Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia By M ...

The term “Great” is used for the historical feminine divine when she has a number of powers and functions, sometimes as a result of the assimilation of several female figures; the Indic Dev is a good example of such a goddess.² Extrapolating from such historical female figures, some authors use the term for prehistoric female figures found in the historical record.³ Because the Great goddess represented both life and the act which leads to procreation, she was erotic; that is, eros is fundamental to the life force. Because she represented death, she was ferocious. She gave life and she took it back again.

These female figures are usually portrayed in one of two ways: nude, with small knobby breasts or breasts barely indicated but with a greatly enlarged and demarked pubic triangle; or nude, with large breasts, but with the vulva not highly exaggerated. These two types of female figures may have had different functions, since large breasts can emphasize nurturing and nourishing and a large pubic triangle may indicate birth, death, and regeneration—it refers to that place from which all humans are born, and—in another sense—that place, too, to which all humans return at death. The two types are often (but not always) in complementary distribution, and indeed, only one indication of the female (either large breasts or large vulva) is needed to indicate the semantic category of female.

Of those female figures dating to the Neolithic, two types of female figure which are pertinent to our study have been found in the Balkans. Some prehistoric figures take a stylized dancing position, in which one or both arms are raised and the legs, bent at the knee, either mirror the arms—one leg up and one leg down—or are bent at the knee in an “M” position. The dance represented may be a ritual—that is, religious—dance. Many figures depicted in this sacred dance have been found on cave and rock paintings dating to the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic