The Agricultural Revolution
The period of transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is called the shift from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. In both periods, humans primarily used stone tools, hence the suffix -lithic (Lithos – stone), and so the Agricultural Revolution is also called the Neolithic Revolution.
Spiritually, it seems that Mother Earth decided to raise humans from the infant stage to the childhood stage, where they began to create their own world. She gave them the gifts of vegetation and allowed them to domesticate her other children—the animals. She taught them to build houses from parts of her body, to make pots from other parts, and it was women who championed this development.
In research, we use the term “agricultural revolution,” but it was not truly a revolution, rather a gradual progress and development of human civilization toward greater complexity—and, I dare say, greater awareness. Agriculture connected humans to the sacred cycles of the earth and vegetation; it was seen as a mythical religious act. Ploughing the earth and sowing, harvesting and gathering—all of these were magical acts. The work was done on the body of Mother Earth and required her permission. It was also an intrusion into the realm of the dead, which lay beneath and within the earth.
Agriculture dramatically reveals the secret of vegetation renewal. According to Eliade, the fertility of the earth was strongly linked to the fertility of women. As such, women became responsible for the grain, because they knew the ‘enigma’ of creation. It is a religious enigma, since it controls the source of life, the supply of food, and death. The earth is like a woman.
The fertility of the earth was aided by the power of the dead buried in her, and depended on their blessing; hence, the connection with the spirits of the fathers and mothers led to increased crops. This explains the burial of specific bodies and skulls under the floors of houses and temples.
According to Eliade, Agriculture was a female invention. Man, busy chasing game or leading the herds to pasture, was almost always absent. Woman, with her sense of observation, observed the natural phenomena of wilting and germination and tried to imitate them artificially. Woman were linked to the cosmic forces of the earth and the moon. At the beginning of agriculture tillage was done with hoes and hand tools, a work that was dominated by women, and still is to this day in certain “primitive” societies.
In other words, Mother Earth made a covenant with her female sisters and transmitted through them the ideas, thought forms, and insights of agriculture, helping them develop it. At the beginning of what is called the “Agricultural Revolution,” the nature of agricultural cultivation was different; it was small-scale farming that combined crops rather than vast fields. Each woman tended her plot, gathered, and harvested. She knew the food and medicinal plants in depth and had a kind of mystical connection with them.
The first plants to be domesticated were wheat and barley. Wheat is the queen of cereals, with the highest nutritional value. At the same time as wheat and barley—used for making bread and beer—legumes were domesticated, providing the protein necessary for human growth.
The Balkans are one of the first places in the world where the transition to permanent settlements took place, as early as 11,000 years ago, and where agriculture emerged as early as 9,000 years ago. Moreover, the agricultural settlements of the Balkans provide the most complete example of matriarchal societies that worshiped the Goddesses.
Goddess Civilizations
Archaeological excavations of settlements from the Goddess Civilizations in the Balkans reveal no traces of war. In popular perception, prehistory (the Stone Age) is often imagined as a time of violence, where “every man is for himself,” but this is completely untrue. The Goddess Civilization settlements were not fortified, were not located in easily defensible places, and show no evidence of fire or destruction. There is no sign of weapon injuries on the skeletons found, weapons do not appear in the paintings, and they are not buried in tombs. According to researcher Jonathan Haas, war was an inconceivable event for the ancients.
The conclusion from this is that there was no slavery or exploitation—people did not work for other people, and there is no evidence of enslavement. Instead, there was cooperation, brotherhood, equality, and probably also free love. Everyone grew their own food and was responsible for their own home and family. The houses (and tombs) found in the villages of the Goddess Civilizations are usually of equal size. This suggests that there were no class distinctions or differences in property. People (usually women) were buried inside the houses, indicating a connection to maternal spirits. Statuettes of the Goddess were found in tombs and in houses that also served as temples—life was sacred.
There was a strong element of cooperation and mutual assistance. Crafts such as pottery, weaving, spinning, tanning, and even drying fruits and plants were done collectively since there was no point in building an oven and collecting wood for just one piece of pottery. Those who managed the work were groups of consecrated women (priestesses). Goddess figurines were found near craft workshops, and sometimes there were temples in her honour, indicating the sanctity of crafts and materials (clay, bamboo, linen). The Goddess was believed to have taught these crafts to her fellow priestesses, who led the work.
In addition to daily life, there was also an abstract and deep spiritual component in the Goddess Civilization: The Great Mother, who gave life at birth, was also considered the one who gave life after death, facilitating rebirth into the spiritual worlds. Women were seen as having a special connection with life after death. The cycles of nature included the cycle of life and death, and the priestesses had a connection with the world beyond. They led the ceremonies of passage.
Of all the processes of life, the most sacred was the moment of birth. Women gave birth in special places after a period of preparation and consecration, in locations designated as birth temples, such as Lepenski Vir in Serbia. Bringing life into the world was the essence of the Goddess, and it began with sexual intercourse between man and woman. Therefore, sexual intercourse was also sacred—it symbolized the connection between worlds, heaven and earth, and was sometimes practiced as part of sacred ceremonies.
The Goddess taught humans to weave baskets, weave clothes, create leather clothing and shoes, and use fire at high temperatures to produce materials that improved the quality of life. First came lime, then clay, and finally copper—three important transformed materials created by high fire temperatures, which were extensively used during that time.
The Goddess gave humans her gifts, first, stones, which were part of her body (bones). For example, she provided obsidian for cutting and flint for cutting and starting fires. With these gifts, humans could drill, scrape, and make tools such as axes. The Goddess also gave humans the secrets of hallucinogenic plants, which were useful for connecting with other realms and the spirits of her other children—the animals.
An important characteristic of the Goddess’s culture was the development of aesthetics and art. Geometric decorations in the form of chevrons, waves, lines, and spirals appear on jars, indicating a developed aesthetic sense, as well as shamanic experiences of the world beyond and the development of an early form of language and symbolic communication that was not merely functional. The clothes and jewellery rival those of today in craftsmanship. Sculpture depicted the human body in a symbolic way. This was a culture rich in refinement, music, and dance, with deep reverence for nature and consideration for the environment.
It seems as if, at the dawn of history, there was an intervention by the Great Mother, who nurtured, guided, and taught humanity, helping it create a new civilization and way of life—not only on the material and social levels but also on the spiritual level. Thus, humans were able to develop abstract ideas, ideals, religious thought, and emotions, becoming creative and inventive.
Çatalhöyük and Hacılar
Archaeology in recent decades has proven the existence of ancient matriarchal societies in many parts of the world. In Turkey, for example, there is a settlement called Çatalhöyük, which is considered one of the earliest and most important in the world, dating from 7100–5500 BCE. At its peak, it was inhabited by nearly 10,000 people. According to archaeologist James Mellaart, who discovered the site, it had an advanced belief system centered on the figure of the Mother Goddess and her various expressions. The society was matriarchal, and women were dominant in the economic, religious, and family spheres.
The houses in Çatalhöyük were adjacent to each other, with the roofs forming a common space. The houses were entered through openings on the roof using a ladder. Around the main room, there were sleeping platforms, and skeletons were buried beneath them. Interestingly, the man’s sleeping platform was moved from place to place, while the location of the woman’s platform, which was much larger, remained constant. Under the man’s platform, skeletons of men were found, while under the woman’s platform, skeletons of both women and children were discovered, indicating that children were attached to the mother rather than the father. In addition, tools such as hoes and axes were found under the woman’s platform, along with jewellery.
Of the 480 skeletons found at the site, only 21 were covered in red ochre, and all of them were women. This suggests the existence of a group of female priestesses who led the society and were sanctified after death. Seventeen of these skeletons were found in larger houses, which, according to one hypothesis, served as temples to the Goddesses.
Many drawings and artifacts from different periods were discovered at Çatalhöyük. Starting from the 58th century BCE, hunting scenes disappear, probably due to the transition to full reliance on agriculture. Until that time, many female figurines and only a few male figurines were found. From that period onward, the few existing male figurines also disappear. Apparently, the female deity associated with agriculture became stronger (some feminist researchers claim that men became nothing more than sexual objects).
Eliade claims that the Agricultural Revolution had a decisive impact on human thought and belief. He argues that it is customary to say that the discovery of agriculture radically changed the fate of humanity, guaranteed an abundance of food, and thus enabled an enormous increase in population. However, the discovery of agriculture had another decisive effect for a completely different reason. It was not population growth and nutritional options that determined humanity’s fate, but the theory that man developed while discovering agriculture. What he saw in the grains, what he learned from this contact, what he understood from the example of the seeds losing their shape underground—these were the decisive lessons. Agriculture revealed to man the fundamental unity of organic life, the analogy of woman-field, mating-sowing, and the most important mental syntheses that arose from this revelations: the cyclical nature of life, death leading to rebirth, and more. These syntheses were essential to the evolution of humanity, and they were not possible until after the discovery of agriculture.
