h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I doubt the people in South America´s worships has anything to do with any Sophia.

I thought the fish-christ thing was rather well established. Perhaps Gnomon could tell us where he has the womb idea from?

I know the fish is meant to represent an acrostic. So were they playing extra safe? I can imagine them using the fish to represent Christ, but being able to claim 'Fish? What fish? It's just Sophia's womb. Only on its side. Honest!'

Anyone know what Inca goddess Mary's being used as a proxy for?

The Incas...they were pretty hierarchical and patriarchal, were they not?

Looking at how many different gods and goddesses the Mayans had, they must have been very confused about wether to choose matriarchy or patriarchy. The hindus of course also had female gods, as well as a caste system and live burnings of widows.

Worshiping of female deities happens within patriarchal and non-patriarchal cultures. Look at the West . So you can't make any useful understanding of that.

What you have to do is look at *how* female deities are worshipped, because that tells you what the general culture is doing with regards to women. That was my point about looking at the myth and history of the transition into patriarchy 5,000 or so years ago. Pre-patriarchal cultures saw the female principle as the creator of the world (women give birth after all). Later, women gods became subservient to the male gods - Athena born from Zeus head, give me a break

>>
In The Greek Myths (8.a, ff.), Robert Graves notes early myths about the birth of Athena which describe her as a goddess from Libya, whose worship came to the Greeks from Crete after arriving there as early as 4,000 BC. According to Graves, Hesiod (c. 700 BC) relates that Athena was a parthenogenous daughter of Metis, wisdom or knowledge, a Titan who ruled the fourth day and the planet Mercury. Other variants relate that although Metis was of an earlier generation of the Titans, Zeus became her consort when his cult gained dominance. In order to avoid a prophecy made when that change occurred, that any offspring of his union with Metis would be greater than he, Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from having offspring, but she already was pregnant with Athena. Metis gave birth to Athena and nurtured her inside Zeus until Athena burst forth from his forehead fully armed with weapons given by her mother.

Late Classical Greek myths most commonly describe Athena as the "daughter" of Zeus, born from his head after he swallowed her pregnant mother.
<<

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena#Birth

In other words, womb envy

You can see that pattern again and again. Goddesses that had roles of power and influence become secondary to the male gods once those cultures are controlling women.



I'll just say it again, there's no evidence for matriarchal cultures (i.e. women ruling men). Or if you think there is please back that up.


>>
Some parts of South America are quite big on worshipping the Virgin Mary, rather bypassing Jesus and God. Yet they all seem to be patriarchal.
<<

Actually what you are seeing there is the remant of worship of the female principle. The Madonna is widespread within all cultures that were Catholicised, not just South American ones. The fact that it has survived and is still strong is remarkable given the strongly oppressive nature of the Christian churches. I've argued before that despite the Vatican, grass-roots Catholicism is as much about God as a woman as anything else. And of course at that level, when you look at women's culture, you see that despite the patriarchal power structures they live in, women still work in ways similar to women in matrilineal cultures. They know that the world actually revolves around women and children

So it's entirely possible, then, that the women who made and worshipped the European Venus figurines lived under patriarchal dominance? That is, assuming the figurines weren't proto-pornography.

Another way of looking at it is that species tend to adopt certain patterns of hierarchy. Chimps, for example, are patriarchal while their (and our) bonobo cousins are matriarchal. This may not quite be true, however: while these are the patterns that anthropologist have reported so far, that does not mean they are universal or fixed. There's plenty of room in biology for 'exuberant variation'.

So it may be that the human species simply has a *tendency* towards patriarchy. This tendency might be reinforced in developed more societies, but with greater variation in less developed.








Can we think of a better description than more/less developed? All contemporary societies are equally developed.

The *assumption* of Western scholars and consequently the public is that what we do in the West is the human norm (as far as patriarchy is concerned). That is patently not so, you don't have to look at so called prehistory, you can look at our neighbours. Which always leads me to look at how the scholars have gotten it so wrong. You see this again and again when it comes to gender. Every indigenous people I have read or listened to, the women tell a different story of their lives and their culture than the male Western anthropologists whose work is enshrined as fact.

eg menstruation in non-Western cultures has often been portrayed by Western anthropolgists as unclean and that women get ostracised while they are bleeding. Those women know that they come into a kind of power when they bleed, and the act of bleeding together serves a range of important social and cultural and health functions.

So on the one hand you have women who describe the practice of bleeding collectively in positive terms, and on the other hand you have white, wealthy men, who have never bled, and who are looking from the outside, describing it as unclean and that those women are pariahs for a week a month.


Who do you want to believe? And guess who the anthropologists asked about menstruation?

Given that kind of bias, why would I consider what we have been taught to believe about prehistory, which let's face it, has been filtered through hundreds of years of patriarchal values and unacknowledged bias? Remember the colonisers get to write history.

