#10 GODESS: MARY AS MYTH AND LEGEND
If most legends have a basis in real life, I wanted the same analysis of their lives as the Gatekeeper gives other people.
“You’d be familiar with the fantastic stories of the twin Gods’ birth, what were their real births actually like?”
“The actual story of the twins Apollo and Artemis (yes that was their real names) cannot compare to your mythical one for romance or adventure, but it is worth telling none the less. They were actual twins born around 1800BC in what is today’s Iraq. Their birth was uneventful and nothing much happened in their childhood during their privileged upbringing. This finished dramatically when they turned sixteen because they were forced to flee south and west to what was to be Assyria. Together they got jobs, both worked in armaments! Apollo would invent the military chariot. He began by finding a way to take a farm cart and put on it stout wheels. First, these wheels were made of solid wood until he invented the spiked wheel. Up until Apollo’s invention, all battles were fought on foot and because of the lack of a stirrup, there was no fighting from horseback. Apollo’s invention allowed the Assyrians and the Hittites to conquer Egypt and from there his story will be picked up by Egyptians and Greeks.
His twin, Artemis, invented the laminated bow. Her invention made the bow lighter and stronger allowing it to propel the arrow faster and harder. She made the bow from the horn of cattle and glued it together in layers. Her glue was made from boiling fish bones down over a fire and mixing the result with the sap of a tree. She put the laminated result in a fire to harden it but it still retained great flexibility and strength.
From their ordinary birth into a privileged family these brilliant twins were undeveloped until they had to undergo hardship. The sons of rich men seldom achieve what their fathers achieved because they don’t know hardship.
The Greek’s passion for storytelling and divinity turned Apollo the technologist into a charioteer, and turned Artemis the technologist into the huntress with the bow and arrow.
All their other characteristics were to be ascribed to them later. Apollo expanded from being an inventor to being a dramatist, warrior and prophet. He did, in real life become a king of a small kingdom and although he died quite young he lived on because of his unique achievement. Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt was not very virginal at all … She married three times! But she was a great athlete who excelled in archery and hunting.” [Litchfield 2005]
ARTEMIS
In Greek legend Artemis grew up to roam the woodlands like Pan, as the goddess of the wild she was a virgin hunter with silver bow, her dogs frisking at her feet. She protected her body, which she believed was sacred, from male eyes and fiercely defended not only her own virginity but the virginity of her female attendants as well. She became the protector of all that is wild and free. She is the goddess of hunters, women and childbirth, and the protector of all children.
Artemis’ temple at Ephesus in Asia Minor was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. As a spectacle of architecture it was three hundred and ninety feet long, two hundred and eleven feet wide and had one hundred and twenty-eight columns of dark green marble, each a gift of a king. After it was destroyed by earthquake (according to legend on the day Alexander the Great was born), it was rebuilt on its ruins on the instruction of Alexander in 356 BC who sent an aspect of Mary having a male life, Hephastion, to supervise its rebuilding. It would be destroyed again by the Goths in 263AD, and eventually its marble columns will be carried to Constantinople to be built into the great basilica Sancta Sophia. Queen Zoe, another aspect of Mary, would command the mosaics of various Christian murals in it. The basilica would later be transformed into the Ayasofya mosque in the renamed city of Istanbul.
At the entrance to Artemis’ temple in Ephesus was a towering statue of her showing many tiers of plump breasts as if she could suckle all the children of the world. Others describe them as tiers of testicles as if she alone could procreate all the children of the world. The festival of Artemis made all May a month of rejoicing, feasting and games. A thousand years later, Christians would dedicate that same month to Mary and declare, in Ephesus, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Mary, in her life as the mother of Jeshua, would use Ephesus as her sanctuary when she had to flee Jerusalem. There she would dictate her life story to Luke, another aspect of Mary. Eventually she would die in the mountains just above the Temple of Artemis and her death would signify the change from one incarnation of the goddess to another.
The twins, Apollo and Artemis, spanned the heavens, complementing one another; Apollo as the god of the sun and Artemis as the goddess of the moon and night. Across the millennia, in various lives, they would play with those themes.
The Gatekeeper expanded on the Artemis-Diana line of Mary and the interaction between Apollo and Artemis:
“Mary as Artemis is more properly captured by the Roman goddess Diamother, because the first thing we see in her is her governance of grace and style and her fearlessness. Elizabeth, the Queen's mother, Jane Austen, the novelist, Margot Fonteyn, the ballerina and Empress Josephine are perfect examples of her here.
The second thing we see in Diana as the huntress is her questing, her restlessness, and her ability to look beyond the stars, always insistent on the beauty of the human soul with a lack of care of others’ opinions. It is an oddity really: - she had mastery of the bow, disregard for normal social mores and she danced to her own tune. Can’t you see this in her lives as the legendary Marian, the lover of Robin Hood, as Admiral Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, as George Sand, or Simone de Beauvoir, or Cleopatra and to some extent as Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson?
