Mother

By Burton Gray

Before there was a God there was a Mother Goddess. The earliest representational sculptures are of voluptuous woman, with an emphasis on the bellies and a de-emphasis on the face, arms and feet. These works illustrate a keen interest in female torsos. Historians speculate that these ancient peoples worshiped woman's bodies because they produced the greatest miracle known to them, childbirth.

In the absence of HBO, sports center, Oprah, and organized religion, the cycle of life is what people watched. The animals they would hunt, the vegetables they would gather, and the children growing up to become adults and having children of their own is what these people would watch most closely.

Plato expanded upon this view of the life cycle in a most interesting fashion. He described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe—an immortal, perfectly constructed animal. A metaphor for the cycle of life that began millions of years ago in some sort of primordial ooze and continues today with all of us.

Mother Goddess is meant to symbolize life: the state that distinguishes organic from inorganic matter. Matter whose capacity for perpetual growth is dependent on consumption, excretion, reproduction, and continual internal change.

The End.