Prologue. Neolithic Old Europe. Ca. 4400 BCE
Because the shaman and the elders of a small town near where the Danube
River flows into the Black Sea are troubled but don’t know why, they ask
for a “showing.” Their totem, the heron, gives them a Shakespearean dumb
show in which their black Mother Goddess gives birth to a pale son who
destroys her. This is so shocking that the shaman blinds herself. While
the shaman is walking the starry paths (visiting inner worlds), the elders
send messengers out to find out what is happening. One group comes back
to report that horsemen from the Asian steppes have destroyed a major city
and are heading west. To save her people’s lives, the shaman sends them
all away.
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The civilization of Old Europe is shown in the prologue. The descriptions
of the houses, people, crafts, and altar objects are taken from the works
of
Marija Gimbutas. Many people believe that Old Europe was a pre-patriarchal
high civilization (or paradise).
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The Paleolithic Era (Old Stone Age, so named because that was when early
people started making and using stone tools) began perhaps 2 ½ million
years ago in Africa and included the glacial and interglacial ages. It
was the longest period of human prehistory. According to Gimbutas, the
Neolithic cultures of southeast Europe arose out of the Upper Paleolithic
(“upper” because the strata of which artifacts are found are higher—thus,
closer to the present time—than the lower, older strata). The Upper Paleolithic
is generally dated from ca. 35,000 to 10,000 BCE. The transition to the
Neolithic (New Stone Age) began first in the Middle East in the middle
of the seventh millennium, BCE, and spread to other parts of the world.
The Civilization of the Goddess(1991) by Gimbutas defines and
describes the distribution and chronologies of the Neolithic Old European
cultures from ca. 7000 to ca. 3500 BCE.
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The little green-eyed boy will reappear as Brother Melchizedek in chapters
9 and 10 and as Matthew Hodge in chapters 17, 19, 21, 23, and 26. He is
the Green Man, who is always associated with nature, rebirth, fertility,
and plant life. Matthew is human and archetype at the same time. (No, I
can’t explain this.)
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The Black Mother will reappear in chapter 9, with the shaman in chapter
25, and in one of Jacoba’s visions in chapter 23. In chapter 12, Milly
has a black goddess on her altar. In chapter 26, the goddess is on the
altar for the circle’s last ritual is a black-painted figure of Dame Fortuna.
The novel is thus “book-ended” by black goddesses. As explained several
time, black is the color of fertility and rebirth, not of death.
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A dumb show is a serious pantomime. The two most famous Shakespearean
dumb shows are in
Hamlet (Act III, scene ii, where the players, under Hamlet’s
direction, show how Claudius murdered his brother) and
Macbeth (Act IV, scene i, where the witches show Macbeth the
eight apparitions). BTW, in
Macbeth, Hecate is spelled Hecat and pronounced with two syllables
(HECK-et). She’s the queen of the witches in the play.
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The descriptions of the horsemen are my version of what Gimbutas calls
the Kurgan invasions, which began about 4400 BCE. This was the beginning
of the historic migrations of Indo-European tribes from the steppes of
southern Russia and the Caucasus Mountains. These tribes eventually crossed
all of Europe, oftentimes assimilating with the indigenous peoples, sometimes
pushing the older tribes in front of them. These migrations continued through
the Roman Empire. And after. In her essay in
The Rule of Mars (2005, Miriam Robbins Dexter writes, “Perhaps
the particular violence and warrior mentality which we see in the conquering
Indo-Europeans was the product of a particular class and age—of a surfeit
of testosterone, as it were” (p. 148). For more information, also see
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and
The Civilization of the Goddess, both by Marija Gimbutas.
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Some historical perspective on invasions. Abram (later called Abraham)
lived about 2000 BCE. Early in the Old Testament, the Lord offers the land
of Canaan to him. All he has to do is invade it and conquer the people,
build altars, and make sacrifices. Additional Hebrew migrations or invasions
took place after the Exodus (ca. 1300 BCE, less than a century before the
Trojan War). Bronze Age Greece (ca. 3000–1000 BCE) is named for the weapons
used by the Indo-European tribes that brought Zeus and the Olympians to
the peninsula and turned the Great Goddess Hera into a mere wife. Rome
started conquering the Etruscans, then most of the rest of the Mediterranean,
starting about 800 BCE. The Celts were moving north and settling across
Europe by about 450 BCE, when Greek civilization was flowering, especially
in Athens. Various “barbaric” tribes (Goths, Vandals, the Germanic tribes)
invaded the Roman Empire throughout its existence (ca. 40 BCE to, for the
western empire, shortly before 500 CE). Attila and the Huns arrived about
the time Rome fell in 476, when the Germanic chief Odoacer drove the last
western emperor, Romulus Augustus out of the city. (The first king of Rome
and the last Roman emperor were both named Romulus.) Muslim armies building
the great caliphate invaded and conquered parts of Europe beginning in
the mid-7th century. Charles Martel (Charlemagne’s grandfather) is famous
for defeating the Muslim army at the Battle of Tours (north-central Gaul,
now France) in 732. The Ottoman Turks began invading Anatolia around 1300
and established the Ottoman Empire, which endured until 1922. The European
Crusaders were invading the so-called Holy Lands from about 1100 to about
1300. Constantinople fell to Ottoman forces in 1453. Ferdinand and Isabella
drove the Muslims (and unconverted Jews) out of Spain in 1492 and brought
in Inquisition about that time. The Norse (Viking) invasions began about
787 CE, and Lindisfarne was struck in 793. The Mongolian Golden Hordes
arrived in the 13th century (but were turned back when one of the Khans
died). Beginning in 1492, Europeans “discovered” and invaded the New World
and turned it into Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English colonies. Ditto
Asia and Africa (with the addition of German colonies). What would history
look like if all these invaded peoples had created dragons (lots and lots
of dragons) to protect themselves?
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The prologue concludes with the first of three diasporas. The second is
related in chapter 1, as Herta remembers how the grandmothers of the Romanian
village of her childhood sent an entire generation away before World War
II. The third diaspora begins as the book ends and the women move out into
the world.
Discussion questions:
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Does it seem to you that history is mostly just a lot of warfare? What
do you know about the history of the Balkans and the lands around the Black
Sea? (See
The Black Sea: A History [2004] by Charles King.) What do you
know about their more recent history, like the wars of the 1990s? In what
ways does the past shape the present?
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What might our world be like if the invaders had not galloped out of the
steppes of Central Asia and brought their storm gods with them
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What do we know about the mythology concerning the lands around the Black
Sea? Why did the Greeks refer to these people as barbarians?
Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. All rights reserved. Permission
granted to print this page of the
Secret Lives Reader’s Guide for personal use only.
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