THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Eisler 25
goddesses as Demeter, Artemis, and Kore in Greece, Atargatis, Ceres, and Cybele in
Rome, and even Sophia or Wisdom of the Christian Middle Ages, the Shekinah of
Hebrew Kabalistic tradition, and, of course, the Virgin Mary or Holy Mother of the
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Catholic Church about whom we read in the Bible.
This same prehistoric and historic continuity is stressed by UCLA archeologist
Marija Gimbutas, whose monumental work, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe,
brings to life yet another Neolithic civilization: the indigenous civilization that sprang up
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in the Balkans and Greece long, long before the rise of Indo-European Greece. Once
again, the archeological findings in what Gimbutas termed the civilizations of Old
Europe not only demolish the old Atruism@ of the Awarlike Neolithic@ but also illuminate
our true past, again showing that here, too, the original direction of human civilization
was in some ways far more civilized than ours, with pre Indo-Europeans living in far
greater harmony with one another and the natural environment.
Moreover, excavations in Old Europe, like those unearthed in other parts of the
ancient world, show that what brought about the onset of male dominance both in
heaven and on earth was not some sudden male discovery. What ushered it in was the
onslaught of barbarian hordes from the arid steppes and deserts on the fringe areas of
our globe. It was wave after wave of these pastoral invaders who destroyed the
civilizations of the first settled agrarian societies. And it was they who brought with
them the godsCand menCof war that made so much of later or recorded history the
bloodbath we are now taught was the totality of human history.
In Old Europe, as Gimbutas painstakingly documents, there were three major
invasionary waves, as the Indo-European peoples she calls the Kurgans wiped out or
AKurganized@ the European populations. AThe Old European and Kurgan cultures were
the antithesis of one another,@ writes Gimbutas. She continues:
The Old Europeans were sedentary horticulturalists prone to live in large
well-planned townships. The absence of fortifications and weapons attests the
peaceful coexistence of this egalitarian civilization that was probably matrilinear
and matrilocal.... The Old European belief system focused on the agricultural
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See, for example, R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New
York: Harper and Row, 1987); M. Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harvest, 1976);
E. Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). [Au.]
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M. Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1982). [Au.]