Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, April 11, 2001

”The Skeptical Inquirer” on the Goddess

A dunce of a man called Robert Sheaffer has written what he apparently considers to be a satirical review of the veneration of the Goddess in “The Skeptical Inquirer.” “The Skeptical Enquirer” is a wonderful foil to various forms of public and private lunacy, but it also gets carried away with its own conviction that it knows everything. In taking its cocky, over arrogant style, it detracts from some of the good it could do. Unfortunately some of its authors think they have omniscience and can pronounce authoritatively upon anything that comes to their notice. They exhibit the error of scientism, but seem utterly unaware of it, and leave you wondering what you can believe of what they say.

In this case Sheaffer is reviewing a book called “The Goddess Unmasked” by someone called Philip G Davis, a fellow traveller in opposition to the Goddess, so unsurprisingly, the review is favourable. Sheaffer enlightens us by telling us that one of the fastest-growing new religions today is a NeoPagan tradition called “Goddess spirituality,” popular among New Age disciples and radical feminists, but accepted at least in part by a large segment of society. Using such talent for mockery as he possesses, Sheaffer says: “The Goddess whispers a seductive tale of a golden age in a distant past.” Sheaffer explains that this golden age “supposedly” existed in Europe at least during the Neolithic era.

He wants us to know that those who venerate the Goddess, whom he puerilely disparages as “fans of the Goddess,” think that “Neolithic” sounds more dignified than “New Stone Age,” which is more intelligible. Apparently, he is not aware that the two terms mean exactly the same thing, are interchangeable, and both terms are used by archaeologists despite the latter being more easy to understand since it is English and not Greek. So, he disparages those who venerate the Goddess for using a perfectly common term used by others whom he does not disparage. Sheaffer doubtless appears clever to the laddies he is writing for but sounds an utter drip to anyone with even half a baseball. He should try hiring one from a neighbourhood kid.

In case anyone is wondering, NeoPagans are quite happy with both Neolithic and with New Stone Age.

Virtual Scholars

Using his favourite word, “supposedly,” Sheaffer continues his mocking explanation saying there was little or no conflict, little or no social hierarchy, and most especially, no gender discrimination or sexual inequality. The reason these Goddess societies were such paradises, he tells us, was because they were “gynocentric” (woman-centered), perhaps even actually “matriarchal.”

The only problem with this tidy picture, he says, is that it is rejected by virtually all professional scholars whose field of expertise lies within the Goddess’s claims, and totally unsupported by sound scholarship. The alert reader will note that this wise boy uses the weasel word “virtually,” because he cannot maintain that everyone holds the views he prefers, but then labels the scholars who disagree with the majority as unsound. He proves that the so-called skeptics are as deranged as the worst New Age dipstick and twice as biased. Sheaffer and his ilk travel under a guise of scientific rectitude, but little analysis is needed to see that they are no different from the worst cases that they claim to be correcting, and they are utterly insulting to respectable scientists who dissent from the majority view. Sheaffer prefers his science to be fascistic.

Sheaffer now finds an excuse for this silent majority of sound scholars not speaking up against “Goddess misinformation.” They fear being branded anti-feminist. Now with the author of “Goddess Unmasked,” a man has found the courage to answer the “rampant Goddess nonsense.” The author is—wait for it—a professor of religious studies, and a practising Christian! Is Sheaffer being serious? Professors of religious studies are not only not scientists but they have a plain vested interest in maintaining their own preferred religious scam. It is like accepting the gangster’s plea that only his protection racket is for the public good and legal safeguards are fraudulent.

The basis of this professor’s particular plea is that “we do not possess a single translated text” from any of these supposed major Goddess cultures, leaving anyone who is so inclined free to attribute to those vanished societies whatever social arrangements they are most eager to promote in our own. He does not say, of course, that the patriarchal religions are based on utterly spurious texts that purport to come from God but could not be more obviously authored by a large number of different men, and tell a provable farrago of lies. His own scam depends on people being encouraged to believe the falsehood that these are God’s own words. By comparison to this distasteful deception, believers in the Goddess have the evidence all around them and need no texts.

Our schoolboy humorist says a cynic might suggest that the Goddess can only reign supreme over societies in which no one can read or write, adding that some movements are so irrational that they are impossible to satirize. And so too is the gormless scientism of some skeptics.

Goddess misinformation

Today, the senseless Sheaffer says, “Goddess misinformation” has entered the curriculum in more places than most people realize. Davis quotes from a NeoPagan book: “Women have always been healers, and the knowledge of healing—of aura work, colors, herbs and homeopathy, reflexology, midwifery, massage, crystals, and trance states—have always been part of the goddess’ mysteries.” In quoting the full list, does Davis think there is something odd about midwifery and massage? Does Davis also deny that psychology has anything to do with healing? As Adelphiasophists, we will not make excessive claims for psychological healing practices, but consider that as adjuncts to healing, properly used, they cannot be harmful and are likely to help. None of these do worse than a placebo and often they do better. Presumably, Sheaffer and his buddy Davis disagree, but it is they who are ignoring the findings of science not the NeoPagans.

Now the professor of religion gets to his real point, the point that really narks him.

The Goddess misrepresents the history of religion!

It is shown as a struggle between warm and nurturing female-oriented religions and exploitative, death-dealing male-dominated ones. The combined laddies, author and reviewer in unity, pronounce that conventional scholarship knows nothing of this supposed struggle, or indeed of those categories of religions. Really? We know nothing after 5000 years of human history under the patriarchal religions about them being exploitative, death-dealing and male dominated? Again, you have to ask, Is this serious? Only a dimwit on the one hand and an incorrigibly thick-skinned purveyer of religious lies on the other could say anything like this. We might know nothing about the detail of the religion of the Goddess in the New Stone Age, but the number and quality of female statuettes and pictures testify to the veneration of women. It is possible to deny this but only in the sense that some people will deny the world is spherical. But the laddies have their best evidence against the caring Goddess yet…

The Goddess Kali, worshipped widely in India, demanded human sacrifice. She ruled over a society in which a person’s caste was fixed at birth, and widows were burned on their husband’s funeral pyre.

