“Devī is the Great Mother of the Hindu pantheon,” says Christopher Fee, a professor of English at Gettysburg College, and an expert on gods and goddesses. “She represents the amalgamation of all the forces associated with the female divine, and is worshipped in manifold manifestations as both life-giver and life-taker.” 

In the 1920s, archaeologists uncovered a large number of female terracotta figures in the Indus Valley (what is now modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) dating back to at least 3000 B.C. Perhaps the most widely accepted theory about these figures is that they represent an early manifestation of what would eventually become the great Indian goddess Devī, note Fee and co-author David Leeming in The Goddess: Myths of the Great Mother.

The Devī Māhātmya (“Glorification of the Goddess”), composed sometime in the sixth century, is regarded as the classic text of Hindu goddess worship, and describes Devī as the singular, supreme goddess, manifested in different forms. The most prominent Devī myth has the goddess saving the world in “the guise of Durga, the beautiful 18-armed, tiger-riding warrior goddess, who alone of all the gods was capable of defeating Mahisha, the seemingly invulnerable demon,” says Fee.

But in one of her other forms as the goddess Kali, she brought disease, war and destruction—necessary aspects to the cycle of life. “She is the destroyer face of the creator goddess, with four arms and bedecked with skulls, striking terror into the hearts of her enemies,” says Fee. 

As an embodiment of both creation and destruction, Devī came to symbolize the full spectrum of feminine power—nurturing, protective and fearsome. Culturally, this reverence for Devī might have influenced societal attitudes toward women. Scholars note that in Vedic times, women and men were equal as far as education and religion were concerned. Female spiritual authority was also acknowledged through roles such as Brahmavādinīs (women Vedic scholars) and female sages.

Gaia was the great mother of all creation and the Greek personification of earth.

“Examination of sacred sites within caves in and around Delphi suggest that the sacred Earth goddess Gaia may have been worshipped by prehistoric peoples some six thousand years ago,” says Fee. While she may have been revered long before the rise of ancient Greek civilization, much of what is known about Gaia comes primarily from classical mythology. 

Around 700 B.C., the poet Hesiod’s Theogony offered the first written cosmogony, or origin story, of Greek mythology. Hesiod introduces Gaia as emerging from Chaos, a primeval void. Gaia gives birth parthenogenetically to elements of the earth, including the sea, mountains and sky—the latter personified by the sky god, Ouranos. United with Ouranos, Gaia produces the Titans, powerful deities such as Kronos and Rhea, siblings and mates who in turn become the parents of the Olympian gods. When Gaia prophesies that Kronos will meet his demise at the hands of one of his own children, he begins devouring each newborn at birth. However, when the youngest, Zeus, is born, Rhea—herself considered a life-giving goddess—deceives Kronos by offering him a swaddled stone to swallow instead. 

While goddesses like Gaia and Rhea embodied impressive power in Greek mythology, the reality for most women in ancient Greece was starkly different. With the notable exception of Sparta, women often lived hidden, restrictive lives. In Politics, Aristotle stated that between the sexes, “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled.”

However, archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly asserts in Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece that “religious office presented the one arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal and comparable to those of men.”

“Central to this phenomenon is the fact that the Greek pantheon includes both gods and goddesses and that, with some notable exceptions, the cults of male divinities were overseen by male officials and those of female divinities by female officials,” she writes. Priestesses in the second century B.C. were granted exceptional societal privileges, including the right to own property and exemption from taxation, Connelly notes.

“Coatlicue (literally 'Serpent-Her-Skirt') was a Mexica earth mother goddess, part of a complex of powerful goddesses worshipped throughout central Mexico in late pre-Hispanic times,” explains Frances Berdan, professor emerita of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino and author of The Aztecs: Lost Civilizations. She symbolized fertility and oversaw the overall well-being of women.

A five-ton basalt monolith of Coatlicue once stood prominently within the sacred temple precinct of Tenochtitlan, the magnificent capital city of the Aztecs. Following Spanish conquest, colonial authorities buried the imposing sculpture—largely to prevent indigenous worship. When rediscovered in 1790, Roman Catholic priests, fearing the sculpture’s pagan powers, ordered it buried once more. The statue remained hidden until 1803, when it was excavated by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

“The sculpture highlights Coatlicue’s attributes of life and death; she is depicted as an old woman,” says Berdan. “Her hands face outward surrounded by a human skull, serpents wind about her skirt and form a dangling belt, and claws are featured on her hands and feet. She is decapitated, her head replaced by serpents.” 

