Was there ever a Mother-Goddess society?

I notice that mostly male anthropologists discount the existence of a prehistory mother-goddess society.  Those who have proposed one have mostly been women.  It seems to me this is the only field and the only subject that divides science up into gender!

The scientific consensus seems to be that there has never been a society ruled by women.  Taking a scattering of clues from a half dozen different social and natural sciences and with them, I have reason to believe that there was indeed a mother goddess society and that, as the consensus claims, women did not rule. 

That is not a contradiction.  To "rule" implies a formal hierarchy which we call "government." Governments did not exist in prehistory.  People lived in communes.  No one "ruled" but the women would have controlled public opinion.  In that sense, they ruled. . .

In http://atheistic-science.com there is a description of the society---and, a concise meaning given to the world "society."

charles

With respect to the Mother goddness idea, I believe that it is the core of the mythology of the Americas. "Mother Earth" is the most common and uniform religious belief and cosmology of allmost any group in here. The concept we live in the womb of Mother Earth, that she feed us, and that she is also the grave of our ancestors, it is so powerful and widespread here that I can't see how these can't be "Mother-godness" societies.  And the idea is so powerfull that it has influenced European settlers, both in North and Latin America, since centuries ago.

Edited by pinguin - 22-Nov-2008 at 23:41

Originally posted by gcle2003 I don't notice that, so I'd appreciate why you claim it. The earth-mother-goddess and sky-father-god dichotomy is very pervasive in early cultures (even in ones which are flexible enough to accomodate both, and I've never come across what opposition to the idea there is coming from males particularly.

I'm sorry for being unable to give statistics or back this up.  I did considerable research in anthropological works and all the authors were men who worked not with religions but with pottery "cultures."  Gimbutas was different.  I read a number of books on the mother goddess religion-bonded society and all were written by women.  It seemed obvious to me that there was a male consensus and a female consensus.  Up until perhaps 9,000 years ago, it was not even recognized that the male played any role in reproduction.

Let me please explain something here:  I do not always use the same terminology as the social science consensus.  I use key social science words functionally.  I define "culture" as the physical heritage of a "society" and a "mainstream society" as the mass of people bonded together by a mainstream world-view and way of thinking ("religion").  I do this because we evolved through millions of years of evolution in small groups and are "innately" (social instinctively) geared to living that way.  The social evolutionary function of world-view systems ("religion") is, therefore, to bond us into much larger groups than we are otherwise able to function in.

So, whether the men or women run a "society" depends upon the world-view system.  If the men do, it is a patriarchal society. Who runs the society is determined by the ideological system.  In our modern society,  the secular doctrines have moved considerably towards the middle with women taking large roles while the old religion is increasing pressure to pull them back. 

There are, as you say, groups and tribes that are matrilineal.  There are some in which women dominate the home---partially because the men are never there any more.  But my interest and focus is on social evolution and that occurs in "the mainstream."  The "mainstream" moved out of Africa, dominated the Near and Middle East and China, spread to Europe and the rest of the Euro-Asian land mass, back to Africa, and then the New World.  The Inca-Mayan civilization had a separate and somewhat later "mainstream."

So, I say that in the mainstream, the patriarchal-monogamous (sort-of!) religion-bonded societies appeared about 5,000 years ago in Sumer, Egypt, India and then China---all based upon a revolutionary Male-god plus modification of the mother goddess religion-based society age.  What made the change necessary was that the huge mother-goddess religion-based society was made up of normal human hunting-gathering size irrigation-based communes---"communes" in the sense that there was no "government" and no "capitalism." With increasing congestion, there had to arise a world-view system that would enable them to organize into larger social entities that could still substitute for the small groups we are evolved to feel "right" in (to feel less stress).
The male-dominated word-view one, and one in which the women were rationed (monogamy), succeeded in doing that.  When a need arises, as in all evolution, an adaptation generally follows that satisfies the need.

In the old mother goddess world-view system---as I describe it in my work (http://atheistic-science.com), I propose the men had no status at all.  They likely lived mostly as "Hippies" and only a few of the more appealing ones were the "studs" who serviced the women in the various homes--which, themselves, were based on mother and children and grandchildren.  This system later evolved "Temple Prostitution." 

