Europe's Last Goddess: The Vénus of Quinipily

 

The Vénus of Quinipily is a statue of a goddess that has been worshipped in Brittany for about 2000 years. It was originally associated with the Roman occupation but the local Celts continued to worship her into modern times. I went to pay my respects to her... 

Art by Ryan Murray

Jive Book Review: Odin's Wife (Frigg and Jord)

Is Odin's wife Frigg the same as his lover Jord the Earth goddess? William P. Reaves thinks they are the same figure and that her cult survived in to recent times among German peasants who called her Frau Holda. I will briefly review his book on the subject here.

Góa month and góiblót - February, March or April festival?

Frigg weaves

While some modern heathens choose to match ancient Germanic festivals with the Gregorian calendar, others try to stick to the lunar-solar calendar the Germanic people observed.

 



There are some problems calculating Góa month in either case, due to lack of sources on the festival. The month of Góa is alleged to have been the penultimate month of winter, according to the old, Norse calendar used in Iceland. According to some Icelanders, góiblót took place in late February - but if we follow the lunar-solar model then it would have been on the full moon, because the full moon marks the high festival of each month, and the new moon marks the start of the month, making the start of this year's Góa month either 23rd Jan, or 22nd Feb, ending either 22nd Feb or 23rd March 2020 - with the final month of winter ending in April when the rites of the start of Summer were held - associated with Easter-month in Anglo-Saxon England and all the variant May day celebrations across Europe.

So February seems to match up well enough for the dating, although I am unsure where the claim it is the penultimate month of winter originates. I know of two sources that mention Góa month and góiblót.

“It was the old custom in Svitjod to hold the main sacrifice in the Goi month in Uppsala. There sacrifices should be made for the peace and victories of the king. That's where the people from all over the Svear Empire should come, and at the same time the Thing of the Swedes should take place there.” -
Ólafs saga helga, chap. 77

Some say this Goi blot was a celebration of the return of vegetative forces - but this source makes no mention of that, and this would vary across Germanic Europe anyway according to latitude. Tonight is the full moon of February and the primroses and daffodils are already up here in West England, but perhaps this is not the case in Uppsala. Transferring a Norse calendar to the wider Germanic world may result in conflicts and anachronisms of this sort.

The second source is a fornaldarsögur which tells a different story. It says the Jotun King Fornjót, father of Ægir, the sea god, and who ruled Gotland, Kænland and Finnland, also had a daughter called Gói. There was a pious sacrificer called Thorri, who made a midwinter sacrifice called Thorra blót and one winter Gói disappeared at this blót - so they later had a sacrifice to find her and this was named góiblót but she did not appear. This seems to scream for a naturalistic interpretation; an obvious one, that Gói represents some green vegetation of a kind absent in midwinter, which people hope to see in Feb/March but don't if they live too far North!

In any case, tonight's Super moon is a holy night as is next month's and one of them is góiblót. Unfortunately we can't say precisely how góiblót should be performed. Obviously you must offer a sacrifice and pray for both peace, and victory for your leader in whatever battles your people are fighting at present. But to whom are the sacrifices and prayers offered? Gói? Perhaps a more familiar deity like Frigg? Some claim Góa month was known as women's month, and if so, then it seems proper to invoke a goddess on this festival.

Dr. Andreas Nordberg, an expert on the pagan lunar-solar calendar, believes that the Goa moon of Snorri's time was not the Goa moon of Heathen times which was in April. Nordberg writes:

"As well as Yule, the time of the disablot in Uppsala has also been the subject of much discussion. According to Adam of Bremen this event took place at “about the time of the vernal equinox”, whilst Snorri instead says that the event was held in the month of Gói, which lasted from mid-February to mid-March in the Icelandic calendar during Snorri’s lifetime. However, it is likely that the information given to Snorri did not refer to the Icelandic month, but the Swedish lunar month called Göje or Göja." (Jul, disting och förkyrklig tideräkning Kalendrar och kalendariska riter i det förkristna Norden Uppsala 2006, P.157)

Have I missed any other sources? Please let me know in the comments.

