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August 22 - November 10, 2021
The life of the mind can be divided into three realms: inner, outer, and supernatural. The inner world of experienced emotions and private thoughts is essentially invisible to others. The outer, concrete world of nature constitutes our environment: it is objective reality. There exists also a third realm: some call it spiritual, some call it sacred, and some call it supernatural. Humans have acknowledged and incorporated this third realm into every culture ever created.
The clearest demonstration of the Goddess’s power was Her ability to bring him back to life each spring. Whether She was resurrecting Her
Easter
every
Of the twin human hemispheres, the right side is the elder sibling. In utero, the right lobe of a human fetus’s brain is well on its way to maturation before the left side begins to develop. The old, wise,
By listening carefully to the forms of speech while the left brain is deciphering speech’s content, the right hemisphere is expert at ferreting out hidden messages by interpreting inflection and nuance. It is aware of the speaker’s posture, facial expression, and gesture. Just below conscious awareness, it registers pupil size and hand tremors.
Another major right-brain feature is its ability to appreciate music; the perception of sounds which the right lobe integrates into an all-at-once harmonious feeling state.
The right brain is better than the left in perceiving space and making judgments as to balance, harmony, and the composition of gestalts, from which we make aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful. Since the right hemisphere processes input instantaneously, it is the better side for appreciating dimensions and judging distances. Driving, skiing, and dancing are its province. The right brain’s principal attributes concern being, images, holism, and music
The right side is concerned with being, the left with doing The left lobe controls the vital act of willing.
The left lobe knows the world through its unique form of symbolization—speech. In right-handed
The left brain cleaved the right brain’s integrated sense of wholeness into a duality that resulted in humans creating a distinction between me-in-here and world-out-there. The ego requires duality to gain perspective.
Along with doing, speech, and abstraction, the fourth characteristic unique to the left hemisphere is numeracy Although the ability to count began in
I propose that the left hemisphere is actually a new sense organ designed by evolution to perceive time.
Metaphorically, time is the masculine coordinate, and space is the feminine one. The poet William Blake wrote, “Time & Space are Real Beings, a Male & a Female. Time is a Man and Space is a Woman. 5
Because rods supply the big picture, they are the key component of a visual, physical, and mental state known as contemplation
Cones allow an animal to scrutinize
Cone vision, I suggest, created the necessary parameters for the left brain to invent the all-important idea of next, which led, inexorably, to foresight (or next-sight)—a sense of the future.
Women have more rods in their retinas than men, and as a result, have better peripheral vision. They can see better in the dark and take in more at a glance than men. Men have more cones than women, allowing
Much of what is vigorously debated in our culture right up to the present has its roots in the archaic dichotomy between males/death and females/life.
the hunter’s skill was no longer necessary to bring home the bacon: it was already home, gently rooting and multiplying in a corral.
Fecundity and fertility became society’s highest values. Women easily adapted to the new way of life. Caring for young plants and animals were nurturing tasks that they had been performing all along in their role as mothers.
The process of planting seeds and waiting for the earth to bring forth its bounty became the symbol of impregnation and gestation. The need to encourage herds to be fertile reinforced the imagery of the female as life-giver. The shift from gatherers/hunters to farmers/herders manifested symbolically in the religions of the new culture.
There was a winnowing of the gatherer/hunters’ multiple hunting and vegetative spirits, in favor of a powerful female deity known as the Earth Mother.
The male’s pent-up aggression began its toxic accumulation. Sport hunting, contests of courage, ritual killings, and human sacrifices came into being because of men’s need to replace the excitement of the hunt.
Archaeologists have uncovered intriguing evidence from the period between 7000 and 4000 B.C., suggesting a muting of violence in many early farming communities. Settlers frequently located their villages in the rich bottomlands of valleys, and many of these communities lacked fortifications, suggesting that these people were not concerned about attackers.
There is little evidence confirming the domination of the many by the few.
these clues suggest an existence relatively free from the strife that seems to have characterized most of recorded history. And
everywhere in the ruins of these cultures there are statue fragments of a female deity. 10
Archaeologists have not unearthed positive proof that Neolithic people ever fought organized wars. 12
agricultural. Elinor Gadon, a feminist historian, mused, “When we look back across the historical time of patriarchy … there seems to be some terrible inevitability, a relentless desire to crush the female essence, human and divine. The question of why is among the most puzzling of our time.” 13
In 1974, anthropologist Sherry Ortner asserted that gender roles between men and women diverged because there is a universal societal tendency to align the male with culture and the female with nature Every human group strives to
When written words began to supersede spoken words, the left brain’s dominance markedly increased. To write and read, an individual uses primarily the left hemisphere, only the hunting cones and only the killing hand. With the strokes of a thousand chisels, styli, brushes, and pens, literacy diminished the right brain’s complementary role in creating and deciphering language, dismissing with it the importance of both the rods of the retina and the left hand.
