One warm summer day, Eglė, the youngest daughter of a local farmer, went bathing in the sea with her two sisters. Afterward, returning to the shore to get dressed, she found a serpent in her clothes. To her surprise, the serpent spoke to her in a man's voice and demanded that she promise to become his wife for the return of her clothes. Faced with an immediate need to get dressed and not thinking about possible future consequences, Eglė agreed.
Three days later a great number of serpents pulling a carriage showed up at Eglė's parents' farm to claim the bride. Eglė's family tried to trick the serpents by giving them one of their farm animals, but each time a cuckoo warned the serpents about the deception. Finally, wise to the trickery, serpents succeeded in taking Eglė with them to their master. At the seashore, they were met by Žilvinas, a handsome young man, the Serpent King, who took Eglė to a nearby island and then to his palace under the sea, where they wed. Eglė and Žilvinas lived together happily and had three sons, Ažuolas, Uosis, and Beržas, and a daughter, Drebulė, their youngest.
One day the children started asking about their mother's former home.
Eglė became homesick and asked Žilvinas to allow her and the children to visit her parents' farm. Žilvinas was against it and set a number of (what he thought) impossible conditions: to spin a never-diminishing amount of silk; to wear out a pair of iron clogs; and to bake a pie without kitchen utensils. Eglė, however, with the help of an old local sorceress, was able to accomplish them and Žilvinas had to let Eglė and the children go.
The reunion with the family was such a happy event that Eglė's family did not want to let them return to the sea and decided to kill Žilvinas. But first, they needed to know how to get Žilvinas to appear from the sea. Through torture, Eglė’s brothers hoped children would reveal the family secret. Sensing danger, the sons refused to comply, but the youngest daughter Drebulė was so frightened, that she revealed her father’s secret call. Eglė's twelve brothers rushed to the seashore, called Žilvinas, who appeared in serpent form and killed him with scythes.
Not knowing her husband's fate and ending her stay with her parents, brothers, and sisters, Eglė returned to the seashore and called Žilvinas. In reply, only a bloody sea foam appeared.
In her deep despair and grief, she realized that Žilvinas was dead. Eglė transformed her family into trees: her sons into an oak, ash, and birch, her daughter into a trembling aspen, and herself into a spruce.
Marija Gimbutas’ theory about the Old European civilization was a wide-tailed meteorite in the dark sky of our known human history.
Many archeologists poised competing theories about the arrival of Proto Indo-Europeans, but Marija’s theory has proven to be the most historically accurate. She argued that the Kurgs, original Proto-Indo-Europeans gradually conquered and usurped the Old European languages and culture from 4000 to 1000 BC. Gimbutas’ work found that war-like behaviors started only around the 4th millennium BC, with the invasion of Kurgs, weapons, warriors, god-in-the-skye-worshipping, and patriarchal domination. “Before that, we have no recorded evidence that Old Europeans would go against one another in this capacity.” — Marija shared.
But the native Old European civilization was centered around the worship of the Earth — the Regeneratrix. The Great Goddess imbued her life into all creatures, soils, water bodies, stones, and places. The Great Goddess worship was reflected in all of Gimbutas' excavations across Europe: hundreds of clay figurines, vessels, and tombs were found depicting the Goddess and human relationship with the life-death-life cycle.
As the archeologists noticed, the more archaic the civilization, the more femme figurines and symbols are found during the archeological research.
However, ridden with the Kurg dominion, the Old European culture did not disappear entirely. It retracted into the dark forest of the collective unconscious. It assimilated and hid itself in the folklore across the European continent. Remnants of it can still be found in symbols that survive to this day, in songs, archetypes, stories, and especially in myth. One such archaic myth is “The Serpent Queen” or “The Queen of the Grass Snakes” (Lith. “Elglė Žalčių Karalienė”). It is, perhaps, the most popular myth in Lithuania, and it can also be found incarnated through variations across Europe and beyond. This myth is believed to be the last remaining myth of the old European civilization, pointing us to the brutal dissemination of this culture and warning all women about the onset of a new, radically different paradigm — the patriarchy.
The crowned snake goddess lies at the core of the old European culture and mythology. Hundreds of snake figurines date back to around seven thousand years BC. The serpent (snake, and most especially grass snake) was the animal that personified the regenerative Goddess of life. In old pagan Lithuania, the grass snake was revered and protected, seen as an animal in which the essence of the goddess lived. Even the linguistics reveal this connection, snake — gyvatė comes from words gyvas, gyvata, gyvybė — which all mean alive, life in Lithuanian. Marija’s theory points out that right up until the Kurganization, the old European culture was matristic and matrilineal — everything was orbiting the mother or the grandmother, the woman, as she was the fractal image of the Great Goddess.
In the myth, the slithery grass snake turns into a handsome prince and the unknown sea hides the lustrous palace. Eglė (name Elgė means spruce in Lithuania, also depicted as the tree of life in Baltic pagan culture) comes to know the ways of old Europe through marrying and entering into union with the grass snake—an incarnation of the Great Goddess. She meets an alien way of living and being, a different kind of culture, a different kind of civilization. This way of existing is incomprehensible to her family, judged, and condemned by her brothers and other men in her family.
The way this myth is told points us towards the way the Old Europeans saw the Great Goddess.
Through the lens of the narrator, we sympathize with the serpentine beast in the story, his life, and his death, rather than humans. This myth works as a primordial pine-sap that freezes the story of two civilizations—Old Europe and Kurgan Proto-Indo-European. It depicts the bleak fate of women during the patriarchal overgrowth: the marriage with the regenerative life force was severed, and brutally killed. Men in this story chop up the serpent/grass snake to pieces with scythes. Leaving Elgė in self-destructing heartbreak. At the end of the myth, Eglė transforms herself into a spruce tree; her three boys are turned into oak, ash, birch — and her daughter into an aspen, deemed to shiver forever in fear, for she was the one who betrayed her otherworldly father to her uncles. This is Eglė’s final act in the myth—returning herself and her descendants back into the life-death-life cycle. The Queen of Grass Snakes warns women about patriarchal death-hungry societies taking over life-revering regenerative essence. This stark transformation from matristic to patriarchal, from life-revering to death-worshiping civilizations that was happening from 4000 to 1000 BC, continues to define our Western world today. We live in the reverberations of the serpent-hacking scythes.
Once killed in the daylight of the human psyche, the Great Goddess scattered herself across our lands.
She turned into myths, songs, and dreams that visit you once in a while. She still runs through every living creature and pulses through every immutable stone. She holds figurines made by her devotees in her large loam belly. And so, Marija Gimbutas unearthed The Regeneratrix and watered her with all of life’s waters. Gimbutas revived her presence in our collective conscious awareness, so we too can become psychic archeologists and remove the patriarchy’sl scythes from our dusted bellies. So we too can recognize the fractal of the Great Goddess inside our beautiful bodies.
