Women born today expect to live a fuller life than I could have anticipated when I was born in the 1940s. Marriage and children is no longer the only approved life path for a woman. It was a parasitical life for women anyway and I’m glad it’s gone. In those days, women were dependent on men for their own and their children’s livelihood, literally for the food they ate. Such inequality led to women being undervalued and abused by the male sex. In the seventies women woke up and realized they were unhappy. It was an instinctive reaction. As I read the manifestos emanating from the movement, I kept saying Yeah, that’s right! I felt it in my bones, in my very being. It was an instinctive, gut reaction.

 

Beliefs don’t have to be true for us to hold them.

 

Beliefs aren’t facts. My neighbors here in North Carolina are fundamentalist Christians. They are wonderful, kind people trying and, for the most part, succeeding in living lives close to Christian expectations of goodness. I love these people but I can’t talk to them. I become angry and frustrated because they won’t and perhaps can’t see things in any other way. If the Bible says it’s true then it is true. It’s a fact as far as they are concerned. That means that abortion is wrong. It’s wrong to kill little babies. I couldn’t agree more.

But hang on, I say. There is more to this issue. I tell them that I think women should be able to control what happens to their bodies. A woman will be responsible for a child for at least 18 years into the future. That’s something to think about. A woman should be able to decide if it’s right for her. This shouldn’t be decided by the church, the government or even the father. It’s her choice.

I blame the bible for this. The bible isn’t any more factual than any other book. It was written by men who had a particular point of view and a particular goal to achieve. History has the same problem. It might be a correct rendering of what actually happened or it might not. It seems to me that a lot of history is just a recitation of different battles. This is the result of having male historians with a warrior’s point of view writing the texts.

I’m now reading Marija Gimbutas’ books, The Civilization of the Goddess and The Language of the Goddess. They are heavy books both literarily and figuratively. Together they weigh in at 10 pounds and although her writing is clear and understandable, it is a lot of information to take in. Right now, I’m concentrating on a story told in The Civilization of the Goddess, beginning in the final chapter entitled, The End of Old Europe. Gimbutas’ Old Europe was essentially the Goddess civilization which she describes as “peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal, matrilineal and sex egalitarian culture.” It was a culture that practiced agriculture and animal husbandry. They worshipped a Goddess who came out of the abyss and was aligned with nature, the seasons, the rich earth, and the waters and life-giving rain. The Goddess culture had no hierarchy as such. Communities existed for the good of all.

What happened to the Goddess culture was perhaps inevitable. From the north came nomadic tribes of people who rode horses, and practiced a “warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical culture.” Their skills at agriculture were rudimentary but they were advanced in the implements of war and their uses. Beginning in 4400 B.C. they invaded the Goddess cultures. It was easy. The Goddess culture did not stand a chance against these horseback riding invaders.

Marija Gimbutas wrote in the mid 1980s but she was proceeded by mostly male archeologists since probably the eighteenth century. Although these archeologists found plenty of evidence of the Goddess culture, they mistook it for something else. The male archeologists mischaracterized the statues as fertility fetishes and tossed them aside. They were hunting for evidence of a male God, a male King or warrior but he wasn’t there. The reason he wasn’t there is now obvious. A hierarchical male God did not exist that far back.

A male God didn’t exist until later. The writers of the old testament created him in their texts. The men purposely incorporated many of the Goddess’ symbols into the Creation story of Adam and Eve. But they twisted the symbols so that they were symbols of evil rather than of goodness and wisdom as they were prior to the coming of the invaders. The snake had been a symbol of wisdom connected to the intuitive knowledge that the Goddess possessed. The apple tree was the tree of life for the Goddess. It stood for regeneration and the seasons. Before the Adam and Eve story, women were comfortable with their bodies but in the Bible’s origin story Eve hid herself and was ashamed.

The authors of the Old Testament wrote history to reflect their own values and created their own laws, laws that clearly placed men above women. Some secretly still worshipped the Goddess. In Christianity a residue of the Goddess remained in the Virgin Mary but she was without power. The Catholic church teaches us that since men were the apostles that men only have the ability to be priests. They put women in the position of servants and handmaidens. Even worship of the Virgin Mary is now being threatened. Her statues have been removed from the churches. I no longer see the side alters to Mary and Joseph with their attendant bank of candles. The church says that their parishioners should go directly to God, not through the intermediary of the Virgin. The image of the Virgin Mary, who represented a lingering belief in the Goddess, has been eroded almost entirely.

If Christian fundamentalists could be exposed to the concept of the Goddess, if they could be shown that the rules of the Bible were designed to replace the Goddess then maybe they could broaden their understanding of abortion. All of this has been lost but we must bring it back. Our culture and our world is being threatened. If it were still the Goddess culture, we would not be having the floods, the famines, the rampant capitalism, the difference between the rich and the poor, the wars or the many immigrants running from them. It would probably not be 104 degrees in Europe right now. The earth we live on is in trouble. Capitalist don’t recognize this. The don’t look that far. They are blinded by greed. We need the Goddess today and cannot continue to push Her away.

History is written by whoever is in charge at the time and rewritten to accommodate changes in the power structure. We and by the word, we, I mean most humans living in North and South America, in Europe and in much of the world no longer question that God is of the male sex. We, that’s the same universal we, forget that the Goddess was worshipped prior to God’s arrival. She was here on earth first and despite millenniums of effort to extinguish belief in Her, She is still worshipped. To venerate the Goddess is to worship nature, the trees, the plants of the field, the rain, the rivers and the oceans that sustain life. She is the Mother Goddess and appears in many forms. Her domain is egalitarian and democratic. She is celebrated for her ability to give birth and to heal the sick. She makes us whole.

Jungian psychology purports the belief that the goddess is still within us as an archetype. She completes the nature of man. She doesn’t replace it. 

Rape in our culture today is a direct result of patriarchy. That is the problem and that is what we need to recognize if we are to make progress. Christianity is the mythical basis of our society and although Jesus Christ was gentle, kind and proclaimed a universal love of mankind, his message has been twisted. Christ’s life stands at a crossroads of history. It marked the end of Goddess worship. The Old Testament and later the New Testament established a male God and placed women firmly in the role of helpmate. Prior to Christ, the Goddess were strong.

All I am saying is it is possible for people to simply change their minds. You may not agree about the Goddess. You may be a Christian and believe in a male God. That’s fine. I understand. But we need a culture that is gentler. We need a culture that allows men to talk about their inner feelings. Sublimating feelings doesn’t work so why do it?

I believe men and women are uniquely made to compliment one another. Our bodies fit together. We are meant to rule this world side by side as equals. But unity won’t and can’t happen if we remain on the road we are on now.

We can’t put half the men in the world into jail in order to teach them that raping us is wrong. There is a far easier way to stop men from raping women. It begins with equality because only by respecting women as equals can men even begin to feel the love and empathy for women I think is actually inside them. Men need to recognize that women are made in the image and likeness of the Goddess just as they are made in the image and likeness of God.

I believe in the collective unconscious of Carl Jung. Memory of the Goddess is alive. It throbs like a heartbeat within the male unconscious. A woman is both Mother and Maid, the mother who suckles you as a child and who makes love to you as a man. Be worthy of her.  Do not rape Her or her.