Subjugation of Sacred Feminine in Peru

In 401, a mob led by St. John Chrysostom destroyed one of the most sacred monuments in Ancient Greece: The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The city of Ephesus had been a center for goddess worship since the city’s dedication to the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, or mountain mother. Under the Grecian Empire, and later the Roman Empire, Ephesus continued to be a center for goddess culture, with sites dedicated to Artemis and her roman equivalent, Diana. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, during the rule of emperor Theodosius I in the year 380, the pagan temples were destroyed. The pagans converted to Christianity and abandoned the pagan mother goddesses. In addition to the destruction of places of worship, Christian ceremonies with similar themes took the place of pagan ceremonies. The feminine face of god in Europe was not restored until 431, when Mary was declared Theotokos at the First Council of Ephesus .

The events that took place in Europe in the early 4th and 5th centuries parallel those that took place in Peru during the conquest of the Andes region by the Inca in the mid 15th century, and the later conquest of Peru by the Spaniards in the 1530s. The cosmologies of Pre-Incan Andean people focused on the worship of a mother goddess, who required a male deity to actualize her powers. Gender complementarity is also apparent in the social organization of early Andean people; men and women had distinct, but mutually valuable roles. As the Incan empire gained power, they imposed their new state religion on the people of the Andes. In Incan cosmology, the complementary relationship shared by the gendered divinities of earlier cultures was still somewhat evident. As the empire progressed...

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...gain, the correlation between the two is tenuous and possibly even ephemeral, but as Christianity move away defining god as a He, society is also moving towards gender equality.

Works Cited

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Chapman, John. "Council of Ephesus." In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909.

Chasteen, John C. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2206.

Imel, Dorothy. Goddesses in World Mythology. Santa Barbara : ABC-CLIO, 1993.

Karen, Powers V. "Andeans and Spaniards in the Contact Zone." American Indian Quarterly, 2000: 511-536.

Silverblatt, Irene. Moon, Sun, and Witches. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987.