CINADER: --how did you come to compare the functions of the brain with theories about Goddess, which you put forward in your book, "The Alphabet versus the Goddess"?

SHLAIN: I wrote an earlier book entitled "Art and Physics" in which I treated those two subjects as if they were simply languages; art being the language of image and metaphor and physics being the language of numbers and equations. I proposed that the visionaries in both fields are investigating the nature of reality, and actually the artist has anticipated many of the great ideas in physics. To write that book I had to immerse myself in communications theory. I was very interested in the ideas of Marshal McLuhan. His famous aphorism was the medium is the message.

Armed with that knowledge about communications theory and right-brain/left-brain theory, I took a trip to the Mediterranean and went on a tour of archaeological sites. Everywhere I went the guide informed us that the temple that we stood before, whether it was Poseidon or Zeus or Apollo, originally had been consecrated to a goddess, and then at a later date for unknown reasons unknown persons re-consecrated it to a God.

In the long bus ride back to the airport, as I was contemplating what I had seen, I began to ponder whatever happened to goddesses? I mean, there's overwhelming archaeological and historical evidence that all peoples, men and women, in early civilization worshiped goddesses, and that women were priestesses of the religion, and held high positions in society. The property generally passed through the mother's line. Beginning about 5,000 years ago, the Goddess began a precipitous decline in power. With the start of the western culture, she just disappears. The three religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not have a goddess. Women were banned from conducting any religious ceremonies whatsoever in these three religions until very recently. Property began to pass exclusively through the male line.

So I wanted to know what happened? What event in culture could have been so immense and so pervasive as to literally change the sex of God? And the answer that I came up with, which is somewhat different than the other ones that are proposed, is that this was basically an inside job. The thug was none other than the invention of literacy. Literacy is a tremendously vast and wonderful boon to any individual who learns it and any culture that learns it. Cultures immediately come forth with new legal codes and new forms of government and philosophical systems and forms of art and architecture. It's tremendous. But on the other hand, as Sophocles once warned, nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse, and certainly the invention of writing was vast. In this book I investigate the curse.

CINADER: So, are you saying the message of writing was the death of the goddess in a very literal sense?

SHLAIN: It doesn't have to do with the content of writing. It has to do with the process of writing. When we speak to each other, as we're doing right now, there's a great deal of cross traffic across our hemispheres in order to generate a conversation. When someone speaks, the other person listening has to follow with their left hemisphere, the very linear sequential aspects of speech. But the right hemisphere is watching the person who is talking and is garnering a great deal of non-verbal communication and information from the way they're dressed and how they carry themselves and how they inflect their voice and what their facial expressions are.So right brain and left brain are involved in speech. In order for me to talk right now, I need the cooperation of both sides of my mouth, both lips, both vocal cords, both sides of my tongue. Even though my left hemisphere is generating these senses that I'm speaking for the most part, I still need a lot of cross traffic to articulate speech. If I went to the dentist and I had novocaine, I would have trouble articulating speech. So as a result, speech is a very bicameral activity both in the decipherment and the generation. However, when you write, up until the invention of the typewriter, for 5,000 years, the only way you could write was to write with one hand. It didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman, whether you held a quill or a chisel or a pen, you could take your left hand if you're right-handed, and you could put it in your pocket while you're writing because you don't need it. So the hand that throws the spear and swings the sword and pulls the trigger and is basically the active hand, the hand of aggression, is the hand that writes. I believe that that shift in reinforcing the left hemisphere at the expense of the right hemisphere (that was approximately 5,000 years ago, then with the start of an alphabet, 3,500 years ago, it greatly accelerated) was the reason that the Goddess suffered, declined in power, that women's rights suffered a precipitous decline, property began passing only through the male line, and we started having all these religions that are based on alphabetic-sacred text.

CINADER: So let's talk about one of the specific points then where you seem to differ from a lot of the theories that have been put forward by other students and writers on the subject. And that is that many people have put forth the idea that these invaders came from the north--

SHLAIN: --yes, yes--

CINADER: --into the cradle of civilization, and they conquered. They were a patriarchal society. You have a differing opinion about that. Could you talk about that a little bit?

SHLAIN: Well, I've read a lot about the subject, and it seems that there's been almost a unanimity of opinion that this is a very acceptable theory, that the horse was domesticated about 4,500 BC, and these rough horsemen came riding out of the north and conquered the Goddess-loving people.

But frankly I don't feel that that's an adequate explanation because throughout history whenever an unsophisticated people have conquered a more sophisticated one, the values have generally flown in the opposite direction. When the Romans conquered the Greeks, for example, they all start worshiping Greek gods. And when the Barbarians conquered the Romans, within a couple of hundred years they were all Christians. So why would we not assume that the rough horsemen riding out of the north who settled down and became agriculturist wouldn't have worshiped the Goddess as well? I find that theory to be wanting, plus the fact that it doesn't quite explain a phenomenon that took a thousand years to develop and unfold, and occurred everywhere in the world to people that read and write.

So I found that that didn't quite explain it, and I thought that something else happened 5,000 years ago that was as momentous as the discovery of agriculture 5,000 years earlier, and that was people learned how to read and write. But the first forms of writing were cuneiform and hieroglyphics, which were so difficult that less than two percent of the population could read and write.

There's an old saying that in the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Certainly if you know how to read and write and nobody else does, within a very short period of time you accumulate all the power. But an alphabet is so simple to use that a four-year old can learn an alphabet. Forest Gump can learn the alphabet. A culture that becomes alphabetic becomes one where they approach levels of near-universal literacy.

The first book ever written in an alphabet is the Hebrew Bible, more commonly known as the Old Testament. And in that book the most important part of the Ten Commandments--I should mention that the right hemisphere mode of knowing, which is--and right-handed people--is primarily involved with image information. It recognizes patterns. It can read a map. It can figure out how to get out of a maze. And most importantly the most complex compound image it must decipher is the human face. So right-handed hemispheric thinking is holistic, it's synthetic, and simultaneous as opposed to left-hemispheric thinking, which is more linear and sequential and involves language, arithmetic, algebra, reason, logic, determinism causality--all of those things depend on the progress through time. Spatial recognition is the forte of the right hemisphere. So in the first book ever written in an alphabet, we find that images are demoted along with women's rights because the first two Commandments--the First Commandment states I am the Lord, thy God, there is no other. And, although the Bible doesn't actually state that the deity is a man, all of the nouns and adjectives used to describe him are masculine, so we have to assume that the singular monotheistic deity is a man, which means there is no Goddess involved.

CINADER: And you're putting forth the idea that because the vast majority of people write with their right hand which--

SHLAIN: --their dominate hand.

CINADER: Their dominant hand, which tends to have very let's say male characteristics and--

SHLAIN: It's the aggressor side of both men and women. I mean, the left-upper extremity cradles children, it holds what the right hand carries, it carries the--the warriors carry their shield with their arm. People ward off blows with their left arms. So your left-upper extremity is an extremely protective and receptive and passive extremity compared to your right-upper extremity and hand, which is your agent of action. I mean, when you decide you want to do something, it's your right hand that carries out the action.

But let's go through history and see how this thesis fits because like, for example, in ancient Greece there were two city states: Sparta and Athens. The Spartans were extremely fascist, cruel, and militaristic, and they disdained the written word. There's no book written by Spartans that's come down to us. The Athenians, on the other hand, loved the written word. They gave us Euripides and Plato and Herodotus, and at the same team they just sat around and discussed the merits of art and the first experiment in democracy. So you would wonder what were their attitudes toward women, and you would think that the Athenians treated the women better. But actually the Athenians passed a law that said that a woman couldn't own property, women couldn't be educated, they couldn't participate in public life, and they were veiled. In Sparta the girls participated in the games, they were educated just like the boys, they could have a child by more than one man, and they could own property. In fact, they owned two-fifths of all Spartan property by the fourth century.

