Tuesday, September 20, 2005

HOW the gods TOOK OVER






Below are excerpts from an excellent review of a world-shaking book, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade (I'll present the second half the review tomorrow). The "Chalice" symbolizes the ancient pre-god Goddess, and the "Blade" the war-peoples that conquered Her. The review is in outline form. I'm giving you snippets from it, which I hope will entice you into reading the entire outline, if not the actual book:

The Feminine Chalice
• The feminine Chalice symbolized the source of life
• The highest values were for the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature, not the powers to destroy
• The function of priestesses and priests was to benefit all the people in the community
o NOT to serve and give religious sanction to a brutal male elite

The Great Change
"But then came the great change--a change so great, indeed that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude (the arrival of the Kurgans,Indo-Europeans).”

Old Europeans
• "The Old European (Goddess peoples) and Kurgan cultures were the antithesis of one another. …

Contrasting Ideologies
• One economy based on farming, the other on stock breeding and grazing, produced two contrasting ideologies....
• Peace and morality are now associated [in the 21st century] with both Judaism and Christianity
• But it is historical fact that these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests --the Levite tribe of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua.

Jehovah was a war God
• Like the Indo-Europeans, [the Hebrews] too brought with them a fierce and angry god of war and mountains (Jehovah or Yahweh)....

Social system: Domination Indo-Europeans and Hebrews imposed a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm....

The Masculine Blade
• "At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life.
This was the power symbolized by the "masculine" Blade, which early Kurgan cave engravings show these Indo-European invaders literally worshiped.

Women Reduced to Concubines • The Goddess and women were reduced to male consorts or concubines

The New Norm: Male dominance
“Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more "effeminate" men became the norm"

MORE TOMORROW

____
Thnx for the fotos to Neadeau (chalice) and
Naraosqa (blade)

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