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When we look deep into the cultural record, it reveals recurring patterns and continuities over long stretches of time. Synchronicity recently brought one of these into focus for me. I found pictures of clay house shrines with horned crests, in a book on the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture.
The same week, I found this motif repeated in the Villanovan culture (pre-Etruscan Italy) thousands of years later: horns at either end of the house, or all along the central roof beam.
This in turn reminded me of the water buffalo horned houses at the far ends of Indonesia. In the east, Toradja people still hang real horns at the ends of their longhouses; sometimes carved ones too. In western Sumatra, the Minangkabau build their longhouses in the shape of water buffalo horns.
Or, back to the clay shrines, others in Macedonia and Bulgaria take the form of women.
There are the pillared or spiral-capped terracotta shrines of ancient Jordan, notably at Mt. Nebo, the legendary threshold never crossed by Moses. (This itself is a lesson in what counts as “history.”)
Or look to the terracotta shrines of the Corn Mother in the Jamacoaque culture in Ecuador.
This vessel from coastal Ecuador shows a goddess or ancestor seated within a stepped shrine:
Or we can look to the array of ceremonial stands made of fired clay, from the “A-Group” of neolithic Sudan
to those of the neolithic Balkans, to the Canaanite shrines of Beth She’an, with their goddesses and serpents, and other, circular stands with coiling serpents
which are repeated in the “snake tubes” of Crete, after the Helladic conquests, and on to the ritual stands of the Etruscans.
And let’s not forget the three-feet-tall terracotta stand at Ta’anach, proving Goddess reverence among the Hebrews in the time of Solomon, in the 10th century bce. (Objects like this are typically referred to as “cult stands,” a problematic label applied to historically-targeted religions).
The historical likelihood is that these ceremonial pots, and ritual stands, and clay shrines, were made by women. They represent women’s culture, and women’s history, the world interpreted through women’s eyes, then and again, now. They are windows into the ceremonies that women enacted in very ancient times for which no written record exists. They are the cultural record for their time.
We can track these ceramic arts, through layers of history and cultural styles, from Colombia and Venezuela,
through the Caribbean, where they manifest through the Taino worlds of the islands. The pottery styles of Boriken and Ayiti and Dominica
have historical linkages reaching even to the Amazon and the Tapajós, the triangular shaped seated women with outstretched legs, a deep pattern shared across vast distances.
Bring Abya Yala into view: put those cultural matrices on your mental map, and on the radar, finally, of comparative religion.
Other deep histories surface in the rock murals of Zimbabwe. Paintings of maternal ancestors dance with ritual ties on their arms and torsos, holding plumes or knives or crescents or leaves.
They are often shown with life essence streaming from their wombs, and sometimes these streams become ladders or pathways along which generations of descendants travel.
What appear to be generational ladders also appear in the rock art of Murujuga (the Pilbara sites on the Burrup Peninsula, Western Australia).
Those petroglyphs also include images of women with life essence streaming from their vulvas, the same theme as Zimbabwe.
The generations theme may also apply to modern woodcarvings of the Maluku Islands, the luli icons, on tree-of-life pillar headdresses worn by female ancestors.
The Murujuga petroglyphs are said to be the oldest rock art on the planet, but are off the radar of most paleolithic surveys you’re likely to lay eyes on. There’s a racialized aspect to these suppressions and marginalizations, which place Aboriginal histories outside the dominant narrative. The focus is consistenly shifted away from most of the planet, to concentrate again and again on the same usual suspects — which also happen to be the most patriarchal civilizations, the hierarchical and colonizing societies. That focus is un-self-conscious, but compulsive and authoritarian.
So the vast cultural record of the Australian and Saharan rock art galleries still remains to be integrated into popular understanding of what constitutes history.
We have barely begun to glimpse the women’s history embedded in the rock paintings of southern Africa or Spain, Baja California or the Australian Kimberley, or in the petroglyphs of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, or in the expanses of Canada, Central Asia, and Siberia.
In the Arabian desert, from the Hijaz to Jordan, powerful images of invoking women have not yet been discussed by Gender Studies or in the field of comparative religion. This is a literate bias, of course, and obviously a male bias, but it is also a racialized bias, that nullifies the historical record of most of the world.
Pattern recognition, and interdisciplinary comparative studies, are important ways of writing women back into history. Not focusing on famous individual achievers, though that has its place too, but instead exploring the cultural worlds that have existed across countless generations, across continents and historical periods. They are the common ground of humanity, but here we are zooming in on the mark left by womanity, the ancient cultural record that has not been allowed to count in the white male his-tories. It exists nevertheless, and remains to be recognized and re-membered. It immeasurably expands our vision of who and how and what women have been, and done. There are countless possibilities, once our eyes are opened to how patriarchal culture has labored to foreclose them, to obscure, bury, and over-write them.
