That's a pretty glib statement at first and sounds a bit like a joke. It is a joke, sort of , but that doesn't mean I don't think it's true. I didn't have enough space in the Facebook comments box to qualify my statement properly, so that's what this essay is about. I'm thinking of adding pictures too. (Why not - I like pictures!)
Just as an aside - does anybody else find Facebook to be the world's most amazing consumer of time? I'm beginning to think it may be evil.
Boys and Girls, Chimps and Bonobos
Have you ever noticed the different ways very young children play. At a really young age (crawling into toddling) they tend to play individual games next to each other, but as they learn to communicate boys and girls start to fall into different styles of playing. Boys become competitive and girls become co-operative.
This is an appalling generalisation because on an individual level it doesn't actually work, but the subject is so big I've got to use averages. I'm assuming - and with good reason - that my readers have the intelligence to see the difference between, for instance, "male" and "a boy".
So why should this be? The nature/nurture debate rages on; personally I think it's a little bit of both. The fact remains, though, that by the time they start infant school (3-4) girls play together and boys play against each other.
Let's apply this to our own societies which have been highly patriarchal in character across a vast history of thousands of years. Obviously competition becomes the norm and violence, which could be considered the ultimate form of competition, is widespread.
We could wonder how much different our societies would be if we'd been matriarchal from the start. Actually, we don't have to wonder because we've got a perfect comparative example right in front of us: chimps and bonobos.
I'm assuming that everyone knows what a chimpanzee is. Well, a bonobo - which is endangered and only lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo - is a smaller, slimmer species of chimp with longer legs, more individualistic facial features and a greater tendency to stand upright. Physically they're very similar. Socially they could hardly be more different.Chimp society is male-dominated and competitive. Extreme violence to males outside the group is normal and violence as a conflict-resolution is common within the group. Bonobos are female-dominated, co-operative and egalitarian as well as very family oriented. They also have conflicts but deal with them in a completely different way: they have sex.
Bonobos have sex for any and every reason they, or we, can think of. They use sex as a greeting, as reconciliation, as conflict-resolution and tension-relief and, frankly, because it's fun. They don't discriminate in terms of age or gender, group sex is normal and permanent pairings are non-existent. You can usually spot a female bonobo by the huge, swollen vulva.
An example (which I think I'm plagiarising from Rev. Ivan Stang) would give a good demonstration of the differences between chimp and bonobo societies:
Imagine a small tribe of chimpanzees at rest. Now throw a large bunch of bananas into their midst. Immediately there's tension. The browbeaten females cower; the braver males make a grab for them. The dominant male beats the daylights out of everyone else until they give in and the bananas are all his. He eats what he wants, leaving the rest to the others to fight over. The females are lucky if they get the skins.
Okay - Imagine a small tribe of bonobos at rest. Now throw a large bunch of bananas into their midst. Immediately there's tension. Suddenly everyone turns to their nearest neighbour(s) and start having frantic, orgasmic sex. In a little while everyone feels much better at which point the dominant female takes all the bananas and shares them out evenly amongst the tribe. It seems that if violence is uncivilised then sex must be the world's greatest civilizer.
The chimps probably developed violent competition due to a lack of resources, the bonobos never needed to. They have all they need and more. Sounds idyllic doesn't it? It sort of is.
Human Bonobos
I'm going to state right now that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the existence of matriarchal human societies in our distant past. This doesn't actually mean that they didn't exist (and I believe they probably did), just that we can't prove it. So, I'm going to postulate one.
Imagine living in a place where all your immediate needs are completely taken care of and always have been. There is no need to compete for resources so competitiveness in society is unnecessary. Female-domination would be highly likely. Co-operation and leisure are, therefore, the norms and what could be more co-operative and leisure-based than sex? Lots and lots of sex.
Frankly, such societies would be rare. Should a highly competitive tribe from a neighbouring, but less well-resourced land decide they want all the food, then it's goodbye to our feminist utopia. But they wouldn't be completely forgotten. They would live on in memory and folklore.
They are certainly remembered in the ancient Greek and Celtic legends of the Fortunate Isles away to the West. Tir na nÓg and Tir na mBan in Celtic mythology are perfect examples. These are places where there is no hunger or thirst, where all are healthy and need not struggle, where sex has no shame attached and which are ruled by a Queen.
