THE GREAT ROUND: World of the Goddess

Symbol -Circle or sphere

Civilization:

• • Self-sufficient farming communities, including villages and towns, as the largest cohesive social unit
• Neolithic and Early Bronze Age; invention of agriculture, animal domestication, pottery, spinning and weaving, astronomy, irrigation, plumbing, permanent architecture including megalithic structures, and, toward the end of the period, writing, metallurgy, and cities
• Egalitarian social structures indicated by collective burials, uniform dwelling types, and the absence of royal tombs and palaces
• Matrilineal families or clans,with descent traced through the mother's line
• Emergence of some occupational specialization
• Evidence of the high status and autonomy of women in actual and mythic roles as creators and mothers, spinners and weavers, potters, priestesses, healers, prophets and oracles, decision-makers, and clan leaders
• Liberal sexual codes that do not restrict women to monogamous marriage, and the celebration of sexuality as a sacred, life-giving energy
• Sustained peace indicated by the absence of war, weaponry, fortifications, images of battle in art and mythology, and battle-mutilated bodies in burials
• Examples: Neolithic and Early Bronze Age or predynastic periods in all civilizations; e.g., the Jomon culture in Japan and China's Yang Shao culture; the Indus Valley civilization; Mesopotamia to the pre-Sumerian Ubaid period and Egypt to the predynastic Gerzean period; the pre-Hellenic Aegean world including Minoan Crete; the Tripolye culture in Europe and the pre-Indo-European megalith building cultures of Western Europe; the Mogollan, Anasazi, and Adena-Hopewell cultures of North America, as well as the contemporary Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo Indians; the early Tehuacan Valley civilization and Tlatilco in Mexico and Chilca in Peru

Psyche:

• • Cosmos as a unity within the Womb-Cavern of the Great Goddess
• In childhood, the separation from the mother in which the child consciously perceives the mother as the center and source of life, but also as the first "other" with whom it has a relationship
• At any age, identifying with the feminine principle
• Perceiving the world as a "Great Round," cyclical in its rhythms, embracing nature and culture as one, encircling one's being in a nurturing matrix, and centered in the Great Mother
• Religions, rites, and initiations offering direct, personal participation in the Goddess and her mysteries (e.g., the Eleusinian Mysteries, Kundalini yoga), ra~er than an indirect relationship to a pantheon of gods mediated by a hieratic priesthood, as in later stages
• Mythic images and rites concerning the Great Goddess, the activities of women (spinning and weaving, baking, birthing), the Womb-Cavern, the Horns of Consecration (linked with the bull, moon, and vulva), the serpent as a symbol of Kundalini and Telluric energy, the sacred bull as the moon and the son/lover of the Goddess, holistic vision (Eye goddesses, oracles, prophecy, divination), the Dying-and-Resurrecting God as the Divine Child or son/lover of the Goddess (connected with vegetation mysteries), spirals and labyrinths, sacred vessels (cauldron, kernos, libation vessels), healing, herbalism, phallus worship as a fertility cult, the hieros gamos or sacred marriage, celebrations of the quarterpoints and cross-quarter-points of the agricultural year
• Cyclical view of time based on the agricultural cycle, the solstices and equinoxes of the sun, and the phases of the moon, with lunar calendars being more common than solar calendars
• Continued emphasis on psychoerotic ways of knowing (through dreams, intuition, omens, ecstatic trances), but with an emergence of techne-logos as seen in the technological inventiveness of Great Round civilizations
• Emphasis on integrating opposites to achieve holistic vision
• Psychological stagnation in the Great Round can produce excessive passivity and vegetative states
• Psychological liberation in the Great Round can generate the perception of the Self as Mother, which fosters, on the one hand, a nurturing sense of responsibility for the health and vitality of all life, and, on the other, an experience preceding enlightenment of psychologically giving birth to the phenomenal world

Space:

• • Space centered in the Womb-Cavern, a still center which extends to encompass the "Great Round" of the cosmos
• Emerging centrality and permanence in architecture growing out of the settled agricultural way of life-appearance of granaries and food storage facilities, permanent homesteads and villages, amd the beginning of cities• Megalithic construction frequently used for the most sacred structures (tombs, temples, geomantic and astronomical structures)
• Tendency to shift over time from undifferentiated round structures (thobi, beehive houses, and semi-subterranean pithouses) to more differentiated rectilinear structures, with sacred buildings sometimes remaining round
• Abundance of single, double, and triple spirals in art, especially on pottery
• Reverence for sacred places in nature such as springs and rivers, caves, grottos, groves, trees, forests, hillocks, mountains, and any natural sanctuary associated with healing, fertility, revelatory visions, and spiritual rebirth
• Evidence in myth and folklore of the divination (geomancy) and manipulation of subtle energies in nature (Telluric currents), which are later personified as serpents, dragons, nymphs, faeries, elves, goblins, and the like
• Territoriality expressed as the right to occupy farmlands, defined not by property laws but by the accumulation of generations of ancestors (ancestor worship) in collective, usually megalithic grave/shrines, which display the clans' long-standing occupation of and investment in the land
• The Womb-Cavern as the most important structure, whether natural cave, passage grave, beehive tomb, tholos/kiva, labyrinth, or temple sanctury