Mother and Son

© Saviour Shirlie. Released for Public Use
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000

Mother and Son

Veneration of the Goddess peaked in the Bronze Age when the purpose of sexual activity was still not clear and lineages were still through the woman. When the role of man in procreation became known, mythology led to stories of gods getting up to all sorts of tricks to penetrate goddesses, but originally they had no such role. Hesiod's Theogony (Birth of the Gods) was the ancient Greek creation myth, designed to show how the patriarchal gods tried several times to replace the matriarchal goddesses before they succeeded.

The earth goddess Gaia formed the male sky, Ouranos, and together they generated the Titans—primitive gods. Ouranos wanted to stop the Titans from being born, by confining them to Gaia's womb, so Gaia gave her youngest son, Kronos, a sickle to castrate his father. Surely Kronos is Chronos, Time—Time castrates all things, but the loss of male virility with time is apt here. The spelling is merely a regional variation of kappa for chi. Kronos impregnated the Titan, Rhea, who began to give birth to the Olympian deities, but Kronos swallowed each of them them on birth. Rhea substituted a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes for her youngest son, Zeus, who then forced Kronos to cough up the Olympians, and set up the Olympian order after they had defeated the Titans. Zeus continued the tradition, but more cleverly, by swallowing his first wife Metis, of “cunning wisdom”, and gave birth to Athena from his head, finally showing that males could reproduce.

The world has declined from the plain reality of the procreative power of the female to the falsehood of male procreative power. With Zeus disguised as Yehouah, it has remained there ever since, largely with the active support of women!

Any creation legend must begin with a mother not a father. Only a solitary mother can give birth—virgin births do occur in Nature even in multicellular animals—but a solitary male never can. One can imagine that by some quirk of nature, such as radiation, a human woman could become pregnant without human intercourse. A male could not experience the same accident.

We are talking definitions. If a creature is able to give life to something which previously did not have it, then that creature is its mother not its father. Of course in the Judaeo-Christian legend, God the father is taken out of it altogether into a transcendental world but that too is a stupid cop out. If that world exists and can influence this one, then it is part of Nature because, again by definition, Nature is everything it is possible to experience. So again we should be talking of a mother, not a father that is merely a product of the warriors and priests.

From the earliest times the goddess was associated with the seasonal and astronomical cycles of the sun and the moon. In probably the earliest tradition, the goddess ruled the calendar as the moon because the lunar cycle could only be associated with womanhood—the moon was naturally a goddess.

She personified birth, growth, decay and death and so had all of these aspects. The flower of the Goddess was considered the five petalled primrose, the petals representing Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose, Death. She begins as a virgin, becomes a mother and ends up a crone. She is the Eonagyne, the perpetual woman. That is why she can be simultaneously a virgin and a mother.

Even when the goddess became much demeaned under the patriarchs, the ambivalence of virgin and mother remains. Diana or Artemis is the chaste and fair huntress, the virgin, but her images made at Ephesus, the centre of her worship, depict her as many breasted—a Great Mother of all Things, like Cybele. As the Eonagyne, she was always both. Furthermore Diana is never given any particular lover, suggesting the primal goddess worship prevalent when fatherhood was unimportant.

In the Martyrdom of Bartholemew, the apostle explains to the king of India:

The first man, then, was called Adam; he was formed out of the earth. And the earth, his mother out of which he was, was virgin, because it had neither been polluted by the blood of man nor opened for the burial of any one. The earth, then, was like the virgin.

This might easily reflect the Jewish legend of the creation of Adam before the Persian priests “returning” from “Exile” mangled it. It properly refers to the earth as the mother of Adam, a fact we can only infer from the patriarchal story, from Adam being made from mud. God was merely a breath or wind, the idea of which has traditionally been translated as spirit, to make it sound more profound for Christians.

Early people thought that women conceived because of the wind. Since the wind is neither here nor there but the earth definitely is here, the only definite thing we can know about birth is the mother. Impregnation was not obviously from sexual intercourse because often no impregnation occurred, so it was uncertain that sex had anything to do with birth. All that was certain was that at irregular intervals women created new life, so women were revered. The first gods were therefore mothers—they were goddesses. We infer this because there are no certain images of gods from the old stone age but figurines of pregnant women dating from before 10,000 BC are found scattered in Europe and Siberia.

