You might be wondering who the woman is in the photo. Well, that’s me circa 1997. This was an exciting moment for me in the Acropolis Museum, Athens, gazing for the first time at something I had studied at university. Nothing compares to seeing something in the flesh. I stood there and teared up, getting my photo taken right before a guard told me off for it.

Most of us are familiar with how the Greeks perceived the gods and goddesses. Whether we are consciously aware, this tends to be our preconceived expectations of what gods and goddesses represent. They are like humans with human feelings, moods, faults and failings. They squabble and have rivalries. The are often fickle, dishonest and are self-serving. They are off-planet, remote divine beings who live in a lofty mountain palace on Olympus, inaccessible to humans.

I began studying Greek culture as a sixteen-year-old in high school. My interest was inspired by a sudden inexplicable desire to go to Italy. I loved it so much I continued in university, studying Classical Studies and Art History. For three years I learned about the art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and religion of Greece and Rome.

The art, architecture, writers, philosophers and religious leaders of Greece and Rome were predominantly men… And not once did I scratch my head and think “hang on, where are the women in all this?”

The odd woman managed to stand out and be remembered through the ages. Sappho comes to mind, along with some feisty memorable fictional characters such as Medea, Clytemnestra, Pandora, Medusa, Antigone. But most of these women were remembered for all the wrong reasons. Most of them were scary man killers. The discrepancy did not strike me as odd at the time.

At the time, I just presumed that there had not been many remarkable ancient Greek women. If I was feeling more charitable, I would surmise that Greek women were barred from academia and had been oppressed. This is closer to the truth, although I do wonder how many more there were like Sappho whose works have been lost to us.

After all, the great Greek philosopher Socrates tells us himself that his teacher was Aspasia. She was known for her ground-breaking teachings on rhetoric and philosophy. Aspasia was also the lover of Pericles and the mother of his child. However, she was erased from history books because she was a woman with no citizenship or rights.

The Greek goddesses did not fare any better.

In the Greek classics, goddesses were only given a passing mention as wives of gods or behaving badly. After reading the Classics, particularly the rollicking Trojan epics the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ by the Greek poet Homer, possibly written down around 750-650 BCE, I was pretty put off by the Greek goddesses.

This vase depicts the judgement of Paris, Side B, by Hera, Aphrodite and Athenafrom an Attic black-figure neck amphora, 540-530BCE from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Even when they are given the spotlight, it is because three goddesses (Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite) kick off the war with their vanity, jealousy and pettiness.

The Greek goddesses made me uncomfortable.

Give me Inanna any day over Aphrodite or Hera. The Greek goddesses are humanised into passive, simpering, weak women who need gods to do the heavy lifting. And don’t even get me started on the deceitful, aggressive, self-centred, misogynistic, rapist gods.

I am not exaggerating.

Crete

To truly understand Greek gods and goddesses we need to go back further to the civilisations that created Greek culture. These are the civilisations who managed to remain long after much of Old Europe had fallen to the nomadic tribesmen from the east, the Kurgan (Barrow) people, some survived.

From the steppes between the Dnieper and Volga Rivers, the Kurgans lived a nomadic life, used a battle-axe and rode a horse. The Kurgan took longer to edge their way into some of the Old European civilisations of Greece, the Cyclades, and Crete where the goddess-worshipping culture survived. It is exciting to explore these ancient cultures for traces of Old European goddess-worshipping traditions.

The last to fall, Crete was one of the last remaining civilisations of Old Europe, who held on for 3,000 years longer. While Old Europe was already suffering from invasions of the Kurgan (Barrow) with their goddess-worshipping culture being forcibly converted to worship of the Sky Father, Crete continued to follow the Neolithic culture of Old Europe that had persisted for millennia undisturbed.

Unlike the rest of Old Europe, Minoan civilisation continued to follow the goddess-worshipping ways, giving us a precious glimpse into how human consciousness had evolved and the beauty of the early goddess culture. Crete shows us that human nature is not naturally warlike.

