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The Women’s History of the World
Apart from their use as food, animals were hunted for their hides, bones and sinews, useful in the manufacture of clothing, tents, traps, and the numerous odds and ends of daily life. Suitable skins would have been dried and cured and softened with animal fats. Clothes could be tailored by cutting the hides with stone tools and assembling the garment by lacing with sinews through holes bored with a stone tool or bone awl . . . There is no reason to suppose that Neanderthal clothes were as primitive as many illustrators have made them out to be . . . The remains of ostrich shells on Mousterian sites in the Neger desert suggest the Neanderthal was using them as water containers, as Bushmen do today . . . what use was made of the exotic feathers? There is no need to suppose that because there is a lack of archaeological evidence for personal adornment no attention was paid to it.34
Hunting man, then, was not a fearless solitary aggressor, hero of a thousand fatal encounters. The only regular, unavoidable call on man’s aggression was as protector: infant caring and group protection are the only sexual divisions of labour that invariably obtain in primate or primitive groups. When the first men fought or killed, then, they did so not for sport, thrill or pleasure, but in mortal fear, under life-threatening attack, and fighting for survival.
Because group protection was so important a part of man’s work, it is essential to question the accepted division by sex of emotional labour, in which all tender and caring feelings are attributed to women, leaving men outside the circle of the camp-fire as great hairy brutes existing only to fight or fuck. In reality the first men, like the first women, only became human when they learned how to care for others. A skeleton discovered in the Shanidar caves of what is now Iraq tells an interesting story, according to anthropologist John Stewart:
The man . . . had been crippled by a useless right arm, which had been amputated in life just above the elbow. He was old, perhaps forty in Neanderthal years, which might be the equivalent of eighty today, and he suffered from arthritis. He was also blind in the left eye, as indicated by the bone scar tissue on the left side of the face. It is obvious that such a cripple must have been extensively helped by his companions . . . the fact that his family had both the will and ability to support a technically useless member of the society says much for their highly developed social sense.35
Whatever became of ‘man the hunter striding brutally into the future’?36 Isn’t he beginning to sound like a real human being?
This is not to say that the women of prehistory were not subjected to violence, even death. A female victim of a cannibalistic murder which took place between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago was discovered at Ehringsdorf in Germany. She was an early Neanderthaler who had been clubbed to death with a stone axe. After death her head was separated from her body, and the base of her skull opened to extract the brains. Near her lay the remains of a ten-year-old child who had died at the same time.37
Nor was prehistory any stranger to sexual violence. An extraordinary bone carving in the shape of a knife from Isturitz in the Basses-Pyrénées shows a harpooned bison graphically vomiting blood as it wallows in its death throes. On the other side of the blade a woman similarly harpooned crawls forward on her hands and knees while a male figure crouches lecherously behind her, clearly intent on sexual penetration from the rear, although the droop of her breasts and the swelling of her belly show that she is pregnant. In a bizarre definition of primitive man’s idea of foreplay, the French anthropologist G-H Luquet interprets this gruesome object as a ‘love charm’!38
But interestingly, women of primitive societies are often far less subjugated than a modern, particularly a Western, observer might expect. Far from being broken-down slaves to their men’s drives and needs, women in early societies often had a better chance of freedom, dignity and significance than many of their female descendants in more ‘advanced’ societies. The key lies in the nature of the tribe’s relation to its surroundings. Where sheer subsistence is a struggle and survival is the order of the day, women’s equality is very marked. Women in these cultures play too vital a role to be kept down or out of action, and their knowledge and experience are a cherished tribal resource. As the major food providers, holding the secret of survival, women have, and know they have, freedom, power and status.
Men in hunter/gatherer societies do not command or exploit women’s labour. They do not appropriate or control their produce, nor prevent their free movement. They exert little or no control over women’s bodies or those of their children, making no fetish of virginity or chastity, and making no demands of women’s sexual exclusivity. The common stock of the group’s knowledge is not reserved for men only, nor is female creativity repressed or denied. Today’s ‘civilized’ sisters of these ‘primitive’ women could with some justice look wistfully at this substantial array of the basic rights of women.
And there is more. Evidence from existing Stone Age cultures conclusively shows that women can take on the roles of counsellors, wise women, leaders, story-tellers, doctors, magicians and law-givers.39 Additionally, they never forfeit their own unique power based on woman’s special magic of fertility and birth, with all the mana attendant upon that. All the prehistoric evidence confirms women’s special status as women within the tribe. Among numerous representations of women performing religious rituals, a rock painting from Tanzoumaitak, Tassili N’Ajjer, shows two women dancing ceremonially among a flock of goats, richly ornamented with necklaces, bracelets and bead head-dresses, while in one of the most famous of prehistoric paintings the so-called ‘White Lady’ of the Drakensberg Mountain caves of South Africa leads men and women in a ritual tribal dance.40
From the very first, then, the role of the first women was wider, their contribution to human evolution immeasurably more significant, than has ever been accepted. Dawn woman, with her mother and grandmother, her sisters and her aunts, and even with a little help from her hunting man, managed to accomplish almost everything that subsequently made homo think himself sapiens. There is every sign that man himself recognized this. In universal images ranging from the very awakening of European consciousness to the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ myths on the other side of the world, woman commands the sacred rituals and is party to the most secret mysteries of tribal life.
For woman, with her inexplicable moon-rhythms and power of creating new life, was the most sacred mystery of the tribe. So miraculous, so powerful, she had to be more than man – more than human. As primitive man began to think symbolically, there was only one explanation. Woman was the primary symbol, the greatest entity of all – a goddess, no less.
2
The Great Goddess
The Great Goddess is the incarnation of the Feminine Self that unfolds in the history of mankind as well as in the history of every individual woman.
ERICH NEUMANN, The Great Mother
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 all tribes. She is the Mother of the thunder, of the rivers, of the trees and of the grain. She is the only Mother we have, and She alone is the Mother of all things. She alone.
SONG OF THE KAYABA INDIANS OF COLOMBIA
Around 2300 B.C., the chief priest of Sumeria composed a hymn in praise of God. This celebration of the omnipotent deity, ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’, is a song of extraordinary power and passion, and it has come down to history as the world’s first known poem. But it has another claim to world attention – both the first God and this first known priest-poet were female.
For in the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.1 And what a woman! The Sumerian inhabitants of what is now Iraq worshipped her in hymns of fearless eroticism, giving thanks for her tangled locks, her ‘lap of honey’, her rich vulva ‘like a boat of heaven’ – as well as for the natural bounty that she ‘pours forth from her womb’ so generously that every lettuce was to be honoured as ‘the Lady’s’ pubic hair. But the Supreme Being was more than a provider of carnal delights. Equally relished and revered were her war-like rages – to her first priest-poet Enheduanna she was ‘a dragon, destroying by fire and flood’ and ‘filling rivers with blood’. Enheduanna herself enjoyed temporal power as the daughter of Sargon I. But it was in her role as chief ‘moon-minister to the Most High’ that her true authority lay. For as poet, priest and prophet of Inanna, Enheduanna was the voice of a deity whose power and worship spanned the whole world and was as old as time itself, the first divinity, the Great Mother.2
The power and centrality of the first woman-God is one of the best-kept secrets of history. We think today of a number of goddesses, all with different names – Isis, Juno, Demeter – and have forgotten what, 5000 years ago, every schoolgirl knew; no matter what name or guise she took, there was only one God and her name was woman. The Roman lawyer Lucius Apuleius was skilfully recycling the whole compendium of contemporary clichés in his portrait of ‘the Goddess’ as she spoke to him in a vision:
I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead . . . Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me.3
Later ages dismissed accounts of Goddess-worship as ‘myths’ or ‘cults’. But since Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of the lost Minoan civilization at the turn of this century, stated that all the innumerable goddess-figures he had discovered represented ‘the same Great Mother . . . whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond’, modern scholarship has accepted that ‘the Great Goddess, the “Original Mother without a Spouse”, was in full control of all the mythologies’ as ‘a worldwide fact’.4
Nor was this an isolated or temporary phenomenon. Commentators stress the prominence and prevalence of the Great Mother Goddess as an essential element from the dawn of human life. From its emergence in the cradleland of the steppes of Southern Russia her worship ranged geographically throughout the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and Asia as far as China, to Africa and Australia. Historically the span is even more startling:
– 25,000–15,000 B.C. – with the so-called ‘Venus figurines’ of stone and ivory in Europe, of Nile mud in Egypt, ‘the Great Mother . . . bursts on the world of men in overwhelming wholeness and perfection’.5
– 12,000–9000 B.C. – in Dolní V
– 7000 B.C. – in Jericho, the first shrines to the Mother Goddess.
