Reply #119: Read "The Chalice and the Blade" many years ago. I...

[newswolf56]

...wondered then (as I wonder now) how -- that is, by what perversion of logic -- could we as a species have turned from worshiping life (consciousness, experience, nature, the moon, the goddess as the deity whose physical body is literally all being and non-being, etc.) to worshiping death (limitation, oppression, eco-destruction, the macrocosm of thermonuclear weapons and the microcosm of the suicide bomber, etc.). While I agree with Eisler's hypothesis -- Marja Gimbutas' too (my original influences were Frazer, Graves and Neumann) -- I think the downfall of goddess-centered culture was caused by much more than simply armed conquest. Something else happened -- something that elevated the death-god over the life-goddess: my guess would be a global cataclysm and/or epidemic that thoroughly discredited the Old Religion and made way for the infinitely more murderous theology of the (then) New.

Now it's happening in reverse: the life-goddess -- or if one is an atheist, all that is embodied in the emergence of such a symbol -- is once more in ascent. Indeed that is why I have (long-term) hope. McLuhanoid to the bitter end, I fervently believe in the preparative function of human consciousness: McLuhan's pivotal notion (borrowed from Jung and now mostly overlooked) of the subconscious as prophet and thus the present as preparation for the future. In other words, I would worry about the ultimate fate of humanity only if there were no resurrection of the goddess. Don't misunderstand: I believe the near future will be more savage than anything humanity has ever seen, and most of us -- especially those of us who are elderly -- will not survive its horrors. The concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking plutocracy (and the concurrent malicious denial of even basic sustenance to the rapidly expanding populations reduced to inescapable poverty) -- all this is merely the beginning. But the legacy of this dreadful and worsening time -- the unforgettable lesson humanity bears down the long path of its evolution -- will be how this era was the terminal expression of the unspeakable evil that lurks at the core of patriarchy: the mandate to tyranny, exploitation, enslavement and ultimately planetary suicide implicit in all patriarchy's symbiotic derivatives, especially theological and/or philosophical.