Chapter 23 of 35 · 1341 words · ~7 min read

Chapter II

) of the means by which the winged disk came to acquire the power of life-giving, "the healing in its wings," will have made it clear that the sun became accredited with these virtues only when it assumed the place of the other "Eye of Re," the Great Mother. In fact, it was a not uncommon practice in Egypt to represent the eyes of Re or of Horus himself in place of the more usual winged disk. In the AEgean area the original practice of representing the Great Mother was retained long after it was superseded in Egypt by the use of the winged disk (the sun-god).

Over the lintel of the famous "Lion Gate" at Mycenae, instead of the winged disk, we find a vertical pillar to represent the Mother Goddess, flanked by two lions which are nothing more than other representatives of herself (Fig. 26). [Illustration: Fig. 26.

(a) An Egyptian picture of Hathor between the mountains of the horizon (on which trees are growing) (after Budge, "Gods of the Egyptians," Vol. II, p. 101). [This is a part only of a scene in which the goddess Nut is giving birth to the sun, whose rays illuminate Hathor on the horizon, as Sothis, the "Opener of the Way" for the sun.]

(b) The mountains of the horizon supporting a cow's head as a surrogate of Hathor, from a stele found at Teima in Northern Arabia, now in the Louvre (after Sir Arthur Evans, _op. cit._, p. 39). This indicates the identity of what Evans calls "the horns of consecration" and the "mountains of the horizon," and also suggests how confusion may have arisen between the mountains and the cow's horns.

(d) The familiar Egyptian representation of the sun rising between the Eastern Mountains (the splitting of the mountain giving birth to "the ridiculous mouse"--Smintheus). The _ankh_ (life-sign) below the sun is the determinative of the act of giving birth or life. The design is heraldically supported by the Great Mother's lionesses.

(e) Part of the design from a Mycenaean vase from Old Salamis (after Evans, p. 9). The cow's head and the Eastern Mountains are shown alongside one another, each of them supporting the Double Axe representing the god.

(f) Part of the design from a lentoid gem from the Idaean Cave, now in the Candia Museum (after Evans, Fig. 25). If this design be compared with the Egyptian picture (a), it will be seen that Hathor's place is taken by the tree-form of the Great Mother, and the trees which in the former (a) are growing upon the Eastern Mountains are now placed alongside the "horns". In the complete design (_vide_ Evans, _op. cit._, p. 44) a votary is represented blowing a conch-shell trumpet to animate the deity in the sacred tree.

(g) The Eastern Mountains supporting the pillar-form of the goddess (after Evans, Fig. 66).

(h) Another Mycenaean design comparable with (e).

(i) Design from a signet-ring from Mycenae (after Evans, Fig. 34). If this be compared with the Egyptian picture (a) it will be noted that the Great Mother is now replaced by a tree: the Eastern Mountains by bulls, from whose backs the trees of the Eastern Mountains are sprouting. This design affords interesting corroboration of the suggestion that the Eastern Mountains may be confused with the cow's head (see _b_ and _c_) or with the cow itself. Newberry (_Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology_, Liverpool, Vol. I, p. 28) has called attention to the intimate association (in Protodynastic Egypt) of the Eastern Mountains, the Bull and the Double Axe--a certain token of cultural contact with Crete.

(k) The famous sculpture above the Lion Gate at Mycenae. The pillar form of the Great Mother heraldically supported by her lioness-avatars, which correspond to the cattle of the design (i) and the Eastern Mountains of (a). The use of this design above the lintel of the gate brings it into homology with the Winged Disk. The Pillar represents the Goddess, as the Disk represents her Egyptian _locum tenens_, Horus; her destructive representatives (the lionesses) correspond to the two uraei of the Winged Disk design.]

In his "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult," Sir Arthur Evans has shown that all possible transitional forms can be found (in Crete and the AEgean area) between the representation of the actual goddess and her pillar-and tree-manifestations, until the stage is reached where the sun itself appears above the pillar between the lions.[346] In the large series of seals from Mesopotamia and Western Asia which have been described in Mr. William Hayes Ward's monograph,[347] we find manifold links between both the Egyptian and the Minoan cults.

The tree-form of the Great Mother there becomes transformed into the "tree of life" and the winged disk is perched upon its summit. Thus we have a duplication of the life-giving deities. The "tree of life" of the Great Mother surmounted by the winged disk which is really her surrogate or that of the sun-god, who took over from her the power of life-giving (Figs. 25 and 26).

In an interesting Cretan sarcophagus from Hagia Triada[348] the life-giving power is _tripled_. There is not only the tree representing the Great Mother herself; but also the double axe (the winged-disk homologue of the sun-god); and the more direct representation of him as a bird perched upon the axe (Fig. 25, _f_).

The identification of the Great Mother with the tree or pillar seems also to have led to her confusion with the pestle with which the materials for her draught of immortality was pounded. She was also the bowl or mortar in which the pestle worked.[349]

As the Great Mother became confused with the pestle, so, "the Soma-plant, whose stalks are crushed by the priests to make the Soma-libation, becomes in the _Vedas_ itself the Crusher or Smiter, by a very characteristic and frequent Oriental conceit in accordance with which the agent and the person or thing acted on are identified".[350]

"The pressing-stones by means of which Soma is crushed typify thunderbolts." "In the _Rig-Veda_, we read of him [Soma] as _jyotihrathah_, _i.e._ 'mounted on a car of light' (IX, 5, 86, verse 43); or again: 'Like a hero he holds weapons in his hand ... mounted on a chariot' (IX, 4, 76, verse 2)"--(p. 171).

"Soma was the giver of power, of riches and treasures, flocks and herds, but above all, the giver of immortality" (p. 140).

Sir Arthur Evans is of opinion "that in the case of the Cypriote cylinders the attendant monsters and, to a certain extent, the symbolic column itself, are taken from an Egyptian solar cycle, and the inference has been drawn that the aniconic pillars among the Mycenaeans of Cyprus were identified with divinities having some points in common with the sun-gods Ra, or Horus, and Hathor, the Great Mother" (_op. cit._, pp. 63 and 64).

In attempting to find some explanation of how the tree or pillar of the goddess came to be replaced in the Indian legend by Mount Meru, the possibility suggests itself whether the aniconic form of the Great Mother placed between two relatively diminutive hills may not have helped, by confusion, to convert the cone itself into a yet bigger hill, which was identified with Mount Meru, the summit of which in other legends produced the _amrita_ of the gods, either in the form of the soma plant that grew upon its heights, or the rain clouds which collected there. But, as the subsequent argument will make clear, the real reason for the identification of the Great Mother with a mountain was the belief that the sun was born from the splitting of the eastern mountain, which thus assumed the function of the sun-god's mother. Possibly the association of the tops of mountains with cloud- and rain-phenomena and the gods that controlled them played some part in the development of the symbolism of mountains. [When I referred (in