Divine Women

[poliphilo]

Bettany Hughes is careful not to tread on any toes, but it's difficult not to tell the story of the development of religion without making the Abrahamic gods- with their tantrums and lace-curtain twitching- seem a little provincial, tribal and Johnny-come-lately. Once upon a time there was a Goddess with huge breasts and buttocks who sat between two lions and presided over the settlement of the land.  According to the latest thought, which is based on the latest archaeology, her shrines predate the earliest cities. Later her uppity children- like the deeply unattractive Zeus-  pushed her back into the shadows, from which she was wont to emerge when their flashier powers proved insufficient. Thunderbolts are one thing, the gifts of birth and death quite another. When Rome was up against it in the form of Carthage her people- in response to a Sibylline oracle- preserved the city by fetching the image of Kybele from its home in Asia Minor and installing it on the site of what is now (harumph) St. Peter's in Rome. In India, of course, she has never been relegated. Hughes dedicated her last quarter of an hour or so to the Durga Puja in Kolkata- all drumming and face-painting and the throwing of statues in the river. It looked a lot more fun than Easter or Eid.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Which shrines might those be, the ones that predate the earliest cities?

I don't really believe in the Goddess thing, anymore. Marija Gimbutas spent her life trying to prove the Kurgan hypothesis and failed. Her acolytes have similarly failed in the years since. I don't think matriarchy was ever widespread, if it existed at all. We were probably more-or-less egalitarian, in the Old Stone Age, and by the pre-pottery Neolithic men had risen to dominance for purely practical reasons. The claim that there was once a time of peace and happiness, when women dominated society, is just so much misanthropy in ahistoric, pseudo-scientific garb -- and, in the case of Gimbutas, politically-motivated, ahistoric, pseudo-scientific garb at that.

The oldest religion was doubtless some form of animism and probably ancestor worship. I think that in some cultures we see feminine imagery holding primacy of rank but what exactly that means is unclear. Female figurines may represent fecundity, for instance, and this power may have been held above all others, but that does not necessarily mean that these people saw a Goddess of fecundity ruling over existence in the way that Judeo-Christianity sees a God ruling theirs. Before the rise of the state, there could have been no sense of rulership at all, for instance, and the very idea smacks of anachronism.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gobekli Tepe is the name of the place. It antedates Stonehenge by nearly 7,000 years.

Some of this material has come to light since Gimbutas. Yes, she was a blinkered fanatic who manipulated the evidence, but I don't think she was all wrong. The "goddess" images exist- lots of them- they require explanation. She was wrong about the Kurgans, though.

I agree with everything in your third paragraph. We need to guard against anachronism.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that nothing has come to light at Gobekli Tepe suggesting goddess worship. What we have seen so far does not even suggest fertility or fecundity. It's still early days, though. Also, the site looks likely to overturn much of what we know about the rise of organized society.

The goddess images are precisely where Gimbutas failed so spectacularly, to my mind. She claimed that the Vinča culture, for instance, had a great abundance of female figurines, which demanded the explanation that she provided. However, it turns out that the vast majority of figurines from that culture are of various animals, not of 'goddesses' at all. Not only was the Vinča evidence some of her strongest, such a culture is precisely where we should expect to find a goddess-centric religion and the evidence just is not there.

I've been looking at the Kurgan peoples, the Indo-Aryan 'invasion', and related topics, recently. It's an unholy mess. Some models still depend upon Max Muller's dating of the Vedas, and by extension the 'invasion', when in fact he retracted that claim in his own lifetime. I'm finding something similar with Gimbutas. Her hypothesis fails, yet it's still assumed as fact in far too many discussion. I suspect this the source of that claim for Gobekli Tepe.