May 22, 2018 • 48 mins
What happened to the worship of goddesses? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore Leonard Shlain’s hypothesis from his 1998 book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” in which the author argues that the brain-altering power of written language unbalanced human civilization in favor of misogyny, tyranny and the worship of abstract, masculine gods.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe,
quick question here, who is your favorite goddess? Oh? Man, Well,
it depends on if you ask me while I've just
(00:25):
been listening to some some Stevie Nicks jams. If I'm
going to go into the Fleetwood Mac kind of Rhiannon territory. Uh.
But if not, I think I'm going to stick with
something that. Actually I wonder if there's a linguistic relationship
between Rhiannon and the one I'm about to talk about,
because it's kind of a cognate the Sumerian goddess in Anna.
(00:45):
You're familiar with in Anna, but she's the one who
rings like a bell through the night. No, no, no,
that's also Rhiannon. But in Nana does sort of take
to the sky like a bird in flight, and I
don't maybe sometimes she promises you haven't. She is definitely
the darkness and she rules her life like a fine skylark.
But let's not get sidetracked. In Nana has hymns of
her own that we can sing and I think we
(01:05):
actually should read some in a second here. So in
Nana is a Sumerian goddess. She is also known as
the Acadian Ishtar. I think that they're This is believed
to be the same goddess, essentially across a different stream
of tradition, and the deep history of the Mesopotamian goddess
has lots of different things associated with it. So in
some sense, Nana is the goddess of the storehouse, meaning
(01:29):
that she rules over the stores of things like dates
and meat and grain. But she's also a goddess of
fertility and sex and war and slaughter. So she's got
all of this interesting stuff gathered up under her feathers.
I don't know why I said feathers. I don't think
she's a bird under her dark wings. That's a different
that's a different song. But it's interesting because all the
(01:51):
things that she is encompassing here. Um, this, this is
the domains that we would cover in a vast pantheon
of gods and goddess is from other traditions, all wrapped
up into one. Yeah, And to give a sense of
the power of Ananna, I if Robert, if you will comply,
I think we should have a reading of some excellent
ancient texts. Let's do it trivia question. In fact, I
(02:13):
didn't know this until this episode. Who do who do
you think is the earliest named author in all of
world literature? M hmmm, well it certainly it would probably
tie to this time period, but I had no idea
who the individual would be. Well, very often we find
ancient texts and carvings things, you know, marks made in
(02:33):
clay and cune of form and stuff. We don't know
who the author is. It doesn't say like you know,
Jeff wrote this clay tablet inscription. But a strong contender
for the title of the earliest named author in all
of world literature is in Headuwana, a twenty third century
b c. E. Mesopotamian high priestess and poet twenty third
(02:55):
century b c. Forty three hundred years ago. This priestess
and poet she was the daughter of the Akkadian king
Sargon the Great, and she's named as the author of
a collection of hymns and poems, many of which are
devoted to the praise of the Sumerian goddess in Hannah.
And I think we should read some selections from Inhduanas
(03:18):
him the Exultation of Anna. And this is from a
translation that I found on the electronic text Corpus of
Sumerian Literature based out of the University of Oxford. Now
the poem is way too long to read in its entirety,
but I put together some abridged selections. So here we go.
On the Exultation of Anna, Lady of all the divine powers,
(03:38):
resplendent light, righteous woman, clothed in radiance, beloved of On
and Rak, Mistress of Heaven, with the great pectoral jewels.
She loves the good head dress, befitting the office of
ain priestess. Like a dragon, you have deposited venom on
the foreign lands, Lady who rides upon a beast whose
(03:58):
words are spoken at the holy command of On the
great rights are yours? Who can fathom them? Destroyer of
the foreign lands, you confer strength on the storm, beloved
of Inlil. You have made awesome terror way upon the land.
Because of you, the threshold of tears is opened, and
people walk along the path of the House of Great
(04:20):
Lamentations in the van of battle. All is struck down
before you. With your strength, My lady, teeth can crush flint.
You charge forward like a charging storm, My lady, the
great an Una gods fly from you to the ruined
mounds like scudding bats. They dare not stand before your
terrible gaze. They dare not confront your terrible countenance. Who
(04:43):
can cool your raging heart? Your malevolent anger is too
great to cool, Lady Supreme over the foreign lands, who
can take anything from your province. Blood is poured into
their rivers because of you, and their people must drink it.
And then there's a section that's talking about if a
city has not acknowledged itself to be hers, if the
city doesn't say I belong to an Anna. Quote, it's
(05:06):
a woman no longer speaks affectionately with her husband at
dead of night. She no longer takes counsel with him,
and she no longer reveals to him the pure thoughts
of her heart. I in head to Anna, will recite
a prayer to you. To you Holy in Anna, I
shall give free vent to my tears like sweet beer.
(05:26):
Be it known that you are lofty as the heavens.
Be it known that you were broad as the earth.
Be it known that you destroy the rebel lands. Be
it known that you roar at the foreign lands. Be
it known that you crush heads. Be it known that
you devour corpses like a dog. Be it known that
your gaze is terrible. Be it known that you lift
your terrible gaze. Be it known that you have flashing eyes.
(05:50):
Be it known that you are unshakable and unyielding. Be
it known that you always stand triumphant. The light was
sweet for her, Delight extended over her. She was full
of fairest beauty, like the light of the rising moon.
She exuded delight. Robert, how would you even begin to
characterize this awesome mixture of brutal, merciless conquest and all
(06:12):
these statements about radiants and beauty. Oh, I mean, well,
but she's not to be trifled with, and she's really
on on on par with the sun in terms of
just beautiful, radiant. But but but also with all this
destructive potential. I think it's fun. It talks about delight.
This is a poem with delight in it. And also
they will make you drink the blood. Yeah, I mean
(06:35):
that The best I can think is the sun. It
is delightful to stand in the sun, but you will
and can be burned by the sun as well. I
mean it is, there's just a primal and vital energy
to her. Now. She in many ways I think here
is described as having the qualities of a storm god
like Baal or mar Duke or Yahwe or Zeus or
thor you know, these these storm war gods where the
(06:58):
sky weather deity tends to be so ceated with conquest
and power and killing um. But she's also embodied, as
you know, resplendence and delight, and she has all these
other qualities we see in in other stories about her.
That she's associated with stores of grain that are necessary
for survival, that she's associated with sex and fertility and happiness.
(07:19):
And so how does it end up that you've got
this one deity who's got all these different qualities gathered
underneath her. Yeah, and then what is taken away from
her over the centuries to follow. That's a good question,
you know. Uh. In thinking about my own favorite goddess,
my mind instantly turned to Fetis because I've been interested
(07:41):
in mythic sea creatures of late, and we've talked about
the Iliad quite a bit of late. So I I
thought to Thetis, who through really throughout the history of
written language. She's most well known as the mother of Achilles, Uh,
you know, the the nearly invincible warrior of the Iliad.
And she's commonly described as an immortal near it. And
she begot Achilles through her union with the mortal Pelias,
(08:05):
king of the Mermaidans. And to protect her mortal son,
she dipped him by the heel and the river sticks.
And she also commissioned Hephaestus to forge his armor and arms.
And she petitions Zeus himself on her son's behalf. Now,
Thetis never strikes me as as someone you want to
cross or mess with, especially as as far as the
(08:26):
welfare of her son is concerned. She commands a fair
amount of power and influence in the Greek pantheon. And
and she herself as the daughter of the sea god Nereus,
and her brother in law is Poseidon. And yet there
is something reduced about her. Uh. This this this being
that is that that was worshiped as a goddess. Uh
(08:47):
seems to be somewhat diminished in the Iliad and in
other works. It's like she's been reduced to a supporting
role when she once was the star. Yeah, and so
I I researched this a little bit and I can't
ram it ran across a pay per titled The Wrath
of Fetus by Laura M. Slatkin from Columbia University and
was published in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association.
(09:10):
And she points out that in the Iliad, she's quote
a subsidiary deity who is characterized by helplessness and by
impotent grief, and yet she persuades Zeus to set in
motion the in the events of the Iliad, and in
Mighty Achilles invokes her name above all others. He asks
her to pretention Zeus and remind the king of the
(09:31):
gods that she is the one who saved Zeus when
all the other Olympians wanted to bind him, and to
be bound, Slatkin points out, is the doom of a god.
And Thetis does nothing short of saving the cosmos and
maintaining cosmic equilibrium by preventing Zeus from going down like
Zeus's own father Cronus. So that's kind of funny to
(09:51):
suggest that you would be saving the cosmos by saving Zeus,
because like, of what good is Zeus? Zeus is just trash? Yeah,
but it but he's the trash we know, right, You
can imagine a situation was like, oh man, these gods,
gods are crazy, but at least we kind of have
worked out, you know, what their their mad passions are.
We don't need another revolution so that the other Olympians
(10:14):
will rule the roost. I mean, Zeus mostly just does
bad stuff. Yeah, but it's true, it's true. Well, there's something.
It's like it's almost like we make excuses for him
as this like bad tempered, criminal, violent male deity, or
we're just like, oh, boys will be boys. What a rascal?
(10:35):
Are we still talking about mythology or not talking about
current events? No? No, no, I mean I think that well,
I think there's something to be said about that, and
that will tie into today's episode. So fetis were also
told in the writings of the Greek poet pindar Uh
was destined to birth of son more mighty than his father,
and that's why her her original suitors Zeus and Beside,
(10:59):
both abandoned her love and forced her against her will
to marry Immortal instead. Uh So, think of that. There's
tremendous power in thetis, like she was faded to birth
this this child greater than its father. So if she
had born the son of Zeus or Poseidon, that would
have been a rival to the King of the gods. Right,
(11:20):
but the King of the gods. If the King of
the gods has a son who's too powerful, he asked
to fear, he will be dethroned. Right, So maker Mary immortal,
so at least her mighty son will be mighty, and
more or less the mortal realm, and certainly at Kells
is mortal. That's kind of the that's the whole theme,
and this immortal mother and the son that is doomed
to die, and sola Can points out that this was
(11:41):
an established trope because Thetis has a lot in common
with Eos, the god, the goddess of the dawn, and
the mother of Memnon, who we've discussed on the show before,
and the Colossi of Memnon episode. Yeah, the established role
of an immortal mother looking after her mortal son who
is doomed to die, and the Iliagist sticks to Fetus
(12:02):
in this one role, but still invoking the established mythological
role of the old Indo European don goddess. Interesting. So
Thetis was certainly worshiped as a sea goddess in her time.
