Customer Reviews

SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World

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Saharasia is one of the most profound works I've ever come across. Contrary to what some other reviewers have said, I could NOT put this book down. It is definitely a 5 star work!

Dr. James DeMeo details hard evidence of the origins of social violence, rape, genital mutilation, warfare, and the suppression of women, children, etc. With a detailed outline of the origins of this area of research, DeMeo proves Wilhelm Reich's sex-economic theory with dozens of maps, images, engaging history, and detailed, iron clad evidence. He shows us exactly how and why our society got the way it is, and how we can change it by ending sexual suppression--by giving our children the love and attention they need--and defeating indoctrinated beliefs.

Have no doubt that this book is HUGE, but don't let its size stray you away from this most fascinating read. A good portion of its size is due to the fact that he has so many maps and images. It took me about 12 days to read it from cover to cover. I normally read a book a week. However, I do recommend that those who wish a gentler introduction to this work, to read Reich's Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, as a pre-requisite to this book.

DeMeo finds no need to sugarcoat truth and facts into deluded, bitesize tidbits. Those who think he pounds the information in too hard, disregard the fact that this book is all about getting to the truth.

Those who have doubted Reich's theories may doubt no more!

This book is probably one of the most important works of the last century, and DeMeo has certainly earned the title. May this book live through history and open minds as an accepted "Great Work"!

I'm adding DeMeo to my favorite authors list!

First, this book is not out of print! A copy should be lodged in every public and school library to inform readers that the world was not always the way we think it is. There was a different time and a different culture before 6,000 years ago. Dr. DeMeo has done a remarkable job of mapping the Sahara/Asia regions and spread of patrism and warfare even to the New World. His sources are impeccable and well worth reading for additional research. Yes, there was sporadic warfare, piracy, etc. prior to 6,000 years ago, but nothing like the organized armored gangs of thugs that wiped out towns, villages, cities and entire civilizations leaving destruction and desolation in their wake. Even the leading military experts cannot find much evidence for organized warfare prior to 3500 BCE, fortressing, etc. De Meo's and Reich's detractors are skating on thin ice if they are going to propose that violence is innate in Homo sapiens, thereby justifying that humankind is predisposed to violence and warfare. Read this book, it's fascinating, educational, and very disturbing. What is to be done to stop generational patrism? DeMeo has some suggestions.

This is the best book I know of for providing a panoramic picture, how the world has come to be so volatile and dangerous, by holistically gathering creditable information from psycholgical sources as well as the usual archeological, historical, and scientific viewpoints. The overall picture, when we get to see it, is absolutely stunning and convincing.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult information to communicate. Not because it is intellectually difficult, but because the information is saturated with emotional landmines. It is important directly because it is so effective at 'pushing anyone's buttons'; the truth is locked away behind a universal hypersensitivity to this material. A straight-ahead strategy of treating this material objectively cannot work-- I've tried-- because our subjective emotional experience always gets in the way.

And that, of course, is one of the themes of the book.

DeMeo goes from the micro to the macro, dictated by the breath of this concept. We have to understand that the human being has a very sophisticated reason for our emotions and emotional functions: by taking in continuous information of the outside world and releasing it emotionally, we are able to remain minutely responsive to all inputs and make wise, integrated and creative decisions throughout our lives. This mechanism of emotional release was coined the term 'discharge' by Wilhelm Reich, who studied it extensively in the 1920s and 30s, building on the work of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. It refers to crying, laughing, sighing, shivering, yawning, and other feeling-expressions. The calm, hopeful, potent peace we feel after a long cry is an example of discharge at work.

But as Reich discovered, and as DeMeo exhaustively maps, our society has very thoroughly built mechanisms for suppressing the emotional discharge of its members into the very fabric of our culture, following cultural and historic trends which have existed for at least 5000 years. So the subject is how we all have been acculturated by very common mainstream childraising practices to undermine our own abilities to think clearly and rationally, and to be happy; how -and why- society has imbedded into itself this all-encompassing inhibition of our emotions.

