by Luciana Percovich
Signs out of time was made by Donna Read and Starhawk in 2003 for the Canadian producer Belili Productions as a tribute to Marija Gimbutas to remember her 10 years after her death. Initially subtitled by the Association Armonia of Bologna, at the suggestion of Sandra Schiassi, retraces her life and work dedicated to the study of Ancient Europe. His interpretation of European prehistory caused a real earthquake that is still not accepted by everyone today, especially by the authors of school textbooks, who continue to underestimate the significance of his vision.
In some respects we could compare M. Gimbutas to H. Schlieman (1822-1890), the archaeologist who became universally famous for having discovered the ruins of Troy and Mycenae: they share the fact that they have provided material evidence of the existence of a civilization (which in the case of Troy had hitherto only had a mythical-poetic existence inIliad of Homer), but they are differentiated by the fact that where Schlieman's discovery confirmed classical mythology, the discovery of the civilization of Ancient Europe has upended and upset many of the founding certainties and implicit assumptions of that same classical civilization .
And the fact that Marija is a woman who reads the testimonies of the past with the eyes of a woman also makes a difference and that her vision and the reconstruction of the archaic past bring to the surface the erased presence of the feminine in history.
His was a complete revolution of perspective on the origins of European culture: in a chronological sense, as it puts the clock of historical time back by at least 5000 years, that is, to a long time before the appearance on the scene of the Indo-European populations: if the first traces of a European civilization certainly date back to before the last glaciation (Willendorf and Laussel around 25.000/19.000 BC), his field of research ranges from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age up to the beginning of the Iron Age, i.e. from 6.000 to 2.000 BC. c.
But also in the very sense of understanding the word civilization, which for us axiomatically and paradoxically begins with wars and the glorious deeds of the heroes and gods of Olympus.
Gimbutas instead speaks to us of the first roots of Europe, which he brought to light in his excavation campaigns in the decade between 1967 and 1978 right in the heart of Europe, in the Danube basin and in the Balkan peninsula (with also a final campaign in Puglia).
Because in this area a great and lasting peaceful civilization first flourished and then the clash with the Indo-European populations took place, arriving in successive waves, from about 4.000 onwards: on horseback, with weapons to kill and a hierarchical and warlike structure. From this perspective, Greeks, Latins, and then the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic peoples were an uninterrupted sequence of peoples "invaders of Europe", called in historical times "Barbarians" precisely by those who had been first and had transformed especially the Danube and Balkan region in a frontier land, devastated by never dormant conflicts, a line of confrontation/encounter between different cultures.
Gimbutas gradually came to the vision that today she is both loved and rejected.
"In the beginning, he says, nothing of the existing studies was able to help me" to make sense of the enormous mass of finds that he had already unearthed at the end of the first cycle of excavations in the north of the Balkan peninsula. He immersed himself in this material and in 1974 he began to copy the signs that appeared very often on the frequent representations of female statuettes, in particular those he called Dee Uccello, due to their beaked faces; little by little he realized that they constituted a kind of recurring alphabet: they were Vs, chevrons, Xs, serpentine lines, double lines, all signs that had an evident symbolic value. Until these materials began to form an organic framework, to match elements scattered in other disciplines and which she was able to grasp and connect (linguistics, mythology, folklore, where similar semantic areas are expressed in other codes).
A working method that recalls by analogy the one used by the geneticist Barbara Mc Clintock who, distancing herself from the dogmas in force in her discipline and which were no longer able to explain the complexity of the data collected, told of how she let herself be "taken by the vision" of the observed object, until she felt she was inside the cell and from there she saw the chromosome filaments move and analyzed, letting "matter speak for itself" until she reached an "understanding" of the observed material.
And the reactions that the two scientists had to face are also similar, namely the hostility of the environment in which they worked, which isolated them and finally deliberately ignored the discoveries made. McClintock, albeit belatedly, received a Nobel prize and now his theories, judged too complex if not eccentric and bizarre compared to the mechanical and hierarchical but very popular model of Watson and Crick, are the basis of contemporary genetics.
Gimbutas instead, archaeologist in the field and meticulous decipherer of even the smallest details, linguist and great connoisseur of the popular culture of the now Slavic countries, comparatively combining data from several disciplines (comparative mythologies, first historical sources, linguistics, folklore and historical ethnography) is finally managed to establish links and connections between all those pieces and all those inscriptions, until a clear plot and a convincing overall design emerged. And to define this unprecedented research model, you coined the word myth-archaeology (archaeomythology).
