Chapter 18 Birth/Death

Birth versus Death

Chapter 18

In this chapter Shlain talks about the creation of Buddhism, how it evolved, and then how it diminished away. First he starts off by talking about how rapidly Buddhism spread in India and how many people quickly joined this new religion, but by A.D 500 it was practically extinct. This new religion was quickly taken up by Siddhartha Gautama, a prince who was very observant of the outside world and the trouble caused to the ordinary people. Watching the troubled people made Siddhartha very sad, so in turn he decided to explore the outside world leaving his family behind. He traveled to a forest where he “encountered a group of ascetics” (Shlain 170). As soon as Siddhartha approached the group he asked a question but in order to get a response from the people he had to join the group. He decided to deprive his body even more than any other person to feel the full effects of how it felt to be in poverty. As the story proceeds he observes this endless cycle of “birth, pain, loss, and death” (Shlain 171). This cycle works on Siddhartha pretty hard and he decides to figure out a way to eliminate this type of suffering. One thing Siddhartha notices is that the ego is the main focus; it’s very selfish and demanding. He goes on to say that the “ego prevents one from combining the soul of the world within each of us with the soul of the world at large” (171). Siddhartha believed that the ego would need to be “awakened” if you wanted to see enlightenment. This is how “Buddha” came about also known as the “Awakened One.” Siddhartha (Buddha) believed that everyone lives a busy short-lived life and no one sees the real bliss in live and that is what he would to preach. He’d rather his people speak than write anything down, and have his words carried on through stories from their elders. Buddha also believed in non-violence, universal love way of life but failed to give any woman respect in it. He then goes on to give his Aunt, who raised him because his mother died during child birth, no status. She tries to join his group and he refused each time until finally Ananda a follower of his, decided to overrule Buddha and let her join their group. There were stiff rules she had to follow, and he made sure she and all other females were second class and were made to bow down to all monks.

I feel Shlain’s rhetorical appeal was mostly Pathos because he is telling this story about Buddhism and how it came about. It plays with your emotions in several ways. First it talks about how he starved himself to see how the other people lived. Then he has this awakening where he sees that the ego is all bad and makes you do selfish things. Following that he tries to say that child birth is the source of all pain when in most people’s mind it is all happiness and joy. I think Shlain makes some good points about this religion but he also degrades women a lot stating on page 176 “women could join, but they must accept second- class status.” To me I feel like every religion has this downgrade towards women and that somehow we aren’t good enough to be a head of any sort of religion.

Question: According to Shlain on page 174 he says that “Could birth, the quintessential female gift, really be the source of all the world’s pain?” Do you agree with Shlain or disagree with Shlain’s statement?

Shlain, Leonard. “Birth/Death.” The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Penguin / Compass, 1998. Pp. 168-178

Penitence Verse. Photograph. A Buddhist Journal. 5 Oct. 2007. Web. 27 Oct. 2010. .

CHAPTER 17 LINGAM/YONI, West over East

Hilary Petrokubi

Professor Lee

ENG 308J

October 28, 2010

“The word hemisphere, meaning one-half a sphere, has only two common uses: to describe the hemispheres of the brain and to describe the hemispheres of the planet.” (Shlain 159) The earth has two complimentary yet different cultures: East and West. These hemispheres mirror the functions of the left and right side of the brain. The West is outer-directed and dualistic, while the East is more introverted (159). The West’s characteristics embody the left side of the brain while the East characterizes the right. Shlain has talked much about western culture thus far, and Lingam/Yoni is the chapter where we will begin to explore the East, beginning with India.

India has many ancient rituals including sati, where a woman joins her husband’s corpse in the funeral, bride burning a practice a husband will use to obtain his wife’s dowry, female infanticide, and Purdah, the practice of segregating women from men. (Shlain 159). Before these customs there was Mohejo-Daro, a place in the northwest corner of India that was excavated in the 1920s. It shows a highly advanced civilization from2500 b.c. to 1500 b.c. with brick buildings, avenues, and more than 2500 inhabitants. (160) It belonged to the Harappan culture.

