The Mother Goddess

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.

Catalhoyuk in Anatolia is the test case, because it produced the most cited figurines and has been excavated again with modern recording. The renewed work found that the great majority of figurines from the site are not female at all; that many are animals or ambiguous forms; that they were overwhelmingly recovered from middens and other rubbish contexts rather than from anything resembling a shrine; and that they appear to have been made quickly and discarded. A figure treated as a goddess in the older literature turns out to be one item within a large and varied assemblage whose disposal pattern does not look cultic.

The general objections are three. Identifying a female figure as a goddess rather than as a doll, a charm, an ancestor, a portrait or a teaching aid is an assumption that the object does not make for the archaeologist. A single continuous cult across thousands of years and a continent is not something the material can support, since the figurines differ enormously across regions and periods. And the argument tends to be circular, with the figurines proving the religion and the religion explaining the figurines.

Cynthia Eller has made the further argument that the matriarchal prehistory story, whatever its appeal, is not a sound foundation for a contemporary movement, because a myth that can be refuted is a fragile thing to build on. The atlas records the Mother Goddess as a useful comparative category and an unreliable historical claim, which is exactly what it is.