Rasa Von Werder

Saturday, 5 October 2013

WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN 3

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

www.WomanThouArtGod which will house many thousands of her photos, including erotic. This website will educate regarding sex & male-female relationships. It is a far cry from the celibacy Rasa practiced for most of her life - she will now espouse the goodness of sex. There will be shrines to the Lingam (penis), Yoni (vagina) & a shrine to Rasa as Guru. There will be teachings on Tantra, the way to God by worship of the female body.

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CRETE – "DOMINATED BY THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE"

Many classical authors wrote that the Lycians and the Carians had strong affinities with the island of Crete. Some claimed that Lycia had once been a colony of that thriving island culture. Upon Crete, Goddess figures have been found in various Neolithic sites, though none as old as those on the mainland. On the Messara plain of Crete, the buildings known as tholoi, extremely similar to those of the Halaf site of Arpachiyah, have also been discovered. From Neolithic periods until the Dorian invasion, Crete was the society that is most repeatedly thought to have been matrilineal and possibly matriarchal.

The former director of the British School of Archaeology in Greece, Sinclair Hood, wrote in The Minoans, Crete in the Bronze Age:

It seems likely enough that customs of the kind described as matriarchy (mother rule) persisted in Crete. These arise in primitive societies where people no not comprehend when a baby is born who its father can be. The children are therefore named after the mothers and all inheritance is through the female line. Primeval traditions of this kind survived in western Anatolia into classical times. Thus among the Carians on the west coast of Anatolia succession was still through the mother in the fourth century BC and in Lycia, to the south-east of Caria, children were named after their mothers.

Charles Seltman wrote in 1952 of this highly developed culture of Crete, whose beginnings preceded biblical times by many centuries. He stated that, upon Crete, matriarchy had been the way of life. He discussed the sexual freedom of women, matrilineal descent and the role of the "king," pointing out the high status of women in and around the land in which the Goddess appears to have been the very core of existence.

"Among the Mediterraneans," wrote Seltman, "as a general rule society was built around the woman, even on the highest levels where descent was in the female line. A man became King or Chieftain only by a formal marriage and his daughter, not his son, succeeded so that the next chieftain was the youth who married his daughter…Until the northerners arrived, religion and custom were dominated by the female principle."

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In The Aegean Civilization. Gustave Glotz, writing in 1925, examined the role of women on Crete and asserted that women initially controlled the form and rites of the religion. He explains that.

The priestesses long presided over religious practices. Woman was the natural intermediary with divinities, the greatest of whom was women deified. Hosts of objects represent the priestesses at their duties…the participation of men in the cult was, like the association of a god with a goddess, a late development. Their part in religious ceremonies was always a subordinate one, even when the king became the high priest of the bull. As if to extenuate their encroachment and to baffle the evil spirits to whose power this act had exposed them, they assumed for divine services the priestly costume of women…while private worship was performed in front of small idols, in public worship the part of the Goddess was played by a woman. It is the high priestess who takes her place on the seat of the Goddess, sits at the foot of the sacred tree or stands on the mountain peak to receive worship and offerings from her acolytes and from the faithful.

Stylianos Alexiou, Director of the Archaeological Museum in Iraklion, writes in the chapter on the religion of Crete in Minoan Civilization, "The alabaster throne at Knossos was intended, according to Helga Reusch, for the Priestess-queen, who, flanked by the griffins painted on the wall, personified the goddess. In the Royal Villa the throne which is set apart like a kind of sacred altar, shows that an actual person sat there to receive worship. According to Matz, when the queen descended the palace stairs to the courts within the shrines, she represented an authentic epiphany of the deity to the host of ecstatic worshippers."

In 1958 Jacquetta Hawkes presented some perceptive observations on the status of women on Crete, commenting that, although one may consider the possibility that the Goddess may have been a masculine dream, "Cretan men and women were everywhere accustomed to seeing a splendid goddess queening it over a small and suppliant male god, and this concept must surely have expressed some attitude present in the human society that accepted it." She continued by pointing out that the self-confidence of women and their secure place in society was perhaps made evident by another characteristic. "this is the fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression and was made obvious in the provocative dress of both sexes and their easy mingling – a spirit best understood through its opposite: the total veiling and seclusion of Moslem women under a faith which even denied them a soul."

In viewing the artefacts and murals at Knossos, the Archaeological Museum at Iraklion and other museums of Crete there is little doubt that the female divinity was for several millennia the principal sacred being on Crete, with women acting as Her clergy. It is therefore interesting to follow the manifestations of the Cretan culture as they later appeared in early Greece, about on thousand years before the classical Golden Age (about 500-200 BC), with which we are more familiar.

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GREECE – "THE ATTACK UPON THE MATRILINEAL CLANS"

The connection are made by the settlements of Crete and/or the mainland of Greece that are attributed to people known as the Mycenaeans, so named by archaeologists for one of the sites on the mainland – Mycenae. Clues to the origins of the people who inhabited these sites have presented scholars with some intriguing possibilities. Most believe that the Myycenaeans were a group of Indo-Europeans, perhaps the same people as the Acheans, or possibly those from an earlier migration of tribes from the north. Other scholars assert that they were already residents of Crete and that they overthrew the previous government shortly before 1400 BC. Some relate them to the group known as the Sea Peoples, while still others suggest that they were the Philistines or that the Philistines were a branch of the Mycenaeans. There has been the suggestion that the Mycenaens were related to the Hyksos, the "shepherd kings" who used horse-drawn war chariots and had previously held Egypt under their rule for several centuries. The Hyksos were driven out of Egypt at much the same time as the Mycenaens first appeared.

Whatever their initial origins, the reason that the Mycenaeans are important to us here is that their culture, as we best know it, was partially Cretan and partially Greek. Most scholars believe that they carried the Cretan culture from Crete to Greece. The Linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans, which are inventory lists, found at the palace of Knossos and all dated to the same year, about 1400BC, used a language that scholars believe differed from those previously used on Crete. After many years of debate, most authorities accept that the language used these tablets (written with many of the symbols and signs that had been used for an earlier language not yet deciphered, though Gordon has offered a body of evidence suggesting that it was closely related to the Canaanite language used in Ugarit) is an early form of Greek. If the Mycenaeans or their leaders were originally Indo-European, as the tablets suggest, once they settled in Crete they soon adopted much of the subject matter and the style of the crafts techniques, the style of dress, the manner of writing, and the religion of the previous inhabitants of the island.

Cottrell tells us that, "Mycenaean art continued to reflect the "Minoan" culture of the Mediterranean peoples…whose system of writing they had adopted." R.W. Hutchinson of the University of Cambridge writes that, "By the middle of the second millennium, probably, Greeks were already settling in Crete, but only in comparatively small numbers, and these Mycenaean Greeks had already adopted many Creten cults and religious customs. Even on the mainland we find survivals from Minoan or least pre-Hellenic religion…

In the Catalog of Prehistoric Collections of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens the curators point out, "In Mycenaean religion, where the adoption of many Cretan features is obvious, we may note above all the appearance of the Cretan nature goddess." In this vast museum is the collection of artifacts discovered in the excavations of Mycenaean settlements on the mainland of Greece, a collection highlighted by the intricate craftsmanship of gold signet rings and seals that depict scenes of the Goddess and Her priestesses – Scenes nearly identical with those produced in "Minoan" Crete.

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Discussing the Linear B tablets, in which the names of several deities later known in classical Greece are briefly mentioned, Cottrell explains…there is also at Pylos [on the mainland] and at Knossos [on Crete] a frequent reference to Potia – "Mistress" or "Our lady"; these last inscriptions confirm what archaeologist has long suspected from the evidence on seals discovered on the mainland – that the Mycenaeans also worshipped the Minoan mother goddess."

The Mycenaeans inhabited and ruled Crete at the Palace of Knossos shortly before a major holocaust, possibly caused by an invasion or earthquake. These same people also founded many pre-Greek cities on the mainland – and with them they brought the worship of the Cretan Goddess. The Mycenaean Age is generally placed between about 1450 and 1100 BC. Its beginning date just before the period generally assigned to Moses. It thrived for centuries before the Greece of Homer and it is likely that it was of events during or just after this period that Homer wrote. The quest for Helen may well have been a quest for the legal rights to the throne of Sparta. Although classical Greece is so often presented as the very foundation of our western culture and civilization, it is interesting to realize that it actually came into being twenty-five centuries after the invention of writing and was itself formulated and influence by the Near Eastern culture that had preceded it by thousands of years.

