Bees & Persephone

Rebecca, look at this thing I found on a page called The Goat, The Bee and the Mushroom:

    “The bee was universally revered. In Egypt, the Pharaohs title of Beekeeper was one of his main designations. The double image of the bee and the reed symbolized the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. The Egyptians believed that when the Pharaoh died, his soul joined Osiris in the constellation of Orion. There he became one of the bee stars in the Beehive or Prasepe, a group of stars in the constellation of Cancer adjacent to Leo the Lion.

    The bee has continued through the millennia as a symbol of the souls survival after death and limitless existence in the harmony of Golden Age of the world. However, the bee also had a very dark side. It remained a primary symbol of the Afro-Asiatic Triple Goddesses such as Demeter, Hecate, Persephone, Aphrodite and the pre-Indo-European aspect of Artemis. Arcadians worshipped both Artemis and Persephone under the name Despoina, which means mistress.

    Aphrodite, the nymph-goddess of midsummer, would destroy the sacred king by tearing out his sexual organs just as the queen-bee destroys the drone. Her Priestesses displayed a golden honeycomb at her shrine on Mount Eryx.

    Butes is the most famous beekeeper of antiquity. He was a priest to Athene on Mount Eryx who represented the love-god Phanes, son of the Triple Goddess. The Greeks often depicted Phanes as a loudly buzzing bee called Ericepaius.

    Incongruous with Aphrodites beauty, the Greeks also knew her as the Eldest of the Fates, Melaenis or black one, Scotia or dark one, Androphonor or manslayer and Epitymbria, which means of the tombs. 263 Artemis was an orgiastic Nymph like Aphrodite. She was the Maiden of the Silver Bow, which symbolized the new moon. Her male consort received the arrows of death. Besides the bow and bee, her other emblems were the date-palm signifying birth and the stag symbolizing her control of wild things. Artemis bees were the melissae priestesses who daubed their faces with gypsum or white clay in honour of the White Goddess. Artemis chief priest was, as we may imagine, the king bee.

    A Treasury was a metaphor for a beehive or hive of melissae bee-priestesses, as at Marmaria near Delphi. The veiled Tholos trompe loeil in Bedroom M of the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, shows the melissae priestesses as a swarm of bees on a pedestal in the foreground. Nearby is the dour goddess Hecate between two columns. The frescos are now in New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art.”


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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on November 23, 2003 at 5:38 pm.

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