00:16:34.920As Jean-François Champollion, a century and a half ago, through his decipherment of the Rosetta Stone,
00:16:41.980was able to establish a glossary of hieroglyphic signs to serve as keys to the whole great treasury
00:16:48.480of Egyptian religious thought from circa 3200 BC to the period of the Ptolemites.
00:16:55.080So, in her assemblage, classification, and descriptive interpretation of some 2,000 symbolic artifacts from the earliest Neolithic village sites of Europe, circa 7,000 to 3,500 BC, Maria Gimbutas has been able not only to prepare a fundamental glossary of pictorial motifs as keys to the mythology of that otherwise undocumented era,
00:17:21.060but also to establish on the basis of these interpreted signs the main lines and themes of
00:17:27.360a religion in veneration, both of the universe as a living body of a goddess mother creature
00:17:33.280and of all the living things within it, as partaking of her divinity. A religion one
00:17:41.560immediately perceives, which is in contrast to that of Genesis 3.19, where Adam is told by his
00:17:47.060father creator in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground
00:17:52.280for out of it you were taken you are dust and to dust you shall return in this earlier mythology
00:17:58.620the earth out of which all these creatures have been born is not dust but alive as the goddess
00:18:04.540creator herself one cannot but feel that in the appearance of this volume at just this turn of
00:18:10.640the century that there is an evident relevance to the universally recognized need in our time
00:18:16.280for a general transformation of consciousness. The message here is of an actual age of harmony
00:18:22.140and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature, which for a spell of some 4,000
00:18:28.440prehistoric years anteceded the 5,000 of that which James Joyce has termed the nightmare of
00:18:35.380contending tribal and national interests, from which it is now certainly time for this planet
00:18:40.860to wake. Signed, Joseph Campbell. Joseph famously inspired George Lucas in his creation of the Star
00:18:50.480Wars series, and I love this interplay. One degree of separation between Maria's artifacts and Lucas's
00:18:57.700science fiction. Everything is truly everything. From the Language of the Goddess. The reason for
00:19:06.520the great number and variety of old European images lies in the fact that this symbolism is
00:19:11.860lunar and tonic, built around the understanding that life on Earth is in eternal transformation,
00:19:20.140in constant and rhythmic change between creation and destruction, birth and death. The moon's three
00:19:27.420phases, new, waxing, and old, are repeated in trinities or triple functional deities that
00:19:34.480Recall these moon phases, maiden, nymph, and crone. Life-giving, death-giving, and transformational,
00:19:42.540rising, dying, and self-renewing. Life-givers are also death-wielders. Immortality is secured
00:19:50.160through the innate forces of regeneration within nature itself. The concept of regeneration and
00:19:56.420renewal is perhaps the most outstanding and dramatic theme that we perceive in this symbolism.
00:20:01.660It seems more appropriate to view all of these goddess images as aspects of the one great goddess with her core functions.
00:20:11.020Life-giving, death-wielding, regeneration, and renewal.
00:20:17.280The obvious analogy would be to nature itself.
00:20:20.840Through the multiplicity of phenomena and continuing cycles of which it is made,
00:20:26.540One recognizes the fundamental and underlying unity of nature.
00:20:33.160The goddess is imminent rather than transcendent, and therefore physically manifest.
00:20:42.520The things that connect us all are the same things which exist now, just as they did, as they do, as they will.
00:20:49.960The things we share, the moon, sun, earth, and stars, are free to behold, free to connect with.
00:20:58.040There's no admission fee to look up at the sky.
00:21:01.400So while we impose meaning and rules and tariffs and borders that only serve to divide us,
00:21:08.280there shines the moon in perfect equality for everyone.
