Chris

Who I'd like to meet:

Aida Wedo

Other names: Haida Wedo, Aida Oedo, Haida Oedo, Aido Wedo, Aido Oedo, Haido Oedo, Aido Oedo

Location: West African, Carribean, South America, Haiti

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Aida Wedo

The snake loa (spirit) in Benin and Haiti, she is the companion of the most popular god, Damballah-Wedo, also a serpent. She rules fire, water, wind and the rainbow. When she appears in a voudoun ritual, she slithers across the ground wearing a jeweled headdress that - like the treasure at the end of the rainbow - is elusive but enriches anyone who can grasp it. She is a New-World form of of the African goddess Oya.

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Aksara

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Amaterasu

Other names: Amaterasu Omi-Kami

Location: Japan

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Amaterasu

Of all the religions currently practiced by significant numbers of people, the only one whose chief divinity is female is Japanese Shinto, based on the worship of the sun goddess Amaterasu ("great shining heaven").

In her simple shrines-notable for their architectural purity and unpretentiousness and for the central mirror that represents the goddess-Amaterasu is honored as the ruler of all deities, as the guardian of Japan's people, and as the symbol of Japanese cultural unity. Her emblem, the rising sun, still flies on Japan's flag. Even the inroads of patriarchal Buddhism have not destroyed the worship of the bejeweled ancestor of all humanity.

There is one central myth of Amaterasu. She quarreled with the storm god Susano-o and brought winter to the world. Two reasons are given for her annoyance with him: one, because of his murder of Amaterasu's sister, the food-giving goddess Uke-Mochi; the other, because of his deliberately provocative acts against Amaterasu herself.

The latter version has it that Amaterasu did not trust her brother Susano-o because of his excesses and his constant shouting. One day he came to heaven to see her, claiming that he meant no harm. She was wary, but he promised that he would undergo a ritual test to prove his goodwill. He said he would give birth, and that if his intentions were peaceful, the children would all be boys.

Amaterasu grabbed Susano-o's sword and broke it with her teeth, spitting out three pieces which, striking the ground, became goddesses. Susano-o asked Amaterasu for some of her jewels: she gave him five; he cracked them open and made them into gods. But then Susano-o grew wild with excitement at his creative feat and tore through the world destroying everything in his path: he even piled feces under Amaterasu's throne. As though that were not enough, he stole into her quarters and threw a flayed horse's corpse through the roof of her weaving room, so startling one of Amaterasu's companions that she pricked herself and died.

This was too much for the sun goddess. She left this mad world and shut herself up in a comfortable cave. Without the sun, the entire world was blanketed with unending blackness. The eight million gods and goddesses, desperate for their queen's light, gathered to call out pleas that she return. But in her cave the goddess stayed.

The shaman Uzume, goddess of merriment, finally took matters into her hands. She turned over a washtub, climbed on top, and began dancing and singing and screaming bawdy remarks. Soon the dance became a striptease. When she had shed all her clothes, Uzume began dancing so wildly and obscenely that the eight million gods and goddesses started to shout with delight.

Inside her cave, Amaterasu heard the noise. As it grew to a commotion, she called to ask what was going on. Someone paused to answer that they had found a better goddess than the sun. Provoked-and curious-Amaterasu opened the door of her cave just a crack.

The gods and goddesses had, with great foresight, installed a mirror directly outside of the cave. Amaterasu, who had never seen her own beauty before, was dazzled. While she stood there dazed, the other divinities grabbed the door and pulled it open. Thus the sun returned to warm the winter-weary earth. Mounted again on her heavenly throne, Amaterasu punished Susano-o by having his fingernails and toenails pulled out and by throwing him out of her heaven.

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Aphrodite

Other names: Venus

Location: Greece

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Aphrodite

One of the most familiar of Greek goddesses, Aphrodite was not originally Greek at all. She was the ancient mother goddess of the eastern Mediterranean who established herself first on the islands off Greece before entering the country itself. There, her journey with the sea traders who brought her across the waters was expressed in a symbolic tale.

