2016-06-17 03:52:30   •   ID: 1398

The Gagarino Venus

• The first interpretations during the 19th century were biased by the fact that Prehistory had to be establishished as an academic discipline. The leading Prehistorians of their time had to proof the enormous age of their findings which directly contradicted to the biblical narrative of a world that was suggested to be only 6000 years old. It was not by chance that these scientists were strictly anticlerical and against every religious interpretation. In fact they believed, that the “savages” of the Paleolithic were unable for religious sentiments and therefore preferred to interpret the Venus figurines either as “l`art pour l`lart” or as realistic depictions of the actual physical properties of Paleolithic women, when they noted that the high amount of fat around the buttocks (steatopygia) of some of the figurines resembled the physicalness of contemporaneous Khoisan woman of southern Africa. While the “l`art pour l`lart” theory was clearly primed by the ideology of the first modern artists in the late 19th century (Realists, Impressionists), the second theory was the reflection of contemporaneous racialist ideas during the high times of European Imperialism. In 1938 it was demonstrated that that true steatopygia is in fact rarely represented in living humans, but ironically this had the consequence of only strengthening this idea that the enormous hips and breasts of female figures had to be symbolic. When the fascination of male scholars with such attributes fused with magic-religious, ethnographic, and even Freudian ideas, a host of analogical possibilities arose, ranging from the aesthetic ideal of obese women and ethological signals of "biological readiness" to prosaic yearnings for erotic stimulation and other masculine socio sexual drives. For some scholars it seemed obvious that the bulging volumes of obese figurines were selectively made, touched, carved, and fondled by men.



• It was not before the discovery of Paleolithic cave art in the early 20th century that the scientific community noticed that most works of prehistoric art had to be interpreted within the context of ritual and religious ideology. The first half of the 20th century was characterized by the unproven assumption, that people of the Paleolithic were only capable for a “magic” worldview but not for more sophisticated religious thinking. Therefore the Venus figurines were believed to play a role in magical practices connected with security and success and fertility. During the last 50 years it became clear that any extrapolation from the assigned thinking of contemporaneous hunters-gatherers (e.g. the San-people in the Kalahari, the Eskimos) to the thinking of people that lived thousands of years ago is highly problematic, as it does not take into account that every society has its own history and individual signature. Religious and ideological systems are dynamic and ever changing, especially when confronted with other beliefs and practices. The idea that belief systems may persist unchanged over many millennia is therefore unhistorical and highly questionable.



• Another assumption, which was later adopted by feminists, interpreted the figurines as depictions or even direct representations of a mother goddess or various local goddesses. This theories were primed by another 19th century ideology, the theory of matriarchy, or "mother right," developed by  J. J. Bachofen. Based on the scare archeological knowledge of his time and using the records of antique myths, Bachofen suggested that the early society was egalitarian and peaceful and ruled by women. The religion of this primal stage of culture was concerned with “the (Mother) Goddess.” A time of destruction followed and male-dominated, pastoral societies whose deity was male arose, the Goddess religion was suppressed and women were subordinated to the rule of men. It is worth noting, that the archaeological record in 2012 does not substantiate such an assumption and that scientific data from early farming communities rather indicate that at least the people who lived in southern Germany 7000 years ago were patrilocal (a social system in which a married couple resides with or near the husband's parents).



• Toward 1950 the enthusiasm for ethnographic hunting-and-fertility-magic interpretations gave way to a concern for "context" in Paleolithic art. Controlled excavation at rich Russian sites found figurines in the domestic context of hut floors, storage pits, and niches and led Russian Researchers to see female ancestor images at the core of a matrilineal clan organization. The difficulties of inferring intent from the archaeological context of these and later Russian discoveries are is, that such an assumption was primary driven by a Marxist approach of reconstructing prehistory and cannot neither be verified or falsified because a lack of sufficient paleo genetical data on this topic.



• For some male figurines, the “shamanistic theory” is currently preferred. According to Mircea Eliade (1951), Shamanism encompasses the belief that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human and the spirit worlds. Shamans are in the role of spiritual champions and guardians of the psychic equilibrium of their communities. They are both masters of “the archaic technique of ecstasy,” and “specialists in the sacred”. According to Eliade Shamanism was once a widespread and worldwide religion dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period and religious beliefs and magical practices of historical hunting-gathering cultures were derived from Paleolithic Shamanism and preserved the message of this “archaic religion”. Eliade was adherent to the 19th century ideas of an Eurocentric, linear evolutionism and to the early twentieth century school of anthropology. He relied on written reports, recorded by untrained travelers in Siberia and elsewhere during the historic period (sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) and looked for similar “shamanistic” elements in the literature to construct a romanticized portrayal of a primary and worldwide shamanistic religion. Moreover Eliade simply ignored that the types of cultures in Siberia during the historical period differed significantly from the Paleolithic cultures in which shamanism purportedly played a role.  In a critical review it appears that any direct evidence for a Paleolithic shamanism is poor. Even the most prominent pictorial Paleolithic examples that could be interpreted as shamans or shamanistic scenes or graves that could be burials of shamans are still open to various equally plausible or equally implausible Interpretations.