“The human past viewed through the bias of the human present is more bias than past.”
—Toba Xochara
As a young woman studying ancient Sumer at UBC, I first came face-to-face with the masculine bias that infuses the study of the ancient world while reading an old text book that discussed pre-alphabetic pictograms. One pictogram, a folded Y-shape that meant woman, was boldly described as a representation of “female genitalia”. A similarly obvious pictogram, meaning man, was described as “a soldier figure wearing a helmet”.
This book had been written, edited, proofed, published, read, and reprinted, almost certainly entirely by men, and that ludicrous error had made it past all of them. It was blindingly obvious, but apparently not one person involved in the book’s publication could see that pictogram as a penis—or if he did, felt it was safe to mention it. That a man could be designated by a penis, it seems, did not enter the realm of possibility for all those men—however easy it was to see a woman as a vulva.
Staring at that little helmetted soldier, I understood not merely the enormous task that was ahead of me in any attempt to bring the ancient Goddess to her rightful place in the human story, but also that I would have to guard against my own unconscious acceptance of this kind of male bias at every level in the scholarly examination of the ancient world. This terrible prejudice was bred in the bone and would not be easily driven out of the flesh.
That was well over 30 years ago. Some things have changed since, but more have not. For example, it is still too common even now for male scholars to label worship of the Goddess, whatever the period or geographical spread, as a cult. The worship that has a male figure as its focus is much more likely to be designated a religion.
The OED defines cult as, “a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object.” Religion is defined as, “the belief in and worship of a God or gods.” It is not easy to see where the line should be drawn, but almost without exception, worship of the Mother Goddess, the Great Goddess, the Creator Goddess, Nammu, or Asherah, has by tradition been labelled a cult, while the worship of Yahweh, Mithras, Zarathustra, Jesus, and Allah—whether these male figures are represented by and worshipped through statues and idols or not—is honoured with the epithet religion.
One tragedy of this is the narrow focus and dismissive approach it has imposed on the academic study of Goddess religions since its inception. Our collective past as worshippers of the Great Mother, a worship that was primordial and global in scope, has been overlooked, ignored, demeaned and robbed of its massive vitality by the blindness of men judging the past from the standpoint of the present…and too often, of their own religion. For at least two centuries that religion has been mostly Christianity—or what we call Christianity today, with its roots in patriarchal Judaism, but its branches so worshipfully directed towards the “particular object” of the cross and the “particular figure” of Jesus Christ, in all his statues and death images, that it is modern Christianity itself that more closely fits the definition of cult.
When the lens is distorted, we have to take our glasses off to see clearly.
Image of Vulva Stone, Private Collection, Used by permission.
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