But this goes beyond the mere limiting of a mighty
deity to a supporting role in the iliot Uh. Slatkin
points out that the Laconian traditions identified her as a
(12:23):
primordial creatrix, so she she is quote not simply a
cosmic force, but the cosmic force. She not only has
power in the sea, but is the generative principle of
the universe. Well, that seems to go along with the
nature of the sea and creation myths, right, Like when
you have the sea, you've got the waters. First, there
is like the darkness and the waters, and then you've
(12:45):
got creation coming out of that. The water is almost
kind of symbolize a primordial chaos from which some kind
of order can be wrought. And you see that in
other creation myths too, like in the Tiamat creation myth
where mar Duke slays Tamat, the sea monster, you know,
the who re presents the water being yeah, and then
uses her body to make the world. So we've already
(13:07):
established this this trend where we see a a often
a primordial like all powerful cosmic goddess who is then
reduced over time made a minor role in a story
of warring men or a or a minor deity that
is that is overpowered by masculine deities. What what happened
(13:30):
and what potentially is still happening in our culture? Yeah,
And on one hand, that kind of male dominant, misogynist
rewriting of cultural ideas and mythology and stuff like that,
it seems so common that you might not even stop
to ask why things are that way, right, I mean,
it just seems like, well, that's always what happens in culture.
(13:51):
You know, men think they're better than women, and they
want to rewrite all of the cultural stories and everything
to downplay women's roles and make themselves feel more important.
And and some people just say, well that, yeah, that's
just how it is. But why wouldn't that be an
interesting thing to have an explanation for why that is
such a trend. And that's what we're gonna be talking
about in today's episode. We're gonna talk about one hypothesis,
(14:13):
one fascinating hypothesis for why this has come to pass.
And this was presented in the book The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess The Conflict between Word and Image by American
surgeon author and inventor Leonard Schlaine, who lived n seven
through two thousand and nine. Yeah, so, in the late
nineties when this book was written, Schlaine was the chief
(14:36):
of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco,
and apparently he worked at least to some degree in
performing surgeries on the arteries supplying blood to the hemispheres
of the brain. And just a fun bit of trivia
that really has nothing to do with our episode today,
but his daughter Kimberly is married to the actor Albert Brooks,
(14:56):
and his daughter Tiffany as a noted filmmaker and founded
the Webby Awards. Stuff About Your Mind incidentally, is a
Webby Award winning podcast. I don't see that as a
conflict of interest, but I just thought I pointed out
but wait a minute, Albert Brooks, Hanks Scorpio, Yeah, Hank
Scorpio himself is connected to this episode. Now, before we
lay out sh Lane's central claim and discuss some of
(15:17):
his arguments, I definitely want to say that this is
an idea we're discussing because it's interesting and because it
raises questions worth investigating, and not because we're endorsing it
as correct. I'd say this is going to be more
in in bicameral mind kind of territory, where this is
a book that brings up a lot of interesting questions,
takes us to a lot of interesting places, but ultimately
(15:37):
we're not going to be saying we think that this
guy has the right idea. And in many cases I
think that I'll go ahead and say that I'm not
convinced by his core thesis, and I've got a lot
of criticisms about his approach to argumentation. But at the
same time, I think a lot of peripheral arguments and
observations that come up in this book merrit individual analysis, right.
(15:57):
And then he's using he to build this hypothesis. He's
using uh, he's using science, and he's using history. He's
using a number of just fascinating cultural examples. So he
is uh. Even if we ultimately are not won over
by the hypothesis, uh, he supports it with so much
fascinating information, and it really does force you to at
(16:19):
least re examine some of these things that we've taken
for for granted, like just the absence of or that,
for the most part, the absence of goddesses from our
our our major world religions. Okay, so let's start with
Schlane's central claim and then back up and and run
through his argument. What do we have a quote here
that will help us get to the heart of Schlane's
claim from the beginning? We do. We have at least
(16:40):
a couple of quotes here, and and certainly he was
he was a great writer, so his words capture at best,
he writes quote, there exists ample evidence that any society
acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part,
these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious
of fact of literacy has gone largely unnoticed. Writing subliminally
(17:04):
fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially
it's alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and within them women's
power in the culture. WHOA. Now, that is a far
reaching and radical hypothesis and something that, if it were true,
would have profound implications for the whole world. Indeed, and
(17:25):
that's that's kind of the heart of his hypothesis here. Yeah,
So whenever you've got these big kind of hypotheses like this, uh,
radical claims about something very fundamental about like say, the
role of gender egalitarianism or the lack thereof in the world,
and explaining it through something as widespread as the idea
of literacy. You definitely it makes your ears prick up right,
(17:47):
you know, you want to know what this was about.
I've got another quote that expresses part of the core
of his idea. It's quote, literacy has promoted the subjugation
of women by men throughout all but the very recent
history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall
with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word. Another nice
(18:09):
summary from from later in the book is quote the alphabet,
through its emphasis on linearity and sequence, caused the left
side of the brain of those who learned it to hypertrophy,
resulting in a marked cerebral dominance of one lobe over
the other. Metaphorically, the mind listed to one side as
one carrying an unevenly distributed load. So we're talking about
(18:32):
like a major, lasting influence on the way the human
brain works. Yeah. Now, Schlan talks. He tells a story
in his book, and he talks about how he first
began to form this thesis when he was touring Greece
with this great antiquities guide who kept going to sit
after sight and explaining, okay, what was once here was
(18:54):
a shrine to a goddess, female goddess, but then later
it was rededicated to a male god. It's kind of
an odd pattern to just see happening over and over
in one place after another. If the if the tendency
is generally toward male dominance in the culture and patriarchy
and misogyny, why did you have all these female goddesses
(19:15):
to begin with, and why did the changeover in power
to male dominated pantheon's occur? And so Schlan started to
wonder what what would cause all that? Yeah, because basically
we do have a wealth of goddesses in the polytheistic tradition,
but we see most of them fall out of favor
over time. They're either reduced to minor deities or demi gods,
(19:36):
or or certainly they are just the the feminine at best. Really,
they're the feminine aspect of the same god that also
has a masculine aspect as well, while the male gods
continue to climb up the hierarchy. Because really, outside of
Hindu Shaktism, which focuses on the feminine aspects of the
gods and the cosmos. Can you think of any widespread
goddess movements outside of WICCA and the neo pagan goddess
(19:58):
movement that is also rather modern. Well, the key is widespread.
If you go into beliefs held by smaller numbers of people,
I think you'll get into all kinds of things with
with female deities and and even uh, you know, matriarchal
kinds of pantheons. But the big religions of the world,
you know, you've really just got a few that are
representing the vast majority of humankind, right, and those tend
(20:20):
to be the big monotheisms. And then you've also got
Hinduism and Buddhism, right. So as a sort of an
inform formal survey of sorts, I reached out to the
folks and the discussion module which is which is the
official stuff to Blow your Mind Facebook group, which you
should all join if you want to engage in meaningful
conversation with other listeners and and also your hosts here.
(20:43):
But I said, hey, what are what are some goddesses
or divine females that are displayed in your homes? Uh?
And I and I also open this up to sort
of hyper real religious examples as well, which will say so,
just a quick list of some of the uh goddesses
that were mentioned. I this wonder Woman, the Virgin Mary
(21:04):
Desire of the Endless, which is a character from the
Sandman comic book. Um, somebody mentioned sort of an abstract
feminist goddess tattoo, uh Freya, Princess Leiah Calisi from Game
of Thrones, um Mucha's Claire de Lune painting. And also
Marlene Dietrich who was an actor, right, yeah, uh Tara.
(21:27):
In fact, here is a quote from listeners sorry, who says,
I have several white Taras in my house. She's a
Tibetan Buddhist deity thought to help curb ego driven thoughts
and action. So I thought this was interesting beginning. I
had to ask because I was looking around my own
living room and I realized, well, we have several depictions
of various gods, but they are all masculine. Why do
(21:49):
I not have any images of a goddess in here
as well? I'm gonna have to fix that. Yeah, what's
wrong with your living room? Man? I know I've got
I've got I've got to balance it. And that brings
us back to uh to Schlane's are here, how did
this unbalancing occur? Yes, And another side of the theory,
of course, would be how come we see goddesses diminished
throughout the world for the last few thousand years? But
(22:10):
now you've got all kinds of people who say, yeah,
I've got wonder woman, she's a goddess. Where did that
come from? She Len has an answer for that too, Again,
not necessarily something we're going to agree with him on,
but it's an interesting thing to consider. All right. Well,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
we come back. We will jump into she Lene's hypothesis.
Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. Now we're
about to get into Leonard Slaine's hypothesis about what happened
(22:33):
with the decline of female lead pantheons of goddess based
religions and lead to male dominated religious ideas and cultures
in history. And so he's got a framework that he
uses throughout the book to sort of describe these associated
ideas of types of thinking, sort of perceptual modes, hemispheres
(22:54):
of the brain, and a gender identity that are all
sort of grouped together into these hemispheres, and I think
this grouping could be kind of problematic. We'll talk about it.
