Marija Gimbutas: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: 6500-3500 BC

I really must do a book review on the books of this very special person. I have several in my library, this is the largest one with a treasure of illustrations.

The role of the female in the evolution of humankind has long been suppressed by a period of about five thousand years of lopsided focus on the male role. This era may now come to an end, but I always like to speak about research done by the more feminist scientists, if only to show that so much is not known by the general public.

The image she invoked of the extended period of peace in ancient Europe preceding the invasions from the steppes of Asia is one that made a deep impression on me.

I was already intrigued by recent discoveries made in Crete, because this seemed to evoke a past that was so different from what I was told in school. A book by Merlin Stone: When God Was a Woman, set me on a path of discovery of what felt to me to be almost an alternate history in a science fiction novel.

While many theories that started around this feminist theology movement were not based on sound scientific research, enough material survives scrutiny to generate a sound foundation for a retelling of the story of our past. As David Korten noted, it is very much necessary to retell the stories, or to start telling other stories. The stories we tell create the context of our world, and the violent and exploitive context we have been living in for too long (but in the historical context of a million years of humankind relatively very short!) desperately needs to be broken down.