CHAPTER 9 The Patriarchal fight against the Religion of the Great Goddess
From the content:
– From Chaos to Order and Other Lies
– Until 5000 years ago, there was no single male god
– The Great-Goddess and the Sacred Celestial Cow
– The Persecution and Defamation of the Religion of the Great Goddess
– The Masculinization of the Near Eastern Goddesses
– The Masculinization of the Great Goddess of Egypt
– The Demonization of the Great Goddess ISIS
– In Seth the Blood Mystery of the Female Creative Power
was persecuted
– The Murder of the Great Goddess Ti-Amat in the
Old Babylonian Myth
– The Murder of the Great Goddess ISIS
– The Myth of Seth and Osiris
in the Myth of the Fight between Horus and Seth
– The Mother Murder in Indo-European Myths
– The Demonization of the Great Goddess
in the Indo-European Dragon Myths
– The Discrimination of the Great Goddess
by Patriarchal Science and Theology
– The Persecution of the Great Mother Goddess in Christianity
– The Persecution of the Wise Women in the European New Aera:
The Murder of Millions of ›Witches‹
– With the Witch-hunt, Europe was forcibly converted to Christianity
– The Fear of Patriarchy
From Chaos to Order and Other Lies
The brutal invasions of Indo-European hordes into the Neolithic cultures caused the upheaval from peaceful matriarchy to martial patriarchy; beginning in Old-Europe, Mesopotamia and Egypt, later spreading all over the world: From the Oriental Despots to Trump in the USA. The Arian priests, who accompanied the conquerors, boast to overcome an existing ›chaos‹, and to replace a chaoticn ›Low Culture‹ by a grandiose advance, a ›High Culture‹ and to replace the primitive religion with a ›High Religion‹. However, of course, none of this is true. Indo-European/Arian priests invented the first male gods, fought, and devalued the everywhere worshiped Great Goddess. We will meet this proceeding every time when new male gods were invented to support the power of a new master. Nothing at that is ›religious‹ or ›spiritual‹; it is eagerness for power driving patriarchal men to create new gods, new mythologies, new cults, new religions, new strategies of suppression and exploitation. Patriarchal gods and patriarchal religions have to support patriarchal ruling. This happened in Egypt for the 3000 years of its dynastic area.
»The myths show that what developed in Egypt to the ancient Egyptian religion known to us, aimed at an extermination struggle of the conquerors against the religion of the Primeval Mother and her female and male admirers. Kings
became divine by assimilating the sacred power of female deities. «
(Fekri Hassan)
The same procedure is used whenever a patriarchal man created a new religion. After all the changes in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the today prevailing monotheist religion started with the fight of Mose against the Great Goddess of Canaan, Astarte; Christ/Paul invented our Christian society which is based on the persecution of the Goddess ISIS in Rome. Her worship had spread throughout the Roman Empire, from Ethiopia to England; and Mohammed created the Islam and started with the elimination of the Neolithic Goddess-trinity Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat of Arabia. (see: Wolf ›Das Matriarchat in Arabien‹ (Matriarchy in Arabia‹)
»God is a latecomer in the history of religion. «
(G. van der Leeuw, religious scholar)
Until 5000 years ago, there was no single male god
What is it that has upset patriarchal men so much about the worship of the Goddess? Her religious veneration had been established for thousands of years before the invention of any male god which is proved in Egypt also by the Sanctuary of the ›Valley of the Queens‹. In the time of the adoration of the Goddess – women, the mothers, especially, the matriarchs – were highly respected and the yoni-vulva was venerated as the ›life-giving gate‹. Especially the latter aroused the jealousy of patriarchal misogynists and made them defame the whole feminine cult as ›chaos‹. They devaluated it as shameless, indecent, obscene and immoral. Thus, they invented the patriarchal phallic cult and the worship of martial masculinity. While the priests of that time called the worship of the vulva indecent and shameless, they had nothing against the phallic cult.
We can only wonder about the inventions and fantasies, the priesthoods had come up with, in order to proclaim their propaganda of male gods and divine kings. The same can be said of modern scientists and theologians. They never tire of praising the tyrannical ›divine kingship‹ and proclaiming the invention of male gods as ›salvation from chaos‹. What they do not say, is that this so-called ›salvation from chaos‹ was about the persecution of the ancient Goddess beliefs and her adherents. The chaos was by no means ›primeval‹, it initially was ›caused‹ by the conquerors and their priestly caste! Modern patriarchal scholars adopted the devaluations of the time of the Neolithic Matriarchy in order to propagate and maintain patriarchy today.
»The mistake began when God was imagined as male.
That makes life so absurd and death so unnatural. « (Eugene O’Neill)
It is »the order-idea of the dynastic religion that overcomes the chaos of the past«, says Walter Wolf (1977, p. 67). And Helmut Brunner: »In Egypt, which was excluded out of chaos by the creation of God and provided with the fertile Nile, which was ›created‹ for the sake of man, is every act of wresting a further piece from the chaos, and ascribing it to the order, a continuation of the creation. The fight is equally directed against the desert animals … as also against the wild peoples around Egypt. « (Brunner 1989, p. 67) Ancient-Orientalist Wolfgang Röllig claims in the celebration script for Emma Brunner-Traut (1992, p. 284):
»There is a resolute step in the history of man, which also decisively determines
his relationship with the gods, namely the creation of an actual, a human culture
that delimits itself from the disordered, pre-civilizational world. «
Röllig here points to the Sumerian Myth of Etana. He reports that there was a time when no royal crown was worn and that initially there was no royal line for the children of the goddess. However, then, the Kingship Descended from Heaven. »After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,000 years …«
The ›heaven‹ mentioned in the Etana myth did not refer to unearthly realms, but was the name of a city southeast of the Black Sea in today’s Georgia with the Indo-European name ›Himin‹, heaven. The Indo-Europeanized Northern Europeans called the home of the gods Himinbjorg, ›Himmelsberg‹ (heaven’s mountain). Georgia, the area of the Transcaucasus on the southern slope of the Caucasus, is connected to the south by many pass crossings, the home of the Indo-European Horites who immigrated there, were smiths, who were familiar with the processing of metals. From there they conquered the southern countries: the ›Fertile Crescent‹, Mesopotamia and Egypt. These ›coming-down-from-the-heaven‹-males were charged with an excess of criminal energy that still has its destructive effect.
The Great-Goddess and the Sacred Celestial Cow
A Slate Palette from the middle of the fourth millennium shows a cow-headed deity, which is surrounded by the stars, and whose arms pass over into stars. »The earliest pieces of evidence do not show the sun, but a star between the horns of the celestial cow. « (Assmann LÄ, IV, p. 270) »With a shake of her udder, the horned moon-cow creates the starry sky; from her streams out the Milky Way in a lush, never-ending stream. « (Johnson 1990, p. 284) As a cow with whose udder later the king is fed, she is the Goddess in dynastic times who steps out of the Theban West Mountains and protects the dead in the Valley of the Kings. It is Isis / I-Set, the multi-shaped and the rich in names, with whom the cow-headed Sun-Goddess Hathor of the Conquerors was merged.
Palette of the Neolithic Cow- and Star Goddess. Besides a scientific-medical drawing
of the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries
As we know and the palette of the Neolithic shows, I-Set/Isis was associated with the moon and the stars. She was revered as the Goddess with the horns-crown, symbols of the increasing and waning moon. The depiction of the Great Goddess I-Set/Isis as cow and cow’s head is by no means a coincidence. As we have seen in chapter 8, women had already in the Neolithic tremendous medical knowledge and surgical skills; their cognition of the reproductive female organs of creation was accurate. The similarity of the uterus, the fallopian tubes, and the ovaries with a Bucranion is striking. On both sides of the uterus, the horn-like fallopian tubes ascend to the ovaries, where the ovum is produced. The celestial cow is a partial aspect of the Goddess I-Set/Isis. She is the Red Goddess of the Goddess Trinity, the sexually mature, menstruating young woman who can become sexually active, pregnant and mother.
But, the patriarchal Indo-European invaders venerated so far also a cow-goddess, Hat-Hor. She was in close contact with the sun god; her attribute is the sun who was idolized by the Indo-Europeans in the north. We meet her on the Narmer-Palette for the first time. She was a goddess of the invading Hurrians (Horites) and the mother of their war-god Hor or Har (Greek Horus).
The cult, in honor of the sacred cow Goddess (see in Chapter 7 the Bucrania-Altar surrounding the tomb of Queen Wadjet/Ua-Zit), was widespread among the population of the Neolithic period. It ranged from the Anatolian Çatalhöyük, the pre-Sumerian Mesopotamia to Iran, and the Indus Valley to India.
The Persecution and Defamation of the Religion of the Great Goddess
As a result of the wars of conquest that covered Egypt in the second half of the 4th millennium descriptions or representations of religious activity are missing. It is only known from the early dynastic period, which also applies to the later periods when two religions existed side by side. »But until the pyramid texts were published, early Egyptologists had no idea that there was more than one religion in Egypt« (Budge 1988, p. 51 f). Emery states also; there »were two different and incompatible cults« (1964, p. 131 f): The ancient religion of the indigenous population worshiped the Great Goddess. The Aryan priestly caste accompanying the Indo-European conquerors was fundamentally different. As a result of the discovery of fatherhood, they worshipped the father instead of the mother and invented the first father gods – only 5000 years ago. People still pray to these father gods today. In the fourth dynasty, we hear from the persecution of the religion of the Goddess, when Cheops shut down with all hardness the sanctuaries and forbade the ›ancient cult‹. The Indo-European conquerors and their Arian priest castes must have planned from the beginning, to eliminate the veneration of the ancient primeval Goddess. Nevertheless, modern scientists – although extremely interested in the religion of Dynastic Egypt – are not interested in the primeval cult and why it was persecuted. Obviously, this passion only affects the appearance of male gods who did not appear in the persecuted cult of the Great Goddess.
Since the invention of male gods and despite the 5000 years of persecution, the cult of the Goddess could never be completely eradicated. »Male attempts to gain control over religion were only partially successful; the worship of the Goddess, albeit often slandered and forbidden, outlasted – often in the strangest detours – to the present day. « (Husain 2001, p. 20) With the persecution of the Goddess religion, the naked female statuettes disappeared: »In the Old Kingdom they are no longer verified« (Helck 1971, p. 20). This conspicuousness leads Helck back to a »progression of the internal order of the Old Kingdom«. What a whitewash for violence and war that broke over the land by the conquerors! Just the disappearance of the statuettes proves: they were representations of the Goddess, not ›concubines‹ and not ›dolls‹. We do not know exactly how the cult of the Goddess was persecuted under Cheops, but we are not without testimonies from later times. For 2000 years after Cheops, the prophets of Jewish returnees from Babylon persecuted the cult of the Great Goddess of Canaan and destroyed the bare clay statuettes made for their worship. »In the Old and New Testaments, we can read the details. Christianity and Judaism proclaimed from the beginning to persecute and destroy ›her divine majesty‹ the Great Goddess, ›to whom the whole landscape of Asia and the world circle rendered veneration‹.« (Acts of the Apostles 19, p. 27) Again some hundred Years later, Muhammad persistently advocated »that Allah must remove the ›Mistress‹, the ›Queen of Heaven‹, the ›Mother of Life and Death‹ (Miles 1995, p. 98).
Everywhere there was a bitter resistance against the new religion. This astonished Adolf Erman, he writes: »It is strange that they did not imagine the reign of the sun god, who was the ruler of the world, as an undisputed one. The children of the weak rebelled against him and sought to destroy him. There was a battle in the whole world, in heaven and on earth, but the sun god triumphed« (Erman 1934, p. 63). ›The weak‹ rebelled also against their kings who boasted to be an incarnation of the sun god. They obviously had little reason to see in their tormentors something ›divine‹. According to the testimonies of Herodotus and other narrators, the Egyptian people were hardly convinced of the divinity of kings – in contrast to many female and male Egyptologists who want us to believe that the simple folk believed in the divinity of the despotic rulers – even loved and venerated them – but this is a factual error.
The veneration of the Mother Goddesss was not a ›Fertility Cult‹
The matriarchal primal Mother has been worshiped under many forms and names since primeval times. This religion did not represent a ›cult of fertility‹, to which it likes to be reduced. The French historian of primeval times André Leroi-Gourhan describes it as »unsatisfactory and ridiculous« to dismiss the religious system of the Paleolithic period, in which the female figures and symbols occupy a central position, and discarding it as a »primitive fertility cult« (quoted by Eisler 1989, p. 39). And the religious researcher Carl Hentze pointed out that »fertility symbolism in itself is never a form of religion but a partial religious phenomenon within a religion. « He emphasized at the same time that a religion presupposes a total world view because cultural phenomena are never to be considered in isolation, it is always about winning the aspect of thinking from the middle, i. e. starting from the worldview (quoted by König 1981, p. 22) Elise J. Baumgartel pointed out: »In the Naqada I era, no Goddess was portrayed with a child. « (1955, p. 36) Fertility was not a major issue in either social life or religious thought and was ›only restrainedly mentioned‹ in Egypt. »There is no evidence of a pronounced desire for many children, nor any recipes or magical texts. No Goddess is considered the mother of many children, with the exception of Nut. « (Brunner LÄ, II, p. 336 f) Fertility, the desire to have many children, only arose in patriarchy, when men wanted to validate their potency.
