[Editor’s Note: This and the forthcoming sequels are originally published in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Mago Books, 2018). Part 1 introduces the six sections of this essay (The Co-Evolution of Greek History and Mythology; Goddesses of Birth, Nurture, Death, and Regeneration—in Neolithic Greece; Rejoicing in the Goddess Religion—in Bronze Age Crete; The Cultural Shift from Mother Rite to Father Right—in Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece; Patriarchy versus Matriarchy—in Classical Athens; and Greek Goddess Thealogy and the Contemporary Women’s Spirituality Movement for Eco-Social Justice) and delves into the first section, The Co-Evolution of Greek History and Mythology, in which Keller enthrones Eurynome, the Creatrix of Pelasgians. Footnote numbers differ from the original article.]
Throughout human history, from the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age to the present, all around the world, people have worshipped goddesses.[1] The myriad faces and marvelous powers of goddesses both reflect and also influence human behavior, culture, and history. It was only with the rise of male-centered religions during the Bronze Age (beginning circa 3500 BCE[2]), that gods became dominant over goddesses in many, but not all regions of the world. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Goddess has been officially suppressed under severe taboos. Notwithstanding, the Sacred Feminine remains alive in these and other male-centered, male-dominant traditions, albeit in diminished forms.
Peoples practice goddess worship in strong enduring traditions in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas, sharing many features that center on a Cosmic Goddess, Goddess of Nature, Mother of Gods, Sun Goddess, Moon Goddess, Mother Earth, Mistress of Plants and Animals, and much more.[3] Often these goddesses are paired with gods, as brother and sister, or goddess and consort—goddess and god in balance with one another. Sometimes the goddesses were more powerful, as during the Neolithic Age (circa 7000-3000 BCE) in Old Europe; or the gods became more powerful, as during the Greek Bronze Age,[4] and subsequently, in more and more regions of the world. After the Greek Goddesses and Gods became assimilated to the deities of the conquering Romans, and after Rome’s conquest of pagan European cultures, the Greek Goddesses continued as a subculture in Europe through the Christian Middle Ages. And despite the holocaust against women herbalists, healers, midwives, and “witches,” these goddesses endure until today, not only in children’s stories but in the rapidly growing turn from patriarchal religions to Goddess, Wiccan, Pagan and other nature-based religions. It would be a mistake to think that the Greek Goddesses are culturally dead, for they have persisted in Western cultural consciousness for millennia, and they are still symbols and metaphors, bearers of female powers that are healing and transformative.
We have been taught that Greece is a primary cultural source of Western civilization. And yet, the narrative has usually omitted to tell us that the roots of Western cultures can be traced back further than the war stories of Homer’s Iliad to a more peaceful and egalitarian time. We will trace the history and mythos of Greek Goddesses in the six sections that follow: The Co-Evolution of Greek History and Mythology; Goddesses of Birth, Nurture, Death, and Regeneration—in Neolithic Greece; Rejoicing in the Goddess Religion—in Bronze Age Crete; The Cultural Shift from Mother Rite to Father Right—in Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece; Patriarchy versus Matriarchy—in Classical Athens; and Greek Goddess Thealogy and the Contemporary Women’s Spirituality Movement for Eco-Social Justice.
We ask: What value can the ancient Greek Goddesses have for us today? To answer this, I adopt a three-fold methodology that combines a women’s spirituality perspective that highlights the spiritual dimensions connected to female life; a spiritual feminist hermeneutics that seeks to understand the spiritual significance of ancient texts about women and goddesses in their own historical contexts, as well as their relevance for us today; and archaeomythology, combining the academic disciplines and fields of archaeology, mythology, linguistics, art history, folklore, and history of religions. In doing so, we discover a rather different history of Greek religion, history, and culture.
Co-Evolution of Greek History and Mythology
Currently, the word myth is popularly used to indicate a false story. However, the meaning of myth encompasses the sacred stories of earlier peoples who believed in goddesses and gods prior to the rise of monotheistic masculinist gods. Myths are the sacred stories of how deities interact with humans, how humans interact with divinity. They symbolize what is most important to know about living. I will use the term mythos, sacred story, to avoid the pejorative use of the term myth.
While mythos and history are not identical, there is a dialectical relationship between the two. During the Neolithic or Agrarian Age, when women (most likely) invented agriculture, weaving, and pottery,[5] the fertility of the Earth as Mother was of primary value to the cultures around the Mediterranean world, and the Mother Goddess was given pre-eminence in many of these cultures. During the Bronze Age, when warfare, empire-building, male dominance, and slavery became more and more common, warrior gods and father gods became dominant over the goddesses, as in ancient Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, Greece, and Rome.
In Pelasgia, the region that later became Greece, the earliest peoples were the Pelasgians, for whom the acorn of the oak trees provided their staple diet. Their primary deity was Eurynome, a Creatress Goddess who existed before all else.
As she wandered, a wind sprang up behind Eurynome, which she fashioned into the great snake Ophion. Taking the form of a bird, she mated with the snake, and from this union came the cosmic egg, from which emerged the universe and all other beings, including humans. Wide-ruling Eurynome lived with her consort Ophion on high Mount Olympus. In time, he came to think that he had created everything. Because of his arrogance, Eurynome cast him down from the mountain top to live among humans. [6]
One of these humans, Pelasgus, was the eponymous leader of the Pelasgians who migrated into Greece; he built an altar at Argos to Demeter-Pelasgia,[7] Demeter of the Pelasgians, Earth Mother and Grain Goddess. This implies the shift from a foraging diet based on acorns to a settled lifeway based on grains; and thus, a transition from the Mesolithic Age to the beginning of the agrarian Neolithic Age in this region of Greece. Archaeological evidence dates the evidence for grain in this region to circa 6000 BCE.[8]
(To be continued)
[1] Martha Ann and Dorothy Imel, Goddesses in World Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1993); Patricia Monaghan, Goddesses in World Culture (three volumes) (Santa Barbara, CA 93116-1911: Praeger, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2011); Eahr Joan, ReGenesis Encyclopedia: Synthesis of the Spiritual Dark–Motherline, Integral Research, Labyrinth Learning, and Eco–Thealogy. Part I. Revised Edition II, 2018. https://ciis.academia.edu/EJoan 2018. Accessed May 21, 2018.
[2] I use the convention of the American Academy of Religion for dates: BCE for Before the Common Era, and CE for the Common Era; these denote the same dates used in the Christian dating system as BC, Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini, in the Year of our Lord.
[3] Mara Lynn Keller, “Goddesses around the World,” Common Ground: Special Issue on Women 113 (Fall 2002): 16, 18-19,137-138; republished in She is Everywhere, anthology gathered by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (iUniverse, 2005), 201-208.
[4] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[5] See Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1997), 53.
[6] See Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.496-511; Hesiod, Theogony 104-210, 452-506; Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vols. 1, 2. Rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1960), 27-28, n2.
[7] Herodotus, Histories I.57-58; Aeschylus, The Suppliants, lines 616, 627, 633, 634. 1022, trans. E. D. A. Morshead; Pausanias, Description of Greece I.xiv.3-4, trans. Jones.
[8] J. E. S. Edwards et al., eds., Cambridge Ancient History, Part I: Prolegomena and Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 570-571, 572.