00:21:11.920so while the moon is free to behold sadly podcasting is not free but we're trying as
00:21:25.560hard as we can to keep missing witches free and accessible for everyone so please check out our
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00:22:10.000herbs and everything that she uses from the most ethical source she can find um yeah it's palm oil
00:22:18.020free palm oil depresses the fuck out of me i was so happy she said that yes i love orangutans
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00:22:29.960please go to foxglovefarm.com and use offer code missing witches for a super witchy 13 discount
00:22:40.000We've seen the alchemy of combination so many times on this podcast. Pixie Smith with her
00:22:57.500illustration and divination, Maria Sabina with her poetry and magic mushrooms, Zora Neale Hurston's
00:23:03.440pen and traveling bone. The work of Maria Gimbutas requires a complex recipe of conversation across
00:23:10.980academic disciplines to even begin to unpack the fullness of its meaning. The exchange of
00:23:16.200information between archaeologists, linguists, mythologists, physical anthropologists, and
00:23:21.340ancient historians, artists, poets, scientists, and witches. She said, there is a belief that
00:23:27.860religion cannot be reconstructed. That it's a waste of time to even speak of religion because
00:23:33.420archaeologists cannot do it. Maybe this is because they are not really trained. They are not interested
00:23:39.320in mythology at all and are just seeing the material culture. They don't want to see anything
00:23:44.920else. They think they are safe in reconstructing the ways of agriculture or how pottery was made
00:23:50.220and that satisfies them. In our days there are no people with vision. They cannot go across the
00:23:56.920border of their discipline. Archaeology now is interested mostly in excavation techniques,
00:24:02.140and they want to be very precise. The computer is used and all that. Of course, you can reach
00:24:06.920some conclusions using statistics, but if you do not have a vision as a person, if you are not
00:24:13.380also a poet or an artist, you cannot see much. You will just be a technician. And this is,
00:24:21.040in most cases, what happens. Back to Joan Martler. She wrote,
00:24:27.060The Bronze Age is typified by the burials of dominant males with caches of weapons.
00:24:32.680Having traveled extensively in Eastern Europe to study the archaeological material, it was clear
00:24:37.600to Maria that something very different was happening before the Bronze Age, and she became
00:24:43.060impassioned to find out what that was. Although numerous excavations were being done on Neolithic
00:24:48.580sites, and she had studied every excavation report in its original language. No one had presented an
00:24:55.940overview to answer her questions, so she decided to conduct her own research and turned her attention
00:25:01.180to an in-depth investigation of the earlier Neolithic cultures. Fortunately, UCLA had money
00:25:07.340for such projects in those days, so between 1967 and 1980, Maria Gimbutas became project director
00:25:14.100of five major excavations of Neolithic sites in Southeast Europe. As long as Gimbutas was
00:25:19.560describing Bronze Age artifacts, she was considered a respected scholar. She soon realized, however,
00:25:25.820that in the earliest levels of excavation, there were no weapons of war or signs of male domination.
00:25:32.340It also became clear to her that descriptions of the material culture would not be enough. It would
00:25:38.480be impossible to understand the cultural development of the Neolithic period without
00:25:42.700acknowledging that an earth-based spirituality was central to every aspect of life. Therefore,
00:25:49.820she employed an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, which she eventually called
00:25:54.500archaeomythology. Other researchers had noticed the relative peacefulness of these early societies
00:26:00.940and the prevalence of female figurines. It was Maria, however, who had the audacity to speak of
00:26:07.540this imagery as sacred expressions of the deity in female form. She used the word goddess and
00:26:15.260spoke of it as all life in nature. If all this prehistoric goddess stuff is starting to sound
00:26:23.740familiar, maybe you caught our episode on Monica Cho, one of the patron saints of the Missing
00:26:28.760Witches podcast. She and her great cosmic mother co-author Barbara Marr were very inspired by Maria
00:26:35.560Gimbutas and mention her several times in the book. So here's an excerpt from Great Cosmic Mother.
