CHAPTER 10 The patriarchal religion of the rulers – An instrument of force
From the content:
– This is how Gods were invented and Myths were made
– The earliest patriarchal myths of Sumer:
– The 1st King of the Conquerors justifies his rule
– Patriarchal Myths Against Matriarchal Cult
– The Dogmatic Myth of ›Divine‹ Kingship
– The Profane Myths of Gods
– as an Image of the Earthly Autocrat Ruler
– The Each-Other-Rivaling Myths about the ›Primal Gods‹
– Absurd Myths of Pregnant Male Gods and Male Giving Birth
– The Repulsive Myths of Male Giving Birth
– The Cunning Myth of Creation Through the Word
– The Tactically Clever Myth of ›Eternal Life in the Hereafter‹
– The Myth of the Wisdom of the Dynastic Religion:
– »A Mess Without Equal. «
– The Indo-European and the Aryan Priestly Caste System
– The Eastern Myths as the Basis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
– The Presumptuous Myth of the Male as the Image of God and of Male Superiority
– The Patriarchal Myths dominating Christianity
– ›Ama-gi‹ – the scream for freedom
This is how Gods were invented and Myths were made
»During this time, the new world of gods arose
whose hierarchical structure reflected the social order of that time. «
(Siegfried Giedion)
From the time when the Greeks had taken over the state power in Egypt, dates the myth of how the heaven of the gods was adapted to the new power. It is about the new creation of the Greek god ›Sarapis‹. According to the myth, Ptolemy I (367 to 238) is said to have brought his cultic image from the Black Sea to Alexandria. He »was clever enough to create a supreme imperial god in Sarapis with the help of an Egyptian and a Greek theologian, who could be recognized and accepted by both parts of his state, the Egyptians, and the Greeks… Hymns of praise tell of his miraculous power, as master of the universe he meets the world empire ideas of the Ptolemies, and it is he who, among others with Isis, prepared the way to the Occident for the Egyptian deities. « (Brunner and Brunner 1984, p. 143 f) This kind of inventing new gods was the way the godmakers followed from the beginning.
The British Orientalist A. H. Sayce (1846–1933), who compared the Egyptian solar religion with the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian, noted a striking correspondence of the sun gods and the divine attributes in these cultures, stressing that the solar cult was not the original religion of the indigenous Mesopotamian population; what the Scottish Theologian, Orientalist and Old Testament researcher W. Robertson Smith (1846–1894) confirms: »The official system of the Babylonian and Assyrian religion, as we know it from priestly texts and public inscriptions, has clear characteristics that it is anything but an exposition of the traditional folk-belief. It is artificially developed by priesthood and state authority in the same way as the official religion of ancient Egypt, this means: It is an artificial combination of elements borrowed from a number of local cults for governmental purposes. Most likely, the true religion of the popular masses was far simpler than the official system.« (Smith 1899, p. 10) Exactly the same is true for Egypt.
Only that this fact is concealed by the Egyptologists. For example, the Egyptologists Hellmut and Emma Brunner, in collaboration with the art historian and Islamist Johanna Zick-Nissen, write: »Religion is the deepest expression of a people. That is why it breaks up when it has to give up its religion, or it transforms with it into another people. Egypt is the classic example of this. It has changed its religion twice in the course of its 5000-year history: from Pharaonic to Christian Coptic and then to Islam. Copticism and Islam coexist to this day, albeit to varying degrees. « (1984 )
The authors conceal the fact that the Pharaonic religion was not the earliest religion in Egypt, but ›artificially developed by priesthood and state authority‹ as in Mesopotamia and that indigenous Egypt was ruined by the new rule and the new religion. What made the ancient Religion, the veneration of the Mother-Goddess, dating from Paleolithic time ›far simpler‹ is that it was not invented to justify political machinations. It is the spiritual implementation of human experience, the honor of the life-giving woman.
»Religion always reflects the earthly reality. When male priests reinterpret with elaborate stories the ancient beliefs they eliminate the Goddess and struggle for a new interpretation of the world. « (Gerda Weiler)
The earliest patriarchal myths of Sumer:
Etana, the 1st King of the Conquerors justifies his rule
Whether in Mesopotamia, in ancient Egypt or in ancient Europe the first male deities and the earliest patriarchal myths date back to the Bronze Age. The art historian Siegfried Giedion observed: that »in the 4th millennium the intense and artistically incredibly attractive abstractions of early ceramics are completely filled with concepts of prehistory. They represent the symbolic world of the Magdalenian, to which they are much closer than to the anthropomorphic [and male dominated] myth about a millennium later. Only in the third millennium, male divinity and patriarchal myths appear on the seal cylinders for the first time. « (Giedion 1964, p. 76)
The Sumerian myth ›Etana‹ was invented in the time after the invasion of the Indo-European pastoral nomads from the north. As in Egypt, the chief of the conquerors made himself forcibly king of the subjugated matriarchal people of Mesopotamia. Innana/Ishtar, the Goddess of love and fertility, according to the patriarchal myth, is said to have independently appointed Etana to be the king of Kish. This is thus to justify, sanctify and confirm his seizure of power by the supreme authority of the Goddess. The myth is preserved in constantly modified versions and in fragments from different epochs and can be reconstructed somehow like this:
An eagle lived on a tree and a snake lived in the roots of the tree. Serpent and eagle lived harmoniously in the tree of life. One day, the bird got a bad idea and decided, along with his young ones, to guzzle the snake’s eggs. The serpent thought of revenge and hid inside a dead animal. When the eagle settled down to devour the carcass, she straightened up in front of him, attacked him, and threw him into a deep hole, where he lay miserably.
The next fragment tells:
Etana was made king by the Goddess (later by the gods), but he does not know how to secure his succession because he cannot have children. He goes to the pit where the eagle has slowly vegetated since the snake’s revenge. The king proposes a bargain for him, saying: I set you free and heal you well when you take me to heaven, to the Goddess of fertility. The eagle agrees. At the end of his journey, Etana meets the Goddess. After she has listened to his story, she hands him a bowl with the life-potion of the herbage for being able to give birth, with which he can secure his succession.
»Behind the myth hides an important historical event, which must be taken into account«, explains Italian archaeologist Gabriele Rossi Osmida, who has discovered stamp seals with the important eagle snake motif in the Karakum deserts of Turkmenistan. »It is a transition from a typical matriarchal culture, characteristic of the Stone Age, the Neolithic, the time of pure agriculture, to another era: The time of fire and of metal, and the time of the supremacy of the male. We see the typical symbol of fertility, represented by the divine primal mother who represents procreation. Etana tries to wrest from matriarchy the secret of life. He goes to the Great Goddess of Life in Heaven to find the means to create a new culture based on a patriarchal system that replaces the previous matriarchy. From then on, the power belongs to the male and in the future it will pass from the father to the son. « (From the film ›Karakum‹ by Marc Jablonsky)
The myth with the classic eagle-snake battle motive was first handed down on stamp seals and only in the 2nd millennium by cuneiform writing. It was also known in Iran’s Elam and in Central Asia and, as we know from amulets, stamp seals and cylinder seals, it dates back to the early Bronze Age. The motif is widespread in Indo-European mythology.
