Goddess Movement - Prehistoric Cultures

Prehistoric Cultures

The Goddess movement draws some of its inspiration from the work of such archaeologists as Marija Gimbutas (Gimbutas 1974 and 1989, Mellaart 1967), whose interpretation of artifacts excavated from the region she called "Old Europe" points to societies of Neolithic Europe that were "matristic" or "goddess-centered".

Heide Göttner-Abendroth, working in the 1970s to mid 1980s and writing originally in German, called these cultures "matriarchies", introducing a feminist field of "Modern Matriarchal Studies". She presented a theory of the transformation of prehistoric cultures in which the local goddess was primary and the male god, if any, derived his power from the goddess. In what she terms the "Downfall", which occurred at varying times in various cultures, the gods overcame the goddesses and made them subservient. (Göttner-Abendroth 1987) This is believed to mirror the gradual suppression of women and the rise of patriarchy.

Göttner-Abendroth's terminology is idiosyncratic. The term "matriarchy" to describe these cultures has been rejected by many Goddess-movement scholars, especially those in North America, because it implies female domination as the reverse of the male domination present in patriarchy. These scholars make the point that such a reversal was not the case; rather these prehistoric cultures were egalitarian and had a social structure that included matrilineality - inheritance of assets and parentage traced through the maternal line (Lerner 1987, Eisler 1987, Gimbutas 1989, Christ 1997, Dashu 2000).

According to Eisler, cultures in which women and men shared power, and which worshipped female deities, were more peaceful than the patriarchal dominator societies that followed. Eisler proposed the terms "dominator" and "androcracy" instead of "patriarchy", and "partnership" and "gylany" (taking the first letters of the prefixes gyne and andro and linking them with an "l") instead of "matriarchy". Others use the terms matrifocal (Christ 1997, Pollack 1997, Starhawk 1979) and matrix. Carol P. Christ (1997:58-59) writes, "The term matriarchy is not used by scholars who are aware of its controversial history."

Ian Hodder's reinterpretation of Gimbutas and Mellaart (2004) disputes the existence of "matriarchal" or "matrifocal" cultures, as do some other archaeologists and historians in this field (Hutton, 1991, Tringham & Conkey, 1998, Meskell, 1998, see also Eller 2000). However, mythologist Joseph Campbell compared the importance of Gimbutas' output to the historical importance of the Rosetta Stone in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Campbell provided a foreword to Gimbutas' The Language of the Goddess (1989) before he died, and often said how profoundly he regretted that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe had not been available when he wrote The Masks of God.

Marija Gimbutas, dubbed "Grandmother of the Goddess Movement" in the 1990s, continues to be cited by many feminist writers, including Max Dashu. Many other scholars, including Joan Marler and Marguerite Rigoglioso, support her work. (Marler 2003 and 2004, Rigoglioso 2002). Still, Gimbutas' theories had been widely criticized as mistaken on the grounds of dating, archeological context and typologies Some archaeologists consider her goddess hypothesis implausible some regard her work as pseudo-scholarship.