The Fall of the Temple

The Fall of the Temple, or the end of the goddess-dominated period, was not a single cataclysmic event. All the cultures of the pre-Hellenic period could be called goddess-cultures to some extent. Nonetheless, the oral and written records from that time make frequent reference to a catastrophe of some kind. Different interpretations of this have been made by different scholars....scientific archaeologists suggest that the disaster referred to was a tidal wave and earthquake caused by the explosion of the island of Kythera; while Immanuel Velikovsky took the old stories literally and concluded that that planets Venus and Mars had near collisions with the Earth at that time. Robert Graves' approach was more sophisticated. He said that the myths were compressed tellings of large scale social movements and historical events.....for example, when we are told of a goddess leaving a city and marrying some god, it refers to that city being overrun by a foreign army with a different culture. Working from this general principle (which is amply exposed in Graves' The Greek Myths), we can conclude that in the Mediterranean of about 1500 BC, the dominant culture ceased to be that developed in goddess-based Crete, and became that of Apollo-centred Greece. The goddess was not forgotten, she just assumed a lesser, and more secretive guise. In Athens, this part of story was carved for us in marble. The pediment of the Parthenon has as its major subject the birth of Athena, the new form of the goddess. On the far right of the pediment, the older Triple Goddess was shown. This, along with almost every other depiction of the Goddess, has been extensively defaced. This defacing of the Goddess' images is of itself a clue to understanding the course of religious history, for which reason we will attempt to recover the original versions in a later chapter.

That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure, indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

"Ionic" C.P. Cavafy, 1911

Three goddesses from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon

The Last High Priestess

Certain feminist theoreticians have chosen the fall of Sappho's temple on Lesbos as the most significant moment in goddess-history, and certainly this is a moment to conjure on, however other points in history can be chosen. If Sappho is thought of as marking the beginning of the fall, then the fate of Hypatia of Alexandria marks its' end, half a millennium later.

Hypatia died at the hands of a proto-Christian mob in the second century AD. She is remembered as a mathematician, and is referred to in Christian writings as a pagan. She appears to have been a focal identity for the mathematicians of that time, which is a relationship which we expand on in another chapter. Before she fell victim to the factional politics in Alexandria, Hypatia was the principal personage there. After her fall, no priestess of the goddess held such a high position, unless some Abbess of some medieval priory did so quietly.