But what is his basic basic division of the two
perceptual modes. All right, so you have the feminine outlook,
which is holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and uh and it involves
(23:15):
concrete worldviews. So this is sort of the perceptual mode
that sees sees things by gestalt, sees everything at once,
that goes by intuition, that works uh more with concrete
images and objects very much bound in image. And then
you have the masculine outlook, which is linear, sequential, reductionist,
(23:36):
and abstract in its worldview. Okay, so this is more
based on non visual information and uh, sequential analysis of things. Yeah,
the feminine is, hey, give me a picture, and then
the masculine outlook is I'd rather have those thousand words. Now,
I'm sure a lot of people you're listening to this
and saying, like, I'm not loving the like gender associations
(24:00):
there with the different types of points of view, And
I think that's a fair point to make. Slain himself
is aware of the fact that these generalizations could be problematic,
and he writes, quote every individual is generously endowed with
all the features of both, right. Yeah. He frequently brings
up the Yen yang Uh symbol from Taoism as as
(24:22):
the idea of balance between the two. Yeah. So Slain
is obviously aware of the fact that these perceptual modes
do not always correspond to the literal divisions of biological
sex or of gender identity. But nevertheless he uses these
concepts by by these terms male and female to describe them,
and I think sometimes throughout the book this leads to
(24:44):
trouble because it continually suggests a blurring of the distinction
between for example, the quote male perceptual mode, which female
primates are perfectly capable of using and even favoring and
confusing that perceptual mode with literal males of the species.
So this, I think, this book is, for one thing,
going to be vulnerable to a lot of criticisms of
(25:05):
over generalization with all kinds of things, actually, but gender
is going to be one of them. Yes, So let's
let's talk about some of the the key sources that
ground his idea. Because he didn't you know, he's very
upfront about this. He didn't just dream all of this up.
He was basing Uh, he's basing it on the foundation
established by other thinkers. Okay, so he points to a
(25:29):
few of these. First of all, there's Robert Logan's the
Alphabet Effect, from which states that quote, a medium of
communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission
of information, but rather an active force in creating new
social patterns and new perceptual realities. There's an intrinsic impact
to the use of an alphabet, and the literate worldview
(25:50):
is different from one where information comes exclusively via oral communication. Okay,
this sounds very parallel to another author that he quotes frequently,
which is Marshall McLuhan. Uh. The the idea that the
medium is the message, right in some way, that the
medium through which information is conveyed actually does change the
way your brain works. Yeah, I mean I instantly think
(26:13):
of the you know, the classic bit of writing advice,
or I guess just storytelling advice in general, show don't
tell you know it is that is in effect image
versus word. But in any case, when you're doing that
as a writer, you're using words. True. Yeah, so it
does get get a little complicated. He also points to
(26:33):
the work of anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, who touches on
the downside of the power of literacy that it brought
with it hierarchical societies and slavery. So while one might
think to the current state of Western women and credit
their rising status to higher levels of education, Schlane argues
based on this that that men and women lived in
(26:53):
greater balance in nonliterate agricultural societies, and that we see
some examples of this in preliterately at grarians cultures, um
you know, from from relatively recent times. Okay, So his
proposition here is that we might actually be very surprised
at how much gender egalitarianism we would find if we
went back in history at times before the written word. Right.
(27:17):
He says that quote images are primarily mental reproductions of
the central world of vision. So he points out that
the brain uses the human brain uses wholeness, uh, simultaneity
and synthesis to observe the world and to gain meaning
from alphabetic writing, the brain is forced to depend on
sequence analysis and abstraction. In other words, the way that
(27:38):
you take in uh, you know, an open field is
different from the way you read a paragraph about what
that open field looks like. And so he's saying that
this ultimately shapes the mind of men and women in
a way that leads to more patriarchy and culture. Yeah,
he says, it affects the inner, outer, and supernatural realms
of the mind. And uh, yeah, he points back to
(28:00):
a time when the goddess, in all her forms, was
the principal deity. And there's that. There's this wonderful quote
that I keep coming back to. Uh. From the book,
he says, from the outer rim of history. We begin
to learn her name Insumer. She was in Nanna in Egypt.
She was Isis in Canaan. Her name was Ashera in Syria.
She was known as as Tarta in Greece Demeter, and
(28:24):
in Cyprus Aphrodite. Whatever her supplicants called her, they all
recognized her as the creatrix of life, nurturer of young,
protector of children, and the source of milk, herds, vegetables,
and grain. Since she presided over the great mystery of birth,
people of this period presumed she must also hold sway
over that great bedevil er of human thought, death. I
(28:48):
brought you into this world, I can take you out.
It makes sense, right, Yeah, And again this this this
gets back to our just our ideas of these primordial
feminine deities. Meanwhile, uh, these his deities, he says, they
tended to have male consorts who, in these concerts might
be gods of the hunt, you know, representing the the
(29:09):
the the hunter gatherer balance of life. But he was
generally a temporary lover to be cast aside, or if
not that, a son, So she was not. It wasn't
even like a king and queen scenario. So when does
Slane propose that this transition from the female empowering female
deity lead religions transitioned into the more patriarchal, male dominated religions. Well,
(29:33):
he points out that around fIF BC you had hundreds
of goddess based religions enveloping the Mediterranean basin. But by
the fifth century CE you these have been almost completely eradicated,
and by that time women were prohibited from he says,
conducting a single major Western sacrament. So something is occurring
(29:54):
during this time that that that depletes the power of
the goddess and allows the masculine gods and ultimately the
the male abstrac abstraction of the one God in Abrahamic
tradition to rise so obviously it's not going to be
so easy to prove that the cause of this change
was the alphabet literacy. So how's he going to go
(30:15):
about it? Well, he argues that this is ultimately left
to quote the court of what archaeologists call competitive plausibility. Yeah,
and this is something that the historical sciences often have
to resort to. Write. You're a historian, you're an archaeologist.
You can't run the experiment of replaying history to figure
out what happened. So you have to sort of construct
a model and see what model best fits the existing evidence,
(30:39):
and then even more important than that, what accommodates new
evidence that gets discovered. Yeah. So, first of all, in
the book, Schlane spends a lot of time assembling an
overview of human evolution with a focus on gender relations.
So he takes us from the scent dependent ground to
the vision dependent life in the trees. He takes us
from packs of male chimps feasting on their kills and
(31:01):
sharing with only females and heat, to the emergence of
estrus free humans who are thus unshackled from the alpha
male structure. Uh human physiology, he points out, increasingly ends
up demanding fragile young and a birthing process that that
incapacitates the female. Prolonged childhood ends up meaning that the
(31:23):
females can't participate in the hunt as much and often
have to stay closer to home, and they need support
from the males and from each other. And then on
top of that, the infant's brain is incomplete. Uh, and
language comes in to fill the gaps, and it also
enables learning lessons to take place outside of genetic change.
Now that's an interesting idea that the fact that humans
(31:46):
are born with maybe fewer instincts about how to behave
properly and and fill their role within the human society
than other social animals come born with. And there's but
that humans have this this card they can play, which
is the language card. You can transmit a lot of
information from one generation to the next through speech. Quote,
(32:06):
using speech, one number of a clan learning a lesson
that would enhance survival could pass it on to the
others within hours instead of eons. And he said, this
this is another bit that I just absolutely love. He says,
the new corporate brain called culture hovered like a friendly
poltergeist over each tribe of hunter gatherers. Isn't it funny
that culture can be like a person. It's almost like
(32:28):
a person who's not there. It's the invisible queen of
your society, right, That culture is a thing that has preferences.
It's a thing that tells you what to do and
how to act. It's a thing that tells you what's
beautiful and what's not, what's tasty and what's not. It's
almost sort of like you have this invisible parent who's
a corporeal parent is assembled from the parts of many
(32:51):
other parents that came in generations before. Yeah, and it's uh.
He points out that all this probably begins as gesture
based communication, uh, you know, as well as um the
visual features of the faith, various expressions. But then these
we end up incorporating vocal communication to free up those
hands and the eyes because if you're only speaking in
(33:13):
sign language, you can't it diminishes your ability to work
a tool. At the same time, you have to look
at the other person. But if you as you can
communicate in the dark, Yeah, it also gives you the
chance the ability to do it in the dark. So
uh language, vocal language begins to take over. Uh. And
it's not only the relay of information here, but complex
(33:34):
discussion and strategy. All of that becomes possible as well,
and so you end up having the situation where the
hunter gatherer divide grows for these early humans, and there
are ramifications on the way that males and females both
experience the world, he argues. He says that you know,
hunting demands cold bloodedness, tinged with cruelty, but if you're
(33:55):
a nurture that requires an emotional generosity combined with warmth, uh,
we see this emergence of of different roles, which leads
males and females to respond differently emotionally to the same stimuli,
different worldviews, different ways of surviving, essentially redesigning the human
nervous system in the process. So he's saying that even
though men and women are born with these kind of
(34:17):
very potent brains that could do whatever they want, the
roles that they tend to assume within the group force
them to favor one kind of emotional state versus the other.
You can have the state that's usually assumed by the males,
which is this cold, cruel hunter state of mind, or
you can have this state that's more often assumed by
the females, which is the intuitive, emotional, nurturing and educating
(34:39):
side right. And of course, all this takes place within
a bilobed brain, something that all vertebrates, beginning with fish,
actually possess. The human brain lobes look symmetrical, but they're
functionally different, what we call hemispheric lateralization, and other vertebrates
have this as well, but it's most striking in humans.