Patriarchal Religion
The supreme sexual power of women was still recognised (albeit in a somewhat lessened form) in the Middle East in the shape of the Temple Prostitute. This carried on right up to the 4th Century AD and was a form of worship for Astarte (Ishtar). The word "prostitute" has connotations nowadays which cannot be applied to the Qedeshah (local Semitic word). She was a sacred female, a minor queen in her own right and not the servant of the men who came to her. She was a servant of her Goddess.
Patriarchal Judaism didn't like it at all. In order to hold position and gain strength in a world quite hostile to its harsh and ascetic ways the Hebrews had to be competitive, they had to fight - like men!
The suppression of women is Patriarchy's most successful policy when it comes to gaining political power. The suppression of women is also the suppression of sex - remember that woman's sex-drive is far more powerful than a man's - and the suppression of sex leads to an immense build-up of energy. Nothing has suppressed sex like Patriarchal Monotheism.
The human sex-drive is incredibly powerful - it's next on the list immediately after food, warmth, shelter. When suppressed that energy has to go somewhere and a skillful propagandist can sublimate and redirect it in anyway he chooses. Fundamentalist Islam (which treats women slightly worse than cattle) is particularly good at this nowadays.
Back to the Present
So that's the history - but how does it apply to the present day?
Well, we're in a kind of flux position. The position of women in modern Western society has improved immensely in recent years, although true equality is still a long way off. Most of us also have all our immediate needs pretty much sorted and secure. A franker and more accepting attitude to sexuality has also become more prominent, although nowhere near enough.
On the other hand we have several thousand years of ingrained Monotheistic history and cultural propaganda which isn't going to go away.
Even though it's no longer necessary for survival, competition is still encouraged and lauded in ordinary society and on the sports field. Violence is less common than it was, but still prominent.
What we need to do now - and in many ways it's just following a trend that's already begun - is to promote two things: Firstly, the feminine (anarchist) virtues of mutual trust and co-operation and secondly sex - lots and lots (of lots of different types) of sex.
Taoist Bonking
According to the ancient Taoist sages in China, the teachers of wisdom are female. The Tao is female, and in sexual (ie. civilised) terms women are superior to men. The sooner both men and women realise this, the better. Sex needs to be learned and taught and practised a lot and, contrary to our society's norms, the teachers need to be women. This doesn't preclude homosexuality because in a truly civilised society all forms of consensual sex become normal - just like the bonobos.
There are violent people in our society, mostly poor and uneducated young men. There are less than the papers would have us believe, but they do exist. They are brought up to be competitive, suspicious of sex and fearful of difference, just like the boys who killed Michael Causer in Liverpool recently. Had they been brought up in a feminised society, would they have considered a gay person as a threat, or a target? Or would they be too busy with their own sexual experiments to want to go hurting anybody?
It's a huge subject and I've waffled for long enough, so here's a little question to finish:
You and you belovèd(s) have just had a fantastic, multi-orgasmic session - do you really want to listen to somebody telling you to get up and fight? No? Neither would I.
Love,
Seán
9 comments:
Hehe, your getting more Dionysian with each post lol!
Well, do I agree or disagree...I would have to say disagree generally. As great an idea as it sounds, it would always fall the way of communism - it requires the impossible, perfect consensus. Unless your neighbours, the next country over and those on the other side of the world all agreed to follow this same lifestyle then you would all be dead within the year more than likely.
Its a very difficult topic for me to talk on really without coming across as some staunch reserved catholic. Do I like sex, absolutely - but I think it is vastly blown out of proportion by most people, simply because the process of sex, the acquisition of sex and subsequent aftermath of sex forces most peoples minds into a certain state which makes them, albeit temporarily - useless. It is such a dominating principle in peoples lives today I find it almost annoying "watching" peoples pursuit of it.
The idulgent societies of the past only afforded the educated elite the priveledge of such freedom and sexual indulgence mostly because a society cannot function any other way. Using the bonobo as an example - I have read of those before and I have also read that a large factor in their dwindling numbers is that there lifestyles, although seemingly utopian, lead to utter laziness and subsequent diminishing numbers due to lack of competitiveness.
De Waal has warned of the danger of romanticizing Bonobos: "All animals are competitive by nature and cooperative only under specific circumstances" as well as writing that "When first writing about their behavior, I spoke of 'sex for peace' precisely because bonobos had plenty of conflicts. There would obviously be no need for peacemaking if they lived in perfect harmony".
I do agree that people need more sex and sex needs to be something more "sacred" in the sense of treating it as an act and not a process. Sex though, is also one hell of a timebomb, for many waiting to go off. People need to learn how to live without sex to help bring about a more peaceful society for it is the lack of it which often is the cause of the problem which I suppose is what you are getting at - it just the solution which I dont think would work.
