[This part and the forthcoming sequels are an elaborated version of the original article entitled “The Norse Goddesses behind the Asir Veil: The Vanir Mothers in Continental Scandinavia—a late Shamanistic Branch of the Old European Civilization?” by Märta-Lena Bergstedt & Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen, included in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Mago Books, 2018) Edited by Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang.]
The Transition Cut in Stone. Last Expression of Old European Civilization
Typically, a major paradigm shift will show in archeological artifacts. To illustrate the transition from the old to the new belief system in Scandinavia, we have chosen the decorated standing stones, called picture stones (bildstenar), from Gotland. As imagery is normally associated with the contextual society, the dating of the stones, before or after 400 CE separates them into two groups, indicating a significant shift, not only in iconography, but also in society. As the two groups of stones are significant in several ways in regards to their shaping, symbolism, iconography, and style, as well as their locations, the two groups actually testify two different world views.
The old picture stones from before c. 400 CE were raised on graveyards. Their iconography, consisting mostly of circles, swirls, vortex patterns and spirals is throughout symbolic with no ambition of realism, and could well be connected the circles of life, death, and regeneration. They are characterized by a convex top side and concave flanks. (Fig. 5)
From the 5th century CE onwards, the shaping, imagery, and location undergo radical changes; the new stones show mushroom or phallus shapes. (Fig. 7, Fig 8) Suddenly the depictions of men, ships, and horses, although mythical (like Odin´s 8-legged horse) have realistic features, and they are personalized. Scholars have succeeded in linking some of the motifs to Asir legends, known from the 500 years later Eddas.[1] Imagery now gets a preponderance of male figures in significant roles, displayed with a variety of features and clothing. Female figures, if they appear at all, are more stereotyped and always portrayed standing and in profile, dressed in full-length robes, some of them wearing capes or shawls. They play subordinate and serving roles as, e.g., handing bowls of wine to central male figures. The difference in the presentation of females and males may indicate a rather strict set of norms, presumably prototyped in the now ruling society. The locations of the new type of stones were not graveyards. Instead they were raised to stand alongside roads and fairways to be seen by many.[2] Thus the motifs on the new stones could well have played a propagandistic role during the establishing of the new social and religious order.
To represent the old type of picture stones just before the shift, we have chosen a stone with a unique motif. (Fig. 5) The stone was found in a grave field in the parish of När, south-west Gotland. It lay face-side down, apparently overthrown when its symbolism was no longer current. Besides the traditional symbolic decoration of circles and swirls, this stone has a symbolic female icon. She is showed frontally, her legs turned out to the sides exposing her sex. In each hand she holds a wiggling snake. A big triskelia composed by three snakes is circling above her head. At each side of her head she has a hair knot, a classic pre-historic hair style, well-known also from, e.g., the considerably older imagery on the Gundestrup Cauldron, Denmark (150 BCE‒100 CE).[3] The squatting female on the När-stone, also known as the Birthing Woman (or Goddess), has confused archeologists ever since it was found in the 1950s. Unable to link it to any known mythology, scholars have attested the motif at least not to be connected to Asir religion.
