In 1908,
everything was quite normal while an archeological team conducting their
excavations near Willendorf, a calm village in Austria. But, the
day-to-day activities took a wild turn when one of the workers on the
site turned up with a female figurine carved out of limestone and dated
back to thousands of years ago. The figurine, which later christened as
“the Venus of Willendorf”, had a legacy of around 24,000 years, probably
the oldest female figurine or mother goddess unearthed in the history.
Even though the mother goddess statue of the Venus of Willendorf is
still in the clouds, the figurine aroused quite a stir among
anthropologists and historians for its emphasis on body parts associated
with fertility and childbirth, a clear indication of a fertility fetish
among the people who made it. Even though
the megalithic population who believed to be the progenitors of the
Venus of Willendorf are far away from domesticating crops and wild
animals, being the first and most important cornerstones in the cultural
history of agriculture, there are traces indicate their awareness of
the mystic connection between the fertility of womanhood and the soil.
Those where the last leg of the hunter-gatherer era of the human race
and around 20,000 BC, wild grains were identified, collected and eaten
in various parts of the world. Around 11,000 BC, the first variety of
rice was domesticated somewhere in the Chinese plains, a milestone in
the cultural timeline as it prompted the hunter-gatherer tribes and
clans to locate and settle down in regions with fertile land and water,
and a consequential realignment of gender roles. By 7,000 BC
various varieties of rice, wheat, barley, lentils, sugarcane, bananas,
root vegetables, cattle, guinea pigs, and sheep were domesticated around
the world and the human race was at the epoch of a cultural revolution.
Among the hunter-gatherer tribes, women were the flag bearers of this
selective breeding process as men were busy with hunting and other
survival maneuvers. As keen seed gatherers, with the help of their
instinct and common sense, they handpicked the best seeds of all
varieties and laid the foundation of the cultural phenomenon called
agriculture, which has been feeding the human race ever since. The
agrarian expertise, along with their intimacy with nature and fertility
connections, placed women at the center of this epoch and they walked
straight into the cultural pantheon as fertility fetishes and cults like
mother goddesses.
The human
race, perplexed and threatened at the same time by the unknown natural
paraphernalia, had been trying to come to terms with their fears through
practices like moon and sun worship. From the fertile plains of the
Mediterranean to the Indus Valley, thriving civilizations like Minoan
civilization, which were assumed to be the matriarch in nature, started
to sprout. Trade links connecting the East and the West not just carried
the traders and their goods, but the cult of mother goddesses and
mythical tales of fertility fetish. Since the agricultural civilization
in ancient Egypt and Indus Valley were dependent on a river system and
natural phenomena, the mother goddess cult became deeply rooted, rich
with the symbolic worship of death, birth, primordial waters, the sun,
the night sky, moon and the earth. Stretching from Indus Valley, along
with the peaks of Anatolia to the islands of the Mediterranean and
Africa, civilizations developed like-minded mother goddess cults,
symbolism, origin stories and agrarian myths, which eventually gave rise
to agricultural rituals. Those rituals
were specifically designed to fight off evil spirits that brought famine
and drought, to improve crops and for the well-being of animals.
Slowly, the rites evolved into harvest festivals and even incorporated
with marriage and initiation rituals of civilizations. Most of these
rituals were cyclic in nature and the ultimate frame of reference was
the female body which embodied the cyclic nature of time with the
menstrual cycle. Among the primates, only humans have a menstrual cycle
perfectly entrained with the lunar cycle. In her book, “Blood, Bread and
Roses,” writer Judy Grahn goes one step further and vindicate how the
menstrual cycle laid the foundation of human culture. With the help
of myths, anthropological evidence, personal memories and observations,
historical accounts, and creation stories, Judy Grahn explores how
menstruation created the world and its major foundation stones like
agriculture, science and civilization. But, this matriarchal system in
which women enjoyed considerable authority and equality with men and
founded on the firm basis of kinship, slowly yielded to a class-based
patriarchal society and the consequent class and gender struggle. Within
a time span of 6000 to 7000 years, there was a transformation from
matriarchy to patriarchy, which took very different courses on different
continents. Factors like colonization, religious missionizing,
industrial revolution and mass migration contributed their part to this
transformation. With the rise of the concept of family, the position of
women in society underwent a drastic change from seed gathering and
preserving matriarchs and mother goddesses to mere subjects of a largely
masculine industrial society where major jobs and roles were determined
and held by men. Agriculture
too had been undergoing its fatalistic transition from a cultural
phenomenon to an industrial phenomenon driven by technology. With the
help of manipulating labor in the fields, including agriculture, the
human race started controlling and dominating nature. The historical
timeline entered another epoch of forgotten mother goddesses and stolen
seeds. While the matriarch and the mother goddesses of her tribe yielded
to the forces of history, the seeds they identified, collected,
domesticated, and preserved metamorphosed as invaluable artifacts in the
corporatized agriculture sector of the 21st century. With a few
multinational corporations are taking control of the supply of major
seeds and decide the variety of seeds the farmers want to plant, the
forgotten mother goddesses and stolen seeds are on the brink of becoming
museum pieces reminding us of our long lost agrarian legacy. References:
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