The Value of Myth:
For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. For by means of them we…have been civilized. [T]he basis not only for living with joy but also for dying with a better hope.
Cicero, On the Laws, 2.14.36
The claim is also made that men who have taken part in the mysteries become more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before. And this is the reason, we are told, why the most famous both of the ancient heroes and of the demi-gods were eagerly desirous of taking part in the initiatory rite; and in fact Jason and the Dioskoroi, and Heracles and Orpheus as well, after their initiation attained success in all the campaigns they undertook, because these gods appeared to them.
Diodorus Siculus, Book 5, Ch 49, 6
"Not every man can be a miracle-worker and a seer, but most are susceptible to ecstasy, especially as members of a great crowd, which draws the individual along with it and generates in him the sense of being filled with a higher, divine power. This is the literal meaning of the Greek word "enthusiasm," the state in which "god is in man." The rising tide of religious feeling seeks to surmount the barrier which separates man from god, it strives to enter into the divine, and it finds ultimate satisfaction only in that quenching of the consciousness in enthusiasm which is the goal of all mysticism".
Martin P. Nilsson, "A History of Greek Religion", 2d ed., p. 205.
"The ultimate purpose of myth is not to interpret reality but to create it."
Bruce Berger, "The Telling Distance"
"The totality of life and death was the mystery at the center of all mystery religions."
(W. B. Kristensen, Aaebericht Ex Oriente Lux)
The Mysteries of the antique world appear to have been attempts to "open the immortal eyes of man upwards". That is to say that mankind gained powers of perception, to note a higher degree of reality. To quote Aristotle, "Therefore, even the lover of myth is in a sense a philosopher; for myth is composed of wonders." On a more primitive level, mythology is really aetiology, or perhaps archonology, a fancy way of saying that mythology explains how things came to be. They also examine cosmology and theogony. These are the things we know from the myth themselves. However, do they have even deeper questions?
One of the things that makes a Satanist is asking the big question, "Why?" However, Satanists were not the first ones to do so. The ancients did this as well, and starting constructing a polytheistic system from this. Shape and form were given to the moon, the sun, the stars, constellations, etc. However, many of these Gods and Goddesses did not have a purpose. It's important to clarify this lest we become Max Mueller. Some of them are just hideous creations, resembling a child's nightmare, which is probably what they were. In this sense, they represented a deeper animism in human nature, a carnality we won't embrace, and thus have to externalize and project. Nevertheless, we can distinguish from this approach a sort of cosmological principle coming forth, which tied with itself followers.
Vardis Fisher argues in "Testament of Man" that women were originally the great ones, who were dramatically usurped by men. According to his argument, the theological significance of myth is greatly negated to only representing a sociological struggle between factions, however, there within, we find that myths dramatically represent what a given culture believes. (I'm greatly oversimplifying what is a great book, but it's to illustrate a point.) The problem is what Samuel Noah Kramer talks about in his introduction to "Mythologies of the Ancient World":
"Modern students of mythology disagree radically in their views of the nature, scope, and significance of the ancient myths. There are those who look upon them as trivial superstitious fairy tales of little intellectual and spiritual import - the infantile products of undisciplined imaginations and capricious fantasy. Diametrically opposed to them are scholars who believe that myths of the ancients represent one of the most profound achievements of the human spirit, the inspired creation of gifted and unspoiled mythopoeic minds, uncontaminated by the current scientific approach and analytic mentality, and therefore open and prone to profound cosmic insights which are veiled to modern thinking man with his inhibiting definitions and impassive soulless logic.
There are whole schools of modern mythologists who argue that ancient myth is closely bound to rite and ritual; that myth was, as it were, nothing other than the "rite spoken"; and that myth and ritual were practically two sides of the same cultic coin. On the other hand, there are historians of religion who claim that the ancient myths were primarily etiological in character - fictitious tales evolved for the purpose of explaining the nature of the universe, the destiny of man, and the customs, beliefs, and practices current in their days, as well as the names of holy places and out standing individuals."
