The Myth of The Goddess; Evolution of an Image

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The Myth of The Goddess; Evolution of an Image

Anne Baring and Jules Cashford

Viking 1991 and Penguin Arkana 1992

Daiwa-Shobo Tokyo 1997 (in Japanese)

 

Long ago, some 20,000 years ago and more, the image of a goddess

appeared across a vast expanse of land stretching from the Pyrenees

to Lake Baikal...

 

 

PREFACE

 

When we began this book we intended simply to gather together the

stories and images of goddesses as they were expressed in different

cultures, from the first sculpted figures of the Palaeolithic era in

20,000 BC down to contemporary pictures of the Virgin Mary. This

seemed worth doing because one way in which humans apprehend their

own being is by making it visible in the images of their goddesses

and gods. But in the course of this research we discovered such

surprising similarities and parallels in the goddess myths of

apparently unrelated cultures that we concluded that there had been a

continuous transmission of images throughout history. This continuity

is so striking that we feel entitled to talk of 'the myth of the

goddess', since the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of

goddess images is constant: the vision of life as a living unity.

 

----The Mother Goddess, wherever she is found, is an image that

inspires and focuses a perception of the universe as an organic,

sacred and indivisible whole, in which humanity, the Earth and all

life on Earth participate as 'her children'. Everything is woven

together in one cosmic web, where all orders of manifest and

unmanifest life are related, because all share in the sanctity of the

original source.

 

----- However, it was evident that in our present secular age the

goddess myth is nowhere to be found. Of course, in the Catholic

version of Christianity, Mary, 'the Virgin', 'Queen of Heaven', is

clothed in all the old goddess images - except that, significantly,

she is not 'Queen of Earth'. The Earth used to have, as it were, a

goddess to call her own, because the Earth and all creation were of

the same substance as the Goddess. Earth was her epiphany: the divine

was immanent as creation. Our mythic image of Earth has lost this

dimension.

 

----- So we set out to discover what had happened to the image of the

goddess, how and when it disappeared, and what were the implications

of this loss. Since mythic images implicitly govern a culture, what

did this tell us about a particular culture - such as our own - that

either did not have or did not acknowledge a mythic image of the

feminine principle? It began to seem no coincidence that ours is the

age above all others that has desacralized Nature: generally

speaking, the Earth is no longer instinctively experienced as a

living being as in earlier times, or so it would seem from the

evidence of pollution (itself a term that originally meant the

profaning of what was sacred). And now is also the time when the

whole body of the Earth is threatened in a way unique to the history

of the planet.

 

----- Consequently, the second aim of this book became to explore the

way in which the goddess myth was lost; when, where and how the

images of 'the god' arose, and how goddess and god related to each

other in earlier cultures and times. It soon became clear that, from

Babylonian mythology onwards (c. 2000 BC), the Goddess became almost

exclusively associated with 'Nature' as the chaotic force to be

mastered, and the God took the role of conquering or

ordering 'Nature' from his counterpole of 'Spirit'. Yet this

opposition had not previously existed, so it needed to be placed in

the context of the evolution of consciousness. One way of

understanding this process is to view it as the progressive

withdrawal of participation from nature, which makes possible an

increasing autonomy and independence of natural phenomena and a

gradual transference of 'nature's life' into humanity. This is how it

seems to be that humanity and nature become polarized. But while this

polarization can be seen to be a first stage in this process -

perhaps even an inevitable one - it does not constitute an absolute

description of the two terms that were once one. Yet so much are we

still living with the thought structures initiated in the late Bronze

and early Iron Ages that we were obliged continually to remind

ourselves that this was not intrinsic to the way in which we had to

reflect upon these terms.

 

----- It came, then, as a surprise to discover the extent to which

our Judaeo-Christian religion or mythology (depending on the point of

view) had inherited the paradigm images of Babylonian mythology,

particularly the opposition between Creative Spirit and Chaotic

Nature, and also the habit of thinking in oppositions generally. We

find this, for instance, in the common assumption that the spiritual

and the physical worlds are different in kind, an assumption that,

unreflectively held, separates mind from matter, soul from body,

thinking from feeling, intellect from intuition and reason from

instinct. When, in addition, the 'spiritual' pole, of these dualisms

is valued as 'higher' than the 'physical' pole, then the two terms

fall into an opposition that is almost impossible to reunite without

dissolving both of the terms.

