a Good Friday event

The Moon is still the White Goddess, to whom we turn our money, and continues to rule widely as Rhea, or Artemis, or Marianae, preserving most of her ancient titles and emblems. Except that the breasts of the Goddess are now draped, there is almost no difference in appearance between the pretty shell-strewn shrine which three thousand years ago Queen Hypsipyle tended at Lemnian Myrine, and its modern counterparts; for as Queen of Heaven the Goddess still claims the moon, the snake, the fetich cross, the blue garment, the stars, the lilies and the Divine Child as her attributes.

What is more, a friend of mine who visited the Pagasaean Gulf not long ago tells me that close to Aphetae, where the Argonauts made their parting sacrifice to the Goddess in her character of Queen of All Creatures, blood still flows in the streams from the throats of sheep and goats slaughtered for her in the same name; and at the same season is the flowering of the scarlet wind-flower On Mount Pelion itself, in the Greek church which possibly marks the site of the Mare-headed Goddess’ shrine – the shrine from which Phrixus and Helle purloined the Golden Fleece – children still pass through her skirts in an archaic ritual of rebirth. But this has become a Good Friday event and the skirts are those of the bier on which her dead Son lies in state; whose flesh is afterwards symbolically torn in pieces and whose blood shed for the good of the land.

Από τον επίλογο του "Hercules my Shipmate" του Robert Graves