Motherhood

During the early evolution of the human race, motherhood was the only recognized bond of relationship. Like any mammalian family, the primitive human family consisted of mother and offspring.

The animal family is the product of the maternal instincts and of those alone; the mother is the sole centre and bond of it. . . The male has no share in forming the animal family; he is not an essential member of it; he may join the maternal group, but commonly does not do so. When he attaches himself to the animal family his association with it is loose and precarious. . . . Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place. Where male cooperation is useful, the male seeks out or follows the female, and it is the latter who determines the segregation of the group and selects its abode. ¹

The root of civilization was the kinship bond that kept groups together to evolve mutual cooperation. The bond was maternal because no paternal relationships were perceived, or even guessed, by such early groups with their shifting, temporary sexual attachments. “The connection between sexuality and childbearing was unknown to primitive men.” ²

People in primitive circumstances still show ignorance of the connection between sexuality and childbearing. Trobriand Islanders attributed pregnancy to spirits, not sex. A woman's husband might help care for her children, but he thought of them as “the children of my wife.” The islanders laughed at white men who first tried to tell them about impregnation. Chukchi female shamans said they made their children by their sacred stones, not by intercourse with men. Australian aborigines thought women became pregnant by eating some special foods, or by embracing a sacred tree hung with umbilical cords from previous births. Bataks believed no woman could become pregnant unless umbilical cords and placentae were buried under her house. ³

Primitives not only attributed pregnancy to a variety of causes, but also assigned to it a variety of different durations, showing that they were not sure when it began. ⁴ Most authorities now agree that not only the uncivilized races today, but certainly all the world's people in the prehistoric period, knew nothing of man's part in the process of reproduction. It was believed that only women held the divine power to give life. ⁵ All the most ancient mythologies speak of a Creatress rather than a Creator because living things could be made only by a female, according to primitive beliefs. Men believed themselves unnecessary to the process. ⁶

The most primitive hunting cultures have legends of still earlier ages, when women possessed all magical arts and men had none. As childbearers and nurturers, women took charge of growing things generally. They became the producers, storers, and distributors of vegetable foodstuffs, hence the owners of the land they used for cultivation. They made the earth valuable and equated it with themselves. Their economic and social power thus evolved the early village communities in matriarchal form. The men saw themselves as almost entirely superfluous, except for the labor they could contribute as hunters or defenders of the matriarchal group. ⁷

The secret of fatherhood can only have been revealed to men by the women themselves, because women were the keepers of calendrical records, another traditionally female skill that most men thought beyond their comprehension. Before the advent of monogamous marriage, a late development in human history, there would have been no reason or inclination to correlate copulations with births. Even if the truth were suspected, there were many negative cases to disprove it: some women could copulate frequently and never become pregnant, others could remain “barren” when living with one man but conceive when living with another. Women past menopause or before menarche could take any number of lovers without conceiving, which tended to suggest that menstruation was the crucial factor rather than sexual activity.

As may be found still in many groups of people, motherhood alone was the foundation of clan loyalties. In Assam, the social unit of tribes was maharis, “motherhoods.” The Malay family was a sa-mandei, “motherhood.” Among the Garos and Khasis, mothers headed the family groups and bequeathed all property in the female line; men could inherit nothing. Nearly everywhere, kinship bonds also passed only through the female line, as in the ancient system deliberately reversed by the Bible's “begats,” which recognized only male ancestors. Seri Indian tribes called themselves Kunkak, “womanhood”, or “motherhood.” ⁸ The earliest religious works of art “are figures of the solitary Great Goddess—the Paleolithic image of Mother, before there was any Father either on earth or in heaven.” ⁹ The idea of fatherhood was alien to the religious or social thinking of the earliest civilizations.¹⁰

“Home and mother” are written over every phase of neolithic agriculture. . . . It was the woman who wielded the digging stick and the hoe; she who tended the garden crops and accomplished those masterpieces of selection and cross-fertilization which turned raw wild species into the prolific and richly nutritious domestic varieties; it was woman who made the first containers, weaving baskets and coiling the first clay pots. . . . In form, the village, too, is her creation: for whatever else the village might be, it was a collective nest for the care and nurture of the young. Here she lengthened the period of child-care and playful irresponsibility, on which so much of man's higher development depends. House and village, eventually the town itself, are woman writ large. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, “house” or “town” may stand as symbols for “mother,” as if to confirm the similarity of the individual and the collective nurturing function. In line with this, the more primitive structures—houses, rooms, tombs—are usually round ones: like the original bowl described in Greek myth, which was modeled on Aphrodite's breast. ¹¹

Ancient civilizations show ample evidence of the matriarchal matrix in which they grew. Egyptians traced their descent through mothers, calling themselves “X, born of the Lady Y,” omitting their father's name. ¹² On Egyptian funerary stelae, the mother's name was given but the father's was omitted.¹³ Diodorus said Egyptian queens received more respect than kings.¹⁴ In the Ramesseum, the queen mother was addressed as “mighty mistress of the world.”¹⁵ Pharaohs ruled by matrilineal succession, and styled themselves “Rulers from the Womb.”¹⁶ The name of the Goddess was always a component part of royal names in the earliest dynasties. A pharaoh's title was originally per aa, Great Gate or Great House, symbol of the cosmic womb. Rulers of the Egyptians' Nubian neighbors had an even more mother-centered title: Mater. ¹⁷

Egyptian men were awed by maternal behavior patterns, wondering why women did what they did to maintain the race. Maxims written about 1500 b.c. said:

Thou shalt never forget thy mother and what she has done for thee. . . For she carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy mouth, and as thy size increased, her heart never once allowed her to say, “Why should I do this?” ¹⁸

Egyptian scriptures emphasized the honor due “thy mother, who bore thee with much suffering. She placed thee in the Chamber of Instruction that thou mightest acquire instruction in books. She was unremitting in her care for thee, and had loaves andbeer for thee in her house. When thou art grown . . . cast thine eyes upon her that gave thee birth and provided all good things for thee, thy mother. Let her never reproach thee.” ¹⁹

An Ethiopian woman expressed to Frobenius the basic psychological attitude of primitive mothers:

How can a man know what a woman's life is? . . . The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person from the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this the man does not know; he knows nothing. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. He can know nothing. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. That is why we won't be told what to do by our husbands.²⁰

In Old Iranian, the head of a clan or family was the hana, “grandmother.” Among the Medes, genealogies were based on the female line. In Babylon, the ideogram for “mother” combined the elements of “house” and “deity,” like the Hindu grhadevata or “house-goddess.” The female sex received precedence in all forms of address. The descending order of beings began with “Goddess and gods, women and men.”²¹ By Babylonian law, “any sin against the mother, any repudiation against the mother was punished by banishment from the community.” The Lycians too kept track of female ancestors only. Heraclides Ponticus said of them, “From of old they have been ruled by the women.”²² Phoenicians wrote of recent past when people didn't know their fathers, but took the names of their mothers.²³

Etruscan tomb inscriptions also disregarded fathers. When married couples were buried together, only the wife's name was written. Late Roman texts reversed this usage, writing the name of the husband and omitting that of the wife.²⁴ But before the founding of Rome, Italy was governed by the Sabine matriarchate, when not even kings knew their fathers. Romulus, Ancus Marcus, and Servius Tullius had only mothers. Indeed, fatherhood was not always noticed even in the classical period; Roman plebeians didn't know their fathers. When the myth of Romulus and his men was written down, it was said Romulus made his followers marry Sabine women, because, as men, they lacked sanguis ac genus, the blood of the race.²⁵ This could come only from the female owners of the land.

Patriarchal writers claimed that Romulus named each of the early Roman curiae (clans) after one of the Sabine women. ²⁶ The story was invented to disguise the fact that these curiae were “motherhoods,” bearing the names of maternal ancestresses.²⁷ The mother of all clans was Juno Curitis, the Queen of Heaven whom the Romans adopted and presented with a new spouse, Jupiter.²⁸

Among barbarian tribes of northern Europe, women were property owners, clan heads, and religious leaders. Roman writers called the northern nations “lands of women” governed by lvaens (queens).²⁹ Prehistoric Irish queens were mentioned in old writings, but their spouses were left nameless. The Lombards claimed their ancestors descended from a primal virgin mother, Gambara, who had no spouse. Mothers, not fathers, gave their names to children in pagan Britain and Scandinavia. Old German documents designate persons by their mothers' names only.³⁰

It was the same in the Far East. Chinese family names are always formed from a sign meaning “woman.” The custom is said to date from a past time when people knew their mothers but not their fathers.³¹ The Man-Tseu of southern China had a system of hereditary queenship passing through a sacred female clan.³² Chinese writings call Tibet “the land of women” and Japan “the land of queens.” Japanese imperial families traced their descent from the supreme sun goddess, Omikami Amaterasu, mother of the world. Japanese legendary “chiefs” of ancestral tribes were usually women.³³

The Chinese said the first man to understand fatherhood and institute monogamous marriage was Fu-Hi—who, however, had no father but only a mother.³⁴ The same first discoverer of paternity in Greek myth was Cecrops, a high priest of Athene and one of her serpent-consorts.³⁵ Athene however was a name of the Aegean Great Goddess and Universal Mother, who ruled alone and supreme during the Bronze Age.³⁶ In the whole Aegean area, religious rites were in the hands of priestesses, regarded as emanations or embodiments of the Goddess, who was simply woman deified, as the later God was man deified. Men didn't participate in public worship until a fairly late date, then only as priestesses' helpers, as the male deity was subordinate to the female.³⁷