The culture came about 500 years later than the Egypt or Mesopotamia. The inhabitants were advanced with irrigation channels and grand palaces and temples. Like all India cultures, they had a deep reverence for all vegetation. Within the excavations were found the first Lingham and Yoni: abstract sacred stone images of a phallus and vulva that represent life force. (Shlain 160) Among the many found artifacts are those depicting the Mother Goddess, which suggests that Goddess-worshiping cultures thrived in India.

The Harappans spoke a form of Sanskirt, which means “sacred and pure”. They invented a unique form of writing with over 500 pictographic characters (Shlain 160). Because it was so complex it was difficult to use. When Aryan warriors invaded India with them they brought letters of the alphabet. The invaders adapted their alphabet to the Sanskirt in India, and thus the Brahmi script matured. (161) During this transition, Vedas, poems about religion and philosophy, carried on. The Aryans took these poems and superimposed their own values on the Harappans, taking egalitarian values and embedding patriarchal and militaristic values. (161)

In the Rig-Veda, the oldest poem, women held power and possessed rights to their own property, and many other freedoms. Although the Aryans changed their Veda creation story, the original still exists. The original Being was a fusion of a male and female and resembled “ a woman and a man closely embraced.” (Shlain 162) Through a series of copulating the being populated the world and said “I, indeed, am this creation, for I emitted it from myself.” (162) The female is coequal with the male.

The Vedas emphasize that all living things are manifestations of god, where in the West, everything is created by God. The Western God manifest Himself through logos, and the god-head of the Hindu appear everywhere in image. (163)

Within India there is also a caste system. The Brahmins, those who gained control over are and writing, controlled the education. Being a somewhat lower caste position before, they began to rise because they controlled all the information. With that many of the freedoms women had disappeared. Women were discouraged from being educated and Brahmins did not allow them to read or write. The practice of Purdah became to go into effect. The Brahmins enforced the first written civil code, the Laws of Manu. (164)

Although the Hindu culture suffered from many outside influences, it has still managed to retain many female characteristics. They still honor their goddess. Through Hindu art and the practice of Karma sutra, there are practices that celebrate sexual union between man and women.

Unlike, many of his other chapters where Shlain draws upon outlandish examples to support his thesis, I feel his logos is very strong in Chapter 17. I am beginning to see his correlations between the brain and the earth hemispheres; the West representing the left and the East representing the right. I think it is very interesting to see his theory thrive as the goddess is still very prevalent in Indian culture and a right/East culture. Where he fails, and where I begin to drift from Shlain, is the understanding of women’s rights in the Western and Eastern cultures. If the Harappans developed their practice of Purdah, essentially from the Aryans, a Western civilization, then why today are women still discriminated in India more so than in ANY Western culture?

Why do you think if Shain claims the Hindu culture is more successful in maintaining female characteristics then Western cultures, that women in India face a prevalent amount of adversity compared to those in Western societies?

Works Cited

"Bee-Hexagon - Vedas." Bee-Hexagon - Start, News. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2010. .

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics), 1999. Print.

Cadmus/Alpha

Chapter 13, Cadmus/Alpha, concerns itself with the beginning of literature in Ancient Greece. Shlain tells the Greek mythological story of Cadmus, a Phoenician prince who brought the alphabet to Greece. Cadmus was on a journey to find his sister Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king of Sidon, who had been abducted by Zeus and forcibly raped. Cadmus came upon Zeus fighting with Typhon, a serpent, and helped Zeus win by distracting Typhon. Shlain reiterates his point of males slaying serpents, a totem of feminism, is an allegory for diminishing the female deities powers. Another version has Cadmus slaying the serpent himself and removing its teeth. Each tooth represented one letter of the alphabet, and Cadmus then planted these “letters”. However, instead of growing beautiful flowers, the planted letters sprouted warriors. Shlain argues that this is another instance of males destroying the image of Mother Earth; warriors sprang from her fields instead of nourishing plants. He also connects removing the serpent’s teeth to a male fear of vagina dentate. Shlain states, “In the Greek myth, the hero who brought the alphabet to Greece also extracted the dreaded fangs of the female’s totem.” I believe Shlain wants this to convey to the reader the sense that the alphabet slayed the female deity, as they were both brought about at the same time by the same masculine hero. Shlain also talks about the siege of Troy and how it was all about the image of women. The Trojan prince Paris abducted the wife of the Spartan chieftain Menelaus, effectively starting a war between Troy and Greece that lasted for ten years. Not only was the war about the Spartan’s wife, but during the war two Greeks, Achilles and Agamemnon, fight over what to do with a captured Trojan woman. To end the war, the Greeks created a massive wooden horse which is hollow and filled with warriors. Shlain argues that when the warriors came out of the wooden horse, “Instead of fetuses nourished within a mother’s womb, these are armed warriors who become agents of death upon their ‘birth’” (128). One can imagine he is arguing that this defiled the sanctity of the nurturing womb and was a blatant attack on women..

