Ancient Goddesses of Sex and War - Ronald Hutton

Foreign

ancient

deities never developed, meaning that they remained more or less the same beings throughout their recorded history, others, however, have biographies in the sense that they evolved significantly in character and function and that process can be study. Some influenced others and contributed to their evolution. What I want to do in this talk is look at a set of such deities and their relationships with each other. They are a clearly defined group of Mediterranean and Near Eastern

goddesses

who, I believe, have discernible connections to each other in many ways. Their development is like a domino effect from east to west across the

ancient

world, they also share to varying degrees the counterintuitive characteristic of modern sensibilities and certainly of anyone who has ever been a hippie of being associated with both love or at least sex. as with war.

Sequence with Inanna, one of the first

goddesses

recorded in Mesopotamia in modern Iraq, when she emerges in literature in the late 3rd century BC. C. or a. C., is already a complex figure with a long development behind it. Scholars like the four murdered. Jacobson has proposed that the goddess we know at this time is a combination of different qualities that derive from different earlier periods. Therefore, they can be distinguished as the development layers and the depositional layers in an archaeological site. This is probably true and the following sequence of development has been proposed. For Inanna, she seems to start out as the goddess who protected the agricultural warehouse; is a granary goddess that would immediately make her an important deity for the communities of ancient Sumeria, the farmlands of southern Mesopotamia that depended on the products of agriculture to survive their continuous preservation between seeds, harvest and consumption were, therefore, a vital phase in the economic process, deserved an appropriately important patron and a nanny got the job.

This original function of hers was underlined by marrying her to dumuzi, the local god responsible for the fertility of farmland in In other words, Dimuzi generated the agricultural products and Anana then looked after them for her. The perfect Divine economic partnership. The first religious rights for them seem to have been dedicated to thanking them for their generosity and encouraging them to provide more and better. This provision became more important during the fourth millennium BC. C. As the cities grew thanks to the rich products of the Sumerian plain and their growing populations needed to be fed, the ceremonies to encourage it, the one that survived in the historical record was the one in which the king of the Sumerian city was married symbolically with the goddess a text has survived from the city of nippua celebrating the union of inanna and muzi which may have been part of that ritual it consists of a dialogue between goddess and god and has a deliciously frank sexuality or at least it is delicious if you like it Frank's sexuality in it, in honor, describes the barge of his body in the new moon-shaped Celestial Crescent, his plot of uncultivated land, long abandoned fallow in the desert, his duck field full of birds, her Hiller clowned so green, her beautiful farmland surrounded by benches that she calls muzi to lay them.

She plowed the well-watered lowlands later as an extension of her role as guardian of abundance and wife of an important fertility god. She seems to have become a goddess of rain and the storms that commonly bring her to the Mesopotamian plain. seems to have led her to become one of the Sumerian war goddesses, so battles became names, the dance of inanna, the combination of receiving the power of the fertility god into her body and filling men with battle. The theory seems to have given him an additional role next. As a goddess of sex as such, she now became a goddess who reveled in the sap, sweat, semen, blood and all other vital fluids and forces of passion and ecstasy.

That's probably why she associated herself with the planet we call Venus when she ascended on it. In the morning she called soldiers to arms and in the evening she called lovers to each other's arms. One of her surviving Sumerian hymns has him speak of her in the fully developed form of her as ruler of Heaven and Earth, delighting in battle, floods and hurricanes. She is called a falcon. while other deities are sparrows as free and powerful as a wild cow on the plane, this entire accretion process probably took between two and three thousand years and when it was complete, at the end of the third millennium BC. development by becoming a personality in the middle of that Millennium The Sumerians had begun to put their various deities in family relationships and tell stories about them.

This was a natural theological consequence of the key political development of this period, the unification of the previously independent and mutually hostile. Sumerian cities in a single empire, the character given to Anana was unique to her and one of the most colorful and strongly marked of all, she is a beautiful, sexy and highly sexed spoiled bulshi and an imperious young princess, in short, she is problematic, appears in stories. In all the roles a woman is capable of assuming, except those that involve stability and duty, she is never either a loyal and supportive wife or a mother.

