Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 7: Astarte

Astarte;

Sources and Influences

BAM: Astarte:

Thealogy

Astarte is a name for a Goddess (or several Goddesses, or one syncretised with a number of others) of the ancient Near and Middle East, who has probably the most complicated history of the Goddesses named in the Charge. Her origins lie in Sumeria, modern day Iraq, where the parallel Goddess was called Inanna, and in Babylonia, where she was called Ishtar.  (This historical information is taken from the survey in Anne Baring and Jules Cashford: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Archetype. Book Club Associates, London, 1991.)
The development of archaeology from the nineteenth century onwards is what has made these cultures known to us, and in fact much remains to be uncovered. The discovery of these cultures of the third and fourth millenia BCE make Astarte probably the oldest Goddess name referred to here, and reveal the origin of the Sumerian culture, many of whose ideas passed through Babylonian, Assyrian and Canaanite culture, through the Bible, into our Judaeo-Christian culture. The origins of the Sumerian people remain unknown, but their history was ultimately marked by conflict with the neighbouring Semitic (supposedly the descendents of Shem in the Bible) peoples, and finally the overcoming of their culture by the Babylonians.
The Babylonians kept, translated, and transmitted much of the culture of the Sumerians, meaning that Ishtar, Goddess of Babylonia, inherited much of the mythology and ritual  of her Sumerian predecessor, Inanna (the books are divided on whether to treat these two Goddesses as separate entities or not).
Astarte was truly referred to by many names.  (Egerton Sykes (edited by Alan Kendall): Who’s Who in Non-Classical Mythology. J.M. Dent, London, 1993.) Her Hebrew name, Ashtoreth, results from both the 6th century BCE standardisation of Hebrew vowels (Hebrew is a language where vowels are indicated by small points placed around the consonants, allowing for a certain ambiguity in spelling. In written modern Hebrew, these vowel points are not included at all.), and the inclusion in the names of all foreign deities of the vowels of the Hebrew word ‘boshet’, meaning ‘abomination.’ Another name was Asherah, meaning simply ‘Goddess’; Lucian calls her ‘Syria Dea’ – ‘Goddess of Syria’; she was also called by the name Atargatis, a conflation of Astarte and Anat, a different Goddess.
Astarte was a fertility Goddess, whose cult extended over the whole Middle East and beyond. The Greeks equated her with Aphrodite, which seems to be the same Goddess cult in a new environment. As Ashtoreth she was the Goddess of war in Egypt, where from 1800 BCE until Christian times, she was known as the lady of hares and chariots. In Ugarit texts she was also called Asheratian (‘The Asherah of the Sea’), and Creatress of the Gods, being the mother of 70 Gods and Goddesses.
Astarte’s mythology shows the influence of four different cultures (  Baring and Cashford, op.cit.) : she was a Mother Goddess (many Goddesses have been given this title – a Roman Goddess even being called Magna Mater, Great Mother – which does not mean that her cultists believed in a single universal Mother Goddess), a fertility Goddess, and she accumulated both the names and attributes of various local Goddesses, and they were syncretised with her.  Her role in mythology is not consistent: at different times she is Mother, or being raped, or walking in fear of the Gods, or being the wife, daughter or sister of the Gods. Her position in the pantheon also changed in a process where Gods began to be primary to female Goddesses; Baring and Cashford comment that her mythology is further complicated by these two historical layers of mythology, and identify the tradition where the Goddess is primary as the elder. They conclude that these conflicting influences and historical layers, together with the relative paucity of the information which has been uncovered about this Goddess, make it impossible to come to a firm genealogy, or even names for the divinities. Because of this I would be wary of those authors who seize on Sumer and its neighbouring and succeeding cultures as examples of ‘Goddess civilisations’: the history is far too complicated to reach sweeping conclusions, and much of it is founded on archaeological evidence, which is always difficult of interpretation.
However, there is one well-known textual source for her, albeit heavily edited to give one side’s point of view: she is an example of the Goddesses named in the Charge who appear in a situation of conflict in the Bible, and her cult was very much of the time of the transition to monotheism. Again and again in the Hebrew Bible, the people of Israel are criticised for worshipping foreign gods and goddesses. In this time of transition the concern of the worshippers of Yahweh in Canaan was to uproot the worship of Baal (or the Baals) and his consort Astarte. It seems that elements of Canaanite religion were absorbed and adapted by Yahwism (which will sound familiar from the Christianisation of Europe) but the people would not abandon their old Gods. The people who maintained worship of Yahweh with other Gods were the target of the followers of Yahweh in their polemic writing, since the covenant with one God meant worshipping him alone. So Astarte is a Goddess who is most familiar to us from a context of religious conflict, with the followers of the old ways wanting to maintain them against the proponents of that new-fangled monotheism:

‘...it was not felt that the two religions were contradictory or mutually exclusive. Indeed, there was a strong tendency for the two faiths to coalesce in popular worship. As we know from archaeology, in the outlying regions of Israel people had in their possession figurines, small statuettes, of the goddess of fertility, Ashtart.’ ( Bernhard Anderson: The Living World of the Old Testament (Fourth Edition). Longman, Harlow, 1988, p. 190.)