Shlain’s rhetorical appeal in this chapter is very logos-centered. He brings a lot of mythical history, which although is well-known to be fictional, is still held as a credible source to gain insight into the lives and thinking of ancient peoples. On page 122 Shlain goes into his spiel about slaying female snake goddesses and how this was a sign that men were re-writing history to be dominated by men. Shlain also goes into how bulls were regarded as a female totem as well as snakes, as looking at the head of a bull it resembles female internal organs. On page 125 he states that from a young age every member of ancient society knew what their internal organs looked like due to the fact that they slaughtered animals all the time. Shlain also tries an ethical appeal with the phalanx, and fails miserably. He says on page 123, “A single metal shield bears a striking resemblance to a single tooth--a row of abutting shields (as in a phalanx) resembles both a row of teeth and a row of letters.” Personally I cannot see why anyone would design an army formation to resemble teeth in any way, or even design gear to resemble teeth. The shields were shaped how they were to protect the warriors bodies, and putting them together was just plain smart to help protect the man next to you.

Question: Shlain spent a lot of time in this chapter trying to relate teeth to letters and other technological improvements of the time (phalanx). Do you feel Shlain pulled this off?

Works Cited
Shlain, Leonard. “Cadmus/Alpha.” The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Penguin / Compass, 1998. Pp. 120-131

. http://markelikalderon.com/2008/06/22/applescript-trojan-horse/

Chapter 12

Chapter 12 Adam/Eve

Paula Lieb

English 308J

Summary:

Chapter 12 attempts to explain the relationship between men and women by connecting it to passages found in the Old Testament. He makes connections that with the coming of the first text, the female was devalued, and cast into a specific role. Schlain claims that the stories through out the Bible attempt to give everyone in society a specific purpose, including slaves and women. Slain begins the chapter with the story of creation. Schain claims that in the story of creation, “Yahweh created woman only as an afterthought because Adam could not find a suitable “helpmeet” among the animals.” (Schlain 112). He continues to explain how the woman was created out of Adam’s ribs inferring that a “women’s function in life is to support a man.” (113). Slain continues to explain how the bible portrays the relationship between men in women by telling the story of the forbidden fruit. He explains how the serpent in the story in cast as a villain which cuts off an earlier notion that tied snakes to a symbol of power for Goddesses’ and devalues to women to “property” (114). Schlain explains how this story reversed associating women with life, and dubbed women as the reason for death. Schlain continues by claiming the “Yahmeh branded female curiousity the greatest sin.” (114). which in turn gives males a way to take power over women, with a “legitimate” claim.

Schlain continues to explain how the original sin created by Eve, caused God to punish Israelite nations that still worshiped Goddess’. He claims that Yahweh also performed “destructive miracles” (116) storms, floods etcetera which were meant to discredit any other male God which claimed to have these powers. Yahweh was attempting to establish his status as the only God.

This chapter continues with yet another story of how the Bible sets women at a status below women. Schlain explains that in Hebrew patriarchs there is a story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All three of these men married women who could not have children. The men decided to try for children with their handmaids and this was successful for all three men, which is interpreted that females are to blame when a couple can not produce children. Schlain interprets this as taking credit for child birth away from the female and giving it to the male.

The chapter continues by comparing the relationship between man and women to that of Yahweh and Israel. He explains how Yahweh let his chosen people suffer for 430 years before Moses was selected to guide Yahweh’s people to slavery. He makes the connection that Yahweh like a husband was “demanding, controlling, and capricious”(117), while Israel like the wife, was “long suffering, obedient, and loyal.” (117). Furthering the claims to gender roles in society.

Schlain finishes the chapter with the explanation that over time men are encouraged to turn to book instead of women for knowledge. He says “The aleph-bet broke the spirit of women and banished the Goddess.”(119).

Schlain uses strong appeals to pathos in chapter 12 due to his connection with the Old Testament which many people, especially Christians and Jewish people take very seriously. He uses famous biblical stories like the story of creation and the story of the forbidden fruit to draw people in because it is something they are familiar with, and then to get them to feel something, which in many females case would be negative feelings. He goes a good job of stirring up emotions in female readers because it breaks down into simple terms the diminishing of their power in society due to biblical texts. “women’s function in life is to support a man.” (113). This is likely to stir up emotion in many females due to the fact that many females believe that there is equal status between men and women. Schlain had strong appeals to ethos in that the chapter was well written. It made good points and Schlain seems to sincerely believe what he was writing. I feel that the logos was very weak. Schlain claims to get information from archeologists and archaeologists, as well as other “professionals” but fails to mention names, or organizations. He says "Archaeologist have recovered..." (115) but never provides information as to who these archaeologists are. Also his claims made from the bible is all personal interpretation and doesn’t provide good evidence just in that many religions have trouble agreeing on an interpretation of the bible. So what would cause readers to take Schlain’s interpretation as valid?

How do you think women interpret the bible’s message of a women’s role in society today? Should Christian women and men take these stories literally? Do you feel Schlain’s interpretation of these stories are correct? What is women’s role in society if it is not what Schlain claims scriptures say?

