Buffie Johnson Explores the Mother Goddess and Her Sacred Animals

 

Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals – Buffie Johnson (1981)

            Sometimes I come across a book so full of information, so well researched and written, that I am overjoyed as a reader.  These types of books are my go-to, my bread and butter so to speak, and they inspire me greatly.  Knowing that a human being had the dedication, intelligence, and insight to gather up a vast amount of information, analyze it, and share their conclusions with us readers leaves me awestruck.  This is the type of book crafted by Buffie Johnson, a visual artist heavily involved in the Abstract Imagist movement.  Sometime in the nineteen fifties, a meeting with psychologist Carl Jung propelled this book into existence.  During their time together, Buffie Johnson discussed her desire to research the many archeological discoveries found that related to the worship of a Mother Goddess, millennia before patriarchal religions altered the worship to that of male gods.  This intrigued Dr. Jung, who gave his wholehearted support for the project, knowing that this specific field of art history was severely underserved.  Four decades later, after travelling the world, visiting different museums and archives, and gathering up as much data as she could find, Buffie Johnson published this amazing compendium. 

            The titular Lady of the Beasts described in this work is the Great Goddess, the initial over-arching deity worshipped by all humans until the advent of patriarchal religions.  For over 100,000 years, humanity understood that the creative principle, that force that brings new life out of death, that provides everything needed here on Earth for our sustenance and care, was female.  They understood innately how the female of the species was the progenitor, the one who could create life out of herself, and seemingly, without the aid of any outside influence.  Millenia before we understood the role of the male spermatozoa in procreation, or even realized it mattered, everyone understood that the womb of a woman, and by extension, any female animal, was the greatest magic in our world.  Not only do women create a new life within them, but they also create water seemingly out of nowhere.  In times when water was as rare and valuable a resource as petroleum is now, seeing a woman’s “water” break, releasing the amniotic fluid built up inside, was as much a miracle as seeing the sun rise again after a dark night, or spring arising after months of dead, cold winter.  Humans understood that life came from water, and that death was just part of the eternal cycle.  The very Earth itself, especially caves and grottoes heading underground, became symbolic wombs where our planet creates itself. 

            The one aspect of women that was seen as magical and undeniably related to the cosmos was that of the menstrual cycle.  Women experience a new menstrual cycle on average every 28 days.  This directly matches the phases of the Moon, which take 28 days to go from New Moon to New Moon, or Full to Full. This was not treated as coincidence, but as divine order, allowing humans to appreciate the divinity contained within the females of any species, including us.  Most ancient cultures and civilizations divided their year into twelve months of twenty-eight days each, along with a five-day period of holiday at the end of each year.  This added up to the 365 days we know occur in a year.  The Mesopotamians did this, and so did the Mayans, the ancient Chinese, and people throughout Africa.  It only made sense to think of the world, and the powers that control it, as female.

            When Buffie Johnson started out on the journey to write this book, the world did not consider the Goddess much.  We live in a time where great patriarchal religions define our spiritual world.  From christianity, to islam, judaism, confucianism, current faiths centered on male deities abound and shape everything about the world we share.  These patriarchal religions are relatively new to our history.  For tens of thousands of years, the worship of the Goddess as the giver and taker of life informed our world and helped explain the many difficult to understand processes of nature we now study through science.  What this means in terms of art history and archeology is that, for the past thousand years of scientific exploration into our past, everything was coded with patriarchal ideas, ignoring and outright fabricating meaning for objects and myths that did not fit in with the idea of a big ol’ male god up in the sky judging and controlling us.  Buffie Johnson’s work in exploring the Goddess through the relics and art left behind was extra difficult, for one of the main jobs of the roman catholic church since their official founding around 300 CE was the destruction of any and all references to the Mother Goddess, and the supplanting of her festivals and rituals with hebrew-coded, christian-coded, or islam-coded festivals and rituals.

            For example, every ancient culture worshipped an aspect of the Goddess called the Grain Goddess.  This was the power that allows life to exist inside seeds, a vitality that only comes to pass once the seeds are buried in Mother Earth’s womb, the soil, where life springs anew and plants grow.  Our current Spring festivals such as Easter, May Day, Mardi Gras and Passover are replacements for the ancient Grain Goddess festivals.  After a long, cold, seemingly lifeless summer, the people had to propriate the fruitful coming harvest by honoring, and sacrificing to, the Grain Goddess.  Around the world, as Buffie Johnson researched, the ceremonies remained eerily similar.  A wagon was created with the image of the Grain Goddess mounted upon it.  This wagon, after preparation by the goddess’ priests, was rolled or carried around the fields to be planted.  As part or the ritual, human sacrifices were held, often of a symbolic “King” who would marry the Grain Goddess before the sacrifice.  After humans stopped being the sacrifice, other animals associated with the Goddess would be sacrificed, eventually leading to the yearly sacrifice of a bull.  This ritual was often followed by a night or a few days of drinking, debauchery and general sexual abandon, as people would pair off and have sex in the soon-to-be-planted field, lending their procreational energy to the coming harvest.  It was all part of the procreative force.

            These types of rituals survived long past the advent of patriarchal religion, but not without considerable effort by those religions to destroy every idol, demolish every temple, and chop down every sacred wood belonging to the Great Goddess.  The celebration of Easter, where christians relive the death of Jesus, his three days in Hell, and his rising again out of the grave, used to be a ceremony for Ishtar, or Astarte, both aspects of the Great Goddess herself, who also travelled to the underworld to ensure life arose again on Earth.  In Greece this legend was transcribed into the story of Demeter, a grain goddess herself, who due to male god shenanigans, was forced to spend half the year in Hades, returning for Spring and Summer, and bringing back life and abundance to the world.

            Due to the very successful propaganda and extermination campaigns, first by the Yahweh-obsessed hebrews and then by the christians, not much was thought to survive of the Goddess and her worship, but archeology proceeded to remove their patriarchal and judeo-christian biases in the mid 1900’s, proceeding to discover and re-assess many images and temples once dedicated to the Great Goddess.  Bastions of ancient worship such as Catal Huyuk were discovered, and true scholarship on the Great Goddess began.  Buffie Johnson was ahead of the curve and collected information on the available pieces found in museums worldwide, many of them not associated with the Great Goddess until she reconsidered the artifacts and symbols found within.  Starting with the Paleolithic era, Buffie Johnson takes us through a bestiary unlike any other, sharing with us the visual clues to decipher the ancient art, and to better understand what we are looking at when we see images of the Great Goddess.

            It is evident that much of the great early developments of humanity came about solely because of women.  The ability to not only cook food, but to raise it, harvest it, and save it for future uses came directly from women.  Women created the first woven baskets, leading to the weaving of fabric itself.  Women created the loom.  Buffie talks about how women created pottery.  Ancient pottery has been found which shows that the first ceramics were made by pressing clay directly onto the outside of a woven basket and hardening it in the flames.  The women’s skill with plants led to their development of medicine, or at least the use of natural products to soothe pain, stop itch, or even help intestinal issues.  Because of the complexity involved, it is also fairly evident that women created language to disseminate the gathered information to other women.  Most modern tribal cultures share something with our ancient humanity, and that is the fact that some knowledge belongs solely to the women, and only the women will share it with each other.  Men are not allowed to know these things, and it has been so for countless millennia.  Menstruation was life incarnate, and due to this most tribes have a place for women to go separate from the men while they menstruate.  It is one of the oldest and strictest taboos for males to enter into a woman’s space, and to steal women’s knowledge.  Up until around 3,000 years ago, most royal lines were matriarchal, something handed down from your mother’s line.  This is still seen in how being jewish is something tracked through the matrilineal line.  In ancient Egypt, even in the time of male pharaohs, they would routinely marry their sisters, in order to keep the claim to the throne intact.  One of the odd current findings that mirror this matriarchal mentality is that of the source of mitochondria.  Each of our cells contain an organelle called mitochondria.  This organelle is responsible for the energy usage of the cell, converting sugars into electrical impulses, and essentially powering the life surrounding it.  Recently, genetic scientists discovered that every single mitochondrion in our bodies comes from the genetic material of the mother.  The specific DNA found in mitochondria only comes from the half of your genes provided by your mother in her ovum.  Thanks to this, it is now possible to trace back our collective evolution through the mitochondria, following matrilineal lines.  What was found is, sometime around 50,000-60,000 years ago, a female human existed which is the “mother eve” for every single human alive today, meaning every human on Earth shares mitochondrial DNA.  This is insane news and would have made much sense to our ancestors who accepted the totality and the invaluable presence of the Feminine.

            The only way we know about the Great Goddess and the people who worshipped her is through art, and more specifically sculptures, petroglyphs, and ancient ruins, all from a time before the written language was invented.  As the artists who crafted the artwork did so in a pre-literate society, visual symbolism was everything.  Ancient works that we have a hard time understanding would have been instantaneously appreciated by ancient humans who lived with the symbols found within, and who could translate the imagery of the specific animals and plants associated with the Mother Goddess.  In order for us “modern” humans to understand what has been forgotten, Buffie Johnson did all the hard work.  She begins by describing the connection between the Great Goddess and the idea of a bird, the most sacred of ancient animals.  Part of the divinity seen in birds is their ability to fly up into what was always considered the heavens, the abode of the Goddess.  Besides that, the imagery of the bird’s egg, with its promise of a whole new life, was developed into the idea of the World Egg, laid by the Great Goddess when she created all existence from her primordial watery chaos.  This idea led to the development of what are now termed “Venuses” but which were initially representations of the Great Mother Goddess pregnant with the cosmic world egg.  These idols, some meant for carrying in the hand, and others, like the giant sculptures in Malta, created to be impressive focal points for a temple of worshippers, helped ancient man understand the giant concepts of eternal life, or birth and death and the immutability of both, and of the idea that creation comes from the Feminine.

            Following the association of the Goddess with birds, the association with water began.  As stated before, women create water to carry their babies until delivery.  Humanity always divided the world into three parts.  The sky above, the earth at our feet, and the waters found deep beneath the earth.  The fish found in these waters belonged to the Great Goddess just as much as the birds in the air did.  Fish symbolism is everywhere in the ancient statues and artwork and has continued into our current modern times.  Jesus is described as a “fisher of men,” and his Greek acrostic, “Ichthys” meaning fish, supposedly stands in for Jesus. Each letter of ΙΧΘΥΣ (the Greek word) stands for a word in the core Christian confession: I (Iota): Iēsous (Jesus) Ch (Chi): Christos (Christ) Th (Theta): Theou (of God) Y (Upsilon): Huios (Son) and S (Sigma): Sōtēr (Savior).  This is why people put the fish symbol on their cars, standing in for Jesus.  It is not from the Bible, but instead an appropriation by early church fathers to supplant the idea of the Great Goddess and her fish symbolism.  Pathetic.  The real sad part is that the fish was an ancient symbol of the androgyny, or hermaphroditism, of deities.  The pointy end of the fish stood for the phallus and the split tail of the fish stood for the shape of the vulva.  Perhaps Jesus was a hermaphrodite?  Who knows?

            One of the most ancient animal symbols of the Great Goddess, apart from birds and fish, is the lion.  In lions the female is the leader, and the females do all the hunting and baby-rearing.  In honor of this, and of the strong feminine power evident, the lion became one of the goddess animals.  Paleolithic art showing the Great Goddess flanked by two lions is found all over Europe, a continent where the lion became extinct thousands of years ago.  Once the lion became extinct, the dog took over the role as protector and guardian of the Great Goddess.  Dogs have always been connected to the Moon, due to their nocturnal howling, and it only makes sense for them to be associated with the Great Goddess.  Gods were seen as intermediaries between life and death, with many ancient people’s believing that dogs helped guide dead souls to the afterlife realm of the Goddess.  The role of Anubis in ancient Egyptian religion was a similar one, a hold-over from earlier matriarchal Great Goddess worship.

            I could spend hours talking about everything covered in this amazing masterpiece of art and archeological history.  Buffie Johnson created a book that has helped open my eyes.  I am now armed with knowledge and ready to look at ancient artwork with a new eye.  The symbols and allegories are in my head and I am so grateful.  I feel almost drunk with knowledge, one of my all-time favorite sensations.  Buffie Johnson researched and wrote this book while living the life of an eminent artist, creating and showing work in galleries and museums worldwide.  She is a great inspiration to me and to anyone drawn to complex ideas and difficult work.  It took her forty years to complete this book, and it will live on in my mind as long as I live.  I hope more people choose to seek this great book out, if only to understand that ancient man had as deep and as complex an internal life as anything we can imagine, and that our apparently wholesale and modern disavowal of anything feminine is a deep hindrance to our collective humanity and the growth we are capable of as a planet full of people.

(This seminal work can be purchased here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lady-of-the-Beasts/Buffie-Johnson/9780892815234 )

Michael Benson Shares The Awesome Beauty We Create When Art and Science Meet

 

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time – Michael Benson (2014)

            Rarely do I come across a book such as this, one that brings together two of my greatest loves and creates something fabulous.  Author Michael Benson shows us how the worlds of Art and Astronomy are, and have always been, connected and complimentary, and the way he does so is so beautiful, informative, and clever that I am left in awe.  I love this book!

            The objects in our sky, the gorgeous night with its twinkling stars, shiny planets, comets, and meteors, and the beaming sky of day with the Sun and sometimes the Moon visible, have been our companions throughout the whole existence of life on our planet.  Ancient man not only saw, but understood, that the view afforded from Earth allows us to see the passage of time, and the cycles described by the motions of the heavens.  Using just plain, careful, repeated observation, and before the invention of written language, humanity catalogued stars and constellations, predicted eclipses, and calculated the Moon’s cycles.  We also created art to help us describe what we saw, from cave paintings to petroglyphs to carved or molded sculptures.  This is how we know that ancient man understood the cosmos in a deep and meaningful way, something which has been sadly lost to much of our modern human population.

            Cosmigraphics collects some of the most amazing images and artwork created by us to describe the heavens above and our Earth below.  This book captures the artistic legacy of the visual explorations of our cosmos, and provides wonderfully descriptive and informative text with each image.  This book is divided into sections exploring the idea of Creation, our Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the structure of the Universe, etc.  Each chapter is so gorgeous and so indicative of the immense genius required to not only grasp infinitely complex ideas but to also portray them in a visual manner, that they allow for the dissemination of information and the spread of wisdom.  These images tell a million stories.  They are beautiful in their own right, and worthy of the appreciation we rightfully lay upon masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo or Picasso.

            We marvel at the heavens, and have always done so.  As our scientific knowledge grew, our ideas of the universe grew.  Whereas ancient man had deduced that the Earth is spherical, it was accepted doctrine that the Earth was the center of all creation (Bible bias, always), and that, according to early Greek philosophers, what we see in the sky corresponds to sequential “shells” with each carrying different denizens of the sky.  It was accepted belief that the Moon rotated around the Earth in its own sphere, then the Sun, then each known planet.  At the time, this was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond the planetary “spheres” was a celestial sphere containing the stars in heaven, all fixed and immovable.  It took centuries of human observation, and the perfection of lenses and the telescope, for us to understand that there are no “shells”, that the heavens do move, that our Sun is the center of our solar system, that the planets all rotate around the Sun and not Earth, and that the stars themselves are ridiculously far away from our personal solar system.  Even so, it was assumed that the whole of existence fit within our galaxy, a self-contained universe we refer to as the Milky Way.

            Astronomers and other scientists improved on the initial telescopes, and with the new-found clarity of vision, were able to discern that many of the objects in our night sky were not nebulas internal to the Milky Way, but actually their own island universes, located an inconceivable distance from our own galaxy.  Each new discovery shrunk the old world dictated by religious dogma and human make-em-up, and increased the scope of vision allowed to a human being.  As our knowledge of the universe, its galaxies, and the overall structure of it grew, the idea that humanity was the single reason for everything to exist also dissipated, much to the chagrin of every deluded, brain-dead, dogmatically religious idiot whose entire world-view is based in blind belief and obedience to thousand-year old make-believe. 

            With every new discovery, with every new tool we create to explore our universe, we find more wonder and weirdness than we could ever have imagined. There used to be just one Sun.  Now we know that our galaxy, the cloudy band of light in our night sky called the Milky Way, is composed of billions of individual stars.  We know that outside of our galaxy lie countless trillions of other galaxies, each with their infinity of suns and planets. Hell we even know that everything we can see in the sky above is just a small part of the entire universe.  Estimates now posit our Universe is on the order of 13-15 billion years old, and nearly unimaginably vast, but we can only observe about 36 billion light years distance in any direction.  In its early stages, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, causing much of the Universe to remain occulted from our vantage point.  Any observer on a planet over 36 billion light years away from us would not be able to see Earth either.  It is these type of realities that, while factually and verifiably true, crash against our ideas of “common sense.”  Common sense stated that, if the Earth were actually rotating, all plants, animals, and water would be flung off the planet! (They did not know about gravitation, just as humans in the 1800’s did not know about radiation.  Who knows what all-encompassing truths of the Universe we remain ignorant of today in 2026!)

            Many of my intellectual heroes utilized both Art and Science in their work.  Leonardo da Vinci fused art, science, and engineering in ways we are still coming to grips with today.  Even Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire, created a visual and artistic way of describing particle interactions with diagrams named after him still used today to explain quantum processes.  Galileo’s observations of Jupiter and his discovery of its visible moons would not have had the impact they had without his daily drawings of the gas giant and it’s satellites.  These beautiful drawings are included in Cosmigraphics.  An image is truly worth a thousand words and Galileo’s drawings helped to simplify the results from exceedingly complex visual observations, allowing the rest of us to grasp his discoveries. 

            Science, the scientific method specifically, is how we understand the basic truths of our existence.  Art is how we communicate those found truths, whether personal or universal.  In Cosmigraphics, Michael Benson catalogues and examines the confluence of Science and Art, and expands our collective minds in doing so successfully.  This is a masterpiece of artistic and scientific exposition, and I hope someday to find a copy for my own collection.  Almost nothing that we humans do is isolated.  Every field of human endeavor touches every other field, and we are better off for it.  The specialization of humanity’s explorations have led to amazing discoveries, but it is the space between the specialists, the diffuse and vague areas between concrete ideas, where the true synergy of life occurs.  We would all be better off if we recognized this fact and lived our lives accordingly.  If you know of anyone interested in science, art, or the history of humanity’s exploration of our universe, this is the book for them.  It is highly recommended.

(This amazing book can be purchased here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/cosmigraphics/author/michael-benson/ )

May the Mother Goddess Forgive Us All, For We Know Not What We Do

 

The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time – Elinor W. Gadon (1989)

            I love deep reading.  If interested in a topic, I seek to understand it, and to explore the books written on that subject.  Invariably, the books will mention a previous work, whether for inspiration or for reference’s sake.  Once I run into several of these, I must go find the book in question.  Sometimes that is a difficult proposition.  The Once and Future Goddess was one of those sought-after tomes.  Thank Mario for my library employment, and the discovery that we have a copy of it in our collections. INSTANT CHECK-OUT!

            This book is an exploration of our shared human history, especially the early spiritual life of prehistoric humans.  Homo Sapiens have been around for over one million years, per the latest scientific estimations.  Our specific human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the only branch of Homo sapiens still existing, has been around for over one hundred thousand years.  For most of our existence on this beautiful planet, we humans understood the interconnectedness of the vital forces we refer to as “life.”  The entirety of the Earth was known and respected as life-giving, much in the way that women carry life within them, and there was no division between the fecundity of the soil, the seasonal rutting and birthing of the animals around them, and the cycles of the flora they witnessed yearly.  It was self-evident that “life” was a universal feature of our world, and our ancestors behaved accordingly.  It was also self-evident that the creative, primal, life-giving force resided in the females.  By extension, our Earth was seen as female, and worshipped accordingly, for it is the cradle of all life, plant and animal.  This power is what the author refers to as the Mother Goddess.

            Elinor W. Gadon does a masterful job of gathering observations and data from our collective pre-history.  The bibliography at the back of the book is extensive.  As our earliest ancestors left no written record that we know of, we must recreate their world from what remains.  Frankly, it is amazing what has lasted until our modern times.  Burial sites, art pieces, religious centers, and entire communities have been excavated in the last century, and the collective knowledge gathered from these artifacts is what points to a complex belief system, seemingly shared by all humans throughout our planet.  The aspect that ties all of these disparate sites together is that they were all created at a time when human and world spirituality was immanent, meaning the divine creative spark of life was to be found in anything and in all things. 

            The very earliest examples of art we have are the small figures dubbed “Venuses” by archeologists.  These are symbolic, carved images of exaggerated female forms, with the emphasis placed on the outward signs of a pregnant woman, the large abdomen, full breasts and thighs, and prominent vulva.  Many of these figures lack the unnecessary features, such as feet, hands, or facial features.  Our ancestors knew the power inherent in women’s bodies and celebrated it openly.  The germ of life existed in the soil, in the water, and in women’s bodies.  Before the advent of agricultural society, our ancestors existed in balance with the changing seasons, animal migrations, and flow of nature. 

            This state of communal coexistence lasted for millennia, until the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry.  The Mother Goddess morphed into the Grain Goddess, responsible for the yearly harvests.  Humans experience with their domesticated animals showed them the importance of the male of the species, for new life, while immanent in females, could not grow without the initial impetus from the male.  These humans were unaware of the cellular nature of spermatozoa and ovum, but they understood innately that life arises from this special combination.  The Goddess was given a consort, a “king” fit for a goddess.  This “king” was initially a yearly choice, and would be either ritually or symbolically “sacrificed” after fulfilling their duty.  Our ancestors saw life and death as two sides of the same coin.  For life to flourish it must also die.  For death to exist, life must first exist. The death of crops and plants and the barrenness of wintertime was always followed by the warmth of Spring and the flowering of the earth.  Humans understood the menstrual cycles as tying women into the greater life force of the universe, the Mother Goddess. 

            The menstrual blood itself was seen as a life force, and women’s lives were shaped by their temporal state.  It was observed that the life of a woman flows in three stages.  Youth, followed by sexual maturity, was then followed by old age. These ages of woman were codified into the idea of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, all different aspects of the same fertile spirit alive in women.  The Maiden was the promise of life, the bounty of possibility.  The Mother was the eternal mother, evident in all life around us, and responsible for each and every living thing us humans understood at the time.  Once a woman reached what is now called menopause (the pause of menses), it was believed she became even more powerful, for instead of losing the holy menstrual blood monthly, it was assumed she kept it inside, absorbed as part of herself.  This placed a great responsibility on the older women, who were responsible for the communal knowledge, whether of food gathering, care of children, manufacture of household goods, and whose wisdom helped protect the entire tribe or village.

            Society in our early days was communal, and female-centric, in terms of spirituality and divinity.  It was NOT a “matriarchy,” a society ruled by women, where men were seen as secondary. That misconception arises from seeing the past as a mirror of our present.  Humans have lived under strict patriarchy, where men rule and decide, and women are nothing more than property for breeding, for thousands of years, so we assume that before, it was the opposite.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Gadon masterfully details how the cyclical Goddess cultures were overrun by invaders from lands whose people worshipped sky gods, gods detached from the everyday existence of life on earth.  Invariably, their gods were male-focused, and everywhere they went they helped to erase or alter the native goddess worship.

