NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31

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Xref: sparky alt.feminism:6684 soc.women:21988 sci.skeptic:21876 Newsgroups: alt.feminism,soc.women,sci.skeptic Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!sheaffer From: sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer) Subject: Critique of Gimbutas' "Idyllic Goddess" Claims Message-ID: <1992Dec31.221419.6089@netcom.com> Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 22:14:19 GMT Lines: 543 Robert Sheaffer Box 10441 San Jose, CA 95157 USA Internet: sheaffer@netcom.com December, 1992 Some Critiques of the Feminist/New Age "Goddess" Claims on Marija Gimbutas' 'Idyllic Goddess' Theories: - from "Idyllic Theory of Goddess Creates Storm" by Peter Steinfels (New York Times, Feb. 13, 1990): "the skepticism about this thesis by many leading archaeologists and anthropologists is unmistakable, although it always comes with expressions of deep respect for Dr. Gimbutas' other contributions and with concern for her struggles with lymphatic cancer. Yet the growing acceptance of her theories among nonexperts has led some of these scholars to feel that they should make their own criticism more widely known. In the end, they say, Dr. Gimbutas' work raises sensitive questions not only about prehistoric civilization but also about the relationship between speculation and scholarship and between scholarship and social movements.... Her ideas have been welcomed by eminent figures like the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who wrote a forward to Dr. Gimbutas' latest volume before he died in 1987, and the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who hailed that book as "a benchmark in the history of civilization." But many other investigators of prehistoric Europe have not shared the enthusiasm. Bernard Wailes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that most of Dr. Gimbutas' peers consider her "immensely knowledgable but not very good in critical analysis. " "She amasses all the data and then leaps to conclusions without any intervening argument," Dr. Wailes said. "Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again," he said. Ruth Tringham is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who is an authority on the same time and geographical area of prehistoric Europe as Dr. Gimbutas. Choosing pages at random from "The Language of the Goddess," she repeatedly voiced dismay over assertions that demanded, she said, serious qualifications. "No other archaeologist I know would express this certainty," Dr. Tringham said. Linda Ellis, an archaeologist at San Francisco State University ... makes it clear that she thinks Dr. Gimbutas has gone too far. David Anthony, an assistant professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., whose area of research also coincide closely with Dr. Gimbutas's, said that contrary to her claims, the cultures of Old Europe built fortified sites that indicate the presence of warfare. There is also evidence of weapons, including some used as symbols of status, and of human sacrifice, hierarchy, and social inequality ... There is also no evidence that women played the central role, in either the social structure or the religion of Old Europe, he said. These were "important and impressive societies," he said, but rather than Dr. Gimbutas' "Walt Disney version" they were "extremely foreign to anything we're familiar with"... "In a way she's a very brave woman, very brave to step over the boundary and take a guess," said Dr. Ellis. But Dr. Ellis strongly rejects Dr. Gimbutas' detailed assertions. Dr. Gimbutas calls the enthusiastic reception of her work by artists and feminists "an incredible gift" coming late in her life. But "I was not a feminist and never had any thought I would be helping feminists," she said. Still, "The Language of the Goddess" rings with a fervent belief that knowledge about a Goddess-worshipping past can guide the world toward a sexually egalitarian, nonviolent, and "earth- centered" future. - - - - - - - - - - - - - from "The Goddess Theory" by Jacques Leslie (Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 11, 1989) "Nevertheless, Gimbutas remains a black sheep within academia; even colleagues who admire her other work express skepticism about her description of ancient Europe. Edgar C. Polome, a leading Indo-European scholar at the University of Texas and co-editor of a volume of essays published in honor of Gimbutas, calls her portrayal of Old Europe "a bit of a dream- world." Kees Bolle, a UCLA religion history professor and a friend of Gimbutas', says she has "a peculiar romantic strand" that causes her to "overestimate" pre-Indo-European societies. Most archaeologists think that Gimbutas' interpretation goes far beyond the tenative conclusions that can be drawn from her data. Ian Hodder, a Cambridge University archaeologist whose field of expertise overlaps Gimbutas', calls her work "extremely important" because it provides a "coherent and wide-ranging view of the evidence," but he rejects her interpretation of symbols. "She looks at squiggles on a pot and says it's a primeval egg or a snake, or she looks at female figurines and says they're mother goddesses. I don't really think there's an awful lot of evidence to support that level of interpretation." Alan McPherron, an anthroplogy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, buttresses Hodder's view. McPherron says that after he published a book describing a dig he led in Yugoslavia, Gimbutas