From Hebrews to Israelites

Chapter 10 Abraham/Moses
Emily Kessler
English 308J

Summary:
Schlain begins the chapter by saying that the Hebrews "are the only people of antiquity whose fundamental belief system has survived the scouring of centuries... despite a litany of calamities that should have extinguished them (Schlain 87)." The Old Testament and the origins of Judaism are important because at a time when the goddess was still held in high regard, Judaism was founded on the claim that "a masculine deity created life without any female participation (Schlain 88)." Schlain argues that the Old Testament is a literary narrative and combines parts that can be regarded as myth, legend, and history. Schlain claims that the crossover from myth to legend begins with Abram. Abram grew up in Ur and was the son of Terah, a man who carved sacred images out of wood. Due to his fathers profession, Schlain speculates that Abram could read cuneiform and that he looked down on those who believed that his fathers wood carvings could emanate the divine. Terah's family moved from Ur to Canaan and when Terah died, Abram became the leader of the clan. When Abram was ninety-nine, Yahweh appeared to him and said that the childless Abram would spread his seed and that one day his heirs would possess the land of Canaan. Twenty-four years later, Yahweh appeared to Abram again and they made a non-written covenant that promised Abram the things he had previously been told he would receive if all the males of this new faith sacrificed the foreskin of their penises. This marks a shift to a patriarchal society, because since the females had no foreskin to offer, they were powerless over this covenant (Schlain 92). Abram's clan held true to their part of the covenant and Abram and his wife Sarai were told to change their names to Abraham and Sarah and they became the first Israelites. To their delight, their first born son, Isaac, was born. Yahweh then told Abraham that he must sacrifice Isaac, and just as he was about to kill him, Yahweh stopped Abraham and told him it was a test of faith. Isaac then went on to marry Rebecca and have two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob inherited the clan and journeyed to Haran, where he fell in love with Rachel. Jacob returned to Canaan with two wives, Rachel and her sister Leah. They bore him eight sons and one daughter. Jacob's favorite son was Joseph. Joseph's brothers were jealous of him and decided to throw him into a well and leave him for dead, but Joseph was rescued and taken to Egypt. There he ended up in a prison where he interpreted dreams of other prisoners. The pharaoh was so impressed with Joseph that he became the second most powerful leader in Egypt. Joseph told the pharaoh of a famine that was coming and warned him to save food. When the famine occurred, the Egyptians traded their land to the pharaoh for food. During this time Joseph's family, the Hebrews, also moved to Egypt. Schlain believes that the Old Testament gains credibility if we assume that the Hyksos invasion of Egypt had already occurred and a Hyksos king was the leader of Egypt at the time of Josephs arrival there. The Hyksos king would have been more likely to trust someone of another ethnicity than one of his conquered native Egyptians (Schlain 96). Joseph and the pharaoh both died and the new pharaoh forced the Hebrews into slavery where they worked at camps until death, and the new pharaoh also ordered all the first born sons of Hebrew women to die. One woman, afraid of what would happen, set her son afloat down the river where he was discovered by the pharaohs daughter and named Moses. Years later, Moses defended a Hebrew laborer and killed an Egyptian overseer. He fled the kingdom and settled in a Midianite camp. One day while walking, Moses came across a burning bush. Yahweh spoke from the flames and told him that he had been chosen to liberate the Hebrews. Yahweh again promised that he would provide a homeland for the Hebrews if Moses followed his directions. Moses went to the pharaoh and demanded that his people be let go. The pharaoh refused and a series of plagues struck Egypt. The pharaoh still would not let the Hebrews go, so Yahweh came and killed all of the Egyptians first born sons, including the pharaohs son. The Hebrews were released from slavery and started on their journey to Mount Sinai. The Egyptians were chasing after them when they came to an uncrossable sea. Moses parted the sea for the Hebrews to get through and then had it come crashing down on the pharaoh, killing him and his troops. The Hebrews made it to Mount Sinai where Moses ascended the mountain and came back down with two stone tablets containing the ten commandments, or rules from Yahweh. To his surprise, when he descended the mountain he found that his people had fashioned a golden calf to worship while he was gone. Moses was angry about this and broke the stone tablets against the golden calf, destroying it too. "When the Hebrews' first written words confronted their last image, the resulting collision destroyed them both (Schlain 100)." Moses ascended back into the mountain to write a new set of commandments, and as his last act he wrote down the whole Hebrew history on a scroll so that his people could read it regularly. Yahweh commanded that the Canaanites be slaughtered for worshipping an image, and that the Israelites take over their land. The Israelites were successful and "words triumphed in this first of many confrontations between pictures and text (Schlain 102)."

Schlain has a strong pathos appeal in this chapter because it delves very deeply into the depths of religion and the persecution of the Hebrews by the Egyptians. There is also a lot of talk about death and dying in this chapter. Especially with first born sons it seems like. I believe Schlains ethos becomes a little shaky in this chapter since most of his information comes from the Old Testament and he himself admits that the authors are unknown and that parts of the book are most likely myth. "The unknown authors of the Old Testament conjoined myth, history, and legend so artfully that it is impossible to tell where one ends and another begins (Schlain 89)." He does however build his ethos back up by citing three specialists that take his side regarding Hyksos rule during the time of Joseph's reign. "A few specialists, such as Martin Bernal, Cyrus Gordon, and Donald Redford, have indeed proposed that the Exodus was coterminous with the Hyksos rule in Egypt (Schlain 97)."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VTH5SWDFq4

Why do you think it is that the written word prevailed over images? Is it strictly because the commandments prohibit the worship or "idols", or is there something else to it?

Schlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.

"Prince Of Egypt"- The Burning Bush. youtube.com. 10 June 2008. Web. 5 Oct. 2010.

Susie Gerard

English 308J

10/5/10

Chapter 8à Alphabet Originates from an unlikely source

Shlains eighth chapter in The Alphabet vs. The Goddess titled alph/bet, is about the history of the alphabet focusing on its pros an cons, its connection to the fall of the goddess and its origin. Shlain describes how the alphabet was u

nconventional, because it was easy to learn in contrast to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian complicated equivalents. Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes also hid their written language from the general public because, to be literate was to have power weather you were rich or poor. Shlain argues that the alphabet ended the dominance of the literate upper class. Shlain also points out that although the alphabet evened the playing field for literacy, it changed religion in a way that essentially extinguished the goddess. Religions once required its followers to see the image of their god, with the a

