Weight: 15% of your final grade
Length: minimum of one page (250 words) for each of the three questions
Due: After Unit 2
Assignment 1: Telephone Review (PDF)
Instructions
This oral review, completed by telephone, gives you and your tutor an opportunity to get to know each other, and for you to ask questions about the course and upcoming assignments.
To prepare for the review, read the assigned chapters and articles for Units 1 and 2, and prepare answers to the three review questions below.
It is recommended that you email your tutor in advance to set up an appointment for the telephone review. You should set aside about 30 minutes for the review. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and clarify anything prior to offering your answers. You will also have a chance to discuss the answers and to clarify any misunderstandings that you may have. The conversation can be relaxed and easygoing. There will be ample opportunity for you to demonstrate competency in this review. It is recommended that you make detailed notes of the points you wish to cover in your three answers, including your own views, and some quotes (with page numbers) from the Baring and Cashford textbook and course Study Guide.
If there are extenuating circumstances that make it difficult for you to call your tutor, you may be permitted to send your review answers by email. Please consult with your tutor before using email as an alternative review format.
The Telephone Review must be completed before you submit any written assignments.
Answer the following three questions for your telephone review.
Readings
The Feminine Principle
Required Viewing
Watch Goddess Remembered, produced by Studio D, National Film Board of Canada (Montreal: National Film Board, 1989).
The haunting, evocative music of this film was composed by Loreena McKennitt. This film will transport you to some of the sites we will learn about: Malta, Silbury Hill, Stonehenge. The film will also show you some Upper Paleolithic Goddess sculptures, which will help increase your appreciation of the black-and-white photos in your textbook. Students report that watching this film brings the course alive for them.
As you watch this film, note the themes listed below.
The preface to the textbook by Baring and Cashford highlights several of the central themes of this course.
First, Baring and Cashford note that the modern age is bereft of a goddess. Unlike earlier cultures, no goddess plays a significant role in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The closest figure to a true goddess is the Virgin Mary, and she is influential only within one form of a single religion. But they also suggest that because Goddess is integral to human consciousness, She cannot really be destroyed but only driven underground or transformed into new and unfamiliar disguises.
In earlier Judaism, for example, Goddess was transmuted into the dragons of Leviathan and Behemoth, or into Yahweh’s “presence” (the Shekhinah), or into the personification of his wisdom (Sophia). Baring and Cashford suggest that in the modern age, one place Goddess is re-emerging is in modern science, specifically in the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg, in which the natural world is understood as a unity that can be expressed only in patterns of relationships that include the human observer. In this example, Goddess no longer appears as an individual being but as an interrelated web of relationships.
Second, from Babylonian times onward, there has been a gradual identification of Goddess with the natural world—with matter—while the god was free to become pure spirit (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. xii). This distinction widened into opposition that led to centuries of attempts to control and subdue the natural world of lifeless matter. Baring and Cashford note that the split between spirit and nature made possible other dichotomies: mind and matter, soul and body, thinking and feeling, intellect and intuition, and reason and instinct. And so, we have the “masculine”—spirit, thought, reason—exalted in patriarchal culture while “feminine” matter—body, intuition, and instincts—are disparaged.
The Power of Stories
The stories we tell about our lives, the narratives we construct about who we are, shape our lives in profound ways. The larger-than-life stories that we call mythologies give meaning to our lives and answer the big questions addressed by many religions: Who are we? How should we live? What are our relationships with each other? What is our relationship with Earth? What is our place in the universe? All religions include these kinds of stories and mythologies. “Myth-making and storytelling are as ancient and vital as humanity itself . . . [this] is how we express ourselves as humans, how we form our stories and gain self-understanding (Wilshire, 1994, p. 1). In the words of Indigenous storyteller Thomas King: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2003, p. 2).[1]
Myths are not literal statements of truth; they are special kinds of stories whose truths come in the form of metaphor, parables, and images to guide us to the deeper meanings of our lives, “to put us in touch with enduring truths about ourselves” (Wilshire, 1994, pp. 3–4). If we want to challenge the dominant patriarchal world view in Western cultures, we have to change the “mythos” that portrays men as dominant and women as “the Other” (Wilshire, 1994, p. 2). Carol Christ warns us that “symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced” with a new symbol system (cited in Wilshire, 1994, p. 2). In this course, we look to Goddess mythology for a new mythos, a new story, which is also the ancient story of Goddess.
Jungian psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of Goddesses in Every Woman, emphasizes the significance of goddess archetypes in our lives, the powerful inner patterns that shape our stories. “Everywoman has the leading role in her own unfolding life story . . . and I realize that there are mythic dimensions in every one.” (Bolen, 2004, p. 1). As we study goddess myths and stories, we learn about the goddesses within, the divine feminine qualities that we can access to shape our lives.
According to C. G. Jung, archetypes are psychological patterns that are universal in all people, times, and places. Depth Psychologist Carol Pearson explains that linking your own story to an archetypal story “is a way we can connect with patterns that are universal in human consciousness” (Pearson, 2016, p. 24). These archetypal stories are deeper than culture, but their expressions and narratives often reflect specific cultures and subcultures (Pearson, 2016, p. 33). The Goddess myths and mythologies presented in this course refer to “expressions of archetypal stories in particular times and places” (Pearson, 2016, p. 43).
We live in a dominant culture that separates the feminine and masculine principles and devalues those qualities associated with the feminine. As we question these gender binaries, we can envision a world where there is a greater balance of the feminine and masculine principles in all people. In conceptualizing Goddess, we create space for reclaiming stories that value women, women’s bodies, and qualities associated with the divine feminine. These stories are important for all people.
Required Reading
Wilshire, D. (1994). Introduction. In Virgin, Mother, Crone: Myths & Mysteries
of the Triple Goddess (pp. 19–27). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International.
By studying Goddess Mythology, we reclaim our stories of the divine feminine. The Mother Goddess inspires “a perception of the universe as an organic, alive and sacred whole” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. xi). The divine Goddess is immanent in creation; She is all of creation and all of creation is sacred. This contrasts with stories of the patriarchal sky God who is transcendent, separate from the world He created.
In The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King (2003) uses humour to subvert the dominant Eurocentric stories about Creation. He contrasts two very different stories, “The Woman Who Fell From The Sky,” a Native creation story, with the Christian creation story. He explains: “the elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies . . . while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations . . .” (pp. 24–25). Here we have two different stories and two different worlds: the Christian creation story of war, duality, individualism, and competition, which has come to shape Western culture; and the Native creation story, which values harmony, sharing, balance, and cooperation (pp. 24–26). You might recognize that the Native story reflects values that are very similar to the Goddess mythologies discussed in this course. We invite you to read King’s story about creation stories and to reflect on your own understandings.
Required Reading
King, T. (2003). “You’ll never believe what happened” is always a great place to start. In The truth about stories: A Native narrative (pp. 1–29). Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
This reading is also available in audio format.
Why Study Goddess Mythology?
There are many reasons for studying our earliest spiritual heritage: those cited below are only a few of them.
Studying goddess mythology is a means to recover an important part of our spiritual heritage as women. Goddesses, their rituals, and their images have been nearly erased from culture by the same patriarchal forces that obliterated the achievements of so very many individual women. In studying goddess mythology, we can breathe new life into their still forms. By re-animating them, we begin to recover part of our own cultural, spiritual, and psychological heritage. There is mounting evidence that there were millennia when the central role in humanity’s experience of the sacred was played by Goddess, later by individual goddesses and their male consorts, still later by goddesses and gods, and only then by a dominant God.
Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers. Even people who no longer “believe in God” or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the symbolism of God the Father. A symbol’s effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational. (Christ, 1991, p. 291)
Goddess mythology is thus a way to set the record straight, to restore a lost balance, to recover a lost sense of wholeness and meaning. So imagine this course as a genealogical quest. Imagine that you know all your relations on your father’s side back to the earliest of recorded times, but that you know, at most, your mother’s and maybe her mother’s name. Without a knowledge of goddess mythology, this is the situation in which every modern woman finds herself.
Goddess mythology can help inspire political action to save an endangered Earth. We are constantly bombarded by articles on familiar dangers, such as air and water pollution, human overpopulation, pesticides and herbicides, loss of precious natural resources, declining biodiversity, and increased rates of extinction of plant and animal species, to say nothing of new concerns, such as food irradiation.[2] No easy, quick solutions exist when almost every ecosystem on Earth is in peril. Action is needed, but action inspired by a new paradigm.
One such paradigm is ecofeminism, which sees critical links between the domination of Earth and the exploitation of women.[3] Some ecofeminists turn to traditional religions for inspiration. Others, particularly cultural ecofeminists, find it in goddess mythology, for Goddess was experienced through creation and as creation, not as separate from it like a transcendent God.