The Masculinization of the Near Eastern Goddesses
The fact that patriarchy is based on the usurpation and reversal of all matriarchal is common knowledge among open-minded researchers. The masculinization of Goddesses, especially if they were important Creator Goddesses, is documented in all ancient cultures. The writer Joachim-Ernst Berendt does not notice without irony: »The linguistic examination of almost all the names of gods in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and both America makes it clear that the gods were originally almost all women, although patriarchs later have tried to masculinize them. « (1985, p. 335) The Orientalist and Old Testament scholar W. Robertson Smith was very astonished to find out that the Goddesses of the ancient Semites actually changed their gender in historical times and became gods. Smith writes: »In fact, in the Semitic religion, the Goddesses occupy a significant position; they do not appear only in the minor role as spouses of the gods. It is noteworthy that in some parts of the Semitic world we originally find female deities who transform their sex and become gods according to the transformation that took place in the order of human conditions. « (Smith 1899, p. 37) »Ashtoreth, the abhorrent pagan deity of the Old Testament was, in fact, Astarte – the Great Goddess known in Canaan, the sky Goddess of the Middle East … though the Bible writers sought to hide her identity by repeatedly using grammatically the male gender. Those pagan idol worshipers from the Bible had been praying to a female deity known elsewhere as Innin, Inanna, Nana, Nut, Anat, Anahita, Ishtar, Isis, Au Set, Ishara, Asherah, Ashtart, Astoreth, Attoret, Attar, and Hathor … the divine ancestress with the many names. « (Stone 1988, p. 35)
»The last stop on the way to the victory of patriarchy
is the matricide, the final abolition of the Great Goddess. « (Gerda Weiler)
Jehovah or Yahweh adopted the name of the Semitic love Goddess Jehva, ›Mother of All Living‹ and ›Mother of the Gods‹ (Eve, Cheba, and Hebrew Chawwa). »Yahweh, before he became the Jewish god of the Old Testament, was a Goddess, the Great Goddess of the Orient, who walked in the sky as a moon. Her Sumerian name is Iahu, the sublime dove. The patriarchalized Israelite tribes usurped her name and her dove shape. Iahu became Yahweh, and the dove, the primeval symbol of matriarchal eros, becomes the ascetic, misogynist Holy Spirit. We are dealing here with a classic example of the masculinization of a deity. « (B. Schneider 1999, p. 63)
On the status of the Goddess in Arabia, Smith reports – however already from the time of an advanced patriarchalization – »that he believed she was originally deified as the raiser of the tribe«. He describes the change of power that then took place: »There was a divine couple in the Arab religion, with the Goddess taking precedence and her son was a lesser deity. Then a gradual transformation took place, during which the attributes of the Goddess were given to the god so that in this way the position of the woman sank below that of the man‹. « (Quoted in Stone, 1988, p. 58) Smith confirms: »If the primacy of the Goddess was too well established to be undermined in this way, she could change her sex, as in South Arabia, where Ishtar was turned into the male Athar. « (ibid. p. 59) In Islam, we know about the masculinization of the Goddess Al-Lat to Allah. In pre-Islamic Arabia, she formed a triad with Al-Uzza and Al-Manat. The symbol of the Goddess Al-Lat was the crescent moon and the wearing of the crescent moon amulet; the visible sign of the worship of the Goddess (see Walker 1993, pp. 733-737). This symbol of the moon and star Goddess from pre-Islamic times is simply unbeatable, though reinterpreted and masculinized; it still adorns the national flags of most Muslim countries. Christianity has also taken over the memory of the moon and star Goddess. In the Revelation of John, she is described as a young woman: »Then a great sign appeared in the sky: a woman clothed with the sun; the moon was under her feet and a wreath of twelve stars on her head. « (Revelation 12: 1) One of the greatest medieval Sufi poet, Ibn al-Farid (1181–1234) the ›Sultan of Lovers‹, said that true divinity was female and Mecca the mother womb of the earth.
Silver vulva with the black cult stone at the Kaaba in Mecca
At the Kaaba, a meter-high silver vulva, with the famous black meteorite in its center, clearly bears witness to the ancient worship of the Goddess and her sacred vulva. It is the pilgrims‘ hottest desire to touch it in order to share in its blessing, which sometimes leads to catastrophic accidents through the scrum.
Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240), called »the ›greatest master‹ of the Sufi mystics, was accused of blasphemy for having said that the deity was female. « (Walker 1993, p. 56) The leading Arab historian, Leila Ahmed, recalls in the entire history of Islam only one great scholar who took a positive stance on women and therefore, she describes him as ›probably unique‹: Ibn al-Arabi (Holland 2007, p. 320). Salman Rushdie refers in his novel to Sura 53 of the Koran: The Prophet Muhammad allows the worship of three female pre-Islamic deities besides Allah. This incident is highly controversial among Islamic scholars. With that, Rushdie hit a sore spot, but he didn’t invent anything new.
The Masculinization of the Great Goddess of Egypt
In Egypt, we find the most striking example of a masculinization of the Great Goddess. It is about the, since the Paleolithic/Neolithic, worshiped Goddess I-Set (Greek Isis) to the male ›evil-bringer Seth‹. Even the name confirms the masculinization: Set is the Egyptian name for a Lady. In the Naqada I era (4000–3500) it has already been detected by name. After I-Seth was known and worshiped in the Naqada I era, she disappears in the time of upheaval (Naqada II), which is inexplicable for the Egyptologists: ›Strange late‹, only in the 5th dynasty, around 2500, almost 1000 years later, she reappears: »Her origin and her oldest development remain obscure. « (Bergman LÄ, III, p. 186 f) However, the disappearance is explainable. It is the result of the process of persecution of the Isis culture and the shifting from the matriarchal Great Goddess to the patriarchal gods of the conquerors. It was not possible to eliminate the Great Goddess I-Set from the faith of the indigenous population that is why she was masculinized to Seth. Seth and I-Set both originated in the Upper Egyptian Ombos, the old Naqada Nubt, »which in prehistoric times was the center of the old African Isis culture« (Beckerath 1951, p. 34); a strange ›coincidence‹ indeed.
From the fifth dynasty, we meet two deities named Seth: the ›resurrected‹ primordial Goddess I-Set / ISIS, but now demoted to the sister-wife of the Indo-European god Asar (Greek Osiris), and the ostracized ›evil‹ god Seth. As we already know and quoted elsewhere from Hornung: Seth is ›probably the most fascinating and confusing phenomenon at the Egyptian gods-sky‹. »Of all the Egyptian gods, the god Seth is evidently the most ambiguous even for the Egyptian himself«, writes Erik Hornung. »There were times when he was held in the highest esteem and almost played the role of an ›imperial god‹ – but also times of ostracism, which no other Egyptian god was granted, right up to solemn ritual cursing and ritual killing. Otherwise, we do not know such fluctuations in the history of a god and his valuation«. (Hornung 1974, p. 49) Although Seth was sometimes given special veneration – in the 19th dynasty, King Sethos named himself after him – he was finally ostracized to the absolute bad, the anti-god and devil. (Brunner 1989, p. 58)
The Demonization of the Great Goddess ISIS
She becomes the evil Seth, then Apophis, then Typhon and then the Satan of Christianity. Red or typhonic were named the followers of the Goddess religion of the ›Red Goddess‹ I-Seth in the masculinized form of Seth. Seth was closely related to the female serpent of darkness, and compared to Typhon, the serpent of the Greek Goddess Gaia of Delphi, the city whose name derives from ›uterus‹.
