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Jul 17, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

An exciting read and refreshing too - here in Sweden among those few academic-feminists who still recognise her name, she is both venerated and shunned at the same time, by the same persons.

They want her ideas to be true, but they cannot discount the flaws in her method (as you rightly point out, freely associating from generic symbols and then drawing conclusions about how a society was organised for thousands of years).

It must be a real problem for present-day archeologists, that 1) they now have to deal with genetics where Y-chromosome haplogroups can be used for tracing and 2) political correctness demanding all finds and conclusions be in line with today's narrative (and of course pro-/retroactively with tomorrow's and yesterday's at the sametime), when material evidence which is what counts the most refuses to comply with said narrative.

The earliest settlements in what is now Sweden date back to around 12 000 BC, give or take a century or so. "Iskantsjägare", meaning "Ice-edge hunters" who made semi-permanent settlements and followed the receding ice. Outside Simrishamn in Scania, the southernmost province, a permanent fishing settlement was uncovered a few years ago, it's founding dating back to around between 9 000 BC - 7 000 BC, with strong indicators that it traded with other permanent settlements inland and along the coast. In Härjedalen (middle Sweden) rock paintings date back to 5 000 BC.

I wonder if Gimbutas took into account, that other - perhaps contradictory - findings would be made after her passing? Science is after all, in any field, never The Truth; it is only ever what we think we know right now. If a decisive find showing that "Out of Africa" is erroneous as it stands right now was to be discovered, then what? The afrementioned genetics (in genetical archeology) must be causing terror among the established academics and their current hegemocial truths.

A final though: it has become increasingly difficult using public sources and search engines to find anything about real archeology and real history, at least in my nation. I cannot help but feel that history is being adapted so as to serve purpose for something still in the future, and while I may not know much history as such, I do know what delegitimising a people's history and historical presence, culture and language is the set-up for.

Ihave to wonder if this is a swedish situation, or EU-wide or even global.

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Thank you for the informative reply. One of my favorite resources here on Substack is Stone Age Herbalist, whose aggregates a ton of useful research. Here in America it’s an embarrassment of riches with all the new stuff being published about the peopling of the New World continents.

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And at the same time search is neutered, academic libraries (at least here in the U.S.) are destroying their physical collections arguing that “everything is available online.” It’s chilling when you think about it.

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I buy all the physical books I can.

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Jul 16, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Marija Gimbutas healed me from the feminist mind-virus. ~15 years ago my radfem community - philosophical precursors to today's terfs - discovered her work and much rejoicing was made of it: a brilliant scholar validating the historical feminist utopia we all knew in our bones had existed. (Obvious caveat that none of us knew a thing about linguistics or archaeology or ancient history, but we had intuition, so.)

However, you take this idea to its logical limits and feminism collapses before you like a house of cards. It proves that women do not form a class that transcends race or economic status or motherhood status or whatever else. And if women don't form a class, then there's no shared oppression and there's no solidarity. At best feminism is then merely women teaching each other how to avoid getting raped, and the answer there is 99% "find a good man who will protect you from other men" and 1% "form a women-only community (don't ask who enforces those borders)."

It's all so obvious now that I'm on this side of it.

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I am glad you made that intellectual journey. For my part, I think the family is the collective identity most in need of protection, and beset on all side by forces that would destroy it.

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Jul 11, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

I've always wondered why archeologists and historians are so against Male and Female deities. I've always wondered why the Abrahamic religions didn't acknowledge that there must be an opposite force to the Masculine god that created the world. The more I read other mythos, the more I realized that Male deities are rarely the creators of things, other than war tools. Female deities have the creative force, which should be evident. Men are suited for building and destroying, planting and reaping, but creating life is something that women do very well.

Oh well. I guess that I'll never know.

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Jul 11, 2023·edited Jul 11, 2023Author

The religion of the Ancient Israelites is profoundly unlike anything else on Earth. Its earliest literature depicts a single God who creates the universe ex nihilo, as opposed to fashioning it from existing matter as in other myths. He is an eternal being beyond the time and space He created, yet immanent within them. He is not identified with any natural force or sphere of human activity, being beyond all, yet encompassing all. Being eternal He has no backstory, and He has no adventures, conflicts, or stories associated with Him (other than in Job, but Job is weird). Other than in Job, in fact, he does nothing in literature but interact with certain humans he has chosen, men not generally singled out for their high social status or personal worth, but because they possess some quality He means to make use of for His divine purpose. This God is profoundly interested in the moral lives of individual humans, and that they direct their lives to higher things, and gradually reveals more and more of the purpose He has in mind for humans, culminating in the incarnation of the Son of God and His ultimate revelation of human meaning. It is a profoundly comprehensive, ethically advanced, and philosophically sophisticated understanding of the divine, which is why I believe it came to supplant similar but lesser ideas across most of the world.

