Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  There were also warrior queens in the more northern lands who lived after the Amazons but before the Vikings. For instance, in the Celtic territories of the Bronze Age, which included ancient France, Germany, Briton, and Ireland, a Roman writer of the First Century BCE named Diodorus Siculus said that these women, in addition to their high social status, were not only equal to their husbands in physical stature but in strength as well! In Scotland there was a matrilineal group possibly having migrated from Old Europe named the Picts by Roman soldiers who encountered them. This name Pictus (painted) originated from their practice of placing astonishing tattoos over every part of their bodies and remaining without clothing much of the time. Here, the women are known to lead their communities and fight alongside their male counterparts with fierce skill and fearlessness.

  One of the most famous of these warrior queens lived in the First Century current era in ancient Briton. She was one of the most imposingly larger-than-life women seen in virtually any age. Her name was Queen Boudicca (sometimes spelled Boadica), described as huge of frame, terrifying of aspect, with a mass of bright red hair falling to her knees. She wore a great twisted torc (necklace), a tunic of many colors over which was a thick mantle (cloak), fastened by a broach. She led her army to resist the Roman legions and succeeded for years in holding off these troops, even burning the original town of London to the ground during the fighting. Roman historian Tacitus d. 120 CE, said, “She is called Boadica, warrior Queen of the Iceni, who led her tribe against the Roman invaders of Britan in 60 CE. The Romans dared to scourge (whip) the Queen and rape her two daughters, then plunder the country. Queen Boadica revenged herself, her daughters and her people by slaughtering the entire Roman legion.”35

  Off the coast of Wales on an island named Mona, which was a sanctuary for refugees from Roman occupation, there was also an important Druid religious center. In the wake of the Queen’s victory, the Roman governor decided to destroy the center and the people there. Tacitus describes in the Annuls what happened: “The enemy lined the shore in a dense armed mass. Among them were black-robed women with disheveled hair like the Furies brandishing torches. (Whenever a mother is insulted or murdered the Furies appear.) Close by stood the Druids, raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses.”35 The Queen, with her daughters in front of her, drove her chariot among the tribes and led the people into battle. When they were finally defeated, she poisoned herself rather than be captured. She is said to be buried under the site where Westminster Abbey in London now stands. The Romans slaughtered the tribes, garrisoned the islands and cut down the sacred grove of trees where the altars were red with sacrificial blood.

  THE GODDESS MANIFEST

  Universal Moon Goddess

  Everywhere in the ancient world, the Moon Goddess was revered. She was the recorder of time. Women whose menstrual cycle followed Her pattern were the first time keepers. The oceans ebbed and flowed according to the pull She as Moon exerted on Earth, and ocean salt water smelled like women’s cyclical bleeding, with a similar composition. The earliest Moon Mother representations were fashioned from a pillar, a stone or cone. Sometimes the stones were from meteors, considered sacred as coming from the sky and were anointed by women using ritual oils, blood, or fermented fruit or grain, which had become alcoholic beverages poured over them.

  “The great Semitic Moon Goddess Astarte was worshipped on Mount Sinai by the Canaanites (present day Lebanon) in the form of a stone pillar, long before Moses received stone tablets of Hebrew law there.”36 Mount Sinai actually means Mountain of the Moon. For future reference, the later Hebrew Levite priests were originally named serpent priests (who served the Goddess as in “Levi” - great serpent, as in Leviathan, a sea serpent).

  Moon Mothers everywhere represent the female trilogy: waxing, full and waning moon phases. Moon Mother is always related to phases of transformation – life, death, regeneration; and, the orderer of time.… the moonths, the seasons, the year. Because of that quality of ordering, She is also the law-giver, the judge of the dead, the eternal source of wisdom. She is Isthar of Babylon long before 3000 BCE. She is Hindu Moon Mother, Kali, sitting in her lotus position breathing life and death. She is the Irish Cailleach (pronounced Kali) who sits in lotus position and does the same as Her Indian sister.