In the ancient days, it was said, the old heaven-god Uranus was castrated by his children, the Titans; his penis fell into the ocean and ejaculated a final divine squirt. The sea reddened where it fell, and then the foam gathered itself into a figure: the long-haired Aphrodite riding on a mussel shell. (Whence the epithet Anadyomene," in="" it="">

Once she arrived, the Greeks provided Aphrodite with a husband: Hephaestus, the crippled god of smithcraft. Aphrodite could not be contained in a single relationship, though, and spread her favors liberally among divine and mortal males. She bore children by half a dozen mates, none her husband. In many of these unions, the allegory is glaringly obvious, as when Aphrodite (sexuality) mates with Dionysus (wine) to produce Priapus (permanent erection).

The most famous-or notorious-of Aphrodite's affairs were those with Ares and with the beautiful young Adonis. She carried on scandalously and publicly with the god of war; their union was a fascinating symbol of the relationship of female carnality and male competitiveness. All heaven knew of their assignations, the Greeks said, before someone finally tattled to the husband. Furious at Aphrodite's unfaithfulness (although in her homeland such behavior would have been expected), the cuckolded Hephaestus fashioned a mesh of gold in which he caught the lovers. Ares and Aphrodite were the laughingstock of heaven then, naked and damp, their limbs entangled in each other's and in the golden web that held them.

As for Adonis, it was said that Aphrodite fell in love with his youthful beauty and hid him in a chest that she gave to Persephone for safekeeping. The queen of the underworld, however, peeked inside to see what treasure she was guarding and, smitten, refused to give Adonis back to Aphrodite. Zeus was called in to arbitrate, and he ruled that Adonis could live one-third of each year by himself, one-third with Persephone, and the remaining one-third with Aphrodite. Each year thereafter Adonis was killed while hunting a wild boar, and his spilled blood turned the Lebanese river named for him red.

The energy that Aphrodite represented, however humanly true, was almost incompatible with Greek culture. The Great Goddess of impersonal, indiscriminate lust meshed poorly with the emerging Greek intellectualism. Thus the tale of the goddess's love for the everdying god ceased to be central to her legend and became that of just another casual attraction to a pretty face. The rather smutty little tale is a far cry from those masterpieces of theological understanding, the stories of Ishtar, Inanna, and Cybele, with their symbolic description of the hopeless love of the earth herself for the life she continually produces and inevitably consumes.

In their attempt to assimilate the alien goddess, the Greeks converted Aphrodite into a personification of physical beauty. But she remained so problematical that Plato distinguished her by two titles: Urania, who ruled spiritualized (platonic, if you will) love; and Aphrodite Pandemos, the Aphrodite of the commoners, who retained her original character in debased form. In this form she was called Porne, the "titillator." It was this latter Aphrodite who was worshiped at Corinth, where the Near Eastern practice of sacramental promiscuity deteriorated into a costly prostitution about which the Greeks warned travelers, "The voyage to Corinth is not for everyone." However degraded the practice became in a patriarchal context, the "hospitable women" (Pindar) who engaged in it were highly valued, serving as priestesses in public festivals, and of such rank and importance that at state occasions as many hetaerae as possible were required to attend.

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Arianrhod

Other names:

Location: Wales

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Arianrhod

The goddess of the "silver wheel" was a Welsh sorceress who, surrounded by women attendants, lived on the isolated coastal island of Caer Arianrhod. Beautiful and pale of complexion, Arianrhod was the most powerful of the mythic children of the mother goddess Don.

It was said that she lived a wanton life, mating with mermen on the beach near her castle and casting her magic inside its walls. She tried to pretend virginity, but a trial by the magician Math revealed that she had conceived two children whom she had not carried to term: in leaping over a wizard's staff, Arianrhod magically gave birth to the twins Dylan-son-of-Wave and the fetus of Llew Llaw Gyffes. Dylan slithered away and disappeared, but Arianrhod's brother, the poet Gwydion, recognized the fetus as his own child, born of his unexpressed love for his sister.

Gwydion took the fetus and hid it in a magical chest until it was ready to breathe. Arianrhod, furious at this invasion of her privacy, denied the child a name or the right to bear arms - two prerogatives of a Welsh mother-but Gwydion tricked Arianrhod into granting them. Eventually the goddess overreached herself, creating more magic than she could contain; her island split apart, and she and her maidservants drowned.