Kramer also states:
"There are psychologists who see in the ancient myths depositories of primordial archetype motifs which reveal and illuminate man's collective subconscious. On the other hand, there are linguists and philologists who are convinced that myth is a "disease of language," the product of man's vain, futile, and misguided attempts to express the inexpressible and to verbalize that which is ineffable."
From Jung to Frazier, many people have had ideas about the myths of native cultures. Generally, any foreigner will suffer from ethnocentricity and assume their culture is better, and a fortiori, their myths are as well. The Raven myth of shamans might sound too funky for an invading Englishman, but Robin Hood and King Arthur were really something else. Outside of ethnocentricity, there is another reason though why the myth of Robin Hood sticks with us. Robin Hood relates to a time period we can mentally conceive, it has characters we can almost hear, smell, and especially empathize with. Very few people of European heritage can truly understand the metaphorical language of shamanism, and the tales of the Native Americans.
In "Mythography, the Study of Myths and Ritual" by Willam G. Doty, p. 11, we find a very good definition for mythology which will help us along:
"A mythological corpus consists of (1) a usually complex network of myths that are (2) culturally important (3) imaginal (4) stories, conveying by means of (5) metaphoric and symbolic diction, (6) graphic imagery, and (7) emotional conviction and participation, (8) the primal, foundational accounts (9) of aspects of the real, experienced world and (10) humankind's roles and relative statuses within it. (The) Mythologies may (11) convey the political and moral values of a culture and (12) provide systems of interpreting (13) individual experience within a universal perspective, which may include (14) the intervention of suprahuman entities as well as (15) aspects fo the natural and cultural orders. Myths may be enacted or reflected in (16) rituals, ceremonies, and dramas, and (17) they may provide materials for secondary elaboration, the constituent mythemes having become merely images or reference points for a subsequent story, such as a folktale, historical legend, novella, or prophecy."
Perhaps that's a bit too detailed for a non-specialists guide to mythology. David Leeming, Myth: A Biography, p. 18, has another definition for it:
"Myths are created by the collective imagination as metaphorical projections of the way things are in life. Myths emerge from our experience of reality, from our instinctive need to clothe that experience in mimetic story and concept."
The major point which he is getting at is that myth may or may not actually tell us something about the cultural atmosphere and what the people thought. Many times, myths were invented just to tell a story or entertain people. They had no religious, cultural, or historical implications at all, though the astute historian may start picking out certain elements from the sub-strata which may have a historical tint to them.
One cannot discuss myth without bringing the erudite Joseph Campbell to the forefront. In the words of James Hillman, talking of Campbell, "No one in our century, not Freud, not Thomas Mann, or Levi-Strauss, has so brought the mythical sense of the world back into our everyday consciousness". Per Campbell, here are the definitions for mythology, what they serve to do.They have four functions (Campbell, 1988, p. 31):
To summarize his point, a myth is a story which features a hero, which coordinates this person within the cycle of his/her own life, in the environment he/she is living, and with the society itself, a part of that environment. There are more hero's than just the hero, however. For instance, the Greek whom we develop our word "mentor" from is a man in the Oddysee, (sp?), by that name, whom teaches Oddyseus' son how to survive in a World without his father. He teaches the boy wisdom, and he inevitably instructs him on how to be a man. Thus our current idea of mentorship, someone outside of the father who teaches the son how to have an initiation into manhood, owes its' effects to this story.
