Willamena
19-12-2005, 07:30
Myth is stories. Myth also tells a story. The important part is not the story, but what happens inside when the story is told, and the meaning understood and believed.
(plagiarized from The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image Chapter 16 pg. 660-661)
This book has tried to tell the story of the mythic images that themselves tell the story of the evolution of consciousness. And if it is true that the way in which humans can apprehend and know their own being is by making it visible in the image of their goddesses and gods, then it may be through such images as these the consciousness tells its own story.
The myth of the goddess has moved through several stages of diminishing influence from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, and those have registered the way humanity looks upon itself and its world. In our Western culture there is now formally no goddess myth and so no feminine dimension in the collective image of the divine. This means that contemporary experience of the archetypal feminine as a sacred entity is no longer available as an immediate reality in the way that it used to be. Although the myth of the goddess partially survives in the figure of Mary, the Virgin, as intermediary, it is still ultimately excluded from the prevailing myth of the god. If we review the historical stages of the demise of the goddess myth, we can gain some perspective on where we stand at this particular point.
In the beginning the Great Mother Goddess alone gives birth to the world out of herself, so that all creatures, including the gods, are her children, part of her divine substance. Everything is living, animated – with soul – and sacred. Today’s distinctions between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ or ‘soul’ and ‘body’ have no place, for humanity and nature share a common identity. This was the myth that prevailed in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. It is still found in what are called (probably for that reason) ‘primitive’ societies and, of course, in poetry.
Thereafter the Mother Goddess unites with the god – once her son, now her consort – to give birth to the world. Here the distinction is made between the eternal womb and its temporal phases (whether or the moon or the seasonal life of vegetation), and the focus of the myth is on the relationship between the Mother Goddess and the god, her ‘son-lover’. Everything is still alive and sacred, but the duality of that which endures and that which changes – zoe, the eternal and inexhaustible source (of life), and bios, its expression in time – prepares the way for the distinction between energy and form, later to become that between ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. This was the myth of Inanna and Dumuzi in Bronze Age Sumeria, Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylonia, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece and Cybele and Attis in Anatolia.
In the next stage the Mother Goddess is killed by the god, her great-great-great-grandson, who then makes the world from her dead body, and the human race from the blood of her dismembered son-lover. This was the late Bronze and early Iron Age Babylonian myth of Tiamat, the mother goddess whose corpse was split apart into earth and heaven by the superior wind-and-fire-power of the sky-and-sun god Marduk. Creation is now dissociated from the creative source, and the world is no longer a living being and a sacred entity; on the contrary, it is seen from Marduk’s perspective as the inert and inanimate substance that we call ‘matter’, which can be shaped and ordered only by ‘spirit’. The considerable implication here – which mythically underlies much destruction of the earth as well as the ‘holy’ wars against other human beings – is that the conquest of matter releases spirit.
Finally, the god creates the world alone without reference to the Mother Goddess, either through self-copulation (the Egyptian Atum) or through the power of the Word. This was the Bronze Age myth of the Egyptian Ptah, whose tongue translated the thoughts of his heart, and the Iron Age myth of the Hebrew Yahweh-Elohim, who made heaven and earth in the beginning and saw that it was good. In the popular version Adam is made of the clay of the inanimate earth and comes alive only when spirit is breathed into him, and Eve is derived from Adam. Here, the world is set still further apart from its creator and cannot share in the sanctity of the original source. The creator is transcendent to creation, not immanent in creation as was the mother goddess before him. The transcendent god – Pure Spirit – creates nature and then, in addition, transfers some of this spirit (or, breathes His spirit) into the body of the human being(s), but not into the bodies of animals, plants, soil and stones. After the expulsion, when the earth is cursed to dust and thistles, Nature itself (not Herself) becomes a punishment for the inevitably inferior spiritual ‘nature’ of humanity. In the Hebrew creation myth, inherited by the Islamic and Christian traditions, there is no relation to the Mother Goddess, who is no longer even an enemy and has disappeared from view.
*snip*
(plagiarized from The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image Chapter 16 pg. 660-661)
This book has tried to tell the story of the mythic images that themselves tell the story of the evolution of consciousness. And if it is true that the way in which humans can apprehend and know their own being is by making it visible in the image of their goddesses and gods, then it may be through such images as these the consciousness tells its own story.
The myth of the goddess has moved through several stages of diminishing influence from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, and those have registered the way humanity looks upon itself and its world. In our Western culture there is now formally no goddess myth and so no feminine dimension in the collective image of the divine. This means that contemporary experience of the archetypal feminine as a sacred entity is no longer available as an immediate reality in the way that it used to be. Although the myth of the goddess partially survives in the figure of Mary, the Virgin, as intermediary, it is still ultimately excluded from the prevailing myth of the god. If we review the historical stages of the demise of the goddess myth, we can gain some perspective on where we stand at this particular point.
In the beginning the Great Mother Goddess alone gives birth to the world out of herself, so that all creatures, including the gods, are her children, part of her divine substance. Everything is living, animated – with soul – and sacred. Today’s distinctions between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ or ‘soul’ and ‘body’ have no place, for humanity and nature share a common identity. This was the myth that prevailed in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. It is still found in what are called (probably for that reason) ‘primitive’ societies and, of course, in poetry.
Thereafter the Mother Goddess unites with the god – once her son, now her consort – to give birth to the world. Here the distinction is made between the eternal womb and its temporal phases (whether or the moon or the seasonal life of vegetation), and the focus of the myth is on the relationship between the Mother Goddess and the god, her ‘son-lover’. Everything is still alive and sacred, but the duality of that which endures and that which changes – zoe, the eternal and inexhaustible source (of life), and bios, its expression in time – prepares the way for the distinction between energy and form, later to become that between ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. This was the myth of Inanna and Dumuzi in Bronze Age Sumeria, Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylonia, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece and Cybele and Attis in Anatolia.
In the next stage the Mother Goddess is killed by the god, her great-great-great-grandson, who then makes the world from her dead body, and the human race from the blood of her dismembered son-lover. This was the late Bronze and early Iron Age Babylonian myth of Tiamat, the mother goddess whose corpse was split apart into earth and heaven by the superior wind-and-fire-power of the sky-and-sun god Marduk. Creation is now dissociated from the creative source, and the world is no longer a living being and a sacred entity; on the contrary, it is seen from Marduk’s perspective as the inert and inanimate substance that we call ‘matter’, which can be shaped and ordered only by ‘spirit’. The considerable implication here – which mythically underlies much destruction of the earth as well as the ‘holy’ wars against other human beings – is that the conquest of matter releases spirit.
Finally, the god creates the world alone without reference to the Mother Goddess, either through self-copulation (the Egyptian Atum) or through the power of the Word. This was the Bronze Age myth of the Egyptian Ptah, whose tongue translated the thoughts of his heart, and the Iron Age myth of the Hebrew Yahweh-Elohim, who made heaven and earth in the beginning and saw that it was good. In the popular version Adam is made of the clay of the inanimate earth and comes alive only when spirit is breathed into him, and Eve is derived from Adam. Here, the world is set still further apart from its creator and cannot share in the sanctity of the original source. The creator is transcendent to creation, not immanent in creation as was the mother goddess before him. The transcendent god – Pure Spirit – creates nature and then, in addition, transfers some of this spirit (or, breathes His spirit) into the body of the human being(s), but not into the bodies of animals, plants, soil and stones. After the expulsion, when the earth is cursed to dust and thistles, Nature itself (not Herself) becomes a punishment for the inevitably inferior spiritual ‘nature’ of humanity. In the Hebrew creation myth, inherited by the Islamic and Christian traditions, there is no relation to the Mother Goddess, who is no longer even an enemy and has disappeared from view.
*snip*