In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’ There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. In an oral … Continue reading Inanna and Jesus
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Mount Arayat at sunrise
A couple of weeks ago I went to Mount Arayat National Park in Pampanga, here in the Philippines.
I’d been invited by some friends to spend the day, with a walk in the mountain park in the morning followed by socialising later. This meant first taking a bus to San Fernando and then another, local bus. We wanted to be there for sunrise, which is why I found myself sitting in a taxi at 3.30 am, hurtling through Quezon City at speeds in excess of 100 kph. It was a good adrenaline rush to start the day.
I took a Victory Liner coach from Cubao. Many of the coach lines have terminuses there, and the other that serves Pampanga is Genesis. (Yes, the biblical one; this is the Phils.) The fare to San Fernando is 102 pesos. You can pay on the bus but during office hours there’s a ticket office which they prefer you to use. You can also get refreshments in the terminus.
As ever, food and drinks vendors boarded the coach to ply their wares before we set off. The journey time to San Fernando is roughly an hour, depending on traffic, following the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX). Be sure not to get off at the first stop in San Fernando, wait till you get to ‘interchange’.
Azumi doing her trail guide thing
I was to meet my friend Azumi Ballesteros and some others for the morning walk, but in the end only Azumi and another girl called Chin showed up. Two others had said they would come but hadn’t, and this had clearly annoyed Azumi; she has a sparkly nature, quick to anger but as quick to forgive.
After exchanging greetings we boarded another bus, which took us close to the Park entrance. Then, in true Pilipino style, we boarded a trisikel (a motorcycle and sidecar) for the last part of the journey.
Unfortunately, Azumi hadn’t checked the opening time of the park, which was 6 am, and we arrived at 5.30. No matter, the security rustled up some chairs in front of a television to divert us while we waited, and even made us hot drinks. I think mine was tea, but I’m not sure; as ever the main thing I tasted was sugar. It’s one of the charms of this country, though; everybody shares, even if they have a sweet tooth that would make a Westerner’s eyes water.
At six the official ticket-seller arrived and we began our walk up the hill. The first part is a steep and very uneven staircase called the Hundred Steps. It’s far more tiring than it should be, because of the difference in the heights between the steps; fortunately there’s a good handrail which allows the less than super fit (i.e. me) to haul themselves up. I noticed that Azumi and Chin had no problems though. Ah, youth.
After the Hundred Steps, the trail debouches (love that word) onto a metalled road for half a mile or so, and then becomes a rough trail through the forest again.
The Philippines jungle is actually a delight to walk in. There are very few nasty insects, unlike jungles elsewhere, to bite and make life misery for the walker, and
The jungle in the Phils is pretty healthy
even the flies are not numerous. I don’t know why this is, but Philippine jungles feel fresh and healthy, even when the temperature climbs.
But it is still jungle and one always has that sensation, as one does in any jungle, of being watched by myriad hidden eyes. I imagined how soldiers must have felt — and still feel — campaigning through country like this. I thought I was being watched by hundreds of shy animals, but the eyes could easily have been those of a predator or a hostile enemy. To patrol in country like this would be nerve-wracking. I grew up during the period of the Vietnam War but it was only much later, when I began to visit jungles, that I realised what that must have been like and why it was so traumatising for the US soldiers.
We were chatting about this as we walked and Azumi agreed.
‘My friend told me it’s really dangerous here.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘There are NPA (New People’s Army) hiding in the forest,’ she replied, with her characteristic lisp.
Involuntarily, I looked around. The NPA, or in Filipino, Bagong Hukbong Bayan, are the armed wing of the Philippines Communist Party.
They appeared in the late 1960s and during the Marcos era their ranks were swollen by young people disaffected by the dictator’s brutal regime. Ever since they have been responsible for a trickle of killings, kidnappings and other banditry.
I am aware that as a European, I am a target that they might consider to be worth cash money; the fact that nobody would pay it would mean I would disappear.
Chin relaxing
While I shrug off Azumi’s worries, it’s true that you could hide hundreds of armed guerrillas in this jungle and not only would nobody ever know, they would be completely self-sufficient. The jungle is literally a larder. There is fruit hanging from the trees to pick and vegetables growing everywhere. The wildlife is rich and while we, as noisy townies, see only birds, there is certainly an abundance of game.
I confirm this in discussion — Azumi translating — with one of the park wardens, who double as guides. He has stopped us to ask where we intend to go, and suggests a viewpoint a few hundred metres higher up. I mention the NPA and he nods. ‘Maybe. You must be careful and stay on the path.’ I personally can’t see how this would make me less likely to be kidnapped, but I let it pass.
I point to the densely-forested peak of Mount Arayat itself, looming above us. He makes a face. ‘It’s four to six hours up there and the same back. And you can’t go alone, you need a guide. We can sort that for tomorrow, but I’m booked today.’
As well as the NPA, it turns out, whose presence the warden is being coy about, a more mundane cause of danger exists. The path is not well marked and the unwary can wander off it and get completely lost. It turns out that recently a party of Germans did just that and it took six hours of search the next day to locate them.
‘They were out in the jungle all night,’ explains the warden. ‘Now we don’t let people go up without a guide.’ I can see that Azumi is quite satisfied with this answer, although I’m not quite. Being a nosey journalist.
Why so dangerous in the dark? I suppose there are animals but there are no large predators; the most dangerous terrestrial fauna here are snakes and I remain unconvinced about the NPA. I think the real issue lies in the Filipino’s terror of the dark. I have encountered this before.
Filipinos are deeply superstitious and believe in a range of truly nightmarish supernatural beings that populate the night. These are not casual beliefs in the way that some people think it’s unlucky to walk under ladders or go anti-clockwise round churches. These are real, visceral beliefs in a spirit world that is not only immediately present, but a genuine threat to humans. These spirits, which range from the kapre, a dark-skinned, cigar-smoking, but usually harmless man* who sits up trees watching people, through the engkanto, and to the truly horrific aswang, a genus of ghouls that feed on people, only appear at night.
The most famous aswang is the mananangal
I am pretty sure this is the real reason the warden is so emphatic that it is dangerous to be out in the jungle in darkness; compared to the monsters of the mind that infest the darkened jungle, the NPA are small beer.
Research into these fascinating ideas, which I’ll go into another time, throws light on the Philippines’ history. Although the originals of the demons existed long before the Spanish came, these colonial overlords used them to terrify the people out of living in the forest and come to live in the towns where they could be better controlled. They slaughtered natives — who may or may not have been campaigning against them — mutilated the bodies and put them on display, claiming that this was the work of the aswang and other creatures of the night.
This, apparently, worked and to this day Filipinos are extremely nervous about being in the forest after dark.
The friendly warden led us a little further up the path and pointed out the viewpoint, then struck off on another trail. Despite the terrors of the night and the poor pay, this was a man with a great job, I reflected.
Azumi, Chin and I reached the viewpoint at around 11, by which time the day was heating up. The most prominent feature was a massive rock, black basalt, which
Massive basalt rock erupted by Mount Arayat
must have been blown out by Arayat when it last erupted and looking around I could see dozens of other, similar rocks. The destruction wrought by these must have been enormous. This individual rock must have weighed 300 tonnes or so; the power needed to blast it up into the air from the crater itself, at least two miles away, is truly humbling. Mother Earth is not just the nurturing goddess that brings life, but the Dark Goddess of death and destruction. To the Sumerian she was Ereshkigal, to the modern Hindu Kali; but she has always been with us, her body the dread portal into death. Arayat, thankfully dormant for now, is where she spews her vengeful anger.
(Arayat is considered to be the home of goddess Mariang Sinucuan, the archrival of Namalyari of Mount Pinatubo.)
Azumi collecting banana leaves
At the rock we sat and some sticky sweet rice cakes, called malagket, which Azumi had brought. I can attest to the sugar content of these and confess I couldn’t eat all of mine, while the girls munched away happily.
Azumi and I climbed to the top of the basalt. The view was magnificent, even though it was a little limited by the heat haze. I could see Olangapo to the southwest, and, closer but still distant, San Fernando. Azumi pointed out other towns.
After a relaxing break we set off down the path again. It was very broken and obviously in times of rain, serves as a temporary river. I had noticed, on the way up, large deposits of manure that looks like they originated in something that was not quite a cow and neither a horse, and to my delight we discovered the source: a carabao. This is a kind of buffalo, and here it was being used by the licensed charcoal-burners who exploited the fallen wood to transport their produce back down the mountain. We watched as one, a female, was hitched into a cart. She seemed very placid and later we discovered more wandering loose. Nobody seemed to bother.
a carabao being hitched up
As we reached the lower levels we became aware of the heat; on the slopes the breeze had kept us cool, but here the trees were much bigger and sheltered us from it. There were many more people around by now and, as usual, everyone greeted us politely.
Once down near the entrance once more we stopped at one of the ‘cottages’ under the trees and the girls set out lunch — barbecued fish, meat and salad. I took a few pictures and we headed off to get a bus back to San Fernando.
*It is widely believed that a tree at the entrance to Malacanang Palace, the Philippines President’s official residence, is inhabited by a kapre, whose role here seems to be of supernatural protector.
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triple crosses
In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves in an organic manner as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’
There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. This is difficult for us to grasp sometimes because we are so used to having a written standard by which tales can be measured. In an oral culture or tradition, this is not available so instead, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they have been evolving for many thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples have carried it forward.
The result of this is that we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins. In fact the strong likelihood is that they are indeed the very same but have organically evolved differences through generations of storytelling. What we have to do is to look at the threads of commonality, the points of similarity. This is exactly as a biologist does when trying to identify an unknown species; in biology, the traditional method is called ‘Linnaean Taxonomy’ where we find points of reference that allow us to identify to which other species our subject is related. We do something very similar in mythology.
This is the reality of mythology and all mythologists and serious historians recognise the influence of syncretisation.
Religious apologists, especially fundamentalist Christians, are horrified by this and attempt to deny it, but it is not necessary to take their point of view seriously. Their protestations, which verge on the ridiculous, that the detail differences between the Jesus myth and earlier ones are simply a rhetorical device used to confuse the argument. These people have no interest in the truth, only in promulgating a cult belief for which there is no evidence. They represent a vested interest: religious control over society and the continuing flow of money into their own coffers.
So let’s look at the original source from which the Jesus myth was syncretised.
Writing was invented by the Sumerians, some 6500 years ago, and in the material they left there are already a number of myths that are clearly syncretised from an original common source. The best known and most complete of these are those of Inanna.
Inanna is an anthropomorphic deity, which is to say she had a human form — superhuman in fact. Previous deities were the Mother Sea, Nammu to the Sumerians and the Mother Earth, Ki. These were distant and remote and could not be communicated with directly. We call these transcendent deities; Inanna on the other hand has a human form and lives, at least partly, amongst humans.
So here we have the first obvious point of commonality between Inanna and Jesus: they are both anthropomorphic — that is, human form — iterations of a transcendent or non-human deity.
On commonality, however, is not enough to prove the relationship. When we look into the myth of Inanna, however, we find many more. The most significant of these is the story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, which we discuss in some detail in Why Men Made God.
In this, Inanna decides to enter the Underworld, or in other words, to die. She puts on her finest clothes and jewellery and, accompanied by a servant, goes to the Palace Ganzer, the entrance to this dread place. There she hammers on the door until it is opened.
The doorward demands to know who desires entrance and why and Inanna says she has come to visit her sister, Ereshkigal. This information is relayed to Ereshkigal who, though deeply troubled by it, commands that Inanna should be allowed to enter. However, at each of the seven gates she must pass through, an item of her clothing and jewellery is to be removed.
Inanna explains to her servant that she will enter the Underworld. The servant must wait for three days, and then seek help. She is to ask for this from three other deities but only one, Inanna’s uncle Enki, the Lord of Wisdom and Sweet Water, will help.
Inanna enters the dread Underworld and at each gate an item of finery is removed so that she is naked when she appears before Ereshkigal. Inanna then does something strange: she causes Ereshkigal to rise from her throne and sits there herself.
The Anuna, the judges, see this and judge her; they look at her ‘with the look of death’ and Inanna dies. Her body is hung on a hook on the wall to rot.
Inanna’s servant waits the prerequisite three days, lamenting and ‘lacerating her eyes and buttocks’ and then sets off for help. As Inanna has predicted, the first two deities that she visits refuse to help, saying that no-one may recover from death and that this is all Inanna’s fault; she must bear the consequences.