In the fight against snakes and dragons, which stands out so much in the myths of the Indo-European religions, the Egyptian Re, the ›lord of light‹, daily fights the serpent of darkness, Seth, the originally Great Goddess. Her annihilation is the explicit theme of the so-called Apophis book. Apophis/Seth becomes the embodiment of darkness and chaos, the demonized feminine. She is the great and dreaded adversary of the sun god Re and the target of priestly attacks.
After 3000 years of indoctrination and persecution, around the turn of our era, the priestly intrigues against the Great Goddess I-Seth and her demonization into the ›evil‹ Seth had reached their goal. The brainwashing by the pious myths of lies had succeeded. From Plutarch, the Greek historian, we hear that the Egyptians left Seth up at the greatest contempt and did everything to demonize or annihilate him. »At one point, a black sow associated with Seth was brutally cut to pieces on a sand-altar on the riverbank. Another time it was a snake, which was dismembered. At a festival, fish and birds representing the god were caught and trampled as they sang: ›You will be hacked to pieces, and all your limbs will be torn apart, and everyone will eat the other: for Re triumphs about all his enemies‹. « (Armor 1989, p. 53) Barbarism had pushed through in patriarchal Egypt. Seth, the masculinized and demonized Goddess I-Set, became the personified devil of all patriarchal religions. Satanizing the Goddess is the vilest work of patriarchal priests. With what viciousness the proscription of the Goddess and the woman is continued in the later religions. All patriarchal religions are based on the fight against the woman and the elimination of the Great Goddess. They cheated the believers around their Great Mother and spiritually made them motherless children. The pathological misogyny of all monotheistic religions represents the woman in some connection with the devil, as devil herself, as Satan’s wife, as the gateway of the devil.
»The true and eternal guilt arises from the female urge to transcend
the boundaries set for her. Therefore, women are the roots of all sins. «
(Mahabharata, Book 13, Chapter 38)
In Seth the Blood Mystery of the Female Creative Power
was persecuted
Seth, called the red, is a split-off and masculinized aspect of the Great Red Goddess, the woman’s sacred blood mystery, menstruation, the monthly sign of the creative power of the Goddess. The solution to the riddle, of which Hornung speaks, lies in the demonization of the female blood. »Menstrual blood is magical blood and guarantees fertility; a man does not have this magical bloodshed. Although power falls into the hands of males, they cannot survive without this magical blood. For this reason, they probably have formed the ›rites of imitation‹, which are supposed to produce magical blood so as not to have to resort to the politically oppositional camp, the women. « (Shuttle/Redgrove 1980, p. 61, see also: The circumcision of boys in Chapter 7) In the blood of women are contained the power of creation, the origin of life, the miracle of pregnancy and birth. It is believed that »the historically first ›magic‹ was the human fertility spell which was practiced by women, who, as priestesses and sorceresses [female] prophets and [female] shamans held it and still hold it. (ibid., p. 64 f). The dependence on the woman and her menstrual blood and the envy against her power and magic sparked the hatred of the patriarchal Indo-European conquerors. Menstruation is the defamed part of the Red Goddess, the menstruating, the sexually mature, sexually active, passionately loving woman Goddess. It is the blood of the Goddess, the life-blood of the woman, which is one of the great mysteries of womanhood, which is persecuted.
The Once Holy Blood Mystery of the Woman
was Devalued and Cursed in Patriarchy
The hatred of the patriarchal priests of Egypt and the later patriarchs of the Bible hit the menstruating woman with all their might. Why? Menstrual blood was considered magical and made the man partake of the woman’s wisdom and magic. Therefore the threat of death of the patriarchs: »If a man sleeps with a woman at the time of the days of her sickness (sic!), and denudes her private parts and reveals her spring, and she exposes the fountain of her blood, both shall be exterminated from their people. « (Genesis 20:18) Like that, it must have been in Egypt. In Islam, the same prohibition applies as in Judaism: spouses are not allowed to sleep together during these days, and the Muslim woman may not speak ritual prayers or touch the Koran at that time.
In addition to jealousy and envy, it is about the abhorred autonomy of woman: »Because in a sexual act during menstruation, the conception is excluded from the outset. Nevertheless, if the woman is not fixable on the mother role by moral laws, then this would be liberating for the woman. Men, however, who thereby lose influence and power, have declared the ›red sexual intercourse‹ to be a sin« (Voss 1988, p. 55). The menstruating woman is a deeply hateful topic in all patriarchal religions. The once sacred, precious, life-giving blood of the woman is discriminated as ›unclean‹, nauseating, and repugnant: »If a woman has the flow of the month, she remains in her uncleanliness for seven days. « (Leviticus 15:19)
The Murder of the Great Goddess Tia Maat in the
Old Babylonian Myth
The myth of Enūma Eliš (Enuma Elish) is about the war of the patriarchal conquerors against the matriarchal order and religion. The patriarchal sons want to wrest the control from the Great Mother Goddess. The myth tells of the victorious battle of the new gods against the Goddess Tia Maat/Tiamat, the female ! ›Creator and Guardian of the Universe‹. In a cruel duel the Goddess is defeated, and the upstart Marduk, a petty god of the conquerors, rises to the supreme god by this matricide and takes her place. The myth describes the fight:
»He shot an arrow, and tore up her belly;
he shredded her inner and pierced her heart.
When he had defeated her, he put an end to her life. «
With a mace, Marduk smashes the head of the Goddess, cuts it in half and makes himself the ›Lord of the Four World-Regions‹. In the murder of the creator Goddess by immature male warrior gods, an author wants to see the »initial act of the creation of the cosmos out of chaos« (John A. Phillips 1987, p. 15). Another author, A. Rosenberg, »calls this act of violence the primordial and fundamental situation of the history of salvation – the primordial drama of the world, which consciously or unconsciously served as a model for all the dramas of the peoples, but especially those of the Occidentals. « (Stapenhorst 1993, p. 15)
»With which arrogance is celebrated, as a victory, the subjugation of the Mother Goddess under the power of the ›masters of the world! «, writes Lucie Stapenhorst. »What is it that makes this Lord the ›Lord of the world‹? It is not the veneration of the human being; it is violence. «
The Murder of the Great Goddess
in the Myth of the Fight between Horus and Seth
This myth is one of the most important Egyptian narratives. It is closely associated to the introduction of the historic kingship and it should serve for its legitimization. Some scholars, including Gaston Maspero, have recognized that the myth of the battle between Horus and Seth symbolized the struggle of the prehistoric Egyptian people who worshiped I-Set against the conquerors who followed Horus.
