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Woman’s work of gathering would inevitably take on a wider and more urgent dimension when she had infants to feed as well as herself. Her first task as a mother would have been to adapt her gathering bag into a sling to carry her baby, since she had to devise some means of taking it with her when she went out to forage. As most early women did not live beyond their twenties, there would be no pool of older, post-menopausal women to look after the next generation of infants once their own were off their hands. Hominid babies were heavy, and got heavier as brains, and therefore skulls, became larger. Similarly, evolving bodies of mothers presented less and less hair for their infants to cling to. Whether she slung her baby diagonally across her breasts, or on her back in the less common papoose style of the native mothers of the New World, sling her she did. How? If only archaeology could tell us that.
Mothering the young had other implications too, equally crucial both to early women and to the future of the race. Two factors made this work far more demanding than it had been to their primate grandmothers. First, human young take far longer to grow and become self-supporting than baby apes – they consequently need far more care, over an extended period of time, and cannot simply be swatted off the nipple and pointed at the nearest banana. Then again, the mothering of human babies is not just a matter of physical care. Children have to be initiated into a far more complex system of social and intellectual activity than any animal has to deal with, and in the vast majority of all human societies this responsibility for infants has been women’s primary work and theirs alone. How well the first mothers succeeded may be seen from the world history of the success of their descendants.
The prime centrality of this work of mothering in the story of evolution has yet to be acknowledged. A main plank of the importance of Man the Hunter in the history of the human race has always been the undisputed claim that co-operative hunting among males called for more skill in communication and social organization, and hence provided the evolutionary spur to more complex brain development, even the origins of human society. The counter-argument is briskly set out by Sally Slocum:
The need to organize for feeding after weaning, learning to handle the more complex socio-emotional bonds that were developing, the new skills and cultural inventions surrounding more extensive gathering – all would demand larger brains. Too much attention has been given to skills required by hunting, and too little to the skills required for gathering and the raising of dependent young [italics inserted].
Similarly women’s invention of food-sharing as part of the extended care of their children must have been at least as important a step towards group co-operation and social organization as the work of man the hunter/leader running his band. Women’s work as mothers of human infants who need a long growing space for postnatal development also involves them in numerous other aspects of maternal care (sheltering, comforting, diverting), in play, and in social activity with other mothers and other young. All these are decisively shown by modern psychology to enhance what we call IQ and must have been of critical value in assisting our branching away from the great apes in mental and conceptual ability. Female parents are not the only ones who can comfort, stimulate or play. But all these activities are very far removed from the supposed role of hunting, killing, primitive man.
Nor does the significance of the mother-child bond end there. In the myth of Man the Hunter, he invents the family. By impregnating his mate and stashing her away in the cave to mind the fire, he creates the basic human social unit which he then maintains by his hunting/killing. The American journalist Robert Ardrey, chief exponent of the hunting hypothesis, naively pictures the sexual division of the average primeval working day: ‘the males to their hunting range, the females to their home-site (we think of it today as the office and the home).’
But in contradiction to this Big Daddy scenario, a mass of evidence shows that the earliest families consisted of females and their children, since all tribal hunting societies were centred on and organized through the mother. The young males either left or were driven out, while the females stayed close to their mothers and the original home-site, attaching their males to them. In the woman-centred family, males were casual and peripheral, while both nucleus and any networks developing from it remained female. These arrangements continue to operate in a number of still-existing Stone Age tribes worldwide, the so-called ‘living fossils’. As anthropologist W. I. Thomas stresses, ‘Children therefore were the women’s and remained members of her group. The germ of social organization was always the woman and her children and her children’s children.’
In fact the human debt to the first women goes on and on, the more we unravel the biological evidence. It is to early woman that we owe the fact that most of us are right-handed, for instance. As Nigel Calder explains, ‘handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon’.
From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur towards the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the ‘femaleness of handedness’, Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, very much more quickly and decisively than boys.
