The Chalice and the Blade

Once again, it is important to stress that Crete was not an ideal society or utopia but a real human society, complete with problems and imperfections. It was a society that developed thousands of years ago, when there was still nothing like science as we know it, when the processes of nature were still generally explained—and dealt with—through animistic beliefs and propitiatory rites.2

For example, one remarkable feature of Cretan society, sharply distinguishing it from other ancient high civilizations, is that there seems to have been here a rather equitable sharing of wealth.

In Crete, for the last time in recorded history, a spirit of harmony between women and men as joyful and equal participants in life appears to pervade.

In the island of Crete where the Goddess was still supreme, there are no signs of war. Here the economy prospered and the arts flourished. And even when in the fifteenth century B.C.E. the island finally came under Achaean dominion—when archaeologists no longer speak of Minoan but rather of a Minoan-Mycenaean culture—the Goddess and the way of thinking and living she symbolized still appear to have held fast.

Prehistory is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with more than half its pieces destroyed or lost. It is impossible to reconstruct completely. But the greatest obstacle to the accurate reconstruction of prehistory is not that we are lacking so many pieces; it is that the prevailing paradigm makes it so hard to accurately interpret the pieces we have and to project the real pattern into which they fit.

“An equalitarian male-female society is demonstrated by the grave equipment in practically all the known cemeteries of Old Europe,” writes Gimbutas. She also notes numerous indicators that this was a matrilinear society—that is, one in which descent and inheritance is traced through the mother.

Moreover, here, as in Catal Huyuk and Hacilar—which show no signs of damage through warfare for a time span of over fifteen hundred years30—the archaeological evidence indicates that male dominance was not the norm.

In sum, here, as in Catal Huyuk, the evidence indicates a generally unstratified and basically equalitarian society with no marked distinctions based on either class or sex. But the difference is that in Gimbutas’s work this is not simply noted in passing. It is brought to our attention time and time again by this remarkable archaeological pioneer, who has had the courage to stress what so many others prefer to ignore: that in these societies we see no signs of the sexual inequality we have all been taught is only “human nature.”

We now know that agriculture—the domestication of wild plants as well as animals—dates back much earlier than previously believed. In fact, the first signs of what archaeologists call the Neolithic or agricultural revolution begin to appear as far back as 9000 to 8000 B.C.E.—that is, more than ten thousand years ago.

This is that in all these places where the first great breakthroughs in our material and social technology were made—to use the phrase Merlin Stone immortalized as a book title—God was a woman.