Goddess Tarot - 5 ~ Tradition: Juno

The Roman Goddess Juno is the patroness of marriage and other traditional rites in women's lives. Juno (also known as Hera to the Greeks) was the wife of Zeus. In the border you will notice peacocks...Juno's favorite bird. To learn more about the whole Peacock connection read this: http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_seduction_io.htm

Juno has a moon over her head which is a symbol associated with the female gender. She also holds something in her hand. At first it looks as if she is holding it our to show to you, but after closer examination it seems as if she is holding at the side...as if to say look but don't touch. The "look but don't touch" philosophy is also one she held about her cheating husband Zeus. Juno is also associated with jealousy. It's interesting that Juno was picked to depict this card. The Heirophant card is often associated with marriage, but it is more associated with conforming to a group or a social pressure. Juno did not have a marriage to Zeus in the sense they had everlasting love and a bond...it seemed like their marriage was just something on paper. They were the queen and king of the gods. I wonder if they felt even they had to conform.

Strange as it may seem, although Juno wasn't exactly married to Jupiter, the truth is that she was the Goddess that protected marriages. Since marriages are very associated with tradition, maybe that's where the sense is.

She looks really bossy... from what I can remember, she was always very jealous of Jupiter's affairs (and boy, did he have many...), so she was always punishing some beautiful lady (human or goddess) who'd catch Jupiter's eyes.

She looks tough, and I wonder if she was ever happy...

Anjo

The first time I got this card in a reading, it was after my mother passed, and we were coming up to the first set of holidays without her. In the context of the reading, I remember, the Juno card immediately resonated with my attempts to start my own holiday traditions, and connect them with my mother's traditions in some way. In fact, the entire realm of women's traditions, rather than the male traditions of the usual Hierophant, opened up to me in this card, and it's become a favorite of mine.

In fact, so many of women's traditions are invisible -- whether it's recipes, holiday traditions, lullabyes, sharing of slips from the garden, ways of raising children, we take them for granted, yet are in danger of losing them within a generation if they are not passed on. Simply because they are not institutionalized in the way that the church or schools are.

Juno was not happy with Jupiter's infidelity's and she made life very unpleasant for those he dallied with. She didn't just sit there powerless. And she protected the home and hearth, in spite of his dalliances. Women could call on her when they needed her strength.

Graves and others believe that Jupiter's many infidenlities -- which were often rapes, -- were recording the imposition of the patriarchal sky-god Dayus Pitar (later Zeus Pater, the Jupiter) on the matriarchal goddess-culture of Greece. Juno (Hera) would have thus been the Great Mother before she was demoted to Zeus's wife, as were the many other local goddesses that Zeus/Jupiter raped (Leda, Danae, etc.)

So those women's traditions go way back to the Great Mother, and can resist the effects of patriarchy including the institutionalized traditions of the Hierophant.

Tradition- oh, how I hated tradition for, oh, the first 21 years of my life! I am 23 now, so I've only appreciated tradition for a very short time... and in fact, have rarely found a Pope/High Priest/Hierophant that I have liked, or even not cringed at when appearing in a reading. I am still not bedfellow with tradition, but I am learning to appreciate it from a distance.
Here we see Juno (whom I think of as Hera) seated on her throne. Her face has a very endearing look, to me... almost as if she is weary of people rejecting what she has to offer- the traditional values of society. And sure, there are some values that OUGHT to go out of fashion- the subjugation of women for one. But this isn't the value for which Hera stands. She stands for honoring the bonds of marriage- especially on the man's part. I always get the sense that men rewrote Hera's myths to make Zeus look good and Hera look like a fool. I think they were afraid of her power. Perhaps it is time to see her as she is- not as a nag or jealous woman, but as a proud, honorable woman whose husband was a cad. Who can blame her for being weary? And don't you wonder, if once in a while she wished she could have a dalliance with someone like Adonis? Or go out into the woods like Artemis? I see some of this longing in her eyes, and I see the full moon above her, which speaks to me of her feminine nature- just because she is traditional, does not mean that she is not subject to the moon. She actually honors the moon, because in her tradition, she honors the women who have gone before... she honors the rights of a woman to be treated with respect... perhaps she was a feminist- but in her own, traditional way.