What are the salient features of this overall design that you yourself called Civilization of Ancient Europe and Civilization of the Goddess?
It was a polycentric civilization, devoid of dominant centers of power, which did not know the use of weapons, did not have fortifications but on the contrary the settlements, even vast and architecturally articulated, were located on the plains and along the water courses, did not use distinctions of rank in the burials and probably indicated through the symbol of the Goddess (whose statuettes, almost always of small dimensions, appear in abundance in every Neolithic site) her conception of life, linked to the cycle of nature of life, death, regeneration and new birth.
And if Gimbutas worked exclusively on European cultures, the evolution model that led to the affirmation of "historic civilizations", his multidisciplinary method and his ability to decode, analyze and interpret the finds can today be successfully applied to cultures from anywhere else in the world. And so it is now happening thanks to an ever-increasing number of researchers who recognize the validity of his method. Who was able to give meaning to archaeological materials which, even in the part in which they were or are already known, before his work were silent, lifeless, as completely misunderstood.
Its main text, The language of the goddess (1989), is a condensed rich in images, information and links. Writing the introduction when the book was first published in 1989, Joseph Campbell said, "If I had known Marija Gimbutas sooner, I would have written completely different books."
And he continues: “Maria Gimbutas was able not only to develop a fundamental glossary of the figurative motifs that serve as an interpretative key to the mythology of an otherwise undocumented era, but also to establish, on the basis of the interpreted signs, the characterizing lines and the main themes of a religion that venerated both the universe as the living body of the Mother Goddess Creator and all living things within it as partakers of her divinity. Religion, it is perceived immediately, in contrast with the words that the Creator Father addresses to Adam in Genesis: In the sweat of your face you will eat bread, until you return to the earth, because from it you were taken: dust you are and dust you will return ! In this archaic mythology, however, the earth from which all creatures originated is not dust, but life, like the Creator Goddess.
And he concludes with these words: “The message of his work is that an effective era of harmony and peace will open again in consonance with the creative energies of nature as in the prehistoric period of over 4000 years which preceded the 5000 years of what James Joyce called the "nightmare" of disputes determined by tribal and national interests, from which it is surely time for this planet to wake up".
Marija Gimbutas did not start from an abstract thesis to demonstrate, she is not the "feminist visionary" (admitted that this is an insult!), as someone wanted to define her: on the contrary, she is a scholar who, analyzing an enormous mass of finds and materials and painstakingly building a coherent ability to read and decode, has finally reached conclusions that are very difficult to contest on the European archaic world and on the language of the Goddess. She is an archaeologist and linguist with an in-depth knowledge of ancient Slavic languages, since she was a child she had shown an interest in the folkloristic aspects of Lithuanian society.
She was born in Vilnius in Lithuania, on January 23, 1921, of both medical parents and both politically active in the defense of Lithuanian cultural heritage, systematically destroyed by a century of politics and oppression by the Tsars. Her father, also a historian and publisher, aimed to disseminate as much as possible, even at a popular level, texts relating to the traditions of her land.
In 1918 Lithuania gained independence from Russia, but in 1921 it was invaded by Poland and later by Germany. In the same 1918, her parents had opened the first hospital in Vilnius. When they reached school age, they decided not to enroll Marija in Polish or Catholic schools, instead making her attend the private school they founded in accordance with Lithuanian traditions. Marija's education included languages, art and music, respecting the principle that “political freedom equals aesthetic freedom”.
The Lithuanian language belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, but the folkloric and mythological imagery of reference is pre-Indo-European and reflects archaic links with the earth and its mysterious cycles. Gimbutas often recalled that in that culture rivers and hills were considered sacred, the earth was kissed, prayers sung to the deity morning and evening. Marija's family owned a farm in the countryside which allowed her to get to know trees and animals, but above all to listen to the songs of the farmers as they worked, songs that varied according to occupation and the various seasons. Marija soon observes that the patriarchal system dominant in that context nevertheless allows for a very balanced relationship between male and female elements, evidently inherited from a tradition prior to the Indo-European invasions, in which women covered a very different role.
The father dies when Marija turns 15. Strongly affected by this loss of hers, she has since decided to continue her father's work in the rediscovery of the original traditions, in particular by studying the beliefs on death and the pre-Christian funeral rites. During this study she begins to glimpse the prehistoric conception of regeneration, of life that continues, the movements of the life cycle in which life and death appear as two faces of the same reality. Also in the course of his long subsequent research, he will increasingly realize that among the ancient populations there was an "organic vision" of existence, in which each individual was recognized the possibility after death of re-entering the life cycle and not leaving it. ever, while the subsequent conception of "transcendence", i.e. the reference to external divinities who govern the world and the cycles of nature, interrupts this cyclical and more harmonious vision of life, introducing the concept of death as a "definitive" end and condemns us to return “definitely” dust.
At the age of 16, Gimbutas took part in the first ethnographic expedition to note down the features of his rich folklore, which survived better than in the rest of Europe given that the Christianization of those lands only took place starting from the XIII century, and never so radically as to erase any trace of previous culture.
While he was attending University, the German invasion of 39 took place and the following year the Soviet one, more disastrous, which set itself the goal of definitively suffocating the cultural identity of that vast region: the Universities were closed, book burnings and local government is deposed while fearsome mass deportations to Siberia occur. The materialist vision of Communism definitely conflicts with the previous surviving Lithuanian cultural traditions. Gimbutas joins the resistance and also fights politically because he has friends deported, tortured and killed.
In 1942 he graduated in archaeology, got married and had a first daughter. In those years, his first eleven articles documented the cultural profile of the Baltic populations for the first time. After three years, he manages to escape ("in one hand my daughter and in the other the thesis") with his family in Austria, then in Germany and finally, from 1949 in the USA where his first books will be published.
Her husband finds work as an engineer in Boston, while she takes on all kinds of work, even humble ones, in order to attend Harvard University, where she gets a job as a translator thanks to her proficiency in Slavic languages; finally, having recognized her great and unique knowledge of the Slavic world, she obtained an academic position and therefore a professorship at the University of California in Los Angeles, in 1968.
In 1956 he had published Prehistory of Eastern Europe, in the 1963 The Balts (also available in Italian) and in 1965 The Bronze Age Culture of Central Europe.
In the public 1971 The Slavs and at the same time she founded a journal of Indo-European studies which led her to make a series of international conferences.
Finally she returned to Vilnius where she was received with great honors and where her studies and related publications were clandestinely printed and read with great appreciation despite having been banned by the Soviet regime. In the end, she will still be invited to Moscow, given her well-established reputation as the leading expert on the Slavic world.
In '67-'68 she began her activity as an archaeologist in the field, starting four cycles of excavations; the first in Karanovo – Sitagroi in Macedonia, where she identifies finds ranging from 5000 to 2000 BC; the second, from '69 to '71 was carried out in Tarcevo and Vinca, in northern Macedonia and covers a period which goes from 6300 to 5000 BC In '73 - '75 the third cycle of excavations took place in Thessaly at Sesklo - Akilleion, in the south-east of the region, relating to the period 6500 - 5600 BC The fourth cycle of excavations is set in Italy between '77 - '78, in Puglia, in the cave-sanctuary of Scaloria near Manfredonia, whose finds date back to 5600 -5300 BC
In 1974 he published The Gods and Goddesses, which later (1982) will become The Godesses and Gods of Old Europe. In 1980 the "Los Angeles Time" defines Marija Gimbutas as the "Woman of the Year", a flattering recognition despite the many disputes; but she herself is aware that for a real appreciation and acquisition of her research "it would have taken at least 35 years"!
The reasons for this belief are contained in this statement of his from 1978:
“During my excavations I became aware that there had been a culture that was the opposite of everything known as Indo-European”.
In 1989 the book was published The language of the goddess. In Campbell's aforementioned short preface we also read:
"The lexicon of pictorial signs of Gimbutas shows the primordial attempt of a part of humanity to understand and live in harmony with the beauty and wonder of Creation, and overshadows in symbolic and archetypal terms a vision of human life contrary in all its aspects to the manipulated systems that have prevailed, in historical periods, in the West. "
In 1991 it comes out The Civilization of the Goddess, a compendium of all his research. He died at his home in California on February 2, 1994.
Luciana Percovich, 2005
