An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J. C. Cooper

Author:J. C. Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-500-77090-0
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 1978-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

An ancient Palmyran relief depicts the Moon as a male god, whose armour, sword and, especially, crescent suggests the horns of power associated with male fertility gods in their aggressive, impregnating aspect.

Mortar See PESTLE.

Mosquito Chinese: Rebellion and wickedness.

Moth A form of Psyche.

Mother/Great Mother/Mother Goddess ‘Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are, whose nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. She is worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names and propitiated with all manner of different rites’ (Apuleius). ‘She is called nurse and myrionymos, from having, in a word, innumerable forms and semblances’ (Plutarch). Brahma prays to the Great Goddess: ‘Thou art the pristine spirit, the nature of which is bliss; thou art the ultimate nature and clear light of heaven which illuminates and breaks the self-hypnotism of the terrible round of rebirth, and thou art the one that muffles the universe, for all time, in thine own very darkness.’

She is the archetypal feminine; the origin of all life; the primum mobile and the ultimate plenum, the containing principle; she symbolizes all phases of cosmic life, uniting all the elements, both celestial and chthonic. She is the Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, ‘opener of the way’; the keeper of the keys of fertility and the gates of birth, death and rebirth. As the Moon Goddess she is perpetual renewal, the bringer of the seasons, the controller of the life-giving waters and the growth from the fertilized earth and the resurrection of its life, the Tellus Mater. As the moon she is the measurer of time, dividing the year into months of a twenty-eight-day cycle, and as time she is the weaver of fate, hence all great Mothers are weavers and spinners, weaving the web and pattern of life with the thread of destiny, symbolic of her powers of ensnaring and binding, but also of loosing and freeing. She has the dual nature of creator and destroyer and is both nourisher, protector, provider of warmth and shelter, and the terrible forces of dissolution, devouring and death-dealing; she is the creator and nourisher of all life and its grave.

Mythologically she is the Virgin Mother, the Mother of God, and bears a male and is begotten by her son-lover, or by the spirit or the will; she is both the Bride and Mother of God and the Mater Dolorosa, mourning the death of her son or lover. Spiritually she is archetypal wholeness; the self-sustaining and self-sufficient; the Virgin who gives birth to the Son of Light; she is the mother of all wisdom, self-mastery and redemption through illumination and transformation, ‘she who leads out beyond darkness and bondage’ and, as wisdom, encompasses the transformation of man from the most elementary to the highest level. She is the ultimate mystery: ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my veil no mortal has yet lifted.

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