The Grail of the Feminine is urging us to open our minds to a new vision of reality, a revelation of all cosmic life as a divine unity. For those awakened to this vision, to be born a human being is not to be born into a fallen, flawed world of sin and illusion, cut off from the divine; it is to be born into a world lit by an invisible radiance, ensouled by Divine Presence, graced and sustained by incandescent light and love (Harvey & Baring, 1996, p. 7).
Goddess mythology can help provide us with images for the range of possible relationships between women and men, relationships based on varying degrees of equality or dominance. Such relationships, as you will see, are greatly influenced by whether the sacred is experienced as Goddess, a pantheon of goddesses and gods, or a God; and by how the divinity or divinities are worshipped.
Goddess mythology can help us understand the origins of patriarchy, since the rise of patriarchy was at the same time, the decline of Goddess. Today, reclaiming the stories and symbols of Goddess is one way to begin to dismantle the structures of patriarchy. Translating Goddess-centred stories and symbols into political action accelerates the process.
Goddess mythology provides us with images of female power and strength as well as mythic role models. In patriarchal culture, women, especially feminists, who try to claim their power as women may feel pulled in two opposite directions. Flinders (1998) outlines the dilemma:
On the one hand, one feels moved as a feminist to celebrate the beauties and strengths of women’s culture, so long and grievously ignored, and to identify oneself as woman and with other women. On the other hand, most of us have also felt—again, as feminists—another kind of need as well: this one can pull us sharply away from other women, or at least from being “woman identified,” because women have been so relentlessly defined—as nurturant, patient, and compassionate, for example—that we simply aren’t taken seriously by a male-centered culture that reveres boldness, individual achievement, and the ability to subordinate others. (p. 41)
In Western culture, power and strength are too often assumed to be only masculine attributes, while the feminine is too often associated with qualities such as receptivity, even passivity. The result is that women’s heritage of feminine power embodied in figures such as Lilith, the Crone, Amazons, and witches has been lost. Studying goddess mythology is a way to reclaim these and other images of feminine power wisely used. Thus, goddess mythology can be a way to discover and claim our own power as women. Wittig expresses this imperative beautifully:
There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . you say there are no words to describe it, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. (Wittig, as cited in Christ, 1991, p. 293)[4]
Goddess mythology is a way of reclaiming and celebrating the bonds of love and friendship between women, especially the fundamental bond of mother and daughter. “Christianity celebrates the father’s relation to the son and the mother’s relation to the son, but the story of mother and daughter is missing” (Christ, 1991, p. 300). The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone is really the only major surviving mother-daughter myth from any Western culture, and it exerts no real influence in the modern world. In Greek culture, however, it was the basis for two prominent festivals, first the Thesmophoria and later the Eleusian Mysteries, both of which were open to women only.
Goddess mythology offers us empowering inspiring ways of experiencing ourselves that are markedly different from patriarchal interpretations of what it means to be a woman. Studying goddess mythology can revolutionize the way women feel about themselves: it is a mirror in which we can look and find ourselves beautiful.
Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.
Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth. Having a moon in her mouth kept her laughing. Whenever her mother tried to pull the moss off her head, or clip the roses round her thighs, Indigo was laughing. . . .
“Mama, if you pull ’em off, they’ll just grow back. It’s my blood. I’ve got earth blood . . . and the sea.” (Shange, as cited in Flinders, 1998, pp. 148–149)
Goddess mythology shows us that it is a blessing to have been born a woman, even in a patriarchal culture. As we awaken to this, there is an obligation to begin to push back the darkness that has shrouded so much of our spiritual heritage as women.
How do we change? First, we take back, over and over again, the sacredness of our Woman selves: our bodies; our sexualities; our birth-giving, creation-making beings. Then we retrieve from misuse and abuse all the concepts the patriarchy relates to our femaleness: body, blood, under, deep, color, dark, below, wetness, depth, intuition, divination (Edwards, 1991, p. 5).
The Body and Its Processes
As women, our identity is shaped by a number of factors, including both our own and our culture’s interpretation of our body and its processes. In this section, we discuss menstruation. Unless you have taken the Athabasca University course Issues in Women’s Health, it is probably not a subject you have covered in any of your courses. You may never have considered that menstruation might have any academic significance; it is not even mentioned much in daily life. But menstruation is a regular occurrence for half the human race, and was, for centuries, defined as a crippling disability, a reason for the exclusion of women from the public sphere. Finally, it demonstrates just how deeply, even radically, goddess mythology can re-vision our experience of our bodies and our culture.
What is menstruation like for Western women now? In 1900, the President of the American Gynecology Society summarized the ways in which women were perceived to be almost lifelong victims of their biological processes:
a young life is battered and forever crippled on the breakers of puberty; if it crosses these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and lastly upon the final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the reach of sexual storms. (As cited in Ehrenreich & English, 1978, p. 110).
Has much changed in the century since these words were written? Menstruation is still frequently experienced as a curse; menopause is still a time of great physical and psychological travail for some women and a major inconvenience for others. With respect to menopause, the primary difference between the early twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries is that the economics of menopause has been fully appreciated by the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies, which now make millions of dollars “protecting” women from its supposed ravages. Would women experience menstruation and menopause differently if they lived in a culture that celebrated the divine feminine?[5]
The only thing more natural for a woman than to cease menstruating is for her to start menstruating. Was there a time when menstruation was not considered a curse? During the first part of this course, we will cover examples of cultures in which menstrual blood was considered a blessing, even a source of power. Then, as we examine the shift over millennia from Goddess to God, we will see a decline, even a disparagement of the natural processes of a woman’s body. Simply put, when the central divinity is female, processes such as menstruation and childbirth are sacred, powerful experiences, and those who experience them, whether women or Goddess, are honoured. However, these most natural of processes often fall under the severest taboos when the central divinity is male.
What follows is an account that relates women, nature, and culture, and is based on archaeological evidence, etymology, and anthropology. There is no way to confirm it, as it is a patchwork quilt pieced together from many sources. There is also no way to refute it. Of what value is an account of woman, nature, and culture that can neither be confirmed nor refuted? It can show how radically different the world and its history might be, relative to the way we have always been taught. It is also important to remember that there is no way to confirm or refute the standard patriarchal story of our origins either.
Three types of carved stones, bones, and sticks are central to this story of menstruation and Upper Paleolithic life. The earliest engraved stones and tools that archaeologists have discovered date from the Neanderthal period, approximately 300,000 BCE (Marshack, 1991, p. 135; Thompson, 1981, p. 118). Engraved Cro-Magnon stones and bones dating back to 30,000 BCE show a complex series of notches and scratches; and another and far later type of carved tool is the Aboriginal calendar stick (Marshack, 1991, pp. 43–56).
Alexander Marshack, an American archaeologist, was the first to suggest that these types of carved forms were in fact different generations of lunar calendars.[6] Lunar calendars are thought to have marked the phases of the moon, the lunar months, times of rituals, women’s menstrual cycles, and also when a baby was a due, as pregnancy lasts ten lunar months (Marshack, 1991, pp. 336–337).
The relationship between the moon, menstruation, birth, and lunar calendars is not limited to prehistory. Various examples of lunar calendars exist, among them the historic Greco-Roman calendars, calendar rune sticks of the Scandinavians, the English Clogg almanac, the Yakut calendar from Siberia, and certain American aboriginal record sticks. (Marshack, 1991, p. 218)
The significance of these lunar calendar sticks is that our human ancestors observed and recorded a relationship between an internal process and a cyclical external event. This observation was the basis for the lunar calendar stick, which may have been the first model of nature.
Thus, evidence from archaeology and anthropology suggests that the origins of all measurement and mathematics, notation or writing, and scientific observation began with women, living as long ago as 300,000 to 50,000 BCE, who observed that their menstrual bleeding had a regular pattern, similar to the shifting but regular phases of the moon. The human being who created the first model of the world may have been a menstruating woman:
The implications of this association of women and the moon would suggest that women were the first observers of the basic periodicity of nature, the periodicity upon which all later scientific observations were made. Woman was the first to note a correspondence between an internal process she was going through and an external process in nature. . . . [The] origins of notation, measurement, and the kind of science which reaches its consummation in the megalithic astronomy of Stonehenge are with women, not men. Such a hypothesis would unsettle the whole of masculine narratives of progress and power from the archaic darkness of myth and superstition to the modern light of technology and industry. (Thompson, 1981, p. 97)
Menstruation and its relationship to the moon may even have shaped the experience of the sacred by our Upper Paleolithic ancestors. As Thompson notes,
the vulva is the magical wound that bleeds and heals itself every month, and because it bleeds in sympathy with the dark of the moon, the vulva is an expression not of physiology but of cosmology. The moon dies and is reborn; woman bleeds but does not die, and when she does not bleed for ten lunar months, she brings forth new life. It is easy to see how Paleolithic man would be in awe of woman, and how woman’s mysteries would be at the base of a religious cosmology. (Thompson, 1981, p. 109)
In fact, menstruation may have been the inspiration for some of humanity’s (women’s) earliest cultural achievements, as this etymological evidence suggests:
[The] Sanskrit matra like the Greek meter, meant both “mother” and “measurement.” Mathematics is, by derivation, “mother-wisdom.” Root words for motherhood produced many words for calculation: metric, mensuration, mete, mens, mark, mentality, geo-metry, trigono-metry, hydro-metry, etc. (Walker, 1983, p. 685)
In Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic times, mathematics would have had many applications, some of which might even have increased its practitioners’ chances for survival. For example, mathematics could have been used to estimate how much stored food would be required to maintain a certain number of people during the winter months or lean agricultural harvests. (Sjoo & Mor, 1987, p. 147)
If this account is correct, menstruating women may have been the first mathematicians and scientists, although you will probably never find this thesis in any book or course on the philosophy of science. Yet this connection between women and mathematics is even embedded in our language. Making this connection explicit is imperative if we are to acknowledge the role that women have played and can play in culture, and at the same time, correct a distorted view of culture that tells us that noteworthy achievements are men’s achievements.
