Re: Semele and Demeter

John Croft wrote :
Hera's wrath came to all "mortal" consorts of Zeus, including Io,
Europa, Leda etc. Robert Graves in his Greek Myths Vol 1 & 2 suggests
that these were originally local "mother goddesses", paired with Zeus
when the Indo-European Greeks arrived in the Aegean. 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. But then this is the man who claimed that Prometheus meant
"swastika" and that the Greek alphabet was Aryan in origin.
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?
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.

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. 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.
As for the Japhetic phylum of substratum languages, I refer you to Glen
Gordon's reply to you on Submerged Languages.

Regards
Dennis