This brief blog is dedicated to Melissa ( @MelissaJaneSays ) who has raised really good points about the war on the feminine conducted by Christianity and the West and by the Catholic Church, in particular.
What I'm trying to do here is create perspective on the process of how the masculine has overridden the feminine by going back in time before the Catholic Church existed so as to demonstrate that the tendency is an existential tendency that's an unfortunate and apparently necessary part of our past, and not simply particular to the Catholic Church.
The first, the most archetypal, theft of the role of the feminine by the masculine occurred in ancient Greece when the cattle-driving men and women from Turkey invaded Greece, conquered it, and made slaves of the indigenous population.
According to some historians, and notably, Robert Graves, the ancient indigenous Greeks didn't understand that sex made babies, or, the women understood it, but they refused to share the knowledge with men. So the women were held in thrall by men who didn't understand that they were the co-creationists of children. The women had a kind of absolute power.
They were an agricultural population who worshiped Hera (name derive from Erith, Earth?), and other goddesses in local cults, the local version of Hera.
The rites of Hera involved the sacrifice of the queen's consort every spring, his entombment and his replacement/resurrection with a new consort for a year. The bodies of the men who were sacrificed were probably eaten by priestesses and their blood scattered on the fields where the nitrogen in the blood helped increase the production of food, validating the whole notion of what they were doing, ie returning sacred blood to be used again.
The sacrificed consorts became Hera's sons and were considered heroes, derived from her name.
A side note: as a boy I always wondered how Hercules could be the son of Zeus. It turns out that Hercules means "little one of Hera", and it's obvious here that the masculine took over what had been traditionally the power of the feminine by changing his parentage to Zeus, a further disrespect of the Feminine.
The cattle drivers knew that sex made babies because they could not possibly take care of a herd of cattle without coming to understand that sex and procreation were connected.
The conquest of the then "Hellenes", the indigenous people of Greece, who became the "Helots", the slaves that served the upper class, brought about a re-dimension of the power of the feminine.
The conquest itself, and the end of the myth of women as divine creatures who give birth to children by themselves without the assistance of men, ended women's essential monopoly on power, especially spiritual power.
Lest you think that this is a conjecture that's way out in left field, I will point out that in the early 1970s in a remote Chinese mountain area, the locals didn't know that sex made babies. Brother and sister raised the children of the female while both of them pursued what would we would consider a very freewheeling sexual lifestyle. This is the original clan model. All members of the clan, all the"kin", were descended from the first brother-sister pair directly from Mother.
In traditional culture, and in Jewish culture until recently, the child could only be a member of the clan if the mother was a member of the clan. This is because the body of the child was considered identical to the body of the mother. So, it seems to be a kind of universally-held notion.
As the men took over ancient Greece, they did not throw out the rites of the then dominant female society but rather took on the role of the priestesses- but with some odd twists.
The men dressed in the robes of the female, donning her breastplates, her wigs, and the double-sided ax, which was a symbol of the waxing and waning moon. The moon in a feminine culture is considered the more important deity in comparison with the sun. The moon is capable of blocking out the sun. Women's menstrual periods are so named because they go in synchrony with the moon, an obvious miracle, as it were.
Zeus, who had been a rather unimportant semi-divine creature previously, now became a major player. His followers, the priests of his rite, went around Greece making deals with all local sites of worship for control.
For Robert Graves, this is the original reason that Hera was "jealous". He means that Hera was jealous because the priestesses of Hera wanted control of all of Greece and its rites, whereas Zeus's followers took over each cult, making deals with the local goddess, with force, ie "rape of Europa".
This whole sacrifice of the prince consort every year was a kind of grand mimicry of nature, which I like to compare to the people on stage at "Rocky Horror Picture Show" who imitated everything that was on screen.
The earth, which is the energy of the Mother, (the Latin mater, which becomes matter), goes through a life cycle like a woman. In the spring the earth is like a child, which becomes like a full woman with the bloom of the trees (May as in "Maya" and June as in "Juno") and gradually goes "gray" as the leaves turn brown and then undergoes a kind of death.
However, everything that shot up out of the ground was considered a son of the mother, a kind of Mercury, a messenger from the earth goddess, a servant and protector. (Even Isaac Newton had such an idea.)
