Where once, as at Chauvet and Lascaux in the European Upper Paleolithic, the bowels of the earth had witnessed remarkable interior journeys by inquiring humans (culminating in the ritual representation of life as a complex structure' [which included pain]), these hidden regions were now host to images which, as the expression of material deemed polluted, were conceptually counter-posed to images of 'high value' existing in the universe above ground. Once the site of human celebration(84), the interior of the earth became now the domain of a transmogrified female aspect, a dreadful place where prowled not only the alienated figure of death, as life-negating, separating, painful, exclusive; here roamed, in perpetual darkness and isolation, ghastly replicas of all the designated enemies of male virtue -- a kind of inverse pantheon over which loomed the structurally perverted likeness of despised nature herself.
Experience gyrated...
In this new Culture of the Open, which the 'nomadic male' embraced as appropriate to his own spirit (and anatomy), sky consciousness, and the inclination to view heavenly bodies as transcendent phenomena (and the earth as subordinate), were necessary stages in an evolving human awareness which turned the perceptual field through which the broad expanse of the material world was organized, viewed, and interpreted on its side. The frame within which nature was conceptualized appears to have been rotated through ninety degrees. The collective construction of the world was thus fundamentally altered. In this new vision of reality the horizontal yielded to the vertical (while lateral connectedness gave way to linear hierarchy).(85)
The invention of new social forms..
This rotation of the perceptual framing of experience had profound consequences for all aspects of discursive interaction in human community. Structures were now in position to allow the replacement of traditional kinship relationships by a hierarchical structure over which the human male, the very representation on earth of the radiant sun in the sky, presided as benefactor and singular source of life -- a mythic assimilation which was no less important for its colossal arrogance and presumption. Kinship systems which spread out from the mother, were abandoned and replaced by the concept of fatherhood, newly discovered in association with the breeding of live-stock, and the patriarchal concept of the family in which biology, curiously, was nudged to the side to make greater room for a reality which was essentially political-cultural.
For despite much surface concern with blood line, biological descent was not the central organizing principle and preoccupation in this new social construct. Myth introduced, of course, its own notion of descent -- a linear affair constructed along the male line exclusively -- but patriarchy brought, at the same time, a new and ultimately more practical meaning to the notion of human kinship, namely the concept of ownership, the notion of the family as property. In its derived meaning the word family came to designate the total aggregate of human beings attached to the household (i.e. owned by the patriarch), including its slaves. One can not escape the fact that the Latin word famulus meant/means 'servant' or 'slave'.
That the ownership of servants was so common among these early pastoralists, leads one to assume that the herding (and ultimately the ownership) of animals was the structural predecessor of human slavery. In any case, these two ugly progeny of the new structure of male virtue, the one the diseased sibling (or parent) of the other, quickly adapted to each other's company and can be seen walking their crooked path through human history, hand in hand. Slavery and the domestication of animals would soon join the social system which despised nature and the human female becoming, in time, inseparable parts of the same moral-cultural package.
The human male as villain...
The opinion has wide-spread (and growing) support that social violence is a fact of human biology, that the destructive tendencies of individuals and institutions are 'hard-wired' in the behavior of the human male in particular (and have, from that bastion of biological support, become transmitted to human culture generally). The extreme position has been recently articulated that societies of the future may have to acquire new forms of control (and coercion) if this 'natural male behavior' is to be restrained. (These analysts rarely consider that the interpersonal violence may have a significant cultural component, that human institutions may be responsible for this 'bad behavior', that new strategies must be devised for curbing them instead. Their low opinion of the 'male character' notwithstanding, such critics appear themselves as apologists for the power-centered ideologies which gird the actions of individuals [and institutions].)
The best evidence one can submit for considering patriarchy, and related structures of social privilege, as culturally 'reinforced' (and not solely the reflection of an 'enduring biological state') is the fact that these modes of organization continue, in the present day and age, to be unsatisfying to wide segments of the human population. Nor are these dissatisfied elements made up entirely of 'feminists'. Passive (if not overt) resistance to the institutions of control, which patriarchal institutions have spawned for their own purposes, is quite high in the general population, even (perhaps especially) among men.
Them not us...
The bleakest summation of the present human condition (and the part an alleged biological heritage of violence has played in bringing this terrible state about) was put together recently by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in a grim compendium of abusive behaviors by Apes (and certain selected tribal 'primitives') toward others of their species (Demonic Males 1996, discussed earlier in this chapter). Yet these two authors appear to consider themselves and certain male members of their own families as exceptional (if I am reading the dedication correctly in which they single out two men with the same surnames as their own -- their fathers apparently -- for recognition as "two who found another way" [my emphasis]). I do not question, for a second, that these men, and perhaps others in the cited authors' families (and in our own), depart from the grotesque representations of the male character (which they nonetheless insist, in their writings, are somehow paradigmatic). Or even that these grotesque characterizations contain a large grain of truth, particularly if, for a moment, we look past the behaviors of individuals and small communities (which present pretty much a mixed bag to analysis), and examine instead the conduct of large organizations and institutions, as these can be found to operate cruelly (and routinely) within the framework of supposedly advanced 'civilized values', a direction of inquiry which Wrangham and Peterson seem not much inclined to pursue.
Besides, if war and other physically and psychologically abusive structures were 'natural' (in the sense of 'inevitable'), as Wrangham and Peterson (and many others) wish to intimate, it does seem that there would be wider endorsement of public policies of violence than we find actually exists. The closest one comes to an 'apologetics' for human violence is not in the writings of Clausowitz and others but in the narrations of socio-biologists and anthropologists who manage, whether or not this is their acknowledged intent, to set this feature of the 'human character' up as paradigmatic. These academics succeed in giving theoretical substance and justification to the very behaviors they claim to abjure in their own lives.
Why violence should be so routine in human conduct is indeed a troubling question. However, the 'default quotient' is high in the human response to initiative by others, so the tendency to 'go along' complicates serious analysis. It is easy to mistake mere acquiescense, in the implementation of a policy of violence by the few, for support by the many. The individual who 'goes along' (der mitmacht) often does so out of misplaced feelings of 'solidarity' with his/her community (which can scarcely be considered the moral equivalent of evil intent).
