the idea that the earliest people worshipped a sovereign, nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a well-liked one. it's been taken up as truth by way of the media, who oftentimes depict sleek goddess-worshippers as "reviving" the traditional religions of our ancestors. Feminist students contend that, within the primordial religions, the nice mom used to be venerated because the basic, inventive strength, giving delivery to the realm, granting fertility to either plants and people, and ruling perfect over her relations pantheon. The peaceable, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her have been finally burnt up or subjugated by means of nomadic, patriarchal warrior tribes corresponding to the early Hebrews, who introduced their male God to overthrow the good mom: step one within the construction and perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant oppression and degradation of women.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz units out to check this speculation by way of reading the genuine girl deities of early human cultures. She reveals no hint of the nice mom of their myths or of their worship. From the Eskimos of the arctic wilderness, whose harsh lifestyles even at the present time such a lot heavily mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the wealthy cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz seems at quite a lot of goddesses who're known as mom, or who supply start of their myths. She unearths that those goddesses have various origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and different divinities, instead of stemming from a typical mom Goddess archetype. for example, Sedna, the strong goddess whose chopped-off palms grew to become the seals and fish that have been the Eskimos' leader resource of foodstuff, had not anything to do with human fertility. certainly, human motherhood was once held in such low esteem that Eskimo ladies have been pressured to offer beginning thoroughly on my own, with out human companionship and no precious deities of childbirth. Likewise, whereas quite a few Mexican goddesses governed over therapeutic, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them both embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the plants: for that the Mexicans regarded to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor have been the rituals of those goddesses nurturing or peaceable. The goddess Cihuacoatl, who nurtured the author god Quetzalcoatl and helped him create humanity, used to be worshipped with human sacrifices who have been driven right into a hearth, got rid of whereas nonetheless alive, and their hearts have been minimize out. And Motz heavily examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the "Magna Mater" customarily mentioned for instance of a robust mom goddess. Hers have been the final of the nice pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall sooner than Christianity. yet Cybele herself by no means provides start, nor does she hindrance herself with helping girls in childbirth or childrearing. She isn't really herself a mom, and the male personality figuring so much prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste better half. Tellingly, Cybele's monks commit themselves to her by way of castrating themselves, therefore mimicking Attis's death--a very ordinary solution to venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict those previous goddesses as peaceable and nurturing moms, as is usually performed, is to disclaim them their very own advanced and complex nature as beings who have been frequently violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who reveled of their eroticism and have been worshipped as harlots. the assumption of a nurturing mom Goddess is especially strong. during this not easy ebook, besides the fact that, Motz exhibits that She is a fabricated from our personal age, no longer of previous ones. through discarding this simplistic and tired paradigm, we will be able to open the door to a brand new mind set approximately female spirituality and spiritual experience.