– 6000 B.C. – the village settlement of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, a site of only thirty-two acres, contained no less than forty shrines to the Goddess, in three incarnations as maiden, mother and crone.
– 5000 B.C. – a statuette from Hacilar in Turkey shows the Goddess in the act of making love.
– 4000 B.C. – the first written language appears on the temple of the Goddess under her title of Queen of Heaven at Erech (modern Uruk) in Sumeria.
– 3000 B.C. – she now appears everywhere in the known world, in statues, shrines and written records.
– 200 B.C. – tribal Celts sent their own priests of the Goddess to the great sacred festival of Cybele in Anatolia.
– A.D. 200 – at Tralles, in western Anatolia, a woman called Aurelia Aemiliana erected a carving at the temple of the Goddess, recording that she had duly performed her sexual service (sacred intercourse in honour of the Goddess) as her mother and all her female ancestors had done before her.
– A.D. 500 – Christian emperors forcibly suppressed the worship of the Goddess and closed down the last of her temples.
As this shows, the sacred status of womanhood lasted for at least 25,000 years – some commentators would push it back further still, to 40,000 or even 50,000. In fact there was never a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical.6
For as the struggle for survival eased by degrees into the far harder struggle for meaning, woman became both focus and vehicle of the first symbolic thought. The French archaeologist Leroi-Gourhan solved a riddle of the early cave paintings that had defeated anthropologists of more puritanical cultures when he revealed that the recurrent and puzzling ‘double-eye’ figure was a symbol of the vulva. Similarly in a remarkable sculpted frieze of animal and human figures at Angles-sur-l’Anglin, the female forms are represented by pure abstract triangles of women’s bodies, with the sexual triangle prominently emphasized.7
How did woman assume from the first this special status? One source of it was undoubtedly her moon-linked menstruation and the mystery of her non-fatal yet incurable emission of blood. Another was her close and unique relation to nature, for as gathering gave way to planned horticulture, women consolidated their central importance as the principal food producers. But the real key lies where the exaggerated breasts and belly of the earliest images of woman direct us to look, in the miracle of birth. Before the process of reproduction was understood, babies were simply born to women. No connection was made with intercourse (to this day Australian Aboriginals believe that spirit children dwell in pools and trees, and enter any woman at random when they wish to be born). Men, so it seemed, therefore had no part in the chain of generation. Only women could produce new life, and they were revered accordingly: all the power of nature, and over nature, was theirs.8
So arose the belief that woman was divine, not human, gifted with the most sacred and significant power in the world; and so was born the worship of the Great Mother. The birth of new life out of woman’s body was intricately related to the birth of new crops out of the body of the earth, and from the very first both were interlocked in the concept of a female divinity far more complex and powerful than conventional accounts suggest. The most ancient incarnation of the Goddess was as mother – but the number of local and national variations on this apparently straight-forward archetype in itself testifies to the maverick vigour of ‘the God-Mother of the country’ as Tibetans called her, and her refusal to submit to stereotypical sentimentalization. So in India, Mata-Devi is the traditional mother, depicted as squeezing milk for humankind from her ample breasts. But other creation myths as far apart as Assyria and Polynesia have the Great Mother delivering not a race of men and women, but one mighty once-and-for-all ‘world egg’. And in Greece at the most sacred climax of the most secret mysteries of Eleusis the Goddess (or her earthly representative) yearly ‘gave birth’ to a sheaf of corn, in an explicit link between woman’s fertility and nature’s, as the archetypal ‘Mother Earth’.
