Kindly show this to any and all Wiccans or Pagans you happen to run into, offline or online.
This is a copy of a Barton article in The Cloven Hoof, issue 127. The utter rubbish she yabbers on about resulted in Phil Marsh writing her a rather rude letter informing her of scientific finds that neither feminists nor anti feminists know of. That letter was turned into an article called "MATRIARCHY." If anyone would like to see the original letter Phil Marsh wrote, just read below her article and ritual. After Marsh wrote it and mailed it to her and LaVey, LaVey made him a Magister. YOU figure that out. Marsh never used that title on anything he wrote or published.
This will have notes inserted in [ ]. Here is where Barton is definitly concerning herself with things that are NOT her concern. The cause of her blustering yammer was that a bookstore would not print her shit - oh but they would print stuff that the TOS gave them. We reminded her that Avon Books printed LaVey's stuff. One can see her, in puritanical Mormon style, reading all these books she mentioned ONLY in order to refute them: that's exactly what regimental Christians do. It's part of their being control freaks that go out of their way to trash all else, if only to JUSTIFY their pallid beliefs. NOTES are in brackets [ ].
The previous issue of The Cloven Hoof shone a harsh light on the Neo-Pagan movement by identifying it as Neo-Christianity. [What she means is, SHE identified it as Neo Christianity.]
As with traditional Christianity, much Wiccan self-righteousness depends on a fabricated history of martyrdom (i.e., Jesus dying on the cross and Christian martyrs dying on the Wheel = The witches' "Burning Times"). [That is not only blatantly false, but the witches being persecuted had nothing to do with the Jesus crucifixion idea/myth. It was entirely political and aimed against women, IN FACT. It really happened.]
It isn't a religion of Strength--applying magic to gain power--as much as a peasant religion of charity, humility and pride in past persecution. Marching in step with their politically-correct comrades, much history has been twisted and revised by modern Pagans to fit their version of a magical legacy and victimization from the oppressive Judeo-Christian patriarchal majority. [We had to wonder what world this woman lived in when such "persecution" goes on to this very day. One also has to wonder at the COS's recognized saintly women: Marylin Monroe?]
For feminists and third-world revisionists, there is no objective "history". In their view, all that has been written has been from the perspective of dead white males who cannot be trusted to present an accurate view of women and non-white cultures. [More rubbish in lieu of the fact that the Wiccan and Pagan movements are predominantly filled with white people from Western cultures; they aren't Islamic or Chinese or African.]
Our history books are being quickly rewritten to accommodate minority concerns. This is a serious threat--to the way we think, the way we feel about ourselves and, of primary importance to magicians, to the language of archetypes we all hold consistent. [As a matter of fact, it's no threat at all if the excavations prove validity - which they most certainly do.]
It is the beginning of all unreason if we wipe out our knowledge of the past. One of our determining abilities, as humans, along with our opposable thumbs, is our capacity to record history in the first place--to communicate events and thoughts accurately to future generations, not diluted or modified by word of mouth, but preserved, communicated to future minds intact, as immediate 500 years from now as they are this minute. This is magic. Every well-written book is a magical evocation as surely as someone crouched in a circle tossing runes. That magic is being diluted and compromised by politically-correct revisionism. [Here is where Barton shows her true colors: she spews the same line of fearful rubbish as do the ultra conservatives in the Christian Coalition. What can one expect from an indoctrinated and conditioned Mormon. Update 2022, Gee, gotta wonder what she thinks of Critical Race Theory. After all, what blacks are saying happened to them DID happen, likewise, what happened to Chinese or other Asians and the Native Americans also really DID happen. Colonialism by white patriarchal nations was REAL.]
To show how this process works, and how the Wiccans have molded history to fit their politico-religious agenda, let's examine "Her/story" (as the feminist neo-Christians would have us believe) as contrasted with pre-Wiccan reality.
"Current researchers into ancient history, working in the fields of theology, archaeology, art history, and mythology are uncovering evidence that, starting around 3000 BCE. there occurred a transition in the predominant religious and political structures that governed humanity. Matriarchal societies, which had worshiped goddesses of the earth and moon such as Innana, Ishtar, Isis, Demeter, and Artemis, gave way to patriarchal societies, which followed the solar gods and heroes such as Gilgamesh, Amen Ra, Zeus, Yahweh, and Apollo." (Demetra George, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, 1992)
"Contemporary scholars are now uncoveririg evidence of how the worship of the Goddess has been suppressed, her temples and artifacts destroyed, her followers persecuted and slain, and her reality denied. The new belief systems of the conquering patriarchal solar tribes denounced cyclical renewal, thereby disrupting the Moon Goddess's cycle of birth, death and regeneration." (ibid,)
"The beginning of the demise of the Goddess can be traced back to the closing of the Neolithic period and the advent of the Bronze and Iron Ages, Between 4000 and 2500 BCE successive waves of proto-Indo-European tribes from northern Europe and central Asia descended into western Europe, the Near East and India. These light-skinned, nomadic, warlike peoples rode horses and fought with bronze weapons. They worshiped a Father God who came from the heavens above, In his fiery, light-bearing nature this solar god wielded bolts of lightning, which could be seen flaming on mountaintops and shining in the sky, The primary enemies of this God were the peoples of the Mother Goddess, and his followers invaded, conquered, and destroyed the indigenous Goddess cultures.
"These nomadic invaders, with their fiery solar gods, were ruled by priests and rulers. They were known as the Aryans in India, the Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, the Luwians in Anatolia, the Kurgans in eastern Europe, the Achanian and later Dorians in Greece, and the Semites and Hebrews in Palestine, The archeological evidence indicates that from this time onward there existed patterns of disruption, including invasions and natural catastrophes that caused large-scale destruction of the Neolithic cultures of Europe and the Near East." (Ibid.)
"Pre-patriarchal religions, practiced universally not too long ago (5000 years is generous), yielded a saner and more comfortable life for all. People focused on life rather than war, Today's obsession with death is a direct result of the exclusive male value system, often referred to as 'progress', and its degradation of women," (Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, 1980).
"What I know about the origins of the Tarot comes from a story my mother told me, and since the patriarchy has no certainties, I will share it with you. Mother said it was originally designed about 2300 years ago, when Alexander the 'Great' burned down the matriarchal libraries. Scrolls of knowledge and.ageless wisdom perished in the flames, especially at the largest library, in Alexandria. The existing scientists, partially matriarchal and partially (new) patriarchal, gathered at a conference to resurrect the living knowledge still in their heads, Being from different parts of the world, they had a language problem, so they devised the Tarot deck to communicate with each other through symbols they all had agreed upon." (Ibid.)