Some scholars read the legend as the record of a change from mother right to father rule, claiming that the heavenly Arianrhod was a matriarchal moon goddess whose particular place in heaven was in the constellation called Corona Borealis. The argument has much in its favor, particularly the archetypal relation of Arianrhod to her sister moon goddesses on the Continent, who like Artemis lived in orgiastic maidenhood surrounded entirely by women. Other scholars, unconvinced that the Celts were matriarchal at any time, see Arianrhod simply as an epic heroine.

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Artemis

Other names: Diana

Location: Greece

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Artemis

As we see her in Western art, Artemis is the virginal moon goddess roaming the forest with her band of nymphs, bearing the bow and quiver, avoiding men and killing any male who looks on her. But this familiar form was only one of the identities assumed by this complex Greek goddess, for she was also the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, a semi-human symbol of fecundity, and the warlike Artemis said to have been the special goddess of the Amazons.

It is problematical whether Artemis was originally an all-encompassing goddess later divided into separate identities, or if Artemis became so complex by assuming the attributes of lesser goddesses as her worshipers took control of Greece. But, like Isis or Ishtar, Artemis came to represent the variable energies of the feminine. She was therefore contradictory: she was the virgin who promoted promiscuity; she was the huntress who protected animals; she was a tree, a bear, the moon. Artemis was the image of a woman moving through her life and assuming different roles at different times; she was a veritable encyclopedia of feminine possibility.

In one form she was a nymph and ruler of all nymphs, an elemental force whose domain was the greenwood. There an order exists so unlike human order that it seems to us formless and free, but this freedom is that of complete obedience to instinct, which animals still follow while humans do not. Artemis in this form was the "Lady of the Beasts," the force who assured their individual deaths and the survival of the species. As mistress of the animals, she was the invisible game warden of the Greeks, killing with sharp arrows anyone who hunted pregnant beasts or their young. Again as instinct, she ruled reproduction, both sex and birth. She ruled the childbed; even in late legend, when her dominance was undercut by male gods, Artemis was said to have been the elder twin of the sun (not originally her brother) and midwife at Apollo's birth. It was to Artemis, the force of creation, that Greek mothers called when the pangs of birth began, and they found comfort in their belief that she nursed them through labor just as she did any of her other animals.

As the nymph of the greenwood, then, she is not really different from her other most famous form: Mother Artemis, whose vast rich temple at Amazonian Ephesus was one of the wonders of the ancient world. There her massive statue stood, rising from a legless base into a huge torso ringed with breasts, then up to a head surmounted by the turret crown of her city. This Artemis was merely a different visualization of the same energy represented by the woodland nymph: the instinct to live, to produce and reproduce constantly, to devour, and to die. There is power in the image of Ephesia--as Artemis in this form was sometimes called--a power that could be seen as terrifying, so vast and inhuman is it.

The most beloved goddess of Greece, Artemis was honored in rituals that were wildly popular although as varied as the forms of the goddess herself. At Ephesus, in her well-endowed temple, Artemis was served by chaste priestesses called Mellisai, or "bees," and by eunuch priests. In Sparta she was Korythalia, worshiped in orgiastic dancing. The Amazons honored the war mother Astateia, the mother as protector of her children, in a circle dance amid the clashing of shields and swords and the stomping of battle-clad feet. But apparently the most popular festivals of Artemis were those celebrated on nights of the full moon, when worshipers would gather in the goddess's wood and give themselves over to her power in revels and anonymous matings. The beloved goddess of Greece was the personification of natural law, so different from the laws of society, so much more ancient, so everlasting.

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Ashera 2

Other names:

Location: Middle East, Canaan

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Ashera

From the root meaning "straight", this Caananite goddess derived a name that implied not only the moral rectitude she demanded of her followers but also the upright posts or living trees in which they perceived her essence. In her temple, Asherah's image was non-human, merely an unshaped piece of wood called by her name. But in private devotions she was represented by simple woman-shaped clay figures with, instead of legs, a base for insertion into the soft earthen floor of the home.She also appeared as a naked, curly-haired goddess riding a sacred lion and holding lilies and serpents in upraised hands.

"Wet nurse of the gods" and "she who gives birth" to seventy of them, Asherah was one of the Ugaritic mother goddesses. Not only did she physically nurture the gods--and human rulers too--she offered spiritual sustenance through her oracular wizards. She was the force of life, experienced as benevolent and enduring, found in flocks of cattle and groves of trees, evoked in childbirth and at planting time.