When women’s role in culture is distorted or lost, women are denied the inspiration and role models that can help them claim their rightful place in the modern world. How many young women today pursue careers in science and mathematics? How many girls and women dislike, even fear academic courses that teach this wisdom of our Mothers? How many professional educators debate whether women are less competent in mathematics by virtue of their gender, or are simply socialized into believing themselves so? Mathematics is one of our birthrights as women, daughters of Goddess.
Reflections of Goddess in Women’s Lives
As we remember the Goddess mythologies and reclaim our power as women, we recover our identities and recognize our strength, beauty, and sacredness. In A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, Kim Anderson explores the “physical, spiritual, and emotional remembering” that links Native women “back to our ancestors and to a time when Native women were uniformly honoured and respected” (Anderson, 2016, xxv). Anderson explains the importance of balance in gender relations in her “vision of a society where every member has a place, a sense of value, a gift to bring” (2016, p. xxiii).
Anderson’s research, based on interviews with 40 Native women across Canada, provides an excellent model for connecting past, present, and future. How can we bring forward the wisdom and teachings of the women who have come before us? How do we understand the Goddess stories in ways that guide us to a future that empowers women, challenges patriarchal power, and respects all life? How do we see ourselves reflected in the divine feminine in all the complexity and diversity of our life stories?
Sample Intersectionality Wheel. Learning Network. (2014). Sexual Violence Awareness. Learning Network Issue 9. London, Ontario: Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children. Available at:
http://www.vawlearningnetwork.ca/sites/vawlearningnetwork.ca/files/LN_Newsletter_Issue_9_2014_e_version_1.pdf.
(Reproduced with permission)
Intersectional Feminist Frameworks (IFFs) provide us with principles for understanding the complexity of women’s lives. Women’s movements and movements for social and environmental justice are increasingly diverse, speaking with many voices and identities, representing many locations and perspectives (Morris & Bunjun, 2007, p. 1). As students in this course who come from diverse backgrounds and stories, you bring multiple understandings of spirituality and gender. We invite you to incorporate intersectional feminist perspectives into your understanding of Goddess mythology, as it relates to your own life stories and identities, your understandings of the Goddess archetypes, and your connection with images of the divine feminine. We will continue this theme in Unit 6, when we explore the sacred feminine in European, Indigenous, and global goddess traditions. And, we will return to our discussion of Intersectional feminist analysis in Unit 7, when we consider intersectionality as it applies to ecofeminism.
Required Reading
Morris, M., & Bunjun, B. (2007). Part 1: Understanding women’s lives. In Using intersectional feminist frameworks in research: A resource for embracing the complexities of women’s lives (pp. 1–10). Ottawa, ON: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women.
In our discussion of women’s lives, it’s important to remember that the goddess was originally androgynous. Baring and Cashford (1993) note: Goddess “was both female and male in the metaphorical sense that she was both the womb and the generative force that seeded new forms of life within it, which she brought forth as the universe” (p. 284). Feminine and masculine “refer to a way of being or a mode of consciousness, available to both men and women” (p. 284). With the rise of patriarchal religions in the Iron Age (discussed in Unit 3), feminine and masculine became fixed and absolute dualities, with the devaluation of all those qualities associated with women. Nature was emptied of spirit, no longer the sacred body of the Great Mother, and spirit became symbolized by the Sky Father separate from nature. Baring and Cashford point out that these binary values of gender, which originated more than 4,000 years ago, are so deeply engrained in the dominant patriarchal cultures that they “are only recently being challenged on a wide scale” (p. 285). As we continue on our journey with Goddess, you are invited to continue questioning gender binaries and to envision a culture where femininity and masculinity are both valued and respected.
References and Supplementary Materials
Anderson, K. (2016). A recognition of being: Reconstructing Native womanhood (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON: Woman’s Press.
Ann, M., & Meyers, D. I. (1993). Goddesses in world mythology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Baring, A., & Cashford, J. (1993). The myth of the goddess: Evolution of an image. London, UK: Penguin.
Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in everywoman (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Christ, C. P. (1991). Why women need the Goddess: Phenomenological, psychological, and political reflections. In S. Gunew (Ed.), A reader in feminist knowledge (pp. 290–302). London, UK: Routledge.
Conway, D. J. (1995). Maiden, mother, crone. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.
Dexter, M. R. (1990). Whence the goddesses: A source book. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Downing, C. (1984). The goddess: Mythological images of the feminine. New York, NY: Crossroad.
Edwards, C. M. (1991). The storyteller’s goddess: Tales of the goddess and her wisdom from around the world. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Ehrenreich, B., & English, D. (1978). For her own good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to women. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Flinders, C. L. (1998). At the root of this longing: Reconciling a spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins.
Grahn, J. (1992). Blood, bread, and roses: How menstruation created the world. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Harvey, A., & Baring, A. (1996). The divine feminine: Exploring the feminine face of God throughout the world. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press.
Husain, S. (1997). The goddess: Creation, fertility and abundance: Myths and archetypes. London, UK: Duncan Baird.
Husain, S. (2000). The goddess: Power, sexuality and the feminine divine. London, UK: Duncan Baird.
King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A Native narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
Marshack, A. (1991). The roots of civilization: The cognitive beginnings of man’s first art, symbol, and notation. Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell.
Morris, M., & Bunjun (2006). Using intersectional feminist frameworks. Ottawa, ON: CRIAW. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302283410_Using_Intersectional_Feminist_Frameworks_in_Research_A
_resource_for_embracing_the_complexities_of_women%27s_lives
Pearson, C. S. (2016). Persephone rising: Awakening the heroine within. New York, NY: Harper Elixir.
Shuttle, P., & Redgrove, P. (1978). The wise wound: Eve’s curse and everywoman. New York, NY: Richard Marek.
Sjoo, M., & Mor, B. (1987). The great cosmic mother: Rediscovering the religion of the Earth. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Stone, M. (1976). When God was a woman. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Stone, M. (1990). Ancient mirrors of womanhood. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Thompson, W. I. (1981). The time falling bodies take to light: Mythology, sexuality, and the origins of culture. New York, NY: St. Martin’s.
Walker, B. (1983). The woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Wilshire, D. (1994). Virgin, mother, crone: Myths & mysteries of the triple goddess. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Woolger, J. B., & Roger, J. (1987). The goddess within. New York, NY: Ballantine.
Younging, G. (2018). Elements of Indigenous style: A guide for writing by and about Indigenous Peoples. Edmonton, AB: Brush Education Inc.
Unit 2 Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic Goddess Mythology
In Unit 2, we begin our historical consideration of Goddess, starting, in Part 1, with the earliest interpretations of the divine, in wood, bone, and stone. The evidence we have from this period is archaeological, and we have cause to be thankful for its durability. In Part 2, we consider the religions of the Neolithic, the era in which people discovered agriculture and some of its companion arts, including weaving and ceramics. From this age, we have received not only knowledge and physical artifacts, but stories and myths, some of which provide interesting suggestions about the origins of the skills characteristic of the era.
In some respects, this unit can be considered the most important one of the course. First, the Upper Paleolithic is usually depicted in goddess mythology as a time of unity, peace, and belonging, a time when humans were at home with others, with animals, and with Earth, the Mother of all. It is important to know that these early people may have lived in greater peace and harmony than their descendants. It is important to know that before there was a God, there was a Goddess, for names (and their gender) confer identity, status, and possibility. Knowing who we are and where we began, we can begin to change our interpretation of everything that follows. Which brings me to the next point.
The material in this unit is also important because it informs both the personal spirituality and political activism of many modern women. Modern women who look to Goddess for inspiration in their personal-spiritual-political lives turn around full circle to embrace the Great Mother Goddess of the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. We can spend our lives celebrating the blessing that we were born women, we can treat each other and Earth as sacred, and our Goddess-worshipping ancestors can show us how.
Finally, this material is crucial because it sets the stage for all the other units in the course. The Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods are usually depicted in goddess mythology as the spiritual “golden age” of humanity, when women were honoured and respected because they were women. (Do not just read this sentence and pass on. This concept is a radical one: in our patriarchal culture, we have been socialized to see ourselves as subordinate and inferior because we are women.)
Beginning in Unit 3, we will see the rise of patriarchy and the fall of women and Goddess in culture after culture. Therefore, it is crucial that you have a full understanding of the material in this unit before you move on: it puts into context the “legacy of loss” that characterizes so much of human history as it has been experienced by women. In subsequent units, we will ask you to compare the images and worship of the goddesses discussed with those of the Great Goddess of the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic times, and to identify what has been gained and what has been lost. In most cases, the losses outnumber gains. We return to this “pre-his-storic” material in Unit 7, where we look at the ways goddess mythology is informing the spirituality of individual women and the political activism ecofeminism.
Part 1: The Upper Paleolithic Mother Goddess
Evocative paintings of animals on the granite walls of caves nestled deep within the body of Earth. Bear skulls piled in hollows within Alpine caves over 7000 feet above sea level. Mysterious symbols carved on polished bones, ivory, and pieces of coal. The skeleton of a four-year-old child, dabbed with red ochre, adorned with carved mammoth jewellery, facing east toward the rising sun. Carvings of female figures, full and fertile, but looking like no woman who ever lived. Female figures emerging from the walls of caves, rough-hewn forms in living rock. Stalactites painted with red and black dots that transform them into the breasts of Earth.
Treasures such as these are part of our human legacy from the Upper Paleolithic period, approximately 50,000 to 10,000 BCE.[1] It is a rich legacy, but relative to later historical periods, even the Neolithic which followed it, it is not extensive. On page 6 of the textbook, Baring and Cashford note that more than 130 figures of Goddess survive, either in statuette form or sculpted on rock ledges or terraces. This is a tiny legacy, but given that these forms were created tens of millennia ago, it is a miracle that even this much survives.
Because there is so little, what remains of our earliest human heritage is even more precious and important for our reconstruction of the past. Because there is so little, any reconstruction must inevitably be tentative. Because there is so little, it is very important that you read your textbook and the commentary with an open but critical mind, for it is even more probable than usual that our interpretations will reflect our own preconceptions. So note this phrase: “Here we leave the evidence and come to interpretation” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 8). The first two chapters of the textbook are based solely upon archaeological evidence, and archaeologists are not even in agreement among themselves about how to interpret it.
Interpretation of the evidence can be affected by many factors, including a tendency to romanticize the past. This tendency may be driven by a need for confirmation that a golden age once existed. For example, Baring and Cashford note that there is no evidence that Upper Paleolithic people fought each other. Personally, I would take comfort in believing this. But is it in fact true? Or did the evidence simply disappear over the passing millennia? If the latter is the case, why would the evidence for warfare disappear so selectively? Is there any way we can know with certainty, one way or the other?
Remember, as you read with an open but critical mind, to read with an open heart as well. Given the evocative nature of the surviving art, it is important that you think and feel whether the interpretations given seem right, or inconsistent, or even contradictory. Imagine the surviving pieces of human life in Upper Paleolithic times—the carvings, the statues, the buckles, and the plaques. Move them around in your mind like puzzle pieces as you read. Fit them together. Do you wind up with a picture similar to that of Baring and Cashford? If not, what does yours look like, and what supports your vision?
How can our imaginations reach back, over dozens of millennia, to find our way to our Upper Paleolithic ancestors? Jungian psychology provides one way. Carl Jung (pronounced “Yoong”) was a Swiss psychiatrist and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. In addition to being a psychotherapist, he was a scholar who read widely in areas such as literature, ancient and modern religions, mysticism, art, and alchemy. He became fascinated by the striking similarities in symbols in different cultures across different historical periods. On pages 42 and 43 of the textbook, Baring and Cashford demonstrate this cross-cultural similarity using depictions of a bird and of a serpent in ancient art from diverse geographic areas, including Siberia, France, and Greece.
As did Freud, Jung believed in the existence of a personal unconscious that evolves over a lifetime of daytime experiences and nighttime dreams. Unlike Freud, however, Jung theorized that a “collective unconscious” exists as well, a common symbolic and experiential inheritance that all people share as a basic part of the human condition. Such a collective unconscious is transmitted to new generations as surely and inevitably as hair colour, height, or facial features. In Jungian psychology, it is the collective unconscious that is both the generator and the repository of the symbols that unify all human experience, from the first primordial stirrings of self-awareness. These recurrent patterns are known as “archetypes”; for example, the Mother, the hero, the son-lover. In fleshing out the theoretical construct of the collective unconscious, Jung described it as:
a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at its command a human experience of one or two million years, practically immortal. If such a being existed, it would be exalted above all temporal change . . . it would be a dreamer of age-old dreams. . . . It would have lived countless times over again the life of the individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it would possess a living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering and decay. (As cited in Baring & Cashford, 1993, pp. 41–42)
Spirit and Matter Split
Take a few minutes to look at the following pictures in the textbook: the Goddess of Laussel (p. 2); the Goddess of Lespugue (p. 7); the Goddess of Willendorf (p. 10); the Goddess statue on page 11; the bird goddess on page 14; and any others that catch your attention. Imagine tracing the form of the Goddess of Laussel, feeling the cool, rough stone of the cave wall beneath your fingers. Imagine cradling the Goddess of Willendorf in your palm. Do you find her form grotesque? Or is it beautiful in a way that might be new to you? Can you imagine what it would have been like to touch these figures in the pale rose of dawn; the deep violet of dusk; or the blackest night, eased only by the feeble light cast by a twig burning in animal fat?
The textbook’s Chapter 1 is an effort by two Jungian psychologists to reconstruct the most dimly lit portion of the human past using carved forms and cave paintings. Baring and Cashford write with apparent confidence of the meaning of symbols such as the meander, the chevron, and the spiral. They speak of how the ever-shifting forms of the moon would have given our early ancestors a sense of the ebb and flow of all human endeavours, and indeed, of human life itself. They are not the only authors to arrive at these interpretations, but their words, especially in the first two chapters, are interpretations—stories. Until our ancestors can speak for themselves in extant written records, we have no choice but to try to speak for them. Our interpretations may say more about us than about Upper Paleolithic humans. On the other hand, if Jung is correct about the existence of a collective unconscious, we can proceed with some confidence, for these ancient symbols continue to live within us. As you read through these pages, which possibility do you find most probable?
The material on the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods is perhaps the most powerfully moving in the entire pantheon of goddess mythology. Part of its power is that what remains of these periods is pure image. Not religious texts, myths, or hymns of praise, but pure artistic image. This is intriguing, and also challenging, in the way it invites us to make fundamental paradigmatic shifts in the way we experience things.
For example, in our Judeo-Christian culture, God is male. Agnostic, atheist, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist, or Jew, we in the West live in a world where the only deity is a male God who created the world while remaining separate and distinct from His creation. Our cultural heritage tells us that we live in an inanimate, dis-spirited world. As Eliade (1959) notes, “desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies [which makes] it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies” (p. 13).
This paradigm of a separation between Creator and created is so deeply rooted in our culture that it may make it difficult for you to appreciate fully the radical nature of the view of Upper Paleolithic mythology presented in this course. If interpretations such as those of Baring and Cashford and others are correct, the central fact of Upper Paleolithic goddess mythology is that the Great Goddess does not live in creation, She is creation. The Goddess is not a life force animating lifeless matter. Such an interpretation would merely perpetuate the split between matter and spirit. As the textbook and this commentary show, the body of Goddess is the Earth, the sky, the stars. Caves were Her womb; mountains were Her breasts. Take this very literally. If you do not, you will miss the truly revolutionary difference between the religion of the immanent Great Mother and religions based on a Father God who created the world while remaining separate from it.
The dichotomy between spirit and matter makes it difficult even to talk about this original unity. Phrases such as “spiritualized matter” or “material spirit” are a slight improvement over each word used separately, but they are still poorly patched versions of the unbroken original unity. (This wholeness still exists in some of the religious beliefs of contemporary Indigenous Peoples. Note the words of Chief Seattle on page 3 of the textbook by Baring and Cashford.)
The Unity of Creatrix and Creation
Chapter 1 is replete with repetitious material, but it is not the repetition of the poorly conceived and executed. Instead, like musical variations on one theme, or a visit to a hall of mirrors where every mirror reflects a new yet similar version of the whole, this chapter is about Goddess, who is the underlying unity that embraces both constancy and change, birth and death. It is the same Goddess who gives birth to all, who takes all back to Her womb for rebirth, whose all-encompassing unity is mirrored
Within this world, death and life are not antagonists, but rather the two profiles of the Mother’s face.
