Odp: The Solar Goddess.

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 12:37 AM

Subject: [cybalist] The Solar Goddess.

There are indeed some Indo-European solar goddesses. However, we have to use the word 'goddess' here loosely, in the sense we say Thetis, the mother of Achilles, was a minor goddess.  Miriam Robbins Dexter seems to be the authority here.

The main set of surviving and reconstructable myths center on the Dawn goddess: Aurora in Roman mythology, Eos in Greek, and Surya and Usus in Indic myth. The main comparison for these is made to Baltic where the cognate is, in Lithuanian, Aushra and Ausrine, Latvian Auseklis, Old Prussian Ausca.

Surya is sometimes the bride of the Asvins, sometimes of Soma, the moon god. Robbins is confusing in that in the three articles I have before me, who she calls Usus would seemingly be called Surya in other articles. I am very weak in Indic mythology.

In Baltic, Saules Meita is the Sun Maiden, married to the Dieva deli -- the twin sons of the Sky god. Othertimes, she is the consort of the moon.

Aurora-Eos is a true Graeco-Roman myth. She's the spouse of the immortal but progressively ever-aging lover Tithonus, who reluctantly leaves her bed at dawn.  Robert Graves suggests that Tithonus is a masculine form of the title 'day queen' (tito = day, onë = day), which is indeed an understandable appelation for consort of the goddess of the Dawn.  Thithonus may be seen as lunar.

The dawn-goddess had her own chariot, pulled by her own horses, went before the chariot of Helios, more or less proclaiming his arrival.

In Roman myth, the cult of Mater Matuta ('morning mother') is involved. This was a women's-only cult, and there are certain obscurities. Restricted to matrons in good standing, among other things, the women prayed for the well being of not their own children, but the children of sisters, or alternatively, their brothers; fosterage of children is involved. Usus/Surya also fosters children, in this case the god Agni.

Dexter points to Helen as a variation on the dawn-goddess theme. She is the sister of the Divine Twins. Her sister Clytemnestra fosters her daughter Iphigenia (in one version of the myths). Helen's husband is Menelaos, a name which evokes, at least as a play on words,  'moon people'. The name 'Helen' can be glossed as 'torch'.

Underlying this all is the idea that somehow the dawn-goddess is guilty of some crime, mostly of tarrying too long with her lover of the night. In the Mater Matuta, a slave-girl scapegoat is vicariously flogged for Dawn's sins, but apparently, not for staying in bed late. The 'sin' of Dawn is very obscure. She is also punished in Indic myth. Only in Baltic myth is she not held accountable for delaying the day.

What I've written above is from my sources. What follows is my own elaboration on this.

Helen and Paris are solar. Helen is a version of the dawn-goddess, leaving her consort of the night rushing to her consort of the day, Paris. Now Paris, you should remember, was exposed by Hecuba and Priam because it was fortold he would be 'a firebrand' (the usual shepherds who always discover and always raise such an abandoned baby, a baby who is always found being suckled by wild beasts is part of the story).  Robert Graves dismisses the myth of Eos-Aurora as prettified fable, self-conscious, mostly literary allegory, and he's actually right, but he missed that the dawn-myth had been transferred mostly to Helen!

In the Baltic, Indic and Graeco-Roman versions, the dawn-goddess is directly conntected in some manner to the Divine Twins. With Helen, they are her brothers.

Notice also that Leto, uniting with Zeus had solar-lunar twins; similarly, Leda, uniting with Zeus also had solar-lunar twins. Apollo and Artemis,  Helen and her brothers are somehow doublets of the same underlying myth. Kastor and Polydeukes/Castor and Pollux/the Asvins/the Divine Twins/etc were originally solar, perhaps originally the twin stallions who pulled the chariot of the sun. In Graeco-Roman myth, other things happen -- they seem identified not merely with the constellation gemini, but also with the morning star and the evening star; they are also involved in the myth of death and resurrection.

Helen has other less-well-known myths associated with her. She was kidnapped as a child by Theseus (and in one version, was raped by him and bore him Iphigenia, who was fostered by Clytemnestra). Her brothers led the war that recovered her -- Helen was the cause of two wars.