"The goddess religion goes back to the beginning, not only of feminism but of time. Before the institutional Protestant or Catholic churches, before Judaism, before Islam or classical Greece, before there was God or gods, there was the goddess, the great mother. In every culture and civilization on every part of the earth, she was worshipped as the source of life, and women were reverenced as her birth-giving image. Every culture had its creation and power stories involving her, and had one or many aspects and names for her Be-ing, In her thousand names and herstories, she is universal, and is the undeniable root of all religions and of the concept of religion itself. In addition, evidence of anthropologists and archeologists indicates that pre-God (goddess) civilizations were both matriarchal and peaceful, and structured far differently from today's world...Not restricted to the Near East, the so-called 'cradle of civilization', the Golden Age triad of goddess worship, matriarchy and peace extended to Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, Crete, Persia, Britain and Ireland, and to Africa." (Diane Stein, The Women's Spirituality Book, 1987)
Understand that, despite the air of scholarship and authority, most of the above is pure fiction, unsupported by fact. It's equivalent to believing in Creationism, with just as much scientific evidence backing it up. In contrast, most authoritative books of mythology, anthropology and archeology project a completely different, and much more sensible, evolution of male and female roles and the tales and myths surrounding them. Two of the best books challenging neo-Paganism's "roots" are Aidan Kelly's Crafting the Art of Magic and Elliot Rose's A Razor For a Goat. Rose's book, particularly, isn't just a refutation of Margaret Murray's contentions regarding surviving witch cults (though he soundly quashes all such claims) but it is a responsible search for exactly what we do know about early beliefs of Great Britain and Northern Europe. He traces the origins of modern witchcraft to post-Christian roots, not a continuing line of benevolent Pagans stretching back 5000 years. As a post-Christian invention, any activities that did take place were in protest to Christianity--meaning that it was Satanism. What Paganism has become--drawing from Gardner's works and mingling with feminist/social consciousness--in Rose's words, "...all looks, nowadays, like a cozy and rather eccentric parlour-game for Yoga enthusiasts".
Folklorist Tristram Coffin wrote an examination of The Female Hero in Folklore and Legend (Pocket Books, 1975) which he opened by noting that sex roles were established early in human history, dictated by necessity. "Up until the later portions of the Paleolithic period, sex-roles amounted to little more than assigned occupations, the division of labor being based on mobility more than anything else." Women had babies--they stuck close to the home camp, protecting and feeding their young, maintaining the small tribe's established territory, while the males were more capable of mobility--hunting, raiding, escape. The male became the possessor, protector and provider, while the woman, usually in a state of vulnerability, became the possessed, the protected and provided for. Women were counted as booty, along with the cattle, jewels, land and other wealth that might be raided and stolen. Patriarchies developed, as dictated by our biological differences. It wasn't until relatively recently, since contraceptives have allowed women reproductive control and since technology has conquered, and destroyed the indigenous Goddess cultures. [See Tree of Destruction for a more accurate evolution of Patriarchy: it had NOTHING to do with our biological differences.]
As for their "Burning Times", there are many more practical reasons that have been postulated for the bloody series of Inquisitions and pogroms recorded throughout post-Christian history. The Ninth Satanic Statement sums it up well. Christianity depends on the Others, by whatever name we are called in a specific period in history. They burn heretics. They burn free-thinkers. They burn scientists. It amuses the mob, eliminates challengers, and vividly discourages dissidents. One interesting theory postulated that those in power began the Witch Trials in Europe and America to direct attention away from crippling economic and social ills--as a misdirection device to keep the populace from revolting against them.
Christianity has had 2000 years to clean up its act. You'd think that our post-Enlightenment age wouldn't support a new version of Creationism, such as Wicca's "historical" roots. But those few thousand who adhere to these concepts seem to swallow them quite willingly and blindly. There is no arguing that there have been legends of isolated female tribes--small, disparate groups that worshipped a goddess and female customs; there is no disputing that most early human tribes apparently worshipped the female fertility principle and the god/male principle of the Hunt. But the Wiccans have parlayed these archeological references--and the sparse knowledge we have of Neolithic times--into a mythical worldwide religion. This is the same principle as "exposing" a worldwide criminal Satanic conspiracy based on discovering a few disconnected groups who do vile things using Satanism as a cover. There is no evidence for matriarchy among Stone Age peoples. They made small statuettes and images of round, fecund females as fertility symbols. That is all that survives.
We should also remember that goddess worship hasn't been neglected by Christianity, or by Judeo-Christian society as a whole. They proffered Mary Magdalene as a goddess figure because the Catholic Church was forced to fill that necessary gap. We have popular stars today that are every bit as mythic as those of Ancient Greece. Stories about Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Achilles, even up to the times of King Arthur and his knights, are all interwoven with facts and poetic exaggerations until the two become inextricable. We pore over stories involving Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Cher, or whichever goddess of choice is featured on the cover of People magazine this month. The goddesses are still there. Feminine power has never waned. We teach the babies; we bend the minds of men; we are worshipped and feared.
While Gerald Gardner is generally hailed as the "father of modern witchcraft", even many Wiccans have had to admit that his tales of being initiated into a surviving hereditary witch cult near the New Forest, and receiving their "Book of Shadows", was probably false. He was drawing from the work of anthropologist Margaret Murray, who proposed that the witchcraft of the Middle Ages was the survival of an ancient Goddess religion.
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret A. Murray was first published in 1921, This work gave a scholarly impetus to the theory that Witchcraft was still in practice, and that it was the survival of an ancient goddess cult, This theory has since been entirely dismissed in academic circles but continues to be embraced by Pagans and occultists. Gardner claimed to belong to such a cult, a direct line surviving from ancient times.
Apologist Raymond Buckland: "If Gardner had made up the whole thing, basic idea and all, from scratch, it would not negate Wicca as a viable religion today. Its rapid growth around the world attests to its 'rightness' in terms of people's religious needs." Very true. Christianity is dead.