One last biological legacy of woman to man deserves more gratitude than it seems to have received. At primate level, the male penis is an unimpressive organ. So far from terrorizing any female, the average King Kong can only provoke sympathy for his meagre endowment in relation to this vast bulk. Man, however, developed something disproportionately large in this line, and can truly afford to feel himself lord of creation in the penile particular. And he owes it to woman. Quite simply, when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself on to her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina’s steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe’s neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.
This need also dictated the uniquely human experimentation with frontal sex. The future of the species demanded that man gained entry somehow. But the ease with which most couples move between frontal and rear-entry positions during intercourse is a constant reminder of the impact of woman’s evolutionary biology.
The biology of woman in fact holds the key to the story of the human race. The triumph of evolution occurred in the female body, in one critical development that secured the future of the species. This was the biological shift from primate oestrus, when the female comes on heat, to full human menstruation. Although generally unsung, indeed unmentioned, female monthly menstruation was the evolutionary adaptation that preserved the human species from extinction and ensured its survival and success.
For female oestrus in the higher primates is a highly inefficient mechanism. The great female primates, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, come on heat rarely, and produce one infant every five or six years. This puts the whole species dangerously at risk of extinction, and the great apes today survive only in small numbers and in the most favourable environments. With twelve chances of conceiving in every year, instead of one every five years, the human female has a reproductive capacity sixty times higher than that of her primate sisters. Menstruation, not hunting, was the great evolutionary leap forward. It was through a female adaptation, not a male one, that ‘man’ throve, multiplied and conquered the globe.
And female menstruation was not merely a physical phenomenon like eating or defecation. Recent commentators have argued that women’s so-called curse operated to cure not only man’s shortage of offspring, but also his primeval mental darkness. In their pioneering work on menstruation, The Wise Wound, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrave stress the connection made in primitive societies between the lunar and menstrual cycles, suggesting that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically. For Elise Boulding, these mental functions arise from an earlier stage in which women taught men the principles of number, calendar organization and counting: ‘Every woman had a “body calendar” – her monthly menstrual cycle. She would be the first to notice the relationship between her own body cycle and the lunar cycle.’
Other female authorities have expressed their amusement at the naïvety of one professor, the celebrated Jacob Bronowski, who on the TV series ‘The Ascent of Man’ solemnly described a prehistoric reindeer bone with thirty-one scratches on it as ‘obviously a record of the lunar month’. Commenting on ‘The Ascent of You Know Who’, Vonda McIntyre demurred: ‘Do tell. A thirty-one-day lunar month? I think it a good deal more likely that the bone was a record of a woman’s menstrual cycle.’
Objectively this carefully notated silent witness of an irretrievably lost transaction could have been either of these; or both; or neither. But in the routine, unconscious denial of women’s actions, experiences, rhythms, even of their ability to count, the possibility that it could have been a woman’s record of her own intimate personal life was not even considered.
No attention at all, in fact, has been given to the implication for women when light and infrequent oestrus gave way to full menstruation, with bleeding in varying but substantial amounts for one week in every four. What did early woman do? Did she simply squat on a pile of leaves and leak? This is uncomfortably close to the passive female fire-watcher of the Man the Hunter myth – and it is out of the question that the tribal food-gatherers, so vital to survival, could have been out of action for twenty-five per cent of their time. But if the women moved around at all, an unchecked menstrual flow would have resulted in badly chapped and painful inner thighs, especially in colder or windy weather, with the added risk of infection in hot climates. Skin scabbing so caused would hardly have had a chance to heal before the menstrual flow was on again.
A number of indicators point to the solution. In the wild, female monkeys are observed to bunch up pads of leaves to wipe off oestrus spotting. From still-surviving Stone Age cultures it is recorded that the women weave or fashion clothes, slings for their babies, and rough bags to carry what they scavenge or garner. The first women must have devised menstrual slings or belts, with some kind of pad to absorb the heaviest flow. Even today both Maori and Eskimo women contrive pads of a fine soft moss, while Indonesian women make tampon-type balls of a soft vegetable fibre. The Azimba women of Central Africa use the same fibre as pads, which are held in place by an oval sling of soft goatskin fastened to a belt of twisted thong.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the women capable of bringing the infant human race forward into the future could also have found the way to deal efficiently with their own bodies.