»The Egyptian ›fate-calendar‹ recalls the ›most terrible day in the history of Egypt‹ when the fight between Horus and Seth took place. At the gate of the gods of Babylon, the two rivals invaded each other, transforming themselves into two hippos. They did so for three days and three nights. Then Isis threw down her harpoon and it entered Horus. He yelled; ›But I am your son Horus! ‹. Then Isis called the harpoon: ›Unfasten yourself, get out of my son Horus! ‹ Then she threw down another harpoon, and it irrupted into her brother Seth. He shouted loudly: ›I’m your brother Seth!‹ But she called to the harpoon: ›Get stuck, get stuck!‹ Then Seth shouted to her, ›Do you love the strange man Horus more than your own natural brother?‹ Then her heart got overpowered with pity, and she shouted to the harpoon: ›Detach yourself, detach yourself! He is my natural brother.‹ However; the majesty of Horus became furious with his mother Isis, like an Upper Egyptian panther. She fled from him, but Horus cut off Isis’s head, whereupon she appeared with a cow’s head as the first of the cows. « (According to Brunner-Traut 1988, p. 21)
The real core of the myth is the decapitation of Isis ›by her son‹ Horus. Like Marduk killing the Goddess Tiamat in Mesopotamia the conqueror god Horus is able to take her place only through the sacrilegious murder of the Great Goddess. »After the decapitation of Isis, Horus is to be charged for this crime; but a punishment does not take place. « (Schlichting LÄ, VI, p. 85)
Even a condemnation of the crime by today’s female and male scientists does not take place; on the contrary. Emma Brunner-Traut writes: »Sensitive is the law, sensitive to false feelings. When Mother Isis comes to help her brother Seth in a fit of pity, Horus determinedly cut off her head quickly. Not the slightest little bit shall be changed at the law. « (Brunner-Traut 1989, p. 308) It is instructive that the Egyptologist evaluates the ›right‹ to the mother-murder higher than the right to pity. Throughout the literature, there are no authors who are bothered that the son is beheading his mother (in another myth he rapes her) and that he is not even held condemned for it; and it does not seem to shock that this mother murderer has risen to be the first male god of Egypt. Nobody seems to care that this mythical matricide deals with the destruction of prehistoric women’s culture and the persecution of the religion of the Mother Goddess. The non-punishment of the mother-murderer is to teach women the bloody lesson that it is useless to stand in the way of patriarchal power. Crimes against the human rights of women become from now on inferior offenses. Till today rapists and women-murders are seldom condemned. The historical murderers of the mother Goddess and her worshipers became Egypt’s famous pharaohs.
The Mother Murder in Indo-European Myths
The subject of the matricide is strikingly often found in the Indo-European myths. Be it in Aryan Iran, where the first created man, ›Gayo Mareta‹, becomes the murderer of the cow respectively the mother Goddess; be it in Aryan India, where the war-god of the conquerors, the Indian Ra ›Ind-Ra‹, slays the Goddess Danu and her son in a hymn of the Rig Veda, whereupon these reappear as cow and calf. Matricide is also known from Indo-Europeanized Greece. As the ›Oresteia‹, the most famous dramas of Greek classical literature shows, the murder of a mother is defended as legitimate, legitimizing the patrilinear origin. »If the first trial before the new court proves that matricide is not a blasphemous crime because there is no matrilineal relationship, which argument for sole patrilineal ancestry would be more effective? « (Eisler 1989, p. 152)
Not only is witnessed the battle against the Goddess in Indo-European, Hebrew and Christian myths but also it is the fact that all patriarchal religions begin with the murder of the mother Goddess. The psychoanalyst Carl Gustaf Jung justifies in a questionable way the matricide as the »world-creative liberation act of the male logo« (Weiler 1991, p. 44). An almost diabolical ruse of the myth inventors is to engage the Goddess in a way in the story so that it seems she agrees to the happening, just like it was insinuated to the Goddess Athena in the drama of Orest in Greece
»In an institutional change«, writes Riane Eisler, »it is very important that a leader of the defeated party accepts, visible to all, the new power. « (Eisler 1989, p. 151) In Egypt, it affects the Goddess Isis: In some Horus myths, she even takes sides for the conqueror god and against Seth. These are examples of pseudo-religious-political cunning that we do not only encounter just here. When Isis seems to advocate male dominance, it is to manipulate the popular opinion and to legitimize the seizure of power by patriarchy. However, all adaptation and submission to the patriarchal rule are of no avail to either the Goddess or the women; the moment she enrages the male hero by acting at her autonomy of decision, her head is cut off. There are a large number of such representations from different regions and different epochs. How brutal the fight against the Goddess, respectively her elimination is to imagine, shows an Old Babylonian terracotta.
Old Babylonian terracotta from the Khafajah-Sin temple around 1800 BC
A male deity rams a dagger into the body of the Goddess who is provided with a star mask. The sun god triumphs over the star Goddess. The theologian Jörg Zink writes about this picture that the younger god, who drills his sword into a »cyclopean primal creature«, »overcomes« an older deity. »The myth speaks about the detachment from a generation of God-images through a younger, more spiritual one. « (Zink 1988, p. 64) But, what is to be ›more spiritual‹ on a depiction of the brutal and barbaric murder of the Star-Goddess, Mr. Zink?
Committed to the same patriarchal mentality, other authors also discriminate against the Goddesses, even if they understand themselves superficially as »enlighteners« of the defamation and murder of the Goddess. For example, John A. Phillips describes the matriarchal Goddess Tiamat as »the dreadful, treacherous dragon mother«, but her brutal murderer uncritically as »young warrior god« and male gods as »benevolent partners« replacing the Goddesses (Phillips 1987, p. 14); although these ›gracious partners‹ slandered, discriminated, raped and murdered the mother Goddesses without being punished.
The Myth of Seth and Osiris
The legend of Seth and Osiris was later prefixed to the matricide-myth about the fight between Horus and Seth. This myth is about the king’s throne, the supreme power in the country. The figure of Seth is defamed by the myth-producers as an insidious brother killer who seeks to wrest the »legitimate« power from his brother Osiris. Although Seth represents the masculinized Great Goddess of the prehistoric population of the Nile Valley and thus the ultimate power, Egyptologists do not reveal this myth as a distorting myth.
The ›good god‹ of the conquerors, Asar/Osiris, is murdered by the ›evil‹ native god Seth, cut to pieces and scattered all over Egypt. The Great Goddess Isis, meanwhile demoted to the sister-wife of the Indo-European god Osiris, collects the pieces and reassembles them by magic. She is no longer the almighty female creator who gave birth out of herself. Based on a strange necrophile idea, she ›receives‹ her son Horus from her dead husband, who moreover was emasculated. As Horus grows up, he wants to take revenge for his father Osiris and fight against Seth for the inheritance of the country. Significantly, Seth still appears in this fight as a respectful opponent. He is far superior to the young god of the conquerors, Horus, in age, power and wisdom. It comes to trial before the gods: In this process, the myth inventors put this sentence into the mouth of the Goddess: ›Entrust to his son the dignity of Osiris and do not commit a great injustice, otherwise, I get angry and the sky will fall on the earth.‹
For the priestly mythologists, it is important to present the story in a way that the Goddess supports the patriarchal verdict, with the intention to bring about »the legitimization of the ›heir‹ Horus be it by duel, or by court order« (Brunner 1989, p. 57). It is about »the mythical model for the succession to the throne, and indeed for the inheritance of an office from father to son« (Brunner ibid.). Nevertheless, the narrative distorts reality. »That peculiarity of the legend that Isis had received her son Horus from the dead Osiris is the mythological sediment of the religious-historical fact that Horus only later became the son of Osiris. « (Rusch 1925, p. 25)
The ›myth of Osiris and Seth‹ represents the attempt, through its close relation to the historical kingship, to represent the male deities as primordial and age-old. »However, this cannot hide the fact that the origin of this myth is causally connected with the formation of kingship«, and the kingship that referred to this myth was »legitimized and exalted« through it (Müller-Karpe 1976, p. 329). The myth clearly shows how the alien conquerors, who had defeated the Neolithic culture of Egypt with their martial-patriarchal rights system and the abuse of the Goddess, destroyed the matriarchal culture and its belief. The mythologists and religious ideologues of ancient and contemporary provenance insist on their inappropriate claim to ›truth‹, they pervert genealogy and project their new male god back to the beginning of creation. They deny the fact of the original creator-Goddess-veneration, gloss over her deposition, hush up her elimination or justify it. They conceal the original order and invent a new one according to male taste.
The Demonization of the Great Goddess
in the Indo-European Dragon Myths
The victory over the autochthonous serpent Goddess and her demonization into a dragon is the metaphor for the victory over the representatives of the matriarchal previous order of the Near East. Samuel N. Kramer assumes that »many a thread in the fabric of the Greek and early Christian dragon legends goes back to Sumerian sources«, where the theme of the dragon slayer played an important role in the Sumerian mythology of the third millennium (Kramer 1959, p. 131). Gilgamesh, the heroic Sumerian dragon slayer, enters the history of mythology as the butcher of the Goddess of the underworld (in her masculinized form as ›Chuwawa‹ or ›Humbaba‹). Dragon slayer myths accompany everywhere the progressing patriarchalization.
The motif of the dragon slayer is a typical motif of the steppes, which spread with the conquests of the warlike Nordic nomadic peoples in the entire world. In countless Indo-European dragon myths, the ›gods of light‹ fight against the hated female deities. The fight against the dragon is repeatedly portrayed as a ›battle of the light against the darkness‹ and as a ›victory over the chaos‹. However, what this parable really describes is the fight of patriarchy against matriarchy, against the primeval feminine, which was ostracized as devilish and satanic. Female and male Mythology researchers identified in all Indo-European battle myths the theme of the destruction of the original serpent Goddess (also in the form of dragons, demons, or monsters) by a patriarchal hero or secondary god, who annihilated the pristine female might and appropriated her powers – such as in Egypt. Emma Brunner-Traut even questions whether ancient Egypt was the origin-country of the medieval European dragon sagas (1988, pp. 109–116). Egypt was not the country of origin, but the Indo-European priests of the conquerors made extensive use of that myth. When Horus stabs the Seth crocodile with his lance, he is »none other than St. George in the fight against the dragon, the symbol of evil«, writes Stierlin (1988, p. 157). In the form of a dragon, Seth fled from Horus into the earth, and Ra said, ›Seth has transformed his shape into that of a roaring dragon.‹
With minor differences, we find this myth at the Germanics, where Thor fights the Midgard Serpent, in the Indian Rig Veda, where Indra maimed the mighty dragon Vritra and tormented Vritra’s mother Danu until her life energy went out. In Hittite Anatolia, the battle between the storm god and the dragon Illujankas is fought, in northern Canaan between Baal and the serpent Lat/Lotan or ›Lawtan‹ (in the Canaanite and the Arabic language ›Lat‹ means Goddess). »In Babylon – during the Indo-European influenced rule – it was the fight between Marduk and the Goddess Tiamat. In the Indo-European Mitanni dominated Assyria, Ashur simply takes over the deeds of the Babylonian mother-murderer Marduk. In Indo-Europeanized Greece, it is Zeus and the dragon Typhon. It is also Hercules, who triumphs over the serpent Ladon, who guards the sacred fruit tree of the Goddess Hera, which, according to the legend, Gaia has given to her at her marriage to Zeus. This myth also appears in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures. There it is the overcoming of the serpent Leviathan by the Hebrew Yahweh (Jehovah). Even Christianity adopted the legend as the story of St. George and the dragon, as well as St. Patrick and the serpents. « (Stone 1988, 107, f) In the Old Norse and Germanic legends, Siegfried (also Sigurd) is the dragon slayer, in the Nibelungs saga.
The fight continued in the monotheistic religions. It was a priestly policy to turn the Goddesses of the old, defeated culture into demons of the new. So we read in the ›biblical revelation‹ of the much later time (12: 7–9):
»Then a fight broke out in the heaven: Michael and his angels
fought against the dragon. Even the dragon and its angels fought,
but they could not assert themselves and lost their place in the heaven.
The Great Dragon, the old serpent, called Devil and Satan,
who seduced the whole world, was overthrown. «
In the Lutheran Bible, we read, »And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, who had the key to the abyss and a great chain in his hand. In addition, he seized the dragon, the old serpent that is the devil and Satan, bound it for a thousand years, threw it into the abyss, shut it down, and put a seal on top, so that it should no longer seduce the peoples, until the thousand years would be completed. After that, it must be let loose for a little while. « (Revelation 20: 1–3)
With the advance of the Indo-European conquerors, the dragon slayer legend spread from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic and remained in African royalty to the modern era. Dittmer Kunz reports in his ›History of Africa‹: »Only after the killing of a ›dragon‹ (or snake or another monster), the founder of the empire can take over the power of an older dynasty (of god-kings, who revered such ›king-animals‹). … In the Persian dualism, this signifies, according to ancient oriental tradition, a symbolization of the duty incumbent upon every noble to contribute to the victory of ›the light over the darkness‹, the legal order over chaos, by combating the ›evil‹. In the sense of native ›maternal law‹, the legitimacy of the throne usurpation took place through a marriage with the native queen. « (Dittmer Kunz 1967, p. 335)
According to the old oriental tradition in Persian dualism, this means a symbolization of the duty incumbent on every noble person to contribute to the victory of the ›light over the darkness‹, the legal order over the chaos, by fighting the ›evil‹. In accordance with the local ›mother right‹, the usurpation of the throne was legitimized by marrying the local queen. « (Dittmer Kunz 1967, p. 335 f.)
»Lucky for the despots that one-half of the people does not think
and the other half does not feel. « (J. G. Seume, Apocrypha)
The Discrimination of the Great Goddess
by Patriarchal Science and Theology
The Egyptologist Georg Steindorff claims that Horus and Seth were at the beginning and only later the two land Goddesses Nekhbet and I-Set; and further he states, as misleadingly, »the two Goddesses were elevated to a position of national deities, which was far beyond their original spheres of influence« (Steindorf/Seele 1957, p. 134). But we know from Emery: »We are not aware of the origins of Horus, but at the time of the unification, he was certainly recognized as a sun god, and the religion of the king, who was the living Horus, was a celestial cult similar to that of the religion in later times. « (Emery 1964, p. 131) »He did not appear until near the end of the Naqada II period, and he was in close contact with the kings of the 1st dynasty, the Shemsu-Hor«, we know form Baumgartel (JEA 1975, p. 30 f). »But however«, Emery writes, »the mass of population descended from the indigenes who in the early years of the dual monarchy, forming a distinct and largely separate group, still gave their allegiance to the tribal gods of their ancestors, and above all to Set. (Emery 1961, p. 120) Interestingly enough, this was translatet in German: »aber die Masse der Bevölkerung… blieb nach wie vor den Stammesgöttern der Väter, besonders dem Set, treu«. Emery 1964, p. 131)
It’s the Other Way round than Presented
Emery and Steindorff are examples of the images too of patriarchy branded in our minds. They could not imagine what they should have known: The Goddesses I-Set, Nekhbet and Neith/Nut were the Goddesses-triad of Egypt since ancient times. The Primeval Goddess is the Great Goddess of Creation, the sage old Neith/Nut; the Goddess I-Seth/Isis is the young Goddess of love and sexual passion and Nekhbet is the Goddess of death and rebirth; they represent the matriarchal Egyptian Trinity and belonged to the original ›peoples‘-belief‹.
Horus, on the other hand, first appeared with the Indo-European Shemsu-Hor, the Horites/Hurrians, at the time of the upheaval in Hierakonpolis. All new Indo-European gods are back-projected before the ancient Goddesses, and this is still happening today. The religious ethnologist K. E. Müller, for example, asserts: »The Goddesses …, despite their full potency, always remain subordinate to the male deities – according to their position as well as to their ›creatureliness‹. In the end, even the oldest and most important ones among them were brought to life by the one, initially first Creator and High God. « (K. E. Müller 1984, p. 277) However Marija Gimbutas writes:
»A study of the symbols in the Paleolithic art clearly shows that the deity
attributed to the creative powers was not male, but female. In fact,
in Paleolithic art, the existence of a father figure is not verifiable. «
Prehistorian Herbert Kühn, a similarly religiously biased scientist, reacts just as insincerely. He writes about the impressive number of female Paleolithic figurines: »The statuettes are thus the representation of a female deity, the primal mother, created by God Himself, the Father of all things. « (1966, p. 186) That is a true daring statement. Kühn let confirm his tendentious conviction by a Christian missionary and ethnologist, the Austrian Father W. Schmidt, »who has the merit, to have assembled habits, and customs, and religious beliefs of these contemporary people [such as the Siberian Tungusics], who had preserved their life forms until today. He has always been able to establish that it was a matter of a single god, the primeval god. « (Kühn 1966, p. 185) This ignorance-based disinformation is an inadmissible assertion of a Christian pietist about the conditions of the Paleolithic, back projected by fundamentalist ideas, when there was, far and wide, no male let alone a father-god. The spiritual ideas of the Siberian peoples, including the Tungusic people, lived in the shamanistic tradition before their conversion to Christianity. Women who were religious mediators between humans and the forces of nature originally only represented shamanism. The earth was worshiped as the supreme deity, their mother.
The denial of the prehistoric Goddess religion by today’s scientists and theologians is like a deception of humanity and corresponds to the matricide in the myths. Even the religious historian and Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who wrote a book on ›Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis‹ (Religion and Cultural Memory) suffers from amnesia of long-term memory. His ›cultural memory‹ only goes back to Dynastic Egypt. He ignores the Prehistoric Goddess. Innumerable religious wars can since be traced back to the erasure of cultural memory, to the destructive power of this dark secret.
The Persecution of the Great Mother Goddess in Christianity
The worship of the Goddess Isis and Artemis was the target of the misogynist Rabbi Paulus‹. »In his book, ›Isis in the Graeco Roman World‹, R. E. Witt quotes perhaps the most revealing line in the history of the destruction of the female religion. He tells us that Clement of Alexandria is repeating a Gospel passage of the Egyptians.
»I have come to destroy the works of the woman. « (Jesus Christ)
Christ’s words are interesting and in such a context that they are almost certainly directed against the then common Isis worship« (Stone 1988, p. 277): There are many pictorial representations of the fight against the Goddess, which show how Jesus (or Mary!) crushes the head of the serpent – the matriarchal symbol of eternal life and rebirth. »The cult of Isis had spread all over the Mediterranean countries and eventually had spanned the whole of the Roman Empire. In the 50s AD, the Roman Senate destroyed the sanctuaries of the Goddess, and Tiberius completely persecuted the Isis community with bloody severity. The persecution was substantiated by accusing the Isis believers of immorality«, writes Bonnet, adding: »We have little reason to take these accusations seriously. It is generally known that Christianity was not spared from them, and moreover, the accusations were explicitly extended by our informants to all the temples in which women used to worship. The victorious overcoming of all persecutions, which from the beginning only went out from the authorities, found the least passive resistance among the common people, and thus illuminates the attraction of the Isis faith. (Hans Bonnet 1971, p. 330 f) The still longtime powerful Goddesses of the conquered territories of the Middle East all went back to those of the millennia-old mother cultures. They were fitted into the patriarchal pantheon of the gods in the aftermath of the conquests, while part of their power was wrested from them and transferred to the male gods; by an absurd manner; above all, their creative power, visible in pregnancy and the ability to give birth. The Indo-European conquerors relegated the great creator Goddesses into the second generation; as daughters, they were stocked with a husband and subordinated to him.
The hatred against the Age-Old-Goddess and her persecution are not taken note of by the male science and the theologians, neither commented nor criticized. In addition, it looks as if one is willing, simply to put away decency and honesty, feelings of dismay, outrage, and horror and to put aside any awareness of wrongdoing. As if coldness of feeling and deliberate indifference to questions of morality and ethics, disguised as ›rationality‹, were the prerequisite of historiography and unconcern was the basis of our patriarchal science. It is not for nothing that Bertrand Russel said: »Scientific thinking is essentially power thinking – that means; a thinking whose conscious or unconscious purpose is to give might to its bearer. «
The Persecution of the Wise Women in the European New Aera:
The Murder of Millions of ›Witches‹
The parallel between the years of female murder in the first Egyptian dynasty and the years of female murder in Europe by the witch-hunts is impressive. In both cases, one of the reasons for the persecution is that they were renitent worshipers of the Goddess. They stood in the way of the patriarchal belief in God and therefore they were killed.
