CHAPTER 2

Mother Earth

The first figure to be discussed in this context is the one found in learned and elite culture, at least until the late modern age. She consists of a mighty female being thought to represent the whole of the natural world, or at least the terrestrial realm of it. Sometimes she functions as a mediatrix between heaven and earth, and correspondingly between a greater divinity than herself and human beings. She has variously been named Natura, Mother Nature, Mother Earth and (in recent times) the Great Earth Mother, the Mother Goddess or simply the Great Goddess.

The Ancient Context

The pagan ancient world could conceive of such divinities, representing the whole of nature and the earth, but they tended to be marginal to actual cult practice. Some ancient goddesses acted as the patronesses of particular kingdoms and peoples, and sometimes were regarded as giving fertility to their lands as well, most notably a trio in Asia Minor: Cybele in Phrygia, Artemis in Lydia and Hecate in Lycia. Others embodied or protected parts of the landscape, such as Ninhursaga in Mesopotamia, who cared for the wombs of creatures and was married to the paramount sky god – but was herself the indwelling spirit of the deserts and mountains that ringed the region, while the Mesopotamian landscape itself was in the hands of other deities.¹ The Greek Gaia and the Roman Terra Mater, on the other hand, did approximate far better to the later universal Earth Mother. Gaia certainly represented the whole terrestrial realm and was a maternal figure in that she produced the principal family of Greek deities, while Terra Mater was literally ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘The Earth Mother’. Here, however, the problem of worship kicks in. Most references to Gaia feature in literary texts, such as the poems of Hesiod and the Homeric and Orphic hymns, which use her as an emblematic figure. In 1985 the dominant authority on ancient Greek religion, Walter Burkert, could conclude that her true place was in the literature of ‘speculation’, adding that ‘in customary religion the role of Gaia is exceedingly modest’, confined mainly to the pouring of libations.² Since then, more evidence has been turned up, and the current position seems to be that most Greeks seemed to know about her, but that her worship consisted only of a statue or a place for offerings in a few temples of her son or grandson Zeus, and an annual offering in two local religious calendars.³

Terra Mater is even less well attested in religious practice. The emperor Augustus included her near the end of a long list of deities to receive sacrifices during one cycle of state-provided games. She was accompanied in this honour by the Fates and the goddesses who protected childbirth, as forces that guarded fertility.⁴ There seems, however, to be not a single temple or shrine or even a statue dedicated to her anywhere in the Roman Empire, and no private inscriptions or dedications to her throughout the western half of the empire, which was the region in which such a figure was later to become prominent. Instead, Rome had a much more important goddess of earth, Tellus, who was specifically the power who quickened the fertility of cultivated soil, and to whom temples certainly were raised. In actual worship, Tellus was paired with the grain goddess Ceres, and the latter’s shadowy husband, Cerus, and both were accompanied by twelve lesser figures with particular responsibilities for different aspects of the farming cycle.⁵ Ancient religion tended to be localized, in specific regions, cities and people, and also practical, in that deities were invoked because of the particular aspects of life over which they wielded power. It seems that the Greeks and Romans could conceive of mighty figures which encompassed the whole of the earth and the natural world, and put them into their literature as symbolic and allegorical figures, but they did not have a lot of use for them in actual worship.

It may be that this began to change towards the end of the ancient world, in the mystery cults which were appearing as a feature of late Roman paganism: closed cults of initiates dedicated to one or two divine figures, with whom members were able to form especially intense personal relationships. One of these was dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis and is the subject of one of the most famous novels to survive from antiquity, that from the second century by Apuleius of Madaura which has long been popularly known as The Golden Ass. Towards the end of it, Isis herself manifests in response to a plea, and is portrayed as associated with the full moon and addressed as ‘blessed queen of heaven’. She then introduces herself as ‘nature, mother of all, mistress of the elements, primordial daughter of time, ruler of all spiritual matters, queen of the dead, queen also of immortal beings, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses’.⁶ This is truly a universal deity, claiming to speak for all and represent the entire cosmos, and it may be exactly how the initiates of this mystery religion actually regarded her. On the other hand, it is not clear how far Apuleius was intending a genuine, and serious, representation of the cult, and how far his representation of the goddess is an inventive and literary one, intended for non-initiates.

Bobbing alongside these unequivocal deities, from the classical Greek period onwards, were more abstract figures employed by philosophers and poets to personify the natural world, the Greek Physis and the Roman Natura. To Aristotle, Physis was the power which generated and animated living things and fashioned and embodied the elements and primary materials of the world. As such, she (or it) had domain over the changeable terrestrial environment below the level of the changeless heavens which were the seat of the highest and purest divinity.⁷ This meant that she (or it) could be associated with Plato’s concept of the world soul, an entity endowed by the creator god with the role of linking his own eternal and ideal realm with that of material and mortal beings and acting as ruler over them.⁸ For the rest of antiquity philosophers elaborated and combined these figures, as cosmological abstractions, in different ways, with Physis translated into Latin, and the Roman world, as Natura.⁹ Roman poets of the imperial period subsequently picked up the concept of nature as a cosmic power, led by Ovid, who declared that order was first established in the world by ‘divinity and nature’, and Lucretius, who called ‘creatrix nature’ the maker and governess of all things.¹⁰ At some point later in the period of the empire, one of the Orphic hymns addressed Aristotle’s Physis as a deity, in a collection which honoured not only familiar goddesses and gods with long-established cults but also abstractions such as Night which had never been worshipped. Physis belonged to the latter category, hailed as a bisexual and timeless spirit, connecting heaven and earth and ruling over and giving life to the world.¹¹

The Antique–Medieval Transition

The literary tradition of a mighty goddess representing the whole natural world developed further in the transitional period between the ancient and medieval worlds, the fourth and fifth centuries. The Roman emperors were now almost all Christian (and all those who ruled for more than a brief period were), and Christianity was becoming first the most favoured religion in the empire and then – by the 390s – the only legally permitted one. At the same time, admiration for the literary heritage of pagan Greece and Rome remained almost as strong as ever, knowledge of it still representing a qualification for membership of the social elite. As a result, in the decades around 400 it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a particular author belonged to the old or new religion, as his enthusiasm for pagan mythology would suggest the former, but his position in the imperial court or hierarchy would seem reserved for the latter.

One such is Claudian, the last great classical Roman poet. In one of his works, he repeated the theme of how ‘Mother Nature’ (as he now firmly called her) produced an ordered world out of chaos, and hailed her as the generous provider of crops for humanity. In another he provided the first real visual portrait of her to date, as a divine being, seated ‘immensely old yet ever beautiful, with spirits crowding and flying all around her’.¹² An author from this period whose Christianity was certainly not in doubt was Augustine of Hippo, the most influential of all the theologians of late antiquity, who felt obliged to consider the figure of Natura given her place in philosophy. On the whole, his conclusions were favourable, as he declared the natural world to be a teacher and guide to humanity, appointed by the Christian God to carry out his will. He wobbled over whether that nature should be considered an animate being, with a personality, first endorsing the idea and then withdrawing it without actually condemning it.¹³ That opened a path whereby belief in such a being could be expressed, at least poetically and allegorically, by the orthodox.

