[Author’s Note: She who gives life, She who gives form: Female Cosmogonies is an English translation of the original Italian book, Colei che dà la Vita Colei che dà la Forma. Below is from the back cover:

How the creation of the universe was imagined and transmitted for millennia in different places on Earth long before the myth of Adam and Eve, and how it still speaks to our present.

A collection of extraordinary creation lore stretching from Asia to Oceania, from Africa to America, from the Mediterranean to India, where the origin of the cosmos is referred as female. The Mother/Goddess was She who gave Life and Form, that is the Rules and Teachings necessary to the never-ending renewing of Creation.

Before the rise of patriarchy, in the golden Ages of earthly Paradises, the daughters and sons of the Mother lived following the Path of Balance and Harmony between nature and human societies.]

Introduction

During the long first period of the history of humankind, female energy – a bridge between what is not yet manifested and what is manifested – and women, whose bodies are the channels that bring us to life, have been observed, portrayed and represented as the expression of creative energy. This is narrated through thousands of tales of creation in the mythologies of all traditions and attested to by the female figurines that have emerged from the deep past, especially during the last century. This book explores these primal ways of imagining creation and the first transformations they underwent.

            The theme is as old as human thought itself. Women and men have ever been pondering the irremediable asymmetry between the sexes (women and men are of woman born), the laws governing the flow of time, the transformations to which all forms of life are subjected, and the rules of harmony and change that divide and reconcile the opposing polarities on which creation thrives. For ages, women and their bodies provided powerful metaphors for the energies perceived as primary agents of movement and transformation, and as the source of wisdom necessary to preserve life. Cosmogonies and myths depicted them as Divine or Great Mothers giving form to the cosmos and to all its creatures, animate or not, visible or invisible, Mothers sometimes merging with the primal Ancestress of tribes or populations.

            In the following pages you’ll find just some of the thousands of numberless variations of myths rooted in the beginnings of human consciousnesses and still remembered: myths inspired by the sense of awe generated in the hearts and minds of our ancestresses and ancestors by the pure awareness of being alive, longing for containment to the riddles of existence, drawing from the limbo of cosmic memory where all the forms of life on earth settle and deposit. The resulting collection of tales of creation and/or cultural foundation might be likened to the geological samples retrieved from delving into the deepest layers of earth. Even if there can be little or no certainty as to their original form, the act of telling them anew is like scattering a handful of precious seeds. For the wisdom they contain is bountiful, not erased by their long sleeping in the dark for ages. While reading them, we have just to let them leaven onto our memories and hearts, and weave them into our awareness, thus deepening and spreading the roots with which we hold on the world.

            There are some experiences that reverberate through many different levels of our being and speak in such complex interconnected ways that we cannot but attribute them to realms of intuition or of the sacred. They give form to a fictional world unveiling all the concerns, desires and turmoil spiraling within when events perceived as distinct from ordinary time hit our sensibility; they are ways to come to terms with the mighty emotions which arise in us while we don’t find other words to account for them. From similar states of mind and moments of being myths were born: cosmogonies questioning the origins of life and providing the rules necessary to preserve it; narrations that are both fanciful and concrete, rendered through the timeless language of symbols untouched by whatever change deposited layer upon layer on their original source, and propelling unchanged and still radiating energy from the darkness of oblivion.

            “Religion, science and the measuring of time were not separated from the body and from the mystery of the biological rhythms of sexuality and fertility; they formed a single body of awareness. We have been projected away from this ancient holistic horizon, which we have just begun to rediscover.” Vicki Noble, commenting on the great art of the Paleolithic, leads us out of the realm of the central dogma of the last centuries. It is exactly from the viewpoint of such a “holistic horizon” that ancient cosmogonies speak, revealing complexities of vision and awareness that only the very latest scientific and philosophical developments have been regaining in western culture. The main impulse that has been guiding the evolutionary historical and productive development throughout the last 5000 years has been divergent from that horizon. It has been characterized by differentiation, by separation, and by fragmentation. To a certain extent, we may all have profited from this process, but at the same time it has enhanced a centrifugal tendency towards the individualistic and reckless shortsightedness that has brought about the great dismay we experience today.

             Within this horizon, far more ancient than that which is often recorded, cosmogonic myths and tales about the origins of the peoples inhabiting the continents speak of a feminine principle. Far from glorifying mother-roles in the manner proper to patriarchal cultures, which reduces women to mere means of reproducing physical life, such myths invest mothering with a manifest power to balance both cosmic and human concerns, to found and hold social groups together, to invent tools, manual skills and sacred rituals.

            These great Mothers and mythical Ancestresses were at the beginning, carefully looking out towards the future; the rhythms of their bodies showed and safeguarded the harmony of the universe. Taking their place and usurping their symbols constituted not only a theft of their soul, but the first political action of patriarchy. And this is the issue, implying rebellion, conflict and loss, so many myths address from a certain point on, almost obsessively.

            In such a context, the terms “Great Mother” and “Goddess”, used to indicate a cosmic and balancing principle, coincide by no means with their modern meanings, which were formed during a long process much later, belonging to a register that has become decidedly anthropomorphic and burdened by the categorizing attributes of patriarchy. The “Mothers” who act within cosmogonies, just like the first steatopygic statuettes, are icons of an emotionally charged expectation. They manifest their creative abundance through the shaping of whatever comes into being through pregnant bodies, that are metaphors of life and nourishment. In patriarchal imagination, mothers are always portrayed as separate from their offspring delivered and sitting on their lap, thus assuming finite and human aspects: but the first representations of “goddess with child” are not to be found until the end of the Neolithic. Nor the adjective “great” – usually added in order to overcome a lack of understanding and an embarrassed amazement before their naked and abundant naked bodies, a conceptual aphasia proper to the disconnected patriarchal vision – does convey their full semantic value. Therefore, even while we go on using such terms, we must recognize them as inadequate stereotypes, particularly in those stories where “Goddess, Ancestress, Mother” express states of fire, desire, awakening, excitement, drive, and love.

            I will start this endeavor to retrieve bits of memories from the far beginnings by setting forth from China, Japan and Korea, continuing across the Pacific to Africa and Northern America, to then return, across the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, back to Asia and India.

            Traces of matrifocal, matrilineal and matriarchal cultures are to be found everywhere, and the abundance of recurrent themes hidden beneath the later layers of recorded patriarchal cultures is truly astounding. In times that are often surprisingly recent when compared to the preceding ages of oral tradition, encoding them in “literature” meant filtering and preserving them at the same time, their original sense being at best lost by the writer, or worse deliberately deprived of their powerful meaning through modifying, clipping, introducing new elements, neglecting or debasing those that may once be at the narrative’s core.

            In the beginning of human time, ages and ages ago, these tales were imagined, narrated and handed down through countless generations all over the continents, to then disappear apparently without leaving any traces. The American historian Susan Stanford Friedman remarks: “The loss of collective memories, of myriad stories about the past, has contributed greatly to the ongoing subordination of women. The unending, cumulative building of broad defined histories of women, including histories of feminism, is a critical component of resistance and change”.

This book has come to being thanks to many women: first and foremost all those who researched, wrote and handed these stories down to us (featured in the bibliography). Among them special thanks to Merlin Stone, a foremother-pioneer with her Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood published in 1979, which definitely won me to carry on female mythological research; the students at the Free Women’s University of Women of Milan, with whom I dared to tread in a triennial course whose title sounded Storie di Creazione. Immagini del Sacro Femminile (Creation Lore. Images of the Sacred Feminine) from 2000; another radical Sister of the Past, Mary Daly, who provided the initial input; Helen Hye-Sook Hwang,  Korean expatriate feminist and theologian whose doctoral thesis introduced me to Mago (Chapter 3); Giti Thadani, who opened new perspectives regarding the interpretation of Sanskrit texts; Chiara Orlandini, who assured the publication of this and other books of the series Le Civette-Saggi with elegance and generosity; and all those who shared their comments on my previous book Oscure Madri Splendenti (Dark Shining Mothers), encouraging me to continue on the path to our deepest roots.

(End of the sequels)

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Meet Mago Contributor, Luciana Percovich