I remember, in the 1980s my friends took an interest in ancient fertility goddesses, witches, and, of course, female madness. There were the films. Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Frances (1982) killed us all. There were the books. The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), The Mists of Avalon (1983), The Lover (1984) and anything by Anaïs Nin or Edith Wharton circulated freely. Perhaps, the most mysterious, and therefore, greatest preoccupation among us all was Lilith. She was the first inkling of a secret Goddess within, and I do say, we were part of a greater movement toward finding her, protecting her and bringing her out.

Before the worldwide web, before Beyoncé’s crowns, fascination for the Goddess hit peak visibility in the concert circuit Lilith Fair (1996-1999). Lilith Fair was founded by the great Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan and featured such headliners as The Indigo Girls, Suzanne Vega, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Lisa Loeb and Natalie Merchant.

This movement gravitated toward the idea that Lilith was a Sumerian fertility goddess and Adam’s first wife, long before the Abrahamic religions plundered her and hid her beneath layers of patriarchy. We thought Adam’s first wife was mysterious new discovery. In fact, it comes from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, written sometime before 1000 CE. Its image of a free every-woman who abandons an unfair marriage was popular in medieval Europea. It was not a new feminist discovery, as my friends thought.

So what about the idea that Lilith was an ancient fertility goddess?

Lilith, or lilītu, is a Mesopotamian (3500 BCE – 400 CE) female demon; the archetypal vampire. She inhabits deserts and open country. She is infertile, her breasts leak poison, and therefore, she is sexually frustrated. Her reproductive frustration makes her jealous, wanton and blood-sucking. While she disturbs men at night to steal their virility, provoking the unsaid – wet dreams, she is especially dangerous to pregnant women as a baby kidnapper.

This toxic image leaves us in a complicated position. She is not what I have in mind for an ancient fertility goddess, and the realities around the narrow reproductive band it leaves for us are erased. Women and children died like flies in childbirth before modern medicine. We know. It is, after all a fraught endeavor to this day. However, Lilith is as likely an abortifacient as a natural miscarriage. This misogynist image plainly carries awareness of women’s desire to control their own reproduction, being and sexuality, the idea of which it hates.

Lilith was adopted into European culture through an Old Testament passage that seems to take the lost garden of Eden as a symbol for the reproductive law of nature, to which God has assured every man some part.

Her nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there. All her princes are gone.

Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches.

Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another. There shall the Lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest.

There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow. There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate.

Look in the book of the Lord and read: No one of these shall be lacking. For the mouth of the Lord has ordered it, and His spirit shall gather them there.

It is He who casts the lot for them, and with His hands He marks off their shares of her. They shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation.

(Isaiah 34)

Odd hey? Repugnant actually.

This is a story of sanctioned rape, successful already in Word and repose. It is repeated in the image of Sarah (Book of Genesis) a fallen woman, whose womb is moved by God once she “gives a slave” to Abraham, because he needs sons. Clearly Sarah understands her duty and is rewarded for it. Judeo-Christian reinforcement of women’s duty to bear sons for men was updated in the Virgin Mary and her immaculate conception of Christ. Nowadays, a woman’s duty encompasses the whole domain of family values, and as unifying mother, she has become central to the smooth functioning of many states, including Canada.

The images created by these myths remind me of Ophelia by Millais, though I dare say he is suggesting something quite oppositional to them. Something aghast at the power of the Word, the sight of no fertility goddess at the fount of civilization; only the domesticated ruin of women in Nature’s bed.

Anyway, I grew up with the Goddess. She was no surprise, really.

My father was Welsh and his first child was a girl, and then his second, me, was also girl. He brought home vivid books filled with tales of Morgaine and the Lady of the Lake, Princess Eilonwy and her magic bauble, and the real-life warrior queen Buddug (Boudica), last light of the Welsh tribes. Under Rome’s brutal onslaught she threw herself on her sword rather than be enslaved.

What I remember of those childhood characters is that they may have been unpredictable, they may have been willful, and they may have been dark, but all lived present with their powers. Each possessed a tested, yet great, unwavering consciousness, and commanded phenomenal respect.  Yes, even Morgaine. I know, because my father sung me her praises.

Not long ago, I ended up in the world of Goddess again, by accident, when I took up Mira Nair’s film, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996) for a graduate project. The film’s date is a giveaway. Yes, it was produced during the era of Peak Visibility of the Goddess. It seems that Rasa Devi (Goddess of Rasa), the film’s beautiful purveyor of flesh, presides over it. But Nair is a cagey director.

I found that I had to learn Devi to enter this film properly. Perhaps one day, when I am done with all that, I will share my discoveries with you. Until then, we must begin with baby steps, because Devi is really difficult to understand.

Now, Devi is a complicated entity. All Devi are manifestations of the Great Mother Goddess, MahaDevi, the One, who is unified as Durgā (Difficult to Access). Many scholarly texts emphasize the Brāhmaṇam formula of Devia: One-All, along a Vaishnava design.

If we follow the research, durgā means “fortress” in India’s most ancient texts, the Vedas (1500 – 900 BCE). As a goddess, Durgā appears during the late Kushan empire, in Hymn to Āryā (300 CE). The Hymn addresses the cult of Āryā, divine mother to Skanda, a war god who was worshiped as early as 400 BCE. In the Hymn, Durgā merges into the cult, so she is likely a “clan” goddess who presided over a kingdom that diplomatically allied itself to the Kushan Emperor.  

The Hymn associates Durgā with a group of female Seizers (grahīs), who are like Lilith. They are blood thirsty, poisonous, baby kidnappers, with serpent (kuṇḍalinī) bodies and bird’s heads. Sometimes they appear as cats. Indra (Lord of Transformations) sends them to destroy Skanda. Overcome by maternal affections, they demand Skanda accept them as his mothers. He does, on condition that he partition them as auspicious and benign (Śiva), and inauspicious and malignant (aŚiva).

Now what a tale that is.

It fits an interesting historical period, because it predates Indian tantra, yet the oppositional is overturned and recycled, overturned and recycled, per Saiva creative-destructive cosmological design.

Later, in the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa (250-550 CE) Devi finally becomes One-All. She is presented, per Vaishnaiva cosmology, as both the Absolute Unmanifest (Nirguna Brahman) and the Manifest Unity (Saguna Brahman) able to be seen in the activity of three elemental cosmic forces (Śakti).

Śakti, of course, is extraordinarily famous, even in the West. In this Purāṇa, she is envisioned as Devīmāhātmyam (Great Souls of the Goddess): destroyer, (Kālī), creator (Sarasvatī), and preserver (Lakṣmī).

Again, what a tale that is! But we will have to leave it for another day.

In the Devīmāhātmyam’s most famous mantra, a shape-shifting demon, Mahishasura, gains powers that make him invincible. In the form of a buffalo, he goes about killing the male gods one by one. Indra pleads to Devi for help, and so Lakṣmī manifests an avatar as a Durgā. This warrior-goddess channels all the power of the gods and destroys Mahishasura. It is this Durgā who is worshiped, in many different forms, as “the super power” (Śakti) of the Great Goddess.

This development of an ancient image of toxic fertility goddesses is decidedly precious, but still a pleasing upgrade to the Virgin, wouldn’t you say? Plus, she sounds like something out of the Marvel universe. Marvel is a bit lame, so I suggest, rather, that it was screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott who clinched for us a contemporary tale of Durgā in the Alien franchise.

In Alien we have Ellen Ripley, with the full battery of masculine virtues, yet still a woman. She becomes the sole survivor in a cosmic battle against an invincible, shape shifting “demon” that eventually reveals itself in a form something like that of a bull. What helps save her? A cat.

Ripley’s motherly super powers develop as she learns to defend the cat against a male alien, then a young girl against a gigantic egg bearing queen. They finally extend through alchemical-biotic transformations that impregnate her with an alien egg, and forge psychic and affective links between her and the aliens. In the end Ripley must breach these affective links to save Earth, her mother planet, despite having become a foreigner to it herself. 

This Alien theme is consistent with the the power of the Goddess in Devīmāhātmyam. A human awareness of her divine manifestation as the cosmos provokes “seizures” (nigraha), yet also empowers release (anugraha).

Obviously, this power of Devi suits the patriarchal agenda of tribal loyalty, and women as objects of exchange to smooth gangsta games of diplomacy and war. Nonetheless, we will return to this notion of capture and release when we look at the most ancient Vedic Great Goddesses, Aditi. The very name captures her pervasive and unbound power that existed long before Brahman was even conceptualized.

Sources

White, David Gordon (2003) Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.