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
– 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 of the country’ as Tibetans called her, and her refusal to submit to stereotypical sentimentalization. So in India, 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.