Old Europe : sacred matriarchy or complementary opposition?

Abstract

In the past decade, it has become increasingly popular to view Neolithic cultures in general as being matriarchal or matrifocal. These cultures are portrayed as peaceful, harmonious, and artistic, in contrast to the warlike, destructive, and coarse patriarchal cultures that followed them. The matriarchal political and social organization is thought to be reflected in the Sacred sphere by cults of a Great Goddess which dominate religious life, a supernatural being from which all Life spontaneously and parthenogenetically stems. The claim is often made that Homo sapiens did, in fact, not know the facts of life in the Paleolithic or in the Neolithic. This interpretation of cultural evolution is essentially a restatement of the nineteenth century unilinear evolutionist views of Morgan, Marx, Engels and others. Most of twentieth century archaeology in Western Industrial countries has tended to argue that cultural evolution was considerably more complex than such unilinear schemes. However, in the contemporary climate of nuclear war threats and accelerating changes in women's status, it is easy to understand why such interpretations might become increasingly popular. To what extent is the matriarchal Neolithic scenario a verisimilitude? To what extent is it a hopeful and idealistic creation on the part of some contemporary writers in search of a social utopia? That is the topic of my paper