AHC: Feminine Monotheism

Philip

Donor
Maybe Yahveh gets blamed for the destruction of the Judean State and the non-deported Judeans turn to Asherah?
YHWH was blamed for the fall of the kingdom and the destruction of the temple. Or at least his wrath at the Judeans' sins was blamed.

The Judeans' religion taught that they inhabited the land at the pleasure of YHWH. Breaking that covenant would result the destruction of their kingdom. I think it might be a challenge to get a people to change their religion when they've just experienced an event that confirmed their beliefs. You would have to, in my opinion, challenge their entire identity as the children of Abraham. It's not impossible, but i think the OTL reaction of 'we screwed up' is more likely than a challenge to their identity.
 

Philip

Donor
A charismatic Prophet for Asherah?

Maybe combine that with Asherah as the wife of YHWH. The Fall of Judea is not enough to sate his wrath and he storms off in a huff. The prophet teaches that Asherah will protect the people, and she will restore them to the land if they are faithful. eventually their loyalty to Asherah will bring the forgiveness of YHWH as well and all will be happy in heaven and earth. They might be a way to reinterpret the covenant.

There would need to be some political and economic stability before the others return from Persia to demonstrate Asherah's favor.
 
Yes, but TBC I’m not talking about a masculine monotheism being reinterpretated after modern feminism has already made its mark, but a long lasting and widespread religion with a singular feminine deity from the get go.

OK, modify Shinto into a monotheistic religion with Amaterasu-ōmikami as the main and only deity.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
Maybe combine that with Asherah as the wife of YHWH.
I was going with Asherah being Yahweh's waifu :)

The Fall of Judea is not enough to sate his wrath and he storms off in a huff. The prophet teaches that Asherah will protect the people, and she will restore them to the land if they are faithful. eventually their loyalty to Asherah will bring the forgiveness of YHWH as well and all will be happy in heaven and earth. They might be a way to reinterpret the covenant.
There would need to be some political and economic stability before the others return from Persia to demonstrate Asherah's favor.
Excellent idea!
Let us not get too hung up on the covenant - always in motion religions - at the destruction of the 1st Temple Judaism was not monotheistic, it was monolatric at best, definitely henotheistic, and the majority was politheistic, with "Yahweh and his Asherah" being the tops of the Pantheon.
So, with YHWH pissed off at the Judeans the survivors turning to Asherah might be quite natural ... he can't punish them any further, can't he? And over time the priesthood retcons the scriptures, removing mentions of YHWH and replacing them with ASRH ...
 
@Optical_Illusion
the link you gave (description of an exposition from 2010) is not quite up to the archaeological state of research. Marija Gimbutas may actually have been closer to the mark than we thought, once again (although this_is_always surprising and borderline miraculous considering how freely she interpreted archaeological findings and other pieces of evidence, so methodologically I'm with your criticism of her approach, but she does seem to have had quite an instinct, or maybe just sheer luck).
Last year, an extensive DNA study was conducted (a short description by Lipson/Nagy/Reich can be found in Nature), and while its focus was on how Anatolian agricultural pioneers did or did not mingle with / replace Very Old European hunter-gatherers, what transpired as a small side-effect is also that, at the Varna site, DNA from Pontic-Caspian horse-breeders was found, too. So, in spite of Varna being rather early and while (iconically "Old European") Cucuteni-Tripolye was still in full swing, Varna may be one of a number of sites where Proto-Indo-European newcomers from the East established itself as a new elite in a, well, let's euphemistically call it "symbiotic" relationship with Old European agriculturalists. Thus, if the wealthy grave at Varna was a male grave, that probably doesn't say anything about wealth and gender in Old European cultures prior to the power reversal which occurred when steppe-dwellers had mastered horse-breeding and a mobile raiding-and-trading culture (of just a handful of male leaders and their gangs) to go with it.

Yep, they've showed genetic exchange (marriage) between societies on the steppe and in Old Europe of the Balkans in the Chalcolithic (at a pretty low level). Though specifically of interest, I guess one point is that burial 43 (the famous wealthiest grave of the 5th millennium), seems to show among the least ancestry from the steppe, which does raise questions about the degree to which anything happening can be characterized as newcomers establishing themselves as an elite (not any evidence of status differentiation in graves with ancestry from steppe, I don't think! For all we know, they may have come as humble shepherds of sorts - this is well before the kind of cultural changes suggested to lead to more militaristic societies in later Indo-European cultures on the steppe.).

But the real point of Gimbutas idea was that the presence of the figurines can tell us something about the structure of the society, that it was egalitarian or matriarchal, at least in spirituality... and this still hardly works if you have the co-existence of the figures with evidence demonstrating exactly the opposite. You can make an exception that co-existence of a male status hierarchy and the relative preponderance of female figures in cultures like Varna was an exception, but it raises the question of why only make an exception for those, or how strong the idea is anyway. Authors from the 2010 piece would scarcely have thought that gene flow didn't exist between the societies of Old Europe and the nascent and early more pastoral societies on the steppe, and it turns out that they didn't! But their point is not dependent on the presence or absence of such gene flow, which itself doesn't indicate any elite linked phenomenon.

Really, the more brutal blows to the idea are the general absence of matriarchy or even gender egalitarianism from Neolithic societies known to anthropology across the world. As well, one way in which recent ancient genetics has called into question Gimbutas ideas is by finding an absence of any genetic flow from the steppe in societies she identified as "Kurganized", such as the societies at Maykop (which is a new one published over the last few months), the Globular Amphora Culture or the Baden culture in Hungary, and also in societies in which male dominated elites become increasingly more visible in archaeology in Anatolia and the Near East. It really just makes less sense to view the social changes through the lens of any kind of ideological or social change in human culture and gender attitudes innovated by Indo-Europeans, more than through the lens of technological change on social substrates that are pretty much for "Old Europe" like they were in every other Neolithic context.
 
