Mark Booth, in The Secret History of the World, says that the Elohim described in the Old Testament is actually written in Hebrew as plural. That is, the gods created the universe. After Lucifer tricked man into discovering the ego, one of the seven original gods split off to fight him. This was the moon, and the same God from the Old and New Testament. Shlain has many things to say about He who so relied on words to gain power. He is an indisputably male God, with his appellations, "Lord, Host, King, Ruler, and Master (The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Shlain 82). He establishes his law by using the written word which underlines his masculinity, for the First Commandment announces the Female Goddess' departure completely, "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:2-3). Shlain calls this the most radical sentence ever written because it cuts the female aspect of the godhead from the cosmic framework. The Second Commandment, probably equally as radical, banishes images of the Father--this is also the disdain of the Mother, for she is the queen of myth and images. By saying he cannot be depicted emphasizes the importance of the written word.
Every Jewish boy must prove he can read at the age of 13 at his Bar Mitzvah. Reading thus tied the clan together. Written words, in their abstraction and linearity, gave rise to the ultimate abstract God, who cannot be depicted at all. "One explanation" according to Shlain, "[... is] they considered iconic information to be a threat to their newfound skill. Learning to think without resorting to images is indispensable to alphabet literacy" (Shlain 83). Yahweh is always emphasizing the written word. He commands Adam to name the animals in the garden, to gain power over them using his voice. He also emphasize time in the Fourth Commandment, by demanding of his followers to rest on the seventh day. Perhaps, the most fascinating of Shlain's incites is that "the Time Commandment lays the groundwork for the idea of justice, since a well-developed sense of linear time is necessary to conceive of punishment delayed and reward postponed. Non-literate people [...] do not conceive of time only as linear" (85), and instead see death as a "passage into another world." The Jews, in fact, do not even have a mythological afterlife.
Yahweh was the collision of the Paleolithic Sky God with the Linear, Literate God of Laws.
The Sky God was indeed a Paleolithic invention. Katherine Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth,
"Some of the earliest myths [...] were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky--infinite, remote, and existing quite apart from their puny lives -- people had a religious experience. The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness. Human beings could do nothing to affect it. The endless drama of its thunderbolts, eclipses, storms, sunsets, rainbows and meteors spoke of another endlessly active dimension, which had a dynamic life of its own" (Armstrong 18).
This sky god eternally exists above us and only comes down to examine us like children or subjects in his court. He is not of this Earth, not like the Great Mother or Saturn/Satan. Armstrong continues "When they watched the waxing and waning of the moon, people saw yet another instance of sacred powers of regeneration, evidence of a law that was harsh and merciful, and frightening as well as consoling" (17). The seven day week is based on the quarter moon and the Muslim counter is still build around its cycles. However, this god is an absent God. He is the God people want to turn to for advice, for comfort, for guidance, for a wholeness which was lost long ago, which will free them from their own confused experiencing mind, caught between dualities. Each of us wishes to return to the "Golden Age", often symbolized by being inside the mother, then less so into childhood--the history of consciousness is not only the history of the world, but also the history of a single human life. The childhood stage is symbolized with Eden and in Esoteric wisdom Adam's vegetable arms stretch across space like a cross, where God's desire for humans, and humans' desire God met again on the Cross. A Golden Age when our minds were one with the gods, before we were trapped in a world of death and consequences.
This kingly God which the West so firmly believes (or disbelieves) originated with the gods in the Middle East, passed down from the Paleolithic tribe people's sky gods. It was here where a state or king was said to be ruled over by a great supernatural force. These gods existed to give the ruler divine right. We see the city of Babylon being ruled over by Marduk, who slew the great mother, Tiamat, and made humans from her lover's blood. It is a tyrannical male fantasy, and one from the lawful, literate culture of the Babylonians. Monarchy gave rise to King-Gods. The Egyptians, the Romans, and the Muslims did this--the right to be king guaranteed through deification. Because religion fomented in this region was wielded by such authority, the God we received today is a Monarchical God. Our churches are built like court rooms, you pay homage to him, you worship him, you pray for his guidance, you are his subject, and in the end, his slave. Along with this myth comes the World as an Artifact. It was made a long time ago by the potter god, the carpenter god (Jesus is the son of a carpenter) and handed to us as our own. This interpretation of the bible is undynamic--it's a diluted, dead thing; is it no wonder it is in the West where atheism grew the most? Alan Watts calls this the myth of the Ceramic Universe. We feel separated from it--as objects, as nouns--not part of the greater whole. This idea is extrapolated in our own bodies, where we believe that the brain governs the rest of the organs. But couldn't one as easily say that the stomach evolved the brain to feed itself? Westerners live out of harmony with their own bodies. The ancients believed that each organ was controlled by a different deity reflected in the heavens.
2. Western Minds
Western minds are raw, full of stress that they don't have enough money or a loved one is going to come down with a sickness and die. This absent father, a father we need because our universe is a universe of laws, should be filled with a myth about the proper way to live offered by a comforting society. Instead, we have a God who exists above us, rules us, and we have to obey his laws. No one really believes in him--they feel they ought to, and people who actually do are on the sides of the streets with blow horns, even good Christians calling them crazy. Material America is God's system, but God is extirpated from it. We still live by his rules, but don't accept his existence. God is dead, and we are looking for someone to follow in his stead, but in America, you are in a vacuum. There are no grand mystery religions for the average person to turn. There are no stories recited by a shaman or a bard. All we have is the amphitheater of corporate produced movies and bought-out mega-churches. The American Dream is a personal dream. We know the end goal, to be rich, to be famous, to be respected, but we don't know how to arrive there. Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt says in Fight Club,
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
Americans are craving real experiences. Our culture fetishises war and death because it is only in these states do we know we are alive. Violence permeates our movies--explosions, war, arms and legs getting hacked off, and people screaming as they get shot. This fetishation is similar to prohibition. We fear death so much that it becomes sexy. We no longer realize it's an illusion even when one of our greatest American poets, Walt Whitman, tried so hard to tell us. The founding fathers would have been horrified by the state we have created. They believed in the infallibility of the truly enlightened man who stood outside partisanship. They trusted that the citizens of the United States would have enough power to look after themselves and not rely on government. But America isn't enlightened anymore. We have bought too much into the universe of laws, with the Religious and the Scientific Academics waging war on one another, trying to prove or disprove whether God exists in a material sense. This is the result of literacy, of Saturn's laws, and complete and utter Statism will be the result. Secular liberals are likewise trying to turn to government to fulfill the need of a guiding father. Christians turn to their hegemonic Church, and in today's Islam, Muslims turn to their spiritual leaders like the Ayatollah in Iran or fundamentalist heroes like Osama bin Laden. These leaders and apparatuses are always corrupted because of human imperfection--a perfect state would be, like Joseph Campbell said, inhuman. It is also surprisingly based on Utopianism, a very Christian idea of a New Jerusalem.
3. Imperfection
Something which would have been lovable under different circumstances can be the tragic flaw in a complete authoritarian dictator, causing tyranny. When humans are thrust to the level of gods they collapse under the pressure. In Egyptian and Roman civilization, the leader would be a living, walking god. In today's culture, celebrities become archetypes, brands, themselves. However, no human can be a perfect representation of an idea--they can never become the absolute which society demands from them. There is no perfect, bias-free, discerning judge (as symbolized by the Greek Justice who is emblazoned across in America in front of public buildings). There is no perfect evil as represented by Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. There is no perfect good--the president of the United States, Church leaders, or boy-scouts. There is an archetypal public face and there is the real person. When we meet celebrities, it almost like we are meeting a God face to face. But humans are fallible, and we should never put complete faith in them. They break down, lie, cheat, steal, murder, and act selfishly--"I've seen good men do bad things, and bad men do good things" says Clancy Brown's character in "Cowboys and Aliens". The only faith is the faith we have in ourselves and the ones we love, not a government run by corruptible politicians and nameless goons. In the end, they are the forces of Satan/Saturn, taking away the people's rights as they suck dry any vestige of freedom. By seeing God as a king who lives far away and yourself as one of his subjects who has give your life to him, you also lose freedom. Laws, lines in the sand, these make us want to walk over them, to dabble in the darkside. Only by knowing both worlds can we exist without corrupting ourselves. Why did people get rid of God in the first place? Guilt.
