[This essay was presented at Roma Goddess Conference, May 22-23, 2021, under the theme of “Goddess & Environment – Save Mother Earth.”]
It was not a sudden accident, but a long process deeply rooted in the past and intertwined with the relationship between the sexes. Two books published in the 1980s inspired this path of research and these abridged notes: The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant (1980) and Reflections on Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller (1985).
Roots
To understand the complex relationship between humans and Gea/Earth, the planet that gave us form and still sustains the continuation of life, it can be useful to start from far away in time, from the long era when our Ancestors learnt how to survive amidst an overwhelming wild Nature.
On the basis of the reconstructions made possible by the development of new research methodologies that are now available, it is likely to assume which must have been the condition of our quite vulnerable species – lacking fur, fangs, claws, etc., – in a natural environment populated by extraordinarily vital, wild and untamed creatures.
The first human cultures of the Paleolithic, between 50,000 and 12/10.000, seem to have been perfectly aware of which was the essential knowledge for their survival. It was based on few key concepts:
- consciousness of the contiguity and of the total dependence of the human world from nature
- fluidity of the boundaries between plants, animals, humans, and the heavenly vault, between the world of the living and of the dead, possibility to communicate and influence interactions among these worlds (shamanism)
- cyclical nature of life, a knowledge born from a long and accurate observation of the movements in the sky and of the related movements/changes of plants and animals on the territory.
As these elements proved on a long period to be the roots of the continuation of human life, they found how to fix and share them through the invention of a set of transmittable signs. In the representations of this first essential wisdom, they attributed to fierce animals and to the female bodies the primary numinous powers – both real and symbolic: they were the sacred guides to the necessary quest for balance from which new life, food and shelter, the gift of abundance flew.
The first forms of art of the Paleolithic, probably performed in ritual settings, carved or painted in the sanctuary caves, focus on these two sets of images: abundant and generous bodies of women and a rich and vivid gallery of wild animals.
(To be continued)