The Language of the Goddess: A Conversation with

Marija Gimbutas
24 June 2014 at 15:01
The Language of the Goddess: A Conversation with Marija Gimbutas by James Powell

MARIJA GIMBUTAS (23 January 1921 – 2 February 1994)

Marija Gimbutas, PhD, was a professor of European Archaeology at the University of California,
Los Angeles, and Curator of Old World Archaeology at the UCLA Museum of Cultural History. She
authored more than twenty books, including The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and The
Language of the Goddess. In his forward to the latter work, Joseph Campbell writes:

As Jean-Francois Champollion, a century and a half ago, through his decipherment of the Rosetta
Stone was able to establish a glossary of hieroglyphic signs to serve as keys to the whole great
treasury of Egyptian religious thought from c. 3200 B.C. to the period of the Ptolemies, so in her
assemblage, classification, and descriptive interpretation of some two thousand symbolic artifacts
from the early Neolithic village sites of Europe, c. 7000 to 35000 B.C., Marija Gimbutas has been
able, not only to prepare a fundamental glossary of pictorial motifs as keys to the mythology of that
otherwise undocumented era, but also to establish on the basis of these interpreted signs the main
lines and themes of religion in veneration, both of the universe as the living body of a Goddess-
Mother Creator, and of all the living things within it as partaking of her divinity . . .

Marija Gimbutas believes she has proof of an ancient European Goddess-oriented civilization that
lived in peace; in harmony with nature; and with a high degree of economic, social and sexual
equality, its goddess-centered art exhibiting a striking absence of images of warfare and male
domination. This culture was invaded by aggressive Indo-European nomads from the Russian
steppes, who worshipped a lightning God, Perun, The Striker, who brings rain to pastures and
shapes the universe with His brawny arms and lightning hammer.

And how did He fashion it? He took sprawling valleys, white temples where in dark recesses the
Goddess had presided for millennia, whole villages, teeming celebrations, mythologies, artists
rejoicing in the supple beauty of their women, dancing limbs circling the fire. . .and He decided to
make them perfect. He shattered them. With no weapons or chariots to protect themselves, they
danced in abandon to His music. The throb of lutes falling to the ground, shrieks of women and
children shrill as flutes, thuds of skulls against the temple floor, and always the same silent refrain:
eyes, as if in worship, upturned, frozen in their final gaze.

Many contemporary feminist scholars, environmentalists, peace activists, and artists trace the
source of current social problems to the spread of domination by the patriarchal Indo-European
mind-set. According to them it began in the 5th millennium B.C. by destroying surrounding
matriarchal Goddess-oriented civilizations, and has continued unchecked in war-like waves to
current times. If one looks at a linguistic map of today’s world, one will see that Indo-European
languages are either primary or the official language of state of most of the globe, except Africa and
China.

The domination was not merely geographical: corporate, military, and family structures were taken
over by hierarchical, patriarchal, Indo-European values. Just as in the ancient battle-ax cultures of
the oak forests and grassy steppes of southern Russia, contemporary males are enculturated to be
living embodiments of the Lightning God: thus, we have Zeus-type bosses, generals, and fathers
wishing to establish their own realm over which they are the absolute ruling divinities.

Since the popularization of Gimbutas’ work, the notion of the defeat of harmonious, egalitarian
Goddess-worshiping matriarchies at the hands of warlike, Indo-Europeans is fast becoming more
than scholarly speculation. It is becoming the germinal axiom of an entrenched social, intellectual,
artistic and spiritual movement.

However seductive the theory, it is not without detractors. Many of Marija Gimbutas’ colleagues have
disagreed with her methodology and conclusions. Furthermore, they feel compelled to make their
criticisms more widely known because of the popularity of her theory. In part they fear a replay of the
first wave of scholarly interest in Indo-European, Aryan origins, a major force in late 19th and early
20th century intellectual life. When this interest overflowed the realm of scholarship, where wars are
carried out in footnotes, and became the subject of politics, where wars are carried out by
footsoldiers, the relationship between scholarly speculation and socio-political movements suffered
an embarrassing chapter. While Hitler proudly asserted the myth of Aryan racial supremacy, he
overlooked the fact that in the realm of scholarship “Aryan” was not a racial, but a linguistic category.
Only in the hands of Hitler could it have been distorted to fit existing prejudices and political
aspirations.