The realisation of the result of sexual activity led quite late to the idea of the son being the goddess's lover and ultimately the father of the whole of mankind. Originally the primal goddess had no male equals but somehow had to produce a son who would be her lover with whom she would copulate incestuously to generate the human race.

The earth and the sky were the same cosmic female principle (Nature), so Neith, who was the earth and the sky, gave birth to the sun god. The new god was denoted as son, brother or twin and companion of the primal goddess. He was Ra, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz and Osiris. Neith was the mother of Ra but was also his daughter, reflecting the change of status when patriarchy replaced matriarchy. Cybele also gave form to her son and consort, Attis. Baal was Anath's brother, and Osiris was Isis's twin.

The goddess Anath equals Neith, as one might guess from their names, because Anath was identified with Athene. At the time of Alexander, Greek speaking Phoenicians living on Cyprus identified their goddess Anath with the Greek goddess Athena, the Greek virgin of Wisdom. And an ancient stele of Rameses II declares Anath and Astarte as the same goddess, the Queen of Heaven and mistress of all the gods. At a later date in the 5th century BC, papyri at Elephantine in Upper Egypt show that Jews there worshipped Yeho (Yehouah) and his wife, Anath! Anath, or Asherah as the Israelites called her, by analogy with the other goddesses of the region, must have given birth to her consort, Yehouah.

Herodotus tells us Athene was the Libyan goddess Neith and was always depicted in Libyan costume. Helladic Greeks including the early Athenians were linked racially with a Libyan Berber race called the Garamantians. In the first millennium AD, they crossed the Sahara to Nigeria and interbred with Negroes to form the black West African tribe, the Akan. This tribe was arranged as a number of clans each with a king whose “Okrafo” priest would be sacrificed as a surrogate for the king each year. They worshipped a triple Goddess called Ngame, a moon goddess identical to the European triple goddess.

The North African goddess, Neith, had travelled at different times south into Africa and north into Greece to become respectively Ngame and Athene. At earlier times she had travelled further still for this was the primal goddess herself—Nature. You will note that the name of the primal goddess was N-vowel-T(H). Sometimes the T was lost and sometimes the order of consonants was reversed. Sometimes a prefix or suffix would be added, usually just a linguistic variation.

The primal goddess is Nut, Neith or Net, Nat(ure), Nana (still a pet name for a grandmother), Nanna daughter of Nef in Nordic mythology, Nantosuleta, Innana, Nina, Ninanna, Ninella, Ningal, Ninlil, Ninmug and Ninsug (Nin is the Babylonian word for a goddess or a lady), Nephthys the twin sister of Isis, Anat(h), Athene, Aine and Anu (Celtic), Aino (Finnish), Anahita (Persian), Anaitis and Anthat (Ugarit), Angu bodi (Norse), Anit, Anna-Purna (Vedic), Anoukis, Anuket, Anunitum, Etan and Etain (Celtic), Ina (Polynesian), Tanit(h), Tefnut, Turan, Thalna and Thesan (Etruscan), Uni (Etruscan), Unt (or Isis!), Uto (or Uadjit).

Gods too have cognate names either because they took certain qualities of the goddess and part of her name too or more likely because supernatural superbeings were initally female and so the word for the nature of a god came from the name or word for goddess. Ennead and the number nine probably have the same etymology.

As the goddess declined, her companion magnified, becoming a dying and resurrected god when the seasonal cycle was projected on to him. He was constantly associated with the goddess but never an equal until the power of the goddess began to fade with the patriarchal revolution. Even now, all the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the son or the mother.

Having given birth to the Son, the prospects then are for the procreation of the whole human race from the incestuous intercourse of mother and son. In legends like that of Oedipus, the lost son of the mother returns to slay unwittingly his father and marry his mother. That he married his mother to become king shows that society still had matriarchal inheritance like the Pharaohs, and might be an echo of the time when the patriarchs usurped matriarchal society, though the open incest required in the myth by the son and goddess has been excused and the son is shown deposing a father rather than his mother.

