Download e-book for kindle: The Faces of the Goddess by Lotte Motz

the assumption that the earliest people worshipped a sovereign, nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a well-liked one. it's been taken up as truth through the media, who oftentimes depict glossy goddess-worshippers as "reviving" the traditional religions of our ancestors. Feminist students contend that, within the primordial religions, the good mom was once commemorated because the basic, inventive strength, giving start to the realm, granting fertility to either plants and people, and ruling excellent over her relations pantheon. The peaceable, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her have been ultimately burnt up or subjugated via nomadic, patriarchal warrior tribes corresponding to the early Hebrews, who introduced their male God to overthrow the good mom: step one within the construction and perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant oppression and degradation of women.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz units out to check this speculation by way of analyzing the genuine lady deities of early human cultures. She reveals no hint of the good mom of their myths or of their worship. From the Eskimos of the arctic barren region, whose harsh existence even at the present time such a lot heavily mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the wealthy cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz appears at quite a lot of goddesses who're known as mom, or who supply delivery of their myths. She reveals that those goddesses have various origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and different divinities, instead of stemming from a typical mom Goddess archetype. for example, Sedna, the robust goddess whose chopped-off hands turned the seals and fish that have been the Eskimos' leader resource of foodstuff, had not anything to do with human fertility. certainly, human motherhood was once held in such low esteem that Eskimo ladies have been pressured to offer beginning thoroughly by myself, without human companionship and no necessary deities of childbirth. Likewise, whereas a variety of Mexican goddesses governed over therapeutic, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them both embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the plants: for that the Mexicans regarded to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor have been the rituals of those goddesses nurturing or peaceable. The goddess Cihuacoatl, who nurtured the writer god Quetzalcoatl and helped him create humanity, used to be worshipped with human sacrifices who have been driven right into a hearth, got rid of whereas nonetheless alive, and their hearts have been reduce out. And Motz heavily examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the "Magna Mater" ordinarilly brought up for instance of a strong mom goddess. Hers have been the final of the good pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall prior to Christianity. yet Cybele herself by no means provides delivery, nor does she situation herself with supporting ladies in childbirth or childrearing. She isn't herself a mom, and the male personality figuring such a lot prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste significant other. Tellingly, Cybele's monks commit themselves to her by means of castrating themselves, hence mimicking Attis's death--a very extraordinary approach to venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict those prior goddesses as peaceable and nurturing moms, as is frequently performed, is to disclaim them their very own complicated and complex nature as beings who have been frequently violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who reveled of their eroticism and have been worshipped as harlots. the assumption of a nurturing mom Goddess is especially strong. during this hard e-book, notwithstanding, Motz exhibits that She is a manufactured from our personal age, now not of prior ones. through discarding this simplistic and tired paradigm, we will be able to open the door to a brand new state of mind approximately female spirituality and spiritual experience.