Elise Kermani, December 2001
This brief paper marks the first phase of my research into ancient mythology, archeology and language of the Middle East and Old Europe as content for a future multimedia essay and/or performance installation called "The HESTIA Project". It is a work in progress exploring the alchemical origins of the Roman alphabet through the unwritten story of Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth/home/fire.
This .html essay is missing footnotes which appear in the printed text.
Methodology
My method of research begins with a thesis which states that there is a relationship between the origins of the letter A and early prehistoric religions, including the mythology surrounding Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth. This thesis, drawn from intuition, memory, and experience has many roots in historical facts. Specific information collected from reading classical as well as contemporary writings will lead directly into the content and imagery for my creative work.
This "remembering" theme will be an important element to the Hestia project. It is a process of remembering the exformation, or information which has been discarded, namely the story of Hestia and the goddess religions. The cultures of pre-history with their multiple polytheistic gods and goddesses were so complicated and so full of information that it seemed like too much of a chaos for man to remember. To convey a message one must throw away a lot of information beforehand. You can measure the depth of that message by measuring the amount of information which has been discarded in order to communicate the message.
It is well known that discoveries are hardly ever the result of just one person's research. Tor Norretranders quotes James Clerk Maxwell's last word as a preface to his book The User Illusion:
"What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me."
This sentence describes my process of research and making art. I work in very interdisciplinary ways, reading from such texts as The Koran, to feminist writings on the goddess, to the 800 page poem "A" by Louis Zukofsky within the same afternoon in order to glean insight on the source material.
Toward Hestia
So this brings me now to the subject of studying the mythology of Hestia and the origins of the alphabet for the purpose of writing a multimedia essay. In the work prior to this project, I was exploring the "Body and the Word" in performance. That culminated in a composition in which I wrote an imaginary language on my skin in front of an audience with surveillance cameras and piezo microphones capturing and processing my live actions. It was a natural progression to then study the origins of writing. In doing so, I discovered many new things, among them the feminist theory regarding language and the body and the Judeo-Christian religious thought which suppresses these connections and divides them into the two separate 'camps' of the Holy Word of Logos/Man versus Image/Woman/Body. My thesis is not to divide the Word against the Image but to combine them in an integrated dance.
In 1993, I happened upon a book by Carlton Laird called The Miracle of Language in which the author published a graph showing the Phoenician origins of the Roman alphabet. I was intrigued by the names of the letters: Aleph, Beth and Gimmel which meant ox, house, camel for the letters A,B,C respectively. The Phoenician signs actually looked like the objects they represented. It made me curious to find out why and how these letters came into existence. What did it mean to write these letters in the specific order of the alphabet, was there some spiritual significance to it?
There are many recently published books about the origins of the alphabet. Most of them agree on the origins of the Roman alphabet coming from the Phoenician signs; although there is a discrepancy whether the Phoenicians were sophisticated enough to originate the idea of the alphabet. Most historians agree that somehow during their frequent trades in the Mediterranean Sea they had carried the alphabet to the shores of Greece, or that Greeks living in Phoenicia (now Lebanon) brought it back to Greece. But it was the Greeks who finally adopted the alphabet, transformed it and put it in use to communicate language and literature such as Homer's Odyssey in 600 B.C.
Hestia "She informs by her absense."
In 1995 I decided I wanted to create a new work centering around the story (or rather the lack of a story) of the Greek Goddess Hestia. In 1993 I had just completed a multi-media performance on the story of Artemis but while creating this work I became intrigued by the goddess Hestia. What was the significance of having a major goddess if there was nothing to be said about her? I was inclined to believe that the lack of a story was the story.
Hestia is mentioned briefly in the Greek mythology as the goddess who gives up her seat on Mt. Olympus to the god of wine, Dionysis. After giving up her seat to Dionysis to tend to the center fire, she is pretty much forgotten. She then disappears completely from the canon of Greek Myths.
Christine Downing writes:
"Although she was an original member of the Olympian Twelve, there is a tradition that at some point she yielded her place to Dionysis-a tradition but, typically, no story. Indeed, there are almost no stories about this least anthropomorphic of the major Greek divinities."
