Zeus, eventually fed up with the embarrassment, ordered Hermes to take the goddesses to the shepherd Paris and let him judge who was fairest. Before Paris, who was also a prince of Troy, could make his decision, each of the goddesses offered him a bribe. Hera, Queen of the Gods, offered him authority over all people—a bribe obviously related to Ethics. Athene offered him her technical wisdom—Truth. And Aphrodite offered him Helen, the greatest Beauty in the world. Of course Paris, being as weak as every other man in the face of absolute beauty, gave the apple to Aphrodite. That made her his friend, but made enemies of the other two goddesses. What followed was a lesson in history for the Trojans, and Paris paid for it with his life and his city.

Now, as we know, this story never really happened, it is just a myth. But this myth nonetheless became reality for the men of Greece. It spoke to their heartstrings, which must have been something like every other man's in the world, because the underlying framework of the myth, a triad, has found its way into every major culture on earth. If you don't believe this, just ask yourself why every major culture has posited a home for the Gods or God in Heaven above and an Underworld below, inhabited by such evils as the Serpent, while we poor humans struggle, yearning for the Good Life while being battered about between Morality on high and Temptation down under. We find something like this scenario in every major patriarchal culture throughout history. The Sumerians, the inventors of high civilization, believed in it. For them, like the Egyptians, the stars above were Gods and the Gods were stars; and both Gilgamesh and Dumuzi, not to mention Innana/Ishtar, made descent into the underworld. And the same cosmological structure can be found in India, China, Egypt, Canaan, Israel, Greece, North America, Central America, South America, etc. Nor are matrilineal cultures exempted, for that matrilineal society which seems to be lurking beneath the surface of Greek myth also exhibits many examples of the triadic systems. Traces of the Triple Goddess of the Moon—the New Crescent Maiden, the Full Moon Mother, and the Old Crescent Chrone—are scattered throughout the Greek World.²⁷.