[…] The Church calls Eve the Progenitor. This should be understood in the widest sense if applied to the cultures of the Neolithic Age. Eve was the progenitor of Homo sapiens, but also the Mother of all that is subordinate to man. Biological maternity in her image rose to a new level: protection and the admittance of other species, both vegetable and animal, to the family. Eve became the 'mother of all living things', the Great Mother. The body of a woman was sanctified, her life cycles are synchronised with the cycle of the Moon, the changing seasons and other rhythms of nature. The period of ovulation is generated by the lunar calendar, childbearing by the annual calendar.

The demiurges of Greek philosophy certainly belong to the female sex. Increasing settlement in Neolithic towns demanded - no, not centralisation, but co-ordination. It was realised by deified female leaders living among humankind. Hard to believe, but female leadership was not accompanied by the humiliation of men. Sanctums occupied a quarter of the town square in Chatal-Guyuk and Hacilar. Their inhabitants could be approached. Some feminists rightly question the fact that the Great Mother was anything like the middle-class housewife. Coitus bore the character of spiritual union. No guardians of virtue were required in Eden, since morality was not contradictory to physiology.

There was no death, because that was contradictory to life. Eve was an incarnation of their inter-penetration. This is illustrated by the statue Woman in Childbirth, dated to approximately 5800 BC. A fat naked woman sits on a throne, flanked by animals. The woman's feet rest on a skull and the head of the new-born child is thrust from between her legs. She absorbs the strength of her ancestors from their remains, she shows command over animals and stimulates fertility: the statue was retrieved from a granary. Before burial Neolithic corpses had their skulls removed from the bodies.*

The commandment about power over animals was realised when man learned not only to take their lives, but also to give them life. Up to this point domestication was completely unknown in human history. The monuments of Chatal-Guyuk stress the role of the goddess-benefactress in the appearance of animals accompanying man. As recently as the 20th century, cases were discovered among inhabitants of New Guinea, Hawai and New Zealand, in certain parts of Spain and Italy, and among gypsies, of dogs and pigs being suckled by a woman - a puzzling phenomenon for ethnographers.

The patriarchy meekly reaped the fruits of domestication for a while, but the masculine ethic is still indignant at the memory of how juicy they once were. The image of the Benefactress was infernalised as the Assyrian Lamashtu who provoked puerperal fever, then as the Jewish Lilith, mother of demons. There was no attempt to achieve the results of the Benefactress in any other way, and the list of domesticated mammals in the Neolithic Age steadily diminished. Let us turn to Durer's famous engraving Adam and Eve (1504). Next to the progenitors there is not one wild beast, not even an elk or shrew. In Eden the boundary between tame and savage is eroded. Judging from temple wall painting, interaction between deer, buffaloes, wild pigs, leopards and men were ingeniously ritualised.

The expansion of communities based on the principle of maternity was not accompanied by aggression. The Neolithic Age was the most peaceful epoch. Between 8000 and 5500 BC (the last date marks the onset of biblical chronology in the extended version) there were practically no wars, and the majority of towns were not fortified. In the backwaters of paradise where a settled way of life was practised, for example Dzheituna (Ashkhabad region) no defensive ramparts were built until the 2nd millennium BC. Tools and weapons of destruction were the fruits of two fundamentally different cultures.

Incidentally, very recently it was fashionable to adopt Adam's cultural heritage and glorify the contemporary Eve's affinity with Mother Nature. In the Neolithic Age precisely the opposite happened. It is easy to imagine what we might have eaten and worn, without civilisation's transfer to agriculture… Weaving, the potter's craft - essentially female occupations - were now almost fundamental rather than secondary and became refined skills. The peoples of the Mother needed a precise and complex language. Eve's larynx was less developed than Adam's because most of the time she communicated by facial expressions rather than vocal utterances. In place of the vocalised language of the hunters came a kinetic lexicon expressed by gesticulation and dance. Eve's language was not strictly structured; self-reflection and abstract concepts were almost absent. This kind of language, strangely enough, satisfied the need for technical reasoning. From this the hieroglyph was formed. The 'language of the Goddess' possessed a quality that was fundamentally inaccessible to modern lettered alphabets: concrete definition did not obscure polysemanticism. Maybe because technical schematism torn from the unity of life inspires instinctive rejection in women, as if technology were a parasite on a far more valuable organic being. […]