"When God Was a Woman" -Tribal Jazzman Scholar, Episode #2

For tens of thousands of years, human beings carved female goddess figurines. These nomadic hunter-gatherers venerated the life-giving powers of women. When these ancestors finally settled into villages and towns about 12,000 years ago they created peaceful and egalitarian societies that lasted nearly 8,000 years, and were likely ruled by women. The Bronze Age followed, and ushered in a new era of male gods, and weapons and slavery. The good news is that we are now at the tail end of this 4,000 detour into patriarchy, domination and warfare. We are entering a new era or partnership. Happy Mother's Day 2010!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• goddess
• worship
• prehistoric
• paleolithic
• venus
• figurines
• neolithic
• settlements
• patriarchy
• history
• prehistory
• partnership
• societies
• korten
• macy
• eisler

[Daibusshi]

30,000 years is an unfathomable gap. Beyond written records, we are only dealing with interpretations of evidence. There are some thorny methodological issues if we're going to make ANY interpretation beyond the obvious recognition that they represent females. We have no way of saying anything with certainty about the symbolic meaning. To talk in terms of a prehistoric religion devoted to the mother goddess is really stretching the evidence because we do not have the evidence to conclude that.

[TribalJazzman]

@Daibusshi You are absolutely correct. It's largely conjecture based primarily on the work of Marija Gimbutas. The case for goddess veneration during the first farming communities of the later Neolithic is less debatable.  The Upper Paleolithic "religion" is mostly unknowable, but I find the ideas very compelling and worth putting forth, if only to counterbalance a preponderance of scholarship that completely ignores both the Upper Paleolithic and early Neolithic peoples from whom we descended

[workingclasssociety]

reciprocal rather than dominating...

You are indeed correct that this shift is indeed coming and much needed.

Great summary the book.

[abarrathemaster]

to use Gobekli Tepe as a esample of per-historic religion, it hold little evidence of a great mother cult, infact found near Gobekli Tepe was a life size statue of a male laying his hands on his jurk. Catalhuyk it not only hold statues of female idols, infact new founds in 2009 show that females made up a small % of figurs found. infact a idol of a breaded was found in catalhuyuk.

[abarrathemaster]

can you look up Talheim Death Pit