Other Goddess Archetypes

The reading for today gives you a view of what some of the other goddess archetypes look like in the Greek mythology. While these "types" may not be present in all religions in the exact form they are in the Greek, they are usually represented somewhere in the greater mythology.

Before we moved into discussing the gods exclusively I thought it would be important to review the complex relationship between Zeus and Hera. These two are destined to run into conflict with each other and Hera is also destined to be the perpetual loser. Even though Zeus is the iron fisted ruler of Olympus, like other Olympians he is susceptible to the power of other powers such as Eros who frequently compels him to commit adultery on his wife Hera. It should be understood that the concept of love as we know it today was an invention which started in the middle ages and slowly evolved into the 20th century to become an emotional/spiritual bond between a man and a woman. The Greeks had no such concept of love; instead they had the sexual yearning and compulsion of Eros to push them forward. Zeus is often a victim of Eros and creates many illegitimate, yet powerful offspring, some of which become powerful heroes like Hercules. Other of his offspring suffer from Hera's interference and come to no good end. One such woman Leda is the subject of another Yeats poem entitled:

"Leda and the Swan"
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20]
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


As you may know it was this coming together that created the beautiful Helen of Troy.
This brings us to Hera. As the goddess of marriage, and the sanctity thereof, she was unfortunate to be married to Zeus. What may appear as meddling on her part amounts to an obligation to fulfill her role in the Olympian pantheon. In order to enforce the bonds of matrimony, she must attempt to punish the transgressions of Zeus or, as she frequently does, prevent his offspring from being born. This present a very human family on Olympus, beset by all the moral failings of humanity.
Another goddess and maybe the most interesting is Aphrodite. She fulfills an interesting role in that she initiates a lot of rule breaking in terms of the gods and men. First off, she married to the witty, yet misshapen Hephaestus, the only parthenogenic child of Hera. Hephaestus' handicap is a result of Hera's attempt to create life outside of Zeus' realm of influence. She attempts to circumnavigate his role in creation and comes up with a cripple. As his wife, Aphrodite proves as constant as Zeus does to Hera. Rarely is Aphrodite really punished by her dalliance with gods and mortals, but those mortals always end up in trouble.
For the Greeks sex and power went hand in hand. They saw the world in terms of power relationships with a dominant power and a passive power present. In their world, the gods were always in a superior power position to mortals and so the mortals who dared to aspire to their status are always punished. One other rule the Greeks held was that by nature men dominated women. So when Zeus had affairs with mortal women all the "rules of nature" are are still being upheld: Zeus, the male is dominating the female; and Zeus the God dominates the mortal.
You can see where Aphrodite might throw a monkey wrench into those plans. She was almost always the dominant power in her sexual relationships. In her affairs with Ares she outwits him and manipulates him. To mortal men however she was a deadly attraction. The Greek notion of sex that the male dominates the female cannot hold up in her affairs with mortals. The men cannot usurp the power of the gods and so (unlike Zeus' mortal partners) Aphrodite’s mortal partners all came to a bad end except Anchises whose son Aeneas becomes famous in the Trojan War.
The last and maybe most important of these Goddesses in Athene. She is a very powerful figure for mortal heroes and champions the cause of many such as Odysseus. While she was born was Zeus' head there is no known link, as opposed to what the book says, between that and her power as a tactician. The Greeks did not have any idea that the brain was associated with thought, and like the Egyptians believed it to be a useless mass of goo. She was what I think of as the female Apollo and a splendid example of how contradictory the Greeks could be.