Celebrations of mothers and motherhood can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who held festivals in honour of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. But the clearest modern precedent for Mother's Day is the early Christian festival known as "Mothering Sunday". Once a major tradition in the UK and parts of Europe, this celebration fell on the fourth Sunday in Lent and was originally seen as a time when the faithful would return to their "mother church" - the main church or cathedral nearest their home - for a special service. Over time the Mothering Sunday tradition shifted into a more secular holiday, and children would present their mothers with flowers and other tokens of appreciation. This custom eventually faded in popularity before merging with the American Mother's Day in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the
Beginning Cybele[1] was an originally Anatolian mother
goddess. She has a possible early Neolithic precursor
at Çatalhöyük, in
modern day Turkey, where the
statue of a pregnant, seated goddess was found in a granary. Cybele
is Phrygia's only known goddess and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by
Greek colonists of Asia Minor and
spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from
around the 6th century BC.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of
the Earth-goddess Gaia,
her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the
Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter.
Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector,
but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially
foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the
accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch
mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek
cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek
invention. In Greece, Cybele is
associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild
animals, especially lions.
What did
the Romans ever do? In
Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman State adopted and developed a form of
her cult after the Sibylline
oracle recommended her
conscription as a key religious component in Rome's second war against
Carthage.
Roman mythographers re-invented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of
the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince, Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised
forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and
priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature and
remain so today.
The Romans also celebrated the Hilaria on March 25th, the eighth day before the Kalends of
April, in honour of Cybele, the
mother of the gods. The day of
celebration was the first after the vernal equinox, or the first day of the
year which was longer than the night. The
winter with its gloom had died, and the first day of a better season was spent
in rejoicing. The manner of its
celebration during the time of the Republic is unknown, except that Valerius Maximus mentions games in honour of the
mother of the gods. During the Imperial
period, Herodian writes that, among other things, there was a solemn
procession, in which the statue of the goddess was carried. Before this statue were carried the costliest
works of art belonging either to wealthy Romans or to the emperors themselves. All kinds of games and amusements were allowed
on the day; masquerades being the most prominent among them, and everyone
might, in disguise, imitate whomsoever they liked.
Christian
tradition In the centuries
that followed, Rome’s influence as the head of the Catholic church led, in
Britain at least, to celebrating Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of the Christian
period of Lent, the 40 day period of fasting leading up to Easter. It was intended for
people to visit their main cathedral, or "mother church", rather than worship in their
local parish. Later domestic servants were given the day off to return to their home town or village and worship with their families. But making the journey naturally led to family reunions that, over time, began to have greater significance. This in turn has led to modern Britain's version of
Mother's Day.
Much like “Trick or Treat” Halloween, the commercialised
version that persists today is largely courtesy of the Americans. Now known mostly for the giving of brunches
of flowers, gifts, cards, and for general outpourings of love and appreciation,
this was not what was first intended, however.
Tradition hijacked In the 1850s, Ann Reeves Jarvis organised women to hold Mother's Day work clubs aimed at improving sanitary
conditions in West Virginia, and to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk
contamination. Between 1861 and 1865, the groups also tended wounded
soldiers from both sides during the U.S. Civil War. In the post war years Jarvis
and other women organised Mother's Friendship Day picnics and other events as
pacifist strategies to unite former Union and Confederate foes.
When Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter Anna
Jarvis was inspired to organise the first Mother's Day observances. On May 10th, 1908 families
gathered at events in Jarvis' hometown of Grafton, West Virginia - at a church
now renamed the International Mother's Day Shrine. They also gathered in Philadelphia, where
Jarvis lived at the time, and in several other US cities. The purpose was not to celebrate "all mothers",
but rather the best mother each son or daughter had ever known - their own. Indeed, this intention may explain
why Jarvis stressed the singular "Mother's Day," rather than the
plural "Mothers' Day”.
A new holiday Largely through Jarvis's efforts, Mother's Day came to be
observed in a growing number of cities and states until, in 1914, U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson formally set aside the second Sunday in May as an
official holiday. Yet Anna Jarvis's idea
of an intimate Mother's Day quickly became a commercial gold mine centred on
the buying and giving of flowers, sweets, and greeting cards. This development so deeply disturbed Jarvis
that she set about dedicating herself, and her sizable inheritance, to
returning Mother's Day to its more reverent roots.
She incorporated herself as the Mother's Day International
Association and tried to retain some control of the holiday. She organised boycotts, threatened lawsuits,
and even attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother's Day to raise
funds for charities. In 1923, for
example, she crashed a convention of confectioners in Philadelphia. A similar protest followed two years later. The American War Mothers had been using Mother's Day for fund-raising, selling carnations every year. Jarvis resented that, so she crashed their
1925 convention in Philadelphia, and was duly arrested for disturbing the peace.
Jarvis's fervent attempts to reform Mother's Day continued
until at least the early 1940s. In a
state of dementia, a penniless Jarvis finally died, aged 84, in Philadelphia's
Marshall Square Sanatorium in 1948.
The holiday Anna Jarvis launched has spread around much of
the world. It is celebrated with varying enthusiasm, in numerous ways, and
on different days - though rarely on the second Sunday in May. One hundred years on and commercialism still overshadows the ancient spiritual beginnings, and the more recent reverent roots, of Mother's Day. Perhaps Anna Jarvis had a point.
1. (/ˈsɪbᵻliː/; Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: ΚυβέληKybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis).
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