What Is a Mother Goddess? A Category That Was Built Backwards

Female figurines have been found at sites across Europe and western Asia from the Upper Palaeolithic onward, and nineteenth and twentieth-century interpreters described them as representations of a goddess associated with fertility and motherhood, frequently as evidence of a universal prehistoric cult. That reading drew on several assumptions of its period: that prehistoric people were primarily religious, that a female figure must be a goddess rather than anything else, that emphasis on reproductive features indicates a fertility function, and that similar objects across a wide area must mean the same thing. The interpretation was then reinforced by a proposal of a matriarchal prehistoric Europe worshipping a single great goddess, advanced most influentially by Marija Gimbutas from the 1970s, which was enormously popular outside archaeology and has been rejected by the great majority of specialists on the grounds that the evidence does not support either a unified religion or a matriarchal social structure.

Archaeologists now offer a range of explanations and the honest position is that the objects are not all doing one thing:

• •Self-representation, supported by an argument that the proportions match what a woman sees looking down at her own body, which accounts for the distorted perspective
• •Teaching objects concerning pregnancy and childbirth, which would explain emphasis on reproductive features without any religious content
• •Dolls, toys or objects of personal significance, which is unglamorous and consistent with the findspots of many
• •Portraits or depictions of specific individuals rather than of a type
• •Objects with ritual significance of a kind not equivalent to worship of a deity
• •Different things in different places and periods, since the figurines span tens of thousands of years and thousands of kilometres and have been lumped together mainly by modern categorisation

Where written records exist, the picture is specific rather than universal. Historical traditions include many goddesses associated with motherhood, fertility, grain and childbirth, and they are individuals with names, cults, temples and contested attributes rather than instances of a single figure. Inanna, Isis, Demeter, Cybele, Parvati and many others have distinct characters, and several are also associated with war, sovereignty or the underworld, which does not fit a simple maternal category. Their worship is documented and studied on its own terms. What the record does not show is a single goddess venerated everywhere under different names, which is a modern synthesis rather than an ancient belief, and which was constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries partly through comparative mythology and partly through literary influence. Recognising the individual figures makes the material more interesting rather than less, since the variation between them records real differences in how societies organised themselves.

The wider problem is that inferring belief from objects is extremely difficult and archaeologists have become explicit about the limits. Function is frequently ambiguous, since the same object can be a tool, a toy, a votive offering or a piece of personal property, and findspot helps only when the context is undisturbed and recorded, which for material excavated before modern standards it generally is not. Symbolic meaning leaves no direct trace at all, so an interpretation of what something meant is always an inference from analogy, and the analogies used have historically been drawn from whatever societies the interpreter knew about. Repetition of a form across a wide area establishes contact or shared tradition and does not establish shared meaning. And the absence of writing means there is no independent check, which is why interpretations of prehistoric religion have changed so completely between generations while the objects have not changed at all. The discipline's response has been to describe what is observed carefully and to mark interpretation as interpretation, which is less satisfying and considerably more honest.

The interpretation has continued in popular writing long after specialists abandoned it, and the reasons are worth naming. It supplies a story about a peaceful egalitarian past that was replaced by patriarchal societies, which has obvious appeal and which is asserted more confidently than any evidence permits. It has been important to some contemporary spiritual movements, which is a legitimate practice whose historical claims are separate from its value to practitioners. It is simple, and a single explanation for many objects across a wide area is easier to hold than the alternative that they mean different things. And it fills a gap, since the honest answer about what most prehistoric objects meant is that nobody knows, which is unsatisfying. The general lesson applies well beyond this case, which is that an interpretation established early and repeated widely becomes the default, and that dislodging it requires more effort than establishing something new.

Calling prehistoric female figurines mother goddesses assumed that a female figure must be a deity, that reproductive emphasis means fertility, and that similar objects across huge distances mean the same thing, none of which follows. Self-portraits, teaching objects and dolls are among the alternatives. Documented goddesses are individuals with distinct cults rather than versions of one figure, and the universal goddess is a modern synthesis.