Bestiary |
Bes and Taweret
In addition to both coming from ancient pyramid-building Egypt, belonging to the pantheon of deities of that time, and enjoying considerable popularity among believers, the dwarf Bes and the hippopotamus Taweret are connected by the fact that they often worked as a pair. That is why I have included them in one story.
Lady first, of course.
Taweret, also known as Ipet, Apet, Opet, or Reret, had, as was customary in the region, an animal form, in her case that of a hippopotamus. Not quite, sometimes the unmistakable hippopotamus head was accompanied by lion limbs and a crocodile tail. She belonged to the higher form of dei domestici and her main task was to help women in childbirth. She also drove away evil demons and symbolized the northern sky. Furthermore, because pregnancy is a matter of fertility, and human fertility in all cultures is linked to agricultural fertility, she was the patroness of the latter. According to the Book of the Dead, she also guided people into the afterlife.
She simply had a lot on her plate, which means that in her peak form, she was a synthesis of several local goddesses, which is the fate of most well-known Egyptian and Mediterranean gods. From a distance of several thousand years, we see these cultures as uniform and unchanging, which makes it easier for us to orient ourselves, but also sometimes causes confusion when (this is especially true for the most popular of the popular, Greek mythology) we encounter strange errors in conceptual continuity. But that would be a long story and does not belong here.
Bes, as already mentioned, was a short figure with a grotesque face, sometimes dressed, like Heracles, in a lion's skin, but this may only be a later concession to tradition.
In the Egyptian pantheon, Bes stands out for one particular reason: he is never depicted in profile, as was customary at the time, but en face, and he does not, as one might expect, have an animal form. This reveals that he is clearly an immigrant who came from Asian Babylon during the reign of the Eighteenth Dynasty, although, as one of my sources wittily notes, this god has a lot in common with the gods of Central and Southern Africa.
As a midwife, he was primarily concerned with entertaining the new baby, which he probably succeeded in doing given his appearance, even though the newborn cannot see him properly and he would scare the slightly older ones. But the important thing about his presence was protection against evil demons and unexpected misfortune.
In addition to the above, Bes was the patron of dancers and musicians, he was involved in fashion, but above all (probably because of his past as a Babylonian god of war) he protected the royal family. Although he had no temples or official ceremonies, he was one of the most popular dei domestici of ancient Egypt, and many houses were protected by a statue of Bes placed right at the door, a practice known throughout the world, as exemplified by the Japanese Shoki.
Tveret in the picture:
Jeff Dahl [GFDL or CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons
23.6.2025 (24.4 2005)
Yemaja
The waters of the Nigerian river Ogun can cure infertility because they are associated with the Great Goddess named Yemaja, daughter of the divine couple Odudua and Obatala. When her son Orungan attempted to rape this patroness of childbirth for the second time, her body burst open and fifteen new gods flew out of it (including the river Ogun).
Yemaja also made a career in Christianity (which adopted old gods not only in Europe) and, on the other side of the ocean in Brazil, she became the ruler of the seas and protector of shipwrecked sailors.
23.6.2025 17.4.2005)
Ardigun
Money rules the world. That's just a statement of fact; I'm certainly not going to get into moralistic musings. Let's look at it technically. Money is a tool that has replaced the bartering items used in the past, whose technical shortcomings are best described by a quote from Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People (1992):
Before money, people had bought things with cows and pigs, which were not very efficient for the purpose because you had to feed them and keep them safe all the time and sometimes they died.
I let someone else answer the question of why money was invented. But you don't yet know how it was invented.
The Micronesians of the Palau archipelago, users of one of the most curious monetary systems on the planet, have a clear understanding of this. No, I'm not talking about the well-known giant stone coins, several meters in size, which are in circulation (which is a strange term, given that such coins remain in one place no matter how many times they change owners) on the neighboring archipelago of Yap. Even though they were produced in mints or quarries on the Palau Islands. The local inhabitants, however, prefer a completely different currency, glass coins, which would not be unusual if there were not three hundred types of them. Where we make do with crowns and pennies, the Palauans revel in coins with names like kluk, brak, elpulup, eldoio, and others I don't know, so we are missing several hundred types.
According to ethnographers and archaeologists, the currency probably arrived in Micronesia via Indonesia from who knows where, but this is Bestiary, so I will explain the origin of the money (about which the Micronesians talk even more than the Czechs) according to its customs.
In the beginning, there was a kivit bird that drank dew collected on a hollow tree. Nothing is impossible in myths, so consider it a fact that this is how the bird became pregnant. It gave birth to a fish, which first lived in the hollow of that tree (understandably full of water, because it was a fish) until one day people discovered it. They did not eat it but threw into the sea, which, according to biology, is much worse, because the water in the tree was obviously fresh, and an ordinary fish should not have survived the sudden transition to a chemically completely different environment. But it was a magical fish, and it thrived in the sea. So well, in fact, that it grew to such a size that it could carry an island on its back, apparently following the example of the leviathans from the other half of the globe. That land was called Wrot, and we will return to it later.
The father was a bird, the mother was water, and the fish (it was a male) followed family traditions and became involved with a human woman during one of his visits to the Palau Islands.
The offspring of the fish and the woman was a girl named Ardigun, and it happened on the island of Babelthuap, which is the largest piece of solid land in the Palau archipelago. At first, she was well taken care of, as she was taken in by the Anisur family. They raised her, but when Ardigun became pregnant—with whom or what, unfortunately, is unknown—they expelled her. Understandably, this did not please the daughter of the fish and granddaughter of the bird.
If you are eagerly asking where the money is, it is right here. As I mentioned, I do not know who the father of Ardigun's child was. But that offspring was supposed to be the glass drop-shaped coins, whose exchange value is still one kluk to a hundred coins of the surrounding world, under German administration, it was worth a hundred marks, under the Japanese a hundred yen, and today a hundred US dollars. So the Palauans could have been much richer than they are today, but Ardigun declared that she would not give them any of the money she gave birth to if they rejected her. She just stretched out her hands and poured a decent amount of money onto the floor of the hut, but certainly not as much as what lies on her father's island.
The beaches of the legendary land of Wrut are not sandy or pebbly, but covered with Palauan glass money. Ardigun eventually moved to that island, and neither she nor her father, let alone the land on his back, were ever seen again.
23.6.2025 (1.5.2005)
Bodhisattvas
A bodhisattva is a person, or rather a being, who is on the best path to achieving nirvana. Except for the last step, which they voluntarily do not take, because not all beings have yet attained liberation. To put it bluntly, bodhisattvas are the Buddhist (or Mahayana) version of Catholic saints. However, there are secular bodhisattvas, who differ from other people mainly in their moral qualities, and celestial bodhisattvas, who have already attained nirvana but do not enter it in order to help the rest of the world in various ways. To be honest, it's all a bit more complicated than that, but this brief introduction has helped me to provide some brief and non-exhaustive information about a few names.
Avalokiteśvara
also known as Padmapani, with the epithet Mahakaruna, is one of the most important bodhisattvas. He cares for the fertility of people and fields, and protects against natural disasters. He is the embodiment of compassionate mercy, one of the two fundamental qualities of Buddhas, and also the patron saint of Tibet.
helps sinners from hell and pilgrims on their journeys. He is equipped with the Chintamani stone of wisdom and a pilgrim's bamboo staff with six knobs. These represent the six possibilities of reincarnation in which Ksitigarbha helps, which are three good (human, god, and asura) and three bad (rebirth in hell, as an animal, or as a preta).
Mahasthamaprapta
is also quite important because he forced people to think about the necessity of salvation.
Mañjuśrī
In addition to being the patron saint of Nepal, this bodhisattva is also the personification of supreme wisdom. He is nicknamed Turtledove, or Mañjughoṣa, the meaning of which, in connection with supreme wisdom and altruism, which bodhisattvas generally do not spare, unfortunately escapes me. I see several particularly cunning specimens of these birds every day, and believe me, they got into the proverb by mistake. Considering that they are not birds of prey, they can be quite aggressive and intolerant and... but that's beside the point, observe them for yourselves, fortunately there are still plenty of turtledoves around.
Samantabhadra
is often depicted in pictures together with Buddha and Mañjuśrī, or sitting on a six-tusked elephant. The latter depicts the sage's victory over the six senses, while Samantabhadra's dark blue body represents cosmic emptiness.
