The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (Compass) - Softcover

Shlain, Leonard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140196013 ISBN 13: 9780140196016

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

Synopsis

This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind.

About this title

About the Author

Leonard Shlain is the author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. He is the chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

The Conflict Between Word and ImageBy Leonard Shlain

Penguin Books

Copyright © 1999 Leonard Shlain
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0140196013

Chapter One

IMAGE/WORD

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

--Galileo

Even a positive thing casts a shadow.... its unique excellence is at the same time its tragic flaw.

--William Irwin Thompson

    Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, feware as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable thatin the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerouspoets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs.Sophocles once warned, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without acurse." The invention of writing was vast; this book will investigate the curse.

    There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written wordexperiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can becharacterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gonelargely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writingof any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values andwith them, women's power in the culture. The reasons for this shift will beelaborated in the coming pages. For now, I propose that a holistic,simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are theessential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential,reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine. Althoughthese represent opposite perceptual modes, every individual is generouslyendowed with all the features of both. They coexist as two closely overlappingbell-shaped curves with no feature superior to its reciprocal.

    These complementary methods of comprehending reality resemble theancient Taoist circle symbol of integration and symmetry in which the tensionbetween the energy of the feminine yin and the masculine yang isexactly balanced. One side without the other is incomplete; together, theyform a unified whole that is stronger than either half. First writing, and thenthe alphabet, upset this balance. Affected cultures, especially in the West,acquired a strong yang thrust.

    In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan proposed that a civilization's principalmeans of communication molds it more than the content of thatcommunication. McLuhan classified speech, pictographs, ideographs, alphabets,print, radio, film, and television as distinctive information-conveyingmedia, each with its own technology of transmission. He declared that thesetechnologies insinuate themselves into the collective psyche of any societythat uses them, and once embedded, stealthily exert a powerful influence oncultural perceptions.

    McLuhan's aphorism, "the medium is the message" is the leitmotif ofthis book. Robert Logan, the author of The Alphabet Effect, expounded onthis idea:

A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. A person who is literate has a different world view than one who receives information exclusively through oral communication. The alphabet, independent of the spoken languages it transcribes or the information it makes available, has its own intrinsic impacts.

While McLuhan, Logan, and others have explored many of the effects thatalphabetic literacy has had upon Western history, I wish to narrow the focusto a single question: how did the invention of the alphabet affect the balanceof power between men and women?

    The proposition that the alphabet has hindered women's aspirationsand accomplishments seems, at first glance, to be antithetical to historicalfacts. Western society, based on the rule of law and constitutional government,has increasingly affirmed the dignity of the individual, and in the lastfew centuries Western women have won rights and privileges not availablein many other cultures. Most people believe that the benefits that haveaccrued to women are due primarily to a high level of education among thepopulace. But a study of the origins of writing in less complex times thousandsof years ago reveals how writing, first, and then the alphabet, alteredthe balance of power to women's detriment.

    Anthropological studies of non-literate agricultural societies show that,for the majority, relations between men and women have been more egalitarianthan in more developed societies. Researchers have never provenbeyond dispute that there were ever societies in which women had powerand influence greater than or even equal to that of men. Yet, a diverse varietyof preliterate agrarian cultures--the Iroquois and the Hopi in NorthAmerica, the inhabitants of Polynesia, the African !Kung, and numerousothers around the world--had and continue to have considerable harmonybetween the sexes.

    Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the very few scholars tochallenge literacy's worth.

There is one fact that can be established: the only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing ... is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the population is made to work for the other part.

Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all butthe very recent history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fallwith the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.

    The key to my thesis lies in the unique way the human nervous systemdeveloped, which in turn allowed alphabets to profoundly affect genderrelations. The introductory chapters will explore why and how we evolved inthe manner we did. In later chapters, I will reinterpret a number of mythsand historical events, making correlations based on circumstantial evidence.Correlation, however, does not prove causality--the disappearance of thestars at dawn does not cause the sun to rise. As we examine various sets offacts, I will appeal, therefore, to the court of what archaeologists callcompetitive plausibility, and I will ask the reader to consider with mewhich of the hypothetical explanations of historical events is the mostplausible.

Although each of us is born with a unique set of genetic instructions, weenter the world as a work-in-progress and await the deft hand of the ambientculture to sculpt the finishing touches. Among the two most importantinfluences on a child are the emotional constellation of his or her immediatefamily and the configuration of his or her culture. Trailing a close thirdis the principal medium with which the child learns to perceive and integratehis or her culture's information. This medium will play a role in determiningwhich neuronal pathways of the child's developing brain will bereinforced.

    To observe an enthralled four-year-old mastering the letters of thealphabet is to witness the beginning of a lifelong method central to theacquisition of knowledge. Literacy, once firmly rooted, will eclipse andsupplant speech as the principal source of culture-changing information.Adults, for so long enmeshed in the alphabet's visual skein, cannot easilydisentangle themselves to assess its effect on culture. One could safely assumethat fish have not yet discovered water.

    Imagine that you came of age in a non-literate culture and wereunaware of the impact the written word could have on your life. Supposethat as an adult you then found yourself in a literate society confronted byothers who seemed to possess magical powers. Your reaction probablywould not differ much from that of Prince Modupe, a young West Africanwho, in his autobiography, related his encounter with the written word:

The one crowded space in Father Perry's house was his bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech. The ink of the print trapped the thoughts; they could no more get away than a doomboo could get out of a pit. When the full realization of what this meant flooded over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself.

The prince could not know that in his attempt to free the doomboo, thepit itself would trap him in an unforeseen way: written words and images areentirely different "creatures." Each calls forth a complementary but opposingperceptual strategy.

    Images are primarily mental reproductions of the sensual world ofvision. Nature and human artifacts both provide the raw material from theoutside that the brain replicates in the inner sanctum of consciousness.Because of their close connection to the world of appearances, imagesapproximate reality: they are concrete. The brain simultaneouslyperceives all parts of the whole integrating the partssynthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived inan all-at-once manner.

    Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctiveindividual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word withmeaning emerges. The meaning of a sentence, such as the one you are now reading,progresses word by word. Comprehension depends on the sentence's syntax,the particular horizontal sequence in which its grammatical elementsappear. The use of analysis to break each sentence down into its componentwords, or each word down into its component letters, is a prime example ofreductionism. This process occurs at a speed so rapid that it is belowawareness. An alphabet by definition consists of fewer than thirty meaninglesssymbols that do not represent the images of anything in particular; a featurethat makes them abstract. Although some groupings of words can begrasped in an all-at-once manner, in the main, the comprehension ofwritten words emerges in a one-at-a-time fashion.

    To perceive things such as trees and buildings through images deliveredto the eye, the brain uses wholeness, simultaneity, and synthesis. To ferretout the meaning of alphabetic writing, the brain relies instead on sequence,analysis, and abstraction. Custom and language associate the formercharacteristics with the feminine, the latter, with the masculine. As weexamine the myths of different cultures, we will see that these linkages areconsistent.

    Associating images with the feminine would seem to fly in the face ofnumerous scientific studies that demonstrate that males are better at mentallymanipulating three-dimensional objects than their female counterparts.Also, numerous other studies reveal that young females are more facilewith words, spoken and written, than are their male peers. Despite thesestudies attributing different image and word skills to each sex, I will presentmany cultural, mythological, and historical examples that will solidly connectthe feminine principle to images and the masculine one to writtenwords. Again, I will use the terms "masculine" and "feminine" in theirtranscendent sense. Every human is a blend of these two principles.

The life of the mind can be divided into three realms: inner, outer, andsupernatural. The inner world of experienced emotions and privatethoughts is essentially invisible to others. The outer, concrete world ofnature constitutes our environment: it is objective reality. There exists also athird realm: some call it spiritual, some call it sacred, and some call itsupernatural. Humans have acknowledged and incorporated this third realm intoevery culture ever created.

    The cosmology of any given culture is analogous to the psyche of anindividual. Its myths and religion reveal how the group psyche arrives at itsvalues concerning sex, power, wealth, and gender roles. In hunter-gatherersocieties, members generally worship a mixture of male and female spirits.In general, virile spirits tend to be more prestigious in societies that place ahigh value on hunting; nurturing ones are more highly esteemed wherevergathering is the primary strategy of survival.

