Vagina (18 page)

The image he described was indeed archetypal. I had a brief but striking memory: the previous morning, Dr. James Willoughby, a research fellow at Oxford University, who was archiving New College Library’s ancient treasures, had kindly shown me an extraordinary illuminated volume, an Anglo-Norman version of St. John’s
Apocalypse,
which had belonged to British noblewoman Joan de Bohun.
¹⁸
It had been created in the fourteenth century. It was worth about a million pounds. It was so lovely it nearly brought tears to my eyes. I could see the follicles of the vellum on the inner binding. Elsewhere, as I later investigated, on several parchment pages, a sacred lamb was framed in what Willoughby had called a “mandorla.” Mary is shown also framed, throned in glory. Her cheeks are rosily tinted, her skin white, and her beautifully modeled hands open in compassion. She, too, is often framed in what Dr. Willoughby had called an “almond mandorla.” This mandorla, curving around her on either side, and pointed at the top and bottom, had infinitely delicately rendered gradations of rainbow colors.

I had bitten my lip at the time in order not to ask further about the origin of the “almond mandorla,” since it was so obviously an archetypal feminine shape. This was the archetypal mother energy, I thought, from which all colors emerge.

I had seen that shape in other works of art, including the double-pointed, double-curved, almond-shaped frames, also painted in rainbow shades, around Buddhist saints in classical Tangkas. The famous image of the sixteenth-century Mexican apparition of Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe—which, as two contemporary accounts maintained, manifested to Nahuatl peasant Juan Diego—also shows the Virgin Mother appearing within a similar, but not identical, radiant mandorla shape.

When I looked up the origin of the almond mandorla, I found that it was indeed a vaginal symbol that antedated Christianity—going back to the Pythagoreans—but that it was also used by early Christians. Early depictions of Jesus portrayed him as an infant within the vesica, or mandorla, which represented the womb of Mary. The mandorla also symbolized the coming together of heaven and earth in the form of Jesus—part man, part god. It represents a doorway or portal between worlds. By the Middle Ages, it was part of the church’s sacred geometry. Other cultures also adapted the mandorla. In Hindu culture, the yoni is also a mandorla symbol: “the yoni is the gateway, or the zone of interpenetration, wherein two circles intersect.”
¹⁹

You can still see this symbol, now placed horizontally, in Piscean form, in stickers on cars of Christians asserting their religious identies; no doubt few realize that it was originally a schematic depiction of the archetypal womb, and related to early depictions of the archetypal divine feminine.

As Lousada and I continued talking, the afternoon had waned. By the time I disconnected from our Skype session, the light was lower, and high white clouds towered over the darker line of the medieval college’s chapel roof. They looked like castles upon castles, like the mighty white clouds I had seen, painted with tiny brushes on vellum, through which a sacred lamb—or a beautiful, ancient Mary—had ridden in from heaven, as if explaining heaven to earth, while sheltered in the perfect double inward curves of a rainbow.

7

The Vagina Began as Sacred

At the summit of the world, give birth to the father; my womb is in the midst of the waters, in the ocean. Thence I extend through all the worlds and reach up to yonder sky with my greatness. . . . the Devi’s womb (Yoni), sometimes translated as “origin” or “home,” is her creative power . . . from this emanates the whole of the universe.

—Deva Datta Ka Li,
In Praise of the Goddess: The Devimahatmaya and Its Meaning

I
t would take many volumes to account comprehensively for the history of the vagina in the West alone; so this is necessarily an overview, concentrating on dramatic shifts in its cultural meaning and representation.

