#barbara mor

[majestativa]

She who bleeds with both life and death.

◈ MONICA SJÖÖ & BARBARA MOR — The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (1987)

[themotherofrevelation]

Female sex objects abound, but they are all manmade; when is the last time you saw a centerfold with hairy armpits, hairy legs, and a bloodflow? The young girl of the modern West learns from all these subliminal signals to distrust, to dislike, and be ashamed of her own body and feelings, and those of other women. The femaleness she knows—body hair, sweat, monthly bloodflow, menstrual odor, ovulation discharge—must be hidden, taken care of in secret; while the femaleness men want to see (their own?) must be enhanced, publicly flaunted. Whether she really feels like doing this or not, she sees all the other women doing it. The message is that she must depend on something outside herself (men, male taste) for her self-definition. And she is on her own, isolated.

Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

[motherpriestess]

God does not want millions of human beings to starve and suffer and die so that a select few can undergo a "spiritual experience." Nor does the Goddess "live" solely in elite separatist retreats, dancing naked in the piney woods under a white and well-fed moon. The Goddess at this moment is starving to death in refugee camps, with a skeletal child clutched to her dry nipples. The Goddess at this moment is undergoing routine strip-and-squat search inside an American prison. The Goddess is on welfare, raising her children in a ghetto next to a freeway interchange that fills their blood cells and neurons with lead. The Goddess is an eight-year-old girl being used for the special sexual thrills of visiting businessmen in a Brazilian brothel. The Goddess is patrolling with a rifle slung over her shoulder, trying to save a revolution in Nicaragua. The Goddess is Winnie Mandela in South Africa saying "Don't push me." I.e., the Goddess is the world - the Goddess is in the world. And nobody can escape the world. We know this, but we forget it.

The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

[lunamarish]

Per gli antichi, la notte non era “assenza di luce” o oscurità negativa, ma una potente fonte di energia e ispirazione. Di notte il cosmo rivela la sua vastità, la terra si apre all'umidità e alla germinazione sotto la luce della luna, e la corrente magnetica serpeggiante si agita nelle acque sotterranee, proprio come lo spesso e sinuoso spruzzo di stelle, la Via Lattea, si snoda nel cielo notturno. Le fasi lunari fanno parte della grande danza cosmica a cui tutto partecipa: il movimento dei corpi celesti, il pulsare delle maree, la circolazione del sangue e della linfa negli animali e nelle piante. L'osservazione del cielo notturno, delle stelle e soprattutto della luna è stata l'inizio della matematica e della scienza.

Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor

[femalethink]

There is the generalized, traditional fear of female sexuality. Further, there is discomfort with the similarity, with the common origin, of the female clitoris and the male penis. Women are used to hearing the clitoris described as an "undeveloped penis"; men are not used to thinking of the penis as an overdeveloped clitoris. Finally, and most seriously, there is a profound psychological and institutional reluctance to face the repercussions of the fact that the female clitoris is the only organ in the human body whose purpose is exclusively that of erotic stimulation and release. What does this mean? It means that for the human female, alone among all earth's life-forms, sexuality and reproduction are not inseparable. It is the male penis, carrier of both semen and sexual response, that is simultaneously procreative and erotic. If we wanted to reduce one of the sexes to a purely reproductive function, on the basis of its anatomy (we don't), it would be the male sex that qualified for such a reduction, not the female. Not the human female.

But these are only biological facts. These are only biological realities. As we know, facts and realities can be, and are, systematically ignored in the service of established ideologies. Throughout the world today virtually all religious, cultural, economic, and political institutions stand, where they were built centuries ago, on the solid foundation of an erroneous concept. A concept that assumes the psychic passivity, the creative inferiority, and the sexual secondariness of women. This enshrined concept states that men exist to create the human world, while women exist to reproduce humans. Period. If we argue that data exists—not solely biological, but archaeological, mythological, anthropological, and historical data—which refutes the universality of this erroneous concept, we are told to shut up; because something called "God" supports the erroneous concept, and that's all that matters. That's the final word.

—Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth."

[haggishlyhagging]

“World myths, folk traditions, and anthropological studies agree that women first discovered how to use and produce fire. In a survey of 224 modern tribal societies, it was found that fires were made and tended always or usually by women in 84 societies; almost all these societies have legends telling of the early times when women were the exclusive "owners" of fire. Ritual maintenance of fire remained entrusted to women down through historic times, such as the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome, or the Irish nuns of St. Brigid (from the originally Celtic Goddess Brigid, or Bride), who tended a perpetual fire at Kildare until the suppression of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Fire is sacred to the Moon Mother. Cooking—boiling, roasting, baking, steaming—was only one of the techniques women acquired from their mastery of directed heat. Fire was the tool of tools; through its use foods could be dried and conserved for future use, and some poisonous plants and fruits made edible. It was women who developed all the early associated industries of cooking and ceramics in which fire was the critical tool.”

-Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth.

[sealwomyn]

"The Great Mother was the projection of the self-experience of groups of highly aware and productive women who were the founders of much of human culture. In this sense, the Great Mother is not simply a mental archetype, but a historical fact. Ancient icons, symbols, and myths cannot be understood if they are disembodied from this fact. They... must be seen in the context of ancient political realities."

"Because the Great Mother was a historical reality, her psychological repression must also be seen in historical terms, as a political suppression of an earlier female-oriented world order by a later male-dominated one."

-- The Great Cosmic Mother, by Barbara Mor and Monica Sjöö, p. 30 and 31

[desescrita]

“Night, to ancient people, was not an ‘absence of light’ or a negative darkness, but a powerful source of energy and inspiration. At night the cosmos reveals herself in her vastness, the earth opens to moisture and germination under moonlight, and the magnetic serpentine current stirs itself in the underground waters–just as the thick, snakey spray of stars, the Milky Way, winds across the night sky. Moon phases are a part of the great cosmic dance in which everything participates: the movement of the celestial bodies, the pulse of tides, the circulation of blood and sap in animals and plants. Observation of the night sky, of the stars, and especially of the moon, was the beginning of mathematics and science.”

— Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother