In the podcast “Home to Her”, dedicated to the Sacred Feminine, the presenter Liz Kelly meets authors, artists, teachers, poets and mystics, with whom she has long conversations on the themes of Female Spirituality. The podcast site contains a series of very interesting interviews.
We particularly highlight the latest recent episode in which it is possible to listen to a long chat between Liz and Joan Marler on “The Legacy of Marija Gimbutas".
Joan Marler in this long interview of over an hour, offers the story of the moments in her life that led her to the meeting with Marija Gimbutas and explains how this meeting then changed her course.
In fact, Joan talks about her childhood and her first approach to the Christian religion, her move to the coast of California in Mondocino (a symbolic place for the generation of Flower children in the 70s) and the impact it had on her psyche , her approach to female spirituality which began to take shape in the early 80s, with the reading of Joseph Campbell's book, The hero with a thousand faces.
It was during a conference by Campbell that he heard Marija Gimbutas mentioned for the first time. She says she was struck by the materials and the book The goddesses and gods of ancient Europe, presented at that conference. From there the desire to personally know Marija Gimbutas was born and the opportunity presented itself with an interview that Marija gave her for a radio station.
From that moment, a close collaboration was born and Joan was soon involved in the editing of entire chapters of what would later become the book, the Civilization of the Goddess.
As she herself says, their long conversations and the approach to Marija's work will have a great influence on Joan's new psychological and spiritual structure.
By editing the texts and therefore totally immersing herself in that work, everything that until then seemed illogical in Joan's head gradually becomes clearer, offering her a new look at her holistic conception of the world.
He quickly realizes that Marija Gimbutas was demonstrating that the father god is nothing more than a patriarchal construct that has supplanted the maternal order of early human societies; an order that developed in harmony with all possible manifestations of life and death on this planet.
Marija Gimbutas was the only one to be interested in the scientific and in-depth study of materials and periods that no one before her had dealt with. Everything before the Bronze Age was not considered interesting by academic circles.
Directing excavations in southeastern Europe gives her the opportunity to carefully study every single piece produced by those excavations.
Joan explains that thanks also to her Lithuanian origins and her cultural background, Marija revolutionizes the study method and literally invents a multidisciplinary method, never used before in the archaeological field which she herself will define as archaeomythology. He will demonstrate with this method that those hundreds of female figurines, which emerged across half of Europe, were the expression of civilizations not only long before the Bronze Age, but also much more advanced than the narrative made up to that point.
Marija Gimbutas has given us evidence of civilizations, very advanced and capable of fervent artistic activity, of translating their cosmic and religious dimension into a sophisticated symbolic language. She demonstrates that in these peaceful and egalitarian civilizations, women who embodied the cosmic origin of life had a central spiritual and social role.
Joan Marler speaks of the legacy of Marija Gimbutas as something that has positively influenced the lives of many women who have rediscovered, thanks to her studies and her thoughts, their own creative power, but at the same time, for many other women active in second-wave feminism in particular, has been the source of fierce criticism.
Today we know that Gimbutas' work is also finding many scientific confirmations. His theories about the Kurgan waves in Europe, thank you to recent studies on DNA for example, they provide the most valid explanation for the continent's rapid Indo-Europeanization.
UNESCO even honors her memory, indicating her as one of the prominent figures to whom public international recognition should be given for the merits obtained in the field of knowledge and the cultural development of humanity.
The Institute of Archaeomythology founded by Joan Marler is inspired by the multidisciplinary vision of Marija Gimbutas and actively encourages students and colleagues from different fields to examine the problems of European prehistory with an inclusive and interdisciplinary point of view.
After the death of Marija Gimbutas, Joan Marler published and edited numerous texts and From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas the massive international collection of essays by leading scholars, inspired by the work of Marija Gimbutas. To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Marija Gimbutas which occurs this year, you are editing a new anthology which will also contain an essay by Luciana Percovich who made a great contribution to the diffusion and dissemination of Gimbutas' work in Italy. The publication of this new anthology, as reported on the site https://www.archaeomythology.org/ will conclude the year of celebrations taking place around the world.
* Photo from the article: John Marler – “Baltic Archaeology, Cultural History, Ancient Lithuanian Symbolism, Old Europe, and the Archaeomythology of Marija Gimbutas” – in Lithuanian Archaeology, vol. 23 – 2022 – page 10-33.
