-Caveat Lector- From: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/17/reviews/000917.17angiert.html Goddes Theory I've lately become a convert to the utility of the Santa Claus myth. It's not that I think the story adds much magic to my 4-year-old daughter's life, but by giving her a powerful incentive to behave it adds magic to my own. You better watch out, little girl, or it's coal, socks and underwear for you! By all accounts from archaeology and anthropology, the possibility that there has ever been a true matriarchy, a society in which women effectively ruled, is about as likely as the chance that an obese fellow in red pajamas can deliver presents to some two billion children in the course of one night. Yet despite considerable evidence that contradicts the story of a prelapsarian gynecocracy, and a glaring lack of evidence to support it, many people, according to Cynthia Eller, continue to subscribe to it. As Eller lays out in the fascinating if often depressing ''Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory,'' a sizable corps of feminists is convinced that male dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon and that before patriarchy grasped the globe in its bloody talons, women were respected members of their tribes, equal if not above men in status and influence, revered for their capacity to give birth and nourish the young and for their innate connectedness -- to one another, to the earth, to the men they suffered with fond affection. Such a tale might not be a bad thing on its own. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has suggested, by helping to counter the notion that male dominance is inevitable, and by pointing out the ways in which patriarchy is culturally rather than biologically shaped, the myth of prehistoric matriarchy may inspire us to seek a fairer shake. But in the view of Eller, who has written books on the women's spirituality movement and conscientious objectors in World War II, the currently popular feminist versions are neither useful nor benign. For one thing, Eller notes, most adherents of the pro-matriarchy party line see it not as an empowering fairy tale but as a genuine account of our past. For another, she objects to key elements of the story, ones that I, too, find insupportable and every bit as stifling as any patriarchal rendering of femaleness. As the matriarchalists see it, the lost paradise of female power was a paradise because women are so wonderful. Who needs the Nature Conservancy when mothers rule? Eller quotes Jane Alpert's delineation of the qualities that inhere by nature to those who give birth, including ''empathy, intuitiveness, adaptability, awareness of growth as a process rather than goal-ended; inventiveness, protective feelings toward others and a capacity to respond emotionally as well as rationally.'' Reading such paeans to female ''niceness'' makes one reach for Joyce Carol Oates and her brilliant snarl, ''How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant scissors?'' Eller describes the extent to which popular and even academic culture has been infected. Experts lead packaged pilgrimages to sites where matriarchy and its goddess culture were thought to have flourished, among them Malta, Crete, Ireland and Turkey. Universities offer courses with titles like ''Herstory of the Goddess,'' ''Reclaiming the Goddess'' and ''The Goddess and the Matriarchy Controversy.'' The myth of a matriarchal prehistory is not new, nor is it always flack copy for females. Many traditional cultures tell stories of dark distant days when women ruled, and made a harrowing mess of things. The matriarchy was transformed from a literary and cautionary trope to purported history in 1861, with the anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen's ''Motherright.'' Drawing on classical Greek sources, Eller writes, ''Bachofen postulated an era of matriarchy ending in classical times with the rise of men and the 'male principle.' ''A century later, buoyed by the research and theories of a few scholars, notably the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, feminists began to sketch out a rough timeline. The details are usually vague, but supposedly human societies began as matricentric, focused on the primacy of mothers and children. Men were around and welcome, of course, but unconcerned about virginity or chastity among the womenfolk because they were ignorant of the role that fathers played in reproduction anyway. Matriarchalists pay particular attention to Europe in the Upper Paleolithic period, beginning around 40,000 years ago, ''when quite suddenly far more extensive archaeological remains appear, including carved and painted images of women.'' By the Neolithic era, some 8,000 to 4,000 years ago -- after the development of farming but before the perfection of metallurgy -- matriarchal culture was said to be in full glory. But then catastrophe struck. Marauding nomads from the Russian steppes, a people Gimbutas has named ''Kurgans,'' began invading neighboring lands, bringing violent codes of patriarchy with them and displacing or destroying the more peaceable matriarchalists. By 3000 B.C., it was all over for the gynecocrats. Women had been subordinated and even their goddess images replaced by one towering male Yahweh. In the latter half of her book, Eller carefully clips every thread from which this matriarchal myth is woven. The goddess imagery of which feminist matriarchalists are so proud? Look at the ancient Greeks: Hera, Athena and other goddesses aplenty, and yet women were virtual slaves in their houses. All the prehistoric imagery evocative of pregnant bellies and female genitalia that adorns sites like Catalhoyuk, the matriarchalists' holiest of holies? Like clouds, these carvings and abstractions can resemble anything the viewer chooses to see in them. The ignorance of prehistoric men? If anything, Eller says, it is the mother's role in reproduction that has been questioned throughout history. Men have often been thought to plant the seed, with women merely serving as the field in which the seed -- the homunculus -- grows. Eller is a committed but unflinching feminist, and her broad survey of the universality of male dominance is unsentimental and potentially disheartening. But she refuses to wax glum. She emphasizes that all studies of sex differences have shown the overlap between the sexes to be enormous and the genuine differences to be too tiny to hamstring us forever. And a future that offers greater visibility, power and status to women will be a better place for all, she suggests -- not because women are nicer or less destructive than men, but because that future is just. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. =================================================================
