The Female Supreme Being … The Goddess

At first, in primal times, there was only the forces of nature and the
unknown power behind it all. Gradually there evolved the concept of a Supreme
Being, a female, a She, a Goddess who created the Universe and all of its
laws. She was the ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom,
Justice, Love, Birth and Death. .And so, for 25,000 years there was only
the Goddess. Yes, that is 25,000 years.
The earliest agriculture grew up around the shrines of the Mother Goddess
and became social and economic centers as well as holy places. These places
were the germs of future cities. Growing cities evolved around these sacred
centers, built to honor the divine Mother, the mother Goddess, the Creatress
of all of life.
The poet and religious historian Robert Graves put it in these words:
“The whole of neolithic Europe had a remarkably homogeneous system of
religious ideas based on the Mother Goddess. The Great Goddess was regarded
as immortal, changeless and omnipotent. The concept of a father God was
unknown in religious thought. In Europe, the Great Goddess was thought
of as the sole omnipotent deity. Fatherhood was not even a part of religious
thinking.”
This same Goddess worship existed much earlier in those areas we know
today as Iraq, Iran, India, Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan , Israel, Turkey, Greece
and Italy. In Egypt, She was, quote: “the Being, eternal and infinite,
the creative and ruling power of heaven and earth and of every creature
and every thing in them. Mother Goddess, Lady of Heaven, Eternal Queen,
She created all that is in existence. She commands the entire Universe
… the giver of life and all that has ever been or ever will be.”
In India, it was the Great Goddess who gave birth to the Vedas, the
rhythms of the day and night, the month and seasons, the inch, the second
and all other measurements of time, death and memory. Root words for motherhood
produced many words for calculation, metric, mark, mentality, geometry,
trigonometry and so forth.
In Africa it was believed that, quote: “to women alone have been
given the secrets of the Mystery.”
The brilliant American Eugene O’Neill wrote these words in his play
“Strange Interlude.” “The big mistake begin when God was re-created
in a male image that makes life so perverted and death so un-natural. We
should have kept the image of life as created in the birth pain of God
the Mother. We would know that our life’s rhythm beats from her great heart
and death would be a passing back into her substance. But what we have
now is a God who pounds his chest and thunders with egotism.”
So…what happened? About 2800 or so years ago…there was a sex change.
The Goddesses became Gods and the divine mother became the divine father,
male, in the strongly patriarchal cultures of Judaism where father was
Lord, literally, of the household and women were owned like cattle or land.
The Christian cult, as well as Islam picked up on this theme and declared
all Goddesses pagan and superstition. Male Gods, you see, were not pagan
and superstition but female Goddesses were. How do you like that for the
laugh of the day.? In the Old Testament there is not even a word for Goddess
and the Koran reads as follows: “only pagans pray to females.” An
orthodox Jewish boy prayed every morning … “O God…I thank Thee that
I was not born a woman.”
Christian Gospels commanded that the shrines of the Goddess be torn
down. (Acts 19:27) Paul and the early members of the Christian cult went
after the female Goddess with a zeal of fanaticism, burning and looting
and destroying temples. Paul’s word was that of the patriarch … there
was no room for a Goddess or female deities in the developing patriarchal
Christian cult. The Goddess Isis especially had to be destroyed. Paul carried
this over into his writings (New Testament) commanding wives to be submissive
to men and to husbands. Writing that women were to be silent and not vote
in church matters. Writing that women were made by God for men. Men were
not made for women. The writings were so pathological that Dr. Karl Menninger
wrote in one of his psychiatric essays that if you lifted these words out
of the bible and read them you would realize you were reading the ramblings
of a psychotic mind.
Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote these words: “I have come
to destroy all the works of the female”.
In 300 A.D. Emperor Constantine commanded an end to all Goddess worship,
calling it, quote, “Immoral”.
In A.D. 380 the Emperor Theodosius destroyed the temples of the Goddesses
and closed down the temple, known as the seventh wonder of the world, the
temple of the Goddess in Ephesus. This Christian emperor followed that
by a massacre of 7000 people in Thessalonica.
The caring Goddess … the nurturing mothe r … was being replaced
with the male God of the sword.
One of the most respected and distinguished church historians of our
time, from Yale University, was Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette. He wrote
this, in plain words, bluntly: “Christianity survived, overcame and
dominated, not through any teachings of Jesus, but by the brutal tyranny
of the bloody sword of Constantine. The bloodiest massacres in history
have been justified by telling the people they were ordered by a male God
who was masculine, jealous and ordering their destruction.”
The nurturing, caring, gentle Goddess who created all things in her
image as the giver of life and love … who endured for 25,000 years …
was finally replaced by a male God of the sword …. a God of battle and
war …. a God who was jealous and judgemental …. and under such a God
the history of religious violence was under way, with full steam.
But … we are still pre-history and its not over. The gentle image
and concept of the Goddess is making today a remarkable and explosive return
to human thought. That will be the subject of my next column: The Evolving
Destruction of the Female.