00:26:41.720Finally, the snake came to symbolize the phallus, male sexual energy, which was understood to be
00:26:48.600originally contained inside the goddess, born from her and returning to her again, when, at the end
00:26:55.900of each world cycle, expansion, contraction, she curls up in a dark sleep. Though upper
00:27:02.360paleolithic images of copulation between men and women occur, icons and myths of the great mother
00:27:08.480do not show her actually mated with a human son-lover until Middle Neolithic times, circa
00:27:14.7005500 BC. At this time, and especially after the peak period of Katahyuk, which seems to have been
00:27:22.000a divorce of male attributes from the mother and quite a phallic obsession developed, shown in
00:27:28.340representations of phallic cups, standing phallic stones, and Ithphallic gods, though pictures of
00:27:34.760shamans in trance with huge erections go far back into Upper Paleolithic. But these are not
00:27:40.760aggressive or misogynist phallic images. Rather, they seem to represent the phallus serving the0.59
00:27:46.800goddess, women, and the life process of all. This is really shown in the tradition of goddess
00:27:53.320phallus stones, with goddess figures carved on phallic-shaped bones or rocks. This phallic form
00:28:00.640of the goddess is found continuously from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic and into the
00:28:06.220proto-urban period in Mesopotamia. Maria Gimbutas sees these goddess phallus icons deriving from
00:28:13.080the Old Stone Age as suggesting the androgynous nature of the Great Mother. This is so. They also0.94
00:28:21.080suggest the potential unity of the sexes in mutual love service, before their disastrous
00:28:28.120splitting apart by patriarchal misogyny and puritanical sex codes.
00:28:35.380So Maria found statues with both male and female traits. Clay sculptures of plump women with0.94
00:28:43.080phallic heads and folded arms. They are amazing works of art indeed, resembling both the feminine,
00:28:49.140bottom-heavy goddess, and, to put it bluntly, dick and balls. This helped Maria to emphasize0.99
00:28:56.680co-creation, that the great goddess is all, so of course exists as androgynous. Everything.
00:29:06.380Everything all at once. People are using the term non-binary a lot these days, and while you might
00:29:12.840understand what that means culturally, maybe you're not familiar with what the words themselves mean
00:29:18.140and how they're used. You've probably heard me say smash the binary in the same breath as smash
00:29:23.280the patriarchy, so I think it's worth going off on another one of our patented missing witches
00:29:28.780tangents to talk about the binary, and how this term got worked into contemporary culture.
00:29:34.080When we say binary, we mean things that are opposites, or set up in opposition to one another.
00:29:40.020Either this, or that. In the language of computers, binary code for example, there are only
00:29:47.400ones and zeros. Nothing else. Day, night, black, white, good, bad. But to view the world in only
00:29:57.980sets of this's and that's is, as we've seen over and over again, easy, uncomplicated, and deeply,
00:30:08.620deeply dangerous. It sets everything up as oppositional. Everything that is set up on
00:30:18.020one side of the binary is also equated with another binary, good, bad. Day and night are
00:30:26.440opposites, sure, but can we all agree that some of the most magical times are held in those blurred
00:30:32.600spectral moments between the two. The dusk, the dawn, the in-between times.
00:30:41.500The binary we are almost always talking about when we use this term non-binary is man-woman.
00:30:47.780Some people feel trapped by society's expectation that we fit into one and only one of two,
00:30:53.640only two options, male or female. The binary says red or blue only, but I don't want to live
00:31:02.440in a world without purple. Purple is my favourite colour. On the academic English lit tip of the
00:31:10.200binary discussion lies the concept of binary opposition. When I first learned about these
00:31:15.060deconstruction theories and movement, I felt like I had found a name for the cultural dissidence I
00:31:20.140felt like I was born with. They ask, does this mean what we think it means, or what we're supposed
00:31:26.760to think it means? Let's take this apart and see. And they proved with literary and cultural
00:31:32.720criticism that meaning, all meaning, is imposed by our reading. That humanity, that art, that
00:31:40.620meaning is not yes or no, but maybe, maybe, maybe, what do you think? And not just what does it mean,
00:31:49.580but how does it mean, and why does it mean, and can it mean something different? Ultimately,
00:31:58.040binary gender expression rules are all a bunch of baloney anyway. Historically, regular old manly1.00
00:32:04.760men have worn everything from wigs to robes to kilts. The first high heels were made for men.
