http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file
For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
==========================================================

Max Dashu

Reaching into archaic times for the long view of human culture, we are
presented with deep continuities across space and time. Striking
commonalities recur in the symbols and ritual artifacts of diverse
neolithic cultures. These international patterns are not limited to
the 6th millennium BCE, but also appear in more recent indigenous
societies in the Americas, Africa, and certain parts of Asia. Once we
break out of a fixation on "the West" and its claimed antecedents, a
much more varied chronological picture appears.
In-depth regional studies are important. There is no substitute for
the rich detail they offer, and an understanding of historical
continuity over long periods of time is indispensable. But a broad
comparative perspective also has the potential to enrich the regional
studies, highlighting similarities that transcend known patterns of
historical relationship or cultural diffusion. What is most
significant about these resemblances is not stylistic but thematic.
Several key themes of the iconic woman repeat on a global scale: vulva
signs, female figurines, ancestor megaliths, and ceremonial vessels in
the form of women or female breasts. These recurring signs reflect the
spiritual concerns and ritual life of the people who created them.
They belong to animist consciousness and philosophies, rich in complex
meanings underlain with myth and mystery, pulse and flow. Sign is
especially important to cultures based on oral tradition, conveying
meaning on multiple levels. Where the transmission of orature has been
interrupted or severed, signs remain as primary testimony to the
cultural life of ancient cultures.
The concept of Matrix exemplifies the multivalent capacity of the
sacred sign. By Icons of the Matrix I mean several things. One is the
matrix of time and space, which various cultures call Mother Nature,
Priroda, Prakriti, Aluna, or Tao. The Tao Te Ching describes it as
"the creating Mother of everything that exists under heaven, upon
which myriads of beings depend for their birth and existence."
The Latin word matrix originally meant "womb," from the same
Indo-European root that gives mother, mater, meter, matr, mat' and
other equivalents. Matrix also encompasses a sense of kinship systems
based on "mother-right," that are matrilineal, matrilocal, and
egalitarian. I call them "matrix cultures" because for many people
"matriarchy" implies a mirror image of patriarchy's relations of
domination and subordination.(1) The social sense of "matrix" connotes
other meanings: a life-support network within the maternal kindreds,
which are cooperative and communal, and circles of exchange that reach
beyond it. These are core values in the matrix cultures.
Any discussion of the nearly omnipresent female figurines must address
the vexed problem of interpretation, the storm center of much
controversy. Much current analysis still subscribes to doctrines that
relations of domination and subordination are unavoidable and that
human society has always functioned on patriarchal principles. These
beliefs entail assumptions about who women are, what they must be and
do, and perhaps more crucially, what they have or have not done. (And
even though men get credited with creating civilization, they are also
cast as natural bullies.) To contradict these assumptions by asserting
that patriarchy was a historical development is to risk accusations of
"golden age" utopianism. Nor is it considered realistic -- or
acceptable -- to speak of the ancient female iconography as sacred.
Polarized conceptual constructs have a compelling magnetic power. The
computer world calls it the "snap-to-grid" command. Philosophers know
it as the "bifurcation fallacy"--if it's not this, then it could only
be that--which forces information into predetermined, polarized
categories. Even the terminology has a built-in bias; everyone knows
about phallic symbols, but what is the name for symbols of female
potency? Insistence on terms like "fertility idols" or "Venus
figurines" flattens our perception according to well-worn cultural
scripts of female shame and anti-paganism. The old Eurocentric
standard of interpretatio romana still holds sway in the common usage
of "Venus figurines" (like the famous "Venus of Willendorf," the
"Venus of Malta," the "Jomon Venus" of Japan, and many others). The
Roman goddess Venus calls up patriarchal notions of the feminine; her
power is fixated on seducing the male, or evading his gaze. But the
Greco-Roman statues of women attempting to cover their nakedness with
their hands have little in common with the potent, self-contained
icons of the neolithic.
This unmediated female power evokes a huge discomfort, ambivalence and
even hostility. The negative baggage piled on "goddess" over the past
millennia is still influential. Medieval theologians defined "goddess"
as heretical and demonic; postmodernist critics call it "essentialist"
and "dangerous." In popular culture the term has been thoroughly
desacralized and diminished, to the point where it is mainly used to
signify Hollywood starlets, sex goddesses and "divas." But even the
Barbie doll is a vanquished and colonized relic of much older
impulses.
We need a name for the female icons; they are the defining human image
in early archaeology. The term "female figurines," although nakedly
descriptive, is an inadequate designation for a cultural phenomenon
that is so widespread and important in the iconography of archaic
cultures.(2) "Idol" is loaded with pejorative connotations, remnants
of the ancient culture-wars against pagans. "Fertility idol" is
offensively reductive. Paula Gunn Allen says it well, objecting to
misinterpretations of the Laguna creator Thought Woman: "to assign to
this great being the position of `fertility goddess' is exceedingly
demeaning; it trivializes the tribes and it trivializes the power of
woman." [Allen 1986: 14]
We could name the figurines teraphim, after the household deities that
Rachel smuggled out of her father's house in the Bible. Or we could
call them dogu, after the Japanese name for the Jomon-period
figurines. I like the term matrika (an Indic diminutive of "mother")
because these icons seem to represent the maternal ancestor,
life-giver, and cultural founder celebrated in traditions of living
matrix cultures. And matrika is congruent with cultures based on the
Matrix.
Many call the figurines "goddesses," and this sacral designation is
not off the mark if a narrow definition of "goddess" is not insisted
on, as it often is in academia today. Rather "goddess" can emphasize a
continuum of sacrality and life essence; such a perspective is
characteristic of many aboriginal cosmologies. For example, the
Bambara assign multiple meanings to their Gouandousou statues, ranging
from "female ancestor," either individual or collective, to Moussou
Koroni, the white-haired old woman who created plants, animals, and
humans, and who personifies air, wind, fire, and exuberant vitality.
[Imperato 1983: 30, 42-43] Much the same has been said of the
gramadevi (village goddesses) in India. [Pattanaik 2000: 152] The
neolithic statuettes are likely to have carried this kind of
multivalent meaning .
Matrikas were kept in shrines, household altars, or granaries. These
last, as repositories of future vitality, are animist shrines in their
own right. In Peru, "the fertility goddess (sic) is often shown in a
granary watching over the harvest." [Trimborn 1968: 127] Figurines are
also found, often broken, in middens and refuse pits. Many scholars
think that they were ritually broken, as the Mimbres people in
southern New Mexico "killed" pots they buried with the dead. A great
many matrikas have been excavated from burials. In some cultures, such
as Badarian Egypt, they were placed in every grave. Possibly they were
also used in conception rituals or as votive offerings. Frequently the
matrikas are painted with red ochre, signifying the life-giving blood
of the mother, and of Earth. They encompass the potency of women, who
are shown as replete with vital essence, and embodying its origin and
flow. Matrikas seem to reference the maternal ancestor as the visible,
self-evident progenitor of a motherline, a lineage or clan, even a
people.
Some call this an "essentialist" interpretation, and dispute the
religious significance and ritual use of these icons. They see such
finds in stoutly secular terms shaped by postmodern fears of
biological determinism. But the recent jeremiads against essentialism
force interpretation into a narrow field of predetermined and
all-too-theoretical definitions. They treat the signs of "mother" as
reductively biological, not perceiving their multivalent cultural
meanings. But scientistic analysis offers little insight into
indigenous cultures, which often address and describe divinities as
"mothers".
In Brazil, "the Tupians believe that every animal and plant species
has its `mother' (cy)." The Mundurucú make offerings to Putcha Si, the
"Mother of Game," to the "Mother of Fish," and to mothers of species
such as the tapir, peccary, deer and monkey. The Camayura venerate
similar animal mothers (mamaé), as do the Canelo of Ecuador and many
South American peoples. Manioc and corn also have "mothers," like the
Quechua mamasara in Peru. Corn Mothers are venerated over most of the
Americas. [Zerries 1968: 264-5, 279]
An ancient reverence for spirit mothers also persisted in the Baltic
region of Europe. Latvians revered fifty-some animist essences which
they called mate: Mother Fire, Mother Sea, Mother Forest, and so on.
[Andersons 1953: 270] Estonians chanted to "the old woman, mother of
the forest." In the 1920s the Livonians south of Irben Strait
worshipped the sea mother (mjer-ämä) as their "greatest benefactress."
[Paulson 1971: 77, 88. See Adrian Poruciuc's article on the Romanian
Wood-Mother in this volume.]
In Nigeria, the Yoruba invoke awon iya wa, "our mothers," which is "a
collective term for female ancestors, female deities, and for older
living women, whose power over the reproductive capacities of all
women is held in awe by Yoruba men." These Mothers are also called
"the owners of the world." [Pemberton 1989: 210] Sometimes the kinship
emphasis is on elders. In Chile, Mapuche ceremonies begin by invoking
"the grandmothers and grandfathers" of the directions. Even more to
the point of the matrikas, the Lenape used to make small wooden images
which they called odas, "grandmother." [From an exhibit of the North
American collection at the Museum of the American Indian, New York,
1976]
Modern theoretical preoccupations should not cause us to lose sight of
the fact that some peoples did (and do) venerate a female creator or
great Goddess. For the matrilineal/local Kogi in Colombia, the Mother
is the source, the sea of consciousness from which all emerged. She is
Aluna, the essence of reality. "This is the Law of the Mother, the
First Woman, the Mother of the Elder Brother and the Younger Brother,
the feminine fertility, life itself." [In Parques Arqueológicos de
Colombia, 1990] Kogi people see indigenous humanity as the Elder
Brother, and the industrial, colonial, patriarchal "civilizers" as the
Younger. They are children of the same Mother, as the Kogi say.
Western Civilization has designated their world as "primitive" and, in
historical terms, classifies such cultures as the Prehistoric,
Predynastic, Formative or Preclassic. But the older orders have their
own classical eras. (For the Kogi it is the rich Tairona culture.) The
indigenous world tells history in its own way, a history without
documents, without king-lists. It keeps a record, what the Iroquois
call Keepings, in stories handed down over countless generations.
[Mann 2000: 29ff] And when those have been lost, their memory endures
in signs.