Selective?

The Goddess writers, notes Davis, present their evidence highly selectively. This accusation is risable taken in the context of, for example, the selectivity of Christian presentation of evidence, presumably practices admired by a professor of religion. Or even here, the failure to realise that widows were often better off dead with their husbands than left destitute without them, a desperation that the patriarchs were keen to exploit. Or that the religion of the Jews, the scriptures of which were stolen by Christians because they had none of their own, had a strict caste system of Priests, Levites, commoners of Israel and Proselytes. Christians never worried about sins either of omission or of commission. They are simply dishonest and cannot help it. They think it is what God wants. Lest anyone should be worrying about Kali, there are two main observations.

• First, the Goddess is Nature, and Nature destroys as well as creates. Adelphiasophists cannot speak for whoever Davis has been reading but Goddess worshippers are fully aware of this and do not seek to deny it. Death is necessary for life and is the sacrifice we all must make that our children can live. Kali is depicted in her role as destroyer, but we leave the destruction to the Goddess herself, and do not seek to take that power into our own hands. Only patriarchal gods permit that of their followers and we have seen its practical consequences in bloodshed and torture.
• Second, any honest scholar will admit that the Goddesses that survived into the patriarchal era were distorted reflections in the warped patriarchal mirror. Whatever some feminists might claim in their desire to equal the ugliness of men, Adelphiasophists do not think women are naturally warlike. Quite the opposite. But that does not mean that she will not defend her children, bloodily if necessary. So the emphasis of Christianity on sonship is a wretched ploy by patriarchs to unnaturally animate women into distressed and angry emotions to be directed at prescribed enemies or invented evil forces. Before that, it was the Goddesses themselves who the patriarchs emphasised in their destructive role, to earn the support of women in destructive male enterprises.

None of this latter seems to have been true of the original Stone Age Goddess, though as Davis shows, these critics pretend we know nothing if it is not written down. We do, and since written words are not necessarily true, we can be better off believing what has been naturally preserved rather than what human priests have passed down to us.

Misrepresenting the History of Civilisation!

The lads are not content with their argument so far and claim the Goddess misrepresents the “entire history of civilization,” portraying it as a struggle between early utopian, female-dominated societies, and later violent, hierarchical and patriarchal ones. Professional historians dispute that there ever was a “matriarchal” or “woman-centered” stage of civilization. So they know, these “professional historians?” They say we of the Goddess know nothing from the archaeological evidence, but “professional historians” know precisely how Stone Age society was arranged! Enough at any rate to be able to tell us we are fools. It is quite plain who the real fools are.

These people say we have a “theory” of an ancient social and religious utopia in pre-history. Adelphiasophists have no such “theory,” but we do have the same “hypothesis,” just as Marija Gimbutas did. Are hypotheses forbidden in the insane world of the professional skeptics? We have a proposal that deserves a proper consideration. Detractors like Sheaffer, proving they have no clue about scientific method, call our proposal a theory, tell the world we believe it, and assert that there is no evidence for it. He does not say they have the evidence that the hypothesis is false. Have they? Where are all the images of the Stone Age god? This new science of skepticism is democratic. The skeptics vote and it is thus!

Do the patriarchal apologists know that there was no peaceable, egalitarian, matriarchal society across Europe, in which a Mother Goddess was worshipped as the giver of life? If not let them shut up, and begin looking for evidence one way or the other, because the patriarchal situation, whatever impression they care to give, is not established, and so the hypothesis of matriachy is as likely to be the case as its opposite. That is why the archaeological evidence wants carefully scrutinizing.

As we saw above, the majority rules for Sheaffer, a view that would have stifled science at birth had it been accepted as scientific method. We base our ideas scientifically on the evidence that exists, irrespective of the opinion of this anonymous majority. What do the opposition base their ideas on? Have they got evidence for continual bullying and warfare in the Stone Age such as we have seen under the patriarchs? We are reminded of Christian missionaries claiming to be civilising tribal people living in straw huts. An excuse was that the natives fought tribal wars! The missionary was incapable of noticing his utter fatuousness, when the wars of the civilised Europeans were killing millions. So much for Christian objectivity. If there was no widespread Goddess movement, were the thousands of female figurines discovered in Neolithic Europe just pornographic images for prehistoric masturbators—male graffitti?

Despite the pathetic and tendentious criticism, the “goddess” movement has given archaeologists a new perspective on the meaning of civilization in prehistory. Challengers rage that archaeological finds are being interpreted on an unsound basis because they do not like the idea of women on top. Amazingly, they say proponents of the matriarchal hypothesis merely want to establish the Great Goddess in the past to re-establish her in the present—as if that were a reason for not accepting the hypothesis!

The plain fact is that the artefacts found from the Stone Age show that Stone Age interests were emphatically different from later ones, and—if we can be permitted to use a little intelligence, something the lads don’t know about—between times there must have been a change in culture. It is unlikely to have been sudden. Believers in patriarchal religions like Christianity hate anyone to use their head. You are not allowed to make deductions. Christians are forbidden to use their brains by order of God’s men! Well, we see a great emphasis on the feminine in the Stone Age and little emphasis ever since throughout the recorded history of the patriarchs. But that does not show there was an intervening struggle. Boneheads!

A False Pedigree

Uh, Oh! Worse to come!

The Goddess misrepresents her own history, claiming to be the heir of an unbroken line of covert pagans and druids who secretly preserved the Goddess’ occult healing ways since remote antiquity despite Christian persecution.

It is fashionable today, under Christian pressure, to discount Margaret Murray’s great book on the witch cult, but there is more truth in it than there is in the Christian bible. At any rate, the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade finds truth in Margaret Murray’s conclusions:

As a matter of fact, almost everything in her construction was wrong except for one important assumption: that there existed a pre-Christian fertility cult and that specific survivals of this pagan cult were stigmatised during the Middle Ages as witchcraft… recent research seems to confirm at least some aspects of her thesis. The Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg has proved that a popular fertility cult, active in the province of Friule in the 16th and 17th centuries, was progressively modified under pressure of the Inquisition and ended by resembling the traditional notion of witchcraft. Moreover, recent investigations of Romanian popular culture have brought to light a number of Pagan survivals which clearly indicate the existence of a fertility cult…

Eliade seems not to notice that the “assumption” he spoke of was the central point she set out to show! She was therefore right. Under Christian torture and immolation to the great Christian god of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages, it would have been remarkable if any concerted movement survived, but Murray and others give evidence that non-Christian rituals occurred in bouts from time to time, implying there was a thread of illicit religious tradition that emerged from time to time as a fad, or as a protest against stifling orthodoxy.

Sheaffer says Davis convincingly traces the origin of the contemporary Goddess movement not to classical antiquity but to 19th-century French and German Romanticism.

Nothing about the Goddess myth correlates with what we know of the ancient civilizations which her devotees claim as their foremothers; everything, however, has clearly identifiable roots in the modern subcultures which began with Romanticism and the nineteenth-century occult revival.

Davis seems to have suddenly found out how the Goddess religion was practised in Neolithic times after all. Sufficient at least for him to be able to distinguish it from later inventions. Has he proved that the Romantics had no earlier traditions to draw upon? He has not, not that it matters where a respect for Nature comes from. Nothing seems more natural than that a desire to revere Nature should force its way through the synthetic junk we are spiritually fed on in patriarchy.

Davis is setting up straw dolls, or is attacking the least informed of the Goddess movement to seem clever. Adelphiasophists have made no pretence of being in a continuous line of Goddess worshippers and we have criticised some who have accepted the inventions of people like Gerald Gardner. Not incidentally, because Gardner and people like him should not be free to invent religions if they want to, but because they should be more open about it, and not claim bogus credentials. That is for patriarchal religions, not ours. Adelphiasophists for that matter are less concerned about the existence of a matriarchy in the Stone Age, than that there should be one in the future.

Disparaging Feminine Values

Davis and Sheaffer as usual seem to disparage feminine qualities as Romantic values.

The prized Romantic values of emotion, intuition, affinity with nature, and boundless love coincided with the qualities which traditional stereotypes had already assigned to women.

Feminine qualities are only stereotypes now. They are so stereotypical that most of the caring professions in our society are female dominated and most of the professional criminals in society, notably the violent ones are male. If these are merely stereotypes, why is Davis not trying to change them with his wonerful patriarchal religions? Doubtless, he will say he is, but so they have been saying throughout recorded history while doing the opposite.

Sheaffer now wants to scare us by quoting Faust. Is this man a Christian or something? Anyway Mephistopheles acknowledged Goethe’s “Mothers” as having far greater power than he had, presumably hoping to make us think their power was like the Devil’s—evil. Yet, “the Eternal Feminine draws us on high.”

Works by utopian social reformers like the Count of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Alphonse Constant, and others, promoted a viewpoint Davis describes as “the Romantic idealization of women as spiritually pure channels of love, intuitively connected to nature.”

These utopians, who sought not merely to improve society but to create a literal paradise on earth, suggested that the key to re-establishing Eden lay in the redemptive powers of woman as messiah. Indeed, one French Saint-Simonist group proclaimed in 1832 the immanent appearance of a female messiah, and symbolically kept an empty chair for her to preside over their meetings. When she failed to appear in France, a vision showed her appearing in Constantinople in 1833, resulting in an expedition to search for her there; she was never found.

Shame! What is striking here is that the Christian professor mocks this messiah because she is female. What is a mockery is the whole idea of a messiah, but Davis is blind to this. Otherwise, the bonehead professor and his lackey concur, it seems, that anyone seeking to make a paradise on earth must be some sort of nut. All Christians are therefore the same, because that is what their messiah is supposed to do too. The difference is that these “utopians” were trying to do it in practice, however imperfectly, while Christians and others like them just pray for it. It is certainly a slogan of the Adelphiasophists that we should seek to build heaven on earth, because earth is as near to heaven as any of us will get.

Satanic

In a parody of trial by association, our lads lead us through the history of Aleister Crowley’s Golden Dawn. The only purpose of this is to tar the venerators of the Goddess with some sort of pseudo-Satanist brush, because most people, if they remember Crowley at all, will remember him as an alleged Satanist. Not content with this, our skeptics draw a line to Gerald Gardner’s made-up witch cult and thence to various modern feminist witches. Doubtless, it will impress the cult of the debunkers, that this reviewer differs not a whit from the pseudosciences he claims to debunk. A skeptic is not someone who believes nothing, but someone who seeks to be convinced by evidence and argument. These dunces set out disbelieving, and it is no wonder they give science a bad name. They haven’t a clue. Certainly, scientists could never willingly associate themselves with those who offered demons and angels instead of Nature. That is what this dunce Sheaffer does.

In the nineteenth century, J J Bachofen and Friedrich Engels discerned, in prehistory, a “matriarchal” stage of civilization. Except that, for Sheaffer, they did not discern it but only “claimed” to discern a “supposed” matriarchy. When skeptics have to heave on their skepticism like this by the bucketload, they are admitting that their argument is thin. They are depending on creating a predisposition to disbelieve by using these pejorative words. And…

Today’s historians and anthropologists uniformly reject these century-old speculations (as did most historians even at the time they were written!).

You will note that the earlier majority for rejection has become, in Sheaffer’s mind, a uniform rejection. That is the way pseudoscientists argue. Democracy rules. They begin with tentative propositions and before long they persuade themselves as well as their unwary audience of their certain truth. Patriarchal religions depend on this dishonesty, but it is not expected of scientists. Anyone to use tricks like this cannot claim any scientific credentials. He should be a bishop. What is the bishop’s conclusion?

Davis has shown conclusively that the Goddess traditions are passed down not from ancient pagan teachers, but from latter-day ones.

If this is conclusive proof then our bishop is easily convinced, but then they are aren’t they? They believe god came to earth to see what it was like being a man, and enjoyed being killed so much he decided to let the whole of the human race have a good chance of the same pleasure. But wait, his conclusions are not finished.

