In The Beginning Was the Goddess
The mystery and creative power
of the feminine as the source of
life was the first religious
experience
Feminine myths of divinity...
• These images reflect a little-known history about spiritual, personal
and cultural attitudes towards women, the feminine experience and
perspective.
• Myths of divinity show us the basic
assumptions that underlie our
personal and cultural sense of
reality,
psychology, spirituality,
mind/body, the
‘other’,
war and peace.
• How do you think and feel
about your body, sexuality,
power, relationship to
nature and to
the ‘other’?
• What is the mythic basis that is
the background of your reality?
The power of love, not the love of power.
It’s all mythology...
Socially and individually we try to make sense of life through telling
stories – it’s a way of seeing connection and forming patterns.
Mythologies and archetypes arise spontaneously in individuals and
cultures out of the circumstances of the times and human experience.
But they also produce our personal and social perspectives as much as
they are produced by them.
This is co-creation.
Cultural and religious creation stories tell how ‘everything’ originated. This
is a conceptual matrix that is extrapolated in social organization,
relationship to others, and how we treat ourselves.
Collective stories are the basis of our personal mythologies. Personal
mythologies frame the lived experience of our inner world and the
world around us.
These stories are influenced by the cultural matrix of which we are part.
Let’s take a look at how it all began....
Marija Gimbutas
1921 - 1994
• Initial and extensive scholarly research
behind the discovery of Stone Age
Goddess culture and religion.
• Prior to her, archaeologists saw these
figures as ‘fertility charms’ aimed to
arouse male sexuality, or as ‘dolls’.
• However, these figures appear in sacred
sites -- on altars in temples, in ritualistic
offering places, caves and graves.
• She was the first to posit these as
remnants of an extensive religion,
centered on a female deity and
cosmology.
• Her background in linguistics, comparative
religion and Indo-European culture as well
as archaeology enabled her to develop
this new perspective.
• Gimbutas came to America as a refugee
from Lithuania in World War II. She rose
to high academic stature, wrote 20 books
and was a researcher at Harvard.
It all started right back at the beginning of the human story. This is
called prehistory or the Stone Age, which is made up of the very
earliest Palaeolithic and later Neolithic civilizations. Cave drawings
and rough flint sculptures of female figures date as far back as the
Lower Palaeolithic Age more than 500,000 years ago.
Palaeolithic imagery is all centered around feminine images. This is the beginning of
the religious experience, and it’s all about the Goddess.
Palaeolithic Age 2,000,000 – 6500 BC
Goddess and yoni symbolism are found in sacred sites like burial mounds. Round,
pregnant female figures, triangles, spirals, zigzags, eggs, snake spirals are all aspects of
the Goddess. They relate to procreative energy, vulva shapes and cyclic time.
Snake and owl imagery has been associated with the
Goddess from Palaeolithic times to the present.
The caves in which we find these
drawings were religious
sanctuaries for the enactment of
seasonal rituals, initiations and
other ceremonies related to the
sacred cycles of life.
Neolithic Period 6500 – 3500 B.C.
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Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated as well as plants
Ceramics were invented and thousands of figures, bowls, temples and clay
models of temples, wall paintings, reliefs and ritual objects appeared
The number of religious symbols multiplied a hundredfold, giving abundant
data to decipher the expansion of Goddess iconography
Arts and creativity flourished
Powers and Attributes of the Neolithic Goddess
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She is cosmic creator, life-giver, mistress and force of nature, fertility and symbol of perpetual cycles
of life. The female body, not the male mind, gives birth to all creation and is connected to Nature
herself in the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth.
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She is responsible for the bearing and nourishing of plants, animals and humans. Her
exaggerated breasts, vulva and buttocks celebrate the energetic centers of her mysterious
procreative power.
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The Goddess is also the holder of laws that order nature and society. Moral conduct in keeping with
the laws of nature is a religious decree
She begins as an all-encompassing unitary image, but
splits and develops into many different aspects
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The life-generating Goddess represents one source, but is pictured in many
forms designating sex, birth, death, rebirth, knowledge, law. The first religious
concepts formed around the Goddess and her marvellous body from which
everything comes. This becomes elaborated over future ages into individual
Goddess like Inanna and Erishkegal, Lilith, Isis, Demeter and Persephone,
Aphrodite, Sophia and Mary. Later, she is joined by a male consort.
Iconography is continuous from the
Palaeolithic to the Neolithic period and
into the Bronze Age
The Goddess has a primary representation as owl (magic) and snake (wisdom and rebirth).) Later these
animals became demonized because of the threat they represented to the patriarchy – the memory and
power of the Great Goddess. Curves and spirals are the geometry of the Goddess and connect to natural
shapes.
Goddess iconography continues to the present day
Mother and child
Neolithic Developments
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This Goddess holds a horn, shaped like the
crescent moon, with 13 marks on it for the
year’s 13 moons. Was this the first
calendar? Did the calibration of time
originate with recording women’s monthly
cycles?
We find granaries and ovens for baking next
to temples and filled with the ritual figures
of the Goddess.
Clay beads and gold jewellery are made as
are flint hunting and cultivation tools.
Sacred sites like Stonehenge show us a
sophisticated technology we do not yet
understand.
Neolithic Cultural Implications
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These cultures were peaceful and agrarian, revered women and placed feminine
values at the center of spiritual life
Time was seen as circular and cyclical
The laws of nature were absolute, inevitable and unarguable
Homes and villages are built in a circle, around the center of the universe – the
belly of the Great Mother
Neolithic Life
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There is no evidence of territorial aggression in Paleo- and Neolithic
Central Europe. The absence of iconography of war implies a peaceful
existence. Villages have no fortification and are found on rivers and
lakes, unlike a fortified position. Graves and imagery show implements
for hunting but not warfare.
The original ‘people of place’ or ‘pagan’ in Greek had deep attachment
to the sacred sites, as opposed to nomadic warriors
No defensive structures like palisades are found in this period
Culture of Peace & Culture of War
•Marija Gimbutas says, “It is a gross
misunderstanding to imagine warfare as
endemic to the human condition...
Humans were once capable of living in
harmony with each other, with nature
and the sacred.”
Civilization was not preceded by an
inferior culture but by a worldview that
reflected a longstanding state of high
social development. This nature-attuned,
peaceful and highly artistic culture was
never completely erased after the
invasion of nomadic marauders.
Rather, the old culture provided a matrix
for later beliefs and practices.
Goddess worship was the religion for thousands of years and
continued in an encoded version even when the patriarchy
became dominant.
Men in the Stone Age
No male Gods appear in the
Palaeolithic era, and no male Gods
associated with creation in the
Neolithic period.
Figures here show Neolithic phallic
and sorrowing male figures. Not
really much representation.
Of the 3,000 Neolithic sculptures
found between Southern France
and central Siberia, only about 5%
of these images depict masculine
figures.
The Sacred Marriage
As agriculture and the breeding of domesticated animals became part of society, the masculine
consort of the Goddess, her mythological suffering son/lover develops as a mythic image. He appears
in the spring, matures in the summer and dies in autumn with the vegetation, then resurrects in
spring. Later Neolithic imagery shows the emergence of a sacred marriage, with feminine and
masculine energy in ecstatic embrace. Although the Goddess is primordial, she needs her consort for
new life to occur. The masculine and feminine energies are both necessary. The sacred marriage
becomes developed in the Bronze Age as the archetypal masculine asserts itself in the cultural
imagination.
What happened to the Great Goddess
religion and culture?
The Indo European Invasion
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The warlike, nomadic Indo Europeans infiltrated Europe from 4400 – 2800 B.C.
And eventually extended into the Middle East
The horse-mounted warrior/herders invaded Old Europe, effecting a drastic
cultural change similar in scope to the invasion of the American continent.
Archaeological evidence, linguistics and mythology show a clash of ideologies,
social structures and technologies.
The domestication of the horse and the
emerging metallurgy of the Bronze Age with its
development of weaponry enabled the
dominance of the patriarchy.
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Horses and chariots introduced violent raids and gave primacy to militaristic, masculine
strength over communal, law-bound, agrarian Goddess-based civilization
The Goddess’s nature-based power over birth, life as ordered within the laws of nature,
death and rebirth were superseded by the death wielding war-makers
A long period of chaos punctuated by violence ensued and social order was finally returned
during the Axial Age circa 800 BC when the world’s great religions
and philosophies formed, recreating an ethical religious
containment structure for the aggression of the warrior, but
now
centered around a masculine figure as powerful
and
creative.
The primordial Goddess was creative and also destructive in nature’s cycles.
Warfare was a new invention. The culture of the masculine War Gods dominated
the feminine Fertility Goddess. The new war technology dominated peaceful
cultures. Strength trumped creativity. Death was in the hands of the warriors’ will.
Sex and death become polarized
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The new supremacy of masculine war-making over Goddess pro-creating gave birth to
the hero myth. The warrior/hero overcomes the threat of death by his strength and
skill. Death becomes the evil opponent. Sex is associated with the power of the
feminine and is suspect. It subverts the will-driven militaristic ethos.
