Dawn Goddess Moon Goddess or priestess from 20,000 years ago

The goddess religion came from Africa with modern humans 100,000 years ago. This may be inferred from the fact that very similar goddess stories are found on all continents, suggesting that the stories were known before modern people migrated to Europe; Asia, the Americas, and Australia. In Europe, (France) there are some recently discovered caves decorated with paintings and carvings which have been dated between 30,340 and 32,410 BP (before present). The caves contain this feature: the cave wall is carved in a manner resembling pudenda and pubic hair; there is a small entrance and a passage which is just big enough to crawl through, and which opens to a space covered in drawings of animals which are (though drawings elsewhere in the caves are photographically correct) mixed up and flowing into each other. My interpretation of this (unsupported as yet by any authority) is that this feature represents the womb of the goddess, and the paintings within all the plants and animals she is to give birth to. This implies that the cave painters were there for a religious purpose and that their supreme deity was the Earth/Nature goddess.

The details of that religion in the tens of thousands of years between then and the Hellenic period can only be guessed at, but we can infer something by looking at some of the neolithic cultures which have survived to the present day. Chief among these are the remaining nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of Australia; and the highland agrarians of the island of Nuigini. In both these cases, society is divided on gender lines. The men have one set of rules and responsibilities; the women another. In Australian aboriginal societies, the camp belonged to the women, while the men went off hunting. In northern and central Australia today, you will still find that it is the women who are responsible for family welfare; for business and for organising. A male aboriginal may refuse to do something on the grounds that it is 'women's business'. This does not mean that he considers the task beneath him, but rather that he would be trespassing in doing it. This women's power does not mean that aboriginal society is matriarchal, just that it is partitioned.

In Nuigini, the highlanders built settlements which consisted of two large buildings... one for the women and infants and one for the men and older boys. If similar arrangements existed in the ancient Mediterranean, we should not be surprised to find at the dawn of recorded history that there were separate-but-connected religions for men and women, with a war god for the men, and a triple goddess for the women.

Aboriginal painting motif meaning waterhole; campsite or women's place

Further parallels may be seen between the societies of the ancient Mediterranean and aboriginal culture. Among the men were selected 'smart men' or 'kadaichas' who kept the tribal secrets. Among the kadaicha's duties was memorising the songs that told the tribal history; and the passing of this song to new replacement singers. It is just such a chain of singer storytellers which are believed to have given us Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and it may have have been that the poets; astronomers, and mathematicians who were servants of the goddess in the temples of the Mediterranean were the equivalent of these Australian smart men Aboriginal cultures (there are many) also possessed detailed knowledge of the heavens; had stories about the constellations, and these stories parallel those passed to us from Greece. As in Greece, music and dance were central to religious activity.

From a similar cultural base, there evolved in the islands and lands of the Mediterranean a more settled and elaborate culture. Some considerable time before 2000BC, there existed on Crete and nearby islands a civilisation which, were we magically transported there, we would find recognisable. The Minoans had farms; they grazed cattle, they had sailing boats and sea trade, they had rope, and nets. They had pottery, and analysis of shards of domestic wares reveals that they had both beer and wine, and the bread and cheese and olives to go with it.

The Minoans were worshippers of a great goddess who had many forms: she was the moon; she was the sea and the dolphin on the waves. She was the new-sprung grain, the grape on the vine and the wild green places. To her were dedicated white cattle with horns like the crescent moon. Because they shared the goddess' ability to create new life and so shared her nature, the women of Crete had high social status. They went bare-breasted as proof of their status.

The Minoans had writing (which gave rise to Greek script, which led in the course of time to our own modern alphabet), and they also had music and poetry and advanced mathematics. The mathematics came about because the priestesses and their servants in the temple needed to be able to predict the movements of the planets (which in their view were manifestations of their gods and goddesses) and phases and eclipses of the moon. Before the invention of writing, knowledge was passed from generation to generation in the form of songs and long memorised verses. After the invention of writing these same verses were recorded, and there came about a new means of furthering knowledge: a succession of scholars whose life work is recorded, and where student can improve on the master's work, taking up where he left off.

The goddess-temples of Crete were a model for the rest of the Mediterranean, with the Minoan way being carried in their ships along with their wine and oil and grain and Cycladic carvings. This may be thought the first goddess temple, the first Fallen Temple. A great disaster befell the Minoan civilisation: around 1500 BC a Krakatoa-like explosion occurred beneath an island north of Crete, which would have caused earthquakes and tidal waves throughout the Mediterranean, which extinguished the Minoan sea trade and disorganised their society. Goddess-cultures reorganised in the centres the Minoans had earlier traded with, notably in Mycenae, and with that the goddess and civilisation began anew in Greece.

The catastrophe which struck the most advanced civilisation on Earth left traces in myth and legend. This historical event may have given us the widespread myth of the Great Flood, and also the story of the sinking of Atlantis. It also gave us the philosophy of history advanced by Ovid in his Metamorphoses which contended that the course of human affairs was not, as is now generally held, a rise to civilisation, but a descent.

Having glimpsed the first Fallen Temple, let us now view the last: the temple of Isis on the Nile, where Greek-descended scholars succumbed to Christianising Roman pressure in ©400 AD, but not before passing on to us their astronomy; their mathematics, their writing, their music, their poetry and their wisdom.