»For the late medieval church, the Wise Women were representatives of another religion, representing another kind of knowledge that remained uncontrollable
for the church and therefore needed to be eradicated. « (Erika Wisselinck)
The ›Hexenhammer‹ (Witch Hammer) of 1487 warns, »Nobody harms the Catholic faith more than the midwives do. –The witch-persecutions of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries are among the most despicable deeds ever committed in the name of Christianity. The number of women accused of witchcraft and murdered reached millions. Most of the victims who died at the stake were simple rural women who had taken over the knowledge of the Goddess and her secrets from their mothers and grandmothers. « (Gimbutas 1995, p. 319) Among the ›witches‹ were many midwives who had at their disposal, an over millennia accumulated, knowledge about medicinal herbs, including the knowledge for contraception and abortion; a knowledge that was eradicated because it opposed the goals of the state and churches to increase their wealth through crowds. Heinsohn refers to the torture and murder of millions of women »as the most monstrous event of modern times before Auschwitz« and points out that the witch murders should destroy »a flower of medieval science, the physical and chemical instruments for obstetrics and primarily for the prevention of pregnancy and abortions« (Heinsohn et al., 1979, p. 14 f). »That the scientific knowledge of wise women has been obliterated has often been described. It has even been realized that it disappeared with the witch massacres. « (ibid, p. 54 f) The Christian witch hunt benefited physicians and »was based on the determination of the academic medical profession to extinguish the female competition« (Miles 1990). p. 275).
With the Witch-hunt, Europe was forcibly converted to Christianity
The murder of millions of people accused of witchcraft, especially of women, shows how the hatred against all the worshipers of the Goddess and the crimes committed in her name, and the silence about them, the overlooking, forgetting, the concealed lies exert up to our time a sinister, destructive power on the history of humankind. The «witch hunt» of those who do not want to follow the patriarchal inventions of gods, continues to this day. To this day, Muslims face the death penalty for apostating from the Islamic faith; why is that so? Religion became the political power of the autocrats, which is pushed through by force.
The Fear of Patriarchy
With the beginning of matriarchal research by women, historians and historians of the monotheist religions had to question their constructed ›truths‹. The difficulties in dealing with this new situation threaten male self-confidence and the prevailing system. Moreover, they are for the betrayed believers, the followers of patriarchal gods and religions a tremendous narcissistic insult. That we were deceived in such a way in our most sensitive soul, our spirituality, must be vehemently rejected and denied, thus matriarchy-research hit the religious nerve: We were defrauded. We have been lied to and cheated with the patriarchal ›ever-so-myths‹ that we have deeply internalized.
The patriarchal ›ever-so-myths‹ are based on ignorance, the absence of knowledge or we have to assume a deliberately falsified representation of the events. Since the emergence of the universe, things have changed permanently. The patriarchy invented lies, legends and myths that served the interests of the ruling class. Over time, political and religious propaganda and constant repetition made these historical falsifications ›facts‹, norms and normalities; they have been accepted by society, even though they harm itself. Lying myths influence our knowledge of history to this day. Abnormality has become the norm that a majority of society agrees with. Even if this leads to highly abnormal undesirable developments, as is the case with patriarchy, these myths are accepted because people are no longer able to recognize that they are lies, even though they led to serious diseases of society and incessantly to wars. Nevertheless, we have to realize, that the divine and the creation were not ›always‹ male and the mental and spiritual guidance was not ›always‹ a cause of the man, the priest, the patriarch and the father. It was erected with the mothers, the priestesses, the matriarchs. It was they who created the true culture, that was destroyed by men’s (male) rule, through their constant wars. Joan Marler, director of the Institute of Archaeomythology in California, comments the reactions: »The systematic rejection and denial of women’s contributions to cultural development has not only affected the potential of countless individuals, but has deprived the world of female visions and originality. Women, who were the creative centers of the earliest human societies, have been marginalized and taught that their special abilities in the public sphere are not significant. « In view of the tremendous affront, it is not surprising that – and with what vehemence – the traditional historiography still defies the fact of the primeval matriarchy. Carola Meier-Seethaler examines this resistance and notes (1988, p. 19):
»The bias of almost all male scientists in the patriarchal pattern of thinking
was and is so strong that it alone puts the idea of a female-dominated or even
feminine-inspired culture in a completely thoughtlessly defensive posture. «
»I think the reason is that those who speak the truth mobilize the resistance of those who repress the truth«, concludes Erich Fromm. »The truth is dangerous to them not only because it threatens their power, but because it shakes their entire conscious orientation system, because it could rob them of their rationalization and even force them to act differently. « (Fromm 1974, p. 185) »Information-suppression lies in the dynamics of dominating society« Riane Eisler says and also recognizes: »Numerous examples from that science, to which we owe most of the findings and discoveries to archeology, show that. A particularly drastic case was the cessation of work on the Neolithic site Haçilar (Turkey). Although the deepest and earliest strata were not yet reached, James Mellaart was banned from digging on, arguing that ›further work at this point merely produced repetitive results of little scientific merit« (Mellaart 1970, cited by Eisler 1989, p. 146). As Riane Eisler guessed, patriarchal sponsors were worried, for they had long suspected that the oldest strata would display only feminine attributes, which were reminiscent of the worship of a Great Goddess. Mellaart protested and described the decision as »one of the most tragic chapters in the history of archeology.«
Heide Göttner-Abendroth, one of the pioneer of German-speaking matriarchy research is certain: »Despite all the hostility, it is not possible to go back beyond the findings of matriarchal research, which has opened up a well-balanced, egalitarian, fundamentally peaceful society, without the human-contemptuous and life-disparaging events, that got by without war of conquest and without domination. That is why I am convinced, that it is needed to achieve a humane world « (Göttner-Abendroth, 2003, p. 65). Today we only acknowledge with a smile, what at the end of the 19th century the men of the Royal Geographical Society called ›the greatest terror‹ ›female explorers‹. Women are no longer deterred from scientifically exploring ›continents‹ that were previously shunned or exclusive domains of men (male); this includes the prehistory, which so terrifies and scares some patriachal gentlemen and equally patriarchal women so much.
The cultural philosopher Otfried Eberz campaigned for understanding, as he responded to the extremely emotional reactions of the academic world to Bachofen’s theses – ›a premature era determined by the woman, on which lies the strongest taboo of patriarchy‹ – and wrote:
»But we should also try to understand the attitude of historians and philologists.
For their purpose is, to be the guardians of the hominist (male-patriarchal C.M) tradition of the Greeks and Romans, such as the rabbis and Christian theologians
are the guardians of the hominist tradition of the Jews. «
Eberz adds: »You must not want to know that the stories of the mythical prehistoric times tend to be falsified in a hoministic way among Jews and Greeks, you must not want to know, and must render harmless every unscientific heretic who touches their basic dogma. « (Eberz, cited by Christa Mulack 2003, p. 62). For patriarchy, matriarchy research is a violation of patriarchal right and law. Do we have to understand and accept atrocities of patriarchal men like Moses, who publicly called for murdering women, men and children? Do we have to be silent when Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas rages against women, humbles, abuses, and insults them? Do we have to accept the discrimination, which is used by patriarchy against woman by all means, such as ridiculousness, threats and devaluation? Even violence and murder?
No, 5000 years of patriarchy are enough.
We will no longer cover up, gloss over, and mitigate this and no longer
silently agree with it. We are no longer the guardians of the patriarchy
and its hidden criminal behavior.