part two of: The Civilized System of Belief is Poor in Worlds
Your System of Belief is Poor in Worlds
Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom ? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones ? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?
The earth was sacred both as the source of life and as the receiver of the dead. She bringeth all things to birth, reareth them and receiveth again into her womb. In many parts of the world, newborn babies were placed on the ground and then picked up again to represent their birth from the womb of the earth. At the same time the ceremony consecrated them to her and ensured that she would protect them. And to this day, even in the modern industrial societies, many people still want to be buried in their native land, to return to their earthly womb.
Mother was seen to be very active. She was thought to exhale the breath of life, which nourished living organisms on her surface. If pressure built up within, she would break wind, causing earthquakes. Fluids flowed within her, and hot water came out of her springs like blood. Within her body- or was it her mind?- there were veins, some of which contained liquids and other solidified fluids like metals and minerals. Her bowels were full of channels, fire chambers and fissures through which fire and heat were emitted in volcanic exhalations and hot springs. She bore stones and metals within her womb and nurtured them as they grew like embryos, within her, ripening at their own slow pace.
With the development of agriculture, the Mother gave way to a clearer and more restricted notion of a great goddess of vegetation and harvesting. (In Greece for example, Gaia was replaced by Demeter). But women were still very closely associated with the fertility of the soil, and they played a dominant role when agriculture was in its infancy; indeed they may well have invented agriculture. All over the world, metaphors connect women with the ploughed earth, the fertile furrow. In an ancient Hindu text for example: « This woman has come as a living soil: sow seed in her, ye men! » In the Koran: »Your wives are to you as fields. » This same metaphor is implicit in our world semen, the Latin for « seed ».
Nature was traditionally idealized as benevolent Mother in images of the Golden Age. All was peaceful and fertile; nature gave freely of her bounty; animals grazed contentedly; birds sang pure melodies; flowers were everywhere; and trees bore fruit abundantly. There was no disease or strife. Men and women lived in harmony. In the idylls of pastoral poetry, nature has already been subdued: flocks graze peacefully, unharnessed by wolves and other predators; the dark forest have been cleared and fertile fields established in their place; the wilderness has given way to orchards and gardens. Nature is calm, kindly like an ideal wife... The fear of wild, untamed nature feeds the desire to subdue her, a desire at least as old as civilisation.
The Triumph of the Gods
The ancient image of the Golden Age, usually regarded as a mythic or poetic^fantasy, has recently gained a new lease of life as a result of archaeological research in southern Europe and Turkey. The origins of settled agriculture in Europe have now been pushed back to about 7000 B.C. For several thousand years, these early societies of collectors lived in comfortable and usually unfortified settlements, worshiping goddesses, making superb ceramics rather than weapons. But between 4000 and 3500 B.C. This peaceful way of life was shattered by waves of invaders whose warrior gods dethroned the old goddesses, demoting them to wives, daughters and consorts in the new male-dominated pantheons. Patriarchy and male domination replaced the older, more harmonious social order.
Meanwhile, in the Near-East, the old goddess-worshiping societies likewise came to be dominated by fortified city-states and warring empires. Violin sky-gods became predominant, the vengeful senders of thunderbolts, floods, droughts, famines; the destroyers of peoples. The same happened in India, where old relatively peaceful societies were conquered by invading Aryan warriors, with their sky-gods and horses (!). All my relations, the pattern has often been repeated, and this looks like historical evidence that our ills stem from male domination. It also supports the hope that things could be otherwise; a different kind of society actually existed and could be possible again if we replaced the values of domination and patriarchy with the consciousness of partnership and matriarchal animism, as it was in each of our people- our animal, vegetal, mineral and human people- before the white invasion came to denature our memories of life.
However, the triumph of the warriors was reflected in new stories. To start with, the primal Mother was the source of all things. She was the virgin mother, she needed no god in order to conceive, and all the gods were descended from her. For example, according to one of the early Greek creations myths, first of all mother earth (Gaia) emerged from chaos. She then gave birth to Uranus, the sky-god, as she slept. He was both her son and her lover; in the earliest Babylonian creation stories, the primal goddess Tiamat was the formless void, the deep, the dark womb from whom the universe was born; she brought forth the world by herself. The god Marduk was originally her son. But then he became the creator god, slaying Tiamat, now pictured as the dragon of chaos.