dvent of the alphabet, “to know the deity demanded that one must first read His written words.” (65) Shlain makes the argument that even though the cultures using the alphabet accomplished all varieties of sophisticated and new age technology, they also, “for the first time in recorded history” (66) had disputes and war. The alphabet allowed people to organize and structure knowledge and think abstractly since all forms of writing strengthen left brain dominance. Shlain is sure that since the alphabet doesn’t resemble the idea its trying to convey it moves from the all at once way of thinking to the one at a time mental processing, since we read words a letter at a time to know what the word is. Ultimately in Shlains mind the introduction of the alphabet led to left brain dominance, abstract thinking and turning away from worshiping goddesses they could see to worshiping abstract male gods.

Chapter 8 is also concerned with the origins of the alphabet. Reference books say that Phoenicians were the creators of the alphabet because the earliest Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote that it was the Phoenicians who introduced writing to the Greeks. Shlain remains unconvinced because the Phoenicians were dull normal people with plain lifestyles. The only thing that can be credited to the Phoenicians was their navy and the only thing written about them was from their enemies who conquered them. He also argues that since all

other forms of writing were from creative and impressive cultures very unlike the Phoenician people. Shlain suggests that the alphabet came instead from the Habiru or Midianite nomadic people who were roaming the Sinai Desert. Hebrew letters were found in 1905 at the site of an Egyptian Goddess temple. The rocks with the letters on them were said to be from around 1800 B.C., which is older than the evidence found supporting the Phoenician theory. Shlain also points out the coincidence that the only event with the Sinai Desert was that this was the place where Yahweh gave Moses the 10 commandments and the old testament of the bible is the oldest known book.

In reading Shlains chapter 8 of The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, I have had a variety of rhetorical reactions. I think that Shlain is a well read, creative individual, but I also don’t know if he is really an authority on the subject. I think the foundations on which he is basing his theories are accurate and his theories are plausible, but not entirely convincing. Shlain seems to give a brief historical background to set the scene in the most favorable way for his evidence to be portrayed, but I think there is a lot more going on than he discloses. Although it would be impossible to put enough historical background facts into this book to make it holistic, the brief historical account he mentions is incomplete, and in some places irrelevant. For example, he spent about 3 pages talking about who he thought didn’t invent the alphabet and only about 2 paragraphs on the people he thought did invent it. The three pages about the people he thought didn’t invent the alphabet were full of negative images of those people but he was still associating them with the alphabet which suggests to me that he is just trying to convey a negative connotation with the alphabet. Since he doesn’t even think that they created it why did he have to spend three pages dissing Phoenicians? Shlain makes the argument that, “all forms of writing increase the left brain’s dominance over the right.” (67) I just don’t agree with this. I feel like yes the left brain is strengthened when we use our cones instead of our rods, our left hand instead of our right and concrete abstract thinking, but I think that there is a lot going on with writing that isn’t only in the left brain. When you write you need to draw on a lot of experiences and complex emotions and feelings from your past. Also writing is a way to put on paper those before intangible things that the right brain is famous for. Maybe it’s impossible to recreate that feeling with one word, but through detailed and creative descriptive writing you can try, and many writers have been very successful in doing so. People who have experienced this same feeling know what they are talking about and are taken to it. They feel that “all at once” feeling that was conveyed to them “one at a time.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about the last page, which kind of suggested that the alphabet somehow came from god because the first written letters came from the same place where the Ten Commandments were and that the oldest book was the Old Testament. I mean that’s strange because if they did… then… is he trying to say that the alphabet was made as some evil plot from a misogynistic mystical person who people still worship even to this day. I know he didn’t directly say this, but if you put his argument in context that’s what it kind of sounds like and it’s a little unsettling.

Question: What was your reaction to reading the last two pages of chapter 8 about how the first written letters came from the same place as the Ten Commandments and the connection that the Old Testament is the oldest written book?

Image from: The Ten Commandments. Web. 2 October. 2010. http://www.scott- warner.com/TenCommandments.html.

Book: Shlain, Leonard. “Aleph/ Bet.” The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Penguin / Compass, 1998. Pp. 64-71.