Anthropology

about funeral directors and flowers at funerals, but I take your point about mothers.

What interests me is that so many primal deities were female, specifically fecund females. It's my uneducated opinion that when women allowed men to know how babies were conceived, it was all downhill. I mean, think about it. People had sex all the time; women suddenly changed: they stopped menstruating and their bellies grew big, and nine months later--hey presto! New life! There would be no way--in my opinion--for early man to connect sexual relations, especially sexual relations with any specific male, to pregnancy and birth. As far as early humans knew, all births were virgin births.

And females were worshiped and feared for their reproductive abilities. They bleed but they do not die; they can produce new life. I suspect that all early, early societies were matriarchal and matrilineal. I think women figured out the relationship between sex and babies first (like the Eleusinian Mysteries--is that what they were about?), and then unfortunately men caught on.

But I am an old lady who hallucinates, so what do I know?