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The Faces of the Goddess
The belief that the earliest humans worshipped a sovereign, nurturing, maternal earth goddess is a popular one. It has been taken up as fact by the media, who routinely depict modern goddess-worshippers as reviving the ancient religions of our ancestors. Feminist scholars contend that, in the primordial religions, the Great Mother was honored as the primary, creative force, giving birth to the world, granting fertility to both crops and humans, and ruling supreme over her family pantheon. The peaceful, matriarchal farming societies that worshipped her were eventually wiped out or subjugated by nomadic, patriarchal warrior tribes such as the early Hebrews, who brought their male God to overthrow the Great Mother: the first step in the creation and perpetuation of a brutal, male-dominated society and its attendant oppression and degradation of women.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz sets out to test this hypothesis by examining the real female deities of early human cultures. She finds no trace of the Great Mother in their myths or in their worship. From the Inuit of the Arctic tundra, whose harsh life even today most closely mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the rich cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz looks at a wide range of goddesses who are called Mother, or who give birth in their myths. She finds that these goddesses have varying origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and other divinities, rather than stemming from a common Mother Goddess archetype. For instance, Sedna, the powerful goddess whose chopped-off fingers became the seals and fish that were the Inuits' chief source of food, had nothing to do with human fertility. Likewise, while various Mexican goddesses ruled over healing, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them either embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the crops: for that the Mexicans looked to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor were the rituals of these goddesses nurturing or peaceful. And Motz closely examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater most often cited as an example of a powerful mother goddess. Hers were the last of the great pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall before Christianity. But Cybele herself never gives birth, nor does she concern herself with aiding women in childbirth or childrearing. She is not herself a mother, and the male character figuring most prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste companion. Tellingly, Cybele's priests dedicate themselves to her by castrating themselves, thus mimicking Attis's death--a very odd way to venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict these earlier goddesses as peaceful and nurturing mothers, as is often done, is to deny them their own complex and sophisticated nature as beings who were often violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who revelled in their eroticism and were worshipped as harlots. The idea of a nurturing Mother Goddess is very powerful. In this challenging book, however, Motz shows that She is a product of our own age, not of earlier ones. By discarding this simplistic and worn-out paradigm, we can open the door to a new way of thinking about feminine spirituality and religious experience.
In The Faces of the Goddess, Lotte Motz sets out to test this hypothesis by examining the real female deities of early human cultures. She finds no trace of the Great Mother in their myths or in their worship. From the Inuit of the Arctic tundra, whose harsh life even today most closely mirrors the earliest hunter gatherers, to the rich cultures of the sunny Fertile Crescent and the islands of Japan, Motz looks at a wide range of goddesses who are called Mother, or who give birth in their myths. She finds that these goddesses have varying origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors, and other divinities, rather than stemming from a common Mother Goddess archetype. For instance, Sedna, the powerful goddess whose chopped-off fingers became the seals and fish that were the Inuits' chief source of food, had nothing to do with human fertility. Likewise, while various Mexican goddesses ruled over healing, women's crafts, motherhood and childbirth, and functioned as tribal protectors or divine ancestors, none of them either embodied the earth itself or granted fertility to the crops: for that the Mexicans looked to the male gods of maize and of rain. Nor were the rituals of these goddesses nurturing or peaceful. And Motz closely examines the Anatolian goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater most often cited as an example of a powerful mother goddess. Hers were the last of the great pagan mysteries of the Mediterranean civilizations to fall before Christianity. But Cybele herself never gives birth, nor does she concern herself with aiding women in childbirth or childrearing. She is not herself a mother, and the male character figuring most prominently in her myths is Attis, her chaste companion. Tellingly, Cybele's priests dedicate themselves to her by castrating themselves, thus mimicking Attis's death--a very odd way to venerate a goddess of fertility.
To depict these earlier goddesses as peaceful and nurturing mothers, as is often done, is to deny them their own complex and sophisticated nature as beings who were often violent and vengeful, delighting in sacrifice, or who revelled in their eroticism and were worshipped as harlots. The idea of a nurturing Mother Goddess is very powerful. In this challenging book, however, Motz shows that She is a product of our own age, not of earlier ones. By discarding this simplistic and worn-out paradigm, we can open the door to a new way of thinking about feminine spirituality and religious experience.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published August 21, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 8, 2025
سومین کتابی که در مورد الههپرستی و مادرسالاری گوش دادم. این به وضوح از دو تای قبلی محققانهتر بود، بعد چک کردم دیدم مال انتشارات دانشگاه آکسفورده.
حرف کتاب اینه که بر خلاف نظریۀ معروف که میگه جوامع پیشاتاریخی مادرسالاری بودن و یک الهۀ مادر رو میپرستیدن که همه چیز رو به دنیا آورده، وقتی در عمل به شواهد نگاه میکنیم چنین الگویی نمیبینیم.
اولاً شکل پدید اومدن جهان در فرهنگهای مختلف خیلی متنوعه، از قربانی یه موجود اولیه و خلق جهان گرفته تا شکل گرفتن جهان از عناصر بیجان اولیه مثل یخ و آتش. فرایند تولد در خیلی از فرهنگها نه تنها مقدس نیست، بلکه آلوده کننده است و زن بعد از زایمان باید مدتی دور از دیگران باشه تا پاک بشه. الهههایی که به تولد مرتبط هستن هم خیلی وقتها نه موجوداتی مقدس، بلکه ارواحی خبیث هستن که باید بهشون هدیه داد تا به زن و نوزاد آسیب نزنن.
ثانیاً الههها در اساطیر باستانی و جوامع بدوی، نقشهای بسیار متنوعی دارن که قابل تقلیل به مادری نیست: از جنگجو و حامی زنان تا فراهم آورندۀ خوراک و برقرار کنندۀ نظم جهان. در واقع خیلی کم به الهههایی با نقش «مادر نخستین» بر میخوریم.
بخش زیادی از کتاب به معرفی نقشها یا چهرههای مختلف الههها در فرهنگهای مختلف اختصاص داره.
حرف کتاب اینه که بر خلاف نظریۀ معروف که میگه جوامع پیشاتاریخی مادرسالاری بودن و یک الهۀ مادر رو میپرستیدن که همه چیز رو به دنیا آورده، وقتی در عمل به شواهد نگاه میکنیم چنین الگویی نمیبینیم.
اولاً شکل پدید اومدن جهان در فرهنگهای مختلف خیلی متنوعه، از قربانی یه موجود اولیه و خلق جهان گرفته تا شکل گرفتن جهان از عناصر بیجان اولیه مثل یخ و آتش. فرایند تولد در خیلی از فرهنگها نه تنها مقدس نیست، بلکه آلوده کننده است و زن بعد از زایمان باید مدتی دور از دیگران باشه تا پاک بشه. الهههایی که به تولد مرتبط هستن هم خیلی وقتها نه موجوداتی مقدس، بلکه ارواحی خبیث هستن که باید بهشون هدیه داد تا به زن و نوزاد آسیب نزنن.
ثانیاً الههها در اساطیر باستانی و جوامع بدوی، نقشهای بسیار متنوعی دارن که قابل تقلیل به مادری نیست: از جنگجو و حامی زنان تا فراهم آورندۀ خوراک و برقرار کنندۀ نظم جهان. در واقع خیلی کم به الهههایی با نقش «مادر نخستین» بر میخوریم.
بخش زیادی از کتاب به معرفی نقشها یا چهرههای مختلف الههها در فرهنگهای مختلف اختصاص داره.
October 3, 2019
More useful as an encyclopedic reference of a handful of goddessdoms and more annoying as an attempt at academic polemics. Motz went out of her way to try and deride, denigrate and disprove the theories of others (primarily the archaeologist Gimbutas and the scholar Neumann) about a pre-Christian Great Mother cult that supposedly once-encompassed much of what would become Christian Eurasia. She isn't very successful at debunking this idea because if she isn't backwards-projecting contemporary anthropological evidence she is openly contradicting herself! She tries to make a distinction between various goddesses worshipped for reasons of fertility and abundance and the idea of a nurturing, overarching Mother figure. For example, she avers that the title "mother" need not describe the goddess in question as a biological procreator. Fine. Too bad the goddesses she invokes have everything to do with birth, fertility, and procreation to the point where in one paragraph she quotes the myth of the "Water Mother [who] brings the babies" and then on the next page dismisses that as having anything to do with maternity or provision!
Whatever. The book is still useful as a one-stop catalogue for some particular pantheons, including Latvia, Mexico, and Japan, the latter two hardly fitting into Great Mother theses at large except maybe in her imagination...
Whatever. The book is still useful as a one-stop catalogue for some particular pantheons, including Latvia, Mexico, and Japan, the latter two hardly fitting into Great Mother theses at large except maybe in her imagination...
December 11, 2025
Motz tackles head-on the proposed mythological backing for a theory of a Goddess-centered matriarchal origin of civilization. She chronicles the myths and context of powerful goddesses of cultures across the globe, pointing out with studious rigor all that they show and not just the selective presentations of those that try to make them fit into the predetermined Great Mother cult. She zeroes in, for example, on the title itself of “Mother” which though ubiquitous almost never refers to any child-bearing aspect, showing it instead as the honorific deemed appropriate for powerful/dangerous goddesses. She similarly gives a masterclass in what pre-agrarian societies, such as the Inuit, can demonstrate regarding the spiritual beliefs of peoples exposed to the sheer brutality of nature and the sheer impossibility of imagining a benevolent and nurturing Mother Earth in those conditions.
August 9, 2026
This is brilliant!
June 11, 2015
This book should not be read by devout believers in the universal Goddess or Earth Mother. It attacks that religion's center as a modern theology, one that 'flattens' the diversity of form, purpose and personality of archaic goddesses, and overstates the independence of pre-modern women in conception and safe child birthing.
The evidence for the archaic diversity, and its relation to the concerns and lives of pre-modern women is well sampled: chapters cover northern Eurasia, northern North America, Latvia, old Mesopotamia, old Anatolia, pre-classical/ classical Greece, pre-Columbian México and Japan. The text proper is supplemented by numerous footnotes, which often go beyond sourcing. (In some cases opinion that does not support the chapter's themes is relegated to these footnotes; for example, Footnote 76 to Chapter 10. So the reader is advised not to skip them.)
There is an absence of similar depth of research in the assertions of the development of the Great Mother religion starting with 18th century scholars, or of the Goddess religion as supported by (re-)interpreted myths written by 20th century feminists. That is, the modern religion's statements about the past are well refuted by Lotte Motz, but the development of that modern religion is only sketched. This is disappointing.
The evidence for the archaic diversity, and its relation to the concerns and lives of pre-modern women is well sampled: chapters cover northern Eurasia, northern North America, Latvia, old Mesopotamia, old Anatolia, pre-classical/ classical Greece, pre-Columbian México and Japan. The text proper is supplemented by numerous footnotes, which often go beyond sourcing. (In some cases opinion that does not support the chapter's themes is relegated to these footnotes; for example, Footnote 76 to Chapter 10. So the reader is advised not to skip them.)
There is an absence of similar depth of research in the assertions of the development of the Great Mother religion starting with 18th century scholars, or of the Goddess religion as supported by (re-)interpreted myths written by 20th century feminists. That is, the modern religion's statements about the past are well refuted by Lotte Motz, but the development of that modern religion is only sketched. This is disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews