Sun rose over the Lucerne Valley, Nevada’s desert. Every rock, pebble, and red grain of sand absorbed it with each passing minute, getting ready to radiate this heat into the air and sustain the harsh elemental life in the red desert.
In such a place, Marija Gimbutas, a pioneering anthropologist and archaeo-mythologist, had her second home, planted a garden and surrounded her cabin with various native trees, including stone fruits such as white peach. However, there was one tree that did not fully belong in her garden — the apple tree, connecting Gimbutas to her homeland, Lithuania.
Marija is my heretic grandmother. Just like her, I too longed for a “Lithuanian” kind of apple during my 10th year of living outside my homeland. This past summer, I visited a Lithuanian village during my trip back home and stumbled upon a sensuous memory. One that can only be revived in a place from which the sense originates: paper apple, plentiful in my grandmother’s garden. I picked up a couple of beaten apples lying beneath abandoned trees in someone’s front yard. I chewed up the apple with an open mouth, devoured it, carefully wrapped the seeds, and placed them in my pocket. I hope one day to plant these seeds in my own garden.
Marija Gimbutas was the Lithuanian apple tree in the desert — rooting in new soil, using the unfamiliar mineral compositions beneath her to bring new work to life. She blossomed in a foreign land and in a misogynistic male-dominated archaeology climate. And as the myth goes, she bore a fruit. Once bitten and digested, the fruit would shake the somatic memories of the Great Goddess and expel the accumulation of 5000 years of patriarchy within the body. The apple of her knowledge was Regeneratrix.
Knowing Death Early
Apart from wielding a deep and prolific knowledge of archaeology, Marija also had the mind of a poet. Using the language of symbols and abstraction, she has built a door into the pre-historic civilizations where thousands of people would walk through, incorporating her archaeological findings as well as theories into second-wave feminism.
Marija Asleikaitė (later Gimbutienė → Gimbutas) was born in Lithuania in 1921, during the interwar period. From an early age, her personality was shaped by songs, folklore, arts, and crafts, as well as nature and sacred places, water bodies, and stones that survived the turmoils of the occupations (German, Polish, and later, Russian). All of them wove deeply into her memory, feeding the luster, curiosity, creativity, and a desire to bring back the sacred culture to the modern psyche. She not only studied archeology but also folklore studies and mythology, the Lithuanian language, and comparative linguistics. She was a folkloric collector and before emigrating to Germany and later the US (Boston and Los Angeles), Marija traveled across Lithuania to write down disappearing songs and stories from small villages.
“When I’m asked why it’s me who deciphered the messages from the past and read the symbols”, she said “I inherited it in my childhood, from my special home in Lithuania. During the years of my childhood, there were still sacred rivers flowing, and sacred stones standing.
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I grew up in Polish-occupied Vilnius. However, I still felt a strong connection to Lithuanian origins since I was 2, 3, 4 years old. Childhood is a vital, extremely important period, perhaps for everyone. But to me, this is the ultimate foundation, and without it, I cannot stand.” — she shares
(Lithuanian chronicle, 1993 - 16 (1674) Marija Alseikaitė - Gimbutienė source).
Marija’s father died when she was 15 years old. “It was perhaps the biggest shock in my life.” The threshold of her father’s passing turned the page of her childhood and ushered her straight into adulthood. This left her asking: What is life? What is death and what happens after it? Since then, the topic of human relationship to death captured Marija’s path. She started her studies by researching Lithuanian and pagan funerary rites and monuments. One of the first articles she wrote at age 19 was about her ancestors’ beliefs about the afterlife: what is soul and what is death. This was the formation of the intuitive capacity; to read the symbols and mostly — to feel the story and history that stands behind the physical form.
In her later years, in the letters to her mother, she would mention being able to see beyond the veil: somewhat of clairsentience or claircognizance that Marija used for peering into the past. Intuitively synthesizing thousands of years’ histories into theories that would later be proven correct through aDNA testing and forever change the course of our known history.
Shapeshifting Goddess
Marija Gimbutas’ theory about the arrival of the Kurgs—the original Proto-Indo-Europeans shows how cultures of domination and patriarchy took over the Old European civilization which (since the 7th millennia BC) was centered around the worship of the Earth, The Great Goddess — the Regeneratrix. The Great Goddess imbued her life into all creatures, soils, water bodies, stones, and places. This worship was reflected in all of Gimbutas’ excavations across Europe: hundreds of Voluptuous, full-bodied clay figurines, vessels, and tombs were found depicting the Goddess and human relationship with the life-death-life cycle. As the archeologist noticed, the more archaic the civilization, the more femme figurines and symbols are found during the archeological research.
“The goddesses inherited from Old Europe, such as Greek Athena, Hera, Artemis, Hekate; Roman Minerva and Diana; Irish Morrfgan and Brigit; Baltic Laima and Ragana; Russian Baba Yaga, Basque Mari, and others, are not "Venuses" bringing fertility and prosperity; as we shall see, they are much more.
These life-givers and death-wielders are "queens" or "ladies" and as such they remained in individual creeds for a very long time in spite of their official dethronement, militarization, and hybridization with the Indo-European heavenly brides and wives. The Old European goddesses never became ''déesses dernières" even in Christian times. Archeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.”
– Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess
Perhaps, the most interesting theory of Gimbutas is that the goddess was herself a shapeshifter. Old pagan Baltic culture inherited and contained the Old European civilization’s remains. Deities such as Laima, Ragana, and Žemyna were the ones that smirked at us through thousands of years with the eyes of the Great Goddess. In Lithuanian mythos, Laima was the goddess of happiness, pregnancy, mothers, and childbirth. She was the spring, the most beautiful woman by the sacred stream, she was the cuckoo — announcing and bringing regeneration on her winged arms.
As the cycle continued, and the harvest ended, Laima turned into Ragana—The Witch Hag. She was old and crippled. She was the winter and the death goddess. Her wings turned long and dark: she was the hawk, catching the last remaining life and bringing it to an end. And once the winter passed, yet again she turned into Laima, and so, the cycle continued. As much as Marija was a scientist and archaeo-mythologist, she also was an intuitive seer, a mediator between our ancestors and us, between the Great Goddess and the modern human psyche–not fully forgetting of the reverence and worship of the regeneratrix. Her legacy is fully alive, pulsing, and living, the same way is living the goddess, to whom Marija has devoted her life to truly understand and translate.
This essay comes to you inspired by our course, When Women Were the Land by Sylvia Linsteadt. In part II of this essay, we will take a look at one of the remaining Old European myths, Eglė, The Queen of Grass Snakes, and its connection to Marija Gimbutas’ work.
