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SAMPLE PASSAGES FROM Switching to Goddess: Humanity's Ticket to the Future |
INTRODUCTION My father’s family were early converts to a tiny Christian sect akin to the Amish and Mennonites, and in 1736 fled to America to practice their faith. Every Sunday my parents, brothers, sister and I would hop into the family station wagon and Dad would drive us from the city deep into farm country for church services. In Dad’s church the women managed the music. Cousin Virginia Funderburg played the piano, Cousin Nancy Skillings the organ, and Mother sang in the choir with Aunt Francis and various cousins. Although we were a small congregation when we sang the sound swept over us like the rise and fall of a mighty sea. My otherwise reserved grandmother contributed a lusty alto refrain to “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while my Aunt Esther smiled at the congregation and pumped her arm in a cross-shaped motion, beating out four-quarter time to keep us on the same note at the same time. Once during Sunday church services Mother and I sang “When I Fall on My Knees in Front of the Lord.” Over and over during practice we sang “face” in place of “knees” and then burst into fits of nervous giggling. Mother’s family -- a 180-degree turn from Dad’s -- was prone to fits of uncontrollable laughter; more on them later. While women tackled the music in Dad’s church, men tackled everything else. Men were the deacons, ministers and ushers. Before Sunday worship service cousin Glen Funderburg trudged up to the balcony where the teens sat to pass out two-by three-inch illustrated pamphlets on the evils of alcohol, playing cards, and motion pictures. During the service men collected money, waiting patiently at the end of each pew for people to plunk their bills and coins into the offering plate and pass it on. Every summer the church heated up to boiling and dozens of donated funeral-home paper fans appeared in the sanctuary like battalions of butterflies. The heat made the varnish on the wooden pews sticky. One Sunday I stuck to a balcony pew and escaped only by sacrificing to the pew the nap of my pink-checked seersucker skirt. This could have been the same pew Aunt Vernona Skillings hauled up in the 1940s and carried out all by herself when the church caught fire. Even though the men still talk with pride about Aunt Vernona, she was nevertheless a woman and so her role on Sundays naturally narrowed to handling music. Dad’s church circled around the War God Jehovah. Undoubtedly at least one of our ministers at some point read Exodus chapter 15 verse three to the congregation: “The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name….” By the time I was five, the phrases "Battle Hymn," "Mighty Fortress," and "burnt offering" were standard fare in my vocabulary. By six I could decline verbs like stone (to death) and smite (smiteth, smote, smitten). All our ministers spoke non-stop about Father, Son and Holy Ghost, never about Mother, Daughter and Holy Grandmother. For Sunday dinner Grandma always killed a couple of hens. Lying on a white platter with their four-toed orange feet still attached and surrounded by the tiny orange egg yolks they’d been carrying at death, the stewed hens dominated the dining-room table. But it was the men who “said grace” and otherwise dominated the meal. Across the hens and over the heads of the rest of us their voices boomed – about religion, politics, economics and so on. The women said things like “Please pass the succotash” and “Dougy, don’t dribble on your clean shirt.” The men on my mother’s side of the family said the prayers too -- but no one listened much. Instead of church, Mother’s family revolved around picnics in the park and holiday parties. This family sailed to America a hundred years earlier than Dad's -- in the 1630s when Indians still practiced their old ways. Anyone in America as early as the 1630s had a lot of work done on them by the Great-Mother loving Native Americans, which could be why in Mother’s family, the women were as much the movers and the shakers as the men were. After church on Easter, instead of Grandma Studebaker’s for dinner we always opted for Mother’s family, who held Easter in the Lawrenceville Community Center. Crossing the threshold of the Community Center’s large double doors we’d step into a whirlwind of sound and color: a babble of chatter, flushed faces, dishes clattering in the kitchen, laughter, boys drumming a basketball on the wooden-plank court at the east end of the Center, lacy festoons of Easter pinks, lime greens and daffodil yellows bedecking the women, who wound in and out among the dark-suited men. The aroma of pipe tobacco and hot coffee. More laughter. The table opposite the basketball court groaned under food heavily laced with sugar, cream and butter: Great Aunt Lucille’s homemade biscuits and egg noodles; Grandma Ramsey’s Waldorf Astoria $300/£192 red cake, fried chicken; fifteen kinds of pies including Great Grandma Davis’s sugar pie; and