The Living Goddesses

About this book

The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative influential work by one of the twentieth-centurys most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her originaland originally shockinginterpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of years. This volume which was close to completion at the time of her death contains the distillation of her studies combined with new discoveries insights and analysis. Editor Miriam Robbins Dexter has added introductory and concluding remarks summaries and annotations. The first part of the book is an accessible beautifully illustrated summation of all Gimbutass earlier work on "Old European" religion together with her ideas on the roles of males and females in ancient matrilineal cultures. The second part of the book brings her knowledge to bear on what we know of the goddesses todaythose who in many places and in many forms live on.