My journey with The Goddess and Myth

From enchantment to disenchantment, to asking better questions

“Myth and folklore; it's how we make sense of the world. It's how we make sense of ourselves. And it's how we make sense of each other. And it’s a big part of us staying in that enchantment and awe”

Women of Ireland Project Interview Participant

It’s no small thing to be a woman of a land named after a Goddess.

Éire (Éiru).

That really mattered to teenage-me. I read all the old Irish stories, myths and folklore I could get my hands on. I asked my parents to bring me to places like the Hill of Tara and Newgrange in the summer holidays, and any other stone circle, dolmen, and ‘sacred site’ we passed by on drives and days out across the country (yes, I wasn’t your ‘usual’ teenager!).

Anything ancient and old Ireland fascinated me, but there was a particular category of “really cool” reserved for the Goddesses of Ireland and the abundance of female characters in Irish myth. Éire, Áine, Fódla, Badb, Banba, Boann, Brigid, Maeve, Macha, Eimear, Eithniu, Flidais, Tailtu. I knew all their stories. And the message my teenage mind imbued from all that reading was very clear — Ireland was once a place were women held high status; the pre-eminence of the Goddesses in our mythos proved it.

Sunset on Knocknarea: Queen Maeve’s Grave

When I began the Women of Ireland Project, I knew next to nothing about women’s history or gender studies in the context of Ireland. My degrees and PhD were not even in any related fields. So, I had no ‘angle’ about women of Ireland I wanted to pursue. I came to this work green with little knowledge but lots of curiosity (and a research training in how to ask questions and methodically find things out).

The one bit of knowledge I did have on Mná na hÉireann (The Women of Ireland) was my teenage-hood’s intimate awareness of the power of The Goddess. I’d read enough to know that the preeminent position of Goddesses in Ireland’s myth and folklore was considered evidence that pre-Christian, pre-Colonial Ireland had once been a female-centred society. So strong was that learning, I’d woven it into my sense of self and my notion of what it meant to be a woman of Ireland.

It was a knowledge derived from what is a large, popular and prevalent body of work which considers the pre-eminence of goddesses in the mythos and cosmology of a culture as evidence of a matricentric (mother-centred) society. A view that first emerged in the mid-19th century¹ when archaeologists began unearthing heavy-breasted, voluptuous, naked anthropomorphic figures in palaeolithic and neolithic dig sites across Europe. This, they surmised, was evidence of a matricentric culture, centred around the worship of female deities and important “Mother Goddesses”.² And with it came the belief, now deeply embedded in the popular imagination, that European society had been matriarchal before it was patriarchal.

“The worship of female deities is connected to a mother-kinship system and ancestor worship in which the sexual identity of the head of the family and kin formulated the sexual identity of the supreme deity. In the mother-kinship system, woman as mother is the social centre... venerated... as the progenitor of the family and stem”

Marija Gimbutas: ‘The Civilisation of the Goddess” (p. 342)

This was why I had concluded that Ireland, given the predominance of Goddesses and powerful female characters in its mythology, had once been a place were women held high status. Through this, I read the force and fire I witnessed in so many ‘ordinary’ women of Ireland as vestiges of a much older female-centred culture. And everything just made sense.

When I began this project, I couldn’t wait to revisit these teenage readings. I threw my adult-self’s researcher training at it and dived into the archives, the academic papers, the books, the archeomythology and the history. I used my access to databases and libraries and went deep into the evidence for primordial matricentric ‘Mother Goddess’ cultures. And what I found devastated me.

“Two important general points emerge: first, the enormous powers and wide-ranging responsibilities of the goddesses; and, second, the inadvisability of making inferences from the status of female divinities about the status of women in society”.

