The Great Goddess in the Ancient World

If you ask someone outside the contemporary Pagan community what Paganism is, one of the first things that they will say is that it has something to do with Goddess-worship. This is not true of all varieties of Paganism, but it is fair to say that a widespread feature of modern Paganism is the worship of a Great Goddess. She is often seen as having a special connection with the earth and the moon. Individual Goddesses – Artemis, Brigid, Inanna – may be seen as manifestations of her, parts of the whole of her mysteries. In some traditions, she takes on a triple form, and her tripleness is linked with the phases of the moon or of a woman’s life.

It is often objected that these are modern rather than ancient ideas. Ancient Pagans (it is said) were ‘hard’ polytheists: their Goddesses were distinct personalities, and most of them were unconnected with the earth, the moon, or tripleness. In this view, the idea of the Great Goddess emerged from the Romantic movement in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The Romantics were interested in the divine feminine, in part as a reaction against Abrahamic male monotheism. A Goddess of the earth and the moon duly appeared in the works of the early Romantic poets. She was subsequently taken up by historians and archaeologists like Jane Harrison and Sir Arthur Evans. By the middle of the twentieth century, the idea that ancient Europeans had worshipped a Great Goddess was something of an orthodoxy.

This is broadly the narrative that is found in – to take the most influential example – Ronald Hutton’s superlative history of modern Pagan witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon. Hutton argues that there is little precedent for the Great Goddess idea in ancient Pagan sources. He does refer to the Roman writer Apuleius, who portrays the Egyptian deity Isis as a Great Goddess in his novel The Golden Ass; but he presents this as an unusual and late exception. (Apuleius lived in the second century CE.)

It is worth pausing here to quote the passage from Apuleius which describes the epiphany of Isis. Here it is in William Adlington’s classic Elizabethan translation:

First shee had a great abundance of haire, dispersed and scattered about her neck, on the crowne of her head she bare many garlands enterlaced with floures, in the middle of her forehead was a compasse in fashion of a glasse, or resembling the light of the Moone, in one of her hands she bare serpents, in the other, blades of corne, her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colours, sometime yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, and sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe in manner of a shield, and pleated in most subtill fashion at the skirts of her garments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the starres glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the Moone, which shone like a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland made with flowers and fruits….

“Behold Lucius I am come…. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven! the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the Goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be diposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis….”

This is certainly an inspiring concept of the divine, but is it unique in the ancient sources?

The figure of the Great Goddess was undoubtedly popularised in modern times by the Romantic movement, before coming to be adopted by scholars of the ancient world. In the first part of the twentieth century, it was a culturally established idea, part of what all well-educated people thought they knew. It is unsurprising that it found its way into esoteric and Pagan revivalist thinking. By 1938, Dion Fortune could write in her novel The Sea Priestess: “Do you not know the Mystery saying that all the Gods are one God, and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one initiator?” It was a short step from this to the theology of Wicca, with its duotheistic Goddess and God. A key link in the chain was the mad poet Robert Graves, who wrote extensively about the Goddess and inspired Gerald Gardner.

It is true to say that the notion of the Great Goddess is at home in the modern age. No doubt there is nothing wrong with this, for those of us who are not traditionalists, the truth and legitimacy of an idea does not come from age. Yet, the Great Goddess is not only a modern construct. The intuitions that there is an immanent divinity in the natural world, revealed in the green earth and the silver moon; that this divine power can meaningfully be seen as female; and that it can be conceived in accordance with the sacred number three… these ideas are not tied to any time or place. Indeed, it turns out that they can be found in certain corners of ancient Pagan culture, if you know where to look.

It all begins with the Orphic movement, which is the earliest esoteric mystery current from the ancient Greek cultural world that we know of. Our knowledge of all of their secrets is incomplete, but we can tentatively say that the Orphics sought to transcend the mortal, material human condition through a mixture of ascetic and ecstatic religious practices.

Unfortunately, not many Orphic texts survive today. The earliest one that we have consists of fragments of a poem, together with a commentary, written on a charred document known as the Derveni Papyrus. The poem may date back to the fifth century BCE. The relevant part reads as follows:

Gé [Earth] and Mother and Rhea and Hera are the same. She was called Gé by custom, and Mother because everything comes from her (Gé and Gaia according to different dialects). She was called Demeter, as in Gé Métér [Mother Earth], the one name being made from the two parts, as it was the same name. And this is said in the Hymns: “Demeter, Rhea, Gé, Mother, Hestia, Déió”.

This is clearly evidence of a concept of the divine in which the distinctions between different Goddesses could be blurred. Other Orphic texts contain similar ideas, although they generally emphasise the male aspect of divinity: they present Zeus not merely as the king among Gods, but as a transcendent universal deity.

