[Editor’s Note: This and the forthcoming sequels are originally published in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018 Mago Books). Part 4 discusses the Goddesses of pre-Hellenic myths and the Mycenean culture wherein the early matriarchal culture of Crete and the patriarchal Indo-European Mycenean culture coexisted.]
The Cultural Shift from Mother Rite to Father Right—In Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece
Ecofeminist philosopher Charlene Spretnak has researched and composed pre-patriarchal portraits of various Goddesses, in Lost Goddess of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths.[1] She lyrically relates the sacred stories of Gaia, Pandora, Themis, Aphrodite, Artemis, Selene, Hecate, Hera, Athena, and Demeter and Persephone that emerged during the early matricultural traditions of Greece. These portraits are invaluable, as they allow us to imagine the possibilities for women and girls in non-patriarchal sub-cultures of today, and in a future post-patriarchal world.
According to an oral tradition written down by Hesiod during the Archaic Age (circa 800 BCE), the first deity to emerge from Chaos was Gaia, Earth.
Gaia, the first deity, who emerged from Chaos in the presence of Love, was the Great Earth Mother, Mother of all Living. She created the Sky as a partner, equal to herself: “And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself.”[2] She gave birth to all on the land, in the sea, and in the sky, and received back into her womb at death.
From Gaia’s partnership with Sky, came the Titan deities. The Titan Goddesses included Rhea, Phoebe, Themis, Nemesis, Mnemosyne (Memory), and Hekate. They held cosmic, cultural, and personal powers:
Rhea, another Earth Mother Goddess, in mating with her brother Kronos, brought forth the first of the next generation of Greek deities, who became the Olympian pantheon. She was worshipped in Anatolia Crete, and Greece. The Athenians remembered her as the Mother of all the Gods, and they built an altar to her at their Council House in the Agora.
Phoebe was the Goddess of the Moon. The three phases of the waxing, full, and waning moon represented the three stages of female life as Maiden, Mother, and Grandmother-Crone. She was the mother of Leto who birthed the twin deities, Artemis and Apollo.
Themis was the Goddess of social order and justice, necessary for the creation of community and social well-being. She was an oracle of the Earth Mother Gaia and the mother of the Fates and the Seasons. She was the conscience of the community. [3] Peoples of Crete celebrated “goodly Themis” and they called upon her sister Diké, Justice “to possess [hu]mankind.”[4]
Diké, the primal Goddess of Justice, was a cosmological principle. The Greeks believed that Justice was woven into the fabric of the universe. She was closely related to the Seasons, and closely related among humans to Aleitheia, Truth.
Nemesis was the Goddess who blocked a person’s path of error, arrogance, and hubris, standing like a brick wall in the path of the transgressor. Later she was only remembered as a Goddess of retribution.
Mnemosyne/Memory was the font of cultural progress. She was the mother of the violet-crowned nine muses, of history, music, comedy, tragedy, choral dance, lyric and erotic poetry, religious hymns and dance, astronomy, and heroic, epic poetry.
Hekate was another Great Goddess who held power in the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and the Sea. As Goddess of the Crossroads, she guided those facing divergent, consequential decisions. She was associated with Demeter and Persephone, with Artemis, and the Moon. Like Persephone, Hekate guided the dying into the Underworld. Like the Moon, Hekate was a Triple Goddess, for she incorporated in herself the living experience of Maiden, Mother, and Grandmother-Crone.
Indo-European Hellenic clans descended in several waves into Greece during the Bronze Age, 2200-1100 BCE, bringing with them dominating male gods, warrior customs, the patriarchal family, and the horse. The shift from a culture of Mother Rite to one of Father Right can readily be seen in the Bronze Age Myceneans, who dominated the Greek mainland and Aegean Islands, circa 1600 to 1100 BCE.
While they continued to worship Goddesses, the Greeks’ dominant religious ideology affirmed Zeus as the chief God of the pantheon that took up residence on Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece. This historical change-over was most dramatically expressed in the tragedies performed in Classical Athens, in the trilogy of Aeschylus called the Oresteia; in the works of Sophocles, especially Antigone; and by Euripides, in his plays The Bacchantes, Medea, and The Trojan Women.[5] These tragedies vividly relate the key mytho-historical episodes in the violent clash of cultures and values and spiritual/religious beliefs that resulted in the establishment of patriarchal rule in Greece.
The Mycenean culture was a mixture of the earlier matricultural, Goddess-centered civilization of Crete and the patriarchal God-centered clans of the Indo-European Mycenaeans, who had the military advantage because of domesticating the horse. Gimbutas describes this mixture of cultures as follows:
The art, architecture, and written records of the Mycenaeans reveal a fascinating mixture of Old European and Indo-European elements. There is no doubt about the Indo-European ancestry of the Mycenaeans. They glorified war, and male warriors held prominence in society. Carrying on the Kurgan burial tradition, Mycenaean graves feature a prominent male warrior buried with his weapons, the dagger and sword, as well as with remarkable gold artifacts. Their pantheon featured male warrior deities. At the same time, the archaeological evidence shows that the Mycenaeans retained strong Old-European-Minoan beliefs. Much of the artwork—frescoes, signet rings and seals, pottery, and figurines—is quite similar to the Minoan. … The Mycenaeans represent an important transitional phase between Old European gynocentric culture and the classical Greek culture, where the male element came to dominate almost completely.[6]
The Mycenaean era in Greek history, with its ongoing war-faring between city-states, ended with the collapse of civilization into three centuries of what are called the Greek Dark Ages, circa 1100 BCE to 800 BCE. Because of continual war, forests were decimated, communities were reduced to subsistence living, the skills of writing were lost, and the arts degenerated. As described by Greek scholar Michael Grant:
From the later part of the thirteenth century, … this whole [Mycenaean] civilization somehow became engulfed in the prolonged series of destructive movements of peoples [and] … within a couple of generations the whole Mycenaean civilization was destroyed, with the help, probably, of internal feuds and disunities; and the palaces and bureaucracies which had exercised general control seem to have been the first to go.
As pollen-analysis reveals, populations sharply declined, reverting to pastoralism. The art of writing was lost for several centuries to come, the use of stone for construction purposes vanished, and Greece became a country of villages, making an impoverished pottery (Sub-Mycenaean, c. 1100-1050) which displayed stolid, insensitive shapes and hand-drawn designs of circles and half-circles. The darkness of this ‘Dark Age’ … represents a real and traumatic transformation.[7]
Greek villages and towns began to recover with what is called the Archaic Age that began circa 800-500 BCE. Greek culture finally began to flourish again in the Classical Age that began circa 500 BCE.
(To be continued)
[1] Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
[2] Hesiod, Theogony 116-122, trans. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University, 1967).
[3] See Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, and Themis (New York: University Books, 1962). [Themis first edn 1912. Epilegomena, 1921].
[4] “Hymn of the Kouretes,” cited in Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 7-8.
[5] For an early feminist interpretation of these plays, see Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).
[6] Gimbutas, Living Goddesses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 152.
[7] Michael Grant, Rise of the Greeks (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 2.