CINADER: And, now, you give another example of that sort of back and forth kind of thing with women's rights in the example of the Middle Ages when--

SHLAIN: --yeah--

CINADER: --with the drop of literacy, which had previously been spreading. Is this the left-brain gone mad? I mean, many people might argue with you, "Well, we could blame this on more mundane things like men's need for power and the muscles, which give them the ability to gain that power; their own unwillingness to give it back." So some women who are very fond of some of these goddess theories, which you have put forward before, find your ideas a little hard to accept, that somehow it's just a malfunction of the brain. How would you respond to that?

SHLAIN: It isn't a--I wouldn't call it a malfunction. We know that children are born with extremely plastic brains, and what you teach children reinforces certain neuronal pathways over other neuronal pathways. When you're born, you have many more neurons in your brain than you're going to have when you're 12-years old because the ones that stay are the ones that are reinforced. We know that if you don't teach a child a language by a certain age, that child will not learn a language. We know that if a child doesn't learn a second language by a certain age, it's much more difficult to learn it later in college. So what is the effect of over and over again, beginning about the age of four, of reinforcing a linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract mode of thought called reading, writing, and arithmetic, which is the basis of Western culture's educational system? That will reinforce the hemisphere that best processes that information, which is the left in a right-handed person. That tends to make the culture more patriarchal and more misogynist. Now, as far as people having trouble with the theory because the men are bigger and stronger, and that's why you have these movements, how does that explain the fact that there's overwhelming evidence from the archeological record that for a very long period of time men and women seemed to live peacefully together? There are excavations of ancient civilizations that do not show war scenes, they do not show scenes of captives, they do not show--there are scenes more of nature and of--there are no warrior tombs actually, the women enjoy the greater--the better burial sites. Now, we can't know for sure what went on in these ancient civilizations, but we also know that there are many preliterate tribes, that when they first came in contact with missionaries and anthropologists, it was common that they would comment upon how egalitarian these cultures were. So I don't think that it's just simply because the men in those cultures were also bigger and stronger than the women, and that doesn't explain why we seem to have gone from a partnership relationship between men and women to women being treated like chattel. And certainly one of the best examples if you follow what happened in the Roman Empire, for instance, you know, the new religion emerged as if from out of nowhere. It's called Christianity based on the oral sayings of the exceedingly wise prophet named Jesus, and his message was extremely feminine. It was turn the other cheek, and the meek shall inherit the earth, and the last shall be first. And women flocked to this new religion, and they became the head priests, and they funded churches and ministries, and they enjoyed these exceptional prerogatives until the words of Jesus were transcribed into an alphabetic sacred text.

CINADER: Okay, let's take that point for a moment because you talk quite extensively about that in the book. Just the idea of a sacred text. And then if I could further, put it in sort of a modern context, to say that these sacred text became best sellers. That brings us to--we have the Bible, we have the Koran. If you could talk a little bit about how these things culminated in a book called "The Hammer."

SHLAIN: Well, "The Hammer" that you're referring to is--before I get to that, we have to point out the fact that during the Dark Ages when literacy was essentially lost all throughout northern Europe, you would think that women would have really suffered during this period because we had very little in the way of civil government and law codes. And, yet, when the stage of history gets re-illuminated in the 10th century, we find troubadours singing the praises of women. There's a new military code called the chivalry code, which states that a man's highest aspiration should be to protect women. The Arthurian legend cycle replaces the Greek myths, which is much more egalitarian. Abbesses leave the monasteries all throughout northern Europe. Women Christian mystics are revered by the church, and most importantly the people of Europe are erecting these enormous cathedrals dedicated to Notre Dame. So Mary becomes a very important figure in Christianity during the time when people could not read or write. And then during the Medieval Period people begin to learn how to read and write again, and then the printing press gets invented in 1454, and literacy rates skyrocket all over Europe.

CINADER: So we had, first, with Constantinople sort of a revolution for literacy, which then dropped off. Then we come back, and we have the printing press.

SHLAIN: Right.

CINADER: And this caused another sort of media revolution such as Marshal McLuhan--

SHLAIN: --yeah--

CINADER: --the first.

SHLAIN: Absolutely. And he wrote a book called the "Gutenberg Galaxy" which shows how discombobulating the printing press was to European society. Alfred North Whitehead once said that the major advances of civilization all but wreck the societies in which they occur. And no better example of that is what happened in the Renaissance because everyone rushed to learn how to read and write cause they all wanted to learn how to read this book that everyone had been talking about but no one had ever read before called the "New Testament."

Now, the "New Testament" is about love and kindness and forgiving and compassion, so you would think that the people who read this book would be loving and kind and compassionate and forgiving. But what happened next was the Protestant Reformation--and the Protestant, which was an all-male movement, said let's get rid of Mary and let's destroy all the images. So, again, that right hemispheric function, again you see being suppressed. They had other parts of their agenda, but those were high priorities for the early Protestants.

And then what happened next is really difficult to explain because, you know, we humans have a bestial streak, and we periodically, you know, invade our neighbors and cross the river, but we rarely have killed our kinsmen next door to us. And all over Europe fratricidal-religious wars broke out so that in England Puritans were killing Anglicans and Anglicans were killing Presbyterians and in France Huguenots and Catholics were killing each other. In Germany even Calvinists and Lutherans were killing each other. In Spain Catholics who lived side by side with Jews and Moors for centuries suddenly decided they couldn't stand it anymore, had to either kill them or get rid of them. These religious wars went on for almost 200 years. In fact, some of them are still going on in Ireland and Bosnia today. But the most bazaar thing that happened is that this culture that's experiencing this incredible surge of creativity in the arts and science and global exploration and architecture--this is the same culture that's giving us Galileo and Shakespeare and Newton and Bach, the men have a psychosis in this country--literate men have a psychosis so extreme that they begin to think their women are so dangerous they need to be murdered. So the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th century were the most virulent throughout the entire witch-hunt history in those centuries, in those countries that experienced the most rapid rises in literacy rates, such as Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and England. Russia, which was illiterate during this whole period, did not have any witch-hunts. Bosnia and Hungary, which were Muslim during this time, which were not effected by the printing press, did not have any witch-hunts. In fact, if you were to go to a Hopi Indian or an Iroquois or a Kung Bushman or a Polynesian and ask them, "Would you believe that there is a culture in the world where the men are murdering their wise women"? They would look at you in disbelief. They would say "that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of" because nobody--no culture ever systematically set out to murder its wise women.

And this phenomenon of the "The Hammer" that you talk about, which became the second-greatest best seller in the Renaissance after the Bible, was a book that was--the purpose of which was how to identify a witch, torture her, and burn her to death. I mean, it's a bazaar episode in history that's never been adequately explained.

CINADER: Okay. Letıs come to the present tense and the ramifications of all these things we're talking about. What I'd like to do is talk about an example in the West and in the East. We're hearing lately in the news about the Taliban, which is ruling in Afghanistan, and lately women there have to cover themselves completely. They're not allowed to work. Can you apply your theory to this situation that's currently happening in that part of the world?

SHLAIN: Absolutely. I talk about this in the book, as a matter of fact. I think that what happened in the 19th century is that in the West photography and electromagnetism began to change all this. These two things began to interweave to produce these incredible telecommunication revolutions, first film and then television and then computers and graphic advertising. We in the West now live in a society that is awash in images. We get a great deal of our information from images. If you listen to your friends, they're often talking about movies they've seen or television programs or a sporting event they're watching on television or a clever ad. Images now and image information are balanced by the print information previously that we used. So that if you have a--you know, western culture has been moved for 2,000 years by long imageless tomes written by esteemed white males, whether it was Augustine, Aquinas, Plato or Marx, Hegel, or Freud. I maintain there has not been a single book written in the last 50 years since television that even begins to compare to the power to change people's consciousness as the image of the atomic bomb in 1945 or the image of the earth beamed back from space in 1968.