Milk from the Mother’s Breasts
Look into the night sky at the broad expanse of tiny lights and imagine them as drops of milk from Goddess’s breast, instead of stars millions of light years away. This primordial experience later became codified into language, for the word “galaxy” comes from the Greek galaxias, meaning milky circle, a symbolism doubly emphasized in the name of our own galaxy, the Milky Way (Sjoo & Mor, 1987, p. 52). (Caution: This is not a metaphor. We see stars of romance, beautiful lights, or burning chemicals, but our ancestors saw drops of milk streaming from their Mother’s breast.)
Baring and Cashford (1993) write that “The flowing breast is the essential image of trust in the universe” (p. 10). The shining drops of milk in the night sky must have been a promise of comfort and sustenance in a world where life depended on gathering and the erratic success of the hunt. Is it any wonder that a common feature of Upper Paleolithic goddess figures is huge, bountiful breasts?[2]
In many cultures, hills and mountains have been experienced as the breasts of Goddess, from Ireland’s Paps of Anu (a Celtic goddess) to Mt. Everest. Tibetans dwelling north of Mt. Everest call it Jomolungma, which translates as “goddess, mother of the world,” while the Nepalese living to the south refer to the highest mountain in the world as Sagarmatha, “goddess of the sky” (Krakauer, 1997, p. 14).
The identity of Goddess and world must have entailed ethical and religious obligations. Baring and Cashford discuss how cave paintings of animals might have been one way to propitiate (or appease) an animal relative killed by a human brother in order to survive. The words of Smohala, a nineteenth-century Nez Percé, illustrate a similar understanding of ethical imperatives:
You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die She will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under Her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter Her body and be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like the white man. But how can I cut off my mother’s hair? It is bad law and my people cannot obey it. (In Rothenberg, as cited in Sjoo & Mor, 1987, p. 86)
Consider the original meaning of the word “pollution”—the profanation of something shared. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the divine is traditionally seen as separate from the material world. If the divine were experienced as immanent in the world, would that experience matter? For example, would we tolerate water pollution if rivers were literally experienced as blood flowing in the Earthly veins of Christ?
The Cave as the Mother’s Womb
Caves were important dwelling places of our earliest human ancestors. In fact, Baring and Cashford suggest that, judging by the marvelous cave paintings and the rituals they imply, the cave may have been the most sacred sanctuary of Goddess. The cave was the womb of Goddess, who gave birth to all creation and who embraced Her children on their death, a death that was only a precursor to yet another birth. Cave as womb thus drew together in the same dwelling place both the living and their dead. Contrast this unity with modern Western society, where cemeteries are often begun on the outskirts of towns, which embrace them only as the town of the living expands until it reaches the town of the dead.
What would it have been like both to live and to worship within the body of one’s deity? Stop and reflect on this question, for it represents perhaps the central difference between Goddess and God. Goddess was immanent in humans and in every part of the created world. Her body was Earth’s body and the bodies of animals, plants, and humans. This immanence is in radical contrast to the transcendence and separation between the various male gods, including the biblical God, and their creation. This is a truly radical difference and it has profound implications for the way Earth and her creatures are treated. If all life is sacred, then there are ethical implications that follow naturally for the way animals, plants, and Earth herself are treated.
Study the photograph on page 17 of Baring and Cashford; it shows the interior of the great cave at Lombrives, France. Try visualizing the slow, two- to three-kilometre journey into such a sanctuary, the labyrinthine passage lit only by the feeble light of animal-fat candles. Take these steps in your imagination, following the path carved in enduring rock by hundreds of generations of your ancestors. Imagine how dazzling it must have been to come to the end of your journey and witness the explosion of animals running, fighting, dying, and being reborn on the walls of Goddess’s womb. Imagine what it might have been like to participate in rituals within these sacred caves, some of which are vast enough to contain a cathedral.
The Moon
One of the perennial symbols in goddess mythology is the moon, the light in the darkness. It is the moon that most perfectly images the unity in the apparent flux of life. It is the moon that gave birth to both sequence and measurement. As Baring and Cashford note, mene means moon in Greek, mensis means month in Latin while its derivative mensura means measurement and was the source for “menstrual” cycle. While the sun gave our ancestors an awareness of short durations—days—it was the moon that expanded their awareness of temporal unity.
The moon was undoubtedly the central image of the sacred to these early people because, in its dual rhythm of constancy and change, it provided not only a point of orientation from which differences could be measured, patterns conceived and connections made, but also, in its perpetual return to its own beginnings, it unified what had apparently been broken asunder. (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 21)
The loss of a loved one, the loss of migrating animals, the loss of vital warmth in the frigid winter months were knit together by the moon whose own return from the dead was the promise of the joyous return of new life in all its myriad forms. The moon, with her endless heavenly rhythms of light and darkness, would surely have given comfort to our earliest ancestors, who lived amid the endless cycles of Earthly growth and decay. Whatever our spiritual beliefs, have we really grown too sophisticated to derive comfort and spiritual inspiration from natural phenomena such as lunar phases?
Furthermore, the moon’s cycles would have been the celestial underpinning of the Earthly cycles of a woman’s life, from maid (crescent moon), to mother (full moon), to crone (dark of the moon). In later goddess mythologies, the original unity between woman and moon is further differentiated (or broken?) and goddesses became “specialized.” Despite this fragmentation, however, traces of the underlying unity sometimes remain. For example, in Roman mythology, Vesta was the virgin goddess of the hearth and home. Yet this virgin goddess was also honoured as a goddess of fruitfulness (traces of the mother?), and her sanctuaries were round like tombs, unlike those of most other gods and goddesses of the time (traces of the crone?). This feminine trinity of maid, mother, and crone is a recurrent theme in goddess mythology. We will return to it later.
Goddess of the Beasts
Baring and Cashford note that the most startling difference between Upper Paleolithic and modern times is our ancestors’ reverence for animals. Animals were once experienced as sacred beings who were epiphanies of Goddess, as teachers of divine and natural law,[3] and as kin to humans. This world view persists among many Indigenous Peoples, and traces linger in fairy tales, where animals still have magical powers.
But in our modern world, animals are too often considered “dumb,” in the sense of stupid or soulless. Fish and marine mammals are strip mined in the oceans by drift nets that stretch for miles. Entire species slip quietly into extinction; others become enemies of progress when their habitat is coveted by real estate developers or industry. As mythologies shifted over millennia from Goddess to God, animals ceased being brothers and sisters to humans, and gradually became commodities instead.[4]
Baring and Cashford discuss animals in detail on pages 26 to 32, but animals play a role in other sections, such as those on the Shaman and the Bird Goddess, and they make appearances in still other sections, such as in the trinity of massive goddesses standing on a bison carved into a cave wall at Angles-sur-l’Anglin, the animal burials near Lake Baikal, and the burial of a goddess statue clothed in a lion’s skin. Once you start looking for them, animals are everywhere in this chapter.
Some of the more prominent animals in this chapter, such as the bear and bison (or bull) will recur across many subsequent mythologies with an amazing persistence of meaning (archetypes again). For example, Baring and Cashford (1993) note that “The bird who appears out of a distant sky has always been . . . the visible incarnation of the invisible world” (p. 13). The horse has been honoured across many cultures, because it guided the souls of the dead and carried the shaman on flights to other realms of being. Baring and Cashford note that the bear was evidently the earliest animal hunted for food in the northern hemisphere and also the earliest animal whose bones were honoured with ritual.[5]
Goddess’s Shaman
Nighttime dreams and daytime reveries may have awakened human beings to the existence of an invisible world. Studying the cycles of the moon, the flowering and decay of plants, the migratory odyssey and return of animal kin may have planted in the human mind a realization of the existence of mysteries beneath the apparent order of the world. It was the shamans who were responsible for penetrating these mysteries and communicating them to other members of the tribe. If the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings are any indication, animals were the teachers, guides, and vehicles of the shamanic flights. It may even have been the dying animals who spoke to the shaman of the fundamental mystery of death and rebirth. If this section of Baring and Cashford reads like an interpretative “leap of faith,” note references to contemporary shamanism among the Bushmen, the Sioux Indians, and Indigenous Siberians.
Goddess and Her Hunter
The section in the Baring and Cashford textbook on “Palaeolithic Mythology” is very important, as it both summarizes some of the central themes in Upper Paleolithic goddess mythology and foreshadows the shattering of the original unity between humans and the natural world of animals.
The original wholeness was based on the recognition that Goddess was mother to both animals and the human hunters who slew them for food and raw materials (hide, fat, and sinew). To survive meant slaying the animals who were the tribe’s teachers, totems, and kin. Yet the act of hunting itself must be sacred, for it is the means by which Goddess has given humanity means for its own survival. In other words, Goddess sanctioned hunting of Her animal children by Her human children. This original unity was celebrated in paintings within the womb of Goddess, the cave. The Goddess myth contains the myth of the hunter.
