26/09/2025
“So powerful was the imagery of the nursing mother as Goddess-like creator and nurturer that the adherents of male gods went out of their way to try to adapt this imagery to fatherhood by hook or crook. Patriarchal Jews claimed for Yahweh the title of El Shaddai, meaning a milk-giving breast or a nursing mother. Numbers 11:12 speaks of God as a nursing father carrying the ‘sucking child’ in his bosom. Even more incongruous were some of the writings of later Christian fathers, like Saint Ambrose who talked of the ‘The Father’s womb’ and the ‘nourishing breasts of Christ.’ Solomon’s Ode said: ‘The Holy Ghost opened the Father’s raiment and mingled the milk from the Father’s two breasts.’
Perhaps most inconsistent of all, it was Mary the real nursing mother who was made to say, ‘He who is milked is the Father, and the Holy Spirit milked him, because his breasts were full, and it was necessary for him that his milk should be sufficiently released.”
– Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects
Art by Sue Ellen Parkinson
