Life slips silently like a serpent, in and out of time.
The snake is a symbol of deep feminity, it's no chance that once cultures established a masculine identity the serpent was suddenly feared for it's representation of death, the Earth and nature's harsh cruelty. Gilgamesh was battling with an Earth goddess, Heracles with a woman, and the Volsungas with their own mortality. Women were once worshipped and feared for their wit, sexuality and cruelty.
Lets not let the ancients down.
The snake is a symbol of deep feminity, it's no chance that once cultures established a masculine identity the serpent was suddenly feared for it's representation of death, the Earth and nature's harsh cruelty. Gilgamesh was battling with an Earth goddess, Heracles with a woman, and the Volsungas with their own mortality. Women were once worshipped and feared for their wit, sexuality and cruelty.
Lets not let the ancients down.
Secondly, while I'd be the last to dispute that women have occupied different, usually higher status in traditional societies than in our most recent historical antecedents, the idea that women as a whole were "worshipped and feared for their wit, sexuality and cruelty" is wishful, ahistorical thinking. Certainly there are examples of such images (the amazons of Greek mythology, etc) but the reality of life for women and men has always been pretty banal. Spending all your time worshipping or being worshipped isn't really on the menu in traditional food-cultivating/gathering societies - food-gathering and processing, child-rearing, gossiping, and just hanging out are/were more popular activities for both sexes. Look into the anthropological descriptions of the !Kung, Amazonian tribes etc for examples of what I mean.
Imagining the past through its epic and religious activities is a little like viewing our society through oral roberts and james joyce - not totally wrong, but hardly representative.
Hunter Gatherer societes...odd...I don't remember saying anything about them.