so forth. On the whole, at Easter time Mother's family was too high on life to give much thought to any long-gone dead man rising out of his tomb. Mother's was a fun-and-games family. The grownups were more like kids than the kids, and the kids were consulted on all important issues. After dinner the men and younger people played cards, the women chatted, and Grandma and her five sisters (often called “The Sisters” by the rest of us) sat together in the southwest corner of the Center. At this point a few of us sneaked out back and hid candy for the Easter-egg hunt. The Sisters got more excited by the egg hunt than the rest of us. Flushed with pride and excitement they’d carefully lead toddlers out to the grass -- babies bedecked in frilly pastel dresses or tiny bow ties and suit jackets. The Sisters would hover as the babies teetered forward dragging their Easter baskets with puzzled frowns on their faces and no idea what they were supposed to be doing in the grass. Crouching in the sun with cameras, mothers dotted the yard, shooting film as if chronicling the pope stumbling upon the Holy Grail. My mother’s family didn’t really worship goddesses. They did, however, live the old Goddess ways far more than my father’s family. And Mother’s family illustrates an important point: some of the healthy old ways of our goddess-revering ancestors still linger with us today, even though over the past 6000 years goddesses have been mostly forced underground. But you hafta go back a ways to get to the healthy times I’m talking about – before for example the new Johnny-come-lately war gods forced Hera, Venus, Inanna and the others into becoming their wives and concubines, and before these gods threw Athena, Bellona, Inanna, Minerva and hundreds of other goddesses down on the ground, sat on them and made them promise to become war gods too. In fact these so-called war goddesses are merely mealy-mouthed makeovers of the real goddesses who came before them. Jehovah, Allah, Mars, Ares, Odin and the other war gods are the new kids on the block. For the first 1.89 million of the 1.90 million we humans have stomped around on planet earth, we survived quite nicely, thank you, without war gods. It was only about 6000 years ago, in places like Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, that these war gods first reared their ugly heads, pounding around all over the place with names like Ninurta, Imdugud, Menthu and Wepwawet. Sometimes we don't even know their names, but it's clear from their pictures what they are; archaeologists call them things like "thunder god" and "conqueror god" (Frankfort 1939). Before the war gods drove into town in their fiery war chariots and with their social hierarchy and sun worship, there’s good evidence that much of the world revolved around healthy female deity. For almost 40,000 years before the war gods hit town, if people made anything that looked like deity, it was not male but female. What's more, during this time most of the world knew little if any war, violence, or social hierarchy. Compared to what followed, the era before the war gods was an actual Never-Never land of adventure and excitement mixed with little if any human-caused large-scale pain or ugliness. Although this book is an exposé on how the war gods overthrew us and on the awful things they’ve done to us since then, it’s also about how we can -- and must -- pitch them out on their ears and make a beeline back to the last real religious system we had: the system of the Goddess. Anthropologists all agree that humans need “supernormal” religion (why, is something we’ll get to later). But the war gods are political-control machines and not really religions at all. As a result, the world’s been religion-starved ever since they rolled into town. The goddesses, on the other hand, and especially the mother goddesses, worked for us: they jacked us up into smart, creative, non-violent, egalitarian, democratic, rich, sensual, playful, courageous risk-takers. The old goddesses have never abandoned us. They bubble up regularly from their subterranean hideaways – but in disguise. King Arthur and Robin Hood for example are men of the Goddess. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and many of our old fairy tales are tales of the Goddess. By unmasking the Goddess in these tales and rubbing the war-god tarnish off Her, we can get important clues about the exact nature of our healthy old Goddess way of life. Whether you imagine Goddess as an actual supra-rational being or as a “myth to live by” doesn’t matter: when we switch back to Her we’ll cure most of what ails us. Although the switch must be international I’ll dissect it in this book mostly from a Western perspective, adding a bit about Japan and her ancient guiding goddesses as we go along. Before the war gods hit, however, people all across the globe were scoring big with their own guiding mother goddesses -- in Australia, Africa, the Americas, China and the rest of Asia too. When they're ready, in other words, most of the peoples in the world today have their own ancient pre-war goddesses to slide home to. If we ditch our war gods and open the doors to our old guiding goddesses it is my firm belief that we can transform ourselves from unloved waifs wallowing in cinders, into the royal heirs and heiresses we were meant to be -- as healthy as the offspring of the world’s healthiest mothers. Evidence for this comes from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, biology, chemistry, history, and other disciplines. If all this sounds like heaven to you please read on. _______________ About the picture above of the Minoan Goddess: This image is part of the remains of a wall painting called “The Campstool Fresco,” uncovered in the Minoan palace-temple of Knossos (This image is copyrighted. Shown courtesy of the University of South Carolina Press). |
We Are What We Worship If we worship gods who solve problems through teaching people instead of punishing them, we too will solve problems through teaching. If we worship a universal life force that loves us just because we exist and not because of how blindly obedient we are (or how successful), then we can expect our family, friends and lovers to love us just because we exist and not because of our svelte physiques, our finely featured faces, our fame, or our fat bank accounts. And if, when our lives are threatened, our deities are willing to risk their lives to save us, we feel safe. If we worship gods at home with the human body and all its natural functions, then we too will feel comfortable with and celebrate our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing. I’m not alone in my thinking, here. In The Myth of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford remind us that although “it may seem a lot to claim that mythic images are so important to all areas of human experience … the discoveries of depth psychology have shown how radically we are influenced and motivated by impulses below the threshold of consciousness, both in our personal and in our collective life as members of the human race” (Baring and Cashford 1991: xiv). It is my belief that the world is jammed in a mess today because few of us do follow gods like the ones I’ve described above. Instead, most of us follow creatures who solve problems through slaughtering, massacring and butchering human beings, and through stoning them to death for crimes as scandalous as being stubborn or working on Sunday (Deuteronomy 21.18-21; Exodus 35.2). Most of us hold up as ideal, creatures who frown at our bodies. Most of us love deities who “love” us only on condition that we slavishly obey them -- even when we’re ordered to burn our children alive (just to see if we’ll do it – check out Genesis 22) -- or on condition that we aren’t physically disabled. Of course those of us worshipping these creatures say, “It’s not my god causing the world mess. The mess comes from the greed, lust and violence we’re all born with. As a matter of fact, my god’s all that stands between us and worse greed, lust and violence. You think things are bad now -- without my god, we’d be slimy, slanderous, slobbering, slathering, incestuous, cannibalistic slitherers slinking across the landscape from one point to another.” I don’t think so. For one thing, through time thousands of human societies have existed – and quite nicely I might add -- without help from dictator father gods, war gods or sky gods. Most of these societies haven’t lacked for food, shelter, warmth, entertainment, or fun and games. What’s more, most of the time their children play nicely together, and adults get along with each other too. Some of these societies have existed for possibly up to thousands of years without one peep from a war, daddy, or sky god. Unfortunately the current plague of planetary war gods has obliterated many if not most of these fine folk. Not only that, there’s evidence that before about 4000 BC, much of the world turned not around war, sky and father gods, but around a peaceful, earth-based, mother goddess. What’s more, when it did so, war was mostly absent from the human landscape. Also seemingly rare were interpersonal violence; totalitarianism; social-class snobbery; me-first scrooge-ism; the low boot-licking the high and mighty; slavery; poverty; stuffed-shirt boors; and sexually uptight sweeties with two left feet. If we’re born greedy and grabby, it’s Goddess apparently and not gods who helps us curb our appetites. It only makes sense: healthy mothers love their children unconditionally, no strings attached, and if Mother is our overarching role model then chances are good everyone’s going to look at everyone else through Mother’s rosy, positive-regard eye glasses. People are going to look at you and see you the way mom sees you (especially if mom’s psychologically healthy): as a pretty sharp cookie who’s hunky dorrie almost all of the time. Of course she’s gonna bark at you if you don’t perform up to standards – the ones she knows you can meet – and so will other people in this goddess-based world I’m speaking