A thought, as I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (again).
There's a large chunk of information being thrown about in Snow Crash regarding goddess worship in regards to Asherah. Mostly in a negative light. Asherah worship as linked with the spread of viruses, of both the physical and meta- variety.
And as something that may not have occurred to me before (or maybe it did, but not having written it down, it escaped into the void), I've started thinking about how Snow Crash compares with Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs and All, which takes a decidedly different view on goddess worship and the religious conflict (with Judaism, with Christianity, etc...) that pops up around it. I'm interested in finding out if Asherah is mentioned specifically in Skinny Legs and All.
*After a bit of digging, it looks like the name Astarte shows up in Skinny Legs and All. While close in appearance with the Asherah in Snow Crash, it doesn't necessarily entail equality. A reference to each exists in Wikipedia, both filling the role of mother goddesses. The two articles conflict a bit in whether or not they are a single entity or two separate entities.
"The goddess, the Queen of heaven whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed, may have been Asherah or possibly Astarte." (from the article on Asherah) would seemingly differentiate between the two. Whereas, "According to scholar Mark S. Smith, Astarte may be the Iron Age (after 1200 BC) incarnation of the Bronze Age (to 1200 BC) Asherah.[1]" would link the two as a single entity.
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3 comments:
interesting parallel between the two books. seems to have been quite a bit of mixing and matching back then, (dionysus/osiris/jesus/mithra) (inanna/istar/astarte/asherah).
And the more I poke around at the names the more convoluted it becomes. If I were motivated I would be hacking and slashing at the cross-factual referential integrity of about half a dozen Wikipedia entries. But I'l let it slide.
As a whole, either Stephenson worked from sources with a particular bent in terms of the relationships of the diverse goddess figures, or overlooked some of the deity equivalencies.
He goes into a bit on the Inanna/Ishtar duality, but has the Inanna persona as completely separate entity from the Asherah bit.
And in another vein, all the various bits point to whichever goddess referenced (regardless of name) as being goddess of "fertility, sexuality, and war" (or something much to that effect). There's also cross references (for astarte in particular) to a correspondence with Aphrodite. Aphrodite drops the war bit come greek mythology. But Athena picks up war (but not the brutal war aspect that is the domain of Ares) and also adds a craft(ing) component that could be seen associated with Enki in the earlier mythos. Splits and convergences all over the place.
Athena actually figures prominently in later Stephenson. Possibly as early as Cryptonomicon, and almost assuredly in The Baroque Cycle.
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