The kids in my family are tremendous lovers of mythology and I'm quite excited about one of Walker's book about myths; I've got to get my hands on a copy! I see she has many books available on amazon but nothing from my library system! I've also listened to some interviews and podcasts with her that are available on youtube. At the moment, I've reached out to my online friend, hoping to find a way to connect up with Barbara G. Walker herself.
I'm going to share Barbara's lecture here (below) because I know you will be amazed and informed by her knowledge. In the meantime, if Barbara prefers that I not share it here, I will remove it. (Better to ask for forgiveness than approval...) 😉
You can read more about Barbara G. Walker here at the Freedom from Religion Foundation website. Do follow the link because Barbara's writing on that page is extremely scholarly and informing.
This
is a wonderful lecture given by Barbara G. Walker at a Unitarian
Universal Church on February 17th.
Grab a cuppa; let's get started:
Studies in both mythology and anthropology show that mothers, not fathers, were the original authority figures in human societies. Paleolithic and neolithic humans were no more aware of fatherhood than any other primate species; the connection between sexual activity and conception was not understood until quite late in human history. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, anthropologists and missionaries found primitive cultures where it was still not understood. Most early peoples attributed pregnancy to mysterious magic that made only females able to create life.
Thus the popular notion of "cave men" dominating women by
physical strength is quite erroneous. Women were generally respected
in primitive cultures. Musclemen don't rule, but rather serve the
rulers. Social power comes not from physical strength but from
psychological, emotional, and/or financial authority. Like all other
mammals, early humans knew they owed their existence only to their
mothers. As a Native American chieftain once explained, "Of course we
listen to and obey the women. They are our mothers." Women usually
owned the dwellings and property, created crafts and technical skills
required to sustain the tribe, later including even the development of
writing and math. According to Hindu scriptures, "male ancestors"
believed that if they could learn how to measure and figure as the women
did, then they might "happily create progeny."
Men did envy women's ability to produce and nourish new life, and wanted a part in it. In some South American tribes, during childbirth a woman's mate would lie down and moan and groan, pretending to produce the baby, and even pretended to nurse it afterward, recalling the Bible's rather absurd mention of a "suckling child" being nourished "in the bosom of Abraham." In the original baptism ceremony of ancient Egypt, a mother gave her child a name while anointing it with her milk. There was a strange recollection of this in the French term nom de lait , "milk name," meaning one given by the mother.
One fact about reproduction that was obvious to primitives
was that, during pregnancy, women kept within their bodies that mysterious blood that was shed in harmony with the phases of the moon. Thus it seemed clear that menstrual blood was the substance of which babies were made. We still speak of "blood" relationships because of the classical belief that all tribes were made of what the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans called the mother's "heart's blood." Aristotle said every human life is made of a "coagulum" of menstrual blood. According to Pliny, each baby is formed of a "curd" of menstrual blood. Plutarch said the power that made a human body came from the moon, source of menstrual blood. Indians of South America said all humanity was made of "moon blood" in the beginning.
In ancient
Mesopotamia, women practiced a standard conception charm, shaping
babies of clay and anointing them with menstrual blood, to make a real
baby by sympathetic magic. This charm was so widely used that the word
adamah literally "bloody clay", was basis of the name Adam, which
Bible translators delicately re-rendered as "red earth."
Hindu scriptures claim that the Goddess Kali made the world and all the gods from her "ocean of blood", (another version of the Red Sea). Chinese sages called menstrual blood the "red yin juice" that made all of life in the beginning.
Because of its wondrous power, menstrual blood was also regarded with holy dread. The Bible calls it "unclean," which is a vague mistranslation of the word meaning "taboo, sacred, untouchable." The Bible also calls it the "flower," meaning the forerunner of the "fruit" of the womb: i.e., a baby. In India, girls had a solemn ceremony at menarche, when they were said to have borne the "Kula flower," which united them to both ancestral traditions and the offspring of the future. Men came to fear this "flower" so much that during the Middle Ages, when patriarchy finally ruled supreme, menstruating women were forbidden to enter churches. It seemed that even God was unable to protect his belongings from "the curse." What a crippling burden of guilt was imposed on women because of their natural physiology!
Despite their fear, men often tried to imitate
motherhood-magic by some form of genital bloodshed. Many are the myths
of gods who were castrated or otherwise genitally mutilated to create
life. The phallus of the Hindu Great God, Mahadeva, was removed so his
blood could give birth to men. The Mexican savior Quetzalcoatl made new
humans to repopulate the earth after the Flood, by cutting off his
penis and giving the blood to the mother goddess Miti. The Phoenician
Father Heaven, Shamin, was castrated to produce the world's rivers from
his blood. Many other gods claimed physical birth-giving powers through
genital bloodletting.
Pubescent boys of the Arunta tribe suffered subincision, called "man's menstruation," and the wound was referred to as a vagina. In ancient Egypt, circumcision for the assurance of future fertility was practiced on 13-year-old boys, who were dressed in girls' clothing for the ceremony. The Jews copied circumcision from the Egyptians but transferred it to infancy, a practice objectionable to the women, according to the story of Moses's Midianite wife Zipporah, who opposed the mutilation of her infant. After the operation she flung the foreskin at Moses, calling him a bloody husband (Exodus 4). The ceremony for adolescents remained, however, and evolved into the bar mitzvah.
Observing that death meant no more breathing, some early peoples came up with the idea that breath was synonymous with soul. In early Hindu mythology, would-be father gods said a man must give the breath of life to each baby, so their custom maintained that a man had to make a "soul" in a newborn child by breathing into its face. This method of fathering was later adopted by the biblical God, who "breathed the breath of life" into the nostrils of Adam to make him a "living soul" (Gen. 2:7).
But the biblical description of God as "all that has been, that is, and that will be" was copied from an Egyptian inscription first applied to the Great Mother. It was written on her ancient temple at Sais, where she was also described as "the greatest power on earth, who existed when nothing else had being, who commandeth all that is in the universe."
Once fatherhood was discovered, patriarchal cultures began to insist
on monogamy, so a man could be sure that every child came from his own
"seed." The Bible is stuffed full of "begats," which never mention
mothers; and it says over and over, "he went in unto her, and she
conceived, and bare a child," to drive home the same message that the
Christian church later insisted on: the soul of a baby comes not from
the mother's "heart's blood," but from semen; and a mother's body is
simply the inert soil in which the "seed" can grow. Of course the human
ovum remained completely unknown until it was finally discovered by
Edgar Allen in 1928.
Patriarchal religion brought about history's most radical changes in human social organization. Over the next millennia in many cultures, men became more warlike and aggressive; they claimed property rights and ancestral naming customs; they established male "blood" lines even when magical moon-blood was no longer involved. Judaeo-Christian tradition began to insist that all evil came from woman, due to the sin of Eve. St. Paul said, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was the transgressor" (1 Tim. 2:14), which seems to indicate that the real original sin was gullibility.
The Catholic doctrine of original sin was established by St. Augustine, who said the sin is transmitted to every child by its passage through the female body. Any male child that died before the requisite forty days before baptism would suffer forever in hell; and a female child could not even be brought into a church for eighty days. This cruel doctrine was not modified until the church relented enough to invent a Limbo for the innocent ones -- who still had to suffer a little, anyway.
In the apocryphal Gospel According to the Egyptians,
Jesus says, "I have come to destroy the works of the female." Clement of Alexandria said "Every woman should be filled with shame." St. Peter said in the Gospel of Thomas, "Women are not worthy of life." St. Odo of Cluny wrote that a woman is only a "sack of dung." Bishop John Aylmer wrote in 1590: "Woman is the dregs of the devil's dung hill." The Malleus Maleficarum handbook of the Inquisition, says "All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman."
St. Thomas Aquinas said every woman is defective from birth, begotten
only because her father was ill or in a state of sin at the time of her
conception, and she must be treated as "lower than a slave, wholly in
subjection to her husband." Martin Luther considered himself an
unusually kind husband because he didn't beat his wife with a stick, but
only punched her in the head "to keep her from getting saucy." A
15th-century church publication on the Rules of Marriage said a husband
should "soundly" beat his wife; it would redound to his credit in
heaven.
