THE CULTS OF THE MOTHER GODDESSES IN INDIA.
by w. crooke.
(Read at the Meeting of the British Association,
Bournemouth, 11th September, 1919.)
Behind many divine impersonations of the Minoan and early Hellenic theogonies appears the majestic figure of the Great Mother, who is generally benevolent. “Just as the mother,” says Dr. Farnell, “frequently stands between the children and the father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world; such at times was Athena for the Athenians; such is the Virgin for Mediterranean Christendom.”[1] But the range of the Mother cult extends beyond the Mediterranean area, in forms like those of Nina or Ishtar in Babylonia, Ashtoreth, sister of Ishtar, among the Western Semites, the great Hittite Goddess of Boghaz-Keui.[2] As regards the Western Aryans, mythographers seem generally to have reached the conclusion that goddesses of this class should not be regarded as aliens, borrowed from the pre-Aryan races in whose lands they settled, and that, as the cults of Mother Earth prevailed widely in Europe, deities like Dione, Demeter, Hera and Hestia may be accepted as old Hellenic
- ↑ Greece and Babylon, 82.
- ↑ Sir J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. Adonis, Attis, Osiris, i. 128 et seqq.
