The Living Goddesses
by Marija Gimbutas
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marija GimbutasEditor: Miriam Robbins Dexter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-01-12
ISBN: 0520229150
Number of pages: 306
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of The Living Goddesses
Book Review: Good reading, Great Goddess!
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
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