Great Goddess

The Venus of Moravany. Venus figurines were among the earliest works of human culture and are widely hypothesized to have represented an epitome of femininity and fertility in the cultures that created them.

Great Goddess is the concept of an almighty goddess or mother goddess, or a matriarchal religion. Apart from various specific figures called this from various cultures, the Great Goddess hypothesis, is a postulated fertility goddess supposed to have been worshipped in the Neolithic era across most of Eurasia at least. Scholarly belief in this hypothesis has reduced in recent decades, though theological belief in a Great Goddess is common in the Goddess movement.

Hypothesis

Fragmentary Snake Goddess icon from Cnossos, illustrated for the Outline of History by H. G. Wells

The Great Goddess hypothesis theorizes that, in Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa, a singular, monotheistic female deity was worshiped. The theory was first proposed by the German Classicist Eduard Gerhard in 1849, when he speculated that the various goddesses found in ancient Greek paganism had been representations of a singular goddess who had been worshipped far further back into prehistory. He associated this deity with the concept of Mother Earth, which itself had been developed in the 18th century by members of the Romanticist Movement.

Soon after, this theory began to be adopted by other classicists in France and Germany, such as Ernst Kroker, Fr. Lenormant and M. J. Menant, who further brought in the idea that the ancient peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia had influenced the Greek religion, and that therefore they also had once venerated a great goddess. These ideas amongst various classicists echoed those of the Swiss judge J. J. Bachofen, who put forward the idea that the earliest human societies were matriarchal, but had converted to a patriarchal form in later prehistory. Commenting on this idea, the historian Ronald Hutton (1999) remarked that in the eyes of many at the time, it would have been an obvious conclusion that "what was true in a secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one."

In 1901, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans—who in an 1895 work had dismissed the Great Goddess theory—changed his mind and accepted the idea whilst excavating at Knossos on Crete, the site of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation. After unearthing a number of female figurines, he came to believe that they all represented a singular goddess, who was the Minoan's chief deity, and that all the male figurines found on the site represented a subordinate male god who was both her son and consort, an idea that he based partially upon the later classical myth of Rhea and Zeus. In later writings in ensuing decades he went on to associate these Neolithic and Bronze Age images with other goddesses around the Near East. As Hutton pointed out, "his influence made this the orthodoxy of Minoan archaeology, although there was always a few colleagues who pointed out that it placed a strain upon the evidence."

Examples

Specific examples include:

• Great Goddess, also known as the Triple Goddess or Diana, an important feminine deity of the Neopagan religion of Wicca
• Great Goddess, referring to the ancient Anatolian goddess Cybele; also associated with Rhea (mother of the gods) and Gaia (mother of the Titans)
• Great Goddess, anglicized form of the Roman Magna Dea
• Great Goddess, anglicized form of the Sanskrit Mahadevi, the Shakti sum of all goddesses
• Magu (deity), a deity in Chinese and Korean myth
• Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, an ancient Mesoamerican deity

See also

• Goddess worship (disambiguation)
• Great Mother (disambiguation)

References

Works cited

• Evans, Arthur (1895). Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Evans, Arthur J. (1901–1902). "The Palace of Knossos". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 8: 1–94. doi:10.1017/S0068245400001404.
• Gerhard, Eduard (1849). Über Metroen und Götter-Mutter (in German). Berlin: G. Reimer.
• Hutton, Ronald (1999). The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press.
• Hutton, Ronald (2022). Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-26101-1.

Further reading

General studies

• Baring, Anne; Cashford, Jules (1991). The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Viking.
• Budin, Stephanie L. (2011). The Myth of the Mother-Goddess. Cambridge University Press.
• Eliade, Mircea (1978). A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. University of Chicago Press.
• Gimbutas, Marija (1999). The Living Goddesses. University of California Press.
• Goodison, Lucy; Morris, Christine, eds. (1998). Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. British Museum Press.
• Marler, Joan (1991). The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. HarperOne.
• Neumann, Erich (1955). The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton University Press.

Archaeology and historical perspectives

• Eller, Cynthia (2000). The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future. Beacon Press.
• Hawkes, Jacquetta (1968). Dawn of the Gods. Random House.
• Mellaart, James (1967). Çatalhöyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. Thames & Hudson.
• Tringham, Ruth; Conkey, Margaret (1993). "Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology". Feminisms in the Academy. University of Michigan Press.
• West, M. L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford University Press.

Religious and mythological studies

• Campbell, Joseph (1959). The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. Viking Press.
• Kinsley, David (1986). Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. University of California Press.
• Robins, Gay (1993). The Women in Ancient Egypt. Harvard University Press.
• Walker, Barbara (1983). The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper & Row.
• West, Martin L. (2007). Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Oxford University Press.

Feminist and contemporary spirituality perspectives

• Christ, Carol P. (1997). Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Routledge.
• Eisler, Riane Tennenhaus (1987). The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Cambridge, MA: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-250287-5. OCLC 15222627.
• Spretnak, Charlene (1978). Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Beacon Press.
• Starhawk (1979). The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess. HarperOne.