“Things you do not expect to dig up from farmland: an ancient goddess with a penchant for wearing the severed heads of her enemies on her belt and then having enormous amounts of sex. That would be of course Anat, the goddess of beauty, love and war for many ancient mythologies, most notably the Canaanites”.

–from the description of This Video discussing a recent archaeological find

I’m passing familiar with this Goddess. She has dozens of forms and related names that arose and evolved over time (especially some few millennia back) and space (especially the shores of the Medi-Terranean), and even a clutch of more recent and less faraway incarnations. Sightings. Episodes.

The Wiki makes this briefly clear–“Anat, Anatu, classically Anath … ʿĂnāth; Canaanite: 𐤏𐤍𐤕 ʿAnōt; Ugaritic: 𐎓𐎐𐎚 … Egyptian Antit, Anit, Anti, or Anant) … is a major northwest Semitic goddess. Her attributes vary widely among different cultures and over time, and even within particular myths. She likely heavily influenced the character of the Greek goddess Athena”. And in considerably attenuated and bowdlerized manifestations, the Virgin Mary too, in the same creeping Western way that the local cavalry murdered a Native war chief and a quarter-century later named a county and a college after him.

I first knew her as Astarte and the first thing I learned was that she was an enemy Delilah who stood opposed to the patriarch Yahweh and all his good followers on almost every philosophical and stylistic point. For example, in the Genesis myth, Evil takes the form of a snake, but in the recently found sculpture, the snake is a prominent part of Her crown.

That was first-knowing, but nowhere near the last. Just the stories about her both ancient and modern are prone to turning what flows through your veins to ice.

I only heard of this latest discovery because I was scrolling the Rumble feed of RT. Which of course stands for Russia Today, an iconic example of ‘state-run media’, an honorific that of course also applies to PBS/NPR, although no one ever calls them that.

I don’t believe the hearing or the manner of it was any kind of coincidence.

Just as with what I’m reading now, which is a book called VALIS, by an author named Phillip K. Dick, who also wrote the original version of Bladerunner.

VALIS is set in our lifetimes; Bladerunner is the future.

The increasingly hypothetical Future.

Praise be to Ishtar.