When God Was a Woman : UCLA scholar Gimbutas’ work painted a different portrait of the female role

“If a single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the huge world will come round to him.” It will also come round to a single woman thus planted on her instincts, and it came round most remarkably to the indomitable Marija Gimbutas, a UCLA professor who died Wednesday of cancer at 73.

Gimbutas, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a student of the paleo-linguistics and Paleolithic archeology. Through her studies, she inferred the existence of a European society that died long before Christianity was born. Evidence of it, even in classical mythology, was to be sought at the margins rather than in the center.

So far, so academic. For many years, Gimbutas toiled in obscurity, known and respected by her academic colleagues but unknown to the larger world. Then, gradually, her work began to have an utterly un-foreseen relevance to a contemporary social transformation. For the world that Marija Gimbutas discerned behind the mental and social world in which we all now live was one in which women played a strikingly different, and larger, role than they have played in all of recorded history.

The buried memory of that lost world is what her books--especially “The Language of the Goddess” and “The Civilization of the Goddess”--sought to recover. And whether or not, for all her remarkable erudition, she ever quite established her historical case, her work has been deeply stimulating to feminist thinkers.

In a day when scholarship on “obscure” topics is under steadily increasing attack, Gimbutas’ story has a clear moral. It is not only in the sciences that pure research yields discoveries whose relevance will only gradually and unpredictably become apparent. Gimbutas added luster to the reputation of UCLA during a long and distinguished career. May Gaea give her the welcome she deserves.