At the same time that the developed nations of the world are balancing their hemispheres with image information to the print information that they had before. Please, I don't want to believe anybody with the impression I'm recommending nobody read because I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we need to have a more balance and more harmony in our perceptional modes. But the Taliban who are newly, recently literate, just came out of the hills and just basically learned how to read and write, are recapitulating the same madness that went on during the witch hunts in Europe. They're banning images, and they're taking away women's rights, and they're starting to kill women, and they're covering them up so there are no images of women. So I think that you can see that throughout the world, as Shakespeare said, "time is out of joint." We have some cultures that are ready to enter the 21st century that are getting a great deal of their information using both hemispheres. We have other cultures in the world that are in the medieval phase, the witch-hunt phase, and it's very difficult to discern what's really going on.

You know the perceptual mode of trying to watch television is so different from reading a book. For example, if you hook somebody up to EEG leads to their brain and you give them a book to read, it's irrelevant what the book is. It doesn't matter what the content of the book is. That person will generate beta waves. We generate beta waves when we are concentrating on a task. If you ask that person to look up from their book and start watching television, it doesn't matter what the program is. Cuddly Kuala bears, fake wrestling matches, sex and violence. The beta waves go away and alpha and beta waves come up, which is what you generate when you meditate.

Now, if you measure blood flow to the brain by a PET scanner, and you give somebody a book to read, again, the content of the book is irrelevant. They will generate largely left-brain blood flow, and the right brain will be relatively dark. And then if they look up from the book and start watching a television program, any television program, the right hemisphere lights up, and the left hemisphere starts to get dark.

Now, when a culture that across the board has their television sets on, on average five hours, how can that not make a major difference in the culture?

CINADER: Now, some people would argue with you there. I think--

SHLAIN: --oh, I'm sure--

CINADER: --this certainly came up with Marshal McLuhan's same assertions that it's not the content so much as the medium. And, yet, when people see all this sex and violence, and, indeed, many women's groups argue that the content is, indeed, very destructive to our society. But you're making a larger claim that somehow these are like the dying throes of something--

SHLAIN: --exactly-- CINADER: --that is moving on. and that just--that the relation of an image. Do you see that as the correlation then perhaps--

SHLAIN: --yes--

CINADER: --that women in our society--in western society, although they may have a long way to go, tend to have more rights and experience more equality and freedom than in, say, in Afghanistan?

SHLAIN: I mean, just look--you know, is it a coincidence that the Suffragette movement occurred in the 19th century after the development of photography? And that in the sixties, the first feminist movement in 5,000 years dedicated to overthrowing patriarchy just so happened to have occurred in the first generation of boys and girls raised on television in the sixties? And I think that you're witnessing an astonishing rise in women's rights. This, of course, is causing a great deal of tension in the society, which is generating a lot of these pornographic images and wife beating, but the truth is that the men, as well as the women, are becoming more feminine. You have men that are hugging trees today and chaining themselves to the trees to prevent them from being cut down because they think they're so beautiful. Can you imagine a Greek or a Roman chaining himself to a tree to prevent it from being cut down? I mean, you know, people talk about the violence in our society today. I don't know what they're talking about because in the first fifty years of this century we had two world wars, and genocide in the developed nations of the world that killed 70 million people. In the last fifty years of this century in the developed nations of the world, there have been no wars fought among themselves, and there has been a remarkable reduction in violence. Yes, there are children that take machine guns to school, and everybody rings their hands saying, "Oh, what a violent society we live in." But the truth of the matter is much less people--many less people are being killed, and women are enjoying far more rights today then they did earlier.