While this does not invalidate New Age NeoPagan practices as religion—all religious practices were new at some time—it certainly explodes one of their proudest claims: that the followers of “wicca” (mistranslated by Gardner as “the wise”) have been secretly worshipping “the Goddess” for millennia, and have preserved her supposed ancient wisdom and healing secrets, which are now widely touted as “alternative medicine.”

Imaginary Fathers

It is another feeble ploy, of those who have no real arguments, to set up straw men to blow over. It is surprisingly succeessful because so many people are not taught, what one might have thought was essential in the modern world, and that is how to see false arguments. Sheaffer probably does not even realise what he is doing. The patriarchal beliefs of our most popular religion depend upon believing utter fantasy, but reportedly there are 2 billion people that believe it. Imaginary fathers are accepted without question, but the real basis of our existence apparently only gets attention out of some cranky and imaginative eccentrics, according to Bishop and Bishop. Nature does not need any history of Wicce or Crowley or Gardner to make it worthy of veneration. Adelphiasophism does not object to these beliefs, though it does not accept the detail of them, but believes in the veneration of Nature as the proper veneration of intelligent beings.

Having apparently drawn conclusions our reviewer then cannot resist mentioning some more cranky writers. It does not impress. Every living movement has cranks and overenthusiastic believers. It is empty as an argument to pretend that they represent the totality of it. Christianity is flawed to its very soul in disdaining the life we live in favour of an imaginary life elsewhere. This is patriarchal religion and it is insane. Merely to compare it with Nature worship refutes this synthetic religion and upholds what is clearly essential to us.

Sheaffer, or is it Davis, can get so far off the mark that they cannot even see what makes clear sense, if studied carefully, and not just discarded as Sheaffer and Davis prefer to do. The art historian Merlin Stone might be another romantic but Sheaffer is doltish again when he pooh-poohs her claim that the ancient Hebrew priests must have been Indo-Europeans, not Semites. If Sheaffer thinks he is a scientist he should study the origins of the Jewish religion. I’ll give him two clues. It began under the Persians. Some people came into Yehud from Persia and refused to accept the religion of the locals. I had better give him another. The Persians were Indo-Europeans. He has no chance of working it out with his miniscule IQ.

Sheaffer finally mentions Marija Gimbutas. When asked in 1989 how could she know whether she had gone too far in drawing conclusions about her “supposed” Goddess paradise, Gimbutas replied:

This has to do with your intuition and experience. Just like an art creation you must feel that you are right in what you are saying.

Sheaffer leaves this without comment as if it were meant to speak for itself, presumably negatively. Yet surely most people, especially motivated by altruism, do nothing less. Does he dispute that people should do what they feel is right? Again, if our skeptic looks at the way science works, he will find that many a scientist has done this precisely—out of conviction, only then proving themselves right. There is nothing at all wrong with this, providing that the outcome ultimately ties with reality.

As a practicing Christian, Davis is worried about NeoPagan Goddess theology. Sheaffer calls it an upstart creed, proving he has no clue because patriarchal religions have creeds, whereas Goddess religions are happy to accept change—evolution, one might say—as being more natural.

Pseudoscientific Tricks

Now, having toed the line with his fellow traveller until now, Schaefer seems to realise he might have been too accommodating for his skeptical audience.

To many skeptics, ideas of spirituality grounded in “the Goddess” are neither less nor more valid than comparable ideas grounded in conventional theology.

So he tries to make out his concern all along was proper evidence—this from a man who uses every pseudoscientific trick there is, it seems. Suddently he is defending the falsehoods entering the curriculum, as if he knows what they are. This it is that moves the skeptic into action. Sheaffer approvingly cites Davis quoting the French feminist Monique Wittig’s advice concerning alleged ancient matriarchies: “Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.” She plainly took her guidance from Christians like Paul and the early bishops who could see no wrong in lying to the glory of God. They all do the same today. Adelphiasophists are peculiar—they value truth and are happy to show that the Goddess, unlike the patriarchal gods, needs no lies.

We finally get to Davis’s own main gripe. He resents the fact that the church no longer has control of the schools and consequently different types of world view are able to be presented in schools. “Secularists, ever vigilant in keeping creationism out of public education, slept as equally-unfounded NeoPagan doctrines slipped in completely without objection.” Needless to say this is hype intended to create some sort of hysterical backlash against cultivating a respect for Nature, Christians realising fully that natural beliefs are incompatible with Christianity.

Sheaffer pretends at the end that he merely wants to keep all religious indoctrination out of schools, but that was far from the tenor of the review and the puke-inducing praise he lavishes on this Christian apologist, for that is all he plainly is. He does not approach evidence objectively but panders to his own delusions. He praises a book in which an opponent of Nature handpicks what he choses to criticise and Sheaffer thinks this is scientific, or at least justifiable from a skeptical viewpoint. The author is a man with utterly unskeptical beliefs of his own that he deludedly spreads throughout the world convinced that is what God wants, while denigrating anything contrary, yet is taken to be a fair authority on the object of his hate. This is a travesty of criticism. If Sheaffer is supposed to be a skeptic, he should be sacked because he is as gullible as anyone could be and, in argument, as dishonest as any pseudoscientist or Christian.

And those who want to know about NeoPagan Goddess veneration had better read these pages to get a balanced view rather than the claptrap purveyed by this pair of holy joes. Elsewhere on a pathetic webside called the “Domain of Patriarchy” or something equally fatuous, Shaeffer “develops” some of his themes.

The Great Patriarch Refutes the Goddess

Sheaffer’s annoyance at one point is directed at some film made by a Canadian film maker in the New Agey style. He makes the film sound like nonsense but the “Discovery Channel” fills its broadcast bands nightly with similar garbage that does not get Sheaffer half as riled. Apparently it claims that “satellite photographs show Neolithic monoliths of the Goddess such as Stonehenge all stand on energy lines, which criss-cross the earth.” Sheaffer denies there are any such lines, and he is most likely right, but his own perversion is in attacking veneration of the Goddess because some dippy film maker wants to make such claims. Plenty of, almost excusively male, dowsers make the same claim and are even hired by companies to find oil or water. The “energy” lines are so-called ley lines, and male dowsers have shown using their own techniques, whatever it is, that these ley lines are not linear but wriggle. Sheaffer could address the New Age believers in the ley lines about their beliefs, but just because some draw in the Goddess into this wrangle, it does not refute Goddess veneration. Sheaffer simply hates the veneration of Nature much more than he hates false scientific information.

