Goddess Worship in the Neolithic

• Neolithic agrarian life was the basis for the development of civilization (8,000 – 3,000 BC)
• Neolithic societies almost universally worshiped the Goddess

•  Equality between the sexes was the norm
• Graves equal
• Both Priests and Priestesses important in religion

• No  imagery idealizing armed might, cruelty, and violence-based power.
• No images of "noble warriors" or scenes of battles.
• No signs of "heroic conquerors" dragging captives around in chains or other evidences of slavery".

• Rich array of symbols from Nature
• Theme of unity in nature
• Art was associated with worship of the Goddess
• example: Goddess figurines

Goddess Worship

• The Goddess was worshiped in all ancient agricultural societies.
• Middle East and Southeastern Europe
• Thailand in Southeast Asia
• Middle America

• Gives birth and nourishment like the earth does

• The feminine Chalice symbolized the source of life
• The highest values were for the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature, not the powers to destroy
• The function of priestesses and priests was to benefit all the people in the community
• NOT to serve and give religious sanction to a brutal male elite
• Partnership society

"But then came the great change--a change so great, indeed that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude”

Indo-Europeans

• Indo-Europeans (Aryan language) were nomadic tribes living on the steppes of Asia
• Warfare using horses
• Swept into Old Europe, Middle East, India
• “Ruled by powerful priests and warriors, they brought with them their male gods of war and mountains.”

• Indo-Europeans gradually imposed their ideologies and ways of life on the lands and peoples they conquered

• Aryans in India,
• Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, Luians in Anatolia,
• Kurgans (Battle-Axe People) in eastern Europe
• Achaeans and later Dorians in Greece

Old Europeans

• "The Old European and Kurgan cultures were the antithesis of one another.
• The Old European were sedentary horticulturalists prone to live in large well-planned townships.
• The absence of fortifications and weapons attests the peaceful coexistence of this egalitarian civilization that was probably matrilinear and matrilocal.”

“The Kurgan system was composed of patrilineal, socially stratified, herding units which lived in small villages or seasonal settlements while grazing their animals over vast areas.”

Contrasting Ideologies

• One economy based on farming, the other on stock breeding and grazing, produced two contrasting ideologies.
• The Old European belief system focused on the agricultural cycle of birth, death, and regeneration, embodied in the feminine principle, a Mother Creatrix.
• The Kurgan ideology, as known from comparative Indo-European mythology, exalted virile, heroic warrior gods of the shining and thunderous sky.”

• Weapons are nonexistent in Old European imagery…
• The dagger and battle-axe are dominant symbols of the Kurgans, who like all historically known Indo-Europeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp blade."

"There were other nomadic invaders as well.   The most famous of these are a Semitic people we call the Hebrews, who came from the deserts of the south and invaded Canaan.”

Early Semites

•  Peace and morality are now associated with both Judaism and Christianity
• But, is historical fact that these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests --the Levite tribe of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua

• “Like the Indo-Europeans, they too brought with them a fierce and angry god of war and mountains (Jehovah or Yahweh).
• And gradually, as we read in the Bible, they too imposed much of their ideology and way of life on the peoples of the lands they conquered”

Indo-Europeans and Hebrews imposed a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm.

Technologies of Destruction

•  Societies that laid the foundations for Western civilization acquired material wealth by developing technologies of production.
• Conquering societies acquired material wealth by technologies of destruction

• "At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life.
• This was the power symbolized by the "masculine" Blade, which early Kurgan cave engravings show these Indo-European invaders literally worshiped.
• For in their dominator society, ruled by gods--and men--of war, this was the supreme power."

• The Goddess and women were reduced to male consorts or concubines
• Due to conquest by invaders
• Not due to men’s gradual discovery that they too played a part in reproduction

“Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more "effeminate" men became the norm"

The Story of Civilization

"The story of civilization, of the development of more advanced social and material technologies, now becomes the familiar bloody span from Sumer to ourselves: the story of violence and domination”

Foundation of Civilization

Foundation of civilization already developed by Goddess worshiping people in Neolithic:

• Material Technology developed by Goddess worshiping people:
• food growing
• construction
• container, and clothing technology
• sophisticated wood, fiber, leather goods
• metals
 
• Non-Material Technology developed by Goddess worshiping people:
• law
• government
• religion
• prayer
• judgeship
• priesthood
 