The character of "The Lady Asherah of the Sea" (her full name) is vague and unclear, coming down as it does to us predominantly through the writings of her sworn enemies, the patriarchal Hebrews who often, perhaps deliberately, confused her with Astarte (which they spelled Ashtoreth). But this official view often did not coincide with popular opinion. In the Old Testament we can read the catalog of a centuries-long campaign against the joyfully orgiastic rites of this benevolent goddess. Asherah would apparently be rooted out of people's hearts, only to reemerge, giving rise to another wave of reforms. Queen Maacah, mother of Asa and Jezebel, publicly worshipped her; Hebrew zealots, however, took the life of Jezebel on the charge of "harlotry" during festivals of the goddess. But so popular did the worship of Asherah remain that there is substantial evidence she was worshipped, with all attendant public pleasures, within the Jerusalem temple itself.

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Ashera

Other names:

Location: Middle East, Canaan

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Ashera

From the root meaning "straight", this Caananite goddess derived a name that implied not only the moral rectitude she demanded of her followers but also the upright posts or living trees in which they perceived her essence. In her temple, Asherah's image was non-human, merely an unshaped piece of wood called by her name. But in private devotions she was represented by simple woman-shaped clay figures with, instead of legs, a base for insertion into the soft earthen floor of the home.She also appeared as a naked, curly-haired goddess riding a sacred lion and holding lilies and serpents in upraised hands.

"Wet nurse of the gods" and "she who gives birth" to seventy of them, Asherah was one of the Ugaritic mother goddesses. Not only did she physically nurture the gods--and human rulers too--she offered spiritual sustenance through her oracular wizards. She was the force of life, experienced as benevolent and enduring, found in flocks of cattle and groves of trees, evoked in childbirth and at planting time.

The character of "The Lady Asherah of the Sea" (her full name) is vague and unclear, coming down as it does to us predominantly through the writings of her sworn enemies, the patriarchal Hebrews who often, perhaps deliberately, confused her with Astarte (which they spelled Ashtoreth). But this official view often did not coincide with popular opinion. In the Old Testament we can read the catalog of a centuries-long campaign against the joyfully orgiastic rites of this benevolent goddess. Asherah would apparently be rooted out of people's hearts, only to reemerge, giving rise to another wave of reforms. Queen Maacah, mother of Asa and Jezebel, publicly worshipped her; Hebrew zealots, however, took the life of Jezebel on the charge of "harlotry" during festivals of the goddess. But so popular did the worship of Asherah remain that there is substantial evidence she was worshipped, with all attendant public pleasures, within the Jerusalem temple itself.

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Atabey

Other names: Atabei, Attabeira, Momona, Guacarapita, Iella, Guimazoa

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Atabey

The Primary Being of the pre-Hispanic people of the Antilles bore five names other than Atabei: Attabeira, Momona, Guacarapita, Iella, and Guimazoa. She was served by a messenger, Guatauva, and by the hurricane goddess Coatrischie. Little is known of her rites, although she was recognized as a form of the earth goddess by the Antillean people, whose culture was such that invading Spaniards called the women "amazons" and said that they lived alone and engaged in war. In some areas, the women even spoke a different language from the men of the same group.

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Athena

Other names: Minerva

Location: Greece

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Athena

She was not always accepted as patron of the famous city that bears her name. Greek legend says that the sea god Poseidon disputed with the goddess for ruler ship of the city. It came to a vote of the people of the town in question. The citizens, men and women alike, gathered to cast their ballots. Naturally the men voted for the god, the women for the goddess. As it happened, there was one more voter on the women's side, and Athena won the day. (An alternative version says that the Olympian deities judged the contest. They ruled that because Athena had planted the first olive tree, whereas all Poseidon could offer was the changeful sea, the goddess would be a better ruler than the god.

