#auseklis

myths around the world challenge: @ibuzoo & @thewinedarksea

Has anyone thought about how weird it is to have a deity for the dawn. The dawn isn’t like the sun or the moon, you can’t really see it. It’s not an important everyday function like caring for the hearth. It’s not a job like blacksmiths. It happens and it’s beautiful but it’s not physical. I googled “dawn definition” and the first thing that comes up is “the first appearance of light in the sky before sunrise.” (The Google Dictionary). It’s weird to deify a small period of time. It’s probably why there are so little dawn deities. There are only two mythologies with dawn deity/spirits (maybe three but Tefnut is the goddess of the morning dew and moisture, that’s not really the dawn) which are not from Indo-European cultures. These deities are the Shinto’s Ame-no-Uzume-no-mikoto and the Sioux’s Anpao (which btw has two faces and I love that fact, it makes a lot of sense to me). All other deities are from Indo-European countries. Which is why “Dawn goddesses are crucial in Indo-European comparative mythology…” (Source 1 to an article about Eostre and Bede.) Dawn goddesses, lunar and solar chariots and Sky Fathers are the backbone of comparative Indo-European mythology studies. (I seriously considered doing something comparing Indra and Zeus but I was already looking up dawn goddesses for funsies. This whole thing was written for funsies tbh).  

What is Indo-European Mythology? Short of it, so I can get to the comparing of deities, is that Indo-Europeans are a theorized people that that originated the Indo-European languages (English, French, Spanish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hittite, Persian, Greek, etc.). There are also a few similarities between the mythologies. Which, you can explain as surrounding cultures influencing each other or if you a psychoanalyst you believe that the similarities between all of them is because of a deep shared self conscious or that they all originated from one original deity. Indo-European mythology exist because of the last mindset.        

Using comparative mythology, we can assume some of the Indo-European Pantheon. It’s a bottom down perspective. And I want to do this exercise, so let’s compare some Dawn Deities. 

Was the original Indo-European Dawn Goddess really named Hausos? I can say with 99.9% certainty no. Hausos is scholar’s best educated guess

1. Auseklis - Latvian Mythology

Sadly, I can’t find to much about him (or her, Auseklis is either one). Yeah, this is the god of the dawn and morning star (aka Venus). He is subordinate to the moon but also serves the sun. He is associated with marriages, bath-houses and birth.

2. Aušrinė - Lithuanian Mythology

I can find more about her then I can about her Latvian counterpart. She had an affair with the Moon God, which caused Sun Goddess and the Moon God to basically divorce. Aušrinė lived on sea-girt island where she takes cares of magical apples that will bring love to people who eats them. Also she had cows that made boiling milk (ummm) that will make you beautiful (sure). Also, she’s connected to maidens, weaving, love, weddings and baptism (she’s later connected with the Virgin Mary when Lithuania was Christinized). And there is a myth of a man falling in love with her after finding her golden hair in the water of a lagoon. She also makes the sun’s fire every morning (that makes a lot of sense). 

3. Aurora - Roman Mythology

Sadly we don’t have much from just Aurora and most stories with Aurora are actually stories about Eos. She gave sight to Orion.

She is the mother of the morning star, Lucifer. It’s cool that the dawn and the morning star are separated. 

4. Brigid - Irish Mythology

Every list of dawn goddesses has her or some articles will say that she comes from the original Indo-European dawn goddess. But they never explain why. In her list of what she is the goddess of, they never mention the dawn. She’s the blacksmith goddess, the goddess of the spring, the fertility goddess, the healing goddess, the poetry goddess.

My favourite quote from my research is “About Brigid there has been scant evident. (...) questions need to be asked about her origins, her functions, in early Irish society, and existing tradition (...)” (Mother Worship:There and Variations, source below)

Sure, spring and beautiful things are often associated with the dawn but that is not enough to convince me that she is a dawn goddess. Also, her name doesn’t fit well, unlike Ēostre.

5. Eos - Greek Mythology

She’s properly the goddess who’ve heard the most about, she’s Greek. She’s the daughter of Hyperion (titan of light) and Theia (she was a titaness and probably had something to do with light, being also called wide-shining). Eos is the sister of Helios (the sun) and Selene (the moon). She is also married to Astraeus (dusk), but if you didn’t know that, I don’t blame you. Eos was well known for getting around a lot. She loved Orion, Tithonus, Cephalus, Cleitus and Ares. Tithonus is a pretty famous story, Eos asks Zeus for Tithonus to become immortal which Zeus does, but as the asshole he is, he didn’t make Tithonus eternally youthful and Tithonus becomes dust. (Zeus it was in the subtext to make him eternally youthful.) When she has an affair with Ares, Aphrodite curses Eos to be constantly falling in love or just to have an unsatisfied sexual desire. Eos also had some children in the Trojan war, when he died, she cried which created the morning dew. And she was the mother of the anemoi (aka the winds).

She had the classic job of announcing the coming of her brother Helios. She seems like his assistant. She also rides her own chariot of Pegasi.

I love how she is constantly being called the rose finger goddess. I find that pretty.  

6. Ēostre/Ostara - Germanic Mythology

She’s more of a spring goddess then anything. But I keep seeing her on list (not just Wikipedia), so I have to add her. Though, I’m more confident in adding her because she linguistically looks like she belongs. And I can see how the dawn goddess becomes a spring goddess (still very iffy on Brigid mainly due to linguistics). Spring announces summer, like dawn announces day (I have no proof of this, it’s just logically I can see how this can happen). Though, there are some scholars who believes that Ēostre might have been an invention from Bede, because that’s the first time they hear about her.

So, Ēostre is associated with spring and fertility. Then there are tons of theories of how she very probably connected with Easter celebration, rabbits how she might just be a spring goddess and not a dawn goddess. She can’t be both? She couldn’t have started out as dawn goddess then became a spring goddess? Bede is writing in the 8th century, at the very least over a thousand of years after the Indo-Europeans migrated. Things change in a thousand years, especially without writing. Hell, Eos and Ushas changed even with writing.

7. Thesan - Etruscan Mythology

She was the dawn goddess and evoked in childbirth. All I could find about her.

8. Ushas - Vedic Hindu Mythology

For brevity sake, there are many different sects of Hinduism. Anyway, Ushas is found in the Rigveda which is one of the oldest texts written in an Indo-European language. In this text the three most important gods are Agni (fire), Soma (moon and plants) and Indra (the king of gods and the weather god). The most important goddess is Ushas, she’s found in many hymns. Her sister is Ratri (night) and her brother is Chandra/Soma (moon) and sometimes she is married to Surya (sun). In her Vedic hymns she is considered the most beautiful of the goddess. She rides a chariot of either horses or cows so she could make way for Surya. She chases away demons and the dark. Interestingly, she is renewed or made young again everyday (reminding me of Ra’s journey). She also breaths all life. I’m very interested in the fact that in that she’s all seeing much like Helios is in Greek Mythology. And, she is sometimes the sister of the twin horse gods Ashvins (and health and medicine gods too), which also are theorized to be originally Indo-European.

9. Zorya - Slavic Mythology

Hahahaha, who decided they would also be known as the Auroras. I have a feeling it was some Western European with classical knowledge decided that. Anyway, one is the dawn and the other is the dusk and one is midnight. The dawn Zorya, named Utrennyaya, has been described as Perun’s wife (Perun is the law and weather god) or both her sister and her were the wives of Jarylo, the god of springtime (interesting). Utrennyaya’s job is to open the gates for the sun every morning. She was the goddess of horses, protection, exorcism, and the planet Venus. I like how there job was guard a chained dog who wants to eat Ursa Minor, because if that happens the end of the world would start. Zoryas are also protectors of warriors where they would show up like maidens with veils and shields of their favourite battles.  They also lived on a paradise island, much like Aušrinė (though the two cultures are neighbours).

So, what educated guesses can we make about the Hausos? The dawn goddesses is beautiful (who would have guessed? It’s not like sunrise is stereotypically the most beautiful time of the day? Sarcasm btw). Dawn goddesses usually have a story involving immortally and aging (see I didn’t just mention Tithonus because it was famous). Many are either springtime goddesses or somehow connected to the deity of the spring. Hausos might have also been a love goddess, since the other dawn goddesses will either be love goddesses or have many lovers (of course there were the apples that made you fall in love too). I don’t know where Wikipedia gets that she might be a weaving goddess. I get it. She weaves the the cloth like she weaves the day but I didn’t see weaving as a theme in enough goddesses (only one) to be confident in making an educated guess that the Indo-European dawn goddess would have anything to do with weaving.

Women in Mythology Series: Previous Morgiana  

Links to sources because I got lost in research a lot: 

1.  The Goddess Eostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s)

2.  Indo-European Deities and the Rgveda

3. Wikipedia 

4.  The Routledge Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons

5.  SIGNS OF MORNING STAR AUŠRINĖ IN THE BALTIC TRADITION: REGIONAL AND INTERCULTURAL FEATURES 

6.  Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines 

7.  Sun Myths in Lithuanian Folksongs

8.  Mother Worship: Theme and Variations 

9. Theoi 

For @mythologicalnet‘s creation event  → Latvian Mythology

Latvian Mythology: Meness & Auseklis

The story goes that Meness, the moon, and Saule, the sun, were husband and wife. However, then Meness caught sight of Auseklis, or the planet Venus, and fell instantly in love with him. Of course, he didn’t get away with this infidelity, and the thunder god Perkons decided to punish him. The nature of the punishment is disputed. Some accounts describe Meness being cut in half, but because he didn’t learn his lesson, the process was repeated every month, hence the phases of the moon. Another version simply says that Saule and Meness divorced, but they took it in turns to see their daughter,  Žemyna, creating day and night.

Auseklis: The Morning Star in Latvian Mythology

An eight-pointed star in the colors of the Latvian flag. A symbol representing Auseklis. The many affectionate diminutives of the name Auseklis reflect the popularity of this mythological deity: ausekliņš, auseklītis, ausekliņis.  Auseklis is one of the celestial deities in the pantheon of Latvian mythology, a male deity. He is the third most important deity after Saule (the sun) and Mēness…