From wikipedia
Isis During the formative centuries of Christianity, the religion of Isis drew converts from every corner of the Roman Empire. In Italy itself, the Egyptian faith was a dominant force. At Pompeii, archaeological evidence reveals that Isis played a major role. In Rome, temples were built and obelisks erected in her honour. In Greece, traditional centres of worship in Delos, Delphi, and Eleusis were taken over by followers of Isis, and this occurred in northern Greece and Athens as well. Harbours of Isis were to be found on the Arabian Sea and the Black Sea. Inscriptions show followers in Gaul, Spain, Pannonia, Germany, Arabia, Asia Minor, Portugal and many shrines even in Britain.
Enraged, Set chopped Osiris's body into fourteen pieces and scattered them all over Egypt to ensure that Isis could never find Osiris again for a proper burial. Isis and her sister Nephthys went looking for these pieces, but could only find thirteen of the fourteen. Fish had swallowed the last piece, his phallus, so Isis made him a new one with magic, putting his body back together after which they conceived Horus
Eve Her husband was Adam, from whose rib God created her to be his companion. She succumbs to the serpent's temptation via the suggestion that to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would improve on the way God had made her, and that she would not die, and she, following the Serpent's advice rather than the earlier instruction from God, shares the fruit with Adam. As a result, the first humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden and are cursed.
RHEA was the Titanis mother of the gods, and a goddess of female fertility, motherhood, and generation. Her name means "flow" and "ease." As the wife of Kronos (Time), she represented the eternal flow of time and generations ; as the great Mother (Meter Megale), the "flow" was menstrual blood, birth waters, and milk. She was also a goddess of comfort and ease, a blessing reflected in the common Homeric phrase "the gods who live at their ease (rhea)."
In myth, Rhea was the wife of the Titan Kronos and Queen of heaven. When her husband heard a prophecy that he would be deposed by one of his children, he took to swallowing each of them as soon as they were born. But Rhea bore her youngest, Zeus, in secret and hid him away in a cave in Krete guarded by shield-clashing Kouretes. In his stead she presented Kronos with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he promptly devoured.
Rhea was closely identified with the Anatolian mother-goddess Kybele. They were both depicted as matronly women, usually wearing a turret crown, and attended by lions.
Pandora was the first woman.[1] As Hesiod related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold her out of earth as part of the punishment of mankind for Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering her "seductive gifts". Her other name, inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum,[2] is Anesidora, "she who sends up gifts,"[3] up implying "from below" within the earth. According to the myth, Pandora opened a jar (pithos), in modern accounts sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora's box" (see below), releasing all the evils of mankind — although the particular evils, aside from plagues and diseases, are not specified in detail by Hesiod — leaving only Hope inside once she had closed it again.[4] She opened the jar out of simple curiosity and not as a malicious act.[5]
KYBELE (or Cybele) was the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshipped with orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia. The Greeks closely identified her with their own mother of the gods, the goddess Rhea. (from...http://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Kybele.html)
This page describes stories of Kybele set in her Phrygian homeland, including the distinctly non-Greek myth of her hermaphroditic birth and her love for the youth Attis.
Tales in which Kybele's identity becomes merged with that of the Greek Rhea can be found on the seperate Rhea-Kybele page.
In Phrygia, where Rhea became identified with Cybele, she is said to have purified Dionysus, and to have taught him the mysteries (Apollod. iii. 5. § 1), and thus a Dionysiac element became amalgamated with the worship of Rhea. Demeter, moreover, the daughter of Rhea, is sometimes mentioned with all the attributes belonging to Rhea.
Tiamat, the female "maker," is the bitter, salt waters. Sweet and salt water mingle together at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, site of the origins of Mesopotamian civilization. Some translators see the word "maker" in line 4 not as an adjective describing Tiamat but as another god, named Mummu, who emerges at the same time. As you might expect, Mummu means "maker," "form," "mold," or "matrix." Besides being Apsu's vizier, Mummu is the mold or the undifferentiated substance from which things are made
In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû (the god of fresh water) to produce younger gods. It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos, the first in which Tiamat is 'creatrix', through a "Sacred marriage" between salt and fresh water, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second "Chaoskampf" Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.[1] Although there are no early precedents for it, some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.[2] In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of deities; she later makes war upon them and is killed by the storm-god Marduk. The heavens and the earth are formed from her divided body.
The Tiamat myth is one of the earliest recorded versions of the Chaoskampf, the battle between a culture hero and a chthonic or aquatic monster, serpent or dragon.[14] Chaoskampf motives in other mythologies linked directly or indirectly to the Tiamat myth include the Hittite Illuyanka myth, and in Greek tradition Apollo's killing of the Python as a necessary action to take over the Delphic Oracle.[15]
According to some analyses there are two parts to the Tiamat myth, the first in which Tiamat is creator goddess, through a "sacred marriage" between salt and fresh water, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second "Chaoskampf" Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.[16]
Robert Graves[17] considered Tiamat's death by Marduk as evidence of his hypothesis that a shift in power from a matriarchy controlling society to a patriarchy happen in the ancient past. Grave's ideas were later developed into the Great Goddess theory by Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone and others. Tiamat and other ancient monster figures were presented as former supreme deities of peaceful, woman-centered religions that were turned into monsters when violent, male-dominated religions overthrew ancient society. This theory is rejected by modern authors such as Lotte Motz, Cynthia Eller and others
The Greek historian Herodotus (3 BC) tells us: 'Babylonian custom compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of love and have intercourse with some stranger...the men pass and make their choice. It matters not what will be the sum of money; the woman will never refuse, for that were a sin, the money by this act made sacred. After their intercourse she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess and goes away to her home; and there after there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are tall and fair are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years or four. There is a custom like this in some parts of Cyprus."
The Canaanite equivalent of Ishtar was Astarte, and according to the contemporary Christian writer Eusebius temple prostitution was still being carried on in the Phoenician cities of Aphaca and Heliopolis (Baalbek) until closed down by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD