Athena and the horse

A t h e n a a n d t h e h o r s e
The image of Athena is conditioned by bondedness to the father. She has the contradictory task of providing progeny for the father while yet remaining the father's daughter and refraining from completing herself with a man, unlike Hera, whose history with Zeus presents another conjunction-mythologem, that of brother-and-sister. Ares, who enters into a relationship with Aglaurus, is hardly to be conceived of as theriomorphic in this connection, but rather as the mythological model and representative of those young men who swore an oath of arms in the Aglaureum and became thereby bearers and defenders of the patriarchal order. The God of warfare himself appears as father and defender of the same order, not as father and husband of his own daughter, however, but rather as the model of the earthly father because he kills the attacker of his daughter, Halirrothius, son of Poseidon. For this he is called by Poseidon before a divine tribunal of justice on the Areopagus. The name of the daughter whom Aglaurus bore to him, Alcippe, and the name of the attacker, Halirrothius, denote the last period in the formation of the Athena religion and mythology as Athenian religion and mythology. This period stimulated no change in the fundamental mythologem of the fortress's sanctuaries, no transformation of the father-daughter mythologem. This had been the mythologem of the fortress Goddess at least since Mycenean times, and so it remained, stated or half-stated. There did occur, however, a representative happening, stimulated not by a father but by an aggressive son, and soon thereafter a new animal appeared on the scene. A new wave of theriomorphism entered with the image of the horse, an animal which had been associated with the Goddess already, outside of Athens. In Athens, the hippomorphic elements that were taken up after the anthropomorphic association with Ares had been made, meant a cultural regression, and this probably occurred in the post-Mycenean period.

Alcippe, "the courageous mare," or "the courageous, like a mare," was an aspect of Athena, just as was her mother Aglaurus, who was the double of her mother, the wife of Cecrops. With Alcippe, the role of aggressor was taken by Halirrothius, the son of Poseidon. According to his name ("he who storms with the sea"), he can be none other than Poseidon himself, who, of all the Greek Gods, was most closely associated with the horse [Image: Athena and Poseidon riding horses]. This name, however, reveals a connection which is more recent in the stories about Poseidon than is his association with the horse. In Greek mythology, the image of Poseidon as "Lord of the Sea" is a more recent manifestation of this God than his role as husband of the Earth Goddess and Lord of the Mainland. It was in this original character that he put forward the horse as his offer in the story of his competition with Athena for possession of the land of Attica. The denouement of the competition was that Poseidon stayed outside the Acropolis and its cults; there, the militant Pallas, who had come there from the northern territories, was recognized and accepted for her essential relatedness to the Mycenean fortress Goddess, though without the hippomorphic accompaniment. Only later was Poseidon associated with the salty spring on the Acropolis in his character as sea God. What is decisive for the chronology, aside from the narrative accounts which tell of the defeat of Poseidon, is the topography. The place where the God presented the steed his semen fell on the rocks, which seems to be an echo of the story about Hephaestus and Athena and where he was worshipped as Hippius, together with Athena Hippia, was the rocky hill Kolonos. (Outside of Athens, in Olympia, Athena -- as Athena Hippia -- is even connected hippomorphically with Ares, as Ares Hippius.) The places of association with Ares, too, lay in the outer regions, located around the Acropolis to the north and west. Kolonos lay out in an even more distant place.

The chronological inference which one can draw from the topography is confirmed by the genealogical line of descent: Cecrops and Aglaurus represent the first generation, Ares and Aglaurus, daughter of Aglaurus, form the second; Halirrothius (son of Poseidon) and Alcippe make up the third. Finally, the same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the mythologem of the sacred wedding of the Goddess with a hippomorphic God never became official but remained a private tradition. It was never forgotten that originally there had been a wedding, but the story was more familiar in another form: in the family of Codrus it happened that Hippomenes, one of the Codrians, surprised his daughter while she was with a man, he bound the seducer to a chariot and then locked his daughter in a building with a horse, which was afterwards referred to as the deserted sanctuary of "the horse and the maiden." The hippomorphic parallel to the wedding of the Athenian "Queen" with Dionysus, the bull God, should not be overlooked. The name Leimone ("she of the meadow") indicates the original place of the wedding as being somewhere outside the city. In Athens the hippomorphic setting of the mythologem, which had earlier been associated with the serpent and bull, remained on the periphery. The horse belongs to the latest level of the Athenian religion and mythology of Pallas Athena. The hippomorphic elements are just as late as another element which most probably came with it: the Gorgon's head. Mounted on the shield or the aegis [Image: The Gorgon's head on the shield of Athena] -- the sacred goatskin which was an even more archaic cultic requisite of the Goddess -- it only increased the terrors which one admits were a part of the Agraulus cult and its associated initiations.

Athena, Virgin and Mother in Greek Religion

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