Reich knew that we are all very confused about our emotions; in a society where completely natural emotional expression is essentially taboo, we all are forced to hide our emotional selves inside armor that we have all built to protect ourselves. DeMeo's purpose is to restore a holistic society in which our emotional armoring is not necessary. But its a nearly impossible order; our armor is primed to become defensive at the very mention of our emotionally inhibiting practices.

That said, the strategy DeMeo uses is totally wrong; rather than gently walking us through an exposition of how the emotional baby we've been burying in the closet really holds our most profound truths, he rubs our noses in a long and grisly academic proof that the more sexually violent and misogynistic a society is, the more dysfunctional. He does this by painstakingly charting twenty sexually abusive practices as they've spread culturally in migration routes across the globe over a span of five or six thousand years. No one I've talked to who has read this book has gotten all the way through it; its brutal!

I think the core of this material is emotional, not academic, and requires a personal, not factual approach. By the time DeMeo has completed his brilliant proof, no one is alive to appreciate it, not even his supporters. Which is a shame, because this might be the most important set of ideas at large in the world at this time.

Its a book still waiting to be written.

In a nutshell, DeMeo says that before around 4000 BCE, humans were democratic, egalitarian, sex-positive, pleasure-oriented, non-violent Goddess-worshiping "matrists." Over the next 10-20 generations, however, certain matrist groups morphed into "patrists": violent, sexually-repressive, misogynistic, sadistic, male-dominated high-god worshipers with painful and traumatic child rearing techniques.

What caused the morphing? More on that below. First, though, a word on DeMeo's research. This is not any old "armchair science" book. DeMeo backs up his theories - ten years in the making -- with some of the most solid and extensive interdisciplinary data I've ever seen. To present this data for our perusal took over 400 pages, in a large-scale format, of scores of maps, charts, diagrams, figures, tables, drawings, photographs, footnotes and appendices as well as ample data-driven text.

The majority of DeMeo's data are sterling. For example, working with class-A anthropological data (from the Human Relations Area Files, etc.) and meshing those with class-A geological data (from the Budyko-Lettau Dryness Ratio), DeMeo shows that (1) around 4000 BCE a broad ribbon of land across Africa, the Middle East and Asia began dying; 2) People living in this land became the most patriarchal on the planet; and, 3) the further one wanders from this ribbon of land, the less patriarchal people are. DeMeo calls this land "Saharasia." It's an area that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles on our planet.

DeMeo offers a fascinating analysis of how the hideous change from matrist to patrist occurred. He bases his arguments on current studies of starving peoples. The behavioral changes in starving groups are enormous and appalling. Starving people become consumed with eating and lose interest in all other pleasures, including sex. The old and young are abandoned to die. Brothers steal food from sisters, and in some cases parents eat their own children. For children who survive, bad diet leads to laundry lists of psychological and physical abnormalities down the road. The culture breaks down. Life bumps into chaos.

Although this starvation syndrome began in Saharasia ca 4000 BCE, it continued for generation after generation. Most of the crazed groups caught in the desertification process died out. In the few that survived (and why they survived is explained below), mentally-ill behaviors became institutionalized. Mental illness became their way of life; the loss of interest in pleasure; the glorification of the strong; the strong stealing from the weak - all these and more would have become fossilized into a new and actively promoted way of life - a set of behaviors "learned, shared, patterned and transmitted from generation to generation," as my anthropology texts used to define culture. It is at this point, when mental-illness becomes codified, that one witnesses the birth of the patriarchy.

DeMeo contends that the first response to desertification was for the agricultural matrists to abandon their land and become nomadic, riding horseback over rough terrain, frantically searching for food and water. In order to keep babies alive, loving matrist mothers would bind (swaddle) them tightly in cloth. Babies spent all day tied to their mother's backs, unable to move heads, hands, legs or feet. For the successful new patrist groups this swaddling became something glorified. One effect was severe skull deformation in both infants and adults.

DeMeo thinks that infant swaddling and head binding produces a deep-set rage in adults, especially toward mothers, women, and female deity. Hence one possible source of the misogyny and abandonment of female deity that became hallmarks of patriarchal cultures.

"The heads of ... children ... are pressed so tightly by means of a peculiar kind of ligature, that little by little the heads assume the shape of sugar-loaves. The pressure is so great that the noses of the children ... are constantly bleeding.... The child cries and turns black, and when the mother presses on its forehead, a white slimy fluid comes out its nose and ears...." (p. 112).

Fortunately, skull deformation has died out over the past several hundred years (p. 112). Swaddling, however, has not. Even today groups across, and on the edges of Saharasia retain this awful practice in, for example, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China.

Although I don't agree with every theory in his book, I think DeMeo's basic premise - that ancient, widespread, continental desertification drove humans from their natural, healthy state into one of codified mental illness -- is a premise he proves almost beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And knowing that, once upon a time we actually *did* live in "The Garden of Eden," means there's hope we can get back there again.

~ Jeri Studebaker, author of Switching to Goddess: Humanity's Ticket to the Future

I want to thank Amazon reviewer J Studebaker for connecting me with this book. It is an exciting read! It has been a long time since I felt impelled to underline and post-it the pages of a book. James DeMeo's Saharasia is full of sweeping, courageous and inspiring insights marred by jarring blind spots.

He says that the drying up of a wide swath of land from Africa through the Middle East to Central Asia caused continued forced migration and psychological desiccation. That led humanity away from the easy going, sex positive ways of the mother goddess to the male oriented warfare and cruelty now considered normal.

He painstakingly documents this theory, but his documentation is flawed. For one thing, the evidence for the previous state of "matrist" bliss is scanty, with much of it coming from very old data compiled by early anthropologists in small, now destroyed, communities in places like the Trobriand Islands. He himself points out that people told those anthropologists what they wanted them to know and what they were willing to disclose. The anthropologists also interpreted their data through their own prejudices.

One blind spot is DeMeo's lumping of homosexuality into the category of an effect of the "patrist" repression of "healthy" heterosexuality. Another is his worshipful attitude toward Wilhelm Reich. DeMeo gives Reich, originally a follower of Freud, credit where credit is due. He first outlined the process of human "armoring" in the face of prolonged trauma.

DeMeo is eager to point out that while Freud first pointed to the importance of the "pleasure principle", he was wrong late in his life, denying the reality of the child abuse reported by patients. When it comes to Reich however, DeMeo is defensive about everything Reich espoused, even the supposedly curative powers of "Orgone energy", a concept which derailed Reich's career late in his life. DeMeo blames the patrist "powers that be" for that.

I enjoyed this book most because it made me think. Although I would like to, I am not sure I agree that in a state of nature human beings are warm, nurturing and sexually permissive. Perhaps we are a complex mix of both open and armored traits and can go either way depending on conditions. In other words, we adapt and survive.

I am willing to accept that the change in the earth's climate that started approximately 6,000 years ago has led to the current cultural climate as well. That doesn't mean that we can go back to Eden. We need new solutions and we have to stop making our problems worse. Future generations will have to find a way to survive the global warming we are precipitating and all its attending climate changes. We ain't seen nothing yet!

You can find a good summary-article of this whole book under the heading "The Origins and Diffusion of Patrism in Saharasia, c.4000 BCE: Evidence for a Worldwide, Climate-Linked Geographical Pattern in Human Behavior" by the same author free on the web. It has all the essential arguments lined up (together with maps).

This is probably the best researched book to date on how environmental destruction has affected society over the course of history. DeMeo shows with charts, maps and studies how we have systematically turned vast regions of the planet into desert wastelands. He then documents a disturbing pattern of cultural consequences for society across the world. DeMeo's decades of research help illuminate what is at stake for us in the struggle to heal the land.

--author of The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History

I grew up in a big happy sheltered family in Salt Lake City, Utah. My Boyfriend is from a small town a few hours away. We laughed so hard at an interview with the author on his book, because it was very apparent that he has never really gotten to know anyone who is gay. His stereotypes that gay men must be created from being sexually abused by pedophiles and that they are violent and abusive leather people who throw strange parties like the Folsom Street Fair in San francisco and that we fantasize about Hitler and the ss and that if only kids were allowed to play with each other sexually when they were young they would never grow up to be gay. Ridiculous stuff. It's too bad this author has never been to a small town gay event. I have never seen a fight at a gay bar or even a scuffle. Most gay youth these days couldn't give a rats a** about sadomasochism. What the hell is Folsom Street fair anyway? We are too busy going to school and working or protesting in rallies for some basic rights. This author also seems to believe that we are either violently involved in the leather scene or that we are queens and exhibit not the good but all the bad behavior of females. Me and my boyfriend have compared our early years growing up and they were as idelic as can be expected. Loving parents, freedom of expression in every way as children, and no sexual abuse of any kind. My dad was my soccer coach and I helped my mom with her vegetable garden and my partner helped his dad build a home for their family when he was a teenager. Anyone who has gotten to know the gay culture would find that most of us queers laugh at the culture which is still very young and can sometimes come across as silly in a gay pride parade sort of way. We have only really been trying to find a voice and a culture for the last three or four decades and It has come a long way in a surprisingly short amount of time. Most of us don't live in San francisco nearly half of this country has a close friend or family member who is gay. We work hard. We want to change the world. We want to be respected. Most of the gay youth I know are eating healthy taking care of themselves and are well adjusted. Being gay is what led me to see that western culture has it wrong in so many ways, I began reading and researching underground books such as this one, now all these years later many people are finally coming around on many gay issues and it is sad how backwards this book is in so many ways, especially because the book has many enlightening concepts.

There's a revolutionary understanding of our lives and our history in this world. It's very enjoyable to read.

Thanks to James DeMeo for writing the book ("Saharasia") I've been searching for all my life, especially this past decade, since the birth of my children. I have been fumbling and stumbling toward an understanding of essential human nature--I guess that makes me an "essentialist," and is that so bad?--and this book has set me free in the way that only truth can, filled me with joy, liberated and grounded me and validated all my life experiences to this point; I feel like a kid who can't wait to play with the greatest Christmas gift ever, excited to apply the book as a tool in my thinking and reading. For example, I am inspired by the Reich quote about the futility of devising systems of thought within a trap; if I reread popular Integral philosopher Ken Wilber, for example, will Saharasia elegantly unseam his system?

I am inspired to reread Reich, whose "Ether, God & Devil" I initially found disorganized and confusing. DeMeo's dissection of Freud is brilliant! I recently read an article in "The New Yorker" about Freudian psychoanalysts, who have little relevance in the US, being in hot demand in China, and I thought ironically of Reich, whose work would return meaning to the study of psychology in the US and of the Saharasian pattern evidenced in China.

I was a graduate fellow at Stanford University when my first daughter was born, and her birth changed me profoundly; just looking at my newborn's face, I understood that I no longer believed in "original sin." My daughter was profoundly colicky, and I persisted in holding her, breastfeeding on demand, cosleeping, etc., despite almost demonic pressure from a pleasure-anxious mother-in-law and a bizarre sort of couvade (I never had a word for it before!) on the part of my husband, a gentle and kind man, who suddenly went through a crisis of the nerves upon her birth and insisted that I "put her down" and "stop holding her for all our sakes." My second daughter was born gently at home, and I expected that my husband's consciousness would certainly expand because of the experience, but I found his anxiety impossible to budge. Books like "Continuum Concept" encouraged me in "attachment parenting" or, as I prefer to call it, parenting empathically. Books like "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" and Weston A. Price's "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" hinted at truths, but I was looking for a theoretical whole, and I consider "Saharasia" better and more brilliant than Vico!

This book has given me such happiness!