The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles
and human heads. Her hands are blood-red, and her glaring eyes red-centred; and her blood-red tongue protrudes over huge pointed breasts, reaching down to a rotund little stomach. Her yoni is large and protuberant. Her matted, tangled hair is gore-stained and her fanglike teeth gleam. There is a garland of skulls about her neck; her earrings are the images of dead men and her girdle is a chain of venomous snakes.10
Wedded as we are to an all-loving, all-forgiving stereotype of motherhood, it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this terrifying image of the bad mother with the good. But both ‘life’ and ‘death’ sides of the Goddess come together without strain in her primary aspect, which is in fact not motherhood pure and simple, but her sexuality. As her primary sexual activity she created life; but in sex she demanded man’s essence, his self, even his death. Here again the true nature of the Goddess and her activities have fallen victim to the mealy-mouthed prudery of later ages. Where referred to at all, they are coyly labelled ‘fertility’ rituals, beliefs or totems, as if the Great Goddess selflessly performed her sexual obligations solely in order to ensure that the earth would be fruitful. It is time to set the historical record straight. The fruitfulness of crops and animals was only ever a by-product of the Goddess’s own personal sexual activity. Her sex was hers, the enjoyment of it hers, and as all these early accounts of her emphasize, when she had sex, like any other sensible female, she had it for herself.
But not by herself. In every culture, the Goddess has many lovers. This exposes another weakness in our later understanding of her role as the Great Mother. To the children of patriarchy, ‘mother’ always includes ‘wife’; mother is the woman who is married to father. That puts a further constraint on the idea of the good mother. The good mother does not fuck around. She does not even choose the one man she does have, but is chosen by father. Hence the insoluble paradox of the Goddess for the custodians of succeeding moralities – she was always unmarried and never chaste. Among Eskimos, her title was ‘She Who Will Not Have a Husband’. But there was more to her sexual freedom than this. As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless. In contrast males came and went, their only function the service of the divine ‘womb’ or ‘vulva’, which is the Goddess’s name in most cultures.11
Yet the lover of the Goddess did not simply have the kind of crudely functional experience that this might suggest. Some representations of her sexuality stress its power and terror: on seal-engravings from Babylon she puts scorpions to flight with the ritual display of her awe-inspiring pudenda, while in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh from before 2000 B.C., the goddess Ishtar, thwarted in her unbridled sensuality, threatens to burst gates, tear down houses and ‘make the dead rise and overwhelm the living’.12 Far more common, however, are the tender, almost girlish poetic tributes to the skill of the lover and the delights of his body, like this song of Inanna, over 4000 years old, yet as fresh as this morning’s loving:
My brother brought me to his house,
Laid me down on a fragrant honey bed, My precious sweet, lying on my heart, My brother did it fifty times, One by one, tongue-making.13
Further north in the legendary city of Nineveh, the unknown poet made the goddess Ishtar croon like a mother as she beds the Assyrian king Ashur-bani-pal:
My face covers thy face
As a mother over the fruit of her womb. I will place thee as a graven jewel between my breasts During the night will I give thee covering, During the day I shall clothe thee, Fear not, oh my little one, whom I have raised.14
Brother? Little one? Who were these lovers of the Goddess, and why are they described in such terms? The answer to this question leads to the clearest indication of the undisputed power of the Goddess that historical evidence affords.
For the Great Mother originally held the ultimate power – the power of the undisputed ruler, that of life and death. Where woman is the divine queen, the king must die. Mythologically and historically, too, the rampant sensuality of the Great Goddess and her taste for blood unite in the archaic but undisputed practice of the killing of the king. ‘King’ is in fact an honorary tide for the male chosen to fuck the Queen-Goddess in a simple re-enactment of the primal drama subsequently described by historians and anthropologists as ‘the sacred marriage’, with the male ‘acting as divine consort’ to the Goddess. But the savage, inexorable logic of the ritual could hardly be more opposed to this weak and anachronistic attempt to dignify the male’s part in the proceedings. For when all life was thought to flow into, through and out of the female, the highest hope of the male was to escape the fate of all the other disposable drones and associate with the deity, even at the price of then being returned to earth.
Mythologically, the ritual sacrifice of the young ‘king’ is attested in a thousand different versions of the story. In these the immortal mother always takes a mortal lover, not to father her child (though children often result) but essentially in exercise and celebration of her womanhood. The clear pattern is of an older woman with a beautiful but expendable youth – Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osiris. In the story of Demeter, the functional motif of the story is even clearer: the bold Iasion ‘lies with’ the corn goddess in the furrow of a cornfield, and dies by thunderbolt immediately afterwards. The lover is always inferior to the Goddess, mortal where she is immortal, young where she is ageless and eternal, powerless where she is all-powerful, and even physically smaller – all these elements combine in the frequent representation of the lover as the Goddess’s younger brother or son. And always, always, he dies. The fate of the lovers of the Great Goddess was well known when Gilgamesh resisted the command of ‘glorious Ishtar’ with the reproach, ‘Which of your lovers did you love for ever? What shepherd of yours pleased you for all time? . . . And if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as all these others whom you loved once?’15
Within recorded history, versions of the killing of the king frequently occur. The goddess Anaitis of Nineveh annually demanded the most beautiful boy as her lover/victim: beautiful with paint, decked with gold ornaments, clothed in red and armed with the double axe of the goddess, he would spend one last day and night in orgiastic sex with her priestesses under a purple canopy in full view of the people, then he was laid on a bed of spices, incense and precious woods, covered with a cloth of gold and set on fire. ‘The Mother has taken him back to her,’ the worshippers chanted.16 In Ireland, the chief priestess of the Great Goddess of the Moon killed the chosen male with her own hands, decapitating him over a silver ‘regeneration’ bowl to catch his blood. The ‘Jutland cauldron’, one of these vessels now in the Copenhagen Museum, gives a graphic illustration of the goddess in action at the height of the sacrificial ceremony.17
Historic survivals of the killing of the king continued up to the present day. As late as the nineteenth century, the Bantu kingdoms of Africa knew only queens without princes or consorts – the rulers took slaves or commoners as lovers, then tortured and beheaded them after use. The last queen of the Ashanti, according to the outraged reports of British colonial administrators of the Gold Coast, regularly had several dozen ‘husbands’ liquidated, as she liked to wipe out the royal harem on a regular basis and start again. Even where kingship was established, African queens had the power to condemn the king to death, as Frazer recorded, and the right to determine the moment of execution. Other cultures, however, gradually developed substitute offerings: first, the virility of the young male in place of his life, in a ritual castration ceremony widely practised throughout Asia Minor (though note that the Aztecs in Meso-America never made this an either/or, until the end of their civilization insisting on both); then in place of men, taking children, animals, even doll-figures of men like the ‘mannikins’ the Vestal Virgins drowned in the Tiber every spring.18
In real terms, however, the average man does not seem to have had much to fear from the Goddess or her worship. In a culture where the supreme deity is female, the focus is on women, and society draws its structures, rhythms, even colours from them. So, for instance, the special magic of women’s sexuality, from her mysterious menstruation to her gift of producing new life, is expressed in the widespread practice throughout the period of Goddess-worship of treating certain sacred grave-burials