23.6.2025 (8.5.2005)
Uranus
According to the most famous (but not the only) Greek theory of the creation of the world, in the beginning there was Chaos, and from it arose the goddess of the earth, Gaia. While asleep, she gave birth to her parthenogenetic son Uranus, King of the Mountains and personification of the Heavens. The son was fond of the world and soon ruled over it. He fertilized his mother with rain, and she gave birth not only to the usual hydrological phenomena such as lakes, rivers, and seas, but also to grass, trees, animals, and birds. However, these are somewhat vague beings and objects, and so they are omitted from the list of Uranus' descendants. But even without them, the first supreme god was a capable founder of a tradition of countless offspring of one kind or another. Whether it was the famous names of the twelve Titans (Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Cronus, Theia, Rhea, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Themis, and Tethys), the three equally well-known Cyclopes and three Hecatoncheires, or unknown descendants such as the giant Anax, king of Caria, or Garamas, whose existence seems to have been believed only by the Libyans, all the children had one thing in common: they were indifferent to their father. Except for the Hecatoncheires (sometimes the Cyclopes and sometimes both), whom he hated and therefore had imprisoned in the underworld.
Which was a mistake, as we now know.
Enraged Gaia incited her Titan offspring for so long that the youngest, Cronus, rose up against his indifferent father. He armed himself with a serrated flint sickle, made by the nine dog-headed Telchines, and ambushed Uranus, grabbing him by the testicles with his left hand (which has been unlucky ever since), castrating him, and immediately proclaiming himself the Supreme God.
The sickle operation was the last chance Uranus had to bring any offspring into the world. And he did; when the blood from his genitals dripped onto the ground, or Gaia, other well-known inhabitants of Greek mythology were born—the Gigantes, according to some, the vengeful Erinyes, and the ash nymph Melia (which, incidentally, is a more pleasant version of the same, namely the then ubiquitous Triune Goddess). And it was done.
Oops, it's not over yet. When Cronus threw his father's genitals into the sea, the future goddess of beauty and love, Aphrodite, came into being from them and the sea foam. Homer tells it differently, but since he considers Zeus and Dione to be Aphrodite's parents, I won't believe him. Zeus later adopted many children of other couples, just as he himself had been adopted.
Cronus was supposed to throw the instrument of Uranus' destruction, the Telchine sickle, into the sea along with Uranus' testicles, but either someone later fished it out, or it remained in the family as a memento, because much later Zeus used it in his battle with Typhon.
23.6.2025 (14.5.2005)
Cronus
When Cronus (whose name is probably derived from Korone, crow), as I revealed last week, killed his father and took his place, nothing really changed at first or second glance. Uranus' son did not deny his father; he behaved even worse. He proclaimed himself the Supreme God and Lord of All, married his sister Rhea and hired his other Titan siblings as bodyguards.
During his reign, people supposedly experienced a Golden Age, a period without worries, wars, or disease, a time when the land produced food on its own and people had nothing to do but enjoy themselves. Of course, this could not lead anywhere, and the people of this golden generation died out without leaving anything behind. This supposedly happened during Cronus's term of office, but the Supreme God did not even notice. Doubts began to wander through his autocratic mind.
He was well aware that any of his own descendants could use the same method he had used to come to power. And since the first was already on the way, Cronus wondered what to do about it. Finally, he made a decision: he had the newborn—it was a daughter named Hestia—brought to him and swallowed her.
He did this four more times: Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon all ended up in his stomach. It was only with the sixth child that the unfortunate Rhea finally thought of tricking her husband and instead of Zeus, she slipped him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. (It is sometimes said that she had used this trick before and that instead of Poseidon, Cronus swallowed a foal, but this is probably a late and self-serving legend).
The un-swallowed son was then raised in a Cretan hideout by nymphs and protected by the Curetes until he came of age and could repeat the history of the previous generation.
But Cronus did not make his father's mistake. Although he had overthrown Zeus's older siblings with the help of an emetic, he did not want to give up without a fight. He entrusted the strongest of the Titans, Atlas, with leading the fight against the rebels.
The first war of the gods began, but some Titans sided with Zeus, even the oldest of them, Oceanus, and the wisest, Prometheus. Fortunately, the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires, whom Zeus had freed from Tartarus after learning that, according to Gaia's prophecy, the Tartarus prisoners would bring him success as allies, also sided with him. However, this was only after the rebels had almost lost and Cronus's armies had driven Zeus's brothers, Hades and Poseidon, to the very top of Olympus. The counterattack was successful (the phrase “panic fear” comes from such depths of time, as Pán shouted during the battle and frightened Cronus’ Titans), and Cronus followed (after a ten-year war) his father Uranus away from the political scene.
According to Roman stories, Cronus saved himself by fleeing into exile in Italy, where he took the name Saturn, but this is only a later attempt to compare the Greek cult of Cronus and the Latin cult of Saturn, for Saturn, unlike his Peloponnesian counterpart, was not such a negative figure.
In Greek reality, Cronus ended up in Tartarus, because the Immortal cannot simply be left in opposition. Perhaps as a political sinecure, and perhaps as a reward for the Golden Age, he was entrusted with the rule of Elysium, which is the pleasant, paradisiacal face of the underworld. Elysium is also not subject to the underground ruler Hades; it is a blissful land where the souls of those who deserve it dwell in the same conditions as the people of the Golden Age once did.
Without going into details and digressions, we have dealt with the most well-known version of the myth. Of course, other stories are hidden in the depths of time. For example, according to one of the many Greek versions of the creation of the world, Cronus was not the son of Gaia and Uranus, but, together with the other Titans, the parthenogenetic offspring of Eurynome. With Rhea, they were the Titans of the planet Saturn, i.e., the patrons of the seventh day of the week. In later times, however, the Greeks associated Cronus with the personification of time, Chronos, possibly due to the phonetic similarity of the two names, because otherwise Chronos did not appear as Time in classical mythology. It was only in recent history, in late Hellenistic Greece, that some cults took him up; because it was not only a late period, but also the last of this culture, Chronos, previously depicted as a multi-headed snake, entered our subconscious in the form of an old man with a sickle and associated with the former First Man of the World, Cronus.
I have omitted a lot, such as the information that Cronus was dedicated to the prophetic dogwood tree (well, now you know that), the roots of the Cronus myth in the mythologies of other nations, the rituals behind the myths of the end of Uranus and Cronus, all of which would make for a long story, and my innate laziness has already been pushed to its limits.
Maybe next time.
23.6.2025 (21.5.2005)
Zeus
I have always been fascinated by the Supreme God's confident audacity, with which the youngest simply declared himself the eldest of his siblings, and everyone accepted it without question. As the leader of the victorious rebellion against Cronus' rule, he could afford to do so. Even more interesting, however, was that he did not automatically ascend to his father's throne, but that three of Cronus' sons democratically drew lots for the rule. Which is nice.
Otherwise, Zeus was not very different from his father and grandfather. He also married a close relative—he took his sister Hera as his wife—and fathered countless offspring, although, unlike his predecessors, a significant number of them were illegitimate. He also inherited an uncompromising intransigence and a tendency to outbursts of uncontrolled rage, which was balanced by his occasional generosity and kindness. He hated disputes and liked to show off, even though everyone knew about his omnipotence. He wanted to exterminate humanity twice, but the first time he was thwarted by Prometheus, and the second time Zeus himself (or Prometheus again) allowed two righteous people, Deucalion and Pyrrha, to survive the flood.
But let's move on to a brief curriculum vitae.
As mentioned above, he was lucky and did not end up like his siblings in his father's stomach for a long time. He was born and raised in Crete, in a cave on Mount Dikti, raised by the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida. His diet was somewhat monotonous, consisting of honey and milk from the divine goat Amalthea. So that no one would hear him cry, especially as an infant, his personal guards, the Curetes, would bang on their shields.
When he grew up, he decided to overthrow his father; how this happened was discussed last week. He did not have peace on the throne either, as someone was constantly attacking him. His grandmother Gaia sent the giant hundred-headed dragon Typhon, whom she had conceived for this purpose with Tartarus, the god of the deepest abyss. The Giants attacked him. And after them came even bigger, in fact the biggest giants in the world, Otus and Ephialtes. His own siblings and children wanted to betray him and almost succeeded, had it not been for Briareus, who untied all one hundred knots that bound Zeus at once.
He simply did not have it easy.
There is one thing I will definitely not calculate here – namely, Zeus's descendants, except for the legitimate ones, of whom there were (mostly) only three – Ares, the god of war, Hephaestus, the blacksmith, and Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth. He had a very unique view of marriage, and Hera eventually became an expert at persecuting pregnant mistresses and making life miserable for their children. She was also an expert at domestic scenes, and with divine powers, it wasn't just plates that flew. One thing distinguished him from Uranus and Cronus. He loved his children and was able to take care of them.
He knew how to arrange his existence as the Supreme God. He did not particularly care about ruling the world. He was accompanied by advisors Kratos (the personification of power), Zélos (the personification of zeal), Bía (a.k.a. Strength) and Níké (the goddess of victory), and he hired the goddesses Themis and Diké as lawyers. He couldn't do anything without the divine ladies Tyche, Eirene, and Iris. The first represented happy coincidence, the second peace, and the third the rainbow, and she was Zeus's messenger along with Hermes.
The attributes of the Supreme Olympian – as is customary in such cases – were primarily lightning bolts, an ancient Indo-European legacy shared by most European chief gods, as documented in the Bestiary by the Slavic Perun or the Etruscan Tinia. However, he was initially the god of weather and the operator of celestial phenomena before he rose to the highest position. In doing so, he absorbed many local deities, as the Hellenes did not move to an empty peninsula, but to a land full of natives. The uncompromising and cruel nature of some of Zeus's actions conceals this absorption of the original cult. I deliberately say absorption and not merging, because the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece were mostly worshippers of the Great Goddess, in whatever form and under whatever name. Such a belief was difficult to change, as evidenced by the attempt to take the Sun away from the priestesses of the Moon. Helios was not yet able to do so, but the fourth generation of Olympian gods, represented by Apollo, already had enough power. Zeus thus acquired most of his unifying epithets later, after the expansion of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean. Of course, he did not even come close to his Roman counterpart Jove in this respect, but that belongs in another entry. In any case, when Zeus Ammon speaks the language of Egypt, it means that the Greeks imagined the local gods as their own and named them the same, while the Romans adopted foreign gods; incidentally, in order to justify the Egyptian pantheon with its animal-shaped gods, the Greeks had to invent a myth according to which the gods fled to Egypt and took on animal forms to hide from Typhon.
Listen, do you still want to read? I have a lot that you could and perhaps should learn, but the problem is that there is really too much. For example, when Graves lists thirty-two of Zeus's epithets in the index, it is clear that each one is linked to some information (and that information to further information, and so on). I have completely omitted the frivolous scenes from Zeus's life, including the spicy stories from the ladies' bedrooms, all the crises in his marriage, and his own disputes and those he judged. All this and much more naturally belongs here, but if you want it, you have no choice but to painstakingly pick out the grains of fact from the depths of the entire Bestiary and also, which is much more reasonable, from the sources I looked at myself.
23.6.2025 (29.5.2005)
Patécatl with his family
Although he worked far across the sea among the Aztecs, who lived in what is now Mexico, Patécatl would probably have gained many clients in present-day Central Europe.
He was not only a god who cared for health and fertility but above all a god of drinking and drunkards. He was able to transform agave juice into a drink called pulque, and among the plants dedicated to him were peyote, as well as other plants and mushrooms that share a certain content of hallucinogenic substances. His wife was a goddess named Mayáhuel, whose main function was to care for the maguey plant, which is the agave cactus.
Mayáhuel originally lived in heaven, under the strict supervision of the mother of the gods, Tzitzimitl, but when the gods decided to give humanity something else besides cultural crops that would put them in an uncultural state after consumption, one of them, the god of wind Éhecatl, went to heaven, seduced Mayáhuel, and took her to earth, where they made love in the form of a tree with intertwined branches. Tzitzimitl arrived too late, so in her rage, she split the tree and had her demons devour the pieces of Mayáhuel. However, the god of wind survived – doesn't this sound familiar from European fairy tales? – gathered Mayáhuel's remains and planted them, whereupon the goddess was reborn in the form of an agave. From the cactus, it was only a short step to the final product – pulque liquor.
The descendants of the divine couple Patécatl and Mayáhuel were a large number of lesser mythological creatures, gods of drunkenness, called Centzóntotochtin. Loosely translated, this means four hundred rabbits, which is supported by the claim that Mayáhuel has four hundred breasts so that she can nurse them.
23.6.2025 (5.6.2005)
Ostara
I know I was supposed to write about her in March, but the weather doesn't even look like June. Ostara (and I'll also mention her pseudonyms, Eostre and Eastre) is an ancient Anglo-Saxon representative of the moon, the rising sun, and above all, Easter. Of course, you may still learn somewhere that she is a goddess of fertility or spring, but in that case, all of that has been carried over from ancient times. In this case, it is probably slightly confusing, or perhaps inextricably intertwined. See, for example, the Greek Eos (goddess of the morning dawn) in the name. I'll take a shot in the dark and maybe I'll miss, but there's also Ishtar, in whose favor the patronage of fertility would play, and of course the Moon hovers over everything, as a celestial body belonging to the Great Goddess.
Away with speculation. Today, Ostara (who loves children) is associated with an annoyingly intrusive little animal: the Easter bunny. And also Easter eggs. This is a truly ancient symbol, reminding us that this lady had something to say about spring long before Christians began to calculate the exact date it would fall on each year.
23.6.2025 (11.6.2005)
