Book and the Godhead

The breaking news was that there was breaking news for the first time. Sometimes the news is so epochal it cannot be seen. So it was about 3,500 years ago when the alphabet first appeared and put to use writing a narrative we call the Bible.

In his 1998 book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that the onset of writing brought about a gender change of the godhead. Out with goddess, in with a male god; in fact, out with images all together.

There is ample archeological evidence of female figures suggesting matriarchal societies in pre-literate times. First was not the word but the image. Yet it is notable that prohibition of graven images comes up as the second commandment. Thou shall not kill  does not appear till number six.

Men controlled the Bible. It is attributed to scribes and to Yahweh, word by word. Whether from right to left or left to right one reads in a linear sequential order. As literacy grew with the advent of the printing press, in the mid-15^th century, the consequences of print technology became more profound and pervasive.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that by extending the visual sense in this way it led to individualism, the nation-state, capitalism and to a way of viewing the world in distorted ways including misogyny and domination.

Reliance on print and its corollaries started to decline with the electronic age. Books by Virginia Wolff and James Joyce chipped away at the straight-ahead narrative.

Arguably, we are now in the post-literate age. Iconography with the return of images and signifiers are more easily read by Gen Z, along with graphic novels, and a gestalt of surfaces, phrases and bytes. Simultaneity has replaced the linear sequential.

Perhaps the Trump-era of male domination is the last gasp of the warrior age. I’d like to believe we are on the verge of a new consciousness informed by feminine principles and communal values.