We are living in the midst of a transformation of human consciousness. Historians 100 years hence will see the changes more clearly than we do as we muddle through them. Some of the religious variations we are seeing may not make much sense without understanding the larger perceptual changes of which they are a part. The re-emergence of Goddess worship is one such divergence within Unitarian Universalism. The interest in non-Judeo-Christian, ancient forms of worship in the home of rational intellectual religion may seem very strange without putting it in a larger context--the clash of images and the written word.

My words this morning are inspired by an interview several members of our World Scriptures class heard Sunday morning in the beginning of November on National Public Radio. They heard an interview with Leonard Shlain discussing his new book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Shlain is Chairman of Endoscopic Surgery, at California Pacific Medical Center, in San Francisco and also author of Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light in 1991. As you can see, his interests are much larger than looking down people's throats. In particular, his interest in the Goddess came from visiting the ruins of ancient cultures around the Mediterranean. His tour guide would talk about how all archeological discoveries of these early agrarian civilizations suggesting they worshipped the goddess, the feminine symbol of fertility and abundance. Suddenly, goddess worship stopped and the male gods took over in each culture they studied. Shlain wanted to know why. His theory to explain the change is the invention of the alphabet. In his words:

There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them women's power in the culture[1].

That's quite a challenge to our most sacred Unitarian Universalist cow - literacy. Let's explore his thinking and reflect on its relevance for our religious tradition.

The first form writing, Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics, emerged with the discovery of agriculture and the settling of the fertile plains of the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers. Commerce probably was the early stimulus to find a way to record transactions as these are the oldest forms of writing extant. These early forms were pictorial in nature with one character symbolizing the idea or image to be portrayed rather than words. Just one level of interpretation was required from image to reality.

It was the conquering Akkadians who stole the Sumerian's tiny triangles pressed in clay and modified them by inventing phonograms, symbols that stand for syllables of speech[2]. This was the revolutionary abstraction which allowed the Akkadians to begin to transliterate their speech in written words rather than images intuiting that they would be more understandable if arranged in a linear sequence.

Both the polytheistic Akkadians and the Sumerians worshipped the Goddess. The Sumerians believed cuneiform was the gift of Nisaba, the goddess of grain and storage. After their conquest, she was superceded by Nabu, the Akkadian god of writing[3]. As writing appears in Egypt and in Greece, we also see the demotion of Goddesses to subordination under young warrior gods of power and conquest.

While both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian peoples had figured out how to use words to represent sounds, they had not found a very simple way to do that. There were literally hundreds of characters to represent complex sounds. Only a few could master the complexity. The first people to master the alphabet were the ancient Hebrew tribes. Every word could be written with a small set of characters. Many could now learn how to read and master the alphabet. The earth must have shaken as Moses came down the mountain with the law in written in letters.

It is not an understatement to say that Judaism is the religion of the alphabet. All the others in ancient times worshipped many gods and goddesses making statues, drawings and pictures of them. These gods and goddesses took human form. The Hebrews worshipped an invisible god that had no image, the supreme god of all the pagan gods and goddesses. Not only was that god invisible, making any image of that god was strictly forbidden in the second commandment.

I've always thought that second commandment was a little unusual. Shouldn't lying, stealing and killing be just a little higher up on the list and no graven images a little lower? What exactly is wrong with using a statue to help focus one's prayer?

The argument against images is they distract the Jew from what should be the real focus of their devotion, the Word. Truth is to be found not in the image of god but rather in the Word of God. That truth was recorded as the rule of law, the rule of ethical values. Rather than worshipping a super being immortal with little concern for human beings, the Israelite's god,Yahweh, actually cared about his chosen people. This all powerful God entered into covenant with his people and made promises. This God was not located in a place or time, he was everywhere.

The Hebrew people were unique in their time for following a divine commandment requiring universal literacy. In most tribal cultures, the coming of age ceremony required some feat of courage, bravery or endurance. For the Jew, the requirement was to be able to read the Torah.

Unlike the polytheistic religions which surrounded them, the Hebrew people did not tolerate any foreign gods or goddesses. Death was the punishment exacted of anyone who sacrificed to other Gods. It is interesting to note that there were no religious wars in the ancient world before monotheism[4]. "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." announces the end of any Goddess worship.

What is it about alphabets that may have caused such a profound change in religious practice and understanding? Shlain argues subtle changes in consciousness come from the act of reading alphabets.

To read a word, one must construct the word in one's mind out of the letters in a linear fashion. This mental activity we've discovered happens predominately in the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere of the brain is known to be the home of the will and action oriented thinking. Speech and action are closely related as words are the tools of communication used to abstract, discriminate, analyze and dissect the world into pieces, objects and categories[5]. Logic evolves out of the "and, or, not, if-then" constructions found in language, sequentially arranged and directed by the left brain.

On the other hand, the perception of an image happens all-at-once rather than in a sequential fashion. The experience of emotion and sensation happens in a transitory way in the present moment. These all-at-once gestalts of consciousness happen on the right side of the brain. The right hemisphere integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music, synthesizing multiple converging stimuli so the mind can grasp the sensory input all-at-once[6].

