From: João Simões Lopes Filho
Message: 3836
Date: 2000-09-18
----- Original Message -----
From: John Croft <jdcroft@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 10:50 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Religion
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>