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Dea Gravida

I bought the little goddess in, of all places, Jerusalem.

“How many people come to Jerusalem to buy idols?” I laughingly asked the dealer in the little antiquities shop where I bought—say, maybe, redeemed—her. In Hebrew, the question has a certain pungency that it lacks in English.

(In an even deeper irony, the real answer is: millions do. Books like the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an are the most dangerous idols of all; they've caused more human suffering than any statue ever did.)

She's maybe 2500 years old, of a Phoenician iconographic type known as the dea gravida, the “pregnant goddess.” (In English, to be “gravid” is not just to be pregnant, but to be really pregnant.) Nearing the end of her term, with her elaborate hairdo and veil, she sits in a chair with her right hand held protectively, reflectively, over her belly. There's a stillness to her. She's waiting.

Mold-made, an affordable best-seller of her day, tens of thousands like her survive. That explains how someone on a student budget like me could afford to buy one, and why the Israeli government would let her out of the country. (Nation-states are usually jealous of artifacts found within their borders: in this case, up north in “Galilee of the gentiles,” where Phoenician influence was strong.)

The little goddess sits on an altar in my bedroom, where I see her every day. In a house filled with Green Men and Astartes, somehow this is the time of year, this pregnant time before Yule, when I find myself noticing her most.

Call it idolatry, if you like.

I'm addressing the Unitarians of Otter Tail County, Minnesota, on the topic of the Dea Gravida: the Pregnant Goddess.

As I speak, images of this common Phoenician iconographic type appear on a screen in the front of the sanctuary: where the altar would be if this weren't a Unitarian church.

Then—secular heresy—we commit an act of worship.

I step down from the platform. The congregation rises, and together we face the Lady who soars in midair before us, paradoxically both there and not-there.

Welcome to modern paganism. As I raise my arms, my inner ritualist smiles, making notes for future applications. Down the millennia, our people have directed their prayers to images of many kinds.

Now, through the magic of technology, we address a goddess made of light.

In the dream, I'm in the Kalasha valleys for Chaumós, their great month-long celebration of the Winter Solstice.

(Living in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, the Kalasha are the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.)

The culmination of the festivities is to be the revelation of the Three Hidden “Idols” of the Kalasha.

When the three wooden images are finally revealed, I realize—much to my surprise and delight—that they are none other than the Three Gods of the Great Temple of Uppsala: Óðinn, Þórr, and Freyr, but rendered in a distinctly Nuristani idiom.

The Dangers of Icon Deficiency

It's arguably the single most shameful episode in American Evangelicalism's brief (less than 100 years), unedifying, and hypocrisy-filled history: its disgraceful (not to mention idolatrous) besotment with a lying demagogue that critics have called their “Orange Jesus”.

In these waning days of the 2024 election, it's well worth asking: where does it come from?

It's part of a larger question: why are aniconic religions—Protestant Christianity, Islam, even Judaism, to some extent—so prone to personality cults?

You may be old enough to remember the cult of the Televangelists in the 1980s. (One could, of course, contend that Christianity itself is, in essence, a personality cult writ large, but let's leave that aside for now.) We've all seen footage of Muslim crowds carrying pictures of frowning mullahs. Hassidic Judaism has, since its inception, been organized around charismatic rebbes.

Here's my theory: they're suffering from icon deficiency.

I'm telling my archaeologist friend about my visit to a local Hindu celebration.

“I got to help carry the 'idols' in to the altar,” I tell him, drawing air-quotes. Smiling, I add: “My Jewish ancestors must have been reeling in their graves.”

(The three deities, who live at the pujari's house, traveled to the Lutheran church where the celebration was to be held in the back seat of his four-by-four, covered with a cloth because they were “asleep.” As we bore them, one by one, into the sanctuary, he preceded each god, ringing little cymbals and chanting a responsorial praise song. Music accompanies gods wherever they go.)

My friend smiles.

“Ah, but your Judaean ancestors must have been dancing in theirs,” he says.

This is no more than truth. One of the most common finds in pre-Exilic Hebrew houses are are little clay terafim of gods and goddesses.

As for “idols” and “idolatry”: of all god-images, the most dangerous by far are Books. Books have wrought more wrong in the world than any statue ever did.

 The Making of a Pagan

The little tow-headed boy is sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching TV. Now playing—maybe because it's Holy Week—is C. B. de Mille's epic kitsch-fest The Ten Commandments.

The film is unrelentingly grim. Oh the slavery! Oh the plagues! Oh the suffering!

Suddenly, the mood changes. The Children of Israel are, for once, happy. They're dancing, they're getting drunk, they're grabbing each others' asses.

They're worshiping the Golden Calf!

That looks like fun! thinks the little boy. That's what I want to do!

With its implications of juvenescence, “calf” is really something of a mistranslation. In Hebrew, an égel (עגל) is actually a yearling bull, newly come to maturity. The Golden Bull is a youthful god, shining with juicy adolescence.

“What the heck is that?” asks my friend.

Chances are, you've seen pictures of the Rällinge Frey many times before.

But how often have you seen His back?

Note the complex, swirling patterns worked in gold. Whoever it was that took the time and care to make them clearly felt that the god's back was important, perhaps just as important as his front.

What are they? Vegetation? A tree, maybe? If so, this tells us something important about this god that we would never have guessed if we'd only seen him from in front.

Across Pagandom these days, gods tend to get shoved onto altars, and there's an end to it, but that's not how the ancestors saw it. To them, the god's back was as important as his front, and they took care to lavish attention—and craftsmanship—on both.

It's intriguing that this should be so regardless of the perspective from which the image was intended to be seen. This makes sense, of course: who would leave a god's likeness incomplete? Such would hardly be a worthy vessel for the divine.

A major way to venerate a statue—or, rather, the god present in the statue—was to circumambulate: to walk around the statue. Anyone that knows gods knows that there's more to any given god than what you can see from the front alone. Much, much more.

One of the pleasures of traveling to Greece was finally being able to see what famous statues looked like from behind; for some curious reason, rear views rarely tend to make it into books. There I was quickly disabused of the notion that I knew these works well. How can you claim to know a work of art when you've only seen half of it?