#hausos

Áusōs

May this Solstice Blessing find you well.

But of the four queens [of heaven], it is Aphrodite who most symbolizes growth, fertility, and procreation. In this She is also the heiress of Inanna and awsos. The early, Hesiodic, myth of Her birth from the Sky God's genitalia in a swirl of foamy water is a metaphor of this basic power. By the time of Homer She is "the Goddess of Nature in Bloom, and is associated with the Graces, the kindly and beneficent spirits of growth. With Them She dances, by Them She is bathed and anointed, and They work the clothing She wears" (Otto 1954: 94; "Odyssey" 18. 194; 8. 364; "Iliad" 5. 338). But more importantly than "bloom," She stands for the individual urge or instinct in animal and man to join with another, to procreate. In man, of course, these impulses are linked to values of family, name, and so forth. Aphrodite also symbolizes the "collective" desire for fertility. She has no rival as a divinity of procreation and, as the Fifth Homeric Hymn says, Her power to arouse and control these passions extends over all creatures in the universe except the three virginal immortals: Artemis, Athena, and Hestia (the myths of Hippolytus, Smyrna, and other mortals who resisted Her call are post-Homeric and, as noted, are "exceptions that prove the rule.")

Hausos & Relationships - a reflection

A residual speculation remains. While few would dispute contact and borrowing between the Phoenicians and the Mycenaeans and, later, the eighth-century Greeks, the evidence on the Sumerian Inanna and, to a lesser extent, on the early Akkadian Ishtar does raise a secondary and far more problematical issue of culture contact and diffusion, for there are many rather specific resemblances between the Sumerian Inanna and the PIE awsos...The overlap in time, moreover, is almost complete between the flourishing of Sumer during the third millennium and the period of the "migrations" of the Indo-Europeans that ended with the entry of the pre-Greeks into northern Greece between 2000 and 1900 BC (and of the early Indics into India one or two centuries later.) From the middle of the third millennium until about the middle of the second millennium BC, early Greeks, Iranians, and Indic were often the neighbors or, briefly, conquerors of peoples in Syria and northern Sumer...These probabilities of contact make more likely some diffusion involving the early Indo-European Dawn Goddesses and the Sumerian Inanna and Her descendants. As Kirk puts it: "Indo-Iranian mythology and religion themselves seem to have been affected by Mesopotamian ideas during the second millennium BC, before the separation of the Indian and Iranian strands and the penetration of the Aryans into the Indian peninsula" (1975: 209). His dating of the "separation" is incorrect, but his case for Mesopotamian influences in the Rig Veda is sound.

The fourth major component comes from the Proto-Indo-European culture of southern Russia and the Danubian plain that has been reconstructed for about the close of the fourth millennium...Outstanding among these features and terms are Her [Hausos'] physical appearance, Her multiple relations with other divinities, particularly the Divine Twins, and Her more general signification of fertility and cosmic dualism. PIE awsos is probably not late (ie, it is not limited to the "Graeco-Sanskrit level.") She is unquestionably "part of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon", just as much as the early Sky God, *dyews. PIE awsos continues to evolve in pre-Greek in the latter part of the third and the first part of the second millennium, still as a Goddess of Dawn. As Boedeker puts it (1974: 10), "Greek epic itself is heir to a pre-Greek Indo-European poetic tradition."

Indo-Europeanists recognized long ago that Baltic Saulē was close in meaning to the Greek, Italic, and Indic Dawn figure. They also recognized that the form was cognate with the semantically related forms for the Vedic Sun God and Goddess and with a large set of forms for "sun" in many other stocks: Latin sol, Old Irish suil, and so forth. It seems reasonable to postulate that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had a Sun God with a name derived from *sū-/sāwe-, as well as a Dawn Goddess called *Áwsōs. And despite repeated charges of overenthusiasm against the solar hypothesis, it should be noted that many of the studies in question have been backed by solid evidence from folklore. For example, Mannhardt, in his basic study, begins by printing ninety folk songs, of up to fifteen stanzas in length, to which he then refers in the course of his descriptive and historical analysis.