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Hello friends.
Last week I shared a video from my fieldwork in the Balkans on Instagram, and it went viral. It’s now been viewed almost 200,000 times, had over 14,000 likes and has brought about 2,000 new followers to my account. It’s a mystery why this particular video has garnered so much interest, as I’ve shared lots of content like it in the past. Instagram really is beyond me…
I’ve received some truly lovely messages and had some very thoughtful conversations come out of it — the comment section has been its own kind of wild ethnographic study!
A number of people expressed genuine interest in the Vinča culture and were excited to learn about a civilisation that doesn’t fit the usual narrative of early human history — or even our modern ideas of what classifies a civilisation in the first place. Some asked for further reading or resources, while others from Serbia and neighbouring regions shared a sense of pride in seeing their heritage acknowledged and discussed.
Of course, there was also the useful handful of not-so-kind messages that didn’t seem aimed at real dialogue. Comments of that kind make me wonder what has to happen in someone’s life for them to have the capacity (let alone the time!) to be mean to random people on the internet that they’ve never met. It’s been my theory since the COVID online battles that most of us wouldn’t dare say to someone’s face the things we’ll type from behind a screen.
I find it fascinating how much words like “matriarchy” and “goddess” can ruffle feathers. For some, I’m now a radical feminist historian who wants to wank off Margaret Meade (I found that particular image incredibly creative and it did actually make me laugh). For others I’m a Eurocentric imperialist putting Europe over indigenous cultures — as the word “European” is now apparently off-bounds unless you align with white-supremacy.
Nonetheless, somewhere in between (and thankfully for the large majority!) there are incredibly thoughtful, constructive and generous words from like-minded people. There’s nothing quite like having your work land for someone. Seeing it land for thousands of people is something else entirely. It’s even a little overwhelming, actually, for someone who isn’t very comfortable in large groups or in much company at all, in fact.
That little video has also brought over a hundred new readers here — if you are among them, welcome!! I’m glad you found your way to this imaginal Fig Tree, and hope you will find these weekly writings soulfully and intellectually nourishing. [Please note: my weekly essays are usually for the paid community. A free subscription will give you access to the monthly newsletters at the start of the month. I have taken the paywall off this post as it is in response to a public video and would like my thoughts to be accessible to everyone.]
The video itself was simple — short clips I filmed during my research visits to the Belgrade National Museum and the Vinča archaeological site last month. I paired it with a few lines about what we now know of the Vinča culture, an ancient European civilisation that existed along the Danube River more than 7,000 years ago. These Neolithic peoples were peaceful, matristic, spiritually rich and strikingly sophisticated — with no sign of warfare for nearly two millennia.
It was never meant to be provocative. But it seems the idea that there was once an ancient European civilisation not based on conquest or dominance is enough to set off a culture war.
So I’d like to respond to some of the primary reflections, and will do so here so I can expand a bit more than I can in the comments — I do try my best at answering all of them (unless they’re rude and inappropriate).
For me, this work has never been about idealising the past or claiming cultural superiority. It's about questioning the dominant story we've been told: notably, that history only begins with violence, hierarchy and empire. The archaeological and mythological records says otherwise. And I think people are hungry for that. We’re hungry to remember that different ways of living have existed — and could exist again.
It’s about expanding the frame. About asking what else might have been possible, and still might be. What stories have we overlooked? What kinds of civilisations have existed that don’t fit neatly into the dominant historical narrative of endless war, hierarchy and extraction?
This is where imagination becomes not just useful, but essential.
Imagination is not just where we invent — it's where we remember, re-see and reconfigure. William Blake wrote: ‘What is now proved was once only imagined.’1 In the Sufi tradition, the heart is considered the seat of the imagination — a place where image and meaning converge, and where inner vision becomes a way of knowing. To access imagination is, in this view, to access deeper compassion and understanding. Not fantasy, but a kind of ethical seeing.
The French philosopher Henry Corbin saw the imagination as a vital organ of perception — a faculty that allows us to access the mundus imaginalis, the real and autonomous realm between spirit and matter where meaning takes form. ‘The faculty of the imagination is not the faculty of forming images,’ he insisted, ‘but of perceiving the reality of what is seen in vision.’2 His work, and that of thinkers like Tom Cheetham (here’s his mighty Substack), calls us to restore imagination to its rightful place: not as a childish escape, but as a mode of perception essential to spiritual and cultural renewal.
Romantic thinkers like Coleridge and Emerson similarly insisted that imagination was a bridge between the known and what’s possible. For Coleridge, imagination was the unifying power of the soul: ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’3 It was perception. It was responsibility. It was how we attuned to the soul of the world.
So when I speak of ancient goddess figurines, peaceful cultures, or alternative visions of history, I’m not asking anyone to suspend reality. I’m asking us to expand it. Because without imagination, we can’t begin to see what else might be possible — politically, spiritually, or relationally.
It has been deeply invigorating to get into discussions and debates. I find them constructive and informative. And I just love to see how this subject catalyses so much response in us, and hearing so many people’s thoughts. It’s our origins we’re trying to grasp here, after all! And how can we know who we are if we don’t know where we came from? There’s much at stake.
As a mythologist and an independent scholar of prehistory and ancient religion, I don’t aim to be inflammatory or romantic in my approach to our deep past. But I do interpret it through a mythopoetic lens, because my primary loyalty is to imagination.
This does NOT mean we can rely on fantasy and call it fact. Apprenticing ourselves to imagination requires creative capacity as much as it does intellectual rigour. My approach to the study of our origins is interdisciplinary; it meets at the intersection of history, anthropology, mythology and folklore, and brings in imagination as a vital ingredient that is devastatingly sidelined in the overly-rational western psyche.
Contrary to popular belief, imagination means seeing things as they are, not as we want them to be. This is because imagination is actually a way of seeing. To invoke imagination is to draw on the entirety of who we are. It is to open all the doors of our perception and all our sense experience. And it requires us to respond to life with the fullness of who we are.
It is not make-believe. It is beyond belief altogether. It is direct sense-experience of the living world, ancestral memory, and what writer P. L. Travers called the fund of ancient knowledge that lives in our very bloodstream.
Imaginative capacity allows for compassion, for kindness. If we can open ourselves to the experiences of others, we are more likely to access empathy. And tolerance. Values so necessary in today’s fragmented socio-political climate.
Perhaps it is unrealistic to think I can get away with writing about these topics without being narrowed down into one category or another. After all, without imagination, that’s what we do. We compartmentalise and attempt to fit everything into neat categories so we know how to behave.
Letting imagination guide us doesn’t mean losing clarity — it means making space for what doesn’t fit the script. I wonder what kind of culture we could build if we valued that kind of space.
Thanks, as ever, for being here! We’ll get back to the Encounters with the Deep Past series next week, and the rest of my conversation with the resident archaeologist at the Vinča site.
Until then! xo
If you’d like to explore this further, I’ve written a whole essay series on imagination — including its spiritual, philosophical, and cross-cultural dimensions. You can find that below.
And scroll all the way down for the video (I particularly recommend the spirited agora that is the comment section!)
The Lost Language of Imagination
This article is part of my series The Lost Language of Imagination tracking imagination through human history, from the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic, into the poetics of Islamic mysticism, the shamanistic nature of the British Romantic era, and the poetry of Spanish Surrealism.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93).
Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal (1972).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817).
Congratulations Gabi, so wonderful that your work and words can interconnect so many of us, through the past and into the future. Interesting that the imaginal realm is where we can all encounter (without necessarily, a programed persona) and maybe exactly where a return to real humanity can occur right now in our polarized world. In the imaginal past, present and future encounter if we open to them. A real healing process for humanity. Thanks once again. `
Gabriella- you captured my imagination years ago (Instagram says April 2020) and have continued to inspire me! Listening to your weekly Substack with my morning tea has become a most anticipated ritual for me. Thank you! Also, as an aside—The Star by Leonara Carrington has been the screensaver on my phone for over a year.