Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

In a recent post, we discussed the eight forms of Satan as listed in Johan Weyer's Pseudographica Demoniaca. While all of them or curious to the student of historical demonology, there can be no arguing that the big dog among them must be the one known as Satan-el: Lucifer.

Lucifer is a far more ancient spirit than the Big Three patriarchal religions would have us believe. He seems to be part and parcel of almost all the first religions to emerge from the area now known as the Middle East and in almost all of these myths, he is the son/lover - by any other name - of a very powerful goddess.

Lucifer's name means Light Bearer and in this form he is syncratized with the Earth's sun.This makes sense when we look much further back into history than the Bible will generally allow. And certainly much earlier than any Hebrew writings on Lucifer can attest. In fact, we should be looking to his other, more populist, moniker: Son of the Morning Star.

In this, early Semitic peoples were not calling Lucifer the sun itself, but the son of She who escorts the sun. Thus Lucifer would be the offspring of the Sumerian Inanna who becomes the Babylonian and Persian Ishtar. She is personafied as both the morning and evening star. In the morning she is the warrior, ready for battle. In the evening, she is the temptress, perfumed and prepared for love, perhaps even with her son.

This pattern of a goddess represented by the morning and evening star continued in Ancient Egypt. There both Neith, the warrior and Isis (Au-Set), the mother, were linked to the star. Most notably, however, the dual goddess Hathor/Sekhmet took on the celestial persona. Sekhmet, the lion-headed warrior claimed the morning while Hathor, the gentle cow goddess, took over in the evening.

Other goddesses such as the Phrygian Cybele and the Arab Al-Uzza would be similarly personified in the star. Eventually in Hellenistic Greece the star was linked to Aphrodite and so to Venus in Rome. This is the name she still bears in modern times.

It was during Hellenistic times that Lucifer - or the spirit that would become Lucifer - was first written about by the Hebrew nations in exile. It was after the Maccabean revolt of 168 BCE, as Peter Stanford points out in The Devil: A Biography, that the apocrypha began to be written. In these books, Jewish philosophers tried to work out the idea of a good God allowing horrible things happening to his chosen people. In books like Wisdom, which made it into the modern Bible, and even more so in books like Enoch, which did not, the problem became identified as an "adversary" to God. Enter the newly made but already ancient Lucifer.

This is where Weyer's interpretation of Lucifer/Satan-el takes its sustenance. Lucifer, the Light Bearer, is the favorite of God's Archangels. When God determines to make man in his own image, Lucifer refuses to bow down before him. Angels take sides and a war ensues resulting in the casting out of the rebel angels. Lucifer and his band fall into hell where they will reside, working their mischief against God's creation until the End of Days. When he takes charge of Hell, Lucifer becomes Satan-el, the Adversary.

Curiously, another story exists in the Gnostic versions of the Gospels. This one is fed not only by the apocrypha but also by the teachings of Zoroaster. There is light and dark, good and evil and in the perception of the Gnostics, Lucifer was the twin brother of Christ and marched before him in defying the old - and Evil - God. This is a confusing scenario for modern Christians in particular. Having been taught from the get-go that Lucifer is the Devil and the Devil is bad, they pick and chose which of Christ's words to pay attention to. When Christ accuses the Jews of worshiping the "wrong God" in Yahweh, no one pays attention. No one, that is, but the Gnostics who, in teaching pure duality, embrace Lucifer and Christ while rejecting Yahweh who made the most evil of all things: the physical world.

Thus Lucifer is more than the sum of his parts. And certainly more than any of the almost geeky eight Satans. Weyer's depiction of Satan-el as a malevolent, angry monster who plots the destruction of God's most perfect creation, Man (and I mean Man to be gender-specific here), seems puny by comparison. Lucifer, the Son of the Morning Star, is a shining god by any comparison.

Header: Lucifer, Bearer of Light by William Blake via Public Domain Images

Mercredi: The Art of Beauty

Though many of our female ancestors were given no end of trouble over their penchant for cosmetics, jewels and other fripperies, the ladies of Ancient Egypt never seem to have had that problem.  From the earliest recorded times they were not only encouraged but expected to maintain a clean, lean, healthy appearance.  Elegance was over the top by the dawn of the New Kingdom, around 1,550 BCE, and this was especially true at the royal court where both ladies and gentlemen primped, plucked and groomed like modern celebrities.

One of the most interesting things about Ancient Egyptian culture, at least to me, is its unusual lack of change.  Things were pretty well set in place for close to 3,000 years as far as politics, religion, etiquette and so on.  This was true of fashion as well and so, with only a few fluctuations, we can look at the Ancient Egyptian’s beauty regimen as being fairly static throughout the culture.

