Europe
EuropeGreece, Rome, The Celtic Lands, Northern and Eastern Europe
The prehistoric gods and goddesses of what modern archaeology terms ‘Old Europe’, the Aegean, the Adriatic, the Balkans, and the western Ukraine, were concerned with the task of sustaining life. Snakes, birds, and eggs predominate in the cults so far discovered; the chief deities were the mother goddess, whose domain included fertility and the afterlife, and a male god of vegetation, the prototype of the Dionysus. The power of the earth mother over death found pictorial expression in such things as the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly. Since there is no evidence from the New Stone Age that mankind understood biological conception, the ubiquity of phallic symbols connotes a glorification of spontaneous life forces. With the inception of agriculture, however, the first farmers began to observe natural phenomena more closely and more intensively than the...
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