Secret_History

Chapter 11: Time 493
Even if in Catholic theology she is demoted to non-divine status, her divinity is
implicitly recognized by her appellation “Mother of God”, as well as by the
prayers of millions who daily seek her compassionate protection and solace. In
fact, the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection seems to be little more than a
reworking of those of earlier ‘mystery cults’ revolving around a Divine Mother
and her son or, as in the worship of Demeter and Kore, her daughter.
It is, of course, reasonable that the deepest understanding of divine power in
human form should be female rather than male. After all, life emerges from the
body of a woman, and if we are to understand the macrocosm by means of the
microcosm, it is only natural to think of the universe as an all-giving Mother from
whose womb all life emerges and to which, like the cycles of vegetation, it returns
after death to be again reborn.
What is more important to us here is the idea that societies that view the
universe as a Mother would also have very different social structures from our
own. We might also conjecture that women in such a society would not be seen as
subservient. Caring, nurturing, growth and creation would have been valued. At
the same time, it does not make sense to think that such societies were
“matriarchal” in the sense that women dominated men. They were, instead, by all
the evidence, societies in which differences were valued and not equated as
evidence of either superiority or inferiority.
What we do know is that “Venus” figurines have been found by the thousands,
all over Eurasia, from the Balkans to Lake Baikal in Siberia, across to Willendorf
in Austria, and the Grotte du Pappe in France. Some scholars (clearly with their
minds where they ought not to be) have described them as “erotic art” of the stoneage
and have proposed that they were used in obscene fertility rites!
But is that really so?
Can these ubiquitous female images found from Britain to Malta even be
described accurately as erotic “Venus” figures? Most of them are broad-hipped,
sometimes pregnant, stylized and frequently faceless. They look like pithoi and are
clearly symbolic, just as the cross with the crucified man is a symbol. Future
archaeologists who might dig in the remains of our civilization would find equally
ubiquitous and symbolic crosses!
The worship of a female creator goddess appears, literally, in every area of the
world. What is significant is that the most tangible line of evidence is drawn from
the numerous sculptures of women found in the Gravettian-Aurignacian cultures
of the Upper Paleolithic Age. Some of these date back to 25,000 BC, as noted
above, and are frequently made of bone or clay. They were often found lying close
to the remains of the sunken walls of what are probably the earliest known humanmade
dwellings on earth. Researchers say that niches or depressions were made in
the walls to hold the figures. Such finds have been noted in Spain, France,
Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Russia. These sites span a period of at least
ten thousand years!
It appears highly probable that the female figurines were idols of a “great
mother” cult, practiced by the nomadic Aurignacian mammoth hunters who
inhabited the immense Eurasian territories that extended from southern France to
Lake Baikal in Siberia.