vulva rocks
Inscription of vulva signs on boulders and rock shelters goes back to
the paleolithic in Australia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. These
include painted vulvas at Tito Bustillo, Spain, and deeply carved
reliefs at Le Roc-Aux-Sorciers, France. La Ferrassie in the Dordogne
is especially rich in vulva petroglyphs. Some are carved on stone
blocks; one has an animal head sculptured on one side and a
high-relief vulva on the other. Another boulder has a vulva
prominently placed beneath an animal's belly.
A group of vulva-incised rocks are the centerpiece of the Brazilian
site Abrigo do Sol (Sun Shelter), circa 10,000 to 7,000 BCE. The
stones show both surface markings and deep gouges, some of which were
used for milling or tool-sharpening, and others for the widespread
animist custom of grinding out rock dust for ritual use. On some rocks
the vulvas are accompanied by symbols such as footprints and solar
signs. The Wasúsu people say that these signs are "tokens of a
long-vanished tribe of warrior women," all killed long ago. [von
Puttkamer 1979: 60-82]
Multitudes of deeply-engraved vulvas cover a section of Carnavon
Gorge, one of many very ancient rock shelters in Australia bearing
this sign. A sacred rock at Ewaninga, Alice Spring, is covered with
similar carvings. Thick clusters of vulvas, possibly hundreds of them,
are carved into rock faces at San Javier in Baja California. Vulvas
are also scooped out of the stone at Phalai Phupayon cave in northeast
Thailand. Painted a vivid crimson, they appear amongst myriads of
lines and shapes. The local people still call this place the Cave of
the Yonis. [Chareonwong 1988: 49-49. Thanks to Pairin Jotisakulratana
for her translation of this title and relevant captions.]
Mesolithic vulvas are deeply engraved at Helan Shan in the mountains
of Ningxia. Rounded vulvas surrounded by concentric circles appear on
a rock wall in the Wa country of Yunnan, southwest China. A modern
Chinese publication identifies them as "Imprints of the Maternal
Worship." [Wen 1995] Vulvas are finely incised into a rock called Batu
Pina at Betengan, Minahasa in eastern Indonesia. They also appear
among petroglyphs along the Lena river bluffs in Siberia.
Vulva petroglyphs are scattered around north Africa; at Taouz and
Adrar Metgourine in Morocco they are outlined with layers of curved
lines. A rock wall at Tiout in the Algerian Sahara shows a woman
lifting her arms in a ceremonial stance; a line is drawn from her
vulva to a hunter raising a bow and arrow. In another connection to
the masculine, vulvas are superimposed on "bird-man" petroglyphs at
the ceremonial center Mata Ngarau, Orongo, on Easter Island. The vulva
motif (komari) is the single most prevalent design on the island, with
564 recorded. [See Lee, Georgia, "Rock Art of Easter Island." Online:
www. bradshawfoundation.com/easter/rockart2.html]
A boulder deeply carved with some thirty vulvas sits near a salt
spring sacred to the Chimane people in Patene, Bolivia. They make an
annual pilgrimage to this sanctuary, stopping to pray at the stone and
make offerings to the Salt Mother before descending to the water to
ritually gather salt. Vulvas, lines, and animals are painted in a cave
near Corinto, Morazan, El Salvador. The sacredness of this ancient
site was retained since the Spanish conquest; people call it Gruta del
Espiritu Santo (Cave of the Holy Spirit).
A graceful vulva is engraved beside the entrance to a cave at Rock
Spring, Wyoming. Rocks along the rivers of southeastern Minnesota are
inscribed with vulvas. They are engraved on boulders at Cape Alava,
Washington, and at many sites in Nevada and California, such as
Hickson Summit in Nevada and Council Rocks in the Chemehuevi country
of southern California. Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra is full of
inscribed rocks sacred to the Paiute people. They bear a diversity of
hieroglyphs including many kinds of circular signs, vulvas, deer, bird
tracks, and human footprints. Vulvas and cupules are especially common
in the stone circles that ring village encampments.
The Teaching Rocks at Kinomagtewapkong (Peterborough, Ontario)
incorporate a deep crack in the stone as the vulva of an outlined
woman. At Piedras Grandes, east of San Diego, natural rock formations
look like vulvas, and some have been carved to enhance the
resemblance. The place is sacred to the Kumeyaay, who hold womanhood
initiations and other ceremonies there. [See McGowan 1991] In the same
way, the Chumash sculpted a vulva around an opening in the rock inside
Swordfish cave, which is filled with petroglyphs. Another place where
vulvas were carved to enhance natural formations is the Empie rock
outcropping north of Scottsdale, Arizona. More than twenty vulva signs
are sculptured into the stone, some connected along fissures. One rock
face splits into a labia shape, and above it a vulva is carved near
the top of the rock. A few yards away, another is connected to a
sinuous carved snake. [Empie, Online]
The cave of Kamakhya at Nilachal Hill in Guwahati, Assam is a living
shrine of the vulva. It is famous all over India as a Devi Pitha
(Goddess sanctuary) where the yoni of Shakti fell to earth. Inside the
grotto, a natural stone vulva is watered by a spring. When the monsoon
begins, the rains flush red ochre from the soil and the waters turn
red. Everyone observes menstrual taboos, and women celebrate mysteries
that men are forbidden to watch. (Legend says that an Ahom king was
turned to stone for defying this taboo.) The women dance to drums and
conch-blowing until the Devi descends into the entranced dancers.
Afterwards, the entire community celebrates a great festival. Kamakhya
and its environs are a major center for Goddess reverence today.
The early neolithic saw a trend toward freestanding sculptures.
Vulva-sculptured stones appear at the hearth altars of Lepenski Vir in
Serbia circa 6000 BCE. One is simply adorned with a curvilinear vulva;
another larger stone shows a fish-faced woman placing clawlike hands
beside her vulva. The icons bear traces of red ochre. These sculptures
and their terrace of hearth altars overlooking the Danube are unique
in Europe. A much more widespread development was the erection of
megalithic statues: monumental stones, usually carved in low relief,
associated with collective burials in womb-tombs built of colossal
rocks.

