Triple Goddess
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In ancient Indo-European mythologies, various goddesses or demi-goddesses appear as a triad, either as three separate beings who always appear as a group (the Greek Moirae, Charites, Erinnyes and the Norse Norns) or as a single deity who is commonly depicted in three aspects (Greek Hecate). Often it is ambiguous whether a single being or three are represented, as is the case with the Irish Brighid and her two sisters, also called Brighid, or the Morrígan who is known by at least three or four different names. In most ancient descriptions of Triple Goddesses, the separate deities perform different yet related functions, and can appear as any age they desire.
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[edit] Overview
The term Triple Goddess was popularised by poet and scholar Robert Graves, in his "work of poetic imagination," The White Goddess. Graves believed that an archetypal goddess triad occurred throughout Indo-European mythology. He was not the originator of this theory, and it appears as a recurrent theme in the "Myth and Ritual" school of classical archaeology at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The "Myth and Ritual" school is often associated with Cambridge University and with Oxford University in England.
The theme of the goddess trinity can also be found in the works of Jane Ellen Harrison,[1][2][3] A.B. Cook, George Thomson, Sir James Frazer, Robert Briffault[4] and Jack Lindsay to name a few. The Triple Goddess mytheme was also explored by psychologists involved in the study of archetypes Carl Kerenyi,[5] Erich Neumann, and even Carl Jung.[5] One of the most recent of archaeologists to explore this theme is Professor Marija Gimbutas whose studies on the Chalcolithic period of Old Europe (6500-3500 B.C.E.) have opened up entirely new avenues of research.[6][7]
The publication of the complete texts of the magical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt[8] provide exhaustive examples of the imagery usually wrongly attributed to Graves. In one hymn, for instance, the "Three-faced Selene" is simultaneously identified as the three Charites, the three Moirae, and the three Erinnyes; she is further addressed by the titles of several goddesses:
- ... they call You Hekate,
- Many-named, Mene, cleaving Air just like
- Dart-shooter Artemis, Persephone,
- Shooter of Deer, night shining, triple-sounding,
- Triple-headed, triple-voiced Selene
- Triple-pointed, triple-faced, triple-necked,
- And Goddess of the Triple Ways, who hold
- Untiring Flaming Fire in Triple Baskets,
- And You who oft frequent the Triple Way
- And rule the Triple Decades...
She is variously described within the one poem as young, bringing light to mortals ... Child of Morn, as Mother of All, before whom gods tremble, and as Goddess of Dark, Quiet and Frightful One who has her meal amid the graves. She is exalted as the supreme goddess of time and space,
- ...Mother of Gods
- And Men, and Nature, Mother of All Things...
- ...Beginning
- And End are You, and You Alone rule All.
- For All Things are from You, and in You do
- All Things, Eternal One, come to their End.
The Greek Magical Papyri reveal elements of the culture of Greco-Roman Egypt that were drawn not only from Classical and Egyptian tradition but also from earlier cultures such as those of Mesopotamia and the Near East. The triplicity of the Goddess in these texts is one of the most recurrent themes.
This imagery was well-known to those with a Classical education and continued in poetry throughout English history. A case in point is the Garland of Laurell by the English poet, John Skelton (c. 1460 - June 21, 1529):
- Diana in the leavës green,
- Luna that so bright doth sheen,
- Persephone in Hell.
The Goddess triad is an essential feature of the Shakti forms of Hinduism and a distinction is made between the separate goddesses Sarasvati, Lakshmi and Kali and their manifestation as three aspects of MahaDevi ("The Great Goddess") when they are named MahaSarasvati, MahaLaksmi, and MahaKali. In the annual festival of Navaratri images of the Triple Goddess are carried in procession throughout India and in Hindu communities worldwide.
An archetypal Goddess triad is not limited to Indo-European cultures, and can also be found in some mythologies of Africa and Asia. The triadic theme also appears in medieval Christian folk traditions — notably with the three Marys.
In one of the ironies of religious history, St. Augustine of Hippo mocked the pagan religions of his time for believing in a goddess who could be both three and one at the same time. This was in his second book, The City of God. By the time he wrote his third book, On the Trinity, he had become a staunch proponent of the Trinitarian doctrine and had obviously resolved this conflict within himself or, at the very least, brought his thinking into line with the new orthodoxy.
