SIGNS OUT OF TIMECOMMENTARY Revised November 21, 2002.

1. (fire and titles)

What does the dance mean to the dancers?

How do we measure the beliefs that set those feet in motion?

What we believe about our past shapes our view of who we are as human beings and how we are capable of living.

We can dream of a culture of harmony and peace, in balance with nature...

But has there ever been one?

(Portrait of Marija)Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas said, ‘yes.’

She told a new origin story, that at the very beginning of Western Civilization lay cultures that were long-lasting and peaceful.

Marija Gimbutas was born in Lithuania, a land tucked away in NE Europe, where remnants of an ancient world still linger, passed down through families like these potters, whose art reflects the myths and songs that left an abiding impression on Marija. 5. (young woman Marija) She was forced to flee the Soviet occupation of her homeland during World War Two …

6. (Marija and 3 kids/beautiful Marija) Refugees throughout the war, Marija Gimbutas and her family immigrated to the United States, where she became a world renowned archeologist, whose scientific theories have sparked a great debate.

7. (Marija with Sunglasses)Her theories are deep and complex, but simply put, they paint a new picture of the earliest layer of Western cultures.

8. (bird flies)

Long before written history began in Sumer and Egypt, settlements in the forest clearings and riverbanks of Southeast Europe achieved a high level of culture and art.

9. (zoom into water)Eight thousand years ago in the Neolithic, or new stone age, agriculture, pottery, weaving, and herding were being practiced.

10. (apple picking)The first farming communities where women and men lived

11. (ceremony)showed no evidence of organized warfare.

12. (goddesses and gods animation)They left behind thousands of artifacts, - a rich legacy of paintings, pottery sculptures and figurines all connected to Goddesses and Gods who were at the center of a rich religious life.

13. (dancer 1,2,3)The primordial deity for our ancestors was female, Marija wrote, a self-generating Goddess, Giver of Life, Wielder of Death and Regeneratrix.

14. (water/swans) She was the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hill, trees, and flowers.

Interview: Marija: She was there for millennia. And She was always sacred. Because what our forefathers understood was sacred earth. Living Earth, Mother Earth figures everywhere in European folklore to this day. And she is the metaphor of living earth, nothing else.

I saw with my own eyes in these rather primitive corners of Lithuania, when not only women, but also men, were kissing Earth in the morning. Also the belief that Mother Earth is lawgiver. You can not deceive Earth, you must respect Earth, especially in the spring, when She is pregnant. You cannot beat Her, that was the life.

15 (cave art) Marija traced a continuity of sacred earth symbols going back to the earliest human art, the Old Stone Age, with their vibrant images of animals and female forms.

Interview:Marija: The Paleolithic Goddess was the Creatrix. Her body parts like breasts, belly, buttocks, vulva, are the procreative parts of the body, and this shows that She is the Creatrix. So I can speak in detail about the functions of the Goddess. About the existence even not of one great Goddess or great Mother Goddess, but about many types of Goddesses.

16. Patricia Reis, Writer, Artist: These images are not portraits. They’re not personified portraits. They’re amalgams of animals and birds, with female form-- they have all these attributes that open your imagination.…

James Harrod, Prehistorian: She opened up the diversity of the Neolithic religious imagery. It’s our language from 10,000 years ago. This is how we understood the world. This is how we spoke about life. And if you don’t like the term Goddess because it comes out of classical Greek culture, as a term, or whatever, that’s ok, but what this represents as part of our spiritual tradition, of who we are, is probably as old as human evolution.

Charlene Spretnak, Author, Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies: In every culture, the symbolism and the metaphors and the myths that they create are their way of interacting with the great mythic drama that we all live in, which is the unfolding of the universe, the earth turning around the sun, the seasons changing, the elements rising, the tides, the rhythms of the moon… How shall we connect with this? How shall we create our cultural story?

Patricia: But she knew that the symbol system was central to the meaning of people’s lives in these cultures.

17. (maps of Old Europe) Marija was the first scholar to bring together a comprehensive picture of this area she named Old Europe. Among its dozens of regional cultures she found many similarities in symbolism, social structure, economy and art.

From their house sites, temples and grave goods, Marija drew a picture of co-operative and peaceful societies, which lasted much longer than the empires that came later.

To date over 3,000 sites have been documented and tens of thousands of miniature sculptures have been found, made of clay, marble, bone, copper and gold.

18. Interview: Marija: I started excavations in 1967, and continued until about 1980, and excavated in four places: mainly in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy. All these excavations were important for my personal research, because at that time I was discovering figurines myself. I discovered at least 500 sculptures. And it was not just sculptures, but the whole sequence of Neolithic cultures starting from 6,500 B.C. up though the Fourth Millennnium, and even later.

Marija: From the excavations, I was learning what I was reading in the books, and then I could prove by spade.

Lord Colin Renfrew, Archaeologist: And so she really put Old Europe on the map as a coherent concept, which was this wonderful flourishing of culture before the Bronze Age, when they had very well developed villages, when they did a lot of art to produce these figurines, when metallurgy was initiated.

James Harrod: The massive synthetic abilities of her mind, to piece together chronologically hundreds and hundreds of sites and different cultures all over Europe, and track their interrelationships and all of that, is just massive.

Richard Buchan, Librarian, Pacifica Graduate Institute: She’s pointing out a whole time here, and it’s a time where everyone’s roughly equal in rank, it’s a female-centered culture, not male dominated, it’s relatively peaceful. People can live like that, and still maintain a large village, and an elaborate culture. Some of the late Cucuteni things had, those villages had 15,000 people living in them.

Cucuteni, Vinça, Sesklo, our history books never told us these names. Perhaps because without kings, warfare, and conquest, they don’t fit the classic definition of civilization.

Marija: We can clearly make a statement: Old Europe is a peaceful culture without weapons. In the whole archeological record, starting from the Paleolithic times, from the cave art, there are no scenes of people fighting each other, no groups of people fighting each other, no single people.

Ralph Metzner, Author, Professor, CIIS: Before, what we think of as civilization, I was like everybody else: civilization begins at Sumer, and it’s always been warfare, and it’s always been weapons, and it’s always been kings and rulers, and somehow before that we were killer apes. It was like straight from the killer apes to the killer guys. Which is a very depressing view of history.

Carol P. Christ, Author, Theologian: And so someone who tells us that there were civilizations that could be peaceful, this is very threatening to everything we’ve been taught, and it’s not only threatening to the power of men in our society, but to the way in which we have accepted that militarism is necessary: that the way to resolve conflict, the only way, is to have a standing army.

So she’s really asking us, is the way we’re living the best way to live?

Brian Swimme, Mathematical Cosmologist, CIIS: At first I thought, this is all fantasy. I could not imagine a time that was free from war. But after a lot of denial, I began to carefully consider what she had written, and examine her works more carefully. And it was like a deeply religious experience, to be swept out of one world and to be drawn into a much vaster and deeper sense of the universe.

Elinor W. Gadon, Author: She’s describing a world in which people were very connected. They were connected to the life process. They were connected to the seasonal cycle. They were connected to understanding that the sacred is in the earth.

The connection is then in the ritual objects that she found, which really had to do with the forces of nature. It isn’t that nature and culture are separate, but that nature is part of culture or culture is part of nature, and this is part of, certainly the evidence from the Neolithic, what she calls Old Europe.

Brian Swimme: The Neolithic is the moment when the humans have moved, the hunters, the gatherers, when they have finally settled down. And this is the birth really of civilization, and of a settled human culture.

Miriam Robbins Dexter, Indo-Europeanist, UCLA: Civilization exists when people can pursue the arts, pottery-making, singing, dancing. We have evidence of all of this from the earliest Neolithic, throughout Old Europe, gorgeous pottery, intricate designs, and they are relatively consistent throughout Old Europe.

Marija’s belief, which I happen to agree with, is that this artistic aesthetic was interwoven with their religious beliefs.

Carol Christ: The three great creations of the Neolithic revolution were agriculture, weaving, and the art of pottery-making. These three great creations were connected to the Goddess, because the relationship between the seed, and how you get it to go into the earth, and when you harvest it, and how you then make bread out of it: this was a great

mystery of transformation. And this is the essence of the mysteries of the Goddess religion. So sometimes people say, well, they had a Goddess, but how do we know that women had power? And it’s because women had invented pottery, weaving, and agriculture, that they would have had a high social role.

Marija: Yes, pottery is woman’s, textile, also woman’s, and then the household is woman’s, and the supervising of everything was in woman’s hands. This is what can we reconstruct from the Neolithic finds.

Joan Marler, biographer of Marija Gimbutas: Her interpretations were based upon an enormous amount of work: Primary research. Not only primary research in the field, but primary research in investigating the historic documents in their original languages.

Marija: Then in Northeastern Greece, I excavated together with Colin Renfrew, who later became my opponent, although we published books together.

Colin Renfrew: It’s true that even in the excavation, there were some differences. Marija was particularly interested in the figurines.

Ernestine Elster, Archaeology, UCLA : Marija was really eager to open an excavation where there was an early Neolithic layer, because she really wanted to see what the beginning of an agricultural settlement, what the material culture would be like. And Sitagroi was extremely rich, it had over 200 figurines.

Marija: In the very beginning, it was still not very clear to me what are these figurines? Why are there so many? Colin Renfrew: Then she developed her ideas about it, and one was that she could really understand the religion of these people from the figurines. She jumped to the conclusion, it was an old conclusion that others reached before her, that all of these different representations of women were all the Goddess, in different guises, in different manifestations.

And of course there you’ve the notion of the Goddess, which I think is meaningless.

Now once you get on that, once you insist every time you see a figurine of a woman you say well, it’s the Goddess, and if you find one

very different from that one, well, it’s the Goddess under a different manifestation, that is no methodology, you can just say well everything is the Goddess. And indeed, for Marija, in a way, everything became the Goddess.

(Grass, forest, spiderweb, pond)Early religion, to Marija, was not about sacred texts or dogmas, but about the great creative powers embodied in the natural world, the interwoven patterns that tie the universe together: Birth, growth, death, and regeneration.

Vicki Noble, Author, Healer: Marija’s view of the Goddess, she would say it with emphasis: She would say, it’s not about fertility, it is about regeneration. Always out of every death there’s a rebirth. Always after an ending comes a new beginning. It’s the organic flow, it’s the organic cycle. So that’s what she was talking about.

Ernestine Elster: What Marija really did, and I believe this absolutely, whether I go along with all of her ideas or not, she set the agenda. She started to write about the figurines when there were two other people who had written about the figurines. And nobody was writing about the figurines because they didn’t know what to say. And she wrote about them and she said all these things and for a while there were very few reviews, because the reviewers didn’t know what to say.

But she set the agenda, and it’s caused all this scholarship, and she loved that, she absolutely loved that.

Naomi Goldenberg, Professor, Psychology of Religion: You have to remember that all historians of religion don’t know very much about the deep religious past, and that much of what historians are talking about as the history of their own religions in the deep past, is a great deal of conjecture. So why not have these sets of conjectures for us to think about?

Carol Christ: She had folk ideas about religion, and not just theologians’ views or historians’ views of what was important. She had common people’s views. And in the common people’s view, the small figurines, the small statues, the presence of divinities in daily life is much more prominent. But our scholars don’t even know how to think about that.

19. (market)The common people of Lithuania, the old women of the fields and markets had always been one of Marija's sources of inspiration. .

20.(house and garden)In the homes of country people, with their pottery, weavings, and carvings, Marija in her youth had seen many of the patterns and designs she would later find in the artifacts of Old Europe.

Common things encoded hidden symbols, Marija discovered, as she studied the rich folklore and folk art that surrounded her.

21. (crosses)Not so long ago, Marija wrote, the Lithuanian countryside was dotted with beautifully ornamented poles, capped by roofs and crosses, whose symbols radiated brilliant sunlight.

They rose from the earth as the folk song had risen, out of religious beliefs.

22. (archives)Under the Soviets, Marija's early works documenting Lithuanian folk culture and symbolism, were considered subversive and banned. 23.(pan down university)But beginning in 1968, after two decades of exile, she was able to return home as a visiting lecturer at the University of Vilnius.

24: (Marija still)

In 1981, she came for three months, Her lectures helped inspire the Lithuanian resistance with a sense of their own rich culture. And throughout her lifetime, she continued to return to her homeland.

Interview:Ernestine Elster: When you excavated in Lithuania, you found in the grave goods material culture which still was reflected in present-day Lithuania folk custom. So she felt that if you studied the folk customs, the ethnography, if you studied the folk tales and the folk songs, and you knew the actual history, and the language, that you could put all these things together, and you might be able to reach some aspect of what is always so ambiguous, prehistoric religion, because you see, she saw that in Lithuania.

26. (sunset )The religion of old Europe changed radically towards the end of the third millenium. Horseback riding peoples from the Russian steppes Marija called Kurgans swept across Europe in three great waves of invasions over several thousand years.

Interview:Marija: And that collision is reflected everywhere, in mythology and in language. Richard Buchan: Villages are often fortified. You also have class stratification. Some people’s grave is big, loaded with loot, loaded with stuff, beautiful museum pieces, and some people’s graves aren’t. You’ve got some people that are rich and some people that are poor.

Marija: And from the very beginning, they had weapons. I’ve dealt with weapons, with the hill forts. All that. I spent 10 years on that.

28. (weapons)Hierarchical, male-ruled, they worshiped a sky God and brought a new religion.

29.(map/moon)They spoke an ancestral Indo-European tongue which spread with their migrations. New gods clashed with old traditions. This collision of cultures transformed the old myths and values - and changed the heart of Old Europe.

Interview:Joan Marler: If you read the epics, if you look at the art, if you look at what’s on the pottery, look at the writings of Homer, what you can see there is that there was a conflict between the old earth deities and the sky deities.

James Harrod: There’s certainly nothing surprising about what she’s saying She’s just kind of proven what many people had speculated about during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and she put that Old European society on the map. She showed us that it was really there.

30. (Pacifica pan from mountain)From the mythic world of Old Europe, Marija’s life journey took her into the world of the scientist, where her early works on the Bronze Age established her reputation as a world-renowned scholar.

Here at the Pacifica Institute in Santa Barbara, her archives are preserved.

31. (inside library pan)Marija’s later works on the Neolithic pioneered the discipline of archaeomythology, bringing together studies in archaeology, folklore,

ethnology, linguistics, and mythology. Interpretations from one field could be checked against the evidence of other fields.

Joan Marler: She also spoke about her satisfaction when the various disciplines would line up, and give the same picture of what she was looking at. And she said that’s my satisfaction, to find out what this means.

32. (boxes pan and mix)In her lifetime, she published hundreds of articles and 20 major books, translated into many languages. As archaeology restricted its focus to statistics and material culture, Maria broadened hers. She insisted that to understand our ancestors, we must consider their belief systems, which she saw encoded in their art.

The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, published in 1974, was the beginning of a deep split with her colleagues.

Interview:Carolyn Radlo, Artist: She was very, very well respected until she went into this material. She took a leap of faith by interpreting. Saying that she could understand what this was pointing to. And I think that’s where she sort of stepped off the map with archaeology, is that she took it into the language of imagery and of mythology and of poetry.

Charlene Spretnak: And this is as far as you could get really from the econometric grip of archaeology during the 50s and 60s where the idea is to excavate a culture, figure out the economic production and relations, and all of these artifacts are epiphenomenal—some kind of religious stuff. I mean it was the modern economist mentality put onto the excavation.

Richard Buchan: The other thing that makes Marija Gimbutas extremely controversial with archaeologists is mythology. Most archeologists don’t have a good background in mythology. Marija Gimbutas came into the field with a damn good background in folklore. She’d been out there collecting folk stories in the fields before World War II broke out.

33. (photo of Marija and Jurgis)Summer was still peaceful in the 1930's when Marija and her sweetheart, Jurgis Gimbutas wandered the back roads of Dzukia searching for singers of old songs.

Interview:Marija: I was interested of course in folklore because throughout my high school years, I already participated in ethnographical expeditions. And I collected folksongs. When I was 16, 17, I collected about at least about five thousand folksongs myself.

34. (grannies)Even today in Dzukia, the ancient songs, called Dainos are still sung. The dainos preserve Lithuania's oral history and culture. Marija described them like the rhythms of a bird, a wedding dance, a lament, a liturgy of nature and the milestones of everyday life.

Interview:Marija: Here, at this point, I start to understand what is the ancient song and what the song was in the very beginning. You did everything singing, and your song traversed the earth. And woman, even working hard, was happy because she had the song with her, and her belief system was connected with what she expressed in songs. So that stayed with me for the whole of life.

