HERA
HERA (HEE-ruh; Roman name Juno) was the goddess of
marriage. Hera was the wife of Zeus and Queen of the Olympians. Hera
hated the great hero Heracles since he was the son of her husband Zeus
and a mortal woman. When he was still an infant, she sent
snakes to attack him in his crib. Later she stirred up the Amazons
against him when he was on one of his quests. On the other hand, Hera
aided the hero Jason, who would never have retrieved the Golden Fleece
without her sponsorship. In Greek mythology, Hera was the reigning
female goddess of Olympus because she was Zeus's wife. But her worship
is actually far older than that of her husband. It goes back to a time
when the creative force we call "God" was conceived of as a woman. The
Goddess took many forms, among them that of a bird. Hera was worshipped
throughout Greece, and the oldest and most important temples were
consecrated to her. Her subjugation to Zeus and depiction as a jealous
shrew are mythological reflections of one of the most profound changes
ever in human spirituality. Tens of thousands of years ago, as the
evidence of cave art and artifacts makes clear, humanity was focused on
the female body, either pregnant or fit to bear children. Childbirth was
the closest humans came to the great power that caused the earth to
bring forth new life in the spring. To the extent that these distant
ancestors of ours were evolved enough to think of worshipping this
power, we may safely conclude that they thought of it as female.
Thousands of years later (and some five to nine thousand years before
our own time), the European descendants of these people lived in large
villages, with specialized crafts and religious institutions. It is
clear from the artifacts they left behind that they worshipped a power
(or a group of powers) that came in many forms--a bird, a snake, perhaps
the earth itself. And this great power was female. For the human female
has the ability to procreate--to bring forth new life. It is said that
it was only when humanity discovered man's role in procreation that male
gods began to be worshipped. There is no reason to doubt, though, that
male gods were worshipped before the mystery of birth was fully known.
In all probability the greatest powers were thought of as female but
there were male deities as well. And it is clear that even after
procreation was properly understood, the more peaceful
Europeans--perhaps down to the "Minoans" of Crete--continued to worship
the Great Mother. And there were many peaceful Europeans. Many of the
largest villages of that distant era were unfortified. The culture known
as "Old European" did not fear aggression from its neighbors. But then
things changed and a great period of violence began. Invaders swept into
Europe from the vast central plains of Asia. They brought the
Indo-European language family that today includes French, Italian,
Spanish and English. They also brought a sky god, the supreme male deity
that in Greek mythology became known as Zeus. Little is known of these
early Indo-Europeans, but the peaceful settlements of Old Europe were no
match for them. In some places their new culture became supreme, in
others there was merger. Hardier mountain folk resisted, though many
were displaced from their strongholds, moved on and displaced others in
a domino effect. The Dorian invasion of Mycenaean Greece can be seen as
a result of this chain reaction. The old order seems to have held out
longest on Crete where, protected by the Aegean Sea from invasion by
land, the high Minoan civilization survived until almost three thousand
years ago. Abruptly, then, from the perspective of human existence, the
gender of the greatest power changed from female to male. And many of
the stories that form the basis of Greek mythology were first told in
their present form not long after the shift. Zeus's many adulterous
affairs may derive from ceremonies in which the new sky god "married"
various local embodiments of the Great Goddess. That there was some
insecurity on the part of the supplanter god and his worshippers is seen
in the mythological birth of Athena from Zeus's head--as if to say that
the sky god could do anything any Great Goddess could do. This Goddess
continued to be worshipped in some form down into historical times. Her
worship is sometimes dismissed as a "fertility cult", largely because
religious practices degenerated under new influences. But we may look
for traces in the myths of the old order, in which Athena, whose name is
pre-Greek, was the Goddess herself. Under the influence of the
Indo-Europeans, this bird goddess became the chief deity of war. Her
earlier guise may be glimpsed in Athena's symbol, the owl, which derives
from the preceding thousands of years of sacred bird imagery. |