As for the association with megaliths with Stone Age Goddess worship, who knows? Sheaffer thinks he does, because he extrapolates the present into the past calling it Occam’s Razor. Yet, when his opponents do the same but beginning much closer to the past in question, namely from ancient times when Goddesses were still popular, he leaps about in agitation. In historic times, goddesses have been killed off totally from modern religions. The trend is therefore plainly from Goddesses as deities to no Goddesses as deities. Extrapolate that trend backwards and it is possible to see a time when there were no gods as deities. Sheaffer is like the weather forecaster who pronounces that it rained yesterday and therefore it will rain today—an unsophisticated form of prediction. Others would look at seasonal trends and variations before coming to a conclusion, but that is too sophisticated for Sheaffer.

Sheaffer quotes David Anthony, an anthropologist in refutaion of the claims of a Goddess society, saying that contrary to Gimbutas’s claims, the cultures of Old Europe built fortified sites that indicated warfare, and weapons were found. Beads on the other hand were considered by the discoverers to be associated with female burials. It reminds us of the Red Woman of Paviland who turned out to be male but was identified by the Reverend Buckland as a woman because he wore beads. Marija Gimbutas is doubtless trying to make a point as firmly as possible and compassing it with qualifiers would doubtless not impress the generally male hacks who report these matters. Mothers will defend their sons. The point is they do not make a sport of it. There was far less mutual killing than there was subsequently under the patriarchal gods.

Shaeffer says that evidence was “easily produced” to substantiate the hypothesis of a Goddess society, once late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship approved it, by the “simple device” of treating any female representations from the Old and New Stone Ages as images of this being. Shaeffer makes no complaint about Christian archaeologists declaring anything from the turn of the era with any vaguely Christian symbol as being Christian. “Archaeologists” from the Mormon University of Utah say that three lines is Christian because it stands for the trinity, and skulls found with a hole in them are Christians because they must have been martyrs.

We are, though, talking here about societies millennia ago when it is hard to believe that people went to college to study art as a hobby. People might have had the leisure to carve, given the ability, but it is hard to accept that they simply carved still life or even took commissions for portraits of local worthies. It does not seem outlandish to anyone, except those desperate, that the carvings of women were of some cultic significance. That was the view of prominent archaeologists like Glyn Daniel and O G S Crawford. Admittedly some experts took what seem like extreme positions, but these people were not Goddess venerators but journeymen scholars trying to interpret what they found. They must have had some reason for it, and the tide has probably only turned through the patriarchal backlash.

Shaeffer tries to make out that spirals, circles, cups and pits were taken to be Goddess symbols because they were like eyes—doubtless magnified with mascara. The obvious sexual symbolism of these glyphs seems reason enough to attribute them to the Goddess. Shaeffer gives Peter Ucko the credit for saving us from the Goddess. Ucko, in his monograph “Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete” claimed:

• a large minority of Neolithic figurines were male or asexual,
• few if any statuettes had signs of majesty or supernatural power,
• few of them had accentuated sexual characteristics,
• the “pubic triangles” of many were loincloths,
• figurines of women holding their breasts showed grief not any symbolic sexuality or motherhood because that is what it meant in the Pyramid Texts,
• female figurines were children’s dolls, intended for girls and so female, or they were made to have pins stuck into them.

Few of these had any substance, though they seem to impress Shaeffer. If female cult images were not dominant in the assemblages of Neolithic sites, it would be a serious blow to the idea that Neolithic European societies were matriarchal, but leaves one wondering why the female figures have created such a greater impression. The “male or asexual,” figures were a minority, so the majority were plainly sexually female. Since it seems a fair bet that some of the asexual ones were intended to be female too, the human race not having an neutral gender, the clear majority were feminine figurines. Did anyone say something different from this? And what is their relative quality, the level of skill in manufacture, and form. If the male figures are low quality scratchings on bone compared with high level and difficult working of a stone female figurine, the two would hardly be comparable.

What sort of signs of majesty or supernatural power was Ucko expecting. Are there any signs of such power on any Stone Age figures? Do most women have accentuated sexual characteristics? Were artistic skills so uniform that such characteristics could easily be depicted in materials that were not perishable? The idea that these people were so prudish as to have to wear loincloths seems risable, the product of Christianity. Have figures of women holding their breasts only been found in Egypt? If so, he might have a point—for Egypt—but the holding of breasts in grief must be emphasising the mother who brought the, presumably deceased, person into life. And how old were they judged to be? If they were ancient, the Pyramid Texts would have to represent a tradition going way back. Why do we not find such a large proportion of female dolls in later periods? When the skills of making images were better, even crude figurines of women are distinctly cultish, like the many found in the Palestinian Hills standing for the Hebrew Goddess.

Andrew Fleming, in “The Myth of the Mother Goddess,” said there was no proof that spirals, circles, and dots or even female figures were symbols for a goddess. Doubtless Fleming is a Christian evangelist. They are the ones who always demand proof but need none themselves. We have no proof that the figures are even human and there are plenty of people selling a lot of books that claim they are alien, but does anyone seriously have to prove they are human? Between them Ucko and Fleming scrape the barrel for excuses, but still fail to convince anyone except Shaeffer and his ilk who think they “blew to pieces” the hypothesis of the Neolithic Goddess. On the grounds of parsimony alone we would have to reject this ragbag of excuses and accept as simpler the Goddess hypothesis.

Shaeffer thinks women had no special role in developing agriculture or domesticating animals. Well such things leave little evidence in the soil, but if women were the gatherers and men were the hunters, it follows that women were in charge of the home and men wandered around after game. It can only therefore have been women who carried out the first experiments in agriculture and, even if the animals were captured by hunters, it was women who domesticated them and had to look after them while the men were enjoying themselves hunting. There is no evidence for this but no evidence against it either, and this has the benefit of being rational.