In the 1890s the president of a leading theological seminary wrote "The Bible commands the subjection of women forever." A 19th-century document of the Anglican church said, "Women are intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and nature... and imperfect and infirm in character." Orestes Brownson opined that "Every woman must be under a man's control, otherwise she is... a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, except through a woman's influence." The Reverend Peter Easton declared the emancipated woman "an incarnate demon, a creature of unbounded lust and merciless cruelty." Quite recently, the Reverend Pat Robertson told women: "If you get married, you have accepted the leadership of a man. The husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
The point is that over the centuries, the primary fountainhead of
sexism in western civilization has been religion. It was religion that
obliterated the mother goddess in favor of the father god. I was
religion that transferred the supposed essence of human life from
mother-blood to semen. It was religion that insisted on patriarchal
rules of marriage and inheritance. It was religion that sanctioned
abuse and enslavement of wives. It was religion that so despised women
as to torture and burn more than nine million of them during five
centuries of dominance by the Inquisition in Europe. It is religion
that still supports sexist doctrines.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: "The church has done more to degrade women than all other adverse influences together. Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, woman becoming the helpless victim of all the delusions in the brain of man. There is nothing more pathetic in all history than the hopeless resignation of woman to the outrages she has been taught to believe are ordained by God."
Though many believers insist that God has no physical being, they fail to make the logical conclusion that "he" would lack the proper genitalia and hormones that define maleness. We do know from mythology that in Graeco-Roman times, gods routinely impregnated large numbers of virgins, even though non-physical beings would necessarily lack any form of spermatozoa. How exactly such an impregnation could happen has never been made clear, even though some sects continue to insist on it to this day.
In truth, however, our only proven source of life is Mother Earth, who is more than just an imaginary concept devoid of physical being. "She" symbolizes an essential reality: one that deserves much more of our attention, because our lives depend on it every day, and for all the foreseeable future.
Grab a cuppa; let's get started:
The Rise of Sexism
Studies in both mythology and anthropology show that mothers, not fathers, were the original authority figures in human societies. Paleolithic and neolithic humans were no more aware of fatherhood than any other primate species; the connection between sexual activity and conception was not understood until quite late in human history. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, anthropologists and missionaries found primitive cultures where it was still not understood. Most early peoples attributed pregnancy to mysterious magic that made only females able to create life.
Men did envy women's ability to produce and nourish new life, and wanted a part in it. In some South American tribes, during childbirth a woman's mate would lie down and moan and groan, pretending to produce the baby, and even pretended to nurse it afterward, recalling the Bible's rather absurd mention of a "suckling child" being nourished "in the bosom of Abraham." In the original baptism ceremony of ancient Egypt, a mother gave her child a name while anointing it with her milk. There was a strange recollection of this in the French term nom de lait , "milk name," meaning one given by the mother.
One fact about reproduction that was obvious to primitives
was that, during pregnancy, women kept within their bodies that mysterious blood that was shed in harmony with the phases of the moon. Thus it seemed clear that menstrual blood was the substance of which babies were made. We still speak of "blood" relationships because of the classical belief that all tribes were made of what the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans called the mother's "heart's blood." Aristotle said every human life is made of a "coagulum" of menstrual blood. According to Pliny, each baby is formed of a "curd" of menstrual blood. Plutarch said the power that made a human body came from the moon, source of menstrual blood. Indians of South America said all humanity was made of "moon blood" in the beginning.
Hindu scriptures claim that the Goddess Kali made the world and all the gods from her "ocean of blood", (another version of the Red Sea). Chinese sages called menstrual blood the "red yin juice" that made all of life in the beginning.
Because of its wondrous power, menstrual blood was also regarded with holy dread. The Bible calls it "unclean," which is a vague mistranslation of the word meaning "taboo, sacred, untouchable." The Bible also calls it the "flower," meaning the forerunner of the "fruit" of the womb: i.e., a baby. In India, girls had a solemn ceremony at menarche, when they were said to have borne the "Kula flower," which united them to both ancestral traditions and the offspring of the future. Men came to fear this "flower" so much that during the Middle Ages, when patriarchy finally ruled supreme, menstruating women were forbidden to enter churches. It seemed that even God was unable to protect his belongings from "the curse." What a crippling burden of guilt was imposed on women because of their natural physiology!
Pubescent boys of the Arunta tribe suffered subincision, called "man's menstruation," and the wound was referred to as a vagina. In ancient Egypt, circumcision for the assurance of future fertility was practiced on 13-year-old boys, who were dressed in girls' clothing for the ceremony. The Jews copied circumcision from the Egyptians but transferred it to infancy, a practice objectionable to the women, according to the story of Moses's Midianite wife Zipporah, who opposed the mutilation of her infant. After the operation she flung the foreskin at Moses, calling him a bloody husband (Exodus 4). The ceremony for adolescents remained, however, and evolved into the bar mitzvah.
