Asdghig, Pantheon of the Armenian gods

She is the creator of all life, the mother goddess. Her symbols are the rose and the dove. The Vartavar festival is devoted to her. Doves are released and water is sprinkled on each other as a cleansing ritual to purge uncleanliness and start over again. Statues of her found in Satala depict her naked while bathing.

Astghig in a broader sense symbolizes love, beauty, moisture, water sources, and springs. The concept of water can be identified with both the water of the womb, hence childbirth and fertility – or universally even the “birth” of humankind – as well as purity, as denoted by her “bathing”, symbolizing the cleansing of the body and soul of impurities.

Her equivalent deities are the Phoenician Astartes, the Akkadian Ishtar, the Babylonian Inanna, the Phrygian Cybele, the Assyrian Atargates, the Greek Aphrodite, and the Roman Venus. Most of her given names allude to a sacred “star”, and Astghig means “little star”.

I firmly believe that she symbolized such a significant cosmic event, and enjoyed such a divine supremacy, that to explain the most important concept in ancient civilization, the “STAR”, many languages adopted the same root of the word, DERIVED from this mother goddess.

The oldest linguistic term is just three consonants from the Sanskrit, STR, which evolved into Աստղ (Armenian) STAR (English) STERN (German) Αστέρι (Greek) ستاره or Sitara (Persian), l’astre (French), Stella (Latin), Astro (Spanish), etc.

Quoting from Vahanyan, “…the source of ancient religious experiences was the great mystery of woman’s life-giving power of creation. The great mother goddess, whose sacred darkness of the womb originated all creations, was the metaphor of nature itself, the universal source of life and death, constantly updated in the continuous change of life, death and resurrection.”

At the beginning of time, she was the supreme and predominant deity. As ancient civilizations gravitated towards the male-dominated deities, and Aramazd and Vahagn prevailed over the Armenian pantheon, Anahit and Astghig branched out into separate deities. Asdghig became the consort of Vahagn and their sanctuary was in Ashtishat, north of Mush.

Mythology has it that when the life-giving waters were held hostage around mount Ararat by dragons, Vahagn defeated them, rescued Asdghig, and “released her waters”, whereupon they married.

In my artwork describing her, I have depicted two ancient figurines, I believe related to her, one bee goddess and one found in Crete called the snake-bearing goddess. I have also introduced many all-encompassing ancient symbols of life, wisdom, and resurrection, including bees, serpents, doves, eternity symbols from the ancient Armenian highlands, ancient rock carvings, ancient Urartian cuneiform, and other pre-Mesrobian scripts, and her standing in the middle of the life-giving waters of Mesopotamia as symbolized by those two human godly figures (Euphrates and Tigris), bearing in mind that both those rivers arise in the Armenian Highlands, (technically making those highlands the true birthplace of Astghig) and not forgetting that our patriarchal ancestor Hayk also brought his flock out of Mesopotamia into Armenia.

There is a famous ancient Classical Greek saying ΓΝΩΘΗ Σ´ΑΥΤΟΝ. It means “know thyself”. Which in this context I mean to extrapolate, know your TRUE identity, your ancient origins, your language, your mythology, your ancient gods, your history, your TRUE mother….

by Joseph Sarkissian