Mother Goddess

Archaeological findings indicate that from the Palaeolithic era, circa 20,000 B.C.E., Europeans worshipped a mother goddess, since they ascribed importance to procreation and reproduction, which was originally believed to occur solely through women's power. In later eras, deities were shown anthropomorphically as interacting males and females, and then with the widespread acceptance of monotheism, toward the Common Era, female deities were generally subordinated or denied. Not all goddesses were represented as purely maternal, nor was fertility the only feature of goddesses emphasized. They were often shown as goddesses of wisdom, fate, and warfare too, and there was a strong association between the reproductive forces of women and the earth as mother, with sexuality embraced as a powerfully necessary life force.

Sculptures from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic found in Europe show women carved with heavy breasts and hips, the vulva often marked as a triangle, suggestive of fertility and the centrality of birth and the life force emerging from people's early experiences of their mother. Birth and nourishment at the breast, to an ultimate return to the womb of the earth in death, suggest the dedication of ancient people to the mother goddess in the continuum of life and death. Her close association with nature and animals is shown in carvings [Page 814]which frequently show the mother goddess with bird or serpent features.

In writing developed in Mesopotamia with the Sumerians, mythological accounts support the earlier iconographic material showing the worship of a mother goddess. The birth of heaven and earth was ascribed to the goddess Nammu of the primal waters. Ereshkigal was the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, and when Inanna visited her and underwent death, the entire natural and sexual world suffered infertility. This necessitated her return to life by sending her consort Dumuzi beneath the earth in her place, and this relationship was the first in a series of “sacred marriages.” The power of the goddess enabled the continuing fertility of the world, both vegetable and human.

The later Babylonian Ishtar and Tammuz were worshipped into biblical times, when Ezekiel records the people's ritual mourning for the death of the god Tammuz, while the goddess Ishtar's force continued immortally. A similar “sacred marriage” was celebrated in Egypt between Isis and Osiris, with Isis restoring Osiris to life in order for her to bear the child Horus. Later Roman statues show Isis nursing her child, which served as a model for icons of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus. (Isis was worshipped into the Christian era.) St. Paul encountered the worshippers of Artemis of Ephesus on his travels, and in 431 C.E. the Virgin Mary was proclaimed the Mother of God in the same town of Ephesus, suggestive of a dedication to the goddess that was not easily destroyed.

In Crete, the mother goddess was portrayed in powerful bare-breasted snake goddess figurines, which celebrated an assertive female sexuality. The god Zeus was born in Crete to Rhea; in the later classical Greek period, the powers of the goddess were split between the various avatars of Aphrodite of love, Demeter of agriculture, Artemis of animals, hunting and birth, Hera of marriage, Athena of wisdom, war and handicrafts, and Hestia of the hearth. By the time of the new year celebration of the Babylonians in the 1st millenium B.C.E., the mother goddess Tiamat was subjected to the power of Marduk and his patriarchal forces. A similar subjection of ancient female forces was seen in the gigantomachies against ancient female serpent-monsters, as at Delphi, although the female Pythia continued to prophesy there. The Romans invited the goddess Cybele, who had been worshipped for millennia in Anatolia, Turkey, to be carried to Rome in 204 B.C.E., where she brought victory over their enemies together with a plentiful harvest.

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