In Europe also, the Great Goddess was thought the sole omnipotent deity. Fatherhood was not incorporated into religious thinking, because in clan life it was a very frail bond, even if recognized.³⁸ Scholars know that “in the beginning the Goddess everywhere antedated, or at least was predominant over, the God. It has been affirmed that in all countries from the Euphrates to the Adriatic, the Chief Divinity was at first in woman form.”³⁹

Recent researches into the history of the family render it in the highest degree improbable that the physical kinship between the god and his [sic] worshippers, of which traces are found all over the Semitic area, was originally conceived as fatherhood. It was the mother's, not the father's blood which formed the original bond of kinship among the Semites as among other early people and in this stage of society, if the tribal deity was thought of as the parent of the stock, a goddess, not a god, would necessarily have been the object of worship.⁴⁰

Modern male scholars often tried to conceal or deny the evidence of the ancient matriarchate. Whenever possible, some automatically converted references to the Great Mother into the word “God,” as was done in translating the Bible. Even so responsible a scholar as Cumont, translating Apuleius's description of the Syrian Goddess as omnipotens et omniparens, “all-powerful and all-producing,” glossed the description as a “conception of the absolute, unlimited authority of God [sic] over the earth.”⁴¹

Frankfort said the Goddess was supreme in Mesopotamia “because the source of all life is seen in the female.” Saggs said she was “the central figure in Neolithic religion.”⁴² In Egypt, she was “the Being eternal and infinite, the creative and ruling power of heaven, earth, and the underworld, and of every creature and thing in them. . . . Mother-goddess, lady of heaven, queen of the gods . . . who raised up Tem in primeval time, who existed when nothing else had being, and who created that which exists . . . the greatest power on earth, who commandest all that is in the universe, and who preservest all the gods . . . the God-mother, giver of life. . . . All that has been, that is, and that will be.”⁴³

Besides creating the world and everything in it, the Goddess created the civilized arts: agriculture, building, weaving, potting, writing, poetry, music, the graphic arts, calendars, and mathematics. These seem to have developed mostly in the hands of women as outgrowths of the maternal nest-building, communication, and play behavior. “Woman was the creator of the primordial elements of civilization. . . . [A]ll the richer perceptions and interpretations that color the actualities of life, all art, all poetic sentiment, are irradiations of those extra-individualistic, racial interests which are represented by the reproductive instincts, and are the dominant interests of the female. They have their source in the race-regarding feminine impulses.”⁴⁴

Hindu scriptures say the Goddess invented alphabets, pictographs, mandalas and other magical signs, hence her title of Samjna (sign, name, image). The Brahmavaivarta Purana says under another of her titles, Savitri, the Goddess gave birth to the Vedas, the rhythms of the Ragas, day and night, the year, the month, the seasons, the inch, the second, and all other units of measurement; also logic, grammar, the days of the week, Time, Death, Nourishment, Memory, Victory, religious rituals, the trinity of aeons, and all the gods.⁴⁵

As Great Mother Kali Ma, she wore on her necklace of skulls the sacred Sanskrit letters, which she invented, and invested with such magic power that she could create things simply by pronouncing their names in this language.⁴⁶ The notion led to the Neoplatonic, and later Christian, concept of the Creative Word of Logos.

Sanskrit matra, like the Greek meter, meant both “mother” and “measurement.” Mathematics is, by derivation, “mother-wisdom.” Root words for motherhood produced many words for calculation: metric, mensuration, mete, mens, mark, mentality; geo-metry, tri-gono-metry, hydro-metry, etc. Women did temporal and spatial calculations for so long that, according to the Vagu Purana, men once thought women were able to give birth because they had superior skill in measuring and figuring. Men imagined that if they could master these feminine skills, they could give birth, too.” Male ancestors” told one another that if they could only learn to measure the earth, they would “happily create progeny.”⁴⁷

In the Middle East also, numbers and letters were inventions of the Goddess and the special concern of her priestesses. Ashurbanipal proudly declared that he was the first Babylonian king to learn “the noble art of tablet-writing,” which belonged to the special scribes called maryanu.⁴⁸ A similar Egyptian word for a scribe was Maryen or Mahir, “great one” or “mother.”⁴⁹ No one was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies in Babylon's municipal temple except women who had given birth; thus it seems likely that the maryanu were originally mothers, dedicated to the Semitic Goddess Mari-Anna, otherwise known as Ishtar.⁵⁰ Among the Hittites, priestesses known as Elderly Women taught the art of writing, kept records, advised kings, and practiced medicine.⁵¹ The Triple Goddess of Fate was incarnate in three Gulses or “writers,” corresponding to the Germanic Fates called Die Schreiberinnen, the Writing-Women, and the Roman mother of destiny Fata Scribunda, “the Fate who writes.”⁵²

In pre-Hellenic Greece the alphabet was attributed to the original three Muses, who were identical with the Fates or Graeae, eponymous mothers of Greek tribes. The Latin alphabet was created by the archaic Goddess Carmenta, mother of carmens or “charms.” Or, according to Isidore of Seville, the alphabet was created by the Moon-goddess Io under her Egyptian name of Isis.⁵³

