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3 books match the query 'Mother goddesses'
Bringing Their Mother Home
Roman Multiculturalism and the Mother of the GodsKrishni Burns
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Bringing Their Mother Home examines the worship of the Greco-Phrygian goddess Cybele, known as the Magna Mater in Rome, to understand the ways that the mid- to late-Roman Republic constructed and performed a multicultural, multiethnic identity. The goddess, originally worshiped in ancient Turkey, was brought by the Romans to their city in 204 BCE and renamed the Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Previous scholarship contended that the Romans feared and hated the goddess and her followers because they were foreign and gender nonconforming, but author Krishni Burns argues that the Romans embraced the Magna Mater and her genderfluid followers as they created a space for multiculturalism at a time when Rome was expanding rapidly across the Mediterranean. By importing the cult and ritually performing the Magna Mater's blended Phrygian and Roman identity, the Roman state was able to ease the process of incorporating the eastern Mediterranean kingdoms into its hegemony.
Drawing on historical, literary, and archaeological evidence, Bringing Their Mother Home reevaluates the semiotics and practices of the Magna Mater cult as a way to perform the multicultural Roman identity and explores the political and military climate of the Mediterranean leading up to the cult's adoption in 204 BCE.
Drawing on historical, literary, and archaeological evidence, Bringing Their Mother Home reevaluates the semiotics and practices of the Magna Mater cult as a way to perform the multicultural Roman identity and explores the political and military climate of the Mediterranean leading up to the cult's adoption in 204 BCE.
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Mother Earth
An American StorySam D. Gill
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"The earth is my mother, and on her bosom I shall repose."
Attributed to Tecumseh in the early 1800s, this statement is frequently cited to uphold the view, long and widely proclaimed in scholarly and popular literature, that Mother Earth is an ancient and central Native American figure. In this radical and comprehensive rethinking, Sam D. Gill traces the evolution of female earth imagery in North America from the sixteenth century to the present and reveals how the evolution of the current Mother Earth figure was influenced by prevailing European-American imagery of America and the Indians as well as by the rapidly changing Indian identity.
Gill also analyzes the influential role of scholars in creating and establishing the imagery that underlay the recent origins of Mother Earth and, upon reflection, he raises serious questions about the nature of scholarship.
"Mother Earth might be modern, stressing the supposed biological ground of native life and its rich mythic tradition, but it hardly frees the native people from their long, lamentable involvement with the white man. For making this point clear, Gill deserves high praise."—Bernard W. Sheehan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"In one of the finest studies of recent years we have an ambitious attempt to satisfy scholar, Native American, popular reader, and truth."—Thomas McElwain, Western Folklore
Attributed to Tecumseh in the early 1800s, this statement is frequently cited to uphold the view, long and widely proclaimed in scholarly and popular literature, that Mother Earth is an ancient and central Native American figure. In this radical and comprehensive rethinking, Sam D. Gill traces the evolution of female earth imagery in North America from the sixteenth century to the present and reveals how the evolution of the current Mother Earth figure was influenced by prevailing European-American imagery of America and the Indians as well as by the rapidly changing Indian identity.
Gill also analyzes the influential role of scholars in creating and establishing the imagery that underlay the recent origins of Mother Earth and, upon reflection, he raises serious questions about the nature of scholarship.
"Mother Earth might be modern, stressing the supposed biological ground of native life and its rich mythic tradition, but it hardly frees the native people from their long, lamentable involvement with the white man. For making this point clear, Gill deserves high praise."—Bernard W. Sheehan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"In one of the finest studies of recent years we have an ambitious attempt to satisfy scholar, Native American, popular reader, and truth."—Thomas McElwain, Western Folklore
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The Goddess and the Nation
Mapping Mother IndiaSumathi Ramaswamy
Duke University Press, 2010
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present.
By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
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