designated one of the excavated structures a temple, even though it was distinguished from surrounding houses only by its slightly greater size. "In my opinion, it's no more a temple than I am a monkey," McPherron says. Many archaeologists believe that one reason Gimbutas has caught laymen's attention is that she habitually presents debatable assertions as fact. Ruth Tringham, an archaeologist at UC Berkeley, says the evidence from early societies is far too murky to allow such definitive statements. "I would never write, 'This is the obvious conclusion' - there is nothing obvious about what we write. Whatever we write is always, 'it could be this, it could be that'. Our problem is that the public isn't attracted by that kind of ambiguous thinking." Since Gimbutas often omits the logical steps by which she arrives at her conclusions, Tringham says she has no way to judge the validity of the conclusions, and therefore can't accept them. Tringham is unconvinced, for example, that Gimbutas' figurines represent goddesses, or that neolithic cultures were dominated by women. Like many other archaeologists, Tringham is reluctant to criticise Gimbutas because she does not wish to thwart the feminist objectives with which Gimbutas' ideas are associated. Nevertheless, she says: "What Gimbutas is trying to do is to make a generalized stage of evolution type of interpretation, in which all societies at one time are [dominated by women] and then they all change to another kind. But prehistory is much more complicated than that. Anthropologists left that behind a long time ago"..... In some ways, the controversy reflects a classic conflict between science and art. To scholars who think that archaeology is legitimate only to the degree that it is grounded in science, Gimbutas' grandiose claims are too far-fetched even to merit consideration. And she considers her colleagues too passionless, too unintuitive, too alienated from nature to understand the prehistoric past. Gimbutas' theories are suspect, conceivably flatly wrong, yet they resonate far more than her colleagues' arid treatises. Whether or not the world she describes existed, her advocates feel as if they've glimpsed it, and long for its return. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - from "Did Goddess Worship Mark Ancient Age of Peace? by Jay Matthews (The Washington Post, Jan. 7, 1990) The Lithuanian-born UCLA professor's work stands as one of the most breathtaking examples of a new surge of feminist- oriented scholarship and has inspired some skepticism. Brian Fagan, archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called the thesis "pretty controversial," and a female scholar, who asked not to be identified, spoke of "goddess groupies ... trying to influence modern social change in a direction a lot of us would like to go" ... Fagan said the notion of a peaceful, female-centered ancient Europe dates back at least a century but has enjoyed a resurgence in the last decade or two as the feminist perspective has affected the way university scholars are examining old questions. Margarey Conkey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, said she thinks Gimbutas has made "important contributions" in emphasising the "mythological traditions" of prehistoric societies but that she and others have "a lot of problems" with Gimbutas' sweeping conclusions.... "Little by little, we became a patriarchal and warrior society," [Gimbutas] said. "We dominate nature; we don't feel we belong to her. This warrior society goes back to the Indo- European conquest of Europe, which eventually led to such people as Stalin and Hitler. We have to come back to our roots." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - from "The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles" by Ronald Hutton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) - p. 37-42 "By the 1950s, prehistorians had achieved agreement upon the question of their origins [European megaliths]. They were described as being the result of an idea brought up from more advanced Mediterranean civilizations, together with the cult of a Great Goddess or Earth Mother. Both parts of this concept were shattered at the end of the 1960s, the notion of the Goddess in circumstances which will be described later, and the belief in a Mediterranean origin by the discovery of faults in the Carbon 14 dating process... [p. 19] It was the world of late nineteenth and early twentieth- century scholarship which extended the idea into principle that prehistoric peoples had believed in such a universal deity [Goddess]. Once this decision had been taken, evidence was easily produced to suubstantiate it, by the simple device of treating any female representations from the Old and New Stone Ages as images of this being. Refernce has been made in chapter 1 to the practice in the case of the Paleolithic 'Venuses'. Any male image could be explained away as the son and/or lover of the Great Mother. During the mid-twentieth century, scholars such as Professor [Glyn] Daniel and the equally celebrated O.G.S. Crawford extended the Goddess' range by accepting that any representation of a human being in the Stone Ages, if not firmly identified as male, could be accepted as her images. Even a face, or a pair of eyes, were interpreted in this way. Because spirals could be thought of as symbols of eyes, they also formed part of the Goddess' iconography, as did circles, cups, and pits. In the mind of a historian of art like Michael Dames, the process reached the point at