So when you ask:

>>So it's entirely possible, then, that the women who made and worshipped the European Venus figurines lived under patriarchal dominance? That is, assuming the figurines weren't proto-pornography.<<

I think it's an irrelevant question because I can't see any evidence for that except our current *beliefs*. Maybe you could tell me why it's such a compelling idea?

btw, I don't believe that hierarchy and patriarchy are synonymous. You can have hierarchies that aren't inherently oppressive (think mother child relationships), and you can have cultures that are a mix of things eg it's not the dichotomy of the evil patriarchy and the utopian non-patriarchies.

I have to chide you slightly for blaming white, wealthy men. I can think of few non-wealthy societies in which black men treat their menstruating womenfolk as unclean.

>>
So it may be that the human species simply has a *tendency* towards patriarchy.
<<

But where's the evidence for that?

I do tend to agree that there is a connection between patriarchy in the West and technological development. But 5,000 years is a blip really when you consider how long humans have been here, especially if you are comparing us to simians in an evolutionary sense


I do agree with the idea of exuberant variation too. Obviously patriarchy is one variation. I'm just challenging the idea that it's what's always been, and that it's the norm.

>>I have to chide you slightly for blaming white, wealthy men. I can think of few non-wealthy societies in which black men treat their menstruating womenfolk as unclean.<<

You've missed my point Ed. What I'm saying is that our ideas in the West about menstruation influenced our scholars when they went and studied native cultures. That's a bias and it wasn't acknowledged. Even now it's hard to get people in the West to understand that for many women in the world, bleeding has been a good thing. And those anthropologists have gotten so much of that wrong when it comes to native women and the cultures they live in.

So I'm not saying that white, wealthy men are the only ones, I'm saying that those anthropologists were white, wealth and male and those three things affected their thinking.


I'd be interested to know which cultures you are referring to though

Thank you kea. When the old bonobo starts pounding a stick
against his log and the fanatic young xanatic starts hopping
up and down and beating his chest I find myself more inclined
to go peel a banana than try to tell them anything. They aren't
really listening, just looking for openings. Silly monkeys!
peace
~jwf~

I'm just gonna say your analysis of whirled-wide Mary worship is
spot on. It's a difficult case to argue in our modern western
whirled where we are supposed to see her merely as a vessel, a
conveyance for god's great plan, and now just a bit of 'history'
on a pedestal as reward for her labour.

>>
So it may be that the human species simply has a *tendency* towards patriarchy.
<<

>>But where's the evidence for that?


Well I guess it's in the sheer dominance of patriarchy.

Unless you're suggesting - which I'm sure you wouldn't - that there's no such tendency in the natural human state but that modern society is in an unnatural state.

Still - tendency doesn't imply inevitability. There's a tendency for humans to catch all sorts of diseases. This is A Bad Thing. We can do something about it.

>>When the old bonobo starts pounding a stick
against his log

Oi, Squiggles! Don't you recognise a Devil's Avocado when you see one?

It's just a device to get kea to educate me.

But back to Modesty.

Is there a connection between modesty and patriarchy? Answers on a postcard.

Meantime - I'm off to bed and dreams of a female-dominated society in which everyone runs around naked. N'night.

>> Devil's Avocado <<

Oh I know that. But it encourages the younger chimps, gets them all excited. And some of them aren't even housebroken and their so cocky they refuse to groom their elders. You're just reinforcing their impudence. Bad monkey!


~jwf~

their=they're

Bad monkeys should be spanked.

I was wondering if I should just start posting book recommendations


Speaking of which, I learnt about the significance of the Madonna from reading China Galland's book on the Black Madonna. That woke me up alot about women's experiences of Catholicism and that they didn't necessarily agree with the Pope. After that it was easy to see the love of the female that exists in those cultures (alongside some hefty misogyny) whenever I came across it, and how much *women* have maintained that. If you want to look at natural tendencies that is a pretty good example of how necessary female centred culture is, given that it's survived so strongly in one of the most woman hating cultures of all time.

>> Unless you're suggesting - which I'm sure you wouldn't - that there's no such tendency in the natural human state but that modern society is in an unnatural state. <<

Oh but I was suggesting that.

In the aftermath of Whatever-the-Flood-was, most societies had been
decimated (and I mean that in the modern sense of wiped out not the Roman discipline percentage).

Mankind (yes both kinds, M&F) was reduced to primitive scavenging in a ruined landscape under dark cold skies. The strongest and meanest survived. They enslaved the weak they didn't kill for sport. They formed gangs, roaming packs, a regression of tens of thousands of years to a very primitive social order when any order was possible at all.

In a whirled not unlike the post-nuclear apocalypse visions we get in modern sci-fi horror tales, women were no longer the guides, the growers, the visionaries, the healers. Their tools, customs, rituals and knowledge were lost. The females who survived were enslaved and subjugated in the militaristic male-dominated societies that emerged in the centuries after the catastrophe.

And because by then, the priestesses, the goddesses and women in general had been blamed for the disaster and Eve was painted as the partner of the devil and the snake, we have trotted merrily along to a military tattoo and lost touch with reality.

A male dominated militaristic culture is an abomination. But it has evolved over 5000 years and now it is about to crumble under the unsustainable weight of its own delusions. Have you counted your sperm lately? It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.


~jwf~

It´s posts like that which make you want Stanley back.