Ä differenworldt the challenge of the work of...

Ä DIFFERENT WORLD"

The Challenge of the Work of Marija Cimbutas to the Dominant World-View of Western Cultures

Carol P. Christ

Old Europe

The archaeologist and historian of religion Marija Cimbutas coined the term Old Europe to refer to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (New Stone Age and Copper Age) societies of southern and eastern Europe and the Creek islands from 6500-3500 B.C.E. Old Europe was a highly developed, artistic civilization with a comfortable standard of living. In Old Europe, people lived in harmony with nature and each other for several thousand years.

In Neolithic Old Europe, as in the Paleolithic societies that preceded it, the Goddess was worshiped as the Giver, Taker, and Renewer of Life. The Goddess was the primary symbol of Old European religion: "The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth."1

The Goddess was celebrated in the symbolism of Old European art, which Gimbutas defined as "the language of the Goddess/' In the language of the Goddess, the Goddess as Giver of Life was symbolized as bird and chevron, as the letter V, as water, stream, zigzags, and the letter M, as meanders and water bird, as breasts and eyes, as mouth and beak, as spinner, metalworker, and music maker, as ram, as net, as the power of three, as vulva and birthgiver, as deer and bear, as snake. The Goddess as Taker and Regenerator of Life was symbolized as vulture, owl, cuckoo, hawk, dove, boar, as the Stiff White Lady (bone), the stiff nude, the egg, the column of life, the regenerative vulva, the triangle, the hourglass, the bird claw, the

1 This essay was first presented as the Second Annual Beaver College Study Abroad Lecture in Athens, Greece, in spring 1995. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 321.

54 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

ship of renewal, the frog, hedgehog, fish, bull, bee, and butterfly. As Renewing and Eternal Earth, she was Earth Mother, pregnant Goddess, lozenge and triangle with dots, sow, sacred bread, hill and stone as omphalos (belly), tomb as womb, holed stones, the power of two and doubling. As Energy and Unfolding, she was spiral, lunar cycle, snake coil, hook and ax, opposed spiral, caterpillar, snake head, whirls, comb and brush, standing stone, and circle.2

Gimbutas believed that women played central roles in the religion and society of Old Europe. Evidence from graves shows no great disparities among individuals or between women and men. This stands in sharp contrast to the royal graves of later periods and suggests that all members of the societies of Old Europe were equal. The clearest marks of patriarchal societies—implements of war and the celebration of warriors, the warrior king, and the warrior God—are lacking. Gimbutas interpreted the civilization of Old Europe as "matrifocal," worshiping the Goddess and honoring women, and probably "matrilineal," with family ties being traced through the female line. Because of the centrality of the symbol of the Goddess from evidence of cult scenes found in shrines and of women's burial with ritual objects, Gimbutas hypothesized that women played central roles in the creation of Old European religion and probably also played the leading roles in its rituals. Though clear evidence is lacking, Gimbutas suggested that the towns of Old Europe were possibly ruled by a priestess queen in conjunction with a council of women and her brother or uncle.3 Gimbutas did not, however, call Old Europe "matriarchal," for this would imply that women dominated men. She insisted that men played important and valued roles within the culture, perhaps especially in trade.

According to Gimbutas, the civilization of Old Europe differed greatly from the patriarchal culture that succeeded it. 'The two cultural systems [the Neolithic and Copper Age pre-Indo-European civilization, or Old Europe/ and the Indo-Europeanized Europe of the Bronze Age] were very different: The first was matrifocal, sedentary, peaceful, art-loving, earth-and sea-bound; the second was patrifocal, mobile, warlike, ideologically sky oriented, and indifferent to art. "4 Gimbutas depicted the symbolism of the religion and culture of Old Europe as also standing in sharp contrast to later

2 These descriptions are taken from the table of contents of Cimbutas, Language of the Goddess.

3 Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, ed Joan Marler (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 343-49.

4 Marija Gimbutas, "Women and Culture in Coddess-Oriented Old Europe," in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 63. This essay is a clear and succinct summary of Gimbutas's major argument.

