I'm sure that most here would agree that it is historically inaccurate to speak of "The" Goddess. Such talk implies a monotheistic way of thought when one of the defining characteristics of paganism (that is historical paganism from the stone age not neo-paganism) is pantheism. Established archaeological opinion suggests that the deities of stone-age people were local - that each tribe had its gods and that those gods were different to those of neighbouring tribes. The ancient world, in all likelihood, had a vast multitude of deities - a far cry from talk of "The" Goddess.
Yet I believe that there is a sense in which it is meaningful to speak of "The" Goddess. Its well known that the people of the ancient world understood that there were a great many similarities between the gods of various tribes. Look at the Romans, for instance, who set up their altars in Britain on the sites of previous (native) temples and altars. A great many Roman altars feature the name of a British deity on one side and the name of a Roman deity on the other in recognition of the fact that both deities were in fact the same, just called by different names.
I'm always banging on about how its important, when it comes to the gods, to distinguish between the symbol and the thing symbolised. It's my view that confusion over this issue muddies the waters in the debate surrounding "The" Goddess. If you look at the symbols alone then it is, of course, meaningless to speak of "The" Goddess of the stone age - there are millions of such symbols, such goddesses. But if you look beyond the various symbols then it becomes much easier to argue that the thing symbolised in many ways always remains the same.
Is "The" Goddess a metaphor, an archetype, that lives in the human brain? Is talk of "The" Goddess, whilst nonsensical in an historical context, meaningful in a psychological one?
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