The Primordial Mothers

PEGI EYERS

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The women’s movement has evolved because the crisis of the eternal world is calling for the return of the Goddess to restore the balance of nature. Old forms and traditions are falling away, and new ideas and ancient systems that were interrupted by Empire are rising.  At a time when our collective Mother Earth is suffering from massive change and climate disaster, we are being summoned to rejuvenate the chthonic Old Ways that honor Earth Community. The feminine archetype is returning, as women everywhere continue to resist the patriarchy, fight for change, and reinstate the Goddess both within and without in acts of revolutionary love.

In recent years, the Divine Feminine has evolved through a monumental array of modalities, practices and Goddess Studies.  With a concise foundational myth, and core principles of equity, egalitarianism, ecological sustainability and nature reverence, Goddess Feminism challenges the intersectional oppressions that have harmed all beings – both human and other-than-human. New explorations in rituals, ceremony, storytelling and the arts, and new paths of liberation in social justice, anti-racism, environmental protection and earth remediation, are all empowering aspects of Ecofeminism and Goddess Spirituality. The principle of the Divine Feminine is both immanent and transcendent, and the many diverse Goddesses we are drawn to, or called by - all precious and beloved - evoke the same cosmic principles of universal love, creative fertility and natural abundance. The “Old Shes” have been there all along - waiting to hold us again, to welcome us home - and in return we are embracing them with our whole body, mind and soul!

As I respond to the call of the Goddess in my own life, I have been compelled to seek a deeper level, to bypass the millennia of patriarchal occupation and go right to the source, to a time of our most ancient beginnings.   As kindred spirits, many of us today are ​ feeling the Great Mystery of our motherlines reverberating in our souls, and to trust that the Primordial Mothers - the weavers embedded in the land- are summoning us back to our most ancient selves, to our Ancestors and wild nature. Tied to the cycles of the land and the truth of our own bodies, the Primordial Mothers are the givers of birth and death, and our fundamental reality. Even in the modern era we are still “Women of the Earth” and our true power is found in our ancient communal past, when we remember, know and feel our symbiotic connection to the Primordial Mothers, and the sacred soil essence our biological bodies arose from, so many aeons ago.

But who or what are the Primordial Mothers? In ancient times when the planet was new and life was just emerging from the sea, the Mothers were birthing primal life forms from the elements and
waters. Holders of the oldest consciousness on the planet, these Creatrixes moved in fluid streams of energy and through the primal “muck” that evolved into earthy and material bodies. From the beginning, the lifegiving properties and fertility of their transmissions were held within the collective “prima materia” of the Divine Feminine, an eternal voice in the wisdom body that still reverberates today. Each one of us continues to hold this deep connection, and as we embody this truth in our lives, we return to a necessary symbiotic relationship with Gaia. This is the ancestral wisdom that can guide our choices and actions from a deep energetic and cellular level, in our current era of potential collapse and environmental destruction.

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Knowing that the Primordial Mothers still surround us is comforting knowledge indeed! Forms found in nature are especially evocative of Goddess energy. Mountains, mounds or rocks shaped like a woman’s face, curves, or body, such as Silbury Hill in England, were further developed by Neolithic peoples into gigantic Goddess sculptures with temples and stone circles. Paintings deep in caverns such as Chauvet Caves at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in France honored the sacred womb principle, and monumental earthworks in Crete and Malta were built into the landscape to evoke the sense of a female body. Even sacred sites in my own region such as Kinowagwapkong (The Teaching Rocks, or Peterborough Petroglyphs) were built or carved over underground streams, symbolizing the underworld womb and source of all life. Indigenous and earth-emergent societies everywhere honored the life-creating power of the Sacred Feminine, and revered women in their cultures as an extension of the miraculous divinity of creation.  Women were held sacred, and their fertility and nurturing abilities were known to be exactly the same as the Primordial Mothers who created all life.

To our Paleolithic Ancestors, it was obvious that women, with their mysterious cycles, performed the same functions as Gaia, who was the source of all nourishment, protection and procreative power. Contrary to the Abrahamic religions that dominated history (“Hisstory”) and subjugated women, when we look to nature it is self evident that the divine presence emanating from, and animating the natural world is feminine - abundant, fertile, yin, cyclic, ever renewing, forgiving, and above all, loving and nurturing (“Herstory”). All things are born and nurtured by a mother, and this love and nurture is the great cosmic principle of all life. It is so obvious, yet our civilization, based on 2000-plus years of patriarchal rule, has tried very hard to conceal this life-affirming and sacred truth. These efforts are now ringing hollow, and women everywhere are reasserting our primal creativity, and reshaping societies in the process. Just like childbirth and the other chthonic feminine powers, this undeniable process is both laborious and far-reaching!

