The Matriarchal Past

Three claims about our prehistoric past provide the final shaky pillar of the fantasy that women leaders would create a more peaceful world. First is the assertion that man's first deity was a "universally" worshipped goddess.

Thus, we have Marija Gimbutas (1989) claiming on the basis of hundreds of Paleolithic “Venus figurines” that Man’s first deities were goddesses and that Stone Age Europe was a harmonious, peaceful, egalitarian matriarchy that worshipped the Great Goddess and was destroyed between 4000 and 3500 BC by violent, male-god worshipping Indo European invaders on horseback. She further claimed that these figurines prove that Man’s first deities were goddesses. Similarly, Cynthia Eller (1993) claimed that by the Neolithic Age a single goddess inspired a peaceful, matriarchal, agricultural society:

There was no war, people lived in harmony with nature, women and men lived in harmony with one another, children were loved and nurtured, there was food and shelter for all, and everyone was playful, spontaneous, creative and sexually free under the loving gaze of the goddess. People were in touch with their bodies and the seasons, there were no rich or poor, and homosexuality (particularly lesbianism) was as valid or more so than heterosexuality.

There are many problems with all this. It is not possible to determine the sex of the majority of the Paleolithic figurines. Among the remaining ones, there are as many males as females. That is, no more than 25% of the existing Paleolithic figurines unambiguously represent females. There is no evidence that the figurines represent gods or goddesses, as opposed to dolls, fertility figures, healing talismans, or simple decorative figures to name some of the equally plausible suggestions made based on the contexts in which they were found.

To the best of our knowledge, agriculture evolved in the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, and the Indus Valley, but the Venus figurines are found primarily from Spain through Western and Central Europe to Siberia in areas inhabited by hunter-gatherers, including the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans whom feminists say are patriarchal. A single religion seems unlikely over such a vast geographical area and period. The Phrygians provide the one clear case of a nomadic Indo-European tribe invading and destroying agriculturalists. Unfortunately for feminist theory, these aggressors worshipped a goddess.

Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian. The nomadic case is more difficult because so many today also are Muslim. Mongolians are among the few remaining non-Muslim nomads, and they are egalitarian. We know that Neanderthals disappeared after the arrival of Cro-Magnons, but not why. The usual theories posit lower intelligence, inferior language skills, and less effective weapons, but archaeologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner suggest on the basis of slender evidence that the decisive advantage was Cro-Magnon’s invention of division of labor, the women becoming gatherers, sewing clothes, and building shelters, while the men hunted and provided defense (Economist 9 December 2006). War appears to have been part of Neolithic life (Chapter 14).

We know from archaeological excavations and thousands of ancient documents that, contrary to feminist myth, hierarchy and patriarchy developed in agricultural societies. This is not particularly surprising, as they alone had the surplus that allows craft specialization, a prerequisite for hierarchy.

The earliest known deities in the Neolithic Near East are sexless and chthonic, not female and matriarchal.

It is not possible to deduce social mores or sexual practices from the skeletons, tools, potsherds, artifacts, cave paintings, and weapons that are all we have from the Neolithic. When confronted on the point, Eller replied that “even if these cultures cannot be proved to have existed, they at least are a possibility, and that is enough.” But, of course, it is not nearly enough. Almost anything anyone can imagine is possible, but a possibility is neither a probability nor evidence. It is up to the individual making a claim to provide supporting evidence. That evidence then is subject to efforts at falsification (Chapter 1). Appeals to ignorance and negative proof are committed when someone argues that because his claim cannot be proved false it should be accepted as true (Appendix).

The existing “evidence” that patriarchal Indo-European nomads conquered goddess-worshipping agricultural matriarchal pacifists collapses under scrutiny. Virtually everything written about a matriarchal past is by non-archaeologists. It dismisses contrary evidence and distorts facts. It subjects credible archaeologists to personal attacks, such as “rigidity in the face of new ideas” that are no more than hopeful speculation. It dismisses or ignores plausible reconstructions of the past to create a nonexistent mystery that then seems to beg for explanation. Then, it combines conjecture, coincidence, and over-extrapolation to reach the desired conclusion. These are time-tested devices of ideological writing. Wanting something to be true does not make it true.