The simple fact is that human evolution has tolerated, one must say even encouraged, such a wide range of contrastive behaviors, mythic dispositions (good and bad), collective preferences, weaknesses of various kinds (and 'strengths'), that it becomes quite impossible to say that such and such a 'behavior' is the inevitable consequence of our 'nature'; except perhaps to say that evolutionary process, with humans, has been particularly accommodating of diversity, both between and within populations. What happens in the actual case is almost anybody's guess, though even in the extreme instance the mythic patterns often assume familiar shapes, and these we must study and identify as matters of urgency.
Another look at the Bible...
There is a text, well-known by name to most Westerners (and to readers in the present pages), which reflects the curious culmination of much Late Ice-Age myth, though its written form dates from a much later period. Let us turn, once again, to the five Books of Moses: the so-called Pentateuch from which Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious cosmology has drawn inspiration.
Let's consider these strange documents for what they might reflect of the period of upheaval outlined and briefly discussed thus far. The style of these texts is uneven. Moreover, they reveal gross contradictions. Their written form is likely a very late compilation of materials from diverse sources, probably oral traditions which have ancient roots, though the more immediate ideological inspiration was likely the same dualistic structures which inspired the religions of Persia, e.g. Zoroastrianism and similar cultural presentations.
In conflict with a distant past...
It is hard to imagine that the intent of this material was not to propagandize a stubborn population. It recalls the war against nature (and the human female) which had raged, on the continent of Eurasia, since the closing millenia of the ice age. The text deserves re-examination because the period it represents is poorly understood. Besides, the struggle against nature did not come to an end in biblical times. It got powerful new impetus in the Christianization of Europe and is waged, with an unrelenting fury, still today.
Resistance to patriarchal hegemony must have been considerable, given the extraordinary measures which were taken to ensure compliance with its precepts and rules. These were extensive, if we are to take the Bronze Age sources at their face value. Two books in particular -- Leviticus and Deuteronomy -- are enlightening if depressing in the extreme. They comprise an interminable codification of patriarchal law and prescribed penalties. (One reasonably asks for what social purpose? To what extent does a healthy, self-regulated community need such declarations and written expressions of belief?) Because the Pentateuch is valued as 'holy scripture' by wide segments of contemporary Western society,(86) it is certainly not unfair to view such materials as philosophically formative in this culture which many of us cling to as our special heritage.
The divine protagonist in these documents presents the picture of a crazed tyrant, petty in the extreme, unhinged by power (thus not exactly in control), reeling from one crisis to another, threatened by dissent both from within and without, competing apparently with other heavenly beings for the fealty of his earthly subjects. (So much for the 'monotheism' on which modern religions are supposedly based.) Believers of today would prefer, no doubt, to ignore these materials, ascribing them to a culturally primitive state which the modern religions of the West have since 'transcended'. But I believe the central messages of this material continue to be highly productive elements in the maintenance and stabilization of Western culture, however embarrassing they may seem to sophisticated believers and others (and however crude their expression).
One is struck by the certainty, and arrogance, with which this ruling entity creates divisions:(87) the division between good and evil, between the righteous and the wicked, between his obedient followers and everybody else; the central distinction between male and female, of course, but also between rich and poor, left and right, creatures which leap (locusts, for example, which are deemed fit for consumption by humans) and those which creep (earthworms, for example, which are not), and dozens of other major and minor differences in culture and living nature which become visible through a lens-filter intended to separate the pure from the impure, the clean from the unclean. The latter distinction appears to be one of the main points of focus of the document. The narrative contains countless additional pairings of an abstract character: for example, sin and atonement, guilt and innocence, sickness and health and (curiously) the state of being clothed as opposed to the 'abominable' condition of being naked, to list just a few. (The Pentateuch and the 'sin' of natural discourse was discussed in Part I -- Chapter III of the present writing.)
Nakedness is a matter of remarkable interest and concern in this text (as noted and discussed in the chapter referred to above), a fact which depth psychology might be inclined to interpret as a compensatory response to the extreme denial of the conceptual element closed. Suppressed as a consequence of the generalized degradation of nature, the concept asserts itself here obsessionally, an illustration of what Carl Jung called the 'shadow expression' of the archetype. Denied in the culture at large, closure surfaces here pathologically as the need to hide the human body (i.e. nature itself). By the way, a word for 'nature' seems not to occur in the Authorized Version of this ancient material, so thorough-going was the effort to eradicate the concept. Neither does the word forest -- not even in its account of the so-called origin of human life which it places in the artifactual context -- what else? -- of a 'garden'.
The farmer had special reason to be troubled by closure. Closure threatened the agricultural fields, newly rescued from an invasive nature. In the farmer's imagination, as in actual practice, the natural forest existed for the sole purpose of being replaced by man-made fields. English translations of the original text refer to animals of the forest as 'beasts of the field'. Artifact must replace nature.
A besieged power structure...
One enters the paranoiac world of a threatened and besieged power structure. Opposites play the crucial role in the building of a discourse. The derogated image, which has the functional task of raising male virtue to lofty heights, is the principal means by which social order is maintained in the face of threats, real and rigged. Harold Bloom has suggested that large portions of the Pentateuch were written by a woman. In my estimation the character of the Lord is so bizarre, so much a caricature of the bronze age patriarch, that Bloom's idea could be given, if appropriately modified, a better political spin. It could be convincingly argued that a great portion (if not most) of this material was derived from an oral tradition kept alive by dissident matristic elements. It is at least plausible that a tradition, in which the sky gods of patriarchy were satirized and ridiculed, survived somehow in the midst of emerging male political dominance. This proposition, though arguably worthy of further investigation, can not be proven. But neither can Bloom's.
These texts bring us face-to-face with the political blame game, the patriarch's modus operandi long before the time of Moses. It has been evident in the maneuvering against imaginary enemies which characterizes policy and public discourse under the diverse systems of social organization and government which patriarchal hegemony has spawned through the centuries. Scape-goating appears to have been the principal stabilizing factor in the maintenance of social cohesion, such as it was (and is) under such systems. At the level of the individual it is the classic mechanism, familiar to psycho-therapists, by which the sick patient seeks to shift the locus of (and responsibility for) presumed crimes, moral lapses, and defects to others. It is quite impossible to imagine that the Pentateuch, which is archetypal in the viciousness of its attack on women and natural process, did not come into being originally as a response to political resistance -- or even as a satirical expression of that resistance!
