The Great Cosmic Mother

Around the 80's this book was published and I red it. Although I don't like this kind of new agey/feminism style of writing, the book was really interesting. 

I lent it to a friend I thought a friend and he literally disappeared with a lot of my best books. Since then I stopped lending my precious books. Some I bought them back, but this one is really expensive, almost 40 €, so I found the pdf and now, somehow, I have it back.

At that time I was about 30 years old, after the great student revolutions of 1968 and the years later. With all that mess going on I had the feeling that the authoritarian system had finally been tamed. Authoritarianism, in my vision, included as well the male predominance, patriarchy, that in those years seemed to have been overturned!

I remember the relief feeling and the satisfaction of considering that nasty problem solved. Nevertheless I red the book to learn more about something that for me had no sense at all. Why should men be considered superior to women?! 

Sjöö & Mor, the two Authors of the book, present patriarchy as a violent overthrow of earlier woman-centered societies and spiritual systems. The ancient matriarchal societies, worshipping the goddesses, with a life organised communally and non-hierarchically. They describe it as a circular way. 

In their book they present the theory that patriarchy was imposed through the violent invasions of seminomadic warrior tribes, especially Indo-European Aryans, originating from the northeast, around the Russian steppes and Kazakh regions, who swept into Europe, the Near East, and India during the fourth millennium B.C. 

These invasions, they say, overthrew the circular matrifocal organised life and imposed a new warrior-based, male-dominated order. 

In the book we read that the Indo-European Aryans were "tall, big-boned, and light-skinned" and had advanced war technology (horse-drawn chariots, iron weapons).

They arrived from the Russian steppes and the Kazakh, conquering matriarchal peoples across India, Mesopotamia, and Europe.

These goddess-worshiping cultures were described as agricultural, peaceful, and matrilineal, often associated with Earth and Moon deities.

In conquered areas, the invaders installed Sky Father Sun Gods, rewrote myths, and demonized the Great Mother, turning her into submissive wives or seductive villains like Jezebel or the Whore of Babylon.

This theory was inspired by the work of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist who proposed the Kurgan hypothesis, which suggested:

-The Kurgan people, early Indo-European speakers from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, invaded Neolithic Old Europe.

-They brought with them a patriarchal, warrior-based culture, replacing the earlier egalitarian and matrifocal societies.

Gimbutas based her arguments on artifacts, burial patterns, and iconography, seeing a sharp break in social structures and symbology.

Unfortunately this theory has been quite controversial. Mainstream archaeologists criticise Gimbutas’ interpretations as speculative. They do agree that genetic and linguistic studies support the evidence of large migrations from the steppe (e.g., Yamnaya culture), but they contest the idea that they destroyed matriarchies, as, they say, it is not conclusively proven. Besides, they consider the idea of a universal, peaceful matriarchal civilisation highly romanticised and lacking definitive archaeological support.

Sjöö & Mor, the two Authors of the book, say that unfortunately archaeologists do not seem interested to seriously delve into the matter. 

In any case, the whole idea is still hotly debated today.

My next reflection, that I am trying to examine, is how can we explain the existence of such brutal tribes when the majority were instead matriarchal societies?