Happy Spring!!
This past Sunday, the world celebrated the Spring Equinox, and those spiritual amongst us celebrated Ostara: both the holiday and goddess of Spring. Eostre. Easter. Venus. Aphrodite. Ishtar. Isis. Inanna. (Use whatever name you like.) To me, the celebration of the Spring Equinox is really just the ultimate celebration of THE Goddess- the divine feminine energy in the world. Isn’t it interesting then that the Equinox is actually about the sun?
Several interesting developments of history are at play here.
First there is the fascinating Etymology of “Ostara.”
"Eostre," “Eastre” (from whence we get the modern “Easter”), and "Ostara" are all cognates, all stemming from the Proto-Germanic deity known as “Austro," which itself derives from the Proto-Indo-European "h₂ews-reh₂” or "auš(t)ra,” meaning “morning” or “dawn.” We actually get the word “East” from the same roots. Essentially, “East” just means “towards the dawn.” And these Spring Equinox goddesses were all celebrated in their various regions on the Spring Equinox to mark the time when the sun is coming back to the Earth as the world awakens to Spring's growth and new life. (It’s not *really* even that different from the modern Easter, a day when we celebrate the rebirth of the Son who is also the Light, and the fact of Him coming back to the Earth.) These Spring goddesses though were also all explicitly known as the goddesses of Dawn and as such, the bringers of the Light (of the sun.)
And THAT is certainly a familiar phrase now isn’t it? The Light Bringer- the Morning Star- is now known most commonly as Lucifer. (A word which literally means “bringer of light.”) The Morning Star/ Bringer of Light is ALSO famously Venus. Literally, that bright star on the Eastern horizon at dawn and dusk that's known as the Morning and Evening Star is not a star at all. It is actually the planet Venus. It’s no coincidence that the 5 pointed star of Venus (a symbol which merely marks the literal path of Venus through the sky) was demonized and turned into the pentagram of devil-worship. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Before we go forwards, I want to go further back. Before Venus was demonized and separated in common knowledge from the celebration of these Dawn Goddesses on the Spring Equinox, before the goddess was even known as Venus, she was called Aphrodite.
It’s fairly common knowledge that the Roman Pantheon and Greek Pantheon were the same deities called by different names. Jupiter is Zeus, Diana is Artemis, Hermes is Mercury, Mars is Ares, and Venus is Aphrodite, to name just a few of the most popular. The Greek Empire bled into the Roman Empire in basically the same region of the world, and it naturally took it’s gods with it. But where did it get it’s gods from? Everyone thinks of Ancient Egypt as having existed so long before and so far from Ancient Greece and Rome, but in reality, there is a lot more overlap. They were all Empires of the Mediterranean, after all, and the span of what we consider “Ancient Egypt” is quite large. 4,000 + years is a really *really* long time. (That’s from now back to the time of Christ TWICE over.) So while the most ancient of Ancient Egyptian culture and stories did exist well before the time of the Greeks and Romans, the Ancient Egyptian culture also existed simultaneously with both Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
Cleopatra famously married Marc Antony, and in fact, though she was the Queen of Egypt, she was of the Ptolemaic Line (that is, the Macedonian Greeks who ruled Egypt after the Empire of Alexander the Great, also a Greek Emperor). Plato studied under the *Egyptian* Priest Solon, as did many others, and passed along the ancient stories he learned, including myths and legends of the gods. In short, it was all rather permeable.
Another good example of overlap is the fact that the Egyptian goddess we now know as “Isis” was actually named the same as the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess Ishtar. That is, they were the same goddess, worshipped in neighboring regions in neighboring times, and when the Greeks came to Egypt to learn what history and myth they could from the Egyptian priests and priestesses, they merely adapted the phonetic spelling of “Ishtar” and wrote it in their language as “Isis.” Nowadays we consider Isis to be Egyptian and Ishtar to be Babylonian/Assyrian and for them to be similar but not the same, but that’s not actually all that accurate.
Remember that 4,000 + year span from the beginning to the end of what we consider “Ancient Egypt”? It literally connects the Mesopotamian era of ancient history to the Greco-Roman era. And thus, it is not actually all that surprising that Ishtar would be not just similar but the same as Isis, who is really not just similar to but IS the same as Aphrodite, who is Venus, who is Ostara, Oestre, Eastre, the bringer of the Dawn.
In ancient Mesopotamia we find the oldest writings to and about this goddess (or indeed to or about ANY goddess) in the world. Mesopotamia consisted of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, which knew the goddess of love, war, fertility, and the sky as Ishtar. They also explicitly documented the movement of the planet Venus and connected this “Morning and Evening Star" with Ishtar. That’s right. The oldest known culture on earth explicitly connected their goddess of love, war, fertility, sex, death, and the sky/heaven as the planet Venus. In neighboring Sumer, the goddess of love, war, fertility, sex, death, the sky/heaven, and daughter of the Sun was called Inanna, and it is widely recognized that Ishtar and Inanna are the same deity. It is Inanna who is worshiped and exalted by name as the Queen of Heaven and goddess of love and fertility in the oldest written goddess texts on Earth. Isis, too, was associated with love, war, sex, death, fertility, the underworld, rebirth, and the sky. Her attributes and identity shifted quite a bit over those 4,000 years, but she was known in various texts as both the “Queen of Heaven” and the “Daughter of the Sun,” and is depicted in some art as wearing a headdress of the sun. Her son, Horus, was also associated with the Sky and the rising Sun, and is related in the Greek Pantheon to Apollo. So not explicitly the Light-bringer…but, close. She did birth the rising Sun God through an underworld journey of death, sex, and resurrection. Sounds pretty Easter-y to me.
So, why do we celebrate all this potent FEMININE energy, the oldest known supreme Goddess, Queen of Heaven, and all the iterations of divine feminine goddess that have come after her, in a line straight from Inanna herself to Venus and Easter... on a day that marks a significant placement of the sun?? Isn’t it the *moon* that is associated with the feminine? The sun is a God, right? Ra, Apollo, Horus, etc. "The masculine sun is what gives us life."
But originally in many places on earth it seems that the the deity of the sun was originally a goddess not a god.
In the earliest depths of Ancient Egypt, the deities associated with the Sun are all goddesses: Wadjet, Sekhmet, Hathor, Nut, Bast, Bat, and Menhit. The Eye of Horus is actually a symbol associated with the much earlier solar goddess Wadjet, and was first known as her All Seeing Eye. Over time the stories evolved and Hathor (cow-mother goddess of heaven who was always depicted with the sun headdress) was said to have given birth to the sun god. (Sound familiar?) Even later, as Isis’s fame surpassed all other Goddesses in the Egyptian Pantheon, Isis took on the role that was previously Hathor’s (and her headdress) and became the one who "birthed the sun.” In Norse mythology, the chariot of the sun driven across the sky each day is piloted by Sol, the goddess. Sol was also called Sunna, especially in Old High Germanic. The Lithuanians, Latvians, Finns, and Hungarians also all have sun goddesses even still. So too do the Japanese in their sun-goddess Amaterasu. The ancient Hittites worshipped the sun goddess Arinna, who was also the all-powerful goddess on high, head of all the gods and “Queen of all lands.”
In ancient Armenia, the people referred to themselves as “Children of the Sun” and worshipped the sun goddess Arev (or Ara) at an intriguing archeoastronomical site called Carrahunge, which is similar in purpose to Stonehenge. The myth of Arev and Krag, which tells the story of both the love and creation of the sun goddess and her consort Krag (the fire god), is passed down from oral traditions of unknowable age. Incidentally, I discovered this story in my own book of recently translated myths and legends of Armenia while researching my own heritage, and I have rewritten and adapted the story myself. It is published in the Winter 2020 Volume of the Starlight Emporium Magazine.
Ultimately, it is almost impossible to say for sure why the sun became known as a god instead of a goddess. Many speculate that it came about with the shift from matriarchal societies to patriarchal, but given that those shifts mostly happened pre-historical records, it’s difficult to know for certain.
But the clues are definitely there. The All Seeing Eye of Wadjet became the symbol of Horus. The Queen of Heaven and Sun Goddess Hathor went from *being* the sun goddess to birthing the sun god. And the great Inanna, Queen of all Heaven, went from exalted in ancient Sumerian love poems to become the devil incarnate, Lucifer, the Morningstar, Venus, demonized pentacle and all. Even Easter has become a celebration of the Son of God. Instead of being the shining light that gives life to the world, the goddesses have become goddesses of Dawn, ushering in the REAL divine power of the sun.
Mostly the goddess, the divine feminine, has become associated with the moon. Aside from the natural biological association, the moon is hidden, shadowed, subtle, and mysterious, and in a world where the feminine is literally demonized and the masculine celebrated, of course these celestial bodies switch gender. But the traces remain. Aside from the startling and obvious connection between celebrating the resurrection (and return to life/the earth) of Jesus, the light, and celebrating the fertility of the feminine and return of the sun either as goddesses or by goddesses, there are many compelling similarities between Jesus and Dionysus for example. These are most spelled out in the gospel of John, but it’s perfectly clear to anyone that both were gods of wine, both performed miracles of wine and also resurrection, and both were born of Virgins and fathered by God the…father.
So if Jesus is in any sense the new Dionysus, and Dionysus is also Pan who is the devil, who is Lucifer, the light bringer, the morning star, the subtle slippery serpent in the lush garden.....then isn’t it kind of true that by celebrating the resurrection (read, rebirth) of Jesus, the son and light of the world on Easter, which we do with eggs and feasts and vigils ...the tradition of celebrating the feminine is certainly not gone from the world even in the mainstream. It is merely shadowed, hidden, filtered through a new lens to reflect the light of the sun and the Dawn Bringers that brought it to us, rather than celebrating it quite so outright.
Somehow, this gives me hope.
Which feels perfectly appropriate for a bright sunny Spring Equinox day. This week we celebrate new beginnings and the divine feminine, and I am personally embarking on a new creative chapter that does both.
Last year on the spring equinox I started a tradition I fully intend on continuing- the release of my quarterly magazine of art and stories and inspirational myths all celebrating feminine energies and released on the solstices and equinoxes (see what I did there?). This year going in I knew that vision would have to shift, at least for a year, because RIGHT after the summer solstice, my first baby will be born. And growing and prepping for baby is taking up a LOT of my time. So to honor this deeply feminine time in my life of literal life creation, I knew I’d have to ease back on the *other* creative output I had originally planned. But it remains important to me to honor these seasonal cycles, and to take time to celebrate the feminine energies of nature and the sun. So I still planned to release *something* for the Spring Equinox, even if it was very small, SOME sample of art and story that celebrated spring was always on the docket. And it’s coming very soon. But it shifted on me at the very last minute, and so it’s not quite ready to release. Hopefully it will be later this week. And it will involve this new fresh canvas.
A fresh new canvas- literally- of story and painting and totally divine Venusian downloads.
And (perhaps because this work is so feminine) it’s challenging me to also utilize a great deal of trust- in my inspiration and in myself and in the world. I haven’t worked out exactly HOW it all fits together yet. But I’m starting anyways, trusting that that will become clearer as I go, and trusting that that IS the greatest part of the magic. 💫