The survival of the neolithic goddess in Polish folklore, myth, and tradition

Abstract

Within the past year, uncovering my ancestry and tracing my motherline has become an important goal of mine. My maternal Polish and Russian ancestries have sparked my interests in Slavic goddesses and the prehistoric female deity of Neolithic Europe. In this paper, I investigate the survival of the Neolithic Goddess in Polish folklore, myth, and tradition. Beginning with the Neolithic period of Poland, I explore the prehistoric cultures and civilizations of Europe in connection to the symbols and images of the Great Goddess. I then move into a discussion of the Slavic Indo-European colonization of central and eastern Europe and discuss how the Slavic goddesses retained ancient elements of the prehistoric female deity. I finally focus on analyzing Polish folklore, myth, and peasant tradition to trace the survival of the Neolithic Goddess into modern times. My research methodology consists of a combination of approaches. I analyze primary and secondary books and scholarly articles from a variety of disciplines, including Polish and Slavic folklore, mythology, history, archaeology, and tradition. My goal of weaving together different disciplines of scholarly work draws on Marija Gimbutas’s interdisciplinary method of archaeomythology. I also rely on Gimbutas’s classification of Goddess symbols and images to understand Polish myths and customs. I employ Marguerite Rigoglioso’s definition of Gimbutasian symbolic analysis to assist my own analyses. In this paper I seek to demonstrate the tenacity of the Divine Feminine and how she has survived in a patriarchal Catholic nation within the realms of folklore, myth, and tradition. There is a lack of English-written scholarly studies devoted specifically to the survival of the prehistoric Goddess in Poland. I hope my work begins to bridge this gap, contributing both to the field of women’s spirituality and to feminist reinterpretations of prehistory.