The Cult of Venus: Templars and the Ancient Goddess

DNF. Managed 2/3. It didn't get any better. sigh Total waste of time.———————-Basically, all the negative reviews were “This author is liberal and hates Trump, won't be reading more of his books”. Huh? It was free on Amazon kindle, and with reviews like that... sounds interesting.———————All the negative reviews were wrong. “This author is liberal and hates Trump” doesn't even touch the problems with this book. The author has two obsessions. 1) Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact (he is a former Director of the New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), which is a hobby society for “amateur archaeologists” who try to prove pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.and 2) [b:The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image 455992 The Alphabet Versus the Goddess The Conflict Between Word and Image Leonard Shlain https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348440082l/455992.SY75.jpg 1309759] and the right side of the brain = feminine, left side = masculine. Both are full of BS, but as David S. Brody is obsessed, he doesn't care. He will use anything to confirm his theories, interpret anything to support them, and invent things if there isn't enough data to be used. For this book, he invented a diary written by Henry Sinclair that proves he visited North America. Here's an excerpt from the diary:“My father has named this river Mary-Mac to honor our Lord. He has taught this name to the natives and hopes they will adopt it.”Yeah, those red injuns didn't name any rivers, it was all white men who done it.“The word “mac” in Scottish meant “son of”, so the name Mary-Mac translated, apparently, to Son of Mary”Except that “Son of Mary” in Scottish is mac Màiri. He uses a lot of “etymology” in this book, and it's all this kind of garbage.“Mary is the most important woman in Christianity. The root of her name is mer, meaning the sea.”Except that it's a Hebrew name. Sea in Hebrew is not mer.“The name Magdalene is the Westernized version of the original Hebrew name, Migdal. Migdal in Hebrew means “tower”. So the name Mary Magdalene translates to the Tower of Mary”No. It translates to Mary from Magdala.“The root of the word is mat, from the Egyptian goddess Maat. Other words have the same root, like matriarch and matron.”No, it isn't. The root of the word is medha, mendh, to learn, wisdom, as a product of learning. Egyptian is not an Indo-European language, and maat, ma'at means truth, balance, and justice. Neither word has anything to do with mater, mother, which is the root of matriarch and matron.That's the kind of “science” he pushes throughout the whole book. For example, he has this theory that the Phoenicians built the Stonehenge and the “American Stonehenge” and that they are connected with a straight “sunrise line” to the “Phoenician Stonehenge”, or the “Israeli Stonehenge” (Rujum al-Hiri)The problem is, of course, that these things are not in line if you remember that the sun rises in due east on Spring Equinox... “What Cam believed, and taught, was that waves of European and Mediterranean explorers had crossed the Atlantic prior to Columbus - Phoenicians, Irish, Norse, French, Scots, perhaps even ancient residents of Atlantis.”Atlantis... Yeah, sure... Sorry, I wouldn't hire you as a history professor either. So - some university apparently had hired him to teach history. He's a lawyer. He teaches this pseudo-history based on very shaky grounds, fairytales, and conspiracy theories. The university didn't renew the contract, and he's p'd off, because “the history he was teaching was not considered politically correct by the liberal-minded faculty”. Atlantis. rolling eyes“When people first learned to read, that caused us to use the left side of our brains much more than we had been. As I said earlier, the left side of the brain is what men use most. So when we began to read, we became more masculine in our thinking”Yeah... things governed by the left side of the brain: maths, science, language, not just reading and writing. Language. But, no language is good, women invented maths, it's just letters, the alphabet that's bad. rolling eyesThen there's the problem with the fact that David (A graduate of Tufts University and Georgetown Law School) made his main character an attorney. (“My name is Attorney Cameron Thorne” Your name is Attorney? Such an unusual name.) The problem is that David doesn't know how the law works. He makes Cam bully people by using legal threats that wouldn't work on anyone with the least knowledge of the law and their own rights. He doesn't know how to handle criminal clients. He doesn't understand what client-attorney confidentiality entails. He doesn't know how to talk about things without mentioning certain things. It's really ridiculous.“This was not like fighting with one hand tied behind his back. It was like fighting with no hands at all”. Nah, it's like fighting with no brains at all.Then there's the pseudo-feminism. “Scientific studies show women, generally speaking, really are more intuitive than men”Yeah... what is this thing called “intuition”? Attention. Noticing small, insignificant details. Association. Understanding. Drawing conclusions. It's not something magical, incomprehensible, supernatural, or paranormal. It's just seeing more in the world than your own navel. If the guys like David here knew this, they would insist men are better at “intuition” than women because it would be called “observation, deduction, and logical reasoning” - like Sherlock Holmes.“I think when people think about Goddess worship, about making the godhead more feminine, they get this vision in their head of everyone standing in a circle holding hands and singing. And then afterward talking about their feelings. But I don't think that's what the ancient Goddess represented. Sure, she was compassionate and kind. But she could also be aggressive and strong when necessary”.(Compassionate and kind? WTF are you talking about?)Amanda blinked, considering Cam's argument. “Okay.”“Think about it this way: what's more aggressive than a mother bear protecting her cubs?”“Good point”.(What? “Good point”?)“We shouldn't think of Goddess worship as necessarily being synonymous with passivity. Cultures that worship the Goddess can be aggressive.”Now, that's insulting, David. Women are not passive and submissive and gentle by nature, and you know nothing about the ancient Goddess worshiping cultures. No wonder considering your source material. Maybe try reading books written by actual historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists talking about actual scientific discoveries and history, (and preferably written by women), instead of finding literature that confirms your theories. “Cam made an interesting observation. “Notice how he uses words like stem and root and honey. All things from nature. As if nature itself were evil.”“That's what they believed”.Yeah. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots”. So evil. And then the stupid jokes. “Did I tell you one of my ancestors, Bertrand de Blanchefort, was a Templar Grand Master?” His pronunciation of the name made Amanda think of cheese fondue.“We call it the eggscroll”Either the language barrier prevented him from getting the joke, or he just didn't think it funny...They are all stupid like that. Some are more questionable than others. Most are of bad taste. None funny.