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Aug 10Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Job is weird, I couldn't agree more.

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Aug 10Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

As to the afterlife: The notion of "after" implies a timescale. Discard time and you have a wholly different perspective, admittedly, that's also weird.

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May 14Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Could you speak a little on the concept of an afterlife in Israelite religion? My understanding is that such an idea was largely a diffusion from Hellenic religion. You have some reference to an afterlife in Macabees, which is chronologically late, but even the Gospels don't have a super clearly developed idea of the afterlife. Just wondering your thoughts on this anthropologically.

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The concept of Sheol, which literally just means 'grave,' appears in some of the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible. However, it is unclear exactly what is intended by this term. Sometimes it is used in its literal sense, but it is also spoken of metaphorically as a collective abode for all the dead. Jacob expects to see Joseph there, and David in 2 Samuel (2 Kingdoms) declares that he will go to his dead infant son, but the latter cannot come to him. Before that, the expression "gathered to his fathers" was used of the Patriarchs in the sense that they were joining their ancestors somewhere. The idea seems to be one of darkness and immateriality, with no sense of any reckoning for one's moral state. Everyone, good or bad, ends up there. There seems some sense of consciousness or awareness; Samuel the Prophet, summoned by the witch of Endor, knows what's been happening in the world of the living since his death.

This is quite similar to Hades, and one could get the impression that the concept influenced Sheol, but if anything it went in reverse. Sheol is much like the nebulous dark afterlife described by Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh:

"There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds “ with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away for ever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old."

Diffusion probably ran from East to West in that regard. The only people in the ancient world with a fully realized concept of the life after death were the Egyptians.

It was not until the Second Temple Period when more complex ideas about the afterlife began to emerge among Jews. This was the Axial Age, and similar developments occurred throughout the world. By the time of the Gospels the idea that one's moral state dictated one's place after death was common, not merely among Jews, but pagans as well.

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Aug 10Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Fuck History and Religion class. I’m saving my money and coming here.

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Thank you for the restack.

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Nicely done. I have a draft of a piece on Gimbutas in the works, maybe one day I’ll post it, but yours is very well argued. As a lefty myself it was pretty hard to disabuse myself of the notion that much of prehistory was some version of a socialist/feminist utopia, but it’s fair to say theres enough cracks in the armor to shatter it nowadays. Chief among them being the findings of ancient DNA and strontium analysis that make a pretty strong case that at least in Europe the farming societies were at least clearly patrilineal/patrilocal. And obvious examples of endemic warfare that predate the steppe invasion. For all we know, it was the Indo Europeans who were more sexually egalitarian! But that’s just it, we will never know the gender dynamics of those societies for sure. I do find the longhouse cultures of LBK and Cucuteni-Tripoli to be pretty fascinating however. And Gimbutas herself is a fascinating and complex figure who made some great contributions to our understanding of prehistory, regardless of her indulgence in speculations about those dang figurines:)

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There’s a lot more to be said about Gimbutas than I wrote here. I’d love to see your take in a stack.

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If I ever get time to finish it, I’ll let you know!

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Jul 22, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Many of Gimbutas ideas live on in the bulk of contemporary historians and anthropologists who insist that primitive peoples lived in harmony with nature and each other. For them war, patriarchy and social stratification are the result of agriculture. Of course this is a type of thinking that goes back to Marx, Rousseau and even Lost Paradise or Golden Age myths but she played her part by trying to prove these ideas.

The only positive aspect of her writing was increasing awareness of the Cucuteni-Tripillia culture which was a pretty remarkable culture due to being the first europeans to build large towns with more than 20,000 people and periodically burning them to the ground.

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I think the positive contributions of her early work are enormous; the later years were Graham Hancock-esque. Their careers actually followed a similar trajectory; people forget he used to write for the Economist.

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Aug 26, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Best Kurgan writing since Highlander!

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It would not surprise me if the character of Kurgan, raping and pillaging swordmaster, was not drawn in some way from Gimbutas' ideas about longhouse-disrespecting Indo-European invaders. Hollywood writers in the early 80s would have gone to school in the 70s when she was at her prime influence.

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Nov 17, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

I hadn't thought of that... I always considered Kurgan from _The Highlander_ to be an avatar for Russian barbarism & savagery, which explained the brutality of the Soviet Union. That theme popped up in more than a few 1980s movies; I always chalked it up to the Cold War-era zeitgeist.

You've goven me some real food for thought. All the best, my dude.

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Jul 14, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

" the people of Old Europe were sexually and politically egalitarian, peaceful,"... What's the Time for the 'Old Europe'?

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Old Europe was essentially the period after the EEFs came to Europe and blended with the WHGs but before the Indo-European invasions, so roughly 6,000-3,000 BC, although Gimbutas believed that elements of the religious practices of Old Europe dated to the Paleolithic (before 50,000 BC).

