Goddess Worship

In the beginning, the goddess was known, loved, and revered by humankind. The goddess, as the Creatress, was given primary reverence. Archaeology has turned up many clues that point to the earliest. Cultures being matriarchies; this does not mean female-controlled but rather ruling partnerships. Between men and women. Because the women were responsible for bearing and raising the all-important children, they tended to live in fixed groups, agricultural communities that provided as stable base for the hunting of males. Women domesticated animals, learned the intricacies of growing plants, and establish small religious centers. They developed medicine, divinated, writing, pottery,weaving, and other types of art and domesticated crafts.

The female elders passed the laws that regulated the communities, keeping the people in peaceful harmony among themselves and with outsiders. Archaeology’s present methods at dating antiquities are still being refined; knowledge is limited. As new methods of dating are discovered, the time of humankind on this planet is pushed further and further into the past. At present calculations, matriarchies and worship of the goddess extend back 40,000 to 50,000 b.c.e. During paleolithic times, sacred objects and the dead were painted with red ocher, a symbol of menstrual blood for recreation. Religions sites such as caves and temples contain the remnants of shells, particularly cowrie shells, which represent female sexual organs. Ancient cave paintings, bas reliefs, and statues were overwhelmingly of the goddess; male depictions during these times were only in peripheral positions, as were their symbols.

Some what later in history the goddess began to be pictured with animals, trees, and symbols of water. Sometimes she was portrayed as being part animal. This is symbolic linkage of her direct connection with all nature. The religious beliefs, the mysteries and rites developed by ancient women, grew organically out of women’s supreme roles as cultural producers, mothers and prime communicators with the spirit world. The Mysteries of creation, transformation, and recurrence- the primal mysteries of All religious- emerged from women’s direct physical and psychic experiences of the mysteries: in bleeding, in growing a child, in nursing, in working with fire, in making a pot, in planting a seed. In pottery-craft and myth alone,we can see the development of a religion. The pot was seen to have the body shape and internal womb of the mother.

In neolithic Europe, clay was said to have"a woman's soul”, and no man was allowed to see the female potter at work. Clay, sacred to women and the goddess, was often marked with theMaze-like windings of the magic underworld, a place for transformation. Aruru –Ishtar, the Cosmic Creatrix of Babylon, was imaged as a potter. A divine potter, shaper of life. The making of cult vessels was like the shaping of life, and the Babylonians words for rebirth were (we are as fresh-baked pots). From this, we can see the absurdity (and political cooperation) of the notion of a male-god-father making human beings from clay or dust. The biblical image is stolen without shame from the earlier Sumerian and Babylonian goddess creation stories. Such a patriarchal version of creation is very recent; the facts of women’s experience of life are primordial. It is the woman who goes through the sacred transformation in her body and psyche- the mystery and changes of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and the production of milk.

It is woman who first shaped a seed into food, earth into pottery, fire into a tool, the struggle for survival into human cultures. During the millennium before Jesus, continuing into the first five hundred yrs. Thereafter, the major divinity of the Mediterranean world appears to have been Auset of Africa,( called Isis by the Greeks), dark mother of many names, Great Mother of the Mediterranean. Isis inherited a long matriarch tradition of Africa who signs were the color red ochre and the pubic v, as well as spirals and circles and human identification with animals.

Scholarship since the 1960’s has recovered what the ancients knew: Isis was an African deity, whose origins were in Nubia, or upper Egypt. The study of Nubian archeology and history has established the centrality of the dark mother Isis, who is considered to have exemplified African matriarchal traditions. It was only through the royal women that the Nubian ruler inherited the throne. All kings and queens had to be born to a queen. Usually the ruler’s sister. The seamless fit between religion and daily life in Africa is suggested by the fact that an African woman, as priestess of the dark mother, was “mistress of heaven” as well as “mistress of the house”. The image of Isis most popular at the height of the roman empire appears to have been that of Isis nursing her child, Heru (called Horus by the Greeks, Apollo by the Romans, and Jesus by the Europeans.).

Besides queen of sea, Isis was considered queen of heaven and of earth, and was easily transmuted into the christian holy mother. Legions of the roman empire, whose ranks were drawn from subordinated dark peoples of three continents, carried images of African Isis, as images of Isis melded together with west Asian divinities Cybele, Inanna, and Astarte all over the known world, from Africa to Asia, to Rome, France, England, to the Danube. At Benevento, where the great Isis flourished in the roman epoch, her followers were later called witches. If you’ve gotten this far I bet you’re asking why haven’t I heard of this before? And if the worship of the goddess is real what happen? Why are we not embracing the goddess now? I’ll go briefly into what happen in part.