In Search of the Earth-Mother of Anatolia

"In Search of the Earth-Mother of Anatolia" A documentary which looks at the root of the Earth Mother goddess common to European pagan religions; call her Cybele, Rhea, Ceres, or whatever - she comes from Anatolia and spread out in various forms from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. One late form was Artemis of Ephesus, an Anatolian version of a Greek goddess who was then sent back to Europe in her new form. This film focuses mainly on the Lycians, who were an early Indo-European people in Anatolia who seem to have preserved more of the pre-Indo-European Anatolian religion and culture than most.


'Leto transforms the Lycian peasants to frogs' painting by Alex Cristi

Sources: 

• - Bryce. T., 'The Lycians in Literary and Epigraphic Sources' (1986)
• - Ovid 'Metamorphoses', Melville. A. D. (trans) (Oxford, 1986)
• - Evola. J., 'The Bow and the Club' (Arktos, 2018)
• - http://www.lycianturkey.com/cults_of_lycia_deities.htm
• - http://bikeclassical.blogspot.com/2017/03/letoon-sanctuary-of-eni-mahanahi.html
• - https://turkisharchaeonews.net/site/xanthos
• - Damgaard et al (2018)

The Pre-Indo-European Anatolian Mother Goddess of Agriculture

Thicc Anatolian Neolithic goddess

People always ask me about Neolithic, pre-Indo-European European religion, and how much survived. I usually say that it is not possible to know much about the pre-literate Neolithic Europeans and hard to distinguish what elements of subsequent IE religion were carried on from before. However we can learn a lot by looking at Anatolia.
10,300 years ago, hunter gatherers in Anatolia started farming. This figure (above) of a seated Anatolian goddess dates to about 8000 years ago. 8,500 years ago Anatolians spread across Europe, replacing most of the people (Western Hunter-Gatherers) who were there before and bringing their agriculturally oriented religion which was heavily conscious of seasons and when to plant. To talk about pre-IE religion in Europe, is the same as talking about Near-Eastern religion since it all originates in Anatolia just as Neolithic Europeans did. Indo-Europeans invaded Anatolia and Europe over the 3rd millennium BC - the ones in Anatolia spoke languages (the Anatolian language family) ancestral to Hittite and Luwian. DNA shows that genetically, Anatolians were not altered much by the IE invasion, especially compared to Northern Europe. It is interesting therefore that their religion was so different to other Indo-European religions. For example, Hittite temples were built according to the same celestial principles as Stonehenge (aligned for solstices) and other Neolithic solar monuments.

Also worthy of note is the fact that some Anatolian peoples, such as Lycians, practiced matronymics, and a tradition of legitimacy and inheritance denoted by the maternal rather than paternal line. Lycian women were able to marry foreigners and have legitimate children but Lycian men, even aristocrats, could not. This is very unlike any other Indo-European culture and almost certainly derives from earlier customs of the Near-East!

Cybele

The goddess Cybele was Anatolian in origin; an earth mother credited with inventing agriculture. She is seems to be a pre-IE goddess and as her cult spread across the Mediterranean, she was associated and combined with other agricultural mother goddesses who were obviously derived from the same original Neolithic Anatolian figure. eg. Artemis of Ephesus was a regional cult in which the Greek hunter goddess was transformed into the Anatolian mother goddess. This cult was influential on the later cult of the Virgin Mary. The Roman goddess Ceres, whose name is cognate with cereal, was seen as equivalent to Greek Demeter (the Mother) - and her cult survived for awhile in Rome alongside the imported Anatolian cult of Cybele, who they called Magna Mater. The Romans also associated the Greek mother goddess Rhea (here seated much like Cybele or the prehistoric Anatolian goddess statue) with the Magna Mater.

Artemis of Ephesus

Ceres

Rhea

Just as there is more Anatolian farmer DNA in Southern than Northern Europe, we see more clear evidence of the endurance of the Neolithic agricultural mother goddess in the South, and most of all among the Anatolians living in the region where her cult originated. If you want to know what religion in pre-IE Britain or Europe might have been like, then take a look at the castrated transgender priests and orgiastic cults of Cybele or other Near-Eastern semi-matriarchal cults.

What is Slavic Paganism?

Corn God: Endurance of pagan habits in 19th century Sweden!

An account of residual pagan practice in Sweden from 1877!

(Västergötlands Fornminnesförenings Tidskrift, Part 3. 1877. Page 60-61.)

