The Concept of the Goddess by

Format: mobi
Tags: Religion
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER SEVEN

MILK AND THE NORTHERN GODDESS 1

Hilda Ellis Davidson

Links between milk and the goddess go back to very early times. In Ancient Egypt Hathor appears as a cow-goddess protecting the Pharaoh, and when depicted in human form as a sky-goddess, she wears on her head a sun-disk flanked by cow's horns. The sky itself might be imagined as a great cow with its belly speckled with stars, which every morning produced a bull-calf, the rising sun (Clark 1959:87; Bleeker 1973:31ff.). Milk was drunk in Egypt and had associations with the Otherworld; milk offerings were made to deities, princes were represented being suckled by goddesses, and the dead Pharaoh as receiving new life from Hathor's milk on his journey to the nether world (Darby 1977:87, 760). One of the chief Mesopotamian goddesses, Ninhursag, protected the animals of the wild, and also domestic herds (Jacobsen 1976:104ff.); sacred cattle and sheep were kept at her temple at Lagash, and milk from the sacred dairy given to the royal children (Levy 1948:97).

In India the reasons why the cow is a sacred animal have provoked much debate, but its importance as provider of milk evidently goes back to early times, probably to the period before the coming of the Aryans (Ferro-Luzzi 1987:109). In the earliest literary texts, the Vedas, the cow is associated with the goddess Aditi (Lodrick 1981:6), while one of the most popular goddesses of recent times, Sri-Laksmi, was said in some sources to have come into being when the primeval Ocean of Milk was churned by gods and demons (Kinsley 1989:61), and she became linked with Vishnu, the dominant god who caused the churning to take place. Goddesses in India are frequently described as cows, and milk and milk-products offered to them and to the gods. Milk is seen as a life-giving drink, symbol of whiteness and purity as well as of bounty and fertility, and the pressing-out of milk from breast or udder has become the symbol for any kind of giving-forth (O'Flaherty 1980:28).

Such concepts encourage a search for links between milk and the Northern goddess, although the subject has received little attention up to now. One peculiarity about milk as a drink is that in some parts of the world adults are unable to digest the lactose because the lactase enzyme

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