And this definition is from the Oxford Classical Dictionary:
"HESTIA, goddess of the hearth, etymologically identical with Vesta (q.v.) , and not unlike her in cult, though less important and not having her virgin priestesses. In early times, when it was a difficult and slow process to make fire, to keep a hearth burning continually was very advisable, and it would seem that in communities of that age, both in Greece and in Italy, the hearth of the chief or king was especially important, probably for practical reasons and certainly also from magico-religious motives; it seems to have been considered in some sense the life of the people (the equation 'fire=life' is very widespread). Hence the cult of the communal or sacred hearth was apparently universal, but the goddess never developed, hardly even achieving anthropomorphization. She therefore has next to no mythology. Homer never mentions her. At the Amphidromia when the 5 days old child was received into the family and named, part of the ceremony was to run with it around the hearth, but it does not appear that the goddess was thought present in any personal way"
So Hestia was the firstborn of Cronos and Rhea, the elder sister to Zeus, and she has no significant story? Why is this? One guess is that her mythology is so ancient and revered that to anthropomorphize her would be blasphemous. Another is that her place was 'in the home' and had little to do with the outside affairs of war, love, thunder and lightning. These latter concepts became the symbols that the Greeks wanted and needed for their own advancement as a civilization.
It is interesting to note that the central 'right' place for women to be for the past 2,000 years has been the 'home'. Some Moslem countries in the Middle East in recent years have taken this idea to the extreme: banning women and girls from leaving the home without a male relative. But this image of woman and the home is not too far removed in America either. In the 1950's the housewife was venerated as the 'good' wife, and even in the year 2001, Martha Stewart makes a comeback luring women to make homes beautiful and comfortable for their guests and family.
Concurrent with the decline of Hestia's importance in Greek Religion came the rise in popularity of the Dionysis cult in ~ 500 B.C., and the rise of alphabet literacy in Greece.2
Leonard Shlain writes:
"After the introduction of the alphabet, the Greeks lamented that Mount Olympus was short one god embodying one type of behavior. The Greeks broke the Golden Circle in the fifth century B.C. and ejected Hestia, goddess of the hearth, family, and children. Her replacement was Dionysis, god of wine, sexuality and dance. The missing behavior was madness. The dynamic growth of his cult coincided with the rise of alphabet literacy, Greek rationality, and the flowering of classical art."
The Origin of Hestia found in Middle Eastern Religions
The origins of the Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth/Fire, might be found in the indigenous fire-based religions of the Middle East including Zoroastrianism and other earlier belief systems from prehistoric Iran. She might also be found in Jewish and Christian religious symbols of fire and the eternally burning candles of the Roman Catholic Church.
Fire worship in Ancient Iran
Some archaeologists have found temples for fire worship dating from 4,000 B.C. in Turkmenistan and Iran. The holy book of Zoroaster is the Avesta, which bears a resemblance to the name of the Roman goddess Vesta3 The Zoroastrian's worship of the eternal fire and the sacrifice of bulls was central to their religion. The anicent goddess Anahita (predating Zoroaster) is often associated with water and is part of the triad along with Mithra and Ahuramazda that the ancient Persians as well as those of the Achaemenid period (560-330 B.C.) worshipped.4
On December 21, the longest night of the year, the people of Iran still jump over a fire to ward off the evil spirits and to "bring on the light and the warmth" of summer. The celebration of Christmas and of celebrating "light" during the winter season can be traced to the worship of the Persian god Mithra. Some historians date the origin of Zoroastrianism to the last ice age, 10,000 B.C., when the first prophet was said to lead the people from the cold ice and into the lands of the "sun". The worship of fire should be thought of as "heat" not "flame" and the importance of the evolution of the "fire-logos": that which evolves all things out of itself, should not be underestimated.
Logos, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary:
- a. Cosmic reason, affirmed in ancient Greek philosophy as the source of world order and intelligibility. B. Reason or an expression of reason in words or things. 2. The self-revealing thought and will of God, as set forth in the Gospel of John, often associated with the second person of the trinity. (Greek logos, speech, word, reason.)