megalithic women
The custom of engraving vulvas onto rock walls and boulders was
carried over to some megalithic statues of women. A number of west
European megaliths, such as those in Huelva, Spain, and the capstone
known as Le Déhus at Guernsey Island, bear these vulva signs. So do
some of the Cycladic marbles. A vulva is the most prominent feature on
a rough, high-relief statue from Thera, circa 1600 BCE. Her face is
abstracted to a beaked nose.
Megalithic women with hands clasped around a large vulva are found in
the Bada valley of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia. They too have
abstract mask-like faces, somewhat concave with upturned edges, and no
mouths. Menhirs known as bülbül ("grandmother") are scattered across
the central Asian steppe, from Mongolia to Ukraine. Some place their
hands over the womb; others hold a chalice there. The Yakut people
still make carvings of women holding a ceremonial choron in this
manner; in their religion, it is women who preside over the great
spring festival in which people gather in great circles to dance
around chorons elevated on pillars.
On a series of impressive stelas at Cerro Jaboncillo, Ecuador, women
proudly display their vulvas, as if emanating power. They have clear
shamanic overtones: one woman's hands are modelled to look like birds,
while others are flanked by spiral-tailed monkeys. Fantastic
lizard-beings are carved on the obverse side of the stelas. Some of
the women are seated on curved thrones. Carved stone seats have been
found at hilltop sites. Though some commentators are quick to assign
the thrones to male chieftains, only women are depicted sitting on
them. [Little historical attention has been paid to these stelas;
Saville 1907 still seems to be the best source, with many photos. The
first image in this article is from Cerro Jaboncillo.]
In the San Agustín complex of Colombia, megalithic women clasp their
breasts or hold a child in front of their body. One smiles broadly,
showing jaguar teeth. Some of the female megaliths of Pasemah in
southern Sumatra also carry children; others ride on the backs of
water buffalo, a symbol of the living matriarchaat of the neighboring
Minangkabau. The women wear necklaces, earhoops, and circular
leg-bands. They belong to a megalithic complex that includes dolmens,
burial cists and stone basins.
Breasts and necklaces are a distinctive theme in megalithic art of
northern Africa and western Europe. They appear in the Aveyron region
of southern France and in the Paris basin, Marne and Oise regions of
northern France; at Arno in the Italian Tyrol; and at Silté in
southern Ethiopia. A megalith at Pedras Mamuradas in Sardinia has
breasts but no necklaces, while others have necklaces but no breasts
(at Toninuelo and Bulhôa in southern Portugal and Tabelbalet in the
Algerian Sahara). The famous Sardinian marble from Senorbi has breasts
and a sketchy necklace (though at 42 cm. she is hardly a megalith).
Breasts and necklaces were the iconographic focus in northern France,
with the faces rendered simply as brow-over-nose. Women were carved as
freestanding stone statues as well as in dramatic rock-cut reliefs in
the hypogea of Collorgues, Gard region. These ancestral women stand
like guardians at the entrances to underground funerary sanctuaries
cut out of the living rock. [See von Cles-Reden 1962; Gimbutas 1991;
and Twohig 1981 for pictures and discussion of the European megaliths.
Documentation for the Sahara and the rest of Africa is sparse; much
more research needs to be done.]
The face of the ancestor, defined by a schematic brow-and-nose, turns
up in many places. It is extensively used in the Jomon figurines of
ancient Japan, in neolithic sites in western Asia and the Balkans, and
in the classic cultures of Brazil and Argentina, to name a few. One of
these ancestor-faces surmounts a clay shrine-house in Macedonia, circa
6000. Another appears on a female megalith from Georgia (Caucasus)
around the 7th century BCE. This motif is sometimes described as an
owl-face, which fits in some cases, like the offering vessels in
Danish megaliths or the Jomon "horned owl" dogu. But frequently the
eyes are not rounded--sometimes they're barely marked--and most lack a
beaked nose. Mouths are often entirely missing (as at Tabelbalet in
Algeria and Collorgues in France). As folklore attests, this sign
often indicates a connection with the dead. These are not portraits of
individuals, but ancestral presences. In megalithic Europe, they are
usually associated with collective burials.
The female ancestor represented with hands on belly is another common
megalithic theme. She is common in western European megaliths
(Fivizzano, Liguria; Toninuelo, Portugal; Collorgues-du-Gard and many
other French sites). The ancestral woman is represented in over fifty
megaliths from the Aveyron region of southern France. Again, the face
is a spare geometric mask. It is framed by multiple necklaces on the
most impressive of these megaliths, a cloaked figure from St Sernin.
The horizontal patterns on her cheeks may represent face-paint or
tattoos.
The St-Sernin icon bears a strong thematic resemblance to Ethiopian
megaliths planted in the earth at Silté, in the mountains south of
Addis Ababa. Both groups are dressed slabs decorated in low relief
that highlights the breasts, thick layers of necklaces, and hands over
belly. The Ethiopian women are larger and more richly carved with
other symbols and patterns. Sorghum, the staff of life over much of
north Africa, appears in the lower body of several. (On one megalith
it doubles as a vulva.) Another statue holds staves in her hands and
wears a cup suspended from her necklace. Most of the Silté monuments
appear to have have been decapitated, although at least one survivor
shows a head carved in the round. Many bear rows of cupules (circular
borings into the stone). [Crawford 1991: 134-5; plates 39-41]
Cupules (or "cup-marks") are also found on European megaliths, and on
petroglyph stones all over the world. This animist ritual practice
originated in very ancient times. It persisted into the middle ages,
when it was practiced even on the walls of certain Christian churches,
such as the cathedral of Nuremburg. Devotional scrapings have also
hollowed out the vulva of a medieval serpent-woman at Sanchi, India.
Many of Irish sheila-na-gigs (sculptures of women displaying their
vulvas) show clear traces of this boring or scraping process. [See
photos in Anderson 1977]
The old statue from Seir Kiaran is an archtypical Irish sheila: a
hairless crone, with prominent ribs and small, pendant dugs (a far cry
from the porn queen favored by some post-structuralist interpretions
of vulvan iconography). Like the Cailleach Bhéara, a woman of
legendary age who was remembered as the mother of nations and peoples,
the Seir Kiaran sheila is old, a progenitor and ancestor. A ring of
borings circles her womb, with the deepest, representing the vaginal
portal all sheilas display, at the base. Atop the sheila's bald head
are two holes, placed as if to attach a headdress, or a pair of horns.
Rock dust from these icons was revered as potent in healing, blessing,
conception, and protection. [Flint 1991: 257] Present-day accounts
report that in some parts of Ireland, the sheilas still figure in
devotional "patterns" that involve walking around sacred sites.
Sometimes, even today, these ritual courses include touching or
rubbing the stone vulva, as Mara Freeman witnessed at an old church at
Ballyvourney, Cork. She was amazed to see a devout Catholic matron who
had been performing the Stations of the Cross reach up through a
window and rub the vulva of a sheila perched above it. [Mara Freeman,
"Sheelas," Online: The Celtic Culture List, Celtic-L at listserv.hea.ie,
March 1, 1998]
These archaic devotions persist within the conservational gravity
field of folk culture. Even in modern times, women in some districts
of Europe went to sacred stones and megaliths said to confer the power
to conceive. They rubbed their bellies or vulvas against the rock, or
lay in a rock "bed," often sleeping in it overnight. [Sebillot 1904:
Vol IV, 56-57] Or they slid down a boulder, as Scottish women did on
the Witches' Stone near Edinburgh, which was carved to resemble a
vulva, and as Estonian women did on the cupule-studded Sliding Stone
of Kostivere. Animist practices of this kind draw on the sacred power
of the living rock. The vulva stones and megalithic icons express this
power through signs of female generativity, sexuality, nurture, and
immanent vitality.

