Quick Answer
Eight hundred illustrated pages tracing goddess imagery from ice-age figurines to the present, and the quality varies enormously by chapter. Where there are texts, in Sumer, Egypt, Canaan and the Bible, the work is careful and the argument holds. Where there are only objects, in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic chapters, it reads far more into the evidence than the evidence carries. Read the second half first.
Key Takeaways
- The best single collection of goddess material across cultures, and it is genuinely useful.
- The prehistoric chapters overreach, and they are the ones most often quoted.
- The Near Eastern and biblical work is strong, because there are documents.
- Jungian by method, assumed rather than argued.
- Advocacy and scholarship together, and the seam is not always visible.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image was published in 1991 and runs to roughly eight hundred pages with several hundred illustrations.
It is a chronological survey. The chapters move from Palaeolithic imagery through the Neolithic, into Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Canaan and Crete, then to Greece, the Hebrew Bible, Christianity, the medieval cult of Mary, and finally to the present.
The subtitle states the method: this is presented as the history of an image rather than of a religion or a social order.
That framing is doing careful work and the book does not always honour it, which is the central problem a reader has to navigate.
The illustrations matter. Several hundred images, many of objects difficult to find elsewhere, well reproduced and properly captioned. Even where the interpretation is questionable, the visual archive is a real contribution and it is part of what has kept the book in print.
Who Wrote It
Anne Baring trained as a Jungian analyst and practised for many years, having read history at Oxford before that.
Jules Cashford is a scholar of myth and a translator, whose version of the Homeric Hymns is well regarded, and who has written on the moon in myth and on Jung's Red Book.
They worked on this together for around a decade, and the collaboration shows in the mixture: the analytic reading of images belongs recognisably to one register and the classical and textual work to another.
Neither is an archaeologist, which bears directly on where the book is strongest and where it is not.
The Central Argument
Stated as the authors state it, before assessment.
They propose that there was an older mythic vision in which the world is a living whole, in which humanity is contained within a larger order rather than set against it, and whose primary image is the mother.
This was displaced, on their account, by a later vision in which a sky god stands outside and above creation, in which spirit is separated from and set over nature, and in which the feminine principle is subordinated or driven out.
The consequences they draw are not merely historical. They argue that the second vision underlies the modern relation to the natural world, and that the ecological situation is among its results.
Their aim is recovery rather than reversal: not the replacement of one image by the other but the restoration of something they think was lost from the account.
The Palaeolithic Chapters
The opening section, and the weakest.
The evidence consists of carved figurines from across Europe and Siberia, dating from roughly forty thousand to ten thousand years ago, most of them female, many with emphasised breasts, bellies and hips, and frequently without detailed faces or feet.
Baring and Cashford read these as religious objects representing a great mother, and treat the corpus as evidence of a widespread and coherent belief.
They also read cave art, and the associated markings and symbols, within the same framework.
The problem is not that this is impossible. It is that the confidence exceeds anything the material can support, and the alternative explanations are given very little space.
The core difficulty with prehistoric religion is simple and rarely stated plainly. An object survives; its use does not. A female figurine is compatible with a goddess, a fertility charm, a doll, a teaching aid, a portrait, an erotic object, a marker of status, or something we have no category for. Nothing in the object selects among these, and the selection therefore comes from the interpreter. When a whole chapter of confident religious description rests on that selection, the confidence is the interpreter's rather than the evidence's.
What the Figurines Do Not Tell Us
Worth developing, since these chapters are the most quoted part of the book.
The figurines span tens of thousands of years and an enormous geographical range. Treating them as a single tradition assumes a continuity that would be remarkable, and that is asserted rather than demonstrated.
Not all are female. The proportion varies by site and period, and the male and ambiguous examples receive less attention in accounts organised around a goddess.
The find contexts are frequently domestic rather than what would be recognised as ritual, and several major sites yield figurines in rubbish deposits, which is difficult to reconcile with cult objects.
