//August 2, 2000 ////First Harvest ////Festival of Lammas   • TABLE OF CONTENTS • BACK ISSUES • HOMEPAGE     Join Awakened Woman's Circle. Subscribe to our free newsletter!                                                                   Inside the Hypogeum                                           The sleeping Lady of Malta                                       Remains of Goddess temple at Hagar Qim             Gigantija, from above Temple ruins on Island of Gozo Discovering the Ancient Mother in Malta Mothers and Daughters travel to the sacred sites, fall, 1999 by Danica Anderson   Perhaps it is the way the yellow white Maltese limestones glisten in the sun and in the dark that triggers a deep hidden memory within us. I have felt that ancient memory on Malta and sister island Gozo sometimes in the smell of aqua seas and mists around Azure Window on Gozo or in the tinges of red ochre coating the Hypogeum walls three stories beneath the streets of a Maltese city. Many think that the pyramids are the oldest structures in the world. The reality is that the Mother & Daughter Temple (Ggantija) located on the island Gozo (a sister island to Malta), predates the pyramids by a 1,000 years. This makes Ggantija the oldest site in the world. The megalithic limestone temples demonstrate that our textbooks and western history are outmoded and one-sided. I ache with sadness at the sheer loss of the feminine in our lives today. Many of the daughters that come to Malta with me on the work/study tour become angry at the sheer absence of 'herstory' in their lives, schools and studies. Malta is one ancient site that triggers memories so old that they seem to be flowing from the First Mother. The huge silent limestone temples and sites urge the world to re-member the power of the mother and daughter relationship. And this seems to channel the fury into a more creative outlet, the deepening of the mother/daughter bond. The pilgrimage of mothers with their daughters on this work/study tour helped all of the participants to access the immediate knowledge and wisdom of our ancient mothers' legacy just by being onsite. Daughters on the Malta tour noted was the deep grandeur of the civilization of the Goddess. Now, young women were hearing her story being spoken and taught; they absorbed their mothers' legacy, a legacy that spoke about 6,000 years of no wars, gender peace and the highest of art forms found to date. Even more profoundly, the daughters were re-membering their mother and daughter relationships, memories triggered by the Megalithic limestones and ancient Goddess sites. Like all tours to the ancient places, this recent visit was filled with synchronicity. We were allowed to have a private tour in the Hypogeum which has been closed for the past five years. Joseph Farrugia was a wonderful Maltese caretaker/herstorian of the Hypogeum and talked as if the Hypogeum was his mother. Red pigment etches the spirals into the limestone , and the round walls -- no wall was straight -- are acoustically perfected to human vibrations. One of the young maidens sang at the limestone window in the Hypogeum and her voice drummed up through all the floors of the underground temple where the Sleeping Goddess was found. Only a few months before, Jennifer Berezan cut her album "Returning" inside the Hypogeum, she did this because of the floating vibrations and the feminine spirituality within these round rooms. After having done my own pilgrimage to ancient Goddess sites and led many tours, I have seen how the megalithic temples and tombs exert their archetypal pull through their embodiment of body forms, and especially of feminine body forms. Even Crete's Knossos palace is a walking labyrinth, and labyrinths are symbolic of the destiny found in the womb. We find ourselves within the body of a woman -- our mother. The Hypogeum made us feel as if we were inside the womb of the Goddess. Within its walls, our tour group lost all consciousness of linear time and calendar days. The Daughters of Wisdom were allowed to sing and open a circle within the womb of the Hypogeum that involved the encircling of arms to model our support for daughters to actually feel with their bodies. The singing vibrated through our bones and resonated in our souls. Many mothers cried during the ritual activities. The only words that floated in the air were the words sung by a young maiden of our group. Rachel Pollack explores the aspect of the Goddess's body in more depth in her book, The Body of the Goddess. Our group lived in an embodied community for seven days. Everything from their feet to their eyes took in the feminine forms that abound in Malta. Many of the rituals and circle-kolo processes added more dimension and depth to the process of honoring the mother/daughter bond. It was as if each one was cutting and sculpting the form of the Goddess during the tour. One process that provided for an embodied community experience was to cut and sculpt the feminine forms. This involved a ritual in which all of us screamed and toned our pain and anger while holding hands in a circle. Much like the Native American women's calls to prayer and the African women's high pitched peals, the daughters cut through manmade language and were able to voice a deeply hidden well of pain and anger. I felt each daughters' call not only in my ears but through my body in vibrations. Often after this ritual, laughter spilled out of the mouths and I sensed a great release similar to the