I was a privileged child. When I have a difficult time now, I go back to my childhood, to the abundance of love around me. 36. (Marija and Meille photo)Marija and her cousin Meille grew up together, their Mothers were sisters and the households were closely intertwined.

37. (ls 3 on couch)Meille, and her daughter Inga, and her granddaughter, Austaija, are respected scholars and hard-working women in their professions, typical of this remarkable family. Our mothers came from a peasant background. Five of the nine children in this family completed higher or secondary education. (Veronika Janulaitis, Marija’s mother): She became a Ph.D. in medicine. She was the first woman in Lithuania with a Ph.D.— a Ph. D. in medicine. She was an occulist, an eye doctor.

38. (Vilnius/mix to archive)In 1921 when Marija was born Vilnius was under Polish occupation.

39. (apartment)The family apartment was the center of her parents’ efforts to preserve Lithuanian culture and restore independence.

40. (Portrait of father)ewspap

Danielius Alseika was also a doctor. Together they established the first Lithuanian hospital in Vilnius. The hospital was also a center of resistance.

Interview:Meile: Not a personal, private one, but precisely oriented to help treat the poor people, the peasants of Vilnius territory. And it was this environment, this spirit, which guided Marija throughout her entire life.

Interview:Marija: My father was so busy, he was out, out all the time. He returned home at night, and I remember the smoke, he smoked. And I slipped in and I was sitting on his lap. And I also started reading while sitting in his lap from newspapers. That is how I learned to read. So that was my father. He was very passionate and loved me very much. My mother was more pragmatic. She was holding everything in her hands. In my childhood when I was at school, I used to disappear in the city, my beloved city Vilnius, and go through the courtyards, through the gates, and then visit churches. I loved churches, especially Baroque churches. And I didn’t say anything to my parents that I went to the church. This was secret. But the connection with churches, with nature, with flowers, with smells, with mushrooms, and berries, with animals, I think this was important.

Marija: But then, at the end of the high school, especially after my father’s death, when I was fifteen, it was a terrible shock. It was the beginning of a new Marija, interested in death problems, birth and death, regeneration, afterlife. And then I became a good student.

42. (street)Peace was shattered when the Soviets invaded Lithuania in 1940.

InterviewMarija: At that time I was writing my dissertation, I felt very relaxed. You can imagine the conditions. They started to ship people to Siberia. Out of my own family, about 25 people disappeared.

43. (archival/Jurgis and Marija wedding photo) With war raging around them, Marija and Jurgis married.

Interview: Marija: At that time when I was married, I thought, well, what I did know? It was a stupidity because I was not really ready to marry, not at all. Well, I was married, and then a child was born in 1943.

44. (Over pictures of Germans)Then the Germans invaded. Interview:Marija: The German occupation brought something different. Again, they started arrests. So who was not arrested now was arrested.

45. (archival and Jews)The Germans destroyed Lithuania’s once-flourishing Jewish community. Then the Soviets came back.

Interview:Marija: So we either escape or we shall be shipped to Siberia.

45. (water)Lithuanians by the hundreds escaped by way of the Neminus river.

Interview:Marija: The child was small, and we were not practical. Because when I fled, I just had my baby in one arm and my dissertation in the other arm, and nothing else.

46. (cart and horse)At the border they were offered two choices. Berlin or Vienna.

Interview:Marija: We wanted to go to Vienna.

47. (Tubingen river)Marija and her family spent the rest of the war as refugees in Austria and Bavaria. When peace came they went to Tubingen in Southern Germany.

Interview:Marija: Tubingen was considered to be one of the best universities, and the first university to reopen after the war. I got my Ph.D. degree in two years, and my book was published on the burial rites of Lithuania. Then in ‘47, my second daughter was born. Then started my very good years in that camp, and very good people were around me, and hundreds of baby sitters. I used to take a train back to the Tubingen library, spend days in the library, and my studies began there. I don’t say that I finished my studies with a degree. No, I did something else. And so what I did, I returned back to the same, to the folklore studies and the folk art studies, mainly.

48. (family picture)In 1949, the Gimbutas family together with Jurgis’ mother were finally ableto emigrate to the United States. They went to Boston, where Jurgisfound work as an engineer, and Marija was offered an unpaid positionat Harvard.

Interview:Marija: I received a letter: “If you are serious, you can continue your studies. We shall give you an office here, and if you want to produce a work on the pre-history of Eastern Europe, you are welcome.”