The men of Athens bitterly agreed to accept the goddess as their patron. But being poor losers, the levied three heavy requirements on the women: that they should forego being called citizens, that they should no longer vote, and that their children should be called by their father's names. They then prepared a new identity for the city's goddess. They claimed that she was a virginal goddess without sexuality, a motherless goddess who sprang full grown from the head of Zeus, who had swallowed her mother Metis. This Athena was "all for the father" (as Aescheylus has her say), who voted on the side of the new patriarchal order against the earlier system of mother right. But hidden in the legend of the Athenian vote are clues to Athena's original identity. If children did not bear their mothers' names, if women were not full citizens, if women did not vote, why bother to legislate against it?

There was yet another version of the birth of Athena, one that is far less flattering to male divinity. This story says that she was the daughter of Pallas, a winged giant. He tried to rape his virginal daughter, so she killed him. She tanned his skin to make a shield and cut off his wings to fasten to her feet. Another myth in which Athena's virginity is threatened says that Hephaestus, the smith god, attempted to rape her, but only managed to ejaculate on her leg. The goddess wiped it off in disgust. But the semen touched all-fertile Gaia, whereupon a half-serpent boy named Erichthonius was born. Athena accepted the boy as her offspring and gave him to the Augralids to guard.

A curious part of this relatively obscure story is the shaky nature of the boy. As Hephaestus had no known reptile ancestors, it must be that Athena provided the serpent blood. Her intimate connection with Medusa, whose snake-haired visage Athena wears on her goat-skin cloak called the aegis, is also relevant. Similarly, the massive snake that reared beside her statue in the Parthenon, her major temple on the Athenian Acropolis, suggests that the snake was one of the primary symbols of the virgin goddess.

It is now well established that Athena--her name is so ancient that it has never been translated--was originally a Minoan or Mycdenaean household goddess--possibly related to the bare-breasted Cretan figures seen embracing snakes or holding them overhead. This original Athena was the essence of the family bond, symbolized by the home and its hearth--and by the mild serpent, who-- like the household cat, lived in the storehouse and protected the family's food supplies against destructive rodents. As household goddess, Athena ruled the implements of domestic crafts: the spindle, the pot, and the loom. By extrapolation, she was the guardian of the ruler's home, the goddess of the palace; by further extrapolation, she was the symbol of the community itself, the larger social unit based on countless homes.

Although Minoan civilization declined, Athena was not lost. A maiden goddess, apparently called Pallas, arrived with the Greeks; she was a warrior, a kind of Valkyrie, a protector of the tribe. This figure was bonded to that of the indigenous tribal symbol to form Pallas Athena, and her legend was re-created to suit the new social order. But Athena's ritual reflected her origins. Each year midsummer her splendid image was taken from her temple on the Acropolis and borne ceremoniously down to the sea. There Athena was carefully washed and, renewed in strength and purity, was decked in a newly made robe woven by the city's best craftswomen. It was the same ritual that honored Hera and showed Athena as a woman's deity--the mistress of household industry and family unity.

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Baba Yaga

Other names: Babayaga

Location: Eastern Europe

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Baba Yaga

The "old woman" of autumn was called Baba by the Slavic inhabitants of eastern Europe, Boba by the Lithuanians. This seasonal divinity lived in the last sheaf of grain harvested in a year, and the woman who bound it would bear a child that year. Baba passed into Russian folk legend as the awesome Baba Yaga, a witchlike woman who rowed through the air in a mortar, using a pestle for her oar, sweeping the traces of her flight from the air with a broom.

A prototype of the fairytale witch, Baba Yaga lived deep in the forest and scared passersby to death just by appearing to them. She then devoured her victims, which is why her picket fence was topped with skulls. Behind this fierce legend looms the figure of the ancient birth-and-death goddess, one whose autumn death in the cornfield led to a new birth in spring.

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Bast

Other names: Bastet, Past, Pastet

Location: Egypt

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Bast

She originated in the Nile delta, but by 930 B.C., the power of Bast was acknowledged by all Egyptians, even those a thousand miles south of her original home. At first she was a lion-goddess of sunset, symbolizing the fertilizing force of the sun's rays. Later her image grew tamer: she became a cat carrying the sun, or a cat-headed woman who bore on her breast plate the lion of her former self.

