I do not necessarily agree with the stuff that Jason Colavito writes here in his “Jason and the Argonatus Through the Ages” but I think his observations about the distinction between Jason and the Storm God are interesting and point the way to new research. This is the same distinction that I wrote about before – the distinction between Jasien and Piorun, between Iasion/Jason and Zeus and between the Aesir and Thor/Tarhunt/Taranus.
“Yet we sense in the evidence that has come down to us a tension between the ‘popular’ Jason myth and the elite poets who operated in Greek literary culture. Homer clearly knew of Jason and chose to minimize him, almost with a whiff of disapproval. The iconographic evidence records exciting and magical adventures the Archaic and Classical poets appear to have purposely rejected or dramatically transformed. I think the reason for this is because the Argonaut story reflects religious ideas that belonged to another time and were no longer in favor among the elite of Dark Age and Archaic Greece. The earliest Jason stories reflect a time when Hera was far more powerful that she would be in Classical Greece, when she was an earth goddess and could even have headed the pantheon of gods in some places. The earliest Jason stories also reflect a culture where humans and chthonic gods interacted closely, and humans could wield heard-divine supernatural powers, including Jason’s own powers of extraordinary healing. We know that in the Iliad Homer (or, perhaps more likely the Dark Age poets whose stories he drew upon) purposely transformed Hera from a powerful and beneficent goddess to the angry but subordinate consort of the all-powerful Zeus. Similarly, Hesiod too takes great pains to place Zeus supreme above a much diminished Hera.
This, then, must be the reason that the Jason story found no great Homeric epic – he was too closely associated with the old, Mycaeneam-era worship of Hera, a hero closely entwined with a chthonic goodies and the unsettling supernatural powers associated with the old religion. Such subjects were clearly inappropriate for the pious poets of Zeus. Only when a way could be found to transform the popular hero into a Greek worthy of Zeus’s divine grace could Jason form a suitable subject for the highest levels of elite poetry. This, I would suggest, accounts for the origins of Medea, a pointedly non-Greek figure who derived from the earth goddess (who, of course, was now also alien to Green religion) and could absorb the unwelcome, impious aspects of Jason’s supernatural power. Through this innovation, the story of Jason could be welcomed back into the fold of elite myths. But something had been lost.
In the attempt to reach into the dragon’s belly and resurrect the Jason of ancient myth, we are confronted with a chasm between the Mycenaean faith and that of Homer, between the religion of Hera and that of Zeus, between the gods who live in the earth and those who live in the sky. Jason’s voyage, then, is at one level a voyage between the lands of the living and the dead, and at a larger level a voyage between the earliest human faith and the powerful new religious order dawning across the Western world. Wherever the storm god went, from Greece to Persia to India, even down into Israel, where he would take the name Yahweh, the storm god came to reign supreme, replacing the worship of Hera, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Astarte, and all her kith and kin. When Jason left Iolcus, he did so with the aid of Hera. When he returned from Colchis. he had come back with the golden fleece dedicated to the glory of Zeus and had brought back to Greece the symbol of the supremacy of a powerful and terrible new god.“
The above fits into a Gimbutas-like narrative of a matriarchal society overturned by, potentially IE-speaking, invaders from the East with their violent storm gods.
This is, I think, an incomplete story. The story of Jason is the story of Iasion and of Demeter (Dea meter) or Jeusens and, potentially, Ceres-Marzanna (though that latter name became associated with the cold season and dying – this is suggested by the fact that in Suavic the word for the Earth and for winter are quite similar – ziemia and zima). The key that Jasienczyk sports is the key to, if you will excuse the seemingly apt analogy, the Earth’s (Mother Goddess’) chastity belt – which opens in the spring and closes in the fall. But Jasion/Iasien is, himself a Sky God – the rider on a horse – though a God that dies with the passing of the summer season (after the “deed”, if you will, of impregnating and harvesting the Earth) and is reborn in the winter.
The thunder it seems to me was originally an aspect of the Sky God that, over time, morphed into the worship of a separate Deity – Thor/Taranus. When the Rus invaded the Polan land of Ukraine they brought Thor with them and the local Suavs adapted the name Piorun/Perun for the new Deity. But Piorun/Pierun/Perun or the Baltic Perkunas seems to have been the same God-Father, Sky-Rider as Iasion. That is why we have Jasny Piorun.
There is a coin that was unearthed in Hungary that shows this quite well. The Sky Rider’s face is shown with a tear streaking down his cheek – that tear is in the shape of a spear or lightning. This is a hugely evocative image as it suggests that the rain with thunder is merely the angry Sky God crying – perhaps for Mother Earth. Surrounding the rider are obviously images of various constellations.
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