Ursula, from her Saxon name, Ursel.73
(As Liz Greene remarks in her haunting and important novel about the alleged secrets of the Merovingians in France, The Dreamer of the Vine [ 1980] `... how different these gods were ... What the one demands, the other abhors. Yet though our poor minds cannot comprehend it, I often suspect these gods are the same.' Then she adds sagely: `I think too much of any god can drive one mad.' )74
The shaggy outline of the Goat-God hung over the years of the witch trials: now the Devil incarnate, he had free rein to ensnare the unwary - mainly women - and seize their souls.
Even the gentle `sylvans and fauns' of lost Arcadia were believed - by the Inquisition and even their much later co-religionists, not the least the Catholic zealot the Reverend Montague Summers (who died in 1948), of whom much more later - to be `commonly called incubi', or sexual demons.75 In this as in much else, Summers is toeing the long-established party line: in fact, satyrs, fauns and the Gaulish nature spirits called dusii (from deus, `god') were listed in the Inquisition's official handbook as incubi:
who had intercourse with witches in front of witnesses . . . Women seem unaccountably willing to copulate with their demons under the eyes of `bystanders'; the latter reported that, while the demon remained invisible, `it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and orgasm, [that] ... they have been copulating with Incubus devils.'76
Summers demonstrates his quirky contrariness when discussing the Devil as represented on the medieval stage: `He is, in fact, the Satyr of the old Dionysiac processions, a nature-spirit, the essence of joyous freedom and unrestrained delight, shameless if you will, for the old Greek knew not shame.' Strangely, Summers appears grudgingly to admire the `joyous freedom' of the Satyr, and even goes on: `... in a word he was Paganism incarnate, and Paganism was the Christian's deadliest foe; so they took him, the Bacchic reveller, they smutted him from horn to hoof, and he remained the Christian's deadliest foe, the Devil.' The Rev. Summers seems to be oblivious of the fact that a good proportion of his book is devoted to describing the horned and cloven-hooved Devil as a reality. In any case, he notes that in Euripedes' classic play Medea dating back to the fifth century BCE, there is the passage: `She seemed, I wot, to be one frenzied, inspired with madness by Pan or some other of the gods',77 adding `Madness was sometimes thought to be sent by Pan for any neglect of his worship'.78
Although to certain groups of country folk, Pan never really died, it was with the rise of the Romantic Movement in the early nineteenth century that saw him enjoy a comeback, although again, perhaps a little diluted in character. The grounds of countless country resi dences became littered with follies in the form of temples or even classical tombs, and statuary evocative of Pan - satyrs, nymphs and the god himself. Ideas about a long-lost Arcadia, a gently wooded Golden Age, permeated society as a whole.
Perhaps the poet Shelley had the Romantics' more sentimental and vivid images in mind when he wrote to his friend Thomas J. Hogg: `I am glad to hear that you do not neglect the rites of the true religion. Your letter awoke my sleeping devotion, and the same evening I ascended alone the high mountain behind my house, and suspended a garland, and raised a small turf-altar to the mountainwalking Pan'.79 Shelley's reverence for the supremely pagan Pan seems to have filled the gap left by his rejection of Christianity. In a recently discovered letter from the poet to Ralph Wedgwood - dating from around 1811 when Shelley was expelled from Oxford University for publishing a tract entitled `The Necessity of Atheism' - he wrote: `Christ never existed ... the fall of man, the whole fabric indeed of superstition which it supports can no longer obtain the credit of Philosophers.' 80 It is interesting that Shelley felt more comfortable with the ultimate archetype of the pagan god than with the Christian deity. The high priest of decadence, Lord Byron - who had an intimate relationship with his own sister among countless other dalliances - wrote regretfully:
Oscar Wilde, perhaps genuinely, or simply ever mindful of his reputation for excess and perversity - after all, he did insist on playing Salome in his play of the same name on its first, and only, night - lamented: `O goat-foot god of Arcady! This modern world hath need of thee! 181
Less predictably, Pan appears anonymously in the great children's classic, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) when Rat whispers, awed, `as if in a trance': `This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me ... Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we will find Him!'
