Well, Im not talking about the neolithic period. Im talking about ALL of history Krimsa. Obviously ,agrarian societies conquered the hunter/gatherers. or we wouldnt be here would we? A good example of this would be the Native Americans. Did the Native Americans win some battles? Yes. But which society won in the long term? The answer is obvious. And I dont know what your talking about me being fearful of the information. I got no problem with "Goddess" wordship or "female spirituality". I just dont make the distinction. I dont believe that spirituality has genders. I believe men and women to be moral and intellectual equals. Both capable of making the same decisions and reaching the same conclusions for "good" or "evil" with the same information. In other words,if gender roles were somehow reversed, I believe history would have proceeded on a similar course. Im proposing that women would have made all the same advancements and mistakes that men have. Thats all Im saying Krimsa.

women make mistakes? are you trying to commit suicide MM?

I feel like such a mysogynist

i used to give mysogies but i stopped, ooops sorry wrong word -

Well, Im not talking about the neolithic period. Im talking about ALL of history Krimsa. Obviously ,agrarian societies conquered the hunter/gatherers. or we wouldnt be here would we? A good example of this would be the Native Americans. Did the Native Americans win some battles? Yes. But which society won in the long term? The answer is obvious. And I dont know what your talking about me being fearful of the information. I got no problem with "Goddess" wordship or "female spirituality". I just dont make the distinction. I believe men and women to be moral and intellectual equals. Both capable of making the same decisions and reaching the same conclusions for "good" or "evil" with the same information. In other words,if gender roles were somehow reversed, I believe history would have proceeded on a similar course. Im proposing that women would have made all the same advancements and mistakes that men have. Thats all Im saying Krimsa.

Well okay, if you want to simply speak in broad terms and make grand sweeping generalizations than I am not going to argue that premise with you. Then you would have to wonder where would we be now if Christianity and Monotheism never took hold of mainstream society? How different would western culture be today? We have no way of knowing because we are where we are now in the present. The only thing we can know for certain is that history is only written by the victors and these Goddess worshiping societies were certainly not the victors, nor were the American Indians.What does a society do with a conquered people? Generally the best approach is an "out of sight, out of mind" final solution to the "problem". Christianity made it possible for the whites to essentially subjugate the entire western world because they were instructed to "go forth and be fruitful and multiply". So thats what we have done in fact. At the expense of the Indians, at the expense of the natural word, at the expense of the animals that share this planet with us, at the expense of everything in fact. The cost of the "American Dream" has been quite high and we are only now beginning to understand that we might not be able to afford it.

I was speaking of the Neolithic in particular because there is evidence that these Goddess worshiping societies extended back that far, certainly predating Christianity by thousands of years. If you at least accept that much, then it certainly puts the bible and its writings into perspective as we would now understand this new religion to be in direct opposition with Paganism and the belief system held within. Women would essentially be squeezed out of the picture as it related to their rights, personal worth and autonomy. They would become nothing more than property first of their fathers and then passed off to a husband. We have reason to believe that it was not always like this.

As for your insistence that these Nomadic peoples were not the attackers and actually the victims (the reversal) I dont really know what evidence you have to support that. Essentially we find that these early civilizations had no fortifications initially, then some attempt at protecting themselves form these nomadic invaders from the North. The Kurgans. And then total collapse. The article describes it as a period of "stagnation" and culture simply stopped evolving. These excavations point to this conclusion through various artifacts. So we cant just rely on what Mirror Mirror wants to believe happened but what the recovered physical evidence seems to support.

Dark Order Out of Chaos: From the Chalice to the Blade

We measure the time we have been taught is human history in centuries. But the span for the earlier segment of a much different kind of history is measured in millennia, or thousands of years. The Paleolithic goes back over 30,000 years. The Neolithic age agricultural revolution was over 10,000 years ago. Catal Huyuk was founded 8500 years ago. And the civilization of Crete fell only 3200 years ago.

For this span of millennia - many times as long as the history we measure on our calendars from the birth of Christ - in most European and Near Eastern societies the emphasis was on technologies that support and enhance the quality of life. During the thousands of years of the Neolithic great strides were made in the production of food through farming, as well as in hunting, fishing, and the domestication of animals. Housing was advanced through innovations in construction, the making of rugs, furniture, and other household articles, and even (as in Catal Huyuk) town planning.' Clothing had left the time of skins and furs far behind with the invention of weaving and sewing. And, as both materially and spiritually the foundations for higher civilization were being laid, the arts also flourished.

As a general rule, descent was probably traced through the mother. The elder women or heads of clans administered the production and distribution of the fruits of the earth, which were seen as belonging to all members of the group. Along with common ownership of the principal means of production and a perception of social power as responsibility or trusteeship for the benefit of all came what seems to have been a basically cooperative social organization. Both women and men-even sometimes, as in Catal Huyuk, people of different racial stocks-worked cooperatively for the common good. Greater male physical strength was here not the basis for social oppression, organized warfare, or the concentration of private property in the hands of the strongest men. Neither did it provide the basis for supremacy of males over females or of "masculine" over "feminine" values. On the contrary, the prevailing ideology was gynocentric, or woman-centered, with the deity represented in female form. Symbolized by the feminine Chalice or source of life, the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature-not the powers to destroywere, as we have seen, given highest value. At the same time, the function of priestesses and priests seems to have been not to serve and give religious sanction to a brutal male elite but to benefit all the people in the community in the same way that the heads of the clans administered the communally owned and worked lands. But then came the great change-a change so great, indeed, that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude.

THE LOST CIVILIZATION

Even in the nineteenth century, when archaeology was still in its infancy, scholars found evidence of societies where women were not subordinate to men. But their interpretation of this evidence was that if these societies were not partriarchies, they must have been matriarchies. In other words, if men did not dominate women, then women must have dominated men. However, this conclusion is not borne out by the evidence. Rather, it is a function of what I have called a dominator society worldview. The real alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy, which is only the other side of the dominator coin. The alternative, now revealed to be the original direction of our cultural evolution, is what I call a partnership society: a way of organizing human relations in which beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species the difference between female and male diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority.

What we have until now been taught as history is only the history of dominator species-the record of the male dominant, authoritarian, and highly violent civilizations that began about 5,000 years ago. For example, the conventional view is that the beginning of European civilization is marked by the emergence in ancient Greece of the Indo-Europeans. But the new archaeological evidence demonstrates that the arrival of the Indo-Europeans actually marks the truncation of European civilization. That is, as Marija Gimbutas extensively documents, there was in Greece and the Balkans an earlier civilization, which she calls the civilization of Old Europe. The first Indo-European invasions (by pastoralists from the steppes of the northeast) foreshadow the end of a matrifocal, matrilineal, peaceful agrarian era. Like fingerprints in the archaeological record, we see evidence of how wave after wave of barbarian invaders from the barren fringes of the globe leave in their wake destruction and what archaeologists call cultural impoverishment. And what characterizes these invaders is that they bring with them male dominance along with their angry gods of thunder and war.

The archaeological record shows a dramatic shift after these invasions. We see the disappearance of millennial traditions of art and pottery, a sharp decrease in the size of settlements, the appearance of 11 suttee" chieftain tombs (so called because with the male skeleton are sacrificed women, children, and animals to serve him even after death). Warfare now becomes endemic, along with "strongman" rule, since these invaders, as Gimbutas writes, "worshipped the power of the lethal blade."

One of the most striking manifestations of this change is found in the art. Now begins something dramatically absent before: the idealization of male violence and male dominance in an art that glorifies killing (scenes of "heroic" battles) and rapes (as in Zeus's fabled rapes of both mortal women and goddesses). And equally striking is the transformation of myth. Here, too, "strongman" rule is idealized and even presented as divinely ordained, as the bards, scribes, and priests of the ruling men systematically distort and gradually expunge the myths and images of the civilization of Old Europe from their sacred and secular tales. But although these, too, become distorted, memories of an earlier and better time still linger in folk stories and legends.

