Neolithic religion – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: A CLASH OF CULTURES IN OUR GENES

This was originally posted on February 27, 2012

I carry the exact replica of MDNA handed down from mother to daughter since the depths of the last Ice Age 17,000 years ago. My father carries the YDNA of the Indo-Europeans handed down from father to son since the time when his male ancestors invaded Europe about 5000 years ago.

My female ancestors moved with the seasons as they gathered fruits and nuts, roots and greens to feed their families. Some of them may have blown red ochre around their hands to leave their marks in ritual cave-wombs.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively from mothers to their children. My MDNA “T2b” was given the name “the clan of Tara” by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve. According to Sykes the earliest female ancestor with this gene lived about 17,000 years ago, perhaps in Tuscany.

Most Europeans–male and female–are related to only eight or ten female ancestors. Going further back, all Europeans, Asians, and Aboriginal Australians are related to the women among the San “bushmen” who left Africa 100,000 years ago. The San are one of 13 lineages in Africa that can be traced back to a single African foremother. We really are one big family.

Women Invented Agriculture, Pottery, and Weaving and Created Neolithic Religion by Carol P. Christ

When I look at the two chapters on Goddess history in my book Rebirth of the Goddess (1996), there is very little I would change, but there is new evidence I would add.* Before discussing that, I would like to underscore two important points I made in discussing Goddess history that are often overlooked or ignored by other writers. The first is that women were the likely inventors of three new technologies at the beginning of the Neolithic age: agriculture (because they were the gatherers of plants and the preparers of plant foods), pottery (primarily used for food storage and preparation), and weaving (women’s role in almost all traditional societies). The second is that the so-called “age of the Goddess” is not a more “primitive” or “unconscious” stage of culture that needed to be superseded or overthrown by more “evolved” or more “rational” patriarchal warrior cultures.

Cultural theorists like the archetypal psychologist Carl Jung assert that “the feminine” represents the unconscious and nonrational ways of knowing such as intuition. From this it follows for them that the age of the Goddess was the age of the unconscious. This sounds good to some women and even to some feminists who have experienced aspects of so-called rational philosophical, theological, and scientific traditions as dogmatic, authoritative and wrong! Wrong about women and wrong when they exclude other than narrowly defined “rational” ways of knowing. However, there are important reasons to reject Jung’s theory.

The theory that earlier more “feminine” or pre-patriarchal cultures are unconscious or pre-rational has been used by Jung and his followers to justify the overthrow of earlier cultures by patriarchal warrior groups in order to allow humanity to develop so-called rational ways of thinking which are identified as “masculine.” That the so-called rational men of these cultures were warlike, subordinated women, seized other people’s lands, and held slaves is rarely counted against their alleged superiority. Moreover, the theory that the pre-patriarchal Goddess cultures of the Neolithic can be categorized as unconscious in no way accounts for the technological inventions that define the Neolithic era. Continue reading “Women Invented Agriculture, Pottery, and Weaving and Created Neolithic Religion by Carol P. Christ”