My favorite word is "ma". It's a false cognate, meaning that it means the same thing in several languages that have no known historical connections. "Ma" refers to "mother" in languages as diverse as English and Swahili. There are a few theories about this, but the simplest (and, IMO, most convincing) is that "ma" is simply one of the first "words" a human infant begins to make and that this became associated with its primary reference, the mother. "Ma" is simply the word that results when you make a sound with your mouth closed and then open your mouth: mmmmm-a... mmmmmm-a. So, according to this theory, it is the mother who learns her title from the infant, rather than teaching the infant to call her "ma" or "mama". The number of languages in which this phenomenon is present, and the rich religious and philophical traditions that have grown out of it, indicates that this development must have taken place very early in the history of human language.
The Sanskrit root "ma" means "to measure", as in "maya" - "to measure forth", or to measure out and demarcate a part from the whole. There is an element of name magic here, I think, the idea that the giving of a name brings something into being: that is, the world exists as a whole and individual "things" separate out from that whole and come into being when they are named, marked off, and called into the foreground by consciousness. Anyway, the Sanskrit root "ma" also means "to make, to create, to bring forth", and we can see that these two senses of the word are related. So, according to the theory above, it is likely that infants taught their mothers their title "ma", and that the word
then came to be associated with creation and bring forth. This, rather than the opposite situation, in which the society had the word "ma" which meant "to create or bring forth", applied it to mothers for obvious reasons, and then taught babies to call their progenitors "mama". This is an important distinction because it indicates that motherhood is the primordial model for all creative action, rather than simply being one example of the abstract concept "to create".
Mother continues to get more interesting as she develops. From "ma", we get "mater", "matter", and "material". But we also get "matrix". Now, "matrix" is defined as "A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained." It is not content, but context. It refers to the underlying,
in-forming structure which allows forms to come into being all. In Bronze Age cosmologies, the primary cult was of the goddess-as-matrix. The goddess herself
was the universe, time and space, the matrix within which we live, breathe, and have our being. The gods were secondary; mostly they were operative principles that existed within the same structural matrix as man, though their place on the hierarchy was more exalted. In Egypt, the great god, the solar disc, passed through the body of the goddess each night to be reborn again each morning. And then we have "matter". The association of the female with the realm of matter - that is, life in the world, in time and space, in the cycle of birth, maturity, death, and regeneration - is ancient. But its post-Bronze Age divorce from the realm of "spirit" - the divorce against which all of Heidegger's work is a protest - was an alteration that has shaped the social order for most of the last four thousand years.
When the nomadic hunters and herders swept down from the steppes and descended from the deserts upon the sedentary goddess-worshipping agriculturalists, they brought with them their active warrior gods. Where they conquered, they inverted the mythology of the primordial goddess, turning her and her titanic children into demons. The gods they carried with them were not associated with the ever-revolving and ever-recurring cycles of life and time, but were conscious actors, in the image of man, battling it out for supremacy. The deep, cthonic goddess, long associated affectionately with the serpent, was turned into a dragon or a Gorgon, slain by a conquering hero god who prototypically cut up her body and used its parts to
build the universe. Indeed, in this mythological inversion, the universe was built, not grown. In these patriarchal cosmologies, we see a distinction drawn between the realm of matter and spirit. That is, between the heavy, earthly, time-bound, ever-changing world of life and death, and the eternal realm of light without shadow, of which the realm of matter was but a passing shadow. Thus, whereas in the the Bronze Age Aegean sacrifices were buried in the ground, with the coming of the gods of Olympus they are offered to the mountain tops. The female, tied inextricably to the lunar cycle, associated with her serpent shedding skin to be reborn anew, was irrevocably associated with the realm of matter, and was devalued in favor of one or another of her conquerers, and as man set about his task - the one we are near bringing to conclusion or catastrophe - of chopping up the body of the goddess to create the world in his image, that is, of setting to order the fearful chaos of nature, the female has been a source of distrust and fascination, awe and fear ever since. And we men, forever children - more on this - have generally handled the ambivalence the way any child would: unsure if we want to steal a kiss or pull a pigtail, so we burn witches outside the very cathedral where we venerate our most merciful mother MA-ry, seated with her holy infant (who is her husband in his Father form) like Isis with Horus, and countless other goddesses with their son-spouse. Mary, by the way, does not seem to be related to this ancient root, but is the English version of Hebrew Miriam. Miriam is traditionally associated with the verb "mara" which means "to be disobedient or rebellious". So here we see the prototypical woman represented from the perspective of the post-Bronze Age patriarchy.
This is all very useful for us men as we go about setting the world aright, blissfully unconscious of how our very own religions have been playing a trick on us. For as we play our games, nodding our heads and silently agreeing to keep pretending that our games of primary importance, something in us knows that our role is secondary and almost superfluous window dressing to the real main event of the human species, which is the continuation of life through female. It took us until Freud to elucidate something that had been known to prophets and embedded in our language since time immemorial. An infant's primary reference is mama. The rules and dictates and rituals and roles of the social order - that ordered realm of consciously conceived gamesmanship - are so many gods competing for precedence, each insisting in its own primacy. But the basic structure of the mind in which these ideas live is nothing less than the mother herself, that primary reference interiorized. And since the world we experience is a projection of the whole psyche, it was not a simple superstition to say that the goddess-mother
was the universe, but the expression of a basic psychic fact.
So what we have here is a very interesting possibility: Mothers learned to be called "ma" from their infants, and the word - as well as the female and motherhood - then came to be the model and basis of all creative acts, and we furthermore understood in our language something which eventually became utterly rejected or repressed, namely that the Mother is the informing matrix of all our experience and our model for the world. The extent to which this was repressed - that is, the success with which one Father or another pressed his claim to primacy - is perfectly proportional to a number of disastrous social neuroses, though it has enabled much of the cultural and technological progress that has taken place throughout history.
Incidentally, "papa" is also a widespread false-cognate. It is theorized by some that there is a connection between the male being associated with an active principle and plosive nature of the word "papa". Also, it should be said that there are rare exceptions to these false-cognates, such as where the plosive "baba" refers to grandmother in Slavic countries, and there are a few places where "mama" refers to the father. But these are exceptions.
This is one of my favorite topics, but I ought to stop before things get out of hand. For more on serpents, and the ancient relationship to woman and the goddess, I wrote another long and boring post in another thread (I don't know how to make it link directly to the post so you have to scroll down):
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