The Demise of the Goddess
The demise of the Goddess can be traced back to the invasions of warlike nomadic people from the Asiatic and European north who overran the centers of Goddess culture first in southeastern Europe, the Near East, and India causing large-scale destruction and dislocation. They brought with them their sky god who ruled from the heavens. The Goddess, women, and their values were suppressed. Patriarchy, the domination of culture by men, was the new order of society. The patriarchal culture made women
inferior and to that of men.
In their earliest development they left neither tables nor temples. It is only upon their arrival in to Goddess-worshipping communities of the East that they come to our attention. The lack of evidence of earlier cultural centers in their northern homelands of Russian and the Caucasus region also portrays them as aggressive warriors. The invasion by the northern people was a series of migrations which took place over a period of thousands of years. The northern invaders viewed themselves as superior people, primarily based upon their ability to conquer the more culturally developed people of the Goddess. A group of aggressive warriors accompanied by a priestly cast, invaded conquered and them ruled the indigenous population of each land they entered.
These northern people brought with them the concepts of light as good and dark as evil and of a supreme male deity. The Iceman Heritance European's attempt to dominate the world through racism.
The last of the Goddess temples was not closed until the fifth century. With the suppression of the Goddess, much has been lost to human culture. As her/history was re-written by the victors, Goddess religion has been portrayed as heretical, bad, of the devil, and pagan. Woman who identified with the Goddess and her ways, were branded and denied full participation in society. Some where even labeled as witches and burned at the stake.
This transition was not just a gender change from Goddess to God but a paradigm shift with the imposition of a different reality, of different categories of being, that deeply affected human relationship. Woman, the female, the feminine, was excluded in this shift of consciousness. All that was most valued in the Goddess culture was devalued, given lesser priority, rejected. The death blow to Goddess culture was delivered by monotheism in which one male, all-powerful and absolute, ruled both the heavens and the earth. Monotheistic faiths were implacable foes of the Goddess.
