Great Mother

In the beginning, life gestate within the body of the ocean 'womb', containing all organic life. A female existence reproduced itself, within the female body of the sea. The protective and nourishing space, the amniotic fluids, even the lunar-tidal rhythm - was transferred into the individual female body.

She floated alone, an entity of perfect balance the creator. In the beginning was a very female sea. For billion of years on earth, all life-forms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean, nourished and protected by its fluids, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms.

The Goddess was often the dominant figure. This is partly due to the fact that in the earliest of times, it was the Mother who was seen to hold the magical gift of life. The word 'father' is a relative latecomer to the human vocabulary. A person could easily not know who their father was, but it was less easy not to know who their mother was.

Western Civilization has been pursuing a course that has taken it farther and farther from the Mother. The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have from their beginning activity suppressed the worship of the Goddess, and have tortured and brutally murdered millions of Her people. Today, she is all but forgotten in the hearts of Her children, and Her body lies raped and ravished in the wake of human progress. The Goddess is the concept of feminine divinity incarnate. The denial of feminine divinity results in the oppression of all women, including Mother Nature.

This is not to say that all non-monotheistic religions have a good record for the treatment of women in those societies. Certainly Hindu cultures, for example, revere various goddesses and yet are among the more sexist and female-suppressive societies in the modern world. Nevertheless, there is abundant "archeological evidence" to indicate that things were not always as they are now, especially in truly ancient societies.

Before the Aryan Indo-European invasion around 1,500 BCE many Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, had societies that appeared remarkably egalitarian. These societies were universally characterized by the worship of a powerful Great Mother. She was later broken into a multiplicity of minor goddesses which were demoted to the position of wives or concubines of the gods.

The land, formerly tied to matrilineal territorial clans, passed into the hands of patriarchal kings and princes who began to treat it as their private property and to lay waste to the forests in order to build vast temples and palaces to house their harems and other slaves. The Goddess of Nature went from the position of being the body and soul of all that lives to that of a wife, mother and household servant.