However, neither Ripinsky-Naxon nor anyone else has ever adequately explained how plant hallucinogens and shamanism were related to Venusian, Mother Goddesses, perhaps because doing so would have required explaining the bizarre features of the many figurines that fostered the notion of such a goddess in the first place. This is not to say that many theories have not been posited to explain the bizarre features of these figurines. Rather, it is to say that none of these theories, most of which have focused broadly on fertility or more narrowly on human sexuality, has ever adequately explained why so many figurines are pocked, faceless, handless, headless, footless, one-legged or marked in some way with red pigment.

I do not intend to review in detail any of the many theories that have attempted to explain the bizarre features of these figurines before I explain the significance of a number of such figurines and, by extension, many others. I will, however,  present a brief review of some of these theories to shed light on just how problematic the figurines have been for at least the last 136 years. 

"Venus" was first applied to anthropomorphic figurines by the Marquis de Vibraye, who used it particularly to describe a figurine he had discovered in 1864. Approximately thirty years later, the French archaeologist Edouard Piette used "Venus" sardonically to describe the most grotesquely obese of a number of figurines he had discovered at Brassempouy, France, but  "Venus" did not become a popular epithet for any figurines until 1916 when a French anthropologist named Verneau applied it sardonically to a woman named Sartje Bartmann, who had a grotesquely steatopygous buttocks and abnormally large labia minora. This caused the name to attach itself in Western Europe to all steatopygous figurines, though "Venus" still is not applied to such figurines in Eastern Europe, where they are technically classified by number and the name of the site at which they were found.

Perhaps the earliest attempt to explain the significance of these then, so-called, Venus figurines was Professor E. Lartet’s theory that they had been produced following an increase in the amount of leisure time people had due to favorable environmental changes. More precisely, Lartet, a French geologist, archaeologist, and a principal founder of paleontology, theorized that many of the figurines' exaggerated features indicated that the artists were sexually obsessed men employing a form of naive realism to depict women who were essentially steatopygous and extremely large breasted. In fact, as late as 1989 a French physician named Durhard argued that the figurines accurately depicted the sexual characteristics of many French women he had examined, though he could not explain why many of the figurines were one-legged, faceless, footless, armless, and pocked, among other strange things.

A derivative of this sexually oriented theory held that the figurines were carved, perhaps even by adolescents, as a form of prehistoric pornography to excite males, and that the figurines' grossly exaggerated sexual characteristics were intended to exaggerate the characterists of primate presentation behavior. More recently, however, it was suggested that the women who presumably modeled for such figurines had exaggeratedly pendulous breasts and steatopygous buttocks because they were old.

Although Lartet’s theory and its sexually oriented derivatives implied that Paleolithic artists had not yet developed the ability to abstract or symbolize, let alone to conceive of a spiritual reality, the theory was later amended to include such possibilities. This resulted in a theory that the figurines were produced as a form of sympathetic magic to promote fertility by depicting fertile or pregnant women, while a variation of this theory held that the figurines functioned to ward off evil spirits.

The most widespread and enduring of all such theories is still, however, that of the noted anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, who held that the figurines were prehistoric prototypes of later depictions of the gods and goddesses of Old Europe.³ Unfortunately, Gimbutas was discredited to a large extent based on the belief that:

"(1) Attributing religious meaning to female representations is tenuous at best;

(2) The tired idea of an original state of matriarchy is founded more on an old-fashioned marxist dogma than on any archaeological evidence; and

(3) Her extrapolation of symbolic meaning of the female image from historic times into the depths of prehistory is unjustified".²

As shown below, these objections are groundless: religious meaning can certainly be attributed to many of the figurines once their strange features are explained and recognized as protypes of those that appear millennia later in many of history's well-known deities. But the starting point for such an investigation cannot even be approached unless one is willing to open his mind to the possibility that such figurines were not originally sculpted to depict either women or goddesses, as we know them, as difficult as this notion may be for some people to entertain.

Nevertheless, the history of science is replete with instances of laymen and scholars alike refusing to entertain, let alone accept, many things we now take for granted. For instance, people simply assumed for over 1600 years that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects, just as virtually everyone thought that the sun revolved around the earth. We can now see how absurd these notions were. But the notion that the Earth revolved around sun and was not the center of the universe profoundly shocked scholars and laymen alike, because it severely threatened presumptions they had been professionally and emotionally vested in since Aristotle's time.

Venus Figurines Explained

Figure 1. Austrian Venus of Willendorf. Limestone. ca. 25,000 B.C.E.

With the above in mind, exemplifying prehistoric anthropomorphic figurines is the well known Austrian Venus of Willendorf (Figure 1), which I first encountered in H.W. Janson’s History of Western Art (1962) during an introductory art history course. Having recently revisited Janson’s treatment of the Willendorf Venus, I recalled that my first view of it had left me extremely puzzled as to what the prehistoric sculptor intended to represent, and that neither Janson's nor my professor's explanation of the figurine's bizarre features had satisfied me. On the contrary, Janson simply wrote: