Jean:
>Whilst there's much in what Glen says, I'm not sure that I can wholly
>accept his theory that the societies who produced figurines of oversized
>ladies also envisaged a goddess giving birth to the cosmos - it would
>depend, for one thing, on what exactly was meant by the term "cosmos".
What I'm seeing here is an inability to disassociate ourselves from
modern views of the world around us, thereby causing some to muddle
themselves in not-so relevant counterarguements.
This is the neolithic, not the tech age. They didn't know what "planets"
were in the modern sense. Doubtful they thought about the "elliptical
planes", the "zodiac", and "celestial equators" that modern-day hippies
in coffee shops take for granted. With only what they could directly see
with the naked eye and some simple "common sense", they produced ideas
about how the world works that are alien to modern thinking, perhaps
even alien to later Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians. It is important
to understand the simple foundation for everything and then how it
evolves over time getting all skewed out of proportion in the process.
Here, the neolithic "cosmos" of the Mediterranean was meant to be as I
stated before:
The sky above,
the land around us,
and the waters below
This is a common sense tripartite world-view model that appears to be
alongside the earliest function of the Goddess as creatrix. There is
further support, given that this three-way contrast must be the source
of the earliest "trinities" recorded in history (like the Sun-Moon-Venus
triad in Babylonian mythology) as well as the rivalry seen between El
and Baal, or *Manus and *Yemos, or Horus and Osiris, or Yggdrasil's
eagle and serpent (thanks to that pesky trouble-making go-between, the
squirrel). The serpent, by the way, "gnaws" at the roots in a figuritive
sense because the serpent is symbolic of the waters in which the tree
sits. This also adds perspective to Eve's "bruised heel".
So, this is the neolithic definition of the "cosmos" that I'm using
here. Makes sense?
>On Level VIa at �atal H�y�k is a shrine depicting a spreadeagled woman
>giving birth to a bull, [...] whether the bull might be an early form of
>Ouranos, her son and husband, [...] The lady, however,
>is not depicted as particularly corpulent.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The woman is the mother
of the cosmos and the bull has come to represent the "sky", or rather
the sun and moon combined (alluding to a trinity). We are also
reminded of Sumerian Gugulanna, the bull of heaven. The whole
son/husband/wife thing is an example of a derivated form of the
trinity, which itself was born from the tripartite model of the cosmos
that I just finished explaining.
For instance, El (sky) and Baal (storm) can be seen to spring from the
natural dual opposition between "skies above" and "waters below". Over
time, the "waters" become "waters of the sky" (tying in with the dragon
topic) and there is a new altered opposition between "clear sky" and
"storm".
The corpulence of the Goddess is not an absolute necessity to convey
her as is seen by even "skinny" models of a central Goddess figure
(the snake lady of Crete comes to mind), but surely this must have been
part of the motivation to sometimes use exaggerated obesity as a symbol
of her great size.
>[...] I would still like to know how anyone in a hunter-gatherer society
>could have had access to the sort of food that would have caused so much
>weight-gain.
As I already stated, this is unimportant because "fat" is symbolic of
cosmic size. That level of girth is not really based on reality and
many can see that these figurines _exaggerate_ the human body for some
purpose, but even mobile hunter-gatherer societies can have fat
people. (I think Jean's been watching too many Hollywood movies.) So I
don't know why one has to respond to that as a valid arguement.
>It's not the antiquity of the figures that I question, but the part that
>they played in the ancient consciousness. Could they have symbolized the
>divine entity that gave birth to at least part of the cosmos, as you argue?
>Possibly: but I'm not entirely convinced.
Yet, if you lack any other credible answer to the origins of the common
themes existant in Mediterranean-based mythologies, what unaddressed
reasons are left for your resistance against this one? I don't think
that this theory is ridiculously complex and I do think that it ties all
the mythological themes together in a credible way.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail