In reply to Arkugal Glen wrote
> Arkugal:
> >Where is it stated that MARS or ARES have any connection with the
> >Underworld?
>
> Nergal, Marduk, Baal, etc. They are related to war or storms and
are
also
> related to the underworld with a venusian consort. Note also that
Mars
> wasn't always a war god and is the product of mythological
confusion.
Nergal became an underword divinity as God of pestilence. He
replaced
Ereshkigal only in late Sumerian times, with a myth that led to the
rape/marriage of Ereshkigal and her subservience to the later god.
Marduk was never "God of the Underword" and had no Venusian marriage
connnection as you put it. Rather he was titulary god of Babylon,
inserted into the Mesopotamian pantheon only with the rise of the 1st
Dymasty of Babylon under Hammurabi. Baal too was not married to a
venusian goddess. Baal was usually paired with Anat, sometimes with
Baalit, who was portrayed (usually) as a fertility goddess, naked,
with a Hathor type hairstyle (sometimes even with Hathor horns)
> Arkugal:
> >VENUS is connected with the land, APHRODITE is connected with the
> >water. Two different things.
>
> Venus is connected with Mars (a theme persistent as well in the
related
> SumeroAkkadian belief) and so by association, they are connected
with the
> underworld which happens to be watery. However, the water theme is
obscure,
> I agree, partly because Mars has always persisted with the early
established
> association with fire even when the underworld went from firey to
watery.
> Clearly, Venus has always been a fertility god whether she be
associated
> with water directly or not. I'm not sure whether Aphrodite was
truely an IE
> deity or rather a later "mirror image" deity of Venus.
Aphrodite was originally a Cyprian divinity, imported into the Greek
pantheon it would seem in post Mycenaean times. This became
cultically signified as a result of a late insertion into the
Olympians, as in Hesoid's story of Theogony in which Aphrodite Urania
was conceived from the sea, when Uranus was castrated and his
genitals
were flung into the Mediterranean near Kythera or Paphos. Homer
presents a second origin claiming she was the daughter of Zeus and
Dione, bit some have doubted whether Homer's Aphrodite Pandemos and
Aphrodite Urania are the same goddess. Certainly Homer by giving
Aphrodite the gift of the golden apples to Paris by promising for him
marriage to the most beautiful woman alive (Helen, who happened to be
already married to Menalaus, thereby initiating the Trojan War), was
probably "retrodicting" - using a new Goddess to usurp the place
originally held by an earlier one. In this case the rivalry between
Aphrodite's support for the Trojans, and Athena's support for the
Greeks seems indicative as to which goddess originally was
responsible
for bestowing golden apples (James Frazer's Golden Bough talks of
this
too).
In either case Herodotus, who traced Aphrodite back to the Phoenician
Astarte was probably closer to the mark. Aphrodite's dying and
resurrecting lover Adonis is clearly the Semitic Adonai (Lord) one of
the titles given to Astarte's dying and resurrecting lover Tammuz.
Astarte was Queen of Heaven, Aphrodite was Urania (Celestial), both
were worshipped with doves and incense, both had a cult of sacred
prostitutes. The story of Aphrodite and Ares too is an exceptionally
late insertion. Once Tammuz was dead, the ancient Greeks who were
loath to insert a third virgin Goddess into their pantheon cast about
for a consort to the new goddess, and married her off to Haephestus.
As the divinity of Ares wmweged out of late Mycenaean times, he too
was consortless, and so Ares and Aphrodite as lovers became the
solution. This established an association between the planets Mars
and Venus that previously did not exist in Semitic or Sumerian myth.
The Roman Venus had none of these cultic associations until the
Graeco-philic period in which the Romans took an old Etruscan myth of
an origin for Sacred twins back to Lydia, and made Aeneas, son of
Venus a Trojan, and inserted their Goddess Venus as being identical
to
the Greek Aphrodite. Before that they were very different divinities
with very different associations.
So Glen, the Venusian associations of the goddess Venus with the
planet Venus came late in ancient history. And the origins of
Aphrodite too are probably due to the spread of a Phoenician cult to
Cyprus, spreading thence to Ionia to be popularised by Homer.
Nothing
to do with PIE divinities.
For god sake Glen please learn a little comparitive mythology.
particularly Burkert.
Have a look at
http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/papers/lombardiaphrodite/aph
rodite.html
http://www.messagenet.com/myths/bios/aphrodite.html
Regards
John