Theodora
But in all this darkness, a remarkable woman shines forth. She was not a doctor but a politician. Her name is Theodora, known as the wife of Justinian I, crowned emperor of the Byzantine Empire in 527 CE. As his wife, Theodora was able to rule by his side, despite forces to the contrary. Some place her as being born on Crete, inheriting the legendary Goddess culture of a thousand years previous. Others place her birth in Syria, which was also Goddess land. Theodora was educated as the daughter of a bear trainer, who was employed by the large circus in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. There she worked as a mime and later as an actress with exceptional skill. (At that time, the term “actress” was considered synonymous with “prostitute,” and retained much of that connotation until the twentieth century.)
When she was sixteen, Theodora went to North Africa with an official of the state, where she lived for four years before returning home to Constantinople. On this journey she visited Alexandria, Egypt’s capital, where she was introduced to, and subsequently espoused, a form of Christianity called Monophysitisim, whose followers believed that the savior Jesus was divine and not human/divine as the Church of Rome insisted. When Theodora returned to her homeland, a new convert, she became a wool-spinner in order to earn a living, since she had given up her former profession. At this time, Theodora lived in a house near the palace of the emperor. She was only twenty when she attracted the attention of a young man, as yet only a government official, named Justinian.
Justinian appealed an old Roman law that prohibited officials from marrying actresses. Successful, he married Theodora in 525 CE. Two years later, his father the emperor died. The couple was crowned on April 4,527 CE. They ruled (unofficially) as joint monarchs, with Theodora sharing both the throne and in the decision-making processes. She was known to be witty, beautiful, intelligent and amusing. Theodora also proved her capability as an able leader during the Nika revolt against her husband, during which two rival political groups rioted in the Hippodrome, setting buildings on fire and declaring a new emperor. While the male officials prepared to flee the government, Theodora delivered a speech to the men regarding the worthiness of those who died as rulers versus someone whose life meant nothing. Her husband and his men are credited with defeating 30,000 rebels, emerging from the conflict victorious. In this case, historians agree that it was the courage and determination of Theodora that saved the empire.
Theodora and Justinian built the city of Constantinople into a cosmopolitan destination, complete with aqueducts for fresh water, bridges, churches, theatres, and the Hagia-Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom named after the Goddess of Wisdom, Sophia. This Empress conceived and had passed laws: prohibiting forced prostitution; establishing homes for sex workers; laws which granted women additional rights in cases of divorce; instituted the death penalty for rape; established laws enabling women to own and inherit property. She also provided safe haven to Monophysite leaders who faced persecution from the Roman Christian Church. Her influence, at this critical moment in history, accorded women in the Byzantine Empire a status substantially elevated above their sisters in Western Europe or the Middle East.
Empress Theodora died in her forties, on June 28, 548 CE. She was buried in one of the beautiful churches she and Justinian had built in Constantinople: the church of the Holy Apostle.63
The Birth of Islam
The Dark Ages of Europe were not dark ages of other cultures. In present-day Saudi Arabia, Mohammed, founder of Islam, lived from 570 to 632 CE. His life teachings form the basis of the Koran, Muslim holy book. In 610, Mohammed as prophet receives the first of many revelations of the Quran (Koran) in Mecca, and in two years begins his preaching.64
Karen Armstrong, in her preface to Islam says, “In Islam, Muslims have looked to God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community, in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God’s will … politics was, therefore, what Christians would call a sacrament: it was the arena in which Muslims experienced God and which enabled the divine to function effectively in the world.”65 Prior to Mohammed, Armstrong contended, Arabs knew that the religions of both Judaism and Christianity which were practiced in both the Byzantine and Persian empires were culturally more sophisticated than their indigenous ancient tribal traditions. It is said that, not infrequently, Christians and Jews shamed the Arabs’ religion, saying that Arabs had been left out of the divine plan because no male prophet had been sent to them. Many Arabs still venerated the Goddesses of Arabia, others had different pagan traditions, and these were the practices now under attack in those foreign empires.
When Mohammed began to preach in 612 CE, many women from the poorer tribal clans sought to convert to Islam in order to escape customs cruel to females. But, according to Armstrong, Mohammed did not believe he was creating a new religion but believed that he was bringing the old faith in one male God, Allah, to the Arabs who were his people.
He taught wealth-sharing versus private fortunes; he taught respect and fairness versus endless clan warfare and deceit. He taught in the most ancient manner: through public speaking because the population (including himself) was illiterate. Armstrong writes, “The new sect would eventually be called Islam (surrender); a Muslim was a man or woman who had made this submission of their entire being to Allah and his demand that human beings behave to one another with justice, equity and compassion … social justice was therefore, the crucial virtue of Islam.”66
The Quran specifies that there would be no “coercion in matters of faith, and thereby no condemnation of the other two male-dominated desert religions of Judaism and Christianity, but he did demand that they ignore the cult of such popular Arabian Goddesses as Manat, al-Lat and Al-Uz-zah however, and worship Allah alone.”67 Mohammed thereby repeated the tactics of the other two by seeking to eradicate the older religion of the Goddess within the hearts of the Arabs.
