Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.
Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.
Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan – in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.
Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.
It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.
The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.
Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.
Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).
As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!
It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.
Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.