Lady of the
Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals – Buffie Johnson
(1981)
Sometimes I come across
a book so full of information, so well researched and written, that I am
overjoyed as a reader. These types of
books are my go-to, my bread and butter so to speak, and they inspire me
greatly. Knowing that a human being had
the dedication, intelligence, and insight to gather up a vast amount of
information, analyze it, and share their conclusions with us readers leaves me
awestruck. This is the type of book
crafted by Buffie Johnson, a visual artist heavily involved in the Abstract
Imagist movement. Sometime in the nineteen
fifties, a meeting with psychologist Carl Jung propelled this book into
existence. During their time together,
Buffie Johnson discussed her desire to research the many archeological
discoveries found that related to the worship of a Mother Goddess, millennia
before patriarchal religions altered the worship to that of male gods. This intrigued Dr. Jung, who gave his
wholehearted support for the project, knowing that this specific field of art
history was severely underserved. Four decades
later, after travelling the world, visiting different museums and archives, and
gathering up as much data as she could find, Buffie Johnson published this
amazing compendium.
The titular Lady of the
Beasts described in this work is the Great Goddess, the initial over-arching
deity worshipped by all humans until the advent of patriarchal religions. For over 100,000 years, humanity understood
that the creative principle, that force that brings new life out of death, that
provides everything needed here on Earth for our sustenance and care, was
female. They understood innately how the
female of the species was the progenitor, the one who could create life out of
herself, and seemingly, without the aid of any outside influence. Millenia before we understood the role of the
male spermatozoa in procreation, or even realized it mattered, everyone understood
that the womb of a woman, and by extension, any female animal, was the greatest
magic in our world. Not only do women
create a new life within them, but they also create water seemingly out of
nowhere. In times when water was as rare
and valuable a resource as petroleum is now, seeing a woman’s “water” break,
releasing the amniotic fluid built up inside, was as much a miracle as seeing
the sun rise again after a dark night, or spring arising after months of dead,
cold winter. Humans understood that life
came from water, and that death was just part of the eternal cycle. The very Earth itself, especially caves and
grottoes heading underground, became symbolic wombs where our planet creates
itself.
The one aspect of women
that was seen as magical and undeniably related to the cosmos was that of the
menstrual cycle. Women experience a new
menstrual cycle on average every 28 days.
This directly matches the phases of the Moon, which take 28 days to go
from New Moon to New Moon, or Full to Full. This was not treated as
coincidence, but as divine order, allowing humans to appreciate the divinity
contained within the females of any species, including us. Most ancient cultures and civilizations
divided their year into twelve months of twenty-eight days each, along with a five-day
period of holiday at the end of each year.
This added up to the 365 days we know occur in a year. The Mesopotamians did this, and so did the
Mayans, the ancient Chinese, and people throughout Africa. It only made sense to think of the world, and
the powers that control it, as female.
When Buffie Johnson
started out on the journey to write this book, the world did not consider the
Goddess much. We live in a time where
great patriarchal religions define our spiritual world. From christianity, to islam, judaism,
confucianism, current faiths centered on male deities abound and shape
everything about the world we share.
These patriarchal religions are relatively new to our history. For tens of thousands of years, the worship
of the Goddess as the giver and taker of life informed our world and helped
explain the many difficult to understand processes of nature we now study
through science. What this means in
terms of art history and archeology is that, for the past thousand years of
scientific exploration into our past, everything was coded with patriarchal
ideas, ignoring and outright fabricating meaning for objects and myths that did
not fit in with the idea of a big ol’ male god up in the sky judging and
controlling us. Buffie Johnson’s work in
exploring the Goddess through the relics and art left behind was extra
difficult, for one of the main jobs of the roman catholic church since their
official founding around 300 CE was the destruction of any and all references
to the Mother Goddess, and the supplanting of her festivals and rituals with
hebrew-coded, christian-coded, or islam-coded festivals and rituals.
For example, every
ancient culture worshipped an aspect of the Goddess called the Grain
Goddess. This was the power that allows
life to exist inside seeds, a vitality that only comes to pass once the seeds
are buried in Mother Earth’s womb, the soil, where life springs anew and plants
grow. Our current Spring festivals such
as Easter, May Day, Mardi Gras and Passover are replacements for the ancient
Grain Goddess festivals. After a long,
cold, seemingly lifeless summer, the people had to propriate the fruitful
coming harvest by honoring, and sacrificing to, the Grain Goddess. Around the world, as Buffie Johnson
researched, the ceremonies remained eerily similar. A wagon was created with the image of the
Grain Goddess mounted upon it. This
wagon, after preparation by the goddess’ priests, was rolled or carried around
the fields to be planted. As part or the
ritual, human sacrifices were held, often of a symbolic “King” who would marry
the Grain Goddess before the sacrifice.