Christ: "A Different World" 55

patriarchal religions and cultures: "[The Old European] culture took keen delight in the natural wonders of this world. Its people did not produce lethal weapons or build forts in inaccessible places, as their successors did, even when they were acquainted with metallurgy. Instead, they built magnificent tomb-shrines and temples, comfortable houses in moderately-sized villages, and created superb pottery and sculptures. This was a long-lasting period of remarkable creativity and stability, an age free of strife. Their culture was a culture of art."5

It is very difficult for people from modern European-based cultures to understand the religion and culture of Old Europe, because our world-view is shaped by the ideas of those who overthrew Old Europe: "We are still living under the sway of that aggressive male invasion and only beginning to discover our long alienation from our authentic European Heritage— gylanic, nonviolent, earth-centered culture."6

Methodological Considerations

I approach Gimbutass work as a feminist theorist, as a historian of religion, and as a participant in the contemporary reemergence of Goddess religion. I am deeply impressed with Marija Gimbutas s work, particularly her two-volume magnum opus, The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess. Yet, although Gimbutass work has been widely appreciated by feminist artists, writers, and ritualists, and by some scholars, it has not been accepted by the majority of traditional scholars.

In this essay I will not attempt to prove the validity of Gimbutass work. Rather, in the first part of my essay, I will discuss the challenge Gimbutas s work presents to the dominant world-view of Western culture. This will unmask the ideological convictions of Gimbutass critics, and, it is hoped, will begin to clear the way for more widespread, serious scholarly consideration of her work. In the second part of my essay, I will reflect on some of the methods that Gimbutas used to interpret the symbolic language of the religion of Old Europe.

Gimbutas's Work as Radical and Implicitly Feminist

Marija Gimbutass work is radical and implicitly feminist, and one of the reasons it has been rejected is that it denies that the patrifocal, warlike, hierarchical, class-based societies in Europe familiar to us for the last three thousand to five thousand years represent the highest spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development of (hu)mankind. Though Gimbutas did not con-

5 Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, 321. 6 Ibid, xxi.


sciously use feminist methodology in interpreting the data of Old Europe, one of the motivations of critics of her work is to defend patriarchal Western hegemony. If Gimbutas's work had been more explicitly feminist, the political motivations of her critics would be more evident. As it is, her critics can claim the high ground of "dispassionate, scholarly consensus" while the assumptions that ground their rejection of her work go unquestioned.7

In feet, most of Gimbutas's critics are consciously and unconsciously situated within a world-view inherited from the Indo-Europeans, which views warfare as endemic to human nature, hierarchical male dominance as the norm, and divinity and the clear light of rationality as residing above the dark earth. I believe that it is almost impossible for a person uncritical of such a world-view to understand or accept the conclusions of Gimbutas's work.

According to Mary Daly, feminist method involves asking "non-questions" about "non-data."8 On this ground Gimbutas's work certainly qualifies. Gimbutas set out to understand the world of Old Europe, a world without written words, a world without a name until she named it, a world that most scholars had dismissed as "prehistory." As I have argued elsewhere, the term prehistory implies that the thousands of years that preceded "history," which is defined as involving written records, is an unimportant and opaque "prelude" to the real thing, "history."9 Gimbutas not only chose to examine the "non-data" of "pre"-history, she also argued that, far from being opaque, this data constitutes a symbolic language that can be read. Many of the criticisms of Gimbutas's work amount to simple repetition of the claim that without written records we have non-decipherable non-data.

Even so, Gimbutas's claim to have deciphered "non-data" might have elicited less criticism had she found in Old Europe what she "should" have found: an inferior, primitive, barbarian prelude to civilization. To the contrary, however, Gimbutas argued that embedded in the symbolic language of Old Europe is a culture and world-view that is not only comprehensible

7 Unless otherwise noted, quotation marks in this part of the essay are intended to mark code words that are used to characterize scholarly method; later in the essay they are used to contrast traditions defined as "mainstream" with those that are not. Highly value-laden and extremely prejudicial language is so much a part of accepted scholarly discourse that we usually dont even notice it. Among the prejudicial dichotomies commonly employed are history/prehistory, rational/irrational, civilized/barbaric, law-abiding/ bloodthirsty, higher/lower, developed/primitive, light/dark, and so on. These dichotomies are found in the work of many of the most respected scholars.