 Goddesses of Crete

This means that the origins of Greek goddesses go back to the Minoan civilisation on Crete. Crete survived much longer and remained staunchly focused on the Great Mother. Minoan civilisation flourished between 3000-1500 BCE, at the same time as Mesopotamia and Egypt. Immigrants from south-western Anatolia are believed to have arrived in Crete as early as the sixth millennium BCE, bringing the culture of Old Europe with them.

Either a priestess or votary, this 35 cm tall Mother Goddess figurine was very damaged and her left arm, face and dress was reconstructed. Her arms are lowered, with snakes curling down her arms and another snake is winding around her tall hat.

The Minoans were a seafaring culture who were well positioned to connect sea routes to the great cultural centres surrounding them. They are believed to have traded with nearby Egypt early on, along with Anatolia, Syria, Sumer, Malta and Sicily. Crete was a melting pot of cultures with many earlier mythic images reappearing in Crete, showing how these symbols persisted for 3,000 years.

In ‘The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image’ According to Anne Baring and Jules Cashford “For example, the bull’s horns of consecration from seventh-millennium BCE Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, fifth-millennium BCE Vinča in Old Europe and second-millennium BCE Knossos in Crete … are almost indistinguishable.”

So far archaeological digs have not found an image of a Neolithic god of Crete. The goddess of Crete was the Great Mother of Life, Death and Regeneration, the Goddess of Animals, and the Mistress of the Sea and of the Fruits of the Earth. The art of Crete has a naturalism rare for the times. The art expresses pleasure in the beauty and abundance of nature.

In Crete, the goddess was celebrated with joyfulness and exuberance. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford note that the goddess “was experienced as a flowing, dynamic energy that could manifest in a swarm of bees, a dolphin’s joyous leap, a flight of birds, the coiling of serpents and sea creatures as well as in the human gesture”.

In Crete, when the young god was the son of the goddess and when depicted together the young god was much smaller and paying homage to the greater power of the imposing goddess. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford in explain that like his animal forms of bull, goat and ram, the god “was still the ‘son’ of the goddess, personifying the dynamic force of growth, which must, like the tree, die an annual death into the body of the goddess in order to be reborn from her the following spring. In this way he incarnates the form of life that has to change, while she remains as the principle of life that never dies and continually renews itself through its changing forms.”

This wall painting is of a cult procession from Knossos (Corridor of Procession) in Heraklion.

The goddess of Crete was androgynous, with her masculine traits symbolised by the crescent horns of the bull or a male animal – the bull, stag or ram. In the Minoan culture of Crete, a male was rendered in the image of a young god, diminutive in scale compared to the great goddess. He is separate although not completely differentiated from the goddess, he is depicted in relation to her.

In Crete, the goddess was celebrated with joyful mess and exuberance. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford tells us the goddess “was experienced as a flowing, dynamic energy that could manifest in a swarm of bees, a dolphin’s joyous leap, a flight of birds, the coiling of serpents and sea creatures as well as in the human gesture”. The figurine belongs to the snake goddess type, which is found in pottery, frescoes, and seal engravings, at Minoan sites.

This faience female figurine from Knossos on Crete is from the Neo-palatial Period, 1750-1490 BCE, when the palaces that had been destroyed around 1750 BCE were rebuilt. Faience is a technique that seems to have been borrowed from Egypt although Egyptian faience contained no clay.  It was instead a quartz-based composition which, when fired, developed a colourful glaze.

She is the Great Mother of Life, Death and Regeneration, the Goddess of the Animals and the Mistress the Sea and of the Fruits of the Earth. She is sculpted with snakes or the double-axe, depicted on seals in the shape of a bee, standing on her mountain with lions or arms raised as the wings of the bird goddess, or seated under the Tree of Life, giving fruits to her priestesses.

On Crete, the goddess is sculpted with snakes or the double-axe, depicted on seals in the shape of a bee, standing on her mountain with lions or arms raised as the wings of the bird goddess, or seated under the Tree of Life, giving fruits to her priestesses. She was associated with serpents, depicted entwined around her body or rising from her arms, and the double axe.

She sometimes had doves or poppies on top of her head. On seals the goddess is symbolised by a bee or raising her arms as the wings of the bird goddess. Other seals depict her standing on her mountain with lions or sitting beneath the Tree of Life offering the fruits to her priestesses. The goddess was associated with mountain tops, deep in the labyrinthine caves, in a grove of trees, sailing her crescent boat or riding a bull on the waves of the sea.

This clay seated goddess was worshipped for 1,500 years, as shown by the Neolithic snake goddess figure, dated 5800-4800 BCE, from Kato Chorio, Ierapetra, Crete, now housed at Heraklion Museum. This terracotta figure, dated around 4500 BCE, is 14.5 cm of a woman seated cross-legged. Her legs have the serpentine look of fat, boneless worms.

Her lower legs are rings and taper off to a point without feet. Her hands rest on her hips to emphasise her rounded belly and breasts carved in a V-shaped shelf on her upper chest. Her thick neck rises out of her shoulders the same size as her head. Her face is simplified with a pinched-out nose that creates the impression of eyes. The top of her head is flat, possibly suggesting a hat.

Mycenae

The earliest culture on mainland Greece are the Mycenaeans, named by archaeologists after one of the sites Mycenae. Best known for its lion’s gate Mycenae is an archaeological site near Mykines in Argolis, north-eastern Peloponnese, Greece. It is located about 120 kilometres (75 miles) south-west of Athens.

The Mycenaeans were a mixture of Cretan and Greek culture. Linear B tablets, inventory lists of the Mycenaeans, were found at Knossos all dated to about 1400 BCE. These tablets were written in an early form of Greek, differing from what had been used on Crete previously.

Many of the Greek deities are known from as early as Mycenaean civilisation (c.1750-1050 BCE) during the Late Bronze Age. Mycenaeans were descended from the Indo-European culture. The Indo-Europeans originated on the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. They migrated into Europe, Iran, and India around 3000 BCE, mixing with the local people and adopting their language.

Mycenaean preserved some archaic proto Indo-European and proto Greek elements. The ancestors of the Mycenaeans migrated from the steppe into Greece between 1900-1650 BCE. They intermingled with the locals, including the Pelasgians, to create a new Greek culture. The Mycenaeans established a Bronze Age culture on the mainland and nearby islands. Their culture was dependent on that of the Minoans of Crete, but they eventually threw off Minoan control around 1400 BCE.

At this time, it is believed that a group of Indo-Europeans took over the rule of Crete, overthrowing the previous government. They adopted Cretan subject matter and style of craft, dress, writing and religion. The Mycenaean Age (c.1450-1100 BCE) begins just before Moses’ time and thrived for centuries before the Greece of Homer. It is this period of Mycenaean rule that Homer memorialised in his epics.

Robert Graves in ‘The White Goddess’ describes the waves of invasions that swept across Greece from the northern peoples, stating that the “Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century BCE seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition… when the Dorians arrived, towards the close of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the role.” These northern people brought their Indo-European gods, Dyaus Pitar, Father God, who became Zeus.

Goddesses of Mycenae

The earliest known records of the names of Greek deities like Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and Dionysus are in Mycenaean Linear B clay tablets. Linear B was indecipherable until recently, making the Mycenaean period a relatively new area of understanding.

What is translated so far shows how different the Mycenaean and Greek cultures were. The clay tablets were discovered at Pylos, what seems to have been a major city with a very large corpus of writing. Excavations continue so we can expect more exciting discoveries.

From Mycenae this scene depicts a goddess seated beneath a fruit-laden tree, holding what appear to be poppies in her hand and receiving floral offerings from female devotees. Between them is a labrys or double axe, an instrument of sacrifice and a powerful symbol of the goddess.

From Linear B tablets, we know the names of some of the gods and goddesses worshipped in the Bronze Age: Zeus (Diwios), Hera (E-ra), Athena (A-ta-na), Ares (A-re), Eleuthia/Eileithyia (E-reu-ti-ja), Poseidon (Po-sa-do-ne), Apollo (Pa-ja-wo-ne), the Erinyes or Furies (E-ri-nu), Dionysus (Di-wo-nu-so), Artemis, and Hermes.

Inscriptions in Linear B found at Pylos, mention the goddesses Pe-re-swa, who may be related with Persephone, and Si-to po-ti-ni-ja, who is an agricultural goddess. A cult title of Demeter is Sito, meaning wheat. Zeus was superseded by Poseidon who received the greatest honours as the Great Bull and Earth-shaker. This is not surprising considering the seismic upheavals of the Late Bronze Age.

Female deities seem to have been more prominent than in Classical times, along with the priestesses who served them. It still isn’t clear whether there was a single Great Goddess in the Mycenaean or Minoan pantheons. This Mycenaean figurine is known as the Ivory Triad found by Alan Wace on the citadel of Mycenae in 1939 of female deities and child housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

The original Greek Great Mother had become many great goddesses who continued the traditions. Originally inspired by Minoan civilisation, these Greek goddesses personified different aspects of the Great Mother with her attributes distributed amongst them.

Athena, Demeter, Hera and Hygeia were associated with snakes, Demeter and Persephone with corn and poppies, Athena Demeter and Aphrodite with birds, and Aphrodite and Persephone with doves in particular. Artemis was associated with lions, stags and wild animals, and Hecate with dogs.

Greek goddesses were originally inspired by Minoan civilisation and came to personify different aspects of the Great Mother. Athena, Demeter, Hera and Hygeia were associated with snakes, Demeter and Persephone with corn and poppies, Athena Demeter and Aphrodite with birds, and Aphrodite and Persephone with doves in particular.

Artemis was associated with lions, stags and wild animals, while Hecate was associated with dogs. Artemis as Mistress of Animals, Parian pottery, 675–600 BCE. Hypothetical restoration (only some parts have been preserved). Archaeological Museum of Mykonos.jpg

The Greek goddesses were all moon goddesses. Persephone and Artemis personify the new moon, Demeter and Hera as mother or fulfilled wife personify the full moon and Hecate of the underworld personifies the waning or dark moon. These goddesses became trivialised.

Hera became the jealous vengeful wife. Aphrodite became the frivolous winner of a beauty contest. Athena became the masculinised daughter of intellect born through the forehead of Zeus as if she was the exclusive product of his mind. Artemis is diminished beside her brother Apollo.

In ‘Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World’ Vicki Noble notes that when the Greek city states were invented, “the Olympian gods and goddesses came into being, fragmenting the old creatrix Earth Goddess, Gaia, into sex-role-stereotyped pieces of her ancient self. Aphrodite became the wonton sweetheart, Keira became a hysterical and jealous wife of a philandering sky god, Artemis was relegated to the wilderness (like Lilith before her), and Athene was recreated as her father‘s daughter.”

God council in Olympus: Zeus and Hera throning, Iris serving them. Detail of the side A of an Attic red-figure belly-amphora, around 500 BCE, from Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.

Vicki Noble mourns all that was lost, asking “What kind of sexuality can we have, segmented off into prostitution (Aphrodite) or motherhood (Demeter) or frustration (Hera) or separation (Artemis) or cerebral expression (Athene)?” Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, was trapped in a loveless marriage; Athena, wisest of beings, always deferred to Zeus; and Hera, Goddess of Marriage, was married to the worst serial adulterer ever known. The Greek Goddesses shared in the oppression of ancient mortal women.

In ‘The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image’ Leonard Shlain says that both the Jewish and Greek stories have the same purpose: “to denigrate women, demote the Great Mother, and create the myth that enables men to dominate women. Women must have possessed power prior to the creation of these stories, or it would not have been necessary for myth makers to try to alter cultural perceptions.”