The most famous of all the stories in question is The Descent of Inanna, which is like this. Much of ancient mythology about deities behaving very badly. Inanna, as usual, is not so much the heroine but the anti-heroine. She decides to visit the underworld, which is the kingdom or realm of a different goddess, Eresh Kigal. Inanna seems to be going purely out of curiosity. to find out what's down there by doing so, she breaks a cosmic rule by going where she has no business being, as a result she ends up trapped there effectively dead, the result being, of course, a massive disturbance in the natural order of things in the world. that there is no chaos. of the main deities are equipped very well in the end, Inanna manages to leave by arranging for her unfaithful husband to want to take her place in the underworld, at least for part of the time, she began a series of apparent migrations towards other forms of goddesses, the first was the easiest because it mainly involved just a name change, she became Ishtar, this was the consequence of another political development, the conquest of Sumeria by another Mesopotamian people, the Acadians, Ishtar was their main goddess, who merged with Nana after the conquest occurred, the resulting composite deity.

She retained the Akkadian name of Ishtar when she was taken over by even more powerful Mesopotamian conquerors in later millennia, the kings of Babylon and Assyria. She experienced some subtle changes in the process. Her iconography became more standardized with the lion as her particular symbol reflecting her fierce nature. She also became an even greater goddess in Sumeria, although one of the main female deities of the pantheon, she had specific local roles, in particular she was the patron saint of a city, Uruk, Babylon and Assyria, sometimes she became the main goddess of the entire Kingdom. literary personality as an attribute, however, she was still the same old janana; in fact, Akkadian translations of Sumerian stories simply changed her name to Ishtar and nothing more.

Her longest and most vivid appearance in an Akkadian text is found in the most famous of all, the Epic of Gilgamesh. compiled by a Babylonian writer at the beginning of the second millennium BC. C. from a variety of earlier Sumerian stories. Ishtar aliasanana is her usual magnificent and outrageous personality. She begins by proposing to the hero Gilgamesh upon his return from an expedition that has established Gilgamesh as the primary king. in Sumeria and her greatest hero she asks him for seed from his body and in exchange he promises her a chariot of gold, lapis lazuli and copper pulled by storm demons, also a perfumed palace in which other rulers pay homage to her and bring her tribute and superlative fertility. for all your cattle what you don't like keep in mind that she is offering you status, power and wealth starting with cars, the Sumerian equivalent of a Porsche Turbo, the great sex has more or less taken for granted, evidently to your astonishment , and maybe two hours he refuses and details it in insulting detail. the way she got rid of all her previous husbands, including music, as soon as they approached her or displeased her, Glorious Ishtar's reaction to this is to get angry and run straight to her parents to ask for revenge against Gilgamesh, Dad, to no avail. she points out that everything the hero has said about her was, in fact, perfectly correct.

Ishtar cheerfully admits that her conduct has consisted of abominable behavior and tainted acts. Her point is that it's irrelevant because mortals shouldn't insult a goddess no matter how unpleasant she is. Sometimes his next move is effectively to throw a tantrum in which he demands that his father give him free use of a cosmic monster, the Bull of Heaven, which is what appears on screen with Ishtar making amends to destroy Gilgamesh if he rejects her. she threatens to break down the gates of the underworld and let the dead loose on the living, thus destroying the entire terrestrial world.

Boy, is this a fit of rage? Her weary father objects that letting the bull of heaven loose will destroy all the crops and cause famine. Ishtar. She cheerfully replies that she has thought about this and has accumulated stalks of food to cover the time until the devastation passes. Clearly, she is the one who plans revenge well in advance. Everyone loses with the result. Gilgamesh and his best friend manage to kill the great Bull and 14-ishtar. once again, but the friend dies as a result and rips out the emotional center of the hero's life. The Epic of Gilgamesh is basically a buddy movie.