The ‘Hymns’ which are referred to in the quotation above do not survive. Though, another set of Orphic hymns have, fortunately, come down to us. These are known, funnily enough, as the Orphic Hymns. They were probably composed in a much later period: perhaps the second or third century CE. They are a very unusual example of an ancient liturgical text that has been preserved intact into modern times: a complete set of 87 invocations of Gods and divine powers. The seventeenth-century Christian scholar Daniel Heinsius called the collection a “true litany of Satan himself”.

Modern scholarship on the Hymns has emphasised how they put forward a theology which is simultaneously both singular and plural. Deities are invoked as distinct figures; but the same recurring epithets are applied across the collection, and individual divinities – female and male – are addressed as if each of them is a being of total divine power. For example, Hekate is the “key-holding mistress of the whole cosmos”; Demeter is the “universal mother Goddess”; and Aphrodite is the deity from whom everything comes. The Hymns do not quite proclaim a Great Goddess; but different Goddesses are presented as expressions of the same ineffable underlying divine substance.

Next, we may turn from the Orphic movement to another ancient mystery religion – the cult of Isis. Isis was one of the oldest Egyptian Goddesses. For reasons which remain somewhat obscure, her traditional worship within the framework of Egyptian Paganism came to evolve into an international initiatory cult which spread across the Mediterranean. This is the movement which Apuleius seems to have belonged to – but the idea of Isis as a Great Goddess long pre-dated him.

Of particular interest here are six surviving inscriptions known as ‘aretaolgies’. These are texts which describe the Goddess’s various powers and functions, sometimes taking the form of declarations by Isis herself (“I am…”). They seem to bear witness to a mixture of Egyptian and Greek influences. The most elaborate aretalogy comes from Kyme in modern-day Turkey and dates from the first or second century CE. Here are some lines from it:

I am Isis, the ruler of every land....

I separated earth from heaven.

I set out the paths of the stars.

I ordained the course of the sun and moon....

I revealed mysteries to human beings.

I taught them to honour the statues of the Gods....

I am the mistress of war.

I am the mistress of the thunderbolt.

I make the sea calm and billowing.

I am in the rays of the sun....

I am the mistress of storms.

I triumph over fate....

In other texts, Isis is identified with a range of individual Goddesses in the traditional national pantheons. For example, a hymn which was composed in Greek in the first century BCE and inscribed on a temple of Isis in Egypt names several Goddesses with whom Isis was associated. Against this background, the passage from Apuleius quoted earlier starts to seem less exceptional. Oddly enough, Apuleius himself appears to have believed in an overarching male God. Perhaps, ancient Graeco-Roman sexism was, for some people, a barrier to accepting a female conception of ultimate divine reality.

The examples that we have been looking at so far were somewhat out of the mainstream – mystery cults were not typical of ancient Paganism. The average person who lived in the ancient world would not have held such beliefs. Yet, ideas of a Great Goddess can be found in more conventional sources too. Here we may turn to the great Roman scholar Varro, an utterly respectable figure who operated squarely within the intellectual mainstream of his day. He wrote, in connection with the earth Goddess Tellus:

They think that Tellus is Ops, because she is improved by work [ope]; Mother, because she produces many things; the Great One, because she produces food; Proserpina, because fruits emerge [proserpant] from her; Vesta, because she is clothed [vestiatur] with herbs. Thus it is that, not without reason, they assimilate other Goddesses to this one. The opinion of our ancestors concerning these Goddesses – they thought that several of them existed – is not inconsistent with this. It may be possible for the same thing both to be singular and to have several things in it.

This bears witness to the same kind of idea that we have already met, that ‘different’ Goddesses are somehow multiple expressions of a single underlying female power. Evidently, even an orthodox Roman intellectual could reimagine ancestral beliefs in plural Goddesses as a theology of a mother Goddess of the earth who was both one and many.

Our next evidence comes from the fascinating body of material known as the Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Magicae Graecae, or PGM). Much could be said about this disparate and somewhat chaotic collection of spells, hymns and invocations, which displays influences from Greek, Egyptian and other cultures. For present purposes, however, we are interested in what we might call the underlying theology of the PGM. Among the divine beings who are named in the papyri, we can discern some broad patterns. There is a tendency to blur female deities who were associated with the moon and the underworld: Selene, Artemis, Persephone and Hekate. These figures could be elided with each other, and it looks like they were not felt to be wholly distinct beings. Among the male Gods, there is likewise a set of linked figures who might be called king-Gods and sun-Gods: Helios, Mithras, Apollo, Abrasax, Zeus and indeed, the Jewish God IAO (Yahweh).

As an example, the blurring of female deities may be seen in the prayer to the moon-Goddess Selene which appears at PGM IV.2785-2890:

….You are Justice and the threads of the Fates,

Klotho and Lachesis and Atropos.

Three-headed one, Persephone, Megaira, Allekto, many-formed one….