A squatting female figure is unique for Migration Period, and no later examples of this squatting icon exist. All the same, the motif as such is well-known from earlier periods. The icon is common on Bronze Age rock carvings in Bohuslän on the Swedish west coast (Fig. 9), and it is found as red paintings inside caves all along the Norwegian west coast from Trondheim to Lofoten.[4] In the last 25 years, squatting female figures have been found in as many as twelve caves. The Norwegian coastline has thousands of caves formed by the sea. However, caves, containing female figures, have specific features distinguishing them from other caves. First, their entrances; their striking resemblance to the female womb may not be too imaginative.[5] Second, these caves may be reached only by boat from the water-side. Cultural deposits in one of the caves indicate a dating between 1700-500 BCE (Scandinavian Bronze Age) suggest that the paintings are also from this period.[6] (Fig. 10, 11, 12)
The iconographic tradition of the squatting woman figure winds its way still further back in both time and space. In fact, it goes back several thousand years, leading from Scandinavia down through Europe, and all the way back to the 9400 year old Neolithic city of Çatal Hüyük, in Anatolia, Turkey, where the squatting female is vividly represented.[7] Çatal Hüyük had a pre-Indo-European culture, which archeologist Marija Gimbutas named the Old European civilization.[8]
Based on her large-scale research, and supported by her innumerable excavations all over Southern and Eastern Europe, Gimbutas pointed to a highly developed culture in Europe during the Neolithic. Its striking absence of both warfare and male domination speaks of a social order built on life-supporting values.[9] The peaceful and creative Old European culture seems to have expressed its understanding of the world and cosmos in circles, spirals, zig-zag-lines, and symbolic animal and female figures: “what is clear is that Old European religion understood life and death as aspects of larger cyclic processes.”[10]
Gimbutas found certain categories of figures and patterns repeated over and over again. Emphasizing a strong connection between the womb and the tomb,[11] she suggested a Neolithic understanding of life, death and re-generation as based on cyclic processes of transition. In substance the idea was the universal pattern of continuous circling and interchanging of seasons. The pattern was mirrored in the bound stages of the life-span of all the living. The Mother Earth personifies per se the female principle as life-giver (not creatrix). After mating, new life starts to grow in the female womb, and from the womb new generations are birthed.[12] When dying, all life symbolically returns to the Earth-womb to be re-born.[13]
The triskelia on the När-stone, the old holy number of three, may well point to these sacred phases of life-death-rebirth, and thus be connected to three holy body functions of the all-female: lust and lovemaking (mating), life-giving (birthing), and returning to the womb/tomb of the Mother Earth (death),[14] in a continuum. The number three echoes the ancient triple mother aspect; the Maiden, Mother and Crone. In Scandinavia these were Braido (Bride, Maiden)[15], När(Mother), and Källing (Cailleach), (maybe even personifying the three Norns) – each of them reflecting an aspect of Hel (The Three Separetes in One).[16] The local name of the parish, När, where the standing stone was found, may well be more than a co-incident and thus complete the picture. När is identical with the name of the mythological mother icon, När (Icel. Njärd and Tacitus; Nerthus).
Gimbutas´ research never encompassed the Scandinavian Peninsulas, although Old Scandinavian Culture expressed itself with iconography similar to that of the Old European civilization. For this reason, we will argue that Gimbutas’ conclusions are valid also for Old Scandinavia. If this finds approval, the squatting women on the När stone will link in with the Old Europe civilization—and probably be its very last manifestation.
(To be Continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen.
[1] Sune Lindqvist, Gotlands Bildsteine I & II (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1941-42).
[2] And in certain military stronghold-areas, Gotland. Carlsson, Tankar Torsten, 176.
Some, like the Flöjel stone, was found covering a grave.
[3] The National Museum, Copenhagen.
[4] Terje Norsted, The Cave Paintings of Norway, Adoranten (2013), 5, 16.
[5] Womb caves, old ritual places, are acknowledged all over the world.
[6] Norsted, Cave Paintings, 20.
[7] James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 1967. D.H. Trump, Malta: An Archaeological Guide, (Valletta: Progress Press Co. Ltd, 2000). Hodder, Catalhöyük, 2006.
[8] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 1999.
[9] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 1999.
[10] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 55.
[11] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 55ff.
[12] There is no creator/creatrix in the old thinking as little as women creates babies. Female wombs give birth to new life.
[13] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 55f.
[14] Marija Gimbutas. The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 89-209.
[15] Åke Hultkrantz, Vem är vem i Nordisk Mytologi: Gestalter och äventyr i Eddans gudavärld (Stockholm: Prisma, Nordstedts förlag, 2001), 35.
[16] Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen. Brigit’s Runes, In Brigit: Sun of Womanhood, ed. Patricia Monaghan and Michael McDermott (Las Vegas, Nevada: Goddess Ink. Ltd., 2013).
Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen, The Scandinavian Cailleach – The Kælling/Kärring, in Goddess Pages, Issue 25, Summer/Autumn 2014, ed. Geraldine Charles, 2014.