. Exploring Female Divinity: from Modern Introduction Myths to Ancient Evidence Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris he idea of an original Mother Goddess in prehistory is surrounded by an intense controversy, but one in which neither side speaks to the other. In entering the debate on the nature of female divinity in ancient European and Mediterranean societies, this book is intended to bridge the gap between two camps, shedding light on areas of prejudice and showing that in this fascina- ting area of study we all still have more questions than answers. Recent decades have seen the emergence of a new movement which claims that human society and religion began with the worship of a Goddess in a peace- loving, egalitarian, matriarchal society, and that female divinities everywhere represent survivals of this early mode of religious expression. A stream of books by non-specialists, artists, psychotherapists, feminists and amateur historians has drawn attention to powerful and often neglected ancient images of the female. ‘These many voices have together been termed the ‘Goddess movement’. Some Goddess movement writers accuse the academics — archaeologists and ancient historians — of wilfully ignoring the evidence for female power in pre- history. Some have fulminated against the prejudice of conventional scholars for keeping the ‘real history’ of women in the dark. Contemporary academics on the other hand have, with a few notable exceptions, either remained silent, ignoring the claims, or have tended to dismiss the Goddess story as an inven- tion of polemic and hysteria. Is one side reinventing the past? What can or cannot be proved by the evidence from prehistory? Can we debate competing reconstructions of the past in a way which is both respectful and flexible? This book aims to address such questions from an archaeological viewpoint; we seek to bring a breath of fresh air, speak- ing ina spirit of enqui We approached ten scholars and invited them to write about their specialist areas of study. We asked them to be as open-minded as possible and to make their material and the grounds for their interpretations visible and accessible so that readers could make up their own minds. In this way we sought their help to breach the academic silence and enable the general reader to pick a path through the myths and the evidence in the Goddess debate. Why does it matter? Why is it important to us now to understand what hap- pened in those obscure corners of prehistory? There are many reasons for delving into the past, but people have felt this issue particularly to have a strong contemporary relevance. Modern campaigns for the ordination ofIntroduction a women and struggles for a fairer distribution of social power to women have sought inspiration and justification from the claim that women held those roles at the very beginning of human society. Opposition to those movements has countered that there has always been sexual asymmetry, that women have always been the ‘second sex’ and should stay so. If we see those modern move- ments which draw strength from the Goddess theory as progressive, it might seem chutlish to scrutinize their appropriation of the past. Tlowever, while the use of the "Goddess’ as a metaphor has been inspira- tional for many, the attempt to reconstruct a litera/ past has appealed to authoritarian attitudes and fundamentalist principles which we find deeply troubling, as we will explain below. Let us look briefly at the stories told by both the archaeologists and the Goddess writers; then we may be able to see in what ways this book interrupts, underscores or reshapes those narratives. The archaeologists’ story The discipline of archaeology is in its childhood. Born in the late nineteenth century, it slowly established an identity distinct from its sibling, anthropolog: Some of the most influential works on matriarchy and the ‘Goddes: emerged in those carly formative years before either discipline had cut its teeth. Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Mutterrecht (Mother-Right), published in 1861, introduced the idea of female power in prehistory. He argued that matriarchy, that is the rule of the mother over family and social institutions, arose from the close biological relationship between mother and ehild, but that this ‘primitive’ social structure evolved over time into the patriarchal system. Bachofen based his views largely on reading myth as a memory of historical reality, while interestingly conceding the absence of ‘the most elementary spade work’ in the domain of archaeological investigation.? Other writers, such as Tylor and Morgan, added their scholarly weight to this theory. In parallel with social developments the female ‘idols’ of ‘fertility cults’ were held to have developed into a more advanced male-focused religion. Similarly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Darwin, Sir James Frazer produced a mammoth work on religious thought, The Golden Bough (1911-15). This compilation of mythical and ethnological material set a mould by focusing on the relationship, in various cultural settings, of a maternal divinity and a male son-consort: the Great Goddess and the Dying God. This was a formation recognized in historical antiquity in the Near East, most famously in the cult of Cybele and Attis. Through Frazer's writings this template influenced perceptions of Greek religion and even of prehistoric cultures, such as the Bronze Age ‘Minoan’ civilization.> In the early twentieth century while Sigmund Freud was presenting his the- ories about the sexual feelings of the male child for his mother, psycho-anthro- pological books such as Robert Briffault’s The Mothers (1927) helped maintain8 ANCIENT GODDESSES a male academic consensus. The “Goddess and her son-consort’ became a catch-all for the interpretation of primitive religion, and terms like ‘Mother Goddess’ and ‘Great Goddess’ were used unquestioningly of the archaeological material emerging from Greece, Malta and the north-west European megaliths. In the 1950s, during the post-war re-emphasis of women’s role wi family, the publication in English of the work of Carl Gustav Jung assigned the Great Mother transcendental status as an eternal ‘archetype’ independent from, predating and influencing human society. He assigned her an immutable psychic reality (‘As a primal being the mother represents the unconscious’) and suggested that the paternal principle of Logos (consciousness) has to struggle for its ‘deliverance from the mother’, stating that ‘its first creative act of liber- ation is matricide’.® Psychology interacted with archaeology and this period saw further books, such az Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955), O.G.S. Crawford, The Eye Goddess (1957) and E.0. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (1959). The latter refers in his pref- ace to the prominence and prevalence of the Goddess cult throughout the ancient world as: an essential element very deeply laid ... centred in and around the mysterious processes of fecundity, birth and generation.? It was against this background that James Mellaart’s publication of his exeava- tions at Catalhiyiik in Turkey (1967} and the first of Marija Gimbutas’ publi- cations on prehistoric European religion (The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 1974}, both stressing the importance of a Goddess, caught the atten- tion of many in the newly emerging women’s movement. Interestingly, at the very point where feminists took up the story, many archaeologists turned their backs. In the late 1960s came a sea change in archaeological attitudes to the Goddess story: Peter Ucko’s 1968 book on anthropomorphic figurines from Egypt and Crete and a seminal article by Andrew Fleming, “The Myth of the mother-goddess’, in the following year both pointed out the flimsiness of the evidence, and what massive assumptions had been built into the existing consensus.8 At this time archaeology took an important general change of direction. This ‘New Archaeology’ sought explicitly to explain change and the over-areh- ing processes — especially social and economic — through which it came about. This ‘processual archaeology’ of the 1970s and early 80s was often coupled with rather negative views on the possibility of effectively studying religion through archaeological materials. The emergence in the 1980s of a number of yet newer approaches — of which cognitive, contextual and feminist archaeology are most relevant here — created a renewed interest in the ritual and symbolic world. Within this more fractured academic arena the approaches of the French structuralists and the later post-structuralists, originally developed to analyse