Chapter Four - Matriarchal Societies

In 1540 Francisco de Orellana led an expedition to the Amazon river and was the first European to do an extensive exploration of it. He reported finding along the riverbank large cities, towns and villages. He also somehow managed to communicate with the natives who told him women ruled them and they even showed him statues of these female rulers.

Then the Spanish managed to upset the natives and the first peaceful exchanges soon turned to open hostility. Where they were being to be attacked by the natives whenever they came to a village or town. He reported that female warriors led these attacks. When he got back to Spain the river he sailed on was named the Amazon after the stories Orellana told about these female warriors.

Yet 20 years later when the next European expedition explored the river they found no trace of the fabulous cities reported by Orellana or the Amazon warriors. As a result Orellana was to be labelled by historians a liar, and his stories of marvellous cities, female rulers and Amazon warriors exaggerated fantasies. This was to be confirmed in more modern time when it was realised that the soil in the rail-forests is very poor for growing crops. At present farmers are destroying the Amazon forest by the slash and burn method. They cut down a large area, then burn it and plant crops. Yet after a few years the soil is so depleted that crops no longer can be grown. So they have to go on to cut down another area and do the same thing.

For this reason modern experts claimed that an ancient civilisation to exist in the Amazon basin was impossible because all civilisations in the past have relied on intensive farming for food. So it seems to be that Orellana was clearly a liar because there was no evidence of any kind to support his stories.

Then very recently archaeologists began to find large earth mounds in the Amazon forests. It occurred to some of them that these mounds might be artificial and they began to dig in them and quickly found large amounts of pottery and other man made artefacts. Not only this, some of these fragments suggested they come from very large pots, far too large to be carried around by anyone. This then means that these mounds were the remains of ancient settlements. As the archaeologists explored further they found ancient roads, linking these mounds demonstrating a complex infrastructure of an ancient civilisation. If this was so, how did they feed themselves? Because, as previously mentioned, without intensive farming they could not feed a large population.

The archaeologists then noticed the soil in the mounds was very different to the normal soil of the rain forest. It was reasoned, that this ancient civilisation must have found a way to fertilise this normally barren soil. Tests were done on it and it was discovered the soil was full of charcoal. What become clear was this ancient civilisation used the slash and burn method, but instead of burning the vegetation they cooked the wood instead. (This is the method of making charcoal all over the world). The charcoal was then able to retain the nutrients in the wood. Not only that, this charcoal rich soil was full of bacteria, which fed the plants growing in it. So impressive are the trials that have been done on this soil. (In experimental plots, adding a combination of charcoal and fertiliser into the rain-forest soil boosted yields by 880% compared with fertiliser alone.) This has now been hailed as a solution to the world’s hunger problem. It seems that this ancient civilisation found solutions to the problems of poor soil that modern science with all its sophisticated chemical fertilisers was unable to find.

This soil has been found in many other areas along the Amazon River. With ancient artificial artefacts within it wherever found. Showing a large civilisation and in all in the places where Orellana claimed he saw these cities and towns. So what happened to this ancient civilisation?

Scientists can only speculate, but it is known that the Europeans brought with them diseases that were unknown to the native population, like small pox and influenza. Not having any immunity to these diseases the native population was decimated. It means that the Orellana expedition brought to the native population these diseases, which would have wiped out most of them out very quickly. The civilisation collapsed and the jungle soon overgrew the cities and town. So by the time the next Europeans came to the same area all they would have seen was virgin jungle. The few survivors were then forcefully converted into Christianity and all knowledge of their ancient ways and stories ruthlessly destroyed. Though I have to say that it is not usual for civilizations to be wiped out by disease, civilization generally collapse through nature disasters like years of famine or conquest and genocide. Orellana questioned a native who told him that these female rulers had gold. We all know how gold mad the conquistadors were and with this knowledge reaching Spain they would want to come back to plunder this gold. Orellana did come back but was killed and his leaderless expedition returned to Spain, but it is likely that another expedition did go to the Amazon. If they had destroyed the Amazon civilization, plundered their gold and committed genocide they may not of wanted the world to know about this, so this expedition may have been written out of history.

This then means that Orellana has been vindicated. Though archaeologists as far as I know haven’t been able to confirm that women ruled this ancient civilisation. Yet as everything else he reported has now been confirmed as correct, we can probably accept that was true as well.

The concept that women once ruled the world in ancient times is nothing new. A scholar called J.J Bachofen in the 19th century started it. He brought together all the evidence of matriarchy in ancient times then available, and very mildly suggested a matriarchal age in the past. He was strongly criticised for this by other scholars who dismissed and discredited his work. Yet in spite of this, his work was to inspire scholars like James Frazer who wrote his famous book, The Golden Bough, and more recently Joseph Campbell. It also influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who publicly praised Bachofen's work. As well as the psychologist Carl Jung who developed from it the theory that the ancient Great Mother, is a very important archetype in the collective unconscious. Other scholars in the early 20th century also wrote about matriarchy like Robert Briffault, who had pointed out that anthropologists then were very biased in their field studies. As they assumed that in all the Stone-Age cultures they studied they were all male dominated, and ignored any evidence when this wasn’t the case. This didn’t go down well with the academic community and again he was very heavily criticised. Yet his work was to inspire the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who also found Stone Age communities they didn’t fit the “normal patriarchal model. As did Margaret Mead who again was greatly criticised for making observations about societies that didn’t fit into the patriarchal norm. Another anthropologist Eva Meyerowitz was to find evidence of matriarchal rule up to recent times in African tribes. While Evelyn Reed, in articles, lectures and her book, Sexism and Science was to savagery attack anthropologists for their sexual bias against women.

Jane Harrison another scholar also suggest matriarchy in ancient Greece, but managed to escape criticism by not being too explicit. Unlike Dr Margaret Murray a respected Egyptologist also received heavy criticism for writing that Witchcraft was an ancient Goddess religion that has survived up to the middle ages. These arguments were kept mostly within academic circles. Then in the 1940s the poet Robert Graves wrote his book, The White Goddess, which was the first attempt to bring this argument to the general public. Even though it was a very complex book. At about the same time Erich Fromm was bringing together the works of Freud, Marx and Bachofen. Where he pointed out that communism and socialism could only work in a matriarchy. Then on the wave of the Feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s Feminist scholars like Merlin Stone and Barbara G. Walker also continued to dig deep into ancient history to find more evidence of matriarchy in ancient times.

After the Second World War archaeologists started to make finds supporting the idea that there was a matriarchal age in the past. This evidence was again dismissed by academics but Feminist writers began to write about it. Like Elizabeth Gould Davis who was brave enough to directly claim that women did once rule the world, and Riane Eisler who kept strictly to Feminist dogma of equality.

Yet we don’t have to go to pre-history to find matriarchal societies, the shocking fact is that they exist in today’s world. The biggest is the The Minangkabau people in Western Sumatra which numbers about 4 million people and is the largest and most stable Matriarchal community in the world today. There are also matriarchal communities in China, Tibet and Malaya, which is kept quiet as government officials find this an embarrassment. In Southern India there is a region called Keralal, which again is matriarchal and has a reputation of being a well run, stable and prosperous area. There is evidence of matriarchal communities that survived in Africa up until colonial times and even American Indian tribes that are still Matriarchal. The Basque people of France and Spain were matriarchal in historic times, but the Inquisition and the medieval witch-hunts finally destroyed this way of life.

There are legends that the Czech people were matriarchal up until the sixth or seventh century. Where it seems that after Libuse, the last matriarchal ruler, had died there was a patriarchal take over. In this legend the women fought back led by two women warriors called Vlasta and Sarka. After a very long and vicious war the men finally won and imposed patriarchy on the women. I have been informed that there are over 150 matriarchal communities all over the world, but we never hear about this in either the mainstream or alternative media.

Yet many Feminists are uncomfortable about this concept for three reasons.

1 Feminism is about equality; so many Feminists just see matriarchy as being the flip side of patriarchy. That is to say instead of men ruling the world, it is women doing it instead. Feminism has achieved a lot through just pointing out the unfairness and injustice of sexual bias in laws and customs. Which has resulted in men standing aside and allowing women to achieve equal opportunities in Western society. Start talking about matriarchy and this totally undermines the foundation of Feminism. As men can then claim that Feminism is not about equality but just “the thin end of the wedge” of female dominance. (Many men see it this way already, and don’t really believe Feminists when they say, “we only want equality.”)

2 Read any Feminist books, they are mostly about the horrors of patriarchy, and why it is wrong for men to dominate women. If there was an age in the past where women dominated men, then women will be as just a bad as men. (According to the women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s men and women are exactly the same. So if we accept this theory there shouldn’t be a problem. Men have dominated women over the last five thousand years, so if women are like men, they will naturally want, “their turn”).

3 There is also a fear of male violence among Feminists. Men in the past, and in Islamic countries today have dominated women through violence. In the 19th century in the West men were legally entitled to beat their wife with sticks if she misbehaves, and social custom encouraged this. (You weren’t a “real” man if you couldn’t dominate and beat up your wife). Yet over the last hundred years men in the West men seem to have seen the error of their ways through an appeal to fairness and equality. Start talking about matriarchy and women dominating society and men might get angry with women and perhaps use violence to take back everything women have gained over the last 100 years.

I can’t say I would personally agree with this last reason, though I can understand women being frightened of male violence. Because just 4 hundred years ago the Church was still carrying on a murderous campaign of slaughtering millions of Witches, (mostly women). Also even today women are publicly executed and flogged in places like Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan for minor infringements of Islamic law. Yet society in industrial countries has changed. After the Second World War the American military decided to interview all the returning troops to see if they could learn anything from their experiences. Most of these soldiers claimed that in the war they didn’t kill anyone and only fired over the heads of the enemy. It seems only a small minority admitted to killing anyone. Which is not exactly the sort of image we have of GI soldiers in Hollywood films.

The Japanese military had similar problems. Japan ranks with Southern Ireland and Switzerland as being one off the most non-violent and crime free, countries in the world. Yet in the Second World War Japanese soldiers were even worse than German and Russian troops for brutality. So how did this happen?

It seems in the 1930s and 40s the Japanese military completely brutalised their troops. Older recruits at the beginning of their training beat up the new recruits. Then in the second year of training they were forced to do the same to the new intake. Later on many were made to kill prisoners of war, either as live dummies in bayonet practise or cutting off their heads. This total brutalisation made it possible for Japanese soldiers to kill without pity. Yet it is of interest that the Japanese military had to go this far into brutalisation to turn their troops into killers.

