The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

513 Pages·1999·3.03 MB·English

by  Shlain

Praise for The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
“Every once in a while, during middle age, we come upon a book we wish we’d
had the chance to read when we were much younger. So it is for me with this
bold and fascinating investigation of the ‘dark side of literacy.’ Shlain … makes
the startling claim that the advent of literacy ushered in the demise of goddess
societies, and shifted the balance of power from women with their intuitive and
holistic, right-brain orientation to the more concrete, linear-focused, left-brain
men… Both hemispheres of my cerebrum… remained stimulated throughout.”
—Bart Schneider, The Washington Post Book World
“Shlain invites us to do nothing less than re-examine the vast history of
humankind on planet earth… he mounts an argument that is… persuasive and
entertaining.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Give Leonard Shlain credit for giving the commonplace practice of reading its
full cultural importance. In exploring the elusive psychology of literature, he
reaches some ambitious conclusions.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A stimulating read … Shlain has produced a lively, readable and often
suggestive tract. The ground traversed is immense, the horizons uncovered are
often intriguing.”
—George Steiner, The Observer (London)
“As provocative as anything published in the last decade… Shlain’s thesis is
shocking…The Alphabet Versus the Goddess is fascinating, vexing, provocative,
and sometimes maddening.”
—Clay Evans, Boulder Camera
“Leonard Shlain may himself be the quintessential fusion of word and image.
With superb writing, he draws for us a fascinating account of the evolution of
our male and female ways of knowing, of the curses—not just the blessings—of
reverence for the word alone. As a history and science lesson, this book is a
vivid, breathing page-turner. As a threshold to a new perception of our history
and our future, it offers both chilling reminders and great hope.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
“A tour de force, with stunning new insights about gender relations, language
and consciousness.”
—Michael Murphy, author of The Future of the Body
“The Alphabet Versus the Goddess is as brilliant as it is well-wrought, an
intricate weaving of past and present told in a story that is never less than
absorbing.”
—Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons
“A fascinating, thought-provoking and original contribution to the literature on
the goddess and her disappearance from our world.”
—Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., author of Goddesses in Everywoman
“This is a bomb of a book—a highly original, titillating thesis that will delight,
infuriate, challenge and enlighten.”
—Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words and Prayer Is Good
Morning
“A bold and courageous work.”
—Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics
“Moving rapidly from the mists of prehistory to the glow of the PC screen,
Shlain offers an ambitious interpretive account of the entirety of human culture:
a well-written, daring work of the imagination, worthy of debate—and likely to
generate plenty.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Engrossing, occasionally poetic, and sure-to-be controversial.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Continually engaging… a monumentally ambitious work that treats all history
as a great struggle between the written word and the visual…. A fascinatingly
elaborate idea for readers to chew over.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An absorbing, provocative, and, ironically, highly literate work.”
—Library Journal
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS
Leonard Shlain is the author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space,
Time, and Light, and a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Creativity
(Academic Press, 1999). He has written for many publications and lectures.
Chief of laparoscopic surgery at California-Pacific Medical Center in San
Francisco, he lives and writes in Mill Valley. His e-mail address is
[email protected], and the book’s Web site is www.alphabetvsgoddess.com.
LEONARD SHLAIN
THE
ALPHABET
VERSUS
THE
GODDESS
THE CONFLICT
BETWEEN
WORD
AND
IMAGE
PENGUIN/COMPASS
COMPASS
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014,
U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd,
Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the United States of America
by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1998
Published in Compass 1999
13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12
Copyright © Leonard Shlain, 1998
All rights reserved
Portions of this work first appeared in The Utne Reader.
Illustration credits
Title page, pages 139 (both), 228 (both), 313 (all): Alinari/Art Resource, New York; 31: Musée
d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux; 38 (top): Gift of Mrs. W. Scott Fitz. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 38
(bottom): Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete; 48, 56, 267: Réunion des Musées Nationaux
Agence Photographique, Paris; 60, 359 (top): Giraudon/Art Resource, New York; 62 (both): © The British
Museum; 123: © 1998 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Seated Bather,
Paris (early 1930). Oil on canvas, 64-1/4 x 51”. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon
Guggenheim Fund. Photograph © 1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York; 126 (left), 179: Mark
Reynolds; 126 (right): © 1998 The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS). New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. (52.203); 134 (left): Scala/Art
Resource, New York; 134 (right): Gift of Edward Perry Warren and Fiske Warren. Courtesy, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston; 166: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Florance Waterbury Fund, 1970. (1970.44); 201
(left) The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Bequest of Florance Waterbury, 1969. (69.222); 201
