Go to Kitchen Goddesses By Sandra Garson l Mother Nature Goddesses l Goddesses and Food Rituals l Mother Earth as Main Food Source

Great Mothers for All

Since as far back in time as human memory reaches, we have believed in a great mother who lovingly provides food and fire to keep us alive. Respected and revered as Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Great Mother, Great Food Princess or the Hindus divine giver of birth to everything, Devi, or Goddess, she’s always depicted with a radiant face, loving gaze and soft body, holding some form of food. People believed if her nonjudgmental generosity was ignored or greedily hoarded, she’d withdraw her love, causing floods and famine, droughts and disagreements, infertility and inedible cooking to destroy the fields and families she’d protected.

So we still appease and honor her today with flowers by our rice bins, statues on our statehouses, offering rituals on Friday, and images in our kitchen. Here are some of the world’s great mothers who want us to eat and be well.

Annapurna

Most of us think Annapurna is simply the name of a wildly popular Himalayan trekking peak in Nepal, not realizing the Nepalese named that mountain as a monument to a beloved goddess. Her name combines two words: Anna or nourishing with food, and purna, totality. Hindus worship Annapurna as the motherly provider of both harvest and daily meals, praying for her to protect and increase the food supply upon which human survival depends. To venerate Annapurna is to ensure you will never be hungry. To invoke her when cooking or to have her image in the kitchen is said to produce exceptionally nourishing and splendid fare. Hindu children who don’t clean their plates are warned about the danger of angering Annapurna and dying of starvation.

Ixcacao

Mayan creation myths describe a great flood, droughts and earthquakes that destroyed the human race because it didn’t take care of the earth. Out of mercy, an earth mother, Ixcacao, gave humans another chance. She was worshipped in matriarchal cultures where gathering crops and feeding everyone was women's work. She was beseeched to banish hunger and provide for her children.

Reverence for her spread from Central to South America where she became Xochiquetzal, goddess of fertility, flowers and fruits. Aztecs and Mayans, even the men, saw her as provider of their most noble “food of the gods,” cacao. An old Mayan prayer offered at times of hunger asks her for a good harvest: Ixcanil, Goddess of Seed, hear me. Ixtoq, Goddess of Rain, help me. Ixcacao, Goddess of Chocolate, see my tears and come to my aid.

Ceres

After the great Roman famine of 493 B.C., Ceres became the European goddess of agriculture, particularly the vital grains of daily bread, “cereal.” Like her Greek counterpart, Demeter, she usually holds a sheaf of domesticated wheat, symbol of survival savoir-faire. Ceres is revered as the source of nurture, fertility and bounty, the divine mother whose ravishing daughter Proserpina (Persephone in Greek) was kidnapped to the underworld and condemned to live there six months of every year, which explains fruitful and fallow seasons. (If Ceres is unhappy, as she is without her child, nothing grows and famine portends.)

Americans keep Ceres atop the Missouri and Vermont state houses, and the agricultural commodity exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade. She’s also on the Garden State (New Jersey) seal, as protector of its prosperity.

Devi Shri or Dewi Sri

Indonesian people, especially the Balinese, believe the rice that sustains them is the gift of a divine mother, beautiful Devi Shri, daughter of the water God and earth Goddess. Because rice is the source of their prosperity and happy family life, one Friday of every month they honor great mother Devi Shri with prayers and offerings. To please her, the Balinese keep fresh flowers next to their rice containers and outside their barns, and dot their rice fields with small honorary shrines.

Indonesians believe Devi Shri will not tolerate greed or hoarding and will thus destroy the crops of anyone who shows no concern for others. She will also bring misfortune to ungrateful children who don’t eat all the rice their mother puts before them. She is a form of the great Hindu Mother Goddess of prosperity, family and health: Lakshmi.