As a side note - when do I get a peek at this book then eh?!
The "uselessness" of people after sex is pretty much the point. They don't want to fight,they're less aggressive, more relaxed. That's what afterglow is for.
You're right that in an aggressive world, the weak and mild are overtaken by the strong and violent, but it's very much an ideal state. It requires a position where all your needs are met by your immediate environment. When I postulated a Matriarchal society of the past, I was talking about just that - an idealized state in the far distant past. They probably did exist, but they were very rare and soon destroyed by more aggressive neighbours.
My point overall is that we can't live like the bonobos, (who have conflict, but not violence - read the bit about conflict-resolution again) but we can become a lot closer and an improved attitude to sex and to women's roles in sex will help. The reason it's such a dominating force in people's lives is because we're already heading that way. Sex is becoming less supressed and sublimated - which to my mind is a good thing.
Tantra teaches us that sex is the way to the gods - in other words the civilizing influence in human life. It raises us up to the greatest of spiritual heights.
It isn't the lack of sex which causes young men to be violent animals - it's the unenlightened attitude to it and to women/the feminine which means that for them to be feminised and more sexual would be a "bad" thing. Thus they become more macho - competitive, aggressive and violent.
Additional after a little extra thought:
I disagree that the bonobo is endangered (even partly) because of its lifestyle. It has been living that way for several million years - if it was a bad evolutionary step we wouldn't have any bonobos at all.
The truth is that ALL the great apes are endangered, not just the bonobo, and that the primary cause is the rise of humanity. Apes are very habitat-dependent and any tribe tends to be limited to a relatively small area (because apes don't swim!). Consequently, it's the destruction of their habitat due to the encroachment of humans through increasing population, farming and Euro-American-Japanese greed for pointless crap (palm oil and diamonds!)that's killing them all off.
On a more positive note, I genuinely believe that it's the qualities of the bonobo - egalitarian co-operation and mutual trust - that led to the success of early hominids and the very beginnings of human civilisation via farming communities. Note also that egalitarian societies tend towards a very relaxed attitude to sex, as the Western Missionaries have often found to their surprise.
Macho competitiveness can work to establish leadership within a tribe, but tends to lead to the rise of the individual rather than the group. That individual human in the wild jungle outside his group is, frankly, fucked. No pun intended!
Humans (and bonobos) have no natural evolutionary advantages for survival as a solo creature. We're not fast or strong, we're not well camouflaged, we don't have big teeth or claws. What we do have are incredible communication skills, inventive adaptability and each other. Without those feminine qualities of co-operation (and socialisation in the tribe via sex) humans wouldn't have got as far as we did.
Following that to its logical conclusion I also believe that when the apocalypse comes it's the human beings who can adapt to those qualities of co-operation, mutual trust and co-dependence on the "tribe" that will survive.
Funnily enough, I've just described an anarchist collective. There's a surprise!
A very thought-provoking exchange.
Our culture has tended to take all-or-nothing positions, whereas reality is always made up of various shades of grey.
A few additional thoughts:-
1. Pinker in 'The Blank Slate' does us all a service by reintroducing the idea of a genetic and 'hardwire' inheritance against the vicious behaviourist pretensions of ideologues who believe that environmental management can 'improve' us.
The danger is that some interests will suggest that policy should be centred on a single and fixed hardwire inheritance, instead of on a multiplicity of marginally different inheritances that provide massive opportunities for creative variation within the species.
The latest form of manipulation is the 'nudge' philosophy being imported into the Tory Party. This is based on an over-simplistic interpretation of some very sophisticated theorizing, based on scientific observations, from American neuro-scientists and psychologists.
In fact, the new paternal conservatism (which expresses a fear of a loss of control by persons with neither the auctoritas nor the ability to claim that control) is merely an extension of what has been happening for some time anyway.
Such thinking was embedded in the communitarian thinking of the 'revisionist' Left behind New Labour.
So, this all suggests that policy-makers are going to interfere more rather than less in our freedoms because they have no other solution acceptable both to them and their backers. So, be warned.
2. The bonobo analogy is amusing and useful polemical but humans are species-unique and comparisons from the rest of nature are not very useful in the long run. The complexity of humankind has to leave space for some harsh realities.
