Pamela Berger Shows How We Devalued the Mother Goddess, Even As We Continued To Ask For Her Help

 

The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protrectress from Goddess to Saint – Pamela Berger (1985)

            Ahhh, the Grain Miracle. What is the Grain Miracle, you may ask?  It is a tale as old as humanity, from a bygone time when agriculture and its yearly seasonal cycles held deeply symbolic and spiritual meanings for us humans.  The story of the Grain Miracle helped us understand the connection between the life of plants and the life within us humans, as well as the correlation between the fecundity of human females and the fecundity of the Earth under our feet.  Even long after the initial impetus for the story was forgotten, or willfully erased, the tale continued its path through the collective consciousness of humanity, altered and shaped to fit the whims of whatever organized religion rose to prominence at the time.

            The original Grain Miracle story arose from our deep past.  Initially a story about the Great Mother Goddess, the divine being that brought forth all life in our world, it was passed on through oral tradition for millennia.  The story goes thusly, The Great Goddess is being pursued, and she arrives at a field, freshly sown by a farmer.  She asks the farmer to help her by telling her pursuers that she had passed by when the grain was freshly planted.  Upon saying this, the grain miraculously grows tall and full of seed, so, when the pursuer soon arrives and is told by the farmer that the Goddess passed by when the field was freshly planted (the truth!), he sees the full growth of grain, and calls off the chase, believing the Goddess to have passed by long before.  What originally served as an allegory for the cyclical nature of growth and death experienced by the initial farming humans was adapted and reformatted to fit in with the current religious ideals, first for the pantheistic religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Europe and Greece, and then for the monotheistic Abrahamic religions.  The main character, the Earth Goddess herself, slowly morphed into a lower deity, then a sainted human, until finally the story was shaped by the catholic church to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

            Humans are shaped by our pattern recognition.  It is one of the skills inherent to our over-developed brains.  We are so good at it that we see patterns where there are none! (For example, visual pareidolia is the scientific name for our ability to see visual patterns, most often faces, in what is otherwise an ambiguous visual field.  This is the “skill” utilized by anyone gazing up at cloud formations, and seeing familiar shapes within.)   This ability to recognize pattern, especially throughout a period of time, is the foundation of much of our cognitive ability.

The largest, all-encompassing pattern on our planet Earth is the yearly cycle of the seasons.  The annual progression from the dead cold of Winter to the warming Spring to the full Sun of Summer to the rains and cooling temperatures of Autumn, and back again to Winter, could not be ignored.  It could also not be ignored that Life seemingly “died” every Winter, only to be “reborn” again in the Spring.  The cycle of the seasons provided the first repeated structures of Life to early humans.  The menstrual cycle of human females provided the second repeated structure.  These two events were not seen as separate by ancient man.  Instead, they were seen as mirrors of one another, as part of the all-encompassing whole of Life.  Ancient man understood that much of the animal world matched the cycles of the plant world, with most of the creatures familiar to us using Spring to impregnate each other, allowing for babies to be born during the plentiful time of the year, and to grow big, strong and fat in time for the hardships of Winter.

With those two cycles in mind, ancient man created allegories, seeking to not only understand the cycles, but to transmit that knowledge to the succeeding generations.  The Grain Miracle arose from the very ancient rituals associated with the planting of seed after the cold Winter.  For over ten thousand years, the arrival of Spring coincided with planting and with the awakening of the natural world.  Ancient humans understood that death precedes life in all things.  They understood that in Winter, the ground “dies” and is then “reborn” once the all-powerful Sun returns in its full glory.  What we call farming was rudimentary in the extreme, and therefore required supernatural help to ensure a good crop and bountiful harvest.  The Great Goddess, symbol of all that is reproductive, was asked to bless the fields before planting. 

According to Pamela Berger’s intensive research, this “blessing” formed into a ritual which humanity carried forward and continued over millennia, all the way up to our modern day.  On the arrival of Spring, (usually sometime in February), before the fields were plowed or furrowed, a figure of the Goddess was put on a cart, and driven around the field to be planted three times, all the while the people supplicated the Goddess with song and dance in order to bless the field, bless the grain to be planted, and bless the natural world to provide good air and rain and sunlight.  Women would bare their breasts as symbols of fecundity, and once completed, the ceremonies ended with revelry, for everyone was satisfied that a great crop of food was to come. In a time before our modern meteorological knowledge, before the use of fertilizers, pest control, etc., planting a field was a seriously risky endeavor.  Birds would eat the planted seed.  Animals such as shrews and deer would eat the young shoots.  Drought, flooding, or unexpected heat or frost would destroy an entire crop, leaving families to starve.  Most families grew their own food, and if unsuccessful, then entire regions could descend into mass-starvation.  The importance of a good harvest was paramount, and the blessing by the Mother Goddess was crucial to the process.

Sometime in the past five thousand years, the matriarchal, Mother Goddess worshipping tribes of what is now Europe were invaded by patriarchal hordes, bringing with them their male, all-powerful, sky deities.  As these male-oriented religions flourished, the Mother Goddess was reduced in scope and power, and transmuted into lesser goddesses, such as Artemis, Asherah, Hera, Cybele, etc.  It was after this societal change that the Grain Miracle stories began, seeking to maintain the respect and adoration of the goddess responsible for their crop’s successes.  The tale initially referred to the goddess, pursued by one of the powerful, invading male gods.  As mentioned above, she came across a farmer sowing his fields, and asked the farmer to tell her pursuers that she had passed by at the time of planting, whereupon the planted seed would miraculously sprout and grow to full height.  This would confuse the pursuers, leaving the goddess to escape.  This became one of the stories sung during the annual procession around the farmer’s fields and served as an allegorical reminder of the past Goddess worship.

The slow demotion of the Goddess continued apace after the christian church codified its dogma and beliefs.  They could not stand to see humans celebrating what they saw as “pagan” rituals and demons.  Their extreme patriarchy and hatred of anything related to female sexuality sought to completely subvert the natural world, the world where females are the source of life, where Mother Earth was seen as a womb, providing life to the planet.  Instead of a Great Mother birthing us all, they somehow managed to get everyone to believe that a male god, and a male Holy Spirit, birthed a male son.  The role of woman was so denigrated that the church, in its never-ending willful stupidity, decided that Jesus’ mom was a chaste virgin, and that she remained a chaste virgin her entire life. (the only ”good” woman is an a-sexual one, according to those deranged perverts they call priests.)  They willfully ignore the specific passages in the New Testament that detail how Mary had to “cleanse” herself after the birth of Jesus, something done by Jewish women to prepare their bodies for the next sexual occasion and possible next pregnancy.  The fear of women from seemingly powerful men is so pathetic and pointless.  It shows just how weak, spineless and corrupt they are.

It is in this mess that the Grain Miracle was transposed from minor pantheistic goddesses to the only female worth worshipping, according to the christian theologians, idiots all.  Instead of a goddess fleeing, the protagonist of the story was changed to one of many early female christian martyrs, eventually settling on Mary. Appending the Grain Miracle to the story of the Flight from Egypt was the only logical choice, and the tale was then dispersed that as they fled Egypt, the holy family asked a farmer to tell King Herod’s men that they had passed by when the seed was just planted, but of course, either Mary, or Jesus caused a miraculous growth, fooling King Herod and his men. 

Even through the repression of the Goddess, these rituals continued, for they spoke something deep and important to the people that work the fields and raise the food we all eat.  Throughout all the changes and thematic drift of the Grain Miracle stories, the simple truths persisted.  Life is cyclical.  The world is a womb, just like all women possess.  The female is the life provider, and the male is just along for the ride (pun intended).  Weak men fear the Female aspect of life.  It is a force too powerful for them to understand.  They seek to lift themselves up by subsuming women, as if that would somehow negate the awesome life-providing continuity which the blessing of childbirth brings and for which the female body was rightfully worshipped through most of human history.  It is through the effort of people like Pamela Berger that we manage to connect history, myth, folklore, and local tales, thereby allowing us modern humans to grasp the ideals and dreams of our ancestors.  For a fairly short book, this tome manages to explore an idea vast and deep within our collective mindtime.  It is highly recommended.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/204036/goddess-obscured-by-pamela-c-berger/ )