Rasa Von Werder: WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN 3

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

www.WomanThouArtGod which will house many thousands of her photos, including erotic. This website will educate regarding sex & male-female relationships. It is a far cry from the celibacy Rasa practiced for most of her life - she will now espouse the goodness of sex. There will be shrines to the Lingam (penis), Yoni (vagina) & a shrine to Rasa as Guru. There will be teachings on Tantra, the way to God by worship of the female body.

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CRETE – "DOMINATED BY THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE"

Many classical authors wrote that the Lycians and the Carians had strong affinities with the island of Crete. Some claimed that Lycia had once been a colony of that thriving island culture. Upon Crete, Goddess figures have been found in various Neolithic sites, though none as old as those on the mainland. On the Messara plain of Crete, the buildings known as tholoi, extremely similar to those of the Halaf site of Arpachiyah, have also been discovered. From Neolithic periods until the Dorian invasion, Crete was the society that is most repeatedly thought to have been matrilineal and possibly matriarchal.

The former director of the British School of Archaeology in Greece, Sinclair Hood, wrote in The Minoans, Crete in the Bronze Age:

It seems likely enough that customs of the kind described as matriarchy (mother rule) persisted in Crete. These arise in primitive societies where people no not comprehend when a baby is born who its father can be. The children are therefore named after the mothers and all inheritance is through the female line. Primeval traditions of this kind survived in western Anatolia into classical times. Thus among the Carians on the west coast of Anatolia succession was still through the mother in the fourth century BC and in Lycia, to the south-east of Caria, children were named after their mothers.

Charles Seltman wrote in 1952 of this highly developed culture of Crete, whose beginnings preceded biblical times by many centuries. He stated that, upon Crete, matriarchy had been the way of life. He discussed the sexual freedom of women, matrilineal descent and the role of the "king," pointing out the high status of women in and around the land in which the Goddess appears to have been the very core of existence.

"Among the Mediterraneans," wrote Seltman, "as a general rule society was built around the woman, even on the highest levels where descent was in the female line. A man became King or Chieftain only by a formal marriage and his daughter, not his son, succeeded so that the next chieftain was the youth who married his daughter…Until the northerners arrived, religion and custom were dominated by the female principle."

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

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In The Aegean Civilization. Gustave Glotz, writing in 1925, examined the role of women on Crete and asserted that women initially controlled the form and rites of the religion. He explains that.

The priestesses long presided over religious practices. Woman was the natural intermediary with divinities, the greatest of whom was women deified. Hosts of objects represent the priestesses at their duties…the participation of men in the cult was, like the association of a god with a goddess, a late development. Their part in religious ceremonies was always a subordinate one, even when the king became the high priest of the bull. As if to extenuate their encroachment and to baffle the evil spirits to whose power this act had exposed them, they assumed for divine services the priestly costume of women…while private worship was performed in front of small idols, in public worship the part of the Goddess was played by a woman. It is the high priestess who takes her place on the seat of the Goddess, sits at the foot of the sacred tree or stands on the mountain peak to receive worship and offerings from her acolytes and from the faithful.

Stylianos Alexiou, Director of the Archaeological Museum in Iraklion, writes in the chapter on the religion of Crete in Minoan Civilization, "The alabaster throne at Knossos was intended, according to Helga Reusch, for the Priestess-queen, who, flanked by the griffins painted on the wall, personified the goddess. In the Royal Villa the throne which is set apart like a kind of sacred altar, shows that an actual person sat there to receive worship. According to Matz, when the queen descended the palace stairs to the courts within the shrines, she represented an authentic epiphany of the deity to the host of ecstatic worshippers."

In 1958 Jacquetta Hawkes presented some perceptive observations on the status of women on Crete, commenting that, although one may consider the possibility that the Goddess may have been a masculine dream, "Cretan men and women were everywhere accustomed to seeing a splendid goddess queening it over a small and suppliant male god, and this concept must surely have expressed some attitude present in the human society that accepted it." She continued by pointing out that the self-confidence of women and their secure place in society was perhaps made evident by another characteristic. "this is the fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression and was made obvious in the provocative dress of both sexes and their easy mingling – a spirit best understood through its opposite: the total veiling and seclusion of Moslem women under a faith which even denied them a soul."

In viewing the artefacts and murals at Knossos, the Archaeological Museum at Iraklion and other museums of Crete there is little doubt that the female divinity was for several millennia the principal sacred being on Crete, with women acting as Her clergy. It is therefore interesting to follow the manifestations of the Cretan culture as they later appeared in early Greece, about on thousand years before the classical Golden Age (about 500-200 BC), with which we are more familiar.

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

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GREECE – "THE ATTACK UPON THE MATRILINEAL CLANS"

The connection are made by the settlements of Crete and/or the mainland of Greece that are attributed to people known as the Mycenaeans, so named by archaeologists for one of the sites on the mainland – Mycenae. Clues to the origins of the people who inhabited these sites have presented scholars with some intriguing possibilities. Most believe that the Myycenaeans were a group of Indo-Europeans, perhaps the same people as the Acheans, or possibly those from an earlier migration of tribes from the north. Other scholars assert that they were already residents of Crete and that they overthrew the previous government shortly before 1400 BC. Some relate them to the group known as the Sea Peoples, while still others suggest that they were the Philistines or that the Philistines were a branch of the Mycenaeans. There has been the suggestion that the Mycenaens were related to the Hyksos, the "shepherd kings" who used horse-drawn war chariots and had previously held Egypt under their rule for several centuries. The Hyksos were driven out of Egypt at much the same time as the Mycenaens first appeared.

Whatever their initial origins, the reason that the Mycenaeans are important to us here is that their culture, as we best know it, was partially Cretan and partially Greek. Most scholars believe that they carried the Cretan culture from Crete to Greece. The Linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans, which are inventory lists, found at the palace of Knossos and all dated to the same year, about 1400BC, used a language that scholars believe differed from those previously used on Crete. After many years of debate, most authorities accept that the language used these tablets (written with many of the symbols and signs that had been used for an earlier language not yet deciphered, though Gordon has offered a body of evidence suggesting that it was closely related to the Canaanite language used in Ugarit) is an early form of Greek. If the Mycenaeans or their leaders were originally Indo-European, as the tablets suggest, once they settled in Crete they soon adopted much of the subject matter and the style of the crafts techniques, the style of dress, the manner of writing, and the religion of the previous inhabitants of the island.

Cottrell tells us that, "Mycenaean art continued to reflect the "Minoan" culture of the Mediterranean peoples…whose system of writing they had adopted." R.W. Hutchinson of the University of Cambridge writes that, "By the middle of the second millennium, probably, Greeks were already settling in Crete, but only in comparatively small numbers, and these Mycenaean Greeks had already adopted many Creten cults and religious customs. Even on the mainland we find survivals from Minoan or least pre-Hellenic religion…

In the Catalog of Prehistoric Collections of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens the curators point out, "In Mycenaean religion, where the adoption of many Cretan features is obvious, we may note above all the appearance of the Cretan nature goddess." In this vast museum is the collection of artifacts discovered in the excavations of Mycenaean settlements on the mainland of Greece, a collection highlighted by the intricate craftsmanship of gold signet rings and seals that depict scenes of the Goddess and Her priestesses – Scenes nearly identical with those produced in "Minoan" Crete.

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

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Discussing the Linear B tablets, in which the names of several deities later known in classical Greece are briefly mentioned, Cottrell explains…there is also at Pylos [on the mainland] and at Knossos [on Crete] a frequent reference to Potia – "Mistress" or "Our lady"; these last inscriptions confirm what archaeologist has long suspected from the evidence on seals discovered on the mainland – that the Mycenaeans also worshipped the Minoan mother goddess."

The Mycenaeans inhabited and ruled Crete at the Palace of Knossos shortly before a major holocaust, possibly caused by an invasion or earthquake. These same people also founded many pre-Greek cities on the mainland – and with them they brought the worship of the Cretan Goddess. The Mycenaean Age is generally placed between about 1450 and 1100 BC. Its beginning date just before the period generally assigned to Moses. It thrived for centuries before the Greece of Homer and it is likely that it was of events during or just after this period that Homer wrote. The quest for Helen may well have been a quest for the legal rights to the throne of Sparta. Although classical Greece is so often presented as the very foundation of our western culture and civilization, it is interesting to realize that it actually came into being twenty-five centuries after the invention of writing and was itself formulated and influence by the Near Eastern culture that had preceded it by thousands of years.

