To: All Msg #47, Aug2393 03:00PM Subject: Re: AthenaVenusAphrodite In article 25aa52$ql5@b

From:    Karl Kluge
To:      All                                    Msg #47, Aug-23-93 03:00PM
Subject: Re: Athena-Venus-Aphrodite

Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI
From: kckluge@glasnost.eecs.umich.edu (Karl Kluge)
Message-ID: 
Newsgroups: talk.origins

In article <25aa52$ql5@bigguy.eng.ufl.edu> greg@irl.ise.ufl.edu (Greg O'Rear)
writes:

   From: greg@irl.ise.ufl.edu (Greg O'Rear)
   Newsgroups: talk.origins
   Date: 23 Aug 1993 11:37:06 GMT

   Since there is some confusion about Velikovsky's assertion that Pallas
   Athene (Athena) is identified with the planet Venus, I thought I'd present
   his sources.  Besides the identification made by comparing the activities
   associated with Athena and Venus, there are a couple of categorical
   comparisons, which I quote below, indented.  The quotations are from
   "Worlds in Collision", Part I, Chapter 9, "Pallas Athene".  Velikovsky's
   footnotes are presented enclosed in brackets [ ].

      Pallas Athene is identified with Astarte (Ishtar) or the planet Venus
      of the Babylonians.  [S. Langdon, "Tammuz and Ishtar" (1914), p. 97]

There is no mention of Pallas, Athene, Pallas Athene, or Minerva in
the cited reference. The passage talks about some of the Babylonian
goddesses, mentioning in a footnote that "Istar as nin-si-an-na is
identified with Venus". P. 97 talks about Aja as an aspect of Innini,
Queen of Heaven. The next several pages talk about Anunit, her
martial aspect. On page 101 it says, "Not only is it one of Ishtar's
names as the planet Venus, but a fixed star in the region of Ares
(lu-zid-mal) was identified with Anunit." Algol, apparently, was also
identified with Anunit. Again, no mention of Athene in any form in
this discussion.

      Anaitis of the Iranians, too, is identified as Pallas Athene and as
      the planet Venus.  [F. Cumont, "Les Mysteres de Mithra" (3rd edition,
      1913), p. 111]

After locating the passage in the 1913 French edition, I switched to
the 1956 English edition (p. 112): "...then Anaitis, the goddess of
the fecundating waters, who has been likened to Venus and Cybele, and
who, presiding over war, was also invoked under the name of
Minerva..." On page 181 Cumont says, "When, under the [Roman] empire,
the taurobolium [the Mithras cult ritual involving baptism with the
blood of a slain bull] was introduced into Italy, it was not quite
certain at the outset what Latin name should be given the goddess in
whose honor it was celebrated. Some saw in her a celestial Venus;
others compared her to Minerva, because of her warlike character." In
other words, (1) the identification of Minerva with Anaitis was not
made until the time of the Roman Empire, rather than dating to the
time of the claimed planetary encounters, and (2) the passage appears
to imply that the identification of Minerva with Anaitis and Venus
with Anaitis is not transitive, but rather reflects uncertaintly
about which Latin goddess was the most appropriate match.

   So, it is incorrect to claim that Velikovsky merely "asserted" the
   identity of Athena with Venus, or to claim that he drew that conclusion
   only from the descriptions of their behaviors, in contrast to all other
   scholars.

Velikovsky showed no evidence that Greek/Latin writers associated
Athene with the planet Venus. In fact, one Latin source he quotes
directly associates Aphrodite/Venus with the planet Venus. Of course,
Velikovsky, rather than acknowledge this as evidence against his
hypothesis, corrects his source. He has a habit of doing this. All
Velikovky showed is that the Greeks and Latins sometimes identified
Athene/Minerva with foreign goddesses which (in those cultures) were
identified with the planet Venus. That isn't the same thing as
showing that the Greeks/Latins made the identification of the goddess
Athene/Minerva with the planet Venus.

   However, if Athena-Minerva really is the comet-planet Venus,
   to what celestial body does the following refer?

      At length as the Morning Star was beginning to herald the light which
      saffron-mantled Dawn was soon to suffuse over the sea, the flames fell
      and the fire began to die.  { Homer, "The Iliad", Book XXIII, 226. }

   I thought the Morning Star (Lucifer, Phosphorus) was an aspect of the
   planet Venus.  If Venus was busy fighting with Mars, what is the Morning
   Star? Elsewhere, Velikovsky states that Aphrodite was the goddess of
   the moon:

      The "play" of Mars with the moon was regarded by the Greeks and the
      Romans as a love affair.  [Mars had near contacts with the moon and
      with the planet Venus, and as a result of these two "romances" the
      goddess Venus (Aphrodite) became associated in mythology with the
      moon as well as with the planet of that name.]

I assume this is from chapter 3 of part II, in the section "When was
the Illiad created?", where V. says:
         "I find in Lucian a statement which corroborates my interpret-
      ation of the cosmic drama in the ILLIAD. This author of the
      second century of the present era writes in his work ON ASTROLOGY
      this most significant and most neglected commentary on the
      Homeric epics:
         'All that he [Homer] hath said of Venus and of Mars his passion,
      is also manifestly composed from no other source than this science
      [astrology]. Indeed, it is the conjunction of Venus and Mars that
      creates the poetry of Homer.' [8]
         "Lucian is unaware that Athene is the goddess of the planet
      Venus [9], and yet he knows the real meaning of the cosmic plot
      of the Homeric epic...
      [8] Lucian, ON ASTROLOGY (transl. A. M. Harmon, 1936), Sec. 22
      [9] In the same sentence Lucian identifies Venus with Aphrodite
      of the ILLIAD."

What Lucian is talking about here is not the conflicts between Athene
and Ares in the ILLIAD, but the episode recounted in the ODYSSEY
where Vulcan traps Mars and Venus in bed together.

   In "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", Joseph Campbell writes:

      Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus: those were the names she
      bore in the successive culture periods of the Occidental development--
      associated, not with the sun, but with the planet that caries her name,
      and at the same time with the moon, the heavens, and the fruitful
      earth.  In Egypt she became the goddess of the Dog Star, Sirius, whose
      annual reappearance in the sky announced the earth-fructifying flood
      season of the river Nile.

   So while I cannot dispute that, at least at some point, Aphrodite-Venus was
   associated with the moon, I'm not quite sure how Velikovsky uses Homer's
   "Iliad" to aid him.  There's such a jumble of Aphrodite-Venus-Athena-
   Minerva-planet-moon-comet that I can't quite make sense of it.  One point
   in favor of Velikovsky's interpretation, I suppose, is that Ishtar is the
   goddess of love, fertility, and war, so there is some overlap of the
   attributes of the "love" goddess and the "warrior" goddess.  But Ishtar is
   not a Greek goddess, so I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn about
   similar goddesses from different pantheons.  I guess this is where the
   comparisons of activities associated with the goddesses comes in, which
   comes back to Velikovsky's thesis, so I'll have to stop here, or else I'll
   end up quoting the whole book.

I think you hit the nail on the head here, in that Velikovsky's
assumption that there are 1-to-1 mappings between the different
pantheons which transitively also match their associated planets is
rather naive.

Karl