In Greek mythology, Hera is the wife of Zeus, and while she is said to be very beautiful, presiding over marriage, birth, and many aspects of women’s lives, she is not the most popular of the Greek goddesses. She is often seen as jealous and spiteful, causing problems for Zeus’s many lovers and illegitimate children. But there is some evidence that Hera was around long before Zeus ever came into the picture.

Pre-Hellenic Greece had a thriving goddess culture, and Athena, Hera, Demeter, Persephone, Pandora, and several others were worshiped before any of the male gods showed up. As Charlene Spretnak explains in her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, beginning around 2500 BCE, waves of invasions by northern groups including the Dorians brought the concept of the male gods—and patriarchy itself—to these matriarchal societies.

According to heaps of archaeological evidence, the Goddess was once worshiped all over the world by many different names. She was often depicted in three forms: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Sometimes these three goddesses were sisters, sometimes separate goddesses reflecting different archetypes, and sometimes as the same goddess in different life cycles.

The Maiden

The Maiden embodies the new moon, springtime, and the dawn, as well as moments of new potential and possibility. She is the Greek Persephone, originally referred to as Kore, which translates to “maiden.” She is also Brigid, the beautiful red-haired Irish goddess of early spring, representing the energy that pushes the very first shoots of grass and flowers up through the snow. She is birth and rebirth after death in the Goddess cycle.

Baba Yaga is the classic crone, the Witch of the Forest. She is old and ugly, often riding around in a mortar without a pestle or on a broom. She lives in a little magical hut that has sentient chicken legs to carry her wherever she wants to go, making her exceedingly hard to find. In some of her stories, she cooks and eats children in her giant stove. In others, she gives them magic, helping them survive and thrive if they are willing to work on her terms.

While Mary has not been traditionally regarded as a goddess, her story reflects more ancient goddess archetypes and can teach us valuable lessons about the power of compassion and motherhood.

The Virgin Mary is not, doctrinally, a goddess. She is the mother of Jesus Christ, and in many Christian traditions, it would be heretical to worship her above God himself.

And yet the Virgin Mary is beloved by Christians and non-Christians the world over. To this day, she is represented in art, figurines, and even tattoos by people who adore her. In their book Evolution of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford discuss the plethora of art centered on Mary and point out that “in art, for the most part, Jesus is either a newly born infant or dead!”

The Egyptian goddess Nut can teach us lessons about the power of motherhood and the eternally nurturing nature of the night. Learn more.

In ancient Egypt, the night sky, filled with stars and streaked with the Milky Way, was embodied by a goddess named Nut (pronounced “newt”). Nut is unusual in the sense that most ancient cultures understood the sky as masculine and the earth as feminine, but in ancient Egypt, the sky goddess wrapped herself lovingly around her beloved earth god, Geb. These two were so in love, so constantly connected, that the sun god Ra had to get between them, thus creating the day.

Medusa may be remembered as a fearsome serpent creature, but upon deeper inspection, her story holds truth about ancient goddesses and the power they still have.

Medusa is an incredibly popular figure from ancient Greek mythology. She’s known as a snake-headed monster, so ugly she can turn you to stone with a single glance. But there’s more to Medusa than that. In fact, her myth may tell the story of what happened to an ancient goddess who was once the primary deity all over the world.

While the common retelling of Persephone’s story may seem heartbreaking, a deeper, more powerful truth lies within.

In the classical Greek myth “The Rape of Persephone,” Persephone, the daughter of the agriculture goddess Demeter, is abducted by Hades, god of the underworld. Demeter grieves Persephone so bitterly that the world stops producing food, and winter falls. In order to bring abundance back into the world, Persephone is returned to her mother, but because Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, it is decided that she must stay in the underworld for six months each year, causing the cycling grief of her mother to bring on winter once a year.

Demeter was likely one of the pre-Hellenic goddesses who was worshiped before the northern Zeus worshipers arrived. “The Rape of Persephone,” as well as many other Greek myths we know today, may actually tell the story of this conflict: The masculine invaders work to subdue indigenous feminine spirituality, leading to uneasy alliances and unhappy marriages in myth.

While often remembered as a demon, Lilith was once an empowered goddess who dared to stand up for herself, and was exiled. Her story has powerful lessons for those of us who need to learn to stand up for ourselves.

Lilith is a goddess with roots in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to 2100 BC. She was once known as a goddess of fertility and sexuality who aided mothers and their newborns. But she’s also been called a demon, a succubus, a killer of children, a temptress, and even a vampire. She was also the biblical Adam’s first wife.