Leonard Shlain (1937-2009)

Dr. Leonard Shlain has passed away. Dr. Shlain was a Doctor of Laparoscopic surgery in San Francisco. He wrote three books, and was working on a fourth, the two that I read were Art and Physics and The Alphabet and the Goddess. He also wrote a book called Sex, Time and Power. I met Dr. Shlain in Balboa Park during his lecture on Art and Physics about 15 years ago. A brilliant, visionary mind. A man who put all the pieces together. Shlain discussed his postulation that ten to fifteen thousand years ago on the grassland, man worshipped a female goddess/earth mother. Language was pictographic and we tended to be acting out of our spatial right brain. When we started worshipping a male god, along came the prohibition against graven and pictorial images and we started a more linear left brain cycle. We discussed Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphogenetic fields after the talk. He was sweet and humble. I purloin some articles about his books below and a link to his site.

Sex, Time and Power

Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? In this provocative new book, Leonard Shlain, author of the bestselling Art & Physics and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess argues that profound alterations in female sexuality hold the key to this mystery.

Long ago, due to the narrowness of her bipedal pelvis and the increasing size of her infants’ heads, the human female began to experience high childbirth death rates, precipitating a crisis for the species. Natural selection adapted her to this unique environmental stress by drastically reconfiguring her hormonal reproductive cycle. Her estrus disappeared and menses mysteriously entrained with the periodicity of the moon. Women formulated the concept of a month, which in turn allowed them to make the connection between sex and pregnancy. Upon learning the majestic secret of time these ancestral females then gained the power to refuse sex when they were ovulating. Men were forced to confront women who possessed a mind of their own.

Women taught men about time and the men used this knowledge to become the planet’s most fearsome predator. Unfortunately, they also discovered that they were mortal. Men, then invented religions to soften the certainty of death. Subsequently, they belatedly grasped the function of sex. The possibility of achieving a kind of immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures whose purpose was to control women’s reproductive choices.

Leonard Shlain explores how these archaic insights about sex, time and power dramatically altered all subsequent human cultures, from the nature of courtship to the institution of marriage to the evolution of language. Along the way, the author also offers innovative and provocative theories concerning the human origins of menstrual harmony among closeknit women, homosexuality, superstition, masturbation, early menopause, circumcision, left-handedness, baldness, color blindness, sadism, and orgasms. His book also addresses the reasons why humans have the deepest capacity to love each other over the longest periods of time compared to any other animal. Sex, Time & Power is a compelling book that challenges accepted views of human sexuality and is sure to stimulate new thinking about old matters.

Art and Physics

Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world. Escorting the reader through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, Shlain shows how the artists' images when superimposed on the physicists' concepts create a compelling fit. Throughout, Shlain juxtaposes the specific art works of famous artists alongside the world-changing ideas of great thinkers. Giotto and Galileo, da Vinci and Newton, Picasso and Einstein, Duchamp and Bohr, Matisse and Heisenberg, and Monet and Minkowski are just a few of the provocative pairings. Shlain also explores the differing world views of reality in non-literate, Eastern, and children's cultures and shows how their themes entered Western art in the late 19th century just prior to Einstein's complete revision of the Western notions of space, time and light. He turns next to Einstein's second great 20th century discovery concerning gravity and uses numerous examples from art to show how the sculptor anticipated and expressed the great physicist's revolution. Shlain demonstrates how changes in music and literature synchronized with those occurring in art and physics. The final chapters explore possible reasons why these connections occur. The split brain phenomenon and Greek mythology are used to explain our culture's division of the two seemingly disparate fields of art and physics.

The Alphabet and the Goddess

In this groundbreaking book, Leonard Shlain, author of the bestselling Art & Physics, proposes that the process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture. Making remarkable connections across a wide range of subjects including brain function, anthropology, history, and religion, Shlain argues that literacy reinforced the brain's linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one. This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and, in literacy's early stages, the decline of women's political status. Patriarchy and misogyny followed.

Shlain contrasts the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing. The first book written in an alphabet was the Old Testament and its most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first two reject of any goddess influence and ban any form of representative art.

The love of Mary, Chivalry, and courtly love arose during the illiterate Dark Ages and plummeted after the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance. The Protestant attack on holy images and Mary followed, as did ferocious religious wars and neurotic witch-hunts. The benefits of literacy are obvious; this gripping narrative explores its dark side, tallying previously unrecognized costs.

Shlain goes on to describe the colossal shift he calls the Iconic Revolution, that began in the 19th century. The invention of photography and the discovery of electromagnetism combined to bring us film, television, computers, and graphic advertising; all of which are based on images. Shlain foresees that increasing reliance on right brain pattern recognition instead of left brain linear sequence will move culture toward equilibrium between the two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image. A provocative, disturbing, yet inspiring read, this book is filled with startling historical anecdotes and compelling ideas. It is a paradigm shattering work that will transform your view of history and mind.

If you have any interest in this stuff, try to find his books. A very brilliant man and a free thinker. Here is a link to his website.