With this physical freedom went certain key sexual freedoms of the sort one would expect to find in a matriarchal society. Where women rule, women woo; and of twenty erotic love-songs from the Egypt of the thirteenth century B.C., sixteen are by women. One shamelessly records, ‘I climbed through the window and found my brother in his bed – my heart was overwhelmed with happiness.’ Another is even more frank: ‘O my handsome darling! I am dying to marry you and become the mistress of all your property!’35 Customs elsewhere in the world were less flowery and more basic. When Julia Augusta, wife of the Roman Emperor Severus, quizzed a captive Scots woman about the sexual freedoms British women were reputed to enjoy, the Scot reproved her with, ‘We fulfil the demands of nature much better than do you Roman women, for we consort openly with the best man, while you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’36 Fulfilling the demands of nature did not apply only to human beings, as Elise Boulding explains:
The free ways in which Celtic women utilized sex come out in the stories of Queen Maedb, who offered ‘thigh-friendship’ to the owner of a bull for the loan of it [to service her cows]. She also offered thigh-friendship in return for assistance in raids and battles. Apparently all parties, including her husband, considered these deals reasonable.37
Equally reasonable, apparently, were the rights and dues that women claimed not in pursuit of their own pleasure but for the honour of the Great Goddess. These were extensive, ranging from ritual self-exposure to far darker mysteries whose disclosure brought the risk of death to the betrayer. At the simplest level, the worship of the Goddess seems to have been conducted naked or only half-clothed: a cave painting from Cogul near Lerida in Catalonia shows nine women with full pendulous breasts clad only in caps and bell-shaped skirts performing a ritual fertility dance around a small male figure with an unpropitiously drooping penis, while Pliny describes the females of ancient Britain as ritually stripping, then staining themselves brown in preparation for their ceremonials.38 Sacred, often orgiastic, dancing was a crucial element of Goddess worship, and the use of intoxicants or hallucinogens to heighten the effect was standard practice: the Goddess demanded complete abandon.
The Goddess also demanded in some cultures a form of sexual service that has been deeply misunderstood by later historians, who as a consequence have misrepresented it under a frankly misleading label. Writing in the fifth century B.C., Herodotus described the ritual as follows:
The worst Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the Temple of Love and have intercourse with some stranger. The men pass by and make their choice, and the women will never refuse, for that would be a sin. After this act she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess, and goes away to her home.39
This is the practice which wherever it occurs throughout the Near or Middle East is always described as ‘ritual prostitution’. Nothing could more comprehensively degrade the true function of the Gadishtu, the sacred women of the Goddess. For in the act of love these women were revered as the reincarnation of the Goddess herself, celebrating her gift of sex which was so powerful, so holy and precious that eternal thanks were due to her within her temple. To have intercourse with a stranger was the purest expression of the will of the Goddess, and carried no stigma. On the contrary the holy women were always known as ‘sacred ones’, ‘the undefiled’, or as at Urek in Sumeria, nu-gig, ‘the pure or spotless’.40
This unhistorical projection of anachronistic prejudice (sex is sin, and unmarried sex is prostitution) fails to take account of historical evidence supporting the high status of these women. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, carefully distinguishes between five grades of temple women and protects their rights to continue in the worship of their mothers. It also makes a clear division between sacred women and secular prostitutes – for it is an interesting assumption embedded in the very phrase ‘ritual prostitute’, that somehow these people did not have the real thing.
They did, of course; and the perennial commercialism of the true ‘working girl’ comes through strongly in one recorded anecdote of the most celebrated courtesan of the Egyptians, Archidice. The fame of her sexual skill was so great that men ruined themselves for her favours. One suitor, rejected because he could not afford her price, went home and dreamed that he had enjoyed her instead. The enraged Archidice took him to court, alleging that, as he had had the pleasure of sex with her, he should pay her normal fee for it. The court admitted the legality of her claim, but after much debate finally adjudicated that as the client had only dreamed he had enjoyed her, she should dream she had been paid.41
Poets, priests, queens, mothers, lovers, athletes, soldiers and litigious courtesans, as the first individual women emerge to take their place in human history, they present an impressive spectacle. No one had yet told them that women were physically weak, emotionally unstable or intellectually ill-equipped; consequently they throng the annals of Minoan Crete, for example, as merchants, traders, sailors, farmers, charioteers, hunters and ministers of the Goddess, in apparent ignorance of the female inability to perform these roles that more advanced societies had yet to discover. At every level women made their mark, from the brilliant Aspasia, the courtesan-scholar-politician who partnered Pericles in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., to her contemporary Artemisia, the first-known woman sea-captain, whose command of her fleet at the battle of Marathon was so devastating that the Athenians put a huge bounty on her head; sadly, she survived the Persian wars to die of love, throwing herself off a cliff in a passion of grief when rejected by a younger man.
These were real women, then, vividly alive even at the moment of death: women who knew their strengths. These strengths were recognized in the range of social customs and legal rights known to be women’s due from a mass of historical evidence: physical and sexual freedom, access to power, education, full citizenship, the right to own money and property, the right to divorce, custody of children and financial maintenance.
The value placed on women in the legal codes and customs of the day traced back to their special female status; and this derived directly from their link with, and incarnation of, the Great Goddess. Though localized, since every country, tribe, town or even village had its own version of ‘Our Lady’, she was universal. To her worshippers, after so many thousand years, she seemed eternal:
I am Isis, mistress of every land. I laid down laws for all, and ordained things no one may change . . . I am she who is called divine among women – I divided the earth from heaven, made manifest the paths of the stars, prescribed the course of the sun and the moon . . . I brought together men and women . . . What I have made lam can be dissolved by no man.42
Was this the challenge man was driven to take up? For where was man in the primal drama of the worship of the Great Mother? He was the expendable consort, the sacrificial king, the disposable drone. Woman was everything; he was nothing. It was too much. Man had to have some meaning in the vast and expanding universe of human consciousness. But as the struggle for understanding moved into its next phase, the only meaning seemed to lie through the wholesale reversal of the existing formula of belief. Male pride rose to take up the challenge of female power; and launching the sex war that was to divide sex and societies for millennia to come, man sought to assert his manhood through the death and destruction of all that had made woman the Great Mother, Goddess, warrior, lover and queen.