Goddess Worship, Archaeology edition

When people confuse matriarchy with misandry, archaeology edition...

Hey, Readers,

I'm rereading The Spiral Dance by Starhawk and got to the part where she discusses that people say Goddess worship always included human sacrifice in a literal sense (as opposed to the symbolic sacrifice of burning poppets, etc), but archaeological evidence does not support this. She lists several sites determined to be home to matrilineal cultures where Goddess imagery was common, yet no evidence of human sacrifice was present.


One of the sites named was Çatalhöyük or Catal Hüyük, where she notes that many figures depicting the Goddess and animals were found, but there are no provisions for human or animal sacrifice. Not knowing much about Çatalhöyük, I decided to look it up and read a bit. 

'Tis the Season (to discuss "stealing" traditions)

Hey, Readers,

Yule is approaching fast in the Northern Hemisphere (I don't know if that needs to be capitalized, but, oh well) and you know what that means! Pagans are talking about Christians "stealing" Yule and people are discussing appropriation. Someone I follow on tumblr said they'd been seeing a lot of those "Christians stole Yule" posts on their dash, so I reblogged with a link to a video I made two years ago on Yule:

On "Stealing" Traditions

After this, I received a question in the Ask box of my tumblr, and my answer was pretty long. It's posted on my tumblr, but I wanted to re-post it here with a little extra.