The Faces of the Goddess

By Lotte Motz

Book Overview

The belief that the earliest humans worshipped a sovereign, nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a popular one. It has been taken up as fact by the media, who routinely depict modern goddess-worshippers as "reviving" the ancient religions of our ancestors. Feminist scholars contend that, in the primordial religions, the Great Mother was honored as the primary, creative force, giving birth to the world, granting fertility to both crops and humans, and ruling supreme over her family pantheon. The peaceful, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her were eventually wiped out or subjugated by nomadic, patriarchal warrior tribes such as the early Hebrews, who brought their male God to overthrow the Great Mother: the first step in the creation and perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant oppression and degradation of women.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz sets out to test this hypothesis by examining the real female deities of early human cultures. She finds no trace of the Great Mother in their myths or in their worship. From the Eskimos of the arctic wasteland, whose harsh life even today most closely mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the rich cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz looks at a wide range of goddesses who are called Mother, or who give birth in their myths. She finds that these goddesses have varying origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and other divinities, rather than stemming from a common Mother Goddess archetype. For instance, Sedna, the powerful goddess whose chopped-off fingers became the seals and fish that were the Eskimos' chief source of food, had nothing to do with human fertility. Indeed, human motherhood was held in such low esteem that Eskimo women were forced to give birth completely alone, with no human companionship and no helpful deities of childbirth. Likewise, while various Mexican goddesses ruled over healing, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them either embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the crops: for that the Mexicans looked to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor were the rituals of these goddesses nurturing or peaceful. The goddess Cihuacoatl, who nurtured the creator god Quetzalcoatl and helped him create humanity, was worshipped with human sacrifices who were pushed into a fire, removed while still alive, and their hearts were cut out. And Motz closely examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the "Magna Mater" most often cited as an example of a powerful mother goddess. Hers were the last of the great pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall before Christianity. But Cybele herself never gives birth, nor does she concern herself with aiding women in childbirth or childrearing. She is not herself a mother, and the male character figuring most prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste companion. Tellingly, Cybele's priests dedicate themselves to her by castrating themselves, thus mimicking Attis's death--a very odd way to venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict these earlier goddesses as peaceful and nurturing mothers, as is often done, is to deny them their own complex and sophisticated nature as beings who were often violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who reveled in their eroticism and were worshipped as harlots. The idea of a nurturing Mother Goddess is very powerful. In this challenging book, however, Motz shows that She is a product of our own age, not of earlier ones. By discarding this simplistic and worn-out paradigm, we can open the door to a new way of thinking about feminine spirituality and religious experience.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195089677
• ISBN13: 9780195089677
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

One Great Goddess ?

This book presents a careful dissection of the supposed evidence of a One Great Goddess cult. The author clearly shows the fallicy in using fragments (often times literally) to support a prehistoric and early historic religious belief in a peaceful mother goddess who was overthrown by masculine, war-like deities. Not a perfect book, but it does the job.

Learned and rich.

Motz draws upon many years of study in mythology and folklore to examine how female dieties are represented in various traditional cultures (Baltic, Germanic, Siberian, Near Eastern, Ancient Mexican, Japanese). The result is a complex view of goddesses as both creative and destructive, dominant and subservient. The first three chapters are given over to a critical review of the purported ancient European "Goddess Religion" that was supposedly swept aside by violent, patriarchical, storm-god worshipping nomads. Motz shows that the evidence for such a belief system is shaky and subject to differing interpretation. Not always an easy read due to a rather academic writing style, "Faces of the Goddess" is very rewarding.

The writing can be tough, but the book is rich and learned.

The decades of Motz's academic work in myth and folklore are on powerful display. In the first three chapters she critically undermines the whole notion of the ancient European "Goddess Religion" and points out how this modern construct is a response to current social concerns. The bulk of the work is given over to an examination of the role of female deities in various pre-modern cultures (Mexico, Siberia, Near East). The result is a richer and more complex understanding of the role of both goddesses and women in these societies. The academic writing style is better than that of many social scientists, and the included illustrations are appreciated. Strongly recommended for those interested in myth, folklore, or the social impact of theology.