“The most familiar goddesses are, as we are so often reminded, the mothers of patriarchy. They are the equivalent of the mothers of what Freud has taught us to call latency, the period that begins when the presence and primacy of paternal power has been acknowledged. Perhaps a reason these goddesses seem so familiar is that we can so easily recognize our own mothers (and ourselves) in them. Yet we half-know they are not adequate representations of the original mother; something has been lost. As we heed that presentiment, we discover that what has been lost is precisely: the mother” (Christine Downing, The Goddess, 133).
Head of Gaia from the Istanbul Archeological Museum
