptable kind of woman.

There were no women involved in the Quest, any more than there
vere women involved in setting policies for the church. 9 In this final
'ersion of the Grail myth, its feminine meaning had been written out of
he script, even though it was a prize sought by men. With this

785
Pen development, interest in the subject declined. Grail legends dwindled
Persephone away for lack of further inspiration. The Christianized, virginized
mm^t^^^^^^^mm Perceval seemed to lack charisma. He was a hero who pleased only th<

monks who invented him; ordinary folk found it difficult to sympa-

thize with this singularly bloodless knight.
1. Squire, 369. 2. Jung &
von Franz, 185. 3. Goodrich, 52, 64, 67; Loomis, 209-1 1.

4. Goodrich, 63-69; Loomis, 211. 5. Campbell, CM., 558.

6. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 169. 7. Malory 2, 199, 204. 8. Malory 2, 201.
9. Campbell, CM., 543, 55 1,566.

Peri

Persian fairy or genie, usually female, like western fairies but some-
times considered one of the fallen angels (djinn). A peri could also be a
familiar spirit, a mischievous elf, a heavenly nymph, a Shakti. Sufis

called a peri a pir, lady-love.

Persephone
"Destroyer," the Crone form of the Triple Goddess Demeter,
whose other personae were Kore the Virgin and Demeter-Pluto the
Mother (or Preserver). The three deities succeeded each other

cyclically like the three points of a turning triangle Demeter's symbol

the delta Kore and Persephone were often confused and
so that
came to be considered the same Goddess. The fable about Kore-
Persephone's abduction by Pluto was a later invention. She was
Queen of the Underworld long before there was a masculinized Pluto.
Orphic mystics worshipped her as Goddess of the blessed dead, to
whom they addressed formula prayers: "And now I come a suppliant t(

the Holy Persephone, that of her grace she receive me to the seats of
the Hallowed." Persephone answered, "Happy and blessed one, thou
be god instead of mortal." She held the keys to heaven and hell
shalt '

(Elysium and Tartarus), thus anticipating the Mithraic pater patrum an

his Christian counterpart Peter. 2

Persephone was considerably older than the Eleusinian myth of

classical writings,which told of her descent into the underworld and
her annual return to the earth each spring. She was really another nami
forHecate, or Hel, and had ruled the underworld as Destroying
Mother Kali ruled it under the name of Prisni, which may have been
the origin of Persephone's Etruscan name, Persipnei. Romans called
her Proserpine. It was under this name that she passed into Christian
tradition as a of She-Demons. 5 Like Kali the Destroyer, she
Queen
was the basic Death-goddess from the beginning.
1.
Legge 1,133. 2. Cavendish, P.E., 98. 3. de Givry, 141.

786
 erseus Perseus
Peter, Saint
iod-begotten, virgin-born Athenian hero supposed to have slain
ibyan Medusa and Phoenician Yamm, the sea-serpent incarnation of w^^mm^mmammm
aal. Greeks claimed he rescued and married the Phoenician queen
ndromeda ("Ruler of Men"), to establish a Hellenic
government in

hoenicia. Perseus became a god and ascended to heaven; but his

Dnstellation was said to exert evil influence.
Astrologers called it

lacodaemon (Bad Demon) because it contained the "Demon Star"

lgol, an eclipsing binary given to mysterious appearances and
1
isappearances.
[Link].228.

eter, Saint
he myth of St. Peter was the slender thread from which hung the
hole weighty structure of the Roman papacy. One solitary passage in

ieGospel of Matthew said Jesus made a pun by giving Simon son of

>nah the new name of Peter, "Rock" (Latin petra), saying he would
und his church on this rock (Matthew 16:18-19).

Unfortunately for papal credibility, the so-called Petrine passage

as a forgery. It was deliberately inserted into the scripture about the
rd century a.d. as a political ploy, to uphold the primacy of the Roman
e against rival churches in the east. Various Christian bishoprics
1

ere engaged in a power struggle in which the chief weapons were

ibery, forgery, and intrigue, with elaborate fictions and hoaxes
ritten into sacred books, and ruthless competition between rival parties
2
* the lucrative position of God's elite.

Most
early churches put forth spurious claims to foundation by
xwtles, even though the apostles themselves were no more than the
landatory "zodiacal twelve" attached to the figure of the sacred king,
arly popes were often mere names, drawn from titles of Roman
xls, such as Eleutherios or Soter, falsely inserted into an artificial

ironology to simulate succession from Peter. But even Catholic

holars now admit that the stories of Peter's upside-down crucifixion
3
rfbre Nero, and burial in the Vatican hill, were fictitious.
The real roots of Peter's legend lay in pagan Roman myths of the
ty-god called Petra, or Pater Liber, assimilated to the Mithraic pater
itwm whose title was corrupted into papa, then
(Father of Fathers),
4
Dope." This personage had been both a Rock and a Father that
,
a phallic pillar in the Vatican mundus since Etruscan times, when

racular priests called vatis gave their title to the site. Other variations

the deity's name were Patriarch (Chief Father), Pompeius, and

atricius (Patrick). 5 Like Indian Brahmans, Roman "patricians"
aimed a patrilineal descent from the god. Since his name also meant a

787
Peter, Saint rock, he was what the Old Testament called "the Rock that begat
thee" (Deuteronomy 32:18).

^^^^^^^^^^^ The god's stone phallus remained planted in the Vatican mount
through the later centuries of the Roman empire and well into the
Middle Ages perhaps even into the 19th century, when a visitor said
Vatican authorities "kept in secret a large stone emblem of the
6
creative power, of a very peculiar shape." Medieval names for such an
object perron, pyr, pierre show that it was both a "rock" and a
"peter." Such was the ancient Pater's phallic scepter or pillar topped
with a pine cone, the thyrsus of Pater Liber. Church authorities often
converted a carved perron into a Christian symbol simply by placing a
7
cross on its tip.

Pater Liber's perron appeared in St. Peter's Church of the 14th

century a.d., atop the round temple called Pantheon, renamed St.
Mary Rotunda. The temple had been buried under an artificial hill
forming the court of St. Peter's, probably because it was known as a

shrine of the Goddess. Local legend said the phallic stone had been
"carried off there by the devil on the night on which the Virgin
8
brought Christ into the world."
This "devil" probably meant the Horned God Bacchus (Pater
Liber), whose phallic staff called baculus was allegedly carried by St.

Peter, though not by the popes. A strange, garbled legend explained the
loss of the baculus. Peter gave it to the earth in order to raise a saint

called Maternus from the grave. This legend evidently arose from the

cult of Bacchus, who sent his phallic staff into the underworld,
sometimes
^^^^ in the form of an inverted "Peter's cross," to fertilize the
maternal soil. Hence the oddly-named Maternus who rose like
vegetation from the ground. The bones of St. Maternus were said to lie

Peter's Cross
under the foundation of the First Church of the Martyrs in Cologne,
built by the Empress Helena in Maternus's honor, a typical confusion ol
9
chronologies.
However garbled, the legend of Peter's baculus was perpetuated
by Germanic emperors, who claimed Peter's staff had passed from
the popes to Germany, betokening Teutonic leadership of the Holy
Roman Empire. 10 Other medieval legends presented Peter in the
pagan role of a fertilizing spirit. For instance, he was said to make a
woman conceive by giving her an apple or a pine cone, symbols of
Bacchus and his bride. 11

Peter or Petra combined with other phallic "rocks," such as the

obelisk at the gate of the Egyptian after-world, sacred to Par, the title

of Ra as "Lord of the Phallus." 12

This was also called Petra. A
"prophet" of Ra incarnate in the savior Osiris was known as Petosiris;
histomb near Hermopolis was a great pilgrimage center about 341 B.C.
A Greek prayer addressed him: "I invoke Petosiris whose venerated
body here Today he is among the gods, he is now united with the
lies.

Wise." King Nechepso was possessed by his spirit, which took him on
a typical shamanic "night journey" to heaven. 13 Greco-Egyptian scrip-

788
tures written under the names of Nechepso and Petosiris were Peter, Saint
14
popular in the 2nd century b.c.
Like the obelisk, a phallic pillar stood at nearly all the
"Pearly ^^^^^^^^^^
Gates" of the Great Mother's temples, representing the Petra who
demanded the right passwords of initiates entering the temple,
and the
same death entering heaven. Petra also guarded the
initiates after

gates of the year, through which the ChristosAeon passed. Thus Peter
was identified with Janus, god of gateways, and came to be called the
15
Janitor, "Gatekeeper."
The church's festival of St. Peter used to be held on the day of
Janus, when the sun entered the sign of Aquarius, symbol of both the
gate of the year and the Pearly Gate of Maria-Aphrodite. 16 Pagan
precedents naturally assimilated St. Peter to the position of guardian
of the janua coeli, "gate of heaven," formerly a yonic emblem of the

Virgin Juno. Robert de Borron's romance of the Grail even suggest-

ed that Peter stood for the gate of Jesus's tomb: Jesus was laid under a
pierre, a peter-stone, such as marked the graves of ancient phallic
heroes. 17
As gatekeeper, Peter inherited the mystical keys based on the
trident of Shiva and the Osirian ankh, called Key of the Nile and also
a heavenly key to the Nile in the Sky (the Milky Way). Key-holding
deities generally gave or denied admittance to the land of the dead,
whether it was located in the earth or in the heavens. The Book of
Enoch described various keepers of the heavenly mansions as key-
holders: one for the winds, one for the seasons, one for the gates of hell,
18
etc. Prayers to the Goddess Persephone called her Holder of the
Keys; or, alternatively, her consort Hades was the holder of the keys to
19
heaven and hell.

On such pagan precedents rested the crucial doctrine of the papal

keys, as stated in the interpolated Gospel passage: "I [Jesus] will give
unto thee [Peter] the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever
thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever
thou shalt loose on earth
be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 16:19).
shall

That is, meant

holding the keys magic power. Whatever the key-
holder commanded would come to be. This primitive idea underlay the

powers of priests, bishops, popes, and the whole church organization.

Without the mystic keys, ecclesiastics' blessings, cursings, baptisms,

exorcisms, excommunications, prayers, or invocations were without

efficacy. As Brahman priests commanded the gods by secret mantras, so
Christian clergymen made the public believe the power of the keys
could cause God to act.
The Gospelssuggest that Peter controlled even the Savior's
passage through the holy gate. There is a ring of ritual about the story
that Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crew (Matthew

26:34), as though some material of the ancient sacred drama were

clumsily re-interpreted. The resurrected god couldn't enter into his
kingdom until dawn. The angel of annunciation appeared as a cock,

789
 Peter, Saint "to announce the coming of the Sun," as Pausanias said. 20 At cockcrow
the Savior arose as Light of the World to disperse the demons of

night. But if he tried to enter into his kingdom earlier, disrupting the

cycles of night and day, the Gatekeeper would deny him. The
ritualistic denial took place also in the fertility cults of Canaan, where
Pausanias Greek the dying god Mot was denied by a priest representing the Heavenly
traveler and geographer 21
Father.
of the 2nd century
a.d. Living in a time of This story made difficulties for Christian theologians, when the
declining culture, he pagans inquired why Jesus should found his church on a disciple who
was inspired by a desire denied him instead of a more loyal one. The conventional answer was
to describe the that it demonstrated Christ's power of forgiveness. But during the
ancient sacred sites for
later persecutions, denial of Christ came to be considered the one
posterity.
absolutely unforgivable crime.
The cock was another totemic "peter" sometimes viewed as the
god's alter ego. Vatican authorities preserved a bronze image of a
cock with an oversize penis on a man's body, the pedestal inscribed
"The Savior of the World." 22
The cock was also a solar symbol. Sun
worship was evident in Christian literature, especially the "Gnostic
Gospel" of John. Mithraic solar symbolism entered into many papal
customs. St. Peter's Chair, the papal throne, was decorated like the
throne of Mithra with zodiacal signs and the twelve labors of the sun
23
god.
Another curious survival of the bird form of "Peter" was the water-
walking sea petrel, whose name meant "little peter." Petrels belonged
to the legendary sea witch, Mother Carey, a corruption of Mater Cara,

the Latin Goddess Car or Ceres, "Mistress of Earth and Sea."

English sailors called the petrels Mother Carey's chickens, chicken
24
being a diminutive of "cock," just as petrel was of "peter." Like St.
Peter, the petrels were "fishermen" who walked on water. Some said
however were pagan souls who didn't reach hell before the
that they

were 25
gates closed, and had to fly into "holes in the earth."
The incident of Peter's water-walking (Matthew 14:29) was drawn
from centuries of Oriental myth. Five hundred years before Chris-
tians attributed this feat to Jesus and Peter, Buddhists were saying a sage
26
proficient inyoga could walk on water. Later medieval writers
attributed the same miracle to various saints noted for asceticism. St.

Maurus forexample lived an especially pure life, and found himself

able to walk on water after he was blessed by St. Benedict. 27
Other miracles attributedto Peter probably v/ere intended to

prove that he truly possessed the power of the keys. Like Christ, he
could make the lame walk (Acts 3:7), and he could kill with a word,
his first victims being Ananias and
Sapphira (Acts 5:5, 10). None of
Peter's legends however suggest that he was a real person. Scriptures

concerning him were written (or forged) long after the epistles of
Paul. 28
It is now certain that there was no St. Peter in Rome to "found the
29
papacy." Stories about Peter were invented after the Roman see

790
vas well established. During the first five centuries of the Christian era, Peter, Saint
10 one thought the bishop of Rome had a right to govern other
>ishops; there was no such doctrine as the primacy of the Roman see.
'Christ neither founded nor desired the Church." 30 Indeed, the

esus of the Gospels would have had no reason to found a church, since
lis principal message was that the world was going to end almost at

jince.
Whatever his origin, St. Peter stood for
patriarchal opposition to
e female principle, as shown by the Gnostic Gospels later censored
ut of the canon. The Dialogue of the Savior made the holy harlot
4ary Magdalene the superior of all apostles; the Gospel of Mary said Gospel of Mary
Christ loved her best, and gave her a secret revelation that Peter tried to One of the early
orce out of her. In the Pistis Sophia, "Peter makes Gnostic Gospels,
Mary remarked,
am once included with the
tie hesitate; I afraid of him because he hates the female race." 31
books of the New
Medieval legends also suggested Petrine anti-feminism. It was said
Testament but later
>eter had a daughter, Petronilla (Little She-Peter), who was too eliminated from the
he prayed God to strike her with a fatal
eautiful in Peter's opinion, so canon. A copy was

lness, God complied. The Golden Legen d suggested that Peter

and rediscovered in the

srtured women to exorcise them, as he caused them to vomit up the

1940s at Nag Hammadi.
32
possessed them, along with "much blood."
evils that

Legends aside, the real political power of the popes depended on

opular acceptance of the doctrine of Peter's keys. Like a Brahman
igh priest, the pope assumed absolute control of God, who would grant
is vicar's slightest request. Thus invested with divine power on
arth, the pope became a figure comparable to the ancient god-kings,

/orshipped with similar subservience and inclined toward a similar

33
rrogance.
Pope Innocent III set papal policy with a proclamation that "the
ord left to Peter the governance not of the church only, but of the
/hole world." 34 Innocent was not content with the title "Vicar of
hrist" but had it
changed to "Vicar of God." 35 The bull Unam
hnctam of Pope Boniface VIII stated that every human creature on
arth must be "subjected to the Roman pontiff." 36 In his jubilee year,

loniface represented himself as the emperor of all Europe. He dressed

lis cardinals as Roman priests, and himself in imperial armor,
37
reclaiming, "I am the emperor; I am the Augustus."

Boniface came to power by tricking his simple-minded, 80-year-

ldpredecessor Celestine into abdicating the throne. Boniface had
^destine imprisoned in the fortress of Fumone, and had him mur-

ered, rumor said, by driving a nail into his head. Boniface's enemies
herished as a holy relic Celestine's alleged skull, with a hole in it.
loniface had many enemies because he used papal power to seize
inds and towns of the wealthy Colonna family, to give them to his own
imily, the Gaetani. Encountering resistance from the Colonnas,
loniface preached crusades against them and plunged Italy into a

loody civil war. He beseiged the Colonna city of Palestrina and

ffered to return half the enemy's possessions if the city were given up;

791
^
Phaedra

^^m
w
but he broke his promise.
razed, its
Once it

plowed and sown with salt. One of the Colonnas survived and
eventually assassinated Boniface.
58

A similarly avaricious heir of St.

was
and treasure-houses sacked, its ground
palaces, libraries,

pope Clement VII, nicknamed "the Butcher" because of his fond-

ness for massacre.
in his hands, he had Palestrina

Peter was the highly inclement

He promised the mutinous people of Bologna that hi

would "wash his hands and feet in their blood." 39 At Cesena in 1376
he offered mercy to the city, then killed five thousand of its citizens.
There were uprisings against him. Mobs hounded him out of Rome
and Naples, crying, "Death to the Antichrist! Death to Clement and hi

cardinals!" 40
Over all, the heirs of St. Peter have tended to follow the general

pattern of dictators, some less If they had any

benevolent than others.
quality incommon, it was
acquisitiveness. This appeared so consistently
that the Renaissance popes made it a heresy to say Jesus and Peter

were poor men. Visiting Rome in 1511, Martin Luther was so shocked
by the decadent luxury of the papal court that he wrote: "If there is a
hell, then Rome is built upon it. Tiberius, the heathen Emperor,
. . .

even if he were such a monster as Suetonius writes of, is nevertheless

an angel comparison with the present court of Rome. The same hat!
in
41
to serve the supper table twelve naked girls." It was rather a contrast

with the popular image of twelve apostles.

[Link],240. 2. H. Smith, 252. 3. Attwater, 274. 4. H. Smith, 252.
5. Knight, S.L., 47. 6. G.R. Scott, 254. 7. d'Alviella, 103, 109. 8. Kendall, 97.
9. Guerber, L.R., 67. 10. Borchardt, 68. 11. Groome, 65-66.
12. Robertson, 193; Budge, G.E. 2, 19. 13. Lindsay, O.A., 185. 14. Angus, 167.
1 Dumezil, 328. 16. Robertson, 1 37. 17. Jung
5. &
von Franz, 304.
18. Forgotten Books, 96. 19. Cavendish, P.E., 98, 1 19; Vermaseren, 80.
20. Knight, S.L., 70. 21. Larousse, 76. 22. G.R. Scott, 262-63.
23. Robertson, 137. 24. Potter& Sargent, 71, 1 17. 25. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 112.
26. Bardo Thodol, 158; Tatz & Kent, 167. 27. de Voragine, 198.
28. Enslin, L.C.M., 233-38; H. Smith, 179-80. 29. Reinach, 240.
30. Guignebert, 125, 226. 31. Pagels, 22, 64-65. 32. de Voragine, 301, 252.
33. Campbell, CM., 390. 34. H. Smith, 256. 35. Guignebert, 323.
36. Lea unabridged, 662. 37. J.H. Smith, C.G., 320.
38. Chamberlin, B.P., 93, 102-5. 39. Lea, 255.
40. Tuchman, 322, 333. 41. Chamberlin, B.P., 246.

Phaedra
Daughter of the Cretan Moon-queen Pasiphae, who gave birth to

the Minotaur. Phaedra married Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. She
accompanied Theseus back to Greece and became his wife, and
simultaneously the stepmother of Hippolytus, a victim slain by horses al

the instigation of the magic Bull from the Sea the Minotaur.
This tangled tale centering around Phaedra points to importation
of the Cretan sacred-bull cult into Greece, where it merged with the
|

local horse cult. Hippolytus was the victim dragged to death by horses j

after coupling with the queen (Phaedra). Apparently Hippolytus died

as a surrogate for Theseus who, as the slayer of the bull-king in the

792
labyrinth, would normally have been the next victim. The classic Phaethon
nyth states that Theseus brought about the death of his son Phallus
Hippolytus Worship
y laying a curse on him and praying to the sea god to implement it. 1

^^^^^^^^^^
Some say Hippolytus was apotheosized and now appears in heaven
s Auriga, the Charioteer.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,357.

haethon
Classic Greek figure of the solar Lucifer, a son of the sun. Phaethon
ommitted the crime of hubris, offended his jealous Father, and was cast
own from heaven like a lightning bolt.

Phaethon tricked Helios-Apollo into allowing him to

his father

the sky, playing the role of the great God

rive the solar chariot across

imself. But Phaethon lacked his father's skill. He lost control of the

orses and nearly set the world

afire with his reckless
driving. His
ither threw him down into the sea just in time to save the earth from
1
eing ignited by the fiery sun-chariot.
Phaethon's myth didn't originate in Greece. It was an old tale from
Lhodes, the Island of the Sun, where white horses and a burning
hariot were annually thrown into the sea to propitiate the Hittite sun
od Tesup, whose cult had replaced that of the Moon-goddess
)anae. 2 It seems likely that in primitive times there was also a charioteer

laying the role of Phaethon and giving up his life for the sake of a
ost-mortem godhood.
I. Reinach, 90. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 157.

hallaina
)ne of the titles of the Greek "female soul," also known as Psyche,
l her devouring aspect; literally, a yoni that which devours the
hallus.
1
The same word was applied to the night-moth, as a
lysterious dark sister of the sun-loving butterfly that represented

syche's daylight aspect. Phallaina was Psyche paired with Eros,

.ccording to the classical myth, their matings could take place only in
le dark. When Psyche saw her husband in the light, their marriage
'as dissolved.
1.
Lindsay, A.W., 131.

hallus Worship
Ls Goddess-dominated made the yoni their holiest symbol,
religions
3 God-dominated religions adored the phallus. Patriarchal Semites

worship ped their own genitals, and swore binding oaths by placing a

793
Phallus Worship hand on each other's private parts, a habit still common among the
Arabs. Words like testament,
1
testify, and testimony still attesf to the

^^^^^^^^^^^m oaths sworn on the testicles. 2

Abraham's servant swore by placing his hand "under the thigh" of
hismaster (Genesis 24, 9) because "thigh" was a common euphe-
mism for "penis," used in superstitious fear of mentioning the divine
organ directly. Myths of male pseudo-birth like Zeus's fatherhood

of Dionysus made the offspring come forth from the father's

3
"thigh." But the meaning was "penis," Hindu myth that
as in the

substituted the lingam for the yoni: the god Sukra (Seed) came out of
the stomach of the GreatGod by way of his penis. 4

Another Middle-Eastern euphemism for "penis" was "knee,"

genu, so often mentioned that some people came to believe the knee
was the source of seminal fluid. A father used to establish paternal rights
to a child by setting the infant on his knee, which is
why "genuine"
(of the knee) came to mean Mesopotamia the word
"legitimate." In
birku meant both "knee" and "penis." 5 In Latin it became virtu,
"masculine spirit, virility, erect-ness."
The Bible calls Jacob's penis the sinew that shrank, lying "upon
the hollow of the thigh." Scholars have tried to interpret this limp

penis as something else: a severed tendon, or a certain thigh muscle,

which Jews were forbidden to eat (Genesis 32:32). But medieval
translators frankly recognized the phallic meaning of the "sinew." They
said the god-man's blighting touch on Jacob's shrunken member was
"to cool the fires of concupiscence." 6
Biblical patriarchs worried inordinately about the vulnerability of
the penis and avoided direct mention of it lest evil spirits be drawn to
it. Old Testament laws reveal a special fear of women's power over the
penis. God's commandment was that a woman who grabs a man's
genitals must have her hand cut off, even if she does it to defend her
husband against an enemy (Deuteronomy 25:1 1-12).
The word "fascinate" is a relic of men's belief in the magic of their
own genitals. Latin fascinum meant an erect penis (presumably
"fascinating" to the opposite sex), especially in the form of a phallic
amulet. Such amulets continued to be used through the Middle Ages
as antidotes to the evil eye. 7 In the 8th century a.d., the church forbade
men to pray to the fascinum. In the 9th century, the same prohibition
had tobe repeated and again in the 12th and 1 3 th centuries, showing
that the custom went blithely on. 8
Thephallic principle was covertly worshipped in sacred posts and
pillars,such as the Maypole and the "bride-stake" erected at wed-
dings, about which "the guests were wont to dance as about a
9
May-pole." Stubbes in 1 583 described common folk dancing and
10
hanging garlands on their Maypole, which he called a "stinking idol."
Women of ancient Rome used to hang flower wreaths on the erect
penis of the god Liber, to "have fruit of the seeds they sow," St. Augus-
tine said. 11

794
 The same sexual ceremony of encircling the phallus with a female Phallus Worship
wreath was perpetuated at Antwerp, where an ancient
ithyphallic
statue of Priapus stood before the sanctuary of St. once the Walpurga, ^^^_-^^^^^_
orgiastic Goddess of Walpurgisnacht or May Eve. Each year at the
women hung wreaths of flowers on Priapus's penis. 12
Ispring festival,
Another image of the same god was carried through the streets of
(Naples in sacred processions, displaying a penis long enough to reach
is chin. This excrescence was known as ilsanto
membro, the Holy
ember. 13
A3th-century Chronicle of Lanercost said that, at Easter, the
1

rish priestof Inverkeithing "revived the profane rites of

Priapus,
llecting young girls from the villages, and compelling them to dance
circles to Father Bacchus. When he had these females in a troop,
ut of sheer wantonness, he led the dance, carrying in front on a poje a

epresentation of the human organs of reproduction, and singing and

ancing himself like a mime." H This priest was less eccentric than one

Wiight think; the same sort of thing was happening all over Europe.
Phallus worship was Christianized in ways that hinted at
Christianity's
krue nature: a cult of the male principle.
Giant phalli were adored up to the 17th century as saints, such as

Eutropius, Foutin, Guerlichon, Gilles, Regnaud, Rene, and Gui-

knole. St. Foutin de Varailles was a phallic pillar kept red with libations

pf wine,
as the phalli of Shiva were constantly reddened in Hindu
15
temples. Ithyphallic saints in Normandy and Anjou were believed to

Impregnate women who lay with them all night. The image of St.
had a large erect penis from which women scraped splinters as
puignole
conception charms. So much scraping went on that the saint might

pave
had his holy member whittled away entirely. But the priests, with
commendable foresight,made his phallus of a wooden rod that
passed
all the
way through the statue to the back, where it was hidden by
a screen, and could be periodically thrust forward
by a tap of a mallet
as it diminished in front. 16
Christ assumed the role of a phallic god in providing the most

popular of conception charms: the Holy Prepuce or more accurate-

y, Prepuces, for there were hundreds of them in Renaissance churches.
17
examples still survive. All had the power to make
\t least thirteen

vomen conceive. The most celebrated of the virile foreskins, housed at

he Abbey Church in Chartres, was credited with thousands of

niraculous pregnancies. 18 St. Catherine of Siena went so far as to claim
hat Jesus used his holy foreskin as her wedding ring. She was bound
o Jesus as his bride, "not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy
lesh, for when he was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his
19
loly body."
Phallic saints were special patrons of virility, much entreated by
nen with sexual problems. Sir William Hamilton described the cult
)f two phallic saints, Cosmo and Damiano, at Isernia in 1781: "Ex-voti
)f wax, representing the male parts of generation, of various dimensions

795
^Phallus Worship

^_
... are publicly offered for sale.

holy oil as a virility

The Vow is never presented with-

charm:
. . .

out being accompanied by a piece of money, and is always kissed by th

devotee at the moment of presentation." The priests sold St. Cosmo's

The oil of St. Cosmo is in high repute for its invigorating quality, when
the loins,and parts adjacent, are anointed with it. No less than 1400 Has!
of that oil were either expended at the Altar in unctions, or charitably
distributed during the Fete in the year 1 780; and as it is usual for
everyone, who either makes use of the Oil at the Altar, or carries off a Us
ofit, to leave an alms for St. Cosmo, the ceremony of the Oil becomes
likewise a very lucrative one for the Canons of the Church. 20

A hint of the broad extent of phallic Christianity in England

appeared after World War II when Professor Geoffrey Webb, of the

Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, investigated a bomb-

damaged altar of an old church and found a large stone phallus within
Further researches showed that the altars of approximately 90% of
21
English churches built before 1 348 had hidden stone phalli. By paga:
tradition, ansymbolized the female body
altar which is
why witches
were said to use a naked woman for their altar and the phallus within
it
obviously represented the Hidden God.
Sexual symbolism kept cropping up to embarrass scholars of

religion, like Georges Dumezil, who called "indiscreet" the Roman

belief that the sacred Palladium in the temple of Vesta was the scepter
of Priam "in the likeness of a male sex organ." Yet Dumezil himself
wrote, "Some day it will be necessary to restore to the history of
religions the idea of the symbol which is today so underrated and yet
of such capital importance." 22
An understanding of phallus worship is important for comprehen-
sion of religious psychology, especially the fundamental insecurity of
male self-worship: for the phallic God was useless without the Goddess
Dr. Lederer says:

During the aeons offeminine dominance, women were well content in

the possession of their own particular magic, and did not envy men
their little tool that was so easily borrowed when it was needed. Indeed,
the Great Mother was never short ofa phallus . . . the phallus was at
her service. It was kept in evidence in the sanctuary of the Goddess, and
was not the phallus ofany particular God or mortal, was not a man or a
God with a phallus, but it was simply a phallus per se, a depersonalized
instrument ofready and convenient use. Once used, it was no longer
useful. For the Great Mother, as for certain of her descendants today,
penises are expendable: one can always get more, and the new ones are
probably better. The new ones, of course, are younger; and the fear of
being spent, and doomed to replacement by a younger man both in .

the sexual and in the general service of the Goddess may on occasion b
a source of deep anxiety for the 2*
middle-aged male.

Phallic anxiety was evident in all patriarchal systems, where fear

796
of the devouring vulva led to both ascetic avoidance and persecution of Phallus Worship
women. Phallic anxiety was the keynote of the one solitary joke in the
Malleus MaleHcarum (Hammer for Witches), the Inquisition's official i^^^^^^^^^
handbook. The monkish authors took the joke seriously, though it
was given them by some sly peasant whose purpose was mockery. The
story was that a witch stole a man's penis, but he caught her and
forced her to reveal its whereabouts. She told him to climb a tall tree
and look in a nest, with penises. He chose
which proved to be filled

the biggest one, but the witch said he couldn't have that one; it

belonged to the parish priest.

The pious authors swallowed all this with great solemnity, and
wrote: "What is to be thought of those witches who in this way
sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or
thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them
up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat

oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common
24
report?" Even more to the point, what is to be thought of those

churchmen who believed it?

Phallus worship often slid over the ill-defined line into homosex-

uality,which was inevitable among men taught to adore the phallic

principle in each other. Sometimes a homosexual kind of adoration was
extended toward the superior male, or toward God. Among gypsy
men, the expression of ritual self-abasement was hav co kar, "I eat thy
penis." It that "If one should, for example, petition
was explained
God in wish to be granted, he would precede his request by
prayer for a
"
saying, 'O God, I eat thy penis.' As with other eaten gods however,
"the question whether it might be the last remnant of a very ancient

practice of cannibalism must be considered." 25

Phallus worship is still evident in the symbols and sayings of the
modern world, though its meaning is less like impregnation and more
like death. Guns, cannon, missiles and other weapons are the phallic

symbols. In underworld slang, "to get a hard-on" means to pull a

26
gun. "Hits" and "scores" describe both attacks and sexual encounters.
Dominant men are "big shots" or "big guns." The ancient image of
the fructifying Lord of Life is unhappily transformed into a Lord of
Death when male power is identified with the power to destroy. In its

worship of the masculine principle of aggression, the modern world

sorely misses the central idea of ancient Goddess worship: that true

power is the power to preserve.

1. Edwardes, 65-66. 2. Brasch, 152; Potter &
Sargent, 298. 3. Graves, 2, 56. CM.
4. O'Flaherty, 297. Gaster, 789. 6. de Voragine, 583. 7. Robbins, 193.
5.

8. Knight, D.W.P., 129. 9. Hazlitt, 76. 10. Frazer, G.B., 142. 1 1. Scot, 219.
12. Knight, D.W.P., 145. 13. G.R. Scott, 250-52.
14. Phillips, 169; Knight, D.W.P, 131. 15. Knight, D.W.P., 141. 16. G.R. Scott, 247.
17. Budge, AT., 26. 1 8. Goldberg, 67. 19. Tuchman, 324.
20. G.R. Scott, 253. 21. M. Harrison, 210. 22. Dume/.il, 26, 323.
23. Lederer, 214-15. 24. Kramer & Sprenger, 1 21 . 25. Trigg, 206.
26. Farb.W.R, 123.

797
Phanes Phanes
Phrixus
Orphic double-sexed deity, firstborn of the World Egg. He-she
helped the Triple Goddess arrange the universe. Phanes was also
known as Eros, Ericipaius, or Phaethon Protogenus (Shining First-

born).
1
Phanes means "Revealer."
1. Graves, G.M.I, 30; 2, 404.

Philosopher's Stone
See Alchemy.

Phoebe
"Bright Moon," title of Themis the oracular Goddess of Delphi, and
her emanation Ar-temis. The title was taken over by Phoebus Apollo,
which gave him the self-contradictory name of "Lunar Sun." 1

Nevertheless, his priests insisted on this title. Sometimes he was called

simply Phoebus, indicating a moon god rather than a sun god.

1. Graves, G.M. 1,178.

Phoenix
Egyptians identified the Phoenician god Phoenix with their bennu
bird, a spirit of the benben or phallic obelisk. He rose to heaven in the
form of the Morning Star, like Lucifer, after his fire-immolation of
death and rebirth. In Phoenicia as in Egypt he embodied the sacred
1

king cremated and reborn. Symbolic burning of the king continued

up to the present century in Upper Egypt, on the first day of each solar
2
year by Coptic reckoning. The king's soul released above the pyre
assumed bird form, as ancient pharaohs at their cremation took the forr
of the Horus-hawk. See Birds.
1.
Budge, G.E. 2,97. 2. Frazer.G.B., 332-33.

Phrixus
Boeotian prototype of Isaac, a son almost slain as an offering to God
by his pious father, when a magic ram appeared to take his place. The
ram carried Phrixus out of danger, then gave up its life and its
Golden Fleece, which became a sacred fetish. The myth "records the
annual mountain of the king, or of the king's surrogate
sacrifice first

a boy dressed in a ram's fleece, and later a ram." Thus Aries-the-Ram 1

(Egyptian Amen) became the god of New Year sacrifices. See Ram.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,229.

798
 P'g Pig
See Boar. Pillar

Pillar

The obelisk, Maypole, pillar, sacred tree trunk, upright cross, and
other male divinity-symbols probably originated in India where Shiva's

lingam (penis) was worshipped as a sacred pillar. Shiva's title Sthanu,

"the Pillar," revealed him as a personified phallus. Some of his 1

holy
pillars are still popular pilgrimage centers. Land within a radius of

100 cubits from such a pillar became known as the of Shiva,

Kingdom
where many miracles occur, including instant remission of sins. 2
Seasonal festivals still feature a Maypole representing Shiva's "Great
3
Lingam."
Phallic pillars appear also in northern Asia and where such
Siberia,
erections are entitled Powerful Posts of the Center of the City, or
Man-Pillar of Iron. People pray to such pillars, calling them "Man" or
them blood 4
"Father," offering sacrifices.

Blood was anciently considered essential to the lingam-pillar,

which Hindus frequently painted red or smeared with blood. Archaic
Egyptian myth said two pillars, called "trees that shed blood," stood at
the entrance of the temple. The blood they shed could render
women pregnant.
5
Here may be found a remnant of the primitive idea
thatmale blood, not semen, is the fertile essence, copied from
Neolithic worship of female "moon-blood." The temple door repre-
sented the yoni, entitled Er-per, the Holy Door of the Goddess. 6
As in India, where Shiva's lingam was painted red or anointed with
blood for religious festivals, so in Egypt the pillars in front of the

temple door were "blooded" in memory of primitive sacrifices when

real men were hung on them to bleed. Jews picked
Egyptian up this

custom and blooded their doorposts for Passover with the vital fluid of
the sacrificial lamb. The doorposts represented phalli, like the pillars
in front of Solomon's temple, named Boaz and Jachin, "Strength" and
"God Makes Him Firm" (1 Kings 7:19-20).
At Hierapolis the temple of the Goddess had an enormous phallic
pillar on each side of the door. Every year, a man climbed to the top
of each pillar and remained there for seven days, symbolically recapitu-

lating ancient sacrifices when the pillars were bathed in the blood of
human victims, who were evidently left hanging for one lunar week,
perhaps in imitation of a menstrual period. When Syria was Chris-
7

tianized, the custom was continued by the "pillar saints" who, like their

pagan predecessors, thought themselves near enough to heaven for

their prayers to be distinctly heard. 8 The most famous of them was St.

Simeon Stylites, "Simeon of the Pillar," who stayed aloft until his
limbs became gangrenous and he died in a pungent odor of sanctity. 9
A church was built around a sacred pillar in Athens and named St.

799
^
Pithos

Planetary Spheres

^^m^^^
John of the Column. As pagans had previously come
illnesses to the pillar

"Let any
healed." 10
sick

Pillars in
with
come and
silk

tie a
thread, so the legendary St.
silk

conjunction with churches

thread to the
to tie their

column and be

as a spire or
John ordered

campanile ai

not often recognized as male symbols in contact with a female one,

although the shikhara or spire associated with a Hindu temple is

11
generally viewed as a phallus.
l.O'Flaherty.354. 2. Mahanirvanatantra, 335. 3. Avalon, 517. 4. Eliade, S., 263.
[Link], 17-18. 6. Budge, D.N., 144. 7. Knight, D.W.R, 84.
8. Frazer, F.O.T., 69. 9. Encyc. Brit., "Simeon." 10. Hyde, 109.
[Link] Camp, A.E., 298.

Pithos

Female-symbolic Holy Vase, used in the Eleusinian Mysteries as a

uterine receptacle for corpses, to give them a blessed rebirth. The
Goddess herself was represented by a vase or pot in the guise of
Pandora the "All-Giver." (See Pandora.) The identity of the Great
Mother with of rebirth and regeneration was an idea
this vessel

common to most ancient cultures, where the manufacture of

pots and
vases of all kinds was usually the business of women. 1

In Christian custom the pithos was transformed into the pyx or

"box" body of Christ; and Erasmus confused the
that enclosed the

two vessels in translating the patriarchal version of Pandora's myth.

1. Neumann, G.M., 132-33.

Planetary Spheres
The Chaldean astrological cosmology was generally accepted
throughout the Mediterranean world in the early Christian era. Accord
ing to this cosmology, the earth lay under a series of nested, inverted j
crystal bowls, turned independently of each other by star-angels. This
idea accounted for the independent movement of sun, moon, and
planets against the fixed stars. Each "sphere" had its tutelary deities. In

Egypt these were known as the Seven Heavenly Midwives, emana-

tions of Hathor, who guarded the seven
gates of heaven. Souls seeking
entrance must address them with hekau, words of power. The first of
them was greeted: "Lady of tremblings, surrounded by lofty walls, the
chieftainess, lady of destruction, the disposer of the words that drive
away storms and deliver from destruction him that traveleth along the
1
way."
Under the earth lay the celestial spheres' mirror image, seven
nether spheres descending into the Abyss. These divisions of the
underworld were called Seven Recesses, Seven Gates, abysses, bothroi,
2
mychoi, pylai, or chasma (pits). At the bottom lay the
antra,

800
"oundations of the earth, "the meeting of the mighty waters." Like the Planetary Spheres
.elestial underworld gates were guarded by special porters,
gates, the
he Assyro-Babylonian maskim or Anunnaki. Ziggurats were models of
^^^^_-^^^^_
ihe upper and lower planetary spheres. Ascending heavens were

epresented by the terraces of the ziggurat, known as the Stages of the

3
Seven Spheres of the World. Underneath, inside the temple, were
even corresponding "deeps" or "pits."
Initiations in the temple apparently mimicked the descent into the
inderworld pits and a journey through the heavenly stages also.
\puleius described his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis as a descent
nto the land of death, to the threshold of Isis-Nephthys, or Persepho-
le the Destroyer. He beheld the Black Sun, nether
image of the solar
;od. Then he ascended through the lower and upper worlds and saw
face to face" the deities of both. Finally he rose to the heights and was
xhibited to the congregation in the costume of the sun god. 4 The
ourney of each initiate was a theatrical performance, with priests and
riestesses wearing the costumes and masks of the appropriate spirits,

nd dramatic descents through dark caves and other specially decorated

ooms. The impressive effects may well be imagined.
Early Christians believed all souls descended from heaven to enter
leir bodies of flesh on earth, during the descent taking faults and
assionsfrom each sphere to sully their initial purity and cause tempta-
on. This was the origin of the Seven Deadly Sins. "As the souls

escend, they draw with them the torpor of Saturn, the wrathfulness of
/lars, the concupiscence of Venus, the greed for gain of Mercury,
ie lust for power of Jupiter; which things effect a confusion in the
juls, so that they can no longer make use of their own power and
5
leirproper faculties." After living the right sort of life, the soul could
j-ascend after death, shedding its sinful qualities one by one. 6
ometimes the spirits of the planetary spheres acted as inspectors after
ieEgyptian manner: "As men ascend, they find custom-houses
uarding the way with great care and obstructing the soaring souls, each
ustom-house examining for one particular sin, one for deceit,
nother for envy, another for slander, and so on in order, each passion
7
aving its own inspectors and assessors."
Gnostic mystery-cults copied the pagans, in that they taught
asswords and charms to propitiate the guardian spirits of each
)here. In the Pistis Sophia, Jesus told his followers:"Stay not your
and ye find the cleansing mysteries which will cleanse you so
until

i to make you pure light, that ye may go into the heights and inherit

ie light of my kingdom." 8 The heights meant the Empyrean, where

k)d lived in the highest heaven. Those who attained true enlighten-
lent would enter the Godhead and become God, just as Oriental
iges believed they could enter Nirvana and become one with the
9 were even
lfinite. In China, the successively higher heavens

raphically illustrated by the multiple roofs of the pagoda, one above

lother. 10

801
Pleiades The days of the week are still named after the planetary spheres.

Monday is the Day of the Moon

(dies lunae). Tuesday is Tiw's Day,

^^^^^^^^^^^ named for the Saxon god who was the counterpart of Mars; it is the Day
of Mars in Latinate languages (French mardi). Wednesday is Wo-
den's Day, dies mercurii, named for the Teutonic god considered the

equivalent of Mercury. The once-supreme Woden was ousted from

the list in the very country of his origin, Germany, and replaced by a
neutral Mittwoch, "Mid-week."
Day was named for the thunder-god who was a Germanic
Thor's
equivalent of Jove; Romans called it diesjovis. Friday was Freya's
Day (Frea-Tag), Rome's dies veneris, the day sacred to Venus-Aphro-
dite-Freya the only wholly feminine day, which may be why so

many superstitions were connected with it. The Goddess's day was
followed by Saturn's Day, then by the Day of the Sun (dies soh's),
associated with the "fiery" heaven of aether.
As the planets ruled various divisions of heaven, so also they were
believed to rule various places on earth according to their qualities.
Under the sun were "light places, the serene air, kings' palaces and
princes' courts, pulpits, theatres, thrones, and all kingly and magnifi-
cent places." Under the moon were "wildernesses, highways, groves,
woods, rocks, hills, mountains, forests, fountains, waters, rivers, seas,

seashores, ships, and granaries for corn." Under Mars were "fiery and
bloody places, furnaces, bakehouses, shambles, places of execution,
and places where there have been great battles fought and slaughters
made." Under Mercury were "shops, schools, warehouses, ex-
changes for merchants." Under Jupiter were "all privileged places,

consistories of noblemen, tribunals, chairs, places for exercise,

schools, and all beautiful and clean places, and those sprinkled with
divers odors." Under Venus were "pleasant fountains, green mead-

ows, flourishing gardens, garnished beds, stews, the sea, the seashore,
baths, dancing places, and all places belonging to women." Under
Saturn were dark, underground, religious, and
"all stinking places, and
mournful places, as church-yards, tombs, and houses not inhabited by
men; and old, tottering, obscure, dreadful houses; and solitary dens,
11
caves, and pits; also fish-ponds, standing pools, sewers."
\.BookoftheDcnd,27\-72. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 64. 3. Lethaby, 129. 4. Rose, 283.
5. Jonas, 157. 6. Lindsay, O.A., 124. 7. Lawson, 284. 8. Legge 2, 174-75.
9. Jonas, 1 53. 10. Lethaby, 50. 11. Agrippa, 149-50.

Pleiades
The convoluted symbolism of the Pleiades or Seven Sisters suggests
an extremely archaic tradition. The importance attached to this small
group of dim stars seems out of proportion to their apparent
insignificance.
The
sacrifice of the Mexican savior Xipe Totec, Our Lord the

Flayed One, took place on the Hill of the Stars at the moment when

802
the Pleiades reached the zenith on the last night of the Great Year Pleiades

cycle. It was thought if the Sisters were not propitiated by the

the universe would and the world would come
sacrifice,
1
fall to pieces to ^^^^^^^^^^^
an end.
Pre-Vedic India also attached sacrificial significance to the Pleia-
des, calledSeven Mothers of the World, or Krittikas, "razors" or
"cutters." They were also seven priestesses who "judged" men a

cognate was Greek kritikos, "judge" and sometimes "critically"

wounded them, for their razors were castrating moon-sickles. The fire

god Agni copulated with the Seven Mothers while they were men-
struating, the usual Tantric rite later outlawed by the Vedic priesthood.

They gave birth to a solar hero enveloped in a great red cloud

(female symbol) penetrated by bolts of lightning (male symbol). The
hero was sacrificially slain, wounded in the side with a spear, and
2
from hisbody sprang his reincarnation, another hero like himself. In
this myth may be discerned rites of great antiquity, predating the
discovery of fatherhood, when blood was the essence of generation.
The Pleiades were prominent in the early cult of Aphrodite, who
was supposed to have given birth to them under her name of Pleione.
Aphrodite was a castrating Crone-goddess as well as a Holy Dove; and
the Pleiades were "a flock of doves." 3 They were connected with
sacrificial New Year ceremonies in Greece as in central America and
southeastern Asia. The Seven Sisters stood at the zenith on New
Year's Eve as if to select the god of the new Aeon. Old Babylonian texts

began the year with the Pleiades. Later, the zodiacal sign of the New
Year became Aries, the Ram. 4
Egyptian texts allude to the Pleiades' archaic significance as
Krittikas, judges of men, assigning them also to seven planetary
spheres as the seven Hathors. The dead had to speak the names of these
Goddesses to pass their "critical" examinations and enter paradise:
"Hail, ye seven beings who make decrees,who support the Balance on
the night of the judgment of the Utchat, who cut off heads, who hack
necks in pieces, who take possession of hearts by violence and rend the

places where hearts are fixed, who make slaughterings in the Lake of
Fire,I know
you, and I know your names; therefore know ye me, even
as know your names." 5 The reference to tearing out hearts is
I

remarkably evocative of Aztec religious customs. The Seven Mothers

Who Make Decrees appeared also in Arabia as Seven Sages or
imams (from ima, "mother"). 6
In classical mythology the Pleiades represented the Maytime feast
of life and the November feast of death at opposite points of the year.
They were emanations of the Moon-goddess "who was worshipped at

the two solstices as the Goddess of alternatively Life-in-Death and

Death-in-Life and who early in November, when the Pleiades set, sent
the sacred king his summons to death." 7 Prayers for the dead were
recited before the Pleiades on November 1 which became All Soul's
,

8
Day.

803
Pluto Greeks said the leader of the Pleiades was the Dove-goddess
Alcyone, the "halcyon" bird who brought good weather for the
^^^^^^^^^^^ planting season. Another Pleiad was Electra, mother of Dardanus,
legendary founder of Troy, whose name is still preserved in the
Dardanelles. Another Pleiad was Merope, "Bee-eater," a title of Aphro^
dite's queen bee as devourer of the drone. Some said Merope was

one of the Furies; others said she married the doomed sun-hero
Sisyphus. Still another Pleiad was Maia "the Maker" or the "Grand-
mother," mother of Hermes the Enlightened One, as her Hindu
9
counterpart Maya mothered Buddha the Enlightened One.
Classical writers seemed anxious to disguise the real nature of the

Pleiades. One story insisted they were all

virgins. Orion the Hunter
tried to rape them, but Zeus protected them by turning them into doves
and placing them in the heavens. The story was obviously absurd, as
all the Pleiades had lovers or husbands, and three of them had mated

with Zeus himself. In earlier myths, Orion the Hunter was their

victim, not their attacker. The Huntress of the Seven Stars, Artemis,
shot him to death in the sea, suggesting that victims were sometimes
riddled with arrows then consigned to the deep. 10
Artemis personified another set of seven stars, the much larger
constellation Ursa Major, the "Great She-Bear," who may have been
another version of the Seven Sisters. Artemis and Aphrodite both were
associated with ancient cults of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, seven

mantic priestesses of Seven-Gated Thebes, where the Seven Hathors

once ruled, where sacred kings were slain every seventh year, and
where Teiresias was castrated and lived seven years as a temple woman.
The same magic seven were called Seven Midwives in Egypt and the
Orient. They were probably represented in pre-patriarchal Jerusalem by
the holy Menorah (seven-branched candlestick) symbolizing the
sevenfold Men-horae or Moon-priestesses, as shown by its female-

genital decorations, lilies and almonds (Exodus 25:33).

Medieval superstitions betrayed fear of groups of seven females,
perhaps a relic of ancient images of the Sisters. East Frieslanders
believed that in any family of seven sisters, one of the seven was sure to

be a vampire or a werewolf. 11 The sevenfold grouping could also be

arranged in a vertical line of descent, e.g. in the ubiquitous belief that a
seventh daughter of a seventh daughter was always a witch.
I. Tannahill, 82. 2. O'Flaherty, 346, 187, 110-15.
3. Graves, G.M. 1, 71; 2, 405; W.G., 194. 4. Lindsay, O.A., 56. 5. Budge, E.M., 165.
6. Briffault 1, 377. 7. Graves, W.G., 194. 8.
Jobes, 336.
9. Graves, G.M. 1, 165; 2, 259, 400. 10. Graves, G.M. 1, 151-52.
I I. Baring-Gould, W., 113.

Pluto

"Riches," underworld consort of Persephone in classical myth. An

was not male but female, a daughter of the Cretan earth-
earlier Pluto

mother Rhea, one of the Titans or elder deities.

1
She was apparently

804
the second person of the original Demeter trinity also called Rhea Poimandres
comprising Kore the Virgin, Pluto the Mother, Persephone the Pomegranate
Destroyer. "Riches" typically meant the Mother figure whose breasts
^^^^^^^^^
poured forth abundance. Later, Pluto was masculinized, and in
Christian times "he" became synonymous with the devil.

[Link].G.M.2,25.

Poimandres
'Shepherd of Men," a title of Hermes Trismegistus as psychopomp
jrConductor of Souls. According to the Hermetic scriptures called
Poimandres, the enlightened soul under the benevolent direction of
Hermes could ascend to heaven by giving up its sins to each of the
olanetary spheres in turn,becoming one with the Heavenly Powers,
hen entering the essential being of God. "This is the good end of those
vho have attained gnosis: to become God." See Antinomianism.'

A medieval prophet named Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio

issimilated himself to Poimandres who seems to have been, in this
:ontext, a reincarnation He arrived in Rome one Palm
of Jesus.

Sunday, riding a white ass a procession. He wore a crown

and leading
f thorns, topped by a crescent
bearing the legend: "This is my son
'imander, [sic] whom I have chosen Thus speaks the Lord God
nd the Father of every talisman in the world, Jesus of Nazareth." This
iermetic hero marched to the Vatican to lay his magic tools on the

ltar, declaring that he had come down from heaven with power to

idge the quick and the dead. He wandered about Italy for years,
reaching and working magic. He was suspected of heresy but as he was
ponsored by Lorenzo de' Medici and other influential patrons, the
nquisition let him alone. 2
1. Jonas, 153-54. 2. Shumaker, 111.

'ollux

,atin form of Polydeuces, twin brother of Castor. Together they

/ere the Dioscuri, born of Leda's egg along with their sister Helen of
roy. Castor and Pollux were worshipped as gods of the morning and

vening star, and attendants of the Moon-goddess, their mother.

1

ecause Pollux as a morning-star god became identified with Lucifer,

nd because he was revered by the pagans, his name gave rise to

pollution."
1. Graves, CM. 1,251.

omegranate
rnon, "pomegranate," was a biblical name of the Goddess's genital
ne (2 Kings 5:18), from rim, "to give birth." The pomegranate
1

805
Pomona with its red juice and many seeds was a prime symbol of uterine fertilit)
Pooka Therefore pomegranates were eaten by souls in the underworld, to

^^^^^^^^mm^m bring about rebirth. Hellenic mythographers said both Kore and
Eurydice were detained in the underworld because they ate pome-
granate seeds there. Nana, virgin mother of the savior Attis, conceived
him by eating either a pomegranate seed or an almond, another yonic
symbol.
The Bible says the pillars of Solomon's temple were ornamented
with the female-genital symbols of lilies and pomegranates (1 Kings

7:18-20). Solomon himself impersonated the phallic god Baal-Rim-

mon, "Lord of the Pomegranate," when he was united with his divine
bride, the mysterious Shulamite, and drank the juice of her pomegran-
ate (Song of Solomon 8:2).

Argive Hera was worshipped as Our Lady With the Pomegranate

atCapaccio Vecchio near Paestum, formerly a Sybarite colony called
Poseidonia. In ancient times the people laid at the Goddess's feet

offerings of little boats filled with flowers, as she sat enthroned with her
child on one arm, a pomegranate in her other hand, inviting contemph
tion of the miracle of her bringing forth life. About the 12th
century
a.d. the new shrine, to which pilgrimages
people of Paestum built her a
are made There sits Our Lady With the Pomegranate still,
to this day.

enthroned with her child on one arm, a pomegranate in her other

hand. 2 The people lay at her feet offerings of little boats filled with
flowers.

Hera was Mother Earth, and the suit of pentacles in the Tarot
pack represented the earth element. Therefore it is not surprising to
find this suit transformed in some medieval packs into a Suit of

Pomegranates, the fruit always opened in an oval orifice to show its

moist red interior. 5

1. Graves, W.G., 410. 2. J. H. Smith, D.C.P., 244. 3. Cavendish, T., 155, 170.

Pomona
Roman Apple-Mother, Goddess of fruit trees; a title of Hera or Eve
as dispenser of the apples of eternal life. Every Roman banquet ended
with apples, as an invocation of Pomona's good will. See Apple.

Pooka
Irish versionof Puck, from Old English puca, a fairy; also related to
"spook," a ghost or demon, as the old gods of the fairy-religion were
called. 1 Ireland had several Puckstowns, a Puck Fair, and a Pooka's
Ford. 2 See Bogey.
1. Potter & Sargent, 295. 2. Pepper & Wilcock, 279-80.

806
 'oseidon Poseidon
Possession
Greek god corresponding to Roman Neptune. He was "greedy of
sea

earthlykingdoms" that is, his priests were and so his myths tell how "^^^^^^^""
he took territories from various forms of the Goddess. He pretended
tomarry the Triple Goddess herself, under her name of Amphitrite,
and demoted her to a mere sea nymph. He tried to take Argolis from
Hera, and Athens from Athene. He claimed to have invented the horse
bridle, He demanded that
though Athene had already done it.

women be deprived of their vote in Athens, and forbade men to

continue taking the surnames of their mothers as they had
formerly
done. He even claimed husbandship of the venerable Mare-Demeter
1

on the ground that he had once raped her in the form of a stallion.

Yet Poseidon was an upstart god, transparently subject to the

Goddess in his earlier myths. "He had,
properly speaking, no name
of his own, but was simply known as 'the spouse of Earth.' He
only
became god when his
a great original nature, and also the origin of
2
his name, were forgotten."
When Poseidon sent a flood on the Xanthian plain, the Xanthian
women beat him off and saved their country by hoisting their skirts
and marching on him with their genitals exposed. The doughty sea god
beat a hasty retreat. 3
1. Graves, CM. 1, 59-60. 2. Guthrie, 98. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 254.

Possession
The idea that a human body may be possessed by a supernatural
personality, in addition to its own natural one, occurs in every
religion.
Christians believed in several kinds of possession, both divine and
demonic. The Catholic church retains the office of exorcist because it

still demonic possession real. At the same time, god-

considers

possession was the central idea of Christ's incarnation, and it is believed

that a worshipper may be possessed by the spirit of Christ, often in
the ecstatic manner of the primitive shaman. Some Christian sects
called this "getting the spirit."

Pagan mystery cults brought about god-possession by eating the

god (as did Christians also), and by initiatory rites and formulae. The
Mithraic initiate said he was "rendered immortal in this hour by the

good of God in his abounding goodness

will that I may be . . .

initiated and that the Holy Spirit may breathe within me." A Hermetic

papyrus prayed the god to enter into the worshipper, "for thou art I
and I am thou I know thee, Hermes, and thou knowest me; I am

thou, and thou art I." Possession by Hermes the Wise Serpent
would have been "diabolic" possession from the Christian point of view;
but the principle was the same everywhere.

People possessed by pagan gods sometimes created a tradition

directly inherited by Christianity. Worshippers
of Attis castrated

807
Possession themselves when fully possessed by the spirit of their castrated god.
Under the same influence "they flogged themselves until the blood

^^^^^^^^^^^ came. In Italy such processions of flagellants during Passion Week have
continued until the present day, the Madonna being the patroness of
theseRe penitenti (penitent kings)" instead of the Great Mother of the
2
Gods, who formerly governed their bloodlettings.
To be possessed meant to take the spirit into one's body, either as
the flesh of a sacrificial victim or as bread and wine representing that
flesh. For the same reason that Christ "entered into" those who ate
him, so possession by devils was thought to occur through incautious
eating. St. Gregory the Great told of a nun who became possessed by a
devil after eating a bit of lettuce. The devil complained to the
exorcist, "What wrong have I done? Here I was sitting upon this
lettuce, and she came and ate me!"' To speak a blessing over food
before eating was originally supposed to drive out whatever devils might
be lurking there.
Pope Gregory professed an ability to recognize the signs of
demonic possession under any circumstances. When a horse kicked
and plunged and refused to let him mount, he instantly realized the
horse was possessed by a demon. He even knew the possession had
been caused by two magicians, whom he arrested, blinded, and tortured
into confessions. Afterward, they were "cared for" at the church's

expense for the rest of their lives, meaning they were imprisoned for
4
life.

All primitive people think humans, animals, and inanimate objects

may serve as vessels for spirits. "The Maori term waka clearly
indicates that the inspired man carries the god in him as a canoe carries

its owner." 5 Our own

vocabulary expresses the same belief. Inspira-
tion means breathing in a spirit; enthusiasm means the god within. We

say, "What possessed you to do that?" or "I don't know what got into
me." An obsessive person may be called devil-ridden or hag-ridden.
Euripides called Dionysus the god of prophecy, because he took
possession of the body through divine madness, which "makes those
whom he maddens foretell the future."
6
We still speak of being
"possessed" by prophetic or poetic frenzy. Mediums are "possessed"
by spirits of the dead, who speak through them as demons were said to

speak through their human hosts.

Men never abandoned the notion of alien spirits within the human
mind. Not only was the god-within concept essential to the commu-
nion rite, but the devil-within concept was also essential to discrediting
other deities, whose communion rites were the same. Moreover,
diabolic possession was affirmed by the scriptures. Summers said, "We
have the authority of Christ Himself as to its reality. [N]o reader . . .

of the Scriptural narrative can deny that Christ by word and deed
showed His entire belief in possession by evil spirits. And if Christ
were divine how came He to foster and encourage a delusion?" 7
The third editionof the Encyclopaedia Britannica gave the same
official opinion under Demoniacs: "The reality of demoniacal posses-

808
 sion stands on the same evidence with the gospel system in general." A Possession
19th-century Catholic authority wrote, "To deny possession by devils
is to charge Jesus and his apostles with How can the
imposture ^^^^^_^^__
testimony of apostles, fathers of the Church, and saints who saw the
8
possessed and so declared, be denied?"
Seventeenth-century clergymen fought the "evil heart of unbe-
lief" that led people to doubt the reality of demonic possession and
the efficacy of exorcism. Priests vied with each other to see
who could
cast out the most demons. In a highly publicized case, Sister Made-
leine de la Palud of the Ursuline convent of Aix-en-Provence was found

to contain 6,666 demons including Beelzebub, Leviathan, Baalber-

Asmodeus, and Astaroth the cream of hell's celebrities. 9 Jesuits
ith, at
Vienna claimed over 12,000 demons in a single case of possession.
One Bishop Miron, suspected the possessed Martha Brossier of
skeptic,
her demon sent her into convulsions at the
when
fakery reading of
what she thought was a Latin Bible; it was actually a copy of Virgil's
Aeneid. Miron called the girl a fraud, but the Capuchin monks
10
rejected his verdict as "Godless."
Fraud was a major ingredient of incidents of possession, often
deliberately fostered by clergymen to trump up a dramatic demon-
stration of their power over the forces of evil. At
Salmesbury in 1612,
threewomen were accused of causing possession in a girl, who later
admitted that she had been coached by a Roman Catholic priest who
wanted the women prosecuted, because they had defected from his
church and turned Protestant. 11 Sir Walter Scott observed:

The Catholic church had much occasion to rally around her all the

respect that remained to her in a schismatic

and heretical kingdom; and
when her fathers and doctors announced the existence ofsuch a dreadful
disease [as possession], and of the power of the church 's prayers, relics,

and ceremonies, to cure it, it was difficult for a priest, supposing him more
tender of the interest of his order than that of the truth, to avoid such a

tempting opportunity as a supposed case ofpossession offered for display-

ing the high privilege in which his profession made him a partner, or to
abstain from conniving at the imposture, in order to obtain for his church
the credit of expelling the demon. It was hardly to be wondered at, if
the ecclesiastic was sometimes induced to aid the fraud of which such
,2
motives forbade him to be the detector.

Some cases were not consciously faked. Symptoms of possession

could be produced by such causes as hysteria, epilepsy, sexual frustra-
tions, depression, or plain boredom. Ascetics in monasteries and
convents were most prone to demonic possession, which seemed a way
to relieve the isolation, inactivity, and drabness of the cloistered life.

Nuns were often imprisoned in convents against their will, because

husbands wished to be rid of them, or because their parents could
give them no dower and so compelled them to be brides of Christ. 13
The church's word for the depression that afflicted nuns and monks
was acedia, "abysmal apathy." H
Screaming fits, blasphemies, sexual fantasies, and erotomania of

809
Possession the possessed sprang directly from hatred of convent life, as shown by j

the nun Jeanne des Anges:

^^^^^^i^^"" My mind was often filled with blasphemies, and sometimes I uttered them
without being able to take any thought to stop myself. I felt for God a
continual aversion. The demon beclouded me in such a way that I
. . .

hardly distinguished his desires from mine; he gave me moreover a

strong aversion for my religious calling, so that sometimes when he was in
'

my head I used to tear all my veils and such of my sisters

as I might lay

hands on; I trampled them underfoot, I chewed them, cursing the hour
when I took the vows. More often than not I saw quite well that I
. . .

was the prime cause of my troubles and that the demon acted only
according to the openings I gave him. As I presented myselfat
. . .

Communion, the devil took possession of my head, and after I had

received the blessed host and half moistened it the devil threw it in the
15
priest's face.

There was a time when demonic possession was almost as

contagious as the common cold. It would sweep through a cloister like

an epidemic. A 1
5th-century German convent suffered an outbreak
of possession in which the nuns took to biting one another. In a
all

French convent, they began mewing like cats. At Aix in 161 1, a man
was burned at the stake for sending an extraordinary number of demons
into the nuns; one nun alone was possessed by 6500 demons. 16
Possession served as an excuse for orgiastic goings-on at several
convents in the 1 7th century. Father confessors at Louviers from
1628 to 1642 instructed the nuns in lesbian intercourse, celebrated

communion naked, and staged obscene masses where the officiating

priest would and engage in coitus or sodomy.
attach a host to his penis,
Nuns were forced by their "demons" to frequent coupling with both

"devils" and At Auxonne, the Mother Superior was accused

prelates. of

causing possession among the nuns by teaching them to masturbate

with a dildo. At Nimeguen, possessed nuns claimed to be sexually
assaulted by black priapic creatures lurking in their beds. Even in the
late19th century, erotic hysteria infected the sisters of Mont-Saint-

Sulpice at the instigation of a "possessed" nun Cantianille, allegedly

17
violated by a priest and dedicated to the devil at the tender age of 1 5.
Maria Renata Sanger, sub-prioress of a convent at Wurzburg,
was executed for bewitching other nuns and causing them to be

seduced by demons in the form of handsome young men. 18 One

would naturally suspect that these "demons" were made of quite solid

material and entered the convent by night through some secret hole
in the wall, with a certain amount of assistance from within.
Erotomania was the major ingredient of one of the most famous
nuns of Loudun in the
cases of fraudulent possession, that of the

1630s, which ended in the legal murder of a priest, Urbain Grandier,

whose misfortune it was to have made some powerful enemies.
With the Mother Superior setting the example, claiming posses-
sion by four major demons Leviathan, Balan, Iscaron, and

810
Behemoth the nuns accused Father Grandier of Possession
causing their fren-
zies, which only grew worse with every attempt at exorcism. 19 The
his innocence though
priest maintained hideously tortured; his legs were ^_^^^^^^^^^
crushed to pulp in the boots. He refused to name any accomplices, as
the custom demanded. To build their case, his torturers said he was
really invoking the devil when he prayed aloud to God for deliver-
20
ance from his sufferings. At last a phony pact with the devil was forged
and "found" to seal his doom. It said:

My Lord and Master, I own you for my God; I promise to serve you while
I live, and from this hour I renounce all other gods and Jesus Christ and
Mary and all the Saints of Heaven and the Catholic, Apostolic, and
Roman Church, and all the goodwill thereofand the prayers which
might be made for me. I promise to adore you and do you homage at least
three times a day and to do the most evil that I can and to lead into evil

as many persons as shall be possible to me, and heartily I renounce the

Chrism, Baptism, and all the merits ofJesus Christ; and, in case I
should desire to change, I give you my body and soul, and my life as
holding it from you, having dedicated it forever without any will to
repent. Signed URBAIN GRANDIER in his blood. 2 '

After Urbain Grandier was burned at the stake, possession of the

nuns continued. It had become a tourist attraction, and the sisters were

celebrities. They learned to show off for the crowds, like Sister Claire:

She fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her

petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame,
and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the
audience averted its eyes. She cried out again and again, abusing herself
with her hands, "Come on then, foutez-moi! [fuck me]!" 22

Possession was often achieved by children and adolescents, who

knew with what would gain them the most attention. The
a sure instinct

conveniently timed hysteria of adolescent girls, followed up by adults'

at Salem, Massa-
superstitious fears, created the notorious witch-craze
chusetts; the basic idea had long been common in England. Panicked
by any sign of fits in a child, parents and neighbors immediately began a
search for the witch who was to blame." Needless to say, any child
who learned what a stir he could cause in this way was strongly
motivated to repeat it.

In 1 595 a thirteen-year-old Staffordshire boy learned to throw fits

at the sight of a woman named Alice Gooderidge, who was tortured

by having her feet burned to induce her to confess sending a demon

into the child. Upon being faced with him, Alice pleaded, "Thomas,
I
pray you forgive me and be good to me." But Thomas only fell into "a

marvelous sore fit," went man come out of the

into a trance, "saw a

chamber pot, flames of fire, and the heavens open." To Alice he said,
"Yonder comes Mother Red Cap, look how they beat her brains out,
see what it is to be a witch; see how the toads gnaw the flesh from her
bones." Alice Gooderidge was convicted of witchcraft and died in
24
2
prison.

811
^
Possession

m^^^^
Faked possession was used to condemn 80-year-old Ann Boden-
ham in 1653. A servant girl caught with stolen silverware accused
Ann Bodenham of sending a demon into her in the form of a black man
without a head. The girl went into fits in Mrs. Bodenham's presence
but was instantly relieved when the "witch" was removed from the
room. She described how Mrs. Bodenham had transformed herself
25
into a black cat to tempt her into the devil's service. Convicted and on
her way to the gallows, the old woman called for beer, and cursed all
who refused her. As was the custom, the hangman asked her forgiveness
before turning her off the ladder. She snapped, "Forgive thee? A pox
on thee, turn me off," and died in her rage. 26
At Norfolk in 1 600, a woman named Margaret Francis allegedly
bewitched a girl who exhibited the usual symptoms of possession:

Tearing her hair, and beating herself, and her head against bedsteads and
stools, sometimes foaming, sometimes dolefully shrieking and blaring
howling, and barking like a dog; and biting like a mad
like a calf; groaning,

dog. Her head, and legs were drawn awry and almost backward;
feet,

and she stared, & gaped most fearfully and gnashed her teeth and lay as 1
dead and senseless many times a day and more sometimes together,
without breath or panting, saving that her natural color remained still
and yet, sometimes suddenly she did spit in the faces of them that
fresh;
stood by or at her friends or at the name ofJesus; and sometimes she did ,

smite at her parents also . . God and good

. sometimes storming at
men, and sometimes blaspheming God, saying God is a good man I can I

do as much as he; I care not for Jesus, etc. Some things were uttered,
unknown before to the maid; and many times in a strange snappish voice;
and sometimes in the tune and voice of the witch and in her phrases
and terms. 27

Exorcism rarely relieved such symptoms, but more often exac-

erbated them, since the exorcistic ritual only increased the effect desired

by making the afflicted one all the more a center of attention. More
brought about the miracle that exorcism failed to pro-
practical cures
duce. In 1835 an epidemic of possession was well under way at a
French convent in Morzine. Professor Tissot investigated, and found
the nuns went into fits at the touch of
holy water if they knew what it
was, but secretly they could be dosed with quarts of it in wine or food,
without effect. The demons were cast out by the police, who
appeared with orders to treat the possessed as lunatics and remove them
to an asylum. Immediately, all symptoms vanished. 28

The Dutch physician Boerhaave found an epidemic of possession

in a Haarlem hospital ward, with patients going into convulsions and
imitating each other in acts of frenzy. He ordered a brazier of coals and
a cauterizing iron placed in the ward, and promised to brand the next
victim of possession. There were no more cases. A similar report from
Japan told of the miraculous cure of a possessed girl, whose father
tied her to a pillar and rushed at her with a drawn sword, crying,

812
picked spirit, if you do not forthwith leave this child I will kill you Possession
loth!" The child was instantly cured. 29
Some authorities recommended flagellation as a cure for posses- ^^^^^^^^^^^
[Link]. Bergomensi "prudent and moderate" whipping could
said a
30
|/ork
wonders. Of course it never worked in cases of illness caused
by
jemonic possession. Demons were convenient scapegoats for igno-
doctors, and many diseases were attributed to possession. Some
jant
uthorities even insisted that every illness is caused by demons. 31
imong the long lists of "signs" of demonic possession were the

flowing: inability to retain food; sensation of weight in the stomach;

ain in the lower belly, kidneys, or head; lassitude; impotence; weaken-
iig
or emaciation of the body; fiery pains in the entrails; sudden
felling of the stomach; yellowish or pale complexion; melancholia.
!)emonic possession was the proper diagnosis "if skilled physicians
re not sure what the affliction is, and cannot form an opinion about it;

r if the medications prescribed do not help but rather increase the

ickness." 32 Since the medications of the period usually did make the
ick sicker, possession must have been a frequent diagnosis.
Aside from its usefulness to physicians, the theory of possession
/as useful to the possessed themselves. It provided an outlet for
(idden rage. This psychological function seen in groups who
is still

prmally
court possession. In the zar, or demon, cult of modern
Ethiopia, Moslem wives maintain a religion of demonism conducted by
patrilineal priestesses. It's the only religion the women have, where
ven Coptic churches refuse to admit them, and the only feminist
istitution in the country. An observer reported that the zar cult is
normously popular, and most women participate despite opposition
rom their husbands, "who fear the sexual and economic emancipa-
33
ion of the wife."

Possession is induced by drumming, chanting, and rhythmic

jfiovement. A woman is "ridden"
by her demon or zar, a name
34
erhaps traceable all the way back to Osiris Zer. The possessed
/oman shrieks, babbles, blasphemes, vents her sexual frustrations and

eaps bitter abuse on her husband. She demands new clothes, gifts and
rnaments, which must be given her, as part of the cure. "The
pidemiology of possession starts a chain of events that enables them
the women] to escape from their social confinement" for a while,
35
t least.

The same forces used to operate in Christian society. Oppressed

/omen used their "demons" to tell the Heavenly Father what they
lought of him, without incurring the punishment of heretics. Demonic
ossession was the confessional of the dispossessed.
Or again, the same theory of possession was used to excuse sadistic
ehavior. As late as1895 one Michael Geary of Clonmel, Ireland,
ortured and burned his young wife Bridget on the pretext that she was
assessed by a devil. 36 With the help of several other men, he poured

813
 paraffin over her and set her afire. The men dragged her to the hearth
and made her sit on the fire, while her husband recited exorcisms. 37
In 1966, a Swiss girl named Bernadette Hasler was beaten to death

by two religious fanatics who claimed they were driving out her
demon. Churchmen's reaction to this case was interesting. Johannes
Vonderach, bishop of Chur, seemed more concerned about the
murderers' usurpation of clerical prerogatives than about the fact that
murder had been done. He announced, "Just as the Church sepa-
rates itself from superstitious belief in miracles, it
rejects a false belief in
the Devil. However, regards the Devil seriously, on the basis of
as it

Holy Writ, places

it itself doubly under the protection of the crucified
Lord." 38
This is a notable example of theological doubletalk, making one
wonder what can be the difference between "superstitious" belief in
miracles and nonsuperstitious belief in miracles; or between "false"
belief in the Devil and real belief in the Devil. What for that matter can
be the difference between a fanatic who believes in the Devil because
he reads the Bible, and a church that "regards the Devil seriously, on
the basis of Holy Writ"? In his haste to separate his church from the
two criminals, Vonderach betrayed his own ignorance of Holy Writ.
John said to Jesus, "Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy
name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us." Jesus
answered, "Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us"

(Luke 9:49-50).
In August 1976 the following item appeared in the American
press:

The voice on the tapes was that ofa woman, but it was unnaturally deep
and the words were incoherent screams mixed with furious profanities.
The tapes recorded the dying days ofa timid, 23-year-old epileptic named
Annaliese Michel, and they were part of the evidence in a manslaugh-
ter case West German authorities were preparing last week
against the
Roman Catholic Bishop ofWurzburg, Josef
Stangl, and two priests he
appointed to exorcise the Devil from the young woman. When Michel
died last month ofmalnutrition and
dehydration, she weighed only 70
pounds. One of the priests, Father Arnold Renz, maintained that six
devils including Nero, Judas, Hitler and Lucifer himself possessed
Michel and made her refuse to eat. }9

That such human tragedies can still occur in a

purportedly
enlightened age is
grim proof of the blindness that can be engendered
by "blind faith." Perhaps the definitive remark on the subject of
possession was made in 1970 by Dr.
Henry Ansgard Kelley of the
University of California: "Diabolical possession is caused by belief in
diabolical possession."'10

1.
Angus, 110. [Link],97. 3. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 71;de
Voragine 549.
186. 5. Eliade.S., 370. 6. d'
^.deVoraginc Alveilla, 165. 7. Summers, H.W.D., 203.
2 ]6 9 Cavendish P-E., 234. 10. White
?i /c
'

Z '

n
.
2, 142-43. 11. Robbins, 298.

< X^ 16
?'. ?-
w1, '*e2.>2J- 14. Mumford, 302. 15.
6- White 2. 141-43. 17. R.E.L.
-

Oesterreich, 49-50.
Masters, 107-8. 18. Summers, G.W, 506-16.
[Link],247. 20. Haining, 107.
[Link] 118-19

814
 22. Robbins, 316; R.E.L. Masters, 106. 23. Robbins, 393. 24. Ewen, 180; Robbins, 66. Potter
[Link],140. 26. Ewen, 328. 27. Ewen, 191. 28. White 2, 1 59-62.
29. Oesterreich, 107. 30. Robbins, 189. 31. Cavendish, P.E., 206. 32. Robbins, 182.
33. Ebon, D.B., 80. 34. H. Smith, 39. 35. Ebon, D.B., 83. 36. Cavendish, P.E., 206.
37. Budge, E.M., 206-7. 38. Ebon, D.B., 148, 171-77.
^^^^^^^^^
39. Newsweek, Aug. 23, 1976, 57. 40. Ebon, ST., 195.

Potter

I
The Sumero-Babylonian Goddess Aruru the Great was the original
|
who created human beings out of clay. She made man in the
Potter
li
image of a god, and infused him with the breath of heaven, which
brought him to life. Aruru was also Ishtar, Inanna, Ninhursag, and
1
1

Mami, Mama, or Mammitu; she made the first man (Adam) out of

clay (adamah, the female earth). Assyrians said she made seven clay

j
mother-wombs for females and seven clay mother-wombs for males:

"The creatress of destiny, in pairs she completed them; the forms of the
people Mami forms." 2
The biblical story of God's creation of Adam out of clay was
plagiarized from ancient texts with the patriarchs' usual sex-change of
the deity. Mesopotamian flesh-is-clay images were derived from the
primitive matriarchate, when all pottery belonged to women. "The
art of pottery is a feminine invention; the original potter was a woman.
Among all primitive peoples the ceramic art is found in the hands of
women, and only under the influence of advanced culture does it

become a man's occupation." ?

The Goddess was worshipped as a Potter in the Jewish temple,

where she received "thirty pieces of silver" as the price of a sacrificial

victim (Zechariah 11:13). She owned the Field of Blood, Aceldama,
where clay was moistened with the blood of victims so bought. Judas,
who allegedly sold Jesus for this same price, was himself another victim
of the Potter. In the Potter's Field he was either hanged (Matthew
27:5) or disemboweled (Acts 1:18), suggesting that the Potter was none
other than the Goddess who both created and destroyed.
India's Kali Ma
was the same creating-and-destroying Goddess,
with a special incarnation as Kel Mari the Pot Goddess. 4 Since she
made the first man out of clay, her people were Aryans, from arya,
"man of clay." 5 Kel Mari was related to Mari of Mesopotamia, or
Mariamne, or Miriam, or Mary, whose name was connected with the
deaths of both John the Baptist and Jesus. Her earth, which drank the
blood of sacrificed men, might have been the same Aceldama that drank
the blood of Judas.
name Maya was the same as the central American
Kali's other

whose women produced remarkable pottery. The oldest

civilization

form of Maya pottery was known as Mamom, "the Grandmother."

Von Hagen says, "Pottery was woman. All we see of the remains of
theMaya ceramic art was done by women. It is a fact that should be
stressed. In almost every place where pottery making was on an

815
 Prakriti archaic level Africa or Melanesia pottery was woman-made and its

Priapus design was woman-inspired. Throughout the area of the Amazon,

^^^^^^^_^^ pottery was a woman's task. Women were the potters, so far as we
know, in ancient Peru. Early Greek and early Egyptian pottery was
also woman-made until the introduction of the potter's wheel. ... All
the superbly beautiful patterns found on pottery (as well as weaving)
6
were conceived by women."
The biblical God couldn't give birth, so he copied the next best
creation technique and molded his first man out of clay, as the
Goddess did before him.
[Link], 121. 2. Neumann, G.M., 136. 3. Briffault 1,466-77.
4. Briffault 1, 474. 5. Potter & Sargent, 33. 6. Von Hagen, 27, 80.

Prakriti

"Nature," the Sanskrit title of Kali as the female Holy Trinity

commanding the Gunas, the white, red, and black threads of Creation,
Preservation, and Destruction. 1
Prakriti embodied past, present, and
future; earth, sea, and sky; youth, maturity, and age; and other manifes-
tations of the Triple Goddess.
[Link],3f0.

Priam
"One Who IsRedeemed," king of Homer's Troy, married to the
Moon-goddess in the person of Hecuba (Hecate). Some said
Troy's
sacred fetish, the Palladium, was Priam's scepter in the form of a
1

phallus. Others said it was a female symbol; most likely it was a dual
lingam-yoni representing the sacred marriage.
[Link],323.

Priapus
God of the phallus, a figure with enormous
genitals, born of Aphro-
diteby Adonis
either or Dionysus, the latter perhaps an
allegorical
statement that wine begets lust.
Priapus was a primitive form of Eros,
based on the wooden ithyphallic idols
worshipped in early Greece, later
translated into stone herms or temple phalli for deflowering brides.
1

See Firstborn. Some of Priapus's grotesque

images lasted through the
Middle Ages, and were even as saints (see Phallus
worshipped
Worship).
1. Graves, CM. 1,71.

816
Prisca, Saint Prisca, Saint

Mythical "virgin martyr" invented from an icon of the Mother

Goddess with her palm branch in her hand and a lion at her feet. The i^^^^^mmim^^^
Christian tale claimed that during the reign of Claudius, Prisca was
condemned to be thrown to the lions for the crime of wanting to

preserve her virginity. Her innocence exuded such powerful magic

that the beasts refused to eat her, and lay down at her feet like house

cats. Later she was beheaded. Apparently 1

human beings were better
able than lions to resist her charm.
Unfortunately for the legend's credibility, Christians weren't slain
in the reign of Claudius. On the contrary, Claudius earnestly wished
to preserve freedom of religion in his empire, and begged warring
Christian sects to "stop this destructive and obstinate mutual en-
2
mity." Claudius was, however, a devotee of Mother Cybele, who was
pictured on his coins with a lion at her feet, like the original icon of
Saint Prisca. 3
The only human who might be legitimately connected with
Prisca

early Christianity was a woman believed to have been the real author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, sometimes called Priscilla, "Little
4
Prisca." There is no evidence that she was ever martyred.
1. Brewster, 73. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Claudius I." 3. Vermaseren, 179.
4. Morris, 121.

Prometheus
Greek "Forethought," probably not the god's original name but the
nearest vocal equivalent to Sanskrit pramantha, the swastika or fire-drill
sacred to Agni, the fire god who brought fertility to Kali's water
element. Prometheus brought fire or "light" to mankind as Lucifer did,

against the will of the Olympian heavenly father. Yet Zeus himself
appeared as Zeus Prometheus at Thurii, holding a fire-drill.
1

One of the Hindu notions of creation was that all things arose from
the action of male firesticks (Agni) twirling in the female groove
2
(Ambika-Kali). The Sea Dyaks have the same image of sexual creation.
They say only one woman survived the Deluge. She made a fire-drill
and used it as a phallus. By its motion in her body, she conceived the
human race. 3 Such myths obviously date back to the time before
semen was credited with the power of conception. One of the early
theories of fatherhood was that only sexual "motion" stimulated
formation of life in the womb.
The Greeks didn't know where Prometheus came from. Diodorus
said he was Egyptian. An Orphic hymn identified him with Saturn.
Lycophron called him "the Ethiopian god Prometheus." 4 He was the
consort of Libyan Athene, who gave life to the human beings he
molded out of clay (see Potter). From Athene he learned the secrets of

817
Prometheus the civilized and passed them on to his proteges, along with the
arts,

stolen "fire from heaven" identified with lightning, or enlightenment, or

5

^^^^^^^^^_ godly knowledge that Zeus wished to keep secret from humans.
Like Lucifer, Prometheus disobeyed the heaven-father by being
more benevolent toward humanity than he was. Aeschylus's Prome-
theus Bound plainly showed more sympathy toward the disobedient one

than toward the he offended. Zeus punished Prometheus by

God
having him chained to a Caucasian mountaintop
where his liver was
daily devoured by his own totemic eagle
and nightly restored to be
devoured again. The sea nymphs wailed for Prometheus. The Daugh-
ters of Ocean cursed Zeus as an insolent despot. The other
lightning-god Hephaestus muttered seditiously,
"The mind of Zeus
knows no turning, and ever harsh the hand that newly grasps the
sway."
Prometheus himself mused, "I rescued mankind from the heavy
blow that was to cast them into Hades. Mankind I helped, but I
. . .

could not help myself." He prophesied Zeus's downfall at the hands of

ancient female powers of justice (or karma): "The Fates triform and
the unforgetting Furies." He told Io the Moon-cow, also oppressed by
Zeus, that her offspring would be the instrument of Zeus's doom.
The Prometheus myth presaged the Gnostics' sympathy for Luci-
fer, who was the same sort of hero a philanthropic anti-god unfairly
punished for giving "light" or "enlightenment" to humanity. Gnostic
icons copied early pictures of Prometheus molding the first man out
of clay while Athene stood waiting to infuse the figure with the spirit of
life. Behind her rose a tree encircled by a serpent, totemic symbol of

her wisdom. 6 The story of Eden was based on just such icons.
According another myth, Prometheus tricked Zeus into accept-
to

ing the less edible parts of sacrificial animals, such as the fat and

bones, on behalf of the gods, while human beings were allowed to

consume the meat. This was not what Zeus intended, and he swore
7
revenge on both Prometheus and his human friends. Still, he had made
his choice and had to stick to it. The biblical Yahweh made the same

choice, and so received only the fat and guts of sacrificial animals
(Leviticus 4) while the priests ate the rest. The Greek sense of humor
envisioned Zeus accepting such offal only because he was forced to,

having sworn by the Styx to keep to his choice; but the Jews simply
claimed that Yahweh preferred it.

Prometheus was made one of the Titans, the group of gigantic

earth-spirits who predated Zeus and his Olympian host, and were

generally hostile to them. The battle betweenZeus's Olympians and the

Titans, in which the latter were deprived of the status of gods and
chained under the earth, was one of the prototypes of the Judeo-
Christian "war in heaven."
1. Graves, G.M. 1, 148; d'Alviella, 48. 2. O'Flaherty, 148. 3. Gaster, 101.
4. Knight, S.L., 88. 5. Graves, G.M. 1, 144. 6. d'Alviella, 166. 7. E. Hamilton, 70.

818
 phecy Prophecy
Prostitution
tie ancients' chief standard of judgment for any holy man or woman
is his or her power to prophesy coming events. Conversely, anyone's
iritual authority was dependent on fulfillment of prophecies that
already been made. This was so important in establishing Christian-

\f
that the New Testament again and again relates events that were
jne only to some prophetic text from the Old Testament. By
fulfill

temporary notions, the coming of Jesus or any other spiritual

er was of no account unless it had been prophesied by a different
itual leader.

Prophets were sometimes carried away by the ecstatic spirit and

phesied too literally, so the prophecy could be too easily checked,
us the prophetic God seemed to tell lies. Provision was made for this

culty in the Bible not to excuse the over-zealous prophet, but to

:cuse God: "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the
ling follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord
ath not spoken" (Deuteronomy 18:22). Of course this made it

npossible to tell, at the time, whether any given prophecy was

enuine or not; and this rather defeated the whole purpose of prophecy.

'rorsa and Postverta

Two faces of the Etruscan year-goddess Anna Perenna, who looked
orward and backward in Time, therefore ruled both prophecy of the
iiture and history of the past. The Romans masculinized her as
anus.

Proserpina var. Proserpine

Roman version of Persephone, queen of the underworld. Along with
Hecate and Diana, Proserpina was frequently designated "queen of
witches" in medieval tradition. Christian Gnostics spoke of her as the

death-goddess whom every soul would meet soon after death. Christian
demonologists listed Proserpina among the dignitaries of hell, as the
"arch she-devil." She had a poetic appeal however for such as Swin-
1

burne, who said she "gathers all things mortal with cold immortal
hands"; and in her mystic garden there was "only the sleep eternal in an
eternal night." 2

1. de Givry, 141. 2. Swinburne, TTie Garden of Proserpine.

Prostitution

Like the devadasis of Hindu temples, prostitute-priestesses dispensed

the grace of theGoddess in ancient Middle-Eastern temples. They

819
 Prostitution were often known as Charites or Graces, since they dealt in the

unique combination of beauty and kindness called chads (Latin caritas)

that was later translated "charity." Actually it was like Hindu karuna,

a combination of mother-love, tenderness, comfort, mystical enlighten-

ment, and sex.

Hesiod said the sensual magic of the sacred whores or Horae
As Mother of "mellowed the behavior of men." Ishtar, the Great Whore of
1

Harlots, Ishtar was

Babylon, announced, "A prostitute compassionate am I."
2
Mary Mag-
called the Great "Not only
dalene said of her sisters in the profession, are we
Goddess HAR. Her
compassionate of ourselves, but we are compassionate of all the race of
high priestess the
Harine was mankind." 3
spiritual
ruler of "the city of Ancient harlots often commanded
high social status and were
Ishtar."
4
HAR was a revered for their learning. 6
As embodiments of the Queen of Heav-
cognate of the
en, in Palestine called Qadeshet, the Great Whore, the harlots were
Persian houri and the
honored like queens at centers of learning in Greece and Asia
Greek Hora, also the
Minor. 7 Some even became queens. The empress Theodora, wife of
origin of
"harem,"
8
which used to mean began her career as a temple harlot. St. Helena, mother of
Justinian,
a Temple of Women, Constantine, was a harlot before she became an empress-saint.
9
or a sanctuary. 5 A In an Egyptian story, a priestess of Bubastis demanded all of a
similar meaning was
man's worldly goods for one night of her love. She said, "I am a
once attached to

seraglio, from Semitic hierodule; I am no mean person."

10
Until recently Egypt still had a class

serai, a shrine of of women called ghazye, "sacred whores," who were greatly honored
in the time of the Mamelukes and
queens.
prized as brides when their period of
service was ended. 11
Temple prostitutes were revered as healers of the sick. Their very
secretions were supposed to have medical virtue. A Sufi proverb still
suggests this opinion: "There is healing in a woman's vagina."
12
Even }

their spittle could perform cures. Jesus's cure of blindness by spittle

(Mark 8:23) was copied from a matriarchal tradition. A clay tablet from
Nineveh says eye diseases can be cured by a harlot's spittle. 15 Harlots
were also sorceresses, prophets, and seers. The Hebrew word zonah
means both a prostitute and a prophetess. 14
Holy Mothers designated the promiscuous priestess-shamanesses
of Japan, also known as spirit-women.
Becoming Brides of God, they
entered the shrine to with a priest possessed by the god's spirit. 15
lie

Similar customs distinguished the Indian

devadasis, human copies of
the lascivious Heavenly Nymphs.
The profession was popular. Temples of Aphrodite at Eryx,
Corinth, Cyprus, and other were served by a thousand sacred
sites

harlots apiece. 16 When Hellenic Greeks reduced wives to the status of

servants, the hetaerae or courtesans remained legally and politically
equal to men. Roman matrons of the highest aristocracy prostituted
themselves in the temple of Juno
Sospita when a revelation was
needed. 17 Every Babylonian woman
prostituted herself in the temple
before marriage. 18 By Amorite sacred "she who was about to
law,
marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate (of the temple)." 19
Such laws were supposed to who disapproved
appease the Goddess,

820
of monogamy in the era when there was no formal marriage and Prostitution
20
children didn't know Greek myth, the Great
their fathers. In
Mother forbade the Heavenly Father Zeus to make a monogamous ^^^^^^^^^^^m
marriage, holding that only her own ancient system of group mar-

riage was honorable. 21

The Tantric word for a sacred harlot was Veshya, probable origin
of the Goddess's oldest names in Greece and Rome, Hestia or Vesta,
the Hearth-mother, served by the Vestal Virgins who were originally
22
harlot-priestesses. "Hearth" and "Earth" both arose from the altar
of the Saxon Goddess Ertha, or Heartha, the northern Hestia- Vesta. In
23
the matriarchal age, every woman's hearth-fire was her altar. The
hearth was also the omphalos, feminine hub of the universe, navel-stone
of the temple, around which the sacred harlots performed their
Dances of Time.
Dancing harlots came to be called Hours: Persian houri, Greek
horae. Egyptian temple-women also were Ladies of the Hour. Each

ruled a certain hour of the night, and protected the solar boat of Ra in
24
the underworld during his passage through her hour. The Dance of
the Hours began as a pagan ceremony of the Horae (divine "Whores")
who kept the hours of the night by dances, as Christian monks later

kept the hours of the day by prayers. The oldest authentic Hebrew folk
dance is still called hora after the circle dances of the sacred harlots.
The Horae also guarded the gates of heaven, ministered to the souls of
the blessed, and turned the heavenly spheres. 25 (See Houri.)
The Hebrew word hor means a hole, cave, or pit, common
synonyms for both a sacred prostitute and the Goddess she served,
whose yoni was represented by a hole, cave, pit, or pool of water in the
heart of the temple. 26 A similar Latin term was puteus, a well or pit,
source of the Spanish puta, "whore." Common folk the Romans buried
in puticuli, "pits," which like all graves used to stand for the womb of
27
rebirth. The common root was Vedic puta, "pure" or "holy," and the
Avestan putika, a mystical lake of the waters of birth. 28 "Lady of the
Lake" was a title of the Great Goddess throughout Eurasia. In Aramaic,
her shrines were Athra qaddisa, "the holy place," literally a "heavenly
29
harlot-place," or genital pit or lake.
"To dive into water means to delve into the mystery of Maya, to
quest after the ultimate secret of life. . . .
[T]he cosmic waters are at
once the immaculate source of all things and dreadful grave." 30 All
Asia called water a female element, the source of creation, the archeoi
Stoic philosophy. To dive into such water was a symbol of sexual
intercourse. Communing in this way with a holy whore, man could
realize the spiritual enlightenment called horasis. This word appears
in the New Testament (Acts 2:17), misleadingly translated "visions." 31
A Semitic clan, the Horites of Genesis 36, traced their descent
from the Great Goddess as "Hora." 32 The Jews had cult prostitutes
in the time of King Josiah, when they lived next to the temple and wove
hangings for the sacred grove (2 Kings 23:7). Modern translations of

821
 Prostitution the Bible call them "sodomites," but the original wording meant holy
harlots." Such holy harlots were often "brides of God," set apart to

give birth to Sons of God, i.e., prophets and sometimes sacrificial

4
victims.'

Holy whores were called "virgins" because they remained unmar-

ried (see Virgin Birth). Like medieval nuns, they took veils as a
badge of their office. Ishtar-Asherah-Mari-Anath was not only the Great
Whore but also the Great Virgin (kadesha, holy one). Her Greek
name was Athene, also described as a "virgin" (Parthenia); but Athene's
temple, the Parthenon, was served by promiscuous hierodules like all
other shrines of the Goddess. Later myths rationalized the perpetual

"virginity" of lascivious fertility-goddesses by periodic hymen-renewing

ceremonies such as sea baptism, annual bathing in sacred springs, etc.

The virginity of Great Mother Hera was annually restored by a dip in

Nauplia Ancient the spring of Canathos at Nauplia. Pausanias said the myth was based
city near Argos in the on a rite of bathing the Goddess's image. 35
Peloponnese, site of Because whores occupied a significant position in paganism, Chris-
Hera's sacred spring
Canathos.
tians vilified their profession. Churchmen didn't want to stamp out
prostitution altogether, onlyamputate its spiritual meanings. St. John
Pausanias Greek Chrysostom earned high praise from the Patriarch of Constantinople
36
traveler and geographer for robbing temple prostitutes of "the honors
paid to them." The triad
of the 2nd century of heavenly Horae were mythically virginized as three maiden saints
a.d. Living in a time of
martyred together, Agape, Chionia, and Irene (Love-feast, She of
declining culture, he 37
was inspired by a desire Chios, and Peace). Real horae were relegated to hora-houses, no
to describe the an- longer temples. The traditional red light of the whorehouse descended
cient sacred sites for from the houses of Roman venerii who displayed the
sign of an erect
38
posterity. phallus, painted blood red.
Medieval Germanic law forbade a man to build a horgr, or to call
hishouse a horgr, on pain of forfeiting every penny he owned;
because horgr meant a pagan shrine, a house of
"holy whores" where
priestesses carried on the old religion. Such place names as Horgsholt
in Iceland 39
still
identify ancient shrines.
In the year 1000 a.d. the Icelanders become
agreed to Christian in
name at least, and to be baptized; but all who wished were still
legally
permitted to celebrate the of their ancestors in private houses called
rites

horgr, for a while, until the church rescinded its promises of toler-
ance. 40 In earlier centuries, the
horgr seems to have been a mons
veneris or omphalos in a sacred 41
grove.
Sometimes the alternate word hus (house) carried the same sense
of "a place of
worship," because every matriarch once worshipped
the Goddess of her own which she could share with
hearth, more than
one hus-band. Hence the word
hussy, Lady of the House, by
Christian definition a woman. 42
promiscuous
Promiscuity was appreciated, rather than deplored, by medieval
minnesingers who worshipped the Goddess under her new name of
Minne, "Love." They objected to commercialized prostitution as a
degradation of their deity: "Love, the queen of all hearts, the free-

822
born, the one and only, put up for public sale! What a shameful
is Prostitution

tribute is this that our mastery has required of her! We cultivate Love

with embittered minds, with lies, and with deceit, and then expect from ^mammm^^^mmi^^
her joy of body and heart; but instead, she bears only pain, corrup-
4*
tion, evil fruit, and blight as her soil was sown."

Theologians however accepted commercial prostitution as "a law-

ful immorality," in St. Thomas Aquinas's self-contradictory phrase.

Aquinas said prostitution was necessary to prevent men from sodomiz-

ing each other: "Take away prostitutes from the world," he said, "and
you will fill it with sodomy." 44 Prostitution enabled man to look upon
promiscuous women as depraved, though their equally promiscuous
clients were seen as helpless victims of compulsion. There was no

recognition of the truth, that most prostitutes acted under a more

telling compulsion than any man's sexuality: the need to earn where-
withal to keep alive. It was not an easy living. At best the prostitute
was forced to make herself a stranger's abject servant. At worst, she
could become his tormented victim. 45
Certain anticlerical writers maintained that prostitutes should be

respected for their willingness to be kind. Lorenzo Valla's 1 5th-

century De Voluptate called for a return to ancient customs, echoing

Horace's Omnia voluptas bona est Valla wrote: "Whores and

prostitutes deserve more from the human race than do nuns with their
46
chastity and virginity!" Of course, such sentiments did not prevail.
Two centuries later, English apprentices celebrated each Shrove Tues-
day by whorehouses and beating the inmates. It also
breaking into
became customary in England for men to "punish" the whores they
patronized by hamstringing: cutting the sinews of the legs to make
the woman a permanent cripple. 47 One might be reminded of the
Chinese custom of crippling courtesans by footbinding.
God punished the whores in hell even more severely than men
punished them on earth, according to God's spokesmen, whose
48
asceticism engendered sexual fantasies of astonishing violence. Monk-
ish deprivations and repressions led to secret envy and fierce hatred of
the carnal folk who might be suspected of enjoying sexual activity. 49
The hatred poured out in a thousand nasty fantasies of hell. Abbe
Francois Arnoux, canon of Riez in 1622, provides an example:

And the light women, these shall have in their arms a dragon most cruel,
flaming with Are . . . who shall bind and enchain their feet and their
legs with his serpent tail and shall clasp their whole body with his cruel

talons, who shall put his beslabbered and reeking mouth upon theirs,

breathing therein flames ofAre and sulphur and poison and venom, who
with his nose, glandered and hideous, shall breathe into theirs a breath
most stinking and venomous this dragon shall make them suffer a
. . .

thousand agonies, a thousand colics and bitter twistings of the belly, and
all the damned shall howl, and the devils with them, "See the wanton! see
the strumpet! Let her be tortured indeed! To it, to it, ye devils! To it,
ye demons! To it, ye hellish furies! See the harlot! See the trull! Hurl ye
" so
upon this whore and wreak upon her all the torments ye can!

823
 Prostitution On the wall of the women's section of the Church of St. John
the Baptist in Kastoria, a painting showed God's punishment of a
whore. Bound in hell, the woman had her legs stretched apart by two
demons, while a third demon plunged red-hot irons into her vagina.
Next to the woman punished for being sexually available, another
Kastoria The ancient woman labeled the Vain Coquette was similarly punished for nor being
Celetrum, a town
sexually available.
51
Women attending this church might well be
and nome in Greek
excused for thinking they were damned if they did and damned if they
Macedonia.
didn't.

Churchmen did not distinguish between a professional prosti-

tute and a woman in love The whole
with a lover. Both were "whores."

point of patriarchal morality was that women must not have the right
to pick and choose men. For a woman to fall passionately in love was a
tragedy under the medieval church: to pay for a few stolen hours of
love, both she and her lover were doomed to an eternity of suffering. 52
The point was by Grunewald's painting The Damnation
illustrated

ofLovers, showing a sinful pair as emaciated corpses living in hell, with

worms burrowing through their flesh, the woman crowned with a
coiled serpent, her genitals gnawed by a toad. According to a 1 5th-

century illustration for St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, lovers would

be bound together on spits in hell and roasted over coals fanned by
53
devils.

With western religion envisioning such grisly punishments for

sexual enjoyment, it is
hardly surprising to find western civilization as
a whole seized by a sick compulsion to destroy all forms of pleasure.
54

Even in the Christian heaven however, whores had their special

protectors,modeled on pagan Roman harlot-goddesses like Venus
and Meretrix. Official Catholic patrons of whores were St.
Aphra, St.
Aphrodite, and St. Maudline (Magdalen), simple canonizations of
former titles of the Goddess. 55 Chief protectress of whores was the
virgin Mary. In Antwerp up to the present century, prostitutes
spent
certain annual feast days in procession to the
marching churches, to
dedicate candles to the Holy Virgin whom they called their own
56
special deity.
An oft-told tale of the Middle Ages said when a nun decided to
run away from her convent, to live as a prostitute for a few days,
Mary assumed the errant nun's appearance and took her
place in the
convent, so she wouldn't be missed and pursued. 57 A German variant
of the story said the nun,
Beatrix, left the convent to live with her
heathen lover for 1 5 years. When she returned, she found that Mary
had served as her stand-in all the while. 58
Medieval brothels were not
always clearly distinguished from
convents. A trace of the
pagan collegia of priestesses still clung to
both institutions. Early "double
convents," with men and women
united in one
community, sometimes housed consecrated prostitutes.
Several popes maintained
"holy brothels" in Rome; Queen Joanna of

824
 Naples founded a religious house of prostitutes called The Abbey in Prostitution

the papal city of Avignon. In Victorian times, it was a common

still

custom to call the madam of a whorehouse "the abbess," though the

^^^^^^^^^^^^
59
historical precedent was forgotten. See Mary Magdalene.
Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, prostitution often became a

fully legitimate lifestyle. Black Africans never fully accepted mission-

aries' views on the matter. White men's laws deprived African women
of their property and their monopoly of farming, trading, and crafts

y which they supported their children. African women suffered a

stating loss of self-respect, for in their society a woman without

le her
er own income was regarded with contempt. On finding that white
c

men would pay for their sexual favors, many African women took up
prostitution as their last remaining chance to make an honest living.
Africans still
regard a successful prostitute as a usefully employed
businesswoman
b rather than a criminal. 60

By contrast, Christian society seldom offered women any formal

pportunity to take up prostitution as a career, but half-deliberately
looked the other way as many hundreds of young girls "fell" into it.

Eighteenth-century London swarmed with female children strug-

gling to keep themselves alive by prostitution, according to a
contemporary pamphlet denouncing "little Creatures piled in Heaps
upon one another, sleeping in the public streets, in the most rigorous
and some of them whose Heads will hardly reach above the
seasons,
Waistband of a Man's Breeches, found to be quick with Child, and
become burdensome to the Parish." Far from extending sympathy to

these little girls, the pamphleteer called them wicked whores, "a most
enormous Sin to lay Snares for the Unwary, and to be the Means of

ruining both Souls and Bodies of so many innocent young

Gentlemen." 61
According to the terminology of the time, a "wench" was a child
of either sex. Dryden's description of a gentleman as one who "eats,

drinks,and wenches abundantly" apparently meant a man who picked

up homeless male or female children in the streets to service his
sexual idiosyncrasies. Later, "wench" came to mean only a lower-class
62
female, a servant or peasant available for a gentleman's sexual use.
By the 19th century, thousands of girls under the age of 14 were
listedon English police registers as "common prostitutes." London in
1860 had at least 500 registered prostitutes under the age of 1 3, and
1 500 more under the
age of 16. Victorian gentlemen had a taste for
raping child virgins, who commanded the highest prices in whore-
houses. Experienced child whores were taught to imitate the cries
and struggles of a newly deflowered victim, and to insert leeches or
broken glass into their vaginas to produce a convincing flow of
blood. 63

Josephine Butler's investigations of the English system of prostitu-

tion led to legislation to raise the "age of consent" to 14; still, large

825
Providence numbers of younger girls were captured and immured in brothels. "The !

Psyche law was lax on the matter of abduction, and the punishment for

._____^__^_ trafficking in girls was derisory."

Male authorities took an interest in
after they clearly understood its connection with
prostitution only
of brothels was instituted
rampant venereal disease. Legal regulation
then; but this didn't mean closing them. It meant subjecting them to
64
medical inspections, so they would be safe for male patrons.
Whores were not considered full-fledged human beings. The
18th-century term whore was "a fleshy convenience." 65 The
for a

word "convenience" also meant an outhouse. One might say that from
the revered sacred harlot of antiquity to this was a long road
backward.
1. 2. Briffault 3, 169. 3. Malvern, 49. 4. Assyr. &Bab. Lit, 170.
Lamusse, 138.
320. 6. Erman, 227-30. 7. Briffault 2, 341-42. 8. Bullough, 125.
5. Briffault 2,

9. J. H. Smith, C.G., 16. 10. Maspero, 138. 11. Briffault 3, 217. 12. Edwardes, 96.

[Link],63. [Link],211. 15. Eliade, S., 463. 16. Knight, D.W.P., 105.
17. Dumezil, 431. 18. Gifford, 182. 19. Briffault 3, 220. 20. Lamusse, 83.
21. Graves, GM. 1, 54. 22. Mahanirvanatantra, 328. 23. Potter & Sargent, 201.
24. Book of the Dead, 497. 25. Lethaby, 199. 26. Gaster, 608. 27. James, 182.
28. Dumezil, 81. 29. Albright, 210. 30. Zimmer, 34. 31. Campbell, M.D.R., 71.
32. Graves, W.G, 411. 33. Martello, 173. 34. Rawson, E.A., 88. 35. Guthrie, 103.
36. J. H. Smith, D.C.P., 175. 37. Attwater, 34. 38. Brasch, 164.
39. Turville-Petre, 240, 298. 40. Branston, 35. 41. Turville-Petre, 236, 298.
42. Legman, 612. 43. Campbell, CM., 249. 44. Daly, 61. 45. Rugoff,251.
46. Guignebert, 365. 47. Hazlitt, 34, 634. 48. Hartley, 323. 49. H. Smith, 266.
[Link],39. 5 1 Lawson, 68. 52. Campbell, CM., 53. 53. Hughes, 203, 211.
.

54. Henry, 405. 55. Scot, 442. 56. Briffault 3, 216. 57. Briffault 3, 500.
[Link],L.R.,73. 59. Briffault 3,215-16. 60. Briffault 2,221.
61. de Vries & Fryer,
104, 1 10. 62. Funk, 261. 63. Pearsall, N.B.A., 243.
64. Crow, 240, 247. 65. de Vries Fryer, 25. &

Providence
Latin provideo meant "to foresee"; Providentia meant divinatory
magic.
1
It was a personification of female prophetic or mantic
talents,
the quality that enabled ancient matriarchs to "provide" for their

dependents through foreknowledge of the stars and seasons, agriculture

and food storage. In Christian usage,Providence was sometimes a
synonym for God; but many mystics defined Providence as a female
2
deity.
1. Funk, 275. 2. Collins, 54.

Psyche
Greek "female soul," corresponding to Hindu Shakti. Classical myth
wedded Psyche to the love-god Eros: a
union of soul with body.
Apuleius's version said Psyche and her bridegroom could come
together only in the dark. When Psyche insisted on seeing Eros by the
light of her lamp, he had to leave her forever. As an allegory, this
1

said the passion of the soul might banish sexual passion. The original

826
J
'

stc
story probably arose from a custom like that of ancient Sparta, where Psychopomp
young husbands visited their wives only by night. "Sometimes children
yo Pudens, Pudenziana
were born before the pair had ever seen each other's faces by day." 2 ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Psyche was incarnate in a butterfly, for the early Greeks believed
human souls could occupy flying insects while passing from one life
to the next. The belief was not forgotten. At Carcassonne in 1 329 an
amorous Carmelite monk was accused of witchcraft for hiding love

charms in women's houses. It was charged that he also called up Satan

3
and sacrificed a butterfly to him, in symbolic offering of the soul.
1. E. Hamilton, 92-100. 2. Crawley, 42. 3. J. B. Russell, 186.

Psychopomp
"Conductor of Souls," title of Hermes and other "Good Shepherd"
gods who led human souls through the after-world. Angels, Valkyries,
certain birds and animals could also act as psychopomps. See Her-
mes; Dog; Vulture.

Pucelle
"The Maid," French title of any woman who impersonated the

Virgin Goddess of the druidic fairy-religion; a feminine form of Puck

(see Pooka; Bogey). It was the title of Joan of Arc, an indication that
her faith was basically non-Christian. British heathens called Maid
Marian the pucelle or Maiden of the Coven. Her consort was Robin
Hood or Robin Goodfellow, known as the god of witches (see Robin).
1

1. Graves, W.G., 441.

'udens and Pudenziana, Saints

Naive Christian canonization of the symbolic genitalia of Rome's
God and Goddess (pudenda). According to the Christian legend,
Pudenziana was the usual virgin convert, a daughter of Pudens, a
wealthy patrician. Peter and Paul lodged in the house of Pudenziana on
their (mythical) visit to Rome. With the help of a holy man named
Pastorus (Shepherd), St. Pudenziana soaked up the blood of Christian
martyrs in sponges, which she hid in a well. This tale was often cited
1

to account for the numerous bottles of martyrs' blood used as healing

relics in countless churches.

The well with holy blood probably meant the yonic "pit"
its

iputeus) in the Forum, where the spirits of blessed ancestors dwelt.

The Shepherd Pastorus was a form of the Psychopomp or Conductor of
Souls, sometimes called Shepherd of the Stars.

1. Brewster, 250-51.

827
 Purgatory Purgatory
One of several Christian doctrines derived more or less directly from
^i^""^"^""" Buddhism. Five centuries before the Christian era, Buddhist priests
claimed to be able to deliver one's ancestors from pains of atonement
in the underworld and to cause them to be born again in heaven, by

reciting magic words and performing sacrifices on their behalf for a

fee paid by the pious descendant.

1
"Above all," Buddhist scriptures said,
"it is necessary to obtain the aid of priests who deliver these bound
2
souls by the ritual."

The Christian doctrine of purgatory implied that priests had the

power to send to heaven individuals who might otherwise have been
damned. Some stories hinted that the privilege could be carried too far.
Pope Gregory the Great succeeded in praying the emperor Trajan
out of purgatory and into heaven, but God punished Gregory with gout,
3
fever, and stomach pains for his sin of praying for a heathen.
The Catholic notion of purgatory was renounced by Protestants,
who were scornful of anything resembling the sale of salvation.
Reginald Scot remarked that in England the ghosts no longer pestered
"Where are the spirits? Who
the living to be prayed out of purgatory:
heareth their noises? Who seeth their visions? Where are the souls that
made such moan ... to be eased of their pains in purgatory?" He
concluded that they had all gone to Italy, because masses had become

too expensive in England. 4

The word purgatory was often applied to the pagan womb-shrine
or abaton used in initiations in pre-Christian times (see
Abaddon). A
candidate would "descend into an underground chamber, simulate

death, undergo great trials, and experience a rebirth into a new life.
The early Christian Church continued this custom, calling such pagan
shrines 'purgatories.' The most celebrated
purgatory during medieval
times was the one at Lough Derg (Red Lake) in County Donegal,
Ireland, towhich pilgrimages were made in the twelfth century in
honor of St. Patrick, for whom the purgatory was named."
Though
Pope Alexander VI declared it a residence of devils and ordered it
closed in 1497, St. Patrick's 5
Purgatory was still in use in 1790.
According to a 1 illustration for the Divine
5th-century Comedy,
purgatory was not a pit or cave but a mountain, constructed in

wedding-cake levels very like a ziggurat. At the summit was the Earthly
Paradise, where a nude male and female figure were joined together
in a sacred
marriage: a peculiar link between the ancient King and
Goddess mating at the pinnacle of the
ziggurat, and the conventional
bride-and-groom dolls on the wedding cake. 6 The implication of the
picture was that, once the sinner had expurgated his sins and moved
up the stages of the mountain, he too could enter the
love-paradise at
the top: a strange
image for a Christian article of faith.
1. Waddell, 98-99. 2. Avalon, 208. 3. de Voragine, 185. 4. Scot, 390.
5. Goodrich, 1
57; Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 244. 6. Campbell, M.I., 91.

828
,Purim Purim
Purple
Jewish festival based on the Book of Esther, which presented a

Hebraic version of the Elamite cult of sacred kingship under the rule of
the Goddess Ishtar, whose name was "Esther" in Hebrew. Yahweh
is never mentioned in the Book of Esther, because the Elamite
Jews
didn't know him. They worshipped Ishtar's spouse Marduk, who
appears in the book as Mordecai.
Purim is the Feast of Lots, because the original Elamite festival
was based, in turn, on the Hittite Purulli, where a sacred-king-victim
was chosen by casting lots, or by a competition. The victim in the 1

Jewish Purim was Haman, the same as the Libyan sacrificial god
Amon.
Haman lay with the Goddess, Ishtar-Esther, then was slain by
Marduk-Mordecai (Esther 7:8). Afterward, his flesh was sacramental-
ly eaten, as he is still eaten symbolically at Purim in the form of

hamantaschen, small triangular pastries in the Goddess's sacred delta

shape. Egyptian bakers made similar three-cornered cakes to represent

the Host or victim in festivals of Amon. 2

The story of Esther is an allegorical tale of the intercession of
Ishtar, whom the Jews worshipped at the time, with the king who was

supposed to be her consort, on behalf of the subject Jewish tribes.

Interwoven with this theme is that of the ritual sacrifice. Haman was
given a Last Supper and a night of the Goddess-queen's love. Then he
was hanged on the high gallows that was "prepared for Mordecai"
that is, he became the god Marduk and assumed the trappings of
divinity (Esther 7:10).
The Jews also worshipped Marduk, who had originally "divided
the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which
were above the firmament" (Genesis 1 :7) by splitting the Water-mother
Tiamat. In the Book of Esther, Jewish scribes made Marduk one of
theirown sacred ancestors. Marduk helped the Jews kill 75,000 of their
enemies, apparently by magic, for they "laid not their hands on the
prey" (Esther 9:16).
1. Hooke, M.E.M., 99. 2. Budge, D.N., 75.

Purple
From Latin purpureus, "very, very holy," or sacer, or taboo. 1
The
ancients' "royal purple" was not purple but a dark wine red, the color of

blood, especially the menstrual blood formerly considered the very

stuff of life. Royal purple meant the same as royal blood: matrilineal

kinship in a sacred clan. Some legends said royal purple descended

from Athene's "goatskin dyed red," the aegis of sovereignty. 2 The
purple robe of a Roman emperor was said to have been "colored by
blood." 3 Purple still meant blood color in the time of Shakespeare, who

829
 of Caesar's assassins, stained with "the
Purusha spoke of the "purpled hands"
Pyerun most noble blood of all the world."
When Mark's Gospel says Jesus's robe was purple (15:17) and
Matthew's Gospel says it was scarlet (27:28), they are really talking
about the conventional sacred-king robe of moon-blood-color. Babylo-
nian kings wore the same dark-red robe, called lamhussu. It was the
same sacred blood color that covered altars in Canaan and Israel
(Numbers 4), and dyed the "red carpet" trod by triumphal religious
processions/
Book of
First Blood-purple was sacred to the pagans, as suggested by the First
Adam and Eve One of Book ofAdam and Eve, which says the art of dyeing crimson and
the legendary 5
purple was invented by Satan.
apocrypha (works was invented who obtained
written in Greek Actually, the art by the Phoenicians,
from Jewish sources) deep-blood-red dye from mollusks of the family Muricidae. These sea
snails were the source of the famous "Tyrian purple" worn by royalty. 6
giving additional
details or alternative In Roman society, people just below imperial rank were allowed to
versions of the
wear stripes or borders of the holy color on their togas, in smaller widths
Genesis myths.
according to a descending scale of status.
1. Graves, W.G., 395. 2. Mendenhall,43. 3. de Voragine, 79. 4. Brasch, 33.
5. Forgotten Books, 77. 6. de Camp, A.E., 79; Potter & Sargent, 146.

Purusha
"Person," the World Body in Oriental imagery, originally the Great
Mother as a colossal being, containing the universe. The earth
plane lay
at her waist, seven concentric hells below in the
pelvis, seven more in
the legs. Fourteen corresponding heavens mounted
through the thorax
and head: 28 in all, like the 14 levels descended by Osiris on his way
to the Pit, and 14 more ascended into heaven one night for each
making a full lunar cycle. Egyptian priests said the World Body was
theGoddess Neith. However, ascetic Jain Buddhists rendered the
1

Purusha sexually neutral. Later, medieval Europe adopted the idea

but made the World Body wholly male. 2
The highest heaven, which Greeks called the Empyrean, spread as
a shining umbrella over the head of Purusha. On the earth plane,
continents and oceans were arranged in concentric
rings, like a horizon-
3
tal
target. This image was still found in medieval geographies.
1 .
Budge, G.E. 2, 299. 2. Campbell, Or. M., 256. 3. Campbell, Or. M., 224.

van Piorun, Peron

Pyerun
Slavic thunder god, identified with Jupiter and Thor. His onomato-
poeic name imitated the sound of thunder.
Pyerun was still worshipped
in some parts of the Balkans up to the 18th century. 1

[Link], 34.

830
 Pygmalion Pygmalion

Greek version of Phoenician priest-kings called Pumiyathon, consorts

of the image of Astarte at Byblos. Pygmalion was a priest-king of ^^^^^" ^^^
1

Cyprus, receiving his right to rule through a sacred marriage with the
Goddess's image, who was called Galatea (White Goddess or Milk
Idess). Aphrodite brought her to life that is, inhabited the

during the sacred-marriage ceremony.

1
statue

[Link],G.B.,38.

Pygmies
Homer spoke of OiPygmaioi, the pygmies who lived in a tropical

garden of paradise near the Mountains of the Moon at the source of the
[Link] still live as they did 3000 years ago, in the jungle near
theRuwenzori Range (Mountains of the Moon). This area was
rendered virtually inaccessible from the north when climatic changes
created a vast swamp, now known as the Sudd, between Nilotic
civilizations and the mountain headwaters. But in an earlier age,
Africa's topography was more congenial to travel and colonization.
Pygmies say their ancestors came from the northern land of Kimi,
a Coptic name for Egypt, derived from Khemennu, "Land of the
Moon." The pygmies' culture hero Efe was sometimes called Heru, an
old Egyptian name for Horus. He was crucified on a World Tree,
and received a revelation of holy law from a lunar spirit named Mara,
the old pygmy name for a tribal matriarch, then for any divine
1

personage.
Like their relatives the Bushmen, pygmies are caucasoid people:

thin-lipped, light-skinned, often blue-eyed. Anthropological investiga-

tions show the pygmies were not true primitives but remnants of a

formerly sophisticated race, the proto-Berber people inhabiting what

Hallet called "old white Africa." 2 Pygmies have about the same stature
as Egyptian mummies; the ancient Egyptians were not large people.
Egypt had a pygmy god, Bes, patron of music, dancing, and
entertainment. He seems to have been an imported court jester to the
gods. "They delighted in his grotesque figure and contortions, just as
the Memphite Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom enjoyed the antics of
their pygmies." Bes became almost as popular as Osiris. He protected

women, especially pregnant ones. He preserved families, looked after

the dead in the underworld, and attended the
infant sun god at his birth.

Later, Bes was diabolized along with all other Egyptian deities. He
was called a "wicked demon' exorcised by Moses. He is said to dwell still
in the southern gate of the temple of Karnak, whence he threatens
3
solitary travelers.

Pygmies retain matriarchal traditions from their original source.

They human beings were made by the moon. The first

say the first

woman, Mother of God, was Matu (Mother), who still dwells in caverns

831
P V ntia under the Mountains of the Moon. Sometimes she was seen as a cat-
headed deity like Egypt's Bast. Her name was a cognate of Maat and
Python
^^^^^^^^^ also of the Sumerian Matu, the primal womb, the underworld, and
^"^^^^^^^^^ the devourer of the dead. In Babylon the Death-goddess Matu was also

Lilith, or the yonic lotus lilu. Now the pygmies say their Goddess can
take the form of a monster named Lulu, with a vast vulva-mouth that
vertically instead of horizontally,
and swallows human beings
opens
4
headfirst.

Not only are the pygmy myths and deities derived from those of
the ancient world, but their traditional stories plainly speak of the time
when their ancestors lived in a high state of civilization, in great cities,
with wonderful tools to use, and skills that enabled them to work

5
miracles.
The true origin of these people cannot be known precisely, any
more than the origin of any other nonliterate group. Yet it seems
clear that they did have a connection with Nilotic culture at a very early
date, possibly even as colonial villages along the upper reaches of the
Nile. Even in dynastic Egypt there were half-forgotten stories about the
"true source" of the Nile at the Goddess's lunar mountain with its
vast uterine cave. Later the ceremonial source of the Nile was located at

Elephantine, because it became too difficult to travel upriver beyond

this point. In the end, the pygmies were cut off.

1. Hallet, 1 13, 1 15, 124. 2. Hallet, 37. 3. Larousse, 39. 4. Hallet, 95, 144, 170.
5. Hallet, 102, 106.

Pyrrha
Wife of Deucalion, the Greek version of Noah. She and her spouse
repopulated the earth after the Flood by the instruction of the Goddess
Themis, magically creating human beings out of stones. Pyrrha,
whose name means "fiery red," may have been the magic ingredient of
the charm, embodying the Blood of Life. Her name was also
1
commonly applied to wine.
1. Graves, CM. 1,141.

Python
Great Serpent born of Mother Hera without the aid of Zeus, which
meant the Mother's firstborn serpent antedated all father-gods, like the
Ophion-serpent of the creatress Eurynome. Also like Lucifer, Python
was the lightning-serpent who descended into the Deep to fertilize the
Goddess. Mother Hera also bore Hephaestus without the aid of any
male god, and Hephaestus was the same lightning-god who "fell from
'
heaven."

Python personified the prophetic spirit of the Delphic oracle,

whose priestess was always the Pythoness even when the shrine was

832
taken over by Apollo. Python lived in the earth-womb and knew its Python
secrets, which why he was an oracle. Some myths said Python was
is

a Lord of Death because Apollo had killed him. But, like all other light- ^mhii^^^mh^^
and-dark twins, Apollo and Python were really the same god. Sacred

kings of Delphi always killed their predecessors, who were laid to rest
in

the stone omphalos where the Pythoness sat to commune with the
2
oracular spirit.

Sometimes Python was the nether aspect of Apollo himself, the

Black Sun corresponding to the celestial sun. This serpent-figure was
the familiar Sata, Thoth, Ouroboros, Okeanos, Hermes, and other
subterranean oracle-gods.
1. Guthrie, 73. 2. Graves, G. M. 1, 80-82.

833
 Q R

In antiquity queen sim-

ply meant a female
land-owner; eventually,
only royalty had
queens. This one, Karo-
mama, ruled in Egypt
with husband Takelot II

in the 22nd Dynasty

(950-730 b.c). Dama-
scened bronze.

The ram was a sacred

and sacrificial
animal,
along with the other
horned beasts bull,
stag, goat. Since they al-

ways carried phallic

connotations, human-
bodied gods often
wore horned heads, as
does this limestone
sculptor's model. Egypt,
4th to 3rd century b.c.

Lupa, the She-Wolf, an

Etruscan bronze,
nurses the Renaissance
ROMULUS AND REMUS.
The three represent the
founding and nurture
of Rome. Rome, Capito-
line Museum.
 Qadeshet Qadeshet
Quintessence Arabic qadisha, Hebrew kadesha meant a sacred harlot or Holy
wmi^^m^^ Virgin; qadeshet was also the title
of Astarte and her temple women.
The word meant "priestess." In the Koran it was used as a name for
Mohammed's rich wife Khadija, whose money supported the prophet's
endeavors. Astarte-the-Qadeshet was the Syrian counterpart of Ish-
1

tar, Babylon's Great Whore, who declared herself the Mother of

2
Compassion. See Prostitution.
1. Briffault 1, 375. 2. Lindsay, O.A., 54.

Queen
Old Norse kvaen, Old English cwene meant "owner," specifically

applied to female owners of the land in the days of the matriarchate.

Ancient writers described many barbarian societies as nations of
"queens."
'
See Matrilineal Inheritance.
1 .
Thomson, 244.

Quetzalcoatl
Aztec savior-god with the same characteristics as similar gods of the
ancient Middle East. Quetzalcoatl was born of a virgin, one of three
mystic sisters (the Triple Goddess). He represented the corn. His
death and resurrection were linked with planting, growth, harvest. Like
the serpent-and-dove deities of Mesopotamia, he combined avian and
he was called the Feathered Serpent.
reptilian attributes;
He gave blood from his penis to re-create the human race after the
Flood and so became one of the "castrated Fathers." He was l

he descended into hell; he rose again from the dead. His

sacrificed;
Second Coming was expected.
Like the dead and living Shiva, like Njord and Frey, Horus and
Set, Apollo and Python,
etc., Quetzalcoatl was a two-faced deity of
creationand destruction, united back to back with his brother Death. 2
North American Indians also worshipped the same
alternating rival
gods as the White Manitu and the Dark Manitu, lords of life and death.
They were alternately sons or husbands of the Great Goddess whom
the tribes named Divine Grandmother. 3 Aztecs called her the Lady of
the Serpent Skirt, receiver of
Quetzalcoatl's sacrifice.
1.
Campbell, M.I., 156. 2. Neumann, CM., 205. 3. Briffault 2, 732.

Quintessence
Blue blood was once supposed to be the
sign of the gods' aristocracy.
It was
given by the Goddess to deified ancestors of the caste. highest

836
Blue blood was called quanta essentia by the Romans, the "essential Ra
part" or quintessence, embodying a spirit of immortality (god-
fifth

hood). Sometimes the quinta essentia was a sacred wine or ambrosia; ^^^^^^^^^^^^
1

sometimes it was more plainly designated the menstrual blood of the

Goddess. Worshippers of Aphrodite taught that the "essential fifth"

came to a man
during the lunar month called honey-moon, planned to
span a menstrual period. Aphrodite's nectar was also called honey.
Horace marriage bond was mixed by
said the kiss that sealed the

Aphrodite with "a fifth part of her own nectar." 2 Homer said the

blood that flowed in the veins of gods was a blue ethereal fluid, ichor,
3
prepared by Aphrodite's honeybees.
This blue essence evolved from a confused memory of Indo-
European ancestral gods made immortal by their blue blood. Hindu
gods are still painted blue in sacred art which may shed light on the
custom of the Picts and other early British tribes to paint themselves
blue with woad for religious ceremonies, and sometimes for warfare, to
4
insure their resurrection in case of death in battle.
The blue-blooded god filled with quintessence was well known to
Gnostic thinkers. Porphyry said the Demiurge or creator of the
material world was shaped like a man, with a dark blue complexion,

exactly like Shiva, Vishnu, and other Hindu gods. 5 Aristotle taught
that quintessence was a fifth element after earth, water, air, and fire

of which the bodies of gods were made. Sometimes this fifth element
6
was said to be the same as ether, the fluid of heaven.

Medieval alchemists described the quinta essentia as a blue elixir,

able to confer spiritual illuminationand resurrection of the body. 7
Later, the mystic Essential Fifth was represented by the fifth trump suit
of the Tarot deck, the Major Arcana (Great Secrets), whose figures

conveyed mystical doctrines to the initiated.

1. Jung, P.R, 109. 2. Bachofen, 46. 3. Gaster, 29. 4. von Hagen, 137.
5. Lindsay, O.A., 137. 6. Funk, 349. 7. Jung, P.R., 109.

Ra
Egypt's royal sun god, said to beget every pharaoh by coupling with
queen mother. He was a late addition to Egypt's pantheon. His
1
the

origins were by his own priests, who called him the

greatly confused
supreme though the Goddess's priests insisted that Ra was only
deity,
her dependent child. Many scriptures demonstrate the ideological
battle.

During the Ptolemaic period, some of Ra's votaries rejected the

idea thatRa was born of the Mother of the Gods; they called him
"self-begotten and self-born." A hymn addressed him as "divine
2

divinity, that came into being of himself, primeval god, that existed at
the beginning." But this passage was an interpolation. The same hymn
also said, "Thou art fair, O Ra, every day thy mother Nut embraceth
thee." 3

837
Ra One source called Ra "the divine man-child, the heir of eternity,

self-begotten and self-born";

but the same source also said he was
"the Disc within thy mother Hathor made strong each day by thy
^^^^^^^^^_ . . .

mother Nut." Sometimes, Ra's divinity depended on identifying him

with the Mother herself. He was told, "Thou art indeed Isis," or "Thou
4
art the Great Cat," i.e., the Goddess Bast-Hathor.

Some writers mocked Ra's pretensions to divinity and considered

him subordinate to the Goddess Mother. He was "born yesterday

from the buttocks of the goddess Mehurt ... the Great Celestial Wa-
ter." He was told, "Thy mother brought thee forth upon her hand."

Apparently the average Egyptian wouldn't tolerate priestly efforts to

erase theGoddess and replace her with the kings' solar Father.
Budge says, "it is quite certain that there was something in the doctrines
of the priests of Ra, or in the worship that was the practical expression
of them, which was contrary to the instincts of the Egyptians as a
nation." 5

Wrestling with the problem of bringing their god into being

without a mother, Ra's priests took refuge in abstractions beyond the

understanding of ordinary folk: "The god hath formed himself and his
form is not [Link] hath joined his seed with his body, so that his
egg existed He had no mother, who might have
in his secret self. ...

given him his name. ... He who hath shaped his egg himself, the
mighty one of mysterious birth, who (himself) created his beauty." Such
abstractions failed to satisfy the literal-minded Egyptian, who wanted
toknow how Ra did it. Priests responded with the same evasiveness that
modern priesthoods also exhibit:

His image is not spread out in books. . . . He is too mysterious that his
glory should be revealed, too great that men should question concern-
ing him, too powerful that he should be known. One falleth down dead on
the spot for terror, if his mysterious, unknowable name is pronounced.
No god can address him by him with the spirit, whose name is hidden,
it,

for that he is a mystery. 6

Yet Ra was not only the Goddess's child; he may even have
been a masculinized version of the Goddess herself. One of her ancient
names was Ra with a feminine ending -r: "Ra-t of the two lands, the
lady of heaven, mistress of the gods . . . mistress of Heliopolis." Her full

name was Rat-taiut, "Ra-t of the world."

7
Her city, translated into
Greek as Heliopolis, was the Egyptian Anu, which the Bible calls On.
The Goddess really controlled Ra by means of his secret soul-name.
Each day she laid on him an unbreakable spell, forcing him to grow old
and senile as he limped on his cane toward his death at sunset. She
forced him to stand still at the summit of heaven while she resurrected
her son Horus from the dead, a feat on which the
Jews modeled their
myth of Joshua's arrest of the sun at the battle of Jericho. 8
The Jews enthusiastically adopted Ra and identified him with
Yahweh, especially in his Babylonian form as the sun god Shamash

838
(Chemosh). Beth-Shemesh, House of the Sun, was
the sun god's shrine, corresponding to Egyptian per Ra.
Moses followed Ra's custom, demanding
foot in his presence.

whereon thou standest

a biblical version of

The God of
that his worshipper go bare-

"Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place
9
holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). Sometimes the
is

Jews called their sun god Elias, a corruption of the Greek

Helios.

Elias was the "father" Jesus called upon from the cross (Matthew
>^ Rabbatu
Ragnarok
^m
1

27:47-49).
1. Book of the Dead, 165. 2. Budge, G.E. 1, 341. 3. Erman, 139.

339-45. 5. Book of theDead, 385, 501, 167.

4. Budge, G.E. 1,

6. Erman, 296, 299-300. 7. Budge, G.E. 1, 328. 8. Budge, E.M., 135.

9. Book of the Dead, 25, 203, 231.

Rabbatu
"Holy One," female form of rabbi, applied to the Semitic Goddess or
her priestesses. See Asherah.
1

1. Albright, 210.

Rachel
"Womb," personification of rachamin, "mother-love" or "compas-
1

sion," comparable to Sanskrit karuna. Rachel's totemic form was the

divine Ewe, mother of the Holy Lamb: an important symbol of early
Hebraic tribal motherhoods. Rabbinical writings admitted that during
this tribal period, the Four Matriarchs Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, and
Leah were more important than the Three Patriarchs Abraham,
2
Isaac, and Jacob.
1. Brasch, 183. 2. Briffault 3, 551-53.

Radha
"Cow elephant," the Shakti of Krishna. Her name doubtless arose
with the ancient bull-elephant cult. Krishna was considered an avatar of
the elephant god Ganesha. According to the Kama Sutra, the
1

elephant represented maximum sexual capacity and unflagging desire.

1 .
Rawson, A.T., 99.

Ragnarok
Norse doomsday, the end of the present universe. Heimdall would
announce the last battle of the gods by blowing the Last Trump on his
horn; there would follow the destruction of the earth, the disappear-
ance of the sun, the death of all gods, and the return of the world to its

original state of chaos.

839
 Rainbow Rainbow
Myths often associate the rainbow with the dream-time or Golden

Age when earth and heaven were in easy communication with one
another. Deities, and mortals might pass back and forth on the
spirits,

rainbow bridge, which was also the axis mundi, or ladder of heaven, or
necklace of the Great Mother who ruled the Golden Age. The Pot of
Gold at the rainbow's end was another form of the Celts' Holy Grail, a

womb symbol related to the pots where Mother Moon (Mana) kept
1
the souls of the dead in her western paradise.
The rainbow's seven colors represented the seven celestial spheres
and the rainbow-hued veils of Maya, the Goddess working behind

the veils to manifest the material world in its many-colored complexity.

Her priestesses wore the colors of the veils, which appeared in
Egyptian mythology as the seven stoles of Isis, and in the Bible as the
seven veils of Salome. 2
The rainbow veils of the Goddess Ishtar were sometimes gar-

ments, sometimes jewels. The rainbow was called her necklace, of

which she made the bridge to heaven for the souls of her chosen ones.
Her rainbow necklace had selective power. If the Goddess willed,

neither nor god could cross it. On one occasion she placed her
man
rainbow to block the Heavenly Father from receiving the food laid on
earth's altars, to punish him after he sent the Flood to destroy her
3
earthly children. Biblical writers re-interpreted this Babylonian myth
toomit the Goddess and make the rainbow represent God's promise to
Noah not to do it again.
The rainbow's selectivity is a common motif. The glowing bridge
was a broad way for the chosen, a razor-edge for the wicked. The
Upanishads Katha Upanishad said the rainbow bridge to heaven is as difficult to
Buddhist scriptures 4
edge of a razor. The Persians said the same of their
traverse as the
representing the final Kinvad or Cinvat rainbow bridge: "For the just it is nine lance-lengths
stage in Vedic thought,
dealing with the
wide, for the ungodly it is as narrow as the edge of a razor. The
philosophy known as
Cinvat bridge is at the 'Center' ... the bridge connects earth and
Vedanta. The Katha heaven at the 'Center.'" 5 Christian tradition spoke of the same
Upanishad discusses selective bridge of heaven: "Narrow the and few there be that
is
way . . .

transmigration of find it" (Matthew 7:14).

souls, the nature of
eternal the
The Japanese said the rainbow is "the road of the gods and the
life,

doctrine of maya, and bridge between sky and earth." As in India and Mesopotamia, its

an account of a visit seven colors were associated with the seven heavens. "The throne of
toYama, Lord of the the surrounded by a rainbow, and the same
Supreme Being is
Dead.
symbolism persists into the Christian art of the Renaissance." The sex of
the Supreme Being was changed by patriarchal theology, but the
symbol still
suggests the archaic Maya-Shakti enveloped in her rainbow
veils. "Shamanic drums are decorated with drawings of the rainbow
represented as a bridge to the sky In the Turkic language the word
for rainbow means bridge." 6
Northern pagans also said the Goddess's rainbow necklace and the

840
 7
rainbow Bridge of Heaven were one and the same. Freya's magic Ram
necklace Brisingamen was the same as the rainbow bridge called Bifrost
or Bilrost, the "trembling way," also known as Asbru, "bridge of the
gods."
8
During the Christian era, this rainbow bridge became one of
Heathen legend said as doomsday ap-
the features of Fairyland.

proached, the bridge would be broken down so there was no more

communication between earth and heaven. In effect this meant
mortals would no longer go to heaven, neither in the shamanic trance
nor in the spirit after death.

Greeks personified the rainbow as the Goddess Iris, usually called

Hera's messenger, one more instance of the Great Goddess's associa- The Nemean
tion with the garment of many colors, Maya's or Isis's veils. As the
Mountains were the
location of an
"bridge," Mother Hera's messages to earth as the rain-
Iris carried
ancient temple, near the
bow-hued peacock carried the messages of Mother Juno. Iris also bound
city of Nemea in
the Nemean Lion with her colorful girdle and carried it to the sacred
Argolis, in the
9
cave in theNemean mountains. Peloponnesus.
1. Davidson, 34. 2. Angus, 251. 3. Assyr. & Bab. Lit, 434. Campbell, P.M., 333.
4.

5. Eliade, S., 485, 397. 6. Eliade, S., 134-35. 7. Turville-Petre, 176. 8. Branston, 104.
9. Graves, G.M. 2, 104.

Ram
One of the "horny" animals embodying the phallic god along with
the bull, stag, and billygoat. The ram was often selected for the dubious
honor of sacrifice, being identified with the god who immolated
himself to himself for the sake of humanity.
Solar gods were linked with the heavenly ram Aries, who began
the sacred year, dead and reborn as the new Aeon. Egyptians called
him Amen-Ra, "the Ram, the virile male, the holy phallus, which
stirreth up the passions of love, the Ram of rams." '
The Ram Caught in a Thicket was a sexual metaphor and a
common religious icon in Abraham's legendary home, Ur of the
Chaldees. The same Ram Caught in a Thicket appeared in the Bible as

a surrogate victim to replace Isaac, whose father Abraham was about

to sacrifice him on the altar at Yahweh's command (Genesis 22:13).
The story marked a transition from ancient customs of human
sacrifice to the classical rule of animal sacrifice, as shown also in the

substitution of the ram of the Golden Fleece for the king's son in a

Boeotian sacrifice to Zeus. 2 An older Midrashic version of the Abra-

ham-Isaac story said Abraham's hand was not stayed, the ram did not
the third day. 3
appear. Isaac was slaughtered, buried, and rose again on
Rams were sacred in Israel as consorts of Rachel, the Holy Ewe,
whom the biblical narrative later married to Jacob, A reincarnated
Isaac. Jews sacrificed the paschal lamb each year as a firstborn son of the
ram god who was identified with Yahweh. At one time the biblical

God wore ram's horns, later assigned instead to the devil. Joshua's

841
Rama priests used ram's horns to make victory magic (Joshua 6:4), showing

Rape that they were led by the divine ram in battle.

1. Budge, G.E. 2, 64. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 226-27. 3. Ochs, 32.

Rama
Hero of the Ramayana, whose name meant "sexual pleasure" or
"enjoyment of virility" one of the phallic avatars of Krishna as consort
l
of the female-genital Goddess Sita, "the Furrow." Their story was
constructed on the framework of titles for the male and female elements
of the lingam-yoni.
[Link],607.

Rape
Classicalmythology abounds in rapes: the rape of the Sabine women,
Zeus's rape of his mother Rhea, Apollo's numerous rapes of nymphs,
even of his sister Artemis. One gets the impression that the Greeks
thought women always had to be forced into sexual relationships, even
with gods. But the word translated "rape" usually meant seduction.

Teiresias, who lived as both a man and a woman, announced his

discovery that a woman's pleasure in sex was nine times that of a

man. 1

True rape was not common in the ancient world. Like the males
of all other mammalian species, the ancients believed sexual activity
should be initiated by the female. The modern conventional description
of a rapist as an "animal" is a slur on the animal kingdom; animals do
not rape. Only man forces sexual attentions on an unwilling female.
The Bible tells of a Levite who gave up his concubine-wife to a
mob to be gang-raped to death in order to save himself from

molestation, to pieces. "All who saw it said, There was

and then cut her
no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel
came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day" (Judges 19:30). A war
was fought over the incident, showing that it was
highly unusual.
A change in the attitude toward rape was one of the contrasts
between the ancient world and the medieval one in western Europe.
The Romans and Saxons punished rapists by death. Normans cut off a
rapist's testicles and gouged his eyes out. 2 The gypsies' Oriental
heritage demanded the death penalty for a rapist. 3 Hindu law said a

rapist must be killed, even if his victim was of the lowest caste, an
"4
Untouchable; and his soul should "never be pardoned. The Byzan-
tine Code decreed that rapists must die and their property must be
given to the victim, even if she was no better than a slave woman. 5
Christian laws changed the
picture. Serfs' wives, sisters, or daugh-
ters were always sexually available to their overlords under the new

842
 ime. 6 Peasant brides were raped by the baron before being turned Rape
er to their bridegrooms probably to be raped again. The Church
made it
illegal for any wife to refuse sexual intercourse unless it was a ^^^^^^^^^^^^
holy day when marital sexwas prohibited. Therefore, marital rape
was encouraged.
Victorian England almost achieved one of patriarchy's most
sought-after goals: total male control of female sexuality. Until 1884 a
wife could be jailed for trying to deny her husband his "conjugal rights."
She was as much a sexual slave as any inmate of an eastern harem.
7

Forced to consent to frequent rape by husbands who neither knew nor

cared about women's sexual enjoyment, 19th-century wives became

predictably indifferent to the delights of the marriage bed, in such

numbers that medical authorities described women as "largely devoid
of sexual pleasure." It was said in a standard marriage manual used for

decades, and translated into 1 2 languages: "Wives seldom seek the

closer embraces of their husbands. They are generally indifferent; often
absolutely averse. God has made the passivity of the wife the
. . .

husband and a source of manifold blessing to their

protection of her
children." Having thanked God for a world of unaroused women, the
author went on: "There can be little doubt that much marital indiffer-
ence upon the part of wives is due to chronic constipation, which is so
"8
prevalent among women. The implied assumption would be that
God foresightedly afflicted women with chronic constipation in
addition to the other curses on Eve.
Societies retaining the idea of Goddess-worship seldom demon-
strate marital or extramarital rape; female sexuality is
nearly always
fullydeveloped. Sadistic, violent sexual fantasies do not appear in the
9
imagery of India. The matriarchal Semai held it illegal for a man
even to try to talk to a woman into sexual relations if she said no in the
10
beginning. Anti-rape rules inspired warmer relationships, as G.B.
Shaw said: "The desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also
the to withhold." n
power
The laws of Shaw's culture, however, were designed to deprive
women of the power to withhold. Before 1653, any Englishman
could kidnap and rape a child heiress, after which the law viewed him as
her legal husband. He was rewarded for rape with the acquisition of
the victim's property. In 1653 the law was changed not to help the
victim, but to cut the government in on the loot. A man could be
imprisoned for raping a young girl for her money, but half the victim's
was taken by the government. 12
estate

Victorians never held men legally responsible for debauching

adolescent girls, since the legal "age of consent" for females was
twelve. A child under the age of eight was not allowed to give evidence
against a man who violated her, on the ground that she was too
young tounderstand the legal oath. 13 Yet in the 16th century, authori-
ties set the "age of consent" at six years. 14 Raping children was a
common enough pastime of Victorian men, who maintained that sexual

843
 Rape intercourse with a virgin child was a sure cure for syphilis. As late as

the 1930s, the madam of a West End whorehouse advertised, "In my j

house you can gloat over the of the with the certainty that
^^^^^^^^^^mB cries girls
1S
no one will hear them besides yourself."
Victorian pornography reflects an obsessive fascination for vio-
lence and rape, often describing sexual partners as "adversaries,"

though they were certainly not evenly matched. One male writer
fantasized a female experience of defloration by a rapist who "quickly
buried his tremendous instrument too far within me to leave me any
chance of escape. He now paid no kind of attention to my sufferings,
but followed up his movements with fury, until the tender texture

altogether gave way to his fierce tearing and rending, and one
merciless, violent thrust broke in and carried all before him, and sent it

imbrued, reeking with blood of my virginity, up to its utmost length

in my body. The piercing shriek I
gave proclaimed that I felt it up to the
very quick; in short, his victory was complete." The same male writer
mused complacently: "How magical is the influence of our sex over the
16
feelings of the softer one."
The magic was not apparent to a modern rape victim who,
nevertheless, displayed an almost catatonic acceptance of the victim's
role, in effect giving her attackers the right to abuse her:

They were just taking advantage ofme because I was alone and available.
That's just the way men relate to women. If
they 're alone and available,
use them. Audit's nothing perverted. their normal
well, It's just
way of
relating to a woman. . . .

After it was over, I was aware ofpain

and dirtiness in my body, and I
was hurt inmy pride and confused about why they had raped me and
why they were laughing at me and making fun ofmy body and taunting
me. And I was also very sure that God was watching the whole thing
and shaking his head and saying what a horrible person I was for allowing
'7
myself to get raped.

Studies have shown that raped women often were reluctant to

hurt their assailants, e.g. by
gouging eyes or twisting testicles, even when
they had a chance. "Women often take the responsibility when men
treat them as prey. This isn't just an odd female quirk. The attitude is

deeply entrenched Women are taught to make themselves at-

tractive to men. Those who don't are ignored by men or incur their
displeasure. But if they become victims of sexual
assault, they are
immediately suspected of collusion. No man is ever guilty." 18
In San Francisco in
1971, a gunpoint rapist was because acquitted
hisunmarried victim admitted having a lover. Women
picketers
protested the decision in vain, handing out leaflets which said:

When a person is robbed, the robber is put on trial. When someone is

murdered, the murderer is tried. But when a woman is raped, it is the
woman and not the rapist who is put on trial. If she can be shown to
. . .

have any sexual history, the must be acquitted, for by their

rapist
definition it is then no rape at all. For a woman to allow herself to be a sex- \

844
 ual person, to enjoy her sexuality in her own way in her own time, is for Rape
her to lose all protection from being forced to commit sexual acts with any
9
man at any time. '

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Sometimes the culture forces on men a pseudo-rapist stance vis-

a-vis women, where men groups gang up on a woman verbally or

in

symbolically, to injure her sense

of self. One young woman wrote:
"When I first started to live in the city, I would walk by the construction

workers having lunch and hear all those horrible comments. I didn't
had
quite know how to deal
with it. I was embarrassed because I breasts.

I felt it was my fault for having them, and that of course I deserved to
be commented upon. Now know that's not true. I It's they who have to
change, not me."
20
A recent investigator wrote:
The virility mystique . . .
predisposes men to rape. If women were physi-

cally stronger than men, I do not believe there would be any instances
offemale raping male, because female sexual socialization encourages a
woman to integrate sex, affection, and love, and to be sensitive to what
her partner wants. Of course, there are many women who deviate from

this pattern, just as there are men who have managed to reject their
socialization for virility. But cultural trends make these cases exceptional.
If our culture considered it masculine to be gentle and sensitive, to be
responsive to the needs of others, to abhor violence, domination,
and
to be
exploitation, to want sex only within a meaningful relationship,
attracted by personality and character rather than by physical appearance,
to value lasting rather than casual relationships, then rape would indeed
be a deviant act. . . .

If lynching is the ultimate racist act, rape is the ultimate sexist act. It

isan act ofphysical and psychic oppression. [L]ike lynching, it is . . .

as well as
cowardly, and like lynching, it is used to keep individual women,
women as a caste, in their place. And finally, as with lynching, the rape

victim is blamed for provocation.

Rape is an abuse ofpower, and the increase in rape shows that men
are increasingly unable to handle their excessive power over women. . . .

Eradicating rape requires getting rid of the power discrepancy between

men and women. 2 '

From the Inquisition's torturers, who usually raped their victims

first, to Victorian doctors who attacked female genitals with leeches,
many kinds of rape could be traced to what has been called "the

virulent woman-hatredfundamentalist Christianity." 22 Recent stud-

in

ies show that most rapists were professed members of a religious sect
23
and learned to regard sex as evil, in the traditional Christian manner.
One rapist said, "I've always been brought up that sex was dirty, sex
was not to be practiced." Another said he was "confused about just what
the sex act was and how they went about it." Another was so naive he
didn'tknow where babies came from, and another was ignorant of the
word "vagina," calling it 'Virginia" instead. 24 "Sex offenders as a
group were extremely naive about sexual matters, felt inferior, had
suffered in childhood from anxiety and fears about sex and had . . .

lacked accurate sex instruction." 25

845
 Rati In some areas, the laws of both church and state actually encour-
aged rape until very recently. Up to 1978 in Italy, a rapist could go
unpunished if his victim agreed to marry him. By a combination of
and coercion, it was quite possible for a man to force
violation

marriage on a woman who had every reason to fear and hate him. And,
since patriarchal society in effect forbade women to hate men,
especially as wives, once again the victim would be blamed for her
victimization.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 11. 2. Pearsall, W.B., 315. 3. Derlon, 135.
4. Muhmiin-nnntuntry, 267. 5. Soisson, 43. 6. Bullough, 168. 7. Crow, 147.
8. Stall, 49, 124-26. 9. Rawson, E.A., 184. 10. Briffault 2, 48; see Dentan.

[Link], 349. 12. Murstein, 224. 13. Crow, 247. 14. Robbins, 462.
15. Pearsall, W.B., 243, 350. 16. Marcus, 212. 17. D.E.H. Russell, 48-50.
18. Russell, 44. 19. D.E.H. Russell, 11. 20. D.E.H. Russell, 168.
D.E.H.
21. D.E.H.
Russell, 264. 22. Robbins, 502; Dreifus, 49; Spretnak, 388.
23. Evans, S.S., 226. 24. Goldstein &
Kant, 56, 81-85, 143. 25. Shultz, 165.

Rati

Balinese name of the Goddess, called "Erotic Delight," perhaps a

cognate of ancient Egyptian Ra-ti of the World, "Lady of Heaven,

Mistress of the Gods." J There may have been a connection with the
Greeks' Erato, "Passionate One," the Muse of erotic poetry. 2 Images of
Rati displayed the overflowing sexuality and fertility admired in
ancient matriarchies: huge breasts, a pregnant belly, a mouth twisted to
Heinrich Zimmer one side and shaped like a vulva. Zimmer's description shows the
(1890-1943) Leading typical uneasiness of the western male in the presence of such exagger-
western student of
ated symbols of the Eternal Feminine:
Oriental religions and
Sanskrit texts, The goddess ofmaternity and fertility is indicating, with a traditional
. . .

particularly the sacred twofold symbolic gesture, the two main functions of the female
literature of India.
principle. One forearm lifts the breasts that nourish the creatures she
brings forth, while the other hand, placed at the lower abdomen,
immediately above the organ ofgeneration, presses the ever-pregnant
womb. The sensual mouth, with its half-open lips and broadening gap
at the left corner, has a voluptuous, dolorous
suggesting simulta- trait,

neously the delights oflove and conception and the pangs and throes of
birth. The figure exhibits, frankly, all the innocent shamelessness of
archaic mother figures, but in addition or so it seems the challeng-
ing, calm, watchful, and consciously exhibitionistic attitude ofa curiously
demonic, suprahuman harlot. The hideous and grotesque features are
suffused with a sinister, devilish allure ofsex. . . .

The image, though by no means isolated in the art ofBali, is one of

its most
challenging and meaningful specimens rawly protesting, as . . .

it were,
against the lofty doctrines of release and transcendent redeeming
wisdom, which, in the forms of Buddhist and yogic asceticism, were the
most conspicuous and forceful products, in that
period, of the masculine
After milleniums of the
spirit. struggle of the gurus to disengage man
from the brutish thrall of the demonic
powers ofsheer nature, these
unabated, unconquered, and unreconciled still were there. And they
are both shocking and attractive. *
1.
Budge, G.E. 1, 328. 2. Graves, G.M. 2, 390. 3. Campbell, M.I., 270-71.

846
.avana Ravana

Kingly Hindu "demon" with an ass head worn by a succession often

human kings, the last of whom was slain by the god Krishna. Ravana's 1
""i^^^^^^^^^
images usually showed the ass head in the center, the human heads
ranged along the sides of his neck. The kings have been related to the
ten antediluvian patriarchs postulated by early ass-worshipping He-
brews. See Ass. .

I. Norman, 123.

Raven
In its black plumage, the raven was a natural totem of the deities of
death. Many forms of the Lord of Death were incarnate in a raven.
Chukchi shamans called their ancestral wizard-king Big Raven, he
who was ceremonially castrated and killed. Danes spoke of a Valraven
1

who was Hel's king in the underworld. As a son and mate of the
nether Goddess, he was sometimes personified as King Morvran, "Sea-
Raven." 2
Valkyries could take the form of ravens to drink the blood of slain
3
warriors, which is
why Norse skalds called blood "the raven's drink."
Like a Valkyrie-psychopomp, a raven was supposed to perch on the
shoulder of the Orphic initiate as he entered the temple for the
4
ceremony of mock death and rebirth. According to the Mithraic

Mysteries, the initiate received the title of Raven when he attained

the first degree of enlightenment, which corresponded to ascent to

heaven's lunar sphere, the domain of the Moon-goddess who re-

ceived and cared for the dead. 5
So constant was the death-and-resurrection symbolism of the raven
in Germanic tradition that the new Germanic hero of the Second

Coming, Emperor Frederick, was said to be guarded by ravens as he

waited, sleeping, in his underground sanctuary for the day of his
return to earth. According to the Armenian version, the emperor still
sleeps under a magic hill called Rock of the Raven. 6 In fairy tales, a
raven is often the soul-bird who conducts the hero into mysterious

underground places and out again, or gives information concerning

the after-world.
1. Hays, 412. 2. Graves, W.G., 87. 3. Turville-Petre, 58. 4. Campbell, M.I., 389.
5. Rose, 289. 6. Borchardt, 152.

Reincarnation

Literally, "re-fleshing," the basic Oriental view of cyclic rebirth after

each death; the original meaning of being born again. In the role of

Fate-goddess, the Great Mother governed the Wheel of Becoming

(Greek, kyklos geneseon) which meant the cycles of successive lives,
like the wheel of karma governed by Kali. 1
Patriarchal thinkers tended to deny the doctrine of reincarnation in

847
 Reincarnation favor of the one-way trip to heaven or hell after only one life on
earth. They sought eternal stasis rather than cycles. Yet reincarnation

was the standard belief of all the ancient nations, with the patriarchal
principle of eternal stasis appearing only as a late development.
Pythagoras believed in transmigration of souls from one body to
another: spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and
"The
occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human
2
bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes." Plato
had the same idea. His Republic depicted Greek heroes in the under-
world choosing bodies for their next incarnation on earth. The rebirth
doctrine prevailed among cultured Greeks who had been initiated into

the Mysteries. Their idea was the same as the Tantric idea, which
promised free choice of subsequent bodies to the Enlightened Ones in

the Intermediate State between death and the next life. 3

Even Jewish tradition retained traces of the reincarnation doctrine.
Book of
First In the First Book ofAdam and Eve, Adam offered God a sacrifice of
Adam and Eve One of his own blood, saying, "Be favorable to me every time I die, and bring
the legendary
me to life." 4 Orthodox Jews made it a rule not to name a newborn
apocrypha (works
child after a living person, lest untimely transmission of the name-soul
written in Greek
from Jewish sources) should bring death to the elder. The rule stemmed from the ancient
giving additional belief that every infant possessed the soul of an ancestor in a new body. 5
details or alternative
The Jewish belief that a woman could conceive by bathing in water
versions of the
used to wash a corpse clearly points to a belief in reincarnation. 6 Indeed,
Genesis myths.
the Talmud says Adam was reincarnated in the person of David, and
then again in the Messiah. 7
Reincarnation was the general belief not only in the Orient but

throughout pagan Europe. Caesar said the druids taught this doctrine
of cyclic rebirths. 8 It is still the prevailing opinion
among "primitive"
peoples who imagine their own souls to be temporary bits of the
World Soul that animates all
living things. The Poetic Edda demon-
strates a belief in the karmic wheel of reincarnations, from which one
may be released only by self-destruction. Brynhild's suicide insured that
"born again she may never be." 9 Among the Eskimos as
among
ancient Greeks and Hindus, cycles of reincarnation include all forms of
life.
They say the Goddess of Animals looks after all creatures and
doesn't like to see too many of them killed, since they are of the same
spiritual substance as human beings. "Life is endless," the shamans
say, "only we do not know in what form we shall reappear after
10
death."
Reincarnation was necessarily bound up with motherhood in all
societies, since mothers were its agents and carriers. It was the mother
of Lemminkainen, hero of the
Kalevala, who gave him another life after
he was killed. 11 In northern India, dead infants were buried under the
threshold of the house, so their
spirits might enter the bodies of mothers
who passed in and out and so be born 12
again.
Reincarnation seems to have been a secret tenet of some of the
early Christian churches, not explained to but
ordinary congregations

848
 ivealed in secret after the preliminary stages of initiation into an inner Reincarnation

;roup of "elect" or "perfected" mystics. Later, the exoteric church

repudiated the doctrine of karmic rebirth. In 553 a.d. the Second
Council of Constantinople laid down a decree: "Whosoever shall
support the mythical doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul and the
consequent wonderful opinion of its return, let him be anathema."
Origen, once accounted a saint and a father of the church, taught the Origen (Origenes
doctrine of reincarnation; but three centuries after his death he was Adamantius) Christian
excommunicated "on account of his 13 father, ca. 185-254
officially beliefs."
a.d., an Egyptian who
The
concept of reincarnation made nonsense of the Christian wrote in Greek,
doctrine of reward and punishment after death. If all souls returned to
exerting a powerful
the same Cauldron of Regeneration, including animal souls mingling influence on the early
with human ones, logically they were not differentiated for eternity Greek church. At first

he was accounted a
into "evil" and "good" souls. The West's traditional denial of soul-stuff
saint, but three
to animals, and its insistence that man alone was immortal and stood centuries after his
at thepinnacle of all creation, led to abuses contributing to the present- death he was declared
day ecological crisis. At a symposium of theologians in California, a heretic because of
1970, "virtually all the scholars agreed that the traditional Christian Gnostic elements
found in his writings.
attitude toward nature has given sanction to exploitation of the

environment by science and technology and thus contributed to air and

water pollution, overpopulation and other ecological threats." Lynn
White wrote, "One of the causes of our present crisis is to be found in
the Judeo-Christian traditions which speak of man's dominance
. . .

over nature. ... By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it

possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of

natural objects." M odd even here, those
It is that living things with
feelings are called "objects."
Eastern opinions on reincarnation mitigated man's cruelty to his
them a psychic content
fellow creatures, at the price of attributing to

indistinguishable from that of human beings. It is no great moral victory

to refrain from killing a spider if one sincerely believes the spider
could contain the soul of one's grandmother. It might be more moral to
refrain from killing a spider simply because it is and wishes to
alive,
remain so; and all will to live deserves respect.

Perhaps the best one could say for reincarnation was that it was not
wasteful. Its soul-stuff was preserved and recycled. The Christian
theory was less tidy, with constant new creation of supposedly "immor-
tal" souls, since the world began: a vast accumulation, still
increasing
daily. In practice, however, many Christians secretly believed in some
form of the forbidden reincarnation. Like Orphics, some even
claimed they could remember their former lives. The conspicuous
absence of proof for such claims only seems to strengthen the faith of
those who wish to believe.
I. Bardo Thodol, lxvii. 2. Campbell, P.M., 293-94. 3. Bardo Thodol, 53, 188.
4. Forgotten Books, 17. 5. de Lys, 428. 6. Gaster, 521. 7. Waddell, 226.
8. Squire, 36. 9. H.R.E. Davidson, CM. V.A., 158. 10. Campbell, P.M., 294.
II. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 234. 12. Frazer, F.O.T., 320.
13. Bardo Thodol, 234. 14. Patai, 135-36.

849
 Religion Religion
Latin rehgio meant re-linking or reunion, a restoration of the umbili-
cal bond between nature and man, or between the Mother Goddess and
her son-consort, typified by human sexual union. The Sanskrit

equivalent was yoga, which also meant linking or joining, root of the
1
English "yoke."
A need to re-establish the mother-child bond in symbol may have
been the source of all religion, which Schleiermacher defined as an
infantile "feelingof absolute dependence." 2 Gaylin says "the helpless-
ness of infancy" is transmuted in religious imagery to "a plea for a
solution to the problem of survival." 3 Significantly, the mature, caretak-

ing figure even in patriarchal religious imagery was the female, not
the male. God nearly always had a baby stage, appearing in his Mother's
arms. But the Goddess, even in her virgin form, was full grown and

maternally capable. This curious fact may be based on the attitude of

worshipper to deity as a child to parent, and the true biological parent
recognized by all mammals is the mother. Thus, even patriarchal
religions conceal the "strong unconscious trend towards mother-
4
worship."
Freud defined religion as an attempt to control the mental world
"by means of a world of wishes." Religious images are "fulfilments of
the oldest, strongest, most compelling wishes of mankind." 5 Apart from
the wish to control the Mother figure, and the wish not to die, the

gods made in the image of men expressed a rather

paltry, self-seeking
series of wishes obviously drawn from limited imagination.
Santayana
remarked, "It is pathetic to observe how lowly are the motives that
religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what a

SirRichard Francis hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given
the best morsel, to be remembered, to be
Burton (1821-1890) praised, to beobeyed
British traveler, blindly and punctiliously these have been thought points of honor
with the gods." 6 Of course these were
consul, orientalist,
points of honor with men first.
translator of The As Sir Richard Francis Burton said, "The more I study the religions,
Arabian Nights, author
of more than 50
more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but
books on Indian, himself." 7

Arabian, South Buddhist ascetics concurred, saying a man's self is "nearer to us

American and African than anything else, indeed dearer than a
son, dearer than wealth,
cultures including dearer than all beside. Let a man the Self alone as for if he
a book on the Mormons worship dear,

of Salt Lake City. worship the Self alone as dear, the object of his love will never
Burton was one of the perish." Children were of no interest to the male ascetics: "Realizing
the glory of the Self, the
first Europeans to
sages of old craved not sons nor daughters.
make the pilgrimage to 'What have we to do with sons and
daughters,' they asked, we who
Mecca and Medina;
have known the Self, we who have achieved the
and with J.H. Speke, "8 supreme goal of
existence?'
one of the first to
With the advent of male gods,
discover Lake religions tended to become obses-
Tanganyika and the sive about guilt and sin, worried about what the
gods might punish as
sources of the Nile.
hubris, fearful of giving offense by a careless word or deed. In the short,

850
gods behaved like not particularly loving fathers, or elder males Religion
seeking to maintain ascendancy over younger ones. The Judeo-Chris-
tian deity became one of the foremost examples of Oepidal hostility ^^^^^^^^^^^^
in the world pantheon. He punished the whole human race for one sin

of its remote ancestor, with a punishment so terrible that it would last

forever in merciless agony. The fear of so irrational and vindictive a

deity drove a whole civilization into neurosis. Social evils that

might
have been remedied were unchecked, on the theory that all human
left

beings were sinful wretches who deserved to suffer especially wom-

en, the primary sinners. Serfdom, slavery, legalized brutality, economic
oppression were excused in the name of a vengeful God, whose
all

priesthood insisted on his hostility toward humanity, to the point where

unspeakable atrocities were committed to the greater glory of reli-
9
gion. Christian history shows that religion may follow a humane course
in response to social trends; but it does not lead the way.
With its doctrine of inherited sin, for which no man could atone by
himself without the intercession of the Son whose death the Father
commanded, Christianity set out to formalize the hostile parent figure
in its
way to righteousness was to fear God.
insistence that the only

Accordingly, fathers of the church emphasized this point. Lactantius

claimed all
religion depends on fear; Tertullian asked, "How are you
,0
going to love, unless you are afraid not to love?" The horror story of
God's hostility toward his wretched children was treated as a literal
reality, not a psychological image. This "fiction of timeless truths has
taxed the ingenuity of even the ablest of rationalizers who seek by
means of subtle taxonomic devices to fit
embarrassing new discoveries
into the framework of the old beliefs." n As the old beliefs were

products of primitive ignorance, their framework has had to be stretched

to cover an immense body of fact that it was never meant to cover.

The fit is still

poor:

No ethics and no religion can contain any wisdom that can transcend
man own knowledge about the immediate and future consequences
's

of his own behavior. Every religion and every ethical system must
recognize that it might well be made obsolete by an extension of
human knowledge in almost any area. . . .

Far from any evidence of far-sighted and consistent leadership, the

clergy has shown nothing other than all too human tendency to fill
their sails with whatever winds ofpublic opinion may blow, and always
with their vested interest firmly at the helm. ' 2

The clergy's vested interest now dictates revision of traditional

illusions to suit more modern thinking. Augstein says theologians now
admit that "Christianity has been on the wrong track for sixteen
hundred years, ever since Constantine, that it has had a wrong concep-
tion of God all that time and is only now in a position to disclose its

social mores in short, that it must start all over again. But when
religion was powerful, it never wielded any positive influence on

851
 Religion social why should it do so today, when it is a survival sinking
mores; so
out of sight?"" Churches have not shown any inclination to reform
themselves except when sales of their nonproduct decline to the danger

point, and few take much

active interest in social issues. Farm worker

Roberto Acuna spoke bitterly of his church's indifference: "I could tear
the churches apart. never saw a priest out in the fields trying to help
I

always the church taking from the people."

M
people [I]t's

James Martineau, professor of moral philosophy at Manchester

New College, summed up the dilemma of conventional religion in
The Seat ofAuthority ofReligion:

Christianity . . . has been mainly evolved from that which is unhistorical

and perishable in its sources; from what is unhistorical in its traditions,

mythological in its and misapprehended in the oracles of

preconceptions,
its prophets. From the fable ofEden
to the imagination of the last

trumpet, the whole story of the divine order of the world is dislocated and
deformed. . . .

The spreading alienation of the intellectual classes ofEuropean

society from Christendom, and the detention of the rest in their
spiritual culture at a level not much above that of the Salvation Army, are
social phenomena which ought to bring home a very solemn appeal to
the consciences of ordinary churches. ,f

Some scholars find it

baffling that man seems unable to found
an ethic or a philosophy on perceptions of reality, but instead must cling
to crude myths even to the point of filling his own life and the lives
of others with unnecessary horrors. 16 Among the worst of these is the
real violence with which man attacks the
questioners or doubters of
his myths: as if to kill his own reasonable doubts before
they rise up to
the surface of his mind and become fully conscious.
To purvey an unenlightened education, teaching myths as if they
were facts, is another abuse of cultural communication, inflicting on
children a confusion between truth and fantasy that may haunt them all

their lives and prevent them from developing clear thought on any
subject. It isn't always easy for a child to know where the real world

stops and his own imagination begins. If adults can't help him draw
the line, because their own minds are muddled by an age-old ignorance,
the next generation will repeat the errors of centuries.

Religions affect to purvey "higher Truth," but all too often their
capital-T Truth bears an uncanny resemblance to a capital-L Lie. One
theologian said the objective of religion is "to know the truth and to
liveby it"; but the same theologian defined religion as "believing things
that do not seem to be
so, and always it is believing what cannot be

proved to be so." A less subtle seminarian once defined religion as "the

Rev. Kirsopp Lake
power that enables us to believe what we know to be untrue." 17 No
British ecclesiastical
wonder the Rev. Kirsopp Lake lamented that a
historian, author of clergyman is "apt to
have a lower standard of intellectual
Landmarks in the honesty than would be tolerated
History of Early
in any other
profession." A noted historian writes: "The churches have
Christianity, 1920. long brought up the intellectual rear of our civilization, and . . . their

852
I claims to spiritual leadership are still weakened by their engrained Religion
I
tendency to resist new knowledge and aspiration. Most are still

disposed to a dogmatic supernaturalism that saps the intellectual honesty ^^^^^^^^^^^^

and courage essential for a responsible idealism." 18

It is often taken for granted that religion helps to keep the ordinary
citizen honest, presumably through fear of divine punishment. This
may be a misapprehension:

Every survey ever undertaken of the composition of the criminal popula-

tion reveals a percentage of the avowedly religious higher than a

random sample of the population will show. . . . Little or no relationship

was found between the presence or absence, intensity, or kind of
expression ofreligious faith, and conduct or moral standard. Some of
those who were most skeptical, or who denied all need offaith or
concern with religious problems, were unimpeachable in behavior, kind
and helpful to others, and of high integrity. . . .

The many attempts to find evidence that religion or its practice have
[sic] desirable consequences in crime prevention have without excep-
tion ended in failure . . . there seems to be no convincing evidence that

conventional religion, of itself, has proved an effective antidote to

crime. ' 9

Unfortunately, in the western world religion has proved more

often an instrument of oppression than a guide to more honest or more
Churches generally supported the powerful at the
tolerant living.

expense of the powerless. For example, the church helped even the
crudest monarchies in history by formulating and upholding the
doctrine of the divine right of kings. In the present century the world
has seen cardinals praying for the success of dictators. 20
The common symbol of religious organization is "the shepherd
and the herd he must tend and at the bottom of it lies the childlike
. . .

concept that our elders run the world for our benefit." 21 Of course, the

shepherd doesn't tend the herd for the benefit of the sheep. He tends
them for his own benefit. He makes his living from them. In some ways
the analogy is
apt. Ecclesiastical"shepherds" in the past have resorted
to every imaginable crime to increase their profits: land-grabbing,
vandalism, false advertising, defamation of character, forgery, plagia-
rism, even all-out war and murder, ever since Pope Leo the Great
endorsed the death penalty for "erroneous beliefs." There is still a
tendency among Christians to "assume that theirs is the only true
religion, and that their Christian duty is to convert the rest of the
world. The rest of the world, which happens to include the great

majority of mankind, still resents this assumption." 22

Christian elitism allowed theologians to "believe that they speak
for everyone when they lecture about things like guilt, love, sin, and
grace. This naivete allows them to make definitive statements about the
true way in which all people should live and think about these
matters. Theologians are ignorant of what every anthropologist
knows i.e, that the forms of our thought derive from the forms of

853
 Renenet our culture." It has been demonstrated often enough that women
particularly suffered from the suppression
of their own natural reli-
of an
^^^^^^^^^^^ gious imagery in favor imposed masculine, alien, hierarchical

system. "For women to become intellectually responsible and cre-

ative members of society, they have to outgrow Oedipal dependence on
paternal authority whether that authority is embodied in a paternalis-
tic husband, or father, or God." Feminists have shown "how important

the demise of Yahweh and Christ is to the intellectual independence

of Western women. Freud was certain that Judaism and Christianity
stunted the intellectual maturity of men. It is probable, however, that
these religions are even more damaging to the intellectual growth of
women." 23
One might hope that, if women again become free to create their
own religion as they were in the distant past, it would be a religion
less sullied by the profit motive, the cruelty, hostility, and Oedipal
jealousy that disfigures the religious images of men. One might hope,
also, that it would remain open to correction by new scientific discover-

ies, as Christianity has never been. Thomas Aquinas warned long ago
that the faith would become a matter of ridicule "if any Catholic, not

gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what

scientific scrutiny shows be false." 24
Later churchmen forgot this
to
advice. In consequence they can offer no reason other than the

church's decree at present to endorse such impossibilities as a

virgin
birth, transubstantiation, resurrection of the flesh, and all the biblical
[Link] the same time they must deny the very same impossibilities
claimed by Christianity's historical rivals, on equally credible (or

incredible) grounds.
It seems the religions of the western world have reached a period
of crisis and must dissolve and re-form new principles,
according to
perhaps more realistic and humanistic ones.
1. Campbell, Or. M., 13; Muller, 315. 2. Starkloff, 38. 3. Becker, D.D., 213.
4. Montagu, T., 273. 5. Augstein, 223, 305. 6. Muller, 85. 7. Edwardes, xx.
8. Upanishads, 80, 111. 9. Muller, 159. 10. Cavendish, P.E., 163; Muller, 86.
[Link],85. 12. Vetter, 470-73, 520-21. 13. Augstein, 328. 14. Terkel, 32.
15. H. Smith, 398-99. 16.
Campbell, P.M., 4. 17. Vetter, 18-19, 257-58.
18. Muller, 250, 354. 19. Vetter, 479-80. 20.
Muller, 154, 185. 21. Augstein, 200.
22. Muller, 184, 45. 23.
Goldenberg, 115, 35. 24. Muller, 249.

Renenet
Egypt's "Lady of the Double Granary," Goddess of suckling, who
gave each baby its ren (secret name-soul) along with its mother's milk.
Sometimes she wore a lion head, like Hathor; sometimes a
serpent
head, Uraeus; sometimes she wore the plumes of Mother Maat, the
Goddess-Named-Truth. Renenet represented the ancient matriar-
1

chal theory that a child's soul

is bestowed
by its mother after she has
given birth to its
body. The ren soul was kept secret, since an enemy

854
jtvho discovered it could work evil charms against the possessor. 2 See Repanse de Joie
Name. Revelation
1 . Larousse, 38. 2. H. Smith, 24. ^_^^_^^^^_

Repanse de Joie
"Dispenser of Joy," the Fairy Queen who kept the Holy Grail in her
temple-palace at Montsalvatch. She was identified with Elaine the Lily
1

Maid Arthurian cycle, and with several other versions of the

in the

White Lady, showing that she was simply a medieval transformation of

the Moon-goddess with her Cauldron of Regeneration. Her title was

a traditional epithet of a harlot-priestess. See Grail, Holy.
[Link].L.M.A.,200.

Restituta, Saint
"
"Restored One, a saint whose legend probably was based on a
vandalized and half-burned statue of the Goddess found on the isle of
Ischia and replaced in her temple. According to the Christian myth,
Restituta was a "virgin martyr" slain in Africa and consigned to a boat

filled with burning pitch. The boat drifted ashore on Ischia where her
remains were taken up by Christians and "reverently cared for." '
The
more likely possibility was that the Ischians took up the damaged
image of their Goddess and restored her to her temple after an attack by
fanatical iconoclasts.

1. Brewster, 245.

Revelation
Latin revektio meant to draw back the veil (velum).
1
It was the
Goddess's rainbow veil that concealed the future and the secrets of the
spirit under the colors of earthly appearances. After death, men might
see her "face to face." A vision of the naked Goddess was vouchsafed to
her sacred kings, who could draw back the veil of her temple, the

hymen, pierce her virginity and die in their mating, to become gods.
But, as the Goddess said on her temple at Sais, "No mortal has yet
been able to lift the veil which covers me."
2
Those who saw her
unveiled were no longer mortal.
In time, the word revelation was applied to every religious vision

or opinion. It even described the stereotyped pronouncements of

fortune-tellers.

The Bible's Book of Revelation purports to be a doomsday-vision

experienced by St. John the Divine, but it is in fact a collection of

images and phrases from many sources. Literature of this kind was

855
 Rhadamanthys plentiful in the first
few centuries a.d., and it still occurred a thousand
Rhea years later in European pagan traditions, e.g. the very similar Voluspa
of the Scandinavian version of doomsday.
^^^^^^^^^^^ (Sybil's Vision)
1. Funk, 282. 2. Lurousse, 37.

Rhadamanthys
"Diviner," one of three Cretan god-kings born of the Full-Moon
goddess Europa, fathered by Zeus. The other two were Sarpedon and
Minos.
Rhadamanthys was said to have been so wise and just that in the
underworld he was made a judge of the dead, like the similar bull-

king Yama in India. Some myths said when Rhadamanthys was installed
of the Elysian Fields he married Alcmene, "Moon-
in the paradise

power," the virgin mother of Heracles. Thus he was another form of

1

the Moon-bull king, like Zeus himself as consort of the Moon-cow

Europa a son identified with his divine father, like all other versions of
theLord of Death.
1. Graves, G.M. 1,294.

Rhea
Cretan name of the Aegean Universal Mother or Great Goddess,
who had no consort and ruled supreme before the coming of patriarchal
Hellenic invaders. Rhea was the
archetypal Triple Goddess, with
several titles
suggesting her separate functions: she was Britomartis the
Sweet Virgin, and Dictynna the Lawgiving Mother of Mount Dicte,
and Aegea the foundress of Aegean civilizations. Another of her names 1

was Coronis, both a carrion crow (death-goddess) and a

virgin mother
(life-goddess) of the great hero of healing, Asclepius, whose Titan cult
the Hellenic Zeus angrily destroyed.
Rhea was not restricted to the Aegean area. Among ancient tribes
of southern Russia she was Rha, the Red One, another version of
Kali as Mother Time clothed in her garment of blood when she
devoured allthe gods, her offspring. 2 The same Mother Time
became the Celtic Goddess Rhiannon, who also devoured her own
childrenone by one. 3 This image of the cannibal mother was
typical
everywhere of the Goddess as Time, who consumes what she brings
forth; or as Earth, who does the same. When Rhea was
given a
consort in Hellenic myth, he was called Kronus or
Chronos, "Father
Time," who devoured his own children, in imitation of Rhea's earlier
activity. He also castrated and killed his own father, the
Heaven-god
Uranus; and he in turn was threatened by his own son, Zeus.
4
These
myths reflect the primitive succession of sacred kings castrated and killed
by their supplanters. was
(See Kingship.) It
originally Rhea Kronia,

856
 Mother Time, who wielded the castrating moon-sickle or scythe, a Rhinemaidens
Scythian weapon, the instrument with which the Heavenly Father
vas "reaped." Rhea herself was the Grim Reaper.
Pre-Roman Latium knew her as Rhea Silvia, "Rhea of the
Woodland," an early form of the Moon-goddess Diana, called the
irst Vestal Virgin and the mother of Romulus and Remus. Under the

rule of Rhea Silvia, the Vestal Virgins were neither celibate nuns, nor
servants of the state, as they became in later ages. They were choosers
and deposers of the early Latin kings, a college oimatronae who
ruled the rulers and took no husbands. Consequently all their children
were begotten by "gods," not by men, as were the children of Rhea
Once born, Rhea's children were cared for by Acca
Silvia herself.

Larentia, a "holy harlot" or high priestess who also mothered all the
Rome. See Akka.
ancestral spirits (lares) of

Hellenic myth assimilated Rhea as both mother and wife of the

Great God Zeus. Zeus "raped" his mother Rhea because she forbade
him to make a monogamous marriage (her own people had practiced
group marriage). Then again, Zeus "raped" his sister-bride Hera,
Rhea's daughter, alter ego, and virgin phase, whose name was really the
same as Rhea's He Era, the Earth. 5

Having forced Rhea-Hera to marry him, Zeus became a symbol of

Greek wife-abuse. The Mother and Father of the Olympian gods
despised one another, constantly bickered and argued; mythographers
always carefully described Hera's hostile "jealousy" of Zeus's many
impregnations of mortal virgins to provide the earth with god-begotten
heroes. To spite her twin-brother-son-husband, Rhea-Hera returned
to her ancient birth-magic and parthenogenetically conceived and bore
the serpent god Python just asunder the archaic title of Eurynome
she had created the world alone and given birth to the serpent god
Ophion.
Another name for Rhea was Pandora, "the All-giver," which

Hesiod converted into an Eve-like giver of disasters to mankind,

6
through her excessive curiosity. The myth had its origin in the idea that
the Goddess did indeed give all kinds of fate, death as well as birth,

suffering as well as joy, in her endless time-cycles.

I, Lurousse, 85-86. 2. Mxhunirvanatantra, 295-96. 3. Squire, 286.
4. Graves, CM. 1, 40. 5. Graves, G.M. 1, 51, 53-54. 6. Graves, G.M. 1, 148.

Rhinemaidens
Teutonic river-nymphs, original owners of the golden treasure of the

Nibelungs. Since the Nibelungs were "shades," or spirits of the dead,

the Ring symbolized the karmic wheel and the Rhinemaidens were
keepers of the dead who were consigned to water, like aquatic Valkyries.

They resembled eastern Vilas and Homeric Sirens; hearing their

sweet songs could mean death to men. In antiquity, such songs were

857
 with sending a corpse to the Water-
Robin sung by priestesses in connection
mother by way of the funerary boat.

Robin
God of the Witches, with numerous variations: Robin Goodfellow,
Robin son of Art, Robin the Bobbin, Robin Hood, or Robin Red-
breast the last apparently derived from memories of the Norman
sacred king with blood-runes or gens-odd carved in the flesh of his
breaston his "red-letter day" (see Runes). As Lord of the Hunt and
Robin was Saracenic, a dying god he became the slain Cock Robin, whose executioner in the

from Rah-bin, "a seer," nursery rhyme did him my wee bow and arrow" a Saxon
in "with
cognate with the version of the Celtic Cu Chulainn who died at Mag Muirthemne
Semitic rabba, "lord,"
bound to the sacred pillar and riddled with arrows. 1

reb or rabbi, a priest.

Robin's cult penetrated
The red-breasted bird of spring was Cock Robin's soul; the red was
northern Europe his blood, shed by a pagan sacrifice, though a pseudo-Christian
from roots in Moorish
legend tried to explain it in a different way. A robin tried to pluck away
7
Spain. The Iberian
the thorns from Christ's crown, but only succeeded in tearing its own
peninsula was not 2
breast, so all robins had red breasts thereafter. This fable failed to
Christianized until
the overthrow of its remove the curse of Cock Robin in the opinion of Christian authori-
Arab governors in who knew quite well that he was a phallic god.
ties

the 11th century. Like In Cornwall, Robin meant a cock in the other sense: a penis. His
Scandinavia in the
surname Hood, or Hud, referred to the symbolic pine log, planted in
same period, it was a
Mother Earth as a sacred pillar. A pamphlet of 1639 showed Robin as a
fount of pagan ideas
and practices.
horned, hoofed, ithyphallic satyr, leading witches' revels in the
3
company of a black dog and an owl.
Robin Hood, Wizard of the Greenwood, was a real person or
persons leading Sherwood Forest covens in the early 14th century,
with a wife or paramour taking the role of the Goddess Maerin, or

Marian, or Mari-Anna, the Saxon wudu-maer, literally the Mary or

the Mother of the Grove. Great sacramental feasts in honor of Robin
and his lady were remembered in popular rhymes nearly three
centuries later, when he was "Robin the Bobbin, the big-bellied Ben,
who ate more meat than fourscore men." 4

Family names can be found dating back to the "greenwood

marriages" performed by heathen shamans, symbolized by the rene-
gade Friar Tuck. Morrises and Morrisons descended from orgiastic
5
Morris-dancers, also called Marian's morrice-men. Like Robin (or
Robinson), Morris dancers' May Day rites came from Moorish Spain.
The original word was morisco, "Moorish." 6
The common folk of England liked Robin, which is why they
called him Goodfellow, or Puck, which descended from a word for
"God." He was supposed to right the wrongs inflicted on the peasants
by the church. He stole the treasures of the rich clergy and nobles
and bestowed them on the poor. By force of arms he maintained a
heathen preserve in the wildwood, a sanctuary for heretics and others

858
persecuted by the
church. Popular legend said Robin was born of a Roch, Saint

virginimpregnated by Oberon, King of the Fairies. He traveled to Romance

fairyland, and was shown "many secrets which he never did open to the
^^m^mm^^^^m^
8
world."
Like the Greeks' Pan, Robin defended unspoiled land against the
encroachment of towns. In country districts, each village set aside a
plot of raw woodland, which was not to be disturbed, because it

belonged to The Goodfellow, or the Good Man. 9 Elders of the

Scottish church in 1 594 exerted their utmost influence to abolish this

Goodfellow's Croft, which they called the devil's acre, claiming it

10
gave "great offence."
Mystery plays of the 1 6th century still continued to celebrate

Robin, Maid Marian, Tuck, Little John, and the other heathen
Friar

heroes. A Churchwardens Account Book lists the prices of costumes for

Robin and Marian as King and Queen of the May. The lady
impersonating Marian wore a crown, a purple coif, a blue surcoat, a
11
yellow skirt, and red sleeves. In such a way did the
church ingest

pagan ceremonials by sponsorship, and eventually deprive them of

serious meaning.
I. Larousse, 233. 2. Bowness, 38. [Link], W.G, 441. 4. Spence, 109.
5. Graves, W.G, 441-43. 6. Hazlitt,422. 7. Shah, 210; Ravensdale &
Morgan, 153.
8. Keightley, 287, 289, 315-16. 9. W. Scott, 78. 10. Hazlitt, 283.
II. Hazlitt, 384-85, 520.

Roch, Saint
The Roman church's official protector against the plague. French
churchmen declared the pestilence would never enter a house protected
1

by the written letters V.S.R. (Vive Saint Roch). Unfortunately, the

charm didn't work.
1. Male, 271.

Romance
Poets of the Middle Ages kept alive many druidic and other pre-
Christian sacred tales, orally transmitted from generation to generation
manner of the Vedas, under the guise of "romances." Earlier
in the

rhyme-makers were priests of the Goddess, who gave them the gift of
inspiration from her magic cauldron, or Holy Grail. A poet was like a 1

seer or wizard, able to deal in "words of power," to create by the charms

of speech, a blessing of the Muse. Medieval poets were worshippers
of Art and Woman, founders of the cult of courtly love, singers of

mansongr, the "woman-songs" beloved by the Goddess; and they

were mockers of the church.
Poets seem to have regarded themselves as a dispossessed priest-
hood of the Goddess Love (Minne), who inspired the church's

859
Romance hostility. Before the 13th century, poets were denied Christian commu-
nion, and denounced by churchmen as "ministers of Satan." Later,

they acceptance by using biblical and theological motifs in their

won
songs, but romantic poetry remained suspiciously heretical. 2
Old romances depicted the clergy as rude, brutish fellows who
mistreated delicate ladies, and even displayed sadistic behavior toward
their own brethren. 3 The pagan gods were credited with warmer
Frithiof s saga suggested that, though Christ despised
personalities. Frithiof 's saga
Swedish national poem lovers, the god Balder did not. Lovers could meet in the temples of
composed by Esias Balder, "the pious god," because "Is not his love for Nanna part of
Tegner (1782-1846), "
his own nature, pure and warm? Romantic heroes generally avoided
based on an Old
Icelandic saga.
the Christian paradise and went to the earthly one,
governed by the
Goddess Morgan, or the Fairy Queen. 4
According to the Lay of Gudrun, the poet had more magic power
than any priest. Like the poet-savior Orpheus, he could charm birds
and beasts with his music, and even raise the dead. His songs were
better liked than clerical sermons:

Whate'er he might be singing, to no one seemed it long;

Forgotten in the minster were priest and choral song,
Church bells no longer sounded so sweetly as before,
And every one who heard him longed for the minstrel sore. s

Minstrels' ballads have been praised as works that seem "to have
looked deepest into the human heart," excluding their occasional
Christian moralizing which is
always "manifestly a later addition."
Steenstrup calls attention "to what small degree the ecclesiastical, or the

strictly Catholic, element gets leave to appear.

. . .
[T]he religious, . . .

the ecclesiastical, the Catholic element has been clapped on later, and
6
... it is a disturbing and jarring force." The bards invoked not God but
Erda Mother Earth and the Goddess Minne, whose name was a
7
synonym for Love.
To churchmen, love was "nothing." To play at a game of chance
"for love" was to play for nothing. 8 The expression "for love or

money" began with this distinction between pagan and Christian

motivations. The
troubadours and minnesingers acted for Minne-
9
dienst, the "service of love." Of course, donations were always

acceptable.
The cult of Love
rarely included marriage, which was usually
arranged by the couple's elders, for economic reasons. Ladies of the
Courts of Love in southern France said true love couldn't exist between
married people. True love could exist only between a lady and her
chosen knight, who was expected to prove
"gallantry" in combat before
he could be a "gallant," or lover. Ladies told their suitors, "It is
Chansons de gestes
Old French epic necessary that for love of meyou should do deeds of chivalry I will

poetry of the 11th to giveyou all my love as soon as I have seen you fight your first joust."
13th centuries. Chansons de gestes advised warriors to strike their enemies squarely in \

the bowels, so as to win the love of "the most beautiful ladies of the
10
court."

S60
 This was a curiously mammalian-biological system, in which Romance
women watched men in combat and rewarded the winners with

sexual favors. Bishop Jacques of Vitrycomplained that knights fought in

tournaments only to gain "the favors of the shameless women whose
tokens they wear." The monk Gildas described the barbarian aristocracy
as "addicted to vice, adulterous, and enemies of God." u
Old ballads and romances depict a society in which men constantly
showed off to excite women's admiration, almost like male birds and
beasts displaying themselves to females. Norse skalds said everything

men did was to impress the ladies. When women were watching,
the ladies and
they spurred their horses to go faster, so "readily will look
Geoffrey of Monmouth said the noble
12
lasses, as we are passing."

women were celebrated for their wit, and "esteemed none worthy of
their love, but such as had given proof of their valor in three several
13
battles."

There arose a corollary belief that no man could fight well unless
said a man couldn't
inspired by the promise of his lady-love. Tristan
be a warrior unless he was a lover. Lancelot became invincible only
because Elaine gave him her sexual-symbolic love-token, a red silk
sleeve as "sheath" for his "sword." Minnesinger Wolfram von Eschen- Wolfram von
bach wrote of the love-trance that made a knight invincible, like a Eschenbach Highly
influential 13th-
berserker. Wolfram's Parsifal asserted that for every kind of spiritual aid,
century author of such
including courage in battle, "it is better to trust a woman than
poetic epics as
14
God." Willehalm, Titurel,
This Germanic Parsifal incorporated no Christian ceremony but Parzival, and various
was written as if the church didn't exist. Parsifal's prayers were Tagelieder.

addressed to his lady, who magically protected him in battle and gave
him success as if she were a sacred agent of the ancient Lady of
Victory. He fought in a love-trance of communion with her spirit,
15
which made him virtually superhuman.
This pagan knight fought his own alter ego, a Christian knight who
fell back before the onslaught of the "heathen man" made invincible
by his lady's love. "The heathen never wearied of love; his heart,
therefore, was great in combat." When he cried the name of his
16
queen's dwelling place, "his battle strength increased."
For a while, certain sects of warriors undertook to defend the
beleaguered rights of women, in the name of the Goddess. From this

period dated romantic stories of knights who rescued "castles of

women" from robber barons who had seized their property. About the
12th century, when the church began to arm its laws with the teeth of
the Inquisition, emphasis shifted from defense of women to defense of
the church. Sir Parsifal, or Perceval, presented a typical example of
the pagan hero who finally turned Christian and renounced women.
At he was a champion of Love; but later he was "purified,"
first

and described by an ecclesiastical writer as "one of the men of the

world at that time which most believed in our Lord Jesus Christ, for in

those days there were but few folks who believed in God perfectly."
Perceval set out to rescue "a gentlewoman which is disherited," but

861
 Romance changed his allegiance in mid-adventure, and renounced her as a
seductress and witch. 17
Romantic literature reveals continual conflict between the min-
strel's love-oriented philosophy and the church's anti-love attitude.

Churchmen said lovers became "vile" by forgetting God and making

the beloved woman a divinity. One priest said the bards "sinfully love
women, whom they make into deities," and this was exactly the same as
18
Johann Huizinga loving Satan. Professor Huizinga noted that "from the side of
Dutch were poured upon love in all its aspects." Yet the
(1872-1945) religion, maledictions
historian, author of "Love was a divine visitation, quelling mere animal
poets insisted that
The Waning of the
lust. . The lover, whose heart was rendered gentle by the discipline of
. .

Middle Ages (1924),

his lady, was initiate to a sphere of exalted realizations that no one
professor of history at
Groningen and who had experienced such could possibly identify (as the church
Leiden University until 19
identified them) with sin."
he was arrested by
Modern scholars have struggled to define the later stages of the
the Nazis in 1942.
courtly-love movement, when the Meistersinger school was founded
by men with the title of Frauenlob, "Lover of Women." The obvious

spirituality of the movement led some to interpret it as a sentimental

asceticism inspired by adoration of the virgin Mary. Yet some of the

minstrels' poetry was intensely even grossly erotic, focused on a
real female body, not an ethereal vision. Scholars failed to understand

this combination of spirituality and carnality because they failed to

its historical root: the penetration of Europe by
discover yet another
wave of Tantric sex-worship.
The most mysterious element in courtly love was the secret
technique of lovemaking known as drudaria, druerie, or karezza. It
can only have been a western version of Tantric maithuna, the sacra-
ment of coitus reservatus. This alone can explain its blend of erotic
and spiritual ecstasy. Significantly, one of the heroes of courtly love
most revered as a model for poets was Tristan, who had reversed his

name and called himself Tantris for the secret understanding of his lady-
love. 20 See Tantrism.
The poets kept their secret but obliquely referred to it when
defending themselves against charges of lechery. They claimed their
Guilhem aim was not selfish pleasure but only gratification of the lady. Montan-
Montanhagol Provencal hagol wrote, "A lover should on no account desire what would
who took
troubadour
dishonor his lady-love," probably meaning an unwelcome pregnancy.
the lead in raising
ideals of romantic love
"Desire never had any power over me to make me wish her to whom
in Renaissance I have given myself aught that should not be. I would not reckon that a
poetry. pleasure which might debase her." Another poet said, "A true lover
must seek the interest of his beloved a hundred times more than his
own." 21
The poets were angered by certain ignorant men who copied
courtly-love behavior without understanding its basis. Men who
pursued women for their own sexual satisfaction were regarded as
vulgar boors who "confounded everything by their behavior, which is

no better than that of dogs." Men who didn't understand the true

862
initiation of love "adopted other maxims, which bring about shame." Romance
Marcabru said scornfully, "If they call that drudaria, they lie." Arnaud
Daniel claimed to have renounced the love of wealthy women, who
knew only pleasures of the shamefulsort. "From such love as moves me
are debarred those disloyal seekers of women who destroy courtli-
ness."
22
Courtliness was synonymous with Minnedienst, the service of Marcabru, or
25 Marcabrun One of the
women who knew how to be served.
earliest Provencal
Where did the bards learn of maithuna? Probably from several troubadours, of whose
sources. The gypsies practiced and gypsies infiltrated Europe from
it, work about 40 pieces
24
at least the 1 1th century on. Even more influential was the Moorish- survive, dated ca. 1135-
1148.
Saracen tradition emanating from Spain and the Middle East after
the crusades. Yoni-worship was preserved by such sects as the Sufis,
whose "Sufi Way" involved a sexual initiation by a fravashi, an occult
love-priestess like the Tantric shakti. Sufi sages taught that a man can
find spiritual fulfillment only in love, realizing Woman as "a ray of
deity." The word Sufi contained "in enciphered form, the concept of
Love." Deciphered, it reduced by the Arabic numerological system
to three letters: FUQ, meaning "that which is transcendent." 25
Under the same language system, the title of a singer was Ta Ra B,
which picked up the Spanish suffix -ador and became "troubadour."
Thus the troubadours' worship of Love was a synthesis of pagan and
Oriental themes, founded on the idea of Woman as the true source
of benevolence. Troubadour Bernard de Ventadorn wrote to his be-
loved: "Noble lady, nothing do I ask of thee but that thou shouldst
Gottfried von
takeme for thy servant. I would serve as one serves a good lord,
Strassburg One of the
whatever reward I might gain. Behold, I am at thy command: sincere
greatest medieval
and humble, gay and courteous. Neither bear nor lion art thou, to kill German poets, author
26
me, as I here to thee surrender." Gentleness and sensuality reigned of the epic Tristan
und Isolde (early Bth
together in the mythical fairyland visited by Aucassin, a French roman-
tic hero based on the Arabic "sultan of love," Al-Kasim. 27 century) and many
,
lyric poems.
Minnesingers worshipped their Goddess Minne as Love, but
mocked the syncretism of Christian dogmas. Gottfried von Strassburg
Walther von der
wrote: "The
very virtuous Christ is as yielding as a wind-blown sleeve;
Vogelweide (ca. 1170-
he adapts himself and goes along whatever way he is pressed, as
1230) Great German
28
readily and anyone could ask." Wolfram von Eschenbach
easily as lyric poet, self-described

parodied the pope as a eunuch named Clinschor ("Clergyman") who

as aMinnesinger,
29 author of many love
offered his services to the devil. Walther von der Vogelweide repri-
poems, protege of
manded the clergy for their condemnation of love:
several Swabian and

Thuringian princes.
Whoever says that Love is sin,
Let him consider first and well:
Konrad von
Right many virtues lodge therein
With which we all, by rights, should dwell. * Megenburg German
anti-papal imperialist
scholar, author of
Minnesinger Konrad of Megenburg wrote a scathing satire
Planctus Ecclesie in
which he presented in the form of a debate between Lady Church
Germaniam (1337) and
(Mary-Ecclesia) and her servants, the clergy, who only pretended to De translatione
serve her, but actually served her rival, Lady Avarice-and- Vainglory. Romani Imperii (1354).

863
 Romulus and Remus Lady Church denounced her servants in most unladylike terms and
"
called their real mistress a whore, a wretched nurse of vice, a
31
^^^^^^^^^^^ superlative evil, a hypocrite."
Out of the courtly-love movement came one of the oddest of
Christian pseudo-saints: St. Dymphna, a corruption of the romantic

poet'sname for his lady-love, madonna or ma dompna, "my mistress,

my lady." As an erstwhile patron of the moon-madness that sent the
poet into his love-trance, she is still advertised today as a healer of
"emotional distress." 32
Language and metaphors of romance in general point to disguised
heretical allegories, which also survived in folklore and pagan custom,
drama, children's games, and witchcraft.
1. Briffault 3, 451. 2. Briffault 3, 446-48. 3. Guerber, L.M.A., 121.
[Link], L.M.A., 271, 138. 5. Guerber, L.M.A., 26. 6. Steenstrup, 188, 199, 207.
[Link]-Petre,251. 8. Hazlitt, 371. 9. Jung von Franz, 75. &
10. Briffault 3, 409-412, 428. 11. Briffault 3, 384, 417. 12. Hollander, 152.
[Link],223. 14. Campbell, CM., 462. 15. Campbell, CM., 476-77.
16. Campbell, CM., 558. 17. Malory 2, 199,204. 18. Briffault 3, 490,494.
19. Campbell, Oc.M., 509. 20. Guerber, L.M.A., 238. 21. Briffault 3,489.
22. Briffault 3, 482-90. 23. Jung & von Franz, 75. 24. Derlon, 1 59.
25. Shah, 29, 121, 135, 176. 26. Campbell, CM., 62, 179. 27. Murstein, 150.
28. Campbell, F.W.C, 216. 29. Campbell, CM., 512. 30. Campbell, CM., 181.
31. Borchardt, 272. 32. Murstein, 1 50.

