In her earlier work, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, Cynthia Eller filled a gap in scholarship by documenting the goddess revival movement and its practices. My own research revealed many readers, both practitioners and more conservative academics, who considered Eller a friend to the practice because she acknowledged the movement by giving voice to its adherents. Now, however, some charge that in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory Eller unveils herself as an opponent to the goddess revival movement.
Early in Matriarchal Prehistory Eller makes this shift from friend to foe clear. She begins by sharing her memories of a class trip to the archaeological site of Knossos in Crete, and her classmates' derisive response to the archaeology professor's description of Minoan society as matriarchal. She felt that 'the whole discussion amounted to cruel teasing of the playground variety' and writes that 'I was annoyed with the professor for bringing it up and then letting it degenerate from archaeological observation to cheap joke' (p. 4). Yet her fascination with the story continued. She admits that the story 'exerted a magnetic appeal' for her, 'but an even stronger magnetic repulsion': 'Eventually I had to admit that something was behind my constant bickering about the myth's historicity, something more than a lofty notion of intellectual honesty and the integrity of historical method' (p. 6). This is an important disclosure of Eller's emotional relationship with this narrative: the trauma, 'repulsion' and something beyond 'intellectual honesty' form the analytic lens through which Eller presents the evidence often cited in support of the theory of a prepatriarchal prehistory. However, Eller reflects no further on her predisposition to the topic, appearing to presume her own evenhandedness.
Matriarchal Prehistory is a useful introduction for those unfamiliar with the goddess revival movement, or the hypothesis of a prepatriarchal prehistory. The first chapters provide an in-depth and broad account of the history of matriarchal theory, the formidable literature, feminist influences, and the diaspora into popular culture. Eller proposes that the 'myth of matriarchal prehistory', beginning with Johann Jakob Bachofen's Mother Right, has influenced many scholarly fields and then does a courageous job of grappling with a vast amount of material. She examines evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology and mythology used in support of a hypothetical prehistorical period in which the goddess was worshiped, women were valued as life givers, and societies were egalitarian and peaceful. Eller concludes that the evidence does not provide proof for the thesis and that it would be more accurate to refer to the theory as a myth. Further, she claims this myth not only commits women to a narrow ideal, strikingly similar to the stereotypes of women propagated by traditional