SEMANTICS ОF THE SACREDNESS ОF THE IMAGE ОF THE GREAT GODDESS IN THE ART ОF PRIMITY

Abstract

An interdisciplinary study is devoted to the study of the semantics of the imagery of the cult of the female deity in the art of primitiveness. Based on the study of archaeological, historical, culturological sources, the preconditions of the cult of the Great Goddess are revealed, which include the foundations of social organization of people in close connection with the natural environment and the formation of consciousness. Analysis of the iconography of small sculptures of the female figure revealed that the origin and spread of the cult is accompanied by the emergence of a "female deity" in prehistoric and early historical Anatolia. A number of studied iconographies of Anatolian female figures, from the Pre-Neolithic to the middle of the Neolithic, testify to the existence of the cult of the Great Goddess. From there, the cult of the Great Goddess penetrated from the territory of Asia Minor to Greece and Rome, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Central Asia and was worshiped throughout the ancient world. The cult of the Great Goddess was a common feature of matriarchal societies. The goddess manifests herself as a symbol of the terrestrial and cosmic source of the universe. The archetypal image of the Great Mother Goddess is expressed in rituals, ceremonies, art, mythology. The archetype of the mother lives in the imagination of every person and is a symbol of protection, fertility and rebirth. At the same time, people have long been aware of the importance of water to ensure the stable life of society, so the rivers were identified with the female origin, and in India they were called mothers. A woman's natural ability is to give her baby breast milk, and in a semantic sense this image appears as a source of life. Under natural conditions, water nourishes all living things and therefore appears as a source of life for all things on earth. The associative comparison of these two natural images led to the synergy of the semantics of the water element with the mythology of the mother deity. The choice of research strategies to study cultural forms and artistic processes related to the semantics of the image of the Great Goddess, its significance in the mythology of ancient civilizations of the patriarchal deities allowed to find that in the iconography of Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Egyptian gods Hapi, Nile and The verbal form of the Jewish god El-Shaddai, who later took the form of Jehovah, has features of the female incarnation of the Mother Goddess. Inertially, the function of motherhood remained in the image of the male god for a long time.