The lumpen need a new faith. Neo-Paganism in all its forms is only one step removed from Christianity. An easy leap for the timid masses. But the rulers have always been and will always be Satanists, worshippers of the Others, the Dark Ones, by whatever names they are called.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against the modern Wicca movement can be provided by the following transcription of a letter from notorious English Satanist, Charles M. Pace, of London, dated 7th April, 1974: "Dear Mr. LaVey, Many thanks for your most kind letter, dated 19th March 1974. The revelations on myself by either the Press or the Wiccan, like 'Revelations', one should take them with a pinch of salt! It is true that the word WICCAN is saxon, but it means 'Enlightened Ones' not 'Wise Ones'. It means those enlightened from Paganism to the 'Christian Way' and the Wiccan Christian Church is one of the oldest...
"Most of these Witch Cults! About 95% of them in this country are faked, i.e. started going from 1960 onwards! However there were occult robed groups going before that!, practicing either the Quaballah or the Hermetic Rituals of the Ancient Egyptians. Before that I never even heard of a Witch Coven up until 1960... Naturally G.B. Gardner was mooching around our occult groups, seeking out information--even then we told him, that Witchcraft was a conglomeration of many old cults, but he would not have it. So we gave him the word WICCAN as a joke, thinking that he would see through it. He did not."
It will be argued, of course, that Wicca and Dianic traditions don't represent all of the Neo-Pagan movement, that I am lumping them all together unfairly in the interest of having a broad enough target to hit (no offense intended with that "broad" crack). I can only reply that I have read much on modern Paganism and interrelated topics and subgrouping and I've presented basic underlying assumptions here about the Goddess and prehistoric Goddess worship, that are common to all Pagan traditions I've encountered--a theoretical "cthonic culture" as some of them call it. Other branches have since sprouted from the same tree, but the origins/roots remain the same. Self-righteousness follows organically from "hypocritical self-deceit" and "spiritual pipe dreams."
As we all know, a Black Mass is essentially a rite of exorcism, liberating the participants from limitations imposed by the reigning sacred cows of the day. In the 1600's, when the most oppressive and powerful institution was the Catholic Church, a Black Mass consisted of parodies and blasphemies against the Church. When Anton LaVey covered this topic in The Satanic Bible, he mentioned several specific cows worth goring in 1969: "...Eastern mysticism, psychiatry, the psychedelic movement, ultra-liberalism, etc....". Many of these would still be valid topics worth blaspheming; some have grown so bloated with popularity that a Black Mass is long overdue. A Satanist doesn't necessarily hate these things, or find them completely worthless, but he feels the intense need [compulsive emotional behavior] to counter some of the sanctimony and implicit sacredness with which the field is popularly honored [just like the Christian Coalition does]. A Satanist would have more advocacy, perhaps, of contemporary psychiatry now--largely because it has fallen into such rabid disfavor in recent years. But our High Priest didn't mention one topic in his original book simply because he could not have guessed how much his own influence has accelerated interest in the subject over the last thirty years. Wicca has become the "enlightened", safe alternative to the dying Christian religion. Our ranks are suddenly swelling with those individuals who have first explored Wicca (since it is one step removed from Christianity) but who have found New Age avenues to be ultimately too shallow and limiting. They seek out stronger stuff and find Satanism.
These Satanic advocates have a special need for cleansing themselves of the mental plaque built up by Wiccan cant, attitudes and activities. The following ritual is offered as a purging, a way to reaffirm our connection to the Dark Spirits. It's based on a ritual performed by the early members of the Church of Satan--one among those they loosely termed Shibboleth Rituals. Instead of repeatedly exorcising Christianity (as in the traditional Black Mass), these were rituals designed to exorcise several popular delusions: hippie drug culture (first performed on 8/7/1969 c.e.), psychobabble fads, anti-war protesters, burgeoning militant feminists, and patchouli-drenched witches. Since self-righteousness is the keyword for Wicca, the rite of exorcising previous Wiccan adherence must include humiliation and debasement, in order to cleanse the Initiate of a bloated sense of false "power", self-deceit and spiritual nonsense. [Here comes Barton's cunt-flapping S & M. One would think that reason would work - IF - conversion is the goal.]
For the actual rite, all of the standard ritual implements as described in The Satanic Bible are to be used. You'll also need a tall stake or cuffs set high onto a wall to which the acting "Wiccan" can be secured (one possibility for a cheap, stable, portable stake might be a portable basketball hoop, available in the sporting goods section of many large department stores). Suggested music would be New Age meditation pap for the Wiccan's entrance, then smashed by the drama of the Mars theme from Hoist's The Planets. The Wiccan must be dressed in flowing Earthmother-type garb, loaded down with candles, cards, herbs, talismans, crystals, New Age meditation tapes, astrological charts and other botanica supplies, perhaps stowed in a large over-the-shoulder environmentally-correct canvas satchel. The Celebrant will also need a whip or cat-o'-nine-tails. Two or three strong Acolytes should be chosen to assist during the ritual.
Open the ritual as usual, using steps 1-8 in The Satanic Bible--call forth the Four Crown Princes of Hell and read aloud the Fifteenth Enochian Key. As soon as the Key is concluded, the evening's appointed Wiccan bursts through the door of the ritual chamber, reeking of patchouli oil. She (he) ceaselessly moves from one black-robed figure to another among the Satanic congregation, gabbling New Age psychobabble, grabbing hands to read palms, throwing various items from her satchel around the room--herbs, charts, fairy dust, etc.--and cautioning vehemently and evangelically against the dangers of Black Magic. She must be a parody of every Pagan and New Age proselyte she's encountered during her explorations of Paganism, using the phrases and exemplifying the attitudes she found most offensive and irritating. After a few minutes, the Celebrant booms forth:
CELEBRANT: STOP! You will not be allowed to interrupt our ceremonies with your self-righteous gibbering. Your kind has had a voice for too long. You've stolen from us and cursed us, all the time draped in the same mantle of self-righteous piety as your Christian cohorts.
(WICCAN continues to cavort around the room, throwing occult paraphernalia like so much confetti, ignoring the Celebrant.)
CELEBRANT: Enough! Let us make an example of this addle-brained poseur. Seize her! Let her feel the wrath of Satan, whose tools she has blindly exploited.
(The two or three ACOLYTES grab the Wiccan's arms and drag her to where she is to be bound, turning her to face the Celebrant and holding her as WICCAN struggles.)
CELEBRANT: We are now your Inquisitors! You stand accused of violating most of our Nine Satanic Sins: stupidity, pretentiousness, self-deceit, herd conformity, lack of perspective, forgetfulness of past orthodoxies, and lack of aesthetics. Once the Gates of Hell were blasted open by Satanists, you and your mystical rabble rushed forward like the cheap, gutless charlatans you are, selling lies for truths and promising great enlightenment. You have dared to insult the Legions of the Pit, while you use their Magic. How do you answer to these charges?
WICCAN: Oh, Great Mother, save me from the clutches of this wickedness. I invoke Diana and Artemis and Innana....etc., etc. (The effectiveness of the ritual is dependent upon how completely the WICCAN can use her imagination to act out the role she is charged with. Specific words cannot be dictated; they must come from identification with that mindset, so that she can crystallize it for everyone in the room.)
CELEBRANT: Silence! You sicken me! You betray your own true feminine power with every breath! Bind her to that post (wall) and she will feel the consequences of denying her Dark Lord.
(Once the ACOLYTES bind the struggling, still-babbling Wiccan to the pole or wall, CELEBRANT rips her clothes to expose her back. Another ACOLYTE hands Celebrant a whip. WICCAN protests.)
CELEBRANT: Scream! Cry! Writhe in fear. We know you for the hypocritical, death-loving masochist you are! You have met your Brothers who know your dark needs. Indulge yourself in the pain of truth.
(CELEBRANT whips the Wiccan.)
AFTER EACH STROKE OF THE WHIP, THE CONGREGATION INTONES "HAIL SATAN!" and the gong is struck.
(The intensity of the drubbing should be discussed before the ritual by the acting WICCAN and CELEB . The level of pain should be up to the WICCAN and a hand signal should be agreed-upon and watched for by the CELEBRANT during the whipping. If the CELEBRANT receives no signal, he should cease whipping after he feels that a suitable level of psychic intensity has been achieved, and the exorcism has taken place.)
CELEBRANT: Release her.
(ACOLYTES unbind the WICCAN, who slumps to the floor in an exhausted heap, covering her bosom with her tattered clothes. She is now quiet and subdued. CELEBRANT still holds the whip in his hand.)
CELEBRANT: Get up! Stand before the altar of Satan. Ask forgiveness for your past stupidity and declare your allegiance to He who deserves it.
(WICCAN rises and faces the Baphomet. ACOLYTE holds declaration in front of Wiccan for her to read.)
WICCAN: I beg forgiveness from my Dark Lord for all of my past misunderstanding of His Ways. I am sorry for each time I misrepresented His beliefs and misused His strength. I believed the lies I was taught, but now my mind has been opened and I see the Truth for the first time in my life. From this day forward, I commit myself to strength, indulgence, vital existence and undefiled wisdom. I petition Satan to accept me as one of His own, as I have been since my birth. I vow I will do all in my power to strengthen myself and thereby strengthen all in the Devil's Fane.
CELEBRANT: Your words of dedication are strong. Only time and deed will prove how sincere your vows are. The Prince of Darkness will know, and punish or reward you accordingly in the weeks to come. You are hereby welcomed among us.
(Ceremony is concluded in the usual manner.)
[And this pretty much sums up the types of females that get into the COS, which is why I personally DESPISED them: they were their own "Story of O's." Sick, pathetic, whipped, enemies of women's rights. COS women, all perfect little Eve's. If you see this bitch walking down the street, kindly smack her face.]
Here is what Phil Marsh wrote to Barton. This letter is now a post called MATRIARCHY with all personal things edited out.
Dec. 23, l995
Dear Blanche:
Phil Marsh here. I would like to respond to your article "Wicca: Exposed! (and Exorcised)" in The Cloven Hoof, issue 127. I will not repeat things Tani has said (whose letter coming to you on "Wicca: Exposed..." I just finished reading). I think you should very carefully consider her insights and actual wisdom on the topic of "religious wars" as reflected in her letter in reference to Satanism vs. Neo-Pagan, coming as she does from a completely different background from over ninety per cent of the people who adhere to either belief system or write the books you have read by George, Rose, et al. What I would like to get you to see here is just one thing: that your reading material on the subject of "ancient matriarchies," authors both pro and con, like Budapest and Kelly, are, to put it mildly, as "hokey" as can be. In both cases, on both sides, there is complete ignorance and bowdlerization of scientific facts of biology, anthropology, historiography, etc. I will confine myself to this narrow subject, since, as I sit here, I can see that this will probably become a rather long letter even so. The only proviso and indulgence I ask of you as you read my letter is this: before you mistake me for someone who is a Marxist, a "male feminist," politically correct, or a third-world revisionist, let me just relate one fact about myself which I think you should bear in mind before you make this mistake as you read what follows. This fact or incident should speak the volumes I would like you to know about any so-called "political correctness" I may be suspected of having before you begin reading what I have to say on "ancient matriarchies."
When I was in college in the late sixties and early seventies, at the peak of the popular wave of student free-speech, socialist, and anti-war fervor, I achieved a certain local notoriety in the college town of New Brunswick, New Jersey (home of Rutgers College) as Philip "Vomitamo" Panaggio. My real name is Philip Panaggio, which appears on all my diplomas, but "Vomitamo," which is Italian for "I vomit," was an epithet given to me by left-wing students who considered me their political and ideological enemy. So much was this so, that several of these students who were on the editorial board of the school newspaper, the Rutgers Targum, set me up in a highly publicized public debate - before a full auditorium on campus - with the notorious itinerant student radical (and "bedlamite," as I publicly called him in the debate) Marc Rudd. Rudd was unprepared for me, and, after the debate, which lasted a grueling three hours before a noisily partisan left-wing student crowd that had come to "revere" the Chicago Seven, Rudd practically admitted defeat by saying that the next time he came to Rutgers to debate me he would "bring an elephant gun." The reason he said this was that I surprised him and so utterly infuriated him during the debate, that he disgorged many epithets at me, such as "Nazi," "racist," "pig," and even "Jew killer," which turned many of the audience members, who knew me a bit better, openly against him. However, without going into further details about the actual debate, which centered on the Chicago Seven, Red China, the Vietnam War, etc., I think you can glean from what little I have said here how politically incorrect I was then, and still am now, though certainly I am not a racist or a Nazi either, which really seemed to confuse Rudd. I am actually part Ophite Jewish Cypriot! With that, let me now turn to the subject of ancient matriarchies.
