4. The
Bull of Heaven
The God JHVH, acc. to K.G.Kuhn[1] “plural of majesty” of Jah with the
original stem, Jau, has been the object of worship back to times immemorial,
and He has, acc. to Enno Littmann,
some connection with the Indo-Iranian Dyauh Pita and Juppiter and Zeus with
Dio as the stem (by word of mouth[2]).
But
I would also like to call the reader's attention to the old cultic call: Jo,
Ju, Ja, in Athens Eleleu ju ju, conf the biblical Hallelu-ja. In Rome the old
king of the primordial golden time and the Saturnalia is greeted with Jo Saturnalia. In Crete the
newborn/reborn Zeus is greeted with the cultic call: “Jo Megiste Koure...” In Athens the call mourns the old king’s
death and celebrates the young king, Theseus, coming to the throne.
The call, Hyês Attês, is in our opinion “Ia Father”. A Greek inscription
in Pisidia speaks about “the Hyiênians”[3],
the name of the town is, acc. to G.E.Bean: Hyia. This transcription of
Anatolian sounds makes it rather safe to assume Hyê = Hyie = Iia. Pisidian
names, Trokôndos, Eia, Ias bear evidence to the gods Tarku- & Iia[4].
The two last mentioned are girls' names. The God is the symbol of an
androgynous ideal, and in the Hellenistic age Ja is the female partner of Attis.
Ph.H.J.Houwink ten Cate[5]
has collected important material on Iia.
This
name belongs to a very old tradition around the changing of universal kingship.
Saturn is king, the Oschophoria-feast celebrates an old king’s death, a new
king's coming. In the Old Test the holy name is connected to the Lord's
epiphany, in our opinion his coming to the temple to be enthroned as JHVH mlk,
as king of the universe on the throne of cherubim in the debir (“Holy of Holies”), cf.
that Jesus is given the holy name as enthroned over the universe, Phil 2. It
all goes back to the very old “kingship of heaven”-motif where the young god
kills the Lord of chaos to take revenge for his killing his father. In Crete
this is still visible, as Zeus is the young god being born in secrecy, hid from
the eyes of the cruel god-king, Cronos. Uranos, the god of heaven, is castrated
by the leader of the demons, Cronos, but Zeus takes revenge and conquers the kingdom of heaven.
In Ugarit the Bull-El wants his son Jamm to be Jaw and king of the
universe. Fighting for the kingship (mlk)
is the main motif of the great Baal-epos. Also Typhon, who claims the
kingship from Zeus, is called Jao on seals from the Hellenistic period.
Johs. Lyd. de mens 4,53 it is
told that JAO in the Phoenician tongue means “supernatural light” (phos noetos).
A coin from Hellenistic Gaza and often dealt with in scientific
literature shows on one side a warrior, on the other side a god sitting on a
winged wheel with a bird sitting on his hand, in our opinion the mystical Phoenix.
At his feet a baitylos (a stone
raised as a house for a god) with human features. The god on the flying wheel
is called JHW[6]. E.L.Sukenik,
W.F.Albright, R.Dussaud read the inscription as JHD = Judah, but this is not
accepted by Cook, Zeus, III, p.1072. We
will try to show that JHW gives good meaning, cf. Mandaic gods like Ju-rabba
and the peacock,
Jo-sjamin. The peacock played an important role in the religious world of
Gaza, cf. Prokopios of Gaza's description of the peacock in his Ekphrasis (P.Friedländer, Spätantiker Gemäldezyklus in Gaza,
1939).
Ju-rabba (pronounced Yurba[7])
is “the Great Yo, whom the Jews call Adonai”. Jo-shamin, the peacock, can be
compared with the eagle of Baalshamin, he is also called “the strength of the
waters”[8]
like the Sumerian Ea and the West Semitic El.
J.P.Milik[9] mentions
Zeus Sima as one of 4 gods connected to a sanctuary outside Beirut and he
translates: “Zeus the Name”.
In Gaza there was a picture of the Greek goddess Jo with a cow at her
side. Is she the female partner of JHW? This goddess seems to be of Syrian
origin.
Acc to a tradition, the people of Antioch knock at one another's doors on
a certain day every year asking for a resting place for Jo's spirit[10].