Gone Wrong. However, Ishtar does not function in Mesopotamian literature simply as a magnificent super brat, a kind of ancient precursor to Joan Collins or Madonna, like other important deities, arrived in the second millennium to act as personal patron saint of the humans who They cared deeply about them and were expected to answer their prayers. The cult of her spread far and wide throughout the ancient Middle East, so that by the second millennium she was found throughout Mesopotamia and as far west as Syria and Asia Minor. As she moved to these western regions, she became associated with two other important goddesses, one had a very similar name, Ishara, and was effectively the same being with the same being.

In mythology, she also supported Muzi's own husband, now called Thomas, with the story of her descent into the underworld in these western lands where the seasons were most marked. That story became a more direct explanation for summer and winter. She was the Near Eastern equivalent. Greek myth of Persephone and perhaps some of the inspiration for her in Syria and Palestine, however, the impact of the seasons is reversed. Winter is the time of rain and therefore vegetation, and some are the time of death, when vegetation burns. Therefore, women would cry. However, for Thomas's departure at the beginning of Summer, Ishara was just a dimension of Ishtar and Inanna represented her as a goddess of love and sex, but not of war and government.

That aspect was assumed by another Syrian goddess, ashtar or ashtate, known in English as astati. Like Ishara Astati, she is a young and sexy goddess, but also a hunter and is much more concerned with war and government. As a virgin huntress, she at first seems like the Greek Artemis, she marries Bal, the horn of heaven and the God of time, and they have several adventures together. It is a representation of astarty or ashtarti from the syrian epic of cheret the god Baal saw astati in the vineyard, the most elegant of all her father's daughters, she had put on a linen dress and over it a wooden armor from Cyprus and her beauty wore a brightness like the desert Stars the golden ball coveted this virgin and wanted to possess her beauty before her face descended Powerful rod to please the beautiful girl wanted to love her limbs brandished his horns against her Watchers and goes From then on, astati is not the same type of deity as Ishtar, but shares some of her functions.

It is as if Ishtar was too much for the people of Syria and Palestine, so they divided the duties of her between two different divine women, except the western land of Syria. and Palestine also made a further distinctive contribution to the image of this type of goddess: she derives her equipment from the Syrian goddesses of the second and first millennium BC. C. a. C. she was often portrayed naked in front of the viewer with her hands raised. Mesopotamian goddesses had traditionally been represented dressed in tunics. art in this later period, however, the Syrian style of nude icons appeared there and the most famous representation of the nude Goddess from both regions is also the most enigmatic.

This is the relief of Bernie, commonly called the Queen of the Night, which has long been deposited in the British Museum and recently acquired by him; there is nothing like this image in all Mesopotamian and Syrian art. She was long thought to be Lilith, the baby-killing nocturnal demoness, but Lilith in Hebrew lilitu in Mesopotamia was never a goddess and this lady is a supergoddess Due to the number of horns on her headdress, others thought she might be the goddess of the underworld, Eresh Kigal, Inanna's nemesis in the myth of her descent to the Underworld Day, Eresh Kigal, however, it is not known at all. . icons or temples, in fact she does not seem to have been worshiped by the living.

My own opinion is that she is actually our own Ishtar Alias ​​depicted in the nude style of a Syrian goddess. She stands in the same posture holding Mesopotamian symbols of majesty, she stands on lions like Ishtarinana does and has clawed feet like some of the Syrian goddesses. In this stance, the owls could be there to indicate her identity as the evening star that brings the night, so one could argue that concepts of deity are common throughout the world. The ancient Near East influenced each other, but I'm more interested in the second half of this talk for its impact on Europe.

