A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

The memory of this “mystery” still survived in the Olympian mythology (Hera conceives alone and gives birth to Hephaestus and Ares) and can be read in numerous myths and popular beliefs concerning the birth of men from the Earth, giving birth on the ground, depositing the newborn infant on the ground, etc.24 Born of the Earth, man, when he dies, returns to his mother. “Crawl toward the earth, thy mother,” the Vedic poet exclaims (Rig Veda 10. 18. 10). To be sure, feminine and maternal sacrality was not unknown in the Paleolithic (§ 6), but the discovery of agriculture markedly increases its power. The sacrality of sexual life, and first of all of feminine sexuality, becomes inseparable from the miraculous enigma of creation. Parthenogenesis, the hieros gamos, and the ritual orgy express, on different planes, the religious character of sexuality. A complex symbolism, anthropocosmic in structure, associates woman and sexuality with the lunar rhythms, with the earth (assimilated to the womb), and with what must be called the “mystery” of vegetation.