Looking Back to our Future Home

The Dawn of Time

Wm Blake's Eden

The tradition that humanity once enjoyed life in great harmony with nature is widespread. It was known in such isolated locations as Polynesia, and pre-Columbian America. Women and knowledge were often held responsible for our loss of innocence and expulsion from the garden. According to the Bible, and some other records, it occurred in ancient Mesopotamia about 4000 years before Christ. There is evidence that the region around the then Fertile Crescent was indeed a garden after the glaciers of the ice age had receded, and the sun shone warmly on the rich alluvial soil they left there. There was no need for war when populations could expand over newly bared fertile lands. Male abilities to tame fire, make stone axes and spears to kill animals and each other, had been vital for survival during the ice ages. But women's understanding of their own fertility and other mysteries helped them to feed their families from their gardens, and the animals they bred in captivity once the earth began to bring forth in abundance.

Like Aphrodite, Astarte, Venus.

Males of many species are naturally inclined to provides for, and protect, their families. But male giving - out of gratitude and wonder - must have increased when female fertility magic was seen to work such wonders. That fertility was personified by Goddesses - Astarte, Aphrodite, Innana... whose mortal representatives were held in high esteem. Goddesses were worshipped in temples where priestesses accepted gifts for helping to increase the fertility of crops and herds - also in sympathetic magic. Showing other species how to increase their fertility was so agreeable that men showed their gratitude even more generously. Love temples over-flowed with love gifts.

Male strength, courage, cunning, inventiveness and organisation became rather irrelevant when mother nature provided for all in such abundance. It probably occurred to the priestesses that they had made male restlessness redundant. Henceforth, people would all live together peacefully. High priestesses would help settle disputes without animosity. Children would be brought up to be affectionate, tolerant and honest. But men tend to have drunken fights - if only in rivalry for beautiful women - and to gang up to raid other tribes to take their women and enslave their men.

The Goddesses and their representatives were incapable of dealing with such problems alone. They thus probably gave some of the many gifts they got in exchange for their pleasurable fertility services to decent, wise, strong, men - and asked them to help keep the peace within their villages, and to keep raiders outside of them. Those men became powerful as they organized others to punish trouble-makers and defend their communities.