This is, of course, where we get to Aphrodite. All scholars agree that she arrived late to the Greek world, unlike most of the world's deities. the classical Greek pantheonShe is totally absent from the inscriptions on linear tablets B compiled between the 15th and 13th centuries BC. C., on the other hand, in the time of Homer in the 8th century, she is completely integrated into the Greek divine family, so she appears in space. of the half millennium of which no written records survive, this conclusion is one with which the Greeks themselves would have agreed, both they and the Romans emphasize that the cult of Aphrodite had come to Europe from the East, she was essentially a foreign goddess In addition, they were aware of the stopping points through which the islands of Cyprus, Crete and Cythera, made the crossing from Asia to Europe; above all, it was Cyprus, the large islands closest to Asia, that produced Aphrodite in her form. endearing and was always considered his true home;

Native Cypriot goddess, although nothing like Inanna, the icon of her from the main cult center of her on the island of Pathos, has survived because she looked nothing like a goddess. She is a large, shapeless piece of rock. One of the natural riches of Cyprus is copper. A vital ingredient in bronze that made the Bronze Age possible Aphrodite appears to have started out as the goddess of mineral-bearing rocks, this would explain a trio of enigmas about her: her original Cypriot name is kipris or Cyprus, echoing the name of the island as if it represented the land itself; the second is the reason why this goddess, the most beautiful, is the marriage in Greek mythology with the decidedly not beautiful god Smith, Hephaestus, but if she produces the mineral and refines it sufficiently, it is an anonymous economic partnership;

The third is the reason why she has repeatedly been called Golden in ancient texts. This is reflected, of course, in her charisma and charm and in the Greek male Porsche for blondes, but also in the literal appearance of some types of mineral. copper and, of course, cast copper. However, this literal rocker girl seems to have transformed into the Aphrodite we all know through the arrival of Ishara and Ashtarti from Syria Stephanie Buden has shown how since 1200 BC. C., images of naked Syrian-type goddesses appeared in Cyprus at a time of close contact between the island and the Syrian homeland. time when Aphrodite's original cult center in pathos shows continuous and massive occupation and development and this pattern may also explain another aspect of the later Aphrodite myth: the idea that she was born as a beautiful naked goddess arriving from the sea ; indeed she had done so by crossing to Cyprus from Asia in the icons of beautiful naked goddesses there was an additional direct connection between Aphrodite and Dinana and that is the myth of Aphrodite's love for a handsome mortal Adonis in the story Adonis is murdered and Aphrodite and her worshipers Humans, especially women, mourn him. ritually forever at the beginning of Summer Adonis is simply the Greek version of the Syrian and Palestinian Adonai which means Lord and is none other than our old friend Thomas Alias ​​of muzi and the mourning rights for Adonis were copied by the Greeks from those of Thomas However, in Syria and Palestine, Aphrodite was not the same type of goddess as Ishtar or Inanna;

She was not widely associated with war or government, although she was a goddess of war in some places in the Greek world, such as Sparta; in fact, Homer played a big part in the fact that she was not at home in the field. battle This is what happens when she intervenes to prevent the Greek hero Diomedes from killing her own son Aeneas, to whom she has given birth to a Trojan prince This is a battlefield in front of Troy in its entirety Pelt Dionides was Following Aphrodite while dragging her son with spear in hand, knew that she was a timid goddess, not one of those who dominate in battles, finally after a long chase, he caught her, jumped on her and pierced her with his spear, wounding her. the skin of her soft skin.

In her hand, the spear pierced the robe that The Graces themselves had made for her and pierced the flesh just above the palm of her hand, blood came out, that Immortal Blood Of The Gods, she screamed out loud and let fall. her son, then Diomedes shouted at the goddess to get away. of battle it is not enough that you deceive women into loving but if you come to war I think that after this a battle will make you shudder if you only hear us in the distance the goddess hastened to walk away delirious in her Agony and diameters comes out unpunished, he does so in part because he is protected by a completely warrior goddess, an Aphrodite-hating Feeney, but also because Clash of Steel is not Aphrodite's Melia, in keeping with this lack of a military or royal kingdom, the chosen animal For Aphrodite it was not the lion, but a variety of birds, usually geese and Dolph's sparrows, nor was it linked to the morning or evening star, it was closely associated with minerals, as said, and also with the sea, her mythological birthplace, her symbol being the cockle or scallop shell, she also connected with flowers, especially roses, perhaps because fragrance was one of her attractive personal characteristics.