Lawrence Heyworth-Mills states:
This Logos is one and the same world-forming element as fire (i.e. heat) It, the Logos, was a reasonable force which inheres in the substance matter of the world. There is nothing material without it. So, it is in the Avesta that we have, of all possible lores, the first record of the soul's moral self-motion.
Most of the Persian Zoroastrians fled to India to escape the persecution of the Moslems in 800 AD and many now live in Bombay. Early Zoroastrianism influenced the Greeks, the Christians and the Jews on many religious concepts such as monotheism, the afterlife and worshipping the "truth" over the "lie". It is possible that the ancient Persians, through the Avesta, also influenced Greeks on the philosophical concept of the "Logos" and brought the worship of fire to Greece. But Zoroastrian priests who tend to the eternal fire are now male, as opposed to the Vesta virgins of Rome, who were young female daughters of the king.
Fire in Jewish and Christian Theology
The Jewish and Christian Bible has many spiritual and revelatory references to fire. In the Old Testament, God's Angel appears to Moses in a burning bush (Ex. 3:2) and in the New Testament the Holy Ghost is represented by a single flame, the third person of the Trinity. In some Christian traditions, the Holy Spirit is thought of as the feminine part of God. The lighting of candles is an important ritual in the Roman Catholic Mass, and it is performed by young altar boys.
The Missing Pieces of the Origins of the Alphabet
The story of Hestia's demise symbolizes the lapse in human memory of our own cultural origins. We write human history by telling of the wars that have been fought - and the winner of the war usually writes the books and wipes out the cultural history of the losers. When Alexander conquered the Persian Empire in 330 B.C. many of the Avestan Holy books were lost or destroyed. Through research for this project I am interested in unlocking the history of the losers, the forgotten peoples and places. I want to speculate and tease out the information that has been discarded and try to reconnect it to a story or a mythology about Hestia and the origins of the alphabet. Like Hestia, this information is buried beneath the ruins of war and conquest, but it may be information we can piece together by reading about new archeological finds in the Middle East and reading various forgotten and discarded books from ancient religions.
I am trying to piece together a puzzle, one that might connect geographical areas such as the ancient sites of Catal Huyuk in Turkey of 7,000 B.C. to the Zoroastrians living in Bombay in 2001 because both cultures allowed their dead to be devoured by birds as a possible act of reincarnation. Or, perhaps there is some connection between the Linear A script of Crete and the origins of Arabic. Perhaps Hestia as a goddess finally leaves the prison of her home and travels through these lands and through time connecting the various cultures to each other by the simultaneous creation of similar rituals and mythologies. Perhaps she joins with her sometimes husband and traveler/ messenger Hermes to connect the dots and complete the image into a whole as the 'pillar and the ring'.
Hermeneutics, stemming from the god Hermes, has become a widespread practise of philosophy and is used in the study of semiotics and semiology. It describes a triadic structure in the act of interpretation as
1) a sign message
2) a mediator or interpreter to
3) convey it to some audience.
The major conceptual issues which Hermeneutics deals with are:
- the nature of a text
- what it means to understand a text
- how understanding and interpretation are determined by presupposition and beliefs (the horizon) of the audience to which the text is being interpreted.
Perhaps our current information and knowledge systems are missing a feminine element of inquiry by denying the flame of intuition.
The Alphabet
In the 2nd millenium B.C. (1300 BC) the Phoenicians began to use a letter looking similar to an upside-down A which they called "aleph" meaning "ox" for the first letter of their alphabet. This upside-down A looks like the horns of a bull, or as my theory suggests, it also looks like the female reproductive system.5
It is interesting to note that in Persian the letter A is not to be sounded out loud - but its name is "alef" and is the same shape as the number one, a single vertical line. Note the sonic similarities of its name to Aleph, Alpha, Allah and Allat, an Arabic female deity.
It was during the time that Middle Eastern societies perfected the art of farming and raising animals that writing began. The first Greek writing went back and forth on the page, or "boustrophedon" in Greek, which translates literally to: "as the ox plows" ...let me finish the simile:
As the Ox plows... the field ... to mix the seed with the soil ... to create new life.
