History of Feminine Principle - Misogyny
“Who is in charge of the social and religious construction of reality?” Elizabeth Dodson Gray asks in Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap.
On time a friend asked, "What happened to the Feminine Principle?" And my response was how long do you have? I will start exploring this topic because of that question asked by Elizabeth Dodson Gray in her book, Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap and by the serendipitous discovery of the book, In Search of the Lost Feminine, by Craig S. Barnes.
The question Elizabeth asked was, “Who Controls the Myth System? What she discovered in writing about Patriarchy is that historically, men were “always in control of the myth system. Male attitudes, rules and values were embedded in the first written stories. Gray feels that “Even in matrilineal societies where descent is counted through women, it is still men who controlled the myth system.” A corollary today would be, “Who controls the Narrative?”
Craig Barnes presents a compelling explanation of this question and illuminates the ramifications of this Patriarchal myth legacy today. Here is the Introductory statement from his book. It is a compelling read.
‘For thirty-five hundred years the story of Western civilization has been told with a political slant that worked for the cause of the victors of the great Trojan War of 1220 BCE. For all this time we in the West have been told that the suppression of women, the heroics of War, and the neglect of female ecstasy are natural and inevitable, the givens of history. We have viewed our condition through the lens of those norms that served one victorious culture but destroyed another, and we have been encouraged to believe that the older culture never even existed. For all this time we have shortchanged human nature, exalted our weakness, and disparaged our deepest instincts toward peace-making and reconciliation, toward nurturing and the cycles of the seasons. We have been on a course that resented the instinct toward moderation and maturation, has suppressed the “civil” in “civilization,” and elevated the mighty or the brutal as if it were some inexorable, bestial instinct that could not be resisted. For all this time we have therefore, tragically, at the cost of millions of lives and millennia of unbearable pain, denied an inward knowing of decency and compassion and persecuted an inner divine, as if these decencies were not included in the genetic code, and as if militarism, monarchy, misogyny and hierarchy were included within the genetic code. Through all this denial, however, again and again throughout the same long evolution of time, like a root fire or a flame that would not die, there was an inward knowing--a gnosis, an inimitable hope, an inner feminine--that repeatedly flared up to illuminate and shine light into the patriarchal world. Each time it did so, the flame revealed aspects of human nature that the heroic patriarchal story did not reveal. ( Craig S. Barnes, In Search of the Lost Feminine, p. 1)
The beginning of narrative power and control started with the development of writing. (3000 BCE) The second wave of how Patriarchal attitudes, rules and values, in particular, misogyny, became entrenched in Western culture is through the written stories and poems of Hesiod and Homer in the Greek culture.(1200 BCE) The third wave of controlling cultural myth and narrative came through the stories and narrative of the Biblical patriarchs.(900-1000 BCE)
Authors and historians, Maria Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, and Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, believe that writing was invented by women in the Minoan, matrilineal culture (around 1500 BCE) and then was weaponized against women to subordinate them in Western Culture that followed!
In 3000 BCE, the Sumerians of Egypt’s Fertile Crescent, created the first form of writing.
In Sumerian culture Craig Barnes asserts, there were “rich pictoral remnants that show women in a respectful light. Sumer was a pacifistic , matrilineal/matrifocal culture. The most important divine representative in this culture was named Inannna. “Her consort Dumuzi was a lesser god whose only function seems to have been to serve patiently as her husband and die each winter so Inanna could resurrect him in the spring.” Resonate with other stories you know? Note the relationship between the Masculine and Feminine Principles at this time!
Wisdom and authority emanate from many female figures at this time. The first distinct literary voice that can be identified in the Sumerian record belongs to the woman author, Enheduana. (Barnes, p 47.) Leonard Schlain in his book, The Alphabet vs the Goddess, states “The Sumerians took the first step in a a process that would reconfigure all human relations. By gouging tiny wedge-shaped marks with sharp sticks into wet clay tablets, they invented the first written language. Beginning in 3001 B.C. the first cuneiform figures appeared. (p. 46.)
The point here is that written language, created by women, was usurped by the masculine principle throughout history and weaponized to subordinate women in all cultures that followed! (Remember how difficult it has been for women to become educated throughout history?)
For this post, I want to focus on the first two significant points in history when (1) misogyny was first presented in the written narrative, myth and story of Patriarchy and (2) where it became entrenched. These are two of three particularly significant historical time periods for understanding what happened to the Feminine Principle in history.
Five centuries after Sumer’s founding, a northern people, the AIkkadians conquered Sumer. “It was during the Akkadian assimilation of Sumerian culture that cuneiform became a supple language and written documents began to proliferate.” (pg. 47) “The Sumerians believed that cuneiform was a gift from Nisaba,, the goddess of grain and storage...After the conquest of Sumer, with the changeover from a pictorial script to a more abstract, sequential one, the Minoan creator was usurped by Nabu, the Akkadian god of writing” (pg. 47) It appears that the beginning of a patriarchal culture controlling the narrative began in 3001 B.C.!
We will return to this historical story of what happened to the Feminine Principle in posts to come but if you are interested in more details about this particular subject, I highly recommend, The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, by Leonard Schlain.
Fast forward now to 1500 BC and the Minoan civilization in the Aegean Sea, the of matrilineal/matrifocal culture where patriarchal culture became entrenched. From 1200 B,C., the decline of that culture, to 800 BC the rise of Greek culture, a monumental change took place, “one from which we have not yet fully recovered.” p. 4, in Barnes. It was at this point that the misogynist myths and stories from the Iliad by Homer and the Odyssey by Hesiod were written. The extolling of them over the centuries as “great literature," has served to entrench patriarchal myths and rules and its concominant misogyny in Western culture.
“There were, of course, extensive Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian myths that had accumulated in the two millennia before the rise of Greece, but these Middle Eastern sources have remained outside the bedrock of Western lore, beyond the immediate study of most Western schoolchildren, and of less significance to the shape of modern values. By contrast, twenty-eight hundred years after Greek tales were written, American schoolchildren were stiil reading translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, just as did children in fifth-century classical Athens.” (p. 4 In Search of the Lost Feminine.)
These stories were the beginning of “political myth-making” or to use a modern day word, propaganda. “Scholarship, since that time has settled into a comfort zone with it’s time-honored patriarchal conclusions…” and prejudices. “The suppression of those Minoans seems to have become a permanent theme, in the thinking of the European world.” (pg. 12)
Matrilineal/matrifocal (feminine principle) values and ideas were buried by the Greek repetition of misogynistic patriarchal stories. The Greeks controlled the narrative!
On a personal note, I visited the Heraklion Museum on Crete followed by a visit to the National Museum of Greece in Athens. There was a startling visual difference between the two. The first distinctly represented a feminine principle culture and the second distinctly portrayed a masculine principle culture!
As I walked into the one in Crete I was met by an overall feeling of softness. There were no weapons visible, all round pots with artistic designs portraying birds, plants, octopi, seashells and other things of nature. There were representations of women and children and the only representation of a weapon was a double edged Labyris which resembled a butterfly and was used in rituals, not war.
In contrast walking into the Museum in Athens one was confronted by of many weapons and accoutrements of war along with nude male warriors sculptured in stone, and statues of Greek gods and goddesses. It had a much more aggressive feel to it. Pots were decorated with the stories of Hesiod and Homer. This was one of my more memorable lessons in recognizing the archetypal Feminine and Masculine energies in cultures!
We will return for an look at some of these earlier feminine principle cultures in future posts.