The earlier myths have Helen happily going home with Menelaos after the war. Later classical commentaters had enormous difficulty with this, as well as the fact that no one ever fights a war over a wayward woman. Modern readers have the same problem. But if you see the Helen cycle (which includes the Trojan War) as a complex mythological cycle, then some things start making a great deal of sense.

What we have in the Iliad and the other associated tales, is not so much history, as a version of the War in Heaven -- a version reshaped by a literary genius, who moves the action downward mostly to the mortal level. I'm not saying Homer did this consciously, only that he and his compeers took existing, ever-so-ancient inherited myths and reshaped them, using the historic kernal of the long-fought battle over who would control the entry to the Hellespont.

The jumbling of various myths, with fragments of one becoming a motif of something else, is found everywhere. You get it in the Arthurian cycle, where Celto-British mythology merges with some historical nuggets, gets recast in Christian clothing and finally gets the Grail-cycle glued onto it, and follows its merry way down to present day. Wagner recast much of this material into his own mold. Even in modern times, you see this happening, with 'conflate' movies a la King Kong vs. Godzilla. Even the bible -- both Christian and Jewish versions -- bears evidence of this.

As for the Indo-European myth of the dawn-goddess, I think we have enough information to reconstruct it. I'm certainly not competent to do it, but know enough to see a basic outline. I'll be speaking more of this as my thinking evolves.

One thought I have is that Dawn is the torchbearer, leading the way. The idea is that the sun is unable see into the darkness ahead and needs someone to forge a path. This would be the Sun-maiden.  She is a member of the celestial family, somehow related to the divine horse twins, the daughter of either the sun or the sky.

It seems she is also, somehow, someway, the goddess of foster-mothers. Here, you get into something sociological, matters of family law and what you do with orphans. At some point, she may have been associated with childbirth (dawn = giving birth).

Right now, my thinking inclines towards seeing her as the closest thing the patriarchal IE religion got to a 'Great Mother' (but just as a thought). She may have been mostly a woman's goddess, but one nonetheless recognized by the men.

Now. I think it's a big mistake to say the IEs were monolithically patriarchal. Every little boy has a mother. Every little boy, however his natal society is organized, is raised by the womenfolk until he is of a certain age. Therefore, every little boy picks up some ideas at his mother's knees, especially religious ideas.  Certain motifs of the dawn-myths seem to be coming from the women.

My original question about the PIE or the later post-Anatolic version's grammatical gender for 'Sun' relates to all of this. Sky is always male, but what if Sun is female? Such fine distinctions were probably beyond the PIEs, who may have been nothing more than shamanistic animists. What is the Japanese word -- kami? This concept 'spirit', 'animistic force' would be a better word than 'god' or 'goddess' then.

Enough for now. The topic is fascinating. Among other things, it would seem to be the stuff to ignite a revolution in the interpretation of Indo-European, and particularly Graeco-Roman mythology.

References:

Encyclopaedia of Indo-European Culture 'Dawn Goddess', 'Sun Goddess' (both articles by Miriam Robbins Dexter).

Miriam Robbins Dexter. "Dawn-Maid and Sun-Maid: Celestial Goddesses among the Proto-Indo-Europeans", in The Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe, edited by Karlene Jones-Bley and Martin E. Huld (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 17, Institute for the Study of Man, 1996).

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It does seem as if the IEs had worshipped various "concrete" elemental forces, though I think that a proto-pantheon of important male and female deities with increasingly abstract functions was already crystallising at the core of their religion. It's salutary to hear somebody claim that the IEs were not monolithically patriarchal. Linguistic evidence shows very clearly that the originally neuter EARTH word was assigned the feminine gender in non-Anatolian IE, and even in Hittite, when personified and transferred to the common gender, it became the name of a female deity (Dagan-zipas; cf. Old Lithuanian Žeme-patis 'the Lady Earth'). What if the cult of Dhghom the Mother, stereotypically attributed to the matriarchal farmers of Europe vanquished by the patriarchal steppe riders was actually part of the IE religion as much as the cult of Dieus the Father?

 

Piotr