Introduction and links to related topics Below are some short introductions. Click on the blue hyperlinked word to get more related articles.
Goddess - GODDESS: the divine Universal Mother, source of fertility, wisdom and love. Often depicted in 3 in 1 aspects of: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Her gift is Life and She is all Nature. The moon is her symbol, as are the cauldron, mirror and five-petaled flowers, to name but a few. Also called the Goddess Mother. The 4th Face of the Goddess: is that which is never seen, the dark side of the moon; the Face of Death. Some say the source of Her power.
She is the female aspect which pervades all of the universe in vast interrelationships of every possible sort, providing impetus, creative spark and more. It is capable of being perceived in many ways depending on the perceiver and transcends time as well as space. Most perceptions of the great goddesses are valid in their own aspects and are or can be of considerable value.
Pagans often choose the archetypal maiden goddess as patroness of things fresh and new, the mother or lady as patroness of challenge, passion, creation and nurturing and the crone goddess for patroness of wisdom and judgment. Such perceptions enable us to form close emotional and magickal links with goddesshood.
Polytheology - Intellectual speculations concerning the natures of the Gods and Goddesses and Their relations to the world in general and humans in particular; etc., etc., etc.: see Thealogy, Theology. I’m now using this term instead of Theoilogy.
Ishtar - Ishtar (Chaldean) Ancient Babylonian deity, eldest of heaven and earth, daughter of Anu (the lord of the heavens). Her worship was fervently pursued by the multitude both in Babylonia and Assyria, although she was known under various names in different localities -- Anunit, Nina, Nanna, Innanna, Atar -- even when represented as the consort of Marduk (Babylonia) and of Assur (Assyria).
In popular conception, she was the bounteous nature goddess, queen of beauty and joyousness, equivalent to Aphrodite or Venus, however, rather than Ceres, although synthesizing certain attributes of both these goddesses. Her other aspect is as the grim, stern harvester, withdrawing the life-forces so that everything during this period shall have sleep and rest. This aspect was stressed by the warlike Assyrians, who represented her as armed with bow and arrows, and hence she becomes their chief goddess of battles; whereas the Babylonians stressed the mother and child idea. Her symbol was an eight-rayed star.
Ishtar, with Shamash and Sin (the life-force, the sun, and the moon), formed an important triad of divinities. In astronomy Ishtar was a name of the planet Venus -- the double aspect of the goddess being made to correspond to the morning and evening star.
Ishtar likewise is mystically the theogonic representation of the earth itself in its productive and fecund aspects as the mother of all, and hence essentially to be considered as prakriti emanating from mulaprakriti.
Muluk-taoos - Muluk-taoos, Muluk-taus (Arabic, Yezidi) The lord peacock; symbol of the principal deity worshiped by the Yezidis, who is regarded as accomplishing the work of creation under the command of the supreme Deity.
Although looked upon as a fallen angel and the source of all evil, he is not named the Devil, but is the emblem of intellectual pride on the one hand, and of hundred-eyed cosmic intelligence or intellect on the other: referring to the equivalent Persian legend of the creation of the peacock by the Evil One. The hundred-eyed peacock, however, may also stand for initiation, wisdom, the bird of the gods and goddesses connected with secret learning (SD 2:514; TG 218).
The Shemitic Muluk is identical with the Hebrew melech (ruler or lord); also the Hebrew mal''ach (messenger, angel).
Spinning - SPINNING: archaic means by which raw fiber is spun into thread with a distaff or spindle. In archaic times, it was figuratively believed that the Great Goddess spun all of existence from raw chaos into reality. Spinning Magick was used among the ancient Norse and Germans as a solitary or group ritual. The Norns, the crone-goddesses of north and east Europe, were said to spin fates and destinies.
Meat-eater - Mansahari. Those who follow a nonvegetarian diet. They are described in the following passage from the obscure Mansahara Parihasajalpita Stotram:
"Those who eat the flesh of other creatures are nothing less than gristle-grinders, blood-drinkers, musclemunchers, sinew-chewers, carcass-crunchers, fleshfeeders - those who make their throat a garbage pit and their stomach a graveyard - mean, angry, loathsomely jealous, confused and beset by covetousness, who without restraint would lie, deceive, kill or steal to solve immediate problems. They are flesh-feeders, loathsome to the Gods, but friendly to the asuras, who become their Gods and Goddesses, the blood-sucking monsters who inhabit Naraka and deceptively have it decorated to look like the pitriloka, the world of the fathers. To such beings the deluded meat-eaters pay homage and prostrate while munching the succulent flesh off bones."
See: vegetarianism, vegetarian.
Magna Mater - Magna Mater (Latin) The Great Mother, the mother of the gods, a title given to many Asiatic goddesses at the time when the Romans were in Asia; identified by the Greeks with Rhea, daughter of Ouranos and Gaia, wife of Kronos, and mother of Zeus and other gods. In Asia the name was given specially to Cybele, whose worship later became degraded into licentious rites. Every nation had its own chief goddess, or mother goddess, who was called Great Goddess, exactly as the Latins did with their own Magna Mater.
