The Shrinking Goddess E-Book

Mineke Schipper

• Herausgeber: The Westbourne Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 316

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Wild and strange stories have been told about the female body since antiquity. While tales of poisoned hymens and witches with multiple breasts circulated, the first creation figure, Mother Earth, fell out of popular culture. Ranging from the empowering to the absurd, ancient myths about women's bodies have not only survived into the twenty-first century but continue to influence modern discourse.The Shrinking Goddess brings together myths about the female form and traces subsequent male efforts to 'tame' it. Mineke Schipper explores how women's bodies have been represented around the world, from the demon daughter of New Mexico with a toothed vagina, to the Japanese supermarkets and European festivals where 'breast puddings' are considered delicaciesDrawing from the vast reservoir of writing and art that shape how women are seen in today's world, The Shrinking Goddess reclaims the female body as a source of power.

Leseprobe

THE SHRINKING GODDESS

The Westbourne Press

Gable House, 18–24 Turnham Green Terrace, London w4 IQP

www.westbournepress.co.uk

Published 2024 by The Westbourne Press

Copyright © Mineke Schipper 2024

Other editions of this book are published under the titles Heuvels Van Het Paradjis(Prometheus, 2018) and Hills of Paradise (Speaking Tiger, 2023).

Mineke Schipper has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and PatentsAct, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain the permissions for copyright material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, however, the publishers will correct this in future editions.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 1 908906 59 5

eISBN 978 1 908906 60 1

Printed and bound by Thomson Press, India

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction: A Precarious House of Stories

The power of myths

The study of the female body

The established order

PART I: FROM FEMALE TO MALE CREATORS

1.   Mothers of All Life

The divine breast never dries

Creation goddesses

Farming and fertility

From the creation of humankind to the invention of glass ceilings

How Eve lost her life-creating status

The ‘crooked rib’ in Islamic tradition

2.   Male Creators

Creating life with and without a womb

Does God have breasts?

The end of Arab goddesses

Jesus as a woman and a mother

3.   God the Mother Becomes the Mother of God

Immaculate conception

Maria lactans

The religious becomes secular

Buttoned up

PART II: DESIRABLE AND TERRIFYING

4.   The Gateway of Life

The ‘Mystery’

Dark threat

Mounds of terracotta, gold or lapis lazuli

Gnashing teeth and other terrors

A little stone in the vulva

5.   Powerful Blood

Hymen, the god of marriage

Virginal bleeding

Myths about menstruation

Monthly magic

Male menstruation

6.   A Storehouse Beneath the Navel

Miraculous pregnancy

Male input

Courtship and its consequences

Dangerous childbirth and safe contraception

7.   The Magic of the Nourishing Nipple

From the nipple to the grave

At the breast of an animal, or an animal at the breast

Supplementary breasts

Charitable nursing

8.   Mammalia

Mamma

Supernumerary breasts

Milk ties as a ban on sex

Erotic lactation

Bare breasts in a globalised world

PART III: POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

9.   Beat Your Wife, She Will Know Why

From a phallic perspective

The devouring mother

Breast rippers and other instruments of torture

Detesting one’s own body

The brain

10. Lessons From the Past

Oh no, it’s a girl

Womb envy

The theft of women’s secret

A Final Note

Acknowledgements

Permissions

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Pregnant Woman by Aat Veldhoen, The Netherlands, 1964