Another human feature that developed in conjunction with gesture is the peculiar color of our hands. Among the varied species of primates, only humans—including highly melanotic native Africans—lack pigment on their palms. One explanation of this unique feature is that it once served the hands’ function in communication. Before the full development of spoken language, our ancestors sat around the fire speaking and gesturing to each other. It would have been a distinct advantage for the palms to be pale and thus more visible in dim light. 4
A letter writer has no instant visual feedback to assess the impact of his words on the recipient, and a letter deprives the reader of the body language, facial expression, and other clues she would normally garner from the letter writer. “Reading between the lines” is a far more difficult exercise than evaluating the nonverbal clues of speech. Ferdinande de Sassure, an early researcher in the field, noted, “Writing veils the appearance of language; it is not a guise for language but a disguise.” 5
Texting, emailing, spending more time in front of a screen...
Speech and writing differ significantly in a purely mechanical aspect.
overburdened. The speaker sets the pace and the listener must follow. In reading, the opposite is the case: the reader’s left brain is in complete control.
A speaker can imply or exaggerate double entendres, puns, and humorous interpretations simply by varying his inflection. The written word, in contrast, is silent. Writers use punctuation marks in an attempt to overcome this serious disadvantage, but while these symbols enliven prose, a question mark is a pallid substitute for an arched eyebrow above a mocking smirk.
* Speech generation and listener comprehension are simultaneous events. The written word’s message is deciphered sometime in the future and usually in another location. It is linear Speech is framed in the here and now Writing’s context is there and then
In most conversations, there is little editorial interference. This helps the listener evaluate the speaker’s message. Slips of the tongue cannot be retrieved. In contrast, a writer has far more control than the speaker, more time to “collect his thoughts” and calculate their effect, allowing him to edit and revise what the reader sees.
Also missing from the written word is the aesthetic quality of the speaker’s voice. Different people’s voices—dull, sexy, forced, slippery, seductive, earnest, convincing, or stentorian—evoke different emotional responses. While consciously attending to the content of spoken language, the listener is also evaluating speech’s emotional tenor subliminally. *
And in modern times, the printing press and then the typewriter further diminished the right brain’s participation by replacing the individuality of handwriting with standardized and impersonal type.
the articulation of words depends on the musculature of both sides of the mouth. Writing involves the muscles of only one side of the body. Pure writing, using stylus, quill, pencil, or pen, engages the dominant hand, which the dominant hemisphere controls. Right-brain participation is markedly reduced. The left hand has no role during
Placing the pen in the fighting hand etches aggression into the written word differentiating it from speech, which depends more on a bicameral cooperative effort.
Nonverbal clues, concrete gestalts, music, inflection, spontaneity, simultaneity, aesthetics, emotion, slips of the tongue, gesticulation, and peripheral vision are all features best processed by the right brain. Speech—
The written word issues from linearity, sequence, reductionism, abstraction, control, central vision, and the dominant hand—all hunter/killer attributes. Writing represented a shift of tectonic proportions that fissured the integrated nature of gatherer/hunter communication and brain cooperation.
The triumphant march of literacy that began five thousand years ago conquered right-brain values, and, with them, the Goddess. Patriarchy and misogyny have been the inevitable result.
The Sumerians had believed that cuneiform was a gift from Nisaba, the goddess of grain and storage. Since cuneiform is essentially a clever way to store thoughts, it was a fitting attribution. After the conquest of Sumer, with the changeover from a pictorial script to a more abstract, sequential, linear one, she was superseded by Nabu, the Akkadian god of writing.
Marduk responded by creating mortals. He began by pardoning all of Tiamat’s allies. Singling out Kingu, Tiamat’s favorite son who had ruled with her after Apsu’s death, Marduk accused the youth of instigating his mother’s attack. In a ritual murder witnessed by all, Marduk forced one victim to expiate everyone else’s crimes. He ordered Ea (Marduk’s father) to knead the flesh and blood of his hapless sacrifice, like a potter manipulating raw clay. After creating the multitudes of mortals from this gory pastiche, Marduk condemned these puny creatures to crawl across the surface of Tiamat’s
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Suffering and dying for the sins of others...
But this ease does not extend to writing. Writing is not genetically encoded. No one writes as he speaks. Judging from the many tablets devoted to teaching it, grammar was a most tedious part of the curriculum in the first scribal schools and took years to master. It still is difficult. Small children can communicate effectively by the time they are four; lucid writing is an achievement high school English teachers seldom see.
Customs organically grow with the maturing of a community; laws press down upon the people and can be initiated and manipulated by a privileged literate elite.
Western culture has long reviled the snake, associating it with evil and temptation. But at the dawn of civilization the snake was a positive symbol of feminine energy. Egyptians perceived the snake as a beneficent, vital creature intimately associated with female sexuality, and, by extension, with life. A snake’s sinuous mode of locomotion is evocative of a nubile woman’s walk and dance. Her movements in the throes of lovemaking are serpentine in contrast to the mechanical pumping of the male. In some cultures, orgasm has been likened to releasing the latent energy of a coiled snake.
