The Mother of Ants

ASPECTS
GENERAL INFORMATION
ARCANA	The Hierophant
ORIGIN	Flesh
PRONOUNS	She/Her
"The Mother of Ants is the child of two rivers" Mysteries of Opening
OTHER TITLES
- The Daughter of Venoms - The Key-Serpent - St. Agnes - Nagi - the Milk-Thief
WF Catalogue Entry

'We call upon the Mother of Ants,
who encircles; who opens; who arises from wounds'

The Mother of Ants is one of the oldest gods-From-flesh, who helped humanity force their way into the upper levels of the Mansus. She was the priestess who helped scar and blind the Colonel to protect him from the Seven-Coils, which he then slew. The priestess then arose from the blood of the dead god-from-stone as a “seven-titled goddess” who now opens the way for others. Her aspects are Knock and Secret Histories and her hour is 5 a.m.

Events

• Lithomachy: The Mother of Ants played a key role in the overthrow of the gods-from-stone and in the death of the Seven-Coils in particular, opening the Mansus to mankind.

• Escape of the Great Hooded Princes: The Great Hooded Princes of the Fifth History escaped their deaths in that history by fleeing to another with the aid of the Mother of Ants, “whose children they had been”.

Servants

• Old Mother Anguish: A Name of the Mother who had two children that became Names of the Twins; a daughter, Daha, and a son, Ahad, a murderer child whose bones still lie in Kerisham.

• Great Hooded Princes: A group of Knock-Long who passed through the Spider's Door, also known as the Serpent Gate, sacred to the Mother of Ants. They are also called naga, and are some form of “serpent-folk”. After fleeing the Fifth History and their home, likely Mesopotamia, and went on to conquer the Land of the River, India. Sulochana Amavasya is the daughter of one of the Princes.

• Peel (former): A member of the Great Hooded Princes who broke ranks and flayed himself in service to the Thunderskin. He is mentioned in the Exile Legacy several times, and can possibly be encountered in person.

• Younger Sisters: These great serpents are literally the younger sisters of the Mother of Ants, and can be found guarding many old tombs and forgotten locations. Not so many of them are left in their serpent-form, they are known to take the human form as the world changes.

Relationships

• The Seven-Coils: The god-from-stone which the Mother of Ants helped the Colonel slay, and from whose death she eventually ascended to become an Hour. The Seven-Coils is also called “The Father of the Mother”. Both are heavily tied to serpents and wounds.

• The Twins: The Mother of Ants appears to be at war with the Twins, as shown by the conflict between their Names, the description for Gladwyn Lake, and one account of events in the town of San Benedetto dei Marsi.

• The Colonel: The god-from-flesh who the Mother of Ants was once a priestess of, and who she aided in the killing of the Seven-Coils. Together they entered the Mansus by force and opened it to humanity. Scars are sacred to both of them, to the Colonel as a weapon and experience to learn from, and to the Mother of Ants as a door to be opened. However, according to one writer, the Mother of Ants became jealous of the Colonel and convinced the Ligeian Echidna to aid her in her own ascent to Name and eventually Hour.

