TELASMOS, the Virtual Museum of Breastfeeding

This is an archaeological hypothesis according to which there would have been a generalised cult of fertility and fecundity which, from the Upper Palaeolithic (30,000 to 20,000 years BC), through the Neolithic (10,000 to 2,000 years BC), would have reached historical times.

Its main expression would be the thousands of images and statuettes representing the deity, with female forms in which her sexual or nutritional characteristics are highlighted: from the Palaeolithic they would have evolved in various civilisations into the Egyptian goddess. Isis (Esi: "she who is on the throne", "the queen"), Greek goddesses Cibeles (Kybelé, Mount Phrygia), Artemis, Demeter o Aphroditethe Venus Roman, Rea in Crete, Kali in India, the Buddhist Chinese goddess of mercy and fertility Kuan Yin, Ana or Dana in Celtic Ireland, the Pachamama with hermaphrodite characters in the pre-Inca Andes, Hine-nui-te-po in Oceania and many others, which later gave rise to other myths such as Melusina in France or the Christian Virgin Mary.

The concept of Mother-Goddess is exhaustive, containing all the complementary opposites: wife and virgin, pregnant and barren, mother and daughter, mother of her father, creator and destroyer, masculine and feminine, the beginning and the end... Societies with this cult would have been matrilineal and of the opposite conception to the God of monotheistic religions.

This hypothesis was put forward in the mid-19th century by the Swiss jurist Johann-Jakob Bachofen, whose work Maternal Law. The Place of Women in the History of Mankind (Bâl, 1861) defends, without any historical-scientific criteria, the idea of a primitive matriarchy prior to current patriarchal forms.

The hypothesis, almost forgotten, regained strength in 1960 with the discovery of hundreds of female statuettes, some representing breastfeeding, in the excavations of Çatal-Hüyük in Anatolia by James Mellaart, and the strong support of feminist organisations strongly influenced by the Californian ethnologist of Lithuanian origin Marija Gimbutas, who advocated a worldwide unity of Mother-Goddess worship based on Jungian archetypes.

Ceres and Diana (Greek Demeter and Artemis, respectively), are the Roman mother goddesses of fertility. There are numerous fertility votive terracottas depicting a seated female figure nursing twins.

Pachamama, literally "mother earth", is the fertility goddess of the Incas and earlier civilisations (Chavin, Tihuanaco). As a mother-goddess, she contains all the opposites, including the masculine and the feminine. Her cult, contaminated with that of the Virgin Mary of the colonisers, has survived in the Andean mountain range of Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. She is often depicted breastfeeding, selling pottery and with a moustache.

Birth of the Milky Way

There are numerous depictions of Isis breastfeeding Horus. Breastfeeding was highly regarded in ancient Egypt. Isis and Horus are the forerunner of the Christian artistic tradition of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the Christ Child.

Although Isis is the best known, there are abundant depictions of other goddesses breastfeeding, either their own children or various pharaohs.

Astiages, grandfather of Cyrus II the Great, king of Media and Persia (556-528 BC), had his grandson killed at birth because of a dream he had in which his grandson usurped his power. The man in charge, a shepherd named Mithridates, was prevented from doing so by Spacchus, his wife, who had just had a stillborn son, whom they exchanged for Cyrus, whom she herself raised. Cyrus eventually dethroned his grandfather in 550 BC.

This legend, narrated by the Greek historian Herodotus, is one of the many cultural variations of the ancestral archetype of the castrating father, a male authority, divine or earthly, who, fearful of having his power usurped, murders children, nephews, grandchildren or strangers: Kamsa to Krisna, Cronus to Zeus, Alexius to Telephus, Herod to Jesus?

The Roman Charity

India: Putana, Krişna's poisoning nanny

Christian Charity

Mythology surrounding the Virgin Mary:

    - The Virgin of Milk

    The Flight into Egypt. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

Es este un tema muy representado y difundido en el arte pictórico europeo cristiano a partir del siglo XVI, tras el concilio de Trento (1545 – 1563) contra la Reforma luterana, que tiende a difundir los valores que la iglesia católica pretende implantar sobre la familia cristiana como unidad indisoluble, núcleo del cuerpo social, vertebradora de la Iglesia y del Estado, y asignando a cada miembro un papel predominante (cuidadora y sumisa la madre, proveedor y rector el padre, obediente y piadoso el hijo). La representación mínima consiste en María, Jesús y José en situaciones cotidianas, familia nuclear a la que se añade en ocasiones, la madre de María, Santa Ana, su padre, San Joaquín, San Juanito (Juan el Bautista, primo de Jesús) y su madre, Santa Isabel, ángeles y otros santos o personajes y hasta Dios Padre o el Espíritu Santo). El tema puede aparecer de modo aislado o imbricado en el tema de la huida a Egipto.

