ZEUS AND METIS

SOME Hellenes say that Athene had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of his skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders; if, indeed, the aegis was not the skin of Medusa the Gorgon, whom she rayed after Perseus had decapitated her.

b. Others say that her father was one Itonus, a king of Iton in Phthiotis, whose daughter Iodama she killed by accidentally letting her see the Gorgon's head, and so changing her into a block of stone, when she trespassed in the precinct at night.

c. Still others say that Poseidon was her father, but that she disowned him and begged to be adopted by Zeus, which he was glad to do.

d. But Athene's own priests tell the following story of her birth Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught at last and got with child. An oracle of Mother Earth then declared that this would be a girl-child and that, if Metis conceived again, she would bear a son who was fated to depose Zeus, just as Zeus had deposed Cronus, and Cronus had deposed Uranus. Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterwards that she gave him counsel from inside his belly. In due process of time, he was seized by a raging headache as he walked by the shores of Lake Tritonis, so that his skull seemed about to burst, and he howled for rage until the whole firmament echoed. Up ran Hermes, who at once divined the cause of Zeus's discomfort. He persuaded Hephaestus, or some say Prometheus, to fetch his wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus's skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout.

1. J. E. Harrison rightly described the story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions.' It is also a dogmatic insistence on wisdom as a male prerogative; hitherto the goddess alone had been wise. Hesiod has, in fact, managed to reconcile three conflicting views in his story:

 Athene, the Athenians' city-goddess, was the parthenogenous daughter of the immortal Metis, Titaness of the fourth day and of the planet Mercury, who presided over all wisdom and knowledge.

 Zeus swallowed Metis, but did not thereby lose wisdom (i.e. the Achaeans suppressed the Titan cult, and ascribed all wisdom to their god Zeus).

 Athene was the daughter of Zeus (i.e. the Achaeans insisted that the Athenians must acknowledge Zeus's patriarchal overlordship).

He has borrowed the mechanism of his myth from analogous examples: Zeus pursuing Nemesis; Cronus swallowing his sons and daughters; Dionysus's rebirth from Zeus's thigh; and the opening of Mother Earth's head by two men with axes, apparently in order to release Core -as shown, for instance, on a black-figured oil-jar in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. Thereafter, Athene is Zeus's obedient mouthpiece, and deliberately suppresses her antecedents. She employs priests, not priestesses.

2. Pallas, meaning 'maiden', is an inappropriate name for the winged giant whose attempt on Athene's chastity is probably deduced from a picture of her ritual marriage, as Athene Laphria, to a goat-king after an armed contest with her rival. This Libyan custom of goat-marriage spread to Northern Europe as part of the May Eve merrymakings. The Akan, a Libyan people, once rayed their kings.

3. Athene's repudiation of Poseidon's fatherhood concerns an early change in the overlordship of the city of Athens.

4. The myth of Itonus ('willow-man') represents a claim by the Itonians that they worshipped Athene even before the Athenians did; and his name shows that she had a willow cult in Phthiotis - like that of her counterpart, the goddess Anatha, at Jerusalem until Jehovah's priests ousted her and claimed the rain-making willow as his tree at the Feast of Tabernacles.

5. It will have been death for a man to remove an aegis - the goat-skin chastity- tunic worn by Libyan girls- without the owner's consent; hence the prophylactic Gorgon mask set above it, and the serpent concealed in the leather pouch, or bag. But since Athene's aegis is described as a shield, I suggest in The White Goddess that it was a bag--cover for a sacred disk, like the one which contained Palamedes's alphabetical secret, and which he is  said to have invented. Cyprian figurines holding disks of the same proportionate size as the famous Phaestos one, which is spirally marked with a sacred legend, are held by Professor Richter to anticipate Athene and her aegis. The heroic shields so carefully described by Homer and Hesiod seem to have borne pictographs engraved on a spiral band.

6. Iodama, probably meaning 'heifer calf of Io', will have been an antique stone image of the Moon-goddess, and the story of her petrification is a warning to inquisitive girls against violating the Mysteries.

7. It would be a mistake to think of Athene as solely or predominantly the goddess of Athens. Several ancient acropolises were sacred to her, including Argos (Pausanias), Sparta (ibid.), Troy (Iliad), Smyrna (Strabo), Epidaurus (Pausanias), Troezen (Pausanias), and Pheneus (Pausanias). All these are pre-Hellenic sites.