The hormone-based differences between men and women in general, between age cohorts and between individuals, and the different hardwiring in brains that creates propensities to, say, an appreciation of the numinous, pragmatism, collectivism or radical individualism, mean that our diferences are dynamic - that is, there is no chance of a single essentialist model of being human permitting us to promote even 'good' or 'nice' visions of the future.
At the end of the day, we are left with a rather simple moral position (anarchic in intent but not actually in outcome) both permitting the free existence on equal terms of all the different hardwired humanities (including the authoritarian, the corporatised and a-sexual) and setting up safeguards, both to ensure that one sort (not only the extreme authoritarian or radical but the predatory individualist) does not dominate or exploit another and to sustain the basic conditions for individual freedom in terms of basic law and order.
This leads me to the sort of anarcho-socialist position that, because it cannot appeal to any majority, has to be highly defensive of liberty. Indeed, it is always on the defensive ...
3. Marx may have introduced us to economic relations as a driver for political, social and cultural change but a 'new Marx', while retaining this thought as a fundamental, might well consider the findings of the new neuro-science (more than the evolutionary biology favoured by free marketeers)
The struggle between different hardwired personalities may be equally important as the struggle between classes or basic animal greed for resources and immediate pleasures.
For example, much of our modern world, which is so upsetting to authoritarians, derives from changes that 'killed God', more specifically Nietzche's characterisation of Judaeo-Christan culture as (probably quite rightly) a collectivist culture of slaves and women.
The collectivist culture moved on into socialist modes in which the 'slaves and women' (in fact, the exploited and those with a tendency to order in alliance) revolted against the claims of their ideologues and took matters into their own hands, while the individualist revolt against constraint brought us to the radical individualism of the market, expressed in extreme terms as Ayn Rand and Aleister Crowley and so on, with order being imposed as an enabler of aspiration against the deadening and conservative claims of 'slaves and women' (not real women, of course, but women who were often reasonably persuaded that men-ness in culture was exploitative).
Somehow, the yin and yang of these tendencies need to be brought into alignment. There should be no slaves or even women (in the Nietzchean sense).
In the case of women, social and sexual liberation (which includes the right to have no sex at all) removes the need for a culture of collectivism built around sexual oppression but may not remove the need for a culture of collective liberation.
The point is that all economic, culture and power struggles make use of particular hardwired personality profiles to 'make it happen'.
The 'free' soft mind [yin] is always disadvantaged by its inability to organise (an attribute of hard 'yang' minds) and (in the end) is forced to work under cover of strong hardwired leaderships that guarantee minimal freedoms to survive.
Hence that dreadful radical libertarian tendency to prefer a distant imperial authority to any messy communalism which generally contains the seds of petty communitarian authority and reverts to priests, council officials and imams.
There is also evidence of 'conservative' women seeking male authority to guarantee the maintenance of a sexual culture in their interest against young competition.
In short, I share Sean's view that much more sex (of the right consensual type) would mean a better society and probably less violence and that we should work to liberate taboos that present it as wrong or 'naughty' (in fact, a dreary fetishistic response to community disapproval) within the bounds of health and protection.
But sex is power precisely because it is unevenly distributed (such as the penchant for rich old men to 'buy' beautiful young women and the a-sexual phases often caused by the dogged stress of child-rearing), not risk-free (emotionally as much as physically), requires very high levels of emotional intelligence to handle and teach, and contains within itself the seeds of exploitation and terror.
The exploitation of sex by the relatively wealthy (as in the sex tourist trade or in droit de signeur) requires a solution before the 'golden age' can come. It also requires an extensive and well-funded educational and health system and something close to full employment.
Such 'socialist' measures must be delivered without interference in private lifestyle choices, including contractual sexual services (at least until you can get sex on the NHS).
This is where it becomes a very tall order because the a-sexual, judaeo-christian and authoritarian mind-sets' approval is required to get political consent for the redistribution of the resources required to deliver such goodies.
There are whole classes of person with a material or emotional interest in resisting increased expression of sexuality and they have to be reassured or bought off.
So, for the 'bonking lobby', I see no alternative to struggle and organisation in support of both freedom and bonking - otherwise what has gained will be lost as economic conditions become more difficult and new coalitions emerge to mobilise fear and anxiety.
Sadly, the right to be sybaritic in one's pleasures is going to be very hard work to maintain, which rather defeats the purpose :-)
Hi Sean
An interesting opening salvo! I would like to hear more about the role of the Prostitute-Priestess. I knew of the role of the Priestess in the Hieros Gamos but would like to know how widespread it was. Pretty much all over, no? And mass copulation was all part of certain Pagan festivals. As I think I've suggested elsewhere, the Song of Songs in the Bible is a deeply Tantric text, which suggests the presence of the Prostitute-Priestess in 4 AD Israel is not a fantasy!
