|
In
Anatolia (present-day Turkey) the towns of Catal Huyuk, Mersin,
Hacilar and Alalakh were also matrifocal Goddess cultures.
At the other end of the Mediterranean, Marseilles and Syracuse
were Goddess-worshipping centres, and perhaps the most famous of
all was Ephesus, a Greek city on the west coast of Anatolia.
What
were women-centred, Goddess-worshipping cultures like? Many
scholars have noted their strong resemblances to the larger number
of European myths and legends about a Golden Age, suggesting that
the myths arose as latter-day accounts of what had once been
reality. The absence of military fortifications and weaponry
indicate that they were peace-loving cultures. There seems
to have been no large-scale, organised warfare, only the minor,
personal skirmishes and conflicts that arise in any human society.
Weapons were small, personal instruments, which suggest they were
used primarily for defence.
Goddess
centres also lacked a bureaucratic political structure; people
lived in clan-like extended families run by mothers. There
was no slavery. Women functioned as priestesses, artists,
agriculturists and small-game hunters. Food was abundant and
supplied by gathering, foraging, hunting and later small-scale
farming. In short, these Neolithic Goddess cultures seem to
have sown the seeds for Western thinkers' fascination with Utopia,
not as a future possibility, however, but as a dream about a
reality we have lost.
It
is not surprising that ancient life centred on mothers.
Bloodlines, kinship and property rights naturally descended
through mothers because the mother-child relationship was always
paramount. A child always knew its mother. Even after
fatherhood was understood, mothers and children did not always
know who the father was.
Matrifocal
societies may indeed have had the characteristics of a Golden Age
simply because the primary bonding was between children and
mothers. As psychiatrist Erich Fromm has pointed out,
children must win their father's love, usually by obedience
and conformity. A mother's love is unconditional,
which breeds goodwill. Cultures based on mother love and
reinforced by religious rites centering on the Mother Goddess
would have been peaceful, easy-going, life-nurturing societies
built on trust. The sacredness of all life would have been
stressed, and violent, destructive behaviour discouraged.
Humanistic values arising from the natural playfulness of mother
and child, rather than obedience to an authoritarian figure, would
have cemented social relations.
The
Goddess centres discovered around the Mediterranean are
representative of the matrifocal cultures in other parts of the
world. Their discovery has led some sholars to suggest that
Neolithic civilization, especially in temperate climates, was
matrifocal everywhere and that women were the originators of human
culture. Because of woman's centrality in human life and
society, she would have been the developer of the arts and skills
necessary for civilisation to advance. Women's labour
provided the bulk of the food supplies, if the hunting-gathering
societies that still exist in our own day are any indication.
Here women provide 60% of the food, and social myths and customs
indicate that the gathering and preparation of food were always
female responsibilities. As part of the food preparation
women would have developed processing, preserving and storage
techniques.
To
provide clothing women learned weaving skills and the art of
tanning and dyeing hides. Among the first attempts at art
may have been the designs that women painted on leather or wove
into textiles. Women were probably the primary fire keepers,
a sacred and vital function in primeval societies. In
eighty-four tribal societies that have survived into the twentieth
century, women are still the primary builders and keepers of
fires, and many of these cultures have legends about woman being
the original discoverer of fire. Ovens were referred to as a
kind of belly or womb. Woman's role in the ritual
maintenance of fire continued down through the centuries, as seen
in the vestal virgins of Rome and the Irish nuns of St Brigid at
Kildare, who tended sacred fires until the time of Henry VIII.
As fire keepers women would have been in charge of pottery,
ceramics and metallurgy.
As
the primary gatherers of herbs, grains, nuts, berries and roots,
women would in all likelihood have been the original herbalists
and pharmacologists. With their knowledge of medicinal herbs
and remedies, women were the first official healers and
health-care providers. (The World Health Organisation
relates that 95 per cent of all health care even today is provided
by women). Cataloguing and explaining to their daughters the
various parts of plants and showing how to prepare them, pointing
out which were poisonous, and cataloguing herbs and
cross-referencing them with specific ailments may have entailed
the refinement of communication that led to the development of
language as we know it. Anthropologists who suggest this
theory point out that hunting large game, the male's primary
function, would not have required such meticulous detailing and
cataloguing of information. Hence vocabulary and sentence
structure would not have been as extensive or complex.
Hunting is best taught and executed by silent observation and
imitation.
