Adelphiasophism
The Gospel of the Goddess—Books Review
Abstract
Review of the “Gospel of the Goddess” by William Bond and Pamela Suffield
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, March 24, 1999
Visionary but Infuriating
William Bond and Pamela Suffield have written a visionary but infuriating book. It is like those William Morris style illustrations of the New Jerusalem on Trades Unionists banners early in the 20th Century. The revolutionary woman, her followers behind her, stands at the entrance to the valley gesturing extravagantly to the distant vision of the spires and minarets of the coming utopia just beyond the distant hills. It looks inspiring but when did it ever happen?
This book is visionary, offering a "matercentric" utopia of the future inspired by the prehistoric matriarchal societies. Unlike hierarchical patriarchies this society is egalitarian, so the word matriarchy is rejected. Nevertheless, it is a return to the ancient social form that is intended because the authors consider we are in a historical cycle from matriarchy through patriarchy back to matriarchy. We are already in the final phase of this cycle.
The book is a sincere argument for us all to turn back to the Goddess but it is infuriating because the authors come from New Age beliefs and it shows, in its pseudo-Christian religiosity and especially in its continuous polemic against science. Their Goddess is a female Yehouah but with the loving characteristics of the Son. She is a real, living, sentient, transcendental Goddess of unconditional love. They speak several times of the will of the Great Mother. Metaphoric? Utopian? Even in ancient times, the Goddess was never so yawningly boring. Today we know she isn’t, and we know it from science.
Since a simple change from a patriarchy to its female equivalent, a matriarchy, is not what is anticipated, why should Jesus disguise himself as a female Yehouah to give us this Goddess? The authors argue that Jesus is part of the transitional phase from vengeful patriarch to loving mother, but the old Goddess never did just love. She had her darker side too. It makes you think that disillusioned Christians are trying to re-invent Jesus as a woman.
Gods want to Punish
The premise of the authors is that the concept of a loving god is absurd, because gods want to punish not to love. Only the Goddess truly loves and unconditionally to boot. She loves irrespective of crimes or disregard by the objects of our love—ourselves. She is the martyred, put upon mother of the fireside, peeling the potatoes and putting up with the cheek of her children. She does not care. We don’t have to earn her love because we are the products of her loins and she loves us all—equally. So, all we have to do is find a way of getting 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?
Everyone should have ideals but, if cynical people are not to laugh out loud in an increasingly cynical world, they have to be realistic. 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 payers 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 pruning us! It is not a question of her loving all humans equally, she only loves the 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 pruned by looking beautiful and healthy to her. We are failing!
Great Mother
The authors speak of us living outside the Great Mother, as if she is a transcendental god like Yehouah. She has allowed us to live outside her to give us room to develop but when we move too far from her, we go astray and take too many wrong paths. They seem not to realise that the whole point is that we are not outside her but within her, developing as she develops. The concept of the Goddess is not the one we have made for ourselves living on the skin of a planet looking out at the universe beyond. Her attention is entirely turned inwards, because there is nothing transcendental—nothing outside her. The cosmic garden is the cosmic womb.
A review is necessarily critical, but I want to break this one here to say that for all my criticisms, there is much in this book of value. People need a vision. The danger is that it will become a prescription. The vision here is a useful one. We must all believe a Goddess oriented society is better than a god oriented one or we would not advocate a change. The authors know the path will be difficult (though that too is a Christian sentiment). Women might have to become more patriarchal in their attitudes to get into positions where they can change them.
Children and simple people might need to have an image of a living, caring Goddess. What I am saying is that it must not be taught as if it were true. We can teach our children by telling them fairy tales which they later realise were not the truth because we tell them so. Tales of a sentient, loving Goddess must fall into that category.
Another aspect of the book which is fascinating and doubtless controversial is the use of sexual perversions as indications of the growing tendency towards Goddess worship. A variety of instances are given but the obvious one would be the man who liked to fantasise about a leather clad, whip-toting, masked dominatrix. Such a man is not far from the realm of the Goddess, the authors suggest. Mmm.
Mother and Son
They do correctly focus on the fundamental sexual relationship in humanity as mother and son. 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.
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. 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.
On their anti-science bent, Bond and Suffield tell us that though science is patriarchal and on a par with Yehouah, it can no longer be abandoned. Instead it should be judged on how harmonious it is, and the yardstick should be feminine intuition, as if scientific truth was somehow arbitrary. It is certainly permissible to say to the scientists that certain experiments are forbidden, but it is Lysenkoism to pretend that scientific results can be altered arbitrarily.
Though the authors like to have their New Age digs at science, they have to admit that science’s discovery of the law of evolution—the survival of the fittest—is really the Goddess’s harmony. And indeed it is. If a human female unwisely swims in a tropical river and is eaten by a crocodile, is it because the Goddess did not love her, or prefers to love crocodiles? When animals, wild or domesticated, harm humans, they are sought out and destroyed, as if the animal should have known human laws. The crocodile hasn’t read the statute books or God's bible and doesn’t know “Thou shalt not kill”. The woman was foolish or ignorant. It was no fault of the crocodile, which simply followed its natural instinct to feed itself. This is the harmony of the Goddess. Animals do what is natural with no blame attached. Only mankind can consciously do what is unnatural and the authors make a heartfelt plea that they should restrain their inclination to do so.
They point out that Chaos Theory is a warning to us. The tiniest changes can lead to monstrous consequences in chaotic systems and the cosmos is a chaotic system. Chaotic in this sense properly means complicated by multiple feedbacks, causing a response to any stimulus to be unpredictable. Humans are happy to carry out grotesque experiments on the fundamental blueprint of life, the genetic code, without the slightest idea what might happen. "It is quite safe," the experts tell us. The unsinkable Titanic sank!
