Archeologist Marija Gimbutas was Professor of European archeology at UCLA and participated directly in excavations for nearly thirty years. Her legacy on the very ancient cultures of the Goddess is contained in many journal articles and three books, published between 1974 and 1991, which form the foundation for some of the information contained in this work but have also been fundamental for the study of this subject internationally. The books are The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe; The Language of the Goddess; The Civilization of the Goddess. There may still be those whose education did not include study of this material, and they may doubt such cultures ever existed, but there is no longer any academic reason to dispute the legitimacy of the archeology.
In the Neolithic period between 6500 and 5500 BCE in Old Europe, a system empathic to the nurturance of human beings flourished. People could gather into larger groups in permanent settlements, develop an economy which created a new means of retaining surplus food, including both production and distribution, which today is called agriculture. Agriculture is the ability to plant domesticated seeds in order to produce reliable crops. Those crops in the Neolithic consisted of wheat, barley, flax (fiber for weaving cloth), legumes, domesticated forms of tree fruit (apples and plums), and the opium poppy for healing and sacred ceremony. Animals had been domesticated earlier than plants. Earliest were sheep, goat, and dog (from the wolf). Some people ate dogs, but the dog was used mainly for protection and to work the herds of animals before the horse was introduced from Eurasia centuries later. Sheep and goats were used to produce fiber from their hair with which to weave, skins for warmth and containers, meat and milk for food. Cattle, pigs and the horse were the second tier of domesticated animals.
At the dawning of human development, there appear to have been three different groupings of lifestyle in the temperate zones. The first is the hunter/fisher. It is most ancient and attributed to the Cro-Magnon of Old Europe. The second is a food-gatherer who became the food producer/agriculturist who came originally from the Middle East and North Africa, slowly migrating from the Mediterranean regions into Old Europe, the Balkans and Turkey (Anatolia), eventually traveling to the Atlantic islands of Britain and Ireland. The third lifestyle was called pastoral. These were the nomadic herders of animals, primarily sheep and goats. Pastoral people inhabited the vast lands and mountains beyond the temperate zones, to the East near present day China and the steppelands near Russia.
It appears that the muscular, rather massive Cro-Magnon and the more slender Mediterranean peoples did intermingle in very early Old Europe. Certainly they would have met on the waterways as they traveled and met again in the fertile valleys because these prime locations were chosen by both as places to live. One group wanted them for fishing, the other for agriculture. This intermingling was so successful that Cro-Magnon disappears as a separate identity. Throughout this introduction of peoples there is no archeological evidence of fortification, no use of weapons against one another, and no evidence of territorial aggression. The entire period was made notable because of orderly human expansion and increased trade: expanding villages, stable communities, the creation of crafts and artwork. All of this was made possible by peaceful coexistence and the continuing development of agriculture. With surplus food equitably distributed, humans could put their primary focus on improving the quality of life for all because they were not engaged in defending against war.
The archeology indicates that women and children lived together for most of the year, inviting males when it was time to procreate, to mate usually in the springtime. Otherwise, the males were sent away and not accepted in the social structure.
It has been supposed by many and written by some that the reason human men lived with this social positioning for thousands of years is because they did not understand the value of their role in the creation of new life. These men were breeders and herdsmen, intimately familiar with animal husbandry, which renders that explanation unlikely.
It has always been believed that the woman has a power of perception beyond what is literally seen and heard. Whether it is called sixth sense or woman’s intuition, it is a highly developed, extra sensitive ability to see what is behind and forward in time. The culture of the Goddess appears to have developed this natural ability and made it into a source of power and prestige for thousands of years.
The ancient natural powers of the woman appeared as the first of the Great Mysteries. And in the circle of time with which women are so familiar, the Mystery became synonymous with Woman. Mystery is the name for the initiation process for ultimate spiritual development of woman from girlhood into adulthood. Mystery became the name of the religious process of the Initiation itself.
Men were permitted to have an initiation also, if they agreed to serve allegiance to the great deity of the Goddess – birth, death, rebirth and, therefore, life everlasting. (Later, many of the famous male philosophers in classical Greece chose to do just that.)
The culture these people evolved was women-focused, matrifocal and matrilineal, which is to say that inheritance and clan belonging was passed through mother to daughter, and only the relationship to one’s mother determined belonging. However, all evidence from burials and art indicate a non-hierarchal structure with equality and division of labor between women and men. In governance, there is no evidence of master-slave or domination of ruler over subject.
