By Donna Marie Giancola
Suffolk University

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the role of justice as it emerges in the early mythic and philosophical traditions of ancient Greece and India. Specifically, my paper will focus on the relationship of justice to the Great Mother as the Divine Creatrix and final judge of all Reality. It is my thesis that there were really two notions of justice which began to emerge in the ancient world. The older view (the one that we have almost forgotten) was rooted in the early Goddess religions where Justice was seen as the avenging/mediating force of the Great Mother. The other view developed later in the dominant patriarchal Aryan culture of norms and laws, and provides the basis for our modern day conception of justice as an abstract principle.

Before commenting on these various images of justice, it might be helpful to outline its emergence and subsequent transformations. The notion of justice as a dynamic, cosmic principle, alive and divine, and manifest in nature is part of the great mythical and historical heritage of both ancient Greece and India. The situation in the Aegean basin, the cradle of Greek thought, parallels in many ways that of early India which, in the late Neolithic Age saw a migration of semi-nomadic herding, androcratic-warrior Aryans into an area whose indigenous population was primarily agricultural and gynocentric. But, as the modern science of ethnology is revealing, indigenous cultures are not so easily obliterated: the world-view and ways of a subjugated people, as preserved in their art and religious rituals and especially their myths, is not so easily erased.