The Masks of God – Primitive Mythologies
by Joseph Campbell.
The fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself.
page 3
We find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution – appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same.
…
No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies, interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers, presented in art, magnified in song, and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but – more tragically – a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants.
…
page 10
The discovery appeared to indicate that the most productive, as well as philosophically mature, constellation of peoples in the history of civilization had been associated with this prodigious ethnic diffusion; for it seemed that even in the Orient, the homeland of many darker races, it had been the lighter-skinned Indo-Aryans who had given the chief impulse to the paramount cultural trend – namely that represented in its earliest recorded phase by the Sanskrıt Vedas and the Vedic pantheon (so close in form and spirit to the Homeric hymns and Olympic pantheon of the Greeks that the Alexandrians had had no difficulty in recognizing analogies), and in its later, more highly developed phase, by the gospel of Gautama Buddha, whose princely mind, inspired by what many scholars throughout Europe took to be a characteristically Aryan type of spirituality, had touched with magic the whole of the Orient, lifting temples and pagodas not to any God but to Buddhahood: that is to say, the purified, perfected, fully flowered, and fully illuminated consciousness of man himself.
…
page 38
And it was a Dutch anatomist, Ludwig Bolk, who, in 1926, in a work entitled The Problem of Human Incarnation, gave a scientific foundation to this idea by showing that mutations inhibiting maturation actually occur in animals, and suggesting that the evolution of man must have been effected by a series of such modifications. According to Bolk’s view, man has been arrested at a stage of growth represented by a late phase in the development of the embryo of a chimpanzee.
…
page 40
In a highly suggestive paragraph, the animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz presents an excellent statement of our indebtedness to this capacity of ours for play, reminding us that:
Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine outcome of curiosity, a kind of game All the data of natural science, which are responsible for Man’s domination of the world, originated in activities that were indulged in exclusively for the sake of amusement. When Benjamin Franklın drew sparks from the tail of his kite he was thinking as little of the lightning conductor as Hertz, when he investigated electrical waves, was thinking of radio transmission. Anyone who has experienced in his own person how easily the inquisitiveness of a child at play can grow into the life work of a naturalist will never doubt the fundamental similarity of games and study. The inquisitive child disappears entirely from the wholly anımal nature of the mature chimpanzee. But the child is far from being buried in the man, as Nietzsche thinks. On the contrary, it rules him absolutely.
…
page 43
Obviously the human female, with her talent for play, recognized many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign stimulus cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have been found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And from there to an appreciation of the force of ritualization, hieratic art, masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature, is but a step – or a natural series of steps.
…
page 59 – 60
And we have the voluminous literature of the Freudian school to assure us that the covert as well as obvious analogies, puns, and inflections by which sex, the sex organs, and the sexual act are implicated in our thoughts are known to every tradition in the world, whether oral or literate. In mythology, of course, the image of birth from the womb is an extremely common figure for the origin of the universe, and the sexual intercourse that must have preceded it is represented in ritual action as well as in story. Furthermore, the mysterious (one might even say, magical) functioning of the female body in its menstrual cycle, in the ceasing of the cycle during the period of gestation, and in the agony of birth-and the appearance, then, of the new being, these, certainly, have made profound imprints on the mind. The fear of menstrual blood and isolation of women during their periods, the rites of birth, and all the lore of magic associated with human fecundity make it evident that we are here in the field of one of the major centers of interest of the human imagination. In the earliest ritual art the naked female form is extremely prominent, whereas the male is usually ornamented, or masked, as shaman or hunter in the performance of some act.
The fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself. And there may be found in the mythologies and ritual traditions of our entire species innumerable instances of the unrelenting efforts of the male to relate himself effectively – in the way, so to say, of antagonistic cooperation – to these two alien yet intimately constraining forces, woman and the world.
…
page 68
Hence, when the mother image begins to assume definition in the gradual dawn of the infantile consciousness, it is already associated not only with a sense of beatitude, but also with fantasies of danger, separation, and terrible destruction.
We all know the fairy tale of the witch who lives in a candy house that would be nice to eat. Indeed, we have seen already what a scare she gave to a child who conjured her up in play. She is kınd to children and invites them into her tasty house only because she wants to eat them. She is a cannibal. (And for some six hundred thousand years of human experience cannibals, it should be born in mind-and even cannibal mothers-were grim and gruesome, ever-present realities ) Cannibal ogresses appear in the folklore of peoples, high and low, throughout the world; and on the mythological level the archetype is even magnified into a universal symbol in such cannibal-mother goddesses as the Hındu Kālī, the “Black One,” who is a personification of “all-consuming Time”; or in the medieval European figure of the consumer of the wicked dead, the female mouth and belly of Hel.
…
page 71 – 72
A third system of imprints that can be assumed to be universal in the development of the mentality of the infant is that deriving from its fascination with its own excrement, which becomes emphatic at the age of about two and a half. In many societies the infant experiences the first impact of severe discipline in the matter of when, where, and how it may permit itself to respond to nature, the worst of it being that for the child, at this period of its life defecation is experienced as a creative act and its own excrement as a thing of value, suitable for presentation as a gift. In societies in which this pattern of interest and action is regarded as unattractive, a socially determined reorganization of response is imposed sharply and absolutely, the spontaneous interest and evaluations of the earlier period of the child’s thought being then strictly repressed. But they cannot be erased. They remain as subordinated, written-over imprints forbidden images, apt on occasion, or under one disguise or another, to reassert their force.
Throughout the higher mythologies there is abundant evidence of dualistic systems of imagery deriving from this circumstance. They are to be recognized in the prevalence of an association of filth with sin and cleanliness with virtue. Hell is a foul pit and heaven a place of absolute purity, whether in the Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Moslem, or Christian organization of the afterworld.
Furthermore, there has been a suggestion from Dr Freud to the effect that the infantile urge to manipulate filth an assign it value survives in our adult interest in the arts — painting smearing of all kinds, sculpture, and architecture-as well as in the urge to collect precious stones, gold, or money, and in the pleasures derived from the giving and receiving of gifts. The aim of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemists to sublimate “base matter” (filth and corruption) into gold (which is pure and therefore incorruptible) would represent perfectly, according to this view, an urge to carry the energies locked in the first system of interests into the sphere of the superimposed second, so that, instead of suppression and therewith division, there should be effected a sublimation, or vital fusion, of the two socially opposed systems of the psyche, or, to use the phrase of the poet Blake, a Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
…
page 73
A fourth constellation of imprints engraved on the maturing psyche of the infant appears (at least in those provinces of our own civilization that have been studied for these effects) at about the age of four, when the physical difference between the sexes becomes a matter of keen concern. The petite difference leads the girl to believe (we are told) that she has been castrated, and the boy that he is liable to be. Thereafter, in the masculine imagination all fear of punishment is freighted with an obscurely sensed castration fear, while the female is obsessed with an envy that cannot be quite quenched until she has brought forth from her own body a son. Hence the value, from the female point of view, of the Madonna image and the whole system of religious references imputing cosmic significance to her womb and breasts.
But in the male the sense of her dangerous envy is ever present. Hence the negative estimate of the woman as a potential spiritual, if not physical, castrator, which in the mind of the child tends to become associated with the image of the ogress and cannibal witch, and in religious traditions where a monastic spirt prevails is an extremely prominent trait.
In this connection it should be noted that there is a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folk-lore as “the toothed vagina” – the vagina that castrates And a counterpart, the other way, is the so-called “phallic mother,” a motif perfectly illustrated in the long fingers and nose of the witch.
…
page 76
A fifth and culminating syndrome of imprints of this kind, mixed of outer and inner impacts, is that of the long and variously argued Oedipus complex, which, according to the orthodox Freudian school, is normally establıshed in the growing child at the age of about five or six, and thereafter constitutes the primary constellatıng pattern of all impulse, thought and feeling, imaginative art, philosophy, mythology and religion, scientific research, sanity and madness. The claim for the universality of this complex has been vigorously challenged by a number of anthropologists; for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, who, in his work on Sex and Repression in Savage Society declares:
“The crux of the difficulty lies in the fact that to psychoanalysts the Oedipus complex is something absolute, the primordial source … the fons et origo of everything. … I cannot conceive of the complex as the unique source of culture, of organization and belief,” he goes on then to say; “as the metaphysical entity, creative, but not created, prior to all things and not caused by anything else.”