    Humankind discovered horticulture approximately ten thousand yearsago. In the Mediterranean, the most extensively studied region, archaeologistshave uncovered strong suggestive evidence that in all emerging agrariancivilizations surrounding the basin, a mother Goddess was a principaldeity. From the outer rim of history, we begin to learn Her name. In Sumer,She was Inanna; in Egypt, She was Isis; in Canaan, Her name was Asherah.In Syria, She was known as Astarte; in Greece, Demeter; and in Cyprus,Aphrodite. Whatever Her supplicants called Her, they all recognized Her asthe Creatrix of life, nurturer of young, protector of children, and the sourceof milk, herds, vegetables, and grain. Since She presided over the great mysteryof birth, people of this period presumed She must also hold sway overthat great bedeviler of human thought--death.

    Prior to the development of agriculture, male spirits embodied theattributes of bold, courageous hunters. But in the iconography of the GreatGoddess, male imagery paled. Her consort was a companion who wassmaller, younger, and weaker than She. A conflation of a son She loved in amotherly way, and a lover She discarded after he consummated his duties ofimpregnation, he was so dispensable in these ancient myths that he frequentlydied, either by murder or by accident. In many agrarian cultures, theyearly sacrifice of a young male surrogate in the consort's honor was a commonritual. The participants then plowed the victim's seed blood into theearth as "fertilizer" to ensure that the following year's crop would bebountiful. The clearest demonstration of the Goddess's power was Her ability tobring him back to life each spring. Whether She was resurrecting Her consortor regenerating the earth, Her adherents stood in awe of Her fecundity.For several thousand years, every people throughout the Fertile Crescentvenerated a deity who personified the Great Goddess. When we speak of thisarea as the "cradle" of civilization, we tacitly acknowledge the superior rolethe feminine principle played in the "birth" of modern humankind.

    Then, the Great Goddess began to lose power. The barely legible recordof the earliest written accounts beginning about five thousand years agoprovides intimations of Her fall. Her consort, once weak and inconsequential,rapidly gained size, stature, and power, until eventually he usurped Hersovereignty. The systematic political and economic subjugation of womenfollowed; coincidentally, slavery became commonplace. Around 1500 B.C.,there were hundreds of goddess-based sects enveloping the Mediterraneanbasin. By the fifth century A.D. they had been almost completely eradicated,by which time women were also prohibited from conducting a single majorWestern sacrament.

    In their attempts to solve the mystery of the Goddess's dethronement,various authors have implicated foreign invaders, the invention of privateproperty, the formation of archaic states, the creation of surplus wealth, andthe educational disadvantaging of women. While any or all of these influencesmay have contributed, I propose another: the decline of the Goddessbegan when some clever Sumerian first pressed a sharp stick into wet clayand invented writing. The relentless spread of the alphabet two thousandyears later spelled Her demise. The introduction of the written word, andthen the alphabet, into the social intercourse of humans initiated a fundamentalchange in the way newly literate cultures understood their reality. Itwas this dramatic change in mind-set, I propose, that was primarily responsiblefor fostering patriarchy.

    The Old Testament was the first alphabetic written work to influencefuture ages. Attesting to its gravitas, multitudes still read it threethousand years later. The words on its pages anchor three powerful religions:Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each is an exemplar of patriarchy. Eachmonotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shinesthrough His revealed Word, sanctified in its written form. Conceiving of adeity who has no concrete image prepares the way for the kind of abstractthinking that inevitably leads to law codes, dualistic philosophy, and objectivescience, the signature triad of Western culture. I propose that the profoundimpact these ancient scriptures had upon the development of theWest depended as much on their being written in an alphabet as on themoral lessons they contained.

    Goddess worship, feminine values, and women's power depend on theubiquity of the image. God worship, masculine values, and men's dominationof women are bound to the written word. Word and image, like masculineand feminine, are complementary opposites. Whenever a cultureelevates the written word at the expense of the image, patriarchy dominates.When the importance of the image supersedes the written word, femininevalues and egalitarianism flourish. In this book we will explore what this hasmeant throughout the human past, and in later chapters will consider whatit says about the present and portends for the future.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Alphabet Versus the Goddessby Leonard Shlain Copyright © 1999 by Leonard Shlain. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140196013
• ISBN 13: 9780140196016
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 464