Baubo

I’ll dispense with the shenanigans and fluff. I think Baubo is a missing link, tieing the replacement theology of the Indo-Aryans and the “Old” Europeans together, or perhaps something older. Maybe. Baubo is a Goddess that made her way into Greek Myth, but we shouldn’t reckon on her having been native. Nor less Medusa, or any other “demoness.” Were they we would expect their having a greater dignity than what is given. Each of these have shreds of redeeming quality to suggest they were major and minor deities from pantheons absorbed or destroyed by Hellenismos. What the Greeks can claim as innovations is I think maybe a much smaller list than we might like, having been conditioned to perhaps overestimate their contributions to Western Civilisation much to the detriment of the overwhelming contributions of the Teuton and forgotten enterprises of the Celt.

Without getting into the jingoism of my lingo, suffice to say I think I’m on fair ground to make some educated assumptions. The Greeks couldn’t deny the power of old Goddesses so like the Christians after them, they inverted them. I will bet you my first English Chestnut that Baubo was originally a Goddess or avatar thereof.

I can’t tell you, although I wish I could, what kind. I can infer. I know its old hat for a man to see fertility in a Goddess. (THE NERVE.) But really, fertility is life. Or the capacity to channel it. Embody, foster, feed it. Women bring forward the power of life safeguarded in men. My wife gave me the son I’ve prayed for. If you can’t understand how that common understanding would reasonably affect history, you are a dunce. Another common complaint is that, by some gay talmudry sexuality and fertility have been compartmentalised. Now infinity feminists refuse to acknowledge there could have ever been a bridge. Thanks Monks. How could Freyja and Frigga ever be One? Frīja. Lolwut? Never you mind. Is Evolution even conditionally true? Than surely one will tie their libido, if male, into their perception of what makes a good mother, however subliminally. Modernists can whine all they like, it is woman’s inclination to do likewise. What does the modern woman betray herself by complaining of most? Things which point to a lack of paternal traits in males. By Wōden’s beard, the dimorphism of it all!!!! Actual meshuggah.

But that’s what I think.

Why? Let’s look at later Greek images. Baubo was drawn as a vagina on stilts. I’d expect this from the Russians, if a vagina here were a cabin in the woods. But I digress. She was written as doing lewd gestures, such as lifting her skirts and showing Demeter her “taint” (what a curious notion) as a joke. Eventually she became a rude, funny hag. A sidekick to the heroine of a romcom. Backseated methinks in a story that she could’ve copyrighted, directed and starred in. Baubo almost certainly has lost gospels.

Before this loss she was a series of statues of a plump woman fingering herself. Or giving birth if you’re a Victorian. Occasionally she was standing and not doing any of that. One rides a boar while holding some legal document. What she wasn’t doing was hiding. Or debating with the Learned Elders of Incel as to whether She qualified as a Venus because reasons. She also had a big hat. Like, Pope Joan big, zomg. (#stillnopopery) Sometimes it was just big hair. Big hat big girl, it should then be clear, had status. You didn’t get to hang out with big hat club being a nobody. Big hat gang ain’t got time for that. I like big hats and I cannot lie, not even Greek homos can deny. Und so weiter.

The last clutch of books excepting Thomas Paine I read have all tackled, in varying depths, the concept of Hierodule. That’s five books across three authors. I refuse to be caught up in the semantics of the word itself, which no longer translates as well as it once would. So I see little point in preempting misconceptions. Look it up. You will no doubt encounter some Greek recants about grisly stories. Know: nobody ever speaks well of those they subdue, and Greek imperialism was to the Hellenes and helots as voting was to republicans – early and often. To legitimise a claim, the conquering agent always boosts themselves by shrinking the other. Always.

Humbly I submit the word has less sting when you consider symbolically what that means. Sex is an act, but also a metaphor. Therefore sexual organs are that, but also poetic. Thus in divine poetry, the characters themselves become yes, archetypes, but also metaphors. Hierogamy, I believe. Odin and Zeus and Heimdall can be seen as inverted hierodules, maybe. Bear with me. In that sexual congress is a tool by which the Gods advance their narratives. Odin selects mothers to his many children to secure their destinies, destinies which it may be understood symbolise chivalrous expectations. Consider Vidar and Vali. From mate to naming, there was – and is – a component of prophecy and destiny. The names of Zeus’ paramours betray spiritual significance: Mnemosyne is mother to the Muses after a 9 nights’ romp. Memory = commemoration, after 9 being the number of months in a pregnancy. I could easily devote whole articles to the one tale- yet the ancients only needed a formula. Metaphors. Sex loves metaphors, metaphors love sex. How else can one pluck a woman’s flower, till her field, how can one sew their oats? Metaphors, endless.

