Who is the First Goddess?

Contrary to popular belief, there are thousands of goddesses, so it is easy to get confused. I have spent the past four years on a deep dive into the goddesses of the ancient world and the women who worshipped them.

Rather than just talking about the well-known goddesses of Egypt, India and Greece I am going to take us on a quick romp through history. This is not a study (this blog barely scratches the surface!) so forgive the gaping holes in the incredible tapestry of goddess paths of the ancient world.

Most of us are unaware that there was a goddess long before a god. The goddess existed in the earliest times of humankind and remained the only god for thousands of years. The god only became the supreme creator about 3,000-5,000 years ago! That is a fraction of time compared to the goddess.

Long before written records and advanced civilisations, when early hominins, the overwhelming majority of artworks that depict women far outnumber any other surviving Palaeolithic depictions of our species.

Why Explore This Far Back?

Our world is in need of a rebalance. We need to reclaim the divine feminine to operate in union with the divine masculine. We, men and women, have been told not to trust our intuition, our spidey senses, our inner wisdom and inner knowing. We have been persecuted for this in the past and our collective consciousness remembers and is fearful.

There is a thread to this forgetting…

We have lost our past – our feminine spiritual path and all her-story of the spiritual paths of women was erased by guess who!! We need to remember our collective her-story to create a more balanced society into the future. The goddess is integral to her-story!

We have forgotten how incredibly old the feminine spiritual path is and how vast the path of the goddess is. We have lost our her-story, our ancient traditions and beliefs. This is our spiritual inheritance. We have lost our own understanding of ourselves as a soul, who has incarnated on this Earth hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The goddess paths will feel familiar.

Depending on when your soul began incarnating on Earth you might feel drawn to these earliest representations of the goddess. She might stir a visceral response, beyond language or memory.

The goddess goes back so much further than we ever imagine. She was the first, long before god was even a thing. It is impossible to know who the oldest deity ever was, but we can explore the earliest surviving evidence for possible deities.

To find this evidence, we are going to have to go all the way back to the Upper Palaeolithic. I am using the ages and BCE, meaning Before the Common Era, and CE meaning the Common Era to help establish the timeline of the goddesses.

Sacred Sanctuaries to the Goddess

Caves paintings found in Iberia, Wales, France and eastern Europe are rewriting our understanding of these hominins.

More than a hundred decorated caves have been discovered so far in northern Spain and southwestern France relatively recently in the early twentieth century, beginning with Altamira (c.20,000-13,000 BCE BCE), La Pasiega (c.16,000 BCE), Les Trois Fréees (c.13000 BCE), Truc d’Audoubert (c.13,000 BCE), Niaux (c.12,000 BCE), Les Combarelles (c.12000 BCE), Pech-Merle (c. 25,000-16,000) and Lascaux (c.16,000-14000 BCE).

These caves show evidence of habitation since the time of Neanderthal humans, before 186,000 BCE. These discoveries overturn the theory that Europe was inhabited by barely human hunter-gatherers. In southwestern France, at least from 30,000-10,000 BCE the Palaeolithic people treated caves as sacred sanctuaries of the goddess and the source of her regenerative power. Within the cave stones were placed to represent the souls of the dead who would be reborn from her womb.

On the exterior wall her images were carved into the stone while the interior was devoted to animated artist’s impressions of animals. Even here the female was given the most honour. After studying thousands of paintings and sculptures from caves, female figures, animals and signs were placed in central positions in a special position in the caves.

The male figures, animals and signs either surrounded the female signs or were on the periphery in the narrow entrances towards the sanctuary or in the tunnels at the back.

So let us meet the Earliest Goddesses …

About 30,000 miniature sculptures made of clay, marble, bone, copper, and gold have been discovered in some 3,000 sites. Vast numbers of ritual vessels, shrines, altars and implements of sacrifice, painted vases, inscribed objects, as well as clay models of temples and actual temples are testament to a genuine civilisation. The focus of this unknown culture was the figure of a goddess incarnating the creative principle as Source and Giver of All.

These figurines were originally called “Venus figurines” by archaeologists because they might represent a goddess of sex and fertility like the much later Roman goddess Venus. I prefer to call these Great Mother figurines who were an integral part of goddess-worshipping, egalitarian or matrilineal communities.

These Great Mother figurines have exaggerated feminine characteristics, including large breasts, protruding belly, and emphasised hips and buttocks. Great Mother figurines from the Upper Palaeolithic also lack facial features and arms.

The majority of these figurines were small, presumably to be a portable object carried by nomadic Palaeolithic peoples. Many have holes in them, supposedly making them easy to carry or wear as amulets. Incredibly the iconography remained almost unchanged, with Palaeolithic people making figurines of this exact same kind for literally thousands of years.

According to Marija Gimbutas in her book ‘The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe’, flint female figurines have been found dating to more than 500,000 years ago.

From 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, triangular stones were placed on burials and cup marks were carved into stones. During the Upper Palaeolithic there was an explosion of art, giving us cave paintings, rock carvings and sculptures representing a variety of deities in horn, stone and bone from 2700-2500 BCE.

Venus of Tan-Tan (500,000-300,000 BCE)

The oldest figurines so far are the Venus of Tan-Tan, found by the Draa River in Morocco and is the oldest piece of art ever discovered in Africa. The figurine, which is made of metamorphosed quartzite is about 6cm long, 2.6cm wide, and 1.2cm deep. Twenty microscopic flecks of a bright red waxy substance were found on its surface. It is unknown whether the flecks were ochre pain.

Venus of Berekhat Ram (280,000 and 250,000 BCE)

Found in Golan Heights, Israel, The Venus of Berekhat Ram has finely sculpted ridges suggest that it has an anthropomorphic form. Both the Venus of Tan-Tan and Venus of Berekhat Ram figurines are contentious with questions whether human intervention played a role in the object’s form as many of the markings are natural. It is generally accepted that the Venus of Berekhat Ram already resembled a human and was sculpted and polished to accentuate these natural features. The sculpture’s base shows that it was flattened to allow it to stand upright.

Figurine from Hohle Fels (40,000-35,000 BCE)

Measuring only 6cm in height, the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being was formed out of mammoth ivory. This Upper Palaeolithic female figurine was unearthed in 2008 in Hohle Fels, a cave near Schelklingen, Germany. This is part of the caves and Ice Age art in the Swabian Jura UNESCO World Heritage Site and is now housed at the Prehistoric Museum of Blaubeuren. (Image: Female Figurine from Hohle Fels. Wikimedia-Commons)

Figurine from Aurignacian Löwenmensch (40,000-35,000 BCE)

Found in Aurignacian Löwenmensch figurine is the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) 31cm sculpture in the world and one of the oldest known sculptures in general. The sculpture has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, although it may have represented a deity. (Image: Female Figurine from Löwenmensch. Wikimedia-Commons)

Venus of Willendorf (30,000 – 25,000 BCE)

The Venus of Willendorf is a 11cm tall limestone carving discovered in Austria, depicts a faceless female figure with exaggerated proportions symbolising fertility. This is one of my favourite figurines and I actually have a modern replica of her in dark earthy clay. She nestles comfortably in my palm and whispers of sacred honouring of a woman’s body and a deep, profound respect for women’s natural stages – maiden, mother and crone. She is deeply empowering to hold! (Image: Female Figurine from Willendorf. Wikimedia-Commons)

Venus of Dolní Věstonice (29,000- 25,000 BCE)

The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, also known as Věstonická Venuše, is a ceramic Venus figurine 11cm tall and 4cm wide at its widest point, discovered at a Palaeolithic site in the Moravian basin, Czech Republic. It is the oldest known ceramic in the world, predating the use of fired clay to make pottery. I see myself in this figurine. She heals the misconception that we need to look a certain way to be loved ad admired. We forget that women come in all shapes and sizes and that childbirth and motherhood take their toll on our beautiful bodies. This figurine reminds us to celebrate our saggy breasts and our muffin top bellies, our stretch marks and our flab as natural aspects of a life lived fully. (Image: Female Figurine from the Moravian basin, Czech Republic. Wikimedia-Commons).