Marija Gimbutas asserts that the people who inhabited Old Europe before the invasions were
peaceful, egalitarian, and valued cooperation over strength. David Anthony, assistant professor of
anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., counters that the settlements of Old Europe
were fortified. That they had weapons, including some used as symbols of states. He further cites
evidence of human sacrifice, hierarchy and social inequality.

Gimbutas claims to have decoded the code of symbols found in Old European sites: figurines of
females are Goddesses, markings on vases and figurines are symbols of the Goddess’s
regenerative power, especially her sexual organs. Gimbutas’ critics say that she sees squiggles on
artifacts and then jumps to conclusions without any intervening arguments, that the figurines could
just as well be dolls of women as of Goddesses. Gimbutas argues that between roughly 4000 B.C.
and 3500 B.C. this matriarchal utopia was shattered by Indo-European marauders from the Russian
steppes, sweeping in on horseback. J. P. Mallory, author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans, states
that the Indo-Europeans may have arrived after the collapse of Old Europe rather than causing it.

Gimbutas remains undaunted by such criticisms. After all, none of her American critics have as
much first-hand knowledge of European archaeology as she, and none are able to marshal the
impressive linguistic, mythic and folkloric evidence she wields. She has a tendency to perceive
criticisms as myopic shortcomings of the discipline of archaeology. Archaeologists are not really
interested in religion, mythology, folklore and language—and she brings all of these into play in order
to interpret her findings.

Yet, yearnings for the Goddess may transcend all science. Even sacred science. In the word of an
ancient Sanskrit hymn:

Alas, I know not the mantra or yantra, nor do I know the songs of praise to Thee, nor how to
meditate on Thee. . . nor how to inform Thee of my distress. But this much I know, O Mother, that to
take refuge in Thee is to destroy all my miseries. Certainly the need for refuge is universal. The
young Marija Gimbutas must have experienced this need intensely as she fled her native Lithuania
with only her doctoral thesis in hand, having witnessed the atrocities of the Nazis and the Stalinists.
 Photo: Marija
Gimbutas in Lithuania

James N. Powell: One thing I have learned in talking with scholars is that the unique circumstances
of their personal lives influence their scholarship.

Marija Gimbutas: [Laughter] Ah! Certainly!

James N. Powell: So, first of all, I’d like to know something of your upbringing, any possible
influences or gifts it provided you with in your work. Growing up in Lithuania were you a devotee of
the Black Madonna?

Marija Gimbutas: In Lithuania there were dark ones. Mary’s place in my heart was very much.
Actually, my parents were not believers in going to church. When I was six, seven, eight years old I
went to the church, taken by our servants. In May I would go every day to church because I liked the
music and flowers. The month of May is dedicated to the Virgin Mary; and that was the most
beautiful thing [glowing]. I was very excited to be in that special month. But the rest of the year not at
all. Just May, because that was the Virgin Mary month, and there were all kinds of flowers and
fragrances, and that, to me, was more important: Nature, the beauty of the Spring. Mary was the
Spring Goddess! She serves the same function as the Goddess of regeneration, or fertility, of
harvest and all that. So I had such an experience in my childhood.

The Black Madonna? It wasn’t so clear to me that they were black or not black. Usually—its
interesting—the face was never white colored; it was dark. There is a connection with the Earth
Mother.

James N. Powell: But of course, strictly speaking, theologically, the Virgin is not a Goddess. She is
the Mother of God! [Laughter]

Marija Gimbutas: She is the Goddess. In India there is the Black Goddess.

James N. Powell: Kali!

Marija Gimbutas: Yes. Maybe she is related to this same thing. In Lithuania it is not very clear.
There is no distinction between white or black. In Italy, I have collected paintings of black Madonnas.
The connection is with the color of the soil, with fertility, with snakes.

James N. Powell: You’re from Lithuania. Did you learn a lot of folklore from your parents in
Lithuania?

