(Viking/Penguin)

Prehistoric societies worshipped goddesses, and women were often in positions of power . Property was passed from mother to daughter. What caused the disappearance in Western civilization of the feminine in religion? Why were women excluded from religious hierarchies for so long?

Since the shift occurred at the point that people were learning to read and write, and alphabetic writing promotes left-brained, linear, logical thinking, societies where the majority were literate developed a left-brained way of looking at the world at the expense of the right-brained way of pattern perception.

So logic, linear reason, analysis, and masculine traits of the left-brain evolved more than holistic imagery, simultaneity, synthesis, creativity, and femininity of the right brain. Images are mental duplications of the world the brains senses through vision. Images are concrete, holistic, and work with synthesis in a field or gestalt. They are perceived all at once.

Yes, while these methods of viewing the world are opposed, every individual has all the features of both sides of the brain. In the 1960’ Marshall McLuhan stated that the" medium is the message." The technology of communication becomes part of the society’s mind and exerts an unconscious, powerful influence on the beliefs and perceptions of the members of that society.

Even though each individual has a unique set of genetic instructions, the culture he is born into does the final shaping. As a part of the evolutionary process, primates leaving the trees needed to develop big brains; but the size of the brain was limited by the size of the birth canal. The evolutionary solution to this problem was to leave the brain incomplete upon birth. Major neurons were left to be developed by education after birth.

Culture therefore has an opportunity to shape those neurons. Two of the most important influences on an individual’s development are the immediate family’s emotional makeup and the structure of his culture. The third influence is the predominant medium of the culture. The medium determines which neurons in the child’s brain will be reinforced.

A second evolutionary solution to the need for brain power divided the brain into two parts to allow development of speech. While all vertebrate brains have two lobes, only human brains have two lobes that function differently:

The right side of the brain, which develops first in the fetus, is nonverbal, nonlogical and meshes the emotions that equal the state of existence. It enables the individual to know something authentically. It is the internal voice that verifies the knowledge as being beyond debate. Having faith in divinity, understanding jokes, and feeling attracted to or repulsed by something are right brain activities.

They are get-it-all at once experiences. Intuition, love at first sight, and religious conversions are right brain activities. The right brain perceives concretely. It creates altered states of consciousness and dreams,. It is the creative side that understands the multiple levels of meaning contained in metaphors. It recognizes images and appreciates music. It perceives balance, harmony, and composition of the whole and develops aesthetic taste.

The left-brain is busy with doing, willing and speech. It abstracts, discriminates, analyzes and dissects. It leaps from particular to general, from concrete to abstract. It creates art, logic, science and philosophy. It removes men from nature and creates the separate ego. The left lobe is a new sense organ to perceive time.

The corpus callosum is neural fiber connecting the two sides. Women have between 10% and 33 % more neural fibers in this area and therefore multitask more effectively than men. The male is more left-brained because hunting encourages the ability to shut out feelings and be objective. The woman’s brain is more right dominant because of the need for emotional commitment in the raising of a child. Male brains are time conscious; Female brains are space conscious.

Once mankind left the hunting/gathering stage and began to farm, the feminine right-brained attributes were encouraged in both mean and women. Seed planting and the wait for the harvest became to connected to impregnation and gestation. The breeding of animals re-enforced the female as life giver. Thus the earth goddesses were born. Anthropological studies of nonliterate, agricultural societies indicate that they had more male and female equality than industrialized, literate societies.

Between 7000 and 4000 BC, which includes the early agricultural period, there seems to have been a decrease in violence. Few walled or fortified villages existed and artifacts from that time show fewer weapons and more tools. Women often had more favorable burial sites than men, and there is little or no evidence of slavery. In the ruins of these settlements statue fragments of female deities are often found.

So what happened to change these societies and destroy goddess worship?

Several theories exist. Marija Gimbute thought the domestication of the horse and the creation of the cavalry caused northern tribes to attack the agricultural communities and to impose the sky god on them. Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that the bride barter eroded women’s value. Sherry Ortner suggests that gender roles diverged because men were associated with culture and women with nature. Every society attempts to rise over nature by means of culture.

Fredrick Engles suggested that land ownership created the idea that a man could own a woman. Gerda Lerner a feminist historian indicates that the formation of the state destroyed the Goddess. The growing settlement concentrated the power in a few people resulting in a hierarchy, which favored the strong alpha male. These theories may explain the how, but they do not explain the why. Why did the agricultural society accept the demise of the goddess and the shift to left- brain perceptions?

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss concluded that the one thing linked to the development of hierarchical societies, slavery and oppression is the development of literacy.

According to Jungian theory everything has a shadow side. Literacy is often praised, but it too has a shadow side. It has encouraged the domination of women by men through out most of history. The idea that the alphabet disempowered women may seem opposed to historical fact. After all, literate societies in the west value the rule of law and constitutional government. They have increasingly affirmed the value of individuals of all races sexes and creeds. This affirmation is a late development.

Reading and writing are linear. Meaning is determined bit by bit with meaning determined by word choice, syntactic order and combinations of letters. Understanding often requires analysis. It is sets of symbols that represent rather recreate the world. Reading and writing are abstract rather than concrete. Images are mental duplications of the world the brains senses through vision. Images are concrete, holistic, and work with synthesis in a field or gestalt. They are perceived all at once.

Custom and language associate holistic, concrete reasoning and synthesis with the feminine. Abstraction, analysis and linear sequencing are associated with the masculine. Goddess worship, feminine values and women’s power depend on a culture where imagery dominates. God worship, masculine values and men’s domination of society are primarily found in cultures where the written word dominates. Word and image, male and female are complementary and ideally are balanced as in the YinYang symbol.

It is literacy itself, which caused the disappearance of the Goddess. Speakers and listeners us both rods and cones, gesture with both hands and are more simultaneous and spontaneous. Both sides of the brain create and interpret speech. Writers and readers use the left hemisphere that also involves the hunting cones and the killing hand.

So literacy decreased the famine right brain’s importance. Nonverbal clues, inflections, simultaneity, emotion and gesticulation are processed by the right brain. Speech requires both brains acting in cooperation. Writing and reading are linear, abstract, central visional and dominant handed—all connected to the hunter/killer male. So literacy demolished right brain values and the Goddess, resulting in male dominated societies where the abuse of women is common.

The rules of grammar develop with writing and reading. Grammar and laws are left brain, and abstract. They inhibit spontaneity and intuition. They reinforce masculine principles. The earliest Mesopotamian law code attributed to Urokagina of Lagash starts with a proscription against one woman having several husbands. The rule of the male is a dominant theme of Hammurabi’s code, which evolved at the high point of literacy in Mesopotamia.

One fourth of the code inhibits women’s rights. The fall of the Mesopotamian Goddess Tiamat occurred simultaneously with the erection of Hammurabi’s stele. While Mesopotamia developed a phonetic writing system based on abstractions, Egypt developed a pictorial system based on images. While Mespotamian women lost power, Egyptian women continued to maintain powerful positions. Max Mueller wrote "No people, ancient or modern has given woman so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of the Nile Valley." Along the Mediterranean as literacy rose, women lost economically, politically and spiritually.

The alphabet developed in the Middle East. It allowed people to organize knowledge. It makes storage and retrieval of data possible. It created the possibility of theoretical science. An abstract alphabet encourages abstract thought. It reinforces only the male part of the dual methods of survival. The myths of the people who use it illustrate its masculine left-brained bias. When any individual, male or female learn the alphabet, he or she turns away from idols, and animal that represent nature and start to worship an abstract god who lacks a face, or image.

That god is male and disconnected from earth. Yaweh wrote the Ten Commandments and expected his chosen people to read what he had written. He prohibited the making of images and blessed the written word. While Akhenaton and Hammurabi tried to introduce monotheism and law to their people, such abstractions weren't accepted because the societies were illiterate. The Jewish people connected monotheism, law and literacy and made them work. Each of the first four commandments require abstract, linear, sequential thinking: the mind set necessary for a successful alphabetical literacy. Yaweh’s message was encoded in the alphabet. To understand it required reading.

All other means of perceiving information were prohibited. The Old Testament helped hold the people steady and helped many individuals. The poor, widows, orphans, slaves, priests, warriors, lawyers, judges, prophets, farmers, business men, sons, fathers, husbands and bigamists. It encouraged law, logic, justice, ethics, morality, dualism, democracy, and conscience. Unfortunately, women, artists and sexual expression were oppressed. Images, beauty wholeness, tolerance and intuition were often debased. Judaism is monotheistic and literate and masculine.

In the covenant with Abraham Yahweh’s requirement for male circumcision automatically made women unable to be a part of the covenant. Sarah is powerless to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac to Yaweh. The story of Moses returning form receiving the Ten Commandments only to find the people worshiping an image of a cow represents the conflict between image and written word. On his second trip to the mountain, God dictates and Moses writes the commandments in stone.

This is obviously a myth describing the birth of literacy among the Jewish people. When they entered the Promised Land God required that all who did not worship him be slaughtered. The Canaanite worshiped images, the Israelites worshiped through written words. The words won. Historically this slaughter was the first occasioned by religious fanaticism.

Additional evidence of the Jewish glorification of males at the expense of females includes the matter of hair. Hair length is connected with sexuality and girls with long hair advertise her fertility to possible mates. Ancient Israelite codes demanded that a bride shave her head immediately upon become a wife. Of course the same rule did not apply to males. Then she must wear wigs or scarves for her entire married life. On the other hand women in the Old Testament are usually well-developed many sided personalities.

However, the basic character of women is based on Eve. The relationship between men and women is the first question raised and answered after the creation. Of course there are two versions of the story. In one version man and woman are both created in God’s image at the same time. Thus they are equal. In the other version Eve is an afterthought and a physical part of Adam. Thus the woman’s role in life was to support a man. Then there is the whole temptation theme, which makes Eve responsible for the exile from paradise.

Israel and Greece were the first civilizations to fully accept the alphabet; that they are the foundation of Western civilization is significant. Homer’s Iliad, which was the first written Greek literature, exalts masculine values of heroism, deceit, trickery and war. If men die in battle or on adventure they are ensured immortality in the poems that will long recite their deeds. The epic begins with a father sacrificing a daughter so the ships can sail.

That is a good indication of the place women held in Greek society. Hesiod too contributed to the vilification of women in his depiction of Pandora as responsible for releasing all the ills that inflict the world. Many of the goddesses lacked mothers and were born straight from Gods. What do the stories of Adam and Eve, Pandora, and Iphanigea teach girls receiving their education in the West? What do they teach the boys?

In Greek mythology Cadmus who had brought the alphabet from Phoenicia to Greece, married Harmony, who was the daughter of Ares, God of War, and had four daughters. He killed a serpent a symbol of feminine power and gave the Greeks the alphabet which led to Greek law. All four daughters seemed bound to Dionysus in a tragic way. Dionysus was the god of pleasure, beauty, ecstasy, and creativity, as well as pain, cruelty, terror and madness.. In the containing of opposing forces he is similar to the Yin-Yang symbol.

His cult was exciting and violent. Women devotees supposedly became so mad that they had superhuman strength and tore men from limb to limb and ate him. Homer and Hesiod did not mention Dionysus but by the fifth century B.C., he was a much worshipped figure. The Ionian alphabet was adopted in 402 B.C. and literacy rates were on the rise. Cadmus’ oldest daughter was mother to Acteon who accidentally glimpsed Artemis at her bath. She encouraged her dogs to tear him to pieces. The second daughter Agave killed and ate her son while participating in a Dionysian rite. The third daughter Io was driven mad and killed her child and threw herself and the child from a cliff.

Semele the fourth daughter was the mother of Dionysus. Antigone a sixth generation member of the House of Cadmus died because the law was enforced without love. The family story metaphorically describes the generations of suffering that results fro the union of the alphabet and war. Wherever the alphabet arrives, some form of madness also arises. When civilization has created an advance in science and knowledge aided by alphabet literacy, a war has occurred. Women suffer as a result of laws designed by men who are alphabetically literate and who have forgotten the feminine justice.

The Greeks also introduced coinage. Dealing with money is linear, abstract, and numerical--- all left brain functions. The hunter instincts in the male transferred to money. Hunt money rather than boars. Women reflecting their evolution as gatherers are more concrete than men and like to keep their money in jewelry or real estate rather than speculating in investment schemes. So the split-brain model explains why couples fight over money.

There are two dominant cultures on Earth: the occidental and the oriental. The western or occidental culture is extroverted and dualistic. It sees history as a sequence of event and medicine as mechanical. The West personifies the left-brain. The orient or east is introverted and holistic,. It sees history as patterns that recur and perceives medicine holistically. It is characterized by the right brain.

India developed the practice of burning a live widow on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. Bride burning which allows an Indian husband to set his wife afire to express his dislike of her is still practiced. The murder of female infants has been a common practice through out the history of India, and the practice of segregating women from men called Purdah is a common Hindu practice. What has caused the development of so anti female a culture?

