Re: Odp: The Solar Goddess.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 477
Date: 1999-12-07

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Stephanie Budin
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 5:01 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: The Solar Goddess.

Stephanie writes:
Sex, fertility and maternity were separate concepts in ancient Greece and the 
Near East, and it is a modern mis-conception (no pun intended) that all 
goddesses, especially the really powerful ones, are "Mother Goddesses."  
The Mother goddesses of the ancient Near East are Asherah (in Ugarit) and 
Ninhursag in Mesopotamia.  Asherah and Astarte are completely different 
goddesses (atrt vs 'ttrt in Ugaritic).
Talking of goddesses and misconceptions, various people have attempted to show, at regular intervals, that PIE *(x)ster-, the STAR word, is a Semitic loan to be identified with Asherah or Astarte or both. The weakest point of this conjecture (on the IE side of the equation, as the Semitic side presents its own difficulties) is the fact that the attested reflexes of the PIE word always refer to stars in general and never specifically to 'the star' -- Venus in its capacity as the Morning or Evening Star.
 
I've also seen attempts to etymologise Aphrodite as an IE name, usually as *mbhr- plus something (cf. Latin imber), with such semantics as 'rain > water spray > spindrift > sea foam'; in effect the name would mean 'foam-risen' (or, perhaps less naively, 'rain-risen'?). Do you consider it remotely possible that some Near Eastern theonym was calqued in this manner?
 
Piotr