Re: Semele and Demeter

Dennis wrote to my point

> It would seem that
> they were originally different aspects of the Great Mother (Hera
> herself is an aspect of this chthonic divinity).
>
> Precisely my point. Semele was mortal, not divine. As for Robert
> Graves, his suggestion reeks of machismo, sexism and racism. His image
> of a dynamic male Indo-European Zeus going around rogering all the
> native non-European mother-goddesses is as unpleasant as it is
> unwarranted.

I don't think it was as simple as that. The local "mother goddesses"
all would have had a male consort god (probably as multinamed as the
mother goddesses themselves). From pre-Linear B times onwards there
would have been a tendency to identify such consorts with Zeus as
supreme divinity of the developing Olympian Pantheon. As travel and
regional intercommunications improved after the Aegean Dark ages so
people found Zeus to have many consorts. So Hesiodic redactors
invented the tales of Zeus and his many amours and Hera's jealousy.

> Pjotr says there is a feasible case for deriving her name from a
> Thracian sky goddess. So how do you square the circle - earth goddess,
> sky goddess and punishment applicable to a mortal?

There are lots of tales of immortals becoming mortal. Even Zeus
Zagreus was a dying God. Even Eve seems to have started her life as a
title of the Sumerian Supreme Goddess Ninhursag (Ninti = Lady of the
rib), before she became the human "Mother of all Living" (Hawwah)

> BTW Io and Europa can be shown to have plausible Egyptian and Semitic
> etymologies respectively, and again nothing to do with earth

goddesses.

> There is a passage in the Bible that goes: "A beautiful heifer is
> Egypt, but a gadfly has come upon her from the north". This seems to
> suggest that the writer(s) knew of the myth of Io, and also the

meaning

> of her name.

There are a number of Biblical - Aegean connections that seem to derive
from the coming of the Peoples of the Sea. The chief Phillistine
divinity was Baal Zeboul (Lord of the Flies) and so the Gadfly stinging
the Egyptian hiefer seems to be a cultural memory of events from the
reigns of Merenptah and Rameses III.

> As regards the whole Earth Mother mythic complex, I never meant to
> imply anything about the origins of the myths themselves. As you
> lucidly point out, the ancient word as a whole had mythical cycles
> centred on Mother Earth and her son/husband/lover, and there is no
> reason to argue against mutual contacts and influences around the
> region in general. However, the mystery cults involving Demeter are
> traditionally considered "late" in Greece.

News to me. From the studies I have seen of the Eleusian mysteries of
Demeter and Kore it has been suggested that it is a classical survival
of pre-Mycenaean religion. Excavations of Eleusis show that the cultus
seems to have begun as early as 1400 BCE if not earlier.

> So if the proto-Greeks did
> not bring these myths with them into Greece, and if as Cyril Babaev
> writes, the Greeks arrived in Greece around XXII-XX century BC, the
> question is, who did they learn these myths from? It is generally
> agreed that the Greek language and culture were formed in Greece, so

it

> is precisely during Egyptian XI-XIX dynasties that this process took
> place.
> The Ancients, down to Hellenistic and Roman times, recognised the
> essential unity of Greek and Egyptian religion, and Herodotos is quite
> explicit as regards the source.

Hellenistic Syncretism recognised the essential unity of Olympian and
all other polytheistic religions. Thus Celtic Lugh became Roman
Mercury became Greek Hermes even though they started as very different
divinities. The association of Egyptian Neith, with Semetic Anath,
with Greek Athene when examined in detail just doesn't hold water.
Thoth and Hermes were not identical gods despite the fact that they
both had roles in communication as Gods of Language.

> As for the Japhetic phylum of substratum languages, I refer you to

Glen

> Gordon's reply to you on Submerged Languages.

To posit an Eyptian origin of Greek myths does a diservice to reality
because

1. How did the myths get from Eygpt to Greece when any Egyptian
missionaries from Menes down to Ptolemaic times showed a cultural fear
of "The Great Green" and left voyages out of the sight of land to
others (Minoans, Mycenaeans and Phoenicians).

2. What happened to the indigenous religions of the Minoans and Greeks
as they adopted the Egyptian forms you propose.

3. Movements into the Aegean region were from Anatolia and the North,
not from the Semitic regions or the Egyptians. The Orientalising trend
in the Aegean only happened after the Phoenicians introduced their
alphabet, not before. Earlier toimes the movements connecting the
Aegean with the middle east were all centrifugal, not centripedal. It
was movements out of the region, not inwards.

So there is no mechanism whereby Egyptian mythic elements would enter
the Aegean. Evans' hypothetical link between Menes and Minos, and the
theory of Eyptian refugees from the unification settling in Crete has
long been disproven.

I read Glen's point on submerged languages and can only refer you to my
reply

Hope this helps

John