over 10,000 years ago hunter-gatherers
in Anatolia learned to farm. they began worshipping an earth mother goddess like
this 8 thousand year old Anatolian Idol and she was associated with agriculture
and fertility. eight and a half thousand years ago, the Anatolians spread across
Europe replacing most of the people who were there before and bringing their
agriculturally oriented religion which was heavily conscious of the seasons,
stars and when to plant the crops. my name is Tom Rowsell. I'm an historian. in
this film I am traveling to Lycia in Anatolia where I hope to uncover some of
the secrets of the ancient earth mother and to learn how her cult survived the
indo-european Bronze Age and beyond. Please join me on this journey through
the ages... *music* Xurious - Identity Europa right here was the capital of the Lycian
League. it's called Patara. these ruins represent
one of the major cities of Lycia during the time that it was part of the
Roman Empire and known as the Lycian League. Formerly, there had already been a
kind of Republic here and it had previously been under Greek, very
Hellenized, Greek influence, but the Lycians were not Greeks, they were not
Romans, they were their own thing and although a lot of the temples here, there's a temple to Apollo here, That's a Greek god, and there's
a grain store dedicated to Hadrian-Zeus in his divine form, so
you can see the Roman and the Greek stuff, but they're not Roman, they're not
Greek, they're lycian, they're their own thing, and even the Greeks did not think
of them as being barbarians, so they were not helennes, they were not Greeks. so
lycian is an indo-european language it's of the Luwian branch. the
Luwian branch is all these (languages) of the western coast of Anatolia. different types of
languages of which Lycian is one and these Luwian languages are part of the
Anatolian language family. the Anatolian language family is the first language
family to break away from proto-indo-european which was spoken
on the steppes of Russia. somehow a branch of indo-europeans came down into
Anatolia, quite early on, and mingled with the native Neolithic peoples of
Anatolia to create a new culture which is what we call ancient Anatolian - the most
famous of which is hittite. Lycians are less famous but they're also important.
right here on the on the western, southwestern coast of Turkey, and this is
a place that links up Anatolia with all the Aegean city-states. so you've got to
remember the Minoans were one of the early civilizations, down to the south were
the Egyptians, of course, a very early civilization, and then to the northeast
we have the Hittites. so this is a key area for the Mediterranean,
trading things, and we're right on the beach, in this city, so no wonder the
Lycians became an important people. we know about lycian as a language from
multiple sources. first we got I mean lycian started being written as
its own language after it became part - Lycia became part of the Achaemenid
Empire which was Persian so there were some Persian speakers here too. but they
started writing Lycian here. Lycian as a language has its own script which is
actually a modified form of Greek script but it's a different language entirely.
as I say, it's an Anatolian language. we have coins with lycian on -
many hundreds of coins - and there's many hundreds of inscriptions here,
on walls, in lycian. most of the inscriptions here aren't actually in Lycian, they're in Greek or Latin or Persian or Hittite or whatever. we have
mentions in Hittite sources as well, about the Lycians, so that's how we know
about them; from the early sources - the Hittites talking about them and also the
Egyptians talk about them too. the Bronze Age collapse is what historians refer to as
this collection of events that happened around the Mediterranean from Greece to
Egypt where some great civilizations all fell and many historians believe that
part of this collapse was caused by what were known as the Sea Peoples and these
were different types of peoples from the northern Mediterranean
sailing south and just wrecking stuff down in Egypt. and the Egyptians
mentioned a people called the Lukka. Lukka are widely accepted to be Lycians
because it's pronounced Lykia in the Greek, even today the
Turks called this area area Lykia so it's still it's quite obvious that the
Lukka were the Lycians who were raiding the Egyptians and causing them a lot of
problems so yeah the Lycians enter history
quite early on and they're well-known about. it's funny how they're not so well
known these days. evocative sight! the tombs of Tlos which one is the tomb of Bellerophon? most of the ruins here date to the Roman
period around the 2nd century BC when what was called the Lycian League was here, that
was a free lycian state which was later taken over fully by the Roman
Empire, prior to that there was the Greek period, that's when you get the theatre
and some of the baths over that way, but that remained in use into the
Roman period. the unique part of Tlos are all these tombs cut in to the rock face
and the tombs are basically meant to look like lycian houses which were made
of wood, so these here represent the wooden beams in lycian houses but when
they died, the aristocrats didn't live in wooden houses, they had
live in stone cut straight into the cliff. stone versions of those wooden
houses. you can't see but there's terraces looking like they're wooden tiles built up at the top here. it's quite an interesting feature and I
wonder what the religious significance of stone was that they
couldn't just build wooden houses for the dead like they lived in. this entire
settlement of Tlos is recorded in many different places. the Romans called it
the great metropolis of Lycia during the Roman period but in the
modern era everyone had forgotten where Tlos was until an Englishman came to
the rescue, of course, charles fellows, In 1838. Like many ancient civilizations,
ancient cities in the world, Tlos had to be rediscovered by the English who took an
interest in uncovering these ancient places but most of what's been exposed
here today didn't get it uncovered until the early 21st century so this is all
quite new discoveries, a lot of it. some of it was exposed and then destroyed by
Ottomans because an ottoman feudal lord took apart one of these tombs and
used it to build the house up on top there, so I mean that the Ottomans knew
that there were ruins here but they didn't know it was the ancient city of
Tlos or they certainly didn't care to find out that anyway. These are sarcophagi of the Lycian style .burials up high where the winged creatures, something
like sirens, come and take the souls of the dead, according to lycian mythology. Tlos was one of the six largest cities of Lycia in ancient times it was pretty
successful in this archaeological site there's an amphitheater there's
lots of ruins in the ancient Greek style, this place was inhabited from at least 2,000
BC by Lycians. But this area is most famous, right up here in the mountains, for these tombs.
now there's a lot of burials on the hillside that we can see. Two main types:
one is the sarcophagi in the Lycian style which actually can be found also down in
the plains and near the sea some of them under the sea to the sunken city of
kekova, but many of them are also up in the mountains like this
but also up in the mountains you have these types of tombs, these very
impressive ones that i'm in now - it goes back into an alcove.
there's a little room back here and that's um that's a tomb for an aristocrat
you know this is for important people but why did they have them all
the way up here? well it's because of their beliefs in winged creatures like
angels that come down and carry the souls of the dead to the sky and it
shows a belief in the immortal soul transcending upwards. quite
different to some indo-european beliefs about the underworld, about souls going
downwards, and generally lycian religion follows that, although Lycians were
indo-european their religion and that of all Anatolian cultures is quite
Chthonic and follows sort of ancient Near Eastern pre indo-european religious
customs relating to an earth mother and the soil being a more sacred thing so
it's quite surprising then that Lycians have this custom of building these
magnificent tombs right up in the mountains and expecting some of
their dead, at least the aristocrats, to be carried up to the sky, a celestial
cult that strikes me as being rather indo-european and not Middle Eastern or
Near Eastern like some of the influences in lycian religion, at least. now one of
the most famous tombs here belonged to an amazing Greek hero,
well, lycian hero, in fact: Bellerophon. now Bellerophon you may know from greek
myths is the one who slew the Chimera. he rode Pegasus the winged horse, of
course you must have heard of Pegasus. Pegasus came from Lycia and Lycia at
that time was terrorized by a monster. the Chimera was a mixture of three
animals a lion at the front a goat in the middle and a snake at the back and
it breathed fire and well as part of.. Old belerephon was an
errant hero, basically, he was accused by a lycian woman who was
married, who fancied him, of trying to seduce her after he rejected her because
the Lycian woman was so ashamed that she was rejected by him, being a married
woman, she then made up the lie that he tried to rape her, and then as part of
his you know Redemption arc, he's given some impossible task to fulfill
rather like the tasks of Heracles and one of these tasks is that he must slay
the Chimera and in order to do that he first gets the advice of a seer and the seer tells him you must first find Pegasus,
and once he acquired Pegasus, the winged horse, he went to fight with chimera and
managed to kill it by lodging a lump of lead in its throat, as it was breathing
fire, of course caused the lead to melt and therefore suffocated
the creature. okay you're gonna like this! We found Bellerophon's tomb. this is it. Bellerophon's tomb.
