Goddess Worship and Civilization
With the beginning of agriculture and the emergence of the Goddess Culture civilizations, a new kind of cosmic religion developed, centered on the Great Mother and associated with the “riddle of vegetation.” In addition, the concept of the cosmic tree, which connects the planes of existence, emerged. Eliade explains that the cosmic cycles are expressed in terms borrowed from plant life. The universe is seen as an organism that must be renewed cyclically, symbolized by the Cosmic Tree. The cyclical renewal of the world parallels the renewal of human existence. The cosmic tree connects the different planes of existence: the three levels of the underworld, Earth, and Heaven.
In Goddess civilizations, trees were associated with fertility and childbirth. When a person was born, it was customary to bury their placenta in the ground and plant a tree on top of it, symbolically connecting the person to that tree throughout their life. They would return to the tree from time to time. When a person died, a tree was planted on or near their grave, serving as a connector between the worlds. With its head in the sky and its roots in the ground, the tree linked the underworld, the earth, and the heavens. The roots of the tree mirrored its branches, and therefore, the trunk was perceived as a bridge between the past and the future. A person raising their hands toward the sky was seen as a mirror image of the tree. It was Plato who said that man is an inverted tree, with roots in the sky and branches in the ground. The head of a person was perceived as a seed, and for this reason, skulls were buried in the earth, encouraging seed germination and rebirth in the afterlife through sympathetic magic.
Because of the tree’s size and height, it was considered the axis of the world and a representation of the structure of the universe. It was believed to house shining celestial deities and to serve as a gateway through which they could appear in this world. Trees were seen as a connection and bridge to the universe, activated especially during specific time of the year when the sun was at its zenith—the longest day of the year. Trees were linked to the sun, and it seems that the ancients intuitively understood that sunlight was essential for their growth.
Trees have always been considered sacred, not in themselves (as Eliade notes) but as representations of divine, sometimes cosmic, revelations. Trees were seen as vessels that could transmit divine energy, but they could also house human souls and be a source of power. Thus, special groves were consecrated, containing trees believed to hold the energy of people, especially shamans or leaders, as described in James Frazer’s comprehensive book “The Golden Bough”. Trees were seen as representations of the universe in general and the Milky Way in particular, and therefore stars were believed to be hanging on their branches.
There is no doubt that trees are an archetype in our subconscious—cathedrals of nature and the most prominent scenic element in the biosphere beyond the earth itself. Trees were seen as extensions of Mother Earth, growing from her, connected to her, absorbing radiation from the universe, enriching her, and ultimately returning to her. The forest was a magical place, full of living beings with whom one could communicate and converse. The forest provided shelter, comfort, building materials, food, and, in some cases, protection.
Not just trees—other plants were sacred as well, serving as sources of food and medicine. Women were gatherers; they intuitively understood plant life and were the ones who forged the alliance between humans and the plant world. Through this alliance, Mother Earth allowed humans to use some of her offspring for their own benefit. Eliade speaks of the “myth of origin” of food plants, which is still found in primitive societies today.
The transition to agriculture brought about a more complex relationship with plants. Mother Earth became the Agricultural Mother. The Great Agricultural Mother then split into different Goddesses associated with specific plants—for example, the Mother of Corn in South America and the Mother of Grain in the Mediterranean region.
Today, we take the existence of crops for granted, but the people of the ancient Goddess Culture Civilizations believed that hidden forces were active within seeds, buds, and flowers, and that these forces could be awakened through rituals. This belief led to the development of “winter carnivals,” in which evil spirits were expelled and seeds for the coming year were infused with growth power. When the flowers bloomed, women adorned with flower crowns sang songs to bring about the optimal ripening of fruits. Many of these ancient rituals were preserved in the folk festivals of Europe, especially in the Balkans.
In alternative circles, it is claimed that every plant has a spirit (or intelligence). In the spiritual settlement of Findhorn in Scotland, for example, cabbages grew to the size of 20 kg in a sandy and desolate area, supposedly due to communication with the spirits of plants. Is this what happened at the beginning of agriculture?
To strengthen the crops, offerings were given, such as the first seeds of the harvest. Sometimes the offerings consisted of drops of milk, symbolizing the feminine principle, and at other times, they included agricultural products such as beer, wine, or baked bread. Apparently, blood did not play an important role in these rituals. The sanctity of blood and bone in the hunter-gatherer culture gave way to the sanctity of fruit and seed in the agricultural culture.