Greece was invaded by the northern peoples several times. Robert Graves, in his introduction to The Greek Myths, wrote in 1955, "Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century BC seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition…when the Dorians arrived, towards the close of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the rule." With these northern people came the worship of the Indo-European Dyar Pitar, literally God Father, eventually known in Greece as Zeus and later in Rome as Jupiter. This transitional period of the change from the worship of the Goddess to the male deity, the change most intensively brought about by the Dorian invasions, was the subject of E. Butterworth's Some Traces of the Pre-Olympian World, written in 1966.

Butterworth managed to accomplish with Greece what Murray had done with Egypt. By carefully tracing the lineage for the royal houses, he ultimately showed that many of the greatest pre-Greek cities which were essentially small nations, were originally matrilineal. He pointed out that Argos, Thebes, Tiryns and Athens, as well as other cities, at one time followed matrilineal customs of descent. He explains that this was the result of the worship of the Goddess and Her Cretan origins, stating that Crete itself was matrilineal and possibly even matriarchal.

His primary interest was in the patrilineal revolution, the time at which the patrilineal clans violently set about superimposing their customs upon those around them:

Matrilineality, though not universal in the Greek and Aegean world, was widely spread…the effect of the system of succession to the kingship and to the inheritance of property on the life and times was immense. The majority of the clans were matrilineal by custom, and the greatest revolution in the history of early Greece was that by which the custom was changed from matrilineal to patrilineal succession and the loyalty of the clan destroyed.

From 3000 BC onward, priestesses had been portrayed in sculptures and appearing in murals and other artifacts of Crete, strongly suggesting that it was women who controlled the worship. Crete was later ruled by the Mycenaens, who then adopted their religion and many aspects of their culture. Since the religious artifacts of the Myceneeans depict the clergy of the Goddess as female, it is quite probable that the women in the Mycenaean communities of Greece also held this privilege. Butterworth asserted that it was the women, especially the women of the royal houses, who were the protectors of the religion. He further explains that.

The attack upon the matrilineal clans destroyed the power of the clan world itself and with it, its religion…the history of the times is penetrated through and through with the clash of patrilineal and matrilineal as the old religious dynasties were broken, swept away and re-established…The matrilineal world was brought to an end by a number of murderous assaults upon the heart of that world, the Potia Mater (The Great Goddess) herself.

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

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I cannot help but recall the Greek legend of the Goddess known as Hera, whose worship appears to have survived from Mycenaean times, and Her thwarted rebellion against Her newly assigned husband Zeus, surely and allegorical reminder of those who struggled for the primacy of the Goddess – and lost. Yet, according to Hawkes, many of the attitudes about the lowly position of the women of classical Greece were exaggerated by "the bias of nineteenth century scholarship." She suggests that, even in the classical period of Greece, women retained some of their Cretan predecessors' freedom:

Just as in Crete, women shared the power of the Goddess both psychologically and socially; priestesses were of high standing and priestly associations of women were formed round temples and holy places. There was an influential one for example associated with the famous temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus. At this city and indeed in Ionia generally, women and girls enjoyed much freedom. While women certainly won influence and responsibility by serving at the temples and great state festivals of the goddesses, there was also the liberation of the ancient cults. Respectable matrons and girls in large companies would spend whole nights on the bare hills in dances which stimulated ecstasy, and intoxication, perhaps partly alcoholic but mainly mystical. Husbands disapproved, but, it is said, did not like to interfere in religious matters.

In the classical age of Sparta, where the veneration of the Goddess as Artemis continued to thrive, women were extremely free and independent. According to both Euripedes and Plutarch, young Spartan women were not to be found at home but in the gymnasia where they tossed off their restricting clothing and wrestled naked with their male contemporaries. Women of Sparta appear to have had total freedom, and though monogamy was said to be the official marriage rule, it was mentioned in several classical accounts that it was not taken very seriously. Plutarch reported that in Sparta the infidelity of women was even somewhat glorified, while Nicholas of Damascus, perhaps as the result of some personal experience, tells us that a Spartan woman were entitled to have herself made pregnant by the handsomest man she could find, whether native or foreigner.

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

Rasa Von Werder

Saturday, 5 October 2013

WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN 3

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