Modern Western
women can date our sacred sexual beginnings at least to the communities of Catal
Huyuk and Jericho. We can read about the downfall of the Goddess cultures and
the sexuality that they embodied in the horrendous stories of the Old Testament.
“Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. . .” is a historic tale told by the victors
about the vanquished ancient, sacred women who had kept the rites of the Goddess
since time immemorial. As the Old Testament makes vividly clear, the overthrow
of the ancient Goddess religion and the “Whore of Babylon” was not easy or quick
but went on for many millennia with a vengeance. The patriarchs would no sooner
get rid of all the “harlots” of the Old Religion than one of their own men would
marry one of them and start up the old worship again. Over and over, the
massacres would take place, glorified as the divine justice of a vengeful
Jehovah who will have “no other gods before me.” The making of idols or images
of deity became one of the central sacrileges of the new Judeo-Christian
religions, and the beautiful figures of the Divine Female that had been
fashioned wince the early Paleolithic era were destroyed, forbidden, and
demonized.
During the transition period between the beginnings of this destruction and the
completing of it (from about 4000 B.C.E. to about the beginning of
Christianity), the sacred women found themselves in the position of being
harnessed into service by the new governmental hierarchies. They were allowed to
keep their sacred sexual practices in the temples but became distorted and
degraded into prostitutes. Once “virgin” (belonging to now man) and married to
the Goddess, serving her energies and purpose, now they were officially in the
service of the men in the community. In many cases and for many centuries, they
still practiced their rites in the name of the Goddess, but now male priests
officiated and ruled over them. Money was exchanged in the temples for their
services, and women were even forced to give themselves at least once in their
lives as an offering to the Divine. Even the famous story of Inanna tells about
this process of change. Her new husband, Dummuzi, builds her a sacred bed from
the old hulupa tree that grew in her garden. Dummuzi is a shepherd, replacing
her older husband, who was a farmer. (The invading nomads replaced the earlier
farming males by killing them and marrying their women.) Dummuzi fells the
sacred Tree of Life with his ax, casing the bird, the snake, and Lilith to flee
into exile. Lilith’s life on the shores of the red sea (menstruation) is
described as “unbridled promiscuity,” in the service of demons, with demon
children as the offspring. Inanna’s permission for the act that exiled her
earlier sister, Lilth, is the necessary compromise for her retention of the
sacred office of temple priestess in the new regime. Sarah, the Priestess
is Savina Teubal’s excellent research on this transition and the difficulties it
presented for the sacred women who were attempting to keep their temple offices,
while necessarily capitulating to colonization, marriage with the invading
males, and exile from their homelands.
Men during the period from biblical Moses to the so-called birth of Christ
donned women’s robes, wore false breasts, and began officiating in the place of
women in the sacred ceremonies. During this time they invented the concept of
kingship and instituted dynasties (around 3000 B.C.E. all over the world). Men
became kings by sitting on the lap of the Goddess (Ishtar, Isis, etc.) and by
lying with the priestess in the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. The
male priests replaced the female menstrual blood offerings with sacrificed
animals, and in some cases, humans. They even castrated themselves and served as
eunuch priests in the service of the Distorted Feminine. Barbara Walker
maintains that the Apostle Paul himself, fanatical on the subject of celibacy,
was a castrated eunuch priest. Men’s relationship to sex in general became
deeply tied to their sense of ownership of women and children, and in Egypt the
newly invented word that meant “slave” also meant “wife.” Men began seeing
themselves in the image of the Father God, defining themselves as divine sons of
that authority, with unlimited sovereignty over women and children (as parent to
child). Sex was gradually taken out of the temple and separated from religion.
Prostitution became a secular “profession” into which certain women (often slave
women captured in wars) were forced. The Reign of the Phallus, by
classics professor Eva Keuls, is a graphic testimony of hierarchical life for
women in Olympian Greece, where married women lived cloistered, indoors, while
their husband’s practices sexual acts in public with young male partners and
female hetairae hired or owned for that purpose.
