The Mother Across Traditions

It’s Mother’s Day. My daughter is three. The whole holiday is uncomplicated for her. It will not be uncomplicated forever.

For most of human history, motherhood has been the most charged and contradictory relationship in the human experience. Every tradition has had to address it. They didn’t all agree.

Here is what they said.

Why this date

The American Mother’s Day is a recent invention. Anna Jarvis, in West Virginia, organized the first official service in Grafton on May 10, 1908, to honor her own mother, who had founded sanitation clubs to fight infant mortality and, during the Civil War, nursed wounded soldiers from both sides. By 1914 it was a federal holiday. Jarvis spent the rest of her life trying to dismantle it, furious at how quickly it had been turned into a Hallmark holiday.

Most countries do not celebrate it on the second Sunday in May.

The UK and Ireland keep an older tradition: Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, originally about returning to the “mother church” of your baptism. Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize honor mothers on May 10 specifically, regardless of weekday. Thailand celebrates it on August 12, the queen mother’s birthday. Ethiopia holds Antrosht, a multi-day feast at the end of the rainy season. Egypt and most Arab countries put it on March 21, the traditional first day of spring.

The dates are not coordinated. The instinct is.

The mother in Western astrology

In Western astrology the Moon is the mother. Not metaphorically. Literally. The Moon’s sign, house, and aspects in your birth chart describe the mother you got, the mother you internalized, and the mother you carry inside you regardless of who raised you.

Cancer, the sign the Moon rules, is the sign of mothering itself. The shell, the home, the food that comes from the kitchen, the door that closes against the world.

Ceres, the largest asteroid and now classified as a dwarf planet, was named for the Roman grain mother. In modern astrology she rules nourishment, attachment, loss, and reunion. The myth is the same one the Greeks called Demeter and Persephone: a mother whose grief stops the growing of food until her daughter is returned to her.

A difficult Moon in a chart often shows up as a difficult relationship with the actual mother. It also shows up as difficulty receiving care, trusting safety, allowing rest. The two are not separate.

The mother in jyotish

Vedic astrology agrees with Western astrology on this point and goes further.

Chandra, the Moon, is matru karaka, the significator of the mother. Her strength in the chart describes the mother’s strength. Her affliction describes the mother’s affliction. A waning Moon, a Moon in a difficult sign, a Moon hemmed by malefics on either side: each of these is read as a particular shape of mother.

The fourth house is the second seat of the mother. Where the Moon describes who she is, the fourth house describes what she gave you. The home. The land. The early environment. The capacity to feel held.

There is a separate concept called Matrukadevata, the mother goddess of the family lineage. Most Hindu families have one: Lakshmi, Durga, Saraswati, or one of the seven matrikas. She is venerated alongside the household deity. The understanding is that the family is a downward stream, and the mother goddess is the headwater.

Vedic prayers do not begin with “Father” the way Christian prayers do. They often begin with “Jagat Janani,” which means mother of the world.

The mother in Hindu thought

The mother in Hinduism is not one figure. She is many.

Devi, the great goddess, contains all of them. Lakshmi is mother as abundance. Saraswati as knowledge. Durga as protection. Kali destroys what must be destroyed. Parvati is the consort, the householder, the partner of Shiva.

The seven matrikas, the “little mothers,” are feminine energies that emerge from the great gods to fight demons even Durga cannot kill alone. They are not gentle. They are war mothers.

Hinduism does not pretend the mother is only soft.

The mother in Buddhism

Buddhism complicates motherhood from the start. The Buddha left his wife and infant son to seek enlightenment. He named that son Rahula, which means “fetter.”

And yet Buddhist iconography is full of mothers.

Tara, who in Tibetan Buddhism is born from the tears of Avalokitesvara as he weeps over the suffering of the world, is the mother who comes when you cry. She is not the mother who created you. She is the mother who responds.

Quan Yin in Chinese Buddhism plays the same role: the listener, the one who hears, the bodhisattva of compassion who takes feminine form.

Prajnaparamita, the personification of perfect wisdom, is called the mother of all Buddhas. Not because she gave birth to them. Because the wisdom she represents is what makes a Buddha possible. Without her, no awakening.

In Buddhism, the mother is the wisdom that makes a Buddha, not the woman who bore one.

The mother in Christianity

Catholic and Orthodox Christianity place Mary above almost any other figure outside the Trinity. The title Theotokos, “God-bearer,” was settled at the Council of Ephesus in 431. She is not just Jesus’s mother. She is the one through whom God enters the world.

The Pietà, Michelangelo’s marble of Mary holding the dead Christ across her lap, is the most reproduced image of motherhood in the Western tradition. The mother carries her child into life. She also carries him out of it.

The Mater Dolorosa is Mary as the sorrowful mother, the figure who carries the seven sorrows of Catholic devotion. Mothers know the price.

Protestant Christianity downplays Mary, but the figure does not disappear. She returns through the Black Madonna in folk Catholicism, through the female personifications of Wisdom in Proverbs, through the Shekhinah in the Christian mystical traditions that draw from Kabbalah.

The mother in Islam

Islam centers the mother in a way easy to miss from outside the tradition. Mary, called Maryam, has more verses devoted to her in the Quran than in the New Testament. Sura 19 is named after her. She is the only woman in the Quran called by her personal name, and she is described as chosen above all women.

The most quoted hadith on motherhood is short. A man asked the Prophet Muhammad who deserved his best companionship. He said: “Your mother.” The man asked again. “Your mother.” A third time. “Your mother.” Only then did he say, “Your father.”

Another hadith, often shortened to a single line, says: “Paradise lies under the feet of mothers.”

In Sufism, the mystical strand of Islam, the divine is approached through love. Rabia of Basra, in the 8th century, refused to love God for fear of hell or hope of heaven. She called that bargaining. She loved God for God’s own sake. Many of the great Sufi saints after her were women.

The mother in Kabbalah

Kabbalah, the mystical strand of Judaism, has two mother figures.

Binah, the third sefirah on the Tree of Life, is called Imma, the mother. She is the one who receives the seed of pure thought from Chokhmah, the father, and gives it form. Without her, nothing can be born. The world only exists because Binah turned thought into structure.

Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, is the feminine divine in exile. She is the part of God that lives in the world, in the home, in the candle on Friday night. The exile of the Shekhinah is the central drama of Lurianic Kabbalah. She is the mother who has been separated from the source and longs to return.

The mother in older traditions

One of the oldest portraits of a human being we have is a mother. The Venus of Willendorf, carved roughly 30,000 years ago, is a small limestone figure of a heavy-bellied, full-breasted woman. She predates writing by 25,000 years. She predates settled agriculture. She is older than almost anything humans have made.

The Egyptians had Isis, who reassembled her murdered husband Osiris and conceived Horus from his body. Isis nursing the infant Horus is the visual ancestor of every Madonna and Child painting in Christian art. The throne in her crown is also her name. Isis means throne.

The Greeks had Demeter, whose grief over her stolen daughter stopped the world’s harvest. Hera ruled marriage and the household. Gaia, the Earth itself, came before the gods.

The Norse Frigg knew every fate and refused to speak it.

In the Andes, Pachamama is still named in offerings before drinking, before planting, before traveling.

Indigenous traditions across every continent have some form of Mother Earth. The mother as the ground itself.

Modern psychology and the two mothers

Carl Jung made the case that the mother is not just a person. She is an archetype, a structure in the human mind that exists before any actual mother arrives. Every infant comes into the world expecting a mother. The actual mother either matches or fails to match the archetype.

Jung wrote of two aspects: the loving mother and the terrible mother. Erich Neumann, in “The Great Mother” (1955), expanded this into a full system.

The good mother feeds, holds, protects, and lets the child individuate. The terrible mother feeds and never lets go. She holds and refuses to release. She protects against any growth that would take the child out of her reach.

Neumann called this the devouring mother.

Jordan Peterson has revived the language for a contemporary audience. His framing: the mother principle is positive when it nurtures and negative when it consumes. The same instinct that protects an infant becomes pathological when applied to an adult who needs to leave.

This is not a modern Western invention. The Hindu goddess Kali is a devouring mother as well as a protector. The Greek Medea kills her own children. Lilith, in Jewish folk tradition, is the demon who threatens women in childbirth and the infants they bear.

Every tradition has acknowledged this. Most modern Mother’s Day cards do not.

The mother is two things

The truthful image of motherhood across traditions is double.

She is the source. The first food, the first warmth, the first language, the first map of what a human being is. Without her, nothing.

She is also the first separation. The first wound. The first place where you learned that love can be conditional, that warmth can be withheld, that the person who keeps you alive can also leave.

Most traditions have held both. Mary at the manger; Mary at the cross. Demeter feeding the world, then starving it. Tara hears; Kali consumes. Binah gives form. Shekhinah grieves in exile.

Mother’s Day in America was invented by a woman who later spent her own money trying to abolish it. She thought it had become sentimental. She thought it had erased the actual mother in favor of a card.

The traditions older than the holiday do not make this mistake.

Today

I am writing this on a Sunday morning. Gracie is three. She does not yet know that not every mother is what every mother should be. For her, today is uncomplicated.

I hope she gets to keep the simple version for a long time.

For everyone whose mother is uncomplicated: today is for you, and the traditions agree on the gratitude.

For everyone whose mother is complicated, or gone, or one of the difficult versions: the traditions agree about you too. They have all known about you. They have all written it down somewhere. The double face of the mother is not a modern problem. It is as old as motherhood.

And for everyone who is a mother today, of any kind: someone, somewhere, in some tradition, is calling you Jagat Janani, mother of the world.

They mean it.

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Sarah