How the Category Was Built

The category has a nineteenth century pedigree. Johann Jakob Bachofen argued in 1861 that human society had passed through a stage of mother right before patriarchy, reading it out of Greek myth. James Frazer assembled dying and rising gods and their consorts from across the ancient world into a single comparative pattern. Jane Ellen Harrison and the Cambridge ritualists proposed a pre-Olympian Greek religion centred on a great mother whom the Homeric gods displaced. By the early twentieth century a scheme was available in which an original goddess religion stood behind the historical pantheons.

Archaeology supplied what looked like evidence. Female figurines from Palaeolithic and Neolithic Europe and the Near East, from the Willendorf figure onward, were interpreted as cult objects, and the concentration of them at some Neolithic sites was read as the residue of a widespread cult.

Marija Gimbutas gave the argument its fullest and most influential form from the 1970s. On her account Old Europe was a peaceful, matrifocal, goddess-worshipping civilisation whose symbolic system can be read from pottery motifs and figurines, and which was overrun by patriarchal Indo-European speakers arriving from the steppe. The steppe migration part of her work has since been substantially supported by ancient DNA studies. The goddess civilisation part has not fared the same way.