Wheat was the miracle plant that became humanity’s main source of food. No more gathering of roots and fruits, hunting animals, and collecting acorns—now there was a uniform food source that was sown and harvested annually. It was a plant with a high yield of nutrition, based on an easy method of separating the wheat from the chaff. Rituals related to wheat developed, many of which have been preserved in Balkan folklore to this day. These include leaving the last sheaf of wheat in the field as an umbilical cord of Mother Earth and making human-shaped dolls from these sheafs. The craft of baking bread, performed by women, was considered sacred. Loaves were shaped in various forms, and remnants of this tradition still appear in the Holy Bread of Balkan Christianity.
Plants were also a source of medicine. Women were experts in the use of medicinal herbs; it was an important part of their world. They gave thanks to the spirits of plants that helped them overcome pain, illness, and suffering (as witches did later). In addition, there were plants that altered a person’s state—intoxicating and hallucinogenic plants that connected individuals to other dimensions and enriched their spiritual intelligence (such as Ayahuasca from South America). This category also included the vine plant, from which wine was produced. There is no doubt that the ancients used such plants in their religious ceremonies, including initiation rituals. Thus, plants were perceived as agents of transformation, capable of elevating a person’s mental state and possessing a complementary spiritual essence.
The connection between plants, trees, and the world beyond gave rise to legends, likely told around the fire in the tribal circle, led by the shaman or a group of priestesses. These were stories about a miraculous plant with special properties that granted eternal life to anyone who ate it—a kind of tree of life or tree of knowledge, as seen in the biblical narrative. Sometimes, a miraculous drink was prepared from this plant and passed among participants—a kind of soma or elixir—a divine drink prepared by the shaman.
The connection between the Goddess and vegetation appears in the iconography of Goddess figurines, which incorporate plant motifs into the human body and its organs, especially the sensory organs—eyes, nose, and ears. For example, some figurines feature wheat grains as eyes. Sometimes, Goddess figurines are depicted in combination with trees.
The main characteristic of plants and trees is their cyclical nature. The tree sheds its leaves in winter, blooms in spring, and bears fruit in summer. Plants die each year with the arrival of winter, only to be reborn in the spring. From the moment humans became farmers, the cycles of vegetation took on a much deeper meaning, expressing the desire to return to the mythical time before creation.
Eliade argues that the experience of cosmic time, especially in the context of agricultural work, ultimately imposed the idea of cyclical time and of the cosmic cycle. Since the world and human existence were evaluated in terms of the plant kingdom, the cosmic whole is perceived as an endless repetition of that same cycle: birth, death, rebirth.
The reliance on vegetation resulted in a cycle of festivals that included passage and initiation rites. Agricultural holidays were linked to the cosmic drama of the diminution and increase of light, the arrival of cold, and the cessation and rebirth of the earth. All of this was connected to the cycles of life and death, with the harvest symbolizing death.
The Sacredness of the plant world is expressed by the use of incense in religious ceremonies, the resin of trees and plants was used to produce incense, which was burned in early temples to summon the spirit of the plants.
Houses and Villages
It can be said in a literary way that if the cave was perceived as the womb of Mother Earth, then when people built their houses, they left the womb. Therefore, the house was seen as an alternative place of connection between heaven and earth—a kind of temple of life. However, this change had a deeper meaning: the transition to living in villages. A house was not a single unit but part of a village.
According to Rappenglück, in the process of building a society and structuring the human world, created restrictions, separations, divisions, and the like. Selective transitions between domains (membranes) had to be established to concentrate efforts and define social and human life. Thus, different boundaries and containers played a crucial role in development.
During the hunter-gatherer era, the cave served as a container of human life and activity. The cave was perceived as a womb, and leaving the caves was, in a sense, being born into a new world. The construction of houses created a new kind of container, separating the protected from the exposed, the familiar and the close from the distant and strange, the wild from the civilized, the world of the living from the world of the dead, and the profane from the sacred. Unlike the cave, which was a work of nature, the house was entirely a human creation. From the time of the agricultural revolution people lived in houses, but in the Goddess Civilization, the house held a much deeper significance.
For the new human, the house represented their center, usually with a pillar or some kind of accessory (sometimes the fireplace) in the middle, which was interpreted as the axis of the world.
Rappenglück claims that humans perceive their environment in a topocentric manner. From the moment humans stood upright, they created a center that divided space according to the cardinal directions and formed a connection between above and below. Thus, the human tendency to establish a center is an a priori anthropological motif that emerged following humanity’s ability to stand upright. The sense of balance creates the first world axis—connecting the nadir (the place where a person stands) with the zenith, forming a line from the center of the Earth through the body standing straight up to the sky. With the construction of houses, the center line – world axis became associated with the house and was reflected in its architecture.
