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Heide Göttner-Abendroth
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THE GODDESS AND
HER HEROS
THE GODDESS AND
HER
HEROS
BY
HEIDE GOTTNEIDABENDROTH
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY LILIAN FRIEDBERG
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
HEIDE GOTTNER-ABENDROTH
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Anthony Publishing Company
Stow, Massachusetts
Anthony Publishing Company
206 Gleasondale Road
Stow, Massachusetts 01775
The original edition appeared in 1980 under the title Die Göttin und
ihr Heros, by Verlag Frauenoffensive, Munich, Germany. The edition
translated here is the 10th Edition, Expanded and Revised.
© 1995 the English translation by Anthony Publishing Company,
Stow, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 01775. All Rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
© 1980 by Verlag Frauenoffensive, Munich
© 10th Edition Expanded and Revised by Verlag Frauenoffensive,
Munich, 1993. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Card Number 95-75436
ISBN-0-9603832-7-1
Cover and text design by Leslie Carlson
To my daughter Heide
CONTENTS
Preface to the English Edition ix
Foreword xiii
Introduction xxi
Part I. The Goddess and Her Heros
The Matriarchal Religions and their Transformations 1
1. Greece (Artemis and Acteon, Aphrodite and Adonis,
Athena and Erechtheus) 17
2. Crete (Demeter and lakchos, Rhea and Zeus,
Hera and Zeus, Hera and Heracles) 27
3. Egypt (Nout-Neit and Ra, Hathor and Horus,
Isis and Osiris) 43
4. Sumeria/Babylon (Inanna-Ishtar and Dumuzi-Tammuz) 59
5. Asia Minor and Palestine (Kubaba and Teshub,
Cybele and Attis, Atargatis and Hadad, Anat and Baal) 67
6. Persia and India (Anahita and Mitra, Prithivi and
Dyaus Pitar, Sarasvati and Brahma, Shakti and Shiva,
Lakshmi and Vishnu) 81
7. Northwestern and Central Europe 95
7.1 The Celts (Dana and Dagda, Modron-Morrigain
and Bran, Erin and Lug) 96
7.2 The Germans (Jörd and Tyr-Heimdall,
Freyja and Freyr, Frigga and Od-Baldur) 105
Transformations of the Matriarchal Religions 117
Part II. The Princess and Her Brothers
Matriarchal Mythology in the Fairy Tales of Magic 133
1. The Abundance-Giving Woman in the Other World 137
2. The Gift-Giving Woman in a Deathlike State 145
3. Fairy Tales of the Redeemer 157
Transformations of the Fairy Tales 169
Part III. The Mistress and Her Hero
Matriarchal Mythology in the Epic Poetry of the Middle Ages 177
1. The Arthurian Epic (the Romance of Ywain, the Romance of
Erec, Romances of the Grail and Parsifal, the Lancelot Cycle) 183
2. The Tristan Romances 211
3. The Nibelungenlied and Siegfried Legends 219
Transformations of Matriarchal Mythology 227
Endnotes 241
Alphabetical Register of Mythological Names
with Explanations 247
PREFACETO
THE ENGLISH EDITION
By a series of coincidences a friend happened to give me The Goddess
and Her Heros as the "best book on that subject,” when I told her I had
just read a related book. Years before I had heard several conversations
by friends who had read Robert Graves The White Goddess, but had not
myself read it. Nor was it the right time, apparently, for me to be inter
ested. As so often has happened in my life, the right time comes to dis
cover a particular author, or work. And so the right time came for me to
read this landmark book—when I was already a publisher of books.