flow of the high tides and low tides of the ocean. The daughters feel the very same rhythm embodied in the oceans and mother nature's cleansing process of floods, hurricanes or fires. The huge and fat Lady of Malta is a large limestone figure of a full-bodied woman in a skirt. The figure of the giantess in the Tarxien cemetery evokes the perception that women's storage-artifacts embody stories about women. I prefer to call her the Giantess and not label her as huge and fat as the previous archaeologists have done. In one glance, many of the young women suggested that perhaps the giantess was strong, like the mythic Amazons. More effective and sacred than words, the giantess triggers ancient memories within the modern daughter. Veronica Veen, a Dutch archeologist who has worked in Malta since the mid-1980's, traced the giantess's name to that of Saracen. The name "Saracen" indicates that the giantess was a pagan and that she had a dark complexion; she wore the clothing of a mother and/or a grandmother. In another part of Malta Xaghra, the giantess was named "Sansuna" and that indicates that she was tall, and stronger than the biblical Samson. These ancient stories echoed many of the women's stories as the participants began relating the truth of their own lives during their pilgrimage. Many had lost their authentic voice and noticed how they lacked the words, and indeed the vocabulary. To name their mother/daughter relationship, one process was to author their personal myth of their lives. Many daughters complained of hitting a wall during this ritual. I have found that many women feel that someone outside themselves must author their story, that they have no right to pen their lives. The paper tablecloths of a Maltese restaurant became the medium that I chose for the young women to express their personal myths. With colored chalks, pastels and pens, they set to work, drawing and penning their own stories as manifestation of our need to become authors. When we were done, there was not a single inch of blank white space on the tablecloths! Before their very eyes, the daughters had made a wonderful tapestry before the food was set in front of them. The meal was eaten in grace and dignity and hushed voices as if to honor the magnificent tapestry that embodied them all. On our visit to Tarxien cemetery on the island of Malta, the young women rubbed their fingers in a circle on an ancient grain stone. The grinding stone ritual ended with the daughters giving gifts to their mothersThe young maiden that sang at the Hypogeum limestone window wrote a song for her mother and played it there. She was 16 and did not know, when she wrote her song about voices from the cemetery, that Tarxien was a cemetery where thousands of Maltese lay decorated in red ocher under the ground. The lyrics pointed to the depth and core of the Mother/Daughter bond that is largely forgotten in our culture. She sang how her mother gave birth to her in the middle of the cemetery. I smiled at the giantess at Tarxien and marveled at how she always manages to stir our collective memory. At times very angry, the young maiden wondered why her mother had not seen her need to be wrapped with divine feminine archetypes while living in the patriarchy. At the mother/daughter temple site, Ggantija on the Sister Island Gozo, the daughters sat in a circle behind the temple. We commenced our circle-kolo and rituals. Pictures of our daughters and mothers in infancy decorated the ground. Some cried, others expressed their rage at the loss of the relationship, while others re-membered their bonds. Overhead a helicopter buzzed around our circle for half an hour. A Maltese man stood outside the wall watching our group. When we tried to gain entrance to another Maltese site the next day, we were almost denied entry because word had gotten around that we were practicing evil. Fear is behind most of this, and always present is the fear of the Feminine. These ancient Goddess sites are more often cordoned off, and as with the Hypogeum, permission is needed to gain access. What was once open, free and available for women to practice archetypal rituals and to remember bonds is now held in the hands of androcratic rule (men). This makes it more and more difficult for women to trigger their ancient memories and to find a mirroring of the divine feminine in our culture. Dale Spencer's book, Manmade Language, describes how our culture and language do not contain a vocabulary for women to express bond with their mothers. As a psychotherapist, I have seen the need for a deeper, fuller mother/daughter relationship. Women are always in service to others. The constant performance for all others taxes the role of being a mother and a daughter. Many women simply cannot imagine taking time off to do a tour like this; they don't value themselves enough to pay for a sacred vacation. Of course, this underscores how women are living in a culture that does not encourage, respect or prefer the feminine. Doing an intensive workshop on mother-and-daughter issues in the realm of a great maternal, ancient culture predating the pyramids offers an experiential inheritance greatly needed by us all. Perhaps, this is one inheritance you might want to give to your daughter. And remember, all of us are daughters, so every woman will benefit from participating in this tour.   Join the next work/study tour for Malta in October 2000. Email me.                                       Gigantija, from above