The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth
Barbara Mor
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 0062507915
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This classic exploration of the Goddess through time and throughout the world draws on religious, cultural, and archaeological sources to recreate the Goddess religion that is humanity’s heritage. Now, with a new introduction and full-color artwork, this passionate and important text shows even more clearly that the religion of the Goddess--which is tied to the cycles of women’s bodies, the seasons, the phases of the moon, and the fertility of the earth--was the original religion of all humanity.
institutions of patriarchy. 12 Women's Early Culture: Beginnings MARX AND THE MATRIARCHY A ncient woman-oriented groupings were the original communism. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx recognized this. Engels especial\y refers to the Mother-right concepts of J. J. Bachofen, 1 and both men based their analyses of social development on the primary existence of ancient matriarchies-i.e., communal matrifocal systems. 2 In this they were influenced by the writings of Lewis Morgan, an American
the workers and farmers, the leaders in scientific, intellectua l and cultural life. In the language of "primitive peoples" the term "mother" is identical with "Producer-procreatrix." 1 It was a society where power was linked with real love. Among the earliest examples of "Stone Age" peoples found living today, such as the Kalihari Bushmen and the BaMbuti Pygmies of Africa, the same linkage occurs; fema le authority is valued, and both sexes are "mothers" to the young. Contrary to the "bloody
basement storage went my belongings: bike, books, notes, typewriter. And I became a Bag Lady on the streets of Tucson. For 13 months, off and on, I was one of those statistics: no job, no income, no home . All the heat I'd not had during the icy months of writing curved around to hit me in the face. Intense 100° + calor of a desert city's brick-oven streets, from May through October. Windless; or the wind blew relentlessly electric, like a laundromat of open driers . I was on foot (age 51). I
blood. 10 When w~ think of the 21, 000-year-old Venus of Laussel, stained with red ochre and holding up the hunter's lunar crescent horn in the sacred cave, we know what all these same rites, images, and analogies mean, and where they come from. They come from our original selves, as children of the Great Mother, as sisters and brothers of all her magic animals. The rites, icons, and dances conceive the earth as the body of the Mother, and try to restore the harmony lost when she is wounded. They
apple but a fig tree; Eve and Adam cover ·their nakedness with fig leaves after eating of its fruit in Eden. Hathor, the Cow Goddess of Egypt, was anciently identified with the fig tree, which was known as the "living body of Hathor on earth." To eat of its sweet pulpy fruit, its very vulva-like fruit, was to eat of her flesh and fluid. The fig tree was also sacred on Crete, considered the food of eternity and immortality. The biblical Garden of Eden was in fact the entire Near Eastern, North