The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

The
earth-goddess.

The sky-and the sun-gods, then, were, I think, the two chief male divinities among the Aryan folk taken as a whole. There corresponded to them in most Aryan creeds two female divinities, an older and a younger, a wife and a maiden, such as were on the one side among the Greeks Hera and Demeter, and on the other side Athene and Artemis,[59] or Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. In the Norse creed, again, there is Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Freyja, the sister of Frey. This last is indeed not a maiden in the Eddic mythology. But the husband of Freyja is a person of such very small importance that we may feel sure he is only a sort of addendum to her nature and surroundings, and that she is in character very much the counterpart of her brother, a maiden-goddess—goddess of spring-time and of love.

In respect to the elder, the married goddess, we may say, almost with certainty, that she is the earth—the natural wife of the heavens, and naturally thought of as the mother of all mankind—Terra Mater. We know that the ancient Germans worshipped a goddess whom Tacitus calls Nerthus (possibly a mistake for Hertha, Earth), and, he adds, Nerthus id est Terra Mater. And in the Scandinavian offshoot of the ancient German creed there can be no doubt that the same idea of Mother Earth is embodied in the goddess Frigg, the wife of Odin.

The Romans had their native goddess Tellus, who was only obscured in later times by such Greek or half-Greek divinities as Demeter or Cybele. For this Demeter of the Greeks bears a name which most philologists are agreed had a signification precisely the same as Terra Mater—Gê-mêtêr. Demeter is but one of many wives of Zeus mentioned in the Theogony of Hesiod. All of these wives, including Hera (Juno), the highest in rank of them all, were probably at one time or another personifications of the earth.

The Vedas, too, have their mother-goddess, their Mother Earth. This is Prithvi, or Prithivi, the wide-stretching, generally called Prithivi-mátar, which is also Earth-Mother. And some think this word ‘Prithvi’ is connected with that of the Northern Frigg.[60] And the Vedas have their young maiden-goddess, who in the Vedas is called Ushas the Dawn.

Goddesses
of Spring
and Dawn.

What is the nature-significance of this maiden-goddess? It is less easy to determine than in the case of the other three divinities. One form of the maiden-goddess is the divinity of the seed, like Persephone, that is to say, a goddess of all vegetation, and hence of the spring. In the Vedas, again, Ushas is a goddess of the dawn, an idea nearly allied to that of Spring; and some people think that this is also the foundation of Athenê’s nature. There are other characteristics of the maiden-goddess which look as if she were an embodiment of the clouds; but then the clouds are so nearly connected with the dawn that such an idea can scarcely be said to contradict the other notion. The maiden-goddess is in many cases born of the sea. Not only is Aphroditê, or Venus, born of the sea, but Athenê is so likewise; at any rate one of her names, Tritogeneia, implies this origin. The more common story of Athenê’s birth, that she sprang from the head of her father, Zeus—this, too, when we remember that Zeus is the sky, is not inconsistent with her being the cloud.

When all is said, it must be owned that the nature-origin of this maiden-goddess is not so obvious as in the case of the divinities of the sky, sun, or earth. That only means that, as a nature-goddess, she is not so necessary to the creed, but that on the other hand many objects of nature—the dawn, the clouds, streams, the wind, sunshine—have suggested the thought of this divinity, and that the suggestion found a natural echo in the heart of mankind.

There are, of course, behind the greater nature-gods a number of other natural forces—the sea, the wind, lightning, fire, streams, fountains, the dawn, the clouds. These all receive their place in the Aryan pantheon. But the characters of the lesser gods tend to echo those of the greater. Sometimes two different but nearly allied objects of nature are rolled into one to form a new god.

Thus the god of storms and thunder is often associated with the sky, as are Zeus and Jupiter among the Greeks and Romans. Dyâus, the most primitive form of sky-god, is the clear heaven. The name is connected with a root div, to shine. But Zeus and Jupiter are the cloudy or thundery skies. The Vedic Indra is often not unlike them. That is to say, the sky-god, in their persons, has taken upon him the nature of the god of storms. But despite these changes, we may still go back to the gods of earth, and sky, and sun, and cloud as forming the backbone of the Aryan creed taken as a whole.