[Music]
Ideally a scientific theory of mythology should be able to explain the genesis
and specific content of ancient myth. Modern schools of myth, alas, have long
since abandoned any pretense of addressing such questions. Much less of offering
comprehensive theories purporting to explain more than a handful of isolated
mythological motifs from one particular culture. Stith Thompson's opinion is
representative of the skepticism that currently prevails in the field,
quote “The ultimate origin of nearly all folk tales and myths must remain
a mystery.” The theory advanced by Dave Talbott and myself, in contrast,
claims to offer a unifying explanation of nearly every globally attested
mythological structure and thematic pattern. Our theory is distinguished from
all other modern schools of myth moreover, by the fact that it explains the
individual themes at a level of detail rarely imagined by other scholars.
The archetypal myth of the Warrior Goddess offers a case study in this regard.
Among the earliest mythological traditions of Mesopotamia are those
describing the planet Venus as the warrior goddess Inanna. Indeed, a third millennium
kenning describes war itself as the dance of Inanna. In the following hymn Inanna is
described as raining fire and flood from the sky, quote “Loud- thundering storm.
Hierodule, who makes heavens tremble, who makes the earth quake,
who can soothe your heart? You who pour down firebrands over the earthly orb,
who flash like lightning over the highland... Whose cry reaches heaven and earth, whose
roar is all-destructive... Your angry heart is a terrifying flood- wave.”
Now I ask, would anyone viewing Venus in the present sky ever be inspired to
describe it as a loud-thundering storm, flashing, lightning and hurling firebrands?
Yet this very language is employed again and again in the Sumerian text to describe
Inanna Venus. Quote “Like a dragon you have deposited venom on the foreign lands... Raining
blazing fire down upon the land... You charge forward like a charging storm.
You roar with the roaring storm... Your rage cannot be cooled!” A recurring
theme places Inanna Venus at the center of a destructive heaven-spanning storm,
described alternately as a tornado or a whirlwind. In a hymn to Inanna for example, Inanna
is described as clothed in a furious storm, a whirlwind. The word described as
whirlwind here is dal-amun denoting a tornado or dust cloud. Evident
in these archaic traditions is an image of a planet gone amok.
Its whirling tornado-like behavior instantiating its terrible rage.
It is telling that analogous behavior is reported of other great goddesses such as the Akkadian Ishtar,
the Canaanite Astarte, the Egyptian Hathor Ugaritic Anat, and the Indian Kali.
Each of these warrior goddesses, several of whom are explicitly identified
with the planet Venus, is associated with a destructive rampage at the dawn of
time that brought the world to the very brink of destruction. If Inanna was conceptualized as a
whirling storm, Ishtar was represented as a whirling dancer.
Quote “Oh valiant Ishtar, shining torch of heaven and earth... Furious and irresistible onslaught...
Fiery glow that blazes against the enemy, who wreaks destruction on the fierce Dancing One, Ishtar.”
The epithet translated Dancing One here as Gushea, literally, “the Whirling One.” Religious
rituals celebrating Ishtar Venus featured frenzied dances in
which its celebrants whirled wildly. Benjamin Foster in his commentary on these archaic rituals
observed, quote “The whirling dance or mock combat the people perform is a
memorial to Ishtar, here etymologized by the poet as the ’whirling dancer.’”
From the standpoint of modern astronomy needless to say, there is no conceivable reason why the
planet Venus should be conceptualized as an agent of storm, much less as a whirling tornado. Nor for
that matter, is there any obvious reason why that planet should be
described as a whirling dancer or fire- spewing warrior. Hence the profound puzzle
presented by these widespread myths and rituals. How then is it possible to explain the
myth of the warrior goddess? In the historical reconstruction offered by Talbott and myself,
the myth in question encodes catastrophic natural events during which
Venus's atmosphere became hyper-charged and disturbed, flaring dramatically in the northern
circumpolar heaven. The basic image was that of a whirling comet-like
object, or hair star. Indeed, ancient artworks from Mesopotamia, Old Europe and
the New World depict Venus as a whirling star. Such imagery is especially conspicuous
in the indigenous traditions associated with the Hindu goddess Kali.
According to the various accounts, the goddesse’s frenzy dancing threatened to destroy the world.
Quote “The dread mother dances naked in the battlefield, her lowling tongue burns like a red
flame of fire, her dark tresses fly in the sky, sweeping away
sun and stars, red streams of blood run from her cloud-black limbs, and the
entire world trembles and cracks under her tread.” A recurring theme in the
Hindu accounts of Kali's rampage is the goddess's wildly disheveled hair,
reputedly capable of raising a terrible storm that blocks out the light of the Sun.
The goddess's hair, as noted by David Kinsley, is a sign of her destructive nature, quote
”Kali's unbound hair may also have a broader, indeed cosmic, significance, suggesting dissolution itself.
Considering Kali's identification with the cremation ground and death,
her loose hair may suggest the end of the world. Her hair has come apart and flies about
every which way; order has come to an end; all has returned to chaos.”
As we would understand this imagery, Venus's swirling hair not only presented
the appearance of a giant comet or tornado circling about the polar axis, it was
laden with lightning and fire and quite literally constituted a storm that
blocked out the light of the primal Sun. Hence the global myth of the giant comet
or dragon that swallowed the Sun and threatening to destroy the world.
A Sumerian hymn from the second millennium BC captures this idea perfectly.
Quote “My hair will quarrel around in heaven for you like a hurricane.” Students of myth will
remember that Kali's dance was not a solo performance. She was joined by Shiva whose
dervish-like dancing added to the apocalyptic destruction.
Shiva is Mars, as I have documented in various works. Analysis reveals that Mars features
prominently in nearly every aspect of the myth of the warrior goddess.
It was a tornado-like storm associated with Venus in fact which vacuumed up
many miles of surface material from Mars, leaving the red planet with a severely
flattened northern hemisphere. Doubtlessly, immense dust clouds of recently
catastrophically excavated material contributed much to Venus's archetypal
status as an agent of destruction and whirling dust devil, not to mention her intimate association
with a vast horde of demonic beings. Despite her many repulsive attributes, Kali remains
India's most beloved goddess to this very day. Artworks depicting the raging goddess
are ubiquitous, most emphasizing her disheveled hair and grotesquely protruding tongue.
It is the goddess's tongue that remains the most iconic and lurid of all her ghastly features.
Quote ”Kali's tongue is a problem... It hangs. It lolls. One cannot help noticing it.
In the famous temple of Kali in southern Calcutta, the image of the goddess appears to be
nothing but a tongue... The history of Kali's tongue, like the history of the goddess itself,
is a story rich in detail but poor in plot.” "We know a great deal about what the
tongue symbolized in specific texts at different periods, but we know very little about how
why, or when the different meanings of the tongue developed.” How then would we explain kali's
gigantic tongue? The fact that warrior goddesses from the New World, likewise display a protruding
tongue, attest the archetypal nature of the imagery in question.
As does the fact that cultures on both sides of the Atlantic explicitly compare
the goddess's tongue to a dagger or knife. Here too it is our opinion that the
imagery encodes the unique relationship prevailing between Mars and Venus during
a specific phase in the history of the polar configuration in which Mars appeared to move below
Venus towards Earth, presenting the appearance of a dagger-like tongue.
The fact that the red planet was described as the knife star or sword
by sky watchers from Early Mesopotamia or Egypt, is certainly germane to our hypothesis
[Music]