In Mecca (at the ancient, and originally Goddess-oriented shrine of Kabah dedicated to Hubal, a Nobatain deity, with 360 statues representing the days of the year), Mohammed insisted Muslims pray facing Jerusalem to the east, literally “turning their backs” on the ancient Goddess religions called pagan. He believed this symbolic behavior would bring Arabs into the context of belonging to the one-god monotheism of the more advanced Western civilizations.
Mohammed met his first wife, Khadija, when he was asked to take her caravan of goods to another city. At twenty-five, he was an experienced merchant, returning to her with success. Khadija was a woman of independence and wealth, which may well mean she was a Goddess-worshipping woman. Certainly she behaved as though she were one, when it was she who asked Mohammed to marry her. He accepted. Although she is reported to have been forty years old, together they had six children, of whom only the four daughters lived to reach maturity. Mohammed remained monogamous until later in his life, after the death of his beloved Khadija. Only then did he marry many women to form political alliances. Basically, he liked women and astonished his male followers by his permissiveness towards his wives, permitting them rarely seen free expression in his presence. He shared some of the household duties and took some of the wives on his travels, often consulting them. Once again, he formed a meaningful relationship with one wife, Aisha, in whom he confided and from whom he took advice.
Armstrong notes,
The emancipation of women was a project dear to the prophets’ heart. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the prophet’s wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house … the Quran makes men and women partners before God, with identical duties and respons
ibilities … the women in Medina took full part in public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle.68
Mohammed was greatly displeased when the Jews of Medina refused to accept him as an authentic prophet and disheartened to learn of the theological difference between Jews and Christians, because he had been under the incorrect assumption that the two were part of a single faith and had not become completely separate religions. In January, 624, Mohammed made a spontaneous decision that would change history to present day:
During the salat prayer, he told the congregation to turn around, so that they prayed in the direction of Mecca, rather than Jerusalem. This change was a declaration of independence. By turning away from Jerusalem and towards the Kabah, which had no connection with Judaism or Christianity, Muslims tacitly demonstrated that they were reverting to the original pure monotheism of Abraham, who had lived before the revelations of either the Torah or the Gospel, and before the religion of the one male God had been split into warring sects.69
In 628 Mohammed succeeds in bringing peace between the warring cities of Mecca and Medina. As a result, he becomes the politically most powerful man in Arabia. Four years later, in 632, Mohammed is dead. His death is but the beginning of an amazing new empire: Between 632 and 656, a period of only 24 years, the Muslim armies under various leaders invade and control Iraq, Syria, Egypt and then conquer Jerusalem. They have conquered the Persian Empire and will control it for hundreds of years. Then the Muslims conquer the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Tripoli in North Africa, and establish their rule in Iran and Afghanistan. Finally, they conquer the Byzantine Empire. Between 705 and 717, they conclude the conquest of all of North Africa and establish a kingdom on the Iberian peninsula (Spain). One hundred years after the death of the prophet Mohammed, the new Islamic Empire reaches from the Pyrenees mountains to the Himalayas.
Because history was seen as a political sacrament to the Muslims, this phenomenal expansion in so few years was perceived as God’s will and divine presence. But these conquests were not religious wars, nor propelled by religious zeal. They were purely pragmatic. This previously despised out-group wanted money and territory, traditional pursuits in their homeland of Arabia and now exported to the outside world. The older Empires they conquered had depleted their internal strength by engaging in endless conflict with one another. Unlike Christians before them, the Arabs did not destroy places of learning. Rather, they established schools in all the conquered areas, promoting literacy and becoming repositories of intellectual progress in astronomy, mathematics and medicine, which will later be exported back into the impoverished Western territories as new and welcomed brilliance in these useful disciplines. As the areas of Islam expand, those of Christianity contract, due to plague, inclement weather patterns, programs to increase ignorance and concurrent widespread poverty.
In the fifth century Germanic tribes from Northern Europe moved to the south and west, taking control of the land now known as England, France, Italy, Spain and North Africa, (until 700’s with the Muslim incursion). These people were not Christians, and, therefore, their predominance disconnected Europe from Christian areas in the east, with an accompanying breakdown of any central authority.
These conquerors spoke various Germanic languages and were not able to read or write, and had little in common with those whose lands they occupied. Consequently, the transmission of Greek learning became non-existent, and knowledge of Latin was confined to the scattered Christian clergy. Under these dismal conditions, the next task of the now sequestered Church of Rome is defined as conversion. And to the issue of attaining converts, the Church of Rome now gives its all, beginning with the conversion of rulers. In return for their conversion to the form of Christianity preached by the Church of Rome, the Pope would recognize the converted warlord over all his rivals and crown him with privileges and powers over the people, entirely disregarding the wishes of the people themselves. In a process that would be replicated over and over again, once the king was baptized, the Church of Rome sent in small army of clerics who then created monasteries, bishoprics and local churches, usually built on top of sites sacred to the older religion of the Goddess, replacing the priestesses, priests and their previous reverence. But the ordinary people did not automatically follow.
So, the following are conversions from the fifth century to the tenth century: Gaul (France) and the Anglo-Saxons of England sixth and seventh century; Germanic peoples seventh and eighth centuries; Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Scandinavians in the north, not until the tenth century, and then only under coercion or threat, not whole-heartedly.
The Female Pope
Far to the south, in Rome, a curious set of events leads to a legend whose origin is denied, but persists nevertheless. This is the story of a female pope. She is first mentioned by historian Anastasius the Libraian (d. 886), “a.d. 854, Lotharii 14, Joanna, a woman succeeded Leo, and reigned two years, five months, and four days.” A portrait of her was included in a row of papal busts in Siena Cathedral labeled, “Johannes VIII, femina Anglia or John VIII, an Englishwoman.”70
This Englishwoman disguised herself as a scholarly monk and became renowned for her extensive knowledge of scripture, so well known in fact, that because of her abilities, she was elected pope. To her misfortune, she became pregnant and collapsed in a church during labor, giving birth to the child. The legend continues: A mob pulled her into the street, stoned her to death, and then buried her in an unmarked grave. Forever more, papal processions avoided that street, and the hierarchy expunged her name from the official register of popes. Another list of popes compiled by Thomas de Elmham is “a.d. 855, Joannes. This one doesn’t count; she was a woman.” But in 1886, a biography on Pope Joan was written and published by Emmanuel Royidis, titled Papissa Joanna, in which he swore everything he’d written was verified and true. His book was banned by the Roman Catholic Church, and he was excommunicated.71
But as an almost comical postscript, an odd Vatican custom arose after the death of Johannes VIII, femina Anglia. Serious candidates for election to pope were required to seat themselves, after removing their clothes, on an open stool. This strange piece of furniture was placed over a small opening in the floor. In a room on the floor below, cardinals could view the naked body of the candidate. From this personal appraisal, the committee was required to make an announcement: Testiculos habet et bene pendentes, “He has testicles and they hang right.”72
People of the Far North
This is also the time that gives rise in the far north to the age of the Vikings, a non-Christianized people whose red hair, powerful sea-going traditions and physical strength will propel them into the annals of mythology and conquest. A very short, and by no means intentionally dismissive, chronicle of Viking achievements would be as follows: 620 CE, Vikings invade Ireland. In 862, through incredible series of portages of sailing vessels, the Viking Russ tribe sieges control of northern Russia. In an even more daring feat of navigation (and due to population increase at a time of a decline in available land for human habitation), the Vikings first find through navigational exploits and then settle the Iceland in 874 CE. Less than 100 years later, Viking explorer Eric the Red begins settlement of Greenland, and Vikings try to colonize the North American continent in Nova Scotia in 1000 CE. By 1189, nearly two hundred years later, the last recorded Viking voyage to North America took place.73
Who were the Vikings and what were their Runes? In the introduction to his book The Elements of the Runes, English scholar and student of the Runes ancient mythology, Bernard King writes, “King Knut (Canute) ruled the three substantial kingdoms of England, Denmark and Norway for the first and only time in history.” Bernard King continues, in explanation of the sacred script of the runes, “Runes were originally designed to be used for both secular inscriptions and magical purposes within the culture which valued them.”74 This is the lore of Northern mysticism. Elucidating further, King says, “The Runes would have originally
received their names at a time when the Germanic world (which included Scandinavia) was both relatively united and unanimously pagan. Two factors would have determined any single name. Firstly, the name of the rune would serve as a mnemonic or memory-aid to call both the symbol and the sound to mind. Secondly, the name would also serve to recall and record the significant details of tribal life.”75
But the Runes may be much more important, because they also “bear a strong similarity to various symbols of hallristningar, the prehistoric cult symbols used by northern peoples and recorded on rock carvings.”76
It is the belief of this author that future scholars will be able to trace the origins of the Northern Rune sacred script to the Neolithic Goddess script detailed by Gimbutas, and will be able to make important connections as to continuity and culture which migrated. After all, Neolithic Goddess people traveled well into Germanic, Celtic lands in the various ancient dispersions from their homelands in Old Europe. Even a cursory look at similarities in the script forms cannot help inspire curiosity as to origins and ancient maternity.
The theory posited by King is that the Runes derive from North Italic alphabet. As archeological evidence, he cites the inscriptions on the Negan helmet, one of 26 found near the Austro-Yugoslav frontier in 1812, dated variously between 500 BCE and 1 CE. The words are read from right to left and form a Germanic votive inscription: “from Harigest to Teiva.”77 Variants appeared around 800 in Anglo-Saxon England and Viking Scandinavia. The Anglo Saxon script had 28–33 symbols, the Viking only 16. But there is a 24 Rune script used for sacred purposes. The actual word “rune” in early English and old German meant secret or mystery, i.e. whisper, as in rown in the ear. In old Norse, the word derived from runar, a magical sign. It also may be derived from rowan, a folk name for the mountain ash tree.
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