[Editor’s Note: This and the forthcoming sequels are originally published in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018 Mago Books). Part 2 discusses Marija Gimbutas’ restoration of pre-patriarchal Old Europe as a background for matriarchal Greece.]
Goddesses of Birth, Nurture, Death, and Regeneration—In Neolithic Greece
The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas uncovered societies in Neolithic Old Europe (7000-3500 BCE), including regions of northern Greece that were decidedly different than the later Bronze Age societies of Eastern Europe, in which she was a leading expert. Instead of warrior-king graves (called kurgans) with a male chieftain buried with his weapons and sacrificed wives, children, horses, and gold; in the deeper earth strata, Gimbutas found burials that indicated the peoples were settled, agrarian, egalitarian, artistic, peaceful, goddess-centered, and probably matrifocal and matrilineal. She named these earlier societies of Neolithic Old Europe, “the civilization of the Goddess.” And she called the Old European set of signs and symbols inscribed on many of the artefacts, the “language of the Goddess.” This set of signs and symbols is being studied as the “Danube script;” it is the earliest known form of inscribed communication, dating to circa 5500-2500 BCE.[1]
Gimbutas’ Old European studies were published in numerous journal articles and four major books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC ([1974] 1983); The Language of the Goddess (1989); The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), edited by Joan Marler; and The Living Goddesses (1999), edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. These works describe the multi-disciplinary academic field and methodology that Gimbutas named archaeomythology.
The reconstruction of the pre-Indo-European social structure of Old Europe is possible if various sources from different disciplines are used: linguistics, historical, mythological, religious, archaeological (especially the evidence from cemeteries and settlements). The society was organized around a theacratic, democratic temple community guided by a highly respected priestess and her brother (or uncle). … In all of Old Europe, there is no evidence for the Indo-European type of patriarchal chieftainate.[2]
By using her methodology of archaeomythology, Gimbutas discovered at her archaeological excavations in northern Greece (at Sesklo and Achilleion),[3] social and religious patterns similar to those she found elsewhere across Europe. She found a preponderance of female and goddess figurines, along with animal, bird, and snake figurines, and a very small minority of male and god figurines. Her analysis of the signs engraved on the female figurines, found in ritual contexts, was the empirical basis for Gimbutas’ characterization of the sacred female iconography as indicating Goddess(es) of Birth and Nurture, Death and Regeneration. She said the artifacts could be interpreted as indicating many goddesses, or as indicating a Great Goddess with many postures.[4]
When Gimbutas compared Neolithic Old European finds with those of Bronze Age Europe, she came to the following conclusions:
The Old European and Indo-European belief systems are diametrically opposed. The Indo-European society was warlike, exogamic, patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal, with a strong clanic organization and social hierarchy which gave prominence to the warrior class. Their main gods were male and depicted as warriors. There is no possibility that this pattern of social organization could have developed out of the Old European matrilineal, matricentric, and endogamic balanced society. Therefore, the appearance of the Indo-Europeans in Europe represent a collision of two ideologies, not an evolution.[5]
It is this thesis of Gimbutas that male and female archaeologists have attempted to disprove, often by arguing, or simply assuming, that patriarchy evolved out of the earlier matriarchal or pre-patriarchal societies and was the next higher stage of evolution and social development. Ecofeminist philosopher-activist Charlene Spretnak critiqued the orchestrated academic backlash against Gimbutas and the thesis, and her ostracism from British and Euro-American archaeology, in her incisive article, “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas.”[6]
Gimbutas’ theory of the origins of European civilization in a relatively peaceful, artistic, egalitarian, Goddess-centered, and nature-embedded culture was very controversial for over four decades. Finally, in December of 2017, Gimbutas’ most prominent critic, Sir Colin Renfrew, declared that Gimbutas’ “Kurgan hypothesis” of the invasion of Old Europe by warrior clans from the area of the Eurasian Steppes had been scientifically validated by recent DNA genetic testing. His Gimbutas Memorial Lecture, titled “Marija Rediviva: DNA and Indo-European Origins” [Marjja Renewed/Revived] was presented at the prestigious Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.[7] Goddess thealogian Carol P. Christ quickly responded to his lecture in her Feminism and Religion blog, titled “Marija Gimbutas Triumphant: Colin Renfrew Concedes.”
In declaring Marija Gimbutas’s Kurgan hypothesis “magnificently vindicated,” Lord Colin Renfrew, considered by many to be “the grand old man” of his field, opened the floodgates. He implicitly gave permission to other scholars to reconsider all of Gimbutas’s theories and perhaps eventually to restore her to her rightful place as one of the most—if not the most—creative, scientific, ground-breaking archaeologists of the twentieth century, “the grand old lady” of her field.[8]
Gimbutas’ Kurgan hypothesis now becomes her Kurgan Theory on the invasion of Old Europe by Indo-European horse-riding nomads.
Gimbutas’ work provides a new understanding of the early indigenous origins of European civilization and of the contending social dynamics between Old European and Indo-European cultures, between matricentric and patriarchal values and practices.[9] Cultural historian Riane Eisler names these contrasting social patterns, the “partnership system” and the “dominator system.”[10]
(To be continued)
[1] Harald Haarman, “A Comparative View of the Danube Script: and Other Ancient Writing Scripts,” in The Danube Script: Neo-Eneolithic Writing in Southeastern Europe, exhibition catalogue, Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania and the Institute of Archaeomythology, eds. (Sebastopol, CA: Institute of Archaeomythology, 2008), 15.
[2] Marija Gimbutas, Living Goddesses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 125. See also Joan Marler, ”Introduction to Archaeomythology,” ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation 23, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 2-4; Mara Lynn Keller, “Archaeomythology as Academic Field and Methodology: Bridging Science and Religion, Empiricism and Spirituality,” in Myths Shattered and Restored: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, ed. Marion Dumont and Gayatri Devi, (www.womenandmyth.org: Women and Myth Press, 2016), 7-37.
[3] See Monumenta Archaeologica, Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles Achilleion: A Neolithic Settlement in Thessaly, Northern Greece 6400-5600 B.C. (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, December 1, 1989). Some of these artifacts are on display in the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, in Athens.
[4] Marija Gimbutas, World of the Goddess, with Ralph Metzner (Videotape) (Earth Foundation, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1990).
[5] Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, ed. Joan Marler (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 396.
[6] Charlene Spretnak, “The Anatomy of a Backlash,” Journal of Archaeomythology 7 (Spring 2011): 25-51.
[7] Colin Renfrew, “Marija Redivia: DNA and Indo-European Origins,” posted by The Oriental Institute, March 14, 2018, video, 1:02:57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=y5u7fls9CIs
[8] Carol P. Christ, “Marija Gimbutas Triumphant: Colin Renfrew Concedes,” in Feminism and Religion Religion, December 11, 2017. https://feminismandreligion.com/2017/12/11/marija-gimbutas-triumphant-colin-renfrew-concedes-by-carol-p-christ/
[9] Mara Lynn Keller, “Gimbutas’ Theory of Early European Origins and the Cultural Transformation of Western Civilization,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, “Legacy of the Goddess,” 12, no2 (Fall 1996): 73-90.
[10] Riane Eisler, Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper and Row: San Francisco, 1987).