From Mother Goddess to Witch

Few of us realize the extent to which our notions of the deity are informed by patriarchal assumptions. We claim that God is raceless and genderless, yet we visualize God as white and male to such a degree that the very notion of a black, female God is enough to raise guffaws in response to a hardy, perennial joke. Most of us have never been taught that the concept of God as male is relatively new to human history and may not necessarily represent progress. Five thousand years ago in ancient Babylonia, our ancestors worshiped the supreme deity as the Queen of Heaven, and it took several millennia of warfare, oppression, genocide, holocaust, idol-smashing, book-burning, and deliberate rewriting of myths and legends for the father-god, Jahweh (and His son, Jesus) to be finally enthroned in our minds and imaginations.

Yet the battle was never completely won. In our myths and in our dreams, in the archetypes we invent and the fantasies we fear, the Mother Goddess still holds sway. She cannot be eradicated as long as man (and woman, too) is born of woman. If the sad day ever dawns when we all become clones or “test-tube babies,” perhaps the Mother Goddess will lose her awesome power; but so long as every human being remembers that she or he is born out of a woman’s womb, the myths and legends of the Mother Goddess will infiltrate our poetry, our works of art, and even our religious yearnings.

It has been a long decline from the Babylonian Queen of Heaven to the withered figure of the old witch, but it is a decline worth tracing. For it shows us how religions build their imageries and myths one upon the other. It shows us, too, the condensations and precipitations of legends within the communal unconscious, and it shows us, finally, how an established religion may drive out (or at least drive underground) an earlier way of conceiving the Creator.

The concept of the Mother Goddess is a thing apart from the myth of a Golden Age of Matriarchy, postulated in the nineteenth century by Engels, among others. The notion that humans were primordially matriarchal, then declined into patriarchy, constitutes a very hardy myth, favored by many disparate religious traditions, long before it was rediscovered by contemporary feminists. But no one has ever proven the existence of ancient matriarchies. We can, however, find many provable instances of all-powerful female deities. In fact, as Elaine Pagels has recently demonstrated in The Gnostic Gospels, Christianity itself originally saw God as both female and male, before the androgynous deity was forcibly overthrown in favor of a patriarchal god. The myth of an ancient matriarchal age, on the other hand, may be a constant of the human psyche—the longing for the peaceable kingdom of infancy, ruled by benevolent female despots.

Our knowledge of the religions of five thousand years ago (in what our schoolteachers used to call “The Cradle of Civilization”—a nice maternal image, that) is necessarily fragmentary. Not only is the archaeological record incomplete, but it has been sifted largely by male archaeologists, wearing the blinkers of patriarchy, assuming that monotheism represented an advance over polytheism and paganism, and seeking to justify the holy books upon which their patriarchal civilization was based.

As the feminist theologian Mary Daly has shown, one need not be a practicing Catholic to be infected by the Catholic Church’s world view. And, as Merlin Stone has demonstrated in her excellent book When God Was a Woman, one need not believe in Judaism or Christianity to have their shared creation myth thrust upon one’s imagination at every turn. Adam and Eve, snake and apple, even the Avenging Angel with his sword are to be found everywhere in our culture—from the art gallery to the television commercial, from the sophisticated New Yorker cartoon to the crassest pop song lyric.

The effect of this constant brainwashing is a set of unconsidered assumptions about the deity that are neither historically accurate nor religiously inspiring. In an attempt to retrace the roots of religious awe, poets and artists have let their unconscious minds wander freely back through the human past. All that is left of the ancient Mother Goddess in our spiritually bankrupt civilization are three figures: the Wicked Witch, the Virgin Mary, and the folk concept of “Mother Nature”—a powerful paradigm of female generativity now debased into a cartoon character. The Wicked Witch, for her part, is mother as crone—evil, full of forbidden sexuality which has festered into spells, poisons, and enchantments. The Virgin Mary is a sanitized version of the Mother Goddess—sanitized and fragmented. She is Woman devoid of her sexuality, Woman giving birth without human intercourse, Woman as unbroken hymen, the child-woman, the ideal of the “female eunuch” which Christianity has imposed upon one-half the human species as the price of their very survival upon this earth.

Why does it matter if we split off Woman from her sexuality and if we allow her only two roles in the world: Wicked Witch or Sanitized Virgin? It matters because it is a lie. Women do not give birth without impregnation by men, and the female sexuality that patriarchy regards as evil is, in essence, the origin of all human life upon the planet. If we deny this evident truth, if we make Woman into a passive vessel, and allow a male god to usurp her generative functions, we do both sexes a great disservice. For Man is doomed to be ever out of touch with his own origins (his mother’s womb), and Woman is doomed to be either Witch or Virgin—though neither role embraces the totality of her being. Christianity claims to honor the woman as mother but does not acknowledge her power to give life. Thus, Woman is doomed to live in a double bind which is at once psychological and physical: she is damned for doing the very thing that keeps the race alive. Man, for his part, is damned for partaking of that guilty sexuality, and doomed to wander the world turning virgins into whores, then cursing his fate in having no true mate to love.

The myth of the Mother Goddess promises both sexes integration. That is why it has held such sway over artists of both genders. To the woman, it promises both sexuality and creativity. And to the man it promises the same in the form of a muse-wife-mother who does not cut off her body to spite her soul.

To the Goddess

Goddess, I come to you

my neck wreathed with rosebuds,

my head filled with visions of infants,

my palms open to your silver nails,

my eyes open to your rays of illumination,

my vagina & my womb gaping

to be filled by your radiance …

O goddess, I would be a worthy vessel.

Impermanence—all is impermanence.

The cock rises to fall again;

the woman fills only to empty

in a convulsion that shakes the world;

the poet grows to become a voice

only to lose that voice when death takes her.

A stroke cancels her upon the page—

& yet I open her book & a chill wind blows from eternity.

Goddess, I come to you

wreathed in tears, in losses, in whistling winds.

I wrap the witch’s herbs around my neck

to ward off the impermanence that is our common fate.

The herbs dry & crumble,

as my face grows the map of my anxieties,

& my daughter leaps up like a vine

twining around the trellis of impermanence.

O goddess, teach me to praise loss,

death & the passing of all things—for from this flux

I know your blessings flow.