Greece was invaded by the northern peoples several times. Robert Graves, in his introduction to The Greek Myths, wrote in 1955, "Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century BC seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition…when the Dorians arrived, towards the close of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the rule." With these northern people came the worship of the Indo-European Dyar Pitar, literally God Father, eventually known in Greece as Zeus and later in Rome as Jupiter. This transitional period of the change from the worship of the Goddess to the male deity, the change most intensively brought about by the Dorian invasions, was the subject of E. Butterworth's Some Traces of the Pre-Olympian World, written in 1966.

Butterworth managed to accomplish with Greece what Murray had done with Egypt. By carefully tracing the lineage for the royal houses, he ultimately showed that many of the greatest pre-Greek cities which were essentially small nations, were originally matrilineal. He pointed out that Argos, Thebes, Tiryns and Athens, as well as other cities, at one time followed matrilineal customs of descent. He explains that this was the result of the worship of the Goddess and Her Cretan origins, stating that Crete itself was matrilineal and possibly even matriarchal.

His primary interest was in the patrilineal revolution, the time at which the patrilineal clans violently set about superimposing their customs upon those around them:

Matrilineality, though not universal in the Greek and Aegean world, was widely spread…the effect of the system of succession to the kingship and to the inheritance of property on the life and times was immense. The majority of the clans were matrilineal by custom, and the greatest revolution in the history of early Greece was that by which the custom was changed from matrilineal to patrilineal succession and the loyalty of the clan destroyed.

From 3000 BC onward, priestesses had been portrayed in sculptures and appearing in murals and other artifacts of Crete, strongly suggesting that it was women who controlled the worship. Crete was later ruled by the Mycenaens, who then adopted their religion and many aspects of their culture. Since the religious artifacts of the Myceneeans depict the clergy of the Goddess as female, it is quite probable that the women in the Mycenaean communities of Greece also held this privilege. Butterworth asserted that it was the women, especially the women of the royal houses, who were the protectors of the religion. He further explains that.

The attack upon the matrilineal clans destroyed the power of the clan world itself and with it, its religion…the history of the times is penetrated through and through with the clash of patrilineal and matrilineal as the old religious dynasties were broken, swept away and re-established…The matrilineal world was brought to an end by a number of murderous assaults upon the heart of that world, the Potia Mater (The Great Goddess) herself.

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I cannot help but recall the Greek legend of the Goddess known as Hera, whose worship appears to have survived from Mycenaean times, and Her thwarted rebellion against Her newly assigned husband Zeus, surely and allegorical reminder of those who struggled for the primacy of the Goddess – and lost. Yet, according to Hawkes, many of the attitudes about the lowly position of the women of classical Greece were exaggerated by "the bias of nineteenth century scholarship." She suggests that, even in the classical period of Greece, women retained some of their Cretan predecessors' freedom:

Just as in Crete, women shared the power of the Goddess both psychologically and socially; priestesses were of high standing and priestly associations of women were formed round temples and holy places. There was an influential one for example associated with the famous temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus. At this city and indeed in Ionia generally, women and girls enjoyed much freedom. While women certainly won influence and responsibility by serving at the temples and great state festivals of the goddesses, there was also the liberation of the ancient cults. Respectable matrons and girls in large companies would spend whole nights on the bare hills in dances which stimulated ecstasy, and intoxication, perhaps partly alcoholic but mainly mystical. Husbands disapproved, but, it is said, did not like to interfere in religious matters.

In the classical age of Sparta, where the veneration of the Goddess as Artemis continued to thrive, women were extremely free and independent. According to both Euripedes and Plutarch, young Spartan women were not to be found at home but in the gymnasia where they tossed off their restricting clothing and wrestled naked with their male contemporaries. Women of Sparta appear to have had total freedom, and though monogamy was said to be the official marriage rule, it was mentioned in several classical accounts that it was not taken very seriously. Plutarch reported that in Sparta the infidelity of women was even somewhat glorified, while Nicholas of Damascus, perhaps as the result of some personal experience, tells us that a Spartan woman were entitled to have herself made pregnant by the handsomest man she could find, whether native or foreigner.

