The Goddess Nidaba, the scribe of the Sumerian heaven, the Learned One of the Holy Chambers, who was worshipped as the first patron deity of writing, was at times depicted as a serpent. At the Sumerian town of Dir the Goddess was referred to as the Divine Serpent Lady. The Goddess as Ninlil, who at times is said to have brought the gift of agriculture and this civilization to Her people, was said to have the tail of a serpent. In several Sumerian tablets the Goddess was simply called Great Mother Serpent of Heaven.

Stephen Langdon, the archaeologist who led some of the earliest excavations of Sumer... asserted that Ianna, then known as Ininni, was closely connected with serpent worship. He also described Her as the Divine Mother who Reveals the Laws. He wrote that the Goddess known as Nina, another form of the name Inanna, perhaps an earlier one, was a serpent goddess in the most ancient Sumerian periods.

He explained that, as Nina, She was esteemed as an oracular deity and an interpreter of dreams, recording this prayer from a Sumerian tablet: "O Nina of priestly rites, Lady of precious decrees, prophetess of Deities art Thou."

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Ishtar of Babylon (1), successor to Inanna, was identified with the planet known as Venus. In some Babylonian texts this planet was called Masat, literally defined as prophetess. Ishtar was depicted sitting upon the royal throne of heaven, holding a staff around which coiled two snakes... Babylonian tablets offer numerous accounts of priestesses who offered prophetic advice at the shrines of Ishtar, some of these very significant in the records of political events.

Even in the Babylonian-Kassite myth, Tiamet was recorded as the first divine being. According to this legend, Tiamet originally possessed the Tablets of Destiny, which, after Her murder, were claimed as property of Marduk. Tiamet was described in this myth as a dragon or serpent.

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On the island of Crete the snake appears in the worship of the female deity more repeatedly than anywhere else in the Mediterranean area. All over the island, artifacts have been unearthed that portray the Goddess or Her priestesses holding snakes in their hands or with them coiled about their bodies (1), revealing that they were an integral part of the religious rituals.

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Evans... asserted that the Lady of the Serpents on Crete was originally derived from the worship of the Cobra Goddess of the predynastic people of Egypt. He suggested that the worship of the Serpent Lady may have been brought to Crete in about 3000 BC.

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The use of the cobra in the religion of the Goddess in Egypt was so ancient that the sign that preceded the name of any Goddess was the cobra (i.e., a picture of a cobra was the hieroglyphic sign for the word Goddess). In predynastic Egypt the female deity of Lower Egypt was the Cobra Goddess known as Ua Zit (1). Not a great deal is known about this most ancient Cobra Goddess, but we later see Her as the uraeus cobra worn upon the foreheads of other deities and Egyptian royalty. The cobra was known as the Eye, uzait, a symbol of mystic insight and wisdom. Later derivations of the Cobra Goddess, such as Hathor and Maat, were both known as the Eye. This term, in any context it is used, is always written in feminine form.

In Greece, we are afforded the closest look at the derivatives of the Egyptian and Cretan Serpent Goddess. Though the nature of the religion had undergone some major transformations after the invasions of the Achaeans and Dorians, who brought with them the worship of Zeus, many vestiges of the earlier images and symbolism still survived. This was especially manifested in the heroic figure of Athena (1). Her serpent continually appeared in legends, drawings and sculptures. In some statues it peered out from beneath Her great bronze shield or stood by her side (1,2). A special building known was the Erechtheum (1, 2) was considered to be the home of Athena's snake. But the snake of the Greek goddess of Wisdom, who was revered on the majestic heights of the Athenian Acropolis, was not a creation of the classical Greek period. Despite the Indo-European Greek legend that suggests that Athena was born from the head of Zeus, the worship of the Goddess had arrived on the Acropolis long before - with the Cretan Goddess of the Mycenaean settlements. The classical temples of the Acropolis, consecrated to the Greek Athena, were actually built on Mycenaean foundations.

