Book: The Alphabet vs. The Goddess

[TheLoracular]

I was caught off-guard by just how much I'm both enjoying The Alphabet vs. The Goddess by Leonard Shlain and made really contemplative and thoughtful.

The premise is that the invention of alphabets and the shift to literate civilizations has biological as well as social ramifications for the rise of the patriarchal monotheistic religions. Leonard Shlain himself was a surgeon who relied heavily on working with experts in very diverse fields to put this book together. As someone who's been putting a mindless number of hours lately into topics like the ancient language that bridges Egyptian hieroglyphs and the modern Greek and Hebrew alphabets, learning Biblical Hebrew and fascinated with "Hellenistic culture" as it spanned from Egypt to Mesopotamia in the 500 BCE to 100 CE era, this took everything else I've been reading about and presented it in a very different way that just kind of hit home hard.

It also makes me suddenly more optimistic for the direction Western culture is going now and making me very, very thoughtful if part of the reason that "spirituality" vs. "religion", neo-paganism, tarot culture, the civil rights movements and other things are happening and going to continue to evolve and improve is because we're moving away from written language being the primary mode of communicating with the growing reliance on pictures and images aka movies, tv, YouTube.

The author hasn't talked about that yet (I'm about halfway through) and the book was written in 1998 so I suspect it won't because a lot of the changes have been subtle and started in the 80s and 90s but are way more obvious now, 30-40 years later.