Woman with Unborn Child, from The Midwives Book, 1671

Cycladic marble female figures, Syros, 2800–2300 BCE

Venus of Hohle Fels, Germany, 28,000–38,000 BCE

Venus of Willendorf, Austria, 23,000–28,000 BCE

Birth of the Milky Way by Peter Paul Rubens, Spain, 1636–1637

Xiwangmu, China, 200 CE

Xiwangmu, China, date unknown

Coatlicue, Mexico, c. 1500

Nüwa and Fuxi, China, c. 750 CE

Anatolian goddess with a newborn baby, Turkey, c. 6000–5500 BCE

An androgynous Adam and Eve, France, 1000

Untitled by Jacob van Maerlants, from Spieghel Historiael, c.1325–1335

God as Midwife by Bartolo di Fredi, Italy, 1300

Bumba by Motshile wa Nthodi, South Africa, 1979

Parvati, India, 1000

Shiva and Parvati, China, c. 500 CE

Androgynous Shiva, India, c. 900 CE

Ceramic fertility figurine, Mesopotamia/North Syria, c. 6000–5100 BCE

Goddess Ashera, Israel, 700–500 BCE

The Lamentation of Christ, Belgium, 1500

The androgynous Nile god Hapi, from Encyclopedia Biblica, 1903

Mary and Bernard of Clairvaux, Belgium, c. 1480

Isis with Horus, United Kingdom, c. 600 BCE

The Virgin Breastfeeding Jesus, France, c. 1400

The Virgin breastfeeding Jesus, Austria, c. 1380

Virgin Mary, Crete, c. 1450

The Prodigal Son by Johannes Baeck, Austria, 1637

The Virgin of Melun by Jean Fouquet, Belgium, c. 1450

Agnès Sorel, France, 1500

Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra by Piero di Cosimo, Italy, 1490

Untitled by Andreas Vesalius from The Structure of the Human Body, Switzerland, 1543

Black Virgin Mary, Gorée, date unknown

Fertility ornaments, Indonesia, North Africa, Mali 1900

Sheela-na-gig, United Kingdom, 1100

Dilukái, Palau, c. 1900

Demeter, Greece, c. 500 BCE

Ishtar, Iraq, 2000–1000 BCE

Death gift, Syros, 2800–2300 BCE

Renault logo, 2024

Spring Night by Utagawa Hiroshige, Hawaii, date unknown

The Ill-Matched Couple by Hans Baldung Grien, Germany, 1507

Earthenware pot, Peru, date unknown

Ritual defloration, from The Travels of Jehan de Mandeville, France, 1484

Film poster, Ghana, c. 2000

Foetuses in various positions, from The Midwives Book, 1671

Eileithyia, Greece, 550–525 BCE

Drawings of spermatozoa by Nicolaas Hartsoeker, c. 1700

Drawings of spermatozoa by Dalempatius, c. 1700

Roman pregnant woman, United Kingdom, 100 BCE–200 CE

Nourishing Mother, DR Congo, c. 1880

Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf, Italy, 1100

Orphan babies being nursed by she-donkeys, France, 1895

Goat as a nursing mother, Cuba, 1903

Priest deflowering a bride by Al-Qazwini, 1203–1283

The Lady in the Bath by François Clouet, France, 1571

Exemplary Chinese daughter-in-law, China, date unknown

Roman Charity by Peter Paul Rubens, Belgium, 1612

The Miracle of Haarlem by Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, 1591

Artemis of Ephesus, the ‘Great Mother Goddess’, Italy, 200 BCE

Sitting Mother Goddess, Netherlands, 200 CE

Illustration from Of Monsters, Netherlands, 1665

Frascan puppet, France, c. 1960

Eve Seduces Adam by Bernard Salomon, France, 1561

Japanese supermarket breast-shaped dessert, 2017

The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Italy, 1100–1200

Saint Agatha of Sicily, The Netherlands, c. 1390–400

Cerne Abbas Giant, United Kingdom, c. 700–1100 CE

Archaic herm, Greece, c. 520 BCE

Greek warrior and Amazon queen, United States, c. 500–490 BCE

Coptic girl, from Woman: an historical, gynæcological and anthropological compendium, c. 1900

Cassatella di sant’Agata or minni di virgini, Sicily, date unknown

Breast Ripper, Germany, date unknown

Pear of Anguish, Austria, date unknown

Engraving from Three Significant and Very Disastrous Reyes, Netherlands, 1676

Hoped-for male progeny, New Guinea, 1893

A girl, finally, a girl!, origin and date unknown

Alma Mater, Havana, Cuba, 1919

Alma Mater Cantabrigia, United Kingdom, 1600

Genitals of Djanggawul brother and elder sister, Australia, c. 1950

Allegory of Vanity by Michel Erhart or Jorg Syrlin the Elder, Austria, c. 1470–1480

Suit Supply ‘Toy Boys’, Netherlands, 2016

MAPS

Female genital mutilation rates by country, 2015

The physical security of women, globally, 2014

Pregnant Woman by Aat Veldhoen. Rotaprint, 1964.

INTRODUCTION

A PRECARIOUS HOUSEOF STORIES

The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Ecclesiastes 1:8

OVER THE PAST five decades I have researched proverbs, art, myths and other verbal genres that magnify the differences between men and women. These sources – many of which are thousands of years old – shed light on our conversations around gender today. For the most part, our myths are mainly concerned with justifying, or establishing, a patriarchal, hierarchical order. However, other genres, such as proverbs, art and folklore, struggle to address the precarious gender balance of power in society.

Comparing the cultural legacies of widely different people from around the globe, I discovered similar ideas and cultural messages – often with the same meaning and (mostly) similar form – expressed through different metaphors:

Women are like banana leaves: they never come to an end in the plantation.

(Ganda, Uganda)

Women are like shoes, they can always be replaced.

(Rajasthani, India)

Women are like buses: if one leaves, another one will come.

(Spanish, Venezuela)

Women are like frogs, for one diving into the water, four others turn up to the surface.

(Spanish, Peru)

This is one of many examples. Such similarities cannot be due only to globalisation, as they originate from times and cultures without demonstrable contact. How is this possible? Our common patterns as human beings have to do with the shape and functions of the human body and its basic needs, such as food, shelter, safety and procreation, and with emotions such as fear, longing, joy and sorrow, experienced by us all.

I have always told my students: if you look only for differences, you will find only differences. If you look for similarities, they are in front of you. Instead of looking for what we share, conversations around human identity are inclined to blow up our differences. Today’s global order goes back to a house of stories, built on mythical foundations, by influential storytellers, who established a strong belief in the differences between sexes.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have devised images of themselves and embedded them in stories, songs and other forms of artistic expression. The nature of how human beings present themselves through such images has varied according to the interests of those involved and the contexts in which they lived. One of the main tasks of my field is to study the similarities and differences of how humankind presents itself in oral and written traditions.

Looking into the worldwide harvest of cultural legacies helps us to put our local views into a wider picture. To make sense of a patriarchal structure, and the ways in which it is sustained, we need to understand its foundations. This book takes a wide-ranging look at our global house of stories and ideas around gendered body parts and the power they wield. Awareness is a modest first, crucial step towards questioning our established views of the self and the other.

Humanity is divided by an ongoing history of exclusion, with devastating consequences. Nonetheless, small miracles happen. In spring 2004 I had a totally unexpected experience. After my book Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet came out, The Times invited me to write about the how and the why of this book. Titled ‘Beware of women with big feet’, the article went into my extensive travels and conversations with a large variety of people, first in Africa where I lived several years in DR Congo, later in other parts of the world. Following my travels, I spent years working on the collected material of more than 15,000 proverbs about women (and men), studying how proverbs have helped impose restrictions on women’s place and role in contemporary society.1

Two weeks after this article appeared as the leading Times Weekend Review article, a huge, mysterious airmail package arrived for me on the doorstep of my Leiden University office. It contained a number of impressive books of Arabic proverbs and a letter from the generous Saudi sender, living in Riyadh. He had read my article and assured me in his letter that, had he been in Leiden, he would have loved to have had a long conversation. Instead, to express his appreciation for the article, he had sent me this gift. This encouraging gesture from the other side of the world convinced me that patient research may build cross-cultural bridges.

The power of myths

Myths deal with crucial issues that affect society. We are enmeshed in traditions passed down from generation to generation, which connect us more closely to our ancestors than we may realise. They lay the foundations for human existence. As long as people believe in their own stories, the established order depicted in their traditions persists.

In this book myths, proverbs, popular culture and past philosophical and medical perceptions tell a pregnant story that throws new light on the female body, with the help of illuminating pictures. Cultural traditions from around the world reveal a desperate need for control over ‘her’, leading to extraordinary beliefs and practices, from fanged wombs to the so-called island of menstruating men. Similar patterns make us ask to what extent the male wish for dominance over the female body has been successful.

The first part of this book goes back to the enormous impact of myths, even today. It shares a history of creation goddesses, and how they slowly and surely made way for male creators. Part II goes into the enlightening wealth of stories and comments on the mysteries of the female body, from the hospitable breasts praised as the ‘hills of paradise’ to fear of the hymen, and the awesome power of the womb’s life-giving capacity.

In the third and final part of this book we are confronted with the consequences of globally developed hierarchies in human history: the continuing violence of physical power inspired mainly by mental insecurity and fear; the ongoing demonstrable preference for sons over daughters in many societies; and the vulnerability of those declared subordinates who risk ending up in contempt of their own appearance, thanks to compelling commercials and other influential media. Finding out how today’s widely held views came into being, and what they tell us about society in the past and present, will help us in taking new roads into the future.

Myths explain how, over millennia, female power had to be curbed. This was done through stereotyping women as capricious, unjust and demanding. Myths justify the notion that men were better positioned – and able – to run the world. Men’s theft of female power, also called the theft of ‘women’s secret’, is a striking motif in several parts of the world.

A Gikuyu story I was told in Kenya describes how women were once in charge. They were cruel, ruthless, and ruled like tyrants. The men did everything for them – they hunted, worked the land, cooked, cared for the children (in some versions they even breastfed the babies) and protected their families against enemies. The women handed out orders and did nothing. But no matter how zealously the men did their best to meet the women’s demands, they were exploited as slaves. The female rulers were never satisfied. No wonder the men resorted to a ruse: they agreed among themselves to impregnate all the women at the same time. And while the women were giving birth, their unjust regime was overthrown. ‘The men created a new order and strengthened their grip on society. Since then, justice and peace have reigned in Gikuyu society.’

This story gives the impression that matriarchal power was superseded by patriarchy; but matriarchy has never actually existed as a societal order. The existence of matriarchies, societies in which women are dominant, has been certain feminists’ stubborn wishful thinking. Convincing proof has never been found – though there are many (mostly negative or threatening) stories about societies that in the past consisted of women only, or in which women reigned.2

In his bestseller Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari concludes that biology makes lots of things possible which culture then restricts or forbids. That male dominance has developed almost universally cannot be a coincidence, he says, but he is unable to explain why this hierarchy remains so widely in force today:

Maybe males of the species Homo sapiens are characterized not by physical strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness, but rather by superior social skills and a greater tendency to cooperate. We just don’t know.3

Disappointing, really. In spite of the claim in the subtitle of his book – A Brief History of Humankind – the author is blind to the revealing light that myths throw on the origins of gendered inequality.

Myths devote a great deal of attention to the body, and link messages about sexual hierarchy in a community to origin stories about gods and the first people. Over time, the basic creative and life-giving functions of mythical goddesses have been taken over by gods imagined and addressed as males. Various deities are themselves more than one sex, or create for themselves supplementary bodily functions they missed for the purpose of creating life or to nurse their babies (the Hindu god Shiva did this, as we will see), something the monotheistic religions were keen to move away from. Many stories have been recast over time so that the male sex is elevated over the female, usually ignoring non-gendered and intersex humans. In some stories the new divine leader radically eliminates his primeval mother in a dramatic battle.

Thousands of years ago, the female capacity to produce life became associated with an uncontrollable nature that had to be tamed. Many myths tried to muzzle this frightening life force by introducing a reassuring male supreme god or ancestor as the creator of all life. In an Egyptian story, the primordial ocean god Nun bears the sun god Atum, and this second male creator subsequently copulates with his own hand. He masturbates and puts his semen in his mouth and, by spitting it out, he creates his children, Shu and Tefnut. In an ancient Egyptian tomb text, he manifests himself as an autonomous procreator:

Before heaven came into being,

Before earth came into being,

Before the ground and the reptiles had been created here.

I was the great one who came into being out of myself,

All alone I fulfilled all my desires,

I considered in my heart and planned in my head

How I would shape and create myriad forms.

So it was I who spat forth Shu and vomited up Tefnut.