Romulus and Remus

Offspring of Rhea Silvia, nurslings of the Etruscan wolf bitch Lupa,
these familiar twins were generally regarded as founders of Rome.
Remus was killed
by his jealous brother, in a myth that placed
beginning of Roman patriarchy just as the myth of Cain
fratricide at the

and Abel placed fratricide at the beginning of Jewish patriarchy. 1

According to legend, the followers of Romulus were all men,

having no right to own land under the old matriarchal law, forced to
marry Sabine property-owning women to acquire community standing
and the sanguis ac genus, blood of the race, which was transmitted
only on the female
2
line. Some said Romulus's men were criminals and
outlaws who could
not participate in the sacred succession of clans. 3
They had to abduct Sabine women, to establish curiae (clans); but each
clan continued to carry thename of its original ancestress. 4 Roman
writers claimed Romulus named the clans in honor of the Sabine

women; but in fact the Latin clans had been named after their
women for as long as anyone could remember. See Motherhood.
Romulus himself was a patriarchal invention based on an ancient
feminine clan name: the Etruscan
gens Romulia, the real founders of
Rome. 5
1 .
Lamusse, 315. 2. Dumezil, 68. 3. Pepper & Wilcock, 83. 4. Briffault 1 , 422, 427.
5. Carter, 22.

H64
 Rosalia ; Saint Rosalia, Saint

Rosary
I
Patron saint of Palermo, a loosely Christianized Venus Rosalia, the

j
pagan Goddess symbolized by the Holy Rose, a yonic symbol. The
j
usual virgin martyr myth was invented for Rosalia, but not even her
:
bones were real. The osteologist Buckland studied Rosalia's relics and
I
found them to be the bones of a goat. Nevertheless, even after this
1

!
discovery, the goat's bones retained an undiminished power to perform

j
healing miracles that had been the speciality of Rosalia's shrine for
j

many centuries.
1. White 2, 29.

Rosary
Dominicans pretended that the rosary began with St. Dominic's
"beatific vision" at the church of St. Sabina in Rome. Actually,

Christians copied the rosary from eastern pagans. Its real origin was
the Hindu japamak, "rose-chaplet," called the Rosary of the Mantras
Upanishads Buddhist
worn by Kali Ma. Its alternately red and white beads symbolized her
scriptures representing
Mother and Virgin forms (see Gunas). The Rosary Upanishad said the
the final stage in Vedic
sounds of her mantras were white, the bead-touchings were red. 1

thought, dealing with

Arab poets viewed both white and red roses as emblems of the female the philosophy known

principle, and called their rosaries wardija, "rose-garden." The same

as Vedanta. The Katha
word in Latin, rosarium, described early rosaries associated solely with Upanishad discusses
transmigration of souls,
the cult of the virgin Mary up to the 14th century. The Litany of the nature of eternal
Loreto calls Mary "Queen of the Most Holy Rosary." The German life, the doctrine of
term Rosenkranz, "rose- wreath," was sometimes shortened to Kranz- maya, and an account
lein, "little wreath," a symbol of virginity or "flower of maidenhead."
2 of a visit to Yama, Lord
of the Dead.
In the east, the flower-wreath represented sacred marriage, circling
the "head" of the phallic god. 3
Like a portable prayer-wheel, the rosary was used everywhere to Book of the Dead
count repetitive prayers or mantras. Constant repetition of such
Common name for the
collection of
verbal charms was believed to bring about blissful after-life, automatic-
Egyptian funerary
ally. The Book of the Dead said the spoken formula of the rosary (in
papyri written
Egypt hung with an image of Horus) was "a protection upon earth, and between 1500 and 1350
it will secure for the deceased the affection of men,
gods, and the B.C., including

which are Moreover it acteth as a spell in Khert- Vignettes, Hymns,

Spirit-souls perfect.
Chapters, and
Neter, but it must be recited
by thee on behalf of the Osiris Ra, descriptive Rubrics.
regularly and continually millions of times." 4 Among the best-
Early Christians at first rejected rosaries and denied the efficacy of preserved, and most

constantly repeated prayers counted on the beads. Jesus said, "When typical, copies of the
Theban Recension of
ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that
the Book of the
much speaking" (Matthew 6:7). Despite
they shall be heard for their Dead is the much-
thisGospel however, Christians eventually adopted the hea-
directive, studied Papyrus of
then custom of "vain repetitions" along with the heathen rose-wreath Ani.

865
 itself, relating both to their own version of the Great Mother just as the
Hindus related them to Kali Ma. To this day, the user of the rosary

appeals most often to Mary, imploring her to be present at his death,

the Tantric sages implored Kali-Shakti.
just as
Association of the rosary with death is still found in the archaic

religion of Tibet, where rosaries sometimes had beads made of

human skull bone, recalling the rosary of skulls worn by Kali the
Destroyer. In a remarkable parallel, Christian rosaries were some-
times made of tiny skulls carved from bone or ivory. Many eastern
rosaries had a retaining bead formed like a vase, said to give birth to

the other beads. In the west, both the pagan Goddess and the virgin
Mary the primary object of rosary worship were known as the
5
Holy Vase.
Mohammedan rosaries usually contained 99 beads, one for each ol

Allah's miracle-working names (see Name). Smaller rosaries were

made of 33 beads, with 3 groups of 1 1 set apart by markers, probably in

imitation of the Vedic tradition of 33 gods divided into 3 companies

of 1 1 each. 6 Arabs sometimes called the rosary Gulistan, the Rose

Garden, which was also the title of a mystical work by Sufi poet Saadi
of Shiraz, a Goddess-worshipper of the 13th century a.d. Europe's
heraldic "gules," meaning red, came from the Arabic word for
"rose." 7

[Link], 44, 194,201. 2. Wilkins, 40, 42, 151. 3. Larousse, 335.

[Link] of the Dead, 567. 5. Wilkins, 45, 58. 6. Budge, A. T., 437. 7. Shah, 98.

Rose
The rosary was an instrument of worship of the Rose, which ancient
Rome knew as the Flower of Venus, and the badge of her sacred
1
[Link] spoken "under the rose" (sub rosa) were part of
Venus's sexual mysteries, not to be revealed to the uninitiated. 2 The red
rose represented full-blown maternal
sexuality; the white rose or lily
was a sign of the Virgin Goddess. Christians transferred both of these
\

symbolic flowers to the virgin Mary and called her the Holy Rose.
Rose windows in Gothic cathedrals faced west, the direction of the
and were primarily dedicated to Mary as the
matriarchal paradise,
female symbol opposing the male cross in the eastern
apse. At Chartres,
the window called Rose of France showed "in its center the
Virgin in
her majesty Round her in a circle, are twelve medallions; four
containing doves; four six-winged angels or Thrones; four angels of a
lower order, but all
symbolizing the gifts and endowments of the Queen
of Heaven." Beneath, the Marian number of five windows centered
on Mary's mother, "the greatest central
figure, the tallest and most
commanding in the whole church." 3
Five was the Marian number because it was the number of
petals!
in the rose, and also in the
apple blossom another virginity-symbol

866
giving rise to the five lobes of the mature apple, the corresponding Rose
symbol of motherhood, fruition, regeneration, and eternal life. Five was
considered "proper to Marian devotion" because Rose-Mary was the ^^^mm^^mi^^^m
reincarnation of Apple-Eve. Christian mystical art showed apples and
roses growing together on the Tree of Life in Mary's "enclosed garden"
of virginity.
The fivefold rose and apple were also related to numerous pre-
Christian images of the Goddess, the witches' pentacle, the

five-pointed Star of Ishtar, and the Egyptian symbol of the uterine

underworld and cyclic rebirth. Mysteries of the Rose belonged to
Aphrodite, according to the poet Nossis: "Anyone the Cyprian does not
love, knows not what flowers her roses are." Aphrodite was repre-
sented by a Rose-Mary plant, named for her as rosmarina, the Dew of
the Sea. 4
In the great age of cathedral-building, when Mary was worshipped
as a Goddess in her "Palaces of the Queen of Heaven" or Notre-
Darnes, she was often addressed as the Rose, Rose-bush, Rose-garland,
Rose-garden, Wreath of Roses, Mystic Rose, or Queen of the Most
Holy Rose-garden. The church, the garden, and Mary's body were all
5

mystically one; for she was Lady Ecclesia, the Church, as well as "the
pure womb of regeneration." Like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral

represented the body of the Goddess who was also the universe,

containing the essence of male godhood within herself. This was largely
forgotten after the passing of the Gothic period. In later centuries,
"Gothic" became an epithet of contempt, synonymous with "barba-
rous." The symbolism of the Palaces of the Queen of Heaven was no

longer understood. By the 18th century, its secrets were as obscure as

the crypto-erotic art of the temples of India. 6
In fact it was in India that the Great Mother, whose body was
the temple, was first addressed as Holy Rose. 7 The "Flower of the
8
Goddess" was the scarlet China rose. This was sometimes identified
with the mystic Kula flower, source of a virgin's menstrual blood,

representing the life of her future children and her bond of union
with the past maternal spirit of her clan. 9
The eastern World Tree was often envisioned as a family rose-

tree, a female Tree of Life and Immortality. In central Asia the tree
was called Woman, the Wellspring, Milk, Animals, Fruits. "The
Cosmic Tree always presents itself as the very reservoir of life and the

master of destinies." Mongols knew the tree as Zambu, whose roots

plunge to the base of Mount Sumer; it is the Mother-tree whose

fruits Zambu was undoubtedly the same as the Hindu
feed the gods. 10

paradise, Jambu Island, home of the cosmic Rose-Apple tree. The

island was shaped like a yoni. In its "diamond seat" (a symbolic clitoris),
one could be reborn as a human being with keen intelligence.
11

Judeo-Christian tradition associated this tree of ancestors with a

male Tree of Life male ancestry as the only
(genitalia), regarding

important kind. The genealogy of Christ was depicted in medieval art as

867
Rose a tree-phallus rising from the loins of a recumbent Jesse, with its

flowers and fruit surrounding the figures of David, Mary, and Jesus.

mystics generally assigned

Still,
feminine gender to the rose-tree,
that these were genital
rose-garden, rose-wreath, etc., fully realizing
The medieval scholar Pierre Col said the Gospel of Luke
symbols.
of the vulva. 12
represented the Holy Rose as sign
a

Britain had a traditional Mummers' dance known as The Rose:

five dancers formed a five-pointed star of swords over a victim, called
the Fool, who was symbolically slain and resurrected with a mysterious
elixir, the Golden Frosty Drop, or Dewdrop in the Rose. This was
simply a western version of the Jewel in the Lotus: i.e., a seminal drop
"
in the female flower. It is said the 'garden' may symbolize the
uterus, as 'scarlet flower' may signify the vulva." The Frosty Drop, or
dew, signified the semen of the God reincarnating himself in the

Goddess. The Bible says dew was a poetic synonym for semen (Song of
Solomon 5:2). Meister Eckhart understood quite well the sexual

significance of both dew and rose when he wrote, "And as in the

morning the rose opens, receiving the dew from heaven and the sun,
1?
so Mary's soul did open and receive Christ the heavenly dew."
The dance called The Rose seems to have been a pagan ritual so
vital that it couldn't be suppressed. The accompanying chant was
"ring-around-the-rose-wreath"; in German, Ringel Ringel Rosenkranz;
14
in English, Ring-Around-A-Rosy. The "pocket full of posies" in
the nursery rhyme probably referred to the cave of flowers, an old
symbol of the underground Fairyland. The final instruction, "All fall
down," was the behest of Morgan the Grim Reaper, or Mother Death
bringing an end to the fertility season. According to Danish folk

custom, roses decorated sacred groves for the dances of Midsummer

Eve, which had to be guarded by armed men against possible
intruders:

Midsummer night upon the sward,

Knights and squires are standing guard;

In the grove a knightly dance they tread
With torches and garlands of roses I5
red.

The Rose was likened not only to Mary but to other surviving
forms of the pagan Goddess. As Spenser's Faerie Queene she had a
Bower of Bliss signifying her sexual nature, where the central holy of
holies was the Rose of Love. 16 Medieval myths of Lady Briar Rose
pictured the Virgin as a rose in the midst of a thorn bush, a sexual
image established long ago by the poet Sedulius:
As blooms among the thorns the lovely rose, herself without a thorn,
The glory of the bush whose crown she is,
So, springing from the root of Eve, Mary the new Maiden
Atoned for the sin of that first Maiden longago.' 7

No matter how consistently the Rose was assimilated to Mary, it

was obviously a sexual symbol of Goddess-

worship brought back to

868
 18
Europe from Arabia with the returning crusaders. Sufi mystics in Rudra
Arabia wrote romantic-religious works centering on the rosary and the
Rose. Fariduddin Attar's Parliament of the Birds explained the ^^^^^^^^^^^m
symbol in the words of the "passionate nightingale":
I know the secrets of Jove. Throughout the night I give my love call . . . It

is I who set the Rose in motion, and move the hearts of lovers.

Continuously I teach new mysteries. When the Rose returns to the

. . .

world in Summer, I open my heart to joy. secrets are not known to My

all but the Rose knows them. I think of nothing but the Rose; I wish

nothing but the ruby Rose. . . . Can the nightingale live but one night
9
without the Beloved? '

This Eros-nightingale reappeared in European romances as the

Spirit of the Rose, or a "devil" named

Rosier in the 17th century.

According to the exorcist Father Sebastien Michaelis, the devil

Rosier whispers sweet words that tempt men to fall in love. Rosier's

heavenly adversary was St. Basil, "who would not listen to amorous
and enchanting language." 20 Still later, the same devil became the hero
of the classical ballet Le Spectre de la Rose in which he tempts a
young girl to fall in love.

Sometimes the male Spirit of the Rose was a briar rose with

"pricking" thorns. "Pricking flesh to acquire blood artificially is the

only way that men

can 'produce' it. In the European romantic legend of
two heterosexual lovers, the female red rose is paired with the male
briar, or 'prick.' Prick, when used as a slang, taboo name for the penis, is

a descriptive-magical term for access-to-power. . . . The briar is the

male rose." 21
1. Wilkins, 108, 136. 2. Hazlitt, 527. 3. Campbell, M.I., 235. 4. Wilkins, 108, 1 10, 133.
5. Wilkins, 93, 106. 6. de Riencourt, 261. 7. Wilkins, 44. 8. Avalon, 203.
[Link],88. 10. Eliade, S.,271. 11. Tatz& Kent, 37, 84.
[Link],481. 13. Wilkins, 102, 113-14, 124. 14. Wilkins, 81.
[Link], 12. 16. Wilkins, 128. 17. Wilkins, 116. 18. Goodrich, 103.
19. Shah, 108. 20. Robbins, 129. 21. Spretnak, 274.

Rudra
Pre-Vedic "red god," a primitive form of Shiva, sometimes known as
The Howler. Both his redness and his howling link him with the death
1

by flaying of the sacrificial beings called Maruts, of whom he was the

founding ancestor. The Maruts became similar flayed gods or red gods
in the west e.g. Mars the red god, and his Phrygian counterpart

Marsyas, the flayed satyr, hung on a pine tree and sacrificed to Apollo.

Satyrs were goat gods, and goats were typical victims of flaying-
sacrifices for atonement in Rome (e.g., the Lupercalia), Phrygia, Syria,
and Mesopotamia.
Rudra was also called Tryambaka, "He Who Belongs to Three
Mother Goddesses." 2 Like Shiva after him, he seems to have been
offered to the original female trinity. Like Shiva also, he merged with

869
Runes her or them and became known as an androgynous Lord Who is

Half Woman.'
His name passed into Latin as "rude," meaning a primitive deity of
4
wild animals and woodlands, a typical satyr. Thus it might be said
that Rudra was the prototype of all the primitive Aryan gods of fertility
and death.
1.0'Flaherty,357. 2. Larousse, 342. 3. O'Flaherty, 298. 4. Dumezil,418.

Runes
The runic alphabet seems to have been invented by the "wise-
women" of northern Europe. Runic letters appear first in the hands of
the Goddess Idun, keeper of the gods' magic apples of immortality.
She gave runes to her consort Bragi by engraving them on his tongue;
thus he acquired the magic of words and became the first wizard-king
of skaldic poetry.
Odin received knowledge of the runes by his self-sacrifice, hanging
on the gallows-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights that is, for a nofnden,
the traditional lying-in period for a woman in childbirth. In the old

myths, self-sacrifice or suicide was often demanded as the price of

male acquisition of feminine wisdom. This also meant a journey to

paradise (Fairyland), and godlike immortality.
Odin died to acquire the runes for men; but men were expected to
imitate his sacrifice, as Christian martyrs imitated that of Christ. If a
Norse hero couldn't die in battle, which would automatically make him
a son of Odin, then he could commit a kind of hara-kiri by carving
own flesh and bleeding to death. In this manner Sigurd
the runes in his 1

Ring summoned the Valkyries to take him to Valholle: "Bravely he

slashes Odin's red letters, blood-runes of heroes, on arm and breast." 2
The festal
day of a hero's death thus became a "red-letter day,"
marked in red on runic calendars, as modern calendars still print
Sundays and holidays in red. Special sacrificial runes called geirs-odd
were recommended for ceremonial suicide. These enabled the hero
to compose his own death-song in his final "inspiration" (literally,

"breath"). Skaldic tradition associated poetry with blood. The Mead

of the Poets was also called the Sea of Odin's Breast, meaning the blood
that flowed from his breast when he was pierced on the Rood.
Thenursery-rhyme figure of slain Cock Robin Redbreast descend-
ed from the folklore of the geirs-odd. Robin was the God of the
Witches, frequently identified with Odin, sacrificed in a sacred grove to
Marian the Virgin, whom the Northmen called Maerin and wor-
shipped with blood sacrifices at Trondheim as late as the 1 1th century. 3
Robin Redbreast appeared as a human martyr in an old Danish
ballad. He won the love of a bird-maiden (Valkyrie) by cutting slices of
flesh from his breast for her, and she took him to
paradise. "The

870
youth has now got his reward, safely has he won from harm; at night he Rusalki
4
sleeps full joyously within his truelove's arms."
The death song composed by Ragnar Lodbrok for himself presents
^^^^^^^^^^^
a pagan version of a runic epitaph, supposed to be sung by the
bleeding man with his final breath, like the song of a dying swan;
indeed, runes and swan-princes were often associated. Ragnar sang,
with a certain gallantry:

Cease, my strain! I hear a voice

From realms where martial souls rejoice;
I hear the maids of slaughter call,

Who bid me hence to Odin 's hall:

High seated in their blest abodes

I soon shall quaff the drink ofgods.
The hours oflife have glided by;
I fall, but smiling shall I die. 5

Knowing the runes of heathen alphabets were connected with

death charms and mysterious curses, Christians came to regard the
runes as devilish. They believed witches could cause death by

"casting the runes." But the original purpose of casting runes was
divination, in a system not essentially different from casting yarrow
stalks of the I
Ching, or casting "the lot of rods" in medieval churches,
or casting dice as magic knucklebones, or shuffling Tarot cards. The
runes were scratched on wooden shingles or chips, like dice, and these
were thrown in certain patterns. The process of interpreting them
was raedan, "reading"; the result was raedelsox "riddles." In old-
fashioned usage, "reading" meant to solve a riddle. 6 From the runes
came such English construction as "read me this riddle," and the use of
"reading" to mean fortune-telling.
I. Branston, 106. 2. Guerber, L.M.A., 279. 3. Turville-Petre, 39, 91.
4. Steenstrup, 54. 5. Guerber, L.M.A., 279. 6. Funk, 27.

Rusalki
Russian water witches and psychopomps, named after Mother Rus-

formerly her priestesses of rivers and springs. Rusalki were feared as

sia;

sirens who could lure men to a watery grave. Yet their old function as

was not forgotten. During Rusalki Week at the beginning

fertility-spirits
of summer, they would emerge from the waters by moonlight and
dance. Peasants said "where the Rusalki trod when dancing, there the

grew thicker and the wheat more abundant." They were the
*
grass
same as the Wilis, Vilas, or Valkyries.

1. Larousse, 293.

871
 shiva, oldest of the Vedic
trinity that includes
Brahma and Vishnu.
He was god of yoga,
death, cattle, dance,
the moon, and all the ab-
stract forces like
beneficence and destruc-
tion. But universal

energy he could repre-

sent only with the

help of his female coun-

terpart, Shakti. Shiva
dances in a circle of
flames representing
the cosmos. Bronze; In-
dia,Chola period,
11th to 12th century.

The Great Goddess

Hathor became the
winged, usually lion-
headed sphinx to
confound humans with
her famous riddle.
Oedipus spoiled her fun
by telling her the an-
swer and then throwing
her out of Thebes.
The painting, showing
them before the trou-
ble started,by is

Gustave Moreau,
1864.
Sa Sa
Sabbat, Witches' of Isis, which made pharaohs and
Egyptian word for the holy blood
other selected heroes immortal; counterpart of the Hindu soma, the
divine fluid of sovereignty and eternal life, manifested in many ways,
but basically derived from the Goddess's menstrual blood. As the

Egyptian Great Mother's "wise blood," sa was said to contain the

1

spirit of all intelligence.

[Link].G.E.2,298.

Sabazius
Phrygian serpent god identified with Attis, with Dionysus, and in the
1
first century B.C. with the Jewish Jehovah. Plutarch said worshippers of
the Hebrew God in Jerusalem called him also by the name of Sabbi.
2

Jews living in Asia Minor said their Jehovah was another form of Zeus
Sabazius. 5

Phrygians said the ancestor of their tribes was a great serpent who
lived in a Tree of Life in the primal garden; therefore they were
4
Ophiogeneis, "Snake-born people." Such pagan traditions led to the
Gnostic sects' confusion of Jehovah with the serpent in the garden of
Eden; sometimes one was the enemy of mankind, sometimes the other
(see Gnosticism).
Some have suggested that the nocturnal rites of Sabazius gave rise

to the name of the Sabbat or Sabbath, for both Christians and pagans
(e.g. the "witches' sabbat"), but there were also other suggested origins
for this lunar festival. Sabazius seems to have been just another form
of the ubiquitous serpent-deity who was the first companion of the
Great Mother of the Gods.
1. Graves, W.G., 366-68. 2. Knight, S.L., 156. 3. Enslin, C.B., 91.
4. [Link], 129.

Sabbat, Witches'
Some derive "sabbat" from the Moorish zabat, "an occasion of
power," at which Berber descendants of north African "Amazons" still

perform sacred dances in groups of 1 3 the traditional number of

the witches' coven for the 13 annual lunations. 1

The European sabbat or festival was fabricated largely by judges of

the Inquisition during the 14th and 1 5 th centuries, on a foundation
of pagan precedents. Churchmen said witches held four Great Sabbats a

year "in derision of the four annual festivals of the Church"; but the
church had copied these from the pagans in the first place. 2 They were:
(1)Candlemas Eve; (2) May Eve, or Walpurgisnacht; (3) Lammas
Eve; and (4) Halloween. Some lists included Midsummer (the Feast of

874
St. John) and the solstitial festival on December 2 1 (the Feast of St. Sabbat, Witches'
3
Thomas).
Details were drawn from classical descriptions of Roman fertility ^^^^^^^^^^^m
festivals, such as the Bacchanalia, Saturnalia, Lupercalia, etc. At the
ancient ceremony of purification for the New Year, in the Lupercal
grotto where Lupa the She-Wolf was said to have suckled Romulus
and Remus, he-goats were sacrificed and youths were touched with the
women's hands with strips of
blood; priests in raw goatskins struck

goatskin as a fertility charm; men and women exchanged clothing and

engaged in orgiastic sex. Late in the 5th century, this Lupercalia was

adopted into the Christian calendar and renamed the Feast of Purifica-
4
tion of the Virgin.

Other pagan practices supposedly incorporated into the witches'

sabbat included widdershins (counterclockwise) dancing in a ring, in
honor of the Moon-goddess; wearing masks; jumping over fires; sacrifi-

worshipping trees, springs, and sacred stones; and

cial feasting;

making lewd jokes and horseplay in a carnival atmosphere. Indeed the

Carnival, or Feast of Fools, descended from pagan holidays when the
social order was temporarily reversed, and everything was done back-

ward, a prototype of the "reverse Christianity" of the Black Mass.

The Saturnalia was still kept by medieval Christians in this manner:
The priests ofa church elected a bishop offools, who came in full pomp,
placing himself in the episcopal seat in the choir. High mass then
began; all the ecclesiastics assisted, their faces smeared with blacking, or
covered with a hideous or ridiculous mask. During the course of the
celebration, some of them, dressed like mountebanks or in women 's

clothes, danced in the middle of the choir, singing clownish or obscene

songs. Others ate sausages or puddings from the altar, played at cards or at
dice in front of the officiating priest, incensed him with the censer, or,

burning old shoes, made him breathe the smoke. s

Such carnival clownishness was "simply the last form which the
Priapeia and Liberalia assumed in Western Europe, and in its various
details all the incidents of those great and licentious orgies of the
Romans were reproduced." 6 However, certain authorities came to

perceive such revels as profoundly evil. In 1445 the Paris Faculty of

Theology called for reform, writing to the French bishops a puritanical-

lyshocked description of pre- Lenten customs: "Priests and clerks

may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office.
They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels.
They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the
altar while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play at dice there.

They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run
and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame." 7
Copies of letters like this one, drawn from the archives, surely gave
the Inquisition's judges many ideas for details of the Sabbat that they

put in the mouths of their victims, and confirmed by torture. With only

875
Sad minimal imagination, a judge could reverse any ordinary church
Sacred service and accuse his victim of kissing the devil's anus (instead of the

bishop's ring), eating children's corpses

and drinking menstrual blood

(instead of bread and wine), saying the prayers backward, making the
sign of the cross with the left foot instead of the right hand, addressing

subterranean deities instead of celestial ones, and so on.

Weekly sabbats were supposed to be held on Friday, once a lunar
"Eve" of the original sabbath, the day of Saturn or of Zeus Sabazius.
Friday was the day sacred to Venus-Freya, and after sunset it was the
Jews' sabbath day, both of which made it a bad or unlucky day in
Christian opinion. Friday the 13th was especially ill-favored.
[Link]& Morgan, 153; Shah, 210. 2. Knight, D.W.P., 225. 3. Robbins,415.

4. Larousse, 208. 5. Crawley, 333. 6. Knight, D.W.P., 207. 7. Miles, 304.

Saci

"Power," title of the Hindu Goddess as the wife of Indra, who

received his essence of divinity from her. 1
She was probably related to
the Egyptian Goddess Sakhmis or Sekhmet, "the Powerful One,"
as

one of the titles of Hathor as the blood-drinking battle-goddess or divine

2
lioness,Lady of Victory. The name Saci or Saki was also applied to
the Arabic spirit of the Cupbearer who gave gods and men the wine of

life, as Indra received the Goddess's blood-wine of sovereignty.

1 .
O'Flaherty, 351. 2. Larousse, 36.

Sacred
Derivation of Latin sacer, which meant "untouchable" in the dual
sense of both holy and unclean. A
sacer person or thing was set aside for
a divine purpose; it was taboo, dedicated to the other world, shunned

by ordinary folk because of its dangerous charge of spiritual mana. A

case in point is who dared to seize the ark
the biblical story of Uzzah,
of the covenant to keep from
it
falling off its oxcart. Though Uzzah's
intentions were entirely honorable, God struck him dead for touching
the sacer object (2 Samuel 6:3). Priests knew a special insulating charm
whereby they could approach the Holy of Holies without deadly risk:
"When they go into the tabernacle of the congregation, they shall wash
with water, that they die not" (Exodus
30:20). This same insulating
charm was used throughout the centuries in Catholic churches, where
people dipped their fingers in the stoup of holy water and made a self-
protective sign of the cross.
The biblical word "unclean" also meant sacer. Menstrual blood
and parturient women were "unclean" because filled with mysteri-
ous, dangerousmagic (Leviticus 15). Sacrificial victims, set aside for
consumption by the gods, were sacer. Certain animals were "unclean"

876
except when eaten on ceremonial occasions, like the sacred bulls of Sacrifice

Egypt and the pigs of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lucian said the

pigs kept in the temple at Hierapolis were taboo in the typical ^^^^^^^^^^^
dualistic sense, both "unclean" and sacred. Simple people everywhere
1

still demonstrate fear in the presence of whatever they consider

sacred: the common emotion Coleridge called "holy dread."
1. Crawley 1,1 14.

Sacrifice

Human or animal, the sacrificial victims of ancient cultures were

almost invariably male. Worshippers of Shiva sacrificed only male
animals; the god himself ordered that female animals must never be
slain.
1
Males were expendable, for there were always too many for a
proper breeding stock.
The same was true even of human sacrifices, which were men, not
women. "The fertility of a group is determined by the number of its
adult women, rather than by its adult men." 2 Therefore male blood

only was poured out on the earliest altars, in imitation of the female
blood that gave "life." That is why totemic animal-ancestors were more
often paternal than maternal. The animals' blood and flesh, ingested

by women, was thought to beget human offspring; and the rule was
"Whatever is killed becomes father." 3 The victim was also god, and
king.
Amazonian Sacae or Scythians founded the Sacaea festivals of
Babylon, where condemned criminals died as sacrificial surrogates for
the king, to mitigate the earlier custom of king-killing. The chosen
victim was a sacred king, identified with the real king in every possible

way. He wore the king's robes, sat on the king's throne, lay with the

royal concubines, wielded the scepter. After five days he was stripped,
scourged, then hanged or impaled "between heaven and earth," in a
prototype of the crucifixion ceremony later extended to sacred kings
of the Jews. 4 The object of scourging and piercing was to make the
5
pseudo-king shed tears and blood for fertility magic. Babylonian
scriptures said, "If the king does not weep when struck, the omen is bad
6
for the year." The king or pseudo-king "became God" as soon as he
was dead. He ascended into heaven and united himself with the
7
Heavenly Father, the original totem father, or first victim.
i.e.,

Probably the promise of apotheosis and privileged immortality induced

victims to accept death willingly, even as the same kind of promise
attracted Christian martyrs.

When ritual murder of kings or human king-surrogates came to be

considered crude and uncivilized, then animal victims took their

place. Ceremonies were invented to identify the animal with the man.
The Egyptians, for instance, "put off their dead with counterfeits,
offered an animal to their gods instead of a man, but they symbolized

877
Sacrifice their intended act by marking the creature to be slain with a seal
bearing the image of a man bound and kneeling, with a sword at his
8
^^^^^^^a throat."
victims in Egypt, India, and the
Pigs were often set aside as sacer
Middle East, which explains why their flesh was taboo to the Jews.
The sacrificial boar-god Vishnu had many western counterparts, such as

Ares, the boarskin-clad consort of Aphrodite, whose children Phobos

(Fear), Deimos (Horror), and Harmonia (Peace) may have represented
the three stages of the sacred drama from the victim's point of
view.9
Meat was not to be wasted, so early theologians were anxious to
invent ways to pretend the sacrifice was politely offered to the deity,
while they actually kept it for their own consumption. The usual
method was to offer the deity only inedible portions of the animal, or
portions that couldn't be readily collected and used, such as blood.

"Kosher blood from a sacrificed animal, was not

killing," draining the
a Jewish idea. It was a common Oriental method of offering the
animal's blood to the Great Earth Mother while the worshipper kept
the meat for himself. 10 The Jews, the Hindus, taught that the
like

animal's soul was in its blood (Leviticus 17:1 1).

Greeks assumed their gods resented being deprived of the best part

of the sacrifice, but they avoided guilt by blaming Zeus's ancient rival,
the titan Prometheus. When the first sacrificial bull was butchered,
Prometheus sorted it into a portion of bones concealed under fat, and
another portion of meat hidden under the entrails, and invited Zeus to
choose his portion on behalf of all the gods. Zeus chose the fat, and
later raged helplessly when he found he had been tricked.
11
But this

became the standard fare for the gods, even Yahweh: "the fat of the
beast, of which men offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord"
(Leviticus 7:25).
Jews were even more parsimonious with their offerings than the
Greeks. Sometimes Yahweh didn't even get the fat of the beast. All
he got was a smell of it. Levite priests legalized the "wave offering,"
which meant the goodies were waved in front of the altar, then eaten
by the priests: "the breast may be waved for a wave offering before the
"
Lord .but the breast shall be Aaron's and his sons' (Leviticus
. .

7:30-3 1). The Jews however did retain a custom of human sacrifice, for

special occasions, longer than any other people in the sphere of

influence of the Roman empire. 12 Out of this tradition arose the
figure
of the dying Christos in Jerusalem.

Concerning the biblical concept of sacrifice, E.C. Stanton wrote:

"The people have always been deluded with the idea that what they
gave to the church and the priesthood was given unto the Lord, as if the
maker of the universe needed anything at our hands. How incongru-
ous the idea of an Infinite
being who made all the planets and the
inhabitants thereof
commanding his creatures to kill and burn animals
for offerings to him. It have
is
truly pitiful to see the deceptions that

878
been played upon the people in all
ages and countries by the priests Saga
in the name of religion." n Saints

I. Mahanirvanatantra, 103. 2. M. Harris, 39. 3. Campbell, P.M., 129.

4. H. Smith, 135. Frazer, G.B., 328. 6. Stone, 143. 7. Frazer, G.B., 513.
5.

8. Elworthy, 82. 9. Graves, G.M. 1, 67. 10. Neumann, G.M., 152.

I I. Graves, G.M. 1, 144. 12. Cumont, O.R.R.P., 119. 13. Stanton, 132.

Saga
Literally, "speaking-woman" or "sayer," an ancient Norse Goddess
Asgard. Her name also meant a priestess learned in sacred poetry,
1
in

charms, words of power. In the Middle Ages, saga or "female sage"

2
became a synonym for "witch."
1. Branston, 88. 2. Wedeck, 140.

Saint Elmo's Fire

This electrical phenomenon, on shipboard, was formerly
usually seen
sacred to Helen, the Moon-goddess, or else toHermes, god of magic.
The French called it Feu de S. Helene, or Feu de S. Herme: Fire of
the Holy Helen or the Holy Hermes. In Spain it was known as St.
Helmes or St. Telmes fire, regarded as a form of witchfire, like the
Fata Morgana (marsh gas). In fact it is a static discharge from points
1

such as masts and spars of a ship, or from the wings of earlier

airplanes.

According to some sea stories, if one flame appears, it is Helen,

who presages bad weather; if two flames appear, they are Helen's
brothers Castor and Pollux, who indicate that the weather will clear, and
also that even sea-myths demonstrate patriarchal bias. Other names
for the mysterious light are Corposant from Italian corpo santo,
Christ's body Anne's Light, and even Saint Electricity. 2
St.

Saint Elmo was entirely mythical. Some scholars claimed he was

the same as St. Erasmus of Syria, who was also mythical, his legend
based only on a spurious "Acts" written three centuries after his alleged

martyrdom. It was claimed that he died of having his intestines

wound out of his body onto a windlass; therefore his symbol in sacred
art was a windlass. Through this tenuous link, he became a patron
3
saint of sailors. But since he probably never existed at all, the point is

only academic.
1. Hazlitt, 94. 2. Jobes, 180. 3. Attwater, 117.

Saints

Canonization of saints was a Christian extension of the ancient Greco-

Roman custom of apotheosis (god-making), whereby mortals could
become immortal and live forever in heaven through identification with

879
 Saints a deity. The liturgy and forms of canonization were taken from the
release of bird-souls to represent the
pagans, including the ceremonial
deified one flying to heaven to join the other immortals.
1

The canon of saints made Christianity in effect a form of polythe

ism, just as the similar system of multiplying bodhisattvas created a
Buddhist polytheism. Medieval Europeans wanted many deities, not
one. Thus, in medieval churches, "the life of Christ fills a smaller

place and is told with far less complacence than are the lives of the
saints."
2
Much time and effort were expended to ascertain the right
saint or saints to answer any particular kind of appeal.
The mythical saints included numerous transformations of the
Great Goddess under names that were only her various pagan titles,

in the same way as the Judeo-Christian God was called "Almighty" or

"Ancient of Days" or "Lord." Among the sainted Goddess-names
were Mari, Marina, Margaret, Aphra, Venerina, Martina, Mary of
Egypt, the Three Marys, Aphrodite, Demetra, and such title-names
as Irene, Philomena, Reine, Pelagia, Corona, Rosalia, Sophia, Eugenia,
Viviana, Columba (Peace, Moon-lover, Queen, Sea, Crown, Holy
3
Rose, Wisdom, Health, Life,Dove).
Diana Ilithyia was canonized as St. Yllis. Artemis became St.

Artemidos. Keraunos the thunder-serpent became St. Ceraunos.

Castor and Pollux were transformed into Sts. Cosmas and Damianus,
whose images replaced those of the pagan Heavenly Twins in their
healing shrine at Aegaeae. Sts. Sebastian and Hubert, patrons of archers
and hunting dogs, were once pagan Lords of the Hunt; so was St.
Eustace, allegedly converted by Christ who spoke to him from the horns
of a magic stag. 4
The sun god Helios became St. Elias. Gods and heroes like

Bacchus, Dionysus, Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Nereus, and Achilles

were canonized under their own names. Mercury became a warrior-
saint,supposedly sent from heaven to assassinate the emperor Julian,
"the Apostate." Under his other name, Hermes, he was canonized
by
the spurious passio of Pope Alexander I. The
satyr-god Silvanus was
canonized, and called a son of the equally fictitious St. Felicity. 5 Even
Buddha became a Christian saint, disguised as St. Josaphat (Bodisat). 6
As St. Aphra or Afra, Aphrodite appeared in the role of a repentant

embracing martyrdom to atone for her promiscuous be-

prostitute,
[Link] was quoted as saying, "My body has sinned, let it suffer."
She was burned to death on an island in the river Lech
meaning
that the Goddess's image was burned in its former Temple of Lechery. 7
A late absurdity was the canonization of the Goddess's Holy Vial
as an anthropomorphic saint, which one 18th-century historian
referred to as St. 8
Ampoule.
About the beginning of the 9th century, bones, teeth, hair,
garments, and other relics of fictitious saints were conveniently
"found" all over Europe and Asia and triumphantly installed in the
reliquaries of every church, until all Catholic
Europe was falling to its

880
knees before what Calvin called its anthill of bones. 9 Martyrs' remains Saints

became extremely valuable, as Gibbon says: "The satisfactory experi-

ence that the relics of saints were more valuable than gold or precious ^^^^^^^^^^^^
stones stimulated the clergy to multiply the treasures of the church.
Without much regard for truth or probability, they invented names for
10
skeletons, and actions for names." Myths invented for the fictitious

relics of the evangelists provide typical examples.

Some Venetian merchants pretended to find the bones of St. Mark
in Alexandria in 81 5. They brought their find home to Venice and
sold to the municipal treasury. A great church was built over the bones
it

in the Square of St. Mark who was only associated with the city in
the first place because the original municipal totem was a lion, and the
was assigned to the season of Leo in the pagan calendar.
evangelist
The bones remain in Venice to this day, for the fiction has not yet been
renounced.
In like manner, the bones of "St. Matthew" were dug up in
Parthia at Hierapolis, and carried to a church in Salerno in 1080 a.d.,

at theheight of the early saint-making fad. Matthew's legend was

invented by Pope Gregory VII, who claimed to have learned by
divine inspiration of the apostle's travels through Egypt, Ethiopia, and
other places, and of the miracles he worked to shame the poor magic
11
of pagan magicians. [Link] was touted as one of the ancient world's
most prolific artists, to judge from the numerous portraits of the
Virgin, painted appeared in many churches. Some
by him, that still

remain, despite ample proof that all such portraits were actually
12
painted during the Middle Ages.
Conversion of pagan gods and goddesses to saints usually accom-
panied the church's takeover of their shrines. An example is the
so-called Isle of Saints whose sacred inhabitants were not saints at all but
women called Gallicenae, former priestesses of the Gallic oracle.

Pomponius Mela, Latin geographer of the 1st century a.d., said they
were "holyin perpetual virginity, said to be nine in number, with

by their charms the winds and seas, to turn

singular powers, so as to raise
themselves into what animals they will, to cure wounds and diseases
incurable by others, to know and predict the future; but this they do
15
only to navigators who go thither purposely to consult them."
Like pagan oracles and wise-women, sacrificial gods were also
converted into saints. The Blutritt (blood rite) of northern heathens was

easily transformed into a Christian ceremony by simple substitution

of the blood of Christ or the relic of a local saint, the former god. A
10th-century ecclesiastical decree in Westphalia ordered that "every
year, on the second day of Whitsuntide, with the grace
of the Holy

Ghost, ye shall bear the patron saint of your cloister church in a long

procession through your parochial district. This processional will

. . .

cause the seed of the fields to grow more abundantly, and the
harshness of the weather will be subdued."
H
In the old shrines of Great Mother Cybele at Acrae in Sicily,

881
 Saints rock-cut niches dating from the 3rd century B.C. sheltered numerous
Goddess, some dating from a much earlier period. After
figures of the
Christian conquest of the area, the Goddess's figures became known as
^^^^^^^^^^^ 15
Santoni, "saints," and are so called to this day.
Pseudo-saints often retained jurisdiction over those departments of
nature that they ruled as pagan deities. St. Medardus controlled the

rain, and during droughts his statue was drenched with water to
stimulate him to action. St. Caesarius of Aries was identified with

Boreas, god of the north wind. In the valley of Vaison his holy glove was
said to hold the air that let loose winds and storms, so his power

actually approximated that of Satan who was Prince of the Power of the
Air. 16

The church that slaughtered the heathen for worshipping false

gods was itself guilty of worshipping false saints which, sometimes,
were even the same deities as those of the heathen. This became so
obvious in the 8th century that the Synod of Leptinnes had to

prohibit the offering of sacrifices to saints instead of to God. 17

Christians surpassed their pagan ancestors in credulity,
propagating
and believing saintly miracle-tales apparently without any limitations.

Pope Gregory the Great wrote a book of saints' lives filled with
impossible feats. St. Honoratus for example halted in mid-air a giant
boulder that was rolling down a mountainside toward his
monastery
simply by making the sign of the cross at it. The monk Maurus
walked on water, Jesus and St. Peter.
like 18
In fact, the miracles
attributed to Jesus were negligible compared to the wonders per-
formed by saints. Angobard wrote in the 9th century, "The wretched
world lies now under the
tyranny of foolishness; things are believed
by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce
the heathen to believe." 19
The church lost sight of practical common sense on one
never
were leading sources of its income, thanks to
point, however; saints
the mandatory pilgrimage system, donations, and tithes.
Gold, silver,
and gems were collected to house and adorn the
precious relics. An
ecclesiastical chronicler of Trier related how the priests buried the
church's treasures to hide them from attacking Norsemen, "so that
the relics might not be mocked and jeered at by the barbarians." 20 Of
course the real fear was not
mockery of the relics, but robbery of their
valuable vessels.
Some genuine flesh-and-blood saints achieved their canonization
by adding to the wealth of the church through trickery. A common
trick seems to have been
manipulation of the popular belief in ghosts.
St. Fridolin of
Sakingen claimed for the church the property of a
deceased Count Urso, on the that Urso had it to the
ground promised
church while receiving the last rites from Fridolin. But the
property
had passed into the hands of Urso's
heir, his brother Landolf, and there

882
 was no document to prove Fridolin's claim. However, the saint won Saints

his case by summoning Count Urso himself to from the grave and
rise

appear before the judges, testifying "in sepulchral tones" that Lan-
^^^^^^^^^^^m
dolf 's holdings must be turned over to the monastery. The unfortunate
Landolf lost not only his inheritance, but also his life. Fridolin
became the patron saint of Sakingen and was buried in the church he
built with the dead man's money. 21
The same thing happened in the case of St. Stanislaus the Martyr,
Bishop of Cracow, who managed some "very ample estates" belong-
ing to a man named Peter. After Peter's death, his heirs claimed the
|
estates, but the bishop refused to part with them. As he was unable to
show any documents of ownership, a court ruled in favor of Peter's
heirs. Then the bishop went to Peter's tomb, touched the body, and

commanded it to rise and follow him to the court. The corpse then
"confirmed the statement of the bishop in every particular, and
22
fearful asthey sat the judges reversed their former decision." The wily
saint kept the estates, doubtless contributing a share to whatever

accomplice it was who impersonated the dead Peter.

Such miracles were more common than might be expected. The
same thing happened in the time of St. Augustine the Apostle of

England, according to his biographer John Brompton. "St. Augustine

had long been endeavoring to persuade a certain nobleman of great
wealth to pay the appointed tithes, but out of obstinacy these were

constantly refused, which did great mischief and caused others to

become discontented and impudently follow so bad an example." One
day during High Mass, St. Augustine directed all who were excom-
municate to leave the church. A tomb in the crypt suddenly opened,
and a corpse came forth, explaining that it had been excommunicated
by a priest now dead. [Link] led witnesses to the dead priest's
tomb, and asked why the revenant had been excommunicated. The

priestly ghost replied, in "a low, far-off" voice, "I excommunicated him
for his misdeeds, and particularly because he robbed the church of

her due, refusing to pay his tithes." 25 Through this elaborate charade,
the saint improve economic piety in the district.
was able to

The multitudes of phony or commercial saints are treated by

modern Catholic scholars with a rather amused tolerance, as if the
saint-makers' fantasies held something of the same charm as tales

invented by bright children. It is rarely admitted that these fantasies

were not intended to charm but rather to defraud. The saints were
made up to earn money for the church, and many of the made-up
saints are still doing so, for the church refrains from publicizing their

spurious such publicity might disappoint the

origins lest faithful

which, translated, means the donations might cease.

1. Gaster, 769. 2. Male, 176. 3. Reinach, 312. 4. Norman, 73.
5. Attwater, 128, 168, 243, et al. 6. H. Smith, 227. 7. Attwater, 33. 8. Hazlitt, 285.
9. Kendall, 122. 10. Campbell, Oc. M,
393. 11. Brewster, 212, 420. 1 2. Artwater, 223.

883
 13 Keightley, 420. 219-20. 1 5. Vermaseren, 68. 16. Male, 271.
14. Oxenstierna,
c-j.
17. J.B. Russell, 66. de Camp, A. E., 265. 19. H. Smith, 260. 20. Oxensteirna,
18. 14.
SaUda 21. Guerber, L.R., 316-18. [Link], V, 55. 23. Summers, V, 111.

Sais

Capital of Egypt during the 7th century B.C., where the Great
Goddess (Isis-Neith) ruled supreme in her temple carved with the
words later copied by the biblical God: "I am all that was, that is, and
that is
yet to come" (see Revelation 1:8).' A thousand years later, the
temple of the Goddess at Sais was taken over by Christians and
converted into a church of the virgin Mary.
1 .
Larousse, 37.

Saki
Arabic "Cupbearer," based on the Hindu Goddess as Saci or Power,
whose wine meant life and energy for all the gods. Saki was sometimes
Greek gods' cupbearer Hebe; sometimes male, like
female, like the
Hebe's replacement Ganymede, the boy lover of Zeus. According to
Arabian symbolism, death came for each man when Saki turned
down his empty cup; his life was "drained to the lees."

Sakyamuni
One of the earlier incarnations of Buddha as "Sage of the Sakyas,"

bearing approximately the same relationship to the Buddha Siddhartha

asKing David to Jesus. Sakyamuni dwelling in heaven perceived that
he would become incarnated again in the offspring of a queen of the
Sakyas, the role assigned to the Goddess Maya in the Buddha
1
legend. His semen was deposited by the god Ganesha.
1 .
Larousse, 348.

Sala
Sacred cherry symbol of virginity, under which the Virgin Maya
tree,

gave birth to
Buddha; celebrated in a similar Christian legend by the
Cherry Tree Carol. See Cherry. The "feminine" qualities of red-

ness, roundness, and fruition made the cherry everywhere sacred to the

Goddess, along with other red fruits like the apple and pomegranate.

Salacia
"Salacious" Sea-goddess, Venus-Aphrodite worshipped in Rome as

fish-teeming womb." The name probably

the feminine abyss "with '

was related to Greek Thalassa, "Sea," which also gave rise to the holy
cry Takssio raised by wedding guests in honor of the Goddess of

884
Marriage, or maritare. Romans didn't know the origin of this wedding Salem
cry but continued to use it nevertheless. 2 See Fish. Salome
1. Neumann, A.P., 6. 2. Rose, 192.

Salem
Semitic "Peace," with variations like Shalem, Shalom, Selim, Solo-

mon, Shalman, Salmon, Shalmaneser. Jeru-salem was "the House of

Peace," or of the god Salem, whose earlier city was ruled by
Melchizedek (Genesis 14), the "King of Light" called Melek or
Molech in Phoenicia. "Peace" was the word spoken daily to the
dying sun, and also to the dying sacrificial victim who impersonated him
in the rites that "brought forth bread and wine" (Genesis 14:18). See

Lucifer.

Saliva

Both Mohammed and Jesus claimed to restore sight to the blind by

applying saliva to their eyes (Mark 8:23). This was an imitation of cures
previously attributed to priestesses of the Goddess. A clay tablet from
Nineveh says eye diseases could be cured by the mixed saliva and milk
of a temple harlot. Romans thought blindness could be cured by the
saliva of a mother of sons. As late as the 19th century, Italian folk

healers were still

trying to cure blindness with the saliva and milk of
the mother of a premature child. 1

Notions of the wonderful curative power of female saliva may be

traced back to Tantrism Chinese offshoot, Tao, whose
and its

scriptures called women's saliva "a great medicine," one of the three
wonderful yin juices, the others being breast milk and menstrual
blood. 2

European pagan heroes also cured blindness with saliva so many

of them that medieval churchmen had to say this was one of the
3
recognition signs for Antichrist.
1. Gifford, 63. 2. Rawson, E.A., 234. 3. Gifford, 120.

Salome
The Bible presents the Dance of the Seven Veils as a mere vulgar
striptease performed by Salome to "please Herod" (Matthew 14:6-8).

Actually, the Dance of the Seven Veils was an integral part of the
sacred drama, depicting the death of the surrogate-king, his descent into
the underworld, and his retrieval by the Goddess, who removed one
of her seven garments at each of the seven underworld gates. The
priestess called Salome or "Peace" (Shalom) impersonated the de-
scending Goddess, passing through seven gates in the temple of
Jeru-salem which meant House of Peace. "Josephus records that the

885
Salt first name of the city was Solyma. Salma, or Salim, was evidently the
Semite god of the rising or renewed sun; Salmaone was the Aegean
whom he took his titles, as did Salmoneus the Aeolian." '

goddess from
Salome represented Ishtar as the third of her three high priestesses

or "Marys." Her name was a translation of the Greek Irene,

2
"Peace," the third of the sacred harlots called Horae. She may have
been identical with the sacred harlot Mary Magdalene, or Mary of
the Temple, whose so-called "seven devils" were the same underworld

gatekeepers to whom the temple dancer gave her veils. These veils,
likethe rainbow veils of Maya, signified the layers of earthly appear-
ances or illusions falling away from those who approach the central

Mystery of the deeps. Isis too had seven stoles with the same mystical
3
significance.
The dancing priestess was more than a trivial entertainer. Salome's
husband Joseph was killed after he lay with the queen, Mariamne or
Miriam (Mary). 4 Salome was present with the virgin Mary the same
Mary? at the birth of Jesus; some said she was the midwife who
5
delivered the holy child. Salome was present with all three Marys at the
death of Jesus (Mark 15:40). Obviously she was also involved in the
death of John the Baptist, which seems to have been not a murder but a
ritual sacrifice.

Some early Christian sects (the Mandaeans) ignored Jesus, and

worshipped John the Baptist as the true sacrificed Christ. An early
6

Greek epiphany hymn said it was the blood of John the Baptist that
"bedewed" i.e., fructified the mothers and children of Jerusa-
lem. 7 As an initiated Essenic prophet, John would have been sacer and
"chosen" to die as a surrogate for the king, whose blood was required
for fertility of the land. John was beheaded, a common form of sacrificial
death throughout the early Aegean and Levantine cultures, still

practiced to this day in some of the eastern temples of the Goddess,

though the victims are now animals instead of men. 8
Though only a fragment in its present form, the story of Salome
presents evidence for the survival of the Tammuz-Ishtar cult in

Jerusalem, where someone periodically died in the role of the god, and
the women raised the ancient lament for the victim in the temple
(Ezekiel 8:14).
1. W. G., 413. 2. Larousse, 138. 3. Angus, 251. 4. Enslin, C.
Graves, B., 48.
5. W. G, 75. 6. Reinach, 77. 7. J. E. Harrison, 174.
Graves,
8. Neumann, G. M., 1 52.

Salt

One of the few substances known to the ancients that could preserve
foodstuffs and dead bodies was salt. Egyptian mummies were preserved

in a brine solution called natron, "birth-fluid." Salt was accepted as a

substitute for the Mother's regenerative blood; it came from the sea-
womb and had the savor of blood. Therefore salt became a symbolic

886
instrument of kinship, like maternal blood. The Roman rite of confar- alt

reatio (patrician marriage) had the bride and groom share a cake of
flour and salt, which stood for flesh and blood respectively, and
magically transformed them like those who in older times shared
real flesh and blood into blood kin, unable to harm one another. 1
The Arabs signified a similar bond
of good faith by sharing a meal
of bread and which created the binding portion of any covenant.
salt,

The Bible speaks of a "covenant of salt" (Numbers 18:19) as one that

cannot be broken, even when it is a covenant between man and God.
Salt was an acceptable substitute for blood also in dedicating an altar,

either Jewish or Christian (see Blessing).

A common Semitic metaphor for enlightened seers was "salt of the

earth," i.e., true blood of the Earth Mother. The term was applied to
Christ's followers (Matthew 5:31) to suggest that they could prophesy
truly.
Christian uses of salt were copied largely from Roman pagans, who
used salt "Immolate" came from mola,
to bless every public sacrifice.

the flesh-and-blood-symbolic combination of salt and flour prepared by

the Vestal Virgins to sprinkle over every beast that was led to
2
sacrifice.

Church bells were solemnly anointed with salt and water, wiped
with linen, blessed, and christened. God was requested to give the
bells power to dispel demons by their sound, and to send thunder and
lightning far away from the vicinity of the
though bell- church
ringing was never very successful in the latter endeavor, since church
bell-towers were struck by lightning more often than any other
5
structure.

Christian infant baptism often involved rubbing the infant with salt
4
to repel demons. It was said that heretics carefully rubbed the salt off.

Superstitious fear of spilling salt was directly related to the idea of

spilling blood. Throwing a pinch of salt over the shoulder to take off
the curse was a symbolic way of putting bloodshed "behind," or turning
one's back on it.

Natural salt pillars in the vicinity of the Dead Sea proved profitable
to enterprising medieval Saracens, who learned that Christians would
pay good money to be guided to the exact spot where "Lot's wife"
stood, to behold a biblical miracle with their own eyes. Eroded by
wind, the salt pillars often assumed fantastic shapes. One may well have
been shaped like a woman; if not, a few touches of the chisel could

make it so.

Cabalistic tradition suggests that the biblical Lot's wife was really a
form of the Triple Goddess. Hebrew MLH, "salt," is a sacred word
because its numerical value is that of God's name of power, YH WH,

multiplied three times.

5
The same word is also a root of Malkuth, the
cabalistic Queen Mother Earth.
1. Hartley, 231. 2. Dumezil, 318. 3. Hazlitt, 43. 4. Cavendish, P. E., 223.
5. Budge, A. T., 323.

887
Samjna Samjna
Samson Hindu "Sign," "Letter," or "Name"; title of the Goddess as inventor

of writing and pictographic alphabets; also a title of the moon. See

1

Motherhood.
1.0Tlaherty,352.

var. Samuel Sammael

"Dread Lord," Semitic version of the Asiatic Sama, Samana, or
Samavurti, "the Leveller," Judge of the Dead, identified with the
underworld king Yama.
1
The Sama Veda called him a storm god,
2
clothed in black clouds. Like his later incarnation Satan, he was Prince
of the Power of the Air; also the Celtic god of Samhain, the Feast of
the Dead, Christianized as All Souls. Medieval Gnostics were accused
of worshipping his as Sammael or Satanael.
In Britain he had a feminine counterpart, Samothea (Death-
Goddess), queen of the mysterious land of the Hyperboreans, where
Pythagoras traveled to learn the arts of letters, astronomy, and science
3
from this all-wise lady. She seems to have been another form of
Skadi or Scatha.
1. Urousse, 346. 2. Frazer, G. B., 78. 3. Boulding, 193-94.

Samson
Hebrew version of the sun god called Shams-On in Arabia, Shamash
inBabylon, identical with Egypt's Ra-Harakhti and Greece's Heracles.
Samson's lion-killing, pillar-carrying, and other feats were copied
from the Labors of Heracles, signifying the sun's progress through the
zodiac. Samson's "mill" was the same as Omphale's wheel, to which
Heracles was bound. His loss of hair meant the cutting of the sun god's

rays, in the season when he became weak.

As Heracles was controlled by Omphale, and Ra was "made weak"
by Isis,so Samson was deprived of his strength in due season by

Delilah, "She Who Makes Weak." Another interpretation of her name

was Lily of the Yoni, that is, the female principle that deprived the

phallicgod of strength by drawing his "rays" or energy into herself.

Hair-cutting was a common mythic symbol of castration, since phallic
power was supposed to reside in a man's hair, according to ancient
eastern beliefs. 1
The castrating priestess Delilah was a Semitic copy of
Heracles's deadly consort Deianira, the instrument of his destruction.

Blinding, also, meant putting out the "phallic eye."

Talmudic tradition viewed Samson's "grinding" in Philistia as a

symbol of fornication suggesting a sacred-king cult in which a

strongman assumed the role of the sun hero, deflowered all the virgins
2
until his
strength was gone, then faced castration and sacrifice. It has

888
been supposed that Samson's wrecking of the Philistine temple stood for Sanguis ac Genus
ithe sun's power to dry out and crumble a structure made of mud Sapientia
cricks.
^^^^^t^^^mi^^m
1. Rawson, E. A., 25. 2. Legman, 520; Silberer, 97.

Sanguis ac Genus
['Blood of the race," the essence of genealogical continuity, possessed
women, according to pre-Roman
only by beliefs in Latium. See
1

Motherhood; Romulus and Remus.

[Link],68. I

Santo Nino

'Holy Child" slain and eviscerated by Jews to cast a death-spell on all

Christendom, according to the legend used by Torquemada and the
Spanish Inquisition to evict the Jews from Spain. Several captured
1

ews, after sufficient torture, confirmed the story. The same legend was
ised two centuries earlier to encourage a persecution of Jews in
2
Germany. See Jews, Persecution of.

1. Plaidy, 171 et seq. 2. Guerber, L. R., 206.

Sapientia
Latin "Lady Wisdom," corresponding to the Greek Sophia, the
Gnostic Goddess worshipped by Hermetists, alchemists, cabalists, and
medieval "philosophers" whose doctrines were disguised heresies. In
fact Sapientia was sometimes represented as "the Siren of the Philoso-

phers," pouring the red-and-white wines of enlightenment from her

breasts, rising from the sea like a crowned Aphrodite. 1

Renaissance mystics depicted Sapientia as the Shakti of God,

identifying her sometimes with the virgin Mary, sometimes with

Mother Nature, sometimes with God's "inner mind" or Goddess-
Within (I-dea). She was described as God's wisdom; indeed, as "all
the wisdom he had." 2 Spenser said Sapientia dwelt in God's bosom, as

his spouse, "the sovereign darling of the Deity, clad like a Queen in

royal robes." She was described as "the basic and primordial foundation
of all things ... the being, life, and light of intelligible things," and a

Triple Goddess: Sapientia creans, the Creatress; Sapientia disponans,

"who unites all things in harmony"; and Sapientia gubernans, "other-
wise known as Divine Providence." 5
The Christian writer pseudo-Dionysius credited Sapientia with
creation itself, calling her "Thou unbegun and everlasting Wisdom,
the which in thyself art the sovereign-substantial Firsthood, the sover-

eign Goddess, and the sovereign Good." 4

889
 Sapphire Sapientia was the hidden Creatress of medieval thought the
Sara-Kali unofficialGoddess supposedly eliminated from Europe's religions
centuries earlier, but still living fragmented under various names: Mary,
^^^^^^^^^^_
Nature, Luna, Earth, Venus, or Sophia.
I. de Givry, 361. 2. von Franz, 16. 3. Collins, 54, 220. 4. Wilkins, 1 12.

Sapphire
Biblical mistranslation oisappur, literally "holy blood": the lapis
lazuli, called the substance of the throne of God. 1

Originally it was
divine blue blood in the cauldron of the Crone, Siris, Babylonian
"Cosmic Mother." 2
1. Graves, W. G., 290. 2. Assyr. & Bab. Lit., 308.

Sappho
Poet-priestess of Lesbos, the "isle of women" dedicated to the
Goddess. Once married, mother of a daughter Cleis, Sappho devoted
her later life to the love of women. She was called the Tenth Muse
and revered even above Homer; but only fragments of her work remain
because her books were later burned. See Lesbians.

Sarah
"Queen," also rendered Sarai, Sara, Serah, Serai. Persian forms
referred to a matriarchal government, evolving into "temple of wom-
1
en," seraglio, or harem.
Sarah was the maternal goddess of the "Abraham" tribe that
formed an alliance with Egypt in the 3rd millenium b.c. 2 This was
the real meaning of the embarrassing biblical Abraham's
story about
pimping for his wife (Genesis 12).
According to Jewish tradition,
Sarah ranked higher than her husband, and her death
brought "confu-
sion" to a nation that was in good order while she lived. 3 She was
interred in the holy cave of
Machpelah, a womb-necropolis of the
Goddess of the Anakim. Votive idols in this cave were later
adopted
by the Jews and called by the names of deified ancestors: Sarah,
4
Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob.
1. Briffault 3, 1 10. 2. Graves, W. G., 300. 3. Ochs, 45. 4. Graves, W. G., 162.

Sara-Kali

"Queen Kali," the Goddess worshipped by gypsies, who came

originally from Hindustan. Some gypsies
appeared in 10th-century
Persia as tribes of itinerant dervishes
calling themselves Kalenderees,

890
"people of the Goddess Kali." A common gypsy clan name is still
!
Sara-Kali
Kaldera or Calderash, descended from past Kali-worshippers, like the
Kele-De of Ireland. 2
Goddess
^^^^^^^^
European gypsies relocated their in the ancient "Druid
Grotto" underneath Chartres Cathedral, once the interior of a sacred
mount known as the Womb of Gaul, when the area was occupied by
the Carnutes, "Children of the Goddess Car." Carnac, Kermarjo,
Kerlescan, Kercado, Carmona in Spain, and Chartres itself were named
after this Goddesss, probably a Celtic version of Kore or Q're,
traceable through eastern nations to Kauri, anothername for Kali. 3
The Druid Grotto used to be occupied by the image of a black
4
Goddess giving birth, similar to certain images of Kali. Christians
adopted this ancient idol and called her Virgo Paritura, "Virgin Giving
Birth." Gypsies called her Sara-Kali, "the mother, the woman, the
sister, the queen, the Phuri Dai, the source of all Romany blood." They
said the black Virginwore the dress of a gypsy dancer, and every
gypsy should make a pilgrimage to her grotto at least once in his life.
The grotto was described as "your mother's womb." A gypsy pilgrim
was told: "Shut your eyes of Sara the Kali, and you will know
in front

the source of the spring of life which flows over the gypsy race." 5
A gypsy prayer to the Goddess demonstrates her Kali-like trinity of

Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer:

Thou destroyest and dost make everything on earth; thou canst see

nothing death lives in thee, thou givest birth to all upon the
old, for
earth for thou thyself art life. Thou art the mother of every living
. . .

creature and the distributor ofgood; thou doest according to thy

wisdom what is useless or what has lived its destined time; by

in destroying

thy wisdom thou makest the earth to regenerate all that is new. . . .

6
[TJhou are the benefactress of mankind.

Sara-Kali was also known as Bibi, "the Aunt," a Destroyer-

Crone corresponding to Russia's Baba Yaga. Like the Kalika who
created fatal illnesses, Bibi "has the power to cause all kinds of

disease, especially at the beginning of a new month when there is a full

moon." 7 Bibi dressed in red, recalling the red-clothed Kali at the final
dissolution of the world when her garment is made of "a red mass of
blood" from all the gods she devours. 8 As Kali's dakinis identified
themselves with the Destroyer at ceremonies of death, so gypsy women
wore red for funerals. 9

Gypsies also used the Indo-Egyptian Yoni Yantra (triangle) as a

sign for "woman," practiced Tantric sexual rites like those of the east,
and believed in reincarnation according to Hindu doctrines of karma
governed by the Goddess. The gypsy said, "The sands of truth will
deposit me on the bed of earth from which I came. . . .
[Njaked, I shall

return to the womb of my mother." 10

Some gypsies insisted that Sara-Kali was Queen of Heaven and
Earth. According to a secret tradition, all the cathedrals in France
were arranged to form an earthly reflection of the constellation Virgo,

891
Sarama Sara-Kali's true home in heaven. 1 '
After being semi-Christianized,
with the virgin Mary. Gypsies celebrated
Saranyu gypsies identified Sara-Kali th

Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin up the heads

^^^^^^^^^^ by piling
of sacrificed fowls in front of her church, as Kali's votaries in India piled
12
up the heads of sacrificed animals.
Further Christianization inspired legends to provide Sara-Kali witl
a Christian background. Some claimed she was not a mother goddess
but a the patron saint of the gypsy people. She accompanied the
saint,

three Marys from the foot of Jesus's cross on their sea voyage to the
west. They landed at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Another story said
Sara-Kali was a gypsy queen from the Rhone delta, who swam from
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to meet the boat carrying Mary Salome,
Joseph of Arimathea, Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus,

and other Christian celebrities, whose bones were displayed at the site
15
throughout the Middle Ages.
[Link],20. [Link],67. 3. Campbell, Oc.M, 294. 4. Rawson, AT., 33.
5. Derlon, 217-19. 6. Leland, 107. 7. Trigg, 186. 8. Mahanirvanatantra, 295-96.
'
9. Trigg, 119. 10. Derlon, 132, 159. 11. Derlon, 210. 12. Trigg, 184. 13. Esty, 79.

Sarama
Vedic bitch-goddess, mother of the brindled Dogs of Yama, who
were westernized first as the Celtic Hounds of Annwn and then as the
Christian Hounds of Hell. Sarama was the eastern form of the
1

Huntress, known in classical mythology as Artemis, Diana, or Hecate.

(See Dog.) Like other Huntress-figures she symbolized the death-
dealing function of the Goddess who implacably hunted down all whos
time of dissolution had come, according to the cycles of karma.
1.0Tlaherty,352.

Saranyu
The Vedic Goddess as a mare, mother of the Asvins or centaurs. Her

western counterparts were Leukippe, Melanippe, Epona, or Mare-

headed Demeter. (See Horse.) Saranyu also gave birth to Yama and
Yami, the Lord of Death and Lady of Life, when she occupied the
form of a woman instead of a mare. According to one story, Saranyu
created a shadow-woman exactly like herself, and left this simulacrum
with her husband while she departed in the form of a mare. When
her husband Vivasvat realized the deception, he turned himself into a
stallionand followed her, as Poseidon became a stallion in order to
mate with Mare-headed Demeter. However, Saranyu's mating took
place in a peculiar way. Vivasvat spilled his semen on the ground,
and Saranyu snuffed some of it into her nostrils. In this way she became
pregnant, and later gave birth to the physician-gods, the Asvins, from

892
iher mouth. 1
The myth evidently came from an early period when the Sarapis
(mechanism of impregnation was thought to be variable and the
of birth not always exclusively genital.
orifice
^^^^^^^^^^^^
l.O'Flaherty.61,69.

SarapiS Var. Serapis

Syncretic god worshipped as a supreme divinity in Egypt to the end

i

of the 4th century a.d. The highly popular cult of Sarapis used many

trappings that were later adopted by Christians: chants, lights, bells,

vestments, processions, music.
Sarapis represented a final transformation of the savior Osiris into a
monotheistic figure, virtually identical with the Christian God. The
of Sarapis was founded in the 3rd century B.C. by Ptolemy Soter
(religion
the Savior), the Macedonian pharaoh who identified him-
((Ptolemy
jself
with the deity in traditional pharaonic style. This Ptolemaic god
1

a combination of Osiris and Apis, called Osarapis, or Sarapis. As

(was
Christ was a sacrificial lamb, so Sarapis was a sacrificial bull as well as a

god in human form. He was annually sacrificed in atonement for the

of Egypt, with the words: "If any evil be about to befall either those
[sins
who now sacrifice, or Egypt in general, may it be averted on this

head." 2
In his later development, Sarapis picked up the qualities of every

Egyptian deity and became both Father and Son, ruler and victim.
He was called lord of Death, Good Shepherd, creator, healer, sun,
fertility god, impregnator of the Goddess his image carried in holy
processions was a huge phallus. His greatest temple, the Sarapeum at

Alexandria, was a cathedral of pilgrimage and medicine. The philoso-

pher Demetrius of Phalerum testified that Sarapis had cured him of
blindness; his paeans to thegod were still sung as hymns centuries
3 4
later. Alexandrian psalms declared: "There is
only one Zeus Sarapis."
Sarapis became a great patron of arts and letters. The Sarapeum
included a vast library of literary treasures from all over the Roman

empire, a storehouse of contemporary learning. When Christianity

came to power in Alexandria, the library was attacked, though it was
5
desperately defended for three years. Finally, in 389 a.d., Theodosius
gave a direct order that the building must be wrecked and the books
burned. Christians therefore destroyed the Sarapeum and its library,
thus eliminating most of the ancient world's important literature in
one holocaust. 6
The "deceased" pagan god was later assimilated into the canon as
an artificial saint or saints. Among several Egyptian St. Sarapions, the
most notable was called a companion of St. Anthony, but a legend of his
martyrdom was constructed from the destruction of Sarapis's temple.
The late official canonization of St. Sarapion at the end of the 19th

893
 the "discovery"
Sarasvati century was based on an ecclesiastical literary hoax,
Satan of some texts alleged to be copies of material in the lost Sarapean
7
^^^^^^^^^^ library.
[Link],A.R.G.R.,74. 2. Budge, G.E. 2, 349. [Link], A.R.G.R.,75.
4. Encyc. Brit., "Sarapis." 5. J.H. Smith, C.G., 168. 6. H. Smith, 228. 7. Attwater, 305.

Sarasvati

"Flowing One," the Vedic river goddess whose water conferred

on kings when it was used in their baptism. Sarasvati was
divinity also

the Queen of Heaven assimilated to Brahmanism as Brahma's wife, a

combination that suggests the biblical A-brahm and Sara(h). Sarasvati
really predated the cult of Brahma. She was said to have invented all
the arts of civilization: music, letters, mathematics, calendars, magic, the
Vedas, and all other branches of learning. Sometimes she bore the
name of Savitri, listed by some scholars as a male god, even though
ancient records called Savitri "wife of Brahma" and "Daughter of the
Sun." Frequently she was identified with the holy waters of Ganges.
1

1. O'Flaherty, 352-53; Larousse, 332, 344.

Sargon
King of Akkad (now northern Iraq), 2241-2186 B.C.; a typical god-
king, born of a "virgin bride of God" or temple maiden, secretly placed
in a basket of rushes and sent away on the river to foil the incumbent
king who wished to him; drawn forth by a magical personage, the
kill

Water-Drawer or midwife-goddess Akki; raised in seclusion in the

wilderness; returned to the court in triumph to marry the Goddess

Ishtar and rule her lands. Many other hero-myths were based on the
1

]
details of Sargon 's story.
[Link],375.

Satan
Like all so-called devils, Satan began as a god. Early Egyptians called
him the Great Serpent Sata,Son of the Earth, immortal because he was
the Goddess's womb. A man could become
'

regenerated every day in

immortal, like Sata, by repeating prayers to identify himself with the

god: "I am the serpent Sata, whose years are infinite. I lie down dead. I

I am born daily. I am the serpent Sata, the dweller in the uttermost parts
of the earth. I lie down in death. I am born. I become new, I renew
my youth every day." 1

Sata seems to have been an underground aspect of the sun, Horus-s

Ra, corresponding to Apollo's underground serpent-form Python,
whom the Jews called Apollyon, Spirit of the Pit. He was a phallic

894
consort of the archaic Goddess Sati, or Setet, whose name was the Satan

same of a virgin aspect of Kali, and who once ruled Upper Egypt
as that

the biblical Seth,

2
which was known as the Land of Sati. The god was also called Set
who may not have been immortal but did manage to
^^^^^i
live 912 years (Genesis 5:8).
The snake's communion with the life-giving fountains of the deep
was still an important image in dynastic times, when Sata became the
keheret-snake, living in a yonic orifice in Isis's temple and giving oracles,
like Python at Delphi. It was felt that disasters would strike the
country if the serpent should leave the Goddess's sacred hole. 5
The serpent was often a symbol of the sun god's alter ego, the
Black Sun, spirit of night or of death. He combined with the solar disc
as the god during his dark hours. The pattern was the same in Osiris-
Set, Apollo-Python, Anu-Aciel, Baal-Yamm, etc. The dark god was
the light god's adversary not because he was originally viewed as evil,
but because he represented a sleeping or quiescent phase of the same
god.
Sata dwelling forever in the underworld reappeared in Russian folk
tales as the great underground serpent Koshchei the Deathless. 4 In
his "adversary" role he eventually became the immortal Dragon whom
the sun-hero had to slay, as men wished to slay the spirit of death

dwelling within their own bodies, the archetypal "betrayer" who led
them sooner or later to destruction.

To the Hebrews, a "satan" was an adversary in the sense of a

judge:one who tested the faith of another by asking trick questions or
posing problems to be solved. The "satan" first appears in the Bible as
one of the sons of God, advising God to test the faith of Job (Job 1:6).
In the original wording, Satan was one of the bene ha-elohim, sons of
"the gods"; but Bible translators always singularized the plurals to
conceal the fact that the biblical Jews worshipped a pantheon of
5
multiple gods.
This "son of God" was identified with the lightning-serpent
Lucifer by the words of Jesus, who claimed to have seen Satan
descending into the earth as lightning (Luke 10:18). This repeated
Persianmyths concerning Ahriman, the lightning-serpent cast from
heaven to the underworld by the god of light. Persians held that God
and the Great Serpent were twin brothers, an idea that entered into
Gnostic tradition and led to medieval magic books that called upon
Satan by the mystic names of God, such as Messias, Soter, Emman-

uel, Saboth, Adonai (Messiah, Savior, Immanuel, Lord of Hosts, the

6
Lord).
Satan not only answered to God's names, he even assumed a
divine appearance when he wished. The medieval church insisted
that Satan "transfigures himself into an angel of light," so anyone
claiming an unofficial angelic vision could be charged with devil
worship at the discretion of inquisitors who, naturally, always knew the
7
difference between a real angel and a devil in angelic disguise.

895
Sati Islamic writers called Satan Shaytan, or Iblis. He governed the race

oidjinn, the "genies" who were once ancestral spirits, like the

Roman genius. The djinn scorned Allah's prophets, so an army of

_^^^^^^^^
angels attacked them,
killed many, and took the rest prisoner. Among
the prisoners was Iblis-Shaytan, also called Azazel, to whom the Jews
used to offer scapegoats on the Day of Atonement. Iblis-Shaytan had
rebelled against Allah when Allah created Adam and ordered all the

angels to worship his creation. Allah says in the Koran, "We said
unto the Angels, Worship ye Adam, and they worshipped except Iblis
who was of the Jinn." 8
The background of this story may have come from the early
Gnostic Gospel ofPhilip, which the church censored for obvious
reasons: "Human beings make gods, and worship their creation. It
"9
would be appropriate worship for the gods to human beings!
Satan's worst offense he was not disposed to respect
seemed to be that

man, whose faults he well knew; nor did he have any good to say of
God, who had governed heaven too harshly and stimulated rebellion.
Medieval Christians interpreted everything apart from their own
orthodoxy as a manifestation of Satan-worship: astrology, magic,

pagan ceremonies, divination, etc.

Service of Satan is everything dealing with paganism, not only the

sacrifices and the worship of idols and all the ceremonies involved in
their service, according to the ancient custom, but also the things that have
their beginning in it. Service of Satan isclearly that a person should
follow astrology and watch the positions and motions of the sun, the
moon, and the stars for the purpose of traveling, going forth, or
undertaking a given work, while believing that he is benefited or harmed
by their motion or their course; and that one should believe the men
who, after watching the motions of the stars, prognosticate by them.
w
1 . Book of the Dead, 307, 544-45 ; Briffault 2, 649. 2. Larousse, 37, 3 3 5 .

3. Erman, 101. 4. Lethaby, 168. [Link], P.E., 184. 6. Wedeck, 95.

7. J.B. Russell, 77. 8. Keightley, 289. 9. Pagels, 1 22. 10. Laistner, 6-7.

Sati

Kali as the dangerous Virgin Bride of India's svayamara ceremony.

The same name was applied to Egypt's similarly archaic Virgin Hunt-
ress,once the ruler of the first nome of Upper Egypt, called "The
Land of Sati." Her holy city was Abu, the City of the Elephant (the
Greeks' Elephantine), where she was worshipped in conjunction with
the elephant god, who also mated with the Hindu version of Sati under
her "magic" name of Maya, to beget the Enlightened Son of God,
Buddha. 1

India still has pilgrimage centers known as Footprints of Sati,

memorials of the time when the Goddess walked on earth. 2
1. Larousse, 37, 348. 2. Ross, 49.

8%
 Saturn Saturn

Roman name for Cronus, the primitive earth god associated with
Great Mother Rhea and credited with her own Destroyer function of mmh^hmmmmmm
devouring her own children. Saturn was the same as the Black Sun
(Aciel) of Chaldean astrologers, the Lord ofDeathjit the nad ir of th e
underworld, representing the sun at his lowest aspect in the midwin-
ter solstice. Sometimes he was called Sun of Night.
At Harran, near old Edessa in what is now Turkey, Saturn's
worship included the wearing of black clothing, and burning candles
made of incense, opium, goat's fat, and urine, with the prayer: "Lord,
whose name is
august, whose power is
widespread, whose spirit is

sublime, O Lord Saturn the cold, the dry, the dark, the harmful . . .

crafty sire who knowest all wiles, who art deceitful, sage, understand-
ing, who causest prosperity or ruin, happy or unhappy is he whom thou
makest such." '

As a rule the Lord of Death was both a god and a demon, like

Shiva the Destroyer. He was the negative side of the summer sun,
propitiatedJajnidwinleiiso he might allow spring tocomejgain. This
important festival became the Roman Saturnalia, which contributed
many of its customs to Christmas. At Saturn's festival, death and
atonement were featured as well as joyous celebration of the sun's

new birth.
A sacrificial victim was chosen to represent both the god himself
and the king-surrogate. He was slain and sent to the underworld to

merge with was the universal practice in

his divine counterpart. "It

ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to choose a

man who played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary privileges of
Saturn for a season, and then died, whether by his own or another's
hand, whether by the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in the
character of the good god who gave his life for the world." 2
Though the real killing of the victim was gradually replaced by
symbolic killing, the festival was never abandoned, and in Christian
times it became part of the midwinter Carnival. "The mock execution
of King Carnival is a vestige of the ancient Saturnalia, when the man
who had acted as king of the revels was actually put to death at the end
of his reign. This practice continued in parts of the Roman army well
into Christian times." 3

Saturn gave his name to Saturday, the sabbath of the week's end,
before the coming of the new sun on Sun-day (Latin dies soli's). To
the Jews this was the seventh day when God "rested," like Saturn
quiescent in darkness before the sun rose again. Saturn was identified
with the seventh planetary sphere, whose astrological influences partook
of "saturnine" qualities such as somberness, heaviness, darkness,

passivity, coldness, etc.

The Babylonian name of the planet Saturn was Ninip, which was
also a name of the underworld god: "the black Saturn, the ghost of
the dead sun, the demoniac elder god." 4 But Saturn was not altogether

897
Savior demoniac. Like most chthonian deities, he was ambiguous. He was
Our medicinal symbol Rx began as the
often revered as a healer.

planetary sigil of Saturn, which was often written on paper and eaten
5
as a cure for disease.
[Link],A.R.G.R.,28,90. 2. Frazer, G.B., 679. 3. Moakley, 55. 4. Hallet, 387.

[Link],401.

Savior
Greek Soter, "Savior," was often affixed to the name of a god or
divine king, e.g., Dionysus Soter, Antiochus Soter. Its literal meaning
was "one who sows the seed," i.e., a phallic god, like Rome's Semo
Sancus Holy Seed consort of Mother Earth. After sowing or plant-
1

in the new grain as a Divine Child,

ing, the Soter was "born again"
and his advent was hailed with the formula, "He is risen." 2
It was usual for the Savior to sow his "seed" three times, like the

Persian Messiah who spilled his seed three times into the womb of
Mother Earth (Hvov). 3 At Eleusis the savior Iasion bore the title of
Triptolemus, "Three Plowings," ostensibly because he lay with
Mother Demeter "in a thrice-plowed field"; but the field was Demeter
4
herself, as Mother Earth, and the Savior was the plow. Ptolemy, the

royal name of the Macedonian line of Egyptian pharaohs, meant

5
"plower" or "sower," like the Greek Soter.
Since most kings were gods made flesh, many bore the title of
Savior. Antiochus Soter (Antiochus the Savior) ruled Babylon from
280 to 260 b.c, and was identified with the sacrificial god Nabu,
"exalted Son, powerful leader of the gods." 6 In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar
was hailed as "God made manifest and universal Savior of human life."

His successor Augustus was "Ancestral God and Savior of the whole
human race." 7 The emperor Nero was immortalized on his coins as
"Savior of Mankind." 8 Roman emperors were routinely deified and
made "saviors," as shown by the address prepared for the birthday
celebration of Augustus in 9 b.c.

This day has given earth an entirely new aspect. The world would have

gone to destruction had not there streamed forth from him who is now

born a common blessing. Rightly does he judge who recognized in this

birthday the beginning of life and ofall the powers oflife. The
. . .

providence which rules over all has filled this man with such gifts for the
salvationof the world as designate him the Savior for us for the coming
generation: of wars he will make an end, and establish all things worthily.
By his appearing are the hopes of our forefathers fulfilled: not only has
he surpassed the good deeds of men of earlier times, but it is impossible
that one greater than he can ever appear. The birthday of God has

brought to the world glad tidings that are bound up in him. From this

birthday a new era begins. 9

Such speeches were often copied by followers of less exalted

898
"saviors," of which the early Christian era had many, especially in the Savitri

Middle East. "Palestine was seething with eschatological (i.e., salva- Scold
tional) movements. [T]he emergence of the Christian sect was
. . .

anything but an isolated incident." One of the greatest problems of

early Christianity was to decide what the savior was supposed to be

saving humanity from. Among the many theories put forth were:
Christ saved mankind from (1) death, or (2) sin, or (3) demons, or (4)
10
the fleshly world and its
demiurge. evil

Celsus quoted a typical speech of the kind of self-styled savior Aulus Cornelius
Celsus Patrician
currently prevalent in his day:
Roman scholar of the
lam God (or a son of God, or a divine Spirit). And I have come. Already century a.d., who
first

the world is being destroyed. And you, O men, are to perish because of wrote at length on the
your iniquities. But I wish And you see me returning again
to save you. subjects of medicine,
with heavenly power. Blessed is he who has worshipped me now! But I agriculture, philosophy,
will cast everlasting fire upon all the rest, both on and on country
cities jurisprudence, and

places. And men who fail to realize the penalties in store for them will religion.

in vain repent and groan. But I will preserve for ever those who have been
convinced by me. "

Gnostics believed in a Buddhistic succession of saviors. Some

Gnostic leaders said "the savior does not come just once into the world
but that from the beginning of time he wanders in different forms
n
through history." The belief of Jewish Essenes in a savior of this type
probably contributed to the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew.

1. Hays, 109. 2. Briffault 3, 162. 3. Campbell, Oc.M., 210. 4. Graves, 1, 93. CM.
5. Budge, G.E. 2, 199. 6. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 195. 7. Angus, 109. 8. Strong, 82.
9. [Link], 171. [Link],31,139. 11. Jonas, 104. 12. Jonas, 79.

Savitri

A name of the Hindu Goddess as mother of civilization, she who

brought forth music and literature, rhythm, time, measurements, day
and night, memory, conquest, victory, yoga, and religion, as well as

many spirits of civilized arts; she also brought forth The Maiden Death,

and diseases. The same acts of creation were attribut-

1
dissolution, all

ed to the Goddess under another name, Sarasvati, inventor of

alphabets, wisdom, language, the Vedas, etc. Both Goddess-names
were applied to "the wife of Brahma," though the creative Goddess
preceded Brahma, and became his consort only after the Brahman
cult claimed her as a source of his power.
1. O'Flaherty, 49-50; Lurousse, 344.

Scold

Probably derived from Skuld (Skadi), the Norse Goddess of cursing,

third of the Norns, who spoke the deadly words that condemned every

899
 man to death sooner or later. Even after Christianity discredited
Scorpion
Skuld, men continued to believe that women's curses had effective
bad luck, disease, or death.
^^^^^^^^^ power to injure them, to cause
fear of women's maledictions.
Certainly Christian laws displayed
Men were permitted to curse women, but a woman could be jailed or
tortured for "scolding" a man. In England, "a common scold" was
considered a criminal, like a thief. The ducking stool, frequently used
1

to drown witches, was also used to punish a scold.

In 1632 the English brought from Scotland an instrument of

torture called a brank, or "scold's bridle": an iron head-cage with a

tongue piece to be inserted in the mouth, the cage being locked around
the head. Sometimes the tongue piece was shaped like a spoon;
sometimes it was a sharp spike. A brank with four sharp spikes, two to
pierce the tongueand two to pierce the cheeks, was used to fasten the
"witch" Agnes Sampson to the wall of her cell, as part of the torment to
2
make her confess to the crime of witchcraft.
The brank was stilluse as a punishment for "scolding" women
in

up to the middle of the 19th century. In 1856 a woman locked

into

one of these devices was paraded from the town cross to the church at
3
Bolton-le-Moors, in Lancashire.
1. Hazlitt, 158. 2. Robbing, 359. 3. Pearsall, N.B.A., 190.

Scorpion
The constellation of the Scorpion is one of the links between the
cultures of central America and those of the ancient east, possibly

Mesopotamia, whose ziggurats were so similar to the Mexican

pyramids. Scorpio was the same in Babylonia, India, and Greece; and
the Maya of Yucatan also called the same constellation "scorpion
1
stars."

Astrological myths everywhere placed Aquarius the Water-drawer

at the winter solstice, Taurus the Bull at the spring equinox, Leo the
Lion at the summer
solstice, the autumnal equinox. 2
and Scorpio at

Therefore it was said in Egypt that the Scorpion killed Horus, the
sun, sending him to his midwinter death and resurrection as his Mother
Isis gave him rebirth; and Pharaoh's daughter apparently played the
part of the Water-drawer or divine midwife on the banks of the Nile, as
shown by the myth of Moses.
Spirits of the four points of the year were sometimes called Sons of

Horus, and placed as small images in the four corners of a pharaoh's

tomb. As man, bull, lion, and scorpion (or serpent) they were adopted
by Christianity and converted into the four totems of the evangelists
and the four angels of the Apocalypse.
1. Von Hagen, 178. 2. Campbell, Oc.M., 259.

900
Scotia Scotia
er
Latin form of the "Dark Aphrodite" after whom Scotland was
named; in her native land she was the Death-goddess Scatha, or Skadi.
1
^^^^^hhhb
She was the mother of Caledonia; some said she was identical with
the Caillech, or Crone, who created the world.
1. Graves, CM. 1,72.

Sebastian, Saint
Canonized form of the Gaulish savior-god immolated by being
bound to a tree or pillar and pierced by arrows, like Cu Chulainn.

Pagan images of the dying god were simply renamed St. Sebastian, as

in the ancient stone temple at Knockmay in Galway that is, Gaul's

1
Way.
The Christianized myth made St. Sebastian a martyr "born in

Gaul." His legend is now described as "simply a romance," the

Catholic scholar's term for a faked sainthood. Nevertheless, he has not
been officially eliminated from the canon. 2
1. Spence, 85, 106. 2. Atrwater, 304.

Seidr

Freya's secrets of witchcraft, copied by the patriarchal gods under

Father Odin; cognate with Irish sidh and Hindu siddhi, the magic

powers resulting from the practice of yoga. Sufi sages called these
x

powers by a similar name, sihr.

1. Shah, 335.

Seker
Egyptian Lord of Death, "the hidden one," or "he who is shut in";
Sun enclosed in the earth's womb, at the bottom of
Osiris as the Black
1
the underworld, in a secret pyramid filled with "blackest darkness."
Seker was a title of the phallus at the point of "dying," sending forth
seed into the dark. The Arab's word for "penis," zekker, came from
the god's name. 2
The same Lord of Death was the tutelary deity of the necropolis at

Sakkara, another variation of his He also appeared in Babylon

name. 3
4
messenger from the moon that is, from the land of death.
as Zaqar, a

In Hebrew he was zakar, "maleness, virility." His medieval descendant

901
Semele was the phallic Satan
enclosed in the darkest central pit of hell, yet

radiating the spirit of

lust.
Senate
^^^^^ 1. Book of the Dead, 145. 2. Edwardes, 23. 3. Budge, G.E. 1, 504. 4. Larousse, 63.

Semele
associated with both the earth and the
Virgin mother of Dionysus,
1
moon. The Moon-goddess Selene was only a variant of Semele.
Phrygians called her Zemelo, an incarnation of Cybele, Great
Mother of the Gods. 2 Semele was "made into a woman by the Thebans
and called the daughter of Kadmos, though her original character
3
asan earth-goddess is transparently evident."
1. Graves, CM. 2,408. 2. Neumann, A.C.U., 70. 3. Guthrie, 56.

Semiramis, Queen
Greek name of the Assyrian queen Sammuramat, said to have
founded Babylon and built its famous Hanging Gardens, conquered the
whole Middle East, and invaded Kush and India. Her consorts had
1

little or nothing to do with government; she was a daughter of the

Goddess and made her son the king. Some said she castrated the
males of her royal household, suggesting that she was the Goddess
whose temples were served by eunuch priests. 2 Like most early
Assyro- Babylonian queens she embodied the spirit of Mari-Ishtar.'
1. de Camp, A.E., 69. 2. Brasch, 155. 3. Encyc. Brit., "Semiramis."

Semites
The Bible said Semitic tribes descended from Noah's son Shem, or
Sem. This mythical personage was actually a title of Egyptian priests of
Ra, who when fully initiated were allowed to wear the panther skin
(as priests of Dionysus and Yahweh did also) and call themselves Shem.
These priests in turn may have evolved from the class of Egyptian

priestesses called shemat, "singing-mothers," who knew the hymns and

words of power. 1

\. Book of the Dead, 22\,27S.

Senate
From Latin se-natus, "self-born," in earliest times probably a group
oimatrones or tribal mothers thought to be reincarnated in their

daughters by matrilineal succession. The later patriarchal gods also

claimed to be "self-born," like Ra in Egypt. Providing any god with a
1

902
mother implied that there was an older, greater female authority over Serpent
him a self-defeating idea for patriarchal thinkers.
1. Budge, G.E. 1,341. ^^^^mm^^^^amam

Serpent
It was a general belief in the ancient world that snakes don't die of old
age like other animals, but periodically shed their skins and emerge

renewed or reborn into another life. Greeks called the snake's cast

skin geras, "old age." The Chinese envisioned resurrection of the dead
as a man and coming out of it as a youth again,
splitting his old skin
like a snake. Melanesians say "to slough one's skin" means eternal life.
A basic serpent-myth said the dual Moon-goddess of life and death

made the first man. Her bright aspect suggested making him immortal
like a snake, able to shed his skin; but her dark aspect insisted that he
should die and be buried in the earth. Eternal life and serpenthood are
1

still equated in the Italian expression averpiu annid'un serpente

"being older than a serpent."
The ageless serpent was originally identified with the Great
Goddess herself. Hinduism's Ananta the
was the serpent-
Infinite

mother who embraced Vishnu and other gods during their "dead"
phase. She was also Kundalini, the inner female soul of man in serpent
2

shape, coiled in the pelvis, induced through proper practice of yoga to

uncoil and mount through the spinal chakras toward the head, bringing
infinite The Serpent-goddess occupied the famous Khmer
wisdom.
temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia where she embraced the king every
night. If one night the Goddess did not appear, it was a sign that the

king must be killed and a new king chosen.

3

The Negritos said the divine people called Chinoi (Chinese) were
descended from a mighty Serpent-goddess named Mat Chinoi,
Mother of the Chinese. In her belly lived beautiful angels who received
the souls of the dead. Since her womb was Paradise, shamans
underwent their death-and-rebirth initiations by entering the serpent's
4
belly.
The ancient Aegean world worshipped primarily women and
serpents. Men didn't participate in religious ceremonies until late in
the Bronze Age, kings were allowed to become priests of
when Cretan
the bull-god. then, the priest's role was subordinate to that of
Even
the priestess, until the priest himself took the title of "serpent." The
5

word for "priest" among ancient Akkadian peoples literally meant

"snake charmer." 6
The Indian Serpent-goddess Kadru gave birth to all the Nagas or
cobra people, and made them immortal by feeding them her divine
lunar blood. 7 She had a Babylonian counterpart, the Goddess Kadi of
8
Der, worshipped as a serpent with a woman's head and breasts. Her
children like the Nagas were depicted as water-serpents, human from

903
 Sefpent the waist up, like mermaids and mermen. The Nagas guarded "great
treasures of wealth and precious stones, and sometimes books of secret
9
teachings in underwater palaces."
A
similar serpent guarded the wonderful Book of Thoth, which
was hidden in an underwater palace. 10 Like his Greek twin Hermes,
BookofThoth Thoth was often incarnate in a snake, signifying his magical wisdom.
Legendary Egyptian
Egypt agreed with India in depicting the first serpent as a totemic
magical text sup-
form of the Great Mother herself. Egypt's archaic Mother of Creation
posed to have been
written by the god was a serpent, Per-Uatchet or Buto. The Egyptian uraeus-snake was
Thoth, found in the ne- a hieroglyphic sign for"Goddess." " Incongruously, "Uraeus" later
cropolis at Memphis became one of the most popular "secret names of God" listed in
by a young prince
named Satni-
Magic Papyri and medieval texts of sorcery.

Khamois. Egypt's Serpent-goddess also had the title of Mehen the Envel-

opes similar to Kundalini or Ananta. Each night, Mehen enfolded

the ram-headed god Auf-Ra (Phallus of Ra) during his sojourn in the
Magic Papyri Col-
lections of exorcisms, uterine underworld. This was a mythic image of the king's sexual
12
invocations, charms, union with his Goddess, reminiscent of the custom of Angkor Wat. At
and widely circu-
spells
Philae, the Serpent-goddess received the title of Anqet, from anq, to
lated during the early
13
Christian era, used as
surround, to embrace. "Serpent of the Nile" was the title, not only of
bases for later gri- Cleopatra, but of all Egyptian queens who represented the nation and
moires and Hermetic the Goddess embracing the king.
texts. The birth-and-death Goddesses Isis and Nephthys became identi-
fied with the dual Serpent-mother of life and after-life. Only they
could help the soul through the section of the underworld inhabited by
Mahabharata Indi-
serpent deities, Egypt's version of the Nagas.
14
The Mahabharata
an epic poem,
depicts a hero seeking immortality in a similar underworld called "city of
consisting of histori-
cal and legendary serpents," where the dual Mother of Life and Death wove the web of

material gathered be- nights and days with black and white thread, binding them with the red
tween the 4th and 10th thread of life. 15
centuries a.d., in- The Akkadian Goddess Ninhursag, "She Who Gives Life to the
cluding the famous
Dead," was also called "Mistress of Serpents" as yet another form of
Bhagavad-Gita.
Kadru or Kadi. 16 Babylon's version of her made her a dark twin of the
Heaven-goddess Ishtar, calling her Lamia or Lamashtu, "Great
Lady, Daughter of Heaven." Cylinder seals showed her squatting, Kali-
17
like, over her mate, the god Pazuzu, he of the serpent penis. As
another Lord of Death, he gave himself up to be devoured by the
Goddess. The image of the male snake deity enclosed or devoured by
the female gave rise to a superstitious notion about the sex life of snakes,

reported by Pliny and solemnly believed in Europe even up to the

20th century: that the male snake fertilizes the female snake by putting
his head in her mouth and 18
letting her eat him.
The male serpent deity became the phallic consort of the Great
Mother, sometimes a "father" of races, because he was the Mother's
original mate. In some myths, he was no more than a living phallus she:
created for her own sexual pleasure. In other myths, she allowed him
to take part in the work of creation or to fertilize her world-producing
womb. When the serpent-creator turned arrogant and tried to pre-

904
tend that he alone made the universe, the Goddess punished him, Serpent
bruising his head with her heel and banishing him to the under-
world.
19
On this version of the creation myth the Jews based their ^^^^^^^^^^^^
notion of Eve's progeny bruising the serpent's head, and the rabbini-
cal opinion that the serpent was Eve's first lover and the true father of
20
Cain.

Actually, the serpent was worshipped in Palestine long before

Yahweh's cult arose. Early Hebrews adopted the serpent-god all their

contemporaries revered, and the Jewish priestly clan of Levites were

"sons of the Great Serpent," i.e., of Leviathan, "the wriggly one." 21
22
He was worshipped in combination with his Goddess, the moon. The
Bible shows that Yahweh was a hostile rival of the serpent Leviathan,

for the two gods battled each other (Psalms 74:14; 89:10, Isaiah 5 1:9).