We have seen how Plato called Lucifer `Aster', simply meaning `star', after his identification with the bright Morning Star. But Plato and countless others in the ancient world knew that the Morning Star had another incarnation - moving round in the heavens as the Evening Star, or Venus. In his classic The Golden Bough (1922), J.G. Frazer wrote:
Sirius was the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both peoples apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed the goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or spouse and wake him from the dead.82
Like the lesser-known Astraea or `Starry One',83 the Libyan Goddess of Law who dispensed the fates of man, the beauty and truth of the deity Venus was believed to be visible in the Evening Star, the opposite and equal to the Morning Star, Lucifer. However, this distinction was too subtle for the pagans' new Christian enemies, and a great blurring between the Feminine Principle and the Evil One rapidly took place, eased in its passage by the tendency of the Romans to refer to Venus as `Lucifera', the enlightener. Venus, the archetypal goddess of the arts of love and women's secrets, an unashamedly sexual deity, gave her name not only to `venereal disease' and `venery', but perhaps, some claim, also more courteously to Venice, the city of her element as `Stella Maris' (`Star of the Sea', a title she shared with Isis, and much later, the Virgin Mary). Originally, like Diana, Venus was a huntress, a `Lady of Animals', whose horned consort was Adonis - `both the hunter and sacrificial stag - became venison, which meant 'Venus's son'.'' Once again the line becomes blurred between homed gods and their consorts. And once again the goddess is associated with animality, sexual secrets, lust - and Lucifer. Barbara Walker describes a predictable reaction:
Early Christian fathers denounced the temples `dedicated to the foul devil who goes by the name of Venus - a school of wickedness for all the votaries of unchasteness'.R5 What this meant was that they were schools of instruction in sexual techniques, under the tutelage of the venerii or harlot-priestesses.86 They taught an approach to spiritual grace, called venia, through sexual exercises like those of Tantrism [the eastern cult of sacred sex] 87
This aspect of Venus-worship was not uncommon among goddess cults: as we have seen, God's wife Asherath had both female and male `temple prostitutes' - although this is a derogatory term first employed by disapproving and uncomprehending Victorian scholars. To the culture itself, these workers in sacred sex rituals were known as `temple servants', a role that was acknowledged with reverence. Both the females and cross-dressing males were there to give men ecstatic pleasure that would transcend mere sex: the moment of orgasm was believed to propel them briefly into the presence of the gods, to present them with a transcendent experience of enlightenment. Only men went with the temple servants because it was believed that women were naturally enlightened and therefore had no need of such rituals - a diametrically opposed attitude to the repressive misogyny of patriarchal Judaism and Christianity.
To these male-dominated religions, sex was evil because women enticed men to lust after them - often, it was claimed, against their better judgement: the unwilling gentlemen were literally `enchanted' by their `glamour' (literally their ability to cause hallucinations or actually shape-shift). Women were inherently evil because of Eve, who let Satan into the world and got mankind expelled from Paradise.
Worse, goddesses were often explicitly associated with serpents - indeed, the Egyptian uraeus snake, worn in pharaonic headdresses, was a hieroglyph for `goddess' 88 Cleopatra took the title `Serpent of the Nile' after all Egyptian queens who represented the Goddess, who took the king into their life-giving embrace. The Egyptian serpent goddess Mehen the Enveloper enfolded the ramheaded Auf-Ra - Phallus of the solar god Ra - every night, as he travelled in the underworld, symbol of their sexual union. Isis and her dark-aspect Nepthys were associated with the Serpent mother of material life and the afterlife, their knowledge specifically aiding the post-mortem traveller in the region of ferocious snakes. In ancient Crete before the Bronze Age the objects of veneration were women and snakes. Even with the later dominance of the bull cult, the priest was inferior to the snake-wielding priestess. The literal interpretation of the ancient Akkadian word for `priest' is `snake charmer' .89
Perhaps that is too cerebral a connection, for to the clergy pagan goddesses were inherently evil, basically because they were pagan and goddesses. They notoriously encouraged both men and women to worship the Feminine Principle that they so gorgeously and flagrantly embodied and taught their female devotees the mysteries
