Transcription
Please welcome Professor [Music] Hutton.
Mercy Sophie, good evening everybody. One of the technological oddities of this hall is that in order to work the camera, I need to have a brilliantly bright white light right in my eyes up there. So to read any notes, I've got to hold them up at this level, like this. So if this looks rather weird, there's a perfectly good practical reason.
What I want to do in this talk is ask how the modern Western world came to have its most common image of what a goddess should be. In the ancient European and Near Eastern world, goddesses were generally patronesses of cities, justice, war, handicrafts, the hearth, agriculture, love, and learning. As much as for aspects of nature, they stood predominantly for civilization. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of ancient pagans genuinely believed that the different goddesses were genuinely separate personalities. In only one text, the famous *Golden Ass* of Apuleius, is the female deity declared to be the embodiment of all other goddesses and represented by the moon and the world of nature. Yet, it's that late image which predominates at the present day. So when did it come to do so, and how?
The short answer is, not for a long time. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the emphasis on representation of pagan deities, now used as allegories rather than worshiped, remained just where it had been in ancient times. The favorite goddess was Athena, alias Minerva, commonly invoked by intellectuals as the personification of wisdom. Those who did so cover a wide span of time and personality, from Pierre Abélard in the 12th century to Christine de Pizan in the 15th, to Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. From the 16th to the 19th century, Minerva seems to retain the most important single function of the goddess represented in European and then American civic decoration. She is the Lady of the Town.
It is true, true that in the early modern Hermetic tradition, there was a concept derived from Apuleius and the texts that follow the philosopher Plato, of a female figure identified with the starry Heaven, who stood between God and the Earth and acted as a world soul. The Hermetic tradition was, however, very much the preserve of a minority of specialists. It is the more relevant to our present interests that the ancient Greeks spoke of the Earth as being female in gender, and the sky as being masculine. As most Western science is ultimately based on Greek thinking, this language became embedded in it. This was reinforced by the mindset of a patriarchal society such as that of early modern Europe, whose scientists, virtually all male, adopted a language of male domination and exploitation of the female natural world. They did not, however, identify this world with a goddess.
Such an identification was the work of a movement which began partly as a self-conscious reaction to the mindset of early modern scientific rationalism, and which we call Romanticism. As it took off in the later 18th century, it can be described as a tremendous exaltation of the natural and the irrational—those qualities which scientific language had come to identify as feminine. It accompanied a recognition that humanity could at last be suffering from too much civilization. For the first time, mountains were seen as beautiful instead of threatening. Wild nature began to be valued over farmlands and cities, the night over the day, the moon over the sun.
These impulses only intensified as the 19th century wore on, and urbanization and industrialization began to spread across Western Europe, and most especially across Britain. A simple statistic: in 1810, 80% of the English lived in the countryside. By 1910, 80% lived in towns or cities. A mystical love of the natural world grew, an almost direct relationship to the change. You can see the impact first in poetry. During most of the 18th century, poems about goddesses were very rare in English letters. As soon as we enter the 19th century, they begin to multiply, but only with respect to two kinds of female deity. We find them both in the 1810s, neatly paired in the work of John Keats and Percy Shelley.
First, Keats: "What is there in thee, Moon, that thou shouldst move my heart so potently? When yet a child, I oft have dried my tears when you have smiled. You were my sister, hand in hand we went from eve to morn across the firmament. And as I grew in years, still did you blend with all my ardors. You were the deep glen, the pool, you were the mountain top, the sage's pen, the poet's harp, the voice of friend. My sun, thou wert the river, you were glory one. You were my clarion's blast, you were my steed, my goblet full of wine, my topmost deed. You were the charm of women, lovely Moon." No wonder Keats's most ambitious poem, *Endymion*, is the love story of a human male and the moon goddess.
This shimmer of moonlight runs through the art of the early 19th century, from England to Prussia. It even gets into the music. When Bellini wrote his operatic melodrama about Druids, *Norma*, he has his heroine, a Druid priestess, address not the sun, usually associated with Druids, but the moon. In its most famous aria: "Chaste goddess, who silvers these sacred trees, show thy face to us without a veil. Bring peace to Earth, as thou hast brought it to heaven."
The other way of personifying a goddess in this decade was that represented by Shelley. As a good classicist, he translated a series of Homeric hymns to various deities. But when he came to apostrophize one of his own, he began: "Sacred goddess, Mother Earth, thou from whose immortal bosom Gods and Men and Beasts have birth, leaf and blade and bud and blossom breed thy influence most divine."
Note by 1820, the dominant image of a goddess in the English poetic imagination was already emerging as the beauty of the green Earth and the white Moon among the stars. This image was thoroughly internalized by the next generation. When the devout Christian Robert Browning tried his hand at a classical subject, he chose the goddess Artemis, alias Diana. And this is how he makes her speak: "Through Heaven I roll my lucid Moon along; I shed in Hell on my pale people peace. On Earth I caring for the creatures guard each pregnant yellow wolf and fox sleek, and every feathered mother's callow brood, and all that love green haunts and loneliness."
Even more remarkable is the case of Charlotte Brontë. She was the daughter and wife of clergymen, overtly Christian herself, and makes her greatest heroine, Jane Eyre, devout enough to contemplate going abroad as a missionary. Yet, every time Jane is in trouble, she turns for help not to God or Jesus, but to nature, of whom she speaks as her mother. And at her lowest ebb of all, the moon appears before her in a dream and manifests itself as a female figure, calling upon her with good advice.
The final stage is to put together night sky and Earth in a single Great Goddess, and this is already achieved in the 1860s in the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. This is his poem to the Great Goddess of the cosmos, to whom he gave the German name of Hether, signifying the Earth, the world: "I am that which began; out of me the years roll; out of me God and man. I am equal and whole; God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the sun-soul. Before ever land was, before ever the sea, or soft hair of the grass, or fair limbs of the tree, or the flesh-coloured fruit of my branches, I was. And thy soul was in me first. Life on my sources first drifted and swam. Out of me are the forces that save it or damn. Out of me man and woman and wild beast and bird. Before God was I am. Beside or above me not is there to go. Love or unlove me, unknow me or know. I am that which unloves me and loves. I am stricken, and I am the blow. I am the mark that is missed, and the arrows that miss. I am the mouth that is kissed, and the breath in the kiss. The surf and the sought and the seeker, the soul and the body that is. I am the thing which blesses my spirit to late, that which caresses with hands uncreate, my limbs unbe begotten, that measure the length of the measure of Fate. But what thing dost thou now, looking godward, to cry: 'I am I'? Thou art thou. I am low, thou art high. I am thou whom thou seekest. Find, find thou but thyself. Thou art I."
So there is the mighty creatrix of all later feminist paganism, the single female deity out of whom all goddesses and gods and all living things are formed. There, entire, by 1867. It would be easy, but hardly necessary, to follow the image later into English literature, to look, for example, at D.H. Lawrence's identification of Eternal Woman with the moon, or at Robert Graves's *The White Goddess*. For now, it's sufficient to note that when organized paganism does reappear in the 20th century, it takes its goddess straight from this imagery. And no wonder, as Swinburne was one of the favorite poets of three of the greatest figures in the development of modern paganism: Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, and Gerald Gardner, quoted directly by all.
I am, however, going to look now at the impact of this concept of goddess upon fields which are normally regarded as more objective than religion, that is, ancient history and archaeology. It seems to have been the German scholar Eduard Gerhard in Berlin in 1849 who first suggested that behind all the different goddesses of historic Greece stood a single great one, representing nature, who was worshiped all over the ancient Near East in prehistory. As the 19th century wore on, more and more classicists in France, Germany, and Britain began to make the same suggestion. It was given some support by the fact that the cultures of Anatolia and Mesopotamia were older than that of Greece and ancestral to it. These did contain certain goddess figures who were regarded as all-powerful and identified with the Earth or with motherhood.