The male-dominated system that followed was a social revolution. There are a number of tribes and ethnic groups still in modern times that are matrilineal. I classify them as peripheral to the mainstream and to the direction of social evolution.

charles

Originally posted by charlesbrough Originally posted by gcle2003 I don't notice that, so I'd appreciate why you claim it. The earth-mother-goddess and sky-father-god dichotomy is very pervasive in early cultures (even in ones which are flexible enough to accomodate both, and I've never come across what opposition to the idea there is coming from males particularly. I'm sorry for being unable to give statistics or back this up.  I did considerable research in anthropological works and all the authors were men who worked not with religions but with pottery "cultures."

Originally posted by charlesbrough I agree with Pinguin and Chilbudios that the mother-goddess influence on religion has survived a long evolution.  The Patriarchal faiths represented the mother goddess as the snake---which as Gimbutas noted, was one of her symbols---in the form of an evil monster serpent they called "dragons" and which heroic male gods went out to slay.  It survived in its strong appeal into the Orthodox icons of a grandiose Mother Mary holding up a tiny, pathetic looking insignificant Jesus in her lap---and modern Marionism.  In Genesis, the snake that tempted Adam and Eve (monogamy) was symbolically the mother goddess.  World-view "religion" system evolve from each other in the mainstream.  All have had ties to the past.  World-view systems of the future will also have ties to our present secular-scriptural belief combination system.

 Maria Gimbutas had a significant contribution in anthropology, especially related to old beliefs and rituals and their survival in the patriarchal European societies, however I find it some of the links highly speculative. In this particular case, I'm not sure if the serpent in the Garden of Eden should be connected to a mother-goddess, I believe these are other metaphors behind the snake: that of monstruous creature, of "chaotic" creature bringing disorder in god's world, a prefiguration of Satan (in many cosmogonic myths there's this motif of opposition between creation and destruction, between order and chaos) and that of hiding, deceit, shame, lie, a creeping creature being a suitable metaphor for the corruption of that perfect world. Much better cases for the survival of and "Old Europe" mother goddesses and priestesses are to be found in Greek mythology or in Christianity in syncretic accounts. I'll take, inspired by your example, few other instances of the motif of woman confronting the dragon/snake more or less directly (instead of passively waiting to be saved by a male hero):

Edited by Chilbudios - 23-Nov-2008 at 23:39

Originally posted by red clay                 Why should use of pottery have any connection with religious beliefs of a certain kind?        Hoo boy!  Graham, that isn't a question, that's a doctoral thesis all by itself.  In some cultures you might even be safe saying pottery was a religion.   It's not something I can respond to in just a few lines, just let it be said that pottery can have a religious connection.   The only easily recognized example I can think of quickly would be the Japanese Raku tradition.

Arguably the male role in reproduction was known but often considered less important. And as we are it, it's worth checking the ancient Egyptian cosmogony where  Nut was the mother goddess of the sky, while Geb was the male god of the earth ( http://www.tulane.edu/~danny/shu.gif Geb and Nut separated by Shu, a god of air).

The ancients (I'm mostly refering mostly the ancient Egyptians and then the Graeco-Roman world, but I assume they didn't learn it all of a sudden) certainly did not have our understanding but knew enough about fertility and pregnancy

For instance contraception was known. The 2nd century AD Soranos of Ephesos suggested that pregancy can be avoided by having intercourse in certain periods (probably they didn't have our accuracy in determining it). A more common suggestion was that woman should not let the semen to get into her womb. Of course there were also potions, diets, inserting objects or lubricating with oils, balsamies, etc.

Originally posted by Chilbudios The ancients (I'm mostly refering mostly the ancient Egyptians and then the Graeco-Roman world, but I assume they didn't learn it all of a sudden) certainly did not have our understanding but knew enough about fertility and pregnancy For instance contraception was known. The 2nd century AD Soranos of Ephesos suggested that pregancy can be avoided by having intercourse in certain periods (probably they didn't have our accuracy in determining it). A more common suggestion was that woman should not let the semen to get into her womb. Of course there were also potions, diets, inserting objects or lubricating with oils, balsamies, etc. They probably didn't understood well menstruation but they certainly had it linked with fertility, based on direct observation if not also on other symbols and events (blood as a sign of life, the blood shed at childbirth etc.). But it is interesting to note that the menstrual blood was sometimes considered poisonous or having various devastating effects.

It must be pretty obvious to women anyway that menstruation stops when pregnancy begins. Of course that may be one of the secrets that women kept to themselves, and men thought it would be dangerous to enquire into.