Temple of Merope
Thursday, May 01, 2008
So this is what I've been working on over the last couple of days. I've started a new project that I hope will be both informative and spiritually beneficial. I guess only people who visit it can tell me for sure. Personally, it's already enriched my experience of the Goddess.
I guess you could say I am doing it as much for me (probably more so) than for anyone else. I went looking for virtual Goddess temples and didn't really find what I was looking for. This virtual temple project is the result of that desire.
So, if you have the time please leave me some comments on this post and let me know what you think about the content of the Temple of Merope. More temples are in the works. Persephone and Demeter should be coming soon and at that time I will build an index page to house all the temples.
Connecting with the Goddess: Musings
(from Panthea's Temple of Merope)
We don't know for sure what her name was or what exactly her rituals might've entailed, but remnants of the Great Bee Goddess can be seen in recovered artifacts and the mytholgy of the Greek descendents of the Minoans. Though much of this Goddess is lost to antiquity, I believe versions of her (stripped of her Great Goddess stature) are found throughout later Greek mythology under the name Merope. But these may just be tiny pieces of her story.
I personally believe that Demeter herself is a later incarnation of the Great Bee Goddess. Demeter's priestesses were called Melissae (Bees) and some sources report that the priestesses believed they would be reincarnated as bees in the afterlife. Where did these ideas originate?
The Bee Goddess of Crete, of the Minoans, was intimately tied to the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth. Regeneration or transformation seem to be one of her primary functions. Most, if not all, Great Goddess figures can be given this distinction. Demeter and her various faces as Triple Goddess can certainly be equated with regenerative properties. Could Ancient Merope have also been a Triple Goddess?
Somehow this Goddess (an ancient and sacred face of Mother Demeter) found her way into my life. She settled down into my heart as if it were her hive and made a nice cozy home there. I have rather syncretically equated the Minoan Bee Goddess with the pleiadian star and the myth surrounding the Goddess it is named for. Though this star happens to be in the Pleiades, a constellation popular with the new age crowd, I don't feel anything is being "channeled" down to me. I simply feel her looking down from her hiding place in the vast blanket of stars above. Though her light is the faintest of the other six sisters, I feel it shining on me as the brightest star in the heavens.
Perhaps she has honored me as a modern version of one of her Melissae; her priestess. Since the bee is a common symbol for this Goddess, and thus a possible metaphor to be looked at allegorically, I wonder what the bee can teach me? I wonder what this little creature of the natural world can tell me about how to live and how to honor the Goddess? Might I be a worker bee? Or can I embrace the Queen within?
In this virtual sacred place I invite you to take on the title of Melissae yourself, and let your soul be opened up to this little known but largely felt face of the Goddess.
Labels: ancient greek goddess, Bee Goddess, goddess temple, Greek Goddesses, greek myth, meditations, Merope, minoan bee goddess, temple of merope, virtual goddess temple, virtual temple
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There's been a lot of blogging about bees lately. 
In ancient Crete the bee was venerated as a symbol of the Goddess. We don’t know the Bee Goddess’ name, but I tend to call her Merope, the Honey Faced. Merope was a later Greek Goddess and one of the Seven Sisters. She married a mortal and, as legend has it, that is the reason she is the faintest star among her sisters within the constellation of the Pleiades. She hides her face in shame. I think this was something the Greeks added later, after the influx of patriarchal ideas. The Goddess is often known to bring together – or balance out – the divine and the profane (profane being anything inherently human, mortal, and mundane.) Her mortal consort is very likely a later image of the bull-god of Crete. 
