The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
One of the curious aspects for me, about the span of the 12,000 years of the Neolithic period, the beginning of the warming of the Earth, was the transfer of power from matriarchies to male dominated societies. As you can see, almost all the guests at the Loewenmensch-Hohle Fels wedding were women. These are women who had been immortalized in clay and stone over tens of thousands of years. They were representative at the beginnings of settlements in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile valley, the Indus Valley, lower Turkey, and France and Germany.
There is very little we know about the images of these women, and particularly about who it was that created these images or what was their motive. Another thing we don’t know about is the power relationship between men and women during that early time. Most societies appeared to be matriarchal, but when the hunter-gatherers began to accumulate into settlements, then into villages and small cities, the image of the male as the dominant gender, in terms of leadership in the society, began to emerge. We do know that there is little to no image record of men in society from about 35,000 BC until, perhaps, around 3,000 BC, except for the painted hand prints that you see on many of the cave walls in France and Germany and Indonesia. But these first images, beginning in the third millennium BC, did generally represent men in power positions.
Some speculate that the aggressive tendencies of men, which had previously been spent on the hunting grounds, began to manifest themselves within the leadership structure of the new communities. These men became known as kings, and pharaohs, and priests, and shaman, and emerged throughout the world, not only in Europe and Africa and middle Asia, but also in eastern Asia and meso-America; ultimately reducing the number of matrilineal societies to about 20% of all cultures.
This shift in power I have been discussing, based theoretically on the supposed innate male traits of assertiveness and aggression, recalls one of my favorite images. It is the one image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo (allegedly) places Eve, within the somewhat possessive and protective crook of god’s arm, and god, sporting his familiar stern visage, points at a somewhat docile and lethargic Adam as if challenging or daring him to arise and take Eve.