Great Goddess hypothesis

The Great Goddess Hypothesis is that in Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and/or Neolithic Europe and Western Asia and North Africa, a singular, monotheistic female deity was worshipped prior to the development of the polytheistic pagan religions of the Bronze Age and Iron Age. Having first been proposed as an idea relating to ancient Greek religion in 1849, it subsequently achieved some support amongst classicists. In the early 20th century, various historians began to postulate about the theory applying across Europe, and it was widely propagated by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in the 1980s. It has since been adopted by various feminist religious groups such as Dianic Wicca as a part of the mythology of their faith.

The theory had been first proposed by the German Classicist Eduard Gerhard in 1849, when he speculated that the various goddesses found in ancient Greek paganism had been representations of a singular goddess who had been worshipped far further back into prehistory. He associated this deity with the concept of Mother Earth, which itself had only been developed in the 18th century by members of the Romanticist Movement. Soon after, this theory began to be adopted by other classicists in France and Germany, such as Ernst Kroker, Fr. Lenormant and M.J. Menant, who further brought in the idea that the ancient peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia had influenced the Greek religion, and that therefore they also had once venerated a great goddess. These ideas amongst various classicists echoed those of the Swiss judge J.J. Bachofen, who put forward the idea that the earliest human societies were matriarchal, but had converted to a patriarchal form in later prehistory. Commenting on this idea, the historian Ronald Hutton (1999) remarked that in the eyes of many at the time, it would have been an obvious conclusion that "what was true in a secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one."

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