posted July 17, 2009 05:13 PM
"The most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species." -- Ashley Montagu"The Chalice and the Blade may be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes." -- LA Weekly
Everything you thought you knew about pre-history is bullsh!t. New archelogical discoveries have been made in the past 30-40 years that completely flip the script, and give us a picture of egalitarian, Goddess-worshipping societies which survived for thousand of years before the dominator paradigm took hold. These discoveries are still unknown to the general public, and public opinion still holds that, prior to the Bronze age, society was male-driven, barbaric, and based on hunting. In light of new evidence, and progressive thinking, past evidence is being profoundly reinterpreted: for instance, drawings on cave walls once thought to represent spears and other weapons are being reinterpreted as plants, leaves and trees.
From The Chalice And The Blade:
The Neolithic
[About 40 years ago], our knowledge of prehistory was immeasurably advanced by the exciting discovery and excavation of two new Neolithic sites: the towns of Catal Huyuk and Hacilar. They were found in what used to be called the plains of Anatolia, now modern Turkey. Of particular interest, according to the man who directed these excavations for the British Institute of Archeology at Ankara, James Mellaart, was that the knowledge unearthed at these two sites showed a stability and continuity of growth over many thousands of years for progressively more advanced Goddess-worshiping cultures.
"A. Leroi-Gourman's brilliant reassessment of Upper Paleolithic religion," wrote Mellaart, "has cleared away many misunderstandings..." ... In other words, the Neolithic culture of Catal Huyuk and Hacilar have provided extensive information about a long-missing piece of the puzzle of out past -- the missing link between the Paleolithic Age and the later, more technologically advanced Chalcolithic, Copper, and Bronze Ages.... As in Paleolithic art, female figurines and symbols occupy a central position in the art of Catal Huyuk, where shrines to the Goddess and Goddess figurines are found everywhere.. Gradually, a new picture of the origins and development of both civilization and religion is emerging.. almost universally, those places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made had one feature in common: the worship of the Goddess.
Digging up the buried treasure of antiquity is as old as the grave robbers who plundered the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. But archeology as a science dates back only to the late 1800s. Even then, the earliest archeological excavations, though also motivated by intellectual curiosity about our past, primarily served a purpose akin to that of grave robbing: the acquisition of striking antiquities by museums in England, France, and other colonial nations. The idea of archeological excavation as a way to extract the maximum information from a site -- whether or not it contained archeological treasures -- took hold only much later. In fact, it was not until after Worl War II that archeology as a systematic inquiry into the life, thought, technology, and social organization of our forebears truly began to come into its own.
...But perhaps most important is that a number of remarkable technological breakthroughs, such as the Nobel Prize winner Wiilard Libby's dating by means of radiocarbon, or C-14, and the dendrochronological methods of dating by the girth of trees, have vastly increased archeology's grasp of the past. Formerly dates were largely a matter of conjecture -- of comparisons of objects estimated to be less, equally, or more "advanced" than one another. But as dating became a function of repeatable and verifiable techniques, one could no longer get away with saying that if an artifact was more artistically or technologically developed, it must date to a later and thus presumably more civilized time.
As a consequence, there has been a dramatic reassessment of time sequences, which in turn has radically changed earlier views about prehistory. We now know that agriculture -- the domestication of wild plants as well as animals -- dates back much earlier than previously believed. In fact, the first signs of what archeologists call the Neolithic or agricultural revolution begin to appear as far back as 9000 to 8000 B.C.E. -- that is, more than ten thousand years ago.
The agricultural revolution was the single most important breakthrough in the material technology of our species. Accordingly, the beginnings of what we call Western civilization are also much earlier than was previously thought.
...But while the excavations carried out at Catal Huyuk, as well as at nearby Hacilar (inhabited from approximately 5700 to 5000 B.C.E.), have yielded some of the richest data about this early civilization, the southern Anatolian plain is only one of several areas where settled agricultural societies worshiping the Goddess have been archeologically documented... In short, though only twenty-five years earlier archeologists were still talking of Sumer as the "cradle of civilization" (and though this is still the prevailing impression among the general public), we now know there was not one cradle of civilization but several, all of them dating back millenia earlier than was previously known -- to the Neolithic. ...Moreover, we also know something else of great significance for the original development of our cultural evolution. This is that in all these places where the first great breakthroughs in our material and social technology were made -- to use the phrase Merlin Stone immortalized as a book title -- God was a woman.
The new knowledge that civilization is much older and more widespread than was previously believed is understandably producing much new scholarly writings, with massive reassessment of earlier archeological theories. But the centrally striking fact that in these first civilizations ideology was gynocentric has not, except among feminist scholars, generated much interest. If mentioned by nonfeminist scholars, it is usually in passing...
Indeed, the prevailing view is still that male dominance, along with private property and slavery, were all by-products of the agrarian revolution. And this view maintains its hold despite the evidence that, on the contrary, equality between the sexes -- and among all people -- was the general norm in the Neolithic.
~ Riane Eisler,
"The Chalice And The Blade"