And the interpretive tradition has a history of its own. The identification of these objects as goddesses was made by nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars working with the matriarchy theories of their own period, and the label has been inherited along with the assumptions that produced it.
The Gimbutas Inheritance
The dependency that determines how the early chapters read.
Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist who excavated extensively in southeastern Europe and proposed that Neolithic Europe was a peaceful, goddess-centred and broadly egalitarian civilisation, destroyed by mounted patriarchal invaders from the steppe.
Baring and Cashford draw on her work heavily for the Neolithic material and adopt her framework substantially.
Gimbutas's excavation record is respected. Her interpretation of the symbolism is not, and the archaeological consensus has moved against it: the reading of pottery motifs as a coherent script of goddess symbolism is regarded as unsupported, and the picture of a peaceful Old Europe does not survive the evidence of fortification and violence.
The steppe migration itself has been confirmed by ancient DNA in ways Gimbutas would have welcomed, which complicates the assessment. She was right about the movement of people and is not generally thought right about what it destroyed.
A reader should treat the early chapters as an inherited position from a specific scholar rather than as a summary of what archaeology holds.
Where It Gets Strong
The turn happens with writing, and it is dramatic.
From Sumer onward there are texts: hymns, myths, ritual instructions, king lists, temple records. The goddesses have names, functions, festivals, priesthoods and stories that can be read.
Here Baring and Cashford are on solid ground and the book becomes genuinely valuable. The treatment of Inanna, Ishtar, Isis, Asherah and Cybele works from documents, quotes them at length, and the interpretations can be checked.
The comparative work also becomes meaningful rather than speculative. When two neighbouring cultures with documented contact share a mythic pattern, the shared pattern is a fact about them rather than an inference from resemblance.
Readers short of time should start at the Sumerian chapters and read forward, and treat the opening section as background the authors were committed to rather than as the foundation it presents itself as.
Inanna and the Descent
The section that best shows what the book can do.
The Sumerian myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld survives in a substantial text. The goddess descends, passes through seven gates, surrenders an item of clothing or ornament at each, arrives stripped, is killed and hung on a hook, and is eventually revived and returns, at the cost of a substitute.
Baring and Cashford handle this well. They read the stripping at each gate as a progressive divestment, note the structural relation to initiation patterns, and connect it to later material without collapsing the differences.
What they do not do, and it is to their credit, is treat this as a dying-and-rising vegetation deity in the Frazerian mould. The text is more specific and stranger than that category allows.
The reading is one that a specialist could disagree with productively, which is the mark of the book at its best.
The Biblical Chapters
The most substantial and most contested section.
Their argument is that the goddess is present in the Hebrew Bible in suppressed form: that the polemics against Asherah and the queen of heaven are evidence of practices widespread enough to require repeated condemnation, and that the suppression left traces.
The archaeological support here is real and it has strengthened since the book appeared. Inscriptions found at desert sites in the Sinai and the Negev appear to invoke Yahweh alongside a consort named Asherah, and the material record of Israelite domestic religion is fuller of figurines than the biblical account would suggest.
What is contested is the interpretation. Whether these represent an older layer being displaced, a persistent popular practice alongside official religion, or something else again, remains argued among specialists.
Baring and Cashford take the displacement reading firmly, and it is defensible and not established.
Sophia and the Wisdom Literature
The most interesting textual argument in the book.
The wisdom books contain a figure, Hokhmah in Hebrew and Sophia in Greek, who is personified as female, described as present with God at creation, and portrayed as delighting in the world and calling out to human beings in the street.
The language is striking. She is not an attribute described metaphorically; she speaks, acts, and is said to have been beside the creator as a master worker.
Baring and Cashford read this as the goddess surviving inside a theology that had no formal place for her, admitted under the category of wisdom because the category was available.
This is their strongest case for the persistence thesis, because the texts are canonical, undisputed, and genuinely difficult for the standard account to absorb.
The line then runs forward: into Gnostic Sophia material, into the mystical treatment of the Shekhinah, and into the medieval cult of Mary, and the authors trace all three.