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN 4

Rasa Von Werder is now building a major website, a continuation of the sensationally successful

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CANAAN – "THE SOCIAL AND LEGAL POSITION OF AN ISRAELITE WIFE…"

I have saved the examination of the women in the two Hebrew nations of Judah and Israel for last, since we generally regard them as part of an isolated patriarchal society which worshipped the male deity alone. At this point it will be clarifying to compare the position of Hebrew women not only with their contemporaries in Babylon and Egypt, cultures so intertwined with their own, but also with the other women of Canaan, where they finally settled.

In the city of Ugarit in northern Canaan of the fourteenth century BC, which was not a Hebrew community, there are records of a woman whose title was translated as "Important Lady of the Royal House." She was known as the Adath (meaning Lady as the female counterpart of Adon meaning "Lord"). The Goddess in this area was known as Anath, which may be much the same word. The texts of Ugarit (present-day Ras Shamra in Syria), where legend of Anath were unearthed, revealed that this "Important Lady" took an active part in political affairs.

Claude Schaeffer, co-director of the first excavation at Ugarit, wrote in 1939, "The social status of women, and particularly the mother of the family, thus appears to have been a high one in Ugarit." Ugaritan documents of this same period reveal that upon divorce or widowhood a woman kept her own property. Legal records read much like those of Elam, stating that husbands let their possessions to their wives rather than their children; these children are told not to quarrel but to respect and obey their mother. As I shall explain in the following two chapters, at Ugarit there was a curious combination of the southern and northern cultures, reflected in their religious myths. There are accounts of many Indo-Europeans living in that city by the fourteenth century, yet the status of women does not appear to have been greatly affected by it at that time.

Among the Ammonites of Canaan, a people with whom the Hebrews were in repeated conflict, women acted in official capacities. In 1961 archaeologists G. Landes wrote of "the superior position of women being in agreement with nomadic practise." He stated that queens, such as the Queen of Sheba (about 950), at the times led Arab states or tribes and that this was also attested in the eight and seventh centuries BC.

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In contrast to the economic, legal and social position of women all about them, the position of the Israelite women exhibits the effects of the almost total acceptance of the male deity Yahweh, and the patriarchal society that accompanied it. According to the Bible, though no archaeological evidence has yet been found to confirm this, the Israelite laws date from the time of Moses (about 1300 – 1250 BC). They continue as the law of the Hebrews of Canaan until the fall of the northern kingdom known as Israel in 722 BC and the fall of the southern kingdom known as Judah in 583 BC. These same laws still appear in the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible to this day.

Through an intensive study of the Bible, archaeologist and priest Roland de Vaux made these observations about Hebrew women in his study of 1965, published as Ancient Israel:

The social and legal position of an Israelite wife was inferior to the position of a wife occupied in the great countries round about…all the texts show that Israelites wanted mainly sons, to perpetuate the family line and fortune, and to preserve the ancestral inheritance…A husband could divorce his wife…women on the other hand could not ask for divorce…the wife called her husband Ba'al or master; she also called him adon or lord; she addressed him in fact as a slave addressing he master or a subject, his king. The Decalogue includes a man's wife among his possessions…all her life she remains a minor. The wife does not inherit from her husband, nor daughters from their father, except when there is no male heir. A vow made by a girl or married woman needs, to be valid, the consent of the father or husband and if this consent is withheld, the vow is null and void. A man had the right to sell his daughter. A women were excluded from the succession.

De Vaux asserted that, unlike all the other cultures of the Near East, there were no priestesses allowed in the Israelite faith. He explained that:

…the suggestion that there were women among the clergy of the temple clashes with an important linguistic fact: there were priestesses in Assyria, priestesses and high priestesses in Phoenicia, where they are shown by the feminine of kohen; in the Minaean inscriptions there was a feminine form of lw' (priest) which some scholars would link with the Hebrew lewy, but Hebrew has no corresponding noun to kohen or lewy, no women ever held a place among the Israelite clergy.

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I might add that according to Hebrew law a woman had no right to money or property upon divorce and since her vow was invalid, presumably she could not engage in business. Perhaps the most shocking laws of all were those that declared that a woman was to be stoned or burned to death for losing her virginity before marriage, a factor never mentioned in other law codes of the Near East, and that, upon being the victim of rape, a single woman was forced to marry the rapist; if she was already betrothed or married she was to be stoned to death for having been raped.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of the status of early Hebrew women was revealed by archaeologist D. Ussishkin in 1970. He described an ancient Hebrew tomb recently unearthed in Israel in this way: "Thus it seems that one body, almost certainly that of the husband, was placed higher that the body of the wife, so that the women's inferior status was also demonstrated after her death."

