One of the more popular accounts of prehistoric human society is that it was matriarchal: that women ruled globally, for hundreds of thousands of years, until a patriarchal revolution reversed things about 5000 years ago. Women were the heads of the households; they worshipped goddesses, or a single great goddess; men revered them and acceded to their rule.
It's not hard to figure out why this theory became so popular among second-wave feminists in the 70s, many of whom were coming out of the Wiccan and neopagan movements. In fact, goddess worship had been proposed as early as the 19th century, and vitalized by archaeological findings of goddess figurines from early excavations.
Cynthia Eller, a professor of women and religion at Montclair State University, argues in her new book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Beacon Press, 276 pages, $16, paper) that the theory is speculative and should be scrapped. I met with her a couple of weeks ago at her office to discuss the theory, why it's improbable and why it's ultimately a blow to feminism.
You think that people went out looking for a matriarchal account of prehistory.
I think it's pretty clear that for at least some of the women coming out of the second wave of feminism, that's exactly what they were doing. They were trying to find a goddess because they had decided that the problem with Western religion is that God is male. They just sort of bumped up against this whole tradition of talking about it in neopaganism, and they ran with it.
The theory of matriarchal prehistory actually started in the 1800s and then seemed to have disappeared for a while.
It was big at the end of the 19th century, and big again at the end of the 20th century in completely different ways. In the 19th century it was that the Victorian era had produced this great civilization because we had finally gotten rid of female influence and moved in this more patriarchal direction. It was this very male-triumphalist kind of story. And of course now it's this very feminist story, but it's essentially the same story. When feminists got interested in this they had plenty of sources to go to to put together a grand unified theory of matriarchal prehistory.
A lot of archaeologists say that it looks like many of those figurines they've unearthed are actually goddess figurines.
My fundamental position on this is that we really can't know. On the other hand, I think these figurine assemblages had some kind of religious function and there's a very good chance they were goddesses, but I don't think that necessarily means that everyone was worshipping one goddess and not a lot of goddesses, or that there were no male gods or that the societies where these goddesses were worshipped were necessarily good to women. I think the closest we can get is to look at other cultures that have many female images and what they do with them, and make some guesses. I don't want to make it sound like you just pick your interpretation and they're all equal, because they're not. The idea that they are idols of one universal goddess is pretty tenuous, because you don't see that pattern.
And the argument of the matriarchalists is that, well, of course you haven't seen it because...
That's how it was then, but it hasn't been that way during these last 5000 years.
A lot of the symbols are now classified as female for various reasons?wavy lines, straight lines, dots, snakes. In the book you make a list of basically every object you would ever encounter, and now people look at these and say, clearly those dots represent?
Those are all parts of the language of the goddess, yeah.
How did that come about?
I think it came from an overlap of two things. One was a Jungian theory of archetypes, which had already divided the world into these male and female symbols. And then there was the desire to find female stuff in prehistory. You put it together, and of course you're going to find that.
Who's talking about this myth?Is it a marginal group of people, radical feminists?
I think it's much more mainstream than that. There are people who you would think of as fringe and radical, but there are also a lot of housewives in suburbia who are attracted to it because it gives them a way to think positively about the things they value in their lives, like being feminine or being a mother.
How did Catalhoyuk [the Neolithic city in what's now Turkey] become such an important part of the prehistory?
Primarily because it was situated in the right time and the right place for it to fit what the myth already believed about where matriarchy occurred. More important, though, is that the archaeologist who excavated the site in the 1960s was a partisan of this matrilineal theory, so he interpreted everything that way. The second advantage is that the excavations had been shut down for 30 years and so you couldn't pull contradictory evidence out of the ground.
[Eller shows me pictures of figurines and wall reliefs from the Catalhoyuk excavation site. She points to reliefs of bulls' heads.]
The matriarchalists say that the reason they use bulls' heads is because they're in the shape of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Their argument is that the reason these people stuck all of these cow heads on their walls was in order to celebrate female reproductive powers.
So they had to know about fallopian tubes and ovaries. If you ask someone now they can draw a picture of the female reproductive system from textbook diagrams, but when you actually dissect someone?
Fallopian tubes are just teeny, and you wouldn't notice that they were connected if you weren't looking for it. In fact, I think you can go back and look at earlier Western medical textbooks and they've got ovaries and a uterus but the tubes aren't a part of it.
Are there any examples of a matriarchy at any point in time? Any ethnographic evidence?
I don't know a single feminist archaeologist who says that there is good, material evidence for a society whose gender roles were egalitarian or matriarchal. There are people who say it was probably better than it is now, and that's an argument you have to make from ethnographies. They say that hunting-and-gathering cultures were more egalitarian than contemporary cultures because they were smaller and everybody knew each other personally. You couldn't pull rank, and women were not bracketed off into public-private space of men's work and women's home.
There's another idea in matriarchal theory that women were revered because men didn't know their part in conception. Supposedly the men thought women were making babies on their own. But people have always watched animals having sex, so they must have noticed that there were consequences.