God, this transcendent spirit, imagination, unlimited potential--it exists inside of you. Was not the universe said to be created by the imaginative spirit of a lonely God? We need a new, healthy system, not a world religion which is easily corruptible by the foxes in control. We need the structure, the stories, for our own personal enlightenment, to "follow our bliss". Being famous shouldn't be an end goal (though this grew out of America as well and our desire to be remembered), being rich shouldn't be an end--these don't fulfill us. Our government, our rulers controlled by banks and multinational corporations, has fed us this great American Dream. Why? To enslave us with debt. Where before being a mother was heroic, being a good father was heroic, becoming a man was heroic--these are no longer goals that are respected by the majority of Americans. Our movies preach to us the importance of societal recognition (on steroids with the Super Hero craze), of the desire to be wealthy. What about Tennyson's "Ulysses"? They never show us what happens after the villain is killed or thrown in jail and the woman is in the hero's arms. The government is instead lobbing off the self-empowering structures and making us dependent on the mother sow offering her engorged tit at the expense of people already standing on their own two feet. How do they this? By lying to us, selling a dream of a perfectly equal world run by benevolent philosopher-kings. By distracting us with sports, politics, and reality television. By surreptitiously making laws under the cover of darkness. In the end, the God the West has functioned with for over 1,000 years is a material one--since he is this way, life is given the most intense meaning. It is here where you decide your eternal reward or punishment. A God-fearing person in the end, is a death-fearing person. Zarathustra's famous quote, "He who fears death, is already dead" is true. We must break free of the matrix and look through whole new eyes.
The first image is of the the Great Mother wiggling, wiggling all around like a fish caught in a net--Saturn is the net then. You catch the great wiggly beasts in events and things. The truth is, everything, every object is a verb, a wave. The tree is treeing. The dog is dogging. The cat is catting. We, through the power of Saturn, separate the great drama so we can study it, control it, but we forget that there is more than just the boxing. This is the work of Saturn alright, with his great scythe chopping everything into bits. Nothing ever ends, it just changes. We picture our lives from birth to death, that's it. There is nothing you can do to stop it. "Oh vanity of vanities, all is vanity," Solomon said in the tradition. By seeing God as a distant father, by seeing ourselves as alien objects cut from the wiggly thing, we make ourselves miserable. Both government and the King-God must make us fear death, so he can keep on ruling--you see now? People in charge control and manipulate us with the fear of our own demise. Death isn't a bad thing. Death isn't real. It's illusion someone created long ago to keep the lions in line. We are all Antony's in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra". The great material Augustus Caesar, with his geometry, columns, and rules and Cleopatra with the overflowing Nile and passion. The Great Mother Goddess--we are all caught in between these two. When Cleopatra died, she knew physical being was temporary, but ideas last forever.
4. Faces of the Enemy
In Sam Keen's "Faces of the Enemy", he shows how nations make abstract images to create an absolute enemy to wage war upon. As he carouses through different culture's propaganda, he says,
"the first thing that caught my attention was that all nations use basically the same visual metaphors, the same hostile cliches, to characterize, to dehumanize their enemies. It's as if all these propaganda artists went to the same art school. The enemy is always a demon, a barbarian, the aggressor, a lier, a madman, or some vile animal that can be exterminated without regret. Before we make war, even before we make weapons, we make an idea of the enemy."
Images, according to Leonard Shlain, were the realm of the mother--but I think what we see here is the modern literate society's perversion of the ancient art. Hieroglyphs were the gods' alphabet. They represented not abstract ideals, but things from the living world. However, after an image is created, it can take on a life of its own, especially in a literate culture which has perfected the abstract. Concepts of love, hate, good, evil, black, white, binaries, it seems, are the result of the left brain's exclusive boxing. It allows us to create the concept of 'I', the ego; while the right brain gives us a holistic intuitiveness, a sense of not being you verse the world, but being part of it. The masculine brain accelerated war because it made it more personal--good (us) versus evil (them). It is relevant that the concept of good and evil also appeared to arrive with the creation of the alphabet.
In the next video Keen interviews the convicted killer, David Rice:
It really struck me that during the interview, when Rice says it would have been easier not to talk at all, Keen agrees. It would have been so much easier to make an absolute enemy and to hate indiscriminately. Written word gives life to this idea. It divides the world into pieces, into little absolute images of the perfect ideal of things, making nouns do verbs, not verbs do nouns. Namely, the creation of an abstract God let us be self-righteous. We can call ourselves 'good'. We can form groups which are 'good'. And we can justify committing genocide as the Hebrews did on the Philistines. This can only happen when we sequester ourselves or our group from the rest of the world by creating narratives from our memories.
When we are the ultimate hero in our story, there must also be enemies. The book, the drama, have influenced our consciousnesses. When we see ourselves as separated from everything else, as written language can allow us to do so easily, it dehumanizes others. In my mind, I am seeing a perfectly white 2D box floating forward, pushing away black boxes, or being helped along by other white ones. Our literate culture deals so often with binaries that we forget that the opposite is what defines us. It appears it was this culture which created racism, slavery, misogyny, and stereotypes, because it is easier to exclude than include. This form of thinking is derived from logos or linear thought. This happened because this happened because this happened. The enemy is evil because he killed one of our brothers because his god is evil because his skin is dark because he worships demons... on and on. It is also true that when we wear masks, as recorded by Philip Zimbardo, we are capable of doing terrible things because it is simpler to start seeing ourselves as being abstract. We are no longer 'us' because the mask hides us. Here is a Ted Talks video by Philip Zimbardo:
and another by Aaron Dykes about how this can be used to control us:
It is easier to con someone who uses abstract thinking. His mind will attempt to justify his or others actions based on reason and logos, while someone from an oral culture will simply see things as they are. Walter Ong reported this fact in his nine characteristics of orally based thought and expression. We are easily manipulated into believing fiat currency has value because it 'represents' something with value. Would an orally based culture ever be able to put value on worthless paper?
What is known is that an abstract, ideal world would make life so much easier. It is a constant fantasy of many to be told what to do, to know who the enemy is, and to know your goal with all your heart. Soldiers often look back on war fondly because of this. It gave clarity and purpose without the ambiguity of normal life. This is the realm of the abstract ideal--Plato's realm of perfect spheres without ego, the lost paradise of Eve. Everything simply makes sense. "We're war making animals" claims someone in Keen's movie. This is true in the fact that living in a world of relativity is hard--it would be easier if we could follow orders like in the Milgram experiments described in the videos above. It would rid us of constantly questioning if our actions were right. I have often made this comparison: just as religious people can give their lives over to God to rid themselves of doubt, so can statists give their identity over to the absolute utopian state. The only truth is the god in ourselves. Indians treat guests so well because they recognize that everyone is a visiting deity. Like God, our nation, our group, we are the perfect good, and propaganda is used to create the perfect evil. It dehumanizes them and allows us to kill without guilt. Confucius said, "If you want to change society, call things as they really are." If we could recognize this fact when we are declaring war on another country, pumping our banks with billions of dollars, or continuing to make certain drugs illegal, then we may be able to start living like a healthy society again.
Abstract thought is, of course, the realm of the left brain and Saturn. It is not a place of enlightenment because he is the god who wants to eat the universe and render it into feces, unordered mass. Now for a fun David Icke video:
Images can be used to control us when we do not know their intention. They are simply frequencies which we choose to see or don't see. Check out this video where even advertisers can be taken in by subliminal messaging.
My Political Science text book, World Politics Trend and Transformation by Kegley and Blanton, reports that "the repeated outbreak of war has led some, such as psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, to conclude that aggression is an instinctive part of human nature that stems from humans' genetic psychological programming" (253). There are many theories to explain why this; however, it also appears we are driven by the need for community and consensus because we are a social animal. A global outlook is in the end a result of the feminine right brain, and individualism that of the masculine left. Again, we see the war playing out both in the material and mental arenas. World Politics continues, "most social scientists now strongly disagree with the realist premise that because humans are essentially selfish, they are also aggressive and murder and kill because of their innate genetic drives to act aggressively. Instead they interpret war as a learned cultural habit" or socialization (254). Feminist theory argues that war and conflict are "rooted in the masculine ethos of realism". It is true that one of the most tell-tale signs of an unstable country are its treatment of women--"where cultural norms condone the mistreatment of women and deny them opportunities for education and employment, the outbreak of civil war is high" (258).
Again, we must return to Leonard Shlain. Literate society has increased our sense of individualism. It created a personal, omniscient, omnipotent God. It made us see ourselves as nouns and not verbs. It separated us from the cosmos, making us the hero and our enemies the villain. It was the birth of drama, which the three Greek playwrights were so famous for. Yes, the masculine brain is the home of war. However, like all things there is a balancing act. The left hemisphere is the home of action and the right the realm of dreaming. Celtic mythology relates to us the mythic female Otherworld, so dictated by the seasons, but ineffectual because it cannot affect the physical plain. Meanwhile, the masculine material world is where men go to war and things are actually done. Sean Kane, in The Wisdom of the Mythtellers, relates, "Free of laws of time and space, and omniscient, [the Otherworld] is curiously powerless in matters involving the division and possession of things. The inferior power is the power of a world constructed by men: aggressive, practical, tool-using, naming, active, purposeful--the world of time and space. For all its ability to measure and compare, it is in danger of ignoring the mystery of fertility on which it depends. Each pursing its own end, the two worlds sustain each other mutually" (Kane 179). We can see this division by how the Celts and Romans determined their year: the Celts followed the seasons, the Romans the sun's progression.
5. A New Age
In George Friedman's books, The Next 100 Years, he describes Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America". In the warning, the infamous killer wrote: "You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women." Friedman claims that this doctrine is at the heart of Al Qaeda's principles--the family is a unit which shouldn't be messed with. Friedman says, "First, the home is the domain of the woman and life outside the house is the purview of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, and extramarital, extrafamilial sexuality is unacceptable. Women who move outside the home invite extramarital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have as their primary tasks reproductions and nurturing of the next generations" (Friedman 49). The Middle East may be one of the most blatant battlefields in the war on the Goddess. It is hear where she has been banished from outword life completely. In America, it is a known fact that the Rockefellers were a supporter of the women's liberation movement during the 1960s. Some have claimed this was a conspiracy to get the women out of the home and split up the family, as well as increase tax revenue. You can find many articles online which deal with man's deminished role in modern society as a result of this. Henry Makow, for one example, has a site named Save the Males with articles like How the Rockefellers Re-Engineered Women and Satanic Baby is Poster-Child for Parenthood. Women's brain are different from men's. In John Gray's book Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice, he describes how women are not as capable of turning off stress because they cannot wield the hormone serotonin (stress-reliever) when they are in a state of high tension.
There is clearly something in the wind when it comes to male-female relations. Conservatives around the world are feeling threatened by the liberation of women and this "conflict is going to intensify in the twenty-first century, but the traditionalists are fighting a defensive and ultimately losing battle. The reason is that over the past hundred years the very fabric of human life--and particularly the life of women--has been transformed, and with it the structure of the family. What has already happened in Europe, the United States, and Japan is spreading to the rest of the world. These issues will rip many societies apart, but in the end, the transformation of the family can't be stopped" (Friedman 49). The reason, Friedman claims, is because of industrialization and the demographic change it foments. Where before children were an asset to a working family, they are now a liability. Kids are expensive. Parents have to support them for the first 18 years of life, pay for their college, and often harbor them again after they graduate. To be a productive member in society in a Western country you need years of schooling. This is a result of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem and the increasing automation of machines. America is relatively well-endowed with high skill labor so the demand for these types of jobs are increasing, but the demand for relatively low-skill labor is decreasing. As the US advances, there will continue to be a greater demand for engineers and other high skill workers because they will be the only ones who can maintain the machines. Joseph Stiglitz wrote a fantastic article in Vanity Fair titled The Book of Jobs. In it he describes this very process: how technology has resulted in less demand for low skill labor and forced many people to use debt to continue living the way they were. Another article in the Economist also talks about this phenomenon. This shift is also causing a demographics bubble--one that will play out in the next 100 years as a greater number of older people have to be supported by fewer younger ones.
The world is changing before our eyes. No longer are manly jobs as necessary because the world is feminizing. Men have few outlets to release their aggression, not even in the work place. Women's needs are different and are not being met in the home or at their jobs either. By not acknowledging the difference in the male/female mind, we are making everyone miserable. One can see this tension play out in movies like "Fight Club" and television shows like "Breaking Bad". Because of the fewer children humanity is having, women will have to continue to work to support the old and their own children, and this isn't a transformation only happening in the West, it is occurring all over the world. "According the United Nations," Friedman says, "women had an average of 4.5 children in 1970. In 2000, that number had dropped to 2.7 children. Remember, this is a worldwide average. That is a dramatic crop and explains why the population continued to grow, but more slowly than before" (Friedman 52). Some more interesting facts reported by Friedman include people putting off marriage until later--"two hundred years ago, women started having children in their early teens. Women continued having children, nurturing them, and frequently burying them until they themselves died" (56). Women now only spend two years of their lives pregnant and only eight-years in "full-time nurturing". Since they spend a less percentage of their time raising kids, women will continue to become less dependent on men. "Marriage is no longer imposed by economic necessity" (56). The troubadours sang of romantic love hundreds of years ago. Only now can their dream fully be realized; however, unlike the marriage of before which brought people together through economic needs, now it is through complete love. And love, well love comes and goes. The trend of marrying later, having premarital sex, cannot be changed. "Family is [no longer] the critical economic instrument it once was. Divorce is no longer economically catastrophic, and premarital sex is inevitable. Homosexuality--and civil unions without reproduction--also become unextraordinary" (58).
The computer, according to Friedman, is the true symbol of everything American. It is completely pragmatic, interpreting information by using only logic and reason in languages like C++. "The charge against American culture is that is has elevated the practical beyond all other forms of truth. The charge is valid, but it also fails to appreciate the power of that reduction. It is in the practical that history is made" (61). It is America where the great spiritual battle of our age will take place. Women are not being acknowledged because they are special, but because they are like everybody else. This is not the way of the Goddess either, who is supremely spiritual and mythological--she is magical, while the male is logical. It is also where technology will continue to progress to the invention of information tech, robotics, nano-tech, and biological augmentations, the singularity which Ray Kurzweil has philosophized about. Walter Ong talked about a secondary orality, well, it seems to me that we will progress past that to secondary humanity. These technologies are going to continue to change us into something beyond human. They will link us together more than ever before, give us powers of perception which our ancestors never had, and meld our bodies with robotics. By completely destroying the Mother and spirituality, we are being brought closer to her again through logos. We are coming full circle. Conferences are being held at prestigious universities which talk about communicating with the divine through computers (sorry, I cannot find a link right now). Theologists like Tom Horn worry about breaking through Forbidden Gates and communicating with demons. The world of man is screaming with anxiety. Who is going to be the authority in a world where everyone is god? It really is the question of our age.
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