Statuettes of female Goddesses discovered in the wheat silos of villages from the Goddess Civilizations indicate the crucial role of women in agriculture. The Goddess was also seen as the patroness of the hunt, and women probably participated in hunting, but agriculture became more important as it developed. Besides initiating and promoting agriculture, women were involved in weaving, dyeing, and spinning. They also engaged in pottery and toolmaking. Statuettes found in Hacılar (another settlement on the Anatolian plateau from the same period of Çatalhöyük, with a similar Goddess Civilization) indicate an intimate understanding of the female body. It is assumed that women were also involved in trade.
Goddess Civilizations in the Balkans
There are two caves in Serbia that contain remains of early Cro-Magnon man from 32,000 and 24,000 years ago, characterized by figurines of fertility Goddesses. These caves are the Salitrena Cave, located inside a rock shelter in the Šumadija region south of Belgrade, and the Hadži-Prodan Cave near Goča, which is also a beautiful stalactite cave and a well-known tourist site. In general, there are scarce finds from this period, likely because it was the peak of the Ice Age, and the mountainous regions of Serbia were too cold for human settlement.
The next prehistoric period dates from 21,000–8,000 BC. Paintings from this period have been found near the Adriatic Sea. Near Stolac in Bosnia, there is a cave called Badanj Cave, where a rock painting of a horse from 16,000 years ago has been discovered. In the Risan area of the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro, paintings of deer antlers and geometric shapes from approximately the same period have been found at the nearby sites of Morinj and Lipci.
It should be remembered that during the hunter-gatherer era and until the end of the Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, the world looked very different. Large parts of Europe were covered by a layer of ice more than two kilometers thick, including London. Paris was a frozen tundra. During most of this time, the Balkans were one of the most suitable areas in Europe for human settlement, with temperatures only 3–4 degrees Celsius lower than they are today.
With the end of the Ice Age, permanent settlements began to appear in various regions of the balkan, the earliest in Serbia 11,000 years ago—namely, the village of Lepenski Vir, situated on the banks of the Danube in the Iron Gates Canyon. It is not entirely clear what kind of settlement this was, as it was established before the advent of agriculture.
Another 2,000 years passed before agricultural settlements appeared in the Balkans in the 7th millennium BC. The first culture is named after the settlement of Starčevo, located not far from Belgrade. It was based on small-scale agriculture and a simple, basic rural organization. However, a few hundred years later, a complex and advanced civilization emerged, characterized by significant material and spiritual achievements. This culture spread over large areas and is named after the Vinča site, also near Belgrade. Both cultures were matriarchal societies that worshiped the Mother Goddess, but the Vinča culture was much more complex and advanced in ways that differ from what we know today.
The development of human civilization is linked to several foundational innovations, such as the use of ceramics and metals. The invention of ceramics changed human life; from then on, it became easier to cook and store goods. Every house had large jars for storing grain and other food products, and in the courtyard, there was a large jar for water. The use of clay began in the 7th millennium BC, allowing religious beliefs to be expressed through the creation of figurines and small models of houses and temples. Pottery was a sacred craft performed by women in temples. Two-story houses have been discovered, with a temple on the upper floor and a pottery workshop on the lower floor.
The remains discovered in Vinča and its associated settlements, such as Pločnik west of Niš, reveal a high level of ceramic craftsmanship, advanced stone processing techniques, social equality, peaceful trade relations, a tendency toward artistic expression, and the ability to think abstractly evident in the spirals and geometric shapes on jars and other artifacts. It was a kind of human golden age that lasted for thousands of years.
In the 5th millennium BC, the unification of Balkan cultures took place, and villages became increasingly like one another, indicating trade relations and cooperation. The population increased, and the initial use of copper began. One of the earliest known instances of copper production in the world occurred in Pločnik. By the end of the 5th millennium BC, both gold and copper were being produced in the Balkan. The most important copper mines were in Majdanpek and Bor in eastern Serbia.
In the 4th millennium BC, the most advanced Goddess Civilization emerged, known as the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture. It covered vast areas in Romania, Moldova, and parts of Bulgaria and Ukraine. In addition to advanced sculpture, highly developed arts and crafts, and thriving trade, this civilization featured enormous settlements where tens of thousands of people lived in harmony and prosperity. During this period, a network of megalithic sites began to appear, primarily in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Bosnia, with a lesser presence in Serbia.