And then you have in between all of this, you
(35:01):
have the neuronal fibers that are called the corpus colossum,
the connect and integrate the two lobes. Each controls the
movement of the opposite side. They work in close congress
with each other. And we've discussed a lot of this
on the show before. With all things brain region related,
we've learned a lot about function through dysfunctions, specifically injury
and disease affecting specific regions of the brain, and in
(35:24):
recent decades we've learned even more through magnetic stimulation. But
essentially it comes down to this divide right brain, you
have nonverbal emotional states, dream, spirituality, music, balance, altered states
of consciousness, metaphor and holistic views and just a quick
reminder that Julian Jaynes and his bi cameral mind hypothesis, Uh,
(35:46):
this is the source of the voices. And then with
the left brain, we have doing, we have action, we
have language, and we have the the complex meshing of
competing emotions. And he describes metaphor as quote the right
brains unique contribution to the left brains language capability. Now,
if we're to recall some of the interesting thoughts of
(36:07):
Julian James, James had this whole idea that our very
consciousness itself is built on the possibility of metaphor. I
don't know if he's correct about that, but it's certainly
true that metaphor undergird's our entire structure of language. There
are very few ways of talking that do not involve metaphors.
In fact, most of our abstract words are actually based
(36:29):
off of metaphors for concrete tasks. Yeah, Slaine. He argues
that metaphors essentially bring plasticity to language, and they translate
emotion into language, birthing poetry, mythology, and more. And then
he to get back to the gender divide here. He
says that in in females and again I want to
remind everybody that this is a um this is a
(36:50):
book from the nineties, so just bear than in mind
of on the science here. But but he argued that
that in females we see ten to thirty three pc
more neuronal fibers in the forward part of the corpus colossum,
and that means greater integration, better communication of emotions, increased
global awareness, field perception, and the understanding of offspring moods.
(37:12):
And they're also generally more adept at multitasking. That's the
other part of the argument. Males, on the other hand,
they become more adapted shutting down their feelings for you know,
improved hunting ability. So the fact that there's more tissue
connecting the hemispheres on average and the female brain tends
to mean that the brain has a more balanced approach,
(37:33):
whereas the male brain, if it on average has less
tissue connecting the two hemispheres, it can tend to be
more uh, an isolated kind of left brain approach to things. Right.
But then again, the argument here too is also that
that that male and female brains can ultimately do the
same things, because he points out that in a hunter
gatherer society, each hemisphere of the brain is executing tasks
(37:56):
for which it is best suited. But you still have
to have versatility in case of injury or death. Right,
what happens if the hunter is sick? Uh, then maybe
the the gatherers have to do a little hunting, or
vice versa. So each sex of the human species has
to be able to assume the principal labors of the other.
So he's not saying that only men can be hunters
(38:17):
and only women can be nurtures. He's saying the opposite.
But this cultures are generally arranged so that men do
the hunting tasks and women do the nurturing tasks. And
then he talks of a fair bit about eyeballs. All right,
we will address the eyeball question when we get back.
Thank Okay, we're back. It's time for eyeballs now. I
(38:38):
think this is actually one of the most interesting little
side tangents in the book. Uh. It only takes a
couple of pages, but he puts forward this interesting idea
about the differing role of light sensitive cells called rods
and cones in the retina and how this may have
actually shaped our cognition. I've never read any thoughts along
these lines before, but I thought this was one of
(38:59):
the most interesting actions of the book. So you've got
these different cells in your retina, you've got rods, you've
got cones. And rods are extremely light sensitive, Schlin writes, quote,
like trip wires, they detect the slightest movement in a
visual field, distributed evenly throughout the periphery of each retina.
They see in dim light and appreciate the totality of
(39:19):
the visual field, seeing images as gestalts. So rods are
for kind of all at once. Perception is how you
get a general sense of a field of vision. Cones, meanwhile,
are concentrated densely in the middle of the retina, called
the macula. And cones have two main functions. One of
them is that they pick out differences in color, and
(39:40):
the other is that they intensify clarity in the in
the middle of the vision, so he writes, quote, concentrating
on one aspect of reality at a time. Cones view
the visual field as if through a tunnel. Like rods,
Cones report to both hemispheres, but the left hemisphere is
metaphorically best suited to p process their input. So while
(40:01):
you've got rods that are used for this all at
once perception of a general field of vision. Cones are
used for focus analysis and sequential processing. Now, biologically, rods
are older than cones. All vertebrates have rods. Cones are
only possessed in abundance by a few animals. Schlan points
out that cones are mainly present in predatory animals like
(40:24):
predatory predatory birds and predatory mammals, and especially in the
in the human primate um because they allow you to
focus on something and to see where it's going and
to scrutinize. So the cones isolate elements of the field
of vision then look at them one at a time,
and this is better served by the sequential analytic function
(40:44):
of the left part of the brain. So to quote
one of Schlene's most interesting smaller hypotheses in the book, quote,
the focusing ability of the phobious centralis creates the illusion
of time passing because the image is seen within this
new auro circle of the eye can only be processed
one at a time. Because macular vision examined what was
(41:07):
and then moved on to what is, it forced the
emerging human brain to consider the possibility of what might
come next. So Schlan argues that the abundance of cones
in the human eye, paired with left brain analytical thinking,
helped give rise to the human sense of time and
our tendency for mental time travel into the past and future,
(41:29):
something that other animals only have these sort of rare
little inklings of though there are some inklings, and we've
talked about that in the past with birds and other animals. Um.
But yeah, I think that's an interesting thing to consider,
the fact that we've got these eyes that focus on
one thing at a time, and how that affects our
perception of reality. Could that actually generate time as we
(41:51):
know it? Yeah? Yeah, this is this is definitely an
interesting portion of the book. He also talks about hands
a good bit. Yeah. He in that specifically this is
tying in with the predominance of right handedness in human beings. Uh.
He points out to the left hand, controlled by the
right brain, is more protective than the right. This is
the hand that's going to hold a baby. Meanwhile, what's
(42:13):
the right hand doing the attacking hand? Right? Yeah, again,
except in people who are reversed and are of course
left handed. Um. So, in all of this, males come
to embodied death. Females come to embody life, but eventually
men come to identify their own role in reproduction as well.
And again, the female goddess reigns supreme. Is this master
(42:34):
of life and death, realizing when there's a dependency between
the two that I have to kill to eat, I
have to consume life in order in order to live.
And h. Layne writes that the goddess reign supreme and
then the Kurgan culture rides in on its horses and
represses it, replacing her with their sky god. Uh and UH.
What he says is interesting about this in this very
(42:56):
early example is uh, is that in other aces we
see a more primitive of two colliding cultures absorbing the
more advanced culture. So you have got these agricultural, more
technologically advanced societies that are invaded by these horse riding
Kurgan people's, and you would expect them to adopt the
more advanced agricultural technology of the societies they invaded, right,
(43:20):
you know, very much like when the when the Mongols
invade China and then essentially become Chinese culturally. But that's
not what we see here. And of course the question
is why, all right, so Schlaine can't be the first
person to offer a hypothesis on what caused the demise
of goddess culture. Uh. And so I know he referenced,
he references Claude levy Strauss a good bit. Does levy
(43:42):
Strauss have a have an argument that he counters? Yeah?
So the the Levee Strauss argument is that the essentially
bride bartering kicked kicked things off, so men came to
realize that they had a role in reproduction. And then women,
of course can procreate earlier than men, so they become
a commodity, and eventually all femininity is is treated as
(44:04):
such a commodity. But Chlane opposes as he says that
it doesn't explain the quote dramatic zigzagging from masculine to
feminine and then back to masculine principles that occurred before, during,
and after the first five thousand years of agriculture. And
then another argument, you have anthropologist Sherry Ortner who credits
the tendency to align the masculine with culture and the
(44:27):
feminine with nature. This is definitely a tendency you see
in in literature all throughout the ancient world. Yeah, and
what do. What do cultures do? Will they rise up
in the world by advancing their culture, and in doing
so they are mastering nature. They are overpowering nature, and
sometimes the exact language for that is even more severe.
(44:49):
Butch Lane opposed this and says, well, it doesn't account
for the female imagery that is predominant throughout these different mythologies. Meanwhile,
you have Frederick Engels who are us that the goddess
perished due to the rise of private property. Of course
he did, and he argues that this this becomes a
thing as nomadic hunter gatherers. Uh, you know, give way
to agriculture so you can own land, and then it
(45:12):
follows that you can own women. Now, sh Leane opposes this,
neans is that it doesn't explained the fall of the goddess.
He points to the work of William Irwin Thompson and
Jane Jacobs who argue that hunters were so reduced in
status during the agricultural revolution that they turned to conquest
and this led to the fall of goddess cultures, which
I think is an interesting especially an interesting idea, especially
(45:36):
in light of of so many discussions going on in
our culture today about what happens when when roles and
peoples who traditionally felt more empowered, uh feel less empowered.
So the idea here is that you've got all these
people with these hunting instincts, especially predominantly men, with hunting
(45:57):
instincts that are not really very necessary anymore. Like, you know,
we've got plenty of grain, we don't we don't need
to hunt, and in fact, there aren't even all that
many animals around for you to hunt anymore. So what
are you gonna do. Well, maybe you just turn your
hunting instinct on people and you say, I'm going to
become a warrior now instead. Yeah, the rise of the
(46:17):
warrior class. Now. Meanwhile, feminist historian Gerda Learner she blames
the form flames all of this on the formation of
the archaic states. So the idea here is that you had,
through the necessity of centralized power, you end up resurrecting
the role of the alpha male. You need some sort
of decision maker at the heart of it. And Lennon
(46:38):
Learner also argus argues that slavery ties into all of
this because slaves would have been of little use during
in hunter gatherer culture. But when you have agriculture. This
gives slaves value, and so the former hunters they they
turn first people into slaves and then women, specifically into
(47:00):
subservient people. Now, Shelen opposes this. He says that it
doesn't account for the numerous goddess based societies that thrived
during this period. And he says, you know why we're there,
slave owning archaic states built around goddesses then, and so
Slaine argues that, yes, there's a change going on here,
but it's a change coming from within and it all
ties in to the hidden cost of literacy. Okay, well,
(47:23):
I think we should end our first part there, and
in the next episode, we're gonna look at a little
bit of the historical evidence that Slane uses to support
his hypothesis, and we're going to discuss some criticisms of
the argument, both criticisms of reviewers and some critical thoughts
of our own. In the meantime, be sure to head
it over the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership. That's what we will find all
the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, as well
(47:45):
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(48:06):
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dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe,
quick question here, who is your favorite goddess? Oh? Man, Well,
it depends on if you ask me while I've just
(00:25):
been listening to some some Stevie Nicks jams. If I'm
going to go into the Fleetwood Mac kind of Rhiannon territory. Uh.
