Did alphabet literacy change goddess worship?

by Nagalingam Kumarakuruparan

Today what remains of the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey is a single stone pillar.

It was different earlier. Alexander the Great came to pay his respects at what was then the western world's largest shrine to a female deity. There was also the legend of Mary, the mother of Jesus, coming to Ephesus to die. There is a hill on which her remains are purportedly buried.

Leonard Shalain

There are other shrines and images discovered pointing to a vast chain of mother goddesses including the Artemisian 'Lady of Ephesus' (The Predecessor of Christian Mary) and pagan mothers such as Cybele and Aphrodite.

They were all lion riders like the Hindu Goddess Durga.

Mother goddess cult

Anthropologists such as the late Maria Gimbutus, therefore, spoke about the entire ancient world being dominated by a powerful mother goddess cult. Then something happened. The goddess cult started to decline. The change was so pervasive and immense, that it literally changed the sex of god. The 'She' god became the 'He' god.

One explanation involves invading horsemen from the north who conquered and destroyed the peaceful goddess cultures and imposed their own patriarchal culture and their god.

But can that be a satisfactory reason for the abiding mystery of god's sex change on global scale.

Leonard Shalain, the late poly math surgeon gave alphabet literacy as the reason or implicated it as a cause.

Alphabet literacy

In 'alphabet and the goddess', Shalain hypothesised that when a critical mass of people acquire alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests in the decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship.

Thanks to the Alphabetic Literacy then, the brains linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere managed to overpower the holistic, iconic, feminine right one.

So, 'She' became 'He'. This was a gender bender. 'Smash all images' was the commandment. 'No worship of any gods before me', this was a rejoiner this conflict argues Shalain in his epic study on the conflict between word and image that ostensibly originated in monotheistic religious culture.

Jimmy Carter

The conflict has also had disastrous practical consequences: Former US President Jimmy Carter, for example, attributes the global discrimination against women to the declaration often made by certain religious leaders that 'women are inferior in the eyes of god'.

"While male religious leaders have had, and still have, an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women: Carter elaborates, "They have, for their selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

Plato observes four times that the goal of human life is to obtain likeness to god. The thing is whether all human beings are capable of achieving likeness to god, and then which god? Definitely for a male not a goddess.

In Plato, there is a pervasive use of male to mean more virtuous, and female to mean intellectually or morally inadequate. For Aristotle, women are simply defective males; defective as such and not merely as possessing weaker and inferior bodies. The writers of scriptures of the ancient world were so much influenced by the Hellanic thinkers before them, they thought that 'Man was created in god's image and god created male and female'.

Compassion and equality

This supposedly took place when saints were speaking of compassion and equality.

The good news is that things are rapidly changing. Shalain argues that the combining of the two 'feminine influences' photography and electronics, has been chiefly responsible for the recent shift in global consciousness.

Comprehending television needs a hemispheric strategy that is quite different from the one used in reading and writing. Consequently television popularity has greatly increased the power of images. Iconic information has superseded alphabetic information as the single most 'tectonic' cultural shift. This may help to regain the lost balance between masculine and feminine elements leading to greater harmony and creativity.