Bumper wrote:Have you found anything in your readings that confirm an influence of Vedic teachings, specifically Kali, on Hekate's attributions?
Theory:
The Golden Fleece is foreign trade, which is why the aristocracy of Europe calls itself the Society of the Golden Fleece. The story of the Argonauts tells of how Jason traveled to India, and of what went wrong with it.
Colchia (Calcutta, the holy city of Kali) is on the "other side of the world," rather than across the Mediterranean. They had a warrior-king Aeetes, who for his own part was well aware of Jason's people because he already had relics of the Theban princes and therefore knew what to expect of the newcomers.
I've seen plenty of ram skulls decorated in precious metals and jewels, marketed as "tantric cult artifacts," and while I'm not precisely familiar with that stuff, I doubt that this practice is new. If they did this kind of thing way back when, it stands to reasons that the Golden Fleece was just such a relic.
As I type this, and for generations prior, the Star of Lanka is guarded by a gigantic cobra whose head is bigger than my own. They get really big! This idea of keeping valuables guarded by a giant dangerous reptile sounds a lot like the Argonauts story to me. Beyond that, there is some suggestion that the "tree" from which the precious relic hung is some kind of Tantric teaching about the
ida and
pingala, the serpentine forces guarding the tree of illumination.
Along with the Fleece, Jason brought back Medea. At this time, Greece was not exactly high-tech, he was a hick with a boat full of jocks, but Medea was an educated priestess from what was then a highly sophisticated society. Her ideas about how to advance her political career, her ideas about pretty much everything, were a radical departure from anything Jason had ever known. This is what we might expect from introducing a genuine foreigner to the Greek political scene of the time, that she was much more advanced in her ways than they were, which is not what we would find if she was just a cult priestess from some remote island.
At the end of the tale, Medea decides that Jason is a jerk, and kills her own children. What might have been a globe-spanning trade empire became instead this myth that is hard to read to children without cringing. The Greeks ended up knowing that there was a whole world waiting over there, absolutely full of everything desirable, populated by a well-armed multitude, and without much of a way to get there again. Having no concept of those things in their native context, they made them Greek characters and deities, and so we have Hecate instead of Kali.