This notion sometimes combined with another which had emerged from a debate between lawyers over the origins of society and of the family. One of the sides in this exchange, represented first by J.J. Bachofen in the 1860s, had argued that human society was originally woman-centered. What was true in daily life had logically also to be in religion. These trends of thought were given a further impetus during the later 19th and early 20th century, when excavations began to turn up female figurines on Old Stone Age and New Stone Age sites, the Old Stone Age across Europe and the Neolithic sites in the southeast of it. Some scholars automatically identified them with the Great Goddess, whom they now presumed to have been worshiped in that period. Some very influential figures either adopted this view at once or came to do so, such as Sir Arthur Evans, the person who rediscovered the culture of Minoan Crete.
For my present purposes, the most significant of them was Jane Ellen Harrison, a Cambridge classicist who stood at the center of an important group of academics in that university. In 1903, she published the view that prehistoric Southeastern Europe had been a peaceful and intensely creative woman-centered civilization, in which humans lived at harmony with nature and their own emotions, and worshiped a single Great Goddess. Harrison believed that this entity was often venerated in three aspects, of which she identified the first two as Maiden and Mother. She did not name the third. This goddess, to Harrison, represented the Earth, and the male deities were all lesser beings, both her consorts and her sons. This happy state of affairs, Jane Ellen Harrison proposed, had been destroyed before the dawn of history by patriarchal invaders from the north, bringing dominant male deities and warlike ways. Humanity, in her view, had never recovered from this disaster.
All these ideas were opposed by other scholars over the same period, but it must be noted that these hostile writers were no more distinguished or successful. In the last analysis, the evidence simply did not permit an absolute decision, and neither now nor later shall I propose one myself. I shall only suggest that the prehistoric Great Goddess would not have been apparent to so many academic writers at this time had they not been already inclined to regard the divine feminine in this form. Reading poetry and novels, all these theories, however, concerned only the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean world. Experts in the emerging field of Northwest European prehistory, and especially of Britain, reserved judgment on them.
This was because their Neolithic looked so different. Its sites had failed to produce any of the female figurines which were such an important prop of the Great Goddess construct in the southeast. It was true that the Western European Neolithic was characterized by a very widespread monumental tradition of building megalithic tomb shrines—the monuments commonly called dolmens, passage graves, and long barrows—and then, a thousand years after these, building circles of standing stones. It was also true that prehistorians were starting to discuss the idea that the dolmen, passage graves, and long barrows might have been the holy places of a single religion covering Northwestern Europe. In some of the French tomb shrines, the figure of a woman, or an apparent woman, was carved in the passage, indicating that a female deity could have been venerated there. The decisive evidence, however, was lacking, and experts carefully reserved judgment right up to the 1930s.
Popular writers, however, had no such inhibitions. A classic example concerns the long barrows of the Cotswolds, one of the most numerous and well-known examples of these Neolithic tomb shrines. I call them tomb shrines because they're full of human bones, but clearly only a selection of people were put there. The bones seem to have been worked with like transmitters in rituals. This was the first group of Neolithic monuments in Britain to be systematically studied in 1925 by O.G.S. Crawford, a famous archaeologist, who wrote a famous survey of them in which he suggested they represented a single religion. But once again, he carefully left the nature of it open.
Five years later, a nature writer called Harold Massingham wrote a book about the Cotswolds. He was a mystic, opposed to most aspects of modern life, and famous for his romanticization of the English countryside. In his description of the long barrows, he followed Crawford right down the line, with a single difference. He declared confidently and without discussion that the deity of the long barrow religion must have been the Great Mother Goddess, representing the sacred Earth.
All through the 1930s, the experts continued to hold back until, in 1939, the dam broke when the vital piece of evidence seemed to be discovered in the bottom of a shaft at Grimes Graves, the big complex of Neolithic flint mines in Norfolk. The archaeologist A.L. Armstrong claimed to have found a female figurine seated upon an altar, with a vessel for offerings placed before her. This seemed to be unequivocal proof of the worship of the Great Goddess in the British Neolithic as well. The figurine featured as such in successive publications upon the period in general, and Grimes Graves in particular. The Ministry of Works put the figurine of the Goddess on the cover of its guide to Grimes Graves and reconstructed the shrine on the site for visitors to see.
