The Once
and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time – Elinor W. Gadon (1989)
I
love deep reading. If interested in a
topic, I seek to understand it, and to explore the books written on that
subject. Invariably, the books will
mention a previous work, whether for inspiration or for reference’s sake. Once I run into several of these, I must go
find the book in question. Sometimes
that is a difficult proposition. The Once and Future Goddess was one of
those sought-after tomes. Thank Mario
for my library employment, and the discovery that we have a copy of it in our
collections. INSTANT CHECK-OUT!
This
book is an exploration of our shared human history, especially the early
spiritual life of prehistoric humans.
Homo Sapiens have been around for over one million years, per the latest
scientific estimations. Our specific
human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the only branch of Homo sapiens still
existing, has been around for over one hundred thousand years. For most of our existence on this beautiful
planet, we humans understood the interconnectedness of the vital forces we
refer to as “life.” The entirety of the
Earth was known and respected as life-giving, much in the way that women carry
life within them, and there was no division between the fecundity of the soil,
the seasonal rutting and birthing of the animals around them, and the cycles of
the flora they witnessed yearly. It was
self-evident that “life” was a universal feature of our world, and our
ancestors behaved accordingly. It was
also self-evident that the creative, primal, life-giving force resided in the
females. By extension, our Earth was
seen as female, and worshipped accordingly, for it is the cradle of all life,
plant and animal. This power is what the
author refers to as the Mother Goddess.
Elinor
W. Gadon does a masterful job of gathering observations and data from our
collective pre-history. The bibliography
at the back of the book is extensive. As
our earliest ancestors left no written record that we know of, we must recreate
their world from what remains. Frankly,
it is amazing what has lasted until our modern times. Burial sites, art pieces, religious centers,
and entire communities have been excavated in the last century, and the
collective knowledge gathered from these artifacts is what points to a complex
belief system, seemingly shared by all humans throughout our planet. The aspect that ties all of these disparate
sites together is that they were all created at a time when human and world spirituality
was immanent, meaning the divine creative spark of life was to be found in
anything and in all things.
The
very earliest examples of art we have are the small figures dubbed “Venuses” by
archeologists. These are symbolic,
carved images of exaggerated female forms, with the emphasis placed on the
outward signs of a pregnant woman, the large abdomen, full breasts and thighs,
and prominent vulva. Many of these
figures lack the unnecessary features, such as feet, hands, or facial
features. Our ancestors knew the power
inherent in women’s bodies and celebrated it openly. The germ of life existed in the soil, in the water,
and in women’s bodies. Before the advent
of agricultural society, our ancestors existed in balance with the changing
seasons, animal migrations, and flow of nature.
This
state of communal coexistence lasted for millennia, until the advent of agriculture
and animal husbandry. The Mother Goddess
morphed into the Grain Goddess, responsible for the yearly harvests. Humans experience with their domesticated
animals showed them the importance of the male of the species, for new life,
while immanent in females, could not grow without the initial impetus from the
male. These humans were unaware of the
cellular nature of spermatozoa and ovum, but they understood innately that life
arises from this special combination.
The Goddess was given a consort, a “king” fit for a goddess. This “king” was initially a yearly choice,
and would be either ritually or symbolically “sacrificed” after fulfilling
their duty. Our ancestors saw life and
death as two sides of the same coin. For
life to flourish it must also die. For
death to exist, life must first exist. The death of crops and plants and the
barrenness of wintertime was always followed by the warmth of Spring and the
flowering of the earth. Humans
understood the menstrual cycles as tying women into the greater life force of
the universe, the Mother Goddess.
The
menstrual blood itself was seen as a life force, and women’s lives were shaped
by their temporal state. It was observed
that the life of a woman flows in three stages.
Youth, followed by sexual maturity, was then followed by old age. These
ages of woman were codified into the idea of the Maiden, the Mother, and the
Crone, all different aspects of the same fertile spirit alive in women. The Maiden was the promise of life, the
bounty of possibility. The Mother was
the eternal mother, evident in all life around us, and responsible for each and
every living thing us humans understood at the time. Once a woman reached what is now called
menopause (the pause of menses), it was believed she became even more powerful,
for instead of losing the holy menstrual blood monthly, it was assumed she kept
it inside, absorbed as part of herself.
This placed a great responsibility on the older women, who were
responsible for the communal knowledge, whether of food gathering, care of
children, manufacture of household goods, and whose wisdom helped protect the
entire tribe or village.
Society
in our early days was communal, and female-centric, in terms of spirituality
and divinity. It was NOT a “matriarchy,”
a society ruled by women, where men were seen as secondary. That misconception
arises from seeing the past as a mirror of our present. Humans have lived under strict patriarchy,
where men rule and decide, and women are nothing more than property for
breeding, for thousands of years, so we assume that before, it was the
opposite. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Gadon masterfully details how
the cyclical Goddess cultures were overrun by invaders from lands whose people
worshipped sky gods, gods detached from the everyday existence of life on
earth. Invariably, their gods were
male-focused, and everywhere they went they helped to erase or alter the native
goddess worship.
