Looking for love in very old places

BY ED FELIEN AND CAROL HOGARD

A venus statue found near Olbia, Sardinia

The Dorian invasion of Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa changed the history of the world.

Nowhere is the evidence of this change more apparent than in Sardinia.

Nothing could stand in the way of the Dorian cowboys from the Russian Caucuses in 1600 BCE when they swept into Sardinia on their horse-drawn chariots, with their bronze spears, herding their cattle and goats. They were a warrior cult with a hierarchal social structure that made military command efficient and effective.
They left little direct evidence of themselves. What we know of them, we know only from the influence they had on the local indigenous cultures.

We know in Sardinia that before the Dorian invasion the Ozieri culture was a very peaceful agrarian society. There were no weapons or forts, even when the land became crowded and food might have become scarce. The hunting of game was done with stone-age weapons—actually, the most advanced stone-age weapons in the Mediterranean—obsidian from an ancient volcano provided a hard and sharp cutting surface that was traded from Cyprus to Crete. Sardinian obsidian was a valuable trading commodity in the ancient world, but it was no match for Dorian bronze. Before the Dorian invasion of Sardinia, the statues were of women, like the Venus of Olbia, and they were made of polished stone. After, stick figures were smaller and made of bronze. They were mostly of men, and they either carried weapons or were engaged in wrestling contests or other acts of masculine prowess.

Before, the people lived in temporary shelters near their fields. After, they lived close to stone forts on high ground to give them protection from invaders.
Merlin Stone, in her book “When God Was A Woman,” describes the other fundamental changes that the Dorians brought:

They believed that light was good and dark was bad. This led to racism, and it justified the subjugation of Mediterranean and North African people by the Caucasian Dorians. This ideology has persisted for 4,000 years up to the present. Anthropologists now believe that all homo sapiens evolved from a common ancestor in Africa probably in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. But a recent study of DNA has concluded that the first immigrants out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals, and that all non-native Africans carry at least 1 to 4% Neanderthal genomes. So, in an amazingly ironic twist, it seems that only native Africans are racially pure homo sapiens.

They believed in a sky god, monotheism as opposed to the polytheistic gods of nature. This led to a strict hierarchy based on patriarchy. Men were supreme and women were treated as little better than cattle. The Tenth Commandment of Moses said: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” Clearly a woman was an important piece of chattel, second only to a house, but definitely a possession of men. Genesis 3:16: “Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”

Merlin Stone sees a strong Dorian influence in the ancient Jewish cultural development. The stories in the Torah begin to be collected late in the seventh century BCE. By then the Exodus was probably over 700 years in the past and the origins of Judaism much older. Often details get blurred in a thousand year old oral tradition, but there are certain features of the Jewish history as recorded in the Torah that seem to have strong allusions to Stone’s interpretation of a Judaism strongly influenced by the Dorians.

Father Abraham came out of Central Asia or modern Turkey and went to Egypt in answer to God’s command. After 10 years, he could not conceive a son with his wife, Sarah, so he went to his wife’s Egyptian servant Hagar and conceived Ishmael. It is tempting to see Abraham, the father of Judaism, the father of Jesus and Christianity, the father of Mohammed and Islam, as part of the Dorian invasion that ruled Egypt. His mixed race son, Ishmael, becomes the Semitic people who, according to prophecy, will rule empires.

Further, it is easy to believe that when the Dorians were finally pushed out of Egypt by the revolt in the Lower Kingdom, the Jews followed them. From the XV to the XVII dynasties most historians agree there was an Intermediate Period between Egyptian pharaohs, and at the end of this period the Jews were expelled. This roughly corresponds to the time of the Dorian invasions, and it is believable that Moses, raised as part of the royal family, would lead the Jews across the Sinai desert to follow his fleeing Dorian kin.

Merlin Stone credits the deep misogyny of the Torah, and later Christianity and Islam, to the influence of the Dorians. It was not until well into the 20th century, 4,000 years later, that women began to be considered the equal to men. The U.S. passed a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote in 1920, well after most of Europe had passed such laws and three years after the Bolsheviks in Russia had granted equal rights to women.

In Sardinia the stone forts stand today as lonely sentinels reminding us of the Dorian invasion 3,600 years ago and how a people resisting an invasion became the thing they were resisting, and how they lost a world where peace, love and the divine feminine were once as natural as sunlight.