From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Peace-loving Paradise of the Goddess
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Livermore CA
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 02:07:15 GMT

In article <2myj9!g.sheaffer@netcom.com> sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer) writes:
:
:        
:             Given our Euro-centric orientation, we tend to think of  the 
:        ancient  "Goddess"  societies as having been  replaced  by  Indo-
:        European  civilization. However, in other parts of  Eurasia,  the 
:        Goddess-worshiping  societies continued more or  less  unmolested 
:        until  very  recent  times. I came across  the  following  rather 
:        alarming passage recently: it seems that, far from the  'blissful 
:        paradise  of gentle femininity', the  Goddess-oriented  societies 
:        were   extremely  bloodthirsty,  and  required   frequent   human 
:        sacrifice.  (Loren,  following Gimbutas, concedes  that  the  Old 
:        European  Goddess-worshipers probably practiced human  sacrifice, 
:        but  apparently  only  when under extreme  duress,  like  when  a 
:        recovering alcoholic falls off the wagon.) 
:        
:             From  the following passages, I think you'll agree  that  as 
:        good  skeptics, we would have to conclude that the *most  likely* 
:        reconstruction  of the "Goddess societies" of "Old Europe"  would 
:        be  to  assume  them  more or less  like  the  surviving  Goddess 
:        cultures  described  below, and not as  some  peaceful  "paradise 
:        lost."

	[Long article on the Khonds deleted...]

	[Note: they are also known as Gonds, and "land of the Gonds"
is in their language "Gondwana"; the ancient continent was named for a
territory that was once in the middle of it.]

	The article stated that human sacrifice had reached a low
during the Buddhist era, and also stated that the Khonds had been
pushed southwards by the Aryans. So the Khonds are not "unmolested".

	The most "developed" society of pre-Aryan India was the
Harappans, but I do not know very much about them. If the Harappans
had been big on human sacrifice, then it has not been very apparent in
what I have read about them. If the Harappans had not practiced human
sacrifice on a regular scale, then the Khond human sacrifice would
have been a later development.

	I note also that Robert Sheaffer presents no direct evidence
that Old Europe was like the Khonds -- indeed, there is little or no
evidence of death by violence, which only started appearing when the
Kurgans started showing up. I concede that this does not exclude death
by strangling or poisoning or drowning or some other way that does not
leave some imprint on the skeleton or some stray artifacts, such as a
broken-off arrowhead. All he could come up with was that one burial.
Among the Minoans, there has been only one plausible case of human
sacrifice found, that of a young man who had been stabbed in a temple
that had been wrecked by an earthquake. This sacrifice might have been
done after a big earthquake, only to be interrupted by another
earthquake's destroying the temple (earthquakes sometimes occur in
swarms). So while human sacrifice was occasionally practiced in
pre-Indo-European Europe, it was almost certainly not a regular
occurrence. 

	Thus, Old Europe was probably _not_ like the Khonds in respect
to human sacrifice.