When
Goddess worship was an integral part of daily life, everyone understood that
the spark or life, of divinity, was found in us and the world around us. This meant we lived in admiration and respect
for the world, and there was no division between “natural” and
“supernatural.” Once the invaders
brought their male sky gods, all of this began to shift. If the gods lived above, separate from us and
from the nature around us, then it was surmised that divinity and holiness
existed apart from the natural world we inhabit. This schism is what we are all currently
living with, the idea that the natural world is soiled, unholy, and base, and
that goodness and divinity only exist in an “afterlife”, where we go to join
the male gods in their sky domains. To
make this shift happen, everything feminine was debased, deemed unimportant,
and unnecessary. Once agriculture
brought certain stabilities and built up more permanent communities, the male
humans began to conceive of private ownership.
Whereas, for tens of thousands of years, humanity considered everything
to belong to everybody, much like Native American tribes describe, the idea of
personal ownership, and the power and influence assigned to those who happen to
“own” more than others grew and grew, until they believed this was the way to
be. They altered and created religion to
suit their greed and power-hungry ways. The
divine was purely a means by which to enforce their male domination.
The
symbols of the Great Goddess, symbols of regeneration and plenitude, such as
the snake who sheds its skin and is “reborn,” the tree or carved pillars
representing the cycle of life itself, and the wildness of nature, were all
subverted and perverted. Gadon describes this process, and explains it well. Consider the story of Genesis, altered
countless times by males seeking to denigrate the female and to assign divine
importance to being male. The symbols of
the Goddess, the Tree of Life and the snake, become the Tree of knowledge of
life and death, which, after the snake seduces the woman, she eats the fruit
thereof, and “convinces” the man to do the same, causing all humanity to suffer
forever more because woman misled man. Instead of the menstrual cycle,
conception, and birth being seen as divine, they were now to be seen as
punishments from a male god for disobeying him.
These few passages are to blame for the myriad of horrors suffered by
women in the past 3-4 thousand years.
Death is woman’s fault. Pain is
woman’s fault. Shame and degradation are woman’s fault. It is the single greatest program of
propaganda ever foisted on the human race, all to benefit a few powerful males
wishing to control the entire population.
It makes me sick, and
goddamn it I was raging while reading this book. Countless examples of the pure misogyny
brought forth by the stupids seeking to invalidate the power of women
infuriated me. Instead of a Maiden,
Mother, and Crone, we are now expected to believe life stems from a Father, a
Son, and some sort of Holy Spirit, who is probably also male, although how
deities and spirits can have genitalia and sexual reproductive organs I will
never understand. Even the one named Emmanuel,
Jesus the Christ, could not be tainted by a female. The idiot church “leaders” decided that Mary
was a virgin (based on a very stupid mistranslation), and because of that, they
reasoned that Jesus was born without the “sinful” method of carnal
copulation. To further their stupid
reasoning, they then decided, centuries later, that Mary was also born from a
virgin, which rationalized their view of her as a non-erotic, non-sensual,
container for Jesus. Never mind that
after Jesus was born the Bible talks of his brothers, children of Joseph and
Mary. (The church is always GREAT at telling you what the Bible says and means,
without actually letting you read it yourself.
Bunch of assholes. What a blight
on humanity. They claim we are all too stupid to understand without their
interpretations, and we believe it because they have “authority.”)
Gadon details the vast
disintegration of Goddess worship at the hands of those pushing their
self-created sky gods. The Goddess was
reduced from the center of divinity to an afterthought by those who wished to
maintain their hold on humanity. The
Christian church either destroyed the ancient places of worship, or, more
frequently, just built their own churches atop the old sacred sites. A cheap ploy which works every time. This helped fan the lie that there are no
holy places on Earth except those built by man and dedicated to their male
god. I could write ten books about how
fucked this shit is and has been, and how much I HATE IT ALL.
The author spends the
last section of this book detailing the work of contemporary female artists
whose work tries to reclaim and renew the idea of female divinity, and of the
goddess herself. In doing so she
presents a hope that we may all soon return to an understanding of the
universality of divinity in our world, and of the critical role that women have
in restoring a sense of equality and fairness to humanity’s religious
beliefs. Should that day ever come, I
will be first in line to celebrate it, but my cynicism and world-weariness
tells me there is very little that can be done to combat the current state of
things, without scrapping the whole thing and starting fresh. We are all fooled by the endless conditioning
we experience, where young girls are taught repeatedly that their role is to be
subservient to a man, whether it is their father or husband, and that they are
merely baby making machines, male babies preferable. Us males are conditioned to believe in our
inherent superiority, and of the woman’s inherent subservience. It is the single greatest stupidity ever
foisted on us by our so-called spiritual leaders. May their end be swift and thorough, and may
we eventually return to a state where life itself is seen as divine and worthy
of respect, whether male, female, animal, or plant. There is no way to return to the past, but we
may yet build an equitable future, worthy of our promise as sentient beings and
our duty as caretakers of our world.
