2. To 15,000 Mother Earth and Great Goddesses?

Female goddesses in all their sexualized glory can be found across the globe in the ancient world. What can these goddesses tell us about pre-historic and ancient faiths, and what can they tell us about gender dynamics? Was there ever a great goddess-- more powerful than men. Probably not.

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Before paleolithic peoples “settled down” into early city states, early people lived in caves, huts, or tepees. They gathered and hunted for food, used basic stone and bone tools, as well as crude stone axes, for hunting birds and wild animals. Women and men shared responsibilities and were mutually reliant on one another these dynamics would change with the advent of agriculture, and led to a very interesting religious dynamic. Everywhere around the world, religions formed, and everywhere around the world female goddesses or feminine beings were a part of that faith. Who were these goddesses? And where did they go?

Religion: Religions of the Paleolithic era were distinctly different from modern religions in that they were heavily influenced by nature, usually polytheistic, and, importantly, honored female goddesses almost in equal number to male gods. These goddesses and gods had power over certain aspects of human life and the worshipers would pray to the particular god to address their need. Worship was ritualistic, spiritual, and varied from tribe to tribe, region to region. Sexuality was evidently important as gods and goddesses had extenuated genitalia and many of the early myths included details of procreation. ​

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The historical record is sprinkled with textual evidence of a matriarchal or divine feminine past that would have been passed down for centuries by oral tradition and later recorded. One ancient Indian saying stated, “Woman is the Creator of the Universe, the Universe is her form. Woman is the foundation of the world.There is no prayer equal to a woman, there is not, nor has been, nor will there be any yoga to compare with a woman, no mystical formula nor asceticism to match a woman.” 

​Mesopotamia was the world's first civilizations with recorded history. Gods and goddesses there were more gender fluid and exemplified a variety of qualities and characteristics later associated with one gender or another. None demonstrates this more than Inanna. She was the goddess of love, beauty, sex, war, justice, and political power. 

One Mesopotamian hymn from the Sumerian city states about Inanna describes her as a virgin who wanted to know more about sex. She asks her brother to take her to the underworld where she can taste the fruit of a tree that grows there and thus learn about sex. This story was passed down over centuries and would eventually morph into the Adam and Eve tale recorded in the Torah, or Old Testament by authors in the 6th century BCE.

Inanna is also a part of a Cane and Abel-esque  tale as she begins courtship and eventually chooses the God of Shepherds over the farmer. This story was important to the great challenge of the time as societies were adjusting to new systems of economics.  There are several versions of their relationship. In one she goes on an epic journey to save him from the underworld. As she ventures into the underworld, she passes through seven gates, at each she must strip a layer off of her. This is intended to humiliate and destroy her power. When she arrives, she is completely naked. Eventually he is permitted to visit her for half the year, but must stay in the underworld the other half. In other versions, Inanna may have killed him.

Inanna morphed and became Ishtar by 2500 BCE. Some Mesopotamian empires elevated her to the highest deity in their pantheon– even over their national gods.

Ishtar’s strength and fearsomeness is featured in the oldest story in the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written between 2900 BCE and 2350 BCE. The epic includes fantastic adventure tales and tales of women taming men, but it also holds warnings about female power and sexuality. 

In one tale, our girl Ishtar falls for the King, Gilgamesh but he rejects her since she had killed her previous lovers. Goddesses around the world, and certainly Ishtar, did not often display “mothering qualities.” In a lot of cases she was violent, sexual, and killed men wildly. He asked her, “Which of your lovers did you love forever? What shepherd of yours pleased you for all time?... And if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as all these others whom you loved once?” 

Facing rejection, Ishtar got a demonic bull to terrorize Uruk and cause widespread devastation. The bull  lowered the level of the Euphrates river, and dried up the marshes. It opened up huge pits that swallowed 300 men. Without any divine assistance, Enkidu and Gilgamesh were able to kill it. Ishtar mourned with the courtesans and harlots, while Gilgamesh celebrated with the craftsmen switching loyalty to the Sun God. 

Later in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we havethe Great Flood, which has major parallels with the story of Noah and the Arc from the Torah, or Old Testament. According to the epic, when the flood came, Ishtar mourned over the destruction of humanity and she swore to stop future floods. 
 
Archeologists have found hundreds of clay cylinders depicting scenes from the Epic that would have been used to help generations learn and remember these important tales.  However, they did not use these cylinders to teach how vital this female persona was in shaping our history.  

Temples were devoted to Ishtar through different empires in Mesopotamia, and the lion icon most associated with her is displayed prominently in iconography of the region. Ishtar continued to thrive long after the Greek and Romans conquered the region. She likely influenced the development of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. A cult to her continued to flourish until its gradual decline between the first and sixth centuries CE in the wake of Christianity.

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In Hinduism, the world’s oldest continuing religion, there has long been a strong tradition of Goddess worship. This divine feminine is known as Devi, simply meaning ‘Goddess’, or the ‘Great Mother’. She is understood to be an embodiment of Shakti, the feminine and ‘creative power of the universe’.  While this power is eternal and formless, all other Hindu goddesses are considered to be manifestations of Devi. Devī is not considered a consort of a male deity but independent, and in some traditions is even regarded as superior above male deities.  
 
Shaktism acknowledges the creative potential of women who are seen to maintain familial and social order. Shakti is also considered the counterpart of the masculine Purusha (spirit) – but neither can survive without the other, providing a promising model for gender equality.  

Many Aztec gods were genderless or dual gender. The Aztec goddess Coatlicue was considered the mother of all gods and embodied opposites: life and death, light and dark, male and female. Almost all representations of this goddess depict her deadly side, because Earth, as well as loving mother, is the insatiable monster that consumes everything that lives. She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist.

Creation Stories: Creation stories were recorded in almost every world culture and give us great insight into the oral traditions passed down for millennia.

In China the story of the goddess Nuwa goes like this: in the beginning, surrounded by chaos was a sleeping giant named Pángǔ. The hairy, horned giant woke up and, upon standing, split the heavens and the earth.  After thousands of years, he died and his body became the sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers and forests and all else in creation.   From this primordial creation, the goddess Nǚwā arrived and found that the four pillars holding heaven and earth apart were broken, so she repaired them. She then fashioned mankind from clay.

In some cases the stories seem disjointed, as if combining different myths. The book of Genesis from the Torah or Old Testament is clearly a combination of a variety of oral myths recorded. The first chapter God creates the earth from a void in seven days, but then in the second chapter a heavenly garden appears out of nowhere and God creates a man in his image and creates a woman from his rib. She convinces the man to eat from the tree of knowledge and both are doomed. Linguists studying the ancient texts have noted that different authors recorded these two stories because the Hebrew words they use for God changed from story to story (in the King James Version this is represented by using the words God and Lord). And of course, the parallels to Ishtar’s story are obvious.  ​

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In Japan, ancient origin stories were recorded in a text called The Kojiki between 500-700CE. Similar to the common rendition of Genesis, earth is created from nothing by a few deities. The story goes, “Izanami examined her body and found that one place had not grown, and she told this to Izanagi, who replied that his body was well-formed but that one place had grown to excess. He proposed that he place his excess in her place that was not complete and that in doing so they would make new land. She greeted him by saying "What a fine young man". They procreated and gave birth to a leech-child, which they put in a basket and let float away for they did not recognize it as one of their children. Disappointed by their failures in procreation, they consulted the deities who explained that the cause of their difficulties was that the female had spoken first when they met to procreate. Izanagi and Izanami returned to their island and again met behind the heavenly pillar. When they met, he said, "What a fine young woman," and they mated and gave birth to the eight main islands of Japan and six minor islands.”

Many aboriginal myths attempt to explain the superiority of men and suggest that there was once a time when women dominated.  In one of the aboriginal myths, the “man eater,” is outwitted by the local men. It begins, “In the dream time, in the land of the Murinbata people, a great river floats from the hills through a wide plane to the Sea where lived an old woman named Mutujinga, A woman of power. She could speak with the spirits. Because she had this power, she could do many things which the men could not. She could send their spirits to frighten away game, to wailing people at night, or to cause a child to be born without life. The men feared the power of Mutiinga and did not consort with her Mutjinga found no satisfaction in food, for she craved the flesh of men.”  She creates an elaborate trap for unsuspecting men and after one goes missing, the men folk come to investigate. They forced her and her daughter to reveal their secrets and took control of what had been mystical. 

A Great Goddess?: One historian explained, “The prevalence of the Venus figurines and other symbols all across Europe has convinced some, but not all, scholars the Paleolithic religious thought had a strongly feminine dimension, embodied in a great goddess and concerned with the regeneration and renewal of life.”  Was it possible there was a time when a goddess reigned supreme?