They would engage in another final battle at doomsday (Isaiah 27: 1 ;

Revelation 12).
Another Jewish name for the Great Serpent was Nehushtan,
described as the god of Moses. Hebrew nahash, "serpent," descended
from an ancient Vedic serpent-king, Nahusha, once "the supreme ruler
of heaven," until he was cast down to the underworld by a rival. 23
Nehushtan was the same god whose image Moses made: a "fiery

serpent" according to Numbers 21:8. The Israelites worshipped him

until the reign of Hezekiah, when the new priesthood "cut down the

groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made"
(2 Kings 18:4).
Yet serpent worship continued in Israel. Seraph, the Hebrew word
for the divine fiery serpent, used to mean an earth-fertilizing light-
24
ning-snake, and later became an angel. The seraphim were originally

serpent-spirits, like those of the caduceus created by Hermes the

Great Serpent and copied by Mosaic tradition. Jewish medallions of the
1st and 2nd centuries represented Jehovah as a serpent god, like
B.C.

the "snake-tailed winds" of the Greeks. 25 Jews of Asia Minor said their
26
Jehovah was the same as Zeus Sabazius the serpent god of Phrygia.
Some Jewish Gnostics early in the Christian era maintained that the
post-exilic Jehovah was no god, but a devil, the usurper of the original
27
Kingdom of the Wise Serpent.
Much Gnostic literature praised the serpent of Eden for bring-
ing the "light" of knowledge to humanity, against the will of a tyrannical
28
God who wanted to keep humans ignorant. This view of the Eden
myth dated back to Sumero-Babylonian sources that said man was made
by the Earth Mother out of mud and placed in the garden "to dress it
and keep it" (Genesis 2:1 5) for the gods, because the gods were too
to

lazy todo their own farming and wanted slaves to plant, harvest, and
29
give them offerings. The gods agreed that their slaves should never
learn the godlike secret of immortality, lest they get above themselves
and be ruined for work. Therefore, as the Epic of Gilgamesh reports,
the gods gave death to humanity, and "Life they kept in their own
hands." 50

905
 In one of the interwoven Genesis stories, God was not one but
Serpent
many, the elohim or "gods-and-goddesses."
The God of Eden
31

remarked to his divine colleagues, "Behold, the man is become as one

of us, to know good and evil"; therefore he must be ejected from the

garden at once, lest he "take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for

ever" (Genesis 3:22). The serpent's teachings would have led man to

conquer death and become godlike, against the will of the elohim.
Hypostasis of the The Hypostasis of the Archons showed that the serpent was a
Archons ("Reality of totemic form of the Goddess, apparently taking pity on her doomed
the Rulers") A creature and seeking to instruct him in the attainment of eternal life:
Gnostic Gospel written
"The Female Spiritual Principle came in the Snake, the Instructor,
about the 3rd centu-
and it
taught them, saying, 'y u sna H not die; for itwas out of jealousy
ry A.D., incorporating
one of the alternate that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open, and you shall
"
versions of the Adam become gods, recognizing evil and good.'
like Then "the arrogant
and Eve myth. 52
Ruler" (God) cursed the serpent and the woman. Some Gnostic
sects honored both Eve and the serpent for their efforts on behalf of
33
humanity.
The present form of the biblical story is
obviously a much-revised
version of the original tales of the Great Mother and her serpent.

Babylonian icons showed the Goddess attended by her snake, offering

man the food of immortality. The Pyramid Texts said it was the
34
serpent who offered the food of eternal life. As Ophion, or Ophi, he
was the ancestor of the African serpent god Obi, whose name is still
preserved in the voodoo-magic system, oheah?^ The Bible uses a
Hebrew version of the name, obh, for the familiar spirit of the Witch
of Endor, and the Vulgate renders this word "python." 36 In Dahomey,
the primal Mother-Creatress Mawu was supported by a Great
37
Serpent.
Gnostic accounts of the Eden myth used the Aramaic pun
identifying Eve, the Teacher, and the Serpent: Hawah, Mother of
All Living;hawa, to instruct; and hewya, Serpent. 38 Eve's name in
Arabic combines the idea of "life" (hayyat) with the name of the
still

39
serpent (Hayyat). Hippolytus viewed the serpent as a feminine Logos,
"the wise Word of Eve. This is the mystery of Eden: this is the river
that flows out of Eden. This is also the mark that was set on Cain, whose
sacrifice the God of this world did not accept whereas he accepted
the bloody sacrifice of Abel: for the lord of this world delights in blood.
This Serpent is he who appeared in the latter days in human form at

the time of Herod." *

Arabian tradition identified the food of immortality with the female
uterine blood, colored "royal purple"; and the Mother's uterine
garden with the moon temple at Marib in Sheba. Legend said the
serpents of Sheba were purple with the divine essence, and lived in
trees; thepeople were serpentlike, with forked tongues, great wisdom,
and longevity. 41 From Sheba might have come the mysterious life-
giving substance called shiba in the Epic of Gilgamesh, dispensed by the
wife of Uta-Napishtim (Noah), who had become the only immortal

906
man; his wife therefore was a Goddess. When this holy matriarch gave Serpent
shiba to Gilgamesh, he shed his old, diseased skin like a snake, and
emerged from reborn. 42
it
^^^^^^^^^^^
Persians also maintained the symbolic connections between men-
strualblood and the serpent's secret of longevity. Mithraists claimed

immortality was conferred by the blood of the sacrificial bull, but a

serpent was there to collect the blood as it flowed from the bull's

body; and this blood was imitation-menstrual blood in that it was

"delivered by the moon." 43
Immortality was the special province of the skin-shedding Serpent
and the blood-bestowing Goddess from earliest times. Some of the
very oldest traditions of the Great Serpent identified him with the
Earth's intestines. Archaic serpent gods like Egyptian Apep and
Sumerian Khumbaba were said to "resemble intestines." 44 In this

connection, the biblical phrase for birth or rebirth was "separation

from the bowels." Serpents understood how to restore life to the dead,
according to the myths of Crete, where the sorcerer Polyidos learned
the serpents' secret and won great honor at the Minoan court by
45
bringing the dead prince Glaucus back to life.

Many Gnostic traditions identified the Serpent with Jesus. In the

PistisSophia, Jesus was the serpent who spoke to Eve "from the tree
of knowledge and the tree of life, which were in the paradise of Adam."

Jewish Naassians (Serpent-worshippers) said the serpent was the

Messiah. Magic Papyri called him "World Ruler, the Great Serpent,
46
leader of gods ... the god of gods." Some Christians held that the
serpent was the father of Jesus, having "overshadowed" the bed of the

virgin Mary and begotten the human form of the Savior.

These traditions were still extant, though hidden, in Renaissance
times. Barrel Bruyn's Gnostic-symbolic painting of the Annunciation
showed an unmistakably Hermetic serpent-caduceus as the rod extend-

ed toward Mary by the impregnating angel Gabriel. The Dove

poised in a halo in its tip, making a sign like a cross between a fairy-wand
and the emblem of Venus. 47 This made a combined symbol of the
male-and-female mystery of the Serpent and Dove, which was inserted
into the mouth of Jesus according to Matthew 10:16. Many theolo-

gians claimed the crucified serpent Nehushtan was a prophecy of Jesus:

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must
the Son of Man be lifted up" (John 3:1 5). In the 16th century, German
smiths made golden thalers with a crucified Christ on one side and a
crucified serpent on the other, hinting that they were two faces of the
same redeemer. 48
Every mythology had some form of the World Serpent. Like the
Hermetic or Gnostic serpent encircling the World Egg, he was a
basic Indo-European religious symbol. Norse myth called him the
Midgard-Worm, who encircled the whole round of Middle-Earth

(Midgard), his tail in his mouth. 49 Russians called him Koshchei the
50
Deathless, encircler of the underworld. This seems to have been a

907
 51
Serpent variation of the Japanese dragon of sea-tides, Koshi. Egyptians called
him Sata (Satan), or the Tuat, on whose back the sun god rode
through the underworld each night. Greeks called him Okeanos, the
sea-serpent of the outermost ocean.
Often the Heavenly Father assumed this serpent form, like Zeus
52
Meilichios, worshipped as a gigantic serpent in the 4th
century B.C.
In the shape of a serpent he became the consort of chthonian Perseph-
one." He also begot heroes on mortal women. Alexander the Great
was allegedly fathered by God who in the form of a serpent impreg-
54
nated his mother, Queen Olympias.
The Pyramid Texts spoke of the serpent as both subterranean and
55
celestial. In his heavenly aspect, he was a dispenser of immortality.

As the divine phallus in perpetual erection he was the Tree of Life, or

axis mundi, a Pole passing through the center of heaven and earth
that is, FatherHeaven coupled to the Goddess's "hub." His eye was
seen as the pole star. In 3000 B.C., the pole star was Alpha Draconis,
the Serpent's Eye. 56
The Mahabharata said the pole star to which the yoke of the world
was fixed was "the supreme snake, Vasuki." The same snake was the

phallic god who Abyss at creation, according to the

stirred the uterine

Vedas. 57 Like the God of Genesis, the Vedic deity Indra claimed to
have cast down the Great Serpent from heaven into the world-
58
encircling abyss of the outer ocean. Like the Bible story, this myth
re-interpreted the original meaning of the serpent as a descending,
fertilizing phallus.
The sexual image of the phallic serpent's head as the Jewel in the
Lotus ramified into many versions of the myth of menarche: the
belief that menstruationwas initiated by copulation with a supernatural
snake (see Menstrual Blood). According to this imagery, the divine
male serpent acquired a "blood-red jewel" in his head. Hindus said all
the great snakes carried blood-red rubies of immortality in their
heads. 59
Germans remembered this Aryan lore, and said a serpent with a

magic stone in its head would be found at the root of a hazel tree
witchwood near mistletoe. The serpent's stone was sacred to the
moon, and was identified with the Philosopher's Stone, which could
60
bring eternal life. Remnants of the serpent's phallic symbolism
appeared in medieval magic charms, such as the conviction that "female
diseases" could be cured by applying to the sufferer a staff with which
a snake had been beaten. 61
In 13th-century France, a snake on a pole like the Ophites' image
of Christ was carried in triumphal procession during Easter Week to
the baptismal font of the church. 62 Sometimes the fetish was an
enormous stuffed serpent, like a Chinese carnival dragon. Church-
men tried to assimilate the custom by saying the serpent was the devil
"driven from his kingdom by the Passion of Christ"; but this was but

908
a lame explanation for a rite that was already old when Christianity was Seshat
new. 63
Early Ophite Christians adopted serpent worship and claimed
Moses as the founder of their sect,
alleging that Moses taught the
64
Jews to worship the serpent in the wilderness. Besides, the serpent had
certainly given to Adam and Eve, and therefore was a
knowledge
savior of
humanity, an earlier incarnation of Christ who also suffered at

God's hands for the enlightenment he brought. The Ophites' holy

serpents were made to twine around the bread of the Eucharist, and
were adored hanging on crosses. Ophite "colleges" still existed in

Bithynia in the 5th century a.d., when

bishops began leading mobs to Bithynia Ancient re-

wreck the Ophite churches. 65 gion of Asia Minor,

Medieval Hermetists worshipped the serpent as Ouroboros, king of adjoining the Sea of
Marmora, the Bospo-
magic, a syncretic mixture of the Ophites' Christ-Ophion, the
rus, and the Black
Greeks' Hermes, the Phoenicians' Taaut, the Egyptians' Tuat, and Sea. The Bithyni, a
other ancient snake-tailed gods including the underground oracle Thracian tribe, set-
66
Python. Ouroboros was linked with the Chinese p;-dragon, symbol of tled the region toward
the universe, carved on jade discs as a dragon or serpent eating its the end of the 2nd
67 millenium B.C.
own tail. This may have been
the prototype of the serpent Python and
the Pythagoreans' worship ofp/as the mystic numerical principle of
the circle. Two serpents eating each other's tails combined the yang-

and-yin mandala with the caduceus, expressing the bisexual nature of

Hermes and all cyclic alternations: birth/death, summer/winter, light/
dark, etc. The Ouroboros was still pictured under the earth in certain
European areas, and some people claimed to be able to feel his slow
movements through their feet when they stood in the ancient shrines.
[Link] 2,643-48. 2. O'Flaherty, 340. 3. Wendt, 198. 4. Eliade, S., 340.
5. Stone, 47-48. 6. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 4. 7. O'Flaherty, 222. 8. Larousse, 63.
9. Tatz &
Kent, 79. 10. Maspero, 125. 1 1. Budge, G.E. 1, 24. 12. Norman, 48.
13. Budge, G.E. 2, 57. 14. Book of the Dead, 140. 15. Lethaby, 238. 16. Ashe, 15.
17. Budge, A.T., 110. 18. Briffault 2,667. 19. Graves, G.M. 1, 27. 20. Tennant, 154.
[Link], 576. 22. Briffault 3, 108. 23. O'Flaherty, 348. 24. Brandon, 360.
25. Campbell, M.I., 294. [Link],C.B.,91. 27. Graves, W.G., 367. 28. Malvern, 34.
29. Campbell, Or. M., 109. 30. Larousse, 72. 31. Reinach, 188. 32. Pagels, 31.
33. Malvern, 34. 34. Lindsay, O.A., 54. [Link], 159. 36. Summers, H.W.D., 177.

37>bes,97. 38. Pagels, 30-31. [Link],387. 40. Jonas, 95. 41. Thomson, 195.
42. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 360; Hooke, M.E.M., 55. 43. Larousse, 316. 44. Budge, AT., 169.
45. Jobes, 245. 46. Legge 2, 173, 256. 47. Campbell, M.I., 245.
48. Campbell, CM., 153-54. 49. Branston, 96. 50. Lethaby, 168. 51. Jobes, 172.
52. Campbell, M.I., 295. 53. Graves, G.M. 1,56. [Link], 141. 5 5. Lindsay, O. A., 54.
56. Encyc. Brit., "Precession of the Equinoxes." 57. O'Flaherty, 131, 274.
58. Campbell, Or. M., 183. 59. O'Flaherty, 226. 60. Briffault 2, 704. 61. Agrippa, 1 58.
62. Male, 183. 63. de Voragine, 280. 64. Budge, AT., 203. 65. Legge 2, 77.
66. Cavendish, T., 70. 67. Rawson, E.A., 229.

Seshat

Egyptian Goddess of writing, measurements, calculation, record-

keeping, and hieroglyphics; "Mistress of the House of Books," "Lady of
the Builder's Measure." Priests of Thoth insisted their god was
married to her and took over her functions, so Thoth was often credited

909
 Set with the invention of letters and numbers. However, in the time of
Sex Queen Hatshepsut, Thoth was not fully entrusted with the court
^^^^^^^^^^ records and bookkeeping. His figures had to be "verified by his
'
wife."
Most contemporary studies (by male scholars) ignore Seshat and
list Thoth as the deity of writing though the earliest dynastic

literature emphasizes her, not him.

1 . Larousse, 28.

Set
Ass-headed Egyptian deity, once ruler of the pantheon; "supplanter"
of the Good Shepherd Osiris; perpetual rival of Horus. Copied by
biblical writers, he appeared in the Old Testaments as Seth, "sup-

planter" of the Good Shepherd Abel. See Ass.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Seven Sisters

See Pleiades.

Sex
Rev. Dr. Joseph Fletcher of the Episcopal Theological School wrote,
"The Christian churches must shoulder much of the blame for the

confusion, ignorance, and guilt which surrounds sex in Western

culture [T]he Christian church, from its earliest primitive begin-
nings, had been swayed by many Puritanical people, both Catholic
and Protestant, who have viewed sex as inherently evil." '

Others have been less forgiving, and stated bluntly that Christian
churches must shoulder not just "much of the blame, but all of it.
R.E.L. Masters declared, "Almost the entire blame for the hideous
nightmare that was the witch mania, and the greatest part of the
blame for poisoning the sexual life of the West, rests squarely on the
Roman Catholic Church." 2 The rest of the blame presumably
devolves upon Protestantism, for there was no institution in western
culture other than Christianity that made
any effort to teach human
beings to hate or fear sex.
Christian abhorrence of sex began with the fathers of the church,
who insisted that the kingdom of God couldn't be established until
the human race was allowed to die out 5
through universal celibacy.
Marcion announced that all
propagation must be abandoned at once.
St. Jerome ordered: "Regard everything as poison which bears within it

the seed of sensual pleasure." 4 St. Athanasius declared the

great
revelation and blessing
brought by Jesus was knowledge of the saving

910
 5
grace of chastity. Tertullian said chastity was "a means whereby a Sex
man will traffic in a mighty substance of sanctity," whereas the sex act

rendered even marriage "obscene." 6

Numenius of Apamea proclaimed that only total cessation of all
sexual activity could bring about the union of the soul with God. 7 St.

Augustine pronounced the doctrine that "concupiscence" is the root of Numenius of Apa-
mea Neopythagorean
original sin and the means of transmitting Adam's guilt to all
and Platonic philoso-
generations. Thus he sealed the church's commitment to asceticism, at
8 pher, born in Syria
least in theory, for the next 1600 years. Augustine said sexual
during the 2nd cen-
9
intercourse is never sinless, even within marriage. Augustine didn't tury a.d.; influential in
invent this doctrine. He got it from Gnostic Manicheans, to whose the school of

sect he belonged before conversion to orthodoxy. Gnostics taught

his Plotinus.

that souls are entrapped in flesh by "the mystery of love and lust,

through which all the worlds are inflamed." This teaching probably
came ultimately from ascetic Jain Buddhist yogis, who enjoined the
same precept as the First Book of John: "Love not the world, neither

things that are in the world ... for all that is in the world, the lust of
the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the
10
Father."
These views became more entrenched as time went on. Medieval
theologians said sex "caused the damnation of humanity, which was
on its account put out of Paradise, and for its sake Christ was killed." 1 1

Officials of the Inquisition taught in their handbooks that women's

"carnal lust" was the cause of witchcraft and Satanism, since God
"allows the devil more power over the venereal act, by which the
original sin is handed down, than over all other human actions . . .

12
because of its natural nastiness."
The church promulgated legends about saints so devoted to
chastity that they preferred extreme physical torment to sexual
pleasure. St. Paul the Hermit was tied down by the wicked emperor
Decius and subjected to the lascivious caresses of a harlot. As soon as

he felt his penis rise, "having no weapon with which to defend himself,
[he] bit off his tongue and spat it into the face of the lewd woman."

The sainted Pope Leo was so pure that when "a woman kissed his

hand, and aroused in him a violent temptation of the flesh," he cut

his hand off. By singular good fortune it was restored by the Holy Virgin
so he could continue to perform religious ceremonies. 13
The early church attacked most bitterly the many pagan faiths
that made sex a central holy sacrament, enacting union of the Great

Goddess and her phallic consorts. Tertullian denounced "the whore-

doms of Eleusis," and Eusebius condemned "the unnameable rites of
the mysteries, adulteries and yet baser lusts." Yet Plato and his

contemporaries had worshipped Eros, god of sexual love, as "the most

venerable of the deities, the most worthy of honor, the most powerful
to grant virtue and blessedness unto mankind both in life and after

death." 14
From the most primitive period, European pagans incorporated

911
 Sex sex into their religion. The word Lust in old Germanic languages
15
meant "religious joy." At their holy feasts, Norsemen sang songs the

^^^^^^^^^^_ Christians called "lewd and shameful," and danced hip-swinging

16
dances the Christians called "female gyrations." The people refused
to give these up, believing them essential to general fertility. When
seasons went awry and crops failed under the Christianized kings,
first

the peasants were sure the cause was neglect of the old deities' rites. 17

Sexuality was reverenced in cultures where the female principle

was accorded freedom and honor, as in Egypt, where women chose
and wooed their lovers at will. 18 Egyptians described carnal knowledge
as "knowing a woman perfectly," and regarded it as a [Link]
counseled men never to be rude to a mistress or wife, nor to try to order
her about; it would be unseemly in one with whom she shared
19
"joy." This was like the Tantric identification of sexual bliss with the
bliss of the Goddess andGod as they continually engendered life in
the universe. 20 Hindus said intercourse with any woman is like union
with the Goddess herself. Far from being sinful, "to have carnal
intercourse with the Goddess Parvati is a virtue which destroys all sin." 21
But in the Christian view, woman brought death into the world
and sex perpetuated it. 22 It was claimed that Adam was made to be
immortal, but he lost both his innocence and his immortality when Eve
taught him about sex. All women were copies of Eve, said Tertullian;
"the unsealer of that Tree," her very existence bringing destruction to
"God's image, man." 25 Women were dangerous even when dead.
An early church edict ordered that a male corpse must not be buried
next to a female corpse until the latter was safely decomposed. 24
St. John Chrysostom said a man "cannot endure" looking at a
woman. 25 A biographer of St. Augustine assumed automatically that
"because of his great holiness, he was unwilling to look upon a woman's
face." 26 St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin was destined to
crucify not only Christ but the whole of the western world with its anti-
27
pleasure, pro-pain philosophy. Even today it is
hardly possible for
anyone brought up in one of the western nations to comprehend the
ancient world's opinion of sex as an experience of divine
pleasure or a
preview of heaven, without deliberate, laborious intellectual progress
toward such an opinion.
Not only was Europe crucified by Christian antisexuality but also
much of Oceania, Africa, and the Far East. Wherever Christian
missionaries went
which was everywhere people were told their
own generally healthy sexual attitudes were wrong and sinful. One
missionary described Bantu harvest festivals as Bacchic feasts: "It is
impossible to witness them without being ashamed. Men and wom-
en, who in ordinary circumstances are modest in behavior and speech,
then abandon themselves to licentiousness." Another
missionary
wrote: "I have seen the most indelicate
performances in the shape of
dances or theatrical pieces in front of the
Badago temples, and on
bearing witness to their wickedness have been told that the god
28
delighted in them."

912
 A missionary in Malaya observed that the natives engaged in all of Sex
29
what he called the carnal sins except one: rape. He didn't follow up
the thought to the prevalence of rape in his own society; but today's
to understand the leading role played by
psychologists are beginning
sexual repression in developing the kind of woman-hatred that leads to

rape. Western thinkers have only recently caught on to the fact that
cultural suppression of the need for bodily pleasure will inevitably result
50
in perverted expression through cruelty.
Cruelty to both women and children was the early Christian
substitute for the affection usually shown them in less ascetic societ-

ies. The Apostolic Constitutions called for severe physical punishment Apostolic Consti-
of children. Fathers (not mothers) were told: "Do not hesitate to tutions Short title of
the Ordinances of
reprove them, chastening them with severity. Teach your children . . .

the Holy Apostles

the word of the Lord, straiten them even with stripes and render
Through Clement,
them submissive, teaching them from infancy the Holy Scriptures." 31 forged documents pur-
Recent experiments have shown that inhibition of sexual responses porting to be
ecclesiastical laws laid
(in animals) is associated with aggressive cruelty, whereas sexual
down by the apostles
permissiveness goes with peaceful co-existence. While some investiga- and their immediate
tors theorized that aggression and lust rise together from a common
successors. In reality,
source, experiments don't support this belief. Instead, it seems one the Constitutions were
32
alternative inhibits the other. Christianity made all Europe a vast written by an anony-

results. In one of mous Syrian author

experiment in sexual inhibition, with predictable
toward the end of the
history's most cruel ages, Thomas Browne spoke of a nearly total
4th century.
rejection of sex: "I would be content that we might procreate like trees,

without conjunction, or that there were any other way to perpetuate

33
Sir Thomas Browne
the World without this trivial and vulgar way of union."
(1605-1682) English
In 1721 Beaumont ordered the pious to reject any and all
physician, author of
sensual pleasures, even the most subtle or involuntary ones: the famous Religio
Medici and other
Ifye perceive a sudden sweet taste in your mouths or feel any warmth in works.

your breasts, like tire,or any form ofpleasure in any part ofyour body,
or . ifye become
. . aware by occasion ofpleasure or satisfaction derived
from such perception, that your hearts are drawn away from the
contemplation ofJesus Christ and from spiritual exercises then . . . this

sensation is be suspected of coming from the Enemy; and

very much to

therefore were it ever so wonderful and striking, still renounce it and do

not consent to accept it. **

Inhibition of sensual impulses was the keynote of western

morality up and including the I9th century, when Dr. Alcott
to Dr. William A. Al-
never be indulged cott American
authoritatively stated that even marital sex should
physician who un-
more than once a month. Any greater frequency was "prostitution of
dertook the instruction
35 the church insisted that
the matrimonial life." For many centuries of married couples in
marital sex should be as barren of sensual pleasure as possible, and that his two books, The

orgasms in women were unseemly or even devilish. The "missionary Young Wife (1837)
because afforded the and The Young Hus-
position" was the only permitted sexual position, it

band (1839).
least pleasure, especially to the wife.
In consequence of such socialization, "good" women were fre-
quently sex-haters. Bertrand Russell said of his first wife that "she had

913
Sex been brought up, as American women always were in those days, to

think that sex was beastly, that all women hated it, and that men's
brutal lusts were the chief obstacle to happiness in marriage." 36

A Christian scripture falsely attributed to St. Dionysius, Of the

Names of God, said the name of Love was not suitable for God,
37
"because one could only honor God, not love Him." Love was left to
the sinful, bearing out Nietzsche's observation that "Christianity gave
Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated into a vice." 38
it even been suggested that love, or Eros, is
Only recently has
essential to themoral development of a man, in a sense that was never
hinted at by the moralists of the west. A man may rise to "a new
moral plane" by falling in love, a process that cannot be pursued

through any rationally established program. Western society doesn't

understand how to instill a comfortably "instinctive" morality into any
individual, even with the opportunity to work on the problem from
earliest childhood let alone to improve the moral outlook of an adult.

But a man's emotional commitment to a beloved, if sincere, may

radically alter and improve his whole view of the world, of himself, of

right and wrong, and of the individual's relations with and responsibil-
ities toward others. 39
Patriarchal religion was devoted to destruction of the sensual
female nature that elicited and responded to such emotional commit-
ments. Women's sexual desire or pleasure was generally considered
detrimental to the marital relationship. 40 A
standard Christian work
on sex dedicated to Cardinal d'Este, Sinibaldi's 1 7th-century Geneanth-
ropeia, said no woman could conceive if she enjoyed sex. 41 Before
the turn of the last century, it was expected that "good" women would
know nothing of sexual pleasure. If they showed an inclination to
Thomas Branagan learn, they might be cruelly teased. Thomas Branagan's advice to young
American author of men was to test the virtue of a fiancee by trying to seduce her, to
The Excellency of
make sure she would react with "becoming abhorrence." If she seemed
Female Character Vin-
too compliant, she must be 42
dicated, 1808. jilted.
The name of John Bowdler became a byword for his pious labors
in removing all risque words from the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. He
even objected to any mention of women's traditional care of the sick or
of infants, on moral grounds: "Few women have
any idea [Bowdler's
how much men are disgusted by the slightest approach to these
italics]

in any female. ... By attending the nursery or sick bed, women are
too apt to acquire a habit of
conversing on such subjects in language
which men of delicacy are shocked at." 43 Male even "delicacy"
dictated that the books of
male and female authors must be kept on
separate bookshelves unless the authors "happen to be married." 44
The Victorian authority on sex was Dr. William Acton, who
couldn't heap too much praise on "all those mysterious sensations
which make up what we call VIRILITY," a
quality that "seems
necessary to give a man that consciousness of his dignity, or his
character as head and ruler and of his
importance, which is
absolutely

914
essential to the well-being of his family, and through it, of society itself. Sex
t is a power, a privilege, of which the man is, and should be, proud."
3ut women were permitted no such pride in their sexual nature. "As a
^^^^^^^^^^^
general rule," said Acton, "a modest woman seldom desires any
exual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to
jlease him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be
elieved of his attentions." Acton admitted however that there were a
jew sad exceptions to his rule, who might be found either in the

livorce courts or in lunatic asylums, suffering from "the form of insanity

45
railed nymphomania."
Those women labeled nymphomaniacs and imprisoned in Victori-

inasylums were frequently women who had somehow stumbled

lpon discovery of their own orgasmic capacity and found to their
lismay that men neither knew nor cared anything about it. Even
"reud's view of female sexuality was all wrong. For over fifty years,
loctors slavishly followed Freud's interpretation and wondered why
here were so many "frigid" women, whose sexual readiness was

:onstantly aroused to no purpose until they rejected sex out of sheer

is remarkable that only
rustration. "It recently has Freud's classic theory
>n the sexuality of women the notion of the double orgasm been
46
ictually tested and found just plain wrong."
20th century was not much more enlightened than the 19th.
The
marriage manual, the ultimate authority at the turn of the
Stall's

entury, blamed women themselves for the sexual ignorance society

mposed on them. If a wife failed to understand her husband's sexual
leeds, she was to blame "for her lack of knowledge and consider-
47
ition." But men's lack of knowledge and consideration was part of
he culture.

The oft-heard complaint directed by women at the clumsiness, crassness,

and incompetence ofmen in their sexual approaches and in sexual
intercourse itself, men 's lack of skill in foreplay and their failure to
understand its meaning, almost certainly substantially reflects the lack
of tactile experience that many males have suffered in childhood. The
roughness with which many men will handle women and children
constitutes yet another evidence of their having been failed in early tactile

experience, for it is difficult to conceive ofanyone who had been

tenderly loved and caressed in infancy not learning to approach a
woman
or a child with especial tenderness. The very word "tenderness"
implies softness, delicacy of touch, caring for. The gorilla, that gentle
creature, is when women wish to
the most frequently slandered
describe the sexual approaches of the average male. Sex seems to be

regarded as a tension releaser rather than as a profoundly meaningful

18
actof communication in a deeply involved human relationship.'

One modern woman a rape victim thus expressed her own view
of sex:

Sex, for men, is totally oriented toward the man $ orgasm and isn 't

successful unless it involves intercourse and orgasm, which is ridiculous,

915
e~ because sex to me is a much more sensual, much more emotional
experience. doesn 't involve just one particular spot on the body getting
It

excited and aroused, and then it's over, and it 's either a success or
^^^^^^^^^ failure.''
9

Men culturally trained not to pay attention to women seldom

understood what women meant by "love," even when they tried to
explain. The celebrated Kinsey reports on American sexual behavior
50
didn't mention "love" in their index. Certainly there was no such idea
in America as the Tantric karuna, which combined all forms of love
in communion with the female, though modern women sometimes try

to grope toward this concept, unaware that it was elucidated long ago:

Gestation . . . is a complex inner process in which sexuality is fed by

everything else a woman has at her disposal, much in the same way that
she might feed a When there is no fetus, an inclusive kind ofsexual
fetus.

intimacy fills up a comparable inner space. But when sex is separated

from that context, the disparity between a penetration that is no more than
"
an "action and a penetration that reaches into complex inner space
can become quite overwhelming. . . .

To most men the problem . . . does not seem very real. To them the
clearest aim ofsex is orgasm, that moment of intense physical intimacy
and satisfaction which so often serves as a substitute for other kinds of
intimacy. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why men seem to be so
concerned with satisfying women sexually and interpret that satisfaction in
terms of what they think would satisfy them if they were women. It

may also be one of the reasons why men seem to think that many women
can never be completely satisfied sexually. The terrain where a woman
"
remains forever unsatisfied or even, as they say, "insatiable, is probably
the area where her sexuality borders most closely on that more complex
5I
psycho-sexual area of her being.

In Oriental countries where an image of the Goddess was

retained, broader ideas of sexuality were retained also:

Western attitudes . . . look on sexual intercourse as a matter of tension,

appetite and relief. . .

according to the simplistic biological conception
which is still current. . . It is well known that the man who, in the Kinsey
.

Report on the Human Male,

recorded a frequency above thirty times a
day for many years became a kind offolk-hero in America. Sexual love, in
such a context, becomes at best a matter offrequently happily shared
orgasms.
To the traditional Indian mind this attitude is grotesque and pathet-
ic. Even the ordinary man recognized that such banality was absurd. ...
Eighteenth-century Indian harlots mocked European men for their
calling them "dunghill cocks" for whom
miserable sexual performance,
was over in a few seconds. Despite recent advances in sexological
the act

knowledge, the West's chosen external explanations ofsex, attached as

they are to a provisional and impoverished rationalization of the infinite
complex of human experience, still tend to regard sex as the pursuit of
orgasm Traditional India did not."

A mystical or poetic view of sex, like the Indian one, seemed to

916
 jar the puritan consciousness even more than a "dirty" or degraded Sex
view. Dr. Marie Stopes's Married Love was imported from England
in 1918 but banned for obscenity in the U.S., chiefly on account of ^^^^^^^^^^^
such delirious passages as the following:

The half-swooning sense offlux which overtakes the spirit in their eternal
moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the whole
essence of the man and woman, and as it were, the heat of the contact

vaporizes their consciousness so that it Alls the whole of cosmic space.

For the moment they are identified with the divine thoughts, the waves of
eternal force, which to the Mystic often appear in terms ofgolden

light."

Some progress has been made since the sexual obtuseness of

western men made them a laughingstock in India. But recent investiga-
tors found "a view of sex that is as distorted as the Victorian, for it is

shrouded with the unrealistic expectations and outmoded standards

still

of gender behavior of the past. Fantasy rather than reality is its

keynote; hostility, anxiety, and guilt are aggravated rather than alleviat-

ed." 54 Significantly, a male author characterizes male sexuality as

loveless and death-centered, capable of destroying the foundations of
society:

Contemporary eroticism attempts to free woman sexually but according to

a masculine conception ofsexuality. . . . The present rehabilitation of
the erotic in its purely sexual, loveless aspect is completely at variance with
the truly feminine conception .an ultimate striving toward disloca-
. .

tion, destruction, and death Thanatos as against Eros, the love-filled

erotic, unifying and conservationist. . . .

Ultimately, this overemphasis
of the masculine component in Western society threatens to destroy its

foundations. fs

To counterbalance the destructiveness of male-dominated soci-

ety, nothing could be effective except recognition of the feminine
principle, according to George Sand: "It will be in the female heart

par excellence, as it
always has been, that love and devotion, patience
and pity, will find their true home. On woman falls the duty, in a
world of brute passions, of preserving the virtue of charity. . . . When
woman ceases to play that role, life will be the loser." 56 Modern
thinkers also regret the loss of cultural emphasis on the feminine
morality that can integrate sex with affection, tenderness, and sensi-
tivity toward others' emotional needs. It has been often said that
male-dominated societies tend to burden the sexual impulses of both
women and men with basically unrelated guilts, fears, angers, and their

resulting aggressions. Some forms of "entertainment" for example

take advantage of the new frankness to introduce disturbingly sadistic
elements into mass socialization for sexual adulthood. "Rather than
is now
lament the fact that sexual appetite being encouraged, we might
more profitably spend our time trying to ensure that the emotions
that are integrated with it are the ones we approve of." 57

917
 of the Irish
Sex recently as 1966, an anthropological study
As
a mini-culture of 19th-century Christian-
islanders of Inis Beag revealed
in sexual life. Female orgasm was unknown.
patriarchal patterns
Women were trained to endure rather than enjoy sex. habitually Men
seconds. Modesty was the overwhelming preoccu-
ejaculated within
pation of both sexes; husbands and wives didn't see each other naked.
Sexual foreplay consisted of rough fondling outside the sleeping
other than Venus observa was used.
garments. No coital position
Premarital sex was virtually unknown, since young couples were
never alone together. Not even "walking out," the old-fashioned
version of was allowed. Young people received no instruction in
dating,
sexual matters. The islanders said after marriage "nature would take

its course" without the embarrassment of discussion.

Though the men were often at sea in small boats, they never

learned to swim, being unwilling to undress in public for this purpose.

"Bathing" in the sea meant wading, fully clothed. The sexes were

rigidly separated
for this activity. Men were known to die of disease or
injury rather than to go to a hospital on the mainland, where they
thought their bodies would be bared to the eyes of female nurses.
Even the dogs of Inis Beag were whipped for licking their genitals

or other "obscene" behavior. Imported copies of American maga-

zines such as Life or Time were denounced from the pulpit as

pornography. Fear of female "mysteries" was overt: women were not

approached sexually for many months after childbirth, or during men-

struation, when men thought them especially dangerous. Predictably,
severe repression exacted a severe toll in quarrelsomeness, alcoholism,
violence, and frequent mental disturbances. 58
more sexuality is banned and ignored, the more
Paradoxically, the
fear it seems to engender in men. A patriarchal-ascetic ethic seems to

arrange sexual attitudes according to the way men would like them
arranged, but it doesn't work well even for men. A psychiatrist says,

"In the privacy of our consulting room we do from time to time see
strong men fret, and hear them talk of women with dread and horror
and awe, as if women, far from being timid creatures to be patronized,
were as powerful as the sea and inescapable as fate. Man, con- . . .

fronted by woman, does seem to feel, variously, frightened, revolted,

59
dominated, bewildered, and even, at times, superfluous." One male
author in a revealing passage on men's sexual feelings refers to a woman
but also admits "general helplessness in the face of her," and a
as "it,"

sense of her "awesomeness and power" seemingly overblown terms

for an ordinary human female:

We cannot relate to the total object as it [sic] is, and thus we need
standardized definitions of sexual attractiveness. These we get in the
form of "cues" that serve to cut the object down to manageable size: we
look at the breast or the black underwear, which allow us not really to
have to take account of the total person we are relating to. . . .
[W]e strip

918
 the partner of awesomeness and power and so overcome our general Sex
helplessness in the face of her. 60

The symbols of "sexiness" are created and instilled by the HmHi^Hi

society, however odd it
may seem to realize that human physiological
responses can actually be keyed to abstract images. "It is now quite
clear that how a
person behaves sexually is largely determined not by
61
inborn factors but by learning." The prevailing conventional wis-
dom and its influence on the growing child determine whether most

people will enjoy sex or hate it, perceiving their own bodies as heaven
or hell. Western anti-sexuality has created many individuals tending

toward the "hate" or "hell" end of the spectrum, epitomized by a

psychiatric patient who said, "Somehow I

always think that sexual
i intercourse is a great disgrace for humans." A female patient called
her body an "abhorrent envelope," and said, "I wish I could tear this

skin off. If I didn't have this stupid body, I would be as pure outside as
62
I feel inside."

Women have an especially difficult time with the body-image in a

society that attaches little value to their complex body-oriented roles
of wife, mother, nurturer, or comforter; and may even cease to play
these roles when they have fully accepted the value system of the
dominant sex. Women don't reject traditional "feminine" roles out of

perversity, nor because of that Freudian absurdity, penis envy. Like

men, most women prefer to do what their society values and rewards. If
the wife-and-mother role is undervalued or even deprecated, as it

has been throughout the past two millenia in the western world
women can hardly be blamed for seeking valid achievement in other
63
fields. In our society the universal standard of valuation is money, and
the so-called "career" of wife-and-mother earns none at all.

Underevaluation of the mother affects sons as well as daughters,

since the mother's reaction to social expectations of her inevitably

creates a deep impression on her children. "Psychiatric observation

suggests that human sexual behavioris subtly shaped by the nature of

the social attachments formed during a person's development"; and the

mother is the primary social attachment. 64 Chodorow says the mod-
ern civilized male "is in the unhappy position of being able to attain
masculine identity almost solely through efforts to distinguish himself
from the person closest to him [the mother], with whom he might most
naturally identify. His efforts commonly take the form of a rather

primitive rejection of all that is 'feminine' in women and in himself." 65

Sexual development is further hampered by conventional religions
which still attach fear and guilt to almost every stage of the process.

Ignoring recent proofs that masturbation is necessary for development

of normal orgasmic capacity in both sexes, Pope Paul VI's 1976
declaration on sexual ethics pronounced masturbation "a grave moral
disorder." Moreover, within the framework of marriage, only the
"finality" of procreation could "ensure the moral goodness" of sex in

919
 66
make babies, not As for premarital
Sex other words, sex must pleasure.

sex, Norman Vincent Peale declared it a dreadful sin even for persons
in love; they cannot be forgiven
without prolonged spiritual
deeply
67
"treatment."
It is now said that sexual appetites have "little or no relation to

needs [Ejrotic urges stem more from

biological or physiological
socio-cultural factors than from those of the strictly physiological na-
68 Therefore the broad extent of ugly or cruel sexual behavior
ture."
modern society should stimulate
serious thought about what
patterns in
the society is teaching. In 1972, the Chief
of the Sex Section of the
"The newspapers print
Washington D.C. Police Department reported:
what they want to. I tell them about little girls of seven or eight
only
who come with venereal diseases inflicted on them by male mem-
up
bers of their own families. An appalling number of 1 1- and
birth after being raped by their own fathers. But
12-year-olds are giving
they won't print things like this. They're only heart-breaking and
69
horrible not sensational."
A report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography
concluded: "Failure to talk openly and directly about sex overem- . . .

phasizes sex, gives it a magical

nonnatural quality Such failure
makes teaching children and adolescents to become fully and ade-

quately functioning sexual adults a

more difficult task The very
foundation of our upon healthy sexual attitudes grounded
society rests
70
in appropriate and accurate sexual information." In other words, the

foundations of society rest on dissemination of precisely the kind of

information that Christian morality insisted on withholding from one
and all men, women, and children.
Churches today have largely renounced all their responsibility to

establish guidelines for sexual development or sexual behavior, leaving

their congregations in an area of confusion. Theologians stress "the
71
personal responsibility of the Christian to find God's will for himself."
In which case, he hardly needs a church.
I. S. Harris, 255. 2. R.E.L. Masters, xxvi. 3. Lederer, 163. 4. Mumford, 145.
5. Bullough, 97. 6. Fielding, 81; Jonas, 145. 7. Bullough, 1 10.
8. H. Smith, 250; Cavendish, P.E., 27. 9. J.B. Russell, 284. 10. Jonas, 73.

I I Briffault 3 494. 12. Kramer

.
, &
Sprenger, 1 67, 1 69. 1 3 de Voragine, 89, 23 1
. .

14. Lawson, 570, 606. 1 5. Wilkins, 122. 16. Oxenstierna, 223-24.

[Link]-Petre, 193. 18. Fielding, 145-46. 19. Hartley, 196. 20. Avalon, 191.
[Link], 52. 22. Ashe, 1 78-79. 23. Bullough, 114. 24. Murstein, 76.
25. Bullough, 1 1 5. 26. de Voragine, 499. 27. H. Smith, 228-29.
28. Briffault 3, 199, 207. 29. Briffault 2, 48. 30. Elisofon
Watts, 11. &
[Link],31. 32. Fromm, 190. 33. de Riencourt, 102. 34. Silberer, 284-85.
35. Rugoff, 47. 36. Barker-Benfield, 279-80. 37. de Voragine, 146.
38. Sadock, Kaplan &
Freedman, 32. 39. Gilder, 145-46. 40. Bullough, 1 14.
41. Simons, 141. 42. Rugoff, 49. 43. Perrin, 68. 44. Bullough, 290.
45. Marcus, 25-32. 46. Gornick &
Moran, 211. 47. Stall, 134.
48. Montagu,173-74. 49. D.E.H. Russell, 105. 50. Mumford, 344.
T.,

[Link],68. 52. Rawson, A.T., 78. 53. Murstein, 421.

54. Steinman & Fox, 258-59. 55. de Riencourt, 416-17. 56. de Riencourt, 301.
57. Nobile, 237-38. 58. Marshall &
Suggs, ch. 1 59. Lederer, vii..

60. Becker, D.D., 242. 61 Montagu, S.M.S., 63. 62. Becker, D.D., 226, 236.
.

63. Mead, 92. 64. Nobile, 232-33. 65. Gornick Moran, xxiv. &
66. Newsweek, Jan. 26, 1976. 67. Ellis, 187. 68. Nobile, 233-34.
69. D.E.H. Russell, 31. 70. Goldstein & Kant, 153. 71. Murstein, 433.

920
Sexism Sexism

The Catholic Encyclopedia declares, "The female sex is in some

respects inferior to the male
both as regards body and soul."
sex,
'
This
is a somewhat modified version of the opinion of St. Thomas

Aquinas, who insisted that every woman is birth-defective, an imperfect

male begotten because her father happened to be ill, weakened, or in
a state of sin at the time of her conception. 2 Knowing
nothing of the
human ovum, the church taught the doctrine of Augustine and
Aquinas that a mother contributes nothing to her child's genetic
3
inheritance, but acts only as "soil" for the male soul-bearing seed.
Nevertheless, churchmen claimed the birth of a true freak was not the
father's fault, but the result of "the heated and obstinate imagination"
of the mother during sexual intercourse. 4
Fathers of the church were earnest woman-haters. St. John Chry- [Link] Chrysostom,
sostom said men suffer "a thousand evils" from having to look at "Golden-mouthed
John," 4th-century
women; "the beauty of women the greatest snare." St. Odo of Cluny
is
Christian orator who
refused to be ensnared; he said, "How should we desire to embrace served as Patriarch of
whatis no more than a sack of
dung!" According to Walter Map, Constantinople until he
"Even the very good woman, who is rarer than the phoenix, cannot incurred the wrath of
be loved without the loathesome bitterness of fear and worry and the empress Eudoxia,
who arranged to
constant unhappiness." A
19th-century Anglican churchman said
have him deposed and
women are "intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and exiled.
nature, weak in body, inconstant in mind, and imperfect and infirm
in character." 5
In the 1890s, the president of a leading theological
Walter Map Canon
seminary declared, "My Bible commands the subjection of women of St. Paul's, Lincoln,
forever." 6 and Hereford; arch-
So did. the centuries, the Bible supported sexist deacon of Oxford;
it
Through
ecclesiastical justice
sentiments which were echoed by all churchmen. St. Paul said: "The
attached to the court of
head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man"
Henry II in the late
Corinthians 1 1:3). St. Peter said in the Gospel of Thomas:
(1 1 2th century. Map was
"Women are not worthy of life." 7 Clement of Alexandria quoted the (probably falsely)
words of Christ from the Gospel According to the Egyptians: "I have credited with authorship
of some of the older
come to destroy the works of the female." 8 He added: "Every woman
Arthurian legends.
ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman." 9
Up to the modern era, clergymen continued to appeal to biblical

authority to maintain the political subjection of women. "The clergy

were often in the forefront
of the fight against suffrage, dredging up
quotations from the Bible to prove that the natural order of things was
female obedience to man." Simone de Beauvoir says: "For the Jews,
Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine
right, the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards
revolt in the downtrodden female." As late as 1971 an Episcopalian
bishop confirmed these views: "The sexuality of Christ is no accident
nor is his masculinity incidental. This is the divine choice." Feminists
believe that even if the churches should destroy themselves in the
effort, they will cling to their notion of male supremacy to the very end,
for this was their primary foundation in the beginning. 10 Theology's

921
 entire conceptual system was invented by men to serve the interests of
Sexism
and, not incidentally, to restrict and suppress
men the interests of

women."
Church fathers long ago laid down the principle of woman's guilt

for the existence of death and sin. Augustine blamed the perpetuation
of original sin on the "concupiscence" that united male bodies with
12
female ones under any circumstances, including marriage. Chris-
to announce that it was sinful just to be
tianity was the first religion alive,

on account of having been sexually conceived and born of a wom-

John Chrysostom commanded every Christian father to instill
13
an. St.

into his son "a resolute spirit against womankind Let him have
no converse with any woman save only his mother. Let him see no
woman." 14
Sometimes the writings of Christian men revealed an almost

hysterical fear of woman. Her very glance could "infect, entice,

bewitch." Her eyes "poison and intoxicate the mind: yea, her company
induceth impudency, corrupteth virginity, confoundeth and consu-
meth the bodies, the goods, and the very souls of men. And finally her
body destroyeth and rotteth the very flesh and bones of man's body."
Vairus said women become witches because "they have such an
unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally. . . . And they
are so troubled with evil humors, that out go their venomous exhala-

tions, engendered through their illfavored diet, and increased by

means of their pernicious excrements, which they expel." 15
John Aylmer labeled all women "tale-bearers, eavesdroppers, ru-
mor raisers, eviltongued, worse minded, and in every wise doltified
16
with the dregs of the Devil's dung hill." Similar opinions have been

by modern woman-abusers, such as the rapist: "I thought

offered . . .

women were trashy, low-down and scummy because that's what I had
been taught." 17
Andrew the Chaplain said woman is
"by nature a miser, envious, a
slanderer . . .
greedy, a slave to her belly, inconstant, fickle . . . disobe-
dient and impatient of restraint, spotted with the sin of pride and
desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of
much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never
secrets, too

loving any man in her heart."

18

John Scotus Erigena taught that human beings were once without
sin and without sexuality; but after they disobeyed God, they were
divided into two sexes. The sinless part was embodied in man, the sinful
19
part inwoman. Other theologians said woman was "the confusion
of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous
anxiety, an incessant warfare, a
daily ruin." The church ostensibly made war on the devil, but in
actual practice made war on women. "Woman was the Church's rival,
the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to
holiness, the Devil's
20
decoy." Official church literature said:

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness ofa woman [T]he

natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her

922
 many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect Sexism
in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent
rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary

direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect

2'
animal, she always deceives.

Curiously enough, modern genetic research indicates that the

truth may be something like the reverse of this view. The XY chromo-
some that produces a male is
physiologically an "incomplete" female
chromosome. Some individuals are born with an XYY chromosome
abnormality, making them genetic super-males. They are said to be
tall, below average in intelligence, and strongly disposed to criminal
behavior. 22
This would have surprised men like Orestes Brownson, who Orestes Augustus
insisted that woman's "ambition and natural love of power" must be Brownson (1803-1876)
U. S. arbiter of opin-
subject to masculine control, otherwise "she is out of her element, and a
ion, writer on
social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom
spiritualism, religion,
23
are, excepting through a woman's influence." Such men never social reform, states'
bothered to notice that their denunciations of women were self- rights, etc.; publisher

contradictory; as in this case, for instance, if woman's love of power was of Brownson 's Quarter-
1844-75.
"natural," then in exercising it she would be in her element, not out ly,

of it.

Martin Luther claimed the physical differences between men and

women demonstrated God's plan for sexism. "Men have broad and
large chests and small and narrow hips and more understanding than
women who have but small and narrow chests and broad hips, to the
end that they should remain at keep house and bear and
home, sit still,

bring up children." 24 But if and bringing up children

their bearing

wore them out, it was no matter, Luther said: "If women get tired and
die of bearing, there is no harm in that; let them die as long as they

bear; they were made for that." 25

Schopenhauer, who detested women, found nothing likeable

about their physical appearance: "It is only the man whose intellect is
clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex
to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-

legged race. [T]he sympathies that exist between them and men are
. . .

skin-deep only, and do not touch the mind or the feelings or the
character." 26 Hartley tends to agree that thanks to Christian tradition,
"An extreme outward sex-attraction has come to veil but thinly a

deep inward sex-antipathy, until it seems almost impossible that women

and men can ever really understand one another." 27
Those few Renaissance men who would speak on behalf of
(
women were outside the church, and usually suspected of heresy, like
Agrippa von Nettesheim, who wrote that women "are treated by the
men as conquered by the conquerors, not by any divine necessity, for
any reason, but according to custom, education, fortune, and the
tyrant's opportunity."

The tyranny ofmen prevailing over divine right and the laws of nature,

923
 abolishes it by use and custom, and
Sexism slaysby law the liberty of woman,
it by education. For the woman, as soon as she is born, is
extinguishes
from her earliest years detained at home in idleness, and as if destitute
of capacityfor higher occupations, is permitted to conceive of nothing

beyond needle and thread. Then

when she has attained years of
she is delivered over to the jealous empire ofa man, or shut up
puberty
forever in a shop of vestals. The law also forbids her to fill public
offices. No prudence entitles her to plead in open court. 28
There was sex discrimination even in the penalties imposed for
witchcraft. Female witches were more severely punished than male

witches. A law of 1683 said that for the crime of causing death by

witchcraft, a man may be hanged, but a woman must be burned at the

stake. Men could with impunity kill their wives (e.g., by beating) in

the 1650s, but women were burned for killing their husbands, a crime
29
defined as "petty treason."
A self-perpetuating belief in woman's inferior intellect was fostered
by the almost universal custom of keeping women out of schools, all
but a few aristocratic ladies who could receive an expensive private
education. Queen Elizabeth I of England was unsexed by several
historians who thought she was too clever to be female. They claimed
she died in infancy, and a boy was secretly raised in her place. The

small minority of educated women were seldom accepted as such. On

one occasion a learned lady was presented as a curiosity to King
James I, and he was told she was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
30
He only inquired, "But can she spin?"
The church controlled most schools, and the church would have
no truck with women unless it was unavoidable. St. Columkille made
a rule that no woman could even be buried in the vicinity of a Christian
church, alleging that this was the custom from Christianity's begin-

[Link] Tyrone still has a

in Ireland Reh'g-na-man, "cemetery of
women," located a half-mile from the church where only men were
buried in the churchyard. 31 Some churchmen opined that women
didn't even have any souls to save. Ockham claimed women did have
souls, and on that account should be allowed to vote in church councils.
The pope instantly condemned this as heresy.
32

Josephine Henry Josephine K. Henry castigated the churches for their consistently
19th-century Kentucky antifemale attitudes over the centuries:
suffragist and
pamphleteer, active in
Has the Church ever issued an edict that women must be equal with man
thewomen's before the canon or the civil law, that her thoughts should be incorpo-
rights
movement. rated in creed or code, that she should own her own body and property in

marriage, or have a legal claim to her children born in wedlock, which

Christianity claims is a "sacrament" and one of the "holy mysteries"!' . . .

No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to

woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and
gives her nothing in return. The history of the Church does not
contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman Through
tyranny and falsehood alone is Christianity able to hold woman in
subjection.
n

924
 Indeed, women were better served by pre-Christian laws nearly Sexism

everywhere. Under the ancient Byzantine code, inheritance laws made

no distinction between heirs on the basis of their sex; and although ^^^^^^^^^i
adulterous men were executed, adulterous women were not. 54 After
centuries of Christian revision, the laws freely allowed men to
commit adultery, though their wives could be imprisoned or beaten to
death for it. Until 1857, no English woman could obtain a divorce on
any grounds without a special Act of Parliament, which meant only
upper-class women with plenty of political leverage could even hope
35
for a divorce.

In 1835, a Mrs. Caroline Norton left her husband after he

repeatedly subjected her to beatings, mental abuse, and infidelity. He

kept his mistress in the same house with her. A court ruled that the wife
need not return to the house, but the husband was given their three

children because the wife had "condoned his actions" by staying with
him through all his cruelties. In 1839, the Infants' Custody Act
introduced a slight modification. At his own discretion, a judge in equity
could allow separated mothers to keep children under seven years of

age, or to have visiting rights to older children, provided the mother was
not guilty of adultery. 36 Fathers suffered no such restriction, of
course.
Women who refused to submit to the "discipline" of marriage, but
instead played the dangerous game of promising without delivering,
were known as jilts. Such women aroused the most violent outbursts of
sexist sentiment, according to an old pamphlet:

Their tricks and devices are numberless, and not to be paralleled by any
thing but their Ingratitude and Inhumanity; there indeed they exceed
themselves; nothing in Nature being so perfectly brutish and cruel as one
of these kind [sic] of Creatures ... a Vermin so ravenous and mali-
cious, and withal so subtle and designing, so formally chaste and
hypocritically virtuous, and yet so scandalously common and impu-
dently lewd, so proud, and yet so mercenary, and above all, so insolently ill
natured, that in the short character ofa Jilt, are comprehended all the
Vices, Follies and Impertinences of the whole Sex. In short, I cannot . . .

but fancy them a Colony ofHell-Cats, planted here by the Devil, as a

mischief to Mankind. 37

Noting that women often refused to play fair in the game for
which men made all the rules, even Freud failed to transcend the sexist
attitudes of his time. He wrote: "One cannot resist the thought that
the level of normal morality is different for women. Their superego
never becomes so unshakeable, so impersonal, so independent of its
we demand it of a man. Critics since time immemo-
affective origins, as

rial have reproached women of certain character traits: that they

exhibit less of a sense of justice than men do; that they are less prepared
tosubmit to the great necessities of life." Since Freud regarded male
domination as one of the great necessities of life, he should hardly have
been surprised to find women resisting it. Simone de Beauvoir said

925
 woman knows that "masculine morality, as it concerns her, is a
Sexism every
vast hoax. Man pompously thunders forth his code of virtue and

honor; but in secret he invites

her to disobey it, and he even counts on

her disobedience; without it, all that splendid facade behind which he
38
takes cover would collapse."
Since women weren't told the rules of the game, many of them
became losers while they were still too young to figure it out for

themselves. Commenting on Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial, W.T.

Stead remarked, "If Oscar Wilde, instead of indulging in dirty tricks
of indecent familiarity with boys and men, had ruined the lives of half a
dozen innocent simpletons of girls, or had broken up the home of his
friend by corrupting his friend's wife, no one could have laid a finger on
59
him. The male is sacrosanct: the female is fair game."
Though women were scorned for being "simpletons," they were
even more violently scorned when they tried to develop their minds.
Florence Nightingale's popularity inspired many women to seek educa-
tions in medicine, but male students ganged up on them. In 1870 a

group of student doctors formed lines to prevent five women from

entering classes inSurgeons' Hall in London. Medical examiners
tried to embarrass female students with indecent questions. When

women received high marks in examinations, they were passed over,

and scholarships were awarded to the men immediately below their
level.

It was the same in other professions. In 1879, Birmingham

schoolmasters barred women from employment as teachers of small
boys, on the ground that it would encourage "immorality." Lawyers

denied women admission to the Inns of Court. Determined feminist

brought about admission of some women to classes at Queen's

efforts

College in 1 848; but the Bishop of London excluded women from

Wheatstone's classes on electricity, because they had "congregated too
abundantly" in Sir Charles Lyell's geology classes, keeping more
deserving students (i.e., men) from finding places in the classroom. In
the field of religion, the Church of England found it "unthinkable"
that women should ever be admitted to the ministry. 40
The basic fallacy of sexism in employment or education was

Christine Pierce pointed out by Christine Pierce: "We need not fear that women will
Contemporary Ameri- do what they cannot do." 41 If women were really unable to learn
can feminist,
medicine, law, theology, science, or any other field of endeavor, it
professor of law and
would hardly have been necessary for men to exert such efforts to keep
philosophy at Har-
vard and New York them from learning. The theory of feminine intellectual inferiority
State University. began to recede from view when women managed to receive education.
But many men still clung to the belief that women must be less able
to think than men.

Reed wrote a book called Sex, Its Origin and

In 1913 T.E.

Determination, to prove "scientifically" that women were biological-

ly inferior to men. The author said coitus during an incoming tide

always conceived boys, while coitus during an outgoing tide con-

926
ceived girls proving that the female was weaker, born of "waning" Shadow
energy. Despite the fact that incoming and outgoing tides differed on
every one of the world's coastlines, and infants conceived inland
couldn't be identified with any tide, the theory proved popular. 42
In many ways, sexist thinkers have tried to pretend male domi-
nance is "natural" or is a divinely ordained biological mandate. Yet as
other mammalian species demonstrate, such an arrangement could
serve no biological purpose.

Any animal species in which males were biologically programmed

to attack and injure the females would be at a disadvantage in terms
of species survival, sincemammalian young can't grow to maturity
without healthy, competent mothers. 43 Thus it is found that, in most

species, males are biologically inhibited from attacking females, even

under strong provocation. And the one virtually unbreakable male
animal taboo is
any kind of interference between a female and the
young she protects.
Karen Homey suggested that men's antagonism may have devel- Karen Horney, nee
of sexual envy: "The male is sexually dependent on
as a result Danielsen (1885-1952)
oped
U.S. psychoanalyst
the female to a higher degree than the woman is on him, because in
and teacher, Freudian-
women part of the sexual energy is linked to generative processes.
trained but breaking
Could it be that men, therefore, have a vital interest in keeping women away from Freudian
M44
dependent on them? Judith Antonelli says, "Patriarchy is based thought in many re-

on the 'phallacy' that the male is creator. Man's original awe and envy spects; author of The
Neurotic Personality
of woman becomes, under patriarchy, resentment and hostility. The
of Our Time (1937),
only way man can possess female power is through woman, and so he Our Inner Conflicts
colonizes her, suppressing her sexuality so that it serves him rather and
(1945), Neurosis
than being the source of her power. Patriarchy is indeed a male
. . . Human Growth
neurosis. (1950), etc.

1. Evans, N.H.N., 180. 2. de Riencourt, 227. [Link],227. 4. Shumaker,95.

[Link],98, 187,203. 6. Stanton, 194. 7. Malvern, 1. 8. Stone, 194. 9. Lederer, 162.
10. Stone, 236-38. 11. Daly, 4. [Link], 117. 13. [Link], 250. [Link], 112.
15. Scot, 227, 248. [Link])lough,202. 17. Goldstein &
Kant, 85. [Link], 160.
[Link] Riencourt, 227. [Link],211. 2 1 Kramer &
Sprenger, 44. [Link], 178.
.

23. Bullough, 309. [Link], 179. 25. de Riencourt, 258. 26. Murstein, 261.
27. Hartley, 266. 28. Agrippa, 271. 29. Robbins, 165, 209. 30. Bullough, 223.
31. Joyce 2, 374. 32. Coulton, 227. 33. Stanton, 205-7. [Link],43. 35. Crow, 147.
36. Crow, 40-41. 37. de Vries &
Fryer, 1 1 1-13. 38. Lederer, 93-95.
39. Pearsall, N.B.A., 231. 40. Pearsall, N.B.A., 43-45. 41. Gornick & Moran, 252.
42. Montagu, S.M.S., 92. 43. Fromm, 192. 44. Ros/ak, 1 10. 45. Spretnak, 401.

Shadow
The ancients believed a person's shadow was one of his several souls.

Egyptians called the shadow khaibut, Romans called it umbra, the

"shade" or ghost that went to the underground Land of Shades after
death. Pagan Europe generally described the ghosts of ancestors as

black, like shadows, and desirous of blood, the elixir of rebirth.

The shadow was a vulnerable soul because it was external and had
to be carefully preserved from accident. Many superstitious people

927
 let their shadows across an
Shaharit
even today think it dangerous to fall open
1
or swift stream.
grave, rocky cleft,
The Bible shows Joshua and Caleb placing a death-curse on their

enemies by saying "Their shadow is departed from them" (Numbers

a prophecy to be
14:9). This was a typical "doom-saying," supposedly
fulfilled by its very utterance.
One could also give one's soul to a god by dedicating one's shadow
Pausanias Creek to him. Pausanias said human bodies lost their shadows in the sanc-
2
and geographer
traveler tuary of Zeus Lycaeus (Wolfish Zeus).
From such beliefs descended
of the 2nd century the shadowless "werewolf" or vampire of medieval superstition.
a.d. Living in atime of
Soullessness was indicated by lack of a shadow or a reflection, both of
declining culture, he
which were anciently identified with souls.
was inspired by a desire
to describe the an- Like those who pretended to give their shadows to the ancient
souls to the devil could be distinguished by
cient sacred sites for
gods, those who gave their
posterity. lack of a shadow, according to medieval superstition. The most famous

shadowless man in Jewish folklore was Peter Schlemihl, whose name

became a byword because the devil tricked him into parting
for a fool

with his shadow.

3
He was apparently based on the biblical patriarch

Shelumiel, whose name meant "friend of God," possibly because he

gave God his shadow-soul. In Bohemia, Peter Schlemihl was known

as Prschemischl, a hero mated to the legendary Queen Libussa. This

may have been a garbled recollection of the sacred marriage of Pater

4
Liber and the Goddess Libera.
Another version of Pater-Peter and his shadow-soul appeared in

Acts 5:15-16. People troubled by sickness or demonic possession

were brought into a street where the shadow of St. Peter passing by
"might overshadow some of them"; and with this kind of soul-contact

"they were healed every one."

In the pagan context, a shadowless man was not a demon, a
werewolf, or a "Schlemihl" but one whose soul had gone into eternal
bliss. Plutarch said at the end of the world, the blessed ones would be
happy forever "in a state neither needing food nor casting a
shadow." 5
On earth, however, a shadowless state was to be feared. Jews lived
in terror of the "noonday devil" (Keteb), a stealer of shadows. It
made the shadow-soul small and weak at noonday, leaving the owner
6
vulnerable to demons of disease. This shadow-stealing devil also
entered into Christian superstition as the demonium meridianum

(noonday devil).

[Link],G.B.,575. 2. d'Alvidla, 64. 3. Norman, 131. 4. Leland, 115.

5.
Knight, S.L., 1 17. 6. Budge, AT., 219.

Shaharit

Jewish morning service, based on the ancient Canaanite cult of the

god of the morning star, Shaher, whose duty it was to announce the
proclaiming, "He is risen." See Lucifer.
rebirth of the sun by

928
Shakta Shakta

A male worshipper of the Tantric image of the Great Goddess,

Shakti; a man versed in the techniques of Tantric yoga and identified ^i
with the Goddess herself through sexual union with her earthly

representative. A shakta was also known as a sadhaka or sadhu, possible

origin of the "Sadducees" mentioned in the Bible. See Tantrism.

Shakti
Tantric title of the Great Goddess ( Kali Ma), realized both as a
sexual partner innermost, animating soul of man or god, like
and as the

the Greek Psyche, Roman Anima, Gnostic Sophia, Cabalistic She-

kina, all based on the Shakti. Jung said she was the figure known as My
Lady Soul: "Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the
carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which

corresponds to the deepest reality in a man."

'

Shakti is translated "Cosmic Energy." She

implies "power, ability,
power; the power of com-
capacity, faculty, strength, prowess; regal

position, poetic power, genius; the power or signification of a word or

term; the power inherent in cause to produce its necessary effect. . . .

[S]hakti'\s the female organ; shakti is the active power of a deity and is

regarded, mythologically, as his goddess-consort and queen." 2 Every

god needed his Shakti, or he was helpless to act. The Tantras say "the
female principle antedates and includes the male principle, and . . .

?
this female principle is the supreme Divinity."

Tantric doctrine said mortal women are "life itself," and Goddess-
because they embody the principle of Shakti. The sages "hold
like,

women in great esteem and call them Shaktis and to ill-treat a Shakti,
that is, a woman, is a crime." A Tantric synonym for "woman" was
Shaktiman, "Mind of Shakti" or "Possessor of Shakti." 4
A Shakti was also a spirit-wife, or female guardian angel, who
could be incarnate in the earthly wife or mistress, or a wholly

supernatural figure. "An important division of the 'mythology of wom-

an' is devoted to showing that it is
always a feminine being who helps
the hero to conquer immortality or to
emerge his victorious from
initiatory ordeals. Every Teleut shaman has a celestial wife who
. . .

lives in the seventh heaven, where he meets her and makes love to her
5
during his ecstatic journeys."
Final union with the Shakti occurred at the moment of death,
according to Tantric mystics. She was both the individual and the
cosmic Goddess, absorbing the soul and body of the dying sage into
herself,an experience of unsurpassable bliss on his part. "The
possession of her, the cosmic Shakti, the living embodiment of the
principle of beauty and youth eternal, is the ultimate quest, the very
6
highest prize."
The Kulacudamani Nigama said not even God could become the

929
 entered into him. All things arose from
Shalirrur supreme Lord unless Shakti
their union, but she said, "There is none but Myself Who is the Mother
Shamrock
to create." The Lalita Sahasranamam said "The series of universes

appear and disappear with the opening

and shutting of Her eyes." As
the god required her power before he could do anything at all, so her
Lalita Sahasrana- worshipper on earth required the power of his own Istadevata, Shakti or
mamOneof the lady-love.
7

Tantric texts in
The same system was followed by Middle-Eastern mystics like the
praise of the Goddess
Kali-Shakti.
Sufis, who deemed the mystic lady-love or fravashi essential to any
man's enlightenment. Early Christian Gnostics also worshipped Shakti
under such names as Sophia, Pneuma, Eide, or Anima. Gnostic
Avesta Early scrip-
writings show that post-mortem union with one's own soul was per-
tures of Zoroastrianism,
written in Avestan, ceived in sexual symbolism, as in the Mandaean Liturgies for the
an ancient Iranian lan- Dead: the soul or "image" (Eide) embraces and caresses the dead man
guage; still used by like a beloved woman. This Tantric idea came into the west by way
the Parsees as a Bible
of the Avesta doctrine that, after the death of a believer, his own
and prayer book.
conscience would welcome him "in the form of a fair maiden." 8
1. Campbell, CM., 488. 2. Zimmer, 25. 3. Avalon, 173. 4. Avalon, 172, 388.

5. Eliade, S., 76, 78. 6. Zimmer, 178. 7. Avalon, 390, 396, 452. 8. Jonas, 122.

Shalimar
Oriental garden of love, the paradise of kings in their sacred union
with the Goddess. The garden was both her body and the after-world,
like the Tibetan Shal-Mari, a "land of souls." The same mystic
garden probably was the body of the Middle-Eastern Great Goddess,
Sheol-Mari; for "Sheol" which later became a synonym for
"hell" was originally a magic garden within the belly of Mother Ear
As the Enclosed Garden (hortus conclusus) it represented the God-
dess Mari as a Virgin. As the pardes (paradise) she was the Virgin Brie
of Hebrew god-kings.

Shamrock
The Celtic trefoil, which originated in the east. Pre-Islamic Arabs
called the trefoil shamrakh, the three-lobed or lotus flower of the
lily

Moon-goddess's trinity: a design of "three yonis" which appeared on

artifacts of the ancient Indus Valley civilization, as well as on stone,
and woodwork
pottery, in Mesopotamia, Crete, and Egypt between
2300 and BOO b.c. 1

Christians pretended that St. Patrick explained the doctrine of the

Christian trinity to the Irish by
exhibiting the shamrock. However,
the Irish were
worshipping this emblem of their Triple Goddess long
before Christianity appeared in their land. It stood for her
triple
"door," and her God sometimes bore the title of Trefuilngid Tre-

930
eochair, "Triple Bearer of the Triple Key," a trident representing the Shayba
triple phallus. He was known as a God of the Shamrock, partially Sheila-na-gig
assimilated to Christianity by a legend that he appeared to the Irish on
the day of Christ's crucifixion, bearing sacred stone tablets and a branch
2
with three fruits.

1. Encyc. Brit, "Indus Civilization." 2. Graves, W.G., 518.

Shayba var. Sheba, Shebat

Arabic-Aramaean title of the Great Goddess. Shayba was the "Old

Woman" whose spirit dwelt in the sacred stone of the Kaaba in Mecca.
Sheba was the land-name and Goddess-name of Arabian queens in

the ancient seat of government, Marib, in southern Arabia (now

Yemen). Shebat was the Mesopotamian Moon-goddess (a variation
of Hebat or Eve), and the month named after her. In Assyria the
ancient head of a family was called shebu, formerly a matriarch, later
a tribal elder of either sex. See Arabia.

Sheila-na-gig
Carved representation of a naked woman squatting with her knees
apart, displaying her vulva, shown as a vesica piscis or double-pointed
oval. Sometimes the figure presented the vesica with both hands or

drew it open with one. Sheila-na-gig figures appeared all over old Irish
churches built before the 16th century. Many were still in place 1

during the 19th century, but Victorian prudery defaced or destroyed

large numbers of them. Some have been found buried near the
churches they once embellished. 2

Sheila-na-gig figures closely resembled the yonic statues of Kali

which still
appear at the doorways of Hindu temples, where visitors
lick a finger and touch the yoni "for luck." Some of the older figures
3
have deep holes worn in their yonis from much touching.
The protruding ribcage on many examples of the sheila-na-gig
imitates the figures of Kali as the death-goddess, Kalika, evidently

remembered in Ireland as the Caillech or "Old Woman," who was also

the Creatress and gave birth to all races of men. 4 Celts generally
protected doorways with some female-genital fetish, which is
why they
settledon the horseshoe, classic Omega-sign of the Kalika. In India it
stood for the feminine cosmos within which Shiva ever performed his
creative sexual dance, although he was assimilated to the Kalika and
given her title of Destroyer. 5
Derivation of the term sheila-na-gig is obscure. It meant some-
"vulva-woman." Gig or giggie meant female genitals and
thing like
may have been related to the Irish "jig," from French gigue, in

931
 Shekina pre-Christian times
an orgiastic dance. In ancient Erech a gig seems to
Shfol have been a holy yoni; the sacred harlots of the temple were known
6
^^^^^^^^^^^ as nu-gig.

I F Huxley, 63. 2. G.R. Scott, 239-43. 3. Rawson, E.A., 30.

4. Knight, D.W.P., pis. XXIX, XXX. 5. Campbell, M.I., 358. 6. Stone, 158.

Shekina
Jewish-cabalistic version of Shakti; the female soul of God, who
couldn't be perfect until he could be reunited with her. Cabalists said it

was God's loss of his Shekina that brought about all evils. The
Hebrew Sh'kina meant "dwelling-place," a hint that God had no
"home" without her. Like her Tantric counterpart the Shakti, the
Sh'kina was the source of all "soul" in the universe. Gnostic Christians
of the 4th century spoke of the Sh'kina as a "spirit of glory" in whom

Beings of Light lived, as children in their mother's body or house. Mani

referred to the Aeons as sh'kinas, or female of the sacred year.
spirits
1

Cabalists taught that it was essential to bring male and female

cosmic principles together again, which might be done by sexual

magic, signifying union of the sun (man) and moon (woman). This was
graphically expressed by the hexagram. Philosophy of the Cabala
said the supernal mother Shekina is manifested in the earthly mother,
with whom her husband should lie on the Sabbath, because "all the
six days of the week derive their blessing" from this coupling. Rabbi
Eliahu di Vidas said, "Who has not experienced the force of
passionate love for a woman will never attain to the love of God." 2
Jewish mystics said the "outer garment" of the Shekina is Torah,
"Holy Law." A man became a Bridegroom of Torah by study,
symbolized in erotic imagery. He must court her like a beautiful
maiden. "She begins from behind a curtain to speak words in
keeping
with his understanding, until very slowly comes to him." The
insight
Shekina as "Indwelling One" might be compared to the Latin I-dea,
or Goddess Within. "She
opens the door of her hidden chamber ever so
little, and for a moment reveals her face to her lover, but hides it

again forthwith He alone sees it and he is drawn to her with his

heart and soul and his whole being." 3
As a man required his Shekina for enlightenment, so God required
his Shekina for wisdom and creativity. This crucial tenet of cabalistic
doctrine is seldom emphasized or even mentioned today.
1. Jonas, 218, 98. 2. Lederer, 187. 3. Cavendish, T., 72-73.

Sheol
Hebrew "Pit," cavern, womb, or underworld; related to the uterine
paradise-garden called Shal-Mari in Tibet and Shalimar in India. 1 In its

932
earliest forms, Sheol was the Virgin's "enclosed garden" of flowers, Shibboleth
fruits, fountains,and fairy-nymphs. Sacred kings who died on trees went Shin-Mu
to this other world. The Markandeya Purana mentioned an under-
2
ground realm where men's souls were impaled on trees.
Shal-Mari probably became Sheol-Mari in the Middle East, where
Mari was Ishtar, and there was a long tradition of hanging human Puranas are
sacrifices on trees. ancient Sanskrit

scriptures in verse,
1. Robertson, 25-28, 93. 2. Hughes, 172.
treating of cosmologies,
sacred histories, and the
nature of the divine.

Shibboleth
Hebrew "ear of corn," the mystical object displayed as the Ultimate
Revelation in temples of Astarte and Demeter: present food and future

seed, current life and life yet to come. At Eleusis, the central Mystery
was "an ear of corn reaped in silence." J

Old Testament writers supposed that the shibboleth was Astarte's

dying-and-reborn god Baal. Shibboleth was used as a password
because some tribes couldn't pronounce it (Judges 12:6). Patriarchal

opposition to the symbol later made it

synonymous with a false deity,
a meaning that remained up to the present time.
l.d'Alviella, 2.

Shin-Mu
"Mother of Perfect Intelligence," China's Holy Virgin, who miracu-
lously conceived her firstborn son, a Savior and spirit of the grain. Her
infant "came like a lamb, with no bursting or rending, with no hurt or

harm," and was tenderly adored by sheep and oxen.

1

After producing this child, Shin-Mu resumed her archaic Great

Mother character and gave birth to 33,333 creatures. Patriarchal
myths deprived her of a vagina, and so insisted all these creatures were
born from her arms or breast. A Christian traveler in China explained
Shin-Mu's miraculous motherhood: she had "no place on her body
whence to bring them forth as other women of the world, whom for
sin God hath subjected to filthiness of corruption, to show how filthy
2
sin is."

After she was virginized and even deprived of a vagina, Shin-Mu's

only remaining connection with sexuality was similar to the virgin

3
Mary's: she continued to be the divine patroness of whores.
and called her Shimnu, the "Great Devil,"
Persians diabolized her
so called in a Manichean Confession-Prayer found at Turfan and in
the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, at Tun-huang. 4
1. Hays, 241. 2. Briffault 3, 171. 3. Briffault 3, 177. 4. Legge 2, 334-35.

933
Ship Ship
Teutonic Schiff, "ship," descended from Old Norse skop, meaning
^^^^^^^^ "Fate" and also It was a symbol of the Goddess Frigga
"genitals."
1

and
(Freya), whose
name also gave rise to "frigging" "frigate"; she
2
ruled the ship-shaped burial mounds.
From these mounds evolved the Norman temples, laid out in the
form of a ship, navis, on which the nave or "belly" of a Christian
church was modeled. Both "navel" and "naval" once referred to the
burial shrine likened to a ship and the Mother's womb at the same
time. The Norse death ship vessel of the famous "Viking funeral"
was called ludr, meaning boat, coffin, and cradle. 3 It took the dead
back to their Mother-sea; the Norsemen's expression for "death" was
"to return to the mother's womb." 4 The pagan Welsh similarly sent
their dead back to the marine womb and called their funeral dirges

marwysgafen, "Giving-back-to-the-Sea-Mother." The vessel of

5

death and rebirth was always feminine, which may be why a ship is still

"she."

Egypt's Lord of Death, Osiris-Seker, was carried away in a boat

under the auspices of a priest entitled "great chief of the hammer,"
the same title held by Thor. The god came to life again in the "morning

boat," tended by a spirit named Matet, evidently the same as Mater

6
Matuta, the Dawn-Mother. Matet was an emanation of Isis the
Mother, to whom the solar boat was dedicated.
Romans worshipped Isis as a ship-goddess, the boat being a symbol
of her womb, each of her temples having a "bark of Isis" carved in
stone at the entrance. The Roman temple where Isis's holy boat was
kept became a Christian church under the name of Santa Maria della
Navicella: of the Boat. 7 Isis-figures in boats, kept in pagan
Our Lady
temples throughout Europe, gave rise to the curious fairy tale
collected by Grimm under the title of "The Witch in the Stone Boat."

Many "witches" or Goddess-figures appeared in boats even during|

the nominally Christian era. A 1 2th-century chronicler spoke of
singing, dancing processions that followed sacred ships mounted on
8
wheels, containing as he put it "I know not what evil genius." One
suspects the chronicler knew perfectly well that the wheeled ship
contained a pagan Goddess. Up to the late Middle Ages, the
Goddess's wheeled ship was drawn through the streets of Flemish town*
by the weavers' guilds, accompanied by half-naked male and female
dancers whose behavior, churchmen said, was "scandalously bacchana-
9
lian." The Midsummer festival at Douai in 1770 featured a huge
Wheel of Fortune, emblem of the Fate-goddess, and a dry-land ship
filled with people who made
"strange gestures," recalling the images
of ancestral spirits in the ship of Arianrhod which was also a star-

wheel. 10 See Wheel.

Ships were associated with orgiastic rites from the earliest manifes-
tations of the ship as a womb symbol and an earthly imitation of the

934
crescent moon. Oriental sages called the moon "the Ark or vessel of Shiva
boat-like shape, symbol of fertility or the Container of the Germ of all
11
life."

1. Neumann, G.M., 254-55. 2. Oxenstierna, 34. 3. Turville-Petre, 276.

4. Gaster, 787. Encyc. Brit, "Welsh Literature." 6. Budge, G.E. 1, 323, 505.
5.

7. Wilkins, 146. 8. Reinach, 138. 9. Briffault 3, 65. 10. Gelling & Davidson, 1 58.

[Link],423.

Shiva
Oldest god of the Vedic male trinity (Brahma- Vishnu-Shiva) formed
in imitation of the older female trinity. Like the Great Goddess whose

son, lover, and victim he was, Shiva had many names. Sometimes he
alone was a trinity, or a three-headed god, bearer of the trident or triple

phallus which enabled him to mate with the Triple Mother. 1

Shiva was "in a state of actualization because he is in bodily

contact with hisown universal energy, the Shakti, the Goddess, the
feminine active principle, the efficient and material cause of the uni-
verse, the Maya that evolves the differentiated elements and beings.
Sakala Shiva bears on his head the crescent of the moon." 2
Shiva was called Lord of Yoga, i.e., of the "yoke" that bound him
to the Goddess. He was also Lord of Death, called Shava, the

Corpse, prostrate under the feet of Kali as she devoured his entrails a
Hindu parallel of the dead Osiris shown as the Still-Heart, a mummy,
3
dead and yet alive.

Among Shiva's many other titles were Great Lord, Lord of the
Dance, Lord of Cattle (Pasupati), Beneficent One (Sankara), Lord
Who Is Half Woman (Ardhanarisvara), God with the Moon in His
Hair (Candrasekhara), He Who Belongs to the Triple Goddess, He
Who Gives and Takes Away, Consort of the Goddess Uma, Con-
4
demned One, Destroyer, Howler.
Tantric yogis insisted that their supreme Shiva was the only god,
and all other gods were only inferior imitations of him. He was

certainly older than the Vedic heaven-gods. A deity like Shiva was
shown under the feet of a Kali-like squatting Goddess on Sumerian
5
cylinder seals of 2300 B.C. Cultures of Sumeria and the Indus valley
were in contact at very early periods. Shiva's worshippers may have
been literally correct in viewing other gods as recent upstarts. Some of
their scriptures claimed that Brahma and Vishnu were so puny that
6
they couldn't even realize the limits of Shiva's cosmic lingam (phallus).
As a sexual god, Shiva epitomized the Tantric ideal of maithuna,
Puranas are
insuring the orgasmic pleasure of his partner while controlling his
ancient Sanskrit
own, to partake of her sexual energy. He advocated the female-superior
scriptures in verse,
position also favored by such Middle-Eastern Goddesses as Hecate,
treating of cosmologies,
Lilith, and Asherah the position usually forbidden by patriarchs. 7 The sacred histories, and the
Brahmana Purana said the female-superior position was a "reversal" nature of the divine.

935
 practiced by Shiva
and lusted after by the "daughters of the sages" of
Skkfurttu Gautama
old; but proper Brahmans must regard it as a perversion. 8
Vedic myths portray hostility between Brahma and Shiva, even

though the two were eventually regarded as components of the same

trinity.
Brahmadeva (Brahma-god) was
Shiva's priests claimed that

nothing more than

under his archaic name of
a servant of Shiva

Rudra Mokshakala, "Liberated Black Rudra." Brahmans retaliated by

belittling Shiva as
"an evil yogi," whose cult was only "worship of the
at least the servant didn't take
lingam"; if Brahma was Shiva's servant,
or "hideous activities" as the master.
up the same "self-indulgence"
Like western underground gods, Shiva was easily diabolized because he
was already the Great Black One (Mahakala), confused with Yama
and Ganesha, the Lord of Hosts, who begot his reincarnations on
9
Maya-Kali.
As Lord of the Dance, Shiva represented one of Hinduism's most
subtle concepts. He copied Kali's Dance of Life, supposedly directing
and controlling by its rhythm the constant movement in time and space
of all material things. Shiva performed this dance in a place called
Chidambaram, the "Center of the Universe"; but the location of this
10
place is within the human heart. The sages' implications were that

(1) the heartbeat is the basic rhythm to which all human music is

related, because it is heard even by the unborn infant in the paradise-

state of intrauterine and it is never forgotten; and (2) each human
life,

being secretly regards his own heart as the center of the universe

indeed, therefore the god is located within the core of man's own self.
Shiva was seldom depicted alone, for his power depended on his
union with Kali, his feminine energy, without whom he could not
[Link] puzzling vision of Shiva as Shava the Corpse, under the
Goddess's feet, illustrated the "doctrine that Shiva without his Shakti
can do and is, so far as the manifested is concerned, nothing." Yet
joined to the Goddess, he became the Bindu or spark of creation.
Every human orgasm was believed to share in this creative experience
as"an infinitesimally small fragment and faint reflection of the
creative act in which Shiva and Shakti join to produce the Bindu which
the seed of the universe." n A Tantric
is
yogi in sexual union with his
yogini or Shakti could attain the experience of yoga, "linking" himself
with godhood, and in his ecstasy exclaim Shivaham "I Am
Shiva." 12
1.
O'Flaherty, 130. 2. Zimmer, 205.
3. Campbell, Or.M., 198, 90.
4. Zimmer, 126, 130. Campbell, Or.M., 42. 6. Zimmer, 129-30.
5.
7. Graves &
Patai, 68-69. 8. O'Flaherty, 144. 9. Tatz &
Kent, 82-83, 106.
10. Ross, 32. 1 1. Avalon, 191, 417. 12.
Campbell, Or.M., 198; Oc.M., 183.

Siddhartha Gautama
Seventh in a line of reincarnated Buddhas, still to come to earth once
more as the eighth avatar
Maitreya, who awaits beyond space-time, in

936
the form of a bodhisattva, his next and final Coming at the end of the Siduri Sabitu
1
world. Siegfried
Siddhartha literally means "rich in magic," siddhi being the magic
^^^^^^^^^^^
power controlled by a master yogi. Tantric texts claimed such a sage
could walk on water, make himself invisible, create and destroy matter,
and turn base elements into gold, as credulous alchemists tried to do
for many centuries. 2

Siddhi was an international word. The Sufi word for the magic

power of an enlightened sage was sihr} The Kalmuks descended

from "Mother Kali" called their sacred tales and magic formulae
Siddhi-Kur. 4 Norse myths said the gods learned from Mother Freya
theirmagic power over elements and spirits, the seidr. In the Loka-
senna, Odin was reproached for practicing seidr because it was a

craft, property of the Goddess. The Lapps worshipped the seidi

5
female
6
(spirit-power) of their deities. The Celts called their matriarchal

fairy-lore sidh, pronounced "she." The center of the Celtic otherworld

was Caer Sidi, the revolving hub of the Goddess's karmic wheel.
1. Ross, 124. 2. 93. 3. Shah, 335. 4. Baring-Gould,
Menen, C.M.M.A., 570.
5. Eliade, S., 385. 6. Davidson, 79.

Siduri Sabitu

Babylonian Goddess of the wine of eternal life. She advised Gilga-

mesh to give up his quest for immortality, for the gods kept her "wine'
for themselves and refused to share it with humans. She
1
became the
Saki of Arabian Sufi mystics, serving the wine of paradise to the

enlightened.
1. Larousse, 72.

Siegfried
Teutonic hero par excellence: dragon-slayer, warrior, winner of the
Queen of the Valkyries, strongman, and ritually-slain sacred king. One
legend said Siegfried's father was King Sigmund of Tarlungaland, his
mother Queen Sisibe, a prototype of Snow White; for, suspected of
adultery, she was sent into the forest with a huntsman who had orders
to cut out her tongue, but he did not. The queen died in giving birth to

Siegfried,who was set afloat on the river in a vessel of glass and taken
ashore by a doe, who nursed him until he was found by the smith

Mimir, who raised him. According to another story, Siegfried was

nursed by a she-wolf, and his early name was Wolfdietrich. 1

adventures are the subject matter of the Nibelung-

Siegfried's later
enlied and other epic romances: how he slew the dragon Fafnir and
married Brunnhilde ("Burning Hel"), and was slain in a typical Liebes-
tod (Love-Death) after which he was reunited with his mystic bride.
He was a Germanic Heracles, with many elements of the sun-hero.
1. Rank, 57-58.

937
Sige Sige
Simon Magus
"Silence," Gnostic name for the Creatress, sometimes called the
grandmother of God. Out of her was born the first Word; this was the

Logos of creation. Like Mother Night, she stood at the beginning of

the state of chaos or nonexistence before the
allthings and represented
universe took form. See Sophia, Saint.

Simon Magus
"Simon the Mage" was one of the principal rivals of the Christians'

Clementine Homi- cult-hero in the first century a.d. The Clementine Homilies said Simon
lies Greek writings was one of the Essenes, and a disciple of John the Baptist, and the
falsely attributed
to a Simon was said tohave appeared in
founder of Gnostic Christianity.
first-century bishop of
Samaria as God the Father, in Palestine as the Son, and in the rest of
Rome; actually com-
the nations as the Holy Spirit. He was even canonized, in the guise of a
posed by an anonymous
Christian apologist "St. Simon" allegedly chosen "bishop of Jerusalem" in 62 a.d., after
toward the end of the leading a group of Essenic eremites in the village of Pella, beyond
4th century.
Jordan. Followers of Simon were still numerous
in the 4th century

A.D.'

From the orthodox viewpoint, the trouble with Simon was that his

sect welcomed women and held that the world-creating power was as

much female as male. Simon's heaven was sevenfold, after the classic

pattern, and ruled by three pairs of male-and-female Powers, Roots,

or Aeons, all born of a great female source with the power of concep-

tion, the origin of all things. Simon said God theFather came out of
her, and was not called Father until she had named him Father. 2
Simon traveled with a sacred harlot named Helen, whom he called
his First Thought (Ennoia). She was a reincarnation of Helen of

Troy, Inanna, Athene, and other Goddesses. Simon claimed that, with
her, in his former god-incarnation he had created the world. Simon-
ians worshipped her as Sophia, the Gnostic Virgin of Light, and insisted
that she had mothered Jesus. As a Holy Whore (Prunikos), she
represented the fallen Ennoia for whose sake God descended and
clothed himself in flesh, in the person of Simon. "World salvation
was bound up with her redemption by him." 3
Simonians said those who placed their faith in Simon and Helen
would be saved by this grace, without need of works. The relationship
between Simon and Helen was like that of the Gnostic Christ and his

Mary Magdalene, who was similarly called Pistis-

sacred harlot

Sophia-Prunikos (Faith- Wisdom- Whore). She embodied Sophia, who

was 4
Jesus's spouse in heaven. Gnostic Gospels said Jesus gave the
mystic secret of the keys to the kingdom of heaven not to Peter, but to
Mary; and Peter reacted with jealousy and hostility toward Mary and
all women. 5
Peter was also hostile toward Simon Magus. According to the Acts

938
of the Apostles, Peter rebuked Simon for trying to buy the apostles' Simon Magus
secret of "laying on of hands" to cure diseases and cast out devils (Acts

8:18). From this biblical tale

selling priestly benefices

came
and powers
the term simony
a sin to
buying and
which the medieval heirs
^^i^
of "Peter" were especially prone. The author or authors of Acts had
no good to say of Simon, who was called a false prophet, one who
"bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some
great one: to whom they all gave heed saying, This man is the great
. . .

power of God" (Acts 8:9-10).

Like Peter, Simon was supposed to have visited Rome and
impressed the crowned heads with his miracles. Christians invented a
story about Simon to explain the inscription on a statue of the old
Sabine god Semo Sancus. The inscription was Semoni deo sancto,
which some semiliterate "authority" rendered The Holy God Simon,
claiming that the statue was raised by Nero in honor of Simon
Magus, after Simon allowed himself to be beheaded by Nero's execu-
tioner. Then, by magic art, he substituted a ram for himself, and on
the third day rose from the dead before Nero, after the manner of all
6
savior-gods.
The Acts of Peter and Paul asserted that Simon flew over the
Campus Martius in a chariot drawn by winged demons. In the midst
of his triumph, his enemy Peter recited a magic formula that caused him
7
to fall and break During the 8th century, Pope Paul I built
his neck.

a church "on the exact spot" where Simon Magus fell to his death the
exact spot having been discovered through a private revelation from
the Holy Ghost. In 850, Pope Leo IV reconstructed this church and
named it Santa Maria Nova the New Holy Mary.
Simon was succeeded by another Gnostic hero,
After his death,
8
Menander, "Moon-man." This seems to have been a reincarnated
Simon, assimilated to the moon. The rivalry between Peter and Simon-
Menander suggests the battles between those Christians who
worshipped the Essenic sun god whose priests were Pater, Petra, or
Peter and those who worshipped the lunar hero. The controversy
suggests a schismatic breaking away from a parent cult: it must be
remembered that Peter's name was Simon before Jesus changed it to
Peter (Matthew 10:2), and that Peter too was a "Mage."
The Magi discovered the advent of Jesus by astrological magic,

according to the Christian story; this was put forth as one of the
proofs of Jesus's divinity. Therefore, Christians were reluctant to dis-
creditany of the Magi. In Simon's case however, the early fathers
were implacably opposed to the main feature of his doctrine: "the
earthly incarnation of the heavenly mother. . . . Leaders of the ortho-
dox Church fought from the very beginning of Christianity against such
9
glorification of women." Writings attributed to Simon made exten-
sive use of feminine symbols: paradise was the womb, Eden the
placenta. "The river that flows forth from Eden symbolizes the navel,

939
Sin which nourishes the fetus [T]he Exodus, consequently, signifies the
and 'the crossing of the Red Sea refers
passage out of the womb,
. . .
Sirens
" 10
to the blood.' Such feminine imagery linked Simon with priests of
the Old In Ireland
Religion.
he was known as Simon the Druid. 11
The Latin cognomen Faustus, "Favored One," was bestowed on
Simon early in the Christian
era. "The he was accompanied
fact that

a Helena whom he claimed to be the reborn Helen of Troy shows

by
clearly that we have here one of the sources of the Faust legend of
the early Renaissance. Surely few admirers of Marlowe's and Goethe's
that their hero is the descendant of a gnostic
plays have an inkling
sectary, and that the beautiful Helen called up by his art was once the
fallen Thought of God through whose raising mankind was to be
12
saved."
1. Legge 1, 183. 3. Jonas, 107. 4. Malvern, 34.
Brewster, 107. 2.
5. 64-65. 6. Male, 297. 7. Reinach,264. 8. Summers, H.W., 193.
Pagels, 22,
9. Seligmann, 128-29. 10. Pagels, 53. 11. Wedeck, 142. 12. Jonas, 111.

Sin

The original Moon-god of Mount Sinai, "Mountain of the Moon."

He was born of the Virgin Queen of Heaven, Nanna or Inanna. He
ruled the Land of Sinim (Isaiah 49:12), which meant "land of the
lunar mountain" and was an older form of Zion. His Chaldean name
was Kingu. He was the god who received the Tablets of Law from
the primal Mother of Creation, Tiamat. As Moses's god, he still had
the same mountain-throne and the same tablets. A biblical scholar has
pointed out that "the Jehovah of the Hebrews" was merely another
transformation of "the primitive lunar deity of Arabia." '

The god Moses met on Mount Sinai claimed to be the god of

Abraham, though he said Abraham knew him by a different name
Sign of Sin
(Exodus 6:3). In fact, Abraham may have been the same deity. Very
ancient documents used the name Abraham or Ab-ram as a synonym
for Ab-Sin, Moon-father. 2 In the 1 2th century B.C., the Babylonian
heaven was ruled by a trinity consisting of Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar,
3
represented by the sun, moon, and stars.

1. Briffault 3, 106. 2. Briffault 3, 108. 3. Campbell, M.I., 88.

Sirens
Homer's word for the magic women of Cyrene, who cast spells on
ships to cause them to be wrecked on the rocky coast. The "sweet
songs" by which the Sirens lured Odysseus's sailors were spells to
draw foreign ships into the Cyrenian shallows, where natives apparently
carried on a profitable trade as wreckers.

940
Sita Sita

a '

Rama
"Furrow," the Goddess Earth as the wife of

Ramayana. A personification of the yoni, mated to the phallic "ram"

whose name meant "sexual enjoyment." See Furrow.
(Krishna) in the
^^^^m

Skadi var. Scatha, Scotia

The Celto-Teutonic Goddess in her "Destroyer" aspect. Like the

Greek Persephone, "Destroyer," she was Queen of the Shades, Mother
Death. Her name was the root of Gothic skadus, Old English sceadu,
"shadow, shade." She was the Shadow into which all the gods went at

doomsday, called Gotterdammerung, or Going-Into-the-Shadow-of-

the-Gods. As Scotia, she was the Dark Goddess
1
like Black Kali, the
Caillech after whom Scotland was named. 2
Like Kali, Skadi had to be propitiated each year with an outpouring
of male blood in primitive sacrificial rites. Her annual victim was

assimilated to the god Loki, who became a "savior" by fertilizing Skadi

with his blood. Loki's genitals were attached by a rope to a goat, and a

tug-of-war ensued, until Loki's flesh gave way and he fell into Skadi's
lap,thus bathing her loins in his blood. The gods watched anxiously
to see if Skadi smiled; and when she did, it means spring could return
once more to the land. 3
Similar blood-rites were practiced all over the ancient world, when
men sought godhood by giving their blood to the Goddess, before
animal sacrifices replaced human ones, and even afterward. It was not
uncommon for priestesses representing the Goddess to bathe in

sacrificial blood, like the women who sacrificed Apis the bull-god in

Egypt, hoisting their skirts as they dismembered him so his spurting

blood would quicken their wombs. 4 Like many death-goddess figures,
Skadi collected the penises of her castrated heroes, and in this
character she was named Mornir, "troll-woman." 5
Remnants of the bloody sacrifice of Loki and the goat could still be
found in Norway and Sweden in the late 1 7th century. Churchmen
vainly denounced the masquerades, sexual promiscuity, and "goat
6
games" associated with Easter and other religious festivals.
Skadi was a dark twin of Freya, therefore virtually identical with
the underground Goddess Hel. She was once all the Earth, birth-
giver and devourer of her children. The entire land mass of Scandinavia
was named was Scadin-auja, the land of Skadi. 7
after her. Originally it

A variation of her name, Skuld, was given to the third of the three
Fates, or Norns, in the role of destroying Crone. Naturally she
became the patroness of witches, whose activities came to be called
"skulduggery."
To the Celts, she was Scatha or Scath. Her underground realm of
the dead was "the Land of Scath." Like Persephone's underworld

941
SkakJ within seven loops of the Styx, the Land of Scath was a city of seven

Slavery walls. was variously located under the earth, or in heaven, or far
8
It

of "Sky." Cu Chulainn
^^^^^^^^^^ away over the sea on a western island, the land
and other Celtic heroes learned magic skill in martial arts from a visit

to Queen Scatha's island of Skye. She kept the hero for "a year and a

day," the usual mythic image

of the old 3-month lunar year with its
1

intercalary day. When she had taught a man

all she knew, she sent him

back to earth a fey man, set apart and sacer, fated to do great deeds
9
and die a sacrificial death. The legend suggests that the real island of

Skye was a cult center of the Goddess, and warriors went there to be
initiated into their heroic profession.

Skadi invoked by place names in Sweden, such

is still as Skadave
10
(Skadi's temple) and Skadalungr (Skadi's grove).
1. Turville-Petre, 164. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 72. 3. Oxenstierna, 213.
4. Graves. G.M. Turville-Petre, 257. 6. Oxenstierna, 2 1 6.
1,255. 5.

7. Branston, 164. 8. Lethaby, 163. 9. Goodrich, 187. 10. Turville-Petre, 165.

Skald
Scandinavian poet-shaman, probably derived from Skadi or Skuld, as
aGoddess of inspiration. A great skald was believed to have words of
power; what he sang or prophesied would come true. He was able to
address the death goddess herself, via funerary ballads, and appeal to her
to treat the deceased well. Norse sagas and eddaic poetry were the
work of skalds who belonged to a priestly class, like druids. See
Romance.