Marija Gimbutas: Not so much from my parents, but from the conditions I had lived. You see, my
parents were very busy medical doctors and scholars, and so what I had around me were
caretakers, and that is where I went to collect folklore when I was a teenager, and later from some
people who used to come to Vilnius from the provinces, you know, Southeast Lithuania, East
Lithuania. It is a very ancient folklore there, so I was extremely passionate collecting folklore at that
time, when I was sixteen to twenty, for four or five years.

James N. Powell: Did you have a model for the passion you felt in collecting stories? Like a nanny
who told your folktales?
Marija Gimbutas: Nobody said anything. It was a spontaneous thing. I heard some folksongs and
beliefs, rituals. That interested me. Why? I am asking now why? I think it was important for me to
know the philosophy of peasants. That attracted me. And also in the family there was a sort of
tradition. My uncle was a historian. He collected a lot of folklore. My mother did the same. Then my
so-called grandfather (not my logical grandfather, but he adopted my father), he was a great
collector of folklore. His collections are published and I keep them to this day, looking over certain
publications about rituals, about spirits, about all sorts of things that became quite indispensable
when I was writing The Language of the Goddess and other things. So that inheritance was really
important.

James N. Powell: Yes, because then it enabled you to bring more of a multidisciplinary, fuller
approach to archeology?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes! Just to see how people are content with having arrows and axes—I just
cannot have it. I have an allergy with these things. There is so much of that. You open anything, you
know, thousands of articles—the same, the same.

James N. Powell: So the role of rote archaeology is to dig a hole and describe what’s in there.

Marija Gimbutas: And you have to be very scholarly and use statistics and all that. And I did that for
twenty to thirty years—just that, because I became bored. I just had to remove myself out of the
conditions of what I call “the company of technicians.” And some of them are very good. I don’t
belong to this group because I am not a technician [chuckles].

Archaeology is like playing the piano. You see, you have to start with something. You have to learn
styles. You have to know hundreds of strata, and in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe you have
to know all that in order to play. That takes a lot of time. I did that for years, for years, for years.

James N. Powell: But you felt all along the need to offer a more interpretive analysis of your
findings?

Marija Gimbutas: Always, always there was that. Of course, I spent a lot of time on this Indo-
European problem. It was a sort of a necessary stage, because that was known on the basis of
linguistics and mythology. And then when I moved deeper, deeper, deeper, I also continued to
question what mythology was telling us, or linguistics. So it became clear that Europe was not Indo-
European from the beginning. The Indo-Europeans are a superstratum.

James N. Powell: So what you are doing at this time is not strict archaeology. Have you ever
considered just transcending your colleagues’ criticisms by saying you’re not doing rote archaeology
but religious anthropology, or even religious studies from an anthropological perspective? After all,
religious scholars are encouraged to use informed imagination, informed empathy as a heuristic
device.
Marija Gimbutas: Well, for me archaeology is everything together. It is not scientific materialism
alone. It is also religion. It is also social structure. Everything is together. It is not only the description
of objects. For you can show sculptures to some scholars and to them they will be dolls. But to me,
these are not dolls, these are Goddesses. Although there are not only Goddesses represented
there, there are worshippers represented also. Some figurines are votive offerings to the Deities.
How can they say the Goddess does not exist if there are hundreds and hundreds of temples in
Catal Huyuk alone? There are 180 walled paintings preserved. So there is an enormous richness of
mythology there. In Europe there are thousands of sites. So only somebody who doesn’t know
anything can say that it’s a questionable thing that the Goddess existed.

James N. Powell: I’ve read The Language of the Goddess, and I’ve also read the criticism various
people have leveled against your work. It seems to me that you are looking at the whole thing more
completely. Where your critics see only a squiggle on a vase, you see a snake because you
perceive the interconnectedness of the symbols, their “intertextuality,” the meaning of the symbols
that emerges as resonant with many interwoven cultural meanings. For you a symbol takes on
meaning in light of previous occurrences or similar occurrences in language, folklore and art—as
part of a variety of meanings within a symbol system—rather than just looking at it as an isolated
squiggle.

Marija Gimbutas: The Language of the Goddess was begun on the basis of collecting objects from
various periods and places in Europe—and just looking at the associations of symbols.

James N. Powell: You saw recurring motifs?

Marija Gimbutas: Recurring motifs, and then I became quite convinced that here it is, something!
And I had no idea in the beginning that I should find it. And then this intrigued me, and then I was
following more and more and more, and then having one group, then I saw there was another group,
another complex of symbolic meanings, then a third one, and so, you know, it was like playing a
puzzle game. Then I started to understand what I call “the language of symbolism of the Goddess.”

James N. Powell: What was the first connection you saw? Do you recall?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, birds and snakes.

James N. Powell: The Bird Goddess and the Snake Goddess?

Marija Gimbutas: Maybe this was the easiest for me to see—there were so many bird-headed
figurines. I excavated many of them myself, in Macedonia, in Northern Greece, and especially when
I excavated in Switzerland they absolutely dominated. And I know, myself, the snake symbolism.
Lithuania has so many snakes around. My mother used to tell me about snakes, how she fed snakes
with milk. And the symbolism is very strong. So my experience in my childhood had an influence to
what I saw first.
Then the symbolism of death a little later on. In Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe there is very
little about death. And now in Language of the Goddess there is much more. And now I see that the
dominating images are regeneration. Everywhere.

James N. Powell: Yes. Because regeneration is both?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, both death and rebirth. And this is wherever you go—in the temples of the
Goddess everywhere are symbols of regeneration. All the Goddesses of Malta are Goddesses of
regeneration. With egg-shaped posteriors. It was clearly egg symbolism—and for so long nobody
noticed [chuckles].

James N. Powell: New Age religious consciousness in the United States is synchronistic in that it
blends music, “witchcraft,” American Indian shamanism, Goddess worship, East Indian spirituality,
Taoism, ecological and peace awareness, feminism and many other currents into a somewhat
unified, somewhat coherent worldview. This movement draws upon your scholarship to redefine how
women think about themselves, how men think about women, how we think about the Earth, how we
think about divinity and social justice. How do you feel, personally, about your scholarship entering
the stream of a popular socio-spiritual movement?

Marija Gimbutas: This is a coincidence, first of all, it’s a coincidence. I never imagined! I never
imagined that I shall have an influence. But it became very interesting to me to see that I was basing
myself, you know, on totally different sources—archaeology, folklore. This American movement is
based mostly on Indian mythology and other things, and I was never involved in these groups and
movements. I absolutely had no time—doing my own work, excavations, writing one book after
another—so I was totally isolated from that movement. Although I had heard of it, I was not active.

I am not a feminist in active form (laughs). I am a feminist, of course, from birth, because my mother
was a feminist, too, She was the first woman student in Switzerland, so I had this from my very early
days, this freedom that I was equal. So I didn’t have to be an active feminist. People now—
journalists, especially—think that I am a feminist, active all the time. This is not true. And now, after
this book Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, I started to see how much influence I had.

James N. Powell: Many people take you very, very seriously.

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, artists especially. I had a really beautiful meeting with about twenty-five
artists. Each of them told me how much I had influenced their work. So I was very happy. I was very
happy. So then I started to realize that, indeed, I am making some influence. So it was a sort of a
satisfaction that was not expected.

James N. Powell: It’s an amazing coincidence—the coming together of your scholarship and
American political thought. It’s like there has always been a Bob Dylan. But at a certain time in
history people needed a Bob Dylan—so there was Bob Dylan.
Marija Gimbutas: Yes. All of a sudden I started to feel that I am needed. And until ten years ago, I
never had that feeling. Never. I was doing my work.

James N. Powell: Well, I needed you before that—for my Indo-European work! I made many
references to you [laughs].

Marija Gimbutas: When I was writing about Indo-Europeans, for a long time I never considered
them awful people. But I spent maybe fifteen years writing about weapons! I never look at these
books now. I don’t even keep them here.

James N. Powell: And when you read about pre-Indo-European Old Europe you don’t see anything
about weapons.

Marija Gimbutas: Nothing.

James N. Powell: You see art.

Marija Gimbutas: And that is it! When I started to study Old Europe I felt I was in my own realm
now. My own interest sphere. When I was small I liked to carve objects—wooden. I probably had to
be an artist, but nobody noticed that. Nobody. Nobody supported me in that. I was learning piano
because it was fashionable. Everyone did. So I did, too. But I wanted to carve. I carried a knife all
the time. Cut out a piece of my flesh [laughs].

James N. Powell: Was Old Europe a utopia?

Marija Gimbutas: It was reality! Well, we can call it “utopia” if we want to use the word.

James N. Powell: Was the Goddess civilization of Old Europe Dionysian in the sense of being
orgiastic?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, that was still in Greek ritual and was in Old Europe. It had to be. It cannot be
proven very well, but I think this is what it was. You can sense it. Because there were no patriarchal
families.

James N. Powell: They obviously weren’t too concerned with population control. Were they able to
lead such a carefree existence because they lived in an environment where they did not have to
compete for food and land? Was the cooperative social structure to some degree a function of low
population density—an absence of Malthusian constraints?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, population density was growing. About the 5th millennium it tripled or
quadrupled. So at the end there is some competition and the settlements become protected by
ditches.
James N. Powell: But before that?

Marija Gimbutas: Before that, no personal property. They were collective units. The religion as I
imagine it included collective property. The land was around the village and everybody worked there.
And the surplus was probably kept in the temples. Just like in Minoan Crete.

James N. Powell: So there we no real pressures on these villages. They didn’t have to compete
with other villages for food or territory?

Marija Gimbutas: No. There was enough land for a long time, for millennia.

James N. Powell: Could that same sort of social structure exist in a more populated environment?

Marija Gimbutas: From what we know, it was functioning from the beginning of the agricultural
period for at least two or three thousand years without conflict. But then it coincided with the fact that
locally they had more problems. Plus the steppe people arrived at the same time, so then we have a
crisis. The steppe people, the Indo-Europeans, had horses. They had weapons. And, of course, they
had a different social structure. From the 6th and the 7th millennium B.C. the patriarchy had started
with them in Southern Russia, so they were different socially.

James N. Powell: Nomadic people in general are less complex societies than settled agricultural
societies. They have less folklore and games dealing with negotiative skills and strategy and more
dealing with strength, power and bravery. You can see that in the “barbarian” invasions of China, for
instance, as they penetrated south through the Great Wall.

I think one problem underlying the criticism of your work is that your work poses a threat to the whole
structure of our civilization, which is based on Indo-European values.

Marija Gimbutas: With weapons, with hill forts, with war. That is a civilization? Only then we call it
civilization [chuckle]—when weapons were used. But if there was a beautiful art and another type of
social structure, then it was not a civilization. It was “pre-civilization” –or according to the title of one
book, Before Civilization [laughs]!

James N. Powell: How about folklore, myths? In the Greek mythology and also in Indian mythology
you find that the pre-Indo-European Great Goddess becomes the wife or consort of object of rape of
the Indo-European Sky God. She no longer is free, self-sufficient.

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, Hera becomes wife of Zeus—and in my Lithuanian mythology the main
Goddess never became the wife of the Indo-European God of the Shining Sky. They were together.
Both of them—very important—both of them appeared in the most important ritual, standing, one
next to the other. Both are very important. Both are rulers [chuckles].
James N. Powell: Why do you think she retained her independence in Lithuania while in Greece the
Goddess was subjugated?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, that’s a good question. The God of the Shining Sky is very well-preserved in
Latvian mythological songs. So this God is rather gentle. He is, even though a warrior, such a good-
natured male God. He was maybe not so very strong to force the Goddess to marry him [laughs].
Well, anyway, we don’t know why it happened, but both are important.

James N. Powell: In some books, popular, unscholarly books about the Goddess, there is a
dichotomy presented: Male-dominated patriarchal religion emphasizes transcendence, spirit.
Goddess religion emphasizes the body, the earth, immanence.

