United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I grant that the variety of her attributes renders it more than probable that Athene was greatly indebted, perhaps to the "Divine Intelligence," personified in the Egyptian Naith perhaps also, as Herodotus asserts, to the warlike deity of Libya nor less, it may be, to the Onca of the Phoenicians , from whom in learning certain of the arts, the Greeks might simultaneously learn the name and worship of the Phoenician deity, presiding over such inventions.
Up sprang, by their side, the Saturn of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of India, the elementary deities of the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the graceful Etruria.
The deity said to be introduced by Cecrops is Neith, or more properly Naith the goddess of Sais, in whom we are told to recognise the Athene, or Minerva of the Greeks. I pass over as palpably absurd any analogy of names by which the letters that compose the word Keith are inverted to the word Athene. The identity of the two goddesses must rest upon far stronger proof.
The male God associated with her was Naith, and according to Higgins represented "the opposite of Neith." In Rivers of Life is observed a reference to the Assyrian Goddess Hea by Lucian. In a note Forlong says that no doubt Hea is the same as Haiya or Haya. In other words she represents the universal hermaphrodite the creative principle throughout Nature, which was originally worshipped as female.
Up sprang, by their side, the Saturn of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of India, the elementary deities of the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the graceful Etruria.
Naith in the Doric dialect. If Onca, or Onga, was the name of the Phoenician goddess! The Phoenicians evidently had a deity correspondent with the Greek Minerva; but that it was named Onca, or Onga, is by no means satisfactorily proved; and the Scholiast, on Pindar, derives the epithet as applies to Minerva from a Boeotian village. De Mundo, c. 7. The Egyptians supposed three principles: 1st.
Word Of The Day