#hausos

[looking-at-the-deiwos]

Áusōs

Or as I write it, Áusos. Also found as Háusos, Héusos (with a hard h as in the ch in loch) or H₂éwsōs. Her name means "the Dawn" or "Rising"

Aúsos is the goddess of the dawn. She also reigns over light, youth and spring. She is characterized as a beautiful maiden who dances freely through the heavens. She is a bringer of light as she brings the day with her and paves the path of the sun. She seems to have been the most important goddess to the Proto Indo-Europeans

Áusos is also related to sexuality and love, sometimes ill-fated. She has a myth in which she falls in love with a mortal, Ausiwendhós, of whom she procures eternal life. Yet he forgot to ask eternal youth for him, so he ends up withering into old age as the dawn goddess takes her leave, broken-hearted.

Áusos is also a goddess of love and sexuality. There is however a Proto Indo-European love goddess, so love isn't Áusos' main domain, even tho she has a big role in it.

The archetype of the maiden fits her well

She is sometimes said to dwell in an western land at the edge of the world, a paradise called Usés Mág̑hās

She is also called Diwós Dhugətḗr, "Daughter of Dyéus" and Bhṛg̑héntī, "Exalted"

Offerings

Taken from here

Flowers, especially pink ones

vase of roses in various shades of pink

birch wood

birch bark

half-circle of birch wood with ribbons

Devotional acts

Dancing

Watching the sun rise

Depiction or imagery related to the dawn

Waking up early (there are myths of Áusos struggling with this, so she feels you!)

Sleeping in (if it's safe to do so)

Paint your nails or put on make up

Listen to your favorite feel good music and dance away

Picking flowers

Have a flower garden

Spend time with a loved one

Listen to love songs/watch romance movies

Self-care and self-love

Wear pink or another of her colours

Respect your own place and limits in your relationships

Associations

Pink

Yellow, Gold, Red and Saffron

Feminity

Birch (as a tree of spring)

the feast of Ostara

Friday

March

Descendants in later pantheons

Eos (Greek)

Aphrodite in some aspects (Greek)

Aurora (Roman)

Aušrinė (Lithuanian)

Ushas (Vedic)

Usha (Iranian)

Eostre/Ostara (Germanic)

Brigid (Celtic)

Finally, here's her wikipedia article

Also, fun fact! It is speculated that Aphrodite absorbed some of the aspects of Áusos (especially those related to love and sexuality), so she's also a descendant of her in a way. These aspects then got lost from her direct descendant in greek mythology, Eos.

[windyskykicker]

May this Solstice Blessing find you well.

May your longest night never be darker than the coming Dawn.

May Hausos light the path of the battles you are fighting, and may she bring you spoils and treasures upon your victory.

May you enter the new year with hope and an eye towards your most sacred desires.

[chthonicdivinebard]

But of the four queens [of heaven], it is Aphrodite who most symbolizes growth, fertility, and procreation. In this She is also the heiress of Inanna and awsos. The early, Hesiodic, myth of Her birth from the Sky God's genitalia in a swirl of foamy water is a metaphor of this basic power. By the time of Homer She is "the Goddess of Nature in Bloom, and is associated with the Graces, the kindly and beneficent spirits of growth. With Them She dances, by Them She is bathed and anointed, and They work the clothing She wears" (Otto 1954: 94; "Odyssey" 18. 194; 8. 364; "Iliad" 5. 338). But more importantly than "bloom," She stands for the individual urge or instinct in animal and man to join with another, to procreate. In man, of course, these impulses are linked to values of family, name, and so forth. Aphrodite also symbolizes the "collective" desire for fertility. She has no rival as a divinity of procreation and, as the Fifth Homeric Hymn says, Her power to arouse and control these passions extends over all creatures in the universe except the three virginal immortals: Artemis, Athena, and Hestia (the myths of Hippolytus, Smyrna, and other mortals who resisted Her call are post-Homeric and, as noted, are "exceptions that prove the rule.")

“The Meaning of Aphrodite” by Paul Friedrich (p 93-4)

[daily-rayless]

Hausos, the goddess of the dawn

[windyskykicker]

Hausos & Relationships - a reflection

UPG matters and VPG matters...but what happens when they contradict each other?

For example: Hausos/Eos has the story that Zeus granted her lover eternal life but not eternal youth, and she stayed with her lover until he aged so much he turned into a grasshopper, at which point she moved on.

VPG from other sources (I read them several months ago, sorry I don't have the link) interprets this as her being a "love 'em and leave 'em once the D don't work" kind of gal. I sort of understand this, as she is the Goddess of Desire and there are definitely other stories where Eos certainly isn't pro-fidelity...

But my UPG is that she is more of a faithful, true-love, fidelity through years of hardship typ of Goddess...at least within the context of that story...

She sticks by her lover and cares for him as he ages for as long as it is possible for the two of them to have a relationship. Only when he is literally no longer a person does she move on. To me, this symbolizes a beautiful balance of fidelity and self-care. Sticking by your SO, but not to the point that the relationship is no longer beneficial to either of you.

Desire does not equal infidelity or lack of devotion to your lover. To say it does is a horrible stereotype.

This UPG is backed up by a recent encounter with the Goddess, when I was at a very low point and she sent a pair of swans flying overhead to remind me to lean on my partner in hard times.

[chthonicdivinebard]

A residual speculation remains. While few would dispute contact and borrowing between the Phoenicians and the Mycenaeans and, later, the eighth-century Greeks, the evidence on the Sumerian Inanna and, to a lesser extent, on the early Akkadian Ishtar does raise a secondary and far more problematical issue of culture contact and diffusion, for there are many rather specific resemblances between the Sumerian Inanna and the PIE awsos...The overlap in time, moreover, is almost complete between the flourishing of Sumer during the third millennium and the period of the "migrations" of the Indo-Europeans that ended with the entry of the pre-Greeks into northern Greece between 2000 and 1900 BC (and of the early Indics into India one or two centuries later.) From the middle of the third millennium until about the middle of the second millennium BC, early Greeks, Iranians, and Indic were often the neighbors or, briefly, conquerors of peoples in Syria and northern Sumer...These probabilities of contact make more likely some diffusion involving the early Indo-European Dawn Goddesses and the Sumerian Inanna and Her descendants. As Kirk puts it: "Indo-Iranian mythology and religion themselves seem to have been affected by Mesopotamian ideas during the second millennium BC, before the separation of the Indian and Iranian strands and the penetration of the Aryans into the Indian peninsula" (1975: 209). His dating of the "separation" is incorrect, but his case for Mesopotamian influences in the Rig Veda is sound.

“The Meaning of Aphrodite” by Paul Friedrich (p 53)

[chthonicdivinebard]

The fourth major component comes from the Proto-Indo-European culture of southern Russia and the Danubian plain that has been reconstructed for about the close of the fourth millennium...Outstanding among these features and terms are Her [Hausos'] physical appearance, Her multiple relations with other divinities, particularly the Divine Twins, and Her more general signification of fertility and cosmic dualism. PIE awsos is probably not late (ie, it is not limited to the "Graeco-Sanskrit level.") She is unquestionably "part of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon", just as much as the early Sky God, *dyews. PIE awsos continues to evolve in pre-Greek in the latter part of the third and the first part of the second millennium, still as a Goddess of Dawn. As Boedeker puts it (1974: 10), "Greek epic itself is heir to a pre-Greek Indo-European poetic tradition."

“The Meaning of Aphrodite” by Paul Friedrich (p 52-3)

[chthonicdivinebard]

Indo-Europeanists recognized long ago that Baltic Saulē was close in meaning to the Greek, Italic, and Indic Dawn figure. They also recognized that the form was cognate with the semantically related forms for the Vedic Sun God and Goddess and with a large set of forms for "sun" in many other stocks: Latin sol, Old Irish suil, and so forth. It seems reasonable to postulate that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had a Sun God with a name derived from *sū-/sāwe-, as well as a Dawn Goddess called *Áwsōs. And despite repeated charges of overenthusiasm against the solar hypothesis, it should be noted that many of the studies in question have been backed by solid evidence from folklore. For example, Mannhardt, in his basic study, begins by printing ninety folk songs, of up to fifteen stanzas in length, to which he then refers in the course of his descriptive and historical analysis.

“The Meaning of Aphrodite” by Paul Friedrich (p 36)