As in Egypt, the male rulers want to be able to conceive and give birth themselves; they demand the feminine power of creation, ›the secret of life‹, the wondrous herb that is unique to women. A woman never appears in the myth. Etana is concerned with the appropriation of the creative capacity of the serpent, representing the Goddess whose children he had eaten out of jealousy; a metaphor for the murder of patriarchal conquerors on the ›children of the Goddess‹.
»Instead of facing reality, they cling to myths and ideologies that seek to turn their paternal insignificance into the opposite and attribute an over-dimensioned importance to it. « (Christa Mulack)
Patriarchal Myths Against Matriarchal Cult
Female and male scholars observed, even if myths are hardly congruous with chronology and often distorted, they always have a realistic background. »If some myths seem confusing at first sight, it’s because the mythmaker accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted a sacred image or a dramatic rite. Examples of this can be found in every religious literature that marks the end of a radical reform of the old faith.« (Ranke-Graves 1986, p. 18 f)
With patriarchal myths, their inventors tried to contrast their own version with the cult of the Great Goddess. But »the much-debated question of the relationship between myth and cult is clearly to answer that the cult goes back to much earlier times than myth. Long before myths and conceptions of the gods arose, there was a cult, ritual acts of individuals or a community in which the religious attitude found visible expression. « (Müller-Karpe 1976, p. 277) This cult was valid for the worship of the Great Goddess. The religious attitude of the matriarchal period was expressed in a deep belief in the forces of nature, a great respect for all living beings and respect for women and their creative potential.
In Egypt in the time of the martial colonization, the ›Unification‹, and the Thinite-Period (1st+2nd dynasty) allusions to mythical-ideas lack entirely. On pictures, and in the accompanying texts, »nothing speaks here for the existence of myths.« (Müller -Karpe 1976, p. 30) The warlike time had left the rulers and their priesthood no leisure for the invention of legends. It is only after the consolidation of their power when they had time to create myths to palliate and justify their presence in Egypt and the male gods they brought with them. The subtle exploration of myths made by Siegfried Schott show: »Myths do not seem to have accompanied the historic process of founding the empire and the associated constitution of the kingship that ruled over the whole Nile valley. Rather, according to Schott, the first conception of distinct myths belongs to the time of the cultural and political upswing of the kingdom in the Third Dynasty under Djoser. « (Müller-Karpe 1976, p. 329) Fekri A. Hassan confirms:
»The Egyptian kingship would not have been possible without the distortion of the matriarchal conceptions and without the creation of new patriarchal doctrines, myths, and rituals. The introduction of the new religious system and the establishment and development of the power of the ›divine‹ kingship and the legitimacy of the claim to male power rest on this basis. In the process of shifting from the worship of the Goddess to the theory of the doctrine of the divine kings, the sacred powers of the female deities were absorbed by male leaders. These mythological changes were an essential part of the emergence of the Egyptian state and not just the consequence of economic and political developments. « (Hassan 1992, pp. 307–321)
This is a remarkably open and surprisingly truthful account of the events that contributed to the creation of the pharaonic kingdom. Fekri Hassan’s statement confirms what historian Pedro Barcelo says about the relationship between religion and patriarchal politics:
»Religion needs state power for its enforcement
and a state needs religion for its legitimation. «
»In Egypt the boundaries between cult and theology are blurring, but also between religion and what we would call politics today. As far as we can make a distinction between temple and state in Ancient Egypt, we see that both support one another. The Egyptian myths can be interpreted as an attempt to support the authority of the pharaoh. Certain changes in religious beliefs can undoubtedly be traced back to the beginning of a new dynasty or the shifting of power from one part of the country to another.« (Ions 1982, p. l5)
The Dogmatic Myth of ›Divine‹ Kingship
»The concept of the divine kingship is perhaps the single most distinctive
trait of ancient Egyptian civilization«, writes Michael A. Hoffman
Addicted to power, honor and fame, until today rulers courtship the devotees from the beginning of patriarchy with their megalomaniac claim of patriarchal divinity. The prehistorian Michael Hoffman says about divine royalty: »The ideological adhesive kept together the early state. There is substantial evidence that the early state evolved from a prehistoric predecessor. It can hardly be questioned how important divine royalty is to the process by which Egypt passed from prehistory to history. Nevertheless, there are a number of important disputes about the origin of divine kingship in Egypt as well as its possible institutional descendants among the tribal states of modern sub-Saharan Africa. One of the most persuasive arguments about the origins of Egyptian kingship was raised by the noted Egyptologist and Orientalist Henry Frankfort, who proposed in his book ›Kingship and the Gods‹ that many elements in ancient Egyptian culture could be traced to an ›African substratum‹. Particularly enticing has been the long-noted association of many seemingly Egyptian customs and ceremonial regalia with the institution of sub-Saharan African kingship. « (Hoffman 1979, p. 257) But, Neolithic African Kingship was Matriarchal – obviously, it was a Queenship and and did not claim to divinity. When we examine the characteristics of this ›higher‹ culture of patriarchal ›divine‹ kingship we find that it is without exception the cultural achievements of the matriarchal period that are attributed to the dynastic time. But it does exist, the outstanding innovation of this sort of ›High Cultures‹, and that is catastrophic. It is the production and use of weapons, violence and war; the consolidation and institutionalization as a military entity. Faraway of being divine, instead of ›High Culture‹, it should have to be called ›war culture‹, if it can even be called ›culture‹.
What a megalomania for a king to claim to have superhuman abilities, to be endowed with a higher, unearthly power, to be infallible and just. This is delusion of grandeur in pure culture. Egyptologists have never noticed this disdainfulness and have not questioned this male hubris; most of them turned the screw even further to glorify them. No one has asked what effects these men’s (male) mindsets »between normality and mental illness« (Erich Fromm) had had on their rule over the people. Egyptologists seem to overlook the catastrophic consequences that the apotheosis of the rulers had for the indigenous people.
»The man (male), basically, is the desire to be God. «
(Jean-Paul Sartre)
»The belief that the king was the earthly incarnation of the supreme deity, a channel of communication between the divine and human spheres, and the unifying force that held Egypt together, without whom chaos would ensue. Such an ideology obviously suited the system of government since it ensured strong support for the status quo and made any return to the political fragmentation of the Predynastic period unthinkable.« (Wilkinson 1999, p. xiv) But fragmentation and chaos arose as a result of the colonization and wars against the indigenous population. By inventing myths, the priesthoods of the various centers propagated and spread the power claim of the ›chief‹-conquerors as ›divine‹ kings. As we heard from Christian Nazi Hellmut Brunner: »The King as the Son of God is in charge of the proper implementation of the cult, as well as the adequate supply of the people, for a just jurisdiction, such as the ›extension of the borders.« A camouflage. The truth is, in worship, the kings paid homage to themselves, the people were not adequately cared for, arbitrariness and oppression prevailed instead of rightful jurisdiction, and the borders were ›extended‹ by brutal wars, not in the name and for the better of the people. There is no trace of ›divine‹ or human virtues not in the Egyptian kings nor in the Führer. The aim of their ›religious‹ efforts was to secure convenience and affluence in this world and the corresponding continuation in the next. »The fantastically rich material of tomb findings shows the desire of the Egyptians [i.e. the kings and his court sycophants DW] to continue to possess furthermore their earthly goods and valuables after death. The deified [upper-class] dead man, who, according to some texts, even becomes master of the whole universe, has much greater demands in the hereafter than in life.« (Kakosy 1989, p. 95)
»The longer I study religion, the more convinced I am
that the man never worshiped anything but himself. «
(Richard Francis Burton)
The Profane Myths of Gods
as an Image of the Earthly Autocrat Ruler
The new rulers took a measure of themselves and created male gods at their own likeness. In their self-overestimation, they usurped to be gods themselves, these gods were adapted to the man’s image endowed with the most primitive and crude features of the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. »The male deities are gods of human, respectively male imagination: creatures of the male mind and male violence. Therefore, they also appear armed in their depictions. Their shape develops out of the domination-claims of the early kings, who soon made themselves gods. « (Uhlig 1995, p. 264) The religious scientist Hans Bonnet confirmed, »the anthropomorphic conception of God led to a ruler and king’s ideal … Of their god-being, only one leadership remains, which, like the earthly, does not exclude, but includes arbitrariness and violence and any human weakness« (Bonnet 1971, p. 221).