 

----- We concluded that, for the last 4,000 years, the feminine

principle, which manifests mythologically as 'the goddess',

culturally as the value placed upon relationship with the Earth and

the Cosmos, and psychologically as the priority given to spontaneity,

feeling, instinct and intuition, had been lost as a valid expression

of the sanctity and unity of life. In Judaeo-Christian mythology

there is now, formally, no feminine dimension of the divine, since

our particular culture is structured in the image of a masculine god

who is beyond creation, ordering it from without; he is not within

creation, as were the mother goddesses before him. This results,

inevitably, in an imbalance of the masculine and feminine principles,

which has fundamental implications for how we create our world and

live in it.

 

----- We also found that even when the goddess myth was debased and

devalued, it did not go away, but continued to exist in disguise - in

images that were prevented from expressing themselves vitally and

spontaneously. In Greek mythology, for example, Zeus 'married' the

old mother goddesses, one after the other, and they continued to rule

the provinces of childbirth, fertility or spiritual transformation in

their own right, even though they were finally answerable to the

father god himself. In Hebrew mythology the goddess went, so to

speak, underground. She was hidden in the chaotic dragons of

Leviathan and Behemoth, whose destruction was never complete, or in

the ineluctable appeal of the forbidden Canaanite goddess Astarte,

or, more abstractly, in the feminine personification of

Yahweh's 'wisdom' - Sophia - and his 'presence' - the Shekhinah. Eve,

though human and cursed, was given by Adam the displaced name of the

mother goddesses of old - 'the Mother of All Living'- though with

fatally new and limited meaning. The Virgin Mary, as the 'Second

Eve' - who has been gathering importance over the centuries in

answer, it must be, to some unfulfilled need of many people - was

finally declared 'Assumed into Heaven, Body and Soul' as Queen only

in the 1950s.

 

--all these instances, as we hope to show, the myth of the

goddess continued to act on the prevailing world view of the time.

However, since this myth was contrary to formal doctrine, its action

had to be implicit and indirect in the manner of any less-than-fully

conscious attitude, which meant that its unacknowledged but

persistent presence often distorted even the finest expressions of

the prevailing myth of the god. It seemed clear that the feminine

principle was an aspect of human consciousness that could not and

should not be eradicated. Consequently, it needed to be brought back

into consciousness and restored to full complementarity with the

masculine principle if we were to achieve a harmonious balance

between these two essential ways of experiencing life.

 

----- So where may we discover the goddess myth now? Turning then to

the discoveries of the 'new' sciences, it appeared, astonishingly, as

if the old goddess myth were re-emerging in a new form, not as a

personalized image of a female deity, but as what that image

represented: a vision of life as a sacred whole in which all life

participated in mutual relationship, and where all participants were

dynamically 'alive'. For, beginning with Heisenberg and Einstein,

physicists were claiming that in subatomic physics the universe could

be understood only as a unity, that this unity was expressed in

patterns of relationship, and that the observer was necessarily

included in the act of observation. Characteristically, these

conclusions were themselves expressed in many of the images that

belonged to the old goddess myth. The web of space and time that the

mother goddess once spun from her eternal womb - from Neolithic

goddess figures buried with spindle whorls, through the Greek

spinners of destiny, down to Mary - had become the 'cosmic web' in

which all life was related. All the mother goddesses were born from

the sea - from the Sumerian Nammu, the Egyptian Isis, the Greek

Aphrodite, down to the Christian Mary (whose name in Latin means

sea). Now this image has come back into the imagination as the 'sea

of energy' of the 'Implicate Order'. (1) James Lovelock's 'Gaia

Hypothesis' takes its name from the ancient Greek Mother Goddess

Earth.

 

----- From a mythological perspective, the goddess myth can also be

seen in the attempts of many human beings to live in a new way,

allowing their feeling of participation with the Earth as a whole to

affect how they think about it and act towards it, aware of the

urgent need to comprehend the world as a unity. Einstein is the

spokesman for this need: 'The unleashing of the power of the atom

bomb has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we

head toward unparalleled catastrophes.' (2)

 

----- But the predominant mythic image of the age - which could be

characterized as 'the god without the goddess' - continues to support

the very oppositional and mechanistic paradigm that the latest

scientific discoveries are refuting. This means that two essential

aspects of the human mind are out of accord with each other. It may

seem a lot to claim that mythic images are so important to all areas

of human experience, but the discoveries of Depth Psychology have

shown how radically we are influenced and motivated by impulses below

the threshold of consciousness, both in our personal and in our

collective life as members of the human race. We cannot, then, afford

to be indifferent to the prevailing climate of thought. It would seem

necessary to make the attempt to move beyond our mythological

inheritance in the same way that we try to gain some perspective on

our individual inheritance - our specific family, tribe and country.

 

----- One way of bringing the myth of the goddess back into

consciousness is to tell again the stories people have told down the

millennia, and to follow the continuous chain of images through

different cultures from 20,000 BC onwards, gathering them all

together so that their underlying unity can appear. Then this

neglected, devalued but apparently unquenchable tradition may speak

for itself. This we have tried to do, in the hope that the vision of

life as a sacred whole, which at its finest the goddess myth

embodies, might be brought into relation with the god myth, and so

contribute to the new mode of thinking for which Einstein calls.

 

-----Owen Barfield, in his wonderfully concise book Saving the

Appearances, (3) defines three phases in the evolution of human

consciousness: the first as the phase of Original Participation; the

second as the phase of Separation and the third as the phase of Final

Participation which he describes as " a self conscious rapport with

the whole phenomenal world. "

 

We realised as we worked together on our book, that the first

phase was reflected in the image of the Mother Goddess; the second in

the image of the Father God; and the third in the image of the Sacred

Marriage of Goddess and God: the recovery of the original experience

of participation in a sacred universe through an imaginative and

consciously created empathic relationship with all orders of life.

 

----- We took a decision to focus on the Western tradition and so we

have not attempted to tell the stories of India, Africa and the Far

East. This is obviously a limitation, but the book is long enough

already! Perhaps readers will see parallels and points of contrast

that would contribute to a truly universal theme.

 

----- One word about myth. Myth, as the foremost exponent of

mythology, Joseph Campbell, has written, is a dream everyone has,

just as everyone also dreams her or his own personal myths: 'dream is

the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream':

 

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every

circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been

the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the

activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to

say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible

energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.

Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and

historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very

dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of

myth. (4)

 

Myths are the stories of the human race that we dream onwards. In

fact, the most we can do, according to Jung, is 'to dream the dream

onwards and give it a modern dress'. (5) Back in the Bronze Age a

union of the mythic images of the feminine and the masculine

principles was symbolized in the 'sacred marriage' of the goddess and

the god, a ritual ceremony that was believed to assist the

regeneration of nature. With the greater self-consciousness of 4,000

years later, may it not be possible to re-create in the human

imagination the same kind of insights that once were enacted in

unconscious participation with the same purpose: the renewal of

creative life? What would the modern dress of this ancient dream be?

With the restoration of the feminine to a complementary relation with

the masculine, might there then be the possibility of a new mythology

of the cosmos as one harmonious living whole? Nature and Spirit,

after the many millennia of their separation, newly embraced as one

and the same?

 

The Myth of The Goddess; Evolution of an Image

 

1. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge and Kegan

Paul, London, 1980, p. 192.

2. Albert Einstein, The Expanded Quotable Einstein, collected and

edited by Alice Calaprice, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and

Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2000, p. 184.

3. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, Second Edition, published

1988 by the Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn. USA.

4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 269

5. C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9:1, p. 269

 

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/Book/BookFrame/0,,,00.html?

id=0140192921

Spanish Edition 2005 see

http://www.siruela.com/catalogo/catalogo.php3?ficha=770 & site=autor

 

A Japanese edition of the book will be published by Hara Shobo in the

autumn of 2007 in 2 volumes.

 

------ ---- -

 

 

 

 

REVIEWS

 

The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

 

-----'This is a long book, but it is not a page too long. It is of

great significance for the reappraisal - which is grossly overdue -

of our approach to history. Here is a work of immense pioneering

significance'

 

Sir Laurens van der Post

 

 

" One of the most important contributions to the evolving

state of our culture since the Second World War. A beautiful,

luminous, feelingly written study of the goddess image through time. "

 

Lindsay Clarke

 

 

" " How rare - and how lovely - to find a book that does it all:

justice to the great poetic stories; good scholarship that is not

ideological; a sharp psychological intelligence; and a style that is

a pleasure to read. I shall recommend this book again and again for

years and years "

 

James Hillman

 

 

----- " The Myth of the Goddess brings together the best of modern

scholarship in lucid synthesis; it is a definitive work of great

importance "

 

Rupert Sheldrake

 

 

----- " " " The authors of this ground-breaking, rich, ambitious work

attempt to trace the evolution of consciousness by following

humanity's changing attitudes toward female deities …. A wonderfully

readable synthesis, this monumental study is packed with scores of

riveting illustrations. It will serve as a source book for students

of myth, feminists and those seeking to balance and integrate

masculine and feminine components of their psyche. "

