di Joan Marler
Adapted from Joan Marler – From the Realm of the Ancestors. An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas - Knowledge, Ideas and Trends Inc. – 1997
The wide variety of voices collected in this volume represents a tribute to the extraordinary depth and depth of the research carried out by Marija Gimbutas. Those who had the privilege of knowing Marija in person remember a woman of great warmth and spontaneity, accompanied by a seemingly endless vitality. She cultivated many deep and lasting friendships throughout her life and nurtured the intellectual development of countless students during a quarter century of teaching. Even those who were not formally her students considered her a mentor and a friend. Among them, Vicki Noble and myself.
We often visited Marija at her home near Los Angeles when she was bedridden. Our last visit was three days before her death. Even in that moment Marija exuded a sense of peace and was completely present. One of her thoughts was about the fate of her last unfinished manuscript, which was later carefully completed by Miriam Robbins Dexter. And she also had a wish: that an archive be created in California to house and preserve all of her books and documents used during her professional life. All this (at the time the volume was being created in her honor, ed.), under the name “Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library and Archives” at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California, near Santa Barbara. The first archive containing Marija's personal documents can be consulted in Vilnius, Lithuania, at Vilnius University.
What follows is a brief exchange with Vicki Noble to attempt a synthesis of the many themes that emerge from this book.
Joan Marler: Starting from the privileged point where we find ourselves at the end of this anthology, the thread of discourse that unravels through all the contributions outlines a vast landscape that extends back in time, to Ancient Europe. There, as if from a ridge of the world, from Marija onwards we are able to read the evolution of events that generally remain hidden in traditional historical narratives.
And the question I have to ask is how to continue from our present towards the new millennium.
Vicki Noble: One of my students told me one day: "I feel like I'm a person who has reached the edge of an abyss, and instead of trying to jump over it, I wander along its edges." My answer is that we must have the courage to take the leap into what we don't know. To do this we can draw inspiration from Marija, who demonstrated extreme courage in these situations.
Joan: One of the examples he left us was precisely his ability to be original and the willingness to overcome the boundaries accepted by everyone when it was necessary to be faithful to his intuitions and his inner authority.
Vicki: The courage and inner authority you speak of is a way of expressing wholeness on a high level, which Marija certainly possessed. I'm not interested in the patriarchal authority that women assume when they achieve a certain external recognition. I am interested in the authentic power that emanates from within those who have achieved a visionary, creative and healing position, which in India is called Shakti.
Joan: This brings us directly to the theme of Sovereignty, which appears several times throughout this book.
Vicki: Certain. Wholeness is the source of Sovereignty, as many as many fear it, especially women. They are people who confuse authority with authoritarianism. I have always thought that true female authority, female sovereignty, is of fundamental importance in our times.
Joan: There is an uncommon definition of wholeness in the essays of Oliver Gouchet, Kristina Berggren and Patricia Reis, in an anthology that mixes masculine and feminine. For example, in European sculpture from the Paleolithic, Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, the female body sometimes takes on a phallic shape, and in myth there is a fluidity of genders that can be read as sacred androgyny. It is difficult to fully understand the meaning of female/male as an expression of wholeness in our current polarized way of thinking. Even the Jungian formulation of soul e animus perpetuates stereotypes about male and female behavior. I absolutely disagree with the notion that if a male is kind and nurturing she is behaving like a woman, or vice versa, that if a woman is powerful and centered she is expressing a deeply masculine nature.
All these aspects are simply human attributes. Cultural stereotypes about male and female behaviors represent a limit to the variety of people's abilities. Perhaps those who created these androgynous images were not conditioned by such categorical criteria as those in force today.
Vicki: In some cultures there appears to be a conceptual understanding that “feminine” can refer to both males and females. In Asia, for example, the Tao contains within it masculine and feminine. I also think of the Tibetan Black Dakini, who wields a crescent moon-shaped blade in one hand and a stick from which three skulls hang in the other. The stick, according to Tsultrim Allione, is a symbol of his integrated masculine energy. There is also an image in an Indian temple of a woman dancing with a snake emerging from her vulva. Western scholars define these motifs as "phallic", but in India they are perceived as aspects of female power. Perhaps ancient images of women with “phallus heads” are carriers of some of this encoded information.
Joan: It's a fascinating thing to think about, and I agree with you about what you said earlier, that wholeness is the source of sovereignty. This was something really central to goddess cultures.
Vicki: Yes, and it can be seen in the motif of the mother on the throne, for example in the small terracotta sculpture from Catal Huyuk of the woman sitting between two felines. I don't know if she is giving birth, although a lot comes from this ability. It's okay for me to think that this is the case, since giving life is the primary creative act. The Mother is intrinsically dual, as she gives birth to both males and females. However, I do not think that sovereignty is based on generative capacity. I think sovereignty is innate and based on all of her regenerative abilities. I would like to remind you of what Marija always said on the subject: “It's not about fertility but about regeneration”.
Joan: This idea of a "goddess of fertility" and of giving life represents a sore point for some women in the feminist movement, even if not even a Goddess, as such, constitutes an appropriate image for women of our era.
Vicki: I partly agree with this position, as the goddess movement magnified fertility and reproduction and sentimentalized the feminine. True, giving birth is an incredibly powerful act, but it has been co-opted into the comfortable Western stereotype of the nurturing, nurturing woman, and from there projected backwards to the Goddess. She spreads the power of an icon. This is why academic feminists have rejected it as banal and regressive.
Joan: An image of Goddess that is certainly not threatening.
Vicki: Certainly. Like the Virgin Mary with the added slightly erotic component of the super-eroticized way men like to look at women, not in a deep, powerful, holistic way that encompasses uncompromising personal authority. It is this kind of unapologetic authority of women – and the self-governance that comes with it – that must have laid the foundations of the matristic cultures that Marija revealed through her work. I am convinced that today's women need to grow up to reach the role of leader - of families, communities and the world of work. We need to find and give voice to the full range of our knowledge and reflections, even if this may sometimes not be pleasant.
Joan: Expressions of female power are often denied and destroyed by women as well as men, as Mary Condren describes well in this volume.
Vicki: We ourselves are intimidated by the proud appearance we can take on, since expressing it breaks a taboo in our culture on what is beautiful and suitable for women. If we think we must always be gentle and nonviolent, it can be terrifying to find – and unexpectedly be – an angry Amazon in some unexplored corner of the psyche!
Joan: Yes, but if we don't consciously embrace it, it runs the risk of emerging even against our will, which can be devastating. In terms of myths, this is the energy of the Gorgon and Kali. If both men and women realized that they possess profound capacities for destruction, perhaps it would be possible to become conscious and able to govern the expression of this capacity.
Vicki: That's right! It has to do with the possibility of positively evaluating these primary powers on a psycho-spiritual level. However, when they are repressed, they become non-voluntary and out of control.
Joan: Perhaps it is that same vitality that can make it possible to enter the unknown zones, to leap into the abyss. Physicist David Bohm and David Peat (1987) talk about “courage, energy and passion” which can break through habitual tendencies of thought, which is often very difficult to do. Naturally, it is necessary to completely escape passive conditioning to contribute to personal and cultural transformation.
Vichi: If there is any possibility of a personal and cultural transformation, it is first necessary to clearly perceive what is happening without placing oneself in a position of denial. In this world at the end of the second millennium, this means, among other things, staring ecological catastrophe directly in the face. The real confrontation is with death. Marija often spoke of the goddess of Death.
Joan: We are talking about our relationship with the power of death, but Marija has always linked death to regeneration.
Vicki: After describing the devastations of the end of a great cycle, the Voluspa Norse, or “the prophecy of the Sibyl”, reminds us that the world will be “green again full of growing things” and that the earth will emerge from the oceans once again to be inhabited by life. This is a vision of regeneration that is similar to the imagery found in the arts and artifacts from Ancient Europe that Marija has described and interpreted.
Joan: The bottom line is that we cannot escape dissolution. We are not promised immortality in this life, only that we will return to the Source.
Vicki: Certainly right, but we need to stop all our activities for a moment and become aware of the presence of death. Western culture is so full of distractions. We have the opportunity to open our hearts freely if we really want to allow ourselves to be touched by the things that happen. It is then that regeneration can begin. I once wondered what Marija meant when she insisted that she was not the Goddess only a nurse, but a Regenerator!
Joan: One thing that needs to be looked at with eyes wide open and in all possible detail is the terrible ecological crisis that is developing more and more every moment, caused by human ignorance and greed. If we need to regenerate a correct connection with nature, however I don't think that fears or anxieties will be the trigger to overturn the situation in which we are immersed. The question is: what do we love? If nature remains an abstract thing, just a background, nothing can be done.
Vicki: Real. We must re-place ourselves in nature as parts of the cellular life of the entire world. I had a dream once, I was on an island and there was a tidal wave coming in, and there was no one to stop it. All the people who were there gathered together and began to sing. It's a metaphor for my work. I think it's important to celebrate life without denying the consequences of our actions and our possible extinction. At this point, we may no longer be able to make the changes needed in time to save ourselves. But rediscovering a sense of interconnection could heal us. This is precisely what is engraved in the art and ancestral rituals of ancient Europeans and other native peoples. I always encourage my students and those who follow me to gather together in a community way, to sing together in healing circles, as the primitive peoples have always done.
Joan: Anna Ilieva and Anna Shturbanova's essay in this volume on ancient ritual dances in Bulgaria describes beautiful ceremonial traditions that fostered vibrant participation of human communities in the cycles of the natural world. The West needs these sacred techniques. So much of the power of mythical reality has been lost. But holding hands and the simplest dance in a circle are enough and something profound is evoked. Marija understood the significance of these rich cultural traditions when she describes Ancient Europe as a true civilization in terms of aesthetics, spirituality and quality of life.
Vicki: Yes, we must return to living in our bodies and feeling our connections with plants and animals and with each other. The rational and scientific mode has its place, but it is very important to exercise our vision skills, our instincts and our intuitions.
Joan: Marija spoke about the importance of having a vision. In a recent article, Susan Griffin wrote that vision is a collective activity and that imagination is required to free us from old thought patterns. Imagining is not simply seeing what does not yet exist, it is also a profound act of creativity to see what is. Griffin points out that every major social movement first reconfigures the world in its imagination and it is from these new ways of seeing that hope for a future emerges (Griffin, 1996). Imagining different values, shifting our attention from objects to relationships, for example, can have profound meanings.
Vicki: Moving from objects to relationships could impact the growing materialism that values things rather than people and other forms of life. This shift could also be in line with the partnerships ethics of Riane Esler, in which "connection" is a relational capacity which is given a higher value than "staying in order" typical of power structures and highly valued by the cultures of domination.
Joan: Even power structures are configured as an imaginary shared by people, otherwise they could not be preserved. Each person has the choice to legitimize or deny her support for any trend or institution. The question is: what kind of world do we want to create? What do we have inside ourselves that we want to take shape in the world?
Vicki: Marija supported the idea of partnerships, and not that of domination systems.
Joan: I thought a lot about the prophecy that Marija's mother made to her when she was still a child, that she would create something that would help people not get sick. What do you think it could mean?
Vicki: On the one hand, Marija showed that it is not “human nature” to wage war and use violence as the center of our reality. It's transformative just knowing that alternatives exist for human culture. She also resurrected the memory of the fact that the original European peoples lived in a much fuller way, which perhaps we would be able to experience again.
Joan: In The Reenchantment of Art (1991), Suzi Gablik wrote that to begin healing we must “find ways to resurface the archetypal memory that preceded the loss of our integration into nature” (Gablik1991:43). Perhaps this is a key to fulfilling Marija's mother's prophecy. Ideas have the potential to nourish people's imaginations, which influences the way we live and what we value and create for future generations.
Vicki: This is exactly how Marija continues to inspire my life and work. To have a positive vision for the future, we must remember our original inheritance that comes from the realm of our Ancestors and Ancestors, which forms the basis of our union with nature. It's in our DNA. And now, thanks to Marija, it is also part of our cultural discourse.
References
- Bohm David J. and Peat David – Science, Order and Creativity. A dramatic new look at the creative roots of Science and Life – New York – Bentam Books – 1987;
- Gablik Suzi – The Reenchantment of Art – New York – Thames and Hudson – 1991;
- Griffin Susan – “Can Imagination save us?” – in Utne Reader – 1996 July-August.
Adapted from Joan Marler – From the Realm of the Ancestors. An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas – Knowledge, Ideas and Trends Inc., 1997 – Afterword to the volume.
Translation by Luciana Percovich and Alberto Castagnola.