The clan chiefs of the various dominion areas of Lower, Middle, and Upper Egypt called themselves ›god-kings‹, ›living Horus‹, ›bodily son of God‹ or ›son of Re‹. They built temples for their own glory, sacrificing for their own persons and seeing themselves as the same beings as their gods. The same is known of the later Persian great kings, of Alexander and the Roman emperors. They all used their ›god kingship‹ as political power. Their idea of themselves and of God was that of an invincible supernatural being and an unbeatable, almighty Superman. Each of the ›chiefs‹ of the various conqueror clans who had settled in the thriving Neolithic settlements of Egypt had their own chief god, whom they let create by the priesthood.
»Theology is ultimately political. The way human communities deify the transcendent and determine the categories of good and evil have more to do with the power dynamics of the social systems which create the theologies than with the spontaneous revelation of truth.« (Sheila Collins)
In Upper Egyptian Nekhen the horite clan of the blacksmiths was in power; their totem was the hawk, called Hor (greek Horus). In Esna, the ›creator god‹ Khnum emerged, who already formed the people from clay like the later God of the Old Testament. In Lower Egypt, the priests of the clan who immigrated to Heliopolis, placed the sun at the center of worship. They claimed that the gods were born here and that their gods were primal gods and creators of the world. In the mid-Egyptian Hermopolis an ›Eightness‹ of four pairs of fathers and mothers of the sun god were invented. In Memphis, it was a father god, with the astonishing Indo-European sounding name Ptah (Pater/Father). He was a relative of the Indo-European Dyaus Pitar, who was declared the father and lord of all gods. In Thebes the Asian Amon / Amun / Amen was worshiped.
The various clans were in constant conflict with each other and fought for their own supremacy. To do this, they used massive propaganda in the form of constantly new myths to manipulate the people for their political ends and convince them of the divinity of the kings.
The Each-Other-Rivaling Myths about the ›Primal Gods‹
Like Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (1846–1933), Sumerologist Stephen H. Langdon (1876–1937) found »such striking similarities between the important religious beliefs of the Sumerians and Egyptians« that it seemed necessary »to accept a connection of any sort between them. « There were no Egyptian ›primordial gods‹; the utopia of a male god was developed by the conquerors. Langdon emphasizes that the Egyptian religion was clearly related to the Sumerian and not to Semitic origins. In 1921 Langdon wrote: »Nevertheless, for the moment the problem of racial kinship or cultural influences between prehistoric Egypt and Sumer must be left undecided. But these things exist and cannot be explained away. « (JEA 1921, p. 134 f) In Egypt, »the introduction of the sun-cult as a state religion is so striking that it cannot be argued about its fixing to the beginning of the fifth dynasty« (UGAÄ 1964, p. 15). This cult was »definitely patriarchal, and was always strained, though by no means always successful, to eradicate and cover up the old matriarchal, female-emphasized lunar religion. « (Neumann 1974, p. 209)
It was important to the myth creating priests that no woman would disturb the male omnipotence-mania; it was the beginning of the ongoing fight against the woman. Erich Neumann stated:
»Only that the masculine without the feminine cannot exist,
has prevented the otherwise so popular extermination
of the ›evil‹ human group. «
Westendorf speaks of the expansion of power of the sun god and a significant shift in the heavyweight: »This sun god strives to be as independent as possible from his female complement, which conceives him, gives birth to him and rejuvenates him. The heavenly Goddesses, the former mothers of the sun god, are demoted to his daughters; not they created him, he created them. « (ZÄS 1974, pp. 136-139)
The sun god Re/Ra is related to the Babylonian Ria. His late appearance in Egypt is striking for a ›primeval god‹, his origin is ›unknown‹ to Egyptologists. For them, »the etymology of the name Re is uncertain« (Barta LÄ, V, p. 156 f). But the name King and Re are fundamentally related and interchangeable. The king is Re, and Re stands for the king, which does not look any different in the European ›god kingdom‹. Perhaps the origin and etymology of the Re/Ra can be explained by some Indo-European designations for ›king‹: lat. Rex, ital. Re, French Roi, Celtic Ri/Rig, Sanskrit Ra, ancient Iranian raja (royal, highly exalted). Ra is the Aryan god par excellence. The origin of the god Amun, one of the most important Egyptian sun gods, is also ›highly controversial‹ among Egyptologists (Otto LÄ, I, p. 237). However, he too is originally a god of nomadizing Central Asian shepherds by the name of Amur.
»The pharaonic Egyptians were of Asian origin,
and necessarily they brought their religious ideas
with them from their eastern homeland. « (A. H. Sayce)
E. A. Wallis Budge pointed out that Indo-European, Greek, and Roman authors failed to prove the absolute identity they sought between the religion of the Aryans and the official Egyptian religion. On the other hand, the Egyptologists did not recognize thoroughly enough the difference between the pre-dynastic and Asian parts of the Egyptian religion. Budge stated in 1904 that »Egyptologists had not thoroughly realized the distinction which exists between the primitive or predynastic element in the Egyptian Religion and the Asiatic element. This element was of a solar character undoubtedly, and was introduced into Egypt by the ›Followers of Horus‹, or the ›Blacksmiths‹, who invaded the country, and conquered the natives, and settling down there, built up the great dynastic civilization which we call Egyptian. « (1904/1969, I, p. xii) Over time, a syncretism (mixture) of the original and the Asiatic religion arose. Since the beginning of dynastic Egypt, ›folk religion‹ and official sun cult existed side by side. Rosalie David reports: »At all times, the solar cult was distant from the ordinary people’s daily lives; they had no relation to it, above all the solar cult remained a royal and state cult.« And T. G. H. James stated: »The complicated theologies developed at places like Heliopolis and Hermopolis, which undoubtedly existed in a lesser degree at most of the cult-centers, were the fabrication of priests, kept exclusive, and made unapproachable for ordinary folk. High Theology at Heliopolis and Thebes affected the conception of the kingship, but the subtle myths of creation and the behavior of the gods could have had little appeal to most people. « (James 1989, p. 132) Its quite understandable, a nation that had spent millennia drawing its religion from reality, trusting its own eyes and mind, was critical about the strange fantasies of new gods and their quirky affectation. These people could hardly be convinced that the gods of the conquerors should be more venerable than their Great Mother.
The priests who invented the gods, attested that they originated from themselves ›at the beginning of primeval time‹ and that they generated new life as ›father and mother‹. Wolfhart Westendorf recognized the tricky thinking of the priests and stated that this conception of an androgynous creator god was historically not the initial awareness of God, but rather the product of speculation. « (ZÄS 1974, p. 136-139) Westendorf confirms what happened back then. The tendency to take one, of a number of gods, to the forefront as the primal creator-god, inevitably caused to endow this ONE divinity with qualities, it originally did not possess.
»The All-Mother is older than the All-Father, Ishtar and Isis were
the universal Mother long before any sky-god or tribal male deity
had evolved into universal fatherhood. « (Robert Briffault 1959, p. 377)
Erik Hornung denied the Great Goddess and argued, that the ›primordial god‹ is »a consequent designation for the oldest god, who even without the feminine assistance calls the first godhood into being. « Characteristic of the Egyptian idea of God is therefore, »the seemingly paradoxical statement that God created the gods« (1983, p. 139 f). His colleague, the patriarchal religious believer Hellmut Brunner, supports this idea alike: »The creation of the world is the act of a primeval god, who can bear different names: Re, Atum, Amun, Ptah, but also others. « (Brunner 1989, p. 48) But ›primeval beginning‹ and ›primordial gods‹ and the to them attributed ›world creation‹, as Westendorf explained, are »›products of speculative thinking‹. Somewhat simply constructed, is the idea of the ›primeval god‹, who hovering above the water as a ›great chattering bird‹ »He has dropped the first egg, from which the first god originated« (Brunner 1989, p. 50). As a Chinese proverb says:
»A rooster cannot lay eggs. «
Even the claim that the omnipotent Amen (Amon/Amin/Amun) is said to have created himself without a mother from a primal egg in his body, is bewildering. No matter how absurd the represented myths were, concocted in Egypt by the various rivaling priests‘ schools, they all have one goal: to legitimize their power by their gods and to project them back to the ›primeval beginning‹. From their respective main god, they claimed, ›He has always been there‹. But in all efforts of the then and present theologians to attribute a primeval-beginning to the gods, it is obvious that they are not primeval male gods, but only gods, who made a new beginning. Wolfhart Westendorf writes about this (LÄ, VI, P. 870): »Even secondary creator gods, above all the sun god, who is himself a creature of the primeval, claim for themselves the primordial god qualities, for the greatness and rank of a god are measured according to his relation to the origin. «
The Absurd Myths of Pregnant Male Gods and Male Giving Birth
The creative ability to conceive and give birth was, as the oldest myths show, the greatest desire of the patriarchal Indo-European/Aryan Priests. »In fact, the takeover of the female power to give life seems to have been the hallmark of the earliest gods. « (Barbara G. Walker) »Ethnological studies have shown that women’s ability to conceive has always been viewed with a mixture of wonder and fear, one of the reasons for the misogyny, even the ›gynophobia‹ that can be found in all developed societies«. writes French historian and poet Jean Markale (1987, p. 16 f)
All patriarchal religions have since endeavored to solve in one way or another the insuperable problem of giving birth, a gift that only the envied women have.
The pregnant God Osiris in the tomb of Tutankhamun
Pictorial representations should support the written myths. Ptah was considered ›male-female‹; to him is assigned the pregnant female body, the ›primeval hill‹. He, like Osiris, is portrayed in this way in the ›chamber of reincarnation‹ in the tomb of Tutankhamun and on the stone sculptures of Bubastis (Tell-Basta) with the decent hint of a pregnancy common in Egypt.
The ›pregnant‹ god Ptah. Picture in Bubastis
(El-Sawi: Excavations at Bubastis (Tell-Basta), Report of Season 1979)
Atum was seen as a male, »but since he contained everything, male and female, he represented a great He-She« (Fekri Hassan). Literally, it says in the Proverb 80 of the coffin texts, Atum gave birth to Shu and Tefnut, (mesj – giving birth), what is translated as ›brought forth‹, ›generated‹. As illustrated, some gods are imagined being pregnant. The Egyptian ›reformer‹ Akhenaten was presented without a penis, but with a pregnant woman’s body; ultimate expression of a bloated male ego.
»No matter how impossible it would have appeared,
men apparently wanted to sustain the idea that a man
could give birth at any cost. « (Barbara G. Walker)
To promote the importance of fatherhood, which was completely ignored in the matriarchy, some cultures invented the custom of the ›Couvade‹, in which, after birth, the father lies down with the newborn baby and gets cared for and fed by the women, as if he would have given birth to the child. »The function of the Couvade is to establish social paternity by symbolically equating the father with the mother. « (Malinowski, quoted by Bettelheim 1975, p. 148) The man wants to distract from the significance of the woman, writes Bettelheim. However, »he only copies the insignificant externalities and not the essentials, which he just cannot imitate. Such an aping of superficialities emphasizes all the more how much the real, essential powers are being envied. Women who are emotionally satisfied because they have given birth, and are assured in their ability of life-generating, can agree to the Couvade; men need it to fill the emotional vacuum created by their inability to give birth to children« (Bettelheim 1975, p. 149).
The Repulsive Myths of Male Giving Birth
Since the myths of pregnant gods also met with skepticism, further efforts were made to propagate male creative ability. And because even gods lack female organs, the priests were forced to invent their own way of creation and childbirth: Amun asserts: »Manifold are the figures as they have ›come forth‹ from my mouth. « Re married with his Hand and ›gave birth‹ out of his penis; Amen took the phallus in his fist, ate his sperm and ›produced‹ the sibling pair Shu and Tefnut. Thus, gods ›give birth‹ to the creatures through the mouth and nose, through the penis, the eyes, through excretion, vomiting, spitting, coughing, through onanism, self-copulation, sperm, saliva, tears, and blood. The macabre and unappetizing myths that tell of it must have occurred to the Egyptians, if they even heard about them at all, as gigantic antics that might have aroused ridicule rather than reverence.
Adolf Erman, who devoted a chapter to the divine saga reports disgustedly about jokes, dirty jokes, and such detailed and disgusting descriptions that he prefers to omit them (Erman 1934, p. 83). Nevertheless, he introduces us to one of these stories. Thoth, »the son of the two gentlemen (!), who came forth from the vertex«, was the product of a rape of Seth by the ithyphallic god Min. Erman, who made the myth public, saw »that the presupposition of such a legend form a conception of pederasty, as the humiliation of the defeated enemy must be a sign of his total submission…. The most extreme of these, by the way, is the corresponding view in the magical coffin text of the Heracleopolitan period, where the speaker asserts that ›Ra has no power over me, for it is me, who takes away his air. Atum has no power over me because I carry out the coitus with his butt‹« (Kees ZÄS, 1925, p. 1).
Erman believed that the sagas had been adapted to the »inclination of the lower people«, who enjoy pleasure in other things, than the ones of higher standing circles. (!) But Erman is wrong; these obscenities were not invented by the people, but by the priestly casts as part of the royal religious myths, and these vulgar stories were not part of folk-belief, which Erman confirms too: »Of all that the Egyptian god-scholars have concocted, in fact just a little, has penetrated the people. « (Erman 1934, p. 88)
In addition, Plutarch rejected many passages of the dynastic teachings as too obnoxious, after which one would have to cleanse the mouth and spit. To call this an »elucidation of consciousness« (W. Wolf 1977, p. 65) is one possibility – to call it an expression of barbarism and perversion would be closer to the facts. This view also represents Gerda Weiler, she writes: »The images of ›birth-giving gods‹ are perverse. Neither Atum, the Egyptian god of Heliopolis, nor the Memphite god Ptah, nor Aton, the god of Akhenaten, nor the Greek Zeus is believable as a father giving birth. The images of birth cannot be appropriated for male conceptions of creation. « (Weiler 1993, p. 161) Birth envy makes this man to be real ›mother and father‹ … a presumptuousness!