This happened when I was still alone …

I masturbated with my fist, I copulated with my hand,

I spat from my mouth, out of myself.4

In many traditions, a male god creates life by uttering a powerful word, or by using his own hands and mud, dust or other materials, including from his innermost body. An innate lack of male birth-giving power is transformed into success stories about a divine masculine order that overcomes and regulates female chaos.

Myths present a desired social order – for some. Most myths confirm an order in which men are in charge, even though they remain dependent on women for offspring. This dependence has not only led to control over female sexuality, but also to an ostentatious male need for compensation in political, cultural and religious terms, and to a striking propensity to territoriality – excluding women from positions in which gender differences are totally irrelevant. On top of mythology and popular culture, philosophers and theologians have frequently warned that the female body disrupts the prescribed order and causes disaster.

The bias of a male perspective was safeguarded in societies where any who were not men were not allowed to recite or comment in public on holy texts, myths, epics, sometimes even proverbs, stopping all those who did not have the required physical features from contributing to the shaping of traditions. In many cultures and religions, it is still only men who are permitted to engage with sacred texts or lead religious services.

The study of the female body

Male fascination with the physical anatomy that they do not have has always been great, not only in storytelling and other verbal genres, but also in artistic depiction of the female body, from statuettes to cartoons. Appraisals of women range from delight to insecurity, distrust and fear. Contact between the sexes has been complicated by male fear of the vulva – a place in which, in cautionary tales in many cultures, the desire to devour is said to lurk. The power of this primal gateway spurned the delusion that a man who looks at female genitals will be punished with children born blind.5 This book is about those ambiguous feelings towards indispensable, coveted, reviled and envied female body parts.

Information from women about their own sex is rare before the twentieth century. No doubt women had ideas about their own bodies (and about those of men), but until recently their views have had little impact. The knowledge they had was either silently taken over by the other sex or dismissed as unprofessional.

In Europe, female doctors and midwives were excluded from medicine as a scientific profession. Some women, like the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen, wrote authoritative medical texts in Latin. Nonetheless, women were barred from secondary education and the study of medicine and, therefore, from access to more respected forms of medical practice. As a result, women’s medical knowledge has rarely been preserved in books.

An exception is Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book, or The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (1671), a medical handbook based on rich experience with the female body. Hardly any knowledge is available about Sharp, except the detail on the book’s title page that she practised as a midwife for over thirty years. There were no guilds for female doctors or midwives. By the end of the sixteenth century, most medical acts were exclusively reserved for members of medical guilds, to which women had no access.6

Woman with Unborn Child. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 1671.

With all that in mind, it is unsurprising that most of what has been said and written about the female body originates from male sources or has been coloured by male perspectives. Over the centuries, research on human society has been led by men. Research from the female perspective at local, national and global levels is relatively recent: we do not know what women were saying or thinking among themselves, they wrote relatively little, and their own oral traditions have attracted interest only since the 1970s.

Moreover, in the cultures where they did their fieldwork, those male researchers often only had access to men. Thus, any subjects who were not male were reduced to ‘muted groups’. This term was coined by Edwin Ardener, who concluded that in the social sciences there is an enormous discrepancy in knowledge about men and women: ‘There is a real imbalance. We are, for practical purposes, in a male world. The study of women is on a level little higher than the study of the ducks and fowls they commonly own – a mere bird-watching indeed.’7

Meanwhile, whatever attention the female body did not receive in a professional, scientific capacity, it received in art. This Latin medieval student song explores an undulating feminine landscape:

Softly shines her virgin bosom, And the breasts that gently rise like the hills of Paradise.

Oh, the joys of this possessing! […]

From her tender breasts decline, In a gradual curving line,

Flanks like swansdown white and fine. […]

’Neath the waist her belly turneth Unto fulness, where below

In Love’s garden lilies blow. Oh, the joys of this possessing!8

In the twenty-first century, male students and rappers still sing about girls’ bodies as property; however, in Western culture today, some such songs are strikingly violent. Bragging about one’s potency conceals the fear of one’s personal performances in ‘Te lam Om te Zingen’ (‘Too Blotto to Sing’), a recent song popular in Utrecht University’s Earth Sciences student union: ‘My sledgehammer is my third leg / It rams rocks to pieces / but I’d rather shove it in your cave.’ The girl submitted to this ramming finds it ‘a bit strange’, because she is only fourteen. The greater the male insecurity, the younger and less experienced the girls that are targeted.

The established order

Even though both sexes are needed for procreation, from ancient times onwards most societies selected only one sex for preferential treatment. In the case of newlyweds, only one of the families decided where the couple would live: with the family of the groom (patrilocal) or with the family of the bride (matrilocal). In cultures where hunting and gathering were replaced by large-scale agriculture, family relations began to move from matrilocal to patrilocal residence, and more and more often young women had to put up with the man’s family instead of the other way round.9 The young women ended up in unfamiliar surroundings, under supervision of and submitting to the rules of the ‘others’, whereas the husband had the comfort of staying with his kinfolk on the family compound. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are commonly presented as being suspicious of or even hostile towards each other.

In many cultures, girls are considered to be ‘in transit’ in their own homes. Indeed daughters, destined to depart, are considered ‘spilt water’ (Chinese) or ‘cigarette ashes’ (Arabic). Children come to belong to the clan of the husband, whereas their mothers never entirely belong anywhere. Or in the words of a Luba proverb: ‘A daughter is like a raindrop, she will fertilise the fields of others.’

Because women have often been considered male possessions, rape has been seen not so much as a violation of a woman’s honour, but as a defilement of her owner’s property. In the case of an unmarried girl, her rapist would pay compensation to the original ‘owner’, her father, and the victim was passed into the hands of the rapist, her new ‘owner’. This arrangement is outlined in the Book of Deuteronomy (22:28–29) in the Hebrew Bible, and, in many societies, it is still a common course of events.

Fathers exercise authority in patriarchal societies. The term patriarchy consists of the Greek words pater (‘father’) and archè (‘beginning’ or ‘reigning principle’). The establishment of patriarchal relations was a long process that took place at different moments in different parts of the world. In the Middle East this development took place over 2,500 years (about 3100–600 BCE). The oldest known laws are engraved in clay tablets dug up in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Inscriptions in cuneiform characters make clear that sexuality and female birth-giving capacity were controlled by men very early, as the women’s history author Gerda Lerner convincingly demonstrates in The Creation of Patriarchy.10

Thanks to the inscriptions on clay tablets from the earliest known period (c. 3000 BCE) we know that women actively participated in economic, religious and political life, but depended on a man for their position in society. Wherever male dominance was established, an iron rule was that women who no longer pleased their menfolk lost their power. Men had their own home, whereas women belonged to men who had acquired rights over them. Women’s place in the hierarchy was determined by the status of the men on whom they depended: their fathers, brothers and husbands.

All women had to accept, as given, the control of their sexuality and their reproductive processes by men or male-dominated institutions.11

Male control over the female body is still openly practised today. An eloquent example is the Taliban’s immediate rebranding of the Women’s Affairs Ministry back to the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, soon after regaining power in Afghanistan in August 2021.

Power generates fear – the fear of losing one’s acquired power. The fact that men are dependent on women for their children upset the balance between the sexes from the very start, creating a strong male desire for compensation and the need for power and control over women’s bodies. This book is heavily weighted towards myths propagated by men about the female body – often insinuating its weakness. Where myths that extol the power of the woman and goddess still survive, in whole or parts, they are precious and indicative perhaps that before the whispers of centuries distorted them, there were more stories about female empowerment. Regardless, the sheer quantity and depth of sources by men exerting control over the female body is, itself, testament to its indisputable indispensability. Without female resistance, male fear of and need to control the female anatomy would be unnecessary. After all, why should you be afraid of someone who is insignificant?

_____________

1    London: Yale University Press, 2004

2    Cynthia Ellen, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Boston: Beacon Press 2000. A few communities have been described in which women and men shared their power in several respects, for example, in Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, a matrilocal urban settlement from the late Stone Age (six or seven millennia old), where about 6,000 to 8,000 people lived, see The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, (Oxford UP, 1986) pp. 30–32. For further explanation and stories see also In het Begin was er Niemand (‘In the Beginning There Was No One’ by Mineke Schipper (Prometheus, 2010) pp. 171–75.

