GODDESS good, GOD IS torture

To a reader who said, "If Goddess does exist and god doesn't, then I am wasting my time and believing in a lie," my reply is:

Know what gave me first clue that your primitive war god Jehovah is a fiction, Gentle Reader? Hell. Or, rather, Hel. The Goddess Hel existed long before your filthy Hell was fictionalized. To my northern European ancestors the Mother Hel was a volcano Goddess. We all return to Her womb at death – a warm place, never hot. It’s a love chamber. She loves us all.

So my Goddess offers a warm, loving place at the end of our lives. And then your war god enters history. What does he do? He *steals* Her warm, loving womb, *steals* her name, and turns both into bloody, infected insanity. Get the difference? My deity is love; yours is torture.

I don't apologize for the word "insanity." Nothing else describes this, Gentle Reader. A deity that rips away another’s love and turns it into torture -- the dipping of humans into boiling vats of oil for eternity -- is filth. You are worshipping filth. Sorry to be so harsh, but you need to be rocked out of the trance you’re in. Open your dingbat eyes! Your war god is a filthy aberration that came out of the minds of demented humans, humans who turned mad via starvation, and then codified their madness (See THIS .)

And, Gentle Reader, you're sucking this madness down like it was Kool-aid. It boggles my mind that anyone in the 21st century could "worship" something so primitive as a torture-deity -- a deity invented 6000 years ago by nomads so backward they could barely speak.

But listen, lovely people: I know you aren't alone. Many Americans are turning to this bogus primitive insanity called Christianity -- primarily because half of us don't have jobs, and the other half are worried about losing everything to the oil companies, just to keep warm in winter.

But remember this: mostly it's backward, uneducated people who turn to this torture religion. People who can't reason for themselves. I don't think that most of you who've found your way to this blog are that uneducated or lacking in intelligence. So I'm counting on you to lead the way for others, not block their path to sanity.

THE GODDESS adores YOU

Yesterday we looked at the world as it exists under the godfather. Today let’s yank off those godFather spectacles and replace them with the GodMother’s. What do you see now? The first thing catches you by surprise: the landscape’s been altered –dramatically.

But first, look in the mirror. What do you see? Not someone potentially lovable, but someone incredibly and unalterably lovable. Someone born exuding lovable qualities. No matter what you do, say, are, feel or look like, the world is stuck with loving you. The universe, in fact, just loves every little dimple, every hair on your body. It can’t help it. You inspire unutterable love, you are love. The universe can’t help loving and cherishing you any more than mother can help cherishing baby. You are baby, the universe is Mother.

Now look behind you. Whoa! The earth has long, wavy hair swaying in the wind and a pregnant belly – it’s huge, much larger and powerful than you – and this earth adores you, is smiling at you, can’t help it, because the earth and the universe and everything in it you don’t understand is a GodMother.

Now look at the rest of the world: you see all humans the way the Mystery sees you – as completely, unutterably lovable. You’re all brothers and sisters, all getting equal portions of the love pie from the Universe, the Unexplainable, the Power. No one has to scramble or perform tricks for love – it’s all around, free as air.

No one’s getting more love than you are, so no one inspires negativity in you. And no one feels the urge to scramble to get more than you – why waste the time? What meaning would it have?

The only thing other humans inspire in you is mother-love. As a mother loves her child – black or green; rich or poor; healthy or sporting two heads; big brain or small – so you, too, react to the humans around you. This orientation saturates your thinking, your planning, your seeing, your feeling, your analyses, your discourse, your consciousness, your subconsciousness, your ego, your identity, your mind, your soul, your body and so forth.

Furthermore – and this is essential – as a child of the GodMother, you don’t love a schizophrenic or a paraplegic because the Mother told you to, or because you want to be “good” and win Her love (you already have that, hands down, no sweat), or because you want to get to heaven, or escape that GodFather invention, that “vast underground torture chamber,” hell. On the contrary – you love schizophrenics simply because they are lovable … draw the love right out of you … inspire you with love. You, in other words, don’t manufacture this love; you don’t have to work to produce it (or feel guilt because the love just doesn’t come, no matter how hard you try). It’s just there. Period. It exists. You overflow with it. It comes with the GodMother, with the Mother’s set of spectacles.

GODDESS WILL save THE WORLD

“If the world worshipped a Mother Goddess, we’d all be as healthy as the healthy children of the healthiest mother. We’d be smart, rich, risk-taking, egalitarian, sensual, creative, capable, playful, freedom-loving, non-violent, lovable, gorgeous WINNERS! I can back this with historical and logical evidence….”

This was my March 22 post. Paxton wants to hear my "logical evidence." Here it is:

Mothers love unconditionally, fathers conditionally. In fact, a scientific basis may lurk beneath this: “Mother love” may be the one-and-only human instinct. In my Ph.D. seminars, we argued about whether humans had instincts at all. Only one was considered possible: mother-love. (Sadly, women under Father gods aren’t always mentally healthy, and therefore don’t always shower us with unconditional love.)

At any rate, if our role model is Father, we love ourselves and others conditionally – with strings attached. If it’s Mother, we love ourselves and others unconditionally. A third possibility is GodScience. Worshippers of GodScience see themselves and others as an absence of love. They behave toward others with an absence of emotion.

Since Father gods love us on condition -- that we are born with certain qualities, are blessed with good luck, behave in certain ways -- a hierarchy ensues. When it comes to winning Daddy’s love, only one or two make first place. When it comes to almost anything in life – sports, grades, looks, what have you – someone almost always beats us.

But those few who've reached Daddy's top rung (& they’re scarce as hen’s teeth) -- win Daddy's love. To the rest of us slobs, Daddy says, “Come back for love when you get on the team/make straight A’s/win the gold.” It's hard to avoid feeling nasty toward the top-rungers.

On the other hand, it seems right that those below Daddy's upper rungs deserve to be punished (abused, robbed, cheated, raped, discriminated against, locked up if they're different, the electric chair if they sin, war -- it's all okay because they're bad. Daddy says so.)

Face it, Daddy worshippers: your life is one big war to win Daddy's love, which is always dangling -- like the carrot on the stick -- just out of reach. You and all your sibs are scrambling hysterically over each other toward the top, where -- somewhere -- Daddy's love lies.

Now I ask you, Paxton, does this sound like Daddy’s kids are “smart, rich, creative, freedom-loving, non-violent, lovable, winners”? I think not. Try “nervous, dumb, up-tight, stodgy, angry, depressed, mean, racist, sexist, unlovable, hide-in-the-house losers.”

But it’s not their fault. It’s that bogus, boogeyman Daddy-god sitting on their shoulders that’s to blame.

Swiped FROM INANNA

Swiped from Inanna, who says she swiped if from the Furious Spinner, who got it from Wendell Berry:

"It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."

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Thnx to hortongrou for the foto

GREEKS CAN WORSHIP Athena AGAIN

This is earthshaking news, from Morgaine at The- Goddess, who got it from the Witch's Voice, who got it from a March 26, 2006, edition of Focus News English:

"Athens. Greek court allowed association of worshippers of ancient Greek deities to be set up, Radio Svoboda informs.

"At the moment Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Athena, Hermes, etc. are being worshipped by 100,000 Greeks.

"Until now Ministry of Culture banned them from conducting public worship at archeological sites and their gatherings were often secretive.

"Greek Orthodox Church is severely criticizing worship of ancient deities."

[Morgaine]: "This is wonderful! You may remember a while back I wrote a review of 'I still Worship Zeus' which is a documentary about this issue. I'm so happy that the Old Ways are legal again in Greece. How a country with such a rich spiritual legacy could suppress it for so long is beyond me. I'm glad they're free again."

Why do I say this is earthshaking? Because I don't know of any other country whose government has re-legitimized the worship of the deities crucified by Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Hinduism.

Am I wrong? Does anyone know anything I don't?
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Thnx to hylasgz for the foto of "Athena's help"

YOU asked FOR IT

Today in my mailbox, I found this little gem from my Christian-Republican Cousin Hal:

"You've got to admire this man [big pic of Bill Cosby]

"Looks like New Orleans is waking people up. Cosby is shaking their bed again.

"We Can't Blame White People"
Wed, 7 Sep 2005 15:23:29 EDT
by BILL COSBY

"They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk:

"Why you ain't,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be...
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.

"Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? Or who is his father?

"People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.

"We have to start holding each other to a higher standard. We cannot blame the white people any longer."

To which I replied:

"I have to admit that this was somewhat effective in making me think there might be a need to motivate *some* people to pull themselves out of poverty.

"But you know what they say about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" -- it's laughed at as an old saying that let's the rest of us off the hook. It's a way to blame the poor for being poor -- even though most of them don't have "bootstraps" big enough to get a grip on. If we can find a way to blame the poor, then we don't have to help them. It's all their fault. We have no responsibility for being Jesus."

Whaddya think? Are Cousin Hal & Mr. Cosby right on this one?
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Thnx to leroys and indiand for the fotos

WHO STOMPED ON paradise?

We used to live in paradise. Then we lost it. How? The story’s in James DeMeo's Saharasia: the 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World. This book is about a group I call the “Flies Guys.”

The Flies Guys were the first patrists, the first patriarchalists, the first war-god peoples, the sickness that killed the Goddess peoples and shot their Paradise in the head.

Here's their story:

In a nutshell, DeMeo says that before around 4000 BCE, humans were democratic, egalitarian, sex-positive, pleasure-oriented, non-violent Goddess-worshiping "matrists." Over the next 10-20 generations, however, certain matrist groups morphed into "patrists": violent, sexually-repressive, misogynistic, sadistic, male-dominated high-god worshipers with painful and traumatic child rearing techniques.

What caused the morphing? More on that below. First, though, a word on DeMeo's research. This is not any old "armchair science" book. DeMeo backs up his theories - ten years in the making -- with some of the most solid and extensive interdisciplinary data I've ever seen. To present this data for our perusal took over 400 pages, in a large-scale format, of scores of maps, charts, diagrams, figures, tables, drawings, photographs, footnotes and appendices as well as ample data-driven text.

The majority of DeMeo's data are sterling. For example, working with class-A anthropological data (from the Human Relations Area Files, etc.) and meshing those with class-A geological data (from the Budyko-Lettau Dryness Ratio), DeMeo shows that (1) around 4000 BCE a broad ribbon of land across Africa, the Middle East and Asia began dying; 2) People living in this land became the most patriarchal on the planet; and, 3) the further one wanders from this ribbon of land, the less patriarchal people are. DeMeo calls this land "Saharasia." It's an area that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles on our planet.

DeMeo offers a fascinating analysis of how the hideous change from matrist to patrist occurred. He bases his arguments on current studies of starving peoples. The behavioral changes in starving groups are enormous and appalling. Starving people become consumed with eating and lose interest in all other pleasures, including sex. The old and young are abandoned to die. Brothers steal food from sisters, and in some cases parents eat their own children. For children who survive, bad diet leads to laundry lists of psychological and physical abnormalities down the road. The culture breaks down. Life bumps into chaos.

Although this starvation syndrome began in Saharasia ca 4000 BCE, it continued for generation after generation. Most of the crazed groups caught in the desertification process died out. In the few that survived (and why they survived is explained below), mentally-ill behaviors became institutionalized. Mental illness became their way of life; the loss of interest in pleasure; the glorification of the strong; the strong stealing from the weak - all these and more would have become fossilized into a new and actively promoted way of life - a set of behaviors "learned, shared, patterned and transmitted from generation to generation," as my anthropology texts used to define culture. It is at this point, when mental-illness becomes codified, that one witnesses the birth of the patriarchy.

DeMeo contends that the first response to desertification was for the agricultural matrists to abandon their land and become nomadic, riding horseback over rough terrain, frantically searching for food and water. In order to keep babies alive, loving matrist mothers would bind (swaddle) them tightly in cloth. Babies spent all day tied to their mother's backs, unable to move heads, hands, legs or feet. For the successful new patrist groups this swaddling became something glorified. One effect was severe skull deformation in both infants and adults.

DeMeo thinks that infant swaddling and head binding produces a deep-set rage in adults, especially toward mothers, women, and female deity. Hence one possible source of the misogyny and abandonment of female deity that became hallmarks of patriarchal cultures.

"The heads of ... children ... are pressed so tightly by means of a peculiar kind of ligature, that little by little the heads assume the shape of sugar-loaves. The pressure is so great that the noses of the children ... are constantly bleeding.... The child cries and turns black, and when the mother presses on its forehead, a white slimy fluid comes out its nose and ears...." (p. 112).

Fortunately, skull deformation has died out over the past several hundred years (p. 112). Swaddling, however, has not. Even today groups across, and on the edges of Saharasia retain this awful practice in, for example, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China.

Although I don't agree with every theory in his book, I think DeMeo's basic premise - that ancient, widespread, continental desertification drove humans from their natural, healthy state into one of codified mental illness -- is a premise he proves almost beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And knowing that, once upon a time we actually *did* live in "The Garden of Eden," means there's hope we can get back there again.

You can read this Amazon.com review, and others about Saharasia, HERE.

Go HERE to read the first of my six-part series on the Flies Guys, "The Origin of Patriarchy."
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Thnx to neneman for the foto of paradise

mothergoddess DOT COM

Here’s a new site after my own heart: mothergoddess.com:

"This site is dedicated to the female aspect of Creator and Creation - She whose back we walk on and whose food we eat. Mother Earth.

"She has been prominent in cultures throughout history and back to Neolithic times. But during the past few thousand years, women have experienced alienation from their power source. The female aspect of the Creator has been excluded and denied by a culture that has focused exclusively on the male dominated religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

"The last remnants of Goddess worship were all but wiped out by the massacre of millions of women as witches, during the Middle Ages. And it was all done in the name of a loving God.

"But the Goddess is reasserting Herself. She is telling us it is time to clean up our acts. The survival of life as we know it, depends upon our willingness to listen to Her and honor Her. To worship the Goddess is to honor the Earth and all the creatures with whom we share this divine place.

"If we take the time to see it, to become aware of the divine gift that this life on Earth is, we begin to understand why all acts of love and pleasure are Goddess rituals.

"If you have Goddess-related artwork, poetry or articles you would like to submit for possible publication on this site, we welcome them."

MORE >>>

TO THE mothers OF THE WORLD

Dear mothers of the world: Are you worshipping a war god (Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu or Yahweh)? If so, please stop. Ever wonder why people worshipping war gods are perpetually at war? Duh!

Before your primitive war gods reared their ugly heads (about 6000 years ago), we basked in a wonderful world. Would I kid you about something this serious? No, I would not. Before 4000 BC, we had it all: Peace. Love. Wealth. Freedom. Safe streets. Everybody happy.

Chew on this, sisters: If your children worship war gods, chances are they will die in war. The war gods are prepping to face off, now, and the odds of everyone the world over being at war constantly are as good as those of George Bush mangling the English language when he opens his mouth next.

Rear your children to ignore the war gods! Scores of peaceful gods and Goddesses are wanting worshipppers (go to The Gods Are Bored for an updated list). Personally I prefer Goddesses, but even Horus or Pan beat a war god. Buddha and Buddhism aren’t perfect, but they too beat the war gods. Even atheism beats your war-god worship!
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Thnx to the Spiral Grove for the picture of the Green Man

The Untouchables Mystery

At his site, Mike has an ad that says where the Indian “Untouchables” (Dalit) came from is a mystery. Actually, the best evidence says it was the mentally-ill Flies Guys, who, about 3500 years ago, carried the caste system into India, along with their other putrid bag of tricks (war, weapons, war gods, violence, sex anxiety, women enslaved, kids brutalized, etc.). They foisted all this crass nastiness onto the splendid, technologically superior Goddess peoples, who at that time were minding their own business, and peacefully inhabiting India.

The particular Flies Guys who hit India were the Aryans. Because they hailed from the north, compared to the Goddess people they had bleached-out skin popping with blue veins. And when these bleached boys ran over the Goddess people, they yanked in a nasty caste system, plopping themselves into the top caste, and the rich-colored Goddess people into the lowest.

The Flies Guys dragged social classes with them wherever they went, but their best job was in India, where the bottom-rung people are supposedly so dreadful that if you touch them you get bugs. (Actually, it was the Flies Guys who were buggy; psychologists call this “projection.”)

Go HERE to read more about the Flies Guys.

Go HERE to see what India was like before the Aryan Flies Guys ruined it (if you’re from India, I mean you no insult; the Flies Guys went all over the world ruining everyone).

Go HERE to visit the Dalit (the polite term for the Untouchables). If you want, you can even spread the love, and sponsor a Dalit child.

EVERYBODY Rich? WHY NOT?

Time for a lecture, gentle readers, on the point of this blog:

If the world worshipped a Mother Goddess, we’d all be as healthy as the healthy children of the healthiest mother. We’d be smart, rich, risk-taking, egalitarian, sensual, creative, capable, playful, freedom-loving, non-violent, lovable, gorgeous WINNERS!

I can back this with historical and logical evidence.

But -- we need to surrender our war gods simultaneously, or the gods left behind will stomp the rest of us into the dirt. So put your hands together for unilateral disarmament of the war gods!

Monogamy, Schanogamy

[Try saying that twice in a hurry: “monogamy, schanogamy; monogamy, schanogamy”]

DID YOU KNOW that polygamy is supported by the Bible? Take a gander at these verses:

Exodus 21:10 "If [a man] marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights."

In 2 Samuel 5:13 "After he left Hebron, David took more concubines and wives in Jerusalem, and more sons and daughters were born to him."

In 1 Kings 11:3, King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines: “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray."

In 2 Chronicles 11:21, King Solomon's son Rehoboam had 18 wives and 60 concubines.

In Deuteronomy 21:15 "If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons...."

And in the New Testament, Jesus sanctifies all of the above by saying: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law (the Old Testament) or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." (Matthew 5:17-18)

After they kill abortion rights, d’ya suppose Christians will go after monogamy next?
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Thnx to kadrip55 for the foto

Forbidden GODDESS WORSHIP

Holy shades of the ancient Minoans! This modern religion, begun in 1981 and based on an early religious group called the Essenes, worships both a Goddess and a God. It’s now located in North Carolina, but you can access them easily through the internet in all kinds of ways. These dudes say Jesus was not Jewish, and was not originally hooked up with the Hebrew Old Testament:

"Nazoreanism

“The Order of Nazorean Essenes … worships a Nature Goddess called Simat Hiya....

“Our Goddess worship has some similarities to the general Goddess worshipping [religions] throughout the Middle East in the late Bronze age, as practiced in the Minoan civilization, Pre-historic Greece, among the Caananites, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Sumerians, and the Nabataeans, but it is not exactly the same….

snip

“…The false assumption that Jesus was raised as, and was a reformer of, the Jewish religion. Jesus was not Jewish nor did He accept the Bible as true. Jesus was a vegetarian of the Gnostic Nazorean sect and the New Testament is not an authentic or accurate portrayal of his life or teachings.”

snip

“Our Priest(ess)hood is composed of both men and women and we worship a male and female form of both Deity and Messiah…. We offer online Catechisms of our Nazorean Way to train potential members of our Order in our doctrines and practices. After graduating from this online Seminary, men and woman are eligible to request formal ordination into Nazorean Priest(ess)hood, should they wish to do so.

snip

“By the end of the year 2003 official Order membership exceeded 1100 in number. By the end of 2004 this number had grown to almost 2000…. MORE >>>

Fight! Fight!

