Reading Marija Gimbutas

Abstract

In 1974 Marija Gimbutas, previously known for her theories about IndoEuropean cultures, published a scholarly work with an academic press on neolithic and chalcolithic Europe. Titled The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, this book argued that the neolithic (stone age) and chalcolithic (copper age) cultures of Old Europe 6500-3500 BCE were peaceful, matrifocal, egalitarian, sedentary, agricultural, highly artistic, and worshiped the Goddess. These cultures, Gimbutas argued, were overthrown between 4500 and 2500 BCE by patriarchal invaders who domesticated horses, worshiped male sky gods, and spoke Indo-European languages. Had it been published twenty years earlier, Gimbutas's book on Old Europe and the two that followed, The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) might have been quietly ignored. But Gimbutas's book was published at about the same time as Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (1973); the first issue of WomanSpirit magazine (1974); Z. Budapest's Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (1975); and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (1976). It quickly became one of the works cited in support of the burgeoning feminist spirituality movement's contention that women were better off in ancient societies that worshiped the Goddess than they were in later cul-