Adelphiasophism
The Goddess and the Serpent: Mary Condren and the Jewish Scriptures
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 28, 2000
The Task of Liberation Theologians
There is a school of militant feminists, perhaps all of them, who want to throw out the baby of history with the bathwater of patriarchal deception. An example is Mary Condren, author of “The Serpent and the Goddess,” a book in which she claims a task of feminists is to be prophetic, but which contains no clear prophecy, or even guidelines for us to follow, though it is a weighty indictment of patriarchy and its cult of warrior heroes or martyrs.
Condren has written informatively about the evidence from Irish mythology for the loss of the matri-focal society to the patriarchal one. As part of the introduction to this she reviews the evidence of the Jewish scriptures, which she takes at face value. She might defend herself by saying that she is merely relating the view of believers, but that is far from clear since she is not happy in her introductory comments about patriarchal historians, so one might have expected some criticism. Here we criticise her implied acceptance of the patriarchal history of the Jews or her failure to criticise it.
Condren cites Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as saying the task of liberation theologians is:
To critically comprehend how the bible functions in the oppression of women and the poor, and thus prevent its misuse for further oppression.
This is like a hooked fish demanding that a discussion be started about how the hook in its palate can be critically comprehended to prevent its misuse for further oppression of fish. The fish hook cannot be absolved of its plain purpose. Nor can the patriarchal books called the bible be absolved of their plain purpose to keep people subject and obedient on pain of everlasting death. Both fish hook and bible are not being misused. They are being used for their intended purpose. Fiorenza cannot bring herself to recognize this either for personal reasons or so as not to cause offence. Neither is good enough.
The bible was originally designed for a political purpose—to control and manipulate people who might otherwise cause trouble for the benefit of a suzerain and his nominated upper class. It had one overwhelming purpose—to get obedience: obedience to the God and thence to his agent on earth, the king (originally the Persian dynasty). It wants dumping in favour of the proper religion that it displaced. Love of Nature.
Objectivity?
Condren rejects the aim of history to arrive at truth while “using our sources responsibly.” Many feminists that remain besotted with the dying Son seem utterly confused in what they are doing. Condren can hardly write truth without quizzical quotation marks arround it to suggest it is the opposite—”truth?” For her truth is a ploy used by male historians to ensure male dominance. Male historians have arrived at a method for seeking the truth that they call “objectivity” but since male truth suppresses women it is not objective and so objectivity is a sham. Condren will therefore dispense with objectivity and any intention of trying to seek the truth. Out goes the baby! If what she is seeking is not true, why should anyone take any notice of what she has found?
The traditional male historians’ idea of objectivity was conditioned by their prejudices, perhaps unrecognized, against women. That seems to suggest to Condren a feminist answer to male “objectivity”—they would make no such pretence! Feminists would be utterly biased against men and their patriarchal history by stating in advance that they would be, thus making their prejudicial view of history all right.
Like a political representative in the House, they think that by declaring an interest, they will have “carte blanche” to distort and twist as much as suits them. It is, of course, no more true than male history but they are absolved by not pretending to be objective—quite the reverse. Our representatives are often found not declaring their interests, just like male historians, but militant feminist writers will not fail to declare theirs. It is, after all, their “raison d’etre.” Having done so they are free to write whatever bigotry can be excused by their declared self-interest. They declare that male historians have lied throughout history while pretending to be honest, so female historians will lie even more, but in an opposite sense. This, sisters, is not the answer!
Despite all this, Condren will treat her sources responsibly. Despite all this rhetoric, the outcome is not as outrageous as the declaration, and she ends up doing no more than certain modern historians of either sex now do. They seek an objective truth that is assumed to exist—or once to have existed—by approximating to it. And they do that, not by each individual historian claiming objectivity, but by claiming that objectivity will be approximated to by a closing spiral of hypothetical truths. Condren’s postmodern vocabulary really means that she is trying to scrape off some of the veneer of patriarchal overpainting and varnishing that currently hides the true picture. However she likes to describe it in her rhetoric, Condren is still trying to get at the truth. She approximates closer to a true history by guarding against a huge bias that it hitherto always had. So the rhetoric is empty. It is posturing. It is playing to the militant sisters in the gallery.
It is far more powerful and persuasive to say: “This is a disgraceful and unacceptable distorting bias that has to be removed or corrected to get at the truth.” That is the simpler and more honest approach of feminists with—dare anyone say it—more traditional values, feminists who see, in postmodernism, a crypto-rebellious faddishness that, at worst, is ridiculous and counter to scholarship and, at best, is good scholarship hiding behind the postmodern upraised finger.
