[Editor’s Note: The following discussion took place in response to an article listed blow by the members of The Mago Cirlce, Facebook group of Goddessians/Magoists from May 6 to May 10, 2016. Readers are recommended to read the original article linked below that has invoked the converation.]
Alaya Dannu So, how did humans arise in Africa to begin with? That’s my question, perhaps a question everyone has, where there are a variety of answers. And yes, I too firmly believe everything began as female based. Even the mythologies of the well famed advanced civilizations, I believe we’re initially female based and then were modified, changed, distorted to fit what we now have today.
Morgaine, here is a link to begin from: In the late 1700s, European identity was shaken when scholars discovered that Sanskrit was closely related to the European languages, though much older and more sophisticated. At first, this discovery fed European Romantic imagination, in which India was glorified as the perfect past. Herder, a German Romanticist, saw Europe’s “discovery” of India as a “re-discovery” of its own foundation. India was viewed as Europe’s mother civilization by Frederick Schlegel in Germany and by Voltaire in France. William Jones, a British colonial administrator, considered Sanskrit the most marvelous product of the human mind. Sanskrit and Indology entered most major European universities between 1800 and 1850, challenging if not replacing Latin and Greek texts as a source for “new” ideas. Many new disciplines were shaped by the ensuing intellectual activity, including linguistics, comparative religion, modern philosophy and sociology.
From http://m.huffpost.com/…/how-europeans-misappropri_b…
This is my main reason for posting initially.
Here is a search I did on www.vedanet.com. Hopefully it will show up in your browser, if not, then go to the main site and search ” aryan”:
Do you have access to the research database JSTOR? How Europeans Misappropriated Sanskrit To Form The Aryan Race… HUFFINGTONPOST.COM
Alaya Dannu And then there’s Gobleki Tepe of Anatolia/Turkey and Dwarta, India to look into …
Morgaine Swann Thank you for all of that! I’ll be digging and reading – I like researching things, too.
Anna Tzanova I agree with the stance of those archeologists, who say, that “with 3/4 of our planet covered with water, we know more about the surface of Venus, than about what lies beneath our seas.” This pretty much applies to everything concerning human origins and the earliest human civilizations. We know little or close to nothing. Discoveries pop up here and there to challenge our knowledge and brake the well stacked linear, hierarchical systems we have put together up until now. This applies to Darwinian evolutionary theory, to the creationist’s belief, to the genome project that was supposed to explain it all from human origin to the cause of all diseases on the planet and it didn’t do it; applies to the astronaut theory and so many other theories. Let’s keep in mind that what we call now Europe, Africa, India, etc. was not the continents and places, little less countries that we know now or in the last few thousands of years. The Earth looked different at that time. Everything is political and it isn’t at the same time. It is just the way we see it according to the lens/belief/knowledge we use/have at the moment. Even the term ‘civilization’ itself has a lot of conceptual problems involved with it. So let’s just add the discovered finds to our personal data base and enjoy the excitement of every new one.
Morgaine Swann You touched on an important point – in school we’re taught that Ancient Greece and Rome were the beginning of civilization but I think they were the end of it. They knew things at the library in Alexandria that wouldn’t be rediscovered for 2000 years. When Rome went Christian the West entered the Dark Ages and we still haven’t recovered.
Anna Tzanova Yes, exactly.
Alaya Dannu Anna, I so love the point about keeping in mind how the Earth once looked. So true. For example, Lesvos island used to be a part of the eastern coast of Anatolia (Turkey), so long ago. So what we call these places now, wasn’t so at many points in the past. Love your points!
Iyanifa Fayele I have to agree in that there is a constant need to discount older non-European cultures that date much older. On the other hand, there is also a tendency to discount the fact that Africans also migrated through ancient Europe. Many of the scripts found that are not decipherable through traditional linguistics are actually found on African monoliths demonstrating they traveled. When I look at this particular picture, I automatically assumed it was an African given the position of the gold and how it would be placed in wide hair and also the level of gold in the first place. It is reminiscent of African traditions that adorn themselves with gold.
Anna Tzanova Yes, Iyanifa Fayele! This is a very important thread we can follow through the ages: the similarities! If one looks at many prehistoric artifacts, even ancient structures built from around the world, they so resemble each other, as if they were created/built by the same people/culture. There are the reoccurring themes that unite so many (if not all of them). To me that’s where our focus should be. Everything else is a social conditioning that divides and creates hierarchies, followed by subsequent antagonism of “who’s the oldest” and ” who’s the most advanced”….
Alaya Dannu I wish there were more conversations like these IN the deeper bowels of academia. Love this!
Helene Lackenbauer The theories are highly speculative. But with growing nationalism and ideas of European supremacy in Europe this fits well with a narrative that opposes refugees from other parts of the World. In Europe we do not need more theories of the cradle of civilization we need a narrative in favor of global justice and the responsibility to protect people in need of asylum.
Anna Tzanova In fact the narrative should go further and ask the question of how after so many thousands of years of history, a specie considering itself to be “advanced and civilized”, claiming its place on top of the totem pole of creation, still spends most of its resources on building weapons and supporting wars in which people are killed, forcefully displaced, and in need of asylum?
Helene Lackenbauer Spot on!
Heidi Adelheid Wachter Precious info! thank you!
Judy E Foster May it be purchased? Marija Gimbutas mentions an earlier civilisation named the “Old European’ present earlier than the Sumerians whose writing could not yet be deciphered. And now it has been! Wonderful! I’d also love the book!
Helen Hye-Sook Hwang Wonderful discussion and keen insights! Very awakening points. Our knowing of the past impact our living of the present. Yes, there are politics, ideologies, and ruses to endorse European civilizations over the rest, which I wholeheartedly agree to expose them. We know that historiography is owned by the victor under patriarchal scholarship. However, I also notice that even within the region, historians do the same thing and use data selectively. I want to throw a question, what would be gynocentric methods to think about our “oldest” civilizations? I want to distinguish what we believe from what mythologies and archaeological data provide. I am interested in both but would not mix up the two. I am interested in the latter and how we assess those data. To be continued, I would say.
(To be continued. See Part 1 here.)
I agree – I think Greek and Roman civilizations were the end and not the beginning! We are still stuck in the ending don’t you think?