The Cunning Myth of Creation Through the Word
The hot desire of the early kings to refer to gods who can naturally conceive and give birth was a difficult task for the mythologists, for it is evident to all that the creation of new life was reserved for women and nature. Unlike in Egypt, where priests invented many unappetizing ›profane-sensual‹ myths to eliminate women from the creative process, the mythologists in Sumer searched for another, more ›spiritual‹, solution to the problem. They invented the creation myth through the word. Marduk, whom we have already met in Enuma Elish as the murderer of the Mother Goddess, ascends to the main god through a cryptic test:
»They put a garment in their midst; to Marduk their firstborn, they said, ›Verily, O Lord, your fate is higher than that of the other gods. Command to destroy and restore – and it will happen! By the word of your mouth let the garment be destroyed; command again, and let the garment become whole again! He ordered with his mouth, and the garment was destroyed. Again, he commanded, and the garment was completely again. When the gods, his fathers, recognized the power of his word, they exulted and paid homage to him, saying, Marduk is king. « (Heidel, quoted by Fromm)
»The significance of this test is to show that man has overcome his inability to natural creativity – an ability that only the earth and women have – through a new kind of creativeness, that of the word (or thought), Marduk, who can create something in his own way, has overcome the natural superiority of the mother and can, therefore, take her place.« (Fromm 1974, p. 146) Walter Beltz comments: »The God, who has no notable past because he is a young god of conquerors, gets a heroic past. The sacred story replaces the necessary proof of power. « (Walter Beltz)
The inventors of the biblical God imbibe Marduk’s invention: He created the world by the word: »If he speaks, it will happen, if he commands, it will be there. « (Psalm 33: 9) »The biblical myth begins where the Babylonian Mythos of Marduk ends. The supremacy of a male god has been established, and scarcely a trace has remained of the earlier matriarchal stage. Marduk’s ›Exam‹ has become the main theme of the biblical creation story. God creates the world through his word; the woman and her creative powers are no longer necessary. Even the natural course that the woman gives birth to men is reversed. Eve is created out of Adam’s rib.« (Fromm 1991, p. 156) »The biblical myth is a chant of triumph over the vanquished woman; it denies that the woman gives birth to the man and reverses the natural relations to the opposite.« (Fromm 1974, p. 127) The myth of creation through the word is one of the most cunning inventions to deny the creative power of woman, and at the same time, it is »the most unnatural fantasy imaginable, denying all experience, all reality, all natural conditionality« (Fromm 1994, p. 91).
»How was it possible«, writes Lucie Stapenhorst, »that, against all reason and against all appearances, men accepted this Creator God, who creates life through his Word. There is only one answer: By force, this doctrine was hammered into their brains until they no longer dared to think otherwise. Since then, it is a special merit in Christianity to believe the most unnatural doctrines. The more paradoxical the message, the more meritorious is the act of faith; In other words, as thinking skills diminish, faith grows. « (Stapenhorst 1993, p. 11)
»Not the gods created the humans but humans created the gods. « (Homer)
It is understandable that the »priests of the male gods almost lunged on the idea of being able to create through the word because it avoided the difficult problem of how a being who was not capable of birth-giving, nevertheless, could create. Therefore, the logos became an important set piece of any patriarchal religion. One reason for the male enthusiasm for the teaching of the Logos was that this doctrine provided a method of creation to the male deities, which was formerly the exclusive prerogative of life-giving Goddesses. « (Angus, cited by Walker 1993, p, P. 149). In addition to creation through the Logos, the gods and their deeds became more and more abstract concepts.
Many Egyptologists admire Akhenaten, who was the first to »take the grandiose step towards an abstract concept of God. « Unfortunately, however, the people could »not yet comprehend the fullness of the numinous«, regret Brunner and Brunner (1984, p. 8). It was the abstract conceptions of gods that made it possible for mythologists to create a heaven of gods without the concrete-creative feminine and to liberate their gods from earthly reality through a fictitious creative force of thinking. This abstraction is called ›spiritual, immaterial, intellectual, substantial, transcendent, hidden, mystical, mysterious, unbelievable‹, which is why the monotheistic book-religions are called by their representatives ›high‹-religions. It is suggested that, because they are written, they are ›higher‹, wiser, more divine, more spiritual, and so forth, than the ›profane‹ religion of nature or folk-religion, which they have devalued.
»Patriarchy changed everything. The ›true‹ belief in the One God was accompanied by the inescapable obligation to impose it on other people. « (Rosalind Miles)
The representatives of the patriarchal religions and their believers have to be measured by the deeds, not by the words: but their deeds are frightening: violent, anti-scientific, intolerant against the followers of other ›high-religions‹, and all are extremely misogynist. There is no trace of ›high‹ and certainly no ›fullness of the numinous‹.
»That is the secret of propaganda; to saturate completely with
the ideas of propaganda the one whom propaganda wants to seize,
without his even realizing that he is being saturated. « (Joseph Goebbels)
Priests were and still are mythologists, myth inventors and propagators of myths. Any patriarchal beliefs, whether Sumerian, Babylonian, Iranian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, European, Celtic, Nordic, Jewish, Christian or Muslim, employ brainwashing while using myths as proof of the sole truth and superiority of their beliefs and violence for the enforcement of these conceptions.
Iran, the land of the Aryans, demonstrates in February 2009 how the Patriarchate has always cared for its flock and asserted itself: in the future Muslims who fall away from the prescribed faith and ›convert to a different religion‹, should mandatorily be punished with death. Hitherto, so far, it was at the discretion of the judge whether the death penalty was imposed or not; therewith, this freedom of case law should be limited. We can imagine the introduction of the pharaonic solar religion in Egypt exactly this way: with violence and bloodshed. You cannot believe that? But you can know it, remember that in Europe millions of ›witches‹ were persecuted, tortured and burned alive because they did not want to belong to the monotheistic Christian faith and remained faithful to the belief of their ancestors, who venerated the Goddess. The last ›witch‹, Anna Göldin, was executed in Glarus only in 1782. That’s barely ten generations ago since our ancestors were tortured and murdered by a female-despising sect called Christianity, who likes to praise its threatening message as ›charity‹. How could it be that we, the great-grandchildren of these victims, then joined forces with the murderers, adopted their misogynist faith, serving them submissively and believingly, kissing their hands and kneeling before them? With men who concede women no rights or dignity, but only the ›lower ranked services‹. How could it come to this? Because our ancestors (mainly women) had no choice after the witch murders if they did not want to suffer humiliation, rejection from family and community, and persecution by fanatical ›orthodox‹. Our ancestors were frightened with sadistic threats of punishment, eternal hellfire, torture and death until they could not think anymore for themselves. And we are forcibly converted after centuries of brainwashing and do not even notice it anymore. We have been shut off from matriarchal knowledge. Self-reliant, independently thinking women are a thorn in the flesh of patriarchal men.
Until a few decades ago, our lives were the same as those of Muslim women today. But worst of all, muslim women are persecuted, tortured and raped by the Taliban, like the medieval inquisitors of Europe, a womenless, neurotic, uncivilized, blind furiously, ›believing‹ male horde who are terrorizing the world.
