I. PREHISTORY
It is important to bear in mind that man's ability
to conceive of deity antedates his ability to record his
conceptions in writing. The religions of the so-called
primitive peoples of the modern world attest to the
fact that a rich complex of belief in supernatural
beings, and ritual practices connected with their serv-
ice, can flourish without the support of a sacred litera-
ture. That such a situation existed before the invention
of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in the early part
of the fourth millennium B.C., is evident from prehis-
toric archeology. Although the interpretation of
archeological data concerning human thought and
belief, unsupported by written texts, must necessarily
be speculative, artifacts nonetheless are documents of
man's mental activity. The making of a stone axe, for
example, can tell much, if carefully interpreted, of its
prehistoric maker's social and economic needs and his
skill in meeting them.
Paleolithic culture has left behind some notable
evidence of what might reasonably be considered as
mankind's earliest known essays in the conception of
deity. The most striking instance of this evidence is
the so-called “Venus of Laussel” (Figure 1). This is the
image of a woman carved on a block of stone, which
was found at Laussel, in the Dordogne district of
France. When found, the figure occupied the central
position among a series of other carvings, so arranged
as to suggest that the place of their location was a
rock sanctuary. The “Venus” figure represents a nude
woman with the maternal attributes grossly exagger-
ated, while the facial features are undepicted; the
figure holds a bison's horn in the right hand. Similar
figures, of much smaller scale and carved in the round,
which have also been found on various Paleolithic sites,
would seem to indicate that a common motive inspired
their making. A clue to this motive is possibly to be
found in the strange fact that the faces of the figures
are invariably blank, whereas the maternal features are
carefully depicted. This difference of treatment is
surely significant. It would seem to show that the
carvings were not designed as portraits of individual
women, but rather to symbolize “woman” as the
“mother” or source of new life. The context of their
relevance, if this was their meaning, is clear. The
phenomenon of biological birth provided the Paleo-
lithic peoples, who made the images, with ocular evi-
dence of the emergence from the female body of new
beings of their own kind. The phenomenon, moreover,
was probably the more impressive since it is unlikely
that the process of procreation was properly under-
stood at the time. There is reason, accordingly, for
seeing in these figures, and particularly in the Venus
of Laussel, the earliest known evidence of man's deifica-
tion of the female principle. “Deification” in this Paleo-
lithic context must, of course, be carefully qualified;
for our knowledge of the ability of the human mind
at so remote a period necessarily rests on deduction
from archeological data only.
The original location of the Venus of Laussel suggests
that it was an object of worship, in other words, that
those who made and reverenced the image sought
thereby not only to portray the female principle, but
also to establish a special relationship between them-
selves and what they conceived to be the source or
creatrix of new life. How they made the mental transi-
tion from the phenomenon of birth, as observed in
individual women of the community, to the conception
of a transcendental Woman or Great Mother as the
source of fertility and new life is beyond our present
comprehension. But, as we shall see, these Venus figures
constitute Paleolithic prototypes of the Mother God-
dess or Great Goddess, whose cult is well attested in
the Neolithic period, and finds subsequent expression
in many of the famous goddesses of the ancient Near
East.
The Venus of Laussel may, therefore, be reasonably
regarded as the earliest known depiction of the idea
of deity for the purpose of worship. It is important
to note that the idea probably stemmed from the con-
cern of Paleolithic man with the phenomenon of birth
as the operation of a mysterious power that replaced
the deceased members of his community by others
newly-born. The depiction of pregnant animals in
Paleolithic cave-art provides evidence of similar im-
port; namely, that these primitive hunting peoples
were deeply concerned with the reproduction of the
animals upon which they lived. Thus the original con-
ception of deity was intimately related to a basic
human need.
The deification of the female principle in Paleolithic
culture is more certainly attested than that of the male
principle. The most likely instance of the latter is
provided by the figure of the so-called “Sorcerer” of
the Trois Frères Cave in the department of Ariège,
France. This designation for the figure does, in fact,
represent an interpretation of it which negates the
alternative interpretation that it depicts a god. The
figure is a strange composition. In form it is generally
anthropomorphic; but the body is shown as covered
with a hairy pelt, and with an animal's tail and genitals.
The head, moreover, which is surmounted by the ant-
lers of a stag, has furry ears, owl-like eyes, and a long
tongue or beard. The posture of the figure is suggestive
of the action of dancing, though other equally reasona-
ble explanations could be offered.
In view of the evidence that exists of a Paleolithic
hunting-ritual in which men disguised as animals per-
formed mimetic dances, many prehistorians have in-
terpreted the figure as representing a sorcerer per-
forming such a magical dance (Figure 2). But this
interpretation encounters the difficulty of explaining
why such a figure should be depicted in a cave which
appears to have been used as a sanctuary. The problem
involved here, though interesting and important, is
outside the scope of this article. The alternative inter-
pretation, which some eminent specialists in prehistory
have advanced, is that the figure represents a super-
natural “Lord of the beasts,” whom the Paleolithic
hunters conceived of as the owner of the animals, and
who had to be propitiated by those who hunted and
killed them. This interpretation is reasonable; but it
has to be regarded as less certain than that which
presents the Venus of Laussel as the earliest depiction
of the idea of deity.
The intimation given by Paleolithic culture that the
earliest conception of deity was inspired by man's
concern with the production of new life finds re-
markable confirmation in Neolithic culture: the most
notable instance will be briefly described here. Exca-
vation of the Neolithic town at Çatal Hüyük in Anato-
lia, which dates from the seventh millennium B.C., has
revealed a flourishing cult of a Great Goddess, who
was concerned with both birth and death. This ambiv-
alence of concept is evidenced in a strange way. The
sanctuaries of the Goddess were adorned by friezes of
plaster models of the female human breast. These
objects were found to contain the skulls of vultures
and foxes and the jawbones of boars. No written texts,
unfortunately, exist to explain this strange symbolism.
However, the union of symbols of maternal nourish-
ment and care with symbols of death is profoundly
suggestive, and this significance is reinforced by other
symbols found in the sanctuaries: human skulls, the
horns of bulls, and mural paintings of great vultures
menacing headless human corpses. The interpretation
of these symbols is necessarily speculative; but the idea
of a Great Goddess, who is the source of life, and to
whom all return at death, is known in other later
religions, for example, in Crete and the Greek Eleu-
sinian Mysteries. In such an ambivalent context, the
Great Goddess is identified or associated with the earth
as Mother Earth, whose womb is conceived as both
the source of life and the place of repose, and possibly
of the revivification, of the dead.
The tradition of the deification of the female princi-
ple, which can thus be traced from the Paleolithic on
through the Neolithic period, found expression in the
early literary cultures of the ancient Near East and
the Indus Valley. The tradition is embodied, with cer-
tain variant features, in such famous goddesses as the
Mesopotamian Innina-Ishtar, the Syrian Astarte, the
Egyptian Isis and Hathor, the Anatolian Cybele, the
Cretan Great Goddess, and the Cyprian Aphrodite.
Many of these goddesses combined the roles of Virgin
and Mother, and they were often intimately associated
with a young god who, alternatively as their son or
lover, was the deified spirit of vegetation.
