For the Romans too, and the Greeks before them, owls were messengers. Better put, they were a glimpse of the goddess herself. Sometimes symbols are the very thing. Athena’s human form was no less a mask than her owlish one. She was the patroness of Athens, so Athenians, proud inventors of democracy, stamped owls on their coins and branded them on the faces of slaves captured in battle. (That’s a lot of owls: per the classicist Moses Finley, slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the population of Classical-era Athens.) Throughout the Mediterranean, the goddess appears on pottery and in sculpture standing beside an owl, or holding one, or with an owl on her head. Wisdom takes some funny shapes. Sometimes she had an owl’s wings and talons growing from an otherwise human female form, or an owl’s body and a human head, helmeted and ready for war.
Over the centuries and throughout classical literature, owls meant one thing—trouble—unless you were lucky enough to be from Athens. Plutarch wrote of an owl alighting on the mast of an Athenian ship before the battle at Salamis, lending the Greeks the courage to defeat the Persians. The tyrant Agathocles is said to have released owls over the ranks of his army to convince his soldiers that the goddess was with them. In Aristophanes’s The Wasps, an owl flies over the Persian troops just before the fighting commences, a sign that the Greeks would triumph. So complete was the association that the bird became a proverb: according to the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook, to observe “there goes an owl” meant that victory was close. But, Cook cautioned in a footnote, “The bird which portended victory to friends naturally portended defeat to foes. Consequently the owl also had a sinister significance.”
The owl is always ambiguous. Archaeologists have dug up pendants in southern Italy showing Athena with an owl’s wings and human hands, which she uses to spin wool into yarn. Weaving, wisdom, war: How can one deity oversee such disparate charges? In “The Writing of the God,” Borges also described that whirling wheel of time as a fabric embroidered with impossible complexity. (The words text and textile are both from the Latin texere, to weave: writing is, perhaps first of all, woven, a fabric of overlapping threads.) His imprisoned priest glimpsed the entire weave at once without any of the comforting lies of narrative, without cutting it down to a single and seductive swathe that, once chosen, negates all other possibilities and obscures the remainder of the cloth from which it’s spun. But it’s all still there, even when we fail to see it. Pull any thread and you’ll tug another that you didn’t mean to move. You’ll find entire worlds. In some of them gods could be birds and birds gods. Homer depicts Athena as a pigeon, a swallow, a hawk. In the Iliad, she and Apollo appear as vultures perched high in an oak tree to watch the Greeks and Trojans battle. They like to watch us fight.
The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in Athena an incarnation of a much older divinity, which she called the Snake and Bird Goddess of Old Europe. Gimbutas, who was born in Lithuania and had to hide during the war from succeeding military occupations by the Russians and the Germans and the Russians again, had a brilliant but fairly conventional career until the early 1970s, when she began to write about goddesses. In 1974 she published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and first laid out the hypothesis that she would continue to elaborate until her death twenty years later. It began by proposing that there was such a thing as Old Europe, a distinct and sophisticated Neolithic culture that stretched from what is now Ukraine and the Czech Republic to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, one that did not owe its achievements to the more storied civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Levant. The societies of Old Europe, Gimbutas was certain, were matriarchal, egalitarian, and pacifistic, and centered on the worship of a nurturing goddess. All that was destroyed, she argued, by invaders from the east: fierce, equestrian Indo-European nomads who replaced the earth-oriented and goddess-centered pantheon with cruel male gods of sky and storms, and who brought with them patriarchy, hierarchy, exploitation, and war. What little of Old European culture was able to survive would be forced into subterranean channels.
All this was widely dismissed by archaeologists at the time, many of them making the sort of complaints—that Gimbutas’s conclusions were irrational, sentimental, and insufficiently rooted in empirical evidence—that men tend to make when women say something they don’t like. (“Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again,” Bernard Wailes of the University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times.) But feminist archaeologists would also find much to criticize in Gimbutas’s ideas, which were most wholeheartedly embraced outside of the academy, by New Age feminists hungry for alternatives to the patriarchal and militaristic society in which they lived. In which we still live.
Looking back, it’s hard not to find something sinister in the narrative of a lost utopia that she imagined—a genteel and gentle Europe assaulted by brutish outsiders invading from the East. If only structurally, it too closely echoes the primitivist fantasies of the latest generation of purity-obsessed ethnonationalists. And Gimbutas surely gave too little credit to the goddesses, and to actual women, stripping them of all but the most stereotypically maternal aspects of human personality. Athena would not have easily forgiven Gimbutas for suggesting that she had been transformed by corrupting foreign influences from a nursing, protective mother god into a goddess of war, and that she only became capable of ferocity and wrath after being “Indo-Europeanized and Orientalized during the course of two millennia of Indo-European and Oriental influence in Greece.” It’s a bit like Botox: Athena’s youthful beauty is restored here, but she’s no longer able to scowl.
Still, I can’t help but find myself circling back to Gimbutas. However loopy the details, in broad outline much of what she wrote seems right. They may not have organized themselves into model feminist communes, but for many, many centuries and until quite recently, humans all over the planet did worship goddesses, and then they stopped. Most of them anyway. Implicitly if not explicitly, under both monotheist and rationalist conceptions, the cosmos is gendered male. This shift seems worth thinking hard about: what it means, what was lost, what might be worth recovering. Someone else can take that up.
What keeps drawing me to Gimbutas is her combination of the darkest apocalypticism and an optimism that, though it is only two decades distant, feels at once difficult to salvage and, in some basic sense, essential to our survival. In her telling, time has a different shape. It’s not a vector pointing upward that is suddenly, cataclysmically collapsing. The disaster already happened. It came in hordes from the East, on horseback, carrying cruel gods and weapons of bronze. Nothing was left standing. Doomsday came and went. It happened so long ago that we’ve forgotten it, repressed it, hidden it from our collective memory. This notion—perhaps more than any imaginative overreaching and selective marshaling of archaeological evidence—may have been what put Gimbutas on the outside of the academic mainstream: she is saying that we got it all wrong. Civilization as we know it is not an achievement, but a tragic defeat. Most of what we recognize as history was founded on a catastrophe that has only been compounded with the accretion of the years. But this also means we are not damned to this, that there are other ways to live, that we have far less to lose than we thought we did, and a great deal still to learn.
“We’ve reached the end of the world,” Gimbutas said in a 1990 lecture. “We’re starting to create another. I expect we shall become a healthier society. We shall worship the earth—well, not in the same way, nothing returns from the past. We cannot repeat the whole thing from the beginning, we can only transform ourselves and use our knowledge about the past and apply it for creating the future. This is my feeling.”
Long after the era that obsessed Marija Gimbutas but more than a millennium and a half before James Watt patented his steam engine, propelling the mills of Great Britain into the feverish consumption of coal and the planet into the current era of cataclysmic climate change, the island’s Roman occupiers were already, on a far smaller scale, digging that miraculous, slow-burning black stone from the coal beds of England and Wales. They used it in smithies, to forge the weapons and armor that allowed their empire to advance; they used it to keep warm through the wet English winters; and they used it to fuel the eternal flame that they kept burning in Bath, in a temple erected there to Minerva, the wisest of the gods.