Crete has left us, not only the divine bull Poseidon, but also another figure, even more majestic, the Mother of the Gods, the Lady-of-the-Wild-Things.
Gaia was at Delphi before Poseidon, before Dionysos, before even Apollo.
Our religion teaches us to revere a male Trinity; the figure of the Mother is absent. The Roman and Orthodox churches with a more happy and genial humanism, include the Mother who is also the Maid. In Greece the Mother and the Father gods are characteristic of the
The figure half rising from the earth we are accustomed to call either Earth or the Mother. But on one vase in the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, the uprising figure is inscribed Pandora. Pandora is familiar to us all from the story of Hesiod. In the Works and Days he thus recounts the making of Pandora:
For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word
Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair,
And Athene, the grey-eyed goddess, girt her, and decked her hair.
And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set
Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet,
The Hours, with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of spring,
While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything.
Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place,
Tricks and flattering words in her bosom, and thievish ways.
He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering, giving her voice,
Spokesman of gods, that he is, and for name of her this was his choice,
"Pandora's box" has become proverbial, but the word pithos, used by Hesiod, does not mean box at all, it means a huge earthenware jar. Rows of these pithoi buried deep in the earth have come to light at Cnossos. They were used for the storage of oil and wine and grain. They were also used for purposes of burial, and occasionally gave shelter to human beings. The famous tub of Diogenes was a pithos. When Pandora opens her box it is not the light-minded woman temptress letting out woes and ills to mortal man; it is the great Earth Mother who opens her pithos, her storehouse of grain and fruit for her children. In the "making of Pandora" the Great Mother has become the temptress maid, a bane and not a blessing. Through all the charm and glamour of Hesiod's verse there is an ugly glint of theological malice. He is all for the Father, and the Father will have no Great Earth Mother in his cloud-capped, man-made Olympus. So she who made all things has become the slave of man, his lure, his plaything, dowered only with a slave's bodily beauty and blandishments. The birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian joke to Zeus, the arch patriarchal bourgeois. "He spake, and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed."
But we will not part from the Mother with a patriarchal joke. Rather let the Homeric Hymn-writer chant her praises:
"Concerning Earth, the mother of all, shall I sing, firm Earth, eldest of gods, that nourishes all things in the world; all things that fare on the sacred land, all things in the sea, all flying things, all are fed out of her store. Through thee, revered goddess, are men happy in their children and fortunate in their harvest. Thine it is