The Rice Goddess

Hola darlings!

Okay, yes, I know, I've been neglecting you all, again.  I've been busy with - dare I say it? - decorating!  Yes, the Celadon Curse has once again descended in full force upon Maison Newton.  Not, mind you, that I actually have a damn thing in this house that is true celadon.  Nope - shades of teal, turquoise, robin's egg blue, marine blue, seafoam green, sky blue and aqua grace the back of the house now as accents (and a beautiful wool area rug that, alas, is not the right color, but it's not going back because I didn't open it up out of it's packaging until a few weeks ago, a year since I bought it at overstock.com), but not a speck of true celadon do I see.  Arggggh!

Well, that's another story and not one for here.  Suffice to say, though, that in one of those synchronicitous events that have blessed (?) my life for years (particularly since the advent of Goddesschess), earlier today while hunting down celadon inspiration I came across a wonderful blog filled with interesting things.  While there, I continued to read a little and came across this most fascinating information about the rice goddess, and a rice god, too.  A rice god? 

Rice Gods and Rice Goddesses

Posted on July 28, 2011 by India pied-à-terre

 

In a rambling indoor/outdoor warehouse in Baan Tawai, Thailand, we saw them, a pair standing there, and they saw us:

 

Photo from India Pied-a-Terre, link above to post.

 

The rice goddess is the figure on the right.  You can read about Deb's curiosity and eventual research into the herstory of these figures, and Deb's discovery of the rice goddess (and rice god. I question the existence of a rice god, but hey, equal opportunity, duly noting thast most gods I've read about over the years have been war mongers or storm gods, or both, or bi-sexual/transsexual entities intent on creating as much mischief among "man"kind as possible.  Hmmm....)  Her post contains tons of information about and several photographs of rice goddesses of southeast Asia and the Philippines, where the rice goddess is called Dewi Shri or Dewi Sri, among other names.

 

I did note the resemblance between "Dewi" and "Devi" or "Deva" (we call some of our modern-day American and European goddesses Divas, har!)

 

I checked Barbara Walker's The Woman's Eycyclopedia of Myths and Secrets for any entries on Dewi Shri/Sri, etc., but found no entries.  My belief is that the Dewi Shri/Sri is a "corn" goddess by another name; in the west  (old world and new world) we think of her in relation to "corn" (grains of varying types); in the east, she is thought of in relation to rice, the number one staple product in the world today. 

 

The internet has plenty of information on rice goddesses.  Thank Goddess for the internet! 

 

I found lots if information at Devata.org,  Rice Goddeses of Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand (the old Siam), an article by Kent Davis. 

 

Dewi Sri is associated with rice, water, the moon…and is believed to have dominion over the underworld…domain of the serpent or Naga race…the very same race that are progenitors of the Khmers.

Cambodia’s closest equivalent goddess seems to be Po Ino Nogar, whose name means “great one” in Khmer, and is sometimes associated with the Hindu goddess Uma. Po Ino Nogar is revered because she brings fertility and agricultural bounty to the earth and its people. Like the heavenly apsaras seen at Angkor Wat, she is also associated with the sky, clouds and water, and is sometimes symbolized as a gentle rain.

It is interesting to note that Po Ino Nogar is polyandrous, with 97 husbands. She also has 38 daughters, one of whom, Po Yan Dari, is supposedly a goddess of disease and death who lives in caves and grottos. However, in a Cham version of this tale, the daughter is named Pajau Tan, and she is seen as a divine healer. According to that legend, Pajau Tan was so successful raising the dead that she disrupted normal life and was finally sent to live on the moon. Another daughter of Po Ino Nogar is “the Mouse Queen” (Po Bya Tikuh), perhaps related because of the threat mice pose to the rice crop.

I’ve been unable to locate an image of Po Ino Nogar (please comment to provide info below) but Thailand’s rice goddess is quite popular and quite visible. Known as Mae Posop (แม่โพสพ) she is still honored as the goddess of fertility and abundance as this article from August 9, 2008 explains: Queen Sirikit of Thailand presided over a ceremony.

Since ancient times, Cambodian and Thai royalty have commemorated the beginning of the rice growing season with an annual Royal Plowing Day Ceremony in the month of May.

I found particularly interesting the information on the Thai (Siamese) rice goddess, Ma (or Mae) Posop.  When I read her name, I immediately thought of the ancient Chinese goddess, Ma Tsoopoo (various spellings), and wondered if they may be connected?  Could the ancient story of how Ma (Mae) Posop arrived in Siam be a recounting of a distantly remembered event of when the goddess first arrived in the land???  Tsoopoo (Tzupo, Tsupoo, etc.) and Posop appear to me to be linguistic cognitives.  Here is an account of how the Goddess Posop arrived in Thailand:

Thai Rice and the Ceremony of the Rice Goddess: Mae Posop

By Vipp Rongsit

It is said that she [Mae Posop] first came to reside in the land of the rice fields from Mount Meru, the home of the Hindu-Buddhist gods. Her journey over the Seven Seas and the Seven Mountain Ranges was long and tortuous. And on her heels came the many fish which today are still so plentiful in Siamese waters.