But one thing is certain: that any such object, along with other examples of early woman’s technology, would not have survived. Even if it had, would it have been deemed worthy of attention? Wide-ranging consideration at every level from academic investigation to wild surmise has been devoted to all aspects of the life of early man. But no attention in either scholarly or popular work has been given to what anthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the early female hominid ‘Lucy’, dismissed as ‘the oestrus argument’ – that is, the importance of the female’s biological shift to menstruation. As Johanson explained, ‘I don’t believe anything I can’t measure, and I’ve never seen an oestrus fossil.’
Well, he wouldn’t, would he?
Like Johanson, generations of male commentators have blinded themselves both to the facts and the significant implications of the evolution of early woman. They have insisted instead on rewriting primitive woman as no more than a sexual vehicle for man. ‘They were fatted for marriage, were these Stone Age squaws,’ wrote H. G. Wells. ‘The females were the protected slaves of the old male, the master of all the women’ – a wistful Wellsian fantasy of women on tap.
For Robert Ardrey, menstruation only evolved as a bonanza for the boys. When a female primate came on heat, burbled Ardrey, she ‘hit the sexual jackpot’, providing ‘fun for all . . . and for herself a maximum of male attention.’
But oestrus episodes are brief and infrequent – there had to be something more to bring the hunter home from the hill. Accordingly, the first woman learned to convert primate heat into menstruation. This made her sexually available and receptive to man all the year round, as a reward for her share of his kill, in history’s first known example of the time-honoured convention of quim pro quo.
The ‘fun for all’ theory of women’s early sexual evolution also accounts for the physical arrangement of the modern woman’s body. When Man the Hunter began to walk upright, he naturally wanted frontal sex. As Desmond ‘Naked Ape’ Morris so engagingly explains, woman obliged this desire ‘to make sex sexier’ by growing breasts. Realizing that her ‘pair of fleshy hemispherical buttocks’ were now quite passé as a means of attracting men’s attention, she ‘had to do something to make the frontal region more stimulating’.
Any connection between the increase in woman’s breast size and the increasing size of the human baby at birth must have been purely coincidental.
For in this androcentric account of woman’s evolution, every aspect of her bodily development took place for man’s benefit, not her own. For him she evolved the female orgasm, as a well-earned bonus for the trail-wearied meat-provider at the end of the day. ‘So female invention went on,’ rejoices Ardrey. ‘The male might be tired; female desire would refresh him.’
In the last of his evolutionary incarnations Man the Hunter now becomes sexual athlete and rutting ape while woman, receptive and responsive for 365 days of the year, awaits his return to display her new-found repertoire of fun tricks with breasts and clitoris, the Pleistocene Playmate of the Month.
In the light of all the evidence, from a wealth of scientific sources, of the centrality of woman, how do we explain the dominance and persistence of the myth of Man the Hunter? Charles Darwin’s concept of the origins of the human race included no such creature – his early man was a social animal working within ‘the corporate body’ of the tribe, without which he would not survive. But later Darwinians like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer (‘the greatest ass in Christendom’, according to Carlyle) re-interpreted the evolutionary battle for survival as taking place not between genes, but individuals. By 1925 academics were treating this idea as fact, Professor Carveth Read of London University excitedly proposing that early man should be re-named Lycopithecu for his wolvish savagery, a suggestion enthusiastically taken up by another thriller-writer manqué, the South African professor Raymond Dart:
Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of their victims and greedily devouring living, writhing flesh.
As this suggests, the notion of Man the Hunter unpacks to reveal a number of other elements that feed and flatter male fantasies of violence and destruction. ‘We are Cain’s children,’ droned Ardrey. ‘Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.’ Lots of the boys have got off on this one, from Konrad Lorenz to Anthony Storr: ‘The simple fact is that we [who we?] are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.’