The story about her wanderings, or her being carried off by Zeus Picus, king of
the west, is a close parallel to the abduction of Europa. Like Europa being wed
to Asterios, poor Jo is held captive by Argos Panoptes, like Asterios a symbol
of the starry sky. When his head was cut off by Hermas and Jo released, his
many eyes were transferred to the peacock’s
tail. The peacock is a symbol of the sky with its 1000 lights. The name
Argos means “the bright one”.
The Gnostic-Coptic
miscellany Pistis Sophia speaks about
the books of Yew (ieou), “which I
have made Enoch write in Paradise, discoursing with him out of the tree of the Gnosis
and out of the tree of life. And I made him deposit them in the rock Ararad”[11].
Jesus calls Yew “the father of my father”, i.e. the highest God. He is also
called “the First Man Yew”. How this name is related to the name Iao also
mentioned in Pistis Sophia is not clear.
The coin from Gaza shows us a god travelling/flying in the course of the
sun to the vision of the primordial light on the primordial mountain. The
mystical bird, which is itself a symbol of the light, shows him the way. He has
domesticated it.
It cannot be proved that this god has a consort, Jo, but it could be
proved that a certain pattern exists: a goddess, Io/Europa, has to be liberated
from being held captive by a god representing heaven or primordial unity seen
as the world mountain or the cosmic snake.
|
Duality:_god –
goddess =
Creation/procreation |
Unity: the
goddess held captive by the god of eternity = Passive
mystical unity |
|
Pherecydes: the
primordial couple Zas /Sandan –
Xthonie |
Pherecydes:
Chronos ("Time") creating the world mountain, the primordial world
massive, the pyramid with its five corners out of his own sperm. |
|
Kadmos – Harmonia ( Europa) |
Harmonia
held captive by the dragon of Ares |
|
Philo of
Byblos: El Cronos –
The wives of Uranos taken by El Cronos. |
Uranos on
top of his wife united to her. |
Kadmos’ fight with Typho is a variant of Sandan’s fight.
Kadmos and Europa are “East” (Sem.: qdm)
and “West” (´rb): Duality.
Argos and Typho are both put to sleep = trance by the young god playing
the flute.
The text for the old Hittite purulli-feast is obviously a forerunner of
the Typho-myth, and describes how the Weathergod (dIM) is defeated by the
dragon, Illuianka. To finally conquer the snake, a goddess must give herself to
a mortal man in a place called Ziggaratta, a high mountain.
That this alone is able to bring defeat upon the monster, is seen from
the structure dealt with above: the dragon is mystical unity of male and female
gender. By establishing the holy polarity between man and woman, the first
creative wedlock has come into existence. The purpose of the purulli-feast is
that the country should be firmly grounded/secure (Hitt.:pahsanu). From the descriptions of Typho in late Hellenistic time
(Nonnos: “polymorpheous”, cf. Hesiod “tireless”), it is important to note the
unstable, latent, floating, amorphous nature of the monster[12].
This unstructured nature is even imposed upon Zeus when he is defeated by the
dragon.
The above-mentioned main structure in West-semitic religion has already been
dealt with by W.Daum. On the front page of his book, Ursemitische Religion, there is a beautiful picture of the young
child-like god liberating a goddess covered with leaves from an old god
pictured as the coiled cosmic snake with a body coiling upwards with a
demon-like lion's head.This picture is from a South Arabian temple. The motif
shown here is almost similar, but with fewer coils, and the mystical rosette on
the snake's breast.
7th cent. B.C. from Curium, Cyprus (Rawlinson, p.323).
Typho is seen as a double-snake. He has a female partner, Echidne. He is
a giant reaching from the sky to the bottom of the sea. As a matter of fact,
his name indicates that he is also the cosmic paradise mountain,
Tsaphon/Typhon, and in a Hittite version of the myth he is a gigantic
stone-pillar cut down by the sun-god and the weather god. The primordial snake
and the primordial massive mountain are closely connected symbols.
The
JAO-gems from the Hellenistic Middle East show a warrior named Jao, and as his
feet 2 snakes and a cock’s head: the kundalini-double snake ascends and is
turned into the bird of ecstasy. The Cilician Typhon is pictured in the same
way with snakes as legs. In fact, this creature must be seen in connection with
the South-Anatolian god Ja.
