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One by one, tongue-making.
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.
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?’
Within recorded history, versions of the killing of the king frequently occur. The goddess Anaitis of Nineveh annually demanded the most beautiful boy as her lover/victim: beautiful with paint, decked with gold ornaments, clothed in red and armed with the double axe of the goddess, he would spend one last day and night in orgiastic sex with her priestesses under a purple canopy in full view of the people, then he was laid on a bed of spices, incense and precious woods, covered with a cloth of gold and set on fire. ‘The Mother has taken him back to her,’ the worshippers chanted.
In Ireland, the chief priestess of the Great Goddess of the Moon killed the chosen male with her own hands, decapitating him over a silver ‘regeneration’ bowl to catch his blood. The ‘Jutland cauldron’, one of these vessels now in the Copenhagen Museum, gives a graphic illustration of the goddess in action at the height of the sacrificial ceremony.
Historic survivals of the killing of the king continued up to the present day. As late as the nineteenth century, the Bantu kingdoms of Africa knew only queens without princes or consorts – the rulers took slaves or commoners as lovers, then tortured and beheaded them after use. The last queen of the Ashanti, according to the outraged reports of British colonial administrators of the Gold Coast, regularly had several dozen ‘husbands’ liquidated, as she liked to wipe out the royal harem on a regular basis and start again. Even where kingship was established, African queens had the power to condemn the king to death, as Frazer recorded, and the right to determine the moment of execution. Other cultures, however, gradually developed substitute offerings: first, the virility of the young male in place of his life, in a ritual castration ceremony widely practised throughout Asia Minor (though note that the Aztecs in Meso-America never made this an either/or, until the end of their civilization insisting on both); then in place of men, taking children, animals, even doll-figures of men like the ‘mannikins’ the Vestal Virgins drowned in the Tiber every spring.
In real terms, however, the average man does not seem to have had much to fear from the Goddess or her worship. In a culture where the supreme deity is female, the focus is on women, and society draws its structures, rhythms, even colours from them. So, for instance, the special magic of women’s sexuality, from her mysterious menstruation to her gift of producing new life, is expressed in the widespread practice throughout the period of Goddess-worship of treating certain sacred grave-burials with red ochre. Strong or bright red is associated in many religions with female genital blood, while the link between red ochre and blood is clearly indicated by its other name of ‘haematite’. With the red ochre, then, the worshippers of the Goddess were invoking for their dead a symbolic rebirth through the potent substance of menstruation and childbirth. The literal as well as symbolic value of women’s menstrual blood, their ‘moon-gift from the Goddess’, is demonstrated in the ancient Greek custom of mixing it with seed-corn for the annual sowing, to provide ‘the best possible fertilizer’.
This open veneration of women’s natural rhythms and monthly flow contrasts strangely with the secret shame and ‘curse’ they later became. But when God was a woman, all women and all things feminine enjoyed a higher status than has ever been since in most countries of the world. Where the Goddess held sway, women did so too. Does this mean then that there was ever a time when women ruled men – when the natural and unquestioned form of government was matriarchy?
‘The age of queens’ – what is the historical truth behind the persistent myths of women holding power over men? Approaches to this question have been dogged by historians’ search for societies where women had total control, and where the men were downgraded and oppressed as an inevitable consequence – for a mirror-image of every patriarchy, in fact. Not surprisingly, this process of going backwards through the looking glass has failed to produce any concrete results. Another will o’ the wisp was the conviction of nineteenth-century scholars that matriarchy had once been a universal stage in world culture, when, the argument ran, as human society emerged from animal promiscuity, women succeeded in bringing about matriarchy through the defeat of their lustful males. In the social order thus created, woman held primacy at every level from human to divine, and the excluded males, uncivilized and violent, lurked about on the fringes of each individual ‘gynocracy’ plotting furious revenge. For matriarchy was only a stage of human ascent towards civilization. Ultimately (and quite logically to the mind of the male historian) the males contrived to overthrow matriarchy and institute patriarchy, the ultimate stage of civilization and its finest flower.
Feminist historians could hardly be expected to take all this in the missionary position. Simone de Beauvoir explosively put the boot in as early as 1949:
The Golden Age of woman is only a myth . . . Earth Mother, Goddess – she was no fellow creature in his eyes; it was beyond the human realm that her power was confirmed, and she was therefore outside that realm. Society has always been male; political power has always been in the hands of men.
Recent orthodoxy dismisses any idea of a primeval rule of women, stressing that the myth of women in power is nothing but a useful tool for justifying the domination of men.
But in the nature of things, matriarchy could not be a system of political rule like that developed later by men, since patriarchy evolved subsequently and from previously unknown ideological roots. Nor can we reasonably look for any one universal system in a world whose societies were developing at such a wildly divergent rate that one might have stone, iron, pottery or village organization some 30,000 years ahead of one another. To return to our indisputable mass of evidence both on the Goddess and on the social systems of which she was the prop and pivot, ‘matriarchy’ is better understood as a form of social organization which is woman-centred, substantially egalitarian, and where it is not considered unnatural or anomalous for women to hold power and to engage in all the activities of the society alongside the men. On that definition, in the 4000 years or so between the emergence of the first civilizations and the coming of the One God (as Buddha, Christ or Allah), matriarchies abounded; and even societies clearly under the rule of men displayed strong matriarchal features in the form of freedoms since lost and never regained by the vast number of women in the state of world ‘advancement’ that we know today.
What were these freedoms? The commandment carved on the base of the giant statue of the Egyptian king Rameses II in the fourteenth century B.C. is quite uncompromising on the first: ‘See what the Goddess-Wife says, the Royal Mother, the Mistress of the World.’
Women held power to which man habitually deferred.
As women, they ‘were’ the Goddess on earth, as her representative or descendant, and little distinction was made between her sacred and secular power – the Greek historian Herodotus describing the real-life reign of the very down-to-earth Queen Sammuramat (Semiramis), who ruled Assyria for forty-two years during which she irrigated the whole of Babylon and led military campaigns as far as India, interchangeably calls her ‘the daughter of the Goddess’ and ‘the Goddess’ herself. As this indicates, the power of the Goddess was inherited, passed from mother to daughter in a direct line. A man only became king when he married the source of power; he did not hold it in his own right. So in the eighteenth dynasty of the Egyptian monarchy the Pharaoh Thutmose I had to yield the throne on the death of his wife to his teenage daughter Hatshepsut, even though he had two sons. The custom of royal blood and the right to rule descending in the female line occurs in many cultures: among the Natchez Indians of the Gulf of Mexico, the high chief of Great Sun only held rank as the son of the tribe’s leading elder, the White Woman. When she died, her daughter became the White Woman and it was her son who next inherited the throne, thus retaining the kingly title and descent always in the female line. This tradition was still evident in Japan at the time of the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220–264) when the death of the priestess-queen Himeko led to a serious outbreak of civil war that ended only with the coronation of her eldest daughter.
The power of the queen was at its most extraordinary in Egypt, where for thousands of years she was ruler, goddess, wife of the god, the high priestess and a totem object of veneration all in one. Hatshepsut who like Sammuramat fought at the head of her troops, also laid claim to masculine power and prerogative, and was honoured accordingly in a form of worship that lasted for 800 years after her death: ‘Queen of the north and south, Son of the Sun, golden Horus, giver of years, Goddess of dawns, mistress of the world, lady of both realms, stimulator of all hearts, the powerful woman’.
But the frequent appearance of the queen as ruler, not simply consort, was by no means confined to the Egyptian dynasties. Queenhood was so common among the Celtic Britons that the captured warriors brought in triumph before Claudius in A.D. 50 totally ignored the Roman emperor and offered their obeisance instead to his empress, Agrippina. Perhaps the most interesting of all, however, is Deborah, leader of the Israelites around 1200 B.C.; in Judges 4 and 5, she holds evident and total command over the male leaders of the tribe, whose dependency on her is so total that their general, Barak, will not even take to the field of battle without her. Early Jewish history is rich in such powerful and distinguished women:
A Jewish princess? Judith, who saved the Jewish people; she flirted with the attacking general, drank him under the table; then she and her maid (whose name is not in the story) whacked off his head, stuck it in a picnic basket and escaped back to the Jewish camp. They staked his head high over the gate, so that when his soldiers charged the camp they were met by their general’s bloody head, looming; and ran away as fast as their goyishe little feet could run. Then Judith set her maid free and all the women danced in her honor. That’s a Jewish princess.
Nor was female power and privilege at this time confined to princesses and queens. From all sides there is abundant evidence that ‘when agriculture replaced hunting . . . and society wore the robes of matriarchy’, all women ‘achieved a social and economic importance’,
and enjoyed certain basic rights:
Women owned and controlled money and properly.
In Sparta, the women owned two-thirds of all the land. Arab women owned flocks which their husbands merely pastured for them, and among the Monomini Indians, individual women are recorded as owning 1200 or 1500 birch bark vessels in their own right. Under the astonishingly egalitarian Code of Hammurabi which became law in Babylon about 1700 B.C., a woman’s dowry was given not to her husband but to her, and together with any land or property she had it remained her own and passed on her death to her children. In Egypt, a woman’s financial independence of her husband was such that if he borrowed money from her, she could even charge him interest!
Marriage contracts respected women’s rights as individuals, and honoured them as partners.
A number of Codes akin to that of Hammurabi explicitly contradict the ‘chattel’ status that marriage later meant for women. In Babylon, if a man ‘degraded’ his wife, she could bring an action for legal separation from him on the grounds of cruelty. If divorce occurred, women retained care and control of their children, and the father was obliged to pay for their upbringing. The Greek historian Diodorus records an Egyptian marriage contract in which the husband pledged his bride-to-be:
I bow before your rights as wife. From this day on, I shall never oppose your claims with a single word. I recognize you before all others as my wife, though I do not have the right to say you must be mine, and only I am your husband and mate. You alone have the right of departure . . . I cannot oppose your wish wherever you desire to go. I give you . . . [here follows an index of the bridegroom’s possessions]
Another, stronger indication of the warm intimacy and forbearance that an Egyptian wife could expect from her husband is to be found in the ‘Maxims of Ptah Hotep’, at more than 5000 years old possibly the oldest book in the world:
If you’re wise, stay home, love your wife, and don’t argue with her.
Feed her, adorn her, massage her.
Fulfil all her desires and pay attention to what occupies her mind.
For this is the only way to persuade her to stay with you.
If you oppose her, it will be your downfall.
Women enjoyed physical freedoms.
The respect accorded to women within marriage mirrors the autonomy they frequently enjoyed before it. In the early classical period Greek girls led a free, open-air life, and were given athletic and gymnastic training to promote both fitness and beauty. In Crete, chosen young women trained as toreras to take part in the ritual bull-leaping, while Ionian women joined in boar-hunts, nets and spears at the ready. Across thousands of Attic vases (‘Grecian urns’ to Keats), girl jockeys race naked, or dance and swim unclothed through millennia of silence and slow time. The freedom of the young unmarried women was so marked in Sparta that it even caused comment in the other city-states of Greece. Euripides was not the only Athenian to be scandalized:
The daughters of Sparta are never at home!
They mingle with the young men in wrestling matches,
Their clothes cast off, their hips all naked,
It’s shameful!
The strength and athletic ability of these young women was not simply fostered for fun, as the story of the Roman heroine Cloelia shows. Taken hostage by the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna during an attack on Rome in the sixth century B.C., she escaped, stole a horse and swam the Tiber to get back safely to Rome. Even though the Romans promptly handed her back, Cloelia’s courage won the day; for Lars Porsenna was so impressed by this feat that he freed her and all her fellow hostages as a mark of honour.
Regiments of women fought as men.
The hardening of young women’s bodies by sport and the regular practice of nudity had wider implications than these sporadic acts of personal daring. Throughout the ancient world there is scattered but abundant evidence of women under arms, fighting as soldiers in the front-line engagements that conventional wisdom decrees have always been reserved for men. Ruling queens led their troops in the field, not as ceremonial figureheads but as acknowledged and effective war-leaders: Tamyris, the Scythian warrior queen and ruler of the Massagetae tribe of what is now Iran, commanded her army to victory over the invading hordes of Cyrus the Great, and had the great king put to death in revenge for the death of her son in battle. Ruling women also commanded military action at sea, as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra did at the battle of Actium, where her uncharacteristic failure of nerve cost her the war, the empire, her lover Antony and her life. Warrior queens were particularly celebrated in Celtic Britain, where the great goddess herself always bore a warlike aspect. The pre-Christian chronicles contain numerous accounts of female war-leaders like Queen Maedb (Maeve) who commanded her own forces, and who, making war on Queen Findmor, captured fifty of the enemy queen’s women warriors single-handed at the storming of Dun Sobhairche in County Antrim.
The fighting women of the Celts were in fact legendary for their power and ferocity – an awestruck Roman historian, Dio Cassius, describes Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, as she appeared in battle, ‘wielding a spear, huge of frame and terrifying of aspect’.
The same belligerence was remarked in the female squaddies: another Roman chronicler who had seen active service warned his compatriots that a whole troop of Roman soldiers would not withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his aid, for ‘swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and brandishing sallow arms of enormous size she delivers blows and kicks like missiles from a catapult.’
Stories of women fighters have always been most persistent around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and from earliest times written and oral accounts record the existence of a tribe of women warriors who have come down to history as the Amazons. The absence of any ‘hard’ historical data (archaeological remains of a city, or carved inscriptions detailing famous victories, for instance) means that these accounts have been treated as pure myth or legend, ‘nothing more than the common travellers’ tales of distant foreigners who do everything the wrong way about’, as the Oxford Classical Dictionary dismissively explains. Feminist historians of the twentieth century have also been uneasy with the Amazon story, finding it an all-too-convenient reinforcement of history’s insistence on the inevitability of male dominance, as the Amazon women were always finally defeated and raped/married by heroes like Theseus. Another problem lies in the evidently false and fanciful interpretation of the name ‘Amazon’, from Greek a (without) and mazos (breast). This is now known to be linguistically spurious as well as anatomically ridiculous – how many women have a right breast so large that they cannot swing their arm? – and consequently the whole idea of the tribe of women who amputated their breasts in order to fight has been discredited.
But wholesale dismissal of the subject is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The written accounts, ranging from the gossip of story-tellers to the work of otherwise reliable historians, are too numerous and coherent to be ignored; and anything which could engage the serious attention and belief of writers as diverse as Pliny, Strabo, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Diodorus and Plutarch holds a kernel of hard information that later generations have too readily discarded. The body of myth and legend also receives historical support from the numerous rituals, sacrifices, mock-battles and ceremonials of later ages confidently ascribed to Amazon origins by those who practised them, as commemorations of key episodes of their own past history.
As with the wider question of matriarchy, to which the concept of a self-governing tribe of powerful women so clearly relates, the way forward lies in the synthesis of myth and legend with the incontrovertible events of ‘real’ history. Women fought, as war-leaders and in the ranks; women fought in troops, as regular soldiers; and the principal symbol of the Great Goddess, appearing widely throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, was the double-headed battle axe or labrys. There are, besides, innumerable authenticated accounts like that of the Greek warrior-poet Telessilla, who in the fifth century B.C. rallied the women of Argos with war-hymns and chants when their city was besieged. The Argive Amazons took up arms, made a successful sally and after prolonged fighting, drove off the enemy, after which they dedicated a temple of Aphrodite to Telessilla, and she composed a victory hymn to honour the Great Mother of the gods.
Marry this and the mass of similar evidence of Amazon activity among women, and it is clear that, as with matriarchy, there may have been no one Amazon tribe, but the historical reality of women fighting can no longer be doubted.
Women claimed the ultimate freedom.
The physical autonomy expressed by these women through sport and military activity speaks of a deeper freedom, and one that later ages found most difficult to tolerate or even adequately explain. Customs varied from country to country and tribe to tribe, but it is evident that women at the birth of civilization generally enjoyed a far greater freedom from restraint on their ‘modesty’ or even chastity than at any time afterwards. For many societies there was no shame in female nakedness, for instance, and this did not simply mean the unclothed body of a young girl athlete or gymnast. Adult women in fact practised regular cult-nakedness, frequetly disrobing for high ceremonials and important rituals either of a solemn or a joyful kind. The evidence of Attic vases dating from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. shows that women mourners and usually the widow herself walked naked in the funeral cortège of any Athenian citizen.
With this physical freedom went certain key sexual freedoms of the sort one would expect to find in a matriarchal society. Where women rule, women woo; and of twenty erotic love-songs from the Egypt of the thirteenth century B.C., sixteen are by women. One shamelessly records, ‘I climbed through the window and found my brother in his bed – my heart was overwhelmed with happiness.’ Another is even more frank: ‘O my handsome darling! I am dying to marry you and become the mistress of all your property!’
Customs elsewhere in the world were less flowery and more basic. When Julia Augusta, wife of the Roman Emperor Severus, quizzed a captive Scots woman about the sexual freedoms British women were reputed to enjoy, the Scot reproved her with, ‘We fulfil the demands of nature much better than do you Roman women, for we consort openly with the best man, while you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’
Fulfilling the demands of nature did not apply only to human beings, as Elise Boulding explains:
The free ways in which Celtic women utilized sex come out in the stories of Queen Maedb, who offered ‘thigh-friendship’ to the owner of a bull for the loan of it [to service her cows]. She also offered thigh-friendship in return for assistance in raids and battles. Apparently all parties, including her husband, considered these deals reasonable.
Equally reasonable, apparently, were the rights and dues that women claimed not in pursuit of their own pleasure but for the honour of the Great Goddess. These were extensive, ranging from ritual self-exposure to far darker mysteries whose disclosure brought the risk of death to the betrayer. At the simplest level, the worship of the Goddess seems to have been conducted naked or only half-clothed: a cave painting from Cogul near Lerida in Catalonia shows nine women with full pendulous breasts clad only in caps and bell-shaped skirts performing a ritual fertility dance around a small male figure with an unpropitiously drooping penis, while Pliny describes the females of ancient Britain as ritually stripping, then staining themselves brown in preparation for their ceremonials.
Sacred, often orgiastic, dancing was a crucial element of Goddess worship, and the use of intoxicants or hallucinogens to heighten the effect was standard practice: the Goddess demanded complete abandon.
The Goddess also demanded in some cultures a form of sexual service that has been deeply misunderstood by later historians, who as a consequence have misrepresented it under a frankly misleading label. Writing in the fifth century B.C., Herodotus described the ritual as follows:
The worst Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the Temple of Love and have intercourse with some stranger. The men pass by and make their choice, and the women will never refuse, for that would be a sin. After this act she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess, and goes away to her home.
This is the practice which wherever it occurs throughout the Near or Middle East is always described as ‘ritual prostitution’. Nothing could more comprehensively degrade the true function of the Gadishtu, the sacred women of the Goddess. For in the act of love these women were revered as the reincarnation of the Goddess herself, celebrating her gift of sex which was so powerful, so holy and precious that eternal thanks were due to her within her temple. To have intercourse with a stranger was the purest expression of the will of the Goddess, and carried no stigma. On the contrary the holy women were always known as ‘sacred ones’, ‘the undefiled’, or as at Urek in Sumeria, nu-gig, ‘the pure or spotless’.
This unhistorical projection of anachronistic prejudice (sex is sin, and unmarried sex is prostitution) fails to take account of historical evidence supporting the high status of these women. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, carefully distinguishes between five grades of temple women and protects their rights to continue in the worship of their mothers. It also makes a clear division between sacred women and secular prostitutes – for it is an interesting assumption embedded in the very phrase ‘ritual prostitute’, that somehow these people did not have the real thing.
They did, of course; and the perennial commercialism of the true ‘working girl’ comes through strongly in one recorded anecdote of the most celebrated courtesan of the Egyptians, Archidice. The fame of her sexual skill was so great that men ruined themselves for her favours. One suitor, rejected because he could not afford her price, went home and dreamed that he had enjoyed her instead. The enraged Archidice took him to court, alleging that, as he had had the pleasure of sex with her, he should pay her normal fee for it. The court admitted the legality of her claim, but after much debate finally adjudicated that as the client had only dreamed he had enjoyed her, she should dream she had been paid.
Poets, priests, queens, mothers, lovers, athletes, soldiers and litigious courtesans, as the first individual women emerge to take their place in human history, they present an impressive spectacle. No one had yet told them that women were physically weak, emotionally unstable or intellectually ill-equipped; consequently they throng the annals of Minoan Crete, for example, as merchants, traders, sailors, farmers, charioteers, hunters and ministers of the Goddess, in apparent ignorance of the female inability to perform these roles that more advanced societies had yet to discover. At every level women made their mark, from the brilliant Aspasia, the courtesan-scholar-politician who partnered Pericles in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., to her contemporary Artemisia, the first-known woman sea-captain, whose command of her fleet at the battle of Marathon was so devastating that the Athenians put a huge bounty on her head; sadly, she survived the Persian wars to die of love, throwing herself off a cliff in a passion of grief when rejected by a younger man.
These were real women, then, vividly alive even at the moment of death: women who knew their strengths. These strengths were recognized in the range of social customs and legal rights known to be women’s due from a mass of historical evidence: physical and sexual freedom, access to power, education, full citizenship, the right to own money and property, the right to divorce, custody of children and financial maintenance.
The value placed on women in the legal codes and customs of the day traced back to their special female status; and this derived directly from their link with, and incarnation of, the Great Goddess. Though localized, since every country, tribe, town or even village had its own version of ‘Our Lady’, she was universal. To her worshippers, after so many thousand years, she seemed eternal:
I am Isis, mistress of every land. I laid down laws for all, and ordained things no one may change . . . I am she who is called divine among women – I divided the earth from heaven, made manifest the paths of the stars, prescribed the course of the sun and the moon . . . I brought together men and women . . . What I have made lam can be dissolved by no man.
Was this the challenge man was driven to take up? For where was man in the primal drama of the worship of the Great Mother? He was the expendable consort, the sacrificial king, the disposable drone. Woman was everything; he was nothing. It was too much. Man had to have some meaning in the vast and expanding universe of human consciousness. But as the struggle for understanding moved into its next phase, the only meaning seemed to lie through the wholesale reversal of the existing formula of belief. Male pride rose to take up the challenge of female power; and launching the sex war that was to divide sex and societies for millennia to come, man sought to assert his manhood through the death and destruction of all that had made woman the Great Mother, Goddess, warrior, lover and queen.
3 (#ulink_6d6043bb-ceb7-5845-a964-d0116b20531b)
The Rise of the Phallus (#ulink_6d6043bb-ceb7-5845-a964-d0116b20531b)
Holy Shiva, Divine Linganaut,
Heavenly Root, Celestial Penis,
Phallus Lord, thy radiant lingam is so large that neither Brahma nor Vishnu can reckon its extent.
HINDU PRAYER
He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly,
Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart,
He destroyed her life,
He felled her body and stood triumphant upon it.
King Marduk overthrows the Great Mother in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, c. 2000 B.C.
Men look to destroy every quality in a woman that will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that brought them forth.
NORMAN MAILER
‘In the beginning,’ writes Marilyn French, ‘was the Mother.’ That mother, as her ‘children’ saw her, is still with us today – her outsize breasts, bulging belly and buttocks, flaring vulva and tree-trunk thighs survive in the familiar figurines found in their tens of thousands in Europe alone. Against this massive, elemental force the human male cut a poor figure indeed. Every myth, every song in praise of the Great Goddess stressed by contrast the littleness of man, often in caustically satiric terms – the illustrated Papyrus of Tameniu of the twenty-first Egyptian dynasty (1102–952 B.C.) shows her naked, over-arching the whole world, flaunting her star-spangled breasts, belly and pubic zone, while the boy-god Geb, flat on the ground, reaches up to her in vain with a phallus that although exaggerated, plainly is not man enough for the occasion. Nor was this the limit of the sexual humiliations the Great Mother would exact. Among the Winnepagos of Canada, a brave who dreamed of the Goddess, even once, knew himself singled out for a terrible fate, that of becoming cinaedi, a homosexual compelled to wear women’s garb and to submit in every way to the sexual demands of other males. There are countless similar examples from widely different cultures of the Goddess’s dreaded and inexorable power: as Robert Graves explains, ‘under the Great Mother, woman was the dominant sex and man her frightened victim.’
For when all meaning, all magic, all life lay with woman, man had no function, no significance at all. ‘The baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns the women,’ declared an Australian Aboriginal: ‘men have nothing to do but copulate.’ Into this vacuum, as consciousness deepened, came envy, the ‘uterus-envy of female-protest within men awed by the apparently exclusive female power of creation of new life’. Resentful of the women’s monopoly of all nature’s rhythms, men were driven to invent their own. In origin, however, these male-centred rituals consisted of no more than attempts to mimic the biological action of women’s bodies, a debt openly acknowledged by many still-surviving Stone Age cultures: ‘in the beginning we had nothing . . . we took these things from the women.’
Typical of numerous such imitations worldwide was the hideous Aztec rite of dressing a sacrificing priest in the skin of his human sacrifice. He would then ‘burst from the bleeding human skin as the germinating shoot from the husk of the grain’, becoming both the new life and the one who gives birth by the power of his magic.
More horrific still was the fate that befell every boy initiate in the Aranda tribe of Australia:
. . . the ritual surgeon seizes the boy’s penis, inserts a long thin bone deep into the urethra, and slashes at the penis again and again with a small piece of flint used as a scalpel. He cuts through the layers of flesh until he reaches the bone, and the penis splits open like a boiled frankfurter.
This hideous ceremony, christened ‘sub-incision’ by the white settlers, tormented their civilized minds – what possible purpose could it serve? Had they understood Aranda, all would have been clear. The Aboriginal word for ‘split penis’ derives from the term for the vagina, and the title ‘possessor of a vulva’ is the honorific bestowed on all boys who undergo the ordeal. Later rituals also included the regular re-opening of the wound to demonstrate that the initiate could now ‘menstruate’.
It was, in Margaret Mead’s words, ‘as if men can only become men by taking over the functions that women perform naturally.’
For Jung, the secret of all male initiation rituals lay in ‘going through the mother again’, embracing the fear, the pain and the blood in order to be born anew not as a child but as a man and a hero. ‘Through the mother’, though, does not imply any sympathetic identification with the female. On the contrary, the key element is the takeover of birth as a male mystery, the first ‘weapon in the men’s struggle to shake off the feminine domination created by the matriarchy’.
This struggle of men not merely to imitate and outdo, but to usurp women’s power of creating new life took place on every level; Zeus giving birth to Athene from his head is a classic reversal of the primal creation myth that finds a parallel in many other mythologies. It was nothing less than a revolution: of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against their oppression, of value structures and habits of thought.
And human thought was itself progressing along lines that eased the way towards the domination of males. As human beings crossed the mental threshold between interpreting events in symbolic and magical terms, and the dawning realization of cause and effect, man’s part in the making of babies became clear. Now women’s rhythms were seen to be human, not divine, and the knowledge that man determined pregnancy completed the revolution that his resentment and resistance had already set in train. Historian Jean Markdale sums it up:
When man began to assert that he was essential to fertilization, the old mental attitudes suddenly collapsed. This was a very important revolution in man’s history, and it is astonishing that it is not rated equally with the wheel, agriculture, and the use of metals . . . As the male had been cheated for centuries . . . equality was not enough. He now understood the full implications of his power, and was going to dominate . . .
And what better weapon of dominance was there to hand but the phallus? As man began to carve out some meaning for himself to set against woman’s eternal, innate potency, what would serve his turn better than man’s best friend, his penis. In its fragile human form, prey to unbidden arousal, stubborn refusal and unpredictable deflation, it could not challenge women’s unfailing power of birth. But elevated above reality into symbol, transformed into ‘phallus’ and enshrined in materials known to be proof against detumescence like metal and stone, it would do very well.
At a stroke, then, the power was there at man’s bidding. Now he was transformed from an unregarded afterthought of creation whose manhood held no magic for any except himself, to the whole secret and origin of the Great Mother’s life force. The power was not hers, but his. His was the sacred organ of generation; and the phallus, not the uterus, was the source of all that lived. Power to the phallus became the imperative (to, from, by, in and of the phallus); and so a new religion was born.
This is not to suggest that the penis and its symbolic equivalent the phallus were unknown to these early societies before the discovery of biological paternity began to sweep the world around the beginnings of the Iron Age, some 3500 years ago. Phallic emblems made their appearance in the earliest recorded living sites, and from the time of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (around 9000–8000 B.C. in the Near East), they occur in impressive size and profusion. At Grimes Grave in Norfolk, England, for example, an altar discovered in the bowels of the abandoned Neolithic flint mine workings bore a cup, seven deer anders, and a mighty phallus carved in chalk, all set out as offerings to the figure of the Great Goddess reared up before it. For whatever their proportions (and some of the lovingly wrought models in clay or stone display a truly impressive capacity for wishful thinking), these emblems were only fashioned as part of the worship of the Goddess, and were not sacred in themselves.
