As it turned out, Metis was pregnant with the daughter the oracle predicted, not the son Zeus feared. Zeus next co-opted the birth process itself by giving birth to his daughter—Athena–through his head. He had a terrible headache, likened to labor pains, before Athena emerged. This was another mythical step away from worship of the goddess as the Great Mother, which naturally derived from the observation that all life comes out of female bodies. Instead, the myth made Zeus—the god— a sole parent and creator. The same idea is repeated in the story of Eve, fashioned from Adam’s rib by God to be Adam’s helpmate.
So Athena was born fully grown from Zeus’s head, wearing golden armor and carrying a spear. She immediately took her place at the right hand of her father, becoming the quintessential “father’s daughter,” or goddess of the patriarchy. Again, this is powerful metaphor: the daughter born of man is a warrior; she reflects the qualities admired by her father and by patriarchy.
Before patriarchy, however, from 5,000 BC to 25,000 BC, if not earlier, archaeological evidence indicates that most cultures of the world worshiped a Great Goddess or a Mother Goddess as the creator. This is only logical because they saw new life being birthed by the feminine. Rather than a God who said with his words, “Let there be light, let there be a firmament, let there be dry ground, let there be animals,” what these people were in awe of was the birth of new life, which always came through the female, or the Earth, which was also revered as female. This has been surmised from surviving carvings, figurines, and the collective unconscious—of all people.
So in old Europe there was first a goddess culture. Then came the Indo-Europeans, or the Kurgans, who worshipped a sky god, and who invaded from the region we now call Russia with weapons and horses. They were easily able to defeat an unwarlike indigenous people, in much the same way that history repeated itself when the western Europeans landed in the New World and defeated and enslaved the indigenous people here, who were also Mother Earth-worshipping and, for the most part, peaceful.
The Kurgans are believed to have entered Western Europe in three successive waves. In each wave, many of the newcomers settled and became acquainted with the peace-loving, art-creating goddess worship of their new neighbors. The way to adjust to this world was either to combine the two—gods and goddesses—or obliterate the conquered people’s religions. So, goddesses who once were the only or major divinities became the wives, daughters, and consorts of the Kurgans’ sky gods. Instead of the divine emanating from all of nature, power came from above, from the patriarchy or hierarchy that ruled from Mt. Olympus.
There are similarities and a major difference between Greek mythology and the history and mythology of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt to the promised land of milk and honey. The land was Canaan, which was already settled by peaceful, goddess-worshiping people. The Israelites– former slaves who had survived, toughened and united after wandering for decades in the desert–conquered the Canaanites, but instead of merging their god with the Canaanite goddess, the god of the Israelites had no consort and would tolerate no other gods or goddesses. Although the Israelite language had no word for goddess, condemnation of the worship of idols probably referred to images of a goddess. The prohibition against creating images of any living thing forbade making art inspired by nature or the beauty of the human form. In contrast, fertility goddesses and Mother goddesses are depicted as sexual; they have lovers and children. In religions where goddesses are worshiped, they are usually prayed to for fertility and other gifts from nature, rather than feared and obeyed like father gods.
Genesis is an amazing metaphor of the birth of fratricide. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. In time, the two sons offered the best fruits of their labor as gifts to Yahweh. Cain’s gift—a portion of his harvest, the “fruits of the soil”—was rejected by God, while Abel’s gift—“fat portions from some of the first-born of his flock”—pleased him. Out of anger and jealousy, Cain killed Abel, thus beginning the history of fratricidal wars we see played out to this day: Sunni vs Shiite, Jew vs. Arab, and so on.
When men are given power over everything—dominion—then everything becomes subject to the power of the male: the power to name, which is Biblical; to say what is good and what is bad; and to define the female as lesser-than; therefore what females do is lesser and inferior. That’s the way patriarchy works. Without a divine feminine who is equal to and can balance the divine masculine, the male psyche and the image of God become distorted as well. Without equality between the male and female; without respect for differences as complementary, two halves of a whole, the qualities of the denigrated half are negative; sissy rather than kind, brood mares rather than carriers of the miracle of life.
