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.
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