As I already said, your reading matter on the subject is by "hokey," non-scientific authors who are either out to promote the neo-Pagan agenda or out to challenge and "refute" it. None of the authors you mention have any connection to any scientific institution (like for, example, the Smithsonian, which is radically anti-White Western Christian Male - for good reasons, I think), nor any regard for scientific facts. Margaret A. Murray never gave any "scholarly impetus" to the theory of an ancient goddess cult, as you incorrectly assert, but was sternly ignored by serious archaeologists and anthropologists in the three decades following the publication of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe - and still is! Nor did the scholarly impetus for this theory, which "folklorist" (that is a real pseudo-science, or, as Tani puts it, "soft-science") Tristram Coffin ignorantly says now lies in the "junkyard of ideas," come from the "humanist classics" that college students are forced to read, like the early, representative feminist essays by Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Condorcet. The real scholarly impetus came from Charles Darwin and Bachofen, and even Marx and Engels, who believed that "Mother-right," in which property is passed down to heirs on the mother's side, is the prototypical and ideal form of social organization. Coffin does not mention this (he may not even be aware of this, so embroiled is he in "pop" soft- and pseudo-science) because then he would have to imply that Darwin and Marx, two of the most alive thinkers today (one responsible for "Social Darwinism," the other for its antithetical movement "Communism"), are "in the junkyard." Plus, he would then be admitting that "intellectual giants" (whose ideas, as I said, are not archaic in any way, but the basis of all modern thinking on these subjects) could "fall" for ideas your author Rose dismisses as a "cozy and eccentric parlour-game... ." Surprised that I can justly claim Darwin and Marx on the "side" of the theory of ancient matriarchies? Then read on.
Tani Jantsang is correct about a "matriarchy" never having existed, but look carefully at what she is saying, and at the facts. "Matriarchy" (in the sense and of the type I will explain further along to have really existed) was not the polar functional opposite of patriarchy, which is the social centrality and dominance of men. Matriarchies are egalitarian (in the legal, Constitutional sense, not in the perverted and idiomatic sense of the term as used by politically correct "equalitarians"),patriarchies are emphatically not. Patriarchies suppress women, children, colored races, and "the mad" (by the latter I mean certain well-recognized creative types responsible for new ideas in the realm of dress, dance, the arts, etc., like Ezra Pound, Wilhelm Reich, et al.) In patriarchies, there are always three things conspicuously absent in matriarchies: an elite, wealth, and social class. Perhaps you are enamored of these. If so, you have to admit to yourself that you cannot be objective in this matter. If you were indifferent to these three things, you could begin to be objective. Any Satanist (or anyone else!) who is enamored of these three things will not be objective either. What is more, matriarchal societies are not based on the institution of property, a state of affairs patriarchists have difficulty even envisioning, wondering how Marx could have done so. They are based on kinship, the famous (among real scholars) "classificatory system," which I can be certain none of the authors you have read has ever studied in any depth. This is a social system based on a mother and her descendants in the female line. Well sure, you will say, but this is not matriarchy, but rather a matrilineal society. I agree, and, as I just said, I agree with what Tani is saying about matriarchies never having existed except among a few scattered and oddball tribes. What is more, many matrilineal societies are actually patriarchal because power is wielded by a mother's brother (a fact which the authors of your reading material are again probably ignorant of, since this is learned only by studying the "nuts and bolts" of anthropology, not by reading "humanist classics" or neo-Pagan apologies or diatribes.) So what this really boils down to, Blanche, is the issue or study of women's status or rank in society, and if you look carefully and objectively at this you find out that things were (and in some places still are) a lot like the neo-Pagans claim, which I will now delineate.
The Mediterranean area is the best area for studying ancient social systems. In Babylon, Egypt, Phrygia, and Phoenicia, to mention some outstanding ancient civilizations, we find the worship of important mother goddesses. You cannot compare this widespread, lavish, dominant reverence and adoration with that of the "Catholic" veneration of Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary, as if the latter could "fill the gap," as you glibly put it in your essay, "left" by Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Phoenicia, Cybele in Phrygia, or Isis in Egypt. That would be like thinking a cork could fill the crater blown off the cap of Mt. St. Helens. You may also have had in mind, in this weak "argument," the minor Catholic hyperdulia cults, typically like those in the Caribbean or on Calabria in Italy, for example. But these are clearly distinguishable from what went on in Babylon with goddess cults, even well into the patriarchal era. Look at the status of women in Babylon, for example. What went on?
Consider the fascinating little figurines you mention in your article, the "small statuettes and images of round, fecund females as fertility symbols," you say. Your authors have misinformed you on these interesting artifacts, some recently discovered examples of which are gigantic. They are known today, throughout the scientific world, as "fat ladies," so I shall refer to them as such here. The fact that the writers you mention do not call them this is evidence that they have no first-hand acquaintance with them, and are "outsiders" to the whole subject. One finds the fat ladies in all the most ancient city-states, for example in Malta they are associated with the earliest free standing public stone buildings yet discovered (see Scientific American, Dec. l993). They go back to the Upper Paleolithic (about 25,000 years ago), through the Neolithic and the dawn of metal-working. Only a few are found in Europe, but in the Mediterranean world they are found in unusually very great abundance in far-flung sites. I actually held one in my hand once, but this is not unusual, since these are not rare and many are in the hands of private individuals. Tani mentioned to you one of her friends owning a cuneiform-covered shard (the Mason, Charles Hand.) So it is with the fat ladies: they were indiscriminately lifted from excavations and sold as objets d'art. This was not really looting, but there is great regret in the archaeological community that this went on because modern archaeological methods, of which the authors you read are not apparently aware, have become very strict as to how excavations are conducted and artifacts removed due to what happened to these fat ladies. Like Charles with his shard, owners of fat ladies cannot fully account for where they come from, or exactly where or how they were situated in a dig site before removal. Now they are not removed from any excavation unless they are first photographed in three dimensions (i. e. from many angles) in situ and the nature of their locations carefully documented in a log. This is because where an object is found in an excavation is as important as the image or material of the object itself. I am going to tell you where the new scientific methods of excavation have found these objects, and you will be surprised, because the new, more careful, documented, and fastidious work indicates they were probably not fertility symbols at all, as your article (and reading) implies. This fallacy was due, again, to "soft science" types in the art world who sold them as objets d'art. These people did not call them "fat ladies," which is a very objective and neutral name for them. They prejudicially called them "Venuses," based on their "Jungian" idea that they "look like" a "fecund mother