Oh, for gosh sakes. Now the Christians are trying to change history over at Wikipedia, the online people’s encyclopedia. Everyone knows the Christians burned down the world’s largest library, at Alexandria, the repository of all the knowledge of the ancient world (most of which has therefore been lost to us forever). But a Christian over at Wiki (“Bede”) insists Christians aren’t guilty, Caesar is. He keeps erasing “Christians” in the article, and popping in “Caesar.”

Here’s a snippet of the FIGHT:

BEDE: “This is Bede here. Eloquence has launched into a well-poisoning exercise to push theories in a book that is fifty years old. I will be eliminating disapraging remarks about myself from the article and restating the case for Caesar.”

ELOQUENCE: “Even the 2003 Britannica does not blame Caesar anymore. In fact, the Britannica article about Hypatia flat out states that the Christians destroyed the Library…. Wikipedia is not a resource for Christian apologetics, as your site is.”

BEDE: “Well, I do hope you have higher standards than the EB [Encyclopedia Britannica]. The last paragraph, a piece of blatant anti-Christian special pleading, has been deleted."

ELOQUENCE: "There is nothing anti-Christian about the last paragraph. It reflects current scholarly opinion."

BEDE: "Rubbish. It reflects your opinion. As your website shows, you are an anti-Christian polemicist…. I have removed your bias again. I will continue to do so whenever you put it up again."

ELOQUENCE: "If you don't want to be called a Christian apologist, maybe you shouldn't publish your papers under the heading "reasonable apologetics".

By trashing the Library at Alexandria – along with looting, rioting, and starting fires everywhere -- Christians threw Europe into the Dark Ages. Personally, I think they’re trying for a repeat performance. Ready for a second Dark Ages, anyone?

JEHOVAH hates AMERICA

Anne from The Gods Are Bored directs our attention to a lovely bit of behavior snatched straight out of the christian bible:

"...'God Hates Fags' send their followers to the funerals of fallen Iraq War soldiers. These protesters shout at the families of the victims and loudly thank God for killing the soldier.

"Here's their logic in a nutcase-shell:

"1. God hates fags (they offer about 500 references from Scripture to prove it).

"2. Since individual states do not kill gays, God hates those states.

"3. Since the states are in America, God hates America.

"4. Since God hates America, He's arranged to have soldiers killed in Iraq. Therefore, the hometown funerals of those soldiers is a good place to demonstrate loudly that God Hates Fags." MORE >>>

If you want even more, see THIS news article, and THIS one as well.

How much longer are we going to laugh off “etiquette” books like the bible and koran that teach people to kill gays, stone people to death for breathing, force-breed women, and make war on anything that moves?

I'm tired of that lame excuse "Oh, those people aren't real christians." "Those people" are drawing their actions straight from your "holy" Old Testament. If the book's wrong, change it. Why are we keeping books containing recipes for keeping ourselves perpetually in the Dark Ages?
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The bible is not a book of love.

Children NEED GODDESSING

Children need healthy role models who live the whole of life, eros as well as agape, joie de vivre as well as sorrow. Role models who love the way healthy mothers love their children – unconditionally. As women give birth, so the Mother Goddess gave birth to us all. She loves all of us, no strings attached. Always, forever, and no matter what.

The best Christians can offer is Jesus: good for agape and sorrow, but not so hot when it comes to eros and joie de vivre. The pits when it comes to how to enjoy beauty, how to love the earth, the animals.

THE loving GODDESS

Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist: “In acting in relationship to other people ... there may be four or five possibilities. The ... dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal...” (Flowers, Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth).

I would add, "If my guiding divinity is an unconditional lover, my decision will be unconditionally loving."

Afraid OF THE GODDESS

If you’re new to Her, the Goddess can be a frightening phenomenon. A commenter on this blog reminded me of that yesterday. And this afternoon as I was retyping an old manuscript, I came to this sentence: “Even the term ‘goddess’ hits me wrong, scares me a little.” I was surprised. I hadn’t remembered my own initial fears. I moved on past this sentence without retyping it, since I no longer feel this way about the Goddess (obviously), but how coincidental that I stumbled across my old fears at just this point in time. I know what discharged my fears for me: a dependable group of women I celebrated the Goddess with, six times annually, for over ten years.

Also helpful were several journals and magazines, some of them gone, now. One journal still in existence is SageWoman. Good online journals are Matrifocus.com and AwakenedWoman.com. Maybe others of you can add favorite Goddess publications still going strong?
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The picture of Artemis comes from my own collection of work done by Susan Seddon Boulet.

VISIONS OF THE Future

This is from Barbara Walker’s Goddess-Women Interviews:

“Certainly I don’t believe in the flip-flop; give women the same kind of power that men have now. That’s unrealistic. You have to work through the system that’s here and try to change it. You can go outside the system and create your own lovely little system, and that’s fun, but we have to operate in a male context and yet make points and change things. In order to change anything, however, you have to maintain the outsider point of view, looking in; otherwise you just join the Old Boys’ Club. It seems to me that women are smart enough to be able to change the patriarchal system at the same time that they’re envisioning something else. We haven’t much choice.

Snip

“As Emerson says, a mind once stretched never goes back to its original size. Any little bit can stretch it that much more. I want the women of the future to find the Goddess and to bring the men along with them.”

Barbara Walker, Restoring the Goddess, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books, 2000, p. 371

These interviews are a real comfort to me. Walker is British, so the women she interviewed are probably over in Britain somewhere, but it's still good knowing they exist. It seems to me that many Goddess women in this country are doing precisely what this woman says we need to move beyond: creating their own, nice little private safe place, without trying to reach out and change anything.

THE TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR Goddess

The geographer James DeMeo has admitted that his academic colleagues are “subtly evading the obvious," i.e., that the ancient Goddess-worshipping Minoans were probably technologically superior to their god-dominated contemporaries:

“In short, there is a subtle evasion of the obvious, a reluctance among contemporary scholars to consider that the peaceful matristic Minoans could have been technologically superior to the patristic, war-dominated societies of the region.”*1

The Minoans were mind-bogglingly sophisticated: 1,200 years before the ancient Greeks, they boasted multi-storied apartments, running water, city sewers, steam heat, primitive flush toilets connected to exterior sewage systems, primitive steam power, woven fabrics, movable type-faces (took Gutenberg another 3000 years to reinvent these), ships with square-rigged sails and multiple oars, and light-wells allowing natural light into all rooms of their large buildings. Also, “primitive bi-metallic batteries have been suggested [for them] in archaeological findings.” *2

Another writer, Charles Pelegrino*3, thinks that

“…had not the Minoans been … destroyed, their rate of technological development was so rapid they might have developed rockets and landed on the moon by the time of Jesus.” *3

Other posts describing life under the Goddess, before the rise of the patriarchy are HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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*1 James DeMeo, 1998. Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World: The Revolutionary Discovery of a Geographic Basis to Human Behavior, p. 293.
*2 DeMeo, p. 291
*3 In Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey, 1991.
*4 DeMeo, p. 291

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The picture is a reconstruction of the "palace" or "temple" of Knossos. Who knows what it was? Sometimes I think it was a combined shopping mall, government building, and religious center where you could also settle in a small cafe for a nice glass of wine.

THE Goddess IN PRE-HINDU INDIA

Found this today on a blog I visited: "Hinduism is generally considered to be the world’s oldest religion….”

To which I replied:

"Not so, EA. There was a highly developed, complex civilization in place in India before the relatively barbaric Aryans took over: the peaceful and complex ancient Indus Valley Civilization, with highly complex cities like Mohenjodaro and Harappa. It was a Goddess civilization. There’s little doubt in my mind that a peaceful, healthy Goddess religion was in place in what is now India for millenia before the crude war gods smashed everything and forced their high-god religions down the people's throats. As they’ve done all over the globe, for the past 6000 years.

"For a short intro, go HERE...."

... or here: "Countless terra-cotta statues of Mother Goddess have been discovered suggesting that she was worshipped in nearly every home."

Other good sites on the pre-patriarchal, peaceful, class-less, highly complex, Goddess-worshipping Indians are HERE, HERE & HERE.
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Thnx to harappa.com for the foto of the ruins of the ancient Indus Valley city Mohenjodaro.

BORN good

This fab post suggests we're born not flawed, but good, lovable, and gorgeous:

"Oops, the scientist dropped his clothespin. Not to worry - a wobbly toddler raced to help, eagerly handing it back. The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges as early as 18 months of age.

"Toddlers' endearing desire to help out actually signals fairly sophisticated brain development, and is a trait of interest to anthropologists trying to tease out the evolutionary roots of altruism and cooperation.

"Psychology researcher Felix Warneken performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers, such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Sometimes he "struggled" with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.

"Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books, each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds - but only if he appeared to need it....

"Warneken never asked for the help and didn't even say "thank you," so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise if they helped. After all, altruism means helping with no expectation of anything in return.

"And - this is key - the toddlers didn't bother to offer help when he deliberately pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor, Warneken, of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, reports Thursday in the journal Science."MORE>>>

This came from Reba Rambles: Musings of a Mental Magpie. Thanks, Reba.
___
& thnx to ppreacher for the foto

love

By now, I trust you all know the three kinds of love: eros, philia, and agape. Here’s what maybe ya don’t know. Christians shiver to think you might get wind of this (they’ve buried it in the bottom bowels of the Vatican). It’s this: there’s a fourth love. This one’s older and Bigger than the other three: it’s Motherly Love (“Agape Mee-teh-rone”).

You think sex and friends are big? Try getting by without Motherly Love. Minus it, humans would be mincemeat. Without Motherly Love the species would come to a screeching halt overnight – sooner, even.

This love is so bigtime that the current Powers That Be don’t want us to write about it, talk about it, or even think about it. Because if we really grokked and respected this primal force, we’d be free.

Back when the human race was healthy, Mother Love was the center of the Divine Wheel. It told us all we needed to know. Almost everything was either mother or child; some things were both. The Golden Rule was “Love your neighbor as a mother loves her child.”

Around 30 A.D., however, someone decided to give the Mother a sex-change (actually, this happened several times in history). The Great Mother became a man named Jesus Christ. Jesus, of course, couldn’t say “Love your neighbor as a mother loves her child,” because that gave the people too much power. It was too easy. People would actually get it. Even if people had mothers so damaged by the war gods that they were unable to love unconditionally, the animal kingdom still provided models of unconditional Mother Love.

So what Jesus Christ said was “Love your neighbor as I love you” (John 13) and “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matthew 22).

This confused people. “Okay, so he did magic tricks and fed lotsa people fish. So what? Ma fed us all the time – even if she had to go without.”

And, “So what if J.C. healed the sick. Ma fed me chicken soup for three weeks when I was sick, and got dark circles under her eyes until I was better.”

“And, “So Christ let them pound nails into his hands and feet. So tell me again -- how is this ‘love’?”

[For those of you who want more info on Motherly Love, go HERE, HERE, and/or HERE.]
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The picture is one I own of a painting of the Goddess, by Susan Seddon Boulet

THEY DON'T LIKE you

Kids, they don’t like you. Check out their holy books. The warrior gods -- Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh and Vishnu – are the W.C. Fields* of religion:

“… certainly [in the Bible] one should find empathy toward children’s needs, for isn’t Jesus always pictured holding little children? Yet when one actually reads each of the over 2000 references to children listed in the Complete Concordance to the Bible, these gentle images are missing. You find lots on child sacrifice, on stoning children, on beating them, on their strict obedience, on their love for their parents, and on their role as carriers of the family name, but not a single one that reveals empathy for their needs.” James DeMause, 1974, The History of Childhood)

Remember: we’re looking at war religions here, built for whipping kids into warmonger and war-lover shape.

Christian kids get stuck with mind-ripping role models: Jehovah shouts “kill and make war!” while Jesus whispers “be sweet and help the poor….” No wonder Christians make up most of our criminal class – they’re schizoid before they’re outa diapers.

Children need role models who live life in toto -- eros AND agape, joie de vivre AND sorrow. Role models who love the way only mothers can: unconditionally. As women give birth, the Mother Goddess gave birth to us all, and She adores everyone, no strings attached. Always, forever, and no matter what. [And believe me, men “under” the Goddess are just as manly as under a god.]

The idea of gods giving birth throws me into a gaggle of giggles (Athena springing from the head of Zeus, Yahweh building Adam from Eve’s rib, etc.). Around the time Yahweh was contrived, a hundred other gods were slapped together. Every single one of ‘em could give birth (See Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia). Why? Hadda compete with the Goddess -- the only deity anyone gave a fig about.

After enough torture people “bought” these new gods. No matter that they didn’t believe in them – all they had to do was brainwash their kids to believe (Voila! More warriors!). You either died from torture and let the torturers brainwash your kids, or you promised to brainwash them yourself.

Atheists: a picture’s worth 1000 words. Are you certain you want children reared with no role models? If all the world were atheist, are you sure you’d wanna live in it?

The world’s ready to burst into flames because junk war gods murdered the Goddess about 6000 years ago. These dudes are ancient dweebs, and we need to trade them back to the Deck for the Goddess card. If you love your children and the planet, give this some serious thought.
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*” Children should neither be seen nor heard from -- ever again.” W.C. Fields. Thnx to ppreacher and surfkid74 for the fotos

Who's afraid of Muhammad?

"The man who catapulted Denmark into an international crisis sits in his cosy kitchen and is confused. Kare Bluitgen has generated a conflict that is robbing ambassadors and heads of state of their sleep…. And it all began with Kare Bluitgen wanting to explain Islam to Danish children...." MORE >>>

Did you know that, the year before the cartoons came out, the Danish film maker Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim -- after he made a film criticizing Muslim treatment of women?
(Go HERE for the story)

Turns out Kare Bluitgen advertised for Danish artists to illustrate his children's book on Muhammed, but after Van Gogh's murder, Danish artists were all hiding in holes.

That's when another Dane stepped up to bat:

"This cowardice prompted Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Denmark's biggest daily, Jyllands-Posten, to get involved. Rose asked the country's most renowned caricaturists to draw the Prophet Mohammed. Rose says he wanted to see 'how deep this self-censorship lies in the Danish public.' Forty cartoonists were approached, twelve sent in their pictures and these were published at the end of September in the paper's weekend edition."

In the West, we've always tolerated a tension between freedom of speech, and our sensibilities. Are we going to chuck this freedom now, just because Muslims tell us to?!? Jeesh! I wanna decide if we give up freedom of speech. Let’s not wilt like wet paper when a pile of flies guys order us around.


What would happen if, say, an American filmmaker made a movie about Muslims, and a Muslim gunned him down on the streets of New York? Would the film company apologize and promise never to “do it again”? Would Americans stop making films about Muslims? Would Muslims stop there, ordering us around?

Has the West -- America included -- already folded to Islam? In my book, our fear of Islam put into office the worst president America has ever had (to date, at any rate). A president with long and deep ties to Islamic oil.

Kiddies: let’s not confuse “respect” for others with self-protection -- i.e. from warrior-god boys.

THE god BOYS & THEIR Slaves

"I don't know how a Christian could read the Bible and arrive at the conclusion that slavery is OK." (from a recent comment left on this blog)

I'd say the Christian read the following, and then made a bee-line to the nearest corner market to see if he could pick up a cheap slave:

"Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves." Leviticus 25:44

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything...." Colossians 3:22

"Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything...." Titus 2:9

"All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect...." 1 Timothy 6:1

"You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life…." Leviticus 25:46

"As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our god, till he shows us his mercy." Psalm 123:2 [And your relationship to Daddy god is: slave to master!]

"Diligent hands will rule, but laziness ends in slave labor.” Proverbs 12:24

Doesn't stop here. On top of the eight above, the bible has 178 more references to slaves or slavery. Not one says it’s evil or nasty.

The Jesus Overlay can't make a silk purse outa a pig’s ear. The bible is a patrist nightmare packed with patrist traits:

Slavery;
Torture (hell; stoning people to death);
High sex anxiety;
High class stratification;
Warfare prevalence high;
Killing the enemy is emphasized;
Bellicosity is high;
Nurture is low;
Display of affection is almost nil;
Female status is inferior;
Abortion penalty is severe; etc., etc., etc.

Ya can’t clean up the bible by plopping Jesus down on top (and, BTW, Jesus is just the Goddess with a sex change). It still smells like the inside of my garbage cans. I can’t wait for people to wake up to this.
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Thnx to m constant for the foto

Peaceful SOCIETIES WEBSITE

Got a nice email from the manager of the Peaceful Societies website I posted about on February 25, 2006 ("Pitching WAR OUT ON ITS EAR")

"Dear Athana,

"Doing a Technorati search on the Semai, I just found your recent post about the Semai and your very kind mention of my Peaceful Societies website.

snip

"I'm glad you singled out the 1978 Montagu volume [Learning Non-Aggression; about 8 non-aggressive societies] in your blog post--it's a good work. I personally feel the 1989 book edited by Howell and Willis, the 1994 volume edited by Sponsel and Gregor, and the 2004 volume edited by Kemp and Fry (all listed on my Best Books page) also have a lot of different societies to offer. The Archive in the website includes articles scanned from that 1989 Howell and Willis volume, and I've just received permission to scan a couple article from the 1994 Sponsel and Gregor book. I have hopes of getting permission for a few of the article from the 1978 book too, at some point. I'm trying.

snip

"Anyway, thanks again for the nice plug for the website.

"Bruce Bonta

"Skeptical that a peaceful society will ever be possible? Check out
http://www.peacefulsocieties.org"

ORIGINS OF patriarchy VI

PART SIX, continued from the previous posts
DEMEO’S DATA

A word on DeMeo’s data: DeMeo ranked over 1,200 world cultures on 63 variables. He used the Human Relations Area Files, the queen of professional anthropological data. Some of his variables included:

O display of affection (hi or lo)
O attention to needs (hi or lo)
O pain infliction (hi or lo)
O sex anxiety
O class stratification
O warfare prevalence
O narcissism index
O bellicosity
O severe male initiations
O slavery
O killing, torture, mutilation of enemy emphasized
O high-god present; etc.

DeMeo found that the data clumped together into patterns. For example, a lack of affection and a lack of attention to needs tended to clump together with high sex anxiety, lotsa class stratification, severe male intiations, and so forth. And high affection clumped together with high attention to needs, low sex anxiety, low class stratification, etc. He called these two patterns “patrist” and “matrist.” AND, he found the patrist cultures generally in Saharasia, the matrist cultures outside it.