The third, Enki, however, is prepared to assist his niece. He takes the dirt from under his fingernails and creates two tiny spirits. He tells them to enter the Underworld in secret and go to the royal chamber where they will find Ereshkigal in agony. They are to say that they will relieve her pain if she will release Inanna. They are to ask for nothing else. Enki tells them that Ereshkigal will at first refuse and offer many other things and great riches but they are to refuse until she agrees. They are then to use two magical devices Enki gives them, the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and to place these on Inanna and in her mouth; she will then come back to life.
The two spirits set off and find everything as Enki has predicted: Ereshkigal is writing on the floor of her chamber, her hair ‘like leeks’ and in agony. At first she refuses to release Inanna but eventually she gives up; she agrees and the spirits give the life-giving water and plant to Inanna, who is brought back to life and, in the company of the demonic guardians of the Underworld, rises up to life. However, there is a catch: Inanna may only spend 6 months of the year in the world above, and the other six months in the Underworld.
So let’s deconstruct this a bit. You recall that I said the Goddess Earth was called ‘Ki’. Ereshkigal means ‘Lady of the Goddess Earth’. In other words, she is the anthropomorphic representation of the older Goddess, the Earth.
This tale comes from the temperate zone, where the year has seasons. So, half the year is plentiful and crops will grow, and half the year they will not. Sumer even then, though not as arid as today — it lies in what is not Iraq — had a long dry season when the ground was parched. The reference to Inanna spending 6 months underground and 6 above is directly related to this.
Inanna and Ereshkigal are actually two facets of the same Goddess, the Earth, one, Inanna in her bountiful summer and the other, Ereshkigal in winter. This is why Inanna becomes Ereshkigal and sits on her throne, and then is reborn from herself. The goddess of light dies to become the goddess of darkness, and then is reborn from herself. The reference to Inanna being divested of her finery is a metaphor for the dying back of the vegetation as the year cycle progresses. Then she dies and goes under the ground — the Underworld. But next spring she will be reborn.
Ereshkigal’s agony is the suffering of giving birth, as she brings Inanna once again into life. Then Inanna goes up out of the Underworld. To the Sumerians, the living world sand heaven were the same place: deities and many other spirits inhabited the same physical space as humans, but were invisible. Inanna is ‘the Queen of Heaven’ but she lives on Earth. So when she rises from the Underworld, she is rising into Heaven, as the Sumerians understood it.
We know from the surviving mythology and the artefacts left behind that prior to the establishment of patriarchal rule in Sumer in the third millennium BCE, a matriarchy was in operation. We have clues as to how this was run from surviving, later texts and these show a slow and deliberate divestment of powers from women and the Goddess to men and gods. So we should not be surprised that a myth that originally featured a woman should have been altered to make the central character a man.
To establish a chain of syncretisation we need to find several points of commonality between the two tales and preferably other myths which also show similarities. Compare this with another famous Biblical myth, that of Noah and the Flood. This is a straight copy of the Sumerian tale of Atrahasis, with only a few names and details changed. This is not so much syncretisation as direct plagiarism. The Jesus myth is a far more subtle case.
So what are the points of commonality? Well in the first place, the main character is an anthropomorphic version of a transcendent deity. Inanna is the human form of the Earth Mother, while Jesus is the human form of the Sky father. This is a strong correlation.
Then, the core issue is that the central character dies and then is reborn. This places both the original and its derivative, the Jesus myth, into the category of ‘dying and rising deities’ stories, of which there are a very great many from all over the world. As we explained in Why Men Made God the annual regeneration of the Goddess, the Earth, was and remains central to the survival of human life in the temperate zones and these tales are expressions of this.
Both Inanna and Christ are hung on a high place for their bodies to corrupt. For Inanna this was a hook on the wall and for Jesus a stake called a ‘crucifix’. (The Romans did not kill people on crosses at this time; they invented this form of execution later to mock Christians. We shall discuss that another article.)
Then, both Inanna and Jesus physically enter the Underworld, which is a metaphor for the reality of death. For a Sumerian this was literally the earth beneath our feet so the Palace Ganzer, where Inanna dies and is reborn, is under the ground. This is because inside the Earth, under the ground in this understanding, is within the Goddess’ body, inside her womb.
In the Jesus myth, the hero’s body is placed under the ground in a tomb, which is then blocked with a stone; the tomb is a metaphor for the womb of the Goddess and both Inanna and Jesus are reborn from it.. Both characters are in the Earth, inside the womb of the Goddess where regeneration occurs for the three days that they are dead.
Why three days? This is one of the most ancient mythological references we know. It gives rise to the concept of ‘triplism’ and we find this all over the ancient world from triple goddesses to three-headed dogs like Cerberus, who guarded the gate of the Greek version of the underworld. It derives from natural observation. The moon has three phases of light, waning, full and waxing; the temperate Earth has three seasons of life, Spring, Summer and Autumn; and perhaps most crucially, at the solstices, there are three days when, even to an observer using a modern sextant, the sun appears to rise to the same height in the sky at midday. On the third day after the winder solstice it can be observed to begin to rise again: this is why Jesus mythical ‘birthday’ is the 25th, a date he shares with nearly all other agrarian deities that are derived from a solar-observing culture. The 25th is the first day that an observer can see the change in declination of the sun and so know for certain that spring will return.
(We should note here that our ancestors were not sun-worshippers. In all but one culture, the short-lived Amarna culture of Egypt, invented by the Pharaoh Akhenaten and rejected after his death, the sun, in all the cultures of the near east and Mediterranean, was associated with a minor deity. The sun was seen as being under the control of the Goddess Earth. The deity being worshipped was the Goddess but the sun was the indicator that she would regenerate. So monuments like Stonehenge are principally solar observatories and not sun-worshipping temples. They undoubteldly had a religious function, but the deity being celebrated would have been The Goddess.)
This three day hiatus, which also happens at the summer solstice, is the main reason why Inanna remains dead for three days and it is also why Jesus does. After their ritual rebirth from the womb of the Earth Mother, both deities rise into Heaven — which in the time that Inanna was invented was a plane contiguous with the one humans live on, but which, by the time Jesus was, had syncretised into being in the sky; but here again we have a wealth of material that clearly shows this evolution.
Once again, it should be noted that not one but three crosses are placed on Calvary for Jesus ‘execution’; simply another iteration of triplism and the Goddess mythology that informs the Jesus mythology.
Syncretism, just by these points, has already been established, but there are more commonalities. Inanna’s rebirth is facilitated by a woman. In Jesus’ myth, it is women who open his tomb and allow him to rise again. These women represent the cadre of priestesses who officiated and celebrated the regeneration of the Goddess in the early solstices. They are the midwives of the Goddess who, in the Jesus myth, perform the same role for the male deity.
The other useful tool to establish syncretism is the existence of similar myths from the same region which allow a mythological timeline to be established between the earliest that we know of to the latest. So do these exist? Can we establish such a timeline? The answer is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The Middle and Near East, the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean are replete with tales of this order from other Sumerian versions, such as that of the Goddess Sul, to the Eleusian Mystery cults, to the Greek tradition of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact this meme is so common that is has its own name, katabasis. This is derived from the Greek and means ‘going downhill’ or ‘descending’ and mythologists use it to describe the huge number of such myths that exist. When we look at the Jesus myth in the context of these others, we begin to see that there is nothing at all remarkable or strange about it; it is just one of many variations on a theme.
Christian apologists have long been aware of the catastrophic threat that an understanding of syncretisation presents to their claims. If Jesus could be shown to be just another iteration of a standard ideography, then religious claims for him to be ‘unique’ would be completely torpedoed. This was understood as early as the first century CE when the Christian apologist Justin Martyr claimed that the earlier stories has been ‘planted be the devil’ to introduce doubt. Surely a mature and educated person must see the convenient disingenuousness of such a claim; and then perhaps remark that for Justin to say that was odd, while in other letters he was actually claiming that Jesus was ‘no different’ to earlier deities like Perseus. As ever, the apologist will use any ruse, no matter how preposterous, to press the claim for his (or, unfortunately, her) ridiculous claims.
The fact that Jesus is just another syncretised ‘dying and rising’ or ‘katabatic’ deity has been established beyond any question since the nineteenth century; but such is the power of religion to strip money from the deluded and channel it into the hands of charlatans that this fact — and it is one — is repeatedly denied. To believe in such things today is obviously to live in a state of ignorance and denial and one should ask oneself whose interests are best served by keeping so many people in such a state; the answer, of course, is the wealthy and the powerful. They invented the patriarchy and the religions that
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Mother and Child. Pic: Rod Fleming
There is a difference between sex and gender; I am going to begin with sex (you’ll see why.) Sex refers to our physical, biological bodies. Usually, it’s how we are identified as babies, by the sex of our genitalia.
