I would have trouble communicating this adequately - taking it from my mind to paper, so please except this following excerpt:
Going Back to the Time of Women
If we go back further to the earliest indications of how people lived, we discover that for thousands of years things were quite different. Women were then the focus and the centre of their societies, because they possessed the greatest and most mysterious power of all, the power to create new life. In the earliest times people had no idea that men played any part in procreation. They did not connect sex with childbirth. The woman apparently simply grew larger and larger and eventually produced a child. So the future appeared to depend on women alone.
Therefore, everything that was passed down appeared to be passed down through women. Continuity passed through women: sons and daughters took their name from their mother. Possessions and wealth passed from mother to child; when eventually agriculture was developed and people ceased being nomadic and settled down, the right to use land was passed from mother to child, as well as tools and equipment and animals. And because it was the female who could create new life, it was the female who was worshipped.
Surprise
This rediscovery of our history as a human race was a total surprise to me. I do not know why it has not caused a revolution. - - -
For the past 3,000 years, children have been brought up to have a positive attitude towards male achievements and skills. These have helped us advance in many ways, so this is justified. But this view has not been balanced by a valuing of the female. Discovering the detail of these ancient cultures felt, to me, like restoring the balance. - - -
Reading the accounts of the discoveries of the existence of the goddess from India to the Mediterranean is like reading a brilliant detective novel, but one in which the body is ME. This is MY history that these archaeologists and art historians are piecing together. These facts alter my outlook on life; I now know that there was a time when it was taken for granted that women would be responsible for the spiritual practices of their society, that women would be revered for their wisdom, that feminine gifts and skills - of intuition, co-operation, of holistic thinking, of playfulness - were valued as highly as masculine gifts and skills. Knowing this has changed feminism for me personally from a struggle to achieve into a path. This is a path trodden before me by millions, and it is a path to integration.
Why it is a Surprise
When all this began to dawn on me, my immediate response was, ?'Why did no one tell me?' - - -
The answer to this question is in three parts. First, all this has only been discovered recently. The historian Merlin Stone describes how it happened for her when the various pieces of evidence fell into place. She then understood that Ashtoreth, the despised ?'pagan' deity of the Old Testament, was (despite the efforts of biblical scribes to disguise her identity by repeatedly using the masculine gender) actually Astarte - the Great goddess, as she is known in Canaan, the New Eastern Queen of Heaven. It dawned on her that those heathen idol worshippers of the Bible had been praying to a woman god - elsewhere known as Innin, Inanna, Nana, Nut, Anat, Anahita, Istar, Isis, Au Set, Ishara, Asherah, Ashtart. Attoret, Attar and Hathor - the many-named Divine Ancestress. "Was it merely coincidence," she asks in the introduction to When God was a Woman, ?'that during all those years of Sunday school I never learned that Ashtoreth was a woman?'
The same author points out how so much of the evidence - the sacred artefacts of the religions which preceded monotheism - has been destroyed. She thinks that it may well have been the evident female attributes of nearly all the statues unearthed in excavations of Neolithic and early historic periods that irked the advocates of the male deity. Most pagan idols had breasts.
The third main reason why this information has been so slow to come to light is that until recently most archaeologists and historian have been male. Because we have not lived in a world where women are leaders of religion, prominent decision-makers, equal holders of power, we simply have not been able to imagine a world where this was so. For example, male archaeologists examining a mural showing figures holding long pointed rods conclude that they must be men wielding spears in battle, and that becomes the accepted explanation. But along comes a woman archaeologist who examines the same mural and suggests that the figures could be priests and priestesses celebrating a religious festival with willow wands. Discussion ensues. If this latter explanation fits better with the rest of the mural it is finally accepted.
The result of this is that goddess worship has been characterised as a ?'cult', whereas patriarchal monotheism is a ?'religion'. Male historians of religion published and republished as recently as 1975 can still find no way of explaining the existence of priestesses. Except to refer to them as ?'temple prostitutes'.
Some female writers, describing essentially the same society, see it as a world in which women's bodies were sacred, and their sensuality a cause for celebration.
Quote:: In some instances, women who were not wishing to lead a chaste life or to enter into marriage spent their entire lives in the temple compounds. Such were the Vestal Virgins, who did not unite with a husband but became the ?'bride' in a ritual; marriage to the king as the surrogate for a god . . . Their feminine nature was dedicated to a higher purpose, that of bringing the fertilizing power of the goddess into effective contact with the lives of human beings. [Close quote]
[Here follows a description of what the role of the priestesses may have been.]
The priestesses would have been chosen by their peers for their wisdom and integrity. This shows in their bearing, tall and reflective, as they walk slowly to the ERECHTHEUM next to the temple. In this chamber are the sacred serpents. Each priestess is handed two of the smaller snakes, which coil around her arms as she moves in the procession to the sanctuary. The snakes are the most ancient symbol of the divine, evoking awe and reverence from all. The priestesses have often been bitten and have developed an immunity to the venom such that it acts as a heightener of consciousness, and can assist a priestess to attain the trance-like state essential for prophesy.
In the centre of the temple is a vast circular vat full of seed to be blessed for this spring sowing. In deep meditation the priestesses move into a circle around the vat, the snakes coiling over their bodies, through their hair, and down into the vat of seed. If a priestess is bitten she may go into a trance, arms raised high and wide, her handmaids swiftly removing her head-dress and robes.
The young men who have reached their peak of manhood this season stand in an outer circle round the priestesses, watching and following their every move. As they become erect they remove their loin cloths and step forward, turning to face the priestesses and leaning their buttocks on the rounded stone rim of the vat of seed. Each priestess moves to the young man of her choice, standing before him, arms upraised. She stands astride his legs, and moves slowly. When she is ready she allows herself to be entered. She moves further into trance by flexing her vaginal muscles round the penis. At this point the young man begins to move, slowly and rhythmically, using the muscles of his buttocks and thighs.
What the priestess is doing is initiating the young man into the mysteries of life, manhood and the feminine. She is giving him something precious, a knowledge that is essential for his full human being. And he is receiving.
Modern Western man's difficulty with receiving means that he has ended up seeing sex as a matter of taking, sometimes by force. In former times initiation rituals in different cultures served to mark the transition between boyhood and manhood. We have lost these traditions, and I believe that we are poorer for that loss. The societies that existed around the Mediterranean in Neolithic times had a much more fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression. In Crete, for example, there is evidence of a devotion to being in the moment, a passion for dancing, and no evidence of any sense of guilt or thoughts of punishment associated with sex.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GODDESS?
Enter the Fathers
As time went by, human beings began to realize the role of the male in procreation. - - - The implications for women were incalculable. It meant that men began to have a profound interest in a line, a lineage. They began to want to know which children they had fathered. And this meant one thing. They had to have control over the women they had intercourse with, in order to prevent them having intercourse with other men. Of course, these changes took place gradually, over centuries, but the result was that women became possessions of men. It meant marriage contracts and the tying down of women. It meant hideous punishments for women who dared to deviate. In some Middle Eastern societies it meant the penalty of death for a married woman, even if she was raped.
Enter Weapons
Between 6500 and 5200 BCE metal objects and tools spread all over the Middle East. Soon after the first earring, the first dagger appeared. Presumably, weapons had been used to kill animals from time immemorial; what took place now was the manufacture of metal weapons to kill human beings on a large scale.
By 1250 BCE weapons and bronze tools had spread all over Europe. Horses had been tamed in Central Asia since 2500 BCE, but now men on horseback brandishing swords and spears appeared, wearing helmets and armour. This brought vast changes to the settled agricultural peoples living around the Mediterranean, in the Near and Middle East and as far as India. This big change, which was to herald the end of these matrifocal societies was the notion of seizing wealth rather than creating it. This meant that every village had to build walls and to defend itself.
Enter Armies
Warlike tribes, called by the vague term ?'Indo-Europeans', came south from central Asia, through what are now Bulgaria and Greece. They were armed, fierce and worshipped male gods. Little information is available on how and why they had male deities or exactly where they came from. Over a period of 1,000 years they gradually conquered all the agricultural, female-worshipping cultures. Possibly the last southern civilization to fall to them was that of Crete, protected by sea on all sides.
So, where images of the Mother goddess had been made and venerated for over a hundred generations of peasant lives, the invaders came with their pantheon of Indo-European gods ruled by the father figure Zeus. Zeus did not care for the dark, slow earth, but ruled the sky with lightning in his hand, presiding over lesser gods and men from a mountain-top. Down below, among fields and pastures, the image of the ancient goddess dispersed into various female divinities; she could no longer be supreme.
Hi - me again - so, it was a gradual process, like water dropping on a stone eventually wears it down.
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