Table of Contents
Names
- A-ta-na (Linear B script)
- A-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja (Linear B script)
- ἄστη (ástē)
- Min-erva (or Minerva), also known as Nyhellenia or Nyhalennia/Hellenia (Oera Linda)
Connection with Atlantis
Diana Cooper and Shaaron Hutton, in Discover Atlantis, describe twelve High Priests and Priestesses who led Atlantis during its Golden Age. These were great beings who came to Earth to incarnate and train as Initiates. They name Athena among them:
Among them were Hercules, Pallas Athena, who was a High Priestess in the Temple of Truth, and Lady Portia, known as the Goddess of Justice.
Discover Atlantis
What we know of Athena today
The origin of the name Athena is not settled. The oldest written form is Mycenaean. A Linear B tablet from Knossos names “a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja”, often read as “Mistress Athena”. Its link to Athens is unclear.
Most scholars think the goddess was named after the city, not the other way round. Athens, Athenai, is a plural place name. Other cities had goddesses named after them in the same way, such as Mykene in Mycenae and Thebe in Thebes. Some suggest a link with the Greek ástē, “city”. Others see a pre-Greek origin in the name.
Athena seems to have begun as an Aegean palace goddess, a protector of the king and of household crafts. She may once have been linked to birds or snakes. The owl is what remained.
The Oera Linda Book
The Oera Linda Book tells a different story. In it, Athena is not a goddess born fully armed from the head of Zeus. She is Min-erva, a burgtmaagd, a priestess of Frya, from the Frisian people. Her other names are Nyhellenia and Hellenia. All quotes below come from Sandbach’s 1876 translation on Project Gutenberg.
Ottema, in his introduction, places her at the citadel on the island of Walcheren, Walhallagara. In his footnote, she was called Nyhellenia “because her counsels were ny and hel, that is, new and clear.”
Arrival in Attica and the Founding of Athens
Ottema dates her arrival in Attica to “about 1600 years before Christ, the period at which the Grecian Mythology was beginning to be formed.” She came with the fleet of the sea-king Jon, at the head of a Frisian colony.
The book says the people of Attica were goatherds who lived on the slopes (hellinga) of the hills, so they were called Hellingers. They let the newcomers settle if they would help fight neighbours who kept stealing their children. Min-erva named the citadel Athens, because the newcomers “were received as friends (âtha).” The local chiefs disliked that the Frisians kept no slaves. Min-erva told them that if they wished to remain allies, they must free their slaves.
Ottema on Pallas
Ottema compares Min-erva with Pallas. He notes that Pallas has no youth in Greek myth and is a virgin goddess, while Min-erva is a burgtmaagd who arrives as a foreign priestess:
The fair, blue-eyed Pallas, differing thus in type from the rest of the gods and goddesses, evidently belonged to Frya’s people.
Her emblems
In “Minno’s Writings”, princes and priests question Min-erva about the things she carries. She explains three of them.
- The eggs. They are “the symbols of Frya’s counsels, in which our future and that of the whole human race lies concealed. Time will hatch them, and we must watch that no harm happens to them.”
- The dog on her right hand. It is a sheep-dog: “What the dog is to the shepherd I am in Frya’s service.”
- The owl on her head. It reminds her of people who live in churches and holes, as follows.
The owl
No, answered Hellenia; he reminds me that there are people on earth who, like him, have their homes in churches and holes, who go about in the twilight, not, like him, to deliver us from mice and other plagues, but to invent tricks to steal away the knowledge of other people, in order to take advantage of them, to make slaves of them, and to suck their blood like leeches.
Elsewhere the book says she put a sheep-dog and an owl on her banner. Ottema links the owl to the emblem of Pallas.
Teachings and Philosophy
Her possessions
When the princes ask where her possessions lie, she answers that they are not property:
I carry my possessions in my own bosom. What I have inherited is the love of wisdom, justice, and freedom.
In the same dialogue, the book has her teach these points:
- She knows no gods that do evil. She knows only one good spirit, Wr-alda’s, and because he is good he never does evil.
- Evil comes from the priests and from the stupidity of people who let themselves be deceived by them.
- During a plague, she refuses to join the offerings. The plague feeds on bad laws, customs and wicked passions. People must “become pure within and without”, and their princes must purify themselves first.
- Wr-alda wills that people find remedies themselves, “in order that we may become strong and wise.” Submitting would make men like sheep, sheared by princes and priests.
- Her people choose their princes, counts, councillors, chiefs and masters “among the wisest of the good men”.
Death, Deification, and Conflict
The book says the priests who had mocked her and called her a witch later made her a goddess. They proclaimed that the Almighty God had sent “his clever daughter Min-erva, surnamed Nyhellenia, over the sea in a cloud”. They put up statues to her, sold advice she never gave and told of miracles she never performed. They appointed priestesses under their own control.
Her followers refused to worship her, because she had told them that no one could be perfectly good except the spirit of Wr-alda. They chose Geert, Pyre’s daughter, as their mother. The priests then turned against them. The Egyptian high priest Cecrops advised them and sent to Tyre for ships, and Geert gave up the stone citadel at Athens. Her people sailed east and settled in the Punjab, “the Five Rivers”, and called it Geertmania.
Legacy as Greek Athena / Roman Minerva
In this reading, the Frisian priestess became the model for the Greek Pallas Athena. Ottema writes that in later times she appears on Roman votive stones in Walcheren as Nehallenia, “worshipped as a goddess of navigation”. He adds that the Athenians worshipped Pallas as the protector of shipbuilding and navigation.
The story fits the book’s larger themes. These are an old Frisian society run by mothers, which spreads knowledge and freedom, and priests who later turn it into idolatry and control. Esoteric Atlantis traditions have echoes of this.
Mainstream scholars consider the Oera Linda Book a 19th-century fabrication. The accounts above appear in “Minno’s Writings” and in the sections on the Geertmen in the Book of Adela’s Followers. For more on the book and its dating, see The Oera Linda Book reviewed and The Oera Linda Book.