The Tactically Clever Myth of ›Eternal Life in the Hereafter‹
After all the trouble that Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian priests had in mastering the problem of birth giving male, they had yet another nut to crack. What could one oppose to the belief in a rebirth in this world, which only is possible with the belief in a Goddess who guaranteed a rebirth, and women of childbearing potential? What should a form of after-death, independent of women, look like? Therefore, they hatched the idea of a physical resurrection and a life after death. The working out of concrete concepts was the work of the priesthood of Egypt, an extremely skillful move to get out of the great embarrassment of meeting the king’s utopian desire for immortality and eternal life. But the ideas for an eternal afterlife in company of their gods, was not very fanciful. The privilege of an eternal afterlife was initially confined to the king and they just wished to live in pomp and luxury eternally. All possible means and measures were now taken for their ›eternal life‹ in the hereafter. An elaborate mummification should preserve their bodies. In addition, the so mummified ruler received lush nutriment for the way, weapons, jewelry and luxury articles, magic protective amulets, incantation-formulas, death books, and for the personal service and for the pastime the murdered women of the harem, servants, and animals. The indigenous Egyptians could hardly imagine that instead of being born again of a woman’s body, life after death should go on forever. And with their lamentable lives under the pharaohs, they had no desire to prolong it in the hereafter. ›Not to be born is the best‹, they moaned, for which reason ›eternal life‹ was not at all attractive to them; this is also borne out by the reports of the suicides, which for many people represented a salvation from the threatening and suffered torments in this world. Over the millennia, the afterlife speculation of eternal life after death has become an integral, indeed most significant, component of patriarchal religions.
The Myth of the Wisdom of the Dynastic Religion:
»A Mess Without Equal. «
An unbelievable amount of publications is concerned with giving the Egyptian religion a particularly spiritualized, wise, pious, and, in comparison to the ›primitive‹ popular religion of the indigenous peoples, an orderly, more advanced, higher profile. The religious historian Edwin O. James writes that in the jumble of religions that characterized Western Asia in the third and second millennium, the Sumerian world creation theory, as well as the Egyptian religion, lacked any spirituality. Alan Gardiner calls them quite disrespectful: » a vast accumulation of mythological rubbish. « And Emery notes that throughout Egyptian history, the theologians failed to form a pantheon, that would not have been full of inconsistencies. »This chaos«, writes Erman, »later never came to an ordering; indeed, in the three millennia which the Egyptian religion still lived after the writing of the pyramid texts, it only got worse.« (Erman (1923/1984, p. 297) Even Herodotus reports that he was reluctant to deal with the Egyptian gods-cult (Herodotus 2, 65). Gaston Maspero, who had studied the religious texts thoroughly, wrote: »I had to admit that they did not contain the wisdom that others had seen in them. « (Quoted by Bernal 1992, p. 390) This statement is confirmed by Erman: »The drabbest part of the Egyptian religion is the interpretations and fantasies to which priests have submitted their faith. They always have done it with predilection, and the call of profound wisdom, in which the Egyptians have been standing up to our day, is primarily based on this kind of science.« (Erman 1934, p. 88 f) »Modern investigators of the Egyptian religion read into the texts ideas and meanings which were and are, wholly foreign to the African mind«, writes Briffault (1959, p. 353). Today, however, the embellishing of the ›great Egyptian religion‹ is once again celebrating some happy times for some authors. Understandable, because the patriarchy still attaches great importance to this ›mythological rubbish‹, which is supposed to support and perpetuate their ›Until now-and-Ever-Valid-Myths‹ and the myth of divine and male superiority.
Die Religion der ägyptischen Eroberer, die von der sie begleitenden arischen Priesterkaste erfunden wurde, war eine perfekte Kopie des patriarchalen Königtums. Mit einem obersten Chef, der Gesetze, Verbote und Strafen erliess, den die Menschen zu ehren und zu lieben hatten, dem sie Opfer bringen mussten, beispielsweise durch das Töten unerwünschter Personen, die zu Feinden erklärt, getötet wurden. Diese Morde wurden religiös geschöntund als Opfer für ihren Gott oder ihre Götter überhöht ausgegeben, deklariert, Die Menschen waren den Priestern, ihren Göttern und ihren menschenfeindlichen Gesetzen hilflos ausgeliefert, wurden von ihnen ihnen ständig überwacht, reglementiert und kontrolliert und mit der Drohung eines Totengerichts und ewiger Höllenqualen in einem fiktiven Jenseits terrorisiert.
»The five major belief systems: Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism,
Christianity and Islam, each insisting in their own way on the natural inferiority of women, and demanded their submission to a system of
values that promoted the natural superiority of the male«. (R. Miles)
The Indo-European and the Aryan Priestly Caste System
Since the first assaults of the Indo-Europeans and wherever they appeared, »the picture of a group of aggressive warriors escorted by a high-ranking priestly caste of Iranian Aryans emerges, who as the first, broke into the respective countries and conquered them in order to dominate the local population« (Stone 1988, p. 104). The Indo-Germanist Polomé stated: »The presence of a priest class is decisive for the typological characterization of Indo-European society.« (JIES 1985, p. 26). Eduard Meyer also emphasizes this fact: »Of crucial importance«, he writes, »is that a fully developed professional priesthood was formed among the Aryans.« (1909, p. 824)
The Aryan priests who accompanied the conquerors »were no different from the civil servants, nor were they spiritual leaders of the people« (Sauneron LdÄK 1960, p. 202). »To become a priest, a man did not need a special vocation or religious grace. His job was that of an administrator, a custodian of temple goods, lands, and revenues. « (Watterson 1984, p. 38 f) Anyone could become a priest who was willing to make certain sacrifices, such as to be circumcised, for at least once they should bleed like a woman, and skirts they still wear today. Another condition was to stay away from the ›unclean‹ women during the time of service and not to have sexual intercourse: The most important quality was ›purity‹ (which means asexuality), not a priesthood talent. Even here begins, what is demanded from the Catholic clergy until today, is to avoid ›impure‹ woman. Each priest received part of the temple income and oblations; Priests did not have to pay taxes or do heavy physical work (Watterson 1984, p. 38 f). Temples were ›Big Business‹.
»Religion is the most ingenious and lucrative business idea
ever developed by humans.« (Roland Berger)
Religion, power and greed have been closely linked ever since patriarchal religions have existed. Wolfgang Helck stated: »Greed was one of the motivations to become a priest because the proceeds from the sacrifice-donations were a great incentive to do priestly service. The struggles of local priests leading to manslaughter for the occupation of unfilled vacancies of workplaces, and for the allotments of their sacrifice-shares, show the decline.« (Helck LÄ, IV, p. 1092) The priestly caste, which provided the tyrannical rulers with psychic and physical terror against the people, was a vainglorious self-contained elite class that was proven to be responsible, inter alia, for »numerous acts of violence and document-falsifications.« Nevertheless, »they should not be evaluated exclusively as brutal tyrants or as cunning intriguers«, teaches us Günther Roeder (1915/1978, p. XIV).
Not only the king, but the clergy also achieved extraordinary power. The lands of the god Amun of Thebes included nearly a tenth of Egypt with 86,000 people, 400,000 cattle, 87 ships, 433 gardens, 46 workshops and 56 villages. This possession, stolen from the people, was a means of power which the clergy had to defend doggedly against different kinds of envious opponents, against those, who were displaced from their possessions in times of turmoil, against soldiers and foreigners, and even against their respective neighboring temples. However, after every temporary impoverishment, a God-fearing man made use of his connections and restored with cunning and patience the possession of his God« (Montet 1975, p. 121).
Alan Gardiner reports that although the pharaonic elite of Egypt was credited by the Greeks with the reputation of philosophical wisdom, no one ever has pursued material interests, with more definiteness than they did (1988, p. 4). »What these kings prayed for was not character and impeccable life; they craved for material goods. « (Breasted 1954, p. 254)
The Eastern Myths as the Basis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
»Egyptians who embraced Christianity found the moral system of the old cult and that of the new Christian religion, were so similar, and the promises of resurrection and immortality in each so much alike, that they transferred their allegiance from Osiris to Jesus of Nazareth without difficulty. Moreover, Isis and the child Horus were straightway identified with MARY THE VIRGIN and her son, and in the apocryphal literature of the first few centuries which followed the evangelization of Egypt, several of the legends about ISIS and her sorrowful wanderings were made to center round the Mother of Christ. Certain of the attributes of the sister goddesses of Isis were also ascribed to her, and, like the goddess Neith of Sais, she was declared to possess perpetual virginity. Certain of the Egyptian Christian Fathers gave to the Virgin the title ›Theotokos‹ or ›Mother of God‹, forgetting, apparently, that this was an exact translation of neter mut, a very old and common title of Isis. (Budge 1904/69, p. Xv f)
The Sumerian, Iranian and ancient Egyptian myths of the patriarchal conquerors have their continuation in the monotheistic religions. The Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer points out that the Sumerian religion, not only the Egyptian but all later religions of the Middle East including the Hebrew, the Greek, the Hittite, the Christian and the Muslim has deeply influenced up to today’s time. The American writer Gore Vidal, a reviewer of social ills and imbalances, and political arbitrariness, expressed it this way: »The great unspeakable evil in the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three misanthropic religions have developed: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are heaven-god-religions. They are literally patriarchal – God is the Almighty Father – and therefore women in the lands plagued by the sky god and his earthly masculine representatives are despised for 2000 years.« (Gore Vidal)
»Monotheism is not just a religion among others – it’s a power proportion. Every idea of One God is based on hierarchical thinking, categories such as precedence and superiority. The One God is ›more‹ and ›higher‹ than all other gods. And his followers are superior to all unbelievers … For the first time, orthodoxy, blind faith, and persecution practices emerged with the sole representative claim to truth. All adversaries of the born-again zealots had to be destroyed mercilessly. As it is said in the covenant of the Jews with Yahweh: ›Whoever does not seek the Lord and God of Israel, shall perish by the sword, whether small, great, man or woman‹. « (Miles 1995, p. 96)
The Presumptuous Myth of the Male
as the Image of God and of Male Superiority
First, the male created gods at their image and then they boast of their God-likeness! Around the middle of the third millennium, the Egyptian king calls himself the ›Son of God‹ and proclaims his ›God-similarity‹. The hubris of the ›god-kings‹, the delusion about male superiority, gradually seeped through epidemically, from the priests and kings to the women-despising Greeks and to the little macho of our day. »From Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Weininger to the modern male, there is a conceited hubris of men versus women, for men would be the God-preferred sex. Men formulate law and order; they claim that male interests must be universal and representative for all humanity. The feminine is considered a secondary principle, and the woman is forced into the role of a servant of the male. « (Weiler 1995, p. 234)
The great tyrants today are imitated by innumerable little tyrants. Ultimately, men – religiously sanctioned – can feel superior to all women. The myth of the superiority of man falls on fertile ground worldwide, indeed is the subject of countless tracts and inexhaustible discussions in which the man constantly has to prove himself, that he is really superior to all other creatures, above all to women.
»The crippling prejudices against the intellectual faculties of women, which even the stupidest man still presumed, seemed barely touched by the passage of time.« (Miles 1995, 142f) Dale Spender put it this way: »Men of all ages, especially those who aspire to profile themselves in one area, think that they have the right to humiliate and reprimand every woman, regardless of her age or status.« (Spretnak 2003, p. 100) The ethnologist K. E. Mueller, in view of the atrocities committed by males all over the world, claims the virtually nonsensical:
»The men occupy the leading position in the world.
Their physique, their superior spirituality, their purity
and moral discipline predestine them. The gods themselves
have ordered them to their representatives and administrators
down here; the existing order corresponds to their creative intentions. «
(Klaus E. Mueller, *1935)
The psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg counters this with the mirror: »The entire history of mankind is filled with this eternal self-adulation of the male and his effort to keep the woman in a status of the submission.« (Zilboorg 1979, p. 209) And Erich Fromm stated: »The essential feature of the man’s vanity is the boasting about what a ›guy‹ he is … a consequence of the man’s insecurity towards the woman and his fear of ridiculousness is his potential hatred against her.« (Fromm 1994 p. 121) Women were deprived of her soul and they were declared to sub humans: »For, the woman is not the image of God, while solely the man is the image of God.« This haughty statement of holy Augustine is one of the many religious arguments that permits men to perpetrate any kind of worst crime against women. The list would fill entire libraries. What is the reason for this war, this hatred, for insisting on superiority? »Behind it is the ancient envy of men against the opposite sex. « (E. Erikson) Therefore, the patriarchal man hates the woman and humbles her to make himself feel important, tall, superior, and self-confident.
The Myth of the Insignificance of the Woman in the Bible:
Sara, queen, tribal mother and wife of Abraham
Abraham is the ancestor of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But who was his wife? This example should be added here because it still plays an essential role as a reversal of the facts in patriarchal religions. The term ‚Saracen‘ for Arabs was common in the Middle Ages especially for the opponents of the Crusaders. The interesting thing is that the Greek ›sara-cenoi‹ and the Latinized ›sara-ceni‹ refer to people who come from the Sara lineage. From the Legend of the Jews, we learn that Sara stood higher than her husband Abraham, a shepherd who came from Ur. Abraham owed his wealth, his flocks and his position as a tribal leader to his wife Sara (Ginzberg 1909). The princess Sarah (Zara) was a Hittite and belonged, like Abraham, to the Indo-Europeans. She was the heiress to the throne, the tsarina who had made her half-brother Abraham, prince by marriage. Similarly, Mohammed owed his reputation and fortune to his first wife Khadijah.