Ever since its discovery, however, rumors circulated among archaeologists that it was a fake. In 1986, Stuart Piggott, one of the leading archaeologists of the mid-20th century, broke ranks and became the first to broach this possibility. He did so, however, in the archaeologists' periodical *Antiquity*, which was mostly read by archaeologists. Not till 1991, however, did it appear in a work designed for general readers, and that was when I blew the whistle on it in my own book, *The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles*. I just wanted a proper discussion at last, instead of all the rumors and the innuendo.
After Piggott had opened the question, a proper investigation was conducted into it by Gillian Vandel, who reported in 1991, just after my book. She found, first, that the excavation concerned was never published. Second, that Armstrong's site notebook stops abruptly on the day of the vital discovery, without recording it properly. Number three, that on the day of the find, most unusually, Armstrong asked all other experienced excavators to leave the site. Next, the goddess and vessel look suspiciously freshly carved. And finally, somebody on Armstrong's team was an expert carver, because similar objects had been made from the same chalk rock, like an Egyptian Sphinx, and were among Armstrong's possessions from the dig. Gillian concluded that as chalk objects cannot be scientifically dated, there is no absolute way of proving that these were fakes, but they cannot now be accepted as reliable evidence. It looks, therefore, as if the Grimes Graves goddess might indeed have been a fraud, perpetuated successfully upon the archaeological community because it represented exactly what many of them wanted to find for so long.
Certainly, for those who wanted to believe in a goddess-centered Neolithic, the barriers were now down. And the greatest of these was Grahame Clark. She was an expert in the New Stone Age who became a professional writer at the end of the 1940s, and during the next two decades became one of the most popular authors on European prehistory. From 1951 onwards, she developed Jane Harrison's view of it with two important additions. She united the figurines of the southeast with the megalithic tombs of the northwest to produce a picture of the whole of Neolithic Europe as a single land of the Great Goddess. It was guided by women, peaceful, creative, and in harmony with nature. Second, she specifically identified the patriarchal brutes who destroyed it by invading from the East and brought in the ages of metal, warfare, and abuse of nature and women as the Indo-Europeans.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Grahame Clark. Not only was she a best-selling author and respected scholar, thus an international figure—the British government gave her the OBE, and she was one of only two British members of the new United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO. It may well have been her example that caused the three leading figures of British archaeology in the 1950s, Gordon Childe, O.G.S. Crawford, and Glyn Daniel, to declare in that decade that Neolithic Europe had been devoted to the worship of the Great Goddess—not something to be argued over now, proven fact in every textbook.
And at this point, the psychologists weighed in. Freud had said nothing directly about the matter, although he emphasized the universal importance of mother figures. Carl Jung was surprisingly cautious, stating that the Great Mother was an important archetype, but not developing the idea further himself by looking much at prehistory. It was left to Jung's devoted disciple, Erich Neumann, in 1963, to draw upon the apparent consensus among archaeologists now existing to argue that the Great Mother had been a universal archetype, representing a vital first stage in the development of the human psyche. The process now set up was perfectly circular, because the archaeologists had convinced Neumann that a Great Goddess had been worshiped all over Europe in prehistory, and Grahame Clark could now claim that Neumann had proven that the Great Goddess was a universal archetype and so must have been worshiped everywhere in prehistory.
This state of affairs lasted through much of the 1960s, in my own teenage years, and was brought to an end mainly by the work of two young archaeologists, Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming. The former considered the figurines of Southeastern Europe, the latter the megalithic cultures of Northwestern Europe. Both suggested that there was, in fact, no decisive evidence that either represented the cult of a single deity. They weren't arguing against goddesses being worshiped in either, just against one single Great Goddess. They emphatically did not disprove the existence of one; they simply returned it to being an open question. And in this state of cautious agnosticism, most experts in European archaeology have remained ever since. Some popular English writers, like Michael Dames, however, failed to notice the alteration in expert opinion and continued to write books about the Neolithic Great Goddess into the 1970s.
