The Living Goddesses

More than a book, the feeling is that one is reading an essay. Really unfortunately that Ms. Gimbutas was unable to complete this book. Despite the great effort from the editor, this book doesn't has the usual Marija Gimbutas style. There are very interesting points on the core that helped the author to prove her theories. Unfortunately, current academia trends are not backing up Ms. Gimbutas. Despite that in Crete there are multiple evidence of a matrilineal system of believes and customs, many authors are not accepting that this matrilineal system was utilized by the old europeans as Marija Gimbutas proposed. Unfortunately, for modern arquelogist the level of destruction and replacement of multiple different cultures in the same territories complicates the study of each layer and the evidence is very difficult to find. Even more when modern archelogist are not accepting Ms. Gimbutas thesis. But for me she had a relevant point that must be revisited and rexamined.Unfortunately for me, this Kindle edition of the book is really bad. It is very difficult to read becuase one cannot have access directoy to the footnotes. The images are poorly rendered and text accompany the ilustrations is so tiny that it is very difficult to read. Sometimes the font changes in size or in type. The images are all in white and black and the notes related are sometimes separated in other page. It is really a very poor Kindle edition and that puts a heavily load on the reader.

Having become an admirer of Marija Gimbutas long ago, I come to this book after reading "Understanding Early Civilizations" by Bruce G. Trigger. The "civilizations" he discusses are all much later than the widespread Old European "culture" Gimbutas explored. With roots in the Paleolithic it spans millennia, flowering in so called Minoan civilization and still surviving in folk culture today. It embodies a kind of "proto-European" religion centered on the most basic of human experiences, life and death. These are seen through the eyes of people whose brains are just as complex as our own, living in a time when social organization was based on extended family and tribe.The clear miracle of birth would naturally be the focus of awe. Death would have been a far closer companion than it is today and the cycles of nature would be very familiar. Hardwired as our species is for abstraction, and by extension religion, it is natural that the cycle of birth, death and regeneration would be central to the earliest belief system. That it would be female centered is not a surprise.The social organization of that early time was probably based on the realities of surviving that include a very high value on child bearing females. Being able to attribute paternity was simply not important. Humans are not strictly monogamous as has been pretended in more recent times. The important thing was to enable reproduction and protect the young. If a woman could get more than one man to provide for her and her offspring, all the better. Young men could more easily be spared from the community to find mates elsewhere.Then, of course, times changed. The human population grew and the horse was domesticated. Mounted Steppe nomads began numerous incursions on the settled, by then agricultural, population. They added a warrior ethic to the old religion and the hierarchy that led to kings and commoners took root. That development is what supposedly led to what we now define as Civilization. That definition is of course in flux. Trigger has allowed that the once essential ingredient, a written language, is no longer necessary.What appears to be universal in the civilizations he includes are warfare and human sacrifice.A little known and inconvenient truth is that human beings were better fed and had more leisure as hunter-gatherers. I suspect that people, especially the female half of that category, were better off where the Great Goddess was honored. While females were central, the essential contribution of males was appreciated.Much of the iconography of the Goddess religion is still in use. Christianity can be seen as the primacy of the dying vegetation god and the mourning rituals leading to his resurrection. Mother Mary and the child Jesus hold a central position. Regardless of the militaristic nature of much that went on in the so called "Christian era", the ideal is still "Peace on Earth".It annoys me that there is so much resistance to Gimbutas' well documented research and its message. Just the other day I saw a biblical archaeology TV special in which they discussed Lilith the supposed first wife of Adam who was created equal and not from his rib. They described how she had been demonized and they identified as a "monster" a winged woman with bird feet. If they had even the slightest familiarity with Gimbutas, they would have recognized the old Goddess immediately.

The basics of archeology show it to be an exacting science. An archeological site is carefully mapped and often photographed to record exactly how it appeared before it is disturbed. Then as the site is examined each artifact, bones and other material objects are carefully notated as to where they were found and with what other objects. The idea is that even an archeologist whose was not present at the site can still get a pretty accurate idea what was discovered. If the site has some unique or interesting characteristics, the lead archeologist will then write it up describing in detail what was found and, usually, providing a plausible hypothesis on the original purpose of the site and as much about the humans associated with it as is possible within the limits of the physical evidence. Most archeologists stop here and devote themselves to cataloguing their findings.Marja Gimbutas, fortunately is not "most archeologists" and goes far beyond the basics of archeology. Using physical evidence from multiple sites in Europe and the Anatolian Peninsula, historical references, and the examples of known "old European" peoples (the Basque, the Etruscans, and the Minoans) she developed a wide ranging theory of the cultures of Europe from the upper Paleolithic until the invading waves of the Indo-European speaking peoples from about 5,000 BCE.The core of her theory is that the peoples of what she calls old Europe (pre Indo-European) from at least the upper Paleolithic through the Megalithic twilight of the Neolithic were matriarchal, peaceful peoples, who worshipped various forms of what she calls `earth goddesses' and reflect an egalitarian society. Gimbutas argues that the widely spread artifacts that more conventional archeologists consider "fertility images' in reality are images of earth goddesses who play a key role in the old European religious concepts of birth, death, and regeneration that Gimbutas theorizes was core to the old European belief system.So has Gimbutas uncovered important clues about the builders of megaliths like Stonehenge and indeed Europe from upper Paleolithic through much of the Neolithic? Perhaps or perhaps not, but at least she has put forward a plausible, evidence based theory that could explain a little understood period in human development.

An absolute treasure trove of history on the Goddess. Fascinating from an archaeological and spiritual standpoint. I will keep and reread this book forever.

I've been a fan of Marija Gimbutas for many years and am wholly convinced of the truth of her basic supposition, namely that the militaristic and patriarchal religion/politics which has dominated the culture of our species from the dawn of recorded history to the present day is actually an aberration against the background of a much longer period in which our societies were united in respect for our mother Earth, as personified in the various goddess figures. However I had not previously read her own original writings and I chose this book as the allegedly most comprehensive account of her ideas and of the archaeological and archaeomythological research underpinning them.The book falls into two distinct parts, of which the first looks in detail at the religious symbolism of 'Old (pre-patriarchal) Europe', as revealed in the artefacts which have survived the last 5,000 to 7,000 years, mainly in the form of ceramic figures, and speculates about the beliefs which can be attributed to the peoples of that time. Clearly we need to see the objects in question both to know what she is talking about and to see whether the arguments make sense to us, and indeed this wide-ranging section does appear at first glance to be well illustrated. On reading closely the fascinating blend of archaeology, deduction and intuition which characterises Gimbutas' writing, however, I found I wished for many more illustrations, and also for more references; there is a massive bibliography and numerous editorial notes, which involves a lot of tedious flicking backwards and forwards, but it's often not clear which ideas are based on her own fieldwork, on that of other archaeologists, or on pure speculation. Gimbutas pioneered with Joseph Campbell the exciting discipline of archaeomythology, but I fear this will never be accepted by the mainstream unless its proponents are open about the distinctions between mythology and conventional archaeology. In short, this section is quite dense and hard to read for the lay person, but not rigorous enough for the sceptical scholar either. The 'conclusions' at the end of each chapter by the editor Miriam Dexter are more in the nature of summaries and do not add much to the experience.The second part of the book is the more original and its strength is in the way Gimbutas traces the survival of the goddess myths over the ages and despite the ever encroaching patriarchal control. As she guides us from the Minoan and Etruscan civiliations via the Basque and Celtic, into the historical era and gradually northwards to the Germanic and even Baltic mythologies, we simultaneously come tantalisingly close to the present day and to Gimbutas' own personal history, thus neatly completing the circle of an extraordinary life and life's work. It is little short of thrilling to learn that these ancient myths have only so recently been laid to rest in some parts of Europe and no wonder that the neopagan movement is inspired by Gimbutas to breathe new life into the abandoned and rejected goddesses. This is potentially a most inspiring and rewarding thread to follow and it is deeply to be regretted that her editor failed to provide one single illustration for these pages! I know nothing of Miriam Dexter or of how much work she had to do to prepare Gimbutas' manuscript for publication; from the long and wordy preface, acknowledgements, introduction, afterword and notes she provides it does not appear that she worked closely with Gimbutas or was familiar in her lifetime with her ongoing work on this her final book, but it seems at the least a disservice to leave what was in many ways her crowning achievement in this incomplete state, all for the lack of some fairly straightforward research in picture libraries which might have brought the historical account to life.Some or perhaps most responsiblity for this must no doubt be laid at the doors of the publishers University of California Press, who have also chosen for some bizarre reason to print both left and right pages with a massive left hand margin and none on the right, so that it is actually impossible to read the left hand pages, never mind hold this awkwardly sized book comfortably, without totally breaking the spine. The revolutionary ideas in this last testament to a lifetime of pioneering research deserve a new editor and publisher to bring them into more general public recognition.

An archeologist who really went in with a big wooden spoon. Three cheers for her - but I fear we'll have to wait for the next generation of matriarchal & patriarchal archeologists to actually start talking to each other. Marija's friend and colleague who completed the book is too reserved to continue the heady words....

Great book, a very pleasant read, just it makes you very sad that the world of the Goddess is gone and replaced by some kind of patriarchal madness....

Thoroughly recommend this for the serious student.Wide historical comparisons ,from across Europe , giving archaeological evidence to support her views of Goddess worship and the role of the sacred feminine in early societies. Fascinating.

There is a history of Europe (OLD EUROPE) that is unspoken and hush-hush because it contradicts linear view of progress. When written this book was before its time and sill is. Buy it read it and be proud of OLD EUROPE.