We Are an Old People, We Are a New People

Part One,  Understanding Our Roots

by Cathryn Platine

One of the traps of studying history is the tendency to project the social realities of our own culture on those we have limited information about.  This is called ethnocentrism and cultural anthropologists are warned about the dangers of this type of thinking to true understanding of other cultures.  It's not easy for most people to distinguish between culturally imposed ethics and morality and biological inclinations so before we can journey back into the past we must first jettison some treasured misconceptions that blind us to understanding.

Archeology began as a hobby of the rich and eccentric and as a result there is a current explosion of revelation about ancient lives based not only on new discoveries, but re-examination of prior ones as each layer of cultural bias is removed from those who study the past.  Some of the cherished myths of the past are only now being understood as pure cultural imposition and in some cases, new, equally cherished myths are replacing them from new, equally flawed, motivations.  The last trap is that in the attempt to view as dispassionately and bias free as possible, some understanding is lost from failure to see clear links and commonalties.  Some bias is so ingrained that it becomes almost impossible go beyond them.  Among these blind spots are gender and sexual morality.  There are very real differences in the sexes that tend to be expressed in societies, but key to understanding the past is the importance of that word "tend".  An inclination is not a guarantee of a certain pattern or result.

There is a very real tendency for humans to think in linear patterns, seeing themselves as the result of progression and progress to an ideal state of being.  This was just as true of ancient historians as it is of today's and much of our ingrained misunderstanding of the past is over reliance on accounts of ancient historians writing from their own cultural blindness.  But yet another trap is the wish of some to see the past as an Eden lost to patriarchal thinking.  Modern feminists historians and many transsexuals are guilty of this type of thinking.  Supposing a lost world-wide civilization of peaceful people ruled by women and where transsexuals were not only accepted but beloved and treasured, they are just as blinded as the most dogmatic Christian historian who imposes his ideals and morality on the past.  As is so often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Our understanding of the Neolithic world has been turned on it's ear in the past thirty or so years.  Every year the clock gets turned back further and further about the dawn of civilization as we think of it.  Despite the recent educational turn away from a liberal education, a true interdisciplinary approach is being used more and more at digs such as Catal Hoyuk as it is being done rather than after the fact.  Let us now start from some things we do know about the ancient world and some we know about human nature and try to reach a new understanding free of our own desires and bias about transsexuals and the Goddess in the distant past.

First, a healthy dose of reality.  Men and women are different.  Their brains function differently, process information differently and give each different strengths and weaknesses.  This we know from medical research using tools only recently available to us.  Often overlooked, however, is the variation within each category that leaves some individuals more towards the centre of the differences than to the "ideal" edges.  Overlooked as well is that radical departures from these differences are also a normal part of human diversity.  Intersexed and transsexual births are as equally a normal part of the human condition, if much rarer, than so called normal male and female births.  They were always a part of human reality.  Ok, we have a beginning point of understanding.  From recent discoveries, we've learned that hunter gatherer cultures were not always nomadic.  Catal Hoyuk was such a culture that combined hunter-gatherer activities with domestication of some animals within the frame work of a very large metropolitan, almost even by modern standards, settlement.  A far cry indeed from the past perceptions of neolithic people living in huts or caves.

Reconstruction of an excavated part of Catal Hoyuk with detail of an individual "house"

Because of differences in physiology, tasks within a hunter-gatherer culture are divided mostly along the lines of sex.  With the male brain pattern of focused, single minded attention and the physical traits ability for spurts of strength, hunting is more natural for males than females.  Conversely, the female brain pattern that gives greater ability to multi-task combined with physiological greater stamina at lower levels of effort making women much better at gathering activities. More important however is the observation of Judith Brown in a little, but vastly important, five page essay that the division of work among the sexes in the ancient world depends on “the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of child care” and because “nowhere in the world is the rearing of children primarily the responsibility of men....”. When I read this simple statement repeated in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's book “Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years” ⁱ  it was a awakening moment for me. After you see this basic premise, Brown's next observation follows as naturally as night follows day. “Such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive; they are easily interruptible and easily resumed once interrupted; they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.” Any woman who has raised children will instantly recognize the basic truth in these observations. A key point here is that the society relies on this division, not that it is hard and fast. Women did hunt with the men as well as we have examples of paintings from Neolithic cultures. It is thus that spinning, weaving, food preparation and gathering and early domestication of animals all became “women's work” of vital importance to the communities and all are intertwined. In addition to early grains, one of the first cultivated plants was flax for the making of cloth and the area of ancient Anatolia the centre of cultivation spreading out to the north and south later one.  The first known looms come from this area as well.  Prior to it's invention all weaving was done using the body as the loom restricting the width of the fabric produced to a fairly narrow one.  The introduction of the ground loom, a simple arrangement of sticks in the earth, made the production of wider sections of fabric.  This loom spread south as far as India and into Egypt and is still in use today among Bedouin women.  With it went the Mother Goddess at the same time.

The differences in the work of the sexes led, in some cases, even to the development of separate languages for the sexes such as in ancient Sumeria where Emesal was the language of women and Eme-ku the language of males. As any modern transsexual woman would expect, the records show that the Assinnu (transsexual priestesses) of Sumeria spoke Emesal which was said to be a direct gift of Inanna.

Hunting and gathering, food preparation and textile production are all equally important tasks for the survival of the community.  Hunting tends to take the males away for prolonged periods, especially as the game closer by became somewhat scarcer.  A transsexual woman in such a culture would likely prefer to stay with the women engaging in the more natural, to them, activities, but more importantly, that transsexual would be more likely to make the leap to the idea of staying at home and still providing meat by domestication of some animals!  Today we know that despite the cultural invisibility of transsexuals, they are two full standard deviations above the mean in intelligence and creativity.  The domestication of animals as an invention of transsexual women would explain much about their later, almost universal, role as religious leaders in a Goddess religion as well as the strong connection between cattle (bulls in particular) and Goddess worship throughout the ancient world.  A woman identified transsexual providing not only meat, but milk and eggs as well as animal fibre for spinning and weaving would have further tipped the balance of contribution of resources towards women since gathering of grain to fed the livestock would still have been dependent on women as the would the care of that livestock depended on staying near the settlement, the women's role.  The male contributions would have been now a variety of diet and more of a luxury than a necessity.  Taking the place of hunting, men naturally gravitated towards trade with the other groups first encountered while hunting, a natural conversion of far ranging activities of hunting to another similar based form of contribution to the community.

The natural focus of such a society towards the Divine would more likely have been feminine rather than masculine as it had been from the paleolithic (evidenced by the well recorded wealth of Venus figures from this period) and further connected by the now multiplied importance of birth not just of children, but the domesticated animals as well.

Further evidence of the connection between transsexual priestesses, the gathering activities of women and the relationship to animal domestication comes in the surviving recipes for "sacred food" prepared exclusively by the transsexual priestesses of Cybele, Astarte and Inanna.  They are mixtures of milk or cheese with cream, ground nuts and seeds and spices and are referred to as the most ancient of Her sacred foods.  A combination of the fruits of gathering, rather than cultivation, with the milk products of cattle raising.  Could the exclusiveness of this preparation by transsexual priestesses be a remembrance of the contributions of transsexual women? We shall later encounter spinning and weaving as primary activities of transsexual priestesses as well.

From Catal Hoyuk we have the first representation of Cybele, recognizable by Her seated position flanked by two large cats found inside, not unexpectedly, a grainery bin.  This is the type of association we could expect in a society that depended more on the efforts of women for essentials.
 

Reconstruction of the bull "shrine" found at Catal Hoyuk

The strong connections of Goddess worship with certain symbols cannot be denied.  When raising cattle, the bulls become the excess available for meat since the cows are needed both for milk production and reproduction.  For a people whose mundane and spiritual lives are intertwined, it would only be natural for the slaughter of bulls to become ritualized and the resulting meat a Divine gift.  A gift of the Divine feminine...........the Goddess.  This explanation answers, for me, a question that puzzled me for years.... why bulls in connection with the Goddess?  Other connections are much easier to understand, but among the almost universal symbols associated with the Goddess in Her various forms, the connection with bulls was one I never found a reasonable argument for and yet it is one of the most enduring connections, lasting all the way into the late Roman period.  Could this be the answer?  Before you dismiss the idea of the domestication of animals being an invention of transsexuals, bear in mind that our contributions to mankind, while often overlooked, are very real even today.  It was a transsexual woman, Lynn Conway, who made the breakthrough in technology that gave birth to the modern computer age.  It was transsexual women who wrote much of the software that took that breakthrough to it's current state.  A transsexual woman, Wendy Carlos, gave us the first real electronic music.  Even the basic electronic ringer in today's telephones was developed by a transsexual woman.  While they may be mostly invisible in today's culture, they still have a large impact.  As we have seen and discussed later is on, the preparation of the most ancient sacred food, often made exclusively by the transsexual and intersexual priestesses combine the fruits of gathering with an early type of cheese now made possible by the domestication of of cattle and goats.

From Catal Hoyuk and the many similar sites of this same culture there is a clear transmission of both tools of women's work and practices honouring the Goddess. By the time of the end of this culture around 4000 BCE the belief in a Mother Goddess not just as a concept but with specific practices and associations had spread from central Anatolia to the south via the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the Indus valley of India and the roots of the Egyptian culture. It spread across the western Mediterranean to Crete and Thera where it flowered as the Minoan culture.

One oft overlooked common element of all societies of the period extending from roughly 10,000 BCE all the way to 2500 BCE is universal matrilinear descent. When you think about it, matrilinear models just make good sense overall. Primary child care was the responsibility of women, one almost always knows who one's mother is and the very tools of activities of women and attendant skills now were essential to maintaining civilization, trade enriching this rather than being central. Even the concept of control of plots of land vital to women's work rather than men's and done so communally rather than individually is found all the way to 2500 BCE in Sumeria were the cultivated land was controlled by the priestesses of Innana.

This matrilinear system survived in Anatolia as far as the classical period where it was noted by Greek historians. Where ever you find a matrilinear descent, you also find equality of the sexes.  The converse is true as well.  Treating women as property began with the introduction of patrilinear descent models.  In order to assure an accurate male line of descent, a woman's sex life must be monitored and controlled meaning she loses basic rights within marriage.