archetype." There is no basis for the idea that they are fertility images, and the new excavating indicates they were something else. As I said, it matters where you find something: did you excavate it from a devotional kitchen niche, or from a massengrab (common grave). Suppose you discovered a lot of mass graves in an archaeological dig. And in these graves, you always find swastikas. What would this mean? Archaeologists truly say that archaeological excavating is like detective work at a crime scene. It could mean that a Nazi killed everybody in the grave and then threw in his "calling card" (the swastika). Or, it could mean that everyone slaughtered in the grave was a Nazi. So these are tough calls for archaeologists. Why do I use the image of a mass grave? Because now that these fat ladies are not just summarily lifted from a site, trumpeted as evidence of early man's "obsession with fertility," and tossed about as "Venuses," it is known that they are not found where one finds an ancient city-state's fertility icons. They are most often found in massengraben (common graves) of disarticulated male bones. A skeleton is called "disarticulated" when the bones are separated from each other. In the case of these mass graves, the males' bones were summarily pulled apart in order to make room for more, like in an over full landfill, because men were not entitled to a burial. This is known with a great degree of certainty, for example, from the death cults in the Malta region I referred to above (in which these fat ladies are found in abundance) because female bones are found nearby fully articulated (not pulled apart like so much refuse), and their (the females') bones are invariably found very ceremoniously and carefully buried under the household itself. Men were not entitled to be buried there - and apparently not entitled to a burial at all! Thus speak the fat ladies! This is the hard evidence, Blanche, of a new and much more careful method of "doing archaeology." For example, when these fat ladies were first found and passed around they started a tradition of scholarly speculation (which may or may not be mentioned by your authors) of an "eye goddess" cult spread throughout the ancient world. The "fertility" idea was more prevalent among art connoisseurs. The "eye goddess" idea got its impetus also from the hard fact of the ubiquitous eye motifs in the ancient Mediterranean. It was believed that this religion spread from the Balkan area into Europe to form the "Old European Religion" from which Wicca claims descent. This speculation went on and had nothing to do with Murray et al. I repeat: this was speculation, and the scholars doing it knew it, unlike the art connoisseurs who were bandying about the less well-grounded speculation that they were "fertility goddesses." What I have told you about the massengraben, however, is not speculation, but hard fact, not otherwise easily explainable except as evidence of a social system much different from ours in which men lacked almost any social status at all. Perhaps neither the Wiccans nor Tristram Coffin want to contemplate a great civilization in which men were completely dispossessed, and couldn't even get a few square feet for their bones, which were regarded as garbage by corpulent women or goddesses. The women's superior status in these civilizations - in life and death - was not based on property, as in a patriarchy, but rather on a different kind of territorial idea in which men had "no territory" but women had the homesite, which they, in some sense, "owned." Note that this is not evidence of a powerful and dominant hierarchy of priestesses, but many archaeologists directly involved in these digs today think it is, contrary to what Coffin says, who seems to be unaware of the new and better work done here. But even if there was not the polar equivalent of a dominant hierarchy of male priests, the evidence speaks most clearly on the side of some sort of ancient matriarchal system, or something resembling one, and this evidence is, contrary to what your authors say, hard physical evidence. Should anyone be surprised at a social system of such widespread prevalence in the earliest stages of (documentable) civilization in which women had some sort of status based on some sort of (by them understood) connection of "territoriality" to a homesite, which the men did not have? It would not surprise a primatologist in the least, for he would know, for instance, about the society of the bonobo or pygmy chimp, possibly the most intelligent primate alive next to man. In bonobo society, the female is clearly central and dominant. (See Scientific American, March, l995, "Bonobo Sex and Society,") in which the author makes a remark that may seem out of place in a hard science journal, but surprises no one in these sciences. I quote from it here: "At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement." He goes on to elaborate on the male-biased "evolutionary scenarios," as the author calls them, "Man the Hunter," "Man the Toolmaker," etc., which now appear to be romantic fantasies having no connection with actual primate and hominid evolution. All of this is quite matter of fact to a primatologist, Blanche. You must know that centuries after Copernicus and Galileo, certain people and "intellectuals" were still arguing whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe. So it is with the authors you are reading. The "soft-science" folklorist you mention, Coffin, is ignorant of what is going on in the hard sciences right now. The division of labor he regards as so "self-evident," i. e. man the mobile, female the sedentary, did not result in, as he puts it, "man the possessor" and women "the possessed." Hard evidence, both from primatology and scientific archaeology, indicates that the naturally based sex roles of man-the-mobile and woman-the-sedentary resulted in just the opposite of what Coffin says during the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Metal Ages, i. e. it actually resulted in woman-the-"possessor" (of some sort of homesite "property") and man-the-nigh-banished!
This continued well into the age of patriarchies. Should we be surprised that the patriarchies did not or could not just reverse this age-old system dictated by biological necessity (as Darwin in fact argued over a century ago)? Not at all, of course. Look at the Code of Hammurabi in Babylon, an early patriarchy. In that Code, women were still allowed a far greater degree of financial and personal freedom than in post-Renaissance European societies. A bride would have to be paid for, and guess who got the money: the bride. This payment, which often included real estate, was settled on her and remained her property. A wife could sue for divorce (only allowed in modern times), but she kept her dowry-price. She could sue for divorce based on cruelty alone. Women could trade on their own account, independent of their husbands, and could be judges, elders, scribes and witnesses. I have found that when I use to tell people this, they once-upon-a-time were astonished: they thought that only in the Great Constitutional Patriarchy of America did this finally come about. I only recently heard a crony of William Bennett on a radio talk show claim that these ideas for the liberation of women were only realized for the first time in America, outside of which women had always been subservient to men. (She did not give the Founding Fathers credit for this, since she knew that none of their wives were allowed in politics, but, in an effort to promote Bennett's "moral and family values" and Christian myths, gave the Founding Fathers credit for it nonetheless by saying that they created the political system in which the political equality of women could come into existence.) Statements like this, that women's social status in America today is a new thing that never existed before, are made in popular books and journals as a matter of course and are never challenged. What Bennett's crony should have said is that woman-right as it was universally practiced in the ancient world was eroded by the patriarchies until it reached a low ebb in the Puritan and Calvanist Christian societies of the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. I don't know if you really know what happened here so let me outline it.
