The Great Mother
The Venus of Willendorf represents fertility and dates from the Neolithic. The breasts and abdomen have been intentionally exaggerated for symbolic purposes: this is the great mother goddess.
Creator gods are, in general, masculine. However, part of the work of creation is delegated to goddesses quite frequently.
Among the Keres of the USA, for example, Utsiti, the creator god who made the world from a clot of his own blood, sends his daughter Iatiky and her sister to make the earth fertile. Iatiky sends her son to lead the people into this world. Afterwards, the goddess and her sister sing the Song of Creation, scattering seeds and images from their song that they draw from a basket given to them by Spider Woman. (see mitologiaamericana).
Is the earth always feminine?
"Erce, Erce, Erce, Mother of the earth" Charm formula of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Despite the evident relationship between the fertility of the fields and human procreation, the earth is not always feminine in mythologies. The Egyptians, for example, worshipped Geb as god of the Earth and his wife-sister Nut as goddess of the heavens.
The cult of the feminine: pleasure and pain
Perhaps it was in India where the cult of the eternal female was strongest. There she is worshipped in various forms under the name of Mahadevi (plural), the great goddess. Devi is the wife of Shiva and is worshipped as the merciful Parvati or Uma, as the fierce and vengeful Durga or Kali.
"In your hands lie pleasure and pain. The shadow of death and the elixir of eternal life are yours" Sankara, 9th century
The association between pleasure and pain is not limited to India. The great goddess Ishtar of ancient Mesopotamia (see mitologiasumeria) also united within herself the goddess of love and the goddess of war. This duality is reflected in the poem of Gilgamesh, because first she desires him, and when he rejects her, she inflicts a terrible revenge upon him.
Isis
"I am Nature,
the Universal Mother,
mistress of all the elements,
primordial daughter of time,
sovereign of all spiritual things,
queen of the dead,
queen, also, of the immortals,
the single manifestation of all
the gods and goddesses that exist.
Isis speaks with the unmistakable voice of the Great Goddess to Lucius, the protagonist of “The Golden Ass,” the novel by Apuleius, when he is initiated into her cult.
From the Neolithic to the Bronze Age
During the Neolithic, the focal figure of all mythology and cult was the bountiful Earth goddess, as mother and sustainer of life and receiver of the dead for their subsequent rebirth. In the earliest period of worship (perhaps around 7500 BC in the Levant) such a mother goddess can only be regarded as a local patroness of fertility, as many anthropologists suppose. However, even in the temples of the earliest civilizations (Sumer, approximately 3500–2350 BC), the Great Goddess of supreme veneration was certainly far more than that. Just as in the East, she acquired the dimension of a metaphysical symbol: the principal personification of the power of Space, Time and Matter, within whose limits all beings originate and die—the substance of their bodies, which shapes their lives and thoughts, returns them to her womb after death. And everything that had form or name, including God, personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful, was her creature within her womb.
Towards the end of the Bronze Age, and with greater emphasis at the beginning of the Iron Age, the ancient cosmologies and mythologies of the mother goddess were radically transformed, reinterpreted and even suppressed by patriarchal tribal warriors, whose traditions have reached the West through Greek myths and the biblical narratives of the Old and New Testament. Two geographical areas were the lands of origin of this modification of the original matriarchal tradition: the Semites, from the Syrian-Arabian deserts, and, across the broad European plains, the Hellenic Aryans.
Bibliography:
Campbell, The Masks of God, vol. 1. Occidental Mythology