Goddess or Woman...The Worship of the Ideal

 

The prison of the external valuation of beauty, one that every culture has been through, going back to the dawn of time, when women were mandated to prostitute themselves in the temples of Ishtar at least once before they were to marry.  A religion that somehow took the power of a goddess that represented both love and war somehow turned inward upon itself to devalue women, by making all women into nothing more than objects for sale.  To get women to comply, it was told that during the act, the women would be transformed into Ishtar herself, and bestow love upon the first man that threw whatever denomination into her lap and he could not be refused.  She was, at that moment, acting as a priestess, and could not leave the temple until she was purchased.  

A woman was immediately judged and compared by all of the men who were there.  Since a woman could not leave until she was purchased, some would spend years in the temple before a man redeemed her.  In a very real sense, this was like the first beauty contest; the first appraisals of being an object and somehow lowering the value of what it means to be a woman.  I have run across many sites that actually look at elevating the worship of Ishar, Inanna or Lilith (among many other names), with many of them not realizing the real secrets of what these temples were used for in their ancient histories.  Who is to say how the temples evolved into making women sell themselves?  What might they had to believe in order to do so?  How young maidens were persuaded to continue the traditions that spanned long periods of time, as the roles of women were molded along the way by using a goddess as the very image to possibly go against their will.

 

The first rule is always to divide and conquer.  If women were forced to compete against each other, they could never unite.  They would have had the shared experience of what it would be like to sell themselves and their future husbands would all know that they were not untouched.  Perhaps that is just one view.  As sexuality seemed to be simultaneously sacred and profane, the conflict that women wrestle with when releasing themselves to another and yet wanting the free will to only release themselves to a man of their choosing seems hard for many women to understand.  The real power of being able to give a heart to another, freely, without purchase, is one that many still do not understand.

I see that there are still many women who act as though they are objects for purchase, only looking into a man's wallet and not at the man.  In return, the women wanted to be treated like a goddess or a princess; often with abusive traits displayed along the way.  Is this really how we need to be?

There are so many people who have lost faith in love, believing it is something to be purchased along the way.  Love can only be given when we first realize we are human.  Being worshiped takes away from the power of being human, having the ability to share our flaws and weaknesses with each other.  To being able to support and share our dreams with each other and helping one another achieve them along the way then enables us to unleash the power that resides deep within us when that couple loves unconditionally.

Not to be sold.  Not to be bought.  And if you still believe that the only way to attain love is through being an image and not a woman, your heart has grown very cold indeed.  Since the women we see in the world elevate themselves through using their sexuality indiscriminately, through varying forms of selling themselves like temple prostitutes to the highest bidder...in pieces of themselves to be possessions, I have to wonder how much it hurt to kill their hearts along the way.

What if we reclaimed our hearts?  What could we do if we stopped our beauty contests and just acted with our true beauty of love?  It is possible, very possible.  All we have to do is change.