The original idea is that people didn't notice because you can have sex without getting pregnant and that pregnancy is nine months down the line. So why would you connect this activity to that one?
That's the theoretical argument behind it.
Is there any historical or archaeological support for the idea that people didn't think conception was a result of intercourse?
There isn't anything historical or archaeological. It's ethnographic, and there are anthropologists who claim to have learned from their informants that these people didn't think there was a connection.
But it seems like what people all over the world were doing was saying that sex was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for pregnancy?that something else needs to be there. In our case, we use the scientific explanation that in addition to having sex you have to be ovulating and you have to get the sperm together with the egg. If you're not using a scientific approach, there are other things that happen, like God breathes life into your womb, or a dream child enters your womb or something like that. That's what was going on in these other cultures.
Why are matriarchalists so interested in reproduction and motherhood as part of the history?
I think childbirth gets seized on because if you're looking for something that is unarguably, specifically female, childbirth wins the prize.
But there's no reason to think that if men believed that women were just popping these babies out of their wombs, then women would be revered as goddesses.
Everybody thinks it's pretty important to have another generation, so it's not a ridiculous argument to say that women would have a special status if it really was thought that men couldn't influence reproduction in any way. But again, we don't see that happening, because the societies that say that men don't have any role in reproduction say that sex isn't necessary, but men always have a role. Either they dream something or they bring back some token and stick it on their heads, and that's what makes women pregnant. Like the way you make a baby is you have to keep getting semen up there because it makes all the body parts, it's the material that turns into the baby. There's this one culture in New Guinea where women have to give men endless blowjobs because that's where breast milk comes from. I think I know who thought that one up. [laughs] I mean, people have a lot of different ideas about these kinds of things.
And people could have thought that men were the only ones that influenced reproduction. You have this quote in the book, you plant wheat, you get wheat. The earth?
?is just this passive vessel. My best guess is that most cultures knew that both sexes were involved and you had to have sex to get a baby.
There are several reasons given for why a prehistoric matriarchy could have fallen apart. Agriculture, which creates hierarchies?
Or droughts and other changes in the climate that made male strength more important for a while. The advent of the state, which is related to population density. When you get a number of people together you have to put somebody in charge, and that leads to hierarchy, and hierarchy leads to male superiority.
But if this leads to male and not female superiority, then maybe men are meant to be in charge.
Except the idea is that women have authority through kinship and natural, organic means.
And then there's the story of the Kurgans, who supposedly swept in from Russia and installed the patriarchy.
The problem with this favored theory of what happened is that these guys came down from Russia and took over, which doesn't explain the rest of the world. It only explains the Mediterranean, Southeastern Europe and the Near East. It's something that people who like the myth are struggling to find ways to talk about as both global and about these invasions. Because the nice thing about invasions is that you can say it was an accident, it wasn't something that had to happen. It makes the myth work better.
The spread of Indo-European languages is one of the proofs for a Kurgan invasion.
It's a great proof that these cultures were in contact with each other. People assume that there was an original proto-Indo-European language and those others split off from it. Then you have to ask what made these people go out to all these other places, and why did their language trump all the other languages? That first assumption might be mistaken. It might be that the reason why these languages have these similarities is not because they all came from one ancestor, but because they interacted with each other at the time they were developing.
What's been the response to this book? Your first book on this subject, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, seemed very sympathetic to the movement.
I was interested in feminist spirituality from a phenomenological point of view, and still am. I was trying to describe what people were doing. It's just an exciting thing to watch a new religion coming out. So it was more journalistic, and I didn't take as much of a critical approach.
It wasn't like you had this sort of moment...
No, there was no big shift. When I was writing Living and soliciting blurbs for the jacket, I told these people that the next book was going to be a critique, that they should really know that up front before they said anything nice about it. When I was working on Myth and asking for permission to reprint materials, there were a few women who were openly hostile, like, "You're part of the backlash and you're a female turncoat and a male-identified woman." Recently I was giving a lecture and somebody asked me what I thought about Starhawk [one of the heads of Wicca] saying that I was a traitor to the Wiccan movement.
Were you worried when you wrote it that you'd be getting phone calls?
I didn't think I'd get death threats or anything like that, but I knew that I'd make a lot of people angry. But I'm not the first person to raise questions about it. A critique like this changes things less than you might think. The other thing is that my book came out at a time of growing opinion that it doesn't matter whether or not it's true, that it's still a helpful and useful myth.
But you don't think so.
It's a very limited notion of what femaleness is. Spookily, the things it comes back to are the things that have already been used for sexist purposes. I'm trying to say that you might think these things look like night and day but to me they look like two sides of the same coin. We need to mess with things in a more fundamental way than that.
And you don't think you need history to do that?
I think you can, but I don't think you need to. History has not been a friend of the feminist movement. I don't think you have to look any further than saying that we don't like this and it's not fair. We can spend way too much time worrying about history and precedent.
We shouldn't be so invested in history.
I think it's really understandable that people want to know what human beings were doing in 40,000 BC. But the sorry fact is we don't know and we'll never know. We need to stick with the history we know and not the history we've dreamed up.