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warriors who lived in small villages or seasonal settlements to graze their animals over vast regions. e Old Europeans, who based their economy on farming, focused on agricultural cycles of birth, death and regeneration embodied by Mother Earth. In contrast, the Kurgan ideology worshiped warrior gods, the thunderous sky and the "lethal power of the sharp blade," states Riane Eisler in her book, e Chalice and e Blade (1988). It is suggested that Kurgans massacred most of the local men and children, sparing some of the women to take them as concubines, wives and slaves. Spreading across Europe, each wave of invasion brought physical devastation to the Old European towns, as well as what historians call cultural impoverishment. As new settlements began to appear, they were far less technologically and culturally advanced, with an economy now based primarily on stock breeding. During this time, at the dawn of the Bronze Age, men began to organize systematic control over women's production and reproduction. Women as a commodity, much like their cattle, became property for men. ey began to take over women's handcrafts such as textiles and pottery, as well as the cultivation of herbs, recognizing the potential to capitalize the mass production of these products. As their understanding and collection of wealth grew through cattle breeding, men transferred these principles to women—the source of the most valuable commodity of all… humans. ey turned the female body into a machine for producing more wealth via children. e number of children women were expected to bear greatly multiplied, notes Eisler. Even primates nurse one baby for three to six years before becoming pregnant again. Women's bodies simply were not meant to produce baby after baby, year after year; but more children equaled more male workers or females to lucratively trade as wives. Religion of Gods While it is an uncomfortable subject for many, the rise of patriarchal dominance is inextricably linked to the expansion of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. In order for patriarchal systems to take over, it wasn't enough to control a woman's body; it became imperative to take over her spirit as well. In Greek and Middle Eastern mythology, women were suppressed but retained some level of authority among the gods. Eventually, most of the functions formerly associated with female deities were reassigned to gods. As cultural anthropologist Ruby Rohrlich- Leavitt points out, "When the patron of the scribes changed from a goddess to a god, only male scribes were employed in the temples and palaces, and history began to be written from an androcentric perspective"— the practice of placing a masculine point of view at the center of one's world view, culture and history. Hebrew tribes accelerated the ideological transformation until the Bible eventually removed all divine power of the Goddess. Eisler writes, "Symbolically the absence of the Goddess from the officially sanctioned Holy Scriptures was the absence of the divine power to protect women and avenge the wrongs inflicted upon them by men." On a practical level, the sexual freedom of women was a threat to the social and economic fabric of a strictly controlled, male-dominated society. It was a necessity to enact severe punishment and laws to regulate a woman's virginity to protect what was essentially economic transactions between men. To secure their investment, divinely mandated power was given to Hebrew fathers to stone to death daughters who were suspected of being non-virgins before marriage. Mothers had no power to stop their daughters from being brutally One of the most striking examples of manipulation of ancient theology is the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. To better understand the significance of the motifs used to illustrate the fall of man, it must be pointed out that the serpent was one of the main symbols for the Ancient Goddess. "The snake and its abstract derivative, the spiral, are the dominant motifs of the art of Old Europe," says Marija Gimbutas in her book, The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982). The Garden of Eden represented the peaceful abundance of Old Europe, with the serpent symbolizing the Goddess who tempts Eve to disobey the new God and eat from the sacred tree of knowledge. "Like the tree of life, the tree of knowledge was also a symbol associated with the Goddess in earlier mythology," declares Eisler. Blaming Eve and, by extension, all women for the failures of humanity was an expedient way to achieve political control. Her punishment for defying Jehovah by going directly to the source of knowledge would be eternal submission to this new, vengeful God and his earthly representative, man. Subscribe at GravitasMag.com | 49

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