            When Goddess worship was an integral part of daily life, everyone understood that the spark or life, of divinity, was found in us and the world around us.  This meant we lived in admiration and respect for the world, and there was no division between “natural” and “supernatural.”  Once the invaders brought their male sky gods, all of this began to shift.  If the gods lived above, separate from us and from the nature around us, then it was surmised that divinity and holiness existed apart from the natural world we inhabit.  This schism is what we are all currently living with, the idea that the natural world is soiled, unholy, and base, and that goodness and divinity only exist in an “afterlife”, where we go to join the male gods in their sky domains.  To make this shift happen, everything feminine was debased, deemed unimportant, and unnecessary.  Once agriculture brought certain stabilities and built up more permanent communities, the male humans began to conceive of private ownership.  Whereas, for tens of thousands of years, humanity considered everything to belong to everybody, much like Native American tribes describe, the idea of personal ownership, and the power and influence assigned to those who happen to “own” more than others grew and grew, until they believed this was the way to be.  They altered and created religion to suit their greed and power-hungry ways.  The divine was purely a means by which to enforce their male domination.

            The symbols of the Great Goddess, symbols of regeneration and plenitude, such as the snake who sheds its skin and is “reborn,” the tree or carved pillars representing the cycle of life itself, and the wildness of nature, were all subverted and perverted. Gadon describes this process, and explains it well.  Consider the story of Genesis, altered countless times by males seeking to denigrate the female and to assign divine importance to being male.  The symbols of the Goddess, the Tree of Life and the snake, become the Tree of knowledge of life and death, which, after the snake seduces the woman, she eats the fruit thereof, and “convinces” the man to do the same, causing all humanity to suffer forever more because woman misled man. Instead of the menstrual cycle, conception, and birth being seen as divine, they were now to be seen as punishments from a male god for disobeying him.  These few passages are to blame for the myriad of horrors suffered by women in the past 3-4 thousand years.  Death is woman’s fault.  Pain is woman’s fault. Shame and degradation are woman’s fault.  It is the single greatest program of propaganda ever foisted on the human race, all to benefit a few powerful males wishing to control the entire population.

It makes me sick, and goddamn it I was raging while reading this book.   Countless examples of the pure misogyny brought forth by the stupids seeking to invalidate the power of women infuriated me.  Instead of a Maiden, Mother, and Crone, we are now expected to believe life stems from a Father, a Son, and some sort of Holy Spirit, who is probably also male, although how deities and spirits can have genitalia and sexual reproductive organs I will never understand.  Even the one named Emmanuel, Jesus the Christ, could not be tainted by a female.  The idiot church “leaders” decided that Mary was a virgin (based on a very stupid mistranslation), and because of that, they reasoned that Jesus was born without the “sinful” method of carnal copulation.  To further their stupid reasoning, they then decided, centuries later, that Mary was also born from a virgin, which rationalized their view of her as a non-erotic, non-sensual, container for Jesus.  Never mind that after Jesus was born the Bible talks of his brothers, children of Joseph and Mary. (The church is always GREAT at telling you what the Bible says and means, without actually letting you read it yourself.  Bunch of assholes.  What a blight on humanity. They claim we are all too stupid to understand without their interpretations, and we believe it because they have “authority.”)

Gadon details the vast disintegration of Goddess worship at the hands of those pushing their self-created sky gods.  The Goddess was reduced from the center of divinity to an afterthought by those who wished to maintain their hold on humanity.  The Christian church either destroyed the ancient places of worship, or, more frequently, just built their own churches atop the old sacred sites.  A cheap ploy which works every time.  This helped fan the lie that there are no holy places on Earth except those built by man and dedicated to their male god.  I could write ten books about how fucked this shit is and has been, and how much I HATE IT ALL.

The author spends the last section of this book detailing the work of contemporary female artists whose work tries to reclaim and renew the idea of female divinity, and of the goddess herself.  In doing so she presents a hope that we may all soon return to an understanding of the universality of divinity in our world, and of the critical role that women have in restoring a sense of equality and fairness to humanity’s religious beliefs.  Should that day ever come, I will be first in line to celebrate it, but my cynicism and world-weariness tells me there is very little that can be done to combat the current state of things, without scrapping the whole thing and starting fresh.  We are all fooled by the endless conditioning we experience, where young girls are taught repeatedly that their role is to be subservient to a man, whether it is their father or husband, and that they are merely baby making machines, male babies preferable.  Us males are conditioned to believe in our inherent superiority, and of the woman’s inherent subservience.  It is the single greatest stupidity ever foisted on us by our so-called spiritual leaders.  May their end be swift and thorough, and may we eventually return to a state where life itself is seen as divine and worthy of respect, whether male, female, animal, or plant.  There is no way to return to the past, but we may yet build an equitable future, worthy of our promise as sentient beings and our duty as caretakers of our world.

African Civilizations Reached the Americas Before Columbus, Thank Goodness

 

They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America – Ivan Van Sertima (1976)

           

            I come from a small island named Puerto Rico.  The people of Puerto Rico are a magnificent blend of native Taíno peoples, Spanish conquistadors, Africans, both slave and free, and a mish-mash of many other people who made their way to my little island.  I grew up my whole life with family and friends whose skin-tones ranged from the darkest browns to the palest of peach-pink, yet all were Puerto Rican.  While it is impossible to say that racism does not exist on my island, it is not the entrenched endemic racism found in Europe or the United States.  My people come in all colors.

            I say this because when my family moved to the USA in 1981 I began to read and study American schoolbooks.  In those texts, it was a given that the superior European (i.e. White) brought civilization, culture, science, and art to the New World, a land supposedly filled with backwards savages that could barely subsist, much less create amazing civilizations and engage in worldwide trade.  I found this so stupid, ignorant, and patently absurd.   Consider the fact that millions upon millions of humans lived throughout the Caribbean and the Americas for tens of thousands of years, with various high civilizations matching or dwarfing the achievements of contemporary cultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia.  For a textbook to say a small group of Spanish and Portuguese mercenary seamen led by a syphilitic and deeply ignorant Columbus “discovered” the entirety of the New World is plain false.  It aggrandizes a grade-A asshole and diminishes the soul and genius of everyone in the New World.

