Sisters of Aphrodite: Radio 3 Sunday Feature

The Christmas Eve Sunday Feature on Radio 3 (available on Listen Again) was an interesting 45-minute documentary on female deities and their worshippers in prehistory. I found the overtly feminist tone rather irritating, and in places I got confused over dates, but there were plenty of noteworthy nuggets of information and ideas embedded in the narrative.

The presenter, historian Bettany Hughes, started with the prehistoric female figurines such as the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf. These figurines turn up over a wide area of Europe and Asia from France to Siberia and are dated at anything up to 25,000 years ago. I didn’t get a clear date for when they went out of use, but had the impression from the programme that the date range might run up to about 4,000 BC. The figurines are conventionally interpreted as representing a Mother Earth Goddess, hence the title ‘Venus’ applied to many of them by the excavators who discovered them. Their wide distribution has been interpreted to mean that the Goddess cult was universal, or at least very widespread. The programme suggested that the figurines might represent real women, rather than a universal goddess. Which is an interesting hypothesis, although I’m not sure how one would go about testing it – how could we tell whether an artefact represents a real woman, an idealised woman, an earthly incarnation or representative of a deity (e.g. a priestess) or a goddess, or indeed a combination of all of them? (This is touched on in an interesting web article, which is well worth reading - though I wonder if his contention that Stone Age women resembled Raquel Welch in the film One Million Years BC may contain an element of wishful thinking).

One suggestion made in the programme was that the preponderance of female figurines (apparently something like 95% of Stone Age figurines for which the sex can be identified are female and only 5% male) indicates that women held high social status. One contributor suggested that this might be connected with the development of farming and a settled lifestyle. The argument suggested that home-based activities such as raising crops in a garden, tending livestock in a yard, making pottery, weaving textiles, etc can be readily done by women, and that when people became sedentary and such activities became at least as important as hunting, women’s power and social status increased. There’s some logic to this, and I think I remember some anthropology survey that claimed that women have higher status in agrarian societies (e.g. peasant farmers where the staple crop is rice) than in hunting communities (e.g. the Inuit). (But I can’t find the reference, so don’t quote me on that, I may have mis-remembered it). Unfortunately, I don’t see how that hypothesis squares with the age of the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf, which is dated to around 24,000 years ago. As farming is supposed to have started around 10,000 BC in the Near East and taken several thousand years to spread across Europe, this would suggest to me that the ‘Venus’of Willendorf was carved in a hunter-gatherer society, in which case the postulated connection with the development of farming rather falls apart.

Another suggestion was that some of the female figurines represent a sort of childbirth manual. This suggestion was, I think, based on statuettes found on Cyprus near the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Paphos. The contributor argued that there are no temples associated with Goddess worship at the right date, and the figurines bear no insignia suggesting they represent a deity. But his excavations showed a high level of infant mortality and a number of women buried with neonates who had presumably died in or shortly after childbirth, which he interpreted as indicating that infant mortality was a problem of great importance to the society at the time. The figurines are shown seated with their knees apart, a recommended position for childbirth, which may indicate they were used to demonstrate a way to bear a child that might maximise the survival chances of both mother and baby. Though I don’t know how one could tell the difference between this and a good-luck charm or an invocation to a goddess who was thought to protect women in labour?

The programme then went on to look at female figures in art and artefact from the Bronze Age up to the Classical period in Greece, arguing that at least some of them represent women worshippers rather than goddesses – e.g. the lady carrying a tray of cakes. (Did you know that cake-baking moulds turn up in temple deposits from classical Greece? Now that gives a whole new meaning to How to be a Domestic Goddess, doesn’t it?) One of the titles quoted for a goddess of this approximate period (I got lost in the dates here, so I don’t know if it’s Bronze Age or Classical or both) was ‘Queen of Heaven’, a title that could be readily applied to numerous goddesses from numerous religions (ox-eyed Hera comes to mind, as does Frigg from Norse mythology). The parallel with the Virgin Mary was drawn, and there is a Christian church dedicated to Mary built on the site of the sanctuary of Aphrodite, suggesting that whoever built the church either saw a connection between two powerful female figures or thought it was worthwhile trying to make one. Apparently Mary’s title in some remote Cypriot villages is ‘The Most Blessed Aphrodite’, making the connection explicit. And a monastery high in the Troodos mountains owns an embroidered girdle which is reputed to have belonged to the Virgin Mary and is reputed to have the power to help infertile couples conceive – as evidenced by the many women who come to the monastery to wear the girdle and pray, and then write grateful letters to the monks when they later become new parents. Homer tells a story of Aphrodite lending her embroidered magic girdle to Hera. In that case the girdle had the power to make men and gods fall hopelessly in love with the wearer, which is not quite the same as aiding conception (though obviously connected) – perhaps Aphrodite’s girdle was a little risque for the Virgin Mary and was adapted to a new role, or perhaps it always had several attributes and different aspects dominated in different circumstances.

It doesn’t seem to me very surprising that religions/mythologies/cults (call them what you will) should pick up ideas and rituals from their environment, building on and adapting what has gone before. Pope Gregory the Great advised Abbott Mellitus to do just that when trying to convert the pagan English to Christianity, to make the transition to a new religion more acceptable by doing it in small steps (the letter is in Bede, Book I, Chapter XXX). Perhaps the practice has a long history. What do you think?