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Antediluvian Goddesses
If, as Xenophanes observed, humans create gods in their own image (21B15 D-K) it seems curious that there is such sustained enthusiasm in modern times for an archetypal Mother Goddess. For unlike goddesses in Greek literature, the Mother Goddess does not think or speak or interact with other gods or humans. In what has been taken to be the authoritative book on the subject, Marija Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess, the female figures are shown sitting or standing, sometimes alone and sometimes flanked by infants or animals, remote from the world of other gods or adult humans.1 The Goddess is distinguished in these images not for her wit or moral strength or vengeful anger, but for her prominent breasts, gaping mouth, and her swollen belly, as if she were synonymous with her reproductive organs. Nonetheless, this Goddess is celebrated in Wicca and in several New Age cults,2 as well as in a lively popular literature.3 The authors of books about the Goddess take it for granted that her existence has been confirmed by the discovery of prehistoric artifacts. Joseph Campbell, who is regarded many people in the U.S.A. as an authority on all ancient mythologies, stated that Gimbutas’ work provided a “lexicon of the pictorial script” of Goddess religion. According to Campbell, Goddess religion was an expression of “that primordial attempt on humanity’s part to understand and live in harmony with the beauty and wonder of Creation” in contrast to the story of creation in Genesis, and the “manipulated systems of the West”. As he saw it, rediscovery of her religion addressed the “need in our time for a general transformation of consciousness.”4 But could a religion that so precisely met the needs of the twentieth century C.E. have existed in the twentieth century B.C.E.? Certainly not in the form that Gimbutas, Campbell, or any of their predecessors imagined it. The present book shows why. Editors Lucy Goodison (University College, London) and Christine Morris (Trinity College, Dublin) explain in a brief, but informative introduction that in reality the Goddess is a recent creation, not of women in the distant past, as many of her enthusiasts suppose, but of male academics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ktistes of her cult was of course J.J. Bachofen, but she had influential priests like C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann.5 Their theories influenced the work of prehistoric archaeologists, such as Sir Arthur Evans and James Mellaart. As the women movement gathered force, the notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess was taken up earnestly even by academics like Gimbutas and historian Gerda Lerner.6 The moral sub-text of these works leant credibility to their arguments: most of the evils of the present-day world had been introduced as a result of the dominance of men. By the 1960s archaeologists had begun to question the existence of the Goddess, in part because they saw what extravagant deductions were being made on the basis of a fragmentary body of material evidence. How (for example) was it possible to know what Cycladic figurines represented, in the absence of written evidence, and when there were no exact records of the proveniences in which the artifacts had been found? The authors of the essays in the book have reexamined the evidence “in areas where claims for the Goddess have been most insistent”. The result, as the editors put it, is a “revelation. Not of a single, fundamental pattern universally repeating itself, but of a picture of staggering diversity”. There are many different kinds and types of goddesses, but no Goddess. Here is a brief account of the some of the significant material in this detailed and extensively documented book.
2020 •
The short bibliography presented in this paper relates to the critique to the "Great Goddess", a notion that several scholars, first of all Marija Gimbutas, believed to be present and well rooted in many different and distant in time and space prehistoric civilizations, as a sort of "feminine archetype".
Today, great interest in the Ancient Goddess cult is still being revived. With the way the Goddess manifests herself as symbolizing an earthly and cosmic source to the universe, some women have found refuge in the symbolical image of the Mother Goddess. The impetus towards the Goddess movement came from an archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas. With the return of the Goddess, the new power of the feminine is being expressed in all areas of life. Other major women writers and exponents of the Goddess religion expressed the self-transformation and empowerment and various aspects of feminist social vision of women in their work. In this paper I will also focus on the archetypal image of the Great Mother Goddess which is expressed in rituals, art, mythology and dreams. In Jungian parlance the Mother Archetype resides in every human psyche and is a symbol of protection and fertility and regeneration. This concept also belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of the mother-goddess. The discussion of ‘Feminist Archetypal Psychology’ shows that the Great Mother Goddess archetype is activated and is returning to consciousness. The Great Mother Goddess archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. Keywords: Archaeology, Art, Great Mother Goddess, Marija Gimbutas, C.G. Jung, Feminist Archetypal Psychology. 1.1
Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book
Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book1990 •
This book is a source book in two ways. It traces the sources of early historic Indo-European (Greco-Roman, Indic, Iranian, Germanic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic, Irish, and Welsh) goddesses and heroines, beginning with Neolithic iconography and continuing through the iconography of Near Eastern goddesses and texts dating from the third through the first millennia BCE. It is found that Neolithic European bird and snake iconography, as well as iconography, functions, and epithets, are given to many Indo-European female figures. The other way in which this is a source book is that the author has translated texts from all of these cultures, so that the reader may have primary sources for all of these female figures.
Cult of the Goddess by National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology, New Delhi
Preface: Cult of the GoddessThe conference on the Cult of the Mother Goddess was not designed by us as a sop to gender concerns but to deal with certain existential problems of understanding. When Aphrodite, coming upon her sculpture cried, "a la s, where did Praxiteles see me naked," she was deploring the profane eye cast on her sacred form. When Maitreyl spurned knowledge, which could only add to the sum of mortality, she was seeking knowledge of a sacred dimension of life, which had nothing to do with religion or theology. When we address the Mother Goddess cult as a continuing strand in Indian imagination, we not only question the ongoing reduction of all sacred and ecological categories to economic and production categories, but also propose to exorcise the long shadow of desacralization, technification and nihilism that darken our thresholds today.
Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni
The "Goddess Theory" and the Eranos Mythology. Crafting an Archaeological Outlook for the Neolithic "Religion"2023 •
From the 1970s to the 1990s, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas developed the “Goddess Theory,” focusing on a divine female figure worshipped in “Old Europe” and displaced by Metal Ages’ patriarchal warrior cultures. Influenced by Joseph Campbell’s views on the contrast between Neolithic “mystical-emotional religion” of a Great Mother Earth and Iron Age patriarchal religions of groups like the Indo-Ary- ans and Semites, Gimbutas crafted an archaeological narrative of these supposed Neolithic beliefs. Her theory significantly influenced the second wave of feminism in North America and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. However, Jo Ann Hackett observed that postwar feminists adopted not ancient “religions” but “modern West- ern scholars’ fantasies.” Hence, the article explores how the Eranos circle’s propa- gation of Great Mother theories from 1933 to 1948 influenced Gimbutas’s research, and how these scholars helped forge new mythologies. These mythologies, influenced by Jungian psychology, were projected onto archaeological data, thereby altering its interpretation up until the late twentieth century.
The historical transition from the Late Antique world to the Early Middle Ages was characterized by the decline of traditional polytheistic paganism and its replacement by Christian Trinitarian monotheism in Europe. In the early modern era colonial expansion and missions established this form of religion throughout the world (Neill, 1975 [1964]; Lewis, 2004). With the advent of modernity and particularly the Enlightenment, reason and secularism challenged Christian normativity and the influence of churches declined. The secularization thesis initially argued that religion would wither and die entirely; such faith would be unnecessary, as science would provide undisputed and rationally evidenced meaning for human life (Clark, 2003: 559-560). However, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an upsurge in scholarly and popular interest in non-Christian religions, both ancient and modern. In the twentieth century these intellectual currents crossed the boundary between academic interest and actual religious practice, and dramatically manifested in a variety of new religions devoted to the revived worship of the Goddess, including Wicca (the Craft), Feminist Spirituality and Ecopaganism (Hanegraff, 1998: 85-88). This chapter investigates the mythology of originary matriarchy and the Great Goddess, and examines Wicca, Feminist Spirituality (primarily Goddess-centred but also within the Judeo-Christian tradition) and the broader Pagan movement as new traditions actively reviving the Goddess. The Goddess serves to critique the Christian God; her gender challenges the masculine norm and her sometime multiplicity challenges monotheistic unity and erasing of difference (Morgan, 1999: 51-59). Worshippers of the Goddess, male and female, view themselves as revitalizing a decadent and dying Western society, and as participants in a revolution that will save the environment and assure a better future for humanity (Rountree, 2002: 486). Finally, this chapter will comment briefly on the effect of the return of the Goddess on the academic study of religion.
2018 •
This book fills the very real need for an affordable, accessible, academic textbook featuring Goddesses from a wide range of world religious, cultural and mythological traditions. As a textbook, its primary audience is professors and students in university and college courses in Goddess Studies, Religious Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. It will also be of interest to students and instructors in the many Goddess-themed courses outside the academy. The contributors to the textbook were selected for their scholarly expertise and qualifications in their respective areas of study, both established and emerging scholars from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Scandinavia, and Australia. The Goddess traditions surveyed in the 22 chapters include the Female Divine in the major world religions—not only Hinduism and Buddhism, but also in the “Western Religions” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, popularly regarded as impervious to the Goddess. The coverage ranges from ancient to contemporary, Mago to Mary Magdalene. As such, it is a unique and much-needed resource for students and faculty, as well as a treasury of Goddess scholarship.
S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies
Nané Jordan and Chandra Alexandre eds., Pagan, Goddess, Mother (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2021), reviewed by Barbara Bickel2022 •
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