Hortensia de los Santos

• At Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (dated to 7400–6200 BCE), no palaces or weapons have been found—only shrines covered in female figures, bulls, and leopards. There is no evidence of warfare or male-dominated hierarchy.
• The Danube Valley Civilization, particularly Lepenski Vir and Vinca, reveals organized urban centers, refined art, and figurines that reflect Gimbutas’ descriptions of goddess iconography.
• The hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni in Malta, with its womb-shaped chambers and curvaceous “Sleeping Lady” figurine, reflects ceremonial reverence for the Earth as feminine.
• Recent studies of excavated Neolithic graves in Romania and Bulgaria show signs of equality in burial offerings between genders, contradicting the war-driven model of early civilization.
• DNA studies confirm that the early Neolithic peoples of Europe were displaced or absorbed by later Indo-European invaders, who brought patriarchal warrior cultures and erased matristic traditions.

The Buried Memory

History, as we were taught, has long been a narrative of warfare, conquest, and dominion. But it is also a record of what was destroyed to make that version possible.

• Goddess temples dismantled or repurposed.
• Women who carried ancestral knowledge were labeled witches and burned at the stake.
• Oral traditions were silenced by the written word—and the written word weaponized.
• Gimbutas, like Hypatia of Alexandria before her, reminded us that knowledge itself has a gendered history—and that to reclaim it is to resurrect the sacred feminine from the ashes.

Her Legacy in Us

Today, Mariya Gimbutas is no longer just a marginal voice. She is a foundational figure in rethinking human history—not as a relentless march of violence, but as a journey once guided by life, renewal, and communion with the Earth. She is the intellectual grandmother to countless scholars, artists, spiritual seekers, and women (and men) who have felt the tug of a memory older than writing—a memory of when the divine was round, fertile, and whole.

Interlude: The Ones They Tried to Silence

History remembers kings, conquerors, and the men who wrote their praises. But beneath that triumphant din lies a second history—of women who bore knowledge like fire, and were punished for refusing to let it go out.

Hypatia of Alexandria

She walked through the marble streets of Alexandria not as someone’s daughter or wife, but as a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. Born around 360 CE, she taught at the great Library of Alexandria—equations, the music of the spheres, and the eternal questions of the soul. Students came from distant lands to hear her speak.

She was Pagan. Woman. Independent. And she refused to be claimed by Church or State. When the Christian authorities saw her influence as a threat, they unleashed the mob. She was stripped, flayed with tiles, her body burned. And the Library—already weakened—fell soon after. Her crime was knowledge without permission. Her death marked the symbolic murder of the classical world’s feminine intellect

And Mariya Gimbutas?

Fifteen centuries later, another woman stepped into ancient ruins not with a sword, but with questions. What if civilization began in peace? What if the Earth itself had once been holy? What if the spirals carved on stone were not decorations, but prayers?

Her academic peers dismissed her. Some called her a mystic, others accused her of feminist delusion. They feared what her work implied: that the oldest human societies may not have been male-dominated at all. That history is not just what is written—but what is buried, burned, and denied.

They did not burn her body. But they tried to burn her credibility.

A Pattern Repeats

From Enheduanna, the Sumerian priestess-poet whose hymns were erased for millennia, to women scribes of medieval monasteries whose illuminations bore no names, to the indigenous medicine women tortured during colonial inquisitions— the pattern holds. Whenever a woman carries sacred knowledge—be it of stars, spirit, or soil—she is met not with reverence, but suspicion. Not with honor, but with fire. But they did not silence them all. Their names return like whispers in wind, carved into forgotten stone, re-emerging in dreams and ruins. And now, in this chapter, they are called back by name.

Hildegard of Bingen

Born in 1098 in what is now Germany, Hildegard of Bingen was a visionary, composer, healer, abbess, and natural scientist. She spoke in voices and saw the divine in patterns of light. She recorded visions of the cosmos, of God as a spiraling fire, of the feminine aspect of divinity—Sophia, Wisdom incarnate.

She composed celestial music that still haunts the soul. She wrote of herbs and their healing spirits, of the relationship between body and soul. In a time when women were rarely educated, she wrote theological treatises, natural science texts, and even invented her own secret language.

And yet, Hildegard survived where others were silenced—because she cloaked her fire in obedience to the Church, even while subverting its boundaries. Her genius was so luminous that even Popes dared not fully suppress her.

Still, after her death, many of her writings faded into obscurity. Her spiritual authority—radical for its time—was buried under centuries of male theology. But she has returned. In the last few decades, her music has found new life. Her writings are studied again, not as curiosities, but as prophecies. In her Scivias, she wrote: I am a feather on the breath of God. And through that breath, she joins Hypatia and Gimbutas—a chorus of women who refused to forget the sacred whole.

She Who Had No Name in the Records

She is not in the annals of kings. Her bones are buried in places no archaeologist will dig. She lived in the long night after the cataclysms—when the stars had shifted and the Earth no longer whispered in ways we remembered. And yet, she remembered. Not with books. Not with stone tablets. But with breath, lullabies, blood, rhythm. She was the medicine woman of the jungle, whispering plant names to children who now only remember her as "Grandmother." She was the weaver in the Andes, encoding constellations into her tapestries, unseen by conquistador eyes. She was the storyteller by the fire, reciting the birth of the Moon in the tongue of a people whose language now survives in a single song. She was the keeper of songs in Africa, her feet marking time with sacred drums that echoed the heartbeat of Earth. No scribe recorded her. No statue bears her face. But she lived—and kept the flame. And we know she lived because the myths are still here. The spirals are still carved. The herbs still grow in the sacred places. The dream still comes to us. She is the Mother behind all other mothers. The one who carried memory when history tried to forget. And we write now for her.

The Wound in the World: When the Mothers Were Forgotten

• Sky gods with thunderbolts.
• Male heroes slaying serpents—symbols of the old religion.
• Walled cities, warrior burials, and weapons.
• Linear time. Linear power. Kingship. Empire.

• The serpent, once sacred, became a symbol of evil.
• The tree of life, once feminine, was guarded by angels with flaming swords.
• The holy well, once visited by women seeking fertility, was filled with stones.
• The womb-shaped temple, once echoing with chants, became a ruin under pasture. Humanity did not just lose stories. We lost connection:
  • To the Earth
  • To our bodies
  • To each other
  • To the mystery of the sacred within

  We inherited instead a world where the divine was far away, unreachable, male—and where to be born woman was to begin at a disadvantage.

  But the spiral never truly ends.
  The symbols never stopped appearing.