Slavery
The de Paors wrote naively of the life of a slave in early Christian
Ireland: "Even
he was a slave he had the advantage of living in a
if

society which had accepted the teachings of Christianity." This

'

wasn't much of an advantage, considering that in

pagan society he
would not have been a slave at all. The United States in the 19th

century had also accepted the teachings of Christianity, but this was of
little benefit to the slaves on southern
plantations.
In effect, the feudalism upheld by the Christian churches was a
were at the mercy of their overlords, who held the
slave state. Serfs

power of life and death over them. Serfs could be bought and sold with
the land. Though they were taxed to support the church and the
nobility, they were without
legal rights. The "teachings" of Christianity
paid no
attention to the plight of the serfs, nor did the churches make

any effort to alleviate their sufferings.

Church fathers were even more concerned to keep women in a
state of subjection
throughout all social strata, so that each male even
at the slave level had at least one slave of his own: a wife. St. Augustine

942
 lidwives should be slaves to their husbands, and husbands had the Sleipnir

right to beat and abuse them. To a wife who had been beaten he would Smashana-Kali
the duty of servants to obey their masters. [Y]ou have
say, "It is . . .
^^^^^^^^^^
made a contract of servitude." 2 St. Thomas Aquinas said a male slave
was superior to a wife, because a male slave was not in subjection
"according to the law of nature," but a wife was "subject to the man on
account of the weakness of her nature, both of mind and body." 3 In
other words, Aquinas believed that might makes right; weakness must be
dominated by strength. Of course this was not always the rule in all-

male relationships, only in male-female ones.

The combination of slavery and sexism in Christian societies made
the lot of female slaves particularly onerous. They were completely
helpless in the hands of their masters, and could be raped, tortured, or
murdered with impunity. Even in "enlightened" 19th-century
America, female slaves were in a singularly unenviable position.
Dr. James Marion Sims, known as the American "father of
gynecology," was famed as the inventor of a surgical technique for

curing vesicovaginal fistula. He also performed hundreds of clitoridecto-

mies and ovariotomies to cure "sex-related diseases" in women.
What is
usually not told about his career is the way he developed his

techniques. Before the Civil War, he kept women slaves in a disused

jailhouse and made them his guinea pigs, performing hundreds of

experimental and exploratory operations on them until they died off

one by one and were replaced by fresh victims. 4 Sims's career and
writings bear out what some psychologists have suspected, that early
gynecological surgeons were fundamentally women-haters with a sadis-
tic bent.
In patriarchal societies, said Marx, "Woman's true qualities are

warped to her disadvantage, and all the moral and delicate elements
in her nature become the means for enslaving her and making her
5
suffer."

1. de Paor, 100. 2. Hartley, 231. 3. de Riencourt, 219. 4. See Barker-Benfield on Sims.

5. de Riencourt, 364.

Sleipnir
Odin's eight-legged gray horse, a Norse symbol of death, likened to
the gallows-tree on which Odin hung. Skalds called the gallows "high-
chested rope-Sleipnir," carrying men to the land of death. The same
word meant "gallows tree" and "horse" (drasil).
1
See Horse; Odin.
[Link]-Petre,48.

Smashana-Kali
Kali Ma as the Goddess of cremation grounds and other places of
death. The yantra (symbol) of Smashana-Kali was doubly yonic: an

943
 lotus with multiple repetitions of the inverted triangle
Smith eight-petaled
that meant "female genitals."
1
The meaning of the yantra of Smashana-
Kali was rebirth following death. Her priestesses, called dakinis,
the dying. In the after-world they became
arranged funerals and tended
psychopomps.
1 . Muhnnirvunatantm, 360.

Smith
A recurrent story about Amazons was that they deliberately crippled

certain men, members of a special caste of metalworkers and smiths

whose deformity became their caste mark. The Amazonian smith-
god Hephaestus was lame. Some said he was lamed when Zeus cast him
down from heaven to the underworld for trying to defend his mother
Hera. Others said he was lamed by Hera herself. Hephaestus shared a

temple with Athene, renowned as an instructress of smiths. She

1

taught smithcraft to Daedalus, the builder of the Cretan Labyrinth.

Many myths point to a continuing relationship between smithcraft
and the worship of the Goddess. Egyptian priests of Isis were mesniu,
"smiths." 2 Aphrodite ruled the copper mines and metalworking schools
of her sacred isle, Cyprus ("Copper"). Medieval alchemists contin-

ued to call copper the Metal of Venus. The lame smith Hephaestus also
claimed Aphrodite as his bride. The primal sea-goddesses loved him,
despite his deformity. "Golden women" helped him in his workshop on
isle of Lemnos, traditional home of militant Amazons.
3
the
Smiths often claimed magic powers stemming from secret connec-
tion with the feminine forces of nature. Roman faber meant both
"smith" and "magician." Russian folk tales portrayed smiths as assistants
of witches. Exorcisms attributed to St. Patrick claimed to avert the

spells of "women, smiths, and druids." 4 The Yakuts said "Smiths and
shamans are from the same nest," believing smiths could heal,
prophesy, and work miracles. Secret societies linking metallurgy and
magic appear in the traditions of China and Japan, as in those of
fraternities, and German Mannerbunde.
5
medieval alchemists, craft
The German name Schmidt (Smith) once referred to a priestly
caste of metalworking shamans, who were also bards. Their
apotheo-
sized founder was Wayland the Smith in Scandinavia, Volund a
consort of the Triple Goddess. He encountered her in totemic form,
as three doves flying above a sacred 6
spring.
Wayland the Smith lived within the Berk-
English tradition said
shire marked by the 370-foot image of the White Horse of
hill

Uffington. If horses were brought to him at night and left, with money,
at one of the
standing stones, he would shoe them before the coming
of the dawn. 7

Mongols said the seven stars of Ursa Major which the Hindus
called Seven Rishis were the skulls of seven smiths who had been

944
raised to the sky by the Goddess. The constellation was a special patron Snake
of smiths. 8 Christian folklore said the man in the moon was Cain, Sneeze
whose name meant "smith"; the Cainites or Kenites were the special ^^^-^^^^^^
caste of metalworkers in ancient Palestine, until they were driven out

of the country (1 Samuel 13:19). See Cain.

The Irish said the celestial smith was Luno (Moon-man), a lame
Hephaestus. He made Fingal's magic sword. Merlin
craftsman like 9

too was a smith; he forged Arthur's magic armor. 10 Christian syncretism

even represented the God who impregnated the virgin Mary as "the
Smith from above" who threw his hammer into her breast probably a
new version of Thor, as an apotheosized Wayland. 11
When the old gods were made devils, smithcraft was associated
with devil's work. Numerous cathedral bells were said to have been
12
forged by the devil. The devil was also the Master Smith who forged
the original ironwork doors of Notre Dame de Paris, which were
replaced by new doors in I860. 13

Gypsies were often described as smiths, and many adopted the

surname of Smith. 14 The prejudice against ironworkers included
gypsies. This prejudice was particularly notable in Abyssinia where
ironworkers were restricted to a special caste, excluded from the rites
of the church, and believed to possess the evil eye. 15

Along with the smiths, other medieval European craft guilds were
considered subversive by Christian orthodoxy. The guild of free
masons, for example, maintained their own ceremonies, secrets, and
semi-religious doctrine. "The Church, not without the semblance of
reason, will regard the Masonic brotherhood as her most treacherous
and dangerous enemy, which aims to dismantle her work and
reconstruct it in another spirit." 16 The smiths' guilds were even more

suspect at one time, to the pointwhere the church even felt it

necessary to dissolve some of them.

1. Graves, CM. 1,311. 2. Briffault 2, 535. 3. Graves, CM. 1, 87. 4. Joyce, 223.
5. Eliade,S., 470-73. 6. Keightley, 215. 7. Hazlitt, 621. [Link],262.
9. [Link], 99. [Link],L.M.A.,211. 1 1 d'Alviella, 16. [Link], L.R., 47-56.
.

[Link], 152. 14. Groome, xxviii, lxi. 15. Gifford, 29. 16. Guignebert, 443.

Snake
See Serpent.

Sneeze
Roman paganism contributed the traditional "God bless you" or
Gesundheit (May you have health) offered to one who sneezed. The
old expression was "Jupiter preserve you" or "Jupiter help me." '
Its

basiswas the ancient Indo-European concept of the air-soul or breath-

soul (Atman), which might be expelled from the body by a violent

945
 Solomon and Sheba rush of air unless prevented by a verbal charm. Covering the mouth
during a
yawn arose from the same fear of losing the soul. Medieval

^^^^^^^^^^ churchmen accepted the superstition, and taught that both sneezing and

yawning should be immediately protected by the sign of the cross,

because "Ofttimes a man sneezed, and expired at the moment of
sneezing. ... In like manner it often befell that a man yawned, and
fell dead." 2
The primitive idea of the air-soul was closely associated with
sneezing by the Polynesians. The first man on earth was kneaded of
red clay moistened with the deity's blood that is, the same combina-

tion of menstrual blood and earth that ancient Semites called

adamah and was animated by the deity's breath. Then the clay effigy
came to life and sneezed. The name of this first man was
Tiki-ahua,
or The Creator's Sneeze. Ahua, or "likeness," was a sound-word for
"sneeze." 3 the man made "in God's image" was the same as a
Thus
man made "by God's sneeze."
The Christian custom of saying "God bless you" to a sneezer was
meant to serve as shorthand for extreme unction, in the event that
the soul happened to leave the body. Hindus still take similar precau-
tions when someone yawns. They snap their fingers to frighten the
soul away from the open mouth and back down the throat where it
belongs.
1. de Lys, 305. 2. de Voragine, 278. 3. Frazer, EOT., 5.

Solomon and Sheba

Solomon meant Sun God of On, the Jewish version of Ra of
Heliopolis. Solomon was the one Jewish king with pretensions to ruling
1

a Golden Age of glory. The wonders of his

reign were attributed to
his wisdom, supposedly the of Yahweh, though the Bible inconsist-
gift

entfy declares that Solomon Yahweh. Solomon's

didn't worship
famous temple was built not by himself but by
King Hiram of Tyre, to
whom Solomon was forced to pay tribute (1 Kings 5:1 1). The deities
worshipped in that temple were the Tyrian sun god Melek or Heracles-
Melkart (biblical Molech); Shamash the sun
god (biblical Chemosh);
and the Goddess Astarte, or Ashtoreth, whom Yahweh's
priests called
an abomination (1
Kings 1 1:5-7).
In reality, there was no Golden
Age of Solomon. No contempo-
rary nation took any notice of Israel's alleged glory. The "great cities"
Solomon was supposed to have built were small mud-hut
villages. The
"city" of Megiddo covered less than 13 acres. "The standard of
living
was far from luxurious when compared to that in other parts
prevailing
of the ancient Near Eastern world." 2
Solomon's reign was set in the middle of the 10th century B.C., but \

the Hebrew manuscript used as a basis for the biblical account was
written in the 10th 2000
century a.d., years later though a few early-

946
 medieval copies of a Greek text might have gone as far back as the Solomon and Sheba
I
3rd century B.C. There were no records whatever traceable to Solo-
mon's own time, not even the king lists that were customary in the
I
nations that amounted to anything. Like David, Solomon was arbitrarily
assigned a reign of forty years because that was the traditional span of
3
, a generation.

Solomon's reign and deeds must be interpreted as a collection of

legends from Egypt, Phoenicia, and especially from southern Arabia,
the land of Sheba, where a true Golden Age was flourishing under a

succession of matriarchal queens. Sheba was the primary source of

frankincense and other valuable spices, in great demand not only for
food preservation but also for religious and funerary use.

Eutychius said the whole Sinai peninsula had been governed by Eutychius Greek
historian, author of a se-
wealthy Sheban queens for as long as anyone could remember. In the
ries of Annals.
alleged time of Abraham, Queen Shabib (Sheba) had "built Nisib and
Edessa and surrounded them with walls. She founded also the

sanctuary of Harran, and made an idol of gold, called Sin." 4 This was
the Moon-god of Mount Sinai, the god of Moses. Semitic tribes of
Arabia worshipped the moon and her earthly embodiment, the queen,
since at least the 16th century B.C. 5 Sheba was the lunar queen's
capital, also known to the Egyptians as Punt or Ophir, famous as a land
of fabulous wealth. 6
There were king consorts in Sheba's capital city of Marib (Mar-
iaba), but they were forbidden to leave the queen's palace on pain of
death by stoning. 7 The city, hub of the spice trade, had a great moon
temple at Almaqah, out in the feminine-symbolic oval character-
laid

istic of matriarchal religious centers. Priestesses of this temple appear in

the Old Testament as "Sabeans" (Shebans). They were described as

holy harlots from the "wilderness," the biblical name for any place
outside of Israel, having crowns on their heads and jeweled bracelets
on arms (Ezekiel 23:42). Sheban priests were called mukarrib,
their

"kindred of the moon," from which descended the Hebrew kerubh

(cherub, angel) and the Arabic muqanibin, "close kindred," a title of

medieval Sufi mystics. 8
The Bible presents a highly improbable picture of a rich Queen
of Sheba coming with a caravan of spices, gold, and precious stones to
visit a king of poor, backward Israel. She loaded Solomon with
gifts
because she was so impressed by what he already owned and by his
clever answers to her questions (1 Kings 10:5). Needless to say, this
was only mythic name-dropping. Solomon was placed on his throne and
crowned by a Sheban moon-priestess called Bath-Sheba (Daughter of
Sheba), said to be his mother (Song of Solomon 3:1 1). The king
whether his name was Solomon or not clearly lived in a more
dependent relationship to the Sheban matriarchate than the account of
the queen's visit might suggest.

According to the Koran, Solomon stole his throne from Balkis,

9
Queen of Sheba. The name Balkis, Bilqis, or Balqama is
thought to

947
 Solomon and Sheba be related to Greek pallakis, "sacred harlot." The Marib temple was
Mahram Bilqis, Moon-Mother Bilqis, name of the God-
the formal
was a large bronze
^^^^^^^^^^ dess-queen. Set in the doorway of the temple
filled with water, the prototype of the "brazen sea" in
baptismal basin
10
Solomon's temple, copied from Sheban antecedents. This mighty
womb-symbol was decorated with the female yonic emblems of

knops and lilies, also "cherubim," derived from the Sheban

mukarribim. n
Solomon's temple featured a pair of phallic pillars named Boaz
(eagerness, strength)and Jachin (God makes him firm), surmounted
by female symbols of lilies and pomegranates (1 Kings 7:19-20). By thi

ancient symbolism, the two pillars at the temple door represented the

king and his tanist, both craving entrance into the Enclosed Garden or

temple-body of the Goddess. The hieros gamos between Solomon

and his mysterious black queen a marriage arranged by Bath-Sheba
was a mating of the king to his land, signalized by pornographic
hymns like the wedding-poems of ancient Sumeria. 12
The fragment of love-liturgy now called Solomon's Song has beei
an embarrassment to theologians, even though they strenuously
insisted it was an allegory of Christ's love for his church,
Lady Ecclesia.
It was hard to explain why such a love should exude such a steamy air

of obviously erotic sensualism. Yet the 18th-century scholar Herder was

persecuted and hounded from one pastorate to another for daring to

suggest that Solomon's love poem should be accepted at face value, as a
13
piece of Oriental erotica.
When the metaphors of this poem are unraveled, they prove to b<

more, not less, frankly sexual. The hortus conclusus or "enclosed

garden" is the internal genitalia of the virgin bride,where her spouse
"enters paradise" from Hebrew pardes, "garden." 14 Solomon says,
"A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain
sealed." He proposes to unseal her, unlock her door, and "drink of
spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate" (Song of Solomon 8:2).
This metaphor is
explained by the contemporary image of the
pomegranate, rimmon, as a female-genital symbol. Spiced wine meant
the secretion of the Goddess
representing the blood of life: i.e.,
menstrual blood, of which only kings and gods could taste. 15
Solomon's bride said invitingly, "Let my beloved come into his

garden, and eat his pleasant fruits." Solomon answered, "Open to

me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled
with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night. I have put off my
garment; how shall I
put it on?" The king's dew-filled "head" was the
common symbol of the penis, in royal wedding hymns of Sumer and
Akkad. A king's union with the Goddess
Inanna, Queen of the
Universe, was so described: "The king goes with lifted head to the
holy lap, he goes with lifted head to the holy lap of
Inanna." Every
king's divine bride was Inanna "the queen, the vulva of heaven and
16
earth."

948
only
A priestess impersonated the Goddess on the royal wedding night.
Solomon's mysterious "black, but beautiful" bride, the Shulamite,
seems to have been no more than an ancient Canaanite title of the
Goddess, Zulumat, "Darkness."
the
stature

mouth
night and
was
the moon;
like a
she
17

palm
Like the Goddess she was not
was also the land and its crops. Her

tree, her breasts like clusters

honeycomb, her teeth like flocks of sheep, her belly a heap

like
of grapes, her
^
Solomon and Sheba

^mwm

of wheat set with lilies, and so on. In short she was the Enclosed

Garden-paradise of Oriental kings, like Shalimar in the Far East the

Semitic Sheol-Mari, or Mary of the enchanted garden underground.

Similarly the Enclosed Garden became a Christian symbol of the

same Mary. The Litany of the Virgin jumbled together many of the
old fertility symbols, calling Mary the Enclosed Garden, Well of Water,
Gate of Heaven, Chosen Vessel, City of God, Beautiful Moon,
Beloved of the Sun, Rose, Lily, Olive, and Palm. 18 Within the Virgin's
hortus conclusus dwelt such phallic symbols as the Tower of David,
Tree of Life, enchanted unicorn, and Exalted Cedar of Lebanon,
always called "tall." The ancient meaning of "tall" combined the
concepts of "prompt, quick, docile, comely, handsome" flattering
19
descriptions of the divine phallus.
Mary or Mari was linked with the Sheban moon-temple at Marib,
having the same name and the title of almah or moon-woman, once a
priestess of the Almaqah. Solomon's mother Bath-Sheba, who crowned

him, apparently represented the elder queen of Sheba, who was also
theNaked Goddess when viewed in her bath by the next king. Her
spouse David had come to kingship by viewing her in her bath and

showing a satisfactory reaction. Prior to Solomon's reign, the king's

defeated tanist was Absalom or "Father Salomon," variants of Salem,

Salma, Shalem, or Solomon. After lying with the royal concubines to

prove his virility, Absalom died a sacrificial death on an oak tree, and
a phallic pillar was erected in his honor (2 Samuel 18:18). Bath-Sheba
meant literally the daughter of Shaybah, an ancient Arabic name of
20
the Goddess. See Zenobia.
In one year Solomon received 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14),
the mystic number of the Triple Goddess, later re-interpreted by her
enemies as "the number of the beast" (Revelation 13:18). Clearly,
Solomon worshipped the Goddess (1 Kings 1 1:5) and paid little or no
attention to Yahweh. Apocryphal texts said Yahweh never forgave
Solomon's paganism, but after his death condemned him to perpetual
punishment, like that of Prometheus: to be daily devoured, forever, by
21
10,000 ravens.
The gold that came to Solomon was probably a symbol of his
wisdom; wisdom was generally ascribed to their union with
for kings'

the Goddess who represented "mother-wisdom" (Hebrew hok-mah,

afterEgyptian hek-maa). Sargon II also claimed to have received
22
"gold" form the Arabian queen. Centuries later, Arabian alchemists
talked in highly esoteric terms of the acquisition of mystic gold, which

949
 from the usual interpretation of
Son of Man may have meant something different
material gold from base metal. In medieval alchemy
much was made
of the occult link between gold and the Wisdom-goddess, variously

named Anima Mundi, Athene, or Luna.

Sophia, Sapientia,
Solomon's legendary wisdom brought him almost as much rever-
ence from medieval occultists as Thoth-Hermes Trismegistus, god of
magic. Several grimoires purported to have been written by his hand;
The Key ofSolomon was one of the most popular. Magic signs like
the pentacle and hexagram were often called Solomon's Seal. "Of a

truth," the Grand Grimoire said of Solomon, "what other man, save
this invincible genius, would have had the hardihood to reveal the

withering words which God makes use of to strike terror into the
23
rebellious angelsand compel them into obedience?" Thus wizards
invoked Solomon's help in calling up demons for magical purposes.
The Bible is remarkably uncommunicative concerning Solomon's
death, considering the intimate detail that describes his wedding
night, histemple furnishings, his household, etc. The Arabs said
Solomon lost his magic ring while bathing in the Jordan, and forgot

his wisdom, so he was killed by a djinniwho ruled in his place. Rabbinic

writers said Solomon's corpse was stuffed and shown to the people on
holy days to make them think he still lived. One day the royal mummy
embarrassingly fell apart, which ended the deception. 24
1. Stanton, 67. 2. Pritchard, S.S., 35.3. Pritchard, S.S., 10, 21. 4. Briffault 3, 108.
1 59-60. 8. Shah, 180.
5. Albright, 96. 6. Pritchard, S.S., 47. 7. Lethaby,
[Link],98. 10. Pritchard, S.S., 61, 100. 11. Shah, 26, 180.
12. Encyc. Brit., "Solomon." 13. White 2, 325. 14. Hughes, 47.
15. Mahanirvanatantra, 273. 16. Pritchard, A.N.E., 135, 202.
17. Pritchard, A.N.E., 97. 18. Hughes, 55. 19. Potter &
Sargent, 220.
20. Briffault 3, 80. 21. Wedeck, 211. 22. Pritchard, A.N.E., 197.
23. Waite, CM., 100-101. 24. de Givry, 97-98.

Son of Man
Narayana, "Son of Man," originally meant Vishnu, not Jesus. It was
coined to prove Vishnu a god made wholly in the image of man, having
no need of a mother. Yet Vishnu himself finally adopted the worship
1

of Mother Kali, saying in his hymn to her divinity, "The gods them-
2
selves are merely constructs out of Her maternal substance."
"Son of Man" was subsequently applied to the Persian Messiah,
then to the Essenic Christ, both of whom were "born" at the hands
of men, "of water and of the spirit." Men so born were supposed to be
able to defeat death, whereas man born of woman was fated to die.
The Persian Son of Man, Yima the Splendid (copied from the Vedic
Yama) became a Lord of Death, "the good shepherd, the most
glorious of those who were born, the sole mortal possessor of the solar
eye." He alone could "render men and beasts non-mortal." ?
Repeating a bit of Persian eschatology, Jesus promised that on the
Last Day "the Son of man shall come in the glory of the Father with

950
hisangels" to judge the world (Matthew 16:27). Theologians have Sophia, Saint
never really decided who was the Father of the Son of Man.
1. OTlaherty, 349. 2. Rawson, E.A., 159. 3. Larousse, 310.

Sophia, Saint
Canonical adaptation of the Gnostic Great Mother: Latin Sapientia,
Greek Sophia, the spirit of Female Wisdom. Symbolized by the Dove

of Aphrodite (later transformed into a sign of the Holy Ghost),

Sophia once represented God's female soul, source of his power, just as
Kali-Shakti served to vitalize the Hindu gods. 1
The Trattato Gnostico said Sophia was God's mother, "the great

revered Virgin in whom the Father was concealed from the begin-

ning before He had created anything." She was identified with

Isis-Hathor, whose seven emanations gave each Egyptian his seven

souls. Irenaeus said Sophia like Hathor was the mother of the seven

planetary spirits, whose names were listed in Gnostic papyri as the

2
magic-working secret names of God.
The Clementine Homilies called Sophia the All-Maternal Being, Clementine Homi-
The Queen, Lady Wisdom. Early Gnostic Christians held that, like lies Greek writings

falsely attributed to a
Krishna and Shiva, or like Dionysus and Zeus, Christ and God together
first-century bishop of
merged with Sophia an androgyne: "The Son of Man agreed with
as
com-
Rome; actually
Sophia, his consort, and revealed himself in a great light as bisexual. His posed by an anonymous
male nature is called 'the Savior,' the begetter of all things, but his Christian apologist
" ? toward the end of the
female, 'Sophia, Mother of All.'
4th century.
A Gnostic creation myth said Sophia was born from the primordial
female power Sige (Silence). Sophia gave birth to a male spirit,

Christ, and a female spirit, Achamoth. The latter gave life to the
elements and the terrestrial world, then brought forth a new god
named Ildabaoth, Son of Darkness, along with five planetary spirits later

regarded as emanations of Jehovah: Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi, and

Uraeus. These spirits produced archangels, angels, and finally men.
Ildabaoth or Jehovah forbade men to eat the fruit of knowledge,
but his mother Achamoth sent her own spirit to earth in the form of
the serpent Ophis to teach men to disobey the jealous god. The serpent
was also called Christ, who taught Adam to eat the fruit of knowledge
4
despite the god's prohibition.

Sophia sent Christ to earth again in the shape of her own totemic
dove, to enter the man Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan. After Jesus

died, Christ left his body and returned to heaven. Sophia gave Jesus a
body of ether, and placed him in heaven to help collect souls. 5 Some
said Jesus became Sophia's spouse and his glory depended on this sacred
marriage; for he was only one of the Aeons, a minor spirit, the
common fruit" of the Pleroma. 6
Some said Sophia was also Jesus's mother, for she was the Virgin
of Light whose spirit entered into the body of Mary to conceive him.

951
 She also entered the body of Elizabeth to conceive John the Baptist.
Sophia, Saint
Some said Sophia was to God as Metis to Zeus: his "mind." But
the all-male church. Of the three mighty
Sophia wasn't acceptable to
female powers in the Gnostic creation myth, all preceded Jehovah,
and two of them opposed Jehovah as a tyrant, overruled his taboo, and
saved humanity from ignorance. It was a version that the Pauline
churches found lacking in appeal.
Nevertheless, Sophia was passionately adored by Eastern Chris-
tians. Her greatest shrine was erected in Constantinople during the
6th century a.d., and was one of the wonders of the world: the Church
of Holy Sophia (Hagia Sophia).
Embarrassed by this magnificent monument to the Great Mother,
Roman Christians claimed it was dedicated to a minor "virgin

martyr," St. Sophia, whose phony legend lacked even a date. Despite
her virginity she was the mother of three daughters, also "virgin

martyrs": St. Faith, St. Hope, and St. Charity. The legend may have
arisen in personification of the saying that Wisdom gives birth to
Faith, Hope, and Charity. Hagiographers took it
literally, confusing the
three virtues with the three Charites. Catholic scholars now claim the
church of Hagia Sophia was never dedicated to the Great Mother in
any form, not even that of a female saint. They say its name which
means "Holy Female Wisdom" in plain Greek really meant "Christ,
theWord of God." 7
Jewish literature owed much to the cult of Sophia,
"Wisdom" who]
was medieval Jewish cabalism as the Shekina of God.
to reappear in

Yet the 8th and 9th chapters of Proverbs demonstrate the early conflict
between followers of Sophia and those of God. The first of these
passages urges the benefits of Sophia's worship; the second belittles her
and her priestesses:

Doth not Sophia cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She
standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths.
She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in of the
doors. Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of man. O

ye simple, understand Sophia: and, ye fools, be ye ofan understanding

heart. Hear; for I will speak of excellent
things; and the opening of my
lips shall be right things for Sophia is better than rubies; and all the
. . .

things that may be desired are not to be compared to her. I Sophia

dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. . . .

Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom; lam understanding; I have

[Link] me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By me princes
rule,and nobles, even all the judges of the earth. Hove them that love
me; and those that seek me early shall find me. I lead in the way of
. . .

righteousness, in the midst of the paths ofjudgment: that I may cause

those that love me to inherit substance; and I will fill their treasures. . . .

Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates,

waiting at the posts ofmy doors. For whoso findeth me findeth life. . . .

952
 But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate Soteira
me love death. Sothis

This was one side of a public-relations war. The other side was hmmmmmm
presented by the following chapter, wherein God scorned the worship
of the Goddess:

Sophia hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: she
hath killed her beasts: she hath mingled her wine: she hath also
furnished her She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the
table.

highest places of the city. Whoso is simple,

let him turn in hither; as for

him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Come, eat ofmy bread,
and drink of the wine which I have mingled [but] the fear of the
. . .

Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is

understanding. For by me [God] thy days shall be multiplied, and the
years of thy life shall be increased. . . . A foolish woman is clamorous: she
is simple, and knoweth nothing. For she sitteth at the door ofher
house, on a seat in the high places of the city, to call passengers who go
right on their ways: whoso is simple, let him turn in hither. . . . But he
knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths
of hell. 8

The "high places of the city" meant temples, therefore the

'woman" was the Goddess, who met with much resistance from
Followers of the God. Yet she was still in evidence during the Middle

\ges, as Sophia-Sapientia, Lady Wisdom, ruling deity of the Gnostic

jhilosophers who said the World Soul was born of her smile. 9
1. Graves, W.G., 159. 2.Legge2,69. 3. Malvern, 43, 53. 4. Jonas, 204.
5. Legge 2, 69 et seq. 6. Jonas, 188. 7. Attwater, 127, 312. 8. Holy Bible, King James
version. 9. Neumann, A.C.U., 56.

Soteira

'Savioress," a title of Persephone; feminine form oisoter, meaning

'savior" or "sower-of-seed." The word came from primitive images of
he Savior as a phallic god who died in the act of fertilizing the earth.
3
ersephone acquired the title as an annual bride of Pluto, or Hades,
vho took her underground.

Sothis

Sreco-Egyptian name of the star Sirius, which "rose in the east" to

innounce the advent of the Savior Osiris each year at the onset of the
^lile flood. "Three Wise Men" announced the rising of Sothis the
hree stars in Orion's belt which point directly toward Sirius. As the
'Eye" of the Great Dog (Canis Major), Sirius was sometimes called
2anopis or Dog- Eye, the same as the holy city of Anubis who, as Dog

953
Soul of Death, kept Osiris's soul in the star Sothis until his rebirth. See

Dog.

Soul
Germanic Seek, "soul," was feminine, used by mystics like Eckhart
and Goethe in the same sense as Shakti'm India: i.e., "the feminine
Ultimate Reality." Most ancient words for the soul were female:
'

psyche, pneuma, anima, alma. God-souls were Goddesses: Kore, So-

phia, Metis, Sapientia, Juno.
The ancients believed every man had a
female soul derived from the Mother Goddess through his earthly
mother.
Each Egyptian had seven souls, bestowed by the Seven Hathors
who guarded the planetary spheres and were fairy godmothers at the
birth of every child. The souls were aakhu, ab, ba, ka, khaibut, khat, and
ren: (1) primordial life spirit, resident in the blood; (2) the heart,
formed from the mother's heart's blood; (3) the ghost that appeared

after death and flew in and out of the tomb, sometimes as a bird; (4)
the semblance or image, the other self seen in reflections; (5) the

shadow; (6) the material living body, supposedly resurrected "in the
flesh" after death; and (7) the secret name or soul-name. 2
Greeks connected different aspects of the soul with different
deities. Psyche, the spirit, was married to Eros, the body, until they
were separated by death: this was the philosophical meaning of the
romantic myth of Psyche and Eros. Souls belonging to Persephone in
the underworld were shadows, or "shades" the umbra corresponding
to the Egyptian khaibut (see Shadow). Reflection-souls in water
seem have been connected with the water-goddess Echo, as shown
to !

by the myth of Narcissus.

Patriarchal writers tended to emphasize the soul called "breath,"
pneuma, since this was the kind of soul that could be given by a
father. The idea came from Vedic India. Patriarchal Brahmans called
the vital principle, self, or soul Atmen, "breath," cognate of the
Greek atmos, "air." Brahman fathers gave their children breath-souls as

opposed to the souls of blood, heart,

name, flesh, mind, shade, etc.,
contributed by mothers. Therefore Brahmans regarded the breath-soul
as the only
important one. A
Brahman father pretended to bring his
newborn infant to lifeby breathing on it three times, putting a soul into
3
its
body. Like all
Aryan notions, this one reappeared in Europe
centuries later, in a superstitious belief about lions."For three days after
birth the cubs of the lioness gave no sign of life, but on the third day
the lion came and with his breath restored them to life." 4
The biblical God performed the same miracle with breath, restor-
to slain warriors who had become
heaps of dry bones. At the
ing life

invocation of Ezekiel, God sent his breath into them from the winds,
and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great
army" (Ezekiel 37:10). We are always astonished at the ease with which

954
the ancient prophets ordered up impossible miracles, such as have Soul
never appeared within living memory.
Jesus's assertion that "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke ^^^^^^^^^^^^
17:21) filtered down from Ionian philosophers of the 6th and 5th
centuries b.c. They identified the air-soul as God, and proposed that the

divine spark within man was precisely the air he breathed, the
"finest" element, forming the personal soul and the Oversoul at the

same time. Diogenes of Apollonia set forth this doctrine:

Mankind and the other animals live on air, by breathing; and it is to them
both soul and mind.
The soul ofall animals is the same, namely air which is warmer than
the air outside, in which we live, though much colder than that near
the sun.
In my opinion that which has intelligence is what men call air, and
by it everything is directed, and it has power over all things; for it is just
s
this substance which I hold to be God.

The philosophers reasoned that if God=air=soul, then the air

within a breathing person was an inner God judging his actions an

interior conscience. So said the poet Philemon:
lam he from whom none can hide, in any act which he may do, or be
about to do, or have done in the past, be he god or man. Air is my
name, but one might also call me Zeus. I, as a god should be, am
everywhere here in Athens, in Patrae, in Sicily, in all cities, in every
home, in every no place where is not Air. And he
one ofyou. There is

who is present everywhere, because he is everywhere of necessity

knows everything. 6

Christians largely accepted the air-soul theory, drawing out of it

their ideas of invisible ghosts that could be felt but not seen, like air; and
the notion that the soul can depart from the body through the nose or
mouth, like breath. Yet older ideas of the soul also hung on.
TheEgyptian doctrine of the seven souls, descending from the
seven planetary spheres, passed into Gnostic Christianity as seven

qualities of souls drawn from, and influenced by, the planetary spheres.
Coming down from heaven to enter a newborn body, the soul had its

original purity adulterated by sins and passions as it passed through the

spheres: "As the souls descend, they draw with them the torpor of
Saturn, the wrathfulness of Mars, the concupiscence of Venus, the
greed for gain of Mercury, the lust for power of Jupiter." Seven

deadly sins were acquired from the seven spheres, but they could be
shed again after death as the soul ascended through the same spheres
in the reverse direction, enroute to heaven. Christians generally restrict-
ed the number of souls to one, but some Gnostics held that every
man has two souls, one emanating from the First Mind, and one called
the God-seeing soul, "put in from the revolution of the heavens." 7
Theories on the physical seat of the soul in the body have been
many and various. The ancients usually placed the soul in the heart
or the liver. Patriarchal thinkers declared that a man's testicles held the

955
Sow souls of his future children; St. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian
in authorities concurred in this. Some souls were external; they dwelt in
Speaking Tongues
umbilical cords, placentae, nail clippings,
or shorn hair; any injury to
these articles would injure the person.
A more recent theory, dating
from the early Age of Enlightenment, was that the seat of the soul is

the pineal gland.

1 BardoThodol,xxx\. 2. H. Smith, 24. 3. Hays, 223. 4. Male, 15.
5. Guthrie, 136. 6. Guthrie, 142. 7. Jonas, 157, 160.

Sow
The white corpse-eating Sow-goddess represented the death aspect of
the Great Mother in cults of Astarte, Demeter, the Celts' Cerridwen,
and the Teutons' Freya. As a death goddess, Freya had the title of
l
or "Demeter the Destroyer" was
Syr, "Sow." Demeter-Persephone
sometimes called Phorcis the Sow, mother of the Phorcids or Fatal
Women. One of these was Circe, swine-goddess of Aeaea, who could
2
turn men into sacrificial pigs. Her island Aeaea meant literally

"Wailing," a reference to the ritual laments accompanying sacrifices of

the god in pig form.
The self-sacrifice of Vishnu in the form of a boar was repeated in

western Indo-European myths, where the god was Porcus, Phorcus,

or Orcus, a Lord of Death. Ore means "pig" in Irish; and the Orkney
3
Islands were once sacred to the devouring Sow.
In Tantric Buddhism the Goddess is still worshipped as the
Diamond Sow, She sits on a lotus throne drawn by seven
Marici.

pigs. On earth she is incarnate in a real woman, the female counterpart

of the Dalai Lama. 4 See Boar; Vishnu.
1. Turville-Petre, 168. 2. Graves, G.M. 1, 129. 3. Graves, W.G., 244.
[Link],233,361.

Spartacus
Thracian slave who led a short-lived uprising against the Roman
government in 73 B.C. Spartacus was a would-be Orphic savior, viewing
himself as an incarnation of the god. His wife, a priestess of Orpheus-

Dionysus, saw in a dream the Orphic serpent coiled around Spartacus's

head, indicating that he would do great deeds and would die a hero's
Her prophecy was fulfilled. Spartacus's revolt was soon put
death. 1

down, and he was caught and executed in the manner of a sacred

king.
[Link],517.

Speaking in Tongues
Glossolalia, "speaking in tongues," was often seen in episodes of

religious ecstasy or trance and was anciently considered a proof of divine

grace. St. Paul was proud of his ability to "speak in tongues" more

956
than any of his followers (1 Corinthians 14:18). Early Christians Sphinx
actually believed the speaker in tongues was expressing himself in Spider
another language or languages not known to his conscious mind, ^^^^^^^^^^^m
through temporary possession by the divine spirit. The idea came
originally from Buddhists who claimed that when Buddha addressed

gods, demons, men, and animals, each heard the Enlightened One
speak in the language he could understand.
1

In reality, glossolalia
is
only meaningless babbling that may pour
forth from an entranced person. Not one authenticated case of
speaking in tongues has ever been observed, where any real language
was spoken and identified by a native speaker of the same language,

together with evidence that the same language was wholly unknown to
the possessed one.
[Link], 159.

Sphinx
Mother Hathor as a lion-headed sphinx asked men her mystic riddle,
and killed those who couldn't answer, until King Oedipus solved her
riddle and cast her out of Thebes. The riddle was: "What goes on
four legs at dawn, two legs at midday, and three legs at sunset, and is

weakest when it has the most support?" The answer was either man
or god. The sun god Ra, Hathor's offspring, grew old and feeble at the
end of each day and walked with a third leg: a cane. Some said Ra's 1

weakness was the result of his mother's curse.

As the two-faced Goddess of birth and death, the Sphinx some-
times looked in two directions, with two heads and two foreparts.
This glyph was called xerefu and akeru, "the Lions of Yesterday and
Today," similar to the Goddess's Greek designation of Alpha and
2
Omega.
1. Graves, G.M. 2, 10. 2. Budge, E.L., 61.

Spider
Arachne the Spider was a totemic form of the Fate-spinner, other-
wise known as Clotho or Athene or the Virgin Moera. The classic myth
of Athene's jealousy of the maiden Arachne, which caused her to
turn Arachne into a spider who continued to practice her incomparable
skill spinning and weaving, was mistakenly deduced from an icon
in

showning Athene with her totemic spider spinning the web of Fate,
from which the future could be foretold. An English writer of the

17th century still

thought "Minerva" (Athene) gave spiders a special
1
ability to foretell the weather.
In Hindu myth, the spider represented Maya, virgin aspect of the
2
Triple Goddess, spinner of magic, fate, and earthly appearances.
The spider's web was likened to the Wheel of Fate and the spider to the
Goddess as a spinner, sitting at the hub of her wheel.

957
 habit of devouring her
mate led to identifica-
started The female spider's
the death goddess, Maya transformed into
SlHU Maris tion of the spider with
relation to India,
Kali-Uma In Aztec myth,
with mysterious archaic
its

the souls of warrior women from the pre-Aztec

spiders represented
Amazonian Fate-spinners. At the end of the
matriarchate, like the
from heaven on their silken
world these women would descend
threads and eat up all the men
on earth, like eight-legged Valkyries.
there were Scandinavian associations, too. Odin's horse
Indeed
was gray and had eight legs, like a spider; it also
Sleipnir (Slippery)
"Fate" in that it was associated with the gallows
represented Odin's
on which he was hanged.
with witches. The folk
_
Medieval Europe usually associated spiders
of the Spider and the Fly suggested the once widespread belief
tale

that flies are souls in search of a

female entity to eat them and give them

rebirth.' See Arachne.

1. Hazlitt, 625. 2. B. Butler, 244. [Link],%.

Starkad
Archaic Scandinavian god of many arms. Thor tore off all but two of

Starkad's "make him more comely," but his body always bore
arms to

the marks of former supernumerary limbs. He was one of the elder

from Sanskrit rishi, "a sage";
gods or giants named risi, a derivation
therefore he was obviously a Hindu idol of the many-armed type still
seen in India. His myth indicates the Asiatic origin of northern Aryan
1

peoples.
[Link]-Petre, 206.2?!.

Stations of the Cross

Image-galleries picturing key events in Christ's life and martydom,

with recommended prayers and meditations for each stop. The gallery
"
of "stations was based on ancient Oriental picture galleries within
the temple, to be traversed by pilgrims enroute to the central Holy of
Holies. 1
The idea of separate, progressive meditations was taken
directly from the Oriental tradition, in which the pilgrim's mind was
supposed to be prepared for the inner revelation by slow stages during
progress through the gallery or labyrinth.
1 .
Zimmer, 1 27.

Stella Maris

"Star of the Sea," an epithet of Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus, Mari-

Anna, and the Mary. St. Jerome was said to have been the first to
virgin
the from the old Goddesses and bestow it on
Mary. The
steal title 1

"star" was variously identified as the planet Venus (morning and

<>SS
evening star), or Polaris marking the axis mundi, or Sirius, or the Stoicism

leader of the Pleiades. Styx

[Link],350. ^^^^^^^^^^m

Stoicism
Greco- Roman school of philosophy based on worship of Fate, the
Goddess whose law ruled the constant combining, dissolving, and re-

combining of elements (stoicheia). The infinite variety of her

manipulations of elemental ingredients "gave rise to all perceptible
1

phenomena."
According to Stoic doctrine, the karmic law of Nature was beyond
the power of any god to rescind, for the gods themselves were subject
to the same law, and in common with other creatures would be

destroyed eventually. Thus Stoicism stood in opposition to the Judeo-

Christian hypothesis of miracles, by which God broke his own laws from
time to time. Stoics said whatever is, is natural.

The Stoic concept of Fate or Nemesis was like the Tantric

concept of [Link] know the Goddess was to accept the fact of

death, and to bow before the decrees of Fate as gracefully as possible.
Stoicism appealed to Roman intellectuals such as Seneca and

Lucretius, who despised religious commercialism and hypocrisy. The

Stoic sage Persius seems to have been a model for the story of Christ's

encounter with the money-changers in the temple. It was Persius the

2
Stoic who first demanded, "What
gold doing in a holy place?"
is

Early Christians envied the esthetic elegance of Stoic theology and

tried to assimilate it, but the basic premises of Stoicism and Christian-

ity couldn't be reconciled. "The difference between the two

conceptions cannot fail to manifest itself. . . . Stoic ethics are self-

sufficing; they proceed from nature, so to speak, and do not rely upon

grace; they have no need of a doctrine of Redemption. There is . . .

nothing in common between them and Christianity save the elements it

once borrowed from them."*

Nevertheless, Christian admirers of Stoicism strove to assimilate
Stoic principles, such as the brotherhood of man, which Christian
Gospels did not teach. St. Augustine even borrowed the phrase coined
by Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic vision of all races dwelling as kindred
in the "City of Zeus," though Augustine revised the title to "City of

God."*
1 .
Cumont, A.R.G.R., 68. 2. Rose, 267. 3. Guignebert, 367-68. 4. Guthrie, 65.

Styx
"Shuddery; That Which is Taboo," principal river of the underworld
inGreek myth. The Styx was taboo because it was likened to the
1

menstrual blood of Mother Earth, emanating from her secret yonic

959
 "He" was called a protector of the sun, yet
SvjyaiTura Marici-deva or Marishi-ten.
of a Chinese woman, indicat-
"he" always appeared in the garments 6
west of Japan.
feminine and rooted in lands
ing an origin both
the sun was a Goddess, Atthar, some-
'

Among the ancient Arabs, 7

times called Torch of the
Gods. The Celts had a Sun Goddess
from meaning both "eye" and "sun."
Germans called
named Sulis, sail,
8
called her Sol. In Scandinavia she
was also
her Sunna. Norwegians
known as Glory-of-Elves, the Goddess who would give birth to a
after doomsday, thus producing the new sun of the next
daughter
creation.
9
The Eddas said: "One beaming daughter the bright Sun
bears before she swallowed by Fenrir; so shall the maid pace her
is
10
mother's way when the gods have gone to their doom."
The Sun Goddess was worshipped in Britain at
Sul, Sol, or Sulis

the famous artificial mountain

Avebury complex of megalithic
in the

now known as Silbury Hill. Here she gave birth to each

monuments,
feet high and more
new Aeon from her belly-tumulus, over 1 30
great
than 500 feet in diameter. "The influence of the British Goddess, Sul,

extended over the greater part of south west England, and

her
conducted on the of hills, overlook-
worship appears to have been tops

springs at Bath we have

Thus near her the isolated hill
ing springs.
called Solsbury, or Sulisbury, probably the seat of her worship."
At
Romans identified Sul with Minerva and set up altars to her
Bath,
11
under the name of Sul Minerva.
1. 408 etseq. 2. Campbell, Or.M., 463. 3. O'Flaherty, 339.
Larousse,
[Link].x). 5. Waddell, 218. 6. Larousse, 422. 7. Larousse, 323.
[Link], 152. 9. Sturluson, 92. 10. Branston, 288. 11. Dames, 154.

Svayamara
the
Bridegroom-choosing ceremony of pre-Vedic queens embodying
spirit of Sati as the Virgin Kali. She chose Shiva the Condemned One
as her consort, casting over his head a wreath of flowers representing
her yoni enveloping his lingam. In the role of sacred king he would die
in his mating, like a penis, and his bridal wreath became the funeral

wreath laid on his grave.

1
His divine bride followed him into the
underworld and brought him back, as Ishtar followed Tammuz and
2
Aphrodite followed Adonis.
Svayamara meant a love-death (Teutonic Liebestod), a sinister
implication for the ones who originally "caught the bride's bouquet."
But later patriarchy converted the spirit of Sati into a symbol of the
dutiful wife who followed her deceased husband into the underworld,
whether she wanted to or not. "Sati" was corrupted into the word for
it was customary to
widow-sacrifice, suttee. Up to the 19th century
burn widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, until the British govern-
ment in India finally classified the rite of suttee as "homicide"
though it was never homicide, but only gynocide. Widowers were
3

never slain for the sake of their dead wives.

1. Larousse, 335. 2. Hauswirth,41. 3. Bullough, 242.

%2
Sufism Sufism
Sun Goddess
Arabic mystical system preserving within Islam a Tantric form of
Goddess- and woman-worship. Like European bards and minnesingers
who copied them, medieval Sufi poets sang of the spiritual signifi-
cance of love, exemplified in the woman called a Fravashi or "Spirit of
theWay." Sufis claimed the universe was held together by the
feminine forces of motherhood and sexuality. To survive within a
rabidly patriarchal society, however, the Sufis disguised their doc-
trines in many allegorical symbols, and established a mystical system in

which nearly every tenet was imparted as a graphic image or

metaphorical tale. Sir Richard Burton called Sufism "the Eastern parent
of Freemasonry." See Arabia; Romance; Tantrism.

Sukra
"Seed," son of the planet Venus, with a second birth from the penis
of Shiva,who had swallowed him and then endured a pregnancy of 100
years.
1
Like the stories of male birth-giving in Greece and the Middle

myth was intended to establish the notion

East, Sukra's that men could
be "mothers." See Birth-Giving, Male.
[Link].354.

Sun Goddess
Though western iconography usually called the sun male and the
moon female, archaic Oriental tradition spoke of a female sun. Japanese
ruling clans traced their descent from a supreme Sun Goddess,
Omikami Amaterasu. In 238 a.d., Japanese tribes were ruled by a
1

queen named Himiko, Daughter of the Sun.

2

The Hindu Great Mother took the form of the sun as the Goddess
Aditi, mother of the twelve zodiacal Adityas, spirits who would
"reveal their light at Doomsday." 3 The Mahanirvanatantra said the sun Sun Goddess
was the "garment" of the Great Goddess: "The sun, the most
glorious symbol in the physical world, is the mayik vesture of Her who is
"
'clothed with the sun.' 4 The same Goddess, identified with Mary,

appeared in the Gospels as the "woman clothed with the sun" (Revela-
tion 12:1).
Tantric Buddhism recognized a precursor of the Middle-Eastern

Mari, or Mary, as the sun. Her monks greeted her at dawn as "the
glorious one, the sun of happiness. ... I salute you, O
Goddess Marici!
Bless me, and fulfil my desires. Protect me, O Goddess, from all the
5
eight fears."
When the Japanese revised their mythology to accommodate new
patriarchal ideas, the Goddess Marici was masculinized, and it was
forgotten that she was once identical with Omikami Amaterasu. Yet
there was a strange ambivalence about the "powerful god" called

961
 on it; so, sorrowfully revealing
his name, Lohengrin was obliged to leave
Else and return to the Mount of Paradise. Other versions of the story

he took her with him to Montsalvatch,

where they lived happily
said
8
ever after.

Other Lohengrin appeared in his swan-feather costume

stories said

to defend Clarissa, Duchess of Bouillon, against the Count of

Frankfort, who tried to steal her duchy. Or, he took up the cause of
Beatrice of Cleves, whose property rights were threatened by hostile

barons.
9
Though he sallied forth to the rescue of several ladies in

distress, the Swan-knight's real home was always "the mountain

10
where Venus lives in the Grail."

2. Larousse, 278-79; Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 579.

1 Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 568.
3 Graves CM.
1, 207-8. 4. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 571,
579. 5. Ross, 36.

6. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 600. 7. Rank, 62. 8. Guerber, L.M.A.,

202-3.
9. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 600. 10. Jung &
von Fran/., 121.

Swastika
Those who know the swastika only as the Nazi Hakenkreuz (Hook
Cross) may be surprised to learn that it is one of the
oldest, most widely

distributed religious symbols in the world. Swastikasappear on Paleo-

lithic carvings on mammoth ivory from the Ukraine, dated ca. 10,000
2
B.C.
1
Swastikas figure on the oldest coinage in India. Persia, Asia

Minor, and Greece represented the rotating axis mundi with the symbol
of a swastika. On a Boeotian amphora of the 7th century B.C., the
3
swastika was presented as a sacred sign of the Goddess Artemis. It also

represented many other deities from Iceland to Japan, Scandinavia to

North Africa. It was much used in Troy and Mycenae before the 1 3 th

4
century B.C.

Sanskrit svastika meant "so be it" or "amen." In Japan, the swas-

tika was an ideogram for "infinity" number 10,000, which was
the
a synonym for infinity because it was the
highest number Japanese sages
could visualize. 5
There were two basic types of swastikas: the left-pointing, counter-
clockwise, widdershins version called the Moon Swastika, and the
right-pointing, clockwise one called the Sun Swastika. The former was
naturally associated with the Left-Hand Path of the Goddess, the
latter with the Right-Hand Path of the God.
(See Left Hand.) Hindus

Ft said the solar swastika

represented the
and the lunar swastika stood for
god Ganesha, "Lord of Hosts,"
Kali-Maya, his virgin bride, mother of
Buddha. 6 As a reincarnation of his divine
father, Buddha
the sign of a cross, with a swastika enclosed in the female circle at the
displayed
SwHtfla
end of each arm. 7 Tibetan Buddhists said the swastika right-handed
was the Savior, the left-handed swastika meant
witchcraft, or the
"magic" of Mother Maya. 8
The feminine moon swastika received the name oisauvastika and
was said to represent the autumnal half of the year, when the sun

m
wanes, while the masculine swastika stood for the vernal season when Swithin, Saint
the sun grows stronger. 9 As the feminine sauvastika suggested the sun

god declining toward his death and resurrection at the winter solstice, it mm^^mtm^^^^mm
sometimes signified rebirth.
In Japan, the reborn Amida, "Buddha of Immeasurable Light,"
wore a left-handed swastika carved on his breast. 10 A similar left-
handed swastika was the sign of Thor's hammer on Scandinavian
11
coins. Thor was one of the gods supposed to have come from
ancient Troy; and Trojan images of the Great Goddess showed a

swastika within a female triangle on her belly, indicating the hidden

12
god prior to his next rebirth.
Early Christians adopted the swastika to represent Christ, calling it

a crux dissimulata or disguised cross. It was also called crux gammata,

gammadion, or gamma cross, because it showed the Greek letter

gamma four times repeated. To Saxons it was fylfot, translated either

"four-foot," referring to the four heavenly pillars at the corners of the

earth, or "fill-foot," referring to the Christian habit of filling in the
13
foot of a church window with swastikas. In old Danish churches, the
14
swastika was the usual ornamentation for the baptismal font. It was
also much used in medieval heraldry, as "cross potent rebated," croix
gammee, or croix cramponnee. Still, knights who wore the swastika
on their shields couldn't be sure whether it stood for the cross of Christ
or the cross of Thor, the latter being revered in swastika form all over
Germanic areas, including the Scandinavian settlements in Lincolnshire
and Yorkshire. 15
In the 1930s, the Nazi party adopted the swastika because of an

impression that it was a "pure Aryan" sign. A variant of the swastika

long represented German Vehmic Courts (from Vehme, "punish-
ment") which began Middle Ages as civil tribunals for
in the

persecuting heretics, and became connected with the Inquisition. Their

activities were kept secret. In Napoleon's time, the Vehmic Courts

were still operating as underground organizations devoted to summary

justice, like the Black Hand in Sicily. 16 From the Vehmgericht arose

specifically anti-Semitic secret societies of Austria and Germany in the

early 1900s the forerunners of Nazism.

1. Campbell, F.W.G, 147.2. d'Alviella, 80. 3. Neumann, G.M., 134.

Hornung, 211; d'Alviella, 43. 6. Graves, CM. 1, 149; d'Alviella, 68.

4. d'Alviella, xi-xii. 5.
7. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 354. 8. Jung, M.S., 36. 9. Budge, A.T., 332.
10. Campbell, F.W.G., 173. 11. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 351. 12. d'Alviella, 33.
13. Hornung, 211. 14. d'Alviella, 39. 15. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 354.
16. Encyc. Brit., "Vehmgericht."

Swithin, Saint
Originally S. Wothin, or Holy Wotan, "Swithin" was the god of
West Saxon kings of Winchester, "Place of the Winds," from Latin
venta, winds. The calendar symbol of St. Swithin was the Cross of
Wotan 1
representing the four winds. Since Wotan was a Saxon version

965
 was claimed that rain on St. Swithin's day meant
Sword of Jupiter Pluvius, it

and that Swithin's relics were buried outside

Syba rain for the next forty days,
from a roof spout onto
___^__^_ Winchester Cathedral where rain could pour
his grave.

Swithin was adopted as a Christian saint about century

a after his
2
alleged lifetime,which was assigned to the 9th century. His claim to
sainthood was that he was supposed to have established
tithes in

the Saxon king Ethelwold into turning over

England, having talked
3
to thechurch a tenth part of all his lands.

[Link], 330. 2. Hazlitt, 576.

3. Brewster, 330.

Sword
Herodotus said the Scythian war god was represented by an ancient
sword (phallus) fixed in a pyramid of brushwood (female symbol),
iron
made fertile with the blood of human sacrifices. Eight centuries
1

later, the Alani and Quadi

in the same region worshipped a father-god

as a naked sword fixed in the ground. Ammianus said the warriors

2
worshipped their own
swords as gods.
In the north, a primary female symbol was the house (hus, hussy),
which was combined with the sword by marriage. A Norse wedding
custom was plunging a sword into the main beam of the house: "a proof
of the virility of the bridegroom and a sign of good luck for the
5
marriage."
Norse myth said the gates of heaven are guarded by a man juggling
seven swords, one for each of the seven (male) spirits of the planetary
4
spheres.
1. Goodrich, 217. 2. Gelling & Davidson, 38. 3. Gelling & Davidson, 150.
4. Keightley,61.

var. Sibyl
Sybil
"Cavern-dweller," a Latin form of Cybele, the Great Mother of
Gods. The name may have been derived from Babylonian subultu, a
1
Goddess seen in the sky as the constellation of the Celestial Virgin.
Her oracular spirit occupied a succession of priestesses in the
sacred
caVe at Cumae, near Lake Avernus, dedicated to Triple Hecate. The

cave was famed as an entrance to the underworld. Sybils called up the

dead there for necromantic interviews. By the same door, Aeneas
descended into the womb of the earth mother Aphrodite). 2
(his
In the 2nd century B.C. the aniconic idol of Cybele was carried to

Rome by order of the Cumaean sybils whose oracles guided imperial

policy. Texts of the priestesses' sayings, the Sybilline Books, were so

respected that both Christians and Jews spent many centuries rewrit-

ing these books, and forging additions to them, to make it seem that the
3
sybils foretold the coming of Christ and the Messiah.

966
 According to Varro, in the first century B.C., there were ten great Sylph
sybils who divided the known world among their ten oracular shrines. Synesaktism
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars described each of the
^^^^^^^^^^^
great sybils as aprophetess of Christ, painting them with Christian
4
symbols such as crucifixes, crowns of thorns, lilies, mangers, etc.
Folk tradition maintained that after the Christian conquest of

Europe, the sybils continued to occupy sacred caves in certain

mountains that belonged to the Great Mother of the Gods. These were
the Venusbergs of medieval paganism. Many legends told of men

who, like Tannhauser and Thomas Rhymer, entered such a cave and
dwelt in "the Paradise of Queen Sybil." 5

Conjurations and pleas for buried treasure, rings of invisibility, and

the like were addressed to the Blessed Virgin of Fairies, "Sibyllia," or
to "three sisters of fairies, Milia, Achillia, Sibyllia." They were charged

by the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to appear "in form and shape of
fair women, in white vestures." 6
1. Briffault 2, 600. 2. Graves, W.G., 273. 3. James, 248-50; Ashe, 132.
4. Brewster, 415-17. 5. Goodrich, 172. 6. Scot, 340-42.

Sylph
Greek word for a female spirit of the element of air: an invisible

angel,whose voice might be heard in the breeze. In medieval times,

"sylph" became a synonym for "witch." See Elements.

Synesaktism
The "Way of Shaktism," Gnostic-Christian term for the cult of

"spiritual marriage," or agape, the love-feast: actually a western version

of Tantric sex-worship. Synesaktism flowered in the late Roman

empire, but before the 7th century a.d. it was declared heretical and
outlawed by the orthodox church. See Tantrism. 1

1. Bullough, 105; Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 23.

967
 was claimed that rain on St. Swithin's day meant
s%vord of Jupiter Pluvius, it

t he next forty days, and

that Swithin's relics were buried outside
SyM rain for

^^___^^_ Winchester Cathedral where rain could pour from

a roof spout onto

his grave.

Swithin was adopted as a Christian saint

about a century after his
2
alleged lifetime,
which was assigned to the 9th century. His claim to
sainthood was that he was supposed to have established
tithes in

the Saxon king Ethelwold into turning over

England, having talked
to thechurch a tenth part of all his lands.'

1. Brewster, 530. 2. Hazlitt, 576. 3. Brewster, 330.

Sword
Herodotus said the Scythian war god was represented by an ancient
sword (phallus) fixed in a pyramid of brushwood (female symbol),
iron
made fertile with the blood of human sacrifices. Eight centuries
1

later, the Alani and Quadi in

the same region worshipped a father-god

as a naked sword fixed in the ground. Ammianus said the warriors

worshipped swords as gods. 2

their own
In the north, a primary female symbol was the house (hus, hussy),
which was combined with the sword by marriage. A Norse wedding
custom was plunging a sword into the main beam of the house: "a proof
of the virility of the bridegroom and a sign of good luck for the
3
marriage."
Norse myth said the gates of heaven are guarded by a man juggling
seven swords, one for each of the seven (male) spirits of the planetary
4
spheres.
1. Goodrich, 217. 2. Gelling & Davidson, 38. 3. Gelling & Davidson, 150.
4. Keightley, 61.

var. Sibyl
Sybil
"Cavern-dweller," a Latin form of Cybele, the Great Mother of
Gods. The name may have been derived from Babylonian subultu, a
1
Goddess seen in the sky as the constellation of the Celestial Virgin.
Her oracular spirit occupied a succession of priestesses in the sacred
caVe at Cumae, near Lake Avernus, dedicated to Triple Hecate. The

cave was famed as an entrance to the underworld. Sybils called up the

dead there for necromantic interviews. By the same door, Aeneas
descended into the womb of the earth mother Aphrodite). 2
(his
In the 2nd century B.C. the aniconic idol of Cybele was carried to

Rome by order of the Cumaean sybils whose oracles guided imperial

policy. Texts of the priestesses' sayings, the Sybilline Books, were so

respected that both Christians and Jews spent many centuries rewrit-

ing these books, and forging additions to them, to make it seem that the
3
sybils foretold the coming of Christ and the Messiah.

966
 According to Varro, in the first century B.C., there were ten great Sylph
sybils who divided the known world among their ten oracular shrines. Synesaktism
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars described each of the
^^^^^^^^^^^
great sybils as a prophetess of Christ, painting them with Christian
4
symbols such as crucifixes, crowns of thorns, lilies, mangers, etc.
Folk tradition maintained that after the Christian conquest of

Europe, the sybils continued to occupy sacred caves in certain

mountains that belonged to the Great Mother of the Gods. These were
the Venusbergs of medieval paganism. Many legends told of men

who, like Tannhauser and Thomas Rhymer, entered such a cave and
dwelt in "the Paradise of Queen Sybil." 5

Conjurations and pleas for buried treasure, rings of invisibility, and

the like were addressed to the Blessed Virgin of Fairies, "Sibyllia," or
to "three sisters of fairies, Milia, Achillia, Sibyllia." They were charged
by the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to appear "in form and shape of
fair women, in white vestures." 6
1. Briffault 2, 600. 2. Graves, W.G., 273. 3. James, 248-50; Ashe, 132.
4. Brewster, 415-17. 5. Goodrich, 172. 6. Scot, 340-42.

Sylph
Greek word for a female spirit of the element of air: an invisible

angel,whose voice might be heard in the breeze. In medieval times,

"sylph" became a synonym for "witch." See Elements.

Synesaktism
The "Way of Shaktism," Gnostic-Christian term for the cult of

"spiritual marriage," or agape, the love-feast: actually a western version

of Tantric sex-worship. Synesaktism flowered in the late Roman

empire, but before the 7th century a.d. it was declared heretical and
outlawed by the orthodox church. See Tantrism. 1

1. Bullough, 105; Sadock, Kaplan & Freedman, 23.

967
C9

*r y
Mother Goddess of the
AzteCS, TLAZOLTEOTL
was very like her medi-
evalNear Eastern
counterpart Hecate.
Here, she gives birth
to the sun-god. Made of
aplite, speckled with
garnets.

Pre-Vedic, primal God-

dess tara was known
from India to Ireland and
worshipped as "sav-
ior" and "star." Gilt

bronze; Tibet, 1 6th

century.

The Great Goddess For-

tune, tyche, sitting
on a rock, the river
Orontes swimming at
her feet. Marble; Roman
copy of the original
Eutychides sculpture
from the 3rd century b.c.
Taaut Taaut
Tammuz Phoenician name for the World Serpent, called Tuat or Thoth in

^^^^^^b Egypt, Ouroboros or Python

in the Greco-Roman world. The tradition-

al figure of the underground serpent with his tail in his mouth was
also associated with the cosmic Water-snake encircling the earth (Oce-
roots of the earth. Egyptians said
anus), and the serpent Sata at the
the chambers of the serpent's body provided the many "mansions"

(Arits) of the nether

world. See Serpent.

vjr. Tat Tait

Title of Isis as weaver and knotter of the threads of Fate, governing

all happenings with her magical manipulation of strands. Persons of
high rank were promised mummy-wrappings woven and tied by the
Goddess herself.
1
See Knot.
1. Erman, 73.

Taliesin

Welsh bard and magician whose legends claimed he was the son of
theGoddess Cerridwen, the White Goddess of the Cauldron of
Regeneration and Inspiration. Many mystical, allegorical writings
about the Old Religion were attributed to Taliesin. He was generally

supposed to have been a real person who lived in the 6th century
However, like the works of Homer, those of Taliesin seem to have
a.d. 1

been made up of collections and reorganizations of older myths.

1. Encyc. Brit, "Welsh Literature."

Ta-Mera
"Land of Waters," an old name of Egypt. Mera or Mara was an
name for the Goddess of the primordial sea. In Egypt she was
archaic
even coupled with the sun god as an androgynous deity Meri-Ra.
Among the meanings of Mera were such female symbols as a water-
course, ditch, pit, sea, and lovingness. 1

1. Budge, E.L., 76.

Tammuz
The Christos or sacred king annually sacrificed in the temple at

Jerusalem, attended by women who dedicated him to their Goddess

Ishtar-Mari, Queen of Heaven, his mother and bride (Ezekiel 8:14).
He was a Hebrew version of Dionysus Liber, or Adonis, whom the

970
Romans l
called the chief god of the Jews. Tacitus however thought Tammuz
the Jews had given up worshipping Liber, for he "established a festive
and cheerful worship, while the Jewish religion is tasteless and ^^^^^^^^^^^
mean." 2 A month of the Jewish calendar is still named after Tammuz,
5
who was revered all the way up to the 10th century.

Tammuz was imported from Babylon by the Jews, but he was

even older than Babylon. He began as the Sumerian savior-god
Dumuzi, or Damu, "only-begotten Son," or "Son of the Blood." He
fertilized the earth with his blood at the time of his death, and was

Heavenly Shepherd. He tended the flocks of stars,

called Healer, Savior,

which were considered souls of the dead in heaven. Each year on the
Day of Atonement he was sacrificed in the form of a lamb, son of the

Holy Ewe; but his animal incarnation was understood to be a

substitute for an earlier human sacrifice. A lament for the dead god
asked rhetorically:

Why have they slain him, him of the plains? The Shepherd, the Man of
Wisdom, the Man ofSorrow why have they slain? The Lady of the
Vine languishes, the lambs and the calves languish. The Lord, the
Shepherd of the fold lives no more, the spouse of the Queen of
Heaven lives no more. *

On the occasion of the god's death, temple women raised ritual

"howls" or "ululations," which the Babylonians called alalu, and the
Greeks called houloi. This was the sound mentioned by Ezekiel: in
the Jerusalem temple, women "wailed" for Tammuz. A typical "wail"
is mentioned in Sumerian scriptures:

For him who has been taken away there is wailing; ah me, my child has
been taken away, my Damu that has been taken away, my Christ that
has been taken away, from the sacred cedar where the Mother bore him.
The wailing is for the plants, they grow not; for the houses and for the
Hocks, they produce not; for the perishing wedded couples, for perishing

children, the people ofSumer, they produce not. The wailing is for the
great river, it
brings the Hood no more. The wailing is for the fish ponds;
the fish spawn not. The wailing is for the forests; the tamarisks grow
not. The wailing is for the store-house; the honey and wine are not
y
produced.

Some liturgies addressed Dumuzi-Tammuz as Usir or Usirsir,

variations of the name Osiris, who was also the Good Shepherd and the
Though Tammuz occupied the
6
keeper of the "flocks" of the dead.
central position in the sacred at Jerusalem, the New Testament
drama
transformed him into a mere apostle of the new dying god, under the
Greek form of his name, Thomas.
A thousand years later, however, Syrian farmers still considered the
sacrifice of Ta-uz, the grain god, essential to the welfare of the crops.
He was cruelly treated: slain by the reaper's sickle, his bones ground in a
mill, his flesh scattered on the earth, his death bewailed by the
7
women.

971
lanit Like all earlier "saviors," Tammuz eventually was diabolized in
he was listed as one of
Tannhauser Christian tradition. During the Middle Ages
hell's leading devils. Weyer's on demonology made Tammuz
treatise

hell's ambassador to Spain, probably because he was still worshipped

8
by Saracenic sects in Spain.
1 Graves W.G. 368. 2. Tacitus, 660. 3. Frazer, G.B., 393. 4. Briffault 3,91-95.
5 Briffault 3, 94. 6. Hooke, S.P., 175. 7. Frazer, G.B., 392-93.
8. Waite, B.C.M., 186-87.

Tanit
the
Carthaginian name of the Phoenician Great Goddess,
Astarte

biblical Ashtoreth or Asherah. Her temple in Carthage was called the

Shrine of the Heavenly Virgin. Greek and Roman writers called it a

temple of the moon. 1

Another of her titles was Astroarche, Queen of the Stars. Her

priestesses were famous astrologers, whose prophecies were circulat-

ed throughout the Roman empire and even rivaled the

pronouncements of the Cumaean sybils. 2

Though Romans destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, Roman
legend traced the very origin of Rome to the Carthaginian
mother-

city, as shown by the story

of Aeneas, who came directly across the
SignofTanit 3
The primitive Roman
Mediterranean from there, to found Rome.
queen Tanaquil, who
conferred sovereignty on the "fatherless" Latin

kings, the Tarquins, was none other than the Libyan Goddess Tanit.
She was also known as Libera, Goddess of Libya, whose festival the
Liberalia was celebrated each year in Rome during the Ides of
March. 4 An alternative name for the festival was Bacchanalia, dramatiz-
ing the love-death and resurrection of Bacchus Liber, or Dionysus,
or
5
Consus, which were various names for the same fertility god.
The distinctive symbol of Tanit was a pyramidal shape, like a
woman in a very full skirt, topped by a disc-shaped full-moon head,
6
with upraised arms in the manner of the Egyptian ka. Similar symbols

represented such goddesses as Aphrodite, Athene, Venus, and Juno.

[Link],42. 2. Lindsay, O. A., 327. 3. Reinach, 106. 4. G.R. Scott, 165.
5. Graves, W.G, 399. 6. Larousse, 84.

Tannhauser
"Dweller in the House of Tann," the hero who lived in the

Goddess's magic mountain, the Venusberg. Tann, Dann, Danu, Di-

ana, Tannetis, or Dennitsa were variations of the same Goddess
(Venus) whom Tannhauser adored in the shape of her mortal priestess,

Queen Sybil. The legend of Tannhauser displayed considerable

hostility to the authority of the pope, and presented the cult of the
Goddess as an alternative to Christianity. See Sybil.

972
Tantrism Tantrism

The system of yoni-worship, or female-centered sex-worship, alleged-

ly founded thousands of years ago in India by women of a secret sect hhuhmhihi
called Vratyas, forerunners of the devadasis or sacred harlots.
1
The
religion was associated with later written scriptures known as Tantras,

therefore it was called Tantrism. The

primary object of its adoration
was the lingam-yoni, sign of male and female principles in conjunction
(the god Shiva and the goddess Shakti-Kali). Tantrism is still widely

practiced in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. 2

The basic principle of Tantrism was that women possess more
spiritual energy than men, and a man could achieve realization of the
divinity only through sexual and emotional union with a woman. A
fundamental was controlled sexual intercourse, maithuna, Latin
rite

coitus reservatus: sex without male orgasm. The theory was that a man
must store up his vital fluids rather than expending them in ejacula-

tion. Through Tantric training, he learned to absorb through his penis

the fluid engendered by his partner's orgasm and to prolong sexual
intercourse for many hours. In this way he could become like Shiva, the

God in perpetual union with his Goddess. Theoretically, the vital

fluids thus conserved would be stored in a man's spinal column, mount

through the chakras up to his head, and there flower forth with the
inspiration of divine wisdom. The Tantras explain this and other

practices based on worship of the Goddess, together with the philoso-

phy underlying the rites.

The most sacred mantra (holy phrase) expressing Tantric worship

was Om manipadme hum, the Jewel (penis) in the Lotus (vulva).
The symbolic lingam-yoni often took the form of an altar, shaped like a
3
penis in a vulva. Remnants of Tantric practice inspired the medieval
European belief that "witches" worshipped at an altar represented by a
female body.
Tantric Buddhism consisted of an uneasy marriage between an

originally ascetic Buddhist cult with ancient sexual disciplines. Like its
Christian offshoot five centuries later, Buddhism was founded on
opposition to the female principle and the belief that men must avoid
women, in order to conserve their souls' vitality by retaining their semen
and concentrating on the Self. Buddhist monks claimed their prophet
ordered them to quell all sexual desire, and never to see or speak to
women. 4
Like early Christianity, however, Buddhism soon spread out

along a continuum of sects ranging from the austere, puritanical Jains to

exuberantly erotic Tantric Buddhists with principles like "Buddha-
hood resides in the vulva." 5 All over Indian temples, Buddhist saints

appeared with their voluptuous Shaktis in the divine embrace called

Yab-Yum (Father-Mother), representing everlasting orgasmic bliss

the real cause of the beatific smiles on the faces of the bodhisattvas.
Erotic forms of Tantric Buddhism penetrated all Asia, though
patriarchal sects later suppressed them and denied their historical

973
 Tantrism existence. Tantric Buddhism flourished in China under the Six Dynas-
ties, T'ang, and Mongol Yuan, until Confucian patriarchs succeeded
remnant. Tantrism
in eliminating it.
Japanese Shingon is an attenuated
is no longer mentioned in China
or Japan; its art was destroyed;
6
authorities pretend it was never there at all.

The same denial appeared in areas dominated by Islam where Sufi

a form of Tantrism. They emphasized the
mystics had perpetuated
disciplineoifana, "rapture," attainable only with a pir (Peri), a fairy
7
mistress, also known as Fravashi, "Spirit of the
Way." Through her,
aman might achieve "the larger full surrender" said to pass beyond
God to realization of the ultimate Void that swallowed even the
8
gods.
Early Gnostic Christians sometimes called their religion synesak-
9
tism, the Way of Shakti, another name for Tantrism. These
Christians were influenced by Oriental Tantrism as well as by some of
western forms, philosophies of Goddess-worship filtered through
its

Pythagorean and Neoplatonic mystics. Plotinus equated the mind's

progress toward the Ineffable with "the sight of a beautiful lady."
Ascent of the mind toward realization of divinity was divided into six
steps, beginning with perception of woman's beauty, culminating
in
10
contemplation of Universal Beauty.
Christians like the Ophites and Montanists apparently practiced
sexual adoration of the feminine life force under the name of Sophia,

the female Holy Spirit, a feminine soul or Shakti of God. Their rite of

"spiritual marriage" was misunderstood by the orthodox, who later

called it a Test of Faith. Certain male and female saints, they said, had
proved their chastity by lying together naked without copulation.
Possibly it was not sexual intercourse perse that such "saints" had
avoided, but only male orgasm. Like Tantric yogis, Gnostic saints
sometimes thought themselves "perfected" by coitus reservatus, so they
could indulge in nakedness and promiscuity without being sinful. 11
These sects were destroyed by the end of the 5 th century a.d. and
no more was heard of the famous Test of Faith. 12 Orthodox fathers
of the church ruled that sexual intercourse should have no purpose
other than to beget offspring, and sexual pleasure should be altogeth-
er denied to women. 13
While Tantric Christians were condemned as heretics, Islamic

leaderswere attacking Sufi cults of love. 14 Sufi mysticism survived

underground, in the hands of troubadours who called themselves
Lovers and adored the female principle as the world-sustaining
power. Sufi yoni-worship influenced European troubadours, who
founded cults of Courtly Love in the centuries following the cru-
sades. The church called them devil-worshippers because they
"sinfully" loved women instead of God, and women were equated
with the devil by the theological opinion of the time. 15 See Romance.
Heroes of the Courtly Love movement apparently practiced
Tantric maithuna under the name of drudaria, a kind of love

974
 associated with male self-denial, yet not at all chaste. On the contrary, its Tao
16
poetry was highly erotic. Bardic romance sometimes showed dis-
tinct connections with eastern Tantrism, as when Peredur's mystic
^^^^^^^^^^^
lady-love revealed that she came from India, or when Tristan told his
lady-love Iseult that his name was the syllabically-reversed Tantris. 17
Though never officially recognized, Tantric sex has been practiced
throughout history in western nations, either in accordance with a
secret teaching, or as an independent discovery. Medieval Goddess-
worshippers vilified as "witches" apparently knew of it, and may have
used it as a birth-control technique. It was claimed that no woman was
ever made pregnant at the witches' Sabbath. 18
In 1848, maithuna was again publicized by the founder of the
Oneida Creek Community, John Humphrey Noyes, who rediscov-
ered it while trying to protect his wife from "the horrors and the fear of
19
involuntary propagation" after she had four disastrous pregnancies.
Noyes called his discovery "male continence," or karezza, and trained
members of his community in the technique. Then they engaged in
what Noyes called "complex marriage" with various partners, without
unwanted pregnancies. 20 Several occult societies of the 19th and
20th centuries made use of Tantric coitus reservatus for various reasons,
but it was seldom admitted to the "normal" sexual repertoire of the
western male.
1 Rawson, A.T., 80. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Tantrism." 3. Rawson, E.A., 47.
.

[Link], Or.M., 301. 5. Campbell, Or.M., 352. 6. Rawson, E.A., 255.

[Link], 150. 8. Campbell, Oc.M, 194,451. 9. Bullough, 105. 10. Collins, 113.
[Link], 112. 12. Legge2,77. 13. Bullough, 114.
14. Sadock, Kaplan &
Freedman, 23. 15. Briffault 3, 490. 16. Briffault 3, 483.
17. Loomis, 21 1; Guerber, L.M.A., 238. 18. Knight, D.W.P., 236. 19. Crow, 179.
20. Carden, 55-56.

Tao
"The Way," Chinese version of Tantrism. Men were taught to
reserve their vital forces, which could be dangerously depleted by
ejaculation, and to let their weaker Yang nature absorb the powerful

Yin force engendered by a woman's orgasm. Men were advised to keep

this "key" secret from women, for if women learned to suppress their

own orgasms while bringing men to ecstasy, they would greatly surpass
men in wisdom and spiritual energy. Their already superior Yin
magic would remain in their bodies, while the man's lesser Yang magic
would be added to it. 1

Lao-Tse said: "How unfathomable is Tao like unto the empti-

ness of a vessel, yet, as it were, the honored Ancestor of us all. Using
it we find it inexhaustible, deep and unfathomable. Now pure and still is

theWay! do not know who generated

I it. It may appear to have
2
preceded God."
1. Bullough, 256. 2. Ross, 141.

975
Tara Tara
Tarot Goddess Earth, known from
Indo-European name of the primal
mm^^^m^ India to Ireland; cognate with Latin Terra Mater, Hebrew Terah,
An extremely ancient festival held
1

Gaulish Taranis, Etruscan Turan.

Athens was
at named after her, Taramata (Mother Tara),
annually
2
nicknamed "the Rioting" because of its wild orgiastic customs.
The sacred grove of Tara in Ireland was the Goddess's genital
shrine, enclosing the God in the form of a stone pillar, Fal (phallus).
like the obelisk in
This pillar represented his generative power, Egypt,
and was "the stone penis."
specifically called
3
The God's name was
Taran in Wales, or Torann in Ireland, meaning "thunder." Like Jupiter
4
Pluvius, he fertilized Mother Tara with rain. The traditional words

of a fanfare, Taran-Tara, originally came from a magic "cry" expressing

the union of the two deities.
Tantric Buddhists in Tibet still pray to Mother Tara like this:

Hail! O
verdant Tara! The Savior of all beings! Descend, we pray Thee,
from Thy heavenly mansion, at Potala, together with all Thy retinue of
gods, titans, and deliverers! We humbly prostrate ourselves at Thy lotus-
feet! Deliver us from O holy Mother! We hail Thee! O
all distress!

revered and sublime Tara! Who are adored by all the kings and princes of
the ten directions and of the present, past and future. !

In India, Tara is called "the most revered" of the old pre-Vedic

Goddesses, just as in all lands populated by Aryan peoples, Mother
Earth was the first, oldest, and greatest of deities. 6
[Link],676. 2. Lawson, 226. [Link],273: 4. Turville-Petre, 120.

5. Waddell, 435. 6. Larousse, 359.

Tarot
The modern pack of playing cards evolved from the Tarot pack by
the subtraction of 25 cards. In addition to the now-standard 52 four
suits from ace Tarot packs had a fifth suit, the Major Arcana
to king

(Great Secrets), a trump suit consisting of 22 picture cards. Only one of

these trump cards now remains in the deck, the Joker, Jester, or Fool.
Present card decks are only remnants of what medieval cards used to
be that is, the Tarot.

Four court cards also disappeared from the suits: the four knights.

Therefore, modern cards have only three court cards per suit: king,
queen, and jack. Disappearance of the knights led some scholars to
think Tarot cards might have been invented by the Knights Templar,
who were declared heretics, disgraced, and exterminated in the 14th

century. Though Templars may have learned from the Saracens to

use cards, they didn't invent them. Unbound "books" of picture cards
1

were long used in the east to teach mystical doctrines to people who
couldn't read. 2
Italian author Covelluzo wrote: "In the year 1379 the game of

976
cards was brought to Viterbo from the country of the Saracens, Tarot
where it is called naib." In that year, Saracen mercenaries served in the

armies of rival popes Urban VI and Clement VII; but Saracenic

Arabs had occupied Spain, southern France, Sicily, and Italy since the
early 8th century. The Arabs dominated Spain until the 1 5 th centu-

ry. Their word naib became Spanish naipes, "playing cards." 3

Gypsies migrating from their ancient home in Hindustan also
brought cards into Europe. Tarot cards have been called "the
4
compendium of gypsy philosophy and religion." The world's oldest
gambling game, Faro, came from gypsies who were supposed to be
"Egyptians," and whose "game of kings" was naturally named Pharaoh
(Faro) because, it was said, their cards had pharaohs painted on
them. 5 Spanish gypsies introduced Spain's national card game, ombre
(Spanish hombre), "the game of man," which was as much a system
of mystical divination as a game. Ombre was "a modification of the
earlier game of primero ... of all modern games that which most
"
resembles the ancient tarot. 6
The mysterious disappearance of the trump suit and the knights
was connected with more or less consistent hostility of Christian

authorities toward the cards. In 1370, a monk named John of Brefeld

said in the symbolism of the cards "the state of the world as it is now
is most excellently described and figured." But this turned out to be a
heretical opinion. Other churchmen claimed the Cathari used cards
to teach their Gnostic faith. In1 378, the cards were banned in

Regensburg, Germany. In 1381, they were condemned in Mar-

seilles. In 1397, they were forbidden in Paris. In 1423, St. Bernardino

of Siena said the cards were invented by the devil. In 1441, importa-
tion of cards was prohibited in Venice. In 1450, a Franciscan friar

denounced cards in northern Italy. John Northbrooke later wrote:

"The play at Cards is an invention of the Devil, which he found out
that he might the easier bring in Idolatry amongst men." Scottish

clergymen called cards "the Devil's books." Churchmen were especial-

ly enraged by the Major Arcana or trump suit. These 22 little

pictures were called "the rungs of a ladder leading to the depths of

hell." 7 Cards were described as the devil's breviary, "in which various Dr. Gerard En-
figures are painted, just as they are ih the breviaries of Christ, which causse French

figures show forth the mysteries of evil." 8 physician, theoso-

and founder of
One may well wonder, what were these mysteries? What "idols"
phist,
the popular spiritual-
did the idolatry of cards show forth? What doctrines were taught by
masonic Order of
the "devil's breviary"? Martinists. Under
The Tarot has been linked with several non-Christian mystical the pen name of Papus,
he published the
systems: the Cabala, Hermetic magic, classical paganism, witchcraft.
highly influential Le
Dr. Gerard Encausse wrote, "The game of cards called the Tarot,
Tarot des Bohe-
which the Gypsies possess, is the Bible of Bibles. It is the book of
miens in 1 889, setting a
Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, the book of Adam, the book of the precedent for Tarot
primitive Revelation of ancient civilizations."
9
A more recent student interpreters of the early
of the cards says, "The Tarot 20th century.
speaks in the language of symbols, the

977
 Tarot language of the unconscious,
and when approached in the right
10
manner it doors
may open into the hidden reaches of the soul."

._ In the east, whence cards originally came, there was an ancient

tradition of religious insights taught through dramatic presentation or

believe in the existence of a secret
through pictures. Eastern mystics
internationalsymbol-code known only to initiates, whereby the true
meanings of religious mysteries are revealed. Similarly was thought
it

the hieroglyphs of Egypt and central America began as a secret

symbol-code. Pythagorean and Orphic

used such code systems
initiates

in antiquity. European mystery plays, too, conveyed Gnostic or non-

Christian ideas in symbols and tableaux of very ancient origin, under the
noses of churchmen who would have suppressed them if they had
11
understood their meaning.
The Tarot strongly resembles an Oriental symbol-code when
observed in relation to doctrines prevailing in the east at the time of
its European debut. Pictures of the Major Arcana can be linked with
pageants of the mystery plays, Gnostic teachings, and Orphic icons.
Here was the real reason for opposition to the trump suit opposition so
bitter that in the all trumps were excised except the Fool, a
end
"know-nothing." Because of the church's hostility, today's card players
have no trump suit, and are obliged to name one of the other suits
"trumps" when necessary.
Images of the Tarot suggest female-centered, cyclic doctrines of
reincarnation such as the old religions taught. The cards probably
were the original "elf-books," allegedly given by the fairies to people
12
they loved, which enabled them to foretell the future. Cards were
associated with witches. In German towns where witch persecutions fell
heaviest, painters of the forbidden cards were women. 13 Moakley has
pointed out that "preachers have never liked playing cards, and it can be
said that the story the cards tell is very much opposed to the basic

tenets of Christianity." H

To understand the story, one must study the cards' format. The
four suits of the Minor Arcana or Lesser Secrets are clearly related to
Oriental images of the elements. The first suit was Cups, Chalices, or
Grails; it later became the suit of hearts. The second was Wands,
Rods, Batons, or Scepters now converted into clubs, though the club
is not a club but a trefoil. The third suit was
usually called Pentacles,
alsorendered Coins, Disks, Denari, or Pomegranates, which became
diamonds. Finally there was the suit of Swords, modern spades,
derived from Spanish espada, sword.
As cup, scepter, ring, and sword, these emblems were displayed by
the four-armed androgynous deity Ardhanarisvara Kali and Shiva
15
merged. Other gods, such as the monkey god Hanuman, held the
same symbols. 16 The female earth principle Brawani also carried the
elements as lily, flame, cross, and sword. 17 Like her the Greek Goddess
Nemesis or Fate displayed the same symbols as a cup, apple wand,
18
wheel, and sword.

978
 These Tarot suit symbols stood for paired male-and-female ele- Tarot
merits: female water with male fire, female earth with male air. These
in turnwere linked with the four stages of life established by Tantric ^^^^^^^^^^^
19
philosophers: Sambhoga, Nirmana, Artha, and Moksha. These four
life-stages had the following "elemental" meanings.
1 .
Sambhoga, the Life of Enjoyment, was related to the feminine
Water element and its symbol the cup, grail, or heart. It referred to
the period of youth under the tutelage of the Mother, pleasures of when
the senses figure most prominently in the experience, while the
life

cup of life fills up with feelings, consciousness, awareness of others. The

Tarot suit of Cups therefore was traditionally applied to the subject of
love, family relationships, marriages, children, emotion: matters of the

heart, or "hearts."
2. Nirmana, the Process of Building, was related to the masculine
Fire element andits symbol the phallic wand, scepter, rod, or club. It

meant young adulthood, the period of assertion of power, a peak of

energy. The wand or dorje represented the phallic lightning streaking
toward the waters. Tarot readers therefore applied the suit of Wands to
matters of status, power, business, and commerce.
The Wand became a trefoil through an alchemical trans-
straight
[Link] trefoil was an alchemical symbol for wood, sometimes
called Wood of the Tree of Life. 20 The Chinese considered wood a

fifth element, placed between earth, which gave birth to it, and fire,
which consumed it.
21
The Wand of the Tarot associated with fire would
have meant a wooden torch, therefore the symbol of wood changed it

into a modern "club."

3. Artha, "Earth," stood for Wealth or Possessions: the period of Symbol of Wood
middle age when the fruits of labor accumulate, and grown children
also are "wealth." The feminine Earth element was associated with
riches in all Indo-European traditions, and so the Goddess's pentacle
became a diamond, the Far-Eastern earth-symbol whose very name
meant "Goddess of the World." The oldest form of money was a
female-genital cowrie shell, and coins used to be manufactured in the
Mother Goddess's temple at Rome. 22 It was not illogical then that the
Tarot suit of Pentacles was related to money matters and property.
Sometimes they were Pomegranates, another female symbol. 23
4. Moksha, "Liberation," or the Art of Dying, was linked with the

masculine Air element that meant the soul released from the body,
into the keeping of the Lord of Death, or Kali the Destroyer, represent-

ed by the sword. Eastern philosophers viewed old age, the fourth

life-stage, as an opportune time to learn to approach death without fear.

However, the Tarot suit of Swords was linked with fear-inspiring

events: calamities, difficulties, threats, various kinds of doom. Even in

ordinary playing cards, the suit of spades, the Swords' descendant,

was reckoned a suit of evil omen.
The
underlying theory of cartomancy was that shuffling the
cards was like mixing the elements in the larger world. Fate would
guide

979
 T*ot the diviner to make combinations which, properly interpreted, would
apply to past or future events that the mingling of elements brought
^^^^^^^^^^ about. Suit colors still show the blood-red of life for the "female"
elements, the black of death for the "male" elements, according to very
ancient Oriental ideas of the active energy of the Lady of Life as

opposed to the passivity of the Lord of Death. It is perhaps oddly

significant that the oversized ace of modern cards is the ace of spades,

symbolically the sword of Father Heaven, which fortune-tellers called

the card of death.

When churchmen failed to eradicate playing cards, there were
several attempts to adapt the cards to Christian orthodoxy. Major
Arcana pictures were described as various episodes in Christ's Passion as
24
if they represented Stations of the Cross. Another system tried to
relate the four suits to the four GrailHallows, listed in the 12th century
as (1) the chaliceof the Last Supper; (2) the wooden lance St.

Longinus used to pierce Jesus's side; (3) the round paten or platter from
which Jesus's disciples ate the paschal lamb, and (4) King David's
"Sword of the Spirit." These Grail Hallows were themselves un-
christian, having been lifted from the Four Treasures of pagan
Ireland, magical emblems of the Tuatha De Danann. These were: (1)
the Cauldron of Regeneration; (2) the Spear of Lug; (3) the Stone of

Fal, or Stone of Sovereignty, which like the Scots' Stone of Scone

would cry out in recognition of a true king; and (4) the Sword of
Nuada. 25 Typical lingam-yoni combination of the last two formed the
famous "Sword in the Stone" that figured in myths of Arthur,
Perceval, and Galahad.
A 1
5th-century game called Triumphs associated the four suits
with qualities resembling the Tantric definitions of the four elemental
26
Riches, and (4) Virginities.
life-stages: (1) Pleasures, (2) Virtues, (3)
These are easily identified with the male-female elements. "Virtues"
came from virtu, "manliness, uprightness" in the dual sense of erect-
ness. "Virginities" referred to the ascetic life recommended for the
elder sage in eastern lands. But the game itself wasnamed after the
Major Arcana the "trump" suit that clergymen called heretical.
The word "trump" came from trionfiov "triumph," the old Latin
word for a religious procession, in which the very sequence, cos-
tumes, and masks of the marchers stood for doctrinal teachings the
initiates could understand.
Images of the deities, sacred masks borne
by temple dancers, charioteers, priests, and priestesses displayed the
exuviae, "attributes," of divinities. The leader of the
procession was
the triumphator, a magistrate in
charge of Rome's sacred games. At the
end of the drama or the parade, celebrants raised the cry of
Triumpe,
announcing the immanence of divine spirit in the things and persons
shown. 27 Trump, then, originally meant "that which is divine," and
like
everything divine it was credited with power of divination.
According to ancient ideas of the divine order, deities revealed
themselves within a calculated framework of time. An initiate into

980
any of the pagan Mysteries would meet them one at a time, learning Tarot
new thoughts from each. A time-frame appeared in the Tarot as well
as the matter-frame of the elements. This had to do with its numbering. ^^^^^^^^^^^
The number of Minor Arcana cards is 56, a number with pro-
found meanings in Oriental philosophy. When Buddha was born, he
took hisfirst 56 steps in each of the four cardinal directions, 7 forward

and 7 back each way, signifying the 14 waxing and 14 waning days of
the moon and the lunar weeks, like the 14 steps on the heavenly ladder
of Osiris. 28
The same number of posts or stones representing "steps in time"
circled old temples of astronomical calculation, like Stonehenge.
There were 56 years in a sacred Great Year when lunar and solar cycles
coincided. 29 The number of the Tarot's Sun card is 19, the number
of the Moon card 18: and the ancient Great Year consisted of two 19-
year periods combined with an 18-year period, a total of 56 years to
bring the sun and moon together. The total number of cards in a Tarot
pack, 78, was the sum of all the numbers of the signs of the zodiac
added together: 1 +24-3+4+5 + 6 + 7 + 8+9+ 10+11 + 12.
Among the many derivations offered for the mysterious word
Tarot was the famous palindrome ROTA TARO ORAT (TORA)
ATOR: the Wheel of the Taro speaks of (the Law of) Hathor. 30
However, the Oriental background of card-divination and the 2 1
numbered cards of the Major Arcana suggest an older connection with
the Goddess Tara, the Aryan Great Mother as "Earth," whose name
gave rise to Latin Terra Mater and Celtic Tara.
From ancient times, this Goddess was assigned 2 1 forms. Magic
diagrams, or painted dice-boards for divining the cause of illness,
prophesying, and so on, are still known as "the 21 Taras." If the 21
numbered cards of the Major Arcana can be related to such boards,
the Minor Arcana certainly echo the similar boards of 56 squares used
"for determining the successive regions and grades of one's future
31
rebirths." In the Far East, games like cards and dice were used to
teach esoteric doctrines. Tantric Buddhists still
enjoy the Game of
Rebirth played with dice and a colorful board; both a pastime and a
it is

32
teaching aid for spiritual doctrines.
As China, cards were created from the possible throws of rods
in in

the I
Ching, so divination by dice obviously influenced the format of
the Tarot. The two Tarot numbers 56 and 21 are dice numbers 21
the number of possible throws by a set of two dice and 56 the number
of possible throws by a set of three dice. Together they add up to 77

seven-times-eleven, the ultimate number of dice games. The Tarot

pack has one more card, making 78, but this card has no numerical
value. It is the Fool, whose number is zero. In many Tarot layouts he
stands apart, as an observer or querent. 33
The form and meaning of Hindu temples also had some influence
on the Tarot. Images showing various manifestations or avatars of the
deities were placed in rows along corridors leading to the central
Holy of

981
 Devout this "instructive picture
Taiot Holies. pilgrims passed through
34
prayers at each station. Pictures of the deities and thei
gallery" saying
used to be painted on cards, like a miniature picture gallery,
^^^^^^^^^^ attributes

for private meditation. Such a pasteboard pageant revealed sacred

mysteries to those who

knew its symbolism. In this circumstance one
might find the real reason why Christians objected to the Major
Arcana not because the cards were frivolous, but because their

underlying meanings were all too serious.

The most significant arrangement in Oriental sacred graphics was
the triangle, sign of the Goddess, known as the Kali Yantra or
Primordial Image.
35
A female triangle with a central dot or bindu,
"spark of life," stood for the Goddess's genital power bringing life
into being. The 21 numbered Tarot trumps seemed designed to form

this yantra, 7 cards to each side of the triangle, with the unnumbered
Fool in the center standing for the bindu.
The three sides of the triangle traditionally represented the Triple
Goddess as Three Fates, ruling past, present, and future; the three
trimesters of intrauterine existence; and the three larger trimesters of
extrauterine life: from birth to coming-of-age at 21; from 21 to
middle age 42; and from 42 to the "grand climacteric" at 63. The
at

same three stages of man's life were depicted in such classical images
as the Riddle of the Sphinx.

The biblical God promised his followers a lifetime of threescore

and ten seven years more than older deities who
years, offering

guaranteed only the mystically trinitarian number of threescore and

three (63). The pagan lifespan was remembered in medieval times,
when the age of 63 was known as the grand climacteric and was thougl
to carry a threat of death. 36 It is still believed that 21 is the pinnacle of
first maturity, because the pagan system of age-counting became incor-

porated in common law.

Each
trimester spanned 21 years, the first exclusive multiple of th(
sacred numbers 3 and 7. Therefore the past, present, and future
could be envisioned in the Major Arcana arranged in one of the
Goddess's essential sigils. This triangular format was often used by
the gypsies, who understood that "triangle" meant "female" and that
the Goddess was the trinitarian ruler of Fate. 37
The last trump is called the World, also known as the Bride, the

Shekjna, the Universe, Mother Nature, Sophia, or the Major For-

tune. 38 This card always showed a naked woman dancing within a
flower wreath, flanked by emblems of the four seasons. This was the
of the Tarot system: the Goddess without her veils, the
final revelation

Shakti bringing joy to the moment of death. According to the

doctrine of karma, "She it is who is ever desired, won, and lost again."
3

In the cyclic or continuous layouts favored by gypsy cartomancers,

the realization of the World led "naturally on to the next card, the Fool

symbol of the newly born child commencing its life's journey. And so

982
the Ring of Return revolves once more." 40 In other words, the religion Tarot
of the Tarot was a cyclic religion of reincarnation, not a linear

religion of heaven-or-hell choices. ^^^^^^^^^^^^

A popular method of laying out the cards signified two Rings of
Right-Hand Path (clockwise) and the
return, the joined circles of the
Left-Hand Path (counterclockwise), traditional symbols of male and
female powers combined in a horizontal figure eight, the Vedic sign of
Infinity. This was inherited by the Arabs along with the other
"Arabic" numerals (actually of Indian origin), and is still the sign of
infinity in modern mathematics. The Major Arcana strongly suggest-
ed this figure-eight layout by their own traditional designs.

The lemniscate infinity-sign appeared as a wide-brimmed hat or

halo over the head of the Magician, a male figure beginning the first

decade of trumps at the #1 position. The same sign appeared again as

the same wide-brimmed hat or halo over the head of the Goddess of
Strength, a female figure beginning the second decade of trumps at the
#11 position. The male and female figures hinted that the first circle

often cards was to rotate clockwise, along the "solar" path; the second
circle often cards was to rotate counterclockwise, along the "lunar"

path.
The figure-eight represented union of the sexes not only in the
Orient, but also ancient Celtic marriage rite preserved by the
in the

Scottishcustom of handfasting. Bride and groom joined their right

"male" hands, then their left "female" hands also, forming the
double-sexed Infinity sign to signify the blending of their two natures.
This custom is still followed in India, where the symbolism of the
41
Right-Hand Path and Left-Hand Path was never lost.
Besides the Magician and the Goddess of Strength, another card

presented the Infinity sign: the deuce of Pentacles, showing two discs
embraced by two endlessly circling serpents, or a comparable lemniscate
design. The importance of this card was revealed by special decora-
tions; it
usually bore the maker's trademark, as the ace of spades does
today. Clearly, the figure-eight layout was urged. But then, what did
it show?
The first circle stood for the realm of consciousness, matter, the
world of affairs: all the cards faced out. The
outward-turning
solar,
second circle stood for the unconscious or the spirit lunar, inward,
feminine, the realm of mysteries and "true meanings." The center
crossing superimposed the two "mandala" cards, the Wheel of Fortune
and the World (or Major Fortune). In such an arrangement, each
card in the solar sphere matched a card in the lunar sphere, their two
numbers always totaling 20, a sacred number in the eastern decimal
42
system. Each pair of matched cards revealed a secret identity or
meaning.
The Magician, or Hermes (#1) corresponded in the spiritual
realm to the masculine power of the Sun (#19). The Papess (#2)

983
^
Ta|ot

^^m
was revealed as a personification

(#3) was the same as the Naked

of the Moon
Goddess pouring forth her blessings
(#18).

on land and sea, on the card of the Star (# 1 7) i.e., Astarte or Ishtar.
The Emperor (#4) stood for the Holy Roman Empire, which would
soon suffer a downfall, according to the heretical prediction; and the

downfall of the Empire was shown on the corresponding card, #16,

the Tower, or the House of God, blasted by the lightning of Lucifer the
The Empress

Light-bringer. Two figures toppling from the crown of the lightning-

struck Tower could well have been Emperor and Pope. As for the Pope
himself, shown on card #5, in the spiritual realm of the Tarot he was
revealed as the Devil (#15), taking the same pose on both cards with
43
two worshippers at his feet.

