The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ Mata-Devi is the traditional mother, depicted as squeezing milk for humankind from her ample breasts. But other creation myths as far apart as Assyria and Polynesia have the Great Mother delivering not a race of men and women, but one mighty once-and-for-all ‘world egg’. And in Greece at the most sacred climax of the most secret mysteries of Eleusis the Goddess (or her earthly representative) yearly ‘gave birth’ to a sheaf of corn, in an explicit link between woman’s fertility and nature’s, as the archetypal ‘Mother Earth’.

      In some versions of the Great Goddess, however, her worshippers were anxious to stress that no matter how ancient she was, the feminine principle was there before her. So Gaea, the Roman Mother Earth, emerges from a primal vagina, the abyss of all-feeling and all-knowing, while Ishtar of the Babylonians is the cosmic uterus, the stars of the zodiac her raiment. The historical softening or bowdlerization of the Goddess’s mother role has obscured the briskly functional nature of her motherhood – Ymir, the wind god of Norse legend (i.e., the breath of life) comes ‘out of the cunt of the All-Mother Ginnungagab’. And paradoxically the denial of the unblushingly physical denies also the ascent into the realms of the metaphysical, a key element of the Great Mother’s godhead: ‘I was pregnant with all power,’ boasted the goddess Vac in a song of the Vedic nature-religion of India. ‘I dwell in the waters of the sea, spread from there through all creatures, and touch the sky with my crown; I roar through all creation like the wind.’ The proclamation carved on the temple of ‘the Holy One’, Nut of Egypt, makes an even stronger claim: ‘I am what is, what will be, and what has been. No man uncovered my nakedness, and the fruit of my birthing was the sun.’⁹

      Over-emphasis on the good mother, procreative and nurturing, also denies the bad mother, her dangerous, dark and destructive opposite. These early civilizations, however, understood very well the strong association of the divine woman with death, and stress that the Goddess who brings humankind into the world is also she who kindly (or not so kindly) commands the way out of it. In the Ireland of 1000 B.C. a sinister triad of goddesses, the Morrigan, haunted battlefields, collecting severed heads and showing themselves to those about to die. In other cultures the Goddess rounds up the dead rather like a sheepdog, and takes them below: to the Greeks the dead were simply ‘Demeter’s people’.

      In her darkest incarnation the bad mother did not simply wait for people to die, but demanded their deaths. The Persian Ampusa, her worshippers believed, cruised about the world in a blood bubble looking for something to kill. Her blood thirst might be propitiated by sacrifice – around 1500 B.C. at Hal Tarxien in Malta, the ministers of a seven-foot goddess, her belly obesely pregnant above pear-shaped legs of massive stone, caught the blood of victims in a deep vessel symbolic of the divine vagina. But the mother, and her blood-anger, endured, as in this vivid eye-witness account of the ‘Black Mother’ of the Hindu religion, Kali-Ma:

      And Kalee-Ma’ee, the Dark Mother is there. She is luminous-black. Her four limbs are outstretched and the hands grasp two-edged swords, tools of disembowelment, and human heads. Her hands are blood-red, and her glaring eyes red-centred; and her blood-red tongue protrudes over huge pointed breasts, reaching down to a rotund little stomach. Her yoni is large and protuberant. Her matted, tangled hair is gore-stained and her fanglike teeth gleam. There is a garland of skulls about her neck; her earrings are the images of dead men and her girdle is a chain of venomous snakes.¹⁰

      Wedded as we are to an all-loving, all-forgiving stereotype of motherhood, it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this terrifying image of the bad mother with the good. But both ‘life’ and ‘death’ sides of the Goddess come together without strain in her primary aspect, which is in fact not motherhood pure and simple, but her sexuality. As her primary sexual activity she created life; but in sex she demanded man’s essence, his self, even his death. Here again the true nature of the Goddess and her activities have fallen victim to the mealy-mouthed prudery of later ages. Where referred to at all, they are coyly labelled ‘fertility’ rituals, beliefs or totems, as if the Great Goddess selflessly performed her sexual obligations solely in order to ensure that the earth would be fruitful. It is time to set the historical record straight. The fruitfulness of crops and animals was only ever a by-product of the Goddess’s own personal sexual activity. Her sex was hers, the enjoyment of it hers, and as all these early accounts of her emphasize, when she had sex, like any other sensible female, she had it for herself.

      But not by herself. In every culture, the Goddess has many lovers. This exposes another weakness in our later understanding of her role as the Great Mother. To the children of patriarchy, ‘mother’ always includes ‘wife’; mother is the woman who is married to father. That puts a further constraint on the idea of the good mother. The good mother does not fuck around. She does not even choose the one man she does have, but is chosen by father. Hence the insoluble paradox of the Goddess for the custodians of succeeding moralities – she was always unmarried and never chaste. Among Eskimos, her title was ‘She Who Will Not Have a Husband’. But there was more to her sexual freedom than this. As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless. In contrast males came and went, their only function the service of the divine ‘womb’ or ‘vulva’, which is the Goddess’s name in most cultures.¹¹

      Yet the lover of the Goddess did not simply have the kind of crudely functional experience that this might suggest. Some representations of her sexuality stress its power and terror: on seal-engravings from Babylon she puts scorpions to flight with the ritual display of her awe-inspiring pudenda, while in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh from before 2000 B.C., the goddess Ishtar, thwarted in her unbridled sensuality, threatens to burst gates, tear down houses and ‘make the dead rise and overwhelm the living’.¹² Far more common, however, are the tender, almost girlish poetic tributes to the skill of the lover and the delights of his body, like this song of Inanna, over 4000 years old, yet as fresh as this morning’s loving:

       My brother brought me to his house,

      Laid me down on a fragrant honey bed, My precious sweet, lying on my heart, My brother did it fifty times, One by one, tongue-making.¹³

      Further north in the legendary city of Nineveh, the unknown poet made the goddess Ishtar croon like a mother as she beds the Assyrian king Ashur-bani-pal:

       My face covers thy face

      As a mother over the fruit of her womb. I will place thee as a graven jewel between my breasts During the night will I give thee covering, During the day I shall clothe thee, Fear not, oh my little one, whom I have raised.¹⁴

      Brother? Little one? Who were these lovers of the Goddess, and why are they described in such terms? The answer to this question leads to the clearest indication of the undisputed power of the Goddess that historical evidence affords.

      For the Great Mother originally held the ultimate power – the power of the undisputed ruler, that of life and death. Where woman is the divine queen, the king must die. Mythologically and historically, too, the rampant sensuality of the Great Goddess and her taste for blood unite in the archaic but undisputed practice of the killing of the king. ‘King’ is in fact an honorary tide for the male chosen to fuck the Queen-Goddess in a simple re-enactment of the primal drama subsequently described by historians and anthropologists as ‘the sacred marriage’, with the male ‘acting as divine consort’ to the Goddess. But the savage, inexorable logic of the ritual could hardly be more opposed to this weak and anachronistic attempt to dignify the male’s part in the proceedings. For when all life was thought to flow into, through and out of the female, the highest hope of the male was to escape the fate of all the other disposable drones and associate with the deity, even at the price of then being returned to earth.

      Mythologically, the ritual sacrifice of the young ‘king’ is attested in a thousand different versions of the story. In these the immortal mother always takes a mortal lover, not to father her child (though children often result) СКАЧАТЬ