Venus of Lespugue (26,000-20,000 BCE)

The Venus of Lespugue was discovered in a cave of Les Rideaux near the Pyrenees. It is a nude female statuette sculpted during the Gravetian culture, approximately 15cm tall and made of mammoth ivory.

If you look up photos of the brain stem looks surprisingly like this female figurine and many others. Coincidence? Of course not! The Venus of Willendorf is another example where her anomalies like her head with no face and horizontal stripes across the torso, the position and scale of the arms. These features correspond closely with the human brain stem and thalamus, with a dramatic correlation between the horizontal stripes across the pons and the torso of the Venus of Willendorf.

It is crazy what wisdom is embedded in the art of the ancient world. For instance, the brainstem depicted in ancient Babylonian and Sumerian sacred art. Meanwhile, in Egypt and ancient sages created the Eye of Horus to look surprisingly like the pituitary gland of the  human limbic system and the nemes pharaonic headdress to look like the ventral view of a brain section.

Another example is the sacred geometry where the vesica piscis, triquetra, genesis pattern or seed of life, egg of life, the flower of life, fruit of life and Metatron’s Cube. This symbol closely resembles the duplication of a cell in the embryo. How the ancient sages saw this without a microscope is mind boggling! (Image: Female Figurine from Les Rideaux. Wikimedia-Commons)

Female Figurine – Venus of Laussel (20,000-18,000 BCE)

The Venus of Laussel is a 46cm prehistoric bas-relief, depicting a faceless, voluptuous female figure. It belongs to the class of Venus figurines found in Upper Paleolithic sites across Europe. Scholars believe that these figures may have been used in fertility rituals or represented fertility goddesses.

The Venus of Laussel holds an upturned horn with thirteen lines carved into it, potentially associated with lunar and menstrual cycles. Her other hand rests on her belly, and the sculpture was once tinted with red ochre, indicating fertility symbolism. (Image: Female Figurine from Laussel. Wikimedia-Commons)

Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük (6000 BCE)

The Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is a 17cm long, 10cm wide zaftig female archetype seated on a throne and captured in the very act of giving birth, was found missing her head and the right-hand rests in the shape of a leopard or panther head.  The Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük comes from the settlement of Çatalhöyük (c.7400-5500 BCE) in modern day Türkiye.

There were other settlements nearby in Hacılar Höyük (c. 6000-5500 BCE), Kültepe in Cappadocia (c.2000-700 BCE). Also in Türkiye is is Göbekli Tepe (c.9600–9500 BCE), one of the oldest human-made sites of worship yet discovered, there is evidence of ritual spaces and in another nearby site, Nevalı Çori (8500-8100 BCE).

Until you stand in front of these statues it is hard to really get a feel for them. I met The Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara in 2024. I learned her head is a modern recreation. That helps me as her facial expression just doesn’t quite match her body. The more detailed feline head is also not the original.

She has the kind of power that is quiet, self-assured authority. She doesn’t need to raise her voice. Her words are listened to. Her body is a solid, grounded force that celebrates the wealth and richness of her community – who have more than enough food to go around.

According to the label the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük “has been associated with both agricultural and human fertility because of her huge breasts and wide hips”. She is seated between “two leopards suggesting a strong social persona”. About the “round shape between her legs” the Museum believes there are two possibilities: “the head of a nascent child or… the skull of reputable forefather”. They don’t even mention the fact she’s been formed three dimensional and her bottom is magnificent!

I hope this helps to get a feel for the thousands of years of spiritual practices we have lost. This is the long lost her-story of The Great Mother worship that was once integral to life.

Next in Part 2 we will meet The Goddess of Christmas…