The sacrifice of the queen's prince consort represented the ancient Greeks' understanding of the relationship of the masculine and feminine.
The queen gets to live because she is reborn of herself, but the son of the mother is reborn in the spring out of Hera. The royal couple had to mimic that relationship. So the king was killed and entombed ("returned to womb/tomb") and the new prince walked out representing that renewed plant life of the spring.
Sounds like something re Christianity?
Yes, it certainly does. If the Christians got the myth of rebirth of Jesus from somewhere, that somewhere was everywhere in the Mediterranean where aspects of the original feminine culture lived on.
I'm not saying that I know whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. I'm just explaining some of the pagan origins of the attraction of the myth, whether the event was true or false.
Over time, the queens became more attached to their temporary consorts and looked for a way out of the sacrifice of the prince. Joseph Campbell has a wonderful passage in one of his books where the story is told of how the delay of the sacrifice of the prince worked out under the distraction of an excellent court story teller, so that he's allowed to live.
Accommodations came about over time. Example: they would depose the prince/king for a day, appoint what was called an "Interrex". He would be sacrificed and the old king would come out as the new king and everyone was happy.
The interrex might be a prisoner, and, then, eventually, animals were used. The story of Abraham and Isaac probably came out of a similar change in the view of human sacrifice.
Catholic priests to this day wear what is essentially a dress that goes all the way back to that event where the priests of Zeus took over the rites of Hera and dressed like her priestesses. I remember in kindergarten looking at the priests and wondering why they dressed in dresses and I remember the nuns talking about it.
Yes, it really does make an impression. Gee, that and how come we have a May procession in May and honor the Virgin Mary and all? Goes right back to Matriarchal times...and the beauty contest was the contest to crown someone the representative of the Divine Feminine.
So, this is a great example of how cultural shifts occur under trauma and stress and under a change in the psychological balance brought about by conquest and the knowledge that sex makes babies and that men are partly gods themselves, as are women.
(In another blog, I will look at how the Egyptians lost their feminine God for a God who masturbates the world into existence.)
It all shows that as the left-brain grew in dominance, everything in the rest of the psyche, outside the conscious ego, got assigned to an increasingly distrusted unconscious that could not be counted on to support the power structure of the leading families and of the men who led them.
A "new" feminine arose to help out: one of the undoubted reasons that Athena got created out of previous goddesses is because the upper-class elite women began to have a disposition which favored the elite men...and the needed a myth to accommodate the new goddess...Athena as the true daughter of her father, Zeus.
A quick explanation.
Zeus took an ancient Greek goddess called Metis and, for some reason or other, swallowed her. Robert Graves said that this represented the fact that her rites got subsumed under the priesthood of Zeus. However Metis is a goddess and she really didn't die after being swallowed by Zeus. She continued to be a voice that spoke to him from his belly, his solar plexus, and probably represents two things:
The first would be that the high priestesses of Metis continued to play a role that was important in advising the new priests of Zeus as to what was what in the community...
The second would be that as men shifted to a head-based culture based on command and words, the kind that the American Indian Hopis (?) talked about with Jung in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, there still remained that need for what today is called "gut instinct".
In the solar plexus we have a connection to the lower half of the body which ends up representing the other half of the psyche outside of the conscious ego.
But, as a result of that union of a traditional Earth mother cult and the new patriarchal Zeus cult, a new kind of feminine was born from the head of Zeus. That new kind of feminine was Athena.
Nowadays Jungian psychologists call the women in corporate offices "Daughters of Athena".
Coco Chanel invented the entire look for the corporate woman. Instead of all that fluffy exaggerated feminine stuff of the past, Coco Chanel, abandoned by her father and raised as an orphan, took the military cloths, the uniforms of her lovers and reworked them into a suit she could wear. Voila! The Chanel suit was born.
So let's get it.
The feminine has been through all kinds of changes in all periods of history, mostly denigrated, but now about to undergo her own re-birth, I maintain, as the masculine overreach has gone on long enough and a re-balancing seems to be manifesting. (Another post.)
It must be pointed out that what has constituted the "new feminine" of today politically and culturally is just the old feminine of Athena, now demanding to be the actual leader, and embodied in the candidacy of an ex-First Lady, almost as if a Greek myth were being acted out in a play....
...hence the terms "collective unconscious"...and "archetypes"...
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