Goddess Worship
Two thousand years ago, this was a world of Gods and Goddesses. Now, we live in a world of Gods. Women have had their spiritual power taken away from them.
In The Da Vinci Code, the characters Jacques Sauniere and Robert Langdon have knowledge in the goddess and her symbolism. It's made clear that Sauniere had expanded the collection of goddess figures in the Louvre. Langdon was preparing a manuscript for a new book, titled Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine.
Throughout history, we see a trend of Goddess worship that slowly decreased around the time of the rise of Christianity. Some 35,000 years ago, the importance of fertility in crops, animals and the tribe itself was of paramount importance. The female life-giving principle was thought of as divine and a great mystery.
Many anthropologists think that the first Gods were feminine. This belief came with the idea that creation was achieved through self-fertilization. The Goddess was believed to have created the universe by herself alone. Generally though, Goddess worshipped was balanced out by honoring both male and female Deities.
It is said that the Goddess has received "a thousand names and a thousand faces." She is associated with the sun and moon, the earthy and sky. The Goddess religion is a nature religion, usually called Paganism.
At the Council of Ephesus in AD 431, a meeting of Christian bishops said that the Virgin Mary should be known as Theotokos or "Mother of God", setting her in the role of the goddess. Though, in the Roman Catholic Church, Mary is seen as a submissive mother rather than the characteristics associated with the goddess.
During the medieval ages in Europe, thousands of women were burned at the stake for witchcraft. This crusade was against feminine to suppress the rise of female independence.
In the nineteenth century, the Wicca religion saw a re-emergence in northern Europe. Wicca is also known as "white witchcraft" and holds the goddess in high esteem with an equilibrium between the gods and goddesses.
The goddess is associated with the moon and is bound in with the bodily cycles of the female and lunar cycles of the moon. There are corresponding phases of the moon - waxing, full and, waning - and the three phases of the goddess - maiden, mother and, crone.
Today, the figure of the goddess has been omnipresence goddess can claim to be the original and oldest deity of all time.