It isn't new that cultural transformation and the silencing of peoples go hand in hand. The transference of the regenerative vulva/fish symbol from the Goddess to the Christ, the silencing of the vulva as first passage, the literal sewing shut of women's labia, the silencing of woman as sex and as voice, the closing of her two mouths is brilliantly analyzed by scholar and poet Anne Carson who writes in her essay "The Gender of Sound":
It is an axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical discussion that a woman has two mouths. The orifice through which vocal activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place are both denoted by the word stoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition of adverbs ano or kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by a neck (auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin).
Both mouths provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed.1
The shutting down of women as centers of power in and of themselves saw its final phases in the persecution of women as witches. In Witchcraze, A New History of the European Witch Hunts, Anne Barstow relates Gabor Klaniczay's suggestion that the witch craze of the Middle Ages was a reaction against women who had gained power as mystics and saints. Clearly, these were women who actively retained and practiced the rituals and medicinal traditions of their ancestors. Malleus Maleficarum—The Hammer of Witches, begun as a 1485 treatise—set out to define those women who were given over to Satan and needed to be purged—most literally—leading to perhaps the greatest movement in history specifically, deliberately, and overwhelmingly directed at women for a major period lasting two hundred years and resulting in the murder of a mostly poor, mostly female peasantry who had been handed over millennia the earth knowledge passed on to them from their mothers along with medicinal and artistic traditions coming from an ancient time in which a still-difficult-to-encapsulate-and-define She was venerated in many forms as manifestation of a powerful female God.
In the last pages of her first chapter, Barstow, like Carson, also writes of the societal problem of women's mouths:
Scolding done by a female was considered a crime and was punished in Britain by the scold's bridle, which locked the victim's head inside an iron cage that drove spikes through her tongue, and by the ducking stool, used for witches as well, by which they were ducked under water in stagnant ponds or cesspools…
In terms of an accused woman's status, Barstow continues:
The alleged witch may have been sliding down into economic dependency, but she still had a certain authority, some standing in her community. As a healer, midwife, advice-giver, fortune-teller, spell-lifter, she was sought after; she could therefore boast [quoting witchcraft skeptic Reginald Scot] "that she (as a goddess) hath brought such things to pass (emphasis mine)."2
That tragedy is still with us as a world-view whose glass-ceiling-ed and lower caste citizenry embodied as woman is the expression of psychological reshaping over time into an acceptance of the generally overlooked, historically under-valued and disempowered goddess. In The Language of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas shows how this goddess once existed as earth mother, in powers of two and three, as snake, owl, vulture, crow, bull, deer, bear, lion, goat, fish, frog, hedgehog, bee, and butterfly. She came with slit-eyes and open mouth, or beak. Her water symbols appeared as V's and streams, nets, chevron flecks and meanders, parallel and tri-lines, all of which have been found in Upper-Paleolithic figurines dating back as far as 18,000 BCE in Old Europe.3
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I hear Sappho now who said: Not one girl I think who looks on the light of the sun will ever have wisdom like this.4 We are left to guess at what that specific wisdom was even as its echoes still surround us, even as we have not become completely forgotten to it.
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In partial answer to the question as to "Why Superstition is chiefly found in Women" Dominican Theologians and Malleus Malleficarum authors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger said, among many things, woman was a monster of three forms, with the face of a lion, the belly of a goat and the tail of a viper, all three animal symbols of the Goddess. (Remember how En-hedu-Ana addressed Inanna as her divine, wild cow.) In addition, said Kramer and Sprenger, woman was beautiful to look at, "but contaminating to touch and deadly to keep," and in possession of one other property that stings, kills and is "bitter as absinthium…as wormwood": her voice.5
In her essay "Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There," June Jordan writes briefly of the poet June Beer who was imprisoned for speaking out against the dictator Somoza: "…she tells me why she has been jailed under Somoza. ‘In the revolution I was too old to be militant. But my mouth was not too old.'"6 In the 20>th and 21st Centuries mouths are still things by which women remain culturally prone to punishment. An Akkadian hymn to Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna) from the second millennium BCE recalls that time when the female was divine, not despised. It reads in part: Reverence the queen of women, the greatest of all the gods…in her lips she is sweet, in her mouth is Life…."7
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Water and animal symbols still appear in contemporary pottery and other arts and crafts in many places throughout the world. Ancient water motifs are interpreted as symbolic representation associated with female moisture and amniotic fluid. Neolithic (4,000-8,000 BCE) hourglass shapes as seen on such artifacts as Romanian vases are thought to symbolize the subterranean or sub-aqueous life and regenerative force of the goddess. It's intriguing then that the batá drums of Nigeria and Cuba are shaped similarly to an hourglass.
