“All the most ancient mythologies speak of a Creatress rather than a Creator because living things could be made only by a female according to primitive beliefs. Men believed themselves unnecessary to the process.” Margaret Mead, Male and Female
“In the Aegean, followers of Father Zeus fought the pre-Hellenic worshippers of Rhea or Hera.” Barbara Walker, Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
One of the conceits of the novel is that Ophion, the Great Serpent, spent centuries evolving a plan to overthrow his mother, claim authorship of the universe and promote himself – a father god who resents and wants to dominate his mother, and by extension all women who once thought themselves superior because they gave birth, domesticated crops and animals and created culture and the law. He evolves into various iterations until he gets it right, becoming Pazuzu, and then Zu the Stormbird. Eventually he becomes Olympian Zeus. Through all these evolutions he wants the same thing, but the love people have for the mother god still challenges his authority.
So, as the god-who-dies-and-is-reborn, he becomes Mithra, who spread far and wide as the god of the Roman legions, and then Jesus. Similarities between Mithraism and Christianity are so deep and so many they are impossible to ignore, and both those religions owe a great debt to the mother-religions that came before them. Many of the rites and customs of Christianity come directly from Eleusis.
I liked the idea of an ever-evolving god trying again and again to recreate himself as the perfect image that would convince the most people, because this kind of syncretism is how gods and religious beliefs actually evolve – nothing new under the sun, as they say. And there are hints that the force of the ideas he is pressing through the underworld of unconscious human thought will become other patriarchal gods by different names in other cultures, all supplanting ideas of the supremacy of motherhood, all broadcast at the same time – for this is also how ever-evolving mythology works. I think it’s arrogant of modern cultures to think mythologizing ended with them: Those were myths, but our stories are true!
I think they are all true, but only metaphorically, where the most beautiful depth and transformational symbols live.
In the novel, Ophion, the father god, just keeps refining his story and changing his name until he can accomplish complete domination of his own mother, first by claiming to have given birth to himself, then proclaiming himself as existing without birth - as an idea - then as a word or vibration, and finally claiming that he is the only god. It worked, too. I could argue it’s still unfolding. There are only six matriarchal cultures still left on earth, and of course, they are endangered.