There is a fairly popular belief that there once existed a much older, pre- patriarchal culture in Europe were a great Mother, or Earth Goddess, was worshipped and that society, as well as religion, was female-centred.
In other words, there is a belief that, as archaeomythologist 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”
So, I decided to explore the roots of this view and ended up discovering that the idea of prehistory being matriarchal and connected to the worship of a singular female deity, the Great Goddess, had a lot more to do with:
Colonialism
19th century scientific thinking
Negative reactions to modernism
than, for example, archeological eviedence of the worship of Goddess figures in Neolithic Europe.
So, I wanted to share with you the story of what I found when I researched this. It’s a story in three parts.
Part 1: Colonialism
During the 17th and 18th centuries, increased European colonial expansion in to North America brought Europeans in to contact with Indigenous Americans, were they encountered matrilineal customs.
In 1672 English “Adventurer” John Lederer published “The Discoveries of John Lederer, in three several Marches from Virginia, to the West of Carolina, and other parts of the Continent”.
It contains the first ever published account of something called matrilineal exogamy, where individuals marry outside of the group and descent is traced through the mother-line, not the father’s, which Lederer had witnessed was the custom for the Tutelo, a Siuoan Tribe.
Then, a few years later, in 1724, a French Jesuit missionary called Father Lafitau, wrote the following about the high status of women amongst the Iroquois:
“Nothing...is more real than this superiority of the women. It is essentially the women who embody the Nation, the nobility of blood, the genealogical tree, the sequence of generations and the continuity of families. It is in them that all real authority resides: the land, the fields and all their produce belongs to them: they are the soul of the councils, the arbiters of peace and war: they conserve the finances or the public treasury; it is to them that slaves are given: they make the marriages, the children are in their domain and it is in their blood that the order of succession is based"
Although many people found these accounts interesting, it wasn’t really until the 19th century that the high status of women and matrilineal customs of other cultures really began to interest early pioneers of sociology and anthropology back in Europe.
But, to understand how it is that these early social scientists came to the conclusion that the earliest human societies were matriarchal before they became patriarchal, we first have to consider the particular types of thinking, or ways of knowing, they applied in order to reach that conclusion.
So, this brings us to the next part of the story.
Part 2: 19th century scientific thinking
Science in the 19th century was dominated by two modes of thinking (or ways of knowing):
Evolutionary models of social organisation
Rationalism
Evolutionary models were very much in vogue at the time, this was after all the era of Darwin’s Origin of Species. And early sociologists and anthropologists did something similar to argue that societies had progressed, or evolved from Savagery, to Barbarism, to Civilisation. This was, of course, also a very handy model for justifying imperialism at the time, because if you can separate humankind into the ”savage” and the “civilised” then, of course, you can justify colonialism as a “civilising mission” (which they did, backed up by the best “science” of the time).
Rationalism, then, was the other key pillar of scientific thought during the 19th century. The view was that knowledge was either rational or non-rational, logical or illogical and reasoned or intuited, were rationality, logic and reason were seen as superior, and therefore, the only valid forms of knowledge. Another really important aspect of that is that everything rational was considered masculine and everything irrational, like feelings, intuition, emotion, were considered feminine.
So, when you put all of this together, what you get is that:
The basic premise of 19th century approaches to culture and studying society was that humankind progresses from a time of non-rationality to rationality, from feminine to masculine, and from primitive to refined.
That this was how 19th century thinkers viewed, and therefore made sense of and organised, the world cannot be overstated.
With this as the organising lens they were applying to view the world, early sociologists and anthropologists began to look at those accounts from Colonial America and said, well, if these “savages”, which was how they viewed Indigenous Americans, have a matrilineal or matriarchal culture well then that must be the earliest form of human society.
It was from this analysis, in applying the evolutionary models of social organisation, that the belief that the earliest societies — human society in its most “primitive” form— were matriarchal or matrilineal orginated. When this was the conclusion, they believed that “civilised” society had therefore transitioned from being matriarchal to patriarchal at some point in the past as it advanced.
This is the origin of the belief that ancient societies were female-centred, and you can see this red thread of thought running through the writing of all the early sociologists and anthropologists of this time.
This red thread begins in 1767 when Adam Ferguson published his “Essay on the History of Civil Society” were he drew on the accounts of people like Father Lafitau to argue that human society in it’s “rude state” was matrilineal. Through him, what had previously been singular accounts of matrilineality amongst a particular peoples, had now been generalised to an entire period of history.
In 1861, Swiss jurist Johan Jakob Bachofen published “Das Muttrecht” which argued that early agricultural societies operated according to a system of “mother-right”, were descent was traced through the mother and women held high status.
In 1865 J.P. McLellan published “Primitive Marriage” were he stated he had proven that “the system of kinship through females…. was a more archaic system of kinship that the system of kinship through males”, and so society had not started out as patriarchal but as matriarchal. Again, it was this evolutionary model of social change that was being applied to reach that conclusion.
Then, in 1881, Lewis Henry Morgan, published “Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines”, were he drew on his first-hand experiences of the kinship systems of Indigenous American tribes, and argued that early societies were organised around a “matron of the household” who decided who got what.
Morgan’s account of a matrilineal clan existing according to a practice of “communisim in living” really grabbed the attention of Friederich Engels and his close friend, Karl Marx, as it helped to strengthen the ideas they were developing which would later come to underpin socialism.
In, 1884, encouraged by Marx. Engels published “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan”. It was a text that would define sociological thinking for generations. In it Engels presented the matrilineal clan as the first, the baseline, family form created by humans. It is also from this work the now, taken-for-granted view that patriarchy derived from a male desire to pass wealth down the male-bloodline comes from As Engels famously wrote:
“The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.
So, to conclude part two of the story, by the end of the 19th century, out of a petri dish of colonialism, evolutionary models of social organisation and rationalism, the story of the past that had stuck was that:
“Matriarchies were the primordial condition of mankind”, and that “modern societies had passed through a matriarchal phase during which descent was reckoned exclusively in the female line and women were politically dominant over men” (Chris Knight, Professor of Anthropology)
But to really understand how it was that ”matriacharies as the primordial condition of mankind” ended up being directly connected with a goddess-centred spirituality in prehistory, we have to look to another cultural development of the 19th century, which brings us to —
Part 3: Negative reactions to modernism
The 19th century was marked by an artistic and intellectual movement known as The Romantic Period
It was a reactionary response to modernism, a desire to push back against the technological and industrial progression of the time and reclaim what was being lost in the name of progress, and it was all about idealising nature, glorifying the past and promoting feelings and irrationality.
Under the Romantics “The Goddess” got a Rebrand. Within the arts, goddesses began to be associated, in a way they had never been before, with the natural world, as a representation and personification of 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”(Professor of History, Ronald Hutton).
Around this time, other important developments and findings began to happen in other fields:
Folklorists and mythologists began applying social evolutionary models to the study of myth and folklore, which led them to conclude and construct that folk customs and myths were ‘survivals’ or ‘remnants’ of a primitive past, or early society.
A German classicist, Eduard Gerhard, introduced in 1849, the idea that behind all the Classical Greek Goddesses, was one singular primordial Great Goddess – A mother goddess.
Archaeologists begain finding naked, large-breasted, female figurines in paleolithic and neolithic dig sites in south-eastern Europe
Unsure how to interpret these figurines, archaeologists looked to the knowledge of the past being presented by the social sciences and art historians at the time. In other words, to interpret these figures aracheologists looked to:
The social evolutionary models which considered matriarchy and matrilineality as the earliest forms of human society
The direct connection being made between nature and the Goddess amongst the Romantics
The belief in a singular Great Goddess as the first religion that was emerging amongst Classicists.
The result being that archaeologists, now, claimed to have found material evidence for the veneration of a great mother goddess in early European societies.
What all of this cross-polinating between different fields meant was, that
By the mid 19th century this image [of the Great Goddess] was already starting to combine with another, which had emerged from a debate between lawyers over the origins of society and of the human family. One of the contesting theories in this exchange, articulated first in 1862 by the Swiss J.J. Bachofen, was that the earliest human societies had been woman-centred, altering to a patriarchal form before the beginning of history; what was true in the human sphere had apparently to be true in the divine one. The notion of a primitive matriarchy was first fully expressed in Britain by J.F. McLellan’s Primitive Marriage (1875), and from 1903 Jane Ellen Harrison combined it with that of the Great Goddess to produce a full-blown vision of how prehistoric southeastern Europe should have been” (Professor of History, Ronald Hutton).
And so, there it was, the work of the early sociologists and anthropologists, which stemmed from evolutionary models of society applied to colonisers accounts of North America, had now been directly connected to a goddess-oriented spirituality in prehistoric Europe.
In 1903, Jane Ellen Harrison, a British Classicist, combined these two threads together, and set forth an image of a prehistory as one in which humans lived in harmony and connection with nature, worshipped a singular feminine deity who represented the earth, and existed within a female-centred, peaceful, creative society, before it was destroyed by patriarchal invaders whose male-deities desecrated the divine feminine. This is a popular image of the past that many of us still hold today.
Interestingly, it is also with Harrison that another belief you may be familiar with —the idea of the feminine having three aspects— originates. However, in her wrok and writing she only named the first two; the maiden and the mother. The third was named, much later, as the crone by Robert Graves in his hugely famous work “The White Goddess” in 1946.
However, around the turn of the 20th century, anthropologists and sociologists began to distance themselves from the idea of societies having been matriarchal before they were patriarchal, it was a line of thinking that had become increasingly acccepted amongst archeologists, classicists, art historians and theologians.
Then, another key turning point in the story came about when, in the 1940s and 1950s, Jacquetta Hawkes, a British archeologist set forth a theory that the megalithic Neolithic societies of Western Europe had had a Great Goddess religion, and a woman-centred society, along with being nature based and peaceful, before it was overthrown by the warrior culture of the Bell Beaker people in the Bronze Age. Essentially, she was applying the view of Jane Ellen Harrison, but to Western, rather than Southeastern, Europe.
With Hawkes, the idea of a matriarchal, goddess-worshipping pre-history had now been applied to Western Europe, and has remained a popular way of viewing and constructing the past ever since.
So infulential, it even influenced the field of psychology.
In the 1960s, psychologist, Erich Neumann published “The Great Mother: an analysis of the archetype”.
In it he drew heavily on the findings of female figurines in archaeological dig sites to argue that, if humans held such a desire to physically express the Great Mother archetype (i.e. in the physical form of the figurines) then it must be an inherent part of the human psyche.
The belief in a matriarchal pre-history, evidenced in the worship of a great mother goddess had now come full circle.
It had become a self-reinforcing ideology; psychologists could base their arguments on the findings of archaeologists, who interpreted their findings through the sociological and anthropological evolutionist models of social organisation, and archaeologists could cite psychologists to declare that a primordial Great Goddess must be a reality if psychology had determined it innate to the human psyche.
The Present
These days, the idea of a matriarchal prehistoric Europe, centred around the worship of a Mother Goddess, is considered overly simplistic. It doesn’t stack up with the vast evidence of local, regional and contextual differences in the archaeological record, and is often criticised as being overly limiting because it replaced a male-centred view of the world with a female-centred one (which is not very balanced).
Yet, all the ideas that I’ve described here, those ways of knowing that have been applied to study the past, have really stuck and do continue to influence how we view stories about ancient goddesses, and underpin why we end up looking to them as evidence of women having high social status in ancient societies, particularly in Ireland.
I am not saying that’s wrong but what I am saying is that it’s important to understand the back story of how that belief came about, because, as with many things, it is not so much rooted in evidence of a veneration of female-deities as it is in how a bunch of people in the past chose to study a time in history and the particular ways of thinking they used to make sense of it.
Post-script
The archeological dig site of Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey has been at the centre of the debate surrounding archaeological evidence of goddess worship and the high statue of females in early socities since it was first excavated in the 1960s by James Mellart. Drawing on all the modes of thinking and ways of knowing discussed here, Mellart concluded that the poeople of Çatalhöyük had a Mother Goddess religion. This went on to inspire extremely popular texts throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, such as the work of Marija Gimbutas (“The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe”) which presented ‘Old Europe’ as having been a female-centred, matrilineal culture, closely connected to nature and engaged in the worship of a creator Mother Goddess. Such a view of the past caught the attention of second-wave feminists throughout this period, who drew on such writing to argue against the idea of universal patriarchy. It was through this period that this association between goddess veneration, matriarchal socieites and prehistory or “Old Europe” became the accepted view of the past in popular writing.
For a more recent update on how the religion of Çatalhöyük is now considered to have been one of ancestor, rather than goddess, worship, and material evidence points towards a society that was reltively gender-blind but organised around the esteem of Elders watch this excellent talk by Ian Hodder, one of the most recent archaeologists to oversee the continued excavation of Çatalhöyük.
POV: Ancient Europe was a matriarchal Mother-Goddess worshipping culture?