The Great Mother Goddess: Puberty Initiation Rites and the Covenant of Abraham

In his “Totem and Tabco” Freud described the original social unit as “the primal horde”—ruled by a powerful adult male, who mated with all the sexually adult females and brutally drove out of the horde all the other sexually adult males. On some momentous occasion, the “sons” united against the “father,” slew him, ate him, and enjoyed free sexual access to their “mothers” and “sisters.” Their reaction of guilt at their horrible crime originated the well-nigh universal inhibitions against parricide (murder), cannibalism and incest. The memory of the crime—reactivated in each individual by his personal Œdipal conflicts—produced the exogamic social system of totemism and the religious cult of the totem sacrifice feast. From the latter institution derives a major portion of the religious symbol-system which is shared by primitive peoples all over the world and which underlies many doctrines and practices of modern religions. These formulations do not cover the entire scope of the religious subject-matter,(8) but they remain basic to any psychoanalytic appraisal of religious symbol-systems.

In the primal horde crime, Freud found “the beginnings of religion, ethics, society and art.”(9) But this point of origin seems to lie somewhere between an earlier and a later stage of social and cultural development. On the one hand, there was carried over into the totemic system the maternal inheritance, the mother right system,(10) which presumably had existed from earlier times. On the other hand, the domestication of animals and the rise of cattle-breeding—(while of later date than the origin of incest-prohibition)—brought about the disintegration of the pure and rigorous totemism of earlier times.(11) “Totem and Taboo” did not address itself to a coordination of these successive stages of cultural development beyond tendering the suggestion (not wholly satisfactory) that “the homosexual feelings and activities” which arose among the primal horde sons “during the time of their ban