Images of Goddess triads are well attested from both inscriptions and sculptural sources from the time of the Upper Palaeolithic. The shrine rooms of Catal Huyuk which dated from 7500 B.C.E. contain bas-relief images of a Goddess in three forms.
While there is no controversy about the fact that a wide variety of ancient cultures worshipped some types of Goddesses who at times were seen as threefold, many scholars consider Graves' statements that they fit a "universal" pattern to be highly speculative, and his lumping together of diverse cultures in the quest for this universal pattern to be inappropriate. Graves attempted to apply his theory of "Maiden, Mother, Crone" to Goddesses who do not fit that pattern, such as the triple goddesses of Celtic Mythology, whose triple aspects are based on function, not age. The Celtic Goddesses also cannot be said to fulfil roles that are static or well-divided. The three aspects of Celtic Triple Goddesses may all be Goddesses of war (such as in the case of the Morrígan) or manifestations of different types of creativity (such as with Brighid). The existence of triple goddesses in a variety of cultures does not mean that those cultures experienced these goddesses in the same way, or that there were universal religious patterns that could be applied to all these diverse cultures.
[edit] Maiden, Mother, and Crone
Some followers of Wicca and New Age religions believe that long before the coming of the patriarchal or monotheistic religions (implying a causal relation between patriarchy and monotheism), the Triple Goddess embodied the threefold aspect of a Great Goddess, sometimes, incorrectly, identified with Gaia, the Earth Mother (Roman Magna Mater). This has been called into question by authors such as Cynthia Ellers and Philip G. Davis (see The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory).
Descriptions of the relation between Greek Mythology and the Triple Goddess can be found in many of the myths translated in Robert Graves' anthology The Greek Myths and more cryptically and poetically in his book The White Goddess and his book of essays entitled Mammon and the Black Goddess. In his fiction book Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) Graves extrapolated this further into a future world where the present Monotheistic religions are discarded and the Triple Goddess once again rules supreme (one of the Goddess manifestations is called "Mari", implying the Mary of Christianity is a disguised form of the same Goddess) (see [1]).
In the introduction to the book he wrote with Idries Shah, entitled The Sufis he translates one of the poems of the Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) which illustrates that the triadic concept of the Goddess remained as a theme even among the medieval Sufis:
- I follow the religion of Love,
- Now I am sometimes called
- A Shepherd of gazelles
- And now a Christian monk,
- And now a Persian sage.
- My beloved is three-
- Three yet only one;
- Many things appear as three,
- Which are no more than one.
- Give Her no name,
- As if to limit one
- At sight of Whom
- All limitation is confounded.
In this book, Robert Graves and Idries Shah explore the influences that medieval Qabalism and pre-Islamic Sufi beliefs had on surviving pre-Christian folk-traditions in Europe.
In pre-Islamic Arabia and Nabataea the goddess triad were called "the three daughters of Allah": al-Lat ("the Goddess"), Uzza ("Power") the youngest, and Manat ("Fate") the crone, "the third, the other". They were known collectively as the three cranes. The name al-Lat is known from the time of the histories of Herodotus in which she is named Alilat, meaning "The Goddess". It is these goddesses who were said to have been briefly interpolated into an early version of the Qur'an in the apocryphal Satanic Verses.
A common Greek triple goddess is the combination of Persephone as the Maiden, pure and a representation of new beginnings; Demeter as the Mother, wellspring of life, giving and compassionate; and Hecate as the Crone, wise, knowing, a culmination of a lifetime of experience. However, the "crone" goddess associated with Persephone and Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries is Baubo, a goddess of coarse and obscene jest rather than wisdom. These goddesses, when grouped together, may also represent the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth.
Some Neopagans claim historical antecedent for their beliefs, with some even holding that in Old Europe, in the Aegean world, and in the most ancient Near East, the Triple Goddess preceded the coming of nomadic speakers of Indo-European languages.
Some Wiccans and New Age religions often profess to work with the Goddess in her triple form and sometimes apply the Maiden, Mother and Crone symbolism to goddesses who do not historically fit this pattern. An example of this would be the goddess Hecate, who could be depicted as three maidens when in triplicate, or as an old woman by herself; or to the many Celtic Goddesses who, while often threefold, appear as any age they desire and fulfill a variety of functions.
[edit] Maiden
Among Wiccans and Newagers "The Maiden" represents enchantment, inception, expansion, the promise of new beginnings, birth, youth and youthful enthusiasm.
[edit] Mother
The Mother represents ripeness, fertility, sexuality, nurturance, fulfillment, stability, power and life.
