Lady Liberty: The Sovereignty Goddess of the USA Part 3

Yep, I've had hours of fun exploring the theories! This seems to be as good a place as any to give words of advice to fellow questing spirits through the dark petticoats of Liberty:

• Simply finding another Pagan deity wearing the same hat doesn't make them Liberty in disguise. Lots of deities are shown adorned in similar attire, because those are the symbols of divinity. It's just the same as God, Mary, Christ, archangels, angels and every Christian saint in Medieval art glowing with divine radiance and fitted with halos. Mary and God aren't the same Being. Hecate and Liberty aren't the same Being. They just each share a hat.
• Just because a deity is Pagan, it doesn't make said deity the Devil. Titan outside the Rockefeller Building, and Prometheus inside it, are Titan and Prometheus. Not Lucifer. And once again for luck - because it appears to be the most common theory out there - Liberty is not Lucifer. Even if one does hold a torch and the other is also called Morningstar. In fact, the Morning Star isn't even a torch, it's Venus. (Look! An opening to link a Pagan deity with Satan! Go pick on Aphrodite and/or Venus instead! It'll make slightly more sense and be less divinely dangerous.)

Before anyone comes up with any more theories regarding Lady Liberty's Pagan antecedents, may I just point out a few key facts:

a) Liberty holds aloft a torch because She was originally installed to double as a lighthouse, which function She performed from 1886 (it took that long to get through the red tape regarding the power supply) until 1901. She was the first lighthouse in the USA to use electric lighting.

Though constructed for this purpose, it was found that Her light in New York Harbor wasn't particularly useful for navigation through it, so Her torch was switched off. Responsibility for Her upkeep passed from the Lighthouse Board to the War Department in 1902, then the National Park Service in 1932.

If Bartholdi hadn't been building a lighthouse, he would have given Liberty anything from a sword to the Liberty Bell instead. But he was, so that aspect was incorporated into the design and labelled Liberty Enlightening the World.

It's not because She is Lucifer.

b) You can't look at Her crown now and determine anything about the original symbolism embedded into it. Liberty's head was blown off in 1916 in a terrorist attack. The one we see now was reconstructed along slightly different principles.

To frame the French for anything, you'll need to find a picture of how She looked when She left Paris. Let me help out here. All the images below depict the original face of the Statue of Liberty.

c) Nor can you base anything off what She's holding. Her original torch is in the lobby. It was taken down and copper pillaged from it, in order to reconstruct Her head in 1916. That torch couldn't have remained in place anyway, because it was badly damaged in said terrorist attack.

We're not even seeing that replacement now. The torch that we see today dates from 1986, when a lot of reconstruction was enacted. Therefore if you're going to use the modern Statue of Liberty as evidence of Satanism, then it won't be Bartholdi in the frame, but the Reagan administration. Whereupon you might find me finally in accord.

But here you go, if only because I do hate to stifle scholarly inquiry. Pre-1916 pictures of Liberty's torch:

d) Liberty is wearing a seven pronged crown as a compromise towards the American elite. People like J.P. Morgan were lobbying at the time not to have Her in the US at all. She would incite the lower classes into thinking they deserved Liberty.

Originally Liberty would have worn a Phrygian cap, as was awarded to manumitted slaves in ancient Rome, and which was later co-opted as the head-wear of Revolutionaries in France and also turned up as an emblem in the American Revolutionary War.  We would now call it the Liberty Cap.

f) Many Pagan deities and other classical/religious figures wear a spiked ray crown, because there was a fashion for depicting them as such in 19th century Italy. It was neither the first nor last time this became a thing, but it did inspire Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye - the designer of Liberty's statue - who spent some time in Milan.

Before you have an ah-ha moment with a statue or figurine of a Pagan deity in such attire, check when it was made and by whom. If it was 19th century Italian, or any other period where such things were artistic fads, then chuck it out.

Let's practice with this image:

You're looking at a personification of the New Testament (Biblical) as sculpted by Camillo Pacetti for the facade of Duomo di Milano (Cathedral in Milan) in the 1820s. It actually DID inspire the Statue of Liberty, as Laboulaye was a frequent visitor to the cathedral and admired that specific design.

So artistically speaking at least, Milan's New Testament statue has a proven route all the way to Liberty Island and the Goddess standing upon it. Italian; 19th century. Lucifer or not Lucifer?

With all of that out of the way, I would share only one more tip - if you're tracing the divine origin of any statue, you need to look at the history of the persona up there. Not its fashionable aspect.

As both a historian AND a Pagan, I'm in the perfect position to do just that.  Ready to strip back the layers of Liberty's religious roots? Because we're finally here.

Let's skip past the part where She's Libertas, freedom loving Goddess of French Revolutionaries, because that's already been covered in the previous two segments. France acquired Libertas when the country was still part of Gaul. The Gallic-Frankish Libertas evolved out of the Roman Goddess of the same name.

We'll begin with Her.

Slaves and ex-slaves usually didn't have the capital to fund Her temples. It was others who did that and they had their own reasons.

Liberty and freedom don't necessarily have to relate to nations, nor an individual's status in society. It can be far more personal than that; downright primal in fact. To be governed by Liberty - to be liberal - was not to swop one set of rules for another, however more palatable the second set may seem. It was to behave without any constraint at all.

Libertas, Liberty and liberal all come from the root word 'liber'. It means to be 'free, unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious'. This was the Goddess's domain. Today a better term might be 'anarchy'.

