Adelphiasophism
Matriarch's Way: Journal of Female Supremacy
Abstract
Review of a magazine about matriarchy, its beliefs, and Nature
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, July 22, 1999
Can Men Ever Win?
This excellent magazine was founded by Shirley Oliveira and is well worth a subscription on merit though everyone should consider that the large publishers are taking over the world and filling it with a uniformity of tripe. Supporting small publishers helps diversity.
The review copy was vol 1 number 2 of 1997 and contained 15 articles and stories ranging in length from 2 pages to 30 pages, together with poems, reviews and a page long editorial by Shirley. In her page, the editor tells us about the Great Goddess Kali who in the cover illustration has conquered Shiva, "the phallic serpent god of masculine intellect, ego, rationality and wisdom". The point is that men can never win. They can pretend that they have invented ways of escaping death in immortality but Kali’s necklace of severed male heads shows that the illusion of male immortality is really perpetual death. Masculine ambition and pretentiousness forever adds 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.
In a plea for women to take the lead in the Restoration of matriarchy, Shirley points out that there are more matriarchists who are male than ones who are female. Feminist publications have often made the mistake of precluding the sex with the penis and have failed. The patriarchs imposed male dominance and set back the development of society for thousands of years. The future matriarchy cannot be the image of the patriarchy with sexes reversed. 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. Later Lorna Frame tells us about millennium man in an article from the Scottish Daily Record. She coins an excellent word when she says that women have been too busy being "ladettes" to notice it is sterile men-apism—the illusion that emancipation is women 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.
The Goddess is Nature
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Now to the body of the magazine. It begins with a 30 page story, a thriller with an Earth Mother theme. Next N Penny argues in a note that we are a part of the cosmos and have no need to worship anything beyond it, least of all, Old Beardy, the absurd invention by men of the male transcendental god. It was plain to everyone that the Goddess was the very Cosmos itself, she was Nature. Any god was necessarily part of her, so they decided that Old Beardy lived beyond Nature, an irrational and non-intuitive idea. Thus they invented the transcendental. If the Cosmos is everything that exists anywhere—as it is—then how can there be something else? Such arguments never deterred the male priesthood whose sky god suddenly passed over to the other side of the sky and being above and beyond Nature was superior to the Goddess. N Penny rightly declares this concept as nonsense and that worship of this male figment is therefore also nonsense. However N Penny declares prayer as equal nonsense, leaving us in disagreement.
If the transcendental god is nonsense then surely praying to him must also be nonsense. Curiously, it is not. N Penny fails to comprehend the psychological or intuitive aspect of prayer. There is no god to answer our prayers, but praying is a psychological process akin to meditation. It awakens responses within us that we might not have thought we had. It quite literally strengthens us. Since there is no god, the effect does not come from him but from ourselves. Prayer is the ultimate placebo, and now we know from extensive studies that placebos actually work.
When we pray, we hope our prayers will be answered. Often we find they are, in that we find the resources to cope. When we take a pill, we hope it will cure our ailment. Often it does, although it is just glucose and some innocuous salt. Praying to the Goddess, even though, as Shirley Oliveira points out, she is merely "gynopomorphised" as female because of her feminine qualities and the primacy of the female in Nature, can do no harm. Or rather the harm is that it gives Nature a personality or a consciousness that she does not have. We might have to excuse this on the grounds that many people find abstractions difficult and they will personify the Goddess whether we like it or not. By all means, pray to the Goddess. You will be amazed to find a response—within!
A short story by Ruth Latta follows, then an article entitled "Winning with Witchcraft" by Jean Williams and a story of speculative fiction called "Rogue Male" by Louse Annschild. Phyllis Chesler, author of several books on men and women contributes a short item on fathers’ 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.
Fathers’ Rights
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. Phyllis proclaims herself the champion of the abolition of female slavery and feels strongly that 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 equals. The equal treatment of unequals is injustice!
Are women to be supreme in the coming matriarchy? Indeed, were women supreme in the matriarchy which 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 it, not to behave antagonistically to each other and Nature itself, not to burn down forests or fight each other in drunken rages. We 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.
There are more articles yet. Andrew Samuels explains the culture of fatherhood from the viewpoint of a professor of Jungian psychology. Miriam Dexter tells us all about the hippomorphic goddess, then Robert Balfour writes what Shirley Oliveira describes as a visionary essay. Among his targets is the Christian right of the USA, extreme conservatives who hold that all good and every moral standard comes solely form some malefactor the Romans crucified in the first century AD. Morality existed before Christianity was invented and good behaviour needs no supernatural revelation. Robert Balfour is a rationalist and points out the differences between scientific rationalism and religious bigotry. One is seeking answers through inquiry, investigation, observation, making hypotheses, experimenting and critically examining. In this way, science incrementally progresses towards the truths of nature. The other is fossilised in the past, petrified by creeds and infallible scriptures, depending on superstition and credulity to benefit no one except a small class of priests and prelates, almost exclusively male. The authority of the scriptures is higher than that of Newton, Darwin or Einstein.
Homosexuality
The bible condemns homosexuality because the Second Temple priesthood wanted the people to multiply to generate Jews who would sacrifice at the temple and make the priests rich. The Christian right consider this cynical ploy to be an infallible word of Old Beardy and freely condemn homosexuality today as the grossest sin. Pederasty and child abuse must be far worse because one party is not mature enough to consent. Yet what does this same infallible holy book tell us? Mary the so-called mother of God was given into the harem of an old man, Joseph, the earthly Guardian of the saviour god, when she was under the age of twelve. Christian protests do not alter the facts of the situation described in their infallible book, which, according to their own rules, condones the practice of taking child brides. If Joseph had taken such a young woman into his household today the right wing zealots would have him castrated. Perhaps they did then, explaining the perpetual virginity of the budding goddess.
What is harmful, today, of same sex couples having their sincere relationships consecrated? These same Christian right wingers blatantly ignore the explicit teachings in these infallible books of the crucified man they claim as a god. They ignore his advocacy of personal poverty and his condemnation of the wealthy as the worst sinners. Their only god today is Mammon. They deify the capitalist economic system which encourages and depends on the selfish pursuit of self-gratification, the profligate exploitation of Nature’s resources, the deliberate planning and engineering of obsolescence thus polluting the earth with prematurely discarded garbage. Added to all this, it is a God-given right to carry firearms even though murder is an unqualified sin.
Women and Science
With such thoughts in mind, Robert Balfour criticises the first issue of Matriarch’s Way for its tilt against science and rationality. Scientists might be overwhelmingly male but science itself has no penis. The scientific method would be the same if all scientists were female. The main interests of the investigators would obviously be quite different but the method itself would not change. Women should also beware of tarring the method of science with the uses made of its discoveries by patriarchal society with its wholly unnatural hyper-competitiveness. If some form of misguided political correctness were to enjoin matriarchs to alter the method of science, they would soon find it did not work. Lysenko tried it in Soviet Russia, sucking up to the political bigotry of Stalin, but nothing now remains of Lysenkoism because it was wrong and was only made to appear correct for a while by fiddling results. Assertion of such falsehoods in spite of the rules of the scientific method leads only to the sterility of patriarchal religion.
The religion of the Goddess has to be scientific because science is the means the Goddess has given us to understand her. Robert Balfour has useful advice here too. The restoration of matriarchy should not be simply the restoration of the matriarchy of pre-history, even supposing we knew what it was. It is matriarchy which we aim to restore, not some ancient set of rules or laws akin to the law of Moses. Matriarchy simply means the Rule of the Mother—the rule of the Great Mother Nature. 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.
Robert Balfour also criticises occult practices like Astrology and Tarot divination. Caution is needed however because the same observations apply to them as apply to prayer. All such forms are essentially psychological. Though, the planets might have subtle effects on our natures and various earthly cycles they are unlikely to have any important effect on our individual destinies. What is true though is that an astrological reading should be personally interpreted allowing one’s intuition to work. The sun signs of the daily papers seem to be incredibly accurate because we read into them something about ourselves, or what we would like to be true about ourselves. It is the psychological act of interpretation which is important, not the phony act of making a reading.
The same applies to Tarot or any other such technique. They are potentially ways of exercising your intuitive powers. Robert Balfour warns matriarchs that these occult arts were often invented by men as part of their religious control procedures. No doubt some were, but the ancient oracles, who were originally women, such as those at Delphi intoxicated themselves on the noxious fumes issuing from a vent in the earth. They answered the questioner with gibberish but another priestess or priestesses would make some sense of it by putting it into verse. The result was something like the quatrains of Nostradamus. They looked as though they made sense. It was the personal act of interpreting the versified oracles that drew on the intuition of the original supplicants enabling them to really make their own sense out of it. The drunken mumblings of the intoxicated priestess eventually meant something to the questioner. It is rather like the way sleeping on a problem can lead to a solution. The subconscious mind throws up the answer.
Doleful Qualitites
Robert is clear that equality in the Restoration 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 nature 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.
Robert argues that everyone desiring the Restoration will need a passionate missionary zeal. In his words:
Missionary zeal is needed. Sacrifice is needed. A sense of determined conviction, courage and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds and the universal scorn that comes with devotion to sacredness is needed.
Christianity—Disastrous for Women
The route to salvation is matriarchy and we 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. Christianity was disastrous for women. After being subjected by the patriarchs for a couple of millennia, women were just beginning to retrieve some semblance of respect and independence in post-Republican Rome. The Romans had not trusted powerful women like Cleopatra in the last century BC but Livia, wife of Augustus, set a precedent of a powerful and influential woman and for the next three hundred years the position of women in Roman society gradually improved.
Then the Christians took control. Christianity was based on the monastic rules of the Essene sect of Judaism. The Essenes at core were monks who despised women as unclean and detractors of men from holy things. The passage in the gospels about "if thy hand offend thee, cut it off; if thy foot offend they cut it off; if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out" (Mk 9:43-49) referring to sins of sexuality (masturbation, coitus [a foot is a euphemism for a penis] and merely looking lustfully) is purely Essenic and exactly illustrates the anti-sexuality on which Christianity was built.
Essenes saw themselves as holy warriors who would be less pure and therefore less worthy of the coming battle on the side of the heavenly hosts, if they participated in sexuality. The Jewish religion was, in any case, prudish—they abhorred nakedness and hated the Greeks for introducing gymnasia where youthful Jews could become Hellenised by exercising naked like Greek youth and listening to Greek philosophy explained. Essenes were more extreme than the Pharisees and took this further. Of course, some Essenes did marry but they too had their relationships carefully regulated.
Paul, the Apostle, took the Essenic outlook away from Judaism into the empire as Christianity and took the negative view of sexuality with him. He preached to the gentiles that their women should remain chaste and infuriated men hoping to marry women who then refused marriage on the grounds of sin, having heard Paul. This was perhaps the main reason why Paul was hounded according to the New Testament. There are always troubled and impressionable young people, just as there still are, and they will follow some charismatic leader. The leaders of Christian sects have behaved thus ever since with awful results for some.
Anyway, the result of the growth of Christianity was the curtailment of women’s freedom and the turning of the most natural and pleasurable of all behaviours into a crime. In 415 AD, a mob of Christian louts, monks of Alexandria, dragged Hypatia from her coach, stripped her, murdered her, tore her limb from limb and even stripped the flesh from her bones with seashells. She was a famous philosopher and the only known female mathematician of antiquity but she was a pagan and, of course, a woman. The bishop of Alexandria liked neither, especially as she was a lot more popular than he and the Christian church was. This murderer was canonised for his zeal!
We know what has happened since. It took about 1500 more years before women started to move back to where they had been when Hypatia was murdered. No one can claim that Christianity has been of any benefit to women unless they have the Christian view that women are merely procreating machines.
What of the women who appear in the gospels? All are put there simply as sops to the first gentile members of the Christian faith—Roman housewives. Many women had been happy to join the Jewish religion, some as full converts but many as Godfearers, people close to Judaism in the synagogues without actually converting. Men were not inclined to have anything to do with Judaism except as Godfearers. To be a Jew, the men had to be circumcised and most were not willing. It seemed to them to be a barbaric and dangerous operation. So, when Paul and the first gentile missionaries went out into the Empire to get converts, these Godfearers were the first to join. Mostly they were women who had been less inhibited by fear of circumcision to associate with Judaism.
