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[ Götter ] Gods, mothers and ancestral cult. The development of religion in the Neolithic. Ina Wunn

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This study in the history of religion deals with the religious beliefs of the Neolithic on the basis of examples from Asia Minor, Greece and Germany. In Anatolia, the earliest focus of religion was the domestic worship of ancestors and a Mother Goddess. In the Late Neolithic, non-figural deities, burial in cemeteries and a kingdom of the dead imagined as separate were added. In Greece, a Mother Goddess, ancestor-worship at the hearth and the grave as well as public rituals of the community are attested. In Germany, worshipping the dead was in the centre of attention and connected to multi-stage burial rites. Also, representations of a Mother Goddess and female idols occurred. In the course of time, worship of the dead was intensified into an ancestor-cult involving buildings based on astronomical observations. In the later Neolithic, a Dolmen goddess occurred as a goddess of death and became the earliest object of a real cultic veneration. At the end of the Neolithic, burials of domestic animals, the growing importance of the sun in cult, graves furnished as houses of the dead and a polytheistic pantheon were new features.

Content:	198 pages, 17 illustrations		Cover:	Paperback
Text:	German		Size:	21,0 x 29,7 cm / DIN A4
Abstracts in other languages:	English		weight:	650 g
Keywords:	ancestor-worship, Mother Goddess
Ph D thesis	Universität Hannover, 1999		ISBN-13:	978-3-89646-021-9
			ISBN-10:	3-89646-021-8
			Place of Publication:	Rahden/Westf.
Price:	30,80 € (fPr)		Date of Publication:	2001