We have a beaten this female archetype thing to death almost, like beating a dead horse with a stick. We get it, we understand, and we all have our opinions. The female archetype is one of the most complex archetypes there is, though it's easy to understand. Yet, here's a little "treasure for your nuggetbox" as my friend would say.
The assignment was to read the first chapter of The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein. Human culture bores me, or rather I must bore it, for I find humans a little on the dull side; they're predictable (unlike animals). I read this chapter a while ago to see what the book was like, so I just skimmed through it. I got interested in what the book would lead to in the end, what conclusions it would draw, so i flipped and skimmed the back of the book. Lo' and Behold!!! There, staring me in the face as if, once again, I was meant to see it this very day, was the Venus Willendorf (or in this case it was the Venus of Lespugue). It was a figurine from the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian Culture (the picture above is a replica of the one found), and was being used as an example to compare a small "carved" rock that may have resembled a human figure made by Neanderthals some 280,000 - 233,000 years ago in a site called Berekat Ram, on the Golden Heights of the Syrian territory, which is now controlled by Israel. Now, the older figure can only be described as "human in shape", and cannot be depicted as a woman at all. But thats not the point. .
The point is, these figurines of Venus and IDEAS of the female archetype and the Earth Mother have been around for 30,000 years or more. . . now. . thats a long time to be able to understand and idolize where life came from. To think that cultures had only really started some 20,000 yrs before that. .well. . I'd say it was a big leap forward, and it shows just how powerful and important these ideas to ancient civilizations.
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