At almost every sacred site on our Mediterranean tour the guide explained, “This used to be a shrine dedicated to the goddess, and then for mysterious reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated it to a god.” Suddenly, I was contemplating the overwhelming archeological and historical evidence that all early peoples worshipped some manifestation of the goddess. Indeed, women were priestesses of their religion, and property passed generally through the female line. But with the advent of Western culture, the goddess disappeared. In the three religions of the West - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - women were actually banned from conducting religious ceremonies.

What event in culture could have been so immense and so pervasive that it could change the sex of God? There are many explanations, but none satisfied me until I realized that the goddess started losing power about the same time people began to read and write. It occurred to me that the process of reading and writing could have changed the structure of the human brain and somehow shifted everyone into a patriarchal and misogynous mode. Sophocles once warned that nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. Well, the invention of writing was certainly vast. So what was the curse?

To build an argument for a strange neural anatomical hypothesis explaining a historical enigma, we have to examine how we evolved as humans. We are the only species of higher animals whose females have a feature of sexuality called menses, during which she bleeds and loses a significant amount of blood. Blood contains the all-important element iron, supplied by meat, so menses became the prod to encourage us to start hunting. The problem was that we were ill equipped to be predators, but for the fact of our exceptional cleverness. So we became more clever - and our brains got bigger, therefore so did our heads. But our babies’ bigger heads began to get stuck in their mothers’ birth canals, causing the death of both mothers and babies.

Nature’s solution to this was inspired. It pulled out all of the neuronal pathways that determine instinct and culture. All other animals have these when they’re born, but we don’t. We only acquire culture through a startling new agent we developed called language. Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.

The end result was that our brains split in two. Some 90% of our language centers were deposited and rewired in the left hemisphere of the brain, where all other linear functions reside, such as logic, arithmetic, causality, determinism and rationality. The remaining functions took up residence in the right hemisphere, where information was processed in a totally different fashion. It was more spatial, holistic. The right hemisphere can look at something and see the pattern and the big picture. It can figure out how to get out of a maze, it can see the parts to the whole, and most importantly, it can recognize faces.

Actually it wasn’t only our brains that split. Our visual field consists of two very different types of vision, namely rods and cones. Rods, which compose about 99% of our retina, see the big picture too, the parts to the whole. They see in dim light, and can pick up peripheral vision. On the other hand, cones are incredibly clear. They are for color, and they see in great detail. If you think about it, the cone vision of the eye corresponds to the kind of mental processes existing in the left hemisphere, and the rods correspond to the kind of mental processes existing in the right.

There is more. In addition to our brains and our eyes, our left hands became the passive, protective, receptive extremity - it holds the baby, or carries a shield - and the right hand became our agent of action. So we have a split brain and a split eye and a split hand, and now we are equipped with the secret weapon that no animal on the face of the planet can defend against: It’s called foresight.

About 10,000 years ago, the advent of animal husbandry and agriculture caused all our feminine attributes to rise to the fore. Just about every agricultural society of that time worshipped some manifestation of the Earth goddess. She was an all-powerful deity that replaced the numinous spirit world of hunter-gathers. She was responsible for bringing the Earth back to life in the Spring after winter’s decay. But then, for unknown reasons, even though the cultures all remained agricultural, the goddess began losing power. Next thing, she was gone.

There are many theories about what happened. Some say horsemen from the North conquered the goddess-loving people. Marx and Engels put it down to wealth, excess land, and archaic states. I believe it was an inside job. I think the thug who mugged the goddess was actually literacy.

A literate person has a totally different world view than a non-literate person. The first forms of literacy, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, occurred about 5,000 years ago, and were so complicated that less than two percent of the population could read and write. About 1500 years later came the greatest technological revolution in our history; that is, the alphabet. Now ordinary working people could learn how to read and write in a very short time.

And what would be the effect of learning a linear, sequential, reductionist and abstract form of communication on our culture?

I suggest that a culture adopting an alphabet would denigrate right hemispheric values because the alphabet is a left hemispheric mode of reception. And this right hemispheric denigration would manifest in two principal ways: Women’s rights would be taken away; and images would be declared abominations.

The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandants. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: “I am the Lord thy God there is no other.” The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.

After the Jews, the second culture to enthusiastically embrace the alphabet were the Greeks. Sparta and Athens are two cultures that were contemporaneous in ancient Greece, therefore, through them, we can test my hypothesis. Sparta was a very cruel, fascist, militaristic society, which disdained the written word. Athenians, on the other hand, gave us a great collection of playwrights, historians and philosophers, and the first extended experiment in democracy. They sat about debating the merits and aesthetics of art. Yet the Athenians passed a law against women owning property which, of course, is the key to power in any society. Women were veiled and had to stay at home and couldn’t participate in public life. In Sparta, however, despite being a cruel society, women owned two fifths of Spartan property by the fifth century. They were also just as well educated as their men.

During the Roman empire’s greatest period of literary, legal and engineering triumphs, a new religion arose based on the oral sayings of a gentle prophet, whose name was Jesus. He never put anything in writing, but told his disciples to memorize his teachings. His message was a very feminist credo. Therefore women flocked to his new religion and, in the early days, played a prominent role in it; they founded churches, they were high priests, and they baptized others. All this until the words of Jesus were inscribed in an alphabetic sacred text. When that occurred, women lost their power. They were ordered not to baptize, to sit in the back of the church, and were no longer allowed to sing in the choir. The patriarchs of the church took the oral sayings of Jesus - which were focused on mercy, love and compassion - and converted them into a masculine ethos about sin, guilt, suffering and death.

Then, in the fifth century, the Roman empire collapsed. Literacy got lost in secular Europe. We don’t really know very much about this time, but the love of Mary, chivalry and courtly love arose during the illiterate Dark Ages, and only plummeted again after the invention of the printing press.

Now printed material, and the alphabet were available everywhere. And everyone wanted to read and write because they wanted to study a book called the New Testament. With all of this, came the possibility that ordinary Christians could interpret Scripture and Prophecy for themselves, thus the Protestant Reformation. First they rid the religion of Mary and all images. Then they descended to a level of barbarity that the world has never seen. People had been killing people for a long time for a lot of different reasons, but this was unprecedented. In England the Presbyterians were killing the Anglicans and in France the Catholics were killing the Huguenots. In Spain the Catholics were killing the Jews and the Moors. In every single country that was impacted by the printing press, people started killing each other over incredibly fine distinctions in doctrine.

The culture that gave us Shakespeare and Galileo and Newton and Bach had within it men that had a psychosis so extreme that they came to believe that their women were dangerous. Hence the witch hunts of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which somewhere between 100,000 and one million women were killed. Russia, which remained illiterate, had no witch hunts, but the countries with the highest literacy rates - Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Spain and Italy - were the most severe. And it wasn’t the peasants who were burning the women; it was the literate segment of the population.

It all began to change at the start of the nineteenth century, when two discoveries occurred simultaneously - photography, and the electromagnetic field. Both conspired to reconfigure society. I call it the iconic revolution. Photographs did for images what the printing press did for words. In the 1950s electromagnetism and photography recombined to bring us television, which has completely knocked the world off its pins.

Alfred North Whitehead once said that the major advances of civilization all but wreck the societies in which they occur. Certainly this happened with the invention of the both the printing press and television. Television requires an entirely different neural anatomical strategy to perceive it. When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book’s content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn’t matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?

It’s no coincidence that the first feminist movement in 5,000 years, the Suffragette movement, occurred right after the invention of photography. The first real feminist movement was inspired in the sixties by the first generation that was raised on television. I am saying that we now live in a society that is awash in images, and not coincidentally, feminine values are rising rapidly. Women are regaining incredible rights. They’ve become priestesses again. We live in an image-based society now. Images have become more important than written words. The image of the atomic bomb in 1945 did more to change people’s consciousness than anything that was written about it. The image of the Earth beamed back from space in ‘68 had an electric effect on people’s relationship to the planet. Images are so prevalent that we get most of our information from them. We receive multiple layers of meaning within a very short compact picture, and that is what the right brain does best. Indeed, as our culture becomes more image-based, we’re balancing our hemispheres. Through this new re-wiring, we’re becoming a much gentler and kinder society. We’re witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It’s already happening. And I think that the good news is that it’s coming just in time.

Posted by: Leonard Shlain

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