Man’s natural aggression found its natural outlet in subordinating those around him: ‘women, boys and girls,’ wrote H. G. Wells, ‘all go in fear of the old male.’ For Ardrey, ‘dominance, a revolutionary social necessity even in the carefree forest life, became a day-to-day survival institution in the lives of the hunters.’
Man’s ‘hunting pedigree’ can thus be used to justify every act of male aggression from business chicanery to wife-battering and rape, while the ‘right to dominate’ of ‘early boss man’ has proved far too serviceable to his successors to be cast aside.
In fact there is almost no aspect of modern human society, no self-flattering delusion about man’s ‘natural’ instinct to dominate and destroy, that ‘Man the Hunter’ cannot be said to originate and explain. Generations of academics have joined their respectful voices to the paean of praise for him and his pals: ‘our intellects, interests, emotions and basic social life,’ chirped American professors Washburn and Lancaster, ‘all these we owe to the hunters of time past.’ Needless to say, man the hunter did not carry all before him: Donald Johanson has described the hunting hypothesis as the product of Ardrey’s ‘vivid imagination’, and ‘an embarrassment to anthropologists’. In professional circles now the whole theory has been consigned to the wasteland between revision and derision, and psychologist Dr John Nicholson is not the only academic to admit to being ‘still annoyed that I was once taken in by it.’
But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, man the hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has travelled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. ‘The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge,’ pronounced a leading French authority, ‘in all of which the female hardly shared.’
Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, singlehandedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the primordial airhead and fully evolved bimbo.
Yet in celebrating the achievement of early woman, and dismissing the farrago of flattering fictions that make up the myth of hunting man, it is essential not to substitute a denial of his real activities for the historic denial of hers. Man’s part in the survival of the species becomes more normal, more natural, and paradoxically more admirable once the essentially co-operative nature of early human life is reasserted.
Hunting was a whole-group activity, not a heroic solo adventure.
As Myra Shackley explains, ‘successful hunting, especially of large animals travelling in herds such as reindeer, horses, mammoth, bison and woolly rhinoceros meant co-operation in bands’.
To this day, all members of hunting societies, including women and children, join in hunting/beating activities as a matter of course. In their own right, too, women have long been known to hunt smaller, slower or safer animals. An eighteenth-century trader of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada discovered an Eskimo woman who had kept herself alive for seven months on the mid-winter icecap by her own hunting and snaring ‘when there was nothing but desolation for 1000 miles around’.
Hunting did not mean fighting.
On the contrary, the whole purpose of group organization was to ensure that primitive man did not have to face and do battle with his prey. The first humans, as Shackley shows, worked together to avoid this, ‘driving animals over cliffs to their deaths (as certainly happened at the Upper Paleolithic site of Solutre) or using fire to stampede them into boggy ground (the method used at Torralba and Ambrona)’.
Cro-Magnon cave paintings from the Dordogne region of France vividly depict a mammoth impaled on stakes in a pit, a practice known worldwide. This method of hunting did not even involve killing, as the animal could be left to die. Most forms of hunting did not in fact involve direct aggression, personal combat or a struggle to the death, but involved preying on slow-moving creatures like turtles, on wounded or sick animals, on females about to give birth or on carcasses killed and abandoned by other, fiercer predators.
Men and women relied on each others’ skills, before, during and after the hunt.
The anthropologist Constable cites the Stone Age Yukaghir of Siberia, whose men formed an advance party to check out the traps for prey, while the women came up behind to take charge of dismembering the carcass and transporting it to the home-site.
Since carcasses were used for food, clothes, shelter, bone tools and bead ornaments, most of which the women would be producing, they had a vested interest in the dismemberment. As Myra Shackley reminds us:
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.
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.
Whatever became of ‘man the hunter striding brutally into the future’?
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.
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’!
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.
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.
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.
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The Great Goddess (#ulink_0fd76620-68a2-5ee6-b6f1-138dd0c1a728)
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
– 12,000–9000 B.C. – in Dolní V
stonice, Czechoslovakia, and Shanidar, Iraq, ceremonial burials of bodies coated in red ochre, commonly associated with Goddess worship.
– 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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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’.
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,