The Greek Material
Where the book overlaps with better specialist work.
The Greek chapters cover Demeter and Persephone, the Eleusinian material, Athena, Artemis and Hera, and argue that the Olympian arrangement subordinates goddesses who were previously more autonomous.
Athena born from the head of Zeus, Hera reduced to a jealous wife, Artemis narrowed from a wider power to a specialised one: the pattern is presented as evidence of systematic demotion.
There is something to this and the arguments are not new. Jane Harrison made a version of them in 1903, and the section is essentially a modernised Harrison with the evolutionary scheme removed.
What the authors do not fully engage is the criticism that eventually undid Harrison's version: that treating an unexplained feature as a survival of an earlier stage explains nothing, and that the Olympian arrangement has to be understood as a functioning system of its own period.
The Cult of Mary
The medieval chapters, which are better than their reputation and rarely discussed.
Baring and Cashford trace the extraordinary growth of Marian devotion from a modest beginning to a position where, by the twelfth century, the great cathedrals of France were being dedicated to Our Lady and the imagery attached to her had expanded far beyond anything the gospels supply.
The titles are the evidence they lean on. Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Throne of Wisdom: formulas with clear precedents in the goddess vocabulary of the ancient Mediterranean, applied to a figure whose scriptural presence is slight.
Their argument is that the devotion answered a demand the official theology had not met, and that it grew because it was wanted rather than because it was taught.
The evidence for the pattern is decent. Where they push further than they can support is in treating the continuity as transmission, since a title reappearing after several centuries in a different language and religion may be borrowing, independent invention, or the same limited stock of imagery available for describing a female divine figure.
The black madonnas get a section, and it is handled with more restraint than most popular treatments manage: they note the range of explanations, including candle smoke and the natural colour of the wood, without settling on the exotic one.
The Jungian Frame
The method operating throughout, and it is worth naming because it is never defended.
Baring's analytic training shows in the treatment of images as archetypal: as forms arising from a shared psychic substrate, appearing across cultures because the substrate is common.
This assumption does enormous work. It is what licenses treating an image from ice-age Europe and one from bronze-age Sumer as instances of the same thing, in the absence of any historical connection.
If the archetypal framework is right, the comparative method follows. If it is not, then the resemblances need explaining case by case, and many of them will turn out to be resemblances that the person collecting them created.
The framework itself is contested and the book proceeds as though it were settled, which a reader should notice.
The Matriarchy Question
Handled better than in most books of this kind, and still not cleanly.
The authors are explicit at several points that their subject is imagery rather than social organisation, and that goddess worship does not entail female rule. That distinction is correct and important.
They do not hold it consistently. The prehistoric chapters describe societies as well as images, and the descriptions carry implications about how those societies were organised that the stated method disclaims.
The underlying difficulty is that the two questions are genuinely separate and the evidence bears on them differently. Goddess imagery is attested across the ancient world in societies that were, where we can check, thoroughly patriarchal. Classical Athens had Athena.
The correlation between female deities and female status is weak or absent wherever it can be tested, and a book arguing from imagery to social vision has to reckon with that more directly than this one does.
A test for any claim in this genre. When you meet an assertion about what prehistoric people believed, try to reconstruct the chain: what object, from what site, in what context, interpreted by whom, and when. Most claims of this kind will not survive being traced. The ones that do will usually turn out to rest on a text rather than an object, which tells you something about where the reliable knowledge in this field actually lives. It takes about ten minutes per claim and it changes how the whole shelf reads.
The Objections
Three, in order of seriousness.
The prehistoric overreach. The opening chapters state as known a great deal that is not, and they are the chapters most likely to be quoted by readers who go no further.
Undefended method. The archetypal framework licenses the comparisons and is assumed throughout without argument.
Advocacy inside scholarship. The book argues for a recovery it believes is needed, which is legitimate, and it does not consistently mark where the case-making begins.
How to Read It
Practical advice for eight hundred pages.
Start at Sumer. The documented chapters are the ones worth your time and they do not depend on the prehistoric section for anything except atmosphere.