As documented in Book III of the 16th century Florentine Codex—the earth mother’s origin story begins when a woman called Coatlicue tucks a ball of feathers into her bosom, which causes her to become pregnant. Enraged by this miraculous conception, Coatlicue’s offspring conspire to kill her. However, a traitor among them alerts the unborn Huitzilopochtli, who then bursts forth from Coatlicue fully armed, defeats his siblings and rises to be venerated as the god of war and the patron deity of the Mexica.

“As the mother of such a signal deity, Coatlicue was highly revered,” says Berdan. “Her presence in annual ceremonies reminded the Mexica of the central importance of motherhood.”

Motherhood was so deeply valued that childbirth was literally likened to the battlefield. “Women were, in fact, given a toy shield and spears to hold while in labor, and at the moment of birth the midwife uttered a war cry,” write Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert in Women in Ancient America. They also note that women who died in childbirth were honored in the same manner as warriors who fell in battle.

Initially an obscure goddess in ancient Egypt, Isis eventually rose to prominence as the patroness of marriage and a protector during childbirth. “Motherhood slowly became an important part of the cult of Isis,” writes Joyce Tyldesley in Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt. Depictions of Isis breastfeeding her baby Horus “marked the transition of Isis from her relatively restricted role as a member of the Egyptian pantheon to more universal recognition as a mother goddess or earth mother,” she adds.

The first major temple dedicated to Isis was built in the central Nile delta around 360–343 B.C. Another important temple was built by the pharaoh Ptolemy II about a century later on the island of Philae in the Nile River. The temple, along with its entryway of two monumental sets of pylons, were moved to higher ground on the nearby island of Agilkia in the 1960s and 1970s after flooding caused by the construction of Aswan High Dam.

Isis is first mentioned in the Pyramid Texts—writings carved into the walls of the first great pyramids at Saqqara beginning around 2400 B.C. Her legacy persisted through the ages, appearing in later works like De Iside et Osiride, part of Plutarch’s surviving collection of essays.

While accounts vary slightly, the central myth recounts that Osiris, a powerful king of Egypt, is murdered by his jealous brother Seth. After an extensive search, Isis—Osiris’s devoted wife— discovers his body sealed in a chest. However, Seth subsequently dismembers Osiris and scatters his body parts across the land. Isis retrieves and reassembles the fragments, ultimately restoring and mummifying her husband. Although his penis is never recovered, Isis conceives their son, Horus, whom she nurtures and protects until he matures and avenges his father’s death.

As a devoted mother and protector, Isis became a model of ideal womanhood and motherhood for Egyptian women, embodying maternal strength and resilience. 

Although Egyptian women enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom in comparison to those in other ancient societies, Tyldesley writes that “it was automatically assumed that all daughters would marry and have children.” Pregnancy and successful childbirth became a means of securing one’s place within the household.

Through her wide-ranging roles, Nüwa was “the founder of marriage, guarantor of childbirth, guardian spirit of pregnancy, and fashioner of the human body,” writes Mark Edward Lewis in The Flood Myths of Early China.

The most famous archaeological depiction of Nüwa and her husband was found at the Wu Liang Shrine. This site is considered the most important surviving pre-Buddhist monument in China, built in the second century during the Han dynasty in Jiaxiang County, Shandong Province. A painting of Nüwa and her husband Fuxi, depicted with intertwined snake-like bodies, was also discovered at the ancient Astana Graves. They are shown holding a compass and a ruler—instruments symbolizing the traditional Chinese cosmological belief that Heaven is round and the Earth is square.

While numerous myths surround the goddess Nüwa, perhaps the most well-known concern her creation of humankind. One version, found in a compendium on the origins of social customs compiled by the Han author Ying Shao describes how Nüwa kneaded yellow earth to fashion human beings. She drew a cord through the earth’s furrow and lifted out human figures: aristocrats arose from the fine yellow soil, whereas, lacking the strength to complete her task, she formed commoners from the cord’s furrow of coarse brown mud.

In another myth, recorded in Duyizhi (A Treatise on Extraordinary and Strange Things) by the Tang dynasty writer Li Rong, Nüwa and her brother Fuxi become the first husband and wife—and the progenitors of humankind. In the Huainanzi, another classic Chinese text from the Western Han dynasty, Nüwa “smelted the five-colored stones” to patch up the sky and to tame a great flood.

Although ancient Chinese society remained largely patriarchal, Nüwa’s divine status may have validated a vision of feminine power rooted not in domination, but in creation, nurturing and healing. Female wus, or spirit healers, are mentioned as far back as the third century B.C. in Guoyü. These women played a vital role in healing practices, gathering medicinal herbs and performing ceremonial rituals to aid the sick.