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A Greek goddess statue in the style of the Elgin Marbles was repatriated by a Los Angeles museum, marking the return of a valuable, but stolen piece of antiquity from the United States to Italy. Known as the Morgantina Aphrodite or Venus, the 7-foot tall marble is now displayed in a 17th century former Capuchin monastery in the tiny town of Aidone in central Sicily.

The plaque on the statue does not identity the goddess as Venus but reads,

The statue of a female deity from Morgantina, excavated clandestinely [i.e. looted by vandals] and exported illegally [i.e. purchased at an art auction without proper papers], was repatriated in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Malibu.

Above:  Donald Yates at a similar statue of the goddess in recent travels to Turkey. Free download of his On the Trail of Europa. This and other titles available in DNA Consultants Online Bookstore.

--Bob Dylan

Will the archeological establishment's obtuseness about prehistory and the religion of the Great Goddess ever falter? In an article titled "Pieces of a Bronze Age Puzzle" in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine (Sept/Oct 2011, p. 15), Jessica Woodard discusses the "enigma" of thousands of broken Cycladic figurines from the tiny, uninhabited island of Keros near Naxos. Summarizing the decades long work of Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew, she dates the site to 2800 to 2300 BCE and (are you ready for this) speculates there was a lot of "social activity as well as ritual activity...relating to beliefs about life, death, and perhaps the hereafter."

This is tantamount to saying that the deliberately broken figurines were broken by people, human beings who lived a long time ago, on purpose. But what kind of rituals and "beliefs"? The word "religion" is mentioned nowhere. Evidently, since archeologists profess no religion themselves they cannot detect it in any of the people whose graves and relics they dig up.

Greek mythology tells how Venus, the eldest of the Fates, was born at sea and stepped ashore on several islands, where her cult continued, notably at Cythera, Crete, Naxos and Cyprus. All the "enigmatic" broken figures clearly relate to the worship of the Mother Goddess. Marija Gimbutas covers the featureless face, arms crossed over breasts and other unmistakable signs of the Goddess or Magna Mater in her voluminous writings, including The Language of the Goddess. We suggest if Colin Renfrew cannot bring himself to read Gimbutas he at least dip into Pausanias, the second century CE author of a guidebook to Greece in ten volumes. There he will find many descriptions of these votive offerings to the Goddess.

Archeologists may also want to acquire at least a bowing acquaintance with Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. Both Gimbutas and Eisler describe three invasions of the warriors of the steppes with their male gods following the year 3000 BCE that spelled an end to the long period of female-based life-celebrating religion in the Middle East and Old Europe. Only the Minoans, Etruscans and certain other peoples from Asia Minor and the Greek Islands were able to retain the Mother Goddess in the new mostly male pantheon, which was focused more on death than rebirth.

The only puzzling part of the Keros Hoard is how archeologists could overlook its abundant testimony to the Mother Goddess religion.


Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" depicts the Goddess' first coming ashore. (No, this is not the famous original in the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence. This is a cheap reproduction hanging on the walls of a Rome pizzeria.)

Native Hawaiians and Native Americans
Part One

In a previous post, "On the Trail of Spider Woman," we suggested that petroglyphs in Arizona and Utah with female goddess symbolism and birthing ceremonies were connected with the Hohokam ("Sea Peoples") and other Indians who followed in their wake, corresponding to archeology and anthropology's Basketmaker Culture. In this and a series of posts over the next few months, we will show pictures of “emergence” petroglyphs from Hawaii, New Guinea, California, Hopi, Zuni, Pima, Papago, Fremont, Zuni, Mimbres, Palavayu and Eastern Woodlands cultural sites that support our thesis. We believe them to be the footsteps and stepping stones of female haplogroup B and its associated lineages.

Mitochondrial Haplogroup B does not have as its dissemination center Mongolia or Siberia or Central Asia but Southeast Asia, specifically Taiwan and Indonesia, and is characteristic, in contrast with Indian groups emphasizing A, C and D, of the Pueblo Indians and some Southeastern Indians such as the Cherokee and Chickasaw and Choctaw. It entered the Americas in successive waves, some of them seaborne, over many millennia.

The first picture comes from the western coast of the island of Hawaii. It is considered one of the oldest religious shrines in the Hawaiian Islands. It shows a stick figure carved into a rock set in the ground. As we will see, this is a typical "emergence" figure marking the arrival of a people in a new phase of existence. The symbolism is of a female mother figure giving birth, her progeny here depicted by the taillike extension coming from between her legs. There are thousands of variations of this tribal or clan mother iconography scattered over Asia and the Americas (but not apparently found in Europe or Africa).

The Hawaiians considered the western coast of the Big Island their place of emergence. According to their legends, their people came from the sea from the southwest and were noted for their ability to twist plants and fibers into ropes. Their capital was hence called Hilo (twisted, plaited). On account of their subtlety in these arts they adopted the hula (twist) dance as their national dance. Its original purpose was as a fertility ritual to increase population. (Johannes C. Andersen, Myths and Legends of the Polynesians, Tokyo:  Tuttle, 1969.) The main song sung during the enactment of the hula was called The Water of Kane, or Waters of Life.

The Hawaiian Mother symbol illustrated above seems to be connected with a certain clan. As is often the case, the head of the female figure is differentiated to show which clan. This one has horns and could represent a dragonfly. This insect recurs in American Indian petroglyphs where it is associated with the Water Clan and fertility rites. To "read" the Hawaiian petroglyph properly we might say, "Here is the spot where the Head Mother of the Water Clan emerged and gave birth to her people." It is likely (although no legends are preserved regarding its use) that women made offerings here to become fertile, attract husbands and be delivered of healthy children. In similar ceremonial sites, such figures mark an actual birthing stone where women squatted to give birth, attended by midwives and clan mothers.

Native American Parallels

To show the physical resemblance of the Hawaiian design to American Indian symbols we will reproduce  thumbprints below from different traditions. They will be linked together and explicated in subsequent posts in this series.

"Lizard Woman" petroglyphs from Arizona/Utah.

And Now in the Cherokee...

Haplogroup N1a became prominent in genetics literature when Wolfgang Haak et al.'s studies on 7500 year old skeletons in Central Europe revealed that 25% of the Neolithic European population might have belonged to this lineage. The skeletons were found to be members of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK ware) which is credited with being the first farming culture in Central Europe.

7,000 Year-Old Linearbandkeramik (LBK ware) from Stone Age Germany.

The study was a major development in the debate on the origin of European populations, since Haak et al. argued that "The discovery of mitochondrial type N1a in Central European Neolithic skeletons at a high frequency enabled us to answer the question of whether the modern population is maternally descended from the early farmers instead of addressing the traditional question of the origin of early European farmers."

1. Demic diffusion (in which farming is brought by farmers), for example Renfrew's NDT - Anatolian hypothesis
2. Cultural diffusion (in which farming is spread by the passage of ideas), which is the assumption in Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

The study's authors concluded: "Our finding lends weight to a proposed Paleolithic ancestry for modern Europeans."

N currently appears in only .18%-.2% of regional populations. It is widely distributed throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa and is divided into the European, Central Asian, and African/South Asian branches based on specific genetic markers. Exact origins and migration patterns of this haplogroup are still unknown and a subject of some debate.

Although not one of the classic Native American lineages (A, B, C, D, and X -- Schurr), N has been identified in the ancient Southwest in the Fremont Culture centered in Utah. It is one of the Middle Eastern lineages that appear in the Cherokee and other Indians; see DNA Consultants Blog, “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee”. Most investigators attribute this phenomenon to recent European admixture. But such haplotypes  if only instanced in North America without exact Old World matches could just as well be considered Native American.

It has been suggested that N is also characteristic of the Sea Peoples, who may have traveled to the American Southwest in antiquity.

Cherokee or Saponi Wedding Dish from Southwest Virginia in author's possession is glazed black, the color of the Earth Mother, and marked with the "tri-line" signifying the Triple Goddess's power of increase and plenty and rule over all life. The style of pottery is similar to Linearbandkeramik (LBK) ware. This is the female dish of a matched pair. The slightly larger male dish is marked with four lines on each handle. They were used to share food in a wedding or bonding ceremony.

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

You hear a lot of talk about the Neolithic Revolution--the gradual adoption and spread of agriculture, animal husbandry and town life by our prehistoric European ancestors--but the most important epoch in the course of civilization goes largely unnoticed in the history books. That was the abrupt shift from matriarchy and worship of the Great Goddess to the warrior-based governments and language stocks of the steppe-dwelling Indo-Aryan barbarians who invaded Old Europe beginning in the late fourth millennium BCE.

The roots of Europe's original female-oriented religion are lost in the mists of the early Stone Age, and may even precede the arrival of "modern humans" in Europe and be part of the heritage of Neanderthals. This substratum of a long-lasting peaceful hunter-gatherer society organized around the religion of the Great Goddess absorbed the spreading practice of agriculture from the Middle East beginning in the fifth millennium and reached its apogee of development in a pure form in the fourth millennium.

The cult of the Great Goddess, depicted here in an enthroned version with flanking felines from Çatal Hüyük, an 8,000-year-old shrine in present-day Turkey (p. 107), was the lifelong object of study by Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose most influential book is The Language of the Goddess (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2006). 

The axe fell on this ancient civilization--quite literally--around 3000 BCE. As confirmed in Jane McIntosh's Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe (New York:  Facts on File, 2006), there was a clear line of demarcation between old and new Europe, from the Balkans to Britain, Spain and Scandinavia. The archeological record tells the story of a sweeping and abrupt end to things. The first metal weapons appear in the graves of elite males along with hoards of gold and jewels. Axes previously used to clear forests for agriculture are now battle-axes. Burials are single rather than family and clan-oriented. Whole villages were massacred and depopulated. Fortifications grew as violence escalated. The horse, venerated as just one of the totem animals of the Goddess since the early Stone Age, becomes the symbol of the warrior, along with the chariot and boat. Rock art features ithyphallic warriors wielding weapons or shooting arrows at each other. The transition can also be seen in the establishment of the Pharaohs in Egypt about 3500 BCE.

The invaders brought their male pantheon of war gods, Indo-European languages, aristocratic forms of government and Central Asian/Caucasian genes. The goddess cult underwent radical male adaptations, surviving in out-of-the-way places like Crete and Brittany. 

So, rather than one transformation, European civilization first went through a Neolithic Revolution, then conversion to warrior-dominated patriarchal societies. It can be postulated that the matriarchal societies eagerly adopted agriculture but exhausted soils, destroyed vital forests and became weaker and smaller-bodied due to a changed diet, falling prey around 3000 BCE to the barbarian warriors of the steppe, who found the accumulation of wealth and unprotected agrarian settlements of Old Europe easy pickings. Climate change could have been a contributing factor.

James Joyce called history "the nightmare from which one cannot wake." If we take a long view of human events, this nightmare began about five thousand years ago. Other-worldly religions like Christianity introduced a further element of alienation and turning away from the sources of life. Before that, people were happily alive, awake, in tune with nature and celebrated life under the auspices of matriarchy.

Assailants with bows and arrows attack

a fortified Neolithic settlement in Furfooze,

France, who defend themselves by hurling

stones and raising clubs. Reconstruction

from Louis Figuier, Primitive Man (London: 

Chatto and Windus, 1876).