One point which Joseph Campbell points out is that the World of a hero has both symbiosis and opposition. In looking at this, you will see something clearly, that there are different places which are governed by different rules and behaviour within the myth itself. Both in war and peace, you'll find the heroes moving about trying to find their place where they fit, and in both places, their actions differ. During an adventure, the hero is the one who is egoistic and active. In the regular life, the hero is the one who is with the community and supports harmony, altruism, and stability. As important as the latter category is, it is the most often denied category for our students of today, the one which matrifocal characters really shine. The temple harlot who tamed Gilgamesh's best friend may be one of the most important characters in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", a woman who transforms a bestial man of the rural areas into the refinement of a man of the city.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamv, "Hinduism and Buddhism" p. 6:
"Myth is the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowever and everywhere”
His model of a hero is Jungian, (who influenced him heavily), (Segal, 1990, p. 42). In a Campbell myth, the hero is on a journey to get his personal identify, and according to Jung, the hero archetype is a representation of the need of the human psyche. Campbell was so influenced by Jung that Jungian therapists now use Campbell's work as part of their therapy. Even modern-day Freudians see that myths can serve as powerful tools.
Accordingly, myths are not only symbolic of the reader's own psyche, but also the role of the hero is Universal, and because of this, the myths help people construct a chart for their own lives. Even the most ardent atheist must admit that there are themes in the Bible, myths if you wish, that tell a helpful story. Campbell tells us of myths that they are important because:
"symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior."
Therefore, understanding myths will put us in touch with "the deep forces that have shaped man's destiny and must continue to determine both our private and our public lives" Jung himself said, "Myths are original revelations of the pre-conscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious happenings" (Jung & Kerenyi, 1951, p. 101). Bill Bradley in "The Vision Thing" has written that, "Myths help explain why things are the they are by placing them in a context of the way they've alwasy been."
Leeming sums up the Jungian importance of myths:
Many people have felt that myths have been fading out of our society. It really isn't true. Everywhere we look in movies, art, television, and books, there are lots of mythical figures. Most people simply can't recognize them. Joseph Campbell greatly inspired George Lucas, and Campbell tells us a bit about how Darth Vader can be seen as a mythic archetype.
As evidence by Celsus, myth focused in large parts on getting people to have a nationalistic feeling. We still have those myths, people like Daniel Boone and Wyatt Earp are mostly legendary, or mythical, but the story is one where the good guy prevails against overwhelming odds. In one of Farrell Till's essays, he points out how people rarely want to believe something bad about their favorite childhood myth who was a real person.
Unfortunately, while myth can be and often is a wonderful thing, it can take a dangerous turn, in that cultivating a good feeling means something else has to be bad, which lends myth to the realm of being taken over by people who only wish to exploit their own ideology. (Read that as "Nazi's") Whether it's Marxism, Communism, Fascism, etc., all of them had many mythical elements attached to them. Most of them, in fact, while praising their secular nature, are actually a hidden theocracy.
Mythology thus represents a powerful unconscious force, which can motivate the collective behaviour of people through the judicial use of symbols and myths. (As elaborated earlier, part of learning how to be a Satanist is learning how to use these symbols to your benefit.) Campbell tells us that a mythology is "an organization of symbolic images and narratives metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment in a given culture at a given time." However, it's a bit more than that. "Myth is the secret opening through which inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation." Or perhaps as Bruno Schulz put it: "So it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament."
One of the most interesting aspects of mythology is the symbols, which I believe are part of our collective unconscious. In almost every place around the World, the same symbols were used by the ancients. In Joseph Campbell's "Bios and Mythos", he states:
"The archetypes of mythology are constant enough for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Roman Catholics, adequately trained in their own symbology, to have regarded the myths and images, sacraments and temples of the New World as diabolical mockeries of the truths of the one True Church. Fray Pedro Simon wrote of his mission in seventeenth-century Colombia:
The demon of that place began giving contrary doctrines, and among other things sought to discredit what the priest had been teaching concerning the Incarnation, declaring that it had not yet come to pass, but that presently the Sun would bring it to pass by taking flesh in the womb of a virgin of the village of Guacheta, causing her to conceive by the rays of the sun while she yet remained a virgin. These tidings were proclaimed throughout the region. And it so happened that the headman of the village named had two virgin daughters, each desirous that the miracle should become accomplished in her. These then began going out from their father's dwelling and garden enclosure every morning at the first peep of dawn. And mounting one of the numerous hills about the village, in the direction of the sunrise, they disposed themselves in such a way that the first rays of the sun were free to shine upon them. This going on for a number of days, it was granted the demon by Divine Permission (Whose judgments are incomprehensible) that things should come to pass as he had planned, and in such fashion that one of the daughters became pregnant, as she declared, by the sun. Nine months and she brought into the world a large and valuable hacuat which in their language is an emerald. The woman took this, and wrapping it in cotton, placed it between her breasts, where she kept it a number of days, at the end of which time it was transformed into a living creature: all by order of the demon. The child was named Goranchacho, and he was reared in the household of the headman, his grandfather, until he was some twenty-four years old whereupon he proceeded, in great state, to the capital of the nation and became known throughout the provinces as “Child of the Sun.”
