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Amatriarchal religion is a religion that emphasizes a goddess or multiple goddesses as central figures of worship and spiritual authority. The term is most often used to refer to theories of prehistoric matriarchal religions that were proposed by scholars such asJohann Jakob Bachofen,Jane Ellen Harrison, andMarija Gimbutas, and later popularized bysecond-wave feminism. These scholars speculated that early human societies may have been organized around female deities and matrilineal social structures. In the 20th century, a movement to revive these practices resulted in theGoddess movement.
The concept of aprehistoricmatriarchy was introduced in 1861 when Johann Jakob Bachofen publishedMother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. He postulated that the historical patriarchates were a comparatively recent development, having replaced an earlier state of primevalmatriarchy, and postulated a "chthonic-maternal"prehistoric religion. Bachofen presents a model where matriarchal society and chthonic mystery cults are the second of four stages of the historicaldevelopment of religion. The first stage, he called "Hetaerism," was characterized as aPaleolithic hunter-and-gatherer society that practiced a polyamorous and communistic lifestyle. The second stage is theNeolithic, a matriarchal lunar stage of agriculture with an early form ofDemeter, the dominant deity. This was followed by a "Dionysian" stage of emerging patriarchy, finally succeeded by the "Apollonian" stage of patriarchy and the appearance of civilization inclassical antiquity. The idea that this period was a golden age that was displaced by the advent ofpatriarchy was first described byFriedrich Engels in hisThe Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
The British archaeologist SirArthur Evans, the main rediscoverer and promoter ofMinoan civilization, believed thatMinoan religion more or less exclusively worshiped amother goddess, and his view held sway for the first part of the 20th century, with a wide-ranging influence on thinking in various fields. Modern scholars agree that a mother or nature goddess was probably a dominant deity, but that there were also male deities.
In the early 1900s, historian Jane Ellen Harrison put forward the theory that the Olympian pantheon replaced an earlier worship of earth goddesses.[1]
Robert Graves postulated a prehistoric matriarchal religion in the 1950s, in hisThe Greek Myths andThe White Goddess, and gave a detailed depiction of a future society with a matriarchal religion in his novelSeven Days in New Crete.[2]
Inspired by Graves and other sources was the Austrian SurrealistWolfgang Paalen who, in his paintingPays interdit ("Forbidden Land"), draws an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female goddess and, as symbols of the male gods, fallen, meteorite-like planets.
The ideas of Bachofen and Graves were taken up in the 1970s by second-wave feminists, such as authorMerlin Stone, who took the PaleolithicVenus figurines as evidence of prehistorical matriarchal religion. She presents matriarchal religions as involving a "cult ofserpents" as a major symbol of spiritual wisdom, fertility, life, strength.[3]
Additionally, anthropologistMarija Gimbutas introduced the field offeminist archaeology in the 1970s. Her booksThe Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974),The Language of the Goddess (1989), andThe Civilization of the Goddess (1991) became standard works for the theory that a patriarchic or "androcratic" culture originated in theBronze Age, replacing a Neolithic Goddess-centered worldview.[4] These theories were presented as scholarly hypotheses, albeit from an ideological viewpoint, in the 1970s, but they also influencedfeminist spirituality and especially feminist branches ofNeo-paganism that also arose during the 1970s (seeDianic Wicca andReclaiming (Neopaganism)), so that Matriarchal Religion is also a contemporarynew religious movement within the larger field of neopaganism, generally known as theGoddess movement.[5]
There is a deity known within the movement and other spiritual groups as the Triple Goddess, who represents a woman's stages of life. Members say it's not strictly for women but for a general guide through childhood, maturity, and old age, but it strongly correlates with women. The Triple Goddess is a deity worshiped by many neopagan groups: women, children, and men. In these movements, she is seen as a deity that helps people understand what is happening in their lives at all ages. Many [who?] believe the stages within women that the Triple Goddess guides them through their maiden/youth, mother and lover, and finally, wise woman. This is rooted in Pagan people and their beliefs but has changed throughout time, yet her central representation has remained the same.[7]
[I]t was her interest in matriarchal religion and her insistence on its importance that most distinctly set her apart from other British scholars.... As early as 1900, she made note of the evidence of an older stratum of religion--the worship of earth goddesses--lying beneath Olympianism and supplanted it.
Marija Gimbutas is indivisibly linked with the study of the prehistoric Goddess.
Marija Gimbutas unwittingly supplied the fledgling movement with a history, through her analysis of the symbolism of the Goddess in the religion of palaeolithic and neolithic Old Europe.
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