The Mother Goddess Debate: June 2020

Paintings I created between 2019 – 2021 explored Neolithic art that was focused on female fertility and the regenerative power of the earth. I was most interested in the European Neolithic era which would have been the birthplace of my ancient forebears. The painting below is based on one of the ceramic human figurines unearthed in northeastern Romania. They were made by the Cucuteni culture, which lasted from 4800 to 3000 B.C. in what is now Romania and Ukraine.

This mysterious culture appears to have worshipped what we would now call an Earth-Mother goddess or goddesses. However, there is a sometimes nasty debate among archeologists on the Mother Goddess theory which represents a collision of world views. There are the passionate proponents of the theory that the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother preceded the Father God or Sky Father and that Neolithic societies were matrilineal and peaceful. This is forcefully argued against with such feeling that one suspects the theory’s opponents find it threatening in some way.

The most well-known proponent of the theory that belief in a Mother Goddess preceded worship of the Father God was archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She also argued that Neolithic societies were matrilineal and peaceful.

A Wikipedia entry on the topic of the the Mother Goddess is remarkable for its lack of coherence. The first part of the article is a less than objective attack on what he calls the popular view of  the Goddess movement  – that the Neolithic era would have been just, peaceful and wise. The author concludes that it is highly unlikely that such a civilization ever existed, based on the following rationale:

“There isn’t a scintilla of physical evidence that anything of the kind occurred. There is no archaeological evidence of a supersophisticated civilization 10000 years ago—no gleaming cities, no factories powered by Earth energies…”

After deriding the theory of an archetypal fertility cult of the Mother Goddess which “supposedly” would have existed prior to the rise of patriarchy, the author concludes:

“Carl Gustav Jung suggested that archetypal mother goddess was a part of the collective unconscious of all humans; various adherents of Jung … have argued that such an archetype underpins many of its (I am assuming Western civilization’s ) own mythologies and may even precede the image of the paternal “father.” Such speculations help explain the universality of such mother goddess imagery around the world. The Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines have been sometimes explained as depictions of an Earth Goddess similar to Gaia.” 

So the author contradicts the earlier stance that there “isn’t a scintilla of physical evidence that anything of the kind occurred” while providing evidence from Psychology ( under the heading New Religious Movements). This evidence supports the idea that Neolithic worship of the Earth Mother Goddess preceded belief in the Sky Father God.

While the Wikepedia entry makes no effort to be objective, then gets lost in conflicting evidence, another footnote to the entry admits that:

“the issue of the Mother Goddess continues to be an exemplar for the problems of studying women in antiquity: mysterious images disembodied from their contexts, multiple scholarly biases and motivations, and conflicting interpretations of the scanty and fragmentary evidence.”

Belief in gods and goddesses is a complex issue in the history of human thought. Philosophers and other thinkers have wrestled with, not only whether earlier human societies worshipped a Mother Goddess before a Sky God, but the very existence of a Supreme Being of any gender. Pascal argued that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).

How is this relevant to the Mother Goddess debate? An article in the Guardian on a UN report summarized the infinite losses, or hell on earth, that we humans are creating. There is an argument that this destruction can be traced back to our widespread belief in a clear mandate from the Sky God to rule the earth and everything in it for our own wants & needs.  As a result, human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems: coral reefs dying; rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.

The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 85%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions. Two in five amphibian species are at risk of extinction, as are one-third of reef-forming corals, and close to one-third of other marine species.

At least one in 10 insects are threatened with extinction and, in economic terms, the losses are jaw-dropping. Pollinator loss has put up to $577 billion of crop output at risk, while land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of global land.

Other impacts on humankind, including freshwater shortages and climate instability, are already “ominous” and will worsen without drastic remedial action. “The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide,”

If Pascal were alive today he would likely suggest that a rational person should live as though the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother exists and seek to believe in her and act accordingly. This would entail worshipping nature instead of converting it to consumer goods and then dumping it in the landfill, and preserving the earth because it is sacred. If the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother does exist, we all stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by the continuation of life on this planet for our children and grandchildren) and avoid infinite losses (Hell on earth as represented by a scorched planet where humans have destroyed the ecosystems on which they depend).

Meanwhile the Mother Goddess debate can be viewed as a clash between those who see the need to change the very basis of our belief systems and those who cling to those beliefs. A corollary of belief in the Father God is that one species and gender created in His image has a mandate to rule the earth in his own interests. The Mother Goddess or Earth Mother is a challenge to that world view at its most basic level as it entails an earth-centred approach to our economic and social organization rather than a human-centred one.  Those committed to a system oriented toward the interests of human males understandably feel threatened by such a radical change. So they counter with convoluted and contradictory attacks on the earth-centric view that we humans were previously in matrilineal societies and worshipped a Mother Goddess.