The World of Myth Magazine

1908 - Near the town of Willendorf Austria, archeologists were going through layer after layer of soil, and going deep into the past. That far down, anything found would be from long before recorded history, before the earliest cities and even long before the invention of farming. And the archeologists did find the remains of human activity during that dig, signs of a complex society slowly taking shape in the 'Old Stone Age', about 25,000 years ago. They were mostly adornments, most likely personal jewelry, made of bones and shells, but because these things were made so long ago this is only an educated guess. Imagine 25,000 years being a weeklong, the height of the Roman empire was only a few hours ago. The people who made these artifacts would have seen a very different world to the one we know, and would have thought about it in ways very strange to us.

One of the most famous finds from this excavation is the 'Venus of Willendorf' or the 'Woman of Willendorf'. It is a very interesting piece, ostensibly a depiction of a large woman with big breasts, and what might be a full head of platted hair or someone wearing some kind of headdress; but it is impossible to know. Physically it is a very interesting object made from a type of limestone that is not native to that part of the world and colored a reddish shade with clay not found in that area. Also, an impressive amount of work has clearly gone into this object, especially when we think that the details would have been made with simple stone tools.

It is also impossible to know why the 'Venus' was made. The most accepted idea among academics is that it is a fertility 'fetish' – a type of object that was believed to be imbued with some kind of supernatural power. Another idea is that it is the symbol of a mother goddess. This is why it has been called the 'Venus' of Willendorf, although some scholars are unhappy with this name, preferring instead 'the Woman of Willendorf'. 'Venus' might make us relate it to concepts like deities or fertility too much, and that might have not have been intended originally, it could also just be the image of someone respected in the community. Ultimately, we will probably never know.

This is not the only object found at Willendorf, but it is the most famous because it is the most intact. The idea that the 'Venus of Willendorf' was a fertility fetish, or fertility aide, is because it is the image of a woman with her sexual aspects overly emphasized. She has large beasts, a large bum, and a large body. All of these features have been associated with fertility in many societies, especially ancient ones. Similar objects, found from later ages and found in different parts of the world, are known to have been used as a fertility fetish, so it is reasonable to think it was a fetish. However, it also could be a work of art and nothing more, and as art the Venus of Willendorf is quite crude. Interestingly, the figure does not have a face, and scholars have been divided on why this might be. It could suggest that the 'Venus' is supposed to represent something abstract, like a god or some magical concept, which would further support the idea it was used as a fertility fetish. It probably had no feet with which it could be stood up on, so might have been held, over being displayed like we would normally think of art today. Still, the object does have artistic merit. Considering the era this came from it is finely detailed, especially in the hair/headdress. It is clear that a lot of effort and time was spent crafting this 'Venus' into its shape. The society that would have made this probably spent a lot of its time foraging for food, and this would have been what almost everyone was doing, but this society was also crafting icons like this, and considering this the level of artistry here is really impressive.

We cannot know much, and probably will never know much, about the people who made this statue and the other items found at Willendorf. It is so old that the mind does struggle to process the gap between when this was made and us in our present day. But it is a kind of communication, an echo from a time now in the very distant past. There is something humbling in the thought that humans have been creating and imagining things long before the invention of writing, or even before farming – which allowed us to establish permanent societies and civilizations. We have always had the ability to imagine.

When we think of the stone age, we might be tempted to imagine people whose only purpose was to hunt and stay alive, maybe they had language, but it would have been simple, and their worlds and mental landscapes would have similarly been very small. What things like the Venus of Willendorf show, however, is that this is not true. The limestone it is made from came originally from outside Europe; they were already thinking in abstracts, and they had customs and beliefs - meaning they had a sophisticated, interconnected world and that they were, essentially, us.