Awakened Woman
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She lives on
The Great Goddess by Jean Markale
reviewed by Stephanie Hiller
For nearly four thousand years we have been living, intellectually at least, under the burden of an incredible deception: the deception that makes the sun into the symbolic image of creative and omnipotent masculinity. Now, if we carefully examine the oldest archaeological data and compare it with mythological motifs derived from the collective memory, which forgets nothing, we see that this deception is the result of a sociocultural disruption, occurring at various times according to geographical area. In fact, it involved a polar reversal by which the individual male began to dominate the woman and to bury the image of her in the depths of his unconscious, with all the negative repercussions that could carry with it. In short, this deception, which is truly a case of fraud, is only patriarchal societies' attempt to justify, through groundless assertion, man's superiority over woman, a claim that cannot be proven, and that is contradicted by archaeological finds as well as by analysis of the most ancient human traditions.
Author Jean Markale is quite charming. He loves women, and honors us in the French manner with nearly every well-chosen word. More important, he does truly recognize the Great Goddess of the beginnings, who survived all this time, he explains, though obscured by the shadows of an overblown male perspective, as the Virgin Mary. She, the Theotokos, as she was finally named five centuries after her lifetime by the Council at Ephesus, is the Mother of God, and therefore, by a simple syllogism, the Mother of All.
Jean Markale does a good job of resurrecting Her from the ecclesiastic catacombs. "She has returned, and her prominence there is sometimes even greater than before. No, the Great Goddess is not dead, and now more than ever, the shadow of the Virgin of the Beginnings falls over a world full of questions about its future." Gently, even tenderly, he removes the veil which has hidden her bright countenance and observes that she is the same sexy lady once worshipped as Cybele --; and even the very one abjured by the Hebrews as the Whore of Babylon. That seductive Babylonian lady, who continued to lure men away from the stern dictates of YHWH, is herself none other than Ishtar, whose worship did include prostitution,-- sacred prostitution that is, not a degenerate act performed for money. And Ishtar is Isis, the original Black Goddess from Africa. So it's one story, Markale concludes correctly, for the "Great Goddess of ancient times has never stopped speaking to humans in the language of timeless femininity."
And it is all one story. The story of the Virgin of the Beginnings (who is one-unto-herself, self existent), her impregnation by a Holy Spirit, her birthing (in a stable!) of God in baby form, and the terrible tragedy of her life --; the murder of her son by crucifixion --; is, yes, one continuous tale.
That last bit --; the crucifixion --; is what Markale forgets. That there was suffering on the cross, and then some. One senses that he must surely still believe in the Resurrection, and though one may well agree that there is life after death (albeit without form), the notion that Jesus hopped out of the tomb and wandered off to learn Buddhism in India (as the Aquarian hippies supposed) must strike us as puerile, compared to the enormous and heartbreaking tragedy of the execution of a beloved son at the hands of ignorant Romans and yes, Jews, who chose to defend the status quo --; those moneylenders in the temple --; against this bright shaft of truth that had briefly penetrated their midst. He was the light before the dark, and his mother had to see him die.
And in the dark period that ensued, she was stripped of her glory. She was harnessed with the reins of chastity --; and became subservient like no Jewish mother before her had been! Robbed of her sexuality, she lost her power to the triumphant male, who eventually, himself bereft of the soothing balm of loving womanhood, became a Nazi. That is how that story ends.
Jean Markale is very nice but in the end he prefers his own theories to the truth. He sees, a tad smugly, that She is there, but he finds the cover up somehow understandable. The old ways had to go. "Not only did they call masculine society into question, but they really did disturb the public order." Too wild for their own good. Even if the Church did make the sexual act "the great sin," that was "the price Christian religion had to pay to survive." But of the price women (and men) have paid ever after, struggling to reconcile their love of virtue with their love of pleasure, he has nothing to say.
"The Church Fathers…tried very hard to graft the new ideology…onto the ancient spirituality. We must at least admit that they did this with much ingenuity, taking the deep realities of the human spirit into account and providing what it had been wanting for so long. The human spirit awaited a new definition of the Goddess of the Beginnings. Whatever differences there, were between them, however many details, the Church Fathers did respond, by and large, to this longing so deeply rooted at the very base of the soul."So they weren't trying to erase the goddess; they were trying to include her. This is too forgiving. In finding justification for the clitoridectomy perpetrated upon the Virgin Mother in the name of holy Order, he allies himself with patriarchy, which after all has endowed him with a nice position at the Sorbonne, and a successful publishing career.
I do not mean to be snide. I am very pleased to have this book, especially just now, when Marija Gimbutas is under attack from academic archeology and where not attacked is simply ignored. Here is a man who sees the vitality --; even immortality --; of the Goddess, and who proves it with a totally different body of evidence than that employed by Gimbutas. He has apparently researched, with prodigious thoroughness, all the holy places of La Virge in La Belle France and found that they were all the sacred places of the ancient Mother. And that definitely proves her continued significance.
He displays consummate knowledge of all the goddess mythologies, especially the Celtic, and effortlessly, with a pleasing eloquence, makes the same point again and again, that all over the world, in every culture, it is all one story, and She never died.
It's just that he doesn't believe that she really exists. Though he does not attempt to invalidate the experience of visionary peasants who saw her apparition at the sacred wells and dolmens throughout France and elsewhere, he attributes these appearances to the telluric currents running throughout the earth which become particularly powerful at the nodes of intersection. And that's all well and good. But ultimately he sees her as the projection of the collective unconscious, a concrete form --; because people need images to express abstractions, he states paternally --; of a deep universal yearning within the human heart. We need her, but: "It is not a question, however, of coming around to the assertion that God is a woman. God is no more female than male (despite the widespread puerile imagery of God the Father)God is. If God is the Whole, he cannot be divided…"
And while on some level I agree with him about God, I have to say there's something far more arresting about the earth and the trees, the immense variety of birds and insects, the tornadoes and the hurricanes, volcanoes and earthquakes, the flame of the funeral pyre and the rocks of the canyons --; to say nothing of the immense variety of human forms and the maya of their interplay --; than this silent omnipresence of His perfect motionless being…
How do we dare measure such things? The Great Goddess is not reducible to human terms, and in the end Markale does kindly commit the errant human sin of thinking he's wrapped the thing up because it's all in the mind.
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published by Inner Traditions, 1999