In this magnificently illustrated volume, foremost archeologist and prehistorian Marija Gimbutas brings prepatriarchal civilization to vibrant life. Pioneering in archaeomythology – the interdisciplinary field based on archaeology, comparative mythology, and folklore – Gimbutas unequivocally establishes the existence of a Goddess religion in Neolithic Europe with its roots in the Paleolithic. Through the interpretation of images and symbols, she reveals the basic worldview of these ancient European matriarchal cultures and decodes the symbolic language that has remained embedded in our civilization.
This most complete rendering of our nature-embracing ancestral culture resurrects a lost world that is the authentic genesis of our Western heritage. Here is a 'pictorial script' of the prehistoric Goddess religion that clearly demonstrates how our ancestors lived a life united with nature. As Joseph Campbell concludes in his foreword, 'The message here is of an actual age of… (tovább)
In this magnificently illustrated volume, foremost archeologist and prehistorian Marija Gimbutas brings prepatriarchal civilization to vibrant life. Pioneering in archaeomythology – the interdisciplinary field based on archaeology, comparative mythology, and folklore – Gimbutas unequivocally establishes the existence of a Goddess religion in Neolithic Europe with its roots in the Paleolithic. Through the interpretation of images and symbols, she reveals the basic worldview of these ancient European matriarchal cultures and decodes the symbolic language that has remained embedded in our civilization.
This most complete rendering of our nature-embracing ancestral culture resurrects a lost world that is the authentic genesis of our Western heritage. Here is a 'pictorial script' of the prehistoric Goddess religion that clearly demonstrates how our ancestors lived a life united with nature. As Joseph Campbell concludes in his foreword, 'The message here is of an actual age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature which anteceded the six thousand years of what James Joyce has termed the „nightmare” from which it is time for the planet to wake.'
Illustrated with nearly 2000 symbolic artifacts – sculptures, figurines, temple models, frescoes, vases, sacrificial containters – The Language of the Goddess forges a framework that supports the recovery of a long-suppressed portion of our European heritage. These Old European images and symbols assert that the parthenogenic (self-fertilizing, creating from herself) Goddess is the most persistent feature in the archaeological record of the ancient world. The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in nature. Her power was in water and stone, in cave and tomb, in animals and birds in hills, trees and flowers. She was perceived as the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on Earth. Her main functions were life-giving, death-wielding, and regenerative. Gimbutas's magnum opus takes the existence of the Goddess-worshipping, earth-centred, egalitarian and non-violent cultures out of the realm of speculation into that of documented fact.
Marija Gimbutas is a professor of European archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the curator of Old World archaeology at the UCLA Cultural History Museum. She is the author of more than twenty books, including Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Thames and Hudson, 1974 and more than 200 articles on subjects ranging from East European prehistory and mythology to the origins of the Indo-Europeans.