“To present this data for our perusal took over 400 pages, in a large-scale format, of scores of maps, charts, diagrams, figures, tables, drawings, photographs, footnotes and appendices as well as ample data-driven text.

“The majority of DeMeo's data are sterling. For example, working with class-A anthropological data (from the Human Relations Area Files, etc.) and meshing those with class-A geological data (from the Budyko-Lettau Dryness Ratio), DeMeo shows that

"(1) around 4000 BCE a broad ribbon of land across Africa, the Middle East and Asia began dying;
(2) People living in this land became the most patriarchal on the planet; and,
(3) the further one wanders from this ribbon of land, the less patriarchal people are.

"DeMeo calls this land 'Saharasia.' It's an area that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles on our planet." MORE >>>

From the Review "Save the World; Read This Book"

ORIGINS OF patriarchy V

PART FIVE: "The Origins of Slavery, Social Classes and Organized Warfare" (Continued from past posts; Auntie Athana is telling Virginia the Patriarchy Story.)

VIRGINIA: “Wake up, Auntie A. You haven’t finished the story. Before you fell asleep over your popcorn, you were talking about how the mangy Lord-of-the-Flies Boys found the first cities and tried to beat them up.”

ATHANA: “Whaa.. Oh… Hmm. Sorry Ginnie [Yaaaaaawn].” Okay, back to the story….

“...Over the next several generations, the psychotic Flies-Boys invented devices to scale the walls of the first cities. They also invented weapons to kill the gentle matrists.

"At first they just burned, murdered and pillaged. But that was no fun. All they had left was a pile of ashes and their own boring, smelly selves. With all the smart matrists gone, no one knew how to make any of the fine-looking matrist furniture, fountains and feather beds. No one knew how to sing the matrist songs, or dance the matrist dances.

“So the smellies mounted their mangy horses and rode off into the sunset to look for another city. This time they left a few matrists alive. Then they invented social classes. Face it, Ginnie: with breath that sinks ships and the table manners of trolls, you don’t make the party-invitation lists. So you invent social classes -- with you, of course, in the primo class."

VIRGINIA: "So people have to invite you to their parties?"

ATHANA: "Exactly.

"You can kind of excuse the flies guys for what they did next. They invented slavery. The matrists refused to make the nice fountains, furniture and feather beds, so the smellies were forced to put them in chains and beat them up a bit until they “cooperated.” But only men got to make stuff. The flies-guys’ were scared fly-less of women, so women were kept in cages for babymaking.

“After a while, though, the smellies got bored. After all, their daddies always said pleasure was for sissies, pain the road to Paradise. They began remembering how good it felt to smash heads, and murder a few hundred matrists a week. They got restless. Slowly it dawned upon them: beating up matrist cities needed to become a full-time occupation.

“And so it did."

VIRGINIA: “So is this finally the patriarchy, Auntie A?"

ATHANA: “Yes, Virginia, this at last is the patriarchy. Women brutalized. Pain glorified. Warfare institutionalized. Social classes. Slavery. And a daddy-god slavedriver/fearstoker. And all this is crystallized forever in a new way of life that is learned by everyone, shared by everyone, patterned, and transmitted from one generation to the next, ad infinitum.”

VIRGINIA: “Okay, Auntie, I’m going home now and drown myself in the bathtub."

ATHANA: “Oh, no, Ginnie. It’s not hopeless. Understanding the enemy is the first step toward conquering it. And of course the enemy is not people, but the culture that sits on top of our heads, running our behavior like a dictator. But cultures can be changed. Not easily, but it is possible."

To be continued. Next Post: DeMeo’s data
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Thnx to bsilder & shOdan for the fotos

ORIGINS OF patriarchy IV

PART FOUR: "The Flies Boys Discover The City" (Continued from past posts; Auntie Athana is telling Virginia the Patriarchy Story.)

VIRGINIA: “Okay, Auntie, got our popcorn, and we're comfie on the couch. Yesterday we stopped with the peaceful matrists starving in the desert. They were turning stark-raving mad, and then dying – all except the teenage boys. Next, can we hear something cheery -- like the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'?“

ATHANA: “Right, Ginnie. After this story, ‘cheery’ will be what the doctor ordered.

“Before we get to the teen boys, remember -- not all the matrists went mad. The lucky ones stumbled onto some of the only water left: the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, and large rivers in China. Some even found fertile land there. They invented irrigation and grew food. Irrigation takes many people cooperating. Ta da: the first cities.

“Now back to the Bad Boys. Put everything in a big pot and stir: Roving gangs of boys who’ve learned starvation-behavior and nothing else. (Pain good, pleasure bad. Can’t see anyone’s else's needs. Brothers steal from sisters. Run fast so ma won’t catch ya and eatcha.) Add to that, “swaddling rage” against women. These boys are roving, ticking time-bombs. Let’s call them “Lord of the Flies” gangs.

“Although many Flies guys died in the desert, some crawled to adulthood. A few stranded women tagged along. Children happened. The children learned their fathers ways. In other words, Virginia, starvation behavior becomes codified. It begins to get handed down from generation to generation. A new way of life is born.”

VIRGINIA: “The patriarchy, right? “

ATHANA: “No, not yet. Vital ingredients are still missing: Slavery. Organized warfare. Weapons.

“One day the mangy, smelly Flies Boys stumble upon – gasp! -- something they’ve never seen! Green plants in the desert! A horde of bejeweled, perfumed people hiding behind high walls (built after other smellies came and tried to wreck this new invention, the city).

"‘There’s food and water here,’ cry the smellies. ‘Let’s take it!’ They hurl stones at the city walls, but the stones just bounce back (several smellies lost toes in just this manner).

“By the way, at some point the smellies invented a god who looked suspiciously like their own fathers: hated pleasure; thought women needed to be branded so ya know which are yours; and so forth.”

Tomorrow: The Origins of Slavery and Warfare
________________

Thnx to AAD and ophelia for the fotos

Bringing Brigit INTO YOUR LIFE

"In one of my vision journeys, I asked Brigit how I could make her more present in my life. She told me to light a candle for her every day for three months....

snip

"Gratitude is a ... shooting star in the dark night of endless yearning..." MORE >>>>

(From an article in the last issue of SageWoman Magazine, "Brigit's Cauldron, Full of Blessings.")
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Thnx to currentmiddleages.org for the picture of Brigit

ORIGINS OF patriarchy III

ORIGINS OF patriarchy PART III [cont'd from previous posts]

Swaddled & Starving in Saharasia

Virginia: [Kicking her shoes off and plopping down on Auntie Athana’s couch] “Okay, Auntie A. I’m ready. On with the story about how, 6000 years ago, the world was full of peaceful people who turned into plug-uglies.”