Marija Gimbutas: Well, if we want to classify, maybe this is right. But all these Goddess images are
not purely bodies. It’s not so. She is a Deity even if portrayed with breasts and buttocks. These are
symbols. This art was purely symbolic, and a symbol is already an abstraction. It is not the flesh. So
we shouldn’t actually classify that way. Although, Indo-European and Christian Gods are
transcendent, more or less, and the Pre-Indo-European, Old European Goddesses are more earthy.
That’s true, but not entirely.

James N. Powell: Is the Goddess of Old Europe androgynous?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, yes. Because she embodied in Her all powers of nature, male and female
together. They were not separated. There are many sculptures in which she has a phallic head
[laughs]. This is Her strength—life stimulation. The Old Europeans were really able to use the sex
symbolism—phalluses and female genitals. You turn an object one way, you see female genitals.
You turn it the other way, you see male genitals. They combined the sexes in one object. Quite
exciting.

James N. Powell: Yes, because if you can do that within yourself, you are complete. But did the Old
Europeans know about the birds and the bees? Did they know where babies come from?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, we cannot reconstruct the role of the father for a very long time. Because in
religion we see that the father does not exist, actually. The mother is there because from very early
times people observed birth, pregnancy. These were clear facts of life. But the role of the father was
unknown. Throughout Paleolithic time, the Old Stone Age, at what time they started to understand,
we cannot prove. It is difficult to pin down.

James N. Powell: So they just saw a thin waif of a girl one day walking along and then she just gets
bigger and bigger, like the moon, or a pear on a fruit tree.

Marija Gimbutas: It’s like a fruit tree. This is why birth was celebrated. And as everybody knows,
religion reflects social structure. So if there is a Goddess and no Father God, the social structure
must be matrilineal. It’s rather clear.
James N. Powell: Is there an aspect of the Goddess that is your favorite?

Marija Gimbutas: When I traveled to India, I liked Lakshmi and Saraswati, but I really liked Kali
[laughs]!

James N. Powell: Well, She is a real feminist!

Marija Gimbutas: In Lithuania we have the same Goddess—Ragana—the Seer. Very important.

James N. Powell: Why was India more successful in absorbing the Indo-European invaders and
pacifying them than the Europeans?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, the matriarchal substratum has a stronger influence in India than in many
other parts. In Europe, myth is a hybridization: fifty percent patriarchal, and fifty percent Old
European myth—Goddess. But in India, maybe seventy-five percent of the old Goddess religion is
preserved.

James N. Powell: Yes, the Goddess religion is big in India, even today.

Marija Gimbutas: You go to India, you see Goddesses. The most exciting thing I experienced in my
life was my trip to India. I loved it very much. The existence of the old religion was very exciting for
me to see: the temples, thousands and thousands of Goddess sculptures, wherever you can see.
Amazing.

James N. Powell: Are there places in Europe, “islands” of culture that still have remnants of the Old
European civilization to a greater of lesser degree, that have remained immune to the process of
Indo-Europeanization, to the patriarchy?

Marija Gimbutas: There are some. The Basques in the Pyrenees is one. Social structure is still very
much matrilineal, even now. Basque religion can be reconstructed as a pure Goddess religion,
where they are still worshipping the Mother Goddess.

James N. Powell: And their language is non-Indo-European.

Marija Gimbutas: Non-Indo-European. The Language is believed to be inherited even from the
Upper Paleolithic. The same language without any disturbances, say some 30,000 years old.
Linguists believe that this language continued for a long time the same as the religion. If we go
through the folkloristic materials, we can find traces of the same religion that we find through
archaeology, the Goddess religion. Also, in Basque society we have traces of the matrilineal system
in the historical records, especially.
If we go back in time, in Scotland, again, matrilineal. And the third would be the Etruscan, before the
Romans. These are the main “islands” that are known to history.

Then if we go as far back as Herodotus, fifth century B.C., he mentions a number of tribes in the
Aegean area and Western Turkey that are all matrilineal. Until Herodotus, the old system was still
alive. Not to speak of Crete. Crete is a matrilineal island throughout the Bronze Age and early
history.

Today, if you travel through the islands of the Aegean Sea, from one island to the other, you can see
the survivals of the matrilineal system. These societies are ruled by the mother and even the mother
is the overseer of the church!

