Saturday, February 1, 2025

Goddess Time by Charlene Spretnak


In the 1970s, a new type of history book appeared, revealing a historical record we had never been taught in school: in numerous prehistoric, Indigenous, and historical cultures around the world, the core spiritual presence was perceived as female and was central to these societies.1 Thus was my understanding of history and religion blown to bits as I realized that our received “manstream” narrative was shaped by patriarchal premises, preferences, and deletions at every turn. It made sense to me that very early cultures would have viewed the bodily female powers—bleeding in rhythm with the moon, swelling up like the full moon, producing a person, and then transforming food into breastmilk to keep the next generation alive—as a presence inherently related to the larger, embedding powers and rhythms of nature and cosmos.

When I read elsewhere that the temples and observances honoring the Greek goddesses were far older than those of the gods, I became intrigued and spent a year in a good classics library gathering the evidence of the traits, functions, and nature symbols associated with each of the pre-Olympian goddesses, prior to their patriarchal makeover by Indo-European newcomers who established Olympian mythology. I immersed myself in the research over time, pieced together what could be known of each goddess, and reconstructed their probable pre-Olympian mythologies, which were published as the book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978).2 Still, I wished more was known about those cultures and even older ones.

Then I encountered the work of the Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–94), whose excavations were focused on the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras of southeastern Europe. She called the Indigenous cultures there “Old Europe.” Her books The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 BC (1974) and The Language of the Goddess (1989), which present a stunning array of art and artifacts, have been important to prominent artists and countless others as well. Yet today, one hears it said that Gimbutas’s work has been “discredited” and is passé. Quite the contrary. Here is a quick look at where things stand today with her three major areas of research and discoveries.

 

The First Area

Beginning in 1956, Gimbutas revolutionized the field of Indo-European archaeology by discovering the answer to the major question looming for decades: where did Indo-European language and culture come from and how did it come into Europe? Drawing on the five major Neolithic excavations she had directed in southeastern Europe, plus scores of excavation site reports across the region (she read thirteen languages), Gimbutas realized that the Indo-Europeans were tribes of nomadic pastoralists who had come from the east, from the Russian steppes, in three main waves of migration: ca. 4400–4200, 3400–3200, and 3000–2800 BCE. She also posited that they then continued west across southeastern Europe, often attacking and burning the settlements of Old Europe. Gimbutas’s realizations, which she called the Kurgan theory, have now been proven repeatedly by historical genome mapping studies over the past twenty years in numerous universities. No archaeologist today disbelieves those genetic findings, which show that the Indo-European gene pools came into Europe where Gimbutas said, when she said, and moved across Europe the way she said.3

However, in the early 1990s a British colleague told Gimbutas that he was about to publish a counter theory that would overthrow her work, and even though his theory was immediately dismissed by paleolinguists and was eventually blown out of the water by the historical genome mapping studies (he finally admitted publicly in 2017 that Marija was right4), that hardly mattered because the exercise of academic politics did, indeed, overthrow her. Since the challenger sat atop one of the major archaeology departments in the world, networks of younger colleagues in several countries, especially Britain, Canada, and the United States, hastened to endorse his flimsy theory and add their own ways to misrepresent, mock, and marginalize Gimbutas for twenty-five years. They got her books removed from academic libraries, and claimed in peer-reviewed journals and books that Gimbutas (supposedly) is wrong because the people of Old Europe probably burned down their own settlements or because talking about invasions is out of style. This effort to disparage Gimbutas spilled over into the two other major areas of her work.5

 

The Second Area

Gimbutas was the first archaeologist to realize that the peaceful, agrarian, artistically sophisticated Pre-Indo-European cultures constituted a civilization, for which she coined the name “Old Europe” (see The Civilization of the Goddess, 1991). Their graves indicated roughly equal status of males and females, though the females were buried with somewhat more objects. After the publication of her book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, she stopped using even her qualified sense of “matriarchy” for these female-honoring cultures because it was being misunderstood to mean the flip side of patriarchy. Instead, Gimbutas called this egalitarian civilization “matristic” (often matrilocal, definitely matrifocal, and probably matrilineal). She demonstrated that Old Europe was markedly distinct from the Indo-European cultures that came later with a patriarchal social system (barrow graves with retainers, horses, objects, wives, and concubines buried around a chieftain); a sky god, a warrior cult with fortifications and caches of weapons, and simple art techniques used mainly to decorate their weapons. Before Gimbutas, Indo-European archaeologists had assumed that it was patriarchy all the way down, that is, that the earlier strata were merely a rudimentary warm-up version of the later strata.


Today, her realization that Old Europe indeed constituted a civilization with distinctly Pre-Indo-European characteristics across many local cultures is widely accepted in archaeology, but she was so thoroughly canceled in the 1990s and beyond that her name is sometimes entirely missing from the wall plaques of museum exhibitions about her conceptualization, Old Europe, as was the case at NYU in 2009.6 In a similar vein, some archaeologists dismiss Gimbutas in their writings as a “matriarchalist” (she wasn’t), and then go on to present as their own discoveries conclusions that she had published decades earlier, such as the fact that the Pre-Indo-European cultures were egalitarian—neither patriarchal nor matriarchal.7

 

The Third Area

Gimbutas was the first of the postwar archaeologists to pay attention to the religion of the Pre-Indo-European cultures, an area of study that eventually expanded and is now widely established. Unlike most of her peers, she additionally had studied ethnology and the history of religion, and was also knowledgeable about art. She saw that the many majestic stylized figurines of women (far more numerous in Neolithic Europe than figurines of males), stylized clay animals, small clay models of shrines, and decorated vessels expressed a cosmological and biological symbol system and worldview. Using a transdisciplinary methodology she created and named “archaeomythology,” Gimbutas decoded the symbols and art forms as an articulated engagement with the innate forces of the regenerative cycles of nature—life-giving, death-giving, and transformational; rising, dying, and self-renewing. These were the powers of the dynamic grand unity, the primal source; each ritualized goddess figurine was a face of that dynamic unity. Gimbutas was somewhat wary of using the term “goddess” because it would connote worship, whereas the focus was, instead, on living in alignment with the cycles of nature and cosmos. Almost all early cultures expressed a consciousness of continuity with the rest of the natural world, which is foreign to the modern mind. Gimbutas used the term goddess because it was the only way to convey the same cultural centrality that God connotes today.

It is mainly this third area—the meanings of the symbol system and the art—that is still disputed in Pre-Indo-European archaeology, as one would expect, because educated speculation is all that is possible from a distance of millennia. For instance, a male archaeologist argues that the myriad ritualized female figurines in the Neolithic era were actually porn dolls for the men. The problem is that the academic disagreements are rarely respectful of Gimbutas’s work, in spite of the fact that so many of her pioneering discoveries have been proven correct. Many of the dismissals of her are ideological. For example, in the mid-1990s, two feminist archaeologists charged that Gimbutas’s observation that women in Old Europe were associated with nature is unacceptable because it denies them the possibility of having cultural agency!8 Those of us watching these attacks from the sidelines who had been working in ecofeminism and cultural history were astounded to see feminists buy into the patriarchal dualism of nature-versus-culture so thoroughly.

It seems nearly impossible for the modern mind shaped by patriarchal schooling to even consider that the gradual evolution of (matrilineal) clans, hamlets, and settlements grew from an organic nexus of women-nature-culture. Try this on: after women created our species by moving from estrus to menses, they eventually noticed that they bled in rhythm with something outside of themselves, the distant moon, which was the beginning of analogical reasoning and abstract thought. The woman-moon-culture matrix was also the reason many cultural items, art, and practices were subsequently invented: to mark and celebrate menarche, most likely presided over by clan mothers.9 This is merely a (logical) theory, but why isn’t it on the table alongside all the patriarchal assumptions? Apparently, the probability that early cultures were matristic is unequivocally unacceptable to some. A male anthropological archaeologist, writing in 2017, compared the Neolithic Goddess to Grigori Rasputin, a nefarious spiritual figure who was exceedingly difficult to kill, adding, “the Goddess refuses to die.… She will only fade away for good when we devise an alternative grand history that accounts for large-scale coherences.”10 Having canceled even the brilliant Marija Gimbutas, the obsessed still yearn to cancel the Goddess in her many guises.

Ecofeminists do indeed think women have been associated with nature (a bad thing only in anti-nature cultures), and we think it would be a saner world if everyone felt associated with nature. Of course, it’s too late for that now, too late to expect any sort of grand ecological transformation of our hyper-modern society in time. We are never going to reach a zero-emissions economy, certainly not soon enough to do us any good, because levels of emissions are rising every year, not falling. The fossil fuel corporations’ death-dealing pushback in recent years has been successful in many directions, and besides, AI will need five times the amount of electricity currently generated, plus lots of our water. Woo-hoo!

So what goddesses in art would be most relevant for our times? I love the resonance of Kiki Smith’s sculpture of mythological Lilith (1994) as a menacing “childless cat lady” creeping down the wall. I love those monumental cedar sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard that are reminiscent of the substantial form of Upper Paleolithic goddess figurines, such as Ona (2013), a nineteen-foot-tall, twelve-thousand-pound female overlooking the sports area Barclays Center in Brooklyn. I love Wangechi Mutu’s goddess-like figures, so embedded in nature and charged with unpredictable energy. In calmer times, I would opt for Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957), with the bird-goddess’ nonchalant exercise of creative power. But for our historical moment, I suggest Mary Beth Edelson’s photograph The Sacred Manic Goddess Makes Tracks (1978). The manic gods and goddesses of New York will surely decamp, at some point, with millions of climate refugees walking behind them before the superstorms and the rising sea swamp the five boroughs. Edelson was relentlessly attacked in the late 1990s as an “essentialist” and canceled for the photographs she created in the 1970s of woman and/in/of nature. Take another look.

Mary Beth Edelson, The Sacred Manic Goddess Makes Tracks, 1978. Silver gelatin print. Courtesy the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and Accola Griefen Fine Art.

Or perhaps a specific goddess would be more useful. Kay Turner, a Brooklyn-based performer, curator, and folklorist, makes a strong case for Hekate, the torch-bearing Greek (and pre-Greek) goddess of thresholds and liminality, of crossroads, of darkness, she who contains the energies of transition we need.11 As part of a performance series entitled “What a Witch,” Turner performed “A Hekate Supper,” Part 1 (Abjection/Separation) and Part 2 (Ecstasy/Return) at FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn in 2022.12 She has stated that, while she does not believe in the gods, she does believe in “the magic of their instruction conjured in their stories and the stories we tell about them and with them.”13 

And now? Turner has an open question for us: “We are already seated at the crossroads of a great divide. Even as the axis crumbles, will we choose Hekate’s third path of transformation and renewal?”14 It may be that Hekate helps those who help themselves. Perhaps it would be wise to have some conversations in your apartment building, on your block, and in your neighborhood about community emergency preparedness. Might come in handy.

1. See The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis (Putnam, 1971) and When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone (Dial Press, 1976).

2. Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Mythology (Beacon Press, 1981 [1978]).

3. See Miriam Robbins Dexter, “DNA Evidence for the Roots of Indo-European Patriarchy and Pre-Indo-European Culture” (see esp. the section “The Kurgan Theory and DNA Evidence”), in Art and Memory: Collection in Honor of the 80th Anniversary of Ivan Marazov, ed. by Irena Bokova and Oksana Minaeva (New Bulgarian University, 2024). Also see David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (Pantheon, 2018).

4. Colin Renfrew, “Marija Redivia: DNA and Indo-European Origins,” delivered at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, November 8, 2017.

5. See Charlene Spretnak, “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas,” Journal of Archaeomythology, vol. 7, 2011.

6. See, for example, the exhibition The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BC, curated by David W. Anthony, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, November 11, 2009–April 25, 2010.  

7. See, for example, Ian Hodder, “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük,” Scientific American, vol. 290, no. 1, January 2004.

8. For full citations to this and other dismissive attacks, see Charlene Spretnak, “Anatomy of a Backlash,” Journal of Archaeomythology, vol. 7, 2011.

9. See, for example, Judy Grahn, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (Beacon Press, 1993). Also see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

10. Richard G. Lesure, “Comparative Perspectives in the Interpretation of Prehistoric Figurines,” in The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines, ed. by Timothy Insoll (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 57.

11. Kay Turner, “Hekate: Goddess for the Twenty-First Century,” in Enchanted Pedagogies, ed. by Kari Adelaide Razdow (Brill, 2023).

12. This performance by Kay Turner was part of her collaborative work Hekate’s Grove (FiveMyles Gallery, October 22–November 20, 2022), with sculpture by Elizabeth Insogna, paintings by Karen Heagle, and “performance/activation” rituals by Turner.

13. Turner, “Hekate,” p. 182.

14. Ibid., p. 192.

 Charlene Spretnak is author of nine books on cultural history, social criticism (including feminism and Green politics), and religion and spirituality. Her work includes The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, 1800 to the Present: Art History Reconsidered (2014; reviewed in BR on Oct. 15, 2015), as well as Relational Reality (2011); The Resurgence of the Real (1997); and Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978). She also edited an anthology, The Politics of Women's Spirituality (1982). She was a cofounder of the Green Party movement in the United States and a cofounder of two branches of the feminist movement: the women's spirituality movement and ecofeminism.


Published in Brooklyn Rail

2 comments:

ellen abbott said...

Thank you for this. I did a lot of reading in my 30s and 40s curious about the origins of religion so a lot of this is familiar, how the goddess was slowly transformed into the patriarchal Father god. The Abrahamic religions have tried to wipe her out through conversion, murder, laws and yet she survives. Even in christianity as Mary. And of course Gimbuta's work has been attacked. She's a woman and she put the lie to the notion that patriarchy has always been supreme. It's my big beef with archeologists who filter all their translations of ancient languages and cultures through their own patriarchy.

Barbara Rogers said...

I have a bookcase of books about goddesses and feminism. I just realized I don't read many of them any more. Time to pass them along to the next generation of questioning women. We women who are in touch with the divine feminine can share it now.