My academic career, as well as fundamental elements of my spiritual journey, has focused upon the sublime and potent Neolithic art of Old Europe. These images transmit ancestral memory through their sophisticated but masterfully simple patterns. I added these this week to my dissertation. Themes here are women’s trance states as well as states of consciousness that facilitate shamanic shapeshifting.

Figurine Ensemble with Chairs, Isaiia, Moldavia (Precucuteni) first millennium BC.Joan Marler, “The Danube Script: Neo-Eneolithic Writing in Southeastern Europe,” Exhibition Catalogue (2008): 110.

Neolithic bone plate figurine from Gaban Cave, near Trento N. ItalyMarija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess : Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 103.
Late Minoan II, Knossos Crete, 15 Cent. BC.Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess:Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 273.

Featured image is a bone fragment depicted a female body from the Iron Gate Region of Romania, 8000 b.c. Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, 5.