THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Eisler 23
sites is that they were structured along very different lines from what we have been
taught is the divinely, or naturally, ordained human order.
One of these ancient cradles of civilization is Catal Huyuk, the largest Neolithic
site yet found. Located in the Anatolian plain of what is now Turkey, Catal Huyuk goes
back approximately eight thousand years to about 6500 B.C.E. C three thousand years
before Sumer. As Mellaart reports, this ancient civilization Ais remarkable for its
wall-paintings and plaster reliefs, its sculpture in stone and clay . . ., its advanced
technology in the crafts of weaving, woodwork, metallurgy . . ., its advanced religion . . .,
its advanced practices in agriculture and stock breeding, and . . . a flourishing trade. .
.@
But undoubtedly the most remarkable thing about Catal Huyuk and other
original sites for civilization is that they were not warlike, hierarchic, and
male-dominated societies like ours. As Mellaart writes, over the many centuries of its
existence, there were in Catal Huyuk no signs of violence or deliberate destruction, Ano
evidence for any sack or massacre.@ Moreover, while there was evidence of some social
inequality, Athis is never a glaring one.@ And most significantly C in the sharpest possible
contrast to our type of social organization C@ the position of women was obviously an
important one . . . with a fertility cult in which a goddess was the principal deity.@
Now it is hardly possible to believe that in this kind of society, where, besides all
their other advances, people clearly understood the principles of stock breeding, they
would not have also had to understand that procreation involves the male. So the Big
Discovery theory is not only founded on the fallacious assumption that men are
naturally brutes, who were only deterred from forcefully enslaving women by fear of the
female=s Amagical@ powers of procreation; the Big Discovery theory is also founded on
assumptions about what happened in prehistory that are no longer tenable in light of the
really big discoveries we are now making about our lost human heritageCabout societies
that, while not ideal, were clearly more harmonious than ours.
But if the replacement of a Divine Mother with a Divine Father was not due to
men=s discovery of paternity, how did it come to pass that all our present world religions
either have no female deity or generally present them as Aconsorts@ or subservient wives
of male gods?
To try to answer that question, let us look more carefully at the new archeological
findings.
3
4
J. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 11. [Au.]
Ibid., pp. 69, 225, 553. [Au.]