The connections begin to take form. ...the Mycenaeans were the people who lived on Crete at the palace of Knossos at about 1400 BC. They had integrated the earlier Minoan-Cretan culture into their own to such an extent that the worship is often described as the Minoan-Mycenaean religion... Once understanding these connections, we realize the significance of the fact that, beneath the ruins of the classical Greek temples of Athens and Delphi, as well as many other Greek shrines where the Goddess was most reverently associated with Her serpent, lay these older Mycenaean remains. The shrine that perhaps offers the deepest insight into the connections of the female deity of Greece to the Serpent Goddess of Crete is Delphi. Under the classical temple and buildings of Delphi, Mycenaean artifacts and ruins of earlier shrines have been unearthed. In the earliest times, the Goddess at Delphi was held sacred as the one who supplied the divine revelations spoken by the priestesses who served Her. The woman who brought forth the oracles of divine wisdom was called the Pythia. Coiled about the tripod stood upon which she sat was a snake known as Python. Though in later Greek writings Python was male, in the earliest accounts Python was described as female. The serpent Python was of such importance that this city had once been known as Pytho. According to Pausanius the earliest temple at this site had been built by women, while Aeschylus recorded that at this holiest of shrines the Goddess was extolled as the Primeval Prophetess. In later times the priests of the male Apollo took over this shrine, and Greek legend tells us of the murder of Python by Apollo.

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To summarize, connections are drawn between the Cobra Goddess of Egypt and the Serpent Goddess of Crete. The Mycenaeans appear to have brought the oracular serpent with them from Crete to the shrines of pre-Greece, observed most clearly at the sites of Athens and Delphi. Other people, known as the Philistines, probably from Crete, brought the Serpent Goddess to Cyprus and Canaan, while the Egyptians carried the worship of the Serpent Lady across the Mediterranean Sea to Byblos and across the sands of Siani to Serabit. Both in Babylon and Sumer we find the Goddess associated with snakes and with oracular prophecy. There is hardly an area in the Near and Middle East where we do not find accounts of the serpent and/or the shrines of divine wisdom as separate elements; yet both of these occur together often enough to suggest that the relationship between these two separate elements be recognized.

There are legends known from classical Greece about the golden apple tree of the Goddess Hera, about which the serpent Ladon coiled. The tree, incidentally, was said to be given to Hera by the Goddess Gaia, the Primeval Prophetess of the shrine at Delphi. Though the legends of apple trees were known in classical Greece, I suggest that the tree of knowledge of good and evil in earliest times was not an apple but a fig. A particular species of tree was continually mentioned as sacred in various ancient records, but deceptively under three names, so that its singular identity has been overlooked. At times it was called the sycamore, at times the fig and sometimes the mulberry. This tree is actually the Near Eastern ficus sycomorous, the sycamore fig, sometimes denoted as the black mulberry.

References to this sacred tree are found in the writings of Egypt, while representations of it appear on Egyptian murals. The Goddess Hathor of Egypt, revered both as the Eye of Wisdom and the Serpent Lady, was also known by another title -- Lady of the Sycamore. This tree was known as the Living Body of Hathor on Earth. To eat of its fruit was to eat of the flesh and fluid of the Goddess. Some Egyptian murals depicted the Goddess within this tree, passing out its scared fruit to the dead as the food of eternity, immortality and continued life, even after death.

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Evans mentioned gold fig leaves found at Mycenaean tombs in connection with a "funeral cult" there. The fig tree was regarded as a gift given by the Goddess, as She was worshipped at the Greek shrine of Eleusis, a temple also built on Mycenaean foundations. It was against a tree that Adonis and Attis both met their legendary deaths and on a tree that the annual effigy of Attis was displayed in Rome. Dionysus, a figure quite similar to Attis and Adonis, associated with the worship of the Goddess both at Delphi and Eleusis, was symbolically associated with the fig tree.

As I mentioned previously, the asherah or asherim of the Bible were planted or stood alongside the altar at the shrines of the Goddess. They were the despised pillars and poles which the Hebrews were continually ordered to destroy. Though we have no certain proof that these were sycamore fig trees, the evidence suggests that this was so. The fruit of this tree, described in Egyptian texts as "the flesh and fluid of Hathor" may even have been eaten as a type of "communion" with the Goddess, perhaps giving rise to the custom of the communion of the "flesh and blood" of Jesus, taken in the form of wafers and wine even today. Most intriguing is the line in the Bible that relates that, when Adam and Eve realized their nakedness as a result of having eaten the forbidden fruit of the tree, they then made aprons to cover their sexual parts -- with fig leaves.