8 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Phifosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 12.

9 Carol P. Christ, "Toward a Paradigm Shift in the Academy and in Religious Studies," in The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy, ed Christie Farnham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 53-76.


but "civilized " Old Europe was nonhierarchical, in tune with nature, peaceful, highly artistic, and in many ways superior to the cultures and world-views that followed it in Europe. As Cimbutas wrote, "I reject the assumption that civilization refers only to androcratic warrior societies. . . . It is a gross misunderstanding to imagine warfare as endemic to the human condition."10

Here, Cimbutas threw down a gauntlet not only to her scholarly colleagues but also to her whole civilization. She challenged the "myth of progress" that is deeply embedded in Western cultures. According to this myth, all of human history is a story of (hu)mankind's "emergence" from "primitive superstition," "irrationality," and "barbarianism," guided by the "rule of law" and the "light of reason," to ever "higher and higher" levels of civilization. Not so, Cimbutas argued: the Indo-Europeans who overthrew Old Europe and whose values became the basis of our own were less "civilized" than the people they conquered, if civilization is measured by artistic production and a comfortable standard of living.

If we define "civilization" as the ability to live in peace for thousands of years, Old Europe is not inferior but superior to the cultures that followed it. The feet that warfare has become progressively more bloody and more destructive over the course of "history" has been a thorn in the side of defenders of the myth of progress. In their (re)writing of history, the defenders of this myth condone warfare as an "unfortunate" and "tragic" fact of life. Evidence that there may have been societies more peaceful than their own is suppressed or distorted by charges that such societies were "primitive" and "irrational" and that they engaged in "bloodthirsty" and "barbaric" rituals such as "cannibalism," "child sacrifice," "orgies," and the like. In asserting that Old Europe was a peaceful civilization, Cimbutas challenged one of the most deeply held assumptions of her scholarly colleagues, namely, that the societies and cultures of which those colleagues are a part represent the "highest development" of "civilization."

Gimbutas's claim that the civilization of Old Europe was overthrown by Indo-European invaders has come under attack as being simplistic. Leaving aside the merits of her argument, let us look at some of the deeper reasons why some scholars might be made uncomfortable by her claim that the culture of Old Europe was violently destroyed. We know from the conquest of the Americas that better-armed, well-trained armies can easily defeat less well armed, less militaristic populations over several generations and may also succeed in largely eradicating traditional values. Nonetheless, proponents of the myth of progress like to think that cultures proceed "onward" and "upward" by a kind of internal logic, with new and superior ideas replac-

Cimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, viii.


ing old and inferior ones. Most of us continue to think (despite our knowledge of at least some evidence to the contrary) that Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe owing to the inherent superiority of its ideas about human life and because paganism was in decline and decadent, rather than because it took control by the sword and by violent suppression of the practitioners of all other forms of religion. Similarly, we like to think that "the Greeks," whose culture we view as the basis of "our" own, were the "first rational men" to "emerge" from the "darkness" of "primitive barbarism." If in fact the Greeks came to power because their ancestors destroyed and pillaged other civilizations, then not only may they not have been the "first rational men," but also our culture's claim to be the "highest" civilization because we carry the "light of reason" discovered by the Greeks is called into question.

The feet that (Indo-)European-based cultures have continued up to the present day to conquer civilizations they view as primitive and barbarian makes this more than an academic matter. From the perspective of Old Europe, Gimbutas raises questions similar to those raised by peoples more recently conquered by Western Europeans: Was it the superior ideas of the (Indo-)Europeans that enabled them to conquer much of the globe, or was it simply their more highly developed technology of warfare? Are Gimbutas's critics "dispassionately" evaluating her evidence about the Indo-European conquest of Old Europe, or are they threatened by the challenge her work poses to their own deeply held assumptions?

