The Goddess and Her Heros PDF
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T G he oddess H H and er eros Heide Göttner-Abendroth O' THE GODDESS AND HER HEROS THE GODDESS AND HER HEROS BY HEIDE GOTTNEIDABENDROTH TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY LILIAN FRIEDBERG WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF HEIDE GOTTNER-ABENDROTH ö W k > Anthony Publishing Company Stow, Massachusetts Anthony Publishing Company 206 Gleasondale Road Stow, Massachusetts 01775 The original edition appeared in 1980 under the title Die Göttin und ihr Heros, by Verlag Frauenoffensive, Munich, Germany. The edition translated here is the 10th Edition, Expanded and Revised. © 1995 the English translation by Anthony Publishing Company, Stow, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 01775. All Rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. © 1980 by Verlag Frauenoffensive, Munich © 10th Edition Expanded and Revised by Verlag Frauenoffensive, Munich, 1993. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Card Number 95-75436 ISBN-0-9603832-7-1 Cover and text design by Leslie Carlson To my daughter Heide CONTENTS Preface to the English Edition ix Foreword xiii Introduction xxi Part I. The Goddess and Her Heros The Matriarchal Religions and their Transformations 1 1. Greece (Artemis and Acteon, Aphrodite and Adonis, Athena and Erechtheus) 17 2. Crete (Demeter and lakchos, Rhea and Zeus, Hera and Zeus, Hera and Heracles) 27 3. Egypt (Nout-Neit and Ra, Hathor and Horus, Isis and Osiris) 43 4. Sumeria/Babylon (Inanna-Ishtar and Dumuzi-Tammuz) 59 5. Asia Minor and Palestine (Kubaba and Teshub, Cybele and Attis, Atargatis and Hadad, Anat and Baal) 67 6. Persia and India (Anahita and Mitra, Prithivi and Dyaus Pitar, Sarasvati and Brahma, Shakti and Shiva, Lakshmi and Vishnu) 81 7. Northwestern and Central Europe 95 7.1 The Celts (Dana and Dagda, Modron-Morrigain and Bran, Erin and Lug) 96 7.2 The Germans (Jörd and Tyr-Heimdall, Freyja and Freyr, Frigga and Od-Baldur) 105 Transformations of the Matriarchal Religions 117 Part II. The Princess and Her Brothers Matriarchal Mythology in the Fairy Tales of Magic 133 1. The Abundance-Giving Woman in the Other World 137 2. The Gift-Giving Woman in a Deathlike State 145 3. Fairy Tales of the Redeemer 157 Transformations of the Fairy Tales 169 Part III. The Mistress and Her Hero Matriarchal Mythology in the Epic Poetry of the Middle Ages 177 1. The Arthurian Epic (the Romance of Ywain, the Romance of Erec, Romances of the Grail and Parsifal, the Lancelot Cycle) 183 2. The Tristan Romances 211 3. The Nibelungenlied and Siegfried Legends 219 Transformations of Matriarchal Mythology 227 Endnotes 241 Alphabetical Register of Mythological Names with Explanations 247 PREFACETO THE ENGLISH EDITION By a series of coincidences a friend happened to give me The Goddess and Her Heros as the "best book on that subject,” when I told her I had just read a related book. Years before I had heard several conversations by friends who had read Robert Graves The White Goddess, but had not myself read it. Nor was it the right time, apparently, for me to be inter ested. As so often has happened in my life, the right time comes to dis cover a particular author, or work. And so the right time came for me to read this landmark book—when I was already a publisher of books. In a lifetime of reading, only a few books stand out as "monumental, " meaning they changed my life. Here was one of those books. I have al ways been interested in "why we think the way we do." This question often came to me as a young girl growing up in the south. I wondered why our family was not prejudiced in the same way that families around me were, particularly in regard to the black race. I never heard disparaging comments about blacks in my home. Years later I happened to find out the reason, that a part of my family were native American. This, and a remark made by Winston Churchill in his History of the English Speaking Peoples, that the American Civil War was but a continuation of the English Puritan-Cavalier conflict (two basic points of view he said would never be reconciled), spurred my curiosity to look more closely into the views held by various members of my family, and then my particular Virgin ian southern culture. I went on to look into the history of New En gland, so that I might better understand the people with whom I came to live, near Boston. Indeed, this interest has proved to me over and over that ideas we think are uniquely ours are only borrowed from others, often without question. Many of these ideas have their roots in religious, politi cal, and cultural views of some other time, often quite remote. The ideals of U.S. southern religious fundamentalism, for instance, have scarcely changed at all from the movement started (or perhaps revived) by Tho mas Münzer in Germany in the early 1600s, from which they were de rived. In this marvelous research by Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth, I was to learn even more about the customs, thoughts, and cultural practices that X The Goddess and Her Heros had influenced my attitudes, and therefore my life. Best of all, this research freed me from the garbage of false ideas that surrounded my being a woman, and how I felt about myself. I was able for the first time, to put to rest events and wrongs that occurred in my youth that made me doubt and not value myself. Personal healing comes when we consciously unite with hidden and repressed parts of ourselves; our culture, likewise, can be healed by an honestly researched account of history. Dr. Heide Göttner- Abendroth's book is full of healing insights, with the greatest benefit being that we can heal ourselves as women and men. This book brings forth all that repressed and forgotten material that is needed to heal our social relationships. Hardly enough can be said about the imbalance that occurs when the masculine element becomes totally dominant: in today's U.S. soci ety it is said that 1 in 5 women are raped in the marriage bed. Similar statistics occur in Europe. In third world countries violence against women is even greater. A similar tragedy occurs when women are "to tally feminine." Masculinity unmoderated by the feminine seems to end in violence, while femininity unmoderated by the masculine seems to collapse inward upon itself. Matriarchal societies, as Dr. Göttner- Abendroth shows us, were societies in balance, where the masculine was moderated by the feminine (the principle of love and social rela tionship), and the feminine by the masculine. Dr. Göttner-Abendroth further shows, in describing the way these societies were patriarchalized, how the newly idealized patriarchal male became aloof from the love principle, regarding love as weakness, and the woman he formerly loved, as beneath him. From that time on she became only "property" for his sexual and other use, with its being dangerous and damaging to his macho self-image for him to become too close to her. She, degraded in the eyes of existing authorities (the newly dominant males and male- dominated religious institutions) now began to disbelieve in herself. As Dr. Göttner-Abendroth shows us, these ideas were not the "natu ral order," but necessary to the politics of empire-building. They were forced upon peoples everywhere by the warring kings and their patri archal legitimizing religions. The most debilitating effects of not understanding this history, we soon realize, occur in the area of "knowing oneself." For until we know ourselves, we continue to react blindly to the old patterns that still dominate us. Most disastrously affected are our personal relationships. A part of knowing oneself involves knowing the history of our thoughts. The history contained here makes this an important book. It became clear to me right away that it was inconceivable that Preface to the English Edition XI this book had not yet been translated into English, especially by one of the big university presses. In conversations with publishers in this and other countries, I soon learned, to my astonishment, that as a general rule, U.S. publishers sell many books to the world, but buy few. For example, in 1994, of the U.S. big commercial publishers, only four titles were bought to be translated into English, and these were mostly novels. Interestingly, the big U.S. university presses such as those at Princeton and Harvard University also buy very few. This one way street of information, especially between the U.S. and the rest of the world, gives Americans the false impression that the U.S. is the leader in all fields of knowledge. Quite the opposite seemed to be true in this case. It seemed to me that without this book, Americans would remain isolated from an important source of knowledge. I therefore decided to try to acquire it. Fortunately, with the author's help, this became possible, and I am here honored indeed, to make it available in English. Carol K. Anthony
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