Women in particular but men as well had a mania for removal of body hair.  This may have been due to a combination of the hot, arid climate of the Nile Valley, the ever-present threat of parasites and the cult of the body developed in Ancient Egypt.  Bodies, even those of the common folk, were worked over with a pumice stone virtually daily to remove all possible hair.  Among the working poor it was not unusual to remove one’s clothing to attend to heavy labor.  Bodies were easy to wash; linen was not.

Bathing was considered a must, even if it only meant pouring water over the body in the evening.  Many queens were notoriously addicted to bathing; Queen Nitocris required an hour long bath in cool water sprinkled with a pinch of natron every morning.

The head and hair were particular focuses of care.  Men routinely shaved and wore either wigs or cloth headdresses.  Depending on the era, women either did the same or wore their natural hair intricately dressed with jewels, metal and extensions of human or horse hair.  By the middle of the 18^th dynasty, baldness for women had become the norm.  Ladies polished their heads with precious oils and wore long, intricately plated wigs to formal occasions while wrapping their heads in elegant scarves at home. 

During the reign of Akhenaton, his daughters’ unusually elongated heads became a fashion icon.  The rumor was that a sorcerer had reshaped the girls’ heads in the womb to spare their beautiful mother Nefertiti the worst pains of childbirth.  Whatever the case, fashion historian Mila Contini tells us that court ladies tried to emulate the princesses’ unusually shaped heads by wearing false headpieces of vegetable fiber or wood.

Cosmetics were applied to face and body with regularity.  A fashionista would not think of leaving home without her hair in a perfect coif and her limbs perfumed with oils of lotus, myrrh or acacia.  Her complexion would be whitened with a lead-based paste followed by a delicate sienna blush at cheeks and temples.  The lips would be tinted the same red-orange color, as would the finger and toenails.  Eyes were heavily painted, usually with three or four different colors.  Black kohl rimmed the eyes and elongated the eyelashes while sparkling green malachite was swept over the eyelids.  The eyebrows were extended with antimony powder which was dark gray in color.  Very wealthy women might sweep a bit of gold dust just over the brow as a final highlight.

The ladies must have cut a very beguiling figure as they swept into a temple festival or royal feast.  It is no wonder that we are to this day fascinated by the beauty of Ancient Egypt.

Header: Two of Akhenaton’s daughters from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

Easter Sunday, according to the Western calendar established by Pope Gregory, falls two days from today on the 8^th.  Of course other Christian religions slate different days for the big event, including the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic churches.  For some reason, because of this variation in days and dates, I tend to think of the very early Christian church at this time of year.  Such thoughts always wander to the highly thoughtful, highly heretical Gnostic faith and the wonderful story of their Pistis Sophia, the greatest of God’s angels.  Or perhaps the very progenitor of God.

The story of Pistis Sophia (which is translated from the Greek as “Faith-Wisdom”) begins with the Old Testament.  In the Books of Proverbs and Wisdom she is mentioned as Yahweh’s companion, created with or just after him and constantly at his side.  At first, she is no more than a balancing metaphor but gradually in the popular faith she, like Shekhina with whom she is often confused, takes on an actual personality.  She is written of in Kabalistic literature as gently contentious, interceding for man with Yahweh in the same way that Christians imagine the Virgin Mary halting her Son’s righteous hand.

Gnosticism picked this template up and ran with it.  In their Dark vs. Light gospel that was so influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, Sophia became the female originating force.  She was born of Silence and in turn gave birth to God the Son who she then took as lover.  The two created the Angels (known as Aeons) who, in their turn, became the lovers of Sophia.  It is she who led these Angel lovers away from God the Son – the Light – toward Yahweh/Satan – the Dark.  In Gnostic belief, all things physical were created by evil ergo anything that existed prior to God the Son was evil.  In an overarching religious embrace of the new vs. the old, the Gnostic prophets threw out the “old God” and associated him with Satan.

This rejection of the Light, along with an insatiable curiosity, caused Sophia to fall from grace.  She became a physical being in the Gnostic Hell, which is our tangible world.  Perhaps not surprisingly she became debased, offering her new physical body to anyone who would pay.  She experienced all the worst parts of life on Earth and is therefore sometimes called “our sister” in Gnostic prayers.

All this degradation taught Sophia wisdom and a new appreciation for the Light.  She returned to the presence of God the Son and was installed beside him as Pistis Sophia, the angel who will champion man.