In a lifetime of reading, only a few books stand out as "monumental, "
meaning they changed my life. Here was one of those books. I have al
ways been interested in "why we think the way we do." This question
often came to me as a young girl growing up in the south. I wondered why
our family was not prejudiced in the same way that families around me
were, particularly in regard to the black race. I never heard disparaging
comments about blacks in my home. Years later I happened to find out the
reason, that a part of my family were native American. This, and a remark
made by Winston Churchill in his History of the English Speaking Peoples,
that the American Civil War was but a continuation of the English
Puritan-Cavalier conflict (two basic points of view he said would never
be reconciled), spurred my curiosity to look more closely into the views
held by various members of my family, and then my particular Virgin
ian southern culture. I went on to look into the history of New En
gland, so that I might better understand the people with whom I came to
live, near Boston. Indeed, this interest has proved to me over and over that
ideas we think are uniquely ours are only borrowed from others, often
without question. Many of these ideas have their roots in religious, politi
cal, and cultural views of some other time, often quite remote. The ideals
of U.S. southern religious fundamentalism, for instance, have scarcely
changed at all from the movement started (or perhaps revived) by Tho
mas Münzer in Germany in the early 1600s, from which they were de
rived.
In this marvelous research by Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth, I was to
learn even more about the customs, thoughts, and cultural practices that
X The Goddess and Her Heros
had influenced my attitudes, and therefore my life. Best of all, this
research freed me from the garbage of false ideas that surrounded my
being a woman, and how I felt about myself. I was able for the first
time, to put to rest events and wrongs that occurred in my youth that
made me doubt and not value myself.
Personal healing comes when we consciously unite with hidden
and repressed parts of ourselves; our culture, likewise, can be healed
by an honestly researched account of history. Dr. Heide Göttner-
Abendroth's book is full of healing insights, with the greatest benefit
being that we can heal ourselves as women and men. This book brings
forth all that repressed and forgotten material that is needed to heal
our social relationships.
Hardly enough can be said about the imbalance that occurs when
the masculine element becomes totally dominant: in today's U.S. soci
ety it is said that 1 in 5 women are raped in the marriage bed. Similar
statistics occur in Europe. In third world countries violence against
women is even greater. A similar tragedy occurs when women are "to
tally feminine." Masculinity unmoderated by the feminine seems to
end in violence, while femininity unmoderated by the masculine seems
to collapse inward upon itself. Matriarchal societies, as Dr. Göttner-
Abendroth shows us, were societies in balance, where the masculine
was moderated by the feminine (the principle of love and social rela
tionship), and the feminine by the masculine. Dr. Göttner-Abendroth
further shows, in describing the way these societies were patriarchalized,
how the newly idealized patriarchal male became aloof from the love
principle, regarding love as weakness, and the woman he formerly
loved, as beneath him. From that time on she became only "property"
for his sexual and other use, with its being dangerous and damaging to
his macho self-image for him to become too close to her. She, degraded
in the eyes of existing authorities (the newly dominant males and male-
dominated religious institutions) now began to disbelieve in herself.
As Dr. Göttner-Abendroth shows us, these ideas were not the "natu
ral order," but necessary to the politics of empire-building. They were
forced upon peoples everywhere by the warring kings and their patri
archal legitimizing religions.
The most debilitating effects of not understanding this history, we
soon realize, occur in the area of "knowing oneself." For until we know
ourselves, we continue to react blindly to the old patterns that still
dominate us. Most disastrously affected are our personal relationships.
A part of knowing oneself involves knowing the history of our thoughts.
The history contained here makes this an important book.
It became clear to me right away that it was inconceivable that
Preface to the English Edition XI
this book had not yet been translated into English, especially by one
of the big university presses. In conversations with publishers in this
and other countries, I soon learned, to my astonishment, that as a
general rule, U.S. publishers sell many books to the world, but buy
few. For example, in 1994, of the U.S. big commercial publishers, only
four titles were bought to be translated into English, and these were
mostly novels. Interestingly, the big U.S. university presses such as
those at Princeton and Harvard University also buy very few. This one
way street of information, especially between the U.S. and the rest of
the world, gives Americans the false impression that the U.S. is the
leader in all fields of knowledge. Quite the opposite seemed to be true
in this case. It seemed to me that without this book, Americans would
remain isolated from an important source of knowledge. I therefore
decided to try to acquire it. Fortunately, with the author's help, this
became possible, and I am here honored indeed, to make it available
in English.
Carol K. Anthony
