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What is, then, the connection between feminism and paganism? Feminism advocates the improvement of women's conditions of life, standing, roles and function in society, and my contention is that the religious system that should support such attitude must be paganism and not any other religious system, unless we are talking about atheism.
Anthropologists who deal with ancient religions have been bothered for many years concerning the question of what prehistoric (i.e. pre-writing) people believed in. The evidence of archeology shows that there no art form existed before the advancement of the Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens, who are known to have appeared in Europe and the Middle East about 50,000 years ago, in the period called Upper Paleolithic. It also shows that the very first art form known to exist (at least in stone, because wood and bone perish) are female figurines, some of which are about 30-40,000 years old. These figurines are commonly considered to represent "Fertility goddesses", owing to the voluptuousness of their appearance.
The notion of Fertility was the basis for all initial religions, and is connected with Motherhood, which includes three sources: the earth, the sea and the sky; therefore, the most ancient divinities in all religions on earth are Mother goddesses who are mostly connected with at least one of these three sources. It must be assumed (though, admittedly, not everyone is ready for such an assumption), that wherever a female divinity ruled the world, women's position in society was much higher than it is today; women must have been not only much more respected but also more important, more listened to and obeyed as standing for the figure of the Great Mother Goddess of Nature who ruled the world.
The social-religious structures that we know of, either through writings that have appeared about 5,000 years ago in the Middle and the Far East, or from oral traditions of Africa, America or Oceania, are all polytheistic and mostly patriarchal. We have no idea how far in the past reach the myths, which describe such structures. On the other hand, the archeological findings from the Upper Paleolithic leave no room for doubt. It is not difficult, then, to conclude that the same feminine figure present the only goddess human knew at the time; with the addition of myths from all over the world, which describe an ancient goddess who was the Mother of the whole world, earth, sky, seas, gods and goddess, animals and humans, there is here evidence that this was the first divinity in which humans believed anywhere. It was, then, according to this theory, a kind of monotheistic religion with the belief in one Mother goddess for all the peoples on earth, whatever her different local names might be.
