The Mother Goddess in Her Queen of Heaven Dove Form

Hola darlings!

Soooo sorry for being absent for so long!  This new old house I downsized to is taking up way too much of my time -- but it's now all decked out for the holiday season and I am sitting back and enjoying it for the next few months.  I'll eventually get around to packing away all "Christmas" decor near the end of February :)

I celebrate the Winter Solstice (a/k/a the Festival of Lights, under its various names), not Christmas, per se, but since Christmas is a Christian expropriation of this ancient Goddess celebration (despite the Romans trying to turn it into a male god thing), I'll take it.  Check out my newest "Christmas" decoration -- the Queen of Heaven:

Do you see her?  She's a crowned dove, and I've got her up on the highest spot I could in the living room, where She is overlooking everything!  She is sparkly white with a gold crown.  I tried to get some close-ups but, frankly, I'm not very good at taking photos and my camera is nearly an antique now, purchased in 2005 (I use that, and my shaky hands, as excuses for crappy photos).  Here are a couple more looks at her, just because:

Please excuse the pea green "metallic" accent wall, I did not paint it that way, it came with the house.  It will disappear as if by magic during the spring of 2015 when I can once again have windows open to air-out paint fumes.

You probably already intuited that when I saw this beautiful crowned dove, I just had to buy her, because I was thinking of the entire criscrossed web of herstory, including: (1) the ancient bird (or eye) goddesses from prehistoric times:

Alabaster eye icon from Tel Brak

(2) the cross-cultural transfers that took place over thousands of years through migration and trade that transformed the ancient bird (or eye) goddesses into iconic goddesses such as Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Artemis, etc.:

Bird Goddess, predynastic Egypt, c.
4000-3500 BCE, Brooklyn Museum

Goddess Artemis in her "Lady of the Beasts"
form (notice the wings) and checkerboard
gown, from Francois Vase. c. 570-560 BCE Greece

(3) the Christian Church's transformation of the Mother Goddess into the Mother of God who was still, somehow, on a lesser footing worship wise than the god she gave birth to whom would not have existed, but for her, LOL!; and (4) those pesky Egyptian Coptic Christians, who keep materializing the Queen of Heaven every so often in the form of white doves flying around church steeples, just to remind everyone that Isis never dies, she just transforms herself into the latest version of goddess chic :)

"Virgin Mary" apparition with dove, appeared outside a
Coptic church, Cairo, Egypt, 1960s.

I am very much looking forward to December 21st, because after that day passes, the days will incrementally begin to get longer once again, and there will be more light.  I am, most definitely, a creature of the Light. So, during this period of celebration of the ancient Festival of Lights (in all of its various forms) which, in this Newton household, is about three months long, I wish you all blessings, joy and prosperity for the fast-approaching new year.  Meanwhile, I am eating too much rich food, drinking too much liquored-up egg nog, far too much wine and hot toddies, burning way too many candles and using far too much electricity lighting a ridiculous amount of Christmas lights around the home and thus contributing to the world's carbon footprint, and spending way too much money on gifts to charities and friends and chessly endeavors.  Oh well.  What the hell, why not!

"Mother of God" Making Miracles Near Green Bay, Wisconsin USA

Holy Cow!  I don't know how I missed this story - but here it is - from December, 2010!  That Mother of God, she's here, she's there, she's everywhere, just like the Scarlet Pimpernel!

Virgin Mary apparitions near Green Bay shrine recognized as first in U.S.

Approval puts Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in same category as Lourdes, Guadalupe and Fatima
9:53 AM, Dec. 9, 2010

A shrine in the town of Green Bay is one of only a handful in the world — and the sole location in the United States — officially designated as a place where the Virgin Mary appeared.

David Ricken, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, announced today his official approval of the Marian apparitions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion.

Ricken’s decision makes the shrine the first and only site in the United States of an approved apparition of the Virgin Mary. The designation puts it in the same category as other famous Marian apparition sites such as Lourdes, France; Guadalupe, Mexico; and Fatima, Portugal.

According to the diocese, the Virgin Mary appeared in the area to Belgian immigrant Adele Brise three times in 1859.

Brise’s account states the apparition appeared in dazzling white claiming to be the “Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners” and asking Brise to also pray for sinners and teach children about salvation. Adele’s father built a chapel at the site of the apparitions soon after. The current chapel, which is the fourth one built in the location, was dedicated on July 12, 1942.