Archaeologist Miranda Green: The Concept of the Goddess

The idea that, as archeomythologist Joan Marler puts it, “Women were honoured at the centre of early, non-patriarchal, non-warlike, egalitarian societies, and the powers of nature were originally venerated primarily in female forms”³ has less to do with the discovery of Goddess worship amongst the material culture of neolithic Europe than it has to do with colonialism, 19th-century scientific theories, negative reactions to the Industrial Revolution and modernity, and second-wave feminism. It’s a long and complex history of dominant 19th-century modes of thought colouring how people viewed and interpreted the past and the development of human society — and I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can.

The early 19th century pioneers of anthropology and sociology (influenced by Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” which was in vogue at the time) argued that human society had ‘evolved’ through three stages: barbarism, then savagery and, finally, civilisation. It was informed by the increasing colonisation of the ‘New World’ which brought Europeans into contact with ‘Savage Nations’. Many of the early ‘adventurers’ and missionaries spoke of and wrote about matrilineal customs being common amongst Indigenous Americans. Anthropologists and sociologists put two and two together, or rather, they conflated matriarchal with primitive and patriarchal with civilised and integrated it into their evolutionary models of societal development. From that point on, that human society developed from barbarism to savagery to civilisation was also taken to mean a progression from matriarchal to patriarchal (and, ergo, from non-rational to rational).

That “matriarchies were the primordial condition of mankind”⁴ became the de facto view of human history and one that “to nearly the end of the nineteenth century was accepted by social scientists practically without exception”.⁵

However, by the 1920s, social scientists were desperately trying to distance themselves from what was, by then, a discredited theory. But folklorists and mythologists, archaeologists, classicists, artists, authors, intellectuals, and creatives of the Romantic movement, and even psychologists, had already locked on to it.

In the Petri dish medium of 19th-century evolutionary models which believed humankind had progressed from a time of non-rationality to rationality, from feminine to masculine, and from primitive to civilised, grew the primordial “Mother Goddess” and a vision of prehistoric society as female-centred, nature-based, peaceable and egalitarian. She was a gradual outcome and creation of a complex cross-pollination across different fields and disciplines from the late 19th century into the 20th century.

Folklorists and mythologists used the evolutionary models of society to argue that folk customs and myths were ’survivals’ or ‘remnants’ of a primitive past. Primitive meant non-rational, and non-rational meant feminine, and all combined, primitive meant pre-patriarchal. Folk customs and myths were interpreted as ‘remnants’ and ‘survivals’ of a matrilineal or matriarchal primordial past. This was especially heightened in Ireland, where the ‘peasant’ Irish had long been dismissed as ‘feminine’ and ‘primitive’ by a colonial framework which viewed such things as ‘lesser’ and thus used them to diminish and devalue the people of Ireland, their culture and customs.

In the classics, Eduard Gerhard introduced the idea that behind all the classical Greek Goddesses was one singular primordial Great Goddess; the “Mother Goddess”. Numerous works in The Romantic movement — a reactionary response amongst artists to modernity and the increasing industrialisation of the period, which idealised nature and glorified the past— were inspired by this. Goddesses began to be associated in art and literature, in a way they had never been before, with the natural world. ‘The Goddess’ came to represent and personify nature:

“By the 1810s the divine feminine is personified either as the moon…. or the spirit of the green earth…. In the latter capacity, she often sheds any classical label altogether, becoming simply ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘Mother Nature’”

Prof. Ronald Hutton: ‘The Neolithic Great Goddess: A Study in Modern Tradition’ (p. 92)

In Ireland, the Romantic movement informed the Gaelic Revival and Irish Literary Revival. It was through this lens of folk customs as survivals of a primitive and pagan past that Gaelic folklore and myth were revisited and reinvigorated in a complex mix of romanticism and nationalism.

The end of the 19th century was also when archaeologists had begun to find female-looking figures in palaeolithic and neolithic dig sites in south-eastern Europe. Because their findings coincided with the establishment of evolutionary models of societal development (which considered matricentric societies the primordial baseline) in the social sciences, and when direct connections were being made between female deities and nature in the arts, and a belief in a singular Great Goddess as the first religion was emerging in the classics, archaeologists understandably drew on this frame of the past to conclude that the anthropomorphic figures they had found were material evidence of the veneration of a Great Mother Goddess in early human societies. By the 1950s, many esteemed archaeologists had even gone so far as to support a view that Neolithic Europe was a singular female deity venerating culture which stretched from Eastern Asia to the Atlantic fringes of Europe (i.e. Ireland). Yet, as the 1960s wore on, the validity of a Mother Goddess prehistory was being questioned strongly by archaeologists (there still had not been any absolute proof of Great Goddess veneration in prehistory) and just as other research fields had done earlier in the 20th century, they abandoned this version of the past.

However, the problem with science and academia is that when a mode of thinking or way of knowing gets rejected, the field tends to quietly move on, preferring to pretend it never was. The public is rarely notified. Consequently, popular writing on a topic often stays disjointed from and out-of-step with active and ongoing research.

This was the situation with ‘The Goddess’ when second-wave feminism began to emerge in the early 1960s. Keen to find an alternative spirituality to the monotheistic, patriarchal religions that had dominated all of known history, and argue against the belief in the universality of patriarchy, writings on prehistoric goddesses and primordial matriarchies found a new, and enthusiastic audience.

It was in this context that the influential and compelling work of archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas began to emerge. Gimbutas was renowned for her theories on Indo-Europeans and the foremost expert on the prehistory of Eastern Europe. She was also unusual amongst archaeologists in that she had not abandoned the idea that prehistoric European culture had been matricentric and Mother Goddess worshipping. Instead, she dedicated herself to arguing its validity.

In 1974 she published her book, “The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe”, the first of many texts, which argued that ‘Old Europe’ had once been a female-centred, peaceful, egalitarian, matrilineal culture, closely connected to nature and engaged in the worship of a creator Mother Goddess, before it was overwhelmed by the patriarchal warrior culture of the Indo-Europeans. In Gimbutas’ work there was a straight line from the sociologists of the 19th century who surmised that society had progressed from matricentric to patriarchal. Her work has inspired a huge body of popular writing which takes the worship of primordial Great Mother Goddess figures as the de facto society of the ancient world and interprets the prevalence of Goddesses in a culture’s mythos as evidence of this.

It was here, in these writings, that teenage-me had landed. Where I had formed my view that Ireland — with its sovereignty goddesses and strong female characters of myth and legend — had once been female-centred.

And now all of that was tainted.

I wanted to tell everyone how the idea of a matricentric prehistory had been abandoned (in the research) as overly simplistic and limiting. For how it painted European prehistory as one homogenous blob, overlooking the vast evidence of regional, local and contextual differences. How it ignored the identities, role and agency of individuals and was eviscerated for being no different to a male-dominant ideology; it simply replaced a male-centred view of the world with a female-centred one.

I could no longer read articles or accounts of any Goddess, which so often operate from a base-line belief that Goddess worship equals the high status of women in society (or a Female-centred society) without finding myself deeply enraged. Righteosuly wanting to scream “No, no, it’s not that simple”.

Even the concept of the ‘Maiden-Mother-Crone’ (as the stages women pass through in life), which is often portrayed as ‘ancient wisdom’ had been affected. I’d learned that Jane Ellen Harrison (the British classicist who was one of the first to propose that Mother Goddess and female-centred culture went together in prehistory) had named ‘The Maiden’ and ‘The Mother’ as the first two of three aspects of the feminine deity. And as she’d not named the third, Robert Graves had developed this as ‘The Crone’ in his hugely famous book “The White Goddess” in 1946**

In short, all this research had ripped my beliefs and my (so called) knowledge of the past, and what the preeminence of Goddesses meant, asunder. Me and ‘The Goddess’ had fallen out.

Then, last year, I took

Jimmy Ó Briain Billings

’ course “Decolonizing relationality in Ireland: unravelling whiteness and Irish identity”. It introduced me to the writing of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and her book “Hospicing Modernity”.

I think of something she says in it often:

“Storytelling in different cultures, especially in many Indigenous cultures, manifests in ways that are different from how it manifests in modernity. In many contexts, including my extended family, stories are not human-made tools of communication that aim to index the world into language, or to word the world. Instead, stories are entities that visit and move things in the world, in nonlinear time: they are stories that world the world….

If a person is not familiar with this type of storytelling… invariably some obvious questions come up: “Is it myth or reality?” “Is it science or folklore?” or “Is it true?” I have observed how the Indigenous people I work with answer the “is it true” question. They usually surprise people with an unexpected answer, which is generally a version of: “Sometimes.” Instead of “Is this story true?” or “What does this story mean?”—questions that come from the expectation that stories will describe reality and convey a fixed meaning— the approach to storytelling illustrated here invites us to ask, “What is this story trying to move?” and “What does it do over time and to time itself?”

I realised I had asked the wrong question of The Goddess.

I had I asked, is it true? Is it true that there was a Mother-Goddess, female-centred society in the ancient world?

A better question to ask (the right question to ask of myth) is ‘What is this story trying to move’?

Prof. Ronald Hutton, an expert on the development of the ‘Mother Goddess myth’ was on to something when he said “Whether or not there was an Age of the Goddess in Neolithic Europe, there certainly was one among European intellectuals between 1951 and 1963”⁶. Asking ‘what was being moved in the world’, when these European intellectuals created (or found) the Great Mother Goddess, and ‘what has this story done over time and to time itself’? is profoundly more enlightening than asking ‘Is this true’?

The concept of the Goddess has been a constant in Irish culture, ever-changing but ever-present. That is, after all, the inherent nature and power of myth. Myths are not static or bounded by time. They are of a time and of all time. They come into the world to do something — to help us make sense of ourselves, to explain something about the human condition and our culture. And that is why we need them.

In this long, painful and confusing journey, I have come to know and understand the Goddess as she should be. As a myth — a powerful story— that has visited the world over and over to move something in it. The Romantics understood this; they drew on Her to move a connection to nature at a time when the Industrial Revolution was separating people from place. Irish nationalists understood this; they drew on Her to inspire a sense of national identity when Ireland most needed it (revolution against Britain was cultural before it was political.)

And now it seems that She has returned once again to move something in the world. To move a reconnection with the energetic feminine at time when the balance has tipped too dangerously into the energetic masculine.

Has there ever been a more important time to be of a land named for a Goddess?

1. This view was first expressed by Johann Bachofen in 1861, in his book Das Mutterrecht.

2. Arslan, A. (2020). Beyond gender. Approaches to anthropomorphic imagery in prehistoric central Anatolia. In J. K. Koch & W. Kirleis (Eds.), Gender Transformations in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies (p. 22). Sidestone Press.

3. Marler, J. (2006). The Myth of Universal Patriarchy: A Critical Response to Cynthia Eller’s Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Feminist Theology, 14(2), 163–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/0966735006059510

4. Harris (1969, p. 85) quoted on pg. 7 of Knight, Chris. ‘Revisiting Matrilineal Priority’. Émergence et Évolution de La Parenté, edited by Jean Lassègue, Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2017, pp. 35–57. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsulm.9160.

5. Murdock (1949, p. 185) quoted on pg. 7 of Knight, Chris. ‘Revisiting Matrilineal Priority’. Émergence et Évolution de La Parenté, edited by Jean Lassègue, Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2017, pp. 35–57. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsulm.9160.

6. Pg. 96 in Hutton, Ronald. ‘The Neolithic Great Goddess: A Study in Modern Tradition’. Antiquity, 1997. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com/docview/217556104/abstract/3BCB89BD6EB14945PQ/1.

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**I find the ‘Maiden-Mother-Crone’ framework to be very helpful. However, I now look upon it for what it is — the poetic inspiration of Robert Graves as opposed to an ancient piece of wisdom long forgotten but recently revived.