There is one obvious reason for the inclusion of her name in the ritual of Wicca: she was the consort of the God Baal, and the two divinities were worshipped together. Here we have the motif, which recurs in many mythologies of male gods and female goddesses paired together. On one level it is an expression of how Pagan Gods are more like us as humans: they relate to each other in family trees, they love, they fight. This is far different from the remote Gods of monotheisms, and creates an entirely different world-view for their worshippers. Gardner believed that the witches worshipped small Gods, who were not too strict, and certainly in duotheism or polytheism, the Gods are more immediate and – almost – human.
On another level this pairing of Goddess and God reflects one of the major mysteries of Wicca as a fertility cult and mystery school: Wicca’s major polarity is that of male and female in creating fertility in all aspects of our lives. This is unashamedly and unavoidably a sexual mystery: sex is the means by which men and women create children, and this ability to create in all spheres of life is mirrored, in Wicca, primarily in the sexuality polarity of male and female.
One difference exists, though: in most Wiccan traditions the Goddess is definitely preeminent over the God, who is seen as her consort, whereas  Astarte, despite the difficulties of identifying her and her relationships to other Gods, is always seen in the Bible as the consort of the God Baal. Some have written that it was not so in pre-Valiente Wicca, and attribute the accentuation of the Goddess to her.
Another possible reason for her name appearing in the Charge could be that since this is the Charge of the Great Mother who was of old called by many names, the syncretic nature of her history and cults fits well with the thealogy of the Charge. Connections can be made with Aphrodite, also named here, and with Egypt, a famous centre of magical learning:

‘Astarte, identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite, was by the Egyptians transformed into an Egyptian goddess, represented as the daughter of Ptah and worshipped with Egyptian rites, though this did not prevent her from being identified also with Ptah’s wife, the lion-headed Sakhmet, a goddess of war. It is idle to look for logical consistency in the bewildering kaleidoscope of ancient paganism, in which gods mingle with one another continually, yet somehow keep their identity.’  (H. Idris Bell: Cults and Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Ares Publishers, Chicago, 1975, p. 16.)

There is another, more obvious, reason for Astarte’s inclusion at a key moment of Wiccan ritual: the famous story of her descent to the underworld is echoed by that of the Goddess in Wiccan ritual.
It is known in two versions, one featuring Inanna and the other Ishtar, who in a mirror of the Wiccan myth of descent ritually acted out within the coven,

‘...Determined to go...
To the house which those entering cannot leave,
On the road where travelling is one-way only,
To the house where those who enter are deprived of light...
Ishtar, when she arrived at the gate of Kurnugi,
Addressed her words to the keeper of the gate...’  (Stephanie Dalley (translator): Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 155. The account of Ishtar’s descent is paraphrased from this translation.)

The gatekeeper tells Ereshkigal that Ishtar has arrived at the gate; she becomes angry and tells the gate keeper to ‘treat her according to the ancient rites.’ Then comes the passing through the gates and being stripped at each one. At the first gate she is stripped of her crown; at the second she is stripped of her ear-rings; at the third, of the beads around her neck; at the fourth, of the toggle-pins at her breast; at the fifth, of her birth-stone girdle; at the sixth, or the bangles on her wrists and ankles; and at the seventh, she is stripped of her garment. Each time she asks why, and the gatekeeper replies that these are the rites of the Mistress of Earth. After this Ereshkigal trembles before her, but Ishtar unhesitantly leans over her and Ereshkigal sends out a number of diseases to her. The whole world stops in mourning. Then the God Ea creates Good-Looks the playboy and sends him to Ershkigal to ask for water. Ereshkigal sends Namtar to revivify Ishtar with the waters of life, and Ishtar returns through the gates, being given back the things of which she has been stripped, at each one.
It was thought that as a result of this Dumuzi rose again and that (although this was not proved until 1963) that a ritual enactment of his dying and rising again caused seasonal fertility. In the shorter Ishtar version quoted here, unlike in the Inanna version, there is no ritual given for this, but Dalley believes that the account features the goddess as a ritual statue, which may have made a periodic ritual journey to the underworld and back again. Parallels to this myth are found in other mythologies – such as Persephone – so it need not have been this one that was chosen, but its significance in a Wiccan context is that it underlines the Wiccan myth of seasonal birth, death and rebirth.
In the Wiccan version of this myth (Gerald Gardner: Witchcraft Today. Arrow Books, London, 1975, p. 45)  the Goddess journeys to the ‘nether lands’ to solve all mysteries. At the gate the guardian tells her to take off her garments and jewellery, which she does. Death himself kneels and kisses her feet in homage, but she replies that she does not love him, and asks him why he causes all the things she does love, to die. Death replies that it is not him, but Age and Fate that cause this, tells her that she is lovely, and asks her to stay with him. She refuses, repeating that she does not love him, and he tells her that she must be scourged because of this. Death scourges her and she cries out, ‘I know the pangs of love,’ and Death replies that only so can she obtain joy and knowledge. Death teaches her all the mysteries and magics, and they loved, since magic controls love, death, and resurrection, the three great events in life. Then comes a great mystery of Wicca: the return from death at the same time and in the same place as those we have loved before. But this cannot happen without dying first, love is necessary for birth, ‘and this is all the magic.’
This myth parallels and adds a new twist to other descent myths. For Ishtar the trial is of having her clothing and gaudies removed progressively at each gate; the Wiccan descent myth disposes of them all at the beginning. In the Ishtar version there is then only death until Ereshkigal decides to revivify her. In the Wiccan version this is changed firstly to the challenge motif, of whether the Goddess is actually prepared to love Death, and then the trial motif, which takes the form of scourging. The Ishtar version is a more straightforward telling of a fertility motif, where death leads to life by the will of a Goddess, and a ritual enactment of this myth to continue the creation of this life. In the Wiccan version the trappings of transitory life are disposed of at the beginning; the Goddess is challenged to love Death, her apparent enemy; she is tried by the scourging. These are the things which enable her actually to come to love Death, and enable her to learn all mystery and magic, which are themselves contained in the very processes which constitute the myth, love, birth, death. A final addition comes in the extension of this continuing circle of life to love itself, which becomes the final mystery: our love does not end at death, but because we love, it can continue into new life.
Gardner makes this myth the centre of witch belief, and comments on its differences from parallel myths:

‘This myth upon which its members base their actions is the central idea of the cult. Perhaps it was coined to explain ideas and rituals already conceived, and to explain why the wiser, older and more powerful god should give his power over magic to the goddess. It is very easy to say this is only the story of Istar descending into hell, but the point of the story is different. It is quite possible that the stories of Istar and Siva have influenced the myth, but I think that its origin is most likely Celtic. In Celtic legends the Lords of the Underworld did prepare you for rebirth, and many living people are said to have entered their regions, formed alliances with them and returned safely, but it needed great courage; only a hero or a demigod dared to risk it. ...’  (Ibid, p. 46.)

In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner makes a further allusion to the significance of Ishtar to witches: he connects her with Freya, asserting that she was probably the original Great Mother, and connects the two Goddesses with the witch cult by their use of necklaces, upon which witches set great store, and he sees the loss of her clothing as representing the waning of the moon, until the Goddess is resurrected in beauty and power.  (Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.)
The significance of this myth for Wiccans is found in the concept of initiation, which is why the myth of the Goddess features in the Third Degree initiation ritual. This is paralleled by the tales of shamanic sickness and the power unleashed by crises, in other traditions. It is by being challenged and coming to love Death that for magical people the keys to all magic and mystery are revealed. This initiation, for Wiccans, takes place in a ritualised context, which reflects and reinforces inner initiatory experiences. The witch who has descended into the underworld and, by facing the tribulations, which are found there, can rise to new life. The trappings are abandoned at the beginning in the Wiccan version, to indicate a stripping of the former personality.
In the Wiccan version, the Goddess actually comes to love Death, which is a major difference from the Ishtar version, where he doesn’t feature at all, and indicates the major mystery of Wicca, that death is not the enemy, nor is it the end. Witches, by their confrontation with death, and coming to love it, find the keys to the essential magical power of transformation, and in this Wicca is in a great magical tradition, as Luhrmann puts it:

‘Proserpine, Inanna: their names run like ore throughout magical practice. Magical rituals and writings make much of this theme of voluntary descent, destruction and rebirth, transformation and return. The destructive underworld must not be feared, but entered.’  (Tanya Luhrmann: Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, p.95)