Queens of the Wild Quotes

“In 1908 a French archaeologist declared that a Great Goddess concerned with death and fertility had been worshipped by all the Neolithic peoples of Europe and the Near East, and that her cult had been focused above all on images of her eyes and breasts. This enabled him to use any figure or symbol on a Neolithic site which could be interpreted as representing an eye or a breast as proof of that cult.”
― Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

“Harrison suggested not only that prehistoric Greek society had been matriarchal but that it had been centred on the cult of a single great goddess who had three aspects, of which the first two were Maiden and Mother (she did not name the third). She portrayed this being as functioning to the subordinate male deities as ‘somewhere between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the patron saint’. Her rule, according to Harrison, was overthrown before history began, with the imposition of male dominance in both the human and divine spheres, the goddess’s role in the latter being supplanted by the celestial father-god Zeus, to whom she referred, rather charmingly and with a very apparent eye on her contemporary society, as ‘an archpatriarchal bourgeois’.”
― Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

“In the next year he declared that all of the apparently different goddess images found in Minoan Crete were actually aspects of one great deity, whom he termed the Virgin Mother. 50 Goddesses who conceived offspring apparently spontaneously were known in the ancient world, but were rare. Evans’s elevation of the type to dominance allowed him to unite female deities of apparently varied kinds, but it in addition is hard to imagine that it would have had such traction on him without the example provided by the Christian Virgin Mary, which would have operated also in the case of George Russell’s use of the same term for his universal goddess.”
― Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

“The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.”
― Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

“By that decade, such interpretations were being made at a feverish pace, so that, in a single presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society in 1937, it could be suggested that pancake tossing on Shrove Tuesday had been a magical rite to make crops grow, team sports on that day had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of winter dark and spring light, and Mother’s Day was a remnant of the worship of the prehistoric Corn Mother. 12 By now, some theorists were intervening in seasonal local customs and attempting to ‘correct’ them if aspects of the current performance did not fit the particular interpretation which the experts concerned were making of them as survivals of prehistoric religion. 13”
― Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation