The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles
Nature met Father God and her doom. In the duel for possession of the soul of humanity she lost her own, as the father god, in Engels’ phrase, brought about, ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’.
Not all these new religions were god-systems. Judaism offered the paternalistic prototype, once it had succeeded in elevating the petty tribal godlet Yahweh into quite a different order of being after the trauma of the Exile just before 600 B.C. Islam likewise patented the slogan ‘There is no God but God’ following the birth of its prophet Muhammad just before A.D. 600. And straddling the period between the two, lodged at its pivotal mid-point, was the reformed Judaism called Christianity formulated when the old God of the Jews gave birth to a son in whom, as a junior version of himself, he was naturally well pleased.1
Equally important, though, to India and China respectively, were Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which arose with the birth of their human founders and spread far and fast from these deceptively modest origins. Neither Buddha nor Confucius ever claimed to be divine, and their teachings are properly understood as value-systems rather than as religions proper. But the foundation of their beliefs was uncompromisingly patriarchal; the founders themselves have been worshipped as gods by their followers throughout history; and the ideologies of both these systems have had a remarkably similar impact on women’s lives to that of religions organized around a central concept of a Father God. To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems – Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.
Historians, both male and female, have not always resisted the temptation to see the rise of monotheism as a plot against women, since the after-effects have been so uniformly disastrous for the female sex. But attractive though the notion of a cosmic conspiracy is to women’s learned feelings of weakness and helplessness, it overlooks the fact that many of the elements of these early religions held a strong appeal for both sexes, and often for women in particular. Organized religion may have been a root cause of the historic defeat of womankind – Eve did not fall, she was pushed – but it did not begin with that aim. Seen in the wider context of the struggle of human beings of different races towards a deeper understanding of the meaning of their lives and of their growing spirituality, these five patriarchal systems readily reveal why in the first instance they were so attractive.
To begin with, each offered a clarity, a certainty, a synthesized world view that carried a fresh and profound conviction after the pluralistic muddle and overlap of the old gods, and of goddess-worship too. An Athenian woman in labour praying for a safe delivery in the fifth century B.C., for example, had to choose between the Great Mother Cybele, Pallas Athene, or even the virgin huntress Artemis (Diana to the Romans), all of whom had a special care of women in childbirth. Her husband, sacrificing for the birth of a son, could propitiate Ares for a little warrior or Apollo for a poet or musician, but neglected Zeus the king of the gods at his peril. Once all these rival divinities had been caught up into one all-powerful father, whose eye was on every sparrow let alone each of his human creations, or into a firm framework of ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘the One Path’, there was a security that had previously been sought in vain.
For the newcomers were wonderfully confident. ‘I am the Lord your God,’ Jehovah told the Jews, ‘and thou shalt have none other gods before me’ – the same message, delivered with the same assurance, as that of the gods of Christianity and Islam. But this apparent simplicity masked a rich complexity that succeeded in harmonizing the universe, offering its believers a patterned metaphysical framework in which each individual, however lowly, was guaranteed their own snug niche. In this confidence, not previously available to them, women could find a terrible strength. The Christian slave Felicitas, martyred with her mistress Perpetua in the Roman persecutions of A.D. 203, on the night before her ordeal gave birth to a baby in prison. When she cried out in labour, the guards mocked her with the taunt, ‘You suffer so much now – what will you do when you are tossed to the beasts?’ But when Felicitas faced the lions in the amphitheatre the next morning she was calm, even joyful, and died without a sound.2
As this shows, these early believers could find through pain and suffering an answer to the pain of the human predicament itself, a meaning to the apparent meaninglessness of life. With belief came, therefore, an enhanced sense of self as the faithful were liberated from being the helpless slaves either of the Mother Goddess or of her phallic supplanters, the petty, disputatious male divinities. Now the individual mattered, to a god who cared about her and her potential: ‘I am thy God’, declared Jehovah, ‘walk before me and be thou perfect.’ And for the believer – but only for the believer – the reward was nothing less than paradise. This is the triumphant boast of the virgin martyr Hirena in a play of the First European dramatist, the Saxon writer Hrotsvitha, who as a woman seems to identify strongly with her tough, jeering heroine:
Unhappy man! Blush, blush Sisinnius, and groan at being vanquished by a tender little girl . . . You shall be damned in Tartarus; but I, about to receive the palm of martyrdom and the crown of virginity, shall enter the etherial bedchamber of the eternal king.3
This combination of revenge psychology with the satisfaction of sublimated sensuality must have been intensely comforting to downgraded women. In a reward-and-punishment system, too, the more women submitted and suffered, the greater the final pay-off.
Interestingly, the more sophisticated of the women under the early monotheisms speedily grasped that her God in fact offered a post-dated cheque, and no one had ever come back to complain that it had bounced. Consequently they plunged into less-than-godly behaviour with extraordinary vigour, only making sure to build into their lives a final phase of high-profile godliness to ensure their passage to eternity. Mistress of this technique was the Russian Queen Olga. Becoming regent after the assassination of her husband Igor I, she first instituted a reign of terror in revenge for his murder, scalding the leading rebels to death and executing hundreds of others. After twenty years of iron-hearted cruelty she devoted herself to Christianity with such good effect that she became the first saint of the Russian Orthodox church.
The confidence with which the women of the early churches adopted, even manipulated, the dictates of the new patriarchies provides another pointer to the reason for their success. At their origins, they were all only a breath or two away from the goddess-religions they had usurped, and there is abundant evidence that for many hundreds of years women worshippers of the Father Gods continued with their traditional female rituals alongside the new observances. The prophet Ezekiel, a founder of the elevation of Judaism from its scattered tribal beginnings, was horrified to witness Jewish women of the fifth century B.C. ‘weeping for Tammuz’, mourning the death of the sacrificial king, who as Tammuz, Attis or Adonis was remembered every year on the Day of Blood at the end of March (later colonized by Christianity as Good Friday). And not only the women: to the scandalized eyes of the prophet Jeremiah, every man, woman and child was guilty of the same offence:
Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven [the Great Goddess] that they may provoke me to anger.4
All patriarchies, in fact, only succeeded by colonizing, indeed cannibalizing the forms, emblems and sacred objects of the Goddess they were purporting to root out. Much recent theological scholarship has been devoted to recovering what in ages past every schoolgirl knew: that the Great Goddess in her three-fold incarnation (maiden, mother and wise woman) lies behind the Christian trinity, that her immature aspect of moon maiden became the Virgin Mary, and so on. To this day modern events like May Day and Lady Day commemorate her special festals, especially the first, when at the celebration of the vernal equinox, maidens wreathed in flowers symbolizing the Earth Mother’s powers of fecundity and growth dance round a maypole, a phallic evocation of the boy-king/sacrificial lover of the woodland (Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Virbius) who has been cut down. This continuity is even to be observed in the ethical systems that make no overt use of the Father God; the Chinese character denoting ‘ancestor’ had an earlier meaning of ‘phallus’ which, even