She was above all the deity of sexuality and love, so she represented half of Inanna's attributes. The Greek word aphrodisia simply means to make love. She is not another goddess nor does he care much about her. human or animal fertility of her the province of her is simply The power of love and the joy of sex Here is the Homeric hymn to her or a little of it. The Muses tell me the works of Aphrodite of the Golden Throne of Cyprus, who as a deity awakens sweet desire and dominates. the race of mortal men and aerial birds and all wild creatures and as many beasts as Farmland breeds and also the sea, the gray wolves are bright-eyed lions that form above their bears and agile leopards hungry for game, they approach her and, upon seeing them, she rejoices and they cast desire into their breasts through her they all choose pairs and pairs of lions within soft shadows.

It's worth noting that the Greeks were not convinced that love was necessarily a good thing; our own culture tends to think it is for two reasons: one is modern. emphasis on spontaneity of choice and response to natural national impulses, natural people; the other is the massive influence of Christianity which was based on the Greek word that English translators love Agape as the divine power that controls and animates the Cosmos; On the other hand, Christians were much less interested in sex and tried to separate it from love. Jehovah is notable as an ancient god who apparently never has sex in honor, and his related goddesses, on the other hand, were normal for ancient deities to enjoy sex a lot, as well as instigating it and others, I mean.

The anonymous enjoyment is prodigious. There is a Sumerian Foundation. Legend of how a particular Sumerian city asked Inanna to become its patron saint and she happily accepted on the condition that she first be allowed to have sexual relations with all the adult men in the population who were required to line up . for her and it duly happened and the countryside was outside the city and when she worked on everything she was quite ready to start all over again until the men begged her to desist because they couldn't keep up with the pagan Greeks and after them the Romans distinguished three human impulses within which we within what we normally call love sex affection and passion were generally positive about the first two some mystics preferred celibacy as a way of freeing themselves from the distractions of the world many people thought that a man real should be the active partner in lovemaking, where heterosexuals or homosexuals, however, recognized that sex was a pleasure and a means for children that could be employed in many different ways.

They also saw it as a superlative reinforcement and expression of emotional attachment, what they also saw clearly was that it is often bad for both the individuals involved and the groups they are involved with when people lose control of their emotions by falling passionately in love. of someone. They also admitted that this was something that could happen without warning and was irresistible to the most sensible people, which is why Aphrodite, like a Nana and her sister or daughter, was scary. One of Aphrodite's titles was ruthless, which is why love is the villain of peace in the most heroic literature.

It is Ishtar who ruins Gilgamesh's happiness in Revenge by his rejection of her, as heard, it is Aphrodite who causes the Trojan War and the annihilation of the heroes of a generation, it is also love that ruins the round table of The Arthur's community when Lancelot and Guinevere meet and destroys the Irish Fiona Finn McCool when Gronia and DeArmond get together and this turns King Mark against his nephew Tristan, so the passionate and infatuated love of the Greeks Ero was simply the most terrifying force in the world after the death of Thanatos, it was overwhelming in the way that a storm or an avalanche is impressive here is the playwright Sophocles about Aphrodite Aphrodite is Immortal Life she is delirious Madness she is pure desire she is lament in her is all activity all Tranquility everything that leads to violence because she sinks into the vital organs of all those who have life and who are not greedy for that goddess, she enters the swimming race of fish, she is inside of the four-legged creature on dry land and its wings spread among the birds, the beasts and the humans, among the race of the gods, over whom among the gods it does so. she does not fight and spear three times in truth she rules over the heart of Zeus himself without a spear without iron all the plans of mortals and the gods are truncated Thia Aphrodite a deviation that the Greeks made when receiving Aphrodite is that unlike the Near Eastern peoples did not like to show goddesses naked, so Aphrodite was depicted dressed in a tunic for the first 400 years that she appeared in Greek art.