Observing that death meant no more breathing, some early peoples came up with the idea that breath was synonymous with soul. In early Hindu mythology, would-be father gods said a man must give the breath of life to each baby, so their custom maintained that a man had to make a "soul" in a newborn child by breathing into its face. This method of fathering was later adopted by the biblical God, who "breathed the breath of life" into the nostrils of Adam to make him a "living soul" (Gen. 2:7).
But the biblical description of God as "all that has been, that is, and that will be" was copied from an Egyptian inscription first applied to the Great Mother. It was written on her ancient temple at Sais, where she was also described as "the greatest power on earth, who existed when nothing else had being, who commandeth all that is in the universe."
Patriarchal religion brought about history's most radical changes in human social organization. Over the next millennia in many cultures, men became more warlike and aggressive; they claimed property rights and ancestral naming customs; they established male "blood" lines even when magical moon-blood was no longer involved. Judaeo-Christian tradition began to insist that all evil came from woman, due to the sin of Eve. St. Paul said, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was the transgressor" (1 Tim. 2:14), which seems to indicate that the real original sin was gullibility.
The Catholic doctrine of original sin was established by St. Augustine, who said the sin is transmitted to every child by its passage through the female body. Any male child that died before the requisite forty days before baptism would suffer forever in hell; and a female child could not even be brought into a church for eighty days. This cruel doctrine was not modified until the church relented enough to invent a Limbo for the innocent ones -- who still had to suffer a little, anyway.
In the apocryphal Gospel According to the Egyptians,
Jesus says, "I have come to destroy the works of the female." Clement of Alexandria said "Every woman should be filled with shame." St. Peter said in the Gospel of Thomas, "Women are not worthy of life." St. Odo of Cluny wrote that a woman is only a "sack of dung." Bishop John Aylmer wrote in 1590: "Woman is the dregs of the devil's dung hill." The Malleus Maleficarum handbook of the Inquisition, says "All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman."
In the 1890s the president of a leading theological seminary wrote "The Bible commands the subjection of women forever." A 19th-century document of the Anglican church said, "Women are intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and nature... and imperfect and infirm in character." Orestes Brownson opined that "Every woman must be under a man's control, otherwise she is... a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, except through a woman's influence." The Reverend Peter Easton declared the emancipated woman "an incarnate demon, a creature of unbounded lust and merciless cruelty." Quite recently, the Reverend Pat Robertson told women: "If you get married, you have accepted the leadership of a man. The husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
The point is that over the centuries, the primary fountainhead of
sexism in western civilization has been religion. It was religion that
obliterated the mother goddess in favor of the father god. I was
religion that transferred the supposed essence of human life from
mother-blood to semen. It was religion that insisted on patriarchal
rules of marriage and inheritance. It was religion that sanctioned
abuse and enslavement of wives. It was religion that so despised women
as to torture and burn more than nine million of them during five
centuries of dominance by the Inquisition in Europe. It is religion
that still supports sexist doctrines.Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: "The church has done more to degrade women than all other adverse influences together. Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, woman becoming the helpless victim of all the delusions in the brain of man. There is nothing more pathetic in all history than the hopeless resignation of woman to the outrages she has been taught to believe are ordained by God."
Though many believers insist that God has no physical being, they fail to make the logical conclusion that "he" would lack the proper genitalia and hormones that define maleness. We do know from mythology that in Graeco-Roman times, gods routinely impregnated large numbers of virgins, even though non-physical beings would necessarily lack any form of spermatozoa. How exactly such an impregnation could happen has never been made clear, even though some sects continue to insist on it to this day.
In truth, however, our only proven source of life is Mother Earth, who is more than just an imaginary concept devoid of physical being. "She" symbolizes an essential reality: one that deserves much more of our attention, because our lives depend on it every day, and for all the foreseeable future.
Isn't this interesting?
What do you think?
What do you think?
Addendum:
Links on interesting online Barbara G. Walker feminist, atheist or humanist resourcesMy Conversion
Interview: begins at the 12:00 mark
I'm extremely disappointed that none of her humanist/atheist/feminist books are available at my library system. The St. Louis library system is quite extensive!
I'll be making some request from them soon!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Barbara G. Walker is a fountain of knowledge! Her awesome compilation, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, is a must-read for every woman who seeks to familiarize Herself with Herstory. Blessed Be!
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