The Double Headed Goddess of the Primal Myth

This book began with a conviction based on the perception of the enormous number of quite detailed resemblances between the major religious myths and legends of the world. Many of these resemblances had been spotted before but it was the author s conviction that, taken as a whole, they could not be attributed to accident alone: they were simply too numerous to be the product of coincidence and must be traceable in some way back to a common originating source, a proto-myth, in other words, from which the many myths of the world have derived. In the late 1980 s the author began to try to reconstruct what this proto-myth might have been and locate where and when it might have emerged. Increasingly, the evidence seemed to point to its having been an ancient matriarchal creation myth, featuring an earth and a moon goddess, the double-headed goddess of the title, in a cosmogony that explained the origin of the universe in a mythical form. The source of the proto-myth appears to have been Palaeolithic and European, or at least Eurasian, certainly in the northern hemisphere, although it was not until the European Neolithic Age between 8000 and 3000 BC that it reached its apogee as a unifying myth of a great goddess-worshipping cult that stretched from Ireland to the Indus Valley. The book charts the reconstruction of the myth and describes in passing the kind of society in which it once held sway. Based on years of historical research, the book is written in an accessible style. The motivating hypothesis, though, is none the less well defended for that and seems to be amply justified on the basis of the evidence cited.