[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> The idea that there have been ages where women once ruled is
not new.
Archaeologists have found evidence
pointing to several examples of societies
that were matriarchal.
And yet for many mainstream historians,
this concept is still unsettling.
In a 2017 study, a team of scientists
led by Archaeologist Douglas Kennet of Pennsylvania State
University found evidence of a matrilineal society
in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon.
The remains of 14 women were discovered
beneath a dazzling cache of more than 15,000 turquoise necklaces
and pieces of shell jewelry.
The remnants of these women were found
in an elite series of burial chambers
that marked them as among the most noble members of Chacoan
society.
And astoundingly, under closer examination
it was revealed that no fewer than nine of the individuals
shared the exact same matrilineal
DNA, which is passed only from mother to child,
concluding that power and influence was passed down
through the female line.
Archaeologists are now finding that there
have been many ancient cultures that
once worshiped female deities.
>> There clearly was a time in remote antiquity when
the feminine, the female was regarded as the single most
important aspect of humanity.
And you have going back at least 30,000 years deep
into the Upper Paleolithic these that are
referred to as goddess figures.
These are large-breasted, large-hipped female figures.
They're the dominant iconography of that period.
And that iconography continues all the way down
through the Upper Paleolithic and into the Neolithic.
There was a time when our ancestors venerated
the goddess, not the male god.
>> In places like Central Asia and Siberia where the female
shaman or shamaness, if you wish,
was one of the great power sources.
And obviously, to different saints
and holy women of places like China and India
and within other societies like Norse
tradition, where there were very fierce
shield maiden and things like this
that would go out in battle and be more
powerful than the many men.
But probably the last vestige of this female role
came down to us through Greek tradition
as the Amazon, these incredible warriors, this warrior
caste that supposedly only contained females.
The Amazons weren't a single tribe, though.
They seemed to be a buzz word for a number
of different female societies that
survived in various parts of the ancient world.
For instance, there were Amazons in the Sahara.
There's lots of stories to do with their great deeds there.
There were Amazons in the area of the Caucasus,
what today is Georgia and the Russian steppes.
There were others in the Urals and the Altai Mountains.
So they weren't necessarily all one tribe.
But what they seemed to represent
was the last vestige of this female caste that
were the rulers, if you like, of their domain, of their world.
And it was something that they did
without the necessity of men other than for reproduction
purposes.
I think that they key to understanding
this is that the role of the female in the past
was much, much more powerful, much more stronger
than we give it credit for.
And it could well be that when we
look at the builders of Gobekli Tepe or the Anunnaki
or those who built Stonehenge were mainly female priesthoods.
And it's difficult to even conceive of it in a way,
but it is strongly possible so we should never roll out
and we should always be genderless as far
as those ancestors who gave us this legacy
of the ancient wisdom.
>> Could it be possible that references in ancient texts
allude to a mother goddess before the first civilization?
>> When we take a look at the first chapters from the Book
of Genesis about the creation, the garden, et cetera,
many events are not in the biblical texts.
Sumerian texts give incredible additional information,
whether it is in gnostic ones or in the "Enuma Elish," which
is the Babylon text about the creation.
What's interesting is that they all
mention a mother goddess that comes from the depths.
Sophia is the mother of the abyss
because, as the story goes, she went
to the deepest point of the abyss
in order to create the world as we know it.
In gnostic, Sumerian, even Egyptian texts,
the abyss is always linked to the process of creation--
all mother goddesses were.
>> Sophia really comes from a Greek term, sophis,
which means wisdom.
In the beginning before there was even
a god or a creative force, everything was dark,
nothing existed.
And because gods and wisdom and knowledge
are simultaneous with each other,
they figured, well, if that's the case,
then wisdom must have existed in the dark.
And in order for it to be procreative,
it has to be feminine.
So they created this concept of a divine feminine person,
the woman, who embodied the whole perfection of the wisdom
and all the sum knowledge of everything that
exists in the universe.
So the Greeks show up and they called her Sophia,
based on sophis, the term for wisdom.
>> If wisdom emerged from the darkness and its procreative
nature was feminine by some early accounts,
then why at some point was it forgotten or switched?
In the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden, Yahweh--
or God-- for bids to humans in the garden
to partake from the forbidden tree of knowledge.
When a serpent seduces Eve to eat an apple from this tree,
it leads to mankind's expulsion from the garden
and thereby from eternal life.
But according to Anton Parks, the Sumerian texts
interpret this story differently.
They suggest that the serpent approaches the woman
as if she is the teacher.
>> In the Book of Genesis, we know that before patriarchy
came about, there was a matriarchy.
When these gods arrive on Earth and settle in Eden on Karzek
Mountain, they were all under a matriarchal system
and Enlil was their queen.
The very interesting tablets of Eden express that.
The woman is collecting fruits for the colony,
and we understand that the man who was doing more manual work.
The text states that the secret was given by the serpent.
The serpent tells the woman and then she goes to tell the man.
The so-called secret that the serpent
is going to tell the woman, found in Sumerian tablets,
is the secret of toolmaking, quite simply
the tool which is expressed as niche in Sumerian
means tree and tool.
One could wonder why Enki insists
on getting this particular secret through to the humans.
Well, he has a desire to set them free.
It is very clear, you can see it well.
He wants to liberate them.
I think that he didn't enjoy watching slaves working
in the fields serving Enlil.
The woman's intelligence is often
mentioned in gnostic texts about the garden.
The woman is generally wise, intelligent.
She is enlightened from motherhood, from the origins,
and has the intelligence and wisdom of the serpent.
If we read the original Sumerian texts,
the woman only passes on the information
that was given to her by the serpent.
The civilizing tool for mankind is
to become self-sufficient and free itself from slavery.
What's more, in Sumerian tablets of Eden, when the woman
messenger is mentioned, she is very often
called the wise woman.
>> If there was a wise woman, where did she disappear to?
Researchers like Freddy Silva had
discovered that other stories that
empower women in ancient evolution
have been omitted from the Bible.
>> One of the greatest examples of the shift from matriarchal
to patriarchal society really revolves around the story
of Jesus, believe it or not.
It's a huge construct.
And we know this because two of the most important pieces
of evidence, which were the Gospels of Philip and Thomas,
were banned by the church until they were inconveniently
found by two goat herders in the desert at Nag Hammadi.
And the idea was that when you joined a secret mysticism
school, you joined as a son of a woman.
When you graduated from that, you
went up to another level of understanding,
you graduated as the son of a man.
If got to the next stage, you became some of the gods.
And then, and this is the most interesting part,
when you actually went into the final initiation process--
and initiation means to become conscious,
that's what the word means--
you undertook an out-of-body experience.
It was an induced near-death experience
where you took a narcotic, almost like a poison which
lowers your heartbeat down to a point where
you are virtually comatose.
Back in those days, those sects held
that the women had the highest level of initiation.
They actually were responsible for the initiate
while he or she undertook this out-of-body experience.
They were called the bees or the watchtower, the flock,
which is actually Mary Magdalene's name, Magdel Ebet,
the watchtower of the flock.
Your soul leaves the body anywhere between three to seven
days.
When you come back, in your body,
a little bit groggy, and you are taken out by the priestesses
onto a mound.
And the first thing you see is the rising
of Venus, the morning star, at the spring equinox.
That's why Jesus compares himself to the morning star.
So did Osiris in Egypt, who was also a disembodied man who
gets chopped up by 72 people.
Of course, he reconstitutes himself
which is the symbol of the resurrected human being.
The shift from matriarchal the patriarchal
really happens around the time that the Catholic Church
is beginning to find its roots, when fundamental Christianity
splits from gnostic Christianity and the fundamentalists
were killing all the gnostic Christians.
>> Could it really be true that details about the ages
of matriarchal rule were censored from some ancient
texts?
Freddy Silva has discovered a similar text
to the gnostic story about Mary Magdalene that
is written in the Quran.
>> Two most important people, John the Baptist and Mary
Magdalene, are basically given very minor roles in the Bible.
And now we know why, because we have the patriarchal system
that takes away the concept of the matriarchal
being the most important part of initiation and then
they went off and killed everybody around the Middle
East that could say otherwise.
That's the one thing that all the sects have in common--
including early Islam, by the way,
it says exactly the same thing, that the actual crucifixion
didn't really take place and the person
that actually was crucified in the real event
was actually not Jesus, it was a guy called Simon or Simeon.
This is the Quran saying this.
So, the church annihilates everybody else
that was saying the complete opposite,
and that's why we have a patriarchal system instead
of the matriarchal system.
So that's how easily this concept gets taken apart.
>> I think in the past, female cultures have been given a bad
press.
We know about kingship, we know about great battles fought
by men, and we know that whole civilizations
seemed to be focused around patriarchal societies.
But clearly, that was not the case in prehistoric times.
It would seem as if the female had a much stronger role
in society and may even have been the controlling
influences governing the places of power, which would have been
seen as the axis mundi, the axis of the Earth,
possibly having a seat of power, the origin of what
we call the throne today.
So in many ways, they was the first kings.
They were the embodiment of life itself.
From them, all life came, of course,
as it's only women that can bear children.
And this was understood by men; recognized and honored
by men, who had a different role in life.
As to exactly what that was, we don't
want to stereotype any of these images.
But something changed over time.
>> If this is, indeed, true, what has changed since
the early ages where a matriarchal society governed
our planet peacefully?
