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From the temporary website of Rose Press, "borrowing a page" from its publisher, Book Developer Naomi Rose (www.essentialwriting.com) {For information about other Rose Press books, please click "Rose Press" on the menu at left} ______________________________________ Jean Houston's Foreword to Healing Civilization Dr. Claudio Naranjo Published by Rose Press/ Gateways Books and Tapes {For details and purchasing information about Healing Civilization, click here:}
Foreword by Jean Houston He does not know it, but I have been observing the journey of Claudio Naranjo for the better part of forty years. And what I have seen is a man who encompasses the Realities from the scientific to the shamanic. Scholar, poet of the possible, he is an explorer of the outer reaches of inner space. His depth soundings of the wells of history and civilization resound with the echo of one who hears the pathology while seeking the song of the new mythos of who we are, where we have been, and what we yet can be. Hundreds of years ago, he would have been both priest and alchemist. Today, in this luminous work, Healing Civilization , he takes on the dark issue that is the cause of so many of our discontents—the patriarchal origins of civilization. Seeking balance he recalls the matristic period, when women's values were critical to the weave of cultures. As the remarkable, if highly controversial, work of Marija Gimbutas and others has shown, the culture of old Europe from about 7000 to 3500 B.C. was essentially a Neolithic agrarian economy centering around the rites and worship of the Great Goddess. The findings of archaeologists James Mellaart in Catal Huyuk in Turkey and of Gimbutas in southeastern Europe reveal civilizations of extremely complex and sophisticated arts, crafts, technology, and social organization. Further, as advocates of these findings such as Riane Eisler suggest, the evidence seems to indicate that these were basically non-patriarchal partnership societies, with descent and inheritance passed through the mother, and with women playing key roles in all aspects of life and work.
This culture was exported to Crete , where it flourished in populous well-organized cities, multistoried palaces, networks of fine roads, productive farms, an almost modern system of drainage and irrigation works, a rich economy with high living standards, and the lively and joyous artistic style so characteristic of Cretan life and sensibility. Again, certain scholars suggest that this was a culture of male-female equality and partnership; and again too, the spiritual authority and guiding principles were those of the Great Goddess. Here the Goddess was seen in her triple manifestation, with her shape-shifting finding its correspondence in the seasons and the phases of the Moon. Thus, she appears as maiden (spring/the new Moon), fertile mother (summer and fall/the waxing and full Moon), and wise old one (winter/the waning Moon).
In both the earlier and later civilizations of Greece , Athena personified an aspect of the Triple Goddess in her role as patroness of arts, crafts, and sciences. Charlene Spretnak, in her study of pre-Hellenic goddesses, offers a beautiful meditation on the myth of Athena that describes perfectly this earlier role of the Goddess in the matristic cultures:
In the Minoan days of Crete an unprecedented flowering of learning and the arts was cultivated by Athena. Dynamic architecture rose to four stories, pillared and finely detailed, yet always infused with the serenity of the Goddess. Patiently Her mortals charted the heavens, devised a calendar, kept written archives. In the palaces they painted striking frescoes of Her Priestesses and sculpted Her owl and ever-renewing serpent in the shrine rooms. Goddess figures and their rituals were deftly engraved on seals and amulets. Graceful scenes were cast in relief for gold vessels and jewelry. Athena nurtured all the arts, but Her favorites were weaving and pottery. Long before there were palaces, the Goddess had appeared to a group of women gathering plants in a field. She broke open the stems of blue-flowered flax and showed them how the threadlike fibers could be spun and then woven. The woof and warp danced in Her fingers until a length of cloth was born before them. She told them which plants and roots would color the cloth, and then She led the mortals from the field to a pit of clay. There they watched Athena form a long serpent and coil it, much like the serpents coiled around Her arms. She formed a vessel and smoothed the sides, then deftly applied a paste made from another clay and water. When it was baked in a hollow in the earth, a spiral pattern emerged clearly. The image of circles that repeat and repeat yet move forward was kept by the women for centuries. As the mortals moved forward, Athena guided the impulse of the arts. She knew they would never flourish in an air of strife, so She protected households from divisive forces and guarded towns against aggression. So invincible was the aura of Her protection that the Minoans lived in unfortified coastal towns. Their shipping trade prospered and they enjoyed a peace that spanned a thousand years. To Athena each family held the olive bough sacred, each worshipped Her in their home. Then quite suddenly the flowering of the Minoans was slashed. Northern barbarians, more fierce than the Aegean Goddess had ever known, invaded the island and carried Athena away to Attica . There they made her a soldier. [Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of PreHellenic Myths ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 99-101.] These
gentle civilizations perished at the hands of the marauding bands of
invaders, the latest in the long line of Indo-Aryan warrior nomads.
These conquerors not only imposed their own rigid rules but also shattered
the finely wrought symbiosis among humans, nature, culture, and spiritual
realities. Their consciousness divided, their loyalties uncertain, the
invaders felt both drawn to and terrified by the gentle complexity of
the high civilizations in which they found themselves. They were both
fascinated and frightened by the pervasiveness of its eroticisms. Thus,
they muscled and armored themselves against the enticement of its sensualities.
They feared, dreaded, and violated the places and persons who bore witness
to the ongoing communication between the seen and unseen orders, which
they themselves had long since lost. We see a late version of this in The Iliad, when the holy communicant and prophetess, Cassandra, is ravaged on the altar of Athena. Thus, to maintain his separateness, the patriarchal hero invader—in Greece, in India, and in the Fertile Crescent—dreads the caress. When he comes close, it is only to subdue by duel or rape. Not that these invaders failed to adopt many of the ways and skills of the more ancient cultures. The Achaeans, for example, assimilated much of the Minoan culture. But they did so by tearing out the feminine threads in the cultural tapestry, leaving a ragged social fabric that was missing many pieces. The suppression of the rich and complex feminine characteristics of the goddess Athena is typical of this rending of culture and consciousness. Too powerful a spiritual force to remove, she is instead pre-empted by the Achaean patriarchy to become Daddy's girl, the spirit of Zeus, born shrieking a harrowing cry that frightens even the gods as she emerges fully armored from the top of his head. One
wonders what lay in this cry. Was it perhaps the cry of outrage of one
forced to live a lie, to inhabit a projection? This is hard enough for
humans; one can only imagine how devastating it must be for divinity.
Caught in the dreams of the long dark night of the heroic ages of Mycenean
power and might, Athena is constrained to be a warrior goddess and protector
of the citadels of power. But one can never contain an archetype for long—certainly not one of such antiquity and complexity. Even when she is raging through The Iliad , her deeper nature is there in potentia. And in The Odyssey, she is clearly in transition. All her acts attest to this shift, which explains all her changes, her disguises, her transformings. Her transition is not only to grow beyond the patriarchal heroic image thrust upon her and to acquire again some of the fuller dimensions she had in earlier times, but also to become something more—a goddess who transcends both the Minoan and Mycenean visions of her, a goddess of transformation who partners the evolutionary journey of both individuals and culture. For Athena, what had been seeded in Minoan culture seems to emerge again after many centuries of being kept in the dark of the patriarchal heroic brain. With The Odyssey, she emerges as a transpersonal and transformational goddess: no longer merely the patron of imperial adventure, but now the guiding spirit who helps refine and deepen the culture of the homeplace. I mention the journey of Athena because it gives substance to Naranjo's argument about the necessity for the rise of the feminine in value and in deed, if we are to survive the challenges of the next years.
I have worked in over 100 countries for the United Nations and other international agencies training leaders in human development in the light of social change, especially in developing countries. I call this work social artistry, for—as with artistic creations—it requires the skills of dedication, focus, stick-to-it-ness, and aesthetic passion. The canvas is the social canvas, and its practitioners learn to cross the great divide of otherness and engage in radical empathy in order to help preserve culture, accomplish Millennium development goals, and midwife the emerging new story. In every country I visit, I find that 70 percent and more of those who take the initiative to make a difference and follow through on their social projects are Athena-like women of a “certain age.” Enjoying post-menopausal zest, theirs is a larger caring, a deeper commitment to social change and community betterment. Hands-on, sensory-rich, vibrant with laughter and intelligence, they get the job done while educating the young ones in ways that Naranjo would find exhilarating, They are the precursors of the pragmatic aspect of the rising feminine, living antidotes to the folly and fallout of the patriarchal ages. What I find in them is the ability to look at the openings, the places where cultures can meet and exchange the skills and discoveries that had been uniquely theirs but now can belong to the whole planetary condition. They are mindful of the planet Herself and the plan that She and the cosmic forces may have in mind for us. Above all is their sense of the great spiritual connectedness within, among, and beyond all peoples, regardless of their cultural or religious differences. In this regard, we see the growing planetization as more important, in some ways, than the globalization that gets so much attention. Globalization belongs to the patriarchal era, in that it supports the corporate hegemony of the world, a kind of corporate colonialism. Planetization, on the other hand, is of a more feminine nature in that it is relational—the world-mind taking a walk with itself. The gradual decline of the nation state is only a part of this; the clash of civilizations or of contending patriarchies may be the sunset effect of the older orders, not the thing to come—although, like the setting sun, it is growing much brighter and more spectacular as it approaches the horizon. At the same time, with everything in transition, the matristic values affirm that we can no longer afford to live as remedial members of the human race. With the rising feminine, a new set of values—holistic, syncretic, relationship- and process-oriented, organic, spiritual—is rising within us and around us. And though the forces of entropy and fear seek to contain or regress us, we know there is no going back. Our complex time requires a wiser use of our capacities, a richer music from the instrument we have been given. The world will thrive only if we can grow. The possible society will become a reality only if we learn to be the possible humans we are capable of being. This requires the new balance between masculine and feminine consciousness. The post-civilizational intelligence that could arise from this will cause us to take initiatives that, in patriarchal ages, would have seemed unlikely, if not impossible. But now, in the last few years, the world has been rearranged; the reset button of history has been hit. But what to do? Where to go? How to take initiative? And—what is key here—how to understand our new role and purpose in this most compelling moment in human history, when what we do will make a difference as to whether we grow or die? Many of the spiritual teachers of the world have likened our lives to “a sleep and a forgetting.” The life and work of Claudio Naranjo is predicated on awakening, on going off-robot and abandoning lackluster passivity to engage co-creation with vigor, attention, focus, and radiance. Thus, the life he envisions, once the genders return to balance, can be perhaps the greatest accelerator of evolutionary enhancement. Through this happening, we tap into wider physical, mental, and emotional systems, and thus gain entrance into the next stage of our unfolding, both individually and collectively. Perhaps the purpose of evolution is to grow us into co-creators who can play a conscious role in transforming the potentialities inherent in matter and ideas into new forms, better societies, richer meanings, and high art. In Healing Civilization , Claudio Naranjo gives us back our once-and-future birthright, as together, male and female, we have the potential to come into phase with the creative energies of the universe and our scope to enlarge such that everything we see—the little girl in the swing, the dog gnawing a bone, the old man in the nursing home, the snappy clerk at the check-out counter—becomes a celebration of the wild, exuberant, all-accomplishing energy of spirited manifestation. In such partnership, we participate in the vigor and the generosity of Divine Life. We would hope that as a result of Naranjo's evocative manifesto, readers will begin to look at each other from newly engendered gender-seeing, experiencing one another as transparent to transcendence, the life force in its infinite oscillations. In such seeing, we will be able to see one another's possibilities with a natural felicity we had not known before. And in such seeing, there is the coincidence of opposites, the cessation of contendings, the seeing of all forms in one form, and yes, the resolution and bringing of new light to the long dark night of civilization.
Dr. Jean Houston is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement. A scholar, philosopher, and researcher in human capacities, her myriad contributions include: co-founding The Foundation for Mind Research and a modern Mystery School ; founding The Possible Society; working with the United Nations as Program Director of the International Institute for Social Artistry, and advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development; and more. She has served in an advisory capacity to the Dalai Lama, then-President William Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, and former President Jimmy Carter and Mrs. Carter, and has counseled leaders at similar levels in many countries and cultures. A recipient of numerous honors, including the Lifetime Outstanding Creative Achievement Award from the Creative Education Foundation, Houston is the author of 25 books, including A Passion for the Possible, Search for the Beloved, Life Force, The Possible Human, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story, and Manual for a Peacemaker. Her widely viewed PBS special, “ A Passion for the Possible,” called on human beings to consider their potential and greatness.
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