one of the most impressive rock-cut tombs in all Lycia with proper pillars and
everything. come and have a look inside now why is it called Bellerophon's tomb
if we don't even know if this mythological guy existed? well because there's a
picture of Bellerophon here. up here he's riding Pegasus. There's our man
the hero himself. now maybe maybe this was just an aristocrat's tomb and he liked
Bellerophon. Bellerophon was one of the important Lycian heroes, in fact one of
the districts of Lycia was named after Bellerophon at one stage,
another one was named Sarpedon after the Lycian hero who's in the literature of
homer. so that doesn't mean Bellerophon was actually buried here but it's
Bellerophon's tomb as far as we're concerned. so what happened to Bellerophon after he killed the Chimera? well he went back to the Lycian king
Iobates whose daughter had claimed the Bellerophon raped her, and told him "I got rid of the Chimera, I saved Lycia from this monster" but Iobates didn't believe him! he said "I don't believe you, I'm gonna give you some more tasks"
so he sent him on some more impossible tasks one of which was to kill a bunch
of Amazons which he did he went and killed the Amazons and finally Iobates
just thought "I'm gonna get this guy dead" he sent some assassins to kill him but Bellerophon kills them too so Iobates has no no more tricks up his sleeve so then Bellerophon is fed up
by now and he calls on the god of the sea Poseidon to completely obliterate
the Lycians to get them back and so the sea God hears his prayer and does so and
sends the waters to overtake the lands. the river Xanthos, it's the main river of
Lycia, it floods its plains. all the fertile
lands are flooded. Bellerophon, our hero, marches into
Lycia, this semi-matriarchal land this Hellenic hero marches in with the
floodwaters of Poseidon going behind him and the Lycians have one
trick left up their sleeve... the thots! the women of ill-repute
of Lycia all emerged from their homes and walk up to the conquering hero and
expose themselves, exposed their genitalia to our hero Bellerophon and he
just turns around 180 degrees and away he goes. he's not having any of that.
and the waters retreat with him and so the Lycian thots saved Lycia with
their licentious and shameful behaviour. but what happens to Bellerophon
after that? well Iobates, seeing that Bellerophon has the power of Poseidon behind him,
realizes he can't fight Bellerophon and so he just says "ok you win, you can marry my
daughter. not the one who said you raped her! Her sister, the other one, you can marry
her." and so he does, he marries this lycian girl and then he takes over lots
of lands in Lycia with many grapes and many fields of wheat and he is a
victorious in the end. I don't know whether he kept Pegasus because there
are other myths about Pegasus but that is how we see Bellerophon henceforth the Lycians believed that a kind of
counsel of gods called the Mahai huwedri would punish anyone who violated a tomb.
if that is the case then the turks who graffiti'd this tomb at Telmessos did
not go unpunished for their shameful desecration. as well as in Egyptian and Hittite documents, the Lycian as a people and LyciaI as a place, are recorded in the
writings of Homer. in the Iliad we have the following passage: “I have come, a companion to help you, from a very far place; Lykia lies far away, by the whirling waters of Xanthos; there I left behind my own wife and my baby son, thereI left my many possessions which the needy man eyes longingly.” in this passage the Lycian hero Sarpedon echoes the sort of feelings that we see
from Hector in the same story, as someone who has left behind his wife and
children. that means Sarpedon was seen by the
greeks as a tragic hero in much the same vein as the Greek heroes. and there's
another passage about lycians in the Iliad: Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others
with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine cups in Lycia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals, and we are
appointed a great piece of land by the banks of Xanthos, good land, orchard and vineyard, and ploughland for the planting of wheat therefore it is our
duty in the forefront of the Lycians to take our stand and bear our part of the
blazing of battle so that a man of the close armored Lycians may say of us:
‘Indeed, these are no ignoble men who are lords of Lykia, these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed and drink the exquisite sweet wine, since indeed there is strength of valour in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians.’”
