The Living Goddesses 1st/1st HCDJ Gimbutas Prehistoric Goddess-Centered Cultures

Description: The Living Goddesses 1st/1st HCDJ Gimbutas Prehistoric Goddess-Centered Cultures______________________________ The Living Goddessesby Marija GimbutasPublished by University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif. (1999) Condition:Excellent++ 1st Edition / 1st Printing Hardcover Book with Dust Jacket! NO MARKS! The binding is tight and all 286 pages within are bright white with NO WRITING, UNDERLINING, HIGH-LIGHTING, RIPS, TEARS, BENDS OR FOLDS. The covers look perfect! The dust jacket is in excellent condition, as can be seen in my photos. You will be happy with this one! Always handled and packaged with care! Buy with confidence from a seller who takes the time to show you the details and not use just stock photos. Please check out all my pictures and email with any questions! Thanks for looking! About the Book:The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original—and originally shocking—interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of years. This volume, which was close to completion at the time of her death, contains the distillation of her studies, combined with new discoveries, insights, and analysis. Editor Miriam Robbins Dexter has added introductory and concluding remarks, summaries, and annotations. The first part of the book is an accessible, beautifully illustrated summation of all Gimbutas's earlier work on "Old European" religion, together with her ideas on the roles of males and females in ancient matrilineal cultures. The second part of the book brings her knowledge to bear on what we know of the goddesses today—those who, in many places and in many forms, live on. Some Book Reviews:5/5 stars - Good reading, Great Goddess!Having become an admirer of Marija Gimbutas long ago, I come to this book after reading "Understanding Early Civilizations" by Bruce G. Trigger. The "civilizations" he discusses are all much later than the widespread Old European "culture" Gimbutas explored. With roots in the Paleolithic it spans millennia, flowering in so called Minoan civilization and still surviving in folk culture today. It embodies a kind of "proto-European" religion centered on the most basic of human experiences, life and death. These are seen through the eyes of people whose brains are just as complex as our own, living in a time when social organization was based on extended family and tribe. The clear miracle of birth would naturally be the focus of awe. Death would have been a far closer companion than it is today and the cycles of nature would be very familiar. Hardwired as our species is for abstraction, and by extension religion, it is natural that the cycle of birth, death and regeneration would be central to the earliest belief system. That it would be female centered is not a surprise. The social organization of that early time was probably based on the realities of surviving that include a very high value on child bearing females. Being able to attribute paternity was simply not important. Humans are not strictly monogamous as has been pretended in more recent times. The important thing was to enable reproduction and protect the young. If a woman could get more than one man to provide for her and her offspring, all the better. Young men could more easily be spared from the community to find mates elsewhere. Then, of course, times changed. The human population grew and the horse was domesticated. Mounted Steppe nomads began numerous incursions on the settled, by then agricultural, population. They added a warrior ethic to the old religion and the hierarchy that led to kings and commoners took root. That development is what supposedly led to what we now define as Civilization. That definition is of course in flux. Trigger has allowed that the once essential ingredient, a written language, is no longer necessary. What appears to be universal in the civilizations he includes are warfare and human sacrifice.A little known and inconvenient truth is that human beings were better fed and had more leisure as hunter-gatherers. I suspect that people, especially the female half of that category, were better off where the Great Goddess was honored. While females were central, the essential contribution of males was appreciated. Much of the iconography of the Goddess religion is still in use. Christianity can be seen as the primacy of the dying vegetation god and the mourning rituals leading to his resurrection. Mother Mary and the child Jesus hold a central position. Regardless of the militaristic nature of much that went on in the so called "Christian era", the ideal is still "Peace on Earth".It annoys me that there is so much resistance to Gimbutas' well documented research and its message. Just the other day I saw a biblical archaeology TV special in which they discussed Lilith the supposed first wife of Adam who was created equal and not from his rib. They described how she had been demonized and they identified as a "monster" a winged woman with bird feet. If they had even the slightest familiarity with Gimbutas, they would have recognized the old Goddess immediately.--G. Joy Robins 5/5 stars - Archeology with ImaginationThe basics of archeology show it to be an exacting science. An archeological site is carefully mapped and often photographed to record exactly how it appeared before it is disturbed. Then as the site is examined each artifact, bones and other material objects are carefully notated as to where they were found and with what other objects. The idea is that even an archeologist whose was not present at the site can still get a pretty accurate idea what was discovered. If the site has some unique or interesting characteristics, the lead archeologist will then write it up describing in detail what was found and, usually, providing a plausible hypothesis on the original purpose of the site and as much about the humans associated with it as is possible within the limits of the physical evidence. Most archeologists stop here and devote themselves to cataloguing their findings. Marja Gimbutas, fortunately is not "most archeologists" and goes far beyond the basics of archeology. Using physical evidence from multiple sites in Europe and the Anatolian Peninsula, historical references, and the examples of known "old European" peoples (the Basque, the Etruscans, and the Minoans) she developed a wide ranging theory of the cultures of Europe from the upper Paleolithic until the invading waves of the Indo-European speaking peoples from about 5,000 BCE. The core of her theory is that the peoples of what she calls old Europe (pre Indo-European) from at least the upper Paleolithic through the Megalithic twilight of the Neolithic were matriarchal, peaceful peoples, who worshipped various forms of what she calls `earth goddesses' and reflect an egalitarian society. Gimbutas argues that the widely spread artifacts that more conventional archeologists consider "fertility images' in reality are images of earth goddesses who play a key role in the old European religious concepts of birth, death, and regeneration that Gimbutas theorizes was core to the old European belief system. So has Gimbutas uncovered important clues about the builders of megaliths like Stonehenge and indeed Europe from upper Paleolithic through much of the Neolithic? Perhaps or perhaps not, but at least she has put forward a plausible, evidence based theory that could explain a little understood period in human development.--Retired Reader About the Author, Marija Gimbutas:Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994) was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Curator of Old World Archaeology at what is now the Fowler Museum of Cultural History. She is the author of Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500 b. c. (California, 1982) and coauthor, with Joseph Campbell, of The Language of the Goddess (1995). Miriam Robbins Dexter, who holds a Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA, is a lecturer in the Honors Collegia and in the Program in Women's Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book (1990). Copyright © 2018-2024 TDM Inc. The photos and text in this listing are copyrighted. I spend lots of time writing up my descriptions and despise it when un-original losers cut and paste my descriptions in as their own. It is against ebay policy and if you are caught, you will be reported to ebay and could be sued for copyright infringement and damages.

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End Time: 2025-01-26T07:00:12.000Z

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