The third thing is the Marian love of conversation, which once again we see in Jane Austen and Josephine, whilst the fourth is her role as the huntress who is not a destroyer. She culls rather than destroys; she culls as an appointed guardian of nature and creation. Here you can see her as Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring spearheading the environmental movement or Gertrude Jekyll, the English gardener, one of the greatest garden designers or Lady Murasaki,the Japanese novelist, and Emily Dickinson, George Sand and Vita Sackville-West all of them working in their flower gardens.
Mary as Diana is fastidious. St Luke wrote of the particular care Mary had for her head garments. You don’t have that part of his gospel, which was his biography of Mary… but think of her as Empress Josephine, her hair, her style and her garden at Malmaison. Napoleon used her charm and conversation to win over his opposition.
Finally, we have to remark again on her moral and physical courage. You can see that shining through in her aspected saints like Canice of Ireland, but particularly in the Queen Isabella of Spain and Catherine Parr and Queen Eizabeth, the Queen Mother of England and when she plays the hero, doesn’t her courage excite? I love her most where her fearlessness became foolhardy, courageous Horatio Nelson and as the Commander in chief of Israel, the judge, Deborah who was the most impressive woman in the Bible.” [Litchfield 2005]
Mary, however, is more than Artemis. She is also the Egyptian goddesses Isis and Hathor. According to Ancient Egyptian theology, Isis was one of four children of the Earth god Geb and the sky goddess, Nut. She married her eldest brother Osiris, while her sister, Nephthys, married their other brother Set or Seth. Osiris and Isis were king and queen of Upper Egypt where Osiris introduced agriculture, animal husbandry and arts and crafts. He civilized his people; giving them a code of law and teaching them the proper ways to worship the gods. He was wisely advised by Thoth.
His brother, Seth, who was bitterly jealous of his popularity and achievements, hatched a plot to murder him and thereby to usurp his throne. Seth secretly acquired all the measurements of Osiris’ body and invited Osiris to a banquet where he showed off a beautiful carved and decorated wooden chest. Whoever could fit into the chest exactly would receive it as a gift. Several guests tried unsuccessfully, until encouraged by Seth, Osiris climbed inside, and suspecting nothing because he was devoid of evil, found he fitted into it exactly. Instantly Seth’s henchmen slammed the lid shut, poured molten lead into the seam to seal his fate. They dumped the chest in the Nile, from where it floated into the delta and out into the sea.
A distraught Isis turned to her mother for help and using their magic powers, they located the chest hundreds of miles away at Byblos on the Phoenician coast. Isis brought her beloved husband’s body back to Egypt for proper burial, knowing that her evil brother and his offspring would now rule Egypt and establish a dynasty. Isis, wailing and moaning like the wind, wept over his lifeless body, until she realised how she could produce an alternative heir to the throne. She breathed life into her husband’s phallus and lowered herself onto it so the seed of Osiris could enter her allowing her to conceive a child. Once she had placed her husband’s body back into a coffin, she hid herself and his coffin away in the marshes of the delta until she was ready to give birth.
But when Seth was out hunting he discovered Osiris’ coffin and viciously dismembered his brother’s body cutting into more than fourteen pieces and scattering them throughout Egypt to ensure that Osiris could never be reincarnated.
Again, Isis turned to her mother who, as sky goddess, saw all, and she located every piece of Osiris and working with Thoth, Isis reassembled her husband’s body and anointed it with special creams. Once again her loving touch breathed life into him. In one account, Isis turns herself into one of the swiftest birds of Egypt, a kite. Diving and flapping above him, she fills his nose and mouth with air from her wings. He rises from the dead, going immediately to become the lord of the departed in the infertile other land, Duat, the land of the dead.
Isis’ rescue of her husband showed she had the ability to move between worlds and enable resurrection of the dead.
Isis’ role expanded from that of being the grieving queen and avenging mother to become the vital link between the gods and humans. Each pharaoh, as the living representative of Horus, became her son, and she became their protector. Isis represented the ideal loving wife, the faithful and resourceful consort of Osiris, the grieving widow, and the nurturing, protective and dedicated mother. It is in these capacities that Egyptians loved her the most.
Isis also became the giver of life and food for the dead. By Hellenistic times, her role had also grown to become protector of sailors and her Latin title was Stella Maris, or Star of the Sea, the epithet attributed to Mary in the Catholic Church.
The symbol of Isis in the heavens was the Star Sept or Sirius, whose appearance above Egypt marked the beginning of the New Year and the inundation of the Nile, which ensured its continuing prosperity.Isis represents also one of the three major roles of Mary, that of High Priestess, able to cross into darkness and return, able to procreate in different ways, and able to personally take on the Darkness and return unscathed.