Iliad XII 310–321 look at all these lion statues
everywhere here. Lycians liked lion statues. come look over this way... here's another
one. now they weren't obsessed with Africa, the reason there were so many
lion statues is because in those days there were the Eurasian lines, the Asiatic
lions, they lived in some parts of the Middle East and Southeast Europe, the
Balkans, Greece, in the ancient period until quite recently in
history. This species of lion is extinct now, and that's the lions we're talking about
in the Bible, those are the Lions that depicted in these statues, these are the sort of lions they used in the gladiatorial arena and they were scary just like African lions. they were
killers. imagine if you were walking around at night time, you've got
to go and visit someone's house at night, and one of these things can just pounce
out at you and crunch your neck and kill you. I mean it's going to be scary, of
course they're going to be a big part of your mythology, and of course
also a big part of your art. but they emerge in almost every culture who knew
about them as beings representing nobility. here we
see them again. more lions in this lovely garden. Oh swastikas on this as well! come
and have a look at that cameraman. so one interesting lion connection in
Anatolian religion is via the Phrygian goddess Cybele. Cybele became a Greek goddess and she was even then imported to Rome. As a goddess, her
role is pretty much the same as the Roman goddess Ceres, whose name
is related to modern English word cereal because Ceres, the Roman goddess, like
Cybele the Greek / Anatolian goddess were mother goddesses of agriculture.
they were associated with the wheat, the grain, fertile crops and this idea, I
don't think it's indo-European, this kind of goddess. obviously Ceres comes
from the same mythic root as Cybele and Cybele herself was not a Greek goddess originally, as I said, she was imported from Anatolia but I think all of these agricultural
mother goddesses including Ceres and the later goddesses like Artemis of
the Ephesians, not the original Artemis, who was a Greek hunting goddess, but
Artemis as she was worshipped in Anatolia, all of them end up being
fertility goddesses, but really they are echoes of that original Neolithic
agricultural goddess who who came from Anatolia. and remember that all Europeans
have ancestry from the original Anatolian migration that brought the Neolithic to
Europe and so all the Neolithic religions of Europe were essentially
derived from Anatolian ones perhaps with a little bit of hunter-gatherer
influence, but mostly Anatolian, because most of the ancestry of Europeans in the
Neolithic came from Anatolia so all this idea of this matriarchal mother goddess of the crops: that comes from Anatolia. now one thing about Cybele is,
she rides a chariot drawn by lions! She is a goddess from Anatolia. now Ovid
tells us of a very interesting story in his metamorphoses about Cybele's lions
and a very important story about why we need to fear lions... according to Ovid's story, the athletic hunting couple, Hippomenes and
atalanta, were turned into lions by Cybele as a punishment for having sex in her
temple. now yoked, they must draw her chariot. this, I think,
is symbolic of how the earth mother goddess seeks to stifle the strong and
virile. but Cybele wasn't popular among the Lycians. so how did the earth mother
manifest among them? and what other elements of pre-indo-european culture and religion can
be found among the Lycians? to find out, I need to visit the religious centre of Lycia Their most sacred site. Letoon. Come. come into the theatre. look at that! Are you not entertained? Letoon is perpetually swampy even in
the scorching heat of summer. for this reason it is home to Terrapins, snakes,
lizards and frogs. this isn't just because it's a ruin. According to ancient
sources it was always swampy around here An ancient legend about this place, Letoon, and the goddess Leto or latona, is preserved for us by the Roman poet Ovid
in his Metamorphoses: in Lycia's fertile fields, Once long ago the peasants
scorned Latona, not unscathed. it's not a thing well known, the men of course being
lowborn louts, but marvellous all the same. I saw with
my own eyes the lake and place famed for the miracle, for my old father, too old by
then, too worn to take the road, had charged me to retrieve some special
steers, and gave me a Lycian for a guide. with him I traversed those far pasture
lands, when standing in the middle of a mere, and black with ash of sacrifice,
beheld an ancient altar ringed with waving reeds. my guide Stood Still and
muttered anxiously 'be gracious to me' and I muttered too 'be gracious' then I asked
him if the altar was built to Faunus or to the Naiads or some local God and
he gave this reply - Oh frog! - "not so my lad, no mountain deity enjoys this altar. it
is claimed by her whom once the queen of heaven barred from the world. whom
drifting Delos scarcely dared consent to harbour, when this island swam
the sea. there leaning on a palm and Pallas' tree, Latona
in spite of Juno, bore her twins. from there again she fled the wife of Jove
hugging her newborn infants, both divine. and now in Lycia, the chimera's land, the
flaming Sun beat down upon the fields. the goddess tired by her long toil was
parched with thirst, so hot heaven's torrid star, the babes had drained their
mother's milk and cried for more. she chanced to see down in the dale below a mere of no great size. some farm
folk there were gathering reeds and leafy osiers and sedge that marshes love.
reaching the sedge Latona knelt upon the ground to drink the cooling water.
knelt to drink her fill. the group of yokels stopped her. "why?" said she "why keep me from the water? everyone has right to water. nature never made the sunshine
private nor the air we breathe nor limpid water. no a common right I've
reached, even so I ask, I humbly ask, please give it to me. I do not mean to
wash or bathe my weary limbs only to quench my thirst.
my mouth is dry as I'm speaking, my throat is parched. words hardly find a
way. a drink of water, nectar it will be, and life, believe me, too, life you will
give with water, and these babies here who stretch their little arms must touch
your hearts." it chanced the twins stretched out their arms. whom could
those words, those gentle words the goddess spoke not touch, despite her
pleas they stopped her, adding threats unless she went away and insults too and
not content with that they even stirred the pond with hands and feet and on the
bottom kicked the soft mud about in spiteful leaps. her thirst gave way to
anger. of such bores she'd ask no favour now, nor speak again in tones
beneath a goddess. raising her hands to heaven "live in that pool of yours"
she cried "forevermore" and what she wished came true. they love to live in
water. sometimes all their bodies plunge within
the pools embrace. sometimes their heads pop up. often they swim upon the
surface often squat and rest upon the swampy Bank and then jump back to cool
pond but even now they flex their squalid tongues in squabbling and
beneath the water try to croak a watery curse. their voices harsh,
their throats are puffed and swollen, their endless insults stretch their big
mouths wide, their loathsome heads protrude, their necks seem lost, their
backs are green, their bodies their biggest part, their bellies white and in
the muddy pond they leap and splash about: newfangled frogs. and all the while
I've read this to you the frogs have been thrashing and squabbling and
jumping about all around me. the descendants of the lycian peasants
who Leto transformed long ago when they insulted her and her newborn divine twin
infants Artemis and Apollo. so Ovid tells us that story about the
goddess Leto. having become impregnated by Zeus (Jove), Zeus' wife Hera (Juno) banishes Leto (Latona) to wander the earth and so she comes on planet Earth to this place Lycia.
one story tells that a wolf guided her to the river Xanthos near here, and that she gave birth to her twins Artemis and Apollo and then
named the region after the wolf because Greek for wolf is Lukos and the Greek
for Lycia is Lykia but I think that's a folk etymology though, I don't
believe Lycia really means wolf but that's one story of it. the other story,
the one we know from Ovid, is that she she gave birth to them before
turning the Lycian peasants into frogs and gave birth to them here in letoon. Letoon is one of the many cult centres of Lycia but this is probably one of the
most important religious sites. 3 temples here: this one, the biggest of all
is for Leto / Latona. She was basically taking the form of the mother goddess of Anatolia just like Cybele who's a Phrygian goddess. they're very similar and Artemis who, although a Greek goddess of the hunt, in the form
that she was known in Anatolia like Artemis of the Ephesians and other
regional Artemis worship in Anatolia, she's more like a kind of...instead of a
Huntress rural goddess, she's more like an urban mother of the people,
just like Leto who is her mother. Leto's name in lycian actually comes
from a lycian word meaning 'lady' so she definitely has this kind of aspect of
this ancient agricultural mother goddess from the pre indo-european
times. of course Anatolian languages are indo-european, as I've said, but Anatolian
DNA that we found so far does not show very much evidence of steppe
ancestry at all, which indicates that Anatolians preserved a pre Indo-European
religion here. this eerie statue does not resemble classical Greek statuary at all.
it is believed to depict the Lycian goddess Eni Mahanahi. a local name for
the late bronze age Luwian goddess Annis Massanassis, who became Leto as Greek culture dominated the Xanthos Valley around the 4th century before Christ. Letoon was originally built around a sacred spring dedicated to Eni Mahanahi -
the mother of the gods. she kept the mother role after being
Hellenized as Leto. her children Artemis and Apollo were known locally as ertemi and natri. undoubtedly Leto derives from a pre indo-european
agricultural mother goddess of Neolithic anatolia the 6th century author stephanus byzantinus explaining the non Greek
word Syessa, tells a story that this was the name of an old woman who gave
shelter to Leto. perhaps this is a memory of a half
forgotten myth of how the cult of Leto was accommodated by that or an older
local goddess. i nscriptions found here talk about how every year there had to
be sacrifices too Leto here and the punishments for those who fail to
make the sacrifices to Leto. They had to be held accountable
to Leto and the nymphs that she presides over. we also learned from
such descriptions that a woman was allowed to preside over the National
Assembly here which shows how Leto was associated with this kind of ancient
Anatolian matriarchal or semi-matriarchal perspective
that allowed women to have much greater levels of power than one would expect
from an indo-european society. the central goddess is a woman.
women could have high roles like the one who was presiding over the National Assembly.
and the Lycians practiced Matronymics. matronymics is when you take
your mother's surname instead of your father's one, which is normally completely absent
in indo-european cultures. This starts to make sense when we
consider that Lycia as a place has always had influences from outside but
it's always kind of preserved its original religion. for example the Romans
came but they just integrated the Roman religion
into the existing lycian one. the Greeks came and Greek religion integrated into
it, like Artemis becomes a different thing here, and similarly when the
indo-europeans first came and Anatolian languages were formed, the pre
indo-european religion of Anatolia, which is very closely related to all the
Neolithic religions of Europe, was preserved in a new way, with goddesses
like Leto and cybele and other Anatolian mother goddesses becoming more
prominent than they are in proper Indo-European religions which are more patriarchal. now this place, you
can see, it's not just the the other pagan religions they integrated with, because
look here, you might not be able to see from there, but there's crosses here.
crosses right here. well over there that's a church. that's a very early Byzantine church and the Byzantines Greeks came here and
practiced Christianity and they used this building. the Temple of Leto was
preserved. they carried on using it and it's not a coincidence that the cult
of Artemis of the Ephesians was very very influential on the early church.
Artemis is very much very similar in her Anatolian form to the Virgin Mary. the
cult of the Virgin Mary as we know it was influenced by that of Artemis of the
Ephesians and that's quite a well accepted fact among historians. but here
you can see not all the gods were treated so kindly as Leto was by the
Christians. here is the Temple of Artemis and it's been deconstructed. the rocks
have been taken away. they they have been removed so that they can build
Christian buildings. the rough raw rock around which the temple was built is
likely to have been the original cultic object representing the goddess herself
and thus proving that the local goddess Artemis was not merely an important
Greek goddess but a fusion of a Greek one with an older local one. ..as has this one for Apollo so Apollo's temple isn't really here
anymore, sorry great Apollo, but we see that these
three gods were the main ones of the area, and two of those of those three
gods are associated with this Anatolian mother goddess. Artemis and Apollo are not lycian deities originally, obviously
Greek ones, but they're totally different here than they are in Greece.
they change a lot. Leto's name comes from the Anatolian
lycian word meaning lady so she's always had this kind of matriarchal Association.
Artemis was a huntress goddess in Greece, here she has no such association,
she's an urban goddess not the Artemis in Greece you would worship in the
countryside, here it could worship her right in the middle of an urban area.
that's that's an Anatolian innovation. and Apollo he changed a lot even in
Greece and in Rome as well everywhere he went, as a God, he becomes more associated with hyperborea, is that because his mother Leto comes from hyperborea, it was
one version of the myth that says Leto was born in hyperborea. others say she
was born elsewhere but it's also thought that Apollo was associated with
hyperborea because the Hyperboreans worshipped him there. Hyperborea is a
mythical land in the north probably equivalent to modern-day Scandinavia.
there's also associations of the precious gem amber, which comes from
the Baltic, with the cult of Apollo, but that isn't a lycian thing. there is no
connection to the north with the Lycian people who are very Mediterranean people.
very southern. very un-indo-european, perhaps the least so of all the indo-european language speakers. that's
interesting since in the first indo-european breakaway language
group is the Anatolian language it's the first group to go away from
proto-indo-european and it's much simpler than proto-indo-european there's
only two cases in the Anatolian language families like lycian and that's
quite interesting because even though it broke away earliest it's
probably one of the least Indo-European of all the indo-european
cultures. something worth considering. In the temple of apollo at the holy site of
Letoon, this mosaic adorned the floor and it's been moved to the museum in
fethiye. three symbols are prominent on it. on the left the quiver and arrow
representing Artemis, and in the middle the solar disc, Apollo
was by then a Sun God, and this being his temple,
he is the central figure represented by that solar symbol, and on the right a
Lyre, a musical instrument, which came to symbolize the land of Lycia itself. as
with his mother and sister we don't actually see any evidence of Apollo
being worshiped in Lycia until the 4th century before Christ but we do have a
Greek source that connects him to the Lycians as early as the 8th century
before Christ in the writing of Homer In the Iliad, apollo rescues the Lycian
hero Sarpedon from the battlefield and he also restores Sarpedon's friend
Glaukos back to full health so that he can fight again. in later times the
second most famous Oracle of Apollo after Delphi was in Patara. Apollo was
conflated with an indigenous lycian God called Natri who was not significant to
the Lycians before the introduction of the cult of Apollo. interestingly an Aramaic
inscription from Lycia refers to Apollo with the Persian name for Mithras
Chatrapati. Mithras was also associated with Apollo. some lycian depictions of artemis look
Greek like this one from Kaunos while others are unique to Anatolia. Artemis of
Ephesus was a hugely influential goddess from Anatolia just north of Lycia, and
her cult spread right across the Mediterranean, as far west as France. the
name Artemis was imposed onto a local goddess and she was depicted completely
unlike any Greek goddess, with her legs combined into a single pillar, and her
body covered in what may be Bulls' testicles or breasts. in Myra in Lycia,
Artemis was worshipped as the personification of Liberty, Eleutheria, who
is depicted on this coin from Myra. Artemis Eleutheria is a puzzling
syncretic goddess depicted in a Near Eastern style like Artemis of the
Ephesians. this one comes from Lycia. the frogs and scorpions carved on the pillar
of her body are thought to be fertility symbols. whatever they are they are certainly not Greek. but we have no evidence that
Artemis was worshipped in Lycia prior to the increased Greek influence of the
fourth century BC. once again we are looking at an indigenous
Anatolian mother goddess. The late Neolithic and early Bronze Age Cycladic
art of the Greek islands just near Lycia somewhat resemble more Near
Eastern styles which makes sense because prior to the arrival of the
indo-europeans, Neolithic Greece was inhabited by people of primarily Anatolian descent. - this anthropological concept of an
ancient earth mother is very old within the field of anthropology itself.
many people have posited it since the earliest days, back in the 19th
century, of modern anthropology. and in this book 'the bow in the
club' Julius Evola explains how, carrying on from the modern developments of ideas of the noble savage from people like Rousseau who never used that term, but French
revolutionaries and progressive liberal thinkers of the early modern times were
influenced by these kind of ideas. Evola writes the following, citing JJ Bachofen:
"a brilliant scholar of antiquity, who has been almost completely forgotten by
contemporary culture, was the first to identify the key idea from which this
whole outlook has sprung. the physical maternal conception of existence.
