22. The Role of Sexuality in the Goddess Cult

According to scholars like Neumann and Campbell, at the time before birth is linked to sexuality woman’s fertility has nothing to do with sex; it simply stands for miraculous increase and mysterious renewal. As people start linking sexuality to fecundity, they lend to it the same aura of wonder. Sexuality is a force of nature, both earthly and divine, both personal and transpersonal, and the fertility rites are a glorification of it. For the entire pre-modern world sexuality partakes in the sacred; it can pacify an angry god and avoid illness or other misfortune. Sex with more than one partner, then, is a thing of value.

The focal point of the cult is woman’s sexual activity unrelated to monogamy and family, i.e., altogether separated from her reproductive capacity. An essential aspect of the goddess’s creative power is her ‘virginity,’ or readiness to receive any man who stands in the service of fertility; only in patriarchal times is the term twisted into a symbol of chastity. All magical operations by women have a sexual character: in rain–making ceremonies, e.g., nudity is required and in India naked women push the plow around the field at night.

Sex a woman's badge of honor.

Courtesan on Greek amphora

So strong is this emphasis on female sexuality that it becomes celebrated for its own sake and incarnated by ‘prostitutes’ attached to the temples of the goddess. Honored in hymns, epics, myths, liturgies and lamentations as Ishtaritu, holy women of Ishtar, or quaditsu, the sacred ones, these women are daughters or wives of aristocratic families among peoples living around Sumer (Hittites, Luwians, Hurrians and Semitic Amorites).

In his classical work The Golden Bough, Frazer describes how the union between the goddess and her consort is joined by the real, though temporary, union of men and women at the sanctuary of the goddess. The sacred marriage ceremony is everywhere a joyous feast, preceded by lavish banquets accompanied by music, song and dance. According to Herodotus (who traveled widely in Asia Minor, the Near East and northern Africa) nearly all peoples partake in rites involving sexual license, which are meant to reinforce the fruitfulness of the ground and of man and beast.

The active sexuality of the goddess is seen as a good in itself long into the recorded era, because it humanizes men and makes them wise, guarantees the stability of the throne and the survival of the social order. The famous courtesans of Corinth originally serve a religious function, and a sacred brothel is attached to the temple of Dionysus in Sparta. Yet in the Bible sexuality freely enjoyed by both women and men becomes equated with idolatry, the worst of sins against Yahweh.

However, the operative factor in the ritual marriage ceremony is not the sexual but the transpersonal, the coming together of the two principles of female and male in holiness, beyond the individual. The particular woman, the personal incarnation of the goddess, is of no consequence; she’s totally unknown and remains anonymous.

This makes the relationship of the goddess to her lover utterly impersonal (the love motif came much later). Originally she is not concerned with the youth at all but only with his phallus, which is holy to her. All phallus cults emphasize the same thing--the anonymous power of the fertilizing agent, the phallus that stands by itself. And the real issue of her union with her consort is not the offspring, or even a bountiful harvest, but the blessings it yields for the whole community.

For the role men play in the cult and what it may indicate about their standing in this society, see next post

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10. Matriarchy

Were men always the first sex?
Is it because we tend to take for granted that patriarchy has always existed that there's so little interest in probing its origin? In her classic work The Second Sex, French author Simone de Beauvoir writes that woman's place in society has invariably been assigned by men, whose biological advantage (larger size and muscular strength) guarantees them sovereign status "from humanity's beginnings.”

This belief, based on the idea that male dominance is ‘natural,’ seems to come either from religion (“God created woman subordinated to man“) or from a deep-seated conviction that brawn is the criterion of superiority. But if we believe society is created by human beings rather than ready-made by God and that it’s our business to examine it, how can we not ask why it looks the way it does?

I believe that in “humanity’s beginnings” sovereign status belongs to the female gender. At a time when survival is precarious, what takes priority is not the masculine physique but woman’s unique ability to bring forth and nurture offspring. To my mind, patriarchy evolved fairly recently in human history in revolt against a preceding matriarchy, which by then had grown out of bounds. It is a reactive social order and its oppression of women a revenge for an earlier devaluation of men.

Now, for me to be able to challenge the common claim that patriarchy is ‘normal,’ in the sense of the social norm, I must show that it hasn’t been around forever; but that, at different times and in different circumstances, also other social systems have existed where men and women behave differently towards each other.

Why do I posit a matriarchy, and what’s that? ‘Matriarchy’ (literally mother rule) has been defined as an ancient system of social organization built around the interests of women, and in which women are the chief authority.

Theories of matriarchy

With his book Mother Right (1861), Swiss scholar J.J. Bachofen presented the first major challenge to the belief that patriarchal society was a natural state of affairs, and that male superiority was self-evident. American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan (author of Ancient Society, 1877) found that practically all Indians of North America were organized in matriarchal clans (singular gens, plural gentes), where only the offspring of the daughters remained in the kinship group. From this he posited that native American tribes represented, “more or less nearly, the history and experience of our own remote ancestors when in corresponding conditions.” To German social scientist and political theorist Friedrich Engels, Morgan’s discovery of the matriarchal gens had the “same significance for prehistory that Darwin’s theory of evolution had for biology.”

Definitions of matriarchy

Do we by matriarchy mean a social system in which descent is matrilineal (traced through the female line) and residence is matrilocal (the husband moves into the woman‘s dwelling place)? If so, we know several examples from eye-witnesses in early historical times (among them Herodotus, Greek historian in the fifth century BCE, renowned as the 'Father of History'). But we also know that staunchly patriarchal societies, such as China, Japan, Egypt, were once matriarchal in these respects.

If by matriarchy we mean a social order that’s also ruled by women, we have less concrete evidence. Yet examples exist, like the ancient Qiang state in the Himalayas, ruled by a queen and a council of female ministers. Described as a Country of Women (Nü Guo), it’s documented in detail by the imperial histories of the Sui (581-618 CE) and Tang (618-907 CE) dynasties in China.

We don‘t know for sure whether matriarchy was once a universal social norm. But—due to the central place in the group that child-bearing assigns woman--many scholars assume that humankind has always lived in some form of matriarchal system; i.e., one where life is centered around the needs of the mother and her progeny, and to which the rest of the group naturally adapts. Like the 106-year-old Chinese dissident Zhou Youguang, who recently declared democracy to be “the natural form of a modern society,“ I declare matriarchy to be the natural form of ancient society.

But for me to postulate as tall an order as a universal matriarchy (that’s also the birthplace of sexism), mustn’t I have other and more tangible proofs? See next post.

For further reading:

Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, vol I-IV

Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype and The Origins and History of  Consciousness

I welcome feedback and would love for you to leave a comment. You can post a comment below this article or you can click on this article's headline.
For the full blog click originofsexism.blogspot.com