New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution

New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live? Now, a computer simulation supports the idea that grandmothers helped our species evolve social skills and longer lives.

In Carl Jung’s theory of analytical psychology, the Wise Old Woman and the Wise Old Man are archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. ‘The “wise old woman”…[or] helpful “old woman” is a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature’. The ‘Wise Old Man, or some other very powerful aspect of eternal masculinity’ is her male counterpart.

In Jung’s thought, the individuation process was marked by a sequence of archetypes, each acquiring predominance at successive stages, and so reflecting what he termed an ascending psychic scale or ‘hierarchy of the unconscious’.

Thus, starting with the intermediate position of ‘anima or animus…just as the latter have a higher position in the hierarchy than the shadow, so wholeness lays claim to a position and a value superior’ still. The Wise Old Woman and Man, as what he termed “Mana” personalities or “supraordinate” personalities, stood for that wholeness of the self: ‘the mother (“Primordial Mother” and “Earth Mother”) as a supraordinary personality…as the “self”‘.

As von Franz put it, ‘If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem, so that he, or she, is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality.

In the dreams of a woman this centre is usually personified as a superior female figure – a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth’.

The masculine initiator was described by Jung as ‘a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago…the mana-personality [a]s a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits’. Similarly, ‘the wise Old Woman figure represented by Hecate or the Crone …the Great Mother’ stood for an aspect of the mother-imago.

The archetypes of the collective unconscious can thus be seen as inner representations of the same-sex parent – as an ‘imago built up from parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child’. Consequently, for the Jungian, ‘the making conscious of those contents which constitute the archetype of the mana personality signifies therefore “for the man the second and true liberation from the father, for the woman that from the mother, and therewith the first perception of their own unique individuality”‘.

In Jung’s view, ‘all archetypes spontaneously develop favourable and unfavourable, light and dark, good and bad effects’. Thus ‘the “good Wise Man” must here be contrasted with a correspondingly dark, chthonic figure’, and in the same way, the priestess or sibyl has her counterpart in the figure of ‘the witch…called by Jung the “terrible mother”‘. Taken together, male and female, ‘The hunter or old magician and the witch correspond to the negative parental images in the magic world of the unconscious’.

But judgement of such collective archetypes must not be hasty. ‘Just as all archetypes have a positive, favourable, bright side that points upwards, so also they have one that points downwards, partly negative and unfavourable, partly chthonic’ – so that (for example) ‘the sky-woman is the positive, the bear the negative aspect of the “supraordinate personality”, which extends the conscious human being upwards into the celestial and downwards into the animal regions’.

Yet both aspects, celestial and chthonic, were (at least potentially) of equal value for Jung, as he sought for what he termed a “coniunctio oppositorum”, a union of opposites. ‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light’, he argued, ‘but by making the darkness conscious’. Similarly with respect to the goal of the individuation process itself, ‘as a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither’. At this stage of development one possesses discernment or some other virtue.

Coming to terms with the Mana figures of the collective unconscious – with the parental imagos – thus meant overcoming a psychic splitting, so as to make possible an acceptance of ‘the Twisted side of the Great Mother’; an acceptance of the way ‘the father contains both Kings at once…the Twisted King and the Whole King’.

The name Hannahanna derives from the Akkadian (Sumerian), Hebrew and Hittite-Hurrian roots: “(Inanna) (Ḥannāh) (hannas)”, meaning “grandmother”. Hannas, in Hittite-Hurrian mythology, is a “mother goddess” related to or influenced by the pre-Sumerian goddess “Inanna”, and is similar in name to the Biblical Hannah, mother of Samuel. In fact, in the Czech language, the name is translated “channa-channa” directly from the Hebrew “Channâh”.

Ḫannaḫanna (from Hittite ḫanna- “grandmother”) is a Hurrian Mother Goddess related to or influenced by the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Ḫannaḫanna was also identified with the Hurrian goddess Hebat (Eva), the mother goddess of the Hurrians known as «Mother of all Living» and «Queen of Heaven». The mother goddess is likely to have had a later counterpart in the Phrygian goddess Cybele.

Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother”, perhaps “Mountain Mother”) is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible forerunner in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, where statues of plump women, sometimes sitting, have been found in excavations dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess.

She is Phrygia’s only known goddess, and was probably its national deity. In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations or other offerings. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century BC.

She was readily assimilated to the Minoan-Greek earth-mother Rhea, “Mother of the gods”, whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was partly assimilated to the grain-goddess Demeter, whose torchlight procession recalled her search for her lost daughter, Persephone.

In Greece, as in Phrygia, she was a “Mistress of animals” (Potnia Therōn), with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap or draw her chariot. Inara, the daughter of Hebat and the Storm-god Teshub/Tarhunt, was the goddess of the wild animals of the steppe. She corresponds to the “potnia theron” of Greek mythology, better known as Artemis.

The mother goddess Hannahanna promises Inara land and a man during a consultation by Inara. Soon after, Inara went missing and when Ḫannaḫanna was informed of this by the Storm-god’s bee, she apparently began a search with the help of her female attendant.

The story resembles that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, in Greek myth. Apparently, like Demeter, Ḫannaḫanna disappears for a while in a fit of anger and while she is gone, cattle and sheep are stifled and mothers, both human and animal, take no account of their children.

As the Hittite kingdom expanded, the cults of the various peoples of Anatolia, all of whom had their own religious traditions and local gods, were incorporated into the Hittite system. Interference between these theological systems resulted at times in gender change: the male Hattic/Hittite ruler of the underworld Lelwani became female under Hurrian influence and was identified with the Hurrian goddess of the underworld, Allani. The Hattic goddess Kait, the deity of vegetation, became the Hittite god Halki (Grain).

Important goddesses of the Hattic pantheon were the two sun-goddesses, the sun-goddess of the sky, Wurunshemu, the consort of storm-god, and the sun-goddess of the earth (or the netherworld). The name of the sun-goddess of the earth in both Hattic and Hittite is unknown while in late Hittite texts she was referred to by the Hurrian designation Allani. Next in importance was Inar (Hittite: Inara), a young warlike goddess, the protective deity of the land. In addition to being a goddess of the wild animals, she was said to have power over fields and floods.

At the head of the Hittite pantheon were the storm-god and the sun-goddess of Arinna, identified with Hattic Wurunshemu. A mother goddess, Hannahanna (Grandmother), was a wise old woman, skilled in healing and childbirth, whose advice was regularly sought by other gods in the old Hittite vanishing god myths. Two important groups of goddesses were the Gulsh(esh) goddesses of fate and the mother goddesses. Kamrushepa, the Luwian goddess of healing, was responsible for the curing of earthly and heavenly diseases and illnesses.

In the sanctuary at Yazilikaya, a procession of the chief divinities of the Hurrianized Hittite pantheon was carved on its walls: one procession of gods on the western wall and another procession of goddesses on the eastern, with the principal deities meeting in the center. This monument provides an affirmation of the symmetry and equal importance of the gods and goddesses.

According to apocryphal Christian and Islamic tradition, Saint Anne was the mother of Mary and the maternal grandmother of Jesus. The story bears a similarity to that of the birth of Samuel, whose mother Hannah (Hebrew: Ḥannāh “favour, grace”; etymologically the same name as Anne) had also been childless.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Hannah is ascribed the title Forebear of God,[citation needed] and both the Nativity of Mary and the Presentation of Mary are celebrated as two of the twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church. The Dormition of Hannah is also a minor feast in Eastern Christianity. In Lutheran Protestantism, it is held that Martin Luther chose to enter religious life as an Augustinian friar after crying out to St. Anne while endangered by lightning.

Origin of the Letter N and the name Nina

Her Cyclopedia: The Goddess Anne

The Goddess Hannahannas – holladay paganism

Goddess Worship: Goddess Worship in the Ancient near East

Hittite Kinship A~ID Marriage