Now, a local family says the Virgin may have cured their young son of leukemia after they visited the shrine and little Joe asked to be made better! Link.   Not sure if that link works - here is one from ABC News' Prime Time Nightline on July 13, 2011 where little Joe Anderson's miracle was discussed in the context of an examination of the now Holy Site. 

The Priestesses of Mary

While doing some research on the serpent-worshippping Ophites, I came across a reference to the Kollyridians - and found out some fascinating information about the now obscure sect.

The name Kollyridians (also Collyridians) comes from Greek collyris, a little cake. Leontius of Byzance had a different name for them. He called them "Philomarianites", meaning Mary-lovers (PG 87, 1364). (Image: Mary in the Notre Dame du Cap, Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Canada. Crowned in 1904 at the orders of Pope Pius X, it is the only statue of Mary to be crowned in all of Canada. The title of Queen of Heaven can also be found in scripture, but not in reference to Mary).

From Epiphanius we learn the group was composed mainly of women and led by women priestesses. The sect may have originated in Thrace, and had extended to Upper Scythia (roughly to the west and north of the Black Sea) and into Arabia by the fourth century, but it could have roots in Syria (Astarte) or Asia Minor (Ceres).

The sect was perhaps inspired by the Gospel events, combined with an Elias-type legend of Mary's purity and "non-death." Epiphanius states that the "priestesses of Mary" worshipped her as a goddess in her own right, the Queen of Heaven, with rituals far older than Christianity, and "adorn a chair or square throne, spread a cloth over it, and at a certain solemn time, place bread on it and offer it in the name of Mary." The worshippers also partook of the sacred cakes (sounds rather like "Holy Communion" where believing Christians partake of the "bread" of "Christ's body").

Recalling the Jews condemned by the Prophet Jeremiah who made similar offerings to the "Queen of Heaven" (Astarte/Ashtoreth/Asherah/Ceres), Epiphanius warned against the worship of the Virgin. This is the seventy-ninth heresy in a long list, challenged by Epiphanius, a religion harking back to the ancient pagan worship of the Goddess, under her new manifestation: "Mary."

According to Jonathan Kirsch: "[In] the Book of Jeremiah, a community of Jews in Egypt worshipped a goddess that he calls the 'Queen of Heaven,' a deity that scholars identify with Anath or Astarte, both of them goddesses in the pantheon of the ancient Near East. Like other goddess worshippers, the Jewish women in the Egyptian diaspora light altar fires to the Queen of Heaven, bake and eat 'crescent-cakes marked with her image' (Jer. 44.19) (NEB), pour out libations as drink offerings to the goddess, and burn incense or perhaps even sacrificial animals in her honor. They are joined in these rituals by their menfolk--'And is it we that offer to the Queen of Heaven without our husbands?' they taunt the old prophet (Jer. 44:19)--but it is clearly the women who serve as priestesses. And when Jeremiah calls on them to return to orthodoxy at the risk of their lives--'High and low alike will die by sword or by famine,' he quotes God as saying, 'and will be an object of execration and horror, of ridicule and reproach' (Jer. 44:12) (NEB)--they boldly and flatly refuse."

Geoffrey Ashe puts forward in his book The Virgin the opinion that the Collyridians represented a parallel Marian religion to Christianity, founded by first-generation followers of the Virgin Mary, whose doctrines were later subsumed by the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 432.

Like other "heretical" sects, the Kollyridians were stamped out - or, as Ashe argues, subsumed into the Roman Catholic Church as it adopted into its tenets many of the pagan beliefs about the "Mother of God" and the "Queen of Heaven," and pragmatic pagans were baptized and became nominal "Christians."

Today, of course, it is quite acceptable for Roman Catholics, approximately 1 billion strong, to worship their Mother of God, even if they no longer offer her sacred bread from the seat of a "chair or throne."

See http://goddesschess.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-chess-lessons-from-ancient-history.html#links;

http://goddesschess.blogspot.com/2007/08/chess-lessons-from-ancient-history.html#links; and

http://goddesschess.blogspot.com/2007/08/goddess-sighting-our-lady-of-guadalupe.html#links.

Information on the Kollyridians compiled from the following sources:

http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/COLLYRID.TXT Patrick Madrid, October, 1994 issue of "This Rock"

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian church, Vol 4, Ch 3

A dictionary of Christian biography and literature to the end of the sixth century a.d., Henry Wace, Collyridians, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wace/biodict.html?term=Collyridians

Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyridians

The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of The Jewish People, by Johnathan Kirsch, http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00CbuJ