One of the first feminist books I ever read (about 1970] was “When God Was a Woman”. Many early carvings of God included snakes. It seems that snakes got a bum rap in the Bible.
I think I need a book on what happed to create the now overwhelming patriarchal views. It seems so much more fitting that God is a woman. Creation is a women’s greatest superpower. All the creative things that follow birth are contained in us. We got the best features! All we need to do is let them bloom. We get to choose ourselves.
Not every woman chooses to give birth (the choice should always be ours) but the innate “standard” features of women have added beauty, caring, loving, compassion and tears. Men hate to cry because they have lost the understanding of the physical and mental benefits.
Some men decided that the “soft” features of women were weaknesses. Boy did they screw up. So to create an opposite human, the “hard” (as in manly man not difficult) features were selected as “the best”. “Feminine” traits became less important and men relegated us to subservient status.
The truth is we are a mixture of traits that are subtly allowed to grow or are suppressed by social constructs. Women are powerful because we know that you don’t have to suppress our “soft” traits to live and grow with the traits of endurance, wisdom, compassion, compromise, intelligence, leadership, strength and good judgement.
We possess the very things that are needed for leadership but short-sighted patriarchy has an underlying fear of us. Why? Because they know and would never confess to their leadership hasn’t done so well. It certainly would look different if women were equals.
The traits that men have decided were the “best” brought us nuclear weapons, genocide, rape as war strategy, violence against women even the ones they say the love and the “need” to hate. To boost men’s self worth, women were denied the right to own property, vote, share political leadership, share religious leadership and to have autonomy over their thoughts, their place in life and their bodies
Our current wave of anti-women laws, attitudes, treatment and expectations is a direct result of claiming our share of the world. We actually are the majority but we’ll settle for 50/50. But this will never happen until men honestly admit that the antiquated belief of male superiority is the cause of much pain, poverty, strife, war, bigotry, hatred and it damages everyone.
There now are significantly more men who understand that human emotional development divides have stopped men from using their “soft” traits thus men have cheated themselves. It’s such a joy for me to see these changes over the past 50 years. These are the men of balance, equality, compassion, peace and love.
I predict that by the end of 2024 and beyond. Women will go boldly forward to seize back what Christian white men and their women supporters have stolen from us and we will continue to “share” all our traits with the world.
A couple of things, Sharon, to try to add to your brilliant reply: (1) Rupert Chapman and I are working on an archaeo-mythological history of the loss of Goddess culture in the Middle East and its replacement with patriarchy--though the Aztec and Chinese cultures, which were not influenced by the DELIBERATELY WARPED Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2, were as patriarchal as cultures get. The ancient Hebrews backing the king Yahweh were determined to wipe out the culture of the Canaanite goddess Asherah and so said writer ALTERED a widely extant Garden of Eden story to attack the fruit of the sacred tree (a totem symbol), the serpent (Asherah's symbol, which still appears in our medical symbol as a representation of what it actually is), and Asherah herself, in the form of Eve. Note that in Genesis 3, THERE IS NO SERPENT, THERE IS NO DEVIL, AND THERE IS NO APPLE. More on that later, but for the most complete researched on this, please see "The Mythology of Eden" by Arthur George and Elena George. This is one of the most important historical / mythological books I've ever seen. Meanwhile, offered total control of women--who PRODUCED most resources, including children, which were considered A FORM OF WEALTH--men took it and ran with it. Control of women was a BIG selling point for early Christianity. Meanwhile, religious authorities from St. Augustine on start tampering with this myth some more. Augustine invents "original sin" in the. 4th century, following biblical pronouncements in Psalm 51:5 ("I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me"),[2] and in Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The Council of Orange in the 6th century brought the concept into the Roman Catholic Church. Note also that the Book of Revelation embellishes this story to the hilt.... Just about as soon as we have the religiously legal transfer of all RESPONSIBILITY FOR EVIL from man to woman, madness results. Women lose rights, they are blocked from priesthood and representation in the Divine, and become, essentially, slaves. But it becomes much, much worse than that: iconography begins to emerge. that Sin, who was Satan's daughter, with whom he slept to produce Death, has snakes scampering in and out of her womb. The myth arises that the daughters of Cain slept with the Watcher Angels and greatly expanded evil in the world (of course the daughters bore that evil into the world). See the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the apocryphal epistle of Enoch. So, what you have is male "scholars" and "theologians" having wild day dreams in which woman becomes more and more evil. Now, there is a lot of speculation that the Inquisition was about the REPLACEMENT of matrilineal inheritance in Western Europe with the patriarchal fiefdoms over which the Roman Catholic Church would be overarching authority. Solution? Declare women witches. The RCC launched its own review several decades ago and decided that only 35,000 people had been burned at the stake in the Inquition--and that most hadn't been tortured more than once! But the RCC wasn't the primary mover of the Inquisition. That was secular courts that blamed women, Jews, and Muslims for the spread of Bubonic plague. But the dead, 3/4 of which were women, varied wildly through European states, topping out in Germany--which is always where the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM, the manuscript on how to torture a woman, went through FIFTY updates and revisions. But note: at the end of 400 years of the Inquisition, matrilineal inheritance was wiped out in Europe. It seems so often to come down to male control of women's sexuality and all the money. Grrrrrrrr. More on this later. https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/case_witchhunts.html
I'm struck by the similarity of the buildings in Çatalhöyük to those in Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, which I visited a couple of weeks ago and wrote about in my latest post. Interestingly, our Native American guide stated that theirs is a patriarchal society. However, indications are that the ancestral Pueblo people were much more egalitarian. After several changes in fortune between them and the Spanish invaders, the Taos Pueblans eventually sought Spanish protection from the invading Americans and embraced Catholicism, assuming Spanish names and customs, including patriarchy.
Have you read Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade?"
Yes! And we're going to be talking about that shortly as there is new research that is saying that Eisler missed something in her research: that almost all the renderings of high governmental figures are of women. Eisler thought that men ran the government and women ran the religion, though they all did their fair share of bull-leaping and sea captaining! So it looks now as if Knossos was heavily matriarchal, not gylanic as Eisler had declared.
You might find Erich Neumann’s book, The Great Mother interesting. He was one of Carl Jung’s most erudite students. It’s filled with wonderful photographs and discussions of the feminine archetype.
One of the first feminist books I ever read (about 1970] was “When God Was a Woman”. Many early carvings of God included snakes. It seems that snakes got a bum rap in the Bible.
I think I need a book on what happed to create the now overwhelming patriarchal views. It seems so much more fitting that God is a woman. Creation is a women’s greatest superpower. All the creative things that follow birth are contained in us. We got the best features! All we need to do is let them bloom. We get to choose ourselves.
Not every woman chooses to give birth (the choice should always be ours) but the innate “standard” features of women have added beauty, caring, loving, compassion and tears. Men hate to cry because they have lost the understanding of the physical and mental benefits.
Some men decided that the “soft” features of women were weaknesses. Boy did they screw up. So to create an opposite human, the “hard” (as in manly man not difficult) features were selected as “the best”. “Feminine” traits became less important and men relegated us to subservient status.
The truth is we are a mixture of traits that are subtly allowed to grow or are suppressed by social constructs. Women are powerful because we know that you don’t have to suppress our “soft” traits to live and grow with the traits of endurance, wisdom, compassion, compromise, intelligence, leadership, strength and good judgement.
We possess the very things that are needed for leadership but short-sighted patriarchy has an underlying fear of us. Why? Because they know and would never confess to their leadership hasn’t done so well. It certainly would look different if women were equals.
The traits that men have decided were the “best” brought us nuclear weapons, genocide, rape as war strategy, violence against women even the ones they say the love and the “need” to hate. To boost men’s self worth, women were denied the right to own property, vote, share political leadership, share religious leadership and to have autonomy over their thoughts, their place in life and their bodies
Our current wave of anti-women laws, attitudes, treatment and expectations is a direct result of claiming our share of the world. We actually are the majority but we’ll settle for 50/50. But this will never happen until men honestly admit that the antiquated belief of male superiority is the cause of much pain, poverty, strife, war, bigotry, hatred and it damages everyone.
There now are significantly more men who understand that human emotional development divides have stopped men from using their “soft” traits thus men have cheated themselves. It’s such a joy for me to see these changes over the past 50 years. These are the men of balance, equality, compassion, peace and love.
I predict that by the end of 2024 and beyond. Women will go boldly forward to seize back what Christian white men and their women supporters have stolen from us and we will continue to “share” all our traits with the world.
Our motto is Choice!
A couple of things, Sharon, to try to add to your brilliant reply: (1) Rupert Chapman and I are working on an archaeo-mythological history of the loss of Goddess culture in the Middle East and its replacement with patriarchy--though the Aztec and Chinese cultures, which were not influenced by the DELIBERATELY WARPED Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2, were as patriarchal as cultures get. The ancient Hebrews backing the king Yahweh were determined to wipe out the culture of the Canaanite goddess Asherah and so said writer ALTERED a widely extant Garden of Eden story to attack the fruit of the sacred tree (a totem symbol), the serpent (Asherah's symbol, which still appears in our medical symbol as a representation of what it actually is), and Asherah herself, in the form of Eve. Note that in Genesis 3, THERE IS NO SERPENT, THERE IS NO DEVIL, AND THERE IS NO APPLE. More on that later, but for the most complete researched on this, please see "The Mythology of Eden" by Arthur George and Elena George. This is one of the most important historical / mythological books I've ever seen. Meanwhile, offered total control of women--who PRODUCED most resources, including children, which were considered A FORM OF WEALTH--men took it and ran with it. Control of women was a BIG selling point for early Christianity. Meanwhile, religious authorities from St. Augustine on start tampering with this myth some more. Augustine invents "original sin" in the. 4th century, following biblical pronouncements in Psalm 51:5 ("I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me"),[2] and in Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The Council of Orange in the 6th century brought the concept into the Roman Catholic Church. Note also that the Book of Revelation embellishes this story to the hilt.... Just about as soon as we have the religiously legal transfer of all RESPONSIBILITY FOR EVIL from man to woman, madness results. Women lose rights, they are blocked from priesthood and representation in the Divine, and become, essentially, slaves. But it becomes much, much worse than that: iconography begins to emerge. that Sin, who was Satan's daughter, with whom he slept to produce Death, has snakes scampering in and out of her womb. The myth arises that the daughters of Cain slept with the Watcher Angels and greatly expanded evil in the world (of course the daughters bore that evil into the world). See the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the apocryphal epistle of Enoch. So, what you have is male "scholars" and "theologians" having wild day dreams in which woman becomes more and more evil. Now, there is a lot of speculation that the Inquisition was about the REPLACEMENT of matrilineal inheritance in Western Europe with the patriarchal fiefdoms over which the Roman Catholic Church would be overarching authority. Solution? Declare women witches. The RCC launched its own review several decades ago and decided that only 35,000 people had been burned at the stake in the Inquition--and that most hadn't been tortured more than once! But the RCC wasn't the primary mover of the Inquisition. That was secular courts that blamed women, Jews, and Muslims for the spread of Bubonic plague. But the dead, 3/4 of which were women, varied wildly through European states, topping out in Germany--which is always where the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM, the manuscript on how to torture a woman, went through FIFTY updates and revisions. But note: at the end of 400 years of the Inquisition, matrilineal inheritance was wiped out in Europe. It seems so often to come down to male control of women's sexuality and all the money. Grrrrrrrr. More on this later. https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/case_witchhunts.html
Thanks for this.
I'm struck by the similarity of the buildings in Çatalhöyük to those in Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, which I visited a couple of weeks ago and wrote about in my latest post. Interestingly, our Native American guide stated that theirs is a patriarchal society. However, indications are that the ancestral Pueblo people were much more egalitarian. After several changes in fortune between them and the Spanish invaders, the Taos Pueblans eventually sought Spanish protection from the invading Americans and embraced Catholicism, assuming Spanish names and customs, including patriarchy.
Have you read Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade?"
Yes! And we're going to be talking about that shortly as there is new research that is saying that Eisler missed something in her research: that almost all the renderings of high governmental figures are of women. Eisler thought that men ran the government and women ran the religion, though they all did their fair share of bull-leaping and sea captaining! So it looks now as if Knossos was heavily matriarchal, not gylanic as Eisler had declared.
You might find Erich Neumann’s book, The Great Mother interesting. He was one of Carl Jung’s most erudite students. It’s filled with wonderful photographs and discussions of the feminine archetype.
Talk about Niankhnum (sp?) and his husband. They did pharohnic hair back in the ancient day and their tomb is splendid.