Roman goddess Libertas

The Idols of America
The Statue of Liberty and Statue of Freedom
Plus Other Icons that are actually "American Babylonianism"

by R.A. Coombes

Libertas was the name of an ancient Roman goddess adopted by the Romans perhaps as early as the 5th century BC and certainly by the 4th century BC. She was referred to as the goddess of personal freedom and liberty. In fact Libertas meant freedom. So liberty means freedom. The two names describe the one concept we call freedom. Liberty = Freedom and Freedom = Liberty.

This goddess was the goddess of freedom because she promoted the ideals for the personal freedom to do anything that felt good. She was called the matron goddess of prostitution because she promoted sexual freedom. Indeed, she had invented the concept. Slaves considered her their goddess in the hopes of winning their freedom.

Many women who gained freedom later turned to prostitution to survive and thereby retained Libertas as their goddess, especially if they became priestesses in the Libertas cult. Libertas was also a goddess of war in order to fight for freedom. She was also referred at times as the goddess of victory because freedom must have victory in order to survive.

This goddess was also the goddess of immigrants. The whole idea of immigration connoted the idea of freedom. Her popularity was also unique because of her unique doctrine of hearing personal prayers. This unique doctrine was something that most of the pagan deity doctrines were not disposed towards.

We know that this goddess existed because of the records left behind to us. We have the ancient writings of Cicero who writes of this goddess and her Temple on the Aventine Way in Rome. She was depicted on some Roman coins as wearing a freedom cap and having a wreath along with a spear or sometimes a sword. Such coin images were not the only depictions.

Sometimes she was well robed and at other times seductively unclothed in both sculptures and paintings. We know of Libertas being referred to as the Mother of Harlots by the famous Roman historian (and senator) Cicero from his writings. Cicero indicates that she was also a very early goddess of the Greeks even before early Roman civilization developed.

Upon further investigation, we find that the Greeks had acquired knowledge of this being from previous empires in the Middle East and Egypt. This goddess was called Ashtoreth in Hebrew and in the Old Testament's Greek version (the Septuagint).

Ashtoreth becomes transliterated into the Greek as Astarte, which became the early Greek name for the goddess until it was later changed to Aphrodite. The Hebrew term Ashtoreth was itself a transliteration from the Babylonian dialect (Akkadian) term of Ishtar.

Ishtar, in the most ancient times, was also referred to by the Sumerian dialect as Inanna or Ninanna meaning the Queen of Heaven or Lady of Heaven. In Canaan this deity was called Ashtaroth. The Hittites called her Shaushka. The Phoenicians on Cypress initially referred to her as Astarte. Isis was the name the Egyptians gave to her. This is how the goddess became introduced to the earliest Greeks.

We know this transformation in part due to the written texts found by archaeologists plus from studying the character traits and descriptions. For instance, all these deities were actually just one goddess and she was associated with the planet Venus.

Most had phonetic language roots in the transliterating aspects of the name Ishtar and this remained so until the Greeks changed the name to Aphrodite. Later the Romans referred to her in the Latin, initially as Libertas and later as Venus when they accepted more than just the Liberty doctrines.