Undoudtedly they were originally the forces of nature, both the benign and the destructive, all stemming, as later myth suggests, from the earth itself, or rather herself, the Earth Mother, the Mother Goddess. Her offspring are everything from storms to magic glades in the woods.

       It has been argued that in prehistory, the Eastern Mediterranean, and perhaps all of Old Europe, honored as the principal deity the Mother Goddess. Feminists would like to believe that civilization under the Mother Goddess was fundamentally different from that organized under a male God. This may be so.

       The last remnants of the Mother Goddess culture, it has been suggested, are seen on Minoan Crete around 1500 BCE. The matrilineal culture of ancient Egypt may also be a feature of a prehistoric society devoted to the Mother Goddess. It can be argued that the Kore figures of Archaic Greece may also be survivors of a culture now disappeared. What happened to the Mother Goddess?

       A current theory is that tribes invading the eastern Mediterranean, and later other parts of Old Europe, from the east, or north-east, brought with them aggressive male gods.

       The Mother Goddess, perhaps already by then fracturing into various aspects in the form of local female deities, was replaced in time by a dominant male god. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, of course, the dominant male god remained singular and omnipotent.

       In ancient Greece, the god Zeus emerged triumphant, but there were also several other gods. The male god of the ancient Hebrews, ancient Christians, and ancient Greeks, effectively usurped the creative powers of the Mother Goddess, claiming for himself the female ability to produce offspring.

       The power of the Mother Goddess was undermined and dissipated in various ways. Instead of collected in one immensely threatening figure (threatening to males, that is), her power was divided up, and thereby weakened, among various female goddesses: Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, Hestia, and Artemis.

       The Kore figures represented the last manifestations of the reverence for the Mother Goddess. It became the project in Greece, as it had been in Egypt and Mesopotamia, to unseat the Goddess and to establish male hegemony.

       Already during the Archaic period, a new role was being defined for women, following the model so successfully established in Mesopotamia which demoted the Mother Goddess to the role of mere spouse to some male god, and concommitantly removed women from all spheres of powers.

       The Goddess, of course, lingers, being too deeply rooted in the human psyche to be eradicated entirely. By the end of the Bronze Age, though, she is ceases to wield her former power and women find themselves playing a distinctly subordinate role in the process of state formation and the definition of culture.

       The Goddess remains, and will persist, but she is no longer defined in her own terms; it is men who define who she is, and it is men who define who women are and determine their role in society.

       Women in the ancient world are primarily wives of men who spend the lives in the home looking after their husbands and their husband's children. When women were depicted in painting or sculpture, it was in this role of dutiful wife and housekeeper.

       Other women, not the wives, were also depicted in ways which focused on their sexuality, and seen entirely from a male perspective. In many images painted on pottery, women were shown nude, often engaged in bathing themselves, which not only provided an "excuse" to show her naked, but also catered to a long-lived fascination men have had with the private toilet of women; for the next two thousand years, women bathing is to remain one the principal subjects of western art. The scene, though erotically facinating for men, does little for the dignity and privacy of women.

       These images of nude women shown bathing, or entertaining men at banquets, or having sex with men, creates for both men and women a female identity which stands at the opposite extreme of the women as dutiful spouse. Neither role is representative of women as human beings who have minds of their own. She is either a house-keeping baby-machine or an erotic sex object. This sort of dichotomy will persist with variations throughout western history.

       Towards the end of the 6th century BCE, as Greek civilization begins to enter the so-called Classical period, we begin to see in mages painted on vases (a significant field for art at this time), the representation of women not as embodiments of the might and mystery of the Mother Goddess but as objects available for the use and pleasure of men.