Re: Bernal.

From: John Croft
Message: 3357
Date: 2000-08-22

Dennis concluded
> So, all in all, we are no further forward. We still have no idea
where the name Athene comes from.

Perhaps we should agree with the Ancient Greeks, she sprang from the
head of Zeus, after he had ingested her mother, Thetis/Themis.

Have a look at

http://www.itp.berkeley.edu/~comp165/msg00076.html

The trial of Orestes was a battle between the rights and
respect of fathers versus ancient and implicit laws. The two sides
were on different arguments for the most part, so the logic seems to
lie more with Apollo than the Furies, who were adamant about the
blood of kin being spilled, who drove Clytemnestra to kill Agamemnon
for the death of her daughter, yet did nothing about Orestes to kill
Clytemnestra for the death of his father. There seems to be
something that I'm missing concerning what seems to me some
inconsistancies.

What I have to say next was more or less taken out of a
lecture with Prof. Bulloch of the Classics department. Try to
imagine this being said in a very well-educated British voice.

As for Athena, she truly is a goddess who is caught in a
technicality. One may argue that she is without a mother, yet has
one. Zeus, while married to Themis (Thetis?), learned that the
daughter she carried would bear a son who would overthrow him. What
was he to do? Well, he could try to imprison the daughter in the
mother's womb like Uranus, though if history serves as any sort of
indicator, that would quickly fail. He could try to swallow his
daughter like how his own father tried to prevent a hostile
take-over, but Zeus himself defeated such a plan with the aid of his
mother. So, what does he do? He goes to his own mother, Maia, and
asks her for her advice. What does she tell him? Swallow the mother
of his child.

Now, recall that Themis (Thetis?) was pregnant at the time,
and the gods are for the most part, immortal. After swollowing the
mother, what was to happen to the daughter? Well, this was quickly
solved when Zeus had this enormous headache one day and asked
Haphaestus to help get whatever was in his head out. So Hapaestus
takes an axe, splits Zeus's head open (on the question of whether
Haphaestus is Zeus's and Hera's son, or Hera's alone I'll just assume
that both are his parents), and out pops Athena, fully armed. So in
a sense, Zeus is both mother and father to Athena, but also in a
sense
Athena does have a mother, that she was born of a goddess.

Symbolically, the swallowing of Themis (Thetis?) is the act by
which Zeus swallows wisdom, and thereby he becomes all the wiser
since she is always able to advise him since she has been
internalized. The birth of Athena fully armed from Zeus's head has
two
effects: one, being that since she was not truly born to a woman,
she
could not go to her mother for help if she should bear a child like
Maia did and continuate that pattern in which the mother should
contrive a plan to overthrow the father with the child and two,
because in essense, Athena is a man, she has not desire for men
sexually so there is little risk that she should ever become
pregnant.
Instead, she becomes very close to her father, and, if you would, his
right-hand man so that he should never be overthrown.~

" . . . you slip out of your depth and out of your mind as you claw
for thin ice."

Regards

John