Anton Parks believes that the rise of patriarchy
began when humans decided to go out on their own
and start building cities.
According to his research, the Sumerian texts
show us how the war between Enki and Enlil
is reflected in the origin of the struggle for power
between men and women.
>> If you try to distinguish between the two energies that
drive matriarchy and patriarchy, we can then find it in all
the texts that speak of this.
It is constantly the fight between Mars and Venus,
war and peace, finding a balance between the two.
With my research on Sumerian Eden,
I found a historical event.
We're not speaking about legends here,
but of the history of Sumer.
It is about the two cities who were fighting each other.
Both of them are part of the realm of Umma.
The two towns were situated in front of the realm of Surulere,
which means the bird of eternal youth.
The Surulere realm is led by Enlil.
If you translate the Sumerian term Uma na,
you get the following definition: the people of Umma
or the people of the wise woman because Uma means
the wise woman in Sumerian.
Here's the idea of wise woman again,
of the woman who passed down the secret.
Thanks to this definition, we understand
that Umma was under the guardianship of some goddesses
that were associated with Enki and with the knowledge
of the gods because in French, a wise woman--
literally, sage-femme-- is a midwife.
And for Sumerians, it is the woman
in charge of the genetics, the one in charge
of the artificial matrices.
The play on words is between sage-femme, midwife, and femme
sage, wise woman.
Therefore, it is the realm led by the mother goddess and Enki.
Between the two realms is a stretch of land, a palm grove.
It is a sort of small garden called the [NON-ENGLISH]..
This can be translated as the frontier of the plane.
In this historical battle between the two realms,
we find many elements that can be linked to the Sumerian Eden.
Through this story, we understand
that the dispute between Enki and Enlil
never really had an end.
Even if you study the text very thoroughly,
it is impossible to know what put an end to these conflicts
between Umma and Surulere.
The one thing we know is that one city of Umma
was wiped out quickly.
Kings always mentioned the divine protection
given by Enlil and his son and royal text,
always reducing the inhabitants of Umma to simple workers.
They were only good to serve the realm of Lagash
and to submit to the patriarchal gods.
>> Could there be more evidence of this throughout history?
>> About 5,000 years ago, when you get the emergence of--
at least in our timeline-- the first great cities,
that seems to be when this testosterone-driven male
aggression and anger start to take everything over.
We still have goddesses, but they're not
running the world anymore the way
they appear to have done in much, much more ancient times.
There's a clear change of emphasis
and we start having male gods.
And they're often very angry and aggressive
and domineering male gods, and they
want to go take other people's stuff.
It's as though some sort of mental virus
has entered the world and we've become these creatures fizzing
with testosterone making war upon one another.
You'd be hard put to find evidence of warfare
in the Upper Paleolithic, when the goddess ruled the world.
There was no warfare.
These people were hunting animals,
but they weren't killing each other-- not in large numbers,
at any rate.
They may have had the odd fight, but they weren't making war
upon one another.
When you come down into the Neolithic,
as we begin to see the goddess cult trailing off
and male gods taking their place, and warfare
becomes a very key element of human behavior.
And so I think that an old ethic and an old way of doing things,
which was harmonious and beautiful
and was sustained for tens of thousands of years,
was overthrown by the upsurge of the male ego.
And I would tie that very much at its worst
to that the time of the emergence of the first cities
in our historical timeline-- ancient Sumer, for example.
>> As patriarchy took over matriarchy,
women lost their place in society.
Their role as goddesses and spiritual leaders
was undermined by a new perspective.
Women were indoctrinated as untrustworthy seductress.
Sean Stone describes how this point of view
marked an era of separation between men and women.
>> In the old tradition, there's really a joint male-female
partnership.
Over the course of Sumerian time, we
recognize that Enki seems to have been considered more
of that trickster character, more of the devil
in the garden who essentially gives humans knowledge
when Enki gives humans the right to procreate with each other
without the permission of the gods.
That's when Enlil and the other gods
feel that their reign is being threatened by the humans.
So, Enki seems to have become the devil,
he's cast in the devil role, and perhaps women as well
as a result, because that whole concept of man and woman, Enki
and Enlil working together to fashion humankind is lost.
So, by the time you come to the Jewish tradition, for example,
you've lost any notion of a female role
in the spirituality of religion.
The god Jehovah is a male god.
You see no female rabbis in any Jewish tradition
until about the 16th, 17th centuries.
The same, obviously, within the Catholic Church,
the notion that there really could be no female pope,
no female cardinals or bishops.
It's a very masculine control of the religious inclination.
Another important example of the complete takeover
of society by patriarchs has occurred by the time
of the Greek civilization.
Basically, by 500 BC and thereafter all the way
through Rome, women are second-class citizens.
They have no right to vote, they have no real voice in anything
beyond the household, they are essentially
outside of the society.
