Originally Posted by
wvwvw
There were NO ancient mother goddess cultures. The very notion is a 19th century revisionist fantasy, unsubstantiated speculation, unsupported by historians.
There were no such thing as God until they were invented at the same time as writing. The two go hand in hand. Non literate societies do not worship any Gods except the forces of nature and the heavenly bodies so as to predict the seasons. That was obvious to ancient writers from observation. Gods are an invention of civilisation through the deification of kings and the preservation of the historical deeds they performed and nothing more.
Even hinduism Hinduism is ancestor worship and nothing more. All of its Gods are deified ancestors and some of them such as Krishna are defied kings from a later period syncretised with earlier Gods. Buddhism is a form of ancestor worship and its deity is Buddah himself weather it admits to it or not.
There is not one hstorical account to support the notion of mother, sky or fertility Godesses.
The Venus- like figurines from the Neolithic are not Venus figurines but stone age pornography and masturbation aids which the HUNTER GATHERERS took with them on long expeditions away from their wives. It wasn't for a couple of days that they left. It was for months or even years if they were fighting a territorial war. They are nothing whatsoever to do with fertility other than something which gave the cave man that made it a hardon.
Why would a civilisation which at the time only consisted of hunter gatherers worship a mother goddess when they did not grow crops or farm animal, but hunted them. These things do not have a religious significance whatsoever. If these hunter gatherers worshiped a god it would have first and foremost been a war god or a god of hunting and we find none of those. They are pornography, nothing more and nothing less.
The term Neolithic refers to a specific time period beginning 10,000 years ago and at this time the people of Europe were Hunter Gathers. Now why would these porn dollies be found in central Europe at a time when the only people there were hunter gathers unless they were porn dollies.
You try carving a an anatomically explicit vagina and anatomically explicit breasts on a piece of animal bone the size of your thumb. The only thing you can do is emphasise the size of the sexually evocative features, tits and arse.
Venus was not a fertility goddess. She was a goddess of Prostitution. Ask yourself this simple question. Why are they name Venus figurines after the Roman Goddess of prostitutes, and why are they always naked. They are porn dollies plain and simple.
Demeter/Cares was the goddess of the corn not Aphrodite/Venus. Why weren't they called Demeter figures. It's because they were identified as pornography and associated with prostitution. They may have even been used as necklaces to identify women as prostitutes to their johns.
The people that made fruit and berry images lived their lives by migrating from place to place when they'd picked all the berries and hunted all the animals and the sheep and goats if they had any had consumed all the grass. Fertility goddess BULLSHIT.
Eusebius would have known of hunter gatherers who were still in Europe and Africa and he would have known that they had no Gods whatsoever. Religion is something which was invented in Mesopotamia in about 3500 BC at the same time as writing and was nothing more than ancestor worship based on recorded history. This religion was then exported to their neighbours who then exported it to their neighbours until it reached Europe, China and even the Americas. Left alone man had no reason whatsoever to believe in any kind of God.
Godesses like Ishtar had nothing to do with matriarchy or mother Godess. She was a Goddess of war and prostitution who was deified by her descendents who ruled over Sumeria at the time the Gilgamesh story was written down.
We know from historical texts that there was no such thing as the concept of a goddess until someone deified on of their queens and wrote down the deeds she did so that her descendents would know how great she was. Before this there were no gods and goddesses except the forces of nature and the heavenly objects which were venerated because they governed over the passage of the season and helped with navigation. Nobody made offerings to them, they simply used them to do basic agricultural and navigational science. Making offerings to the Gods is an exact copy of giving tribute to a feudal lord, or haven't you noticed. Feudalism was the system in pre-Dynastic and Dynastic Egypt and Ancient Sumeria and Assyrian and Babylon.
People do not go contemplating a higher intelligence or the afterlife until they are first comfortably well off enough not to need to think about where their next meal is going to come from, defending themselves from invaders or having to work for a living, and this one comes with the foundation of cities and city states, and city states do not exist without writing as a means of accounting and organisation. You can therefore take it for granted that there were no Gods of any kind before the Sumerians. Gods are a consequence of organised civilisation not agriculture or hunting and gathering.
The Aboriginals were living every day in fear of where their next meal would come from and being attacked by intruders and wild animals. They had not science, philosophy, sophisticated art, metallurgy, pottery, literature, proper music, or anything that would indicated they had contemplated anything of a higher nature such as religion which only come with civilisation and being well of, safe and secure both physically and financially.
The Orgia were the commemoration of the sins and excesses of the Gods. That's what the word actually means and women were part of it. The orgia of Dionysus involved women masturbating themseves. When men organised orgies they hired orostitutes (flue girls) to entertain the guests. They would never invite their own wives and daughters to participate.
"'I think, too, that we ought to trace the etymology of "orgies" and "mysteries," the one from the anger (οργης) of Deo aroused against Zeus, and the other from the pollution (μυσους) which had occurred with regard to Dionysus. Or even if you derive it from a certain Myus of Attica, who perished in hunting, as Apollodorus says, I do not grudge that your mysteries have been glorified by the honour of a name which is engraved upon a tomb.
'In another way also you may think of your mysteries as mytheria (hunting-stories) by the correspondence of letters." Bacchantes by Euripides
There weren't any gods before the advent of writing since gods are nothing more than defied kings and ancetors whose memories are preserved in historical texts which became written prayers. What is most important is what is recorded in historical texts not something made up be science fiction writers pretending to be historians.
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