Perhaps two of the most important inventions for human progress has been the creation of the alphabet and the discovery of agriculture. Is it possible that there is a relationship between the two inventions? Some creative spark of association? There seemed to be some mystical meaning behind writing the alphabet in the prescribed order: A,B,C,D, etc. as many artifacts are found with this inscription including Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician.
It is curious to note that archeologists have found bull bucrania (skeleton of bull's head with horns) below human breasts in the temples of Old Europe (Catal Huyuk, ~7,000 B.C.) and archeologist and author Marija Gimbutas makes the connection between the woman's reproductive organs and the horns of the bull. Very early versions of what I would call the letter A (an upside-down A) were found carved into the vulvas of goddess figurine sculptures. As the woman mixes the seed of man in her womb to create new life, so also does the Ox mix the seed with the soil? The beginnings of life, beginnings of culture and the beginning of the alphabet? Could this be the secret of the alpha and the omega? The bull and the ox are animals which are common symbols for the ancient pagan gods, but it is possible that the image of worshipping a woman's magic reproductive organs predates the symbol of the bull? Perhaps, in order to further discredit women's involvement in religious practices, the Greeks turned the A right side up, finally destroying any relationship to the earlier goddess religions? That the Zoroastrians finally begin to omit the female goddess Anahita, and make only men and boys the priests of tending the fire?
Leonard Shlain, in his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess, argues that it is the alphabet, writing and the dominance of left brained thinking that brought the fall of women. He says that the 'word' triumphed over the 'image'. I do not agree with his thesis. I speculate that the rise of the alphabet and the fall of the goddess happened simultaneously, but the two events are not related to each other. I propose that the fall of women and the goddess religions was not due to writing but rather due to the strength and power of the goddess-based religions which preceeded the patriarchal ones. The fear of "woman" is primal and deep, and it is most apparent in cultures where goddess religions once flourished.
In the Middle East and possibly in Iraq, buried underneath the rubble of war and neglect lies evidence of a great goddess Ishtar/Inanna and possibly the tablets which can explain this mysterious question of why the goddess religion was wiped from history. We can surmise that the prehistoric goddess polytheistic religions were a threat to the male dominated monotheistic ones, but I am not convinced that we have the whole story.
Perhaps the renewed interest in this time of prehistory and the resurgence of interest in the goddess religion in recent years is due to the fact that a 'polytheistic' faith is a way of thinking which is more aligned to our recent discoveries in science and human perception, including the study of chaos. We are discovering that our universe is complex and therefore we might need to retrieve more information from the past in order take the next big step in human 'enlightenment'.
Finally, it is interesting to note that the letter in our Roman alphabet "Z" or "Zeta" in Greek and "zayin" meaning "weapon" in Phoenician, became the last letter of our alphabet - perhaps signifying the end of life? In Christian kabbalah:
Zayin is linked with the symbolism of the sword. In sequence following Vau
Zayin represents the conclusion of the act of impregnation and the open field of possibilities.
Vau is the letter V and also the chevron shape found on inscriptions on sculpture from Catal Huyuk and other Balkan prehistoric sites.
Summary of "The Story of A"
In summary, let me reiterate my story/mythology of the letter "A". Aleph might be traced back to originating in 5th-6th century B.C. as first appearing as a "V" shaped chevron found on figurines from numerous Old European Archeological sites near Turkey, Romania and other Balkan areas. We can then follow its progression to the Cycladic Islands where the "V" is transformed to a triangle on the pubic area of the beautifully sculpted "folded-arm" figures from 2700 B.C. to 2400 B.C. Next we find an inverted A used by the Phonecians 1300-1000 B.C. which is called "Aleph" and means Ox. This letter (along with most letters of the Phoenician alphabet) was appropriated by the Greeks and turned right side up and called "Alpha" in 500 B.C. about the time of the rise of the Dionysian Cult and the disappearance of the worship of Hestia.
The Greeks call their earliest writing, which went back and forth on the page from right to left and then left to right, and so on "boustrophedon" literally meaning "as the ox plows". The Greeks also add another letter in the shape of V called "upsilon".
