We Pagans are great storytellers. Our religion is founded more on the exploration of myth, symbol, and metaphor than on creeds and moral law. In our inner work, we use the power of trance and active imagination to go on vivid journeys into spirit worlds, or perhaps our own subconscious minds. With that same power of vision, some of us imagine the creation of new and better cultures, societies that live more lightly on the earth and allow everyone to live in beauty, balance, and delight.

Unfortunately, when it comes to learning about the past, too often Pagans have based their beliefs about history more on what makes a good story than on good scholarship. Without widespread easy access to technical books and journals in those fields in archaeology and history, it’s natural to rely on secondary Pagan sources – writers who, although not experts themselves, have done research in these fields and then present the evidence to a lay audience. As the Pagan movement has grown, we’ve reached a point where many Pagan writers limit their sources for historical background to earlier Pagan writers, without looking at fresh scholarly research.

The history that most Pagans know – based on work done by Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, Margaret Murray, and others – is history that has been largely debunked by later scholars, and not just those who might be considered “part of the patriarchy.” eminist archaeologists and historians invested in the liberation of women have joined in criticizing earlier theories of prehistoric Goddess-worshipping cultures, the existence of a single ancient Near East fertility Goddess, and the notion of a genocidal “Burning Times” that targeted practitioners of a pre-Christian religion.

As a religious movement that deeply believes in our responsibility to seek the truth, Pagans have a responsibility to get the best data we can about where our ancestors came from and what they were like. To this end, I will summarize some of the criticisms of what’s come to be known as Goddess history, focusing primarily on the work of Marija Gimbutas. In addition, I will provide an annotated bibliography to sources dealing with prehistory, classical times, and the medieval and Renaissance periods so that readers can do their own research and come to their own conclusions.

Particularly in the case of prehistory, the evidence allows for a number of different interpretations, many of which are equally plausible. It is essential that our religion not crumble in the face of hard facts. As Starhawk wrote, “Goddess religion is not based on belief, in history, in archaeology, in any Great Goddess past or present. Our spirituality is based on experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and in human lives” (“Religion from Nature, Not Archaeology”). If history provides us with further support for our experiences, that’s wonderful. But if what we’re doing here is more new than old, then we should be proud to be known as the New Religion, the religion that speaks to the needs of the present.

Critiquing the work of Marija Gimbutas: Archaeology

Marija Gimbutas’ theories about the Goddess religion of Neolithic Europe are based almost completely on studies of figurines from that period. Her books are lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings of these figurines: topless dancing women with bee heads and hands, spirals, snakes, toads, double-headed axes and butterflies, disturbing masks like grey alien heads, bulls, birthing women, women with huge buttocks containing eggs, pigs, does, dogs, women with animals' heads. As I read The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, I found myself both deeply moved by these images and thoroughly convinced that Neolithic Europe contained cultures that worshipped goddesses.

What is less clear, however, is whether these figurines provide a basis for Gimbutas’ other claims. For Gimbutas, a figurine is never just a “bee,” “snake,” or “toad,” but rather “a bee goddess,” “a snake goddess,” or “a toad goddess.” Figurines that looked of indeterminate sex to me are inevitably identified as female. Further, although Gimbutas dedicates a chapter to male figurines, she downplays their significance, insisting without clear evidence that if they represent a god, he must only have been the subordinate son/consort of the Goddess. The purpose of her frequent use of the capitalized, singular “Goddess” is also unclear. Why does she assume that such different kinds of imagery all relate to the same deity?

As feminist archaeologists Margaret W. Conkey and Ruth E. Tringham point out, figurines do not speak for themselves. They must be interpreted, and each interpretation inevitably shows the cultural background and ideology of the interpreter (1995: 212). The tradition of interpreting figurines with large stomachs and “pendulous” breasts as representing fertility dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is an assumption that has mainly gone unquestioned to this day. Yet this is very much a product of Victorian-era thought, which conflated sexuality with motherhood and associated such representations of fertility with “primitive” cultures. In a demanding environment where it may have been difficult or impossible to eat enough calories for long enough to become fat, these curvaceous figures may simply represent a portrait of ideal health and beauty. Alternately, the figures may have been erotically charged without being intended as portraits of motherhood, or were portraits of motherhood that were not specifically sexual.

Even more unclear is what a given figurine says about the status of women in the culture it came from. Looking at our own culture, the proliferation of Barbie dolls and images of a submissive Virgin Mary certainly do not indicate that women have especially high status or hold political or religious power. In the absence of written texts telling us what prehistoric figurines mean, we must be careful to differentiate between what these images mean to us and what they might have meant to their makers (Tringham and Conkey 1998).

Conkey and Tringham argue that no study has been able to show that more than 50 percent of the figurines are definitively female. One study of the Upper Paleolithic figurines from the Czech Republic (one of the areas of Gimbutas’ “Old Europe”) shows that most of the figurines from that period are animals, and that the few anthropomorphic ones are very different from each other, making it difficult to argue that they represent the worship of a single Mother Goddess (1995: 215). Gimbutas often fails to present the figurines in context with regard to their time and place of origin, as well as the location where they were found. Whether a figurine was found in a room that has the features of a shrine or temple, or broken in a refuse heap, is essential information (Goodison and Morris 1991: 15).

Gimbutas also glosses over the diversity of the cultures she studies, referring to them homogeneously as “Old Europe” and charting cultural change only in sweeping historical terms. In her view, an unchanging, unified Goddess culture was destroyed by the patriarchal invasion of the Kurgans, leading to its violent transformation and the formation of the classical cultures we know from written history. Yet this obscures the fact that the figurines are not as numerous in some areas as in others, as well as significant differences in their forms (Conkey and Tringham 1995: 217). The uniqueness and individuality of these cultures, as well as the individuality of the artists who produced the figurines, is largely ignored (Tringham 1991).

Probably the most beloved feminist belief that can be traced to Gimbutas’ work is the assertion that before the invasion of the patriarchal Kurgans from the East, there was no warfare in Old Europe. Studies by other scholars suggest otherwise. Cynthia Eller notes that skeletons from the Mesolithic, thousands of years before Gimbutas’ theoretical patriarchal invasion, show injuries caused by projectile weapons; maces, considered by archaeologists to be of little use in hunting, are present among Neolithic grave goods from Çatalhöyük to the Balkans; and Neolithic European settlements are often surrounded by multiple layers of moats and palisade walls, some of which also contain mass graves (2000: 113-114). The evidence does not suggest a completely pacifistic society.

Finally, it is important to be aware of the scholarly context out of which Gimbutas’ work emerged. Scholarly belief in the existence of prehistoric matriarchy was strongest in the late nineteenth century, after the publication of J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht. Bachofen drew on ancient Greek writings to argue that prehistoric matriarchy had ended with the rise of the “male principle” in classical times. The theory attracted important thinkers such as E.B. Tylor, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, among others. Importantly, however, the majority of these thinkers were not feminists. Matriarchy was associated with primitive culture, and the rise of patriarchy was seen as the next step in human evolution, with reason conquering the irrational emotionalism of the past. The theory of matriarchy was used by German protofascists and post-romantics as part of a nationalist mythology (Eller 2000:30-39), but by the middle of the 1960s, most scholars had abandoned the theory as lacking solid evidence (Hutton 1997: 96).

When Gimbutas began to work with prehistoric matriarchal theory to unite her archaeological findings, by her own admission she was not a feminist, nor did she see herself as helping feminists (quoted in Eller 2000: 38). In fact, academically speaking she was staunchly conservative. Though a highly respected archeologist due to her command of the languages of Eastern Europe, Gimbutas developed her views of prehistory in a straight line from the archaeological orthodoxy of the 1950s and was seemingly unwilling to update her theory with new research (Hutton 1997: 97). (As Hutton notes, this may have been partially due to the need for cooperation with Warsaw Pact states. Soviet archaeologists followed Marx in embracing the theory of prehistoric matriarchy long after it had been abandoned elsewhere. Gimbutas’ continuing loyalty to the theory may have smoothed relations with scholars in the areas of her digs.) Only in the early 1980s, when feminists began to take an interest in her work, did Gimbutas explicitly begin to address her writing to the feminist movement, sharpening her moral outrage over the destruction of the cultures she studied and emphasizing “the Goddess” over “goddesses.” Her later books were increasingly directed toward the general public instead of scholars. Hutton describes Gimbutas in the 1980s as “a convert to a faith, preaching it in order to save a threatened world while there was still time” (1997: 98). He observes that The Civilization of the Goddess contains massive chronological errors in which some of her dates are off by more than a thousand years (1999: 359). By the end of her career, Gimbutas’ work was no longer that of an objective scholar. Ideology had colored her interpretation of the facts too deeply for her theories to make good history.

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