In very brutal societies as many third world countries, it seems men are so brutalised that they are far more likely to use violence against women to retain male dominance. Where men are less brutalised as in most industrial countries, then they are far less likely to resort to violence. Though I have to say the brutalisation of men in the West seems mostly to come from very violent films and video games. In that it helps to make violence acceptable to many young men. (Perhaps the makers of these films hope it will turn our young men into, “real “macho” men” who will put women back in their place).

Scientific studies have shown that boy and men who have been subjected to violence or fierce competition do have greatly increased testosterone levels. This can be increased to a level where sportsmen will commit horrific violence on the sporting field. A case in point is Australian Rugby. In the 1990s Australian rugby players developed what was called the pile-driver tackle. Where a group of players would lift a player of the opposing side off his feet and then drop him on his head. Neck injuries are the most horrendous injury you can get in rugby, where injured players have been left paralysed from the neck down. Also a pile-driver tackle has the potential to kill a player. So rugby laws had to be made to quickly stop this practice. Yet the question that was never asked is why were players willing to do it in the first place? They must also be aware of the physical damage that can happen by doing a pile-driver tackle. They also must be aware of the fact if they do it to the opposing side it will in turn be done to them. Yet reason and common sense didn’t come into it and a law had to be made to outlaw his practise. This begs the question that if a loophole was found in the law that players could legally take a gun on the field of play and shoot opposing players to win the game. Would they do this?

So it means that when the testosterone levels are high in sportsmen they are willing to commit terrible injuries on the players of the opposing side. Surprisingly even watching competitive sport can increase the testosterone levels of men. So it seems that violent and competitions do make men even more violent. The less brutal and competitive a society is the less violent men become. This might be the answer to a very puzzling archaeological mystery and controversy.

Chapter Five - A World Without War and Violence. (You Must Be Joking!)

On Thursday 31 January 2002 at 9.00pm in Britain BBC Two the scientific TV program Horizon. Called, “The Lost Pyramids of Caral”, the subject matter was archaeology (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/caral.shtml)

Now to anyone who didn’t have an interest in science this program passed by unnoticed. Yet what this program was about is a very big shift in the understanding of our past and the true nature of human beings. To the degree that historians in the future will have to re-write history and sociologists will have to rethink all their theories about human nature. In fact what was discovered could bring about a colossal social, religious and political change in our future. Once the information about what was discovered fillers down to ordinary people.

As previously pointed out, most books about our ancestors in the Stone, Bronze and Iron age portray them as very brutal and violence people. It also seems that the further you go back in time the more violence and savage people seem to be. For this reason it was assumed that people who lived in prehistoric times were even more barbaric than the people in historic times. This has been the prevailing view by most archaeologists, anthropologist and palaeontologists up until very recently.

Now to most people academic theories are irrelevant to their normal daily lives, but the belief that we descended from savage barbarians effects us all. Because it assumes we are all deep down just violent brutes in modern clothing, and have to be kept in line through strict laws, moral codes and brutal punishment. This belief influences the nature of our religions, political systems and laws. It also has a unconscious effect on the way we treat others, because if we are to believe that the true nature of humans is barbaric. Then we learn to fear other people and assume the worst in them. Creating a vicious cycle of fear and hatred for other people.

This belief is not much different from the Christian belief that all people are born into sin. The implication of this belief, is that people can only be saved by obeying the very strict rules and moral code of the Christian religion. When scientists replaced priests as the “wise men” of our society all they done was to continue this belief in another form. In that we are no longer born into sin but we are given instead the equal negative belief that deep down we are all savage brutes.

This belief was spelt out on this Horizon program by Prof. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University, who said-

“I frankly find it difficult to conceive of the emergence of urbanisation complexity civilisation in the absence of degrees of conflict, or the presence of, warfare."

In other words he was saying it is natural for human beings to live in conflict, and he couldn’t imagine any civilisation that didn’t generate violence and war.

Proof of this belief was found by Dr Tom Pozorski of the University of Texas-Pan American and his wife Sheila who had previously discovered what was then thought to be the oldest city in South America. In the Casma Valley they had discovered one of the largest pyramids in the world, in fact it was so large that previous explorers had assumed it was just a hill. Wood on the site was carbon dated to 1500 BC and this at the time it made it the oldest city in the America. In the excavation they discovered carvings of warriors who were killing and mutilating their victims. To quote, Jonathan Haas of Field Museum, Chicago-

“Heads have blood flowing from their eyes and blood flowing from their mouths and then you have body parts so you'll have just the leg and you'll have a torso or you'll have feet and you'll have crossed hands”.

So this find seems to confirm everything archaeologists believed about the early civilisations. That they were created by warlords who ruled by fear and created the first cities as fortresses against conquest by other warlords. This theory seemed to be validated until Dr Ruth Shady if the University of San Marcos, Lima, was to make a discovery that was to turn everything archaeologists believed about early civilisations, on its head.

Like Tom Pozorski she began to dig around what was thought to be hills in a place called Caral in Peru only to discover they were pyramids. As she and her team began to excavate the site she was puzzled the fact that there was no pottery on the site, (pottery is nearly always found in ancient civilisations) and finding only stone tools. This suggested this site was so ancient that it existed before the invention of pottery and metal. This was confirmed when some bags made of reeds found on the site were carbon dated. They were dated to 2600 BC so Caral was nearly five thousand years old making it as nearly as old as the first civilisation in Egypt, and was a thousand years older than any other civilisation in South America. This was to cause a sensation in the archaeological world and archaeologists from North America came to visit the site.

Jonathan Haas, “the world's leading expert on the warfare theory” began to search around for evidence of warfare. To his surprise he couldn’t find any fortifications or any means the city could have defended itself. He began to look further afield to look for battlements in the hills around Caral and then in mountain passes where invading armies would have to travel though, but came up with nothing. Meanwhile Ruth Shady couldn’t find any weapons of war or any carvings of violence in her excavations; so all this lack of evidence was undermining the warfare theory. To the degree Jonathan Haas had to admit-

“You seemed to really have the beginnings of that complex society and I'm able to look at it right at the start and I look for the conflict and I look for the warfare, I look for the armies and the fortifications and they're not there. They should be here and they're not and you have to change your whole mind-set about the role of warfare in these societies and so it's demolishing our warfare hypothesis. The warfare hypothesis just doesn't work."

It seems that archaeologists now accept that it was irrigation and not warfare is what started the first civilisations.

Another realisation about Caral is that what was true of this civilisation was also true for nearly the whole of South America at the time. Trading goods were found from the Amazon jungle at the other side of the Andes Mountains as well as from the coast. The picture that emerged was that Caral was the centre of a vast trading network. So if the people of Caral felt so safe that they didn’t bother to look for ways to defend themselves. The same must of been true for most of South America, because in no way was Caral just an isolated city cut off from the rest of the world. It suggests that Caral lived in an age where warfare was completely unknown. The evidence is that the first civilisations in South America lived in peace for about a thousand years before we had warfare, violence, torture and human sacrifice.

The cosy picture painted by the Horizon program of unbiased scientists looking for the truth and finally finding it in the excavation of Caral is basically false. The archaeologists who strongly believed in the warfare theory and then were willing to admit they where wrong in the face of the evidence, or lack of evidence, in Caral, need to be congratulated. Yet this has not been the case for most archaeologists in the past. The truth is that the whole archaeological world for a period of 50 years has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting the evidence, that the first civilisations live in a world where warfare was unknown. It was not just the evidence from Caral that made them ditch the warfare theory but evidence coming from Neolithic, Copper and Bronze age sites in Europe, the Middle East and China.

What happened in Caral at the beginning of the 21st century also happen 40 years previously in the 1950s and 60s in a place called Catal Höyük in Turkey. Unfortunately the way Archaeologists reacted to this excavation was very different.. An archaeologist called James Mellaart found in this location, the oldest city ever discovered, going back 9,000 years. Making it far older than the ancient Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations. Again the archaeologists couldn’t find any evidence of fortifications or weapons of war. Nor any paintings or carvings showing images of violence, or for that matter any form of centralised government. What were found instead, were feminine images of childbirth, Goddesses and animal life.

This city was unlike anything discovered since. In that it had few streets, and most houses were built so close together that the only access was through the roof. This then means that to many people in the city to gain access to their homes they had to walk over the roofs of other people’s houses. This was to greatly puzzle archaeologists.

It is impossible to understand Catal Höyük while we think in terms of a civilisation that had masculine values. Unfortunately what is not being considered is the possibility of civilisations those values were feminine, by mainstream archaeologists. In later civilisations we see the masculine values of war, power and status glorified in images and writings. In Catal Höyük we see images of the feminine values of childbirth, fertility being represented. So clearly women were the dominant sex in this community as it is their values that are represented and strongly influence the nature of the civilisation. As it is women’s superior social skills of co-operation and communication that allows the city to function.

So disturbing was these findings that the whole site was closed down for thirty years by the Turkish Government. James Mellaart was criticised by many archaeologists for claiming that the people of Catal Höyük worshipped Goddesses. One of the most vocal critics was another archaeologist Ian Hodder. So it wasn’t a surprise to find that when the excavations were reopened in the 1990s, it was the sceptic Ian Hodder who was put in charge. In the thirty years the excavation was closed down, the academic world kept quiet about the discoveries made at Catal Höyük. Though there was one archaeologist Marija Gimbutas who broke ranks and began to tell the world about implication of the findings. Not only have Catal Höyük but other Neolithic sites in Southern and Eastern Europe. She wrote about a peaceful world in ancient Europe that worshipped the Great Mother that was ended by violent Indo-European tribes that came from the North and invaded these peaceful civilisations.

Marija Gimbutas wrote books about the Neolithic excavations in Malta, Crete, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia and Ukraine, all these finds showed a world without war and violence and where the people worshipped the ancient Great Mother. It seems that when a society worship feminine deities, war and violence were unknown. But when societies worship male gods or both male and female deities then violence becomes commonplace. She was criticised and condemned by her colleges and it was claimed her work unscientific because it when against the fashionable warfare theories of the time. No other archaeologists at the time would support what she claimed, and she was dismissed as just a strident Feminist maverick of no importance.

Then similar finds began to be written about in the in Indus Valley Civilisation in Pakistan. (Although it was first discovered in the 1920s) Recently archaeologist have found its beginning goes back as 7,000 years making it again one of the oldest civilisations discovered. And again archaeologists couldn’t find evidence of fortifications, violence and warfare, and it was a civilisation that worshipped horned Mother Goddesses. It was also claimed this civilisation was ended by a violence invasion from Aryan people from the North. Though his is know being disputed, as there is no evidence for this, as it came out of the imagination of 19th century archaeologists.

The first excavations of Neolithic sites started back in the 1940s. So why did it take over 50 years for archaeology to accept the evidence of an age in the past where warfare didn’t exist? Controversies like this have happened before in science, new evidence and theories can take a long time to be accepted if they go against existing theories. The problem is that knowledge of a Golden Age of peace ruled by a Mother Goddess doesn’t only just come from archaeology. They also come from myths and legends all over the world. What is clear there is a campaign to suppress and destroy all evidence about this Golden Age has been going on for thousands of years. The attack on Marija Gimbutas theories is only latest chapter in this crusade.

At Catal Höyük their are now Feminists and Goddess groups who are attempting to keep the archaeologists on the site honest. So when they attempts to dismiss evidence of a Mother Goddess culture out of hand they find passionate and articulate Feminists who are willing to contradict them. An example of this is a posting I found on the Internet in a Yahoo E-Group called Goddesssites.

Dear Diana,

That's great you enjoyed the site, it's so beautiful, and holds so much important history (herstory?) It's good they didn't make negative comments about the Goddess, I wouldn't really expect that. But did they mention the Goddess at all? The problem for me with the visitor's center was the ABSENCE of the Goddess, and the absence of what I would call "Goddess consciousness." Mellaart and other early archaeologists were congruent with the material they dug, in the sense that they were able to use language that explicated what they were looking at (peaceful, fertile, nurturing, egalitarian, spiritual, artistic, and so on) while the more recent archaeologists seem to shy away from anything remotely connected with "matriarchal" theories. By the way, matriarchal actually means "beginning with the mother," which makes it technically quite a good term for describing matrilineal, peaceful, mother-centered agricultural peoples of the Neolithic, although perhaps the term "matristic" used by Marija Gimbutas is more appropriate for our time. At the visitor's center there are two murals displayed--two versions of the same one--which happens to be the only wall painting from the site that was predominantly male. All the others are female-central and mostly Mother Goddesses and Double Goddesses. Interesting choice to represent the site, then, don't you think? In the display case showing the reproduction of the beautiful ivory-handled flint dagger, the artifacts are described as having to do with "hunting and war." This is a travesty, since the piece comes from the Neolithic and there is absolutely no evidence of any kind for war or violence. As I have written in an article recently, the knife is much more likely to fall into the category of knives that belong to midwives--for cutting the umbilical cord at birth. These knives were still used b shaman women in Siberia in the 20th century. Fortunately the museum in Ankara still has integrity and shows the finds from Catal Höyük as belonging to the ancient Mother Goddess cultures that are found all over Anatolia. It's too bad the team at Catal Höyük doesn't feel obliged to keep in step with local Turkish scholars and the way they see Anatolian history (and prehistory). I'm not trying to pick an argument, but I was really very upset when I went there. It was a place I had looked forward to visiting for such a long time--two decades at least--and it seemed criminal to me that no one seems to be monitoring what interpretations these "new archaeology" types come up with. There is a culture war happening right now--a concerted effort to block and erase certain approaches to ancient scholarship--and I believe this is quite political and dangerous for scholars of women's studies.

Thanks for listening--Vicki Noble

(Vicki Noble is also a well known authoress)

Also, there are now a younger group of scientists who wasn’t so opposed to the theories of Marija Gimbutas. When Catal Höyük excavation was reopened and it suddenly became respectable to write about it. Richard Rudgley recently wrote two books and made a TV program called “The Secrets Of The Stone Age” that broadly supported Marija Gimbutas theories. So in recent years there are many people in the academic world who are now more accepting of the evidence that the first civilisations live in peace.

Richard Rudgeley comes straight to the point when he says, “The widely accepted view of the human story is wildly inaccurate.” He then goes on to point out that because historians have ignored what happen during the Neolithic age it seems that to the general public that civilisations suddenly appeared out of no-where. Because we are taught that the people in the Stone Age were ignorant savages, who then suddenly created sophisticated civilisations like ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Then because orthodox archaeology gives no explanation to the public of how this suddenly happened, in this vacuum people outside science have invented their own theories. Like Erich Von Daniken in his book Chariot Of The Gods, or the many theories of a lost continents like Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria.

The point he is trying to make is that if the general public was aware that Stone-Age people were not ignorant brutes and that civilisation didn’t start with the Egyptians, but thousands of years earlier in the Neolithic age. Then we would not need aliens from outer space or lost continents to explain how civilisation got started.

He explains that the first large stone structures were not built in the Nile Valley but in the island of Malta. When the first archaeologists first excavated the Temple complex of Malta they assumed it was a crude attempt to copy what was built in ancient Greece, but when it was carbon dated it was found to be built 5,500 years ago. A thousand years older than the Great pyramid in Egypt. He then says that the comment of archaeologists hearing this news was that is was the wrong date in the wrong place. The reason apparently for this attitude for this is that Malta is off the beaten track. Which is strange because Malta is just off the coast of Italy and not that far from Ancient Greece and Egypt. A more plausible explanation is that the archaeologists didn’t want to know that Malta had the oldest freestanding stone buildings in the world, because the Temples in Malta are Goddess Temples, with Giant statues of the Great Mother.

Can it be, that the reason we have such a large gap in our history that Richard Rudgley complains about, is because it is an age when people clearly worshipped the Great Mother? As all the “lost Civilisations” that he writes about where all full of feminine images. It strongly suggests that his silence is simply male bias, in men who discovered these sites wanting males to be the ones who created the first civilisations and not women. Or is there more to this than that? Archaeology like most science is very expensive, so most archaeologists are either very rich individuals like they were in the 19th century, or they rely on funding from universities, governments or religious sects like the Roman Catholic Church. As in everything else in life, “he who pays the fiddler calls the tune”. Archaeologists finding the “wrong” things or advocating the “wrong” theories, in the eyes of the people who sponsor them, could have there funding cut off.

The First person to do a “scientific” excavation on Malta was a Jesuit priest called Father Emmanuel Magri in 1903. His form of excavation was to rub off paintings on the walls of the largest Goddess temple in Malta. Then to dig up the floor of the Temple and what he discovered there mysteriously disappeared. In other words, his work was to destroy the site for its archaeological value. This is not unusual. In the 19th century European explorers discovered in Zimbabwe an ancient city that was built by African kings between the 12 and 16th century. Europeans at first carelessly destroyed all evidence that it was Africans who built this city searching for gold and wouldn’t entertain the idea that Africans built it. Simply because if it was known that Africans were able to create civilisations in the past, it would undermine the right of European countries to colonise Africa. Because the justification of colonialism at the time was they were civilising the people of this continent, whom were called savages.

Not only did archaeologists keep quiet about the first civilisations of the Neolithic and Bronze Age period. They have also kept quiet about the Amazons. Some time ago I accidentally come across information that Western archaeologists have found graves of female warriors all over Europe. Yet they seem to think these finds are an “embarrassment”, (where have we found this expression before?), and so they are never published. The only people who have let the cat out of the bag are archaeologists of the old Soviet Union. In the 1950s and 60s they have published finding graves of Female warriors in the Ukraine and Georgia.

Both the ancient Greeks and Romans have reported fighting Amazon warriors on the northeast coast of the Black Sea. This is where the Soviet archaeologists have discovered the graves of women with armour and weapons of war within them. So it seems from the Soviet finds we can say that the Amazons existed in the places the Greek and Roman historians said they did. Unfortunately the silence by Western archaeologists about their discoveries of female warriors is censoring an important chapter in human history. It seems that after the Goddess civilisations were invaded from the North not all women meekly submitted to this. Some it seems fought back and created Amazon armies and communities. Though it has to be said they were all finally defeated.

This process of censorship is being clearly shown in the archaeology of what is called, “the holy land”. The Bible gives an impression that the people of Israel worshipped Yahweh from the time of Abraham. It even suggests that the people in the Bible before Abraham like Adam, Cain, Able, Noah and Jonah also worshipped a male God. Yet modern scholars have found a hidden Goddess in the Old Testament. It seems there is 40 coded mentions of a Goddess called Asherah.

In support of this, archaeologists have discovered in Israel over 3000 clay figurines of Large Breasted women, some are pregnant and other are nursing children. There is a possibility that more have been found but when excavations are sponsored by Christian sects or Zionist organisations, then images of Goddesses are strangely not discovered. These statues it seems are of the Goddess Asherah, showing that the Children of Israel were worshipping other deities than Yahweh.

In the 1960s a young archaeologist found a inscription that read, “Blessed by Yahweh and his Asherah.” It seems he was too frightened to publish this find until another archaeologist published a similar inscription he had discovered. The reason why he was so reluctant to publish his find is that archaeology has become very political in Israel today. This is because archaeologists are being accused by politicians of undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to own modern Israel. Because the legitimacy of the Jews owning Israel comes from the truth of the Hebrew Bible. Start proving that the Bible is not accurate and it undermines the Israelite’s case.

It seems that Asherah was openly worshipped in Israel up until a series reforms between 721BC and 609BC when by royal command Yahweh became the only God that was allowed to be worshipped. Though in this period some later Kings backtracked on this reform so it seems there was in this period a religious power struggle, that the worshipers of Yahweh finally won. Though the ordinary people were still worshipping Asherah in the privacy of there own homes. As shown in the images archaeologists found in ordinary people’s home after this date. Also in this period the Hebrew Bible was written to create the belief that the Jews had always worshipped Yahweh. This rewriting of history was so successful that people even today are shocked to learn that the Jews once worshipped a Goddess.

The success of the Jewish ruling class in rewriting their own history seems to have inspired other rulers of other nations to follow suit including that of the rulers of the Roman Empire. When the rulers of Rome decided to create a religion to unite the whole of the Roman Empire they chose a Jewish sect called Christianity. They followed up this by destroying all knowledge of ancient history burning down libraries throughout the Roman Empire and attacking educated men and women. The Moslems also done the same thing in adopting their own version of Judaism called Islam and also tried to destroy all ancient knowledge. Yet it seems some ancient knowledge did survive like the legends of a Golden Age of the past.

The Golden age is written about by Hesiod the 8th century BC Greek poet, in which he says.-

“they lived like gods, free from worry and fatigue, old age did not afflict them, they rejoiced in continual festivity.” “ All the blessing of the world were theirs: the fruitful earth gave forth its treasures unbidden.”

The Golden age would probably be before humans began to use agriculture. Now there is some evidence that people then lived better lives. Modern nutritionists are coming to the conclusion that human beings are healthier on what is called, “the Stone-Age diet”. This is because this is what our bodies have been used to over millions of years of evolution. Then came agriculture, which gave us a far greater supply of food, but it also brought about a change in our diet that also brought about diseases caused by dietary deficiencies. The same is true with the modern Western diet today in that we are now eating foods like margarine, refined flour and sugar that are completely new to our bodies. Also it seems we didn’t really benefit from agriculture in the way we should. Because with the increasing food supply the human population became larger and larger, which was all right while they had good harvests. Then suddenly when where there was famine, the population was too large to find food for everyone to eat and there was mass starvation.

Hesiod goes on to talk about the Silver age.

“After the Golden Age came the Silver Age, during which lived a race of feeble and inept men who obeyed their mothers all their lives.”

Clearly he is talking about the Neolithic age confirms this age was ruled by women. Clearly Hesiod had contempt for these men who were dominated by women.

Then there was the Bronze age which he says.-

“The men of the Bronze Age were robust as ash trees and delighted only in oaths and warlike exploits. ‘Their pitiless hearts were as hard as steel, their might was untameable, their arms invincible.”

We now see the rise of the warrior who ruthlessly conquered the peaceful matriarchal world.

After the Bronze Age Hesiod talks about a Heroic age which declines to the Iron Age which is the age that Hesiod lived which he says is a period of misery and crime. “When men respect neither their vows, nor justice, nor virtue”..

Yet the myth of the Golden Age doesn't only come from Ancient Greece. Probably the most ancient religion that survives today is Taoism in China. Again in the Tao-Te-Ching it talks about a Golden age in the past, and the slow deterioration to our present world. We even have a Golden Age Legend in the Bible in the story of the Garden Of Eden that probably came from Mesopotamia. Though the story was rewritten to blame women for the fall from grace and claim it happened as a punishment from God for disobeying him. Hinduism also has a Golden Age myth similar to the Greeks where they write about an eternal cycle of Golden, Silver, Copper and Iron ages. They claim that when our present Iron age finishes, then a new Golden Age will dawn.

Now that archaeologists are unwittingly proving that the ancient Golden Age legends are not myth but historical fact. This could bring about world wide political revolution. For the last five thousand years we have lived in a world of violence that has resulted in wars, conquest and genocide. We also live in a very unfair and uncaring world where the majority of the world’s wealth are in the hands of only 3% of the world’s population. Today in spite of all the advances in modern technology we still live in a world where billions of people live in poverty. Yet world wide the common people are forced to accept this because we are told there is no alternative. We have always lived in an unfair and uncaring world of violence and war and so nothing can change. Yet what archaeologists have been finding over the last 50 years in the earliest civilisations shows us there is an alternative view of our past. Which means that these finds are becoming highly political.

Youtube videos

Signs out of Time, Marija Gimbutas  Part one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozaeuULrLjM

Chapter Six - Why The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Is Not Ruling The world

When Dr Ruth Shady began to make know her findings at Caral the local people were proud that the earliest civilisation found in America was in Peru, but they were also very puzzled. The question that she is frequently asked is: “Why did our ancestors have the capacity to build such an important city, and we live so poorly and don’t have the ability to do similar things?”. The only answer she is able to give is: “the society was organised with a population that worked to do things collectively for the collective good.” (http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0103/p11s1-woam.html Though she didn’t go on to point out that whereas today everyone works for the benefit of the ruling elite who keep the wealth of the country in their own hands.

The Peruvian government is now feeling the political ramifications of these finds. Already they have cut her funding making it very difficult to continue her excavation or preserve what she has already discovered. Universities in USA have offered to fund the site, but their condition is that they themselves will take over the excavation. So it seems there are political moves to sack Dr Ruth Shady and put someone in charge who will toe the political line. Which could mean censorship of what is being discovered.

So it seems ancient discoveries are very political. If it became common knowledge that thousands of years ago people lived in peace and equality, then people world wide will begin to ask the same questions that the Peruvian peasants are asking today. This is turn could create new political and religious movements that will challenge our present ruling elite. Because if in the past we lived in a world of peace and equality then why can’t we do the same today? This is why archaeology today is becoming increasingly political, as it is questioning the way our world has been ruled for the last five thousand years.

The stability of any ruling elite is a belief that life is better now than any time in the past, because if the people are to believe that life in the past was better. It would create great unrest as they will want to recreate the better conditions of the past. So the leaders need to be able to tell the people, “you never had it so good.” This is what the ruling elite have successfully convinced the people over the last couple of thousand years through censorship and destruction of all knowledge of early civilisations. Now this is changing, there is evidence that people in the past where able to live in peace and equality that is unmatched by any country today. Then if this knowledge was to become common knowledge, people will ask why can’t we do the same today? Which could cause a worldwide revolution that could undermine all governments all over the world. It is no wonder there is a attempt to censor all the archaeological finds from the Neolithic age.

As I have pointed out before many Feminist are uncomfortable about the findings of the Neolithic age to the degree that some are as critical of the concept of pre-historic matriarchy as many male chauvinists. Even women like Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas have claimed that the people in the Neolithic age lived in a age of sexually equality. Which is a very politically correct Feminist line.

The problem is that we have no writings from the Neolithic age has been satisfactory translated. So we know nothing about the social system of that era. This means there is not real proof that people then lived in a matriarchy, patriarchy or an equal society. (Though the fact they worshipped Goddesses and lived in a non-violent society is more likely to suggest matriarchy or equality.)

The suggestion of sexual equality in the Neolithic age does present a few problems for men. It means that when women had power they used it to create a equal society. Yet when men later had power they used violence to dominate society and women. This then makes men out to be the “bad-guy”, while women come out of it being paradigms of virtue. So many men would be very resistant to ideas of pre-historic equality, as it puts them into a very bad light. It seems to prove the children’s saying, “What are little boys made of? Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. What are little girls made off? Sugar and spice and All things NICE.” For this reason, many men would prefer the opposite extreme where women did rule men harshly in those days and preferably walked around in black leather and carrying whips in which to beat men.

Another problem with a equal or matriarchal society is how did women prevent men from competing with each other and with women? A clue to this is what I mentioned in the last chapter. If men live in a society without violence and competition then their testosterone levels greatly decrease. So men in these societies would be more amiable then than in the later very brutal patriarchal societies. Problem solved then. Just keep men away from violence and competition and everything will be all right. Except how did it happen that these peaceful non-violent men of the Neolithic age suddenly became the brutal savages of the Bronze and Iron ages?

Marija Gimbutas suggests this happened through invasion. In that violent patriarchal tribes from the North conquered the peaceful matriarchal communities. That doesn’t solve the problem because how did these Northern tribes become violent and patriarchal? A possible explanation is that life in the North was so harsh, it brutalised the men. Raising their testosterone levels and they became violent and competitive with women. Resulting in them dominating women through violence. That explanation sounds reasonable enough but there is another explanation that comes from the myths of Pandora and the story of Adam and Eve.

Pandora was the Ancient Greek’s Eve, in that she was the first women and lived in a Golden Age like that of the Garden of Eden. She was given a jar or box and one day she opened it to find out what was inside. Then from it out come all the plagues of illness, envy, spite and revenge that have been with us ever since. This at first sight seems to be a absurd and fanciful tale and a attempt to blame women for all this ills of the world. Yet if we look at modern research on the Stone and Neolithic ages we find it is a metaphor of what could have happened.

When palaeontologists and archaeologists began to discover the remains of humans during the Stone Age they were surprised to discovered in carved statues and wall paintings there was far more images of women than men. At first they didn’t take the feminine images seriously and female statuettes were routinely discarded as just fertility images or Stone Age pornography. It was only because some people in the art world got interested in these statuettes that we know about them today. As palaeontologists found they had a profitable sideline in selling female statuettes to art dealers.

Yet the surprise of scientists that Stone-Age people seemed to be more interested in making images of women rather than men has a lot to do with the Judeo-Christian attitudes. For the last two thousand years it has been accepted by the main religions of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and to some degree Hinduism that god is a male. We have then been so brainwashed into believing this, that it is hard for us to think of a Creator that is not a male. Including it seems scientists whom many profess to being unbiased and logical atheists.

Yet it was not always like this and from the evidence coming from the Stone and Neolithic Ages, it seems people then naturally assume our Creatix was a women.

When humans first became self aware they began to ask themselves, “what created the world?” It then would be natural for them to assume that the intelligence that created our world would be feminine. Because if we look at animal and human life we find that life is created within the bodies of females. In fact it must have seem to our ancestors that women had great magical powers to create life like this. So it would be logical for them to assume that the whole of creation was born from the body of what they called, “The Great Mother”.

This belief it seems gave women great power and status in human societies, because if the Creatrix was female then all women were created in the image of the Great Mother. This then made women very sacred and holy because it was only women who could create in the same way the Great Mother had done. This is seen clearly in the many images found in Stone Age and Neolithic sites that show images of the sex-act, the genitalia of women represented as V or slit symbols and the very many naked images of women themselves. The picture that comes from these ancient times is that people then regarded the sex-act, menstruation, childbirth and breast-feeding as all being very sacred, because they were all part of the process of creating life.

Some palaeontologists have speculated that people in the Stone Age were unaware that the sex act produced childbirth. So women suddenly producing children would be seen as a wondrous miracle where men had no input. They also went on to imagine that when men realised this role in conception, he no longer worshipped women as magical beings and took over the role of Creator himself. To support this theory we do find in Ancient Egypt that the God Atum created the world in a act of masturbation. The problem is that we do find the sexual act portrayed in Stone-Age art. So the people then, may not be as daft as we assume they might be. Also the input of men in the act of creation can be over in two seconds, (wham, bam, thank you ma’am). Which is not anywhere equal to women carrying a foetus for nine months, the pain and drama of childbirth itself, then the ability of the women to feed the newborn baby from her breasts. Not to mention all the mysteries of menstrual, which was seen as something very holy and sacred in matriarchal societies, and something as unclean and taboo in later patriarchal societies.

So we can see from this that the ancient religion of the Great Mother would be a very feminine religion and empathise the feminine virtues of compassion, caring, nurturing, loving and creativity. This is supported by the fact that in the first civilisations of the Neolithic age, warfare and violence against other people was completely unknown. We only begin to find weapons of war, fortifications and images of violence in the later bronze and iron ages. Where it seems people began to worship male warrior gods.