These people lived in peaceful, equalitarian, agricultural communities, which “developed a rich and sophisticated artistic expression and complex symbolic systems formulated around the worship of the Goddess and Her various aspects, and thrived from approximately 7,000 BCE to 2,500 BCE, about 5,000 years.”1 As pottery replaced stone carving, jewelry in copper and gold appeared, as well as thousands of figurines. And, it is these figurines that lead us to the discovery of an “intensive religious ceremonialism” according to Gimbutas. She writes,
The emergence of great numbers of figurines – anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, female and male – as well as anthropomorphic, bird shaped, and animal shaped vases, miniature replicas of furniture, stools, tables, and thrones, miniature offering tables and containers, libation vases, and lamps, as well as temple models, coincides with the early ceramic period.… the second half of the 7th millennium BCE A pattern of worship (a rich Neolithic pantheon of Goddess and gods) is established which continues to the end of Old Europe, 2500 BCE. Specific places of worship – the temples are incorporated into housing with courtyards, altars, offering places and temple workshops for making pottery and bread.2
From 5,500 to 3,500 more changes occur. Copper metallurgy occurred about 5,500 BCE and increased throughout the millennium. Gold was also discovered and used for both secular and religious purposes. Trade routes flourished, causing some of the people (usually the men who were more attuned to moving) to travel long distances on foot, leading pack animals such as goats or sheep, before the horse was introduced.
Advancements in more complex architecture led to building multi-room/multi-story houses, in which one room always was used as a temple, usually on the second floor. Bread ovens, grinding stones, exterior ash pit collection areas, spinning whorls and food storage areas are now standard features in the village housing complex. There are underground food storage areas dug underneath the houses, complete with ventilation. The Bird Goddess was the main deity of the household and the Temple. Temples, pottery and houses abound with a symbolic script evidenced in painting on pots and walls, doorways and pillars, as well as on all the figurines of women.
Ritual headdress and costume are clearly detailed on pottery vases and figurines, leading to the possibility of eventually deciphering and understanding these complex belief systems and ritual ceremonies. Vertical looms for weaving cloth and loom weights are found now in every village excavation.
In addition to the Bird Goddess, archeology also uncovers the Snake Goddess, mothers holding babies (i.e. madonnas), and in various zoomorphic figurines representing snakes, frogs, hedgehogs, fish. There are
also male figures wearing ram or Billy goat masks, making up about 20% of figurines.3
Here we also find the Centaurs for the first time in Southern Yugoslavia. The Centaur is the representation of a masked human head grafted on a bull’s body. This is a figure of male mythology. The great Auroch bull of Old Europe (now extinct) represented the male life-force of all nature and was featured in regeneration ceremonies. The blood of the bull was rubbed on sacred objects and spilled over the fields for fertile harvest. In Hungary today there is still a red wine named for bulls blood, as are various other modern drinks produced elsewhere, which are thought to produce increased stamina and energy.
Large owl-faced vases used for liquid containers are found. The owl can see in the night, and no doubt the liquid was part of a divination process, possibly a liquid made from the opium poppies planted by Neolithic farmers.
The figures were carved out of marble, alabaster, opalite. Pottery had beautifully painted spirals, energy symbols, snake and water markings along with triangles. The pubic triangle of the Goddess and vulva symbol of birth and sexuality was virtually ubiquitous, incised or painted on clay, bone, stone, animal and human skin as tattooing.
The pottery was decorated with astonishingly modern motifs, not literal drawings, or representational art. The decorations are spirals, triangles, water meanders; all these energy motifs were fluid and symbolically beautiful. They are sophisticated, decorated with graphite and gold by the 5th century BCE. Neither in pottery nor sculpture was realism the desired outcome. Little is focused on realistic human details; rather, the goal is schematically representing a universally shared understanding of intrinsic significance. Some figurines show breasts, belly, buttock, symbolic of regeneration and birth – but no realistic faces. Ritual masks cover the human head – to represent the ritual or spiritual function understood to be performed by the wearer. Here are found the Bird Goddess death masks and owl masks for “seeing in the dark” (divination). Male figures are rarely if ever found.
These people are identified as gracile, small statured Mediterranean with narrow face and dolichoeaphic head, a far cry from the stocky Cro-Magnon of a thousand years before. Genetics had favored the more slender.
Their settlements had a circular formation with houses radiating out from a temple center. The settlement had no protective moats or walls; however, they were encircled by ditches which evacuated waste water and were done for the dual functions of spiritual and physical health. These permanent settlements prospered and grew to populations of up to 4,000 people. One circular settlement discovered in the Balkans could have housed up to 10,000 residents and must be considered a city in the modern sense. It was replete with two-story houses, temples, workshops, large storerooms, bread bakeries, offering altars and graves. Extensive farm fields and constructed animal stalls existed contiguously, but outside the city ditches.4
Around this time a new figurine was found in graves: It is an elongated slender female figure with oval mask face, bird wing protuberances for arms, breasts and pubic triangle defined and perforations along the sides of the figurine to attach feathers or some other decorations. These figurines are called “stiff nudes,” partly because they appear in gravesites in groups of three and partly because they are so distinctly different from the exaggeratedly round breasts, buttocks, belly, and legs of the classic pregnant birth-giving Goddess found in the temples.
While figures of males are uncommon, nevertheless, three types have been found: They are 1) A seated man who appears to be mourning, with head covered by hands, 2) an older bearded man, 3) a slender young man, often ithyphallic (displaying erect penis), who seems to be a helper attendant to the Goddess in a ritual capacity. This may be an early ancestor of the later son/lover/king/consort of Priestess Queens in Goddess cultures we know through later written accounts.
Two story temple workshops from 4,000 BCE have been found in present day Bulgaria, giving us many clues to the relationship between workshops and reverence.