about. It’s not like it’s all a free ride. But in general, Mom and therefore everyone else is going to love the socks off of you, no matter if you’re two-feet high, have curly hair sprouting out your ears, and the breath of a bear just breaking out of hibernation. In their article “What Is This Thing Called Love?” in New Scientist, Anderson and Middleton say it best: “Of all the forms of love, none seems as deep, strong, selfless or enduring as the love of a mother for her child, nor is any other bond so ubiquitous in the animal kingdom” (Anderson and Middleton 2006: 32). With this kind of love as our model, how could we miss? Unfortunately, somehow over the past 6000 years we lost our pre-4000 BC wonderland world. Like Alice stepping through the looking glass, we now live in its mirror opposite. Instead of egalitarian, courageous risk-takers, most of us are snooty, sniveling, bully-wimps who look down our noses at those “below” us, and kowtow to those “above.” Instead of democratic, peaceful, creative paragons, most of us lick the boots of the rich -- “Big Money” for short. Big Money owns our media and our leaders, and is busily infecting our air, water, soil and food. Big Money drags us into war after war, and we don’t know what we’re dying for, but we know we love it (The flag flying over the battlefield … And the rocket’s red glare … Achilles’ heel! Helen of Troy! G.I. Joe! War spies … and the caissons go rolling along …. Give him a hearty welcome then … and so forth.) It’s all what one might expect from people who hold up a warrior god to their children and say, “Kiddies, here is the highest rung.” This is as good as it gets. An absent, untouchable sky god, a father god when “father” in nature is an unknown quantity. In most of nature, if daddy is present at all, he loves you with strings attached. Unlike daddy birds, daddies in most of our closest animal cousins the great apes do not hunt for and help feed baby. As a matter of fact if they’re not watched carefully, chimp and gorilla males – like males in many species -- kill and eat their own babies for breakfast. According to primatologist Frans de Waal, “Doubt about whether infanticide” by males “is a real phenomenon in wild animals has largely subsided. It is now known to occur in a wide range of species, from lions to prairie dogs, and from mice to gorillas. Current estimates of infanticide … are astonishing: 35 percent in grey langurs, 37 percent in mountain gorillas; 43 percent in red howler monkeys; and 39 percent in blue monkeys” (de Waal and Lanting 1997: 118). Interestingly however, one of our closest cousins, a fairly newly discovered primate called the bonobo, is a rare bird in that bonobo males do not seem to kill newborns. Although we’re not sure what makes the bonobo so unique here, my bets are all on the fact that bonobo males and females share the power. If a male tries to get sassy with a female, the female simply grabs a few friends and they all stand up to the dude like a well-oiled machine. My guess is if any male tried to harm a hair on junior’s head, this ‘machine’ would have a meltdown. “How did bonobos escape this curse” of baby-battering daddies, asks Frans de Waal. “Are infanticidal tendencies simply absent in the bonobo male, or did females evolve effective counterstrategies? Perhaps both are true: when females find a way of protecting themselves against infanticide, the tendency may disappear in males” (de Waal and Lanting 1997: 119). More on these fascinating cousins later (turns out one reason we don’t know more about them is they spend tons of time enjoying various and sundry kinds of paramouric encounters, and they just, well, made researchers blush…). While human fathers don’t as a general rule kill their offspring, they don’t seem to have the direct pipeline to unconditional love that mothers do, either. Even fathers who haven’t flown the coop (and many of course do just that) don’t always love you unconditionally. Many fathers love you only if you make the honor roll, the soccer team, make it into a good college, or win gold in the Winter Olympics. Then there are those millions of dads who do love their kids unconditionally, no matter what. It’s my feeling, however, that those dads aren’t born that way. They have to learn it. And who do they learn it from? Mothers. Their wives, their own mothers, grandmothers and aunts, teachers, neighbors. Among humans and all life on earth, it’s mothers and mothers alone whose unconditional love is as natural as breathing. We’ve all heard the stories of mothers who single-handedly lift 2-ton cars when their kiddy’s caught underneath. "The mother’s drive to protect her children is the most powerful heroic instinct we know. Cindy Parolin showed no hesitation when she leapt to the defense of her 6-year-old son. Attacked by a cougar, Steven was saved by his mother’s incredible bravery as she wrestled with the animal for hours while he was dragged to safety by his brother and sister." (“Natural Born Heroes,” BBC). I’m not saying all women are perfect. Bad mothers