It seems that men started to began to dominate our world about five thousand years ago through violence and conquest. They then also created male dominated religions that made the Creator a male and claimed that the sexual act; menstruation, childbirth and breast-feeding were all unclean, sinful and taboo. Even today few women dare to breast feed in public. While back in the 1950s and 60s male doctors all but banned breast-feeding claiming that cow’s milk was better for the child! It was only later scientific research showed the obvious fact that that human milk was best for human babies. As it had been discovered that mothers pass on their immunity through the breast milk. Unfortunately there is still resistance because mothers are not encouraged to keep breast-feeding too long, and to switch to cow’s milk as soon as possible. In spite of the fact that the research shows that mothers keep on feeding their immunity to disease to the baby right up to time the baby is weaned.

Some Christian women, even now will after birth still go to priests for a cleansing ritual to clean them of the “sin” of childbirth. Children also go through the cleansing ritual of baptism, which originally was to clean them of the sin of being, “born of women”. So we can see through patriarchal attitudes an attack on the importance of women’s roles. As Feminists have pointed out so often, child rearing is the most devalued work in our society. When some Feminist in the 1960s and 70s suggested that women should be paid to bring up children they were laughed at and ridiculed. After all bringing children and caring for them is clearly not as important as the work of a general who make plans to wipe out whole cities with nuclear weapons, or politicians who tell the public lies, to get votes.

So this is the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal religions. The feminine Goddess religions were about the celebration of whole act of creation from the sexual act to giving birth and breast-feeding. So it empathised the maternal instincts of women of compassion, caring and love. The masculine religions on the other hand have throughout history have been about the glorification of violence. Where religious wars have been commonplace and still go on even today. The irony of this is that in Christianity, Jesus preached love and compassion yet Christianity has been one of the world’s most violence religions, throughout it’s history.

This has been the great tragedy of the last five thousand years. While humans believed that the world was created by the Great Mother, the feminine maternal instincts of compassion, nurturing and love became the ideal for everyone. Then people began to question this belief and accept that our Creator could be male and female. This allowed people to accept masculine principles and instincts of competition and aggression. In time this was allowed to grow until it turned into violence, and conquest. Creating the world we know throughout recorded history of war, oppression, poverty and suffering.

So we see a similar story to that of Pandora’s Box. Some Feminists have commented that because Pandora and Eve are blamed for bringing all the ills into the world these are anti women stories. Yet blame also implies power. Suggesting that in the past women did have power and gave it away.

In societies that worshipped the Great Mother, women would be the superior sex because only women had the magical power to create life. This would then make men the inferior sex who would have no real power or status except to serve women. It then must have occurred to many women that perhaps this was a bit unfair. So we find that the Great Mother then has a son, this son soon becomes the lover or brother of the Great Mother and they became co-creators. This probably reflected on the growing status of men in society as women allowed men to have equal rights.

The anthropologist Eva Meyerowitz discovered the way one African tribe change over from matriarchy to patriarchy. Living in Ghana she got friendly with the Akan people and learnt their history, which she wrote in four books. It seems in the past they were once a matriarchal tribe ruled by a Queen. Then over time some Queens allowed their sons more power to rule men’s affairs. Slowly over time if the son was more assertive than his mother then the son would take more power to himself. While on the other hand if the Queen was more assertive then things stayed as they were. So in this way the power of women in the tribe was slowly eroded over many generations. Then when the British came they only dealt with the men and ignore the Queen and the power of the women. Which confirmed to the men they didn’t need a powerful Queen and she was overthrown in colonial times and all the power given to the King.

In some ways this research confirms the ideas of Steven Goldberg that women are not assertive enough to allow men to slowly take over. Yet women did rule in the past suggesting in this tribe women were once far more assertive in the past than they are now. Suggesting that the patriarchal age came into being not only because of men’s aggression but also of women’s apathy in allowing it to happen. This apathy could only come about through women not realising that men would create a world of conflict and suffering if they ruled the world.

So it is probably true that equal rights between men and women is possible, in the change over from matriarchy to patriarchy. Anthologists have studied Stone-Age culture who have practised this in modern times. Perhaps in a hunter/gather community this wasn’t a problem but in an age of agriculture, it sowed the seeds for its own destruction. People who have become dependants on their crops to feed themselves become very dependant on having a good harvest most years. One bad harvest is not a real problem if grain is saved from previous years. Three or more bad harvests in a row is a real problem and can destroy a civilisation.

In situations of starvation people can become very selfish and violent. Archaeologists have even found cases of cannibalism being practised in very bad drought conditions. Starvation created a true situation of the survival of the fittest. This means that men being bigger, stronger and more aggressive will have a big advantage over women in taking what small amount of food that is left. So men will gain dominance over women through violence. Then once the drought is over it is doubtful if men will give up their dominant position and continue to dominate women.

Now this wouldn’t of happened if women still retained a strong sisterhood. They could of stuck together and ganged up on the men in starvation conditions. Ensuring it was them and their children that was fed first, an example of this was written by Paul Vallely a Christian aid worker.

In visiting many refugee camps he was used to them being taken over by the local alpha males who run them like a Mafia, where food was used to as a weapon to give the alpha males greater power over the population, and if the food aid charities objected, they were threatened with violence. Yet in a place called Tendelti in the Sahara desert he found something different. This was a refugee camp of ten thousand people most of whom were women. (The men had either died in wars or were still fighting wars). The women organised the food aid in a very different way, in that they gave the small amount they received equally to the children. While the adults lived on mokheit and the other scant famine foods in which the desert people turned to at times of desperation. It seems that without alpha men in the camp it greatly increased the survival chances of all the people within it.

The above shows what women can do if they organise themselves into a strong sisterhood. They will put the welfare of the children first and try to share what food they have fairly. Unfortunately if the sisterhood is broken down through patriarchy or equality, women then become very vulnerable to the violence and dominance of men.

The story of Pandora’s box and Adam and Eve suggest that once women were the dominant sex and people then lived in a non-violent Golden age and later Silver age. Then women decided that making men the inferior sex was unfair. This is represented by Pandora opening the box or Eve tempting Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. The very act of doing this suggests that Eve was in charge.

Unfortunately in giving men equality resulted in him eventually becoming competitive with women and dominating society through violence. This resulted in our present world of violence, injustice and poverty. As the Bible points out this was a tragedy for both men and women as Adam found that outside the Garden of Eden were he had to, “work by the sweat of this brow”. In other words in a masculine world of winners and losers there are few winners and many losers. So the losers in a patriarchal society which includes both men and women found themselves having to work, not only to support themselves, but the ruling and warrior classes and the patriarchal priesthood.

The problem is that whatever theory you subscribe to does seem that women will always have problems in the long run in trying to tame men. If women are able to create a society where violence and competition is unknown and it brings down the testosterone levels of men. Or they convince men that the Creatrix is a woman and so all are Goddesses in the same mould. It doesn’t always mean that men will always be like this. There is always a chance that a natural disaster may happen and in the fight for survival, men’s testosterone levels may rise again.

While men are naturally aggressive and competitive there is always the chance that this aggression will break out into violence and brutality. So is that it? Does it mean that although women can tame men, in the end men’s instinctive competitiveness will break through and we will be back to the violent world we have seen over the last five thousand years.

The question is, is it natural and normal for men to be violent and brutal? The evidence from the whole of recorded history, with its countless wars, genocide and torture and would be a resounding “Yes”. Yet five thousand years is a very small period in the four million years humans have lived on the Earth. Were men always very brutal and violent during that period? Most palaeontologists would probably say, “yes” to this as well. Unfortunately most palaeontologists are men and seem to be very chauvinistic men at that. So we will have to accept some bias in this assumption. There is another way to look at our early ancestors that shows us in a completely different light.

Recently I learnt of surprising statistic. It seem that of all the British soldiers that experienced military action during the Falklands War, more of them have since committed suicide, than died during the conflict. There is an even more shocking statistic about the Vietnam War. Where THREE TIMES as many ex-soldiers that saw action, have since committed suicide, than died in the war. Though this figure is hotly disputed there is still an agreement that it is still a very large number. So if men do get very traumatised by war where many kill themselves afterwards. It begs the question, if war and violence is normal and natural for men? It is true some individual men enjoy war and enjoy killing as we see in the case of serial killers. Though there is still a high suicide rate in men who have committed multiple murders. So it seems that men can be made into killers through brutalisation, but do they really want to be like this?

If killing traumatises men, it also begs the question whether all the wars and massacres we see in history is also normal and natural for men. As previously pointed out the Japanese military had to brutalise their troops in the Second World War to turn them into trained killers. The German army also brutalised their young men in the same war, to again make it possible for them to kill without mercy.

So we are back to the nature verse nurture debate. Is violence and male dominance over women only possible by the brutalisation of men? Or is it “all in the jeans” and men are naturally programmed by their genes to be violent and dominant over women? I would personally think it was the third option and that it is a bit of both. We can see clearly that if you brutalise men that will become violent and will dominate others less violent then themselves, like women. So men do have this potential, which is probably programmed in his genes, but without this brutalisation it seem that men are not naturally violent. Nor do they naturally dominate women. As we can see today in Western societies where men are less brutalised then they were in the past, and seem far less inclined to commit violence on women.

So was this true in the Stone Age, which makes up 95% of human existence? Were men violent brutes then, or were they able to live lives of peace and harmony in those days. We cannot know because we have no written record of those times, but their is evidence coming from the behaviour of one ape that throw a very different light on the behaviour of early humans.

Since Darwin, it has been accepted that humans have evolved from apes. The general public know about four different species of ape, Orang-utan, Gorilla, chimpanzee and Gibbon. You will see all these apes featured on wild life programmes on TV. Yet there is one other ape that doesn’t get the same coverage, and that is the bonobo. Along with the chimpanzee this ape, the closest species to us. So we can learn a lot about our ancestors by examining the behaviour of both apes. Interestingly people are comfortable with the behaviour of chimpanzee because the males are very violent and brutal. (Just ordinary, good o’ macho males) Yet they are not so comfortable about the behaviour of bonobos and this is because they are the, “the make love not war, ape.”

Chapter Seven - Make Love Not War

The bonobo was first discovered by Europeans in 1929 and was considered then to be only a subspecies of the chimpanzees. More recent research has shown it to be very different from the chimpanzee. Being more lightly built and having longer legs, it has the body structure more like a human than any other ape. But the main difference is in the way it behaves, which is very human.

