Before it happened we can infer that the humans who lived with the creator of the Venus of Hohle Fels 35,000 years ago acknowledged the female power in her images, while men weren’t represented at all among the magnificent animal drawings of the same era with the exception of the Animal Master or Lion Man hybrids. Even 18,000 years ago, in the Lascaux Cave, we had only a man-bird stick figure to stand for us. Differentiation was inevitable, but the wonder is the violence, brutality, viciousness, cruelty, and totality of their eventual obliteration of woman, with the exception of the Virgin Mary, as a spiritual creature worthy of reverence. The Swan Maiden And The Sons of Boreas is the story of the power struggle between man and woman for sovereignty over the world. What happened to Jezebel, though late in the story, is typical of the erasure of the Mother rite.
“Jezebel’s father King Ethbaal was the high priest of Baal, but according to the Annals of Tyre, which are now lost, he was probably actually the high priest of Astarte. Astarte was the primary Phoenician deity, a Goddess, and Baal was her son, consort, or husband, depending on the region.
“ I contend that it is this worship of a female deity that was the deepest issue in this conflict and consequently, the Goddess was removed from the story as much as possible to hide the fact of her once widespread power. The presence of the female in the divine was simply an unthinkable state to the followers of Yahweh at this time, as it is to the followers of the three Yahweh based religions today.
Called ‘Lady of Galera.’ Phoenician figure representing an ancient Mideastern deity, probably the goddess Astarte. (Luis Garcia)
“The Bible purposefully skirts the issue of the worship of the Goddess as the prime religion at the time, consistently referring to Baal as the major deity when that was not the case; indeed Baal is the consort of Astarte, who dies every year and is then reborn, and holidays of grief and celebration commemorated this yearly cycle; does this story sound familiar? In earlier times, Astarte or Ashtoreth, as she was also known, was the consort of Jehovah before the move towards monotheism, and apparently the Israelites had a bit of trouble adjusting as they continuously fell back into their old ways of worshipping the older dualistic deities.” Jezebel: Slander of The Queen of Israel, Virgin of Baal, Princess of Tyr, –26 FEBRUARY, 2019 – 20:39 MARGARET MOOSE
Seven swans in their flight, spying a lovely pool below, swooped down to bathe, and once on earth they shed their feathered cloaks to reveal the beautiful maidens underneath. The sons of Boreas who were hunting nearby saw the birds’ descent and crept closer to watch them frolic. One boy, urged on by his brothers, crept even closer and snatched one of the cloaks. The maidens, surprised, scooped up their feathers and fled into the sky except for the one whose cloak had been stolen. She’s forced by the youth to marry him with the promise that if she is not happy after a time he’ll release her back to the heavens and guarantees her assent by hiding her feathered cloak. For twelve years the swan maiden endured every pain and restriction suffered by a human woman, including childbirth and backbreaking labor and beatings until…Of two flutes found at Geissenkloesterle Cave, Germany, dated to 42-43ka, one was made from a swan’s ulna bone while another was of mammoth ivory. At Hohle Fels, where the Venus was found, flutes of vulture bone and ivory remained.
“It was at the same time swan animism made its first confirmed appearance in southern Siberia that an unknown artist from the Mal’ta community carved a mammoth ivory plate, its upper surface covered with pecked spiral patterns. As proposed by Russian archaeologist Vitaliy Larichev (1932-2014), the number and arrangement of these spiral patterns may well preserve calendrical information regarding precession, eclipse cycles, and even a canicular period of 487 years (a third of the so-called Sothic cycle of ancient Egypt). Moreover, the Mal’ta plate, along with an ancient calendar system used even today by the shamanic peoples of the Altai region, both display an acute knowledge of numeric systems based on key numbers such as 9, 12, 54, 72, 108, 216 and 432.” from The Lost Legacy of the Super Intelligent Denisovans Who Calculated Cygnocentric-based Cosmological Alignments 45,000 Years Ago, by Andrew Collin
The Denisovans are, mythologically speaking, Boreas, the god of the north wind. The Encyclopedia Of What We Don’t Know About Denisovans might have a page on their progeny: The Mal’ta population has a good claim as the ancestor of northern Eurasians, western Eurasians, and native Americans, did you know that? And there’s a third archaic human peeking up through the dirt at us, contemporaneous to them. Note: the survivors of the out of Africa bottleneck would be prone to socialization and cooperation due to low numbers and unfamiliar terrain while they encroached on populations of hominins such as Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Homo erectus whose numbers had always been precarious and were probably diminished by the Tuva eruption. And just imagine, after all the other hominins had been erased, a measly 3000-5000 years following the rise of patriarchy, from 7000-5000 years ago, there was a helluva bottleneck for us caused by rampant massacres by male-dominated tribes upon another with only a limited Y-chromosome diversity remaining to commemorate the victorious, while evidence of variation in surviving women is relatively abundant. We men almost wiped ourselves out, if that sounds familiar.
Seven times, on snowy pinions, circle round
The Delian shores, and skim along the ground:
The vocal birds, the favourites of the Nine,
In strains melodious hail the birth divine.
Oft as they carol on resounding wings,
To soothe Latona’s pangs, as many strings
Apollo fitted to the warbling lyre
In aftertimes; but ere the sacred choir
Of circling swans another concert sung,
In melting notes, the power immortal sprung
To glorious birth. A picture, this, of the white cloudlets
Fleeting around the rising sun.
Leto, the child of Titan siblings, is raped by Zeus and, when she delivers the gods Apollo and Artemis, a host of swans circles overhead. Leto is the Greek version of Latona.
“Some swan maiden tales celebrate the powerful connections between the human world and the fantastic. A number of Mongolian creation tales trace the origin of clan heroes to their powerful swan mothers. Among Siberian tribes, the hunting and killing of swans is considered a sin and an offence against this first mother. A Buryat swan maiden tale tells how the swan maiden patiently waits for her chance to recover her feathered skin only after she has produced eleven children for her hunter husband. When she asks her husband if he remembers where he hid the old skin, the husband, trusting her after so many years, obligingly shows it to her. She immediately slips it on and flies up to the roof vents. From there she declares her intention to return to heaven, and commands her children to perform special ceremonies in her honor every spring and autumn when the swans migrate. The narrative also offers one small etiological detail: A daughter with sooty hands reaches up to grab her mother’s disappearing feet; the soot wipes off on the webbed feet, leaving swans with black feet ever since.” The Swan Maiden’s Feathered Robe, In The Labyrynth (copyright © 2007 by Midori Snyder).
Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water;
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose,
While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lovely daughter
Tells to the night-star the tale of her woes.
When shall the swan, her death-note singing,
Sleep with wings in darkness furl’d?
When will heaven, its sweet bells ringing,
Call my spirit from this stormy world?
“Sadly, O Moyle, to thy winter-wave weeping,
Fate bids me languish long ages away;
Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,
Still doth the pure light its dawning delay.
When will that day-star, mildly springing,
Warm our isle with peace and love?
When will heaven, its sweet bells ringing,
Call my spirit to the fields above?
– Tom Moore
Look around in 2019. Where do you see trapped women, humiliated women, trafficked women, minimized women, diminished women, derogated women, cheapened women, disparaged women, marketed women, not to mention murdered women? And the answer is, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Mexico…now it’s your turn to name a few places. You know where they are. Feel free to name several US states, several African dictatorships. In fact, any authoritarian state crushes women. The unfreedom and inequality of women is a measure of the existence of autocracy. The swan maiden’s period of captivity, you might say. Her name is Acephale.
Boghul & Acephale 