This tradition was revoked in the 4th century, apparently due to a notable woman named Frinny, an upper-class courtesan. Living in Athens we know two things about her: one is that she prepared for initiation into the mysteries of the Elus by bathing naked in the sea in public and in daylight instead of waiting for nightfall as other pilgrims did in the other places. walls. The other is that she was subsequently tried in Athens for blasphemy, the penalty for which was death. She was tried in the same court in which the philosopher Socrates had been convicted a few decades earlier, but she was later acquitted.

Roman legend said that she informed the judges that she was dedicated to Aphrodite and the search for love, she invited them to decide if she was really ready for it and she stripped naked to be naked before them. The judges, all of course men, then unanimously declared her innocent, we will never know what really happened in that courtroom. What is certain is that two great artists produced works in which Aphrodite herself appeared naked and that each of them supposedly was inspired by Frinny and used her as a model for her. One was Peles, a painter who portrayed the birth of Aphrodite from the waves. another was Praxicles, a sculptor who created for the city of Canidas a statue showing the goddess undressing to bathe.

From that time on, it became customary throughout the Greek world to depict Aphrodite naked in art and the Romans adopted that tradition for their goddess Venus behind. All this endearing Western tradition can lie in one brave woman, Freddie became a millionaire and received a statue as a heroine in the great Greek cult center of Delphi when the walls of another major city were destroyed by an earthquake that she supposedly offered to Paying to rebuild them, however, had one condition: the original walls were said to have been built by the hero Heracles. Friendly Hercules wanted an inscription on the new construction reading the boy Power raised these walls but the feminine power had to put them back the Thebans refused.

Now I have mentioned Venus as the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite and we must end this journey with her in Western Europe once again. The goddess concern turns out to be a more complex and interesting figure than often thought. Venus begins long agotime. in archaic Roman history as a sexless spirit who tended cultivated gardens, her vital role in that sense was to care for that vital economic component, the garden, thus begins her career as a goddess of the cabbage garden, a genderless divinity of cabbages. , beans, turnips, etc. This fact incidentally explains what would otherwise be a linguistic enigma: the most unbridled Roman goddess has a name that has a neuter noun early in Roman history.

This Roman spirit merged with the now forgotten Etruscan goddess when Rome conquered the Etruscans, the most cultured people. To the north of them, this goddess was Tiram, the patron saint of flowers, it was her common interest in gardening that brought her together with Venus and Tiran. Venus now became completely feminine and physically very pretty, and her association with flowers, especially roses, made her the obvious match in the Roman Pantheon for Aphrodite, the two merging when Rome absorbed Greek culture wholesale from the Greek colonies in Italy and conquered those colonies. The Romans took over the Greek deities by giving them Roman names and in the year 200 BC.

C. were translating their myths. Venus was simply given all of Aphrodite's bread. Facts and relationships and iconography of Aphrodite, including the models and our friend frinny. However, she was never the same as Aphrodite because she lacked the Greek goddesses' connection with the sea and rocks, although she did take the association with copper, in addition to her connection with flowers and greenery. Even stronger here is my favorite evocation of her in that role, the perva Gilliam veneris, the Night's Watch of Venus composed in the imperial Roman period. The hills have drunk the sun now and she walks between Our Lady of the woods and a wedding bed with which she weaves them. roses and cords with curtains of green she she with her fingers dripping with gems enamels the crowns of the ear she she when the rose sprouts a new and violent swelling the winds whisper in the ear disguising her voice in the zephyrs so secret the hour and so shy she she through the silent wet midsummer night draws the Dew from on high because of its brightness with the tears of its origin because of its weight on the earth.arc exit lost and clinging and trembling now it must fall now it is splashed of stars on the stem of the heather while it gathers and hesitates and flows and its trail runs through a wave of fire over the bud that asks me then emerged in globes in diaphanous Veil on Veil and nuptial ground attracted to deposit the small virginal petals that await the betrothal of Aurora Until the wink of Venus's green eye cools Cupids in carnadine Kiss until the ray of Ruby the dawn will color the bath of her Bliss until the cloud Covered her chest, reveals a fabric of Fire In Sight and the mantle in the hands of the lover it slides down while they reach to undo you now learn to love Who loved another Who never loved you now, who has loved you loving you also unlike Aphrodite Venus continued Her image took a quantum leap.