You can see basically step by step
this descent away from the notion
of a man and woman working in conjunction to fashion
humanity, to essentially guide humanity.
It becomes more and more the assertion of the male energy,
the male totem basically.
And that ultimately, I would say,
manifests itself in the overall nature of our society.
If you look at what Tesla was looking, for example,
at the nature of energy creation and production,
he was pointing out that what we have is explosive energy, which
is basically a male exertion, whereas the female energy is
considered more vortical.
So, only a few of the scientists that
were looking into alternative forms of energy that basically
was more vortical, what people describe by UFO
craft for example and the way that their propulsion systems
work, that is essentially a female style of energy
where it ideally recycles itself.
>> When you look at the origins of warfare,
and this is organized warfare, you don't actually find any
good evidence for it until somewhere roughly between about
9,000 and 6,000 BCE.
That's when real organized warfare seemed to start.
And of course, that was after the Neolithic Revolution.
Prior to that, you do find occasional skeletons showing
signs of violence, just individual human
against human violence.
I mean, it's always been there.
But this whole thing about humans
actually organizing into armies and getting together in groups
and then let's go charge against the other group and then
the other group having to then respond in the same way
by forming your own little army, that didn't actually
happen until after the Neolithic, it by most accounts.
>> We talked about the gnostic tradition and this issue
of precisely who created the reality--
was it the male god, the male demiurge who
fashioned the world or was it the Sophia spirit,
divine spirit wisdom, who came into the reality?
And I think that the darker interpretations have oftentimes
given onus and power to the male form,
whereas the older traditions might actually
recognize and respect the fact that it
was male and female working in conjunction,
in unison to really create the human existence.
Take, for example, the Anunnaki stories about Enki.
Enki was this chief scientist who
was trying to design the human race on behalf of the sky gods.
But in order to do so, he needed Ninmah, who was basically
his partner and consort.
>> Looking back to Sumerian times,
civilizations of war seemed to be preceded and followed
by civilizations of peace.
Perhaps it's possible that humanity will embrace again
a future cycle of matriarchy, a society where
we become more cooperative and less aggressive.
>> I like to look at statistics and evidence.
And Steven Pinker wrote a very interesting book
called "The Better Angels of Our Nature."
And he did a long-term study showing that contrary
to the images we're getting on TV of the warfare--
and of course, the images we're getting are very real.
We need to solve that, they're very important issues that we
need to deal with.
But overall statistically, warfare
has been declining over a fairly long period.
So we're seeing this general progression
of a generally less violent, less warlike global society.
Corresponding with that is we've seen the role of women increase
during the same period of time.
I believe that there is a relationship between that.
I think the more that women have a role in governance
and equality, we're going to see more of that trend happen.
Because back in the days going back much earlier when
we didn't really have organized human warfare,
they were much more matriarchal.
So shifting the power balance to patriarchy,
there are probably all kinds of biological reasons for that.
They were the ones who had to go out and hunt the mastodon
while the woman is giving life.
And so that shift between what we have in our DNA as men
and as women because of that whole role probably
then affects the level of violence in our society.
>> The disappearing wise woman, to me,
refers to our loss of intuition, our heart, intelligence,
which should be our guiding light.
To be whole, we need both intuition and logic,
which is kind of the feminine and the masculine principles.
You need some structure to your intuition,
or else you could get delusional without some structure.
We've been cut off from the heart intelligence
and all we have is this logical, irrational, egoic mind.
And that's when we start really going down the path of error.
And I do believe there are signs now that we're
starting to hopefully correct the situation as more
and more people are returning to that kind of inner voice,
the light of conscience really.
It's light of conscious I think we'll get back
to a state of wholeness.
>> If wholeness is the meaning of joint feminine and masculine
energies in the world ruling by partnership,
then what is our next step?
Could ancient history lead us down a new path of thinking?
If we as the current civilization
are, indeed, returning to our inner voice,
then could this inner voice be leading us
to a much older civilization that has now just emerged
from the ice?
>> You get reports occasionally of structures emerging out
the ice in Antarctica.
Just recently, there was one which took my attention
to do with what was described as almost like an embanked area
like a hill fort that was found.
And That struck my attention.
It's different to all the other stories.
>> Anybody who is a pure blooded Indian or native person
in the Americas, their whole haplogroup or genetics are A,
B, C, or D. But we've tested three of these so far,
and they are not A, B, C, or D. They show ancestry either from
Europe or the Middle East or the Middle East people who moved
to Europe.
So that completely blows the theory
that there was only one way to get to the Americas
in pre-Colombian times.
>> Could new evidence of a civilization much older than
that discovered at Gobekli Tepe be emerging from a desolate
continent?
Up next, the code unravels--
or should we say melts--
from Antarctica to reveal a possible new species
on this planet?