Читать книгу Circle of Stones - Judith Duerk - Страница 15
ОглавлениеLong ago when life was still sacred, in many places on earth, the Goddess was worshipped. Known by many names in many lands, as Isis, Astarte, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Hathor, temples built in her honour saw to the care of lands and flocks and kept the books and records.
The Great Goddess was revered in ceremonies perpetuating the fertility and holiness of the earth. Woman crouched on the ground during the menses in rituals regenerating the earth with the flow of her own blood. The gift of sexual love, most sacred of the gifts bestowed by the Goddess, was celebrated in yearly rites as the high priestess or queen of a region united in love with the yearly consort to honour the Goddess. Young women, coming of age, spent a night or more in the temple in sexual union with those coming to pay love honour to the Goddess. Through this act of sexual union, a woman became a virgin … sanctified, empowered, and knowing of the mysteries of life.
And, sanctified and empowered unto herself, a woman could empower other women. Woman passed down to woman a sense of herself, of her body, of the mysteries of fecundity and regeneration.
Woman was autonomous, owned property, sat on the councils of elders, served in the courts of law, and passed down the sovereign rule, in many lands, through matrilineal descent. The children born to woman were legitimate and respectable, inheriting her property, name and title, in many places, whether or not she was married. Woman was recognized for her knowledge and sought out for her advice in practical matters. She held jobs alongside men and was valued for her insight and authority in all things seen.
But it was for her insight and authority in things unseen that woman was most valued. Through her feminine rituals, through the sacred act of sexual love, woman came into the direct presence of the Goddess, and through this experience, was opened to her own prophetic and oracular vision.
Woman knew the mysteries of life and how to invoke the primal elements of nature, touchable and untouchable. Woman passed down to woman knowledge of the elemental energies in the earth and in herself, and of how to align herself with the eternal flow of those energies, within and without.
Woman passed down to woman a sense of the Goddess, of the Primal Feminine and her belonging within it. Woman passed down to woman a sense of herself as “woman unto herself.”
Woman passed down to woman a respect for her own being, revering the Great Mother in herself and herself in the Great Mother.
Woman passed down to woman a way of being within herself as she carried out her daily tasks in which she related to herself and to the task as sacred and necessary to the completion of the cosmic cycle, to be fulfilled by her, by her alone, again and again. Through that fulfilling, she renewed the earth, blessing the cycles of nature, quietly carving into the stillness of time the steps of her repeated trips for water, her winnowing of the grain, her nurturing of the earth.
Time passed.
Things began to change.
Laws were introduced taking rights of inheritance away from woman. Control over her property, finances, and legal affairs was given to the men related to her. Her political and social autonomy was taken, and in some places she was considered property.
The most supreme gift of the Goddess was denigrated—sexual love was shamed and reviled. Her claiming of her sexuality as sacred to herself and to the Goddess was scorned and humiliated. Sexual union, once sacred and ecstatic, became debauchery. The sacred temple rituals, wherein a woman had become holy and free, were condemned as orgiastic and the priestesses as “temple prostitutes.”
The sacred groves dedicated to the worship of the Great Mother were condemned and closed. The serpent, venerable symbol of wisdom and nobility, was denigrated and reviled. It became, for the epochs following, a target for humiliation and derision, treated as a symbol of woman’s folly, evil, cunning, and lust. This ancient symbol of life was abased as that which tempted Eve, and, through Eve, all of humankind, into sin and death.
The wisdom of woman, gained through her identification with her body, with the Goddess, and with the earth, was no longer revered, but ridiculed and rejected. Once honoured as prophetess and seer, woman was now scorned. Her instincts and intuition, through which she perceived the elemental energies in the cycles of nature and her knowledge of healing, were rebuked and humiliated.
Among the last of nations to hold the Goddess in highest reverence and woman in a place of honour was the small land of Elam. Lying in the Zagros Mountains between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, Elam was known in the ancient world for the unique respect it gave woman. The right to its royal throne passed down in complex forms of matrilineal succession through much of Elam’s history until the capital city Susa, the temple, and the ziggurat were razed (circa 627 B.C.).
In Elam, the snake, ancient symbol of the Goddess and feminine wisdom, was represented in bronze-casting and pottery. The Elamites knew the symbol of the tree of life with its coiling serpent. The fertility symbol of intertwining mating snakes spread through the ancient world.
In Elam, the Great Mother was revered as primary deity. Not until the second millennium B.C. was Her position threatened. And then, even as the Goddess relinquished ever greater worldly authority to the male gods, the secret rites of Elam remained those of the Goddess, the earth, and the serpent.
In Elam, among the last and alone, the Goddess was revered, woman was honoured, and, through the sacred sexual rites, she tended the elemental energies in the cycles of nature, reconsecrating the Goddess, the earth, and her own body.
In Elam, last and alone, woman still passed down to woman entitlement to live her life in devotion to the Goddess and to the feminine within herself.
In Elam, last and alone, woman passed down to woman the sense of living her life each day identifying with the Great Mother, knowing that life was sacred, within and without.
And then in Elam,
in Elam, also, things began to change,
No more could woman hold up her head to
revere the Goddess and honour herself.
No more could woman hold up her head,
No more.
No more.
How might it have been different for you, if, on your first menstrual day, your mother had given you a bouquet of flowers and taken you to lunch, and then the two of you had gone to meet your father at the jeweler, where your ears were pierced, and your father bought you your first pair of earrings, and then you went with a few of your friends and your mother’s friends to get your first lip colouring;
and then you went,
for the very first time,
to the Women’s Lodge,
to learn
the wisdom of the women?
How might your life be different?