The second floor is the temple with a stone-offering altar. It was an open room providing space for community to gather en-masse. The first floor is divided into two or three rooms with ovens for both bread and ceramics. They have beautifully and elaborately decorated ritual pottery and the many tools for decorating, including polishers of deer bone, awls, flat stones for crushing ochre, which is the red dust put onto bodies at burial signifying the blood of rejuvenation. There are bird bones, flint blades, pick-like tools from finds in corresponding grave sites, and from them it is learned that women were the potters and decorators. Pottery decorating tool kits with sample bones and pebbles, polishers and paint, were found in the grave sites of females. From observation of temple models, only women are shown producing pottery in temple workshops.
At first, this beautiful pottery was produced using the coil method, whereby clay is worked and hand rolled into long ropes which are then stacked into rounds, one on top of another to be fashioned into pots, vessels or other objects. Around 4000 BCE, a rotational device was invented which would become the “potter’s wheel,” still in use today. But much earlier, around 6000 BCE, at what is thought to be the initiation of ceramic pottery production in the Neolithic, the pottery kiln (firing oven) was invented. When the potter’s wheel came into use, the women potters were able to achieve firing temperatures of approximately 1,000 degrees C., according to modern analysis.5
THE GODDESS AND HER CHILDREN
For both daughters and sons, everything derived from the mother. Names came from mother’s clan/family name only, no father’s name. The daughters were taught everything they would need in an entire lifetime by the women in the mothers’ lineage, including the sacred laws, the sexual practice and the endeavors which provided abundance for community. These were the fundamental building blocks upon which new generations were acculturated, nurtured, and prepared for adulthood with awesome responsibility vested in each girl on her way to womanhood.
The women were dedicated to the Goddess herself, whether they were baking bread in the sacred, round ovens or weaving cloth on the small looms, or creating Goddess votives in clay, sitting in the Temple courtyards, and baking the votives in the same ovens used for bread. Both were life staples, one for body, one for spirit, and the two ideas were not yet separated. All were dwelling in a primarily vegetarian population.
Ceremonies of regeneration, sometimes in caves deep underground in magical grottos, sometime in tombs signifying the cycle of life-death-rebirth were led by women. The postulants crawled in the tomb/womb complex through a giant rock cut-out resembling a vagina, the birth canal. The people prayed, staying inside the tomb/womb for a prescribed amount of time and reentered the daylight plane initiated into the mystical cycle of spiritual rebirth and personal transformation. There is evidence that a Priestess of healing was with them throughout this journey. The presence of the Goddess was always with them.
Pubescent girls had communal public ceremonies to mark the onset of menarche, menstruation, and to celebrate their entrance into female adulthood, life giving, child nurturing, sexual exuberance and joy. (In contrast, modern women are often told they are getting “the curse.”)
All adult women were dedicated to the service of the Goddess. Some families chose the honor of serving Her in the Temples as priestesses. This was a lifetime choice, but they did not forego sexuality on her part. In fact, the Temples were not only the seat of community justice with priestesses serving as judges, they were also the location of service of another sort.
Then as now and perhaps forever, some men will have problems with sexual performance: Some are homosexual, some bisexual, some prefer women as sexual partners. For those who preferred women or were bisexual, the sacred women of the Goddess are the “viagra” of the very ancient world.
All young women of certain Temple families were required to dedicate several years of their lives to service in the Temple compound as holy women, helping the men of their community overcome sexual challenges and become united
with their Goddess through sacred sexual union with Her through the dedication of Her holy women. These women were not permitted to choose among the men, but they took each in his turn on an equal basis. Their mission was to restore each man to his Goddess-given sexual capacity in the energy return of life force and to be able to provide the other half of sexuality manifested in the expression of human ecstasy, which was a primary focus of Goddess culture. This public expression of ecstasy is portrayed in artistic wall painting, on pottery, in sculpture, on megalithic stoneworks and tomb/womb regenerative resting places.
The people of the Goddess understood the vitality of sexual youthfulness on the energy field of the Goddess representative, the Queen/Priestess, because everything in this culture was aligned with energy transmission and received male sexual energy kept the vital flow alive.
Women kept the people healthy through knowledge of plants for medicinal use, through their knowledge of divination/shamanism for contact with alternative realities, and also through their knowledge of psychotropic substances for knowledge of prophecy and foretelling of future outcomes. Daughters are the inheritors, the heiress of name, material goods, the sovereign right to govern and to sit in council, deciding the fate of others. Daughters are the prophetesses, the diviners, the healers and foretellers of the future. Daughters are the Priestess/Queens of tomorrow and, in times yet distant, the warrior/protectors.
Sons are the divine son, the son/lover and son/consort of adulthood. Sons are symbolic of the “Tree of Life,” the sacred male sexual energy, the protectors of that which is wild, and the other source for fecundity in yearly vegetation upon which the entire community depends for existence. This spiraling, ever-recycling female and male energy, pulsing and rotating, ebbing and flowing again, gives essential impetus to sexuality and its eternal celebration on earth.
Daughters of the Inquisition Page 2