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 )

P.V. Glob shares the life and times of Iron Age Bog-People, and it is awesome.

The Bog People – P.V. Glob / Translated by Rupert Bruce-Midford (1969)

            Thank goodness for peat and peat bogs!  And thank goodness for great translators, as they permit us all to share in the learned literature of all the world’s nations.  This intriguing book by Dr. Peter Vilhelm Glob, translated by Rupert Bruce Midford, himself an eminent scholar of antiquities in the British Museum, explores the fascinating and macabre discoveries made by farmers digging peat used to heat homes and cook food through the long Nordic winters.  As the Director General of Museums and Antiquities in his home of Denmark, Dr. Glob is a perfect guide through the history of the bogs, the people found buried within the bogs, and the many cultural items discovered alongside the bodies.

            This relatively short work (200 pages) takes its impetus from letters received by Dr. Glob written by English schoolgirls intrigued with the tales of the bog-people they read in local newspapers of the time. They reached out to him inquiring about the Tollund Man, a find which had ignited great interest in the world’s media following his 1950 discovery by farmers digging peat.  The idea of a 2,000-year-old human preserved so well that we could see his fingerprints, hair, and skin so clearly seemed an impossibility, but it was very real.  Dr. Glob goes into great detail describing the find itself, the excavation and preservation processes, and the analysis of the Tollund Man’s remains, all in the form of a “long letter” to the schoolgirls whose interest sparked the correspondence.

            Peat bogs are chemical factories, created when thousands of years of vegetal growth sinks into a swamp to be buried under low-oxygen and high-iron content groundwater.  The weight of subsequent plant matter deposits presses down on the material, and the highly acidic water kills and prevents bacteria from decomposing the organic matter.  It also stains skin a dark ebony.  As Dr. Glob relates, farmers digging peat for fuel came across such buried bodies countless times in the previous 400 years, many of which were documented by local priests and officials.  Townspeople saw these bodies as evil, partly because of their dark appearance and partly because they were found 4-8 feet underground, the abode of satan himself.  Because of this, many of the older finds were not studied scientifically, but instead given a proper Christian burial in a local churchyard. 

            Sometime in the 18^th century, people started to analyze these finds, and they realized that most of them were over 2,000 years old, an amazing fact. Bodies from the time of Christ just did not survive.  Even the ancient Egyptian mummies did not keep in such a great state of preservation.  Studies showed that these bog finds, men, women, children, and animals, belonged to early Iron Age societies.  Further study informed scientists as to the nature of these burials.

            Our agrarian ancestors worshipped the very idea of fertility, in the guise of a goddess responsible for the return of life to the Earth following the “death” of life during wintertime.  Many of the people found in these bogs were spring sacrifices to the goddess of fertility, and when the goddess was supplanted by a male fertility god, the sacrifices continued to him.  In the old myths, the figure of the goddess was cared for by her priests, and once a year, a special wagon was outfitted with the carved image of the goddess (usually in wood) and taken around the farmer’s fields in a grand procession involving dancing, song, and prayer.  Much as in other ancient agrarian cultures, the “king” was chosen specifically for this spring sacrifice.  Many of the bog men have ligatures around their neck, and many others have their throats cut.  In this century, scientists were able to analyze the stomach contents of the bog-people, finding that most of them, the ones showing ritual strangulation or ritual throat-cutting and bleeding, were served simple meals of gruel, which, when analyzed, showed a remarkable variety of local grains and seeds, numbering in the high dozens.  It makes sense to include seeds from all the edible grain and grasses if what you want is to make an offering to the fertility goddess thereby propriating a great harvest and lush abundance in the coming year.

            One of the details I found most intriguing is the way that the peat bog’s chemical nature preserved textiles.  Amazing examples of woven fabrics and leathers show just how advanced and creative the humans we call “ancient” and “primitive” were.  Human ingenuity brought us out of the wild, and only the truly ignorant or vain assume that intelligence is a hallmark of modern man, and not of humanity in general.  Examples of trade and commerce between ancient people always fascinate me, and one of the greatest bog finds is the Gundestrup Cauldron, a masterpiece of silversmithing which was broken into pieces and placed as an offering within the peat bog.  The beautiful images of the goddess, and of the ritual lives of the people, sculpted into the silver cauldron transport us back into antiquity.  As Dr. Glob details it, the amount of silver used to create this massive cauldron likely represented much of the actual wealth and riches of the local people and their leaders, as most of the silver they had arrived from far-off lands, and would never have been broken into pieces and buried as an offering if the times were not critically dire.  Ancient man did everything with purpose, even if today those purposes are forgotten, or seen as inconsequential.  It is a great example of how everything we value today will be either forgotten, ignored, or supplanted by new things and new ideas, just as modern man dismisses the ideals, beliefs, and religions of ancient man.

            The last section of the book describes the many carved wooden gods found in the bogs.  These carvings, usually abstracted and taking advantage of the natural shapes and forms of the wood used, were found in all ancient human cultures that worshipped the great goddess of fertility.  It was these carved gods which were cared for and protected by the god’s priests, and which, in a wholesale act of evil, were ordered destroyed or burned by the early roman catholic church (always ready to exterminate humans, ideas, and religions they saw as counter to their fascistic fake-ass christianity.)  The patriarchal roman catholic church feared the power of women and of the Great Goddess, and they still do, seeking to subjugate half the population into subservience towards the male half.  So dumb.  The attempted erasure of our collective human past and human mythology is among the worst, along with the wholesale slaughter of “heathen” humans that religions love to engage in frequently. There is nothing capable of more evil than a religious zealot. History shows it again and again. And again.

            Two thousand years is not a long time.  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for just over 60,000 years.  The Homo family, our human ancestors such as Homo Habilis, Neanderthal man, and such, have been around for around a quarter of a million years.  This is but a drop in the bucket compared to the dinosaurs, who flourished on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, or green plants which have populated our planet for over two billion years, a ridiculous amount of time.  I bring this up because the humans that started what we call civilization did so very recently, cosmically speaking.  We are more similar in our day-to-day lives to the ancient Scandinavians working the old peat bogs that we care to admit.  Our collective humanity has learned more, and forgotten more, than we can ever imagine, and it is great books such as this one that help us keep the awareness of deep time in mind.  Reading about the bog-people and their culture keeps us grounded, aware that the concerns of humanity have always been the same.  The need for family, food, shelter, and spiritual connection is found in all human cultures.  I hope more people read this great book and open their minds to the infinite variety of human existence.

(This great book can be purchased here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-bog-people )

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/ )

May the Mother Goddess Forgive Us All, For We Know Not What We Do

 

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.