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for Enlarged Photo of Medallion
Goddess
This particular talisman is derived from one of many,
many ancient Old European and Near Eastern Neolithic sculptures
and petroglyphs of the Great Mother. She was, before the
development of patriarchal religions with their primarily
male god forms, the prime deity, Dea Mater, Gaia, Tia Mat,
Mother Earth. The Great Goddess, with Her cycles of birth,
fertility, death, and rebirth. Because earthly women undergo
a regular menstrual cycle in union with the moon, the Goddess
is often identified with the full, crescent, and dark moon
(threefold). The Goddess, the Earth and women move through
the seasons of embodied existence, continually waxing and
waning, dying and being reborn.
This
unending cycle was generally personified in a triad or
trilogy, wherein the Goddess was viewed as having three "Faces":
Maiden, Mother, and Crone. As the Great Goddess occurred
in later mythologies, the sacred "3" became triads
such as Persephone/ Demeter/Hecate in Greece, or the Celtic
This ancient trilogy is still to be found in later religions,
such as Christianity, where it is masculinized into the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Or in Hinduism, where Brahma,
Vishnu and Shiva represent Creation, Sustenance, and Destruction.
Although
the Great Mother has been driven from our imagination
with the advent of patriarchal monotheism, the ancient
Mother never really left us, returning eternally in myth,
symbol and legend throughout history and her-story. Perhaps
the most potent return of the Great Mother is to be found
in contemporary ecology, with the Gaia Hypothesis introduced
by biologist James Lovelock, which revolutionized earth
sciences by proposing that the Earth was a living, self-sustaining
being. Gaia was the name of the primal Creatrix Goddess
among the early Greeks.
Ancient
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