Real-World References

• The Mother of Ants takes the place of the Hierophant in the Tarot of the Hours. The Hierophant can represent mercy, tradition, and institutions, and is a teacher of wisdom. While the Hierophant is generally depicted as male, the Mother’s role as a priestess in her mortal life and her connection to Christianity as St. Agnes (the card is also sometimes called the Pope). Fittingly, as a card of traditional values and conventions, the Mother of Ants was involved in establishing and maintaining the current social order of the Mansus following the Lithomachy.
• The Great Hooded Princes also are known by the name naga, which are semi-divine half-human, half-cobra beings from several eastern mythologies and religions, who could take one of several forms.
• Sulochana Amavasya herself is likely a reference to a character of the same name in the Indian epic Ramayana, who belonged to the naga race and was the daughter of the king of serpents, Sheshanaga.
• “The Gospel of Zacchaeus” connects the Mother of Ants to a heterodoxical account of Jesus of Nazareth, interpreting his wounds as doors to the House. The Mother of Ants is frequently tied to Christianity as St. Agnes, a connection most notable in the Priest legacy.
• St. Agnes of Bohemia is a Catholic saint from the 13th century, a princess who chose a life of charity and piety over luxury, and who practiced the mortification of the flesh. Funnily enough, she was not canonized as a saint until the later half of the 20th century (after the setting of Cultist Simulator), though she has been venerated since her death.
• The Mother of Ants is likely at least partially based on the goddess Angitia from central Italy, though she is believed to originate from the Greek world. Angitia was a goddess of medicine and magic, who dwelled near Fucine Lake as a healer and specialized in curing snakebites. Her name may derive from “anguis”, meaning “serpent”, and she supposedly had various powers over snakes. She is often tied to Medea and Circe, two other famous sorceresses, either being their sister or another name for Medea herself.
• The Mother of Ants was originally from somewhere in or near Mesopotamia, as she is called the “child of two rivers” and there is a reference to the land of Elam in the painting of her.
  • The Weather Factory Catalog connects the Mother of Ants more specifically with Ecbatana, an ancient city in Mesopotamia which came under the control of the Parthian Kings, as was known to have its seven walls painted differents colors - white, black, scarlet, blue, orange, silver, and gold - which perhaps connects to the Seven Doors of the Mansus.
• Deep Mandaic is said to be the birth-tongue of the Mother of Ants. Mandaic in the real world is considered a dialect of eastern Aramaic spoken by followers of Mandaeism, a monotheistic gnostic religion in the Middle East.
• The Mother of Ants is one of several Hours associated with Janus, a Roman god of doors, beginnings, and endings who is referenced occasionally in Cultist Simulator. Terea Galmier connects the Mother to Janus through his status as “the god that wounds.” Teresa also claims that the Mother of Ants has two heads, one looking up towards the higher levels of the Mansus and another looking down into Death and Nowhere. This trait is also shared by Janus, a two-faced god who looks towards the future and the past.
• The Mother of Ants takes her name from the amphisbaena, a mythical ant-eating serpent with two heads, one on each of its ends. It was born from blood spilled from the severed head of Medusa after Perseus slew her, a myth that the slaying of the Seven-Coils by the Colonel alludes to.
  • Given her association with the amphisbaena and with Mesopotamia, Elam, and Mandaeism, it's possible that the Mother-of-Ants is associated with the Shahmaran, another folkloric two-headed creature, in Kurdish, Armenian, Azeri, and other regional folklore across the Caucasus, Taurus, and Zagros Mountains (the latter of which is often considered the Rending Mountains). These regions are also associated with Mandaeism, as well as similar gnostic regional religions like Yarsanism, Yazidism, Yazdanism. The Shahmaran was once worshipped as a goddess by ancient Anatolian and Mesopotamian peoples, and remains a figure of popular folklore. Called "Yamlika" in Arabic, the Shahmaran has the head of a serpent on one end and the head of a beautiful woman on the other, both heads wearing royal crowns. She is the Queen (Shah) of Serpents and mother of a thousand monstrous serpents and serpent-men, but she is also a benevolent figure. She wounds herself to provide healing blood and flesh, and even allows herself to be killed so her body may be used as medicine to heal a leprous king (leprosy being a disease which causes people to shed their skin, like snakes).
• St. Agnes Hospital, located in London, is named after the Mother of Ants, who among many titles is also a healer, though the hospital was known for frequent amputations.
• The Rite of the Mother’s Mercy honors the Mother of Ants, where she mercifully spares an assistant offered in sacrifice and accepts a lesser offering in their stead.
• In the Priest Legacy, the player takes the role of a priest who, after experiencing visions of St. Agnes, begins to collect scars representing the other aspects to become a gateway for the desires of their congregation. Their final transformation suggests the Great Hooded Princes underwent a similar ascension.
• The Mother of Ants also is involved in both paths of the Change ascension, as the player’s Sending takes the form of a serpent and travels to Kerisham to learn from the conflict between the Names of the Serpent and the Twins.
• The unusual version of her enactments can be found in the Twin-Serpent Tantra - 'Nagi encircles; Nagi arises from wounds; Nagi spares those who are already harmed'. That could possibly indicate that Hours' enactments may have their "regional" variations, like Gates being named differently in the tantras (Stag Door and Spider's Door being the Hunter's Gate and Serpent Gate respectively).

Theories and Questions

• The Mother of Ants seems to be referenced in the description of the Dappled Mask, along with several other Hours, in relation to the moon, which “might change herself to an ant or to a bird or to her sister”. What this means exactly is unclear.
• Peculiar choice of St Agnes as one of the Mother's disguises is probably because of phonetical similarity between "agn" and "ang"—the latter coming from the anguis/Angitia. A similar trick is pulled with one of her Names being called Anguish.
• As a native locutor of Deep Mandaic, the language of the Shadowless Empire, it is plausible that the human origins of the Mother of Ants now lie in the First History. Further, as at least one historical account of this timeline depicts the Shadowless Kings struggling against "the unskinned armies of the hooded serpents", one may surmise that this may be the Secret History where the Mother of Ants might have accepted the exiled Hooded Princes of the Fifth History: one she would know well, and have at least some amount of vested interest in.