Thoughts of a Neopagan / the Reconstruction of Neolithic Religion
Many books have been written about Neolithic religion, a time when a Goddess was worshipped along with a multitude of male Gods, seen as her consorts or sons; but how is it possible today, in such a distant and different era, to reconstruct the contours of an ancient spirituality without having sacred texts or scriptures? How can we hear the voices of a people who left no written words?
The answer does not lie in a simple archaeological equation but in an act of profound spiritual intuition and listening; we are not simply solving a puzzle with missing pieces, we are practicing a form of sacred remembrance, a re-knitting of the threads of instinctual knowledge that lies dormant within us; Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of religion are, in a sense, our modern shamans. Through sophisticated methodologies, they interpret patterns of ancient settlements, terracotta finds, and engravings on animal bones, deciphering a universal symbolic language left by our ancestors on rocks.
What emerges is the revelation of an immanent spirituality, a spirituality in which the gods were not confined to a distant heaven but pulsated in the earth, flowed in rivers, sprouted in seeds, and shone in the sun and moon; the divine was the very breath of the world.
Reconstructing the religion of the Neolithic period is not just a matter of writing a few pages in history books; for neo-pagans, it is an act of reconnection; it means remembering that our ancestors did not pray to a God separate from creation but lived within a living and sacred cosmos, immersed in the gods; it is an invitation to look at the full moon and see the face of the Goddess, to touch a tree and feel the power of the God, to feel them in the air around us and within us, it is an invitation to understand that spirituality is not written in a book but must be lived.