Settlements of the Dravidians of the Indus valley that date between 2500 B.C. and 1500 B.C. reveal artifacts that indicate serpent worship. Inherited property passed through the female line,. There seems to have been a reverence for vegetation. The largest structure was a brick public bath. Graves for men and women tend to be equal. Lingam and Yoni have been unearthed from these sights. Lingam and Yoni are stone images of male and female genitals that represent the creative force of life.

Artifacts that resemble humans seem to be statues of Mother Goddess. These are the people that probably composed the Vedas orally. They did have a pictographic form of writing that would have been difficult to learn. Literacy was probably limited. Equality of the sexes probably prevailed.

The Aryans conquered the Dravidians and brought a rudimentary alphabet with them. They adapted the Semitic alphabet to the Sanskrit. By the third century B.C. Brahmi script matured and was used to create literature. The Aryans took the oral Vedas added their own values and wrote them down using the alphabet.

India was late in adopting alphabetic writing. Images remain in it religion. Kali, Durga, Parvati and Sarasvati are goddesses honored by both men and women. Hindu art celebrates sexuality of both male and female The major god Brahman is genderless; nature is worshiped. These all suggest strong right brain values. Buddhism was a reformation of Hinduism. It retained doctrine based on feminine values, but disliked sexuality, women, and birth. It was overcome by a rise in literacy accompanied by patriarchy.

Buddha himself wrote nothing. Buddhism didn't adopt writing for five hundred years and then it was too late. It was most successful in cultures that were illiterate or which used a non-alphabetic form of writing. In India The Manu Code of laws were written and people were expected to read them. That began the shift to left brained values and antifeminism

China is the birthplace of the yin/yang symbol, which suggests the equality of the sexes. However, China has been a rigid patriarchy that has abused and mistreated women for generations. The Chinese written language transformed ideas into images rather than sounds into letters. It is one of the oldest written languages still in use. It has 216 radicals, which represent common nouns or verbs.

One ideogram can contain up to 8 radicals. It is written in vertical columns. This is a right brain written language that calls upon the ability to synthesize and see holistic connections. In every way ideograms are the opposite of the alphabets’ linear masculine form. Scientist agree on the right and left orientation in occidental and oriental writing..

However, Chinese characters became very stylized and therefore abstract. Even though it is written vertically, it still requires sequencing for understanding. It requires analysis of characters into radicals. It is much closer to the alphabet than it is to oral language. Therefore it had a masculinizing influence on the culture. Writing of any kind will shift gender politics.

The Axial is the period when many of the influential religious leaders lived. Isaiah, Socrates, Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao-tzu, and Confucius were alive during the Axial period. Each created an abstract system of thought that changed the brains of followers. All of them were literate, and had no important relationship with women. An explanation for the sudden appearance of abstract systems of thought occurring over a wide geographic area at the same time is that literacy enabled the spiritual leaders to a develop a new way of thinking. Unfortunately misogyny accompanies the written word. Men fascinated with writing are sexist. Men that love women spend their time with women not developing abstract systems of thought.

In the West, Jesus attempted to return to a more feminine egalitarian model. He expected them to have faith a right-brained way of knowing. He encouraged nonviolence. His message was mysterious and he used aphorisms, parables and metaphors in his teaching. That’s a very right brain approach. In picking the greatest commandment, Jesus skipped the idea of the first commandment, which forbade image making. Instead, he put the emphasis on love. He said that the end of time was at hand. All of these teachings are counter to left-brain processes.

Jesus became Christ after Jesus died. Jesus’ feminine teachings on faith, love, and peace were transformed after his death to a celebration of death, suffering and obedience. This alternation between feminine creed and masculine doctrine reoccurred throughout history. When images are strong, the right brain processes and values are strong. When writing and reading are emphasized the left-brain emphasis on laws and hierarchy and orthodoxy are prized. Paul who was the first to write about Christ had problems with women.

He welcomed any man no matter his station or reputation or nationality Any man could teach and have a congregation. Women could not. This was obviously counter to Jesus teachings which include several women as learners and teachers . Because Paul believed the world was going to end tomorrow the role of the female as mother was made a non-issue. Later two groups of Christians developed: the Orthodox and the Gnostics. The Orthodox accepted the written words of the New Testament as totally sufficient for salvation.

The Gnostics said that they were an introduction but that there was a secret knowledge revealed for only a few. The Gnostics were proud of their inclusion without distinction of everyone regardless of class, education, nationality or sex. The teacher or preacher was selected by lot. They celebrated Agape or love feasts and exchanged the kiss of peace. The orthodox placed women as obedient helpmate to men. They believed that a physical fleshy man had died on the cross and had bodily come back to life on the third day. They believed the literal meaning of the written gospel as history with moral meaning.

The Gnostics believed the Crucifixion, death and resurrection were symbolic myths with important meaning. The orthodox won the battle and Western civilization became more word and less image oriented. Unfortunately most orthodox writers were misogynists. For example, Origen believed it necessary to renounce his sexuality to obtain salvation. He hoped to create an androgynous third race, which would echo the souls of the Kingdom of Heaven. He actually castrated himself to join this third race. In the four hundred years following Jesus death his message underwent drastic transformation.

What he began others changed. The principle orthodox writers denounced women and sexuality. They denounced imagery and were advocates of literacy. The Gnostics, who lost, accepted imager and sexuality and preferred oration to writing. The New Testament became more important as women’s rights and imagery were destroyed. In spring of 415 Hypatia a renowned woman philosopher in Alexandria was resented for her influence. Cyril Alexandria’s Christian patriarch had a group of monks ambush her, take her to a church and torture her until she died. This was an acceptable Christian act.

For a while during the Dark ages Christianity swung back to imagery in the decoration of churches, because the people of the congregation did not understand the language of the service and were illiterate. The age of Chivalry arose with its adoration of women and Mary became a prominent figure in individual worship. During this time Carthars and Waldensnsians appointed women clergy. Celibacy evaporated and priest usually had wives and children. This began to change with the foundation of the Benedictine order by the jilted Benedict.

The monastic movement grew and celibacy came with it, as did literacy. The regulation of time for prayers developed. The monastery was a left-brain force. The vows of silence cut off right brain function. Combined with reading and writing, silence force d monks to rely on their left-brain abilities. Monasticism undermined the position of women. Marriage declined. Monks unable to follow their vows of celibacy had illegitimate children. The Great Schism of 1054 divided the church into Eastern and western branches.

The Eastern church retained its literacy and developed an iconoclastic movement among the clergy Church mosaics, painted icons, stained glass were destroyed. The movement grew so widespread that the Patriarch was beheaded for refusing to support it. The iconoclast movement didn't reach the west, which was illiterate outside of the monasteries.

In Islam the prophet originally taught that in Allah’s eyes men and women were equal. However, he cursed imagery and demanded a belief in a single male god. This god initiated written dialogue through alphabetic writing with Mohammed. Mohammed’s instantaneous literacy allowed him to read the sacred words. The Prophet himself wrote nothing. Through one generation of oral tradition to a final version of the Koran, which was written by committee, many of the passages were modified unintentionally by the interjection of the tellers’ or writers’ biases.

Once the committee version of the Koran was finished, the ruler ordered all of the other versions destroyed. Early Islam had democratic institutions and was tolerant and easy to follow. Imams were married, had families, and engaged in secular work. A hundred and fifty years later al Bukhari wrote Correct Book or the hadith. It is more patriarchal and anti image than the Koran. Islam split into the Sunni and the Shiite sects. The Sunnis are literalists In the Sunni sect the hadith is taken literally. All truth is seen to reside in it and the Koran.

The Shiites believe that each generation has individuals capable of interpreting the Koran and passing on an oral wisdom. The Sunnis restrict female rights more than the Shiites do. The custom to veil women became popular in the literate sections of the culture and spread at about the same rate as the Arabic alphabet. The segregation of women into harems and the ban on women appearing public produced the need for eunuchs to provide the services that women were no longer allowed to perform. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced in Islamic cultures.

It is a relatively recent practice. It seems to be connected to cultures where males learn to read the Koran even though there is nothing in the Koran about it. It occurs more frequently among the Sunnis literalists than among the Shiites. It is more common in cultures where literacy is new than those where literacy has been practiced for centuries.

In the Renaissance the printing press created a spread of literacy. Popes prohibited marriage for priests, and the church hierarchy became entirely male dominated. The flooding of the culture with alphabetic symbols caused a dramatic shift to the left brain hunter –killer abilities and values. Within the masculine dominated institutional church and the Papacy itself, wealth, pride, competition, and glory were esteemed. The absence of the right-brained, feminine connection helped lead to its ultimate weakening.