Athana: “Alright, Ginny. You’ll remember from yesterday that when thousands of miles of land all around them began to die, the peaceful matrists living in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia began starving.

"As you starve, Ginny, you become totally obsessed with the ‘feeding of the self.’ You lose interest in all pleasures, including sex.“

Virginia [Index fingers stuck into ears, humming softly “lalalalalalalala….”]

Athana: “You lose all interest in the pain or needs of others. Brothers steal from sisters. Parents may eat their children.“

Virginia: “Aaaaw, Auntie A! I don’t wanna hear this. I knew I shoulda stayed home and cleaned garbage cans. “

Athana: “And then there are the nutritional effects of the sand-and-briar diet. The result: total psychosis.

“Mr. DeMeo says that, when their land died, starving matrists became nomads. At first this was just a way to find new, good land.“

Virginia: “Which they never found, right? “

Athana: “Well, some did. We’ll get to that. “

“Some Matrists sent scouts ahead to find water. The scouts were the strongest: the young men. Often the women, children and elderly left behind, died. “

Virginia: “Ouch! So the only people left to carry on the group were …“

Athana: “You got it. Starving, psychotic, teenage boys. “

Virginia: “O. My. Gawd.”

Athana: “The new nomads rode hard over rough land to get to water. This, of course, woulda been a killer on young babies. “

Virginia: “Literally! Wha’d they do about that? “

Athana: “Well, some enterprising matrist mother invented “swaddling” – cocooning babies in cloth so tiny little necks wouldn’t break at “breakneck” speeds. Imagine, though, being unable to move even a finger, day in and day out, for up to 18 hours a day. Remember, mothers have lost the ability to notice others' pain. From what we know about historical swaddling, it can be a living nightmare. “

Virginia: “Why? Whaddya mean? “

Athana: “Well, when soft baby skulls are bound, they get long and tall, like loaves of bread. Among later patrists, this became a mark of gentility. So babies were tied up 24 hours a day to make their heads even taller. Little devices allowed them to eliminate through their cloth. Listen to this, Ginny [Athana picks up James DeMeo’s Saharasia and reads]:

“The child cries and turns black, and when the mother presses on its forehead a white slimy fluid comes out its nose and ears. Thus it sleeps every night until its head has taken on the desired shape….”

Virginia: “Gotta go, Auntie A. Bye. Forgot I have something in the oven. Gotta catch it before the house burns down. “

Athana: “Wait, Ginnie – this is Big: DeMeo thinks swaddling produces deep, deep rage at mothers, and, by extension, all women. And add female deity to the list, too.“

To be continued. Next: What happened to the gangs of psychotic teenage matrist boys?
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Thnx to jcash for the foto above, and to James DeMeo for the picture below (From Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social violence in the Deserts of the Old World.)

ORIGINS OF patriarchy II

[PART TWO, continued from the previous post]

Starving in the Desert

Virginia: “Okay, Auntie A, what’s next in the story bout how the first violent people were born.”

Athana: “Well, we're getting to the crunchy part, Ginny. But sit down on the couch, cause it’s also kinda gruesome. “

Ginny: [Kicks off her shoes and plops onto Auntie’s A’s couch]

Athana: “Mr. DeMeo shows that before around 4000 BCE humans were non-violent, pleasure-loving, democratic, egalitarian sorts. He calls them “matrists” because he also believes they worshiped Goddesses.

“Next Mr. D. carts in new facts from psychology, anthropology and medicine to paint a picture of the changes a group of people goes through when they begin starving to death. From there he paints gruesome but mesmerizing scenarios about how some of the peaceful matrists got trapped when all the land around them began dying, and how they began starving – and what they tried to do about it.

“Anyway, grab that world atlas off the bookshelf….

“… Now look at THIS...

“...See here? You can still see Saharasia on the map today. It’s the desert that stretches all the way from the Sahara desert in North Africa, across the Middle East, and across Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Mr. D. uses top-notch geographical data to show that before 4000 BCE this land was friendly farmland, thick with green growing things.

“Now Ginny, Mr. D. ranked over 1,200 world cultures on 63 variables to see which were matrist and which were patrist. And guess what? “

Ginny: “What? “

Athana: ”The most violent patrist people in the world live in Saharasia. And the matrists live as far away from it as you can get.”

Ginny: “Whoa, Auntie A! Get out!”

Athana: “No joke, Ginnie. Okay that’s all for today. Tomorrow we’ll go talk about what changes starving people go through.”

Virginia: “Uh…. I think I have something to do tomorrow, Auntie A. I think I hafta scrub out the toilets, the garbage cans and the garbage disposal. It’ll probably take me all day….”

[To be continued. Next: A taste of DeMeo’s gripping scenarios about how peaceful matrists began turning into violent patrists.]
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Thnx to kadrip 55 for the foto

THE ORIGIN OF THE patriarchy

PART ONE

Auntie Athana: “No, Virginia, violence has not always 'been there.' Once upon a time, humans were almost totally non-violent. “

Virginia: “Get out, Auntie A! Is this a fairy tale? “

“Hunh-unh, Ginny. This is real stuff. We’ve all been dealt a pack of bad information upta now. You know, “Nature’s violent, so we gotta be, too.” And “Survival of the fittest!” And “Heap big caveman drag women round by hair.

“But people’ve really been putting their heads together lately, Ginny, and they’ve dug up some new, exciting stuff. Turns out that, before around 4000 BCE, humans lived almost like Dorothy in Oz. -- after, of course, the wicked witch was scrubbed.

“One of the best studies -- ten years in the making -- is by a geographer – Mr. James DeMeo. In 1998, Mr. DeMeo published a 454-page, over-sized book called Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World: The Revolutionary Discovery of a Geographic Basis to Human Behavior.

“I think others mighta announced this before James D. did, but the first thing he says is, the first violent peoples reared their ugly heads in desert lands. About 6000 years ago.“

Ginny: “That makes sense, Auntie A. Who’d be anything but prickly and spiteful if they hadda live in a desert? “

“But this isn’t even half the story, Virginia. And it’s not the fascinating part. The fascinating part comes next.“

To be continued.
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Thnx to stoneraven, blont and bsilder for the fotos