A sampling of patterns I have been investigating for nearly 50 years now:
Female Icons Ancient female figurines in stone, bone, ivory, terracotta, wood, or metal (often labeled as “fertility idols,” or worse). They cover a vast historical terrain, from the paleolithic to neolithic, bronze, age, iron age, to living Indigenous cultures in Brazil or Cameroon. Some reflect ceremonial practices such as paint-up of bodies and faces, tattooing or scarification, ritual dress or headdress.
Some figurines are inscribed with sacred signs, such as spirals or other patterns, or are modeled with serpents. Others make ritual gestures, like cupping the breasts, or hands on belly, or arms raised in invocation or benediction.
The ivories belong to a very old layer, and a long-lasting one, that is seen in the Old Bering Sea Culture, paleolithic Siberia and Europe, Egyptians and Canaanites, and many peoples in the Congo.
Vulva Stones Petroglyphs engraved into the walls of caves or rock shelters or earthbound stones. (Shown, vulvas deeply grooved into the walls of a megalithic chamber at Loughcrew, Ireland.) The Freudian obsession with “phallic symbols” militated against recognition of the universality of these female signs, which were carved in every continent inhabited by humans. This symbol was further elaborated in sculptures, in stone or wood or metal, of female ancestors, sheela-na-gigs, Tantrik icons.
Female statue menhirs Megalithic statues, usually carved in relief on undressed or lightly shaped stone blocks. I’ve documented examples from Ethiopia, France, Italy, Sardinia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Sumatra and Sulawesi in Indonesia. This presentation shows examples from Europe.
The colossal Water Goddess who topped the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan was followed by smaller statues of Coatlicue in Aztec times, one of which was still much larger than life. In the Ukraine, the Kipchak Tatars created multitudes of kammeniye baby (“stone old women”) which belong to a larger steppe tradition that extends through Mongolia (where male sculptures also occur).
Statues This is a large category, in stone and wood and other media. It includes the Egyptian goddesses (especially Sekhmet, of whom many hundreds of statues exist) and those of the Sumerians and Babylonians; and the goddesses in Indian temples, including the rock-cut Saptamatrika (“seven mothers”) and the circular temples of the 64 Yoginis.
Kybele and other goddesses were also cut out of the living rock in Asia Minor. In Lydia, the colossal statue of Artemis Ephesia was destroyed, but is attested by many historical sources.
Smaller stone statues exist in many places, including Yemen; the Cycladic marbles in the Aegean; the ancestor icons in southern Appalachia; and the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific, to give a few examples. The Huastecs sculptured a large number of stone statues of women in Veracruz, eastern Mexico.
The wooden ancestral mothers of Africa stretch from Senegal to Congo to Malawi and Mozambique. Carved masks belong to this large group of ancestral women as well, as do the mother-drums in Ghana and Nigeria. Wooden sculptures are also important in Southeast Asia, aboriginal India, Melasia and the Pacific Islands. They were carved by the Kalasha people in the Hindu Kush.
Maternal ancestors (like the Frog Mother shown below) figure in the clan crests better known as “totem poles” along the western coast of Alaska and Canada.
Ceremonial pots Vessels in the form of breasts are very widespread. So are motherpots in the shape of women, alias “female effigy vessels” in the dry parlance of archaeology.
Also in this category are ceramics painted with processions of dancing women, which are found in ancient Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, China, Romania, Ukraine, and Greece.
In Egypt, this theme is expressed as women or goddesses standing in boats with arms upraised, amidst birds and animals and water patterns. In more recent times, similar scenes of dancing women were woven into baskets in western North America.
Invoking women Some of the Arabian petroglyphs of the first millennium bce are shown here. For a worldwide look at this theme, see chapter one of my dvd Woman Shaman: the Ancients.
Many other patterns remain to be discussed; these are just a few. For an earlier exploration of these themes, see my article “Icons of the Matrix: female symbolism in ancient culture” (2005).
We look at these subjects in more depth in the Suppressed Histories online course, which is open to subscribers at any time. Thousands of photo essays can also be found open source at the Suppressed Histories website and in the photos section of the SHA Facebook page.
If you would like to support this research into global women’s history, you can contribute via my Matreon.
Max Dashu, Suppressed Histories Archives
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