Our Warrior Religion
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Successive waves of invasions by the Indo-Europeans began the dethronement of the Great Goddess. The dates when these waves began are given by various authorities as between 4500 B.C. and 2400 B.C. The goddesses were not completely suppressed, but were incorporated into the religion of the invaders.
The invaders imposed their patriarchal culture and their warrior religion on the conquered people. The Great Goddess became the subservient consort of the invaders’ gods, and attributes or power that originally belonged to a female divinity were expropriated and given to a male deity. Rape appeared in myths for the first time, and myths arose in which the male heroes slew serpents — symbols of the Great Goddess…
~Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
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It sure does seem like, when some people say the words, “American history,” they are really just remembering John Wayne movies. They don’t want anyone bringing up real history and killing the buzz…
And, it sure does seem like, when some people say the word “Constitution,” they really just mean the Second Amendment. Books can be censored. Voting districts can be Gerrymandered. Protests can be banned. To some people, only the right to bear arms is inalienable.
— Jim Rigby
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If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished…
― Bessel A. van der Kolk
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Somewhere on this crowded planet, in a place I have never been before and will never visit in my lifetime, someone I do not know and will never meet has just said a prayer in a language I do not understand as an expression of faith in a religion I do not accept. And yet, the prayer was for me…
~ Steven Charleston
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We imagine a master is someone who knows exactly what he wants to say and says it with astonishing expertise, but maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe creativity is a way of learning, of discovering new realities, of uncovering insights you had hidden in your deeper self. Our culture structures our psychology such that we suppress large parts of ourselves. We need some way to access what we already…