Fray Pedro's testimony is but one of many. The Mexican symbols and myths of Quetzalcoatl so closely resemble those of Jesus that the Padres in that area supposed that Saint Thomas's mission to India must have reached Tenochtitlán, where, cut off from the pure source of Rome, the Waters of Redemption were muddled by fallen angels. Three centuries later, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), voyaging in China and Japan, India, Africa, and South America, also recognized the uniformity of what he termed the “Elementary Ideas” of mankind, but he took a scientifically maturer view of the implicit problem. Instead of attributing the local variations to the distorting power of a devil, he considered the force of geography and history in the processing of the “Ethnic Ideas” (Völkergedanken), that is to say, in the shaping of the local transformations of the universal forms."
The use of symbolism is rampant in telling a story. One such example would be a cultural myth, a myth that provides a way for people to express themselves in a way that can be interpreted by others. Allusions, metaphors, allegories, etc. all fall under this category when used in illustrating an idea. For instance, in Southern Cajun places, (some parts of Louisiana), good food is allegory to love. If a woman can't cook there, she'll probably have a harder time finding a husband than anywhere else. Food becomes an allegory to love, so that things like a home-cooked meal have a deeper cultural impact within a story taking place in Louisiana, than it would if the same story was told in New York City.
Another example would be a Social Drama, something which Ayn Rand was fond of writing stories about. A social drama is challenging societies thinking by confronting them with a moral rule or dichotomy and seeing how they react. An example might be "Lord of the Flies", where people are literally asked the question if humans are intristically evil, even though there is no form of competition on the island? Another one might be the true story of a plane crashing into the mountains, where the passengers are forced to eat other dead passengers. The moral rule being invoked is "Can we accept cannibalism if the opposite choice is death?" A greater moral dilemma could have been invoked if the story were not true and the passengers couldn't find help. Would they decide to kill each other? Or kill and eat someone who was near death?
One essential theme of a myth is that it may not change, but the interpretation it draws from the people hearing or reading it. The way that myths are transformed is usually not conscious, and the actual power of a myth in sustaining a long-term use is it being able to be transformed by a variety of people into what they think it means. An interesting example would be a totemizing rituals. Em Griffin explains a totemizing ritual as a ritual that involves a careful performance of a sequence of actions, that pays reverence to a sacred object. When we now view the ancients totemizing rituals, we get a variety of ideas about them. Rather than reflecting what the ancients may have actually thought of them, and even they had conflicting ideas about them, we tend to see our own reinterpretation of what they thought of them. Totemizing rituals can also be commonly seen in the man who takes his child to the baseball game, as his father did before him, and possibly his father before him. It's a family ritual to the sacred space, the consecrated diamond.
The loss of rituals and myth is something which actually scares people, and Anton Lavey was certainly one of them. Despite the myth, Lavey was more scared of atheism than Christianity. He felt it was depriving people of a central core of myth, lore, and ritual which were necessary for humanity. The words of Ian MacDonald might have ringed a familiar sound to him.
Ian MacDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day, says that:
"I have this dread that afflicts me . . . it is that, somehow, we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age. We are withdrawing into another age's mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler, clearly defined, and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane. We have created a comfortable, sanitized, pseudo feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armour and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Columbian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales, and the desecration of the rain forests. Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debit? Where are the Sagas and Eddas of the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and Rolands and Arthurs? Why do we turn back to these simplistic heroes of simplistic days, when black was black and white biological washing-powder white? Where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?"
"It is through symbol that man finds his way out of his particular situation and opens himself to the general and universal."
Mircea Eliade
Myths are of great importance in our life to help us relate to problems. They tell us how other people, great people, acted in similiar situations. They show us how their society worked, and they show us that we still face many of the same problems that they once did. Jung and Sheldrake could make a case for this, Jung telling us that our collective unconsciousness of humanity has made these stories for future generations to help them, and Sheldrake telling us that the inherited laws of Morphic Resonance would state that we need these stories as a matter of repetition, they have become a part of us, and we do not want to lose that part of us.
Michael Meade, "Men and the Water of Life" says that:
"The collapse of traditional cultures, the loss of shared myths and rituals that enfold the individual into the group, and the spread of modern industrial societies are producing generations of unbonded children and adults who are not initiated into the purpose and meaning of their own lives."
Jung would tell us further that our myths are like our dreams, after all, they were produced at times which were similar to our dreams. (Jung actually wasn't familiar with the idea of bicameral consciousness, but I think that it complements this discussion). There was no conscious input into them to distort what they meant. They are our aspirations put into a metaphysical language, descending into the underworld to rescue a loved one, being torn apart by enemies only to come back again, born through the father and the mother, and finally destroying the evil tyrants. These are merely external symbols which have been known for many ages. As Heinrich Zimmer put it, "Symbols hold the mind to truth but are not themselves the truth." In Sam Keen's "Your Mythic Journey", we find out that myths need to change throughout time, "The stories we tell ourselves determine who we become, who we are, and what we believe."
Let's look at one movie that recently came out, "The Green Mile". In that movie, the man, John Coffee, was modeled after Jesus Christ. Even had the same initials. Both were a despised minority living in a time when they were least appreciated, both were being tried for a crime they did not commit, both were unable to change the circumstances despite their powers, etc. This presents a particular problem for the non-myth groups, because even if something does not look exactly like what it is borrowing from, it doesn't mean that no borrowing has occured. The truth of the story, whether watching "The Green Mile" or reading the New Testament is not on J.C. in either of them, it's on the struggle that they went through and coming out with a better appreciation because of that struggle. Alan Watts describes myths as things which "signify the inner meaning of life", or as Elie Wiesel writes of Hasidic legends, "some things happen that are not true, some don't happen that are."
James Hillman, "City and Soul":
"Without images, we tend to lose the way. . the soul wants its images, and when it doesn't find them, it makes substitutes... The soul that is uncared for turns into an angry child."
Because of our need to have symbols, Mark Schorer has suggested that "Myths are the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves." Whether it be parables, Zen koans, Native American folk-stories, etc., people visiting a guru want to be told a story. The problem comes about, "Can the student understand the hidden meaning?" Like the Zen koan, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." Or, "To become the Buddha, you must kill the Buddha." What those two sayings mean is that if you have reached a point where you can recognize the Buddha, you don't need the Buddha. If you attempt to keep following his path, you will never become the Buddha yourself. Thus, "To kill the Buddha" doesn't mean attempting a drive-by on your local Zen guru's house, but rather recognizing the point where you can leave your mentor to find your own way.
The most important part of this mythical saga is the hero, briefly touched upon earlier. The hero can be anyone, whether someone with Cosmic powers such as Hercules, or a regular, if not wimpy, character such as in "Lord of the Rings". The hero is an embodiment of our cultural shared values, our collective psyche's, or our standard. The best hero's capture us because we want to be them, they represent something to us. Joseph Campbell writes of this person in "Hero", p. 19-20:
"The Hero is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his (or her) personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms."
The hero is questing for something, the father, an object, their soul, their cultures enemies, etc. The hero must leave behind the place they love to go on this journey. Generally in sequence with this is that someone is after them, someone wants to kill them. Dionysus and Hercules were constantly having to move away and roam around because Hera was after them. Both had to prove their powers to people in order to get people to believe in them, whether it was by making a ship turn into a giant vineyard, making Pentheus go mad, or by performing 12 tasks. The important thing to realize, however, is that these archetypical heroes are not always fictional people. People such as Ghandi, George Washington, Martin Luther King, etc. all were heroes as well. I think that by better understanding the heroes quest, we better understand our own quests, our own aspirations and the trials found within them. By better understanding mythology, we better understand the collective ideas of our communities and our civilization, and we reach a closing gap between this generation and ones of the past. A beautiful example of how mythology can change people was in the recent version of "1001 Arabian Nights", which had Jason Scott Lee and other fine actors in it. In this myth, a female poet and storyteller cures a man she once loved of his madness by telling him stories which reinforce points of loyalty, friendship, and overcoming the odds. This is the perfect matriarchal hero, a woman who fights against certain death and madness to restore the man whom she once loved, and to save his kingdom from his scheming brother.
The two get married, and the man has to fight his brother in war. The man whom had heard the stories remembered them and used the myth's of his people to set up traps and ambush his brother's army. Myths surround and permeate us, and like Jung said of evil, the more we understand and know about it, the greater our ability to control their influence. David Leeming does a great miniature psychoanalysis of American culture by examining the Bible and the myth's within it, and how they relate to women. Some Jewish feminists have objected to this of course, because the Jewish interpretation of the Bible as handed down in the oral and written traditions of the Jews is not overtly patriarchal and mysognistic, while the Christian interpretation handed to us by the Church fathers obviously is. Nevertheless, in the dominating Christian World, women are evil. David shows us by changing the myth, and the interpretations of it, we greatly change the impact of it on our collective (sub)conscious.
"Poets create a poem, and theologians reduce it to dogma." (Vardis Fisher, Testament of Man)
The Goddess in man
Man needs his woman, or as Nietzsche put it, a laboratory man only wants his Adriane. Surprisingly though, the Goddess was cut more and more out of the theology, and the God was placed more and more into it. What happened?
One of the primary things which psychologists see women as a threat to men, at least to the man himself, is called "Womb envy". Men do not possess the ability to have children, while women do. The second most common problem is the power of sex. Many men have discovered through time that women have enormous control over their penis, and hence, over their entire body. The only way to stop this was to make sex as painful for the woman as possible, and to make it as least desireable to the men. The act of circumcision was born from this act, the foreskin being one of the most sexually exciteable parts of the penis. During our Puritan days, the power of the female body was so revolted and well-known that things words on a chicken such as "breast" couldn't be used, it was now "white meat", and things like "thigh" couldn't be either, it was now the "third-joint".
Early in the history of mankind, women were the great providers of inter-cultural affairs. Men were out getting food, water, herding animals, etc., while the women maintained the inner order of the tribe, and the dealings with other tribes. Women thus became the primary power source in the World, inheriting the land, money, wealth, etc. As societies started to become more agrarian based, women's prominence faded from practical, to merely being cumbersome to the men. Men probably regarded them as an inferior species, but were amazed at how much control they had over them, emotionally, sexually, psychologically, but not so physically. In all societies, the change was rather slow. Doubtless, legions of men were still loyal to their mother-image, but with the clever use of myths, this started changing.
In Egypt, the more ancient the time period, the greater power they had, and the same applied to Mesopotamia. Likewise, Europe had a similar history. The reason being the lack of centralization, where the women had the greater role. The best example of this is to examine the rights of Bedouin women versus their sedentary partners in the city. The Bedouin women are regarded as highly important, but not so with the sedentary women, who are seen as almost being mentally incompetent, and worse.
Many images of large-breasted or pregnant women have been found from Paleolithic Europe, yet no one has found images of heroes or warriors from before the Bronze Age. Likewise, many ancient era's feature figures of the Goddess, yet very few figures of Gods. (Outside, perhaps, Shiva and Set, who seem to be some of the most ancient Gods in history). Likewise, the fertility Goddesses were pretty easy to recognize because of the big hips, enlargened vulva, and large breasts.