She suddenly became a goddess of war and love, presiding over life and death. She was also associated with the planet that has since borne her name in the Western world on the planet Venus of Inanna, what had certainly happened was that the Roman Empire had reached the Near East and was so connected with the worship of Ishtar Alias ​Anana and goddesses influenced by her which had now been held there for thousands of years. The Romans were so impressed that they gave her nature and powers to Venus as well. In doing so, she absorbed and reproduced virtually all of Inanna's associations thousands of years earlier, making Venus the last and greatest of Inanna's daughters as a result of the Imperial Empire.

In the Roman period, the cult of her was divided into four aspects that extended in festive terms throughout the flower season that extended from April to August. First she was honored as Venus, the obsessive, the easy giver of the pleasures of life and especially of the body, then she was celebrated as Venus. Genotrix, the animating force of vegetation and especially flowers, later became Venus victrix, the Mistress of life and death, and gave her a victory in war. The Roman soldiers who conquered gold and Britain used Venus's name as her battle cry, but her military role was only one. aspect of her powers a stirrer of sap sperm blood and the juices of libido the forces of life itself finally on August 19 she had her Festival as libertine Venus The Giver of death who was portrayed in a chariot pulled by mice the directors of Funeraries throughout Imperial Rome were dedicated to her and she maintained her feast as her annual festival during the Imperial Roman period.

Furthermore, the extensions of these qualities had given him eight more responsibilities, including several leaps of logic. Chariot racing and the sewer system, too, while Inanna and Ishtar disappeared from Living Tradition at the end of the ancient world until she was rediscovered by archaeologists and Aphrodite was known only to a small literary elite Venus remained an important figure in European culture in her developed Roman imperial film, she was carried throughout the western half of the Empire and continued to appear in art and literature forever after my last reading as an invocation to her as a classical goddess and planetary deity composed of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Jordan Obruna Giordano Bruno loved her so much that he actually worshiped her along with other Roman deities and after the 11th After years of trying to convince him to change his mind, the Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake because he is worth having. first in English and then in the original Renaissance Latin.

There is Jordana on the left and there is the more famous Venus of the Renaissance by Botticelli on the right. well and let's put them together to savor the pure sensuality of their language invoking Venus first the English and then the Renaissance Latin Venus known as the lady who feeds a beautiful beauty queen hand held in the darkness the warmest of generous hearts the woman of honey Giver of sweet Madness shining a star woman treasure made perfumed flesh a playful foam born and fertile gold and delivered silver drafted Delight of all the senses flame of the end of the night Brightness of the night passion blender Giver of the storm of love Giver of the peace of love listen to me heal me hold me and now your Latin is not a classical Latin but a Renaissance one that adapts even better to your writing venusa Dulce yokosa afrogenia facundiya long benefit plachida delicious foreign foreigner for this fascinating conference and, as you can imagine, we have many questions from the audience first.

Someone who is interested in the economics that has been shown at the beginning of the presentation and particularly in the symbolism that seems to continue the motif of The Lion and the Feet of Cloth. Could you expand it? those reasons because the iconography appears before we have the written myths developed about her, she is actually older, so we don't know how she originates or where she comes from, except that in terms of what she really does goddess of fierceness goddess of war goddess of the night and the coming of day everything makes sense and, like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian iconography is incredibly stable for about 3,000 years and then fades away in the period of the common era or Christian era, but in reality it is Greek iconography that takes over the West. by storm, especially since it was supposedly inspired by our friend Frinny and therefore the forms that the Greeks developed for Aphrodite become those of Venus and continue to be those of Venus to the present, fascinating, thank you, another question that perhaps acquire a little importance. maybe from a feminist question um the goddesses had a rather unpleasant view of you described so well to their characters and do you think that one impulse's sexuality and his ferocity in war were perhaps male fantasies or perhaps anxieties that could be uh?

