Ancient Goddesses

"This is a collection of chapters published by the British Museum Press. It was published in 1998, which was just at the time when I was starting to really consolidate all my research in this field. It was one of those moments when I was walking through the British Museum and I saw this book and thought, how fantastic, someone is thinking along the same lines as me. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What is incredibly helpful about this book is that it deals with different kinds of goddesses, right from the very earliest examples in prehistory, going back to around 25,000 BC, and it looks at the goddesses in the Middle East and the early Israelite religion and then the slightly later British goddesses. This book is a very good place to start because it very intelligently does the beginning of the story. What is very useful about it is that it challenges what had become a kind of orthodoxy among people who study goddess worship. There was a very rose-tinted spectacle view of things that said that at one point in time goddesses were in charge and there was an almighty mother goddess. The world was at peace, matriarchy was the order of the day, everything was OK with human society. And of course the picture is much more subtle and varied and complex than that. The book is very good at looking in great depth at different traditions, but it doesn’t do so with a polemic or with an idealised view of the world. They talk about the goddesses of Çatalhöyük [in Neolithic Anatolia], which is one the earliest surviving cities that we know of. What is fascinating about it is that it is one of the first examples we have of people living together in a kind of proto-city. They have found both male and female figurines, and what is really striking is the potency of the female figures that are found there. It is almost like the birth of the goddess. She is not in charge but this is where we see her emerging. She is often beautifully fat. There is a very famous picture of this goddess figurine from Çatalhöyük where she is sitting with these wonderful big fat thighs and breasts and stomach, flanked by two big cats, probably leopards. So there is no denying her potency in a figurine like that. “Through early religions…goddesses are both wonderful and sexual and in charge of fertility, but also very scary and very closely connected with death.” But what I am fascinated by is that if you look at some of the other female figurines – and this is something I do a whole section on in Divine Women – you will see that although she is pregnant from the front, if you turn her slowly around the flesh starts to give way to bones and she becomes a skeleton from behind. I think that is really key because what that is doing is setting up a paradigm that you then see right through early religions, where goddesses are both wonderful and sexual and in charge of fertility, but also very scary and very closely connected with death. And my theory, as a mother, is that if you look at the infant mortality rates in ancient societies you will find that for every two children that were born one would be born dead – so it was 50-50 if they lived or were stillborn. Very close, and I think more than it just being about women dying in childbirth. There is this idea that women were thought to be creatures that could physically generate both life and death, and who could almost decide whether they were carrying life or death within them."