3    Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (Vintage, 2011) p. 178.

4    Free translation from Papyrus Bremner-Rind 26, 21–27, 1 Bibliotheca Aegyptica 3, Brussels 1933: 59–61 and other magic tomb texts referring to myths. With thanks to Egyptologist Jacco Dieleman for personal information.

5    Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Constructions of Nakedness. Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (3) Fall 1997, pp.441–442.

6    Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight (University of California Press, 2008), chapter 4.

7    Edwin Ardener in: Perceiving Women, (Shirley Ardener, ed.) (Malaby Press, 1977) pp. 1–2.

8    ‘Flora’ in Wine, Women, and Song: Medieval Latin Students’ Songs (King’s Classics, 1840) pp. 112–13.

9    Ruth H. Munroe, Robert L. Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, ‘The Conditions Favoring Matrilocal Versus Patrilocal Residence’, American Anthropologist 73 (1971), pp. 571–94.

10  Here I gratefully refer to her chapter 1: ‘Origins’. (OUP, 1986).

11  Ibid. p.100.

PART I

FROM FEMALETO MALECREATORS

Cycladic marble female figures; the one at the centre is pregnant. Archaeological Museum, Athens. Syros, 2800–2300 BCE.

CHAPTER ONE

MOTHERS OF ALL LIFE

To the Mother of the Gods

Divine are your honours, O mother of the gods and nurturer of all,

Yoke your swift chariot drawn by bull-slaying lions And, O mighty goddess who brings things to pass, join our prayers.

Many named and revered, you are queen of the sky,

For in the cosmos yours is the throne in the middle, because

The earth is yours and you give gentle nourishment to mortals

Gods and men were born of you.1

MODELS OF WOMEN DATE BACK to the earliest signs of civilization. Such statues certainly predate the oldest written prayers. These figures were usually carved in stone, bone or ivory, with prominent breasts, bellies and vulvas. Dating between 10,000 to 20,000 years old, they have been found in many places, from Europe to East Asia. In 2008 a small ivory figure was unearthed in six fragments in a hollow rock in southwest Germany, a statuette with strikingly big breasts and a marked vulva, carved from a mammoth tusk. This so-called Venus of Hohle Fels – almost 6 cm high and between 35,000 and 40,000 years old – is the most ancient so far discovered in a series of mother images that archaeologists call Venuses. The next oldest is the Venus of Willendorf, at around 30,000 years old.

Venus of Hohle Fels. Blaubeuren Museum of Prehistory, Germany.

Venus of Willendorf. Museum of Natural History, Vienna.

‘Venus’ is a problematic anachronism for these female figures, because Venus, the goddess of love, arrived considerably later. She is just one of many Roman goddesses, ranked below a supreme reigning Father God. The term ‘protecting mother figure’ or ‘fertility symbol’ seems more appropriate here:

Looking back so many thousands of years later at these earliest figures, it seems as if humanity’s first image of life was the Mother. […] Images of giving birth, offering nourishment from the breast and receiving the dead back into the womb for rebirth occur in the Palaeolithic as they do 10,000 years later in the Neolithic and 5,000 years after that in the Bronze and Iron Ages – and, indeed, are present to this day in Western culture in the rituals surrounding the Virgin Mary. It is not surprising that these images of the goddess appear throughout human history, for they all express a similar vision of life on Earth, one where the creative source of life is conceived in the image of a Mother and where humanity feels itself and the rest of creation to be the Mother’s children.2

The divine breast never dries

The mother figure has been placed on a pedestal around the world for tens of thousands of years. In the words of an English proverb: ‘God could not be everywhere, that’s why He created mothers.’ Sometimes, it feels as if the mother figure is the divine presence herself. The breast is a significant part of the mother figure, and the earthly breast is no less cherished than the heavenly. This is true for cultures around the world, for example in this Spanish proverb: ‘My home is my mother’s breast’, and this contemporary Chinese poem, which sighs yearningly:

Mother, my mother

Hold me tight in your warm embrace

Because the dark night is imminent.3

‘The earth, our mother, feeds us, waters us and clothes us’ is a Russian saying. In the same way that some origin stories lengthen the first penis to such extreme dimensions that the owner has to wrap it around his middle to be able to walk unhindered, the breasts of goddesses in origin stories grow to unlikely dimensions. Some stories about the pre-Islamic Arab goddess al-Uzza say that her breasts were so huge that she would throw them over her shoulders to let them hang down her back.4 Sometimes, the breasts of goddesses even gain special powers.

