She has directed five excavations in Europe, reads more than 20 languages and brings to her work an extraordinary knowledge of European folklore and mythology.īut the skepticism about this thesis by many leading archeologists and anthropologists is unmistakable, although it is almost always comes with expressions of respect for Dr. Gimbutas is indeed a prolific scholar, the author of 20 books, including a monumental study of Bronze Age Indo-European cultures, and more than 200 articles. ''Marija Gimbutas is the one world-class scholar showing that what feminists wished were true is in fact true,'' said John Loudon, a senior editor at Harper & Row who worked on the archeologist's book published last year, ''The Language of the Goddess.''ĭr. Gimbutas's research germinal and fundamentally important. In ''The Once and Future Goddess,'' a new book on goddess symbols and images, Elinor W. Her work was a major scholarly source for Riane Eisler's ''The Chalice and the Blade,'' a sweeping analysis of cultural evolution that has become a minor classic in the women's movement. Gimbutas gives them something more: the seeming stamp of science and the reassurance of history. For some time feminist writers have been seeking non-patriarchal mythologies and rituals in Jungian psychology, reconstructed notions of witchcraft, or even in pure creations of the imagination.

Gimbutas's theories are sprinkled liberally throughout a growing literature about goddess-based religion. It is a thesis that has made the 68-year-old professor of archeology at the University of California at Los Angeles a heroine among many feminist social critics and religious thinkers and a controversial figure, to say the least, among her colleagues. Then, about 6,000 years ago, this Old European culture, in which the two sexes lived in harmony with one another and with nature, was shattered by patriarchal invaders who installed their warlike gods in place of the life-generating Great Goddess. It was during the Stone Age, she says, when goddesses were worshiped and societies were centered on women. MARIJA Gimbutas is an eminent archeologist who says she believes the world once lived in peace.

The chalice and the blade criticism