Mother goddess
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Mother goddess is a term used to refer to a goddess who represents motherhood, fertility, creation, or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother.
Many different goddesses have represented motherhood in one way or another, and some have been associated with the birth of humanity as a whole. Others have represented the fertility of the earth.
James Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) and others (such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Robert Graves and Marija Gimbutas) advance the idea that goddess worship in ancient Europe and the Aegean was descended from Pre-Indo-European neolithic matriarchies. Gimbutas argued that the thousands of female images from Old Europe (archaeology) represented a number of different groups of goddess symbolism, notably a "bird and snake" group associated with water, an "earth mother" group associated with birth, and a "stiff nude" group associated with death, as well as other groups.
See also
- Ananke
- Aphrodite
- Brigid
- Cybele
- Devi
- Durga
- Freyja
- Hecate
- Ishtar
- Juno
- Kali
- Kamakhya
- Laxmi
- Minerva
- Mut
- Nerthus
- Ops
- Potnia Theron
- Radha
- Rhea
- Shakti
- Tawaret
- Venus
- Yashoda
- Allat
- Breast shaped hill
- Çatalhöyük
- Dodona
- Dying-and-rising god
- God (male deity)
- God and gender
- Goddess
- Goddess movement
- Mother
- Petrosomatoglyph
- Shitala Devi
- Sky father
- The Hebrew Goddess, by Raphael Patai
- The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
- Thealogy
- When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone
