The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ Great Goddess is the incarnation of the Feminine Self that unfolds in the history of mankind as well as in the history of every individual woman.

      ERICH NEUMANN, The Great Mother

      The Mother of songs, the Mother of our whole seed, bore us in the beginning. She is the Mother of all races of men, and all tribes. She is the Mother of the thunder, of the rivers, of the trees and of the grain. She is the only Mother we have, and She alone is the Mother of all things. She alone.

      SONG OF THE KAYABA INDIANS OF COLOMBIA

      Around 2300 B.C., the chief priest of Sumeria composed a hymn in praise of God. This celebration of the omnipotent deity, ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’, is a song of extraordinary power and passion, and it has come down to history as the world’s first known poem. But it has another claim to world attention – both the first God and this first known priest-poet were female.

      For in the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.¹ And what a woman! The Sumerian inhabitants of what is now Iraq worshipped her in hymns of fearless eroticism, giving thanks for her tangled locks, her ‘lap of honey’, her rich vulva ‘like a boat of heaven’ – as well as for the natural bounty that she ‘pours forth from her womb’ so generously that every lettuce was to be honoured as ‘the Lady’s’ pubic hair. But the Supreme Being was more than a provider of carnal delights. Equally relished and revered were her war-like rages – to her first priest-poet Enheduanna she was ‘a dragon, destroying by fire and flood’ and ‘filling rivers with blood’. Enheduanna herself enjoyed temporal power as the daughter of Sargon I. But it was in her role as chief ‘moon-minister to the Most High’ that her true authority lay. For as poet, priest and prophet of Inanna, Enheduanna was the voice of a deity whose power and worship spanned the whole world and was as old as time itself, the first divinity, the Great Mother.²

      The power and centrality of the first woman-God is one of the best-kept secrets of history. We think today of a number of goddesses, all with different names – Isis, Juno, Demeter – and have forgotten what, 5000 years ago, every schoolgirl knew; no matter what name or guise she took, there was only one God and her name was woman. The Roman lawyer Lucius Apuleius was skilfully recycling the whole compendium of contemporary clichés in his portrait of ‘the Goddess’ as she spoke to him in a vision:

      I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead . . . Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me.³

      Later ages dismissed accounts of Goddess-worship as ‘myths’ or ‘cults’. But since Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of the lost Minoan civilization at the turn of this century, stated that all the innumerable goddess-figures he had discovered represented ‘the same Great Mother . . . whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond’, modern scholarship has accepted that ‘the Great Goddess, the “Original Mother without a Spouse”, was in full control of all the mythologies’ as ‘a worldwide fact’.⁴

      Nor was this an isolated or temporary phenomenon. Commentators stress the prominence and prevalence of the Great Mother Goddess as an essential element from the dawn of human life. From its emergence in the cradleland of the steppes of Southern Russia her worship ranged geographically throughout the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and Asia as far as China, to Africa and Australia. Historically the span is even more startling:

       – 25,000–15,000 B.C. – with the so-called ‘Venus figurines’ of stone and ivory in Europe, of Nile mud in Egypt, ‘the Great Mother . . . bursts on the world of men in overwhelming wholeness and perfection’.⁵

       – 12,000–9000 B.C. – in Dolní V

stonice, Czechoslovakia, and Shanidar, Iraq, ceremonial burials of bodies coated in red ochre, commonly associated with Goddess worship.

       – 7000 B.C. – in Jericho, the first shrines to the Mother Goddess.

       – 6000 B.C. – the village settlement of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, a site of only thirty-two acres, contained no less than forty shrines to the Goddess, in three incarnations as maiden, mother and crone.

       – 5000 B.C. – a statuette from Hacilar in Turkey shows the Goddess in the act of making love.

       – 4000 B.C. – the first written language appears on the temple of the Goddess under her title of Queen of Heaven at Erech (modern Uruk) in Sumeria.

       – 3000 B.C. – she now appears everywhere in the known world, in statues, shrines and written records.

       – 200 B.C. – tribal Celts sent their own priests of the Goddess to the great sacred festival of Cybele in Anatolia.

       – A.D. 200 – at Tralles, in western Anatolia, a woman called Aurelia Aemiliana erected a carving at the temple of the Goddess, recording that she had duly performed her sexual service (sacred intercourse in honour of the Goddess) as her mother and all her female ancestors had done before her.

       – A.D. 500 – Christian emperors forcibly suppressed the worship of the Goddess and closed down the last of her temples.

      As this shows, the sacred status of womanhood lasted for at least 25,000 years – some commentators would push it back further still, to 40,000 or even 50,000. In fact there was never a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical.⁶

      For as the struggle for survival eased by degrees into the far harder struggle for meaning, woman became both focus and vehicle of the first symbolic thought. The French archaeologist Leroi-Gourhan solved a riddle of the early cave paintings that had defeated anthropologists of more puritanical cultures when he revealed that the recurrent and puzzling ‘double-eye’ figure was a symbol of the vulva. Similarly in a remarkable sculpted frieze of animal and human figures at Angles-sur-l’Anglin, the female forms are represented by pure abstract triangles of women’s bodies, with the sexual triangle prominently emphasized.⁷

      How did woman assume from the first this special status? One source of it was undoubtedly her moon-linked menstruation and the mystery of her non-fatal yet incurable emission of blood. Another was her close and unique relation to nature, for as gathering gave way to planned horticulture, women consolidated their central importance as the principal food producers. But the real key lies where the exaggerated breasts and belly of the earliest images of woman direct us to look, in the miracle of birth. Before the process of reproduction was understood, babies were simply born to women. No connection was made with intercourse (to this day Australian Aboriginals believe that spirit children dwell in pools and trees, and enter any woman at random when they wish to be born). Men, so it seemed, therefore had no part in the chain of generation. Only women could produce new life, and they were revered accordingly: all the power of nature, and over nature, was theirs.⁸

      So arose the belief that woman was divine, not human, gifted with the most sacred and significant power in the world; and so was born the worship of the Great Mother. The birth of new life out of woman’s body was intricately related to the birth of new crops out of the body of the earth, and from the very first both were interlocked in the concept of a female divinity far more complex and powerful than conventional accounts suggest. The most ancient incarnation of the Goddess was as mother – but the number of local and national variations on this apparently straight-forward archetype in itself testifies to the maverick vigour of ‘the God-Mother СКАЧАТЬ