But if not, I think I'm going to stick with
something that. Actually I wonder if there's a linguistic relationship
between Rhiannon and the one I'm about to talk about,
because it's kind of a cognate the Sumerian goddess in Anna.
(00:45):
You're familiar with in Anna, but she's the one who
rings like a bell through the night. No, no, no,
that's also Rhiannon. But in Nana does sort of take
to the sky like a bird in flight, and I
don't maybe sometimes she promises you haven't. She is definitely
the darkness and she rules her life like a fine skylark.
But let's not get sidetracked. In Nana has hymns of
her own that we can sing and I think we
(01:05):
actually should read some in a second here. So in
Nana is a Sumerian goddess. She is also known as
the Acadian Ishtar. I think that they're This is believed
to be the same goddess, essentially across a different stream
of tradition, and the deep history of the Mesopotamian goddess
has lots of different things associated with it. So in
some sense, Nana is the goddess of the storehouse, meaning
(01:29):
that she rules over the stores of things like dates
and meat and grain. But she's also a goddess of
fertility and sex and war and slaughter. So she's got
all of this interesting stuff gathered up under her feathers.
I don't know why I said feathers. I don't think
she's a bird under her dark wings. That's a different
that's a different song. But it's interesting because all the
(01:51):
things that she is encompassing here. Um, this, this is
the domains that we would cover in a vast pantheon
of gods and goddess is from other traditions, all wrapped
up into one. Yeah, And to give a sense of
the power of Ananna, I if Robert, if you will comply,
I think we should have a reading of some excellent
ancient texts. Let's do it trivia question. In fact, I
(02:13):
didn't know this until this episode. Who do who do
you think is the earliest named author in all of
world literature? M hmmm, well it certainly it would probably
tie to this time period, but I had no idea
who the individual would be. Well, very often we find
ancient texts and carvings things, you know, marks made in
(02:33):
clay and cune of form and stuff. We don't know
who the author is. It doesn't say like you know,
Jeff wrote this clay tablet inscription. But a strong contender
for the title of the earliest named author in all
of world literature is in Headuwana, a twenty third century
b c. E. Mesopotamian high priestess and poet twenty third
(02:55):
century b c. Forty three hundred years ago. This priestess
and poet she was the daughter of the Akkadian king
Sargon the Great, and she's named as the author of
a collection of hymns and poems, many of which are
devoted to the praise of the Sumerian goddess in Hannah.
And I think we should read some selections from Inhduanas
(03:18):
him the Exultation of Anna. And this is from a
translation that I found on the electronic text Corpus of
Sumerian Literature based out of the University of Oxford. Now
the poem is way too long to read in its entirety,
but I put together some abridged selections. So here we go.
On the Exultation of Anna, Lady of all the divine powers,
(03:38):
resplendent light, righteous woman, clothed in radiance, beloved of On
and Rak, Mistress of Heaven, with the great pectoral jewels.
She loves the good head dress, befitting the office of
ain priestess. Like a dragon, you have deposited venom on
the foreign lands, Lady who rides upon a beast whose
(03:58):
words are spoken at the holy command of On the
great rights are yours? Who can fathom them? Destroyer of
the foreign lands, you confer strength on the storm, beloved
of Inlil. You have made awesome terror way upon the land.
Because of you, the threshold of tears is opened, and
people walk along the path of the House of Great
(04:20):
Lamentations in the van of battle. All is struck down
before you. With your strength, My lady, teeth can crush flint.
You charge forward like a charging storm, My lady, the
great an Una gods fly from you to the ruined
mounds like scudding bats. They dare not stand before your
terrible gaze. They dare not confront your terrible countenance. Who
(04:43):
can cool your raging heart? Your malevolent anger is too
great to cool, Lady Supreme over the foreign lands, who
can take anything from your province. Blood is poured into
their rivers because of you, and their people must drink it.
And then there's a section that's talking about if a
city has not acknowledged itself to be hers, if the
city doesn't say I belong to an Anna. Quote, it's
(05:06):
a woman no longer speaks affectionately with her husband at
dead of night. She no longer takes counsel with him,
and she no longer reveals to him the pure thoughts
of her heart. I in head to Anna, will recite
a prayer to you. To you Holy in Anna, I
shall give free vent to my tears like sweet beer.
(05:26):
Be it known that you are lofty as the heavens.
Be it known that you were broad as the earth.
Be it known that you destroy the rebel lands. Be
it known that you roar at the foreign lands. Be
it known that you crush heads. Be it known that
you devour corpses like a dog. Be it known that
your gaze is terrible. Be it known that you lift
your terrible gaze. Be it known that you have flashing eyes.
(05:50):
Be it known that you are unshakable and unyielding. Be
it known that you always stand triumphant. The light was
sweet for her, Delight extended over her. She was full
of fairest beauty, like the light of the rising moon.
She exuded delight. Robert, how would you even begin to
characterize this awesome mixture of brutal, merciless conquest and all
(06:12):
these statements about radiants and beauty. Oh, I mean, well,
but she's not to be trifled with, and she's really
on on on par with the sun in terms of
just beautiful, radiant. But but but also with all this
destructive potential. I think it's fun. It talks about delight.
This is a poem with delight in it. And also
they will make you drink the blood. Yeah, I mean
(06:35):
that The best I can think is the sun. It
is delightful to stand in the sun, but you will
and can be burned by the sun as well. I
mean it is, there's just a primal and vital energy
to her. Now. She in many ways I think here
is described as having the qualities of a storm god
like Baal or mar Duke or Yahwe or Zeus or
thor you know, these these storm war gods where the
(06:58):
sky weather deity tends to be so ceated with conquest
and power and killing um. But she's also embodied, as
you know, resplendence and delight, and she has all these
other qualities we see in in other stories about her.
That she's associated with stores of grain that are necessary
for survival, that she's associated with sex and fertility and happiness.
(07:19):
And so how does it end up that you've got
this one deity who's got all these different qualities gathered
underneath her. Yeah, and then what is taken away from
her over the centuries to follow. That's a good question,
you know. Uh. In thinking about my own favorite goddess,
my mind instantly turned to Fetis because I've been interested
(07:41):
in mythic sea creatures of late, and we've talked about
the Iliad quite a bit of late. So I I
thought to Thetis, who through really throughout the history of
written language. She's most well known as the mother of Achilles, Uh,
you know, the the nearly invincible warrior of the Iliad.
And she's commonly described as an immortal near it. And
she begot Achilles through her union with the mortal Pelias,
(08:05):
king of the Mermaidans. And to protect her mortal son,
she dipped him by the heel and the river sticks.
And she also commissioned Hephaestus to forge his armor and arms.
And she petitions Zeus himself on her son's behalf. Now,
Thetis never strikes me as as someone you want to
cross or mess with, especially as as far as the
(08:26):
welfare of her son is concerned. She commands a fair
amount of power and influence in the Greek pantheon. And
and she herself as the daughter of the sea god Nereus,
and her brother in law is Poseidon. And yet there
is something reduced about her. Uh. This this this being
that is that that was worshiped as a goddess. Uh
(08:47):
seems to be somewhat diminished in the Iliad and in
other works. It's like she's been reduced to a supporting
role when she once was the star. Yeah, and so
I I researched this a little bit and I can't
ram it ran across a pay per titled The Wrath
of Fetus by Laura M. Slatkin from Columbia University and
was published in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association.
(09:10):
And she points out that in the Iliad, she's quote
a subsidiary deity who is characterized by helplessness and by
impotent grief, and yet she persuades Zeus to set in
motion the in the events of the Iliad, and in
Mighty Achilles invokes her name above all others. He asks
her to pretention Zeus and remind the king of the
(09:31):
gods that she is the one who saved Zeus when
all the other Olympians wanted to bind him, and to
be bound, Slatkin points out, is the doom of a god.
And Thetis does nothing short of saving the cosmos and
maintaining cosmic equilibrium by preventing Zeus from going down like
Zeus's own father Cronus. So that's kind of funny to
(09:51):
suggest that you would be saving the cosmos by saving Zeus,
because like, of what good is Zeus? Zeus is just trash? Yeah,
but it but he's the trash we know, right, You
can imagine a situation was like, oh man, these gods,
gods are crazy, but at least we kind of have
worked out, you know, what their their mad passions are.
We don't need another revolution so that the other Olympians
(10:14):
will rule the roost. I mean, Zeus mostly just does
bad stuff. Yeah, but it's true, it's true. Well, there's something.
It's like it's almost like we make excuses for him
as this like bad tempered, criminal, violent male deity, or
we're just like, oh, boys will be boys. What a rascal?
(10:35):
Are we still talking about mythology or not talking about
current events? No? No, no, I mean I think that well,
I think there's something to be said about that, and
that will tie into today's episode. So fetis were also
told in the writings of the Greek poet pindar Uh
was destined to birth of son more mighty than his father,
and that's why her her original suitors Zeus and Beside,
(10:59):
both abandoned her love and forced her against her will
to marry Immortal instead. Uh So, think of that. There's
tremendous power in thetis, like she was faded to birth
this this child greater than its father. So if she
had born the son of Zeus or Poseidon, that would
have been a rival to the King of the gods. Right,
(11:20):
but the King of the gods. If the King of
the gods has a son who's too powerful, he asked
to fear, he will be dethroned. Right, So maker Mary immortal,
so at least her mighty son will be mighty, and
more or less the mortal realm, and certainly at Kells
is mortal. That's kind of the that's the whole theme,
and this immortal mother and the son that is doomed
to die, and sola Can points out that this was
(11:41):
an established trope because Thetis has a lot in common
with Eos, the god, the goddess of the dawn, and
the mother of Memnon, who we've discussed on the show before,
and the Colossi of Memnon episode. Yeah, the established role
of an immortal mother looking after her mortal son who
is doomed to die, and the Iliagist sticks to Fetus
(12:02):
in this one role, but still invoking the established mythological
role of the old Indo European don goddess. Interesting. So
Thetis was certainly worshiped as a sea goddess in her time.
But this goes beyond the mere limiting of a mighty
deity to a supporting role in the iliot Uh. Slatkin
points out that the Laconian traditions identified her as a
(12:23):
primordial creatrix, so she she is quote not simply a
cosmic force, but the cosmic force. She not only has
power in the sea, but is the generative principle of
the universe. Well, that seems to go along with the
nature of the sea and creation myths, right, Like when
you have the sea, you've got the waters. First, there
is like the darkness and the waters, and then you've
(12:45):
got creation coming out of that. The water is almost
kind of symbolize a primordial chaos from which some kind
of order can be wrought. And you see that in
other creation myths too, like in the Tiamat creation myth
where mar Duke slays Tamat, the sea monster, you know,
the who re presents the water being yeah, and then
uses her body to make the world. So we've already
(13:07):
established this this trend where we see a a often
a primordial like all powerful cosmic goddess who is then
reduced over time made a minor role in a story
of warring men or a or a minor deity that
is that is overpowered by masculine deities. What what happened
(13:30):
and what potentially is still happening in our culture? Yeah,
And on one hand, that kind of male dominant, misogynist
rewriting of cultural ideas and mythology and stuff like that,
it seems so common that you might not even stop
to ask why things are that way, right, I mean,
it just seems like, well, that's always what happens in culture.
(13:51):
You know, men think they're better than women, and they
want to rewrite all of the cultural stories and everything
to downplay women's roles and make themselves feel more important.
And and some people just say, well that, yeah, that's
just how it is. But why wouldn't that be an
interesting thing to have an explanation for why that is
such a trend. And that's what we're gonna be talking
about in today's episode. We're gonna talk about one hypothesis,
(14:13):
one fascinating hypothesis for why this has come to pass.
And this was presented in the book The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess The Conflict between Word and Image by American
surgeon author and inventor Leonard Schlaine, who lived n seven
through two thousand and nine. Yeah, so, in the late
nineties when this book was written, Schlaine was the chief
(14:36):
of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco,
and apparently he worked at least to some degree in
performing surgeries on the arteries supplying blood to the hemispheres
of the brain. And just a fun bit of trivia
that really has nothing to do with our episode today,
but his daughter Kimberly is married to the actor Albert Brooks,
(14:56):
and his daughter Tiffany as a noted filmmaker and founded
the Webby Awards. Stuff About Your Mind incidentally, is a
Webby Award winning podcast. I don't see that as a
conflict of interest, but I just thought I pointed out
but wait a minute, Albert Brooks, Hanks Scorpio, Yeah, Hank
Scorpio himself is connected to this episode. Now, before we
lay out sh Lane's central claim and discuss some of
(15:17):
his arguments, I definitely want to say that this is
an idea we're discussing because it's interesting and because it
raises questions worth investigating, and not because we're endorsing it
as correct. I'd say this is going to be more
in in bicameral mind kind of territory, where this is
a book that brings up a lot of interesting questions,
takes us to a lot of interesting places, but ultimately
(15:37):
we're not going to be saying we think that this
guy has the right idea. And in many cases I
think that I'll go ahead and say that I'm not
convinced by his core thesis, and I've got a lot
of criticisms about his approach to argumentation. But at the
same time, I think a lot of peripheral arguments and
observations that come up in this book merrit individual analysis, right.
(15:57):
And then he's using he to build this hypothesis. He's
using uh, he's using science, and he's using history. He's
using a number of just fascinating cultural examples. So he
is uh. Even if we ultimately are not won over
by the hypothesis, uh, he supports it with so much
fascinating information, and it really does force you to at
(16:19):
least re examine some of these things that we've taken
for for granted, like just the absence of or that,
for the most part, the absence of goddesses from our
our our major world religions. Okay, so let's start with
Schlane's central claim and then back up and and run
through his argument. What do we have a quote here
that will help us get to the heart of Schlane's
claim from the beginning? We do. We have at least
(16:40):
a couple of quotes here, and and certainly he was
he was a great writer, so his words capture at best,
he writes quote, there exists ample evidence that any society
acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part,
these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious
of fact of literacy has gone largely unnoticed. Writing subliminally
(17:04):
fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially
it's alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and within them women's
power in the culture. WHOA. Now, that is a far
reaching and radical hypothesis and something that, if it were true,
would have profound implications for the whole world. Indeed, and
(17:25):
that's that's kind of the heart of his hypothesis here. Yeah,
So whenever you've got these big kind of hypotheses like this, uh,
radical claims about something very fundamental about like say, the
role of gender egalitarianism or the lack thereof in the world,
and explaining it through something as widespread as the idea
of literacy. You definitely it makes your ears prick up right,
(17:47):
you know, you want to know what this was about.
I've got another quote that expresses part of the core
of his idea. It's quote, literacy has promoted the subjugation
of women by men throughout all but the very recent
history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall
with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word. Another nice
(18:09):
summary from from later in the book is quote the alphabet,
through its emphasis on linearity and sequence, caused the left
side of the brain of those who learned it to hypertrophy,
resulting in a marked cerebral dominance of one lobe over
the other. Metaphorically, the mind listed to one side as
one carrying an unevenly distributed load. So we're talking about
(18:32):
like a major, lasting influence on the way the human
brain works. Yeah. Now, Schlan talks. He tells a story
in his book, and he talks about how he first
began to form this thesis when he was touring Greece
with this great antiquities guide who kept going to sit
after sight and explaining, okay, what was once here was
(18:54):
a shrine to a goddess, female goddess, but then later
it was rededicated to a male god. It's kind of
an odd pattern to just see happening over and over
in one place after another. If the if the tendency
is generally toward male dominance in the culture and patriarchy
and misogyny, why did you have all these female goddesses
(19:15):
to begin with, and why did the changeover in power
to male dominated pantheon's occur? And so Schlan started to
wonder what what would cause all that? Yeah, because basically
we do have a wealth of goddesses in the polytheistic tradition,
but we see most of them fall out of favor
over time. They're either reduced to minor deities or demi gods,
(19:36):
or or certainly they are just the the feminine at best. Really,
they're the feminine aspect of the same god that also
has a masculine aspect as well, while the male gods
continue to climb up the hierarchy. Because really, outside of
Hindu Shaktism, which focuses on the feminine aspects of the
gods and the cosmos. Can you think of any widespread
goddess movements outside of WICCA and the neo pagan goddess
(19:58):
movement that is also rather modern. Well, the key is widespread.
If you go into beliefs held by smaller numbers of people,
I think you'll get into all kinds of things with
with female deities and and even uh, you know, matriarchal
kinds of pantheons. But the big religions of the world,
you know, you've really just got a few that are
representing the vast majority of humankind, right, and those tend
(20:20):
to be the big monotheisms. And then you've also got
Hinduism and Buddhism, right. So as a sort of an
inform formal survey of sorts, I reached out to the
folks and the discussion module which is which is the
official stuff to Blow your Mind Facebook group, which you
should all join if you want to engage in meaningful
conversation with other listeners and and also your hosts here.
(20:43):
But I said, hey, what are what are some goddesses
or divine females that are displayed in your homes? Uh?
And I and I also open this up to sort
of hyper real religious examples as well, which will say so,
just a quick list of some of the uh goddesses
that were mentioned. I this wonder Woman, the Virgin Mary
(21:04):
Desire of the Endless, which is a character from the
Sandman comic book. Um, somebody mentioned sort of an abstract
feminist goddess tattoo, uh Freya, Princess Leiah Calisi from Game
of Thrones, um Mucha's Claire de Lune painting. And also
Marlene Dietrich who was an actor, right, yeah, uh Tara.
(21:27):
In fact, here is a quote from listeners sorry, who says,
I have several white Taras in my house. She's a
Tibetan Buddhist deity thought to help curb ego driven thoughts
and action. So I thought this was interesting beginning. I
had to ask because I was looking around my own
living room and I realized, well, we have several depictions
of various gods, but they are all masculine. Why do
(21:49):
I not have any images of a goddess in here
as well? I'm gonna have to fix that. Yeah, what's
wrong with your living room? Man? I know I've got
I've got I've got to balance it. And that brings
us back to uh to Schlane's are here, how did
this unbalancing occur? Yes, And another side of the theory,
of course, would be how come we see goddesses diminished
throughout the world for the last few thousand years? But
(22:10):
now you've got all kinds of people who say, yeah,
I've got wonder woman, she's a goddess. Where did that
come from? She Len has an answer for that too, Again,
not necessarily something we're going to agree with him on,
but it's an interesting thing to consider. All right. Well,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
we come back. We will jump into she Lene's hypothesis.
Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. Now we're
about to get into Leonard Slaine's hypothesis about what happened
(22:33):
with the decline of female lead pantheons of goddess based
religions and lead to male dominated religious ideas and cultures
in history. And so he's got a framework that he
uses throughout the book to sort of describe these associated
ideas of types of thinking, sort of perceptual modes, hemispheres
(22:54):
of the brain, and a gender identity that are all
sort of grouped together into these hemispheres, and I think
this grouping could be kind of problematic. We'll talk about it.
But what is his basic basic division of the two
perceptual modes. All right, so you have the feminine outlook,
which is holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and uh and it involves
(23:15):
concrete worldviews. So this is sort of the perceptual mode
that sees sees things by gestalt, sees everything at once,
that goes by intuition, that works uh more with concrete
images and objects very much bound in image. And then
you have the masculine outlook, which is linear, sequential, reductionist,
(23:36):
and abstract in its worldview. Okay, so this is more
based on non visual information and uh, sequential analysis of things. Yeah,
the feminine is, hey, give me a picture, and then
the masculine outlook is I'd rather have those thousand words. Now,
I'm sure a lot of people you're listening to this
and saying, like, I'm not loving the like gender associations
(24:00):
there with the different types of points of view, And
I think that's a fair point to make. Slain himself
is aware of the fact that these generalizations could be problematic,
and he writes, quote every individual is generously endowed with
all the features of both, right. Yeah. He frequently brings
up the Yen yang Uh symbol from Taoism as as
(24:22):
the idea of balance between the two. Yeah. So Slain
is obviously aware of the fact that these perceptual modes
do not always correspond to the literal divisions of biological
sex or of gender identity. But nevertheless he uses these
concepts by by these terms male and female to describe them,
and I think sometimes throughout the book this leads to
(24:44):
trouble because it continually suggests a blurring of the distinction
between for example, the quote male perceptual mode, which female
primates are perfectly capable of using and even favoring and
confusing that perceptual mode with literal males of the species.
So this, I think, this book is, for one thing,
going to be vulnerable to a lot of criticisms of
(25:05):
over generalization with all kinds of things, actually, but gender
is going to be one of them. Yes, So let's
let's talk about some of the the key sources that
ground his idea. Because he didn't you know, he's very
upfront about this. He didn't just dream all of this up.
He was basing Uh, he's basing it on the foundation
established by other thinkers. Okay, so he points to a
(25:29):
few of these. First of all, there's Robert Logan's the
Alphabet Effect, from which states that quote, a medium of
communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission
of information, but rather an active force in creating new
social patterns and new perceptual realities. There's an intrinsic impact
to the use of an alphabet, and the literate worldview
(25:50):
is different from one where information comes exclusively via oral communication. Okay,
this sounds very parallel to another author that he quotes frequently,
which is Marshall McLuhan. Uh. The the idea that the
medium is the message, right in some way, that the
medium through which information is conveyed actually does change the
way your brain works. Yeah, I mean I instantly think
(26:13):
of the you know, the classic bit of writing advice,
or I guess just storytelling advice in general, show don't
tell you know it is that is in effect image
versus word. But in any case, when you're doing that
as a writer, you're using words. True. Yeah, so it
does get get a little complicated. He also points to
(26:33):
the work of anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, who touches on
the downside of the power of literacy that it brought
with it hierarchical societies and slavery. So while one might
think to the current state of Western women and credit
their rising status to higher levels of education, Schlane argues
based on this that that men and women lived in
(26:53):
greater balance in nonliterate agricultural societies, and that we see
some examples of this in preliterately at grarians cultures, um
you know, from from relatively recent times. Okay, So his
proposition here is that we might actually be very surprised
at how much gender egalitarianism we would find if we
went back in history at times before the written word. Right.
(27:17):
He says that quote images are primarily mental reproductions of
the central world of vision. So he points out that
the brain uses the human brain uses wholeness, uh, simultaneity
and synthesis to observe the world and to gain meaning
from alphabetic writing, the brain is forced to depend on
sequence analysis and abstraction. In other words, the way that
(27:38):
you take in uh, you know, an open field is
different from the way you read a paragraph about what
that open field looks like. And so he's saying that
this ultimately shapes the mind of men and women in
a way that leads to more patriarchy and culture. Yeah,
he says, it affects the inner, outer, and supernatural realms
of the mind. And uh, yeah, he points back to
(28:00):
a time when the goddess, in all her forms, was
the principal deity. And there's that. There's this wonderful quote
that I keep coming back to. Uh. From the book,
he says, from the outer rim of history. We begin
to learn her name Insumer. She was in Nanna in Egypt.
She was Isis in Canaan. Her name was Ashera in Syria.
She was known as as Tarta in Greece Demeter, and
(28:24):
in Cyprus Aphrodite. Whatever her supplicants called her, they all
recognized her as the creatrix of life, nurturer of young,
protector of children, and the source of milk, herds, vegetables,
and grain. Since she presided over the great mystery of birth,
people of this period presumed she must also hold sway
over that great bedevil er of human thought, death. I
(28:48):
brought you into this world, I can take you out.
It makes sense, right, Yeah, And again this this this
gets back to our just our ideas of these primordial
feminine deities. Meanwhile, uh, these his deities, he says, they
tended to have male consorts who, in these concerts might
be gods of the hunt, you know, representing the the
(29:09):
the the hunter gatherer balance of life. But he was
generally a temporary lover to be cast aside, or if
not that, a son, So she was not. It wasn't
even like a king and queen scenario. So when does
Slane propose that this transition from the female empowering female
deity lead religions transitioned into the more patriarchal, male dominated religions. Well,
(29:33):
he points out that around fIF BC you had hundreds
of goddess based religions enveloping the Mediterranean basin. But by
the fifth century CE you these have been almost completely eradicated,
and by that time women were prohibited from he says,
conducting a single major Western sacrament. So something is occurring
(29:54):
during this time that that that depletes the power of
the goddess and allows the masculine gods and ultimately the
the male abstrac abstraction of the one God in Abrahamic
tradition to rise so obviously it's not going to be
so easy to prove that the cause of this change
was the alphabet literacy. So how's he going to go
(30:15):
about it? Well, he argues that this is ultimately left
to quote the court of what archaeologists call competitive plausibility. Yeah,
and this is something that the historical sciences often have
to resort to. Write. You're a historian, you're an archaeologist.
You can't run the experiment of replaying history to figure
out what happened. So you have to sort of construct
a model and see what model best fits the existing evidence,
(30:39):
and then even more important than that, what accommodates new
evidence that gets discovered. Yeah. So, first of all, in
the book, Schlane spends a lot of time assembling an
overview of human evolution with a focus on gender relations.
So he takes us from the scent dependent ground to
the vision dependent life in the trees. He takes us
from packs of male chimps feasting on their kills and
(31:01):
sharing with only females and heat, to the emergence of
estrus free humans who are thus unshackled from the alpha
male structure. Uh human physiology, he points out, increasingly ends
up demanding fragile young and a birthing process that that
incapacitates the female. Prolonged childhood ends up meaning that the
(31:23):
females can't participate in the hunt as much and often
have to stay closer to home, and they need support
from the males and from each other. And then on
top of that, the infant's brain is incomplete. Uh, and
language comes in to fill the gaps, and it also
enables learning lessons to take place outside of genetic change.
Now that's an interesting idea that the fact that humans
(31:46):
are born with maybe fewer instincts about how to behave
properly and and fill their role within the human society
than other social animals come born with. And there's but
that humans have this this card they can play, which
is the language card. You can transmit a lot of
information from one generation to the next through speech. Quote,
(32:06):
using speech, one number of a clan learning a lesson
that would enhance survival could pass it on to the
others within hours instead of eons. And he said, this
this is another bit that I just absolutely love. He says,
the new corporate brain called culture hovered like a friendly
poltergeist over each tribe of hunter gatherers. Isn't it funny
that culture can be like a person. It's almost like
(32:28):
a person who's not there. It's the invisible queen of
your society, right, That culture is a thing that has preferences.
It's a thing that tells you what to do and
how to act. It's a thing that tells you what's
beautiful and what's not, what's tasty and what's not. It's
almost sort of like you have this invisible parent who's
a corporeal parent is assembled from the parts of many
(32:51):
other parents that came in generations before. Yeah, and it's uh.
He points out that all this probably begins as gesture
based communication, uh, you know, as well as um the
visual features of the faith, various expressions. But then these
we end up incorporating vocal communication to free up those
hands and the eyes because if you're only speaking in
(33:13):
sign language, you can't it diminishes your ability to work
a tool. At the same time, you have to look
at the other person. But if you as you can
communicate in the dark, Yeah, it also gives you the
chance the ability to do it in the dark. So
uh language, vocal language begins to take over. Uh. And
it's not only the relay of information here, but complex
(33:34):
discussion and strategy. All of that becomes possible as well,
and so you end up having the situation where the
hunter gatherer divide grows for these early humans, and there
are ramifications on the way that males and females both
experience the world, he argues. He says that you know,
hunting demands cold bloodedness, tinged with cruelty, but if you're
(33:55):
a nurture that requires an emotional generosity combined with warmth, uh,
we see this emergence of of different roles, which leads
males and females to respond differently emotionally to the same stimuli,
different worldviews, different ways of surviving, essentially redesigning the human
nervous system in the process. So he's saying that even
though men and women are born with these kind of
(34:17):
very potent brains that could do whatever they want, the
roles that they tend to assume within the group force
them to favor one kind of emotional state versus the other.
You can have the state that's usually assumed by the males,
which is this cold, cruel hunter state of mind, or
you can have this state that's more often assumed by
the females, which is the intuitive, emotional, nurturing and educating
(34:39):
side right. And of course, all this takes place within
a bilobed brain, something that all vertebrates, beginning with fish,
actually possess. The human brain lobes look symmetrical, but they're
functionally different, what we call hemispheric lateralization, and other vertebrates
have this as well, but it's most striking in humans.
And then you have in between all of this, you
(35:01):
have the neuronal fibers that are called the corpus colossum,
the connect and integrate the two lobes. Each controls the
movement of the opposite side. They work in close congress
with each other. And we've discussed a lot of this
on the show before. With all things brain region related,
we've learned a lot about function through dysfunctions, specifically injury
and disease affecting specific regions of the brain, and in
(35:24):
recent decades we've learned even more through magnetic stimulation. But
essentially it comes down to this divide right brain, you
have nonverbal emotional states, dream, spirituality, music, balance, altered states
of consciousness, metaphor and holistic views and just a quick
reminder that Julian Jaynes and his bi cameral mind hypothesis, Uh,
(35:46):
this is the source of the voices. And then with
the left brain, we have doing, we have action, we
have language, and we have the the complex meshing of
competing emotions. And he describes metaphor as quote the right
brains unique contribution to the left brains language capability. Now,
if we're to recall some of the interesting thoughts of
(36:07):
Julian James, James had this whole idea that our very
consciousness itself is built on the possibility of metaphor. I
don't know if he's correct about that, but it's certainly
true that metaphor undergird's our entire structure of language. There
are very few ways of talking that do not involve metaphors.
In fact, most of our abstract words are actually based
(36:29):
off of metaphors for concrete tasks. Yeah, Slaine. He argues
that metaphors essentially bring plasticity to language, and they translate
emotion into language, birthing poetry, mythology, and more. And then
he to get back to the gender divide here. He
says that in in females and again I want to
remind everybody that this is a um this is a
(36:50):
book from the nineties, so just bear than in mind
of on the science here. But but he argued that
that in females we see ten to thirty three pc
more neuronal fibers in the forward part of the corpus colossum,
and that means greater integration, better communication of emotions, increased
global awareness, field perception, and the understanding of offspring moods.
(37:12):
And they're also generally more adept at multitasking. That's the
other part of the argument. Males, on the other hand,
they become more adapted shutting down their feelings for you know,
improved hunting ability. So the fact that there's more tissue
connecting the hemispheres on average and the female brain tends
to mean that the brain has a more balanced approach,
(37:33):
whereas the male brain, if it on average has less
tissue connecting the two hemispheres, it can tend to be
more uh, an isolated kind of left brain approach to things. Right.
But then again, the argument here too is also that
that that male and female brains can ultimately do the
same things, because he points out that in a hunter
gatherer society, each hemisphere of the brain is executing tasks
(37:56):
for which it is best suited. But you still have
to have versatility in case of injury or death. Right,
what happens if the hunter is sick? Uh, then maybe
the the gatherers have to do a little hunting, or
vice versa. So each sex of the human species has
to be able to assume the principal labors of the other.
So he's not saying that only men can be hunters
(38:17):
and only women can be nurtures. He's saying the opposite.
But this cultures are generally arranged so that men do
the hunting tasks and women do the nurturing tasks. And
then he talks of a fair bit about eyeballs. All right,
we will address the eyeball question when we get back.
Thank Okay, we're back. It's time for eyeballs now. I
(38:38):
think this is actually one of the most interesting little
side tangents in the book. Uh. It only takes a
couple of pages, but he puts forward this interesting idea
about the differing role of light sensitive cells called rods
and cones in the retina and how this may have
actually shaped our cognition. I've never read any thoughts along
these lines before, but I thought this was one of
(38:59):
the most interesting actions of the book. So you've got
these different cells in your retina, you've got rods, you've
got cones. And rods are extremely light sensitive, Schlin writes, quote,
like trip wires, they detect the slightest movement in a
visual field, distributed evenly throughout the periphery of each retina.
They see in dim light and appreciate the totality of
(39:19):
the visual field, seeing images as gestalts. So rods are
for kind of all at once. Perception is how you
get a general sense of a field of vision. Cones, meanwhile,
are concentrated densely in the middle of the retina, called
the macula. And cones have two main functions. One of
them is that they pick out differences in color, and
(39:40):
the other is that they intensify clarity in the in
the middle of the vision, so he writes, quote, concentrating
on one aspect of reality at a time. Cones view
the visual field as if through a tunnel. Like rods,
Cones report to both hemispheres, but the left hemisphere is
metaphorically best suited to p process their input. So while
(40:01):
you've got rods that are used for this all at
once perception of a general field of vision. Cones are
used for focus analysis and sequential processing. Now, biologically, rods
are older than cones. All vertebrates have rods. Cones are
only possessed in abundance by a few animals. Schlan points
out that cones are mainly present in predatory animals like
(40:24):
predatory predatory birds and predatory mammals, and especially in the
in the human primate um because they allow you to
focus on something and to see where it's going and
to scrutinize. So the cones isolate elements of the field
of vision then look at them one at a time,
and this is better served by the sequential analytic function
(40:44):
of the left part of the brain. So to quote
one of Schlene's most interesting smaller hypotheses in the book, quote,
the focusing ability of the phobious centralis creates the illusion
of time passing because the image is seen within this
new auro circle of the eye can only be processed
one at a time. Because macular vision examined what was
(41:07):
and then moved on to what is, it forced the
emerging human brain to consider the possibility of what might
come next. So Schlan argues that the abundance of cones
in the human eye, paired with left brain analytical thinking,
helped give rise to the human sense of time and
our tendency for mental time travel into the past and future,
(41:29):
something that other animals only have these sort of rare
little inklings of though there are some inklings, and we've
talked about that in the past with birds and other animals. Um.
But yeah, I think that's an interesting thing to consider,
the fact that we've got these eyes that focus on
one thing at a time, and how that affects our
perception of reality. Could that actually generate time as we
(41:51):
know it? Yeah? Yeah, this is this is definitely an
interesting portion of the book. He also talks about hands
a good bit. Yeah. He in that specifically this is
tying in with the predominance of right handedness in human beings. Uh.
He points out to the left hand, controlled by the
right brain, is more protective than the right. This is
the hand that's going to hold a baby. Meanwhile, what's
(42:13):
the right hand doing the attacking hand? Right? Yeah, again,
except in people who are reversed and are of course
left handed. Um. So, in all of this, males come
to embodied death. Females come to embody life, but eventually
men come to identify their own role in reproduction as well.
And again, the female goddess reigns supreme. Is this master
(42:34):
of life and death, realizing when there's a dependency between
the two that I have to kill to eat, I
have to consume life in order in order to live.
And h. Layne writes that the goddess reign supreme and
then the Kurgan culture rides in on its horses and
represses it, replacing her with their sky god. Uh and UH.
What he says is interesting about this in this very
(42:56):
early example is uh, is that in other aces we
see a more primitive of two colliding cultures absorbing the
more advanced culture. So you have got these agricultural, more
technologically advanced societies that are invaded by these horse riding
Kurgan people's, and you would expect them to adopt the
more advanced agricultural technology of the societies they invaded, right,
(43:20):
you know, very much like when the when the Mongols
invade China and then essentially become Chinese culturally. But that's
not what we see here. And of course the question
is why, all right, so Schlaine can't be the first
person to offer a hypothesis on what caused the demise
of goddess culture. Uh. And so I know he referenced,
he references Claude levy Strauss a good bit. Does levy
(43:42):
Strauss have a have an argument that he counters? Yeah?
So the the Levee Strauss argument is that the essentially
bride bartering kicked kicked things off, so men came to
realize that they had a role in reproduction. And then women,
of course can procreate earlier than men, so they become
a commodity, and eventually all femininity is is treated as
(44:04):
such a commodity. But Chlane opposes as he says that
it doesn't explain the quote dramatic zigzagging from masculine to
feminine and then back to masculine principles that occurred before, during,
and after the first five thousand years of agriculture. And
then another argument, you have anthropologist Sherry Ortner who credits
the tendency to align the masculine with culture and the
(44:27):
feminine with nature. This is definitely a tendency you see
in in literature all throughout the ancient world. Yeah, and
what do. What do cultures do? Will they rise up
in the world by advancing their culture, and in doing
so they are mastering nature. They are overpowering nature, and
sometimes the exact language for that is even more severe.
(44:49):
Butch Lane opposed this and says, well, it doesn't account
for the female imagery that is predominant throughout these different mythologies. Meanwhile,
you have Frederick Engels who are us that the goddess
perished due to the rise of private property. Of course
he did, and he argues that this this becomes a
thing as nomadic hunter gatherers. Uh, you know, give way
to agriculture so you can own land, and then it
(45:12):
follows that you can own women. Now, sh Leane opposes this,
neans is that it doesn't explained the fall of the goddess.
He points to the work of William Irwin Thompson and
Jane Jacobs who argue that hunters were so reduced in
status during the agricultural revolution that they turned to conquest
and this led to the fall of goddess cultures, which
I think is an interesting especially an interesting idea, especially
(45:36):
in light of of so many discussions going on in
our culture today about what happens when when roles and
peoples who traditionally felt more empowered, uh feel less empowered.
So the idea here is that you've got all these
people with these hunting instincts, especially predominantly men, with hunting
(45:57):
instincts that are not really very necessary anymore. Like, you know,
we've got plenty of grain, we don't we don't need
to hunt, and in fact, there aren't even all that
many animals around for you to hunt anymore. So what
are you gonna do. Well, maybe you just turn your
hunting instinct on people and you say, I'm going to
become a warrior now instead. Yeah, the rise of the
(46:17):
warrior class. Now. Meanwhile, feminist historian Gerda Learner she blames
the form flames all of this on the formation of
the archaic states. So the idea here is that you had,
through the necessity of centralized power, you end up resurrecting
the role of the alpha male. You need some sort
of decision maker at the heart of it. And Lennon
(46:38):
Learner also argus argues that slavery ties into all of
this because slaves would have been of little use during
in hunter gatherer culture. But when you have agriculture. This
gives slaves value, and so the former hunters they they
turn first people into slaves and then women, specifically into
(47:00):
subservient people. Now, Shelen opposes this. He says that it
doesn't account for the numerous goddess based societies that thrived
during this period. And he says, you know why we're there,
slave owning archaic states built around goddesses then, and so
Slaine argues that, yes, there's a change going on here,
but it's a change coming from within and it all
ties in to the hidden cost of literacy. Okay, well,
(47:23):
I think we should end our first part there, and
in the next episode, we're gonna look at a little
bit of the historical evidence that Slane uses to support
his hypothesis, and we're going to discuss some criticisms of
the argument, both criticisms of reviewers and some critical thoughts
of our own. In the meantime, be sure to head
it over the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership. That's what we will find all
the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, as well
(47:45):
as links out to our various social media accounts. And
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