| The White Goddess
is one of the names
given to the Earth Mother; the Moon goddess, to Venus, Astarte, Lilith,
Belili, the Muses, the Three Graces and to innumerable other female deities.
She is found in the myths and legends of all cultures. The stories and
attributes of the white goddess are remarkably similar in nations as far
apart as Ireland and China, and this points to a very ancient common source
for the myths, which appear to have come out of Africa with Homo sapiens
100,000 years ago.
This was a nature-based
religion which involved close observation and celebration of the seasons
and of the moon and the planets. Its bible was written in the stars
for all to see, and its hymns were the songs of birds and the sighings
of the breeze. The worship of the White Goddess reached its highest
level in the time of the Minoans (say 1600 BC). In that period, the
sea-trading Minoans carried their religion from their ports in the Mediterranean
as far as Ireland in the west; and to tropical Asia in the east. Of
the goddess-temples founded, the highest may have been that of Sappho
on the island of Lesbos. The goddess-temples are of great importance
to scholars, for they are the source of the alphabet we use; the musical
scales we use, of the concept of poetry, of the calendar, of astronomy
and history, and of formal mathematics and the sciences. This culture
fell in a cataclysm in approximately 1600 BC, but was resumed by Achaeans
(proto-Greeks), and by other civilisations honouring the nature goddess.
The temple's role at the pinnacle of human culture and achievement lasted
until the second century anno domine, when the the high priestess
of the temple of Isis was murdered. The fall of the temple on the Nile
marked the end of goddess-worship as a manifest or established religion,
and the beginning of the Goddess' long career in hidden religion, that
is, in the .
Coming
chapters:
Sources and acknowledgements:
- The White Goddess
Robert Graves Faber and Faber
- Greek Art John Boardman
Thames and Hudson
- Archaic Greek Gems
John Boardman Thames and Hudson
- The Greek Myths Robert
Graves
- The World's Mythology
Veronica Ions Hamlyn
- The Illustrated Golden
Bough Sir J G Frazer Macmillan
- Greece M Rostovzeff
Oxford University Press
- Gibbon's Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire Bison Books
- Stonehenge Decoded
G S Hawkins Fontana
- The Key to the Tarot
A E Waite Rider and Company
- Don Fernando W S
Maugham Mandarin
- The Druids T D Kendrick
Senate
- Art and Ideas William
Fleming Holt Reinhart Winston
- The Penguin Atlas of
Ancient History Colin McEvedy Penguin
- The lives and works of Chaucer;
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats , Coleridge,
Morris, Yeats and Graves in various editions, and, of course,
The Muses.
|
The
Fallen Temple