I painted Athena in December 2020 as part of a Goddess painting challenge, at the very beginning of my deep-dive into Goddess traditions. I painted her as a mean girl, inspired by Regina George. I had never liked Athena, and the result was an unflattering portrait.
My perception of Athena was based on the story of her punishment of Medusa. I had recently seen a YouTube video from Medusa's perspective. I wasn't yet aware of the complexity of Greek mythology, especially with respect to representations of the divine feminine. Later I learned that this story of Medusa was written by Ovid, a Roman poet, around 8 AD, well after the classical period of Greek mythology.
From Robert Graves, I read that Plato identified Athene with the Libyan Goddess Neith, "who belonged to an epoch when fatherhood was unrecognized...Virgin priestesses of Neith engaged annually in armed combat, apparently for the position of High-priestess." Herodotus writes, "Athene's garments and aegis were borrowed by the Greeks from the Libyan women, who are dressed in exactly the same way, except that their leather garments are fringed with thongs, not serpents."
Neith was a powerful Goddess. She was the patron of the city of Sais on the Nile River Delta, which also happened to be home to a medical school dating to c. 3000 BCE. Pesehet, the first named female physician in the historical record is thought to have taught at this medical school c. 2500 BCE (source). Neith was worshipped as early as predynastic times (c. 3000 BCE), and several queens of the 1st dynasty (c. 2925–2775 BCE) were named after her (source). She was the creator Goddess.
"Pottery finds suggest a Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4000 BCE; and a large number of Goddess worshipping Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about the year 3000 BCE. The First Minoan Age began soon afterwards, and Cretan culture spread to Thrace and early Helladic Greece." (source)
An inscription of Athana Potnia appears in the oldest decipherable Greek writing (Linear B) from Crete, at Knossos, in the Room of the Chariot Tablets. Athena may also be mentioned in older Linear A inscriptions, which are not yet conclusively translated. Jan Best translates part of an older inscription of a-ta-nu-ti as 'I have given' (source).
"The early twentieth century scholar Martin Persson Milsson argued that the Minoan snake goddess figurines are early representations of Athena. Nilsson and others have claimed that, in early times, Athena was either an owl herself or a bird goddess in general. In the third book of the Odyssey, she takes the form of a sea-eagle. Proponents of this view argue that she dropped her prophylactic owl-mask before she lost her wings.
'Athena, by the time she appears in art,' Jane Ellen Harrison (a British classical scholar and linguist) remarks, 'has completely shed her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figure vase-paintings she still appears with wings.'
Regarding the story of Medusa's head forming Athena's aegis, Robert Graves offers an alternate version, attributed to Byzantine Greek scholar Tzetzes, who wrote an essay on Lycophron's 3rd century B.C. poem Alexandra, explaining its cryptic references. From Tzetzes, Robert Graves reports, "Some Hellenes say that Athene had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of his skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders."
I kind of like this version, although the idea of the Great Goddess having a father is still somewhat unsettling. Indeed, in a later footnote Graves writes, "Pallas, meaning 'maiden', is an inappropriate name for the winged giant whose attempt on Athene's chastity is probably from a picture of her ritual marriage, as Athene Laphria, to a goat-king after an armed contest with her rival. The Libyan custom of goat-marriage spread to Northern Europe as part of the May Eve merrymaking." Laphria is explained later to mean "she who wins booty". He writes, "Laphria suggests that the goddess was the pursuer, not the pursued."
Jane Ellen Harrison has also described the more accepted story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as "a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions."
Finally, Graves suggests that the aegis originally described a goat-skin tunic worn by Libyan girls. Death would come to any man who removed the aegis without consent, hence the "Gorgon mask set above it and the serpent concealed in the leather pouch." Inspired by this, and by current events, I painted E Jean Carroll, Medusa, and Trump. I previously blogged about Medusa as well.
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