Those leaving tributes at Her shrines, or devotionals at Her temple altar, were seeking to shrug off all pretense at law and order. They were getting back to nature in its fullest sense, going wild, growing feral.

However, the Goddess didn't come from Rome. She emigrated there, carried in the devotion of faithful admirers during the Classical Period. We'll have to head east to find Her origin.

But how She came to define that is apparent in the context by which Eleutheria entered the common language. To act in the spirit of Eleutheria was to speak freely, without fear of retribution, ridicule, censure, nor anything else that works to silence expressing the thoughts within. There was no censorship, not even self-censorship.

As a verb, 'eleftheria' became parrhesia, but in its purest sense is more like our concept behind the phrase 'it's a fool's prerogative to speak truths to kings' or 'out of the mouths of babes and fools comes great wisdom'. These people didn't grasp that society expected them to think or speak in certain ways, hence their utterances came unblemished by any other factors.

It's worth noting that both modern phrases reference the fool. In a Classical sense, the Fool had a very specific role - which is still retained in its representation as the first Major Arcana tarot card. I'll include it here, as it's a useful way of explaining Eleutheria, if you know your tarot.

If you don't, then you should recognize this as the basic plot-line of practically every movie you ever saw, or novel that you read.

The Fool sets out on a journey of discovery, knowing nothing, an empty vessel. Along the way, the Fool picks up all manner of context, information, knowledge, wisdom, which culminates in the complete destruction of its world.

Only beyond that point (The Tower) can the Fool attain true insight. It arrives at the start, seeing that place again for the first time. The Fool has attained a higher level of being, growing beyond and rising above.

The etymology of Eleutheria means to go (eleu) to the place of love/wholeness/completeness (eran). As a Goddess, She governed that journey, or transition, between two states. From innocence all the way to inner sense; from blind curiosity to enlightenment.

But along the way, that meant tearing up everything that anchors a person (or society) to itself - losing self-identity in the absolute annihilation of self - in order to rise higher like a phoenix from the ashes.

This is closer to what the Goddess Libertas represented too. Even more so the divine root of Eleutheria, because She didn't begin as a deity in Her own right. She was (and still is) simply an aspect of a greater deity.

Artemis was the midwife of the Fates. Those petitioners courageous and humble enough to shed self at Her altar might enter into a shamanistic journey. If they survived long enough to find favor, then they'd find Artemis lighting the way back to the material world. They emerged changed, risking life and sanity in the quest for enlightenment.

They had peeled back the layers of their old order; lost themselves in the primal void of euphoric, dangerous, passionate, anchored chaos; smashed all that they knew to be true of themselves and their universe; then (hopefully) followed Artemis's guiding light to a place of pure sanctuary, where they could gather together a new reality based upon how it was now illuminated for them.

Their minds stripped of all its shackles let them perceive their world as something brand new. They had transformed into a virginal state of intellect and spirituality; able to speak without fear, gaining further insight through curiosity and query, like new-born babies or fools.

What followed now was wisdom, genius, madness or simply an unblocked, flowing stream of consciousness. They had entered into the spirit of liber, they were liberated, and thus had accepted Artemis's gift of eleutheria.

Centuries passed and the reward became the thing itself. Greek society awarded itself the automatic right - and expectation - to achieve eleutheria. The gain without the pain, culturally dressed up as parrhesia; facilitated by isolating that aspect of Artemis with Her torch, semi-divorced from all context and eventually named after the thing She governed. Like She was suddenly a separate Goddess entirely.

The Romans stole the idea of Eleutheria, too late to the party to realize they were looking at a single role fulfilled by Artemis (else they would simply have spliced it onto Diana). The idea became inspiration. The muse developed into deity. The Goddess Libertas was born and carried throughout the Roman Empire; where notions of Her lodged in the Gallic consciousness, understood through the prism of their own dark muses and therefore akin to Sovereignty.

Rome fell. Gaul fell. Half a millennium on, their descendants - now long since Christianized and French - retained some imagery of a fragmented Artemis, all mixed up with the Goddess of Sovereignty, and labelled Libertas. It was a hybrid that worked to glorious effect by the time of the French Revolution.

Sovereignty's influence meant that Libertas could personify the land as a nation. She brought politics into it. Artemis made it all about liberty; Sovereignty added fraternity; and the French themselves threw in equality. Sovereignty brought the fight to a real world battle-field. Artemis turned it into a frenzy. She epitomized freedom and the breaking of chains; Sovereignty contextualized that as directed towards the ruler.

As single entities, neither Goddess was particularly interested in representing the people. But that was the only interpretation that made sense, once their elements had been mingled in this way. Incidentally, not everyone was entirely blind to the origin of Libertas, as you can tell from the image on the front of this book.

There's enthroned Libertas, displaying the French constitution, with another Goddess under her Freemason symbol dangling hand. That Goddess is Artemis.

By now the Wild Huntress Artemis must have been thoroughly fascinated to discover Herself the divine embodiment of a civilization, with all its governmental trappings. Not to mention that Her Enlightenment apparently now used scholarly research, rationale, learning and logic as its touchstones. It was all about as far from losing oneself in the primeval melee of a Shamanistic voyage as it's possible to get.

But the frenzy remained, and the Terror, and even the possibility of dismemberment, once there had been the addition of a guillotine. And in this form, She was transported to America, where Her Romano-Gallic-French name Libertas was Anglicized as Liberty.

In short, the Statue of Liberty is ultimately a statue of Artemis.