So are the sexes unequal? Yes, absolutely. Women are many many times more important than men. This is because the success, indeed the survival, of any population is dependent on the number, not of men, but of fertile mothers.
In China right now, a disaster is unfolding because of decades of legal restriction of family size to one, and a cultural misogyny which has seen female foetuses routinely aborted. This means that China simply doesn’t have enough women and it is facing financial — and possibly existential — collapse as its population ages. Doubtless the Chinese will soon be seeking net immigration on a huge scale; whether they’ll be able to persuade anyone is less sure.
One man can father hundreds or thousands of babies, but a woman can only carry perhaps 20 or so children in her lifetime and very few do that. Most women have far fewer children, which makes each individual mother more important. We explain how human society developed around core groups of women and children in Why Men Made God. Without children, humans cannot survive and the key to this is not men but women. This is why we developed a ‘two-group’ social structure, based around the mothers and children, with the men in a peripheral role.
Further and, as we discovered while researching, in most traditional (i.e. ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘forager’ cultures, it is the women who feed the tribe, not the men. For example, the amongst the !Kung San bush people, the women spend around three hours a day foraging and collecting food. They plant small gardens also. This is enough to feed the tribe.
The men hunt, but hunts are only successful 5% – 10% of the time, so actually, it’s a pastime and the people survive by the efforts of the women. Yes, the sexes are unequal: women are worth more than men.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct of behaviours, appearance and gendered roles. It is independent of sex, as transgender people prove. It is entirely possible to be born male, for example, and still have a feminine gender; indeed, this happens in about 1% of mail births, everywhere, according to GIRES.
We discovered that in traditional societies there are some gender markers. These include divisions of tasks by gender. The habit of women dressing their hair and wearing some sort of make-up appears universal, even in such traditional peoples as the Zoé, who wear no clothes.
As above, the efforts of the women in traditional societies actually tend to be more important. (This is not always the case, although it is so generally; in extreme regions, for example the Arctic, where foraging is more difficult, the hunt becomes more important. However, even there it is never all-important; that it is presented so is a function of patriarchal academia.) Gender in traditional cultures, which are frequently matriarchal, does not suggest that men are ‘worth more’ than women; if anything the opposite, as these cultures, we discovered, are frequently matriarchal.*
Gender within the patriarchy is different: it is a social construct designed specifically to disempower women and to reinforce the cultural understanding that women are the property of men, and their bodies may be bought and sold though a system called ‘marriage’. This is a contract in which a man gains proprietary rights over a woman’s body and fertility. In the older versions of the patriarchy a woman always ‘belongs’ to a man, either her father, her male relatives or her husband. (A few hours reading the Bible — Patriarchy 101 — will soon demonstrate this.)
In the modern versions this right of property is partially transferred to an external body called an ’employer’, and those exceptional women who learn to play the role of men well enough may be afforded some illusory patriarchal privilege — which ends at the ‘glass ceiling’. The patriarchy’s structures are designed to give the illusion of fairness while actually being the opposite. That is why so few women sit in legislatures: after all, they should be a majority, if ‘democracy’ actually had any meaning.
One way or the other, the woman’s freedom is removed altogether. That is the point of the gender construct. This being the case, the only way to make the genders equal (which I hope by now you understand that I would like to see, although I doubt if I shall live long enough) would be to completely destroy the patriarchy root and branch. That will require the destruction of its economic system, capitalism, at the same time.
The problem, of course, is that men use violence, particularly sexualised violence like rape but also homophobic attacks, and, as we see al over the world, concerted military attacks and other acts of the most obscene cruelty to maintain control. Just today I read of a 19-year old girl being stoned to death in Afghanistan for running away from the much older man she had been forcibly married to. (Western men need not point the finger: their patriarchy is quite as evil and wrong as the Islamic one, it’s just more media-savvy. It does its dirty work in the dark, not in front of cameras.)
At low level you can see it all over the stinking swamp that is YouTube comments; at a more serious level in the fact that a woman is raped in the US every six minutes. The patriarchy will fight tooth and nail to preserve its privilege and men, being the idiots we are, will largely go along with it.
Ending the patriarchy and replacing it with a modern matriarchy will be very difficult. But it must be done.
*We use Peggy Reeves Sanday’s definition of the matriarchy. This is not the patriarchy in reverse, as is sometimes claimed. That’s because women socially organise differently from men. It is rather a culture where women, especially mothers, are central. We discuss this at length in Why Men Made God.
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Together, in the context of the shared adventure of life’s journey, these emotions are even more deeply satisfying. In a good pair-bonded relationship, the couple are not only best friends but also lovers, enjoying the most satisfying fruits of both.
These powerful emotions combine to make a level of intimacy between two people possible that is spiritual in intensity and can indeed last for the lifetime of the partners. Yet the mechanism is much more complex than is often realised. In the first place, there is absolutely no imperative which says that the parties must be of different sex or even gender. Successful, lasting and loving relationships exist between two cis-men, two cis-women, transwomen and cis-men, transwomen and cis-women, transmen and cis-women, between two transgenders and other forms.*
In fact there is as much scope for variety in successful pair-bonding as there is in any other facet of human life. Furthermore, humans can develop sexualised pair-bonds that are lasting and profound, but not necessarily exclusive; this occurs in extant polyamorous cultures – which have survived despite centuries and more of oppression by the patriarchy – all over the world.
Thus it is quite possible for both women and men to have pair-bonds with several others at once, of any sex or gender. Over a lifetime this becomes even more complicated. Same-sex, same gender and multiple, concurrent sexualised bonding models are all completely viable and all, as seen where they continue to exist, provide for the birth and raising of children, and the successful management of society. In many cultures such models have endured for hundreds or even thousands of years and are probably as old as humanity.
Formalised marriage ceremonies are not necessarily a bad thing and the steps taken in more enlightened parts of the world to overturn the old patriarchal model and allow for so-called ‘same sex’ marriages has clearly made many, including me, very happy. As long as the rights of both individuals are equal and protected and it is possible for either party to end the arrangement without excessive cost or social opprobrium, the arrangement can work very well, especially by allowing the couples’ close friends and family to celebrate and support the partnership. In this case the pair-bond comes first and is always the most important factor; so if the couple, for whatever reason, falls out of love, then the marriage can end so that they may move on.
However, the patriarchal marriage – the one that we are used to and was exclusively the case until the last few years – is not a voluntary union between two equals, which exists out of the mutual love of the parties, but one in which a woman is possessed by a man. The patriarchal marriage prescribes exactly who is allowed to enter into a pair-bond and invariably reduces this to one man and one or more women. This is so pervasive that we need to make the point again: heterosexual and exclusive pair bonds are neither the only ones available nor are they intrinsically ‘better’ than any other. They just conform to the patriarchy’s model of social domination.
Essentially, the patriarchy has done the same to human pair-bonding as patriarchal religions have to our sense of wonder at the natural world. It has appropriated positive emotions and perverted them to its ends, such that only pair-bonding of the type it arbitrarily permits is sanctioned. It then goes further and attempts to eradicate all other forms of bonding, through violence, murder, patriarchal law and relentless peer pressure.
The patriarchy sets out not only to prescribe with whom we are allowed to fall in love, but how we are permitted to express that love. It makes certain expressions of intimacy taboo or illegal– for example, public sex, kissing and, in some cultures, even holding hands. It restricts how couples – even those it accepts as ‘legitimate’ – may have sex and has a long history of making laws proscribing anal and oral sex, even within the privacy of the bedroom.
It produces religious nonsense, bogus philosophy and pseudo-science to pretend that it has a case; yet none of it is true: there is no one ‘correct’ form of pair bond, and no form of consenting sex is any less ‘natural’ than any other.
By appropriating and perverting something so fundamentally human, so profoundly beautiful and so powerful to its own ends, the patriarchy uses the human pair bond to enforce its control over society. It is a telling example of the wickedness at the heart of the patriarchy.
The issues discussed here will be explored more fully in ‘Why Men Made God’, co-authored with Karis Burkowski, which is scheduled for publication on 1 May 2015
* The term cis refers to a person of particular birth sex who presents in a gender role usually thought to be conforming to that, or gender-normative. Thus a cis-woman is a person of female birth genitalia who is a woman. This differentiates her from a transwoman, a person of male birth genitalia who is a woman. The inverse applies to cis and trans men.
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Pic: Rod Fleming
Pic: Rod Fleming
Aset or Isis, Egyptian Queen of Heaven[/caption]
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