An Ancient Perspective

In her groundbreaking book The Spiral Dance, feminist writer Starhawk paints a different picture of our early ancestors, “According to our legends . . . more than 35 thousand years ago, when the temperature of Europe began to drop and the great sheets of ice crept slowly south in their last advance. Across the rich tundra, teeming with animal life, small groups of hunters followed the free-running reindeer and the thundering bison. They were armed with only the most primitive of weapons, but some among the clans were gifted, could “call” the herds to a cliffside or a pit, where a few beasts, in willing sacrifice, would let themselves be trapped. These gifted shamans could attune themselves to the spirits of the herds, and in so doing they became aware of the pulsating rhythm that infuses all life . . . They did not phrase this insight intellectually, but in images: the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life; and the Horned God, hunter and hunted, who eternally passes through the gates of death that new life may go on.”[1] These people danced with death every day of their lives, and I doubt they ever took the gift of life for granted. They must have had great reverence for life, nature, and women, who possess the seemingly supernatural power of bringing forth life.

The mother represented the life, death, and renewal cycles reflected in the waxing and waning cycles of the moon. The female body must have seemed like great magic to these people who lived completely dependent on nature. In Whence the Goddesses, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Ph.D., says, “Woman per se was probably believed to have potent, even ‘magical’ powers of fertility, and her birth-giving powers on a personal scale mirrored the feminine principle of birth and regeneration on a cosmic scale.”[2] Still today, we recognize and acknowledge the magnificence of the pregnant female body, though we can now explain it, even reduce it to sterile, medical terms.

In Modern Maturity, Native American activist, author, and actor Russell Means relates a story his grandfather told him: “A long time ago the people were sitting around the fire. Pretty soon the men came to watch the women grow with child and when they watched, they witnessed the miracle of life, birth itself, live birth, the miracle of created life. Then they looked at one another. That’s how my grandfather’s story ended: Then they looked at one another.“[3]

A woman bleeds, without being cut, in harmony with the moon. She holds the egg within her womb, waiting for the instant of creative merging, then grows the new life within. The two bodies live as one, hearts beating in rhythm. The mother breathes and eats for her baby until at last she is called to face the warrior’s ultimate test of courage. Risking death, she willingly stands at the threshold of worlds to bring forth new life. Her moon blood then magically transmutes into milk to feed her newborn. This “miracle of life” that we too often take for granted must have affected our ancestors like nothing else in their world.

In the same article, Means explains that the famous Sun Dance ritual was created to help men come into balance with the female; that the ceremonies were developed to bring understanding to the men and boys of what it’s like to give birth. He goes on to describe the Sun Dance and compares it to the ritual of birth and labor, “We dance the Sun Dance for four days, facing the sun, following the sun, all day, sunup to sundown. During those four days and nights we do not eat or drink water so we can try to begin to understand the suffering of pregnancy. You see, when you eat food it has to go to two people. The body starts relying on itself within.” “Eating itself,” the interviewer says. “Yeah, exactly, for protein. It starts eating the muscles. On the fourth day we pierce our chests, maybe even our backs, to understand the pain and the giving of flesh and blood the woman goes through. The ceremony’s about coming into balance with the female. The piercing is about trying to understand birth.”[4]

Means’ recounting of how the indigenous people of America have recognized and honored women–the life givers–for the courage and selfless love they demonstrate in bringing forth new life provides a clear picture of how our early ancestors probably viewed females in prehistoric and early historic periods of civilization. The logical thing to do when envisioning an anthropomorphized deity would be to make her female. “The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you’re born from your mother,” says Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth.[5]

Interviewer Bill Moyers questioned Campbell about the reverence that early societies accorded the Goddess figure, the Great Goddess, the mother earth. Campbell responded, “The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it’s her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe.”[6]

So when these early people thought of a supreme deity, it’s not surprising that they imaged the creator as female. Indeed, thousands of female figurines, some dating back as far as 30,000 B.C.E., have been unearthed all over prehistoric Europe. These images reflect the religious minds of our early western ancestors. In fact, “twenty times more female figurines than male figurines have been excavated from Neolithic European sites thus far.”[7] (The Neolithic is estimated to be the era between 7000 and 3000 B.C.E.)

Unfortunately, early scholars reduced these magnificent, large-hipped, often pregnant sculptures to mere expressions of prehistoric male erotica. But led by University of California professor Marija Gimbutas, many scholars, including British archaeologist James Mellaart, have challenged those conclusions and argue that, on the contrary, the Goddess figurines were intended for the purpose of worship.

What is the social, cultural, or historical importance of these thousands of prehistoric sculptures, found over a widespread geographical region? What do they tell us about our distant past, and how early humans revered the feminine and the cosmos she represented? Most important, what do they reveal about the way men and women related to and treated each other in those early developing societies? These ancient female sculptures, along with wall paintings and cave and burial sites, are essential parts of the psychological and cultural landscape of our ancestors. It seems the female was not only revered as the life-giving force, but she played an important part in understanding the cycle of death and rebirth, as well. Based on this ancient wisdom, death was not an end, but a path–a passageway–to a new cycle of life.

Anthropologists, archaeologists and historians learn a great deal about our predecessors by the style of grave and burial sites, and by the equipment found in there. Based on Gimbutas’ extensive work, Riane Eisler, in her book The Chalice and the Blade, explains this important association with the feminine to our early ancestors by referring to a burial site in Les Eyzies, France, where in a rock shelter known as Cro-Magnon, the first skeletal remains of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors were discovered in 1868 (the Paleolithic era was earlier than the Neolithic). Eisler says, “around and on the corpses were carefully arranged cowrie shells. These shells, shaped in the form of what (religious historian) E.O. James discreetly calls `the portal through which a child enters the world’ seem to have been associated with some kind of early worship of a female deity.” She reiterates the resurrection theme by recounting, “Both the ritualized placement of the vagina-shaped cowrie shells around and on the dead and the practice of coating these shells and/or the dead with red ocher pigment (symbolizing the vitalizing power of blood) appear to have been part of funerary rites intended to bring the deceased back through re-birth.”[8] Red ocher was used to signify and honor the life-giving menstrual blood of woman–a far different perspective from today’s view of menstruation as “the curse.”

[1]. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), p. 17.

[2]. Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1990), p. 5.

[3]. Russell Means interview in Modern Maturity Magazine (September-October 1995): 70.

[4]. Ibid., p. 71.

[5]. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p.166.

[6]. Ibid., p. 177.

[7]. Dexter, Whence the Goddesses, p. 4.

[8]. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 2.