The Language of the Goddess
by Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joseph Campbell, Marija GimbutasEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-02
ISBN: 0500282498
Number of pages: 424
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Book Reviews of The Language of the Goddess
Book Review: Good but flawed
Summary: 3 Stars
Professor Gimbutas has provided an excellent, richly detailed and scrupulously referenced overview of prehistoric art. I found it hard to finish however due to her obvious biases. She might have benefited greatly had someone pointed out to her early in her career or perhaps even still in graduate school that Dr. Freud might as easily have quipped that sometimes a triangle is just a triangle.
Dr. Gimbutas somewhat blunts her own arguments by seeing images of the Goddess wherever she looks and seems willing to overlook or even distort obvious variations in the symbols unless she can explain both the original and its variants as more symbols of the Goddess. In this way, she first identifies any triangle as a pubic triangle and then goes on to expand the triangle into nets and checkerboards. The snake is associated with the Goddess and then every wavy line becomes a putative snake and arms without hands are "obviously" snakes. As another example, she describes spirals, wherever they may occur, as symbolic of the developmental, creative aspect of the Goddess. Anyone who has spent even ten minutes with children's art, knows that spirals are a great way to "fill space" and several of the photos provided by Gimbutas appear to be exactly that. She even goes so far as to claim that a bent line or hook is an "incomplete spiral." I kept expecting her to next claim that a straight line is an "incomplete hook!"
She has two whole chapters on what she calls "bi-lines" and "tri-lines" (sets of two or three parallel lines) in which she completely ignores the fact that the few numbers larger than three which cannot be represented by a collection of either "bi-lines" or "tri-lines" can always be represented as a mixture of the two. In another case, she reproduces what she claims is clearly a picture of the Bird Goddess as evidenced by birds' feet in place of both the otherwise anthropomophic figure's feet and hands. Unfortunately, the figure's hands have only three "fingers" (perhaps only two in one case while the feet have four. This figure appears only a couple of chapters after a multi-page argument for three-fingered hands and feet being representative of birds' feet. Children's art again provides a possible clue. When they first begin drawing hands, children may draw them with three, four, five, six or even more fingers, depending largely on the size of the hand desired. Perhaps for this figure, the original artist considered three fingers sufficient to represent the hands and added a fourth digit to the feet only because there seemed to be room for one.
Dr. Giumbutas' book is a good starting point and a valuable reference source for a study of prehistoric art and religion, but the text should be read with the clear understanding that it may be less fact than fantasy (or perhaps "fancy" is a better word.) Things may not always be as she sees and describes them, especially when it comes to the presumed intentions of the original artists. This is, of course, always difficult territory for an archeologist/anthropologist and many have done even worse. I wish there had been more photographs and fewer drawings since the drawings may often emphasize what is barely there.
Summary of The Language of the Goddess
"The first authoritative work on the ancient goddess culture."?Boston GlobeThe Goddess is the most potent and persistent feature in the archaeological records of the ancient world, a symbol of the unity of life in nature and the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on earth.
In this pioneering and provocative volume, Marija Gimbutas resurrects the world of the Goddess-worshipping, earth-centered cultures, bringing ancient matriarchal society vividly to life. She interweaves comparative mythology, early historical sources, linguistics, ethnography, and folklore to demonstrate conclusively that Goddess-worship is at the root of Western civilization. Illustrated with nearly 2,000 symbolic artifacts, Gimbutas' magnum opus is at once a "pictorial script" of the prehistoric Goddess religion and an authoritative work that takes these ancient cultures from the realm of speculation into that of documented fact. Over 500 illustrations.
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