Old Europe

The pre-Yamnaya European agricultural culture Jiang presents, through Gimbutas, as peaceful, artistic, egalitarian, and mother-goddess centered.

Jiang uses old Europe for the pre-Yamnaya European agricultural society he describes as Mother Goddess-oriented, egalitarian, peaceful, and artistic.

Maria Gimbutas's term, as Jiang presents it, for the high point of the pre-conquest Mother Goddess civilization in Europe. The pre-Yamnaya farming civilization Gimbutas described as women-governed, artistic, peaceful, and egalitarian. The pre-conquest European civilization whose loss frames the lecture's Paradise Lost structure.

Jiang credits Maria Gimbutas with arguing that Old Europe was peaceful, woman-honoring, egalitarian, artistic, and later conquered by aggressive patriarchal Yamnaya culture.

Old agricultural Europe collapses because static agriculture, disease, and climate change reduce population and create an opening for Yamnaya invasion.

Jiang frames old Europe as having been, for most of its history, egalitarian, peaceful, and artistic before conquest by a warlike people he identifies as the Yamnaya.

He connects old Europe's egalitarian and peaceful politics to this religion: women were elevated because they gave birth, resources felt sufficient, and intellectual energy went into art celebrating the Mother Goddess.

He names plague, climate change, and Yamnaya colonization as the three things that destroyed old Europe, with plague as the most important.

Jiang presents early human religion as animistic: humans, animals, and plants all come from one Mother Goddess source, which grounds an egalitarian and compassionate social order.

The migrating farming families brought Mother Goddess religion into Europe, and Jiang links that religion to egalitarian, peaceful, artistic society.

Jiang attributes to Gimbutas the claim that Old Europe was women-ruled, peaceful, egalitarian, and artistic for about 4000 years before conquest.