Egyptians revered the Goddess as measurer of time, mistress of the house of books, mistress of the house of architects.⁵⁴ As foundress of the science of architecture she was named Seshat, “Lady of the Builder's Measure.” She built “the abode of a king in the next world,” a pyramid. She also created the Golden Calf, Horus, familiar in the Bible as the idol worshipped by Aaron and the Israelites.⁵⁵

Ancient beliefs linking motherhood with superior intelligence, reasoning power, and magical knowledge made it hard for men to oppose the matriarchate, even when they discovered paternity and personified it in gods. Fathers' claim to children's respect seemed relatively trivial by comparison with the mothers' gestation, birth-giving, nursing, supporting, and daily teaching. The Book of Maccabees said a mother's sympathy with her children is deeper than a father's.⁵⁶ The Mahanirvanatantra said, “Mother is superior to father on account of her bearing and also nourishing the child.”⁵⁷ Menander wrote, “A mother loves her child more than a father does.”⁵⁸ Therefore the child is more hers than his; as the old Irish proverb put it, “To every cow belongs her calf.”⁵⁹ The Laws of Manu stated that “A spiritual teacher exceeds a worldly teacher ten times, father exceeds a spiritual teacher one hundred times, but a mother exceeds one thousand times a father's claim to honor on the part of a child and as its educator.”⁶⁰

There may have been a real biological advantage underlying ancient views of the female's superior intelligence. As mothers or potential mothers, female mammals have more need of naturally responsive alertness than males. “Girls' more mature skills enable them to attend to stimuli, especially from other people, more swiftly and accurately than boys. Girls are better at analyzing and anticipating environmental demands; in addition, they have greater verbal facility. . . . The perceptual, cognitive, and verbal skills which for unknown reasons are more characteristic of girls enable them to analyze and anticipate adult demands.”⁶¹ As a modern woman said, “After the birth of children—that enormous thing you do—everything else seems kind of a breeze. But so many of us lock the doors of the mind. We never bother to penetrate below the surface of that bottomless sea of resources that may be nature's gift to women.”⁶²

For a long time men feared to oppose women because they were convinced women were more closely allied with the forces of nature. West African tribesmen testified that “women were more powerful than men, for to them alone the mysteries of the gods and of secret things were known.” Women founded the magical Egbo society, but after men learned the secret rites, they kept women from participating any more. In Queensland also, once men learned magic, they forbade women to practice, on the ground that women had too much natural aptitude for it.⁶³

In northern Europe, the Vanir or Elder Gods, led by Mother Earth and the Goddess Freya, were overthrown by new patriarchal deities from Asia, the Aesir led by Father Odin. In the Aegean, followers of Father Zeus fought the pre-Hellenic worshippers of Mother Rhea or Hera. In Babylon, worshippers of Marduk rebelled against the primal mother Tiamat, whose own son killed her to take over her world-creating function. In Mexico, the legendary leader of the Aztecs overthrew his sister Malinalxochitl, former ruler of men and beasts, afterward described as “a bad witch.”⁶⁴

In Australia, the Goddess named Marm (Mother) was diabolized by men who resented the advantages she bestowed on women. She made women in her own image, and gave them “magic fruit” (offspring) that she denied to men.⁶⁵ In Malekula, men frankly admitted that their religious rites were stolen from the women, who invented them but ceased to practice them.⁶⁶ Tierra del Fuegan men said women used to rule the world by witchcraft, and all religious mysteries belonged to their Goddess, the moon.⁶⁷ Men adopted the cult of the sun god, and under his leadership they murdered all the adult women of the tribe, leaving only immature girls not yet initiated.⁶⁸

A transparently mendacious Iatmul legend said women invented sacred objects and secrets of magic, then “gave” these things to men, and “asked” the men to murder them so no woman would have the secrets anymore.⁶⁹ Many similar examples show that the defeat of the matriarchate was mythologized as a violent attack of men upon women. Such myths of leadership forcibly wrested from women occur throughout the world and cannot be overlooked.⁷⁰ As Engels noted, “The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historical downfall of the female sex.”⁷¹

In some ways, it may have meant the downfall of all humanity from a basically peaceful social order to a hierarchical structure established and maintained by aggression. Patriarchal societies insisted on pecking orders; matriarchal ones tended to be more egalitarian.⁷² Neolithic village cultures with their matriarchal family-based governments were cooperative, unwarlike, and nonviolent. Their lack of destructiveness has been attributed to the life-loving spirit of affirmation that scholars find at the core of most matriarchal societies.⁷³

The same spirit of affirmation has been found in matriarchal or semi-matriarchal societies of the recent past. American Indians who worshipped the female principle, and were ruled by tribal chiefs elected by the real leaders, called Female Governesses, surprised Christian missionaries with behavior more “Christian” than that of white men. A missionary said, “What is extremely surprising in men whose external appearance is wholly barbarous, is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized countries.” Indian women were known as the Life of the Nation, and Mistresses of the Soil.⁷⁴ In answer to a white questioner who couldn't understand the Indian reverence for women, one Indian man said, “Of course the men follow the wishes of the women; they are our mothers.”⁷⁵

