Menu Odigos Gaia Thesis Mother Dear Far & Wide Honour Thy Mother What Went Wrong? Please Come Back! Witches Salem Witches Ask Odi Whyte Bard Stories Aesop's Fables Follow The Frog            What Went Wrong? "Be the terror and the dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish of the sea: they are handed over to you." (Gen. 9:2-3) Since the time of the Exodus, 3,500 years ago, Western Civilization has been pursuing a course that has taken it further and further off course. The three great monotheistic religions of the West, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have from their beginning activity suppressed the worship of the Goddess, and have tortured and brutally murdered millions of Her people. Today, she still flickers in the hearts of Her children, and Her body lies abused and battered in the wake of human progress. The Goddess is the concept of feminine divinity incarnate. The denial of feminine divinity results in the oppression of Mother Nature. As Toybee says: 'The thesis of the present essay is that some of the major maladies of the present-day world: for instance the recklessly extravagant consumption of nature's irreplaceable treasures, and the pollution of those of them that man has not already devoured: can be traced back in the last analysis to a religious cause, and that this cause is the rise of monotheism.' This is not to say that all non-monotheistic religions have a perfect track record for the treatment of women in those societies. Certain Hindu cultures revere various goddesses and yet are among the more sexist and female-suppressive societies in the modern world. Nevertheless, there is abundant archeological evidence to indicate that things were not always as they are now, especially in truly ancient societies like India. Before the Aryan Indo-European invasion around 1,500 BCE many Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, including the Harrapan culture of the Indus Valley and the Minoan people of Crete, had societies that appeared remarkably egalitarian. These societies were universally characterized by the worship of a powerful Great Mother whom the Hindu people still call Maha Devi Ma. She was later broken into a multiplicity of minor goddesses which were demoted to the position of wives or concubines of the gods. By the time sacred writings were codified in the Vedas, the Primal Goddess Maha Devi in India had been divided into a triplicity of goddesses characterized as Creator, Preserver and Destroyer: Saraswati, Laksmi and Kali; respectively the consorts of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. In Greece, a similar process led to Kore, Demeter and Persephone (or Hecate) created from the original Cretan Rhea. Once the Great Mother had been married off She became easier to control and the way was paved for Her dowry of natural wealth to be handed over to the financial control of Her divine consorts. Whether this new mythical development was a simple mirror of the social diminishment of women's rights or whether it preceded it and was invoked as a justification is really a moot point. But the land, formerly tied to matrilineal territorial clans, passed into the hands of patriarchal kings and princes who began to treat it as their private property and to lay waste to the forests in order to build vast temples and palaces to house their harems and other slaves. The Goddess of Nature went from the position of being the body and soul of all that lives to that of a wife, mother and household servant. Many traditions have given lip service to the so-called "Female Principle," either in the form of a divided identity like the Hindu Shakti or as a semi-divine emanation. But the power of the Goddess of Nature is gradually losing its ability to inspire the necessary respect and reverence once accorded to the Source and Bearer of Life.