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Author Topic:   What You Don't Know About The Origins Of Civilization
Valus
Knowflake

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posted July 17, 2009 05:16 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

"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"

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Valus
Knowflake

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Registered: Apr 2009

posted July 17, 2009 05:19 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

This is also worth reproducing,
from McKenna's "Food of The Gods"
(which draws heavily on Eisler's work):


There is little doubt that at Eleusis something was drunk by each initiate and each saw something during the initiation that was utterly unexpected, transformative, and capable of remaining with each participant as a powerful memory for the rest of their life. It is an incredible testament to the obtuseness of the scholars of the dominator society that not until 1964 did someone make bold to suggest that a hallucinogenic plant must have been involved. That person was the English poet Robert Graves in his essay 'The Two Births of Dionysus':

The secret which Demeter sent around the world from Eleusis in the charge of her protege Triptolemus is said to have been the art of sowing and harvesting grain... Something is wrong here. Triptolemus belongs to the late second millennium B.C.; and grain , we now know, had been cultivate at Jericho and elsewhere since around 7,000 B.C. So Triptolemus's news would have been no news... Triptolemus's secret seems therefore concerned with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and my guess is that the priesthood at Eleusis had discovered an alternative hallucinogenic mushroom easier to handle than the Amanita Muscaria; one that could be baked in sacrificial cakes, shaped like pigs or phalloi, without losing its hallucinogenic powers.

This was the first of many observations Graves made on the underground tradition of mushroom use in prehistory. He suggested to the Wassons [[who then "discovered" psillocybin mushrooms and brought them back to the "civilized" world]] that they visit Mazatecan Mexico for evidence supporting their theories on the impact of intoxicating mushrooms on culture. Graves believed that recipes in classical sources for the preparation of the ritual Eleusinian beverage contained ingredients whose first letters could be arranged to spell out the word "mushroom" -- the secret ingredient. Such a cypher is called an ogham after the similar poetic device in use in Irish riddlery and poetics. Graves readily grants that "you are at liberty to call me crazy," but then goes on to defend his thesis very well.


~ Terence McKenna, "Food of the Gods"


Valus
Ascendant/Ceres

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Valus
Knowflake

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posted July 21, 2009 11:19 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message
I may just keep bumping this
until somebody with a brain
comes along and recognizes
the importance of this thread.
*bump*

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Yin
Knowflake

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posted July 21, 2009 11:51 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
Dear Valus, 2 things come to mind:

1.Why did you post those two seemingly unrelated quotes together? (apart from the Goddess references in both)
2. What are you trying to say?

I, for one thing, have not read any of these books. They sound interesting and are something I would love to explore but it's difficult to express an opinion when one cannot see the whole picture. At least for me.

Maybe people aren't commenting because they have not read them either?

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Valus
Knowflake

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From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted July 21, 2009 12:10 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message
Yin,

1. "(which draws heavily on Eisler's work)"
The timeline is the linking factor here... On account of the changing timeline, as shown by the evidence in Eisler's book, the interpretation of the Eleusinain mysteries is correspondingly altered to suggest that Demeter was responsible, not for agriculture, -- or, not for agriculture alone, but, for the bounty of the sacred mushroom. Also, McKenna's comment on how the dominator paradigm blinded us (until 1964) to the very suggestion that a hallucinogen was responsible, is relevant in light of Eisler's findings.

2. I'm trying to say a few things. For one, I am reporting on objective findings which dramatically alter our view of prehistory, giving us a picture of peaceful, non-sexist, agricultural societies which existed for many thousands of years prior to the current age of war, domination, colonization, competition, hierarchy, etc. Eisler's book shows that the greatest advancements in culture, including the birth of civilization itself, occured much earlier than we think, and in a time of peace, where the Goddess was worshipped, -- and not, as most people believe, in a time of patriarchy and conquest.

quote:

I for one have not read any of these books. They sound interesting and something I would love to explore but it's difficult to express an opinion when one cannot see the whole picture. At least for me.

Maybe people aren't commenting because they have not read them either?


I'd love to hear from people who have read the books, but my primary interest here is in awakening people to their existence. The excerpt I bothered to type out will acquaint you with the basic thrust of the book. I dont believe the whole picture can be seen, -- not after reading the entire book, and not after reading every book in the world. But the excerpt I posted above covers a number of key points, and -- thanks to my reporting -- now you dont have to read the book to get an idea of them. It is my hope that the excerpt will have provided enough information to whet people's appetites, and get the ball rolling.

Have you read the excerpt?

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Yin
Knowflake

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posted July 21, 2009 07:44 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
quote:
Have you read the excerpt?

LOL. Yes, I have. Twice.
It made all the difference when you elaborated though. Thank you.

P.S. I would still like to read the book and form my own opinion. It makes for a healthier debate.

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Valus
Knowflake

Posts: 799
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Registered: Apr 2009

posted July 21, 2009 10:44 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message
quote:
I would still like to read the book and form my own opinion.

That's all I ask.

quote:

It makes for a healthier debate.

Absolutely.

It's good to be informed.

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