Words stimulate the left brain and images stimulate the right brain. The holistic, simultaneous, synthetic and concrete view of the world arising from right brain activity has been identified with the feminine principle. The linear, sequential, reductionist and abstract modes of thinking arising from the left brain are commonly identified with the masculine principle. When one half dominates the other half suffers.

The growth of literacy in Western Civilization is the story of the masculine principle overrunning the feminine principle. The invention of the printing press, putting books into the hands of the people stimulated the Protestant rejection of the mother church. The hallmark of patriarchal theology today is adherence to the letter not the spirit of the written Bible. The Protestant movement was one of rejecting the oral and image tradition of the Catholic Church and adhering solely to scripture. It is out of this enthusiasm for adherence to the rationally understood scripture that Unitarianism arises rejecting the logic of the triune nature of divinity. The Renaissance Humanism out of which our religious tradition grew is built on solitary acts of reading, engendering a new sense of self as individual.

So why are we seeing a turn back toward polytheology? The left-brained advance of science and technology is coming full circle.

Nothing has changed the balance of brain hemispheric power since the creation of the alphabet like the invention of photography. Photographs allow a picture to take the place of a thousand words of description. Reality could now be captured all-at-once in an image--photo-graphy, literally, writing with light[7]. Photography did for images what the printing press had done for the written word. Is it a coincidence that the women's rights movement began at exactly this same moment?

As the right brain reveled in photography, the left brain was busy discovering electromagnetic waves. Shlain writes:

Electromagnetism is not confined to one bounded locus in space. It is not mechanistic as it has no moving parts. It is not reducible and can only be apprehended in its totality...Since it is invisible, one has to imagine it in order to grasp it. The words to describe it, such as "web", "matrix", "waves" and "strands" are all words etymologically and mythologically associated with the feminine. A "field"... is a noun borrowed from agriculture and nature[8].

The more physics has advanced the stranger and less linear and orderly it becomes. A trip through the science of quantum mechanics is enough to make one's head spin. Sub-atomic particles are no less seemingly irrational, strange and charming.

Photography, electromagnetic fields, and quantum mechanics come together in yet another Gutenbergian leap forward with the invention of electronic communication and computer technology. Today, images presented on the television, computer screen, and in advertising dominate our perception. On a daily basis we take in many more images that ever before.

And perhaps all this right brain activity is changing how we think ... and do religion.

Unitarianism has always been a strong left-brained religion bringing the results of science and reason to bear on scripture and faith. Yet at the same time as Enlightenment style Unitarianism was taking hold in America, the romantic revolt was taking shape in Europe led by Rousseau, Keats, Byron, Goethe and Shelley extolling love, nature and beauty. Enlightenment enthusiasts claimed reason was superior to emotion; to the Romantics, feeling was the surer guide to truth[9]. The Transcendentalists Emerson, Parker, and Thoreau championed a move away from the left-brain and into the right. Ever since that time, Unitarianism has had within it this dynamic tension between the rational and direct experience, between Humanism and spirituality, between...the word and the image.

Today, renewed interest in the goddess among us has come from women seeking the core of their identity as women rather than as defined by or against men. Their quest for words and images that affirms the feminine principle has taken them back to a pre-literate time when the Goddess was who held the world together and gave it order and meaning. I believe the power which is animating the UU Pagan movement is this exploration of non-word based religious experience.

Even as images are making a comeback, there has never been a time when we were so saturated with words as we are now. Everywhere we look, words crave our attention. Electronic mail is fast taking over as an alphabet based form of communication. Philomena and I have a house with words overflowing our bookshelves, coffee tables, and filing cabinets. We are drowning in paper. I sense in myself a hunger to escape the demands of all these mountains of words and find peace on a meditation pillow, emptying my head of words and resting all-at-once in the present moment, in ritual, in dance, in music, in art, in the image ... of the all accepting and all embracing Goddess.

The greatness of Unitarian Universalism is in our ability to penetrate the words and images and see them as symbols. We know the words and the images are not identical with what they represent. We also recognize that neither the masculine nor the feminine principle alone should guide our religious life. Both the right and left brain, in balance and harmony with each other will bring us inner peace. There is no creed which can lead us to this balance and harmony as that would be giving the left brain too much control. There are no secret initiations, rituals or devotions which will lead us to this balance for this will surrender too much to the right brain.

Finding that balance as individuals, as a society, and as a world will permit us to evolve consciously to realize what Jesus called the Kingdom of God and what Buddha described as enlightenment. We are living right in the middle of this transformation of consciousness.

What an exciting time to be alive and a part of it all!

Closing Words

Sophocles said:
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
Let us begin to see the darker side of the written word as we celebrate its many benefits.

Let us not worship only the written word for that is just as idolatrous as worshipping the golden calf.

May we be open to the visual, auditory and kinesthetic paths of religious expression that use no words but communicate deep religious truth.

May word and image both be honored and respected as limited tools to communicate the greatness of being.

Go in peace, make peace, be at peace.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Shlain, Leonard, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Viking, 1998, p. 1
[2] Shlain, p. 46
[3] Shlain, p. 47
[4] Shlain, p. 80
[5] Shlain, p. 21.
[6] Shlain, p. 18
[7] Shlain, p. 382
[8] Shlain, p. 385
[9] Shlain, p. 381