  In Her form as the Great Whale-Dragon (Babylonian Tiamat, Hebrew Leviathan) Ishtar brought fourth the great flood, and that legend was carried forward into the Old Testament. Later, in the legends created by Her enemies, She was put to death as a dragon, a sea monster or a great serpent.

  In pre-Islamic Arabia, She is the three-fold Goddess, Magna Dea and enshrined in the sacred Black Stone, the Kaaba at Mecca. It is imprinted with Her vulva/yoni sign and covered with the black skirt of Kaaba, so no one now sees Her sacred sign. The male priests who serve Her today are called “Beni Shaybah” which means “sons of the Old Woman,” i.e. the Moon. Unaware of the ancient significance, the people on pilgrimage circle the stone seven times, the magic number of the Moon, because ancient peoples always danced the “way” in spiraling approach to Her stone pillars to increase spiritual energy.

  Moon Temples, shrines and sanctuaries appeared in various locations on mountaintops, in forest groves, in caves and at springs. Moon priestesses watched over lakes, springs, all water supplies for the protection of the people. In Roman times these priestesses were called Vestal Virgins, virgin meaning not belonging to a man, one in herself. The modern word for these Moon Priestesses is derived from the Latin meaning “strength, force, skill,” i.e. virile. Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, and later Diana, were called Virgin which refers to their independence, not to their sexual abstinence.

  Water and the Moon have always been associated with one another, and water coming from out of the earth was believed sacred, healing. Fire was the Moon’s light when the Moon herself was dark, so fire was sacred and light was sacred.

  Originally, the means of counting the passage of time was via the Moon and Her path; therefore, people devised the Lunar Calendar, which in turn set the auspicious times for planting, for the rites of fertility and the seasonal ceremonies around the changes. Marks on bones have been found that are believed to be signs of humans counting Moon phases dating from 25,000 years ago in the Paleolithic. Today Arabs, the Islamic world, and the Chinese still officially use the Lunar Calendar. The festivals long associated with the observance of the calendar are Equinox: The day the sun crosses the equator; day and night are equal length everywhere. Vernal equinox: In the northern hemisphere, about March 21, the first day of spring. Autumnal equinox: In the northern hemisphere, about Sept. 22, the first day of autumn. Solstice: The day the sun is farthest from the equator. Summer solstice: In the northern hemisphere, June 21, the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. Winter Solstice: In the northern hemisphere, Dec. 21, the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year (New York Public Library Desk Reference).

  Each of these special lunar events was celebrated throughout the Goddess cultures and survived nearly completely intact as seen in the peasant folk practices of medieval continental Europe. Today, renewed interest keeps the ceremonies alive.

  Moon Rites and Rituals

  “Women were everywhere (in ancient times) the original mantics – the shamans, the ecstatic oracular prophets, the visionary poets. Mantism is the natural art of prophesying, divining, receiving psychic-biological energy from the (spirit world) Earth and from the Moon.” “All pagan orientation was a biomystical discipline designed to help the individual and the group channel and direct the real power of the universe radiating into and from all of us. Women were the first bearers of this technique … women are tied to the moon by both a mental and a blood cord.”37

  The dark side of the Moon is real. Ancient peoples fasted and prayed for the light to return and for protection in the vast darkness of earth at those times repeated each month. The fear of the darkness, its relation to both physical and spiritual death, the negative aspect inherent in al
l life, in everything growing and beautiful now, the excesses of orgiastic rites, of soma, of the poppy, of the sacred mushroom-all were and are real. And, Goddess ancestors had a sense of absolute realism far surpassing ours – their very lives depended on it.

  The ancient Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, where women were free to choose their lovers and engage in sexual union with as many men as they wished. When this was celebrated in Her Temples, the women were acting as Goddess surrogates, joining the men to Her through the use of their own human bodies engaged in sacred sexuality, ensuring that all men knew their Goddess personally through Her earthly representatives. This served to bring men into contact with Goddess energy, with spirituality, and through both psychic and physical unity, recharging the energy of the living Goddess. For women, it was a pathway directly to the Goddess, to becoming Goddess-like herself and to be a Moon Woman Priestess, even if her entire life had not been so dedicated in perpetuity. The Moon is the Goddess in triplicate. She appears, appears to die and is reborn again every month of every year, coming out of the ancient past and going forward into eternity itself.

  A famous Priestess of the Moon, En Hedu’ anna (c. 2354 BCE) was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad who founded the first Sargonian Dynasty in Babylon. Only through this high priestess, moon goddess of the city, could a leader claim a legitimate right to rule. Although there are none of her major writings that have come down to us, hers is the first name recorded in technical history. There are, however, forty-eight of her poems in translation. She was proficient in astronomy and mathematics, which follow an ancient pathway from Sumerian Babylon to the present. (As early as 3000 BCE the priestesses and priests in the temples directed every essential activity of life and established a network of observatories to monitor the movement of the stars. The calendar they created is still used to date certain events, such as the Christian Easter and Jewish Passover.) After the death of her father, the new ruler deposed her. She wrote of this injustice:

  Me who once sat triumphant, he has driven out of the sanctuary.

  Like a swallow he made me fly from the window, My life is consumed.

  He stripped me of the crown appropriate for the high priesthood.

  He gave me dagger and sword –‘it becomes you,’ he said to me.

  (She appeals to Goddess Inanna to help her)

  It was your service that I first entered the holy temple,

  I, Enhedyuanna, the highest priestess. I carried the ritual basket,

  I chanted your praise.

  Now I have been cast out to the place of lepers.

  Day comes and the brightness is hidden around me.

  Shadows cover the light, drape it in sandstorms.

  My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.

  Even my sex is dust.

  Apparently, she has been sent to some desert doom: The new ruler hoping she will kill herself. She is gone, but her words are with us still.38

  The Moon and The Blood

  Primevally, the female human noticed that her menses, menstrual periods, coincided with the cyclical waxing and waning of the Moon, a mightier presence in ancient times than the credit we give it today. When women lived in small, closely knit communities, probably all related to one another, it is believed that women’s menses coincided, guided by the ebb and flow of the pull of gravity exerted by the Moon. Therefore, the occurrence of a natural bonding took place between the Moon Goddess and the human mother, connecting them through the idea of blood – first as sacred and then as sacrificial. Menstrual blood, the miracle of women being able to bleed profusely each month and not die from the loss, was seen as mystical, magical, and very powerful.

  It certainly did not go unnoticed that if a man were to bleed that often and that much, he would be vastly weakened and perhaps even die. (Many centuries later, men who controlled the practice of medicine thought that regular bleeding was helpful, perhaps mistakenly based on women’s natural bleeding. These men prescribed leeches to suck blood from patients who were ill. Unfortunately, this practice had the opposite effect and has mercifully been discontinued.)

  It was also believed that the Great Mother as Earth needed strengthening and renewal through blood, so the blood of creatures needed to be recycled back to Her. The Earth gave grain, healing spiritual plants, and all the animals for harvest; therefore, something of equal value needed to be returned to nourish Her as She nourished humans. Blood sacrifices and sexual rites of regeneration were intermingled with other practices such as mourning the dead (who were covered with powered ochre symbolizing mother’s blood of rebirth), ploughing the fields, harvesting the crops, and granting elevation to shepherdship for males who were then honored to sit in the lap of the Goddess. Blood, sex, spirit, regeneration – all are linked together through woman, birth, men sexual union, ritual and ceremony.

  Later generations would be taught that the Dark of the Moon was the awesome underworld, the place of death of spirit, a place to be feared, as people feared the Death aspect of the Goddess. This fear was embellished by Her enemies.

