Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
In a late wave of invasion by the Indo-Europeans, beginning around 1000 BC, the sky god was elevated beyond the sky as a universal god. The sky god was universally seen as the supreme god by the Greeks, the Indians and the Romans, but under the influence of the Aryan prophet, Zoroaster, he was lifted head and shoulders above all the other gods as effectively a monotheistic, transcendental god, Ahura Mazda, later called Ormuzd.
The single all-encompassing god of Zoroaster, like the earlier Goddess, was an ambidextrous god incorporating the opposing principles of Good and Evil, but that was too difficult for the patriarchs to understand and he quickly divided again into opposing principles, which became two separate gods, often twins. We know them as God and Satan.
The ambivalence of the original god gave rise to dualism, the battle of Good and Evil in which good eventually will triumph. This dangerous nonsense has for millennia led people into endless murder and torture, while they fool themselves into believing they are doing good. The right hand of the ambidextrous god tries to lop off his left hand causing untold harm.
Reject the division of Good from Evil. The Goddess is the sower and the reaper, the slayer and the slayed, life and death, love and hate, good and evil. The goddess is the goddess of opposites and therefore everything. She is ambivalent and ambidextrous, and even ambiguous. The central spirit of the universe is a unity and good and evil are as conjoined as the two sides of a coin. Every new creation will have opposing aspects and to speak of trying to have one without the other is madness. It leads to what it seeks to prevent—dissension and hatred. Our aim must be to achieve an acceptable balance, a balance tipped in the direction we prefer, but it is lunacy to pretend that we can be free of everything we wish to classify as evil.
The goddess is ambivalent. Thus she is white because she is pure like newly fallen snow, like flour, like milk, like a teutonic maiden's skin before they all started to use sunbeds. But also white are ghosts, the ill, the consumptive and the leprous. The proper offering for a cleansed leper in Leviticus 14:10 includes an ephah of flour, a relic of goddess worship. The Latin word for white is albus which will be familiar to botanists and gardeners in the names of white plants. The same Greek word is alphos which supplies their word for leprosy and alpiton, from the same root, means barley which was ground into the flour with which priestesses of the goddess whitened their faces to look like the full moon—and Death!
James Mellaart said that bird figures painted on walls at Çatal Hütük are the "Vulture Goddess," who is identified with the "Goddess of Death." When Gimbutas finds clay or bone white figurines, she says they are of "the White Death Goddess," with "terrifying masks."
The goddess is Truth and truth she defends with death. Eternal life is a lie. It is static not dynamic. It is death not life—life moves. Only the goddess herself lives forever and she is ever moving, ever changing. The promise of a personal everlasting afterlife is an invention of wicked people who desire to control simpler people in this life. Just as a teacher can be thought of as living in his disciples, our life lives on in our children and the changes we have made in our life—we live on in the goddess but not as a personal consciousness. Our future life is much more subtle than the anthropocentric spiritism of Christianity and other spin-offs from post-exilic Judaism, and what is more important we create it in this life!
Goddess worshippers had no fear of death. They saw only continuity in the cycles represented by the goddess—constant birth, constant death and constant renewal as a perpetuum with death simply meaning a new birth. Initially, the male gods knew only of Hades or Sheol, places where the shadows or shades of people who had once lived wandered unaware forever. This form of death was not popular and people feared it. What is there to fear if the shades are aware of nothing? Plainly it was worse for people to imagine an eternity of mindless wandering than it was to look forward to a rebirth.
Cybele was the interest of a minor nation but was taken to Rome on the advice of an oracle and seemed to rescue Rome from Hannibal. She lived there then for over 500 years. The twin of Osiris, Isis also persisted, surging back into favour after Alexander had conquered Egypt. She also lived in Rome until the Christians murdered her. The goddesses of the patriarchal Greeks came to be seen again as aspects of the Great Mother, whether Isis or Cybele, both of whom lived as great mystery religions for over a thousand years.
Earlier the Eleusinian Mysteries had featured the goddess as the earth mother, Demeter, and her younger self as the daughter, the virgin Kore, Proserpine or Persephone, who descended into Hades in death but was resurrected. Bacchus or Dionysos seems to have been involved in this trinity as the son who was resurrected by Cybele and therefore, like Jesus, offered the hope of resurrection to the mystai. For Cybele and Isis, it was clearly their male companion as son or twin who was resurrected—Attis and Osiris respectively—not the goddess herself in her virginal aspect.
In all these mysteries, as in the last of them, Christianity, initiates were promised eternal life for their earthly personality. The patriarchal priests had realised that Sheol and Hades were no rivals to the rebirth of the Goddess, but the eternal life that they had invented was a winner.