which a hole in a stone signified her presence. Mr. Dames was doing no more than summing up a century of orthodox scholarship when he proclaimed that 'Great Goddess and Neolithic go together as naturally as mother and child' [_The Silbury Treasure_, London, 1976, p. 51]. As a matter of fact, when Dames published those words in 1976, they were about seven years out of date. In 1968 and 1969 two prehistorians directed criticisms at this whole edifice of accepted scholarly belief which brought it all down for ever. One was Peter Ucko, in his monograph _Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete_ .... Professor Ucko reminded readers that a large minority of Neolithic figurines were male or asexual, that few if any statuettes had signs of majesty or supernatural power, and that few of them had accentuated sexual characteristics (the 'pubic triangles' on many of them could be loincloths). He warned against glib interpretations of the gestures portrayed upon figures; thus, early Egyptian figurines of women holding their breasts had been taken as 'obviously' significant of maternity or fertility, but the Pyramid Texts had revealed that in Egypt this was the female sign of grief.... all over the globe clay models very similar to those of the Neolithic are made as children's dolls. Just as in the modern West, most are intended for girls and are themselves female. Another widespread use of such figures is in sympathetic magic ... there was absolutely no need to interpret them everywhere as the same female or male deity. The second attack was made by Andrew Fleming, in an article in the periodical _World Archaeology_ uncompromisingly entitled 'The Myth of the Mother Goddess.' He pointed out the simple fact that there was absolutely no proof that spirals, circles, and dots were symbols for eyes, that eyes, faces, and genderless figures were symbols of a female or that female figures were symbols of a goddess. This blew to pieces the accepted chain of goddess-related imagery from Anatolia round the coasts to Scandinavia. He was helped by the revolution in the carbon-dating process, which disproved the associated belief that megalithic architecture had travelled from the Levant with the cult of the Great Mother... There was no answer possible to Ucko and Fleming, and during the 1970s the scepticism which they embodied proceeded to erode more of the Mother Goddess's reputed range. Ruth Whitehouse ['Megaliths of the Central Mediterranean' in Renfrew, _The Megalithic Monuments of Western Europe_] considered the statue pillars of Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica, which had been treated as part of the deity's iconography, and found that only a few had any female characteristics; many, indeed, carried weapons. Even Malta, long considered one of the most obvious centres of Neolithic goddess worship, fell before David Trump ['Megalithic Architecture in Malta' in Renfrew, op. cit.]. He pointed out that although some of the Maltese statuettes were certainly female, many of the large cult statues were kilted, flat-chested and generally androgynous... However, the same mood of iconoclasm in the late 1960s which inspired Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming brought into being a women's movement bent upon challenging patriarchy in both society and religion. Professor Ucko's book was an academic monograph with a forbidding title, while Dr. Fleming's essay was lodged in a scholarly periodical; the old popular works were still lining public library shelves (and indeed being reprinted), and they provided some radicals with precisely the universal female deity they had been seeking. At the very moment that the concept of the Neolithic Great Mother crumbled inside academe, it found more enthusiastic adherents among the general public than ever before. This tendency was enhanced by the appearance in 1974 of Marija Gimbutas' beautiful book _The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_ [Berkeley: University of California Press]. It deserved praise for two great achievements: it established that the Neolithic cultures of the Balkans had left a huge trove of figurines, statues and painted ceramics, and it provided a feast of new images for historians of art and indeed for artists themselves. Yet Professor Gimbutas' interpretation of those images caused much scholarly concern. She accepted Peter Ucko's work to the extent of speaking of different goddesses and gods instead of one. But she completely ignored his other criteria by regarding a very large range of human representations, especially among the statuettes, as divine, and proceeding to classify them confidently with no justification other than her own taste. She explained the significance of geometrical symbols in the same fashion, and in subsequent works went on to complete her portrait of a goddess-worshipping, woman-centered, peaceful and creative Neolithic Balkan civilization, destroyed by savage patriarchal invaders. There is good archaeological evidence to cast doubt upon this, but Professor Gimbutas has refused to recognize it. The mixture of affection and frustration which her work inspires is neatly summed up by her Festschrift, the collection of essays by admiring colleagues customarily presented to a distinguished scholar who is approaching the formal age of retirement. That delivered to Professor Gimbutas is characterized by both deep respect for herself and profound dissent from her views... [Catal Huyuk in Turkey, discovered by James Mellart in the 1950s, is the largest Neolithic settlement yet known.] Mr. Mellart returned to the subject once more, in a detailed text for students, _The Neolithic of the Far East_, published in 1975. By now Peter Ucko's warnings had made their impact upon academe, and Mr. Mellart scrupulously avoided any interpretations of the kind which he had made earlier. He now spoke only of 'female figurines', male statuettes', and ex-voto figures', and raised the possibility that some were dolls. When he wrote of the Balkans, in the wake of Marija Gimbutas's book, he carefully declined to repeat any of her interpretations of the finds there. But this dry, densely written academic text made no impression upon the public, whereas his own popular book of ten years earlier [_Earliest Civilizations of the Near East_] had now been reissued in paperback. Read with the works of Professor Gimbutas, it produced strong and escalating interest in Catal Huyuk among the same sort of feminist writers and artists who were taking up the Mother Goddess. By the time feminist philosopher Riane Eisler published in the mid-1980s [San Francisco: _The Chalice and the Blade_, 1987], the settlement was confidently believed by them to have been matriarchal in its society as well as its religion, and also - or rather, 'therefore' - a peaceful community requiring neither weapons nor defences (a claim contradicted in Mr. Mellart's original textbook)... Ian Hodder has recently taken a fresh look at this evidence and the context in which it is set ['Contextual Archaeology: An Interpretation of Catal Huyuk and a discussion of the Origins of Agriculture', _London University Institute of Archaeology Bulletin_ 1987, 24, pp.43-56]. He notes that women were buried with ornaments and cosmetic boxes, men with weapons of war and hunting and implements of agriculture; that women were portrayed far more often in the figurines, usually nude, while men were portrayed most often in the wall-paintings, clothed and usually engaged in hunting; that the art placed a great emphasis on wild nature and little upon agriculture or domestic tasks; and that the living spaces around the hearths and the cooking-pots were never decorated like the rest of the hearth... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - On Gimbutas' "Kurgan Invasion" Hypothesis: - from "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" by J.P. Mallory (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991) ...the present formulation of this theory owes much to the publications of Marija Gimbutas who has argued for over twenty- five years that the Proto-Indo-Europeans should be identified with her Kurgan tradition ... The capsule image of the Kurgan tradition is a warlike pastoral society, highly mobile ... [p. 182-3] The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or in total ... One might at first imagine that the economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright. But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply - almost all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions, and most of the evidence so far presented is either totally contradicted by other evidence or is the result of gross misinterpretation of the cultural history of Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe [p. 185; detailed discussion follows in next two chapters]. - from _European Prehistory_ by Sarunas Milisauskas (New York: Academic Press, 1978, p. 183.) Many scholars, especially Gimbutas (1956, 1965, 1973) have maintained that the Late Neolithic saw not only the influx of pastoralists from the steppe regions of the southern Ukraine but also the appearance of the Indo-European speaking peoples in various parts of Europe. However, to demonstrate a prehistoric migration or even the presence of a pastoral economy is not a simple matter. As we shall see, the migration hypothesis should be treated with caution. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - on Marija Gimbutas' "Language of the Goddess" - from Hutton, op. cit., p. 346. Its many illustrations make it a wonderful gift to artists: that apart, it is a personal dream-world infused with the author's political preoccupations. It makes wholly arbitrary and selective interpretation of the prehistoric symbols which it reproduces, and tacks onto this an interpretation of the historic Great Witch Hunt which is based not even upon dubious scholarship but upon assertions of modern pagans made without research. Overall, the book is an extended and very beautiful radical feminist tract. - from a review by Ruby Rohrlich in "The Women's Review of Books" (Vol. VII, No. 9, June, 1990) The reknowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley has shown that in Sumer, the first civilization in the Old World, the earliest dynastic rulers practiced human sacrifice. Others have made similar findings. Gimbutas seems to accept human sacrifice as a corroboration, not a refutation, of hr thesis; she argues that such sacrifice strengthens the life-force by conveying the energy of the victim to the sacrificer... Gimbutas proposes a single, simplistic theory - invasion by violent, patriarchal Indo-Europeans - to account for the changes that radically transformed human society in this period... Despite its theoretical weaknesses, _The Language of the Goddess_ is a book to cherish for its spectacular reproductions alone ... If nothing else, Gimbutas' herculean labors have borne fruit in a magnificent collection of the art of our early ancestors, a treasure trove for anthropologists, art historians, teachers, and students. [RS note: Rohrlich is a feminist scholar who makes the highly-dubious claim that ancient Crete was a "matriarchy" (in _Becoming Visible - Women in European History_, Bridenthal & Koonz, eds., Houghton Mifflin, 1977, chapter 2)] - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dubious Assertions by Marija Gimbutas: - from an interview in the "Whole Earth Review", Spring, 1989. " 'Old Europe' is my term for the culture which was matrifocal, not patriarchal, non-Indo-European.... The social structure *didn't* change [for 20,000 years]. The matrifocal social structure continued from the Paleolithic into the Neolithic and therefore the goddesses were the same.... I discovered at Achilleion - this is northern Greece - one temple above another. They were in the shape of houses.... The huge herds [of the Indo-European pastoral nomads] had to be controlled by the man, and I think this was the primary cause why patriarchy became established. Question: How can you tell if you've gone too far in drawing conclusions? Gimbutas: Well, this has to do with your intuition and experience. Just like an art creation you must feel that you are right in what you are saying. - from _The Language of the Goddess_ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989, p. xx - xxi): The Goddess-centered art with its striking absence of images of warfare and male domination, reflects a social order in which women as heads of clans or queen-priestesses played a central part. Old Europe and Anatolia, as well as Minoan Crete, were a gylany. [MG footnote: Riana Eisler in her book _The Chalice and the Blade_ (1987) proposes the term gylyany (_gy_ from "woman," _an_ from _andros_, "man", and the letter l between the two standing for the linking of both halves of humanity) for the social structure where both sexes were equal.] A balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system is reflected by religion, mythologies, and folklore, by studies of the social structure of Old European and Minoan cultures, and is supported by the continuity of the elements of a matrilineal system in ancient Greece, Etruria, Rome, the Basque, and other countries of Europe... So the repeated disturbances and incursions by Kurgan people (whom I view as Proto-Indo-European) put an end to the Old European culture roughly between 4300 and 2800 B.C., changing it from gylanic to androcratic and from matrilineal to patrilineal. The Aegean and Mediterranean regions and western Europe escaped the process the longest; there, especially in the islands such as Thera, Crete, Malta, and Sardinia, Old European culture flourished in an enviably peaceful and creative civilization until 1500 B.C., a thousand to 1500 years after central Europe had been thoroughly transformed... We are still living under the sway of that aggressive male invasion and only beginning to discover our long alienation from our authentic European Heritage - gylanic, nonviolent, earth- centered culture. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - on Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade": - from "The Goddess Theory" by Jacques Leslie (Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 11, 1989) "Equally significantlly, a book called "The Chalice and the Blade," written by Riane Eisler, used Gimbutas' ideas as its cornerstone for arguing that features of modern civilization such as patriarchy, warfare, and competitiveness are recent historical developments, introduced by the villanous Indo-Europeans. Far from being inevitable, Eisler claims, the ills of modern civilization can be blamed on its unbalanced embrace of masculine values. Societies that cherish the Earth, as Gimbutas and Eisler argue that the Old Europeans did, would not waste their wealth on nuclear arsenals, nor would they allow life on the planet to be threatened by environmental problems. Published in 1987, "The Chalice and the Blade" is now in its seventh printing and enjoys a kind of cult prominence within the women's movement. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Conclusion: The feminist/New Age "Idyllic Goddess" theory is not an intellectually-respectable hypothesis. It was invented by conjecturing far beyond what available facts will permit, guided by a political agenda, and "validated" by intuition. While a belief in a universal Goddess of the Neolithic was widely-held by scholars several decades ago, recent scholarly critiques have exposed serious difficulties with this view, and it is now quite discredited within academe. The overwhelming majority of anthropologists and archaeologists reject Gimbutas' interpreta- tions and conjectures on "the Goddess"; however, most of them are reluctant to speak out too strongly, out of sympathy for their ailing colleague, and for her feminist goals. Yet in spite of its rejection by scholars, the Idyllic Goddess theory has found enormous support among certain segments of the general public, because it appeals to their preconceived beliefs. Thus Gimbutas' Goddess theories should be placed alongside those of Velikovsky and Von Daniken: belief-systems which, while enjoying a cult-like popularity among certain groups of laymen, are rejected virtually _in toto_ by scholars who have worked in the field. They are classic examples of pseudo-science. Robert Sheaffer -- Robert Sheaffer - Scepticus Maximus - sheaffer@netcom.com Past Chairman, The Bay Area Skeptics - for whom I speak only when authorized! "Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." - Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: 126)