It is first recorded in Anatolia in the form of a pottery die stamp 6,000 years before Christ. The diamond symbolises in geometric and abstract form the power of women as the source of all life. Perhaps it sprang originally from the W created by a woman’s heavy, milk laden breasts and the M formed by the swelling pregnant abdomen between thighs which are spread wide apart.
A few years back I had seen an extraordinary exhibition of birth symbols from Eurasia and the Western Pacific in the Museum for Textiles in Toronto. Now I wanted to track down more of these symbols in all their brilliant colour and variety in Turkish carpets and woven wall hangings. And because the worship of the Mother Goddess which started in Anatolia manifested itself at different times in many different forms as it spread to other Mediterranean cultures – the Earth Mother, the Many Breasted One, the Queen of Night, the Moon Goddess, the Huntress – my search would also take me to museums to discover statues and carvings of her.
The Sumerians called the life-giving Goddess Ma and Marienna, the Hittites, Kubaba and Heba, the Syrians and Arabs Lat, the Cretans Rhoea, and the Phrygians, Cybele. The cult of Cybele, goddess of fertility and of all creation, spread from Anatolia to the whole of Greece. She reigned alone, lions on either side, until she took as her lover her son, the young God Attis. Later still, Zeus, the father god, entered the scene and a divine trinity was created of which she was the central figure. A mountain sanctuary on the slopes of Mount Panayir was from prehistoric times the shrine of this Earth Goddess and statues of Cybele were placed in niches in the rock. Eleven of them are in the beautiful little museum at Ephesus.
But Ephesus was above all the centre of the worship of Artemis, the greatest Mother Goddess of them all, virgin queen, Goddess of Childbirth and of perilous ventures. She was the embodiment of the energy of creation, no nurturing mother, but the strength of birth itself. And though fertilised by semen offered through the castration and sacrifice of bulls, she belonged to no man. Beside her the statues of Priapus, each with an enormous erect penis weighing down his body, are like some Blackpool pier postcard, a grotesque caricature of sex, for she is the beauty and power of Life Incarnate.
Her first shrine was a hollow in a tree trunk with her statue just a block of wood inside it. Her most splendid was the temple at Ephesus which was four times larger than the Parthenon, with ceilings of cedar and gates of cypress.
The city of Ephesus was built in her honour and was the centre of the Ionian culture which formed the basis of the whole of western civilisation. It flourished seven centuries before Christ, until Athens, under Pericles, became ascendant.
The earliest surviving effigies of Artemis have an almost Egyptian stiffness typical of archaic Greek sculpture. There is in the museum at Selςuk a small gold statue, haunting in its simplicity, which shows a moon-faced young girl standing straight and tall with a secret smile on her lips. In full light her eyes are wide with amazement, but in gentle light her lids seem to lower and it appears that she withdraws into herself, in serene contemplation of her own feminine being.
The two statues of the Goddess dug from her temple still have a rigidity about them which owed more to her origin as a log than to any Egyptian influence. She reached out her arms to us. A triple row of breasts had budded and her whole body blossomed in a splendid exuberance of living things: acorns, pine cones, vines, roses, lions, griffins, deer and bees, which traditionally were her servants. She had all the sweetness, beauty, richness and power of life.
Yet the Goddess was not quite what she seems. Those breasts had no nipples. ‘Pomegranates’ said one guide. But pomegranates are not that shape. ‘Eggs’ said another. Nor are eggs. They are testicles. For originally the priest in her shrine had to castrate himself and offer his seed to the Goddess. The sacrifice of bulls to the Goddess goes back more than 6,000 years and perhaps it was a priest who suggested that bulls’ testicles would be better still. Originally they were embalmed and hung round her neck. Later they were immortalised in marble.
Artemis is no comfortable Goddess and though women stand staring at her, I noticed some men turned quickly away. There are those who are disappointed in her because she does not conform to the conventional idea of feminine beauty. ‘I much prefer Aphrodite rising from the waves’, one man told me. For Aphrodite is all curves and gentleness. She is a sex object. Artemis is the energy and ripeness of creation.
Later Artemis became the Greek Diana, Goddess of the Womb and the Hunt, who controls the rhythms of menstruation. And later still her countenance changed to become the Virgin Mary. Legend has it that after Jesus’ death St John brought Mary to live in his house on the mountains of Ephesus, and that she died here.
It was in Ephesus that the Ecumenical Council was held in 431AD at the Basilica of St John when Mary was first proclaimed the Mother of God. And it was here that the Pope knelt and worshipped at the feet of the Goddess who has for thousands of years been the Great Earth Mother, and whose prehistoric origin was the geometric code of the hooked diamond denoting female power and fertility.
This is the shape still woven by women into cloth, rugs and carpets from Turkey to as far as the Western Pacific today. For weaving is above all women’s business. In Turkey they spin and dye the wool and weave the carpets, though it is the men who sell them. In the isolated mountain villages girls must remain as daughters in the family until they are passed on to another man’s family as wives. They have few recreations or other ways in which they can express themselves, and into these rugs, which form their dowry, they weave all their hopes and dreams.
Men don’t understand these symbols and when I asked, seem vaguely uneasy about them. They suggested they are ‘rams’ horns’, ‘stars’ or ‘flowers’, or that they were there to ‘keep away the evil eye’. Occasionally one would say that the symbols are ‘about the family’ or putting it in the context of Muslim religion, point to a border with a key pattern or snake-like curves in a design and say that it is ‘the belt of Fatima’. (She was Muhammad’s daughter and women pray to her for fertility). The significance of the birth symbol was hidden.
But it isn’t only spinning and weaving that women do. The whole peasant economy is built on female labour: and hard labour at that. Women are picking and sorting cotton, carrying heavy loads on the back of their necks, plaiting straw mats, digging ditches, trudging and toiling, as well as tending children, scrubbing laundry on bare rocks, sweeping and cleaning and preparing the family meal, while many men sit drinking in the cafes from morning till night. They only get stuck into work when it involves machinery, like tractors, or the excitement of selling carpets. The athletic contests of the Hellenic era have been transferred to the streets of harbour towns, and the ancient songs and sagas changed to sales patter. Young men, nattily dressed, with gold chains around their swarthy necks and rings on their fingers, fresh for the fray as each ship docks, compete for the tourist trade and proclaim the wonders inside their emporiums.
Compared with that, women’s work was very dull indeed. Yet all peasant societies have been based on woman’s labour and while men are off doing the glamorous things, like hunting and shooting, they have developed survival techniques and shouldered responsibility for the basic provision of food. One writer, tracing the culture of the Anatolian village of Catal Huyuk 8,000 years ago, says, ‘Women and children could collect enough grain in three weeks to feed a family for an entire year. The men would return from the hunting or fishing camp to find the home base filled and overflowing with grain … If we wonder how easily men are threatened by women … perhaps we would do well to think back on the origins of agriculture.’43 He believes that because woman was so formidable the origin of agriculture, instead of destroying the religion of the Great Goddess of the Upper Paleolithic, produced a new form of the Earth Mother.
A New Baby
The carpet merchant’s wife had a baby five days ago. Ann was a Canadian he met when he was in charge of the firm’s jewellery department and stopped her in the street to try and sell her
a harem ring. For the birth she was provided with the best of everything, including a private obstetrician who drugged her senseless for the delivery, when she wanted to be awake and aware. Now she had breastfeeding difficulties and her nipples were sore and bleeding. Other women were telling her that her milk might not be good for the baby and her mother-in-law was worried that the baby’s sucking is feeble. Her doctor had ordered her to give regular sugar water and to take the baby off the breast for 24 hours, but her breast was now swollen and hard and she was in pain. I offered to go to see her.
They lived with the husband’s mother and his brother in a miniscule ‘summer house’ on the hill above Kusadasi. It must have been impossible to get any privacy or for the couple even to talk alone together. Whereas a Turkish bride might have resigned herself to this, it must have been hard on a Canadian woman.
But the mother was busy with the meal downstairs and Ann and I sorted out that the baby wasn’t really ‘fixed’ and was chewing on the end of her nipple, instead of getting a satisfying mouthful. Hence the soreness and pain, the desultory sucking and the mass of impacted milk. I explained that the baby needed to draw the nipple into the back of her mouth and she could tell if she had done this because when she sucked her ears wiggled! It was a joy to get the baby on. Ann said the sucking didn’t hurt her at all now, and the baby was having a gorgeous feed.
It was not just a technical problem. Ann was anxious and torn between Turkish traditional ways of caring for new babies and her modern baby books. Babies in Turkey were tightly swaddled, arms as well as legs and body, for 40 days. The mother did not take the baby out of the home during this time. She must not be visited by any other woman who had recently had a baby or, later, go to see a new mother, lest the baby became ill. Ann would have liked to take her baby out of doors. This shocked the other women. Fear of the ‘Evil Eye’ being set on a baby is an expression of the reality of the risk taken by babies in this culture. Two hundred and twenty-five out of every 1,000 babies died before they reached their first birthday, either at birth or in the months afterwards. Ann had to cope with the orders laid down by her doctor, too. He represented the modern ‘scientific’ way of doing things. This not only conflicted with traditional Turkish ways but also with her spontaneous feelings as a mother. From what she told me of the doctor’s advice I guessed that he had studied in the United States about 20 years ago. Aziz, the baby’s father, had been told that he must not kiss his daughter in case he gave her ‘microbes’. Her mouth must be painted with antiseptic to prevent thrush. There was to be no unnecessary cuddling and, above all, the mother must not take the baby into bed with her.
There was a meal waiting: fish, green peppers, crisp cheese pastries, yoghurt and grapes. No wine, of course, because they were Muslim, but glasses of tea afterwards. In the little room there was Ann, Saki, her brother, the mother, my husband and me and the TV set on non-stop and dominating the conversation. It seemed a crowd. Ann had left the sleeping baby upstairs, but her mother-in-law was obviously anxious about this and fetched the child. She had wrapped her tightly in a blanket as if swaddled, so that there was now a stiff, solid little bundle which she could hold in the way she is used to handling babies. All attention was on the baby’s eyes. The rest was motionless, like a wooden doll. When the baby opened her eyes she immediately talked to her. Turkish babies and small children get a great deal of stimulation, lots of touching and handling. They are the most important part of family life and the community as a whole. I noticed that wherever we had seen babies and toddlers fathers and grandfathers carry and play with them and everyone obviously took great delight in children.
The mother-in-law didn’t speak a word of English, so we smiled. I was worried that she disapproved of my influence on Ann, who was now critical of the 40 days seclusion. I suggested that in the life of women who labour in the fields, cook, clean, wash and carry heavy loads, a period when they don’t have to work for everyone else and can concentrate on their babies may be a very good thing. It was a tradition which should not be jettisoned without much thought, but it might be modified. I hoped I discussed it so that Ann could be more sympathetic towards what her husband’s mother was saying and that she, too, could understand Ann’s thinking better. When I left the mother embraced me and, far from being resentful, seemed to be very glad that I came.
The conflicts that Ann was going through are those which more and more Turkish women would obviously experience too, as male-dominated Western professionalism and technology changed the traditional patterns of peasant societies.
One of the things I wanted to do in Turkey was to see belly dancing. This was originally an important part of sacred rites enacted by women at the time of birth and there was evidence that it was also part of the worship of the ancient Anatolian Earth Mother. Even today in some countries belly dancing is practised in preparation for birth and during labour the women present dance around the mother and encourage her to make similar movements. Wendy Bonaventura, in her book The History of the Belly Dance reports that in Hawaii the hula is used as preparation for birth as it also is among Maori women in New Zealand and in parts of the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa. And where women no longer dance during labour the association of rhythmic pelvic movements with fertility persists in countries where young women get ready for marriage, wearing part of their dowry in the form of gold coins decorating their clothing, and dance with a strong pelvic movement to show that they are ripe for sex and childbirth. She quotes Armen Ohinin, writing about the belly dance in Egypt, as saying that in her youth it was ‘a poem of the mystery and pain of motherhood. In olden Asia which has kept the dance in its primitive purity, it represents maternity, the mysterious conception of life, the suffering and joy with which a new soul is brought into the world.’ Over the years this birth dance changed and was degraded to the belly dance of the modern cabaret. It is athletic but not sensuous. The only Turkish belly dancing I saw was, in fact, rather less erotic than the belly dancing I had seen in the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris! And when I consulted experts on Turkish culture I learnt that the modern Turkish dancer is descended from the dancers who were in each Sultan’s household and called on to delight, entertain and stimulate jaded appetites, rather than those who danced in worship of Artemis.
Nevertheless, there was still an element of fertility rite in the dancing which took place in celebration of a marriage in Turkey, when all the wedding guests, men as well as women, joined in belly dancing.
Thailand
I broke journeys to and from Australia and Japan in Thailand, and lectured and did research there, too in the late 80s and early 90s.
There were obstetric nurses, but no midwives. Many upper class women feared that they would lose sexual attractiveness with vaginal birth and opted for Caesarean section. Men still had minor wives, though polygamy was not legally recognised. When I was there the Crown Prince had a morganatic wife who bore him five children. She was an actress whom he had been in love with for many years.
Women feared pain and thought Caesareans were pain-free. Thailand had one of the highest rates of drug use in the world. Doctors didn’t tell patients what the drugs were that they are prescribing. There was wide-spread use of antibiotics for minor conditions such as colds, and a resulting general resistance to antibiotics.
Fathers were not present during childbirth. They could look through the glass of the communal nurseries to see their babies. A woman who had had a Caesarean could not see her baby until she was well enough to travel to the nursery, which was on a different floor to the postnatal ward. She was also told that she would not be able to breastfeed for three days and that the baby must have formula. Bottles were brought out and stood in jugs of hot water to keep warm.
Induction was popular for social reasons. For example, a baby must be born on its grandfather’s birthday, or because the horoscope gave an auspicious date. Other medical interventions, including surgery, were decided on, and dates set, for largely social reasons. A woman
opted to have her appendix out and be sterilised at the same time, for example, and get back to work in three days.
Doctors gave little explanation of what they were doing, not only concerning childbirth but also in dealing with infertility and miscarriage. This was because if the doctor could not do anything it would result in loss of face, which was very important in Thailand.
I also visited the museum in Bangkok to see the birthing figures there. These very simple figurines in clay from Sangaloq dating from the Sukothai period – the twelfth to fifteenth century – showed the woman sitting with one knee bent and the other knee rotated outwards on the ground with her heel guarding her perineum. There was one which showed the mother with her hand on the head as the baby was emerging. Clearly, at that time women actively gave birth and knew exactly what to do to deliver gently and slowly.
Grandmothers Of The Umbilical Cord
In Nicaragua, nurses and other health workers were working together to offer women education for childbirth. Nicaragua was a country torn by war and revolution, where deaths and kidnappings occurred every week. Health teams were struggling to bring not only good care for women in pregnancy and birth, but to help them get the information they needed in order to make choices, prepare themselves for birth and motherhood, and find a voice as women that would affect the social changes being made throughout the country.
When modern kinds of maternity care were introduced to Latin American countries they were invariably based on the US model, with obstetricians making the rules, high-tech machinery and ostracism and humiliation of the local traditional midwives. Brave efforts had been made to resist this. Since the revolution in 1979, a model of health care had been created by the Sandinistas based on the principle that health care was the right of all people, and that the best of traditional practices should be incorporated. In 1982 a national training programme for the midwives – parteras – was launched, and by the end of 1984 more than 3,000 had been incorporated into the National Health Care System.
A Passion for Birth Page 29