Back in the 1960s professor Leakey in trying to understand how early humans behaved decided that a insight in this could be gained by observing different species of apes in the wild. He decided that women were better observers than men, so he used women like Jane Goodall observing chimpanzees Diane Fossey studying Gorillas. The result of this brought about a revolution in the study of apes, and many new things were discovered. Like chimpanzees were able to make tools, as up until then scientists believed that only humans could do this. Also it was discovered that gorillas were gentle and peaceful creatures, as it was formerly believed that gorillas were dangerous and aggressive animals. All the other apes were observed in the same way, with the bonobo being only intensely observed in very recent times.

One of the first surprises about this ape is that it is very sexual in its behaviour. Like the human female the bonobo female can still have sex even when her body is not ready for fertilization. It also indulges in homosexual sexual behaviour with both sexes doing this and can copulate face to face. (Though the orangutan has also been observed to do this as well).

In many other animals and apes aggression between males and against females is quite common. Most animals overcome this aggression by having a strict hierarchical system where everyone knows its place. With the animals with lesser social status giving way to those with higher status. The animal's place in the system is controlled by its strength and aggression. So fights only break out when a animal of lesser status wants to achieve higher status in the pecking order.

The bonobo does have a similar system but aggressive behaviour between them is far less than other animals because of the way they use sex. In a article by Frans B. M. de Waal, it compares the different behaviour of chimpanzees and bonobos when two females and a male come across some food. In the case of the chimpanzees the food was bananas. Their behaviour was very straight forward the male chimpanzee fed first until he had enough and he then took away as many bananas as he could carry. Then the dominant female fed herself, and the subordinate female it seems got nothing. In the case of the bonobos it was sugar cane, and their behaviour was more complex. The two female started by indulging in sex by rubbing their genitals together. While the male bonobo displays his erect penis to them, but they ignore him. Then the two female fed together equally and only when they had finish was the male allowed to feed.

This is it seems is normal bonobo behaviour where there is a possibility of a dispute, the first thing they do is to have sex together which seems to defuse the situation. In this situation the natural aggression of the male seems to work against the male bonobo in contrast to the way it helps the male chimpanzees. As the female bonobos are less aggressive it is easier for them to bond with each other, which they reinforce through sexual play. It then makes it easier for them to gang up on males, who although do also bond together through sex, are still more aggressive towards each other. This makes them less able to co-operate and work together in the way the females can. Which suggests that the bonobo could also be called, “The Sisterhood Is Powerful” ape.

As the bonobo males are bigger than the females they stand a better chance in a one to one situation but even here they can lose out. In a conflict say over food, the female will immediately have sex with the male, the sexual bonding defuses the natural aggression of the male and they will share the food equally. It also has been observed of a male who had found a large fruit and a female immediately had sex with him and he afterwards gave her his fruit. Which seems to be the first case observed in the animal world of prostitution. Female bonobos will also encourage males to help in looking after their children in return for sexual favours. Which also sounds very much like human behaviour.

So this it seems is how the slogan "make love not war" can work in practice, by having disputes settled by sexual bonding. Comparing the bonobo’s behaviour with that of the chimpanzees’ can assess how effective this is. Both animals share 98% of the genetic makeup of a human and we were all the same animal as little as eight million years ago. In fact of the body structure of the bonobo looks very similar to that of a australopithecine, a early pre-human with similar length arms and legs. From this it is speculated that the bonobo is more similar to our common ancestor than either the chimpanzee or the human. With the human later growing longer legs and a more upright stance while the chimpanzee growing longer and stronger arms to climb trees. As our body is shaped by our behaviour over evolutionary time, it is reasonable to suggest that how the bonobo behaves today is more like how our common ancestor behaved in the past.

The behaviour of the chimpanzees is of the traditional patriarchal society. Chimpanzees only have sex to fertilise the females when they are on heat. This is the ideal of the patriarchal Christian Church who has tried to enforce this type of behaviour for hundreds of years. Claiming that sex only for the sake of pleasure is "sinful" and should only be used for conception. So it is strange that the Christian Church has never held up the chimpanzee as a ideal of moral virtue!

Chimpanzees tend to bond through fear and mutual protection, with a group of males holding on to a territory against other groups of males. There seems to be sometimes war between these different groups over land, resulting in males getting badly injured or even killed. The effect of this is there is always more females in a community than males as so many males get killed through violence. As the males have to stick together to fight off the territorial ambitions of other groups of male, they bond closer together than the females. Males not only show aggression to other groups of males but to each other, as they will charge each other or show off their strength to try and intimidate each other to gain more status in the pecking order. Aggression is also shown towards females who being smaller than males have to give way to them in all disputes.

In contrast the bonobo society nearly all aggression is defused through sexual bonding. It has been observed in zoos that if say a cardboard box is thrown into the enclosure and more than one bonobo shows interest in it. They will then briefly mount each other before playing with the box together. Or if one jealous male chases away another male near a female. The two males will then reconcile with each other by engaging in scrotal rubbing together. The same will be true if two adult females have a dispute over the behaviour of one of their children. They will reconcile by rubbing their genitals together. Male bonobos rarely fight each other over status. A male bonobo stays attached to his mother all his life and his status in society depends on the status of his mother, whom he will look to for protection from any aggression from other bonobos. Even though she may be smaller than him in size.

In human behavioural studies it has been noted that people who live in very stressful situations like extreme poverty, war, prison, an aggressive family or neighbourhood, tend to become very desensitised and so they are far less affected by fear and pain. In Hellabrun, Germany, in the World War Two there was a zoo, which housed both chimpanzees and bonobos. One night the city was bombed and the bonobos died of fright from the noise while the chimpanzees were completely unaffected. Demonstrating how desensitised chimpanzees have become living in their brutal patriarchal society, and how sensitive bonobos are, living in a more peaceful matriarchal world.

Apart from the fact that chimpanzees do not get married or "pair-bond". Its society is very much like a normal human patriarchal society. And until bonobo behaviour was studied properly, chimpanzee behaviour justified the patriarchal society as being "natural" for humans. So it is of interest that when primatologists first started to study bonobos in zoos during the 1950s the first findings were completely ignored by the scientific establishment until the 1970s. Even today most people are unaware of the behaviour of the bonobo or even that such a creature exists. The reason for this silence is because the bonobo's behaviour undermined all our patriarchal beliefs about human and pre-human behaviour.

If the bonobo is a very sexual ape than it has to be said that so is the human. Though chimpanzees only partake in basic reproductive sex, bonobos share all kinds of sexual pleasures, including cunnilingus, fellatio, masturbation, massage, bisexuality, incest, body-licking, sex in different positions, group sex, and French kissing. Also like humans in love, copulating bonobos often look deeply into each other’s eyes.

Although patriarchal societies have attempted to enforce sexual relations in the confines of marriage, many human have always had urges to want more than this. So in all patriarchal societies none have been able to prevent prostitution. While in secret and sometimes quite openly both men and women have had relationships outside of marriage. In very recent times with the decline of the patriarchal society, marriage is breaking down in Western countries. Which has resulted in many people frequently changing sexual partners, having "one night stands", joining sex-clubs, going to sex-parties, advertising for sex in contact magazines or having “open” relationships. So why do many people have the urge to have sex with many different partners? To the degree that the patriarchal society with all its laws, religious and social censure fail to stamp this behaviour out. The only reason could be is that before the patriarchal society took control with all it laws to restricting people's behaviour. People’s behaviour must of been very similar to that of the bonobo.

Bonobos like humans also tend to eat food in the company of other bonobos in big dinner parties. It seems that when fruit is in abundance bonobos will collect the fruit for a large community feast. Then will eat it together, in a big banquet after the high status females have eaten first. This is very unlike the chimpanzees that will generally hide food from others and eat alone. Another interesting point is that human couples have romantic evenings together. This involves sharing a meal together, either at a restaurant or sometimes at home, then having sex together. Which is also what bonobos couples do, though they tend to have sex before the meal and not afterwards.

It is well know that many couples when they have a "flaming row", they will afterwards "make up" by having sex together. To the degree that some couples claim that they enjoy a turbulent relationship because they greatly enjoy the making up afterwards. This then is similar to bonobo behaviour of using sex to defuse a conflict.

So like the bonobos, humans do associate conflict and food with sex. In times of war it used to be that when a conquering army takes a town or city, all the women and even sometimes the men are raped. This behaviour is generally seen as an expression of power over conquered people. Which is probably true but looking at bonobo behaviour their could be another reason for this. Perhaps it is a form of unconscious reconciliation by rape. Soldiers in warfare can become through extreme fear, very aggressive in battle. Even disciplined troops have been known to slaughter defenceless civilian populations after a battle, because of this fear induced aggression. So rape may defuse this situation, making possible for the soldiers to calm down and prevent a killing spree.

In the past when people used to worship Goddesses which is a indication of a matriarchal religion. The later patriarchal priests condemned the priestess of Goddess temples as being prostitutes. When the Romans first conquered Britain many of the Celtic tribes were still ruled by Queens. Their behaviour was seen as being very scandalous by later writers, as some of these Queens would openly have sex with large numbers of different men. So it does suggest that the old matriarchal societies were far more sexual than the later patriarchal societies. Which does suggest that a matriarchal society could perhaps be as sexual as a bonobo society. With people bonding together through sexual behaviour, allowing people to be more intimate with each other. Which will in turn will create a more intimate, caring and loving community.

War has been "normal" throughout recorded history, where there has never been a time when there hasn't been a war going on in some part of the world. Many people have written about the senseless suffering of war, and have looked unsuccessfully for ways to prevent future wars. The study of both the chimpanzee and bonobo societies shows there is a alternative to war. In the non-sexual chimpanzee society, conflict and war is normal. In the very sexual bonobo society conflict is rare. So because of the study of these different ape societies we find that the slogan "make love not war" is not a joke but does in fact work.

It is of interest that Frans de Waal who has written books and articles about the bonobo was criticised by Dawkins for “bad science”. Which is understandable because observations on the bonobo undermine completely his belief that we are all basically selfish. Perhaps it would be “good science” to ignore the bonobo completely and only concentrate on the chimpanzee. It is of interest that Dawkins also criticises the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her crime being that she observed human nature in a positive light. Also the fact that she was both a famous scientist and a feminist at the same time upset many of her male colleges.

It then means we humans have a choice. As pointed out previously both the chimpanzee and bonobo are the closest species to us, and we can clearly see similarities in their behaviour to ours. The behaviour of the chimpanzee is very similar to a patriarchal society in that it is very violence and relatively non-sexual.

