PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form
Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Trypillian

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Mother Jars

Check out this 6000-year old storage jar from ancient Ukraine. Standing nearly 2½ feet tall, it's a product of the Copper Age Trypillian culture.

I saw this jar myself some years back at a traveling exhibit of artifacts from what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas calls the “Old European” cultures. What may look at first like abstract designs soon emerge as an owl—you can see the eyes and beak on the jar's upper register—and, strikingly, the back of the jar bears exactly the same patterns. This is a janiform owl, double, looking you directly in the eye no matter what direction you're coming from.

We don't know what was stored in the jar, but we can make a good guess. The people of ancient Trypillia raised all the staples of the Neolithic diet: wheat, emmer, barley, peas, lentils. The advantage of agriculture is that it produces lots of good, nourishing, storeable food with which to feed your family through long, cold Central European winters.

The disadvantage: stored grains and legumes draw rodents.

Hence the owl. Marija Gimbutas would have it that we are here in the realm of the Bird Goddess, Lady of Death. Perhaps. But, as my friend and colleague Helga Hedgewalker pointed out at the time, owls are good at keeping down vermin, whatever your mythology. Thank you, Mother Owl.

The breathtaking mastery of the ceramicist who made this jar is apparent only when you get close. From a distance, the patterns of the “head” and “body” of the jar look very similar. It's only when you get close that you see that they are, in fact, quite different. The owl's face—faces—are painted; the running spirals along the body are engraved. The potter has used two different techniques to achieve the same visual effect. Artistically speaking, it's a bravura performance.

We know from the house models that the Trypillians buried beneath their hearths that a row of just such storage jars stood along the side wall of every house: the Mother Jars that feed us through the winter.

Last modified on
Intimations of Emergence: When Pottery Speaks

The clay bowl on the coffee table could be in a museum, but it isn't.

What the potter in what is now Ukraine who, some 5500 years ago, painted the swirling designs on its surface, meant by them, we do do know. Possibly, nothing at all.

But when you look closely at the patterns, that's hard to believe.

This evocative bowl is an artifact of a remarkable culture known after the “type site” as Trypillian. (Named for the Ukrainian village nearest the original digging site, the word—appropriately enough—means “Three Fields.”) This is one of those glittering Old European cultures made famous in the English-speaking world by Lithuanian archaeologist (and feminist ideologue) Marija Gimbutas.

During the course of her career, Gimbutas handled thousands upon thousands of painted ceramics like this little bowl. She was convinced that the designs not only bore meaning to their makers, but that we can—to some degree, at least—read them today.

Hold this little clay bowl in your hands. Look closely. What do you see? Yonis? Buds? Antlers? Paired chrysalises? A butterfly? A woman, arms upraised?

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Foundation Offerings

The offering bears the prayer.

The ancestors thought long and hard about their foundation offerings.

In their choices, we see their intent, their wit and (like enough) their humor.

When the New Stone and Copper Age ancestors of Old Europe built a new house, they buried beneath its floor a little model of a house, lovingly rendered in ceramic detail.

No one needs to tell you what that means.

To the ancestors, it was obvious that when you built something important like a house or a temple, you first laid an offering in the ground to bear the embodied prayers of the builders.

We too have thought long and hard about what offerings to lay beneath the Bull Stone, when we raise it to mark the Marriage Point of Earth with Sky, of Land with People.

There will be three.

Last modified on
Gimbutas Revisited: A Trypillian Clay Phallus, 4500-3500 BCE

In the cash-strapped days following independence, a trio of Ukrainian businessmen watched in horror as illegal digging and the black-market antiquities trade threatened to denude Ukraine of its historical patrimony. The three began to buy up antiquities before they could leave the country, and so assembled the world's largest private collection of artifacts from the Copper Age Trypillian culture (4500-2700 BCE).

I saw a traveling exhibit from this collection at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis in early March 2011. What I saw there forced me to reassess my analysis of the work of Lithuanian-born archaeologist (and feminist ideologue) Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). Although none of the ceramics in the collection had been excavated before her death, I found that the analytic vocabulary of symbols that she articulated in her 1989 book The Language of the Goddess again and again produced cogent readings of the art.

Let me take one particularly striking example. The not-quite-life-sized (6¼ x 2½ inch) clay phallus and testes (shown above), from the Khmel'nitska region of Ukraine, dates from the Trypillian BI period, roughly 4500-3500 BCE. Above the testes is a small, inset cup; the clay wedge that supports the phallus gives the entire piece a rather droll, and probably not unintended, resemblance to a quadruped. (“I like the kickstand,” I overheard one visitor say.)

Note the engraved “decoration.” Twin spirals adorn the sides of the testes. There are parallel lines engraved along the phallus itself. Rows of evenly-spaced dots ring the top of the scrotum and run down the length of the shaft.

Last modified on

Additional information