…
page 77 – 78
And so, finally, to conclude this brief sketch of the Freudian notion of the family romance and its variations, the reaction of the very young male who vaguely senses that his mother is a temptress, seducing his imagination to incest and parricide, may be to hide his feelings from his own thoughts by assuming the compensatory, negative attitude of a Hamlet – a mental posture of excessive submission to the jurisdiction of the father (atonement theme), together with a fierce rejection of the female and all the associated charms of the world (the fleshpots of Egypt, whore of Babylon, etc.):
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villaın, villaın, smilıng, damned villain!
[Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, when Hamlet promises vengeance to his father’s Ghost]
Here we are on the way to the worship of the omnipotent father alone, monkdom, puritanism, Platonism, celibate clergies, homosexuality, and all the rest. And there is much of this, too, to be found in the chapters to come.
For as long as the nuclear unit of human life has been a man, woman, and child, the maturing consciousness has had to come to a knowledge of its world through the medium of this heavily loaded, biologically based triangle of love and aggression, desire and fear, dependency, command, and the urge for release. It is a cooky-mold competent to shape the most recalcitrant dough.
…
page 139
[5500 – 4500 BCE] And the role of women has perhaps already been greatly enhanced, both socially and symbolically, for whereas in the hunting period the chief contributors to the sustenance of the tribes had been the men and the role of the women had been largely that of drudges, now the female’s economic contributions were of first importance. She participated – perhaps even predominated – in the planting and reaping of the crops, and, as the mother of life and nourisher of life, was thought to assist the earth symbolically in its productivity.
However, no one can speak with certainty of the social and religious place of woman in this period, for the meager evidence of the bones and coarse pottery shards reveals nothing of her lot. One has to read back, hypothetically, from the evidence of the following millennium (4500-3500 B C ), when a multitude of female figurines appear among the potsherds. These suggest that the obvious analogy of woman’s life-giving and nourishing powers with those of the earth must already have led man to associate fertile womanhood with an idea of the motherhood of nature. We have no writing from this pre-literate age and no knowledge, consequently, of its myths or rites.
It is therefore not unusual for extremely well-trained archaeologists to pretend that they cannot imagine what services the numerous female figurines might have rendered to the households for which they were designed. However, we know well enough what the services of such images were in the periods immediately following-and what they have remained to the present day. They give magical psychological aid to women in childbirth and conception, stand in house shrines to receive daily prayers and to protect the occupants from physical as well as from spiritual danger, serve to support the mind in its meditations on the mystery of being, and, since they are frequently charming to behold, serve as ornaments in the pious home. They go forth with the farmer into his fields, protect the crops, protect the cattle in the barn. They are the guardians of children.. They watch over the sailor at sea and the merchant on the road.
A number of the typical and apparently perennial roles of this mother-goddess can be learned, furthermore, by simply perusing the Roman Catholic “Litany of Loreto,” which is addressed to the Virgin Mother Mary. She is there called the Holy Mother of God, the Mother of Divine Grace and Mother of Good Counsel; the Virgin most renowned, Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, Virgin most faithful; and she is praised as the Mirror of Justice, Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our Joy, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, and Queen of Peace; Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, and House of Gold.
Among the symbols associated with the great goddess in the archaic arts of the Mediterranean we find the mirror, the kingly throne of wisdom, the gate, the morning and evening star, and a column flanked by lions rampant. Moreover, among the numerous neolithic figurines of her we see her standing regnant, squatting as though in childbirth, holding an infant to her breast, clutching her breasts with her two hands, or one breast while pointing with the other hand to her genitals (the posture modified in the Roman period in the celebrated image of the same goddess found in the porticus of Octavia and now in Florence, the Medicean Venus).
Or again, we may see her endowed with the head of a cow, bearing in her arms a bull-headed child; standing naked on the back of a lion, or flanked by animals rampant, lions or goats. Her arms may be opened to the sides, as though to receive us, or extended, holding flowers, holding serpents. She may be crowned with the wall of a city. Or again, she may be seen sitting between the horns, or riding on the back, of a mighty bull.
…
page 142
And what is most remarkable is the prominence in this beautifully decorated northwestern ware of the bull’s head (the so-called bucranium), viewed from the front and with great curving horns. The form is rendered both naturalistically and in variously stylized, very graceful designs. Another prominent device in this series is the double ax. We find the Maltese cross once again, as in Samarra, but no swastıka, nor those graceful gazelle designs.
Furthermore, in association with the female statuettes (which are numerous in this context) clay figures of the dove appear, as well as of the cow, humped ox, sheep, goat, and pig. One charming fragment represents the goddess standing, clothed, between two goats rampant – that on her left a male, the other a female giving suck to a young kid. And all the symbols are associated in this Halafian culture complex with the so-called beehive tomb.
But this is precisely the complex that appeared a full millennium later in Crete, and from there was carried by sea, through the Gates of Hercules, northward to the British Isles and southward to the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and the Congo. It is the basic complex, also, of the Mycenaean culture, from which the Greeks, and thereby ourselves, derived so many symbols. And when the cult of the dead and resurrected bull-god was carried from Syria to the Nile Delta, in the fourth or third millennium B C, these symbols went with it. Indeed, I believe that we may claim with a very high degree of certainty that in this Halafian symbology of the bull and goddess, the dove, and the double ax, we have the earliest evidence yet discovered anywhere of the prodigiously influential mythology associated for us with the great names of Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, Mary and Jesus.
From the Taurus Mountains, the mountains of the bull-god, who may already have been identified with the horned moon, which dies and is resurrected three days later, the cult was diffused, with the art of cattle-breeding itself, practically to the ends of the earth, and we celebrate the mystery of that mythological death and resurrection to this day, as a promise of our own eternity. But what experience and understanding of eternity, and what of time, gave rise in that early period to this constellation of eloquent forms? And why in the image of the bull?
page 153
the king said “Far-li-mas, today the day has arrived when you must cheer me Tell me a story”. The performance is quicker than the command,” said Far-li-mas, and began. The king listened, the guests also listened. The king and his guests forgot to drink, forgot to breathe. The slaves forgot to serve. They, too, forgot to breathe. For the art of Far-lı-mas was like hashish, and, when he had ended, all were as though enveloped in a delightful swoon. The king had forgotten his thoughts of death.
…
page 161
Leo Frobemius, to whom we owe the recording and publication of this legend from the lips of the old captain of his camel-boys, has pointed out that in the Historical Library of the Sıcılan annalist Diodorus Siculus, who visited Egypt between the years 60 and 57 BC, there is an account of the practice of ritual regicide among the Nubian Kassites of the Upper Nile, in the province then known as Meroe-Napata. The priests would send a messenger to the king, declaring that the gods had revealed the moment to them through an oracle, and the kings, as Diodorus declares, submitted to this judgment through superstition. However, Diodorus goes on to say, in the period of the Alexandrian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309-246 BC), the custom was disregarded by an Ethiopian monarch named Ergamenes, who had received a Greek education. Placing his trust rather in philosophy than in religion, and with a courage worthy of the tenant of a throne, Ergamenes walked with a body of soldiers into the hitherto solemnly feared sanctuary of the Golden Temple, slew the priests to a man, discontinued the tradition derived from the awesome past, and reorganized things according to his own taste.
…
page 164
In the vast body of material assembled by Sir James G. Frazer in the twelve volumes of his monumental work The Golden Bough, we have evidence enough of the prevalence of a custom of ritual regicide throughout a large portion of the archaic world, associated – just as here – with a pattern of matrilineal descent.
Among the Shilluk of the White Nile (a people now inhabiting precisely the region of our tale) the custom of putting their king to death prevailed, according to Frazer, until only a few years ago. “It is said that the chiefs announce his fate to the king,” Frazer writes, citing the studies of C G. Seligman,’ “and that afterwards he is strangled in a hut which has been specially built for the occasion.” Furthermore, in 1926 new evidence attesting to the nature of the destiny of the earliest kings and their courts was un-earthed by Sir Leonard Woolley in his excavations of the so-called Royal Tombs of Ur, the city of the moon-god of ancient Sumer.
His grim discovery is described in a later chapter. So, from what we now know, it can be said with perfect assurance that in the earliest period of the hieratic city state the king and his court were ritually immolated at the expiration of a span of years determined by the relationship of the planets in the heavens to the moon, and that our legend of Kash is, therefore, certainly an echo from that very deep well of the past, romantically reflected in a late story-teller’s art.
…
Page 166
“The essential motif lies in the timing of the death of the god, writes Frobenius in his summary discussion of the archetype of the sacral regicide.
The great god must die; forfeit his life and be shut up in the underworld, within the mountain. The goddess (and let us call her Ishtar, using her later Babylonian title) follows him into the underworld and after the consummation of his self-immolation, releases him. The supreme mystery was celebrated not only in renowned songs, but also in the ancient new-year festivals, where it was presented dramatically: and this dramatic presentation can be said to represent the acme of the manifestation of the grammar and logic of mythology in the history of the world.
…
page 169
When the king was dead all the fires in his domain were extinguished, and that during the period of no rule, between his death and the installation of his successor, there was no holy fire. The latter was ritually rekindled by a designated pubescent boy and virgin, who were required to appear completely naked before the new king, the court, and the people, with their fire-sticks, the two sticks being known, respectively, as the male (the twirling stick) and the female (the base). The two young people had to make the new fire and then perform that other, symbolically analogous act, their first copulation, after which they were tossed into a prepared trench, while a shout went up to drown their cries, and quickly buried alive.
We are entering, indeed, the realm of King Death, the Great Chief Death.
…
page 170 – 171
The particular moment of importance to our story occurs at the conclusion of one of the boys’ puberty rites, which terminates in a sexual orgy of several days and nights, during which everyone in the village except the initiates makes free with everybody else, amid the tumult of the mythological chants, drums, and the bull-roarers – until the final night, when a fine young girl, painted, oiled, and ceremonially costumed, is led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another, and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her the supports of the logs above are jerked away and the platform drops, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted, and eaten.
…
page 184
The Greek festival, called Thesmophoria, was exclusively for women, and, as Jane Harrison has demonstrated in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, such women’s rites in Greece were pre-Homeric; that is to say, survivals of the earlier, so-called Pelasgian period, when the hieratic bronze-age civilizations of Crete and Troy were in full flower and the warrior gods, Zeus and Apollo, of the later patriarchal Greeks had not yet arrived to reduce the power of the great goddess.
The women fasted for nine days in memory of the nine days of sorrow of Demeter as she wandered over the earth, holding a long, staff-like torch in either hand. Demeter met the moon-goddess Hekate, and together they proceeded to the sun-god, Phoebus, who had seen the maid abducted and could tell them where she was; after which Demeter, in wrath and grief, quit the world of the gods. As an old woman, heavily veiled, she sat for days by a well known as the Well of the Virgin. She served as nurse in a kingly household near Eleusis, which city then became the greatest sanctuary of her rites in Greece. And she cursed the earth to bear no fruit, either for man or for the gods, for a full year – until, when Zeus and all the deities of Olympus had come to her in vain, one after the other, begging her to relent.
…
page 314 – 316
As Franz Hančar has pointed out in his article “On the Problem of the Venus Statuettes in the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic,” 20 human figures of larch and aspen wood are carved to this day among the Siberian reindeer hunters-the Ostyaks, Yakuts, Goldi, etc .- to represent the ancestral point of origin of the whole people, and they are always female. The hut is entrusted to the little figure when its occupants leave for the hunt; and when they return they feed her with groats and fat, prayıng, “Help us to keep healthy! Help us to kill much game!” “The psychological background of the idea,” Dr. Hančar suggests, “derives from the feeling and recognition of woman, especially during her periods of pregnancy, as the center and source of an effective magical force”. “And from the point of view of the history of thought,” he then observes, “these Late Paleolithic Venus figurines come to us as the earliest detectable expression of that undying ritual idea which sees in Woman the embodiment of the beginning and continuance of life, as well as the symbol of the immortality of that earthly matter which is in itself without form, yet clothes all forms”.
There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself, and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population to break, control, and employ to its own ends. It is, in fact, most remarkable how many primitive hunting races have the legend of a still more primitive age than their own, in which the women were the sole possessors of the magical art. Among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, for example, the idea is fundamental to the origin legend of the lodge or Hain of the men’s secret society. Here is Mr Lucas Bridges’ summary of the legend.
In the days when all the forest was evergreen, before Kerrhprrh the parakeet painted the autumn leaves red with the color from his breast, before the giants Kwonyipe and Chashkilchesh wandered through the woods with their heads above the tree-tops, in the days when Krren (the sun) and Kreeh (the moon) walked the earth as man and wife, and many of the great sleeping mountains were human beings in those far-off days witchcraft was known only to the women of Ona-land. They kept their own particular Lodge, which no man dared approach. The girls, as they neared womanhood, were instructed in the magic arts, learning how to bring sickness and even death to all those who displeased them.
The men lived in abject fear and subjection. Certainly they had bows and arrows with which to supply the camp with meat, yet, they asked, what use were such weapons against witchcraft and sickness? This tyranny of the women grew from bad to worse until it occurred to the men that a dead witch was less dangerous than a live one. They conspired together to kill off all the women, and there ensued a great massacre, from which not one woman escaped in human form.
Even the young gurls only just beginning their studies in witchcraft were killed with the rest, so the men now found themselves without wives. For these they must wait until the little girls grew into women. Meanwhile the great question arose: How could men keep the upper hand now they had got it? One day, when these girl children reached maturity, they might band together and regain their old ascendancy.
To forestall this, the men inaugurated a secret society of their own and banished for ever the women’s Lodge in which so many wicked plots had been hatched against them. No woman was allowed to come near the Hain, under penalty of death. To make quite certain that this decree was respected by their womenfolk, the men invented a new branch of Ona demonology a collection of strange beings – drawn partly from their own imaginations and partly from folk-lore and ancient legends – who would take visible shape by being impersonated by members of the Lodge and thus scare the women away from the secret councils of the Hain. It was given out that these creatures hated women, but were well-disposed towards men, even supplying them with mysterious food during the often protracted proceedings of the Lodge.
…
page 318
And Mr Bridges concludes:
“This legend of leadership being wrested from the women, either by force or coercion, is too widely spread throughout the world to be lightly ignored.”
…
page 320
Here it was the women who showed themselves supreme they were not only the bearers of children but also the chief producers of food By realizing that it was possible to cultivate, as well as to gather, vegetables, they had made the earth valuable and they became, consequently, its possessors. Thus they won both economic and social power and prestige, and the complex of the matriarchy took form.
The men, in societies of this third type, were within one jot of being completely superfluous, and if, as some authorities claim, they can have had no knowledge of the relationship of the sexual act to pregnancy and birth, we may well imagine the utter abyss of their inferiority complex. Small wonder, furthermore, if, in reaction, their revengeful imaginations ran amok and developed secret lodges and societies, the mysteries and terrors of which were directed primarily against the women!
…
page 323
We have already noted the role of chicanery in shamanism. It may well be that a good deal of what has been advertised as representing the will of “Old Man” actually is but the heritage of a lot of old men, and that the main idea has been not so much to honor God as to simplify life by keeping woman in the kitchen.
Some such flowery battle in the continuing war of the sexes, translated into and supported by mythology, must underlie the complete disappearance of the female figurines from the European scene at the close of the Aurignacian. We have already remarked that in the mural art of the men’s temple-caves, which developed during the Aurignacian and reached its height in the almost incredibly wonderful happy-hunting-ground visions of the Magdalenian age, anımals preponderate and the human figures are male, costumed as shamans, whereas in the Aurignacian cult of the figurines, whatever its reference and function may have been, the central form was the female nude, with great emphasis placed on the sexual parts. Was the revolution the consequence of an invasion of some kind – a new race, or one of those missionizing “men’s society” movements of which Father Schmidt has written?
Or was it the consequence of a natural transformation of the social conditions with a transfer of power and prestige naturally to the male?
…
page 372
However, it is likely, too, that the power of woman’s magic was recognized and accorded something of its due. We have seen how, in the Pygmy rite reported by Frobenius from Africa, the woman’s lifted arms and cry to the sun were essential. And we know that among the circumpolar hunters to this day female shamans are numerous and highly regarded. For, as Ruth Underhill has pointed out, the mysteries of childbirth and menstruation are natural manifestations of power. The rites of protective isolation, defending both the woman herself and the group to which she belongs, are rooted in a sense and idea of mysterious danger, whereas the boys’ and men’s rites are, rather, a social affair. The latter become rationalized in systems of theology. But the natural mysteries of birth and menstruation are as directly convincing as death itself, and remain to this day what they must also have been in the beginning, primary sources of a religious awe.
…
page 383
The males — like many innocents of the woman-dominated equatorial zone – instead of concealing, decorated their genitals, while the women wore long stylish skirts.
…
page 388
And so it is that, whereas the men in their rites (as initiates, tribal dignitaries, shamans, or what not) are invariably invested with magical costumes, the most potent magic of the womanly body inheres in itself. In all her primary epiphanies, therefore, whether in the paleolithic figurines or in the neolithic, she is typically the naked goddess, with an iconographic accent on the symbolism of her own magical form.
Woman, as the magical door from the other world, through which lives enter into this, stands naturally in counterpoise to the door of death, through which they leave. And no theology need be implied in this, but only mystery and the wonder of a stunned mind before an apprehended segment of the universe-together with a will to become linked to whatever power may inhabit such a wonder.
…
page 441
Many signs exist throughout the area of an early matriarchal social organization, with female shamans and perhaps even female rulers, while among the mythological and ritual motifs that were almost certainly associated with this Far Eastern basal neolithic complex are the immolated maiden and the fire goddess “Society in the Far East during the New Stone Age,” as Professor Carl W Bishop has observed, “seems indeed to have borne a decidedly feminine cast.” 55
Footnote: 55 Carl W Bishop, “The Beginnings of Civilization in Eastern Asia,” Supplement to the Journal of the American Oriental Society, No 4 (December 1939), P 49
…
page 447
Father Schmidt in his characterization of the natural supremacy of the female among primitive planters. However, with the pig, the Makı, and the rites of the men’s lodge, a masculine, mythological, “spiritual” counterforce is brought to bear against the feminine power. The chief divinity concerned is female, indeed-the guardian of the gate, who eats. But she is cheated, overcome, by the rites. She consumes the boar, but the man escapes. She consumes the black boar, but the radiant tusks survive and are hung as signs of man’s immortality from the roof beams of the cult houses.
Women, furthermore, being without souls, are not deeply concerned in this spiritual game. They acquire rank along with their husbands as the men, through sacrifice, proceed up the mystical ladder of their masonic lodges, but the cult itself is a man’s affair, and through it the role and importance of woman have been systematically reduced, so that she cannot even figure now as the sacrifice. It is the boar, not the sow, that is killed, and when a human offering is to be made, it is no longer a maiden but a man or boy.
…
page 464 -465
The first, kāma, corresponds to the aim or interest conceived by Freud to be fundamental to all life and thought, and – as a vast literature of psychoanalytic research now lets us know – anyone motivated by this urge, whether he be the patient or the doctor, sees sex in everything and everything in sex. The symbolism of mythology, like the world itself, means sex and nothing else to such a psyche. food, shelter, sex, and parenthood And all mythology and cult then (including the cult of psychoanalysis itself) is simply a means to the harmonious realization of this vegetal system of interests.
The second category of worldly aims, artha, “power and success,” corresponds to that conceived by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the later psychology of Alfred Adler3 to be the fundamental impulse and interest of all life and thought; and again, we have a considerable clinical literature to let us know that any psyche fully mastered by this drive, desiring to conquer, eat, consume, and turn all things into itself or into its own, dıscovers in the myths, gods, and rituals of religion, no more than supernatural means for self- and tribal aggrandızement.
These two systems of interest, then – the erotic and aggressive – may be taken to represent, together, the sum of man’s primary biological urges. They do not have to be infused, they are implicit at birth and supply the animal foundations of all experience and reaction.
…