Turan, Goddess of Love

By Patricia Winton

Picture a young fifth century BC woman in Volterra or Saturnia or another Etruscan town in what has become Italy. She gazes at her reflection in a polished bronze disk as she prepares for her marriage. She lays the mirror, polished side down, and regards the scene incised on the obverse. She may see Helen of Troy with Paris or another scene from Greek mythology.

More than 3000 such mirrors have been unearthed from Etruscan archaeological sites and dot museum collections around the world. The earliest, dating from the sixth century BC, exhibit scenes from Greek mythology, frequently featuring Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love, and procreation.

As the Etruscan civilization evolved, the people adopted Greek mythological figures as their own, and Aphrodite became Turan, goddess of love, sex, and fertility. She’s depicted on the mirrors as a beautiful woman, often naked or naked to the waist, with cascading ringlets. When clothed, she wears Greek-style garments with many jewels, and often a tiara. Occasionally, she's winged.

She is sometimes paired with her lover, Atunis (Adonis) at which times she’s portrayed as a mature woman while he’s a boy. She may also have been consort to Laran, god of war. Her festival was celebrated in the summer, and she was revered enough by the Etruscans that their month Traneus (July) was named for her.

Many of the mirrors depict Turan accompanied by doves or, especially, a swan called Tusna. (We know the names of the people and creatures on Etruscan mirrors because they’re usually etched beside the figure.) Scholars believe the swan represents whiteness—perhaps purity. On one such mirror, the giant swan dwarfs Atunis and twists his beak to peck at Turan’s crown.

Turan morphed into Turanna, the good fairy of peace and love, who deals out fortune by the use of cards. From Roman times, a winning cast of the dice was three sixes, known as the Venus-toss. Turanna also bestows good luck by means of three cards.

That young Etruscan bride may pick up her mirror again. Perhaps the scene she observes is Aphrodite and Adonis, and she hopes for her own happy future, offering her fate to the figure on the back of her mirror.

I blog on alternate Thursdays at Italian Intrigues Please visit my website at http://PatriciaWinton.com

Tevodas, Rakshasas, and Other Cambodian Lore

By Supriya Savkoor

A couple of months ago, my book club chose to read a novel that I hadn’t yet heard of—In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Cambodian-American author Vaddey Ratner. I must have been living under a rock not to have heard of this critically acclaimed first novel, but I’ll admit, I was ambivalent about this choice as I knew it would require some fortitude to read. It's set against the backdrop of Cambodia’s darkest hour—the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge systematically decimated about half of its own people, through torture, starvation, and, most of all, outright murder. And yet I soon discovered this semi-autographical book is extraordinary, as uplifting and hopeful as it is heartbreaking.

As I’ve told nearly everyone I know, this important book has so many complex facets and layers to it that schools and universities should be adding it to their required reading lists. Which subject? Take your pick—history, psychology, sociology, ethics, religion, spirituality, politics, cultural studies, philosophy, literature, even poetry.

And add one more to that list: mythology, which also happens to be the topic of the week here at Novel Adventurers. (Oh, but how I would really love to expound on all those other topics!)

Ratner’s story led me to a startling discovery—that many aspects of Cambodian civilization were influenced by Hindu myths, legends, and folklore. It’s startling because, while the faith of nearly all Cambodians is Buddhism—a faith that also hails from India, but has morphed into the local cultures and more or less lost its “Indianness”—I could not have conceived of a Southeast Asian culture that's seemingly so different from Indian culture, yet so closely aligned to it. Especially when it comes to ancient Hindu mythology, which is still very much alive in present-day in India and, it seems, in Cambodia as well.

Ratner seamlessly weaves in mythical characters that are often as real as her human ones. She also infuses her story with poetic metaphors such as my favorite, the one about the Reamker. 

A mural that shows a scene from the Reamker at the
Royal Palace in Phnom Pen, Cambodia. (Photo by hanay)

Hopefully, it’s no spoiler to tell you about the beginning of In the Shadow of the Banyan. We enter the privileged world of our protagonist, seven-year-old Raami, a Cambodian blue blood. Surrounded by her loving family, Raami enjoys all the joy and magic of an innocent childhood. While sitting under a banyan tree (an image evoking the Buddha) in the courtyard of her family’s palatial home, Raami begins rereading her favorite book, the Reamker.

“In time immemorial there existed a kingdom called Ayuthiya. It was as perfect a place as one could find in the Middle Realm. But such a paradise was not without envy. In the Underworld, there existed a parallel kingdom called Langka, a flip-mirror image of Ayuthiya. There, darkness prevailed. Its inhabitants, known as the rakshasas, fed on violence and destruction, grew ever more powerful by the evil and suffering they inflicted.”

I include that passage because, on several levels, it fills me with awe.

The story of the Reamker is surprisingly familiar to me, one that I too had read many times as a child of about Raami's age. It’s the Cambodian version of one of India’s best-known epics, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism’s most sacred texts and one of India's most popular mythological legends, comparable to Greek and Roman mythology. Hailing from ancient times, the Ramayana, is filled with a pantheon of gods and goddesses who have inexplicably human desires and weaknesses. It's part of the traditional Hinduism belief system, while for some (even in India), it's a colorful story steeped in philosophical themes combined with the magic of mythology.

A view of Angkor Wat, the world's largest
Vishnu temple, in Angkor, Cambodia.

The story of the Ramayana/Reamker is also a brilliant metaphor for Ratner’s novel. As the title(s) of the former imply, it's the story of Rama (aka Preah Ream), whom Hindus believe to be a human avatar of the Lord Vishnu. As the story goes, Rama led a happy, privileged life as a prince in the benevolent kingdom of Ayodhya (Ayuthiya). As a young man, he’s banished for reasons out of his control. He spends years in exile, far from home and separated from most everyone he loves. Soon, his wife is abducted by a jealous king from Lanka (modern-day Sri Lanka, called Langka in the Cambodian version). Ram eventually returns home but not before a long, bloody war pits all the forces of good and evil against each other and ends in devastating losses for both sides.

Sound familiar? Yes, it sums up Ratner's telling of the Cambodian genocide, with young Raami as a sort of avatar of the noble Ram. Raami is exiled into a world filled with rakshasas, in the form of Pol Pot’s vast army of soldiers, and tevodas, angels who are perhaps counterparts to the mythical devas that fend off the devil’s rakshasa minions. Raami’s father is frequently compared to Indra, the powerful god of thunder and lightning, who also happens to be the king of the devas (the good guys). And, of course, even after it was all over, there
                                                                                 were no winners.

For thousands of years, the story of the Ramayana has been performed in
plays and dance all over Southeast Asia. This photo, a postcard scan, 
shows the Royal Ballet of Cambodia performing the Reamker in the
courtyard of the Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh sometime between the
1900s and 1920s. This particular postcard depicts a scene from a battle
between Rama and Ravana. Starting in 1900, F. Fleury published
a series of postcards featuring such scenes from the Reamker in China.
The publication year of this postcard is unknown, but it is suspected to

be taken during either King Norodom's reign in Phnom Penh or during
the early years of King Sisowath's reign. Author Vaddey Ratner herself

is a direct descendent of Sisowath royalty.

The rest of Ratner's novel is likewise steeped in the Hindu mythology I grew up on, albeit with a Cambodian flavor.

One other surprise entailed references to the old animal fables known as Jataka Tales, filled with morality lessons. These short stories, which some historians say inspired Aesop’s Fables, had titles such as The Monkey King’s Sacrifice, The Mouse Merchant, and The Demon Outwitted. I'd always presumed the Jataka Tales to be purely Indian, so I was surprised to learn through In the Shadow of the Banyan that the Jataka Tales are equally well-known all over Southeast Asia. Considered to be a recounting of the Buddha’s previous births, in both human and animal form, the stories impart the virtue and wisdom of the Buddha as he appears to us in all his worldy forms (and, of course, teaches that god is within all of us).

 Po Romem, Hindu temple from the Cham era
near present-day Phan Rang, Vietnam.

(photo by Irdyb)

All of this cross-cultural exchange, it turns out, occurred because, for a few thousand years starting in the first century, Hinduism dominated as both a religion and a culture in Cambodia—and to varying degrees, in modern-day Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia (see my related post here), Java, Bali, Vietnam, and even the Philippines. Hindu kingdoms across this region were later described as “Indianized” kingdoms or states, part of a “Greater India” or “Farther India.” India’s influence, however, was entirely cultural, not connected in any way to politics or government. (Historians have called this India's "cultural expansion" and even "cultural imperialism.")

Much of Southeast Asia's oldest sacred texts, literature, and philosophy were written in the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Pali. Though these languages are now archaic (used only in sacred Hindu and Buddhist texts), modern-day Southeast Asian languages still retain vestiges of them. Southeast Asian names in general also sound a lot like Indian ones. And it's said that the name of the country Singapore, known as the Lion City, is based on the Sanskrit words simhah for lion and puram for city. (Simhah puram sounds a bit like "Singapore," right?)

For thousands of years, Southeast Asian kings stylized themselves after Indian devarajas, or god-kings, a bit like Prince Rama from the Ramayana. These kings took on royal, Indian-sounding names, such as Jayavarman VII (Cambodia) and Wikramawardhana (Java), and consulted Brahmin priests from India before making big decisions, such as going to war or relocating a capital. They performed the Hindu ritual ceremony known as a puja. Some even adopted the infamous caste system.

These kings also erected numerous temples and statues—many of which survive today—in honor of Hindu gods and goddesses. Cambodia has preserved one of the world’s only two temples dedicated to Brahma as well as the world’s largest Vishnu temple, Angkor Wat, located in Angkor.

The Hindu kingdoms of Southeast Asia flourished for about a thousand years, before, bit by bit, they began infusing more Buddhist beliefs in with their Hindu ones until, eventually, Buddhism prevailed. As I learned from Ratner’s amazing novel, remnants of the region’s Hindu past still linger and inspire. And the title of In the Shadow of the Banyan suggests that despite all that young Raami, and Ratner herself, experienced, a higher force had protected them all along.

(A post-script: I'll be writing a follow-up to this post in 2 weeks, when we cover book reviews. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit Vaddey Ratner's web site, www.vaddeyratner.com, or connect with her on FaceBook. Most importantly, read her book! I'd love to hear your impressions.)

Anahita—The Water Goddess

By Heidi Noroozy

Anahita temple in Kangavar, Iran
(with graffiti on one column)

Outside the city of Kangavar in western Iran, a brick wall stretches along the Kermanshah-Hamadan highway. Behind it, tall columns of pale stone rise into the cloudless sky, a sight as unexpected in the arid landscape as the flowering bushes that line the road. These columns, along with the crumbling staircases and rubble that lie at their feet, are all that remain of an ancient temple to one of Persia’s greatest deities, Anahita.

In Persian mythology, Anahita was the goddess of fertility, love (and, strangely, war) as well as all the waters of the world. She also represented justice and wisdom, a quality that many cultures in antiquity associated with water. The goddess is depicted as a voluptuous young maiden with full breasts and a tiny waist. She wears a fur cloak embroidered in gold, a crown of stars and beams of light, and she carries a flowering branch (or sometimes a water jug). In her warrior role, she drives a chariot drawn by four white horses that represent the wind, rain, clouds, and hail. Sometimes, she is accompanied by her sacred animals, the dove and the peacock.

Worship of Anahita dates back to pre-Zoroastrian times. She was a major deity in the pantheon of the Median civilization (728 to 550 BC), which preceded the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. The Medians, and especially the Magi, their religious sects, referred to her as the Mother Goddess. Not surprisingly, considering her high status among the Medians, the Zoroastrians also incorporated her into their worship, even if she had to accept a demotion from Mother Goddess to guardian angel (yazata). After all, the Zoroastrians were monotheists and worshipped Ahura Mazda (who, incidentally, they also inherited from the Medians) as their only god. The Zoroastrians gave this goddess/angel the name Ardvi Sura Anahita, which means “the High, the Powerful, the Immaculate.” She was believed to have lived among the stars, the brightest of which is the planet Venus (which translates into modern Farsi as “Naheed,” another version of Anahita).

