Tis ˇtryae ̄nı ̄s, who represent the lesser stars surrounding him. In the Pylos
tablets there are both Poseidaon and Posidaeia, both Zeus and Diwya. In
Homeric mythology and in Dodonaean cult one of Zeus’ wives is Dione,
again a name formed from his by adding a standard feminine suffix. In some
cases the same divine title is used in the masculine and the feminine for
different (but related) deities: there is a Phoibos and a Phoibe, a Hekatos and
a Hekate. Many such pairs are attested at Rome: Janus and Jana, Liber and
Libera, Faunus and Fauna, and others.^69 In Nordic myth we have the pairs
Freyr and Freyja (in origin ‘Lord and Lady’), Fjo ̨ rgynn and Fjo ̨ rgyn, and a male
god Njo ̨rðr whose name, apart from its masculine declension, corresponds to
that of the goddess Nerthus that Tacitus knew in Germany. Of some four
hundred divine names recorded from Gaul, the great majority –– some eighty
per cent –– are males, and the females are mostly their consorts.^70
‘Mothers’As male gods are in certain cases called Father, so are goddesses called Mother.
In the Graeco-Aryan area, however, this is quite rare. The river Sarasvatı ̄ in
RV 2. 41. 16 is addressed as ámbitame, nádı ̄tame, dévitame,‘most motherly,
most torrently, most goddessly’, and in the next line as amba, ‘mother’. In
post-Vedic popular religion a Mother (Ma ̄ta ̄ or Amba ̄) appears as the pro-
tecting goddess of a village. In Greece there is a Mother or Great Mother, but
she is the Mother of the Gods, a deity of Near Eastern provenance,^71 though
she suffered syncretism with the Indo-European figure of Mother Earth.
Demeter, whose name incorporates ‘mother’, was perhaps originally a form
of Mother Earth (see p. 176), but in classical times she is a separate
goddess, and her motherhood is understood in relation to her daughter
Persephone, not to her human worshippers.
In the greater part of Europe, especially the west and north, Mothers
are much commoner. It seems likely that this reflects the influence of a pre-
Indo-European substrate population for whom female deities had a far
greater importance than in Indo-European religion. The archaeologist Marija
Gimbutas saw the Indo-Europeans as bringing a male-oriented religion into
a goddess-worshipping ‘Old Europe’, and this reconstruction, based largely
on iconic evidence, seems essentially sound.
Certain Illyrian and Messapic goddesses (some borrowed from Greek) have
the title Ana or Anna, which is plausibly interpreted as ‘Mother’.^72 In Italy we
(^69) Usener (1896), 33–5. (^70) Vendryès (1948), 266–71.
(^71) West (1997), 109. (^72) Mayer (1957–9), ii. 6.
140 3. Gods and Goddesses