The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality. By Philip G. Davis. It is a dogma of feminist mythology that before there was God, there was Goddess.
Goddess worship is everywhere in the literature and praxis of feminism.
It shows up among the Paleo lithic flint chippers of Jean Auel s Clan of the Cave Bear novels set in circa 40,000 b.c. An advice column in the Washington Post recently featured a query from a bride to be whose Christian fundamentalist parents refused to attend her Wiccan wedding. Those roots, he argues persuasively, turn out to be planted not in the misty terrain of prehistory but in the well mapped soil of the early nineteenth century, when neopaganism itself was born, along with other manifestations of Romanticism, in reaction to the rationality obsessed Enlightenment. Davis surveys the archaeological remains of the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age cultures where feminists claim to have found signs of Goddess worship caves in Western Europe, the Catal Hayuk settlement in Turkey, prehistoric Malta and the Balkans, and Minoan Crete and finds little hard evidence to support their theories. Whereas anthropologists of a generation or so ago tended to assume that every painting or carving of a female image at an ancient site depicted an object of worship, their present-day successors are far more cautious about such ascriptions.