Ancient Goddesses of Sex and War - Ronald Hutton

foreign ancient deities never developed meaning that they stayed more or less the same beings throughout their recorded history others however have biographies in the sense that they evolved significantly in character and function and that process can be studied some influenced others and contributed to their evolution what I want to do in this talk is to look at a set of such deities and their relationships with each other they are a clearly defined group of Mediterranean and near Eastern goddesses who have I think discernible connections with each other in many ways their development is like a domino effect from east to west across the ancient world they also to varying extents share the characteristic counter-intuitive to Modern sensibilities and certainly to those of anybody who's been a hippie of being associated with both love or at least sex and War I shall start the sequence with inanna one of the earliest goddesses recorded in Mesopotamia modern Iraq by the time that she emerges into literature in the late 3rd Century BC or BCE she is already a complex figure with a long development behind her Scholars like four killed Jacobson have proposed that the goddess we meet at this time is a composite of different qualities which derive from different earlier periods they can thus be distinguished like the layers of development and the layers of deposit on an archaeological site this is probably true and the following sequence of development has been proposed for inanna she seems to begin as the goddess who protected the agricultural Storehouse she's a barn goddess that would make her immediately a major deity to the communities of ancient Sumer the farmlands of southern Mesopotamia which depended on the produce of Agriculture to survive its continued preservation between seed and and harvest and consumption was therefore a vital phase in the economic process it deserved an appropriately important patroness and a nana got the job this original function of hers was underlined by marrying her to dumuzi the local God responsible for the fertility of the farmlands in other words dimuzi generated the farm produce and Anana then looked after it the perfect Divine economic partnership the first religious rights to them seem to have been dedicated to thanking them for their Bounty and encouraging them to provide more and better this provision became the more important during the fourth millennium BCE As Cities grew up on the rich produce of the Sumerian plain and their increasing populations needed to be fed foreign of the ceremonies to encourage it which survived into the historical record was that in which the king of the Sumerian city symbolically married the goddess a text has survived from the city of nippua celebrating the union of inanna and muzi which may have been part of that ritual it consists of a dialogue between goddess and God and has a delightfully Frank sexuality or at least it's delightful if you like Frank's sexuality in it in honor describes her body's barge of Heaven Crescent shaped like the new moon her untilled plot of land long left fallow in the desert her duck field thick with birds her Hiller clowned so verdant her lovely Farmland banked around she calls on to muzi to put his plow to her well-watered lowlands later as an extension of her role as guardian of abundance and wife of a major fertility God she seems to have become a goddess of rain and of the thunderstorms that commonly bring it to the Mesopotamian plain power over Thunder seems to have led her to becoming one of the Sumerian War goddesses so that battle became names the dance of inanna the combination of receiving the power of the fertility God into her body and filling men with battle Theory seems to have given her an additional role next as goddess of sex as such she now became a goddess delighting at once in sap sweat semen blood and all the other vital fluids and forces of passion and ecstasy that is probably why she became associated with the planet that we call Venus when it Rose in the morning she called soldiers to arms and in the evening she called lovers to each other's arms one of the surviving Sumerian hymns to her has her speak in her fully developed form as ruler of Heaven and Earth delighting in battle flood and hurricane she is called a falcon while other deities are sparrows as free and Powerful as a wild cow on the plane all this process of accretion probably took between two and three thousand years and by the time that it was complete by the end of the third millennium BCE she had made a further development by becoming a personality by the middle of that Millennium Sumerians had started to put their various deities into family relationships and tell stories about these this was a natural theological consequence of the key political development of this period the unification of the previously independent and mutually hostile Sumerian cities into a single Empire the character given to Anana was unique to her and one of the most colorful and strongly marked of all she is a beautiful sexy and highly sexed spoiled stroppy bulshi and imperious young princess in short she is trouble she appears in stories in all the roles which a woman is capable of taking except those which involve stability and Duty she is never ever either a loyal and supportive wife or a mother the most famous of all the stories concerned is that of The Descent of inanna which is like so much ancient mythology about deities behaving very badly inanna is as usual not so much the heroine as the anti-heroine she decides to visit the underworld which is the kingdom or realm of a different goddess eresh kigal inanna seems to go purely out of curiosity she wants to know what's down there in doing so she breaks a cosmic rule by going where she has no business to be as a result she ends up trapped there effectively dead the result is of course a massive disturbance in the natural order of things in which chaos none of the major deities equip themselves very well in the end inanna gets out by arranging for her faithless husband to musy to take her place in the Underworld at least for some of the time commenced a series of apparent migrations into other goddess forms the first was the easiest because it involved mostly just a change of name she became Ishtar this was the consequence of another political development the conquest of Sumeria by another Mesopotamian people the acadians Ishtar was their main goddess who became merged with the Nana after the conquest occurred the composite deity resulting retained her a Acadian name Ishtar when she was taken on by still more powerful Mesopotamian conquerors in later Millennia the kings of Babylonia and Assyria she underwent some subtle changes in the process her iconography became more standardized with the lion as her particular symbol reflecting her Fierce nature she also grew into a still greater goddess in Sumeria although one of the main female deities in the pantheon she had specific local roles in particular she was the patroness of one city Uruk Babylonia and Assyria she became at times the leading goddess of the whole Kingdom in literary personality as an attributes however she was still our same old yanana indeed Acadian translations of Sumerian stories just changed her name to Ishtar and nothing else her longest and most Vivid appearance in an Acadian text is in the most famous of all the Epic of Gilgamesh put together by a Babylonian writer in the early second millennium BCE from a variety of earlier Sumerian stories in it Ishtar aliasanana is her usual magnificent and appalling self she starts by propositioning the hero Gilgamesh on his return from an Expedition which has established Gilgamesh as the leading King in Sumeria and its greatest hero she asks him for seed of his body and in return promises a chariot of gold lapis lazuli and copper drawn by storm demons also a perfumed palace in which other rulers do him homage and bring tribute and superlative fertility for all his livestock what's not to like note that she's offering him status power and wealth starting with the Chariots the Sumerian equivalent of a Porsche Turbo the great sex has taken more or less for granted evidently to her amazement and perhaps two hours he refuses he itemizes in insulting detail the way in which he's disposed of all her previous husbands including the music as soon as they board or displeased her the reaction of Glorious Ishtar to this is to fly into a bitter rage and run straight to her parents to ask for Vengeance on Gilgamesh daddy unhelpfully points out that everything the hero has said about her was in fact perfectly correct Ishtar cheerfully admits that her conduct has consisted of abominable behavior and tainted acts her point is that that's irrelevant because Mortals shouldn't insult a goddess no matter how obnoxious she happens to be at times her next move is effectively to throw a tantrum in which he demands that her father give her free use of a cosmic monster the bull of Heaven that's the thing on the screen with Ishtar making up to it to destroy Gilgamesh if he refuses she threatens to smash the doors of the underworld and let the dead loose upon the living so wrecking the entire terrestrial World boy is this a hissy fit her weary father objects that to let loose the bull of heaven will itself destroy all the crops and cause famine Ishtar brightly replies that she's thought of this and has laid up stalks of food to cover the time till the devastation passes shes clearly alas who plans Vengeance well ahead everybody loses by the result Gilgamesh and his best friend succeed in killing the great Bull and 14-ishtar yet again but the friend dies as a result and rips out the emotional center from the hero's life the Epic of Gilgamesh is basically a buddy movie Gone Wrong Ishtar does not however function in Mesopotamian literature merely as a gorgeous super brat a kind of ancient Forerunner of Joan Collins or Madonna like other major deities she came by the second Millennium to act as a personal patroness to