Other Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries picked up the question of the place of nature in the cosmos and answered it in much the same way, drawing as Augustine did on the answer provided by Aristotle and the pagan philosophers whom he and Plato had inspired. They tended to do so for a particular polemical purpose: to condemn the pagan belief in an animate natural world, presided over by deities who often embodied particular aspects of it. Against this, they asserted that their own true God had created the whole universe and governed it in person ever after, so that the natural world was his product and servant. A spin-off consequence of this argument, however, was that they tended to personify nature as an animate being, of female gender, instructed by the Christian God to provide for humanity and to act as a teacher and guide for it. At times they made her speak in her own voice.¹⁴

A very good example of how such an entity could make the transition from paganism to Christianity, and from abstraction to active invocation, is provided by the Latin poem Praecatio terrae matris, which was composed by an unknown author, probably but not certainly pagan, towards the end of the Western Roman Empire. The opening section of it has survived, and is a very sophisticated and polished literary composition, eulogizing the fertile land as ‘Earth, Divine Goddess, Mother Nature’, who offers protection and nourishment: it fits into the salutation of this being in poetry during this period. What is significant about it in this context is that it was preserved by being incorporated into early medieval medical works as a charm to be used when collecting plants for medicinal purposes. It was glossed in the earliest extant of these, from the sixth century, as ‘the beginning of the prayer to earth employed by the pagans of old when they wished to collect herbs’: it is possible that what had originated as a glittering piece of literature had indeed became used for this purpose by pagans, or that the later Christian author of this gloss was in error. At any rate, it became popular in this context, being found in several Continental manuscripts, and also an English one from the eleventh or twelfth century. It was adapted to a Christian model by the addition to it of a similar prayer directed to the Christian heavenly powers, so bringing the divine spirit of earth into the domain of those powers, much as Augustine, taking his cue from Aristotle and Plato, had suggested.¹⁵

A similar theology was manifested in an Anglo-Saxon charm, which may possibly have been influenced by the Praecatio. This is the Aecerbot, or Field Blessing, already cited in the present book. It is known from a single manuscript of the late tenth or early eleventh century, with its cry of ‘Erce, erce, erce, earth’s mother’.¹⁶ It is a long and elaborate act of magic to increase the fertility of a piece of land, involving the consecration of pieces of earth from it, with both various natural substances and Christian masses and prayers, and the invocation of the Christian Trinity and evangelists. All this takes place before ‘earth’s mother’ is addressed, and she is treated not as an active power in her own right but as one to whom ‘the eternal lord’ must grant prosperity. Thereafter that ‘God’ is implored again repeatedly, and the ceremony ends with a triple repetition of the Lord’s Prayer. The term ‘erce’ has been the object of much scholarly speculation. It does not work grammatically in Anglo-Saxon, and may possibly be the name of a former pagan goddess, though one attested nowhere else and who would be an odd addition to such a liturgically inspired text; a neat solution recently proposed is that it functions perfectly as a form of a contemporary Irish verb signifying ‘may you be abundant’. Anglo-Saxon medical texts show many other imported Irish words and phrases, so this would fit the context well.¹⁷

It seems, therefore, that, on making the transition to the Christian era, a being who had operated in pagan literature as a philosophical and allegorical abstraction had become one who could be supplicated for aid within a firmly Christianized theological setting. This development was doubtless made the easier by the lack of any apparent existing cult centres or iconography of her; but it is also telling that she seemed to fill a conceptual gap within the Christian cosmos so neatly.

The Medieval and Early Modern Periods

The next great development in the figure took place in that major efflorescence of Latin Christian culture, produced by a mixture of political stability, economic prosperity and a large-scale recovery of ancient texts, which has become known as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. In particular, it was associated with one of the most notable schools which embodied this movement: that attached to the superb cathedral which was being constructed in the French city of Chartres, south of Paris. The scholar connected to it who took up the figure of Natura, and in spectacular fashion, was Bernard Silvester, working around 1150, who gave her a major role in an epic for the first time. He portrayed her as a divinity created by the Christian God who initiates the formation of a beautiful world from the crude matter of primal creation. In his allegorical fable, she persuades the divine intellect (also personified as a goddess, and identified with the Roman Minerva) to undertake the work of making an ordered and lovely universe. The resulting achievement is then animated by Plato’s world soul, likewise represented as a female being, and Natura fashions the bodies to contain the souls engendered by the world one. The divine intellect then gives her the task of creating and instructing humanity, which she does with the help of two other goddess figures, Urania, representing the heavens, and Physis, representing the earth, under the overall authority of the Christian Trinity.¹⁸

Bernard’s work was immediately followed up by another scholar associated with Chartres, Alan of Lille, between 1160 and 1184, in a pair of works which begin by saluting Natura as the ruler of the world on behalf of the Christian God and the maker of humanity. Under her master’s instructions, and emphasizing her utter dependence on his authority, she makes humans the gift of procreation to continue their species, enlisting the aid of the pagan goddess of sex, Venus, though Venus mars the work by investing humans with sinful and sensual desires as well as the healthy and preordained one of producing children. Alan supplies a vivid visual portrait of Natura, her crown glittering with jewels representing the heavenly bodies and her clothing embroidered with images of animals and plants. She travels in a glass coach, drawn by peacocks and driven by a handsome male giant. At her arrival on earth, the birds and fish come to greet her, the sun shines more brightly and the fields sprout flowers.¹⁹ She is also the heroine of his second work, a poem in which Natura sets out to make a new and better kind of human, lacking the flaws in the existing one. It gives her a home, a columned palace set in a forest and painted with images of famously wise and brave people, to which she calls the virtues, personified as her sisters, to assist her. God sanctions the project and creates the soul of the new being, while Natura models its body, and so a new and better era begins.²⁰ Both Bernard Sylvester and Alan of Lille knew the poems of Claudian and were influenced by them.

Their books, though philosophical and theological allegories, were wholly or partly in verse, and, just as in antiquity, genuine poets now followed where philosophers had led. Already in the 1180s another Frenchman with connections to Chartres, Jean de Hauteville, composed a work in which a young man goes on a quest to find Natura and be healed of his woes and learn from her the meaning of the world and the best way to live in it (which he does, and she gives him a wife, Moderation, as well).²¹ During the following two centuries, the greatest poets of their time in both France and England made use of her. The French one was Jean de Meun, in his version of the Roman de la Rose, a quest romance embodying a discussion of erotic love, which he wrote in the 1270s. Once more, Natura has responsibility for the making of mortal beings and the continuity of life on earth, as God’s chamberlain there and queen of the world. De Meun does not provide a portrait of her, commenting only that her beauty is beyond description, but equips her with a palace that comes complete with a Christian chapel. He reveals that those who keep her laws go after death to an especially delectable pastoral paradise caught in a perpetual springtime.²² The Englishman, a hundred years later, was Geoffrey Chaucer, in the poem commonly known as The Parliament of Fowls. His Nature is a goddess fairer than any other earthly being, enthroned in a palace of green boughs set upon a hill covered with flowers. She presides over the annual springtime assembly of birds, at which they choose their mates for the year: Chaucer references Alan of Lille for the idea that she represents the God-created world and acts as God’s deputy there, and he was well acquainted with Le Roman de la Rose.²³

This celebration of her at times provoked counterblasts. One of the most notable was a long poem composed by a fourteenth-century French monk and translated into English early in the following century. It was at least in part a reply to Le Roman de la Rose, and portrayed Nature as a quarrelsome old woman, in order to elevate the spiritual and eternal over the material and changeable.²⁴ Generally, however, late medieval representations of her were admiring, largely due to the great influence of Le Roman. One of the most delightful was in a French quest romance, composed around 1400 and rapidly turned into English, in which Nature manifests to the princely hero on a spring morning as a bright goddess clad in a robe woven with pictures of all earthly things. She fills his bedchamber with the scents of ambergris and roses and sends him on his search for worthiness.²⁵ Her appearances became rarer as the Middle Ages ended and allegory became less popular as a literary form, although she resurfaced when it was adopted: notably, for example, in The Faerie Queen, the epic produced by the Elizabethan Englishman Edmund Spenser. His Nature is a radiant, ageless and mighty supernatural being, invested with divine authority to carry out her tasks. A pavilion of trees spontaneously grows up to receive her, flowers spring up beneath her feet and the spirits of rivers pay her homage, even as the classical deities of Greece and Rome recognize her as much greater than they.²⁶

Early modern scholars, however, were more inclined to envisage a great female entity embodying or superintending the earth on behalf of the Christian Almighty in the form of the Platonic world soul, which underwent a revival at this time in accordance with the revival of interest in Plato’s works in Western Europe. The seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, publishing in Rome, prefaced one of his books with a woodcut of the goddess Isis in this role, as described by Apuleius.²⁷ A Jacobean English occultist, publishing in Germany, also made Isis the Soul of the World, this time using ideas from another author working in the Roman Empire, Plutarch. In his frontispiece illustration she stands nude, with flowing hair and a crown of stars. A crescent moon covers her pudenda, another her left breast and a star her right one, though it is clear that rays or seeds are streaming to earth, like mother’s milk, from the nipple beneath the star. The hand of God holds a chain attached to one of her arms, while in turn she holds another attached to an arm of Man. She has one foot on land and another in water.²⁸

It may thus be seen that the concept of a mighty female figure embodying and ruling over the terrestrial world was embedded in Christian intellectual and literary culture all through the periods in which Christianity most completely dominated Europe, the medieval and early modern. The idea that this being could be supplicated as part of fertility and medicinal rites seems to be confined to the earlier Middle Ages, as no more is heard of it after the eleventh century: it appears to have functioned as a transitional notion. Allegorical use of a goddess-like entity called Nature or the world soul, however, only gathered strength thereafter, to become an enduring component of elite Christian thought.

The Modern Nature Goddess: The Literary Personification

The main effect of the advent of true modernity on the figure of Nature, Mother Earth or the world soul was to strip away the empowering and dominating figure of the Christian God from her cosmos and leave her to reign in her own right. This could be done with all the more enthusiasm in that one of the main features of the Romantic Movement, that great cultural current that swept Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was to eulogize the natural world as a fount of wisdom, beauty and redemption from the more corrupting and debilitating aspects of civilization and urbanization. It was achieved with the greatest drama and violence, though also the greatest brevity, in the French Revolution, where a national cult of Nature was instituted by the revolutionary government to replace Christianity. It lasted only long enough to stage one festival, on 10 August 1793, the anniversary of the final overthrow of the French monarchy, upon the site of the now-demolished royal fortress-prison of the Bastille. At sunrise a chorus of girls dressed in white performed a hymn to the goddess by one of the revolutionaries’ favourite composers, François-Joseph Gossec, and then a cantata was sung based on a text by their favourite philosopher and eulogist of Nature, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The president of the National Convention next ascended a flight of white steps to a statue of the goddess, enthroned between two lions, with water pouring from her breasts into a tank below. He hailed the deity, asked her to bless and fructify France, and poured a libation of the water in the name of liberty. Eighty-six old men then followed his example, each representing one of the new administrative departments of the nation, and each being announced with drum rolls and fanfares of brass and his action followed by the firing of cannon. A huge crowd watched the ceremony.²⁹

Within a year the regime which had instituted this cult was overthrown, and the new observance fell with it. Instead, a reverence for a personified natural world proved to be more enduring, if less dramatic, in England, which not only became as deeply imbued with Romanticism as any other country but responded to its adulation of that world with the more intensity because of its sudden, extreme and unprecedented degree of urbanization and industrialization.³⁰ Of the first major generation of English Romantic poets, in the late 1810s, two in particular articulated aspects of it. One was Percy Shelley, who introduced the classical deity Proserpine, daughter of the Roman corn-goddess Ceres, with an invocation to her mother as:

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom

Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,

Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,

Breath thine influence most divine

On thy own child Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers

Till they grow, in scent and hue,

Fairest children of the Hours,

Breathe thine influence most divine

On thy own child Proserpine.³¹

This is much more the divine nature as described by the medieval authors than the Roman grain goddess. The association of that greater being with the night sky also endured in the work of these poets, most vividly in that of the other poet who is especially relevant here, John Keats. He also celebrated Nature as donor of a delightful store of luxuries and patroness of deities and nymphs.³² It was, however, when he turned his eyes towards the celestial that his invocation became most passionate:

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move

My heart so potently? when yet a child

I oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled.

Thou seemst my sister: hand in hand we went

From eve to morn across the firmament.

. . .

And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend

With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen;

Thou wast the mountain’s top – the sage’s pen –

The poet’s harp – the voice of friends – the sun ;

Thou wast the river – thou wast glory won;

Thou wast my clarion’s blast – thou wast my steed –

My goblet full of wine – my topmost deed:

Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!³³

At times the former Christian pattern of a cosmic feminine force subject to a patriarchal sky deity lingered among creative writers. Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre was the work of an author who was herself the daughter and wife of clergymen, and made her heroine consider a life as a missionary abroad. It is, however, the moon and not Jesus that appears at moments of especially intense emotion in her life, and at one of these takes the form of a white divine female in a dream, to give her advice: she addresses this being as ‘mother’. Having run away from her previous existence and finding herself alone and penniless, sleeping rough on a moor, she is comforted first by the thought of Nature, again conceived of as maternal, and next by that of a loving God, as creator of Nature.³⁴ At times, the same heavenly–earthly divine relationship could be blended with traditional classicism, as in the work of another celebrated mid-Victorian writer, the poet Robert Browning. For his representative of the natural world, he chose the Greek goddess Artemis, patroness of wild places and animals and of the night, and elevated her status to the greatest female divinity next to Hera, the latter being wife to the patriarchal sky god Zeus and so queen of deities. Once more, the equation between wild nature, the moon and the divine feminine was articulated, and Browning gives this goddess dominion in the sky, the earth and the underworld as well:

I am a goddess of the ambrosial courts,

And save by Hera, Queen of Pride, surpassed

By none whose temples whiten this the world.

Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;

I shed in hell o’er my pale people peace;

On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard

Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,

And every feathered mother’s callow brood,

And all that love green haunts and loneliness.³⁵

Another course was, however, possible for mid-Victorian writers of a more radical or counter-cultural turn of mind, and one of these was Algernon Swinburne. In 1867 he introduced his readers to a mighty female deity, embodying and creating the universe herself, to whom he gave the Germanic name Hertha, to signify a goddess representing the whole earth. Her declaration commenced:

I am that which began,

Out of me the years roll,

Out of me, god and man,

I am equal and whole;

God changes, and man,

And the form of them bodily;

I am the soul.

Before ever land was,

Before ever the sea,

Or soft hair of the grass

Or fair limbs of the tree,

Or the flesh-coloured fruit of my branches,

I was, and thy soul was in me.

First life on my sources,

First drifted and swam,

Out of me are the forces

That save it or damn;

Out of me, man and woman,

And wild-beast, and bird;

Before god was, I am.³⁶

Few were yet prepared to go that far, and later Victorian creative writers tended to want their earth goddess still to share her power. The medieval Christian role for her could be found consistently, for example in the poetry of George Meredith between the 1860s and 1880s. His passionate love of the English natural world shone through it across all these decades, and he often personified that world as ‘Great Mother Nature’ or ‘Earth, the mother of all’. Meredith held that only by loving and understanding her could humans be truly led to an understanding of ‘her just Lord’, the Christian God, who presided over heaven and the afterlife even as the goddess presided over the earth and the mortal existence. His attitude was summed up in the verse:

And are we the children of Heaven and Earth,

We’ll be true to the mother with whom we are,

So as to be worthy of Him who afar,

Beckons us on to a brighter birth.

Meredith found a place for the classical pagan deities in this scheme, declaring that Aphrodite, Apollo and Pan still had a place on earth and deserved respect there as a part of Nature, serving, loving and honouring her. He thus envisaged a divine hierarchy descending from God to Mother Nature or Mother Earth and through her to the Graeco-Roman goddesses and gods.³⁷ Another writer in this tradition was George Russell, who like his friend and collaborator William Butler Yeats (who has been cited earlier) made an eclectic personal mixture of religions. To him, the goddess of nature and earth was above all maternal, ‘the Mighty Mother’, ‘ancient mother’ or ‘Virgin Mother’, sometimes given the name Dana, from a presumed earth goddess in medieval Irish literature. His verse could be fired up with love for her:

Mother, thy rudest sod to me

Is thrilled with fire of hidden day

And haunted by all mystery.³⁸

Ah, when I think this earth on which I tread

Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead,

And makes the living heart I love to bear,

I look, with sudden awe, beneath my feet

As you with erring reverence overhead.³⁹

That last line reads like a rebuke to those who looked to a heavenly father, but in his poetry Russell referred indiscriminately to ‘God’, also called ‘the Mighty Master’ or the ‘Heavenly Wizard’, or to the earth goddess as the presiding power of the universe, without any sense of contradiction. He even found a place for Christ, though as an aspect of the Hindu god Krishna.⁴⁰ When he finally came to publish a formal synthesis of his cosmology, he firmly made the ‘Lord and King’ the creator and master of Nature, also called ‘Earth the Mother of Us All’, and the Olympian and Irish deities subservient to her, a hierarchy much the same as Meredith’s.⁴¹

During this later period, however, some authors were prepared to follow Swinburne and grant the earth goddess independent and dominant power. The fantasy novelist and creator of short stories Algernon Blackwood in The Centaur (1911) sends its hero on a spiritual quest which culminates in a rediscovery of the Garden of Eden, as ‘the heart of the Earth, his mother’, where he knows ‘the Great Atonement’ of perfect union with Nature and so self-realization. His deity is explicitly ‘his great Earth Mother’. From the time of the First World War, creative writers were less inclined to be concerned with deities in general, save for that minority which self-consciously represented traditional denominational positions. Instead, to more hard-bitten modernists, the qualities hitherto associated with the world goddess, namely the green earth and the night sky, became treated as hallmarks of the feminine in general. One very clear illustration of this is in the novels of D.H. Lawrence. In The Rainbow (1915) his heroine repeatedly seems to empower herself mystically by relation to the celestial lights of the night. In one passage she ‘stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way with it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon. She wanted the moon to fill in to her, she wanted more, more communion with the moon, more consummation.’ In another she makes love with her boyfriend on chalk down turf at night and as she does so ‘her eyes were open looking at the stars, it was as if the stars were lying with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming her at last’.⁴²

Another of his heroines, Lady Chatterley, manifested the aspect of the nature goddess as the greenwood, this time after sex, when ‘she was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.’⁴³ In Women in Love (1921), one of his male anti-heroes lashed out repeatedly at this image of transcendent womanhood, railing against ‘the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceedeth everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up . . . He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.’ Later the same man symbolically threw stones into a pond to smash the reflection of the full moon in it, reviling ‘the accursed Syria Dea’ (one ancient great local goddess). Later still he found ‘horrible’ the idea that woman was ‘the perfect womb, the bath of birth, to which all men must come’.⁴⁴ A piece written by Lawrence in 1924 contains the outburst ‘Oh woman, wonderful is the craft of your softness, the distance of your dark depths. Oh open silently the deep that has no end and do not turn the horns of the moon against me.’⁴⁵

By the twentieth century, therefore, the medieval image of a natural world personified as a single mighty goddess had retained its potency in response to modern needs and proved resiliently adaptable. To some creative writers, the earlier Christian concept of a ruling and empowering creator God still had traction, whereas to others, the goddess had been cut loose from it to function as a dominant entity in her own right. To yet others, she had become a repository of symbols and associations which could be used to inform a sense of female divinity in general, or even of femininity itself. It was not creative writers, however, who were to be the main fount of interest in such a figure during the modern era, but scholars, who were to project her into the remote past and across the globe, in a manner which supercharged her apparent importance and significance as a universal human concept.

The Modern Nature-Goddess: The Scholarly Personification

It seems to have been a German classicist, Eduard Gerhard, at Berlin in 1849, who first suggested that before the dawn of history the ancient Greeks had venerated a single great goddess, of whom the various female deities recorded in historic times had been aspects and derivations, who took individual form as the original belief disintegrated and localized.⁴⁶ It made sense that this idea should surface then and there. A generation of German Romantic thinkers, notably Johann Herder, Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, had argued that primitive human society had generally held religious beliefs which embodied sublime truths concerning the processes of nature and of human life. This was advanced in opposition to the dominant view taken by leaders of the French and Scottish Enlightenments that primeval religion had been a compound of superstition, ignorance and fear, from which civilization had rescued humanity: the Germans held instead that the closer to creation humans had been, the nobler their instincts. Tieck and Schlegel, the two younger men, had worked together in Berlin, the city of Gerhard. One of the sublime truths that ancient human intuition had attained was assumed to be monotheism, and in constructing an imagined single great goddess for the ancestors of the Greeks, Gerhard was giving specific expression to this idea.