Sara is the feminine form of the Indo-European and also known in Egypt name Sar/Ser/Tsar and means Czarina/Tsarina, Princess, Queen. »From the (Jewish) legends, though not so much from the creation story, it is clear that she was a Chaldean, i. e. a Sumerian princess who gave Abraham a position by marrying him. That she was the more important person, is hinted at in the Old Testament, and perfectly clarified in the sagas. The legends of the Jews are a compilation of ancient Jewish traditions, which had been preserved in the consciousness of the people after the Pentateuch had been subjected to a revolutionary new edition by later patriarchs. They, therefore, provide a much closer insight into early Judaism. It says that ›Sarah’s death was a big loss to the country. Everything went well as long as she lived. After her death, disorder began‹. And that is not possible when a simple wife dies. In fact, Abraham was ›just the husband‹. His tribe was originally the tribe of Sarah. The Jews were given their name Israelites not by the father Abraham, but by Sarah’s son Isaac or Israel. (According to the Bible, the name of the Israelites derives from Jacob, the son of Rebekah). Talmudic scholars, Jewish rabbis, all have long recognized that the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah were more important persons than their husbands Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But post-exilic patriarchal editors of the Old Testament hid the fact very successfully. « (Gould Davis 1987, p. 132 f)
»The characteristic of the Egyptian system can again be found
in the Christian doctrine. « (Wolfhart Westendorf)
The Patriarchal Myths dominating Christianity
The Indo-European tradition of letting attest superiority, power, land, wealth, and ›divinity‹ through a primal god or a god-father, was later followed by all patriarchal religions, including Christianity. It is not surprising that those Egyptologists who are particularly concerned with the religion of Ancient Egypt, see this primal-god-idea »not without inner gratification« (Bonnet), as confirmation of their own faith. A striking number of them come from ›deeply religious‹ families, are often sons of priests, even trained theologians, although if not practicing, and are – patriarchally convinced. Therefore, they are not interested in acknowledging the fact of the earliest matriarchal religion of the Goddess of prehistoric time, though they may have been informed about it on the basis of their studies. Solidified dogmas, religious bias, and sensitivities prevent the exploration and publication of the truth. The problem that scientific terms portray personal contents of belief as facts is a falsification of the history of religion, and equals an indoctrination. For lack of better knowledge, very few people can see through this fraud. They believe the authorities, even if they misrepresent or mislead the facts.
»I am equally convinced that religions are causing damage,
as well as of being untrue. « (Bertrand Russel)
The spiritual ground for Christianity »was well prepared and even cooperatively elaborated by Egypt, so that it was the first country in the world to be Christianized«, Brunner and Brunner proudly state (1984, p. 6). The Christian Jesus figure is the continuation of the dying vegetation god Osiris Osiris, who rises again in the spring. Even the »idea of a savior who has a divine father but an earthly mother was invented by Egyptian [Indo-European/Arian] priests« (Brunner 1989, p. 149). Jesus, who is called the ›Son of God‹, is not a new creation, but an invention that was more than 2000 years old when he was born. »The Egyptian myth of the Son of God clings to the person of Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the son of God and as such carries the title of ›Son of the (Sun-) God‹, but also with his accession to the throne the title ›Horus‹, which legitimizes him as God.« (Brunner-Traut 1988, p. 34) As we have seen, the utopia of immortality or ›eternal life‹ is also of Egyptian origin, just as the concept of a bodily resurrection of the dead, is the idea of Egyptian priests.
There are more transfers, for instance: The matriarchal female trinity of Neith, I-Set (Isis) and Nekhbeth was usurped by the Egyptian priests and transformed into the male divinity of Amen-Re-Ptah. This seamlessly merges into the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In patriarchal trinity a mother figure no longer exists, »the masculinization and spiritualization [!] of this third element« is complete«, writes Westendorf. »It should not be forgotten«, he says, »that in apocryphal texts (Acts of Thomas) the Holy Spirit is referred to as the ›mother‹. « (Westendorf ZÄS 1974, p. 140)
»The most important religious legacy of Egypt is without question the idea of the ›Judgement of the Death‹, Hellmut Brunner says. (1989, p. 149 f) What is so meaningful in the sadistic ideas of being mercilessly persecuted, judged, and tortured?
The idea, invented in Egypt, entered the monotheistic religions as the ›Last Judgment‹; as well as the idea of being condemned to unimaginable torments in an eternal fire, with which people of patriarchal religions are intimidated and made submissive until this day. The idea of a flaming hell could be based on the observation of a volcanic eruption of the Ararat (called ›Alalat‹, Goddess, before the linguistic change from L to R). The mountain, which today is a dormant volcano, belongs to the northern area of the Caucasus Plateau where Indo-Europeans had immigrated.
»There is reason, to believe that the disgusting hell tortures were invented primarily to intimidate women into obeying the new patriarchal laws. « (Walker 1993, 408) »In Persia, the priests of Aryan Zarathustra threatened the women that adulteresses in hell would be ripped open their breasts with iron combs. The Jewish religion adopted the image of the Persian hell ›as a place of punishment for the majority of women, who were found to be hopelessly unworthy for the God of Heaven‹. Males then were threatened with hell when they made superfluous conversation with their wives or accepted the advice of a woman.« (Walker ibid.) We cannot bypass realizing that neither the ten commandments nor the infernal threats have kept away any patriarchal man from corruption, exploitation, sexual abuse of children, sadism and other crime.
As one of the countless monstrosities in history of the Christian church, the taking over of Satan’s figure, the demonized and masculinized Great Goddess of primeval times, I-Seth/Seth must be assessed. Despite ostracism and persecution – the Great Goddess survived. Theologian Christa Mulack points out: » The Mother of God still embodies the characters of the original Goddess«. The representatives of the Christian (Catholic) Church, structured according to the strictly hierarchical model of the pharaonic kingdom, have taken even more from the Egyptian pharaohs and their gods: one of their symbols of dominion is the crosier or shepherd’s crook. They call themselves, like the Near Eastern and Egyptian rulers, ›shepherds of the people‹, who are their sheep, and they love to live in palaces, dress in luxury robes and wear precious jewelry. All that resembles more to a pharaonic standard than to that of a poor itinerant preacher like Jesus Christ.
Patriarchy and patriarchal religions are the cause of global misery,
not their solution.
›Ama-gi‹ – the scream for freedom
On a document from the Sumerian Lagash the word for freedom is found for the first time in the history of mankind: ›ama-gi‹. The literal translation of ama-gi means ›back to the mother‹ (Kramer 1959) and might express the longing of humankind for the ancient mother right, which let them live in freedom and dignity, where their human rights were inviolable. After the world was literally turned upside down, the feminine was demonized as ›chaos‹ – a name for the uterine motherly fluid of the cosmic goddess – as anarchy and disorder, while the so-called ›order‹ was claimed for the male. The Arabic word for ›freedom‹, al-hurriya, is synonymous with ›disorder‹ in the Arab world. The dictators in the ›Arab Spring‹ put an end to the cry for freedom with military and police force – heavily armed with the latest war equipment from the West – with arrests, torture and murder.
The Arabic word for ›freedom‹ al-hurriya is in the Arab world of
religious and secular dictatorships, a synonym for ›disorder‹.
The countries in the Middle East no longer come to rest. Because never, never will people stop fighting for their freedom and dignity. Moreover, dictators and occupiers will never be safe in their lives.
The collapse of the dynasties of Egypt and Mesopotamia was only the temporary end of the patriarchal, Indo-European despotism. Until today, the dictators of the world hold the peoples in the stranglehold of their military and religious power! Our world dominated by patriarchal men became in the 5000 years since the beginning of the patriarchy one single slaughterhouse, bloody, defective, ill, corrupt and rotten to the roots.
»The woman is the man’s limit. Men who refuse to be limited by female life contexts and feminine wisdom, claim – comparable to the mentality of the pubescent boy – the right to spread … without any sense of responsibility for the consequences. The mature, socially-adjusted male should take responsibility for life and integrate with his personal capacity for all tasks that serve life – privately and politically. (Gerda Weiler)
»The position of women is a measure of
the cultural development status of a society. «
(Jeanne Achterberg)