THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Eisler 22
RIANE EISLER
OUR LOST HERITAGE:
NEW FACTS ON HOW
GOD BECAME A MAN
RIANE EISLER (b. 1931-) is co-director for the Center for Partnership Studies and a
national and international lecturer. She is the author of Dissolutions: No Fault
Divorce, Marriage, and the Future of Women (1977), The Equal Rights Handbook: What
ERA Means to Your Life, Your Rights, and the Future (1978), and The Chalice and the
Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), and, more recently (1996) Sacred Pleasure: Sex,
Myth , and the Politics of the Body. The following essay first appeared in the
May/June 1985 issue of The Humanist.
n the nineteenth century, archeological excavations began to confirm what
Ischolars of myth had long maintainedCthat goddess worship preceded the
worship of God. After reluctantly accepting what no longer could be ignored, religious
historians proposed a number of explanations for why there had been this strange
switch in divine gender. A long-standing favorite has been the so-called Big Discovery
theory. This is the idea that, when men finally became aware that women did not bring
forth children by themselvesCin other words, when they discovered that it involved their
sperm, their paternityCthis inflamed them with such a new-found sense of importance
that they not only enslaved women but also toppled the goddess.
Today, new archeological findingsCparticularly post-World War II
excavationsCare providing far more believable answers to this long-debated puzzle. For
largely due to more scientific archeological methods, including infinitely more accurate
1
archeological dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology, there has
been a veritable archeological revolution.
As James Mellaart of the London University Institute of Archeology writes, we
now know that there were in fact many cradles of civilization, all of them thousands of
years older than Sumer, where civilization was long said to have begun about five
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thousand years ago. But the most fascinating discovery about these original cultural
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Radiocarbon dating is a method of establishing the age of prehistoric artifacts by
measuring the radioactivity of carbon; dendrochronology is a dating procedure based on
counting the growth rings of trees.
2
[Au.]
J Mellaart, The Neolithic of the Near East (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975).