



A collection of Sardinian Goddesses from the Neolithic Age, on display at the Archaeological Museum of Cagliari.

What is a revolution? I have uttered the word thousands of times, but I don't believe that I've begun to really think about what it means until very recently.





Its meaning is truly cyclical. A revolution, in geometric or astronomical terms, always refers to a circular motion: a coming around, again and again. Politically, something of that meaning has been lost. My teachers taught me about the US revolution, the French revolution, the Chinese cultural revolution, etc. as events sui generis, Rubicon crossings which usher in a new age, a history unseen beforehand. But I think that in coining the term, the intellectuals of 18th century America and France understood their movements as something more of a circling -- perhaps similar to what Martin Luther King Jr. expressed as the long arc of history, bending toward justice.





In that same spirit, I wish to circle back to the 18th century salons to revive the cyclical meaning of the word "revolution." Only I don't wish to stop there. I want to keep circling back, and back, and back, to the very roots of human civilization, in the Neolithic Age. As in the salons of the 18th century, we humans got something right back then which has since become forgotten, rubbed off, lost.





Yet traces still remain, even from this distant time, and within the Mediterranean region, they exhibit such a thematic unity that multiple eminent scholars have made the case for something of a common culture. While they were no Utopia, the Neolithic cultures of the Mediterranean were less violent, more equal, and starkly less patriarchal than what we've seen since. Marija Gimbutas calls it "Old Europe," noting the abundance of consistent goddess iconography across thousands of years and between peoples living throughout the Mediterranean. Riane Eisler sees in this age a partnership model of society, strongly opposed to the domination model which succeeded it. Joseph Campbell simply describes an ancient age in which Mediterranean peoples espoused more respect for the divine feminine.





Such movements may seem too distant to matter today -- it is literally the stone age that we're discussing, after all. Yet I believe that in Western culture today, much of the spirit of Old Europe is making its return.





Americans have begun to have franker discussions about race than I have ever seen before. The very idea of race, as we Americans understand it, was constructed by our ancestors between the 17th and 20th centuries -- during this time, race became an ever-evolving construct to regiment groups of people into their hierarchical positions. The racially stratified slave system of the US was the epitome of the domination model Eisler describes (or one of them, anyway). Yet I see signs of this stratification dissolving -- a slow end of domination culture toward a resurgence of partnership culture.





The perils of climate change, and other looming environmental catastrophes, will only accelerate this shift. How do I know? Because human history is replete with examples proving that, when it comes right down to it, we can achieve extraordinary feats in order to survive. Frankly, we have no choice. My mind returns again to the words of Dr. King: "Our ancestors may have had the choice between violence and nonviolence, but our only choice is between nonviolence and nonexistence." This principle spreads out to many different aspects of our society: it is no coincidence that one of the most effective tools we have against climate change is to provide better access to education for girls worldwide . There is no avoiding the fact that we're all in this together -- a fact that inexorably erodes at domination ideologies, which are now and have always been premised on aggressive expansion and the consumption of the supposedly infinite resources which are now running out.





Yet even before our collective carbon footprint began turning up the heat, Western culture had begun a dramatic turn. The experience of World War II, in which western Europe and the US fought face-to-face against a horrifically dominating regime, in time began to reflect back on us. How could we condemn Nazi Germany for treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, while American racial policy created vast swaths of second-class citizens, all our own? While more extreme than America's racial laws, the policies of the Nazi regime were inspired by the same ideologies of racial superiority and domination. And I can write these words thanks, in large part, to the critical self-inquiry of the Americans who have come before me; this intellectual revolution of self-recognition has been another part of western culture's turn back toward an ideology which saw all peoples as connected, not inferior or superior.





Recognition of the revolution quite conveniently transcends the great debate about western culture raging these days. Some trumpet something like a greatest hits album of accomplishments notched by everyone from the democratic philosophers of ancient Athens to the industrious titans of Silicon Valley, going so far as to declare western culture the pinnacle of human achievement. Others retort, just as loudly, that the slouching, overstuffed underbelly of western culture is smeared with the blood of oppressed peoples, trodden under its self-absorbed advance. The discursive dipoles may appear utterly irreconcilable, but -- call me crazy -- I think that actually, both sides are right. To me, it's obvious that western culture has a bad case of multiple personality disorder: at times we really are the compassionate, enlightened innovators, the shining light; while at other times or even at the same time, we can be cruelly racist and oppressive, and recklessly destructive of our earth.





This, dear friends, is why I embarked on creating The Sacred Wells of Atlantis. As Eisler did in The Chalice and the Blade, I too want to expose the dual roots of western culture, both the cooperative and the oppressive. While her book did a great job of describing our cultural outlines and is still very much worth reading today, it really just begins a much bigger conversation. With Sacred Wells, I intend to dig a little deeper, and to bring you spectacular footage of some of the amazing places I've seen in my own journey to understand my own culture. I also have the unfair advantage of benefiting from newer archaeological discoveries which were not available to Eisler when she wrote her book over 30 years ago. Thus I intend to build on her work, as well as the work of Gimbutas, Campbell, Starhawk, Giovanni Ugas, Jonathan Kirsch and many others, to gather together the entire story of western civilization in one single documentary series, for the very first time. Believe it or not, we were once much more egalitarian: we saw the fundamental connectedness of people, acknowledging an equality between men, women and children; espousing nothing like the racism of our current age. It was at a specific point in time -- clearly marked by the archaeological evidence -- that a new ideology violently shoved its way in. The invaders set themselves up as dominators, and proceeded to spread their ideologies of domination -- a legacy still with us, today. But when we understand this story, we will see that we are not truly "progressive," nor are we "advancing", nor is the revolution already underway going anywhere, to any kind of unknown territory. In fact, we're just going home.



