The patriarchal world view has been dominant for roughly the last 10,000 years, but how did humankind make the shift from the matriarchal world view that seems to have predominated for the 190,000 years prior?
Since the written word didn’t come into play until about 3,100 BC, the roughly 197,000 years before this time are affectionately referred to as “prehistory.” Although we began painting on cave walls at about 38,000 BC, without the written word, there was no record of government, state, religion or property, all the key ingredients it takes to create culture, the featured star in our writing of history.
Yet we have found evidence of tools and music throughout this period. As humans shifted from our nomadic lifestyles, living within the confines of Nature’s bounty, to sedentary agrarianism, we first started to manipulate the food bearing plants around us, and set up a more cohesive tribal system. Thriving for millennia under the sharing economy, the recovered art of this era before the written word tells the story of a species highly in awe of the feminine virtues and with no record of war.
Beyond the cave paintings, the earliest known pieces of art are of various female forms. With much emphasis on the breasts and belly, it is widely accepted throughout this Paleolithic era, and into the Neolithic which followed, the female’s ability to create life from the womb merited much greater respect from the human species, resulting in a more maternalistic worldview than what has since developed through the inherent paternalism of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic traditions. As God has been the Father all these many years, Nature has been our Mother, and while the hope for this book is to help us move beyond the dichotomy of sexism, for the duration of it, I’ll be referring to Nature as a She, just to balance things out a bit and help the ball to get rolling in that general direction.
“The Goddess-centered art we have been examining,” writes Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, “with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good.”
However, this is not to say Mother Nature completely ruled the day. As Ken Wilber pointed out in A Brief History of Everything, “Matriarchal strictly means mother-ruled or mother-dominant, and there have never been any strictly matriarchal societies. Rather, these societies were more ‘equalitarian,’ with roughly equal status between men and women; and many such societies did indeed trace ancestry through the mother, and in other ways have a ‘matrifocal’ arrangement… about one-third of the these societies had female-only deities, particularly the Great Mother in her various guises, and conversely, virtually every known Great Mother society is horticultural. Almost any place you see the Great Mother religion, you know there is a horticultural background. This began roughly around 10,000 BCE, in both the East and West.”
Basically, it seems as we adhered to Mother Nature, we lived in relative harmony with her, but since the Goddess became God, we’ve implemented quite a few new destructive tools and toys.
Originally posted at SteveMc.xyz