Even aggressive savages like the Dobu islanders regarded motherhood as the only possible antidote to warfare. Mutual trust was maintained exclusively among members of a matrilineal kinship group known as “mother's milk.”⁷⁶ Societies where women set the standards of behavior and morality were found generally kinder than male-dominated societies. Children grew up without harsh punishments, expecting kindness from others as a matter of course and consequently developing into nonhostile, nonviolent adults. Envy, greed, and exploitiveness were minimal; depression almost unknown; crime almost unheard-of. People were generally good-humored, trustful, and confident. Women were treated as the equals of men. Attitudes toward sexuality tended to be positive and permissive. People seemed to feel sure Mother Nature would provide for their needs, even in cases where a harsh environment demanded hard work for the sake of survival.⁷⁷

Societies dominated by men tended to introduce cruel punishments, hostility toward the young, formalized rivalry, and sadistic elements replacing easy, affectionate sexuality. Some of this may have been biologically based. Among animals, females care for the young, males fight for mates, and care only for themselves. The primitive human female “nourished, reared and protected the more feeble than herself, while her mate, a terrible savage, knew only how to pursue and kill.”⁷⁸

When new-born humanity was learning to stand upright, it depended much on its mother and stood close to her protecting side. Then women were goddesses, they conducted divine worship, women's voice was heard in council, she was loved and revered and genealogies were reckoned through her. What broke into this feminine Elysium and robbed it of liberty and happiness? The male of the species. As the race grew older, rationality flourished at the expense of moral sense. . . . Man, unmindful of the mother's contributions to racial uplift and welfare, thought only of bending every energy and forcing tribute from everything and every one who could elevate himself and give him dominating power. . . . There's no more reason for not killing humans who oppose you than for sparing the lives of mosquitoes, in the mind of a man whose self-seeking emotions are permitted to run rampant. And the average “normal” male's personality balance tends definitely in the same direction.⁷⁹

Bachofen said, “The idea of motherhood produces a sense of universal fraternity among all men, which dies with the development of paternity.” Ancient societies believed that those related by mother-blood shared a common soul, so no member of the group could hurt another without doing injury to himself. Egyptians and other folk carefully distinguished between children of the same mother and children of the same father; the former were the “real” siblings, constrained to care for each other as for their own selves. As Telemachus remarked, a person must be told who his father is; the mother is the parent every child knows “of himself.”⁸⁰

Psychologists agree that the images of Mother and Father affect the psyche in different ways. Feelings of connectedness are more closely associated with the mother; feelings of dissociation or alienation with the father. In spiritual terms, outer and inner worlds of nature and the self were not separated under a matriarchal order, whereas patriarchy insisted on their absolute severance.⁸¹

Past societies dreaded even a temporary loss of the mother image. Apuleius spoke of the period when the Goddess departed from the world for her season of self-renewal: “There has been no pleasure, no joy, no merriment anywhere, but all things lie in rude unkempt neglect; wedlock and true friendship and parents' love for their children have vanished from the earth; there is one vast disorder, one hateful loathing and foul disregard of all the bonds of love.”⁸² When the Goddess permanently disappeared from theological imagery, the sense of alienation became universal:

The earlier, neolithic order was of the female above the male, the cosmic mother above the father . . . with the progressive devaluation of the mother-goddess in favor of the father, which everywhere accompanied the maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy. . . . A sense of essential separation from the supreme value symbol became in time the characteristic religious sentiment of the entire Near East.⁸³

G.R. Taylor's classification of “matrist” and “patrist” societies showed guilt, negativism, and fear in the latter, as opposed to a more confident outlook in the former. Matrist societies were typified by: (1) permissive attitude toward sex; (2) freedom for women; (3) high feminine status; (4) welfare more valued than chastity; (5) democratic political principles; (6) progressive views; (7) spontaneity, exhibition; (8) sex differences minimized; (9) hedonism, pleasure welcomed; (10) mother worship. Patrist societies displayed opposite tendencies: (1) restrictive attitude toward sex; (2) restriction of women; (3) women seen as inferior, sinful; (4) chastity more valued than welfare; (5) authoritarian politics; (6) conservative, against innovation; (7) inhibition, fear of spontaneity; (8) sex differences maximized, e.g. in dress; (9) fear of pleasure, ascetic self-denial; (10) father worship.⁸⁴

Worshippers of the Great Mother celebrated rites of “love,” including sexual love, which was often taken as a symbol for all loves, expressed in gestures and acts similar to those of mother-child behavior: cuddling, breast-sucking, and so on. Conversely, votaries of the Father were ordered to “fear” him (Deuteronomy 6:13). St. Paul declared that those who had no fear of God were automatically sinners (Romans 3:18). Christianity gave its followers much to fear, including one of the most sadistic hells ever devised by the human imagination, and an implacable God who consigned “most” human beings to that hell forever, according to his theologians. But the primitive Mother gave comfort and reassurance. Eskimo shamans still call her the soul of the universe, never seen, but her voice can be heard: “a gentle voice, like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid. What it says is ‘Be not afraid of the universe.'”⁸⁵

Montagu says the mother image is still used to alleviate terror. “When the male's defenses are down, when he is in extremis, when he is dying, his last, like his first word, is likely to be ‘mother,' in a resurgence of his feeling for the mother he has never repudiated, but from whom he had been forced, at the overt level, to disengage himself.”⁸⁶ Eugene O'Neill expressed the secret longing in a dramatic speech:

The mistake began when God was created in a male image. . . . That makes life so perverted, and death so unnatural. We should have imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God the Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we would know that our life's rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth. And we would feel that death meant reunion with Her, a passing back into her substance, blood of Her blood again, peace of Her peace! Now wouldn't that be more logical and satisfying than having God a male whose chest thunders with egotism and is too hard for tired heads and thoroughly comfortless?⁸⁷

The Kagaba Indians expressed the same sentiments in a less sophisticated but equally forceful song describing their Goddess:

The Mother of Songs, the mother of our whole seed, bore us in the beginning. She is the mother of all races of men and the mother of all tribes. She is the mother of thunder, the mother of the rivers, the mother of trees and of all kinds of things. She is the mother of songs and dances. She is the mother of the older brother stones. She is the mother of the grain and the mother of all things. . . . She is the mother of the dance paraphernalia and of all temples, and the only mother we have. She is the mother of the animals, the only one, and the mother of the Milky Way. It was the mother herself who began to baptize. She gave us the limestone coca dish. She is the mother of the rain, the only one we have. She alone is the mother of things, she alone. And the mother has left a memory in all the temples. With her sons, the saviors, she left songs and dances as a reminder.⁸⁸

Psychologists often regard the universal myth of the Golden Age as a symbol of childhood. Yet when Plato wrote of the Golden Age, he apparently took some details from matriarchal societies familiar to the Greeks as either contemporary or belonging to the recent past. He said there was “no wildness nor eating of each other, nor any war, nor revolt amongst them. . . . There were no governments nor separate possessions of women and children. For all men rose again from the earth remembering nothing of their past. And such things as private property and families did not exist.”⁸⁹ This was regarded as a figment of Plato's imagination until research discovered the pre-urban community of the Neolithic cultivator:

There was no ruling class to exploit the villagers, no compulsion to work for a surplus the local community was not allowed to consume, no taste for idle luxury, no jealous claim to private property, no exorbitant desire for power, no institutional war. Though scholars have long contemptuously dismissed the “myth of the Golden Age,” it is their scholarship, rather than the myth, that must now be questioned.

Such a society had indeed come into existence at the end of the last Ice Age, if not before, when the long process of domestication had come to a head in the establishment of small, stable communities with an abundant and varied food supply: communities whose capacity to produce a surplus of storable grain gave security and adequate nurture to the young. The rise in vitality was enhanced by vivid biological insight.⁹⁰

At Catal Huyuk, in what is now southern Turkey, a matriarchal community of the 7th millennium B.C., there was no evidence of chieftainship or rivalry, though there were many priestesses. Children were buried in the tombs of their mothers. Art and handicrafts flourished, producing obsidian mirrors, copper and lead jewelry and tools, woollen textiles, artistically carved wooden vessels. For 1500 years—seven times as long as the existence of the United States of America—the community seemed free of massacre or war. Though many hundreds of skeletons have been found, none showed any sign of violent death.⁹¹

Matriarchal Sumeria dominated the Fertile Crescent for 3000 years with virtually no evidence of warfare.⁹² Neolithic foundations of such peaceful societies have been unearthed at Hassuna, Tell Halaf, Samarra, and Ubaid—where there were no gods. Holy icons showed only naked women holding or nursing infants.⁹³ Patriarchal religions gradually ousted the ancient matriarchies, chiefly by violence; but some scholars have suggested that this revolution was neither satisfactory nor final. The Great Mother, ostensibly overthrown by her sons, is an ineradicable archetype dwelling somewhere in the psyche of every human being born of woman—which means, of course, every human being. The more emphatically she is denied, the more threatening her images appear.⁹⁴ Ancient myths were not merely allegorizing when they spoke of the furious wrath of a neglected deity.

Even scholars refrain from noticing the everyday words for ancestry that clearly indicated matrilineal descent: “forebears,” for example, a short form of “fore-bearers.” Ancestry is called extraction, an obvious reference to what one came out of; similarly descent is the “descending” from the womb. From the beginning, it was maternal spirit that fostered cooperation and togetherness in work or worship.

The maternal totemic clan was by far the most successful form that human association has assumed—it may indeed be said that it has been the only successful one. . . . Political organizations, religious theocracies, states, nations, have endeavored in vain to achieve real and complete social solidarity. They are artificial structures; social humanity has never succeeded in adequately replacing the primitive bond to which it owes its existence.⁹⁵

Medieval ballads depict a pagan world where mothers were the ultimate authority in every household. Sons appealed to mothers, not fathers, in times of crisis, as the ballad-hero Johnie Cock asked the help of his mother, and through her, of the Goddess. Christianity however was devoted to destruction of the Goddess and her temples (Acts 19:27). Clement of Alexandria quoted Christ; “I have come to destroy the works of the female.”⁹⁶ Christ ordered his followers to renounce their families (Luke 14:26) and said to his own mother, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2:4). Fathers of the church wrote diatribes against motherhood.⁹⁷ Western religion consequently became an exercise in male-dominated power-seeking.⁹⁸

Many male scholars still try to pretend there never was a Goddess, or if there was, she was only a “cult” figure vaguely associated with sexual promiscuity and/or “fertility.” It is not recognized that religious feeling for the Mother was, if anything, much deeper and more passionate than feelings for a divine patriarch. Deities of both sexes are styled “gods.” Egyptian sacred art showing divine persons with obvious dangling breasts, is described as a picture of “gods.”⁹⁹ Scholars carefully avoid quoting ancient texts that say the Primordial Being was a Creatress, not a Creator. Though she was the central unifying concept of ancient civilizations, the Great Mother isn't mentioned in ancient-history texts. Scholars' violent denial of the evidence for the prehistoric matriarchate causes one to suspect that their prejudices often blind their eyes, as if a patriarchal culture prevents its members from comprehending any foreign viewpoint.¹⁰⁰

Freud's ignorance of feminine values left him incapable of understanding humanity's most basic bonds. He gave sexuality a primary significance that probably should have been relegated to the mother-child bond instead. Freud admitted that thirty years of practice never taught him what women really want—because, of course, he had already convinced himself that what every woman wanted was a penis.¹⁰¹ He even went so far as to imagine that a mother loved her child only because it was, for her, a penis-substitute.

The reason for Freud's failure of insight here should by now be plain: in his analysis of the development of the self, he left out of account the positive influence of the other member of the family, the mother. Overemphasizing, if anything, the rule of the father, the Jovean, power-seeking, repressive, organizing element in the personality, he played down the function of the mother, with her life-bestowing gifts, her relaxing and yielding attitudes, her life-transmitting and life-nurturing functions: the mother's sympathy and responsiveness, her giving of the breast to her infant, her special effort to establish an I-and-thou intimacy through language, her endless ways of expressing love.¹⁰²

Freudian phallocentrism added to Christian devaluation of the female tended to perpetuate the common pattern of troubled families, as described by a social worker: “There's always a husband who's withholding his emotional support and a wife who's unhappy, whose feeling of personal worth has been damaged.”¹⁰³ Mumford points out that devaluation of motherhood leaves children of both sexes cut off from a vital experience, the essential basis of all future commitments to cooperative functioning in the social context. “In repressing the mothering and nurturing impulses, in the personality, the scientist has also lost the normal parental concern for the future life it cherishes. One hardly knows whether to characterize this attitude as innocence or fatalism; it certainly indicates a failure to reach maturity.”¹⁰⁴

Gilder theorizes that few men can attain psychological maturity at all without a vital connection with the sense of futurity through intimate association with a woman. She has, “as part of her very sexuality, a sense of the future: a sense of evolution and growth, a notion of deferring pleasures for future gains, a sense of the phases and seasons of life, a devotion to the value of the individual human being. These sentiments are the very source of human morality.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed these are precisely the sentiments embodied in matriarchal religions' cyclic, future-oriented view of life. Such religions were free of the neurotic quest for indefinable “meaning” in life, since they never assumed that life would be required to justify itself. They were also generally free of the anxiety, guilt, and sense of sin imposed by patriarchal religions, evolved by males made insecure from earliest childhood by a social order based on male intimidation and dominance.

Might-is-right morality was typical of the linear, hierarchical masculine theology. Feminine morality seems to have been both more subtle and more affirmative, fostering the same spirit of close cooperation that enabled humanity to become civilized in the first place.

Despite the basic male need to take part in feminine values, the patriarchal society seems to be organized the other way: women are forced to attain a sense of personal worth by taking part in masculine values. Instead of aspiring happily to the worthy estate of motherhood, many women are taught to think it unworthy while they are still in the “bosom” of the patriarchal family:

The upwardly mobile career of every go-getting woman seems to have been her father's gift to her. As a sop to his male guilt, Daddy may have goaded daughter to achievements he willfully denied his wife; or as a sop to his male vanity, he may have engendered in her such hurtful feelings of female worthlessness that only the adoption of a male-style existence could appease. But always, it seems, daughter has been vicariously wounded by damage the maternal ego suffered at paternal hands. She may feel compassion for her mother's plight, or contempt that “Mama let Papa get away with it,” or a mixture of both emotions, but she invariably grows up with an almost pathologic horror of “living out Mom's life all over again.”¹⁰⁶

Briffault and other scholars believed devaluation of the maternal role inflicted injury on males as well as females: “Men have much more of the ‘patriarchal theory' to unlearn. Women have to learn that all racial ideals that are worth while are ultimately identical with their own elemental instincts, and are the outcome of them. . . . The compromises that govern the relations between the sexes are those that condition all true human values. . . . it is, as of old, the part of the Vestal Mothers to tend the Sacred Fires. Upon women falls the task not only of throwing off their economic dependence, but of rescuing from the like thraldom the deepest realities of which they were the first mothers.”¹⁰⁷

Even Buddha reached back to basic maternal imagery in his Discourse on Universal Love: “As a mother, even at the risk of her own life, protects and loves her child, her only child, so let a man cultivate love without measure toward the whole world, above, below, and around, unstinted, unmixed with any feeling of differing or opposing interests. . . . This state of mind is the best in the world.”¹⁰⁸ But no man could achieve it without Motherhood as a model.

1. Briffault 1, 191.  2. Neumann, A.C.U., 11. 3. Frazer, G.B., 45­46, 138.

4. Briffault 2, 445­47. 5. Stone, 11. 6. Mead, 102. 7. Campbell, P.M., 315, 320­21.

8. Briffault 1, 275, 288, 300. 9. Neumann, G.M., 94. 10. Graves, G. M. 1, 11.

11. Lederer, 87. 12. Maspero, 3. 13. Budge, D.N., 20. 14. Hatley, 188.

15. Briffault 3, 42. 16. Eman, 83. 17. Budge, G.E. 1, 52, 93. 18. Hartley, 197.

19. Briffault 1, 374. 20. Jung & Kerenyi, 141­42. 21. Hartley, 201­3.

22. Stone, 43, 46. 23. Larousse, 83. 24. Briffault 1, 245, 426. 25. Dumézil, 68.

26. M. Harris, 80. 27. Briffault 1, 422, 427. 28. Dumézil, 296.

29. Thomson, 244. 30. Briffault 1, 414, 419. 31. de Riencourt, 170.

32. Briffault 3, 23. 33. Larousse, 403. 34. Briffault 1, 366. 35. Graves, G.M. 1, 97.

36. Larousse,85. 37. Stone, 47. 38. Graves, G.M. 1, 11. 39. Avalon, 409.

40. Stone, 26. 41. Cormont, A.R.G.R., 64. 42. Stone, 15, 26.

43. Budge, G.E. 1, 93, 213­14, 459, 463; Maspero, 286­87; Larousse, 37.

44. Briffault 1, 432; 2, 442. 45. O'Flaherty, 65, 352, 49. 46. Graves, W.G., 250.

47. O'Flaherty, 48. Assy. & Bab. Lit., 387. 49. Erman, 227-30.

50. Briffault 2, 515. 51. Stone, 131. 52. Gaster, 764. 53. Graves, W.G., 240, 248.

54. Larousse, 28. 55. Budge, G.E. 1, 426. 56. Forgotten Books, 194.

57. Mahanirvanatantra, 161. 58. Bachofen, 133, 59. 59. Brewster, 280.

60. Hauswirth, 30. 61. Gormick & Moran, 226. 62. Gittelson, 26.

63. Briffault 2, 545, 551­52. 64. F. Huxley, 215. 65. Hallet, 183.

66. F. Huxley, 207. 67. de Riencourt, 20. 68. Neumann, G.M., 290.

69. Mead, 94. 70. Campbell, P.M., 318. 71. Beard, 113. 72. Daly, 94.

73. Fromm, 158. 74. Briffault 2, 497; 1, 316­17. 75. Hartley, 142.

76. Fromm, 174. 77. Fromm, 168. 78. Briffault 1, 432. 79. Beard, 40­41, 55­56.

80. Bachofen, 80, 133. 81. Campbell, Oc.M., 70, 82. Neumann, A.P., 31.

83. Mumford, 242­43. 84. Bullough, 13­14. 85. Campbell, M.T.L.B., 206.

86. Montagu, T., 273. 87. O'Neill, Strange Interlude. 88. Neumann, G.M., 85.

89. Harrison, J.E., 496. 90. Mumford, 242­43. 91. Fromm, 155. 92. Hays, 63.

93. Encyc. Brit., “Babylonia and Assyria.” 94. Campbell, OcM., 86, 153.

95. Briffault 2, 493­94. 96. Stone, 194. 97. Simons, 99. 98. Augstein, 200.

99. Larousse, 13, 36. 100. Daly, 94. 101. Lederer, 238. 102. Mumford, 341.

103. Gittelson, 87. 104. Mumford, 469, 347­48. 105. Gilder, 144­52.

106. Gittelson, 66. 107. Briffault 3, 519­20. 108. Ross, 123.