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Great Goddess is the concept of an almighty goddess or mother goddess, or a matriarchal religion. These religions may have been Monotheistic, in which she was the singular deity, or Polytheistic in which she presided over a pantheon of lesser male and female gods Pantheon (religion) including fertility deities.
The Great Goddess is hypothesized to have been worshiped as a Creator deity in the Neolithic era across most of Eurasia, at least. Scholarly support for the hypothesis waned in recent past decades . Archaeologists Graeber and Wengrow identify this as backlash to prominent feminist scholarship in their field--a trend which they say has reversed in recent years .
Outside academia, theological belief in a Great Goddess is central to the Goddess movement.
Soon after, this theory began to be adopted by other classicists in France and Germany, such as Ernst Kroker, Fr. Lenormant and M. J. Menant, who further brought in the idea that the ancient peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia had influenced the Greek religion, and that therefore they also had once venerated a great goddess. These ideas amongst various classicists echoed those of the Swiss judge J. J. Bachofen, who put forward the idea that the earliest human societies were matriarchy, but had converted to a patriarchy form in later prehistory. Commenting on this idea, the historian Ronald Hutton (1999) remarked that in the eyes of many at the time, it would have been an obvious conclusion that "what was true in a secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one."
In 1901, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans—who in an 1895 work had dismissed the Great Goddess theory—changed his mind and accepted the idea whilst excavating at Knossos on Crete, the site of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation. After unearthing a number of female figurines, he came to believe that they all represented a singular goddess, who was the Minoan's chief deity, and that all the male figurines found on the site represented a subordinate male god who was both her son and consort, an idea that he based partially upon the later classical myth of Rhea and Zeus. In later writings in ensuing decades he went on to associate these Neolithic and Bronze Age images with other goddesses around the Near East. As Hutton pointed out, "his influence made this the orthodoxy of Minoan archaeology, although there was always a few colleagues who pointed out that it placed a strain upon the evidence."
A preponderance of the evidence supports the worship of a Great Goddess in multiple pre-historic cultures . The extent to which these figures are survivals of a broader, singular Great Goddess archetype, are subject to scholarly debate.
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