Note 94.1 — Chapter V · The Predominance of the Goddess.

We might guard ourselves at the outset against the uncritical dogma which has been proclaimed at times that the goddesses in the various Aryan polytheisms were all alien, and borrowed from the pre-Aryan peoples in whose lands they settled. Any careful study of the Vedic and old-Germanic, Phrygo-Thracian religions can refute this wild statement: the wide prevalence in Europe of the worship of “Mother Earth,” which Professor Dieterich’s treatise establishes,94.1 is sufficient evidence in itself. Nor could we believe that the early Aryans were unmoved by an anthropomorphic law of the religious imagination that is almost universally operative. The Hellenic Aryans, then, must be supposed to have brought certain of their own goddesses into Greece, and perhaps philology will be able one day to tell us who exactly they were. On linguistic and other grounds, Dione and Demeter may be accepted as provedly old Hellenic: on the same grounds, probably, Hera; also the name and cult of Hestia is certainly “Aryan,”94.2 only we dare not call her in the earliest, and scarcely at any period, a true personal goddess. Now, there is a further important induction that we may confidently make: at the period when the Aryan conquerors were pushing their way into Aegean lands and the Indo-Iranians into the Punjaub and Mesopotamia, they had a religious bias making for the supremacy of the Father-God and against the supremacy of the goddess. We can detect the same instinct also in the old Germanic pantheon.95.1 Its operation is most visible when the Thrako-Phrygian stock, and their cousins the Bithynian, broke into the north of Asia Minor, and the regions on the south of the Black Sea. The god-cult they bring with them clashes with the aboriginal and—as it proved—invincible supremacy of the goddess linked to her divine boy: we hear of such strange cult-products as Attis-Παπαῖος, Father Attis, and one of the old Aryan titles of the High God appears in the Phrygian Zeus Βαγαῖος, Bagha in old Persian and Bog in Slavonic meaning deity. The Aryan hero-ancestor of the Phrygian stock, Manes, whom Sir William Ramsay believes to be identical with the god Men, becomes the father of Atys;95.2 also we have later proof of the powerful cult of Zeus the Thunderer, Zeus the Leader of Hosts, in this region of the southern shore of the Black Sea. Another induction that I venture, perhaps incautiously, to make, is that in no Aryan polytheism is there to be found the worship of an isolated or virgin-goddess, keeping apart from relations with the male deity: the goddesses in India, Germany, Ireland, Gaul,96.1 Thrace, and Phrygia are usually associated temporarily or permanently with the male divinity, and are popularly regarded as maternal, if not as wedded. Trusting to the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this important conclusion concerning the earliest religious history of Hellas: namely, that where we find the powerful cult of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic population. The axiom applies at once and most forcibly to Artemis and Athena; the one dominant in certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. Their virginal character was probably a later idea arising from their isolation, their aversion to cult-partnership with the male deity.96.2 The Aryan Hellenes were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people. As regards Hera, the question is more difficult: the excavations at the Heraeum have been supposed by Dr. Waldstein to prove the worship of a great goddess on that site, going back in time to the third millennium B.C.,96.3 a period anterior to the advent of the god-worshipping Aryan Hellenes. And this goddess remained dominant through all history at Argos and Samos. But we have no reason for supposing that her name was Hera in that earliest period. Phonetically, the word is best explained as “Aryan”: if it was originally the name brought by the Hellenes and designating the wife-goddess of the sky-god—and in spite of recent theories that contradict it I still incline to this view—the Hellenes could apply it to the great goddess of the Argolid, unless her aversion to matrimony was a dogma, or her religious isolation a privilege, too strong to infringe. This does not seem to have been the case. The goddess of Samian cult, a twin-institution with the Argive, was no virgin, but united with the sky-god in an old ἱερὸς γάμος. Nevertheless, throughout all history the goddess in Argos, and probably in Samos, is a more powerful cult-figure than the god.