            Some of the greatest anthropological discoveries made in the New World seem to point to an influence from outside the New World centuries and even millennia before the travels of Columbus.  One would think that such finds would resonate in the literature of world history as examples of the ingenuity and resilience of the human spirit.  There is one problem, however.  The peoples that made contact with the New World between 600 BC and 1400 AD were Africans, dark-skinned people, and most of the researchers and historians, themselves raised under the blanket racist idea that white Europeans created all that is civilization and science and art in the world, could not bring themselves to accept that Africans could cross the Atlantic Ocean safely.  Africa not only fostered civilizations the magnitude of anything in Europe, they essentially created everything we hold to be the modern world.  Our civil and religious systems, our science and technology, our knowledge of animal husbandry, our ability to create agriculture, and so much more came directly from the heart of Africa.  Only the blind idiot racism of European historians could deceive them from these facts.  Not only were African’s contributions to the world dismissed as accidental, many of their achievements were, instead, assigned to later, whiter civilizations, as if Africa was not the mother of all humanity.

            Into this world, in 1976, Ivan Van Sertima released this amazing book, They Came Before Columbus.  From what I have read of its reception by academia, many established historians were deeply butt-hurt!  They could not imagine that Africans had the ability, much less the organization, to engage in trans-Atlantic travel.  Much of the contemporary criticism of this book sought to dismiss it entirely based on one or two small and quite meaningless points of contention.  Imagine you drawing a huge map of the continental United States using all your available research and someone shoots it all down because you failed to include some minor river or village.  Ridiculous.  However, this is exactly what Mr. Van Sertima experienced.  Non-white people of the world are used to being dismissed based on superficial bullshit.  Shit don’t change.

            Based on countless archeological, ethnographic, agricultural, and historical examples, Van Sertima shows that there were at least 2 periods where Africans came to the Americas, either as castaways on the trans-Atlantic current, or as members of large expeditionary forces sent by great African kings.  The oldest of these took place around 600BC, and coincided with the rise of the Olmec culture, from which most of the later native civilizations sprang.  Everyone is familiar with the giant Olmec heads, carved in basalt, which seem to portray Africa/Negro individuals.  Around this time, the Olmec people started creating step pyramids similar to the ones created in the Nubian kingdom that preceded the Egyptian dynasties. 

A second wave of African immigration to the New World occurred sometime between 1000 AD and 1200 AD, which coincides with the histories provided by West African peoples.  They spoke of massive fleets sent out from western Africa heading west to a new world.  This may seem weird, based on the false notions we have been taught that state the African was backwards, ignorant, and lacking in technological knowhow.  In fact, the desert-wandering Africans were the first people that understood navigation by the stars, and how to use both longitude and latitude to determine location.  Their ideas and instruments disseminated into the ancient Mediterranean by the Phoenicians who traded with these highly advanced African civilizations.  The racism barely hidden in the history books tries to portray the Phoenicians as the true innovators, relegating the Africans who sailed with the Phoenicians to slave or menial status.  Racism is a bitch and demeans everyone involved.

I wish I could write more and more about this book, but it is better read that talked about.  Much of the subject matter and topics covered in this book has been ignored since its publication, as the European historians seek to keep light-skinned folks as the primary drivers of human innovation.  It is a self-serving load of shit.  Any new finds that corroborate the African presence in the Americas are either ignored, hidden, or portrayed in such a light as to seem unimportant.  Even in the very first voyages of Columbus and his Spanish mercenaries, the natives would talk of dark-skinned visitors from the “morning,” (the East, where the Sun rises).  In Central America and the coast of South America, the native peoples talked of villages of dark-skinned men that came by boat over the water.

Even today, much of the world lives under the lie that the ancient Egyptians were not Black Africans, but light-skinned people.  The (white) world cannot accept that the original Egyptians, the builders of the great Pyramids, the creators of a religion and culture that lasted for millennia, were dark-skinned, Negro Africans.  The fact that Nubia, and Nubian kings, ruled over what is now Egypt is forgotten, or relegated to a mere happenstance.  The empire of Mali, on the west of Africa, was, in medieval times, larger, more prosperous, and far more advanced in every way than the contemporary Holy Roman Empire.  They had the resources, capabilities, and knowledge to sail around all of Africa, the Mediterranean, and, as Ivan Van Sertima has shown, all the way to the New World.  This is something to celebrate alongside all other great human achievements, but racism and prejudice prevents us from doing so.  What a shame.  I highly recommend this book.

(This book is available for download here: https://afrikin.org/books/Ivan-Van-Sertima-They-Came-Before-Columbus.pdf )

Humanity Creates Gods and Demons Alike

 

Demonology and Devil-Lore – Moncure Daniel Conway (1879)

           

            For someone like me who loves to read older books the Project Gutenberg website is a gold mine.  It allows me to discover thinkers and writers otherwise lost to me.  Sometimes I have heard mention of the authors or their works.  Oftentimes I have not.  Either way I love digging through their archives.  This is how I came across Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Demonology and Devil-Lore,” an amazingly rich book that has captured my mind for the past weeks.  This book traces the development of the demons and devils that have plagued human religious thought since before the advent of writing.  In doing so, it explores much of our past, our collective fears, and the many ways that gods become demons as one culture/religion usurps another.

            Initially, humanity feared everything.  Mother Nature was brutal, harsh, unsparing, and sought to destroy early man at every turn.  Humanity sought to placate Nature, even before we invented gods.  The tribe reinforced personal rites and superstitions.  In this ancient estimation of Nature, there was no “Good” or “Evil” as we think of them today.  The earliest revelation of humanity was the knowledge that to stay alive means killing other living things.  Primitive man saw evidence of this constantly.  There was no favored species.  All things suffered the wrath of a hurricane, or a wildfire, or a volcano's eruption.  All creatures had to kill to stay alive.  Conway shows how this initial metaphysical idea is found in the early passages of Genesis, in the parable of man gaining the knowledge of Good and Evil.  Before humans had that knowledge, they existed in the state I described above.  It was a huge metaphysical leap for early humans to understand that some things can be seen as only Good and some seen as only Evil.  From there, it was a small step to imagine that offerings or sacrifices would appease the Evil and please the Good.  It was in this stage of humanity that we began to codify specific things as Demons.

            Conway describes Demons as initially being personifications of destructive force in the world around us.  They were the flip-side of the wonder that humans felt when they looked at the beautiful Earth and the heavens above.  The very earliest religious texts we have, the Vedas of Southeast Asia, speak in simple terms of how the Creator brought forth all that is good and all that is evil.  The Creator brought forth all that is joyful as well as all that is painful.  It took a long time, and a period of intellectual maturation, for humanity to split evil from the Creator, and to assign the source of evil to an entirely malicious entity.  Zoroastrian belief, a very ancient religion, shows the next step.  In Zoroastrian thought, there are two equal and opposing forces created at the beginning of time.  Light eternally battles Darkness.  Good eternally battles Evil.  Only later did these personifications receive proper names, and humans given their role in the entire process, which is to strive for Good to defeat eventually the forces of Evil in the world, creating everlasting peace and harmony.  This is the next level of theological thought humans achieved.

            Once humans saw the Universe around them as a battleground between the forces of Light and the forces of Darkness, as stated in the text by Conway, “Man found that in the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere.  The Evil powers seemed to be the strongest.”  Even the greatest deity, the Sun itself, could burn you, kill you, and wither your life away.  The whole world was divided into realms controlled by individual malicious entities, whence came storm gods, water gods, mountain gods, etc.  Early sacrifices and offerings were not given to the “good” spirits” but to the “bad” ones.  It was the bad spirits that needed placating, whether this was in the form of an offering meant to keep evil away, or a sacrifice intended to send evil to an enemy instead of one’s family/tribe.  One tribe’s gods became another tribe’s demons.  This has continued until the present day.

            For example, one of the earliest names for the glory of the Sun was Baal.  Once sun-worship became outdated, and prayers to the Sun forbidden, the god Baal was converted into the demon Baal-zebub, a personification of the power of the Sun to rot things, and bring forth clouds of maggots and flies.  In the interim, Baal-zebub combined both of these traits.   As most old religions, including the Hebrew faith, did not have a need for an Evil One, their gods embodied both Good and Evil traits, such as the Jehovah of the Old Testament who not only saves the Jews, but kills thousands of first-born children, drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, destroys whole cities (Sodom, Gomorrah), etc. The Hebrew Jehovah is an old god, raised to primacy by the Hebrews from a pantheon of pre-existing deities.

            Conway discusses how early humans saw the world as haunted by demons way before they assigned specific moral qualities to those very demons.  Early demons behaved like a ravenous tiger, who kills and eats because it is in his nature, not because he is “bad.”  They were not judged in the manner that modern Christians seek to judge what they see as demons.  Instead, these demons were appeased, praised, and sacrificed to but never ignored.  The history of humanity shows evidence that one generation’s gods become degraded until they are seen as the next generation’s demons. 

            For example, In the Old Testament the Hebrews are spoken of as setting an offering to a deity named Azazel (meaning “Strength of God”) as well as to Jehovah.  Jehovah was just one of a pantheon of gods back then.  Only through endless repetition and the “refinement” of religion by priests did Jehovah become THE GOD, the one and only that exists (at least for the Hebrews.)  As time passed, Azazel was seen as a powerful Demon, an enemy of Jehovah.  In fact, the Hebrew myths mention four arch-demons, Azazel, Samael, Asael, and Maccathiel, which originally represented four aspects of the divine Creator.  As stated above, Azazel was the “strength of god,” Samael meant “the left hand of god,” Asael was god’s reproductive force, and Maccathiel was god’s retributive power.   For the past few thousand years, these four have been seen as some of the mightiest of demons.  This is how gods, or the personifications of a god, degrade and eventually turn into demons.

            Conway explores so much that it is difficult to discuss it all.  One of the critical points he makes is the difference between the idea of Demons, and the idea of a Devil.  Demons are the personification of malevolent forces that assail humans and animals alike.  They are not moral, and they are countered by proper sacrifice or incantation.  Conway details the earliest demons, those of Hunger, Heat, Cold, the Elements, and Animals, as those were the very first deep fears in early man.  As we developed socially and intellectually, the demons became more specific, such as those of Illusion, Darkness, Disease, and Death itself.  Conway explores each type and their development in their own chapter.  Very cool.

The Devil however, is a much later development in the theological life of humanity.  The Devil is specifically an adversary to the Creator, who actively seeks to undermine and destroy the Creator’s good work (i.e. the divine soul of humans).  In many cases, humans ascribe the Devil more power than that of the Creator, at least on Earth itself.  Once the idea of a Devil was loosed upon the world, humans began to imagine the world itself as a fully evil, sinful, corrupt place.  The Earth and everything on it, ruled by the Devil himself, exists solely to test whether humans can survive with their divine souls intact.  If successful, when they die, they end up joining all that is good in heaven and leaving behind the carnal, sinful world of flesh and bone.  Many humans today live in this theological world.  From this came the idea that detachment from worldly pleasures is a good thing, instead of worldly pleasures being something gifted to us by the Creator.  All the good and beautiful in the world, from food to sex to beauty itself, is a temptation used by the devil to corrupt our souls.  Once the Devil was in charge of the Earth, his powers grew exponentially, until every manner of bad luck and evil was blamed on Satan himself.

            Moncure Daniel Conway details everything he discusses.  He delves into the way that spiritual/religious beliefs of the populace tend to help everyone get along, and provide them with purpose and meaning, until a priest/sacerdotal group decides to take over and dictate what the tribe/group is supposed to believe.  This has occurred through all of our time on this planet.  Whether it was the shaman who relied on handouts from the village to procure his services, the rabbi who dictated who was Hebrew and worthy of Jehovah and who was not, or the priest that “explained” exactly what the Bible stated whether or not the congregation felt or believed otherwise.  Those same people gained incredible power, luxury, and prestige from their subjugation of our collective human beliefs.  They still sit in the lap of luxury, castigating us for being sinners; all the while, they commit the most heinous acts of torture, sexual abuse, outright theft, and moral degradation imaginable.  They claim to know who the demons and the Devils are, always hiding their own flawed humanity behind the veil of organized religion.  Conway hated those bastards so much.  I am eternally thankful that I found this book and this author, another intellectual hero to add to my ever-growing list.  I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how humans have created their gods and demons, and how we continue to do so today.

(This book can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40686 )

The Ancient Sumerians May Have Left Us Our True Legacy

The 12th Planet: Book I of the Earth Chronicles – Zecharia Sitchin (1976)

            I have always enjoyed my forays into what mainstream writers refer to as “the Fringe,” or, if they are being blunt, “the Lunatic Fringe.”  Ideas and subjects once considered ridiculous or plain deluded, have been shown throughout history to be valid, sometimes because it takes time for society to catch up to the ideas being described, and sometimes because what may come intuitively to a human being as a Truth cannot be verified until years or centuries later. 

An example of the former is Copernicus, whose writings were deemed heretical, solely because the mass consciousness at the time was living under a reality tunnel that did not allow for anything other than the will of a god to determine what happens to our world.  In a world rife with illiteracy, those who were literate and powerful (the church) controlled what the illiterates thought and believed.  An example of the latter would be Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist who, in the early 20^th century, wrote up his ideas that the continental plates were in constant motion, and that the landmasses were all connected at one time in the distant past.  His ideas, while consistent with the observational data, were dismissed out of hand by geologists and earth scientists, who still believed the Earth was an unchanging rock, only altered by erosion and wind.  Once we humans began to create tools to explore the possibilities and history of plate tectonics, it was discovered that all the landmasses had indeed been connected in the past, and not just once, but at least 5 different times that can be verified through rock strata.  There are countless such examples.

I am not stating that what Mr. Sitchin describes in his book is factual, or even possible, but who am I to know?  I am just a well-read, educated reader, but in no way am I an expert on ancient cultures, especially the Sumerian kingdom, and what came before it.  What I do have experience with is reading about religion and myth and exploring how truth can be coded into legend, and how legends can betray truth when misread.  I say that as a caveat.  Mr. Sitchin studied the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew, and has studied the Greek early translations.  I am not sure if he has taught himself to read cuneiform and earlier writings, or if he is using other’s work, but I have to take all of his translations with a grain of salt.

That being said, what is described in this book is, to my mind, plausible, and a bit frightening if even slightly true.  There are some very serious and unanswered questions regarding the evolution of Homo sapiens, from the previous hominid species (Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis, etc.) that immediately preceded our species.  The anthropological record seems to show that hominids evolved in Africa, and around 100,000 years or so ago (maybe longer), the ancestors of our species migrated out of Africa, settling in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and spreading through the world.  The earliest civilization that we can find any record of, whether archaeologically, or in ancient myths and writings, seemingly began out of nowhere around 8-10 thousand years ago, complete with agriculture, livestock, and societal structures we would recognize already in place.  This also coincided with the end of the last Ice Age on record.

Sitchin claims that the legends of Sumer and their tales of their gods are actually factual accounts retold as legendary history.  The 12^th planet of the title, is supposed to be a planet on an inclined elliptical orbit of the Sun, taking it out way past Pluto, and then back into the Solar System, between Mars and Jupiter, every 6,400 or so years.  This planet was the home of beings that sought out the mineral riches of Earth for their benefit, and who settled down on our planet, building several cities in the Euphrates to serve as their “space port” in a way, for every one of their years afforded them a chance to return to Earth or return from Earth back home.

In this tale, the beings asked their lesser brethren to work on Earth, gathering the minerals (gold, lithium, plutonium) that they needed from the southern areas of Africa.  According to Sumerian myth, these workers got fed up and asked their leaders to create a race of beings to serve as their work slaves.  This was to be us, the humans.  Much is discussed about how the biblical story of creation seems to describe exactly such events, especially when the god of genesis describes how he is one of many gods, and how they created humans in the gods’ image.  Sitchin goes into a lot of detail regarding this, and it makes for very interesting reading.  Humans served the gods.  The gods watched over the humans.

In recent times, WWII air forces would set up temporary bases in secluded Pacific Ocean islands, bringing with them everything modern, and, once the usefulness of the island was gone, the Air Forces would leave.  The people who lived there, the native islanders who had very little, if any, knowledge of the world outside their islands, started very quickly to believe they were gods, who, if placated or inspired, would return, providing the islanders with the modern goods and luxuries they saw as nearly magical.  They would build effigies of WWII propeller fighter planes, and create landing strips, hoping to inspire the visitors to return again and grace them with their godly presence.  They stopped their native religious practices in the attempt to feed this new belief.  That is our human nature.  It is very plausible to me that if beings from another world ever came to our planet and interacted with us that we would see them as gods and build our entire culture around them.

There are a lot more examples and cool stories in this book.  While it may all be a writer-created hope, there is always the possibility that what Sitchin is describing is the truth of our existence.  Ancient man had deities that were eternal, always with us, always a part of the world around us.  In fact, the world itself was full of life spirit.  Modern man, however, created civilization, rigid religion, and the idea that the god/gods came once in our past, and will return again in the future.  This makes no sense if it was just a truth gathered by our experience in the world round us.  This makes more sense if we are collectively remembering a past in which humans were the subservient slaves of what seemed to us to be god-like beings.

 

This book is from 1976, and helped foster the Ancient Aliens hypothesis that I so deeply loathe.  (This states that the great works of humanity’s past were too hard for lowly ancient man, and must have been created by aliens, or with the help of aliens, etc.  This insults the brain of ancient man which was exactly like ours today.  If we can do something, they could have done it too.  The only difference is in our storehouse of aggregated knowledge that we can all build upon.)  What Sitchin proposes is not that aliens came down and helped humans, but that an alien race came down to Earth, genetically altered Homo erectus, and created what we call Homo sapiens.  This is why our upward mobility and societal structures have exponentially grown in the past 6,000 years, where before our ancestors were pleased enough to just chill in family groups, and enjoy their lives.  It is a crazy idea, but there have been far crazier ideas that have turned out to be correct.  Many of the criticisms I read about this book and Sitchin's work pertain to very specific instances of sections that critics state are mistranslated from the Sumerian language.  They outright dismiss any of the other claims in this book, without properly addressing them.  That is lazy criticism.  The jury is still out!

(This book can be downloaded and read as a PDF here: The 12th Planet - Sitchin )