Tarot cards were not the only manifestations of these subversive

symbols. The same pictures mysteriously appeared in many places,

including even churches. Rheims Cathedral still has a carved stone

panel showing the lightning-struck Tower with the two male figures
44
falling from its blasted crown. An engraved Horoscope wheel manu-
factured at Niirnberg in 1515 placed seven of the Major Arcana
45
pictures in various zodiacal positions. The figures of the World, the
Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the Fool, and Death the skeletal Grim
Reaper with his scythe were common illustrations of the medieval

Zeitgeist; but no one knows whether they were copied from the
Tarot, or the card pictures were copied from them.
Just before the card of Death came the card perhaps most
characteristic of the Tarot alone: the Hanged Man, who "cannot be
found any orthodox Christian symbology, and is one of the clearest
in

indications that the Tarot trumps were designed to illustrate some

non-Christian system of belief." 46 The Hanged Man hung on a door-

shaped gallows such as Norse pagans called the Wooden Horse, or

the Horse of Odin. 47 Even though the figure of Death immediately
followed him, it was only a symbolic death. He hung, not by the
neck, but by one foot: a custom known as "baffling," inflicted on

debtors and traitors in Germany, Italy, and Scotland. 48 Baffling was a

formal humiliation, like a sojourn in the stocks, or like the mockery of

sacred-king-victims (such as Jesus). Mystical initiations imitated such

procedures, so the novice "should empty himself completely, should be
stripped of all his faculties, renouncing all his own predilections, his
own thoughts, his own will in a word, his whole self." 49 The Hanged
Man's number, 12, recalled the famous Twelfth Rune sacred to
Odin the Hanged God, the rune by which hanged victims could be
made and reveal the mysteries of the death- world. 50
to speak,

The mystic revelation following the Hanged Man's encounter

with Death was the female figure of Temperance, copied from magic
texts that showed the Goddess Isis with one foot on land, the other in

water, revealing her dominion over both elements. 51 This Temper-

ance angel poured water from one jar into another, recalling the

984
symbolic merging of Isis and Osiris in the Amulet of the Two Jars, an Tartarus
ancient Egyptian charm of eternal life. 52 Similarly in India, the revela-
tion of divine love was a merging of God and Goddess "like the
^^^^^^^^^^^^
pouring of water into water."
53
One of the incarnations of the God
himself was a water jar, just as Babylonian, Egyptian, and Cabirian
savior-deities were symbolized by water jars in their holy processions, as

was Jesus also, according to Luke 22:10. In the Far East, the vessel of
water was regarded as the residence of the deity. 54 Moreover, this same

Water-Jar-Savior appeared in Hindu playing cards at the head of the

suitof Jars, which corresponded to the Tarot suit of Cups. 55
the European Tarot seemed to show a man symbolically
Thus
dying, and meeting a manifestation of the Goddess as a result. This
meeting or merging, "like the pouring of water into water," prefigured
the final meeting with the cosmic Mother upon actual death the
Last Trump just as a man's sexual union with his earthly Shakti

prefigured his union with the ultimate Shakti of the spirit realm, Kali
[Link] wonder then that patriarchal Christians regarded the
Tarot as a Bible of heresy comprehensible to the illiterate, at a time
when even literate laymen were officially forbidden to read their own
Bible. 56 The Oriental origin of its heretical Tantric/Gnostic imagery

is
suggested by the Slavic word for a "reader" of the cards: Vedavica,
literally a Vedic seer. 57 Small wonder that some of the bishops and
cardinals tried to collect packs of cards and burn them, as was done in
Niimberg in 1452. 58 Cards became harmless to the church only after
their religious symbols were removed and their meanings forgotten, so
they were mere "games" ludicrous, in the new interpretation of the
old pagan ludiox "sacred games." To Hebrew patriarchs also, naipes,
59
"cards," became naibi, "sorcery."
1. A. Douglas, 21. 2. Cavendish, T., 18. 3. A. Douglas, 20. 4. Trigg, 47.
5. Funk, 320. 6. Hazlitt, 460. 7. Cavendish, T, 15-17; A. Douglas, 24, 32.
8. Moakley, 98. 9. Papus, 9. 10. A. Douglas, 43. 11. Bardo Thodol, 3.
12. Keightley, 81. 13. A. Douglas, 24. 14. Moakley, 35. 15. Larousse, 371.
16. A. Douglas, 19. 17. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 375. 18. Cavendish, P.E., 71.
19. Bardo Thodol, 11. 20. Koch, 74. 21. Lethaby, 245. 22. Larousse, 204.
23. Cavendish, T., 155. [Link],79. 25. A. Douglas, 37. 26. Moakley, 46.
27. Dumezil, 231, 572. 28. Bardo Thodol, 207. 29. Hawkins, 140. 30. Case, 123.
31. Waddell, 359, 467, 1472. 32. Tatz & Kent, 19, 32. 33. Moakley, 41.
34. Zimmer, 127. 35. Silberer, 170; Mahanirvanatantra, 127. 36. Elworthy, 407.
37. Trigg, 48. [Link], 109. 39. Zimmer, 178. 40. A. Douglas, 114.

[Link], 169. 42. Jung, M.H.S., 42. 43. A. Douglas, 44-45. 44. Gettings, 87.
45. Lehner, 60. 46. A. Douglas, 85. 47. Branston, 1 14. 48. Moakley, 95.
49. Waite, O.S., 234. 50. B. Butler, 154. 51. Seligmann, 43. 52. Budge, E.M., 60.
53. Tatz & Kent, 140. 54. Zimmer, 34. 55. Hargrave, 25, 27. 56. H. Smith, 253.
57. Leland,65. 58. Hargrave, 101. 59. Hargrave, 224.

Tartarus
Greek name of the underworld, related to tartaruga, "tortoise,"
because archaic Hindu tradition claimed the earth was supported by
Vishnu in the form of a tortoise. The tortoise was a totem of the

985
 Taueret Underground God, sometimes incarnate in Pan or Hermes who invent-
1
Tetresias ed the tortoise-shell lyre to create universal harmony. In alchemy,
^^^^^^^^^^_ the Underground God became spiritus tartari, spirit of Tartarus, a
description of tartaric acid, or simply tartar.
1. Jung & Kerenyi, 78.

Taueret
"The Great," Hathor as the Goddess of childbirth and nursing; as
Mother of the Nile, she sometimes wore a hippopotamus head. At other
times she wore the lion head of destruction. Her images were
associated with the hieroglyphic sign sa,
meaning the uterine blood of
the Goddess which could bestow eternal life. See Menstrual 1

Blood.
].Larousse, 38-39.

Tefnut
Primitive Egyptian death-goddess living at the bottom of the under-
world; a shadow twin of the Goddess Nut who lived at the summit of
the sky. A group of nether gods with slaughtering-blocks hacked the
dead to pieces and fed Tefnut with their blood a mythic memory of
1
Neolithic sacrifices.
Tefnut was identified with Hathor-the-Sphinx and with the
Greeks' Artemis. 2 Some said she was a savage Goddess from the
Nubian desert; she was always reddened with the blood of the men she
devoured. 3 She resembled the blood-red Kalika who devoured all that
she brought forth (see Kali Ma).
Tefnut's consort was Shu, "Giver of Winds," a god of dryness as
4
opposed to her wetness. He was "dry, parched, withered, empty."
He was a phallus called Prop of Heaven, but a spent phallus entering
the Goddess's "deep" which served as "a hiding-place for his body."
He could give souls of air to the dead, like Yahweh in Ezekiel's valley of
bones; in fact some Jews said Yahweh and Shu were the same. 5
1. Book of the Dead, 146. 2. Larousse, 13. 3. Book of the Dead, 176.
4. Budge, G.E. 2, 420. 5. Budge, G.E. 2, 67, 87.

Teiresias

Double-sexed seer of Thebes. The Goddess miraculously made him

a woman, and he lived as a
temple harlot for seven years, acquiring great
powers of insight and divination. His myth may date back to the
transvestism or ritual castration
required of men who entered the
Goddess's priesthood. Hermes also became a
god of magic insight by
turning himself into the pseudo-female Hermaphroditus and presiding

986
over the temple of his consort Aphrodite, wearing female robes and Tell, William
1
artificial breasts. Teraphim
Teiresias had a Hindu counterpart, Trisiras, god of magic, whose ^^^^^^^^^^^m
powers were based on his ability to change from male to female at
2
will.

Teiresias's "daughter" was Mante, whose name means Seeress,

and was really a title of the Theban priestesses before men managed

to take over their functions.

1. Graves, CM. 1, 73. 2. O'Flaherty, 70.

Tell, William
Archer-wizard of Altdorf, the best known of the whole cycle of

legendary heroes. A cruel overlord ordered Tell to shoot an apple from

his son's head with an arrow to prove his skill. Tell performed the feat
successfully, holding a second arrow which he said would have slain the

oppressor, had the junior Tell been injured.

The same tale was told earlier of the Rhineland archer-wizard
named Puncker (Marksman), ordered by Prince Eberhard Long-
beard to shoot a penny off his son's head. Puncker too held a second
arrow, saying if he failed the test, the second arrow would have
1
penetrated Longbeard's heart.
In the 12th century, Saxo Grammaticus told the same story about

Toki, a Danish archer-wizard forced by King Harald Bluetooth to

shoot an apple from his son's head. The same incident occurred in the

mythical history of Egil, brother of Velundr, in the Saga of Thidrick.

Another Norse hero, Eindridi, was obliged to shoot a writing-tablet off
his son's head. Another, Hemingr, had to throw a spear at a hazel nut

on the head of his brother Bjorn. The Faroe Island archer-wizard was
Geyti, whom King Harald commanded to shoot a hazel nut from his
brother's head.
All the stories may have come from an ancient Persian poem, the
Mantic Uttair, or Language of Birds, by Farad-Uddin Attar. One of
itsmost widely repeated stories told of a king who shot an apple from
the head of a beloved page boy. 2
1. Kramer & Sprenger, 151. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 119-25.

Teraphim
Old Testament household fetishes, said by Hosea to be essential to

worship (Hosea 3:4). A Hebrew commentator said the

teraphim were
ancestral ghosts, in the form of mummified oracular heads. Their 1

name means "children of Terah." The Bible says Terah "begat"

Abraham; but the word translated "begat" often meant "gave birth

to," and many of the so-called patriarchs in the Pentateuch are feminine

987
^
Terra Rrma
Tetragrammaton
m
names.

Earth.
The Jews'
If

parent would have been

Abraham was
the Goddess Tara,
the same as Ab-Brahm

teraphim were similar to the Romans' lares or manes,

also ancestral spirits residing in relics.

teraphim, African natives still believe

an effigy especially if the effigy contains
Like the worshippers of
a dead ancestor's spirit can inhabit

physiological relics like

and by consulting such an idol one can
or Father Brahma, his
a universal name of Mother

bones, teeth, hair, etc.

2
communicate directly with the ancestor.
There were many Middle-Eastern peoples whose habit it was to

preserve skulls of the dead for necromantic consultation, espe-

later

cially the skulls of sacred kings. Their place of sacrifice called Golgotha,

alleged scene of Jesus's crucifixion, meant "the place of skulls."

1 .
Graves, W.G., 1 64. 2. de Lys, 43 1 .

Terra Firma
Title of Mother Earth, taken from the Homeric phrase "Great
Mother, Firmly Founded, Oldest of Divinities." To the Greeks she was
Gaea the Deep-Breasted One, who ruled Mount Olympus before
the coming of the Hellenic gods. See Tara.

Tetragrammaton
Literally, "four-letter word," the secret name of God in Hebrew
letters yod-he-vau-he (YHWH); often confused with God's introduc-
tion of himself to Moses, "I Am That Am" (Exodus 3:14). This
I

introduction was borrowed from the god Ab-braham or Father Brahma,

who introduced himself in Sanskrit Tat Sat "I Am That that Is." '

The root of YHWH is the radical HWH, he-vau-he, which meant

"being" or "life" or"woman" interchangeable concepts in the
ancient Middle East. 2 The same letters in Latin are E-V-E: Eve. 3 Thus

meaning of the Tetragrammaton was really Eve,

the so-called inner
Mother of All Living, the real creator of the world and mother of Adam,
4
according to Gnostic scriptures.
The Tetragrammaton had two versions. The lesser-known one
was EHYH, a feminine principle derived from Hayya (another of
Eve's names), designating the Goddess in her special connection with
women in childbed. On Samaritan phylacteries the masculine and
feminine versions of the Tetragrammaton were intertwined. 5
Medieval writers who didn't know the meaning of Tetragramma-
it for the name of a
ton often took powerful demon, and invoked it in
magic charms. A 17th-century writer declared that "the mighty Tetra-
6
grammaton" was a devil who protected witches. Other authorities
 Tetragrammaton was one of the more powerful secret names of
said Teutatis

God, used to control demons when they were invoked. (See Name.) Thais, Saint

Jewish mystics used the Tetragrammaton extensively in the lore of ^^^^^^^^^^^^

the Cabala. YHWH
was called the Divided Name, "considered to
contain all the Forces of Nature." Since the holy name could be divided
into that of Mother Eve (HWH), and that of the "I" or jod for

Jehovah, it suggested the cabalistic doctrine of God's loss of his Shekina,

the Great Mother, whose return the mystics believed essential to the
achievement of peace in the universe.

Sometimes the Tetragrammaton was called Sem ha-mephoras, or

Schemahamphorasch, probably the word "semaphore"
origin of the
in the sense of a word-sign like the Hindu samjna? Rabbinic tradition

said the Sem ha-mephoras either was inscribed on a holy phallic stone

buried in the Great Gate of Mother Earth, or else was the stone itself,

also called Eben stijjah, the Stygian Stone, or Stone of the Deeps. It

was connected with the sexual myth of the descent of Father Heaven's
phallus into the yoni of the virgin Mother Earth, to "unlock her
fountains," that is, to stimulate the Nether Upsurge of world-sustaining
blood. Sexual organs of God and Goddess lay at the center of the

holy of Holies. "David supposed to have found at the digging of the

is

foundation of the temple, the Eben stijjah, Stone of the Deeps, that
unlocked the fountain of the great deep, and on which the Sem ha-
mephoras, the outspoken name of God, was inscribed." 8
1. Mahanirvanatantra, Reinach, 188. 3. Cavendish, T., 1 16. 4. Pagels, 30.
xix. 2.

5. Budge, AT., 224, 261. 6. Hazlitt, 656. 7. O'Flaherty, 352. 8. Silberer, 315.

Teutatis
Germanic version of the priapic Hermes, worshipped as a giant

phallus at Eresburg, the Mount of Mother

Earth (Hera). Teutatis was
also called a Lord of Death, and a father of "Teutons." '

[Link], 145.

Thais, Saint
The famous harlot Thais, mistress of Alexander the Great, was
transferred to the 4th century a.d. in her Christianized legend, which
ignored chronology so Thais could repent her gaudy life and be
converted to Christianity by one of the Coptic cenobites, usually St.

Anthony. To fulfill what seemed to be one of the ascetics' favorite

fantasies, Thais at the height of her beauty and fame was said to have re-
nounced her sins, mortified her flesh, burned her fine clothes and

ornaments, given away all her wealth to the church, and walled herself
up in a desert cell to live in the midst of her own filth.
1
The only trou-
ble with the hagiographer's tale was that, at the time it was supposed to

989
Thalassa have happened, Thais had already been dead for more than 600
Themis years.
[Link], 320.

Thalassa
The Goddess Rhodes and Miletus, mother of the Telchines
at

("enchanters"). As patroness of sex

and marriage, she was an archaic
form of Aphrodite Marina. She was invoked at Roman weddings by
the cry Talassio, the meaning of which had been forgotten, but
'

everyone knew "it was the correct thing to shout at weddings."

1. Rose, 192.

Thecla, Saint
"Famous One," a title of Ephesian Diana, whose shrine in Seleucia
was a popular pilgrimage center in pagan times, and remained so even
after the Goddess was Christianized as a saint, up to the 1 7th century

A.D.
1
Early churchmen didn't like St. Thecla or her shrine. In the 4th
century it was attended by a group called Apotactics, under a female
2
"deacon," subsequently declared heretical. Some Christians asserted
that St. Thecla was Diana's priestess. Others, like Tertullian, knew
3

she was nothing but an epithet of the Great Goddess. Tertullian denied
the legend connecting Thecla with St. Paul, calling it a lie invented

by a misguided church elder "for love of St. Paul" a curious explana-

tion, hinting that Paul might have been honored by the connection. 4
[Link],321. 2. Boulding, 370. 3. Brewster, 423. 4. Reinach, 255.

Themis
Pre-Hellenic Creatress, cognate with Chaldean Thamte, "Sea," or
with Tiamat. Her Virgin aspect was Artemis (Ar-Themis); her name
was numerically equivalent to that of the moon. Her children were 1

Themistes, "oracles." She founded the oracle of Delphi ("Womb"),

long before it was taken over by Apollo.
Aphrodite, Cybele, Black Sea Amazons worshipped Themis in the form of a black
Anat-Athene, and many stone on their sacred island of Themiscyra, "Divine Themis." The
other Goddesses oc-
Roman Forum had an ancient black stone, the Lapis Niger, engraved
cupied aniconic stones,
with the Goddess's sacred law. 3 In faraway Iceland the same Goddess
called baitulos in

Greece, baetyl in Syria, was adored in the form of a stone called Spamathr, "Mother of
4
beth-ei or "house of Prophecy," or Armathr, "Mother of Prosperity."
2
deity" in Palestine. To the Themis was "Temu," of the fertile
Egyptians, spirit Abyss
that gave birth to all things in the beginning.

990
 myth made Themis the spirit of the post-diluvian creation.
Classic Theology
After the Flood receded, Themis taught the survivors Deucalion and

Pyrrha how to repopulate the earth by magic. They were to fling "the
bones of their mother" behind them as they walked. On resolving the

riddle, they understood that Themis meant stones, the bones of their
Mother Earth. 5 By the grace of the Goddess, new human beings rose
up from these stones.
1. Neumann, CM., 214. 2. Graves, W.G., 405. 3. Lindsay, A. W, 176.
4. Turville-Petre, 230. 5. Graves, CM. 1, 139.

Theology
Literally, "God-knowledge," the paradoxical pretense of knowing
what theologians themselves call unknowable. The weakness of theol-
ogy as a "science" is its lack of objective proof for any of its claims.
Vetter points out that any theologian in the modern age is
likely to be
confused and worried: "He is
trying to reconcile science with faith
and dogma, and they are simply not to be reconciled." 1

Since Galileo's time, Christian theology has been concerned not

with justifying God's ways to man but with justifying God's ways to
science. This is
usually done by reasoning backward from religion's

given conclusions to theoretical causes. In 1952, Pope Pius XII

demonstrated this in an astonishing series of non sequiturs to force
"science" to prove the existence of God:

What significance, then, has modern science for the proof of the existence
of God, which depends on the fact that the cosmos is susceptible of
change? . From the fact that there is change we may conclude that
. .

there is an Absolute Being whose nature is unchangeable. [Science] . . .

has, with the concreteness that belongs to physical proof, confirmed the

principle of contingency and the conclusion based on it that . . . the

cosmos came into being by the hand of the Creator. 2

Only theology could make such a long, loose-jointed leap from

the fact that there is change to a "conclusion" that something un-

changeable must exist. Needless to say, science has not confirmed

any such thing as the theological principle of contingency with any
"physical proof"; theologians simply don't understand what physical
proof consists of.

Theological problems are not solved by physical evidence but by Peter Lombard Ec-
adjustment of verbal definitions. The usual method is debate. Medi- clesiastical teacher of
eval Schoolmen earnestly debated such questions as how many angels the 1 2th century,

could dance on the head of a pin, or whether the earth hung from bishop of Paris, author
of many sermons,
heaven by a golden chain or an iron one. "Evidence" was taken from
commentaries on scrip-
analogy. For instance, Peter Lombard's rules on incest said it was all
and theological
ture,
right to marry outside the sixth degree of consanguinity because there treatises known as the
were six ages of the world. In 1215 the fourth Lateran Council Books of Sentences.

991
 declared it all right to marry outside the fourth degree of
was even
Theology
consanguinity, because there were four humors in the body and four
3
^^^^^^^^^^ elements in the universe.
Most of the time, theology and science have been implacable
enemies.
1
The aggression has been on the side of theology, not

science; the latter simply pursues facts, the

former attacks facts because

they threaten orthodox fantasies.

The priesthoods of whatever stripe can never live down, nor make amends
for, their disgraceful role
in retarding the development of modern

science during the past millenium in Christendom. But what is even

worse, they seem to have learned nothing from that defeat and are now
in the area of the
closing ranks, better to fight the same sort of a battle
social sciences and ethics. [S]upernaturalism is, in its social func-
. . .

tions and consequences, a dangerous opiate. And, what is perhaps even

worse, it discourages objective attempts at intelligent social trial-and-
error, planning, and even research, and undermines man s faith in his own
resources. . . .

The methods and principles of the theologians are still the same;

they have merely abandoned certain fields as no longer profitable for

exploitation and have concentrated their efforts in the psychological and

sociological, derived out ofa distant past. Their sole claim to validity

today derives from the extent of their social acceptability, not from any
empirical validation. To preserve that social acceptability organized
religion bendsevery effort to keep "controversial" topics out ofpublic
its

educational institutions and to provide as much parochial education as

s
possible for as many of the "faithful" as possible.

To provide the kind of education defined as Christian, it has

been necessary for theologians to lie, and then to find words that call

Such semantic wriggling is shown by a book

their lies morally right.

for Catholic laymen by Edwin F. Healy, S.J., published in I960 under

the rather astonishing title of Mora] Guidance.

At times one is obliged in conscience to veil the truth, for there are secrets
to be guarded and detractions to be avoided. Sometimes silence will not

suffice to maintain the secret which one is trying to guard. In fact, it may

happen that silence would betray the secret. Hence there must be some
licit means of concealing the truth when necessary. This licit means is the

broad mental reservation. One way ofputting the question is to ask

. . .

if a false statement is always a lie. Some theologians answer in the

negative. . . . Sometimes it is necessary to make a false statement in

order to protect secret knowledge. Silence or the use of mental reservation
is not sufficient; the
only way to protect the secret is to make a
statement contrary to what you know to be true. 6

In direct ideological descent from Eusebius who extolled "holy lying"

Healy makes "licit" every form of falsehood.
for the church's sake,

Churchmen themselves seldom believed the lies they told, or al-

lowed, as shown by the 19th-century clergymen's aphorism: "He may
hold anything who holds his tongue." 7 The theologian Beausobre
wrote:

992
 Churchmen not only do not say what they think, but they do say the Theotokos
direct contrary of what they think. Philosophers in their cabinets; out of
them they are content with fables, though they well know they are fables. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nay, more: they deliver honest men to the executioner, for having
uttered what they themselves know to be true. How many atheists and

pagans have burned holy men under the pretext of heresy? Every day
do hypocrites consecrate, and make people adore the host, though as well
convinced as I am, that it is nothing but a bit of bread. 8

Perhaps the most dangerous truth, about which theologians

always lied,was the one advanced by the Arab philosopher Averroes:
that all religions are of equal validity or nonvalidity, because all are
9
merely human productions. Judeo-Christian tradition could not bear
this idea, for it
taught that not only were its scriptures directly dictated
by God but its religion was the only "right" one even though shaped
and supported by false statements.
How could the modern church acknowledge, Guignebert asks,
"that religion lives its whole life in the consciousness of men and that
human consciousness has changed since the thirteenth century?"

Orthodoxy must believe itself immutable, but it is always embarrassed

by the records of its mistakes. Renan says, "There is one thing that a
theologian can never be, and that is a historian. History is necessarily
disinterested. . . . The theologian has one interest, his dogma. If this
dogma be trimmed down as much as ever it can be, then it is still for the
critical mind an unbearable load. The orthodox theologian may be
10
compared to a bird in a cage; all real movement is forbidden to it."
The conclusion that theology once found unthinkable
is
becoming
more and more thinkable. "What gods what gods have
are there,
"
there ever been, that were not from man's imagination? To insist on
' '

deities in the real world, the theologian must resort to intellectual

dishonesty. "One should claim as knowledge only what he really knows,

and admit that he does not know what he doesn't know. The
characteristic Western ardor for answering the unanswerable would be
more if it did not entail claims of certitude." n Morton
uplifting
Smith points out that "When a theologian talks of a 'higher truth,' he is

1B
usually trying to conceal a lower falsehood."
[Link],257. 2. Keller, 413. 3. Murstein, 11. 4. See White. 5. Vetter,472, 515.
[Link]& Jackson, 109. 7. H. Smith, 375. 8. Doane, 435. 9. Guignebert, 305.
10. Guignebert, 467, 492. 1 1.
Campbell, M.L.B., 253. 12. Muller, 334.
[Link], 165.

Theotokos
"God-bearer," title of the virgin Mary. Church fathers originally
opposed the title because "It is impossible that God should be born of a
woman." Later church authorities changed their minds and pro-
'

nounced it
possible.
1 . de Riencourt, 1 50.

993
Thesmophoria Thesmophoria
Thomas Rhymer Women's festival of Demeter Thesmophoros, "Demeter-Who-Es-
bh^hh^ tablished-the-Customs." Women mixed the seed corn with
sacrificed pigs; and carried
their

in proces-
menstrual blood to give it life;

sion seed vessels, serpents, and cakes formed like female genitals. On 1

the third day, sacrificed victims came forth from the earth-womb in
2
the Kalligeneia, "Fair Birth." Victims were identified with the savior
to die and give his
Dionysus, a Holy Child laid in a manger, later
blood as sacred wine for the worshippers to drink, thus assuring their
immortality.
1. Spretnak, 269. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Thesmophoria."

Thomas Rhymer
Thomas Learmont, alsoas Thomas of Erceldoune, a 14th-
known
century Scottish poet-seer. Erceldoune (now Earlston) was "Ercel's
Down," seat of the Saxon Goddess Ercel, or Ursel, or Horsel, the

"Fairy Queen" who loved Thomas and taught him secrets of magic.
Thomas was accosted on Huntlie Bank by the incumbent Queen of
Elphame, an earthly incarnation of the Goddess, who taught him the
secrets of the witch cult and re-baptized him as True Thomas when
1
he had renounced Christianity.
According to "The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer," the Fairy Queen
showed Thomas three roads: one leading to heaven, a second to hell,

and a third to "fair Elf-land," that is, a Way that was neither Christian
nor anti-Christian. Along the third road he came to the River of
Blood, comparable to the Greeks' birth-river Styx, or the river of
giantesses' menstrual blood, crossed by the god Thor on his way to
Here Thomas entered a very mysterious place:
the land of elder deities.
"For forty days and forty nights / He wade thro' red blude to the
knee, / And he saw neither sun nor moon, / But heard the roaring of the
sea." 2

The legend suggests a Tantric sort of enlightenment, brought

about by communion with female life-essence. The Fairy Queen
stated that she had "claret wine" in her lap and invited Thomas to lay

his head there. The original

meaning of "claret" was perception, or
enlightenment. In common English usage, claret was also a synonym
for blood. In Celtic myth, the Fairy Queen offered "red mead"
which was also herself, Mab (Mead).
5
The Norse version of Thomas
was Sir Bosmer, who swam the "eddying flood" to the Elf-Queen as
she stood on the far bank, saying, "Welcome, Sir Bosmer! Come home
brewed the mead and the wine 4
to me, I've Such tales tend
for thee."
toconfirm clergymen's insistence that menstrual blood was the
communion wine of witches.
After Thomas's journey to the secret paradise, where he remained
seven years recalling the seven windings of the Styx he became a

994
great wizard, poet, and prophet, ranked with such sages of the old faith Thomas, Saint

as Merlin and Tristan. 5 Thor

1. Graves, W.G., 483. 2. Sargent & Kittredge, 64. 3. Rees, 75. 4. Wimberly, 1 16.

5. Encyc. Brit., "Thomas the Rhymer."

Thomas, Saint
Hellenized name of the god Tammuz, traditional Dying Savior of
the Jerusalem cult (Ezekiel 8:14), whose rites were supplanted by those
of Jesus. Tammuz then became Doubting Thomas, challenging
Jesus's claim to authentic apotheosis and resurrection in the flesh. He

refused to believe in his rival's return from death until he had probed
his wounds. Then, Thomas-Tammuz announced his acceptance of
Jesus as "my Lord and my God" (John 20:28) or so the Gospel
would have it.

The Doubting Thomas appears only in the so-called

story of
Gnostic Gospel of John, written more than 1 50 years after Jesus's
purported lifetime. Its purpose was to press Christian claims to superi-
1

ority over the old deities.

Thomas the doubter-turned-convert was also Thomas the twin:
Christian legends admitted that Jesus and Thomas-Tammuz had the
same face and were really the same god. According to some sources, the
rival's name was Judas Thomas, or Judas the Tammuz, whose face
2
was the same Judas and Jesus seem to have been
as Jesus's face.

traditional names taken by victims in whom the god Tammuz was

incarnate.

During the 4th century, a shrine at Edessa was taken over by

followers of the new Tammuz now called St. Thomas, Apostle to
3
India and the usual phony relics were installed.

[Link], L.C.M.,451. 2. Augstein, 1 5 1 . 3. Atrwater, 325.

Thor var. Thundr, Thunaer,

Donar
Scandinavian thunder-and-lightning god, corresponding to the Slavs'
Pyerun and the Latin Jove which is why Rome's diesjovis, Jove's
Day, became Thursday (Thor's Day). Thor had at least six major
sanctuaries in England; Thurstable in Essex was originally "Thor's
Pillar." Thor's cult persisted up to the 1 1th century when a Christian
chronicler said Thor or his priest was "a wicked man of Kent"
acting as the king's counselor. Saxons converted to Christianity were
obliged to renounce "Thunaer, Woden and Saxnot, and all those
demons who are their companions." x

Yet Thor continued to be worshipped in the north. His sanctuary

2
at Maerin in Trondheim was still active in the 1 1th century. Eligius,
bishop of Noyons, scolded Christians for observing Thursday as the
holy day of Thor in the 7th century; yet even 500 years later, Thor's

995
Thoth hammers were still revered in temples as sacred relics and sources of
thunder. In Prussia up to the 16th century, Jupiter-Thor was wor-
Thugs
shipped by the people in "sacred
woods in which they made sacrifices
and sacred springs which Christians were not allowed to approach." 3
Thor apparently descended from the Middle-Eastern thunder-bull

who was also Jupiter. Plutarch said the Phoenician thunder god was

Thur, the bull.

4
The Germanic Thor "bellowed like a bull" as he
swung hammer. 5 Like other forms of the bull god, he was married
his
6
to the Earth Goddess as Thrud, "Power" or "Strength." Though late

myths sometimes called Thrud his "daughter," Thor's home in

7
Asgard belonged to her. It was called Thrudvangar, "Thrud's Field."
1. Turville-Petre, 99-100. 2. Oxenstierna, 294. 3. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 81-87.
4. Knight, S.L., 20. 5. Lamusse, 261. 6. Hollander, 32. 7 Branston, 87.

Thoth
Egyptian god of magic words and writing, which he acquired from his
He was identified with the Greek Hermes. His
consort Seshat, or Maat.

holy city was known as Hermopolis, "City of Hermes." Priests of

Hermopolis pretended that Thoth had created the world, either by
hatching the World Egg (which he encircled in the form of the
Gnostic Serpent), or by speaking the words of creation, after the
manner of the biblical God. (See Logos; Ur-Text.) The Book of

Thoth was a famous legendary work supposed to reveal the secrets of

manipulating matter by verbal charms.
Like Hermes and other manifestations of the Wise Serpent, Thoth
owed powers to his former close association with the Great
his

Mother. He was lunar in nature, rather than solar. When he ascended

to heaven, he became the guardian of the Moon gates. 1

1 .
Larousse, 27.

Thugs
The curious ritual-murder cult of Thuggee flourished in central India
for some three centuries, until the advent of railroads decreased foot
travel in the 1800s so that the
depredations of Thuggee "highway-
men" declined.

Thugs were fanatical worshippers of the Goddess Kali, having

developed the idea that killingmen in her name would win them a
privileged reincarnation. They preyed on her enemies, the Brahmans.
Women had nothing to fear from the Thugs; their victims were
only
men. 1

Thuggee legend said Kali once tried to destroy all the "demons of
blood and seed" (men) created
by male gods. But each time she
beheaded one, another man
sprang up from every drop of spilled blood,
probably a remnant of the belief that spilled blood in the Goddess's

996
sanctuary brought forth increased fertility. At last Kali wiped the sweat Thumb
from her arms with a handkerchief, gave the handkerchief to her Thyrsus
faithful followers, and told them to make it into cords to strangle the

"demons" without bloodshed.

Male human sacrifices were still offered to Kali up to the 16th

century and occasionally even later, decapitation being the

a.d.,
method of choice. A boy was beheaded at Kali's altar in Tanjore every
Friday at sunset. A king of Cooch Behar offered a hundred and fifty
2

men to Kali at Danteshvari in the 1 500s, and a king of Bastar sacrificed

twenty-five men at the same shrine in 1830. Human sacrifice was
prohibited and replaced by animal sacrifice in 1835.
Like medieval Arabian Assassins, the Thugs maintained that the
rites of their Goddess should continue, and the Brahmans were
heretics who deserved extermination. The Mahabharata presents Kali as
a spirit of Brahmanicide, "with teeth projecting terribly, of an aspect

furiously contorted, tawny and black, with disheveled hair, appalling

eyes, and a garland of skulls around her neck, bathed in blood, clad in
rags and the bark of trees." 3 This probably represented a primitive idol
of the Death-goddess whose devotees believed she must be bathed in
blood to remain fertile and satisfied.
1. Tannahill, 153. 2. Campbell, Or.M., 5. 3. Campbell, Or.M., 187.

Thumb
Hindus said the soul, "of the size of a thumb, the innermost Self,
dwells forever in the heart of all beings." According to the Katha

Upanishad, "That being, of the size of a thumb, dwells deep within Upanishads Buddhist
the heart. He is the lord of time, past and future." The belief was literal. scriptures representing
the final stage in Vedic
The sages actually thought a thumb-sized manikin danced inside the
thought, dealing with
heart, stamping out the heartbeat, just as Dancing Shiva stamped out the philosophy known
the rhythm of the universe as he perpetually danced within the as Vedanta. The Katha
cosmic body of his consort. The crudity of the original belief now has to Upanishad discusses
be glossed over by modern commentators, who don't want their transmigration of souls,
the nature of eternal
ancient traditions to seem absurd. So the pious scholar writes, "The
life, the doctrine of
sages ascribe a definite, minute size to the Self in order to assist the
!
maya, and an account
disciple in meditation." of a visit to Yama, Lord
Still, European folklore and
the thumb-sized soul passed into of the Dead.

emerged as
Hop-O'-My-Thumb and the fairy Thumbelina, both of
whom probably began as disembodied souls in search of new bodies.
1 .
Upanishads, 2 1 , 24.

Thyrsus
Rod and staff of Dionysus, a wand or scepter tipped with a pine cone,

representing the god's power to fertilize. The thyrsus was borne by the

997
Tiamat himself, by his satyrs, hisMaenads, his sileni, and other partici-
god
Sometimes the thyrsus was displayed in
pants in his sacred orgia.
a male-and-female combina-
conjunction with a wine cup, forming
1

tion like that of the royal scepter and orb.

1. Lamusse, 153.

Tiamat
from whose
Sumero-Babylonian "Goddess Mother" (Dia Mater),
formless body the universe was born at creation; personification of The

Deep, or Tohu Bohu. Babylonians later claimed

their municipal god

Marduk, Tiamat's son, divided her into heavens above and earth below,
as did Marduk's imitator, the biblical God. But the original division

was made by the Mother herself, as in the ancient Pelasgian myth of her
1

Aegean counterpart, Eurynome.

Hebrew myths, Tiamat became Tehom, The Deep;
In derivative
and how she appears in the Bible (Genesis 1:2). Patriarchal
this is

writers forgot that "The Deep" was a personified womb, a Middle-

Eastern version of Kali whose being before creation was "formless."

Most creation myths incorporated the idea of formlessness, in the
darkness before the birth that brought "light" and the splitting of the
Mother's body, so she became both heaven and earth. The Bible's

account is based on the same archetype.

In Egypt, Tiamat was Temu or Te-Mut, oldest of deities, mother
of the archaic Ennead of four dual female elements: Water, Dark-
ness, Night, and Eternity. 2 She was also Nun, Naunet, or Ma-Nu, the

great fish who gave birth to the universe and the gods. In repeated
cycles of becoming, she periodically swallowed up both gods and
5
universes and gave them rebirth like Kali.

Tiamat's firstborn child seems to have been a duplicate of herself,

Mummu, translated either "churning" or "mother." The combina-
tion recalled the ancient notion that solid earth was made from
4
"churning" the primordial fluid, like making butter from milk. Some
myths gave Tiamat a male consort, Apsu, similar to Jupiter Pluvius: a
Father Heaven whose job it was to fertilize the Mother's abyss with
seminal But he was not her superior, not even her equal. Even in
rain.

the chaotic conditions before creation, Tiamat was the true source of
5
life. Her consort was subordinate, not even very necessary. Various
myths said Tiamat alone produced the fluid of creation, which was
not semen but her menstrual blood, flowing continuously for three years
and three months. 6 Its great reservoir was the Red Sea comparable
to Kali's "ocean of blood" the eastern shore of which is still called

Tihamat by the Arabs.

Babylonians said their god Marduk divided his mother Tiamat into
two parts,upper waters and lower waters. Likewise, the Jewish God

998
"divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters Tiamat
which were above the firmament" (Genesis 1:7). The Jewish God
also divided the Red Sea, which was likened Tiamat
to herself.
^^^^^^^^^^^
The idea of dividing waters was not original with the Jews.
Goddesses did it before gods. The Hindu Goddess Bindumati,

"Mother of Life," divided the waters of the Ganges. 7 The Goddess Isis
8
divided the waters of the river Phaedrus, to cross dry-shod. Even an

insignificant Egyptian wizard named Zazamonkh divided the waters of

9
a lake to retrieve a courtesan's lost pendant. Yahweh's miracle on
fairly common in contemporary lore.
behalf of the Israelites was

By dividing Tiamat, Marduk established the Diameter (horizon),

which was the Greek version of Tiamat's name, meaning Goddess-
Mother. We still say a diameter divides a whole circle. Though Marduk
was supposed to have slain his mother, the Ocean of Blood, he still

maintained the menstrual calendar in Babylon, celebrating sabbaths and

months of the year according to the moon's phases. 10
Modern scholars tend to ignore Tiamat's maternal Creatress

nature, describing her as nothing more than a "dragon of chaos" slain

by Marduk. It is seldom emphasized that this was a myth of matricide,
or that the Goddess was the one who created the world. Some
traditions indicate that Marduk's murder of his mother may have been
motivated by jealously, like Cain's murder of Abel. Mother Tiamat
had overlooked Marduk and chosen another of her sons, Kingu, to be
her consort and the king of the universe.

[She] exalted among the gods, her sons, that she had borne, Kingu, and
made him greatest among them all placed him on a throne, saying,
. . .

"By my charm and incantation I have raised thee to power among the
gods. The dominion over all the gods I intrusted to thee. Lofty thou
"
shalt be, thou my chosen spouse; great be thy name in all the world. She
then gave him the Tablets of Destiny, and laid them on his breast. "

Jealous Marduk not only killed Tiamat; he also deposed, castrat-

ed, and Kingu, and made the first man on earth out of Kingu's
killed

blood which tends to show that Kingu was once the name of the
sacrificed god-king, whose blood had the "feminine" power to make
12
life.
Kingu was identified with the moon. Chaldeans called him Sin,
theMoon-god of Mount Sinai. Apparently he still had the tablets of the
Law given him by Tiamat (as Mother Rhea gave sacred tablets of the
Law to Minos on Mt. Dicte), for the Old Testament claims he passed
them on to Moses.
In southern Arabia, the Goddess was assimilated to Ishtar. The
eyes of her idol Tehama were said to flow with tears each year as she
bewailed the death of Tammuz. 13
I. Graves, CM.
27. 2. Budge, D.N., 21 1. 3. Neumann, CM., pi. 91; Erman, 252.
1,
4. Brandon, 22. Stone, 26. 6. Assyr.
5. &
Bab. Lit, 301. 7. Rawson, AT., 74.
8. Budge, CE. 2, 191. 9. Erman, 40. 10. Hooke, M.E.M.,45.

I I
Assyr.
. &
Bab. Lit, 287. 1 2. Larousse, 54. 13. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 279.

999
 Tingeltangel Tingeltangel
TWteut,i Mother
Sexual orgy connected with worship of the Great in medi-
^^^^^^i eval Germany. The same word was known to Scottish witches in the

17th century, according to a Forfar witch's confession that at the

sabbat a "merry" song was sung at a nocturnal churchyard meeting.
The song was called "Tinkletum Tankletum," close enough to the
German term to show correspondence between them. The Scottish
rites seem to have been fairly innocent. Scottish witches only drank

some beer and danced, and "the devil kissed every one of the women." '

As a result of such confessions, four women were hanged.

1. Summers, G.W., 230.

Titania

Ovid's name for Diana, inherited by the medieval Fairy Queen, as

shown in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. The original
1

Titania was the Great Goddess who ruled the pantheon of Aegean
"Titans" or Elder Gods, later overthrown by patriarchal Olympians
under Father Zeus. The name of the Titans meant "rulers," for they
once ruled the Aegean world. Titania, their queen, was otherwise

known as Themis, Gaea, or Mother Rhea, assimilated as the mother

of the conquering Zeus.
1.
Keightley, 325.

Tiw
Saxon god identified with Mars; the god of Tuesday (Tiw's Day),
called Mars's Day in Rome, modern French mardi. Tiw was an archaic

Aryan sky god descended, like Zeus Pater, from Sanskrit Dyauspitar,
as suggested by his other names: Tiuz in northern Germany, Ziu in the

south, Tyr in Scandinavia. He was also called Things, because he was

invoked Germanic Thing or Ding, an assembly for lawmaking.
at the A
3rd-century inscription in Britain called him Mars Thincsus. The
German word for Tuesday, Dienstag, evolved from "Thing-day." '

I. Larousse, 265-66.

Tlalteutli

Aztec Goddess of creation. At the beginning of time, the universe

was made of her body. The gods discovered that she wouldn't bring
forth new fruit for food, nor any new life, unless she was fed human
hearts and drenched with human blood, like some of the manifestations
of Kali. 1
Hence the Aztecs' sanguinary sacrifices.
1.
Campbell, P.M., 225.

1000
Tlazolteotl Tlazolteotl
Tohu Bohu
Aztec Goddess resembling the medieval Hecate as Queen of Witch-
[Link] symbol was a broomstick; she was also associated with the moon, ^bbhih
the snake, and the screech owl. Her sabbats were held at crossroads.

Her sacred women were Ciuateteo, "right honorable mothers," or

Ciuapipiltin, "princesses." Sahagun said they were the ghosts of

women who "They were supposed to wander
died in childbirth.

through the air, descending when they wished to earth. They . . .

haunted cross-roads to practice their maleficent deeds, and they had

temples built at these places where bread offerings were made to

them, also the thunder stones which from the sky." In other words,
fall
'

in Mexico as in Europe, the missionary clergy were at pains to

diabolize the Mother-deities.
1. Summers, V, 261-62.

Toga
Garment of clan-ruling matronae in pre-patriarchal Rome. Men

adopted the toga as they gained political power, until in classical times
the only women still wearing it were promiscuous priestesses of the
Goddess. Thus it became a custom to distinguish a prostitute by the
name of "toga-wearer." '

1. Rose, 191.

Tohu Bohu
Hebrew "primal chaos," elemental formlessness between the destruc-
tion of one universe and the creation of the next. The idea came from a

general Asiatic belief in cyclic recurrences brought about by the

Goddess (Kali), herself the cauldron or sea of "infinite formlessness,"

holding all potential forms in a plastic state of flux.

1
She was the
Abyss or the Deep before creation, according to the Bible (Genesis 1:2).
Chaldean sources of the Bible myth said the brooding creative
spirit that brought order out of chaos was the Goddess; but patriarchal

writers transformed her into the "Spirit of God." 2 Tohu bohu was her
semi-fluid substance, menstrual blood in the process of clotting into

solidity; the sea, but also a sea of blood. Orphics called it "Chaos eternal,

immense, uncreated, from which all is born; neither darkness nor

light, nor damp nor dry, nor hot nor cold, but all things mingled,
limitless." Some scholars have identified tohu with
3
eternally one and
the Primordial Sea, the Goddess Tiamat (Hebrew Tehomet), and bohu
with the male earth god Behemoth, making "a sexual creation." 4

[Link],229,233. 2. Augstein, 209. 3. Lindsay, O. A., 116. 4.0chs,94.

1001
Tongue Tongue
Latin lingus, "tongue," was derived from Sanskrit Hngam, "phallus."
^^^mb^^^h Showing the tongue between the lips was once
a sacred gesture

to this day the folds of the vulva are

representing the lingam-yoni;
properly called kbiae, "lips." (See Vagina Dentata.)
At the moment of her mating with Shiva, Kali Ma usually showed
a protruding tongue in token of the sexual sacrament. The classic
1

Medusa head signifying "female wisdom" also had a protruding tongue,

2
a reference to ancient sexual mysteries celebrated in her honor.
Medieval Christians understood very well that the protruding
tongue was a sexual symbol. Their pictures of lusty devils showed
long phallic tongues, and sticking out the tongue "at" someone became
"fuck you." In the east,
their favorite gesture of insult, equivalent to

where sexuality was not associated with shame or dishonor, sticking out
the tongue considered a polite greeting.
is still

Italians used to heighten the mouth's resemblance to a vulva by

3
drawing down one corner of it with the thumb. Biting the thumb, a
supreme insult in Italy, cast a curse of castration.
Archaic sacred kings, who had to kill their "fathers" or predeces-

sors towin the queen, often castrated the defeated rival to deprive his
ghost of virtu (man-magic) which might give him enough power to
return for revenge. This Oedipal attack was often mythologized as
the slaying of a dragon, symbol of "father," or "phallus bigger than
mine." The dragon-slayer's reward was the woman (mother). Drag-
on-slaying heroes cut off the dragon's tongue, representing amputation
of the penis. Tristan cut off the tongue of his slain dragon, to establish
4
his right to demand the hand of Iseult.

In medieval cathedrals, "an extraordinary number of grotesque

heads are depicted with protruding tongues," and this was distinctly
related to exposure of sexual organs. "The exposure of the genitalia was
5
widely believed to thwart and keep at bay pursuing evil forces." All
over the Gothic cathedral, numerous creatures with their tongues

sticking out showed once again that the cathedral was dedicated to a

pantheon of both Christian and pagan deities. People wanted their

"creatures from the grotto" ox grotesques to inhabit the same

churches that were built over the sites of the old grottoes. By Renais-
sance times, the old deities with their obscenely protruding tongues
were declared devils, so it became conventional to show devils making
this gesture.
6

The story of Pinocchio's nose, which grew every time he told a lie,

may have originated in Oriental beliefs concerning the tongue.

7
Buddhists said aliar's tongue would
grow to great length in hell. The
Buddhists called "liars" most of the old non-Buddhist deities who
stuck out their tongues in token of the sexual sacrament.
1. Neumann, CM., pis. 65, 67. 2. Massa, 19. 3. Knight, S.L., 30.
4. Guerber, L.M.A., 240. 5. Sheridan & Ross, 54. 6. de Givry, 141.
7. Tatz & Kent, 69.

1002
Tophet Tophet

Alternate name from the Jewish shrine of Tophet in the

for hell,

valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem, where Solomon made fire- ^^m^^^mm^^^m

Tyrian god Heracles-Melkart, or Molech (1 Kings
sacrifices to the

11:17). The previous source was probably the Egyptian Tephet, "Hid-
1
den abode," a part of the underworld.
At the Tophet altar, victims "passed through the fire to eternal

life," meaning they were burned to death and rose again as gods. For
a while, Molech was identified with Yahweh, which is why the sons of
Aaron were consumed on the altar by "fire from the Lord" (Leviti-
cus 10:2). Norse heroes also passed through "magic fire" to reach the

paradise of the Valkyries. Jewish surrogate-kings were still burned for

the Lord in Hilkiah's reign (2 Kings 23: 10). 2

Levite priests eventually distinguished Yahweh from Molech and
forbade the latter's worship (Leviticus 18:21); but the cult of Hera-
cles-Melkart still flourished in St. Paul's time in Paul's own home town
of Tarsus. 3 Because victims burned in this "Tophet" were deified as

holy martyrs, Paul thought there was a special magic in giving one's
body to be burned (1 Corinthians 1
3:3).
1. Budge, G.E. 1,230. 2. James, 192. 3. H. Smith, 182.

Torture

During the Middle Ages, torture became the common accompani-

ment to legal cases involving matters of faith. Pagan common-law
traditions opposed the use of torture, and regarded an accused person
as innocent until proven guilty by the prosecution. 1 Christian crusaders
and inquisitors reversed this trend. (See Inquisition.) The Inquisi-
tion's use of torture removed all possibility of proof of innocence.
Gibbon said, "No power under heaven could save the prisoner; he
was doomed." Weyer, an eyewitness, wrote that the inquisitors' victims
were "slaughtered with the most refined tortures that tyrants could
invent, beyond human endurance. And this cruelty is continued until

the most innocent are forced to confess themselves guilty." 2

Surviving records, though scanty, paint a hideous picture of the

Inquisition's activities, which were sometimes disbelieved even by
icontemporaries because they were unimaginable. A woman arrested at
Eichstatt in 1637 "laughed heartily" on the first day of her trial at the
idea that she might have trafficked with the devil. She said she would
rather die than accuse herself of such doings; she had lived a

jblameless life with her husband and eight children for more than 20
years. Three weeks later, she died under the torture, confessing that
he was in love with the devil, that she killed one of her children at his
3
bidding, and that at least 45 of her neighbors were fellow-Satanists.
Not even the most saintly had a chance against the inquisitors'
hngines. A 16th-century abbess of the convent of Santa Isabela at

1003
 Torture Cordova, Magdalena de la Cruz, was a woman of "an extraordinary
Nevertheless she was accused and arrested,
reputation for sanctity."
and soon confessed to practicing witchcraft with the help of two familia
4
demons, Balbar and Pithon.
The inquisitors' rule was to keep on torturing until the victim

named many "accomplices," who were then arrested and tortured

more names were given, and so on until whole districts were foun
until

to be "infected" with heresy. One woman told her confessor: "I

never dreamed that by means of the torture a person could be brought

to the point of telling such lies as I have told. I am not a witch, and I

have never seen the devil, and still I had to plead guilty myself and

denounce others." One minister urged a condemned witch to re-

nounce her accusations of innocent people, but she answered, "Father,

look at my legs! They are like fire ready to burn up so excruciat-

ing is the pain. I could not stand to have so much as a fly touch them, t<

say nothing of submitting again to the torture. I would a hundred

times rather die than endure such frightful agony again. I cannot
describe to any human being how terrific the pain actually is."
5
Such
torture was "extensively, viciously, and persistently used and could
break all but the most heroic spirits." 6

Weyer served as a physician in witch prisons and spoke from first-

hand knowledge of women driven half mad "by frequent torture . . .

kept in prolonged squalor and darkness of their dungeons and . . .

constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until they would

gladly exchange any moment this most bitter existence for death, are
at

willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather than

be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid ever recurring torture.'
Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit confessor who also worked in the prisons,

wrote: "All recantation is vain. If she does not confess, the torture is

repeated twice, thrice, four times. In 'exceptional' crimes, the

torture is not limited in duration, severity, or frequency. . . . She can
never clear herself. The
investigating body would feel disgraced if it
acquitted a woman; once arrested and in chains, she has to be guilty, by
7
fair means or foul."

This might be contrasted with the old law of the Ripuarian Franks
that man who killed a woman for any reason whatever must pay a
any
fine so heavy that it obligated his descendants for three generations. 8

Motherhood was a distinct liability for those who fell into inquisi-
tors' hands. Bodinrecommended that children, if "craftily handled,"
could be depended on to inform against their mothers. Children were
also highly susceptible to torture; so a rule was made that children

could be tortured at once, without any waiting period. Elicited by

torture or
by craft, the testimony of "infants"
meaning children
under 10 was acceptable to the Inquisition and could convict their
mothers of witchcraft, even though such testimony was not accepted
in other kinds of trials. 9
Rules for the persecution of witches allowed no revocation of

1004
confessions after torture. Those who tried to retract their confessions Torture
were taken back to the torture chamber and tortured again; once to
purge themselves of the retraction, and once again to elicit a "true" ^^^^^^^^^^^m
confession. Any display of fear was proof of guilt. So was denunciation

by another tortured victim. In 1 597 a 69-year-old woman named

Clara Geissler manage thumbscrew, but confessed every-
to resist the

thing she had been asked after racking and crushing of her feet.
When those she named had been arrested and similarly tortured, Clara
was returned to the torture chamber to confirm their confessions. She
was tortured with "the utmost severity," and died. The record stated
10
that the devil had wrung her neck.

In some cases of retracted confessions, the court automatically

assumed that the confession was true, and the retraction a perjury.
The victim was then declared a relapsed impenitent, and handed over to
the stake. 11

Inquisitors were instructed by their handbooks to give false prom-

ises of mercy for the sake of compliance and confession. 12 There was
no need to keep any promises to an accused witch. If a victim confessed
everything, abjured her heresy, and threw herself on the court's
mercy, her sentence was carried out anyway, on two counts: (1) for the
"temporal injuries" she had caused, and (2) for the worthlessness of
her confession which was made "from fear of death" rather than from
true repentance. 15 The same "worthless" confession, though, was a
legal basis for execution.
Denial of guilt was useless, even if it could be maintained against
tortures. Le
Sieur Bouvet declared that "denial of guilt by a prisoner
was an especially good reason why torture should be continued."
Limborch's History of the Inquisition said it was a simple matter to
by torture from "such as are most innocent." Accord-
extort confession

ing to Cornelius Loos, "Wretched creatures are compelled by the

severity of the torture to confess things they have never done, and so by
cruel butchery innocent lives are taken and by a new alchemy gold
and silver coined from human blood." Von Spee wrote, "The most
robust who have thus suffered have affirmed to me that no crime can
be imagined which they would not at once confess, if it would bring
ever so little relief, and they would welcome ten deaths to escape a

repetition."
H
Records of the Spanish Inquisition at Toledo show that some
victims were prevented from confessing until the lust of their tormen-
tors had been gratified. Their torture went on for days or weeks beyond
the point where they had wholly broken down, and pleaded to be told
15
what to say, so they could say it. Such evidence shows that the
Inquisition really was a system of formalized sadism. The fact that the
vast majority of itsvictims were women points to crypto-sexual motiva-
tionsengendered by repression on a massive scale.
Pope Alexander III said in an encyclical letter that confessions
should not be forced by torture. His successors took it upon themselves

1005
 what Alexander meant was that torture must not

^
Torture to explain that really

be used against clergymen by lay persons; but it could be used by the

laymen. When Innocent
IV adopted torture for eccle-
^^^^^ clergy against
of loss of life or limb," but thi:
siastical trials, he said it should "stop short

was a mere formality, since limbs were broken or crushed routinely in

the torture chamber. When a victim died under torture, inquisitors were
authorized by Pope Urban IV to absolve each other from guilt, to be
16
innocent in the sight of God.
Many semantic devices were used to convey an official impression
that the inquisitors were not monsters of cruelty. Records often said

confessions were given freely, sine tortura et extra locum torturae

"without torture and even out of sight of the instruments of torture."
This meant thatafter the victims were tortured, they were carried into

another room and given the choice of confessing "freely" or being

17
taken back to the torture chamber.
When victims managed to kill themselves in prison, or died of thei

injuries, they were said to

have been slain by the devil. One victim
who succeeded in cutting his own throat was described by Friar Guazzc
as "tempted by a demon," which carried away his soul, "for so did
Divine Justice dispose." 18 Few victims were allowed an opportunity to
kill themselves, for they were closely chained at night; but they could

easilybe devoured by the rats and other prison-infesting vermin attract-

19
ed by the smell of blood and suppurating wounds.
Most victims pleaded for death sooner or later, but pious ones
were further tormented by visions of the hellfire that awaited them,
dying with lies on their lips.
A housewife named Rebecca Lemp ser

letters from prison to her husband and six children, showing radical

alterations in her attitude before and after torture. At she was

first

confident: "My dearly beloved Husband, be not troubled. Were I to be

charged by thousands of accusations, I am innocent, else may all the

demons in hell come and tear me to pieces. Were they to pulverize me,

cut me in a thousand pieces, I could not confess anything. Therefore

do not be alarmed; before my conscience and before my soul I am
innocent. Will I be tortured? I don't believe since I am not guilty it,

of anything."
After she had been tortured five times, and had confessed every

enormity her tormentors suggested to her, Rebecca wrote again to

her husband: "O thou, the chosen of my heart, must I be parted from
thee, though entirely innocent? If so, may God be followed through-
out eternity bymy reproaches. They force one and make one confess;
they have so tortured me. Husband, send
. . . me something that I
may die, or must expire under the
I torture. . . Send me something,
.

20
else may I
peril even my soul."
Another letter smuggled out of the Bamberg prison in 1628 was
written by a man of means, Burgomaster Johannes Junius, whose
property was taken by the inquisitors:

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica.

1006
 Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, Torture

innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must
become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his
^^^^^^^^^^^^m
head and God pity him him ofsomething. I will tell you how
bethinks
it has gone with me. The executioner put the thumb screws on me,
. . .

both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and

everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you
can see from the writing .... Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my
hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought
heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let
me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. The executioner said,

"Sir, I beg you, for God's sake confess something, whether it be true or
not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you

will be put to, and even ifyou bear it all, yet you will not escape. "...

Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die.
And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I
was forced to say through fear of the torture which was threatened
beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the
torture till one confesses something; be he never so good, he must be a
witch. Nobody escapes. Dear child, keep this letter secret so that
. . .

people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the
jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. I have taken several . . .

days to write this; my hands are both lame. lam in a sad plight. Good
night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more. . . . Dear
child, six have confessed against me at once through . . . all false,

compulsion, as they told me, and begged my forgiveness in God's name

before they were executed. 2 '

Torture was euphemistically called "the Question." Making a

show of mercy, handbooks of the Inquisition recommended that the

accused be questioned at first "lightly, without shedding of blood." 22

Sometimes this elicited full confessions. A witch in the diocese of
Constance confessed to having raised a hailstorm by pouring water
into a small hole in the ground after she "had at first been exposed to
the very gentlest questions, being suspended hardly clear of the
25
ground by her thumbs."
Other methods, not quite so gentle, included the rack, thumb-
screw, bootscrew, whips, branding irons, pincers for twisting off
gobbets of flesh, ropes to wind the extremities until blood spurted from
under the nails. A favorite of the judges was the hoist or strappado, a
pulley to haul the victim into the air by her arms bound behind her
back, jerking her up and down until the shoulders were dislocated.

The water torture was common. This consisted of forcing gallons

also of
water into the belly through a funnel put down the throat, sometimes
also forcing down and pulling up long strips of linen along with the
water, or paddling the distended belly with sticks. Feet or hands
24
might be basted with boiling fat and roasted over a brazier. Most of the
instruments were inscribed with the pious motto: Soli Deo Gloria,
25
Glory be only to God.
Dr. Johann Meyfarth witnessed hundreds of witch trials in the

1007
^
Torture

^^^^^^^^^
^^^m
17th century and wrote that he would have given
to be able to forget what
torn from their sockets,
basted with

watched them revel

oil.
he had seen: "feet
a thousand thalers

wrenched off legs, and eyes

and the prisoner burned with brimstone and

He had seen torturers apply flaming balls of brimstone to
the genitals of a woman while she was hanging in strappado. He had
in horror until their victims confessed
26
or died

(strangled by the Devil, the judges explained)."

Execution was still another torture, sometimes miserably protract-

ed, as in Spain where half-burned heretics were snatched from the

flames, alive, and allowed to suffer for hours before being returned
still

to the At the "Witches' Tower" in Hesse, victims were hung 1 5

fire.

feet above ground in niches, and slowly baked to death over a low fire.

Numerous burned bones and skulls were found buried at the base of
the tower.
27
Oddly enough, the tower later became the property of the

novelist Sacher-Masoch, who gave his name to the perversion known

28
as masochism.
A significant detail, speaking psychologically, was that inquisitors
seemed very anxious to make women cry. It was their rule that a

witch was proved guilty if she didn't shed tears during torture. The

judge adjured her to weep, "by the loving tears shed by Christ on the
cross." If she did weep, though, she went to the stake anyway, for it
proved the devil had given her the gift of tears to mislead the
29
judges. If she didn't weep, she was convicted of "taciturnity," a crime

punishable by burning. In England, the punishment for taciturnity

30
was peine fort et dure pressing to death.
England didn't import the engines of torture used on the conti-

nent, but Scotland did. English witch-finders used informal or

bloodless tortures like starvation, "swimming the witch," or "walking
the witch" (preventing her from sleeping until a confession was

made). Various binding tortures were used. An accused witch might

31

be stripped and bound cross-legged on a table, sometimes with ropes

around the neck attached to the four corners of the room, and left in
that position until she confessed. Sometimes, accused witches were so

tightly manacled in jail while awaiting trial, that they came to the

courtroom with limbs rotted by gangrene. Many died of "gaol fever"

(typhus) before they could be tried at all.

Swimming the witch was a relic of the ordeal by water. With
thumbs bound to the opposite big toes, the victim was lowered into a
stream or pond by men holding ropes, one on each bank. If the body
floated, witchcraftwas proved, on the theory that water rejected a
witch. If the body sank, the accused was innocent, although frequently
dead of drowning. The decision was largely dependent on the men
who held the ropes.
Peasant mobs often invented their own tortures for suspected
witches. At Catton in Suffolk in 1603, a mob of men tossed an 80-
year-old woman up in the air, punched her, flashed gunpowder in her
face, and "having prepared a stool in the which they had stuck

1008
daggers and knives with sharp points upwards, they often times struck Torture
her down upon the same stool whereby she was sore pricked and

grievously hurt."
32
^^^^^im
"Pricking" was the favorite technique of witch-finders who
claimed to locate the giveaway witch mark or "devil's mark" on a
witch's body by sticking a three-inch awl into her flesh. The devil's mark
was supposed to be a numb spot, so the pricking would produce no
pain. Most witch-finders used a trick instrument with a retractable blade,
33
dagger, to find the "painless" spot.
like a stage Scottish prickers
formed a regular guild. Among the more famous of them were John
Bain, John Balfour, John Kincaid the "common pricker," and Mat-
thew Hopkins, who pricked hundreds of old women in the country of
Suffolk, and soon announced that the entire area was infested with
witches. 34
The search for the mark was not necessarily definitive, if it failed.

When the Bavarian witch-finder Jorg Abriel couldn't find the mark
on a woman, he simply said she looked like a witch to him, and went on
35
to torture her into admitting it.

Grim Calvinist Scotland instituted tortures as nasty as the conti-

nental ones, though the persecution was less, because the church
made no profit from Perhaps the most famous Scottish witch trial was
it.

conducted in the presence of King James VI (James 1 of England),

who was convinced the witches had caused a storm at sea that nearly
wrecked and badly frightened him. The record said they had
his ship,

done it by throwing a dead cat into the sea. They also set sail on the sea
36
in a sieve.

The alleged ringleader of the "coven" was Dr. John Fian, a

schoolmaster, who displayed exemplary courage in the face of multi-

ple tortures, but his courage did him no good. "His nails upon all his

fingers were riven and pulled off with an instrument called in Scottish
a turkas, which in England we call a pair of pincers, and under every
nail there was thrust in two needles." He was subjected to "thrawing"
(binding the head tightly with a rope), tongue-pricking, and three
sessions in the [Link] "did abide so many blows in them, that his
legs were crushed and beaten together as small as might be, and the
bones and flesh so bruised, that the blood and marrow spouted forth
37
in great abundance, whereby they were made unserviceable for ever."
He was carried to the stake on a cart. 38
The memory of this martyr to superstition was sullied by a
rather bawdy tale that arose after his death. Dr. Fian was said to have
craved the love of a village maiden, and bribed her brother to obtain
three of her pubic hairs for a love charm. The boy was caught by his

mother, who substituted three hairs from a cow's udder. Dr. Fian

accepted these and made his love charm, after which he was pursued
39
through the village by a roaring, lovesick cow.
Through its history, western civilization has been disgraced by
spectacles of formalized infliction of pain upon the helpless. Such

1009
 even contrived in modern "entertainment,"
Torture spectacles are artificially

such as films. G. B. Shaw remarked, "A public flogging will always

____^^_^_ draw a crowd; and there will be in that crowd plenty of manifestations of

a horrible passional ecstasy in the spectacle of laceration and suffer-

40
Sometimes it was so blatant as to embarrass even participants.
ing."'
When Protestants abolished the bloody sport of bear-baiting in
it was cruel to bears and
England, they gave as their reason not that
41
dogs, but that it afforded too much pleasure to the spectators.
Animals and women were perennial victims, even equated with
one another by churchmen who claimed both were devoid of souls.
Among the most savagely tormented were women suspected of enjoy-
ing their sexuality witches, whores, adulteresses. The latter received

public floggings in colonial America: "Public whippings yielded a

vicarious sexual experience a mixture of sadism and mass voyeur-

ism cloaked in righteous disapproval. They gathered on such

. . .

occasions to watch as awoman convicted of uncontrolled desire

bared her back down to the waist and was whipped by a man with a kind

of erotic violence later made notorious by the Comte de Sade." 42

Western civilization came to choose pain over pleasure: to think
pain-giving permissible, fit for public display, even pious, whereas
pleasure-giving of the physical sort was suspect, hidden, "evil." The two
types of behavior seem to be inversely related. If a society suppresses
one, the other will flourish. Studies with laboratory animals show that
individuals conditioned to be highly aggressive have below-normal
sex drive and display little interest in copulation. It has also been

observed among human beings that angry, hostile individuals have

little sexual appetite. 43

Sexually repressed individuals abounded in western society, espe-

cially in the church, which spawned the Inquisition. There were also

less extreme manifestations of the evil. Doctors lauded the salutary

effects of pain. Paullini's Flagellum Salutis (
1
698) recommended
severe beatings for "quick and easy cures" of such disorders as melan-

cholia, paralysis, toothache, sleepwalking, deafness, and

nymphomania. Professor Cullen at Edinburgh taught that "stripes and
blows about the body" help cure maniacs. John Battie, another expert
on the care of the insane, wrote: "Body pain may be excited to purpose
and without the least danger. Beating is often serviceable." 44

Among the most curious manifestations of western man's pain-

obsession was its projection upon women as the givers of pain, almost
as if man collectively sought punishment for his historical offenses

against females. Flagellation was remarkably popular among Victori-

an "puritans." Publisher George Cannon called flagellation "a letch
which has existed from time immemorial, and is so extensively
indulged in London at this day that no less than twenty splendid
establishments are supported entirely by its practice." 45 One writer

said, "Lovers of the birch ... are almost as common as the lovers of
Venus." 46

1010
 But it was Venus who wielded the birch: usually a mother image, Torture

stepmother, aunt, governess, housekeeper, or a large, imposing sort

of courtesan. Swinburne said, "One of the great charms of birching lies ^^^^^^^^^^^
in thesentiment that the floggee is the powerless victim of the furious

rage of a beautiful woman." St. George H. Stock wrote: "When an

elegant high bred woman wields the birch with dignity of mein and
grace of attitude, then both the practice and suffering becomes a real

pleasure." Dugdale published a pornographic book entitled Betsy

Thoughtless, "a most spicey [sic] and piquant Narrative of a Young Girl
obliged to excoriate her sweetheart's bum before he could ravish her
Maidenhead." 47 A typical passage of Victorian "spice" ran:

Martinet meanwhile had taken off her loose morning wrapper, and armed
herself with a rod, formed, not of canes and cuttings like the rest, but of
stout birch stems with innumerable branches, like a tree in miniature.
With this weapon in her hand, how terrible she appeared! Juno
deprived of the apple might have looked like her. Her splendid neck and
arms were bare, her cheeks flamed, her huge breasts were heaving.
Speech was too weak, the graces of birching were ignored, nothing short
ofsavage beating would satisfy her present need of vengeance. *8

Was this a vision of woman wronged or Goddess ignored

through centuries of oppression, surfacing in pornography which by

its very simplicity may give expression to genuinely archetypal imag-
ery? These books were written by men, not women. They presented
men wanted to see in the mind's eye. In one porno-
fantasies that

graphic work, a young man was beaten for insulting his mother, by an
older woman presented as a "nurse" ordinarily, a nurturer or
caretaker. Her bizarre speech ran: "The young gentleman thought, I

dare swear, there was no one could break him of those crimes, but I'll

whip this bold backside of his till I

strip every bit of skin off it, or I'll work
an amendment in him." The youth pleaded, "Try me this once, my
dearest mistress! Oh gracious! Try me! Oh, I'm killed! let me down! let

me down! nurse! nurse! nurse!" She answered, "You may roar, and
cry, and kick, and plunge, and implore, my pretty gentleman, but all will
not do; I'll
whip you till the blood runs to your heels! You shall feel

the tuition of this excellent rod!" 49

William Gladstone, four times prime minister of England, regular-
ly indulged in flagellation and patronized brothels for the purpose, as
was discovered when his diaries were published in 1975. 50 Of course,

English public-school customs of hazing and caning created many

unfortunates whose sexual drives were warped into a confusion between

pleasure and pain; the poet Swinburne presents a well-known exam-

ple. But even older had predisposed all Christendom to this
a tradition

kind of confusion. The sense of sin and guilt attached to all forms of

sexuality; the ubiquitous image of a tortured Christ revered for his

suffering (inflicted on him by Father); the generally accepted theory

that children must be trainedto "fear God" through painful punish-
ments many such things together established a culture of cruelty,

1011
 Transubstantiation where men often judged their own success in life by their level of ability

to make others suffer. This was the real meaning of power.

_^^^^^^^^^_ Psychologically, men who obviously enjoyed torturing women anc
children revealed their own incapacity to inspire love. Sadists find
sadistic behavior satisfying because it can elicit strong emotional re-

sponses from people who would otherwise pay no attention to them.

A sadist doesn't know how to be lovable. This feeling of powerlessness
can be transformed into a feeling of power if he can torture. He can
even achieve something like a sense of bravery or daring, despite the

fact that the victim has no opportunity to retaliate. To subject others

to any violent physical attack is to defy their rage. When such rage is

made completely helpless to express itself, as in the case of a prisoner,

the victim becomes an object of total control which is

precisely what
men yearned to make of women ever since patriarchal thought
introduced the possibility.
Sadism has been called the religion of psychical cripples. 51 It was
also a religion of sexual cripples. Unable to reconcile their concept of

sin with the tenderness and affection that good sexual relatedness

requires, Christians turned to perverted obsessions with pain and

punishment. Western historians were fond of describing the barbarian

cruelties of the ancient
pagan world, as contrasted with a "Christian"
morality of kindness. However, it might appear that of the two ap-
proaches to morality, paganism was the kinder one on the whole. At
least its cruelty was never so mercilessly efficient as that of western

civilization, extending from the Inquisition to the wars and concen-

tration camps of the 20th century.
1. Lea, 1 17. 2. Robbins, 500, 540. 3. Haining, 103. 4. Summers, H. W, 69.
[Link],501. 6. [Link], 43. [Link], 102. [Link], 154. [Link], 15, 16,21.
10. Robbins, 43, 104, 503. 11. Lea, 125. 12. Kramer &
Sprenger, 226, 125.
13. [Link], 290. 14. Robbins,
103,482-83,309. [Link], 157. 16. Coulton, 154-55.
17. [Link], 221. 18. Robbins, 18, 508. 19. H. Smith, 287. 20. Robbins, 303-4.
21. Ewen, 122-23. 22. H. Smith, 285. 23. Kramer &
Sprenger, 149. 24. Plaidy, ch. 8.
25. H. Smith, 286. 26. Robbins, 346. 27. Summers, G.W., 496-97. 28. Robbins, 450.
29. Daly, 64. 30. Robbins, 506. 31. Ewen, 124. 32. Robbins, 509. 33. W. Scott, 240.
34. H. Smith, 294. 35. Robbins, 42. 36. H. Smith, 293;
Robbins, 196. 37. Robbins, 198.
38. Rosen, 201. 39. Seth, 39-40. 40. Pearsall, N.B.A., 181. 41. Woods, 141.
42. Rugoff, 22-23. 43. Fromm, 190, 193. 44.
Bromberg, 53, 102.
45. Pearsall, N.B.A., 257. 46. Weintraub, 163. 47. Marcus, 255; Pearsall,
N.B.A., 258-63.
48. Marcus, 258. 49. Marcus, 256-57. 50. Sadock,
Kaplan &
Freedman, 62.
51. Fromm, 288-90.

Transubstantiation
Catholics claim by the doctrine of transubstantiation that the bread
and wine of the Eucharist is entirely transformed into
Jesus's flesh and
blood, a doctrine as old as primitive cannibalistic blood-sacrifices
when the "symbol" was real because the dying god was in fact eaten.
The Satapatha Brahmana says the first sacrifice most acceptable to
the gods was a man; then a horse was substituted, then a bull, ram, or
goat, and at last "it was found that the gods were most pleased" with
offerings of grain.
1

1012
 Mystery cults of the early Christian era sacrificed and ate their gods Transubstantiation

in the form of bread and wine, whether the "savior" was Osiris,
Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, or Orpheus. Rationalists like Cicero objected to ^^^^^^^^^^
the practice: "When we call the corn Ceres and the wine Bacchus we
use acommon figure of speech; but do you imagine that any one is so
insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?" Yet the

it, transforming the ancient omophagia into

vulgar did indeed believe
and wine-blood of the god who might carry them into
grain-flesh
heaven when he became a part of them. Jesus repeated the same claim
as all other savior gods: "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my
2
blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day."
The theory behind transubstantiation was the most primitive kind
of magic, "the echo of some prehistoric cannibalistic religion. . . .

The flesh and blood consumed becomes an innate part of the diner.
Thus, if a man feeds on a stag, some measure of the animal's
swiftness becomes a part of his own skill; if he drinks the blood of a

warrior, he acquires the warrior's power and strength." 3 If he eats a

god, he becomes godlike.

Literal belief in the conversion of bread and wine into Jesus's flesh

and blood was essential to the idea of salvation, which Christianity

shared with the pagan Mysteries. Doubt on this point was not tolerated.
St. Gregory the Great told of a woman who dared laugh at the

Eucharist, explaining to Gregory, "I laughed because you called this

morsel of bread, which I kneaded with my own hands, the 'Body of

Christ.'"Gregory then prayed, and caused the host lying on the altar to

be changed into "a piece of flesh in the form of a finger." This

convinced the woman, who then ate the bread she had just seen turned
into a finger, and came back to the faith. 4

Even today, those who tried to reinterpret the Eucharist as a purely

symbolic act have been rebuked ex cathedra by the pope. The 1965
encyclical Mysterium Fidei once again insisted on "the marvelous
change of the whole of the bread's substance into Christ's body and
the whole of the wine's substance into his blood." Having never
wavered on churchmen were curiously inconsistent, to say
this point,

the least, in condemning converted Mexican Indians for secretly con-

tinuing their "great heresy and abominable sin," which consisted of
5
making "dough images of their god which were distributed and eaten."
Transubstantiation was one of the primary doctrinal causes of the
Protestant Reformation. John Huss and his colleague Jerome of
Prague went to the stake for denying it, but their martyrdom set off the
war between the papacy and the Bohemian heretics, which ended
with the church's loss of all Bohemia and the foundation of the
6
independent Moravian church. Protestants eventually developed
contempt for Catholic "God-eaters." Heath's 1610 Epigrammes called
them worse than cannibals, who committed only the lesser sin of
7
eating man's flesh. Both factions, perhaps dimly recalling pagan ver-
sions of transubstantiation, viewed witches as cannibals. "Where the

1013
Transvestism basic internal social divisions are between the generations or sexes,
women and children are often cast as witches and cannibals by the
8
^^^^^^^^^^^ dominant males."
There was much satisfaction in pagan communion feasts where
the god was incarnate in an edible animal and distributed even to the

poor, who seldom enjoyed any

meat of their own. But the church came
to regard this kind of feast as too expensive. "The point that really
merits attention is that the nutritive value of the communion feast is

virtually zero, whether there is transubstantiation or not. . . . What

the end of animal sacrifice really signified was the end of ecclesiastical
9
redistributive feasting."

[Link], 27. 2. H. Smith, 168, 200. 3. Jobes, 219. 4. de Voragine, 185.

[Link], 67, 161. 6. H. Smith, 319. 7. Hazlitt, 594-95. 8. Arens, 1 58.
9.M. Harris, 119.

Transvestism
When men began to seek a share of religious and magical knowledge,
formerly the property of women, their original objective was to make
themselves resemble women so the spirits would find them accept-
able. A common method was to put on women's clothes.
Transvestism is found in a majority of ancient priesthoods. Tacitus
said the priests of Germanic tribes were muliebri ornatu, men dressed
up as women. Norse1
priests of sunrise and sunset rituals in honor of the
Haddingjar (Heavenly Twins) were men whose office demanded that
2
they wear the dress and hair styles of women. Even Thor, the thunder
god, received his magic hammer and was filled with power only after
he put on the garments of the Goddess Freya and pretended to be a
bride. 5

At the ancient Argive "Feast of Wantonness" (Hubristika) men

became women by wearing women's dresses and veils, temporarily

assuming feminine powers in violation of a specific taboo. 4 Cretan

priests of Leukippe, the White-Mare-Mother, always wore female
dress. So did priests of Heracles, ostensibly in memory of their god's

service (in female dress) to the Lydian Goddess Omphale, personifi-

cation of the omphalos} The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides
said men in his day put on women's clothing to invoke the aid of the

Goddess Venus. 6
Roman Magna Mater dressed as women, and
priests of the
transvestism figured prominently in Roman rites of the Lupercalia
and the Ides of January. The custom was still prevalent in the time of St.
Augustine, who inveighed against men who clothed themselves in
women's garments at the feast of Janus. He said such men could not
attain salvation, even if they were otherwise good Christians. Before
his conversion to Christianity, St. Jerome even participated in ritual
transvestism, though his biographers tried to pretend that he had
worn women's clothes by mistake.
7

1014
 Despite Augustine and other church fathers, ritual transvestism Transvestism
continued. Men dressed in women's clothes at religious festivals at
Amasea in the 5 th century, and again or still at the Kalends of
^^^^^^^^i
January in the 10th century. Balsamon said in the 12th century even
the clergy participated in pagan rites in the nave of the church, wearing
masks and female dress. 8
Gregory of Tours, bishop of Auvergne in
Merovingian times, was forced to give up his church to a crowd of

"demons," their leader dressed as a woman and seated on the

9
episcopal throne. The inquisitor Jean Bodin asserted that male and
female witches actually changed their sex by changing clothes with
one another. 10
Men's transvestism was rooted in the ancient desire to imitate

female magic. In the Celebes, religious rituals remained in the hands

of women, assisted by an order of priests who wore female dress and
were called tjalabai, "imitation women." The same word was applied
in Arabia to the robe that men copied from women, djallaba. n Among
the northern Batak the shaman is always a woman, and the office is
hereditary in the female line, because there was no transvestism. 12 In
Borneo, magicians are required to wear female clothing. Siberian
shamans often wore women's clothes. Considered greatest were those

shamans who could "change their sex" and become female, taking
husbands and living as homosexual wives. 13
Similarly, American Indians viewed the homosexual or berdache
as a gifted medicine man. He claimed to receive an order from the

Moon-goddess in a dream, to the effect that he must turn female and

become one of her own. He was accepted by the tribe as the woman
he wanted to be, was allowed to wear women's clothes, joined the
women's craft guilds and dance societies. Eliade says, "Ritual and
symbolic transformation into a woman is probably explained by an
H
ideology derived from the archaic matriarchy."
An observer in Maiaya said it was "more than likely that manang-
ism (shamanism) was originally a profession of women, and that men
were gradually admitted to it, at first only by becoming as much like
women as possible." 15
The manang or shaman put on female
clothing after initiation, and remained a transvestite for life. A Dyak
manang wears women's dress and follows women's occupations.
still

"This transvestism, with all the changes that it involved, is accepted

after a supernatural command has been thrice received in dreams: to
refuse would be to seek death. This combination of elements shows
clear traces of a feminine magic and a matriarchal mythology, which
must formerly have dominated the shamanism of the Sea Dyak; almost
all the spirits are invoked by the
manang under the name of Ini
16
('Great Mother')."
The Krishna cult as currently practiced in India still demands ritual
transvestism for men who adore the feminine principle by identifying
themselves with Krishna's Gopis. They wear the clothes and ornaments
of women and even observe a "menstrual period" of a few days'

1015
Tretuilngid retirement each month. According to their theological doctrine, "all

Triangle souls are feminine to God." ,7

^^___^^^_^_
^^^^^^^^"^ 1 Tacitus, 730. 2. Turville-Petre, 219. 3. Oxenstierna,
206. 4. Lederer, 145.
222-23. [Link], 139.
5 Gaster 316 6. King, 50. [Link],83,588. 8. Lawson,
10 Scot 71 11. Gaster, 3 17. 1 2. Eliade, S., 346-47. [Link],416. [Link],S.,258.
15 Briffault 2, 526-27. 16. Eliade, S., 351-52. 17. Rawson, A.T., 109.

Trefuilngid Tre-Eochair
Irish god of the trefoil (shamrock), known as Triple Bearer of the

Triple Key, the same as Shiva the "trident-bearer," referring to a triple

phallus designed to fertilize

the Triple Goddess. The shamrock-god
was assimilated to St. Patrick, another bearer of the trefoil, whose name

meant "father" like that of any tribal begetter. Old legends said the

Irish god's trefoil produced apple, nut, and oak trees, as well as the five

mystic trees representing the five senses. See Shamrock; Trident.

1

1. Graves, W.G., 518.

[Link] Trevia
"Three Ways," a Roman title of Hecate as Goddess of three-way
where her three-faced images received offerings of cake,
crossroads,
fruit, or money. She also ruled springs and fountains. Money is still
offered to the Roman fountain that bears her name, Trevi.
The modern meaning of "trivia" may be related to early attempts

to belittle the cult of the Goddess and render unimportant the old
custom of offering gifts to her image for protection on journeys.

Triangle
Tantric tradition said the triangle was the Primordial Image, or the
female Triangle of Life. It was known as the Kali Yantra, representing
1

Kali as Cunti, or else as the Yoni Yantra, or sign of the vulva. 2 In

Egypt the triangle was a hieroglyphic sign for "woman," and it carried
the same meaning among the gypsies, who brought it from their

original home in Hindustan. 3 In the Greek sacred alphabet, the delta or

triangle stood for the Holy Door, vulva of the All-Mother Demeter
("Mother Delta").
Most ancient symbol systems recognized the triangle as a sign of
the Goddess's Virgin-Mother-Crone trinity and at the same time as
her genital "holy place," source of all life. The triangle represented the

Virgin Moon Goddess called Men-Nefer, archaic deity of the first

4
Mother-city of Memphis. The triangle itself was worshipped in much
the same way that modern Christians worship the cross. Concerning

this, Oriental sages said: "The object of the worship of the Yantra is to

1016
attain unity with the Mother of the Universe in Her forms as Mind, Trident

Life, and Matter . . .

preparatory to Yoga union with Her as She is in Triduana, Saint
herself as Pure Consciousness." 5
The triangle was everywhere connected with the female trinity,
and a frequent component of monograms of Goddesses. To the
6
Gnostics, the triangle signified "creative intellect."
1. Silberer, 170. 2. Muhnnirvanntuntrn, 127. 3. Lederer, 141. 4. Book ofthe Dead, 204.
5. Avalon, 428. 6. Koch, 8-9, 54.

Trident

Symbol of the triple phallus displayed by any god whose function it

wasto mate with the Triple Goddess; a masculine counterpart of the

triangle. In India, the "trident-bearer" was Shiva, bridegroom of tlJ

1
threefold Kali. In the west, the trident passed to such underground or

abyssal gods as Hades, Pluto, Neptune, and Poseidon, and after them
to the Christian devil, their composite descendant.
Celtic retained the original phallic significance of the Triple Trident
myth
Key Holy Door. Like Shiva, the primitive Irish shamrock-god
to the

Trefuilngid Tre-Eochair was a "bearer of the triple key." Symbol of

his Door was the trefoil that the Arabs called shamrakh and the
Hindus worshipped as an emblem of Kali thousands of years before the
first Aryans came to Ireland. 2 The Irish god was quaintly assimilated
to Christianity by a Middle Irish text claiming that he appeared to
Fintan, king of Tara, on the day of Christ's death, bearing a sacred
branch with three fruits, and stone tablets of Celtic property law. 5
Because the trident was generally recognized as a phallus in pagan
tradition, Renaissance "devils" were often pictured with three-

pronged or forked penises. A devil "cum membro bifurcate" was

mentioned in 1 520, and a number of inquisitorial judges said witches
4
copulated with devils whose phalli had two or more points.
l.O'Flaherty, 130. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Indus Valley Civilization." 3. Graves, W.G., 518.
4. Robbins, 466.

Triduana, Saint
Christian transformation of the Triple Goddess, Diana Triformis, in

Scotland. Triduana was the Three Dianas, a threefold Lady of the

Moon. She was credited with the same legend of eye-sacrifice as St.

Lucy, the Christian transformation of Juno Lucina (see Lucy, Saint).

Triduana's shrine at Restalrig was destroyed in 1 560 by a church
arder that declared it "a monument of idolatry." '
So, even as a saint,
jhe proved to be unacceptable to the church that canonized her.
[Link], 131.

1017
Trinity Trinity
From the earliest ages, the concept of the Great Goddess was a trinity

and the model for all subsequent trinities, female, male, or mixed.
Anatolian villages in the 7th millenium b.c. worshipped a Goddess in

three aspects as a young woman, a birth-giving matron, and an old

woman. This Virgin-Mother-Crone combination was Par-
1
typical

vati-Durga-Uma (Kali) in India, Ana-Babd-Macha (the Morrigan)

in

Ireland, or in Greece Hebe-Hera-Hecate,

the three Moerae, the

three Gorgons, the three Graeae, the three Horae, etc. Among the

Vikings, the threefold Goddess appeared

as the Norns; among the

Romans, as the Fates or Fortunae; among the druids, as Diana

Triformis. The Triple Goddess had more than three: she had
hundreds of forms.
Pre-Roman Latium worshipped her as the Capitoline Triad under
name of Uni, "The One," a cognate olyoni. Her three
the collective

personae were Juventas the Virgin, Juno the Mother, and Menarva or
Minerva the wise Crone. Under the empire, Juventas was ousted to
make room for a masculine member of the trinity, Jupiter. 2 Some
modern scholars refer to the two-female, one-male Capitoline Triad
of the later period as "three gods" as if they might describe a group of

two women and one man as "three men." 3

Like three-headed Cumont says, "Oriental theologians developed the idea that the
Kali in India, Egypt's world forms a trinity; it is three in one and one in three."
5
The
primal mother Mut masculine scholar substitutes the neuter "world" for "Goddess," though
had three heads and
An ar- they were in a sense synonymous. It was she who established the
three names.
trinitarian form of Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. Even though
name for Egypt,
chaic
Khem, with a femi- Brahmans evolved a male trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva to
nine ending formed the play these parts, Tantric scriptures insisted that the Triple Goddess had
word for "three" created these three gods in the first
6
place.
Khemt*
The three aspects of the Goddess were personified on earth by
three kinds of priestesses: Yogini, Matri, Dakini nubile virgins,

mothers, and elder women. These were sometimes called "deities of

nature." Manifestations of the Triple Goddess were known as The

Three Most Precious Ones. 7
Negritos of the Malay Peninsula remembered the Goddess as Kari,
a virgin who conceived the first man and woman by eating her own
lotus; yet she was also a trinity called the "three grandmothers under the
earth." 8
Even in pre-Columbian Mexico the Virgin Goddess who gave
birth to the Savior Quetzalcoatl was a trinity, one of "three divine
sisters." Like the Semitic Mary, she was a birth-giver, mother, and

death-bringer all at once, for she was also known as the Precious

Stone of Sacrifice, apparently represented by the altar on which her

savior-son's blood was poured out. 9

Mother of the Greek gods was a trinity composed of Virgin Hebe,

Mother Hera, and Crone Hecate; at Stymphalus she was wor-
10
shipped as Child, Bride, and Widow. Each of her personae could be a

1018
trinity again, so she could be the Muses or the Ninefold Goddess. Trinity

Hecate was called Triformis and shown with three faces, each a lunar
11
phase. Among the Irish she was the Triple Morrigan, or Morgan, ^^^^^^^^^^^
sometimes multiplied into "nine sisters" who kept the Cauldron of
12
Regeneration and ruled the western isle of the dead.
The Goddess Triformis
ruled heaven as Virgin, earth as Mother,
and the underworld Crone, or Hel, or Queen of the Shades. This
as

was remembered even in Chaucer's time, for his Palamon invoked her
"Three Forms," Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, Proserpine in
hell.
13
The old name of Sicily, Trinacria, invoked her as a "center of the
earth" with three realms.
Bardic romances abounded in manifestations of the Triple God-
dess. Wayland the Smith married her, after she first appeared to him
14
as three magic doves. King Arthur went to Avalon with her. The
triadic Guinevere was another version of her. Sir Marhaus (Mars)
encountered her as the Three Damosels at their magic fountain: the
eldest "threescore winters of age, wearing a garland of gold; the

second of age, wearing a circlet of gold; the youngest

thirty winters
15
fifteen winters of age, wearing a wreath of flowers." Fifteen was the
number of the pagan Virgin Kore, the pentacle in the apple. Mythic
virgin mothers, like that of Zoroaster, typically the age of
gave birth at

1 5. Double that was the Mother's age, double again the age of the

Crone.
The Middle East had many trinities, most originally female. As
time went on, one or two members of the triad turned male. The
usual pattern was Father-Mother-Son, the Son figure envisioned as a
Savior. 16

The notion of a trinity appeared during the 14th century B.C.

among the Hatti and Mitanni. In the 5th century B.C., a popular
Babylonian trinity was composed of Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar Sun,
Moon, and Star. In Greece this was repeated as Helios the sun,
Selene the moon, and Aphrodite the star. A Father-Mother-Son trinity
was worshipped at Costopitum as Jupiter Dolichenus, Celestial
17
Brigantia, and Sal us.
Gnostic versions of the trinity followed the Father-Mother-Son

patterns of the contemporary east, with the Holy Ghost recognized as

a female Sophia, the Dove, worshipped as the Great Goddess in

Constantinople, and viewed by most Gnostics as the Shakti of God.
The Christian God was originally modeled on Far-Eastern heaven-
fathers, such as Brahma and Dyaus Pitar, all of whom needed their
female sources of "Power," or else they could not act. 18 Therefore, a
female member of the triad was essential even to God. Among
Arabian Christians there was apparently a holy trinity of God, Mary,
and Jesus, worshipped as an interchangeable replacement for the
Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. 19
During the Christian era, all-male trinities became popular among
Germanic tribes. Woden, Thor, and Saxnot were worshipped together

1019
 Norsemen called them Odin,
Triptotemus by Saxons of the 8th and 9th centuries.
Tristan Tyr, and Frey. According to a certain fragmentary myth, the Triple

^^^^^^^^^^ Goddess seems to have been burned as a witch. She had to be burned
to ashes three times. Afterward, youth, beauty, and love in the person of

Freya departed from Asgard; and there

was war in heaven. 20
Like many other remnants of paganism, the female trinity is still

associated with marriage. Breton wedding ceremonies celebrated the

three phases of the bride's life, impersonating her first by a little girl,
21
then by the mistress of a house, then by an old grandmother.
Modern weddings still retain the flower girl and the matron of honor,
but significantly the Crone
figure has vanished.

August Comte nearly revived the female trinity in his vision of

woman as mediator between man and the guiding moral spirit.
Mother, wife, and daughter were to represent man's unity with past,
and future; also with what Comte called the three altruistic
present,
22
instincts: veneration, attachment, benevolence. In plainer words, these
were what women want from men: respect, love, kindness.
1. Stone, 17. 2. Dumezil, 1 16. 3. Carter, 26. 4. Budge, G.E. 1,317.
5. Cumont, A.R.G.R.,69. 6. de Riencourt, 167. 7. Waddell, 129, 169.
8. Hays, 352. 9. Campbell, P.M., 458. 10. Graves, G.M. 1, 52. 1 1 d'Alviella, 183.
.

12. Graves, W.G., 406; Rees, 193. 13. Chaucer, 81, 51 1. 14. Keightley, 215.
15. Malory 1,115. 16. Briffault 3, 96. 17. Lindsay, O.A., 1 12, 328, 375; Norman, 71.
[Link],25. 19. Ashe, 206. 20. Branston, 112, 213-14. 21. Crawley 2, 51.
22. [Link], 401.

Triptolemus
"Three Plowings," name or title of the young god with whom
Demeter lay three times in the plowed fields of Crete, before he was
slain. He mated three times with the Triple Goddess (naturally) to
fertilize each of her; he was not Pluto, the god of the trident, able to do
it once. Triptolemus's other
all at names were Iasius or Iasion,

cognates of Jesus and Jason.

1

1. Graves, G.M. 1,89,93.

Tristan

Cult hero of the courtly-love movement; a wizard, poet, dragon-

slayer, lover, and perhaps also a Tantric adept. When he met his Shakti
in the form of Iseult, he reversed the syllables of his name and
introduced himself as Tantris, which may have been a secret bardic pun
or "recognition sign." '
Iseult was the wife of Mark of
Though King
Cornwall, the poets called King Mark a "felon" for trying to prevent her
from choosing her own lover. As a faithful votary of the Goddess of
Love, Tristan was said to have been reincarnated in another of her
votaries, Thomas Rhymer.
[Link],L.M.A.,238.

1020
Tritone Tritone

Athenians claimed their Goddess Athene was born from Zeus's head,
but her real origin was North African, in "an epoch when fatherhood ^^"^^^^^^^"
was not recognized." Her Libyan mother was Tritone, the Third
Queen, and her birthplace was Lake Tritonis, "the Three Queens." .

Herodotus said Athene's dress and the attributes of her cult were
borrowed from those of Libyan women. See Athene; Neith. 1

1. Graves, G.M. 1,44.

Trolls

Earth-demons, called Trulli in Burton's Anatomy ofMelancholy}

The word "trull," a loose woman, grew from the same root; thus the
Troll was probably at first one of the pagan Hags or earth-priestesses.
Norse folklore said trolls commonly sat under bridges, waiting to
seize and eat those who crossed the bridge without making them an
offering. Association with bridges suggests the Valkyries who guarded
Bifrdst, the Bridge of Heaven; they too were "trulls" or "trolls." The

Angels of Death were said to congregate at a divine Sabbat called the

1
trolla-thing.
1 .
Wedeck, 107. 2. J.B. Russell, 48.

Tuat
Egyptian word for the underworld; sometimes a uterine cavity,
sometimes a great snake around the world's outer rim, the same as the

Phoenicians' Taaut.

Tuatha De Danann
"People of the Goddess Dana," early matriarchal settlers of Ireland,
who dwelt in their barrow-graves and sacred mounds.
later called fairies

Dana, Danu, Ana, Dinah, Diana, and other such names designated
the Aryan Great Goddess worshipped by Danes, Celts, Saxons, and

many other tribes in Europe and the Middle East.

Tu Kueh
Legendary eponymous founder of the Turkish nation, suckled and
brought up like Romulus by a divine She- Wolf, whom he later
married. See 1

Dog.
[Link],228.

1021
Tuteta Tutela
Twins "Goddess of the City," title of any divine Mother who took a
^^^^m^mmm particular town
under her protection. Her emblem was the mural
crown, signifying that everything within the city walls was held in her
the crown.
thought. Medieval kings copied

Tutunus
Phallic god of Roman weddings; another name for Priapus. Brides

deflowered themselves on the erect penis of the god's statue, in order

that the god, not a man, should "open the matrix" as the biblical
1

phrase goes, and the firstborn child

could be considered God-begotten.
as a Virgin Bride of God.
Any woman thus deflowered was described
The god himself was a Christos, "anointed," because his phallus was
anointed with chrism or holy oil. The custom was still common in the

4th century a.d. See Firstborn.

1. Simons, p. 77.

Twins
Dylan and Lieu, twin powers of darkness and light, were born
simultaneously from the womb of Arianrhod, Celtic Goddess of the
1
star- wheel.

Castor and Pollux, twin gods of the morning and evening star,
were born simultaneously from the womb of Leda, or Latona, primal
mother of the World Egg in Greek myth. 2
Shaher and Shalem, twin gods of the morning and evening star in

Canaan, were born simultaneously from the womb of Helel, the Pit,

a dark yonic aspect of the Goddess Asherah, she who swallowed the
3
Father-god El.
Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, God and the devil, were twins born
simultaneously from the womb of Zurvan, the primal two-faced an-
drogynous being who personified Infinite Time to the Persians. The
event is shown on a famous silver plaque from Luristan, dated in the

8th century b.c. 4

American Indians said the White Manitu or Lord of Life and the
Black Manitu or Lord of Death were twins, born simultaneously from
the womb of the Moon-goddess, called The Old Woman Never Who
Dies, the real ruler of all gods and men. 5
Gnostics said the sun god Sol, Helios, or Apollo had a dark twin,
known as Sol Niger (Black Sun), king of the nether world. The

Chaldeans called him Aciel. 6 The light god was transformed into the
dark god when he entered into conjunction with their common mother,
the Moon.

Throughout all
mythologies the same pair can be found: twins of

1022
light and darkness, born from the Great Mother. Every dualistic Tyche
religion-such as Zoroastrianism-opposing a principle of evil to a princi- Typhon
pie of good had to begin with the two principles personified as offspring ^^^^^^^^^^^^
of the primordial womb. Hence the medieval heretics' claim that God
and the devil were twin brothers; for if there were no dark twin, then
God had to be made responsible for evil. See Devil.
1. Squire, 261. 2. Graves, CM. 1, 246. 3. Hooke, M.E.M., 93. 4. Larousse, 323.
5. Briffault 2, 729-32. 6. Jung & von Franz, 200.