Behind the latter part of this story is a great unspoken fact: that many of the young archaeologists of the 1960s and 1970s were glad to see the Great Goddess go. It is time, therefore, to confront this fact directly in the last part of my talk, on the politics of the Goddess. The original image of the goddess as spirit of Nature and the night sky have been part of a radical language. At the time of writing about her, Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne had all been revolutionaries, both in politics and in religion. After the mid-19th century, however, this began to alter. Jane Harrison, for example, opposed the campaign to give women the vote on the grounds that politics was a man's business and women should give themselves up to the world of education and culture.
And this shift is also perfectly clear in the work of Harold Massingham, the chap who declared the Cotswold long barrows had been the center of Great Goddess religion because he hated modernity in virtually all its aspects and declared that the finest institution in the present world was the Roman Catholic Church because it resisted the modern age hardest. His ideal time was the Middle Ages, when society lived in harmony, allegedly, and everybody knew their place, allegedly. This was exactly the language of Grahame Clark. She idealized a woman-centered Neolithic because she believed that women were the great forces for conservatism in the world. Her two great hatreds were science and socialism, and her favorite period was the 18th century, when the aristocracy lorded it over the land in beautiful houses and gardens, and everything was kept in order. Sometimes her dislike of science and socialism fused rather bizarrely, such as when she visited the center at Los Alamos, where America just developed the atomic bomb, and said in her detestation of it: "This is what socialism does when it's allowed to grow." Her sort of prehistory mirrored entirely the sort of reactionary sentimentality mirrored in the popular history works of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Arthur Bryant. In the period, it was a Conservative government which gave her the OBE.
These attitudes were mirrored in archaeology. It was Childe, Crawford, and Daniel, the three great archaeologists who had popularized the idea of the Great Goddess among archaeology students, who represented the general old-fashioned attitudes to prehistory which the new archaeology of the 1960s was out to challenge. That new archaeology aims at drawing parallels from the new sciences of anthropology and sociology to reconstruct models of ancient society. Nobody fought it more bitterly than Grahame Clark, who became the loudest voice of reactionary prehistory in the British archaeological community.
So to many young scholars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was my time as a young scholar, technology had emancipated ordinary working people from misery, and the welfare state had given them dignity and security for the first time. The Neolithic Great Goddess was explicitly the deity of the enemies of both. The choice was not between the goddess and patriarchy, but between the goddess and socialism. She was not the deity of women's liberation, but of the Mother's Union. So many of us were glad to embrace a prehistory which toppled her from her throne. We were also glad to have a psychology which did not create sexist stereotypes and call them natural archetypes.
One major feature of Erich Neumann's work was that it instinctually presupposed that the mass human psychology which was being created in his story was a male one, with the female symbols as auxiliaries to an early and primitive phase of its development, which was shed as a result of maturing as a species. It was a deeply sexist and restrictive language. Allied to our new prehistory was an anthropology which brought us huge quantities of new information about the way in which gender relations had been constructed in other human societies. It showed us the extraordinary range of possibilities which could be open to us and destroyed insistence upon any essential male or female qualities in humanity.
In confronting this problem, the British anthropologist Shirley Ardener could say in 1975 that "our categories of men and women might be entirely an intellectual creation which wonder might disappear." It must therefore be imagined how shocked and surprised we were over here when the whole of the old images and the old language came back to Britain from America in the late 1970s and 1980s, but this time as part of a radical language which we weren't expecting. Writers such as Mary Daly and Susan Griffin over in America had taken up the old reactionary idea of an essential female nature and radicalized it, turned it into a liberation message by reversing the sympathies, attaching a positive value to those qualities which the patriarchal language had defined as negative, much as the Romantic Movement had done almost 200 years before.
The most distinguished Western scholar of Eastern European prehistory, Marija Gimbutas, based in California, directly developed the work of Harrison, Clark, and Neumann, but drew a liberationist instead of a conservative message from it. That is Marija on the board. She carefully avoided contamination by the writers whose ideas she was developing by giving her books prefaces which suggested that her approach to the Neolithic was essentially her own original creation. In her book on the Balkan figurines in 1974, before she embraced Californian feminism, she did state she was building on the work of others and explicitly acknowledged Neumann as the writer who had provided her code, her provided her with her code for interpreting symbols and designs.
By 1989 and 1991, however, feminist thought had turned against Neumann for reasons I stated above. It was necessary, therefore, for Marija Gimbutas to distance herself by attacking his work in detail, while concealing the fact that her basic system of interpretation still depended upon it. As for Grahame Clark and the old-fashioned British archaeologists, their books still appear in her bibliographies, but in her prefaces and texts, the Neolithic was treated as if they had never written. They had vanished from the story, so that their ideas could be repackaged in a radical form. The only one still writing when Marija Gimbutas began to do this in the 80s was Grahame Clark. And in 1982, the year in which Marija Gimbutas fully embraced a feminist view of prehistory, Grahame Clark published a book in which she said that "the subconscious desire of every woman is to be dominated by virile man." You may see why Marija Gimbutas was not too keen on acknowledging Grahame Clark's influence.
Quite clearly, what had happened was that the British and American radicals had dealt with the problem of the old stereotype in completely different ways. The British had deconstructed it; the Americans had reversed it. Both were excellent strategies in their own right. The problem was that they were completely incompatible, and they now crashed into each other. British archaeologists and historians of my generation have built up a whole series of excellent arguments for not believing in the Great Goddess of the conservatives and those pitted against feminism. We are not able to drop those arguments just because the goddess had suddenly reappeared with an American accent and a much better set of politics.
In confronting this problem, one major defect in the new archaeology now became seriously apparent: that its proponents had mainly written for professional colleagues. None of them had shown the interest in reaching a mass audience and the genius for doing so of either Grahame Clark or Marija Gimbutas. As a result, the American ideas diffused very rapidly among British magical subcultures and British radical subcultures, and the more easily in that they actually preserved old and familiar models. They simply, as suggested, required people to change attitudes to them. When these subcultures collided with professional British archaeology and found that the latter was unwilling to accept the new American ideas, the very academics who had deconstructed the Great Goddess in the name of socialism, feminism, and reform now found themselves being abused as patriarchs and reactionaries.
From the 1990s, however, the situation started to alter yet again because of developments in the heartland of feminist theory in America and Australia. American-based archaeologists such as Ruth Tringham and Lyn Meskell define true feminist archaeology as one which celebrates the ambiguity of the archaeological record and the plurality of its interpretation. Feminist academics such as Carol McCormack, Val Plumwood, and Susan Heckman question the validity of the idea of an essential femininity with perpetual traits that men don't have. Val Plumwood could declare in 1993 that earlier American feminist theory had just replaced the myth of woman as the angel in the house by the equally reconstructive one, the equally restrictive one, of the angel and the ecosystem.
In concluding this talk, I would like to make a number of personal observations clear. As a man, I would not dream myself of defining what a true feminist archaeology is or ought to be. I have also consistently avoided pronouncing upon whether or not the Neolithic was a civilization of the Great Goddess. I leave that question open, as I do the other one of whether there is an essential masculinity and femininity among humans. And in doing so, I also leave open the question of whether this goddess actually exists. I'm perfectly prepared to allow for the possible existence of divine currents, energies, or even beings in the universe to which human beings can relate in different ways at different times. In doing so, I recognize that audiences are people who operate between different worlds, each in their own ways, and so in my own way do I.
So, having devoted so much of this talk to tricky politics, I'm going to close by leaving the last word to Swinburne and embracing again his more emotional and poetic sense of a goddess figure on this scale:
"Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than the foam of the grapes or love.
And I turn to thee still, having seen thou shalt surely abide in the end,
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and be friend.
Oh daughter of Earth, of my mother her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also thy brother; I go as I came into Earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears, and deep as the deep dim soul of the star.
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find peace, and forget what is done or undone."
[Applause]