Experiencer

I have been a goddess worshipper since I first encountered the work of Marija Gimbutas in my Anthropology of Women in Religion class at Emory in 1995. Discovering that tens of thousands of ancient goddess sculptures had been created and honored more than forty thousand years ago shattered my understanding of reality. It was my first true ontological shock: everything I had been taught about the past was incomplete, distorted, or simply not true.

The first shock was realizing that the story of time we have been told in the West was a lie. That these ancient people had worshipped the feminine, and that this fact had been erased or hidden for millennia, was unthinkable. The past had been rewritten, and we had been taught the lie as if it were gospel.

Marija Gimbutas was an archaeologist who saw what nearly everyone else had missed: a deep, ancient culture centered on the goddess.

Her research revealed figurines and sacred objects created over thousands of years, evidence of societies built on fertility, creativity, and reverence for the feminine. Discovering the sculpture she unearthed awakened a deep healing in me. As I gazed at the sumptuous forms of these ancient goddesses, the last few years of starving myself came sharply into focus. I felt the curves, the fullness, the power of the female body, and I realized it was meant to be honored, celebrated, and lived in, not denied.

Reading her work cracked something open in me. It was like a sacred re-remembering. I realized I had been right to sense that there had once been another way to live, a world where the feminine was honored, sacred, and celebrated long before it was erased from history.

I was raised Anti-Catholic by a single mom, and having never been nurtured by a man, the male gods never resonated with me. I couldn’t feel them.

But a goddess who embodied love, fertility, protection, joy, and nurturance, those were the powers I could believe in.

I soon found Hathor, a cow goddess and I swiftly became her devotee.

I also realized that the authority of scholarship resisted change and marginalized feminine perspectives. Anthropology was a male-dominated field that claimed “objectivity,” yet nearly all scholars were men. Their perspective was inherently limited, shaped by their assumptions and experiences, and the notion of objectivity reinforced a narrow, male-centered worldview.

Deep in my bones I knew that the “facts” we were being taught were only part of the story. What was recorded and what was erased reflected their perspective. Lucy was not the end-all-be-all. Australopithecus and Homo habilis were only part of the picture, and today we know there are at least eight Homo species. I take pride in never wasting time memorizing facts I intuitively sensed were meaningless, incomplete or misleading.

Memorizing names and dates felt like a waste of energy because the bigger picture mattered more, the one that honored intuition, mystery, and connection, revealing patterns of power, dominance, and erasure. Seeing how much has been discovered since college, I feel proud of my past self for trusting that these so-called facts were never worth my brain space.

I took every class I could in cultural anthropology, women’s studies, and religion. Psychological and symbolic anthropology became nearly religious for me.

These disciplines came together to shape an ecofeminist perspective. Women and the earth had both been dominated, violated, and silenced. Even though we were the true creators of life, the ones who carried and nurtured it, men were taught that they held the power. It was an artificial power, built on insecurity and fear. Thinking of the rape of the land alongside the rape of women hit me in the chest, a sharp recognition of how control and violence had been justified across generations.

Peggy Sanday’s Female Power and the Myth of Male Dominance became my bible. She argued that cultures living in abundance, with plenty of water and food, honored the feminine and treated women with equity. Their creators emerged from the water or the earth.

By contrast, societies in harsher, desert environments imagined male-centered gods to explain survival. These myths stripped women of power. Looking at where the most powerful religions began, the pattern becomes clear.

Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman argued that women were central to human evolution rather than an afterthought. Her Aquatic Ape Hypothesis proposed that our ancestors’ deep relationship with water shaped traits such as bipedalism and subcutaneous fat, with women playing pivotal roles in survival and nurturing. She suggested that the “missing link” was water itself, that humans may have evolved in aquatic environments for eons, safe from land predators and adapting to resemble the water creatures we feel so connected to, like dolphins and whales. According to her, our bodies evolved to know water as home, which explains our diving reflex, our breasts, our hairless bodies, a much more compelling story, to me, than the idea that we lost our hair simply to run faster.

The call of water has always resonated deeply with me. How could we ever know the full story unless we looked beyond the land, into the oceans where so much remains hidden?

Hearing feminist perspectives in anthropology reshaped everything for me. Reading Gimbtas and Sanday felt like opening a window I hadn’t known was shut. Their work gave language to truths I had sensed intuitively for years.

The Aquatic Ape Theory showed me how incomplete our understanding of evolution really was. I remember the blooming in my chest as I read, the thrill of realizing the past had been deliberately rewritten. Women were not peripheral to history or evolution. Their erasure had been a choice, not a fact.

Eventually, I wrote my thesis on the ancient goddess, exploring the ecofeminist symbolic function of the feminine and the ways she had been systematically erased. It was my attempt to heal myself and honor her, to put her back into the story she had been stolen from, and to reclaim the deep, luminous power that had always been present in the world, the divine feminine.