Zeus smiled, that the [infant Apollo] so quickly came to ask for worship that pays in gold. He shook his locks of hair, to put an end to the night voices, and took away from mortals the truth that appears in darkness, and gave the privilege back again to [the child god], and to mortals confidence in the songs of prophecy at the throne visited by many men.
– Chorus, from Iphigenia in Tauris, written by Euripides between 416 BC and 412 BC1
My last entry spoke of how a Wikipedian suggested that the former Soviet Union was being “eugenicist.” This suggestion, and my reading of Trotsky’s monism, brings me to a website that I’ve used often on this blog: Cogniarchae. Although I will continue to use insights I find there, I feel I should warn my readers that this page is promoting Aryans as “Übermensch” – in its view, however, Slavs are the true Aryans. I would say, in bringing attention to overlooked Slavic contributions to world culture, that the site is right for the wrong reasons. In fact, this website’s promotion of Slavs reminds me of what “Shots in the Dark”2 wrote about men in the televised frontier. Cogniarchae implies that Slavs “…were not just in control; they were responsible for all accomplishments and, indeed, all significant actions.”
To establish the cultural factor as one of the essentials of national power bases, this series has to analyze how our idea of patriarchy has manifested throughout history3. I think the three roles in a patriarchal structure that I named in my “4 ‘D’s’ of Neoliberalism” entry can be of use here: the “Person Supposed to Know,” (PSK) the “Person Supposed to Believe,” (PSB) and the “Person Supposed to Feel (PSF).”
Research for my series on Bohemia pointed to the “Ubermensch” (according to most readings, Germans) as “people supposed to believe.” Romans, in their praise for them, and the Roman Catholic church, in its protection of them after WWII, would be the “people supposed to know.” To reclaim and hold on to their “people supposed to feel,” these patriarchs have labeled various groups as “Untermensch” ever since: Jewish people as well as Gauls, Slavs, and beyond.
Interestingly, the three categories seem to conflate the patriarch of what I consider The Four – The Temporal – with The Sensual4 (PSK) and/or The Potential (PSB.) This “Original patriarch,” represented by the Greeks as an aspect of Zeus, seems to have been absorbed in both Indian and Roman mythologies. In the Rigveda (1500-1000 BCE,) Indra ended up taking the place of Brihaspati. As to the Romans, as we saw in our Bohemian series, they modeled the inviolability of their city, as sacred to Jove, on the inviolability of Delphi, as sacred to The Sensual, jealous Apollo, rather than to Jove’s counterpart, Zeus.
To give justice to the subject of this demotion of The Temporal, we need to begin with the first Indo-European migration – to Anatolia. This land mass, now mostly the domain of Turkey, had been the home of numerous advanced civilizations before the Aryan invasion migration. We’ve touched on some of these civilizations on this blog in its “Alternatives to Cancel Culture” series – among them, the proto-city of Çatalhöyük and the city of Ebla, as well as on Thrace and the Hattian and Hurrian people.
My research indicated the common worship in this area, since Neolithic times, of a storm god whom the Hattians called, “Taru,” a god to which his worshipers often sacrificed a double-axe (called a labrys) and a bull – a god which was prominent there during the “Age of Taurus”: This deity had been worshiped in the proto-city of Çatalhöyük (a large dwelling consisting of a labyrinthine network of rooms) as early as the eighth millennium BC.5 This form of dwelling and worship easily led to the Greek myth of The Minotaur. An ancient city that also worshiped this god (under the name Hadda6) was Ebla – a city with four gates, each named after one of its major deities. This city was destroyed around 2,000 BC, when the Third Kingdom of Ebla arose, ruled by an Amorite king. According to Wikipedia, “During the third kingdom, Amorites worshiped common northern Semitic gods; the unique Eblaite deities disappeared. Hadad was the most important god, while Ishtar took Ishara’s place and became the city’s most important deity apart from Hadad.”
I can’t, however, find any distinction between Hadda and Hadad, both of them being variations of Taru. I do note that city’s final destruction was by the (Aryan) Hittites.7
A couple more things I want to note before ending this post:
1. Zeus and Jove, who are associated with the number four, are also associated with storms, the planet Jupiter (as is the Indian god, Brihaspati,) and bulls – Zeus took this form when capturing Europa, and Jove, or “Jupiter Dolichenus,” drives a yoke of bulls;
2. Excavations at Çatalhöyük, according to Wikipedia, found that “Some skulls were plastered and painted with ochre to recreate faces, a custom more characteristic of Neolithic sites in Syria and at Neolithic Jericho than at sites closer by.”8; and
3. During the switch from the Age of Taurus to that of Aries, the Aryan peoples invaded India, and Ramessesi became Pharaoh of Egypt.
“Set Theseus Fights With the Minotaur Statue,” from Etsy
1Dates according to Professor of Greek Matthew Wright
2“Shots in the Dark: Television and the Western Myth” in Montana The Magazine of Western History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 72-76 (5 pages)
3 The link goes to the “Outgrowths of Essential Concepts” entry in this blog, the post that has a brief overview of the history of (my idea of) patriarchy. – Viola.
4 The Sensual is a complex concept, thus the many links. I would start with my series, “The Question of Evil,” here. For The Potential, I would use the link I gave about The Four above.
5 Renfrew, Colin (2006). “Inception of agriculture and rearing in the Middle East”. Human Palaeontology and Prehistory. 5: 395–404
6 Archi, Alfonso. “Studies in the Pantheon of Ebla.” Orientalia, vol. 63, no. 3, 1994, pp. 249–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43076169. Accessed 5 Dec. 2023.
7 The disappearance of the two most important Ebla male gods, Kura and Hadabal, is also interesting with respect to our topic, as is the number of controversies and confusions around their functions.
8 The significance of this point may become clearer later, but the world’s move towards Monotheism (later to Monisms, such as Social Darwinism — Please see my brief history in “Outgrowths from Essentials,” linked above) began with Judaism, and the “ownership” of the location of Jericho is disputed to this day. I should say here that Wikipedia gives an ambiguous citation for this point, and it doesn’t look easy to access the source that appears most likely. I have, however, saved a PDF of the page with this quote. – Viola
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