From the position of dominance I mentioned above in these ancient city states and the high status still maintained in early patriarchies, after wave after wave of new patriarchy, by the time of the Roman Empire, a woman had sunk to the level of what, in Roman law, was called an imbecile. This is kind of like an "incompetent" in modern jurisprudence, but slightly different. An imbecile cannot be called as a witness at a trial (an incompetent in modern jurisprudence can in certain cases), and cannot make contracts, wills, or hold public office (like the modern incompetent). How low can you go? Well, lower still, because in the post-Roman Christian world, something was added to women's being imbeciles: they were considered to be temptresses, responsible for the Fall of Adam, not permitted to speak at all, barred from all public affairs in Christian society, secluded in homes owned by the male, needing to keep the fact that they could read a secret, especially if they read Greek or Latin. That was the lowest they went, and that takes us into the Eighteenth Century in Europe, where this went on, and in some parts of the New World. Tani says in her letter to you that an exorcism performed to banish Wicca and neo-Paganism is very "Christian." Likewise, I see as very Christian the Cloven Hoof's casting of women in the role of temptress, whether this is considered "positive" or not, just as I consider the imbecile image of Marilyn Monroe very Christian and un-Satanic, though I do credit her Satanically for making oodles of money from it and for gaining power through it. We are animals. It is male animals that vie for the privilege of being picked to sire the offspring of the females who judge and choose among them - in most of the animal kingdom. In the microscopic realm of sperm and ova, the sperm might rush and struggle to fertilize the ova, but the ova's surface electrical field must collapse or "open" to allow a sperm in. Israeli scientists have found that much infertility in healthy couples today is due to this "refusal" to allow the sperm in - a "choice" made by the ova. By studying human fertility, would not an extra-terrestrial race otherwise unfamiliar with humans have guessed what Darwin and Marx believed - as well as intellectuals in the ancient world, like Apuleius: that matriarchy is the norm for humans?
Tani mentioned that Herodotus is continually being upgraded and "rehabilitated" by modern archaeology. His credibility has soared. Until very recently, he was regarded by arrogant and smug Nineteenth Century European scholars as having the intelligence and veracity of Walter Winchell, a comparison I actually read once. Herodotus is no longer thought to be so, and his reputation as "The Father of History" has been restored. With this in mind, one should consider his comparison of Egypt in his time to Athens, which was well on its way then into patriarchy, where women were already well on their way to having the great joy of their existence - childbearing - made into childbearing-slavery, as Bertrand Russell once pointed out happened in the Christian world. The beginning of the end of Athenian civilization came with Pericles, an age that should more properly have been called the "Age of Aspasia." This is about the time when the Pythagoreans went wholly underground. One of the wonders of Egypt Herodotus described is his observation that "the people also in most of the manners and customs exactly reverse the common practice" of the Athenians. He is known to have had the relation of the sexes in mind when he wrote this. In Egypt, in Herodotus's day, women were still owning property, working in many sectors of the economy, taking part in public life, and mixing freely with men. The authority of Herodotus, which, as I said, has reached a new high with modern archaeologists and historians, combined with what has been known all along about some very powerful Egyptian Queens, indicates then that the roles of Egyptian men and women were reversed from those in Athens, which were already much like those played by men and women of early Twentieth Century Europe and America (pre-WWI). You might also be interested in noting that in Black Athena by Martin Bernal, a very scholarly, reputable, and academic book despite its unfortunately dissonant and ill-conceived title (as Bernal himself has said regretfully), has extensive detail on how the main threat to European Christianity as a religion, ideology, and political system, as well as to the European Christian misinterpretation of world history, has always been Egypt and Egyptian things and ideas, which is why the Freemasons adopted much that is or was Egyptian in their eclectic symbolism and rites. Keep in mind that among "Egyptian things" no scholar associates any notion of "Set" as put forth by the ToS. Set or Seth was an Egyptian epithet or metonym for anything of the people we'd call Semites today: not vice-versa, as the historical fabricators would like to be the truth. The name "Seth" referred to the man Seth and his people. This fact is explained in the very scholarly work by Te Velde that is misused despite the fact that it utterly refutes everything else being said. The calling of these people and their things "Set" and other forms of this word was "the first anti-Semitism" in history. Tani exposed this in full in her article entitled "Set?" It's right under everyone's noses, including yours, but no one sees it: a powerful society in which the sex roles are reversed - Egypt prior to the Fifth Cent. B. C. E. Writers from the Christian Osmoconsciousness repeatedly err in their interpretations of the ancient world. For example, try to tell them that women's skeletons of the Neolithic Age show many of the growths and scars that result from their having spent many hours on a saddle quern (this is a kind of cracker, splitter, and grinder for grain) and they immediately and wrongly see this as evidence of ancient female subservience. Women really did this kind of hard physical work, and it often took several hours on a quern to make enough flour for one meal. If anything, the terrible, disfiguring scars and skeletal mutilations borne by male skeletons wounded in the hunt should be regarded as a sign of "banishment and subservience," and this would be thought were it not for the fact that there is a Romantic Glamour surrounding the "Man the Hunter" scenario which keep European Christians from seeing what this really involved. I mentioned how the woman had a kind of specific "space" around a homesite which was "hers" and on which no man could be buried, where she and her female descendants alone could be buried. On this homesite she practiced, for example, what archaeologists call "textile technology." Recently, an intricately woven fabric was found some 25,000 years old, much older than previously thought existing. Tani mentioned to someone how women did all the pottery and crafts. The romantic idea of "Man the Artisan" has also been eroded by scientific archaeology little by little, whatever "hold-backs" there may be in the world of "pop" culture and "pop archaeology." Increasingly, the Neolithic is being seen as a transition from a healthy system in which salutary foods picked and gathered by the females were supplemented by male-hunted game. During this late Upper Paleolithic Era, humans were very healthy, and women were the artisans and lorists. With the coming of the Neolithic, it is now known that the health and vigor of humans suffered miserably. The stature (or "height") of a skeleton is physical evidence that archaeologists use to gauge a Neolithic individual's health. It is known that if you have two members of the same race, and one is taller than the other, the taller of the two is better nourished. As humans passed into the Neolithic and into the introduction of agriculture, the height of a Briton, for example, shrunk from close to six feet to a stunted five foot three. In addition, his new diet of grains, whether hard and rough grains, which are severely abrasive and damaging to the teeth, or cracked grains cooked into porridge to make them soft and stick to the teeth, resulted in massive dental caries: imagine the constant, sleepless pain they had to look forward to and endure as they passed into their twenties!
