Goddess, worship

Euripides fifth century BCE play Medea tells of the return of Goddess worship to Athens and the inception of child sacrifice in response to desertion of the Mother Goddess religion by Jason ... 

Yet, the practices of Triple Goddess worship were entrenched elsewhere in Europe and horrifying myths continued to circulate. While the Indo-Hittite invasions of Greece stopped the practice of male sacrifice, the Goddess Demeter s ensuing hostility to children demanded constant, covert appeasement. 

The principle behind variolation, the same principle that forms the basis of homeopathy, reflected a much older practice. Inoculation in one form or another was widely practiced well before the rise of modern medicine. In India, variolation was carried out by ritual specialists and was thoroughly integrated with the worship of the goddess Sithala." In other societies, its cultural setting was no doubt different, although the actual procedures were remarkably parallel. 

Unlike ourselves, the people of long ago who worshipped those goddesses observed the Moon carefully and were fully aware of its location. Over time, they discovered that the monthly journey of the Moon as it waxed and waned both reflected and supported the pattern of human activity. 

The bee has continued through the millennia as a symbol of the soul s survival after death and limitless existence in the harmony of Golden Age of the world. However, the bee also had a very dark side. It remained a primary s5mibol of the Afro-Asiatic Triple Goddesses such as Demeter, Hecate, Persephone, Aphrodite and the pre-Indo-European aspect of Artemis. Arcadians worshipped both Artemis and Persephone under the name Despoina, which means mistress. 

The Nabatean storm god was Duchares who was later identified with Dionysus. Like Yahweh, the Nabateans worshipped Duchares on high rocky places. However, both Duchares and his consort, the fertility goddess, were subservient to the Moon God. We continue to see the triple character of God represented by three deities. 

The Mysteries of Demeter became the established religion of the Arcadians and over the years developed into the worship of Diana. In recent times, the women of Aegina re-established this ritual, most likely in the spirit of protecting their husbands from the Goddess (see Appendix 13). 

Moreover, Jeremiah complains that even the remnant who fled to Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem would not abandon this custom, and to his protests gave an answer which explains exactly the purpose of these obscene emblems, and of similar incidents connected with the worship of the great Fertility Goddess, who by then had largely absorbed the attributes of the Moon, just as her son and lover has partly absorbed those of the Sun. 

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