Despite the eventual rejection of Gnostic teaching as heretical, the Roman Catholic Church retained some vestige of respect for Sophia as a metaphor not only for divine wisdom, but for the outcast returned to the fold.  She reappears in Revelations as the apocryphal Bride of Christ, and icons of Pistis Sophia are not uncommon in the Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches.

Perhaps the best end note to the unusual and contentious history of “our sister” Sophia is a passage from the Dead Sea scrolls of Nag Hammaddi, discovered in the 20^th century.  The script paraphrases the much more ancient words of the Egyptian goddess Au-set/Isis and puts them into the mouth of Sophia:

I am the first and the last, the honored and the despised, the whore and the holy one, wife and virgin, barren and fertile.  

Happy Easter/Joyeuses Pâques

Header:  Pistis Sophia icon from the wonderful (G)Nostic Nunnery where you can find this lovely prayer to Sophia

Jeudi: Great Spirits

Islam is, of course, one of the “big three” world religions.  Like its progenitor Judaism and its sibling Christianity, it is a markedly patriarchal system.  Given these facts, it should come as no surprise that Islam has also tried to stamp out the memory of any goddesses that ruled over its people before it swept through and “saved” them.  The religion has done a pretty good job, in all fairness, but a trinity of goddesses – one of whom was once worshipped by the family of the prophet Mohammed – still lingers in the collective Semitic memory.

The ancient Arabic ladies known as Al-Uzza, Al-lat and Menat form a sort of Maiden/Mother/Crone group that will be familiar to many pagans.  Much like the same sort of trinity in Wiccan and Druid traditions, these goddesses stand alone at times, meld with each other at others and are sometimes confused or even mistaken for one another.  For instance, the temple thought to be dedicated to Al-Uzza, the virgin warrior, at Petra in modern Jordan, is also mentioned as a place of worship for Al-lat, the fertile mother.

The confusion here is particularly easy to understand.  Just as Al-lah simply means “God”, so Al-lat means “Goddess”.  This is not uncommon in languages of the ancient Near East.  A similar quirk in the Phoenician language, for instance, created the god Ba’al (Lord) and his consort Ba’alat (Lady).  It is worth noting that the acacia tree was sacred to Ba’alat, just as it was to the warrior Al-Uzza.

Al-Uzza was the particular goddess of Northern Arabia and the Koreishite tribe into which Mohammed was born.  She was thought of as a nubile woman whose name meant “the strong”.  Her particular symbol was the morning and evening star and, much like Astarte and Ishtar before her, she took on the oversight of love and war.  Her sacred acacia grove, whose trees were thought to house the spirit of the goddess, was just south of Mecca.  Mohammed had the grove and its temple destroyed as he strove to assert the rule of the “One true God”.

Al-lat, the Goddess, was compared by the Romans to their Ceres.  She has also been compared to the Egyptian Isis.  A goddess of fertility and protector of her people, she was often symbolized by sheaves of wheat or other grains.  She also had a shrine near Mecca where she was venerated in the form of a giant block of white granite.  According to Patricia Monaghan, women were required to appear before the block of stone naked, and circle it once around.  Doing so would guarantee the granting of any boon asked of the goddess.  Ancient Arabians swore oaths by the name of Al-lat, as she was considered to be as permanent and steadfast as the white granite block at her shrine.  Needless to say, this too was destroyed with the coming of Islam.

The third component to the triad was Menat or Menata.  Her name meant, alternatively, “fate”, “allotment” or “death”.  Much like the Angel of Death in Christian myth, Menat was the spirit who came for a person when it was time for them to die.  She was called down when curses were necessary; provided the curse was righteous, Menat would punish the evil-doer.  Like Al-lat, Menat was thought to inhabit a block of stone.  Hers was a huge piece of black granite at Quidaid near Medina and its location is still a place associated with the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.

As is often the case with goddesses, people are reluctant to abandon them all together.  Thus the Koran lists Al-Uzza, Al-lat and Menat as three of the daughters of Al-lah.  In that holy book they are longer goddesses, but spirits who intercede for humans much like the Virgin Mary in Catholic Christianity.

Header: Al-Uzza, Al-lat & Menat by Thalia Took (find her fascinating site listed on the sidebar)

Jeudi: Great Spirits

When my family first moved to Southern California I was very much wrapped up in Ancient Egyptian mythology.  In that hot, arid land it was very easy to imagine the creatures and spirits that Egyptian culture conjured up.  During the extreme weather known as Santa Ana winds, I always found myself meditating on the Lord of the Red Land, Seth.  To me, this ancient god is one of the most paradoxical of the Egyptian pantheon.  And, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood.

Seth, whose name is sometimes spelled Set following the correct pronunciation, was one of the original five children of the sky goddess Nut.  He is an old god; representations of him as a bizarre, donkey-like beast appear on pre-dynastic artifacts such as the war club of King Scorpion.  In the Old Kingdom he was considered a god of strength and courage who rode at the head of the sun god’s barge where he kept the terrible serpent Apophis at bay.  Seth was the protector of Egypt in general and the Pharaoh in particular.  The strongest metal known to the Egyptians, iron, was called “the bones of Seth”.  But something happened to Seth’s good name around the time of the Hyksos occupation toward the end of the Middle Kingdom, and his powerful personality began to take on a very dark mantel.

The Hyksos, invaders from central Europe who introduced the wheel and the horse into Egypt, found a great affinity for the warlike, powerful Seth.  They equated him with their god Ba’al and worshiped him accordingly.  Whether or not the conquered Egyptians, who always had a distaste for foreigners and their customs, imagined Seth had betrayed them is unclear.  What is clear is that, with the restoration of Egyptian Pharaohs around 1640 BCE, Seth became an embodiment of evil.

He was known euphemistically as the “Red One” and, in a culture where order and balance were primarily important, assumed the throne of chaos.  He caused the withering hot winds to blow sand storms toward the Nile.  He encouraged rebellion and invasion.  He married foreign goddesses like Astarte and Anat.  Seth became so horrible in the eyes of the Egyptians that his name was not spoken, or even written, and depictions of him were often pierced through the head or body with a knife to nullify his out of control power.  Though the 19^th Dynasty of Seti I and Ramses II would embrace the old vision of Seth, the damage to his character was essentially done.

The real slander to Seth’s name came with the reworking of the myth of his family which became part of both popular and ceremonial religion by the start of the New Kingdom.  As noted, Seth was one of the five children of Nut and the Earth god Geb.  These children, some of the most powerful gods in the Egyptian pantheon, were born over the course of a five day period in the following order: Osiris, Seth, Horus, Isis, Nephthys.   Four of the gods were grouped into couples, with Osiris marrying Isis and Seth paired with Nephthys. 

The story goes that even at birth Seth was competitive and cruel.  As he saw his brother being born before him, he clawed his way out of the womb rather than have to follow behind anyone else.  Nephthys, originally a quiet consort, was said to be none too happy in her marriage.  Her son, Anubis the jackal headed lord of funeral rights and embalming, was now rumored to be the offspring of a fling with Osiris rather than Seth’s child.

Osiris and Isis took the throne of Egypt and a time of plenty and peace fell over the land.  Seth grew more and more jealous and, in a bid for power, killed Osiris by getting him drunk and convincing him to climb into a sarcophagus which was then locked down and thrown into the Nile.  Isis, a master magician, found her husband’s body in a sycamore tree in far off Cypress.  With her dead husband she managed to conceive their son and heir who was confusingly named after – and eventually absorbed – his uncle Horus.

After Seth found his brother’s body and desecrated it by cutting it into seven pieces, Isis regained all but one piece of her husband and then hid in a swamp.  Here she not only performed the first embalming on her beloved spouse but also raised her son to hate his uncle Seth.

When Horus grew to manhood he challenged Seth for the throne of Egypt and an epic battle lasting eighty years ensued.  Horus lost an eye to Seth and in turn castrated his uncle when Seth tried to rape him.  In the end good, in the form of the falcon headed son of Osiris and Isis, prevailed.  Horus became the protector of Egypt in general and the Pharaoh in particular.

It is obvious, when one takes a closer look, that the story has been doctored.  Originally Horus was not the nephew but the younger brother of Seth.  While obviously murdering ones brother to gain the throne is questionable, there can be no question that in the original family lineage Seth would be next in line for that throne.  It is only with the glaring addition of Horus-son-of-Osiris and the disappearance of Horus-son-of-Nut that the succession changes.  The addition of particularly vulgar actions on Seth’s part, like corpse mutilation and rape, only add insult to the original injury.  Particularly curious to me is the fact that Isis, who is always held up as the ultimate hero of the tragedy, was not known as Isis by the Egyptians but as Au-Set.  Even her name was kin to the Red One’s.

The Egyptian religion, which dominated much of the Middle East for 4,000 years, was bound to be a fluid, ever changing doctrine.  But the jarring demonization of Seth is as unprecedented as it is an instructive bit of foreshadowing with regard to powerful religions around the world.

Header: Ramses III crowned by Horus and Seth c 1170 BCE