From what we know, this Mount Meuru is not an actual physical mountain because no mountain on earth extends into the heavens 672,000 miles!  That is not to say, however, that it does not represent an ancient memory of a mountain range or a particularly high mountain within a mountain range, and I tend to agree with scholars who point to the Hindu Kush as being the home of Mount Meru.  A Chinese goddess may well have travelled from the "land of the west" in western China (the home of Goddess Xi Wang Mu a/k/a Shing Mu) through a pass in the Hindu Kush, enduring a long and arduous journey, in order to reach Nepal, India, etc. 

Shin-Mu

Also called Shing-Mu, various spellings - Queen of Heaven.  Hislop (The Two Babylons) equated her with Ma-Tsoopo, a sea goddess worshipped in "Fuh-kien" China.  People have all kinds of opinions about Hislop, but I won't say he's wrong for tracing out similarities in word-sounds to ancient meanings from long before writing was invented.  He wrote: 

The name of Shing Moo, applied by the Chinese to their "Holy Mother," compared with another name of the same goddess in another province of China, strongly favours the conclusion that Shing Moo is just a synonym for one of the well-known names of the goddess-mother of Babylon. Gillespie (in his Land of Sinim, p. 64) states that the Chinese goddess-mother, or "Queen of Heaven," in the province of Fuh-kien, is worshipped by seafaring people under the name of Ma Tsoopo. Now, "Ama Tzupah" signifies the "Gazing Mother;" and there is much reason to believe that Shing Moo signifies the same; for Mu was one of the forms in which Mut or Maut, the name of the great mother, appeared in Egypt (BUNSEN'S Vocabulary, vol. i. p. 471); and Shngh, in Chaldee, signifies "to look" or "gaze." The Egyptian Mu or Maut was symbolised either by a vulture, or an eye surrounded by a vulture's wings (WILKINSON, vol. v. p. 203.) The symbolic meaning of the vulture may be learned from the Scriptural expression: "There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen" (Job xxviii.7). The vulture was noted for its sharp sight, and hence, the eye surrounded by the vulture's wings showed that, for some reason or other, the great mother of the gods in Egypt had been known as "The gazer." But the idea contained in the Egyptian symbol had evidently been borrowed from Chaldea; for Rheia, one of the most noted names of the Babylonian mother of the gods, is just the Chaldee form of the Hebrew Rhaah, which signifies at once "a gazing woman" and a "vulture." The Hebrew Rhaah itself is also, according to a dialectical variation, legitimately pronounced Rheah; and hence the name of the great goddess-mother of Assyria was sometimes Rhea, and sometimes Rheia. In Greece, the same idea was evidently attached to the Mother of the children of the sun (see ante, p. 20, Note), For one of her distinguishing titles was Ophthalmitis (SMITH'S Classical Dictionary, "Athena," p. 101), thereby pointing her out as the goddess of "the eye." It was no doubt to indicate the same thing that, as the Egyptian Maut wore a vulture on her head, so the Athenian Minerva was represented as wearing a helmet with two eyes, or eye-holes, in the front of the helmet.--(VAUX'S Antiquities, p. 186.)

I was looking in Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets to see if she had an entry under sisters (she doesn't) when I came across her entry on Shin-Mu:

"Mother of Perfect Intelligence," China's Holy Virgin, who miraculously conceived her firstborn son, a Savior and spirit of the grain.  Her infant "came like a lamb, with no bursting or rending, with no hurt or harm," and was tenderly adored by sheep and oxen.(1)  [Sound familiar?]

After producing this child, Shin-Mu resumed her archaic Great Mother character and gave birth to 33,333 creatures.  Patriarchal myths deprived her of a vagina, and so insisted all these creatures were born from her arms or breast.  A Christian traveller in China explained Shin-Mu's miraculous motherhood: she had "no place on her body whence to bring Them forth as other women of the world, whom for sin God hath subjected to filthiness of corruption, to show how filthy sin is."(2)

After she was virginized and even deprived of a vagina, Shin-Mu's only remaining connection with sexuality was similar to the virgin Mary's: she continued to be the divine patroness of whores.(3)

Persians diabolized her and called her Shimnu, the "Great Devil," so called in a Manichean Confession-Prayer found at Turfan and in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, at Tun-huang.(4) [Tocharians???]

Notes:

(1) Hays, 241.
(2) Briffault 3, 171.
(3) Briffault 3, 177.
(4) Legge 2, 334-35.