Intuition
Scientists do not accept angels, pixies and fairies because evidence about them is "outside the realm of empirical proof" and for scientists what "cannot be verified, cannot exist". Though scientists like Einstein use intuition, Bond and Suffield tell us they refuse to accept it. Is there any book on science history that does not tell about the discovery of the benzene ring by Kekulé, a prime example of intuition—the unconscious mind working on a problem the conscious mind has failed to solve? Bond and Suffield think that intuition introduces a completely new thought—out of the blue—whereas logic is stuck with rearranging accepted wisdom. But intuition demands a problem first.
Intuition is not as the authors seem to think—an alternative truth. It is an alternative mental process to rational thought. Just as computers can be digital or analogue, if rational thought is digital then intuition is analogue. Rational thinking needs the figures in place to work properly. If the figures are not all available then assumptions have to be consciously made to supply them. Intuition only needs partial information to yield an outcome—and working unconsciously. Scientists often work on hunches, even if not often enough. But their hunches still have to be tested in the real world because there is no guarantee that a hunch will be correct. It is this very testing of ideas against reality that New Age critics of science do not like, and Bond and Suffield go to the ultimate of insults and call it patriarchal. Though they speak frequently of harmony, they cannot see that intuition and logic are not competing systems of thought but complementary ones.
The sort of "science" that Bond and Suffield want is science that allows them to believe in souls. They require no evidence that souls exist and are reincarnated. Furthermore, there are "Old souls" and "Baby souls". The "Old souls" have incarnated frequently on earth and know all there is to know about it and soon will take off to pastures new on distant planets where they will incarnate as some form of silicon life. They might as well stay here on earth and incarnate as a microchip. Seriously, the "Old souls" help the "Baby souls" in their faltering first steps as incarnated souls on earth. The "Baby souls" are the common herd, too unwashed and ignorant to rise to positions of power and influence. The "Old souls" have the experience and wisdom to fit them for the roles of princes and priests. The original "Old souls" were women and the "Baby souls" were men whom the "Old souls" left when they departed to b-Regulus. The males began to make mistakes without their "Old souls" to guide them and developed patriarchal society. Right?
Since angels, fairies and aliens manifest themselves in similar ways in all cultures, they must be real, according to Bond and Suffield. To a scientist, wanting objective evidence, they are false and relegated to religious experiences or madness. My own impression is that mystical experiences are indeed culture bound and not usually similar. In Catholic countries people used to see visions of the BVM but increasingly they see visions of the UFO.
Scientists do not think the mystical phenomena are false. They think they are real illusions. The fairy or ghost is false but the experience of having seen one is real (discounting hoaxes). Illusions like the ones experienced can be explained, at least partially, and can often be induced, showing that there are contributing circumstances, but those who have seen the illusion delude themselves that it was real and will not be convinced otherwise by any scientist. None of this is helped by the increasing neurosis of people, which a change of attitude to life could help alleviate. Patriarchal religion has a long history of using people’s delusions to allow them to keep control. I cannot see how acceptance of patriarchal quackery and fraudulence can possibly help the Goddess.
Foibles
Science naturally works in the real world itself, and scientists are not free from the faults and foibles of any normal human being. Some are crooks. Some try to find evidence for anti-social views through science. The authors criticise scientists who find racial differences between people. Yet elsewhere they quote approvingly scientific findings that men and women think differently. Both fields of research have been politically incorrect in the last 30 years and only bigots would not question with extreme suspicion any finding of mental differences whether between races or sexes. But once the results have been found to stand up under questioning and testing, they have to be acknowledged. All scientists have to be aware that devising genuinely culture fair tests is not easy and that inability to perform skilfully on one test does not preclude skill in another. We have to accept Nature as it is, not how we would like it to be, and that is diverse.
The criticism Bond and Suffield have of scientists is that they are not really objective but seek information to help "controlling". Their cure seems to be to abandon all pretence at objectivity in favour of subjectivity and emotion. Well under the subjective emotional system, the patriarchal religions controlled us absolutely for millennia. They argue that we are in an evolutionary cycle out of patriarchy. If they cannot recognise that the development of science in the last 200 years has helped to untie the bonds of patriarchy, then they are blind to their own thesis.
The authors are correct to say that 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. The authors’ whole attitude to marriage focuses on the male as exploiter and the female as victim. This is essentially true but 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 prssures 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.
Bond and Suffield use the old Chines symbol of Yin-yang 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. Humans are a part of Nature so we two are dual. 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.
Bond and Suffield seem to want the qualities of men and women to equalise in their matercentric 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 Bond and Suffield envision.
The book also has a long section explaining the authors’ thoughts in terms of the Quaballah and the Tarot. I cannot see the need for it except that these are some of their New Age interests. It would have been better left out or put into a separate book.
There is nothing wrong in having visions of an ideal. For such visions, this book is worth reading. If you are a New Ager looking for a synthesis of New Age ideas and an analysis of patriarchal society and how it needs to change, you will enjoy this book. There is a lot of interesting and provocative discussion in it from which there is much to learn.
Its downside is a sort of New Age dreaminess and attachment to New Age fancies which will only help to discredit those who support the move to honouring the Goddess instead of Yehouah and introducing matriarchal ways instead of the coarse vulgar insensitivity of our patriarchal society. I’ve given you my view, now buy it and read it for yourself.
The Gospel of the Goddess, William Bond and Pamela Suffield, (1994), Artemis Creations Publishing, 3395 Nostrand Avenue, 2J Brooklyn NY 11229-4053. $19.95. Telephone Orders: Call Toll Free on 1-800-247-6553 with your Optima, Discover, Visa or Mastercard ready.