signs of the matrikas
All these themes are repeated in the classic icons of the neolithic
era: the matrikas fashioned in clay and stone and ivory. Like the
megalithic women, many place their hands on the belly, or occasionally
to the vulva. Some hold up their arms in invocatory postures; others
fling them wide. Countless others cup their breasts, in a widespread
sign of life-giving power. The breast gesture is already present in
paleolithic statuettes from Willendorf, Menton, and Lespugue; in the
early Canaanite neolithic; the Naqada period of Egypt and up the Nile
in ancient Sudan; at Catal Huyuk and Hacilar in Anatolia; the Sesklo
culture of Greece; the Halafian and Ubaidian in Iraq; the Kulli in
Pakistan; and in ancient Iran, Lebanon, Cyprus, and western Mexico.
Matrikas with hands to breasts survive into the early centuries CE in
west Asia, Egypt, France, and much later in some other places,
especially the Americas.
Around 4000 BCE, the matrikas of neolithic Sudan (unimaginatively
designated as the "A-group") show similarities to the Naqada figurines
in Egypt: hands on breasts, seated with thick legs close together, and
big buttocks. But the phallic pillar-heads with diagonal snake-like
eyes are distinctive, as are the heavy curved lines flowing around the
vulva and hips. The hands-to-breasts motif continues for thousands of
years, and remains a central sign of African sculpture, in the
maternal ancestor statues of the Yoruba, Bamilike, BaLuba and other
peoples. It was the favored female icon in the Nok culture of Nigeria,
from about 400 BCE on. These ceramic masterpieces emphasize heavy
necklaces, the women's belt and loincloth, and breasts adorned with
dotted lines. This pattern could well represent the African custom of
cicatrization, but the question remains: what do the patterns of
ritual scarring themselves represent?
It seems to me that the sign-inscribed matrikas reflect ritual acts,
and not only in the making and use of the figurines themselves. In
fact, painting and incision on the icons are likely to have originated
in women's ceremonies in which they painted, tattooed, or scarified
their bodies with sacred signs and substances. Body-painting has been
an integral part of Australian women's ritual for thousands of years.
African scar-patterns are typically applied as part of womanhood
initiations, and tattooing has similar significance in Samoa and
Micronesia. Quite a few matrikas have vertical lines on the chin, a
very common tattoo pattern for women around the world, including
Maori, Bedouins, villagers in some parts of Syria, and northern
Californian peoples such as the Shasta. In tropical South America,
aboriginal people use body-painting for ritual, but it has everyday
uses too. A person who is painted is clothed.
Matrikas are often nude in modern terms, but not truly naked. Most are
clothed in signs, their bodies and faces painted or incised with
lines, dots, spirals, swirls, chevrons, zigzags, dotted patterns, or
splashes of color. The brilliant red-glazed matrikas of Chupícuaro,
Mexico, exemplify this eloquent body-inscription, with their black and
white zigzag patterns. The Vinca matrikas are incised with V's and
chevrons, and some have meanders on the belly. So do some Japanese
dogu, which are often embossed with spiral patterns. A statuette at
Yalangach-depe, Turkmenistan, has legs painted with patterns and sun
symbols. Step-patterns and zigzags adorn the hollow matrikas of the
Condorhuasi culture in Argentina, and their even larger counterparts
in western Mexico wear spirals and dot patterns.
The pubic triangle is often shown as a numinous forcefield rendered
with outlines, hatchmarks, swirls and, especially, dot patterns.
Vulvas outlined or filled with punched dots occur on ivory and wooden
matrikas in predynastic Egypt and Be'ersheva, in stone at Siluca,
Bulgaria; in ceramic in Japan, Turkmenistan, and the Balkans. The
Jomon people made clay vulva triangles as stand-alone objects, with
dot-impressions and, sometimes, with breasts and navels. Giant dotted
vulvas with triangle patterns are the focal center of the wooden
"paddle dolls" found in 11th-dynasty Kemetic burials, and
dot-impressed vulvas appear on clay women at Karanog and Meroë, Sudan,
as late as the 3rd century CE.
Vital essence is also expressed--or rather invoked--by painting the
matrikas with red ochre, the blood of Earth (in ancient Egypt, Japan,
Canaan, Indus foothills, Mexico, Utah, to name a few). Many ancient
peoples also painted the bones of their dead with this sign of
life-bearing blood. The matrikas themselves were commonly buried with
the dead, as signs of rebirth.
The sign of hands-on-belly also evokes this power of the origin and
center. It is first seen on paleolithic statuettes, like the mammoth
ivory matrikas at Mal'ta, Siberia. A limestone relief from Laussel
places one hand on the belly, the other holding a animal horn. In the
7th MBCE, a small marble statuette with hands over belly was created
at Catal Höyük, and dozens of alabaster women were carved in the same
attitude at Tell-es-Sawwan, Iraq. In the 5th MBCE this gesture is seen
in the stone women of the Ozieri culture in Sardinia, the Lady of
Paszardjik in Bulgaria, the Vinca matrikas, and many other Balkan
icons. Their torsos are inscribed with rich labyrinthine patterns in
the Tisza culture of Hungary. In the fourth millennium, the Valdivia
figurines from ancient Ecuador and the Hongshan culture in
northeastern China also clasp their centers.
Countless examples of the hands-on-belly sign are found in the
Americas: in the Paracas and Nazca cultures of Peru; the Condorhuasi
of Argentina; the Marajoara in Brazil; Guanacaste-Nicoya, Costa Rica;
in El Salvador, and in thousands of examples from Mexico, from
Chupícuaro to the western coast. In Colima and Jalisco they are
painted with elegant spirals over their wombs. In Veracruz, the
Huastec created beautiful stone sculptures of women holding their
bellies. The Arawaks sculptured a nearly round zemi stone in this
stance at Santo Domingo in the Caribbean. Seated women from a mound at
Dayton, Tennessee, are sculptured in stone with hands-on-belly motif.
It appears in ceremonial pipes of the Tapajós river in Brazil and of
the mound temple cultures of eastern North America. The woman's belly
is the bowl of the pipe. One of these pipes, found at Mt. Vernon,
Indiana, was gorgeously carved in stone as a birth-giving woman.
Wooden ancestor statues from Malawi to Senegal make the ancient
gesture of clasping the center, as if to say, "I contain, I am
brimming with vital power." This is the classic stance of African
sculpture (but that is another article). Centuries ago in Ghana, the
Ashanti created clay ancestor effigies, usually representing the heads
alone. In more recent times, young women tie wooden akua-ba into their
clothing in order to conceive. The small wooden statues retain the
large heads of the old ceramic icons, but their overall outline, with
arms outstretched, resembles the ancient Egyptian ankh.
The ancestor connection is explicit in the Hongshan culture of the 4th
MBCE in northeastern China. Matrikas are found on and around
red-painted circular altars in temples that are also funerary
sanctuaries surrounded by burial grounds. At Niuheliang, which Chinese
archaeologists call a "female spirit temple," they discovered many
small clay figurines and several lifesized unfired clay statues of
women, delicately painted with red patterns. All but one of the
lifesize clay women await development of a technology that will allow
them to be excavated without being destroyed. Another shrine with
matrikas has been excavated at Dongshanzui. [Nelson 1991: 302-308;
Yang 1999: 76-81, 96-97]
In ancient Japan, people placed dogu figurines on stone altars at the
northwest side of their houses. A smaller number have been founded
buried in the ground, some inside stone circles. Most have been found
in middens, broken, causing Japanese archaeologists to speculate that
they were used in healing or magical ceremonies. Other archaeological
finds have a clear-cut sacramental context. Marija Gimbutas has called
attention to the Moldavian shrine at Sabatinivka, with its altar full
of painted matrikas sitting on tiny horned chairs, and a life-sized
chair in the same shape. [Gimbutas 1991, 14; 260-62] At Ovcharovo Tell
in Bulgaria, archaeologists excavated a similar "cult scene" of
painted figurines with their arms raised. They were accompanied by an
array of clay furniture, including painted panels, little chairs,
tables with tiny lidded vessels, querns and grinding stones, as well
as a couple of larger bowls. [Stefanova et al., 2004:7]
Matrikas are also clearly treated as sacred images in 6th millennium
Iraq. In the early levels of Tell es-Sawwan, alabaster female icons
were found in rooms where thick layers of residue showed that
offerings had been burned there over long periods. One matrika stood
in a central niche in the wall of the end room. D.G. Youkana thinks
the building "had a religious purpose": the veneration of "a mother
deity with prominent buttocks." He compares this shrine to a building
of similar layout at Yarim Tepe, which had "no domestic debris" and "a
number of figurines representing a mother deity..." Rooms of similar
orientation and contents were excavated in level IV at Tell Hassuna.
Another shrine was found at Choga Mami, in a heavily plastered room
with three conical pillars in its corners (and traces of a fourth),
along with "remains of clay figurines representing seated women" and
"highly polished pestles." [Youkana 1997: 16-17, 50-58]
Matrikas are often found together with animal figurines, especially in
the oldest archaeological layers. This association repeats the
connection of vulvas with animals in many ancient petroglyphs.
Sometimes the matrikas themselves show animal traits, like the
vulture-headed icons of Amratian Egypt or the snake-faced nursing
mother at al-Ubaid, Iraq. At Vinca, Serbia, a bear-headed mother
suckles a bear-baby, and several other icons have duckbills. The
famous goddess from a granary at Çatal Höyük sits on a throne flanked
by leopards, the prototype for Kybele and her lions many millennia
later. At Hacilar, too, a woman sits on a leopard throne, their tails
snaking up her back. Another stands with a leopard cub balanced on her
hip, the tail dangling. At Lago Valencia, Venezuela, it is snakes that
hang from the matrika's shoulders to her inner thighs. A serpent also
crawls over the lap of a seated figurine of the Namazga culture,
Turkmenistan.
Matrikas often wear necklaces, headdresses, or caps. Some have
elaborate coiffures, like the big hair of the Valdivia figurines or
the bitumen topknots of al-Ubaid in southern Iraq. The women at Çatal
Höyük wear caps with a rolled edge, while it was pointed hats with
concentric rings at Hacilar. Over much of south and central America,
the women wear squared, flat headdresses. Sometimes, as in Pakistan,
Japan, Mexico and Utah, the matrikas are garbed in ceremonial dress.
The "Fremont" matrikas of eastern Utah wear beautiful necklaces and
deer-hoof-rattle belts; their faces are painted with curved lines of
red ochre. Jomon dogu often wear robes emblazoned with spirals and
other patterns, and occasionally spiralled hats. Certain Mexican
styles, such as Zapotec and Remojadas, stand out for their festival
attire, with rich headdresses, plumes, and ornaments. The most
elaborate costumes are found on matrikas in Pakistan and India. They
are festooned with thick layers of necklaces, bangles, long earrings,
and towering headdresses laden with discs, flowers, and rolls of
cloth. These styles were already well developed before the 3rd
millennium, when they appear on the well-known matrikas at
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. They carry on through the 2nd millennium in
north India, and continue into the Maurya period of the last centuries
BCE.
Such cases demonstrate the spread of styles from one region to
another. Perhaps the most spectacular case of proven cultural
diffusion is the spread of al-Ubaid matrikas and ceramic styles from
southern Iraq to Turkmenistan in the Namazga epoch, and from there to
Baluchistan in the hills west of the Indus. Another well-known example
is the spread of a prototype originating in the area of Halaf, Syria.
The Halafian style rapidly swept over much of west Asia at the height
of the neolithic era. The spread of its distinctive breast-cupping
matrikas and vessels painted with bull's heads, butterflies, and
Maltese crosses, was a veritable cultural movement, and not associated
with conquest or ethnic migration.
The spread of artistic styles is likely to have borne along ideas and
ceremonial practices as well. The newly adopted features were, after
all, used in offering vessels and grave goods. As Marija Gimbutas
recognized, "formal repetition" of symbolic elements is a key element
of the ancient iconography. [Gimbutas 1974: 38] In fact, all religions
employ it. However, a reluctance is still evident, particularly on the
part of Anglophone academics, to consider the neolithic female icons
as having religious significance.
Diffusion does not explain the trans-historical and intercontinental
recurrence of certain themes. "Coffee-bean" eyes are one of the most
widespread features; they turn up at Sesklo, Greece; Hacilar,
Anatolia; Sha'ar haGolan, Canaan; Chupícuaro, Mexico; in ancient
Japan, Pakistan, and India; in the southern Andes and over much of
Colombia, Venezuela and the Caribbean. The shape comes naturally to an
artist working in clay, who can easily add a blob of clay and make an
eye with one horizontal impression. But the coffeebean eyes were also
carved with considerable difficulty in walrus ivory in the Okvik
culture of St Laurence Island, Alaska, and elsewhere in wood and
stone.
Other renditions include slit eyes (Jomon-period Japan; Achilleion,
Greece; Valdivia, Ecuador; Santarem, Brazil); inlaid eyes (predynastic
Egypt, Tell es-Sawwan, Iraq; Be'ersheva, Israel); painted eyes
(notably at Tepe Gawra, Iraq); and round "goggle" eyes (Japan,
Pakistan, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil). Artists in ancient Louisiana
and medieval Georgia rendered eyes with rectangular incisions
recalling the faces on Pueblo kachinas. The Vinca icons of Serbia are
instantly recognizable by their distinctive angled, convex eyes. "Eye
goddesses" of ancient Syria and Iberia placed great emphasis on this
feature. At Tell Brak, they were carved in stone, often with eyes in
the center of the breasts. Perhaps they signify the "eye of life" that
Sumerians, farther down the Euphrates, attributed to the goddess
Ninhursag.
In some regional styles, the matrikas are faceless or have very
abstract or cursory features. In the Halafian style, the heads are
often just a pinched clay tip. Some Sudanese statuettes have the same
pinched face, but with tiny incised features. In Baluchistan,
ring-like eyes were added to a hand-pinched face; at Gumla, the heads
were rendered as flat tabs. Early Hamangia (Romania) and Cycladic
icons have featureless pillar-heads. Sharply beaked faces are seen on
some early Egyptian, Balkan, Halafian and Cycladic matrikas.
Mask-faces are well-known for Jomon and Vinça, but also appear in
Martinique and elsewhere.
Some matrikas stand, others sit or, occasionally, crouch with their
knees up. Often their legs are close together, tapering to a point,
even merged into a single block. (This motif was popular from the
Mediterranean to Pakistan.) Or they assume a widelegged stance,
especially common in Japan, South America and western Mexico. These
regions also favor broad-bodied women, depicted in large hollow clay
statues. Some have bulbous legs, as in Japan, Venezuela, and Mexico.
In other places the legs are rounded, as on the little marble Karanovo
icon from Tell Azmak, Bulgaria, and elsewhere in southeastern Europe.
Sometimes the bulbed legs resemble breasts, especially on the classic
Karajá matrikas of Brazil, which terminate in nipples. Halafian
matrikas have very round legs that taper to a point. Sometimes they
are painted with horizontal lines. This motif of lines painted or
incised horizontally on the legs spread over much of west Asia and the
Balkans, including the Sesklo and Cucuteni cultures. It occurs as far
east as Taxila, Pakistan. An older expression is the segmented legs
seen at Kato Ierpetra, Crete, and the Yarmukian sites south of lake
Galilee.
A very ancient type of seated matrika has a triangular profile, often
with the outstretched legs drawn up in a curved shape, or in their
most abstract form, flanged outward. These are among the oldest clay
figurines, appearing in the 9th millenium at Tepe Sarab and Jarmo Iran
(where one archaeologist calls them "double-wing-based objects."
[Morales 1983: figures 157, 164] Others appear somewhat later at Netiv
Hagdud, Israel; Cayönü, Anatolia; and Mehrgarh, Pakistan.
Seated matrikas with outstretched, tapered legs in a triangular
pattern were also quite common in southern America many thousands of
years later. This is the classic form at Marajó and Santarem in
Brazil; Diquís in Panamá, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Kaminaljiujú in
Guatemala. But a wide diversity of styles developed in the Americas.
In the Condorhuasi culture of Argentina, the hollow legs are
outstretched, while in Illinois and Ohio, they tend to be drawn up to
one side. In the Ulúa valley of Hondoras, matrikas are often
cross-legged, and from Georgia through Louisiana to Missouri, they sit
with calves folded under thighs. Many others stand.
The arms of some matrikas are abstracted to vestigial stubs (classic
Vinca, Lengyel, Cucuteni, the "C-Group" in Sudan, some Mexican and
Japanese, and many Pakistani and Indian matrikas). A few at Tepe
Gawra, Iraq, and Meroe, Sudan, are entirely armless. Occasionally the
legs too are missing, with the artist's attention entirely devoted to
a curved torso. Stone images of this shape have been dubbed "fiddle
idols." Pillar-headed "violin" figurines of polished stone have been
found at Gilat, Israel, and in the Cycladic islands, dating to the
third millennium. Around the same time, violin-shaped matrikas appear
in the Namazga culture of Turkmenistan. One from Altyn Depe has
coffeebean eyes, a large dotted vulva, and a "tree of life" pattern
incised on her torso. An in-the-round Indian version comes from
Bilwedi, Madhya Pradesh, circa 1000 BCE. She is entirely covered with
red ochre paint.
Classic matrika shapes cross over into other media in some places.
Rock art and offering vessels underline their ceremonial context.
Silhouettes shaped like matrikas appear in rock art at Beyuk-dasha, in
the western part of the former USSR. Eight women stand in front of a
large bovine creature; though armless, they are shown as if holding
staves or crooks. Abstract matrika outlines were also sometimes
painted on the walls of pots. Predynastic Egyptians brushed their
armless silhouettes onto zigzag-adorned pots. Or they were modeled in
relief, like the woman on the side of a vessel at Maheshvar in the
Indian Deccan, 2nd millennium BCE. Another abstract figurine with
raised arms was fashioned on a pot at Umm Dabaghiyeh, Iraq, circa 6500
BCE.
The vulture-faced matrikas of Amratian Egypt are famous for their
invocational stance, with arms raised in a curve above their beaked
heads. This motif is repeated in ochre-painted pots of the Gerzean
period, which frequently show a goddess or priestess lifting her arms
in a circle-shape. Usually the woman stands in a boat, as the focal
point of a tableau of people, birds, and animals. This scene is
repeated in a petroglyph in the eastern desert: she stands in a boat
that a group of women are towing up the Nile. The upraised curve of
her arms is strongly reminiscent of the dances that women in Uganda
and Namibia still perform in honor of the cow.
Painted pots are like neolithic canvases that allow glimpses of
ceremonial culture. In ancient Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, China, and
Greece, they show scenes of women dancing hand in hand. Spirals,
animals, plants, quadrants, water and net patterns were painted or
incised on ancient vessels all over the world. The symbolism of
offering vessels allows insight into the spiritual values of cultures
that have not left a written record. Many pay reverence to the
principles of nurture and the life-giver.