Agricultural societies tended to associate the life-giving earth with a mother figure, and that idea made its way into religion. Since religion’s original purpose was to try to appease the forces of nature and protect the people, it makes sense that farming people would develop goddesses as their major deities.
In Arabia, the Southern Part of Arabia had been long occupied, and women had lost their rights. Meanwhile, the people to the North, generally bedouins, or oasis-dwelling bedouins, still had many of their rights. Muhammad himself complained when his wife went to live North, she developed a new sense of independance. Over time, the Goddesses lost their position within the pantheons. Isis and Hathor were no longer as important in Egypt as Ra, Horus, and Osiris overshadowed them, and Apollo started to overtake the prominence of female deities, Allat and Al-uzza lost their position to Allah, etc. Myths subconsciously change how we think, or as other mythologists have said, myths are not true, yet always true. By changing the story, the subliminal concept of what women and the Goddesses did changed as well.
Eventually, out of man's hatred for women, ascetic practices started to form. Men started to believe that extreme self-denial would allow them to have the female capacity to have children, a compensation for their womb envy. Oriental myths said the first creator-gods acquired the ability to produce living things by practicing fierce asceticism for ten thousand years. Eventually, men realized they would never be able to actually give birth, but their stories now changed to say that men who practiced asceticism would be granted enlightenment. In their myths, men had miraculous powers developed by asceticism. Perfected eremites were said to fly, to walk on water, to understand all languages, to turn base metals into gold, to heal lameness and blindness, and other miracles that became the common property of all scriptures, including the Christian ones. Asceticism meant a union with the God, and that included the ability to defy nature. Because the Church Fathers, and other early patriarchs realized that not having sex, food, water, etc., were unnatural acts against natural human desires, they believed this in turn gave them the power to do magical acts. By going against nature they could perform acts that were against nature as well.
Becoming a god meant acquiring the ability to perform miracles, as many Christian ascetics were supposed to have done. By definition, miracles flouted the laws of nature. Thus the ascetic became deliberately un-natural, confusing the denial of his own instinctual desires with denial of Mother Nature's observed habits. Ascetic ideals therefore placed body and spirit in conflict with each other. The price to be paid for this wasn't cheap. Rape became a regular occurrence, while previously it was unthinkable. Methods had to be devised to spare the women, thus the origin of the confession box. Previously, Catholic priests would rape any woman confessing her sins, so the confession box gave her a fighting chance. Instead of mature women performing a patronage for their God or Goddess, brothels were becoming synonymous with convents, and the women were long-gone, replaced now by small boys and girls.
Men started to look at women under a different angle. While in the Bedouin societies, a woman was prized based upon her wealth, intelligence, and even age, societies forming a more patriarchal approach wanted their women as young and easily influenced as they could find them. Whorehouses which featured girls under the age of 11 became commonplace, and many men turned to a strange form of homosexuality seen in jails. Since women were not to be given control of the male penis, and sex was still going to happen no matter what, a substitute would be needed. Generally, this became young boys who hadn't developed the masculine features yet. Currently, we see this same sort of problem in the sex-denied Catholic priests, right now undergoing lots of scrutiny for sexual molestation.
Like the Cathars, they realized that sex couldn't be avoided, so special exceptions had to be made. In the Cathars case, it was virgin women, which seems to have been the standard idea. Eventually, priests and nuns became so scared of sex that they would go for years without taking baths, (this is what caused the infamous episode in European history where people wore heavy perfumes to keep from smelling each others odor). Diseases broke out rather regularly, wiping out ten to fifteen percent of the population every 20 years. If not having a bath, (hence, never touching yourself), wasn't enough to keep people from having sex, other favorite ways to roll around in scorching sand, roll around in thorns, beat yourself, cut off sexual organs, and other such psychologically and physiologically healthy practices.
