Novedades en el web

Summary of God Was Born a Woman

© Pepe Rodríguez 

© Ediciones B., Barcelona, 2000.

Translation: Heather Hayes (E-mail: hhayes@inicia.es)

In all prehistoric cultures, the central cosmogonic figure, or the power or force that was the procreator of the universe, was personified in the figure of a woman, and her power as a generator and protector was symbolized by her feminine attributes: breasts, buttocks, pregnant abdomen and vulva-all very well accentuated. The experts have called her (a divine uterus from which all was born, and to which all returned, in order to be regenerated and follow the cycle of Nature) the "Great Goddess", or also, under a limited conceptualization, the "Great Mother", and she presided exclusively over human religious expression from ca. 30,000 B.C. until ca. 3,000 B.C. This single parthenogenetic Great Goddess, in all of her her invocations, contained all of cosmogonic fundaments: chaos and order, darkness and light, drought and moisture, death and life… Thus, her omnipotence remained undisputed for millennia. The concept of a masculine god did not even appear until the 6th or 5th millennium B.C., and failed to achieve supremacy until the 3rd or 2nd millennium B.C., a date varying from region to region.

It is important to remember the fact that the concept of a "divine being" appeared and evolved parallel to different phases in the development of human logical-verbal thought, which took shape over some 40,000 years, and that its symbols and myths varied at the same time and in the same direction as did human socio-economic structures. During the entire pre-agricultural era, control over food production and basic social institutions (except that of defense) was in the hands of women, and it is to them that we owe the vast majority of psychosocial and technical advancements that led to civilization, and these matricentric collectives were all ruled by the Great Goddess. However, upon entering the agricultural era, when societies began to become sedentary and dependent upon crops, due to a series of reasons impossible to summarize in this brief section, males became obliged to become involved in food production, and thus a transformation process began, which would dispossess women of their ancestral power, delivering it into the hands of men.

In just a few millennia, following the introduction of agricultural surplus, the masculine god appeared, as did the clergy, class-based societies, and monarchies, while women became reduced to becoming the chattels or possessions of males. Obviously, male dominance on earth had its equivalent in the heavens (social changes have always been justified by changes in myths), and the masculine deity began to overpower the feminine. Women and the Goddess continued to lose their autonomy, their importance, and their power, practically all at the same time. They became the victims of a changing world, in which men took control of production, warfare, and cultural media; men became, therefore, the only keepers and guardians of private property, paternity, and thought-in short, of the very right to life.

For a period not less than 25,000 years, the Great Goddess was considered to be the universe's only source of generation. Starting in the 5th millennium B.C., however, there appeared (by imposition) a coadjutant in her fertilization-a young male subsidiary deity (her son and lover), who would die annually after a copulation in which the Goddess would actually continue to fertilize herself, since this male source was no more than the flesh of her flesh. From the end of the 3rd millennium B.C., monarchs began to take on this symbolic role of lover and fertilizer of the Goddess, a fact that coincided with the deification of monarchies. During the next step, which took place in the 2nd millennium B.C., the process of creation stopped being understood in terms of simile with feminine physiological reproduction, and began to be understood as having been the result of instruments of power, such as the word ("let there be… and there was"), used fundamentally by masculine gods who were always accompanied by a feminine partner. This change was truly transcendental, since the concept of a creator allowed people to distance themselves from their ancestral dependence upon the Goddess as single source of generation. Finally, an omnipotent masculine god exclusively accumulated (and eventually deforced) all aspects of generation.

With the establishment of complex societies in the Near East and Europe, the role and social function of women and the Goddess were mercilessly degraded. Even women's productive efficacy, from their reproductive capacity to their abilities as cultivators/gatherers, which had meant sustenance for human communities for hundred of thousands of years, ended up being, because of inevitable socio-economic changes, the involuntary origin of the progressive social degradation of women and the process of mythical shift, which would lead to the substitution of the primitive conception of a feminine deity by a masculine one. Even so, despite all of this, no later religious formation has been as holistic, intelligent and soothing as that of the Goddess; and no masculine god, no matter how much of a "God the Father" he has built himself up to be, has ever possessed the same capacity for integration and mythical evocation as the Goddess. For these reasons, even in patriarchal religions, the feminine has endured, crouching beneath diverse divine characters. This can bee seen in the case of the Catholic Virgin, whose symbols (waxing moon, water, etc.), are exactly the same as those identifying the Great Goddess during the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Not in vain, then, was the concept of God born a woman.

 

Index

Introduction

Abstract