Fierce dogs are dear to you, and so they call you Hekate.

Many named one, Mene,

you cut the air like Artemis, the shooter of arrows….

Artemis, Persephone, deer-shooter, shining in the night.

Triple-sounding, triple-voiced, triple-headed, triple-named Selene,

triple-cornered, triple-faced, triple-necked, Goddess of the triple roads….

Many-named Goddess, with fair children,

bull-faced one, horned one, mother of gods and men.

Nature, mother of all….

You are the beginning and the end;

you alone rule over all things;

everything comes from you and everything ends in you, eternal one….

Night, Erebos, yawning Void.

You are Necessity, hard to escape; you are Fate, you are Fury,

you are Torment, you are Destroyer, you are Justice….

This is a prayer in which Selene is invoked primarily in a dark, chthonic guise: a deity of death and suffering (see the full text here). Yet, she is also equated with the ultimate power of the universe: a great mother, a Goddess of everything.

A further feature of this text which stands out is its presentation of Selene as a triple Goddess. It is fair to say that the modern Pagan idea of a triple Goddess derives from twentieth-century writers, notably Jane Harrison and Robert Graves. But it has ancient precedents. Divine figures were sometimes conceived by the Greeks as coming in threes – the three Fates, the three Graces, the three Hours and others, including the nine Muses. It is notable that this did not happen with male Gods. The “triple” epithets in the extract above have a specific origin, connected with Hekate, the Goddess of witchcraft. As a Goddess of road junctions, Hekate came to be depicted as having three heads or bodies looking in different directions. This conception seems to have migrated to the Roman moon-Goddess Diana. For the poet Horace, Diana was the “three-formed Goddess”, while Virgil had the tragic queen Dido call on “triple Hekate and three-faced virgin Diana”. An ancient commentary elaborated on the latter reference:

....[W]hen she is above the earth, she is believed to be Luna [the Moon]; when she is on earth, Diana; when she is under the earth, Proserpina. Some see her as a triple Goddess because the Moon has three phases.... Some call the same Goddess Lucina, Diana and Hekate because they attribute to the one Goddess the powers of birth, growth and death....

We appear to have here a universal Goddess, associated with every layer of the known universe and linked with the powers of creation and destruction.

In similar vein, the third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry linked Hekate with the three phases of the moon, the three Fates and the earth Goddess Demeter:

Next, Hekate is the moon, the symbol of her changing phases and of her power, which varies by the phases. Her power is therefore three-fold….

Next, the Fates are linked to her powers: Klotho to the generative power and Lachesis to the nourishing power, while Atropos is the power of the unmoveable aspect of the divine.

They also associate with her the generative power of the crops, which is Demeter….

What about the idea that a triple Goddess corresponds with the female life cycle of maiden, mother and crone? That too can be found in antiquity. Jane Harrison got the idea that Goddesses were identified with stages in the lives of women from Pythagorean philosophy. We also find the following testimony in the Greek travel writer Pausanias. He is reporting a local legend from Stymphalos in Arcadia:

They say that Temenos, the son of Pelasgos, lived in old Stymphalos, and that Hera was raised by this Temenos. He founded three shrines for the Goddess and gave her three titles. He called her Child when she was still a virgin and Adult while she was married to Zeus. When she quarrelled with Zeus about some matter and went back to live in Stymphalos, Temenos called her Widow.

None of this is to deny that the contemporary Pagan cult of the Goddess is deeply modern. It certainly speaks directly to modern concerns, across the whole spectrum of viewpoints. Goddess-worship has appealed alike to political radicals and to reactionary conservatives. For separatist feminists, the Goddess is a liberator from millennia of patriarchal oppression. For others among her votaries, she “oppose[s] the messy and insecure contaminations represented by science, technology and socialism”.

Yet it is worth understanding and appreciating the fact that modern ideas about the Goddess have genuine ancient Pagan antecedents. Goddess-worship connects with modern preoccupations; but it evidently also points to deeper human instincts and needs. A conception of the divine as female and triple; the personification of divinity as a Great Goddess; the sense that one can experience this Goddess through the natural world – these sentiments are in a real sense timeless.

Authored by Robin Douglas, Art by Christine Violet, & Edited by Georgina Rose.

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FOOTNOTES:

 Fortune had got this idea from Charles Seymour, whose writings I have posted online here.

Orphic Hymns, 1.6, 40.1, 55.4-7.

Isidorus, Hymns to Isis, 1.

Augustine, City of God, 7.24.

Horace, Odes, 3.22; Virgil, Aeneid, 4.511.

Servius, Commentary, 4.511.

7 Porphyry, On Images, fragment 8.

8 Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 262.

9 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 8.22.2.

10 Michael York, “Invented Culture/Invented Religion,” Nova Religio 3 (1999): 135–146.