Meanwhile, the unfortunate Jews, who regularly bathed and kept themselves clean, started to attract the attention of their European neighbors. Since the Jews were not the mysognists that their European counterparts were, it no doubt caused problems with their neighbors. The Jews were not coming down with sicknesses and illnesses like the rest of Europe, their death rate was rather low. Rather than link the use of hygiene to it, the ignorant and superstitious Europeans decided the best idea was to kill the Jews, whose health must have been a gift from the Devil.
On the Evolution of the Goddess, Joseph McCabe states:
"Zeus-Jupiter-Dyans-Thor (the old sky-god of the Aryans) was believed to have had not the slightest regard for sex-rules; and there we come to a new and interesting chapter in the evolution of morals. Many of the nature-gods had, as I said, a natural tendency to become ethical. They sent rain or sunshine or fertility; they caused drought, fires, storms, and floods. One had to gratify them by observing the rules. And one of the most important of all, when men learned agriculture, was the goddess (in a few places god) of fertility. The spirit of mother-earth was even more important than that of father-sky.
But, quite naturally, the fertility of the earth became closely connected with a woman's fertility. At first human beings copulated like cattle, not even knowing -- the Australians did not know it -- that the man begot the child. In time love and fertility became one of the mightiest facts of life in the mind of men. The most tremendous force, the most beneficent thing, in the world was the spirit of sex-pleasure. This gave a twist to the primitive moral rules; and, as the spirit of war just as naturally became deified at the same time, another grave perversion of the humanitarian code of conduct, as we understand it, occurred in moral evolution. These and other eccentricities we will now show to be a normal part of the evolution of conscience."
Fredrick Edwords tells us:
"The same myths, the same symbols, can have vastly different meanings at different times and places. Myths and symbols need not be viewed as unchanging. They might better be seen as vehicles for helping people understand and communicate new ideas."
The abandonment of the Goddess made many Europeaners form Mary cults, which grew more popular than Jesus cults. (I use cult in the loosest sense of the word.) The Church Fathers initially cut her out of the picture, having Jesus appear full-born. To the Church fathers dismay, Mary became a part of the trinity, something which Muhammad reported when he interacted with Christians. The Church fathers were confused over what to do with this Goddess in the making, so like Allat and Al-uzza in the "Satanic Verses" of the Qur'an, Mary had to lose her high position by becoming a divine intermediary for mankind.
Since the feminist movements, the Goddess has slowly started to come back. In Kabballah, God has both feminine and masculine qualities, and many people have re-adopted the deitist position that God is neither male nor female. Thus, I propose a quaternity for this religion consisting of 4 archetypes, of which almost any other deity fits. Those archetypes are Dionysus, Apollo, Devi, and Isis. Each of them should be worshipped at the time they traditionally were, with each one having a different method of worship. This is, of course, negotiable, some may wish to perform more "traditional" methods of worship, which is also fine.
For instance, I view Devi as being a Goddess of Intimacy, that's how she should be worshipped and celebrated, as your maternal/paternal side, a rebonding with the people that are close with you. Even if you don't have any relatives, there are friends, animals, even places, which hold significant attachment to you. I also hold no objections to doing what the Hinduists do to worship her as well.
To worship Dionysus is easy, the Greeks left us with many ideas on this joyous occasion. Apollo speaks the word "culture" to me, learning about instruments, learning a new language, growing an appreciation for your heritage and origins, that's how Apollo speaks within me.
Isis is the Goddess of Intelligence to me, she shines at night in a celestial splendor of enchantment, a guiding force in the night sky, the night our representation of ignorance. For her, I recommend doing something which is purely intellectual, perhaps going to the public library and learning a bit about sociological issues, or taking a workshop related to your job. Lavey had a very linear approach to the celebrations, to cultivate hedonism, which is also okay with me, but I would prefer, at least in my mythical archetype, to have each God or Goddess that means something special to me have its' own method of worship, therefore relating a somewhat more personal experience with the Goddess or God.