Fundraiser for Women's Breast Cancer Programs
November 10, 2001, First UU Society, Madison Wisconsin

All over the world, indigenous peoples have noticed a relationship between the human body and the body of the earth. For many of these people, the mountains around them were considered to be their mothers and were often called goddess. Sometimes, the mountain peaks themselves were referred to as the mother's breasts, or the breasts of the Goddess.

It's easy enough to see why mountain peaks would be thought of as breasts -- just think of their shapes.

The Greek goddess Gaia was called "the deep breasted one." For the ancient Greeks, Earth (Gaia) was their mother, and the mountains were Her breasts. Most of us know Gaia, who's become the "poster girl" for the environmental movement.

In Greek, Her name means "Earth" (and in Latin, "birth, race, family, kin"). She is still alive in our own language, in words that have their roots in Gaia (pronounced "jay" in Greek): geology, geography, genealogy, genesis, geode, geodesy, geometry, gender, generous, genital, gentle, genuine, germinate, gestate, and genius, and also germ and genocide and geriatric.

The reverence for the goddess that is a mountain, the mountain that is her breast, is older than the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. All the families, royal and other, interred in the pyramid tombs in the Valley of the Kings were under the protection of Meretseger -- mountain, goddess, and breast.

In the New Kingdom, the peak of this mountain was venerated as a goddess. The mountain itself is a natural geological pyramid (as is the shadow of another mountain we'll be discussing in a minute).

It is said that if you stand on the floor of the Valley of the Kinds and look up, "you will see that against the horizon it clearly forms the image of a woman's breast, facing towards the sky. During the New Kingdom the peak of this mountain was venerated as a goddess. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we read: "His mother shall nurse him, and shall give him her 'breast' upon the horizon."

A few other breast//mother/mountain//goddesses are

I could go on about other mountains in other parts of the world -- in South America, Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, Korea, Japan, the Fertile Crescent -- but I won't.

I will spend a little time talking in more depth about one more mountain, Chomolungma, the most colonized mountain of our time.

Chomolungma is a mountain we all know well, another mountain from the Himalayas. We've studied this mountain in geography. Chomolungma is known as Mother Goddess of the Universe, Goddess of the Earth, Mother of the Snows, Maiden of the Wind, and Roof of the Sky. To the Sherpas, an ethnic group of the area, She is also "Unshakable Good Elephant Woman."

--I asked for a show of hands in the audience -- who had heard of Chomolungma. About 5 women raised their hands.

--I asked who remembered "from geography" the highest mountain in the world. Several women said "Mt. Everest."

--I asked where Everest got its name, and there were speculations it was named after the guy who discovered it or something like that.

In 1808, the British decided they needed to identify and name the tallest mountain in the world. Sir George Everest, Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843, calculated Peak XV and several others as part of this effort.

Peak XV lies on the Tibetan Plateau, the largest and highest plateau on our planet. It averages 15,000 feet above sea level. Many of us think of Tibet as a place of barren windswept plains. While this is true for regions of Northern Tibet, other regions are rich with diversity. The plateau is dotted with thousands of lakes and extensive grasslands utilized by nomadic herders to graze yaks. Large tracts of forest in Eastern Tibet are regarded by China as their second most important source of timber. The glaciers and snow melt of the Tibetan highlands initiate four of Asia's greatest rivers, and are a major contributor of the waters that flow in the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow Rivers.

When Peak XV was formally declared the planet's highest peak, Everest was retired. His successor had the task of naming Peak XV, and he proposed to name it after the former Surveyor General, and in 1865 the name "Everest" was officially adopted by the Royal Geographical Society.

What you should know is that Everest himself fiercely opposed the naming. He believed and had said many times that the mountains should keep their local names. He noted that "Everest" couldn't be pronounced by a native of India or written in Hindi.

Nonetheless....

As the 19th century saw India and the Himalayas colonized by the British, the 20th century saw Everest, Chomolungma Herself, "conquered" in 1953 and assaulted many times since by small groups of climbers, many of whom die in the bold and daunting effort. (Chomolungma is over 28,000 feet above sea level. Pictures taken from the summit show a black sky, no matter what time of day it is, because there is so little oxygen in the air at that altitude.)

The son of the Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, who led the 1953 group on the first successful mission to the peak of Everest/Chomolungma, has climbed Everest himself, but only once.

I want to read to you a few paragraphs from an interview he gave. He said:

"you know…we look on the mountains as sacred, and to this day some of the Himalayas remain off limits to us. They are such holy mountains that to climb them would be wrong.

Sherpas have been hired to help on these expeditions from the very beginning, and for many of us - especially on Everest - mountain-climbing has become our livelihood. But we go to the mountain with respect. We know that Chomolungma lives there, and so prayer and ceremony must precede any attempt to climb the mountain…

We place prayer flags wherever we go (on these treks). Chomolungma, the maiden of the wind and mother goddess of the world, lives on Everest, and our prayers are to her by the wind horse. The flags blowing in the wind are the sound of our prayers, our communication with the goddess. In prayer, we learn the respect with which we must approach the mountain.

The deities can be defiled by people who abuse the mountain, who pollute it with garbage or try to climb it without showing proper respect. Ignorant people sometimes climb mountains; they climb only as an expression of ego. It is very important that climbers respect the mountain and the people who live there."

It seems to me that in the Himalayas, we have the crossroads of two sets of values, those who come to respect the mountain and those who come to "conquer" her. Somehow, there's a metaphor here for us as we think about our breasts, our bodies. We know that women's breasts sell advertising and are central to pornography. To fondle a girl's breasts is "to make it to second base" in the sports vernacular of teenagers -- a heroic deed, an act of daring.

From the indigenous peoples, perhaps we can learn that breasts are to be thought of as mountains, and vice versa. That they are sacred, the providers of sustenance and bounty, whether that be mother's milk or the pure water from mountain sources that slakes the thirsts of people, animals, grasses and trees.