The vagina began as sacred. There are vagina symbols carved into cave walls in the earliest historic settlements. The earliest artifacts of human prehistory featured vaginas. Figurines such as the Venuses of central Europe, which probably represented fertility, often exhibited exaggerated pudenda. We can’t know for certain exactly what these sacred vaginas represented, but feminist historians such as Riane Eisler, in
The Chalice and the Blade,
and others, are sure they represented a primordial state of matriarchy.
¹
But the prominence given to representations of the vagina when human beings first made art certainly suggests that female sexuality and fertility were seen as sacred. From 25,000 to 15,000 BCE, “Venus figurines”—fertility images with pronounced vulvas—made of stone or ivory were abundant in Europe, and similar images crafted from the mud of the Nile were common in Egypt. Sir Arthur Evans, who discovered the Minoan civilization at the turn of the twentieth century, pointed out that the multitude of such fertility figurines in so many diverse parts of the world suggested that “The same Great Mother . . . whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond” was “a worldwide fact.”
²
As a number of historians, such as Rosalind Miles in
The Women’s History of the World,
see it, “From the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.”
³

And from the beginning of recorded history, every early culture that has been studied had a version of a sex goddess, from the Sumerian creation epic
Gilgamesh
’s Inanna to the many versions of Ashtaroth worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sixth-century-BCE Egyptian goddess Astarte who grew out of Ashtaroth worship, and onward to the cultures of classical antiquity, Greece and Rome.

Five thousand years ago in what is now Iraq, Inanna’s vulva was worshipped as a sacred site; Sumerian hymns praised the goddess’s “lap of honey,” compared her vulva to “a boat of heaven,” and celebrated the bounty that “pours forth from her womb.” The connection of her sexuality to the earth’s fertility was so direct that even lettuces were described as the pubic hair of the Goddess.
⁴
Inanna’s vagina was magical, a locus of pure holiness: “Inanna . . . leaned against the apple tree / When she leaned against the apple tree, her vulva was wondrous to behold / Rejoicing at her wondrous vulva, the young woman Inanna applauded herself / She said, I, the Queen of Heaven, shall visit the God of Wisdom. . . .”
⁵

The core of the Sumerian religion was a “Sacred Marriage” between the shepherd god Tammuz and Inanna: coins from this era show Inanna spreading her legs wide apart in sacred congress with Tammuz.
⁶
Women worshippers dedicated vases symbolizing the uterus to Inanna. A sacred text of the period notes that “Once the Holy Inanna had washed / Then was she sprinkled with cedar oil. / The King then proudly approached her sacred lap. / He proudly joined with the glorious triangle of Inanna. / And Tammuz, the bridegroom, lay with her / Tenderly pressing her beautiful breasts!” Inanna’s “wondrous vagina” is connected with the search for wisdom. Eventually all the early major Goddess religions included a male consort, with whom the Goddess would copulate in sacred marriage.

Qadesh, a variant on the Astarte archetype, the Egyptian goddess of nature, beauty, and sexual pleasure, was portrayed as a naked woman standing on the back of a lion, adorned with a crescent moon headdress. She was often shown holding snakes or papyrus plants in her right hand, which represented the penis; and in her left hand, lotus flowers, which stood for the vagina. Serpent symbology often accompanied representations of sex goddesses. Minoan goddess figures also depicted the Goddess bare-breasted, holding a snake in each hand. The story of Eve, tempted by the serpent into the original sin of her shameful female sexuality, is a later, Hebraic negative transposition of the sacred symbolism of the Goddess with her serpent.

Throughout the Fertile Crescent, worship of the sex goddess Astarte/Ashtharoth was universal in the period before the rise of the Hebrew patriarchal God. Goddess worship in this period identified Astarte with sexual generation, but also with the wisdom of the cosmos itself. But, as Judaism grew away from its Sumerian antecedents, all aspects of Goddess worship were gradually transformed into negatives, as the younger religion sought to focus its followers on a masculine version of the One God.
⁷
When the Hebrews developed monotheism, they did so in a context in which the Goddess religions had developed a system of sacred priestesses. At certain points in the calendar, these priestesses would copulate with male worshippers, a practice seen as bringing into the community the order and goodness of the Divine Feminine. Worshippers regarded sacred prostitutes reverentially, and in no way as degraded sex workers. There are many steles that depict these sexual priestesses having what was considered to be sacred intercourse with male worshippers.