If Gimbutas had merely questioned the myth of progress and unmasked the history of violent conquest at the heart of what we call civilization, this in itself would have been enough to evoke the desire to discredit her work. But Gimbutas further violated the scholarly code when she placed the female at the center of her work. Gimbutas amassed a great deal of evidence to support her theory that the civilization of Old Europe interpreted itself through the "language of the Goddess" that it created. She believed that at the root of Old Europe's artistic creations and at the heart of its ability to live in harmony for thousands of years was a spiritual world-view anchored in an understanding of the Goddess as Giver, Taker, and Renewer of Life.

Gimbutas further argued that the society of Old Europe was matrifocal and egalitarian. She found no evidence of organized warfare or kingship, two hallmarks of the patriarchal societies of the later Bronze Age. Grave evidence and evidence from temple models supports the idea that women were religious leaders. Gimbutas hypothesized that the society of Old Europe was matrifocal and matrilineal but not matriarchal, suggesting that there was mutual respect between the sexes within economic and social life.

In her depiction of the religion and civilization of Old Europe, Gimbutas provided massive new evidence that corrects and clarifies the work of scholars such as J. J. Bachofen and Robert Briffault who proposed the theory of


"primitive matriarchy," and of scholars such as Jane Harrison, C. Rachel Levy, and E. O. James who addressed the preponderance of prepatriarchal Goddesses.11 The theory of primitive matriarchy has been discredited in scholarly circles, and some have dismissed Gimbutas as simply restating outdated ideas. Gimbutas in feet rejected the idea of matriarchy in Old Europe, and she certainly did not see Old European civilization as primitive. In addition, she synthesized copious new evidence from excavations in the twentieth century to support her views. It will not do to dismiss her as simply reviving the matriarchal theory of the nineteenth century.

In evaluating criticisms of Gimbutas's work, it is important to bear in mind that her critics may be deeply offended by the idea of the Goddess as the primary divinity. European-based culture is, after all, still predominantly Christian: God is understood as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Zeus as the father of the gods is the favored icon of European culture's classical roots. Furthermore, the Anglo-German cultures of Europe, unlike their Mediterranean counterparts, do not have a tradition of worshiping the Mother of God on an almost equal plane with the Father and Son; this makes it even more difficult for Anglo-German scholars to recognize a Mother Goddess.

In addition, criticism of Gimbutas's work has emerged in the United States within a highly politicized academic context. All or nearly all of Gimbutas's American critics are associated with an academic establishment within which men whose values are those of the European patriarchy still hold most of the significant power and wherein those same men are launching a counterattack against the challenges of feminism and multiculturalism to their definition of the canon. For all of these reasons, I suggest that criticisms of Gimbutas ought to be subject to very careful scrutiny for their potential biases and ought to be carefully weighed against the considerable evidence Gimbutas presents, before the conclusions drawn by her critics are accepted.

Much of the criticism of Gimbutas can be found in brief remarks delivered to the press.12 In one of the more systematic critiques of Gimbutas's

11 See Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [Mother Right, orig. published in 1861]); Robert Briflault, The Mothers (1927; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1977); Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; reprint, London: Merlin Press, 1962); G. Rachel Levy, Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age (1948; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1963); E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (New York: Prager, 1959).

12 See, for example, the widely reprinted article by Peter Steinfels, "Idyllic Theory of The Goddesses Creates Storm, " New York Times, 13 February 1990 (Excerpted in International Herald Tribune, 15 February 1990); Jacques Leslie, "The Goddess Theory: Controversial UCLA Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas Argues that the World was at Peace


work so far proffered, "Old Europe: Sacred Matriarchy or Complementary Opposition?" Brian Hayden reveals his bias when he (deliberately?) slurs Gimbutas's work in his title by attributing to her the "discredited" matriarchal theory. In the body of his essay, Hayden questions Gimbutas's hypothesis of the "dominance of the Goddess," arguing instead for a "balanced" polarity of male and female forces. Against Gimbutas's view of the water snake and water bird as images of the Goddess, Hayden argues that the snake is more logically viewed as a masculine force, citing both Freud and Eliade.13 In a single sentence he objects to Gimbutas's interpretation of the pillar as a symbol of the Goddess, stating simply that "all common sense and psychiatric wisdom would associate it instead with the phallus."14

Because scholarly politics are as they are, Hayden is not required to take account of the many criticisms of Freud's theories as androcentric, nor of similar criticisms of Eliade, such as my own.15 Until Hayden and others offer a more sophisticated analysis taking account of feminist criticism of the sources they cite and carefully evaluating Gimbutas's evidence and arguments, we ought not rush to embrace their conclusions.

Entering into "A Different World"

Marija Gimbutas wrote that "A serious and continuous obstacle in the study of ancient societies is the indolent assumption that they must have resembled our own. . . . [T]he existence of 'a different world' is the hardest thing to admit."16 Gimbutas stated that it was not until after she had directed several excavations where 90 percent of the images dug up were female that she had a flash of insight that something was lacking in traditional theories about religion and culture in the Neolithic period.17 "During my excavations," she recalled, "I became aware that a culture existed that was the

When God was a Woman," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 11 June 1989, 22-24; Jay Matthews, "Did Goddess Worship Mark Ancient Age of Peace?," Washington Post, 7 January 1990, reprinted as 'Things Were a Lot Better When God was a Gal," San Francisco Examiner, 21 January 1990; and Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Flight from Science and Reason," Wall Street Journal, 10 July 1995.

13 Brian Hayden, "Old Europe: Sacred Matriarchy or Complementary Opposition?" in Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean (Amsterdam: B. R. Grunner Publishing, 1986), 17-30.

14 Ibid, 20. 15 Carol P. Christ, "Mircea Eliade and the Feminist Paradigm Shift, "Journal of Feminist

Studies in Religion 7 (Fall 1991): 75-94. 16 Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 324. 17 Marija Gimbutas, comments made to a group of women after her speech to the

Women and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in November 1985.


opposite of all that was known to be Indo-European."18 So began her exhaustive survey of artifacts in the museums of eastern and western Europe and her study of articles and books published in both western and eastern European languages.

In developing her theories of the religion and culture of Old Europe, Gimbutas drew on the folk tradition she had known in her native Lithuania, the last European country to be Christianized.19 She hypothesized that Lithuanian folk tradition contained many pre-Christian and pre-Indo-European elements, survivals of Old European culture. As she said, "Goddesses were still alive in my time. This is more than sixty years ago. They were there."20 Gimbutas also found survivals of pre-Indo-European traditions in classical Greek sources. I believe that folk tradition, both ancient and modern, can provide clues about pre-Christian and pre-Indo-European religion. But it must be admitted that the method involved in amassing the evidence is not linear. Let us explore this further.

On the night of September 7, 1994, I attended a festival on the Greek island of Skyros dedicated to the birth of the Panagia. The title "Panagia" refers tc¡ the Mother of God, bût it literally means the "All Holy One" in the femmine gender. The celebration of the birth of the Panagia puts the focus on the Mother (Anne) and Daughter (Mary), not on the male Trinity. This celebration was held in a small church built into a mountaintop cave that could only be approached on foot. I immediately thought of ancient Cretan rituals to the Mountain Mother, held on mountaintops and in caves. The celebration began at dusk and continued until daybreak. The small church had been decorated by women with flowers, and the carcasses of two slaughtered lambs hung in its doorway. The priest was inside the tiny church saying (lie liturgy. The person clearly in charge, a heavyset woman who was the mother of the family that tended the church, was busily directing the preparation of the feast. As I sat in the darkness outside the crowded church, I knew that I was witnessing a festival whose roots were Eu* more ancient than Christianity.

The woman who prepared the feast for the Panagia and her Mother probably did not know about the ancient worship of Mother and Daughter as Demeter and Persephone, nor about the even older veneration of the Mountain Mother in caves and on mountaintops. We do not find documents stating that the earliest Christians on Skyros consciously set out to meld Christian and pre-Christian practices.