Bast ruled pleasure and dancing, music and joy. At the city of Bubastis ("house of Bast"), the center of her worship, great celebrations were held. Boatloads of worshipers--hundreds of thousands of them, Herodotus said--were greeted by pleasant flute melodies as they debarked for a worship service combined with a vast trade fair. Bast's followers believed that in return for this reverent celebration Bast bestowed both mental and physical health. As part of Bast's worship, Egyptians honored live cats. Domesticated (if cats can ever be truly said to be domesticated) during the early period of agriculture, cats were useful to keep down the rodent population and therefore to assure a stable diet for humans. Egyptians cherished their cats, often decking them with golden earrings or other jewelry. When they died, the cats were mummified and buried in the vast cat cemetary at Bubastis.

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Blodeuwedd

Other names: Blodewedd

Location: Wales

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Blodeuwedd

Arianhod, unwilling mother of the Welsh hero Llew Llaw Gyffes, laid a curse on him that he would never have a human wife. So two magicians made Blodewedd from nine kinds of wildflowers, among them meadowsweet, oak, broom, primrose, and cockle. The magicians piled blossom upon blossom to create "Flowerface."

The beautiful Blodewedd was also treacherous. She lived with Llew Llaw for a time. One day, though, she saw a band of hunters pass outside her window and, falling in love with one of them, plotted the death of her husband. Llew Llaw had a magical safeguard. He could be killed only under curious circumstances: in a bath by the side of a river, under a thatched roof over a caldron, while standing with one foot on a deer. Blodewedd set up those circumstances, daring Llew Llaw to stand in his only dangerous position. He took the dare and her hidden lover killed the king.

Blodewedd eventually was found out, captured by the magicians who created her, and turned into an owl. This strange legend, which parallels the Irish story of Blathmat and the Semitic Delilah, seems to record an ancient legend of the goddess, the clues to which are now lost. Some, like Robert Graves, see Blodewedd as a type of the May Queen, wedded ritually to the king who would eventually be sacrificed to her. Others see her as a flowery rebel, an image of women's opposition to patriarchal bondage. But it is also possible that the flower goddess of betrayal was simply the goddess of life and death, a form of the earth goddess who, like Ishtar or Cybele, both loved and devoured the living.

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Brigid

Other names: Brigit, Briget, Brigandu, Brigantia, Bridget, Bride

Location: Ireland

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Brigid

Probably the clearest example of the survival of an early goddess into Christian times is Brigid (pronounced "breed"), the great triple goddess of the Celtic Irish who appeared as Brigantia in England, Bride in Scotland, and Brigandu in Celtic France.

So entrenched was the devotion of the Irish to their goddess that the Christians "converted" her along with her people, calling her Bridget, the human daughter of a Druid, and claiming she was baptized by the great patriarch St. Patrick himself. Bridget took religious vows, the story went on, and was canonized after her death by her adoptive church, which then allowed the saint a curious list of attributes, coincidentally identical to those of the earlier goddess.

The Christian Bridget, for instance, was said to have had the power to appoint the bishops of her area, a strange role for an abbess, made stranger by her requirement that her bishops also be practicing goldsmiths. The ancient Brigid, however, was in one of her three forms the goddess of smithcraft. Brigid also ruled poetry and inspiration, carrying for this purpose a famous caldron; her third identity was as a goddess of healing and medicine. Not surprisingly, the Christian Bridget was invoked both as a muse and as a healer, continuing the traditions of the goddess.

There were three Brigids, who were probably never construed as separate goddesses but as aspects of one divinity; unlike other triple goddesses, they were identical, not aging through the typical maiden-mother-crone sequence. The Brigids were unified in the symbol of fire, for her name means "bright arrow," or simply the "bright one." Almost into modern times, the ancient worship of the fire goddess Brigid continued at her sacred shrine in Kildare, where 19 virgins tended the undying fire and where, on the 20th day of each cycle, the fire was miraculously tended by Brigid herself. There, into the 18th century, the ancient song was sung to her: "Brigid, excellent woman, sudden flame, may the bright fiery sun take us to the lasting kingdom." But for more than 10 centuries, the Bridget invoked was a saint rather than a goddess; her attendants, nuns rather than priestesses.

The Irish said that the goddess Brigid brought to humanity a num,,ber of useful things, including whistling, which she invented one night when she wanted to call her friends. And when her beloved son was killed, Brigid invented keening, the mournful song of the bereaved Irishwoman; this story draws her close to the great mother goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean, and like them, Brigid was identified with the earth herself and with the soil's fertility.

Ritual, that most conservative of forces, preserved Brigid's name and symbols for more than 1,000 years after she ceased to be acknowledged as a goddess. But little is left of the legends told of one of the greatest of all Celtic goddesses, a deity so high that her brass shoe was the most sacred object that could be imagined, a divinity so intensely related to the feminine force that no man was allowed to pass beyond the hedge surrounding her sanctuary.

Some rituals and legends suggest that Brigid's history may date back even beyond the era of the Celts-that she may have taken on some of the aspects of an even more ancient seasonal goddess of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland. In the latter, a series of stories relate how the Cailleach kept a maiden named Bride imprisoned in the high mountains of Ben Nevis. But her own son fell in love with the girl and, at winter's end, he eloped with her. The hag chased them across the landscape, causing fierce storms as she went, but finally she turned to stone and Bride was freed. In such stories, which may date back as much as 2000-3000 years, Brigid becomes a surrogate for a spring/summer goddess whose rule over the land alternated with that of a fall/winter hag. Similarly, the fact that the massive sandstones called sarsens, used in the building of such ancient pre-Celtic monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury, are called Bridestones, suggests that Brigid's identity as a primary goddess caused her name to be used of Neolithic (late Stone Age) divinities of the area.

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Cerridwen

Other names: Cerridwyn, Cerridu

Location: Wales

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Cerridwen

Cerridwen was worshipped by the people of Wales -- who call themselves the Cymri or friends, for the term "Welsh" means "foreigner" in the language of their British neighbors.

Cerridwen lived on an island in the middle of Lake Tegid with her two children -- the beautiful Creidwy and the ugliest boy in the world, Afagdu. To compensate her son for bestowing such a body on him, the goddess brewed a magical formula that would make her son the most brilliant and inspired of men. For a year and a day, she kept herbs simmering in her caldron, which she left under the care of a little boy named Gwion.

One day, while the goddess was out collecting more herbs for her brew, a few drops of the bubbling liquid splattered onto Gwion's finger. Scowling in pain, he stuck his hand instantly into his mouth. Miraculously, he was able to hear everything in the world and to understand the secrets of both the past and the future.

His enchanted foresight showed him how angry Cerridwen would be when she found a mere mortal had acquired the inspiration intended for her son. So he ran away; the all-knowing Cerridwen realized what had happened and pursued him. Gwion changed himself into a hare; Cerridwen pursued him as a greyhound. So they ran: he as a fish, she as an otter; he as a bird, she as a hawk; he as a grain of wheat, she as a hen.

It was in the final form that she caught and devoured him, bearing him nine months later as a child. She threw the baby into the water where he was caught by a prince and grew into the poet Taliesin, the greatest poet in his language. Thus the Welsh expressed their understanding that death and rebirth were necessary for true inspiration to be brought into this world, showing the Muse, the goddess of inspiration, in a somewhat more terrible form than she appears in other cultures.

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Changing Woman/ Estsanatlehi

Other names: Turqouise Woman

Location: Southwest America

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Changing Woman / Estsanatlehi

The Apache called the earth goddess by this name, for she never grew old. When her age began to show, she simply walked toward the east until she saw her form coming toward herself. She kept walking until her young self merged with her aging self and then, renewed, returned to her home. Among the Chiricahua Apache, the name of this eternal goddess was Painted Woman. "Turquoise woman" was the Navaho sky-goddess, wife of the sun. She lived in a turquoise palace at the western horizon, where each night she received her luminous husband. Sister (or twin or double) of Yolkai Estsan, the moon's wife, Estsanatlehi was able to make herself young each time she began to age, thus her name, which means the "self-renewing one."

Here is her story: the ancestral goddess Atse Estsan, discovering Estsanatlehi on the ground beneath a mountain, reared her to be the savior of earth's people. When she was grown, Estsanatlehi met a young man; each day they went to the woods to make love. When her parents looked on the ground and saw only one set of footprints, they knew their daughter had taken the sun as a lover.

Delighted at the honor granted their family, they were delighted again when Estsanatlehi gave birth to twins, who grew so miraculously that eight days after birth they were men, ready to seek their father. But when they found his house, the twins found another woman there. Angry at the intrusion, she threatened them with their father's anger as well.

Undeterred, the twins remained and won from their father magic weapons, which they needed to clear the earth of monsters. This they did. After dancing with their mother in celebration, the twins built Estsanatlehi a magnificent home at the sky's end, so that the sun could visit her again.

But the twins' wars with the monsters had depopulated the earth. Estsanatlehi brushed the dust from her breasts. From the white flour that fell from her right breast and the yellow meal from her left, she made paste and molded a man and a woman. Placing them beneath a magical blanket, Estsanatlehi left them. The next morning they were alive and breathing, and Estsanatlehi blessed the creation. For the next four days, the pair reproduced constantly, forming the four great Navaho clans. But the creative urge of Estsanatlehi was not fulfilled. She made four more groups of people, this time from the dust of her nipples-and the women of these clans were thereafter famous for their nipples.

Feeling her creation to be complete, Estsanatlehi retired to her turquoise palace from which she continued to bestow blessings on her people: seasons, plants and food, and the tender sprouts of spring. Only four monsters survived her sons' wars on evil: age, winter, poverty, and famine, which she allowed to live on so that her people would treasure her gifts the more.

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Coatlique

Other names:

Location: Central America

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Coatlique

The earth was a fivefold "serpent-skirted goddess" to the ancient Mexicans, who counted four directions and a central point, up and down, on their compasses. The fivefold earth goddess therefore sometimes appeared to them as a woman with four sisters; they gathered, it was said, on Coatepec ("Snake Hill") to meditate. There Coatlicue gathered white feathers to adorn her breasts; becoming pregnant while remaining a virgin, she gave birth to the savior-god Quetzalcoatl. In other legends, she was impregnated by emeralds or jade stones.

Sometimes the fivefold goddess was called a moon divinity, wife of the sun-god. She was also called the creator: she was preeminent and pre-existent, floating for eons in a misty world. Even the sun and his magicians did not realize her magnificence. Once they did, however, they brought her love charms, and she suddenly flowered forth as the great mother of all living.

But Coatlicue was the death mother as well. Her most famous images show her as the ruler of life and its end, garlanded with hearts and hands, wearing a skirt of swinging serpents, hung with skulls, vested in a flayed human skin. Coatlicue, honored with spring's earliest flowers, was also rightly attired in claws and snakes, for to the ancient Mexicans the goddess was both Tlaltecuhtli, the ugly earth toad, and Tonantzin, the mother redeemer.

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Corn Maiden

Other names: Corn Woman, Corn Mother

Location: Southwest America

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Corn Maiden

Uti Hiata is the Pawnee name for "Mother Corn," one of the most important divinities of the Plains Indian culture. Their neighbors, the Arikara, told the Corn Mother's story in detail. From the great blue lake of creation, diving ducks brought up bits of silt to build prairies and foothills. Sky father Nesaru, seeing giants populating the earth, sent a great flood to destroy them; he replanted the earth with maize seeds, which sprouted into human beings. Then he sent Uti Hiata to assist at their birth.

Finding no one on earth, Uti Hiata walked and walked. Suddenly the thunder kidnapped her and hid her beneath the earth. There, she gathered the underworld animals-the mole, the mouse, the badger-and with their help dug through the ground and burst out into the sun. As she emerged, so did the people of the plains, to whom she taught secrets of life and magic and the methods of agriculture and of religious ritual. Satisfied that humanity would live in abundance, she disappeared from the earth, leaving the cedar as an emblem of her existence.

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Danu

Other names: Danaan, Don

Location: Ireland

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Danu

The greatest of the goddesses of ancient Ireland, Danu was the ruler of a tribe of divinities called Tuatha de Danaan, the people of Danu, who where demoted to fairies called Daoine Sidhe in later times. Her name derives from the Old Celtic dan, meaning "knowledge," and she was probably the same goddess and the Welsh Don. Some scholars see her as the same goddess as Anu, while others contend that she is an aspect of Brigid. There are no legends of her left to elucidate the search for her meaning, but her preeminence among ancient Irish deities remains clear.

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Demeter

Other names: Ceres, Damatres, Demeter Erynes, Demeter Louisa, Kidaria, Chamaine, Thesmophoros

Location: Greece