| Pottery Pottery technology, as well as bone and stone working techniques had made advancements and copper metallurgy had been introduced to east central Europe by 5500 BC. (81) According to Archaeologist Victor W. Von Hagen, writing in World of the Maya: “Pottery was woman. All we see of the remains of the Maya ceramic art was done by women. It is a fact that should be stressed. In almost every place where pottery making was on an archaic level – Africa or Melanesia – pottery was woman-made and its design woman-inspired. Throughout the area of the Amazon, pottery was a woman’s task. Women were the potters, so far as we know, in ancient Peru. Early Greek and early Egyptian pottery was also woman-made until the introduction of the potter’s wheel.” (82) Robert Briffault, in The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (1927), writes: “The art is exclusively in the hands of women throughout North America, Central and South America, and in those parts of the Malay Archipelago and Peninsula, Melanesia, and New Guinea, where the art is practiced as a native industry. In the Nicobar Islands pottery is made by the women only, and in the Andaman Islands it is made exclusively by the women in the northern island, while in the south, island men also make pots. In the Pamir highlands of Central Asia, the women manufacture all the pottery. In the Nilgiri Hills, among the Khotas, the pottery is made exclusively by the women, and the same is the case among the wild tribes of Burma. Throughout by far the greater part of Africa pottery is made by the women only. Zulu tradition ascribes the making of the first pot to the first woman. Out of seventy-eight tribes investigated by the ethnologists attached to the Belgian Congo Museum, the men had no hand whatever in the making of pottery in sixty-seven.” (83) If the first clay pottery was made by women, then it’s very likely that the first cuneiform seals or clay tablets that language was first written on, were also made by women. (84) However, it’s possible also, that women were not the ones who first started writing things down to preserve knowledge. We will return to this point in the near future. Temple Sites The goddess was such a prominent idea and figure among early Neolithic civilizations that the entire village outline would be formed in the shape of a goddess body such as the one excavated in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, where upwards of sixty houses made of stone and mud were uncovered, some shaped like uteruses and vaginal entranceways. In Malta, there are stone temples shaped like the goddess and in them have been found clay figurines of the same shape and design. Similar sites that pay tribute to the goddess in this way are the West Kennet Longbarrow, in England, the Medamud temple in Egypt, and the Bryn Celli Ddu mound in Wales. (85) |
Language and the Invention of Writing In her book, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker cites many of the words that have come to us from the root word Ma. “Sanskrit matra, like the Greek meter, meant both “mother” and “measurement.” Mathematics is, by derivation, “mother-wisdom.” Root words for motherhood produced many words for calculation: metric, menstruation, mete, mens, mark, mentality; geo-metry, trigono-metry, hydro-metry, etc. Women did temporal and spatial calculations for so long that, according to the Vayu Purana, men once thought women were able to give birth because they had superior skill in measuring and figuring. (86) The Egyptian hieroglyph for water (Mu) is our English letter M. In Greek also, the letter that is M, as well is Mu, means “water.” (87) The M sign is a frequent occurrence on goddess figurines and idols along with the zig zag but its most commonplace is on water jars or vessels. When it occurs on the goddess figurines, the position underneath the breasts likely implies the nutritious milk or “water of life” as it may have been referred to in ancient times. (88) Obviously, there was a huge gap in between the time that language was first used and the time writing was invented. McKenna makes a wonderful argument in Food of the Gods, that language was the invention of the mushroom. Henry Munn proposed this idea as well in his essay, The Mushrooms of Language. This is due to the fact that the mushroom causes the enchanted person to sing the songs that they hear being sung by the mushroom spirits, also referred to as the ”little people.” Though writing was believed to have been developed to write Sumerian, the Akkadians who lived nearby had their own language, though they were known to have written in Sumerian ascribing their Akkadian names. The cultures of the Sumerians and Akkadians were very synchronistic. The people of Ebla in Syria also spoke a Semitic language and wrote in Sumerian on tablets. (89) (81) The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, p.18 (82) The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 36 (83) The Great Mother, p. 134; Briffault, Vol. 1, pp. 466-70 (84) The Great Cosmic Mother, p.37-8 (85) ibid., p.106; See William Irwin Thompson, Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, 264-66, for photos and diagrams (86) ibid., p.685; O’ Flaherty, p. 48 (87) The Language of the Goddess, p.19 (88) ibid, p.22 (89) In the Wake of the Goddess, p.10; See J.J.M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), esp. 152ff |