On a list of priests serving at
the Corycian cave where, acc to the Typhon-myth, this monster had its lair, we
find the names Tarkymbies, Eianbies, Trokozarmasa, Janzarmas, acc. to
E.Herzfeld[13] proof of
the gods Tarku and Jan.
Acc. to Philo of Byblos
Jao is hailed in Phoenician mysteries as the supernatural light. Typhon-Jao is
primordial totality, the primal mystical unity of the universe. It can be seen
as shapeless matter being cut/divided into two by Zeus’s sickle.
The first gem carries the inscription: Jao Abrasax. The Greek letters of
the word Abrasax, or Abraxas, have the numerical value of 365, which makes
Abrasax a name for the god Aiôn, the Hellenistic god for time and eternity.
This god, Aiôn, is mostly pictured as a man standing with a snake coiling
around his torso, ascending in seven coils and placing its head on the god’s
forehead. The likeness to the Indian kundalini-snake rising through 7 cakras to
the scull seems very obvious.
From being the younger aspect of the highgod, the Bull, the South
Anatolian god, Ja, has developed more into a personification of the highgod as
primordial reality experienced in the mystical vision. As proved by
H.Th.Bossert[14] the Roman
god, Janus, has an Anatolian forefather: a man with a double face stands before
the god as his priest or vizier. His double face indicates that he is an
ecstatic, and one with primordial reality (he has made two into One).
Zan, Janus, Diana: the -n is not an independent sound, but a nasal sound
attached to the vowel (also known from Tarqiunius, Triambe, Jambe). It is
well-known from Polish.
Reiteration
is also a common feature in Anatolian languages:
Ja, Ieie
paian, Aiaia.
Kush,
Kaukasus
Ar, Ariarathe,
Urartu
A very old Roman god is Janus.
He is the god of all beginning, the primeval god. He has his female counterpart
in Diana, goddess of the moon as pointed out by E.Preller whose excellent
description of Roman Mythology[15]
has a chapter devoted to this god. He is in our opinion the old high god
stemming from Anatolia. Janus is the God of living waters: He has a son called
Fontus (“wellspring”). He is the creator of nature. But the Anatolian high god
called Ja (with a nasal) has as his son the guardian of the gate of the sun,
and as this gate has two pillars and is the symbol of primordial unity split
into two, there are often two guardians seen as the primordial twins. This is
the reason why Janus is also the god of gates. When the Romans were involved in
war, the two doors of the small temple were opened. We may assume that these
two doors were the two gates through which the sun enters the visible universe
at dawn and leaves at sunset. By opening the doors there will be wide space and
free passage for the sun to run its course - and for the sun warrior to create
“Lebensraum” (space for life) in primordial massiveness symbolised by the
dragon or the primordial mountain or both - for this is the old Indogermanic
purpose of war.
It seems as if these
highgods from Anatolia are so closely connected to their female counterpart
that the wife often bears a name which is only a kind of feminine gender of the
name of the male god
Janus - Diana
Dio (Zeus) - Dione
Zas (Sandan) - Sauska
Faunus - Fauna
The last mentioned
is an old god of folk religion and farming. As in the Anatolian myth connected
to the cult of Sabazios he changed himself into a snake and then made himself
guilty of having intercourse with his daughter, after he had made her drunk and
whipped her naked body with twigs[16].
The snake as the symbol of sexual power, the intoxication and the gravest
promiscuous behaviour are also typical of the old Anatolian religion centred
around the cult of the Great Hunter.
The most obvious Roman
representative of the Great Hunter is Picus, the young hunter[17].
He is seen hunting by Circe and she wants love from him. The young man is not
willing and in revenge he is changed into a woodpecker and now in his great
anger and frustration he beats the trunks of the wood with his strong beak (the
hunter being an enemy to the vegetation). The young hunter is the young
ecstatic losing his ecstatic energy by his fatal meeting with the female sex.
But Faunus and Picus are not clear-cut types. Faunus has the demonic behaviour
of the hunter and Picus has the tragic death of the god of vegetation: the
faithful Canens roams through wild nature seeking him for 6 days and nights.
(The women seeking and mourning for the dead god of vegetation.)
