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The Civilization of the Mother

In order to undertake this kind of research successfully, it is necessary to provide a more exact typological characterization of the forms of civilization that followed the primordial one. First of all, I will discuss the notion of the “civilization of the Mother.”^[1] The characteristic trait of this civilization is a transposition into the metaphysical of the view of woman as the principle and substance of generation; a goddess expresses the supreme reality, while every being, conceived as a son or daughter, appears next to her as something conditioned, subordinated, lacking life in itself, and ephemeral. This is the type of the great Asiatic-Mediterranean goddesses of life, such as Isis, Asherat, Cybele, Tanit, and especially Demeter (Ceres to the Romans), a central figure in the Pelasgic-Minoan cycle. The representation of the solar principle as a child resting on the lap of the Great Mother, suggesting that it was generated from her; the Egyptian-Minoan representations of queens or divine women holding the lotus and the key to life; Ishtar, celebrated by one of the most ancient recorded hymns with the words: “There is no true god besides you,” and who is often referred to as Ummu ilani, “the Mother of the gods”; the various allusions, often with cosmological transpositions, to an alleged primacy of the “night” principle over the “day” principle arising from her bosom, and therefore of dark or lunar deities over manifested and diurnal ones; the ensuing characteristic sense of the “occult” as destiny and as a fatalistic law from which nobody can escape; the priority, in some archaic symbolisms (often connected with the lunar rather than with the solar measure of time) of the sign or of the god of the moon over that of the sun (see for instance the primacy enjoyed by the Babylonian god Sin over Shamash) and the inversion whereby the moon was sometimes portrayed as a masculine deity and the sun as a feminine deity; the part assigned to the principle of the waters and to the relative cult of the serpent and of analogous entities; and also, on a different plane, the subordination of Adonis to Aphrodite, Virbius to Diana, some forms of Osiris (who was transformed from his original solar form into a lunar god of the waters) to Isis,^[2] Iacchus to Demeter, the Asiatic Heracles to Milittas—all of these examples seem to point in the same direction. Little statues of the Mother with child dating back to the Neolithic are found everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic.

In the civilization of Crete, where the homeland was called “motherland” (µετρίς) rather than “fatherland” (πατρίς), which also exhibits a specific relation with the Atlantic-Southern civilization^[3] and with the substratum of even more ancient cults in the South, the gods were believed to be mortal; just like summer, every year they underwent death. In Cretan civilization Zeus (Teshub) did not have a father, and his mother was the humid soil; the “woman” was therefore at the beginning, while the god himself was a “generated” and mortal being and his sepulcher was shown from generation to generation on Crete’s Mount Iouktas.^[4] Conversely, the unchanging feminine substratum of every form of life was believed to be immortal. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, when the shadows of Chaos are dispersed, the black goddess Gaia (µέλαιναγαîα), a feminine principle, makes her appearance. Gaia generates her own male or bridegroom without a spouse, after producing the “great mountains,” the Ocean, and the Pontus; Gaia’s entire divine offspring, which Hesiod lists following a tradition that should not be confused with that of the pure Olympian stock, is portrayed as a world subject to movement, change, and becoming.

On a lower plane, and on the basis of traces that have been preserved until the earliest recorded historical times, it is possible to recognize in some of the Asiatic Mediterranean cults ritual expressions that characterize this inversion of values. Take, for instance, the Sacchean and Phrygian festivals. The Sacchean festivals, which were celebrated in honor of the great Goddess, culminated in the slaying of a person who represented the male regal figure.^[5] The dismissal of the virile element on the occasion of the celebration of the Goddess was also found in a dramatic way in the castrations performed during Cybele’s Mysteries: sometimes the priests who felt possessed by the Goddess would go so far as emasculating themselves in order to resemble her and to become transformed into the female type, which was conceived as the highest manifestation of the sacred. Moreover, from the temples of Astarte and of Artemis at Ephesus to Hieropolis the priests were often eunuchs. Consider the following: (a) the Lydian Hercules, dressed as a woman, who for three years serves the imperious Omphales, who was a type of the divine woman like Seramis; (b) the fact that those who participated in some Mysteries consecrated to Heracles or to Dionysus often wore women’s clothes; (c) the fact that priests dressed in women’s clothes would keep watch in the sacred woods by some ancient Germanic trees; (d) the ritual inversion of sex whereby some statues of Nana-Ishtar in Susa and of Venus in Cyprus would display masculine features, and whereby women dressed as men and men dressed as women celebrated their cult;^[6] and finally (e) the Pelasgic-Minoan offering of broken weapons to the Goddess and the usurpation of the sacred Hyperborean warrior symbol of the battle-axe by Amazonian figures and southern goddesses—all of these instances represent the fragmentary, materialized, and distorted echoes, none of them any less characteristic, of the overall view according to which (as the feminine became the fundamental symbol of sacredness, strength, and life) the masculine element and men in general came to be looked down upon as irrelevant, innerly inconsistent, ephemeral, of little value, and as a source of embarrassment.

Mater = Earth, gremium matris terrae. This equivalence suggests a main point, namely, that in the type of civilizations with Southern roots it is possible to include all the varieties of cults, myths, and rituals in which the chthonic theme predominates; in which the masculine element appears; and in which not only goddesses but gods of the earth, of growth, natural fertility, the waters, or the subterranean fire are to be found. The Mothers presided over the subterranean world and the occult, conceived of in terms of night and darkness and in opposition to coelum, which also suggests the generic idea of the invisible, though in its higher, luminous, and heavenly aspect. Moreover, there is a fundamental and well-known opposition between the Deus, the type of the luminous deities of the Indo-European pantheon,^[7] and Al, who is the object of the demonic, ecstatic, and frenzied cult of the dark southern races that lack any contact with what is truly supernatural. In reality, the infernal-demonic element, or the elemental kingdom of the subterranean powers, defines the lower aspect of the cult of the Mother. In opposition to all this there is the “Olympian,” immutable, and acosmic reality bathed in the light of a world of intelligible essences (κόσμος νοητός), and sometimes dramatized in the form of gods of war, victory, splendor, or heavenly fire.

If in southern civilizations (in which the feminine, telluric cult predominates) burial was the prevalent funerary rite, while cremation was practiced among civilizations of northern and Aryan origin, this reflects the abovementioned view; namely, that the destiny of the individual was not to become purified from earthly residues and to ascend to heavenly regions, but rather to return to the depths of the Earth and to become dissolved into the chthonic Magna Mater, who was the source of his ephemeral life. This explains the subterranean rather than heavenly location of the kingdom of the dead, which is typical of the most ancient ethnic strata of the South. According to its symbolical meaning, the burial of the dead was characteristic of the cycle of the Mother.

Generally speaking, it is possible to establish a relationship between feminine spirituality and pantheism, according to which ultimate reality is conceived as a great sea into which the nucleus of an individual merges and becomes dissolved like a grain of salt. In pantheism, personality is an illusory and temporary manifestation of the one undifferentiated substance, which is simultaneously spirit and nature as well as the only reality; in this weltanschauung there is no room for any authentically transcendent order. It is necessary to add—and this will be a key factor when assessing the meaning of later cycles—that those forms in which the divine is conceived of as a person represent a mixed and yet similar thing;^[8] in these forms we find a connection between the naturalistic relationship of generation and creation of man and the corresponding pathos of utter dependence, humility, passivity, surrender, and renunciation of one’s will. Strabo’s opinion (Geographia, 7.3.4), according to which prayer was taught to man by woman, is very significant in this regard.

I had previously suggested that the materialization of true virility is the inevitable counterpart of the femininization of spirituality. This motif, which will introduce further modifications of various civilizations during the Bronze or Iron Age, helps to characterize other aspects of the civilization of the Mother.

When we compare femininity with virility understood in material terms, such as physical strength, harshness, and violent affirmation, it is only natural that the woman, owing to her characteristics of sensitivity, self-sacrifice, and love—not to mention the mystery of procreation—was regarded as the representative of a higher principle; she was even able to acquire authority and to appear as an image of the universal Mother. Thus, it is not a contradiction that in some instances, spiritual and even social gynaecocracy did not appear in effeminate but in violent and bellicose societies. Indeed, the general symbol of the Silver Age and of the Atlantic cycle was not a demonically telluric or a coarsely naturalistic symbol (as in the case of the cycle of the coarse prehistoric feminine idols), but one in which the feminine principle was elevated to a higher form, almost like in the ancient symbol of the Moon as a purified or heavenly Earth (οὺρανἱη αιθερἱη λ ), and as such, ruling over anything terrestrial;^[9] a spiritual or moral authority was therefore bestowed upon femininity that predominates over purely material and physical virile instincts and qualities.

