Was The Neolithic A Golden Age Of Goddess Worship?

That's what He says in Mark (minus the expletive, of course. The whole point of Mark was to draw on the model of Isaiah's prophecy of the Suffering Servant to explain how the Messiah could die like a common criminal. This was, in fact, a previously connection between the Suffering Servant figure and the Messiah. Mark has an aesthetic that appeals to my love of ambiguity, but is not for people who like all the loose ends tied together. He is the George Sluizer of gospel writers, Sluizer being the Paris born Dutch film maker who made a Franco-Dutch film in 1988 called The Vanishing. At the end, we leave the hero buried alive. In 1993, Sluizer did a remake for American audiences, providing a less dark ending with the loose ends tied together and the hero surviving. In Mark, the answer to your question comes when the women arrive at the empty tomb with the heavy stone rolled back and find a man in a white robe who tells them that Jesus has been raised, and tells the women to let the disciples know He'' meet them in Galilee. But the women are afraid and said nothing to anyone. So how did anyone find out???? Read the other gospels.

 

I claim no true knowledge for knowledge is only experience given form by naming but I would postulate that the sacred feminine was worshipped equally with the sacred masculine before the dichotomy of duality arose in the earthborn consciousness. Edit: I believe mountain valley wolf alluded to this back toward his entrance in the discussion

 

I think you're probably right. Masculinity and femininity are the yang and yin of human relations. When one or the other tries to take over at the expense of the other, I think we have problems.

 

Balance is paramount to harmonious living but to have balance one must first experience imbalance. I am relatively certain Neolithic humans understood this and incorporated it into their expressions of understanding

 

I would argue that it goes back to their paleolithic ancestors and their more natural understanding of reality---that is a multiplistic understanding rather than a dualistic one. The multiplistic view of reality allows for many different forces at work, some good, some bad, some neutral, and so forth. The universe is not black and white, but filled with many shades of white, grey, and black.

I believe that in India this multiplistic influence was handed down from the older goddess traditions, In China it was an older Ural-Altaic shamanic tradition that came to be known as Taoism. This is of course a generalization. The Chinese had a strong Goddess tradition as well. The Indo-Europeans brought their own multiplistic zeitgeist into the Indian subcontinent. And Eastern philosophy is certainly grounded in dualism as well----the feminine being equated to the physical and is therefore the inferior side of reality, while the masculine is the superior heaven or transcendent side of reality. This too was introduced in part through the Indo-Europeans who early on persecuted the indigenous tantric cults, before assimilating it into their own local beliefs (which was undoubtedly a political move.)

But in the end you did not have the reductionist repression of the older multiplicity-based beliefs that you had in the Middle East, Persian, and Europe.

Duality leads to conflict between the in-group and the out-group which plays out to a significant cosmic battle of good over evil, male over female, etc. The ideal way to live in a dualistic world is to chase after an ego-ideal. In a multiplistic world, the ideal way of living is to achieve a balance between the various forces of the universe.

 

On a sidenote, and significant of social changes happening right now (a breakdown of duality in the face of nihilism), did anyone watch Fox Networks new show, Lucifer?

The first season ended about 2 weeks ago. I was very interested in how it represented a Derridean deconstruction of the binary opposites of good and evil. I plan to write something on this which I will probably post on this forum as well.

 

Is that about Ted Cruz?