The Arabs take the same letter sounds of the Greek Alphabet, but they devise a separate system of writing possibly influenced more by the Linear A script from Crete, thereby losing all association from the original bull/ox/female reproductive organ. They call their first letter "aleph" and call their god "Allah" and their goddess "Allat" even though Mohamed preached monotheism and opposed goddess worship and destroyed the bull worshippers' idols in the Ka'ba. . Aleph is not to be pronounced, and has the numeric value of "1". Perhaps this number emphasizes the indivisibility of God.
The god and goddess of fire (most likely the precursor to Hestia) continued to exist in the worship of the trilogy Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra of the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, even though Zoroaster preached monotheism. The Zoroastrians and the remaining goddess religions were finally almost completely wiped out with the rise of Islam in the Middle East around the year 800 A.D. The connection between the Ox, fire and the Logos can be found in the ancient holy books of the Avesta of Zoroaster.
Many interesting books have been published in recent years (1980 and1990's) about the goddess religion and about the alphabet and in 1998 Leonard Shlain put these two concepts together and published a book about the goddess versus the alphabet. My thesis is a continuation of themes that I have been working with in performance since 1993. There is a connection between the ancient goddesses, and the origins of the letter "A". Unraveling the mysteries between the ancient scripts and the prehistorical religions where this script appeared, namely in Lebanon, Sinai, Iraq and Iran we may find clues to find out why these religions were destroyed. Once we have the missing information about the origins of our culture we may have a deeper understanding of the meaning of human civilization and its possibilities for the future.
My current work on this subject:
Description of the visual essay "Aleph the Ox (and the origins of A)"
In the following very short visual essay (http://ishtar.cdemusic.org/aleph.html) I have taken the story above and abbreviated it for the internet. This work was created with the computer programs Photoshop, Macromedia Director, Protools and Peak.
I sampled the first solo vocal phrase from Guillaume de Machaut's (1300-1377) motet "Inviolata genitrix" in which the first line translates from the Latin to:
"O happy Virgin, mother of Christ
who brought joy to a sad world
By your birth,
Sweetest one,
You vanquished heresy
When you believed in the angel
And bore your son
Most chaste one."
which I then crossfaded into two very short loops of my voice. These loops are :094 and .241 seconds long and are an experiment in producing "infinity" and a "warp of time" made available only through modern technology. By selecting very short loops and repeating them into infinity, one is able to take a segment of sound time and stretch it over many minutes. The shortest loop that I've been able to produce is .010 seconds and it sounds to the ear like a single pitch. But this is a subject to be researched for another paper! The effect is something like taking a photograph of music with a very fast shutter speed, slicing a moment in time and extending it into infinity. Of course slicing a section of music is a great distortion, since music exists in the 4th dimension of time, and when you dissect it like this you are changing all of its attributes until it is unrecognizable. This modern technology of sampling and looping might be compared to the movement of cubism visual art, or the supra-realistic poetry of Gertrude Stein, where distortion is achieved through repetition and a description of 360º views. It also is related to my interest in exploring the number "zero" and non-rational thought.
I videotaped a bull living alone on an abandoned farm near my house in upstate New York and converted it into video stills. The alphabet letters were scanned in from the Carlton Laird's book The Miracle of Language and manipulated in Photoshop. The images of the body are self portraits. All of the imagery and sound elements were brought together first in Director and then into Protools where I could match the imagery to the music and then back into Director where I made the final adjustments and compressed the file as a Shockwave movie for the internet.
The movie is small and short because it was intended for the internet. Many people do not have fast modems or extra RAM, so I decided to make the movie for the average internet user who has a 56k modem.
I am currently working on the connection between "heat" and interactive technology by developing the "Body Chime" infrared motion sensor. In a future installation of The Hestia Project (in collaboration with sculptor Barbara Kilpatrick), I plan to use the Body Chime to track the motion of the viewer to trigger computer generated sequences. The energy of the viewer's body is detected by the sensor and as they participate in the installation it becomes the source material for the interactive musical composition.
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