The mother goddess, right? Wrong wrong WRONG! The so-called Willendorf Venus dates somewhere between
The mother goddess, right? Wrong wrong WRONG! The so-called Willendorf Venus dates somewhere between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE, although it’s not as if Josef Szombathy could have called that one when he found this figurine in a cave near Willendorf, Austria in 1908. Carbon-14 dating was in its infancy in 1908, as you can imagine, since it wasn’t invented until 1949. We have learned now that this figurine is incredibly old. In fact, it’s so old that a similar figurine found relatively nearby made of fired ceramic is the oldest piece of ceramic ever found. So why would anybody think this was the mother goddess? Well, that is a really good question. First of all, who was the mother goddess? Short answer, she was a goddess whose first monuments rose up from the mountaintops of central Anatolia in about the eighth century BCE and whose last altars were dedicated in the fourth century CE. There were other goddesses known as mother, but this mother goddess was so enduring and widespread (Anatolia to France) that she gets the title. So around twenty thousand years passed in between the carving of this stone figurine and the earliest monuments to the mother goddess. What happens in twenty thousand years? Well, I don’t know, a ton of stuff. Written history has only been a thing for like, five thousand, so it’s pretty hard for me to imagine twenty thousand years basically!! Around the turn of the century everyone was soooo into the grand narrative. Everyone was so obsessed with writing a continuous story about all of human civilization and progress. It was the hot thing. But here is the problem! People didn’t know a ton of facts about all this old stuff back then. Surprise! It’s way too old to possibly be continuous. So about this Venus of WIllendorf. Maybe it’s not the mother but surely it must be some kind of mother goddess, right? Look at her curves! Come on! Fertility goddess, right? Fertility amulet? Right? Sorry guys. With almost no context for this figurine, we are going to have to start from scratch. Stone figurine of a female, around twenty-six thousand years old, found in a cave in Austria. Well, I don’t know, people got the creative impulse. Look at her pretty braided hair. -- source link
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