00:32:12.000Everyone has body hair. Okay, okay, except for those with alopecia, shout out to my hairless1.00
00:32:17.480homies, everyone has body hair. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, is a pretty recent marketing0.98
00:32:23.940construct. So wear what you want, be who you want, choose your own name, impose your meaning onto the
00:32:32.640world, and more importantly, let's all work and strive to create a world where everyone is safe
00:32:40.520to do so. As I said, Maria often emphasized the egalitarian nature of the society she was
00:32:47.360theorizing. Matriarchal hierarchy structures, in her opinion, are the same as a patriarchal society,1.00
00:32:54.420not the actual opposite. She wrote, an egalitarian society is one without hierarchy.0.98
00:33:02.680I'm going to say that again. An egalitarian society is without hierarchy.
00:33:10.520In The Living Goddess, she wrote clearly that while female form seems to dominate, this is simply because birth was a most sacred mystery.
00:33:18.940In fact, one of her most important discoveries was a birthing room, walls painted red.
00:33:24.500Maria was a feminist, certainly, but she was not, as some have accused, a skewed, man-hating revisionist.
00:33:40.520woman's body was regarded as parthenogenic, that is, creating life out of itself. The female body0.95
00:33:48.780gives evidence of maternity, while the male body does not give evidence of paternity. The male0.50
00:33:53.580element and symbolism was significant. Male animals and humans stimulate and enhance life,
00:34:00.660particularly plant growth. They are seen as an important part of the process of becoming,
00:34:06.940but do not actually create life. In Neolithic art and myth, the male deities appear as partners
00:34:14.720of the goddesses. In Maria's thinking, the role of the father in the creation of life in prehistoric
00:34:22.280antiquity may not have been valued only because it was not understood. Nonetheless, everyone was
00:34:30.220seen as having a valuable role. I want to take a second here to quote some of our witches found.
00:34:35.900Jackie Beaumont, and I'm paraphrasing here, finds it super problematic that Mother Earth is given, quote, feminine attributes, that femininity is painted as soft, non-aggressive, compliant, but Mother Earth is as destructive as she is creative, as rigid as she is supple, as terrifying as she is nurturing.
00:34:58.620and our Found Witch of the Week, archaeologist Vanessa Olivier Lloyd, whose full interview you'll
00:35:04.820hear on Wednesday, have reminded me that matriarchy isn't synonymous with peace, that an ancient
00:35:10.280matrilineal society of Quebec's First Nations people would capture men from other tribes to0.90
00:35:15.280replace fallen warriors. What Gimbutas claims to have found was not matriarchal or hierarchical,
00:35:22.180but egalitarian. If we simply flip the binary instead of dismantling it, we will have solved
00:35:29.700nothing. We've pondered so many times, Risa and I, to each other and with you all here on the
00:35:35.940Missing Witches podcast about the nature of patriarchy and how it started and why. What
00:35:40.940happened? It's just like some baffling decisions got made at some point in prehistory that people
00:35:46.560and the earth should be conquered and subjugated, that women should be silent. And we've all seen0.51
00:35:52.460some caveman cartoon of him whacking a cavewoman over the head with a club and dragging her back
00:35:57.640to his cave. We've been led to believe that it's just always been that way. Man strong, woman weak,
00:36:04.180the female of the species forced into servitude to pay for her protection against a cruel world.0.95
00:36:10.060Gimbutas is perhaps the closest I've come to getting some kind of answer to our question,
00:36:14.700has it always been this way? Well, Maria Gimbutas is here to say emphatically, no. These pieces of
00:36:22.82010,000 year old evidence say different. It's a resounding no. It has not always been this way.
00:36:31.080A peaceful, earth-connected society is possible. An egalitarian society is, or at very least,
00:36:40.720was possible. Let me just stress this one more time. In her digs, Maria found thousands of
00:36:48.380artifacts, but not one weapon. Not a single tool of war. Let that sink in for a second.
