FOR THE BROTHAS: CULTURE AND INTELLECTUALISM: THE EVOLUTION OF MOTHER-GODDESS COSMOLOGY AND ITS CONNEXION TO MOTHERS DAY

IN HOMAGE TO MOTHERHOOD…

The ancients revered the mystery of motherhood as the premier symbol of creativity and power. All of our current religions evolved from primordial mother-goddess fertility cults and some of the earliest sculptural artifacts that human beings made were crude representations of pregnant females.

Wherever one looks; to the cult of Isis in Khemet, The cult of Athena in Greece, or to the cult of Hina in Polynesia certainly derived from an earlier mother-goddess cult in India or china the world was once dominated by religions devoted to the reverence of the mystical powers of fertility only women possessed.

The prehistoric world was dominated by female power figures who served as priests, shaman and oracles and they held power within those early human tribal structures beyond anything imaginable by today's standards, the roles of men and women were not yet fully evolved then and because they held the power of childbirth over me woman ruled supreme. Over the millenniums men replaced these powerful goddesses with male approximations such as Osiris and Zeus but in many cultures the mystical power of these primordial female deities remained largely intact such as in India from which comes the earliest known concept of a divine trinity in the form of Vishnu, Krishna and Shiva who appear to take on male and female attributes. The gradual supplanting of the mother-goddess by Male deities was a comprehensible but unnatural evolution wherein the men did not actually create anything of their own artifice but rather took control of the creative process begun by others, in this case the mother-goddess deities.

This power structure more closely resembled the matriarchal power structure that typified most human civilizations. Whereas in antiquity female-shaman-wizards possessing the divine connexion between fertility and the spirit world, (which men could not possess), were the most powerful socio-political figures now men revised cosmology over tens of thousands of years to mirror the tribal structures they established through warfare and political aggression. When the French painter Paul Gauguin painted his impressions of Polynesian culture in Martinique in the late 1890's he became fascinated by the local tradition of the female fertility deity Hina marveling at how it had managed to survive in what he viewed a a virtually pristine example of prototypical human civilization. Gauguin painted the figure of Hina in many of his paintings from that period as a testament to his homage for the mother-goddess cosmology he found still in existence there.

Today we are so far removed from the history of the religions we observe that we hold on to very little of our prototypical reverence for femininity and motherhood. Western Christianity, for example, reveres the mythic Mother Mary merely as the bearer of the savior of men but leaves her powerless in her impregnation by a male-deity who literally gave her no choice in the determination that she would bear this child we call Jesus. Feminists have overlooked this aspect of western religion as a critical defining point in the evolution of a cosmology that edited them out of socio-religious power structure of men.

In contemporary human civilization what is called “The Immaculate Conception”, would have been likened to forcing a woman to be artificially inseminated and then paying her off by cleaning up what could interpreted as rape and giving her divine celebrity status as a constellations prize.

For over two centuries the Catholic church has packaged this myth as an "Immaculate Conception" but in modern courts a woman similarly impregnated against her will compelled to succumb to the dictates of a man intent on forcing upon her a pregnancy of his own will could sue that man for sexual assault. But that is another story… Today women still fight to regain their equality with men having once been their lords.

The purpose of Mother’s Day is to revere the women that bought us all into existence and nurtured us to become the magnificent men and women we have become. The impact that our mothers have had upon the development of our human psyche is inestimable… we owe not only our physical but also our psychological existence to these women who served as mothers for their children. Many children will attest to a profound emotional connection they have had with their mother that did not require words… Mothers magically knew what was going on with their children perhaps due to the intimacy of birth when mother and child are principally one organism sharing the same body.

That is why the bond between a mother and her child can never be severed, there will always be some profound connexion between a mother and her children. For those fortunate enough to have mothers who are still living my advice to you is to cherish every instant you have and will share with them, hold close to their wisdom and shower them with the same unquestioned love and devotion they have given to you all of your life. Do everything you can to make their days upon this earth beautiful, it is their turn to be pampered and fussed over… your mother should be the queen of your existence and if you are married then your spouse must respect this relationship because it is one that is fundamental to humanity.

If your mother is no longer living please cherish her memory on this day asking yourself if you have become the amazing human being that she envisaged. Perhaps there is a mother who has been neglected by her children and you must make it your mission to find her and act as a surrogate child to celebrate and cherish her so that her motherhood is exalted. I say this because mother’s day is not really just one day out of the year it is every day. We must celebrate and cherish the tradition of motherhood every day! Every day should sacred to the homage of motherhood… So if asked what is the true purpose of Mother's Day one might answer that it is to recognize the creative mystery, beauty, humanity and power of women who have unfalteringly nurtured the human race through it's difficult struggle for survival on this planet and on a personal level it is a celebration of the mother who has so closely and lovingly shaped us into a loving, breathing, thinking organism when we could not even care for ourselves and in spite of those who might not care four us whenever we could...