the reference here is to a kind of civilization incapable of conceiving
anything higher than the physical principle of generation and natural
fecundity, personified on the religious and mythological level by maternal
deities, and especially Mother Earth, magna mater, the Great Mother. before the
generating mother all beings are equal law knows no exclusivism or differences,
love shuns all limits and her sovereignty does not allow any
individual to claim a special right over that which by nature
belongs to all beings collectively. the quality of being a child of the mother
ensures intangible sacred equal rights to all. Equality goes hand-in-hand with
physical intangibility and a specifically brotherly social ideal of
organized life is defined as being in compliance with nature. all this is not
necessarily associated with an explicit Matriarchy. the origins may be
forgotten. the Chthonic background ie the background related to the earth may become utterly invisible yet lived on in a particular
spirit and pathos in an inner character. this is the case for instance when the
principles of natural law are applied in themselves, in the abstract, on a
rationalistic level. it is clear what aspects of the more ancient lower rung
are irreducible to this outlook: patria potestas, virile, aristocratic, senatorial and consular Authority. The very conception
of the state and ultimately the theology of Imperium. Thus Rome is marked by an
antithesis, alongside laws and institutions of this sort we find
individual elements that, as the counterpart to particular cults, attest
to layers reflecting that ancient Mediterranean civilization which can
generally be described as Pelasgian. at its center stands, in various forms,
the cult of the great mothers of nature, life and fecundity. if we return to the
legal background positively embodied by the Roman state, we find that up until a
certain period, the upper strata of Roman society were also shaped by a religious
conception, only one opposite to the Chthonic religious just outlined. for the
state and it's law expressed the same kind of sovereignty that the ancient
indo-european man assigned to the paternal forces of light and of the
luminous sky, in contrast to the maternal deities of the earth, and even of the
heavens. Christoph Steding has rightly spoken of the luminous deities of the
political world. I have already mentioned how the heavenly and Olympian deities
were also seen to govern the world as cosmos and Ordo. The higher Hellenic
conception of cosmos ie of an orderly and articulated whole equivalent to the
indo-european concept of Rta, also informs the Roman ideal of the state and
of law. An etymological correspondence here, Rta and ritus, reveals the most
profound meaning of the strict specific ritualism that constituted the
counterpart of Roman patrician law. this law was differentiated and by contrast
to natural law encompassed the principle of hierarchy, instead of a quality of
individuals vis a vis the great mother. what applied here was the principle of
different degrees of dignity based on one's origin. one's particular position
within a given stock or people, one's relations with the Res Pública and one's
specific vocations the plebs, instead obeyed a kind of law,
an idea of community, where neither the individual himself nor his origins or
clan carried much weight. ....and when Ulpian justifies the practice of assigning
children, born without the sanction of positive law, to their mothers,
he is echoing the archaic, matriarchal view, a view which had remained
particularly strong among the Etruscans, according to which children belong first
and foremost to their mother, rather than father, and would take her
name. it would be possible to provide many other details of this sort, all
leading us to the same point." One might, instead of Etruscans, have
mentioned the Lycians, an even better example, perhaps Evola was not aware, but
as I have said, this form of goddess that was common in Rome in many different
ways and Greece in different ways, Evola sees as an avenging cult in
the sense that it had formerly been the primary cult of the mediterranean, that
of the great chthonic mother who ruled over a form of equality,
everyone equal before the mother, and this was not the idea of the
indo-europeans at all, it was something that was the Neolithic ideal, which has
its origin right here. right here in the Anatolian Mediterranean regions, and
which spread out before the Indo-Europeans did, across Europe and had an
avenging power in in the European civilizations in Europe, among peasants,
among the lowest sorts of humanity, who were ruled by
an aristocratic elite who were basing society on principles of celestial order,
of the heavenly Gods, the sky father! Dyēus Phater *end theme music* Amalec
