Who’s Your Venus?

Some riddles are worth turning over and again. Often, you find answers to riddles buried in your psyche. Roots are buried in your childhood memories; often you are not aware of the totality of a question that has bothered you. Obsessions, interests and proclivities can be traced to that foggy field of memory. One of my own more bizarre interests (for me) has been the Paleolithic Fertility Cults. I could end my intellectual query at the fact that I like round things. Up until a certain age in my life, all women were round. I don’t think I really saw a thin one until the third grade when some of the girls got into running. More than that, I am simply comforted by roundish things. I would have made a good Greek geomancer. Except I am not Greek, I am an Anglo. When I was a child, my sister (who held great sway in my life) entertained Wicca. She is still there, dealing with all the inconsistencies and contradictions that often entails.

However, time should tell that your life is more that incomplete childhood memories. So when it comes to the Goddess question, at around age thirty, I think I have attained a satisfactory archetypical balance. It came about whilst I was reading a transcript of a lecture called “Looking for the Lost Gods of England.” Not much ado is made of the National Gods of the English; our deities are often conflated with those of the cousin Race of the Norse. This is not an unfair motion, mind you, as the Nordic tradition was very well developed and established in writing and system. Moreover, it was preserved with considerable acumen by latter-day Nordic Monks (for all the controversy that invites.) The Continental Germanic tradition and the Colonial Germanic Traditions were not so well preserved. This has invited endless tides of speculation, fascinating exercises in imagination, and so forth. However, I must digress. Kathleen Herbert, the authoress, divulges much to what she considers a lost English peculiarity in which we apparently hosted a Goddess above others in terms of deity.

The woman, Herbert, cites the Roman Tacitus as a chief example. I myself own a copy of the Germania, both transcripted and in the original Latin. And I am familiar with her citations. She relates Tacitus’ account of the mysterious Goddess Nerthus, who is supposed to be a female Earth Goddess. She goes on to describe later traditions still in use in Christian times wherein a mysterious ritual has it that God impregnates the mother of the Earth with a corn baby, while a priest makes invocations with the word/name ‘Erce!” It is supposed that Erce is a reference to a Greek Goddess, as it was a common ploy for Christians in Germanic cycles to use “Classical” (Graeco-Roman) names when referring to their own deities.

We know from Roman and Greek sources that the Germanic Races tended to favour women in excess of other concomitant cultures. We know, as Tacitus is fond of reminding us, that men viewed women as having access to prophetic stores that apparently were dampened by excess testosterone. There are obvious mythological examples. As I must, I shall cite the Nordic literature. Before going a-viking the mighty All-Father, Odin, consults his wife Frigga. Frigga, it is said, knows all Odin does but chooses to keep her secrets. Mysterious. Similarly, it is frequently said (with tongue in cheek) that even the mightiest Gods feared the wrath of Freyja. One needn’t stop with the Nordic Gods, however.

If one reads Hellenic Mythology along parallel lines with Nordic mythology and keeps an open mind than they will be treated to a common thread. The Greek and Norse myths share very similar feminine functions. They both include Trinitarian Goddess formularies who govern fate. It is recognised that in divine terms, feminine energy seems more interested in manipulating the course of human affairs than masculine. Masculine energy is reserved for infrastructural and historical aversions. In the Norse, Odin’s chief concern is averting Ragnarök – a cataclysmic reshaping of reality which results in a new phase of creation, while Frigga’s chief concern is averting the death of Baldur, her son, whose murder triggers the thing Odin sought to prevent. I digress. In the Norse, the personae fatae are called Nornir (Norns.) In the Greek, the personae fatae are called Moirai. In both sets they sow, weave and reap the threads of life. In each set they refer to past, present and future. In the Norse they are Urd (ancient, past) Verdandi (shall be, becoming=present) and Skuld (should be, future.) The Romans have this system also, and it is presumptive that they imported it from Greece.

In the Greek, as well as the Norse, the “minor” Goddesses are personified aspects of domestic life. They symbolise and represent traits and concepts which lead to good breeding. You have for instance, Var, a Nordic Goddess, upon whom oaths were sworn. She was a Goddess involved in marital fidelity. There are of course, many others. In the Roman Tradition there is a Goddess figure of unique proportions. She is Vesta, the Goddess of the Hearth. It was said that she ordained the Eternal Fire of Rome be lit and that Rome would stand as long as her fire endured. It is worth noting that to this day the Eastern Orthodox Church (Roman Born) has a custom in which they tend an Eternal Flame hidden away which never goes out. Perhaps Roma Dea blesses her adopted children even now. The Romans also had a strong votive culture attributed to household Gods, Lares and Penates. This concept of votive offering was strong also with the Celtic Races, and way shrines dedicated to mysterious Goddesses were prevalent.

All of this and more has been used to imply that European Culture was once Matriarchal. It is believed that the earliest religio-social contexts were feminine. Enter the Venus Figurines. Found predominately in regions of what becomes Europe, the Paleolithic figurines are modelled after what modernity would come to categorise as BBWs and/or SSBBWs. That is to say *very* fat women. This depiction caused a stir. It shook the foundations of what people believed to be true of our ancient ancestors. How could there be fat broads when everyone was starving? (Maybe are ancestors weren’t as hapless as we’ve been led to believe?) At any rate, the figurines of voluptuous, excessively well-endowed women were labelled Venusian, and the title stuck.

The figurines were assumed to resemble early European man’s idea of the Goddess, and by proxy, simulate fertility rites. The figurines sported heavy bellies, engorged breasts, round asses and thunder thighs. They also frequently lacked hands, which led the big-brained nibba community down a series of entertaining rabbit holes. The most famous of these is the Venus of Willendorf, who is faceless. Not all were made equal. Some have attempts at facial features, especially some of those found in Malta, among which is the “Sleeping Woman of Malta.” Some bolster grossly exaggerated hips, such as the Venus of Laussel. Others, mostly with French names I can’t begin to remember without the internet, have varying degrees of feminine exaggeration. That is the current, however, they all stress feminine attributes – magnified.

Regardless of your opinion on fertility cults, or body positivity for that matter, the quarry remains and something must be made of it. When I attended college I had a keen interest in things Irish. Here I learned that ancient Celtic culture WAS matriarchal. According to scholars. And it is true that a great deal of retained knowledge of Celtic myth revolves heavily around women. We know much of the Morrigan, who is another triple goddess. We also know much of the Welsh Rhiannon. In Irish myth, women hold great power. Queen Maeve, for instance, who instigated the great cattle wars, also competed with her husband Ailil as to who was the most prestigious. Also noteworthy, it was likely Queen Maeve and not a generic redskin, who asked first “How Now, Brown Cow?”

Some go so far as to imply the Matriarchic striations of Europe lasted until the coming of Christianity. I think that this is a gross over-simplification and an obvious attempt at political innuendo subtly (and sometimes obviously) influenced by intersectional feminism. Some say there was a utopia under the Matriarchy, in which the rule of wise women ensured prosperity. (Hence why all the hand-held women figurines were all so variously fat.) My first question is, how did such a paradise ruled by the wise wisdom of the wimynz ever fail? This is often dealt with anthropologically by theorising that a new wave of Europeans subverted the “Old Europeans” with the warlike patriarchy to come. The ancient forms of the Zeus-Jupiter cult that eventually mutated into the other European myths were what put the Sleeping Lady of Malta to bed.

Yet it remains, the theory that warrants address: Europe was once matriarchal. I would add to this consensus. I believe there is a forgotten trend of matriarchy. I think there is a perfectly logical reason to believe this that does not rely upon feminist conspiracies. I think there is a possible answer that does not require us to split the pantheon into some ridiculous he-said-she-said divide.

I think the socio-religious tendencies of the Race are governed by the demands of the time. In a pastoral, agrarian civilisation you would be naturally more inclined to feminine virtues. Peace-keeping, oaths, bounty. A Goddess would make more sense. Women evolved to fulfil certain roles which benefit domestic life. In times of bounty, in times of plenty, women thrive. However, we know from records that there was an event called the Pleistocene Epoch in which a great tract of plenty went to straw. In times of scarcity, men and masculine virtues would endure. Men were designed with higher testosterone and savagery to help them do things like kill and pillage. These are skills that would benefit men in a frozen time of starvation. Where women gathered, men hunted. I believe this scarcity is what prompted the transition from matriarchic to patriarchal society.

In the Greek mythology you have a theme which I think is pointedly misunderstood. The dichotomy of Zeus and Hera. Zeus is depicted as a cavorting and fun-loving God who resists (sometimes with embarrassing shenanigans) being cuckolded by his domineering wife Hera. It has been suggested that this gross depiction of an unhappy holy marriage is a sociological statement. But what if it is an inside joke whose punch-line was lost? Angry Hera might be recalling the days when she called the shots, not fun-loving Zeus with his thunderbolt.

Echoes of this may be found in Norse mythology where the Goddesses have a strong voice. Freyja objected savagely to being offered in marriage to the Jotunn wall-builder. The Gods, in every account, feared her wrath so highly that they stuck mighty Thor in a pretty, pretty dress and sent him off to war. Sans cross-dressing, the Greeks have a similar story in which a Light Goddess is demanded in marriage by a Cyclops in exchange for a wall to keep Olympus safe. In both cases the Gods fear the wrath of the Goddess.

Graeco-Roman tradition has the Goddess Athena/Minerva act in strict opposition to Ares/Mars. Though it is noteworthy that the Greeks and Romans have vastly different opinions. In the Greek model, Ares is a savage and often cowardly God. He is a God of violence. It is said that Athena, Goddess of wisdom, is his direct contrast and views his actions as base and uncouth. The Romans, a martial race, saw Mars as a disciplined and virtuous God, more like the Norse Tyr. This idea that the Goddess had a divine right to question another God’s actions suggests a tradition in which women held considerably greater power. Athena, temperate, consistent, frowns on Ares, distemperate, spontaneous, unpredictable. It is not hard to imagine a matronly Athena frowning in judgement on a young Ares, as the old orders always frown on the new.

Another facet worth mentioning is the idea that you have scaling tribes of Deity in the European tradition. Deity comes in waves. In both Greek and Norse they are scaled according to their beauty and intelligence. More or less it goes Titan/Jotnar, Aesir/Olympian. However, in Norse, you have the tribe of the Vanir. These were considered to be fertility oriented Gods. Scholars suggest that the Vanir were older than the Aesir, and that the Aesir supplanted them. Noteworthy is that of the Vanir, Freyja has the greatest body of lore attached.

This brings me back to the Lost Gods of England. Tacitus made mention that the Anglii treasured a Goddess above all. Herbert relays the Christianised Goddess ritual. She also makes mention that the two aspects of the Goddess were never separate as they were in Norse. Frigga’s name was originally a word, not a name, that related to love-making. Frig, in colloquial English, while degraded to an insult because French people, betrays this. Frig=fuck. Fuck simply meant fornicate before things got too Latinised. Conversely, Freyja was derived from or else gave us our words for ladylike behaviour. Freyja gave us the Germans “Frau,” (lady, misses, woman) for instance. In colloquial English “froufrou” a diminutive of this, refers to exceptionally, irritatingly feminine and high-brow behaviour.

In the Norse, the two personae were split. Frigga, the love maker, ironically became the ladylike steadfast wife of Odin. Freyja, whose name means ladylike, was depicted as the primogenitrix of love makers in the Norse myth. In the Anglo-Saxon, they were simultaneously Frija, and there appears to have been no discrepancy. It is worth noting that Hera and Aphrodite refer to glory and lovemaking respectively, in the Greek.

I can only speculate as to the purpose of the Venusian Figurines. After all, everything we do post hoc tempus is an act of guesswork. However, for me, I think the proof is in the pudding. We know the Venuses date to Paleolithic times, before the arrival of the modern European Gods to eminence. There is a tradition of Minor Goddesses with names betraying voluptuousness and full-figuredness. They revolve around harvest, food and domesticity. You have the Nordic Fulla. I suspect her name needs no rendering. You have the less attested Greek Adephagia (lover of eating, more or less.) You have various Goddesses whose stated function revolved around food. The entire story of Persephone is such a one. Without Persephone’s blessing, the crops do not grow, and it is an anecdotal tale explaining to Greek children the purpose of winter. (Crop Goddess makes growth, but she dies and goes to Hades, nothing grows, the Gods could not abide this so she was allowed to return to earth for a time, in which growth again occurred. Life-death-rebirth cycle always relates to natural phenomenon.)

Thus, it strikes me that the theory of the Venusian figures representing a myriad of things is simultaneously logical. I think it betrays a small-minded modernity that we assume any one thing can ONLY mean one thing. The fertility Goddess probably symbolised abundance, as well as yearning for abundance. They probably also related to a woman’s fertility, stressing the parts of a woman that grow during pregnancy. The whole missing hands business might be symbolic. A pregnant woman is ill advised to do hard labour, so perhaps the handless ones were a reminder that women shouldn’t be out busting their very round asses in the field. It might also represent that the divine feminine was removed from earthly affairs and that bounty came from above – but that is hyper-speculation. Personal gnosis, as the Heathens enjoy saying, very, very unverified personal gnosis.

It is also possible that what the baseline theorists say is true. That the statues represented some kind of idealised form. We know Goddess depictions have time stamps. They are the fashionable models of the time, and we also know that for the most part, the history of female beauty would today be considered at least “plump.” That plump factor becomes fat the further back we go. If it is true that people starved in paleolithic times, than a fat woman would probably have been looked on as a prize for all the reasons commonly cited. You have to be wealthy to get fat in a starvation economy. If you are fat you have leisure time, et cetera, in short, fat represented access to the dream life for many who worked to the bone. Ironically, today in Clown World, magazines, media, whatever, variously idolise bone-bags and Photoshop princesses who have the leisure time to primp. Will the wonders ever cease?

Now, moving back to the question of regime changes, I will leave you with this: I stipulated earlier my belief that matriarchy and patriarchy interplay based upon social changes and needs. I base my assertion on entry-level familiarity with evolution, being that women evolved as gatherers and homemakers and men evolved as hunters and wanderers. I sometimes think warfare is an archetypical outbreak of the hunting instinct. In that in times of peace and lack of scarcity war erupts as a kind of evolutionary hiccup. Culling the herd when nature didn’t do the job. That being said, I tend to think society is in throes, now. I think the shift between patriarchy and matriarchy is shifting. The kind of hyper-abundance we have does not necessitate the masculine virtues, and so masculinity is faltering as it is being curbed by excess. The natural answer is that women are attempting to fill the power vacuum, but because society has become so unnatural by way of globalism, you have a charade in which both sexes have been neutered and given interchangeable rules with no clear direction as to how to behave. Instead you get the invention of a clique of a bunch of false genders designed to fill the purpose gap that traditional societies would have supplied. (I sexually identify as a duly reincarnated Super Ragnar, which is my third gender. As such I am planning to write the Swedish Government for reparations, and because they sexually identify as limp sacks, they’re just going to have to give it to me.) After all, what was once clearly feminine is questioned, so is what was once clearly masculine. Funny thing, both sexes have never been unhappier with all that freedom.

Make no mistake. If indeed there was a matriarchy, it would not have been a libertarian paradise. There would have been customs, culture and rules. Yes, things would have been more egalitarian, but history attests that women have in-group preferences. Freyja refused to marry the foreign giant. When Freyja went to Svartalfheim to acquire the Brisingamen her penance was to spend a night with four (((dwarves.))) The myths are clear she found this price loathsome. Then and now, women have preference. You have ancient European mythology in which Hercules marries the Gaulish princess Celtos. This is cited as evidence for egalitarian mythology, but this word is abused. The Greeks knew about Africa, nobody really talked about stealing wives from there. Truth is the Gauls and the Greeks had more in common than is let on, Druidic culture mastered Pythagorean science and the Celts learned Greek, handily. This was because they came from similar tribes. Often for what is known, safe and comfortable. While the women today with the loudest voices champion the causes that they do, today, it is forgotten that the women who choose silence and passivity do so because it is within their comfort zone. And they very often choose silence because they do not want their life choices loudly questioned by other women, who, as modernity sometimes shows us, are not universally graceful when in positions of power. Nor do they necessarily advocate solidarity like they promise to in their equality grabbing, as I have observed that when my wife decided to become a housewife of her own accord it was women who insulted her, derode and questioned her most brutally. In fact, their scorn was so volatile it made men cringe. I suppose it ironic that feminists with power do to traditionalists with not as much power the very things they accuse the patriarchy of doing to them. Women, my friend, have every capacity to be enforcers, too.

What remains that is neglected is the concept of balance in all things. Mythologically speaking, it is an easy riddle to solve. Men and women have different perspectives. They use their faculties differently. With men acting on analytical and women on emotional bases, they each have important information that benefits the other. A woman’s perspective keeps rational man from becoming a monster with no regard for life, and a man’s perspective keeps emotional woman from becoming a monster with no regard for life. After all, a man with his rationale can easily dehumanise anyone to fulfil his goals, and an emotional woman can lose sight of perspective when she is hurt. In either case, the end result is the same, with a variance as to how they got there.

So? Who’s your Venus? I can’t answer that question. These 3,000 and so words have been an exercise in illustrating just how much culture has changed, and how thoroughly perspectives can change. The answer of modernity is to stamp the feet and play the blame game. That’s no answer, unless you are a child. And seeing as we live in an era of children who have to moralise with all the emotional faculty of a retard, all the answers seem shallow. Most of them avoid the middle ground like a plague. Our ancestral religions did not have clear cut heroes and villains, all roles were interchangeable. There was, however, a clear compass. Decisions were made to benefit the tribe. Decisions were made to facilitate the healthy environment in which your posterity would grow.

Patriarchy or Matriarchy, the answer shouldn’t change. To make the world safe for your children, to ensure the survival of your legacy. Good God(s), it should not be hard to imagine. Anything less than this is a waste. The old regime of Goddesses knew this, as did the regime of Gods. This idea that individualistic fervour has a right to supplant tribal and familial lines is nothing more than a social disease that has crippled the planet. The long and short of it is this, in a pagan context, balance is everything. Creation rests on balance, without it, there is Chaos (Khaos,) which nature cannot tolerate and from which Cosmos and Order must come. The Gods and Goddesses tempered each-other. Even in monotheistic cultures, you have echoes of this. Iesvs Khristos said to his apostles that “I am like a mother hen,” and so on. Gnostic traditions had high gods with bifurcated sexual identities that have heretofore managed to escape being absorbed into trannie culture. Even the established Gods/Goddesses of indigenous European pantheons have what Jung might have classified as an anima/animus interplay.

These things do not need to be a moral question. They arose from observation, and for a very long time, were facts of living. But now that Globalism has given us Deconstructionism and Nihilism, Materialism and Absurdism, none of those facts of life have sacred meaning beyond a loosely fitted social narrative. So, who’s your Venus? There is no question which doesn’t have an answer, and for those reading this that understand my words; it is a question worth asking. Society is in tumult, things are shifting, men and women with eyes to see have an opportunity to throw their hat in the ring and take something of historical legitimacy back for themselves. Because society is in flux, what comes next is inspired by what we do now. What our posterity recalls is what we call the present. Urd, Verdandi and Skuld weave in harmony, the Nornir-Moirai are marvellous things. Cause and effect, fate, Wyrd.