In Olympia we can dig up something kept silent and suppressed by patriarchal thinking, something you will not find in any travel guide or easy accessible descriptions of the Olympic Games' history. Once again: it's herstory.

The excavation place Olympia is most beautiful on the early morning, before the first tourist busses arrive or in the evening hours before the trill whistles of the guards request the last admirers for leaving the place. Then Olympia appears like an extensive park decorated with pieces of columns, cornices, stones covered with moss and cantilevered pine trees.

On the question, which made for them the biggest impression most people, who visited Olympia, will naturally call the palaces and the temple of the Zeus, which by the way was finished only 456 BCE. An impressive building, in the middle into the Altis (see fig. right),

Olympia - and this will maybe surprise you - was a thoroughly female sanctum. Let me name just a few of the deities, who's cults go back long before Hellenic times.

Athena had two altars in the Altis. She came from Libya over Crete to Greece, long before she jumped out of the head of Zeus, according to patriarchal ideas. (Plato identifies Athena with the Libyan Goddess Neit.) Excavated vessels suggest that a Libyan immigration already took place to Crete in the year 4,000 BCE. [1]

At five altars Artemis was admired, a virgin goddess, which roots go back far into pre Hellenic times. She appears as a "killing and life-giving mother goddess", thus not only the "black", but also as the "red" goddess and in her virgin manifestation as the "white", whereby she is completed to her Trinity.

A very old cult applied for Gaia, which was connected with oracle, too. Gaia is the embodied earth, the divine feeding and fostering nature, which creates and calls all mortal.

An altar was established for the admiration of Eileithya. She is a Crete/Minoan, perhaps even a birth goddess of Asia Minor.

The virgin goddess Hestia is the guardian of the stove, the cleaning, life-donating, never expiring fire. Her cult of the sacred stove in Olympia designates the holy center and the religious fundamental idea of the domestic right and protection sphere. Hestias? fire is still in use to date at the Olympic Games.

In the same way Themis, the goddess of the "old-sanctified right" was admired, at her altar.

Also the Moira, i.e. the Goddesses of fate, comparable to the Nordic norns, which begin the thread of life, yarn and cut it, was dedicated a sanctuary. The Moira is the conception of the fate: Each human gets their "portion" of life.

The Muses in their nine-number had a sanctuary. They are the defenders of all spiritual life.

Even to the Nymphs, old vegetation divinities, three altars were dedicated. The Nymphs are elementary female spirits, which are always connected with water of all kinds, particularly with springs.

So in Olympia all elements of life are gathering in the goddesses, which serve to any fundamental need. The hearth gives warmth und is useful for preparing food. Growth comes from all Goddesses of vegetation, like Gaia or Demeter. Athena protected the crafts, she taught the art of pottery, brought the loom, taught yarning and so she provided clothing. She invented the yoke of oxen and the plough and therefore helped to multiply the crops. Also the wagon and the ship are her inventions. And the cycle of life is arranged, too: birth lies in the hands of Eileithis, the Moira escort life and Themis cares about justice for the community, Artemis arrow provides a gentle death.

For Olympia we can assume at least 16 female deities. Do you know a place more sacred to women?

The Origin of the Olympic Games.

By F. M. Cornford [2]

The Heraea.

The Olympic festival was a moveable feast, and occurred alternately in Apollonios and Parthenios, which were probably the second and third months of the Elean year. This variation of the month is a strange and inconvenient arrangement. Moreover it is unique. The Pythia also were held at intervals of 50 and 49 months, but the incidence of the intercalated months of the octennial period was so arranged that the festival itself always fell in the same month (Bukatios) of the Delphic year. In the same way the Panathenaea, though penteteric, always fell in Hekatombaion. There must have been some very strong reason for the troublesome variation of months in the sole case of the most important of panhellenic gatherings.

Weniger finds the reason in the existence of an older immovable festival at the very season at which the reconstituted Games were to be fixed. Every fourth year a college called the Sixteen Women wove a robe for Hera and held games called the Heraea. The games consisted of a race between virgins, who ran in order of age, the youngest first, and the eldest last. The course was the Olympic stadium, less about one-sixth of its length (i.e. 500 instead of 600 Olympic feet). The winners received crowns of olive and a share of the cow sacrificed to Hera. They trace the origin of the games of the virgins, like those of the men later, to antiquity, saying that Hippodameia, out of gratitude to Hera for her marriage with Pelops, assembled the Sixteen Women, and along with them arranged the Heraean games for the first time.

