Gynotheism

Gynotheism is the counterpart of androtheism, the worship of men or gods in the form of men, and Marsh places it first in the order rather than beside it. Animism, gynotheism and shamanism are the root first age beliefs that gave way to ancestor worship and androtheism during the second age, which makes the female form the earlier arrangement and the male form the replacement. The reasoning is not sentimental. Since life emanated from women it is entirely rational to create anima banks in that image, and if a god is a bank containing surplus group anima then the source of life is the obvious model for it. She points to the archaeological record, including the Venus of Tan-Tan dating to somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, and to a large body of cupola and vulva carvings from earlier periods than the first figurines, and holds that evidence strongly indicates all early people worshipped a mother goddess. The chaoskampf myths carry the trace, since the dragons and snakes in them are symbols of Tiamat, the Sumerian creator goddess of primordial chaos, later edited. Residues persist in the present. Muses and knowledge are female, and the change under male endo-idealism was to make women's creations manifest only once taught to a man, reducing women as a source of knowledge to women as teachers. Even the Bible credits Eve with acquiring knowledge.

The mother goddess hypothesis has a long and contested history. Marija Gimbutas argued for a widespread peaceful goddess-centred Old Europe displaced by patriarchal Indo-European incomers, and the thesis was influential and heavily criticized by archaeologists who read the figurines differently. Merlin Stone and Riane Eisler popularized related accounts. The current mainstream position is that Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines are too various and too poorly contextualized to support a single religion. Marsh's argument sits with the goddess-first position and adds her own reasoning, since her case rests on the anima bank logic making the female form the rational default rather than on the figurines alone.