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Jul 16, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Ok... I can not see how in those days we - [h]uman animals - could exist in a peaceful way, specially if politics were already at play (meaning a higher level of Thought therefor higher levels of division and conflict).

As usual we do like to invent nice stories about the Past.

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Just saw this article for the first time (dunno why it passed me by in July), but anyways just one question; I've always held Campbell in high regard and was wondering why you don't consider him a rigorous scholar?

Just curious and hope you're well.

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May 15Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

I am amazed at the claim that Gimbutas could speak 7 languages and read 20! I recall that Sir Richard Burton also had similar claims about his linguistic prowess. It is quite inspiring to think thatsuch things are possible with enough study.

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I think being Lithuanian she must have known that language, Russian, Polish, and German just from growing up. I had a professor from Romania who was an ethnic Hungarian who spoke 19 languages; he taught Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese at the college. Funny thing was, he was married to a Korean woman and didn’t speak a word of Korean.

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That's amazing, and a bit funny.

I can't help but wonder if this extreme mastery of language is a unique gift few possess, or something most people could acquire with enough patience and will. I recall Jared diamond quizzing the members of a PNG village about how many languages they spoke and got an average of 5. So maybe the latter possibility is more plausible than we realise.

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Jul 15, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Judge them by their actions not their philosophy and mythology, as we all known only the best killers in human history get to write the history books that survive;

...

Big Pharma is owned by the Bankers in 'The City of London' and Basel, Switzerland...THOSE ROBBING ALL BLIND FOR CENTURIES

...

That is a true statement, but like all things you are the blind-man and the elephant, and you are holding the tail, and think you have a snake, and you got shit and piss raining down on you;

Catholic Church gave ashkeNAZI the right of 'usury' in 12AD, and told them to convert to Judaism, because the Vatican said "Only jews can run banks", it didn't last long in Khazaria because the Russians hated the money-lenders so in 13AD all OP was moved to "City of London" a vatican, inside london, just like Basel, just like the Rome Vatican; Note to this day Swiss Mill still protects the vatican; Even the Queen of England, may not enter the "City of London"

In 15AD schism of the Church forced the "City of London" to distance themselves from the Vatican, so they created agents to run the ZOG Nazi banks of "London"; They called them Rothschilds; By 17AD they had taken over the world

In 1800's they funded agent Rockefeller who traded whale-oil in Shanghai china to move into petroleum, in 1840's, by 1910 Rockefeller owned the OIL world, in 1920's Rockefeller begat OIL-Based Medicine ( now called big pharma );

Rockefeller Foundation was setup, which to this day runs the US-GOV, but still an agent of ZOG

In 6AD the ashkeNAZI called themselves "NAZIS", which is why the AZOV today calls themselves Nazis; They had been run out of Khazaria forever by Russian farmers because when the Russians got into debt they would kill the money lenders.

The "CIty of London " offered a safe base for the money lenders. The catholic church in 12AD needed a bank to fund their CRUSADES, e.g. robbing & rapping the muslim world;

...

In 1920's agents ( Bush, Gates,Ford,Hearts,Loeb,Schiff) of Rothschild groomed Hitler, MAO, & Stalin; All the world, and modern GOV on earth is Rothschild bank owned, China, & Russia; To this day the original "Bank of China" still rules, and its 100% Rothschild;

In 1871 London took ownership of WASH-DC because Homo ZOG agent "Lincoln" failed to be war debts for his war of north aggression; London Banks have owned USA since it was a penal colony, later in 1913 the created FED Res bank, they destroyed the world left only the USD standing and then used that bank to pillage the world, and most recently to fund the RESET, using COVID $12T USD as a pretext

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I hadn't heard that Bush and Gates groomed Hitler in the 1920s.

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Grand-Pa Gates "Wrote the book on eugenics" that based Hitler

Senior BUSH owned RCA-UK electronics and most banks in UK associated with Rothschild as an agent, BUSH FAMILY, name PRESCOTT BUSH USA Senator

Known as "Hitlers Banker"

RCA-UK Hitler's electroncis

IBM Hitlers computer company ( in those days punched cards for collating )

...Seriously to not know this stuff would be a chap-GPT heavily filtered bot, or not to have read any history of Hitlers rise to power??

All MAO, HITLER, & STALIN were agents Groomed by Rothschild bank;

ALL modern GOV on earth is owned by ONE BANK

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I see...

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Jul 15, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno

Janet Reno proved how well female deities perform compared to male counter-parts;

Bitches & Bastards are just siamese twins sharing a common asshole

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I'll take that as a complement.

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I am a non-judgmental bitch.

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She was homies with Dumezil. Say less.

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You are an intelligent shit-stirrer.

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deletedMay 16
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I will work on that.

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