It is highly probable that these games of virgins (Parthenia) gave its name to the month Parthenios, and were in honour of Hera Parthenos?Hera whose virginity was perpetually renewed after her sacred marriage with Zeus. It is also probable that they were held at the new moon, that is, on the first day of Parthenios. Further, if these games gave the month its name, in that month they must always have fallen. Thus the octennial period of the Heraea is of the usual straightforward type, which keeps always to the same month. The natural inference is that the Heraea were first in the field, and that, when later the men?s games were fixed at the same season, it was necessary to avoid this older fixed festival. At the same time, if the games of Zeus were allowed to be established regularly in the middle of the previous month Apollonios, it was obvious that the Heraea would sink into a mere appendage. Zeus, on the other hand was not inclined to yield permanent precedence to Hera. The deadlock was solved by a characteristic compromise. The octennial period for the Games of Zeus was so arranged that in alternate Olympiads they should fall fourteen days before, and fourteen days after, the Heraea (on Apollonios 14/15 and Parthenios 14/15). By this device of priestly ingenuity the honour of both divinities was satisfied, and so the inconvenient variation of months for the Olympic festival is explained.

The Heraea, then, were very likely older than the reconstituted Olympia; and if they gave its name to the month Parthenios, they must have been annual before they were octennial or penteteric. They carry us back to the old lunar year, which preceded the combined sun-and-moon penteteris.

[Professor Ridgeway? Athenaeum, May 20, 1911, ?pointed out that the astronomical cycles, such as the Metonic, were late, and may have come in with the remaking of the games, which must have existed long before B.C. 776 at Olympia.?]

In discussing that combination we agreed with Dr Frazer that form its introduction the Olympic victor represented the Sun united in marriage with the Moon. Even if there were no further evidence, it would still be a reasonable conjecture that in earlier days, the sacred marriage, here as elsewhere, had been an annual feast, and its protagonists imitating the celestial bridegroom and bride, had embodied the powers of  the cosmic cycle of the stars and planets, according to the seasons. If that is so, the new penteteric festival in the late summer may have attracted to itself features, such as the single combat and the foot-race for the olive branch, form feasts which under the older systems of time-reckoning would naturally belong to winter or to spring. We are therefore untouched by objections based on the time of year of the historic Games?a time fixed solely with reference to the Sun and Moon. We are at liberty to suppose that the winner of the foot-race represented the transforming moon, before he represented the Sun. As one mode of time-reckoning supersedes another, so in the sphere of religion emphasis is successively laid on Earth, with her changing seasons and meteoric phenomena, on the Moon, and on the Sun. This line of enquiry may set at rest many old-standing controversies.

Moon disk - lunar disc - whatever you call it, this young (marble) Greek athlete is going to throw it. Not just so. It was a ritual movement with a meaning. He is standing no more than on his right foot, the toes pressed into the ground (the supporting trunk is only for the marble version, it is not there in the several bronze copies). The right hand with the disc is thrown back as far as possible. The whole upper body and the head are following this move in a spiral rotation, while the left hand touches the right knee and the toes of the left foot contact the ground - just  for an instant.
In the next moment the right hand will go  downwards in an arch and throw the disc far away - the whole body, following the swing, will sit up again. In the represented moment the figure is turned away from the target and will make a turn of 180? to the left, in order to let the disc go.

What does this figure stand for? We see just the second of intermission between two opposite directions. There are similar statues, like the statue of Marsyas at the Lateran in Rome, originally belonging to a group together with Athena: The Satyr crept along and bounced back, when Athena turned around. Again an encounter of two contrary movements, captured in the statues.

I want your guesses, what this symbolisms could mean. The Greek and also the Romans (the Egypts  anyway, and the Celts for pretty long) lived in a matriarchal way of life, much more than we imagine. Because their systems had become double-societies: The natives (matriarchal) of a region and a small group of conquerors coming from east, without scruple, but armed, mingled and influenced each other.