[Stones] Longman of Wilmington Abuse

[Ric]

--- David Shugarts <David.Shugarts at AzimuthComm.com>
wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> Two answers:
> 
> (A) There is no greater goddess than my wife.
> 
> (B) I think it is a little wrong and confusing to
> need to see a "Great"
> Goddess in cultures that absolutely did worship
> goddesses--just not "Great"
> ones. And therefore if you don't get substantiation
> in archeological or
> written evidence you get to say, "See, see, there
> was no Great Goddess."
> There is plenty of solid evidence of female dieties,
> in a time when it is
> very likely that having just a single deity, whether
> male or female, didn't
> make sense to people. We have so many cultures left
> even today that believe
> there are gods and goddesses everywhere--can that
> all be modern? Everyone
> thinks of Egyptian civilization with its powerful Ra
> or Osiris, its powerful
> Isis, and therefore a contest for the reputation of
> top god/goddess. But
> Egyptian culture had thousands of gods and
> goddesses. Were they all
> conceived of in 3,000 or 2,000 BC?
> 
> That this time was supplanted by eras when some
> major religions crafted
> their most powerful god as male and set their female
> goddesses on lower
> pedestals (e.g., as saints), isn't in dispute. But
> also, many cultures
> retained their female equivalents, some co-equal or
> nearly so. When you
> notice how many cultures had sun-moon pairs, to me
> it seems so fundamentally
> human-logical.
> 
> --Dave Shugarts

yes but, it does leave me wondering when folks speak
of the 'Great Goddess' without qualifying exactly what
is meant by the title? the nearest named cultural
equivalents i can think of are mentions of the 'Queen
of Heaven', a powerful and pervasive deity throughout
the Middle East in proto-monotheistic and biblical
times; in India today you can speak of the Great
Goddess and everybody will know exactly what you mean:
"MahaDevi" - literally "great goddess", also often
known as Durga (deity). so the concept of a 'great
goddess' was alive in antiquity as it is in the modern
period :)

Ric