  The Sacred Serpent

  The sacred Serpent aspect of the Moon Goddess is the snake that sheds its skin and is reborn. In this feat, the serpent is unique. This uniqueness is a parable which teaches Goddess people that such transformation is possible, and is one of the reasons the serpent is sacred to the Goddess. Transformation from illness to health by shedding the “skin” of disease is most likely why the snake is chosen by the Goddess to represent the healing helper. Today the insignia of the double entwined snakes around the staff (the tree of life) is still the sign for medicine and the healing profession. So the message of the ancient Goddess is with us today, as She had always been, ready to heal us and transform the negative into positive.

  This triplicate Moon Mother is the opposite; therefore, there can be no alienation, nothing other than psychic wholeness through Her. She is the great Cauldron, the melting pot, the Chalice. In this exact aspect, She is portrayed as the Suit of Cups in the Tarot card deck.39

  Sacred Plants

  Throughout this study of ancient peoples, indications have arisen pointing toward widespread use of natural plant substances which are utilized to produce altered states of consciousness in sacred ritual settings and ceremonies of healing.

  So, too, the idea of the magical tree in India which grew “soma” fruit from which wine was made, having a narcotic effect.

  “The yellow (women’s color in Crete) soma fruit was plucked by moonlight, bathed in water and milk, becoming thereby identified with the yellow, swelling and water-cleansed moon. This ceremony was intended to (assist women to) become like the Moon-Goddess, to transcend death and become immortal with the power to envision and create what had not been manifest before.”40

  Soma is a drink, but it also means mind (mens: mind/moon). “Spiraling the body-psyche through sexual rite, ecstatic dance, and the drinking of soma, one reaches the center of all.” However, there is a caution: “What is true of natural power – fire, wind, water, lightening – is also true of spiritual power. Great energy is also great danger.”41

  The Goddess ceremonies, rituals, celebrations were engaged to balance and enhance the natural and creative energy:

  And this is the importance of ancient symbols, myths and techniques, of all rites of initiation and occult doctrines. They can help one get through the danger center of the spiral and emerge transformed on the other side. They can help transform personal psychosis at the extreme negative point that the dark of the Moon turns and shifts into its opposite pole of ecstasy and illumination. It is at this point that the Moon Journey can lead either into madness or a luminous experience of immortality.42

  The “Moon Tree,” as with all symbols of the Goddess, is double-sided: double ax (Crete and Anatolia), double spiral, right and left spinning energy going all the way back to the Neolithic pottery and paintings.

  In Minoan ceremonies on Crete, the Priestesses wore opium poppy pods on their headdresses, a vivid in
dication of how important the plant had become. Opium poppy juice had been utilized for thousands of years to heal, to reduce human pain and suffering, and to produce visions. Traces of this poppy, which had its homeland in the Eurasian steppelands and is currently the primary cash crop in Afghanistan, from which it may have originated, were found in the excavations of Neolithic villages in Old Europe.

  All the Goddess cultures evidence a great love of music and dance. Dancing is shown in the most ancient cave art drawings, on pottery and in Temples until more recent times. Music, ceremony, dancing and sacred plants in Goddess worship have a long tradition in both the religion and everyday life.

  THE GODDESS IN HER OWN LANDS

  She was understood as the Divine Ancestress, the Mother Earth, the Great Goddess, and belief in Her spiritual powers was nearly universal in the known world of the West from 25000 BCE through Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Greece, Egypt and Rome until the first centuries of the current era, after the fall of the Roman Empire. This is a period of at least 25,000 years of human belief in the Goddess as supreme deity across cultures, climates and languages.

  Most Goddess creation stories do not initially include a male companion. In the earliest days of human memory, She reigned alone: giving birth, presiding over a sustainable food supply produced by Her people, keeping accounts, healing the sick, prophesying the future, and meting out justice. She is mother, healer, lawgiver, priestess, as well as store keeper, potter, weaver and tradeswoman.

  Exactly when a shift took place in the concept of Goddess as self-producing is not yet known. But eventually in the late Neolithic, She is portrayed as having a brother by Her side or a son on Her lap, or holding his hand. Later, but still very early and before the Transition Times, this son evolved into a Son/Lover/Consort to the Goddess: