Have you ever wondered where the idea of the Great Goddess comes from? The idea of one Great Goddess that Wicca then employed comes from? How is the worship of the Goddess connected to an alleged matriarchal past?

So many questions and one video to answer them all! Welcome to today’s episode, where we’ll delve into the fascinating world of ancient goddess worship and its impact on modern paganism.

Hello every, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a Religious Studies scholar and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Paganism, Shamanism, Esotericism and all things occult.

A common misconception about the 19th century is that the idea of evolution was synonymous with an unwavering belief in the progress of civilization. However, Margret Hodgen‘s work in 1936 demonstrated that evolutionism emerged during a “period of doubt” (Hodgen 1936, 9–35). Furthermore, Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the most prominent evolutionists of the time, was particularly interested in the “survival” of earlier stages of civilization. John Burrow argued that the 19th-century intellectual discourse revealed a more self-reflective and broken attitude toward progress.

Now the one who is interesting is Johann Jakob Bachofen, a jurist from Basel, who posited that a matriarchal order preceded the current patriarchal one. This idea was influenced by his examination of ancient tomb symbolism, particularly the wall paintings in a columbarium of the Villa Pamfili in Rome. Bachofen’s work, Das Mutterrecht (1861), was based on a limited foundation of evidence from ancient sources, including Herodotus’ report on the Lycians and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. His main argument, without substantial evidence, was that ancient mother goddesses represented a matriarchal juridical system.

[Bachofen’s study was published as Das Mutterrecht, Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (1861; “Maternal law: A study of gynaecocracy in the ancient world with reference to its religious and juridical nature”)]

Bachofen believed it was his responsibility to decipher these cults because he was fascinated by the recently discovered wall paintings in a columbarium at the Villa Pamfili in Rome, which he visited in 1842. Bachofen thought these tomb paintings were proof of the earliest cult of humankind. His interpretation of the image of Ocnus the rope plaiter is a good illustration of his method of academic reasoning.

The myth states that Ocnus was sentenced to weave a rope out of straw for eternity in Tartarus. He is accompanied by his donkey, which consumes the rope as it is made, as shown in Polygnotos’ illustration. Ocnus is a figure or allegorical deity that personifies hesitation, frustration, delay, and time wastage, representing the ups and downs of human life spent in futile endeavours. The accompanying donkey that consumes the rope serves as a representation of the inherent destructive principle, while the penitent and the rope he was plaiting represent the operation of the natural powers. According to Bachofen, the Roman tomb paintings transformed this representation of an “unwept creation” into a picture of salvation, signifying freedom from the pointless cycle of nature.

Plutarch, who asserted that the creating male principle gave form while the receiving female principle provided the material for this form, was followed by Bachofen in his description of a culture characterised by material interpretations of natural symbols.

In Bachofen’s view, much like British evolutionists, early stages of human evolution didn’t simply blend into higher stages, but instead re-emerged later on. He believed that natural symbols and maternal law represented a human connection with nature, which rational, male-driven progress could suppress but not eliminate. Bachofen’s work went on to influence Marxist theorists, the Frankfurt School, and psychology, impacting figures like Freud, Adler, and Jung.

Bachofen believed that matriarchal and patriarchal systems needed each other for balance and that the characteristics of maternal law would re-emerge at the end of legal progress. His ideas were further developed by figures such as Engels, who praised Bachofen for discovering pre-bourgeois family structures but critiqued him for basing his conclusions on religion rather than real-life conditions. Bachofen’s conclusions regarding a matriarchal system were challenged by anthropologists who recognised that matrilineal social structures, as observed among the Lycians, rarely resulted in local female communities or matriarchal systems. In most cases, these women were part of their husbands’ social communities and governed by male rule.

Despite immediate criticism for methodological shortcomings and eccentric claims, Bachofen’s work had a considerable impact on subsequent generations. Often used without explicit citation, Bachofen’s culture-critical interpretation resonated with the 19th-century mindset. Bachofen argued that, in gynaecocratic societies, humans were not yet separate from the harmony of nature, and the law they followed was a universal one, not exclusively human. Bachofen’s ideas were particularly influential in the 20th century among German intellectuals and in the discipline of psychology. Carl Jung, for example, was heavily influenced by Bachofen’s work, integrating concepts such as Anima, Animus, and the “magna mater” into his teachings.

In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, he argued in 1849 that;

not only for Dia-Dione, Eileithyia and Theia, Themis and Artemis, Tyche and Praxidike, Chryse and Basileia, but also for Demeter and Cora, Aphrodite and Hestia, Hera and Athena” it can reasonably be argued that in all these goddesses we must recognize the changing names and attributes of one and the same Hellenized earth- and creation goddess, equivalent to Gaia; this Gaia is conceptualized not only as fermenting primordial matter, linked to Uranus, but mythically as Chronos’ wife, conceptually a mother goddess of the Olympian world order, who works together with Zeus, juxtaposed to the concept of Urania as a Gaia Olympia. […] In all these goddesses we can see the concept of a world order that precedes the Olympian powers, a concept of a goddess of fate to whom, as Homer tells us, even Zeus had to pay respect

(Gerhard 1851, 463)

This idea was later developed by classicist Jane E. Harrison, who recognised the fundamental unity of all Greek goddesses as first observed by Gerhard.

In her recent study on the life and work of Harrison, Ulrike Brunotte highlights that Harrison’s ‘discovery’ of a pre-Greek goddess religion—linked to Asia Minor, Africa, the ‘Orient,’ and ‘primitive religion’—was part of a more extensive discourse around 1900. Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), particularly in the chapter “The Making of a Goddess,” puts forth the idea of ancient goddess worship destroyed by gender conflicts and the subjugation of indigenous religions by patriarchal tribes invading the Peloponnese from the North. Harrison’s unique contribution to this discourse was her in-depth examination of the often brutal ‘making of a goddess’ process, reflected in myths and visual evidence, from local mother cults to the patriarchal Olympus. This critical and feminist approach had a significant impact on her time’s artistic and literary avant-garde and, with some delay, on religious studies that took gender seriously as an epistemological category.

The discourse Harrison engaged in was shaped by James G. Frazer and later by archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans, whose excavations at Knossos influenced many English scholars, including Harrison. Evans believed that the entire island of Crete worshipped a Great Goddess, who he later identified as being identical to all other goddesses and even the Mother of God.

In 1903, Sir Edmund Chambers asserted that prehistoric Europe knew a Great Earth Mother and worshipped her as both a ‘creatrix’ and a goddess of destruction, later known by various names.

As late as 1989, Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas maintained this narrative in her book Language of the Goddess, which had a significant impact on pagan and feminist circles.

The construction of the Mother Goddess in archaeology is well-known and has been fundamentally critiqued by recent scholarship. A similar discussion occurred in Egyptology, where Margaret Murray, in her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), depicted a powerful image of continuous European paganism centred on the Goddess. Thanks to archaeologists and historians of religion, the idea that Europeans, particularly women, had been followers of the Great Goddess for centuries was extremely popular around 1900. Alongside academic discussions, several authors writing for broader audiences popularise the idea of the Great Goddess, blending academic argument with poetry, personal accounts, and novelistic writing. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) and Robert Graves (1895–1985) are particularly noteworthy in this context.

Authors Charles Godfrey Leland and Robert Graves played a significant role in popularising the idea of the Great Goddess to a wider audience. While they were familiar with major aspects of academic debates surrounding the topic, they employed a more accessible approach in their writing by blending academic arguments with poetry, personal accounts, and novelistic writing.

They would deserve their own separate episodes, so let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in seeing those.

This unique style allowed them to reach a broader readership, capturing the imagination of the public and generating interest in the concept of the Great Goddess. As a result, their work contributed to the stabilisation of the historical meaning of the Great Goddess, making the idea more widely recognised and understood than it would have been through academic writing alone. Their impact helped ensure that the concept of the Great Goddess remained a topic of fascination and discussion for generations to come and, in the case of Robert Grave specifically… that the Great Goddess, as well as the Pagan Goddesses, would be seen and conceptualised in their triple aspects of Maiden, Mother and Crone.

What are your thoughts about today’s episode? Do you think there is archaeological and historical evidence to suggest that in the past there was one Great Goddess? What is the aspect that shocked you the most? What do you agree with and what do you disagree with?

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I’m really glad that you watched this episode and I hope you stay tuned because there is lots of Academic Fun coming next.

Bye for now.

(von Stuckrad, 2014, pp.140–146; Hutton, 2019)

REFERENCES

Hutton, R. 2019. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft 2 edition. Oxford: OUP Oxford.

von Stuckrad, K. 2014. The Scientification of Religion. Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter.

Brunotte, Ulrike. 2012. “Unveiling Salome 1900—Entschleierungen zwischen Sexualität, Pathosformel und Oriental Dance.” In Verschleierter Orient—Entschleierter Okzident: (Un‐)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Bettina Dennerlein, Elke Frietsch, and Therese Steffen, 93–116. Paderborn: Fink

First uploaded 5 Apr 2023