• Art developed by Goddess worshiping people:
• dance
• ritual drama
• oral or folk literature
• art
• architecture
• town planning
 
• Trade developed by Goddess worshiping people:
• trade by land and sea
• administration
• education
• forcasting the future: prophetic power of the priestesses of the Goddess
• example: Oracle at Delphi

• "In many surviving ancient religious texts it is the Goddess--not any of the then already dominant male deities--who is identified as the one who gave the people the 'gifts of civilization'.
• The myths attributing our major physical and spiritual inventions to a female deity may thus reflect their actual invention by women”

“ Such a hypothesis is just about inconceivable under the prevailing paradigm.”

• The current paradigm pictures woman as dependent and secondary to man
• Intellectually inferior
• Less spiritually developed than man
• Thus women are to blame for our fall from grace according to the Bible

"But in societies that conceptualized the supreme power in the universe as a Goddess, revered as the wise and just source of all our material and spiritual gifts, women would tend to internalize a very different self-image.”

Goddess a powerful role model for women

• With the Goddess as a powerful role model women would tend to consider it both their right and their duty to actively participate,  to take the lead in developing and using both material and spiritual technologies.
• They would tend to see themselves as competent, independent, and most certainly creative and inventive.

"In order to replace a partnership social organization with one based on force-backed domination, fundamental changes in replicative information had to be made.”

Imprinting a new code
 
“...a new code would have to be imprinted in the mind of every single man, woman, and child until their ideas of reality had been completely transformed to fit the requirements of a dominator society".

Shows of Force

• Behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions that did not conform to dominator norms were systematically discouraged.
• Directly, through personal coercion
• Indirectly, through intermittent social shows of force such as public inquisitions and execution
• “This fear conditioning became part of all aspects of daily life, permeating child rearing, laws, schools”

"Undoubtedly many of these men believed that what they did was also the will of their gods and felt divinely inspired.

Changing Norms

• Norms were changed by constant fashioning and refashioning of oral and written literature
• New male-dominated, violent, and hierarchical society gradually began to be seen as not only normal but also as RIGHT

"It had to be established that the old powers that ruled the universe--as symbolized by the life-giving Chalice--had been replaced by newer and more powerful deities in whose hands the Blade was now supreme”

Goddess Pulled Down
 “And to this end one thing above all had to be accomplished:  not only her earthly representative--woman--but the Goddess herself had to be pulled down from her exalted place.”

Justifications of Male Dominance

• “In some Middle Eastern myths this is accomplished by a story of how the Goddess is slain.
• In others she is subdued and humiliated by being raped...
• Such tales served a very important social purpose.
• They both symbolized and justified the imposition of male dominance.”

 “Another common device was to reduce the Goddess to the subordinate status of consort (wife) of a more powerful male god.  Still another was to transform her into a martial deity."

Athena

Goddess Absent in Hebrew Bible

In Cannan:  "...the invasions of the thirteen Hebrew tribes not only accelerated, but also radicalized, this process of social and ideological transformation.  For only in the Bible is the Goddess as a divine power entirely absent…”

New Male Social Order

“If we read the Bible as normative social literature, the absence of the Goddess is the single most important statement about the kind of social order that the men who over many centuries wrote and rewrote this religious document strove to establish and uphold”

Wrongs inflicted by Men
 
“For symbolically the absence of the Goddess from the officially sanctioned Holy Scriptures was the absence of a divine power to protect women and avenge the wrongs inflicted upon them by men".

Women in Old Testament

• “By and large, ancient Hebrew society was run from the top by a small elite of men.
• Most critically, as we can still read in the Old Testament, the laws fashioned by this male ruling caste defined women, not as free and independent human beings, but as the private property of men.
• First they were to belong to their fathers.  Later on, they were to be owned by their husbands or their masters, as were any children they bore.”

“In Numbers 31, for example, we read of what happened after the fall of Midian.  Having slain all the adult males, the ancient Hebrew invaders 'took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones'…” “ And now they were told by Moses that this was the command of the Lord: 'Kill every male among the little ones and every woman who hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves'... for these could be sold for concubines, slaves, and even wives".

We are still Imprisoned in a Dominator System

"Millions of people still today seem incapable of perceiving what our sacred literature really says, and how it functions to maintain the boundaries that keep us imprisoned in a dominator system".

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