individual humans who cared about them deeply and was expected to respond to their prayers her cult spread very far across the ancient Middle East so that by the second Millennium it was found across the whole of Mesopotamia and as far west as Syria and Asia Minor as she moved into these Western regions she became associated with two other major goddesses one had a very similar name ishara and was effectively the same being with the same mythology she also kept the same husband de muzi now called Thomas with the story of their descent into the underworld in these Western lands where the seasons were more strongly marked that story became more straightforwardly an explanation for summer and winter it was the near Eastern equivalent the Greek myth of Persephone and perhaps part of the inspiration for it in Syria and Palestine however the impact of the seasons is reversed winter is the time of rain and so of greenery and some are the time of death when vegetation is scorched up women would therefore weep for Thomas's departure at the opening of Summer ishara was however only one dimension of Ishtar and inanna she represented her as goddess of love and sex but not of war and rulership that aspect was taken on by another Syrian goddess ashtar or ashtate known in English as astati like ishara astati is a young and sexy goddess but also a Huntress and much more concerned with war and government as a virgin Huntress she seems at first like the Greek Artemis that she marries Bal the horn sky and weather God and they have various adventures together this is a portrayal of astarty or ashtarti from the Syrian epic of queret the god Baal saw astati in the vineyard the most graceful of all the daughters of her father she had put on a dress of linen and over it a coat of Cyprus Wood armor and her beauty wore a Sheen like the desert Stars the gold ball coveted this virgin and wanted to possess her beauty before her face descended Mighty bar in order to please the lovely girl he wanted to love her limbs he brandished his horns against her Watchmen and it goes well from there on so astati is not the same kind of deity as Ishtar but shares some of her functions it's as if Ishtar was too much for the people of Syria and Palestine and so they divided her duties between two different Divine females but the western land Syria and Palestine also made one further distinctive contribution to the image of this kind of goddess that she gets her kit off Syrian goddesses of the second and first Millennia BCE BC were often portrayed nude facing the Observer with upraised hands Mesopotamian goddesses had traditionally been depicted robed in art in this later period however the Syrian style of nude icons made an appearance there as well the most famous depiction of the naked Goddess from both regions is also the most enigmatic this is the Bernie relief commonly called the Queen of the Night which has long been deposited in the British Museum and recently been acquired by it there is nothing else quite like this image in the whole of Mesopotamian and Syrian art she was long thought to be Lilith the nocturnal demoness who kills babies but Lilith in Hebrew lilitu in Mesopotamia was never a goddess and this lady is a super goddess because of the number of horns on her headdress others thought she might be the goddess of the underworld eresh kigal inanna's Nemesis in the myth of her descent into the day of the underworld eresh kigal however has absolutely no known icons or temples she does not in fact seem to have been worshiped by the living at all my own opinion is that she is actually our very own Ishtar Alias rendered in the nude style of a Syrian goddess she stands in the same posture holding Mesopotamian symbols of majesty she stands on lions as ishtarinana does and has clawed feet like some of the Syrian goddesses in this posture the owls could be there to indicate her identity as the evening star bringing night so it could be argued that concepts of deity across the whole of the ancient near East influenced each other but I am more interested in the second half of this talk in their impact upon Europe this is of course where we come to Aphrodite all Scholars agree that she was the latecomer to the Greek World unlike the majority of deities in the classical Greek pantheon She is totally missing from the inscriptions on the Linear B tablets compiled between the 15th and the 13th century is BCE on the other hand by the time of Homer in the 8th Century she is fully integrated into the Greek Divine family so she appears in the gap of half Millennium from which no written records survive this conclusion is one with which the Greeks themselves would have agreed both they and the Romans emphasize that the cult of Aphrodite had arrived in Europe from the East she was essentially a foreign goddess furthermore they were conscious of the staging posts by which it made the Crossing from Asia to Europe the islands of Cyprus Crete and kythera above all it was Cyprus the big Islands nearest to Asia which produced Aphrodite in her