Goddess

Goddesses in Ancient Religions

There are numerous accounts of goddesses in the local religions of ancient cultures, such as the cult of Cybele in ancient Greece, Isis in Egypt, Asherah and Anat in Canaan, Kuan Yin in China, and Prajapati in India. What we know about these goddesses is based partly on literary evidence (e.g., the poems of Homer and Hesiod or inscriptions on Egyptian tombs) and partly on archeological findings (e.g., excavations of temples, pottery, or votive offerings). But the interpretation of this material is difficult, and scholars continue to debate both the meaning of goddesses and their implications for human gender roles.

The apparent prominence of goddesses in various ancient civilizations has led some scholars to propose the theory that the predominance of patriarchal religions was preceded by an earlier, matriarchal age in which goddess worship was universal. This theory has its roots in the 19th-and early-20th-century scholars of myth, who saw goddess worship as rooted in primitive cultures that perceived motherhood as magical. That argument was first articulated by Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose book Mutterrecht (Mother-Right) traced the idea of mythical female power to ancient fertility cults. The theory was further supported by James Frazer, who in The Golden Bough compiled mythical examples from various cultures of a goddess and her dying son/male consort. The notion that religion began with female, rather than male, divine imagery was later strengthened by psychologists such as Carl Jung, who wrote extensively about the Great Mother as an archetypal being. In the mid-20th century, these mythical accounts were supplemented by archaeological findings of female figurines in “Old Europe,” Greece, Malta, Egypt, India, and the Near East, which were interpreted by some archeologists as evidence of a universal goddess culture. Perhaps the best known and most controversial work was that of Mariya Gimbutas, whose The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Europe caught the attention of feminist scholars seeking to recover lost or suppressed evidence of female divinity. Feminists postulated that human society began everywhere with goddess religion, whose priestesses fostered a peace-loving, egalitarian culture. That religion was violently suppressed some 4,000 years ago by the rise of warlike, nomadic tribes (the Aryan migration to India and the Israelites in the Near East), who imposed the patriarchal religions that are still with us today.

Other scholars reject this theory. They point out that in most cultures where goddesses were worshipped, they were part of a pantheon of various deities, both male and female, animal and spirit, which does not support the notion of one universal goddess as a kind of counterpoint to patriarchal monotheism. When we do have evidence for worship of a high goddess, it is still not clear what that meant for human women in that culture. For cultures where we have written documents, such as ancient India, Greece, or Rome, it appears that ancient goddesses were revered by both genders and that their cult was sometimes officiated by males and sometimes by females. Ordinary women in these societies, however, often had few rights and were treated as the property of men. In contrast, much of the evidence for a goddess-worshipping matriarchal society comes from preliterate cultures, the interpretation of which is impossible without [Page 475]conjecture. The determination of the meaning of a female stone figurine, for example, relies heavily on contextual factors, such as where it was found (e.g., in the ruins of a temple or by itself) and the other objects found with it (e.g., weapons or pottery), and these factors are subject to varying interpretations. Modern interpreters risk projecting contemporary readings onto ancient cultures. They assume, for example, that a figure with large breasts must be a mother goddess. But many ancient cultures symbolized the divine in animal form; thus, a stone figure of a human female could refer to a human woman rather than a goddess. We also lack information about the structure of these societies; thus, visual images of female participation in a typically male activity—for example, hunting—does not tell us that women shared equally in power or authority. In short, critics assert that there is insufficient evidence to verify the existence of universal goddess worship or a causal relationship between goddess religion and gender roles.

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