There is some evidence that goddesses were honored above the male gods. The most compelling part of this theory is our evolutionary ancestors inability to perceive cause and effect, thereby their inability to understand birth. To them, living in this state, women were magical, capable of producing offspring out of nowhere. Every month, in sync with the moon cycle, women bled and didn’t die. Women produced life-sustaining milk. 

A similar tradition was evident when Sir Arthur Evans discovered the lost Minoans civilization in the 20th century, and believed the goddess figurines he found represented the same Great Mother, worshiped under various names and titles. This Great Goddess was the creation mother and in full control of all other gods.

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The divine feminine is all over the early mythology stories, although she may not be all powerful. Ishtar is considered the cosmic uterus, the Roman mother earth ​​Gaea and the Norse Ymir, emerged from a birth canal. In Egypt, the goddess Nut makes an even stronger claim for power in an engraving, “I am what is, what will be, and what has been. No man has uncovered my nakedness, and the fruit of my birthing was the sun.”

Many scholars take issue with the theory that these goddesses ever doubled as a Great Goddess. Historian, Cynthia Eller, explained how attractive this theory was as a woman, and yet how improbable it is. In her words, the theory “exerted a magnetic appeal for me, but an even stronger magnetic repulsion. The evidence available to us regarding gender relations in prehistory is sketchy and ambiguous, and always subject to the interpretation of biased individuals.”   She dismisses the theory as wishful fantasy of a utopia that never existed. She said, “Theoretically, prehistory could have been matriarchal, but it probably wasn't, and nothing offered up in support of the matriarchal thesis is especially persuasive.” 
In spite of the drawbacks, the myth of matriarchal prehistory continues to thrive. 

Eller adds, “The myth of matriarchal pre-history is not a feminist creation, in spite of the aggressively feminist spin it has carried over the past 25 years. The majority of men who champions the myth of matriarchal pre-history during its first century (and have mostly been men) have regarded patriarchy as an evolutionary advance over prehistoric matriarchies if the myth now functions in a feminist way, it’s anti-feminist past can become merely a curious historical footnote.”
Whether a Great Goddess ever existed or not, what all these stories tell us is how in so many ways human development was similar across the globe, and that at one point, feminine attributes were considered divine before they were replaced in most of the world by a single male God with male prophets or messengers. It also shows us how important nature, procreation and its mystery was to early people. 
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By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Can we know for sure if there ever was a Great Goddess? How reliable are oral traditions recorded centuries or millennia after they were first told as evidence of prehistoric culture? What would happen to these goddesses as communities settled and adapted agriculture? ​

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Bibliography

Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in Human History.” Discover Magazine, 1987. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF. 

Gruss, Laura Tobias, and Daniel Schmitt. “The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 370,1663 (2015): 20140063. doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0063

Landau, Elizabeth. "How Much Did Grandmothers Influence Human Evolution? Scientists debate the evolutionary benefits of menopause." Smithsonian Magazine. January 4, 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-much-did-grandmothers-influence-human-evolution-180976665/​. 

Pollard, Elizabeth and Clifford Rosenberg, Ed. World Together Worlds Apart: A Companion Reader, 2nd Edition, Volume 1. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2016.

Schrein, Caitlin. "Lucy: A marvelous specimen." Nature Education Knowledge 6(7):2, 2015. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/lucy-a-marvelous-specimen-135716086/​. 

Strayer, R. and Nelson, E., Ways Of The World. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Swaminathan, Nikhil. "Naia—the 13,000-Year-Old Native American." Archaeology. January/February 2015. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/161-1501/features/2793-mexico-cave-clovis-dna-naia.

Primary AUTHOR:

​Kelsie Brook Eckert

Primary Reviewer:

​Chloe Gardner

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer, Consultant
Professor of History at Maryville University. 

Chloe Gardner, Consultant
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University

Dr. Whitney Howarth, Consultant
Former Professor of History at Plymouth State University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

​Maria Concepcion Marquez Sandoval
PhD Candidate in History at Arizona University

Amy Flanders
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Ron Kaiser
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Chris Canfield
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy

Reviewers

Ancient:
Dr. Kristin Heineman
Professor of History at Colorado State University
Dr. Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon
Professor of History at Wilson College
Sarah Stone
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University
Medieval:
Dr. Katherine Koh
Professor of History at La Sierra University
Dr. Jonathan Couser
Professor of History at Plymouth State University
Dr. Shahla Haeri
Professor of History at Boston University 
Lauren Cole
PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University
Modern:
Dr. Jack Gronau
Professor of History at Northeastern University