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Updated: June 19, 2025
We may find in the religious sexual festivals, common to all civilisations, abundant confirmation of these facts. As one illustration out of many that might be chosen, I will refer to the account given by Prof. K. Pearson of the festival of Sakäēs, held in Babylon in honour of the great goddess Mylitta, who was essentially a mother-goddess of fertility.
Prithivi, the Earth, in like manner, retains her physical attributes, and does not become the nourishing mother of all things. Whether this fact is to be explained from early Hindu views of the social position of women, or from some other idea, is uncertain. It is probable that in early times every tribe or district had its female divine representative of fertility, an embryonic mother-goddess.
And thus Mary, our Lady of Sorrows, pure and undefiled, "the church's paradox," became the ideal of man. Although Christianity thus took over and embodied in its doctrines the cult of the mother-goddess, at the same time it condemned all the rites which had accompanied the worship of the fertility goddesses in all the pagan religions.
Whatever disillusionments may come about other women later in life, the mother ideal thus established remains a constant part of man's unconscious motivations. It is perhaps possible that this infantile picture of a being all-wise, all-tender, all-sacrificing, has within it enough emotional force to create the demand for a mother-goddess in any religion.
Syria had been the home of certain mysteries from an early day, for we read in the Old Testament of women mourning the death of Tammuz, the god of vegetation who dies and is born again. Now Adonis or Attis was the corresponding god of Phrygia, and all people of Syria were well acquainted with the cult which showed the mother-goddess mourning for her son.
How it extended from the East over the nations of the West, how it grew and spread, may be read in ecclesiastical histories. Everywhere it seems to have found in the human heart some deep sympathy deeper far than mere theological doctrine could reach ready to accept it; and in every land the ground prepared for it in some already dominant idea of a mother-Goddess, chaste, beautiful, and benign.
Her historical connection with the great Asian earth-goddess, the Mother-Goddess, is uncertain. +785+. The group of deities that may be called maiden goddesses is of peculiar interest. A maiden goddess is originally an independent deity who, for whatever reason, has not been brought by the myth-makers into marriage relations with a male deity.
Allatu would, according to this view, be a personification of the 'earth. But a factor that also enters into play is the notion of productivity and fertility which gave rise to the conception of the great mother-goddess, Ishtar. Allatu is correlated to Ishtar. From the earth comes vegetation. The origin of mankind, too, is traced to the earth, and to the earth mankind ultimately returns.
Later on, after her marriage when shock had deprived her of her mind, these priests renewed the attempt, this time in Egypt, and succeeded. In the end we rescued her in Central Africa, where she was playing the part of the Mother-goddess Isis and even wearing her ancient robes. Next she and her husband came home with their minds turned towards a branch of study that took them back to Egypt.
Even the Chinese had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms ; and the ancient Etruscans the same. R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.
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