idealize hunter-gatherer bands, earlier generations of poets, anarchists and bohemians had tended to idealize the Neolithic as an imaginary, beneficent theocracy ruled over by priestesses of the Great Goddess, the all-powerful distant ancestor of Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and Demeter herself – that is, until such societies were overwhelmed by violent, patriarchal Indo-European-speaking horse-men descending from the steppes,
