Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Imagine that you are a prey animal lucky enough to have survived to the present. You made it this far because you and your ancestors learned to recognize the typical features of your dreaded human nemesis. The most striking characteristic of Homo sapiens, making him hard not to miss, was his outline—watermelon head perched on a pole resembling in silhouette an outsized lollipop. Other distinguishing features facilitating your ability to identify the savanna’s Public Enemy Number One: distinctive tangy aroma of his perspiration, strangest damn form of moving about you had ever seen, odd squeaking noises, bald-bodied, yet sporting a hairy crown.

  Suppose you found yourself in the predicament of being among humans’ favored quarry. You would need to evolve a critical instinct that would identify the part of this dangerous adversary that you saw first when one of these critters was attempting to ambush you. Over time, you evolved a mutation that allowed you to associate the sight of what looked like a mop rising slowly over yonder rock with the imminent attack by the bizarre-looking, squeaking lollipops heaving sharp sticks. Whenever you espied that peculiar configuration or caught a whiff of the odor that emanated from the mop, you knew to sound the alarm and head for the hills. Inevitably, a pair of round eyes soon appeared after you sensed the mop, and you instinctively knew that next all hell would break loose. You and the fellow members of your species came to rely on this early warning to stay alive.

  Suppose that, among a group of twelve hunters, one had a crown that was anomalous in that it was shiny, and lacked the typical hairy outline of a human head. Suppose this hunter was the one chosen by the rest to peer over the top of a rock to check on your position. The first thing you would see rising slowly over the crest of a nearby boulder would be strange and unfamiliar. A band of hunters, employing the bald-man subterfuge, might gain a small but incremental advantage by delaying the activation of your flight-distance instinct just long enough for the others to move in for the kill.

  A bald hunter would have a slight advantage over the others in that he would most likely be able to get the closest to a skittish prey before it would flee. Proximity increases accuracy when trying to hit a target. Success in hunting would increase a man’s reputation with the women. Perhaps this is the basis of the ineradicable myth that bald men are more virile. Slightly better hunting success would offset any loss of physical attractiveness to the opposite sex a bald man might experience.

  All of the four features catalogued—ESSP, color-deficient vision, left-handedness, and baldness—might very well be spandrels. They might have no bearing whatsoever on the survival or reproductive success of the human species. And yet it does seem odd that all of them boil down to the 8 percent ratio, all appear in every human culture, all affect males far more than females, and all would serve to make a hypothetical Pleistocene band of twelve hunters more deadly and efficient.

  One way to test my Theory of Eights indirectly would be to search for correlations between these four features. In a general population, a higher percentage of gay men are left-handed than are straight men.15 Left-handed men are more likely to have color-deficient vision than are right-handed men. Color-deficient men are more often gay than are non-color-deficient men. There is a suggestion in some studies of a link between left-handedness and baldness, and baldness and color deficiency, but I can find no study linking baldness and ESSP.*

  Though my Theory of Eights may provide a partial explanation for same-sex preference in males, how do evolutionary biologists account for a lesbian gene? Throughout history, lesbians have maintained a lower profile than gays for a variety of reasons primarily related to the masculinist thrust of the majority of the world’s cultures, with its repression of the feminine principle in general and women in particular. From a mixture of scientific studies (few) and guesstimates (many), the proportion of lesbians seems to have remained fairly constant, hovering around 5 percent.

  Wilson’s theory of the advantage to the hunting group of having one hunter in twelve who was gay can be applied to the one woman in twenty who was a lesbian. In a group of women burdened with child-care duties, there is a benefit to having one woman who prefers women to men. A lesbian’s inclination would make her less likely to have offspring (although many do). She could then choose to use her surplus time and energy either directly or indirectly assisting the other mothers. Nieces and nephews benefit from having an aunt without children of her own. Wilson’s theory accounting for lesbians dovetails with the earlier Grandmother Theory, discussed in chapter 8, because it provides an accessory adult female to assist mothers. Many lesbians are in the helping professions, and their efforts in both direct and indirect ways often alleviate the workload of straight mothers. Lesbians are also in a better position to make notable contributions to culture. The world would be a poorer place without the considerable talents of Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Anaïs Nin, Ethel Waters, Mary Cassatt, Florence Nightingale, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf.*

  Mythology is a projection of a community’s collective beliefs onto the scrim of the cosmos. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that mythical characters who fully manifested both their anima and animus were considered the wisest seers and most powerful deities in ancient cultures. Originating in the myth of the union of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, hermaphroditic sagacity has remained a constant thread connecting many civilizations throughout the ancient world. The symbol of this wisdom in ancient Egypt was two entwined snakes. In the Mesopotamian myth of the Garden of Delights, two serpents coil around the trunk of the Tree of Life. In the Greek myth of Hercules, entwined snakes guard the tree bearing Zeus’s golden apples on the isle of Hesperides.

  Hermes, the Greek god of magic, transformation, and wisdom, was an androgynous god who combined both the essence of the female and the virility of the male. Appropriately, Hermes was the god of the hermaphrodites (Hermes and Aphrodite were the parents of Hermaphroditus, who combined an equal mixture of masculine and feminine in one body). Hermes’ aegis was the caduceus, two entwined snakes, one female and one male. It has come down to us through the ages as the symbol of life and vitality and now signifies the medical profession.*

  In Sophocles’ plays, Tiresias, the blind hermaphroditic prophet, warns first Oedipus in Oedipus Rex, then Cleon in Antigone. Tiresias’ gift of foresight allowed him/her to see the character flaws of mortals and predict events that had not yet transpired.

  The myth associated with how Tiresias became a hermaphrodite reveals much about relations between the sexes. One day, Zeus and Hera began to bicker over who derived the most pleasure from sexual intercourse. Soon, all the other gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus joined the contentious debate. Cleverly, the goddesses protested that men did, not wanting the men to know the truth, that women actually enjoyed sex more than they. The gods, seeing through the ruse, insisted women did. As the fervor of the controversy intensified, it became clear that neither side would ever convince the other, since sexual pleasure is a purely subjective experience.

  To settle the question, Zeus selected a poor shepherd, Tiresias, to change into a hermaphrodite. The unsuspecting young lad came upon two snakes copulating and, striking them with a stick, suddenly found himself transformed by Zeus into a woman. After Tiresias had lived ten years in this mode, Zeus summoned the hermaphrodite before an assemblage of all the deities and asked: “Now that you have experienced sex both as a man and a woman, who has more pleasure?” Tiresias replied, “Of the ten parts of pleasure there are in sex, the female partakes of nine and the male is left with the remaining one.”

  Hera was so furious at the truthteller for not supporting her position that she struck Tiresias blind.† Zeus, immensely pleased that Tiresias had revealed the goddesses’ ploy, could not reverse Hera’s terrible punishment, but he endowed Tiresias with the gift of a seer’s foresight. Thus, Tiresias the hermaphrodite would play the important role of warning heroes of what was to come in Greek tragedy.

  Among Hindus, Lord Shiva is an androgynous god
who is both the creator and destroyer of worlds. His feminine aspect is Durga. Many of the paintings depicting this hermaphroditic deity portray Shiva on the right side and Durga on the left. The Hindu caste system has a special class, called hidjra, for homosexuals, transvestites, and intersexes. In Mesopotamia, cultic dancers dressed in costumes to emphasize the hermaphroditic nature of their deities. The right side of their costume signified the male, and the left side represented the female aspect.16 The ancient culture of Oman recognized a third sex they called the “zaniths.”17

  Farther east, originating in the same distant era, people began to worship a hermaphroditic deity in China. Quan Yin, born a man but transformed into a woman, is the god/goddess of wisdom and compassion.

  In North America, many Pueblo Indians—for example, the Zuni and the Hopi—had a special reverence for a man who manifested a strong anima. White settlers disparagingly called a man who lived and dressed like a woman a “berdache.” The other members of his native tribe often believed a transvestite or gay male possessed magical and intercessionary powers. Often he was the tribe’s shaman.18

  But hermaphroditic wisdom did not prevail. Three thousand years ago in the West, the powerful idea of monotheism transformed the world. Patriarchy became a defining characteristic of Western culture and religion. Soon after, an unsettling question began to trouble the faithful. If there was but one God, then of what sex was this singular deity? Over the years rabbis, clerics, and mullahs attempted to evade this question by claiming that God has no sex. But this stance contradicted the sacred scripture of their singular God that states, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of god created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). To have created man and woman “in his own image” means that the god of Moses, Jesus, and the Prophet would have to have been a hermaphrodite.

  Further confusing the issue is a second, older Genesis story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. In this parable, Yahweh is singular and obviously very male. Although the Bible does not actually state the deity’s gender, all of the adjectives and names that subsequent Biblical writers used for Yahweh (Lord, Ruler, King of the Universe, Host, Adonai, and Elohim) are masculine. Even in this story, however, there are intimations of Yahweh’s hermaphroditic persona. In Genesis 3:22, He states, “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil….” The obvious question is, whoare the entities constituting an “us”? Why does the monotheistic deity refer to Himself as an “us”?

  The banishment of goddesses from Western religions was a wrenching change from all that had gone before. The deity of the three Western religions—Yahweh, God Almighty, and Allah—came to represent a lopsided animus. It is notable that the serpent in the Genesis story, once twins of opposite genders in prior legends, was reduced to one.*

  Beginning with the ancient Hebrew Old Testament and continuing through Christianity’s New Testament and Islam’s Koran, Western culture declared war on the feminine. Men emphasized their deity’s vengeful and wrathful character. Eve, Mary, and Fatima, by comparison, were all mortal women whose stature was nowhere near as numinous as that of a masculine godhead.

  Worshipping a God perceived to be a Father but not a Mother presents a series of confounding problems. Within the three Western religions, there have been periodic attempts to reconcile an animus monotheism with the notion that the deity embodied masculine and feminine traits.

  In the first century A.D., a time when Hellenistic values were pervading all Mediterranean cultures, rabbis, uncomfortable with the Torah’s masculine bias, introduced the concept of a Shekina. She represented the essence of the divine anima, which they believed was the missing aspect of God. Around the same time, the Gnostic Christians began venerating a deity that possessed both feminine and masculine traits. They elevated the divine Sophia to a place coequal with God. Christian mystics held that the Trinity consisted of a Holy Father, a Holy Mother, and a Holy Son. The Shiite branch of Islam honored the feminine essence of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Even today, the veneration of Mary in many Latin American cultures borders (some might say has become) goddess worship. All of these movements have attempted to soften the male monotheistic deity by converting Him into a hermaphrodite. In every case, these attempts have been defeated by those who want to believe that a patriarchal singular male deity reigns supreme. Religious movements that honored the divine feminine have tasseled the fringes of the West’s dominant religions from time to time, but they have never been central to any of them.

  At present, Judeo-Christian denominations (with the exception of a few hard-core fundamentalists) are rushing to expunge their liturgies of passages that harshly denigrate the feminine. Women are becoming priestesses, masculine pronouns are being replaced by more egalitarian ones, and the feminine aspects of the deity are increasingly emphasized as mercy and compassion replace vengeance and punishment as His/Her key features. Many leaders of the West’s religions seem to acknowledge, at long last, that the failure to reform their doctrines will consign their religions to irrelevancy in the near future. The essential truth for both men and women is that those of each gender must acknowledge and encourage their psychic hermaphrodite within in order to achieve their intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual potential. The poet Coleridge opined that all great minds are truly androgynous. Only when fertilized by elements of both the masculine and the feminine can someone fully become wise and creative. Cultural institutions such as religion, governments, and educational systems undergoing the same realignment will also prosper.

  In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the molecular configuration of DNA was a double helix. Life, they demonstrated, derives from the intertwining of one strand of DNA from the father and one from the mother. The double helix instantly became the modern symbol of the combination of the anima and animus. But the ancients had already intuited this truth. Watson and Crick confirmed that, at its most fundamental level, life’s most compelling icon is Hermes’ caduceus, the quintessential symbol of the hermaphrodite.

  Death and Paternity

  Part IV

  Women were the first to achieve the knowledge of time. They did so at considerable risk to their life and health. Now it was the men’s turn to experience extreme anxiety.

  Chapter 18

  Mortality/Angst

  Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.

  And we also once. Never again. But this having been

  Once, although only once, to have been of the earth,

  Seems irrevocable.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  It takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make a unique self-conscious individual, and then he is good only for dying.

  —André Malraux

  By using her new split brain to make the connection between the moon’s periodicity and her monthly menses, Gyna sapiens gained entry to an entirely new realm. Her insight profoundly altered the course of human evolution. Like Alice falling through the looking glass, she tumbled headlong into the tunnel of time. And, Homo sapiens fell in right behind her.

  As with all vast gifts, learning time’s secret carried a terrible price that first women and then men had to pay. Not long after women crossed time’s threshold by endangering their health and life, it would be the men’s turn to be discomfited. Before exploring the feature of time that so unnerved them, let us tally the considerable benefits Homo sapiens incorporated into his survival kit by gaining the ability to think in deeptime.

  Homo sapiens began to put this new skill to use by first discerning certain recurring patterns in nature. He began to merge his gradually increasing life span with his prodigiously expanding memory capacity in order to study and then remember the habits of prey and predator. Soon, he felt confident enough to organize larger and more ambitious hunting forays. Success in these endeavors increased the available quantity of high-quality brain food. A diet rich in supplemental iron, anim
al fats, and amino acids increased the band’s survival odds and produced slightly smarter and healthier babies. The Homo sapiens hunter reveled in his maneuverability both in the canyons of the past and on the misty plains of the future, exultant in the knowledge that he was smarter than any other creature.

  When game was not plentiful, both men and women stored the knowledge necessary to differentiate poisonous flora from edible flora in the deep pouches of their new long-term memories. Slowly, over time, they identified and remembered plants that had medicinal properties. To their delight, they also discovered and remembered plants that altered their state of mind. There seemed to be no end to the largesse spilling forth from time’s cornucopia.

  Communication between humans expanded rapidly once it was reinforced by the concept of linear sequence. The addition of words such as “after,” “before,” “long ago,” “next,” and “fortnight” made speech increasingly supple and sophisticated. Syntax and semantics were the twin factors enriching language. Adding tenses to verbs and time-related adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions greatly expanded speech’s power.

  This expanded sense of time greatly facilitated a new mode of thought called “reason,” which in turn was dependent on a simple two-step mental equation: The if = then algorithm. Calling upon his considerable memory reserves, Homo sapiens began to place to the left of the equals sign a hypothetical situation. He conjured scenes based on similar situations that he had previously encountered. Then he constructed an imaginary scene of what he would predict might happen in an epiphenomenal scenario that existed only in his mind.