The Furious Spinner

Saw Vicki Noble last night in Portland where she presented a slide show that corresponds with her new book, The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power. I've been studying with Vicki for over a decade. Archaeology is an avocation of mine, and I appreciate her multi-disciplinary approach to archaeological evidence. In her new book, she makes many cogent and original arguments, but the ones I find the most interesting are that "dual Queens ruled together, sharing power....Later during the Bronze Age, when the early peaceful matristic cultures had been disrupted and replaced by systems of male dominance, Amazon Queens ruled in 'dual Queenship,' as a 'warrior' and a 'priestess,' cultural forms still intact as late as the 5th century burials of Sauromatian-Sarmatian women. Amazons specifically represent a women's resistance movement, with migrating as an ongoing attempt to save the Old Religion of the Goddess....Amazons were real. The Western view that Amazons are mythic or imaginary is obsolete, in light of excavations of women warriors and shaman-priestesses all across the Silk Routes from Turkey to the Altai mountains and China." (Vicki Noble, personal correspondence.) Vicki isn't the only scholar making the claim that the Amazons were real. Renowned archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Ph.D. also makes this argument in her book Warrior Women.

Since archaeologist Marija Gimbutas died nine years ago, critics have tried to dismiss, belittle, and bury her work which, in many ways, revolutionized how archaeologists look at and interpret archaeological evidence. She was the mother of archaeomythology and a genius at the synthesis required to master such a technique. Joseph Campbell admired Marija Gimbutas and "expressed regret that her work was not available in the 1950s and 1960s while he was writing the Masks of God ." (Joan Marler, "Introduction," From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, 1997, p. 1.) Vicki, along with people like Starhawk and Dr. Davis-Kimball, reaffirms Gimbutas's theories and keeps her work alive. Gimbutas believed we have to re-envision our past so that we can imagine a better future—and not destroy ourselves through war or by ruining the natural world. When I first read Marija Gimbutas, where she laid out the evidence that Indo-Europeans had lived in peace and worshipped the Goddess, it changed my worldview. Previous to that, I had thought human beings were born to kill, and I could not even imagine that there was another way to live. As I started digging around, I discovered that peaceful societies exist even today. The Western way of dominance, war, and oppression is not the only way.

Years ago I gave a friend of mine Vicki's book Shakti Woman. After she read it, my friend said she didn't like it because Vicki seemed "full of herself." I laughed and said, "And who else should she be full of?" My friend thought about it and decided I was right and pledged to read the book again. I have always liked the idea of the Amazons. (I never believed that nonsense about them cutting off a breast or killing their sons.) In a world where Amazons existed, I suspected every woman was completely and absolutely full of herself. Every girl, boy, and man, too. I liked envisioning that world. I still do. (My own novel The Jigsaw Woman explores many of these issues.) Marija Gimbutas was full of herself, too, and she now speaks to us from the realm of the ancestors, through people like Vicki Noble, and reminds us that we must not forget her work or the lives of our ancestors. 0 comments

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