Tyche
Greek "Fortune," also called Dike or Moera; the Goddess of Destiny
either for the universe, or for the individual soul. 1 Tyche Basileos was
the title of the "female soul" or Fortune-goddess of a
king. No ruler
had any power to act unless the Goddess Tyche looked upon him with
favor. See Fortune.

[Link],289.

Typhon
Greek name of the Egyptian ass god Set, whose breath was the hot
wind supposed to bring pestilence (typhus). The name was pan-Asiatic:
t'aifung in China, tufan in Arabia, "typhoon" in southeastern Asia.
This god of winds was probably based on the Vedic ass god Ravana. In
all the ancient world, a hot desert wind that brought pestilence was
called the Breath of the Ass. See Ass.

1023
t

9-J

'-akJU . i-
 U V

Mary is the West's most

famous virgin, but
unmarried maidens ap-
peared throughout
ancient and medieval
history and mythol-
ogy. This carved and
painted wood panel,
"Christ in the Virgin's
Womb," is German,
ca. 1400.

The Roman venus is

best known as a love

goddess, but she was

much more, including
goddess of birth and
death. This early 19th

century school-girl paint-

ing is called "Venus
Drawn by Doves," but
the artist and title are
actually unknown.

The Saxon goddess Ur-

sel, the She-Bear, was
eventually transmogri-
fied into SAINT URSULA

by the Christian fathers.

She was so smart,
pretty, and pure that to
marry her, Prince
Conon of England met
her every whim:
1 1 ,000
virgin handmaid-
ens, a three-year
pilgrimage to holy
shrines, and Conon's
own conversion in the
bargain. Conon and
the 11,000 were dis-
patched by the Huns,
and since Ursula refused
to marry their leader,
he shot her with three
arrows. Benozzo
Gozzoli; painting on
wood; Florence, 1 5th
century.
Uchati Uchati
UKte of sacred harlots of Ishtar, whose duty it was to make
title
"Weepers,"
m^mi^m^m formal lamentations for the dead. They also wailed for the dead savior
1

Tammuz in the temple of Jerusalem, where Ishtar was worshipped as

of Heaven (Ezekiel 8:14). Their title was related to
Mari, Queen
Divine Eyes, sacred to the Goddess
Egyptian Utchatti or Udjatti,
Maat as the All-Seeing Eye, whose hieroglyphic eye emblem later
2
became associated with the cult of Horus.
1 .
Assyr. & Bub. Lit, 413.2. Budge, A.T., 360.

Uma
Kali's Destroyer or Crone aspect, also known as Prisni, mother of the
dark season and of the "demon" Maruts and Rudras. In the Skanda
Purana, Uma appeared as a demoness with a vagina dentata: "hard
teeth like thunderbolts with sharp tips inside the vagina."
l
Sometimes
Uma was called Daughter of the Mountains, or Daughter of Heav-
en that is, of Himalaya, which meant both mountain and heaven. As
the wife of Shiva, Uma was a patroness of yogic asceticism. In most of
her forms she was recognizable as Mother Death.
l.O'Flaherty.257.

Umbra
"Shade," the shadow-soul that Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Semites,
and other ancient peoples believed in. After death, the umbra went to
the Land of Shades, to live a dark, bloodless pseudo-life. See
Shadow.

Ummati
Title of Assyrian priestesses, meaning "mothers of creation," for
umm was the Semitic version of the Om or Creative Word attributed tc
Kali in India. To be admitted to the Holy of Holies, a woman had to
have borne children to prove she had the spirit of fertility and the
"wisdom of motherhood."

Uncle
Before recognition of physical fatherhood, and even for a long time
after it, most people viewed a mother's brother as a child's nearest male

relative, because he was united with the mother and the mother's
mother by the all-important matrilineal blood bond. Hawaiians still use

1026
the same word for "father" and "uncle" because formerly they made Uni
no between them.
distinction
1
Unicorn
Tacitus said Germanic barbarians regarded the relationship be- ^^^^^^^^^^^^
tween sister's sons and maternal uncles as "more sacred and binding"
than the relationship between sons and fathers. 2 The same was true of
the Celts. Early Christian missionaries in Ireland had to call Christ
"our sister's son," because that was the only masculine relationship held
sacred by the people. J

Malory said the whole purpose of introducing Christianity into

Britain was to establish laws of patrilineal succession and the authority
of father. Among the pagans, fathers and sons cared nothing for one
another. 4 Only nephews and maternal uncles had a true blood bond.
More recently among the Semang, enlightened sages and prophets
were known as nephews of God, not sons of God. 5
Fathers were of no significance in family relationships among the
matrilineal clans of early Latium. Inheriting this tradition, even
patriarchal Romans distinguished between a father's brother, patruus,

and a mother's brother, avunculus derived from avus, "ancestor."

The patruus was unimportant and usually ignored. 6 The avunculus was
the true uncle, as shown by the very word "uncle" which descended
from his title, and "avuncular" which implies a benevolent interest.
Europe still retains a linguistic memory of the dual-uncle system. A
father's brother is just an uncle; but a mother's brother is called "own
uncle."

Systems of uncle relationships were always older than those of

paternity, having descended from the matriarchal period when father-
hood was not understood. See Motherhood.
[Link].W.R, 194. 2. Tacitus, 719. 3. Rees, 145.
4. Malory 2, 179, 199. 5. Eliade, S., 337. 6. M. Harris, 80.

Uili var. Unial

Etruscanname for the Great Mother's holy trinity, a "three-in-one"

Goddess who gave birth to the uni-verse. She was represented by the
sign of female genitals; Uni was a cognate of "yoni." In Rome, the
three were worshipped as the early Capitoline Triad of Virgin-Mother-
Crone (Juventas, Juno, Minerva); but in Imperial times the virgin
Goddess was removed to make room for Jupiter. The name of Uni 1

evolved into Iune, or Juno.

1. Hays, 181.

Unicorn
Classic symbol of the phallic horse deity, or sacred king incarnate in a
horned horse. According to medieval legend, the unicorn could be
captured only by a virgin girl, because his irresistible desire was to lay

1027
 his "horn" in a lap. While thus engaged,
maiden's he was incapable of
Urania
(However, no unicorns were ever captured.)
Uraceus resisting capture.
The unicorn was a secret phallic consort of the virgin Mary, shown
inside her "enclosed garden" of virginity, in many examples of
Christian mystical art. At times he was identified with the Savior. A
medieval hymn called Christ "the wild wild unicorn whom the
'

Virgin caught and tamed."

A source of the unicorn myth may have been the Babylonian
dragon-beast made up of a horselike body with lion's forelegs, scales,
a snakelike neck and a flat horned head with a single spike growing from
the center of the nose.
2
One
theory proposes that the unicorn was
originally the bull of spring, rearing up
and struggling with the lion of
summer. Babylonian art showed both animals in profile, so the bull

appeared to have only one horn. The British coat of arms still has "the
lionand the unicorn" contending in just such a manner. 3
Explorers thought they found the legendary unicorn in the African
rhinoceros. Because of the unicorn's phallic significance, powdered
rhinoceros horn became a highly popular "remedy" for impotence, and
is so used even today. 4
1. Harding, 51. 2. Hooke, S.P., 135. 3. Jobes, 254. 4. Woods, 176.

Uraeus
Egyptian serpent symbol, a hieroglyphic sign for "Goddess," suggest-
ing that in pre-dynastic times it was thought all serpents were female
and divine. The serpent-mother was one of Egypt's oldest divinities,
and her uraeus-snake idol signified healing. Egyptian Moses copied this

magic with his "brazen serpent" (Numbers 21:9). Egyptian rulers

wore the uraeus-snake in the form of a rearing cobra on the forehead,
representing the "third eye" of mystical insight. Despite patriarchal
opposition to the symbol of the she-serpent Uraeus, among later
Gnostic Christians her name became one of the "secret names of
God." See Serpent.

Urania
"Celestial One," title of Aphrodite as Queen of Heaven. Her former
consort Uranus was transformed into her castrated "father" in classical

myth; Uranus's patricidal son threw his severed genitals into the sea,
and the sea-womb brought forth Aphrodite. Actually, Celestial Aphrodi-
te and the sea-womb were one and the same: manifestations of the

Triple Goddess. The

castrated dying god was her ubiquitous son-lover
who died, her by his death, and begot himself again.
fertilized

Uranus was a western form of Varuna, a deity of indeterminate

sex, sometimes a male-turned-female like Hermes or Teiresias. To

1028
the Persians he was varan, a spirit of sexual intercourse like the Hindu Urd
Kama. His name came from envelop vr, to a female function and Urine
he performed female-imitative miracles, such as turning water into ^^^^^^^^^^^^
blood, giving birth to the sun, and measuring the earth. From the
1

Asian precedents it
may be assumed that Urania and Uranus were the
same primal androgyne as Jana-Janus, Diana-Dianus, etc.

1. Campbell, Or.M, 177.

Urd var. Urth

One of the Norse names of Mother Earth, in addition to Urtha,

Erda, Eartha, Wyrd, Wurd, Word, Weird, etc. Urd was usually called
the divine fount of wisdom tended by the three Norns (Fates) under
the root of the World Tree; it was also the name of the oldest Norn, an
Earth Goddess who knew everything, past, present, and future. The
gods couldn't render judgment unless they gathered at the fount of Urd,
because they were helpless without the wisdom imparted by the
Urdarbrunnr, "Stream of Urd," which gave life and mind. Old mythol-
ogies held that the fount of wisdom was female, and without it

neither men nor gods could know anything. Another

1
name for the

fountain was Mimir, which means "Mother," although the same

name was given later to Odin's maternal uncle, who brought him back
to life with fluid from the Mother-spring and taught him the wisdom
of the runes.
1 .
Branston, 76.

Urim and Thummim

Divinatory knucklebones or "dice" used by Jewish priests, probably
copied from the oracular knucklebones said to have been invented by
Hermes. Kings of Israel governed their acts by the prophecies of the
Urim and Thummim (1 Samuel 28:6). Levitical law directed that these
articles be carried
high priest's "breastplate of judgment"
in the

whenever he entered the tabernacle, so the mana of the holy place

would enter into them and yield correct prophecies (Exodus 28:30).

line
rom Uranus, "Father Heaven," whose magical urine, semen, or
iloodcame down as rain to fertilize Mother Earth. Primitive myths
resent all three fluids as the fertilizing principle. Zeus came down as

'golden rain" of urine to fertilize Danae, the Earth, whose priestesses

le Danaids performed charms by carrying water in a sieve.
rain

ccording to Aristophanes, rain was caused by Zeus urinating through a

1029
 s i eve . mentioned the general belief that "Zeus does not rain
Ursu| ^ Sjint Aristotle

in order to make the crops grow, but from necessity," suggesting that

^" ^^ Zeus rained for the same reason men urinated because he had to.
1

The Danaids founded the Eleusinian rite of Thesmophoria, when

the severed genitals of the sacred king were offered to the Goddess,

just as the severed genitals of Uranus were given to the sea-womb. The
real genitals of a
were eventually replaced by symbolic
real victim

substitutes: serpents and phallus-shaped loaves of bread. But the mean-

a summoning of the god's urine, semen, or
ing was the same
2
blood.

Aeschylus said of the Danaids' performance: "Rain falling from

the bridegroom sky makes pregnant the Earth. Then brings she forth
for mortals pasture of flocks and corn, Demeter's gift, and the fruitful-

ness of trees is brought to completion by the dew of their marriage."

As the Goddess was both Earth and Sea, the rain-urine-seed-blood, etc.,
"
fell on both. The priestesses looked up to the sky and cried, "Rain!
"?
Then they looked down to the earth and cried, "Conceive!
Rain-making was a chief function of Heavenly Fathers every-
where. Rome's begetting god was Jupiter Pluvius,

Jupiter-Who-Makes-Rain, another version of Zeus, who was in turn a

replacement for Uranus. Even after the essential fluid was definitely
identified as semen, the other fluids were not forgotten. Urine remained

a popular rain charm. Shamans in Siberia used to bring rain by

"making water" on the naked body of a woman who represented the

4
earth. In Iraq, when rain was wanted, a female dummy called the
Bride of God was placed in a field, in the hope that God would "make
water" on her. 5
1. Guthrie, 38. 2. Graves, CM. 1,202,205. 3. Guthrie, 54. 4. Frazer.G.B., 80-81.
5.Briffault3,210.

Ursula, Saint
Christianized form of the Saxon Goddess Ursel, or Horsel, the
"Ercel" of Thomas Rhymer's Erceldoune, and the Venus of the

Horselberg-Venusberg. Ursel means "She-Bear," the title of Artemis

Calliste, the same as the Helvetian Goddess Artio, in the guise of Ursa
Major, the Great Bear (Big Dipper), whose constellation circles the

pole star without disappearing into the sea. The ancients said Artemis
the She-Bear ruled all the stars until Zeus usurped her place. 1
The mythical St. Ursula was accompanied by eleven thousand
virgins, acommon pagan image of the Moon-goddess accompanied
by her children, the stars. One of the Goddess's foremost shrines was
Cologne, where "Ursel" was converted into a Christian heroine to
account for the reverence paid to her by the local people.
The tale on which Ursula's canonization was based was first

invented about the 9th century a.d.; then, "During the 12th century

1030
this pious romance was preposterously elaborated through the mistakes Ursula, Saint

of imaginative visionaries; a public burial-ground uncovered Co- at

logne was taken to be the grave of the martyrs, false relics came into ^^^^^^^^^mK^
circulation and forged epitaphs of non-existent persons were
2
produced."
The churchmen claimed that St. Ursula was a Breton princess
betrothed to Conon, prince of England, in the 5th century a.d. Prior
to her marriage, she took her eleven thousand virgins on a pilgrimage.

While passing through Cologne, they were attacked and slaughtered

by the Huns, at the instigation of two Roman generals who feared the

Christian ladies' exemplary piety would convert all the northern

3
barbarians to Christ.
This fable was intended to Christianize the lunar bear-goddess
worshipped at Cologne, the same who was Artio, the Helvetian
"Mother of Animals," with another cult center at Berne ("She-Bear"),
4
where her portrait appears on the Bernese coat of arms. Ursel
still

and Artio were alternate names of the triple Artemis who took the
"bear-king" Arthur to paradise. The Greeks said Artemis Calliste,
"Fairest One," was associated with both the moon and the constellation
of the Great Bear. In Britain, Ursa Major was often called "Mistress
5
Ursula," at first a title ofthe Goddess, later transferred to the saint.
Artemis the She-Bear was so widely recognized as the Mother
of Animals that the island once sacred to her, Callista, is still called
6
Thera, "She-Beast." Arcadians traced their descent from her son
Areas, the Little Bear (Ursa Minor), a bear-god like the Celtic Arthur.
Hellenic mythographers pretended that Arcas's mother was a mere
nymph, Calliste, who was punished for losing her virginityby receiving
the form of a bear, along with her child; but Artemis took pity on
them and placed them in the stars as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. This

version ofthemyth was invented "to account for the traditional

connection between Artemis and the Great Bear." 7 The Christian
version was invented for different reasons, but with the same ultimate
aim: to mortalize the Goddess.
Some memory of Ursula the Moon-goddess seems to haunt the
foundation ofthe Ursuline order of nuns, by St. Angela Merici in
1506. Catholic authorities now claim the Ursulines were the oldest
order of teaching nuns. But most convents were centers of learning
for women until the church forbade women's education in the 1 3th
8
century. The Ursulines were perhaps the only order of teaching
nuns who remained obedient to the papacy, and so were permitted to
continue.
Yet the Ursulines began under a cloud of suspicion. Angela Merici
was which Pope Calixtus III described as a hotbed
a native of Brescia,

of witches. 9 Angela's first group of sisters numbered exactly 28, the

lunar number. They made their first devotion in a church dedicated
to another mythical saint who was only another transformation ofthe
Goddess, St. Afra or Aphra (Aphrodite). 10 Angela was not allowed to

1031
 establish her holy society of teachers until forty years had passed since
U^jert
her original vision, which she received not in a church but in an open

^^ fieldunder the moon. She and her women had no religious

homes
habit, no

vows, no communal life. They went to their pupils' to teach,

like itinerant governesses.

The church was not interested in Angela until she underwent

"popular" canonization in her

home territory. Two centuries later,
the church decided to take advantage of the popularity of her cult by
declaring her Blessed. Finally in 1807 she was canonized by Pope
Pius VII.
11
But she is still almost as vague and dim as the Ursuline lunar
She-Bear that the people of Brescia once worshipped. A 20th-
century Catholic scholar mentioned her with one of those curious slips
of the pen so common among patriarchal writers; he said the
Ursuline order was founded by "Bishop Angela of Brescia."
n
1. Graves, G.M. 1,86. 2. Attwater, 333-34. 3. Guerber, L.R., 66. 4. Larousse, 226.
Jobes, 266. 6. Herodotus, 251. 7. Graves, G.M. 1, 84,
5. 86. 8. Bullough, 160.
9. M. Harrison, 240. 10. Attwater, 46. 11. Encyc. Brit, "Angela Merici."
12. Brewster, 459.

Ur-Text
Greatest legendary treasure of medieval Hermetic magic, after the
Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. The Ur-text was supposed to

be a magical grammar of the primordial tongue, whose words God

pronounced at creation in order to bring forth the things themselves;
that is, the words could create, just by being spoken. The idea was

based on eastern notions of the creative power of Sanskrit, the Mother-

language. Another development of the idea was the Neoplatonic

1

Logos or "Seminal Word," which was adopted as a Christian dogma.

(See Logos.)
Presumably the Ur-text emanated from Abraham's "Ur of the
Chaldees," famous as the home of magic and astrology. The medi-
eval theory was that all words and names exerted some influence over
their objects, hence the efficacy of both magic spells and liturgies. But
in all known languages, the power of the word was slightly displaced
from the true essence of the thing, as the calendar was slightly
displaced from the sidereal year. In the Ur-text, words were precisely
aligned with essences or "souls," so the words could control things
and events absolutely.
The were the same as in the Hindu idea of the "holy
implications
language" of Sanskrit. Knowledge of the Ur-text would give a man
absolute power over the universe; whatever he said would come true at
once.

Many magicians identified the Ur-text with the equally wonderful

Book ofThoth, named Egyptian god of magic and men-
after the

tioned in very old Egyptian folk tales as a written version of Thoth's

technique for creating by the power of the Word. One story claimed

1032
the book was found by a sage named Satni-Khamois in a Memphite Ur-Text
tomb. contained only two formulae but they were great hekau
It

of
(words power) :
^^^^^^^^^^^
The two formulae that are written there, if thou recitest the first of them,
thou shalt charm the heaven, the earth, the world of the night, the
mountains, the waters; thou shalt understand what all the birds of heaven
and the reptiles say, as many as there are. Thou shalt behold the fish,
for a divine power will bring them to the surface of the water. If thou

readest the second formula, even when thou art in the tomb, thou shalt
resume the form thou hadst on earth; thou shalt also behold the sun rising
in the heavens, and his cycle ofgods, also the moon in the form that
she has when she appears. 2

The first beneficiaries of this wondrous magic became immortal,

not by reading the book but by eating the papyrus it was written on al-

though the book continued to exist, hidden in underwater vessels

5
guarded by the Great Serpent. Eating instead of reading a piece of
magical literature was a common Oriental method of absorbing the

magic words even when one is unable to read. In Tibet,

virtue of

Madagascar, China, and Japan it was customary to cure diseases by

writing the curativecharm on paper and eating the paper, or its ashes. 4
Tartar lamas wrote the names of medicines on paper and made the

patient swallow the prescription; for they believed "To swallow the
name of a remedy, or the remedy itself . . . comes to precisely the
5
same thing."
The same notion was often found in the west. The modern
pharmacist's Rx began as a curative symbol of Saturn, written on
paper and eaten by the patient. A common medieval prescription for
6

toothache was a paper bearing the magic words by which Jesus

removed a worm from St. Peter's tooth. 7 The Venerable Bede declared
that scrapings from the pages of "books that were brought out of
Ireland," when drunk in water, instantly cured snakebite. 8

With many different kinds of credulity in regard to the written

so
words among the majority to whom all writing was a
especially
mysterious, unknown magic it is hardly
surprising that belief in the
Book of Books, the Ur-text, survived. Some of the beliefs concerning
the Ur-text became attached to the Latin Bible, which the medieval
church would not allow to be translated into any other language,
even though the readings from the pulpit were quite incomprehensible
to most congregations. The theory was that Latin was the language of
St. Peter's Roman see, andGod intended the Bible to be written in that
language and no other; for the magic efficacy of the words lay in their
sound, which would be lost if they were rendered in another tongue.
Thus, out of superstitious belief in the power of the Word, the
church kept the "dead" language of Latin alive within its own in-group
for over 1 500 years.
1. Mahanirvanatantra, cvii. 2. Maspero, 118. 3. Maspero, 129. 4. Gaster, 299.
5. Wedeck, 1 12. 6. Waddell, 401. 7. Leland, 38. 8. de Paor, 18.

1033
Uta-Napishtim Uta-Napishtim
Vagina Dentata the flood hero who carried progeni-
Babylonian prototype of Noah:
mbm^^^mmm torsof all creatures through the Deluge on his ark. He was the only man
to become immortal, because he married the Goddess who dispensed

shiba, the fluid of life. See Gilgamesh.

Uther Pendragon
See Arthur.

Uzza
"Powerful One," Jewish traditions, a rebellious angel who stole
in

divine secrets of magic and revealed them to Eve. Originally, a title of

the Arabian Moon-goddess, Al-Uzza, the Powerful One probably a
version of the Crone. See Arabia.

Vac
The "Voice" that pronounced the first creative Word, Om; a Hindu

Goddess described in the Rig Veda as the First, the Queen, the
Greatest of All Deities. See Logos.
1

[Link] 1,7.

Vagina Dentata
"Toothed vagina," the classic symbol of men's fear of sex, expressing

the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner
during intercourse. Freud said, "Probably no male human being is
spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the
female genitals." l But he had the reason wrong. The real reason for
shock" is mouth-symbolism, now recognized universally
this "terrifying

inmyth and fantasy: "It is well known in psychiatry that both males
and females fantasize as a mouth the female's entranceway to the
2
vagina."
The more patriarchal the society, the more fear seems to be
aroused by the fantasy. Men of Malekula,
having overthrown their
matriarchate, were haunted by a yonic spirit called "that which draws us
to It so that It may devour us." 3 The Yanomamo said one of the first

beings on earth was a woman whose vagina became a toothed mouth

and bit off her consort's penis. Chinese patriarchs said women's
genitalswere not only gateways to immortality but also "executioners of
men." 4 Moslem aphorisms said: "Three things are insatiable: the

1034
desert, the grave, and a woman's vulva." 5 Polynesians said the savior- Vagina Dentata
god Maui tried to find eternal life by crawling into the mouth (or

vagina) of his mother Hina, in effect trying to return to the womb of the ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Creatress; but she bit him in two and killed him. 6
Stories of the devouring Mother are ubiquitous in myths, repre-
senting the death-fear which the male psyche often transformed into
a sex-fear. Ancient writings describe the male sexuarfunction not as

"taking" or "possessing" the female, but rather "being taken," or

7
"putting forth." Ejaculation was viewed as a loss of a man's vital force,

which was "eaten" by a woman. The Greek sema or "semen" meant

both "seed" and "food." Sexual "consummation" was the same as
"consuming" (the male). Many savages still have the same imagery.
The Yanomamo word for pregnant also means satiated or full-fed; and

"to eat" is the same as "to copulate." 8

Distinction between mouths and female genitals was blurred by

the Greek idea of the lamiae lustful she-demons, born of the
Libyan snake-goddess Lamia. Their name meant either "lecherous
9
vaginas" or "gluttonous gullets." Lamia was a Greek name for the
divine female serpent called Kundalini in India, Uraeus or Per-Uatchet
inEgypt, and Lamashtu in Babylon. Her Babylonian consort was
Pazuzu, he of the serpent penis. Lamia's legend, with its notion that
males are born to be eaten, led to Pliny's report on the sexual life of
snakes that was widely believed throughout Europe even up to the 20th
century: a male snake fertilizes the female snake by putting his head
into her mouth and allowing himself to be eaten. 10
Sioux Indians told a tale similar to that of the Lamia. A beautiful
seductive woman accepted the love of a young warrior and united
with him inside a cloud. When the cloud lifted, the woman stood alone.
The man was a heap of bones being gnawed by snakes at her feet. 11
Mouth and vulva were equated in many Egyptian myths. Ma-Nu,
the western gate whereby the sun god daily re-entered his Mother,
12
was sometimes a "cleft" (yoni), and sometimes a "mouth." Priestesses
of Bast, representing the Goddess, drew up their skirts to display their

genitals during religious processions.

13
To the Greeks, such a display
was frightening. Bellerophon fled in terror from Lycian women

advancing on him with genitals exposed, and even the sea god Poseidon
14
retreated, for fear they might swallow him.
According to Philostratus, magical women "by arousing sexual
devour
lesire seek to whom they wish."
15
To the patriarchal Persians
ind Moslems this seemed a distinct possibility. Viewing women's
nouths as either obscene, dangerous, or overly seductive, they
nsisted on veiling them. Yet men's mouths, which look no different,

vere not viewed as threatening.

"Mouth" comes from the same root as "mother" Anglo-Saxon
nuth, also related to the Egyptian Goddess Mut. Vulvas have labiae,
lips," and many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth.
Christian authorities of the Middle Ages taught that certain witches,

1035
Vagina Dentata with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their

vaginas. They likened

women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of
__ hell, though was hardly original; the underworld gate had always
this

been the yoni of Mother Hel. It had always "yawned" from Middle
another derivative of "yoni." A German vulgarity
English yonen,
meaning "cunt," Fotze, of Bavaria meant simply "mouth." 16
in parts

To Christian ascetics, Hell-mouth and the vagina drew upon the

same ancient symbolism. Both were equated with the womb-symbol
of the whale that swallowed Jonah; according to this "prophecy" the
Hell-mouth swallowed Christ (as Hina swallowed her son Maui) and
kept him for three days. Visionary trips to hell often read like "a

description of the experience of being born, but in reverse, as if the

child was being drawn into the womb
and destroyed there, instead of
being formed and given life." St. Teresa of Avila said her vision of a
visit to hell was "an oppression, a suffocation, and an affliction so

agonizing, and accompanied by such a hopeless and distressing

misery that no words I could find would adequately describe it. To say
that it was as if my soul were being continuously torn from my body
17
is as nothing."

The archetypal image of "devouring" female genitals seems unde-

niably alive even in the modern world. "Males in our culture are so
afraid of direct contact with female genitalia, and are even afraid of

referring to these genitalia themselves; they largely displace their

feelings to the accessory sex organs the hips, legs, breasts, buttocks, et
cetera and they give these accessory organs an exaggerated interest
and desirability." 18 Even here, the male scholar inexplicably "displaces'
the words sex organ onto structures that have nothing to do with
sexual functioning.

Looking into, touching, entering the female orifice seems fraught

with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in

overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Psychiatrists say sex

is
perceived by the male unconscious as dying: "Every orgasm is a
little death: the death of 'the little man,' the penis." 19 Here indeed is the

root of ascetic religions that equated the denial of death with denial of
sex.

Moslems attributed all kinds of dread powers to a vulva. It could

"bite off" a man's eye-beam, resulting in blindness for any man who
looked into its cavity. A sultan of Damascus was said to have lost his

sight in his manner. Christian legend claimed he went to Sardinia to

be cured of his blindness by a miraculous idol of the virgin Mary who,
being eternally virgin, had her door-mouth permanently closed by a
20
veil-hymen.
Apparently Freud was wrong in assuming that men's fear of
female genitals was based on the idea that the female had been
[Link] fear was much less empathetic, and more personal: a fear
of being devoured, of experiencing the birth trauma in reverse. A
Catholic scholar's curious description of the Hell-mouth as a womb

1036
inadvertently reveals this idea: "When we think of man entering hell Vajra
we think of him as establishing contact with the most intrinsic, unified, Valentine, Saint
ultimate and deepest level of the reality of the world." 21
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Becker, D.D., 223. 2. Farb, W.P., 93. 3. Neumann, CM., 174.
1.

4. Rawson, E.A., 260. 5. Edwardes,45. 6. Briffault 2, 657-58.

7. Assyr. &
Bab. Lit, 338-39. 8. Chagnon, 47. 9. Graves, G.M. 1, 206.
10. Briffault 2, 667.
1 1 Campbell, F.W.G., 78. 12. Maspero, lx.
.

[Link], G.E. 1,448. 14. Bachofen, 123. 15. Wedeck, 153. 16. Young, 47.
17. Cavendish, P.E., 1 57-58. 18. Ellis, 239-40. 19. Lederer, 126.
20. Gifford, 143. 21. Cavendish, P.E., 160.

Vajra
Sanskrit "jewel," "phallus," or "lightning" images of the Jewel in
the Lotus, male enclosed in the female, graphically represented by
spirit
the lingam-yoni. Vajrasana meant the "diamond seat" of the Tantric

yogi, a mystic state of psychosexual union with the Goddess. As a

diamond shape was an archaic symbol of the clitoris, it
may be that
the vajra was recognized as an enlarged male version of the same thing.
See Lotus.

Va-Kul

Zyrian "Mother of Waters," worshipped throughout the Middle

Ages as a powerful Goddess whose displeasure could cause catastro-

phes.
1
See Water.
1 .
Lurousse, 307.

Valentine, Saint
The original Valentine's Day in the idesof February was Rome's
Lupercalia, a festival of sexual license. Young men chose partners for
erotic
games by drawing "billets" small papers with women's
names on them. Christians denounced these prototypical valentines as
"heathens' lewd customs." l
Churchmen tried to substitute saints'

names and short sermons on the billets, but people soon reverted to the
old love-notes. 2 February was sacred to Juno Februata, Goddess of
The church replaced her with a mythical
the "fever" (febris) of love.

martyr, St. Valentine,who was endowed with several contradictory

biographies. One of them made him a handsome Roman youth,
executed at the very moment when his sweetheart received his billet
of love. 3
St. Valentine became a patron of lovers perforce, because the
festival remained dedicated to lovers despite all official efforts to

change it. Even in its Christianized form, the Valentinian festival

involved secret sex worship, called "a rite of spiritual marriage with

1037
 angels in a nuptial
chamber." Ordinary human beings engaged before
4
VaMtyries
witnesses in an act of sexual intercourse described as the marriage of

Sophia and the Redeemer.

A spoken formula said, in part, "Let the see<
of light descend into thy bridal chamber, receive the bridegroom . . .

open thine arms to embrace him. Behold, grace has descended upon
5
thee."

During the Middle Ages, St. Valentine was much invoked in love
charms and potions, since he was a sketchily Christianized version of
such love-gods as Eros, Cupid, Kama, Priapus, or Pan.
1. Brewster. 104. 2. Hazlitt, 608. [Link],358. 4. Angus, 116. 5. Seligmann,65.

Valkyries
Norse death angels who hovered over battlefields and took the souls

of brave warriors to Odin's heaven, Valhalla according to the classic

picture. Previously, the Valkyries seem to have been Amazonian

priestesses who ruled the gates of death, and in the most primitive times
even cannibalized the dead to give them rebirth.
Valkyries were northern counterparts of the funerary vulture-
priestesses of Egypt, often decking themselves in feathers. Like

angelic Hindu apsaras, they wore swan feathers; or, in funerary aspect,

they appeared as carrion crows (ravens). Dead warriors were known

in skaldic verse as hrafengrennir, "raven-feeders," and the blood of slain
men was called "the raven's drink."
l
In Old Saxon the Valkyries
were walcyries or waelceasig, "corpse-eaters," defined as "man-eating
women" during the 1 1th century a.d. 2

Valkyries in their black raven-feathers were called Kraken, or

"crows." In the Middle East also, ravens were spirits of the lunar

sphere of death and rebirth, symbolically preserved in Mithraic religion

as the Raven who led the initiate into the first stage of mystical

hierarchy, the sphere of the Moon. Similar connotations were still

3

attached to ravens in 1613 a.d., when Perkins's Witchcraft said if a

raven stands on a high place (lunar sphere), "and looks a particular way
and cries," death can be expected to come from that direction. 4
Swans, ravens, crows, or hawks represented Valkyries in old
ballads, such as "The Maiden Transformed into a Bird," who was
fond of eating her true-love's flesh. This was beneficial to him, for after

sacrificing his flesh to her, he attained a state of paradise in her arms. 5

Eliade says, "The Valkyries are psychopomps and sometimes play the
role of the 'celestial wives' or 'spirit wives' of the Siberian shamans. .

. .
complex extends beyond the sphere of shamanism and
[T]his later
has elements both of the mythology of Woman and the mythology of
Death." 6
The Valkyries were also totemized as mare-women, like the
ancient horse-masked priestesses of Demeter. In Sweden, a mare-
woman was a volva, meaning Goddess, priestess, or a witch who could

1038
turn into a
a holy

goddess."
woman,

8
mare and carry

Wilas, or Wilis, possibly derived from

a man away to

Some claimed that death

passage into a fairy paradise.
Naturally, this
Others said
death.

vilasa,

dispensed by Hindu nymphs of paradise in the service of the Goddess.

Such spirits were sometimes called Samovila or Samodiva: "death-
in the

it
7
A cognate was
with Slavic and central Asian counterparts in the Vilas,
the heavenly bliss

arms of a Vila was a

was cruel torment. 9
was a mythic expression of various ways of dying. See
vala,

blissful
^
Vampire

Vila.
The Grimnismal lists 13 Valkyries, the number of a witches'

coven; other sources said there were only nine, the number of the
Muses. From the 10th to the 14th centuries, Valkyries and witches
were considered identical; both were also mystic swan-maidens and

Earthly priestesses who played the Valkyrie role in pagan

10
fairies.

funerals were described by churchmen as either Vilas or witches. 11

Valhalla or Valholl was the death-realm of Hel, the Great Vala.

Though it was taken over by new gods led by Father Odin, its archaic
feminine name made it a paradise reserved
remained. Later myths

solely for warriors and war-kings, members of the military caste who
shared the opinions of Japanese samurai and Moslem "soldiers of

Allah," that heavenly bliss belonged only to those who died fighting
bravely.
Radbod, king of the Frisians, refused to abandon this faith when a
Christian missionary informed him that Valhalla was the same as the

Christians' hell. Where were his own ancestors, Radbod wanted to

know, if there was no Valhalla? He was told they were burning in hell

because they were heathens. "Dastardly priest!" Radbod cried. "How

dare you say my ancestors have gone to hell? I would rather yes, by
their god, the great Woden, I swear I would ten thousand times rather

join those heroes in their hell, than be with you in your heaven of
12
priests!"
1. Woods, 156. 3. Campbell, Oc.M., 255, 4. Scot, 546.
Turville-Petre, 58. 2.
Steenstrup, 53-54. 6. Eliade.S., 381-82. 7. Avalon, 199. 8. Leland,67.
5.

9. Uwusst, 292-93. 10. Branston, 191-92. 11. Leland, 143. 12. Guerber, L.R.,9.

Vampire
The primal notion that all life depends on the magic of menstrual
blood some primitives say evolved a
or "the blood of Moon," as

corresponding notion that the dead crave blood in order to make

themselves live again. Greeks believed the shades of the dead could be
1

recalled from the underworld by offerings of blood, which they

greatly desired; therefore blood was the essential ingredient of necro-
mancy. Homer's Odysseus consulted the dead with a necromantic
ceremony: "I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and
the dark blood flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the dead that be
2
departed gathered them from out of Erebus."

1039
Vampire Ever since Homer's time, western nations had the fixed idea that
blood could recall the dead to life, at least temporarily. Regular
supplies of blood
would impart a kind of life to the "un-dead," that is,
called forth by the moon, their original Mother,
vampires. They were
who also called made the living. Since the moon
forth the blood that

The Greek word for was the original home of the dead and the source of rebirth, it was
avampire was sarco- closely associated with vampires.
Breton churchmen, still not altogether
menos, "flesh made Middle Ages, claimed
in the
certain of the physiology of conception
by the moon."' The
word "vampire" was that a woman who exposed her naked body to moonlight would
Slavic, possibly trace- conceive and bear a vampire child.
5
Yet common folk continued to

belief that the souls of all children

able to central Asia,
express in their customs the older
thence to India. The Si-
waited in the moon to be reborn. Scottish girls refused to be married
amese still call a
for fear they otherwise
lunar sabbath day vam-
at any time except during the full moon, might
As in early
not have children. New brides in the Orkneys went to a circle of
pra.
Greece, there were two megalithic stones locally called the Temple
of the Moon to pray for
6
vampra sabbaths in babies.
each lunar month, at
moon and
The idea that the provided vital force for both the living
the new moon and
the dead persisted through the centuries, and reappeared as emphati-
full moon, with lesser
sabbaths on the quar- cally as ever in popular vampire literature only a hundred years ago.
ters to make four Boucicault's The Vampire instructed his servants to carry his body to
1
seven-day weeks.' a high mountain where it could be touched by the first rays of the rising
moon. When this was done, the vampire sprang back to life, saying,
"Fountain of my life: once more thy rays restore me. Death! I defy

thee!" 7 English friar once said, "The moon is the mother of all
An
humors," and the body's most important life-giving "humor" was
blood. 8

Therefore, vampires walked wherever the moon shone and they

might find blood; the church taught this, and no laymen dared to
doubt it. Balkan countries had certain wizards who specialized in

bottling vampires, a technique they probably learned from Arabian

magicians who put djinn (Latin genii) into bottles or lamps, like the
lamp of Aladdin. When a Bulgarian village panicked over a purport-
ed outbreak of vampirism, the specialist was called. He would solemnly
identify the offender's grave, bait his bottle with blood, catch the
9
restless spirit, cork him up, and burn the bottle.

The Rev. Montague Summers mentions a sure cure for vampir-

ism, which would have been simple, and eliminated all the dramatic,

time-consuming, ultimately ineffective classical measures such as exor-

cisms, crucifixes, garlic, silver bullets, stakes through hearts, and so
on. This simple solution was to place a consecrated host in a vampire's

grave, which would immobilize him forever. However, Summers

remedy "was not to be essayed, since it savors of rashness and

said, this
10
profanation of God's Body." Summers, an earnest believer, evi-
dently thought it was better to let a community be ravaged by
marauding vampires than to profane Eucharistic bread.
Summers also attacked the rational doubts of Dom Calmet,
who wrestled with the physical improbabilities of vampirism two

1040
centuries earlier, asking questions that no one ever bothered to answer: Vampire

How can a corpse which is covered with four or five feet of earth, which
has no room even tomove or to stretch a limb, which is wrapped in mi^mmmmmmimmmmmm
linen cerements, enclosed in a coffin of wood, how can it, I say, seek the

upper air and return to the world walking upon the earth so as to cause
those extraordinary effects which are attributed to it? And after all that
how can it go back again into the grave, when it will be found fresh,
incorrupt, full of blood exactly like a living body? Can it be maintained
that these corpses pass through the earth without disturbing it, just as
water and the damps which penetrate the soil or which exhale therefrom
without perceptibly dividing or cleaving the ground? It were indeed to
be wished that in the histories of the Return of Vampires which have been

related, a certain amount ofattention had been given to this point, and
that the difficulty had been something elucidated. "

Rev. Summers quickly disposed of Dom Calmet's questions in

the accepted theological manner, not by answering them but by
denouncing the asking of them:
These difficulties which Dom Calmet with little perception has raised . . .

are not only superficial but also smack of heterodoxy. . . .

[OJne can
hardly brush aside the vast vampire tradition. . . . Can the Devil endow a
body with those qualities ofsubtilty, rarification, increase, and diminish-
ing, so that it may pass through doors and windows? I answer that there is
no doubt the Demon can do this, and to deny the proposition is hardly
orthodox. ' 2

From the church's "vast vampire tradition," Summers conclud-

ed: "There can be no doubt vampire does act under satanic
that the

influence and by satanic direction." 1? This assertion was made not in

the 12th or 13th century, but in the year 1928.
A thinly disguised reason for the never-failing popularity of vam-
pire stories was, of course, their suggestion of sinful sex. Kissing and
biting ran close together in both mental and actual behavior; and the
attack of amale or female vampire on a victim of the opposite sex
surely bore some resemblance to a love-bite. One of the all-time classics
of vampire literature, Prest's Varneythe Vampire, titillated Victorian
male readers with scenes more suggestive of rape than of demonology:

That young and beautiful girl exposed to so much terror . . . . Her

beautiful rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The
glassy horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous
satisfaction horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed's edge.
He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge
he seizes her neck in his fanglike teeth. M

The church sanctioned vampire superstitions in order to draw

converts through fear, and church rituals officially established the

burning or piercing of suspected vampires in their graves. Even in the

15
still done
present century this was by priests in the Balkans. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau showed the evidence for the existence of vampires

1041
Vsrir restingon much the same foundations as the evidence for the existence
Varuna of God: "If there ever was in the world a warranted and proven
history, it is that of vampires; nothing is lacking, official reports,

testimonials of persons of standing, of surgeons, of clergymen, of

,6
judges; the judicial
evidence is all-embracing."
The most famous fictional vampire of them all, Count Dracula,
did have a real history. He was a feudal baron
of sadistic tempera-

ment, Vlad the Impaler, of the Little Dragon clan: that is, Dracule. He
liked to impale his enemies on stakes, while he cut, roasted, and ate

pieces of flesh from

their still-living bodies.
17
The fear engendered by
this monster was such that his serfs believed he would return to
plague them even after his death. Of course
no such revenant has ever
reappeared, but the Count's clan nickname, at least, seems truly
immortal.
Chagnon, 38. 2. Homer, 163. 3. Summers., V, 19. 4. Briffault 2, 425.
1.

Summers, V, 238. 6. Briffault 2, 587-88. 7. Summers, V, 316. 8. Briffault 2, 782.

5.

[Link], 124. 10. Summers, V, 106. 11. Summers, V, 171. [Link], V, 174.
13. Summers, V, 32. 14. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 53. 15. Hyde, 182-83. [Link],302.
17. See McNally & Florescu.

Vanir
Scandinavian elder deities: peace-loving, matriarchal, agricultural
nature spirits led by Mother Earth and by Freya, "the Lady," called

Vanadis or Matriarch of the Vanir. The warlike Aesir led by Father

Odin moved into the territory of the Vanir and made war against them,
beginning with an act of cruelty: the Aesir seized and tortured their
holy sorceress, Gullveig. In the end the Vanir were conquered, but
1

many generations remained in awe of their miraculous powers. They

were said to have accomplished everything by magic, and invented all

the knowledge that the new gods learned. 2

Whether the Vanir were described as elder gods, giants, elves,

matriarchs, or "primal ancestresses," they seem to have represented

pre-patriarchal farming cultures who were forced to give way to nomad-
ic Aryan invaders.
1. Larousse, 270. 2. Turville-Petre, 159, 176.

Varuna
Son of the Hindu sun-goddess Aditi, Varuna was an archaic god of
Protean forms: lord of the sky, of waters, of law, of winds, of seasons,
and of death. He was sometimes female, sometimes an androgyne
representing sexual union. In this guise, he-she probably became the
Persian Varan, a "spirit of concupiscence." Varuna was paired with

Mitra, a similar entity, a sister or male twin; from this deity evolved the
Persians' wholly masculinized Mithra.
1 .
Lxroussc, 328.

1042
Vas Hermeticum, Vas Spirituale Vas Hermeticum

Alchemical terms for the symbolic Grail, signifying the womb of

Venus

matter, a universal vessel of all transformations. The original symbol was

the "Vase" of life and death representing the womb of the Great
Goddess Rhea Pandora. Among Christian mystics, Vas Spirituale was a
common title of the virgin Mary.

Venus
Roman name for the Great Goddess in her sexual aspect, derived
from the eponymous mother of Venetian tribes of the Adriatic, after
whom the city of Venice was also named. "Veneration" and "ven-
mean hunting; for, like
ery" were further derivatives. Venery used to
her eastern counterpart Artemis, Venus was once a Lady of Animals,
and her Horned God Adonis, both the hunter and the sacrificial
became venison, which meant "Venus's son."
?
stag Sign of Venus
J

Early Christian fathersdenounced the temples "dedicated to the

foul devil who goes by the name of Venus a school of wickedness
2
for all the votaries of unchasteness." What this meant was that they

were schools of instruction in sexual techniques, under the tutelage of

the veneriiox harlot-priestesses. 3 They taught an approach to spiritual
4
grace, called venia, through sexual exercises like those of Tantrism.
Like Tantric yogis, educated Romans envisioned the moment of
death as a culminating sexual union, a final act of the sacred marriage

promised by the religion of Venus. Ovid, an initiate, said he wished to

die while making love: "Let me go of coming to Venus; in
in the act
5
more senses than one let my last dying be done." Centuries later, in

Shakespeare's time, "to die" was still a common metaphor for sexual
orgasm.
6
An
English treatise on interpretation of dreams said if a sick
man dreamed of marrying a lovely maiden, it meant death. 7 When
Christians said to die was to be gathered to the bosom of Christ or

Abraham, they unwittingly based the concept on the ancient female

one.
Modern interpretations of classical mythology tend to picture

Venus as a sex goddess only. Her birth-giving and death-giving

aspects have been suppressed; but they were equally important in her
cult. As Queen of the Shades she was identified with Proserpine, but
went by the name of Libitina. Plutarch said Libitina was only another
name 8
Venus, "the goddess of generation."
for

During the early Middle Ages, Venus became the ruling Fairy
Queen of the magic mountains called Venusbergs. She also became
a Christian saint, St. Venerina, who never existed in human form but
only as a cult figure continuing the worship of the Goddess in
Calabria. 9 In the Balkans she was called St. Venere, and is still invoked
as a patron of marriage by young girls making a wish that they might
find good husbands. 10
The magic rhyme addressed to the planet Venus

1043
 Venus Observa as Evening Star still echoes down the centuries: "Star light, star
|

Veronica, Saint bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish

^^^^^^^^^^^
^^"^^^^^ Iwish tonight."
Venus the Evening Star was also Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. In
her sacred of Venice, on Ascension Day each year, the Duke of
city
Venice ceremonially married her by throwing a gold wedding ring into
the sea. This practice continued through Renaissance times, even
11

when the title of Stella Maris was assimilated to Mary.

1 Potter &Sargent, 209. 2. J.H. Smith, C.G.,
287. 3. Massa, 101. 4. Dumezil, 94.
5 Cavendish, P.E., 51.6. Sadock, Kaplan &
Freedman, 544. 7. Hazlitt, 190.
8 Knight, D.W.P., 73. 9. Hughes, 52. 10. Hyde, 84. 11. Scot, 173.

Venus Observa
Technical term for the male-superior sexual position, which Adam
tried and failed to impose on Lilith, and which the Catholic church

designated the only legal position for marital intercourse, since it

1
afforded the least pleasure to the wife. Patriarchal societies generally

opposed such female-superior sexual positions as those favored by the

worshippers of Shiva and Hecate, and by medieval witches who, as the
nursery rhyme says, rode on top of their "cock-horses."
Christian missionaries throughout the world usually insisted that
their native flocksmust abandon any sexual variations they might be
accustomed to, and adopt the Venus observa posture exclusively, for
anything else was sinful. Thus it came to be known as the "mission-
ary position," and native couples often made fun of it in secret.
1. Graves & Patai, 67.

Veronica, Saint
St. Veronica was not a person but only a contraction of two Latin

words, vera iconica, "the true image." In 8th-century Rome, a cloth

imprinted with a man's face appeared in St. Peter's basilica and was
advertised as the vera iconica of Christ. The legend invented to accoun
for it was was carrying his cross, a woman named
that, as Jesus
Veronica wiped the sweat from his face with her veil, which miraculous
ly took the image of the divine face. 1

Such stories were not uncommon in the ancient world. An old

Greek tale told of Pandarus the Thessalian, who had "shameful
letters" on his brow until the god Asclepius miraculously removed then
2
to a scarf that Pandarus bound on his forehead. Another pagan tale

was adapted to the Veronican legends: the king of Edessa sent an artist
to paint Jesus's portrait; but the artist couldn't see Jesus's face because
of its blinding sunlike brightness. So he merely pressed a cloth to the
divine features, and the imprint rendered a perfect portrait. Another
impossible story claimed that Veronica's veil cured the emperor Tiberi-

1044
us of sickness, so he carried it to Rome on a road entirely spread with Verthandi
silk and installed it in the shrine where it was "found" eight centuries Vesica Piscis
5
later.

St. Veronica's act of veil-imprinting is still included in the Stations

of the Cross, though some churchmen recommended its elimination
on the ground that the legend's transparent fakery is becoming too well
known. 4
1. Brewster, 65. 2. Frazer, F.O.T., 227. 3. de Voragine, 215, 634. 4. Attwater, 335.

Verthandi
Second of the three Norns venerated by Norsemen. Verthandi
signified the present, while her sisters Urth and Skuld stood for the past
and future.
1
As the Weird Mothers of Fate (wyrd), they
Sisters, or

corresponded to the Greek Moerae, Latin Fortunae, and other versions

of the Triple Goddess. Verthandi also governed motherhood and the

phases of the moon, like Kali the Preserver.

[Link],209.

Vesica Piscis
"Vessel of the Fish," a common yonic symbol, the pointed oval,
named from the ancients' claim that female genitals smelled like fish.

Mother Kali herself appeared in a Hindu story as "a virgin named

Fishy Smell, whose real name was Truth," Egypt's Goddess Maat.
1
like

Egyptians said Abtu, the Abyss, was "a fish who swallowed the penis
of Osiris," but this abyss was also "The Fish of Isis," therefore a sexual
Vesica Piscis
metaphor. Aphrodite's principal rites at Paphos took place under the
sign of Pisces, the Fish. Aphrodite, Isis, Freya, and other forms of the
2
Goddess in sexual aspect appeared veiled in fish nets. See Fish.
The vesica piscis was an unequivocally genital sign of the sheila-
na-gig figures of old Irish churches. The squatting naked Goddess
displayed her vulva as a vesica, as did the temple-door images of Kali in
India. 3 One of the old pagan ideograms of sexual union was adopted

by the church to represent the Feast of St. Nicholas on the runic

4
calendar: a vesica piscis enveloping a male furka.

The pointed-oval fish sign was even used by early Christians to

represent the mystery of God's union with his mother-bride which
is why Jesus was Fish" in the Virgin's fountain. 5
called "the little

This female enclosure was much used in Christian art, especially

as a superimposition on Mary's belly, with her child within. Some-
times Christ at his ascension was shown rising into a heavenly vesica, as
if
returning to the Mother-symbol. The vesica was also shown as a
frame for figures of Jesus, God, and saints.
Another name for the same sign was mandorla, "almond," which

1045
 also represented a yoni. In the cult of
the Magna Mater, an almond
Vestal Virgins
was the feminine for the virgin birth of Attis.
conception-charm
CM., 13. 2. Knight, S.L., 296. 3. [Link], 239-43. 4. Brewster, 13.
I. Campbell,
5. Harding, 58.

Vestal Virgins
Priestesses of Rome's oldest Goddess-matriarch, Vesta, who was the

same as the Greeks' Hestia. Descendants of an ancient order of holy

women who guarded the public hearth and altar, the Vestals were
entrusted with keeping alight the perpetual fire that was the mystic heart

f
of the empire.
were vkgines, i.e., women who vowed never to marry
Vestals

because they were brides of the spirit of Rome, in the same sense that
Christian nuns were brides of Christ. Vestals underwent the same

ceremony was later applied to nuns, to limit their magic female

that
Sign of Vesta had their hair shaved off. In an earlier era, however, they
1

powers: they
were not so restricted. Like all other ancient priestesses who ruled by
virtue of magic and motherhood, the Vestals used to be the governing

sisterhood of Latium.
Rhea "Rhea of the Woodland" was called the First
Silvia or

Vestal; she was actually the Goddess Rhea transplanted to the Latin
colonies. According to Roman legend, she gave birth to Romulus and
Remus, the founders of Rome. Their midwife, Acca Larentia,
another Vestal described as a "courtesan," gave birth to all the ancestral

spirits the Romans called lares. (See Akka.)

The Vestals were never altogether virginal in the physical sense.
Their marriage to the phallic deity of the Palladium was physically
consummated in Vesta's temple, under conditions of great secrecy. The
ceremony was performed by a priest called the Pontifex Maximus,
"great maker of the pons," which meant a bridge, a path, or a way. The
Pontifex Maximus had what Dumezil calls "an obscure, now un-
known duty" toward the Vestal Virgins. 2 One might suppose that his

"way" was something like the Way of eastern sex-sacraments; that is,

he built the "bridge" between Father Heaven and Mother Earth

(Vesta).
The office of Pontifex was adopted by Christians, and became a

"pontiff," synonymous with "pope." The Vestals however were

emphatically not adopted by Christians, although several of the details
of their habit and lifestyle passed on to Christian convents. Pagans
revered the Vestals and were horrified by the way they were treated by
Christian regimes in the 4th and 5th centuries. In 382 a.d., the
endowments of all the pagan temples were withdrawn, including that of
Vesta's 600-year-old Mother-hearth. "Worst of all in the opinion of
some traditionalists, the fire on Vesta's hearth was to be permitted to go
out: the Vestal Virgins were to lose their endowments and immunity
from taxation, and all their privileges were to be taken away. The tiny

1046
order of six Vestals was particularly hated by the Christians. . . . Their Vida
Christian enemies feared them as mysterious and magical: they did not Vila

understand them and did not want to do so; they wanted only to see
m^^^^^^^^^mmt
them destroyed." 3
1. Graves, W.G., 396. 2. Dumezil, 583. 3. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 149.

Vida
Norse skald's word for the sacred poetry setting forth religious tales;

cognate with the Hindu Vedas. Vida might be traced back to the elder
race of giants called risi, from Sanskrit rishi, an Enlightened One or

sage, such as the early collectors of the Vedas were supposed to be.
1

[Link]-Petre.231.

Vidya
"Wisdom," a Tantric term for a woman acting as sexual partner of a
man in the magic circle; another epithet of the enlightenment-bringing

Spirit of the Way, or Shakti.

Vikarr
Ancestor of the Vikings; a legendary king of Norway, sacrificially
by the priests of Odin, enabled to beget tribes by the blood he shed
slain

on the maternal earth.

Vila var. Will

Slavic witch-spirit associated with water; cognate of the Scandinavian

Vala or Valkyrie. Russian Vilas were sometimes known as Rusalki,

daughters of Holy Mother Russia (Earth). Like Valkyries, the Vilas

of old had charge of the rites of death and the guiding of souls.
Sometimes, especially favored men were invited to join the Vilas
for a while, usually seven years. A man would be invited into a cave
or hollow tree, and find himself in fairyland. He was "one who has won
the love of a Vila," and his was Krstnik, a "Christ," which meant
title

both an Anointed One and an Accursed One. That is, he was the
1

Slavic version of the Enchanted Hunter (Chasseur Maudit), or

Thomas Rhymer, Tannhauser, etc.
In Dalmatia, a man associated with the Vilas was called Macieh,
Messiah." He took the form of a youth in a Phrygian cap, like the
Indo-Iranian sun-hero Mithra. 2 The female spirits he lived with were
also called krstaca, "crossed ones," from krst, a cross cognate with
both the Greek Christos and the Saxon "curst." The female spirits were
also known as Rogulja, "Horned Ones." 3

1047
 Virginal, Ice Queen Vilas or Wilis came to be feared as angry, dangerous "souls of
Virgin Birth drowned women" who dwelt in water, perhaps because so many
"witches" were drowned. Like Sirens, they were supposed to draw into
the waters any heedless wayfarer who happened to see them dance by

moonlight. They still dance on

modern stages in the classical ballet
Giselle; the old fear of them resides in such phrases as "it gives me
the willies." A cold shudder was said to be a prophetic touch from a
Wili's deathly hand. However, traces of the priestesses' former
benevolence are found in the legend that where they danced on the
nights of the old pagan festivals, there
the grass grew thicker and the
4
wheat flourished more abundantly.
1. Leland, 145-46. 2. Keightley, 494. 3. Leland, 66. 4. Larousse, 292-93.

Virginal the Ice Queen

Medieval European version of the high-mountain Goddess, known
in India as Durga the Inaccessible. She lived in the high Himalayas, an<

sometimes came down to form alliances with men; but always she
returned to her lonely glaciers. In European folk tales, Virginal the Ice

Queen lived alone in the pure upper snowfields of the mountains,

but once she descended to a valley to become the bride of a minstrel-

wizard, Dietrich von Bern. Soon, however, she wearied of the
lowlands and of him, and went back to her inviolable mountaintop,
where "she still rules supreme."
'

The Norse version of Durga- Virginal was the death-goddess

Skadi, who married the god Njord but grew tired of living with him
in the lowlands by the sea, so she returned alone to her mountains.
Some say she became the evil Snow Queen who would kidnap
children from their homes and
away their [Link]
Since snow-covered mountains were widely associated with the

milk-giving breasts of Mother Earth, it is possible that Durga the

Inaccessible and similar Ice Queens represented the nursing Goddess,
in the period when lactating human females, like lactating animal
females, were literally inaccessible to the male. Preoccupied with
motherhood, the Goddess became "virgin" again in her refusal to
male attentions. She "withdrew" from her marriage and went
tolerate
Dr. Marie-Louise
away to a place where no man could follow. There was an archetypal
von Franz Modern
Swiss psychologist,
element in these stories. As M.-L. von Franz has said, "One may
collaborator and friend suddenly find oneself up against something in a woman that is

of Carl Jung. obstinate, cold, and completely inaccessible." 2

I. Guerber, L.M.A., 115. 2. Jung, MRS., 189.

Virgin Birth
"Holy Virgin" was the title of harlot-priestesses of Ishtar, Asherah, or
Aphrodite. The title didn't mean physical virginity; it meant simply

1048
"unmarried." The function of such "holy virgins" was to dispense Virgin Birth
the Mother's grace through sexual worship; to heal; to prophesy; to

perform sacred dances; to wail for the dead; and to become Brides of
God.
Children born of such templewomen were called by the Semites
bathur,by the Greeks parthenioi, "virgin-born." According to the
'
The temple hiero-
dules were called
Protoevangelium, the Virgin Mary was a kadesha and perhaps married
one of that class of priests known as "fathers of the 2
See virgines or venerii in
to god."
Rome, horae in Greece,
Firstborn.
kadishtu, qadesh, or
Mary's impregnation was similar to Persephone's. In her Virgin kadesha in Babylon, Ca-

guise, Persephone sat in a holy cave and began to weave the great naan, and Palestine.

tapestry of the universe, when Zeus appeared as a phallic serpent, to

3
beget the savior Dionysus on her. Mary sat in the temple and began
to spin a blood-red thread, representing Life in the tapestry of fate,

when the angel Gabriel "came in unto her" (Luke 1:28), the biblical

phrase for sexual intercourse. Gabriel's name means literally "divine

husband." 4
Hebrew Gospels designatedword almah, mistakenly
Mary by the
5
meaning "young woman." It was
translated "virgin," but really

derived from Persian Al-Mah, the unmated Moon-goddess. 6 Another

cognate was Latin alma, "living soul of the world," virtually identical
to Greek psyche, Sanskrit shakti. The Holy Virgins or temple-harlots
were "soul-teachers" or "soul-mothers" the alma mater.
Christian translators insisted on rendering Mary's title as "virgin,"
which saddled their religion with an embarrassing article of faith.
Even today, theologians like Karl Barth declare that "It is essential to the

true Christian faith to accept the doctrine of the virgin birth" thus

drastically reducing the number of people who can be called true

Christians. 7

Early Christians demanded a virgin birth for their Savior out of

simple imitativeness. All the other Saviors had one, for they were
born of the Goddess incarnate in a chosen "virgin of the temple,"
whose business it was to bear Saviors. The notion that mortal women
were impregnated by gods or spirits was a matter of everyday acceptance

throughout the ancient world. Even the Old Testament says the
archaic "giants" (ancestral heroes) were born of mortal women impreg-
nated by spirits that came from God (Genesis 6:4).
Zoroaster, Sargon, Perseus, Jason, Miletus, Minos, Asclepius, and
dozens of others were God-begotten and virgin-born. Even Zeus, the
Heavenly Father who begot many other "virgin-born" heroes, was
8
himself called Zeus
Mamas, "Virgin-born Zeus." Plutarch noted
among the Egyptians the common belief that the spirit of God was
9
capable of sexual intercourse with mortal women.
Heracles was born of another almah, the Virgin Alcmene, whose
name means Power of the Moon. 10 Her husband also, like the
biblical Joseph, kept away from her bed during her pregnancy. The
same tale was told of Plato, whose nephew affirmed that he was

1049
 his earthly parents having no sexual
Virgin Birth begotten by the god Apollo,
relations until after his birth.
11
Christians believed this, and solemnly

attested that Plato was a virgin-born son of the sun god. 12

After Christianity was established as the official religion of the
Roman however, church fathers tried to discredit all other
empire,
by claiming that the devil had devised them, and malicious-
virgin births

ly placed them in a past would pre-date the real Savior.

time, so they

St. Justin Martyr Justin Martyr wrote,

"When I am told that Perseus was born of a virgin
Christian apologist of I realize that here again is a case in which the serpent and deceiver

the 2nd century, has imitated our religion."

1?

born of pagan parents

Despite the efforts of church fathers, the virgin birth of Jesus was
and trained in philos-
neither the first nor the last such miracle given credence by Chris-
ophy before his

conversion. In addi- tians. Priapic idols of antiquity, credited with the power to father
tion to his Apologia and children, actually fathered other priapic idols who became saints like

Dinlogus, many Foutin, Gurtlichon, Gilles, Regnaud, and Guignole; these were credit-
anonymous later works
ed with the same power of fertilization and were much adored by
were falsely attribut-
ed to his pen.
women who desired offspring.
14
Women of Tuscany and Portugal
thought they could become pregnant by eating apples specially
consecrated by a priest. Spaniards remembered the virgin birth of Mars,
and thought any woman could conceive like Mars's mother Juno, by
eating a lily. It was believed that souls could enter a woman's body in

the form of flies, worms, or serpents, to cause impregnation. Cases

were solemnly documented, like that of a Scot named Gillie Downak
Chravolick, conceived when his mother raised her skirts on an old
and received into her "private member" some ashes from the
battlefield

burned bones of dead warriors. 15 As impregnation by a god used to be

the "acceptable explanation for pregnancy in most pagan countries
where the sexual was part of the fertility rites," so Christians
act

thought impregnation by spirits was still credible, whether the alleged

father was a dead hero, a devil, an incubus, or even in some sects
16
the Holy Ghost again.
Such an untenable belief survived because it was important to

men. The impossible virgin mother was everyman's longed-for reso-

lution of Oedipal conflicts: pure maternity, never distracted from her
devotion by sexual desires. Churchmen unwittingly showed their

anxiety by denying even the evidence of their own Gospels that Jesus
had brothers and sisters. St. Ambrose insisted that Mary never
conceived again, since God couldn't have chosen for his mother-bride
"a woman who would defile the heavenly chamber with the seed of a
'17
man.
Theologians in effect severed the two halves of the pagan God-
dess, whose realistic femininity combined abundant sexuality and
maternity. One half was labeled harlot and temptress, the other a female
ascetic even in motherhood. The Goddess's old title, Sancta Ma-
trona Holy Mother was added to the canon of saints as a phony St.
18
Matrona, whose pseudo-biography made her a "hermitess."

1050
 The primitive naivete of the virgin-birth concept was dressed in Virgo
pretentious verbiage, purporting to explain it, while actually hiding it Virtue
from prying eyes. "A shadow is formed by light falling upon a body. ^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Virgin, as a human being, could not hold the fulness of divinity;
but the power of the most High overshadowed her, while the incorpore-
al light of the godhead took a human body within her, and so she was
19
able to bear God."
Churchmen often presented the doctrine of the virgin birth as
"ennobling" to women, since they viewed women's natural sexuality
as degrading. Seldom were female sexuality and motherhood perceived

as component parts of the same whole. Some women were astute

enough to see that the doctrine effectively degraded real womanhood by

exalting a never-attainable ideal. At the end of the 19th century one
woman wrote:

/ think that the doctrine of the Virgin birth as something higher, sweeter,
nobler than ordinary motherhood, is a slur on all the natural mother-

hood of the world. . . . Out of this doctrine, and that which is akin to it,

have sprung all the monasteries and nuns of the world, which have
disgraced and distorted and demoralized manhood and womanhood for a
thousand years. I place beside this false, monkish, unnatural claim . . .

my mother, who was as holy in her motherhood as was Mary herself. 20

l.Briffault3, 169-70. 2. Budge, D.N., 169.

3. Campbell, P.M., 101. 4. Augstein, 302.

5. Brasch, 25. 6. Lamusse, 3 Augstein, 38. 8. Graves, W.G., 320. 9. Angus, 113.
1 1 . 7.
10. Graves, G.M. 2, 378. 11. [Link], 183. [Link], 152. 13. [Link], 183.
14. Knight, D.W.P., 141. 15. BrifFault 2, 452. [Link],35. [Link],182.
18. Boulding, 370. 19. de Voragine, 206. 20. Stanton, 1 14.

Virgo
Virgil said the constellation Virgo (the Virgin) was Erigone, Goddess
of Justice, also known as Astraea or "Starry One." She identified with
l

Libera, or Libra, the Lady of the Scales, judge of men and ruler of
their fates. Renaissance poets still called her Astraea: "She is that royal

and great goddess by whom cities and empires are preserved in pride;

without her no kingdom can long endure. This is she who makes them
all secure." 2
1 .
Lindsay, O.A., 277. 2. Moakley, 111.

Virtue
Latin virtu was derived from vir, "man," and originally meant
masculinity, impregnating power, semen, or male magic, like Germanic
heill. Patriarchal thinkers defined manliness as
good and womanliness
as bad, therefore virtu became synonymous with morality or godliness,
along with other synonyms hinting at male sexuality: erectness,

1051
 etc. As the Old Testament said,
vishnu uprightness, rectitude, upstandingness,
the

"^
Vitus, Saint "Praise is comely for upright" (Psalms 33:1).

^^^^^^^^^^ Old phallic connotations

of "virtue" may have been hidden in the

Gospels' description of Jesus's

miraculous cure of the woman with an

issue of blood. When she touched Jesus, he felt "virtue" go out of him,

"and straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up" (Mark
5:29-30). According to ancient systems
of sacred kingship, it was
to give proof of virility, which meant
important for the king-victim
a
impregnating specially chosen priestess, so that the "fountain of her

blood" might cease.

Vishnu
Vedic god representing both the sacrificial boar and the phallus. His
name meant "he who embraces, pervades, or penetrates"; he was
known as "the expander," and "he who excites men." His emblem
l

was a lingam-yoni composed of a male cross with a female circle, called

the sign Kiakra: "When held by Vishnu, it signifies his power to
2
penetrate heaven and earth."
Vishnu insisted that his flesh and blood, poured out on the
sacrificial altar, preserved the whole world, creatures and gods alike.
When he transformed himself into the boar, he became the Universal
Savior. For the sake of the world he gave himself up to death, and
by "gods saying Om."
?
was sacrificed

The boar's tusk was identified with his phallus, because it was the
tusk that effected Vishnu's mating with the primal Goddess Earth:
"He uprose bearing on his tusk the fair
goddess Earth, shedding in all
directions the brine of the cosmic sea." 4 Boars' tusks often represent-
ed phalli in Oceanic and Far-Eastern cultures.
1. Campbell, M.I., 480-81; O'Flaherty, 357. 2. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 374.
3. O'Flaherty, 196-97. 4. Campbell, M.I.,481.

Vitus, Saint

Imaginary saint dimly associated with Sicily, possibly based on a Latin

word carved on an ancient healing shrine: Vitus ("life"). An emblem of
the Moon-goddess entered into the fabrication of St. Vitus as his

alleged "nurse," Crescentia.

Vitus was especially venerated in Westphalia, where bones said to
be his had rested since the 9th century a.d.,though his legend
assigned him to the time of Diocletian, six hundred years earlier. The
bones were credited with the ability to cure many diseases, especially
chorea, the so-called St. Vitus's Dance.
1

[Link],338.

1052
Viviana, Saint Viviana, Saint

Canonized form of the pagan Goddess Viviane, whose name meant

Life. It seems to have been nothing more than a word on the Goddess's i

temple on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Probably an image of the

Goddess, so labeled, was deliberately re-interpreted as the image of a
1
"virgin martyr."
Among early medieval Celtic poets, Viviane was the name of the
Lady of the Lake, who reappeared in Arthurian myths as another
form of Nimue, the "Nemesis" of Merlin.
[Link], 338.

Volsi
"Horse's Penis," a title of Odin as the castrated royal horse, whose

amputated member became the ancestor of the Volsungs. Welsh

equivalents were the Waelsings, sons of Waels, who later became
"the god Wales." Waels also meant "the Corpse," for the dead god was

always resurrected and became the usual Lord of Death, like Shiva's

corpse-form Shava. See Horse.

Vulcan
Latin lightning- or volcano-god derived from Cretan Velchanos,

Hephaestus. Vulcan's forges were said to lie under Mt.

identical with

Etna or Mt. Vesuvius. See Lightning; Smith. He evolved into the

medieval "Volund the Smith," a divine wizard whom the British called

Wayland.

Vulture
One of the oldest totems of the Great Mother in Egypt was the
vulture, eater of the dead. Vultures who devoured corpses were regard-
ed as her angels of death, since they carried the dead piecemeal to
heaven. In Neolithic times it was a common practice to expose dead
bodies to carrion birds, who embodied the Mother's spirit. For this
reason even the Greeks and Romans fostered a belief that all vultures
are female. 1
On the Stele of the Vultures from Catal Huyuk, 7th
millenium B.C., dead bodies are carried off by vultures in a time and
place where only the female principle was worshipped. 2
Ancient Iranians didn't bury their dead, but exposed them to
vultures in open-topped "towers of silence" called dakhmas, many of
which still stand today. Such towers were built when Iranians wor-

shipped the Moon-goddess Mah, the Mother, and believed that

1053
^
Vulture

^^^Im
vultures carried the deceased to her heavenly
was instituted in Persia, a dead body couldn't

first

all
torn by vultures.*

Egyptians worshipped
things, calling her
realm. 5 Even after burial
be interred until it was

the vulture-headed Mother as the origin of

5
Mut, Isis, or Nekhbet. In combination with the
serpent goddess Buto (Per-Uatchet),
the vulture-mother gave rise to the

Two Mistresses, guardians of royal dynastic clans, and nurses of

deceased kings in the after-life. Temples had special chapels for the

Two Mistresses: the serpent Goddess brought the sun to

on the east,

birth; on the west, the vulture Goddess daily

ordained his death. 6

Sometimes both Goddesses appeared as vultures on the sacred mount

of Sehseh, where the deceased pharaoh became an eternal infant at
7
their breasts.

Egypt's oldest oracle was the shrine of the vulture goddess

Nekh-
bet at Nekhen (modern Al-Kab), the original "necropolis" or city of
the dead. Because it was a birth shrine as well as a death shrine, Greeks
called it
Ilithyiaspolis after their own Great Mother of childbirth,
8
Aphrodite Ilithyia. Romans called it Civitas Lucinae, the city of Juno
9
Lucina, Goddess of childbirth.
Egypt's symbol for "grandmother" was the vulture goddess bear-
flail of authority: a totemic form of the pre-dynastic clan
ing a
matriarch. 10 The word "mother" was written in hieroglyphics with the
11
sign of the vulture. Nekhbet the Vulture once ruled all of Upper
Egypt, wearing the white crown in token of sovereignty. As Isis, she
appeared in vulture form on mummy-pillows, crowned with a vulture

skin and bearing in each claw the ankh or Cross of Life. 12 As a vulture
she devoured her dead consort Osiris, just as Kali devoured her dead
Shiva. 13 Then she reincarnated him in her body, and gave him rebirth
as a new Holy Child, Horus.
was dismembered, which was the funerary custom of primi-
Osiris

tiveEgypt, dating from a remote time when the dead probably were
eaten, after the manner of primitive Greece's omophagia. Funerary

magic lay in the hands of dancing priestesses called muu, "mothers,"

who may have worn costumes of vulture feathers to represent "eaters"
and, like Isis, reconstitute the dead in their own bodies. The Book of
Ani said the first was guarded by the
gate of the uterine underworld
vulture Goddess, whose tearing beak could admit the dead to the

place whence they rose again. 14

The vulture-mother was known also in northern Europe and Asia.

Valkyries were "corpse-eaters" to the Saxons and often took the form
of carrion-eating birds such as crows or ravens. In Siberia, each shaman
had a "Bird-of-Prey Mother" who appeared twice in his life, at his
spiritual death-and-rebirth like the Dove-mother appearing at Jesus's

baptismalceremony and again at his physical death. This spirit-

mother was a large carrion bird "with an iron beak, hooked claws, and a
15
long tail."

Funerary priestesses came to be called "dirty" in classic myths, as

1054
they appear in the tale of the vulture-feathered Harpies. However,
the ancient claim that
Christian era.

5.
by
all vultures are female was believed well into the

Church

spirits
fathers cited, in defense of the Virgin Birth,
the "fact" that vultures conceived their eggs only because they were
fertilized of the wind. 16
[Link],G.E.2,372. 2. de Riencourt, 24. 3. La/misve, 31 1,314. 4. Herodotus,
Lamusse, 34. 6. Budge, G.E. 1, 440. 7. Neumann, A.C.U., 13; Erman, 9.
8. Book of the Dead. 493. 9. Budge, G.E. 1 438.
, 1 0. Budge, G.E.
1 , 286.
56.
^
Vulture

^mM

11. Neumann, A.C.U., 12. 12. Bcx>k of the Dead, 623. [Link],257.
14. B<x,k of the Dead, 272, 289. 1 5. Eliade, S., 36. 16. Neumann, A.C.U., 65.

1055
W X Y Z

yama, Hindu Lord of

Death, with his spiri-
tual side, Yami. He peers
into his karmic mirror
to espy the victims'
good
and deeds before
evil

butchering them. Tibet;

19th century.

Matthew Hopkins, self-

appointed scourge of
witchcraft, wrote The
Discovery of Witches
in 1647 and used this

frontispiece showing
himself with two witches
and their familiar

spirits.

zeus was Father of

Heaven, but he did not
create human life nor
dispense the laws of the
universe. He could

only send lightning and

rain to fructify Moth-
er Earth and let her

bring forth life. This

detail is from a statue of

the god in his Roman
aspect, Jove; now in the
Vatican.
 Walpurga, Saint Walpurga, Saint
War Christianization of the pagan Goddess of Walpurgisnacht (May
of the springtime sacred marriage. Walpurga
Eve), the orgiastic festival
was the May Queen whose cult remained so popular in Germany
that the church had to adopt her in its usual way, by a spurious
var. Saint Walburga to the canonical legend, she was an English-
canonization. According
woman who became supreme abbess of the double monastery of

Heidenheim during the 8th century; but there were no contemporary

when this "abbess" was supposed to have lived and
records of the time
1

reigned.
In the 8th century, however, double monasteries largely perpetuat-
ed the pagan traditions of the "colleges" of priests and priestesses
living together under a female ruler,
and apparently carrying on the
ancient sex rites under a thin veil of Christian-pagan syncretism. 2

(See Convent.) The name of Walpurga's monastery means literally

"home of heathens."
The medieval church produced and sold vast quantities of an
allegedly miraculous Oil of St. Walpurga, which exuded so it was
claimed from the holy rock under which the saint's bones lay, and
which was highly recommended for the purpose of healing many
kinds of diseases. 3
transferred from May Eve to February,
The saint's day was
an attempt to discourage the Walpurgisnacht revels; but
possibly in
"witches" celebrated the original date of the marriage-festival anyway,
in honor of Walpurga. Therefore the church had to claim that May
Eve commemorated the transfer of St. Walpurga's relics to Eichstatt so
the processions and dances and songs would seem to be associated
with the progress of a revered reliquary. 4 May Eve, however, remained
a prime festival of witches throughout all Europe.
1. Attwater, 339. 2. Encyc. Brit, "Women in Religious Orders." 3. Wilkins, 61.
4. Attwater, 339.

War
A primary patriarchal contribution to culture, almost entirely absent
from the matriarchal societies of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages. 1

Even when Goddess-worship was beginning to give way to cults of

aggressive gods, for a long time the appearance of the Goddess imposed
peace on all hostile groups. Among Germanic tribes in Europe,
Tacitus said, whenever the Goddess moved in her chariot at certain
seasons to certain sacred places, the people "do not go to battle or
wear arms; every weapon is under lock; peace and quiet are known and
welcomed." 2 In later centuries, one of the reasons for the devaluation
of women in feudal Europe was that the feudal system was based on

war, in which women played no part except as victims.

3

Patriarchal gods tended to be warlike from their inception

1058
including, or even particularly, the Judeo-Christian God. Stanton War
observed that the Old Testament's account of God's nature, purpose,
and activities on behalf of his Chosen People boils down to "a long
painful record of war, corruption, rapine, and lust. Why Christians who
wished to convert the heathen to our religion should send them these
4
books, passes all
understanding."
But Christianity was never a pacifist religion. The church placed
warfare in its armory of persecution as soon as its political power
made this possible. Pope Innocent I (d. 417) proclaimed that God gave
the church the right to kill, and permitted papal armies to employ the

sword "for the punishment of the guilty," which meant massacre of the
nonorthodox. 5 The warfare of Christian sect against Christian sect
was unremitting, so that pagan observers said Christians behaved toward
each other with the ferocity of wild beasts. 6 These trends continued
throughout the Christian era, under the headings of holy wars, crusades,
conquests, and conversions by the sword. All-male Christianity was
disseminated by violence. 7

Meanwhile, with the decline of their religious power and the

obliteration of their Goddess, women helplessly disapproved, as many
do today. An American black woman recently said:
/ don 't think a few should control everything. I don 't think it's right that

women lay down and bear sons and then you have a few rich people
that tell your sons they have to go and die for their country. They're not
dying for their country. They're dying for the few to stay on top. I don 't
think that's necessary. I'm just tired of this type of thing. I just think we

ought to be just human. s

In contrast to these sentiments, there was a more masculine

opinion published in Marinetti's "manifesto of futurism" in the follow- Filippo Tommaso
"we want to extol the love of danger. There no Marinetti (1876-1944)
ing terms: . . . is
Italian founder of the
beauty apart from conflict. There are no masterpieces without aggres-
literary Futurist move-
sion. . . . We want to extol war the world's only hygiene
ment; supporter of
militarism, patriotism, the anarchist's destructive gesture, the glorious, Fascism; self-described
death-giving ideas and contempt for women!" 9 as a"mystic of
Some women accepted the contempt and tamely submitted to the action."

God and the man who extolled war, even giving up their children
without protest, like housewife Jesusita Novarro:

I pray a lot. I pray to God to give me strength. If He should take a child

away from me, to have the strength to accept it. It's His kid. He just
borrowed him to me. . . .

These kids don 't ask to be born these kids are gonna grow up and
give their lives one day. There will always be war. Why? I really
. . .

don 't know. Nobody has ever told me. I wish I knew. I guess the big . . .

shots decided the war. ,0

More articulate women have spoken out against the "big shots"
who seem to leave the life-affirming interests of women out of their
plans for the future, calling their power-mania gynocidal and therefore

1059
 11
often implied that only women can take on the
It is
War genocidal.
of defying the war machines, to save their children; but
responsibility
in a no-win situation when they have no
again women are placed
power to enforce their defiance.
With the advance of technological civilization, as everyone
knows, wars have become deadlier than ever, as if the mind of man
becomes less "civilized" as his tools become more so. Some have
doubted that man
capable of constructing a stable, peaceful world.
is

Becker remarked, "It seems that the experiment of man may well
prove to be an evolutionary
dead end, an impossible animal." n Jules

Henry said:

Is there nothing in life in an achieving culture but constant war war

against the outside as the fullest expression

of the drive, and war on the
inside to contain and transform it? The grisly history of achieving cultures

does not permit anything but the affirmation: No, there

is nothing

more. Though the inner and the outer war continue, the outer has so far
been most successful, and the history of the achievement drive shows
that Homo sapiens has been dying ofsuccess and will probably fail as a
n
species because of it.

Teilhard de Chardin wondered whether some historical error

might have brought man to a

wrong turning in the path of progress, so
that violence of the modern world betrays "a certain excess, inexpli-

cable to our reason, as if to the normal effect of evolution is added the

H
extraordinary effect of some catastrophe or primordial deviation." It

is not difficult to find such a deviation in the contrast between "matrist"

and "patrist" societies, especially in their respective valuations of

elemental caring behavior.

The fundamental problem ofmankind is to develop a culture where the

needs of the individual are always complementary to those around him;
a culture in which a child is not slapped for crying; a culture in which
sorrow always is met by the complementary need to be compassionate;

where fear is always met by the complementary need in others to give

reassurance; where the need to be loved is met by a need to give love in
theway it is wanted, at the time it is wanted and as much as it is wanted.
This is not an American view, for the American makes conflict into a

god; and although sociology swells its chest with a thousand "conflict
theories, "it has none on compassion. Life without conflict seems
. . .

stale to the American elites; and compassion, which is a low-paid motiva-

tion, has been relegated to the fringes of the low-paid segments of the
,s
culture, and has never been a subject for research.

The highest-paid pursuits of the modern age tend to exploit

violence either directly or in symbol, as Arthur Miller observed:

There is violence because we have daily honored violence. Any half-

educated man in a good suit can make his fortune by concocting a
television show whose brutality is photographed in sufficiently monstrous
detail. Who produces these shows, who pays to sponsor, who is
honored for acting in them? Are these people delinquent psychopaths

1060
 slinking along tenement streets? No, they are the pillars ofsociety, our War
honored men, our exemplars ofsuccess and social attainment. We must
begin to feel the shame and contrition we have earned before we can ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
begin to sensibly construct a peaceful society, let alone a peaceful world. A
country where people cannot walk safely in their own streets has not
earned the right to tell any other people how to govern itself, let alone to
bomb and burn that people. 16

Some observers of the modern scene fear that the symbolism of

violence, so prevalent in what passes for "entertainment" in our
aggressive society, will actually create its social
counterpart because of
man's propensity to model his behavior on symbolic forms. Mumford

says:

Power and order, pushed to their final limit, lead to their self-destructive

inversion: disorganization, violence, mental aberration, subjective

chaos. This tendency is already expressed in America through the motion
picture, the television screen, and children 's comic books. These forms
ofamusement are all increasingly committed to enactments of cold-
blooded brutality and physical violence: pedagogical preparations for
the practical use of homicide and genocide. Was it not in the country
. . .

most disciplined by militarism, absolutism, and physical science that

systematic torture in the form of "scientific experiments" was undertaken?
Did not Germany produce the nauseating horrors of the extermination
camps? In the combination of cold scientific rationalism with criminal
' 7
irrationalism the fatal poison produced its equally fatal antidote.

The rise of Hitler's Germany provides an interesting case in

point, showing a nation swept by militaristic sentiment coupled with a
sense of divine mission. The churches accepted Hitler's warmonger-
ing with religious joy. In April 1937, a Christian organization in the
Rhineland passed a resolution that Hitler's word was the law of God
and possessed "divine authority." Reichsminister for Church Affairs
Hans Kerrl announced: "There has arisen a new authority as to what
Christ and Christianity really are that is Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler
Holy Ghost." And so the pious gave him their blessing, and
18
is the true
the churches gave him God's. "Organized religion has always man-
aged to provide prayers and thanks for victories in bloody wars. ... In
more recent history, is there any evidence that organized religion
19
anywhere did anything but bless the battlers on both sides?"
In fact, Nazism was not the creation of Hitler alone, nor even of

Germany alone. The Nazi myth of "pure Aryanism" began not with
a German but with a Frenchman, Comte de Gobineau, who claimed in

1853 that the divinely chosen Master Race, of Teutonic stock, had
been defiled by admixtures of inferior, swarthy peoples: Latins, Ne-
groes, Semites. Teutons would "naturally" rule the world once these
were purged from their Aryan bloodlines.
inferior strains

Germans founded Gobineau societies all over their country, and

developed a new nationalistic pride out of the myth of the Teutonic
Ubermensch. The myth was further elaborated by an Englishman,

1061
War H. S. Chamberlain, who wrote The Foundation of the Nineteenth
"scientific" rationale for the awful conse-
Century in 1899, giving a
the contamination of "exalted
quences of racial mixture, especially
blood. Chamberlain married Wagner's daughter
Aryans" by Semitic
German citizen. Kaiser Wilhelm praised him, and
Eva, and became a
called Chamberlain's book his favorite reading. Clearly, it was also a

favorite of Hitler's.
The Gobineau-Chamberlain-Hitler theory of the Ubermensch
shows one of the most common underlying causes of war: man's
propensity to view himself and his own group as superior to others, who
therefore deserve destruction because they are substandard. Once the

propaganda machine begins to work, there is no limit to the depravity it

can impute to the enemy not wholly without reason, for war

corrupts everyone including one's own troops, though this fact is

invariably overlooked. War is an outstanding example of the We-
They syndrome: the Saved versus the Damned, the Chosen People
versus the heathen, God's champions against the forces of evil (even
when God is on both sides). Hitler succeeded brilliantly in convincing
enemies were subhumans (Untermens-
his followers that his political

chen), therefore was only reasonable to exterminate them. 20

it

In a sense this indoctrination can extend even to the enemy's

homeland, which can be seen as a non-country whereas according

to the patriotic ideal one's own country is the most superior spot on
Mother Earth's body, the essential cunnus as primitives believed, a
paradise on earth. Such maternal symbolism has even been used to good
developing desirable sentiments of aggression in wartime, as
effect in

shown by the writing of a California superintendent of schools:

The good citizen stands in relation to his country as the good son to his
mother.
He obeys her because she is his elder, because she conjoins within
herself the vision ofmany, and because he owes to her his begetting

and his nurturing.

He honors her above all others, placing her in a special niche within
his secret heart, in front of which the candles ofrespect and admiration
are forever kept alight.
He defends her against all enemies, and counts his life well lost in
her behalf 21

Such utilization of the powerful Mother-symbol on behalf of

militarism tends to conceal the real aggressors from their real victims. As
women seem to know almost instinctively, the former are the "big
shots" mature men in positions of power. The latter are the younger,
handsomer, more virile rivals the sons who can be made obedient
soldiers and sent off to be destroyed, which may defuse the Oedipal
jealousy. In effect, war is a
gentlemen's agreement between the
authority figures on both sides that they will kill off each other's youths,
and even win 22
social approval or adulation for doing so.

1062
 Patriarchal males have always shown hostility to the young, who War
divert the attention of females, either as mates or mothers. In the
west, male aggression against the young is sometimes projected onto ^^^mm^^ma^^m
women: example, accusing women of murder in the case of
for

abortion, or of crime in the case of birth control. Both these measures

tended to diminish the patriarchs' supply of cannon fodder. Margaret
Sanger thought women could end war by "cutting off the surplus
people. Of course military states always clamor for more children,
first defend the Fatherland, and when the population soars, to
to
23
conquer more territory for the added millions." But the goals of a
militaristic state would not be served by women who deliberately denied
it the necessary population base; the state wanted quantity, not

quality.

Religion of the patriarchal sort was, and is, always on the side of
the patriarchs. Vetter says, "There is little to choose between the
head-hunting which keeps down
the number of people to be supported

by the game produced given area, and the periodic wholesale

in a

slaughter engaged in by 'civilized' peoples in their battles for the control

of equally vital economic resources, and for which slaughters the
24
blessings of our religions have never failed to be forthcoming."

Wars are begun by elite males and carried out by those of lower
status, while priesthoods bless the effort. "It is a fair estimate that 100
million people have been by war since 1900. Responsibility
killed for

thismass slaughter rests directly upon the male members of the

25
species." Yet war is never reasonable, as males imagine their actions to
be. "Destruction of the world by a small group of white men in order
to achieve more wealth than they can ever possibly use does not make
sense. We are talking here about a drive for power, a need for
domination that must be examined. ... In squelching female energy,
patriarchy creates a culture that is destructive and death-oriented." 26
Today "we see the threat of nuclear annihilation more serious than ever
after two decades of disarmament efforts. We realize that science and
technology cannot save us, at least not as currently administered by
men. The design for disaster we currently face was not planned by
women." 27
In the Tantric morality which probably was planned by women, at

least in part, war is

adept may not
entirely unacceptable. The
participate in fighting or in the manufacture of weapons; he must not

glorify soldiers' bravery, nor praise killing in a hunt or a battle. These

"constitute a worse form of murder since they incite others to do it, thus
28
harming their spiritual growth." With modern films and television
still
trying to glorify violence, it seems the Tantric sages had already
achieved a deeper understanding of human nature than those of our

"enlightened" modern world.

[Link], 158. 2. Tacitus, 728. [Link],281. 4. Stanton, 66. 5. Bullough, 122.
[Link] 1, 719-22. 7. Campbell, CM., 390; Reinach, 295. 8. Terkel, 461.

1063
 9 Wolff, 258. 10. Terkel, 402. 11. Daly, 184. 12. Becker, E.E., 153. 13. Henry, 348.
Waste Land H JA Harris 2 24.
'
15. Henry, 197. 16. T.A. Harris, 262. 17. Mumford, 385.
18^Langer,63. 19. Vetter, 513. 20. Fromm, 121. 21. T.A. Harris, 246. [Link], 178.
23' E. Douglas, 137. 24. Vetter, 485. 25. Lewis, xiii. 26. Spretnak,401.

^mmmmhmmm 27. Boulding, 76 1 28. Tatz

. &
Kent, 3 1 .

Waste Land
The recurrent threatening theme of medieval romances was the
Waste Land motif, especially in the Holy Grail cycle. Like the Grail

legends themselves," the Waste

Land motif probably came from the

Middle East, where European travelers and crusaders had seen a true
Waste Land: the great desert which eastern mystics attributed to
Islam's renunciation of the fertile Great Mother. Western pagans also
maintained that if the Mother should be offended or neglected, she

might curse the land with the same desperate barrenness that could be
seen in Arabia Deserta and north Africa. (See Grail, Holy.)
One of the Grail stories said a king of England (Logres) once
committed a mortal sin by raping one of the Goddess's priestesses
and golden cup, symbol of her love, which must not be
stealing her
stolen but only given. Afterward, priestesses of the sacred springs no
wayfarers with food and drink. The Peace of the
1
longer welcomed
Goddess was destroyed, for the women no longer trusted men. "The
land went to waste. The trees lost their leaves, grass and flowers

withered, and the water receded more and more. ... [A] wrong
against a feminine being and a plundering of nature were perpetrated. . . .

[T]he origin of the trouble was looked upon as an offense committed

against the fairy world, i.e., actually against nature. The growth of . . .

masculine consciousness and of the patriarchal logos principle of the

Christian outlook are concerned in no small measure with this
2
development."
The Goddess appeared in several myths of the Grail cycle as a

great lady disinherited, or a queen robbed of her possessions and

reduced to penury, like La Reine de la Terre Gaste (Queen of the
Waste Land) in the Cistercian romance of the Queste del Saint Graal}
Many tales speak of groups of women deprived of their former property
rightsand gathered together in "castles of damsels," under three rulers

personifying the Goddess: a queen, her daughter, and her

granddaughter.
Hoping to keep their enemies at bay by magic spells, the woman
waited for a champion to defend their cause, as the Grail knights were

supposed to do. The queen employed a certain learned astronomer

whose wizardry kept away from the castle any knight likely to fail

through cowardice, envy, greed, or any other weakness of character.

The ladies waited for the coming of their savior, the Desired Knight,
perfect in his honesty and bravery: one who could destroy all their
enemies and restore their landsand possessions, which had been taken
from them by various robber barons. "Orphaned maidens," deprived of

1064
their inheritance by new patrilineal laws, also took refuge in such castles Waste Land
of women; so did older widows who were no longer permitted to inherit

m^^^mt^m^^^mm
4
property as under the former laws of mother-right.
Legends of the coming of the Desired Knight may have been
promulgated by women, or by bards seeking to please women with a
favorite theme. But there was more than this to the image of the Waste

Land. It which, "Under the autocratic regime of

haunted a society in

persecuting Christianity during the Middle Ages of Europe, Christian

dogma was indeed accepted nominally by great intellects, but it was
accepted under duress and with a reservation. The men of highest
. . .

intellect were compelled to express the faith that was in them in the

most guarded language." 5 Often, the language was symbolism the

most guarded of all, since its true meaning could always be denied. The
symbolic Waste Land was "a landscape of spiritual death," where
religious concepts were dissociated from the feelings and life experi-
ences of ordinary people, and imposed upon a confused, reluctant
6
public only by authoritarian indoctrination.
This could well describe Europe in the 1 2th century, when the
coming of the Desired Knight was vaguely identified with the second
coming of Christ or Merlin, Arthur, Frederick, etc. Many oppressed

people despairingly yearned for a powerful hero to defy the oppressors

on their behalf. The Waste Land theme invoked the collective fear of
every agricultural society since the Stone Age: the fear that Mother
Earth's cyclic miracle of food production might fail. But it meant more
than that. It also stood for collective devitalization and depression in a

society perceived by its members as lacking spiritual roots.

A famous modern application of the Waste Land theme is, of

poem, based not only on western applications of

course, T.S. Eliot's
Grail symbolism but also on the Hindu tale of the hopeless quest for the
true Word of Power, as recounted in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
The Hindu version ran like this:

Gods, men, and demons went to Shiva-Prajapati in the guise of

Lord of Thunder, to find out from him the ultimate word that is, the
word signifying the goal and end of all things, as signified their Om
beginning. But the Thunder, being thunder, was not able to say any
word except one: Da.
Men, hearing this word, thought it meant datta, meaning "give" or
"fertilize," because begetting was the only divine thing they could do,
and charitable giving was the only way they knew to seek blessedness.

Demons, hearing this meant dayadhvam, meaning

word, thought it

"sympathize" or "be compassionate"; in the Oriental context demons

were not evil spirits but deities of the old matriarchal religion, who
preached karuna, mother-love. Gods, hearing this word, thought it

meant damyata, meaning "control," the secret of their success; by self-

control they became divine, and by divinity they achieved power to
control all the others.
But the Lord of Thunder couldn't distinguish one word from

1065
 Water another. He only repeated mindlessly the only word he knew: "Da! Da!
7
Weird Sisters Da!"
Spence 138. 2. Jung & von Franz, 202, 204.
3. Campbell, CM., 543.
^^^"^^^^ 1

i. Jung &'von Franz, 229.

5. Shirley, 3 1-32. 6. Campbell, CM., 5-6, 373, 388.

7. Upanishads, 112.

Water
First of the elements, according to the philosophers of ancient
Miletus; the Arche, mother of all things. Water gave birth to "spirit,"
1

supposedly a male principle;

hence the idea of baptismal rebirth that

Christians copied from the pagans involved both water (feminine) and

spirit (masculine). The baptismal font was described as a "womb,"

specifically the
womb of Mary, whose name was that of all the ancient
2
Sea-goddesses. Most myths placed the primary impulse of creation
in a watery womb of chaos or "formlessness" representing the Great
Mother (Tiamat, Kali, Ma-Nu, Themis, etc.), an image really drawn
from the lack of differentiation between self and other or self and
mother experienced by the infant in the womb and subconsciously
remembered throughout life asan archetypal image. The Mother-letter
M (Ma) was an ideogram for waves of water.
"Students of mythology find that when the feminine principle is

subjected to sustained attack, as it was from the medieval Christian

authorities, it often quietly submerges. Under the water (where organic
life began) it swims through the subconscious of the dominant male
society, occasionally bobbing to the surface to offer a glimpse of the
3
rejected harmony."
Correspondence between "water" and "mother" was so universal
even in the Middle Ages, when the maternal principle was theoreti-

cally squelched, that theHermetic magicians and other "philosophers"

claimed souls were created not by God, but by the maternal earth and
maternal waters. 4 Goddess-shrines were nearly always associated with
wells, springs, lakes, or seas.
5
The Lady of the Lake was identical with

Minne/Aphrodite, the Minnesingers' Goddess of Love, who appeared

as a mermaid and was assumed to have a "nature of water." Often,
water was a metaphor for love itself. Like water, love stayed with the
man who held it loosely, as in an open, cupped hand; but the man
who tried to grip it hard, in his fist, found that it flowed away and left

him gripping nothing. And water, like love, was essential to the life-

forces of fertility and creativity, without which the psychic world as well
as the material world would become an arid desert, the Waste Land.
1. Campbell, P.M., 64. 2. Neumann, CM., 31 1. 3. Dames, 152-53.
4. Agrippa, 43, 49. 5. Dames, 1 54.

Weird Sisters

The three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth were called Weird

Sisters after the three Fates, or Norns, corresponding to the Greek

1066
Moerae and the Celtic Morrigan; that is, the Triple Goddess of past, Wells

present, and future. Weird was Saxon name of the death-goddess or

a

who often stood for the whole trinity. Her name was variously
Crone, ^^^^^^^^^^^^
given as Wyrd, or Wurd, or Urd, meaning both "Earth" and the Word
of Fate's immutable law. As Beowulf said, "Every man in this life
1

2
willgo lay him down on the bed where Wyrd has decided to nail him."
This passage from an early Saxon romance might throw light on
the eastern yogi's celebrated bed of nails, symbol of his submission to
the Goddess. Devotion to the Fates and their decrees often brought
forth a "passionate surrender" in both eastern and western mystics:
"This eagerness to submit to divine Fate inspired certain souls in days of
old with feelings so fervent as to recall the rapture of Christian

devotion, which burns to subject itself to the will of God." 3 Fate was

karma, a concept virtually identical with that of Weird.

Beowulf was written in a pagan era, but it received later Christian
additions. For instance, Beowulf said once that the Goddess Wyrd
would determine the outcome of his battle; then he said that God
would. Triple Goddess was much opposed by churchmen of the
The
time. A
12th-century Bishop of Exeter scolded his people for inviting
the Three Sisters into the house after a birth, to cast a good destiny
for the newborn, and making offerings to them on a table prepared
4
"with three knives for the service of the fairies."

Nevertheless, the Fairy Godmothers or Weird Sisters continued to

be invited. Four centuries later in Tudor England, they were still
prayed to appear at the cradle of a newborn infant, "for to set to the
babe what shall befall to him." 5
1. Campbell, Oc.M., 485. 2. Goodrich, 18, 32. 3. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 86.
4. Cavendish, P.E., 74, 82. 5. Hazlirt, 379.

