Circle of Stones. Judith Duerk

most supreme gift of the Goddess was denigrated—sexual love was shamed and reviled. Her claiming of her sexuality as sacred to herself and to the Goddess was scorned and humiliated. Sexual union, once sacred and ecstatic, became debauchery. The sacred temple rituals, wherein a woman had become holy and free, were condemned as orgiastic and the priestesses as “temple prostitutes.”

      The sacred groves dedicated to the worship of the Great Mother were condemned and closed. The serpent, venerable symbol of wisdom and nobility, was denigrated and reviled. It became, for the epochs following, a target for humiliation and derision, treated as a symbol of woman’s folly, evil, cunning, and lust. This ancient symbol of life was abased as that which tempted Eve, and, through Eve, all of humankind, into sin and death.

      The wisdom of woman, gained through her identification with her body, with the Goddess, and with the earth, was no longer revered, but ridiculed and rejected. Once honoured as prophetess and seer, woman was now scorned. Her instincts and intuition, through which she perceived the elemental energies in the cycles of nature and her knowledge of healing, were rebuked and humiliated.

      Among the last of nations to hold the Goddess in highest reverence and woman in a place of honour was the small land of Elam. Lying in the Zagros Mountains between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, Elam was known in the ancient world for the unique respect it gave woman. The right to its royal throne passed down in complex forms of matrilineal succession through much of Elam’s history until the capital city Susa, the temple, and the ziggurat were razed (circa 627 B.C.).

      In Elam, the snake, ancient symbol of the Goddess and feminine wisdom, was represented in bronze-casting and pottery. The Elamites knew the symbol of the tree of life with its coiling serpent. The fertility symbol of intertwining mating snakes spread through the ancient world.

      In Elam, the Great Mother was revered as primary deity. Not until the second millennium B.C. was Her position threatened. And then, even as the Goddess relinquished ever greater worldly authority to the male gods, the secret rites of Elam remained those of the Goddess, the earth, and the serpent.

      In Elam, among the last and alone, the Goddess was revered, woman was honoured, and, through the sacred sexual rites, she tended the elemental energies in the cycles of nature, reconsecrating the Goddess, the earth, and her own body.

      In Elam, last and alone, woman still passed down to woman entitlement to live her life in devotion to the Goddess and to the feminine within herself.

      In Elam, last and alone, woman passed down to woman the sense of living her life each day identifying with the Great Mother, knowing that life was sacred, within and without.

      And then in Elam,

      in Elam, also, things began to change,

      No more could woman hold up her head to

      revere the Goddess and honour herself.

      No more could woman hold up her head,

      No more.

      No more.

      How might it have been different for you, if, on your first menstrual day, your mother had given you a bouquet of flowers and taken you to lunch, and then the two of you had gone to meet your father at the jeweler, where your ears were pierced, and your father bought you your first pair of earrings, and then you went with a few of your friends and your mother’s friends to get your first lip colouring;

      and then you went,

      for the very first time,

      to the Women’s Lodge,

      to learn

      the wisdom of the women?

      How might your life be different?

“Yes, sadness …”

      In my dream the woman who spoke of Elam was Pat Fleming. She and I had known one another for half a dozen years through a conference on religion and psychology. Pat was warm and embracing, maternal. A few weeks after she appeared in my dream, her article appeared in Psychological Perspectives. In it she wrote of her loss of, and life-long search for, her mother.