We find in science that it is the genetic markers in the female that are passed down, making the female progenitors of the human race the ones with the power.  It makes one consider if early civilizations feared this power and thus the insurgence of a male dominate sky god bent on supplanting and dominating the earth goddess from which he emerged.

At the beginning of recorded history, of recorded myth and legend, God and Goddess stand united in their power and their being.  Using myths for hundreds of cultures as a basis, the hypothesis would stand that humanity began with a Matricentric or egalitarian societies.  Matricentric, being societies that were centered on the authority of females, rule and decisions were placed in the hands of women, as males were warriors, hunters and did not live as long, therefore the females of these societies were left to create their own rules and government.  Egalitarian societies were more balanced, with power falling on both male and female elders equally.  Based on the evolution of mythology one can see how this balance of belief is reflected in the gods and goddesses above.  From the matricentric cultures we have the development of the Mother Goddess; the Earth from which all life is born.  She is represented by Ki in Sumerian myth, Nertha of the Norse, Danu of the Celts, Kabau of the Akkadians and Gaea of the Greeks.  From her was born the gods, Sun Gods who were at once sons and lovers, being born by her and then consumed.  As humankind evolved into more egalitarian cultures we see the god become more consort than child, equal and still born of the earth.  These representations of the earth honored that life came from the womb of women.  It gave honor to both the female and the male, showing that neither was complete without the other.  And then evolved the patriarchal societies, and the monotheistic.

In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, one can clearly see both an egalitarian and patriarchal creation story side by side. They were written centuries apart, the myth about Adam and Eve,  was written prior to the creation of them both at the same time.  God sees that it is not good for man to be alone and so creates him a help meet.  He causes Adam to sleep and “the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto man.” (Genesis 2:22).  Bringing Eve out of Adam and presenting her to him places her in a subservient position, the evidence of a patriarchal mentality.  And in a more egalitarian version “And God created humans in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27).

Further evidence of the shift to a patriarchal mentality is the domination of the Sun god over the goddess.  Earth becomes subjugated, losing her power and potency, we see this in the evidence of Aphrodite, a reincarnation of the Goddess Ishtar who is fierce and unconquered, but in the Greek patriarchy she becomes a spoiled, haughty, flighty female without the substance of her former self.

Eve and Pandora, once creatrix goddess’ of their cultures, shrink into shadow, losing their power as they become subjects to the male superior societies in which they are surrounded.  It is the fear of losing power, of becoming emasculated by the female deity, as seen with Cronos’ castration of his father Uranus at the urging of Gaea, the Earth Mother.  It is this fear turns Eve, the womb of life to the “the lance of the demon”, “the road of iniquity” “the sting of the scorpion”, “a daughter of falsehood, the sentinel of Hell”, “the enemy of peace” and “of the wild beast, the most dangerous.”  It turns Pandora into the bearer of all the gifts of man, from the holder of Hope, the cause of man’s pain and misfortune.  She is the bane of man’s existence, born as punishment for knowledge and civilization.

In the middle ages, this was further advanced, to an almost hysteric level.  The church elders draw upon scripture, urging submission and silence upon women, arguing that “Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression”.  It was Eve who was tempted so the early Fathers of the Church blamed her and all women thereafter responsible for sin and the Fall of man.

Woman and Man were created through science and through myth as one; their physical union is the creation of life and in our ancient past both were honored for their place in the catalyst of life and society.  But through fear and aggression, ignorance and the need for power, the balance shifted and the union of Male and Female was lost.  Even now, humanity struggles to find our balance, to shift the power from one hand to the other, and ideally into both, so that the scales are balanced once more.

All societies of man have sought to answer how we came in to being.  It is the greatest goal of man to have an answer to the mystery of life.  It is not enough to simply be alive, we need to know we matter, have a purpose.  In order for us to search for that purpose we need to know where we came from.  All cultures have a creation myth, and to the Greeks everything began with the four great powers, Chaos, Gaia, Tartaros and Eros.  Unlike the monotheistic genesis of creation that the Judeo-Christian faith follows, the Greeks were created out of the void, Chaos. An unplanned void, a void that had a beginning.  Unlike the omnipotent God of Christians, who has no beginning and no end, Greek mythology begins at a beginning, which means their gods and deities had a beginning and if they had a beginning, unlike the Christian God, they have an end.

Chaos is the unfathomable void, from which life is formed, the swirling mass of energy, like the forces of energy that generated the Big Bang.  From Chaos is life and from life was born Mother Earth, Gaia.  Gaia is the womb from which man and gods were born.  The Greeks were an agrarian culture and their life came from the earth, so there was much significance in their creation coming from the ample bosom of the earth.  Life springs from the ground and when we die we return to it.  The opposite of life is death, and Tartaros, though not a being of death, is the depthless prison into which the Titans were thrust, in essence ending their life.  Tartaros is both a place and a being, the inevitable void, the unexplained, the thing to be feared that was even deeper down than the Underworld. Life and death, chaos. These elements bound together, held together for all creation by Eros.  God of love and passion, on him the Greeks placed great emphasis.  Physical love and passion, not the hearts and flowers type, but in the purest most primal essence, for without love and sexual encounters life would not be created. It was from these four beings that all life could grow out of. From creation, Hesiod shows the gods, a mirror image of the ideals of man.  They have the same flaws and desires, simply amplified.  It is from their lives that we can draw an image of ancient Greek life.  How man and woman related, how children and their parents interacted.  We see an idealized, more dramatic version, but it is still a blue print of Greek life.

The Greeks were a patriarchal society in which the father’s word was law.  Women were subservient to men, the vessels of their passions, the wombs for their children.  They were also a society in which social status and achievements were highly valued, sons were desired and yet feared by their fathers.  Desired to carry on the family name, to achieve a sense of immortality, yet feared because the fathers knew that they would someday age and die, become useless while their suns replaced them.  Sons both respected and resented their fathers.  It could have been the competitive nature of their culture that the sons would strive to surpass their fathers, to gain control over them, even in the eyes of their mothers.  There was conflict and pride in every encounter.  The competition so deeply ingrained that the sons sought to replace their fathers in the devotion of wives and mothers.  In a culture where women were not held in as high esteem, mothers were sacred.  Sons were devoted to their mothers and their mothers to them, a strange symbiotic relationship that was not reflected in the relationship men had with their wives.  Mothers were revered, wives were owned. The Greeks were a culture of assorted myths and beliefs, beliefs that came to them from other cultures and were seamlessly integrated into their own.  They were devout in a way our modern society cannot fully understand.  They did not have the prayers and churches like we do.  Their religion was a part of their history and culture.  Gods and man were separate and yet not.  Their gods were not all powerful beings that could not die.  They had weaknesses and mortal flaws.  Jealousies and passions very much life mortal mans. They believed in a universe that was ruled by gods who were not the ultimate, omnipotent creature, where life begins and ends, their gods had a beginning, could be killed and die.  They were called deathless gods, yet they were not eternal. The Greeks were pragmatic in the belief that all things came to an end, even the gods would someday end.  The gods did not age, but they were not eternal.  They had a beginning and thus an end.  A universe created by gods that had a beginning shows that there is an inevitable end to all things.  The Greeks did not believe in eternal life, their stories, epics and tragedies always came to an inevitable end.  Heroes would die and cease to exist.  Death in Hades was not a pleasant experience, they did not believe in a resurrection or a heaven the way that the Judeo-Christian faith does.  A polytheistic faith answered their questions about things in the universe that they could not comprehend, but they did not have a belief in eternal life.  For the Greeks the only way to achieve immortality was to achieve glory, the kind of glory that would be sung about for the ages.