On the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgnin Mary, we celebrate the ascension to Heaven of the Mother of God.
Our Blessed Virgin Mary, is the only person other than Christ, Her Son, the Incarnate God, not to have left mortal spoils in our physical world. Like Her Son, the Blessed Virgin also ascended to Heaven. The Son of Man, chose to become incarnate to guide humanity towards a deeper understanding of our Universe, beyond the limits of our senses and the physical world, so we may develop an understanding of how everything is animate, and everything is united. Yet Christ never abandoned us not only as Creator, but also as physical being. After the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, the Son of Man entrusted his mother to the Apostles and the Apostles to His Mother. The Blessed Virgin remained on Earth to console us of Christ's absence and Her legacy as our intermediary to the divine endures to this day.
The Blessed Virgin is our Universal Mother, the person we first implore in our request for healing, and salvation from suffering. She is our first and greatest hope in letting our voices be heard by divine powers. She is after all our Mother. And yet She is also so much more because in her womb the entire Universe was begotten.
Christ is not merely an incarnation of God, but God incarnate, God in the flesh, and thus His mother Mary is the Mother of all there is, the Mother of God. She is known by Eastern Christians as Theotokos, the bearer of God and is remembered with these words: “He whom the entire Universe could not contain was contained within your womb, O Theotokos."
The cognitive evolution of humanity has followed a slow and tortuous path. The cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux, show us that our forefathers, the primitive Homo Sapiens, and the Neanderthal before them, had learned to grind rocks rich in iron oxide creating a red paste called ocher. Ocher could be used as a durable paint to represent through images what happens inside our mind. Human beings learned to utilise their surrounding environment rather than merely being subjected to it. After millennia as hunter-gatherers we first learned to tame animals and developed animal husbandry and we also learned how to produce goods from the earth rather than just rummaging what we could. We developed agriculture. It was around this time that humanity started asking questions about who we are, venturing into religion and the earliest creation myths. It was the very mystery of Life itself, the very first mystery to perplex our ancestors. The question "Why?" was humanity’s first unresolved question and remains to this day our most important question. First and foremost, our early ancestors asked themselves why we are here? Why is there Life? Other mysteries will soon perplex humanity, generating new myths both around the physical forces that govern our world and concepts that inhabit our spirit. Physical elements such as fire would become divinities such as Agni, the ancient Hindu God of Fire, and with fire humanity later developed metallurgy, embodied in gods such as Vulcan, the Roman God of Metalworking. Abstract concepts such as the human ability to experience ecstasy, passion and inebriation would also become gods, such as Dionysius, the Greek God of Wine. We later developed more conceptual gods, probably with the advent of written languages, gods such as Pallas Athena, Goddess of Strategy. Other emotions followed, fear, love, hate. Abstract concepts such as death also had their deities. Over time our entire Universe where our life unfolds became animate through the myths of Gods and Spirits, whether they be rivers and stars, the Sun and the Moon, or as in the case of Aeolus, the God that governs winds, whose understanding allowed our species to transform bodies of water into the the most prolific conductors for the exchange of human knowledge. All of this wealth of mythology stems from the very first 'Why?" humans asked themselves. Why is there Life? The most ancient, and still unresolved of all questions, the origin of Life. We know this not because of writing which would take another several millennia to surface, but because of the shape of the earliest temples, the earliest idols and the structure of society during humanity’s agricultural revolution.
The Maltese Archipelago hosts the oldest temples in Europe, all erected with the same design and all dedicated to the God Mother. The temples are shaped by three circular chambers decreasing in size. The temple entrances are in the first larger chamber, the Womb of the God Mother, then comes the Breast of the God Mother and finally Her Head. Still today our Churches reflect the same pattern, now in the shape of a Cross, where we congregate at the Breast of the Church and celebrate our sacraments at the Head of the Church. The few idols that have been excavated in Malta are also all identical in content, for they all depict a mature woman, a mother, our God Mother.
Besides these archeological finds, we also know our forefathers worshipped the God Mother thanks to our studies of early agricultural societies and primarily through the structure of their cities. Historian Riane Eisler pieces together the puzzle best in her landmark study, The Chalice and the Blade, whereby we learn that war came relatively late in our evolution compared to agriculture. By the time human beings were already capable of developing multi-storied buildings with complex systems of streets, sewage and irrigation, cities were still erected without defensive walls to surround them, and weapons intended for combat with other human beings, such as shields and swords did not yet exist. It stems that these agricultural societies that worshiped life-giving mothers were also matriarchal, and Eisler explains that it was only after seeking mediation with more primitive patriarchal nomadic hunter gatherers, inviting them to settle amongst the sedentary populations to defend them from other nomadic tribes, that humanity became patriarchal once again.
Traces of matriarchal societies have endured in all civilisations. Judaism is a matrilineal religion, and Hinduism defines as feminine the universal life force that permeates all animate things, including their pantheon of gods. Shakti is the name of this life force, and without Shakti even the most powerful of gods, such as Shiva, the God tasked to destroy the Universe so It can be born again, cannot lift an arm without Shakti.
Thus the feminine continued to brew in our subconscious, beneath our skin, flowing in the subterranean veins of our societies, until God finally became incarnate and the God Mother became Mother of God. Christianity brought to the surface once again humanity’s fascination with the mystery of Life, and our subconscious devotion to the feminine life force that nurtures our Universe. It is in the compassionate Body of Christ, that the first question humanity tried to resolve, the origin of life, finally triumphed over all other myths becoming the Mother of God. The feminine life force that first mesmerised our earliest ancestors, became once again the origin of our cosmology, the source of our Universe, compassionately presiding once again over our interpretation of humanity's role in our Universe. When Pope Saint Sixtus III, following the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, finally proclaimed the Blessed Virgin Mary to be Theotokos, the Bearer of God, the feminine mystery of the origin of Life, resurfaced in the form of the Church, Christ’s Bride, to permeate our Universe once again as the Mystic Body of Christ.
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2020