Eliade claims that humans naturally seek a center from which they can be reborn. Therefore, every house and dwelling place is organized around some mythical center, which creates and sustains the experience of the sacred. In this sense, the house is an imitation of the world, the seat of the Gods, and the center of the universe. Indeed, the first houses were radial or square centralized, aiding in the organization of the world and establishing a central point.
The walls of the house were perceived by the ancients as a selective membrane that let in energy (spirits) in. their world was full of spirits and was perceived as sacred and miraculous. Therefore, they simultaneously separated and connected the inside and the outside through rhe walls that were perceived as being able to summon energies. This is why magical paintings are found on the walls of Neolithic houses. There are openings in the walls that allow transitions from one reality to another, hence the (sacred) importance of doors and gates. These were perceived as a horizontal opening to the three-dimensional vertical dimension of the house, which served as the axis of the world.
Houses were seen as living entities, sometimes as a human body with different parts (as in the Indian Sthapatya Veda). Additionally, the entire ecology was perceived as a living entity—an organism with different interrelated parts made of both matter and spirit. The interplay of light and shadow added another dimension to the architecture of houses; the entry of light from openings in the roof or walls illuminated different parts of the house, revealing the passage of time.
The house became a place of life, culture, family, a meeting between male and female, growth, consecration, and prayer. It was also a place of sleep, during which one passed into another dimension. In the Goddess Culture, the house was a place of birth and death. It was seen a cosmic container within which life was born and died—a space where a person could undergo a transformation from the mundane to the sacred. In some houses, skeletons and skulls were buried under the floor. The spirits of the mothers thus became part of the house, guiding and helping the people who lived there.
The transition to houses involved the construction of villages, marking a major transformation. Previously, the social unit had been a tribe of 20–25 people, as this was the maximum that a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle could sustain. With the advent of agriculture, it became possible to establish settlements of hundreds and even thousands of people, living in separate houses rather than in the shared space of a cave. This shift created a need for a unifying force in society, which was embodied by the Goddess. Whereas nomadic tribes migrated from place to place, carrying their belongings with them and considering the entire earth their home, the house and the village became permanent places of residence where a new kind of world could be created.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the transition from a nomadic life to living in permanent houses and villages. This raises several questions: How were the first villages organized? Who organized them? Was there a master plan? Were the houses built adjacent to one another, even leaning against each other, or were they separate structures?
At Çatalhöyük, for example, the houses were connected into a kind of conglomerate, where people moved from house to house over the rooftops and entered through an opening in the roof. In such a setting, living in a village meant that people were closely involved in each other’s lives—hearing neighbours’ conversations through the walls and engaging in communal maintenance and construction work. The social structure that emerged from this type of village differed from the social structure found in villages where houses were spaced farther apart and isolated from each other, such as those discovered in the Vinča Culture villages in Serbia.
The village represented an Imago Mundi, with various parts within it relating to the cosmogony of the universe. In some villages, there was a central place that served as a temple or was perceived as sacred, usually related to agricultural work—especially the storage of agricultural produce, involving craft workshops such as weaving and pottery.
Cooperation among the women of the village was much more extensive than it is today, and studies have shown that in some villages, they cooked food together rather than each household preparing meals separately. Crafts such as weaving and pottery were carried out collectively in shared workshops, which also functioned as temples to the Goddess.
Part of the Goddess’s rituals included group dancing and music. It is impossible to dance within the nuclear family, and it is also difficult to do so within a small tribe. Living in villages allowed for large dancing circles accompanied by music and ecstatic drumming, led by female priestesses and shamans. The tradition of the sacred journey transformed into a pilgrimage to sacred places to celebrate special events of the year, such as the longest day. Thus, the worship of the Goddess took place at multiple levels—within the family, at the village level, and at the regional level—with the participation of many people.
The big question is whether there was social stratification in these villages. Wether there were differences in property and status among the people? The answer (though complex) is that this did not occur, at least not in a prominent way. The Goddess guided people toward values of awareness, responsibility, justice, modesty, and consideration. As a result, decisions within the village were made collectively. The value of giving encouraged mutual assistance, while the value of responsibility ensured that each person grew their own food and was not dependent on others, while also preventing exploitation. Archaeological excavations reveal that, in general, there were no significant differences between houses in the village, nor were there notable disparities in burial practices.
Goddess Worship
During the Goddess Culture period, there was extensive religious and ritual activity at three levels: family, village, and region. Within the family, ceremonies were held using small figurines (statuettes), libations, offerings, and incense. These ceremonies addressed essential life needs, such as birth, death, food, health, and family life. At the village level, public ceremonies took place, especially during important periods of the agricultural season and in the context of agricultural work, the joint production of tools, and collective efforts for ploughing or harvesting (these ceremonies are the source of many folklore traditions that exist to this day). At the regional level, religious activity was connected to cosmic events, such as the solstices, which took place in sacred complexes. At the beginning of the Goddess Culture period, these were natural sites, but toward the end, they developed into megalithic complexes.