Wells
Springs, fountains, ponds, wells were always female symbols in

archaic religions, often considered water-passages to the

underground
womb, in northern Europe associated with Mother Hel, whose name
also gave rise to "holy" and "healing." Many pagan sacred springs

throughout England received the name of Helen's Well during

Christian times, and churchmen claimed all these wells were named

Empress Helena, Constantine's sainted mother. But the real

after

"Helen" was Hel, or Dame Holle, whose water-womb was called the
source of all the children on earth. 1
There were also many wells named after the Goddesses Morgan
and Coventina, "Mother of the Covens," was associated with
Brigit.

healing wells. Margaret, a traditional witch name, also designated wells

and springs. Lancashire legend speaks of a statue called Peg o' the
Well beside a formerly holy spring in Ribblesdale, said to claim a human
sacrifice every seven years. 2 Ecclesiastical canons of the 10th century

1067
 but they continued
Werewolf expressly forbade "well-worshippings,"
5
nonetheless.
The Danish poem Water of Life drew on the pagan tradition of

resurrection through theMother-symbol of a sacred well called

Hileva (Hel-Eve). With this magic water, a divine queen put
her

dismembered lover back together and made him live again, as Isis did

4
for Osiris. The and fountain of Lourdes once had a similar
grotto
tradition, now revamped to the service of the church.
pagan
In 1770 a curate of Brpmlield forbade pagan ceremonies, wakes,
and fairs at a spring calle<rHellywell (Hel's Well), to which site the
ceremonies had been moved after they were evicted from the church-
The ceremonies had been going on for a
5
at a still earlier date.
yard
very long time. A medieval Life ofSt. Columba mentioned them in

connection with a fountain-shrine "famous among this heathen

men, blinded by the as a
people, which foolish devil, worshipped
6
divinity."
1. Rank, 73. 2. Phillips, 1 12, 160. 3. M. Harrison, 143. 4. Steenstrup, 186.
5. Hazlitt, 78. 6. Joyce 1 ,
366.

Werewolf
Belief in the werewolf, or "spirit-wolf," probably began with early-
medieval wolf clans who worshipped their totemic gods in wolf form, as

did some people of the Greco-Roman world centuries earlier. Zeus

Lycaeus, or Lycaeon, was a Pelasgian wolf-king who reigned in a
nine-
1

year cycle as spouse of the Ninefold Goddess, Nonacris. Virgil said

the first werewolf was Moeris, spouse of the trinitarian Fate-goddess

(Moera), from whom he learned secrets of magic, including the

2
necromantic knack of calling up the dead from their tombs.
Lycanthropy (werewolfism) was named for Apollo Lycaeus,
who used to be worshipped in the famous Ly-
"Wolfish Apollo,"
ceum or "Wolf-temple" where Socrates taught. 3 Apollo was mated to
Artemis as a divine Wolf Bitch at Troezen, where she purified
4
Pausanias Creek Orestes with the blood of nine sacrificial victims. Pausanias said Apollo
traveler and geographer was an Egyptian name from Up-Uat
originally deity, deriving his
of the 2nd century
(Ap-ol), a very ancient name of Anubis. 5 (See Dog.)
a.d. Living in a time of
Another Roman version of the wolf god was Dis Pater, Soranus, or
declining culture, he
was inspired by a desire Feronius, consort of the Sabine underground Goddess Feronia,
to describe the an- "Mother of Wolves." A certain Roman family claimed descent from
cient sacred sites for her Sabine priestesses, and annually demonstrated her power by
posterity. 6
walking barefoot over glowing coals during the festival of the Feronia.
She was also identified with Lupa the She- Wolf, whose spirit purified
Palatine towns through the agency of young men in wolfskins,

consecrated by participating in the Lupercalia or Festival of the She-

Wolf. 7
The She- Wolf was another aspect of the Triple Goddess, as

1068
shown by her triadic motherhood. She gave three souls to her son, Werewolf
the legendary King Erulus or Herulus, so that when he was overthrown
by Evander, he had to be killed three times.
8
The Amazons, who ^^^^^^^^^^^
worshipped the Triple Goddess, incorporated a tribe called the Neuri,
who "turned themselves into wolves" for a few days each year during
their main religious festival, presumably by wearing wolf skins and
masks. 9 The same story was told of a certain Irish tribe in Ossory,

who became wolf-people when attending their Yuletide feast, devouring

the flesh of cattle as wolves, and afterward regaining their human

shape. "Giraldus Cambrensis relates this great wonder in detail, as in

10
operation in his own time, and believed every word of it."
The heathens' devotion to ancestral wolf gods in Teutonic Europe
isevinced by the popularity of such names as Wolf, Wulf, Wolfram,

Wolfburg, Aethelwulf, Wolfstein, etc. "Beowulf son of Beowulf," hero

of the Anglo-Saxon epic, was called Scyld by the Danes, who said he
came from the waters in a basket like Romulus and Remus, foster-sons
of the She- Wolf. 11
Irish tribes said their spiritual fathers were wolves, and for that
reason they wore wolf skins and used wolves' teeth for healing
amulets. Celtic folksongs tell of children or wives transformed into
wolves. One whole tribe was said to assume wolf shape very seventh
12
year. As Germanic "berserkers" could become bears by donning
bearskins, so it was thought people could become wolves by donning
wolf pelts. 1?
In Mercia during the 10th century a.d. there was a revival of

pagan learning under two druidic priests, one of whom was named
"
Werwulf. 14 This name of "spirit-wolf seems to have been applied to
opponents of Christianity in general. About 1000 a.d., the word
"werewolf" was taken to mean an outlaw. 15
South Slavs used to pass a newborn child through a wolfskin,

saying it was thus born of the She- Wolf. After their conversion to

Christianity, the people claimed this ceremony would protect the child
from witches. But purpose, obviously, was to assimilate the
its real

child to the wolf totem via a second birth from the wolf. 16

Livonians said witches routinely transformed themselves into

wolves by passing through a certain magic pool, another instance of
17
baptismal rebirth in animal form. Polish legend said a witch could
transform a bride and groom into wolves by laying a girdle of human
skin across the threshold at their wedding feast. Later they would
receive dresses of fur and would regain their human shape at will.
18

Against such totemic ceremonies the 7th-century Council of Toledo

issued severe denunciations of people who put on the heads of beasts,
or "make themselves into wild animals." 19
Italian peasants still
say a man who sleeps outdoors on Friday
under a full moon
be attacked by a werewolf, or will become one
will

himself. Friday was the night of the Goddess, and the

warning against
her lunar influence probably dated back to the myth of Endymion

1069
 ("Seduced Moon-Man"), who fell asleep
Werewolf on her
holy moon-mountain
and became her enchanted bridegroom, never to wake up again, so
20
the Goddess could shower her kisses on him each night.
Another story traceable to wolf-clan traditions was "Little Red
Riding Hood." The giveaway details are the red garment, the
in the deep woods a grandmother
The werewolf was offering of food to a "grandmother"
known to every Indo- who wore a wolfskin and the cannibalistic motif of devouring and
European language: resurrection. In Britain, "a red woven hood" was the distinguishing
Danish var-ulf, Gothic
mark of a prophetess or priestess. The
21
story's original victim would
vaira-ulf, Old Nor-
man have been not the red-clad Virgin but the hunter, as Lord of the Hunt.
wargus, Servian
wlkoslak, Slovakian Like Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood was part of a Virgin-
vlkodhk, Russian waw- Mother-Crone trinity, wearing the same red garment that Virgin Kali
kalak, Greek moon of a lunar eclipse she prophesied catastrophe
wore; as the red
vrykolaki, Romanian
and inspired much fear. Romanian churchmen declared that the
varcolaci, French

loup-garou, Italian lupo eclipsed moon was reddened by her own blood, shed when her
manaro, German wolves attacked her, to "make men repent and turn from evil." 22
Wahr-Wdlffe." Shvk The Gaulish Diana had numerous wolf-cultists among her vota-
terms descended
ries, in both ancient and medieval times. Under her totemic name of
from volkhvi, a title of
theshamans who Lupa she was a Mother of wild animals, and certain women seem to
held important positions have impersonated her in southern France. A Provencal troubadour
before
in tribal life named Pierre Vidal wrote a love poem to a lady of Carcassonne, whose
Christianity. Cognates name was Loba, "She- Wolf ":
are German Volk,

"people," and Russian When loup-garou the rabble call me,

vrach, "physician" When vagrant shepherds hoot,
indicating that were- Pursue, and buffet me to boot,
wolves were people: It doth not for a moment gall me,
totemic healers in wolf
I seek not palaces nor halls,
masks. 24 Similar
Or refuge when the winter falls;
"medicine men" are
still found among all
Exposed to winds and frosts at night,

primitives.
My soul ravaged with delight.
is

Me claims my she-wolfso divine;

And justly she that claim prefers,
For, by my troth, my life is hers
More than another's, more than mine. 25

Lovers of the She- Wolf sometimes found her on a holy moun-

tain, which the gypsies called Monte Lupo, Wolf-Mountain. Young
men could learn the secrets of magic by celebrating the sacred
marriage: masturbating over the Goddess's statue and ejecting semen on
it. She would guide and protect them, provided they never again set
foot in a Christian church. 26 Her votaries' shape-shifting followed the
phases of the moon, which was another form of the Goddess herself.
In the 12th century, Gervais of
Tilbury noted: "In England we often
see men changed changes of the moon."
into wolves at the 27

Sacharow quoted an old Russian charm, to be spoken by one who

wished to invoke the Moon-goddess and become a werewolf:

On the sea, on the ocean, on the island, on Bujan, on the empty pasture
gleams the moon, on an ashstock lying in a green wood, in a gloomy

1070
 vale. Toward the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf, horned cattle seeking for Werewolf
his sharp white fangs; but the wolf enters not the forest, but the wolf
dives not into the shadowy vale. Moon, moon, gold-horned moon, check ^^_^^^_^^^^^
the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives, break the shepherds'
upon all cattle, on men, on all creeping things, that
cudgels, cast wild fear
they may not catch the gray wolf, that they may not rend his warm
skin! word is binding, more binding than sleep, more binding than the
My
28
promise ofa hero.

This charm has a ring of peasant magic, suggesting a hungry

poacher hoping to steal some fresh meat from the baron's herds, under
the protection of a wolfskin. Poaching the overlord's cattle or game
was punishable by death, which may account for the cruelty meted out
to those accused of lycanthropy. One captured "werewolf" in France
was so mauled that, a witness said, "he bore hardly any resemblance to a

man, and struck with horror those who looked at him." The inquisi-

tor, Pierre Boguet, explained that terrible injuries were common among
werewolves, due to the many lacerations they suffered while running
29
through bramble bushes.
Another werewolf captured by the Inquisition in 1 598 was "pos-
sessed by a demon" while in prison, which gave him such a thirst that
he drank a large tubful of water, so his belly was "distended and hard."
He refused to eat or drink any more, and soon died. 30 Translating this

report into its probable reality, one would assume the unlucky
official

werewolf was subjected to the water torture and died of a ruptured

stomach.
Another unfortunate werewolf was Peter Stubb of Cologne, tor-

tured until he confessed having transformed himself into a wolf by a

magic girdle given him by the devil. The judges couldn't find the girdle
where Stubb said he hid it, but they explained this by saying it had
"gone whence it came, so that it was not to be found."
to the Devil

Though was unproved, Stubb was nastily executed for the

his case

crime of lycanthropy: he was sentenced to have the flesh pulled off his
bones in ten places with red-hot pincers, then to have his legs and
arms broken with a wooden axe; finally to be beheaded and burned. 31
Yet another werewolf in 1 541 never even lasted long enough to go
to prison. His captors hacked off his arms and legs, claiming to be
searching for the wolf-hair that he wore on the inside of his skin. The
hairwas not found, so the victim was declared innocent of lycan-
32
thropy which did him little good, as he was already dead.
An often-repeated story concerned a lone man attacked at night by
a lone wolf, which he wounded, usually by cutting off a forepaw.
Next day a woman would be found with her hand missing, which
identified her as the werewolf. Such an incident was reported as fact
by Jean de Nynauld in woman in the case was burned alive. 33
161 5; the
The story probably recommended itself to some men as a perfect way

to dispose of a woman they had mistreated, such as a rape victim.

On December 14, 1 598, a tailor of Chalons was sentenced to

1071
 children into his
Wheel death for lycanthropy, having confessed to luring
and eating them. Methods by which these confessions
shop, murdering
were extracted from the man can only be guessed, because the judges
ordered the court records burned. In 1 521 at Poligny, three men were
induced by torture to say they had made themselves wolves with a
the devil, and in wolf shape they had eaten
magic salve given them by
34
several children, and enjoyed sexual relations with wild she-wolves.
Gilles Gamier was famous "lycanthrope" caught by the Inquisition,
a

tortured and executed for having devoured children. The charge was
35
not murder or cannibalism, but lycanthropy. Whatever was left of the

pagan wolf cults, it seems the Christian church molded the material
into the enduring legend of the werewolf.
[Link], W.G., 406. 2. Lawson, 250. 3. Summers, W, 144.
4 Graves, G.M. 1, 201; 2, 66. 5. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 129. 6. Larousse, 210.
7 Wedeck, 174. 8. Dumezil, 244. 9. Herodotus, 244. 10. Joyce, 299. 11. Rank, 63.
12 H Smith, 275. 13. Wedeck, 173. 14. Wainwright, 70. 15. Robbins, 325.
16 J E. Harrison, 131. 17. Scot, 72. 18. Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 152-53.
19 H. Smith, 270. 20. Graves, G.M. 1,211. 21. Goodrich, 180. 22. A. Masters, 93.
23 Baring-Gould, W, 48-49. [Link],9. 25. Baring-Gould, W, 64. 26. Leland, 206.
27. Robbins, 327. 28. Baring-Gould, W., 117. 29. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 49.
30. Baring-Gould, W., 83. 31. Robbins, 490. 32. Cohen, N.H.U.T., 44.
33. Robbins, 326. 34. Robbins, 324, 537. 35. Summers. G.W., 23-24.

Wheel
A primary Oriental symbol of the Goddess as ruler of Fate was the
karmic wheel, often identified with the wheel of the galaxy, the Milky

Way, or zodiac, circling the outer reaches of the universe around the
Goddess's yoni or omphalos (navel), her earth-centered hub. Tantric
traditionshowed the wheel as a mandala centering on the three
totems of the Triple Goddess, the dove (Virgin-Creatress), serpent

(Mother-Preserver), and sow (Crone-Destroyer). This mandala es-

1

tablished "the six realms of the round of being," the sacred Hexagram.
Celts worshipped the karmic star-wheel as the emblem of Mother

Arianrhod, ancestress of "Aryans." Some said it was a great silver

wheel that dipped into the sea, on which heroes rode to Emania, the
Moon's land of death. 2
In Ethiopia the Goddess's image was placed in the center of a
wheel of flames, Indian images of Kali. Christian myths depict
like

the early missionaries' destruction of her idol, which was called an old
woman with the power of the evil eye and with feet "like unto a
wheel of fire." Jesus commanded: "Take this woman of the evil eye,
and make up a fire, and carry her thereto, and throw her into it and
burn her." 3 Her ashes were to be scattered to the wind, for people
believed she might be resurrected from them, like the Phoenix, if

they remained in one place.

Destruction of the Wheel-goddess's image was the probable basis
for the legend of St. Catherine, supposedly martyred on a wheel of

fire, the famous "Catherine Wheel." There was no real St. Catherine,

1072
but there was a Goddess as Dancer of the Fiery Wheel, performing Wheel
Kathakali Kali's "dance of time" at the hub of the universe. The

Kalacakra Tantra (Wheel of Time), which presents this image, is still ^^^^^^^^
the most revered text in India and Tibet,
"coming at the head of the
tannic section of the sacred canon." 4 See Catherine.
Catherine was not the only medieval manifestation of the Goddess
of the Wheel of Time, which was also the Wheel of Fortune
manipulated by the trinitarian Mother of Fate, Fortuna. In ancient
Rome she was one of the emanations of Juno Februata, whose
festival was Christianized as St. Valentine's Day. Its symbol was a wheel

of six spokes formed of yonic mandorlas, in the Asiatic manner. 5 The

6
six spokes remained a sign of Juno well into the Christian era.
In the 1 2th century, the Goddess and her wheel appeared in the
Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights). Wheel windows of cathe-
were connected with her, some showing human figures rising on
drals

one side of the wheel and falling on the other, like the Rota Fortuna
at the center of the Tarot's Major Trumps. "In these cathedral churches
and royal abbeys is Dame Fortune who turns topsy-turvy faster than a
windmill." Honorius of Autun said, "Philosophers tell us of a woman Wheel of Fortune

fastened to a wheel which turns perpetually, so that they say she is

sometimes rising and sometimes falling with its movement. . . . The
woman fastened to the wheel is Fortune, whose head alternately rises
and falls." Here was the real St. Catherine: the Fate-goddess, wor-

shipped by builders who incorporated their own secret symbols into

the churches they built. Hugo pointed out that "Sometimes a porch, a

facade, or a whole church presents a symbolic meaning entirely

foreign to worship, even inimical to the Church." 7
Boethius, a Gnostic philosopher whose writings were too popular
tobe ignored, was claimed as a Christian theologian; but his major
work made no mention of Christ. He found his Consolation of
Philosophy in the of his guardian Goddesses, Philosophia
visitation

and Fortuna. The taught him her doctrine of the karmic wheel: "I
latter

cause a rapid wheel to turn; I love to raise the fallen and abase the

proud. Mount, then, if thou wilt, but on condition that thou dost not
wax indignant when the law that presides at my Games demands that
thou shalt descend." 8
Fortuna, Goddess of the Wheel, may have been derived from a
pre-Roman Vortumna, "She Who Turns the Year." 9 Fate and
Time were always linked in the thought of the ancients. Later Roman
writers tried to masculinize this Goddess as a seasonal god, Vertum-
nus; but they gave away "his" original character by saying he appeared
in the guise of an oldwoman. The Goddess was worshipped in both
beneficent and maleficent aspects as Bona Fortuna or Mala Fortuna,
represented in her temple on the Esquiline as an All-Seeing Eye in
the form of a wheel. 10
As Fortuna Primigeneia, the Goddess of the Wheel was called the
firstborn of the primal Mother Juno, and revered as the Virgin "who

1073
Wheel bestows on her worshippers every grace of body and every beauty of
soul."
n She was identified with the Mazdean "Glory." From her, as
the Fortuna Augusti, Caesars drew their divine right to rule.
Her fiery wheel was associated with kingship in a more primitive,
direct way during the early Bronze Age, when sacred kings died
within the wheel of rebirth, as shown by the legend of Ixion, a ruler of
the Thessalian Lapiths.
12 end of his term of
Ixion was killed at the

office, when he was rolled downhill, fastened inside a fiery wheel that
be compared with the
signified the sun. This sacred-king figure might
Norse deity Kris Kringle, a "Christ of the Wheel," personifying the
dying and reborn sun of the winter solstice
hence his later connec-
13
tion with Christmas, even identification with Santa Claus.
Northern Europeans believed the mystic wheels of existence
stopped turning at the crucial transition from one year to the next,

during the darkest days of winter, when the sun came to its nadir. At this
time, during the season of Yule, all rotating motions were taboo. Cart
wheels were not allowed to roll; butter could not be churned. 14 Yet at
the winter solstice and its corresponding point at the other side of the
rolling year, Midsummer Eve, fiery fate-wheels were set rolling from
British hilltops as late as the 19th century. "The Pagan rites of this
festival at the summer solstice, may be considered as a counterpart of
those used at the winter solstice at Yule-tide. . . .
[T]he people imag-
ine that all their ill-luck rolls away from them together with this
15
wheel."

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a 6th-century Christian mystic

who pretended to be a lst-century bishop of Athens and was believed

authentic for many centuries, declared that the class of angels called
Thrones werereally Wheels, having the name of Gel, "which in the
Hebrew tongue signifies revolutions and revelations." 16 This image was
Oriental, drawn from the vision of eastern temples as gigantic world-

chariots, complete with wheels, in which the god was enthroned. In his

chariot the Carnival of Existence, carrying the

god participated in the

world along with all its teeming life forms: animals, plants, mountains,
rivers. Upon identification with the
god, the sages said, "He who has
seen his true self looks down upon transmigrating existence as upon a
17
rolling chariot-wheel."
Medieval processions sometimes took a circular form and went
round and round a public square or courtyard, this exhibition being
known as a carrousel, "a wheel of chariots." 18
The inclusion of its
model in the proceedings of carnivals and fairs bears out the probabil-
ity of its pagan origin, for most of the traditional trappings of fairs were
left over from the Old Religion, including the wheel of Fortune.
The very name of the Carnival came from old festivals of the
Goddess Carna, mother of "re-in-Carnations," the same cycles
The roulette or "little wheel"
controlled by Kali's wheel of karma.
evolved from the eastern prayer wheel. Its spirit was not only Dame
Fortune, but also Lady Luck, from Sanskrit Loka, a Divine Midwife

1074
guarding one of the planetary spheres or "ascending light planes of Whisper
19
experience." Whistling
Another carnival manifestation of the wheel was the Ferris Wheel,
^^^^^^^^^^^
a form of the Fairies' Wheel, descended from the Celtic Wheel of
Arianrhod. Riders of the Wheel represented pre-Christian "fairy folk"
whose souls were involved in karmic cycles. The Dream ofKing
Arthur describes a Fairies' Wheel closely resembling the modern Ferris

Wheel. 20
[Link], CM., 416. 2. Spence, 152-53. 3. Gifford, 57. 4. Tatz &
Kent, 1 8.
[Link], 104. 6. Koch, 54. 7. Male, 95-97, 395. 8. Male, 96. 9. Graves, G.M. 1, 126.

[Link], 195. 11. Cumont, M.M., 1 1 1. 12. Campbell, CM., 422.

[Link],245. 14. Oxenstierna, 214. 15. Hazlitt, 346. 16. Hughes, 29.
17. Rawson, AT., 193. 18. Moakley, 44. 19. Avalon, 40. 20. B. Butler, 147.

Whisper
The ancients believed that ghosts and spirits would speak in whispers.

Having been deprived of flesh, the dead spoke without laryngeal sound.
Nearly all supernatural beings were supposed to be identifiable by
their whisper-voices, even God, according to 1
Kings 19:12 the "still

small voice" of God speaking to Elijah was a mistranslation of a phase

l
meaning literally "a thin whisper."
Other biblical parallels are Job 4:16, the same word "whisper"
translated as a still voice; and Isaiah [Link] "Thy voice shall be as one

ground, and thy speech shall

that hath a familiar spirit, out of the

whisper out of the dust." These passages indicate the practice of

ancient "spirit mediums" when purporting to be in communication
with the dead. Impersonating the spirit, they whispered, so the voice
couldn't be identified.
In a medieval German legend, the Triple Goddess presided over a
land of the dead called Wisperthal (Valley of Whispers) centering on
an enchanted Hall of Mirrors perhaps related to the fairy-tale Crystal
Mountain. Three innocent youths once trespassed in the valley, met
various aspects of the Goddess as three beautiful maidens, three terrible
hags, and three black death-ravens. They barely escaped with their
2
lives from the eerie place and vowed never to return.
1. Hoolce, S.P., 57. 2. Guerber, L.R., 219.

Whistling
An old rhyme says "Whistling girls and crowing hens never come to

any good ends." It was true; women who whistled were suspected of
witchcraft. Whistling was a piece of sympathetic magic used to raise a

wind. Becalmed sailors were allowed to "whistle for the wind," but

whistling women were believed to cause destructive storms. There-

1

fore it became "unladylike" for girls to whistle.

[Link],361.

1075
 Widdershins Widdershins
Witch
Counterclockwise, the direction of the moon, or "left-hand path" of
pagan dances (still prevalent in folk tradition). To open the door of a
one must walk around it three times widdershins, as Childe
fairy hill,
Rowland did, calling, "Open door!" The same Open Sesame appears in
var. Withershins
other ballads: "Thrice went fair Agnes the mountain round, and

entered the cave beneath the ground." As sacred caves once served as
l

the medieval church forbade their use and claimed

pagan temples,
that walking or turning one's self widdershins was an indicium of
witchcraft.
2
See Left Hand.
1. Wimberly, 363, 367. 2. Robbins, 209, 421 .

Willow
Water and willows represented the Goddess Helice, "Willow," virgin
form of Hecate with her willow-withe grain-basket. Willow wands 1

invoked the Muses, whose mountain was encircled by the Helicon,

"Willow-stream." The Dionysian thyrsus, like the later witch's wand,
was willow. As Dionysus was once a major god of Jerusalem, the
willow figured prominently in municipal ceremonies there. A "Great

Day" of the Feast of Tabernacles was known as the Day of Willows,

with rites
honoring and water. 2 Willow wands gave protection in the
fire
3
underworld, where Orpheus carried one to show the way. Willow
wands were sacred to the Moon-goddess as late as the 1 7th century a.d.,
when an English herbal said the moon owns the willow.
Witches used willow bark to treat rheumatism and fevers; it was
the source of salicylic acid (aspirin), one of Hecate's cures. Some said
wicca or "witchcraft" evolved from a word meaning willow, cognate
with "wicker" (willow-withe weaving). Magic cats were supposed to

grow from pussy-willows or "catkins," to become witches' malkins

(familiars): hence the saying that all cats were gray in the beginning.
The catkins were harbingers of spring, appearing on the willow as

graymalkins. (See Cat.)

1. Graves, CM. 1,115. 2. Graves, W.G., 47. 3. Pepper & Wilcock, 57.

Witch
There were many other words for witches, such as Incantatrix,
Lamia, Saga, Maga, Malefica, Sortilega, Strix, Venefica. 3 In Italy a
witch was a Strega or Janara, an old title of a 4
priestess of Jana (Juno).
English writers called witches both "hags" and "fairies," words which
were once synonymous. 5 Witches had metaphoric titles: bacularia,
"stick-rider"; fascinatrix, "one with the evil eye"; herberia, "one who
gathers herbs"; strix, "screech-owl"; pixidria, "keeper of an ointment-

1076
box"; femina saga, "wise- woman"; lamia, "night-monster"; incantator, Witch
"worker of charms"; magus, "wise-man"; sortiariae mulier, "seeress";
veneficia, "poisoner"; maliarda, "evil-doer." Latin treatises called witch-
es anispex, auguris, divinator, januatica, ligator, mascara, phitonissa,
6
stregula.
Dalmatian witches were krstaca, "crossed ones," a derivative of the Skeat's Etymological
1
Greek Christos. In Holland a witch was wijsseggher, "wise-sayer," Dictionary derived
8 "witch" from medi-
from which came the English "wiseacre." The biblical passage that
eval English wicche,
supported centuries of persecution, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
formerly Anglo-Sax-
live" (Exodus 22:18), used the Hebrew word kasaph, translated "witch" on wicca, masculine, or
9
although it means a seer or diviner. wicce, feminine: a

Early medieval England had female clan-leaders who exercised corruption of witga,
short form of witega,
matriarchal rights in lawgiving and law enforcement; the Magna
a seer or diviner; from
Carta of Chester called them iudices de wich judges who were
10
Anglo-Saxon witan,
witches. Female elders once had political power among the clans, to see, to know. Similar-
but patriarchal religion and law gradually took it away from them and ly, Icelandic vitki, a

called them witches in order to dispose of them. In 1711 Addison witch, came from vita,

observed that "When an old woman begins to doat and grow chargeable to know; or vizkr,

u clever or
knowing one.
to a Parish, she is
generally turned into a witch." Wizard came from
Scot remarked that the fate of a witch might be directly proportion- Norman French wis-
al The pope made saints out of rich witches, but poor
to her fortune. chard, Old French
witches were burned. 12
1

Among many examples tending to support this guiscart, sagacious one.

The surname Whit-
opinion was the famous French Chambre Ardente affair, which
taker came from
involved many members of the aristocracy and the upper-class clergy in
Witakarlege, a wiz-
a witch cult. Numerous male and female servants were tortured and ard or a witch. 2 The
burned for assisting their masters in working witchcraft; but in all the words "wit" and
"wisdom" came from
four years the affair dragged on, no noble person was tortured or
executed. 13 thesame roots.

enough, the authorities persecuted poor, outcast folk

Illogically as

witches, yet professed to believe witches could provide themselves

with all the wealth anyone could want. Reginald Scot, a disbeliever,

scornfully observed that witches were said to "transfer their neigh-

bors' corn into their own ground, and yet are perpetual beggars, and
cannot enrich themselves, either with money or otherwise: who is so
"
foolish as to remain longer in doubt of their supernatural powers? H

Witchcraft brought so little profit to Helen Jenkenson of Northants,

hanged in 1612
bewitching a child, that the record of her execution
for

said: "Thus ended this woman her miserable life, after she had lived
many years poor, wretched, scorned and forsaken of the world." 15
The nursery-rhyme stereotype of the witch owed much to Scot's
description:

Women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of
wrinkles; poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as know no
whose drowsy minds the devil hath gotten a fine seat; so
religion; in as,
what mischief, mischance, calamity, or slaughter is brought to pass,
they are easily persuaded the same is done by themselves. . . .
They are

1077
 lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of
WHcti
all that They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish; and not much
see them.
to be possessed with spirits. ' 6
differing from them that are thought

Persecutors saidit was heretical to consider witches harmless.

Even in
England, where witches were not burned but hanged, some
authorities fearfully cited the "received opinion" that a witch's body
'

should be burned to ashes to prevent ill effects arising from her blood.
1

Churchmen assured the arresting officers that a witch's power was

lost the instant she was touched by an employee of the Inquisition; but
18
the employees themselves were not so sure.
Numerous stories depict the persecutors' fear of their victims. It

was said in the Black Forest that a witch blew in her executioner's

face, promising him his reward; the next day he was afflicted with a fate

leprosy. Inquisitors' handbooks directed them to wear at all times a

bag of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday; to avoid looking in a witch's

eyes; and to cross themselves constantly in the witches' prison. Peter
of Berne forgot this precaution, and a captive witch by enchantment
made him fall down a flight of stairs which he proved later by
19
torturing her until she confirmed it.

Any unusual ability in a woman instantly raised a charge of

witchcraft. The so-called Witch of Newbury was murdered by a
group of soldiers because she knew how to go "surfing" on the river.
Soldiers of the Earl of Essex saw her doing it, and were "as much
astonished as they could be," seeing that "to and fro she fleeted on the
board standing firm bolt upright turning and winding it which
. . .

way she pleased, making it pastime to her, as little thinking who

perceived her tricks, or that she did imagine that they were the last
she ever should show." Most of the soldiers were afraid to touch her,
but a few brave souls ambushed the board-rider as she came to shore,
slashed her head, beat her, and shot her, leaving her "detested carcass fo

the worms." 20
From ruthlessly organized persecutions on the continent, witch-
hunts in England became largely cases of village feuds and petty

spite. If crops failed, horses ran away, cattle sickened, wagons broke,
women miscarried, or butter wouldn't come in the churn, a witch
was always found to blame. Marion Cumlaquoy of Orkney was burned
in 1643 for turning herself three times widdershins, to make her

neighbor's barley crop rot. A tailor's wife was executed for quarrelling
with her neighbor, who afterward saw a snake on his property, and his
children One witch was condemned for arguing with a
fell sick.

drunkard an alehouse. After drinking himself into paroxysms of

in
21
vomiting, he accused her of bewitching him, and he was believed.
A woman was convicted of witchcraft for having caused a neigh-
bor's lameness by pulling off her stockings. Another was executed
for having admired a neighbor's baby, which afterward fell out of its
cradle and died. Two Glasgow witches were hanged for treating a
sick child, even though the treatment succeeded and the child was

1078
cured. Joan Cason of Kent went to the gallows in 1 586 for having dry Witch
thatch roof. Her neighbor, whose child was sick, was told by an
on her
unidentified traveler that the child was bewitched, and it could be

proved by stealing a bit of thatch from the witch's roof and throwing it
on the fire. If it crackled and sparked, witchcraft was assured. The test
came out positive, and the court was satisfied enough to convict poor
22
Joan.
Witches were convenient scapegoats for doctors who failed to cure

their patients, forit was the "received" belief that witch-caused

illnesses were incurable. Weyer said, "Ignorant and clumsy physicians

blame all sicknesses which they are unable to cure or which they have
treated wrongly, on witchery." There were also priests and monks who
"claim to understand the healing art and they lie to those who seek
23
help that their sicknesses are derived from witchery." Most real witch
persecutions reflect "no erotic orgies, no Sabbats or elaborate rituals;
merely the hatreds and spites of narrow peasant life assisted by vicious
laws." 24
Witches provided a focus for sexist hatred in male-dominated
society, as Stanton pointed out:

The spirit of the Church in contempt for women, as shown in the

its

Scriptures, in Paul's epistlesand the Pentateuch, the hatred of the

fathers, manifested in their ecclesiastical canons, and in the doctrines of

asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, destroyed man 's respect for woman
and legalized the burning, drowning, and torturing of women. . . .

Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian

missionaries and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and
monks. The priestess mother became something impure, associated with
the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a

brewing ofpoison, nay, her very existence a source ofsin to man. Thus
woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch. . . .

Here is the reason why in all the Biblical researches and higher
25
criticism, the scholars never touch the position of women.

Men displayed a lively interest in the physical appearance of

witches, seeking to know how to recognize them as men also craved
rules for recognizing other types of women from their physical

appearance. It was generally agreed that any woman with dissimilar eyes
was a witch. Where most people had dark eyes and swarthy complex-
ions, as in Spain and Italy, pale blue eyes were associated with
witchcraft. Many claimed any woman with red hair was a witch. 26
This may have been because red-haired people are usually freck-

led, and freckles were often identified as "witch marks," as were

moles, warts, birthmarks, pimples, pockmarks, cysts, liver spots, wens, or Thomas Ady One
of the few 17th-century
any other blemish. Some witch-finders said the mark could resemble
an insect bite or an ulcer. 27 English debunkers of
the witchcraft craze; au-
No one ever explained how the witch mark differed from an thor of A Perfect
ordinary blemish. Since few bodies were unblemished, the search for Discovery of Witches
the mark seldom failed. Thomas Ady recognized this, and wrote: "Very (1661).

1079
 Witch few people in the world are without privy marks upon their bodies, as

moles or stains, even such as witchmongers call the devil's privy

28
marks." But no one paid attention to this.
Trials were conducted with as much injustice as possible. In 1629
Isobel Young was accused of crippling by magic a man who had
a water mill to break down. She
quarrelled with her, and causing
man was lame before their quarrel, and water mills
protested that the
can break down through neglect. The prosecutor, Sir Thomas Hope,
threw out her defense on the ground that it was "contrary to the

libel," that is, it contradicted the charge.

29
When a witch is on trial, Scot
30
said, any "equivocal or doubtful answer is taken for a confession."

On the other hand, no answer at all was a confession too.

Witches who refused to speak were condemned: "Witchcraft proved by

31
silence of the accused." Sometimes mere playfulness "proved"
witchcraft, as in the case of Mary Spencer, accused in 1634 because she
merrily set her bucket rolling downhill and ran before it, calling it to
follow her.
32
Sometimes women were stigmatized as witches when they
were in fact victims of unfair laws, such as the law that accepted any
man's word in court ahead of any number of women's. A butcher in
Germany stole some silver vessels from women, then had them
prosecuted for witchcraft by claiming that he found the vessels in the
woods where the women were attending a witches' sabbat. 33
Sometimes the accusation of witchcraft was a form of punishment
for women who were too vocal about their disillusionment with men
and their preference for living alone. Historical literature has many
references to "the joy with which women after widowhood set up
their own households, and to the vigor with which they resisted being
courted by amorous widowers." 34 The solitary life, however, left a
woman even more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, since men
usually thought she must be somehow controlled.
Those who tortured the unfortunate defendant into admitting

witchcraft used a euphemistic language that showed the victim was

condemned a priori. One Anne Marie de Georgel denied making a

devil's pact, until by torture she was "justly forced to give an account
of herself," the record said. Catherine Delort was "forced to confess by
the means we have power to use to make people speak the truth,"
and she was "convicted of all the crimes we
suspected her of commit-
ting, although she protested her innocence for a long time." The

inquisitor Nicholas Remy professed a pious astonishment at the great

number of witches who expressed a "positive desire for death,"
pretending not to notice that they had been brought to this desire by
innumerable savage tortures. 35 See Torture.
The extent to which pagan religion, as such, actually survived
Dean R.W. among the witches of the 16th and 17th centuries has been much
Church British clergy-
discussed but never decided. Dean Church said, "Society was a long

man, author of St. time unlearning heathenism; it has not done so yet; but it had hardly
Anselm was only
(1870). begun, at any rate it
just beginning, to imagine the possibility

1080
of such a thing in the eleventh century." In 1 5th-century Bohemia it Witchcraft
was still common practice at Christmas and other holidays to make
offerings to "the gods," rather than to God. 35 European villages still
^^^^^^^^^^
had many "wise-women" who acted as priestesses officially or unoffi-
cially. Since church fathers declared Christian priestesses

unthinkable, all functions of the priestess were associated with pagan-

37
ism. Bishops described pagan gatherings in their dioceses, attended
38
by "devils ... in the form of men and women." Pagan ceremonies
were allowed to survive in weddings, folk festivals, seasonal rites,

feastsof the dead, and so on. 39 But when women or Goddesses played
the leading role in such ceremonies, there was more determined

suppression. John of Salisbury wrote that it was the devil, "with God's

permission," who sent people to gatherings inhonor of the Queen of

the Night, a priestess impersonating the Moon-goddess under the name
of Noctiluca or Herodiade. 40
The Catholic church applied the word "witch" to any woman who
criticized church policies. Women allied with the 14th-century

Reforming Franciscans, some of whom were burned for heresy, were

41
described as witches, daughters of Judas, and instigated of the Devil.
Writers of the Talmud tended to view nearly all women as
similarly
witches. They "Women are naturally inclined to
said things like,

witchcraft," and "The more women there are, the more witchcraft
there will be." 42

Probably there were few sincere practitioners, compared with the

multitudes who were railroaded into the ecclesiastical courts and
legally murdered despite their innocence. Yet it was obvious to even the
moderately intelligent that Christian society deliberately humiliated
and discriminated against women. Some may have been resentful
enough to become defiant. "Women have had no voice in the canon
law, the catechisms, the church creeds and discipline, and why should
they obey the behests of a strictly masculine religion, that places the
43
sex at a disadvantage in emergencies?" Possibilities for
all life's

expressing their frustration and defiance were severely limited; but

voluntary adoption of the witch's reputation and behavior was surely

among such possibilities.

[Link],66. Wainwright, 238. 3. Wedeck, 140. 4. Elworthy, 353. 5. Scot, 550.

2.
6. Robbins, 544. Leland, 66. 8. Funk, 1 16. 9. J.B. Russell, 54. 10. Wainwright, 97.
7.

[Link],259. 13. Robbins, 84. [Link], 405. 15. Rosen, 354.

11. Phillips, 180.
16. H. Smith, 269; Scot, 5. 17. Summers, V, 81. 18. Robbins, 334.
19. Lea unabridged, 815, 831. 20. Ewen, 251-53. 21. Rosen, 326-28.
22. Rosen, 163-64. 23. Bromberg, 59. 24. Maple, 49. 25. Daly, 69. 26. de Lys, 149.
27. Castiglioni, 243. 28. Robbins, 552. 29. Robbins, 456. 30. Scot, 19.

[Link],202. 32. Holmes, 112. 33. Baroja, 124. 34. Boulding, 554.
35. Baroja, 85-86, 117. 36. Miles, 35, 183. 37. Boulding, 361. 38. Baroja, 64.
39. Miles, 161, 190-91. 40. Baroja, 62. 41. Beard, 277. 42. Baroja, 80. 43. Stanton, 74.

Witchcraft

irly in the Middle Ages, almost anything women did could be

described as witchcraft because their daily lives invoked the Goddess

1081
 with a thousand small ceremonies as well as the larger
ones connect-
Witchcraft
ed with major
holidays. Martin of Braga said women must be

^^^^^^^^^ condemned wearing laurels, taking omens

for "decorating tables,
^^^^^^^"" from and wine on the log in the hearth, and
fruit
footsteps, putting
bread in the well, what are these but worship of the devil? For
women to call upon Minerva when they spin, and to observe the day of
Venus weddings and to call upon her whenever they go out upon
at
l

the public highway, what is that but worship of the devil?"

Outside the official religion, where they were kept, women passed
down their private family recipes and charms, curses and blessings,

telling traditional tales

of the past and foretelling the future from omens
and "signs." The Dominican Johann Herolt declared: "Most women
belie their catholic faith with charms and spells, after the fashion of Eve

their first mother, who believed the devil speaking through the
serpent rather than God himself. . . .
[A]ny woman by herself knows
2
more of such superstitions and charms than a hundred men."

Up to the 1 5th century, women's "charms and spells" were

virtually the only repository of practical medicine. Churchmen avoid-

ed doctoring, on the ground that all sickness came from demonic

3
possession, and the only permissible cure was exorcism.
Europe's traditional witch doctors were women: clan mothers,

priestesses of healing shrines, midwives, nurses, vilas. In pre-Christian

Gaul and Scandinavia, medicine was entirely in the hands of women. 4

Even in the Christian era, the village wise-woman was still
every
peasant's family doctor. Paracelsus said witches taught him everything
he knew about healing. 5 Dr. Lambe, the Duke of Buckingham's
famous "devil," was said to have learned secrets of medicine by
6
consorting with witches.
In 1 570 the gaoler of Canterbury Castle released a condemned
witch, citing the popular opinion that she did more good for the sick
7
with her homely remedies than all the priests' prayers and exorcisms.

Agrippa von Nettesheim thought witches superior to male practitio-

ners: "Are not philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers often

inferior to country women in their divinations and predictions, and

does not the old nurse very often beat the doctor?" 8 The men who
learned doctoring from witches were allowed to practice, but their
female teachers were persecuted. Scot observed that a male "conjurer"
was permitted to cure disease by magic arts, whereas a woman was
condemned to death for 9
doing so.

Ordinary folk had no doctors. Physicians were available chiefly to

the rich. The poor took their troubles to the local witch. Irish farmers
still
say a "fairy doctor" is needed for charms against the evil eye. In

Greece, "both priests and witches are available for emergencies

created by the evil eye. The priest burns incense and recites appropriate
prayers. The witch also burns incense as she recites appropriate
10
incantations."
It wasn't unusual for the witches' healing charms to be preferred

1082
to those of the church, or for the two to be regarded as identical in Witchcraft
essence. Ramesey wrote that the witches' cures were indistinguish-
able from the "magical and juggling cures" professed by the clergy, ^^^^^^^^^^^
including "saints, images, relics, holy-waters, shrines, avemarys, cru-
cifixes, benedictions, charms, characters, sigils of the planets, and of the

signs ... all such cures are rather to be ascribed to the forces of the
n
imagination, than any virtue in them."
Officially, women were often forbidden to do any kind of healing.

In 1322 a woman named Jacoba Felicie was arrested and prosecuted

by the medical faculty of the University of Paris for practicing medicine,
although, the record said, "she was wiser in the art of surgery and
12
medicine than the greatest master or doctor in Paris."

Scot said witchmongers gave the witches as much power as Christ,

and even more, when they claimed witches could raise the dead, as
Christ raised Lazarus; they could turn water into other fluids, like wine
or milk; they could control the weather, the crops, animals, men; they
could see into the past and future. Reading of witches' trials, he said,

"you shall see such impossibilities confessed, as none, having his right
n Loher also declared that the "sins" for which
wits, will believe."
witches were brought to the stake were such "that they could not
14
possibly commit."
Churchmen, however, viewed the impossibility of witches' mir-
acles as perfectly good ground them, "because the
for believing
15
performance of the impossible proved that demons were at work." It
was never explained how the performance of a miracle demonstrated
the intervention of a saint in one case and of a demon in another. For
example, Marie Bucaille was burned as a witch, though her "mir-
acles" were saintlike: she healed the sick, saw holy visions, displayed

stigmata, and performed many of the acts that led to canonization in

other cases. 16
The same acts were by churchmen in
differently interpreted
different times. Witchcraft was allowed through the first half of the
Christian era. It was not called a "heresy" until the 14th century. In 500
a.d. the Franks' Salic Law recognized witches' right to practice. In
643, an edict declared it
illegal to burn witches. 17 In 785, the Synod of
Paderborn said anyone who burned a witch must be sentenced to
death. 18 France's first trial to declare witchcraft a crime took place in

1390. 19

Up to a surprisingly late date, nobility and clergy alike employed

the services of witches. In 1382 the Count of Kyburg hired a witch to
stand on the battlements of his castle and raise a thunderstorm to
20
disperse an army of enemies. This practice was soundly based on
theological opinion that witches could raise storms at will, "either upon
sea or land." 21 Churchmen said witches controlled the weather "with
God's permission," and they didn't begin to punish what God permitted
until the 22
beginning of the Renaissance.
Witches were summoned to court by Louis d'Orleans to cure his

1083
 had (The witches
brother's madness, after priestly exorcisms
failed.
Witchcraft
also failed.) Guichard, Bishop of Troyes,
used the classic pierced-puppet

kind of witchcraft to kill his enemy, Queen

Blanche of Navarre. 23
of witchcraft until the reign of
English law was fairly tolerant

I. As late as 1371 a male witch was arrested in Southwark for

James
articles: a skull, a grimoire, and a corpse's head for
possessing magical
24
divination. He was released after he had promised not to do it
again.

560, a lenient period, eight men confessed

In 1
to conjuration and

sorcery, and were released with a reprimand. Only three years later the
25
same were made punishable by imprisonment or a death penalty.
acts

The Council of Treves in 1 3 10 outlawed conjurations, divina-

tions, and love potions.
26
Further prohibitions seemed to be aimed at

supporting husbands who wished

to cast off their wives. Stringent laws

threatened a witch to whom an abandoned wife might apply, for

revenge through malefica, since she

had no recourse under law. 27
The church distinguished between sorcery, which was generally
acceptable,and witchcraft, which was heresy. Von Nettesheim's books
of sorcery were published under church auspices, accompanied by a
statement of ecclesiastical approval; indeed, his instructor in magic had
been John Trithemius, an abbot. What the distinction between sorcery
and witchcraft boiled down to was that men could practice magic,
women could not. 28
When the church discovered that common folk couldn't under-
stand the doctrinal subtleties of heresy and didn't care about theological

arguments, persecution was extended into areas that were accessible

to

the public mind, so the church could maintain its control of that mind.
For example, in the region of Bonn a late spring frost of 1610 ruined
crops and was officially described as an act of God. Twenty years later,
after the witch judges came to the area, the same kind of natural

disasters were blamed exclusively on witches. 29

Churchmen fostered the public delusion that witches were en-
gaged in a vast secret plot, under the devil's guidance, to overthrow the

kingdom of God on earth. They created and embellished the concept of

the black mass, and made laymen believe it frequently occurred,
whereas it was largely a fraud supported only by spurious "evidence"
from the torture chamber. The Inquisition needed this public delusion,
because the work it was created for was finished when the Albigensian,
Waldensian, and other heretic groups of the south of France had been
finally crushed. In order to continue its profitable existence,
the Inquisi-
tion needed new victims. The witchcraft mania was the solution to its

50 have
problem. Whatever secular crimes the witches were supposed to

committed, the one crime that was decisive in sending all of them to the
stake was the one crime of which all of them were completely innocent,

because it was impossible: the crime of collaborating with a real devil.

As for secret continuation of a pre-Christian religion: that was more

often done by the church itself, in the guise of saint-worship, festivals,

healing shrines, etc.

1084
 Scholars aren't sure how much pagan religion survived in the form Witchcraft
of actual group worship, at the beginning of the era of persecution. Pico
della Mirandola's La Strega (The Witch) described a cult in northern

Italy where a pagan Goddess presided over sexual orgies; she was said to
bear a close resemblance to the Mother of God. 31 Another group at
Arras was said to have centered on "a prostitute" called Demiselle, or
The Maiden. Her consort was the Abbot of Little Sense, otherwise
known as the Prince of Fools, a composer and singer of popular
52
songs in other words, it was a cult of minstrelsy.
(See Romance.)
There is a vast body of "information" about what went on at the
witches' Sabbat all of it worthless, because its source was the torture

chamber. The late Renaissance saw a frivolous interest in "black

masses" among who tried to model a new cult group on
the wealthy,
what they had read of earlier trials. In 1610, Pierre de l'Ancre wrote of
"great Lords and Ladies and other rich and powerful ones who handle
where they appear cloaked, and the
the great matters of the Sabbath,
women with masks, that they may keep themselves always hidden and
unknown." 33 In the reign of Louis XIV, half the Parisian clergy and
most of the court, including Madame de Montespan, were involved Francoise Athenais
with a society witch called La Voisin, who staged black masses for de Rochechouart,
them. 34 But their rituals were based on ecclesiastical literature, not on a Marquise de Mon-
tespan (1641-1707).
true folk tradition.
Mistress of Louis
It has been claimed that witchcraft constituted a coherent under- XIV for 1 3 years, moth-
ground organization from the beginning, with well-defined chains of er of seven of his

command and communication. "Witch books" purporting to come children; court patron-
ess of Corneille,
from the ancient tradition speak of a Brotherhood (not Sisterhood): "If
Racine, and La
you are condemned, fear not, the Brotherhood is
powerful, they will Fontaine.
help you to escape if you stand steadfast. ... Be sure, if steadfast you go
to the pyre, drugs will reach you, you will feel naught. You but go to
35
death and what beyond, the Ecstasy of the Goddess." But during
lies

the real persecutions, few witches seemed indifferent to their sufferings,

and virtually none escaped.
Monstrelet described a typical early example of persecution in
1459.

In the town ofArras and county ofArtois, arose, through a

this year, in

and melancholy chance, an opinion called, I know not why, the

terrible

Religion of Vaudoisie. This sect consisted, it is said, of certain persons,

both men and women, who, under cloud of night, by the power of the
devil, repaired to some solitary spot, amid woods and deserts, where the
devil appeared before them in a human form save that his visage is

never perfectly visible to them read to the assembly a book of his

ordinances, informing them how he could be obeyed; distributed a very

money and a plentiful meal, which was concluded by a scene of

little

general profligacy; after which each one of the party was conveyed home
to her or his own habitation.

On accusations ofaccess to such acts ofmadness, several creditable

persons of the town ofArras were seized and imprisoned along with some
foolish women and persons oflittle consequence. These were so horribly

1085
Witchcraft tortured that some of them admitted the truth of the whole accusations,
and said, besides, that they had seen and recognized in their nocturnal
assembly many persons of rank, prelates, seigneurs, and governors of
and cities, being such names as the examiners had suggested to
bailliages
the persons examined, while they constrained them by
torture to impeach

the persons to whom they belonged. Several of those

who had been thus
informed were arrested, thrown into prison, and tortured for so
against
also were obliged to confess what was charged
long a time that they
them. After this those of mean condition were executed and
against
inhumanly burnt, while the richer and more powerful
of the accused
ransomed themselves by sums ofmoney, to avoid the punishment and the
shame attending it. Many even of those also confessed being persuaded to
take that course by the interrogators, who promised them indemnity for
lifeand fortune. Some there were, ofa truth, who suffered with marvel-
lous patience and constancy the torments inflicted on them, and would
confess nothing imputed to their charge; but they, too, had to give large
sums to the judges, who exacted that such of them as, notwithstanding
their mishandling, were still able to move, should banish themselves from

that part of the country. . . .

fl]t ought not to be concealed that the whole
accusation was a strategem of wicked men for their own covetous

purposes, and in order, by these false accusations and forced confessions,

*6
to destroy the life, fame, and fortune of wealthy persons.

Those prisoners who found themselves condemned to death

immediately shrieked aloud that they had been tricked; they were
promised a light sentence, such as a pilgrimage, if they confessed
as
57
the inquisitors wanted.
Witchcraft persecutions picked up momentum when inquisitors
were seeking new victims to keep their organization going. In 1375 a
French inquisitor lamented that all the rich heretics had been extermi-
nated; there were none left whose wealth could support the
Inquisition, and "it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should
be so uncertain of its future." Then Pope John XXII empowered the
Inquisition to prosecute anyone who worked magic, and "the Inquisi-
and unevenly developed its concept of witchcraft."
tion slowly
w
Soon the church was making sweeping claims, such as the claim that the

entire population of Navarre consisted of witches. 59

Witch hunting sustained itself because it became a major industry,

supporting the income of many. Local nobles, bishops, kings, judges,

courts, townships, magistrates, and other functionaries high and low all
received a share of the loot collected by inquisitors from their victims'
assets. Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the
wood burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee.
that

After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated them-

40
selves to abanquet at the expense of the victim's estate.
Inquisitors were no less zealous in wringing the last penny out of
their poorer victims than in helping themselves to the estates of the
rich. In 1256, a woman named Raymonde Barbaira died before her
sentence could be carried out, leaving to her heirs a chest of linens,

1086
her clothes, several cows, and four sous in cash. The inquisitor demand-
ed from the heirs forty sous for all the property. "Such petty and

vulgar details," Lea said, "give us a clearer insight into the spirit and
working of the Inquisition, and of the grinding oppression which it
exercised on the subject populations."
41
^ Witchcraft

^^mmmmmm

A history of the Inquisition written by a Catholic in 1909 had to

admit that it "invented the crime of witchcraft and . . . relied on torture

as the means of proving it." At the Inquisition encountered

first

skepticism everywhere. Even theologians shocked the inquisitors by

attributing natural disasters to chance, or God, rather than to witch-
craft. The public disbelieved witches' confessions, saying they were
extracted only by torture. Peasants in some subalpine valleys broke
into open rebellion against the judges' wholesale burnings. It took
decades of ceaseless propagandizing, and ruthless measures to stop
the mouths of critics, before the persecution could be said to have won
42
public support.
Severe persecution dated from the bull of Pope Innocent VIII,
Summis desiderantes, wherein God's vicar "infallibly" declared that
witches could blast crops and domestic animals, cause disease, prevent
husbands and wives from copulating, and in general "outrage the
Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many." 43
The Divine Majesty being apparently unable to look after its own
interests without human help, the churchmen took it
upon themselves
to carry out God's vengeance, which developed into a "hideous
nightmare" as the church's mailed fist stretched over the western world
44
for five centuries.

The earlier Canon Episcopi ruled that witchcraft was nothing but
a delusion, and it was heresy to believe in it. But that was before the

church discovered how to profit from the witchcraft belief. After Pope
Innocent's reign, it was heresy not to believe
According in witchcraft.

to Martin Del Rio, S.J., anyone who thought witchcraft was only a

deception must be suspected of being a witch. No one was allowed to

speak against the extermination of witches. Inquisitor Heinrich von
Schultheis said, "He who opposes the extermination of the witches
with one single word can not expect to remain unscathed." 45

Superstitious belief in the "evil" of witchcraft persisted to a very

late date. The last English witch trial took place in 1712. The last

official witch burning in Scotland was in 1727, with unofficial incidents

even [Link] a century ago, an elderly woman in the Russian
village of Wratschewe was locked in her cottage and set afire for

bewitching cattle. Her murderers were tried, and sentenced only to a

46
light ecclesiastical penance. In January, 1928, a family of Hungarian

peasants beat an oldwoman to death, claiming she was a witch. A

court acquitted them, on the ground that they acted out of "irresistible
47
compulsion."
The real reason for persistence of the witchcraft idea was that
Christian authorities couldn't let it die, without admitting that God's

1087
Witchcraft
word was wrong, and God's servants had committed millions of legal
murders and tortured millions of helpless people without cause. Dr.
Blackstone, England's ultimate authority
on jurisprudence, wrote: "To
of Witchcraft and Sorcery,
deny the possibility, nay, actual existence
is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various

passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a

truth to which every Nation in the World hath in its turn borne

testimony." When skepticism about witchcraft seemed to be on the

rise, John Wesley cried bitterly, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect

48
the giving up of the Bible." Calvin and Knox also protested that
49
denial of witchcraft meant denial of the Bible's authority. Joseph
Glanvill, chaplain to Charles II, said all who disbelieved in witchcraft
50
were atheists.

Despite such protests, skepticism grew with the slow advance of

the Age of Enlightenment. In 1736, Scottish laws against the
"crime" of witchcraft were formally repealed. Yet the church refused to
keep pace with the law. Forty years later, ministers of the Associated
Presbytery passed a resolution declaring their unabated belief in witch-
51
craft. As late as the 1920s a rector of four parishes in Norfolk could
still I were to take a census of opinion in all four villages I am
write: "If

certain that should find a majority of people seriously professing

I

belief in witchcraft, the policy of the 'evil eye,' and the efficacy of both
52
good and evil spells." The churches wouldn't let these beliefs die.

Christianity, then, has been chiefly responsible for the survival and

growth of witchcraft as an article of faith. It seems so still. In the

1940s, Seabrook estimated that "half the literate white population in the
world today believe in witchcraft"; and the nonliterate nonwhite

population attains a much higher proportion. A Gallup poll taken in

53

1978 showed that ten percent of all Americans believe in witches. 54

But what is meant by "believe in"? It could mean a belief that

there are people who call themselves witches; this is self-evident

enough. It could mean a belief that such people erroneously think they
have supernatural powers. It could mean a belief that such people
really do have supernatural powers. It could mean a belief that, as the
church has always maintained, witches are agents of the devil, seeking
to destroy the world out of sheer perversity. Or, it could mean a belief

that witches preserved an older and better religion based on worship

of Nature and the female principle.
Those who now call themselves witches usually uphold some
version of the latter belief. A modern witch, Leo Louis Martello,
says:

We worship and identify with the Horned God, Lord of the Hunt and the
Underworld, and the Mother Goddess, especially the latter (Mother
Earth, Mother Nature). Without the female principle (women) man
wouldn 't be here. . . . Witchcraft is a pre-Christian faith. . . . It tends to
be matriarchal whereas both Christianity and Satanism are patriarchal and

urn
 male chauvinist. The latter two are merely opposite sides of the same Witchcraft
coin. Witchcraft, as the Old Religion, is a coin ofa different vintage,
55
predating both. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Asked how he feels about belonging to a heavily matriarchal
tradition, one male witch answered: "I'd rather be first mate on a ship

that is than captain on a ship that has a rotten hull, a ship that is
solid

sinking. Patriarchy is such a ship." Witches have defined patriarchy as

"manipulative and domineering." The matriarchal world view, on
the other hand, values "feelings of connectedness and intuition . . .

nonauthoritarian and nondestructive power relationships." It is

claimed that witchcraft tends to correct what W. Holman Keith called

the fundamental religious error of our time: "to substitute force as the
divine and ruling principle in place of beauty and love, tomake
destruction, in which the prowess of the male excels, more important
in life than the creativity of the female." 56
men persecuting women
Certainly the history of witchcraft shows
in order to maintain a malemonopoly of profitable enterprises, such
as medicine and magic. Women of outstanding reputation in any field

were at risk, since almost any woman's accomplishment could be

When the church declared war on female healers,
defined as witchcraft.
became a crime punishable by death if it was practiced by a
healing
woman. Women were forbidden to study medicine, and "if a woman
dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die." 57

Doctors eagerly participated in witch hunts, to eliminate their competi-

tion. It was all done very deliberately. "Given the number of

instances in which the church combined with various economic groups

from doctors to lawyers to merchant guilds, not only to make

pronouncements about the incapacities of women, but often to accom-

plish the physical liquidation of women through witchcraft and heresy
trials, one can hardly say that it all happened without anyone intending
58
it."

Churchmen who availed themselves of witches' services some-

times persecuted even those who
helped them, in remarkable
examples of ingratitude. Alison Peirsoun of Byrehill was so famous as a
healing witch that the archbishop of St. Andrews sent for her when
he was sick, and she cured him. Later he not only refused to pay her fee,
but had her arrested, charged with witchcraft and burned. 59
The muddy illogic of persecutors' sexist thinking is nowhere better
illustrated than in the notion of the witch's "poppet," or wax doll,
which could be mistreated by piercing or melting in order to make a
human victim suffer corresponding stabbing pains, fevers, and other
troubles. When the witch destroyed the doll altogether, the victim
would die. Yet oddly enough, when male authorities discovered the
doll and destroyed it, the victim would not die but would recover. A

similar sexist attitude was apparent in the whole idea of traffic

between human beings and demons. Burton's Criminal Trials of

1089
Witchcraft Scotland stated that a male sorcerer is the master of demons, but a
60
female witch is the slave of demons. Yet her offense was usually

^^^^^^^^i^^ considered more punishable than his.

Modern witches, male and female, seem inclined to restore the
sexual balance of old romances, where men's magical skills were

acquired under feminine

instruction.
61
The witches appear to be recon-
structing an old religion in a new format, gradually working out a

theology that owes more to ancient Indo-European models than to the

"reverse Christianity" associated with the idea of Satanism. Important
this theology differs from Christianity are the
points upon which
following:
(1) The female principle is deified, equal to or greater than the
male. (2) Body and soul are seen as one and the same; one cannot ex-
ist without the other. (3) Nature is sacred, not to be abused or

"conquered." (4) The individual will has intrinsic value and is not to
be subordinated to the "revealed" of a deity. (5) Time is circular
will

and repetitive; existence is cyclic; the figures of the Triple Goddess

symbolize constant repetitions of growth and decay. (6) There is no
original sin, and no hard-and-fast separation of "good" and "evil" (for

example, a feast of fresh beef is good for the feasters but evil for the

once-living main dish). (7) Sexuality, spontaneity, humor, and play

activities may be incorporated into ritual, where the experience of
pleasure is
regarded as a positive force in life, rather than a temptation
62
or a sin.

The Goddess speaks to modern witches in somewhat the same

vein as the speeches drawn from her ancient scriptures:

Mine is the secret that opens upon the door ofyouth and mine is the Cup
of the Wine ofLife and the Cauldron ofCerridwen, which is the Holy
Grail of Immortality. lam the Gracious Goddess who gives the gift ofjoy
unto the heart ofman upon earth. I give the knowledge of the Spirit
Eternal,and beyond death I give peace and freedom and reunion with
those that have gone before. . . . I who am the beauty of the Green
Earth, and the White Moon amongst the stars and the mystery of the
Waters, and the desire of the heart ofman, I call unto thy soul to arise
and come unto me. For lam the Soul ofNature whogiveth life to the
universe; from me all things proceed and unto me all things must
return. . . . I have been with thee from the beginning, and lam that whici
is attained at the end of desire. 6i

1. J.H. Smith, D.C.P., 241. 2. Bullough, 177. 3. White 2, 36. 4. Briffault 1, 488.
5. Lederer, 1 50. 6. Rosen, 7. 7. Ewen, 69. 8. Agrippa, 270. 9. Scot, 20. 1 0. Gifford, 89.
[Link], 103. [Link],216. 13. Scot, 43, 124, 141,403. 14. Robbins, 308.
1 Cavendish, P.E., 218. 16. Summers, G.W., 429-30. 17. Tannahill, 96-97.
5.

18. Castiglioni, 233. 19. Robbins, 209. 20. Briffault 3, 12. 21. Hazlitt, 655.
22. Wedeck, 78. [Link], 193. 24. Lea unabridged, 786. 25. Robbins, 161.
26. Robbins, 547. 27. Hazlitt, 341. 28. Agrippa, Foreword. 29. Robbins, 330.
30. Robbins, 50, 207-8. 31. R.E.L. Masters, 27. 32. Knight, D.W.P., 207.
33. de Givry, 84-85. 34. Summers, G.W., 435. 35. Book of Shadows, 11.
36. W. Scott, 166-68. 37. Robbins, 105. 38. Robbins, 8. 39. Ravensdale & Morgan, 105.
40. Robbins, 1 11, 113. 41. Lea, 172. 42. Robbins, 9, 271. 43. Kramer Sprenger, & xliii.

44. R.E.L. Masters, xxvi. 45. Robbins, 108, 143. 46. Robbins, 169, 457, 336.
47. Summers, W,
87. 48. Summers, H.W.D., 63; G.W. 169. 49. H. Smith, 293.

1090
 50. Maple, 98. 51. Robbins, 457. 52. Summers, G.W., 181-82. 53. Bromberg, 179. Woden
54. Newsweek, June 26, 1978, 32. 55. Cohen, N.B., 129-31. 56. Adler, 122, 188, 204.
57. Dreifus, 7. 58. Boulding, 427, 505. 59. Baroja, 126. [Link], 159.
Womb
61. Wimberly, 219. 62. Goldenberg, 1 1 1-14. 63. Book of Shadows, 65-67.

Woden var. Wotan

Saxon and Frankish names of Odin, whom the Goths called Godan
(God), or Father Goth. The day sacred to him was Wednesday
Woden's Day. German churchmen eventually changed the name of
the day to Mittwoch, "mid-week," to prevent speaking of the heathen

deity's name.
Wednesday is
Mercury's Day in Latin-based languages (Italian

mercoledi, French mercredi, Spanish miercoles), because Woden-

Odin was identified with the Roman Mercury (Hermes). As a

Conductor of Souls, Woden was associated with the cult of the dead,
who were formerly called "elves" in Scandinavia; therefore he evolved
into the Elven-king, Erl King, and leader of the Wild Hunt, when
ghosts rode through the sky at Halloween. As Hod, the slayer of the
year-god Balder, he appeared in his death mask and hood as a
malicious deity, Old Carl Hood, father of the greenwood-hero Robin. 1

Christians readily identified him with the devil because he was

already a fearful deity of death very like the Hindu Yama.
1. Wimberly, 200.

Wolf
Sacred totem of many European clans during the Middle Ages, as
shown by the frequency of the name Wolf or Wulf in place names and
family surnames. The old Saxon year began with Wolf-monath
(Wolf Month). Wolf mothers or wolf nurses figured prominently in the
An early version of Siegfried was nursed
biographies of pagan heroes.
by a divine she-wolf and was named Wolfdietrich.
1

Worship of the wolf among heathen clans led to innumerable

superstitions about wolf-demons and werewolves. Wolves were asso-
ciated with deathand reincarnation, since they were carrion eaters,
formerly believed to carry the dead in their own bodies to the pagan
heavens and hells. See Dog; Werewolf.
1. Rank, 58.

Womb
The Sanskrit word for any temple or sanctuary was garbha-grha,
"womb." '

The great annual festival of Aphrodite in Argos was called Hyste-

i,"Womb." 2

1091
 ^
Worid
Wormwood sea,
The oldest oracle
and
in Greece, sacred to the Great Mother of earth,
was named Delphi, from delphos, "womb."
sky,
and barrow-mounds were designed as "wombs"
Megalithic tombs
" "^^^^^^" to give rebirth to the dead. Their vaginal
entrance passages show that

Neolithic folk went to considerable trouble to devise imitations of

female anatomy in earth and stone. Tomb and womb were even
related linguistically. Greek tumbos, Latin tumulus
were cognates of

tumere, to swell, to be pregnant.

The word "tummy" is
thought to
3
have come from the same root.
Womb-temples and womb-tombs point backward to the matriar-
was thought efficacious.
chal age, when only feminine life-magic
Rebirth from the womb-tomb was the meaning of the domed funerary
the remains of the sainted dead lay
stupa of the Far East, where
4
within a structure called garbha, the "womb." The parallel with barro
Mycenaean tholos tombs, cave temples, and other such
graves,
structures is now well known. Even a Christian cathedral centered on
the space called nave, originally meaning "belly." Caves and burial

chambers were said to be sunk in the "bowels" of the earth that is, of

Mother Earth. The biblical term for "birth" is "separation from the
bowels."

Archetypal womb-symbolism is as common today as it ever was,

though not always recognized as such. Paul Klee said, "Which artist
would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion . . . from
which all functions derive their life? In thewomb of nature, in the

primal ground of creation, where the secret key to all things lies

hidden?" 5
1. Campbell, CM., 168. 2. [Link], 126. 3. Potter & Sargent, 28. 4. Waddell, 262.
[Link],M.H.S.,263.

World Egg
See Egg; see also Dioscuri; Goose; Swan.

Worm
"The Worm" or "The Worm That Never Dies" sometimes desig-
nated the Earth Goddess in her corpse-eating aspect. Her spirit was
thought to inhabit grave-worms (maggots), for which the Old Norse
word was mathkr, Old English matha both related to "mother." The
modern word descended from a Middle English derivative, mawke}
Linguistically related to these "worms" were the Goddess's familiars oi

mawkins. See Cat.

1. Potter & Sargent, 238.

Wormwood
Artemisia absinthium, wormwood, was sacred to the Great Mother.
Trevisa wrote in 1398: "Artemisia is called mother of herbs, and was

1092
sometime hallowed to the goddess that hight [is named] Artemis."
'
Wudu-Maer
In Russia, wormwood or absinth was called an "accursed herb" because Xipe Totec
it was sacred to the pagan nymphs (Vilas); but it had also protective
^^^^^^^^^^^
2
magic.
Wormwood was a corruption of Old English wermod, "spirit-
mother," which became German Wermut, French vermouth.
Absinthe was first prepared by French witches from artemisia, and
became a commercial product itin the
proved 1 8th century, though

very dangerous. Wormwood drug can

is a habit-forming
destroy that

brain cells and cause delirium; furthermore, commercial absinthe was

68% alcohol by volume. 3 During the 19th century, the French govern-
4
ment outlawed its production.
1. Potter & Sargent, 274. 2. Larousse, 293. 3. Potter & Sargent, 275.
4. Encyc. Brit., "Absinthe."

Wudu-Maer
"Forest-mother," literally "Wood-Mary"; Old Saxon for a nymph or

fairyof the sacred grove, a priestess of the Oak-goddess, or a female

druid. In Bavaria, the wudu-maerwere presented with offerings of
foodstuffs to court their goodwill; they were known as Little Wood
Women. A 1

concept of a forest priestess survived

similar in English
legends of Maid Marian. See Robin.
[Link]/.er,F.O.T.,312.

Xikum
Babylonian Tree of Heaven, emblem of Ishtar, spreading her
branches into the celestial and nether worlds, holding the Savior
Tammuz in her midst. 1
Moslems diabolized this Mother-tree and
2
mentioned her in the Koran as Zakkum, the Tree of Hell. See Fig.
1.
Harding, 48. 2. Campbell, Oc.M., 430.

Xipe Totec
"Our Lord the Flayed One" in pre-Columbian Mexico, impersonat-
ed by a man who was executed on the Hill of the Stars at the end of
each sacred 52-year cycle, at the moment when the Pleiades reached
the zenith. He was castrated and flayed, and the priest was clothed in his

People carried new fire

1
bloody skin, signifying the god's rebirth.
from his temple to re-kindle their household fires, believing that his
death staved off the end of the world, at least for one more cycle. 2

Xipe Totec was the son of the Demeter-like Corn-goddess Chico-

mecoatl. Like all gods of
crops, he suffered in imitation of reaping
and grinding the grain. His flaying may have represented the husking of
the corn cobs.

1093
 The "Flayed One" bore a remarkable resemblance to the archaic
Xochiquetzal
Yahweh Hindu god Rudra, the Red One, or the Howler, or the Lord Who Is
Half Woman. Rudra too was associated mystically with the Pleiades,
Seven Mothers of the World, or Krittikas ("cutters"),
called the

whose "cutting" function may have been castrating or even flaying

3 -
sacrificial gods.
1. Neumann, G.M., 192. 2. Tannahill, 82. 3. 0'Flaherty, 298, 346.

Xochiquetzal
Mexican Aphrodite: a many-faceted Love Goddess, Moon-virgin,
fairy queen, and Madonna;
a patroness of marriage and sacred harlots,

dance, songs, spinning, weaving, changes and transformations, magic,

and Like Syrian Adonis, her son-lover was a young vegetation god.
1

art.

Her worshippers said Xochiquetzal was the mother of all races of

humanity after the primordial flood. Her many children were as

dumb as animals her holy spirit in the form of a dove descended

until oi

them from the Tree of Heaven and gave them speech. In this way all
2
the world's languages were created.
In addition to the dove, another symbol Xochiquetzal shared with
the ancient Indo-European Goddesses was her sacred flower, the

marigold perhaps a New World version of the golden Thousand-

Petaled Lotus representing the Great Mother in India.

Xochiquetzal's paradise was located "above the nine heavens in a

very pleasant and delectable place, accompanied and guarded by
many people and waited on by other women of the rank of goddesses,
3
where are many delights of fountains, brooks, flower-gardens." This
fairyland was available after death to those who faithfully served the
Goddess and lived according to her laws.
1. Neumann, G.M., 196-97. 2. Frazer, F.O.T., 107. 3. Summers, V, 260.

Yab-Yum
"Father-Mother," the Tantric coital posture in which gods mated

with the Goddess and men with their Shaktis, especially at the moment
of death when the Eternal Shakti brought everlasting bliss.
1
Unlike
western patriarchs, Oriental mystics said the most favorable position for

copulation was not Venus observa (male-superior), but Yab-Yum,

with both partners upright, face to face, and free to move.

[Link].E.A., 170; pi. 103.

Yahweh
Hebrew name of God, a vocalization of the Tetragrammaton. It

was also rendered Yah, Yahu, Jahveh, Jahi, or Jehovah, and has been

1094
related to the name of the Canaanite moon deity Yareah, possibly a Yama
female or androgynous form. A male Yahweh was married to the Yang and Yin
Canaanite mother goddess Anat at Elephantine. 1 ^^^^^^^^^^^
The name of God pronounced Jaho, Ieuw was applied to
Iao, or
Zeus-Sabazius as the nocturnal sun: a Lord of Death under the earth,
like Saturn. Jews called him Sabbaoth, "Lord of Hosts.". His Latin name
came from the same roots: Iu-piter, "Father leu," that is, Jupiter or
2
Jove.
Jahi was also a very ancient Goddess, appearing in Persian scrip-
tures as the maker and seducer of the first man. Like many other

mated with the primal serpent; she also gave the

Creatresses, she
menstrual "blood of life" to Eve.
1. Hays, 85, 89. 2. Knight, D.W.P., 113.

Yama
Hindu Lord of Death, male counterpart of the Lady of Life, whose
name was his own in reversal: Ma-Ya. In classic Hindu myth, however,
Yama's consort was his twin sister Yami, a feminine form of himself.
The Fates ordained that he should mate with her, in the manner of the
Primal Androgyne (see Androgyne). But Yama refused, saying he
intended to keep himself pure. Because he detached himself from his
feminine half and renounced the life-supporting power of the female,
he became the first man to die. He went into the underworld and
1

became its
king.
This myth presents an interesting reversal of the Judeo-Christian
notion that the sin of woman and sex brought death into the world.
Here death came about through the sin of male asceticism; Yama
"died" because he refused to be a sexual being. His followers revered
him psychopomp, like Hermes after his detachment from Aphro-
as a

dite: "Yama chose death, and he found out the path for many, and he
dead a resting place." 2
gives the souls of the
As Lord of Death he took the title Samana, "the Leveller," and at

times he wore the fearsome aspect of a blue-skinned, bull-headed

demon, the same as Sammael, the Angel of Death in the Book of

Enoch. 3 Persians worshipped him as Yima the Splendid, the Good
4
Shepherd who gave men immortality. In the ancient land of Canaan,
he became Yamm, Lord of the Abyss, annually cast down by Baal in
their eternal contest for the favors of Astarte.

1. Lamussc, 345. 2. Rees, 108. 3. Brandon, 362; F. Huxley, 45. 4. Larousse, 310.

Yang and Yin

Chinese mandala of light and dark, male and female, summer and
'inter, death and life, etc.: an S-curve dividing black and white halves of Yang and Yin

1095
 Yantra the circle, each half containing a spot of the opposite color. Though
now regarded as a bisexual emblem, the Yang and Yin symbol was onc<
Yggdrasil
it referred to the
wholly feminine. During the Sung period cyclic
moon. female power in the mandala, was a
1
the
phases of the Yin,

cognate of "yoni."
1. Campbell, Or.M., 24.

Yantra
Tantric "meditation sign," the graphic or symbolic equivalent of a
mantra. Most important was the Sri Yantra or Great Yantra, a design of
two interlocking triangles representing time cycles and the union of
Goddess and God (see Hexagram). Worship of the yantra was meant
1

to attain "unity with the Mother of the Universe." 2

1. Rawson, AT., 82. 2. Avalon, 428.

Yard
From Scandinavian gard or garth, "world," the earth.
1
The church-
yard descended from the old pagan tradition that a temple and its
environs constituted a model of the universe, and those buried in the

yard corresponding to the Greek koimeteria, "cemetery" automati-

cally entered paradise because they were already in its vicinity (i.e.,
close to the temple). This was the pagan belief underlying the Christian
habit of burying the pious in "consecrated ground" adjacent to the
church. Refusal of such burial to criminals, witches, and other outcasts
was tantamount to sending them to hell, for it was believed that

anyone buried in unhallowed ground was automatically damned.

[Link].62.

Yggdrasil
"Terrible Horse," or "The Horse of Ygg [the Ogre]"; Norse name of
the World Ash Tree thatbecame Odin's gallows tree a gallows being
poetically likened to a horse (drasil) on which men rode to Death.
Like Christ's cross, Yggdrasil was depicted as the axis mundi. Its roots

supported the earth, its trunk passed through the world's hub, its
branches stretched over heaven and were hung with the stars. Under its
by the Fount of Wisdom lived the three Fate-goddesses or
roots

Norns. A mighty serpent constantly gnawed at the tree and at doomsday

would succeed in toppling the entire structure. All the worlds it
upheld Earth, heaven, Midgard, Asgard were destined to tumble
down and fall apart. See Doomsday; Odin.

1096
Yin Yin

Feminine Chinese cognate of "yoni "; usually represented

om
life force, a
as a fluid emanating from a female "Grotto of the White Tiger" ^^^^mmmm^mm^
(genitals). According to the doctrines of Tao, the power of yin was
1

stronger than any male power; therefore men had to learn to take
feminine fluids into themselves, to gain wisdom and health.
1. Rawson, E.A., 253.

Ymir
Teutonic giant who died to give life to the universe. His flesh became
the soil; his blood became rivers and seas; his skull was the dome of the

sky. The first couple of male-and-female beings emerged from the

sweat of his left armpit. The race of dwarves evolved from maggots that
bred in Ymir's rotting corpse. This pantheistic creation myth was

designed to give primordial significance to a sacrificial god; but Ymir

was not really the first of all creatures. He was brought to life and
nourished by the Cow-mother Audumla, "Creator of Earth."
Ymir's name has been related to the Sanskrit Yama, the oldest
underworld god in hermaphroditic guise as a producer of living
things.
2
As Odin was another form of Indra, so Ymir was the Yama
remembered by Aryan tribes in their westward migrations.
[Link], 248. 2. H.R.E. Davidson, G.M.V.A., 151, 199.

Yoga
Sanskrit yoga meant to link, join, or unite, like the English derivative
"yoke." It was the term for sexual union between the Tantric sadhu and

his yogini, or Shakti, in imitation of the union between Kali and

Shiva. As Kali's consort, Shiva bore the title of "Lord of Yoga." l

The practice of yoga was supposed

to develop magic powers

collectively called siddhi northern Europe, sidh or seidr, "mag-

in

ic." The fully developed sage could walk on water, change base metals

to gold, understand all languages, heal diseases, cast out demons, and

so on. 2 The Moors called such a person a sidi, "hero." In the myth
cycles of Moorish Spain, the title itself became a name of the greatest
known hero, El Cid. ?
1. Campbell, Or.M., 13. 2. Bardo Thodol, 158; Campbell, Or.M, 424.
3. Goodrich, 236.

Yoni
"Vulva," the primary Tantric object of worship, symbolized variously
by a triangle, fish, double-pointed oval, horseshoe, egg, fruits, etc.

1097
 Personifying the yoni, the
Goddess Kali bore the title of Cunti or
Yonijas
word "cunt" and all its
Yule Kunda, root of the ubiquitous Indo-European
relatives: cunnus, cunte, cunning, cunctipotent, ken, kin, country.

The Yoni Yantra or triangle was known as the Primordial Image,

Mother as source of all life. As the genital
1

representing the Great

focus of her divine energy, the Yantra was adored as a geometrical

symbol, as the cross

was adored by Christians.
The ceremony of baptismal rebirth often involved being drawn
bodily through a giant yoni.
Those who underwent this ceremony
2
were styled "twice-born."
1. Silberer, 170. 2. Frazer, G.B., 229.

Yonijas
A Hindu myth of the battle of the sexes told of a quarrel between the
Goddess Parvati (Kali) and the God Mahadeva (Shiva) over their rival
claims to the true parenthood of human beings. To decide the
a race of people without the aid of the
question, each proposed to create
other. The God, spirit of the lingam or phallus, created the Lingajas,
who were weak and stupid, "dull of intellect, their bodies feeble, their

limbs distorted."
However, the Goddess created the Yonijas, spirits of the yoni or
vulva, who turned out to be excellent specimens: "well-shaped,
with

sweet aspects and fine complexions." The two races fought

1
a war, and
the Yonijas won.
This may have been one of the earliest myths of conflict between
male and female divinities over the matter of who did the creating. It

was still a matriarchal age, as shown by the way the Mother made more
viable people than the Father could make.
1. Simons, 57.

var. Yul Yule

Norse solstitial festival, the season of the sun's rebirth, assimilated to
Christmas in the Middle Ages, along with its pagan trappings: holly, ivy,

pine boughs, lighted trees, wassail bowls, suckling pigs, Yule logs,
carols, gifts, and feasting.
Some said the god of Yule was Kris Kringle, i.e., a Christ of the
Orb, a new solar king. But most northern folk remembered the
celebrated in honor of Frey."
'
reborn god as Frey. They said, "Yule is

In France it was celebrated in honor of another phallic god, like

Cernunnos, whose phallus was identified with the festive log, called
the Noel Log. Provencal folk songs mention the fertility magic of the

1098
Noel Log, the ashes of which were traditionally mixed with cows' Yu-Ti

fodder to help them calve. 2 Zalmoxis

1. Oxenstierna, 216. 2. Briffault 3, 101-2. ^^^^___^^__

Yu-Ti
Chinese Heavenly Father, consort of Mother Earth (Wang-Mu). He
was known as the August Personage of Jade, or August Supreme
Emperor of Jade. He lived in heaven in a palace exactly like the
earthly emperor's palace. He was said to have made the first human
beings out of clay, like other archaic gods whose "creating" took
1
place before the concept of begetting was understood.
\.Larousse, 381-82.

Zabat
Berber name for sacred dances performed in groups of thirteen, in
connection with the magic ceremony called "an occasion of power";
possible origin of the so-called witches' "sabbat."
'

1. Shah, 210; Ravensdale & Morgan, 1 53.

Zagreus
Cretan bull-god and savior identified with both Dionysus the Son,
and Zeus the Father. Zagreus was slain by the Titans (pre-Hellenic
gods) as a sacrifice, then assimilated to his heavenly father and
resurrected as a new copy of himself, by rebirth through the Mother
(Rhea).

Zakar
Hebrew "male," from several ancient words for "penis." Zakar or
Zaqar was a phallic deity like Hermes
Babylon, where he was called a
in

messenger from the moon. Zekker, the Arabic word for "penis,"
came from a similar Egyptian root: Seker, the Lord of Death, i.e., Osiris
as the dead god (or phallus) hidden within the Mother's womb. See
Seker.

Zalmoxis
Savior of Thrace, worshipped by the Getae and identified with

Orpheus. Zalmoxis promised eternal life to guests at his sacramental

1099
 Last Supper. Then he went into the underworld, and rose again on
Zar
the third day or, by some accounts, in the third year. He established
Zephyr
sacred Mysteries to teach the secrets of the after-life. Human sacri-
fices to him were impaled, like victims impersonating Tmolus in Lydia
1

Martyrdom as the spirit of Zalmoxis apparently was

(see Heracles).
being hurled onto the points of
coveted. If the victim survived after

spears, he was rebuked

and designated a "bad man"; and another was
2
chosen to die in his place.

1. Herodotus, 241-42. 2. Guthrie, 175.

Zar
Ethiopian demon, still worshipped by women as the spirit of their
voodoo-like cult of possession, to which they have recourse when

oppressed by their patriarchal society. The name Zar may be related

to an ancient name of Osiris, worshipped during the first dynasty at

Abydos as the god-king Zer, who became Lord of the Underworld.

Zen
Japanese system of controlled meditation, to master various skills,
especially the martial arts. Zen was a mispronunciation of Chinese
ch 'an, which was in turn a mispronunciation of Sanskrit dhyana,
"contemplation." Medieval knights of romance, who worshipped Di-
'

ana and followed a similar martial-arts cult, may have drawn their
tradition from the same Oriental source.
1. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 127; Or.M., 440.

Zenobia
Dynastic name of matriarchal queens of Palmyra. In their native
Aramaic, the name was Bath-Zabbai, or Bath-Sheba, meaning "Daugh-
ter of the Goddess." See Solomon and Sheba. The famous queen

Zenobia Septimia was the "seventh Bath-Sheba." She had no official x

consort. She named her son Wahab-Allath, "Gift of the Goddess

Allath." Allath was the same Semitic Moon-mother whom Islam later
masculinized as Allah. 2
1.
Encyc. Brit., "Zenobia." 2. de Riencourt, 75.

Zephyr
Greek wind-spirit, capable of impregnating women or female ani-
mals, as Boreas the North Wind was thought to impregnate mares.
Greek phallic gods often appeared in carvings and amulets as "snake-

1100
tailed winds." The idea that fatherhood resulted from sending air, Zeus
breath, or wind into a womb was not only a Greek idea. It was Ziusudra
common to early patriarchal religions, which taught the male Oversoul ^^^^^^^^^^
was nothing but air. See Soul.

Zeus
Greek form of Sanskrit Dyauspitar, "Father Heaven," probably
linked with Babylonian myths of Zu the Storm-Bird, a thrower of
thunderbolts. The Romans called him Jupiter, or Jove; the Jews
called him Jehovah.
Unlike the Judeo-Christian God who assumed his attributes, Zeus
was not a creator of humanity, nor even a giver of laws. The real
Creator-lawgiver was the Goddess called either his mother or his wife:
Rhea, Hera, Gaea; in all her forms a "Virgin Mother of God." Zeus
was entitled Mamas, "Virgin-born Zeus." He was also identified with a
'

number of dying gods, such as Zeus-Sabazius, Zeus-Zagreus, Zeus-

Sabaoth. Like Lucifer, he "came down" as rain or lightning to fertilize

his Mother, the earth. god of the fructifying bolt, he was known
As a

as Zeus Kataibates, "Zeus Who Descends." 2 He took over Mount

Olympus, former shrine of Gaea Olympia.
Zeus eventually became the Olympic-Platonic patriarch, even
claiming to give birth to Athene the ancient Libyan Goddess of
female wisdom from his own head. "With the spread of Platonic
philosophy the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degen-
erated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus
and Apollo were the ruling gods." 3
1. Graves, W.G., 320. 2. Guthrie, 38. 3. Graves, G.M. 1,117.

Ziggurat
Babylonian "Mountain of Heaven," the pyramid that served as
temple and palace in Mesopotamian towns. At its summit, the king
consummated his sacred marriage with the Goddess, this being the
point of contact between heaven and earth. Nebuchadnezzar's ziggurat
was built in seven stages, representing the seven planetary spheres.
Beneath, seven nether pits represented the descent into the correspond-

ing seven spheres of the underworld. Such pits were used for
death-and-rebirth ceremonies of priestly initiations. See Mountain.

Ziusudra
Sumerian prototype of Noah, the flood hero, carrying the seeds of a
new universe through watery Chaos between destruction of one world
and the birth of the next. Sometimes spelled Xisuthros. See Flood.

1101
 Zoe Zoe
Zurvan
"Life," a Gnostic name of Eve, comparable to the Teutonic All-
^^Ma^MBHHMB Mother [Link] was a daughter or emanation of the Gnostic Goddess,
'

Sophia, who gave Adam his soul. She also threw down to the Abyss
the unjust Creator, who had dared to curse her, and elevated the Lord

of Hosts to the seventh heaven, where she undertook to instruct him

about the eighth, the Great Mother's dwelling place. Gnostic Gospels
said Zoe's power alone animated the first clay man, after various gods

had tried to do it and failed. Therefore the man called her Mother of All
Living.
2
The canonical Bible kept her title, but eliminated her giving
of life to Adam.
1.
Pagels, 30. 2. Robinson, 159, 166-69, 172-76.

var. Zarathustra Zoroaster

Patriarchal Persian prophet whose name was affixed to many anti-

female doctrines, such as the rule that no women could enter heaven

except those "submissive to control, who had considered their hus-

bands lords." Most women, of course, were destined to go to hell.
'

Along with much else, these sentiments were adopted from Zoroas-
trian teaching by the Jews and applied to the laws of Yahweh.
1. Campbell, Oc.M., 196, 199.

Zorya
The "Three Fates" in Slavic myth. "Three little sisters, three little

Zorya: she of the Evening, she of Midnight, and she of Morning" i.e.,

of the old lunar calendars that figured the day from noon to noon.
Like the Norns, the Zorya kept the doomsday-wolf fettered to the pole
"Their duty is to guard a dog which is tied by an iron chain to
star:

the constellation of the Little Bear. When the chain breaks it will be the
end of the world." l
An
Egyptian prototype of the triple Zorya was
the Goddess Reret, who kept the powers of destruction fettered
by a
chain. 2
1. Lamusse, 285. 2. Budge, G.E. 2, 249.

Zurvan
Archaic Persian deity of Infinite Time, two-faced or two-sexed in
Zoroastrian symbolism. Zurvan must have been
originally a manifesta-
tion of the Two Ladies of life and
death, like Kali who united Virgin
and Crone aspects of female divinity. From the womb of Zurvan were
born the twins Ahura Mazda (God) and Ahriman (Satan). The
former twin became king of heaven because he made the right sacri-

1102
fices. Ahriman's sacrifices were unacceptable, so he was banished to Zurvan
the underworld and became the Great Serpent. 1

Zurvan Akarana was worshipped as the First Cause, or principle of

creation, linked with Time, Destiny, and Fate: three common
characterizations of the Goddess.
2
An ancient scripture said her divinity
could not even be addressed; itwas "so incomprehensible to man that
we can but honor it in awed silence." ? Thus Zurvan was similar to the
Gnostic Goddess Sige, origin of all things in Silence. Ahura could
have been one of her early names. In Egypt, Ahura was feminine. 4
The Zoroastrian pantheon assigned Zurvan to the dark side of
divinity as a demon of decrepitude, very like the Crone Kali who
5
represented moribund old age. Patriarchal thinkers characteristically
emphasized the negative aspects of the destroying-and-creating God-
dess, even when the primal character of the Mother of good, evil, time,
fate, and the universe wasclearly discernible under the veneer of later

myth.
1. Lawusse, 323. 2. Cumont, A.R.G.R., 61. 3. Seligmann, 14.
4. Budge, E.M., 144. 5. Seligmann, 14.

1103
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York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Wilson, Colin. 77je Outsider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Wimberly, Lowry Charles. Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads. New
York: Dover Publications, 1965.

Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. New York: WW Norton

& Co., 1968.

Wolff, Geoffrey. Black Sun. New York: Random House, 1976.

Woods, William. A New York: G.P Putnam's
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Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization.

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1118
Acknowledgments
Permission to reprint from the following works is
gratefully acknowledged:
J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim,
Bollingen Series 84. Copyright 1967 by Princeton University Press.

Robert Briffault, The Mothers (3-volume edition). Copyright 1931 by

Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1959 by Joan Briffault.

Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series 100. Copyright 1974
by Princeton University Press.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R.
Trask, Bollingen Series 76. Copyright 1964 by Princeton University
Press.

SirJames G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (one-volume abridged edition).

Copyright 1922 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1950 by
Barclays Bank Ltd.

Vivian Gornick & Barbara K. Moran, Woman in Sexist Society. Copyright

1971 by Basic Books, Inc.
Charles Guignebert, Ancient, Medieval and Modern Christianity: The
Evolution of a Religion. Copyright new matter 1961 by University Books
Inc. By arrangement with Lyle Stuart Inc.

Jules Henry, Pathways Madness. Copyright

to 1965, 1971 by Mrs. Jules
Henry. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages: Its Organization and
Operation. Copyright 1954 by The Citadel Press. By arrangement with Lyle
Stuart Inc.

Wolfgang Lederer, M.D., The Fear of Women. Copyright 1968 by

Wolfgang Lederer, M.D. By permission of the author.
Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling. Copyright 1962
by University Books Inc. By arrangement with Lyle Stuart Inc.
Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians. Copyright 1966 by Steven Marcus;
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.

Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, by permission of Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
ErichNeumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans.

Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series 47. Copyright 1955 by Princeton

University Press.

Newsweek, "The 1976 by Newsweek Inc. All rights

Exorcists," copyright
reserved. Reprintedby permission.
Eugene O'Neill, Selected Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Copyright 1928 and
renewed 1956 by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. Reprinted by permission of
Random House, Inc.
Philip Rawson, Erotic Art of the East. Copyright 1968 by Philip Rawson. By
permission of G.P Putnam's Sons.
Diana E.H. Russell, The Politics ofRape. Copyright 1975. Reprinted with
permission of Stein and Day Publishers.

1119
 Acknowledgments What They Do All Day and How
Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About

Photo credits TheY feel About What They Do. Copyright 1 972, 1 974
by Studs
Terkel. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random
^^^^m^^^iMMB House, Inc.

George B. Vetter, Magic and Religion, by permission of Philosophical Library,

Publishers.

Photo credits

Page
xii D.A. Harissiadis, Athens
1
top Alinari/Art Resource
1 bottom D.A. Harissiadis, Athens
82 Louvre
83 top The Historical Society of York County, Pa.
83 bottom Art Resource
1 28 Tzouaras/Art Resource
129 top Saint
Catherine of Alexandria, Ugolino
Lorenzetti; National Gallery of Art,
Washington; Samuel H. Kress Collection
129 bottom The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1958, Fund from Various
Donors.
204 Alinari/Art Resource
205 top Louvre
205 bottom Devil Bootjack, Maker unidentified. Ca.
1850-1875. Polychromed cast
iron figure. Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art
Abby Center, Williamsburg, Va.
260 The Seattle Art Museum, Kress Collection

261 Photo Hirmer

296 The Bettmann Archive, Inc.
297 Scala/Art Resource
330 Scala/Art Resource
331 top Art Resource
33 1 bottom Berkson/Art Resource
364 Merseyside County Museums, Liverpool
365 Alinari/Art Resource
422 Alinari/Art Resource
423 Museum
top Philadelphia The Louise and
of Art: Walter Arensberg collection.
Photographed by Philadelphia Museum of Art
423 bottom Scala/Art Resource
520 left
Library of Congress
520 right Alinari/Art Resource
521 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wildenstein Fund, 1 970
558 Scala/Art Resource
559 top The Museum of Art,
Metropolitan Fletcher Fund, 1935
559 bottom Museo De Arte De Cataluna
704 Alinari/Art Resource
705 top Alinari/Art Resource
705 bottom Alinari/Art Resource
756 Alinari/Art Resource
757 top Alinari/Art Resource
757 bottom Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Cora Timken Burnett, 1957
834 Alinari/Art Resource

1120
 835 top The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1917-1918 Photo credits
835 bottom Alinari/Art Resource
872 Borromeo/Art Resource
873 Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of William H. Herriman, 1921
^^^^^^^^^^^^^m
968 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
969 top Victoria and Albert Museum, London
969 bottom Alinari/Art Resource
1024 Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
1 025 top Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia

1025 bottom Saint Ursula With Angels and Donor, Benozzo Gozzoli; National

Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection.

1056 Courtesy American Museum of Natural History (Photo: Leon Boltin)
1957 top Matthew Hopkins, Discoverie of Witches, 1647. Rare Book Division, The
New York Public Library
1057 bottom Alinari/Art Resource

1121
Ifyou enjoyed this book, you will also want to read
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This insightful probe into the origins, and symbolism of
history,
tarot brings to light its and its
links to early Christian cults

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THE SKEPTICAL FEMINIST

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A spiritual autobiography following Walker's journey away from her
Christian upbringing, past the necessity for a belief in God or
Goddess, to an appreciation of the idea of the Goddess as a way to
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JAGUAR WOMAN
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identity in a Native American culture read like a spiritual
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thriller.

Castaneda and Lynn Andrews have not initiated a new genre of

contemporary literature: Visionary Autobiography." San Francisco
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Medicine Woman also available in two 60-minute audiocassettes.

WOMANSPIRIT RISING
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"Twenty-four essays on feminist aspects of religion. . . .

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intellectual transcendence. The best of the books
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This practical workbook provides guidance for a contemporary

and fully realized feminist spirituality.
It outlines an authentic,
alternative, holistic path for women seeking liberation from
traditionally male-dominated religions.

MOTHERPEACE
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Vicki Noble

"Focusing each chapter on an image created for a set of round tarot

cards, Noble synthesizes Jungian psychology, goddess mythology;
and holistic thought into a positive feminist interpretation of the
[Link] of these images provides a way of touching
knowledge in the unconscious that will lead to full initiation into
the human community." Library Journal

TRUTHORDARE
Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery
Starhawk
An eloquent examination of the nature of power and authority in
women's experience, enabling women first to understand, then to
redefine power and its uses in terms of their own values.

THE SPIRAL DANCE

A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
Starhawk
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can be used to ... let us tap into our psychic and
exercises that

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This passionate exploration of the Goddess religion in prehistoric
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as well." Robin Morgan

BECOMING WOMAN
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This book has been composed in Electra, with Optima Bold display,
by Tri-Star Graphics, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and printed and bound
by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Pennsylvania.

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

under the direction of Harper & Row, San Francisco, by
Design Office Bruce Kortebein, San Francisco
Richard V. Carter, editing
Joy Dickinson, production assistance
Martha Kortebein, photo research

1124
WOMEN'S STUDIES/REFERENCE

THE WOMAN'S
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTI
AND SECRETS
"A tremendously interesting compendium. . . .

indispensable on my bookshelf beside Robert Graves.

Russell Hoban, author of Riddley Walker

Where the legend of a cat's nine lives comes from?

Why "mama" is a word understood in nearly all languages?
How the custom of kissing began?
Whether there really was a female pope?
Why Cinderella's glass slipper was so important to the Prince?

The answers to these and countless other intriguing questions are given in this
compulsively readable, feminist encyclopedia. Twenty-five years in preparation,
this unique, comprehensive sourcebook focuses on mythology, anthropology,
religion, and sexuality to uncover precisely what other encyclopedias leave
out or misrepresent. The Woman's Encyclopedia presents the fascinating stories
behind word origins, legends, superstitions, and customs. A browser's delight
and an indispensable resource, it offers 1350 entries on magic, witchcraft,
fairies, elves, giants, goddesses, gods, and psychological anomalies such as
demonic possession; the mystical meanings of sun, moon, earth, sea, time and
space; ideas of the soul, reincarnation, creation and doomsday; ancient and
modern attitudes toward sex, prostitution, romance, rape, warfare, death and
sin, and much, much more.

Tracing these concepts to their prepatriarchal origins, Barbara C. Walker

explores a "thousand hidden pockets of history and custom in addition to the
valuable material recovered by archaeologists, orientalists, and other scholars."
Not only a compendium of fascinating lore and scholarship, The Woman's
Encyclopedia is a revolutionary book that offers a rare opportunity for both
women and men to see our cultural heritage in a fresh light, and draw upon the
past for a more humane future.

A professional researcher and writer,

Barbara G. Walker lives near Morristown,
New Jersey.

Cover design by Design Office Bruce Kortebein

Cretan Snake Goddess; Heraklian
Photo courtesy Giraudon/Art Resource

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS 9 780062 M 509253

USA
San Francisco
CANADA $32.50