Was The Neolithic A Golden Age Of Goddess Worship?

As I understand it, archeologist Marija Gimbutas advanced a theory popular among feminists that in the Neolithic the predominant form of political organization was rule by women or at least relative gender equality, the religions emphasized nourishing female deities, and people were peaceable. Then came the male marauders, horse nomads worshiping their Alpha Male Sky God and took over. That may be an oversimplification, but it's how it came through to me. Gimbutas developed this theory for the Indo-Europeans or Kurgan culture as she called it, but recently I encountered a variant by De Meo who extends it to the Semites, as well, and relates it to climate change and desertification, causing competition for scarce resources. So my question is how true is this?

The theory can be, and has been, attacked on a number of fronts: (1) was there an invasion? Gimbutas' Kurgan theory seems to have the most support in explaining the dissemination of Indo-European languages, but there are alternatives, like the Anatolian expansion theory that the linguistic changes accompanied a natural, more gradual diffusion of agricultural developments from Anatolia. (2) was there a matriarchy? Camille Paglia says flatly: "Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time." (3) Did the development, if it occurred, result in more brutal, authoritarian deities and values, evidenced by such practices as genital mutilation? There seems to have been plenty of human sacrifice in the Neolithic, and the Great Mother with her pet lions seems to have been a tough cookie. (4) were the Indo-European deities that patriarchal? I'm struck by the prominence of a particular water goddess Danu in Indo-European religions from India to Ireland, who gave her name to the Danube, the Don River, the Danes, the Scythian word for water, etc.

Y'all feel free to jump in anytime. Don't hold back.

 

Looks like an interesting discussion. I'm marking it so I can come back later.

 

and.... There is not a shred of evidence for this viewpoint.

 

In fairness to Gimbutas, she doesn't say that there was, although some of her femminist fans must not have gotten the memo. Gimbutas prefers the terms "matristic" (not ruled by women but giving women a prominent role) and "gylanic" (relative gender equality). In the world today, the best example of a matriarchy (and that only after redefining the term) are the 4 million Minangkabau of Western Sumatra, Indonesia, who ironically are Muslim. Anthroplogoist P.R. Sanday,in her book Women at the Center of Life: Life in a Modern Matriarchy , argues that "the definitiaon of matriarchy or the control of political power by women should be abandoned in favor of a definition emphasizing the role of maternal symbols in the web of cultural significance." Other societies are matrifocal (the mother is the de facto boss who holds the family together, e.g., some Afro-Carribean societies), or "separate spheres" gender division where men and women hold power in different sectors, e.g., the Akkan in Ghana, where men have political power and women have economic power. All of these forms of gender relationships seem to be the subject of the theory that women in Neolithic times had more power and goddesses reigned at the top of Neolithic pantheons.

The notion that men and women tend to be relatively equal in primitive societies has scientific support https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
and it does appear that this holds for the Paleolithic.http://www.historyhaven.com/joomla2/index.php/8000-bce-to-600-ce?id=72
But during the Neolithic, things became more complicated even before the Indo-Eruopeans arrived. During the earlier Neolithic, agriculture improved the importance and position of women , when farming was done with digging sticks and hoes, since women took the lead in these areas. But after oxen and plows were introduced, around 4,000 B.C. E., men increasingly came to dominate agriculture, since large animals had to be controlled. It is possible that this process rather than the later incursion of Indo-Europeans, was the beginning of male domination. http://web.clark.edu/afisher/HIST251/prehistory%202.pdf[

 

And men were thought to be able to control large animals better than women? Why?

 

Tis difficult to pin down exactly in the Neolithic period in Eurasia, so much being erased by successor cultures.

Yet, during historical times, Neolithic cultures were contacted during the exploration of the Western Hemisphere. Explorers encountered matiriaical societies in native American communities. Communities where crop fields were owned in common. You were born into your mothers family. Housing and Clan membership was identified through the mother. These communities have solid historical documentation. Communiality seemed to go together with matriarchy. Private property with patriarchy.

 

I dunno. Never having controlled a large farm animal myself, I was just going by what I read. The animals we're talking about are mostly oxen. Although women are physically superior to men in various respects that contribute to their longevity, on average men seem to have greater muscle mass as a result of testosterone, and tend as a result to have greater upper body strength. http://www.steadyhealth.com/articles/difference-between-male-and-female-structures-mental-and-physical http://www.blisstree.com/2007/02/22/mental-health-well-being/5-physical-differences-between-women-and-men/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology

Ironically, if I were looking for ancient examples of women to refute what I just said, I'd bring up those MCP Indo-Europeans, some women of whom were prototypical amazons. Herodotus' reports on the legend of amazons were based on the examples of the Scythian and Sarmatian women. Many were given burials with full military honors in their battle outfits, with weapons. Their bodies showed signs of similar battle wounds as the men. But this challenges the stereotype of Indo-European patriarchy. On the other hand, the Indo-European graves of chiefs showed the practice of suttee, in which when the chief died, the wife was murdered and buried with him. There are no known instances of the husband being murdered to be buried with the wife.