Protestantism led by Luther and Calvin depended completely on written tracts. Their written instructions to their followers were long and difficult and imageless. Calvin created the Protestant ethic of simplicity, hard work, self-reliance, strict morality and literal understanding of the Bible. Once again the emphasis on literacy and the written word led to violence. The wars between the Catholic and Protestant factions tore across all of Europe.

The alternation of Catholicism and Anglicanism in England, led to one Queen being called Bloody Mary and a King being beheaded Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Protestant Huguenots in France restored France to Catholicism once and for all. Ireland’s conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions is a leftover from these times.

The printing press and the increase of literacy created a shift in religious thinking and made the Reformations rigidity and repression possible. The religious wars of the 150 years after the printing press were madness. The madness occurred only in those lands affected by the printing press.

The printing press increased literacy. A society that is newly literate finds new ways for its members to interact, creates new forms of government and new forms of religion. Literacy also has undesirable side effects. The religious wars were one such side effect. The period of the violent witch-hunts when women and feminine values were abhorred was another. Literacy is wonderful, but the process of reading and writing initially shifts the individual and culture to the left brain values at the cost of the right brain ones often resulting in violence and the denigration of women.

In the west the periods of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries were a time of conflict between the forces of The Enlightenment and the advocates of Romanticism. Newton and his scientific discoveries created a view of the cosmos where everything was quantifiable and obeyed immutable universal law. The universe was giant clockwork. This scientific approach is of course left brained with its emphasis on mathematical skills and law.

Ultimately it led to the Industrial Revolution, a combination of science, brute strength, monetary concerns, mathematics and competition. Again very left brained. Mother nature was used hard with deforestation of Europe eventually driving man to the mining of coal. Literacy rates for women began to rise. Women became famous writers. Eventually the educated class divided into two groups: Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume and Locke were logical thinkers who led the Enlightenment movement.

By emphasizing the left- brain’s linear logic and trying to influence policy on important matters, they ignited a reaction from those who favored the right brain. Rousseau, Keats Byron, Goethe , and Shelly hated the industrial revolution and celebrated love, nature and beauty. Enlightenment advocates favored reason over feelings; the Romantics favored feeling as the guide to truth.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Westerners had a new world created by technology. The photograph and the discovery of electromagnetism magnetism begin to shift culture back to the right brain. Images and fields became more important than alphabets and linear sequencing. The typewriter came along and shifted writing from dominant handed left-brain process to a more balance two-handed process.

Thomas Edison invented the film, which with its images soon become more popular than reading. Unfortunately these swift changes and the appearance of the radio, led too quickly to a right- brain dominant world. The quick shift to the irrational right hemisphere has a shadow side too. Hitler’s voice over the radio created a violence on a never before seen scale. World War II was the death of the Mechanical Age, and the Advent of the Atomic Age. It was also the end of male domination, and the triumph of image over the written word. The goddess was about to reappear.

Since World War II the way information is transferred has changed and those changes have transformed world culture by balancing feminine and masculine. Television, computers, photocopiers, fax machines and the Internet increase the appreciation of images, women’s rights and the Goddess. Iconic information allows us to look back at the linear qualities of literacy. The benefits of alphabet literacy are life changing. No one wishes to recommend that people should not become literate, but respect for iconic information in conjunction with literacy will bring the two brain hemispheres into better cooperation allowing both individuals and cultures to be more balanced.

The case for the theory that when cultures adopt alphabetic writing they suffer negative side effects is based on circumstantial evidence The right/left, feminine/masculine/nurture/killer, and intuiter/analyzer dualities are easily overstated. They are useful in examining history and its complex patterns. Certainly the masculine energy of the left-brain is responsible for many of mankind’s greatest achievements.

However a lopsided emphasis on the left side’s characteristics without moderation by those of the right hemisphere leads to a social period of madness. Reliance on the right-hemispheres characteristics without the logical balance the left hemisphere provides leads to anarchy and sensual excess.

We are entering a Golden age. The right hemisphere’s values of nurturing and respect for nature can ease the conditions that the left hemispheric values created during its period of dominance. The image came first. Then came five millennia when the written word dominated. With the return of the iconic symbol, women will regain opportunity to achieve their potential.

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Susie Pedigo: sgpedigo@earthlink.net