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The
Alphabet Versus The Goddess
The Conflict Between Word & Image
By Leonard Shlain Preface
The thesis of this book occurred to me while
I was on a tour of Mediterranean archaeological sites in 1991.
Our group had the good fortune to have for its guide a
knowledgeable University of Athens professor. At nearly every
Greek site we visited, she patiently explained that the shrines
we stood before had originally been consecrated to a female
deity. And, later, for unknown reasons, unknown persons
reconsecrated them to a male one.
We then traveled to Crete to wander among the
impressive remains of Knossos. Elegant palace murals depicted
festive court women, girl acrobats, and snake-holding
priestesses--mute evidence of women's seemingly high status in
Bronze Age Minoan culture.
The trip ended at Ephesus on the Anatolian
coast--the site of the ruins of the Temple of Artemis, the
largest shrine to a female deity in the Western world. Until
Christian authorities closed it in the late fourth century, a
woman (or a man) could officially worship a goddess and
priestesses could officially perform major sacraments. As our
group contemplated these facts, our guide told the legend of
Jesus' mother, Mary, coming to Ephesus to die. The guide then
pointed out the hillside on which Mary's remains were purported
to have been buried.
On the long bus ride back to the airport, I
asked myself why Mary would have chosen a place sacred to a
"pagan" goddess as her final resting place. Even if
the legend was a fiction, why did it gain credence? This led me
to ponder a larger question hovering over the entire trip--what
caused the disappearance of goddesses from the ancient Western
world?
There is overwhelming archaeological and
historical evidence that during a long period of prehistory and
early history both men and women worshiped goddesses, women
functioned as chief priests, and property commonly passed
through the mother's lineage. What in culture changed to cause
leaders in all Western religions to condemn goddess worship? Why
were women forbidden o conduct a single significant sacrament in
these religions? And why did property begin to pass only through
the father's line? What event in human history could have been
so pervasive and immense that it literally changed the sex of
God?
I was familiar with the current, most
commonly accepted explanation: just before recorded history
began, invading horsemen sweeping down from the north imposed
their sky gods and virile ethics on the peaceful goddess
cultures they vanquished. Somehow, this answer seemed to me
inadequate to explain a worldwide social phenomenon that
occurred everywhere civilizations emerged and which took a
millennium to unfold.
My Mediterranean journey coincided with the
publication of my first book, Art & Physics: Parallel
Visions in Space, Time, and Light, which put forth the idea
that innovations in art prefigure major discoveries in physics.
Art and physics are two different languages; the artist uses
image and metaphor; the physicist uses numbers and equations. To
sharpen the ideas I put forth in Art & Physics, I had
immersed myself in the study of how different communication
media affect society.
While on that bus ride, and perhaps because
of my heightened interest in how we communicate, I was struck by
the thought that the demise of the Goddess, the plunge in
women's status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and misogyny
occurred around the time that people were learning how to read
and write. Perhaps there was something in the way people
acquired this new skill that changed the brain's actual
structure. We know that in the developing brain of a child,
differing kinds of learning will strengthen some neuronal
pathways and weaken others.
Extrapolating the experience of an individual
to a culture, I hypothesized that when a critical mass of people
within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy,
left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense
of tight hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the
status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship.
The more more I turned this idea over in my
mind the more correlations appeared. Like a dog worrying a bone,
I found this connection compelling and could not let it go until
I had superimposed it on many different historical periods and
across cultural divides. The book that you now hold in your hand
is the result of my teeth-gripping, head-shaking, magnificent
obsession.
By profession, I am a surgeon. I head a
department at my medical center and I am an associate professor
of surgery at a medical school. As a vascular surgeon operating
on carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain, I have led
the opportunity to observe firsthand the profoundly different
function performed by each of the brain's hemispheres. My unique
perspective led me to propose a neuroanatomical hypothesis to
explain why goddesses and priestesses disappeared from Western
religions.
My hypothesis will ask readers to reconsider
many closely held beliefs and open themselves up to entirely new
ways of looking at familiar events. in an effort to prevent
factual errors from detracting from my ideas, I enlisted many
experts to help me along the way, and the manuscript continually
became smoother and finer as it sifted through the collective
sieve of their multiple intelligences.
Because there is patriarchy even in
non-alphabetic Easter cultures, I felt compelled to make a brief
detour into their history to see if it would fit within the
framework of my thesis. The result is a book covering many
centuries and many belief systems, a few of which,
unfortunately, received short shrift. My mission was to present
my reasoning in a manageable space while providing a panoramic
view of the human condition. I am aware that numerous other
respected explanations have been given for the dramatic events I
recount. I could not in this book present accounts of all other
historical theories, and chose to focus on the relationship
between literacy and patriarchy.
I am by nature a storyteller. I have tried to
make this book a lively read devoid of technical jargon. I had
to balance this goal with my love for the luxuriant diversity of
English. at times, I could not restrain myself from trying to
rescue a few of my favorite words from what I fear may be their
impending extinction due to neglect. Therefore, in the following
pages t the reader may occasionally sight an unfamiliar member
of an endangered species of the English language. I as the
reader's indulgence.
As I sit here on a beautiful spring day
thumbing through the freshly printed hefty cube of manuscript
that sits upon my desktop, I realize that my part in this
engaging, maddening, wonderful, complicated, exciting writing
project is complete. Now it is your truth. Have a good read.
Leornard Shlain
Mill Valley, California, 1998
Source:
The
Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (1998) by Leonard Shlain |
