The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

Marija Gimbutas presents a carefully researched, compelling and detailed composite portrait of the pre-Indo-European culture existing for 5,000 years up until about 5,000 years ago. Her greatest contribution is her willingness to NOT assume that things then must have been pretty much like they are now. That is, she explores with a much more open mind than most, what do the artifacts and patterns of housing and so on, tell us about that society? or, more accurately, that set of societies that prospered, growing larger, more creative and artistic, and more complex, over almost all of central and western Europe during that period of time? Marija illustrates beyond doubt that these societies were anything but "like" ours today, or even like the set of societies that conquered and replaced them for the next 5,000 years. The earlier social structures were centered on an understanding of the cycle of life: their villages were built with streets along concentric circles; their burials were in circular graves, their temples and worship were focused on the life giving aspect of the Goddess (her book includes photographs of hundreds of such artifacts), and in all of their thousands and thousands of pictures and artifacts, none -- not one -- were of war, fighting, or domination. Rather than a "Matriarchal" society where women dominate, Marija found a pattern of valuing women as were valued men, with villages of robust size -- 10,000 residents -- along trade routes. These societies fell easy prey to the domination of patriarchal and linear God-worshipping warriors on horseback that came out of what is now southern Russia around 5,000 years ago. Yet it took a few thousand of those years for nearly all the circular meaning of the growing of life to be pushed out. Interestingly, one might consider today's contemporary concern with sustainability to be a resurgence of that earlier understanding of the circular eternality of life /THI IS A GIFT QUALITY BOOK/