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Subject Headings (Quick Links)
GAIA * PREHISTORY * EILEITHYIA
* ARTEMIS * ISIS * LIGHTBEARERS
MIDWIVES & DR. PRAJNAPARAMITA *
ECSTATIC BIRTH
Beginning at the beginning is the birth of Life itself where Mother Earth or Mother Nature is the Birth Giver, the source of all life and ground of being. She is Gaia, the Earth Goddess, midwife to herself birthing the world into being. Out of this world births the flora and fauna that makes earth a living, breathing organism. It is out of Earth’s imagination and artistic expression that humans have inspired their evolution.
Some of the earliest known humans seem to have worshipped the Birth/Life-Giver in the shapes of triangles representing vulvas on pottery and animals in birthing positions painted on the walls of caves and sculpted into figurines made from clay and stone. Found at Catal Huyuk in Turkey, a pre-historical civilization, there are the Bird, the Snake and the Frog Goddesses, the Pregnant Vegetation Goddess and the Phallic Goddess. On the Greek island of Crete at Knossos, there are prehistoric life-giving Goddesses depicted on 16th century B.C. Minoan frescoes and seals as the “incarnation of the fertility of nature known as the Queen of the Mountains and Mistress of Animals" (109 Gimbutas). The House of Frescoes at Knossos is called “an orgy of vegetation” where plant and animal energy is “portrayed as bursting forth” with the energy of the Goddess, as “mountains, stones, waters, forests, and animals, an incarnation of the mysterious powers of nature” (Gimbutus 111). It was the Minoan Cretens who lived in peace and harmony with nature and had the greatest faith in this Goddess (87 Gadon). These people were attracted by everything that came out of the soil (89) as well as the birthing body of a woman.
The Queen of Mountains/Mistress of Animals soon became the first known Greek Goddess of Childbirth called Eileithyia whose name means “child-bearing.” It is on the island of Crete that a cave sanctuary was created and dedicated to Eileithyia. Outside this cave sanctuary lived a fig tree that is archetypal to the midwifery goddess because of the pulpy fruit’s resemblance to a woman’s fertile womb (92). These images, the cave and fig as womb and the tree itself “rooted in the earth sprouting flowers who then withers and dies only to rebirth itself again from its own seed” (90), were all primordial manifestations of what the midwifery goddess signifies. There is an image of Eileithyia that represent her as “veiled from head to foot, stretching out one hand to help, and in the other holding a torch as the symbol of birth into the light of the world” (48 Meltzer).
Artemis, the goddess of wild nature and childbirth is also associated with the wild fig fruit (Downing 167) and may have been worshipped in the form of a tree (Gadon 197). Again the symbolic fig tree and its fruit is present in Greece similarly discovered in Minoan and Buddhist traditions. Yet, unlike the primordial earth goddess Gaia, Artemis is wilderness within the human world (Downing 165). She is a woman’s goddess connected to women’s blood mysteries: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, menopause, and death. She is both huntress and protectress of all that is wild, untamed and vulnerable. Ginette Paris believes:
The function of Artemis is to preserve our contacts with animality, […] teach one to submit to the powerful working of nature […and become] completely possessed by the animal force that inhabits her with all the fury and, at times, with all the bloody cruelty of which nature is capable. […] Artemis, who rides wild horses and can battle the animals, can teach a woman how to follow her instincts. (118-9)
There is a cave sanctuary in Greece at Brauron devoted to Artemis where initiatory rites of passage took place. At this place women and young girls from Athens clad in bearskins would enter a jagged cave sanctuary (Streep 194). Although the ritual was associated with adolescents and their coming of age, it was through the path of emergence from this cave through its jagged rock opening that is an archetypal representation of “the act of birth from the cavelike womb” (194).
Artemis may originally have been an oriental goddess (165 Downing). In Asia Minor the greatness of Isis-Artemis was revered. Isis was ‘queen everywhere’ and Artemis was the one ‘whom all Asia and the world worshippeth’ (Gadon 149). They were moon goddesses. R.E.Witt tells us:
In their capacity of deliverers both Isis and Artemis carry the torch symbolizing the light of the moon, present to save mother and child in their darkness. Each as heavenly midwife is peculiarly ready to hear and to save. (149)
Isis was a pancosmic figure similar to the primordial Divine Mother of Asia Minor and Crete, the goddesses who personified Nature as the source of life (Witt 131). She was called the “Mother of the Gods”.
The Romans called this goddess Diana, the “opener of the womb” as well as Lucina, the goddess who “leads the child to the light” and the Christian called her St. Lucy known as the candle bearing saint whose emblem was the red ladybug (Monaghan 212).
Goddesses of the Light or Lightbearers could be the midwife’s naming for it is she who is the guide who helps the child emerge from the darkness of the cavelike womb to the opening of the light of this world. It is this Light, or rather the light of the Moon, that seemed to have enticed the goddess worshipping cultures to project their beliefs upwards. This upward gaze is believed by some to have eventually converted or objectified their goddesses into a singular image of a moon leading them perhaps toward a more monotheistic way of thinking.
In the first half of the Christian era, the arts of medicine remained almost exclusively in the hands of “wise women” because ancient healing shrines had been devoted almost exclusively to the Goddess’s priestesses (Walker). Yet times changed and history recounts that:
In ancient times and in primitive societies, the work of the midwife had both a technical or manual aspect as well as magical or mystical aspect. Hence, the midwife was sometimes revered, sometimes feared, sometimes acknowledged as a leader of the society, sometimes tortured and killed. These women had knowledge and skill in an area of life that was a mystery to most people. Since women had no access to formal education, it was widely assumed that the midwife’s power must come from supernatural sources such as an alliance with the Devil. During the Middle Ages, a frenzy of witch burning, promoted by both church and civic authorities, was responsible for the killing of up to several million women, many of whom were midwives and healers. (Sullivan)
As the medical profession gained power and medical training was restricted to men, women lost the privilege to attend a woman’s birthing (Sullivan). Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a call for the abolition of midwifery and by the 20th century the practice was nearly non-existent (Sullivan). Today, midwives and doctors work side by side complementing each other’s gifts in assisting women to birth forth.
When I discovered that I was pregnant with my son, I knew I could not give birth as I had with my daughter. My daughter’s birth was painful even though it was medicated. I wanted an experience altogether different. I was resolute to create a space where an uninterrupted birth experience could take place I would be able to spare the pain generally modeled by western medical childbirth practices. To prepare for this birth, I turned my gaze toward Asia to seek out the tantric goddesses for inspiration. It was here that I found a portal to a past where the Birth Giver was honored.
In particular, the goddess Prajnaparamita or Goddess of Perfect Wisdom became my mentor. She was beloved as Mother of All Buddhas and honored as Mother Wisdom and in Tantric Buddhist teachings, Mother Wisdom is the highest object of worship, more worthy than Buddha’s Wisdom. Both Buddhas and Bodhisattvas revere her as the omniscience, the Birth Giver who is greater than the one who is born (Shaw 50).
Miranda Shaw, a preeminent scholar on Tantric Buddhism states that this spiritual tradition not only founded on “the principle that ecstasy is the essence of the world” (39) but one that treasured the human body as a vehicle of enlightenment and an abode of bliss. The tantric text Candamaharoshana Tantra states that “those who fail to honor women can not attain liberation, but those who render to women their due homage will be rewarded with supreme enlightenment” (51). Shaw translates:
Envisioning her as a living goddess, [man] should bow at her feet, beg her to grace him with a loving glance and worship at the altar of her thighs. He should lovingly kiss her stomach, thinking, “This is where I formerly dwelt; from here I was born,” and grant her any form of pleasure that she desires. […] It is the high value placed upon the human body and upon birth [that] is the cornerstone of this—and any—female-affirming philosophy. (51)
Through yogic preparation and the study of this tantric goddess philosophy, I was able to align with the Great Goddess and discover her path of bliss. This goddess’ Tantric Buddhist teachings became a gateway to a peaceful, pleasurable birth experience. My son was born beautifully at home and I was able to reclaim my feminine power through the initiatory experience of an ecstatic birth.
In an article entitled “Ecstatic Birth,” Sarah Buckley, a mother and medical doctor, states that “[the] way of birth affects us life long, mother and child, and that an ecstatic birth, a birth that takes us beyond our self, is the gift of a lifetime”(51). Buckley is hopeful that this claim is one that both mothers and science are beginning to discover and affirm. I am grateful for the author’s research for I have comprehended the scientific reasoning behind my pleasurable birth experience.
I learned that on the physical plane, four major hormonal systems are
active during labor and birth. These are:
1. oxytocin, the hormone of love;
2. endorphins, hormones of pleasure and transcendence;
3. epinephrine and norepinephrine, hormones of excitement;
4. and prolactin, the mothering hormone.
It is known that these systems are common to all mammals and originate in our mammalian or middle brain, also know as the limbic system (51)—our most primitive part of our brain. For birth to proceed optimally, the middle brain must take precedence over the neocortex, or rational brain (51)—the part of the brain that separates us from animals. This shift from rational to instinctual can be helped by what the author describes as “an uninterrupted birth” where a woman may intuitively birth her baby allowing her body and heart to open to the pleasure.
Dr. Frederick LeBoyer best prescribes a way of inviting in joyance.
There is nothing to do. Just as in lovemaking.
Open and let go.
Surrender. Let it to happen.
Being, merely, a witness.
A bewildered, raptured witness.
To your utter amazement you watch yourself and the baby being carried,
as it were, by an uninterrupted, continuous, flowing, beautifully rhythmic
process.
Yes: nothing to do.
Just be. And flow with the process.
The inner power
And the baby
Have done it all for you. (209)
Buckley’s research confirms my curiosity that for a woman, having a baby has a lot of parallels with making a baby: same hormones, same parts of the body, same sounds, and the same needs for feelings of safety and privacy (55). She asks the question I have been asking for some time, ”How would it be to attempt to make love in the conditions under which we expect women to give birth?” (55). And “if giving birth is an act of love” (59) then how may we teach women to love themselves giving birth, to drop all inhibitions and become the prime animal we have evolved from?
Perhaps by connecting back to the nature-rooted realms of the Goddess and the blissful corporeal tantric yogic traditions where human life is “simply an awesome mystery that emerges from the body of a woman” (6), this sacred and natural mystery will be revered, respected and honored once again. Not only looking at birth scientifically and physically but metaphorically and philosophically. Contemplating the female hormonal systems in this manner and asking how may these systems which allow physical experiences of sexual pleasure, love, altruism, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding become intentional and purposeful resources of love, pleasure and transcendence, excitement, and mothering? And moreover remembering that it is what the goddesses offered humanity that is most important—refuge from the struggles with the facts of life and death, a hope of renewal (Streep 19). It is in the reconnection to the more primal and instinctual nature of birth that empowers the one that brings forth.
Works Cited