For a long time a lot of Christian theologians didn’t even think that women had souls; only men had them. Women could not be priests, only men could because only men were made in the image and likeness of God, and so on. It makes a huge difference whether there is a sacred feminine as far as women sensing and feeling their worth and being treated as worthy by their culture. When both the male and female are recognized as sacred, then people who resemble either one understand their intrinsic connection to the divine.
We’re not there yet.
The MOON: Do you think we’re moving in that direction?
Bolen: When I wrote Goddesses in Every Woman “goddess” was a charged word. I notice it’s not so much anymore, except among certain fundamentalists. The word has entered the culture and a lot has transpired to advance the recognition of the goddess in the second half of the 20th Century. On the historic and religious side, the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels revealed that Christianity had a different beginning than we’ve been taught—with more egalitarian congregations, including women priests, and women visionaries whose experiences were taken seriously and written down. Politically, however, this group lost to the patriarchy and the power structure of the Church of Rome—and we didn’t even know about them until the discovery of two ancient texts in 1945. We still might never have known about them if the women’s movement hadn’t come along and included women interested in archaeology and theology who were intrigued by scrolls that told of a place for women in the early Christian church. If the scrolls had been discovered a century earlier they probably would have been destroyed.
So there’s something going on now. There is a shift in the direction of empowering women and, with that, a recognition of the value of the feminine and her nurturing aspects. The women’s movement has made a huge difference in graduate and professional education of women. Theology is catching up with medicine, where over 50% of students are women. This is true for many law schools and liberal theology graduate schools, like Union Theological, where more than 50 percent of students are women. At many other theology schools, women constitute closer to 40 percent of students. Women are now represented across the board in places they weren’t even admitted at the beginning of the 1960s.
The MOON: When you’re describing the archaeological evidence that shows there were prehistoric cultures that were goddess-based and peaceful, are you referring to the work of Marija Gimbutas?
Bolen: Yes.
The MOON: Has her work been widely accepted, or not?
Bolen: Yes and no. Women who have brought forth new ideas have faced an uphill struggle. They have a history of being overlooked, put down, or sometimes totally co-opted. In the scientific field one of my heroines is Candace Pert, who was a major figure in immunology and who was part of a team that received the Albert Lasker Award, which is often a precursor to a Nobel Prize. Pert’s contribution to the groundbreaking research, however, was not mentioned in the award, which went to Dr. Solomon Snyder, the head of her lab. Although this type of treatment was commonplace in her field, Pert protested—drawing attention to an injustice that was accepted as part of the status quo. For motivation, she looked to Rosalind Franklyn, who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA and received no credit for it when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Francis Crick and James Watson in 1962. Not wanting to befall a fate similar to Franklin’s Pert decided she had to speak out.
There’s something about women’s contributions—and indeed, their different way of viewing the world—that might lead both to scientific breakthroughs, as well as a tendency by male scientists to overlook or dismiss them. One of the fascinating developments currently emerging is the whole neuroscience side of things: that the brain is literally a “use it or lose it” organ. We’re born with so many billions of neurons and we shed the ones we don’t use. One of the problems with patriarchy is that boys are encouraged by fear of humiliation to atrophy their right brains—the hemisphere of imagination and compassion and emotional intelligence. As a result, the dominant alpha male often has a one-sided left brain, literally larger than the right brain, and with it a failure to imagine what it might be like to be “an inferior.” Because of this, science has had to learn what seems obvious to many of us: that animals have feelings, for example; that when you do experiments on them they feel pain; they suffer. That was actually a breakthrough discovery for scientists; they literally did not imagine that was so. Similarly, scientists had to discover that they couldn’t operate on infants without anesthesia. As recently as my tenure in medical school, it was believed that infants’ nervous systems were so under-developed, they could be operated on without anesthesia and not feel pain.
The MOON: It seems rather important to establish that humans were once capable of peaceful coexistence—as Gimbutas attempted to do—because it means we’re capable of it again; whereas if you believe that “war is inevitable” because you think human beings are “naturally violent,” your belief system limits what is possible.
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