The Cult Of Mother Goddess

This book provides a complete historical overview of the Mother Goddess and her influence. All of the major female goddesses found throughout history are covered.

This is the first thorough account of the nature and the spread of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, and the first to present her worship soberly as a religion rather than sensationally as an orgiastic celebration of self-castrated priest-attendants.

Presents The Theology, Historical Evolution, Manifestations And Shrines Of The Divine Mother. 7 Chapters-Theology, Down The Ages, Manifestations, Shrines Guide To Devi Temples, Glossary. Bibliography And Index.

"In The cult of the mother-goddess, E.O. James brings together the evidence that is now available concerning the unique position occupied by the Goddess Cult in myth and ritual, especially in the Ancient Near East, India and the eastern Mediterranean, and has subjected it to critical examination. James first inquires into the antecedents of the Cult from its earliest manifestations in the sculptured female statuettes commonly called "Venuses," to its subsequent modes of expression in Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. The association of the unmarried Mother, personifying the divine principle of maternity, with a male partner in the guise of the Young God as her son or spouse, is next considered as the Cult developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in Syria and Anatolia, in Iran and India, and in Crete and the Aegean. Against this background is set the syncretistic figure of the Magna Mater in Phrygia and the Greco-Oriental world, together with her mysteries as a dominant feature in the Hellenistic Age and the Roman Empire. Finally, the interpretation of the Cult in Christendom is examined in its mystical and theological content in relation to the Church as the Mater Ecclesia and to the Theotokos as the Madonna. The importance of the Cult is becoming increasingly recognized not only by archaeologists, but also in a number of related disciplines; there can be no doubt that a theme of such permanent significance demands the serious and objective treatment it has received in this volume"--Dust jacket flaps.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.

This study of various female deities of Graeco-Roman antiquity is the first to provide evidence that primary goddesses were conceived of as virgin mothers in the earliest layers of their cults. By taking feminist analysis of divinities further, this book provides a fresh angle on our understanding of these deities.

Papers presented at the national seminar on "The Cult of the Mother Goddess: Fictions and Facts", held at K.K.S. Women's College in 2008.