When the Greek city-states were invented, Greek vase painting rose to an
elevated status (around 500 B.C.E.), and stories of Greek heroes killing Amazons
became the main myth portrayed in all the artwork. They Olympian Gods and
Goddesses came into being, fragmenting the old creatrix Earth Goddess, Gaia,
into sex-role-stereotyped pieces of her ancient self. Aphrodite became the
wanton sweetheart, Hera became a hysterical and jealous wife of a philandering
sky god, Artemis was relegated to the wilderness (like Lilith before her), and
Athene was re-created as her father’s daughter. Women of Western cultural
descent have had to make do with these remnants of an earlier feminine wholeness
that was eradicated almost five thousand years ago. What kind of sexuality can
we have, segmented off into prostitution (Aphrodite) or motherhood (Demeter) or
frustration (Hera) or separation (Artemis) or cerebral expression (Athene)?
The earliest threads of Christianity appear to be more benign than the later
orthodox tradition. The Gnostic gospels show us rites and ceremonies that recall
Indian Tantric practices, with their male-female groups and menstrual blood as a
sacrament. The Magdalene was a sacred name for the office of the priestess,
linking Mary Magdalene and Jesus to these earlier female roots. But by the time
Christianity was officially anchored in the Western world, there were no more
sacred women. Sexuality was officially banned, except for the purpose of
procreation, and only then practiced in distaste. By 400 C.E. the Church Council
had formally declared cyclic reality (female, lunar, menstrual reality) a
heresy, including the doctrine of reincarnation. Whatever role Mary Magdalene
had played in the origins of early Gnostic Christianity had been rescinded and
her name blackened by the usual stamp of disapproval: whore, harlot, prostitute.
Eve, Adam’s second wife and Lilith’s replacement, was presented as the
archetypal woman, the root of all evil, with an untempered lust for the fruit of
knowledge in the Garden. The Apostle Paul’s books in the New Testament are the
foundational texts for contemporary Christianity, and the celibate priesthood
walks in Paul’s, rather than Jesus’, footsteps.
Even so the old practices continued in all of Europe and the Mediterranean area
well into the Middle Ages through the Dianic religion of the peasant people. At
that point the virulence of the enforced celibacy erupted as a rather active
shadow from the unconscious of the practitioners. The burning of nine million
women in Europe by the Catholic priests of the Inquisition cannot be logically
separated from the malicious and repressive beginnings a thousand years earlier.
The invention of the printing press in the Middle Ages led to the widespread
distribution of the world’s worst book, the Malleus Maleficarum, all
over Europe. This book charged women, in the lewd details that sprang from the
repressed minds of the Catholic clergy, with all manner of lust and fornication.
But most prominently the book declared in no uncertain terms that any woman who
was successful at healing was by definition a witch and would be burned.
Children were forced to watch their mothers burn at the stake, and women were
routinely raped, violated and tortured until they confessed to anything the
Inquisitors accused them of. The Catholic church confiscated all property of the
women they murdered and became rich as a result of this plunder. Records tell of
whole villages in which all the women were wiped out.
Contemporary Western women healers must contend with our racial and genetic
fears not only in regard to healing but also in direct relationship to our
sexuality. Women were accused of being “carnal” at the core and of being the
source of every evil temptation for men. Our psychic powers and healing
practices were linked with evil, sin, and degradation, leading the whole Western
world in the centuries that followed to fear women’s unconscious power. “Uppity
women” everywhere have reason to fear for our lives. Although many of the
accusations and descriptions of what the “witches” were doing are clearly
fabricated from the minds of the murderers, some of the behaviors and attitudes
described in the official records point to shamanic practices of healing and
empowerment and to the worship of the Goddess of the Old Religion from the
ancient past. Herbal knowledge was very deep before the witch burnings, and
midwife-healers were the main practitioners in European villages and towns. In
those days women controlled their own fertility. When peasants met in the sacred
groves for their earth-based ceremonies in honor of Diana and Nature, they
undoubtedly practiced the forbidden arts of magic and shamanism. They covered
themselves with hallucinogenic herbal ointments that endowed them with the
ability to “fly,” that is, to leave their physical bodies like a shaman and
travel in their soul-bodies. They certainly must have still practiced the
ancient sexual rites, as they had always done, in spite of the new Christian
dogmas. It is for these actual “heretical acts” that the witches were burned, as
well as for their healing practices, which were quickly appropriated by the new
male doctors.
Some of the shamanic practices, although taboo, are apparently still known today
in France and Britain and probably other places, where they are practiced in
secret by some of the older women. Marija Gimbutas chronicles many customs from
Lithuania that demonstrate this unbroken thread from the past, including the use
of saunas for birthing right up into the twentieth century. I would imagine this
might include sexual mysteries as well as healing rituals. The seasonal
festivals celebrated until recently by the peasants in Europe marked the points
of power in the old calendar and were originally celebrated, at least in part,
through sexual expression. The cross-quarter holidays were feasts of fire,
meaning the female sexual fire, the kundalini. It was understood that sexuality
kept the community healthy, that the union of the male and female in ecstatic
embrace raised energy that made for a fertile agricultural year. Rumors and
legends about how our ancestors used to run naked in the fields on Beltane and
practice total sexual license during the festivals, such as Bacchanalia, are
remnants of what was once Goddess worship. And Beltane is the May Day holiday
when the church burned the most “witches,” in direct response to the practice of
sexual customs that had prevailed. Through out the entire five-thousand-year
history of transition away from the Goddess to God, there has been uninterrupted
suppression and hatred of female sexuality, which is said to be the work of the
devil.
Five thousand years of denigration and massacre have been enacted against the
female, whose crime is that she loves and produces life. The biological base of
our fundamental power has become the root of our now-universal oppression. As
women have become more liberated since the late 1960’s, the rise in rape (four
times the rise in other crimes) has kept up with whatever small gains we might
have made. Ancient images of women giving birth have been replaced by the
specter of a male doctor “delivering” the woman of her child, and C-sect ion has
become a norm in birthing practices in this country. We also have the highest
young unwed mother count of any country in the world due to our absurd
insistence that young people abstain from sexuality, while it is pushed on them
from an extremely early age and from every direction. Our refusal to provide
them with safe, simple birth control information and materials is equally geared
toward the inevitable out come we are experiencing.
One of the important differences between our lifestyles and the way our
ancestors lived in Catal Huyuk or ancient India is that a woman didn’t live in
an isolated unit with a man and her children. The women in these ancient
communal societies lived together, practicing their religion together as a
fundamental way of life. They cooked, made art, raised children, gathered food,
healed the sick, and birthed the next generation together. Men hunted and
practiced the arts of commerce, traveling from place to place, returning home to
the women and children regularly. There is no evidence to show that women and
men got along with one another in any other way but harmoniously, but no one
woman was dependent on a single man for her survival. And no one woman was
locked in a cage with her male partner, whose frustration might at any moment be
the source of harm to her and her children. Our contemporary social form of
organization is quite insane and is rapidly breaking down. The death of the
nuclear family, although uncomfortable in the present moment, as women become en
mass the lower caste in our culture, may ultimately prove to be our freedom. As
we are abandoned by the individual men in our lives, hopefully we will begin
once more to turn to one another and rely on the group form that women can
create together.
There are two poles of experience, two avenues to source energy, the male and
the female. In the Old Religion the Goddess had a male counterpart who was not a
father but a sexual partner. He was imagined in the image of an earth-based,
lunar male energy, named Shiva, Dionysus, Adonis, and finally Jesus. The female
had a direct link with the Goddess, and with female source energy. She did not
search for truth through the mediation of the male but danced a dance of
opposites in relation to him. The garden within is the deep sacred sanctuary
where we reconnect with the Goddess, the deep Feminine, the underground source
of female empowerment and expression. We were once deeply rotted in that place,
expressing power and sexuality from there without any splitting. That’s the
unambiguous wholeness we see in the ancient female figurines. We were snake and
bird, earth and sky, body and spirit. We could invite the male into that place
for an encounter, and he came. And even now, from that sacred enclosure, as a
priestess, when I perform the magical rites of the ancient deep Feminine, I can
initiate and heal the male though his simple encounter with he there.
Excerpt from Shakti Woman, Feeling Our Fire, Healing our World by Vicki
Noble, (pgs. 187-94, 197-98). Published by permission of the author Order from
Powells!
For more about Vicki Noble,
visit her website at
www.motherpeace.com
The original page I had this article linked from is no longer
available but found the write up here:
http://goddessesrising.blogspot.com/2009/04/recovering-ancient-deep-feminine-by.html