During the later nineteenth century it was taken up by a few prominent French and German scholars, the former being classicists who were also experts in the growing field of Near Eastern archaeology, and the latter concerned with comparative mythology, as supported by archaeology.⁴⁷ The Frenchmen were able to point to the divine patronesses of the kingdoms of Asia Minor and the maternal nature-goddesses of Mesopotamia as models for what such an imagined prehistoric supreme deity might have been like. This strain of thought was given additional impetus at the end of the century, when prehistoric sites in south-eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean islands began to reveal large quantities of figurines, most apparently female. There was no evidence that these represented goddesses, let alone a single great one, but also no disproof of that idea, and so they began to be enlisted in support of it.⁴⁸

By now, some British scholars were becoming converts, and one of the most notable was Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete. Those Cretan sites were also revealing prehistoric female figurines, and while in the 1890s Evans did not associate them with any specific deity, in 1901 he identified them firmly as being the same one as the Mesopotamian mother goddess, whose cult he believed had spread to the Levant.⁴⁹ In the next year he declared that all of the apparently different goddess images found in Minoan Crete were actually aspects of one great deity, whom he termed the Virgin Mother.⁵⁰ Goddesses who conceived offspring apparently spontaneously were known in the ancient world, but were rare. Evans’s elevation of the type to dominance allowed him to unite female deities of apparently varied kinds, but it in addition is hard to imagine that it would have had such traction on him without the example provided by the Christian Virgin Mary, which would have operated also in the case of George Russell’s use of the same term for his universal goddess. By 1931 Evans had extended the realm in which this deity form was venerated to include all of Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt.⁵¹ By the time that he first became convinced of her prehistoric existence, another element was entering the construct, which had emerged from a debate between lawyers over the origins of society and the human family. It was supplied first by a Swiss jurist and academic, Johann Jakob Bachofen, in 1861, who, relying largely on ancient Greek myth, proposed that the earliest human societies had been run by women, altering to a male-led form before the beginning of history. Naturally, he suggested that the prehistoric woman-centred culture had a religious focus on an earth mother goddess.⁵² This was imported into Britain in 1875, in J.F. MacLellan’s Primitive Marriage. A female-dominated society could readily be paired with a religion of a great goddess. That pairing was made influentially in Britain in 1903 by a Cambridge academic, Jane Ellen Harrison, and once more in the particular case of ancient Greece. This was for the Victorians and Edwardians a culture of particular exemplary power, because not only was the evidence for it so rich but it was regarded with some justice as the foundation of all succeeding European civilization, and with more subjectivity as the most admirable in the ancient world. Harrison suggested not only that prehistoric Greek society had been matriarchal but that it had been centred on the cult of a single great goddess who had three aspects, of which the first two were Maiden and Mother (she did not name the third). She portrayed this being as functioning to the subordinate male deities as ‘somewhere between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the patron saint’. Her rule, according to Harrison, was overthrown before history began, with the imposition of male dominance in both the human and divine spheres, the goddess’s role in the latter being supplanted by the celestial father-god Zeus, to whom she referred, rather charmingly and with a very apparent eye on her contemporary society, as ‘an archpatriarchal bourgeois’.⁵³ Harrison relied especially on German lexicons and dictionaries which drew attention to those Greek goddesses who appeared in triple form, such as the Fates, and Hekate and Diana. Poets and philosophers under the Roman Empire had sometimes compared the three faces of the last two deities to the phases of the moon. These ideas were developed further by scholars commenting on famous classical texts, in that boundary phase between paganism and Christianity that had produced Claudian: notably Servius in the fifth century, who declared that the goddess known as Diana on earth had been known as Luna above it and Proserpina below it, and that her three aspects had respectively presided over birth, life and death.⁵⁴

In the following twenty years, a set of leading classicists at Oxford and Cambridge endorsed the idea of a single prehistoric deity, a goddess associated with the earth and motherhood, as the focal point of the oldest Greek religion.⁵⁵ By this time, the range of that deity’s worship was being greatly extended by some scholars. In 1903 a distinguished British scholar, of medieval and early modern drama, spoke of an earth mother goddess, associated both with fertility and death, as having been worshipped under various names and forms in many ancient civilizations as the fundamental form of ancient female deity.⁵⁶ Three years later, a German one declared that such a goddess had been found universally throughout humanity, as one of the most ancient and primordial of human religious conceptions.⁵⁷ Over the following decades more and more anthropologists picked up this idea and interpreted the beliefs of indigenous peoples in conformity with it; indeed, it has been alleged that these researchers actually erroneously convinced some of those peoples, especially in the Americas and Australia, that they had formerly held it. Thus, some native Australians did apparently believe in a divine mother figure, but had not connected her to the earth until white academics persuaded them to do so.⁵⁸ In 1908 a French archaeologist declared that a Great Goddess concerned with death and fertility had been worshipped by all the Neolithic peoples of Europe and the Near East, and that her cult had been focused above all on images of her eyes and breasts. This enabled him to use any figure or symbol on a Neolithic site which could be interpreted as representing an eye or a breast as proof of that cult.⁵⁹ Two years later an Italian medical scientist who wrote on prehistory asserted that matriarchal religion had held sway across Neolithic culture and had been brought to an end by an invasion of patriarchal barbarians whom he identified with the Indo-European peoples.⁶⁰ Finally, in 1929 a British archaeologist projected it backwards effectively to the beginning of human time by suggesting that the feminine figurines found on a scatter of Palaeolithic sites across Europe had also been images of the Great Goddess.⁶¹

As the twentieth century entered its central decades, a belief in a primeval human propensity, and especially one of Neolithic Europeans and Near Easterners, to venerate a great earth mother was spreading further, and especially in the English-speaking world. Hitherto it had made little impression upon experts on the prehistory of the British Isles themselves. Their Neolithic had produced spectacular stone monuments but was remarkably aniconic, free of symbols, images and figurines which could be interpreted as evidence for any kind of deity.

British writers who were not experts on prehistory, by contrast, had no such inhibitions, being carried away by the attraction of a nature-goddess figure which had been sweeping the West for a century. In 1898 a medical doctor with a mystical attachment to the Celtic past declared that ancient Ireland had been ruled by a high queen representing the land’s Great Mother Goddess, whom ‘the Celtic Church’ turned into the Christian saint Bridget.⁶² In 1932 a popular writer on the English countryside, Harold Massingham, produced a book on the Cotswold Hills in which he showed particular interest in their Neolithic chambered long mounds, which had been brought to public notice by an archaeological survey a few years before. That survey had scrupulously avoided commenting on the possible nature of the religion which had inspired the construction of these monuments while suggesting that they had been united by a common worship, but the popular author had no hesitation in declaring confidently that it had been devoted to Mother Earth. He seemed to elide this figure with what he termed ‘the Sleeping Beauty of the countryside’, who would be reawoken when ‘the English recover their appetite for natural beauty and natural living’.⁶³ Yet, all the while, specialists in British archaeology held their peace.

That was broken after 1939, when a remarkable discovery was reported at the complex of Neolithic flint mines in Norfolk called Grimes Graves. At the bottom of one mine, a female chalk figurine was allegedly uncovered, seated on a crude altar and with a vessel, apparently for offerings, placed before her. This was sensational, and apparently decisive: none of the other Neolithic (or Palaeolithic) figurines from the rest of Europe and the Near East had been found in a context so clearly indicative of worship. The statuette accordingly appeared in books on the British Neolithic as a deity, and the Ministry of Works put it on the cover of its official guide to the site and reconstructed its ‘shrine’ for visitors to see. Not until the 1980s did doubt begin to be expressed publicly about the authenticity of the find, and not until the 1990s was a proper investigation carried out into the circumstances of discovery and the nature of the objects. That was not conclusive, because chalk artefacts cannot be chemically dated, but the discovery turned out to have been announced by the director of the excavation, without his having recorded it in the site notebook and after he had asked all other experienced archaeologists to leave the area. The figurine and vessel looked freshly carved, and somebody on the team was an expert sculptor and had made other objects during the dig from the same local rock.⁶⁴ As a result, and in view of the fact that nothing like this ‘shrine’ has been found anywhere else in Europe, it can no longer be accepted as reliable evidence.

At the time of its announcement, however, it opened the way for anybody who wished credibly to add the British Isles to the domain of the Neolithic Great Goddess. Two respected archaeologists to accept this invitation were a young married couple, Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, who proceeded in the course of the 1940s to publish textbooks in which they proposed that the builders of the megalithic monuments of Western Europe had been converted to the worship of a single great fertility goddess by missionaries moving up through the Mediterranean from her older cult centres in the Balkans and Levant. This religion had been replaced in turn, they argued, by new cults of sky gods introduced by the Beaker People, conquering westwards from Central Europe.⁶⁵

At the end of the decade, Jacquetta abandoned both Christopher and professional archaeology to marry the playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley and become herself, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a prolific writer of novels, plays, poetry and (above all) popular surveys of prehistory and the history of religion. The latter earned her an enormous readership, and she became one of the two first British members of the new United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO. The vision of the European Neolithic which she propagated was one of a woman-centred, peaceful and creative set of cultures, united by the worship of Nature, embodied as a single goddess, with whom they lived in harmony. This religion united the whole continent between the figurine-makers of the south-east and the megalith-builders of the west, with a series of specific cult centres between, such as the temples of Malta. In her version, which built directly on that developed in the 1900s, it was destroyed by the Indo-Europeans, of whom the Beaker People were the western spearhead, a horde of warlike and patriarchal invaders who substituted a religion centred on aggressive sky gods – so rupturing permanently the harmony between peoples and sexes, and between humans and the land.⁶⁶

The belief that Neolithic Europe had venerated a single great goddess representing mother earth now at last became something like a general orthodoxy among the leaders of British archaeology. During the 1950s it was adopted by four of them: Gordon Childe, O.G.S. Crawford, Stuart Piggott and Glyn Daniel. Crawford made something like a dramatic personal conversion to it during a holiday in Brittany in 1953 and devoted a large and euphoric book to propagating the idea to the general public.⁶⁷ He and Childe projected the image into later ages, the latter asserting that memories of the prehistoric goddess lay behind the medieval Christian veneration of female saints, and Crawford finding traces of her in a range of folk customs, including corn dollies. In a circular process, the interpretation of newly discovered ancient sites was made in conformity with the belief in her cult, and so appeared to reinforce the evidence for it. The most spectacular example of this effect was probably James Mellaart’s revelation and excavation of a Neolithic town in Turkey dating from 6500 to 5700 BC, at Catal Höyük, in the early 1960s: this was the biggest urban settlement yet found for the age. He immediately interpreted the female figurines there, and some wall paintings and plaster reliefs, as images of ‘the Mother Goddess’ or ‘the Great Goddess’, a deity of fertility and abundance of whom the later goddesses of historic Greece were mere aspects. Male representations were taken as those of her son and consort, as they had been by Evans in Crete: this was a relationship found in two historic goddess cults in Anatolia.⁶⁸ Mellaart also suggested that religious and social life had been dominated by women. He then publicized these views both in reports for fellow experts and popular textbooks.⁶⁹ He acknowledged to fellow archaeologists that his own readings of his finds were ‘speculation, not scientific fact’, but declared that ‘at this period there was no doubt that the supreme deity was the Great Goddess’.⁷⁰ In his popular works, his interpretations were generally presented without even these qualifications, and as established truth.

To a great extent, the vision of a prehistory in which human society had been violently altered from being led by and centred on women to being dominated by men, and in which religion had changed its focus from an earth goddess to a sky god, was an obvious response to modern anxieties about gender roles in changing Western social orders. Nonetheless, the divine relationships being envisaged preserved a memory of the medieval origins of the two figures. In those, the earth goddess had a harmonious interaction with the sky god, as his creation and his deputy in caring directly for the earth and for generation. In the newly imagined past, the two were placed at odds with each other, the goddess initially both dominant and in a superior position to her own male consort as his parent, mate and leader. It was the sky god’s cult which then overthrew and replaced her worship. The utility of this vision of the remote past was that it could be used to equal effect by both extremes of modern gender attitudes. To feminists of different hues, prehistoric social and/or religious matriarchy could be turned into an earthly paradise of peace, harmony within society, sound ecology and benevolent political and judicial structures. In this version, its violent overthrow turned the condition of humanity into one of war, oppression, exploitation and pollution, a new version of the Christian Fall or the ancient pagan myth of the human decline from a Golden to an Iron Age. To those who wanted to retain the traditional gender roles of Western society, at least as conceived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a female focus in religion and society could be disparaged and dismissed as a hallmark of the primitive and underdeveloped, a child-like phase from which the human race progressed as a first stage in its climb to the benefits of civilization and modernity. The same basic model of prehistory could thus be made to satisfy a range of modern ideological positions.

With this advantage, and the increasing endorsement of so many professional archaeologists, it is not surprising that it was taken up by a widening range of other writers between the 1920s and 1960s. In 1927 a medical doctor in London, Robert Briffault, published a large book to support the belief in prehistoric matriarchy and the rule of the Virgin Mother Goddess, with her son as her partner, worldwide. He developed the image of the goddess further from that supplied by Harrison, into a triple deity who appeared as young, mature and elderly, to match the phases of the moon.⁷¹ This image, of a universal moon goddess who was simultaneously Maiden, Mother and Crone, was taken further by one of the greatest poets and novelists of the century, Robert Graves, in his celebrated publication of 1948, The White Goddess. It was specifically aimed at the general public, on the grounds that scholars were too timid and blinkered to recognize its truth, and consisted of a personal interpretation of texts taken from a very wide range of cultures, bridged by personal assertions of faith. Like Harrison and Briffault, who exerted a great influence upon him, he accepted completely the existence of prehistoric matriarchy in both society and religion, but his goddess was more particularly the patroness of poetry, as was natural enough to a poet.⁷² Graves’s book had an impact on Jacquetta Hawkes, and also on George Ewart Evans, the eminent collector of oral information on traditional rural crafts and lifestyles, who adopted the Great Earth Mother into the hinterland of his impression of history and declared that she had been revered in Britain long after the official triumph of Christianity.⁷³ James Mellaart interpreted the images at Catal Höyük in conformity with Briffault’s and Graves’s concept of a universal goddess who was at once Mother, Maiden and Crone.⁷⁴ In view of her prominence in the professional texts of archaeologists, as well as in the work of Briffault, Graves and Hawkes, it is not surprising that when the modern Pagan religion of Wicca was revealed to the public in the 1950s, its principal female deity was characterized as the Great Mother who rules the natural world and gives birth to all life.⁷⁵