In the nineteenth century, the archaeological excavations of Sophia and Heinrich Schliemann established that the Homeric story of the Greek sacking of Troy was historically based. Similarly, the probable historical basis for the legend of Atlantis is now being revealed by twentieth century archaeological excavations. The fabled civilization of Atlantis was said to have ended when large land masses sank into the sea. What geologists and archaeologists now reveal is that approximatelY 3,500 years ago massive earthquakes and tidal waves in the Mediterranean caused large land masses to sink into the sea. For example, as in the legend of Atlantis, most of the island of Thera, or Santorini, was swallowed by the sea.

These cataclysmic events seem to have marked the end of what scholars call Minoan civilization, a highly technologically developed Bronze Age civilization centered in the Mediterranean island of Crete. Minoan Crete had the first paved roads in Europe, and even indoor plumbing. In sharp contrast to other "high civilizations" of antiquity (such as Sumer and dynastic Egypt), Crete had a generally high standard of living, with houses built for both beauty and comfort. Its art, too, is very different from that of Sumer and Egypt: it is so natural, so free, so full of the celebration of life in all its forms, that sober scholars have described it as unique in the annals of civilization for its grace and exuberant joy.

But what really makes Minoan Crete unique is that it was neither a male-dominant nor warlike culture. Archaeologist Nicolas Platon, the former head of the Acropolis Museum and director of antiquities in Crete, notes that this was a "remarkable peaceful society." He also notes that here descent was still traced through the mother and that "the influence of women is visible in every sphere. 114 For example, the only Minoan fresco of tribute is not the conventional picture of an aggrandized king with a sword in his hand and kneeling figures at his feet characteristic of male-dominant ancient civilizations. It is rather the picture of a woman. And instead of sitting on an elevated throne, she is standing with her arms raised in a gesture of benediction as men approach with offerings of fruits, wine, and grains.

In other words, in this highly creative and peaceful society, masculinity was not equated with domination and conquest. Accordingly, women and the "soft" or "feminine" values of caring, compassion, and nonviolence did not have to be devalued. Power was seen as actualizing power -as the capacity to create and nurture life. It was power to, rather than power over: the power to illuminate and transform human consciousness (and with it reality) that is still in our time symbolized by the "feminine vessel," the chalice or Holy Grail..

I dont think I ever said they weren't invaded. That is what we have been discussing for the past 6 hours mirror!

I actually replaced it. I only left it up for a second. You get the point however. Like I say, all this is simply another possible way to look at some of this historical evidence. Its nothing to argue about. Like we were asking you last night, if you have your own information to present to discredit this or prove it erroneous in some respect, please do. Then you just got all mad at us.

Well it certainly didnt stop them from falling. Not to mention these other Neolithic civilizations were also invaded by the Indo Europeans. I think the point that is being made here is there was a distinct difference in the cultures and one came into conflict with the other. Im not so sure you can say, well they were safe so the women had more rights. Then what would have stopped their own men from taking over, designing weapons, building up arsenals like these invaders form the north?

No one attacked you. You posted something and I guess we couldn't tell if it was your own summation and opinion or documented by someone else. There is kind of a difference to be fair. It doesn't make this information any more valid because you can still say I dont want to believe it or it doesn't matter. However, generally people like to know where information is coming from. I usually only care if Im going to act on it or I want to pursue it in some respect like look it up or get the book or what have you.

Why are you assuming men want to "take over" and "build weapons"? Im sure women would make weapons too if they had a chance Krimsa. But that doesnt sound like a realistic goal for a society unless they are out to conquer others. But why would you do that unless you needed resources that someone else had? Maybe the Minoans had access to all the resources they needed and therefore did not need to invade other societies.

I am not assuming that ALL men want to take over or dominate. That is what you are saying and that women need to be protected from other men and that is the only reason that these particular cultures enjoyed more freedoms and prosperity. I am saying that based on the archeological evidence and what they were able to find, the men in these societies had no reason to waste a lot of time and energy making and designing weapons like the Nomadic tribes did. That wasn't nearly as important to them so in effect they were able to prosper, build stationary societies, indulge in arts and entertainments. Make pots, clothing and rugs. Build elaborate homes. The Minoan culture had indoor plumbing even.

You see when you aren't wasting a lot of energy and time building fortification and protecting yourself from invasion, you tend to have more expendable leisure time in order to enjoy yourself and take on these various other endeavors, therefore, improving the overall quality of the society that you exist in.