The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  As the date of this episode shows, the rise of the phallus did not mean the immediate overthrow of the Great Goddess. On the contrary it is fascinating to observe how the myths, stories and rituals of her worship were adapted over a considerable period of time to accommodate the accelerating rhythms of the male principal in its thrust towards full centrality. The devolution of power from Goddess to God, from Queen to King, from Mother to Father, took place in stages, which may be as plainly detected in world mythology as strata in rock. In the first phase, the Great Mother alone is or creates the world; she has casual lovers and many children, but she is primal and supreme. In the second, she is described or illustrated as having a consort, who may be her son, little brother or primeval toy-boy; originally very much her junior, he grows in power to become her spouse. At the third stage, the God-King-Spouse rules equally with the Goddess, and the stage is set for her dethronement; finally the Man-God kings it alone, with Goddess, mother and woman, defeated and dispossessed, trapped in a downward spiral which humankind has only recently begun to arrest, let alone reverse.14

  Mythologies are never static, and even to divide this development into phases is to suggest an organizational logic that historical processes rarely possess. Different developments occurred over different times in different places, and even when men had made themselves into kings and held gods and goddesses under their sway, they found it still advisable to honour the old customs and pay the Great Mother her due. ‘The Goddess Ishtar loved me – thus I became king,’ declared Sargon of Assyria in the eighth century B.C.15

  Other records of religious and political rituals in these early kingdoms abundantly testify to the fact that the king’s power, however great, was not absolute; a king of Celtic Ireland had to perform the banfheis rígí, or ‘marriage-mating’, with ‘the Great Queen’, the spirit of Ireland, before he could be accepted as king by the people. For the kings of Babylon, this duty was literal, not symbolic. Their power had to be renewed every year, and was only confirmed when the royal embodiment of the sacred phallus was seen to consummate his ‘divine marriage’ with the high priestess of the Great Mother in a public ceremony on a stage before all the populace.16

  The Great Goddess still had some power, then, and the evidence suggests that the ruling men neglected the due observances at their peril. On the wider horizon, however, an interlocking series of profound social changes combined to shake these early civilizations to their foundations, and the force of events conspired with the new aggressive phallic impetus to drive out the last remaining elements of the power of the Goddess and the accompanying ‘mother-right’. Broadly, these changes arose from the population growth that resulted from the first successful social organization. They derived from the most basic of imperatives, the need for food. Nigel Calder explains the nature of the development that helped to push women from the centre of life to its margins:

  From Southern Egypt 18,000 years ago comes the earliest evidence for cultivation of barley and wheat in riverside gardens . . . feminine laughter no doubt disturbed the water-birds when the women came with a bag of seed to invent crops. Perhaps it was a waste of good food and nothing to tell the men about – yet it took only moments to poke the seeds into the ready-made cracks in the mud . . . The women knew little of plant genetics, but the grain grew and ripened before the sun parched the ground entirely, and when they came back with stone sickles they must have felt a certain goddess-like pride.17

  This ‘goddess-like’ control of nature by women continued, Calder judges, for 10,000 to 15,000 years. But from about 8000 years ago, an upsurge in population enforced changes in the way that food was produced. By degrees agriculture, heavier and more intensive, replaced women’s horticulture. Where previously women had worked with nature in a kind of sympathetic magic as her natural ally, now men had to tame and dominate nature to make it deliver what they determined. The new methods involved in agriculture found an equally damaging symbolic echo in the male/female roles and relationships, as a Hindu text, The Institutes of Mana from around A.D. 100, makes plain: ‘The woman is considered in law as the field and the man as the grain.’ Where the Goddess had been the only source of life, now woman had neither seed nor egg; she was the passive field, only fertile if ploughed, while man, drunk with the power of his new-found phallocentricity, was plough, seed, grain-chute and ovipositor all in one.

  As planned husbandry and domestication of land replaced casual cultivation, the more the role of the male strengthened and centralized. Paradoxically, this was also true of those groups who failed to produce enough from the land to live on. For those tribes, any shortage or failure of crops brought enforced migration, which also necessarily involved warfare, as groups already established on fertile territory banded together to resist the invaders.18 Both in the group’s nomadic wanderings and in any fighting which resulted, men had the advantage, as they had superior muscle power and mobility, over women encumbered with children. All women’s earlier hard-won skills of cultivation became useless when the tribe was on the move. Meanwhile, men driven by the darker side of phallicism seized the upper hand through aggression and military organization. As these clashes of force inevitably produced dominant and submissive groups, winners and losers, determining rank, slavery and subjection, it was not possible for women to escape from this framework. Caught between the violence of ploughshare and sword, women had to lose.