Patricia Reis: Nobody understands the width and the breadth of information that she brought with her. She had this background in mythology, and then she had all these languages. And then she had her archaeology training which was rigorous and European.

Marija: So here I am at Harvard, and this was already 1950. And I knew that I am the only person who knows East European pre-history in the whole United States. There was practically nobody else. And that was my strength.

49. (Marija photo)Like so many women, Marija struggled to balance her professional life and her family life as the mother of now, three daughters.

Interview:Jovila: What I remember of Mother, she would sit down at the piano and play, maybe a few times a week. We didn’t have a television, and the living room was a place to read, to study and to listen to music. We had lots of company, many interesting writers, intellectual people, so-called intellectuals, because my parents belonged to the Lithuanian Cultural Club, which they also led for a few years.

50. (Harvard Gates pull back)Harvard published “The Prehistory of Eastern Europe,” and it was widely read and distributed, although Marija received no advance or royalties. It established her reputation as expert in Eastern Europe's deep past.

Interview:Marija: So this was the beginning of my career in America. There was no real chance to stay as a woman at Harvard, I knew that. I could stay as a research fellow and lecturer, but I probably would never be a professor there. In the nineteen-fifties, as a staff member I couldn’t join the faculty club if I went alone, not escorted by men. Also, two

libraries were closed to women. So that I couldn’t, I couldn’t really stand. I hated the situation.

Marija: My relations with my husband, they were also never very wonderful.

In 1963, Marija was offered a position at UCLA, as a professor. She left her marriage, and moved to California...

Marija: I fell in love with California. I restored my health, and I was suddenly happy at UCLA, and I felt a future in front of me. I was thinking of possibilities, what I shall do, and what can be created, and this was a very good moment.

51. (UCLA/little owls)Marija flourished as a professor, publishing dozens of academic articles and her fourth book on the Balts.

52. (poster)In 1965, her monumental work on the Bronze Age Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe was published, and brought her international acclaim.

Interview:Marija: From then on I used to get fellowships. Now of course, in Goddess work, I don’t get fellowships, no grants, nothing. But at that time, perhaps because I was young, I used to get grants. Ernestine Elster: I spoke of her generosity, because her idea was that if she had a student who was interested in archaeology and she had the funds to support them, and she was always getting grants from here and there, that they had to go out into the field because they had to get this experience. She didn’t say we should go and do it in the library. She said no, you have to go into the field.

And here she is in the field, 1968, I’d say. She didn’t go out there and set out the squares and start excavating with the shovel. She was the person who had a kind of an overall view. She was a synthesizer. She had such a tremendous knowledge of the archaeology that had gone before.

Achillion, which began in 1973, was really Marija’s dream excavation, because it yielded so many figurines, and so many figurines in context.

52 (a). (pan over Greek landscape)

The settlement of Achillion in Greece, dating from the 7th to the 6th millennium BCE, was located in Southern Thessaly and belongs to the Sesklo culture. Hundreds of figurines were found in association with houses, outdoor hearths, bread ovens and special platforms, their context furnishing vital clues to their functions.

Ruth Tringham, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley: And that’s the fun of it. You’ll work out how many figurines are there that look like this on this particular site? What do the others look like? They’re all talking about the diversity, in terms of their shapes, and their occurance. Then you can say well, where are they found? What are they found with?

Did they believe in the Goddess? Were they Goddess worshipers? Were women respected?

Patricia Reis: She worked so hard. I have images of her at her desk, when I stayed with her. Every morning, I’d get up, she’d already been up at the crack of dawn, she’s studying, she’s reading, she’s looking, she’s writing, she’s taking notes.

She spent hours and hours, hundreds of hours, looking. She begins to connect these images together, until eventually, over years, a narrative starts to emerge, and this is a long process.

Carolyn Radlow: So she’s going through all these pieces. She’s going through thousands and thousands of these artifacts, and holding them and touching them and looking at them and beginning to see, seeing the patterns, seeing the overlapping patterns, is a language in itself, in other words it’s a way of communicating.

Patricia Reis: And that’s why her artistic sensibility came to play so deeply in it, because it’s not a written language, it’s a visual language

53: (Venus/Triangle)The pubic triangle, locus of birth, pleasure and regeneration was the primary pictogram of the symbolic language Marija decoded in her most controversial book, The Language of The Goddess.

The triangle morphs into the V or chevron that Marija found marked on hundreds of bird goddess figures. She identified the zigzags and lightning bolts and sinuous meanders with water. Chevrons point to the flowing, nurturing waters of her breasts…source of life, sustenance, and her primal power.

Her breasts are like her eyes, which also stream life-giving moisture. The coiled spirals are writhing snakes that shed their skin and come out new again, fsymbols of regeneration…

In the duck faced waterbird these symbols combine. The bird lays the eggs that are seeds of rebirth…

The fat, fertile Goddess,

Mountain mother, mother earth...

is sow

temple body

portal

mother and child, animal mother

the original madonna…

She is linked to the uterine-shaped bull's head

His upraised horns are symbols of the birth-giving goddess

Whose children are also malesmusic makers, bards, shamans

The bonelike death Goddess

Marija called the stiff nude…from her vulva come rebirth and regeneration

She is the owl, the funerary urn,the bird of preythe meandering soul's journey…

The goddess was fish….she had many animal forms,,,Egglike, fertile, watery…

She was the womblike hedgehog…

the double axe butterfly of transformation..

and Marija saw these symbols repeat again and again, in infinitecombinations that spelled out a mythology…

Interview:Marija: What I have done is not a discovery of the Goddess. I search for the Goddess in Europe especially where treasures of information were never really touched before me, and I am really glad I had a chance to do it.

54. (conference stills)Marija presented her interpretations at many international conferences, but was often harshly criticized by her colleagues, who disputed her conclusions and did not understand her methods.

Margaret Conkey, Archaeologist, UC Berkeley: Anybody who tells us that they know that this is what happened in the past has got to be questioned because we’re not going to know this IS what happened in the past.

Ruth Tringham: If I can just butt in there, That’s what’s interesting with Marija, that in a way she did challenge authority, she did challenge the established authoritative picture or story of what happened in prehistory by writing about Old Europe. On the other hand, she wrote that story in an authoritative fashion, we feel.

Colin Renfrew: She felt she had a direct line to these things, so she felt to some extent that she could understand it in an intuitive way, I might almost say a feminine way, but I might be criticized by some of your more critical viewers, but she had a very holistic approach to things.

James Harrod: And that’s why it was so creative. It was a cross-fertilization of ideas which enabled her to see things which other people hadn’t seen.

Narrator: But artists, ecologists, feminists, contemporary Goddess-worshipers and social thinkers were deeply inspired by her work.

Interview:Joan Marler: When Marija began to published her work on the symbolism of Old Europe, it just happened to coincide with the second wave of feminism and the development of ecofeminisim in the sense of rediscovering the fact that we are connected with this Earth.

Interview:Ernestine Elster: There were feminists who found in Marija’s ideas the scientist whom they had hoped would support their ideas that once God was a woman, and so she was borne aloft by really a lively group of women, and men too, and she never looked back.

Patricia Reis: So the backlash against her I think is part of the backlash against feminism, because she got identified with feminism.

55.(a) (Photos of Marija)What she saw and how she interpreted what she saw, came from the sum total of her life, the depth of her scholarship, her excavations, and her deep roots in Lithuania.

A new generation celebrates the summer solstice on this hill, near Kaunus, maintaining a spiritual connection to Nature that was a hallmark of Marija’s lifework.

56. (archival)Throughout her lifetime Marija was awarded many honours and degrees, but none meant so much as the one she received in 1993 from the University of Kaunas, on what would be her last visit to Lithuania.

Interview:Marija: Sometimes there are difficulties when traveling such an independent path. One has not to give in, not to deviate. And then you look for a source of strength, for the fountain of life. For me, that fountain of life has always been Lithunia, and my childhood.

57. (photos/summer solstice)55:52Marija died in Los Angeles, February 2nd, 1994. She asked for her ashes to be carried back to Lithuania, her beloved homeland, where Goddesses have never been forgotten.

58. (cu goddess)May the Earth Mother Zimeyna hold you in gentle embrace,May the rays of the Goddess Sula warm you in winterMay Medina spirit of the forest shade you in summerMay Lima, Lady of Good Fortune bring you all you can conceive.

(Message from the filmmakers on the screen; credits. Folk music.)