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According to Mark Corralés the bata drums were introduced or developed in Yoruba Land, what is now Southwestern Nigeria, about 500 years ago, perhaps as long ago as 800 years. Corrales writes:
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According to [Fernando] Ortiz and others, the bata drums probably have roots in northeastern Africa or the Middle East or even India, where double-headed drums also exist. Their ancient relatives were most likely in Sudan or Egypt.8
Now this becomes very, very interesting to me, for an assemblage of miniature ritual objects was discovered at a site in NE Bulgaria, dating back to the mid-5th Millennium BCE, about the same time as the shrine painting at Çatal Hüyük (site of the first painting found depicting a frame drum around 5800 BCE). Among the objects found in Bulgaria are three double-headed drums, one small, one medium, and one large, together with four figurines, chairs, three tables and three screens. The figurines and screens are marked with V's, meanders, parallel lines and streams, all water symbols (as pictured):
Top: Ritualistic Drum Scene, Bulgaria, mid-5th millennium BCE. From Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess.
Bottom left: Clay drums with breasts and water marks, central Germany, 3700-3500 BCE.
Bottom right: Replica of Bronze Age drum with owl face and water marks, Yorkshire, 2000 BCE.
 Dumbek: Middle East, 2006 |
 Tabla: Northern India, 2006 |
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In viewing this remarkable setting, with chairs, screens, drums, tables and figurines, a drum ceremony seemed so obvious to me as to not be overlooked and the batá is what first came into my mind, although the drums in miniature are also similar to some of the double-headed tablas of India. 
The batá drum set is comprised of cylindrical, double- headed drums, one each of small, medium, and large. When the ceremonious batás are played there are three drummers and often a principal dancer, depending upon which deity / Orisa is being invoked. I'm not suggesting anything absolute regarding batá drum origin, but I am suggesting a striking similarity between these drums found in Bulgaria some 5,000 years earlier, their size and type, as well as an indication of people meant to play them as part of what seems to be a depiction of musically ceremonious engagement seemingly linked to women and water. It's worth mentioning here that early creation myths of nearly every culture are said to share the theme that life arises from the primal waters of creation. This echoes the relationship of mouths, river mouths, and those of caves and mines which were, as Layne Redmond notes, equated to the womb of a Great Mother Goddess who between 3500 and 2000 BCE was known as Hathor in Egypt, Inanna in Sumer (Iraq), and as several early Hindu goddesses in the Indus Valley (India). Language itself is shown to incorporate this sensibility. In When the Drummers Were Women, Redmond relates the Egyptian word bi means a gallery of a mine and vagina. The Sumerian word buru means both river and vagina, and the Babylonian word pu indicates source of river and vagina.9
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A perhaps fascinating link to this is the Yoruba batá traditions, and that among the Orisas honored in the Yoruba songs and batá ceremonies of Nigeria, and preserved as Lukumí traditions of Cuban Santería, Yemoja stands out as a striking triple goddess similar in power and function to any myriad of ancient goddesses in their life-giving and regenerative forms whose symbols have been found on figurines and ceramics, and painted on sarcophagi and in caves and temples in areas of Old Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East. Yemoja, is a living goddess who exemplifies a nature-centered consciousness manifest through the female. Yemoja is a powerful Orisa. John Mason, of the Yoruba Theological Archministry of New York writes:
Yemoja, Oya and Osun, the great mother and her two powerful daughters are now saluted. Reverence for feminine salt water/maternity power, wind-fire/transformer power, and sweet water/sanitation-comfort power accompanied Lukumí captives into the Americas. These are three of the most powerful philosophic principles that Lukumí re-thought, expanded on, and used to base their new lives, in exile, on. Yemoja, "Mother of the Children of Fishes," is the ultimate symbol, and the personification of motherhood. She represents the place of origin and the maternal source of divine, human, animal and plant life. The ocean is the most common symbol of this all-encompassing maternity. However, in Yorubaland, Yemoja is the deity of the Ogun river, the largest river within the territory of the ancient Yoruba. The Lukumí equate Yemoja with the top or euphotic layer of the ocean. The euphotic layer teems with life and acts as the womb of the world by being conducive to the growth of plants and animals and permitting the continuance of life. It is the largest environment for life on earth. Both views see Yemoja as the mother who gave birth to civilization.10
In her lips she is sweet, in her mouth is life….
Notes:
1 Anne Carson, "The Gender of Sound," in Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions Books, 1995), 131.
2 Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts: Our Legacy of Violence Against Women (San Francisco, CA: Pandora Press, 1994), 28-29.
3 Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess.
4 Anne Carson, If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 56.
5 Montague Summers, ed., The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer & Sprenger (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), 46.
6 June Jordan, "Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There," in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (New York: Basic/Civitas Books, First Paperback Edition, 2003), 207.
7 N. K. Sanders, "Introduction," in The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 26.
8 Mark Corralés "The Batá Drums," http://www.lafi.org/magazine/articles/batadrums.html (accessed April 16, 2003).
9 Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women, 59.
10 Mason, Orin Orisa, 307.
Images:
1. Tlazolteotl c. 1300-1521, Aztec goddess of earth, sex, childbirth; also a mother goddess
2-4. See above.
5. Tabla drums of India
6. Lukumí batá drums of Cuba