 

There are a few things I disagree with Gimbutas on, but for the most part I think she was on the mark. Camille Paglia didn't do much research to back up her statement. There are plenty of mythical accounts around the world that suggest an older history where the women held the power, which was followed by a rise of the male. There are numerous Jungian psychologists who have demonstrated that it is a normal part of human development, reflecting how even the human mind goes through its earliest stages of individuation and development by first learning of the all powerful and seemingly omnipotent mother, and then later the power of the father.

My own research which makes up a major part of one of several books I am writing tracks the sacred feminine through language, and demonstrates that every culture went through a goddess phase considering that almost every language, in every language family, has retained a very ancient feminine root (k~n) which later, in the Middle East became (k~n~t). Every language family has a considerable amount of vocabulary built off of this root. For example, the English word, country, and the Japanese word, kuni, with the same meaning, are not directly related, but they are distantly related through the same root. The basic root, of course, refers to the female genitalia. But the fact that it has changed so little through a very long history, and is very universal demonstrates that it was a very significant word at many levels including at a mystical spiritual level. Most words devolve, change, or are simply replaced over the course of hundreds of a thousand years, and do not cross languages so easily.

Language also points to an older period----one of hunter-gatherers (as opposed to the goddess cults which evolved into and around the early planter cultures) when gender dominance was not an issue. Over the past 10 or 15 years, archeologists and anthropologists have come to understand that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, much like hunter-gatherers today, do not put the emphasis on gender that we thought they did. There was no cave man beating a cave woman over the head and dragging her back to his cave.

 

Evidence for a golden age of matristic or glyanic goddess worshipers is somewhat sparse and disputable: (1) the claim that in the stone age people didn't know that males had a role in making babies, thereby giving women the role of bringers of life--that based on anthropological studies by Jacquetta Hawkes, James Frazer, Margaret Meade, and Brontislaw Malinowski ; (2) the notion that ancestor worship was especially linked to women because the Chinese used women figurines to represent all human ancestry;(3) the prevalence of matrilineal (tracing descent through the mother) and matrilocal (residing with or near the mother's family) marriage pattern; and (4) the numerous sculptures and symbols of women found throughout Upper Paleolithic and Neolitihc sites. (Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman, pp. 9-14. As for the first claim, skeptics think the natives may have been pulling the anthropologists' legs. The second, the relationship between ancestor worship and female figurines doesn't necessarily extend beyond that area to serve as a general indicator of influence. The third, the prevalence of matrilineal and matrilocal marriage arrangements might be significant, but matrilineal descent is common to some very patriarchal people, e.g., Jews, and matrilocal arrangements often give authority to the wife's brother. The fourth point, the prevalence of female sculptures and symbols of women at Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic sites, this supplies the bulk of Gimbutas' evidence. Here she has been challenged by many of her colleagues for making highly subjective, impressionistic interpretations of the evidence. Virtually every figurine is a goddess, and various geometric shapes are somewhat arbitrarily interpreted as feminine:zigzag lines represent water,the life giving essence of femininity; v-shapes represent the pubic triangle, etc. She even thinks that bulls are feminine, because (oddly) they resemble uteruses--a highly quirky idea. Her colleagues think that some of these figurines may be dolls, while others are examples of Stone Age porn.

But in fairness to her, I think that some of her colleagues have over-reacted to her theory bu rejecting all suggestion that any figurines have religious significance.Mellart identified the figurine below from Catall Huyuk, in Anatolia, at the dawn of the Neolithic, as a goddess. It's a sculpture of a woman seated on a throne between two lions. His colleagues, reeling from the flack generated by the Gimbutas controversy, said it's just a figurine of a woman. But it happens to bear a resemblance to subsequent representations of Cybelle, the Great Mother, who also originated from Anatolia was worshipped in Phrygia and invited to Rome by the Senate for help in its second Punic War. She's taken off weight, but I think the Goddess is still recognizable in both images. Pets have grown up.

 

Right.

Neolithic man and woman were only separated in height by a few inches. I'm sure they were each physically fit enough to drive ox and plow.

 

Besides height, muscle mass and upper body strength should be taken into account. And even if they were fit enough, it might have been a question of relative efficiency, leading to gender role division. Iversen and Rosenbluth (2010) think that agricultural intensification created a premium on male brawn in plowing and other heavy farm work which led to a division of labor within the family in which men used their physical strenght for food production and women took care of food processing, child rearing and other famiily-related duties leading to male dominance. Burton and White (1984) think that agricultural intensification is responsible for the shift in gender roles regardless of the plow. All I know is what I read.

 

That's interesting.

 

Sounds like interesting research. You mention Jung. He had some of the same problems Gimbutas did--being a little too intuitive with his data to satisfy "his left-brained" colleagues, who were probably all Indo-European, patriarchal assholes. I think there may be some truth to her theory, but there are things about it that make me cautious. First of all, she draws on some of the same data the Nazis did in their myth of the Aryan race, except this time the "blonde beasts" are the bad guys and their original homeland was Russia and the Ukraine instead of Germany. Second, she suggests a "stage" model of human development reminiscent of a very similar theory by the nineteenth century Swiss anthropologist Jakob Bachofen (Myth, Relgiion and Mother Right) who posited that cultural evolution went through a matriarcal stage with a related goddess religion or "Urreligion". His theory was criticized for accepting a "ladder" model of evolution in which matriarchy was only a "stage" that we went through on the way to patriarchy. Gimbutas put his theory together with the Aryan model and came up with an explanation for patriarchy that views it as a usurpation instead of a natural step in evolution. It's appealing to femminists to think that the world was doing fine under matristic and gylanic rule until the patriarchal barbarian Indo-Europeans came along and upset it all. Third, because her archaelogical research centered on the Indo-Europeans, her admirers like Merlin Stone have assumed that they are the ultimate culprits, instead of a broader theory that would also include Semites. In this regard, I think the theories of De Meo, Eisler, and Myss that view the bad guys as products of bad environments (literally) the steppes of Eurasia and the deserts of Arabia, where they came to develop harsh religions and values to fit the harsh conditions and then took them on the road to more fertile lands.This would account for the Jewish patriarchs, who were certainly patriarchal but certainly not Aryans (oi veigh!)
(4) it emphasizes extrinsic causes for the changes (invasions) instead of possible intrinsic causes (e.g., technological or economic developments.) So there may be truth to the theory, but it probably needs refinement.

 

The scholars may be speaking from their asses, but which scholars and which asses. You may think as I do that the Paleolithic "venuses" have religious significance, but the current trend among archeologists is to hold back on such interpretations and entertain the possibility that they're just Stone Age porn. I recently got into an argument with an atheist who was claiming that there was no religion at all in the Paleolithic or Neolithic because all of these figurines can be dismissed. I think that's also a dubious position, for reasons I alluded to in post #9.

 

Because we haven't cracked the Harrapan language, we can only make inferences from artifacts. There are certainly indications that the society was well-governed, but to say it was a democracy is sheer conjecture.

 

Willendorf.

 

I am busy working on something and don't have time to respond the way I'd like to yet. But you are touching upon some things that I also have trouble with Gimbutas on. I do think the theory needs refinement.

I do see the Indo-European invaders as something like the Huns coming into Europe and dropping into the Indian subcontinent. They were a product of their environment in that they came from around the Caspian Sea and it was a land rich in iron. But there were also groups in the Middle East that did the same thing.

I define religion in the sense that it is an institution with an institutional hierarchy. Therefore I argue that religion began along with other institutions in the planter cultures. In fact I would say the Goddess cults were the earliest stages of religion. Before that, you had a spirituality rather than a religion. The Lakota who lived a somewhat hunter-gatherer lifestyle have a spirituality. In the SouthWest where you have communities growing out of pueblos, and the focus becomes more of a planter culture, you have the individual oriented spirituality growing into a pseudo-religion. If white man had not come, I am sure you would have had the development of religion. In the Mayan and Incan cultures you had the rise of religion.

Religions are bastardizations of the original spirituality, and the further they evolve---for example, Christianity, from its Judaic source, from the older Goddess cults, from the archaic hunter-gatherer roots, the more bastardized and alienated it becomes from the original spirituality.

You started out with amazing and powerful ecstatic experiences, and by the time you get to Jesus, and the Protestant Reformation you have the Tree of Life brought completely into the mundane.

I do believe that these older fetishes and icons were spiritual in nature. In a hunter-gatherer setting there is no concept of secular and non-secular, so even if they were 'porn' in nature, they were still spiritual.

But you don't find a dualistic view of reality until people start planting and developing a strong group ethic. Therefore I belief these older icons were still used in a more natural multiplistic view of reality. The mother is very powerful in every indigenous culture, but she is only a part of a greater spiritual complex that in a more absolute sense can be largely undefined, but that embodies all the oiwers of nature.

 

I agree.

 

This is a topic about which I know very little, but how about neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge? It seems highly likely they had some religious significance. Maybe not much to do with goddess worship, but nonetheless significant and suggestive of some kind of ceremonial function.

 

What does the venus of Wittendorf and other feminine icons say with certainty about the place of women in that society and how they lived? They're regarded as fertility symbols most of the time, often portraying a goddess.