The Double Goddess by Vicki Noble

Author:Vicki Noble [Noble, Vicki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women’s Studies/Spirituality
ISBN: 9781591438663
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-02-18T23:00:00+00:00

EARLY AMAZONS RULED IN DUAL QUEENSHIP

The first historian to mention the fact that the Amazons had “two queens at the same time,” was Justinius, who discussed “two sisters . . . who held the government. . .”; many others have repeated this fact since.21 In 1926, a Marxist historian named Emanuel Kantor published a book, The Amazons: A Marxist Study, in which he analyzed the Amazons as a resistance movement against violent male dominance. “Amazons . . . do not appear until barbarism is firmly established as a system. For it is from the disruption of primitive communist tribes which are on the point of becoming patriarchal in character . . . that they arise.”22 His understanding of their dual system of leadership is very insightful: “This society was ruled democratically by them through the mechanism of a peace ‘queen’ and a war ‘queen,’ who were in reality chiefs equivalent to the sachem and war-chief in an Iroquois gens or tribe.”23 This is especially interesting because the Tibetan monastic system is run in a similar way by two lamas whose functions differ, but who share the responsibility in a collaborative way. In his discussion of Tibetan leadership, Geoffrey Samuels mentions “the appointment of two persons, one lay and one monastic . . . the lay monastic reliationship is a special case of the principle of division of responsibility.”24 And perhaps this custom relates back even farther to the birth of the Buddha, Siddhartha, and his two mothers. According to a short essay in Tricycle magazine, the mother of the Buddha, Maya, had a sister, Pajapatai. Both were “married to Suddhodana, a chief of the shakyan clan, and went to live with him in the town of Kapilavatthu.” Maya became pregnant first and gave birth to the “future Buddha,” but she died seven days later, “whereupon Pajapati took Siddhartha and raised him as her own firstborn.”25

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