A friend of mine once did a play on this subject called DANCES WITHIN WALLS set in India. It was about how the erotic dance of the Priestess was gradually pushed out of Indian Temple Worship and preserved by Prostitutes ever since. Its a chapter in Indian culture which is glossed over. Very interesting.
I have one spanner to throw into the argument though. I am all for more sex, greater sexual equality and more openness about it but... I am not sure its the answer to all our problems, or that even monotheism is to blame. Eastern cultures like India which are Polytheistic or China and Japan which are pantheistic (Taoist), animist (Shinto) or atheistic (Buddhism, sort of) have not proven to be much less violent than we in the West. Nor, alas, is there much evidence that pre-Christian or Pagan cultures didn't have their fair share of wars, conflicts or warrior ethics. The Greeks and Romans were very into the erotic arts, but they were not famous for not doing anything afterwards, and judging by the scope and history of their Imperial efforts a great deal of shagging (of all genders!) doesn't seem to have made them any the more 'useless'.
So... where do we go from here?
I think its certainly true that the denial of the body and the equation of sex with Sin (thank you for that, St Augustine, most helpful) makes for a tense, uptight, deeply hypocritical society in which women suffer. We in the West are still emerging from centuries of suppression. But there is equally a fairly tragic link between violence and sex, as well as a separation between them. You just have to look at the level of rape and sexual violence that has gone with warfare down the centuries even in our own time. These are primal energies. Easily exploited, hard to control if unleashed in the wrong way.
So I'm not sure its Monotheism that is the problem, more our own lack of understanding of ourselves, our sexuality and each other. I sometimes wish that if men helped women to be a little more like men and women helped men be a little more like women - ie if we got to KNOW each other, what we each wanted and who we all were - we might get somewhere useful a little quicker. The removal of any sign of a Goddess from our culture (except for a Virgin) hasn't helped. But we have gone from a Matriarchal Goddess-worshipping period when men were secondary to a Patriarchal God-worshipping period where women have been secondary. Maybe what we need is a little polarity, not a Mother or a Father but the Lovers, whereby we can all be involved equally and sexual union is celebrated as part of that...
Hmmmm......
BTW are you aware of the theory from some quarters that the so-called 'Johannine' texts of the New Testament (ie the First Epistle & Gospel of John) are written by a woman? Or rather, that the tradition/take on Christ is derived from women followers of Christ, possibly Mary Magdelene?
Without going all Dan Brown, the thesis is that in the plethora of 'takes' on Christ which emerged after his death one was based on the teachings of Mary Magdelene and/or some of the other women associated with Christ in the Gospels (and there are a good number of them - Susannah, Johanna, Veronica, Mary and Martha of Bethany etc etc). John's Gospel was not only the last to be included in the 'Canon' but also was not attributed to the Disciple John until relatively late.
The theory goes that, as a record of Mary Magdelene's (I prefer to call her Mary of Magdala to get away from the daft associations attached to the Magdelene by Christians and Dan Brownians alike) more mystical/intimate view of Christ, it was immensely popular among early Christians and so could not be suppressed. But equally it could not be allowed to be attributed to a woman, and particularly not Mary of Magdala, as that would upset the building patriarchal structure the spirituality was taking. So the figure of the Beloved Disciple was created to pull away from Mary's preeminent position in the story as the true understander of Christ.
The Beloved Disciple first gets mentioned in the Last Supper, or rather someone is identified as 'the Disciple that Jesus loved'. From then onwards, whenever Mary Magdelene does something key - like stay at the foot of the Cross when all the men have gone or discover the empty tomb of Christ, someone called the Beloved Disciple appears miraculously and rather strangely beside her. In both places the syntax is completely bizarre and its pretty clear that a rather clumsy 'cut and paste' job is being done.
As we know from the Gospels of Philip and Mary Magdelene as well as the epic (and fairly heavy going) Pistis Sophia, Mary is identified as the chief Apostle of Christ, a fact that Peter gets very cheesed off about (only in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter are they friends). If the Beloved Disciple IS Mary then the final passages of John's Gospel, in which Peter complains about said Disciple following behind, makes absolute sense.
The thinking here is that, just as the Gospel of Thomas was not LITERALLY written by Thomas but is a probably a record of sayings passed down by him, so John's Gospel is a record of the teachings of Mary's Ecclesia (I hesitate to say 'Church'). In esoteric Tradition, the Hidden Church of Mary Magdelene is the Church to come. In this reasoning, the reference to the Seven Devils cast out by Christ refers to her Intiation to the Seventh Level of the Mysteries. The male Apostles, whose mission is to spread the exoteric message of Christ, were only Initiated to the Sixth Level. Thus Mary's Way is the hidden or Inner School of the teachings of Christ. Interestingly the Cathars held that the soul needed to undergo seven key incarnations before it could reach the state of spiritual purity which meant it could achieve 'Perfection' through the Holy Spirit and so find release from the cycle of Incarnations. And as we know, the Cathars have, spuriously or not, been linked in some way to Mary of Magdala. Indeed, the region they flourished in, the Languedoc, was said to have been where she landed to bring the Word, just as Joseph of Arimathea is said to have come to these isles, where he settled in Glastonbury...
Given the fact that Seven is the number of the Divine Feminine, the Sophia, the Virgin, of Athena, the Sabbath Bride etc this makes perfect sense. Given that the Johannine texts are the most mystical of the New Testament Scriptures and have always appealed more to the visionaries of Christianity, including the great Beguine Mystics with their Love Mysticism, their Divine Feminine nature, as a complement to the Divine Masculine of Christ, also makes sense. It is John's work, for example, which stresses the place of Love more than any other NT writings. Divine Union with God through Christ is also the essence of John's message as well. As if to reinforce this, take a look at the verbal echoes in John when Mary encounters the empty Tomb and the Risen Christ and the Song of Songs. Someone is making deliberate reference to that great Tantric poem about the Divine Marriage. In all truth, perhaps we should be calling the Gospel of John the Gospel of Mary Magdelene.
Messianic hopes from the Book of Jeremiah onwards talk about what is hidden being revealed, the Shekinah made manifest, 'a woman compassing a man'. If Mary's Church is 'Hidden', then it is untainted by the corruptions of the temporal Church. It is the source of the Initiations of Inner Christianity and the Mystics. And it is yet to be revealed.
But, imagine what would happen if we DID view John's writings in this way? It would transform everything...
Have a go. Take up the Epistle, for instance, and read it with the voice of a woman. See what having that perspective has on it. You will find something very interesting!
PS Another interesting element here is that the name Mary, or Miriam to use its Hebrew derivative, is linked to the word for the 'Bitter Waters of Marah', mentioned in the book of Exodus. In this story, which is told after the Dance of Miriam, sister of Moses, after the destruction of Pharoah's armies at the Dead Sea, the Israelites come across an oasis of 'Bitter Water' known as Marah. God tells them to place a 'tree' in the waters and they become purified and drinkable.
In Kabbalistic tradition, these Bitter Waters are associated with the Feminine Waters of Binah (Understanding), the highest of the feminine Sephiroth (also known as Imma, or the Great Mother). They are also said to give Prophetic powers to the drinker.
Thus in terms of myth, all the Maries of the Bible, Miriam sister of Moses, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdelene and Mary of Bethany (who John identifies as being the Woman With The Alabaster Jar) are etymologically linked to Marah and, by extension, Binah...
As Luke's Gospel says:
'Wisdom is justified of all her children..."
And as if I haven't already said enough, an interesting byproduct of this transgendering of Mary into John (if that IS what happened) has been the use of the relationship between Christ and the Beloved Disciple in terms of homosexuality.
Much as with Jonathan and David in the Old Testament, the relationship between JC and John the Beloved has been used to defend homosexuality. No less august a personage as King James 1st compared his relationship with a particular male courtier as being like that of Christ and the Disciple. So, just as David's says of Jonathan:
"thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women"
Christ's love for John becomes an image of the beauty of male-male love...
So in terms of a more inclusive Christianity, whichever way you take it (as it were), this Gospel can be seen to be potentially very forward looking!
:-)
To make a full reply of any kind to these last few comments is going to be impossible here, so I'm going to go away and have a think about things using the discussion points as topics for inspiration.
Meanwhile, there are a couple of short points I'd like to address:
Tim:
I think I agree with pretty much everything you've said, except that (embarrassingly) I don't fully understand it all. We do appear to be coming from different angles, though, in that I believe in a Basic Income structure rather than Full Employment.
I'm not even going to attempt to justify that position in a socio-economic way because I can't. I'll leave that to the experts in the same way that I'd leave a heart bypass to a surgeon. In the future I may write about the benefits of being one of Thatcher's teenagers and the advantages of long periods of unemployment but that's for another time.
Meanwhile, a (glib?) little economic consideration: Mrs Thatcher has claimed the right to a state funeral which would cost £3 million, and seems to think this acceptable. At present prices, £3 million will provide a comfortable (not thoroughly luxurious but definitely comfortable) living for a family of, say, four for 150 years! There's obviously an awful lot of money floating around ready to be wasted.
Pegasus:
I think male-dominant competitiveness leads to patriarchy and patriarchy leads eventually to montheism. Monotheism isn't really the cause of violence and sexual repression as much as it is a symptom which keeps itself sustained by perpetuating directed violence and sexual repression. But as the hidden Shekinah proves, Goddesses just won't go away.
Pagan cultures have been as guilty of violence as any others, but they have been the competitive male-dominated ones, unlike the mythical Shangri-Las of the Fortunate Isles and Tir na mBan.
Please don't confuse rape with a sexual act. Rape is an act of violence as much as stabbing somebody - more so in fact - but it's disguised as sex.
Similarly BDSM may appear quite viloent, but it's not. It's sex, dressed up as violence. I think the difference can be defined as imposing one's will one someone else.
I've not studied Christian mysticism in any more than a surface way, so I didn't know the theories about the Gospel of John. Thanks for that, it's definitely worth looking at.
Funnily enough, when I went through a period of Christianity at the age of 15 (many Pagans do this, until they find the right way for them) the Gospel of John is the only one I had any real feeling for. I found the rest dry and without real depth.
I'm assuming you know that the early Christian churches (long before Constantine) were egalitarian and pro-feminist because they were based on an early style of Orpheus worship, which was a direct descendant of Dionysian rites (particularly including the taking of communion).
Dionysos learned the rites from his granny, Rhea, in Phrygia - which makes them earth-goddess worship.
In other words Christianity can be seen as a development (or corruption) of primal Earth-Mother worship.
It's likely that Paul of Tarsus deliberately altered the teachings of Jesus (which weren't written yet) to appeal to the Pagans he was trying to convert. Jesus may have been a Dionysian/Orphic/Pythagorean mystic, but he could equally have been a Jewish reactionary. We don't know. It's possible, then, that the mysticism of John is an attempt to get around the orthodox view expected by Paul and his followers.
This might be another blog - Jesus was a Pagan!
Love,
Seán
Thanks, Sean. Interesting stuff.
As you say, there's very little scope to go into detail here so I'll confine myself to three things:
1) Re Rape. Don't get me wrong. In my view rape is a heinous crime and, indeed, the only crime which is not justified under ANY circumstances. I have several female friends who have suffered under this and the after effects are many and far reaching. All I was trying to flag up was the enormous, multifarious nature of sexuality. Its what makes it such a potent force. I can't think of anything else like it we humans can do. It can drive people to the heights of beauty and the depths of obsession. I agree with you in what the Tantrics say - apart from being a basically delightful thing to do it also has the potential to take us to the uttermost heights. Kabbalah and Gnostic Christianity agree on this too... All I was trying to suggest was its not as simple as 'sex is great'. Its complicated. And while its right to celebrate it I'm not sure its right to sentimentalise it.
Mind you, rationalising about sex is a contradiction in terms! That's the problem! Its there to be enjoyed, not talked about or (I think we can all agree on this!) legislated about! Lol!
2) Yes, I am aware of the egalitarian nature of early Christianity and its essential origin as a fusion of Pagan and Judaic Mysteries - Zoroastrian, Eleusinian, Platonic, Egyptian, Orphic, Mithraic, Essenicetc etc. To me, if we only allowed it to be this it would let a vast amount of air and space into it. It would become, as Simone Weill put it, Catholic in nature and not only in name. The significant spin it put on all these earlier traditins was its anti-elitism (it was available to all as opposed to Royal Families and Priesthoods) and its utter humanism (Christ embodied the Divinity within Man like nothing before, at least in the West). It also, in the idea of Eternal Life, opened the Western Consciousness up to an entirely new possibility as to what it could be. This is why, ultimately, I don't think that it was a load of crap and a massive blunder for the human race for the last 2000 years. There is a big difference between Christianity as it became and Christianity as it was, and an even bigger difference between that and the sayings of Christ... Pretty quickly, once it had become established as the religion of Rome it was shorn of its revolutionary power and broken in to a male-dominated hierarchy. The rest, as they say, is history - but not 100& BAD history. When I talk of Christianity I mean all its different manifestations and certainly not its lacerated and lacerating incarnation now. Also, I am talking as an outsider. As someone brought up by secular parents, albeit ones brought up as Jewish and Christian respectively, I never went through a Christian or a Jewish upbringing or phase, so I approach the Scriptures for what I can see. Perhaps this gives me a different perspective. To me, the Old and New Testament are to be read as one reads the Tao Te Ching or the Bagavad Gita or the Greek Myths - for what they reveal about the Spirit, Soul and Body without intermediaries. I'm aware this keeps people guessing, but I mean no harm!
I wouldn't say that Christ was a Earth Mother Worshipper (far too many references to the Father for that!). I think he was something more subtle. Until Christianity, as you say, we had Matriarchal religions or religions with equal parts Male and Female in terms of Gods. From having read the canonical, Apocryphal and Gnostic writings, I would say Christ was after something else - a modification of the balance between the Earth Mother and Sky Father Mysteries. Far too complicated to go into here but I think the Earth Mother Mysteries were taken as read in Christ's time. What was needed was the equal connection to the Sky Father to give us access to the Higher Ego. The Gospels are actually studded with Goddess references - Water, the Tomb, the Holy Spirit, Rebirth, the Woman With The Alabaster Jar, the Samaritan Woman by the Well etc etc - but they are Concealed, the Hidden Sophia of Christ (which is why I left that quote from Luke at the bottom of one of my posts). The Goddess is actually integral to the Christ story, but its not overt. Alas, as the Gospels show with the Apostles endless talent for missing the point, when something is Concealed, even though it IS the whole point, it tends to get overlooked. The history of Christianity is the history of this happening on a mass scale for two thousand years.
No time to go into to here but I DO hope to go into it in detail on my Blog, so watch this space!
3) Monotheism is not, I maintain, a bad thing per se. Monotheism was breaking out before Christianity even beyond Israel - in Persia and in Greece (cf Plato). Creative Monotheism is INCLUSIVE, it embodies the idea of the Many in the One, as Plato puts it. A Monotheism which is INCLUSIVE understands the multiplicity of everything within an underlying Unity. Perhaps the purest expression of this is in the Tao, but you also find it in Atum/Ra, Brahman, the Ain Sof of Kabbalah, in Sufism and the Deus Abscondus of Orthodox Christianity, Franciscan Spirituality etc etc. This God tends to be panentheistic - ie immanent and transcendent - and it tends to embrace masculinity and femininity (the 'imma'-nent element tends to be feminine, the transcendent element tends to masculine). Originally, the whole idea of the Holy Trinity was supposed to embody this, with the Holy Spirit being the Feminine (it is a Dove, for God's sake!), or at least Masculine/Feminine aspect of God which is everywhere. Alas, the Holy Spirit has been downplayed in favour of the masculine and anthropomorphic Father and Son, but there is a great deal of evidence that the Holy Spirit is, as Jung pointed out, the WHOLE POINT of the Christian Mystery, being the energy which is supposed to be released into us all which will transform us into Christs and set us free. But since the Churches have tended to want to to dominate and control, the releasing of the Holy Spirit has been played down (its not insignificant that EVERY Medieval Heresy which clashed with them prioritised the Holy Spirit and its availability to everyone) and, since they have also tended to be male dominated, the Holy Spirit has been 'masculinised' and turned into 'a person' rather than an energy...
So Christianity was, once again, shorn of its real radical power...
What we have been left with is an EXCLUSIVE Monotheism which has been dualistic with its separation of male and female, believer and non-believer, spirit and body, good and evil etc etc. This has been the source of all the woe we are reacting to here... As Harayat Khan said"
"God made man and then man made good and evil."
But, I maintain, Monotheism which is INCLUSIVE, something more like the Kabbalistic notion of God, is not a bad thing. It should draw us together... As an image of the Higher Ego, it moves us towards the Single-Pointed Thought of Buddhism and teaches us that we are ALL ONE.
Its flip side, which is the restrictive, EXCLUSIVE Monotheism you are speaking against, is the opposite, It creates division, repression, dualism and impossible tension...
And now I will shut up... Thanks for giving me the space to talk!
The Blog's great, BTW. & I love the fact that you can't get on it without having to give consent because of BLOGGERS' fear of sex and violence! What better illustration could there be for the point you are making?
Lol!
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