The same problem of incest arises with the legend of Adam and Eve. We are not told that they had daughters, only sons. So Eve was the mother of all mankind and must have copulated incestuously with her male offspring. Admittedly these are only creation stories and have nothing to do with how human life arose, but nevertheless we have to accept that as the sophistication of human beings grew, they would puzzle over such problems and add to the legend to try to resolve them.

In the earliest stage, matriarchal society had no such arrangement as marriage and nuclear families. The social arrangement was one of clans or totem groups who “married” each other. The taboo was on having sexual relationships with anyone within your own clan. The paternity of any woman's children was never known—knowledge of fatherhood was unimportant, though high ranking women would plainly prefer high ranking men for their partners. The clan undertook to look after all children born to women of the clan and no children ought to have been neglected.

The square cross whether plain, bent into a swastika or enclosed in a circle shows the four points of the compass and therefore the whole of the earth. It was a symbol of the goddess. Besides the four directions there is another that can be traversed—upwards. The zenith is the fifth direction, yielding a pyramid and denoting the whole of the cosmos. The vertical direction is associated with the sun and fertility—the erect phallus—the son! The four triangular faces of the pyramid represent the triple goddess in her universality—she looks in all directions—and since the pyramids of Egypt for example were tombs for sun-kings, sons of the goddess, she enclosed him from all sides in death.

The son of the Goddess was worshipped as a fertility figure represented by totem poles or phallic stones. The young women and infertile ones danced erotically before them in honour of the goddess, commemorating the annual life of her son, the annual fertility cycle, and hoping the goddess would bless them with the power of her son.

The bard would sing his verses, so called from the Latin versus, a turning, because each one accompanied a complete turn of the sacred stone or grove. The bards were also the professors of their time. Knowledge, the Goddess's gift to humanity, is not fixed in any creed but grows up as a spiral or helix, getting bigger but not repeating itself. “Helice” is the name of the willow tree, sacred to the goddess and therefore to poets who originally were her bards.

The son was the waxing year who brought back the light of the sun, but the waning of the year was a serpent, phallic but spent, and associated with the earth as a dweller close to it and in rocks and crevices. Serpents were the spirits of the dead coming back through their holes into the world from the underworld.

At the midwinter solstice when the son was born he destroyed the serpent of the dying year and won the goddess's love only to die himself in fertilising the earth when he was in his prime at Easter. From his ashes came the annual serpent whose egg was eaten by the goddess and impregnated her with the son of the next winter solstice. Thus the son died at Easter but automatically generated his successor of nine months hence.

The serpent of the waning year represented Wisdom, the knowledge achieved by the Goddess through intercourse and the completion of the annual cycle. The group explained in the story of Adam and Eve is a group of the goddess depicted as the moon, Wisdom shown as a serpent and the son depicted as a star attending a fruit tree, suggesting plenty. The star denoting the son is the morning star and was known as Lucifer because it heralded the light of the sun.

At this early stage the goddess was not the morning star which she became. The change will have been made by the patriarchs who made the sun into the son and made Lucifer into a devil, simultaneously demoting the goddess to the morning star which was previously the son. The annual cycle of the son and the serpent, which alternately scorched and inundated or froze the earth, was considered inferior to the more frequent and regular cycle of the moon which was seen as the over-riding constancy of Nature. For this reason she was also seen as justice.

The Capitoline Trinity, worshipped also at Elephantine and at the Holy City, Hierapolis, was the Sun, the Moon and the Morning Star, Venus or Ishtar. The Orphics brought this trinity to Rome explaining that Ishtar should be identified with physical nature, that the sun should be identified with Zeus, known by the Romans as Jupiter, and was the animating or impregnating principle, and the Moon should be identified with Minerva, the directing wisdom of the universe. The Greeks knew her as Athene.

Here is what was originally the goddess in her triple form but with one aspect displaced by the impregnating father god. The maiden and the mature woman seem to have been rolled into one form representing nature in general and the separate mother replaced by a father figure. Wisdom is represented still by the wise old goddess, the crone.

Blog Back

Here you can give short responses and suggestions. Considered contributions, criticisms and discussion can be made privately via email[†]