Marija Gimbutas: The Civilization Of The Goddess

The Civilization of the Goddess Marija Gimbutas was born in 1921, in Vilnius the capital city of Lithuania, situated in the southeast of the country. She maintained a lifelong interest in the culture and customs of her homeland. She came to the United States as an immigrant from the Soviet government in 1949 after earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree in archaeology in 1946 at Tubingen University in Germany. Her background included linguistics, ethnology, and the history of religions, which was unusual for an archaeologist. Marija was engaged by Harvard University in 1950 to do research and to write texts on European prehistory. She remained at Harvard for thirteen years, where she also became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. Marija
Gimbutas also wrote three popular books called The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974, 1982), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991). In 1963 Marija Gimbutas was invited to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she remained until her retirement in 1989 and she passed away in 1994. In her book of The Language of the Goddess, the section on “hands and feet of the goddess” talks about how Catholic European people view hands and feet as a way to protect them against evil. At the same time hands and feet represented the touch of the goddess, which was influenced by other religions. Hands and feet were painted in cave, carved in stone, vases, etc. Today, some places around the world still has the paintings of hands and feet. Particularly hands of women appear in red and black. Red symbolized life, and black symbolized fertility. Its said that those colors were selected for their symbolic significant. Most of the hand symbols are drawn in groups, in row or individually. The feet are meant to encourage life. Foot prints were found in French graves. Hands and feet represent the divine touch, then the pattern is surely imparts the powerful energy of the goddess. In the section on “standing stones and circles”; humans and animals are drawn to menhirs (The standing stones). A standing stone is a large stone set vertically into the ground. They appear throughout the world in many patterns and can be found as an individual stone or in groups that form circular or other patterns. Today, people still believe in magic of the stone. Whoever get sick, they will touch the stones or go around three time in order to cured the illness. They also believe that menhir is the goddess. The stones were usually six feet high, and were established at places sacred to the goddesses who spent their time at the stones spinning the fates of humans. A historical record said that at midnight the stones were alive because it could move, walk, dance, and they saw the stones going to the river to drink water. A stone circle is an ancient monument.
Stone circles are most often found in Europe, especially in Ireland and Great Britain. More than nine hundred circles still exist in the British. The earliest known stone circles were thought to have been erected during the Neolithic period. While the use of each of the individual structures isn’t always known, it has been determined that some megaliths were part of burial mounds or were used to burn the dead. Sometimes boulders were used in combination with the stones as were ditches surrounding the place. As time progressed the stone circles became more complex and bigger. Regardless of size stone circles are considered usually spiritual places. It has been widely claimed that stone circles were designed as astronomical observatories, that the stones were laid out to create sight lines to various celestial objects and events. While it seems pretty clear that solar and lunar alignments were an important factor in the layout of many of the rings. In order to completely understand the origin of where these stones came from, we would have to find out the whole history of these artifacts. Finally, there are thousands of combinations of stones at any given site that produce sight
lines. Stonehenge is the oldest prehistoric structure in western Europe. Stonehenge was built over a long period. Stonehenge is a giant stone circle situated on the Salisbury plains in England. Very few stones were placed at Stonehenge during the first period. A earthwork ditch was dug around the site, and there were wooden buildings placed around the center. In Stonehenge I, was a circular ditch with an internal bank. The circle, 320 feet in diameter, had a single entrance, 56 mysterious holes around its perimeter with remains in them of human cremations, and a wooden sanctuary in the middle. The circle was aligned with the midsummer sunrise, the midwinter sunset, and the position of the moon when its rising far south or setting far north. The book explained how “the stone circles are not activated unless the calendrical event are accompanies by human rituals and dance”. Celebrations in village have much to do with magic life giving water, going around the house, dancing ring dances and making noise to protect against the evil winter/death powers. Dances and processions around the perimeter are generally part of the ceremonies as are sacrifices and feasting. In Britain and Ireland, festivals such as these were connected to the rhythms of the land and took place at specific times of the year planting, harvesting, the lambing season, etc. A number of the Scottish circles are funerary in nature at least insofar as they were found to contain burials or cremated bone. However, the burials appear to have been secondary to the erection of the stones. Many are connected with the exchange of stone axes a number have been found near Avebury and Brodgar. Axes, of course served a very practical purpose as far as Neolithic farmers were concerned and were used to fell trees and to work the soil but they also appear to have objects of veneration and symbols of status. Many of them had never been used as tools and some, such as the chalk versions found at Woodhenge, were clearly nonfunctional. Some of the axes appear to have been deliberately buried, a practice that was widespread on the European mainland as well. In later times, axes were identified with the forces of nature and fertility. Over all, the sections of the book were really interesting, I specially enjoyed the section about the “standing stones and circles” because it has some similarities with my own culture, because we used similar rituals when it comes to illness.

Supranee Kongyaem World Religions The Language of the Goddess