18 See Joan Marler, "The Life and Work of Marija Gimbutas/' in this issue. 19 Ibid 20 Marija Gimbutas, interview in Det lykkelfolket pa Kreta: En science fiction fra forti-

den, dir. Ellen Lundby and Anne Magnussen (Ariadne Film, 1994), short film in Norwegian and English.


Recognizing the relationships among Neolithic images, practices reported in classical sources, and folk tradition depends on noticing a similar pattern and hypothesizing a connection. There is a certain selectivity and circularity involved: knowledge about ancient religion feeds our understanding of folk practice and our reading of classical sources, while information about folk practice gleaned from contemporary and classical sources shapes our understanding of ancient religion. I think it is fair to say that conclusions reached on the basis of this sort of logic are not proved in the same way as scientific hypotheses, that is, detail by detail. Rather, Cimbutas offers to the imagination a gestalt that makes sense of a variety of data. The truth or falsity of her vision will be shown not by proving or disproving individual details but by determining whether the gestalt as a whole makes more convincing sense of the data than do alternative interpretive frameworks.

The gestalt that Cimbutas proposed is the symbolic world-view embedded in "the language of the Goddess." Gimbutas argued that if we assume that the Old Europeans worshiped the Goddess as Giver, Taker, and Re-newer of Life, as manifest in nature and in all natural processes, we can make sense of the archaeological data that others have found opaque. Using this "hypothesis," Gimbutas gathered her data together under various headings, such as water, water birds, snakes, streams, nets, and so on, in every case relating the material to her central image of the Goddess as the Giver, Taker, and Renewer of Life. Using this methodology, Gimbutas found that she could "read" even abstract symbols, such as zigzags, chevrons, and wavy lines.

Some may object, as Brian Hayden did, that not all symbols are symbols of the Goddess. But let us not forget that in the Christian world-view of the Middle Ages, the entire natural world was viewed as a symbol of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Trees and streams, forests and glens testified to the glory of their creator, as did the waters of baptism and the wine and bread of Communion. No matter that to some the tree (or at least its "phallic" trunk) might be seen as masculine and water as feminine, nor that water and blood flow from the female body at the time of birth, nor that bread is usually baked by women. To the medieval mind, God was male, and everything in the world was symbolic of him. Medieval saints even imagined nursing at the breasts of Jesus. Could not the opposite have been true in Old Europe? If Gimbutas's hypothesis that the Goddess was the central symbol of Old European religious consciousness is correct, then there is no "logical" reason why snakes and pillars could not symbolize her power. From this perspective, Brian Haydens critique can be seen as an "indolent assumption" born of our own culture's prejudices.

I am quite convinced by Gimbutas's massive evidence that there was a Snake Goddess in Old Europe. I call your attention to an Old European Goddess found near Kato Chorio, Ierapetra, Crete (see figure 1). She is a


small, seated female figure (not a figurine!) with ample hips and buttocks; her arms, legs, and belly are marked with curved lines. Gimbutas interpreted this image as a Goddess, though some would argue that it might have been a child's toy or a fertility image that was not a divinity. The idea that she is a Goddess makes more sense to me than the other interpretations, after living in the world of the Goddess myself and having studied Gimbutas's work for twenty years. I admit that before I broke free of my culture's assumptions about the nature of divinity and began to think of divine power as Goddess, I might not have been particularly interested in this tiny figure, and I certainly would not have been disposed to view a heavyset female as sacred.

When I bought a terra-cotta copy of this image two years ago and set her on altars used in rituals in caves and on mountaintops in Crete, I turned again to Gimbutas's books. Gimbutas said that the image's thick, striped legs and arms resemble a coiled snake, and the more I looked at her, the more I saw the validity of Gimbutas's interpretation, though it was not evident to me when I first looked at the image. My point is that Gimbutas's interpretations are often subtle, requiring interaction over time both with individual images and with other images to which she compares them, before her interpretations settle into the imagination.