After humans stopped being the sacrifice, other animals associated with
the Goddess would be sacrificed, eventually leading to the yearly sacrifice of
a bull. This ritual was often followed
by a night or a few days of drinking, debauchery and general sexual abandon, as
people would pair off and have sex in the soon-to-be-planted field, lending
their procreational energy to the coming harvest. It was all part of the procreative force.
These types of rituals
survived long past the advent of patriarchal religion, but not without
considerable effort by those religions to destroy every idol, demolish every temple,
and chop down every sacred wood belonging to the Great Goddess. The celebration of Easter, where christians
relive the death of Jesus, his three days in Hell, and his rising again out of
the grave, used to be a ceremony for Ishtar, or Astarte, both aspects of the
Great Goddess herself, who also travelled to the underworld to ensure life
arose again on Earth. In Greece this
legend was transcribed into the story of Demeter, a grain goddess herself, who
due to male god shenanigans, was forced to spend half the year in Hades,
returning for Spring and Summer, and bringing back life and abundance to the
world.
Due to the very
successful propaganda and extermination campaigns, first by the Yahweh-obsessed
hebrews and then by the christians, not much was thought to survive of the
Goddess and her worship, but archeology proceeded to remove their patriarchal
and judeo-christian biases in the mid 1900’s, proceeding to discover and
re-assess many images and temples once dedicated to the Great Goddess. Bastions of ancient worship such as Catal
Huyuk were discovered, and true scholarship on the Great Goddess began. Buffie Johnson was ahead of the curve and
collected information on the available pieces found in museums worldwide, many
of them not associated with the Great Goddess until she reconsidered the
artifacts and symbols found within.
Starting with the Paleolithic era, Buffie Johnson takes us through a
bestiary unlike any other, sharing with us the visual clues to decipher the
ancient art, and to better understand what we are looking at when we see images
of the Great Goddess.
It is evident that much
of the great early developments of humanity came about solely because of
women. The ability to not only cook
food, but to raise it, harvest it, and save it for future uses came directly
from women. Women created the first
woven baskets, leading to the weaving of fabric itself. Women created the loom. Buffie talks about how women created
pottery. Ancient pottery has been found
which shows that the first ceramics were made by pressing clay directly onto
the outside of a woven basket and hardening it in the flames. The women’s skill with plants led to their
development of medicine, or at least the use of natural products to soothe
pain, stop itch, or even help intestinal issues. Because of the complexity involved, it is
also fairly evident that women created language to disseminate the gathered
information to other women. Most modern
tribal cultures share something with our ancient humanity, and that is the fact
that some knowledge belongs solely to the women, and only the women will share
it with each other. Men are not allowed
to know these things, and it has been so for countless millennia. Menstruation was life incarnate, and due to
this most tribes have a place for women to go separate from the men while they
menstruate. It is one of the oldest and
strictest taboos for males to enter into a woman’s space, and to steal women’s
knowledge. Up until around 3,000 years
ago, most royal lines were matriarchal, something handed down from your
mother’s line. This is still seen in how
being jewish is something tracked through the matrilineal line. In ancient Egypt, even in the time of male
pharaohs, they would routinely marry their sisters, in order to keep the claim
to the throne intact. One of the odd
current findings that mirror this matriarchal mentality is that of the source
of mitochondria. Each of our cells
contain an organelle called mitochondria.
This organelle is responsible for the energy usage of the cell,
converting sugars into electrical impulses, and essentially powering the life
surrounding it. Recently, genetic
scientists discovered that every single mitochondrion in our bodies comes from
the genetic material of the mother. The
specific DNA found in mitochondria only comes from the half of your genes
provided by your mother in her ovum. Thanks
to this, it is now possible to trace back our collective evolution through the
mitochondria, following matrilineal lines.
What was found is, sometime around 50,000-60,000 years ago, a female
human existed which is the “mother eve” for every single human alive today,
meaning every human on Earth shares mitochondrial DNA. This is insane news and would have made much
sense to our ancestors who accepted the totality and the invaluable presence of
the Feminine.
The only way we know
about the Great Goddess and the people who worshipped her is through art, and
more specifically sculptures, petroglyphs, and ancient ruins, all from a time
before the written language was invented.
As the artists who crafted the artwork did so in a pre-literate society,
visual symbolism was everything. Ancient
works that we have a hard time understanding would have been instantaneously
appreciated by ancient humans who lived with the symbols found within, and who
could translate the imagery of the specific animals and plants associated with
the Mother Goddess. In order for us
“modern” humans to understand what has been forgotten, Buffie Johnson did all
the hard work. She begins by describing
the connection between the Great Goddess and the idea of a bird, the most
sacred of ancient animals. Part of the
divinity seen in birds is their ability to fly up into what was always
considered the heavens, the abode of the Goddess. Besides that, the imagery of the bird’s egg,
with its promise of a whole new life, was developed into the idea of the World
Egg, laid by the Great Goddess when she created all existence from her
primordial watery chaos. This idea led
to the development of what are now termed “Venuses” but which were initially
representations of the Great Mother Goddess pregnant with the cosmic world
egg. These idols, some meant for
carrying in the hand, and others, like the giant sculptures in Malta, created
to be impressive focal points for a temple of worshippers, helped ancient man
understand the giant concepts of eternal life, or birth and death and the
immutability of both, and of the idea that creation comes from the Feminine.
Following the association of the Goddess with birds, the
association with water began. As stated
before, women create water to carry their babies until delivery. Humanity always divided the world into three
parts. The sky above, the earth at our
feet, and the waters found deep beneath the earth. The fish found in these waters belonged to
the Great Goddess just as much as the birds in the air did. Fish symbolism is everywhere in the ancient
statues and artwork and has continued into our current modern times. Jesus is described as a “fisher of men,” and
his Greek acrostic, “Ichthys” meaning fish, supposedly stands in for Jesus. Each
letter of ΙΧΘΥΣ (the Greek word) stands for a word in the core Christian
confession: I (Iota): Iēsous (Jesus) Ch (Chi): Christos
(Christ) Th (Theta): Theou (of God) Y (Upsilon): Huios
(Son) and S (Sigma): Sōtēr (Savior). This is why people put the fish symbol on
their cars, standing in for Jesus. It is
not from the Bible, but instead an appropriation by early church fathers to
supplant the idea of the Great Goddess and her fish symbolism. Pathetic.
The real sad part is that the fish was an ancient symbol of the
androgyny, or hermaphroditism, of deities.
The pointy end of the fish stood for the phallus and the split tail of
the fish stood for the shape of the vulva.
Perhaps Jesus was a hermaphrodite?
Who knows?
One of the most ancient animal symbols of the Great
Goddess, apart from birds and fish, is the lion. In lions the female is the leader, and the
females do all the hunting and baby-rearing.
In honor of this, and of the strong feminine power evident, the lion
became one of the goddess animals.
Paleolithic art showing the Great Goddess flanked by two lions is found
all over Europe, a continent where the lion became extinct thousands of years
ago. Once the lion became extinct, the
dog took over the role as protector and guardian of the Great Goddess. Dogs have always been connected to the Moon,
due to their nocturnal howling, and it only makes sense for them to be
associated with the Great Goddess. Gods
were seen as intermediaries between life and death, with many ancient people’s
believing that dogs helped guide dead souls to the afterlife realm of the
Goddess. The role of Anubis in ancient
Egyptian religion was a similar one, a hold-over from earlier matriarchal Great
Goddess worship.
I could spend hours talking about everything covered in
this amazing masterpiece of art and archeological history. Buffie Johnson created a book that has helped
open my eyes. I am now armed with
knowledge and ready to look at ancient artwork with a new eye. The symbols and allegories are in my head and
I am so grateful. I feel almost drunk
with knowledge, one of my all-time favorite sensations. Buffie Johnson researched and wrote this book
while living the life of an eminent artist, creating and showing work in
galleries and museums worldwide. She is
a great inspiration to me and to anyone drawn to complex ideas and difficult
work. It took her forty years to
complete this book, and it will live on in my mind as long as I live. I hope more people choose to seek this great
book out, if only to understand that ancient man had as deep and as complex an
internal life as anything we can imagine, and that our apparently wholesale and
modern disavowal of anything feminine is a deep hindrance to our collective
humanity and the growth we are capable of as a planet full of people.
(This seminal work can be purchased here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lady-of-the-Beasts/Buffie-Johnson/9780892815234 )
