FROM MOTHER GODDESS TO DISHWASHER
                                   by Dena Justin
                      (Natural History, February 1973, Vol 82:2)


Sometimes she appears as Cinderella's cruel stepmother, sometimes as Hansel and 
Gretel's scheming witch or the adulteress-queen of the Arabian Nights or the 
jealous co-wife in an African folktale. While the nuances of her role vary, her 
identity remains the same. The surrogate mother, folklore's formulaic agent of 
evil, shares a common lineage with Eve. She is a debased manifestation of the 
Great Mother Goddess at whose altars the ancient world once knelt.

In perpetuating the calculated distortion by males of the female principle, 
Cinderella's stepmother is, I suggest, a carefully programmed conception in a 
manipulative process that began thousands of years ago with the advent of trade 
and bronze weaponry, urbanization and the dynamic state. Or, as mythology tells 
it, with the triumph of the patriarchal deities of the sky cults over the 
matriarchal deities of the earth cults. Today's feminist manifestos inevitably 
fall upon ears made deaf by what may be the oldest and most effective propaganda 
campaign in human history, a campaign transmitted across the eons through the 
powerful mass media of mythology, cosmology, and folklore. The Brothers Grimm, 
Andrew Lang, the anonymous compilers of the Arabian Nights, represent only the 
latter-day purveyors of the message that successfully restructured the fabric of 
our civilization and diminished women to a "second sex"--their identities shaped 
and their roles defined by the social and economic needs of men.

The earth as Mother, the womb from which all living things are born and to which 
all return at death, was perhaps the earliest representation of the divine in 
protohistoric religions. The Great Mother Goddess, a more powerful incarnation 
of the female principle as lifeforce, reigned over the sky, earth, and 
underworld, and revealed herself to humankind in the ever renewing productivity 
of the earth and the ever recurring rhythms of the new, full, and waning moon. 
Her subordinate male consort was the young god, alternately her son and her 
lover, who died with the harvest and was reborn with the spring seed. And woman, 
who shared the prodigious magic of procreation and nurture, whose menstrual 
cycle mysteriously coincided with the lunar cycle, was the terrestrial link 
in this cosmic orbit of fertility.

How old is the Great Mother Goddess, and the religious revolution that thrust 
her into the background and subjugated her sex? Existing mythologies are of 
comparatively recent vintage. Whatever information they yield concerning the 
former goddess comes to us carefully siphoned by the male victors. Archeology 
digs deeper-and with less bias. Nude female figurines (the Venus of Willendoff, 
ca. 25,000 B.C., is the best-known example) appear to have been the earliest 
cult objects of humankind. These fertility statuettes with pendulous breasts and 
bulbous loins, carved out of bone, stone, or the ivory tusk of the mammoth, have 
been found in widely scattered sites of the Aurignacian period. Uncensored, they 
tell us that for our Paleolithic ancestors, the generative force of the universe 
focused in the female body.

Yet even among these earliest races of our species, Joseph Campbell notes the 
evidence of a shift "from the vagina to the phallus, and perhaps too from an 
essentially plant oriented to a purely animal-oriented mythology." At the rock 
shelter of Laussel, in southern France, and in Paleolithic camps from northern 
Spain to southeast Siberia, nude female figures of obese proportions, dating 
from about 30,000 B.C., have been found shattered beyond restoration. By the 
close of the Aurignacian, the many fertility statuettes enigmatically disappear 
from the European strata, while the hunting murals in the men's "temple caves" 
grow ever more predominant, reaching their highest development about 20,000 
B.C., in the Magdalenian age. Campbell suggests a deliberate design by men to 
break the "magical" power of women by a "consciously contrived mythology"--a 
preliminary battle in what was to become a continuing war of the sexes. It may 
be," he concludes, "that the main idea has been not so much to honor God as to 
simplify life by keeping women in the kitchen."

Worship of the Great Mother Goddess peaked during Neolithic times with the 
development of agriculture by women. This newly found capability of influencing 
the earth's fertility and insuring the rebirth of the seed gave woman a dominant 
position in the economic and social structure of early agricultural societies. 
As cult priestess of the Great Mother Goddess, she possessed the powerful 
knowledge of magic, rainmaking, and prophecy.