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In each area in which the Goddess was known and revered, She was extolled not only as the prophetess of great wisdom, closely identified with the serpent, but as the original Creatress, and the patroness of sexual pleasures and reproduction as well. The Divine Ancestress was identified as She who brought life as well as She who decreed the destinies and directions of those lives, a not unnatural combination. Hathor was credited with having taught people how to procreate. Ishtar, Ashorteh and Inanna were each esteemed as the tutelary deity of sexuality and new life. The sacred women celebrated this aspect of Her by making love in the temples.

Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt toward asherim, a major symbol of the female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree had caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each altar, was dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents.

So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites offered as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods know" -- the secret of sex -- how to create life.

As the advocates of Yahweh destroyed the shrines of the female deity wherever they could, murdering when they could not convert, the Levite priesthood wrote the tale of creation. They announced that male supremacy was not a new idea, but in fact had been divinely decreed by the male deity at the very dawn of existence. The domination of male over female, as Hebrew women found themselves without the rights of their neighbors, rights that they too may have once held, was not simply added as another Hebrew law but written into the Bible as one of the first major acts and proclamations of the male creator. With blatant disregard for actual history, the Levite leaders announced that woman must be ruled by man, declaring it was in the agreement with the original decree of Yahweh, who, according to these new legends, had first created the world and people. The myth of Adam and Eve, in which male domination was explained and justified, informed women and men alike that male ownership and control of submissively obedient women was to be regarded as the divine and natural state of the human species.

But in order to achieve their position, the priests of the male deity had been forced to convince themselves and try to convince their congregations that sex, the very means of procreating new life, was immoral, the "original sin." Thus, in the attempt to institute a male kinship system, Judaism, and following it Christianity, developed religions that regarded the process of conception as somewhat shameful or sinful. They evolved a code of the philosophical and theological ideas that inherently espoused discomfort or guilt about being human beings -- who do, at least at the present time, conceive new life by the act of sexual intercourse -- whether it is considered immoral or not.

This then was the unfortunate, unnatural and uncomfortable trap of its own making into which the patriarchal religion fell.

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Without virginity for the unmarried female and strict sexual restraints upon married women, male ownership of name and property and male control of the divine right to the throne could not exist.

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According to legends of Sumer and Babylon, women and men had been created simultaneously, in pairs -- by the Goddess. But in the male religion it was of ultimate importance that the male was made first, and in the image of his creator -- the second and third claims to the male kinship rights. We are next told that from a small rather insignificant part of man, his rib, woman was formed. Despite all we know about the biological facts of birth, facts the Levites certainly knew as well, we are assured that the male does not come from the female, but the female from the male. We may be reminded of the Indo-European Greek story of Athena being born from the head of Zeus.

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The couple so designed was placed in the Garden of Eden -- paradise -- where the male deity warned them not to eat any of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To the ancient Hebrews this tree was probably understood to represent the sacred sycamore fig of the Goddess, the familiar asherah which stood beside the altars of the temples of the Goddess and Her Baal. The sacred branch being passed around in the temple, as described by Ezekiel, may have been the manner in which the fruit was taken as "communion." According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves.

But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolized sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first -- upon the advise and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offered Eve the advice. For people of that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counselor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in a most dangerous manner.

The relationship between the woman and the serpent is shown to be an important factor, for the Old Testament related that the male deity spoke directly to the serpent, saying, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed." In this way the oracular priestesses, the prophetesses whose advice and counsel had been identified with the symbolism and the use of the serpent for several millennia, were now to be regarded as the downfall of the whole human species. Woman, as sagacious advisor or wise counselor, human interpreter of the divine will of the Goddess, was no longer to be respected, but to be hated, feared or at best doubted or ignored. This demand for silence on the part of women, especially in the churches, is later reflected in the passages of Paul in the New Testament. According to the Judaic and Christian theology, woman's judgment had led to disaster for the whole human species.

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The Hebrew creation myth, which blamed the female of the species for initial sexual consciousness in order to suppress the worship of the Queen of Heaven, Her sacred women and matrilineal customs, from that time on assigned to women the role of sexual temptress. It cast her as the cunning and contriving arouser of the physical desires of men, she who offers the appealing but dangerous fruit. In the male religions, sexual drive was not to be regarded as the natural biological desires of women and men that encouraged the species to reproduce itself but was to be viewed as woman's fault. Not only was the blame for having eaten the fruit of sexuality, and for tempting Adam to do the same, laid heavily upon women, but the proof or admission of her guilt was supposedly made evident in the pain of childbirth, which women were assured was their eternal chastisement for teaching men such bad habits. Eve was to be severely punished as the male deity decreed: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you."

Making use of the natural occurrence of the pains of the pressure of a human child passing from the womb, through a narrow channel, into the outside world, the Levite writer pretended to prove the omnipotent power of his deity. Not only was woman to bear the guilt for sexual consciousness, but according to the male deity her pain in bearing a child was to be regarded as punishment, so that all women giving birth would thus be forced to identify with Eve.

The notion that women's reproductive systems affect their lives is ancient, but the concept of the premenstrual syndrome is quite modern -- it can be traced to the 1960s. During this time, Katharina Dalton published research suggesting that women experience a wide variety of negative emotional, cognitive, and physical effects due to hormonal changes that precede menstruation. These effects became known as a syndrome, although the list of symptoms extended to over 150, and some of the symptoms were mutually exclusive (such as elevated mood and depression).

All of the hormonal changes that occur during the menstrual cycle have been candidates for the underlying cause of premenstrual syndrome. The possibilities include an excess of estrogens, falling progesterone levels, and the ratio of estrogens to progesterone. However, research has failed to show that hormonal differences vary according to the experience of PMS. This failure to tie any pattern of hormonal changes to the experience of PMS is a major problem for the concept of PMS (67).

Other problems come from the changing pattern of research findings on PMS. Inconsistency is one problem. Until the mid-1970s, researchers tended to find that mood is highest during the ovulatory phase of the cycle and lowest during the premenstrual and menstrual phases. Beginning in the late 1970s, researchers no longer found this pattern. This change may have been attributable to methodological problems in earlier menstrual cycle research. Such problems include the bias that expectation can introduce into studies in which the participants know that the research is about the menstrual cycle, a reliance on participants' memories of symptoms, and the failure to use appropriate comparison groups. Indeed, a random survey of women indicated that only 8.3% experienced PMS (68).

Jessica McFarlane and her colleagues have conducted two longitudinal studies that avoided the methodological problems from other studies. Both studies involved instructing women (and men) to keep records of their daily moods without knowing that the menstrual cycle was the focus of the study. Both studies involved women who were cycling normally, women who were taking oral contraceptives and thus not cycling normally, and men.

The main result... was that no differences in mood stability appeared when comparing the young men and the young women who participated in the study. All participants experienced similar mood changes within a day as well as from day to day. Also, the men and women reported similiar variability in mood during the 70 days of the study.

A second study recruited participants who were older than the typical college student participants and lasted at least 12 weeks to cover more menstrual cycles... This study also revealed that people experienced cyclic mood variations, but that these changes did not conform to the PMS pattern.

Several PMS studies have included a component that may provide an explanation for the belief in PMS. These studies asked participants to rate their PMS symptoms during the month and then to recall their symptoms at the end of the study. This approach allows an evaluation of the influence of recall bias in memory, which appears as a larger PMS effect in recall than in the daily experience of symptoms. Both of these studies found significant effects for recall: When participants remembered their moods, they reported more symptoms of PMS than when they recorded their moods. These findings suggest that some of the mood changes associated with PMS may be a product of expectation and labeling rather than of hormones. This effect appeared among women in Mexico as well as women in the United States.

In the studies by McFarlane and her colleagues, about half of the women who met and about half who failed to meet diagnostic criteria consistent with PMS reported that they had it. Another study also asked women to self-diagnose, and the results showed that 40% of women reported that they had PMS. However, none of them exhibited the pattern of cyclic emotional changes that are part of the diagnostic criteria. That is, regardless of symptoms, some women believe that they have PMS (69).

The denigration of the female body is expressed in cultural and religious taboos surrounding menstruation, childbirth, and menopause in women. While menstruation taboos may have originated in the perception of the awesome powers of the female body, they degenerated into a simple perception that there is something "wrong" with female bodily functions. Menstruating women were forbidden to enter the sanctuary in ancient Hebrew and premodern Christian communities. Although only Orthodox Jews still enforce religious taboos against menstruant women, few women in our culture grow up affirming their menstruation as a connection to sacred power. Most women learn that menstruation is a curse and grow up believing that the bloody facts of menstruation are best hidden away.