But the connection between hunter and Goddess is a tenuous one, which must be continuously explored and deepened through ritual, painting, and shamanic journeys if the original unity is to be preserved. Modern culture and those cultures that preceded it through the millennia are evidence of the sundering of these two myths as the hunter evolved into the warrior. “In the myth of the hunter, animals and human beings compete for survival and the life of the one is often the death of the other” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 39). To cite but one example, bears, the oldest of ritual animals, are shot today because there is a premium market on bear parts in Asian markets or, closer to home, because they may prey on farmers’ cattle or are coveted as trophies. “Life in time came to be separated from the vision of eternity as the part broke away from the whole” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 40).
In the Upper Paleolithic, the hunter was still peacefully if tenuously contained within ritual that honoured a sacred world centred on Goddess. Over the course of millennia, however, the hunter would evolve into the warrior-hero, dominating women under patriarchal rule, a development mirrored in and legitimated by the overthrow of Goddess by patriarchy’s God. This point is mentioned only briefly here by Baring and Cashford, but we will pick up this theme again in Unit 3, which explores the origins of patriarchy.
Part 2: The Great Goddess of Sky, Earth, and Waters
In Neolithic times, people gradually shifted from a life centred on caves and hunting to settlements sustained by agriculture. Yet Goddess remained the spiritual focus of the Neolithic cultures throughout much of Europe.
Required Reading
Chapter 2, “The Neolithic Great Goddess of Sky, Earth, and Waters,” pages 46–105 of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford.
The Work of Marija Gimbutas
The archaeological work of Marija Gimbutas has been the inspiration for many influential feminist books on goddess mythology, among them those by Baring and Cashford, and Riane Eisler.[7] Indeed, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Gimbutas’ archaeological finds, and her interpretations of those finds, are the archaeological foundation on which modern goddess mythology is based. Scholars such as Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Ashley Montagu have praised Gimbutas’ work. Some of her own colleagues in archaeology have not been enthusiastic about her methods or her conclusions, and often completely ignore her work. Some of this reaction is undoubtedly a result of androcentrism in archaeology:
Archaeology has consistently been told to us from a male perspective that adopts “male” as the norm and proceeds from the male experience. In the received view, art is male, with females sometimes as subjects/objects; males take over agriculture because agriculture is the more critical activity. Tools, their production and use, are male concerns and are intimately involved with the evolution of “man.” Empires are made by men, and the underlying labor and energy directly attributable to women lies hidden. (Conkey & Gero, as cited in Conkey & Tringham, 1995, p. 201)
According to Conkey & Tringham (1995), the issues may run deeper than entrenched androcentrism, and they have raised a number of critiques about the work of Gimbutas and other feminist scholars who draw on her analyses.[8]
Gimbutas has been criticized by some of her archaeological colleagues for basing her conclusions on a preconception of early agriculturalists as peaceful, egalitarian, and matrilineal. Gimbutas is then seen as selecting evidence that supports this preconception and ignoring contrary evidence. In addition to a concern for method, there is a related concern that an appeal to an ancient Goddess is simply an attempt to replace an androcentric or patriarchal society with a gynocentric one (Conkey & Tringham, 1995, p. 207).
Many Goddess narratives begin with the Neolithic culture of Old Europe. Gimbutas is criticized for treating the whole of European prehistory as a homogenous unit from the point of view of religion and social organization. The rich variation of European prehistoric material culture is normativized[9] so that the figurine and clay-rich archaeological record of Neolithic Southeast Europe, for example, “stands for” the continent as a whole. But the figurines do not occur in equal quantities (or form) everywhere in Europe from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, and any one area cannot, in fact, stand for the whole continent (Conkey & Tringham, 1995, p. 217). Considering the huge geographic area that Gimbutas categorizes as Old Europe, is it possible for all the societies in Old Europe to have been so similar? In later work, Gimbutas (1991) expanded her in-depth discussion of the underlying unity in Goddess images to include additional Neolithic cultures in southeastern and central Europe, northern Europe, western Europe, and the Adriatic and central Mediterranean region.
Although Gimbutas’ understanding of “Old Europe” has been critiqued by some archaeologists, there is archaeological evidence and analysis to support the idea of a Goddess religion expressed in a similar manner throughout this huge area. Current research about goddess mythology in Old Europe can be found in The Journal of Archaeomythology,[10] which combines the study of archaeology with mythology. The journal is published by the Institute for Archaeomythology , an international organization of scholars that fosters interdisciplinary cultural research on the beliefs, rituals, social structure, and symbolism of ancient societies.
It’s important to note that there is no consensus by archaeologists about gender issues in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic culture. This is a contested area of research and analysis. To learn more about the research and life story of feminist archaeologist Marija Gimbutas—and her challenges to the patriarchal norms of archaeology—see Signs out of Time: The Story of Archeologist Marija Gimbutas , a DVD produced by Belili Productions in 2003. The film focuses on the “signs,” the visual imagery of the ancient goddess cultures as interpreted by Gimbutas.
The basic archaeological evidence underlying Goddess narratives is based largely on Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines. However, it’s important to remember that figurines have no voice of their own and must be interpreted. In a similar vein, Baring and Cashford state on page 8 of the textbook: “Here we leave the evidence and come to interpretation.” You are invited to critically assess the interpretations offered in the Baring and Cashford textbook, as well as other resources, and to consider the implications of these stories for our understanding of ancient cultures. As discussed in Unit 1, goddess mythologies are powerful and inspiring stories that continue to have an impact on our understanding of the possibilities for how we might live. Imagining goddess cultures and remembering the ancient stories can inspire hope for change.
In Part 1 of Unit 6, we will continue our discussion of matriarchal goddess cultures, which honour the sacred feminine and offer an alternative paradigm to dominant patriarchal cultures. For research on matriarchies in the past, present, and future, see Societies of Peace, edited by Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2009). This comprehensive study of matriarchal cultures includes papers from two world congresses on modern matriarchal studies (a growing field of feminist study). As we will discover in Unit 7, twentieth-century cultural ecofeminism is an important testament to the continuing hold Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic goddess mythology exerts on our imagination.
From the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic
Do you recall the metaphors we used earlier, of musical variations on a theme or a visit to a hall of mirrors? Such metaphors are ways of describing the underlying unity of the divine feminine across cultures and historical periods. For example, Baring and Cashford relate Goddess as the source of life, death, and rebirth to the three female Fates in Greek mythology (Clotho who spun the thread of life, Lachesis who measured it to a certain length, and Atropos who severed it). It is the same divine feminine, but clothed and named differently, just as every moon goddess in every culture will retain features of primal Goddess who first appeared as the light in the darkness.
The key to understanding these first two chapters, as well as goddess mythology in general, is to understand both the underlying unity of, and the distinctions among, Her manifestations across cultures and historical periods. There are both outright differences and subtle differentiations of Goddess as She appears in the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. For example, some but not all of the animals central to Upper Paleolithic mythology continue to be significant in the Neolithic. Many animals are painted and sculpted for the first time in the Neolithic. Note them, as well as the lessons they teach about humanity’s deepening understanding of Goddess.
The shift from Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic was the gradual shift from gathering and the hunt to agriculture, and from the cave to the fertile field. Life was no longer centred on the hunt, but upon agricultural cycles “contained and concentrated on the precise nurturing of the crops and the continual care of the domestic animal” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 47, emphasis added). The words I highlighted convey for me the “feeling tones” that I experience when I consider the Neolithic. What words or symbols convey to you the essential features of this period?
Women, as daughters of Goddess, were the containers of new life as well as the first potters who created containers for ritual and for the storage of precious food supplies.[11] These clay containers opened up possibilities for new artistic expressions of Goddess, who was frequently depicted as a container Herself (see Figures 9 and 13, on pages 59 and 60 of Baring and Cashford). Goddess as container embodied the unity of all human, plant, and animal life—a unity so all-encompassing that it could embrace the passage of all Her children from life to death and back again. Goddess both contained these mysteries of life and death, and participated fully in them. She was both goal and guide.
Goddess of the Animals
In Neolithic times, Goddess continues to be associated with animals, although Her new role as the Goddess of Vegetation begets symbolic associations with new animals. As were those whose power continues from the Upper Paleolithic, these animals were honoured as manifestations of Goddess. Animals continue to be ways Goddess reveals Herself in the created world itself, in fact, nothing more or less than the body of Goddess. I want to emphasize this point, as it is the essence of a paradigm that is fundamentally different from our own world, in which spirit and matter are two different entities.
Continue to take notes on the animal symbols in this chapter. There are three good reasons for doing so: first, animals provide a thread that unifies many of the goddesses across different cultures and historical periods; second, animal symbolism can alert you to the concealed presence of Goddess in contemporary life; and third, the ancient bond between animals and Goddess evolves over time to an association between women and animals as fundamentally “other” than men, and therefore subject to exploitation and domination (a theme we will explore in Units 4 and 5).
New Articulations in the Neolithic: Unity in Diversity
The Goddess of Vegetation
“The movement of consciousness in the Neolithic is one of differentiation and proliferation, but there is no loss of the original sense of unity”
(Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 47)
The “differentiation and proliferation” of consciousness may be seen, among other ways, in the persistence of the moon as the primary image of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. But now, this theme is further articulated to embrace the new agricultural paradigm. For example, the four phases of the moon as Goddess gradually come to assume a new symbolic significance as they now represent the four different agricultural seasons as well. Seeds are sown in the body of Goddess, who gives birth to them, sustains them through summer, and reclaims the seeds prior to decay in the fall, only to give birth to them again the following spring.
The association between Goddess, moon, and the fertility of the land may also be related to the moon magic of menstrual blood. For example, the ancient Greek fertility festival of the Thesmophoria, sacred to Demeter, may have grown out of a far earlier practice in which women mixed seed corn with their menstrual blood to bless and fertilize the seed before planting (Shuttle and Redgrove, 1978, p. 182). Is it possible that this practice, or a similar one, originated as early as the Neolithic? There is no way to know for sure, but it is interesting to speculate whether this or similar practices existed then.
Remember examples cited in the textbook of Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic statues found with traces of red ochre on them? Remember the discussion in the Introduction of Oestre, Sabbatu, and Easter as the time of rebirth for God’s son? Recall from Baring and Cashford the skeleton of the four-year-old girl that had been dabbed with red ochre and buried in the fetal position to await rebirth. Easter eggs, a womb symbol of the goddess Oestre, were often painted red and laid on graves to strengthen the dead (Walker, 1983, p. 639). In all these cases, the red ochre symbolizes the menstrual blood of Goddess, the source of new life and new birth, whether of the dead or of seeds. Does it shift your feeling about menstruation even a little to know there was once a time when humanity worshipped a deity who menstruated?
The Neolithic saw the birth of a new manifestation of the divine feminine, the Goddess of Vegetation. The Goddess of Vegetation is not different from the Great Goddess of Upper Paleolithic times. Rather, she is a deepening or articulation of Goddess, who was first honoured for creating and sustaining the plants and herbs that Her human and animal children needed to survive. In the Neolithic, Goddess is honoured as well for Her new role of nurturing the crops growing under the watchful care of Her human daughters. Her daughters, in turn, were midwives to the vegetal birth of Goddess as She is reborn each spring, because their own bodies directly mirror Her fertility:
By the very fact that her body in the act of giving birth portrays the mysteries of creation, she becomes in some sense endowed with magical power to embody the relationship between the invisible and visible orders, helping the crops to grow, the trees to bear fruit and the animals to remain fertile. (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 50)
When I read these words, I feel reverberations of the shaman’s power in bridging the visible and the invisible worlds. In the act of bringing forth the fertility of the land and the fertility of their own bodies, were Neolithic women like shamans, who explored the passage between life and death and gave “an infinitely profounder meaning to the human cycle of growth, flowering and decay” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 32)? Or were women perhaps the first shamans, authorized—even crowned—by sacred aspects of feminine sexuality?
The Goddess of the Sky or Upper Waters, the Earth, and the Underworld or Waters Beneath the Earth
The gradual differentiation of Goddess into Her forms as Goddess of Upper, Earthly, and Lower Waters is of enormous significance. As do other images of Goddess (e.g., mother and daughter, two sisters, Goddess of both death and life), it represents an underlying unity despite multiple appearances. But in it lie the seeds of still further differentiations. And at some point, differentiations lead to outright separation into distinct figures; for example, in Greek culture, it leads to the association of Demeter with the fertility of Earth, Selene with the moon, and Hecate with the underworld. Yet even in the separation, traces of the underlying original unity may occasionally be glimpsed.
The Bird Goddess
In a world where survival depends heavily on agriculture, rain is a critical factor in the success of crops. But rain was more than an agricultural necessity, it was an epiphany of the Goddess of the “upper waters” of the sky. The bird becomes the fundamental symbol for the Goddess of the upper realms, for it was equally at home in the celestial and on the earthly waters. As does the moon, the bird knits together the different worlds of sky and Earth.
Study the figures of the bird goddess on page 59 of Baring and Cashford, and compare them to an earlier bird image from the Upper Paleolithic (Figures 12 and 13 on page 14). Note all the different species of birds that are associated with the goddess; look for them in literature—fairy tales, “Mother Goose” tales, and the Bible. The chevron symbol became shorthand for the bird goddess, specifically, her wings, her beak or the fertility of her genital triangle.
One of the most significant characteristics of birds is that they reproduce by laying eggs (a feature that links together the bird and fish goddess, by the way). Thus, it is no surprise that the egg is a prominent symbol of the bird goddess (study the figures on Baring and Cashford’s page 62). Are the eggs of Easter a lingering symbol of the springtime fertility of the bird goddess? The fertility of the egg applies equally to rebirth. Gimbutas notes that in the Neolithic period, the corpses of children and babies were laid in egg-shaped jars to await rebirth (1982, p. 159).
The Fish Goddess
Fish emerge from eggs laid in the waters of Earth, and the statues of the fish goddess retain the rounded shape of their origin. Note the examples in Baring and Cashford of the relationship between fish and fertility in Chaldean and Egyptian myths. One of the earliest symbols for Christ was the fish, for he was honoured as the “fisher of men.” The fish, the bull, and the serpent seem to contain the essence of the male principle, which gradually begins to become distinguished from the goddess in the Neolithic.
The Serpent Goddess
This section is short, dense, and fascinating. It discusses the serpent goddess, who is equally at home on and within Earth; hence, her equation with the goddess of the lower waters or underworld. Because of the richness of this section, I would like to use it as an example of how you can “unpack” the areas in Baring and Cashford that present a dense concentration of symbolic information.
What follows is my note taking on this section. I hope it gives you ideas about how to mould this intriguing information into forms that are natural to you. Play around with your own ways. Do not try to remember every single detail, but do remember the basic flow.
| 1. | Physical Attributes of the Serpent | ||
| coiling shape of moving serpent | = | the coiled up energy of Kundalini in Indian mythology and meditation | |
| = | spiralling form of DNA in the heart of each cell | ||
| = | power beneath Earth to make the plants grow (Figure 21 on Baring & Cashford’s page 66) | ||
| circular shape of the serpent | = | the snake swallowing its own tail (uroboros), which across many cultures represents the waters surrounding Earth[12] | |
| intertwined double snakes | = | the umbilical cord; may relate to labyrinth and meander connecting this world and the one beyond | |
| 2. | Activities of the Serpent | ||
| sloughing of skin | = | Goddess’s power of renewal and rebirth for the dead (not mentioned here; also relates to the sloughing of uterine blood in menstruation) | |
| hibernation of serpent | = | sleep from which the dead awaken | |
| 3. | Serpent in Creation Myths | Sumerian myth of Nammu, a great serpent who gave birth to Heaven and Earth |
If you start a list like this one for each major animal (and list the relevant page numbers for each reference), you will find it very quick and easy to add to each entry as you move through the course and to refer back as needed.
The Density of Symbols
As you may have noticed by now, the Baring and Cashford textbook is unlike expository textbooks you may be accustomed to from other courses. One way of looking at goddess mythology is to regard it as the evolution of symbols. Symbols are dense concentrations of meaning. They may also have a certain dreamlike quality, flowing into and merging with one another.
For example, consider the relationships among certain aspects of the bird and fish goddesses:
Do you feel the underlying unity beneath these dreamlike images? It is not always easily apparent when the descriptions are spread over different pages, with intervening material between.
Let me share with you an example of the unity and differences amid the density of one of these images, the bull:
And so, the bull can symbolize the crescent moon as epiphany of Goddess, the reproductive organs of the human daughters of Goddess, and the emerging god.
As Baring and Cashford note, the bull begins as a Goddess symbol and gradually changes into an image of the consort or son-lover who unites with the goddess in a sacred marriage that brings a new level of unity (the child). This theme is an important and recurrent one.
Neolithic Cultures: Old Europe, Çatal Hüyük, the Megaliths, and Malta
Old Europe
Despite its name, “Old Europe” includes not only much of Europe, but areas of the Ukraine, Italy, Malta, Greece, and the western coast of Turkey. This section of Baring and Cashford relies heavily upon the work of Marija Gimbutas. The following points are some of her major conclusions about the culture of Old Europe.
Gimbutas suggests that the culture of Old Europe was so advanced that until recently, many archaeologists considered it to be a product of Greek and Roman influences. It was almost inconceivable to some that such an advanced culture could, in fact, be far more ancient than Greece and Rome; they believed that “older” must mean “more primitive.”
Çatal Hüyük
Gimbutas discusses Çatal Hüyük as the largest Neolithic site in the Near East. It appears to represent a distinctive culture, not a derivative of Old Europe. Baring and Cashford discuss some fascinating features of this culture. However, it is important to remember that all scholarly interpretations are based on the work of archaeologists who have excavated only five per cent, or one-twentieth, of the 32-acre site. While the material on Çatal Hüyük seems consistent with the discussions of other Neolithic Goddess cultures, it is important to remember that what has been excavated may not be representative of the whole site.
Bull’s horns or bucrania are a prominent feature of extant temples in Çatal Hüyük. While bull’s horns were prominent in Old Europe, none of its shrines have survived, so it is impossible to know anything about their placement in sites of worship. Hence, this is one of the important contributions of Çatal Hüyük.
In Çatal Hüyük, Goddess was imaged as maid, mother, and old woman or crone (the trinity of the divine feminine). Twin goddesses, representing mother and daughter, were depicted on temple walls (Figure 49 on Baring and Cashford’s page 85) and in statues. (Remember that goddess mythology can give us ways to “reimagine” the mother-daughter bond.)
Look closely at the powerful sculpture of the mother goddess giving birth in Figure 50 on Baring and Cashford’s page 86. Can you imagine what it might have been like to participate in rituals within this sacred space? Compare this shrine with that of the Goddess of Death and Regeneration with its vulture-covered walls (Figure 52 on page 87). During the Neolithic period, dead bodies were left out as prey for vultures, servants of Goddess who carried them piecemeal into the heavens (Walker, 1983, p. 1053).
The Megaliths of Western Europe
The Megalithic culture[16] of Western Europe (Ireland, England, Brittany) is a third Neolithic civilization. Unlike Old Europe or Çatal Hüyük, it is characterized by large standing stones, which are often organized into circles. Stonehenge is perhaps the most famous circle of standing stones in the world, although Avebury is far larger. At Avebury, it is still possible to walk up to the stones.
Around 5000 BCE, people whose spiritual life was centred on Goddess began constructing circles using giant stones, some of them weighing several tonnes. Look at Figures 67, 69, and 70 (Baring & Cashford, 1993, pp. 98, 99, and 100 respectively), and try to imagine not only the geometric, engineering, and astronomical skills necessary to construct these circles, but the depth of spiritual commitment, across generations, needed to complete them.
An important Megalithic site, Silbury Hill, is part of the Avebury complex. Silbury Hill is 130 feet high, and every foot of it was constructed by human beings. That may not sound very impressive, and if you remember the film Goddess Remembered, you may not think that it looks impressive. But consider: it is a 130-foot high hill constructed by human beings living 4600 years ago working with flints, antler picks, and bone shovels made from animal shoulder blades. Some estimates suggest it may have taken 500 workers 15 years to build it. Can you imagine the long-term communal commitment needed? Can you imagine any spiritual vision that would so fire the imaginations of modern city dwellers that they would commit a proportional amount of time and resources to actualizing it?
Read with care the discussion of Silbury Hill as the embodiment of Goddess giving birth. Imagine how the “momentous annual birth of her child began when the moon was reflected in the still waters of the moat so that it appeared as the child’s head emerging from her womb” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 100).
Imagine standing beside the still waters when the moon touched the breast of the hill and began to suckle.
Malta
According to Gimbutas, Malta is actually part of Old Europe, but it may also be categorized as megalithic because of its magnificent stone temples, of which only a handful exist today on this island located about 80 kilometres south of Sicily. Animals sacred in other Neolithic cultures, such as the pig, fish, and bull adorn the walls of Maltese temples, suggesting an amazing continuity of Goddess images across vast geographic areas.
Note Figure 73 on Baring and Cashford’s page 102, which shows two side-by-side temples, one smaller than the other. The form of these temples is reminiscent of the body of Goddess. Baring and Cashford speculate that these two temples might have represented Goddess and Her daughter. Remember the discussion of Goddess-daughter in Çatal Hüyük (see the figures on Baring and Cashford’s page 85).
The Birth of the Son-Lover/God
Images of the god begin to appear in the Neolithic cultures of Old Europe (see Baring and Cashford, Figures 36–38, 39b, and 41 on pages 75, 76, and 78, respectively) and Çatal Hüyük (Figures 59 and 60 on page 91), although they are far scarcer than representations of Goddess. Animal images, such as the serpent and bull, change from Goddess symbols to become symbols of Her son-lover. In the next unit, we discuss the son-lover of goddesses such as Isis and Inanna-Ishtar, as well as the defeat and murder of the Babylonian mother goddess, Tiamat, by a young god.
Summary
The Upper Paleolithic period is often regarded as the spiritual “golden age” of humanity, when there was a bond of kinship between humans and animals as children of Goddess. Unlike the transcendent Father Gods who eventually deposed Her, Goddess was immanent in every part of Her creation, the darkest cave, the brightest star, the ever changing moon, and the monthly bleeding of women. All creatures were sacred, but certain animals came to symbolize Goddess, as certain of their features—the sloughing of a snake’s skin or the shape of a bison’s horns—represented different aspects of Her being. Animal symbols are a fundamental aspect of goddess mythology. Animals and women, the human daughters of Goddess, are linked today in their joint oppression by patriarchy. But in the Upper Paleolithic, the hunter of animals was still peacefully contained within a sacred world centred on Goddess. Over the course of millennia, he would evolve into the warrior-hero dominating women under patriarchal rule, a development mirrored in and legitimated by the overthrow of Goddess by his God.
During the Neolithic, an underlying unity remained as Goddess of the Upper Paleolithic evolved into different forms, such as the Goddess of Vegetation, the Goddesses of the Sky or Upper Waters (the bird goddess), Earth (the fish goddess), and the Underworld or Waters Beneath Earth (the serpent goddess). The first traces of the god or son-lover may be seen in animal symbols such as the bull and the serpent.
Valuable archaeological evidence from Europe, Çatal Hüyük, Malta, and the Megalithic cultures shows how humans continued to worship Goddess as they shifted from a life centred on caves and hunting and gathering to settlements sustained by agriculture. Women, as daughters of Goddess, were midwives to Her vegetal birth as their own bodies directly mirrored Her fertility. Goddess and women are inextricably linked by the fertility and sexuality of the sacred feminine.
References and Supplementary Materials
Baring, A., & Cashford, J. (1993). The myth of the goddess: Evolution of an image. London, UK: Penguin.
Benyus, J. M. (1997). Biomimicry: Innovation inspired by nature. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Conkey, M. W., & Tringham, R. E. (1995). Archaeology and the goddess: Exploring the contours of feminist archaeology. In D. C. Stanton & A. J. Steward (Eds.), Feminisms in the academy (pp. 199–247). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.
Dames, M. (1976a). The Avebury cycle. London, UK: Thames and Hudson.
Dames, M. (1976b). The Silbury treasure: The great goddess rediscovered. London, UK: Thames and Hudson.
Eisler, R. (1987). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Eisler, R. (2002). The power of partnership. Novato, CA: New World Library.
Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane. (W. R. Trask, Trans.) New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.
Gadon, E. (1989). The once and future goddess. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Gimbutas, M. (1982). The goddesses and gods of Old Europe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gimbutas, M. (1989). The language of the goddess. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Gimbutas, M. (1991). The civilizations of the goddess: The world of Old Europe. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.
Goettner-Abendroth, H. (Ed.). (2009). Societies of peace: Matriarchies past present and future. Toronto, ON: Inanna Publications.
Gowlett, J. A. J. (1993). Ascent to civilization: The archaeology of early humans (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Grahn, J. (1992). Blood, bread, and roses: How menstruation created the world. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hayden, B. (1986). Old Europe: Sacred matriarchy or complementary opposition. In A. Bonnano (Ed.), Archaeology and fertility cult in the ancient Mediterranean (pp. 17–30). Amsterdam, NL: Gruner.
Johnson, B. (1981). Lady of the beasts: Ancient images of the goddess and her sacred animals. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Jung, C. G. (1969). Collected works of C. G. Jung. Archetypes and the collective unconscious (Vol. 9, Pt. 1). G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull. (Eds./Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Krakauer, J. (1997). Into thin air: A personal account of the Mount Everest disaster. New York, NY: Villard.
Levy, G. R. (1948). The Gate of Horn: A study of the religious conceptions of the Stone Age, and their influence upon European thought. London, UK: Faber and Faber.
Mellaart, J. (1967). Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic town in Anatolia. London, UK: Thames and Hudson.
Nelson, S. M. (1997). Gender in archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Scarre, C., & Fagan, B. (1997). Ancient civilizations. New York, NY: Longman.
Shuttle, P., & Redgrove, P. (1978). The wise wound: Eve’s curse and everywoman. New York, NY: Richard Marek.
Sjoo, M., & Mor, B. (1987). The great cosmic mother: Rediscovering the religion of the Earth. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Stein, P. L., & Rowe, B. M. (1995). Physical anthropology: The core. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Walker, B. (1983). The woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
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