It was our lot to be harmoniously married for 41 years . . . Why recall your wifely qualities, your goodness, obedience, sweetness, kindness . . . why talk of your affection and devotion to your relatives when you were as thoughtful with my mother as with your own family? . . . When I was on the run you used your jewels to provide for me . . . later, skilfully deceiving our enemies, you kept me supplied . . . when a gang of men collected by Milo . . . attempted to break into our house and pillage it, you successfully repulsed them and defended our home . . .40
Set this against the mysogynistic posturing of the majority of Roman commentators, and it is difficult to believe that the subjects under discussion are one and the same creature – woman. It becomes in fact increasingly clear that experience on the micro-level of what real women were doing contradicts the macro-dimension of what men were insisting should and did happen.
Yet there is no denying the growth of the threat to women, as phallus-worship swept the world from around 1500 B.C. The accumulated force of men’s resentment of women, their struggle for significance and the recognition of the male part in reproduction had brought an irresistible attack on women’s former prerogative. The Mother Goddess lost her sacred status and the power that went with it; and in this violent downgrading queens, priestesses and ordinary women at every stage of their lives, from birth to death, shared in the loss of the ‘mother-right’. The phallus now separating out from the rites of mother-worship becomes a sacred object of veneration in itself, then the centre of all creative power, displacing the womb, and finally both symbol and instrument of masculine domination over women, children, Mother Earth and other men. When all life flowed from the female, creation had been a unity; when the elements became separated out, male became the moving spirit, and female was reduced to matter. With this god-idea of manhood, Mesopotamian males fought through their fears of being slaves of the woman-god by destroying her god-head and making slaves of women.
What this meant for women may be illustrated by the story of Hypatia, the Greek mathematician and philosopher. Trained from her birth in about A.D. 370 to reason, to question and to think, she became the leading intellectual of Alexandria where she taught philosophy, geometry, astronomy and algebra at the university. She is known to have performed original work in astronomy and algebra, as well as inventing the astrolabe and the planisphere, an apparatus for distilling water, and a hydroscope or aerometer for measuring the specific gravity of liquids. Adored by her pupils, she was widely regarded as an oracle, and known simply as ‘The Philosopher’ or ‘The Nurse’. But her philosophy of scientific rationalism ran counter to the dogma of the emerging religion of Christianity, as did her womanhood and the authority she held. In a terrorist attack of the sort with which women were to become all too familiar, Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria in A.D. 415, incited a mob of zealots led by his monks to drag her from her chariot, strip her naked and torture her to death by slicing her flesh from her bones with shells and sharpened flints.41
Hypatia’s infamous murder signified more than the death of one innocent middle-aged scientist. In Cyril and his bigots, every thinking woman could foresee the shape of men to come. The aggressive rise of phallicism had revolutionized thought and behaviour; but it was not enough. Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room for manoeuvre – control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more – an idea of immanent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable – one God, God the Father, who man now invented in his own image.
All men allow women to have been the founders of religion.
STRABO (64 B.C.–A.D.21)
Behind man’s insistence on masculine superiority there is an age-old envy of women.
ERIK ERIKSON
Is it perhaps in a spirit of revenge that man has for so many centuries made woman his slave?
EDWARD CARPENTER
The birth of a man who thinks he is God is nothing new.
TURKISH PROVERB
As a man is, so is his God – this word
Explains why God so often is absurd.
GILES AND MELVILLE HARCOURT, Short Prayers for the Long Day
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, that Thou hast not made me a woman.
DAILY PRAYER OF HEBREW MALES
‘In the beginning was the Word,’ declared St John, ‘and the word was God.’ In fact the word was a lie. In the beginning, God was not. But as history unfolded in different nations and at different times it became necessary to invent him.
For the assumption of divinity and power from a purely physical base had certain crucial limitations. The human penis, even when inflated to magico-religious status, falls short of godhead. Up to a point, the rising phallocrat had carried all before him. Women’s traditional power based on creation and nature had been systematically whittled away. The Sacred King had stolen from the Great Queen her selective technique of man-management on the Kleenex principle of ‘use and throw away’, and applied it wholesale to the female sex. But brute force could only go so far. So long as women still retained their atavistic power of giving new life, they could not be stripped of all association with the divine.
Additionally, with the discovery of agriculture and the consolidation of tribes into townships, human societies became increasingly sophisticated, requiring structures, systems and administration. Once survival was assured, surplus became property, and man awoke to the glory of being lord and master. To secure ownership and protect rights of inheritance in a more complex society called for something subtler than the indiscriminate deployment of man’s bluntest instrument. And with the increase of organizational structures came greater opportunities for subversion or resistance; every tribe, township, throne-room or temple held women of ingenuity and resource eager to demonstrate that, whatever men’s claim to power, it would not automatically be accepted. These women could not all be destroyed like Berenice or Boudicca, thrown to the dogs and ravens, or hurried to unmarked graves. Achieving power, man reached out for the secret of control; and as he began to look beyond the end of his penis, he found a stronger lord, a greater master – God.
Male divinity, of course, was nothing new. Isis had her Osiris, and Demeter had been forced to bow to the vengeance of the Lord of the Underworld. Indeed, as phallomania swept the world, male godhead found a new measurement in lost maidenhead; Zeus, king of the immortals, demonstrated his supremacy by the numbers of young women he raped. The new gods of power were equally aggressive and rapacious. The difference was that now each one insisted that he alone was God – he was the One God, the only God, and no one else could play.
For within the short millennium or so that separates the forging of Judaism from the birth of Islam, all the world’s major religions made their début one by one. Immediately each set about the twin tasks of carving out their own community of believers, and annihilating all opposition. Where other male deities were targeted for extinction, what