At 21:51 02.12.00 +0200, Barbara Piazza-Georgi wrote:
> > But I discern a tradition of female authority regionally
> > going right back to Catal Huyuk, 4000 BCE.
>
>Shan, I thought that the Mother-Goddess cult that is associated
>with Catal Huyuk, rather than being a regional particularity, is just
>part of the general late-prehistorical trend in the European region?
The Leopard (and Vulture) Goddess of Çatalhöyük basically continues
paleolithic "keepers of the animals" (also especially reminiscent of the
cave lion women figurines of Mal'ta and Buret), the inovation is her
responsibilities being extended to cultivated plants. Also, instead of
subterranean caves (symbolizing uteri) she is worshipped in houses. As the
Hittites had an outspoken love of "going native" they continued her into
their Inara.
What in her cult, however, still was a symbolic cycle of death and rebirth,
also depicted by sexual means as going back into her and being reborn out
of her, later on gets a violent and noisily sexual spin. Here also belongs
the already mentioned vires condere of the galloi deposing their severed
genitalia in the subterranean thápamos of Kybele as a substitute for
vegetational god Attis' deadly intercourse with his mother and lover --
which probably wasn't their declared motivation still, but rather something
like dedicating themselves to the goddess exclusively (perhaps also worth
noting, we're here speaking of Phrygians, who were relatively recent
immigrants, while still in Europe called Brygoi, not of Anatolian
Indoeuropeans such as the Carians). Which then is the classical case of the
engulfing mother not releasing her son from their symbiosis (and him
inscribing his pleasure into "la femme" instead of the phallus), which also
is the typical case in which the phallus is not recognized as a metaphor
for relationality resp. that which founds (in the sense of the copula in an
Aristotelean predication) a relation (because the son himself is the
"phallus feminisé de sa mère"). I also think that this was one of the key
factors in the emergence what we these days call patriarchy, because such
sons needed to be freed from such a symbiosis (mind you that in such a
society this was considered acceptable behavior probably rather than
structurally psychotic) "in nomine patris" if such a mother wouldn't do it
on her own.
>Or did it survive in Anatolia longer than elsewhere?
We probably have such types of numina up to the day...
Best,
Heike
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