The Great
Mother. The Goddess whose body is the
Earth itself, and even the entire cosmos with its countless stars.
She of Whom we -- humanity -- are but a small part, and through Whom
we are continually reborn.
The Great Mother does bring forth all life, as all female beings do. But she is a power Creative as well as Procreative, and fully controls all of Her aspects. Women server Her by aspiring to live by Her many ideas (aspects), and men must respect Her power if they are to love Her. She is central to women's spirituality and to witchcraft and paganism in general. It is incorrect, as "pop" anthropology would have us believe, to see Her as merely a fertility goddess, for to do so is to say that a woman is merely a womb. No, She herself decided when to bring forth life and when to create and make love without doing so, and women of old followed Her example.
Yet this Goddess-power, women's control of reproduction, is under attack by those who tell us precisely that a woman is merely a womb, and has been attacked for over 3500 years. Today on this continent, ever since abortion was legalized 25 years ago, it has come under a many-sided attack by a rich white man's coalition: politically and economically the state has narrowed it from a woman's right on demand to a financial privilege, and complements this with a sterilization campaign of genocidal proportions against women of color (45% of Native American women and 35% of Puerto Rican women have been sterilized, often without their prior knowledge); culturally and religiously a Christian Coalition led by the Catholic Church on one hand and the "Moral Majority" on the other have used every weapon in their well-financed arsenal to miseducate and browbeat fear and guilt into us about sex; and now the abortion facilities that exist are under paramilitary attack by the "Army of God" and lauded by other paramilitary fascists including the Klan, Nazis and Posse Comitatus. On all fronts the storm troops of patriarchal property attack -- yet as Pagans we know this is not new to their ways.
POPE INNOCENT'S "FINAL SOLUTION"
Just over 500 years ago, Christianity stepped up
its already vicious inquisition and genocide into what it hoped would
prove a "final solution" to the "problems" of women's power, sexual
freedom and pagan-led resistance to their rule. Pope "Innocent"
VIII's Bull of 1484 accused witches as heretics, among other things,
that "by their incantations, spells, conjurations and other accursed
charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have slain infants
yet in the mother's womb... They hinder men from performing the
sexual act and women from conceiving." This is nothing less than the
Church's way of stating that we provided herbal and other forms of
contraception and abortion.
Other Christian sources of the time admitted that "one third of mankind is devoted" to the Goddess even at this late date, indicating a massive Pagan culture, a counterpole to feudal/Christian authority among the people. And anthropologists have established that in 16th century Europe over half of all women were unmarried -- in some areas as high as 90%! Thus it was not religious intolerance nor superstition that propelled the persecution of witches (although Christianity is not lacking in either), but instead the need of the propertied classes to destroy our leadership around which the peasantry often rallied in rebellion (that is, class war), and of their churches to destroy women's control of reproduction, and to repress sexuality in general. While leaving it to Ricardo and Marx to work out the details, the Christian churches had a very good grasp of the labor theory of value, and embarked on a brutal campaign to force women into patriarchal marriage, and to have child after child after child -- 15 to 20 barring early death. Thus it was in the 17th century that the population of Europe began to explode. And in repressing sexuality they were robbing the people of our personal power and self confidence, replacing them with guilt and "sin". In this polluted atmosphere of mass psychic illness their kind of spiritual-political authoritarian regime could thrive.
THE COMING OF THE PATRIARCHS
This orientation against
women's power and reproductive control has much more ancient roots,
going into the Jewish origins of Christianity, with fully conscious
insistence upon monogamous marriage in the service of patriarchal
property accumulation. This is why the Jewish patriarchs attacked
with such hatred the priesthoods of Baal and of the "Red Whore of
Babylon," Ashtoreth (Ishtar) -- under the sexual freedom of the
Semitic Goddess, no one could tell who a child's father was! In
addition to contraception/abortion, gay-, lesbian- and bi-sexuality,
transvestite priesthoods and all the other "abominations" of the
ancient, natural ways of humanity. Christianity showed its true
colors at its outset -- with the birth of its "Son of God" not in
sexual pleasure but in "immaculate conception". Virgin birth ala
Christianity is not an example of women's power but of disempowering
anti-sexuality. We know from the Charge of the Goddess that "all acts
of love and pleasure" are rituals to the Great Mother, especially
lovemaking. The Patriarchs knew this too, and carefully told their
tale so as not to "soil" their messiah's origins with any pleasure on
Mary's part, but only the "greatly multiplied" pain. Thus we gained a
"savior" who said, "Go out into the highways and along the hedgerows
and force them to come in. I want my house to be full," and "Don't
think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I've come, not to
bring peace but a sword," and, tellingly, "I have come to destroy the
works of the female (Isis)." No, the witchhunts were not at all an
aberration, but very much in the spirit of patriarchal
monotheism.
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES...
Today's world is the result of these battles, especially the present relations between women and men -- institutional, individual and cultural. The struggles for women's reproductive control, lesbian and gay liberation, for safe and accessible contraception, for legal and convenient divorce (and against what effectively is compulsory marriage in the first place), for equal pay for equal work, for affordable childcare, for the decriminalization of extramarital and premarital sex, and the destigmatization of all the above -- these are not new struggles, but go back to our desire to return to our ancient ways. Women -- and men who were loyal to the natural ways of humanity -- fought the imposition of patriarchal imperialism every inch of the way. And we still fight. Even if our most ancient leaderships have been mostly suppressed, rediscoveries are taking place and new leaderships are arising to organize this resistance, which is in the same spirit of life as that of the witches and other pagan priesthoods, even if they are not conscious of this role in its full implications, or yet embody the contradictions of the society they were raised in. The common strands in all these struggles are the life-affirmative orientation we share toward love, sexuality, culture and toward those who bear the children of the next generation, and the life-denying oppression we share at the hands of the Patriarchal Empire, sexist, homophobic and indeed anti-sex -- and through racism and colonialism imposing these on the people of the entire planet, those native to each continent, exploiting them ever more brutally in the process.
WE MUST FIGHT!
So, when we hear that yet another assault is being
launched against women's reproductive rights, we must take the
lessons of our own history: We
must defend ourselves by whatever means necessary! The Great
Mother has many aspects. As was said of Ashtoreth, "She was the
analog of the human matriarch, free in hezr love, the fruitful mother
of the clan, and its leader in peace and war" -- and it has been war
for millennia. Whether it takes ritual workings, political actions,
or armed sisters (and brothers) guarding endangered clinics, we must
fight patriarchal imperialism as the ones who've gone before us did,
for our love and our lives depend in it. To turn back their assault,
to win through to a clear victory here against the Christian
Coalition, the Imperial regime and their rich backers, would have
tremendous repercussions throughout the entire planet -- for women,
for sexual liberation, for all humanity -- and for the Great
Mother.
So Mote It Be!
- Nimué