The protagonist, known in English translations simply as 'The Lord', seemed to have chosen as his adversaries not just patriarchal 'sun-cults' but also adherents of female-centered religions. Consider his reference to worship of both the 'sun and the moon' in Deuteronomy 17.3-5. In pre-patriarchal cultures world-wide the moon had a strong positive association with the human female; it might be that certain of such cultures revered the sun as well, though most sun-cults were explicitly patriarchal. (This cultural-political ambiguity continues to be reflected in the fact that the various words for 'sun', in Indoeuropean languages, alternate between masculine and feminine gender [e.g. 'die Sonne', in German, but 'le Soleil' in French]. To the Sami of Scandinavian Lapland, who appear, like the Navajo, to have occupied a cultural mid-point in the transition from 'matristic' to 'patriarchal' social structures, the 'sun' was the all-powerful mother of creation.)
In any case, the Pentateuch would deal with the two groups of pagans in the same manner:
And if it is indeed true and certain that such an abomination has been committed..., then you shall bring out to your gates that man or woman who has committed that wicked thing, and shall stone to death that man or woman with stones. The sentiment expressed in this passage (with characteristic clumsiness but with the special clarity which seems to emerge with crude redundancy) is affirmed, we may presume, by Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike as the inerrant 'word of God'. It is hardly surprising that the killing of people for their so-called religious beliefs is usual practice in patriarchal community when overt ideological non-compliance is encountered. Murder and legally sanctioned genocide have been ubiquitous when and wherever these social and ideological aberrations have prevailed. It seems self-evident that this material could not have been produced by a culture at one with itself, unless it was, in actual fact, satire.
An empty vessel...
But there was another change in perception, which redounded to the benefit of the patriarch and his position at the center of the newly created 'family', namely the construal of its females members as empty, as objects without intrinsic content. The new system of privilege separated the human female from the richly variegated structures which comprised her natural conceptual milieu, and reduced her to the status of mere container, a solely artifactual representation of her procreative capability.
The effects of this conceptual transformation continue to be pervasive in patriarchal culture. They are seen tritely in linguistic derogants such as English old bag and German alte Schachtel. Male counterparts in the lexicon of English (or German), which might otherwise correspond structurally to these examples, carry no derogated meaning: e.g. young blade. The element old has become likewise pejorated in the advanced cultures of hegemony, which is an extra complicating factor in these examples. To promote its aggrandizing objectives -- and maintain its increasingly shaky grip on the collective imagination -- patriarchy must seek, like cigarette manufacturers and other drug pushers working against a widening public awareness, to attract the unknowing young.
It was not too long ago that young males tooled around town (looking for girls). Even though 'tool' can designate the 'male penis', the word is, to my knowledge, never pejorated when used in this sense. Artifacts associated with the male aspect are strikingly up-beat. An aura of carefree romance attends the despicable behavior of Brecht's Mackie Messer ('Mack the Knife'). When derogation of a specific male tool does occur, the referent is unsurprisingly often a woman: 'old battle-axe'.
The notion of the female person herself as artifact is deeply imbedded in patriarchal myth and fundamental to an understanding of the so-called 'family'. In her mere association with the patriarch, the creator or maker of the 'family', and as the mere recipient of the valuable male 'seed', the female acquired the mark of her belonging to the structure put together by the male creator. But this status was also the sign of her qualified redemption, or rescue, from polluted nature -- the concessional offering to the potentially dissident female.
The metaphor of metallurgy...
It was appropriate that metal-making would emerge in this setting. In no conceptual representation is the mythic nexus between creator, nature, and artifact more clearly evident than in the ancient patriarchal art of metallurgy. Indeed, the technology was likely the off-spring of the metaphor. This was a technology which re-produced, in its essential phases (and outputs), much of the imaginal detail and dualities of the new construction of experience: pure and refined were the valued products of the new art whose polished surfaces shone as mirrors to the radiant sun. Dull and dark, by contrast, was the polluted residue of this process and its complex sources in the natural materials of the earth. The metallurgist separated -- here we have what must be considered, in the mythic perspective, to be the quintessential male function(88) -- useful matter (Latin mater meaning 'mother') from its polluted nature through the fire of purification (which is itself a metaphoric representation of explosive male energy and virtue) to create the valuable artifactual rendering of nature, i.e. the pure metal. The mythic elements of patriarchy, assembled on the framework of ancient biology, were imbued with new purpose.
The cleansing power of fire...
The use of fire to cleanse, in a mythic-metaphoric sense, is itself ancient and no doubt pre-patriarchal. The ancient 'bonfire', in which the community got rid of the rubbish (i.e. the bones) of the old year, is a ritual of collective purification, i.e. a freeing of the community from a useless and encumbering past, which has deep roots in pagan culture. (It may be a 'bone-fire' of this sort which human society, and the human psyche, now desperately needs.)
However, emerging patriarchy would adopt the fire of purification for purposes peculiar to its own agenda. Having found direct application as a weapon-tool against the forest (in slash-and-burn), the fire of purification soon became the mythic center of the process which would produce tools for use against the earth in general. In patriarchal myth the fire of purification was assimilated by/to the godhead and became a powerful weapon against humankind itself (as well as the rest of nature). The relation of male to female, within the overarching context of the so-called family, is this technology and chemical process mythically transformed and socially reproduced.
But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner's fire... He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness (Malachi 3:23). The use of violence against nature is metaphorically sanctioned and made morally requisite. Note, by the way, that the act of creation bears an uncanny structural-conceptual resemblance to rape. Violence necessarily attends the transformation of polluted matter into a pure and thus valuable artifact. The LORD, as Creator, confronts a cowering and polluted nature, overwhelms it, ravishes it with fire, renders it fit.
The pure and the impure...
However, unlike her metaphoric antecedent, i.e. the metal ore which was allowed to achieve that ultimate transformed state of relatively lasting purity, the female person was never able to escape her polluted disposition -- it was her 'nature' after all. It was thus necessary and urgent that she undergo nearly continuous ritual cleansing.
Much nonsense has been written about the supposedly regenerative effects of female purification ritual. Viewed against the practical aims of the prehistoric patriarch, who must have been engaged in perpetual struggle to maintain hegemony (in the household and in the world), the repressive function and value of such repeated degradation of women is self-evident. In the Late Middle Ages, as Christian patriarchy sought frantically to extend its imperialist claims -- an especially mad time in the progress of a mad social pathology -- the creative metaphors of Deuteronomy found literal application in the killing of women at the stake, i.e. in the 'purification' of 'polluted nature' through fire.
Patriarchy based the concept of the female as unclean ostensibly on menstruation but extended this into many other areas and functions in human life, including the natural process of giving birth. The polluting effects from the birth of a boy child were not so long-lasting as from the birth of a girl, if the document we are examining is to be taken as a reliable indicator of the early patriarchal position on this issue (Leviticus 12.2,5). This was, in fact, the immediate textual basis for the insistence by many Christians, beginning in the Middle Ages, that Christ was a first-born child, though the Law of the Firstborn ("All that open the womb are Mine" in Exo 34:19) is almost certainly a late statement of a precept which is much older in patriarchal traditions.
(To the patriarchal mind-set, it was no insignificant matter that Mary had not previously undergone the polluting ordeal of giving natural birth. The ancient notion that the natural channels, through which new life emerges, are polluted and polluting, as is death [being 'natural' -- Num 5:2 and passim], gave rise to, among other things, the concept of the 'caesarian section'. It lies also at the root of the strange belief, adhered to by at least one Middle Eastern sect, that the Messiah will be born of a man [as the natural source and giver of life], an idea one would consider farcical, were it not for the fact that the historical stage, upon which this odd notion emerged, is so covered with blood.)
Nature rescued...
For the female person the only hope of redemption from polluting and polluted nature lay in her artifactual transformation. Owing to its origin in male conception, the artifact was clean and uncontaminated, qualities the early patriarchal consciousness must have readily assimilated to the polished edge of a jade axe, for example, or the shiny bronze or steel of a new knife which did, on the other hand, require regular polishing, if used, as did the female person herself.
In the context of early patriarchal agriculture -- the period which ensues with the fabrication of steel farm implements and the turning of the soil -- the human female had her primary artifactual reflex in the clean field, which male virtue had rescued, like the female person herself, from polluted nature. In the proto-mythology of patriarchal agriculture the clean field appears to have been the structural equivalent of the empty container. The clean field was, like the Garden of Eden, nature transformed, ready for use (but not yet contaminated by use). The clean field, virgin and un-entered, was the spiritual inspiration of the early patriarch as farmer. (In early patriarchal burial practice unused artifacts are seen gradually to replace natural objects as preferred grave goods.)
In the agricultural community the field was the main basis for patriarchal claims of ownership and wealth and, like all rescued nature, it posed the threat it might return to type. Like the patriarchal fields, tilled and tended with devotion, the human female had also to be watched and cultivated, lest she 'revert to nature'. Here the need of the burgeoning agricultural enterprise for large families played no small role in the important task of holding 'nature' at bay. Big families augmented the significant labor force required to keep the patriarchal fields from 'going back' while, at the same time, they kept women continuously pregnant and happily in need of 'purification', that important ritual hedge against the dreaded reversion.
Memories of old...
Return to nature struck terror in the patriarchal heart. What this reversion may have comprised is not hard to guess. Forms of polyandry, as expressed in the freedom of the desirous female to initiate sexual interaction with an assortment of partners, had probably been occasional (if not common) practice among many early European societies, a tradition which may have survived as a disturbing memory in the consciousness of the nervous (and often aging) patriarch.
Here again: is not the noise against it prima facie evidence of its erstwhile existence as the social 'norm' (or, at least, as a social alternative)? How else is the degraded image of the whore to be interpreted if not as castigation of a perceived tendency among the free women of a present (or older) time, a tendency to 'behave' in ways which were subversive of patriarchal claims to power?
The condemnation of the polyandrous female is not surely to be explained by the possible fact that she expected payment in compensation for sexual favors. Material exchange, as the basis for a sexual relationship, was hardly frowned on by patriarchal institutions then or since. It provides, indeed, the necessary basis for the marriage contract in many traditional patriarchal societies. At issue was not the female's exploitation of her own body, and its sexual and procreative capability, for material gain but rather the alarming likelihood that she too, on occasion, might exhibit preference for a wider assortment of discursive partners and thus bring to ruin her exclusive relation to the patriarch. At issue was her possible licentiousness! There was the dark fear that females, especially those attached to the patriarchal household, might seek again to exercise the discursive freedom which was once theirs but which now only the patriarch himself enjoyed (and continues to enjoy, as special privilege, in many cultures of the world).
The mythic origins of monoculture...
When the Lord spoke to Moses (Leviticus 19.19), he intoned against the planting of 'mixed seeds' in a single field. One's immediate response is merely to pass this over as yet another instance of the xenophobia which is ubiquitous in this document. It is, of course, that. But there is a more direct meaning less obscured by crude abstraction. This passage may well constitute the earliest written formulation of the environmentally disastrous concept of 'monoculture' as a prescriptive principle.
One is startled to find this pernicious modern practice laid out so explicitly, in an ancient Bronze Age text at that, and in language which is nearly disarming in its simplicity and straight-forward surface meaning (though the rule is stated inversely). Moreover, the ban on mixed seed and plant types in a single field is no mere recommendation to be treated lightly. Like other dictatorial pronouncements in this genre it is delivered with the expectation of full compliance.
Israel Shahak describes in amusing detail the elaborate subterfuge (ordained and instituted by the Talmud), which fundamentalist Jews must resort to, to create the 'appearance' of compliance with this difficult injunction (while violating its intent), the Lord being apparently quite gullible and easy to bamboozle:
Similar dispensations were issued by zionist rabbis in respect of the ban (based on Leviticus, 19:19) against sowing two different species of crop in the same field. Modern agronomy has however shown that in some cases (especially in growing fodder) mixed sowing is the most profitable. The rabbis invented a dispensation according to which one man sows the field lengthwise with one kind of seed, and later that day his comrade, who 'does not know' about the former, sows another kind of seed crosswise. However, this method was felt to be too wasteful of labor, and a better one was devised: one man makes a heap of one kind of seed in a public place and carefully covers it with a sack or piece of board. The second kind of seed is then put on top of the cover. Later, another man comes and exclaims, in front of witnesses, 'I need this sack (or board)' and removes it, so that the seeds mix 'naturally'. Finally, a third man comes along and is told, 'take this and sow the field,' which he proceeds to do.(89) Moreover, the instruction has extra force by reason of the fact that it occurs elsewhere in the Pentateuch.(90) Right-wing Christian purveyors of hate who have used these (and other) passages of so-called scripture to promote the exclusion of so-called Blacks and other people of so-called Color from so-called White community correctly understand the original xenophobic metaphors of this material, though they appear to ignore its more mundane surface meaning (a fact I find interesting, if somewhat puzzling).
However, other levels of metaphor become immediately apparent, and these relate directly to the topic previously broached. The ignorant identification, in the consciousness of the would-be patriarch, of 'seed' with the male ejaculate and, by apparent extension, with the male individual himself, is sufficiently in evidence in surviving texts, oral traditions, and linguistic reconstructions (PIE and Nostratic) for us to conclude that this meaning, though perhaps subtle to moderns, was quite clear to the contemporary mind. English seed, and numerous cognate forms in Indoeuropean and related languages, has been derived from PIE *se[i]-, meaning to 'cast' or 'scatter'. The concept of dispersal, ubiquitously associated in Indoeuropean (and pre-Indoeuropean) consciousness with the male individual, who appears to have been more inclined to 'stray from the nest', thus lies at the root of these modern reflexes. In the Authorized Version of the Pentateuch the word seed means 'male offspring' or 'male descendant'. The core meaning of the word field(91), its implication of nature as artifact combined with its assimilated connection to the female procreative capacity, would have been likewise obvious to the contemporary sensibility. The Lord's injunction had thus an area of applicability which extended beyond what was falsely considered, at that time (and ever since), to be merely good agriculture. It is self-evident that the Lord sought here to establish certain specific rules regulating the social conduct of the human female, her proper relation to the patriarch, her proper position in the patriarchal family, etc.
A lop-sided dispensation...
The Lord's rule makes clear (if only indirectly and, in fact, through omission: the crafty way dispensations of privilege are frequently disclosed in patriarchal law) that while a single seed type (i.e. a single male individual) may be employed to 'inseminate' several fields (i.e., a male may engage in intercourse with a wide assortment of females), the individual field (i.e. human female) may receive seed from only a single source. Although the male -- this is the unmarked part of the message -- may engage in sexual contacts with a multiplicity of partners, this quite ordinary dispensation is not available to the female (the articulated or marked part of the transmission). The overt language of the Lord's injunction conceals a precept, hardly less important for the fact that it is tacitly stated, which affirms the lop-sided monogamy which has characterized the mythically correct patriarchal family through its long tenure in human history and prehistory.
The myth of single cause...
But this understanding of the text hardly begins to do justice to the complexity of the imaginal structures which have pushed themselves, in this instance, into surface recognition. The immediate pettiness of much of this early material -- one can usefully make the connection here with the simple metaphors and language of modern advertizing -- easily obscures, for us, their probable impact on the contemporary mind and their power to transform culture. Mixed seeding, as a proscribed method of planting (as in all derogation the appreciated element is unmarked) was merely the trigger which fired simultaneously a number of assimilated connections (in part, already addressed). These comprised, in their totality, an even more inclusive message of the text, a message in which racism, male supremacy, and numerous other pathological manifestations of patriarchal myth came together and were rationalized. This was the concept of singular causation (within, of course, traditional patriarchal dispensations of value). Though other surface phenomena may be discredited, and dismissed, as the superstitions of a primitive band of pastoralists, this notion remains as a central organizing precept in the Western imagination, though its existence and origins are unexplored (if even recognized) by science and philosophy.
The main tenet (and error) of Western thought, that follows from the need to elevate the male to the position of the single giver of life (and the inspirational center of the 'family') is the notion that complex phenomena have simple causes, that worlds of variegated meaning arise from singular moments of creativity, that the human family and its various socio-cultural divisions and manifestations arise from biological sources which are somehow irreducible, that creation itself began in an extraordinary [[[burst] = [ejaculation]] of [male energy]]].
(The notion of the 'big bang', intended by astronomer Fred Hoyle originally as a joke, is only one of the more transparent expressions of this mythic proposition, for which astronomers seek evidence of its literal occurrence at the 'beginning of time'. The empirical outcome of this fantasy is by no means pre-ordained. It may turn out that 'bad myth', in this case too, makes 'bad science'.)
The notion that the so-called religions of the West are distinctive in their monotheism should be immediately discarded, not just because it falsifies the literal mythology of these belief systems but because that aspect of the doctrinal emphasis eclipses their more fundamental message: that is, the notion of monogenesis, the idea of an 'original created reality'. This is a notion the Big Three share with the sky-god religions of antiquity (and with the male science of more enlightened times). What these systems turn out to have in common clearly overwhelms all arguable differences. The idea that nature and all matter came into existence at some singular moment in the past turns out to be the philosophical precept which overrides much else in Western thought and culture.
We are mesmerized by a false analogy. We envision natural process as an improbable tree in which branches grow, at successive levels above the surface of the ground, into lofty and ever-increasing isolation from each other, an unlikely superstructure consisting of functionally independent elements which arise, to make an impossible metaphor even worse, from a 'root' which is the last word in simplicity and singularity: a trimmed affair which has no resemblance to the complex and encompassing lateral network which comprises the actual sub-surface structure of living plants. We see all history, art, politics, feeling, evolutionary process, disease, plus all other manifestations of human thought, action, feeling, experience as the continuous unfolding of complex structure from some primal cause, singular and remote!
Clearly we do not wish to suggest that simple events do not have effects which are manifold, various, complex. But what is construed as linear complication and development from simple cause is, more often than not, a falsification of reality created under the selective lens of the prevailing ideology which seeks out past images of pristine simplicity (and singularity) in order to project them on the increasingly restricting screen of the collective imagination, where they function as a set of pruned-down imperatives, irreducible in their paradigmatic simple-mindedness, a sort of ultimate goal constituted in the mythic convergence of male virtues. It is evident that this precept involves us conceptually in a feedback which can be most destructive.
The Christian concept of Paradise...
The new system of privilege introduced, probably for the first time in human conceptualization, the twin notions of an original beginning and an ultimate end.(92) The astonishing result of this new construction of time is that the future is not envisioned as a state evolving out of (and dependent upon) the present, which is complex, but rather as movement toward a mythic end-state, one which seeks obsessively to duplicate an original condition of primal simplicity. The future, inspired by the past, thus shapes (and diminishes) experience of the present.
It is likely that, in pre-patriarchal cultures of the forest, an encompassing present time provided the backdrop for all experience. So distinct was the experience of the present vis-a-vis what is, to the modern Western sensibility, the experience of the past, that events happening in the remote reaches of the latter were often visualized, by pre-patriarchal peoples, as occurring in some other time, in some temporal context wholly unrelated to (and non-continuous though sometimes running parallel with) the present, a present which was conceived, like the circle, as being self-contained, yet having the capacity for infinite accommodation of new and temporally remote experience.
I have, at other points in the development of the present thesis, appealed to vestiges of this ancient conception in modern languages and cultures. The Spanish spoken in Central America retains explicit devices by which the present encompasses moments in time which the English-speaking sensibility may regard simply as the 'past' or the 'future'. The word 'horita' (truncated form of Standard Spanish 'ahorita') means both a 'short time ago' and a 'short time hence'. Thus it answers the question 'When did you arrive?' ('Horita' meaning 'Twenty minutes ago'); as well as the question 'When are you leaving?' ('Horita' meaning 'In twenty minutes').
The invention of the future...
In marked expressions of the Western imagination, by contrast, the present becomes increasingly defined by factors external to itself. It enters into the service of something lying beyond its own conceptual reach. Formerly inclusive and fully encompassing, the present and all process becomes now dependent upon the 'future', a new creature of male virtue. The enduring and complex experience of present time, formerly vibrant with laterally extended meaning, becomes a mere means to re-create that primal male condition of simplicity, purity, and causal singularity as these were manifest in the original moment of creation.
It is as though the visual-spatial skills associated with focus and an understanding of trajectory, to which patriarchy seems to have become fanatically devoted, found new application in a construction of time in which the spatially defined target was the future, with the future becoming, in turn, actualized as a representation of the mythic past. The simplification of nature (in the gross forms of environmental and human degradation) becomes thus the consequence of a continuous striving toward (and re-enactment of) the simplicity and, above all, the purity of a mythic beginning.
And the degradation of the present...
It is not surprising therefore that, in Indoeuropean (and pre-Indoeuropean) patriarchy, the concept of the now is progressively derogated. Devalued (and ultimately by-passed) in the cultural imagination, the now, formerly the only basis for the conceptualization of experience, became eroded and eventually overwhelmed by the mythic concept of the then, which embodies both past and future, both original cause and goal. Western consciousness construes the present as a merely theoretical intersection, or boundary, between past time and the future, a mere point on a continuum which divides itself into two segments. The present, formerly infinitely expansive and inclusive, is reduced in the language of politicians (who wish to underscore the limited and ephemeral nature of personal and collective responsibility for present action) to 'this point in time'.
Unsurprisingly, the degradation of the enduring now has the consequence (this is its structural purpose so to speak) of appreciating and inflating further the worth and value of its mythic opposite. The artifactual Garden of Eden (of the mythic past) and the Moslem-Christian Paradise (of the mythic future) merge in that mysterious then: the conceptual-cultural repository of all value. Everything else -- all of earthly life including (especially) the complexities of present time and experience -- has diminished importance in late patriarchal myth, or so we are urged to believe. The behavior of the patriarch himself appears not to be constrained by these moral compunctions and considerations. On the contrary. While the rest of us are pondering the so-called future, and various then-states (which are inevitably out of reach), patriarchal acquisitiveness proceeds to exploit the resources of the earth as if the present were all that mattered. At its philosophical center, where one should expect to find concentrated its ethical meaning and moral purpose, patriarchy conceals a stupendous duplicity. It is sometimes said we offer our children no 'future'. The reality of this particular cultural tragedy is that our children, for whom we hypocritically profess 'concern' and 'feeling', have no present.
Meanwhile, patriarchal hegemony doesn't confine itself to remote and philosophically primal events, such as the Garden of Eden (or the Big Bang for that matter), in its obsessional effort to manufacture singular cause out of the material of prior collective experience. It takes in all of the past through a selective lens which progressively and systematically strips away lateral connectedness, and complexity, as it adjusts its focus to ever greater depths in time. To support its mythic vision and conceit, Western science scans the past for any evidence of simple causation and singular origin.
To be sure, in a purely empirical sense the search is fruitless. Try as it may, Western science seems never able to uncover that early stage (in biological evolution for example) which gives evidence of those simple beginnings from which all complex structure is supposed to have emerged. Where science expects to discover simple structure, it finds (more often than not) frustrating evidence of ever greater complexity. That simple beginning, so celebrated in patriarchal myth, seems forever to elude identification. Empirical reality fails to co-operate, it seems, with this central precept of the prevailing mythology. Moreover, the principle is kept alive by science writers, even when the practitioners of science themselves have become disaffected. (Time Magazine proclaims a philosophy of science so egregiously derived from the mythic precepts, upon which Western institutions rest, that the researchers themselves must cringe when reading its effusive and propagandistic accounts of their own research and progress.)
A futile quest...
While some astronomers appear still to cling to the mythic (read: ideological) precept of singular causation, high energy physics has long since laid to rest the Newtonian notion that matter is simple in its origins. The concept of the 'atom' as separate, original, irreducible, simple, singular in purpose and, like the male individual of Western Culture, only "...accidentally related to others whom it bumps into..." (in the charming summation of Evelyn Fox Keller), can probably be now immediately recognized, even by school children, for what it is: the obvious manipulation of scientific process and discourse by a self-serving political ideology.
On the other hand, in places far removed from the studies and laboratories of academia, and industry, ordinary unscientifically inclined people derive solace from fantasies of a simple alternative to their own supposedly complex existence. For, in the typical pattern of conceptual derogation, complexity, that natural expression of present time, is deliberately con-fused with 'arduousness'. Complex is forced into increasingly fixed alignment with difficult and acquires a distinct pejorated value (which has the pernicious effect of blocking the assimilation and understanding of natural process). That the undeniable difficulty of modern life has little to do with its alleged 'complexity' is suggested by the fact that its primary symptoms are emptiness, dissociation, powerlessness, the sense of uselessness, the pervasive feeling of the individual that his/her energy is being drained away: all consequences surely not of complex social relation, in the organism's life, but its lack.
In this false and distorted conceptualization complexity thus presents us with a seeming paradox. Perceived as 'bad', complexity is seen as arising from a condition of original simplicity and purity which is, in turn, perceived as 'good'... which brings us back to the hopeless conundrum posed by the biblical account of creation: despite His best effort (and alleged omnipotence), the Creator has managed to produce a world which is both 'complex' and burdened with 'sin'. The prevailing culture instills in us a false sense of natural process packaged in a derogated conception of the present. It inspires in us the need to re-create, again and again, the condition of original artifactual simplicity. The modern sentimental longing for a simpler time, which has become especially intense since the Industrial Revolution -- Biedermeier, William Morris, Arts and Crafts, back to the land, etc. -- stems in actual fact from a paucity of complexity (or 'connectedness') to nature and to other humans, not from too much, from deprivation not a surfeit of experience.
 We re-visit thus a striking characteristic of the colonization of the cultural imagination. A structural element, widely perceived as socially and environmentally deleterious, becomes dissociated from the phenomena which are literally adjacent to its occurrence, through the blaming of the very structure which was/is its victim. Complexity is a casualty of the progress of the disease, not its cause. (Historically nature, i.e. first woman [Pandora or Eve respectively], is victim not culprit.) Thus, an alien pattern is imposed on the conceptualization of experience which short-circuits cause and effect (and present time) and attempts to build solutions to vexing problems of the day out of the same material which brought them into being. This is the destructive feed-back which seems, to us now, to be so clearly depicted in those early representations of the traditional circle: a dragon devours its tail. Beginning consumes the end. (See image at left.)
The urban fantasy of isolation...
The need to escape a supposedly complex present reality (which is, in fact, a cruel simplification of experience, structurally analogous to incarceration in prisons) resurrects, intensifies, and distorts material adjacent to an earlier cultural event. Urban humanity, already deprived, in its present alienated circumstances, of complex relation, attempts to fill the conceptual-experiential void with fantasies of further isolation!
Consider, for example, the typically American image of the isolated 'cabin in the wilderness', and similar symbolic structures derived from mythic simplifications of the literal past(93) which have soothed the imagination of a desperate urban population for who knows how long? Male 'bonding' mechanisms and institutions (the 'deer shack', for example, which is nearly obsessional among many American males of the Upper Great Lakes), even the image of the seasonal vacation 'retreat,' conjured and nourished by economically advancing yet sensually deprived city dwellers (engaged in an atavistic search for their own personal 'petit trianon'), or the isolated perfection embodied in the image of the nuclear family, ensconced in socially and environmentally disconnected (and disconnecting) suburbia: these all rise as tired manifestations of this same mythic distortion. Even the 'wilderness experience', much sought after by sophisticated and environmentally sensitive city-dwellers, tends often to be a fantasy constructed from this mythic falsification of experience. To meet their needs, the United States Department of Agriculture 'manages' wilderness, i.e., it turns 'wild nature' into human artifact.
The complexity of a present painful time is exchanged for a future dream which is modeled on the simplicity and purity of an original condition. The dream arises from the diseased organism's genuine need to re-connect with nature, but the attempt to correct this defect, ubiquitously acknowledged as such, is nevertheless destined to fail. For it draws its inspiration from a false representation of the problem. Solutions to environmental disconnection, degradation, and social disorder would be freely forthcoming if their sources in the failed mythology of our culture could be recognized.
To alleviate its symptoms of pain, and to bring order to an anomic present, an alienated humanity mines the past for reassuring images of simple causation and singular purpose. As in ancient metallurgy, this material is refined and purified, stripped of its polluted lateral connectedness, brought into an appropriately linear form which can serve as the inspiration for goal-oriented process and a patriarchal vision of the future. In the new conception of time, the past and the future (the former continuously re-processed to conform to the structural imperatives of the latter) manage eventually to squeeze out of existence the enduring present which was, and still is, the sole basis for the conceptualization of experience. In advanced patriarchy result obliterates process.
The source of it all...
A trivial news item recently caught my attention which nevertheless wonderfully captures the practical meaning, for wide segments of modern, disconnected America, of this 'mining' and 're-processing' of the past. We discover that a famed American astronaut is able to 'trace his ancestry back' to an individual who lived 375 plus years ago, to a male person who happens to have been one of the original signatories of the Mayflower Compact.(94) Given the ease and confidence, with which these words tumble from the tongues and lips of amateur genealogists, and from the media reporters who give their comments distribution (and sanction), one naturally takes for granted that there exists some hard evidence to back up such a remarkable claim as this one.
A moment's reflection, however, reveals that the whole proposition is on quite shaky ground. Even if one assumes that the genealogical work was done 'correctly', and that a signatory of the Mayflower charter (i.e., a member of that small band of bigoted individuals who fled the growing liberalism -- and religious tolerance -- first of England, then of Holland) was indeed among the astronaut's biological antecedents, the claim that his (or anybody's) ancestry can be 'traced back' through twelve-to-eighteen-plus generations to a single individual is almost meaningless if not entirely nonsensical. It does, however, show the power of patriarchal myth to shape our imagination of the past and to distort our view of natural structure.
As individuals we are, of course, the unique results of stupendously large numbers of discursive relationships (between other likewise unique individuals) which were entered into in the past, forming a massive cross-generational network which, from our individual vantage point, widens, and becomes laterally more complex (and resistant to study) as we move our attention back in time. So complex is the widening structure of our personal family diagram, as we direct our gaze back in time (and forward, from the vantage point of some early single antecedent), and so large the exponentially increasing numbers of its membership, that we quickly lose the ability to track the detail in this vast and unwieldy structure. At each generational remove from the present, our parentage doubles its numbers (two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc.), so that, at distances greater than a few generations into the past, structures begin to arise whose complexity frustrates the most determined record keeping, even when siblings are ignored and the examination confines itself to direct parental lineage. (In the actual and preferred construction, the genealogy is patrilineal [and thus simple],(95) but other social factors such as wealth, prominence, or political pre-eminence can force the recognition of female 'lines' which would be otherwise ignored, especially when these point forward [or back] to illustrious males. A case in point is the famous Wedgwood genealogy which, as often visualized, is understandably side-tracked to include the naturalist Charles Darwin whose mother was Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah. This family connection was reinforced by reason of Darwin's own marriage to Emma, his first cousin and granddaughter of the patriarch.
In general, however, side-branching involving females [and other socially degraded elements] is stripped away, the representation becoming thus streamlined in accordance with the mythic delineation of descent along an exclusively male line.)
Certainly at a time depth of three-hundred-and-seventy-seven (377) years it is no longer meaningful to talk about being a direct descendant of anybody. If we assume that these three-and-three-quarters (3 3/4) centuries constitute fifteen (15) to eighteen (18) generations -- at twenty (20) years per generation we are rushing things a bit, but the reader probably gets our point -- then the American astronaut in question must count not only that original dauntless Mayflower voyager among his early seventeenth century antecedents but upwards of one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand (130,000) others as well (2 to the 17th power -- mostly English men and women who preferred to stay at home despite the inconvenience of the developing liberalism and perceived leniency of the political and intellectual climate), each of whom has precisely the same position, and should have the same importance, in the astronaut's family lineage as that early American 'puritan'.
Now, if we move from this original complex parentage forward to the present time, the astronaut's biological connectedness to the rest of humanity challenges the imagination. It may well include much of the population of present-day England (and is likely expanding as you read this paragraph), while his laterally extended biology in the New World alone -- his blood relationship, so to speak, on the American continent -- is probably quite extensive too (even though it is traceable, supposedly, only to that single seventeenth [17th] century individual and [presumably] his wife, who was not mentioned in media accounts).
One's actual genealogy is astounding in its rapidly encompassing nature operating, through succeeding generations, across the boundaries of variously differentiating cultural and economic categories and conventions, and so-called 'race', to assimilate and preserve, as biological structure at least, that mixture and complexity of constituency which the system of privilege denies at the level of social reality. Is not one's true genealogy -- conceptualized not as lineage but as lateral extension with all its propensity for multiplication of diversity and complex biological amalgamation -- the more suitable image and inspiration for a humanity victimized at the present time by cultural simplification, reduction, and personal isolation?(96)
Let's stay with the topic a moment longer. One's biological lineage, as conventionally reconstructed, tends to throw all attention, focus, and value back on some individual in the distant past who, like the creator of patriarchal myth, was somehow the 'source of it all'. Although the desired effect of a genealogical research project is to strengthen appearance of an illustrious connection (where often little is apparent on the surface) and thus shore perhaps a shaky individual (or family) ego, the genealogizing descendant manages instead to create a formal structure for contemplating his-or-her own relative insignificance. The primary emphasis, after all, is not normally on the so-called descendant him-or-herself but (in a typical case) on a single noteworthy predecessor, if such can be discovered in the bewildering network which constitutes one's actual biological foreparentage.
The very notion of descent attaches high value to the predecessor -- his status, accomplishments, intelligence, character, sometimes even his notoriety. Otherwise the genealogical undertaking (typically) fails its purpose, which is to exhibit the lowly 'descendant' as the reflected image -- as merely the reflected image, one should say -- of that high personage of the past. For we are dealing here with a central modeling principle of the system of privilege, the purpose of which is to create (and interminably re-create) the conceptual structures which allow us to see ourselves (and others) not as primary living and sentient beings, laterally connected to the real world of present experience, but as the mere reflection of some glorious moment in the so-called past. But is this the solitary effect of such a mode of conceptualization? to diminish the value of the present generation (in its own eyes) and thus inflate the image of the so-called forefather?
Regretfully not. A selective process is at work, in most of these seemingly innocent exercises, which unfortunately reproduces metaphorically the social reality toward which the system strives in actual fact, thus giving sanction to these processes. As we have already suggested, genealogical reconstruction typically proceeds by (1) ignoring most of the so-called descendant's actual complex foreparentage and (2) choosing instead, when possible, some individual (usually male) antecedent, or assortment of antecedents, whom the descendant and/or family tradition have deemed worthy (by reason often of their success in the amassing of wealth, power, and/or worldly acclaim) of isolation and veneration, and (3) beginning the actual work of the genealogy with that (or those) individual(s) from the past and working forward toward the present. This is the curious reversal of vantage point which comes about in response to the mythic need to show 'simple' events as 'underlying' the emergence of complex surface phenomena (and as ennobling of these descendant structures). The very act of reversal trims away the worst of the lateral complication which otherwise clings to the genealogical material like encrusted debris, hampering the work of reconstruction, preventing a 'clean' tracing and view of the so-called descendant's so-called lineage. |
It was, at root, a metaphoric representation, visually manifest and akin (mytho-conceptually) to the triangular 'triskelion' in its various forms. The latter was of probably earlier cultural date. Whatever the precise chronology, it is likely that the 'swastika' (and related graphic representations) experienced 'symbolic' application in ancient times as in modern. See images at left. (Jung's mistake, by the way, was that he argued from the narrow ground of 'symbol' not 'metaphor'.) 