“Marriage was matrilocal with women residing in the kin territory of the mother, a custom which continued as a tradition into later times. Marriage laws are inscribed on a wall in the Temple at Gortyna. They say that a woman after marriage retained full control of her property and had the right to divorce, at her pleasure. The mother’s brother was very important and responsible for helping to raise her children.”45
Migration of the matriarchy and knowledge of the Goddess traveled across the north of the European continent; matrilineal traditions survived in social customs and artistic expression in Nordic and Germanic countries, in the Baltic’s, in all Celtic countries and in Slavic areas as well.
Greek and Roman writers for 600 years, from Herodotus (5th cent. BCE) to Strabo (1st cent. CE), detailed what they knew in their own time regarding the non-Greco/Roman cultures to which they ascribed central or common themes: 1) inheritance through the female lineage, 2) queenship passed from mother to daughter, 3) endogamy – matrilocal marriage and group marriage with common ownership of property, 4) matrongmy – naming only through the mother with no recognition of paternity, 5) important role of queen’s or mother’s brother, not a husband or consort, 6) the high status of women generally, particularly in contemporaneous Etruscan and Minoan cultures with which they were familiar.
The Etruscans
The Etruscans took as their homeland the ancient area known as Etruria, whose southern border was just north of the Tiber River across from the city of Rome. The Etruscan territory stretched northward along the Italian coast to the Arno River in the north, covering what today is the region of Tuscany. The ancient Etrurian language was not Indo-European, Persian, or Greek. Quite possibly it was derived from parts of the Old European language that survived. The Etruscans were matrilineal. In bilingual inscriptions found, the name of the father was given only in Latin, while the mother’s name was always given in Etruscan. The status of Etruscan women is most interesting because it did not coincide with either the laws or the customs of Roman women living just across the Tiber River, or conform with Roman law in the years 700 to 400 BCE. Etruscan women chronicled in tomb paintings with inscriptions, tell of high status, luxurious lifestyles and many important roles able to be taken by women, more so than contemporary women in either Rome or Athens were permitted.
While the Greek and Roman writers of the time appreciated the gifts of Etruscan arts and culture, Greek historian Theopompus (4th Century BCE) was critical of Etruscan women who had freedom and power in their society, “took great care of their bodies, often exercising in the nude with men and with each other,” which they did not consider shameful. These women liked to drink and took part in “toasting” at dinners, an activity which in Greece was the privilege of men only. What shocked Theopompus most was that Etruscan women raised their children without the acknowledgement of paternity of the child, a distinctly matrilineal custom from very ancient times.46 This custom may also have been connected to the woman’s ability to hold and inherit property in her own name and right. Here we see proof of the two sets of customs and laws regarding women existing side-by-side as they continue to do for nearly another one thousand years into the future in many other regions.
Further Reading: Marija Gimbutas, Goddess and Gods of Old Europe.
PART TWO
TRANSITION TIMES
WomanSpirit—Challenged—Threatened
THE EARTH, MOTHER OF ALL
The Homeric Hymns, xxx
I will sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away. Happy is the man whom you delight to honour! He has all things abundantly: his fruitful land is laden with corn, his pastures are covered with cattle, and his house is filled with good things. Such men rule orderly in their cities of fair women; great riches and wealth follow them: their sons exult with everfresh delight and their daughters with flower laden hands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field. Thus it is with those whom you honour, O holy goddess, bountiful spirit.
Hail, Mother of the gods, wife of starry Heaven; freely bestow upon me for this my song substance that cheers the heart! And now I will remember you and another song also.1
Transition Times
Four major elements were catalysts for the transition times, which propelled societies in the Western world from stable agrarian to ceaseless conquest, beginning slowly around 3500 BCE in Old Europe, in the river plains of Mesopotamia and throughout the Middle East. The transitions themselves began with the astonishment of discovery, then came the unrequested changes and finally the struggle to survive against odds which were induced by both human and natural forces.
These new elements of change were the following: first, the weather; second, the horse; third the concept of individual ownership; and fourth is introduction of a new supreme deity who is male and resides in the sky.
None of these factors had previously existed in Neolithic Old Europe nor in the more southerly regions of the Middle East during thousands of years under the governance of Goddess-based and female-administered systems, as seen in Part One. During these periods the peoples had intentionally settled in the warm valleys where water was plentiful, where crops, herds, and communities of people could thrive. As a result, these stable villages and towns became prosperous through three primary attributes: They successfully produced more food than was needed for immediate consumption; they evolved an egalitarian system of governance wherein all worked and all were provided with basics; they became adept traders in food (grains, oil, wine), merchants of cloth, pottery, jewelry, leather. Without the requirement of devoting great energy and resource to either self-defense or the conquest of others, their talents and prosperity went into artistic endeavors and improvements in the overall social condition. In fact, these towns were so civilized and wealthy that those new immigrants who were soon to come into contact with them were both amazed and jealous.
When the first factor in this ancient equation, the weather, began to change, the peoples of the Goddess who lived in the fertile valleys and river plains were able to modify with success. Time was on their side, primarily because of the temple storehouses filled with surplus grain, oil and legumes.
