The very name “primates” betrays our self-centered view of the world. The order of primates is the first, the prime order, because we are in it.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Problems with Archeological Interpretations

Problems with Archeological Interpretations

It seesm the Mother was the goddess of the megalith builders from Malta to Scotland. Megalithic sepulchres were built as wombs with a long vaginal access tunnel because the dead were to be reborn. But the goddess had also long been associated with the serpent, as a symbol of life and death from its phallic shape and its habit of slinking in the grass, in rocks and cavities of the earth. The snake's ability to slough off its skin also impressed the ancients who believed that by so doing it was being resurrected.

Later idols of a presumed Mother Goddess are found in the agricultural valleys of the first civilisations. The veneration of the goddess extends into the earliest historic societies as a goddess centred religion but a goddess in many forms.

In about 3000 BC in Sumeria was a goddess called Nin-Khursag, She who gives Life to the Dead, or Nintu, the life-giver, the Mother of All and Queen of the Gods, also called Inanna.
In Babylon the same goddess was Ishtar, simply known as The Goddess,
in Syria, Ashteroth or Astarte,
in Canaan she was Asherah,
in Phoenicia she was Anath,
in Egypt and Libya, Neith, then Isis, Queen of heaven,
in central Asia Minor, she was Cybele, the Great Mother of All Nature,
in Aegean Asia Minor she was Artemis, Lady of the Moon, known to the Romans as Diana,
in Greece she was Ge or Gaia, the Mother of All Things, and Rhea and Aphrodite or Venus who rose from the sea and was identified with Astarte, the Syrian goddess, and many other names.

The trouble is Gimbutas heavily overeggs the pudding in making her case. There is sufficient sound evidence to support the general idea that goddess religion was widespread in neolithic times but Gimbutas reads into sites and findings speculations that few could support. Among her dubious practices are:

drawing conclusions with insufficient or even no evidence;
arguing back from her theory to the meaning of artefacts, thus easing everything into the hypothesis;
assigning religious significance to almost anything, and even to many abstract designs;
declaring figurines from different sites to be similar when few others agree;
using vague qualifiers like “probably” and “may be” to suggest links that she then takes to be assured.

Such faults are used against her conclusions, so that the idea of a single cult devoted to a single goddess all the way from Anatolia to Ireland, and continuing backwards and forwards in time until destroyed by the Indo-Europeans is left open to question. The fact that biblical scholars like Albright and Gray have been forced through lack of evidence of the history of the Hebrews from Moses to the Exile to use the same qualifying adverbs is considered quite acceptable because it suits God's vast army of bullshitters!

Now that Gimbutas has drawn a treasure map of the territory but with many false “Xs” marked on it, a much more hard nosed attitude must be taken to establish with sureness whatever can be. It is not necessary to prove the myth of matriarchy as the historical truth. Evidence that women were respected for their own worth and were also worshipped for it is sufficient to prove the modern inclination of society to be wrong.

Barstow says that at Çatal Hütük women had a status that enabled them “not necessarily to control the society but to express their own values and experiences in it.” She describes her thoughts on seeing the shrine at Çatal Hütük:

The goddess figure above the rows of breasts and bulls’ horns, her legs stretched wide, giving birth, was a symbol of life and creativity such as I had not seen in the Western church. But fertility symbols are no longer a sufficient image for twentieth century women.

She goes on to say we cannot go back to the ancient goddess cults but nor can we ignore these alternatives to the images of Western religions for women today who struggle to find satisfaction in the patriarchal religions however revamped they might get.

In any case, a myth cannot be wrong if it is recognised as a myth. The myth of the universal matriarchal society differs not a whit from the myth of the kingdom of David or the court of King Arthur. It offers an alternative—here an alternative to patriarchy, and the dream that it could be realised.

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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