The Goddess, the Great Mother. Her story explained.
Mothers at the centre
Did you know that until 6000 BCE* the worship of women and mothers as goddesses and life-givers was a worldwide fact, which can be traced back through prehistory to the beginnings of human development? Numerous finds of Venus figurines and temple complexes, for example on Malta, bear witness to this. In a time before written records, the mother was at the centre of society. Matrifocality is a term that translates as "mothers in focus, mothers at the centre".
Egalitarian societies
They lived in egalitarian societies. In these societies, everything was collectively owned and distributed. They were also very evolved in their artistic expression and their ability to handle conflict. All humans have conflict but records show that they didn’t have weapons and wars and, like so many matriarchal cultures that exists still today, they were able to find resolutions as a collective. It was part of their value system.
Unfortunately, all that changed and morphed into what we call patriarchy today: 3000 BCE a massive periodic wave of Indo-European male-centered nomadic tribes on horses invaded Old Europe along the Danube river and colonized and settled. They worshipped Skygods and suppressed the Goddess/ Earth worshipping cultures, eventually pushed them to the fringes of the continent, to islands like Crete and Malta.
Goddess Movement
The Goddess Movement emerged predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s. It draws some of its inspiration from the work of archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas, whose interpretation of artifacts excavated from "Old Europe" points to societies of Neolithic Europe that were "matristic" or "goddess-centered" worshipping a female deity
Since then, the Goddess Spirituality has emerged as a recognizable international cultural movement without centralized tenets of belief. Many of the "Great Mothers" of this movement continue to teach and do research.
Mother Earth
Many people involved in the Goddess movement regard the Earth as a living Goddess, become involved in ecofeminism, and are concerned with environmental and ecological issues. Rather than having dominion over the Earth, Goddess-movement theorists see humans living as part of the Earth environment, and also refer to Earth as „Mother".