The Hebrews’ aversion to this form of worship—which again and again tempted the tribes of Israel—their political struggle to compete with such a religion, and the consequent hostility to the tradition of the sacred prostitute, are all evident in the horror with which the Five Books of Moses speak about unconstrained female sexuality, and especially about “harlotry.” The Hebrews recast what had been seen as divine unions as abominations.

The worship of the sacred vagina and of female sexuality as metaphors for a larger divinity extended, before the arrival of Christianity, to Europe. In pre-Christian Ireland, and even into the Christian era, stoneworkers carved many Sheela-na-Gig figures on the outer walls of buildings. In these carvings, naked women—representing the “sacred hags” of Celtic mythology, and, as we saw, symbolizing liminality—are portrayed with their legs apart, hands holding open their labia.
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Some architectural historians believe that even the dimensional, peaked stone folds that form the entrances of medieval European cathedrals incorporate vaginal imagery from this pre-Christian tradition. (Indeed, I was startled once as I wandered about the peaceful, and traditionally sacred, island of Iona, in the Scottish Hebrides, when I looked up onto the outer wall of an ancient nunnery and saw large and elegant labia carved, with nothing else around them, into the convent’s stone wall.)

But sex goddesses were not all sweetness and light: in every culture that worshipped the Goddess, though she had a majestic and alluring aspect, she also had another aspect that was dark and potentially destructive. Many cultures have a version of what anthropologists call “the vagina dentata.” This means, literally, “the vagina with teeth.” In his
Theogony,
for instance, the Greek poet Hesiod described the unborn god Kronos reaching out from his mother’s womb to castrate his father, Ouranos. In Hindu mythology, the demon Adi, in the form of the goddess Parvati, has teeth in the vagina. Author Erich Neumann, in his account of Goddess worship,
The Great Mother,
identifies the vagina dentata motif also in North American Indian mythology, in which “a meat-eating fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother.”
⁹
Inuit myths also describe women with dog heads where the vagina should be. The archetypal and universal association (usually by men) of the vagina with the mouth make the vagina dentata a universal and timeless symbol of male anxiety about engulfment and annihilation by a threatening Mother—so universal that Sigmund Freud would explore this symbol in his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
¹⁰
These universal vagina dentata images are not about personal aversion to the human vagina, I believe; rather, they are archetypal images that are a necessary balance to the reverence for women’s life-giving powers. They address the inevitable dark side of the Goddess by acknowledging that destruction is the other side of generation, that incarnation—the womb, the birth canal—is a gateway into being, but that incarnation also inevitably leads to death.

THE VAGINA BECOMES PROFANE

While some of the power and seductiveness associated with the earlier goddesses still appeared in Greek narratives of female Eros and desire, women’s subordinated status was complete with the establishment of the first Greek city-states. Some ancient Goddess symbolism survived into the classical period; in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
for instance, in the story of Cadmus and Arethusa, Arethusa is converted into a serpent—which represents, counterintuitively, the vulva—and the man into a fountain, representing the penis. Another figure who echoes the powerful vagina symbolism in Goddess-worshipping antiquity is that of Baubo, who lifts her skirt to show her vulva, and who makes Demeter—who has lost her daughter, Persephone—laugh once again. Demeter’s laughter helps restore fertility to a world threatened with barrenness by her grief.

No historian has conclusively explained how women lost status in the transition from the earliest civilizations to those of classical antiquity. By Plato’s time (427–347 BCE), sexual perfection was seen as the union between a man and a boy; Greek wives were strictly for reproduction. Pleasure for women was restricted to the class of
hetairae,
or the courtesan class; wives were well contained behind the walls of private homes and immured in legally subordinated marriage. An exception was the poetess Sappho of Lesbos, who celebrated female eroticism, giving us the first vibrant metaphors in the Western poetic tradition for female arousal and orgasm.