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Originally Posted by H-I
Have you been reading much of Dan Brown lately?
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Haven't heard of him - my 'inspiration' here is RJ Stewart & Caitlin & John Matthews.
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But if you go for MMC triple Goddess, you'll need another Mother, for Galadriel seems more into Crone business, as Shelob is way too horrible to fit in. May it be Celebrían to fill the vacancy? Than there will be direct line to fill all of the aspects, and Shelob would oppose all three.
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Without wanting to pursue this too far, there isn't really an 'opposition' of Goddesses in the ancient mysteries. There is an interesting old 'romance' of Thomas the Rhymer, where Thomas, lying under a tree, is met by the Fairy Queen, riding on a white horse. When she first appears she is incredibly beautiful (he mistakes her for the Queen of Heaven at first). When she tells him she is 'The Queen of fair Elfland', he asks to lay with her. She is transformed into a monstrous hag, & takes him off to fairyland to serve her for seven years. On the journey, they stop at a tree, & thomas offers to pick an apple for her to eat. She warns him off, telling him 'All the plagues that are in Hell light on the fruit of this country'. She then offers him bread & wine, which they share, & she transforms back to her beautiful self. But she is both the queen & the hag. Similar thing in the Wife of Bath's tale, where Gawain marries a terribly ugly, deformed hag, but when they retire to his room on the wedding night, she appears to him as a beautiful young maiden. Gawain is amazed, & asks her what's happened. She tells him that he can choose to have her ugly by day & beautiful by night, or the other way about. He says it will be up to her. At that point the 'spell' she was under is broken, & she is beautiful all the time from that point. Also, as I mentioned, in the Irish Goddess figure of Sovereignty - she appears to the potential king as a foul hag who, if kissed, is suddenly transformed into a beautiful maiden who confers the Kingship on him.
(Back to the plot) Shelob is
not 'way too horrible' to symbolise the 'Dark' Goddess - actually she's perfect for the role. Its the whole Anabolism/Catabolism, 'building up/breaking down' thing. The Goddess was creator & destroyer, weaver & unweaver of all creation. In the 'Prophecies of Merlin' (included in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of the Kings of Britain - the medieval bestseller which introduced Arthur to Europe) it is the Goddess Ariadne who unravels the worlds & draws everything back into the Void from which it arose. If you check out figures like Morrighan & Ceridwen (mother of Taliesin, the Shining Brow) you find that many ancient Goddesses have a 'horrible aspect', simply because in the Pagan world there wasn't the Christian opposition - creation/destruction, beauty/ugliness = Good/Evil. It was more like a Yin/Yang view.
But that is
way off topic.
I did wonder if anyone was going to pick up on my earlier speculations about Orcish metaphysics - but maybe that's been dealt with in another thread?