The tenets of Goddess Spirituality hold all life as sacred, bond us to the land, and give us a holistic view of Earth Community. We are connected with all life, from the surging rivers, to the smallest cells, to the plants, the animals, the birds, the reptiles, the insects, and to the great flowing atmospheres of infinite space. Seeking our timeless bonds to the Primordial Ones, we yearn for a way of life when we are immersed in natural processes every waking moment, and embedded in ancient knowing. That is why locating our mtDNA signature across time and space, and membership in one of the great Motherhood Clans is so incredibly empowering. With immense joy (and a mtDNA test) I found my belonging within the largest and most resilient Celtic group, the mtDNA-based Helena Clan, one of the world clans descended from “Mitochondrial Eve” as traced by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve. My deep time ancestors originated in the Lascaux region of France 32,000 years ago, and even though I may never fully know the lifeways of my distant relatives, I can still resonate with their treasures, and the beauty of their legacy to the world.    Being close to the textures of the earth, walking barefoot on the sand, feeling clay on my hands or body, viewing petroglyphs and working with red ochre or earth pigments, can instantly transport me back, to my foundational earth connection.     

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Rooting ourselves deep in Earth of every texture and hue, we   express Her Body as Our Body.

Earth as foundation, Earth as matrix, Earth as crucible, Earth as
lightning rod, Earth as watercourse, Earth as birthing platform,
Earth as sacred adornment, Earth as sweet bed of fern and flower,
Earth as woven bier, and Earth as joyful resting place - our bonds to
the land will never fade. The centuries fall away when we come faceto-
face with the “prima materica” that patiently waits all around us,
in grotto, ocean-side cave and deep within the forest floor. What
better way to shed the trappings of "modernity" for a time, and
connect with what is primal and real, both in ourselves and the land?​
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​It is time that we honor the Primordial Mothers, the clan leaders who founded the countless generations of humanity – the ones who possessed the skill, intelligence and resilience for our communities to survive and thrive. We are being summoned at this time to align with the components of ancestral knowledge systems, to reclaim our power and realize the sacredness of our bodies, minds, voices and   spirits, and to recover the beliefs and practices our Ancestors were forced to give up long ago. At the foundation of our essential return,  aspects of ancestral identity can be reclaimed from ancient   matriarchies and Indigenous societies worldwide, traditions that   were guarded through the ages, preserved and passed down through  oral traditions, parables, poetic sagas, fairy tales, folklore and myth.   Learning to put the “we” ahead of “me” is at the heart of the Divine   Feminine, and the wisdom from primeval societies hold beliefs and  values that can benefit us today, in our quest for (re)emergent  Goddess myths and collaborative community. The resurgence of   matriarchal ethics in our time gives us the courage, wisdom and joy    that is needed to revitalize ourselves and the world, to recover what has been lost and grieve what cannot be recovered, and ultimately, to   restore much-needed balance to the world.

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RESOURCES
Austin, Debra, Daughter of Kura: A Novel, A Touchstone Book, 2009

Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, Beacon Press,   1993

Dashu, Max, Women’s Power (DVD), Suppressed Histories Archives, 2008

Eisler, Riane, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, HarperCollins, 1988

Gimbutas, Marija, The Civilization of the Goddess, HarperCollins, 1991

​Goettner-Abendroth, Heide, editor, Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past Present and Future, Inanna Publications, 2009

Hillyer, Carolyn, Sacred House: Where Women Weave Words into the Earth, Seventh Wave Books, 2010

Pollack, Rachel, The Body of the Goddess: Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture, Element Books/Vega, 2003

Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 20th Anniversary Edition, HarperOne, 2011

Stone, Merlin, When God Was a Woman, Mariner Books, 1976

Sykes, Bryan, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science that Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Wells, Spencer, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project, National Geographic Society, 2006

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"Primordial Revival" was originally published in  She Summons:  Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, and  Spirituality?    A Mago Books anthology,  Edited by Kaalii Cargill and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, June Solstice, 2021.       >Mago Books<