Earth, Our Mother – Armenian Directory & News

May 9, 2010

Donna Henes
Urban shaman, eco-ceremonialist and ritual expert

Earth, Our Mother

Humankind in its infancy clung to the primal comprehension of a maternal
Earth, in the same way that any completely dependent child hangs onto her
mother’s hip. The reality of our utter reliance incontrovertible, we held on
for dear life. Until only five, six thousand years ago, the archetypal Great
Mother, She Who Birthed the Earth, creatrix of all existence, matriarch of
the races of god/desses, reigned supreme everywhere. Homer sang Her praises:
"I shall sing of Gaia, Universal Mother, firmly founded, Oldest of all the
Holy Ones." Foremost in all early religions, the Earth was personified and
identified in many ways, but She was universally regarded with reverence and
deference as a living mother.

Many creation myths describe how Earth was made from Her sacred body.
According to the Apaches, all creatures came from the Earth: "Just like a
child being born from its mother. The place of emergence is the womb of the
Earth." Asintmah, the first woman of the Athapascan peoples of Western
Canada and Alaska, was midwife to Mother Earth. She wove Her a great blanket
of Earth to use during Her confinement and laid it carefully across Her
body. She then reached under this birthing blanket and pulled out a mouse,
and then a rabbit, and then, one by one, She brought forth each of the
Earth’s vast multitude from the loins of the Great Mother.

Earth is often seen as an island floating in the vast sea, very much as an
embryo is suspended in the womb. Falling Woman, the ancestress of the
Iroquoian tribes of the North Eastern portion of North America, was said to
have tumbled out of the watery sky into the waters below. Otter, beaver,
muskrat and sea bird pulled soil up from under the water to create a mound
to soften Her fall and to serve as a solid, dry place between the liquid sky
and the wet depths for Her to stand upon. The body of the
Sumerian-Babylonian Earth Mother, Tiamat, also defined the division between
the watery realms above and below, like a horizon differentiates the heaven
from the deep blue sea. Her title, Dia Mater, "Goddess Mother," gives us the
word, "diameter," the dividing line which stretches across the center of a
circle.

Other myths relate how clay, the flesh of the fertile Earth, is shaped by
the Goddess into living beings of skin and bone and breath, of blood and
brain and flesh. Another version of the Iroquois creation story is that in
which the Great Turtle tosses the mud off of Her back to create the Earth
and all that lives on Her. As She shimmies, shakes and shrugs, each clod
creates a different species of creature. The Shake Dance is still danced by
women in ceremony and at pow wow gatherings. It is a deliciously, sinuous
rendering of the subterranean rhythms of that great grandmother terrapin and
a sensuous celebration of the great landmass which She created, Turtle
Island.

The Shilluk people of the Sudan tell of the divine Juok who fashioned people
from Earth. The white people were made from white loam and the Arabs were
made of brownish soil. The black people were made of the finest and best
Earth, which is the fertile black clay from the banks of the Nile. The Ewe
of Togo say that good people are created from good clay and bad people are
made out of stinking mud. The creator of the Dogon of Mali is Amma, who
created the sun and moon out of clay pots decorated with copper and brass,
and then created the Earth from clay in the shape of a reclining female
figure. Her head faces north, Her feet, south. Her mons veneris is an
anthill, and her clitoris is a termite hill.

The Mesopotamian Goddess, Aramaiti, was known as Mother of the People Made
of Clay. Aruru was the potter who not only fashioned figures from clay, but
also breathed into them the animating energy of the universe. The Assyrian
Goddess, Mami, Mother, formed the first seven pairs of people, the original
male and female fashioned from clay. The Sumerian, Ninhursay, created the
human race from a mixture of clay from Her own body and Her menstrual blood.
This clay-converted-into-flesh myth cycle eventually culminated in the
ass-backward biblical tale of God creating Adam from clay and then creating
Eve from out of Adam’s body.

The biblical name, Eve, means Mother of All Living. Her name is derived from
those of much older Earth Mothers. In India, she was known as Jiva or Ieva,
The Creatress of All Manifested Forms. A Tantric appellation was Adita Eva,
The Very Beginning. The Hittites knew Her as Hawwah, Life, the Persians
called her Hvov, The Earth, and the Anatolians named her Hebat, Virgin
Mother Earth.

Adamah, the original feminine form of Adam, means "bloody clay," although
male scholars usually refer to this generative element as "red Earth."
Hmmmm. Eve means something like, "Mother Earth the Creator" and Adam means,
"Made from Earth." So I ask you, just who gave birth to whom? And who, if
you please, Doctor Freud, is envious of what?