I was going with Asherah being Yahweh's waifu :)
There's no evidence that decisively concludes that Asherah being worshiped as God's wife was widely practiced. The origin of this notion comes from a small temple in Tel Arad where there are two standing stones, as well as two descriptions on a jar and inscription that say "YHWH's asherah" and "YHWH and his asherah". The way these are phrased is kind of weird so it's probably referring to a ritual object called an asherah.

There probably were some Judeans who did worship Asherah, but it probably controversial among the Orthodox priesthood.
 
Yes, but TBC I’m not talking about a masculine monotheism being reinterpretated after modern feminism has already made its mark, but a long lasting and widespread religion with a singular feminine deity from the get go.

There was those ancient dolls they found of a creator goddess, but that predates most religion as far as I knew.
 
Buddhism isn't really masculine, particularly so in the more ancient to medieval world.

Buddhisms early church had the same roles for men and women, and adopted the "feminine male" ideal from some of its rival Hindu sects. There are a number of enlightened women in Buddhist history, bodhisattvas and dharmaphalas. Buddhism has often been described as a proto-feminism of the east for its significant role in providing sanctuary to women and a theological bent that puts men and women on equal footing; female leaders in the far east often using their power to promote and invest in Buddhist temples as a bastion for women wanting to escape the various things that sucked about their world.

I'm not saying it is perfectly so. Thailand's Buddhism for instance is quite weird in that its supposed to be the most Orthodox Buddhism, yet entirely rejects its own Canon where the Buddha allows female ordination and the same rights/responsibilities as male monks.
If anything, the Buddha is kind of strange on that point. From memory, he allows transgender monks, men and women, but forbids the '4th group' quite vehemently although to this day we have no idea what he was referring to.

So whilst it would be unfair to say it is a feminine religion, its a bit odd to say that is of the more "masculine' religions.

Hermaphrodites, possibly? I know the Greeks and Romans regarded them with revulsion.
 
For all we know, they may have come as humble shepherds of sorts - this is well before the kind of cultural changes suggested to lead to more militaristic societies in later Indo-European cultures on the steppe.
Not really. It is centuries after the first clearly high-status burials with ornamented mace heads and sacrificed cattle on the steppes, which even Anthony associates with the emergence of cattle-raiding warbands who enjoyed great prestige and could play host/patron in what he calls the emerging Indo-European guest/host-relationships.

But the real point of Gimbutas idea was that the presence of the figurines can tell us something about the structure of the society, that it was egalitarian or matriarchal
We'll have to look at "egalitarian" and "matriarchal" separately.

There is plenty of evidence that neolithic farming villages, not only in Old Europe, were a lot more egalitarian than following societies. Mega-villages from Cucuteni-Tripolye, which housed over 5,000 and sometimes maybe even over 10,000 people, bear no signs of social hierarchy (like larger vs. smaller buildings, protected centre vs. unprotected periphery, or actually anything that archaeologists could call a "temple" or "palace"), and Vinca settlements, which clearly show high division of labour (mining villages, pottery villages, coppersmith villages, fishing villages etc.), also don't show a trace of any group clearly standing above another one.

This chimes in with results from anthropolgy really, for your statement
Really, the more brutal blows to the idea are the general absence of matriarchy or even gender egalitarianism from Neolithic societies known to anthropology across the world
needs clarification. Indeed, Neolithic societies encountered by European researchers over the last couple of centuries have often been labelled as "acephalous" (especially Eastern African groups). And some of the Native American groups who come closest to being comparable to the Old European neolithic show gender roles quite different from the male-centered ones we're used to from more recent Eurocentric history - I'll just hint at the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois for one example. Among neolithic and comparable groups, there are matrilinear and patrilinear ones, matrilocal and patrilocal ones. Ones were "secular" authority is male and religious authority is female, ones where both are male, and, yes, ones where both tend to be female (regardless of whether the two branches are conceived of as separate or as being the same).

In fact, I could well imagine "Old Europe" (i.e. the neolithic societies prior to the advent of PIE groups and horses) having consisted of both patrilinear and matrilinear groups, of groups with differing conceptions of the male and the female spheres. We know little about them. I see no reason to assume that they were all like the Egyptians and the Sumerians (and among them, gender roles in the pre- and early bronze age were not quite as patriarchal at all when compared to, say, classical Greece or Song China or Early Modern Western Europe).

Yes, looking at the bulk of data available, Varna is very much an exception in many ways.

It really just makes less sense to view the social changes through the lens of any kind of ideological or social change in human culture and gender attitudes innovated by Indo-Europeans, more than through the lens of technological change on social substrates that are pretty much for "Old Europe" like they were in every other Neolithic context.
So you do agree that there were social changes? Then we're on the same page.
Technology is certainly important here (especially if you count, among wheels and anything to do with wool, also horses into the category of "technology"). Assuming the change doesn't stretch into the ideological or social nature of culture appears a little weird to me - why would these aspects not be affected? Also, saying that (mostly Indo-European) steppe pastoralists didn't play a central role in spreading all sorts of such cultural and technological innovations across Eurasia appears rather questionable to me.

But the real point of Gimbutas idea was that the presence of the figurines can tell us something about the structure of the society
I think we agree that we don't really know how to interpret them yet. Saying they're evidence for a matriarchal Old Europe is not solid scholarship. But neither is concluding from the Varna site that Old Europe must have been male-centered.
 
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