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A new, strange concept of a male creation-God was introduced. Warlike, vengeful and
jealous of any Gods before him – especially of the forces of mysterious feminine
fertility. He must dominate through might and be wary of seduction. War Gods and
Fertility Gods didn’t mix. Creation now became centered in the mind rather than the
body.
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In Goddess culture’s cyclical time, death is a part of the cycle of birth, death, rebirth.
The Goddess son/lover, like the crops is born, grows, dies, and is reborn. This became
encoded in myth and religion. Inanna and Dumuzi, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and
(daughter) Persephone, Sophia and her fallen, lost daughter. These Goddess cults
continued to be celebrated throughout the Bronze and into the Iron Age.
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Even Mary, Mother of God, with her suffering son who is crucified and resurrected is
part of this lineage that continued into modern times.
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Goddess culture survives, encoded in cultural and personal attitudes.
Bronze Age
3500 – 750 BC
Age of the Warrior Hero and horse
H
The superior military strength destroyed the old civilization and social
structure. Most notable was the changed relationship between men and
women. The warrior strength of the masculine dominated and subjugated the
mythic power of the Goddess.
This happened to such an extent that our social views are still formed around
masculinity as the center. This is the basis of our individual and social sense of
reality. It has repercussions on how we treat ourselves, each other, and the
environment.
The conceptual matrixes of the Goddess and the Warrior have been arguing
ever since – in social roles, perceptions of the other, battles of reason &
emotion, logos & gnosis, mind & body. They argue through ages, like the
Enlightenment Age of Reason and the Romantic period. They argue in our
alienation from nature
and from our own inner nature.
Cultural attitudes
• Warrior-based
• Goddess-based
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Logos
Discipline
Reason
Causal
Science
Allopathic medicine
Linearity
Dominance & control
Mind
Sequential
Competition
Individual
Fundamentalism
George W. Bush
Gnosis
Creativity
Emotion
Systemic
Art
Holistic medicine
Complexity
Relationship & negotiation
Body
Cyclical
Collaboration
Collective
Liberalism
Barack Obama
Psychological attitudes to the self and others
Warrior-based
Goddess-based
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I need love and understanding
I have to get into it
Complexity oriented
Self-acceptance
Emotions bring self knowledge,
interiority, reflection
Forgiveness
Feeling
Humanistic, transpersonal, somatic,
psychodynamic
Communication
Body-mind relationship
Process
Don’t just do something, stand here!
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I need to get control
I have to get over it
Solution oriented
Excellence
Suppress emotion, favour reason
and action
Judgement
Thinking
Cognitive-behavioural therapy,
symptom orientation
Action
Mind over body
Results
Don’t just stand there, do
something!
The Sacred Marriage
can we make a new world?
The Sacred Marriage is a mythic structure in which the mind/body split, the Goddess
and Hero dance together in erotic embrace instead of mutual annihilation. It is a
more expansive and more redemptive understanding of our humanness and our
social and environmental contexts. It is an integrative model.
This implies a holism that is full spectrum. It does not refer to gender-based
heterosexuality, but to a primal dancing of opposites that are drawn into erotic
connection. These are the opposites that exist within our psyche’s inner world,
within the relationships we have with the other, and within our culture. It provides
an expansion of gender comprehension within a metaphysical context. It is a
rebalancing of dichotomy into dialectic.
The outcome is a greater ability to draw together with our opposites. This is not just
abut sex. It’s about how we interact with the ‘other’ in all its manifestations.
Hegel’s model of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Transformation is accomplished, not by the extinction of the opposite, but by deeper
insight into what they bring us. The dialectic third. The divine child.
The power of love, not the love of power.
This gives a new matrix of iconography, of reality and of social organization. The
sacred marriage is elaborated in some cultures of the Bronze Age,
notably in the beautiful poetry of Sumerian Inanna mythology.
Eros is the mysterious force of the sacred union.
The sacred marriage is not just about the awakening of Eros as a primary
force, but also of respect for the other as it appears through interaction
between conscious and unconscious, science and art.
Feminine sexuality was first deified, then feared, vilified and degraded.
Aphrodite and Lilith are two central figures of feminine sexuality that have
much to offer us today.
Aphrodite
And who better to mediate the
erotic dance of the sacred
marriage than the Goddess
Aphrodite as she appears in her
ancient and modern forms.
According to Reich, the energetic
basis of patriarchal power
structure is control of the natural
expression of Eros. Eric Fromm
saw this related specifically to
Fascism.
Aphrodite is a terrorist in the
realm of this control. Even the
Gods can’t resist her soft power.