(right): Courtesy of the author; 359 (bottom), 373 (both): Dover Pictorial Archives; 382: Joseph— Nez
Perce, 1903 by Edward S. Curtis (published in The North American Indian, Volume VIII), courtesy of Lois
Flury, Flury & Company Ltd., Seattle, Washington; 410 (left): Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical
Museum Archives, Los Alamos, New Mexico; 410 (right): NASA THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS
CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Shlain, Leonard.
The alphabet versus the goddess: the conflict between word and image/Leonard Schlain.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
EISBN: 9781101573914
1 Written communication—Social aspects. 2. Literacy—Social aspects. 3. Alphabet—History. 4. Language
and culture. 5. Patriarchy. 6. Misogyny. I. Title.
P211.7.S57 1998
302.2’244—dc21 98–21673
Printed in the United States of America Set in Minion Designed by Francesca Belanger Except in the
United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Version_2
To my mother, Frances Shlain
PREFACE
he thesis of this book occurred to me while I was on a tour of Mediterranean
T
archaeological sites in 1991. Our group had the good fortune to have for its
guide a knowledgeable University of Athens professor. At nearly every
Greek site we visited, she patiently explained that the shrines we stood before
had originally been consecrated to a female deity. And, later, for unknown
reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated them to a male one.
We then traveled to Crete to wander among the impressive remains of
Knossos. Elegant palace murals depicted festive court women, girl acrobats, and
snake-holding priestesses—mute evidence of women’s seemingly high status in
Bronze Age Minoan culture.
The trip ended at Ephesus on the Anatolian toast—the site of the ruins of the
Temple of Artemis, the largest shrine to a female deity in the Western world.
Until Christian authorities closed it in the late fourth century, a woman (or a
man) could officially worship a goddess and priestesses could officially perform
major sacraments. As our group contemplated these facts, our guide told the
legend of Jesus’ mother, Mary, coming to Ephesus to die. The guide then
pointed out the hillside on which Mary’s remains were purported to have been
buried.
On the long bus ride back to the airport, I asked myself why Mary would
have chosen a place sacred to a “pagan” goddess as her final resting place. Even
if the legend was a fiction, why did it gain credence? This led me to ponder a
larger question hovering over the entire trip—what caused the disappearance of
goddesses from the ancient Western world?
There is overwhelming archaeological and historical evidence that during a
long period of prehistory and early history both men and women worshiped
goddesses, women functioned as chief priests, and property commonly passed
through the mother’s lineage. What in culture changed to cause leaders in all
Western religions to condemn goddess worship? Why were women forbidden to
conduct a single significant sacrament in these religions? And why did property
begin to pass only through the father’s line? What event in human history could
have been so pervasive and immense that it literally changed the sex of God?
I was familiar with the current, most commonly accepted explanation: just
I was familiar with the current, most commonly accepted explanation: just
before recorded history began, invading horsemen sweeping down from the
north imposed their sky gods and virile ethics on the peaceful goddess cultures
they vanquished. Somehow, this answer seemed to me inadequate to explain a
worldwide social phenomenon that occurred everywhere civilizations emerged
and which took a millennium to unfold.
My Mediterranean journey coincided with the publication of my first book,
Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, which put forth the
idea that innovations in art prefigure major discoveries in physics. Art and
physics are two different languages; the artist uses image and metaphor; the
physicist uses numbers and equations. To sharpen the ideas I put forth in Art &
Physics, I had immersed myself in the study of how different communication
media affect society.
While on that bus ride, and perhaps because of my heightened interest in
how we communicate, I was struck by the thought that the demise of the
Goddess, the plunge in women’s status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and
misogyny occurred around the time that people were learning how to read and
write. Perhaps there was something in the way people acquired this new skill
that changed the brain’s actual structure. We know that in the developing brain
of a child, differing kinds of learning will strengthen some neuronal pathways
and weaken others. Extrapolating the experience of an individual to a culture, I
hypothesized that when a critical mass of people within a society acquire
literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are
reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline
in the status of images, women’s rights, and goddess worship. The more I turned
this idea over in my mind the more correlations appeared. Like a dog worrying a
bone, I found this connection compelling and could not let it go until I had
superimposed it on many different historical periods and across cultural divides.
The book that you now hold in your hand is the result of my teeth-gripping,
head-shaking, magnificent obsession.
By profession, I am a surgeon. I head a department at my medical center and
I am an associate professor of surgery at a medical school. As a vascular surgeon
operating on carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain, I have had the
opportunity to observe firsthand the profoundly different functions performed by
each of the brain’s hemispheres. My unique per-spective led me to propose a
neuroanatomical hypothesis to explain why goddesses and priestesses
disappeared from Western religions.
My hypothesis will ask readers to reconsider many closely held beliefs and
open themselves up to entirely new ways of looking at familiar events. In an
effort to prevent factual errors from detracting from my ideas, I enlisted many