Think of all the religions. Now take the male figure out and replace him with the Goddess. Quite a change, right? This idea struck me as I was reading Islam Under Siege by American University professor and author, Akbar Ahmed; somewhere around chapter two, What is Going Wrong?
I came across a description of the world we live in today by a scholar named Roland Barthes as “a moment of gentle apocalypse”. Then, I wondered if we would have the wars that are waged in the name of God as frequently as if they were in the name of a Goddess? It seems to me that the Goddess was predominating in planting cultures and it was the hunting nomadic cultures that have Gods. The connection with the Goddess and the planting cultures is connected with fertilization, feeding the crops, planting of the seeds and harvesting the crops. Just think how we refer to the Earth as “Mother Earth” all invoked through the mother image. If a tree or plant dies it goes back into the Earth and is reborn; you do not get this in the hunting cultures.
Just changing this metaphoric symbolization could change the whole psyche of an individual and how religion is viewed, I believe.
A mother is nurturing and is the first person you come in contact with once you are born and dependent on throughout your childhood. Why did religion kill the Goddess and what kind of world would this be if say somebody as a Christian started their prayer with "Our Mother" instead of "Our Father"?
14 years ago
You've posed a question that is arguably at the base of our class subject matter. In fact, one of the central questions people have been pondering for millennia since The Eumenides was written is what is the role of the female goddess in that play and does the play somehow hint at the betrayal of the human understanding of the role of the feminine in life. And, was this changed understanding, this new perspective, necessary to preserve life? Do the Furies really represent the female form of life preservation? Is there not another way out of the morass of endless cycles of spreading vengeance?
ReplyDeleteTwo interesting--but non-scholarly--books you might want to pick up are Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade and Rosalind Miles's Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Woman's History of the World. Both are eminently readable, even as so-called "beach reading," but both also have a wealth of information, with footnotes and references to scholarly studies of this topic. There are many scholarly studies, and I'd be happy to discuss this further and provide further readings.