It is remarkable how many legends survive among Preliterate cultures of, an 
earlier matriarchal period and a violent uprising by men in which they usurped 
female authority Rupture from the mother, both biological and religious, 
constitutes a basic motif in male puberty rites. Among the Papuans of New 
Guinea, the initiant treads over his mother's belly to symbolize the severance. 
Although in some societies initiation rites entail no more than the means to 
clan membership, in others, the ordeals of such rites often represent a 
spiritual journey into a higher state of being. To achieve his integration into 
the community of men, the novice must undergo ritual death in the maternal 
"profane universe" and be reborn into the paternal "sacred universe." This 
mystic dichotomy-the maternal as profane and the paternal as sacred-follows an 
archaic and worldwide pattern. In the enactment of the rites, the adolescent 
male is often subjected to homosexual practices by his elders, perhaps to 
condition him to scorn women and fear the female genitalia, depicted as the 
"toothed vagina." There are societies, however, where homosexuality occurs 
because women are considered sacred and inviolable.

Amyth of the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego provides an illuminating preface to 
the rites. In the beginning the sorceress moon woman, Kra, taught women to 
dominate men through terror, transforming themselves into spirits by the use of 
masks. But the sun man, Kran, learned the secret and revealed it to the men. 
They promptly killed the women, sparing only the girls, and to legitimatize 
their seizure of power, they took over the masks and the magic. According to Leo 
Frobenius, the nineteenth-century anthropologist, this type of insurrection 
underlies the formation of all male secret societies in pre- literate cultures: 
the societies of the masks were an outgrowth of matriarchy, organized by men to 
maintain their control.

Literate societies have been more cryptic in dealing with the proto-historic 
struggle between the sexes. They have either cloaked it in mythological imagery 
or ignored it. The universe begins from a tension of moral opposites, defined by 
Pythagoras as the good principle, which created order, light, and man, and the 
evil principle, which created chaos, darkness, and woman. The form that this 
misogynist doctrine takes in mythology and scriptural writings manifests a 
systematic division into three parts.

First, there is the myth of the male as sole genitor, which would appear to bear 
out Eric Fromm's contention that the antagonism between men and women arose from 
pregnancy-envy, not penis-envy. To oust women from their position of power and 
esteem, it was not enough for the paternal gods to depose the Great Mother 
Goddess throughout her vast domain, to take over her shrines, to shatter her 
images, to fragment her prerogatives. These were only peripheral elements of her 
hold on her worshipers. As bearer and nurturer of progeny, woman's focal role in 
family, tribe, and race survival was obvious. In order to achieve religious, 
social, and economic supremacy, man had to strike at the source of her 
preeminence, 6r biological role in procreation.

Mary Jane Shafey has recently reported on "the best-kept secret in 'the history 
of biology": the recognition in the 1940s that all mammalian embryos are 
initially female, and that the penis is an enlarged clitoris. Mythologically 
speaking, the ancients scooped our modem-day biologists by unknown thousands of 
years in their recognition of the female principle as the primal creative 
force. And they too buried the truth, restructuring the myths to accommodate 
male ideology.

Both the old and the revised theory of creation, disavowing the finale 
principle, appear first in Sumer, the Mesopotamian matrix of culture from 3500 
to 1750 B.C. Samuel Noah Kramer affirms that the Sumerians regarded the primeval 
sea as "a kind of first cause and prime mover." From his studies of the 
cuneiform texts, he has established that the Sumerians considered Nammu, the 
goddess of the primeval sea, as the primal generative force of the universe, the 
cosmic mother who gave birth to the male An, representing heaven, and the female 
Ki, representing earth. They in turn parented Enlil, the air god, who separated 
the two and, uniting with his mother, completed the organization of the world.

The Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, dating from the early part of the 
second millennium B.C., and like most Mesopotamian myths derived from Sumerian 
prototypes, shows significant alterations. The poem casts Marduk, the Babylonian 
Enlil, as the primordial genitor who brings forth the universe and all it 
encompasses by the divine force of his word. But the creation is, in actuality, 
a recreation, which takes place only after a cosmic battle between Order and 
Chaos. The victorious Marduk-Enlil represents Order. The vanquished Tiamat, the 
Babylonian Nammu, goddess of the primeval sea, incarnates Chaos. Marduk fashions 
the new heaven and earth out of Tiamat's severed body.

From Egypt's earliest documents, written about 3000 B.C., Rudolph Anthes has 
concluded that in prehistoric times the Egyptians also conceived the primeval 
sea as the ultimate generative principle. Out of the sea arose the primeval 
earth hill, a symbol of the womb, akin to the Greek omphalos stone, the sacred 
navel. A female divinity was envisaged as the cow in the primordial waters, and 
eventually identified in historic times with Hathor, the cowgoddess. Egyptian 
art depicts Hathor as the "waters of the sky," in the form of a cow: her body 
the starry firmament, her legs the four quarters of the horizon. Her role as 
primal creator, however, is appropriated by the god Atum, who, rising out of the 
earth hill, mythically initiates the divine genealogy by masturbation. When 
Memphis was established as capitol of Upper and Lower Egypt during the First 
Dynasty, the Memphite theologians proclaimed their male patron-god, Ptah, the 
first principle. Ptah conceived the universe and all therein by the divine force 
of his heart and tongue, the archaic Egyptian equivalents for mind and speech.

When we reach the Old Testament, the female principle has disappeared from the 
genesis of the universe. Indeed, woman herself becomes a supplement to the male 
issue. God fashions Eve, the Mother of All Living, from Adam's rib. Even her 
name attests to the demeaning nature of her origin. The Old Testament says " ... 
she shall be called woman, because she was taken from man - She is a lesser 
being, "a misbegotten female ... made in the image of man, not God," declares 
Thomas Aquinas.

Hesiod, the Greek mythographer, relates that in the beginning there was Chaos, 
and then wide-bosomed Gaia, Earth, came into being, the ever immovable source of 
all the gods. Nevertheless, Athene, a former Great Mother Goddess, acquiescing 
to the demands of Olympian patriarchal mythology, emerges full-grown and 
helmeted from Zeus's head. "No mother bore me for her child," she states 
unequivocally. The Greeks, who prided themselves on their devotion to 
knowledge by rational pursuit, felt constrained to buttress this blessed event 
with biological argument. Apollo, the god of reason himself, presents the 
physiological basis in Aeschylus Euimenides: "The mother of what is termed the 
child is not its parent, but only the nurse of the newly impregnated seed."

Despite a timeless and exalted tradition of matrilinear succession to the 
throne, and the high status of Egyptian women throughout antiquity, Egypt echoed 
this dogma. "They (the Egyptians) maintain that the father is the sole author of 
procreation," Diodorus Siculus writes. "The mother only supplies the fetus with 
nourishment and a place to live; and they call the trees that bear fruit 
'male' and those that do not 'female."'

Having established, through holy writ, both creation and reproduction as the 
unique endowment of the male principle, the second objective of male strategy-
the subordination of women in the social and economic spheres-would be 
comparatively simple to execute. Who shall dispute what the gods have willed? In 
Greece women were deprived of their political and social authority, not by the 
connivance of self-seeking men, but as the consequence of Olympian design. 
Athene, the "lost leader," defeats Poseidon, the sea god, for tutelary control 
of Athens, but yields to male pressure. Descent will henceforth be patrilinear, 
not interlinear. Children will no longer be called by their mother's name, but 
by their father's. Women will be disenfranchised and deprived of citizenship. 
Apollo seizes the oracle of prophecy and law-giving at Delphi from the earth-
goddess whose domain it has been since the beginning of time. Here, where the 
omphalos stone, awesome symbol of the universal Mother, marked the earth's 
center. Apollo inscribes the precept of the new order: "Keep women under rule."

In the Old Testament God informs Eve ". ... and thy desire shall be to thy 
husband, and he shall rule over thee. " Saint Paul declares the husband is the 
head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church. And Thomas Aquinas 
defines woman's subjection as the result of sin: "Therefore, it was decreed that 
she shall be under men's power." The Koran, too, states that "men are superior 
to women because of the qualities in which God has given them preeminence."

The Brahman juridical code, the Laws of Manu, proclaim that a woman may never 
act independently. In childhood she must be subject to her father, in youth to 
her husband, and when her lord has died, to her sons. "Even though her husband 
is totally devoid of virtue, or seeks pleasure elsewhere, he must nevertheless 
be worshiped as a god:' The Jain Yogi is told that women cannot attain Nirvana 
because they are incapable of self-control. Deceitfulness is as natural to them 
as teaching the law, to sages.

The coup de grace in this systematic decimation of the female image is the 
mythos of woman as the destroyer of mankind, prime cause of Paradise Lost, 
precipitator of the Fall, begetter of all evils. The broken texts relating the 
Sumerian flood story make it difficult to assess the role of the mother-
goddess, Nintu, or the love-goddess, Inanna, in the oldest recorded destruction 
of humankind by divine retribution. But Egyptian mythology leaves no room for 
doubt concerning Hathor's role. The solar deity, Re, king of gods and men, 
learning that the people are plotting evil, dispatches Hathor, the cow-goddess, 
to punish them. She does so thorough a job that when night falls, the blood of 
her victims has inundated the desert. Re, appalled at the prospect of humanity's 
extinction orders his servants to cover the fields with seven thousand gallons 
of beer mixed with red ocher. When Hathor returns at down to complete her grisly 
task, her heart fills with joy as she perceives the blood-red expanse. The irony 
of it-Hathor, the gentle cowgoddess who suckles the Pharaohs and nurtures the 
entire universe with her life-giving milk, whose eternal bounty overflows into 
the Milky Way. Now her reflected face grows radiant as she slakes her heinous 
thirst for human blood. The goddess becomes inebriated by the beer, according to 
plan, and reels back to heaven, her monstrous mission unaccomplished. The 
ingenuity and compassion of the father god, Re, has saved humanity.

Man's tragic expulsion from Eden, all our earthly travail, we owe to Eve. She, 
the Mother of All Living, ate the forbidden fruit, tempted Adam, and 
precipitated the Fall. It was then that they saw their nakedness, then that 
woman and sexuality became the formula for sin. Tertullian denounces her as the 
devil's doorway, one who should always go in mourning and in rags to expiate her 
wickedness. The ancient Greeks, too, invested woman with 3 the guilt for human 
suffering and misfortune. Pandora, whose name means "all gifts," the beneficent 
source of nature's largesse, is one of the earliest of the Hellenic 
earthgoddesses. Hesiod's patriarchal genealogy of the gods refashions her into a 
creature of clay, a wily seductress, who ensnares men by her beauty and brings 
gifts of sorrow to humankind. Goaded by the willful disobedience and insatiable 
curiosity that characterize women in male annals, Pandora opens the gods' 
forbidden jar and unleashes lust, plague, vice, and toil, all the manifold woes 
of human existence. Fortunately, the shrewd Olympians, knowing women, had also 
put hope into the fateful jar, Thus we mortals are not totally bereft.

The Great Mother Goddess has been toppled from her throne, her role as cosmic 
genitor effectively erased from the world's cosmogonies. The reason for woman's 
subordinate status and "natural" inferiority has been unequivocally established 
through the omniscient word of the divine or secular explanations of the divine 
intent.

Folklore provides an ingenious capstone. Sigmund Freud was the first to observe 
that the symbology of myth and dream are the same, a common language of the 
subconscious spoken by all people the world over since the dawn of history. 
Folktales employ this same symbolism, channeling the subconscious fears of 
childhood-of separation, loss of love-into the realm of nightmare. The mother 
who loves, nurtures, and protects all her children, impartially, becomes the 
cruel stepmother, the plotting queen, the wicked fairy, the varied surrogate 
mother figures subsumed by folkloric into "the witch!' It is her powers of 
sorcery that turn Prince Charming into a lion, a dove, a swan, a crab, a frog. 
The giants and dragons who bedevil hero and heroine are also creatures of the 
earth mother. The giants~ derived from the Greek gigantes, were born from Gaia, 
the earth-goddess. It was they who attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the 
Olympians.

Prince Charming, like the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the Hellenic Hercules and 
Perseus, and Maui, the Maori hero of Polynesian myth, must surmount the 
supernatural challenges of initiation in order to break the sorceress' hold and 
live happily ever after with the princess. The heroine of the fairy tale is 
sometimes the self-effacing, hearth tending Cinderella or Snow White. More 
often, she is the pampered, self-centered "little princess," who feels the 
pressure of a pea under twenty mattresses. It is she who usually lengthens the 
prince's thralldom and their mutual suffering by disobeying his orders or by 
yielding to her insatiable curiosity.

So subtly have our nerve ends been twisted against our own reason that we accept 
the resolution of the Arabian Nights as a routine happy ending. The virtuous and 
talented Scheherazade has won her reward. She will share the bed of a psychotic 
sex-killer forever after. The sultan who rapes a different maiden nightly and 
murders her at dawn has become Prince Charming.

Although the witch, incarnate or in surrogate mother disguise, remain a 
universal bogey, pejorative aspects of the wizard, her masculine counterpart, 
have vanished over the patriarchal centuries. The term wizard has acquired 
reverential status-wizard of finance wizard of diplomacy, wizard of science.

A compassionate king named Urukagina, reigning in the Sumerian city-state of 
Lagash about 2350 B.C., instituted sweeping reforms to liberate his people from 
oppression by thieving bureaucrats and venal priests. Concerning these reforms, 
Kramer states that "we find the word 'freedom' used for the first time in man's 
recorded history; the word is amargi, which, as has been recently pointed 
out by Adam Falkenstein, means literally 'return to the mother.' However, we 
still do not know why this figure of speech came to be used for freedom." 
Perhaps Urukagina remembered a time when the motive force of human society was 
matriotism, concern for the individual, for the flesh and blood family, and this 
to him symbolized freedom.