The sites where regional rituals took place were part of the sacred routes of ancient times, remnants of the period when people were hunter-gatherers and moved freely across the land. The villagers travelled to these sacred places, and since the Goddess had granted them permission to cultivate the land, they felt free to modify the sacred sites in ways that would enhance the energies of the land and improve their harvests. Thus, they shaped sacred complexes through collective effort—piling up earthen mounds, driving wooden stakes into the ground, collecting huge stones, erecting megalithic structures, or shaping prominent rocks and earthen formations. All of this required cooperation and joint effort, and it was done joyfully and willingly; it was an act of creation, art— creating a giant mandala symbolizing peace between humans and nature and among people themselves.
Music and singing played an important role in these rituals and ceremonies. Dance and music were likely part of human culture since the time of cavemen, defining human nature just as much as art and religion. The musical instruments certainly included flutes and drums, which appear as early as the caveman period. In addition, they probably used shells and struck stones with acoustic properties. Sound played a significant role in the world of the ancients, and various studies have shown that even in the caveman period, people chose their places of abode (which was considered sacred) based on their acoustic properties. Paul Devereux has demonstrated that the stones of megalithic sites, such as Stonehenge, possess acoustic properties, and suggested the place was used as a giant xylophone.
The priestesses wore ceremonial clothing, which included belts with a sun disk, scarves, aprons, and other adornments. Their garments featured characteristic symbols such as chevrons, triangles, spirals, and dots. Evidence of this comes from figurines found in places like Vinča in Serbia. Additionally, models of drums with female breasts on them have been discovered, suggesting a connection between the Goddess and drumming—perhaps as a reference to the heartbeat that a baby experiences in the womb. Lewis-Williams argues that the rituals were shamanic in nature and that an essential aspect of them was entering trance states, often with the aid of hallucinogenic plants.
Sexuality and Fertility
In the Goddess Culture, sexuality was sacred because it was linked to fertility. Sex was connected to the earth receiving the fertilizing power of the sky (sun). Eliade suggests that the sanctity of sexual life, and above all female sexuality, became inseparable from the miraculous riddle of creation of life. The ‘Hieros Gamos’ (sacred marriage), and the ritual orgy express, on various levels, the religious nature of sexuality.
A complex symbolism, which is essentially anthropomorphic, links woman, sexuality, and the lunar cycle, the earth is compared to the womb, and her fertility has to do with what can be called the ‘enigma’ of vegetation. This is an enigma that demands the ‘death’ of the seed to ensure a new birth—producing a birth even more miraculous as it is accompanied by amazing multiplication.
What this means is that a sexual act, performed in a magically sympathetic manner, was believed to lead to an increase in crops. Therefore, it was customary to engage in such acts in the fields. This practice was thought to bring about cosmic renewal and universal germination. According to Eliade, the connection between the sexes has intrinsic value because it touches on the essence of wholeness—completion. He writes: “The principle of completion (between the two sexual and cosmological principles, the religious values hidden beyond the sign of ‘male’ or ‘female’) is intended to organize the world, as well as to explain the mysterious riddle of its creation and renewal.”
The connection between the sexes leads to procreation, which is linked to the essence of Mother Earth. According to Eliade, the earth is a hierophany—a divine revelation—related to procreation: “The earth produces living forms; it is a tireless pattern of procreation. Regardless of the structure of the religious phenomenon caused by the revelation of the earth—whether as a ‘sacred presence,’ a clear divine figure, or a ‘custom’ arising from a vague memory—the destiny of motherhood, the tireless power of procreation, can always be encountered in it.”
According to Gimbutas, sex in Goddess culture was considered sacred and existed freely between women and various men, so it was often impossible to know the father of a child. As a result, the family naturally centered around the woman. There were no formal husbands, but men played important roles in art, trade, and construction. Women’s lives were socially and sexually liberal and were linked to the religious system that ensured their supremacy.
The period of pregnancy was sacred and involved both spiritual and physical preparations. Childbirth was also sacred and took place in childbirth temples. For example, at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, rooms painted red with red floors were found, and on their walls, women were depicted in childbirth positions. These were childbirth temples, featuring a low couch that served as the place of birth itself. Similarly, the huts in Lepenski Vir in Serbia served the same purpose. They have red floors and a representation of the cervix and uterus, appearing through the arrangement of the hearth stones.
