Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

It is not difficult to understand the symbolism. The midwinter solstice was the point at which the sun was reborn. When it appeared that day, the standing stones were arranged so that the first shaft of light entered a slit in the centre of the circular alignment, the centre of the world in the sacred landscape, which helped to regenerate the whole community, gathered there to welcome it. A good example of this is Newgrange in Ireland.

One final word on megaliths. While Orkney and Malta cannot really be called part of the same early culture, there are signs in both that there was a special caste of people, apart from the general population, in sizeable megalithic communities. ‘In Malta, the skeletons of those associated with the temples after 3500 BC indicate a lightly muscled people, who ate a special diet which wore down their teeth very little for Neolithic times.’ The bones of animals slaughtered at an uneconomically early age, associated with inhabitants who lived in houses luxurious for the time, suggests that there was already in existence a social division between people with, at the top, a special caste, a combination of ruler, priest and scientist.⁵²

At much the same time as megalithic ideas were proliferating, but in a different part of Europe, a different form of worship of essentially the same principles was evolving. This part of the continent is generally referred to as ‘Old Europe’, and includes Greece and the Aegean, the Balkans, southern Italy and Sicily and the lower Danube basin and Ukraine. Here the ancient gods have been studied by the Lithuanian scholar, Marija Gimbutas.

She finds a complex iconography grouped around four main entities. These are the Great Goddess, the Bird or Snake Goddess, the Vegetation Goddess, and the Male God. The snake, bird, egg and fish gods played their part in creation myths, while the Great Goddess was the creative principle itself, the most important idea of all. As Gimbutas puts it, ‘The Great Goddess emerges miraculously out of death, out of the sacrificial bull, and in her body the new life begins. She is not the Earth, but a female human, capable of transforming herself into many living shapes, a doe, dog, toad, bee, butterfly, tree or pillar.’⁵³ She goes on: ‘. . . the Great Goddess is associated with moon crescents, quadripartite designs and bull’s horns, symbols of continuous creation and change . . . with the inception of agriculture’.⁵⁴ The central theme was the birth of an infant in a pantheon dominated by the mother. The ‘birth-giving Goddess’, with parted legs and pubic triangle, became a form of shorthand, with the capital letter M as ‘the ideogram of the Great Goddess’.⁵⁵

Gimbutas’ extensive survey of many figurines, shrines and early pottery produced some fascinating insights – such as the fact that the vegetation goddesses were in general nude until the sixth millennium BC and clothed thereafter, and that many inscriptions on the figurines were an early form of linear proto-writing, thousands of years before true writing, and with a religious rather than an economic meaning. By no means everyone accepts Gimbutas’ ideas about proto-writing but her main point was the development of the Great Goddess, with a complicated iconography, yet at root a human form, though capable of transformation into other animals and, on occasion, trees and stones.⁵⁶ There is a link here, back to Lewis-Williams’ ideas of the mind in the cave, ‘releasing’ living forms from the rock surfaces.

At this point, then, say around 4000 BC, there is a small constellation of ideas underlying primitive religion, all woven together. We have the Great Goddess and the Bull. The Great Goddess, emerging via the Venus figurines, symbolises the mystery of birth, the female principle, and the regeneration of nature each year, with the return of the sun. This marked a time when the biological rhythms of humans and the astronomical rhythms of the world had been observed but not yet understood. The Bull and stones represent the male principle but also suggest, via the decorated caves of the Palaeolithic age, the idea of a sacred landscape, special locations in man’s environment where significant occurrences take place (having mainly to do, first, with hunting, then with agriculture). These are early humans’ most basic religious ideas.⁵⁷

There was another reason why stones and the landscape should become sacred, and it had nothing to do with astronomy. At some point after 4000 BC, early humans experienced the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock, when treated in a certain way through heat, can produce molten metal, sometimes of a very different colour.