In all the North-European, Germanic-speaking countries, Baltic-speaking countries, Slavic-speaking

countries—in all of these cultures there is a lot of survival of the Old European system. If you
analyze historical records of legends then you will see that a boy or a prince has to wander out from
his family and look for a princess—and marry a princess—to become king, there in the area the
princess lives, not in his home! So, what is this!? So, that was still alive in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th,
12th, 13th centuries.

James N. Powell: Do you believe Gods and Goddesses are purely sociological inventions, simply
constructs of the human imagination? Or are Goddesses actually divine beings? Do Kali, the Virgin
Mary, Aphrodite, and the Great Mother Goddess exist somewhere in their respective Heavens and
lokas?

Marija Gimbutas: [Thoughtful] First of all, religion is a reflection of social structure. The earliest
human social structure was matrilineal because of the natural situation of how children were born.
The father was probably not known for a very long period in history. The mothers were raising
children and this way the matrilineal system grew. The Goddess was a reflection of the mother
image, and the woman was giving birth, and the Goddess was giving birth. Also totems, protectors of
families of whatever unit there was—the bird, maybe also the snake—and from these protectresses
the image developed also. So there is no one origin, but maybe several.

James N. Powell: Is that all a God or Goddess is, through, just a reflection of social reality?

Marija Gimbutas: Not just a simple reflection, but a philosophical thought—from where does life
come? Where do we go? All that was asked. So the woman was creating life.

James N. Powell: But who created the woman? Do Gods and Goddesses really exist?

Marija Gimbutas: For hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, in the lower Paleolithic objects
were divine symbols. They are there already, so they developed for a very, very long time. The
Goddess sculptures start around 40,000 B.C. But then we have in the Middle Paleolithic, triangles,
etc., which continue in the Upper Paleolithic. If we go to the Lower Paleolithic we find hand axes,
triangles. These are symbols! They are miniature in size. They are not tools, they are symbols. They
start one million, two million years ago!

James N. Powell: Do you believe that the image of the Mother Goddess arises because of an
inherited image within the psyche, such as Jungians believe exists, or is it a cultural inheritance,
after birth?

Marija Gimbutas: It is inherited. It existed for such a long time that we cannot get rid of these
archetypes. They are in a sense, always here. For many millions of years it was a cultural
inheritance. Then the patriarchal people arrived and subjugated the whole continent, little by little.
But the images that existed for so long did not vanish. They are still there with us. In our dreams.
Even if we don’t have churches where we worship Mother Goddesses—we worship Father God—
but in our dreams we have images of Mother Goddesses. Some aspects of Her.

James N. Powell: Do you have an experience of the transcendent aspect of the Goddess? Is she a
spiritual being?

Marija Gimbutas: The Goddess can be touched, the Christian God is high up. You cannot touch this
old bearded man—or Christ. But the Goddess, she leaves her footprints, but she also has spiritual
dimension. If we go back to the second century, The Golden Ass.

James N. Powell: Yes, by Apuleius! In the last chapter, the description of the Goddess is beautiful.
That reminds me of Ramakrishna’s experience. In a lot of ways, this debate—does the Goddess
exist, did She exist?—is really silly in light of Ramakrishna’s experience. He could not escape Her.
Everywhere he turned there She was—this luminous presence within everything, the Mother of the
Universe, the Womb of everything, shining twenty-four hours a day. He couldn’t escape.

Marija Gimbutas: The same thing.

James N. Powell: Do you believe that just changing the gender of our object of worship will produce
social harmony?

Marija Gimbutas: I would say so. Social structure is intertwined with religion. Already we have a
much more balanced society, so change must come. And in religion, women are priestesses even in
Christian churches. In some churches here in California we have already women priestesses. So the
change is visible, but still this transformation from male Gods to female Goddesses has not gained
wide acceptance. The change has started, the transformation has to come. Only then will we have
the balance of power. It is very important.

James N. PowellSanta Barbara

Image: Ms Gimbutas at the "Raganų kalnas" - "Hill of witches" there are many wooden sculptures of
Baltic mythology personages.