Condren also slags off scientists in general, all of whom are uniformly wicked, and seemingly making no distinction between female and male scientists, the former presumably being dupes or lackies of scientific methodology. Condren seems to have that primitive feminist attitude that all men are the mortal enemies of women, an attitude that, even if true in some senses, fails to recognize that modern men increasingly see the past treatment of women as being intolerable, making them valuable or even essential allies in any serious attempt to remove patriarchy. It is puerile—and the word is deliberately used!—to condemn all men or all dominantly male professions even if it is just to recognize that some females in those professions are feminists, and many complacent females are as bad as the men!
Look, Adelphiasophists of either gender know that patriarchal society has oppressed and suppressed women and nobody, male or female has escaped its baneful influence. That does not mean that everything produced by the human race under patriarchal forms is worthless, nor that everyone accepts equally its double standards. There have always been rebels and conservatives on both sides of the gender divide, and many of the intellectual and scientific tools discovered under patriarchy are valid, “if used properly.” The fact that an orang-utan cannot properly use a knife and fork does not mean a knife and fork has no proper use. If objectivity, though a useful concept, has been misused as a male weapon, then let us use their own weapon against them to expose the truth. What is the point of taking some absurd non-objective approach, thus weakening the power of our arguments apparently because anything that can be tarred with male associations must be discarded out of some militant feminist idea of purity. Ultimately deconstruction is a way of wiping off the overpainting. It is criticism of lack of objectivity and exposure of bigotry revealed in the text of the writer. It is therefore removing obstacles to an objective knowledge of the truth. Why pretend otherwise? Why brag that you have rejected objectivity as a goal?
Patriarchal Authors’ Vision
Condren says the aim of the postmodern feminist approach is to write “new stories” and to construct “new models.” Fine! Then why not just discard the patriarchal nonsense called the bible and write new stories indeed? For Adelphiasophists new stories based on the wisdom of the Goddess—that is, what we have been allowed to discover about Nature—would be welcome, but feminists who seek to “prevent the misuse” of a boastfully patriarchal rag-bag of obedience stories, instead of discarding it, cannot be expected to do anything useful in the struggle against patriarchy. They are as intellectually dishonest as male theologians.
Condren, for all her critical attitude to the patriarchal religions, constantly accepts the patriarchal authors’ vision of Jewish history, even though her book was published in 1988 when already such history as that of Abraham was thoroughly discredited by authoritative (if ignored) studies. Echoing some authority, she foolishly declares:
Abraham was probably responsible for bringing Sumerian influence into Palestine.
Abraham, the bible’s original patriarch still commands the patriarch basher, Condren’s respect. Needless to say, the nearest that Abraham gets to history rather than romantic fiction is as an allegory of the deportees of the Assyrians or the Persians into Palestine from Mesopotamia. They were moved “abarnahar,” beyond the river, the Euphrates, into the province called just that, Abarnahar, and so were called Hebrews, the word “eber” meaning “beyond.”
“Genesis” was apparently written in the time of David or Solomon, Condren declining even to nod to the growing recognition that there never was a David or Solomon. She accepts that the first few chapters of “Genesis” are mythical but otherwise goes along with the Judaeo-Christian belief that the bible otherwise is history. She also assumes that the Israelites wrote the bible, quoting books on Jewish history that were already being questioned in the seventies, books that are now discredited as being nothing other than praraphrases of the bible bound in scholarly boards rather than theological ones. She writes as if Solomon’s temple and its rituals are well established historical facts.
The Purpose of the Scriptures
All of this brings her to see the Jewish scriptures as testimony to the apostasy of the Israelites from Yehouah to serpent worship. The truth is that the apostasy was the reverse. The original Canaanites were polytheists who had in their pantheon a significant god symbolized by a serpent. It was the deportees from Mesopotamia, under their Assyrian and then Persian overlords who sought to impose Yehouah as a universal god—the local version of the Persian God of Heaven, Ahuramazda—to further their imperial ambitions.
One can surmise that initially the deportees were initially ready to accept the snake as symbolic of the god, Yehouah, they sought to impose. Thus the story of Moses allowed the Israelites to worship a snake rather than a calf. The syncretism was to get rid of the bull god while encouraging the worship of the universal snake god. At a later stage, the deportees depicted Hezekiah as destroying the snake idol as unsuitable for a transcendent god of heaven. These were stages of replacement of a snake deity by the God of Heaven. It was not an evolution—it was an imposition!
