Children of the Mother Goddess. History of Mediterranean Neonates

By Vassilios Fanos and Murat Yurdakök

The leading elements in this volume are the cultural representation of birth and the forms through which its narration and representation develop in the figurative arts, through historical references, mythological tales and legends, traditions, customs and habits. The influence of myth, language and artistic expression on our cultural representation of procreation is manifest, and this way of “narrating” birth resists even today, although it comes into conflict with a more scientific vision of pregnancy and childbirth.
With this book we believe we have contributed to an in-depth examination of illness narratives, thus favouring the search for a convergence between medical language in the sector and the language of cultural experience so that evidence-based medicine does not clash with narrative-based medicine, but that the two languages come together towards a reciprocity that will strengthen the alliance between physician and patient.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hygeia Press
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9788898636433

Book preview

Press

Presentation

It is my pleasure to present this book, which deals with the history and traditions surrounding conception, birth and care of the newborn in European culture, especially in the countries in and around the Mediterranean Sea.

The underlying theme of this book is the narration of childbirth and the forms in which it is expressed: through the figurative arts, myth, legends and traditions that orient behaviours and legislative measures. Readers are guided along a fascinating pathway in which they will rediscover with pleasure their origins in the history of humankind.

History and traditions are a part of a cultural heritage that brings together physicians and patients and these are expressed in a shared language that makes communication possible. It would be mistaken to neglect these elements that are so deep-rooted in our common consciousness, only partly concealed by new technological language but quite present and still active at the emotive level. They address a moment in life in which it is easier to see in those who try to become mothers and fathers a regression towards known experiences offering reassuring aspects.

Thus this book does not propose a representation of a cold and remote past, although well delineated and still fascinating, but as the recalling of experiences that are still alive and in the foreground of consciousness and common experience. Birth is in all cases a new and unrepeatable emotion: as that mother in my home town who used to say when asked about her emotions in her twenty-fourth pregnancy: The coming of a child always opens the heart to joy. My emotion is new and different each time. This is the fascination of life: a unique and unrepeatable experience.

Giuseppe Buonocore

President of the Union of European Neonatal and Perinatal Societies

October 2010

Presentation

On a stele in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin one can admire the image of Pharaoh Meteti and his son, where the child is represented as an adult in miniature to emphasize his complete dependence and absolute subjection.

This was the position of children up to the time of the arrival of the fresh wind of the French Revolution which brought to people's consciousness the idea of assistance for children.

Despite all this, the event of birth has assumed in all epochs and cultures the connotations of myth, the touch of magic, the symbolism of the supernatural, and it is from these roots that have stemmed the rights of the newborn to be brought up and protected as the prime symbol of the mystery of life.

Today, when we affirm newborns' right to the title of persons, when we try to offer them the best prospects of health, when we wish to protect in the strongest way all their potential for development, recalling the past helps us to find the right answers to the many unresolved questions. Being able to relive the past with the aid of the text "Children of the Mother Goddess. History of Mediterranean Neonates", excellently edited by Vassilios Fanos and Murat Yurdakök, cannot but help us to remember our roots and interpret in a modern key what has been handed down to us.

As long as we humans are thrilled at the sight of a newborn child, as long as we can rationalize its arrival in our emotions, at that point the hope for equity and solidarity will not be frustrated.

Paolo Giliberti

President of the Italian Neonatology Society

October 2010

Presentation

In order to approach and understand this book, the cultural challenge it offers must be accepted without reserve: reading between the lines, perceiving what has not been written but is there: words, sounds, colours.

The authors are not professional writers, but experts in birth and neonatal assistance, people who use extremely sophisticated technologies in their daily practice, for decades engaged in strictly biomedical research activities.

By discovering the similarities between the science of nature and the science of man, the authors have embarked in the holistic dimension of neonatological culture, tearing down the barriers between the levels of acting and knowing, almost as though wanting to give life to new horizons of knowledge.

