En Homenaje a Anna Arroba:
Workshop by Joan Marler about the legacy of Marija Gimbutas
and Vicki Noble about the Mother Peace Tarot
Place: Coral Reef Convention Center in Cahuita
Date: June 1 st., 2024
Time: 10:00 am a 12:00 with Joan Marler
12:00 – 1:00 pm Lunch
1:00 pm – 3:30 with Vicki Noble 3:30-4:00 Homenaje in the Memory of Anna Arroba
₡18,000 lunch included
Convened by: INMAR Caribe – Instituto de Ciencias Ciudadanas del Mar
About the Workshops
Joan Marler’s workshop will introduce the life and work of Marija Gimbutas, the extraordinary Lithuanian North American archaeologist born in 1921 in Vilnius, the ancient capital of Lithuania, the last European country to be Christianized. From her childhood she absorbed the songs, poetry, folklore, and sacred beliefs and rituals of the village people who did their work in traditional ways, who kissed the earth every morning and evening. She recalled, “The old women used sickles and sang while they worked. The songs were very authentic, very ancient. At that moment I fell in love with what is ancient because it was a deep communication and oneness with Earth.” Marija Gimbutas grew up in a family of intellectuals who were dedicated to the preservation of Lithuanian language, culture, and folklore. She received an excellent, classical education despite ongoing political turmoil, with one warring invasion after another. After fleeing to the west with her husband and baby daughter in 1944, she earned her doctorate in archaeology at Tuebingen University in 1946. After immigrating to the US in 1949, she began her long, distinguished career at Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a brilliant lecturer on European prehistory who produced more than 20 scholarly texts that revealed a depth and breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge previously unknown among archaeologists in the United States. Marija Gimbutas’s excavations (from 1967 to 1980) of major Neolithic sites in southeast Europe intensified her dedication to understanding the significance of many hundreds of female sculptures found in domestic contexts. In her view, it was not acceptable to ignore the overwhelming presence of female imagery and evidence of ongoing ritual activities. Her early experiences in Lithuania demonstrated that people who have maintained their closeness with the living world experience the Earth and all of life as sacred. Besides, she was a women and, by then, a mother of three daughters, excelling in a male-dominated field. She formulated the interdisciplinary practice of archaeomythology to expand the interpretative boundaries of archaeology in order to recognize ancient patterns of meaning inherited from the ancestors. In the case of Neolithic Europe this was thousands of years before patriarchal structures, male dominance, and warfare changed the face of Europe.
Vicki Nobel’s Mother Peace Tarot workshop will be a general introduction to the Motherpeace images as a simple oracle to be used in our everyday lives. It will discuss the history of the creation of the cards, co-created in the late 1970s as a feminist revisioning of history (putting women back into it), as well as a fresh approach to tarot and esoteric science. Designed by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel, the contemporary Motherpeace images have attained worldwide distribution since then (printed and distributed by US Games Systems, Inc.). The round feminist cards function as a shared symbolic language among women (and men) in various countries around the world, regardless of diverse languages, cultures, and borders. A pioneering aspect of the Motherpeace deck is its early appreciation of multiculturalism in the fact that more than half the images depict people of color. Embedded within the symbolic language of the diverse Motherpeace cards are the paradigms of matriarchal and ethnic studies, shamanism, yoga, and paganism, as well as the core principles of western occult and esoteric studies. The Motherpeaceimages contain, in a fresh stylized form resembling “folk art,” reproductions of artifacts, images, and knowledge from the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, history, and art. And in 2017, thanks to the visionary thinking of Maria Grazia, the new Artistic Director at Christian Dior, the Motherpeace images became the focal point of a fresh new line of clothing released in the fall of 2017.
About the workshop presenters
Joan Marler was raised in the redwood forest overlooking the Pacific Ocean of northern California where the main populations were loggers and fishermen. She studied music and art and earned a BA in Dance and the Liberal Arts at Mills – a woman’s college near San Francisco. Joan taught modern, folk and ethnic dance while working as a radio producer and journalist focusing primarily on feminist issues and women’s spirituality. In 1987 she met the Lithuanian-North American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and worked as her personal editor until Dr. Gimbutas’s death in 1994. During those years she edited The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas and earned an MA in Archaeomythology. She published From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas and has lectured internationally about Dr. Gimbutas’s life and work. In 1998 Joan established the Institute of Archaeomythology which publishes the online Journal of Archaeomythology. After earning a doctorate in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where she taught for a number of years, her long-term goal is to complete the biography of Marija Gimbutas.
Vicki Nobel, producer of the Tarot MADRE PAZ, isa feminist artist, writer, scholar, and wisdom teacher, who has developed an eclectic and complex mix of profound knowledge and practices, informed by four decades of scholarly investigation grounded in daily practice, producing a teaching that is original and experiential. The female lineage from which she draws is a holistic underground stream that runs from the most ancient times when women were the unquestioned spiritual leaders and teachers at the center of our human communities. Herresearch focus is on tracing this lineage back through time and across continents to its origins in deep antiquity, and to revision the role of women as central to shamanism and tantric practice in all of AfroEurAsia for at least ten millennia. Her work does not fit into any orthodox tradition and cannot be described from within any one understanding of contemporary women’s spiritual evolution. It draws from many sources, beginning with feminism as a path to enlightenment, and then building on that foundation through Buddhism, tantra, shamanism, bodywork, and other forms of spiritual understanding and natural medicine.
The Memorial in Memory of Anna Arroba
This event is dedicated to the Memory of Anna Arroba for her contribution in Costa Rica to these global feminist approaches.
In her honor, at the end of the workshops INMAR Caribe and the CCBEM will present a proposal towards the publication of a book The Goddesses of Anna Arroba, which contains photographs of her collection of goddesses and a way of describing them, in which you can participate. Each person who wishes can choose and sponsor one of the goddesses, in photographs taken by Ana Mara Arenas, to research HER and contribute what they research to the book. The photos have been authorized for publication by Anna’s family. We hope that Jorge CÃceres, who has supported us in this endeavor, can come to the event. Joan Marler is going to support us in the preparation of the book. She comes to meet and get to know us to support us in this work of tribute to Anna Arroba.
This book project was born at an extraordinary moment for the Costa Rican Caribbean, as its diving youth is ready to give Talamanca, the country and the world, the conclusive result of a decade-long research in citizen science applied to community underwater archaeology.
It is the result of a discovery that will clearly deepen and expand the history of the area and the country. It is about the identification of two Danish slave ships, the FedericusIV and the Christianus V, that arrived by mistake somewhere in the Caribbean in 1710, leaving 650 African men and women free on the coast.
In the world, during the three centuries of the Transatlantic Traffic in Enslaved Men and Women, of a total of some 1,200 slave ships that were shipwrecked, only a handful (with only one hand) have been identified.
The two slave ships in the Caribbean of Costa Rica would make history in more ways than one: slave ships did arrive in Costa Rica. Africans did arrive directly from Africa. The Afro and Bribri or Cabecar mestizaje may date back further than the arrival of those who arrived from Jamaica. The discovery of the identity of those ships has been carried out by a new Talamanca generation of young people with a citizen science method. The process has produced literature that connects with ancestral myths.
Honor and glory to the ancestral African and mestizo Afro and Bribiri and Cabecar, honor to Anna Arroba and honor to Marija Gimbutas!