endearing form and was always regarded as her true home she was indeed a native cypriot goddess though nothing like inanna her icon from her main cult Center on the island of pathos has survived because it looked nothing like a goddess it is a large and shapeless hunk of Rock one of the natural Riches of Cyprus is copper a vital ingredient in the bronze which made the Bronze Age possible Aphrodite seems to have got started as the goddess of the mineral-bearing Rocks this would explain a trio of puzzles about her is that her original cypriot's name is kipris or Cyprus echoing the name of the island as if she represented the land itself the second is why this most gorgeous of goddesses is marriage in Greek mythology to the decidedly not gorgeous Smith god Hephaestus but if she produces the ore and suffices refines it it's an anonymously economic partnership the third is why she has repeatedly called Golden in ancient texts this reflects of course on her Charisma and Allure and the Greek male Porsche for blondes but also on the literal appearance of some kinds of copper ore and of course of smelted copper nonetheless this literal rock chick seems to have got transformed into the Aphrodite we all know by the arrival of ishara and ashtarti from Syria Stephanie buden has shown how from 1200 BCE images of naked goddesses of the Syrian kind were appearing in Cyprus at a time of close contact between the island and the Syrian Homeland it is from this time that Aphrodite's original cult Center at pathos shows continuous and massive occupation and development and this pattern may also explain another aspect of Aphrodite's later myth the idea that she was born as a beautiful naked goddess arriving out of the sea she had effectively done this by Crossing to Cyprus from Asia in the icons of beautiful naked goddesses there was a further direct connection between Aphrodite and dinana and that is the myth of Aphrodite's love for a handsome mortal Adonis in the story Adonis is killed and Aphrodite and her human worshipers especially women mourn him ritually ever after at the beginning of Summer Adonis is simply the Greek version of the Syrian and Palestinian Adonai meaning Lord and he's none other than our old friend Thomas Alias de muzi and the rights of mourning for Adonis were copied by the Greeks from those of Thomas in Syria and Palestine nevertheless Aphrodite was not the same sort of goddess as Ishtar or inanna she was not widely associated with war or government although she was a war goddess at a few places in the Greek World such as Sparta indeed Homer made great play with the fact that she was not at home on the battlefield this is what happens when she intervenes to stop the Greek hero diomedes from killing her own son Aeneas whom she has borne to a Trojan Prince this is a battlefield in front of Troy in full Pelt dionides was following Aphrodite as she dragged her son away spear in hand he knew she was a timid goddess not one of those who Lord it in battles at last after a long Chase he caught her leapt on her and thrust with his spear wounding the skin of her soft hand the spear tore through that robe that The Graces themselves had made for her and pierced the flesh just above the palm of her hand the blood ran out that Immortal Blood Of The Gods she shrieked aloud and dropped her son then diomedes shouted to the goddess away from the battle isn't it enough that you beguile women into love but if you will come to War I think that after this a battle will make you shiver if you only hear us in the distance the goddess hastened away raving in her Agony and diameters gets off scot-free he does so partly because he's protected by a thoroughly war-like goddess a Feeney who hates Aphrodite but also because the Clash of Steel is not Aphrodite's Melia in harmony with this lack of a military or Regal Realm Aphrodite's chosen animal is not the lion but a range of birds usually Dolph's geese and sparrows nor was she linked to the morning or the evening star she was closely associated with minerals as said and also with the sea her mythological birthplace her symbol is the cockle or scallop shell she also became connected to flowers especially roses perhaps because fragrance was one of her alluring personal characteristics she was above all the deity of sexuality and love thereby representing half of inanna's attributes the Greek word aphrodisia simply means to make love she is not another goddess or much concern with human or animal fertility her province is simply The Power of Love And The Joy of Sex here's the homeric hymn to her or a bit of it Muses relate to me the works of Golden Throne Aphrodite of Cyprus who in deity stirs up sweet desire and who subdues the race of mortal men and Airborne birds and all wild creatures and as many beasts as Farmland rears and also the sea the gray wolves are bright-eyed Lions form over her bears and Nimble leopards hungry for game approach her and seeing these she is delighted and cast desire into their breasts through her they all choose mates and lion pairs within soft Shadows it's worth pointing out that the Greeks were not convinced that love was necessarily a good thing our own culture tends to think that it is for two reasons one is the modern emphasis on Choice spontaneity and response to national natural impulses natural folks the other is the massive influence of Christianity which pitched on the Greek word that the English translators love Agape as the controlling and animating divine power in the Cosmos on the other hand Christians were much less keen on sex and tried to separate it from love Jehovah is remarkable as an ancient god who apparently never has sex in honor and her related goddesses by contrast were normal for ancient deities in enjoying sex a lot themselves as well as instigating it and others I mean Anonymous enjoyment of it is prodigious there's a Sumerian Foundation Legend of how a particular Sumerian city asked inanna to become their patroness and she accepted joyfully on condition that first she was allowed to have sex with every adult man in the population they were obliged to line up for her and it duly happened and the countryside outside the city and when she'd work through the lot she was quite prepared to start all over again until the men begged her to desist because they couldn't keep up with her the Pagan Greeks and after them the Romans distinguished three human impulses within which we within that which we normally call love sex affection and passion they were generally positive about the first two some Mystics preferred celibacy as a way of shaking off the distractions of the world many people thought that a real man should be the active partner in love making where the heterosexual or gay nevertheless they recognize that sex was a pleasure as well as a means to Children which could be employed in all sorts of different ways they also saw it as a superlative reinforcement to and expression of emotional attachment what they also saw starkly was that it's often bad for both the individuals concerned and the groups with whom they are involved when people lose control of their emotions by Falling passionately in love with somebody they admitted moreover that this was something which could occur without warning and it was Irresistible by the most sensible of people that's why Aphrodite like a Nana and her sister or daughter goddesses was scary one of Aphrodite's titles was merciless that is why love is the villain of the peace in most heroic literature it's Ishtar who ruins the happiness of Gilgamesh in Revenge for his rejection of her as heard it's Aphrodite who causes the Trojan War and the annihilation of the heroes of a generation it is also love that wrecks The Fellowship of Arthur's round table when Lancelot and Guinevere get together and it wrecks the Irish Fiona Finn McCool when gronia and DeArmond get together and it turns King Mark against his nephew Tristan so the Greeks Eros passionate infatuated love was simply the most frightening force in the world next to Thanatos death it was awe-inspiring in the way in which a thunderstorm or an avalanche is awe-inspiring here's the playwright Sophocles on Aphrodite Aphrodite is Immortal Life she is raving Madness she is unmixed desire she is lamentation in her is all activity all Tranquility all that leads to violence for she sinks into the vitals of all that have life who is not greedy for that goddess she enters into the swimming race of fishes she is within the four-legged brood upon dry land and her wings range among Birds beasts and humans among the race of gods above whom among the gods does she not wrestle and throw three times in truth she rules over the heart of Zeus himself without spear without iron all the plans of Mortals and gods are cut short Thia Aphrodite one departure that the Greeks made when receiving Aphrodite is that in contrast to the peoples of the near East they didn't like showing goddesses as nude thus Aphrodite was depicted robed for the first 400 years in which she appeared in Greek art this tradition was overturned in the 4th Century apparently because of a remarkable woman called frinny a high-class courtesan living at Athens we know two things about her one was that she prepared herself for initiation into the mysteries of eluses by bathing nude in the sea in public and in daylight instead of waiting for Nightfall as other pilgrims did the other walls the other is that she was subsequently tried at Athens for blasphemy the penalty for which was death she was tried on the same court as that in which the philosopher Socrates had been condemned a few decades before but she was acquitted later Roman Legend had it that she informed the judges that she was dedicated to Aphrodite and the pursuit of love she invited them to decide if she was truly fitted for it and disrobed to stand naked before them the judges all of course male then unanimously declared her Guiltless we shall never know what really happened in that courtroom what is for sure is that two great artists then produced Works in which Aphrodite herself was portrayed nude and that each of them were allegedly inspired by frinny and used her as the model one was a peles a painter who portrayed the birth of Aphrodite from the waves the other was praxicles a Sculptor who created for the city of canidas a statue showing the goddess disrobe to bathe from that point onward it became customary across the Greek world to represent Aphrodite as nude in art and the Romans took over that tradition for their goddess Venus behind the whole of this endearing Western tradition May lie one courageous woman Freddie went on to become a Millionaires and was given a statue as a heroine at the great Greek cult Center of Delphi when the walls of another major city thieves were destroyed by an earthquake she allegedly offered to pay to have them rebuilt however she had a condition the original walls were said to have been built by the hero Heracles Hercules friendly wanted an inscription on the new construction reading boy Power put these walls up but girl power had to put them back again the thebans refused I've now mentioned Venus as the Roman equivalent to Aphrodite and we must end this journey with her in Western Europe once more the goddess concern turns out to be a more complex and interesting figure than has often been thought Venus begins way back in archaic Roman history as a sexless Spirit who looked after cultivated Gardens her vital role in that regard was to care for that vital economic component the vegetable patch she thus begins her career as a Cabbage Patch goddess a non-gendered Divinity of cabbages beans turnips Etc this fact incidentally explains what is otherwise a linguistic conundrum that this most rampantly feminine of Roman goddesses has a name which has a neutral noun early in Roman history this Roman Spirit became merged with the now forgotten Etruscan goddess when Rome conquered the Etruscans the more cultured people to the north of them this goddess was tiram the patroness of flowers it was their common interest in gardening that brought Venus and tiran together Venus now became thoroughly feminine and physically very pretty this and her association with flowers especially roses made her the obvious match in the Roman Pantheon for Aphrodite the two became merged when Rome absorbed Greek culture wholesale from the Greek colonies in Italy and conquered those colonies the Romans took over Greek deities by giving them Roman names and by 200 BCE were translating their myths Venus was simply given all of Aphrodite's deeds and relationships and aphroditees iconography including that models and our friend frinny she was never however quite the same as Aphrodite for she lacked the Greek goddesses connection with the sea and rocks although she did take the association with copper moreover her connection to flowers and Greenery was even stronger here is my favorite evocation of her in that role the perva Gilliam veneris the Night's Watch of Venus composed in the Imperial Roman period The Hills Have drunk Sun now and she walks Our Lady of the woodlands between and a bride bed she weaves them with roses and lacing with curtains of green she she with her gem dripping fingers enamels the wreaths of the ear she she when the rose buds a new violent swelling winds whisper in ear disguising her voice in the Zephyrs so secret the hour and so shy she she through the hushed humid mid-summer night draws the Dew from on high due bright with the tears of its origin due with its weight on the bow missed outing and clinging and trembling now must it fall it is now star flecked on the stem of the Briar as it gathers and falters and flows and its Trail runs a ripple of fire on the bud that it bids me arose then in globes at diaphanous Veil upon Veil and Bridal ground drawn to bedrate the small virginal petals awaiting the spousal of Dawn Till the wink from the green eye of Venus chill Cupids in carnadine Kiss till the ray of the Ruby the sunrise will color the bath of her Bliss till the cloud cloaked her bosom uncover a tissue of Fire To The View and the cloak on the hands of the lover slips down as they reach to undo now learn you to love Who Loved another Who Loved never now you who have loved loving you moreover unlike Aphrodite Venus continued to develop in the late antique period in particular during the first half of the final Century BCE Her Image took a Quantum Leap she suddenly became a goddess of war as well as of Love presiding over life and death she also became associated with the planet which has ever after borne her name in the Western World inanna's planet Venus what had certainly happened was the Roman Empire had reached the near East and so connected with the worship of Ishtar Alias Anana and goddesses influenced by her which had now been conducted there for thousands of years the Romans were so impressed that they gave their natures and Powers as well to Venus in doing so she absorbed and reproduced virtually all the associations of inanna thousands of years before and so Venus is the last and greatest of inanna's daughters as a result by the Imperial Roman period her worship was divided into four aspects extending in Festival terms across the season of flowers extending from April to August first she was honored as Venus obsequence the easy Giver provider of the pleasures of life and especially of the body then she was celebrated as Venus genotrix the animating force of vegetation and especially of flowers next she became Venus victrix the Mistress of life and death and give her a victory in war the Roman soldiers who conquered gold and Britain used Venus's name as their Battle Cry but her military role was just one aspect of her powers a stirrer of sap sperm blood and the juices of libido the forces of life itself finally on the 19th of August she had her Festival as Venus libertina The Giver of death who was portrayed in a chariot drawn by mice the funeral directors of Imperial Rome were all dedicated to her and kept their feast as their annual holiday by the Imperial Roman period moreover extensions from these qualities had given her eight more responsibilities including by various leaps of logic Chariot racing and the sewer system furthermore whereas inanna and Ishtar disappeared from living Tradition at the end of the ancient world until rediscovered by archaeologists and Aphrodite was known only to a small literary Elite Venus remained a major figure in a European culture in her developed Imperial Roman film she was carried all over the Western half of the Empire and continued to feature in art and literature Ever After my last reading as an invocation to her as a classical goddess and planetary deity composed by the Renaissance Italian philosopher Jordan obruna Giordano Bruno loved her so much he actually worshiped her along with other Roman deities and after 11 years trying to convince him to change his mind the Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake for it it's worth having it first in English and then in the original Renaissance Latin there is Jordana on the left and there is the most famous Renaissance Venus Botticelli's on the right and let's put them together to savor the sheer sensuality of his language invoking Venus first the English and then the Renaissance Latin Venus known as the lady nourishing one gorgeous one queen of beauty hand held in darkness warmest of Hearts generous one honey woman Giver of sweet Madness shining one star woman treasure made flesh perfumed one playful one foam born and fertile gold and handed silver worded Delight of all the senses flame of the night's ending Brilliance of the evening passion blender Giver of the storm of Love Giver of the Peace of love hear me heal me hold me and now his Latin not classical Latin but Renaissance which suits his wording even better venusa Dulce yokosa afrogenia facundiya larga beneficia plachida deliciosa foreign foreign [Applause] for this fascinating lecture and as you can imagine we have lots of questions from the audience first a person that is interested in in the econography that you've been shown addition at the beginning of the presentation and particularly the symbolism that seems to carry on uh of the the motif of The Lion and the cloth feet and can you please perhaps expand on on those motifs because the iconography appears before we have the developed written myths about her it's actually older and so we don't know how it originates or where it comes from except that in terms of what she actually does goddess for fierceness goddess of war goddess of the night and the coming of the day it all makes sense and like ancient Egypt Mesopotamian iconography is incredibly stable for about 3 000 years and then trickles Away In the period of the the Common Era or Christian era but it's really Greek iconography that takes the west by storm uh especially as allegedly inspired by our friend frinny and therefore the forms the Greeks developed for Aphrodite become those of Venus and continue to be those of Venus right up to the present fascinating thank you um another question that perhaps takes on a bit of a perhaps of a feminist question um the goddesses had a fairly unpleasant sight of you described so well uh to their characters and do you think that the sexuality of a drive and their ferocity in war were perhaps all made male fantasies or perhaps anxieties they could be uh you have to bear in mind that the gods of these pantheons are pretty ghastly too at times and the goddesses are no worse uh it's a Divine package because they are reflecting the natural world of the Superhuman as well as human personalities nature can be deadly as well as in ancient times baffling capricious and frightful and deities can be or everything as nasty or as wonderful as humans can be but have much more power so they're they're that much more daunting so you put this package together and what you get are these strikingly good bad figures which of course utterly against the later idea of religions of the book that a proper deity has to be essentially good as well as all-powerful and all present uh I don't have a problem with the ancient representations of woman