Moreover, scholars in other academic disciplines were persuaded by the archaeologists to adopt the same concept as an established feature of remote prehistory. During the 1950s an expert in medieval Welsh literature declared that prominent female characters in it were echoes of the Great Mother Goddess, preserved in immemorial, orally transmitted, myths.⁷⁶ Experts in the history of religion now routinely incorporated her worship into their accounts of its early development, as a now proven fact.⁷⁷ One of the most important and fruitful interdisciplinary impacts of the concept was on the relationship between archaeology and psychology, which likewise peaked in the middle of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud himself had apparently said nothing directly about the primeval divine feminine, although his work did emphasize the universal importance of mother figures. Carl Jung, in view of his famous emphasis on the crucial role of archetypes, was likewise also surprisingly reluctant to embrace the idea of the ancient goddess. While declaring that the essential archetype was that of the mother, he saw the goddess as merely one derivation from it, and not of immediate concern to psychologists because her image was rarely encountered in the modern world. Indeed, he seemed to imply that he only considered her at all because historians of religion were making such a fuss about her.⁷⁸ It was left to one of his disciples, Erich Neumann, to argue in 1963 that the evidence for the universal ancient goddess indicated that the archetype of the Great Mother had been a constant ‘inward image at work in the human psyche’. He developed this belief into an elaborate theory of worldwide spiritual development, in which the goddess stood for the ‘archetypal unity and multiplicity of the feminine nature’ and even now determined ‘the psychic history of modern man and of modern woman’. The system of symbols which he proposed by which to recognize ancient images of the universal goddess, and the different aspects in which she was supposed to appear, was based directly on the interpretations made by archaeologists of the evidence from south-eastern Europe and the Levant.⁷⁹ A perfectly circular process was now set up, whereby psychologists such as Neumann used material provided by archaeology, and writers such as Jacquetta Hawkes could declare that psychology had proved that the archetype of the Great Mother was inherent in the human mind.⁸⁰

Belief in the universal human worship of a great prehistoric goddess representing Mother Earth or Mother Nature was therefore dominant by the mid-twentieth century among both academic and popular writers; and its trajectory had exactly paralleled that of the belief in the survival of ancient paganism through the Middle Ages. Both had been deeply influenced by nineteenth-century German and French ideas, while becoming eventually especially popular in the English-speaking world. There, both had followed exactly the same chronology of acceptance, becoming fashionable in the 1890s and established by the Edwardian period, before being elaborated and reinforced still further through the first half of the twentieth century, to reach an apogee in the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of the Great Goddess was therefore, like that of surviving paganism, ripe to meet the wave of reassessment and revision of established ideological orthodoxies which swept the West from the late 1960s onwards.

Revision and Restatement

There had always been authors who were not convinced by the evidence for the prehistoric goddess. Both significantly and ironically, the Germans, who had done so much to pioneer the idea of her, were also the first national group of scholars to retreat from it, and that process started in the discipline which had launched them: Classics. In the 1920s some who were emerging as leaders in it there started to question Evans’s attempt, in particular, to reduce all Minoan goddess images to a single one, a nature deity with a youthful male son and consort. They thought it more likely that these representations were of a multitude of different deities like those venerated by other ancient peoples.⁸¹ In the English-speaking world, even as the opposite belief became dominant in the mid-twentieth century, there were still isolated experts who questioned it. A leading authority on the archaeology of Neolithic Malta, which had been taken as providing some of the most famous images that had been used to bolster belief in the Great Goddess, could still publish a textbook on it in 1959 which pointed out that this interpretation of them remained unproven, as did accompanying visions of ancient matriarchy on the island.⁸²

From the late 1960s, such scepticism became general across most of the scholarly world. There was no great onslaught on the concept, just two pieces by young archaeologists focusing on different artefacts at opposite ends of Europe: Peter Ucko on the Neolithic figurines of the Levant and Andrew Fleming on the megalithic monuments of the north-west. Each pointed out that the evidence used to support the belief in veneration of a single great deity was not conclusive and could all be interpreted in other ways.⁸³ They emphatically did not disprove the veneration of such a goddess in the Neolithic, but showed that there was no solid basis for a belief in it; and that was enough for virtually all archaeologists. Nobody came forward to defend the departing orthodoxy, and it duly vanished from textbooks on prehistory in the English-speaking world during the 1970s. Even Jacquetta Hawkes mounted no defence, only referring to the change in passing in an article in which she condemned the whole of the so-called New Archaeology of the late 1960s and which drew heavily on structural models taken from sociology and anthropology and tended to ignore religion as too intangible a phenomenon to understand in pre-literate societies.⁸⁴ She subsequently declared that she would continue to believe in a Neolithic cult of the goddess as a personal opinion.⁸⁵ Though she lived for another three decades, she wrote no more popular studies of prehistory after 1968. Subsequently, some anthropologists, especially in the United States and Australia, attacked the manner in which they asserted that their predecessors had distorted the beliefs of indigenous peoples to bolster the idea that the veneration of Mother Earth was natural to all humanity.⁸⁶

These developments were, as said, part of the wholesale inspection and rejection of former orthodoxies which was a feature of the period between 1967 and 1980. It was certainly not an antifeminist backlash, because (as said) the related constructs of the goddess and prehistoric matriarchy could be employed as readily for feminism as against it. However, there were features of the concept of the prehistoric Great Goddess which did seem unpalatable to many academics from the late 1960s and ran counter to aspects of intellectual culture from this time. There was something disturbingly essentialist, as an image of femininity, in the presentation of her that had been made by previous generations. It was all about womanhood as focused on fertility, pregnancy, motherhood and nurturing. There was nothing there about leadership in technology, public affairs, intellectual pursuits, creative arts, commerce or industry, absences which were the more striking in that the genuinely attested cults of historic ancient goddesses frequently did reference such roles. Moreover, the twentieth-century concept of the ancient Great Mother seemed essentialist in its sharp polarization of gender as well as its associations for femininity. This especially mattered because by the 1970s anthropology had brought in large quantities of new information about the way in which gender relations had been constructed in other human societies. It displayed the wide range of possibilities which were open to humans in this respect. In 1975 the British anthropologist Shirley Ardener could pose the question of whether Western categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ might not be entirely an intellectual creation which some day could disappear.⁸⁷

In this context, it was significant that previous prominent champions of the concept of the prehistoric goddess had often themselves been inspired by social and cultural conservatism. Jane Ellen Harrison had been a lifelong Tory who had opposed the suffragette campaign to secure women the parliamentary vote, holding that their influence should be confined to the cultural sphere.⁸⁸ Harold Massingham loathed modernity for its industrialization and urbanization, which he called an ‘utter darkness and savagery’.⁸⁹ His favourite period was the Middle Ages, and his most admired institution the Roman Catholic Church, at least in what he imagined to be its medieval form in England.⁹⁰ Robert Graves’s eulogy to the universal triple goddess as muse of poetry embodied a wholesale condemnation of modern poets, especially T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.⁹¹ Jacquetta Hawkes hated modernity as much as Massingham, and for the same aspects, though her most admired age in England was the eighteenth century, the Georgian period, which she saw as an apogee of beauty, civilization, order and hierarchy.⁹² In many respects her books provided a prehistoric dimension to the sentimental conservatism represented in the same period by the histories of Sir Arthur Bryant and Sir Winston Churchill and the guides to English counties provided by Arthur Mee. A major feature of Erich Neumann’s work was that it instinctually presupposed that the mass human psychology which was being created in his story was a male one, with the female archetypes as auxiliaries to its development.⁹³

