Arguing About the Goddess
Eller claims that “feminist matriarchalists almost always posit a form of goddess monotheism for prehistory...” [103] She doesn’t seem to have a clue to how controversial this idea has been in Goddess circles. Already in the ‘70s feminist pagans objected to anything that smacked of a monotheist Big Daddy in the Sky. More recently, Asphodel Long wrote, “for Goddess people generally the term ‘the Goddess’ describes all aspects of female divinity, goddesses singular and plural: academic determination to impose a monotheism on us is misplaced and counterproductive.” [Long, 1998] Daniel Cohen remarks that archaeologists “perceive ‘the goddess’ and ‘goddesses’ as being opposing notions,” but he points out that pagans use them interchangeably, “with the same person referring to ‘the goddess’ in one sentence and ‘goddesses’ in the next." [Cohen, 1998].
Eller
uses the problematic claim of goddess monotheism to sidestep the prehistoric
preponderance of female iconography. She acknowledges “a huge number
of anthropomorphic figurines, many of them clearly female.” [124]
But it is not “many” but “most.” These overwhelmingly
female statuettes are found on a global scale, from Ecuador and Colombia
to Ohio and Utah and Alaska, from Chad and Egypt to Kazakhstan and the
Punjab and Japan. Their femaleness has not been controversial (at least
until recently) even if they have often been ignored.
<<< 'Ain Ghazal, lower Jordan river
However, Eller contends that only
50% of the ancient Balkan figurines that Gimbutas studied are indisputably
female. If all the rest are assumed to be male, she says, then the gender
breakdown would be 50-50. An illustration shows one of these “sexless”
images: a statuette from Vinca in the stance of the obviously female figurines:
hands on belly, feet together. Its rounded hips are wider than the shoulders,
the body violin-shaped, but Eller thinks it may be male since it is breastless.
[125-129. Here she draws heavily on Tringham and Conkey’s analysis.]
Her interpretation is hardly compelling, but even if we were to concede
that such images were male, how many male-dominated societies do we know
of that make nude figures of masculine gods, lords, warriors, or fathers—sans
penis?
Conversely, Eller believes the female images
are the neolithic equivalent of porn: after all, “how do we know”
they aren’t? To make her case, she uses drawings by Hubert Pepper
comparing paleolithic art and modern pornography. He pictures an archaic
sculpture from the rear, with its buttocks turned up, in order to compare
it with a doggy-style photo. [Eller, 124, 136-138] A butt is a butt, but
the figurine is not on its hands and knees, neither does the reclining
female relief in the second example resemble the splayed modern photo.
None of the ancient figures display the simpering coyness of Playboy pinups.
Anyway, people do not bury their dead with porn. Female nakedness does
not equate to pornography, and the old sexist assumption that a vulva
signifies a sex object while a phallus indicates power should be tossed
out.
Eller proffers other possible interpretations
of the figurines: they may have been used in curative rites and then disposed
of, since some were found in garbage middens. (Didn’t men also get
sick, or do the figurines then represent healing goddesses?) The sacramental
context of many finds hardly comes into consideration, although Eller
concedes that the figurines had “protective or magical functions
in some cultures.” She runs through other theories that they were
dolls, toys, or were used to teach boys. [139] (Why not girls?) None of
this explains how they ended up in so many burials, or why they were buried
under thresholds, or in temples from Malta to Niuheliang to the North
and South American mounds. Thus, Eller repeats processual archeology's
monolithic insistence that the female figurines were at best fertility
idols, at worst of minor significance, and anyway, we can't prove what
they were in the absence of written evidence. The idea that they represented
goddesses whose divinity could be considered on a par with the gods of
the "great" religions is dismissed.
We learn that feminist researchers are prone
to see vulvas everywhere (though a male archaeologist also comes under
fire for interpreting signs in cave art as vulvas). The symbols in the
book’s Figure 7.3 “said to be vulvae” seem to fit the
bill quite well, and so do those on the phallic baton in Figure 7.9. The
author expects “fm’s” to object to interpreting a multivalent
Cypriot seated-woman/phallus/vulva sculpture as a dildo. [125, 130, 133]
Yet for decades now, feminists have speculated that phallic-headed female
figurines were ritually used to stretch hymens open in womanhood initiations.
Eller thinks that most of the images regarded
as female, including the famous plaster reliefs at Catal Huyuk, “are
not definitely or even probably female.” Her short discussion of
Malta states that evidence for widespread goddess worship “is practically
nonexistent.” Why? Because certain archaeologists have declared
the larger statues to be of uncertain sex, or even eunuchs. (One man has
likened them to Sumo wrestlers.) Common sense should apply here: the sculptures
have huge hips, round feminine arms, and tiny hands. There is no penis.
The breasts are small, but similar proportions are found, with the same
ridge of belly fat, on female figurines from Sardinia and, from an earlier
period, at Sesklo in north Greece and at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria. [See
Gimbutas, 1991, and Youkana, 1997, for pictures] A smaller Maltese scupture
from Gozo shows a pair of seated women, identical in shape, holding children
in their laps. No masculine statues with these voluptuous proportions
have been found anywhere.
Eller also discounts the idea that the Maltese
temples are shaped in the form of a goddess. She admits that their outlines
resemble the amply proportioned sculptures. [149] But she notes two exceptions
at Hagar Qim and Tarxien that depart from the shape of the earlier temples
at Ggantija, Mnajdra and Gozo, with extra chambers added on. However,
both date from the later phase of temple-building; Tarxien also has earlier
temples of the classic fat-woman shape.
Although I usually disagreed with Eller on issues of
interpretation, some of her points are well taken. For example, she criticizes
a woman who called some four-fold cross-like symbols “moon signs.”
I couldn’t see any basis for the claim myself. The same symbols
have elsewhere been interpreted as “sun signs”; who's to say?
I think Eller's right that the paleolithic “Venuses” are not
pregnant, but that's hardly startling: everyone I know thinks they are
simply fat. I don’t find Gimbutas’ interpretation of the “egg-shaped
buttocks” convincing, nor ridiculous either. What is striking to
me about these clay sculptures is their resemblance to Nile Valley contemporaries,
as well as Saharan and South African rock art.
Eller observes that the Greeks did not regard
their various goddesses as “aspects of a unitary goddess.”
[103] That's true for classical Greece, but a case can be made for a syncretic
Mediterranean goddess in late antiquity. An aretalogy of Isis identifies
her with Artemis and various west Asian goddesses such as Astarte (Palestine)
and Nanaia (Iraq). [Godwin, 120-121] The famous invocation by Apuleius
is one of several Roman-era litanies treating major national goddesses
as manifestations of one Great Goddess: “My name, my divinity, is
adored throughout all the world, in different ways, in variable customs
and in many names, 
for
the Phrygians call me the Mother of the Gods; the Athenians, Minerva;
the Cypriots, Venus; the Candians, Diana...” and so on at length,
ending with the Egyptian veneration of Isis. [The Golden Ass,
book XI] The overlap in these litanies is matched by the iconographic
exchange of symbols and attributes of Isis, Fortuna, Terra Mater, Tyche,
and various Celtic and west Asian deities across the Roman empire.
Naqada, predynastic Egypt >>>
Another example of a “unified”
goddess is found in the Shakta (Goddess-oriented) stream of Hindu religion.
Devi (Goddess) is worshipped under a myriad of names and forms. Many Indian
scholars think her origins are very ancient. [N. N. Bhattacharya, Pupul
Jayakar, Adit Mookerjee, Shanti Lal Nagar, and Devdutt Pattanaikm, to
name only a few.] Numerous litanies of the Thousand Names of Devi are
still being chanted today, the most famous being the Sri Lalitambika
Sahasranama. [Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, no date] They approach
all the classic Indian goddesses as aspects of Devi. One of her names
is Ekakini, "the One, Only." Litanies of the ancient Kemetic
goddess Neit include the same title. Neit is also called Mother of the
Gods, a concept found in many other cultures, including the Phrygian,
Ugaritic, Aztec, and Calinya Caribs. While not “monotheistic”
or exclusive of male gods, these traditions clearly do envision a Great
Goddess. This is the configuration envisioned by most matrix historians,
not the singular goddess The Myth is attempting to refute.
Naturally, Eller counters the assertion that goddess
veneration proves high female status by bringing up goddesses who are
violent or support patriarchal custom. [104] No surprises there, since
not all patriarchies are monotheistic. Her example of Anat wading in the
blood of battle is to the point (although I’m curious what she’d
say about Anat bearding her father El, king of the gods, and coercing
him to do her will). Eller's observation that “Goddess worship has
been reported for societies rife with misogyny” is also undisputed.
She points to low female status in Hindu, Buddhist and Catholic societies.
She neglects to add that Catholic doctrine denies its female saints the
status of deities, and Buddhist technically has no deities, being non-theistic.
Historical denial of ordination to women is part of the picture in all
these cases, as well.
Clearly, goddess worship alone can not be used as a
measure of women’s social power. But is it really meaningless as
an indicator? All Eller’s examples come from post-imperial societies,
which combined many strands of indigenous traditions with the religion
of ruling elites and their priesthoods. The ancient goddesses persisted
in the ancient empires like Babylon and Rome. Much ink has been spilled
about the pronounced gap in values between folk religion and state theology.
These patriarchies are complex cultural mixtures; their retention of goddesses
can't be used as a yes/no indicator of high female status. But their goddess
myths do supply interesting clues about women's status. The Vedas, the
Icelandic Edda, Sumerian and Greek texts, all show patriarchy among the
gods themselves. In India, over the millennia, the brahmin priesthood
absorbed indigenous goddesses into their profoundly hybrid religion. Adivasi
peoples who maintained their sovereignty placed great emphasis on a primary
goddess. For example, the matrilineal Toda attribute the origins of all
their clans and ceremonies to the goddess Tökisy, "who divided
and gave them in the beginning." Some of these peoples held on to
mother-right and female liberty in choosing partners. Those subjugated
into the lower castes also tended to retain matrilineage, primary goddess
veneration, and womanhood initiation rituals.
Western feminist analysis turned to goddesses partly
because they are so strongly anathematized in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
scriptures. In the Christian world, their erasure was linked to suppression
of priestesses, both pagan and Christian (the female prophets of the Montanists,
for example). In Judaic scripture their worship was condemned as “whoring
after false gods,” with a recurring metaphor of Zion as an adulterous
wife punished by a wrathful god-husband. [For example, chapters 16, 20-23
of Ezekiel, and the entire Book of Hosea.] Islam’s triumph resulted
in outlawing of the old Arabian deities, among whom a trilogy of goddesses
was prominent: “instead of him, they worship only females.”
[Quran, IV, 117. Some translations render the last word as “idols,”
apparently a highly gendered word in Arabic. See also LIII, 27: “Most
surely they who do not believe in the hereafter name the angels with female
names.”] The idea that patriarchal religion is pervaded by sexual
politics was inescapable.
An extremely strong case for religious pluralism
in ancient Judah and Israel has been built in the past thirty years. In
The Hebrew Goddess, Raphael Patai marshalled much evidence from the Bible
itself to show that ancient Jews worshipped the goddess Asherah, and that
her image stood in the Temple itself for two-thirds of its existence.
Archaeologists have turned up female figurines in great numbers, but Eller
scoffs at discussions of Hebrew goddess figurines, because “we know
that the religion of that place and era was adamantly monotheistic.”
This assumption is seriously outdated. (Unsurprisingly, the sole footnoted
source for it is Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, who has been fighting a rearguard
action against the idea that Asherah was a goddess.) [See In the Wake
of the Goddesses, 1992] The weight of scholarly opinion has shifted
as more information emerges—including the Asherah inscriptions from
Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom—indicating greater religious
diversity than conventional Biblical scholarship was prepared to concede
until recently. [See the flood of articles in Biblical Archaeological
Review and Biblical Archaeologist, and the works of Asphodel
Long, Ruth Hestrin, Jenny Kien, Joanna Stuckey, Ze’ev Herzog, Israel
Finkelstein, Mark Smith, among many others.]
Eller is correct that some feminists (most notoriously
Elizabeth Gould Davis) advanced a thesis that the Hebrews were patriarchal
invaders and destroyers of goddess religion. Many expressions of this
theory unconsciously incorporated anti-Semitic tropes of the old Christian
blood libel, replacing the old charge of “Christ-killers”
with some version of “ Jews destroyed the Goddess.” But these
ideas have been roundly attacked and not the all-pervading theme the book
implies. (The only reference to feminist opposition to them, all too brief,
is buried in the footnotes.) [See Eller, 50, 201] Jewish women such as
Phyllis Chesler, Naomi Goldenberg, and Starhawk, though Eller elsewhere
describes them as supporters of the the “myth,” are left out
of the picture. [Starhawk refuted Judith Antonelli’s accusation
that the Goddess movement was inherently anti-Semitic in her “Response
to ‘The Goddess Myth’,” but the Utne Reader refused
to print her excellent rebuttal. Read it at < http://www.starhawk.org/pagan/religion-from-nature.html>
.]
The story is complicated, because feminists did not
make up the Hebrew invasion narrative, or the stories of prophets smashing
idols. Like many others, they took the Biblical account at face value
as history, looking at the Book of Joshua’s description of a conquest
with genocidal destructions of Canaanite towns and later accounts of kings
ordering the smashing of religious sanctuaries and images. [See Deut.
2:34; 20:16-17; Num. 31:15-18, and much of Chronicles and Kings] In recent
decades, archaeology has contradicted the Bible, showing Hebrews gradually
assimilating to their Canaanite relatives. Some excavators have even stated
that it’s difficult to tell the two cultures apart. It is clear
that the Hebrew states were never a great regional power. [Finkelstein
and Silverman, 2001]
(Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . NEXT ------>
Whose Interpretation?
T he Furor Over Gimbutas
Deconstructing "Matriarchal Myth"
Where's the History?
PoMo Prescriptions
© 2000 Max Dashu