So, clearly things are improving. When you're in the center of a spinning washing machine and the clothes are tumbling violently about you, it's very difficult to notice that the clothes are also becoming cleaner. So, I'm aware of a great deal of hand ringing about the violence in our television programs today. But the truth is I grew up watching westerns and shoot-em-ups and violent movies and violent television programs. I don't consider myself a violent person. And most of the people that I know are not violent people. There is a disconnect between what is proposed as the maker of society, that the content of these image technologies are changing us as a people to be very violent. And the truth of the matter is that men are better husbands to their wives today then they were one hundred years ago, and they're better fathers to their children then they were one hundred years ago. What's happened, what changed to bring that about?

CINADER: And I suppose you would say it's the preponderance of--or the reemergence of the image--

SHLAIN: --I think that--

CINADER: --in our society--

SHLAIN: --reemergence of image information and electromagnetic information because the computer, for instance, is changing--is a very feminine device that is changing culture. For five thousand years the only way you could write was to hold a pen or a quill or a chisel in your right hand if you're right-handed.

CINADER: So now we can hope that the destruction of the whole world corporate domination structure will actually be the keyboard of the computer.

SHLAIN: I think that it's very significant that the typewriter was invented in the late 19th century, but the problem was that only women learned how to type in the majority because the men didn't want to learn how to type. The women were the secretaries, and the men dictated the letters to them. Then the personal computer gets invented in the seventies and all the men rush out to learn a skill that their grandfathers considered was for sissies, called typing. Now, in order to type, you have to type with both hands. It's like playing a musical instrument. So what is the effect on culture of having millions of men's left hands connected to millions of men's right brains tapping out one half of every written message? I think that that's an ameliorating influence on the culture that is turning the culture in a more feminine manner.

CINADER: Okay. I'd like to finish with a little biology if we might.

SHLAIN: Sure.

CINADER: And go from talking about the difference between masculine and feminine, say, and the actual male and female. I think it's quite fascinating your perspective in writing this book, and that a great deal of what you've been able to put forth comes from your perspective of having worked so much and have so much knowledge of the brain, let's say. You explain that there's really some differences in the male and female brain. Can you tell us what those are?

SHLAIN: Well, recent--it used to be maintained for a long time that men and women's brains were the same, but we're finding that there's some significant differences. For example, there are thirty three percent more neurons in the interior part of the corpus collosum of women than that of men, which means that the right and left hemispheres of women are better connected than they are in men. The significance of that is, that women's language lobe has greater access to their right hemisphere, which is the seat of many emotions. So I don't think that there is a man that would argue with you that women are better able to express their feelings than men are. Of course, the women feel that, oh, these poor men are so emotionally impoverished that it's a great disadvantage for them. But it has its advantage too, because if you're engaged in the most dangerous activity there is called the hunt, the last thing you want is a bunch of extraneous information and emotion spilling over from the other side. So the men want to stay focused and dispassionate and cool, calm, and collected if you're stalking a wooly mammoth, for example.

There are changes and differences in the two hemispheres that have some bearing on the way each person develops into the world. Now, you know, hormones also play a significant part. It's been shown that the brain is basically shaped by whatever hormone it's bathed in in-utero, so bathing a baby's brain in testosterone as opposed to estrogen changes many neuron pathways in that brain. So there are differences, but I don't want to emphasize the differences because I think that it's important to understand that we're born with a set of genetic instructions that sort of delimit our potential and capabilities. Then we come into the world, and we're a work in progress. Then we wait for culture to finish us off. The family that you're born into and the culture that you're born into and what you learn in school; all of those things determine who you become. And one of the most important factors is how do you learn the key information of your culture? And if you learn it through reading and writing as opposed to seeing it in image form, it changes the person. It can't help but do that.

I'm not--I don't want to sound like a zealot and say that there's no other factors involved and that my answer is the only answer. I'm just pointing out that this seems to be an overlooked possible explanation for trends in history of women's rights going up and going down and certain periods where they've enjoyed great privileges and other periods where they've been treated just abysmally. I know of no other explanation that can attribute and explain these historical periods because you certainly can't use warriors on horseback coming down from the north to explain the witch hunts in Europe. It was the kings and the noblemen and the lawyers and the doctors that were persecuting the women. It wasn't peasants. They were trying to protect their women.