Signs Out of Time (2004)
Featured in The New York Times
Published by Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The life and work of acclaimed archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas serve as the subjects of this documentary narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis. Few archeologists have ever achieved quite the level of fame, or courted quite as much controversy, as the Lithuanian-born mythology and linguistics who dared to develop theories that challenged the “establishment” of her time. By unearthing evidence of goddess-worshipping civilizations throughout pre-historic “Old Europe,” Dr. Gimbutas highlighted the importance of critical thinking while influencing an entire generation of feminists, scholars, and social thinkers. In this film, experts like Carol Christ, Margaret Conkley, Vikki Nobel, and Patricia Reis all offer their opinions on why the discoveries that Dr. Gimbutas made during her lifetime as still as relevant today as they were when she was still traveling the world in search of answers to our true origins.
 

From PaGaian Cosmology
by Glenys Livingstone

When I first encountered the work of Marija Gimbutas in a library in country Australia at the beginning of my post-graduate research on earlier layers of human consciousness, it was the lighting of a flame … perhaps the re-lighting. Her book now known as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe - then hard to get - presented a view of the world that was so different from the views I had felt were set in concrete. It was the opening up of a heretofore hidden, dormant layer of the human story, a presentation of “the spiritual manifestations of Old Europe”. “Old Europe” itself was a concept brought into being by Marija Gimbutas’ grounded research, which uncovered it as a “distinct culture developing a unique identity” as she writes in the Introduction to her now readily available book. Her work fed both the scientist and the Poet in me, and the one who longed to know her roots in this Earth. Gimbutas’ method was the application of a rigorous scientific mind - Europeon-trained in the discipline of archaeology - in combination with an intuitive sensuous indigenous relationship with her material. And so it is for this great documentary of her life and work, of her theories and her critics, and of her influence on scholarship and consciousness studies. It is itself a document of the complexities and confluences of all these aspects, and pleasurably presented with narration, interviews and animated graphics.

Signs Out of Time combines a wonderful collage of images - both photographic and animated - from the extensive excavations that Gimbutas conducted over decades, with story and photos of her life - who she was and what enabled her unique perspective and synthesis. Gimbutas’ scholarship is really beyond question - she had established her award-winning credentials as an archaeologist; and her knowledge of languages, mythology, and folklore was extensive. What disturbs her critics is the audaciousness of her interpretations, how she steps out of line with her interdisciplinary knowledge and approach. Her approach was so new that it came to have its own name: archaeomythology.

Signs Out of Time includes clips from interviews with significant people who knew Gimbutas - personally and professionally, some of whom critique her work. Personally I was amused by how often the critics fell into their own web, and to my mind did not offer what I considered to be a problem with Gimbutas’ creative contribution to thought about human cultural origins.

Marija Gimbutas asserted from the evidence she found, and from her extensive first-hand knowledge of her place - including its folklore and traditions - that the earliest layers of Western culture were peaceful, and that the primordial Deity in this place was female. Gimbutas says of the Deity of these Old Europeans: “She is a metaphor of living Earth - nothing else.” Gimbutas grew up in Lithuania where people still kissed the Earth each morning … what kind of shape does such a mind have? And how different is it from what is considered even sane in mainstream media and academia.

By her work Gimbutas has called into question definitions of “civilization” and the view of human history as barbaric from the beginning. She describes an early religious understanding that is “not about sacred texts and dogmas”, but a great creative process in the natural world - not separate from culture - that wove the cosmos together, as the narrator tells us in the film. These powers were represented in the form of a female metaphor, whose raison d’etre was not “fertility” in the narrow biological econocentric sense of most interpretations of “goddess” cultures; but it was “regeneration” in a broad rich sense of abundant creativity that included song and dance, art and meaning. Gimbutas describes evidence of a female Deity - “Great Goddess” she names her - who was the morphic form of the great powers of regeneration evident in animal and plant, human, earth and cosmos.

Glenys Livingstone 2008

Glenys Livingstone has been passionately involved in the resurgence of female imagery for the Sacred for three decades: this was the topic of her participative doctoral research in Social Ecology (University of Western Sydney 2002). She is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. She lives in Australia - the land of her birth - where she and her partner hold sacred space for the celebration of Earth’s holy-days with a small open community, according to their place on the planet. Glenys completed post-graduate theological studies in Berkeley California in 1982. She is a mother and grandmother. Her website is http://pagaian.org, where her book is live.