7 Key Teachings: THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS, by Leonard Shlain

TRANSCRIPT:

So I realize that I’ve talked a fair amount of some of the contents of The Alphabet versus the Goddess, but I’ve never actually talked about this book in its entirety, including its primary thesis. He’s a neuroscientist, he passed unfortuantely, I would love to interview him. He talks abotu the rise of literacy, and the emergence of writing as a tool, shut down goddess culture, or a culture evidenced primarily by its images, its iconography, its symbols. And that we effectively, by prioritizing—he links it to the brain, one side of the brain over the other—we have patriarchy. It’s a really fascintating book becuse he goes throughout history. For context, I have 22 pages of typed, single-space notes. But he writes about how he came to this: “While on that bus ride, and perhaps because of my heightened interest in how we communicate, I was struck by the thought that the demise of the Goddess, the plunge in women’s status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and misogyny occurred around the time that people were learning how to read and write. Perhaps there was something in the way people acquired in this new skill that changed the brain’s actual structure.” And he talks about, he says: “For now, I propose that a holistic, simultaneous synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine.” Anyway, enjoy the below, I hope you find it as fascinasting as I do.

There is so much history in this book, it’s impossible to distill. Here’s a related video I made about “Left” and also about “Why is Jesus associated with the Fish?”—I had these insights via Shlain.

I highly, highly recommend reading The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image.

7 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. There are essential parts of our experience that will always escape codification through language. Shlain attributes these to the right brain, whereas left is responsible for our conception of linear time—and ordering existence.

As Shlain writes: “The right brain’s feeling-states are authentic. Once a person has experienced love or ecstasy, he or she knows it. An internal voice verifies the experience beyond debate. Feeling-states allow us to have faith in God, to grasp the essence of a joke, to experience patriotic fervor, or to be repulsed by a painting someone else finds beautiful. These states all possess a non-discursive quality. Standing in the shadows of our ancient beginnings, feeling-states overwhelm the brain’s more recently evolved glib facility with words. No crisp nomenclature exists to describe them. When pressed to explain their emotional experiences, people, in exasperation, commonly fall back upon tautology—‘it is because it is!’ The things once loves, lives, and dies for cannot be easily expressed in words.” (p. 19)

This tidbit on page 23 is fascinating: “I propose that the left hemisphere is actually a new sense organ designed by evolution to perceive time.”

And then here’s Shlain on the left brain’s function: “The written word issues from linearity, sequence, reductionism, abstraction, control, central vision, and the dominant hand—all hunter/killer attributes. Writing represented a shift of tectonic proportions that fissured the integrated nature of gatherer/hunter communication and brain cooperation. Writing made the left brain, flanked by the incisive cones of the eye the aggressive right hand, dominant over the right. The triumphant march of literacy that began five thousand years ago conquered right-brain values and, with them, the Goddess. Patriarchy and misogyny have been the inevitable result.” (p. 44)

2. A bit of a tangent, but love this exposition on the reality of so many seismic events that seemed improbably as described (i.e. a river of blood). This book has range!