She can turn anyone into a fool
for love.
Birth of Aphrodite
She is born at the moment when
Heaven is separated from earth
and creation. In the myth, all that
was being restricted is suddenly
freed as Chronos frees himself
from his mother’s womb and
castrates Uranus, the father who
would not let his children see the
light and kept them trapped in
Gaia.
Aphrodite is a figure who, in the
likeness of the original goddess,
brings back together the separate
forms of her creation -- not by
control and domination like
Uranus, but by erotic interplay. In
this sense, Aphrodite is ‘born’
when people joyfully remember,
as a distinct and sacred reality, the
interconnection that exists
between humans and the
whole of nature.
Aphrodite is no longer the Great
Mother Goddess who is the origin of
all things, but as daughter of the sea,
she is the child of the beginning.
Aphrodite
Lover of laughter
intensifies and transforms
everything she touches.
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Aphrodite combines physical union with the
world of relationships and time. As an image
connected to the heart, Aphrodite comes alive
when our animal nature is experienced as
divine. Her influence makes life sparkle with
beauty and joy. The Graces that attend her are
called Joyous, Brilliance and Flowering – all that
makes for sweetness in life. Desire and Love
follow her wherever she goes. As she walks
through nature, everything is filled with longing
for the other.
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The myth proposes that life is generated
through love. Union is then reunion, for love
that begets life connects with the mystery of life
itself. Eros is the force of interrelatedness with
all creation. As union is reunion, so fertility is
rebirth.
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The worship of Aphrodite involved ritual
bathing in the spring as a sign of renewal, or
being made ‘virgin’. Virgin referred back to the
original Great Mother who was complete unto
herself.
The Goddess Aphrodite
Beauty
She sends Love to assist in the court of
Wisdom. The atmosphere of playful
affection and exhilarating joy, mixed with
awe and respect is such a contrast to our
culture’s attitude to sexuality. There is no
association with sin or a fallen state.
Perhaps we have forgotten this Goddess.
Maybe she can help us rebalance and see
that physical love is sacred. That
integration of body, heart and spirit is
wisdom. That beauty is a complex,
mysterious force that defines us in ways
beyond our comprehension and draws us
on to our destiny.
Today, sex is all around us in popular
culture and pornography, but much of it is
actually a distraction from real Eros that
involves vulnerability, mystery and
relationship. Aphrodite’s Eros is not
something you consume and discard.
Lilith
Lilith first appears in the Sumerian Inanna
myths 2000 BCE in the story of the huluppu
tree. Inanna and Ishtar are both called
“Divine Lady of the Owl”, (Nin-ninna and
Kilili) and Lilith is associated with the screech
owl. “Gilgamesh struck the serpent who
could not be charmed./ The Anzu bird flew
with its young to the mountains./ And Lilith
smashed her home and fled to the wild
uninhabited places.”
Lilith in Antiquity
In Isaiah 34:14 (900 BC) the scripture warns of a night hag or night demon,
sometimes translated as Lilith.
In the Testament of Solomon (200 CE), a character named “Obizuth” is
described in terms of Lilith and amulets are prescribed to ward her off.
The Talmud (400 CE) contains four mentions of Lilith as succubus and night
demon.
The Nippur Bowls (600 CE), a set of 40 bowls, 26 of which feature Lilith as
child killer and succubus.
The Alphabet of Ben Sira (800 CE) is the founding text for the Genesis story
of Lilith as Adam’s first wife.
The Zohar (1200 CE), a central work of Jewish mysticism depicts Lilith as
“female of Samael” beautiful an seductive, who sleeps with men and kills
them. She begets demons from intercourse with sleeping men, is Adam’s
first wife and is described as a murderer of children.
In Medieval times, the accusations of witchcraft followed the lines of
seductress, flight through the air and child killing.
In the figure of Lilith, the original Great Mother is split into polarized
opposites of life-giving and death-bringing feminine powers.
Feminine sexuality itself is demonized.
The Goddess became demonized by the patriarchy, especially
the power of her mythic sexuality
Fear of feminine sexuality
The Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria
in the early first century AD says: “No
Essene takes a wife, because a wife is a
selfish creature, excessively jealous and an
adept in beguiling the morals of her
husband and seducing him by her continued
impostures. For by the fawning talk which
she practices and the other ways in which
she plays her part like an actress on the
stage, she first ensnares the sight and
hearing and then, when these victims have,
as it were, been duped, she cajoles the
sovereign mind.” Philo had a considerable
influence on Christian thought.
For him, it was Eve’s presence that initiated
the ‘fall’ of ‘man’. Lilith was sometimes
seen as Eve’s tempter, connecting her with
the serpent.