    - Mary intercessor

    - Lactatio of Saint Bernard and other Saints and Prophets

Jesucristo «amamantando»

Mercenary breastfeeding

En la mayoría de las sociedades, muchas mujeres han evitado dar el pecho, confiando sus hijos a la crianza por parte de otras mujeres que recibían un pago por este servicio: las nodrizas o amas de cría. Es una práctica atestiguada desde hace 4.000 años (Código babilónico de Hammurabi), hasta hace unos 50 años, cuando ha sido casi totalmente desterrada por la alimentación con leche de vaca modificada.

The subject of wet nurses has generated countless images in painting, sculpture, illustrations and cartoons, as well as a wealth of literature.

Breastfeeding in solidarity

There are many moving experiences of women who breastfeed other women's children out of solidarity and generosity, usually in dramatic circumstances. Some of them have been recorded in philately, such as that of Erika Orellana, the Honduran policewoman who breastfed an abandoned baby in the police station. Isabel Caro, a woman from Seville, breastfed a baby from North Africa who arrived on the beach in a boat while his mother was recovering. Migrant women workers in Spain, in the absence of laws that effectively protect their maternity rights, take turns to breastfeed the children of those who are working... and so many other anonymous stories that someone should take the time to compile so that the history of breastfeeding is not incomplete.

Human milk banks

Milk banks, since their inception at the dawn of the 20th century, have produced specific images of breastfeeding.

Desde el siglo XIX, cuando gobiernos de cualquier signo se ven necesitados de población para atender la producción económica del país, generalmente tras guerras que han diezmado a la población, hacen uso de todo tipo de presiones ideológicas, morales e incluso punitivas sobre las mujeres, exhortándolas a tener hijos y criarlos sanos. Son numerosos los carteles, folletos y libros en los que se les exige el «sagrado deber de amamantar».

Since ancient times, women's milk has been considered a remedy for various adult illnesses. Pliny the Elder, in book XXVIII, chapter 21 of his Natural History, recommends it for fevers and certain poisonings, for diseases of the eyes, ears and lungs, and for fatigue in the elderly. In a correspondence between members of the Borgia family in 1569, it is reported that an aba- desa de las Descalzas, a member of this family, had improved from an illness by "suckling milk from a woman without any other maintenance". The Encyclopédie by Diderot and d'Alambert considers mother's milk to be a good treatment for marasmus and tuberculosis.

Stories and illustrations of adults, the sick or the elderly being nursed for curative purposes are not uncommon. In the 372nd night of The Arabian Nights, a king suffering from leprosy is cured by drinking a bottle of milk from Queen Yamlika. In The Incas or the Destruction of the Empire of Peru, a melodramatic fictional novel written by Jean François Marmontel in 1777, Bartolomé de las Casas, deathly ill, is cured after being breastfed by the Inca priestess Cora.

Today, based on information that lacks scientific rigour, there is a trade in breast milk, often via the internet, based on cancer and physical vigour that, in addition to being ineffective for its intended purpose, carries risks of infection and fraud for consumers.

Related topics: Roman charity, Filial piety of Confucianism, Lactatio of St. Bernard.

Humour is also made out of breastfeeding. Jokes and other humorous descriptions with better or worse fortune, tact and sensitivity have been published in different formats: newspaper article, comic strip, postcard, etc.

There is an ambiguous discourse about the female breast, especially in the West. Its dual function, reproductive-nutritional on the one hand and erotic-sensual on the other, is responsible for most of the jokes about breastfeeding. 

The discomfort that women may experience when breastfeeding in public is linked to an ambiguous socio-cultural attitude towards it. Despite the dual erotic-sensual and nutritional-reproductive function of a woman's breast, society tends to magnify the erotic purpose to the detriment of the other, and in practice censures it. It is difficult to find in magazines, cinema or television images of breastfeeding or of a woman's breast in any other attitude or with any other purpose than erotic.

In 1997, the Paediatrics Department of the Marina Alta Hospital (Alicante) launched the first Breastfeeding Photo Contest as a means of recovering and promoting the image of breastfeeding women. This competition continues to be organised annually by the support group. Nodrissa Group and has been the mother of around a dozen similar competitions in various autonomous regions and the source of a huge image base for breastfeeding promotion.

Advertising has not been alien to the subject of breastfeeding. Forgotten by advertisers when it ceases to be frequent or socially appreciated, it is recovered in times when breastfeeding becomes a rising social value. Breastfeeding then becomes the "hook" that sells other products.

Cronus was the son of Uranus and Gaea, parents of all the gods in Greek mythology. Uranus, for fear of being dethroned, killed all his children by throwing them off the cliff, until Cronus, with the help of his mother, castrated his father with a sickle, who predicted that a son of his would take power from him.

Against this background, Cronus devoured all the children he had with his wife and sister, Rhea. Rhea, aided by her mother Gaea, managed to hide her son, Zeus, in the grottoes of Mount Ida in Crete, where he was cared for by the nymph Adrastea and suckled by the goat Amalthea. Rhea deceived her husband by presenting him with a stone wrapped in rags which Cronus swallowed, believing it to be his son Zeus, who, when he grew up, dethroned his father.

Tèlephos suckled by a doe

Tèlephos, Tèlephos, legendary king of Mysia, was the son of the priestess Auge, seduced by the demigod Heracles. Auge was the daughter of King Aeleus of Tegea; the latter, supposing that a plague declared in the region was the result of the defilement of the temple, had the child abandoned shortly after birth, but the baby did not die because it was suckled by a hind, until a peasant found it and presented it to Teutras, king of Mysia, who took it in as his own son.

It would not have been easy to survive on hind milk because of its very high protein content, seven times higher than that of hind milk.

His legend is narrated in the Mythological Library, an anonymous text from the early Christian era, falsely attributed to Apollodorus, an Athenian scholar of the 2nd century BC. C.

Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf

Lupam sitientem ex montibus, qui circa sunt, ad puerilem vagitum cursum flexisse; eam summissas infantibus adeo mitem praebuisse mammas (A thirsty she-wolf from the nearby mountains strayed towards the crying children and meekly bent over them and offered them her breasts).

This is the wonderful and incredible description of Titus Livy (59 BC - 17 AD) in his Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome from its foundation, 1:4). Incredible, because the composition of the milk of canids is so different from that of women that the children would have died within a few days due to its very high protein content.

Titus Livy himself does not concede the veracity of what he has just recounted, for a few lines further on he thinks that the legend may be due to the profession of the shepherd's wife who took the children (a whore in a brothel, a "she-wolf", which is what it means in Latin).

The Scandinavian creation myth. The giant Ymer and the nurturing cow Authumla

This complex myth can be summarised as follows: from the melting of the primeval ice was born an immense cow, Authumla, "the great nurse", from whose udders flowed four rivers of milk, which fed the giant Ymer, whose remains, once dead, formed the earth, the sea, the rivers and the celestial vault.

The Modern Myth: The Jungle Book

The English writer and 1907 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rudyard Kipling (Bombay, 1865-London, 1936), in his well-known The Jungle Book of 1894, describes an abandoned boy, Mowgli, raised by a she-wolf. The story has been made into a film and made universally popular by Walt Disney.

Both the story of Romulus and Remus and the story of Mowgli are related to the proven existence of wild children, abandoned children, without contact for years with humans and raised by animals (dogs, wolves, sheep, bears...). Abandonment must occur at ages when they are no longer young infants, otherwise their survival is not plausible.

Breeding with goats

In Cuba, there was a long-standing tradition of training goats (chivas) as mistresses to suckle young children. Eliza McHatton-Ripley fled with her family and two slaves from the American Civil War, and lived in Matanzas (Cuba) between 1865 and 1875 at the sugar mill "Desengaño". In his book From flag to flag (1869) writes: "Visiting a family in our neighbourhood, the baby cried; immediately a goat entered the room, lay down on the floor in a convenient position for the infant to obtain its food, and the baby seized the occasion as eagerly as it would have done from its own mother. The goat, having done its maternal duty, would carefully separate from the kid and disappear. A goat so well taught is held in high esteem, and passed from one family to another as a monthly nanny.

Goat's milk, although popularly considered to be more digestive than cow's milk, shares a great similarity with cow's milk in its composition, and is therefore not suitable for feeding infants under six months of age.

The donkey to feed infants

The milk of equidae, especially mare's and donkey's milk, is more similar in composition to that of women than that of cows or goats. It is very tolerable and easily digestible by the human infant, as it has a similar protein composition, although as it contains much less fat, it also has considerably fewer calories.

Donkeys were used in hospices and hospitals to feed abandoned and sick children, even making them suckle directly from the animal's udders, and the hawkers of fresh donkey milk were famous in the streets of European and American cities until the first half of the 20th century.

Due to lower milk production, fewer animals and less docile animals, the trade and the animal milk feed industry shifted towards cow's milk.

The triumphant cow of the 20th century

Despite the enormous differences in their composition, cows had a series of characteristics (docility, easy reproduction and enormous milk production) so that industry and chemistry in the second half of the 19th century worked together to achieve modifications of the milk that would bring its composition closer to that of a woman, so that it would be tolerable for the metabolism of the human infant.

Dilution to lower protein levels and the addition of sugar and fat to compensate for their dilution, together with Pasteur's advances in limiting bacterial growth, were key elements in a process which, due to factors such as pressure from an industry that was the embryo of thriving multinational baby food companies, led to one of the most important and successful infant feeding practices of the time, the scientifically driven, social movements for women's liberation, and the often self-interested collaboration of a medical class that was well aware of the increased mortality caused by this practice, the scientism of the time, the social movements for women's liberation and the often self-interested collaboration of a medical establishment that was well aware of the increased mortality caused by this feeding practice, led to one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century: the serious damage to the ancestral culture of breastfeeding.

The culture of breastfeeding has been in serious danger of extinction, with terrible consequences for the reproductive health of humanity, as the morbidity and mortality caused by commercial infant formula feeding far exceeds that of breastfeeding in both mothers and babies.