If life is inherently evil, the church fathers needed someone to blame; and who better to blame than the Woman, who created life from her own body? Living women, also, can be publicly punished, as the iconic and illusory devil can never be. The myth of feminine evil which has dominated the westernized world for over two thousand yrs. led logically and directed to the religiously targeted murder of women as witches during the Great Inquistition of Europe. The number of deaths from the inquisition was euphemistically underestimated as a way of denying about five hundred yrs. of systematic persecution and slaughter by the holy christian church. The deaths range from 1 million to 9 million people burned as witches between the fifteen and eighteenth centuries (between 1200 and 1500 people were officially killed as heretics). In 1484, pope innocent the eight pronounced a papal bull against the now suddenly discovered crime of witchcraft. He denounced witchcraft as an organized conspiracy of the devil’s army against the peace and common order of the holy christian empire( a peace and common order which people living under the empire had rarely experienced.)

And thus the war against women was officially launched by the christian papacy, as a diversionary tactic to keep itself in power through the strategy of sheer terror. In the late middle ages, dominated by the christian inquisition, the delivery of a pregnant woman was no longer considered a sacrament but a dirty business, and the woman who attended the poor at child birth were frequently considered social outcast or worse. They were charged with again witchcraft, tortured, and burned. One witch was burned alive in Scotland for the sole crime of bathing some neighborhood children, for hygienic reasons, in the midst of epidemic. Health care and healing were publicly discouraged by the christian church, which officially believed that life was supposed to be diseased, wretched, and painful- this is god’s will, as punishment for human sin.

People who tried to alleviate suffering or cure illness, especially through ancient folk and herbal medicines, or simple hygiene were suspected to be agents of the devil. During the time of catholic-dominated Europe, it was also a crime against god to miscarry. Even if a woman miscarried after being beaten by her husband, she could still be put to death for her “sin” against the father because all miscarriages were suspected by the clergy of being intentional abortions. The celibate clergy always tended to believe women were guilty until proven dead. Even the word Hell, comes from the Norse goddess Hel of the underworld. Though christian theology gave its underworld the name of the Goddess Hel it was quite a different place from her womb of regeneration. The ancients didn’t view the Underworld as a primarily a place of punishment. It was dark, mysterious, and awesome, but not the vast torture chamber Christians made of it.

The idea of eternal torture in hell arose with ascetic Patriarchal religions like that of Zoroastrian Persia, Judaism, and Islam. Masculine preoccupation with pain stood in contrast to the matriarchies’ preoccupation with pleasure, a physic outgrowth of the severities of ascetic life. There is reason to believe hell’s nastier torments were INVENTED primarily to intimidate women into obeying new patriarchal laws. Zoroastrian priests insisted women who were unfaithful to their husbands would go the hell and have their breast torn open with iron combs. Women who scolded would be forced to lick hot stoves with their tongues. Women who showed disloyalty to men would be hung up by one leg, while scorpions, snakes, ants, and worms dug their way in and out of their bodies. A similar vision inspired Grunwald’s medieval picture of the hellish torments in store for those who committed the crime of loving. But not even the Persians supposed the torments of hell would go on forever. That refinement of cruelty was left to the Christians.

The Jews adopted the Persians hell as a place for punishing the majority of women, judge hopelessly unworthy of the Father-Gods heaven. Men could be consigned to hell for holding to much unnecessary conversation with their wives,or for taking feminine advice. While I'm at it, let me give you a little info on this thing we call Sin. Sin the original Moon-god of Mount Sinai, “Mountian of the Moon.” He was born of the Virgin Queen of Heaven, Nanna or Innanna. He ruled the land of SINIM (ISAIAH 49:12), which meant “land of lunar mountain” and was an older form of Zion. His Chaldean name was Kingu. He was the god who received the Tablets of Law from the primal Mother of Creation, Tiamat as Moses’s god, he still had the same mountain-throne and the same tablets. A biblical scholar has pointed out “the Jehovah of the Hebrews” was merely another transformation of “the primitive lunar deity of Arabia. The God Moses met on Mount Sinai claimed to be the god of Abraham, though he said Abraham knew him by a different name (Exodus 6:3). In fact, Abraham may have been the same deity. Very ancient documents used the name Abraham or ab-ram as a synonym for ab-sin, moon-father.

In the 12th century b.c the Babylonian heaven was ruled by a trinity consisting of Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar, represented by the sun, moon, stars. And this info is barely scratching the surface of the suppression of goddess worship by patriarchal societies or male dominated religions.

Information from Khepera of myspace