1686 3063 1 pb

The Goddess and the Evidence: A Gathering Vindication of Marija Gimbutas G.S. Swan I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the worlds, in diverse manners, in variable customs, and by many names. For the Phrygians that are the first of all men, call me the Mother of the gods at Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans which bear arrows, Dictynnian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusians their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate, other Rhamnusia, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun, and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kinds of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.1 - Apuleius Quièn sabe? Certain legends, Rider Haggard’s ‘She’, William Sloane’s ‘To Walk the Night’, suggest imaginatively a bizarre connection between the conscious (or unconscious) entity of femaleness with mathematics, space, time, and the mystery involving these. No scientific material exists in respect to either the legends or the fiction. 2 - Phillip Wylie The following was the occasion of the dream. Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in my job in the dream, had been calling on me. ‘Lend me something to read’, she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard’s ‘She’. ‘A strange book, but full of hidden meaning’, I began to explain to her; the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions...3 -Sigmund Freud Introduction The Goddess Movement of recent decades has elicited notable social and intellectual controversy. The Goddess Movement allegedly signifies a Volume 13, Number 1

SPRING 2001

phoebe

55

The Goddess and the Evidence neofeminist/neopagan reemergence of a religion (or civilization) of antiquity (or of prehistory). Nevertheless, this element of the Goddess Movement simultaneously has been discounted as mere propaganda in the contemporary cultural wars.

The following pages briefly recall the work of the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She advanced propositions relative to the western incursion into Europe of the Indo-Europeans, and relative to facets of Old European culture.

These latter propositions prove of relevance to the Goddess Movement.

Evidence of 2000 has tended to substantiate some of Gimbutas views.

I. Gimbutas argued that repeated incursions by Proto-Indo-Europeans made an end of the Old European culture. This transpired approximately between 4300 B.C.E. and 2800 B.C.E.4 It changed Old European culture from matrilineal to patrilineal, and from gylanic to androcratic.5 Western Europe was among the regions evading this process the longest.6 There, Old European culture could flourish as a peaceful and creative civilization until 1500 B.C.E.7 (This marked between a millennium and 1500 years beyond the thorough transformation of central Europe. 8) A main repository of Old European beliefs remains the Basque county of northern Spain. 9 The Basque tongue seems once to have been spoken across a far broader area than is suggested by its present stronghold in the Pyrenees. 10 It is logical to speculate upon an intrusion into Iberia to explain the presence, since, of Indo-European speakers.11 The late extension of an Indo-European language into western Europe, only, could have marked the final chapters of the expansions of the Indo-Europeans.12 The Iberian intrusions responsible for the Celts must have developed from approximately 1000 B.C.E. to 500 B.C.E.13 In the posthumous 1999 book which occupied Professor Gimbutas (1921-1994) for the two final years of her life,14 she propounded that the present-day Basque culture of northern Spain and southeastern France is one of the most remarkable cultures to preserve Old European roots.15 The Basque culture is completely non-Indo-European.16 Non-Indo-European are the Basque language, legal code, folklore, and matrilineal customs:17 There is no doubt that the Basques are living Old Europeans whole traditions descent directly from Neolithic times. Many aspects of Old European culture – goddess religion, the lunar calendar, matrilineal inheritance laws, and agriculture work performed by women – continued in Basque country until the early twentieth century.18

The Goddess and the Evidence Basque law codes (both in ancient and modern times) accord women exalted status as inheritor, arbitrator, and judge.19 Treating women and men wholly equally are laws in the French Basque region governing successions. 20 And although the Inquisition mercilessly persecuted as witches the devotees of the goddess, Mari somehow eluded destruction among the Basques.21 Mari is revered in legend as an oracle and prophetess. 22 Legend allots to this goddess the power to control human greed.23 Herself a lawgiver, she upholds law codes. Jealously watching to see that her commandments are observed, she rules over communal life. Mari generates droughts or storms to castigate evil, or disobedient persons.24 Mari is linked with the moon.25 Basque folklore elucidating Mari’s command over heavenly phenomena presents information which archaeological sources cannot.26 (Mari appears as a sickle of fire or as a woman casting off flames, or as a woman whose head the moon encircles.) 27 Professor Gimbutas was a key individual in the promotion of goddess spirituality.28 Archaeologist Gimbutas represents the only notable professional from the disciplines of anthropology or ancient history who truly joined the Goddess Movement’s ranks.29 Gimbutas stood virtually alone, within professional circles, in supporting the Goddess.30 Hers is, perhaps, the most formidable of the arguments on behalf of an ancient goddess culture. 31 II. But Professor Gimbutas’ labor has been dismissed as that of a believer, rather than that of a purely scientific, disinterested scholar. 32 The key to her final books has been alleged to be faith: her faith in the Goddess. 33 Where should one look to test Gimbutas’ theory of ancient goddess spirituality?

Of relevant interest is the book of 2000, Genes, Peoples, and Languages,34 by Stanford University Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza is esteemed by other scientists as the planet’s foremost authority on human population genetics.35 Cavalli-Sforza recalls that Gimbutas had suggested that the Indo-European languages derived from a location north of the Caucasus and south of the Urals.36 When she published this thesis, she assumed a date of 3500 B.C.E. to 3000 B.C.E. for the earliest speakers of Indo-European.37 This dating was rejected by English archaeologists as too remote. 38 But her dates appear to be vindicated by fresh excavations.39 The Stanford scholar cites recent genetic studies which confirm that the population that might most closely resemble the Mesolithic Europeans (prior to the arrival of Neolithic populations) are the Basques. 40 Indeed, Cavalli-Sforza’s work indicates that Basques descend directly from Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples who lived in northern Spain and southwestern France.41 During the final Paleolithic

The Goddess and the Evidence period, the Basque area encompassed nearly the entire region wherein ancient cave paintings are discovered.42 Cavalli-Sforza notes cues that Basque itself descends from a language spoken during the initial occupation of France by modern humans: 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.43 Basque is possibly related to the tongue of the Cro-Magnons.44 III. Additionally relevant are several professional reports of autumn 2000.

Anatomically modern humankind initially appears (within Africa) some 150,000 years ago.45 In the November 10, 2000, issue of Science, scholars including Cavalli-Sforza and Dr. Peter A. Underhill of the Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Genetics assessed the genetic legacy in extant Europeans of Paleolithic humans.46 They derive a genetic perspective upon human prehistory in Europe from twenty-two binary markers of the nonrecombining Y chromosomes. Accounting for over ninety-five percent of the 1007 Y chromosomes studied were ten lineages.47 Analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequence variation within European populaces have been conducted.48 These data suggest that these populations’ gene pool signifies approximately a twenty percent Neolithic ancestry and approximately an eighty percent Paleolithic lineages in the ancestry. 49 The Science evidence substantiated these observations.50 And a paper published on October 16, 2000, in The American Journal of Human Genetics by scholars including Dr. Martin Richards of England’s University of Huddersfield traced European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mitochondrial DNA pool.51 Those authors’ goal was identifying the principal lineages to have entered Europe, and dating their arrivals, so as to quantify the contributions which the main episodes of fresh settlement within European prehistory made to our contemporary mitochondrial DNA pool. 52 The study of the geographic distribution and diversity of genetic variations (the phylogeographic approach) is a useful device for investigating range expansions, migrations, and other methods of prehistoric gene flow.53 Those authors aimed to trace the ancestry of Europe’s lineages as remotely as 48,000 B.C.E.54 This marks the approximate juncture of the pioneering of Europe by anatomically modern humans.55 Sure enough, the extraction of the Basque Country population includes the scantiest Neolithic (i.e., relatively recent56) element.57 This bespeaks a dearth of Neolithic settlement.58 Gimbutas stands posthumously vindicated regarding her theory of Indo-European origins. And modern science confirms her respect for the pronounced antiquity of the Basques. It now (more than ever) is to intensive research of Basque culture and archaeology that scholars must turn to prove (or disprove) Gimbutas’ theories of the Goddess. Of the three disciplines bearing

The Goddess and the Evidence upon human origins, (archaeology, historical linguistics, and population genetics) archeology alone boasts a solid means of dating, premised upon radiocarbon and other types of radioactive decay.59 Conclusion The preceding discussion has reviewed the contributions of Marija Gimbutas. It has been seen that this sympathizes of the Goddess Movement propounded an embattled position on Indo-European origins. Her position has, in recent years, found empirical support.

Moreover, Gimbutas advanced the idea that the Basque nation has constituted a stronghold of Old European culture. In her view, the Basques afford at least some window into a goddess society of the past. Genetic studies published during 2000 have added some empirical support to Gimbutas’ thinking.

Therefore, deeper research into Gimbutas’ perspective on Old European culture is justified.

Endnotes 1. Apuleius, The Golden Ass: Being the Metamorphases of Lucius Apuleius, 545-47 (W. Adlington, trans.) (Harvard U. Press, Cambridge: 1965) (footnotes omitted).

2. Philip Wylie, The Disappearance, 31 (Pocket Books,NY:1971) (Wylie’s emphasis).

3. Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), 5 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 453 (James Strachey, ed. and trans.) (The Hogarth Press, London: 1981) (Freud’s emphasis).

4. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, xx (Harper & Row, San Francisco: 1989).

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., xx-xxi.

8. Ibid., xxi.

9. Ibid., 190.

10. J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth, 105 (Thames and Hudson Ltd, London: 1989).

11. Ibid.

12. Andrew Sheratt, Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives, 474 (Princeton U. Press, Princeton: 1997).

13. J.P. Mallory, supra note 10, 106.

14. Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, xv (Miriam Robbins Dexter, ed.) (U. of California Press, Berkeley: 1999).

15. Ibid., 122.

16. Ibid., 122-123.

17. Ibid., 123.

18. Ibid, 172.

19. Ibid, 123.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 173.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 173-74.

24. Ibid., 174.

25. Ibid.

The Goddess and the Evidence 26. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess, 342 (Harper, San Francisco: 1991).

27. Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, supra note 14, 174.

28. Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, 30 (Spence Publishing Co., Dallas: 1998).

29. Ibid., 51.

30. Ibid., 52.

31. Ibid., 69.

32. Ibid., 70.

33. Ibid., 71.

34. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages (North Point Press, NY: 2000).

35. Jared Diamond, AThe Golden Phonebook”, NY Review of Books, April 13, 2000, 58.

36. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, supra note 34, 118.

37. Ibid., 159.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., Cf. ibid., 160-61.

40. Ibid., 112.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 121.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 141.

45. Nicholas Wade, “The Origins of the Europeans: Combining Genetics and Archeology, Scientists Rough Out Continent’s 50,000-Year-Old-Story”, New York Times, Nov. 14, 2000, D9.

46. Ornella Semino, et.al., “The Genetic Legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Extant Europeans: A Y Chromosome Perspective,” 290, Science 1155 (Nov. 10, 2000).

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 1158.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Martin Richards, et.al., “Tracing Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern DNA Pool,” 67 Am. J. Hum. Genet., 1251 (2000).

52. Ibid., 1269.

53. Ibid., 1252.

54. Ibid., 1253.

55. Ibid., 1252.

56. Ibid., 1256.

57. Ibid., 1267.

58. Ibid., 1271.

59. Nicholas Wade, supra note 45, D9.