Eve tempted by the
serpent/Lilith
Lilith and sexuality
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In the Zohar, Lilith is called ‘the ruin of the world’ and defined
in sexual terms.
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For the early patriarchary: “Women are evil, my children:
because they have no power or strength to stand up against
man, they use wiles and try to ensnare him by their charms;
and man, whom women cannot subdue by strength, she
subdues by guile. For, indeed, the angel of God told me about
them and taught me that women yield to the spirit of
fornication more easily than a man does, and they lay plots in
their hearts against men: by the way they adorn themselves
they first lead their minds astray, and by a look they instil the
poison, and then in the act itself they take them captive – for a
woman cannot overcome a man by force. So shun fornication,
my children, and command your wives and daughters not to
adorn their heads and faces.”
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Eve’s responsibility for the expulsion became the justification
for making Jewish women subject to their fathers and husbands
so that they didn’t possess even a small degree of sexual, social
and political autonomy. Even though Jesus did not endorse this
view of women, it was brought into the New Testament by Paul,
and so entered Christian doctrine.
Lilith in the Romantic Period
Demoness, seductress, child killer changes in popular representation to first
feminist, champion of independence and liberated sexuality
Lilith began to be represented differently. In Goethe’s Faust
(1808). Mephistopheles speaks of her as Adam’s first wife,
a beautiful seductress with long flowing hair.
In John Keats's “Lamia” (1819), we find the first
sympathetic portrayal of Lilith. She is beautiful but is
trapped in the form of a snake until freed by Hermes so
that she can be with her lover, Lycius. On her wedding day,
a philosopher speaks her name and she dies. In 1820, Keats
writes “La Belle Dame sans Merci”. The unnamed Belle is a
femme fatale enchantress who seduces men.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti does two paintings of a beautiful
Lilith combing her hair, and also writes a sonnet, “Lilith”,
later published as “Body’s Beauty” 1868. the poem
references the story of Adam’s first wife, affiliates her with
the snake, and ends with Lilith killing a young man,
strangling him with her hair. In a later ballad, “Eden Bower”
(1869), Rossetti makes a transformation into a feminist
figure. Lilith has a sympathetic narrative voice that
undermines the traditional negative representations.
In 1883, Robert Browning writes a poem where Lilith
confesses that she truly loved Adam. Romantic era
paintings by John Collier and Kenyon Cox show Lilith
erotically caressing the snake. The succubus becomes
erotically charged rather than vilified.
Modern representations
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George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Back to
Methuselah” (1922) shows Lilith as the
personification of creative development and
mother of Adam and Eve and all humanity. She
gives Eve the great gift of curiosity. The last act is
set in the year 31,920 and Lilith concludes that the
experiment of humanity has been worthwhile.
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In 1974, Peter Gabriel’s album, “The Lamb Lies
Down on Broadway” has Lilith as the guide of the
soul in the underworld.
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In “Lilith: A Metamorphosis”, a 1991 novel by
Dagmar Nick, Lilith tells her version of the story of
Adam, Eve and the snake.
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In 1998, Sarah McLachlan creates the Lilith Fair to
showcase female recoding artists. She portrays
Lilith as the first strong, independent woman. A
feminist heroine, freeing herself from repressive
patriarchal regimes.
Lilith and Aphrodite and not usually compared, but there is an interesting
relationship to be explored here regarding myths of self actualization
through the liberation of feminine sexuality.
Lilith became the unofficial patroness of the
women’s liberation movement because of her
raging independence, individualistic expression
of sexuality, and history of vilification. Lilith
became an image of denied sexual desire,
repressed and projected onto the female, who
thereby becomes the demonized seducer.
The soft graceful sexuality of Aphrodite needs to
be revalued in our culture. For many women, it
is not possible to reclaim this until they have
gone through an archetypal revival with Lilith.
Dark and light versions of feminine sexuality
Lilith
Aphrodite
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Succubus. Giving into sex = death
Unpredictable and uncontainable
Feminine rage
Kills babies
Ugly hag (Crone) and also beautiful
maiden
Defies God Himself
1960’s feminist archetype
Aggressive feminine sexuality
Shadow material
Embodiment
Needed in today’s commodified and
commercialized world
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Seductress. Giving into sex = new
life
Unpredictable and uncontainable
Feminine sweetness
Generative
Beautiful maiden
Overpowers all the Gods
Post-modern feminist archetype
Polymorphous sexuality
Shadow material
Embodiment
Needed in today’s commodified
and commercialized world
THE LIVING INSTITUTE
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