Yet, the story of Jesus was entirely a male story. So, they introduced his mother and the curious figure of Mary Magdalene to represent the poles of femininity—the mother and the harlot. Luke added many more women but all were of incidental interest, though intended to persuade women that they understood when all the other apostles were still dumb. Men have of course, always run Christianity while women have been their congregations. The emotional appeal of a son hung on a cross is aimed purely at the caring maternal aspect of women. It is the perfect male scam to get women as their slaves. It also enslaves men with its empty promise of eternal life but women are doubly captured. Christians call, "Hosannah", meaning "Save Us" or "Free Us" but enslave us all.
A small point is that Robert criticises Mother Theresa for placing her faith in male priests and the Galilaean imposter but seems to accept the general belief that she is herself a saint, who has saved lives. Mother Theresa’s fame was built on her hospices—places where the terminally sick can die in peace. Her critics say that she made little if any attempt to save the dying poor in the streets of Calcutta by offering them treatment. She simply offered them a clean palette to lie upon, away from the dogs and rats, and a minimum of care, until they died. Her main purpose in the Catholic Church was to raise funds most of which were used to expand her own Catholic order by building seminaries and retreats for her nuns all over the world.
Catholic heroes were often gruesome ogres when examined closely. The murderer of Hypatia was canonised rather than anathematised. Tim Marshall tells us of another canonised Catholic hero, father Junopera Serra who in 1769 AD claimed California for Spain and set about converting the natives. In "Woman: The Only Solution", Marshall reviews the follies of war and environmental destruction under the patriarchs, explaining that Father Serra was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1993 for his zeal in starving the California Indians into conversion to Christianity by feeding them only one bowl of maize each a day and at the same time making them build twelve Catholic missions to atone for their sins. Indian mothers killed their children at birth once they realised what slavery the dying and rising god had in store for them. Christopher Columbus similarly exploited the innocence of the American Indians. He found the Arawak Indians of Haiti where he landed would offer him anything he admired or desired. His reward to them was slavery. He sent them in boatloads back to the Old World, saying:
Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity send all the slaves that can be sold.
Within two years, half of the original quarter of a million Indians had been killed. In little more than a hundred years they were extinct. Matriarchs ought to feel no compunction about exposing the horrific record of Christianity, yet all we hear about are saints, martyrs and missionaries. Tim Marshall gives us a quotation from Susan B Antony:
I shall explode if some of you young women do not wake up and raise your voice in protest… How can you not be all on fire?
Eccentric Vocabulary
Robin Trout writes about the "Return of the Fighting Woman" comparing KungFu and kickboxing heroines of adolescent fantasies with the Amazons of mythology—pretty silly stuff. Then Barbara Walton contributes another short story and the articles finish with Lee Lowell questing for the Great Mother. The final pages are devoted to poems by Carol Atkins and several useful book reviews.
I have to disagree with the editorial policy of Matriarch’s Way of adopting an eccentric but politically correct vocabulary free from "phallic" speech "concockted" by the patriarchs in ancient times. The basis of the decision is explained in an interesting book review of "Breaking the Patriarchal Code: The Linguistic Basis of Sexual Bias" by Louise Goueffic (Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, Inc 800/826-0529 $19.95) reviewed on page 151 of the review issue. The book sounds fascinating but, bearing in mind the observation Shirley made in her editorial that many matriarchal publications have failed from being too exclusive, 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?
I suggest you should subscribe and support this endeavour. If other issues are half as good as issue 1:2 they’ll be worth it.
Matriarch’s Way, Artemis Creations Publishing, 3395 Nostrand Avenue, Ste 2-J, Brooklyn, NY 11229-4053. Subscriptions $30.00 US, $36.00 outside the US. Single copies $8.50 US. $14.50 outside the US. For more details online, visit: Matriarch’s Way ~ Journal of Feme Supremacy
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