[edit] Crone
The Crone represents wisdom, repose, death, and endings.
[edit] Triadic imagery
In The White Goddess, Graves said:
- the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth;
- the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle;
- the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination.
This relates the three life-thresholds of birth, procreation and death with phases of the moon. It should be noted that this order is not consistent with that usually cited by some Neopagans and that the triadic structure is not dependent upon the division of the lunar month into three phases.
In Neopagan writings, the "new moon" refers to when the moon is completely black in the sky. This is slightly contradictory, since the traditional new moon (which is the sighting of the first crescent moon in the western sky at sunset) which was used as the starting point of lunar calendars.
[edit] Fates
Another cross-cultural archetype is the three goddesses of fate. In Greek Mythology there are the Moirae; in Norse mythology there are the Norns. The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Wyrd Sisters of Terry Pratchett's novel of the same name are most definitely inspired by these deities. (In Pratchett's work, they are referred to as "the maiden, the mother, and... the other one", as everyone is quite afraid of calling Granny Weatherwax a "crone".) The three supernatural female figures called variously the Ladies, Mother of the Camenae, the Kindly Ones, and a number of other different names in The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman play self-consciously on both the triple Fates and the Maiden-Mother-Crone goddess archetypes. The manifestation of a Fate goddess in multiple forms in also attested from ancient Egypt papyri in which the birth of a child is greeted by the appearance of the Seven (or in some writings Nine) Hathors.
In traditional Greek folklore, a low table is still prepared on the 6th night following a birth with food and drink so that the Fates may enter the house and bless the child with good fortune.[citation needed] A similar ceremony occurs in India, where the goddess who visits is in single-form and is named Sashthi ("sixth").[citation needed] This is similar to the Scandinavian tales of the Norns who visit the houses in which a birth has taken place.[citation needed] All of these themes, over the course of time, move from the realm of sacred myth to that of popular folktale and folk-custom. Most of the original cultural undercurrents would have had to be pre-Indo-European to have lasted so long and to have stretched across so wide a cultural and linguistic expanse.[citation needed]
The earthly representatives of the Fates may have been travelling bands of women in the role of priestesses, seers and celebrants, evident from the Norse sagas (cf. Egils Saga) and Indo-European and Egyptian myth and folktale (cf. Sleeping Beauty, The Westcar Papyrus).
The celebration of the life-thresholds was from early times in the hands of woman and was repressed comparatively recently. That is why the Three Fates, the Three Graces and the Three Furies were said to be sisters. When the women presided over the blessing of the child at birth and who acted as midwives they served the Fates, when they performed the traditional dances and songs for blessing weddings and acted as bridesmaids they served the Graces and when they fulfilled the role of professional mourners and psychopomp they served the Furies[citation needed].
[edit] The Ennead
An expansion of the triadic concept is that the triad can expand into an ennead, or a group of nine aspects or nine goddesses, e.g. the Nine Muses, the Nine Maidens.
The manifestation of the Maiden aspect of the Great Goddess, known to archaeologists as The Goddess of Love-and-Battle[citation needed] (such as Inanna/Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Freyja of Scandinavia), is represented pictorially as The Three Graces, The Bull with Three Cranes or the as triad: Athene, Hera and Aphrodite in The Judgement of Paris representing the embodiments of victory in battle, royal dominion, and love. This was a recurrent theme in Bronze Age myth and iconography in both Europe and the Middle East. This was a time before Astarte became Aphrodite, as a separate goddess of love. This was a later, Iron Age development. As Anne Ross noted in her work Pagan Celtic Britain, "there is no Celtic goddess of love".[9]
Each aspect of the goddess could thus appear in triad, for example, the Dea Matrona or Matres ("the Mother goddesses") shown as a triad throughout the Celtic, Gaulish and Romano-Celtic territories. They are still known in Welsh folklore as Y Mamau ("the Mothers").
[edit] References
- ^ Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, London, Cambridge University Press, 1903.
- ^ Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, London, Cambridge University Press, 1912.
- ^ Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual , London, Cambridge University Press, 1913.
- ^ Robert Briffault, The Mothers (in three volumes), London and New York, 1927.
- ^ a b C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology. Bolligen/Princeton University Press, 1967.
- ^ Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.
- ^ Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
- ^ Betz, Hans Dieter (ed.) (1989). The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation : Including the Demotic Spells : Texts. University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.
