Re: Semele and Demeter

----- Original Message -----
From: John Croft <jdcroft@...>
To: <cybalist@eGroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, 20 January, 2000 4:51 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Semele and Demeter


To reply, I've snipped my original posting to save space and avoid
confusion.

> I don't think it was as simple as that. The local "mother goddesses"
> all would have had a male consort god (probably as multinamed as the
> mother goddesses themselves). From pre-Linear B times onwards there
> would have been a tendency to identify such consorts with Zeus as
> supreme divinity of the developing Olympian Pantheon. As travel and
> regional intercommunications improved after the Aegean Dark ages so
> people found Zeus to have many consorts. So Hesiodic redactors
> invented the tales of Zeus and his many amours and Hera's jealousy.

I'm sure you're right. But your original posting spoke of earth mother
goddesses, and my point is that there is no reason to classify Semele (or Io
or Europa) with earth goddesses. The image I was objecting to was Robert
Graves' one of masculine Indo-European dominating and subduing female
native.

> There are lots of tales of immortals becoming mortal. Even Zeus
> Zagreus was a dying God. Even Eve seems to have started her life as a
> title of the Sumerian Supreme Goddess Ninhursag (Ninti = Lady of the
> rib), before she became the human "Mother of all Living" (Hawwah)

Fine. Egyptian religion also allows for the deaths of gods, which has been
accounted as one reason why it was so easily superseded by Christianity.

> There are a number of Biblical - Aegean connections that seem to derive
> from the coming of the Peoples of the Sea. The chief Phillistine
> divinity was Baal Zeboul (Lord of the Flies) and so the Gadfly stinging
> the Egyptian hiefer seems to be a cultural memory of events from the
> reigns of Merenptah and Rameses III.
>

Io, as daughter/sister of Kadmos, would seem to go back to the Bronze Age.
Michael Astour, Cyrus Gordon and others have written that texts from the 2nd
millennium found in Ugarit reveal a West Semitic mythology that in many ways
provides a bridge between Greece and Canaanite/Israelite mythology (as far
as it can be disentangled from Biblical rationalisation). So maybe the
story, and other connections predate the Philistines.

> News to me. From the studies I have seen of the Eleusian mysteries of
> Demeter and Kore it has been suggested that it is a classical survival
> of pre-Mycenaean religion. Excavations of Eleusis show that the cultus
> seems to have begun as early as 1400 BCE if not earlier.

Sorry, by "late" I meant 15/14th century BCE.

> Hellenistic Syncretism recognised the essential unity of Olympian and
> all other polytheistic religions. Thus Celtic Lugh became Roman
> Mercury became Greek Hermes even though they started as very different
> divinities. The association of Egyptian Neith, with Semetic Anath,
> with Greek Athene when examined in detail just doesn't hold water.
> Thoth and Hermes were not identical gods despite the fact that they
> both had roles in communication as Gods of Language.

I wrote that the essential unity of specifically Greek and Egyptian religion
was recognised from Ancient times (5th century BCE) .
I'm not sure whether you intended the pun, since Neit and Athene's essential
function was the holding and controlling of water, hence the enmity with
Seth in Egypt and Poseidon in Greece who represented the untamed forces of
nature. Athene (I exclude Anath because I know nothing about her) and Neit
were not just associated. Athene is Neit. Neit's city in Egypt was Sais,
whose religious title was Ht Nt "the Temple or House of Neit". This would
give in Greek Ath-(a)Neit. The full Homeric name for Athens is Athenaie.
There is also the statement of by one Charax of Pergamon in 2nd century AD
that "the Saitians called their city Athenai". Iconographically too, since
pre-Dynastic times Neit had been represented as a cockroach on a stick,
which developed into a figure 8 shield. There is a limestone plaque from
Mycenae showing the arms and legs of a goddess coming out from behind a
figure 8 shield, This image has been seen as an early representation of the
Palladion, the standing suit of armour associated with Pallas Athene.
Of course, this may all be coincidence.


> To posit an Eyptian origin of Greek myths does a diservice to reality
> because
>
> 1. How did the myths get from Eygpt to Greece when any Egyptian
> missionaries from Menes down to Ptolemaic times showed a cultural fear
> of "The Great Green" and left voyages out of the sight of land to
> others (Minoans, Mycenaeans and Phoenicians).
>

What? I have great difficulty in believing what I read here. Nevertheless,
I quote from Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd Edition, William Hayes
concerning the
reign of Tuthmosis III (early 15th century BCE) :
"....are now generally conceded to have been ships designed and built by
Egyptians for journeys to Byblos and Crete or journeys of similar type and
duration. Furthermore, it is evident that in ship design and construction
and in seafaring knowledge in general the Egyptians of the New Kingdom owed
little or nothing to their Minoan and Phoenician neighbours, but were, in
fact, the originators of at least one type of ship adopted and used by the
latter."
Note that this is a "concession". You are obviously not alone in believing
this utter nonsense. But facts do sometimes get in the way of reality,
n'est-ce pas?
By the way, what impact does this have on another myth, that of the
Minoan/Mycenean thalassocracy?


> 2. What happened to the indigenous religions of the Minoans and Greeks
> as they adopted the Egyptian forms you propose.

I don't know. What happened to Druidism or the Old English religion?

> 3. Movements into the Aegean region were from Anatolia and the North,
> not from the Semitic regions or the Egyptians. The Orientalising trend
> in the Aegean only happened after the Phoenicians introduced their
> alphabet, not before. Earlier toimes the movements connecting the
> Aegean with the middle east were all centrifugal, not centripedal. It
> was movements out of the region, not inwards.

Why the exclusivity? Of course the earliest movements, of people,
agricultural techniques and assuredly other influences, came from the north
and Anatolia. I'm talking here about cultural and economic and, perhaps,
political ties, particularly during the 2nd millennium. The Greeks did not
move into a vacuum. The eastern Mediterranean was a sophisticated,
urbanised, literate and highly active economic entity, dominated, in my view
at least, by the already ancient civilisation of Egypt, with its
dependencies in the Levantine trading cities.
Are you then suggesting that these established, densely populated and
successful states were influenced or even dominated by the relatively small
and poor
Cretans and Myceneans? This seems to defy common-sense.

> So there is no mechanism whereby Egyptian mythic elements would enter
> the Aegean. Evans' hypothetical link between Menes and Minos, and the
> theory of Eyptian refugees from the unification settling in Crete has
> long been disproven.

Is this Sir Arthur Evans? I agree. But a link between Minos and the Egyptian
god Min (equated with Greek Pan), or Rhadamanthys with Mntw, both gods being
associated with bull cults, now there is an avenue worth exploring.

I am not for one moment suggesting exclusive one-way traffic from Egypt to
Greece. Cultural influences are elusive and often multi-sourced. But I think
the real disservice to reality is to refuse to even consider Egypt as a
major player in the concert of nations that made up the eastern
Mediterranean during the Bronze Age.

Regards
Dennis Poulter