As the Persian Empire expanded, Anahita’s cult spread to other cultures, and she became associated with goddesses honored by the local populations. When Cyrus I conquered Babylon in 539 BC, Anahita blended with Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of war, fertility, and love. When the Greeks conquered Persia several centuries later, leaving their own imprint on the culture, they associated Anahita with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Armenia, she was known as Anahit. And the Indian Parsees call her Anahid.

The Magis also made the transition from the Medians to Zoroastrianism, although these religious cults lost much of their power. They continued to promote the worship of Anahita by reading sacred texts dedicated to her and drinking a beverage called haoma, made from a plant of the same name, which is still used in Zoroastrian rituals today. Anahita’s special day, celebrated with abundant feasts, was the tenth day after the new moon in Avan, the eighth month of the Iranian calendar.

Anahita dish in the
Cleveland Museum of Art

Ardashir II (also known as Ataxerxes), who ruled Persia from 405 to 358 BC, was devoted to Anahita. He had statues erected in her honor in all his major cities and built a temple to the goddess/angel in Ecbatana (present-day Hamadan, Iran). Although Alexander the Great laid waste to the temple in 324 BC during his conquest of Persia, it wasn’t completely destroyed until 2006, when local authorities had the site flattened to make way for a musalla, an Islamic prayer hall.

The Anahita Temple in Kangavar was probably built sometime after the one in Ecbatana, during the Parthian era (246 BC to 224 AD), although some archeologists attribute it to Ardashir. I visited the site several years ago on a road trip from Kermanshah to Tehran. Although the temple was discovered in the early 19^th century and excavated 150 years later, it felt as though little work had been done there in decades. Only a few of the round columns stood upright, with most lying broken on the ground. Crumbling staircases led nowhere, and boulders that once formed the temple’s walls were half buried in the soil.

Our guide, well aware of the neglect, apologized profusely for the state of the archeological treasures. He lamented the lack of government funds and pointed out cracks in beams that had been caused not by the ravages of time over millennia but by frost heaves during a recent winter. His concern didn’t stop him from inviting me to touch the marble columns and climb the staircases. After a moment’s hesitation, I couldn’t resist. How often do you get this close to antiquity? Even at Persepolis, Iran’s most famous archeological site, where visitors wander through the remains of ancient palaces, they follow well marked tourist paths designed to protect the monument from damage.

The same year that I visited Kangavar, the temple was submitted to UNESCO for listing as a World Heritage Site. I hope these efforts are successful—and soon—before Anahita’s temple becomes nothing more than a legend, along with the goddess herself.

Crete—A Weekend With Myths, Legends, and History

Heidi is taking the week off, and so we have a guest today. H. S. Stavropoulos was born and raised in a small Greek Village in the middle of Oakland, California, and writes about being born in America to Greek immigrant parents and living between those two worlds. A frequent visitor to Greece and having hundreds of relatives there, H. S. Stavropoulos writes stories that describe life in Greece, Greek food (of course!!), the wealth of Greek culture, mythology and traditions, and the complex and wonderful Greek people. 

The wonderful thing about visiting my family in Greece is that when I need to escape for a weekend getaway, I have hundreds of islands to select. I’d always wanted to see the Palace at Knossos, so Crete it was.

I flew in and grabbed a cab to my beachfront hotel. I spent the day swimming and as the day drew to a close and I walked along the shore listening to the gentle sound of waves lapping against the sandy beach, a single white flip-flop was tossed among the waves. I reached it and kicked it onto the beach, continued my walk, and eventually headed back to my hotel.