Others even more deeply affected by the increasing drought conditions were not so fortunate. For those non-agrarian people, totally dependent on vast herds, the effect of the drastically drier weather patterns in the steppelands was like a rocket propelling them toward water and new pasture. Time was not on the side of the nomads. Without water and grass, their animals would all die, sealing also the fate of the humans depending on them.
Because the fierce Mongols lived to the east and would never permit entry into their territory, there was little choice for the nomads but to head toward the west in their search. The distances were enormous; there was little chance to return to the previous homelands. Many probably perished. The drought conditions increased and spread. Therefore, so did these migrations.
James DeMeo, Ph.D, in his complex book titled Saharasia writes,
Populations were exposed to severe ecological pressures, the scale of which had never before been experienced by the people. As the region was transformed from lush grassland to desert, resident populations migrated or perished. Concurrently, populations in surrounding moist regions, or living on secure water supplies, were devastated by invasions, migrations and conflicts.2
By 3000 BCE drying conditions began in Arabia, Central Asia and Africa, and by 2000 BCE desert conditions prevail in the Near East.
DeMeo’s theory is that these unprecedented and often catastrophic climate changes influenced disruption in social structures and the personal behavior that followed. He says that both archeology and historical da
tum
demonstrates that desiccation of Saharasia coincided with a number of very specific and profound human social disasters and adjustments. These include extremely important changes in the treatment and status of infants, children, and women, with a reduction of emphasis upon sexual pleasure and shifting emphasis toward sexual pain and repression, and a growth of emphasis upon strongman leadership and the military caste.3
During the period c. 1200 BCE and according to the theory of drought vis-a-vis social change, the Hittite empire collapses, Mycenaean Greece collapses, Egypt is on the decline. Both Babylonia and Assyria are weakened and will dissolve. Thousands of years of culture, religion, and social structure were now threatened by powers over which no one ultimately had control. Drought, earthquakes, meteor showers of burning hailstones that incinerated over-dry areas, all combined to produce chaos. People fled, ancient power elites tumbled, and yet the Goddess people’s beliefs were so deeply ingrained that many were able to hold onto them over millennia, even if in secret.
The second factor prevalent in transition times is an animal: the horse. This living transitional catalyst of monumental consequence thundered into the settled agricultural communities of Old Europe.
It is believed that horse domestication occurred around 5000 BCE in the land area between present day Kazakhstan to the east and the Ukraine to the northwest. “The earliest evidence for the presence of the domesticated horse comes from the forest steppe of the middle Volga basin where Neolithic economy-stock breeding and small scale farming was present from the end of the 7th millennium BCE.”4
The domestication of this animal, and the ability to ride astride it, changed human development from this point forward in the Western world.
First, the horse gave humankind a mobility never imagined or possessed, vastly increasing trade possibilities, communication between previously isolated cultures, and was an enormous advantage over non-horse owning peoples. And, therefore, the use of the horse greatly enhanced probability of conquest over them, including cattle raids and other wealth accumulations through stealing.
Secondly, the horse became an individual’s most valuable possession, which was guarded and fought over. In fact, preference for a special horse and its possession by a single individual may have been the initial step toward the idea of private, personal ownership, the third of the change catalysts. This idea of personal property, individual ownership, and the accumulation of wealth through this ownership of a living being, which resided within the grasp of a person, eventually came to replace the older system where by all goods, herds, and lands were shared by the community as a whole. Before the horse, herds of animals guided by the nomads on foot were still considered as belonging to and benefiting the entire community. However, with the newly acquired power of the horse, men and women developed skills of ridership and hunting from its back. It could not have been long before the idea of warring on horseback emerged. Eventually, the nomadic idea of personal ownership of animals led to the concept of personal ownership of people, such as ownership of women by men, or ownership of conquered people as slaves. These concepts were unknown by the Goddess worshipping people of Old Europe.
Thirdly, the act of riding astride the back of the horse required invention of a new garment: the trouser. And because riding in all weather conditions exposed people to more wind and cold, the close-fitting tunic with long sleeves evolved, woven out of wool. Animal skins continued to be worn into recorded times but over the tunic and trouser as capes, similar to shawls. Leather shoes and leggings were also worn for protection. The shoes had stiff, turned-up toes and were not suitable for walking.
Lastly, there evolved the “cult of the horse” as an addition to other religious traditions, involving horse sacrifices at ceremonial times, horse figurines as protective power pieces worn as pendants and at burials, both outside the graves and inside the burial chamber with the dead humans.
Initially, horses may have been domesticated for their meat and milk, just as other earlier herd animals such as sheep and goats. Even today, a potent mildly alcoholic drink of fermented mares’ milk is a prized offering to guests in nomadic lands of Eurasia.
By the end of the fifth millennium BCE, horses were the primary bones discovered in graves along the Don River and in Kazakhstan. Great numbers, more than 100,000 horse bones, have been excavated representing 90% of all domesticated animals at that time. Oxen and cattle were still herded and used for draft animals to pull heavy carts. The word “lord” originally meant “lord of the cattle.”5
As a direct consequence, the first wave of migration by the steppe nomads from the vastlands into Old Europe happened about 4500 BCE when this Goddess civilization was more than 2,000 years old. Archeologists called these nomads “Kurgan,” from the Russian word (borrowed from Turkish) meaning “barrow” referring to their custom of building round burial mounds in their summer pasturelands in which to bury their dead. This migration came into Old Europe by way of the Russian Volga River/Caspian Sea area. First they went to the Black Sea where they conquered the region to the north.
This first wave of steppe people did not conquer the Old Europeans but rather were assimilated by them or lived side-by-side. The Old European pottery styles and burial practices remain intact for almost 800 to 1,000 years more. But after that period, finds of long-dagger knives, spears, halberds, bows and arrows associated with Kurgan warriors are noted. The Kurgans brought a siege style of settlement with them, building hill forts on steep, nearly inaccessible river banks. Other than hill forts, the Kurgan people, still semi-nomadic, tending and moving their herds, built seasonal semi-subterranean dwellings not dissimilar to their Kurgan grave mounds.6
The second wave of Kurgans, more culturally advanced, came from the North Pontic area and the Caucasus Mountains nearly one thousand years later, around 3500 BCE. These people were not only more culturally advanced, they were taller and light skinned: They were the people of the Caucasus – the prototype Caucasian or “white” people who had arrived outside their homeland for the first time. Blue-eyed, white-skinned giants riding on horseback were the most astonishing sight of the second migration. With them came their warrior women, priestesses, Queens and families, now; the Old Europeans really were on the move, settling as far away as present day Spain, Germany, and the British Isles.7
In addition to the hill forts, horses and weapons of war, these Kurgans brought a new and terrifying burial practice with them, which is called “suttee.” This is a practice of killing and burning the women who are wives of the chieftain along with all his children, as well as some of his horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs, putting all of them with him in the burial mound grave. Whether the family was killed first and then immolated, or died by burning first, is not known.8
The fourth factor evolves directly out of the previous three. The fourth is the new concept of a male god as supreme deity, and within that concept is contained the idea of the male’s personal ownership of individual property.
Radically different beliefs about the universe and humans’ place in it now appeared. The Kurgan people worshipped a double sky god, expressed by sun and thunder, who resided in the sky, not in both earth and sky as had the Goddess. Amber, the color of the golden sun, was prized, traded and used extensively in personal ornaments such as jewelry and beads. Their pottery is decorated with solar designs and crushed shells. But their houses and burial mounds were round, and red ochre was spread over and under bodies in the grave, indicating earlier influence and understanding of the mother/womb/life cycle. Kurgan bodies were placed in the grave with the males only facing the rising sun. These male bodies were not excarnated and were buried intact, in distinct contrast to the Old European practices described earlier.9
“From later archeological materials and comparative Indo-European mythology, it is known that the dagger and the yoked oxen pulling carts are attributes of the sovereign “God of the Shining Sky.”10 Their religion appears to have a conception of the afterlife as a lin
ear process: birth, death, permanent afterlife. There are no sets of symbols for rebirth or regeneration or the circular nature of all existence on earth, as existed in the Old European structure.
After, and as a result of this migration of Kurgan/Proto-Europeans into Old Europe, the pantheon of gods was oriented socially and economically more toward the class of men, typically derived from tribal warrior horsemen who had mastered horsemanship in their homeland. In this pantheon, the life-giving and death-wielding functions belonged to the male gods who also rode horses and brandished weapons. Female Goddesses, like the Dawn and Sun Maiden, were not Creatrix, but simply brides or wives of male deities.
“The Indo-Europeans worshipped the swiftness of arrow and spear, and the sharpness of blade. The touch of an axe blade was thought to awaken the powers of nature and transmit the fecundity of the Thunder God. The frightening Black God of Death and the Underworld marked the warrior for his death, with the touch of his spear tip, glorifying him as a fallen hero.”11
As “God of Shining Sky” he bestows progeny and promotes vegetation. This god exists throughout written folklore: Indic Mithra; Baltic Dievas; Roman Dieus Fidius; Janus and Mars; Celtic Lug (called ‘Sun-faced’); Anglo Saxon Tiw; German Tiwaz and Zi; Icelandic Tyr. His power is transmitted by his weapons, by his stag and horse animals and by the shining vehicle in which he travels.12
This marks the beginning of a new world vision of duality, of the division into light and dark, earth and sky, grounded and ethereal, touchable and untouchable, sacred accessibility and sacred inaccessibility. Fortunately, enough of the Old European people survived, migrated and founded new communities elsewhere ensuring that the customs, principles, and religion of the Goddess were not extinguished.
WARRIOR WOMEN, KURGAN QUEENS AND THE AMAZONS
As the old world was shifting, some new women rode into our midst and took over many parts of the Western world in the late Neolithic. These women had adapted to radical changes around them and had become the warrior protectors of the community.
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