Butterworth in ‘Some Traces of the pre-Olympian World’ asserts that this impacted the women most, particularly royalty, who had been the protectors of the religion. He states: “The attack upon the matrilineal clans destroyed the power of the clan world itself and with it, its religion… The history of the time is penetrated through and through with the clash of patrilineal and matrilineal as the old religious dynasties were broken, swept away and re-established… The matrilineal world was brought to an end by a number of murderous assaults upon the heart of the world, the Potnia Mater [The Great Goddess] herself.”

Look at how many rapes are reported in these Greek myths. I count 45 in all, with 12 of these being Zeus who raped or at least has non-consensual sex with mostly females (but not all, as Ganymede took his eye) goddesses, mortals, and nymphs. This included Zeus raping his mother Rhea, his daughter Persephone, his cousins Metis and Nemisis, not to mention his sister who later became his wife, Hera. Six of these women gave birth to Zeus’ offspring, making them a target of his wife, Hera’s ire.

Some went to extreme lengths to escape the attentions of a god. According to an Arcadian myth, when Demeter was pursued by her brother Poseidon, she turned into a horse to escape him. However, Poseidon transformed himself into a horse and raped his older sister. Demeter conceived, giving birth to Despoina, a mysterious goddess, and Arion, a divine horse.

This terracotta  figurine of Demeter was found in the Sanctuary of the Underworld Divinities, Akragas, 550–500 BCE, now housed in the Museo Archeologico Regionale, Agrigento, Italy.

 

These myths are truly gruesome and show how little men respected or supported women. After Apemosyne had been raped by Hermes she went and told her brother. Accusing his sister of lying, he attacked her in a fit of rage, kicking her to death.

The brutality is also evidenced in the actions of heroes like Heracles who abducted and raped women, and the priests of Apollo who took the form of a snake and a wolf to rape princesses. These priests most likely took over the Oracle Temple at Delphi from the priestesses of Gaia, a Great Mother goddess, killing the great python who lived in a subterranean cave. Delphi was one of the most famous oracular temples of the ancient world, attracting kings and rulers to ask for their guidance.

This Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci, Italy, 440-430 BCE, depicts King Aigeus in front of the Pythia at the Oracle of Delphi. The oracle Pythia-priestesses then came the under the authority of Apollo and his priests who continued to use them for their oracular wisdom. I imagine them resenting the very priests who murdered their great serpent and expelled the Great Mother goddess from the temple but being unable to fight back.

Minoan Crete and Mycenae offers up the remnants of a history that is indigenous to Europe, the stories that need to be excavated to remind ourselves that patriarchy is not, and has never been, the only narrative, that it is up to us to return to it, to breathe life into stories that have lain dormant.

Minoan Crete and Mycenae  flourished without patriarchy, who embedded themselves in nature and saw themselves in it, saw all of it as divine and deserving of honour. But at the same time, they saw the paradox of it all, in the cycles of time that rendered everything small. In this way the bacchanalia in Rome reflected that comfort in paradoxes, which presented a sharp contrast to everything the patriarchal empire of Rome stood for: all had to be defined, recorded, structured.

The ancient stories from Crete and Mycenae show us the civilisations before patriarchy became the dominant system. Contrary to what we have been told life without patriarchy was far from barren or disorganised chaos. In fact, it the egalitarian goddess-worshipping civilisations were characterised by freedom, diversity that benefitted the whole community and led to fulfilling lives.

Patriarchy is not the only narrative. This is a truth our ancestors knew and lived just five thousand years ago – not so long ago, considering the history of time and Earth, and us humans living on it.

I hope this helps to get a feel for the thousands of goddesses who are available for us to work with. This is the long lost her-story of goddess worship that was once integral to a feminine spiritual path.

Which place and period in her-story resonates for you?

Which goddess draws your curiosity?

Examples of Greek goddesses: Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Persephone