Despite the lowly position of women decreed by the Hebrew laws and customs, there were two incidents that reveal a possible revival of the ancient Goddess religion, even within the royal house of Israel. Their association with the ancient beliefs suggests that two queens may have gained power through the ancient matrilineal customs, which had perhaps slipped back into Israel along with other "pagan" patterns. Both incidents involved women who were listed as Hebrew queens, on in Israel and the other in Judah.

The first concerns a woman known as Queen Maach, possibly a descendant of an Aramaean princess of the same name who was in the harem of Hebrew king David. The second Maacah was listed in the Bible as the queen of Rehoboam, king of Israel from about 922 to 913 BC. His mother was not Hebrew, but Ammonite princesses. This king is recorded as having erected "pagan" golden calves. Murray suggests that this name Queen Maacah was later the wife of the succeeding king, Abijam, who is listed as the son of Maacah and Reboboam. Her suggestion is based upon the fact that some versions of the Bible list Maacah as the mother of Abijam's son Asa. Other versions list Maacah as his grandmother, but place her name where the name of the mother would ordinary be listed and never mention who his mother was, a pattern quite unlike all other descriptions of a royal Hebrew sons. Murray wrote, "They only say that Abijam and Asa could have had the same mother, was by marriage of Abijam with his own mother."

It was Asa who brought about many Hebrew reforms, suppressing the then very prevalent "heathen" practices, and who finally had Maacah dethroned. In light of the curious discrepancies in Asa's genealogy, the reason given in the Bible for the dethronement is all the more interesting. In I Kings 15:2-14 we read that Maacah had made a asherah, that is, a statue of the Goddess Asherah. Considering the repeated evidence of "paganism" during this period, it seems quite likely that Israel had taken up the religious customs of old, at the time accepting the female religion and the female kinship succession to the throne. If this was so, then Maacah would have been the royal heiress and held this position until Asa, possibly under the influence of Hebrew priests, once again established the religion of Yahweh.

The second incident is dated about 842 BC, when Athaliah, daughter of Queen Jezebel, claimed the throne of Judah as her own. According to Hebrew law, women were not allowed to reign alone. Yet it required a violent revolution to dethrone her. Jezebel herself was closely identified with the ancient religion. Jezebel's parents, Athaliah's grandparents , where the high priestess and priest of Ashtoreth and Baal in the Canaanite city of Sidon, reigning there as queen and king. The murder of Jezebel, who had reigned alongside Ahab as queen in the northern kingdom of Israel, was actually a political assault upon the religion of the Goddess. This is made clear in the events that followed her murder in the biblical account in Kings I and II. So it is worth noting that it was Jezebel's daughter who ascended to the royal throne of Judah, the only women ever to rule the Hebrew nation alone. Most significant is the fact that, once Athaliah secured her rights to the throne, she reigned for about six years, re-establishing the ancient "pagan" religion throughout the nation, must to the distress of the Hebrew priests.

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SUMMARY

Through cause and effect between matrilineal decent, high female status and the veneration of the Goddess are often confused, we cannot avoid the fact that repeated evidence attests that the religion of the Goddess and a female kinship system were closely intertwined in many parts of the Near East. Though much of the material pertains to royalty, there is enough to suggest that matrilineal customs were practiced in many areas by the general population as well. In examining the transition from the Goddess religion to the worship of the male deity as supreme and the subsequent effects upon the status of women, we find certain patterns emerging.

From the beginning of the second millennium, the Assyrians were in close political and commercial contact with the Indo-European Hittites. Indo-European Hurrian princes appeared in various cities of northern Syria from that same time on. By 1600 BC Babylon was controlled by the Indo-European-led Kassites. By 1500 BC Assyria was completely under the control of the Hurrians who had formed the kingdom of Mitanni.

Accompanying these conquests was the introduction of the myth of Marduk, who, we are told, murdered the Goddess to gain his supreme position in Babylon. In Assyria the same myth was told, the name of Ashur simply substituted for the name Marduk. Throughout the second millennium, the Indo-Europeans made further inroads into the lands of Canaan and Mesopotamia and, as I Shall explain in the next two chapters, may have played an important role in the formation of the Hebrew religion and laws.

It may be helpful at this point to summarize the changes in the laws as they affected various aspects of the lives of women. In Eshnunna (in Sumer) at about 2000 BC, if a man raped a woman he was put to death. In the Old Babylonian period of Hammurabi, before the major incursions of the Indo-Europeans, though many of the northerners were in Babyonia even at that time, the same punishment was given. In the laws of Assyria, which are dated between 1450 and 1250 BC (when Assyra was under Indo-European control), we read that if a man rapes a woman the husband of father of that woman should then rape the rapist's wife or daughter and/or marry his own daughter to the rapist. The last part of the law was also the law of the Hebrews, who added that a raped woman must be put to death if she was already married or betrothed. Assyrian laws appear to be the first to mention abortion, assigning the penalty of death.

The reforms of Urukagina (about 2300BC) refer to the fact that women used to take two husbands, though at the time of his reign that was no longer allowed. In the laws of Eshnunna a man who took a second wife, after his wife had given birth to a child, was to be expelled from the house without any possessions. In Eshnunna, if a woman had a child by another man while her husband was away at war, her husband was expected to take her back as his wife. No punishment for adultery was mentioned. In Hammurabi's laws, if a woman related to another man sexually she was expected to take an oath at the temple and return home to her husband. The Assyrian and Hebrew laws give the husband the right to murder both the wife and lover.

It is somewhat difficult to make comparisons between the various places and periods since the laws seem to have been included to codify very specific incidents and refer to varying situations. The major changes in the law concerning women affected their right to engage in economic activities, what they might or might not inherit, what they in turn were allowed to pass on to their children, the attitude towards rape, abortion, infidelity on the part of the husband or wife and, among the Hebrews only, the penalty of death – for women – for the loss of virginity before marriage. These laws, since they primarily affected the economic and sexual activities of women, point to the likelihood that they were aimed at the matrilineal descent customs. The very fact that so many of the laws concerned women suggests that both the economic and sexual position of women was continually changing all the time of the first attested northern invasions (about 2300 BC) until the laws of the Hebrews, probably written down between 1250 and 1000 BC – though, as I mentioned, none of the original Hebrew text have yet been discovered.

In questioning to what extent the female kinship customs and the reverence of the female deity affected the status of women, we may perhaps best judge by our observations of the women of the Hebrew tribes who had accepted the worship of the new male deity alone and the subsequent laws controlling their position and rights in the society in which they lived.

We might also want to consider the possibility that, in an even more personal way, just as the Hebrews prayed for sons and rejoiced when male heirs were born to carry on the family line (not so far removed from the attitudes of many families even today), in matrilineal societies the birth of daughters was likely to have been considered a special blessing. Female children may have been especially cherished for the same reasons. According to the curators of the Archaeological Museum of University of Cambridge in England, even today, "Among the matrilineal Asanti in Africa, female children are especially valued because of their power to transmit blood (mogya), to continue the matriline (abusua)." In ancient times the Sun Goddess of Arinna in Anatolia was worshiped along with Her two daughters and a granddaughter. The Khasis of Assam worshiped their Goddess along with Her three daughters and a wayward son. What emotional effects this may have had upon the self-esteem and development of young girl at that time we can only guess.

A consciousness of the relationship of the veneration of the Goddess to the matrilineal descent of name, property and the rights to the throne is vital in understanding the suppression of the Goddess religion. As I shall explain, it was probably the underlying reason for the resentment of the worship of the Goddess (and all this it represented) by the patriarchal invaders who arrived from the north.

Judged by the continued presence of the Goddess as supreme deity in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies of the Near and Middle East, Goddess worship, probably accompanied by the matrilineal customs, appears to have existed without challenge for thousands of years. It is upon the appearance of the invading northerners, who from all accounts had established patrilineal, patriarchal customs and the worship of a supreme male deity sometimes before their arrival in the Goddess worshiping areas, that the greatest changes in religious beliefs and social customs appear to have taken place. Who were these northern people? And how were they able to gradually suppress and eventually destroy the ancient Goddess religions that had existed for so many thousands of years?