THE FEMALE IMAGE AS IT EVOLVED IN THE AWARENESS OF MANKIND
Today, extremist religious group categorize the female as a baby carrier and a symbol of the human creature that lacks intelligence and religion.
Women’s organizations, on the other hand, feel that they have always been persecuted and that they have to fight to gain their rights. This kind of thinking from both, men and women, simplifies the issue between two contradicting views. It doesn’t allow any chance for a discussion between them.
To understand how did this happened and how the complexity of the female image ended the way it is now, we must trace the roots of the female’s manifestation, how she evolved and controlled the consciousness of the primitive man.
In ancient times, primitive man did not understand nature, volcanoes and plant growth. He also did not understand the female. She was an absolute mystery to him.
When this female is a youth, she became mysterious with her menstruation and blood flow. When she reaches puberty, she remained a mystery with the roundness of her tummy that announced a birth. To the primitive man, this metamorphosis represented the birth of things around him.
The female also knew about plants on the ground and that added to her mystery. She knew which plant soothed and which plant to use as medicine. She, also, knew how to keep the group together.
The man, on the other hand, is the one that brought things. He was the fighter and the hunter.
Looking at the female as the one connected with the creation and the keeper of the group, there was a need to worship her in the form of deities.
Worshipping and the female in the ancient time were intertwined, and in particular in the Eastern world, where the religion of female worshipping was created.
The religion of female worshiping lasted thousands of years; three times longer than the three Abrahamian religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is how important the female phenomena were in the history of man.
The first Goddess to have ever been worshipped was Ishtar in Mesopotamia. She was the Goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. During many civilizations, Ishtar became the one Goddess in which many other Goddesses were manifested through her.
In Egypt, NUT, a manifestation from Ishtar became the Goddess who circled the orbiting Zodiac as was understood by the ancient Egyptians. NUT surrounded the universe from all angles stabilizing the world. To Ancient Egyptian, NUT was the Start and the end. Then Ishtar became ISIS in the awareness of ancient man.
ISIS HYMN
I AM THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING
I AM LADY OF THE ELEMENTS
AND THE CREATOR OF WORLDS
I AM THE RULER OF THE SKY ABOVE
AND HELL UNDER
I AM THE CENTER OF THE GODLY POWER
I AM THE TRUTH BEHIND THE GODS AND GODDESSES
IN ME, THEY MEET IN ONE FIGURE AND ONE IMAGE.
HYMN TO ISIS (3RD OR 4TH CENTURY AD)
Ishtar body was round like the roundness of all creations, and from this, the ancient man predicted the earth is round. Roundness, he believed, was the moment of fullness that announces a birth.
For thousands of years, the primitive man worshipped Ishtar as the female creator, the original and the beginning. Ishtar held the snake tail in her mouth as a symbol of power. She reigned until the male God Marduk split her in half. One-half became the sky and the other half became the earth. This could be was the first male “coup” in human history. This male coup, back then, was not political. Man did not flex his muscle to take over anything.
There were three different cycles that helped create the turning point of the male control.
The discovery of agriculture during which primitive groups needed the muscle of men. Men were still not worshipped. Up until the discovery of agriculture, a man was just part of a woman. With agricultural woman remained worshipped, but stayed in her own space at home leaving the outside world to men.
Because agriculture was regulated by season there was a need for a family to create order.
Ancient Egyptians were the first to give humanity the family structure. The man had to be satisfied with one woman, and a woman with one man. During that time, Egypt practiced family life while other civilizations lived freely without structure.
Egyptians were the first to practice loyalty, consciousness and composed love songs for that new world associated with agriculture.
Then came war. Before long there was vicious, short fights. The man was not satisfied with short bursts of fights; he needed to have what his neighbors had. So the idea of war was created. War back then was worshipped like it is now. It always happened for a grandiose reason, like an acquisition of land.
In wars, All female Goddesses were manifested again into different Gods. Ishtar became the destructive Goddess Sekhmet, the lioness. Both were a manifestation from ISIS. ISIS, too, became Hathor the cow symbol that cultivate the land.
But since in reality the male is the one that runs the wars. He wins and loses wars, he guides the group and capture wealth from wars. Primitive mankind switched from female worshipping to male control.
It took years for this transformation. And the first male to be worshipped was the castrato. Only castrated men were permitted inside the temples to serve the Goddess. Castration happened voluntarily. Man castrated himself and placed his castrated organ at the feet of the female Goddess.
But, in reality, this male worshiping started from the original female worshipping.
In ancient time, there was no male god. There was never a male prophet or any male who was worshiped. It was always females.
Then came Horus/Osiris/Gilgamesh/Zeus. They were all male Gods.
Following this many different God manifestations, the Torah, the Jewish holy book (written 400 years after the death Moses), appeared and became the first document to destroy the worshipped female image. It is the first written document to make the male as the original God. Eve in the Torah was degraded. She was created from one of Adam’s rib. And She, with the snake that they both worshiped, influenced Adam and caused his expulsion from Heaven. Nowhere in the history of the female had she been so humiliated the way she was in the Torah.
But Jesus came and restored the once worshipped female image. Mary, his mother, the virgin who delivered him without a male, brought the female worshipping back to life. In Egypt the original teaching of Christianity flourished.
In Rome male, Patriarchy took over. This is most apparent in Michael Angelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Cappella Sistina. The painting restored the male position by showing God touching Adam‘s finger to give him life, male to male.
Western Christianity pushed the female aside and put the male in her place. Since then men and women live in an unending power struggle because man wants to exist independently from the woman that he once worshipped