Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Women’s reproductive rights, her right to self-determination, what we now call family planning, is endangered right here. Women in Goddess culture always had herbs, planned the number of their pregnancies through extended nursing of infants until perhaps three years, and decided how many children could be nurtured to maturity. Here is cold evidence that men were taking that right away and creating extreme punishments for self-determination.

  1.58

  “Unless it is forbidden in the tablets (the code) a man may strike his wife, pull her hair, her ear, he may bruise or pierce. He commits no misdeed thereby.” (Granted that the Assyrians were known as violent people, but the significance of their laws here are that they are now carried forward with the weight of precedence! This is the beginning of codified civil (as opposed to military) violence against women, in their own home, a situation unthinkable in Goddess lands existing nearby.)

  1.7

  “If a woman bring her hand against a man, they shall prosecute her, 30 manas of lead shall she pay, 20 blows shall they inflict upon her.” (Less than half the blows inflicted on women who wore head coverings prohibited by another law code.) In no case it is ever assumed that the accused will not be convicted and punished.69

  These laws of the Babylonian, the Hittites, and the Assyrians did not claim religious basis; they do not claim “good or evil” nor do they claim to be the word of a deity. Only after they had written the laws to control their men did the lawgivers turn their eyes to controlling the behavior of women. And then, more often toward the women they could claim belonged to their own men because they had already effected a change of status in these women, from being free and independent to women as the property of their biological fathers.

  All of this was to enable men to attest to the paternity of offspring, ensuring the blood line of the male through their sons, mitigating the blood lines of the mother through her daughters. Without very specific behaviors to ensure rights of paternity, this personal property ownership business could turn combative and extremely nasty.

  This also begins the process of conflict over who controls women’s reproductive rights: the woman herself as had been assumed for thousands of years, or the man who wishes to have complete control over his new property?

  Still flourishing and yet to come into direct conflict with the intent of these law codes were the Goddess cultures of Old Europe, Crete, Anatolia, Greece, the many islands of the Mediterranean, and to a lesser extent Egypt.

  WOMAN AS HEALER

  First as gatherer of food from plants available in the wild, and then as she created systematic cultivation of plants she found useful, which we now call agriculture, Woman was always in close contact with the mysterious properties of the natural plant World. We know that the opium poppy and psychedelic mushrooms were widely used from Neolithic times.

  But there was another method of figuring out what worked and what did not: It is the spiritual practice of Shamanism based on pervasive ancient beliefs that information valuable to humans existed in another plane called the dreamtime or non-ordinary reality which was possible to access by those initiated. Shamanism is a technique of divination used throughout the world, emanating from a self-induced trance state which transports the practitioner out of ordinary reality and into the non-ordinary (altered state of consciousness) where she may have contact with spiritual helpers such as animals or totems. In this altered state, she may see the source of the problems in both physical and psychic senses, and she is empowered to return to the earthly realm with the answers to the illness, mental malaise or community difficulty. She then uses all the powers at her command from realms, earthly and celestial, to bring healing and respite to the person or group which sought her assistance.

  Other forms of divining were given by the sacred mushroom, which produced ecstatic states where information from the dreamtime realm could be searched out, brought back, and given out as remedies.

  The Oracles, Sybils, and Priestesses in the Temples of the Goddess were asked for answers to questions of health, love, war, politics, and the future. All three of these different types of healers used prodigious numbers of snakes. The snakes were held, wrapped physically around the arms, head and torso of the healer and perhaps also the patient, but we do not know that definitely. The snakes were housed in huge pits and fed with religious fervor. Their venom was milked and used in healing, in rituals, to produce altered states of consciousness. Snakes, although phallic (male penis) symbols, became entwined around the image of woman until they were inseparably linked to her in human consciousness.

  A fourth method of healing and divination was animal sacrifice. Young sheep, goats, birds, and bulls were brought to the temples, ritually sacrificed, their entrails studied and their blood sometimes drunk, sometimes used to saturate icons, or the people who were seeking help, and sometimes returned to the earth as prayer. The meat of the sacrifice was allocated between temple and the people of the community, who under other circumstances were primarily vegetarians, except at feast times and after religious sacrifices had been performed.

  Women’s knowledge of botanicals and the appropriate use of them, not only to heal but also to improve conditions of overall health, was so extensive that even today many remedies still originally come from plantlore, and country women in every part of the world still carry some fragment of the ancient wisdom.

  SUMER – Mesopotamia – Middle East

  It wasn’t until the rise of Sumer (modern day Iraq) that we have written records about healing that are extant. The Sumerians did not invent writing or healing or those processes which evolved out of thousands of years of prior experience, but they did detail what already existed and are, therefore, mistakenly credited with parenting Western healing systems, and writing, which they did not.

  Jean Achterberg says that “Until about 2000 BCE, women participated fully in sacred activities throughout Sumer, owned property and businesses and, if they were unmarried, could serve as priestesses and physicians. “70

  Sumerian civilization was in nearly total demise by 1000 BCE with new invasions and years of war. But before that, they detailed theories of body function and disease thought to be caused by worms, insects, parasites, malaria or sin. These ideas were carried to other lands by trade routes and were understood as a result by Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Greeks, filtering into the writing of later Judeo-Christian theorists.

  From a grave site of 5500 BCE a clay pot for distilling plants into medicines has been unearthed. The grave of Queen Shubad of UR, 3500 BCE, held the prescriptions for relieving pain inscribed on clay biscuit-shaped pads and included tools, possibly early surgical tools, made of both flint and bronze, along with charms and amulets meant to be worn on the body for protection.71

  Dr. Achterberg continues, “Over eight hundred prescriptions have been recovered from this ancient part of the world, and have been translated by Assyrian scholars.” The oldest known medical text has also been found here. Unfortunately, the tablets in Crete have not yet been deciphered. When they are, we will have revealed to us the women’s medicine from this highly evolved, equally ancient civilization. Also according to Ackterberg, “Until at least the Semitic invasions into Sumer in about 2600 BCE, women were allowed to practice healing with little or no restrictions. Female occupations included doctor, scribe (writer/scholar), barber and cook. That women were allowed to be scribes is of great importance and most unusual (in the new patriarchal cultures) because it shows that women (were literate, able to read and write a language not necessarily their own) had the power to transcribe the culture through their own senses.”72

  But from 1000 BCE forward, women were excluded from Sumerian education and three hundred years later, 700 BCE, they were neither scribe nor doctor. Classes of work listed as available to females were entertainer, transvestite, midwife, nurse, sorceress, wet nurse, and two kinds of prostitute. The last is probably the remnants of the temple system with priestess and holy woman mistakenly categorized. Sorcery in Sum
er is still a form of healing or divination practiced by women probably utilizing altered states of consciousness even if the name has become tainted.

  Before repression of women as healers in Sumer, there were two categories of practitioners: the Ashipu and the Asu. The Ashipu treated diseases in the invisible, spiritual or magical realm. The Asu treated the physical realm of health and disease, knowing the intricacies of plants, their botanical properties and the other methods currently at her disposal for treating illness.

  In Sumer, Achterberg explains, prescriptions for healing the invisible and the visible aspects of disease are regarded as of equal importance. Both may appear together on the same clay biscuit. The Sumerians had knowledge of the uses of opium and featured the poppy in their works of art. Previously, we have see the opium poppy featured in the headdress of the Priestess/Goddess of Crete and before that in the necklace torque of Artemis/Diana, the Many Breasted Goddess of Ephesus in Anatolia.

  GREECE

  Ancient Greece arises 2000 BCE and concludes with the fall of the city of Corinth in 146 BCE, although its influence lingered and was “reborn” a thousand years later by medieval male scholars.

  Helen of Troy lived in a city guided by her matriarchal Queenship. She was a student of Polydamma, physician and Queen of Egypt. In the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey, when Helen was lamenting the death of a missing father and visited Sparta in order to sooth the misery of her visitors, she is said to have cast a drug into the wine whereof they drank, a drug to lull all pain and anger and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow. This drug was the legendary Mepenthe, which Plutarch suggests is verbena, adiantum and wine. Others believe it was a root called oinopia; still others say it was datura, opium poppy juice or evening primrose. Helen had a veritable pharmacopia for relieving pain, altering moods. Mention, therefore, is made of the following plants and substances: hellebore, burned sulphur, mandrake. (This narcotic root becomes prominent again in the European Middle Ages), and, once again, poppy juice inhaled from a steaming sponge.73

  Women of this time developed surgical techniques and therapeutics, making Greek city medicine the most advanced to date. Classical Greek Goddesses were initially given healing natures. Demeter was caretaker of women and children. Persephone could cure toothache and sore eyes. Genetyllis was prayed to, asking Her to cure infertility problems. Hecate was a specialist in children’s diseases. Athena, who cured blindness, was also the patron Goddess of Athens, the Greek city center. Leto was the surgeon Goddess. Eileithgia was midwife to the Goddess. Hera was chief healing deity at the city of Argos. Isis, although a foreign Goddess from Egypt, was considered by Corinthian Greeks to be the greatest healer of all.74

  About 900 BCE, the Hippocratic Oath, which is an ethical code of honor repeated by every new physician even today, came into being as a result of the two daughters of Asclepius: Hygeia and Panacea. It states, “I swear by Apollo the physician, by Asclepius, by Hygea and Panacea and by all the Gods and Goddesses making them my witness that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgement this oath and covenant.” The two daughters represented prevention and cure. His wife, Epione, was the patroness for those in pain.75

  To this unique family of three women and one man, no fewer than three hundred healing centers have been found, all dedicated to them. These healing centers had as their core a large central healing area where patients were sent into an “incubation sleep,” in which they experienced an altered state of consciousness, and during which earthly representatives of deities appeared and ministered cures. Incubation sleep is not explained in any detail, since we already know about the range of herbs in use, the opium poppy and sacred mushroom (amenita muscaria), and their effects of producing altered states of consciousness in various degrees, and it may be that any of these were utilized.

  Hygeia represented prevention of disease, cleanliness and sanitation, nutrition and prescriptions for healthy living. Panacea represented the healing herbs, the actual prescriptions, as we would think of them today. Both have given their names to parts of modern medicine. The wife Epione, daughters Hygeia and Panacea each had their own healing staff or caduceus, which is the stick (the “tree of life”) entwined by two snakes that is still the primary symbol of medicine. Hygeia is often portrayed holding a snake and a disk from which she feeds the sacred serpent.

  Greek women healers were keepers of the snakes, as were healing women in Crete, Canaan, Egypt and way north into modern day Germany and Scandinavia. Yellow snakes (now thought to be extinct) were so sacred that when one escaped from a Greek ship off Italy, a temple to Asclepius was built there immediately.

  The snakes were trained to lick the eyelids and sores of patients during healing ceremonies. Snake venom may have been used to induce healing imagery during the incubation sleep. The venom of many poisonous snakes (cobras, kraits and rattlesnakes) has hallucinogenic properties. Healers, too, may have been bitten in order to achieve supernatural realms of altered consciousness, where virtually all ancient peoples believe healing information is available.76

  The ancient Mediterranean world had a most famous healing site at Delphi on one of the Greek islands. In the beginning, the Oracle at Delphi was always a woman. She was call the Pythia, who sat on a stool around which a giant python was coiled. Her divinations were usually interpreted by Goddess priestesses. The Oracle at Delphi attracted pilgrimages, processions of people who traveled great distances to receive prophetic information and asked for cure. Over many years, treatment facilities were built to accommodate the healing similar to the temples built to Asclepius, Epione, Hygeia and Panacea.

  “Primary methods of treatment were herbal remedies, baths, exercise, water from sacred springs, purges, bleedings and perhaps even surgery, as well as games and entertainment which took place on the site. It is reported that the nature of diagnoses, possible treatments and even sudden cures would occur in the imagery state of near sleep or incubation sleep.” This state was brought about by the use of drugs such as opium or cannabis and wine which was described over and over again in many contexts. “Around the shrine (of Delphi) are numerous sculptures and reliefs of women, the Amazons – fighting men, which may actually depict the seizure of the sacred shrine.”77

  As at other transition times locations, when there was the desire to eradicate women from practicing their ancient rights and freedoms, a myth has grown: The Oracle of Delphi was usurped by the Sun God Apollo, who then found it necessary to kill the python who was the female spirit representing the power of the Great Goddess. This ritual killing of the great serpent, retold in myth, will continue in many other lands and in different times.

  But whether the myth translates as the killing of the Delphi python, or driving the snakes out of Ireland (snakes which did not inhabit the island in reality), or the killing of the medieval Dragon by knights (“dragons” which also did not exist in reality) the intent of the story is always the same: This myth is first and foremost intended to kill the worship of the Goddess, secondly to frighten worshippers into believing that Her power is gone, and then degrade any reverence for women as Her representatives.

  The myth, in its many guises, teaches that the intent by ruling men is to destroy Her most universal symbol of powerful healing: the Snake representing rebirth and transcendence. The sacred Snake has been in service to humanity for thousands of years, coming forward out of the far reaches of the Neolithic past.

  The myth also, perhaps unintentionally, tells us today that the Goddess was so powerful in the minds and lives of the people that killing Her was the only option the new rulers saw available to them. Intimidation, subjugation, disenfranchisement had already been tried and had not silenced Her. Only death and total annihilation could counteract Her power.

  This myth also begins the process of turning a mighty Goddess power – the healing and transformative properties of the Snake – into a sinister symbol associated with evil, death and bad women, instead of its original meaning of health and spiritual power.

>   Today Hygeia and Panacea are only dictionary words (hygiene and panacea), without reference at all to their being women nor to their work as original Daughters of Medicine with hundreds of healing sanctuaries built in honor of them. This is a perfect example of how the Herstory of the past is intentionally obliterated.

  Although Aristotle (b. 384 BCE) and Hippocrates (b. 460 BCE) are usually noted as the Greek fathers of medicine, Jeanne Achterberg has uncovered details of other Greek female healers and doctors.78

  Pythias, wife of Aristotle, co-created with him an encyclopedia of their studies on plant and animal life, which they wrote on Sappho’s island during their honeymoon! Pythias (which means Snake) studied tissues and reproduction in chickens and humans.

  And, in contrast, Aristotle wrote about “the good wife” in Oikonomikos (c. 330 BCE) as follows:

  A good wife should be the mistress of her home, having under her care all that is within it, according to the rules we have laid down. She should allow none to enter without her husband’s knowledge, dreading above all things the gossip of gadding women, which tends to poison the soul. She alone should have knowledge of what happens within. She must exercise control of the money spent on such festivities as her husband has approved – keeping moreover, within the limit set by law upon expenditure, dress and ornament – and remembering that beauty depends not on costliness of raiment. Nor does abundance of gold so conduce to the praise of a woman as self-control in all that she does. This, then, is the province over which a woman should be minded to bear an orderly rule; for it seems not fitting that a man should know all that passes within the house. But in all other matters, let it be her aim to obey her husband; giving no heed to public affairs, nor having any part in arranging the marriages of her children.79