Schaeffer tells us that “during historical times the woman’s perspective has not been ignored, but was woven along with mens’ into tradition, religion, morals, etc. A society’s myths and morals reflect both womens and mens experiences and interests.” This really does not need an answer.

Shaeffer says though “some Gnostic texts attribute feminine as well as masculine traits to the Deity, there was never any worship of a creator Goddess within Gnosticism.” Note that he has to specify a “creator” Goddess to make his refutation work. It remains true that the Collyridians worshipped Mary as a Goddess. The fact that other Gnostic sects had a more orthodox patriarchal position on the issue is irrelevant. No one except Shaeffer is claiming that all Gnostics worshipped a Goddess. It is typical of these dishonest types that they set up a false argument to knock down. Adelphiasophists know what they believe and do not need twiddlers to tell us what is is or should be.

Shaeffer tells us that “all known human societies are patriarchal, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, Occam’s Razor prohibits us from concluding that unknown societies (such as during the Neolithic) were otherwise.” Well, we have already noted that by the same token the opposite can be concluded because Shaeffer fails to take into account the plain trend in society throughout recorded history away from Goddess veneration, despite the occasional attempts to reassert it. Allowing for this trend, Occam’s razor tells us prehistory was a society of Goddess worshippers.

As for alleged “pockets of female resistance,” there is no historical evidence to substantiate such claims.

Shaeffer is speaking about the legends of the Amazons, but his knowledge is seriously lacking as usual. Scientific papers and whole books have been written about the Scythian female warrior queens, and even TV programmes have been made about them. Where does Shaeffer live? He calls himself a “layman” but he sounds like an adolescent who cannot find anyone else to play with.

In one of his articles Shaeffer does make a good point, quoting Camille Paglia as having written:

Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel, and malarkey.

This is true, but, though some Goddess enthusiasts argue from a less than sound position, it is not this that is the trouble. It is the fact that they are told women should reject all orhthodox scholarship and build up a specifically female variaety. This is precisely what Paglia says—malarkey. Women are entitled to chose their own interests and emphases, but the forms of study and the techniques of presentation of evidence and argument are all established. Women are beguiled by the phony French school of Postmodernism. If it is taken as an emphasis on criticism, then that is valid, but it is more than this. It disppears up its own rump. Let women contend on the ground already established. Shaeffer proves how desperate he is, and how flabby most of his argument is. Surely we can handle such poor stuff without having to devise feminist methods that will simply be ignored as crankiness.

A Review of Criticisms

Arnaud F Lambert of Iowa University has prepared a fairly objective review of the background to the interest in the Goddess. The archaeological arguments for the hypothesis of the Goddess society in Neolithic times and criticisms of it are presented, but despite an honest attempt at balance, the effect of putting in barely relevant or ill-founded material on either side, tends to dispose the neutral reader against the hypothesis, and perhaps what is more important the need to venerate the Goddess today.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s model of development was described in his 1877 book, “Ancient Society.” Morgan’s notion that the origin of civilization was related to kinship and marriage would go on to influence many contemporary thinkers. In his 1861 work, “Das Mutterrecht” (“Mother Right”), J J Bachofen argued that Greek myths contained the evidence of a power struggle between the worship of the Goddess and a race of invaders. Bachofen used evidence such as Lycian myths about inheritance being passed down to women, Lycian myths about Amazons giving up war in pursuit of motherhood, as well as Athenian cults dedicated to a nature mother to show that before the Greek Classical period female deities dominated the pantheons, women established the families, and gynocrats ruled society. Eventually, men sought to reverse this situation by asserting the principle of fatherhood in religion. Women’s culture came to an end when men ascended to religious power.

According to John McLennan in his 1865 book, “Primitive Marriage,” competition for food and shelter necessitated infanticide and, as ever, females infants were selected to die. The shortage of women gave them power and led to the first matriarchies. Groups of males had to share a wife with the common wife and mother at the centre in control. The era of primitive mothers came to end with the transition from polyandry to polygyny as various groups began the practice of wife capture. In 1903, Jane Harrison, a British classicist, used McLennan’s model to propose the idea that a peaceful, woman-centered culture had predated Classical Greece. This matriarchy featured humans living in harmony with nature and worshipping an earth Goddess.

Arguments for the existence of an ancient Goddess religion tried to show that European witchcraft was its descendant. In 1749, Girolamo Tartarotti claimed that witchcraft was a descendant of the Dianic cults of Roman times. Jules Michelet similarly argued that witchcraft was a survival of a pre-Christian northern European fertility cult. Charles Leland thought Italian witches had descended from a cult of the Roman goddess Diana.

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray, argued that witchcraft was an ancient religion by comparing Paleolithic rock art from Ariege and Dordogne depicting masked and horned dancers with Roman, Greek, and Celtic art, Christian depictions of the Witches’ Sabbath as well as the folk dances and costumes of rural people in England and Europe. Murray concluded that witchcraft is an old religion dedicated to the worship of a nature deity known as the Horned God. With the advance of Christianity and the witch hunts, the witches went underground and formed disparate covens. While these covens largely disappeared before the end of the Nineteenth century, Murray suggested that some had survived and had left a group of cultural artefacts that permeated European culture.

Gerald Gardner encountered a coven of witches and became an initiated member. Gardner constructed the history and rituals of witchcraft or Wicca from a diversity of sources, including Murray, but Gardner claimed that witches also worshipped the Goddess.

Many anthropologists and historians objected to Murray’s interpretations and here I list them from Lambert’s summary, and defend her when appropriate. Note though that Murray was not suggesting witchcraft was a Goddess religion, so some of the criticisms are irrelevant to our purpose and, though she can be defended, in the defence of the Goddess, a defence of Murray’s position might not be relevant.

1. Murray has to mine such a broad volume of time and space that she finishes up having to unite elements for which there is no other connexion.
2. There is no archaeological or documentary evidence that the Horned God existed except as a synonym for the Devil. Lambert states this rather baldly, so we must assume he means in the Europe of the Middle Ages when Murray thinks the witches were practising underground. That would be sufficient reason to explain a scarcity of evidence for the god, but to say that there is no evidence that a horned god existed at all other than the Devil is manifestly nonsense. The Great God Pan was a horned god and was a god of nature who was highly revered. In the old Arcadian religion, it is possible that Pan was always associated with the Goddess, but from our viewpoint today, Pan is not important.
3. Murray forced evidence to fit her theory and she even ignored witchcraft trial records which, in some cases, would have bolstered her arguments. Is this an argument for or against Murray? It seems to be two separate points, one for and one against. In studies of secret or suppressed material, conjecture is often needed if the study is to be done at all. Material might then seem forced, but the point is to stimulate closer study.

That is it. Quite a feeble set of criticisms compared with the original work.

Matristic Cultures

Marija Gimbutas was the pre-eminent archaeologist of Eastern Europe in the United States and held a position of authority among archaeologists. Her most important work was of a copious amount of Upper Paleolithic (30,000-7000 BC) and Neolithic (7000-3000 BC) carved figures, ceramic figures, pottery, shrines, and cave art. Gimbutas argued that Neolithic European society was woman-centered, peaceful, and worshipped fertility by venerating women. She also claimed that Indo-Europeans invaded these matristic cultures during the Bronze Age and suppressed the Goddess religion.

1. Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic images of nude women with prominent breasts, vulvas, buttocks, and/or bellies indicate that women were associated with fertility. The Venus figurines of Willendorf and Lespugue are the most famous examples of such figures.
2. Female figurines seated on what appear to be altars or thrones, handling animals like the Knossos snake-handling statues or with the heads of animals, show that women were also associated with fertility of animals and held leadership positions in the religions of ancient Europe.
3. Ceramic artefacts with painted or sculpted designs reminiscent of snakes, deer, bees, and eggs, indicate that prehistoric Europeans were deeply concerned with various aspects of fertility such as rain, vegetation, and pregnancy.
4. Some caves perhaps used as temples were painted in red ochre which made them reminiscent of blood, life and birth and the womb.
5. The Anatolian site of Çatal Hütük (c. 6500-5700 BC) is the most clearly matriarchal site ever excavated, with female figurines in birth-giving positions. There are no signs of human sacrifice. Bulls universally stand for fertility in later religions, and perhaps here already in the Stone Age, but Gimbutas thinks it is because the bull’s head has similarities to a uterus with its fallopian tubes.
6. Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic artefacts are similar in form to the art of the Minoans (c. 1930-1400 BC) and the Indo-European Mycenaeans and Greeks. The similarities of these artworks suggest a continuity and this must find its origin in the earlier worship of goddesses and fertility. Moreover, the use of such artefacts by later cultures may indicate that the Goddess religion had survived beyond the Neolithic Age and the Indo-European invasions.
7. In European folk traditions, witches are seen as old crones associated with disease and unnatural death, possibly relics of Neolithic symbols of death such as stiff nudes and carved crones.
8. Ancient female religions encouraged matrilineal forms of descent and gave women power over men. This is utterly uncontroversial because the only sure lineage is the mother’s, and indeed was the only possible lineage before the male role was realised.

During the Bronze Age (c. 2600-1000 BC), Goddess worshipping cultures were violently invaded by war-like, patriarchal Indo-Europeans—Celts, Slavs, Germans, Romans, Mycenaeans, and Greeks. As a result of these invasions, the Goddess was absorbed into the warrior pantheons of the Indo-Europeans. Goddess worship continued unmolested by the Indo-Europeans in remote places, and elsewhere underground in defiance of the acceptable forms of patriarchal and distorted Goddess veneration permitted by the Indo-Europeans. The destruction of the Goddess religion continued more vigorously under Judaism and reached its culmination under Christianity, both religions based on the Iranian discovery of the cosmic God.

Archaeologists’ Arguments

The archaeological evidence presented by Gimbutas has been hotly debated among archaeologists, not always without prejudice or even sensibly.

1. Adolescent boys can hardly have changed over 10,000 years to any noticeable degree but some archaeologists maintain that they made all the female figurines because they were more inclined to sexual fantasies and the use of pornographic dolls in their masturbatory activities than they ever were later, or at least were allowed to indulge them to an astonishing degree. It has a ring of desperation about it as an argument against the Stone Age Goddess and fertility cult.
2. Somewhat more convincing is that female figurines were created as self-portraits by pregnant women, perhaps one imagines with some charm function in safeguarding the mother and child. Rather contrary to this suggestion which would imply a wide variety of talents in manufacture and styles of production, the figurines are often quite stylised. There are different styles admittedly but they do not suggest individual creativity, but rather accepted forms. Many of the female images have similar anatomical features and omissions. The explanation best fits an accepted and formalised purpose, and this is most likely to have been religious rather than abstract romantic doodling.
3. Few will deny that Gimbutas is often over speculative in her interpretations, but that does not automatically mean she is wrong. It means her speculations need confirming or refuting. It seems remarkable and perhaps unlikely that Neolithic people had seen any resemblence between the shape of a bulls head with its horns and the shape of a female womb with its fallopian tubes, but it should not be simply rejected. If fertility was revered, would not curiosity have led some Stone Age post mortem examiner into seeking the origin of birth, and revealing the womb and its adjuncts. The critics say there is no evidence that Neolithic peoples dissected the bodies of dead women, but what evidence need be found? And how often need it have been done? Once the belief that bulls’ heads stood for fertility in women, the belief could have propagated with its origin forgotten. The whole belief might have had its own origins in another era when human butchery of corpses, perhaps for ritual or even cannibalistic purposes was practised. Equally, critics say the fact that the plan of Neolithic passage tombs is similar in appearance to the outlines of Venus figures and the cruciform plans of cathedrals needs documentary or archaeological evidence to prove the connection. Yet no one disputes the womb-like form of many Bronze Age tombs, even to the point that they suggest the concept of solar fertilisation. And the form of churches goes back to primitive times in some aspects including their easterly orientation to catch the sun. Such features are most unlikely to have occurred by coincidence.
4. Archaeologists also question the extension of the ancient matriarchy premise to Western Europe and Britain. Many claim that her model works best among prehistoric East European cultures. These criticisms are not refutations but limits placed on a hypothesis otherwise accepted. More work needs to be done to reveal the extent of the Goddess religion.
5. There is little doubt regarding a prolonged expansion of Indo-European speakers. The artefacts and linguistic evidence show an alien culture based on the horse and chariot warfare emerging during this period. Critics say that many aspects of Indo-European society are uncertain—such as the location of their homeland and the nature of their religion. We have to formulate our hypotheses out of what we already have. We can revise them or reject them later, but uncertainty in some things is no reason for not trying to explain them with the knowledge we have. Knowing the place of origin of the invaders does not alter the effect their invasions had, and their religion plainly left its mark in the societies that formed when they settled down.
6. Archaeologists question the accuracy of comparisons between Neolithic European societies and the later Indo-European societies. If Neolithic European cultures were culturally and linguistically distinct from the Indo-European cultures that came later, then there is little hope of being able to use the myths of the latter to illuminate the culture of the former. The similar forms of the artefacts cannot be assumed to denote that they had similar functions. This is another case of desperation. All we know about succession of civilisations through invasion shows that the invaders rarely if ever utterly destroy the previous culture. It would probably require the total destruction of the conquered population. What emerges is an amalgam of the conqueror and the conquered, and when the conquered people already had the superior civilisation, it is often almost taken over wholesale. The patriarchal conquerors obviously did not destroy all goddess worship but adapted it to their own aims. The Great Mother was weakened by dividing her into her distinct qualities with a new goddess for each. From then on, the evolution of the Goddess cult was towards the reuniting of the Goddess into her original self. Christianity stopped it. As for artefacts, as in evolution, form is central to function. Similar forms of tools do not necessitate the same use, but it is more likely than not that they had!
7. Lambert tells us that the scholars who have tried to relate the mythologies of surviving non-Indo-Europeans with the artefacts and sites of Neolithic European societies, such as the Basque goddess Mari with the Neolithic Goddess, assume again that similarity in form equals similarity in function. Well, again this is an incautious and tendentious way of putting the fact that those who propose a Goddess culture in the Stone Age make hypotheseses about how they relate to surviving non-Indo-Eurpean cultures. It is a blatant and unfair intent to depict the Goddess hypothesis as deranged, that critics depict the Goddess hypothesis as if it were an unfounded belief rather than a hypothesis for investigation. The people that use this tactic show themselves to be fools, though admittedly they do fool fools.

Feminists’ Arguments

Some feminists have cricised the Goddess hypothesis. According to Lambert some feminists have just transmuted Christianity by changing the sex of all the participants. Instead of a God, there was a Goddess, instead of his son, there was her daughter, instead of being celibate like the Virgin Mary, the Goddess rejoiced in her sexuality.

It is unlikely, therefore, that the contemporary Goddess religion is related to pagan traditions.

Quite so, but these women are entitled to formulate the religion that they like, and the rest of us understand that it is just as synthetic as Christianity itself. Whether the inventers of it are claiming it is the ancient religion or not, it is an utter travesty of analysis for the objective analyst to pretend that this view is the view of all, or even most, of the proponents of the Goddess relgion of the Stone Age. Lambert must know that it is their own peculiar view and is quite an indepondent approach from those who placed the goddess in pre-history. Adelphiasophists feel no need to have a prehistorical Goddess foundation, because the Goddess is self-evident to us, but we realise that it would be beneficial to our view if an earlier Goddess phase could be proved.

1. R Ruether argues that there is no evidence of a prehistoric woman’s religion or, if there was, of its survival to modern times. That is two arguments. Does she want us to believe one or both of them? Reuther is a Christian, so, even though she is a feminist, cannot be believed! Apparently creating a link to hypothetical Goddess-worshippers in the past promotes separatism and rejection between the sexes and the estrangement of women from mainstream society. That is not so, but what is true is the diversion of feminist scholarship into pointless dead-end “alternative” approaches. While women go down these blind alleys, the patriarchs gloat. Women can easily face up to patriarchal culture on its own ground because it is false and crumbles under determined assault. The patriarchs want women to tilt at windmills.
2. Some feminists accuse Goddess-worshippers of substituting assertion for proof, and of taking similarity to mean identity. All of those who venerate the Goddess are not scientists, and it is undoubtedly as true among committed women as it is among committed Christians that they will assert what is not established. It worked extremely well for Christianity, so who can blame them. Others of us do not accept it, but apparently are tarred with the brush anyway! Apparently these women take all the various goddesses present in the religions of ancient Europe and view them as reflections of each other. What the basis of this is as a criticism is hard to know. It is an empty vessel simply meant to add to the critical list.
3. Another feminist criticism, according to Lambert, is that the Goddess religion is Eurocentric despite its universal assumptions. If anyone looks carefully they will see that the evidence mainly comes from Europe. I am not aware that any defender of the hypothesis denies this, so what quite is the argument? It does not seem unreasonable to imagine that if European humans saw Nature as a Goddess that other humans did as well. If someone can convince us otherwise then let them begin.
4. Lambert tells us that another feminist criticism is that contemporary Goddess religions are just romanticism. The age of Goddess worship is a time of egalitarianism or even female superiority. Female superiority or gender equality among Neolithic farmers are not historic facts but are romantic fictions—unproven hypotheses at best. So, now, unproven hypotheses are merely romantic fictions, or at least they are when they are hypotheses about a matriarchal society—but not otherwise. Let the critics say how inequality could exist as a social form in any subsistence society. The Neolithic farmers and gardeners were essentially equal. How could they be otherwise? The weak ones were unable to scratch out their living, and even the successful ones only succeeded in surviving. There were no princes or priests because there was no economic basis for them. Religion was an amateur matter in those days. Now this is part of the hypothesis, but where is its refutation?

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