Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Jo Graham, author of The Great Wheel, Winter, and the new Seven Goddesses of the Hellenistic World.
Some pagans place a lot of emphasis on working within the spiritual tradition of their ancestors or reclaiming the wisdom of their own culture or ethnic past. Also, many people today want to be careful not to offend by appropriating the traditions of living groups they were not born into. But what do you do if you’re not drawn to the gods of your genetic ancestors? Are you just stuck, not welcome anywhere?
The universal goddesses of the Hellenistic world have been inclusive of people of all ethnicities and backgrounds for thousands of years—indeed, their worship spread widely because they were welcoming to all during a period of enormous upheaval and mixing, when the first truly diverse cities came into being. Some of them you may already be familiar with: Isis, Aphrodite, and Athena. Others were once celebrated in temples from Scotland to Sudan, but are less well-known today. Have you ever heard of Atargatis, the Mermaid of the Great River? Tyche and Cybele welcomed hundreds of thousands of worshipers, and while Epona is today mainly identified as a Celtic goddess, she was once worshiped as far away as Egypt!
Though each of them began as the goddess of a particular people, in the great cities of the Hellenistic world—multi-ethnic and multi-lingual—their rites were transformed. Aphrodite, for example, was known as Aphrodite Pandemos, Aphrodite of All People. Love is universal. It does not discriminate by race, language, gender, age, or anything else. Anyone can love and be loved. Therefore, Aphrodite is the goddess of all who love, whoever they are or wherever they came from. This is as true today as it was two thousand years ago!
In my book, Seven Goddesses of the Hellenistic World: Ancient Worship for Modern Times, I explore these universal goddesses, first in the context of their ancient stories, and then in how modern pagans can connect with them. Each of them has lessons for today and each of them welcomes everyone.
Our thanks to Jo for her guest post! For more from Jo Graham, read her article “Isis, Healer of Hearts.”
