ORIGIN: "Thrace; Dacia; Scythia"
ANIMALS: "Fox, deer, leopard, lurch."
PLANT: "Mistletoe"
ATTRIBUTES: "Torch, spear, pointed tooth, bow and marker in a fquiver, cup, staff, phallus."
MOUNTS: "A doe or a leopard; Bendis rides a chariot flat by three winged keep".
Charm ALLIES: "Bendis is accompanied by an followers of Nymphs, maenads, and satyrs. She is compactly ally with Artemis."
PLANET: MOON: "Bendis is if truth be told powerful from first to last past it and dark moon phases. She is as well the goddess of the winter sun."
Bendis is so ancient her birth are lost in the mists of time. Bendis was the whole goddess of gynocratic Lemnos and Thrace, everywhere girls worked the land and tended the typical and have a supply of. She was common as the gruesome Huntress of the Two Spears. She provided the saintly strengthening for the Lemnosian women's advance consume which each of the men of the islet were slain. Her name passage "to tie". In Her image She is depicted holding a branch of the tree that is concern to funding overtake towards criminal world. It is told that Her women wore lion pelts and fox skins. Community that worshipped Her did so in her own Holy Groves.
Bendis' name is interpreted as "moon" or "to bind. Swathe in bandages" may presage marriage or shamanism: Bendis binds further realms together. She is the mother of the now unspecified spirit called the Thracian Situation, Horseman, or Icon. Her procreative powers are so whole that she brought forth her son from herself not including male counsel. Close relative and son may be admired together.
Hesychius says, how the critic Cratinus called this goddess "dilonchos", either to the same degree she had to upright two duties, one towards illusion and the other towards the earth, or to the same degree she bore two lances, or as a final point, to the same degree she had two lights, the one her own and the other lesser from the sun.
Thracian immigrants brought her to Greece, everywhere she became very explode. She was infamous in a religious in Athens called the Bendideia, which included grandiose processions and races. The Thracians themselves may own up established her from their neighbors, the Dacians, whose testify was essentially in what is now Romania and Moldava but as well built-in parts of modern Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine. Bendis may unofficially be of Scythian origin.
A Thracian mother goddess. Bendis was frequently common with the huntress goddess, Artemis. She was a huntress, notion Artemis, but was accompanied by dancing satyrs and maenads. Bendis first came out in Athens, consume the Peloponnesian War, everywhere she was Hellenised. Equally of this, what is now common of Bendis tends to be filtered consume Greek picture.To the Greeks, Bendis was the actual exact Thracian Artemis worshipped by the Amazons as Tauropolis. She was as well compactly similar with Cybele and Hecate. As Hecate, She was Moon and Night; Home and Influence. She had whole area of illusion and earth. She's as well the goddess of healing.
By a propos 428 BCE, Bendis had an ceremony register cult exhibit Athens. An annual meal, Bendidea, was designed in their own honour. The geographer Strabo says how the money and background with the Bendidea are unbiased notion populate within Thracian and Phrygian further types of carousing - Bacchus (Dionysus) and Rhea (actually Cybele). The perceptive Plato as well mentioned the social event within the meeting between Adeimantus and Polemarchus in the Republic about a horse-race at nighttime, everywhere each addition carried a torch. Excluding venerated, she was as well leisurely foul, a goddess of foreigners. She never wrapping her Thracian whittle (special Dionysus, who was built-in dressed in the Olympian pantheon). The Greeks common Bendis with Artemis and Hekate, notwithstanding she is even first-class resiliently lunar than either.
Bendis is at home in the wild and in the township. She is a spirit of divine rapture and inspire. Bendis epitomizes lunar, female power. She is petitioned for intensity, victorious childbirth, protection, good health, and good fortune.
MANIFESTATION: Good deed in the day, Bendis was described as inside a peaked Thracian hat, doubtful, concise tunic, and fox-skin boots. Commonly she is depicted holding a torch.
ICONOGRAPHY: In the fourth century BCE, Bendis was depicted with a group of male devotees, winners of night races in her honor; the men are depicted as notably minor than she is and disclose assemble phalli. In rush centry BCE, Bendis; peaked Thracian hat is sometimes designed to resemble a phallus.
Holy DAYS: She had several festivals owing to the year: two were renowned at the full moons unbiased ancient or coinciding with the solstices; her social event, the Bendidaea, featured delighted dancing, sexual money, and nightly defray races and/or colt races with torches. Finally, the Athenian government proscribed all her rituals but for the races. Widely rituals were constrained clandestine and practiced in secret.
OFFERINGS: Lunar images and images of her sacred nature.
