The Living Goddesses

by Marija Gimbutas

Book Overview

The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original--and originally shocking--interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520229150
• ISBN13: 9780520229150
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.9" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Good reading, Great Goddess!

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 document

Not really a paradise

First of all, Gimbutas was an eminent scholar, not a "fringe archaeologist". The fact that most archaeologists reject her theories does not prove that she was wrong. In fact, most, if not all, of her opponents has never seriously tried to explain why upper Palaeolithic and early neolithic symbolism is focused on women, while the latest neolithic and bronze symbolism clearly is cantered on men. No one of them ever had a good explanation for this fact - so why so harshly attacking Gimbutas who at least had a plausible theory?In this book, published five years after Gimbutas death, the reader will get a good picture of Gimbutas theory of the goddess cult who, according to her, was the ideology of a matrifocal and matrilineal society. She is probably right in her main theory - at least none of her critics have a better alternative. But... there is a contradiction between her tendency to idealize these societies and some known facts about some of them, facts that even Gimbutas acknowledge in this book. For example at page 106 the reader is informed that at the centre of the ritual circle Woodhenge, which Gimbutas sees a sacred place for the Goddess, "the archaeologists uncovered the crouched skeleton of a tree-year old child" . On the next page she argues that all the British "roundels" were sacred places for the Goddess and mentions "the sacrificial or ritual nature of their human remains". In fact , many of these human remains comes from small children, probably sacrificed when the circles where built.Gimbutas was an eminent scholar, but when it comes to idealizing, it appears to have been a snake in the matrifocal paradise, at least in some regions, after all. If I have to choose, I prefer the Virgin of Guadalupe before the goddess of Woodhenge.

Old European culture has survived in its living goddesses.

For those familiar with Gimbutas's earlier works, Part I is a refresher course on how the peoples of Neolithic Europe saw the Goddess. Especially interesting are the chapters on Stonehenge and other temples and ceremonial centers of wood stone and wood throughout Britain and the continent. The book's greatest value, however, lies in Part II, which comprises chapters on the Minoan, Greek, Etruscan, Basque, Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic religions. Gimbutas and Dexter explain with precision and clarity how the civilization of early historical Europe was an amalgam containing both Old and Indo-European elements. The Old Europeans were already there, of course, working the land, building cities, creating their elegant pottery, worshipping in temples sometimes miscalled palaces or fortified settlements. The Indo-European tribes came and saw and conquered. And then they settled in. Yes, they made terrible changes, but they also intermarried and adopted, and life went on. Much remained and was transformed. Although we are, for example, perhaps most familiar with the Greek gods and goddesses, we may not be familiar with their Old European ancestors. Hekate, Artemis, Athena, and Hera survived from Old Europe. So did some of the Greek gods, including Hermes, Pan, and (amazingly) Zeus. The information on the Balts is especially interesting, for they were the last pagans in Europe and their region "represents the greatest repository of Old European beliefs and traditions." This is the paganism Marija Gimbutas experienced as a child in Lithuania. Some who espouse the "culture wars" would have us believe that Gimbutas made it all up. This book is proof that she simply reported what she found. It is a testament to her extraordinary scholarship in archaeology, folklore, history, and matrilineal culture.

The Kirkus reviewer obviously did not read the book!

The evidence laid out in this series of works is very compelling. The critics of these ideas seem only able to express themselves with "Preposterous!" or "Idiotic" but never with a calm rational comparison of data and artifacts.The Kirkus reviewer says it is "bordering on the ridiculous" to assume that the bull could have been a female symbol, that this is Gimbutas' imagination. But then there is artwork remaining from this era with clear pictures of bull skulls with horns drawn over the pelvic areas of women, with the horns positioned where the fallopian tubes would be. This murals are reproduced in the book. Had the reviewer wanted to actually check what the book presented as evidence for this assertion, he or she would have been able to find this mural. Bull skulls painted over the pelvises of women, the symbolism is hard to dismiss.The critics of Gimbutas either don't read her work or address people who have never read her work themselves.Seeing the anger and spite towards this body of scholarly work leaves me wondering why is there so much hatred and antagonism towards the work of Gimbutas? Why are there so many irrational and inaccurate criticisms of her body of work?The Kirkus reviewer was sloppy -- if he or she had bothered to read the book being reviewed, then he or she would have had access to the data that supports Gimbutas' assignment of the bucranium, the head and horns of ther bull, as a uterine symbol.What kind of fly-by-night operation is Kirkus that they allow such sloppy reviews by someone who will make an attack on a position presented in the book without actually looking at the physical evidence for this position that is decribed and presented and footnoted properly in the book itself?I am not impressed by the critic of Gimbutas. I haven't seen a criticism that was either accurate or unemotional.

An Excellent Overview of a Gifted Scholar's Life's Work

Although some reactionary reviewers would like the general public to believe that the late Marija Gimbutas, Ph.D. was a beyond-the-fringe scholar, one only has to look at the list of illustrious scholars who chose to write for the earlier Anthology celebrating her life's work to see that such a view is an insult to this extremely capable, gifted, and intelligent archaeologist and scholar. Marija Gimbutas was just ahead of her time and in conflict with the predominantly male powers that be within the Miriam Robbins Dexter, Ph.D.; Riane Eisler, J.D.; James Harrod, Ph.D.; Carol P. Christ; Martin Huld; and Michael Dames to name just a few contributed to the Anthology volume honouring Marija's work. Kees Bolle, Ph.D. and Joseph Campbell can be numbered among Marija's admirers as well. Some reactionaries would like you to think that Marija stood alone and foolish in her ideas. However, time will tell and it seems that time and science are on Marija's side.For those of you who have not had the privilege of an academic career or who are just starting out at University, you might not know that there are fads and fashions in academia just as there are fads and fashions in the other aspects of our lives. When I was an undergraduate, the History Dept. at my University was pretty much run by Marxist Historians. They groomed their students with their favorite concepts and practices and a generation of Marxist Historians was popped out. A few rebelled (some became reactionary, some revolutionary, and some just tried to be objective) and thus, twenty years down the line you have a change in fad and fashion and new schools of thought and modes of methodology take over in the halls of upper learning.The same thing happens in all realms of study -- remember, all of these examinations and explanations are THEORIES! Even Marija's are theories; however, it is up the individual READER to determine which theory is logical and probable and to make their own choices. Do not surrender to the view of some self appointed arbiter of academia to tell you what is or is not of value. Now remember, there are fads and fashions in academia. Marija's mode of theory arose from her life experiences (and just to find out a bit about the adventures of this extraordinary woman's extraordinary life is one reason to purchase "Living Goddesses") and the time in which she taught. Marija began teaching in the time of freedom and exploration that arose after W.W.II and in the Sixties. She continued teaching through the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties. Many of her critics, however, are the products of the reactionary Reagan Era. Marija was not an ill taught or unaccredited scholar. She published twenty books and more than two hundred articles in various languages and taught at the best schools on this planet. She worked on many of the important archaeological digs of this century in many countries. She brought a new and fresh vis