To that end, the eroticism of Baubo, I think, or perhaps the final inversion of it, is a Hellenic aggression. A common complaint of the Greek treatment is violence against women, either spiritually or culturally. To take a young, fleshy, obviously sensual figure and turn her into an older, less fleshy and sometimes outrightly de-anthropomorphised form speaks volumes. Now you can take the transitory road and say Baubo has transitioned from Maiden and Mother and into Crone. If it were clear to me that Baubo controlled her destiny here, I might agree. I doubt the Greeks who worshipped their own at times dubious aesthetic intended to do the Goddess a favour by ripping her from her cultural beauty standard and thrusting her into the mould the Greeklings loved least.

Levy again the Eleusian Baubo against what we think we know of the aforegoing full bodied Venuses whose stories are lost, we gather. A notion is entertained in which the votive Venuses are fetishes intoned to emphasise desired effects. Healthy motherhood. In ancient times, it’s not hard to suss out that what passed as society saw a pregnant woman puts on flesh. Thus a fleshy woman might entertain better pregnancies. Ergo a thick woman would have been more desirable, at least before Rome discovered that Pontius Pilates was a person. Fertility and sexuality were not seperate until very recently. Stay tuned for the smash hit Lifetime Television for Midwits special “When Sally met Grug.” The fertility Goddesses helped ease pregnancies, is a prominent theory, which they did by emphasising fertile aspects. Does fertility end at birth? I don’t think so. Why should it? Brainlet modernism compartmentalises this, but fertility is and can only be a spectrum to be treated holistically and not piecemeal.

Flash forward, Old Baubo helps Demeter deal with child loss, an obvious fertility allegory. Crops fail, children die. Both are from a harvest. Mind that anyone who has suffered infertility or child loss knows: laughter is needful, precious. We know that Demeter arranges for a partial custody of Persephone. It remains that Baubo fills an archetypal role of a mentor fortifying a mother archetype whose principle is to secure the 14 Words. In a sense, a crooked line can be established.

Still, it could yet be the cheeky Goddess having her laugh- I don’t know. The planet we live upon is a bloody UPG.

The Greeks, perhaps following an older tradition, such as damnifying Mycenæ, have censored the Goddess by robbing her vital essences. Her power was in her flesh, her fertility. Hence, perhaps, even likely, her advanced size. Her name, in older Greek, can be rendered as both “belly” and “womb.” According to some traditions. That’s a fairly clear statement. In iconography the Goddess made good use of both.

Her lingering role as encouraging, bawdy surrogate grandma to Demeter following the loss of Persephone would probably have had much more symbolic power had Baubo not undergone the Greek treatment. Or otherwise being reduced in whole to a mere organ. That in her earlier easterly forms she is shown as a masturbator may indicate her past as a fertility Goddess or avatar symbolised by a hierodule. That she is shown partnerless may indicate she is an objective, or ideal to aspire to or channel. Of hierodules we may infer that the enactor of divine love took on the attributes of a God or Goddess they invoked. Potential survivals of this are numerous, but Heimdall as Rig fertilising the patriarchs matriarchs of the castes of mankind comes to mind. Often, after the Indo-Aryan invasion the predominately patriarchal pantheon adopts skills from a presumably matriarchal one. Odin getting Freyja’s juju is an example.

In more easterly traditions in Egyptian mythology, and one assumes others, ejaculation was conceived as a metaphor for creative principle. One God, not Nut sadly I don’t think, did this to fertilise the cosmic egg. The Greeks had a cosmic egg, in some myths. In others, Erebus, like Ginunngagap which I believe to be a cosmic womb, is filled by “light” called Eros. Compare to the new testament and all that goodness the darkness couldn’t understand. Anyway. The womb which is not a womb is charged by the hermeaherm which is left unsaid, but the Congress is there, often in the gender cases lost to English. Mother Sun and Father Moon fertilise their cohorts Brother Day and Sister Night. Greeklings did a gender swap. But all were polarised into a balancing tapestry.

It remains that her earlier form, which is structurally similar the Celtic Sheela Na Gig, in that both are holding the door open. As it were. Another metaphor in which the powers of life and death, womb and tomb, birth and rebirth are all streamlined into chain of being leading we the hermeaherm, dolmen, right back into Ginunngagap, womb and progenetrix- yawning gap fertilised with the water of life, and the blood of the old order.. The sexual connotation is inescapable, even if the intention is debatable. Genitive metaphors are among the oldest spiritual allegories. Enough of that for now.

Baubo, is full with flesh and may hearken back to an earlier and less objectively explicable or at least more debatable trend of Palæolithic Venuses whom she appears to succeed. Whereas most Sheelas are lithe, sometimes even frail, albeit fierce looking. Baubo has been found also in Cairo and I think maybe elsewhere besides Greece. The Egypgian connection tentatively suggests a connexion to earlier Mesapotamia where there was possibly a crucible of culture informing one or more waves of moving culture.

The Western Venuses tend to be older than their Eastern counterparts. This might suggest that in the East the old Venus culture lived longer. Its higher threshold for activity might have explained Hellenic reactionary bias. If the old Goddesses, their consorts and Gods had active footholds it would have naturally been seen a as challenge to Greek ascendancy. In the same way Rome and America were scarred by the memory of their Tarquinus Superbus and George Rex III leading them to forever ban kingship and invent ever more hypocritical and increasingly brutal replacements, so Greece seems to have been scarred by something older and thus resolved that always the Greek should say “no girls allowed,” with the dull modern form being “No fat chicks.”

The transition to the beginnings of European Paganism as we know them occurred with some violence. But the evaporation of older ways into newer ones wasn’t complete. The attitude of the Celtic and Teutonic peoples was more open to the inclusion of the wisdom of the elder races and their Gods.’ Though there was violence, the Aesir allied with the Vanir and maintained relationships with some Jotnar. You can find my thoughts about giant culture and venuses in my archives, ask if you care enough and don’t find it and I’ll get you there. I digress… Celts maintained a strong tradition of enchatresses which continued with Morgana La Fey, a composite of several Goddess and Priestess forms.

So Baubo, I deduce, was once of significant value to someone, as all “minor” deities I believe must have. Morphologically I think she bridges a gap between the vast waxing prehistoric Goddesses and the diminished waning Goddesses that would eventually be subsumed into the constrained, unhungry, desireless, flesh-mortified, dainty, slinking, neutered, meek, mild mother Mary.

If I have a point here, it is that alpha and omega points are not final nor are they mutually exclusive. Nothing is gone, the Paleolithic religion, whatever it actually was, did not dissappear. We have shreds. It was swallowed, reduced in complexity and regurgitated by the Indo-Europeans. They in turn were swallowed and puked back up by Christianity which is being vomited back in our faces by modified Bolshevism, which even now is feeding a more generalised and rootless globalism, which you guessed it, is retching something worse in our laps.

Bone appetite, or however the Queebs say it. Maybe looking at things like this changes nothing. But it makes my life more entertaining. Still, I think it is a potential illustration of how virtually everything we can see or touch has been altered, from concepts and and sexual attitudes, to the very nature of the Gods we worshipped even long before they were rolled up into a bizarre Hellenistic Jewish blender and spat out again as the schizophrenic demiurge tearing itself and the world apart.

Or maybe the French are right and everything is pornography because liberty. But that can’t be because my whole world hinges around the French being wrong about everything, so come great God of autism and save me from reason.

Will the wonders ever cease?

I SAID GOOD DAY SIR.

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More:

Photos of Paleolithic & Neolithic art, here. Scroll 2/3 of the way down to find Baubo before the Greek treatment.

From my sketchbook, here. She’s in there, not hard to find.

Alternatively you can apply pressure to my navigation page and find all kinds of tangentially related nonsense. Here. It’s great, you’re gonna love it more than a trump impersonation. Tremendous. Literally ten feet higher. Mexico already paid for it. Screw you, Benny.