  There could be only one outcome. However, wherever, and whenever it came in the millennia immediately before the birth of Christ, all the mythologies speak of the overthrow of the Great Mother Goddess. In the simplest version of the story, like that of the Semitic Babylonians, the god-king Marduk wages war on Ti’amat, the Mother of All Things, and hacks her to pieces. Only after her death can he form the world, from the pieces of her body, as it rightfully should be. This motif is astonishingly consistent through a number of widely separated cultures, as witness this Tiwi creation myth from central Africa:

  Puvi made the country the first time. The sea was all fresh water. She made the land, sea and islands . . . Puriti said, ‘Don’t kill our mother.’ But Iriti went ahead and killed her. He struck her on the head. Her urine made the sea salty and her spirit went into the sky . . .19

  In other versions of the story, the Great Goddess is defeated, but lives. Celtic folk myth relates how the Three Wise Ones (the Goddess in her triad form), Emu, Banbha and Fódla, meet the sons of Mil the war god in battle, but after many violent clashes are subdued and humbled to the power of the invader. Whatever form it takes, the fundamental power-shift from female to male is reflected in all mythologies. Among the Greeks, Apollo took over the Goddess’s most sacred oracle at Delphi; the Kikuyu of Africa still relate how their ancestors overthrew their women by ganging up in a scheme to rape all their women on the same day, so that nine months later they could overmaster the pregnant women with impunity; while for the Aztecs, Xochiquetzel the Earth Mother gave birth to a son Huitzilopochtli, who killed her daughter the Moon Goddess and took her place as the ruler of heaven, killing and scattering all her other children in his rage for domination.

  This pattern of defeat and partial survival finds a frequent expression in the motif employed here, the victory of the sun god over the moon, who is always female. In the Japanese version, the goddess Ama-terasu, the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon, is attacked by the god Susa-nu-wo, who destroys her rice fields and pollutes her sacred places with faeces and dead flesh. Although she fights him, he ‘steals her light’, and she only regains half her previous power, and so may only shine by night.20 Just as in the historical shift from horticulture to agriculture, this apparently natural development masked some profound and irreversible changes in the relations between men and women, even in the ways of thought:

  The divinity of the sun, lord of time and space, was essentially masculine – the phallic sunbeams striking down on Mother Earth – a maleness whose rays impregnate the earth and cause the seeds to germinate. From Spain to China, the prehi
storic sun stood for maleness, individual self-consciousness, intellect and the glaring light of knowledge, as against the moon ruler of the tide, the womb, the waters of the ocean, darkness and the dream-like unconscious . . . solarization, the victory of the male sun god over the female moon goddess . . . implied the collapse of the female-oriented cyclical fertility cults and the rise to supremacy of the male concept of linear history, consisting of unrepeatable events . . .21

  Nor was the overthrow of the female simply a mythological theme. Women of power in real life came under attack, as men sought to wrest from them their authority in a number of different ways. Where royalty passed through the female line, a bold adventurer could commandeer it by enforcing marriage on the queen, or seizing possession by rape – Tamyris the Scythian ruler fought off a ‘proposal’ of this sort from Cyrus the Great of Persia in the sixth century B.C. Others were not so lucky. When Berenice II of Egypt refused to marry her young nephew Ptolemy Alexander in 80 B.C., he had her murdered. The violence of this outrage is demonstrated by the fact that the loyal Alexandrians then rose up and killed him.22 But in general kings were more successful in retaining the powers they usurped. From this period of aggressive male encroachment on female prerogative comes the introduction of royal incest, when the king who was unwilling to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, would marry the rightful heir, her daughter. Alternatively, he would marry one of his sons to the new queen; this had the double benefit of keeping the monarchy under male control, and by degrees weaving sons into the fabric of inheritance until their right superseded that of any daughter.

  Under these circumstances, ruling women rapidly became pawns in male power-games, their importance only acknowledged by the lengths men went to to possess or control them. Galla Placida, daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great, was captured by the Visigoth Alaric at the sack of Rome, and after his death taken over by his brother. On the murder of the brother, she was handed back to the Romans, and forcibly married to their victorious general Constantius, who designated her Augusta, and as ‘Augustus’ ruled as her co-emperor. When Constantius died, her brother exiled her to Constantinople and took the throne, and only when her son became emperor in 425 A.D. did she achieve any peace or stability.

  There are countless historical examples from all countries of royal women, through whom inheritance or claim to the throne would pass, being exploited as pawns in the power game, and then disposed of. A classic story is that of Almasuntha, queen of the Ostrogoths: made regent on behalf of her son when her father King Theodoric died in A.D. 526, Almasuntha was forcibly married by the late king’s nephew when her son died, and then, as soon as the usurper had secured his power, put to death.

  Women of royal blood were not alone in experiencing men’s rage to dominate, to downgrade and destroy. With written records come the first in a series of orchestrated attacks on women’s nature, their rights in their children, even their right to full human existence. The sun-moon dualism now becomes extended into a cosmic system of polar opposition; whatever man is, woman is not, and with this imposition of the principle of sexual contrast comes the gradual definition of man as commanding all the human skills and abilities, woman as the half-formed, half-baked opposite. By the fourth century B.C., Aristotle’s summary of the sexual differences in human nature said no more than any man or woman of his age would have accepted as fact:

  Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She stays at home, as is her nature. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine. Man consequently plays a major part in reproduction; the woman is merely the passive incubator of his seed . . . the male semen cooks and shapes the menstrual blood into a new human being . . .23

  Once articulated, the denigrations of women flood forth unchecked as war-leaders, politicians and historians like Xenophon, Cato and Plutarch worry away at the ‘woman problem’:

  The gods created woman for the indoors functions, the man for all others. The gods put woman inside because she has less tolerance for cold, heat and war. For woman it is honest to remain indoors and dishonest to gad about. For the man, it is shameful to remain shut up at home and not occupy himself with affairs outside.24

  You must keep her on a tight rein . . . Women want total freedom, or rather total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be any easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .25

  I certainly do not give the name ‘love’ to the feeling one has for women and girls, any more than we would say flies are in love with milk, bees with honey, or breeders with the calves and fowl they fatten in the dark . . .26

  As Plutarch here reminds us, for the Greeks there was ‘only one genuine love, that which boys inspire’. The homosexuality of ancient Greece in fact institutionalized the supremacy of the phallus, denying women any social or emotional role other than childbearing. But to the emerging male, newly born into consciousness and thinking with his phallus, it seemed inescapable that such a creature should have as little part as possible in his children: and in the famous ‘Judgement of Apollo’ at the climax of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the sun god obligingly pronounced:

  The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child: but only nurse of the newly planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.

  In this simple, brutal diktat phallic thought reversed the primeval creation beliefs of thousands of years. Woman was no longer the vessel of nature, creating man. Now man created woman as a vessel for himself. As the sun overthrew the moon, the king beat down the queen, so the phallus usurped the uterus as the source and symbol of life and power.

  Under the new dispensation women’s rights went the way of their rites, and in cities and states from Peking to Peru women dwindled into little more than serfdom. They became property; and found that truly property was theft. The new social and mental systems robbed them of freedom, autonomy, control, even the most basic right of control over their own bodies. For now they belonged to men – or rather, to one man. At some unidentified but pivotal point of history, women became subjected to the tyranny of sexual monopoly – for once it was realized that one man only was necessary for impregnation, it was a short step to the idea of only one man.

  Yet the exclusive possession of a woman and the monopoly of her sexual service could always be waived when a greater need arose. In Eskimo tribes, for instance, wife-lending is endemic. For the Eskimo husband, this is ‘a wise investment for the future, because the lender knows he will eventually be a borrower’, when he needs a woman who ‘makes the igloo habitable, lays out dry stockings for him . . . and is ready to cook the game he brings back’. Nor was this all – the extent of the obligations of the borrowed wife can be judged from the special term by which Eskimo children refer to any man who does business with their father: ‘he-who-fucks-my-mother’.27

  As their property, women of these early societies were at the disposal of men; and when women were no longer the struggling tribe’s prime resource, nor the sacred source of life and hope for the future, nothing inhibited men’s use of force against them in the struggle for control. Among the ancient Chinese, the Greek writer Posidippus noted in the second century A.D., ‘even a poor man will bring up a son, but even a rich man will expose a daughter.’28 On the other side of the world, a chieftain of Tierra del Fuego told Darwin during the voyage of The Beagle that to survive in a famine they would kill and eat their old women, but never their dogs.29 From written records, epics and chronicles, and from anthropological and archaeological evidence, come countless examples of sexual hostility in action, frequently carried to extremes: women are traded, enslaved, ravished, sold in whoredom, slaughtered on the death of their lord or husband, and in every way abused at will.

  One poignant
story from an Anglo-Saxon settlement of pagan England puts some flesh on the bones of this stark generalization. Two female skeletons of the pre-Christian period were discovered lying together in one pit grave. The older woman, in her late twenties, had been buried naked and alive; the position of the skeleton after death showed that she had tried to raise herself as the earth was thrown on to her. The younger of the two, a girl about sixteen years old, had previously sustained injuries ‘typically the result of brutal rape, which was strongly resisted by the victim’, including a cavity in the bone behind her left knee where she had been prodded with a dagger to make her draw her legs up for the rapist. She had survived for about six months after the attack, and the fact that she was buried naked, bound hand and foot and possibly alive like her sister-inhabitant of the same grave suggests that her death was the result of her unchastity coming to light, most probably through pregnancy, as the archaeologists conclude: