The concept of an Earth Mother or Mother Goddess or Great Goddess derives primarily from the Greeks whose Archaic creation myth identified the Earth as female and whose matings with a male sky produced the cosmos. (It may be noted, however, that for the Ancient Egyptians the sexes were reversed, with a male earth and a female sky.) The Greek poet Hesiod writing around 700 BCE names the "deep-breasted Earth" Gaea, who emerges out of Chaos. Subsequently, classical authors such as Lucian made occasional references to a Mother Goddess who was equated with the Earth, and who Plato and Sophocles maintained was one of the oldest of the deities. Tacitus claimed that her worship was foreign to the Greeks (and therefore possibly earlier). The Romans worshipped her as Tellus, or Terra Mater.

A measure of her prominence in the pagan world is the considerable space St. Augustine (413-426 CE) devotes to attacking her worship in his book The City of God. Largely suppressed during the Christian period, she emerges again in the 18th century when references are made to the female Earth as Mother Goddess. Interest in the Earth Mother and the Great Mother increased significantly in the 19th century. Besides the classical sources attesting to her worship, the 19th century became aware of the many contemporary tribal peoples who worshipped the Earth as a female deity. In 1861, in the first volume of his book Das Mutterrecht ['The Mother Right']

The Swiss anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887) argued that the matriarchate or gynaeococracy found among tribal peoples, where authority in both the family and the tribe was in the hands of the women, was to be associated with the worship of a supreme female earth deity. When these ideas became meshed with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, laid out in 1859 in his On the Origin of Species, there emerged the view that human evolution must have passed through an earlier matriarchal stage. Though controversial, this view posed no serious threat to patriarchal order.

Indeed, in the context of arguments developed by the social Darwinists in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it nicely demonstrated the superiority and evolutionary "fitness" of patriarchy over matriarchy. The fact that matriarchy was to be found in the contemporary world only among "primitive" tribal peoples only served to substantiate this claim. It was against this background of ideas that archaeologists working at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century saw the newly discovered Palaeolithic "Venus" figurines, and which permitted an interpretation of them as representations of the Mother Goddess.

Despite the lack of evidence, beyond the appearance of the figurines themselves, Ancient Greek cosmogonies, and the spurious connection with much later tribal practices, numerous scholars have nonetheless felt free to extend the idea of an Earth Goddess or Mother Goddess into the prehistoric past and to claim that Stone-Age peoples had believed in her as a universal deity. Other scholars, however, have rejected these ideas as a basis for interpretation and have pointed out, for example, the lack of obvious signs of divinity in the figurines. But, again, lacking written documentation these claims either way are difficult to support or refute.

Although the paradigm of the "Venus" of Willendorf as Mother Goddess persists, in recent years the figurine has also been interpreted as possibly functioning in a more gynaecological context, perhaps serving as a charm or amulet of some kind for women in connection with fertility. At the time of its discovery, the statuette showed traces of red ochre pigment, which has been thought to symbolize, or serve as a surrogate of, the menstrual blood of women as a life-giving agent, as is the case in later traditions. In Ancient Mesopotamia, for example, the Sumerian goddess Aruru (another name or aspect of the mother-goddess Ninhursag, a goddess of birth and the Mother of All Children), taught women how to make a conception charm by forming a clay doll and smearing it with menstrual blood.

Current anthropology also provides examples of the custom among pregnant women of the Igbo of eastern Nigeria of carrying with them a red-painted wooden doll in a little bag, and of the use made of magic dolls by Zuni women in order to get pregnant or following a miscarriage. There is also ample anthropological evidence from the historical period for systems of symbols centred on blood that linked the menstrual blood of women and the blood spilled by both game animals and, periodically, by the male hunters. This connection between menstruation and the hunt may have involved women in magic ritual intended to ensure success. The emphasis given to the vulva in the "Venus" of Willendorf and the possibility that the red ochre served as a blood substitute suggest that the figurine may have served some purpose in connection with female menstruation. If the "Venus" of Willendorf was made to function within this sort of context, it would place the figurine emphatically within the sphere of the female. This would also increase the possibility that it was carved not by a man, but by a woman.

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