From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Worship of the Greek gods
Date: 11 Apr 92 04:02:14 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Livermore CA

In article <1992Apr10.055934.23834@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>pciszek@isis.cs.du.edu (Paul Ciszek) writes:

	[A name he had mentioned he had misspelled:]
	[	Marija Gimbutas			]
	[He had made fun of her for communing with trees]

	In MG's defense, I suspect that she was communing with trees
in order to place herself in the mindset of those who kept sacred
groves. I wonder if Paul Ciszek is jealous :-).

	And I have noted no credit given to the trees of Topanga
Canyon (where she lived) in her books.

>pharvey@mipos3.intel.com (Paul Harvey) writes:

::Warfare is an invention of men, (the masculine), and perhaps even defines
::modern man. To turn a goddess, (typically the source of life), into a
:
:Ah, yes.  The central paradox of modern paganism:  When an ancient culture
:is obsessed with making exagerated, unrealistic images of women and considers
:sex and preganancy to be the core of female power and function, it is
:called "matriarchal".  When a 20th century man is obsessed with exagerated,
:unrealistic images of women and considers sex and procreation to be the
:primary function of women, he is a sexist pig.
:
:Why do we assume that people in an earlier age were fundamentaly different
:than they are now?  What little we know of these cultures can be explained
:just as easily by the desires, ambitions, lusts, and hungers that people
:experience now as by assuming any Golden Age.

	There is independent evidence, such as women being able to
have very important positions in many early societies. So while being
able to have children was considered an important feature of the
female sex, it was not considered something that disqualifies women
from all serious careers.

::goddess of war is obviously a male trick to subvert female power. When
:
:Obvious?  How?

	That's one interpretation. Another is that the war goddesses,
such as the Morrigan or the Valkyries, were originally goddesses of
death, and were turned into war goddesses when warfare became common.
After all, people do die in battle, don't they?

	The first explanation does hold for other war goddesses, such
as Athena. She may originally have been a simple protector of the
household, but got turned into a war goddess by more militaristic
worshippers.

	And why a goddess of death, like the Hindu Kali? She would be
a goddess of completing the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth.
Gimbutas reconstructs such a cyclic view in her books on Old Europe.

::you find a goddess of war, this is ussually an indication that the culture
::was originally female centered and underwent a change to male centered
::as warfare was introduced.
:
:The Irish whom I used as an example invaded the island from the continent,
:and both their own legends and the present day genetic makeup of the Irish
:population indicate that they couldn't have been too gentle about it.  Thus,
:they had to have been warlike since before they came to Ireland.  Now, the
:continental Celts that they were descended from were quite content to have
:male war gods; thus a people who were already warlike decided to throw
:away a perfectly servicable male war god in favor of a female one.  They 
:already had a different goddess for the "source of life" stuff.

	If the Morrigan was a native Irish goddess of death, then she
would have become a war goddess by the process I described above.
Simply consider that the classical Greeks had two war deities, Ares
and Athena.