THE SYMBOLS OF THE FEMALE

by Bernard Katz

I recently taught a class of the elderly about the Bible and phallic worship. My students were very responsive, one reason being that in all their Bible studies and religious schooling they had never had so much as a hint about sex worship of the male. During the next-to-the-last class, one woman asked that since there was a symbol for the male, why wasn't there one for the female? Oh, I said, but that's for another course. However, if you can't wait, I'll give the class a brief run-down next week. And this is what I said.

The horseshoe shape was one of the most sacred in the ancient world because it was a stylization of the yoni, signifying entrances and exits in general. "Yoni" is a Hindu word for our familiar "vulva," and its male counterpart is the Hindu word "lingam"—and you know what this means from this course.

Druidic temples, Hindu and Arabic arches testify to the importance of the yoni.

The sacred alphabet of the Greeks enclosed all things (i.e., letter symbols) between the birthletter alpha and the horseshoe-shaped omega, the name of which means the "Great Om." The Upanishads referred to Om as "the supreme syllable, the mother of all sound," and sound was the Great Goddess's tool of creation. She invented the Sanskrit alphabetical letters, which were matrika, "mothers." Om was the mantramatrika, the Mother of Mantras—that is, the first of all the creative spells spoken by the Goddess to bring the world into being. The Goddess created all things by speaking their names in her magic language, "as from a mother comes birth, so from matrika, or sound, the world proceeds."

The meaning of Om was something like "pregnant belly," certainly a prerequisite for symbolic maternal creation, comparable to the deep of biblical and Middle Eastern creation myths, which bore the name of the Mother (tehom) even in Hebrew. The Arabic cognate of the word, Umm, meant mother, matrix, source, principle, or prototype: all concepts derived from the primal womb.

The Oriental teachings surrounding the Om as the "creative Word" were the true roots of the Christian doctrine of the Logos—the Word of God that was supposed to have made the world and to have become incarnate in Jesus. Before it was Christian, this doctrine was Greek (Hermes was the Logos of Zeus). And before that, it was the common property of Mesopotamian gods like Marduk and Enlil, who claimed to create by the power of their words. It was also the doctrine of hekau, words of power, in Egypt, where it was under the jurisdiction of the Crone goddess Hekit (Hecate). Priests of the male gods seized eagerly upon the idea of creating by a word, because it avoided the impossible problem of assigning creativity to a nonbirth-giving entity, the male. Thus the Logos became a prominent part of nearly every patriarchal religion.

The Christian God's description of himself as "the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending" (Revelation 1:8), was usurped from older titles of the Mother of birth and death.

The omega-shaped horseshoe continued to be hung "for luck" over doorways throughout the Christian era, protecting the threshold as it did in pagan times. There was always controversy, however, about whether its opening should point upward or downward. Orthodox piety insisted that the omega should be reversed, so "the luck wouldn't run out." Pagan tradition said the symbolic yoniform doorway should retain its original upward arch. The two ways of hanging the horseshoe actually echoed the magic signs called Dragon's Head and Dragon's Tail, the ascending node and descending node, connected with the path of the moon above and below the ecliptic, which when plotted would result in the wavy line representing the lunar serpent. And, once again, lunar (or the moon) was a female symbol because of the monthly periods of women.

Another very important female symbol is the mandorla, meaning "almond," which was one of the more cryptic synonyms for this symbol. It was also known as vesica piscis, the Vessel of the Fish, and more simply as the yoni. Almonds were female-genital symbols and maternity charms from very ancient times. The virgin birth of the god Attis was conceived by a magic almond. Even the Israelites' tabernacle made use of its fertility mana (Exodus 37:20), and Aaron's rod produced almonds in token of a general power of fructification (Numbers 17:8).

Although the yoni meaning of this sign was well known in the ancient world, it carried such sacred overtones that Christian artists seized upon it to frame the figures of saints, the Virgin, or Christ. Christian mystics redefined the mandorla as the arcs of two circles, left for female matter, right for male spirit. Even God himself appeared sometimes incongruously enclosed in this female genital emblem. A well-known twelfth century panel in Chartres Cathedral shows "Christ of the Apocalypse" within a mandorla. With an unintentional double entendre, the mandorla was sometimes piously interpreted as a gateway to heaven.

So there you have it, ladies! Instead of a male symbol for good luck like the cross or the Mogen David, you can wear your very own horseshoe or almond!