We find this higher form in those regions where the entities that not only safe-guard natural customs and laws, avenge sacrilege, and punish misdeeds (from the northern women to the Erinyes, Themis, and Dike), but that also mediate the gift of immortality are portrayed as female. This form was usually characterized as Demetrian and it was associated with chaste symbols of virgins or mothers who conceive without a male partner, or with goddesses of vegetal fertility and crops such as Ceres. A true opposition exists between the Demetrian and the Aphrodistic type. This differentiation may be associated with the opposition found in Far Eastern countries between the “Pure Land” inhabited by the “Western Woman” and the subterranean world of Emma-O; in the Hellenic traditions this opposition existed between the symbol of Athena and the symbol of the Gorgons whom she fights. The pure and peaceful Demetrian spirituality, portrayed as the moon’s light, characterized the type of the Silver Age and, most likely, the cycle of the first Atlantic civilization; historically, however, it was not the original spirituality, but rather a product of an ensuing transformation.^[10] Effective forms of gynaecocracy developed in those places where the symbol became a reality; traces of it can be found in the most ancient substratum of several civilizations.^[11] Just as leaves are not born one from another but derive from the trunk, likewise, although man produces life, it is woman who begets it. The son does not perpetuate the race, but merely enjoys an individual existence circumscribed to the time and place in which he happens to live; real continuity-abides in the feminine-motherly principle. Hence, as a consequence, the woman as mother was the center and the foundation of a people’s or a family’s laws and the genealogical transmission took place through the feminine bloodline. By transposition, if we go from the family to society at large, we arrive at structures of a collectivist and communist type. In reference to the unity of origin and to the maternal principle of which we are all the children, aequitas becomes aequalitas; relationships of universal brotherhood and equality are established; a sympathy reaching out beyond all boundaries and differences is affirmed; and a tendency to share whatever one possesses, which is considered to be a gift of Mother Earth, is encouraged. An echo of this motif is found in the fact that until recently, during festivals that celebrated chthonic goddesses and the return of men to the great Mother of Life (not without a revival of an orgiastic element typical of the lowest southern forms) all men felt themselves to be free and equal; caste and class distinctions no longer applied, but could freely be overturned; and a general licentiousness and pleasure in promiscuity tended to be rather widespread.

On the other hand, the so called “natural law” and common promiscuity typical of several savage populations of a totemic type (Africa and Polynesia), up to the so-called Slavic mir, almost always point to the typical context of the “civilization of the Mother,” even in those places in which matriarchy was not found and where, rather than mixed-variations of the primordial boreal civilization, we find remnants of tellurism inherent to inferior autochthonous races. The communal theme, together with the ideal of a society that does not know wars and that is free and harmonious is found in various descriptions of the earlier ages, including the Golden Age and Plato’s description of primordial Atlantis. But this, in my view, is merely due to mistaking a relatively recent memory with a more distant one. The “lunar” theme of peace and community in a naturalistic sense has little to do with those themes that characterized the first age.^[12]

Once we eliminate this misunderstanding and bring them back to their true setting (namely, to the second age of the Mother, or Silver rather than Golden Age), the abovementioned memories concerning a primordial, peaceful, and communitarian world close to nature and without conflicts and divisions, become very significant.

On the other hand, if we bring this order of ideas to its logical conclusion, we arrive at a morphological characterization of fundamental importance. In reference to what I have expounded in the first part of this work concerning the meaning of the primordial regality and the relationships between regality and priesthood, it is possible to see that the type of society ruled by a priestly class and yet dominated by “feminine” spirituality, which is characterized by the subordination of the spirit to priestly matters and the confinement of the regal function to a subordinated and material role—this type of society tends to be dominated by a gynaecocratic and lunar spirit or by a Demetrian form, especially if it is oriented toward the ideal of mystical unity and brotherhood. In opposition to a society articulated according to specific hierarchies and animated by a “triumphal” assumption of the spirit and culminating in regal superhumanity—this society reflects the truth of the Mother, but in one of its sublimated versions. This version is in line with what probably characterized the best period of the Atlantic cycle, which was reproduced and preserved in the colonies that developed from the Pelasgic populations into the cycle of the great Asiatic-Mediterranean goddesses of life.

Thus in myth and ritual, in the general views concerning life and the sacred, and in laws, ethics, and even social forms one finds specific elements. These elements can be found in the historical world only as fragments mixed together with other motifs, transposed to other planes, yet leading back, at least ideally, to the same basic orientation. This orientation corresponds to the Southern alteration of the primordial tradition and to the spiritual deviation from the “pole” that occurred, parallel to the change of location, in the mixed-variations of the original boreal stock and the civilizations of the “Silver Age.” This is what must be held by those who accept the meanings of North and South—not only morphologically in relation to two universal types of civilization (it is always possible to limit oneself to this minimalist view), but also as points of reference—in order to integrate into a higher meaning the dynamics and the struggle of historical and spiritual forces in the development of recent civilizations, in the latest phase of the “twilight of the gods.”^[13]

Footnotes

1. A reading of Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1897) will show the extent to which I have employed the findings of this scholar and the extent to which I have integrated them in a wider and more up-to-date order of ideas.

2. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 41; 33. Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca historica, 1.27) related that in Egypt the queen enjoyed greater powers and was given higher honors than the king, to reflect the fact that Isis survived Osiris and that she was credited with the resurrection of the god and with the bestowal of many gifts to mankind (since she embodied the immortal principle and knowledge). I would add that this view reflects the decadence of the primordial Egyptian civilization.

3. Bachofen, Mutterecht, chap. I. Herodotus says that originally the Licians (the primordial inhabitants of Crete) adopted their mothers’ rather than their fathers’ names.

4. Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, 1.9–15.

5. Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, 4.66. Although the modern interpretations that see in this ritual the slaying of the “spirit of vegetation” are typical of the whims of the ethnologists, nevertheless we find a predominant chthonic character in these Sacchean rituals that is found among several other peoples. Philo of Biblos recalled that Kronos sacrificed his son after putting the regal robe on him; in this context, Kronos is not the king of the Golden Age, but he represents time, which in later ages gains power over all forms of life and from which the new Olympian stock manages to escape only thanks to a stone. The sacrifice recalls the ephemeral character of every life, even when it has a regal dignity. While in the Sacchean feasts the role of the king was played by a prisoner sentenced to death—just as, according to the truth of the Mother, everybody is sentenced to die at their birth—this may contain a deep meaning.

6. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.7.2. An analogous change of sex occurred at Argos during the feast of the Hibristics, and also in the marriage ritual that was retained in some ancient traditions or employed by some primitive populations that are the degenerated remnants of lost civilizations.

7. The “gods,” according to Varro, are beings of light and the day. Heaven is at the origins of all things and it expresses the highest power. The root of Zeus, as that of Jupiter (the Deus Pater), is the same as that for deva, Dyaus, and similar words, that refer to the splendor of the sky and the brightness of the day.

8. I am referring to cases in which this attitude was not typical only of the inferior strata of a civilization and the exoteric aspect of a tradition, and in which it did not even occur in a given ascetical path as a transitory phase, but formed all relationships with the divine.

9. “For Selene is the last of the heavenly spheres that Athena fills with wisdom; and by her aid Selene beholds the intelligible that is higher than the heavens, and adorns with its forms the realm of matter that lies below her, and thus she does away with its savagery and confusion and disorder.” Emperor Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 150a.

10. Bachofen’s views, which in many regards are true from a traditional point of view, should be rejected or at least integrated whenever they take as a reference point and assume as an original and even older element that which is connected with the Earth and with the Mother; these views posit something like a spontaneous evolution from the inferior to the superior in those cases in which there are forms of “mixture” between the inferior (the South) and the superior (the Hyperborean element).

11. A characteristic example is the legend of Jurupary, which reflects the sense of the recent Peruvian civilization. Jurupary was a hero who appeared in societies ruled by “women” to reveal a secret solar law, reserved to men alone, to be taught in every nation, against the ancient law of the mothers. Jurupary, like Quetzalcoatl, eventually withdrew to the sacred land situated east of America.

12. The Saturnalia, by evoking the Golden Age in which Saturn reigned, celebrated the promiscuity and universal brotherhood that were believed to characterize this age. In reality, this belief represents a deviation from traditional truth, and the Saturn who was evoked was not the king of the Golden Age, but rather a chthonic demon; this can be established by the fact that he was represented in the company of Ops, a form of the earth goddess.

13. A. Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Munich, 1930), was right to claim, against Bachofen, that it is necessary to differentiate and not to put civilizations in a linear succession; that the “civilization of the Mother,” which Bachofen thought to be the oldest stage from which Uranian and patriarchical societies “evolved” as superior and more recent forms, in reality was a heterogeneous, independent world, inhabited by other races that eventually clashed or came in contact with Nordic traditions. Rosenberg was also right to criticize Wirth’s association, concerning the Northern-Atlantic cycle, of the solar cult with the cult of the Mother, which consistently presents chthonic and lunar, rather than solar, characteristics. Such confusions are driven by both the temporal distance between us and those events, and by their assumption of mythical forms; in many traditions the memories of the Arctic cycle are fused together with the memories of the Atlantic cycle.