The name Ju/Jaw/Jahu/Djau
(the many variants are witnesses to the antiquity of the name) must be an old
name of the highgod. Even the myth of the wanderings of the moon-cow Jo carries
a remnant of this old name for the moon as the golden horns of the heavenly
bull. He survives in Anatolian folk-religion as Menotyrannos, as Attis/Papas (=
Father), as the Taurobolium, and as the divine bull slain by Mithras. It is
still, both in the mysteries of Mithras and in the Taurobolium, the life-fluids
of the bull, the blood (or semen) that is most important. G.Widengren has shown
that in the Babylonian New Year's ritual a bull is sacrificed and hailed as
“Great bull, High bull, Divine bull, Shining bull, that enlightens (the
darkness)”. Acc. to Widengren the bull is a kind of scape-goat and the cultic
representation of a suffering and dying god of the Tammuz-type[18],
and Widengren draws the parallel to the Yom Kippur-ritual with the offering of
a young bull and a buck and a ram, and even to Is 53[19].
Now it is important to
remember that Yom Kippur was one of the very few occasions where the holy JHVH-name
could be mentioned (6 times over the bull, 3 times for the buck and one time
for Urim and Tumim, the holy lot-casting device). Note the triple structure of
both the sacrifice and the mentioning of the divine name.[20]
Characteristic of the
JHVH-god is the personal relations to his followers. He is called father (just
like Attis = Papas) as can be seen from the name Ab-raham/Ab-ram (= Father is
the High). The foster mother of Moses is called Bitjah “Daughter of Jah” (1.Chron 4,18). A man from Kuntillet Ajrud
on the Border of Sinai is called hljw = “Jaw is (maternal) uncle”[21].
The meaning of the name Job is “Where is the (divine) Father?” cf. Ikabod =
“Where is the Glory?”
Ja is the name of the bull-god, or perhaps rather the name of his son
(Ea, Jw in Ugarit). It seems a name so old that it has stiffened into cultic
cries with a lost meaning: Eleleu ju ju, Je Paian (Paian is the “healing
dawn”, acc. to Kereny,: Asclepios), Jo. It is not used as a name for
Attis, but for his female partner Ja, who most certainly is only the female
aspect of an androgynous numen. The
same development can be seen with Jo, the cow held captive by the highgod,
Argos. As the divine cow closely connected to the moon, she is also the female
partner of the androgynous numen of the highgod.
From Salamis in Cyprus come the two brothers, Teucer and Ajas (Tarku
& Ja), Teucer being the founder of this city. The strong one, Ajas, kills
himself, and out of his blood a new flower appears, much like the hyacinth,
bearing letters which spell Ai! Ai! – the name of the hero[22].
It seems that Teucer with his bow and Ajas are the same as the pair Apollo and
Hyacinthos. In both names we find a suffix -ak (Ajax,Hya-ac-inthos) added to
the stem, Ja. The same suffix is found in the Lydian word for vine, môlax, a stem which must have some
connection to the magical plant saving Odysseus on the island of Circe[23]
“in the language of the gods called môly”
acc. to Dioskurides from Cilicia, a Cappadocian word[24].
The
island of Aiaia with Circe singing at her loom is the paradise island, conf.
the Syrian goddess, ´Athirath, with her spindle. Here Odysseus kills a very big
and splendid stag. Here Hermes shows
him the magical plant which is the mystical union, not of four leaves, but of
the two contrasting colours, black and white. It can only be culled by the
gods. Circe is the aunt of Medea, the same names figure in the
heroic deeds of Perseus (Medusa and Gorgo). The Golden Fleece is
guarded by Aeétes at the top of a tree guarded by a dragon (the symbol
of ecstasy at the top of the world pillar). Aiaia, the island of Circe,
must be the paradisiacal numen of the highgod Iia, and the union of Odysseus
with Circe is the mystical union of male with female as an important stage on
the journey to paradise. The island, Aiaia, is at the centre of the world: it
was impossible to decide what was east and what was west and where the sun was
setting[25].
Butterworth[26] has proved
that Circe’s island is the Omfalos (“navel”) of the earth, and Circe is the
goddess sitting at the centre of the universe weaving the thread of destiny
(perhaps also the patterns of cosmos; the motif seems very old and common to
Syrian and Nordic religion).
In
Iran the just man coming to heaven will meet a beautiful virgin, the daena (perhaps from dhéna, an Indian word for cow). She is, acc. to Widengren, the
Indo-Iranian mother-goddess with whom the king has to celebrate his hieros
gamos, his holy union[27].
In Mesopotamia the king has to ascend the temple tower with its seven levels as a symbol of the
paradise mountain. On the summit he has to celebrate holy union with a woman,
who, acc. to Herodot, must be of native birth.
The
female part of the hieros gamos is a representative of the land, the earth. With
her pigs Circe is a representative, an “avatara” of the earth goddess, Demeter.
The union with Circe is eternal bliss, mystical ecstasy seen as a state of
inactivity Odysseus has to break off from as his men urge him to continue their
journey. Like Demeter with Demophon, Circe has a magical juice, a life-renewing
unction. When anointed with this, the men look younger and stronger.
We
find traces of a very old and very important myth about the sun-hero travelling
in the course of the sun or to the land of the sun, to the paradise-mountain or
-island. Also Perseus' attack on Medusa is a penetration into transcendent
mystical vision. The vision of Medusa will turn the hero, not only into a state
of inactivity, but immobility, turn him into stone. Note that poor Enkidu is
turned into some mystical immobility after confronting Huwawa.
A
reason for this motif could be the fact that mystic vision can only be obtained
in a state of absolute tranquility, all the senses of the body sleeping. This
state threatens to be lethal: in India the state of samadhi will either kill the mystic within three days or let him
return to life as god and guru.
To
find Medusa's cave west of the sunset, Perseus has to rob and use an eye taken
from the Graeae, three old women having only one eye to share: the 3 Graeae and
the 3 Gorgos are symbols of utmost reality often seen as a trinity, and the
magical eye by which one is able to see through transcendent darkness, the
primeval mountain transcending all differentiation, is the mystical vision, the
eye of the soul[28].
A Kassite God was named Bugas, cf. Slav. bog, Vedic bhaga; old
Pers. baga. Acc. to Nehring[29]
the root could best be understood on the background of a very old Near Eastern
word for “bull”, buga~buka, Southern
Turkish boga, Uigurish (8-10.cent.) buqa, Mongol. (13.cent.) buka, German Bock, Armen. buc[30]. In Kassite
there is also a horse called Bugas, so it seems likely that the word is more a
divine numen than a real god[31].
It can also be used as a title “prince” (Balkan,
ibd.). The old bull symbolism is still alive, shedding divine glory on chiefs
and gods.
In Asia Minor we find a god, Ijaja/ Aya, wife of the Sun-god, Simegi. Why
do we not find a male god with this name? Because he is overshadowed by the
Mesopotamian Ea, also well known in Anatolian pantheons. We have, among the
many divine mountains, a Mt Iya(u)-wanda, where -wanda is a very common ending[32].
There is a river with the same name (ibd.).
W.F.Albright has already in 1961 in
a short note[33] pointed out
the amazing similarity between the Neolithic culture dug out by Mellaart in
Catal Hüyük and the 2nd and latest pre-ceramic period in Jericho. It proves to
this famous archaeologist that the prehistoric civilisations from Pisidia
stretched through all the Middle East. Ch. Picard concludes in a commentary on
the same subject[34] that the
findings made in Anatolia must from now on “be taken into direct consideration
in all comparative studies” of the Near Eastern pattern.
Our small excursion to South Arabia
has proved to what an amazing degree some religious patterns can survive
thousands of years. Religion has proved to be a most conservative phenomenon
building on tradition. Especially in a cultural periphery in the deserts of
South Arabia some motifs can remain unchanged for an enormous span of
centuries. In the last chapter of this book we shall see how old motifs from
Catal Hüyük like the wild hunt, the changing of men into leopards/wolves, the
charging of the wild boar, the coiling snakes have survived in the northern
periphery of our culture, in Scandinavia.
But our small side-glance to modern
South Arabia has also proved that traces of very old folk religion are stored
up in the fairytales, a fact already noticed by the German scholar Otto Huth
(to whom we will return later).
In Hellenistic times the main god of
Inner Anatolia was Men (the moon). That the sacred bull of Catal Hüyük was an
epiphany of the moon god cannot be seen from the archaeological evidence but it
comes out very clearly in the South Arabian version of the old pattern.