The sacred goddess

 One of the main inspirations for this blog-project has been my reading of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford. While I had received it as a gift from my partner in 2015, it was not until mid-2020 that I actually delved into it. 

Deep into confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic, I was watching my son play in the living room when I looked over to the bookcase and just felt the book pop out at me. I slid it off the shelf and opened to the first pages. Immediately drawn in, over the next few months I used every free moment to read the tome of over 700 pages. And my life was changed. 

From the first chapter, I felt as if I was being told a story I already knew, deep inside, but had somehow forgotten. It was like hearing a familiar story, one's own story, but not remembering how it went. Like from a dream you are trying to piece back together but cannot quite recall. Like when you sing along to a favorite song without actually knowing the words. 

The only other times I had felt this way was during my pre-natal classes with a traditional midwife in the Peruvian Andes. As she spoke, it was like hearing myself speak in a different voice with words I did not know I knew, articulating feelings, beliefs, and truths I had never consciously articulated about my body, my feelings around pregnancy and birth and motherhood. I do not doubt that these two experiences are deeply connected, speaking to the living memory of the sacred feminine in all of us that has been silenced, repressed and marginalized for centuries. 

The book, published in 1991, starts in the Paleolithic era and focuses geographically on the Western/European traditions leading up to the modern Judeo-Christian religions. Another anchoring point for me: as a European-American living currently in Europe, I have been on a quest to reconnect to my ancestral heritage here. As soon as I started reading, I realized that this story was about me, my ancestors, and my heritage. 

Right away I was drawn in with the mysterious figurines of the goddess discovered just footsteps from where I was currently living. The shapes of fertility and fecundity. The worship of the feminine principle in nature and creation. The moon as the symbol of the Mother Goddess. The authors explain how to these people, the creative source of life was conceived as a Mother. This sacred dimension was immanent -- inherent, intrinsic, indwelling - in all of creation, including humanity. 

This, then, was our shared primordial experience. The sacred principle was our origin, our beginning. And the myth of the goddess was the moral vision for the age, which lasted thousands and thousands of years. 

The authors invoke Jung, who discusses a collective unconscious. Like a shared collective memory, this primordial experience and myth is passed down just like instinct and genes. Therefore, this original vision and experience of the unity and sacredness of life exists within our psyche still. 

Of course, as the rest of the book goes to tell, over the course of history this story, myth and belief was systematically repressed, violently destroyed, and intentionally forgotten -- but never eliminated. The myth of the goddess -- and our innate need for the energy of the goddess -- lives on through symbols. She surfaces in quiet resistance in poetry, art, and literature, sometimes unconsciously. Her presence pops up in disguise and endures through gentle tending of her archetypes. We might not know the words, but we recognize her voice. We feel her in our souls and our hearts, deep inside beyond our mind and our education. 

It is this knowing that I want to cultivate. This deep feeling we need to reconnect with, revive and revivify. We need to learn how to pause when we feel her and just say: Yes, there. We do not need to understand, articulate, explain. Just notice. Pause. Make space. Listen. 

In the beginning, she was there. The story starts with the Great Mother Goddess, the sole deity, and all of creation as her divine manifestation, including humanity. This was 20,000 years ago in the Western world, in what is known as the Paleolithin and Neolithic eras. But alive and well in the Peruvian Andes, for example, who worship Pachamama, Mother Earth, as a very alive and sacred being. 

The next step was in the Bronze Age, approximately 3500-1250 BCE, when the Mother Goddess begot a god-son (who was also her consort/lover in some versions). Here the first separation takes place: of zoe, the ever-renewing source of life and bios, the manifestation of life, which is born and dies. 

Around 1250 BCE a new story takes hold: the Mother Goddess is murdered by the god, her own creation, and the world is formed from her dead body. Creation is now separated from creator. The world is no longer a living being and sacred entity. Starting to sound more familiar?

The Iron Age ushers in an updated version, which becomes the source of all three patriarchal monotheistic religions of Christianiy, Judaism and Islam. A male god creates the world alone. The world - and humanity- is set apart from the creator, and therefore cannot share in his sanctity as he is transcendent. There is no Mother Goddess and the female in the story in fact is subordinate and sinful. Although just 4,000 years old, this is the story that continues to infuse our collective consciousness in Western religions and societies until today. 

The authors interpret the replacement of the goddess myth to the god myth as representative of the withdrawal of humanity's participation in nature. From living off the land to dominating nature and living separate from it in cities, the lifestyle change was accompanied by a massive paradigm shift. The "fall" of humanity and "original sin" as Christians see it, was the same disconnect from nature/god that necesitated this new version of the creation myth and divine creator.

I can only fathom that over these past 4,000 years, our sin has grown with the size of that disconnect. Think about the patriarchy, white supremacy, Christian exceptionalism, and Euro-centrism that has led to our current state of depravity: climate crisis, capitalism, and Covid, to name just a few broad strokes.

And so this leads us to the question of, what is the next stage?

The authors have a vision for this, as well, based on their exhaustive analysis of this evolution over the past 20,000 years which I have mightily simplified. The next step, according to the flow, is the "sacred marriage". It is not a return to the prior eras, but rather bring the goddess myth back to consciousness to complement the pervading god myth, and in that process putting the god myth into its rightful balance. It is a reunion of transcendence AND immanence, spirit AND nature, male AND female, mother AND father, creator AND creation, humanity AND nature, matter AND spirit. Etc. Etc. Etc. 

Unity. Harmony. Balance. 

And I believe this. 

Of course, in a post-modern critique, I would make a few caveats. Again, remembering that this text focuses geographically on Western culture and European society and religion. This is not a universal declaration and does not consider Eastern, African, indigenous and other non-West traditions. And rightly so, as the book focuses specifically on a line of tradition manifesting from the Near East to the European continent. It just so happens to be my tradition, and it just so happens to be the tradition of the people who tend to hold geopolitical power. The other caveat I would make is to be clear, as the authors also do, that the imbalance of masculine and feminine is not about men and women, or at least not exclusively. It is important to remember that characteristics ascribed to particular genders and sexes do not innately have value judgments. It is the value judgments themselves that are patriarchal (for example, that emotions are feminine, and also bad). And so, in any discussion of marriage, it should be taken as an experience of the unification of dual characteristics, not a heternormative "perfect union" of male and female. I wonder how the authors would update their language now based on current gender politics. I also wonder now, 30 years later, what additional technologies and literature has been added to this area of research that further elucidates the story of the goddess. The authors discuss carbon dating which shifted the assumed dates of several archeological sites in the second half of the 1900s, and therefore changed the narrative and chronology of several of these myths and images. With so many advances in the past thirty years, I wonder what other discoveries have taken place that have influenced this timeline.

There is so much more that was eye-opening and heart-awakening as I read this book. For example, that the Myth of Inanna in Sumeria, as shown through carvings, is almost a spitting image of the Christian nativity, from 2,000 years BC. That the word "virgin" originally means, continually regenerating from itself. Like the Mother Goddess did. That really puts Mary's "virgin" birth in perspective. That since the Bronze age, the story of a god-son descending into the underworld and returning has existed.

 

From The Myth of the Goddess. The Virgin Mother who gives birth to a son-lover-hero under her guiding star and is visited by people bringing gifts.

All the while as I read this book, it is like I was being let into all these secrets, all the secret stories behind the stories. It was bewildering and enlightening all at the same time. I always knew that the Bible represented the stories, culture and society of Biblical times, but I was never taught -- and never looked into -- the stories that they knew, that were then transformed to the Bible. Looking at it through this lens, it is like tracing one long story over 20,000 years. And the Bible stories we know are edits and revisions of oral tradition that people had been sharing for ever. Those edits and revisions are intentional, to uphold the power of the powerful. But within those stories, little twinkles of resurrection and insurrection shine through. 

Now I look for the Goddess wherever I go. The painting of the Virgin. The story of a hero. The planting of seeds. And I try to pause. Make space. Listen.