00:36:57.980A society who was herding animals, practicing agriculture, creating pottery and art had no
00:37:03.380use for weapons. No concept of war. As we always say, when you go looking for witches, you find
00:37:13.220them everywhere. Wonderful, wacky, and wise witches. You can't research a witch without
00:37:18.780finding at least two more. I came upon an interview with Maria conducted earnestly and
00:37:24.600eagerly by a woman named Star Goody. It's a YouTube upload of a cable access program,
00:37:30.180a series that ran from 1986 till 1991 called The Goddess in Art.
00:39:35.160with the goddesses, gods, and spirits of the Balts.
00:39:38.460It is perhaps fitting that she ended this book
00:39:41.160with a long section on Lithuanian folklore, since it was the Baltic goddesses, particularly the
00:39:46.840Latvian and from the Lithuanian, with whom she had felt a kinship since her childhood. Throughout
00:39:53.200her life, her native country, its folklore, language, and customs remained foremost in her
00:39:58.960heart. When she was a child, she learned of the Lithuanian goddesses, gods, and spirits,
00:40:04.940honored even in the early part of the 20th century. These deities peopled the landscape
00:40:10.720of her spirit, enriching her love for the land, waters, flowers, trees. Maria Gimbutas was an0.96
00:40:18.500ecologist decades before the word became popularized, and her home in the hills of
00:40:23.660Topango, California reflected her love of nature. This love became a foundation stone in her own
00:40:30.700philosophy of life and her personal spirituality. In the last decade of life, Maria Gimbutas' own
00:40:37.340ecological and spiritual beliefs found resonance in the growing spiritual and ecological movements
00:40:43.120in the United States and abroad. Her books, as well as her presence, became a strong focus in
00:40:49.180ecological movements, so much so that many people, perhaps without intending to, learned quite a bit
00:40:55.260of archaeology. Maria Gimbutas's philosophies, describing a world where men and women might
00:41:01.240live in harmony with one another and with their environment, found a home in the hearts of
00:41:06.260thousands of people, helping to shape the ideas of a new generation of ecologists. Women and men
00:41:13.960in the fields of ecological science, anthropology, folklore, and mythology, as well as archaeology,
00:41:21.640have been touched and transformed by the works of Maria Gimbutas.
00:41:29.520Maria has had a lot of detractors over the years. Every strong woman is a witch and is hunted,0.88
00:41:35.280right? I've seen her work described as off-the-wall, eccentric, hippie, and even0.92
00:41:41.480horse feathers. One of her biggest and most scornful critics was Colin Renfrew, a geneticist
00:41:48.080who claimed that such a large ancient society, as Maria suggested, based on her findings of
00:41:53.940reoccurring symbols and so on, was impossible. Turns out, it just took a while for science to
00:41:59.780catch up to what Maria Gimbutas already knew. We now have the technology to analyze DNA,
00:42:06.120to map and trace genetics. So in 2017, Colin took to the stage at the University of Chicago
00:42:13.420and declared, Maria's hypothesis has been magnificently vindicated.
00:42:20.980Maria was right. She is said to have told a colleague that it might take decades,
00:42:26.080but eventually the value of her work would be recognized. In a letter she wrote to her
00:42:31.120old Lithuanian college professor, she said, I planted my seed as well as I could.0.79
00:42:37.740And that goes for you too, witches, with your planting seeds of crazy ideas, it might take
00:42:43.980decades. You may not even live to see how you changed the world. You may never know how the0.95
00:42:50.420magic of you can ripple waves into the future. So plant your seed as well as you can. Live your
00:42:57.840truth, even if no one gets you right now, and make it easier for others to live theirs.
00:43:03.780On that note, I'd like to leave you for today with some advice from Maria, and I hope her words will resonate with you and shake you out of preconceptions of prehistory and headlong into the present and future of our civilization and of your brand new day on this ancient earth.
00:43:23.560Don't be sheep. Do what you want to do. It's very important to be mobilized, to have determination to do what is meaningful.
00:43:34.080If you feel a need to do something, you must do it.0.96