It mattered also that the whole construct of the downfall of the goddess religion in Europe, and the often associated one of primeval matriarchy, was bound up with a model of European prehistory as driven by successive invasions by newly arrived conquering races equipped with superior technology. This had been developed in the mid-nineteenth century, and was clearly inspired by the contemporary phenomenon whereby European settlers were occupying larger and larger areas of North America, Australasia and northern and central Asia at the expense of indigenous peoples. In the early twentieth century, the sweep of German and Soviet armies across large tracts of the continent during the world wars, and especially the second one, with its much greater component of ethnic displacement and massacre, made the model continue to seem familiar and relevant. The Hawkeses, writing in the early 1940s, drew an explicit parallel between ancient and modern to produce a sense of Britain as an island always threatened by attackers from the east. In the postcolonial, stable and increasingly united Europe of the late twentieth century, such a view came to seem much less instinctively obvious. Moreover, it did not seem to match a lot of the archaeology either, as processes of cultural change came to appear a lot more gradual, piecemeal and extended than had been formerly thought.⁹⁴

There were, however, two qualifications to the quiet abandonment of the Great Goddess concept by authors on prehistory after 1970. One was that popular writers sometimes continued to put her cult into their works as an established orthodoxy of the Neolithic, simply because they were not aware of the change. The most prominent of these was Michael Dames, a lecturer in the history of art who during the late 1970s wrote a pair of widely selling books which interpreted the ritual landscape around the spectacular late Neolithic site of Avebury in Wiltshire in terms of that cult.⁹⁵ His ideas were based on those of Briffault, Graves and Jacquetta Hawkes, but his reading of archaeology itself was flawed, so that he assumed that monuments which actually belonged to different millennia were part of a single system – even though to Hawkes they had been separated by the great divide in her imagined past which had separated the era of the goddess and matriarchy from that of the sky gods and patriarchy. Nonetheless, aided by his deep knowledge of the modern Wiltshire landscape and the sweep and daring of his imagination, he both propagated the idea of the Neolithic goddess further among general readers, especially among the new counter-culture of the 1970s, and concealed from them the disappearance of belief in her among experts.

The other qualification is that the idea of the Neolithic Great Goddess was given a powerful new academic endorsement in the years around 1990 by a single front-rank academic archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, at the University of California. She was the foremost Western expert in the prehistory of Eastern Europe, and between the 1950s and the 1970s produced a standard series of publications which at first paid no particular attention to ancient religion and then, when she turned to it, treated the evidence from the Greek and Balkan Neolithic as suggesting a range of different deities of both sexes.⁹⁶ After then, however, she moved to California and formed a personal association with the evolving US spiritual feminist (or ‘Goddess’) movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which sought to substitute the worship or honouring of a female deity for the male one of the Abrahamic faiths. This had already drawn upon some of the apparent evidence for prehistoric matriarchy and the veneration of an ancient great goddess produced by previous generations of writers.⁹⁷ Gimbutas’s own work now gradually mutated to serve the beliefs and ideals of this movement, culminating in a pair of large and excitingly illustrated books at the end of her life, in the years around 1990, which were explicitly aimed at a popular and inexpert audience.⁹⁸ In these she fully restated, with complete and unqualified confidence, the view of the European and Near Eastern Neolithic as woman-centred in society and religion, (and so) peaceful and creative, and devoted to the worship of a single great goddess, this having been brought to a violent end by patriarchal, brutal and destructive invaders, the Indo-Europeans.

There was a paradox at the heart of this later work of hers. On the one hand, it was deeply traditional, drawing upon the ideas of predecessors as those had developed through the first seven decades of the twentieth century, down to and including Jacquetta Hawkes, James Mellaart, Erich Neumann and Michael Dames. In major respects – the goddess and the invasion – it was a continuation of the view of European prehistory taken in her youth, in the 1950s and 1960s, enriched with her own detailed knowledge of the south-eastern European material.⁹⁹ At the same time, she concealed this inherent conservatism of approach and interpretation by presenting her own restatement of the old model as something radically new, and concealing its debt to forebears. She emphasized instead that she had been the first to reveal ‘the pictorial “script” for the religion of the Old European Goddess’ and allowed Joseph Campbell, the well-known psychologist and author on the history of religion, to state in a foreword to one of her books that she had deciphered Neolithic symbolism even as the French scholar Champollion had discovered the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. She declared herself the first scholar ‘to bring into our awareness essential aspects of European prehistory that have been unknown or simply not treated on a pan-European scale’.¹⁰⁰ This approach had the important tactical benefit of concealing the extent to which the former deployment of the concept of the Great Goddess had been bound up with reactionary, restrictive or sexist attitudes to society and gender. By emphasizing instead the value of the goddess figure as one of general female majesty and empowerment, and jettisoning its especial association with fertility and motherhood, she refashioned it for a new and politically radical audience. A large part of the power of the concept of the primeval Great Goddess, for over a hundred years, had been that it could be equally used for radical and reactionary purposes, to topple the foundations of a patriarchal society, or to denigrate and confine womanhood. Marija Gimbutas was the latest scholar to attempt the former project. The problem was that to fit the concept for her purpose she had remodelled it, whereas her professional colleagues, especially in Britain, had discarded it. Both were effective approaches to the problem of a figure with inconvenient trappings: unhappily, they were also mutually incompatible.

For a moment it looked possible that Western archaeologists might divide over the issue, with Americans on one side and Europeans on the other, or feminists on one and the rest of the professional community on the other, but it was not to be, as Marija Gimbutas, while attracting a fervent public following, won no allies among her peers and left no successors. Her dogmatic approach to evidence and use of what seemed to many to be outdated interpretative models alienated colleagues, and especially other self-consciously feminist archaeologists, including fellow Californians. These argued that a proper feminist archaeology should consist of a celebration of the ambiguity of the archaeological record and the plurality of interpretations possible from it, enabling a genuine diversity of vision.¹⁰¹ When an Anglo-American team, led from a Californian university, commenced a systematic re-excavation of Catal Höyük in the 1990s, it soon made a very different reading of the evidence from that of Mellaart – and thereby found itself in a sometimes uneasy interaction with (mostly American) feminists making pilgrimages to the site as a Goddess centre because of his works and those of Gimbutas.¹⁰² One consequence of the latter’s championing of the idea of the Neolithic goddess was, indeed, an abandonment by archaeologists in the English-speaking world of the earlier policy of ceasing to express belief in it without mounting much of a direct attack. In the two decades following 1993, there was an outpouring of publication from professionals, directly opposing the interpretation of Neolithic material as evidence for such a being and covering between them all the main sites in Europe and the Near East which had supplied it.¹⁰³ As a result, the figure of a single mighty goddess representing the natural and terrestrial world now seems to exist mainly as a component of a particular branch of contemporary spiritual feminism, with some crossover into traditions of modern Paganism.¹⁰⁴

She has enjoyed a very long career, in which she has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to adapt to different ages of the world and their changing cultural needs. Drawing on ancient philosophical and poetic roots, she became a major figure in the European imagination virtually as soon as Christianity became dominant, as though there was a gap in Christian theology which demanded, for many thinkers and writers, such a figure. As that religion began to lose its hegemonic status among Europeans (and their descendants in other continents) with the onset of full modernity, she remained just as relevant, retaining her status as a powerful literary metaphor, allegory or personality and acquiring a new and very extensive back-projection as a component of the human past. She may have fresh glories before her yet.