 

Publishers Weekly May 1992

 

 

---- " . " ..a stunning achievement, the sweeping story of the

intellectual, social and cultural history of humanity. This

extraordinary book provides the mirror in which we can see more

clearly who we are and how we arrived here. "

 

Natural Science Book Club

 

 

-----'This generous and ambitious study - is packed with knowledge

from a heaped board of sources, and presents a historical chronology

for the " evolution " of the subtitle. But like the cross-dressed

heroine of a chivalric romance, it really records, not the story of

the past, but a quest for the buried Grail of the feminine, which

will heal the self-inflicted wounds humanity continues to open and re-

open. "

 

Marina Warner, author 'Alone of all Her Sex'

 

 

----- " This is the ultimate that has been written on the myth of the

Goddess so far, a powerful and most complete synthesis of what we

know about the goddess between the Upper Palaeolithic and modern

times. The book is a clear and masterful presentation in fifteen

chapters of the flourishing Goddess religion in Upper Palaeolithic

and Neolithic times; its demise during the Bronze Age caused by the

infiltration's of patriarchal Indo-Europeans and Semitic peoples in

the Near East and Europe; a cruel and total dethronement during the

Iron Age; and ultimately, the irresistible rise of the goddess as

Sophia and Virgin Mary as an indestructible archetype needed for the

fullness of life in an unbalanced patriarchal society. Each chapter

is an indispensable part of the whole and yet each can be read as a

separate book.

 

-----This Magnum Opus will serve as a sourcebook and a guide for many

coming years. It will be an indispensable source work for historians

of religion, philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and

everyone else interested in this very important development of

religious ideas.

 

-----The learned and unbiased presentation of the problem will help

to overcome the fear of the Goddess. Most of all this book will serve

as a torch for the future, directing us to an understanding of female

and male, goddess and god, not in terms of opposition, but as

complementarity. "

 

Marija Gimbutas Professor of Archaeology UCLA

 

 

----- " Two Jungian analysts' amazingly detailed research has produced

an encyclopaedic volume of goddess information. Artifacts are

painstakingly documented as the authors trace the fascinating history

of goddess worship from the Palaeolithic mother goddess through the

great father god of the Iron Age to Eve, Mary, and Sophia. Baring and

Cashford describe the metamorphosis of the original creator goddess

into a male god image during the Christian Era, from

Wisdom/Sophia/Hockhmah, to the incorporation of the archetypal

feminine image associated with Christ as Logos, the Word of God, and

finally to the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. The authors explain that

these fluctuations in deity illustrate the " soul's constant attempt

to restore relationship and balance between the feminine and

masculine archetypes reflected in the images of goddess and god.

Excellent and complete index and bibliography. A valuable scholarly

reference for anyone's library as well as fascinating reading. "

 

Evelyn Byers Suries, SBC BOOKNEWS

 

 

----- " This brilliant and penetrating study will surely be recognised

as a landmark in its field…Here we have the evolution of

consciousness presented through mythic images, which are generously

illustrated in the text. The authors are both Jungian analysts with

experience between them in the fields of art, history, literature,

mythology and philosophy. Their work can be seen as an extension of

Jung's own psycho-historical approach and that of his follower Erich

Neumann, author of the classic books " The Origins and History of

Consciousness " and " The Great Mother. " It assumes immense topical

importance because it addresses perhaps the central psychological

task of our time, namely the reconciliation or marriage of the

masculine and feminine principles…

 

-----In their final chapter, the authors summarise their perspective

and call for a restructuring of consciousness so as to permit the

sacred marriage, the reconciliation of masculine and feminine,

transcendence and immanence, spirit and nature. The key insight is no

longer to think in terms of 'opposites that tend to conflict, but as

complements that tend to relate'; to advance from dualism and

opposition to duality and complementarity. They draw on Owen

Barfield's useful distinction between the 'original participation' of

prehistory and 'final participation', which involves a conscious

rediscovery of the connectedness of humanity and nature. Mentally,

this means attributing much greater significance to image, feeling

and intuition and seeing life as an organic whole; such is the

message, quoted on the first and last pages, of Chief Seattle. From

what I have written here, I hope to have conveyed that this book is a

major contribution to our contemporary self-understanding and the

need to achieve an integrated view of life. "

 

The Scientific and Medical Network Review 1993