In a disturbing about-face from traditional archaeological assessment, the current excavation team at Çatal Höyük, headed by Ian Hodder from Cambridge, England, is referring to the birthing image as a “splayed animal” and calling into doubt its status as a “Goddess.” Yet the frog is linked to birthing and fertility all over the world, and this abstract image of the woman-as-leopard, stylized as a frog—the alter ego of the birthing woman—is widely recognized by experts in the field. It is these frog-shaped “splayed” leopard Goddesses that are reproduced in duplicate repeated images in this powerful triptych. On the left panel,additionally a pair of leopards is shown eye to eye; and on the right panel—the only singular image in the whole piece—a black bird like a raven is portrayed. None of these Goddesses actually appears to be in the act of giving birth (as compared with other images at the site, in which clearly a baby is emerging from between the legs of a birthing Goddess), which is why, like Kelly, I feel that in the most basic sense these are images of matrilineal descent (chains of mothers and daughters) rather than representing strictly physical fertility. And because they are found at the same site as two sculpted images of Double Goddesses that share a girdle,or are close enough to be Siamese twins (see Fig.3), I would go even further and posit that they represent matriarchy, authentic female sovereignty (what feminist theologian Mary Daly calls “gynocracy”).

Çatal Höyük remains the most important Goddess site (and early city) in the world, as I hope will become clearer now that the site is once more open for excavation. In his 1960s dig, Mellaart unearthed dozens of exquisite female statuettes. The figurines (mostly housed in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara,Turkey) are carved from alabaster and stone, many of them in meditation or yoga postures, others wearing tall headdresses. If these images had been found in India or Tibet, they would automatically be taken as sacred or religious icons of a female deity. In the West these implications are often dismissed or ignored, especially nowadays.

Mellaart also unearthed the burial of an old woman with a convex polished obsidian mirror. It was only women who were buried with mirrors, which are known to be the oracular tools of shaman women and priestesses throughout the centuries. In a huge shrine he found the “rich burial of a woman, interred with three tusked lower jaws of wild boars arranged around her head.” Just the ritualistic arrangement of the boar’s jaws suggests the high status reserved for those holding an office of importance, but beyond that, the boar’s tusk was a female accoutrement down through the ages, found buried with women in Central Europe, Crete, and along the steppes down to the Iron Age Amazons recently unearthed in Russia. The mirrors, boars’ tusks, wall paintings, and female figurines from the site can be seen beautifully displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Ankara. Clearly, in these shrines to the Goddess, the people of the time created artistic ritual and food offerings for her, adorned her statues with woven and naturally dyed gowns, performed rituals of birthing and prophecy in her temples, and used mirrors for healing and scrying (clairvoyance), which, when they died, were buried with them.

Another form of Double Goddess found at Çatal Höyük is a tiny side-by-side figure that bears a strong resemblance to another of the earliest side-by-side Double Goddess figures. The prehistoric Sesklo Double Goddess (Fig.4 above) comes from eight thousand years ago in northern Greece, at Achilleion in Thessaly, where Marija Gimbutas leaned down and picked up the first of the many Goddess figures she would come to examine so carefully. The sixth-millennium Sesklo culture in northern Greece contained artifacts that would remain consistent in Goddess sites over the next several thousand years, such as portable offering tables, bird-shaped vases with breasts, miniature clay temple models, bread ovens, grinding stones, and female figurines wearing headgear indicative of their special rank or office. The Dimini culture that followed in the same place (fifth millennium B.C.E.) contained figurines “that may suggest a hierarchical order among temple priestesses or other ritual performers.”

The Çatal Höyük figurine comes from the same time period, although it is softer and rounder than the more robust, angular one from Achilleion. Both sculptures show two fleshy Goddesses with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like dear friends or equals, comrades in some enterprise, Divine Twin Deities modelling a profound sharing of power.

Like the Siamese-twin figures from Çatal Höyük, side-by-side Double Goddesses may have metaphorically expressed the duality we have come to expect of the feminine archetype, such as opposite seasons (winter and summer, spring and fall/autumn); the alternating rhythm of day and night; the integration of death and life; or the female twin deities of Moon and Earth. But rather than a merged pair, these two almost-identical women sit or stand side by side more like equal comrades in a work project, co-leaders in government, or blood sisters (perhaps demonstrating a kinship connection) Of course, the image could still be used to express the relationship of lovers, but without the psychic fusion we saw in the two women sharing a girdle or one body.It is more likely that the standing and enthroned side-by-side Double Goddess figures represent the work of running the government. They radiate authority.

Extracted from a forthcoming book by Vicki Noble on ‘Double Goddesses’ to be published by Inner Traditions, USA. Distributed in Britain by Deep Books. [sales@deep-books.co.uk].

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