Mystery of the Venus Figurines of the Upper Paleolithic

There was a time when I was supportive of the Venus figurines as evidence of cult worship, but it appears I had been misled by the extreme popularity given to the work of a single researcher; Maria Gimbutas. Her interpretation of them as evidence for a Palaeolithic "Earth/Mother Goddess" was but one of many and is, in fact, not at all taken seriously nowadays by the archaeological community. As the years unfold, in fact, this theory is beginning to look increasingly like a product of her time - being picked up and elaborated upon by feminist writers in the early 70's in an attempt to depict a prehistoric "Golden Age" characterised by a dominant female hierarchy and a male sub-class enthralled by the mystique of women's fertility.

Gimbutas in the "Language of the Goddess" and "The Civilization of the Goddess" went on to infer the existence of a pre-Indo-European early matriarchal order that preceded the Bronze Age civilisations and was indeed displaced by them. This theory was given further mileage by Robert Graves whose "White Goddess" and the "Greek Myths" similarly assumed the existence of old matriarchal civilizations in the Aegean, such as Minoan Crete, that were displaced by northern invaders whom we know today as the Mycenaeans. Gimbutas' reading of the Venus figurines as representations of a "Great Mother Goddess" at the heart of a fertility cult was also picked up and further popularised by Jean Auel in her "Clan of the Cave Bear" books and by New Age/Mysticist type writers, such as, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor in works, such as, "The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All" and "The Great Cosmic Mother".

Many archaeologists are apparently exasperated by this popular misconception and it appears that there is no consensus on the horizon as to what purpose they actually served. Patricia Rice for example breaks them down into four categories based on age and pregnancy;

(1) young women up to 15yrs old (23 per cent)
(2) pregnant women between 15 and 35 (17 per cent)
(3) mature nonpregnant women (38 per cent) and
(4) women older than 35 (22 per cent)



There is a popular belief that the majority of them depict pregnant women and therefore are a form of veneration to the mysterious female power of fertility, but clearly this is not the case, as the numbers here testify. A further reason why this Paleolithic ignorance concerning female fertility may have been assumed by writers of this era was perhaps the then popularity of the view expressed by Bronislaw Malinowski in his "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1923) that the indigenous seafarers of the Kula Ring made no causal connection between insemination of the male seed and pregnancy. Reviewers have since concluded that these Papua New Guinean islanders knew that male insemination was necessary, but that it was not the only condition; fertilisation could only be complete if the seed were consummated by the presence of a spirit entity.

Leaving these conjectures aside, others have again argued that anything which enhanced fertility during the Ice Age would be counter-productive for the group as the harshness of living conditions would have promoted behaviours which sought to put a check on population growth. Then there is Karl Absolon who excavated a number of the figurines at Dolni Vestonice. He seems to regard them as evidence of stone age erotica;

"This statuette shows us that the artist has neglected all that did not interest him, stressing his sexual libido only where the breasts are concerned - a diluvial plastic pornography".

The oversize buttocks and breats common to many of them are here interpreted as perhaps fanciful wish fulfillment on the part of early male artists. Following this, there is Abbe Brueil who sees in the steatopygia a faithful depiction of African Bush women.
In addition, I was reading about one of the Venus figurines (c.25,000 BCE) recently and researchers managed to identify the fingerprints of a child on the cast - indicating that it was not perceived to be a "sacred object". It might just as well have been a doll or a plaything.

Also, given the ubiquity of the sun as the primary god/deity in so many animistic thought systems, you would imagine that at least some of the contemporary cave paintings in Lascaux etc would carry depictions indicative of it's worship or reverence. Not only is the majority of Paleolithic art concerned with the faithful non-abstract depiction of indigenous wildlife; wild boar, auroch, tigers and lions etc., but the oft-cited "birdman" and "shaman" drawings can be convincingly shown to be "over-interpreted" to the point of inferring complexity where in fact none exists. This to me is the result of the over-complexity of our own age and a Ph.D system which requires "original" research creating a feed-back loop wherein each successive interpretation of Paleolithic thought must be more elaborate than the next.

How can we ever be sure what people were thinking of or how they viewed the world so long ago? We can't, all we can do is make best guesses given the evidence before us and then maybe try and imagine being born into a world that hasn't been explained for us; we can at least envy them that mystery.

Contrary to the alleged abstractions that they were capable of, I'm getting a feel for a much more grounded visceral experience. Most of the cave paintings are direct representations of the most important creatures that surrounded them. The figurines, too, are plain and unadorned; just seemingly simple attempts to fashion from clay man's other great pre-occupation; woman. It is the life around them that they are concerned with - not inanimate objects; there are no idols as yet on the scene. They just seem to have a firm grip on what's most important. In sum, very practical people I think.

The emergence of language and abstract thoughts create their own separate reality and this process of reification renders the "true" as that which occurs between your ears and not what transpires in front of you. These people weren't dizzied by too many abstractions, in my opinion, but were grounded and secure. This is not to say they were "brutish" though, Chomsky's notion of a universal grammar allows for the full range of conceptual ability to be present - it's just that the linguistic circuits to put those thoughts and concepts into the form of speech with which we are familiar appears to be absent, and were in fact yet evolving. They are living, it seems to me, on an emotional plane, which, as Georges Bataille says in reference to the experiencing of a pre-symbolic, "gives things a sort of thickness".

As time wears on, I think evidence from genetics, in particular, mutations of genes concerned with the Broca speech region, will demonstrate that a fully formed complex language as we would be familiar with it today - i.e., an advanced recursive grammar - was in fact largely absent among the peoples of the Upper Paleolithic, which, when it is considered, makes the creation of the Venus figurines even more remarkable, and in some ways, even more provocative.