because they do credit the feminine with an unabashed healthy sexuality and also the ability to be warlike to have a temper to lay things waste and in many ways the the right to express these things is a modern feminist claim another question you describe aphrodite has a sort of a later addition to the um the Greek mythology whether the great where did they put sex and love then before her were there any any record of someone else or an earlier version or they must have put it somewhere with somebody trouble is we know nothing about the mythology of the pre-humor period because all we have are names and in Crete and a few other places images and we're not sure how the names and the images relate or even what the images really represent if you have abuse free dress lady standing up on a platform is she a goddess is she a queen is she a priestess she could be any of those but each one of those renders an utterly different interpretation of the image and so we have to wait until we get extended writing which incorporates mythology to know what these beings are and what they represent so there must have been some kind of love and sex deity before but who they were where they went whether they were absorbed into Aphrodite we cannot say at this stage we're not going to take questions from the audience you have any any question I know you're only talking about Western things I wonder if you have any views about goddesses from other parts like in India or maybe you don't um just an idea I I get us I go north uh because I've noticed that uh the northern peoples also have Love and War goddesses the Irish Morrigan who's a classic of those and freyja in the north Pantheon there's another goddess who really does combine both war and love and I'm not sure yet whether this is because the Northerners by the time they write these stories have absorbed a lot of Greek and Roman mythology and so uh incorporating this image or whether there's something in the human DNA in certain parts of the world that Associates those two qualities because they are to do with passion and rage war and sex I going east goddesses like Carly and Durga might be said to represent the same qualities but I I don't pronounce on anything or I try not to pronounce anything until I've actually studied it and I don't think but I'll have time to get over to the east if I've got to get the hang of the Irish and the north sources in time as well you raise a very good point I have a broader question about how I guess deities and gods in these times uh actually acquire all of these traits because it seems like you you gave the example of um you know starting as like the the goddess of copper and then like boom she just gets all these other traits that come in could you just speak a little bit to that uh I wish I I wish I could speak to that uh the trouble is that this snowballing effect of deity Evolution tends all waves to occur before we have proper Rich Records so we never ever get anybody in the ancient world saying okay this is how we're going to make a goddess or uh Hey we've conquered Naples it's time to blend Aphrodite with Venus or hey guys I'm back from Syria boy can I tell you about this fantastic goddess of love sex and the planet of the evening and the morning Sky Let's uh dress up venusness it isn't there what you see is the results and then we have to try and work backwards from that thank you and just one last question I think that's quite an interesting one um how did the representation of these goddesses contrast with the role of women in ordinary Society has been particularly perhaps Greece that's quite interesting uh it depends on the society uh Greek women at least in Athens were very carefully circumscribed so uh as in some parts of the Eastern world you tend to get a combination of disempowered human women and Powerful goddesses whether the women were less disempowered and earlier periods of course a great debate uh there's a huge argument uh about the status of women in the ancient near East I just read through another very good book on this uh showing how controversial it is at the very least you can say that uh ancient near Eastern peoples particularly in Mesopotamia tense and and Egypt tents who invest women with an acknowledgment of uh their power as personalities uh the power of their sexuality and their right to decide what they do with it and uh a sense of their presence as essential figures on the the world stage uh but the ancient near East is still full of testosterone overladen guys with amazing beards or Egyptian headdresses shooting lions or humans from chariots and trampling vast fields of enemies so it's a very Butch sort of a lot of societies well on that note thank you very much Professor Hutton for this fantastic lecture [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 120,924

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, Divinity, Religion, Goddesses, ancient history, sex, war, deity

Id: ZeqTn6bxnyU

Length: 60min 6sec (3606 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023