This article by Thom written in 1998 tlaks about White societies history. I read parts of Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight about a year and a half ago, and I recognize the themes in this article coincide with those in the book, but it encapsulates our ancient history and the great forgetting. I hope a discussion will follow.

The Lost People

eley

I was recently reading this story:
http://foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240677,00.html

Apparently whoever destroyed the city around 2500 BCE was so offended at the image of a man playing a harp that they smashed all the statues. As if they were still offended at the shards of broken statuary, they later hauled all the statues to a cliff a few miles away and dumped them over the edge. That art must have been mightily offensive to someone, especially since none of it depicted glorious armed warriors, pitched battle or slaves being dragged off to a life of exile and servitude. No, this art reveals a society dedicated to aesthetics. Gardens and wine, music and and dance, pregnant women and the turn of the seasons were the focus of their art. This offensive society was matriarchal.

The "turn of the seasons" is the key to understanding the difference between matriarchal earthcentric spiritualities and patriarchal godcentric spiritualities. Like the serpent Ouroboros who consumes his own tail, time was perceived as a neverending cycle of repetition. The individual was eternal by living everyday life. Partaking of the Tree of Life, as it were.

The patriarchal cultures of Greece and Rome had no such understanding of time. For them, time was a straight line. Seasons were reduced to months and numbers, a beginning and an end, binary opposites. Time was something that accumulated, and the more time you collected the more posessions and status you had. Birth was the beginning and death was the end. Partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, as it were.

Separating a society from its history is symptomatic of patriarchy, because it breaks the cycle of time. Forcing conquered societies to accept a vision of time that starts with birth and ends with death is essential to keeping people disempowered and servile. Fear of death fostered a dependence on authoritarian structures, and so dominance and control became the thread that held society together. Our modern-day avalanche of trash TV is not a new phenomenon, nations conquered by the early patriarchal armies found themselves saturated by stories of jealous bickering gods, evil seductive sirens and glorious warriors who slaughtered barbarians. This was the real conquest, the reprogramming by myth.

It is much easier to replace an existing story with another story than it is to erase the existing story and create a vacuum. The Hellenestic cultures that evolved into Europe transmitted their patriarchal values right up until now. The idea that earthcentric spiritualities are "evil". That motherhood results in spoiled and unmotivated children. That the planet is here for us to exploit. These are all the result of a powerful Greek mythology that denies matriarchy an equal share in our society.

The transcript from the part of the show mentioning the story is here.

Sunday Service in Central Park

William Irwin Thompson

(For the Very Reverend James Parks Morton)

Sunday languages in procession round
the sunlit Great Lawn could be cloud-laddled
to each couple’s lips—Babel on the level,
metropole of peace where old cultures
become either Fifth Avenue parades,
ethnic restaurants, or street fair boutiques.
Come on Israel, get with the program.
Let the Holy Land become a theme park
where tourists buy biblical baseball caps,
St. Peter key rings and Islamic tiles
as hot plates for couscous and Irish stew.
And if Disney builds the Dome of the Rock
as the Night Journey Ride of Mohammed,
its plastic terrors beat the hell out
of herrem, jihad, and Christian crusade.
I look south across the open Great Lawn
surrounded by the towers of Midtown;
today the Park Rangers have a display
of peregrine falcons, hawks, and one tamed
enormous brown Peruvian Condor
that flies while a Swiss alpine hornsman plays
Tibetan riffs for a time to come when
religions too will be tamed and displayed.
As the Andean condor soars, harmless
and an immense eucharistic monstrance
to the transfiguration of torn flesh,
I am taken up to imagine in
the topology of the raptor’s eye
faceted within New Jerusalem
the whole city’s an historical park.

www.williamirwinthompson.org

This poem written by the Author of The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light is for me an interesting observation. I am yet to read this text and am only beginning to read it now. Is Gnarly on to something with the male vs female energy driving civillisation? Are global issues dirivative of relations between man and woman? A woman (the egg) - a civillisation of Being? The man (the sperm) a civillisation of Doing?

We are Hungry Ghosts as Thom put it, or at least I can claim as a seeker that identity. I want an understanding...

Zoe and Gnarlodious--wonderful observations.

quote:

today the Park Rangers have a display
of peregrine falcons, hawks, and one tamed
enormous brown Peruvian Condor
that flies while a Swiss alpine hornsman plays
Tibetan riffs for a time to come when
religions too will be tamed and displayed.

quote:

Is Gnarly on to something with the male vs female energy driving civillisation? Are global issues dirivative of relations between man and woman? A woman (the egg) - a civillisation of Being? The man (the sperm) a civillisation of Doing?

If so, I wonder how being holds it's own against doing? By absorbing? By remembering and absorbing and creating something new?

eley

I'm sure everyone is familiar with Riane Eisler's powerful reassessment of history in her international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future where she goes back and examines the roots of both male and female energy in civilization, and the fundamental implications of both.

quote:

It has been hailed as a major cultural contribution. For example, anthropologist Ashley Montagu called it “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species” and novelist Isabel Allende wrote, “The Chalice & The Blade is one of those magnificent key books that can transform us.”

From that she has introduced something she calls The Partnership Way, and has been working to transform a number of institutions with it, including the way corporations are run. One of her follow ups to The Chalice and The Blade is THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIP: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life

quote:

War isn’t in our genes, it’s in our cultures, Dr Eisler points out. The 9/11 terrorists came from cultures where women and children are terrorized into submission. Cultures such as Norway and Sweden pioneered the world’s first peace academies; their social policies respect and honor women and children. Why the difference? Drawing from decades of research, Dr. Eisler describes partnership cultures that are very different from dominator cultures—where peace is a priority, where caregiving is rewarded, women’s work is valued, children are well fed, and where there is less fear, poverty, and crime.

This passionate and compelling book demonstrates the growing worldwide movement toward such partnership cultures. But it also shows the strong resistance to change. Dr Eisler points out that this resistance comes from those who believe in authoritarian families and governments and the ranking of men over women. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, for example, served as the springboard that launched today’s politically powerful religious right.

The Power of Partnership offers action tools we can use to move toward partnership. It also proposes a new politics that takes us beyond Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal, and right/left: a partnership agenda that integrates the personal and the political. It shows us how our families, education, media, economics and politics can support relations based on mutual respect, nonviolence, and equity instead of manipulation, fear, and control – and what we can do to get there.

Thanks for the reference Ren. It looks really interesting. I looked at the web-site briefly--but I think I'm going to have to check the book out to get a better picture of what she is talking about.

eley

No Ren, I haven't heard of this book that I can recall. It sounds powerful and will check out. I wonder how those countries who value partnership came to be? What changes the consciousness of a people that reform becomes attractive? Must other civillisation objectives be achieved before the sacrifices will be accepted?

eley and Zoe,

In my readings of Riane's works, I find a resonance with my own values of empathy, fairness and a personal responsibility that values other's in a mutually respectful way. I thought this offered a core phrase of understanding:

quote:

Dr. Eisler describes partnership cultures that are very different from dominator cultures—where peace is a priority, where caregiving is rewarded, women’s work is valued, children are well fed, and where there is less fear, poverty, and crime.

Good companion readings to Riane's come from Hazel Henderson, who was a stay at home mother and homemaker in the sixties, who found herself in a situation where she had to make sense of some unfair economic circumstances she encountered in New York City, an experience which started her on a path to analyzing contradictions and paradoxes she perceived in the economic system, which led to her first book, Creating Alternative Futures, a career as an economic futurist, and eventually a PhD.

quote:

Creating Alternative Futures, first published in 1978, pioneered many of today's debates on how to reformulate economic theories to guide industrial societies on healthier paths toward more equitable, ecologically sustainable human development.

The essence of her critique can be found in what she's sees not valued in economics, as reflected in the above quotes about Riane Eisler's work. She also brings an informed ecological analysis to her arguments.

You can browse a list of her book titles here as a way of charting her path from its beginning in the sixties: Books

Oh, and this was her first book I read, back in the early eighties (her second published) The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics, and this is a hint of what interested me in the book:

quote:

It describes the new, winning coalitions that have already begun to replace the old parties and alignments in these societies. The new coalitions comprise the "small is beautiful" rural and urban homesteaders and land trusters; the activists in food, housing, and other cooperatives and credit unions; those formally excluded from the Old Order: women, blacks, Hispanics, and the solar-and-renewable-energy and appropriate-technology reformers as well as the movements for consumer and environmental protection.

While these factors are alive and continue to develop in peripheral ways, the assault of the dominator culture beginning with the Reagan revolution in the eighties, certainly shoved aside and belittled these values almost into extinction. But as the dwindling spurts of the non renewable energy begin to dribble from the ground, a resurgence may be possible.