breastpots
Breast tripods were a common form of ceremonial chalice in ancient
northeastern Asia, from China and Mongolia to southern Siberia. A clay
tripod from Aginskoye in the Transbaikal bears narrow incisions of
parallel vertical lines on the breasts. In neolithic China, the
breastpots of the late Yangshao period are painted with spirals and
lines. They have been identified as prototypes of the bronze age Li
tripods, one of many deep continuities that pulsed through Chinese
culture. A variety of unadorned breast tripods continued to be
produced in clay during the Shang dynasty. A related style of tripods
were beautifully painted with curling flame-like patterns in orange on
cream in the Mongolian Xiajiadian culture.
Miguel Covarrubias was one of the first scholars to remark on the
stylistic similarities between ancient Chinese and American cultures.
He presented a compelling visual comparison of breast tripods from Sha
Jing, Gansu and Chupícuaro, Mexico. Both have a narrow band with
dot-impressions around the neck. [Covarrubias 1967] These breast
tripods are found in a variety of styles from the Mexican plateau
through central America into Colombia. A Colombian breast-tripod is
decorated with pecked dots and lines, some ending in tiny spirals. It
too has the thin dot-impressed band. A more unusual example from
Guatemala is glazed and stands on more than three breasts.
Women in the lower Mississippi region created a different style of
breastpot. In the area of Nashville, Tennessee, potters fashioned
rounded and painted breasts on footed vessels. Some have narrow necks
for pouring libations. Others are capped with female heads. Vessels
with breasts facing the four directions have been found in farflung
locations: in the Philippines at Mindoro, Calapan; as stirrup-top
libation vessels in several Peruvian cultures; and in the Lausitz
region of Germany.
This last group of breastpots closely resemble an early Cucuteni
prototype over three thousand years older, from Negresti, Romania. The
vessels are remarkably similar in shape and even in the tender
modelling of the breasts. The neolithic pot is set apart by light
fingertip swirls that surround and connect the breasts. A later phase
of Cucuteni-Tripolye expressed the same motif in a different way. A
pot from Levikovsky, Ukraine, has four large breasts incised with
spirals that flow toward the nipples. Another variation on the theme
comes from Glendora, Arkansas, perhaps 700 years ago; it is skillfully
inscribed with sinuous double spirals that feed into each other and
swirl around the four breasts. A pot from the ancient Otomanská
culture in central Europe is covered with small, pointed breasts (and
again here undulating curved lines join the breasts). Rounded breasts
entirely cover the surface of a late Chavín vessel from Tembladora,
Peru.
African artists created unique styles of breast pots. A late-period
Kemetic vessel stands on multiple breasts connected to the Tjet symbol
sacred to Isis. The Matakam of Cameroon create "soul pots" (mbulom)
with two round breast bulbs and a neck (or necklace) adorned with clay
studs. In northern Nigeria, the Nupe make a waterpot-stand as a
breasted cylinder adorned with patterned lines and studs. Here the
nurturing sign of the breasts is connected with the life-giving power
of water and integrated into daily life as part of the home furniture.
An Öllampe pot of the Yoruba has a breasted pillar raised above a bowl
by four skirtlike curved bands. Its arms reach up to grasp another
bowl where the head would be. The breasts and arms are covered with
dotted striations. Another ritual pot shows a human figure--not an
infant--suckling at breasts molded into the pot, which represent the
goddess of the Ogun river. The Aworri Yoruba also make pots
consecrated to river deities; a woman sits on each pot lid, holding
between her breasts a small pot filled with stones from the riverbed.
Here the sign of the female breast is used for river gods as well as
goddesses. A precedent for this exists in Kemetic representations of
Hapi, god of the Nile, who was always depicted with the breasts of a
woman. These traditions emphasize the sacred meaning of the breast
sign as a broad metaphor for life-giving power.

<<< Breast pot from Mindoro, Philippines

motherpots
People all over the world made ceremonial use of the woman-vessel:
Canaanites, Indonesians, and the Nok culture in ancient Nigeria. Some
beautiful examples come from the Ozark region of Missouri. Female
effigy vessels from Costa Rica and Ecuador show hands on belly. Their
bodies are artfully painted, as are their counterparts at Casas
Grandes in Chihuahua. One of these shows a sitting woman with one hand
to her breast and the other cupping her belly. The vessel opens
through the basket on her back. So do the Canastera (basket-woman)
pots of Calima, Colombia, in the 8th century BCE. Like the Costa Rican
and Chihuahuan vessels, they show very solidly built women with
peaceful expressions.
A magnificent vessel from the great Colombian mound at Betancí
exemplifies the iconic power of the hands-on-belly gesture. Four women
face the directions, cradling their bellies. Their torsos and
shoulders are lightly incised with signs, and they wear patterned
sarongs slung low around their hips. The women smile, gazing dreamily
through half-closed coffee-bean eyes. Probably they represent
ancestral mothers, as do present-day female effigy pots of the
indigenous Embera. [Labbé 1998: 197] Betancí is a place where
predominately female iconography clearly correlates with high female
status: "historical sources confirm that women held considerable
political power in this region, sometimes ruling entire provinces."
The Spanish were stunned to find that a great cacica (female
chieftain) governed the Zenúes from her capital of Finzenú. In true
matrilineal style, she is associated with a brother, not a husband.
[Labbe 1998: 37-40, 173-178]
Many ancient cultures customarily placed remains of the dead,
especially children, in funerary urns shaped like women. Or they
filled them with burial offerings of food and drink. At Hacilar,
Anatolia, woman-vessels with hands to the breasts are painted in red
ochre with lines, spirals, chevrons and zigzags. Around the same time,
circa 5500, motherpots appear in a different style at Grades^nica,
Bulgaria. Breasted ossuaries with mask-faced female heads occur at
Azar in the southern Levant circa 4000 BCE. Maternal urns were also
favored in early Crete, on Cyprus, and at Troy, where they are modeled
with the "ancestor-face," breasts, and raised arms. In Etruria they
hug the belly. Female vessels were laid among burial goods across the
Americas, from the great Brazilian ceremonial center of Marajó to the
mounds of Arkansas and Illinois.
Fascinating similarities turn up between some of these mother-pots.
Around 5500 we find ochre-painted offering vessels at Hacilar with a
woman's head and neck forming the neck of the vessel. This
construction appears around the same time at Hassuna in Iraq and in
the Starc^evo culture in Bulgaria. For these a cultural connection is
conceivable, but not for the similarities between the Hassuna urn and
those of the Diaguitas culture that flourished in the southern Andes
some six and a half millennia later.
[Above: Hassuna. Below: Diaguitas]

Both woman-vessels have stovepipe necks enclosing a face framed by
patterns, and other designs painted on their rounded bodies. Both
faces show the ancestor face: the two arches of the brow connected
like bird's wings over a snub-nose. Both have coffee-bean eyes with
lines streaming from them. The triad of vertical lines on the Iraqi
urn also appears in South American archaeology, so frequently that it
has been given a name: the "crying eye" motif. This sign appears on
female urns of the Calchaquí culture in Argentina, at Cunaní in
northern Brazil, and as far north as Chihuahua (where three vertical
lines were painted below the eyes on the woman-pot described above).
In our Chilean example, the line is diagonal and encloses a zigzag.
Woman-urns with diagonals or zigzags below the eyes are also known
from Samarra, Iraq; Hacilar, Anatolia; and the early Vinca culture in
Macedonia, circa 5100 BCE. Separated as they are by many thousands of
years, and even more miles, I can confidently state that no historical
diffusion or ethnic connections account for such distinctive
resemblances. They appear of their own accord out of the human
creative spirit and common cultural meanings. They are icons of the
grieving mother and of the ancestral source that people looked to for
rebirth.
The "crying eye" sign appears in west African megaliths as well. Stone
pillars in the upper Cross river region of Nigeria show lines
streaming from their heavily outlined eyes. One has a mask-like
lioness silhouette around the face. The gender is not clearly marked,
unless the outlined oval swelling on the belly represents pregnancy.
The Ekoi people venerate the stones as ancestors.

I came across another stunning resemblance of Diaguitas ceramics to a
much older neolithic counterpart. Around 1500 CE Chilean potters made
breasted bird-woman vessels, painted with kaolin, carbon and ochres.
Their descendants have kept the prototype alive, though they no longer
paint them. Their bird-pots express the same concept as breasted
vessels in the shape of waterbirds from the Körös group in Hungary,
circa 5500 BCE. [Gimbutas 1991:29] Breasted bird decanters of an
entirely different shape were made in the ancient Aegean, with a long
spout and dotted circles around the breasts. Whatever the style, a
nurturant bird-mother is the common theme.

[Illustration on left is the 7500-year-old European vessel; the South
American at right.]

An unusual woman-pot comes from Tell Far'ah, Jordan, circa 4000 BCE: a
ceramic figure raises her arms toward a pot that sits on her shoulders
in place of a head. Occasionally vulvas are highlighted, on round-eyed
clay matrikas attached to a Carib pot at Vivé, Martinique, and on a
fierce-looking woman sticking out her tongue on an apotropaic Tairona
vessel of Colombia. An outright sheila-na-gig turns up at the classic
Halaf site in Syria. Some unique pots of the Nazca culture in Peru are
molded and painted with a series of large, fully naturalistic vulvas,
with clitoris. More abstract vulva forms are painted on pots of the
Banpo (China) and Cucuteni-Tripolye (Ukraine) cultures. Vulvas were
painted with fine red ochre lines on vessels from Thailand, circa 2500
BCE.
Some are certain to object to this interpretation, so I refer them to
a similar fine-lined vulviform on a Hopi pot. In this case, an
authentic culture-bearer can shed light on the symbolism. The master
potter Dextra Quotsquyva explains that she painted this sign to
represent the womb of Mother Earth as the source of life, "surrounded
by the spirits of all unborn people entering the world." [Arnold 1982:
603] This does not "prove" that the neolithic Thai symbol is a vulva,
but does demand serious consideration of the idea. Matrix icons are
still a living tradition, and their custodians unequivocally affirm
their sacredness.

Notes
1. Clearly not all present-day matrilineal systems are egalitarian.
Many, particularly those practicing patrilocal residence, show
increased emphasis on patrilineal inheritance and the sexual double
standard that goes with it. The historic trend toward patriarchy
deserves further analysis not possible in this short article. My use
of "matrix" rather than "matriarchy" is a strategic choice, not only
because of its multiple resonances, but also for clarity, and to
interrupt the misrepresentation of these cultures as another system of
domination. But feminist scholars of this subject, whether they use
"matriarchy," "gylany," or other terms, agree that the egalitarian
matrilineages uphold a different paradigm than the hierarchical
patriarchal societies.
2. Jacques Cauvin (2000: 205) calls these female icons the "central
preoccupation of the Neolithic."

Bibliographical References
Anderson, Jørgen
1977 The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British
Isles. London: George Allen & Unwin
Andersons, Edgars
1953 Cross Road Country: Latvia. Waverly, Iowa: Latvju Gramata.
Arnold, David
1982 "Pueblo Pottery: 2,000 Years of Artistry," National Geographic.
(November): 593-605.
Cauvin, Jacques
2000 The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chareonwong, Phisit
1988 Silpa Tham Nai Prathet Tai [Rock Art in Thailand]. Bangkok:
Victory Powerpoing
von Cles-Reden, Sybille
1962 The Realm of the Great Goddess: The Story of the Megalith
Builders. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall
Covarrubias, Miguel
1967 The Eagle, the Jaguar and the Serpent: Indian Art in the
Americas. New York: Knopf.
Crawford, O. G. S.
1991 The Eye Goddess. Oak Park IL: Delphi [1st ed. 1957].
Empie, Sunnie
1999 "The Empie Petroglyph Site, AZ U: 1:165 (ASM)." Online:
www.boulderhousepublishers.com/content/petroglyphsitepaper.htm
Accessed October 3, 2004
Flint, Valerie
1991 The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Gimbutas, Marija
1991 The Civilizationof the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San
Francisco: Harper
_______ .
1974 The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500: Myths, Legends
and Cult Images. University of California Press, Los Angeles.
Gunn Allen, Paula
1986 The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press.
Imperato, Pascal James
1983 Buffoons, Queens, and Wooden Horsemen: the Dyo and Gouan
Societies of the Bambara of Mali. New York: Kilima House.
Krickeberg, Walter, et al., eds.
1968 Pre-Colombian American Religions. History of Religion, series
editor E.O. James New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston.
Labbé, Armand
1998 Shamans, Gods, and Mythic Beasts: Colombian Gold and Ceramics in
Antiquity. New York: University of Utah Press.
Mann, Barbara Alice
2000 Iroquoian Women: the Gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang
McGowan, Charlotte
1991 Ceremonial Fertility Sites in Southern California, San Diego
Museum Papers, No. 14 [1st ed. 1982].
Morales, Vivian Bromen
1983 "Jarmo Figurines and Other Clay Objects." In Prehistoric
Archaeology of the Zagros Flank, Chicago: Oriental Institute.
Nelson, Sarah M.
1991 "The `Goddess Temple' and the Status of Women at Niuheliang,
China." In The Archaeology of Gender, edited by Dale Walde and Noreen
Willows, Calgary: Chacmool.
Pattanaik, Devdutt
2000 The Goddess in India: Five Faces of the Eternal Feminine.
Rochester VT: Inner Traditions
Paulson, Ivar
1971 The Old Estonian Folk Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Pemberton, John III
1989 "The Carvers of the Northeast," in Yoruba: Nine Centuries of
African Art and Thought, edited by Henry John Drewel et al., New York:
Harry Abrams.
von Puttkamer, W. Jesco
1979 "Man in the Amazon: Stone Age Present Meets Stone Age Past."
National Geographic (January): 60-82
Saville, Marshall H
1907 The Antiquities of Manabí, Ecuador. New York: Irving Press.
Sebillot, Paul
1904 La Folklore de la France. Paris: Librairie Orientale et
Americaine.
Stefanova et al.
2004 "Bulgarian Lands in Antiquity." National Museum of History: A
Guide, edited by M. Totomanova and V. Shishkova. Sofia: Bulgarian
Bestseller.
Twohig, Elizabeth Shee
1981 The Megalithic Art of Western Europe. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Trimborn, Herman
1968 "South Central America and the Andean Civilizations." In
Pre-Colombian American Religions. Edited by W. Krickeberg et al.,
83-114.
Wen, Yiqun
1995 Maternal Souls Amidst Wooden Drums: the Wa. Kunming: Yunnan
Educational Publishing.
Yang, Xiaoneng,
1999 "The Hongshan Culture." In The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology:
Celebrated Discoveries from the People's Republic of China. New Haven:
Yale University Press. Edited by Yang Xiaoneng, 72-98.
Youkana, Donny George
1997 Tell es-Sawwan: the Architecture of the 6th Millennium BC.
London: Nabu Publications.
Zerries, Otto.
1968 "Primitive South America and the West Indies." In Pre-Colombian
American Religions. Edited by W. Krickeberg et al., 230-310.
No author listed
1990 Parques arqueologicos de Colombia. Bogota: Instituto Colombiano
de Antropologia.

Icons of the Matrix © 2004 Max Dashu

Home