Buffie Johnson Explores the Mother Goddess and Her Sacred Animals

 

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 )