The belief that the earliest humans worshipped a sovereign,
nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a popular one. It has been
taken up as fact by the media, who routinely depict modern
goddess-worshippers as "reviving" the ancient religions of our
ancestors. Feminist scholars contend that, in the primordial
religions, the Great Mother was honored as the primary, creative
force, giving birth to the world, granting fertility to both crops
and humans, and ruling supreme over her family pantheon. The
peaceful, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her were
eventually wiped out or subjugated by nomadic, patriarchal warrior
tribes such as the early Hebrews, who brought their male God to
overthrow the Great Mother: the first step in the creation and
perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant
oppression and degradation of women.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz sets out to test this
hypothesis by examining the real female deities of early human
cultures. She finds no trace of the Great Mother in their myths or
in their worship. From the Eskimos of the arctic wasteland, whose
harsh life even today most closely mirrors the earliest hunter
gatherers, to the rich cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and
the islands of Japan, Motz looks at a wide range of goddesses who
are called Mother, or who give birth in their myths. She finds that
these goddesses have varying origins as ancestor deities, animal
protectors, and other divinities, rather than stemming from a
common Mother Goddess archetype. For instance, Sedna, the powerful
goddess whose chopped-off fingers became the seals and fish that
were the Eskimos' chief source of food, had nothing to do with
humanfertility. Indeed, human motherhood was held in such low
esteem that Eskimo women were forced to give birth completely
alone, with no human companionship and no helpful deities of
childbirth. Likewise, while various Mexican goddesses ruled over
healing, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned
as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them either
embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the crops: for
that the Mexicans looked to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor
were the rituals of these goddesses nurturing or peaceful. The
goddess Cihuacoatl, who nurtured the creator god Quetzalcoatl and
helped him create humanity, was worshipped with human sacrifices
who were pushed into a fire, removed while still alive, and their
hearts were cut out. And Motz closely examines the Anatolian
goddess Cybele, the "Magna Mater" most often cited as an example of
a powerful mother goddess. Hers were the last of the great pagan
mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall before
Christianity. But Cybele herself never gives birth, nor does she
concern herself with aiding women in childbirth or childrearing.
She is not herself a mother, and the male character figuring most
prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste companion. Tellingly,
Cybele's priests dedicate themselves to her by castrating
themselves, thus mimicking Attis's death--a very odd way to
venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict these earlier goddesses as peaceful and nurturing
mothers, as is often done, is to deny them their own complex and
sophisticated nature as beings who were often violent and vengeful,
delighting in sacrifice, or who reveled in their eroticism and were
worshipped asharlots. The idea of a nurturing Mother Goddess is
very powerful. In this challenging book, however, Motz shows that
She is a product of our own age, not of earlier ones. By discarding
this simplistic and worn-out paradigm, we can open the door to a
new way of thinking about feminine spirituality and religious
experience.
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