The Persian administrators who wrote the scriptures were opposed to the idea of local kings who might have become rivals to the Shahanshah. Their orders were to set up a theocracy ruled, under the direction of the Persian administrators who called themselves priests, by the God of Heaven who implemented the inviolable laws issued by the Persian king. The glorious kings of the Jewish scriptures were not introduced until the Maccabees who set up the first Jewish state which they ruled as priest-kings and so wanted a historical precedent for their acts. David and Solomon are idealised Hasmonaeans. Their enemies, the Philistines, were the Seleucid Greeks. The House of David was the House of Hasmon translated into mythology. When Mattathias murdered the apostate on the king’s altar, starting the Maccabaean rebellion, he probably became the model for the mythical Phinehas who murdered Zambri in the Mosaic saga, not the reverse.
Again, Condren accepts that the Israelites entered into a “covenant” with God even though they were just a disorganized rabble of mixed desert tribes. Yet covenant relationships in the first and second centuries BC were between suzerains and vassals. It is much more likely that the covenants with God in the scriptures were covenants with the conquerors of Israel, Persia, and Assyria before them. The priests of the imposed religion might have put it over as a covenant with a God of Heaven, but it was really a treaty with a conquering king. The whole purpose of the Jewish scriptures is to justify obedience to a king, but not an Israelite king. Obedience to a universal god rather than a disparate pantheon was the intention of the Persians when they sent their successive administrators to change the ways of the Israelites. The covenant with the god of the Persians, whatever his name locally, was a covenant with the Persian kings. The Israelites were to have no other god but the universal god of the Persians. So, Condren is accepting the patriarchal history of the Jews rather than deconstructing it, as she should be. For all her powerfully critical words against modern patriarchal institutions including the Vatican, we hear no words critical of the source of it all—the bible.
Women in Christianity
Condren says several times that God was “technically” neither male nor female. Some women beguiled by Christianity and the Hebrew god might have persuaded themselves that it is so, but they are merely seeking a justification for refusing to ditch the patriarchal monster while remaining a feminist in name. The God in the bible is plainly male! No one can read the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and come away with any idea other than that the Hebrew god and the Christian father is male—not androgynes or hermaphrodites—and He make man, not women, in His image. If these feminists are saying that God is not male then they are already rejecting the Hebrew god and the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Instead of pussy-footing around trying to find ways of resurrecting Him so that He is no longer misused, they should boldly turn away from all of this patriarchal nonsense and return to the Goddess. In fairness to Condren, she shows signs of having done this in practice even though her thinking still seems steeped in biblical mythology.
She cites the “Law of Adamnan,” describing it as Christian propaganda, which it is, as even the name betrays. It shows Christianity bringing the triumph of patriarchy into Ireland by fooling women into thinking it would help them. To emphasise the benefits, women are depicted as having been in an abject condition before Christianity arrived. Condren tells us that the patriarchal Celts had already imposed patriarchy when they conquered Ireland in the previous millennium, but Irish mythology shows that it was an unsuccessful or only partially effected form of patriarchy. The Irish were keen on their Goddesses and were to hang on to them into the Christian era. So, it is unlikely that women were as badly off as the propagandist made out.
He says they were forced into warfare by their “warrior” husbands! However unreal this degree of oppression, the women of pre-Christian Ireland apparently accepted Christianity as a liberation. The patriarchal Christian missionaries fooled women into voluntarily giving up a society that was still at least partially woman-centred in favour of what we have had for two millennia—a society with no place for women outside of the kitchen and bedroom. This Christian ruse is a tactic that assumes that Celtic women had considerable influence at least in the home and in the raising of children. The Christian monks and bishops knew that by winning women, they would have the children within a generation, and the whole of society a generation later still.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton noted that “most ready converts to Christian religion, as might be expected are women, through them the men are made victims of priestcraft and superstition.” A contemporary writer on Turkish civilization said the great block to all progress in that nation was the condition of the women, and their improvement was hopeless, because they were taught by their religion that their position was ordained of heaven. Stanton summarises:
Thus has the religious nature of woman been played upon in all ages and under all forms of religion for her own complete subjugation.
There was no liberation under Christianity for these women. They were to find themselves worse off even than the Christian propaganda had imagined. Having secured their position, the priests then obliged the women to obey them threatening to use their influence with God to curse the women’s sons to death and decay, while offering a carrot of sending increasing numbers of obedient women to heaven. The question is not why women obeyed then, but why they obey now.