Read the wisdom literature and Sophia material closely. That is the book's genuine contribution and it is well made.
Treat the prehistoric chapters as a position rather than a summary, and read the current archaeology alongside them if the period interests you.
Use the illustrations. They are the reason to own the physical book rather than reading about it.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want the fullest available survey of goddess imagery across cultures gathered in one place.
Read it for the biblical and wisdom material, which is where the argument is strongest and most original.
Read it if you have encountered the goddess literature in popular form and want the serious version, with citations you can follow back.
Do not read it as archaeology, and do not take the prehistoric chapters as settled, because the field they draw on has moved considerably since 1991.
There is a real loss described in this book and it survives the objections to how the loss is dated. Somewhere in the history of Western thought, the idea that the world is itself alive and that we are contained within it gave way to the idea that spirit stands outside nature and above it. You do not need a Neolithic golden age to notice the shift or to think it cost something. The weakness of the historical case is that it locates the loss in a period we cannot check, which makes the argument unfalsifiable and, more practically, makes the recovery a matter of nostalgia rather than of anything you could do this week.
The fullest survey of goddess imagery in print, uneven and worth the unevenness.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our assessment of the prehistoric chapters and of the undefended method is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Myth of the Goddess about?
Anne Baring and Jules Cashford's 1991 study tracing goddess imagery from Palaeolithic figurines through the ancient Near East, Greece and the Bible to the present, as a history of an image.
Who wrote it?
Anne Baring, a Jungian analyst, and Jules Cashford, a translator of the Homeric Hymns and a scholar of myth. They worked on it together for roughly a decade.
What is the central argument?
That an older mythic vision of the world as a living whole, expressed in goddess imagery, was displaced by a later one in which spirit stands apart from and above nature, and that the loss has consequences.
Does it claim there was a matriarchy?
It is more careful than most books in this area. The claim is about mythic imagery and a way of experiencing the world rather than about who held political power, though the line is not always held.
Is the archaeology reliable?
The early chapters are the weakest. The interpretation of Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines as goddess images is contested, and the confident reading of prehistoric religion goes beyond what the evidence supports.
How does it relate to Gimbutas?
It relies substantially on Marija Gimbutas for the prehistoric material, and inherits her interpretive framework along with the criticisms that have been made of it since.
Is it a Jungian book?
Substantially. Baring's analytic background shapes the treatment of images as archetypal, and readers who reject that framework will find the interpretive method assumed rather than defended.
How long is it?
Around eight hundred pages with extensive illustration, which is a serious commitment. The chapters are largely self-contained and it can be read selectively by period.
What is the strongest part?
The chapters on the documented ancient Near East and on the biblical material, where there are texts to work from and the argument can be checked against them.
Does it discuss the Bible?
At length, arguing that the Hebrew Bible preserves traces of the goddess in suppressed form, and reading the wisdom literature as retaining a figure the surrounding theology had displaced.
Is it scholarship or advocacy?
Both, and the two are not always separated. It is written from a position and argues for a recovery, while working with real material and citing its sources properly.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in goddess imagery across cultures who want the fullest single treatment, provided they read the prehistoric chapters with more caution than the book invites.
Ask what the object was found next to
The single most useful question about any prehistoric artefact is the least romantic one: where was it found, and what was around it. A figurine from a hearth, a figurine from a grave and a figurine from a rubbish pit are three different objects wearing the same shape, and the context is most of what can honestly be said about use. Books that describe the beliefs of people who left no writing are usually skipping that question, and the confidence in the prose is doing the work the evidence cannot. It is worth reading such passages with the question in mind, and noticing how often it goes unanswered.
Sources & References
- Baring, Anne and Cashford, Jules (1991). The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Viking.
- Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess and the Old Europe hypothesis.
- The Descent of Inanna and the Sumerian hymn literature.
- Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions and the archaeology of Israelite domestic religion.
- The wisdom literature: Proverbs, Job, Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon.
- Current archaeological assessment of Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines.