#the great cosmic mother
“Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belong to a man—a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chasity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus—they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chasity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle—‘the Maiden,’ ‘the Virgin’—the word retained some of its original pagan sense of a strong and independent woman. The Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, being the divinity of matriarchal women free to take as many lovers as they choose. Women could ‘surrender’ themselves to the Goddess by making love to a stranger in her temple.”
— Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth
“The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”
- Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987)
“The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”
- Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987)