In some versions of the Great Goddess, however, her worshippers were anxious to stress that no matter how ancient she was, the feminine principle was there before her. So Gaea, the Roman Mother Earth, emerges from a primal vagina, the abyss of all-feeling and all-knowing, while Ishtar of the Babylonians is the cosmic uterus, the stars of the zodiac her raiment. The historical softening or bowdlerization of the Goddess’s mother role has obscured the briskly functional nature of her motherhood – Ymir, the wind god of Norse legend (i.e., the breath of life) comes ‘out of the cunt of the All-Mother Ginnungagab’. And paradoxically the denial of the unblushingly physical denies also the ascent into the realms of the metaphysical, a key element of the Great Mother’s godhead: ‘I was pregnant with all power,’ boasted the goddess Vac in a song of the Vedic nature-religion of India. ‘I dwell in the waters of the sea, spread from there through all creatures, and touch the sky with my crown; I roar through all creation like the wind.’ The proclamation carved on the temple of ‘the Holy One’, Nut of Egypt, makes an even stronger claim: ‘I am what is, what will be, and what has been. No man uncovered my nakedness, and the fruit of my birthing was the sun.’9
Over-emphasis on the good mother, procreative and nurturing, also denies the bad mother, her dangerous, dark and destructive opposite. These early civilizations, however, understood very well the strong association of the divine woman with death, and stress that the Goddess who brings humankind into the world is also she who kindly (or not so kindly) commands the way out of it. In the Ireland of 1000 B.C. a sinister triad of goddesses, the Morrigan, haunted battlefields, collecting severed heads and showing themselves to those about to die. In other cultures the Goddess rounds up the dead rather like a sheepdog, and takes them below: to the Greeks the dead were simply ‘Demeter’s people’.
In her darkest incarnation the bad mother did not simply wait for people to die, but demanded their deaths. The Persian Ampusa, her worshippers believed, cruised about the world in a blood bubble looking for something to kill. Her blood thirst might be propitiated by sacrifice – around 1500 B.C. at Hal Tarxien in Malta, the ministers of a seven-foot goddess, her belly obesely pregnant above pear-shaped legs of massive stone, caught the blood of victims in a deep vessel symbolic of the divine vagina. But the mother, and her blood-anger, endured, as in this vivid eye-witness account of the ‘Black Mother’ of the Hindu religion, Kali-Ma:
And Kalee-Ma’ee, the Dark Mother is there. She is luminous-black. Her four limbs are outstretched and the hands grasp two-edged swords, tools of disembowelment, and human heads. Her hands are blood-red, and her glaring eyes red-centred; and her blood-red tongue protrudes over huge pointed breasts, reaching down to a rotund little stomach. Her yoni is large and protuberant. Her matted, tangled hair is gore-stained and her fanglike teeth gleam. There is a garland of skulls about her neck; her earrings are the images of dead men and her girdle is a chain of venomous snakes.10
Wedded as we are to an all-loving, all-forgiving stereotype of motherhood, it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this terrifying image of the bad mother with the good. But both ‘life’ and ‘death’ sides of the Goddess come together without strain in her primary aspect, which is in fact not motherhood pure and simple, but her sexuality. As her primary sexual activity she created life; but in sex she demanded man’s essence, his self, even his death. Here again the true nature of the Goddess and her activities have fallen victim to the mealy-mouthed prudery of later ages. Where referred to at all, they are coyly labelled ‘fertility’ rituals, beliefs or totems, as if the Great Goddess selflessly performed her sexual obligations solely in order to ensure that the earth would be fruitful. It is time to set the historical record straight. The fruitfulness of crops and animals was only ever a by-product of the Goddess’s own personal sexual activity. Her sex was hers, the enjoyment of it hers, and as all these early accounts of her emphasize, when she had sex, like any other sensible female, she had it for herself.
But not by herself. In every culture, the Goddess has many lovers. This exposes another weakness in our later understanding of her role as the Great Mother. To the children of patriarchy, ‘mother’ always includes ‘wife’; mother is the woman who is married to father. That puts a further constraint on the idea of the good mother. The good mother does not fuck around. She does not even choose the one man she does have, but is chosen by father. Hence the insoluble paradox of the Goddess for the custodians of succeeding moralities – she was always unmarried and never chaste. Among Eskimos, her title was ‘She Who Will Not Have a Husband’. But there was more to her sexual freedom than this. As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless. In contrast males came and went, their only function the service of the divine ‘womb’ or ‘vulva’, which is the Goddess’s name in most cultures.11
Yet the lover of the Goddess did not simply have the kind of crudely functional experience that this might suggest. Some representations of her sexuality stress its power and terror: on seal-engravings from Babylon she puts scorpions to flight with the ritual display of her awe-inspiring pudenda, while in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh from before 2000 B.C., the goddess Ishtar, thwarted in her unbridled sensuality, threatens to burst gates, tear down houses and ‘make the dead rise and overwhelm the living’.12 Far more common, however, are the tender, almost girlish poetic tributes to the skill of the lover and the delights of his body, like this song of Inanna, over 4000 years old, yet as fresh as this morning’s loving:
My brother brought me to his house,
Laid me down on a fragrant honey bed,
My precious sweet, lying on my heart,
My brother did it fifty times,
One by one, tongue-making.13
Further north in the legendary city of Nineveh, the unknown poet made the goddess Ishtar croon like a mother as she beds the Assyrian king Ashur-bani-pal:
My face covers thy face
As a mother over the fruit of her womb.
I will place thee as a graven jewel between my breasts
During the night will I give thee covering,
During the day I shall clothe thee,
Fear not, oh my little one, whom I have raised.14
Brother? Little one? Who were these lovers of the Goddess, and why are they described in such terms? The answer to this question leads to the clearest indication of the undisputed power of the Goddess that historical evidence affords.
For the Great Mother originally held the ultimate power – the power of the undisputed ruler, that of life and death. Where woman is the divine queen, the king must die. Mythologically and historically, too, the rampant sensuality of the Great Goddess and her taste for blood unite in the archaic but undisputed practice of the killing of the king. ‘King’ is in fact an honorary tide for the male chosen to fuck the Queen-Goddess in a simple re-enactment of the primal drama subsequently described by historians and anthropologists as ‘the sacred marriage’, with the male ‘acting as divine consort’ to the Goddess. But the savage, inexorable logic of the ritual could hardly be more opposed to this weak and anachronistic attempt to dignify the male’s part in the proceedings. For when all life was thought to flow into, through and out of the female, the highest hope of the male was to escape the fate of all the other disposable drones and associate with the deity, even at the price of then being returned to earth.
Mythologically, the ritual sacrifice of the young ‘king’ is attested in a thousand different versions of the story. In these the immortal mother always takes a mortal lover, not to father her child (though children often result) but essentially in exercise and celebration of her womanhood. The clear pattern is of an older woman with a beautiful but expendable youth – Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osiris. In the story of Demeter, the functional motif of the story is even clearer: the bold Iasion ‘lies with’ the corn goddess in the furrow of a cornfield, and dies by thunderbolt immediately afterwards. The lover is always inferior to the Goddess, mortal where she is immortal, young where she is ageless and eternal, powerless where she is all-powerful, and even physically smaller – all these elements combine in the frequent representation of the lover as the Goddess’s younger brother or son. And always, always, he dies. The fate of the lovers of the Great Goddess was well known when Gilgamesh resisted the command of ‘glorious Ishtar’ with the reproach, ‘Which of your lovers did you love for ever? What shepherd of yours pleased you for all time? . . . And if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as all these others whom you loved once?’15