are a dime a dozen, and some even abuse and murder their own children. Some of you’ve had fab dads and mucky mothers. Others have been sabotaged by women and saved by men. What I am saying is, in general the evidence points to the metasymbol of the healthy mother and not the healthy man as the role model most likely to succeed in leading us to the world we all want to live in. And I’m not talking here about a mealy-mouthed, simpy world, but one in which we’re all just as on-the-spot plucky and powerful as the parent who lifts the 2-ton truck off the child. It just so happens this parent is not a father but a mother. Go figure. This isn’t putting men down. It’s just a simple fact of nature that while mothers come biologically equipped to lift trucks off kids, dads don’t. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for men in the new world we need to get to – far, far from it. Although some of you, men and women alike, may think of this as an attack on men, it’s certainly not. Failing to use the right role model to guide our behavior has brought us to the brink of obliteration. In my opinion, we no longer have time or energy to lug the male ego around on our backs; it weighs us down in an era when men and women alike need all the energy and strength we can muster to keep the planet going. In other words, y’all, please lighten up and get a grip. Whomped by War Gods Today over half the world – a whopping 53 percent of us -- worship the god of Abraham, a war god known variously as Yahweh, Allah and Jehovah, YAJ for short, and according to Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins “the Old Testament psychotic delinquent” (Appendix F: World Religions: Dawkins 2006: 38). In Exodus 15.3, YAJ just comes right out and admits he’s a warrior: “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name” (KJV) or “The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name” (ESV). What’s more, depending on what version of the Bible you’re holding, the words “war” and “warrior” appear 250 to 300 times (Strong 1996; BibleGateway.com), while according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible “armies,” “arms” and “weapons” appear another 176 times (Strong 1996). Oh sure, “peace” is in the Bible a few hundred times too, but that doesn’t make us peaceful – only schizophrenic and liable to do peace half the time and war the other half. _____ The image above of the early war god comes from Tell Asmar, Iraq and is approximately 5000 years old. Although it’s not known for certain, many think it is the head of the war god Ninurta. (This image is copyrighted. It is shown courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.) |
But Are They Really Goddesses? So all across the globe our Neolithic ancestors snapped out female figurines by the megaton. But are these goddesses -- or something else? Unfortunately, since no one’s translated the written languages of the guiding-goddess-Neolithic- or Bronze-Age societies, we can’t lope over to the local library and read what these societies have to say about the why’s and wherefore’s of their figurines. Through the 1800s and most of the 1900s our best minds taught that our early ancestors worshipped mostly goddesses. With archaeologists unearthing all those otherworldly female figurines and no male figurines to speak of, what other conclusion were they to draw? Not only that, when written records do begin, they say similar historical figurines are indeed goddesses. So before the 1980s, books like Robert Briffault’s The Mothers and Eric Neumann’s The Great Mother were all the rage. These authors said that for the first kazillion years of human existence we probably all worshipped a Great Mother Goddess; however (they continue), that was because back then we were all dumb as mud. When we got smart (in their minds not until around 4000 BC) we began worshipping male gods. In other words, with time we ‘evolved’ into proper worshippers of such deities as Thor the War God, Jealous Jehovah, and Yahweh the “control freak” -- as Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins calls him (Dawkins 2006: 31). Go Directly to Jail, Do Then in the 1980s a cluster of books tangoed into town that turned everything on its head: Our evolution from goddesses to gods, said these authors, was not a footstep forward but a giant leap back. Merlin Stone, University of California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler and others pointed out that when the new male gods roared into town, peace, equality and human health morphed into non-stop war, bigotry and general societal sickness. When this cluster hit the stands, a hailstorm of controversy fell over the literate world. As long as thinkers stuck to the party line (“before 4000 BC Mother was everywhere but not worth the paper She was printed on”) all was peachy keen. The second someone suggested goddess was equal to god however, all hell broke loose. The result: since the 1990s a backlash of unprecedented proportions has raged against the Neolithic and Bronze-Age Great