I am not, however, uncritical of Gimbutas; not everything she says is plausible to me. The fece of the image from Kato Chorio is stylized, and it seems to be wearing a hat or crown. Referring to this image and others, Gimbutas says that the "anthropomorphic Snake Goddess . . . never [has] a birdlike nose."21 To me this figure has a beaked nose, which I have learned to recognize from my study of the many images Gimbutas designates as beaked images of the Bird Goddess. But in disagreeing with Gimbutas in detail, I find verification of her overall theory, for she writes that "the combination of water snake and water bird is a peculiarity of Old European symbolism."22 Further entering into the symbolic world Gimbutas describes, I begin to see the stripes on the legs of the image as symbolic of rippling and flowing waters.

Let us consider another image that bears upon the substance of Hay-den's critique. This is the "Goddess of Myrtos" (see figure 2), described by Anna Kofu in the guidebook Crete as follows: "Anthropomorphic libation vase, the 'Goddess of Myrtos,' one of the masterpieces of the Early Minoan period. The small head on the thin neck is a marvel. The goddess is holding

21 Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 237. 22 Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: Myths, Legends and Cult

Images, 7000-3500 B.c. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 112.


a ewer, the mouth of which is the only opening on the entire vessel."23 When I first saw this image, I could not help thinking of its long neck and tiny head as a phallus. I am not offended by images of the phallus. In tact, I quite like the male images found at peak shrines in Minoan Crete that depict men with their phalluses prominently displayed in what books sometimes call a "codpiece." But I couldn't figure out why a female figure with clearly defined breasts would have a phallic head. The image bothered me because I couldn't understand it. When showing it to a group of women on one of the Goddess pilgrimages I lead in Crete,24 I remarked on my mystification, and noted that Gimbutas often interpreted long-necked images as water birds or water snakes. Suddenly I noticed the image's slender, snakelike arms, and I recalled the image of a snake I had seen rising out of a spring when I was a child. Perhaps this too is an image of a Snake Goddess, I thought. The net imagery on the figure's body and the ewer she holds further identify her as a water snake. Since then, this interpretation has seemed satisfying to me.

As you read this essay, you may be thinking that I have entered into a circle of interpretation in which my world-view predisposes me to accept Gimbutas's interpretations of ancient artifacts. Admitting participation in contemporary Goddess religion seems tantamount to giving up all claims to scholarly neutrality in relation to Gimbutas's work. But note that no one would claim that a Christian could not evaluate the history of Christianity, or that a general could not become a historian of warfare. I argue that I am able to appreciate Gimbutas's lifework in part because my religious perspective allows me to enter into the "different world" of Old Europe in a way that makes it possible for the images to speak to me as they spoke to Gimbutas after decades of study. Many other scholars freely admit that they are repulsed by the female images of the Neolithic period, calling them "fat," "grotesque," "distorted," "boringly repetitive," and so on. Yet they call their perspective "objective." I do not agree that they are in a better position to understand the meaning of the images of Old Europe.

In conclusion, I invite others to devote time to the study of Gimbutas's magnum opus and to enter into the world Gimbutas describes. Hers is a lifework that must be absorbed over time. It is far too early for facile dismissals based on reiteration of timeworn prejudices.

23 Anna Kofu, Crete: AU the Museums and Archaeological Sites, 2nd ed, trans. Phillip Ramp (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), 186; illustration on 187.

24 For information on Goddess pilgrimages to Crete, an educational program of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, please write 1306 Crestview Drive, Blacksburg, Virginia 24060.


FIGURE 1. Neolithic Goddess found at Kato Chorio, Ierapetra, Cíete, ca. 5800-4800 B.c.E.


FIGURE 2. "Goddess of Myrtos," a vessel holding a vessel, found at Myrtos, Crete, ca. 2600-2300 B.C.E.

^ s

Copyright and Use:

As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.

No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling, reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However, for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article. Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available, or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).

About ATLAS:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS®) collection contains electronic versions of previously published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American Theological Library Association.

Ä differenworldt the challenge of the work of...

Documents