Adelphiasophism
Motherhood and the Fundamental Sex: Veneration of Women
Abstract
Perhaps one can say that the male is interested in the quantity of his offspring whereas the female is interested in quality. If so, humans have adopted a female strategy of reproduction.
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Motherhood
The church boasts a particular reverence for women, particularly for motherhood, because Christians adore the image of Mary and her child. Why then do not the priests of the Roman church marry and offer motherhood to women who might appreciate their Christian ways? They argue that they are married to the church, to Christ, and to marry a woman as well would distract them from their holy work. Taking a wife would lower their sacred office.
In truth, the reason is that the church would have to extort even more from their congregations to keep the families of the priests out of destitution, or bishops and cardinals would have to give up some of their palaces. Moreover, priests with wives and children might have reason to question some of the nonsense put out by the church in the name of religion.
The Catholics who cross themselves before the sculpted Madonna, or plaster statue of the mother and child, are not doing so out of reverence for motherhood but because Mary is the mythical mother of God, a valuable source of coinage. Who could believe a plaster Goddess had any powers? Yet the ignorant faithful do.
The Virgin Mary is not a goddess that sprang fully formed from a seashell. She is a Goddess who was reborn slowly and reluctantly over almost two thousand years from the ashes of the Great Mother, in response to popular demand. This growth of the Christian divine mother can be clearly seen in history, the work of patriarchs besotted by male domination but lacking even in their own principles, obliged to yield fractionally to an age old impulse.
The encouragement given to motherhood by the Roman church is simply the encouragement to procreate to provide more hands to fill the platters of the future. Catholic mothers have a duty to increase church membership in the next generation. The holy bachelors of the church have dishonoured motherhood by making it into a production line for tomorrow’s congregations.
Those who sincerely revere motherhood are those who love and attentively care for their own mother, and their own family, not those who pray before the plaster figure of “The Virgin” for good luck in next week’s lottery.
The Fundamental Sex and Immortality
The female sex, if it is defined as the one that gives birth to the next generation, is the fundamental sex. In asexual reproduction, there is only one sex and it is female. In animals and plants that normally reproduce sexually, sometimes the female alone can naturally generate or can be artificially induced to. The male cannot, if for no other reason than that it has not the apparatus to do so.
The Judaeo-Christian patriarchal religion could not have this, and had Eve made synthetically from Adam’s rib, a desperate attempt to make males primal contrary to ancient knowledge and the plain facts of biology.
The male cell has to struggle biochemically to be male. The female embryo has two X chromosomes, a failsafe system so that either can take over if the other is defective, but the embryo also lives in a female environment—the female hormones of the mother. This is why the female is the fundamental sex. The embryonic male has to develop in an alien environment showing that maleness is the derived sex. In the male embryo, an X chromosome has become a Y chromosome, making it male, but it still has the female environment of the mother’s hormones. In this situation, it must develop nevertheless as a male, turning the embryonic gonads into testes which must produce enough male hormones to counter the mother’s. Any error will be likely to cause a reversion to the natural female condition.
The fundamental sexual relationship in humanity is mother and son. When species formed sexes the male must have been an altered female. Males are all descended from females—they are naturally sons. They became fathers having no father themselves, having been born of a virgin. The Great Mother must have herself been a virgin because until she had her son there were no males to mate with.
Men have more testosterone than women—though women need it too—and so have more aggression and drive, but a side effect is that it wears them out sooner. Testosterone makes men physically strong in bodily structure, but their immune systems are weaker than women’s. Consequently women live longer than men.
The male sex with its invented god of masculine vengeance, ego, rationality and vanity cannot bear the thought of dying. It is not fair that such a noble, wise and beautiful creature as a man should just die. Men think they are gods and want to be gods. They want immortality and only gods can have it. Yet, they pretend they have invented ways of escaping death in immortality, though the depiction of the Great Goddess Kali with her necklace of severed male heads shows that the illusion of male immortality is really perpetual death. Masculine ambition and pretentiousness forever add to her necklace of male trophies. Man’s insensitivity and selfishness pollutes the earth and the Cosmic Mother but there will be only one outcome. She will be victorious.
Women and the Future Ishtar’s advice to Gilgamesh
In this early poem, which might be up to 5000 years old and reflect the struggle of the matriarchs and the patriarchs, Gilgamesh is discontent with his lot on earth and seeks to be a god. He wants the secret of immortality, the Goddess Ishtar having killed his friend, Enkidu. Gilgamesh has been trying for a long time to find the secret but full of despair he drowns his sorrows in a tavern. The barmaid, Ishtar in disguise, gives the hero in his cups this advice:
Thou wilt not find, O Gilgamesh,
That which thou seek’st. Forego thy quest!
Just take thy fill of meat and beer,
And day and night be of good cheer;
Spoil not a day with thoughts of woe,
But dance and play where e’er ye go.
Then bow thy head, proud Gilgamesh,
And bathe thyself in water fresh,
And wash thyself and don clean clothes,
Thy spouse to take unto thy hose;
Love well the child which takes your hand,
For then, proud man, th’art merely sand.
Gilgamesh ignores it as mankind has always, unable to accept that they cannot be gods, however much they might desire it.
The Goddess a Female Jesus?
The concept of a loving god is absurd because gods are male and interested in might not love, and they use threats and punishment. This leads some attendants of the Goddess to the mistaken belief that only the Goddess, being female, truly and unconditionally loves, and does so irrespective of crimes or disregard by the objects of her love—ourselves.
This Goddess is a martyred, put upon mother of the fireside, peeling the potatoes and putting up with the cheek of her children. She does not anger and we don’t have to earn her love because we are the products of her loins and she loves us all irrespective of what we do.
In this view, all that remains for us is to worship this loving Goddess and get rid of patriarchy, and everything will be harmonious and joyful. The future world of the Goddess will be free of scarcity, aggression and guilt. Proof is that the previous age of matriarchy was the Golden Age which sages and poets have celebrated ever since.
What is there to choose between the patriarchal fantasy of a sentient loving god and the matriarchal fantasy of a sentient loving goddess besides the sex change? What differs in the way either, by faith, can condition a future heaven on earth? If the prehistoric social system was matriarchal and, by modern standards, utopian, how is it to function as well in grossly overcrowded and under-resourced world, compared with the relative abundance at the earlier time?
Some sisters want to re-invent Jesus as a woman. Since matriarchy as a female patriarchy is not our objective, why should the Goddess disguise herself as a female Jesus to give us this? If it helps, Jesus can be seen as properly being the Goddess Wisdom, because he stole her attributes, but then the figure on the cross should be a crucified woman. This is what we are truly doing—crucifying our Goddess! We must learn to value her as divine before she really dies! Jesus can be considered a transitional phase from vengeful patriarch to loving mother, but the old Goddess never did just love. She had her darker side too, so the whole system of thinking that goes with the absurdity of a purely loving deity must be abandoned for a Goddess that we have to love in practice ourselves. The crucified Goddess should remind us of what we do to her when we forget our duty to her!
NeoPagans should neither fall for pseudo-Christian religiosity nor for New Age invective against science. The Goddess is not a female Yehouah with the loving characteristics of the Son. She is not a sentient, transcendental Goddess of unconditional love. It is silly to speak of the will of the Great Mother except metaphorically.
We live in an increasingly cynical world, and if cynical people are not to laugh out loud at us, we must reject old ideals and smash worthless icons. There is not the least shred of evidence that any supernatural being exists, let alone is constantly watching each of us to check whether we are doing right or wrong, or need love and attention. The Goddess is blind to our knee bending and deaf to our prayers and entreaties. She tends her cosmic garden, planting here and pruning there, and if she thinks that we are a pernicious weed, she will have no compunction in pulling us up!
It is not a question of her loving all humans equally, she only loves her overall creation. In making it, she is quite happy, like an oil painter, to paint out something she finds distasteful or ugly. We can only avoid being painted out by being apt and beautiful in her composition. We are failing!
Some ex-Christian attendants of the Goddess continue to think of the Great Mother as a transcendental god like Yehouah. They speak of her allowing us to live outside her to give us room to develop but, in our arrogance, we move too far from her, go astray and take too many wrong paths. Their intentions are worthy but the point is that we are not outside her but within her, developing as she develops.
Living on the skin of a planet looking out at the universe beyond, we are conditioned to think in terms of looking outwards rather than inwards. Her attention is entirely turned inwards, because there is nothing transcendental—nothing outside her. The cosmic garden is the cosmic womb. If we take wrong paths, we damage our environment, the womb of the Goddess.
Children and simple people might need to have an image of a living, caring Goddess, but it must not be taught as if it were true. Assuredly, we can teach our children by telling them fairy tales but later they realise they were not the truth because we tell them so. Tales of a sentient, loving Goddess must fall into that category.
The point about a Goddess religion is that it is a giving belief, not a taking one. We make personal sacrifices to preserve the Goddess in the present day, so that, in the future, our children might receive a clean and pleasant planet.
Matriarchy
The patriarchs imposed male dominance and set back the development of society for thousands of years. Yet, strangely there are more matriarchists who are male than ones that are female. Feminist publications have often made the mistake of precluding the sex with the penis and have folded from inadequate support from our sisters. Males will be part of our matriarchy but will be equals, not superior, to women. Even if it were possible to achieve a matriarchy without male support, it is silly not to have it by rejecting men as they have always rejected women except as objects of sex.
Matriarchy means the Rule of the Mother—the rule of the Great Mother, Nature. The restoration of matriarchy should not be simply the restoration of the matriarchy of pre-history, even supposing we knew what it was. No one pretends that there is nothing to be learnt from the past, but learning means using experience to make the future work. That is exactly what patriarchy has failed to do at its root. Proof is the dismal prospects of the world as it buckles under male exploitation like a battered wife before her tormentor.
The future matriarchy cannot be the image of the patriarchy with sexes reversed. Women are better behaved than men. Women have better personal habits than men. Women are less vicious than men. Women have fewer vices than men. Few men would tolerate in a woman what women tolerate in a man. Men have set these standards and they have devised a God to suit them and justify them. This God only made women as an after thought, as a companion to men. They were to be subordinate to men. They were not allowed to do what men did and were often considered unclean.
Things are changing. Women have asserted themselves more and more strongly over the last century and have wrenched back from men many rights that should have been theirs anyway. The trouble has been that women have wanted to have the rights of men. They have wanted to sow their wild oats like men, to have their liaisons like men, to smoke and drink like men, to be soldiers, entrepreneurs, terrorists and criminals.
Many modern women, often not feminists, seem intent on copying the worst traits of men in the delusion it proves they are equal. Women object to the patronising word "ladies" so pretend to be "laddies" instead. Lorna Frame explains it and coins a better word still when she says that women have been too busy being "ladettes" to notice it is sterile men-apism—the illusion that emancipation of women is mimicking men.
Aggression, smoking, drinking, swearing, loudness, bragging and swaggering, in short, generally being obnoxious does not benefit women or the world at large. A group of women belching and telling dirty jokes in a four-ale bar is a poor sort of liberation. Many men find it an embarrassment in their own sex. Why should it be liberating in women? "Women behaving badly" is the final victory of the patriarchs—women as ersatz men.
Of course, there should be one moral standard for men and women. The divided standard of conduct should be abolished. Both sexes should behave in the same way, but why does it have to be the man’s way? Should the joint standard be the highest or lowest? Should it be the standard for woman or for man? Why cannot men have just as good habits as women? Does it make sense to adopt the coarsest and most vulgar standard for both sexes? Are women sensible to do as men do, rather than insisting that men adopt women ’s behaviour? Women should insist that their standards are the superior ones and should be adopted by all. Shall we have coarse and aggressive women or refined and gentle men? The choice is plain.
Are women to be supreme in the coming matriarchy? Indeed, were women supreme in the matriarchy that preceded this patriarchy? Millennia of patriarchy have deprived society of every contribution that women could have made to social progress except as mothers and skivvies. To reverse the roles in the future might seem just, but is it wise? When society is unequal, there can be no justice.
The point of the future matriarchy is to establish a just society. In it, men and women will interrelate as equals in the way intended by Nature. The purpose of reverence for the Goddess is to get people to revere Nature and work symbiotically with her, not to behave antagonistically to each other and Nature itself, not to burn down forests or fight each other in drunken rages.
Adelphiasophists aim to develop caring female qualities, creative qualities, artistic ones, to preserve beauty not to produce chaos, to help each other not to fight each other, to milk the world not to mine it, and to promote truth and honesty not to mythologise pious lies. After the Restoration has matured, both sexes will be equal and will respect each other for their individual talents. Both men and women will be free.
Equality in the Restoration of Matriarchy has to take into account the doleful qualities of men. History proves that men are not interested in equality and fairness in general. The horrors of history and the quality of evil are the payoff of the patriarchal social order. When fairness leads to outcomes that they do not like, men in suitably powerful positions such as military commanders or leaders of the wealthy classes simply ignore them and impose a new regime approved by them. Since men are unquestionably bigger, stronger and more aggressive than women, justice has to take account of these factors.
The answer is, of course, that women have to be the rulers and men have to be restricted up to a point because of their bad characteristics. Ultimately when female characteristics pervade the political units of the world, as they used to do when the political unit was a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, men will have been conditioned to behave properly and an egalitarian society will automatically prevail.
Meanwhile, men must be given a clear sense of duty, their sacred duty in promoting the welfare of us all in the struggle for the Restoration of Matriarchy. They require an unequivocal code of conduct so that they need never be in doubt of how they should act. They need safe rituals of bonding and safe rights of passage at various critical ages to give them a creative rather than a destructive pride in their male role in a society ruled by women. Unfashionable though it might be to many feminists who see it as patronisation, what is needed is a code of Chivalry to give men a lost sense of honour and respect for women and for Nature
Inheritance
Matrilineal inheritance makes more sense than institutionalising female slavery via marriage to ensure that a man’s son is his own. There can be no doubt about who a child’s mother is, but every doubt about the father unless women are restricted by law to one man. In marriage the male is not just the exploiter and the female the victim. The male is also a loser in this system—males too are victims.
Prehistoric matriarchy seemed to exist when human groups were small enough for everyone to help each other. Burdens of child- rearing were taken by elderly people, in our society left to waste their time in endless pointless holidays, if they have the money, or left to slowly die unwanted and unloved, if they have not. Meanwhile married couples are often almost isolated in the duties of bringing up the children and most of this burden falls on women.
When the pressures of such marriages end in divorce, it is assumed that the men get the best deal. But enquiries show that more men than women regret the divorce. Quite so, they had the easy role, but men also die sooner whether married or divorced. Nuclear marriage has no clear advantages for either party.
The old Chines symbol of Yin-yang has been used by feminists to discuss the separateness of men and women. The proper interpretation of this symbol is not that the sexes are separate, though they plainly are, but that Nature is dual—most of its qualities have two sides, or ends wirh a spectrum of values between. Humans are a part of Nature so we are dual in the same way. We have a multiplicity of aspects which consist of opposites. Though patriarchal teachers might have identified the shapes as pertaining to one sex with its qualities and another sex with is different qualities, the symbol itself cannot be so construed. It is more abstract because Nature, human or otherwise, is not so easily characterised.
Some devotees of the Goddess seem to want the qualities of men and women to equalise in their gynocentric world. Yin-yang will become a uniformly coloured disc because the opposites will have disappeared. Well, whatever we humans might want, we have not yet discovered a secure way of making the Goddess conform. The point is not to make men and women the same but to generate the mutual respect that will allow us to use their different qualities fully. Sincere acceptance of Nature’s diversity in all respects will give us the healthy and wholesome world some matriarchs envision.
Father’s Rights
To control society and particularly to confine women to confinement and motherhood rather than more diverse lives, patriarchs have imposed on us their core idealogies of the Church (God is the Father), the State (we must be Patriotic) and the private enterprise system of economic production (selfishness, greed, aggression embodied in a male dominated system of ownership). If we do not concur that these constitute a veritable heaven on earth we are labelled as atheistic, traitorous, psycho-social deviants, in short, communists! Curious that communism should have been the mode of ownership of the first Christians as described in “Acts of the Apostles” and according to most professors of religion and politics is a secular Christian heresy.
The Fathers’ Rights movement is the latest addition to the corpus of oppressive male ideologies. Fathers’ Rights means the right of fathers to their children, but the right to reject responsibility for them—when they chose! A strange alliance of right and left wing males unite in this movement, suggesting it is not political but a patriarchal alliance of men against women. Left wing men insist that men can "mother" as well as a mother, and right wing men claim that God in heaven proves that every family needs a father! Thus the Fathers’ Rights movement is a blatant attempt of the male to uphold and extend patriarchy.
The "gender-neutral" approach of treating mothers and fathers equally, can never be neutral or equal under patriarchy. In male courtrooms, the male is the judge. Under the patriarchal system, even though it is claimed that women are habitually favoured by getting custody, 70 per cent of the times that a man contests the granting of custody to the woman he will succeed. Justice is the equal treatment of social equals. When people are socially unequal, there is no justice!
Politically Correct Language
Matriarchs should hesitate to adopt eccentric but politically correct vocabulary, free from "phallic" speech "concockted" by the patriarchs. The adoption of eccentric language can only alienate the non-committed, and so must be an error if we have any serious ambition of restoring matriarchy in the world.
The roots of many of our words are surely patriarchal having come to us from the ancient priestly language developed when the patriarchs were worshipping the thunderbolt father in the sky somewhere in central Asia. But those words entered the mouths of the people when secular language was unsophisticated and writing non-existent except as a religious ritual or aid. We cannot replicate the circumstances and really have to be patient.
In any case, while they exist in general use, masculine roots serve as living proof of the depths of patriarchal control. Do we want to fog such clear evidence?
Conviction
Everyone desiring the Restoration will need zeal, need passion, need sacrifice. Adelphiasophists must have conviction, courage and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds and universal scorn.
The route to salvation is matriarchy and Adelphiasophists must be prepared to stand up and say so. The trouble is that few women either believe it or are prepared to stand up. Successful women who could make the impact come to think that patriarchy is not so bad, after all, they made it. Oppressed women still do not have the confidence and many are in thrall to the appeal of the dying and rising god of Christianity.