The breasts of the Greek goddess Hera were so powerful that they left their mark on our galaxy. As the myth goes, Hera’s husband, the supreme god Zeus, was so fond of Hercules, his son by a mortal lover, that he wanted to immortalise him. So he placed the baby at the breasts of his sleeping spouse Hera to suckle. The baby sucked so hard at Hera’s nipples that she woke up and realising this was not her own child, she angrily pushed him off, causing her divine milk to squirt high into the air, where it continues to brighten the Milky Way. The incident inspired fine artists such as Rubens, many centuries later.

Peter Paul Rubens, Birth of the Milky Way, 1636–1637.

A dry human breast was seen as a curse, but Mother Goddesses blessed mortals with their abundantly nourishing breasts:

The mother as breast is the Alma Mater, the Mother of Corn in ancient Greece and Asia and the Americas and, where agriculture was unknown, the Old Woman of the Seals of the Eskimo, the mother of Walruses of the Chukchi.5

On Babylonian clay tablets dating back millennia, the Alma Mater is known as ‘The Mother with the faithful breast’ or ‘She whose breasts never failed’. Breasts were sometimes depicted in stylised spirals or circles, impressively emphasised, or even multiplied as in the case of Artemis, also referred to as Diana of Ephesus. Stories tell how milk or honey, blood or wine – or in an Inuit story, fish – flowed from Artemis’s nipples.6

Creation goddesses

The shamanistic goddess Xiwangmu (‘Queen Mother of the West’) is one of the oldest Chinese deities. The first inscription referring to her is found on an oracle bone from around 1600 BCE. In ancient times, the Chinese side of the Himalayas known as the Kunlun Mountains were considered a paradise where the immortals were supposed to live, including Mother Xiwangmu. Nobody knew Xiwangmu’s beginning or end,7 but her dazzling beauty was glorified by poets. According to local tradition, Xiwangmu is the one the Bible refers to as the Queen of Sheba, who went to visit King Solomon and gave birth to his son Menelik, to whom she would hand over the throne of her earthly realm.

In the Kunlun Mountains, Xiwangmu attained a high state of spiritual enlightenment, and there she still reigns over the cosmic powers thanks to her peach tree, which stands as the axis between Heaven and Earth and bears the fruits of immortality. The peaches ripen only once every thousand years and at these rare moments the other gods join Xiwangmu in a heavenly banquet. If a human succeeds in eating one of those peaches, they will be blessed with miraculous longevity.

Xiwangmu, Golden Mother/First Ruler/Queen Mother of the West. Eastern Han Dynasty. Pottery, 200 CE.

Xiwangmu Statue in Western China, honoured with rainbow-coloured fireworks. Mother's Day, date unknown.

Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of the earth – ‘our grandmother’. National Anthropological Museum, Mexico City, ca. 1500.

According to the stories, Xiwangmu always wears a rainbow-coloured dress with winged sleeves. She helps, protects, gives excellent advice and takes care of humanity’s elixir of life, nurturing her favourites.8 She continues to be ceremonially worshipped, as I found out some years ago when attending a Mother’s Day festival in the countryside near the city of Xining, where many people gathered in her honour.

Many disparate cultures, despite having little or no contact with one another, have similar stories about a powerful goddess who manifests herself in all the living earth, water and air. The earth is her body, stretching out to the horizon, and all that exists belongs to her. In these origin stories not only plants, trees and animals came up from her birth canals, but also the first human beings: ‘The little people crawled out in the dark like grasshoppers, their bodies naked and soft. Their eyes were closed; they hadn’t opened them yet.’ (Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico.)9