You have to keep in mind that the gods of these pantheons are also quite gruesome at times and the goddesses are no worse. It is a Divine package because they reflect the natural world of superhumans and human personalities. Nature can be deadly too. like in ancient times, bewildering, capricious and frightening, and deities can be either all as unpleasant or wonderful as humans can be, but they have much more power, so they are much more daunting, so you put together this package and what What you get is these surprisingly good and evil figures which, of course, go completely against the later book religions idea that a proper deity has to be essentially good, as well as all-powerful and omnipresent.

I have no problem with ancient representations of women. because they attribute to the feminine a healthy and unabashed sexuality and also the ability to be bellicose, to have a temperament to destroy things and, in many ways, the right to express these things is a modern feminist statement. Another question you describe, Aphrodite has kind of a later addition to Greek mythology, either the big one where they put sex and love, so before her, was there some record from someone else or an earlier version or they must have put it in somewhere with someone. The problem is that we know nothing about the mythology of the pre-humor period because all we have are names and in Crete and some other places images and we are not sure how the names and images are related or even what the images actually represent if you have abuse. standing on a platform Is she a goddess?

Is she a queen? Is she a priestess? She could be any of those, but each of them offers a completely different interpretation of the image, so we have to wait until we have expanded writing that incorporates the mythology. To know what these beings are and what they represent, then there must have been some kind of deity of love and sex before, but who were they, where did they go, were they absorbed by Aphrodite, we can't say right now that we won't answer questions. . From the audience, do you have any questions? I know you're just talking about Western things.

I wonder if you have any opinion on goddesses from other parts like in India or maybe not. Just an idea. I understand us. I'm going north. because I have realized that the northern peoples also have goddesses of love and war, the Irish Morrigan, who is a classic of them, and Freyja, in the Northern Pantheon, there is another goddess who really combines war and war. love, and I'm still not sure if this is because the northerners at the time they write these stories have absorbed a lot of Greek and Roman mythology and then incorporated this image or if there is something in the human DNA in certain parts of the world that associates those two qualities because they must. with passion and rage, war and sex.

I'm going east. You could say that goddesses like Carly and Durga represent the same qualities, but I don't pronounce on anything or I try not to pronounce anything until I've really studied it and I don't. Think about it, but I will have time to get to the east if I have to understand the Irish and northern sources in time. You raise a very good point. I have a broader question about how I guess deities and gods in these times actually take on all of these traits because it seems like you gave the example of, you know, starting out as the goddess of copper and then, like boom, she just you get all these other traits that show up.

Could you speak? a little bit about that, I wish, I wish I could talk about that, the problem is that this snowball effect of deity evolution tends to have all the waves happen before we have the proper rich records, so no one ever In the ancient world it says it's okay. this is how we are going to make a goddess or eh, we have conquered Naples, it's time to mix Aphrodite with Venus or, hey guys, I'm back from Syria, boy, can I tell you about this fantastic goddess of love, sex and the planet of evening and morning Sky Let's disguise Venus, it's not there, what you see are the results and then we have to try to work backwards from that.

Thank you and just one last question. I think it's quite interesting. How was she? The representation of these goddesses contrasts with the role of women in common society has been particularly perhaps in Greece, that's quite interesting, it depends on the society, Greek women, at least in Athens, were very carefully circumscribed, as well as in some parts of the eastern world. They tend to get a mix of powerless human women and powerful goddesses, whether women had less power and earlier periods of course a big debate, there is a big discussion about the status of women in the ancient Near East.

I just read another very good book. On this, showing how controversial it is, it can at least be said that the ancient peoples of the Near East, particularly in Mesopotamia, tensed the tents and Egypt that conferred on women a recognition of their power as personalities, the power of their sexuality and your right. to decide what they do with it and, uh, a sense of their presence as essential figures on the world stage, uh, but the ancient Near East is still full of testosterone-overloaded guys with amazing beards orEgyptian headdresses shooting lions or humans from chariots and trampling vast fields of enemies, so it's very Butch, many societies.

Well, on that note, thank you very much, Professor Hutton, for this fantastic lecture.