Mother Goddess. Backlash Backlashers pepper the ranks of theologians, feminists, anthropologists and archaeologists as well. Among them sit assistant professor of religion Cynthia Eller, theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther, anthropologist Richard G. Lesure, feminist archaeologist Lynn Meskell, and the writer-combo team of Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (Lucy and Christine are also feminist archaeologists). Here’s an example of some of the backlash folderol emanating from this group: “The Victorian scholars’ notion of the all-powerful, all-sexual and potentially all-destructive Mother Goddess … mirrors the obsessive sexual love, fear and hate of the small Freudian boy in his mother’s lap” (Goodison and Morris 1998: 20). And getta load outa this: After the female figurines “are no longer limited to … objects of male desire or ‘the Mother Goddess,’” then we can imagine other things their makers meant them to be (Tringham and Conkey 1998: 37). And then there’s this about why we should pitch the ancient Goddess out on Her ear altogether: “I have reservations about” the prehistoric Goddess says theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther. “If women, and women alone personify the forces of nature … either they need to be dominated … in order to control these forces … or they are the primary gender that will somehow ‘save’ us from the destructive effects of millennia of male domination of nature” Reuther 2005: 39-40). Whoa Rosemary, say I! If goddess replaced gods, men would feel an itch to dominate women? Excuse, Rose, but have you glanced out your ivory-tower window lately? Personally I can’t fathom how men could feel a greater itch to dominate than they do today -- under your war gods. In Nigeria during the 2002 Miss World Pageant, for the crime of wearing bikinis in public, Muslim men felt an itch to set women on fire and burn them to death; over 200 people died as a result (Harris 2004: 46). In Deorala, India, in 1987 men felt an itch to publicly burn to death a teenaged Hindu widow in the ancient practice of suttee (in which widows are immolated simply for the crime of becoming widows) (Sarkar 1997). And in the glorious Christian US, men every year feel the itch to beat to death 1300 women – their intimate partners -- with 1.5 million women “raped or physically assaulted or both” and with “one in three of these … injured to the extent that significant medical intervention is required” (Jafee et al. 2005: 713). What’s worse, Rose, ample evidence shows this delight in domination began exactly when your gods stomped the goddesses and began telling men to beat women into the dust as well. Rose also moans and groans that if gods were swapped for goddesses, she might be handed the crackly task of cleaning up the mess her war gods have made of the planet. But Rose! Why not let women try to put the world house in order? Some might have more energy for it than you do. Besides, women have been handling the housecleaning for millennia now. We’ve gotten good at it. My biggest concern is that the world’s women have been punched and crushed by war gods for six millennia now. The end result is, women aren’t the powerhouses we could be. So although we women can make life sweet and exciting again, to do so we need to rear our daughters under new rules -- rules that restore their innate Goddess-given powers. Tricky-Dickies I’m warning ya: these anti-goddess people are tricky. Since they know they couldn’t get away with it, they never say our Neolithic grandparents didn’t worship goddesses. So they do the next best thing: throw page after page at you of confusing, stuffy, tangled academic language that boils down to this: before 4000 BC the world might not have worshipped goddesses. Which of course is something you can say about anything archaeologists dig up. A piece of obsidian with all the features of an arrowhead and buried near a bear skeleton might have been an arrowhead – or it might not. We’ll never know. In archaeology all we can ever do is go with our best bets..... ____________ The image above is a an ancient clay figurine of a predynastic Egyptian Goddess. This Goddess is the embodiment of mother love: soft nurturance coupled with the iron strength it can take to safeguard offspring. From |
As Far as the Eye Can See: No War! Of all the praises that can be sung about our Great-Goddess ancestors, probably the most stunning is their ability to live for hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of years without plunging into the hell that is human warfare. As we’ll see later, as soon as daddy gods roared into town and mowed the Mother down, we had war 24/7 -- for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But while the Mother Goddess watched over us we had no war. In other words there seems to be a link between on the one hand guiding goddesses and peace, and on the other daddy gods and war. Imagine: a world without war. Otherwise well-educated people will tell you we’re born biologically primed to wage war. That it’s in our genes. Frankly my dears, those people don’t have a clue. Before about 4000 BC give or take a few years in either direction and depending on where you are on the globe, there was no war. At least not what’s called “institutionalized” war, where war is built into our social systems, so it’s almost impossible to dig out and pitch it on its ear, and where wars happen every few decades or so, regular as the beat of your heart. I’m sure you’ve heard the fantasy tale – doubtless more than once as a matter of fact – that humans are biologically built to war, and that war’s been with us from the beginning of time. For whatever reason, during the twentieth-century big batches of academics convinced themselves humans are born violent. Although some today still believe this hogwash, others are pointing to the obvious: given what we now know about our peaceful first cousins the bonobos and the numbers of nonwarring societies in the world, there’s just no way human beings can be born violent. Pure and simple: if you’re not taught war, you're not going to do it. Come on: be logical, for Goddess’ sake! If war’s stuck in our genes there wouldn’t be any peaceful societies anywhere on the globe -- no way Jose. But piles of peaceful peoples do exist, and piles more writers have written about them. For a list, go visit www.peacefulsocieties.org. Although my favorite peaceful societies are the Semai of the Malay Peninsula and the Paliyans of Southern India, there are dozens of others, which you’ll see if you visit the website (or if you read Keeping the Peace by Kemp and Fry; Fry’s Beyond War; Ashley Montagu’s Learning Non-Aggression; Signe Howell and Roy Willis’s Societies at Peace; Bruce Bonta’s Peaceful Peoples; Leslie Sponsel and Thomas Gregor’s Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, or one of dozens of others. For more, tap those keys on over to www.peacefulsocieties.org). But it’s not just peaceful societies that show war’s not in our genes. Evidence is dribbling in from all directions: “archaeology, hunter-gatherer studies, comparative ethnography, the study of social organization, cross-cultural research findings on war and justice seeking, research on animal aggression, evolutionary theory, and … cultural belief systems … about war and peace.” As anthropologist Doug Fry of the University of Arizona puts it, all this evidence is fitting together to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Humans are “really not so nasty after all,” says Fry. We’re more flexible than we think, and we have tons of ways other than war to manage conflict (Fry 2007: 211-12). Despite all this evidence, some doodle-bugs just won’t give up. “Scholars who study war are at war with each other” says anthropologist Keith Otterbein (2004: 11). Keith has dubbed the two armies in this war the “Hawks” and “Doves.” “But,” I can hear you protesting, “if tons of peaceful societies exist, how could Hawks say (without blushing at least) that we’re born to war?” The answer is, some doodle-bugs are just darn good at doodling. But look at it from their POV: if we begin to suspect war is not something ordained on Day One, think of all the poor dears who’d suffer: the military industrial complex would be only a small start of a long list. Think of all the spies who’d be shoved out on the dole. West-Point instructors, Scotland Yard, military songwriters, The CIA – who’d need ‘em anymore? C’mon! Havva heart! Anyhow, in 2004 Doug Fry took pity on these potential losers, and published a little treatise called “Seven Ways to Make Peaceful Societies Disappear” (Fry 2004: 187-194). From the start of his essay Fry warns that “peaceful” doesn’t mean perfect. In all societies people bicker and bark at each other. Not all societies, though, let this bickering boil over into violence. Also we’re not talking black and white here. Societies fall onto a continuum that starts with “very peaceful” and slowly oozes to “very violent.” Plus, even though among themselves some societies are peaceful (“low levels of physical aggression and nonviolent core values”) they still might do war every once in a while. Or maybe in the past they did war but not now. Anyhow pay attention here ‘cause I’m gonna pass on to you Fry’s list of ways to rub out peaceful people. You’ll wanna pass it on to all your military-industrial-complex buds so they can use it in their spin about how we’ve always had war and always will: _____________ The image above of the Guiding Goddess of Akroteri, comes from the Mediterranean island of Santorini. It is part of a 3,500-year-old wall painting showing the Goddess seated on an outdoor throne and surrounded by a griffin, a bipedal monkey, and a crocus-gathering young girl. (This image is copyrighted. Shown courtesy of Ch. Doumas, The Wall Paintings of Thera, Idryma Theras-Pteros M. Nomikos, Athens). |
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From Chapter 5, "Before War" |