Sunset over Heraklion

I awoke to the sun shining into my room. I opened the window to admire the sea view. But today was not a beach day, today was for an archeological tour. I hopped on a local bus and headed into Heraklion, where I transferred to another, headed to Knossos. Arriving at Knossos, I walked the short distance to the gate, paid, and entered the heart of the Minoan Civilization.

The day was hot and dusty and filled with the cries of peacocks. I’d never seen peacocks in the wild and for a time I was enthralled watching them, almost forgetting that they weren’t the reason I’d come.

Knossos peacock

I walked to the palace with its red columns and frescoes of dolphins, bulls, and bull-jumping youths. The colours were bold and vibrant and the artistry magnificent.

I walked around the complex and was amazed that the site covered 20,000 square meters. The palace is a multi-storied structure with multiple floors, innumerable corridors and colonnades. I wondered as I peered down several levels with zig-zagging staircases that reminded me of an Escher painting whether this wasn’t the basis for the myth of the labyrinth.

The Palace of Knossos features in many myths about the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. In Greek, minotaur, means the “bull of Minos.” Minos was the King of Knossos. King Minos commissioned the great architect, Dedalos to build the labyrinth to house the Minotaur. But the King kept Dedalos prisoner to prevent him from revealing the layout. Dedalos fashioned two sets of wings from feathers and wax. He and his son, Ikaros, escaped by flying off the island of Crete. Ikaros flew too high and the sun melted the wax and he plummeted into the Aegean Sea.

Knossos Palace

Another myth surrounding the Palace is that of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Crete required a tribute from Athens of young men and woman to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Theseus, the son of the King of Athens, vowed to kill the Minotaur. If he succeeded, he would change the sails on his ship to white to alert his father, Aegeus. When Theseus returned, he forgot to change the sails, and his father jumped to his death from the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, thereby giving his name to the Aegean Sea.

One modern theory is that the word “labyrinth” can be associated with the double headed axe, the labyrs, used throughout Crete.

As I walked about the palace, I thought of these rich stories filled with symbolism and tragedy.

I waited in line to view the alabaster throne, surrounded by reclining griffins painted on the walls of the room. I saw ceramic jars taller than myself. A double horned limestone sculpture, the symbol of the sacred bull, stood in an open area with tourists vying to be photographed in front of it.

Double horns at Knossos

After spending the better part of the day at Knossos, I returned to Heraklion, where I toured the open exhibits of the Heraklion Archeological Museum. The museum houses the actual frescoes from Knossos along with many of its findings. Items from other sites on Crete are also included. The Phaistos disc has always fascinated me with its hieroglyphic symbols arranged in a spiral that has never been translated.

The next day I explored the city of Heraklion, once owned by ancient Venice. Along the stone walls built to fortify the city, I wandered past a large structure with vaulted ceilings and arches then walked to the old harbour. At the end of the pier I came to the Venetian fortress. I entered the cool and dark stone fortress and then walked up to the top of the battlements overlooking the sea.

Venetian fortress in Heraklion Harbour

I walked back towards the city and entered a pedestrian street filled with shops. I wandered through a pedestrian mall and cross streets until I reached a magnificent fountain in the center of the shopping district surrounded by cafes and restaurants.

The Morozini Fountain is an ornate 17th-century Venetian fountain used to supply water to the fortified city. Water flows from the mouths of four lions into the base of the fountain.

After eating lunch, I went to the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis, the writer known to most Americans for his story, Zorba the Greek. He is supposed to have lost the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature by one vote to Albert Camus. Camus is reported to have said that Kazantzakis deserved it more.

Kazantzakis is buried outside the walls of the city of his birth, as he requested, since the church would not allow him to be buried in a cemetery. The epitaph on his grave reads, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

I ate at a seaside restaurant as the sun glowed orange as it set over the sea. That night, I mused over the sights I had seen on this too quick jaunt to Crete, knowing that there was much more to see and experience on the largest of Greece’s islands. The next day would see me on a plane returning to Athens.

Remember that white flip-flop I found on the beach? It inspired a story that will be published in Fish Nets, the second anthology of the Guppies Chapter of Sisters in Crime, which will be released in early May 2013.