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March 29, 2023
Finding Our Goddesses
Every major religion in the world today features a male deity. Or as Miriam Robbins Dexter puts it: “Man was created in God's image and woman wasn't.”
How does it affect women of the world - that we have no major religious symbols that reflect the f...
Every major religion in the world today features a male deity. Or as Miriam Robbins Dexter puts it: “Man was created in God's image and woman wasn't.”
How does it affect women of the world - that we have no major religious symbols that reflect the female? That most religions greatly devalue women? That most religions have taboos against the female body and its life cycles?
These are questions Miriam has spent her extraordinary career grappling with, and also what drove her to look into prehistory - our pre-patriarchal history - on a search for female deities and past religions that may have offered women affirmation of female power, the female body, and the female will - rather than shame and denigration.
In this episode, Miriam, a hugely accomplished research scholar in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and mythology, talks about uncovering the female aspects of prehistoric belief systems, unearthing the roots of Indo-European patriarchy, and how she and famed archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (and many others) formed the contested theories about the matriarchal societies of the neolithic.
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Miriam Robbins Dexter
Research Scholar & Author
Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a Ph.D. in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and comparative mythology, from UCLA.
Her books include Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book; Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia; Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. She edited and supplemented Marija Gimbutas’ final book, The Living Goddesses; a book of essays in her honor after her death, Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas; and a posthumous book of her articles, The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected articles from 1952 to 1993, by Marija Gimbutas.
Miriam is the author of over thirty scholarly articles and nine encyclopedia articles on ancient female figures, and she has edited and co-edited sixteen scholarly volumes. For thirteen years, she taught courses in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages in the department of Classics at USC. For the following sixteen years, she taught courses in Goddesses and Heroines in the Women’s Studies department at UCLA. She has lectured at the New Bulgarian University in Sophia, Bulgaria and Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Moldavia, Romania.