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The Myth That Underpopulation Means Peace Maybe now’s the time to tackle the myth that there was no war in the Neolithic because populations were too small. I guess the idea is that Neolithics snuggled up in little groups of ten to fifteen, with the next nearest neighbor nowhere in sight. Or maybe the idea is that whenever you get more than a few of us humans together in one place, stuff gets scarce and everyone begins to fuss and fight over it – land, ladies and the last bottle of Lindemans Reserve Chardonnay, for example. The fact is, however, there’s no good relationship between underpopulation and peace, or overpopulation and war. According to University of Michigan anthropologist Raymond Kelly, " What’s more, not all Neolithic peoples were underpopulated. Take the peaceful, Goddess-centered, Neolithic Old Europeans for example. Their countryside areas seemed as densely peopled as any I know (outside modern large cities, that is). Old Europe took in the territory of modern Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, Croatia and Serbia and parts of the Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro. Out of this vast territory, figure 5.1 pinpoints a relatively tiny area in the Uman region of Western Ukraine – one only 70 miles across and 50 tall (113 by 80 kilometers). Nevertheless, back in the Neolithic a remarkably dense carpet of Cucuteni people covered this pint-sized area. Back in the Neolithic this little spot was literally peppered with towns and settlements. The largest, Tallyanky, was 2.2 miles across and 1 mile deep (3.5 by 1.5 kilometers) with possibly up to 10,000 inhabitants. The five largest black circles in figure 5.1 symbolize settlements from 1 to 1-1/2 miles large (250-400 hectares). The next-to-the-largest circles represent settlements 62 to 185 acres (25-75 hectares). Figure 5.2 shows one of the smallest Cucuteni towns, Petreni, 62 acres (25 hectares) -- picture ten football fields lying side-to-side and end-to-end. Petreni inhabitants arranged their 498 houses, each about 26 feet by 16 feet (8 by 5 meters), in ten concentric rings (Gimbutas 1991: 104-107). In short, in spite of its hefty population, Old Europe did not do war. Among the early-Bronze-Age Minoans, the same stood true: sizeable populations, no war. Recent population estimates indicate that in its heyday the Minoan town of Knossos was home to from 12,000 to 18,000 people (Muhly 2006). And in addition to Knossos, Minoans lived in four other large population centers: Mallia, Chania, Zakros and Phaistos. What’s more, on the roughly 155-mile by 37-mile island of Crete, archaeologists have excavated scores of smaller Minoan settlements. And it’s not as if the Minoans were locked on their island with no opportunity to plunder and lay waste to surrounding lands. They traded on a regular basis all over the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast, but there’s no evidence they made war on those they visited. In the Goddess-centered Indus Valley Civilization, we find the same story: large towns and cities but no war. Blanketing a whopping quarter of a million square miles (402,336 square kilometers) in what is today India and Pakistan, the Indus Valley Civilization included over 1000 cities and settlements. Some of these were definitely hefty in size. Harappa for example was 60,000 people large. Looking at the UK, that’s roughly the size of Maidenhead, Stafford or Royal Tunbridge Wells – nothing to sneeze at. In the US it’s the size of Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state (McIntosh 2002: 103; City Population). Mohenjodaro, size-wise the runner-up to Harappa, contained a not-so-shabby population of roughly 30,000 (Maisels 2000: 187). The next three largest Indus cities were between 200 and 250 acres each (80 and 100 hectares) (McIntosh 2002: 104). Each of these five cities seemed to be a hub for its own 38,000-square-mile area (100,000 sq. kilometers) (McIntosh 2002: 105). Many small countries aren’t 38,000 square miles large (take Portugal, Austria or Hungary for example), making these Indus cities somewhat akin to capitals plunked down in the middle of their own small countries. Nevertheless the Indusites failed to carry on wars, conquests or attempts at subjugating each other. The five Indus city-states did not struggle to smother one another – which is exactly what was going on in the same era down the road in Egypt and Mesopotamia. And like the Minoans, the Indus Valley people too were great long-distance traders, traveling as far as Mesopotamia to ply their wares. Like the Minoans, if they’d wanted to raid and plunder, they had plenty of chances to do it. ____________ The image above (of the Indus Valley goddess figurine) comes from the 3rd millennium BC. In the larger cities of the peaceful, prosperous Indus Valley Civilization, archaeologists have uncovered -- in almost every household -- goddess figurines like this one (This image is copyrighted and owned by J.M. Kenoyer. It is shown courtesy of the Dept. of Archaeology and Museums, Govt. of Pakistan). |
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