The words in the book "Children of the Mother Goddess. History of Mediterranean Neonates", belong not only to the writers, but also to those who read and listen, since it puts readers in touch with the authors, with birth as the shared essential link.

Together they travel along a common pathway in search of the roots of the future, as it is seductively referred to in one of the chapters. But this seduction is present everywhere, albeit in the different ways of representing birth, the most fascinating moment of all human experience.

The woman, present at every birth, is represented in various eras as a metaphor of an almost provocative beauty that denies obfuscation and can always be attributed to a design of perfection.

A history book like this could be written with a neutral glance towards the past, but instead it induces thoughts projected towards the future and calls for complicity and participation.

The impetus for this modernity is determined above all by the images of mythology, history and ancient art, ending up with a light touch of poetry that makes the cords of emotion vibrate, as has been happening in the Mediterranean cradle for thousands of years.

Other suggestions of an ethical and sociological nature insinuate themselves into the issue to complete it and create a second great metaphor of this work: Mediterraneus. The term means in the midst of the lands, and evokes the profound vocation of this book, namely the common purpose of defending the rights of newborns, first and foremost their lives and health.

The book strongly emphasises how birth is a political and social event that belongs to the history of every single neonate-citizen, to the woman or man who procreated it, to the whole of society.

This book should be read by all those operating in the neonatological, paediatric and perinatological sciences at any historic, health, psychological, sociological, and anthropological level, as well as all university students during their training in this discipline.

All the mothers and fathers of the Mediterranean Neonates are invited to read this book.

Gian Paolo Donzelli

President of the Italian Perinatal Medicine Society

October 2010

Introduction

Vassilios Fanos, Murat Yurdakök

It takes a strong act of consciousness to denaturalize disease and contemplate it as a cultural domain.

B.J. Good, Medicine, rationality, and experience. An anthropological perspective

The Mother Goddess is the ancient goddess of the Mediterranean and the Near East who represents the female capacity to procreate. Representations of the female body with accentuation of the attributes indicating fertility, large breasts and buttocks, a prominent and belly heavy with child, date back to the Neolithic. Representations of this goddess or symbols associated with her have been found in Crete and Asia Minor. The goddess often divides to form the couple of girl and adult woman to represent the female before and after giving birth, considered the fundamental moment of passage in the life of the female. The goddesses that go hand in hand, such as Demeter and Kore or Latona and Artemis, are the remnants of the Great Mother after undergoing the rationalization of a male-oriented society as was that of Greece. Greek mythology succeeded only in concealing, but not suppressing, the power of the Great Mother, who surfaced in several Olympic goddesses, the expressions of the Mother Goddess with their often pre-Hellenic names and the lunar symbolism that accompanies them. Even Athena, a goddess with male traits and the protector of victorious males, is accompanied by the lunar symbol of the night owl. The Great Mother is Isis, who from the remote times of ancient Egypt continued to be venerated throughout the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Isis is the goddess who breastfeeds, thus transmitting life through nutrition and care for children, the icon that has always been dear to women and venerated by the common people, transformed into the Christian image of the Virgin breastfeeding the Child.

With this book we have tried to understand how the cultural perception of the reproductive process has changed and evolved in today's society in the countries of the Mediterranean basin and those attracted to this area by a cohesive network of millenarian relationships.

We have oriented our investigation backwards in time, to a period which is indicated historically as classic antiquity, generally considered as a remote past, but as you will find while reading through the chapters, in reality we are dealing with a recent past, and in certain aspects perhaps with the present.

An example? Today there is a diffuse debate concerning childbirth pain and there are those who are in favour of or against analgesia, not always based on objective premises but on the grounds of personal opinions formed through experience and based on one's formation and ethical convictions. Our intention here is not to enter into the discussion, but we wish to demonstrate that the debate today is fed by the traces of the past. Perhaps the reader will be surprised to learn that in ancient Greece childbirth was the only occasion in life when a woman could vie with a man. By supporting that pain, a woman gave proof of a courage comparable to that of a soldier at war: a woman gave stability to her home by having children, the man by defending his country at war. The pain of childbirth thus ennobled a woman, made her worthy of being a member of society and represented a fundamental moment of passage in her life. The pain of childbirth has never been considered a pain like others and even today intervening in the ways of giving birth is not only a medical act but, depending on the degree of empathy that is established with the protagonists of the event, may become facilitation, participation, interference or even an obstacle at the time of this fundamental event in the life of the mother, the child and the family.

In the course of the last few decades the way of perceiving and experiencing pregnancy has certainly changed radically: pregnancy and childbirth and quite recently even fecundation have become more and more medical concerns. But if at the rational level humankind can advance at ever-increasing speed, at the emotive level progress is much slower and the need to reconcile the scientific approach with a more traditional perception of the experience emerges especially with the advent of a new life, a moment at which it is easier for future parents to return to known, and thus reassuring, experiences. For this reason our intention is to draw attention to the history of childbirth and the myths connected with it so as to understand the traces remaining in the present.

The leading elements in this volume are the cultural representation of birth and the forms through which its narration and representation develop in the figurative arts, through historical references, mythological tales and legends, traditions, customs and habits. The influence of myth, language and artistic expression on our cultural representation of procreation is manifest, and this way of narrating birth resists even today, although it comes into conflict with a more scientific vision of pregnancy and childbirth.

With this book we believe we have contributed to an in-depth examination of illness narratives, thus favouring the search for a convergence between medical language in the sector and the language of cultural experience so that evidence-based medicine does not clash with narrative-based medicine, but that the two languages come together towards a reciprocity that will strengthen the alliance between physician and patient.

1. Birth in Mediterranean Cultures: Searching for the Roots

Luigi Cataldi, M. Giuseppina Gregorio

A new tree was not worth so great a price.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, 310

The Mother Goddess and the evolution of a culture

The Mother Goddess was probably the first deity imagined by man. She is also the most represented in cultures of the ancient world. The Goddess's representation is widely available in the European and Mediterranean area. It is characterized by very large-breasted female figures, symbolizing abundant milk production, with buttocks and bellies beyond normal size that glorify pregnancy (Figure 1). Representations of the Mother Goddess have been found not only as engravings on stone or bone, or even rock carvings, but they are mostly in the form of stone or clay statues in the entire Mediterranean basin and Europe, extending to the Ural Mountains, and the Middle Eastern area, to territories of ancient Mesopotamia, many millennia before the flowering of Babylonian-Assyrian civilization. The oldest artefacts depicting birth are in fact dated around 40,000-30,000 BC. From this period, known as subglacial, comes the oldest representation of birth, carved into rock, which was found in 1911 in a cave in Dordogne, in south-eastern France.

Figure 1. The Venus of Willendorf, 11 cm high (22,000-21,000 BC).

To better understand the reasons behind the interest of the populations of the time in this deity we must discover the origins of its cult of fertility and procreation. This requires a knowledge of the previous life of humankind, prevalently a life of hunting and gathering closely connected with those natural cycles for which humans have always shown great interest. Over the millennia, man acquired knowledge that allowed him to understand the rotation of the seasons and find the periods in which seed will produce a good harvest. He sensed that the land was not always fruitful, but only when it was impregnated by what was then called the male principle, the sun. Simultaneously, he arrived at the understanding that the Mother Goddess could become a mother only when she was accompanied by a partner, sometimes even a son, generated by the Mother Goddess herself, who became pregnant, as occurred for the mother earth who must be made pregnant in certain times of the year. Likewise also her companion is subject to a number of cycles of death and rebirth that represent the birth and death of nature. In the Neolithic, the meeting of Mediterranean people, devoted to hunting, with East Asian nations, who were farmers, led to a vast cultural transformation. Man's relationship with the deity did not change: it moved slowly from forest to farm, but remained dependent on natural cycles and fertility rites. The latter, which were related to spontaneous production, were now closely related to agriculture and harvesting.