Taurus
- Taurus The bull; second sign of the zodiac, a constellation containing the Pleiades. In astrology a fixed earthy sign, the night house of Venus, corresponding to the throat, neck, and base of the brain. It is the bull among the four sacred animals who are the Maharajas of the four quarters, and presides over the south. Called in Sanskrit Rishabha, dedicated to Yama, the god of the Underworld, it stands in Hindu reckoning for Pranava or Aum (12 Signs of the Zodiac). Frequently it is connected with Logos, Verbum, Vach -- for it is another form or aspect of the Third Logos.
Taurus stands for both sun and moon gods, its symbol being sometimes a bull and sometimes a cow, the Third Logos mystically being considered androgyne, differentiation into the two opposites not yet having supervened. Thus Taurus was usually connected with sun gods, such as Osiris; and at others connected with moon goddesses -- Isis, Diana, Cybele, etc. -- with the moon, and with the far higher Magna Mater (great mother), source of Taurus as the Second Logos, a distinctly feminine aspect.
Its symbol represents the cow horns which are also a symbol of the moon and lunar goddesses. "Ancient mystics saw the ansated cross, in the horns of Taurus (the upper portion of the Hebrew Aleph) pushing away the Dragon, and Christians connected the sign and constellation with Christ. St. Augustine calls it ''the great City of God,'' and the Egyptians called it the ''interpreter of the divine voice,'' the Apis-Pacis of Hermonthis" (TG 323).
Designated by the first letter of the alphabet, Taurus is described in many ancient systems as being number one among the signs, because this ascription took place and became static at a time in past history when Taurus opened the spring, and hence was reckoned as the first. Blavatsky suggests that the constellation Taurus was in the first sign of the zodiac at the beginning of kali yuga (3102 BC.), and consequently the equinoctial point fell therein (TG 387).
Associating the Hebrew patriarchs with the signs of the zodiac, Cain presides over Taurus (IU 2:465).
Anunit - Anunit (Chaldean) One of the popular nature goddesses of the early Babylonian peoples, who in one aspect is called Ishtar. Her worship was prominent at Sippar in the later Babylonian period. A sanctuary was erected in her honor by Sargon of Akkad at Babylon (3800 BC). Blavatsky held that Anunit was the planet Venus as the morning star, whereas the same planet as the evening star was Ishtar of Erech.
Pantheon - A collection or group of Gods and Goddesses in a particular religious or mythical structure, commonly regional i.e. the Greek Pantheon.
Goddess - GODDESS: the divine Universal Mother, source of fertility, wisdom and love. Often depicted in 3 in 1 aspects of: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Her gift is Life and She is all Nature. The moon is her symbol, as are the cauldron, mirror and five-petaled flowers, to name but a few. Also called the Goddess Mother. The 4th Face of the Goddess: is that which is never seen, the dark side of the moon; the Face of Death. Some say the source of Her power.
She is the female aspect which pervades all of the universe in vast interrelationships of every possible sort, providing impetus, creative spark and more. It is capable of being perceived in many ways depending on the perceiver and transcends time as well as space. Most perceptions of the great goddesses are valid in their own aspects and are or can be of considerable value.
Pagans often choose the archetypal maiden goddess as patroness of things fresh and new, the mother or lady as patroness of challenge, passion, creation and nurturing and the crone goddess for patroness of wisdom and judgment. Such perceptions enable us to form close emotional and magickal links with goddesshood.
Norns - Norns (Scandianvian Norse). The three sister goddesses in the Edda, who make known to men the decrees of Orlog or Fate. They are shown as coming out of the unknown distances enveloped in a dark veil to the Ash Yggdrasil (q.v.), and "sprinkle it daily with water from the Fountain of Urd, that it may not wither but remain green and fresh and strong" (Asgard and the Gods). Their names are "Urd", the Past; "Werdandi", the Present; and "Skuld", the Future, "which is either rich in hope or dark with tears". Thus they reveal the decrees of Fate "for out of the past and present the events and actions of the future are born" (loc. cit.).
Pantheon - A Collection or group of Gods and Goddesses in a particular religious or mythical structure. Example are
Monogenes - Monogenes (Ancient Greek). Lit., "the only-begotten"; a name of Proserpine and other gods and goddesses.
Priestesses - Priestesses. Every ancient religion had its priestesses in the temples. In Egypt they were called the Sa and served the altar of Isis and in the temples of other goddesses.
Canephorœ was the name given by the Greeks to those consecrated priestesses who bore the baskets of the gods during the public festivals of the Eleusinian Mysteries. There were female prophets in Israel as in Egypt, diviners of dreams and oracles; and Herodotus mentions the Hierodules, the virgins or nuns dedicated to the Theban Jove, who were generally the Pharaohs’ daughters and other Princesses of the Royal House. Orientalists speak of the wife of Cephrenes, the builder of the so-called second Pyramid, who was a priestess of Thoth.
(See "Nuns".)
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