When the Jewish people entered the Promised Land as pastoralist warriors it was already inhabited by Canaanites, Philistines and other peoples. As they settled there and adopted and agricultural way of life, local beliefs were assimilated into their religion, as were many of the ancient places of power such as holly wells, sacred oaks and terebinth trees. For many generations they worshiped at the old « high places » and groves sacred to the Queen of heavens. These sanctuaries were equipped with stone pillars, altars for animal sacrifices and tree stumps known as Asherahs, the name of the ancient goddess.
The religion of the Jews resembled many others in the recognition of sacred places and times and in the offering of sacred animals. But one of the ways it differed was its insistence on the uniqueness of its God; another was through the prohibition on the making and worshiping of representations of the God. These features of Judaism were inherited by Christianity and Islam and have had profound historical effects.
In the 1st. Chapter of the book of Genesis, the primal Mother is again the formless void, the dark, the watery abyss. Unlike Marduk, God did not fight with her, but He first created by dividing- the light from the dark, day from night, the waters above from the waters below, the heaven from the earth and the dry land from the sea. When it came to the creation of plants this God evoked them but did not make them himself. They were formed and brought forth by the mother, the earth:
He said: « Let the earth produce growing things; let there be on earth plants that bear seed, and trees bearing fruit each with its own kind of seed » So it was (...)
Likewise he called forth animals from the earth, and sea creatures and birds from the waters. In theological terminology, this was not a direct but a mediate mode of creation.
Although the Judeo-Christian tradition has always emphasized the supremacy of the male God, the earth retained some of her old autonomy for many centuries. The Jews were forbidden to worship the old goddess-mother, but nevertheless the holy land remained both sacred and female. Throughout the Middle-Ages, Christians continued to regard nature as animate and mother like. Mary was Queen of Heaven, a title inherited from Asarte-Ashtoreth, the aspect symbolized in her blue, star-spangled cloak; she is lunar, like Artemis, and is often depicted standing on a crescent moon, and as Virgin Mother of God, she is heir to the ancient tradition of the primal Mother. And like the Earth Mother who gave life and took it back, she is present at death: « Holy Mary, mother of Good, pray for us at the hour of our death »
The complete supremacy of the Father was not established until the Protestant Reformation, in the 16th. Century, with the suppression of the Holy Mother's cult and the final desacradization of the natural world. The Protestant reformers were trying to establish a purified form of Christianity, rejecting the abuses of the Roman Church. Personal faith and repentance were what mattered; ritual observances, seasonal ceremonies, pilgrimages, devotion to the holy mother and the cults of the saints and angels were all denounced as pagan superstitions. The Protestants were trying to bring about an irreversible change in attitude, eradicating the traditional idea that spiritual power pervades the natural world and is particularly present in sacred places and in spiritually charged material objects. They wanted to purify religion and this purification involved the disenchantment of the world. All traces of magic, holiness and spiritual power were to be removed from the realm of nature; the spiritual realm would be confined to human beings.
This process was taken to its ultimate conclusion in the 17th. Century when nature became nothing but inanimate matter in motion, created by God and mechanically obedient to His eternal laws. Nature was no longer acknowledged as mother and no longer considered alive. She became the world-machine and God the all-powerful engineer. The material world was governed by God's laws and incapable of responding to human ceremonies, invocations or rituals; it was spiritually neutral or indifferent and could not transmit any spiritual power in or of itself. To believe otherwise was to fall into idolarty, transferring God's glory to His Creation. There was to be no attempt, even through religious means, to change the way the world operated; it should be accepted as an expression of God's will. In the influential view of Calvin, God had predestined all events from the beginning of time.
The Reformation thus prepared the ground for the mechanistic revolution in science in the following century. Nature was already disenchanted and the material world separated from the life of the spirit; the idea that the universe was merely a vast machine fitted well with this kind of technology, and so did the constriction of the realm of the soul to a small region of the human brain. The domains of science and religion could now be separated: science taking the whole of nature for its province, including the human body; religion, the moral aspect of the human soul.
This religious revolution not only helped pave the way for the development of modern science but also provided a favorable environment for the growth of technology and the acceleration of economic development. Traditional and symbolic values attached to particular places, plants and animals, were replaced by monetary values.
Ironically, the idea that nature functioned mechanically and automatically rendered God increasingly superfluous, and by the late 18th. Century, he was fading away from the scientific worldview.
Nowadays we live in a desacradized world;. Of course certain ceremonies still have a religious significance, and so do certain places or certain animals and plants, such as cows for Hindus or horses for Indians... But there is nothing in the scientific worldview to support such an idea of sacredness. They are survivals from earlier epochs and their sense remains absent.
AKAtjecoutay
photos by Atjecoutay
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