The sacred marriage of the Goddess: the Mediterranean culture

The idea of the sacred couple as an apotropaic ritual that made the land fertile and pregnant, is far more ancient than the myth itself. Such a concept is expressed in the primitive idea of sacred caves, deep uterine images of the Goddess where the male element, the universal Priapos, represented by the Sacred Stalagmites, was generated in this metaphorical womb of the Goddess. So it is both the son being generated by the Goddess and her partner because he ensures fertility. Another important example, that we find around Salento, the extreme southeastern part of Italy, are the sacred betyls, the male element, the menhirs, the stones placed upright in the ground, which, as a mystic Priapos, makes it fertile. Marija Gimbutas recalls an ancient custom quoted at the beginning of 1900 by Sebillot: "Rubbing the bare navel or stomach against a menhir (standing stone) and especially around a projection, a round knob, or an unevenness of the stone assured marriage and fecundity and helped a happy delivery. A round knob and even an unevenness on a menhir was considered to be a spot where divine energy was concentrated – in other words an omphalos".

What we now call myth thus consists of the memory of these ancient traditions of worship that we find in later societies and cultures. We shall now briefly report the result of our research on the traces that remain of this ancient cult of fertility and prosperity in cultures that come down to us from ancient Mediterranean peoples.

In Mesopotamia, during the third millennium BC the goddess Inanna (who later took the name of Ishtar) and her union with the god, the son, mate and shepherd Dumuzi (later Tammuz) were worshipped. The harvest myth of Dumuzi was celebrated as a source of life and fertility. Indeed, the Mesopotamians were convinced that nature was reborn each year through a sacred marriage that was consummated between the two deities. The myth is embodied in the poem of Inanna's descent into the Underworld, which we find in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story goes that the goddess had descended into the underworld, where she was imprisoned, and her absence caused the ceasing of births on Earth. The goddess pleaded for her own release, but even a goddess had to comply with a strict rule of the underworld: every soul that comes back to life must be replaced by another in the underworld. So Inanna offered poor Dumuzi in exchange for her release, but here his sister intervened in favour of her brother by pleading that he should be retained in the underworld only six months a year and offering to take his place there for the other six months.

According to a vision that James Frazer defined as sympathetic magic, this union was actually celebrated between a priestess representing Inanna and the king of the city, who assumed the functions of Dumuzi. This marks the beginning of a tradition that later gave origin to the practice of sacred prostitution. We once again find the cult of Inanna and Dumuzi in Classical Greece in the myth of Tammuz, that is, Adonis: Persephone, moved by pity for her beloved, transformed him into a tree and held a funeral feast in his honour. The anniversary, which was held during the day of the equinox, was linked to the reproductive cycles of death and rebirth of nature: also in this event Adonis as a tree is the phallic symbol of the god.

Moving to Egypt, we find the myth of Osiris: it is said that on the chest where the god was imprisoned, a pomegranate tree grew, then represented by the letter zed. Zed was a symbol in ancient traditions associated with his cult, but in reality it was far more ancient. It was depicted in tombs of the pre-Dynastic period, while the name of the god is not found prior to the Fifth Dynasty. The tree grew on the chest built by Typhon and is thus a phallic symbol of resurrection, often represented in sarcophagi for the purpose of bringing the dead back to life.

In Egypt, the life-giving functions were performed by Hathor, the cow goddess with uterine horns where the sun rises, as identifying the goddess from whom all things come and whose name means House of Horus. In the first myths she is the goddess and mother of Horus and for this, when the god was identified as the posthumous son of Osiris and Isis, she is confused with the latter and thus Isis acquired from Hathor her representation with cow's horns. It is precisely this confusion that caused the sacred wedding to be associated with Isis and Osiris, a tree god who died and was then resurrected by the goddess. If we return to the first records, Hathor is, however, both mother and companion of Horus in a vision similar to those previously described. Horus does not undergo a real death, unlike the earlier gods, but loses an eye thanks to which he can resurrect his father Osiris, the symbol of vegetation and therefore of natural cycles. As previously described in the cult of Inanna, also in this case it was the Pharaoh himself who had intercourse with his