In contrast the bonobo live in a very sexual world where both males and females bond together through many different forms of sexual play. So it means we all get to be laid and with multiple partners and can experiment with heterosexual and homosexual sex play. We even would get to try things that are considered to be kinky. The bonus is that by bonding through sex we won’t have to fight wars any more. Is it that easy? Well probably not, as human society is far more complex than that of the bonobo.

Yet we can see many similarities with bonobo society.

1. Over the last hundred years in the West women have gained equal opportunity, and guess what? As women have gain more status, power and freedom, our society has become more sexually liberated at the same time. Is that a coincidence?

2. Patriarchal societies create oppressive laws and customs not only to restrict women’s freedoms but also women’s sexuality. In fact patriarchal Christians have declared that sex is dirty and sinful and can only be used for reproduction. Which is what chimpanzee do.

3. Goddess religions in the past were called an abomination by patriarchal priests because they openly used sexual rituals. Goddess priestesses were condemned by patriarchal priests as temple prostitutes. Was this just sour grapes by patriarchal priests because they weren’t getting laid? Or had they worked out the connection between sex and intimacy versus war and sexual frustration. It is of interest that even today many sportsmen will not have sex before an important sporting event because they believe sex will weaken them. Doctors claim that this is a myth because sex only weakens a person temporary. So having sex the night before is not going to affect any sportsman physically. Yet coaches ignore this advice, so perhaps sex will lessen men’s aggression and this is why it will weaken men. Some coaches have even banned wives and girlfriends when going to sporting events in other countries. Does this suggest that even the presents of girlfriends and wives undermine the sportsmen’s aggression?

4. In the Neolithic age we find many images of sexual expression as we find the presents of Goddess worship and non-violence. Is this just another coincidence?

5 The famous psychiatrist Sigmaund Freud discovered at the beginning of the 20th century that most of his patients were suffering from mental illness because of sexual repression. So it seems that suppression of sexual desire can not only make men violent but also it can cause female hysteria.

This concept was taken even further by the controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who has been dubbed, “A scientist with attitude” He was originally a disciple of Freud but Reich took Freud’s theories to the extreme, claiming that our whole society was insane because of sexual repression. This was a step too far for Freud whom was very aware that his theories were controversial enough already. He wanted social acceptance and scientific respectability for them and didn’t want to alienate everyone by taking it too far. This wasn’t a consideration for Reich who was willing to, “rush in where angels fear to tread”.

He created a storm in Austria in the 1930s by trying to encourage young girls to have sex before marriage and teach them about contraception. This in a society that then rigidly believed that it was a sin and a social disgrace for a woman to have sex before of marriage. He was forced to leave Austria and went to Germany in 1933, where he wrote a book called The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, which linked fascism with sexual repression and insanity. Which didn’t exactly go down a storm with the Nazi party and he had to flee Germany in disguise. He then went to Copenhagen and managed to upset the Danish Communist Party and other left wing intellectuals. (They claimed that his book The Mass Psychology Of Fascism was counter-revolutionary). The Danish government had him thrown out of the country and about the same time, the Congress of Psycho-analysis, also expelled him for his views and opinions. He ended up in USA where he continued to make waves and upset people. Then after the Second World War he was sent to prison where he died and the FBI destroyed his papers and laboratories. To make enemies of the Nazis, the Communists and USA authorities, is quite a feat, and he probably died in prison wondering, “was it something I said?”

The irony is that he was put into prison by a country that proclaimed freedom of speech. All right, he clearly didn’t read the book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, and some of his theories and research was very wild and controversial.. Yet why did the authorities need to destroy all his research papers and try to burn all the books he had published? After all he had lost all scientific credibility by chasing UFOs in the Arizona desert, and trying to shoot them down with something called a cloudbuster. All right, perhaps he did go potty towards the end of this life. Yet his earlier work was just a logical extension of Freud’s work. Saying what Freud dare not say, for fear of upsetting too many people. What probably upset the authorities so much was the fact that Reich was brave or foolhardy enough to claim that the whole of our society was insane because of sexual repression. Which although sounds like a extreme position, is valid when we realise that the whole of human kind became very close to committing global suicide during the Cold War. We must remember that USA was gripped by the McCarthyism at the time Reich was put into jail. So the last thing the authorities at the time would want is a psychiatrist claiming that they were paranoia in wanting to persecute communists. More so if he was to comparing them to Nazis in the way they persecuted people.

Oppression, genocide, war and male violence in general is justified through the concept of good and evil. The concept is one of the biggest con tricks ever invented. This can be illustrated by a story about an encounter between Lady Astor and Joseph Stalin. Before the Second World War Lady Astor was a member of a party of British MPs who visited the Soviet Union and were made guests Stalin. Lady Astor being a very out spoken woman verbally attacked Stalin for the millions of peasants that had died, because of his policies of the collectivisation of agriculture and forced industrialisation. He listened to her patiently and then explained that it was very unfortunately that all these people died, but it was needed if the Soviet Union was to become an industrial country and was able to efficiently feed itself in the future. He clearly didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing, and believed it was necessary to make the Soviet Union a modern prosperous country.

The point is that to many people Joseph Stalin was one of the most evil men in history. Yet he didn’t see himself like this. He honestly saw himself as a good man who was attempting to do the best for his country. Likewise the same can be said of even worse tyrants like Hitler and Po-Pot the Cambodia dictator. Hitler felt justified in the genocide of the Jews and Slavs because in his mind they were a evil and inferior race. This means that in his mind he was a good person, fighting what HE had decided was evil. The same is true of Po-Pot who slaughtered millions of his own countrymen and women who didn’t share his ideal of a perfect society. What is clear is that all these men believed very strongly that, “the ends justified the means”. So in their minds war, violence, torture and genocide were all acceptable in creating, what they believed was a better future for their countries.

I remembered once reading about a prison governor who relating his long experiences dealing with prisoners explained the surprising fact, that most criminals see themselves as good people. It seems that criminals tend to blame society, the police or the system for their crimes. To be fair, there is some justification for this, as the majority of criminals come from the poorest and least educated sections of society.

This then means that if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys. We find it is very much a matter of opinion who is who. For instance in the conflict in Northern Ireland the Roman Catholic assume it is the Protestant para-militaries and the police who are the bad guys. While the Protestants assume it is the IRA. With both sides claiming that the other side are the evil and they off coarse are the good guys. It makes peace talks between the two sides very difficult, if not impossible. The IRA and the Protestant terrorist groups are also in a strange collusion, because they are justified in their existence and actions by the behaviour of the other side. As both sides can point to the atrocities done by the other side to give credence to their violent behaviour. This keeps a cycle of violence going in perpetually.

This is true for every war ever fought. With both sides claiming that they are the good guys while the other side is off coarse evil. This was brought out in the open in the Xmas of 1914 during the First World War. The British and Germans in the trenches began singing Christmas carols with each other, and then calling out to each other over no-mans-land. In the end some soldiers came out trenches and began to talk with each other and organising football matches against each other. When they began to talk British and German soldiers ask each other.-

“What are you fighting for?”

“For freedom and my country,” came the replied, “what are you fighting for?”

“The same.”

Exchanges like this caused many of the soldiers to ask the obvious question,

“Why are we fighting each other?”

Unfortunately no one came up with a sensible answer to this question. The incident greatly worried the politicians and military leaders on both sides as it threatened to turn the whole war into a farce. (Which is what war is, although it is a very tragic farce). In the end “normality” was restored and both sides went back to murdering each other. The problem this highlights is that war is easy if you believe the people you are fighting are bad or evil. Once you realise they are just human being like yourself, then this greatly undermines the moral justification for wanting to kill them.

The result of condemning someone as evil is that it de-humanises them. Once it has been agreed that someone is evil then it becomes acceptable to hurt, torture and kill them. For instance the justification of Europeans to massacre and steal the land of the native people in the Americas and Australia was that they were “savages”. Which is just another de-humanising word like bad and evil.

In many action and adventure films, books and TV programmes the concept of good and evil comes across very strongly. A villain is established; who behaves in an appalling manner and this gives the hero the justification to commit violence and murder on the villain. Some commentators claim that these stories are just harmless fun. Yet as any advertising executive knows, people are greatly influenced by what entertains them. So in the end it becomes just another way to indoctrinate people, that hate and violence is perfectly justified.

Even intelligent and academic people can be seduced by the concept of good and evil as in the case of the Christian author and academic C.S Lewis. He wrote a trilogy of Science Fiction books to explore religious themes. I read the first one, Out of the Silent Planet and I thought it was very good book but the second one Journey To Venus shocked and horrified me. In it, he had a hero and a villain travel to Venus, where they find a Garden of Eden complete with a Venusian Adam and Eve. (This was written before and spacecraft flew to Vesus, to show what a inhospitable planet it is.) Both men then set about influencing this couple’s beliefs. Initially, the villain was successful; the Venusians listened to him more than they did the hero. Eventually the hero became desperate, believing there was nothing but misery for the Venusians if they followed the villain’s ideas. His solution was to beat the villain to death with a rock. The logic being that his actions were justified because the man was evil. Yet it was an appalling message to give to the Venusians, if you can’t win an argument, kill your opponent! C. S. Lewis was a respected academic. He wrote children’s books, which are still hugely popular, and a number of books on religion, as well as his novels. Yet it’s clear that illusions about good and evil were able to blind even an intelligent man like him.

The concept of good and evil also prevents us from solving problems like crime. The “macho” solution to crime is that when you catch a criminal you then punish him. (it is far more likely to be a him than a her). Yet prisons are known and the “university of crime”, in that they are more likely to confirm a man into a life of crime than cure him. This happens for four reasons.

1. In going to prison a criminal gets to mix with other criminals where he learns better ways to rob and steal from other prisoners. He also gets to make criminal contacts, which he will probably use once he is released.

2. In mixing with other criminals he gets to believe that crime is a ‘normal’ way of life for him.

3 Once a man has a criminal record it is much harder for him to get a legal job. So he is more likely to drift back to a life of crime even if he has intentions of going straight.

4 Although in theory criminals are not longer punished. Being put into a over crowed prison can be hell, which results in criminals becoming brutalised. So they learn to hate the society that put him into prison. Teaching a man to hate society and then releasing him back into the community, is not a good idea.

Prison should be about rehabilitation. This has been put forward as early as the 19th century but even now in the 20th century many politicians and prison governors still only pay lip service to this concept. In many Western countries today prisoners are still not properly educated and get no support or help to become productive members of the community.

Although it is natural for people to want to punish criminals more so if you are personally a victim of crime. Revenge is certainly not the answer and it only makes a bad situation even worse. This is clearly illustrated by happened in Tihar jail in India.

In the 1980s Kiran Bedi was a very successful female tennis star, but she then abandoned her jet-set life to become the first female officer in the Indian police force. She rose swiftly through the ranks and her success made her enemies of some of her superiors, who firmly believed that a women’s place was in the home. So to bring her down a peg or two they gave her the poison chalice, of one of the toughest jobs imaginable. They made her the governor of Tihar jail.

To quote, -

Tihar Jail in New Delhi is the size of a small town. It was designed to hold three thousand people. Instead, it holds ten thousand men, women and children. The desolation of the surroundings reflects the dire poverty of the inmates. There are no means of occupation, education or recreation, and the prison is a breeding ground for the very crimes it was designed to punish. Drugs are endemic, prostitution flourishes, corruption breeds and violence and fear lurk in every corner. Remand prisoners, including women with their children, can languish here for up to ten years before their cases come to trial, sharing overcrowded cells with petty thieves, murders and addicts. Under a succession of male governors, mob management barely maintains the status quo, and the problems are more than the staff can handle. Inmates are sometimes shot at random by prison officers out of control.

So in July 1993 this small Indian woman stepped into the hell of Tihar prison. Yet she had the self-confidence to adopt a very feminine strategy to govern the prison and quickly changed everything.

She fired the worst prison officers, then began a radical restructure of the prisoners day. She introduced a complaint box for inmates to air their grievances. She initiated drug rehabilitation, health care, yoga therapy, prayer meetings, music, arts and crafts sessions, adult literacy and physical fitness programmes. Idleness was banished, every hour of the day was positively accounted for, and she achieved this by motivation and encouragement, not by the ‘compelling force of law’…To men and women used to the rule of the stick and the gun, the arrival of Kiran Bedi was like a gift from the Gods.

She even called in a famous guru S.N. Goenka to teach the prisoners meditation.

The authorities who appointed Kiran Bedi in the expectation of destroying her saw her turn every obstacle to her advantage, winning the trust, respect - and love - of both prisoners and officers. She was given the Magsaysay award for public service, and although her time at Tiher was short-lived, the changes she instituted had a lasting effect. Prisoners who leave the jail do not usually return.

Punishing prisoners is the masculine solution to crime while rehabilitation is the feminine way. In the West both methods are used. With politicians and newspaper owners trying to whip up hatred by the general public against prisoners. So they can once again use the masculine methods to brutalise prisoners. Although in theory politicians claim that prison is for rehabilitation, they tend to starve the prison service of money so prisons are vastly overcrowd and don’t have the staff or resources to rehabilitate the prisoners properly. This has resulted in Britain in recent years of some prisoners being locked up 23 hours of 24 hours in a day.

Yet the ideas of reforming prisoners instead of punishing them goes back to the early 19th century.

Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) came from a wealthy Quaker family, and enjoyed the benefits of a very academic education, which was unusual for women of those days. In 1812 she began to take a interest in the plight of prisoners and visited London's Newgate prison for women and was appalled at what she saw there. Prisoners were crowded into single cells where they had to eat, sleep and defecate. Typically a woman's children would accompany her to prison, where they lived in destitute poverty, obtained clothes, alcohol, even food by begging or stealing. To tolerate this hell many prisoners only begged for alcohol and sat around in a drunken stupor stark naked.

Other prisoners who were unable to beg or cared for by families or charities simply starved to death. Children often remained in the prison until their mothers died or were executed. They clung to their mothers and watched as they were led to the gallows and hung.

The attitude at the time that prisons were places of punishment and that the inmates were evil, so this perfectly justified this appalling treatment. Elizabeth Fry didn’t see it like this and set about using all the influence of her position of wealth and privilege gave her.

She started by providing basic food, clothing and medicine for the prisoners. She then turned to education, ministering to the prisoners and establishing a small school. Recognising that occupation was essential to self-esteem and dignity, she convinced the wardens that the school should be run by the prisoners themselves. She also provided materials allowing the women to sew, knit and make goods for sale, in order to buy food, clothing and fresh straw for bedding. In 1817 she enlisted the help of ten friends to form the Ladies' Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate.

Somehow her work did prick the conscience of the nation. She soon found herself in the role of a prisoner adviser and was invited to other prisons to advice on measures for improvements. She was also asked to give evidence on prison reform before a Committee of the House of Commons in which she advocated compassionate treatment of prisoners. It says something for her personality that in a age when women were suppose to keep quiet, her views and opinions were listened to and some of them became in time encoded in the laws of England.

She was even invited to Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Prussia to give advice to prison officials and reformers in these countries. Her work planted the seeds that prisons are place for reforming and not punishment.

Her ideas were tried out by a prisoner governor called Alexander Maconochie on Norfolk island in 1840-44. Norfolk island, which was halfway between Australia and New Zealand, was in many ways the British version of the more infamous French, Devil’s Island. Where the prisoners were kept in harsh and degrading conditions to punish them for their crimes. Maconochie instead bravely tried reforming prisoners instead of punishing them.

After receiving contradictory stories about his reforms the authorities sent out a commission. His report was very favourable but Maconochie was still dismissed by a new Colonial Secretary. Yet his success can be measured by the fact that of 920 prisoners he released only 20 were re-convicted.

Back in Britain he was to obtain support from many people including Charles Dickens and became a very controversial figure. Because then people believe in a evil criminal class, the idea that criminals can be reformed undermines the concept of evil and the justification of punishment. Also it makes people also ask questions like, “why are people criminals”. If we ask questions like this, then we have to look at the unfair hierarchical system that gives some people great wealth, power and privilege and others only poverty and brutality, because the overwhelming numbers of criminals come for the poor and unprivileged sections of society. So it is not surprising that most, “good” people come from the upper and middle classes and most “bad” people come from the working classes. (The word villain come from the middle ages and originally meant villager. So this word gives an insight about what the upper classes then felt about the common people).

This then is adding insult to injury. Not only do he rich and powerful keep the vast majority of wealth and power in their own hands. On top of this, they condemn the poor as being bad and evil, while they of coarse are good people.

Punishment and vengeance are the masculine solutions to problems. That is to say you overcome violence with violence. In other words, “two wrongs make a right”. In this situation the person with the biggest stick wins. Yet violence has another side to it in that it ensures that men have dominance over women.

Aggression, competition and violence are the ways that men can always get the upper hand over women, whereas a non-violence and non-competitive community gives all the advantages to women. This has been clearly shown in primate studies.

In many species of primates like chimpanzees, orang-utans and hamadryas baboons male violence against females is commonplace. A female can expect an assault from the larger males on average once a week and can be seriously injured about once a year from these assaults. Observations of these assaults suggest that males do this to gain sexual access. This behaviour is very similar to that observed of men in badly run prisons. If a naïve and attractive looking young man is put into prison he will find himself being assaulted by older prisoners, who want to have sex with him. If caught on his own in a group he may find himself being raped. He quickly learns from this he has two choices. He can continue to be assaulted and raped, or if he wants to stop this he has to align himself with a protector. This would be a bullyboy or alpha man in the prison who will give the young man protection in return for sexual access. It was from this form of relationship the contemptuous expression “sucker” or “bum” come from, in referring to people at the bottom of the pecking order. It is also the origins of the sayings like, “get your arse (ass) over here”, or “get your arse into gear”, which are very dominant assertions to man about to be buggered. There is nothing about consent or consideration of other people’s feelings in any of these sayings. The passive male’s response about this form of relationship is the statement, “your just a pain in the arse”(to me).

This expression is similar to, “your a right pain in the neck” in reference to someone who is too demanding. A way a person can get a neck ache is through giving cunnilingus. (This happens because to lick a women’s clitoris while she is lying on her back, the man is forced to hold his head back. If this goes on for too long he can get a neck ache). So a man could say that about a women who is too demanding in wanting him to give her long sessions of oral sex. Now this is unlikely to become a common saying in patriarchal times. So it must be a very ancient, going back to a time when women were the dominant sex.

In primate behaviour we can see a strong connection between sex and power. In many primate species, when two male confront each other and one back down he turn his back and allows the winner to demonstrate his superiority by mounting him. Which is also the behaviour of homosexual men in that the man who “takes it up the arse” is seen as the submissive member of the relationship. In Japanese macaque monkeys females have been observed to mount males and rub themselves against the male. As the female is the dominant sex in this species it is a demonstration of the dominance of the female. Again we can see similar behaviour in human beings. In the dominatrix scene some of them wear strap-on dildos and bugger their clients. Who are willing to pay for this privilege.

Male violence takes away the female’s right to choose who which males she wants to mate with, in any species where males fight among themselves for the right to mate. The strongest male also uses violence against females to keep them under his control. So violence becomes a way of keeping women, “in their place”.

We can see this pattern in human traditional patriarchal societies where husbands are encouraged to assault their wives. In many Islam countries they claim that a man has no “honour” if he doesn’t exercise his right to beat his wife. This custom also give him the right to have sex or rape his wife whenever he wants to without contraception, and so taking away the women’s right to refuse to have children.

Also in these societies boys are also beaten, the idea being to “toughen them up”. Child abuse is needed to make “real men” out of boys. The way it works is that if a child is abuse enough then they only way he can cope with it is to learn not to feel anything. This then makes him not only unaware of his own pain but the pain of others. In fact more than that it teaches him to hate, so he can become a “good” soldier and kill without pity, and become a “good” father and husband and in turn beat his wife and children without mercy.

Yet not all primates are like this. Many species are female dominated like the bonobo ape, Vervet monkeys, macaques, olive baboons, patas, rhesus monkeys, grey langus, capuchins, prosimians and Lemus. In all these species the females form a powerful sisterhood, where if one female is assaulted or intimidated by a larger male, then all the females in the area will be quick to defend their sisters and drive the male away. The exception is the Lemus were female dominance seemed to be bred within the species.

So these studies show that in all primates including humans male dominance over females is only possible through male violence. While female dominance came about through a powerful sisterhood. So it seems from primate studies we have we have two choices.

1. We can behave like chimpanzees, and live in a violent; male dominated, and sexually repressed society.

2. We can behave like bonobos and live in a non-violent, female dominated and sexually liberated societies were anything goes.

So which type of society is natural for human beings? It could be that both types of societies are natural for us as we can partly see in the work of Desmond Morris. Whom has attempted to examine human behaviour from the point of view of a zoologist.