A magazine by Västergötlands Fornminnesförening tells the interesting story of a wooden figure called "the Corn God", which used to be kept in the local church of Vånga. The journalist wrote: 

"Several years ago, Skara Museum was visited by an old man and his wife from Vånga. When he saw the figure he cried, ”Mother, here stands the corn god.” This prompted me to ask him what he knew about the sculpture. He then told me that folk in Vånga called it the Corn God, and that the farmers at spring time would smuggle him out from the church and at sunrise carry him around on the fields to attain good harvest that year. When, despite this, the crops still failed in 1826, one farmer knocked the nose off the figure on a Sunday. Shortly thereafter, the old man added, the sculpture went missing, but no one dared ask where it might have gone to.” 

Even though these people regarded themselves as Christians, they were still aware that this was something the priest didn't want them to do. They even called the figure a god. Not a very Christian thing to do! The figure itself is from late 13th century and depicts an unidentified apostle. The persona of the Corn God, reminiscent of Freyr, was imposed on it by the parishioners, but why? Montelius claimed it was not an apostle but Saint Olaf:

‘The fact that the worship of Saint Olaf [the Norwegian king killed in 1030 AD] was not, like that of the Swedish Saint Erik, limited principally to his own country, shows that there must have been some special reason for the prominent position he occupied within the northern Church … If the Christian Scandinavians looked upon him in the same way as their heathen ancestors had looked upon Thor, we can easily understand why it was so. Just as people in old days believed that Thor could grant good harvests, so even in the nineteenth century they have supposed Olaf to be in possession of the same power. Stories from the south of Sweden and from Denmark tell how the peasants were wont to drag the image of Saint Olaf round the fields after the sowing. The image of Saint Olaf in Vånga church in Vestergötland was carried round in that way, in spite of vigorous protests from the clergy. The peasants had given it the name of the “corn god”’

 

Montelius, O.A. 1910. The Sun God’s Axe and Thor’s Hammer. Folk-Lore 21(1910): 60-78.

This tradition is an obvious continuation of a Germanic tradition of parading an idol around the land to bestow it with fertility. The earliest source we have on this is Tacitus' Germania (98AD) in which he describes how the Germanic peoples worshipped a goddess called Nerthus whose idol toured the country in a ceremonial wagon drawn by Oxen. Similarly, the 5th century Palestinian historian Sozomenos wrote that the Goths under Athanaric had led about a wooden idol placed on a covered wagon. They passed by a tent of Goths who had converted to Christianity and demanded they pay respect to the idol and make offerings to it. He wrote that those who refused to honour the idol were burned alive in their tents. Finally, in the 8th century Einhard wrote that Childeric III, the last of the long-haired Merovingian kings (long haired rulers being a residual pagan custom) was a degenerate king who was purveyed about the country on a wagon drawn by oxen in an annual celebration, which we can infer was of pagan origin, and originally involved the ruler filling a similar role the idol of Nerthus had 700 years earlier. The touring of idols is also common in other Indo-European religions such as Hinduism. 

Montelius provides more on the enduring cult of Thor in modern Sweden:

Writing about Wärend, that old part of Småland where so much of the belief and customs of former ages still remains, Mr. Hyltén-Cavallius says, - ‘They still look upon the thunder as a person whom they call alternately “Thor” or “Thore-Gud,” “Gofar,” and “Gobonden” [The Good Farmer]. He is an old redbearded man. In 1629 a peasant from Warend was summoned for blasphemy against God. He had said about the rain,— “If I had the old man down here I would pull him by the hair on account of this continual raining.” Thus it is Thor that gives the summer rain, which therefore in Wärend is called “Gofar-rain,” “Gobonda-rain” [The Good Farmer rain] or “As-rain.” The rumbling of the thunder is produced by Thor’s driving in his chariot through the clouds. It is therefore called Thordön after him. People also say that “Gofar is driving,” “Gobonden is driving,” “The Thunder is driving.” Thor drives not only in the air but also on earth. Then they say that “he is earth-driving.” … The most noticeable trace of our country’s older worship of Thor is that “Thor’s day” (Thursday) was still in the nineteenth century considered as a sacred day, almost as a Sunday’ (Montelius 1910:76-77).

Review: The Seed of Yggdrasil