1.
Mount Parnassus was where the ark that Deucalion built to escape the flood rested when Zeus sent down great rains to punish the world.
2.
Though she seemed not to appear within the work, I cannot but speak of the goddess Hera, who in fact had been appearing throughout from beginning to end.13)
Would not Hera be the most lamentable of the Greek goddesses? What is the world's perception of her today? The image of a strong-willed woman who all day long keeps her eyes fixed upon the earth from atop the clouds, huffing and puffing as she watches where her husband Zeus is having another affair—that is precisely the figure of Hera.
The Greeks claimed they treated her well enough, seating her squarely in the position of wife to Zeus the supreme god, but from Hera's perspective, this could not have been a very pleasing matter. For Zeus was originally a male god far beneath her.
Where was the oldest temple in Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympics? The Temple of Zeus? No. It was the Temple of Hera.
Her name, he era, means "earth." She had been revered by the name Rhea since the early Aegean civilization, and was an earth mother goddess who had existed long before any male gods appeared. However, upon being incorporated into Greece, Rhea was split away into the role of Hera's mother.
The gala of "galaxy," which means universe in English, signifies "Hera's milk." Also, the word 'hiera,' meaning sacred, shares the same etymology as Hera. Hiera was a title used to address ancient goddesses or queens, and many female sovereigns ruled their lands being called Hiera.
In the Iliad, Hera is described as having the eyes of a cow; one can surmise how exalted her position was on Crete, an island that worshipped cattle.
(In the midst of this, Zeus commits the atrocity of ravishing Io, who had transformed into a cow to flee. Thus, some mythologists speculate that Io may have been a kind of transformation of Hera herself. The possibility is very high that the myths reflect the immigrant male gods who were degrading the status of mother goddesses at the time.)
In truth, the ugly marriage between Hera and Zeus was an example that crudely displayed the clash of two cultures. It suggests that fusion and compromise were not well achieved, and that an unfair relationship was continuously forced.
That Hera kept her chastity while Zeus endlessly philandered and betrayed her was also due to the same logic.
In her rage, Hera would kill the objects of his affairs or commit rash acts that made herself appear ridiculous; that she persecuted Heracles, the greatest hero of Greece, alone shows how irrational the responses she forced upon others were.
The Heraion, Hera's temple, was the most important and oldest temple in Bronze Age Greece. In her temple, not a single symbol of her husband Zeus was engraved. Moreover, the Heraea, a women's Olympics, began before the Olympics, a festival for men.
This is proof that they were not originally husband and wife, but independent chief deities of patriarchal society and matriarchal society, respectively.
Furthermore, Hera's husband had originally been Heracles, called the Glory of Hera, but he too had been forcibly bound to Zeus by the immigrant culture.
The mythologists Baring and Cashford describe their union thus:
"Hera's marriage was a fraudulent farce brought about by deception. One day when thunder struck and heavy rain fell, Hera was resting alone on the mountain where her temple would later be built. Then Zeus appeared, transformed into a filthy cuckoo, and sat upon Hera's knee, soaked through with rain. Hera took pity on this wretched bird and wrapped the cuckoo in her robes. Then Zeus suddenly revealed his true form and overpowered her."
Here, Zeus is depicted not as a great male god, but as a lecher who committed marriage by theft.
Despite such fraudulent acts, Zeus forced his way into the Hera worship of the Argos region and successfully secured dominance.14)
Hera, too, could not escape the social atmosphere of the time, in which matriarchy was falling and the influence of patriarchal society was swelling grotesquely.
Hera was a goddess praised as more beautiful even than Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and was a goddess of childbirth and the home, possessed of the powers of maidenhood, conception, and creation.
But after the invasion of the immigrants, she was degraded into the image of a wife who did nothing but vent jealousy and resentment all day long, and it is nothing but sad that today, there are not many who remember that she was a mother goddess greater than Zeus.