Women's
experience also shaped our ancestors' concept of time. The
earliest calendars were lunar calendars based on the
twenty-eight-day cycle of the moon and the thirteen moons in a
year. Chinese women developed lunar calendars three thousand
years ago, and lunar calendars have been discovered at Neolithic
sites across Europe. They were also used by tribal people in
the Americas up into modern times. Since menstrual cycles
follow lunar cycles - and still do today when women live away from
from artificial lights - Neolithic women would not have
escaped noticing the strong connection between the two. They
probably even identified the two as being parallel aspects of the
same phenomenon - an indication that the Goddess who manifested in
the moon each month also manifested in their own bodies. The
Gaelic words for menstruation and calendar still reflect this
close identification. They are miosach and miosachan
respectively. As Stone Age women etched or notched moon-time
on to wood or stone to track menstrual cycles, calculate
pregnancies and predict births, they developed the earliest forms
of mathematics and astronomy, two fields which scholars believe
originated in conjunction with one another.
If
women and women's mysteries inspired astrology and calendrical
sciences, then women's influence was most likely the inspiration
for the stone circles and megalithic structures that were built
all over the globe. Many of these were laid out to mark the
passage of time by means of celestial events such as the
appearance of certain constellations in the sky at appointed times
of the year or the rising of the sun at the summer and winter
solstices. In other words, Stonehenge and Avebury in
England, and their counterparts in other areas of the world, were
huge astronomical observatories. On of the most recently
discovered examples is an Irish tomb outside Dublin built in
alignment with the rising sun at the winter solstice so that the
first rays of the dawn on 21 December enter a small slit in the
roof of the tomb and throw pools of light which illuminate designs
carved on the floor in the inner chamber. This old Celtic
tomb, erected over five thousand years ago, is older than
Stonehenge and the pyramids.
In
many of these stone circles, or 'medicine wheels' as they are
called in Native America, sacred rituals were performed in
conjunction with solar, lunar and stellar sightings. Even
today astonishingly accurate observations can be made using these
structures, even though the stones themselves look crude and
clumsy. The mathematical precision with which they were laid
out and constructed clearly indicates that these old tribespeople
were sophisticated engineers and geometricians. It also
indicates that they felt a powerful need to construct, by means of
their own physical labour, earth structures that would be in
harmony with celestial events. They intuitively understood
that harmony and balance need to be affirmed by human endeavour,
that it was their responsibility to express and live according to
the patterns of harmony they saw around them. The same
should apply to us living today - for of all the earth's
creatures, human beings have the power to ignore, even destroy,
the balance of nature. Today the haunting stones and
medicine wheels appear like sentinels guarding sacred places as
well as sacred concepts. They seem to say to us, 'Be
careful. Enter this sacred space only if you vow to
uphold the harmonies and beauties of creation.'
It
is well known that in small groups of women living or working
together, menstrual cycles harmonize and align with each other.
Scholars believe this was the norm in tribal life. Thus all
or most of the women would share their menstrual times together,
and the monthly period would have been recognised as a time
when woman experienced the divine power inherent in the earth and
moon most intensely. In many indigenous cultures women still
spend these days in meditation and sacred rituals.
When
human life and social activity coincide with the natural cycles of
the earth and moon, ovulation and menstruation occur regularly in
conjunction with lunar phases. The former coincide with the
full moon, the latter with the new moon. Modern life has not
totally destroyed this conjunction. More births occur around
the full moon than during any other time of the month, which makes
sense considering that the human gestation period lasts the
equivalent of nine lunar months.
As
one sifts through the scattered bits of information gathered from
cultures around the world and dating back thousands of years to
pre-recorded history, a pattern begins to emerge. The most
intimate female experiences - ovulation, menstruation, gestation,
birth, the production of milk - and the clocking of these
experiences formed and shaped our ancestors' conceptions of time.
And the way a people measure time determines the timing and nature
of their important social activities and rituals which become the
foundation for civilization. For these reasons, it is
suggested by many scholars that women were the real culture
bearers and founders of civilization in these prehistoric times.
Witches
practice many of the same arts and skills that lie at the base of
human culture and were once considered sacred to the Goddess.
As we cook, sew, brew potions, prepare herbs, build fires, collect
healing stones, set up altars, read the omens in the movements of
earth and sky, perform healing rituals for the sick, we recite the
prayers and chants that we hope are similar to those chanted by
our Neolithic grandmothers. We continue to use the old names
for the Goddess. In Crete, the place where the Goddess
culture flowered for the last time in all its purity, were
worshipped the famous Greek Goddesses - all aspects of the one
Goddess - whose names touch something deep and sacred in our
unconscious, names that we invoke in many of our rituals:
Aphrodite, Athene, Demeter, Persephone, Artemis, Hecate.
Witches continue to honour the Great Goddess depicted in Cretan
art as the Lady of the Beasts, the Lady in tune with the wild
things of nature, the Lady who can pick up serpents and channel
energy from the sky and the earth, the Lady who knows the secrets
of herbs and plants.
|