Only the late Twentieth Century modern Briton has begun to approach the stature or health known for the ancient pre-agricultural Britons. With the coming of agriculture and patriarchy (they come and go together, contrary to any Wiccan pop-claims), women, at first, retained the skills of "craftsmen" (now known to be craftswomen: there were no craftsmen then). Men labored at the crops, keeping pests away, etc. With the coming of patriarchy and the developing urban elites, agriculture became more quantity-intensive. This is when men developed skill in engineering to irrigate crops, etc. This social system created a new, servile class of workers which did not exist under mother-rule, and caused massive salinization and devastation of planting sites that archaeologists and paleo-biologists now see at these city-sites over and over again from modern satellite surveys and other scientific investigations of these sites. The social decline of women was only beginning at this point. I touch briefly on this broad subject here, because, in the hard sciences, the artifacts and objets d'art that "the cultured" and "the rich" and in fact people of all classes of society wait in line to ogle at museums are increasingly seen by hard science types (like me or Tani) as tokens of systems of massive single-crop agriculture and catastrophic planting-site destruction, resulting in the cyclic rise and fall of patriarchal systems based on property and an elite which lives off the mass-product of a labor-exploited or slave agricultural sector. (Try to see this all as if there is no intentional human component involved, like you might be inclined to view the complex and socially stratified system that exists in an ant colony, for example, so as to remain objective. Try, for example, to see the Earth's exhausted topsoil and the exploited agricultural slaves that are key components of this system like you would see the decayed leaves collected by ants as fertilizer and the fungi that ants exploit when they raise their fungus crops - yes, ants do agriculture too - though theirs is quite different!) This (human) system employs a new professional group of males called "priests" which further employs an even newer professional group of "scribes and scholars" who reify the whole thing as somehow "divinely sanctioned." The first known writing (in cuneiform, like on Charles Hand's shard), which is so glorified and revered by literate people such as you who believe in its (I believe, unfounded) "self-evident superiority" over phonocentric systems (using only sonic or oral adjuncts), was another key element of this system. The first "books" were written to justify "in stone" this system for the elite. These writings had nothing - and still have nothing - to do with any kind of scientific or philosophical truth. This system is referred to very scientifically and unromantically as a "new kind of "bee hive" by the present secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and former University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology Robert McC. Adams - these so-called "great city-states of the dawn of civilization," as subsequent written histories in the continuing literate tradition of later agri-patriarchies called them well into this century to glorify them, a tradition of (literate) exaltation of which you are enamored. It is, after all, all that people are willing, in literate cultures today, to call "civilization." Everything else to them is "primitivism," "tribalism," or, like the disparaging image you partly invoke in your article, merely people sitting around campfires "tossing runes" - or just: "nothing"! When these great "hives" self-destruct, as satellite surveys show of their sites of layer upon layer of succeeding civilization - Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia - in comes the only known really perennial form of human culture, one based on kinship and shared descent, reciprocal obligations, one reviled and feared by these elites and their literate "fans," one with a low-density population, fluidly adaptive, based not on property, as I said, but on the "matriarchal" classificatory system, one which lives on a least-effort basis, sharing risks and labors, capable of flexibility in drawing from among many subsistence alternatives (including "looting"!), one not vulnerable due to being tied to particular (planting) locations or administrations, one mortally feared by these patriarchal agriculturalists and elites for reasons so well outlined by Tani Jantsang (to which I will add a few in a moment). These incoming perennial cultures (sorry!) leave few "records" (of which you think so highly), few monuments that receive "historical" attention by anyone but a few cracked Wicca loons and some others of "the mad," like the mathematician and astronomer C. Piazzi Smyth and Dr. Alvarez (who has since been redeemed and rehabiliated from among the mad due to having won a Nobel Prize in a different field of science: the discovery and investigation of the Earth's iridium deposit, put their by a the collision of the Earth with a comet at the end of the Cretaceous!) The short interval you regard as "splendor" and its artifacts (like writing) you mistakenly take for the whole.
These incoming "matriarchal"-type cultures are so completely sexually free (just like bonobo society, see article I referred to above) and so extremely exogamic (outbreeding) that they utterly scandalize and horrify the agri-patriarchies, which are, as Freud pointed out in Civilization and its Discontents, sexually inhibitive or outright repressive and puritanical, relying heavily upon sexual sublimation for the energy and drive for their many "cultural" pursuits. The idea of a women having husbands of all types from all over of all races outrages and threatens them. Even the reasons for this "outbreeding" have been misunderstood by the theorists of these patriarchal societies who just "make things up" to "understand" these societies instead of using the modern method of letting the facts and details speak for themselves. These cultural liars and xenophobes, who managed to overcome enough of their fear of these "tribal" societies to at least talk about them, made up the ideas, based on their own European experience, and not on any real scientific knowledge, that "outbreeding" is really necessarily: you know what comes out when you breed with your first cousin, right? However, it is now known that certain cousins in these societies they so fear and misunderstand, under the classificatory system, are even encouraged to mate, and that the real reason for their women taking husbands of all types from all over, who were invited to live on the woman's homesite, was the advantage of dietary diversity these women obtained by having husbands and kin-through-marriage from all over. Christians have been misled by the black widow spider paradigm, how the male spider dies in order to mate. The "moral" these dolts have gotten from this, and still do, is that mating is the center of all social relationships. It is expected or predictable that "thinkers" from a sexually repressed society would eventually arrive at this "idea." What people who do not really study hard-science entomology but only the "soft" versions are never told, apparently, is that the male spider does indeed have to be killed and eaten by the widow to mate, but the male black widow is frequently observed avoiding sex in order to just, say, eat his own food, or etc. He is not a "sex zombie," as people from Christian homes invariable are. Believe it or not, another struggle anthropology and archaeology has had in the latter half of this century has been to overcome the new prejudice that "everything biological is centered on sex," including, of course, the phenomenon of outbreeding. This prejudice, which they mistakenly view a "new liberation in thought," born of their late "liberation" from Nineteenth Century Victorian strait-jackets on scientific - and other - repression, has continued right down to this day in Desmond Morris's pop science idea of "man: the world's sexiest mammal." (I have reason to believe, however, that Morris may be doing something like Tani says the Masons (and others) often do: Morris may be exploiting the new freedom on the BBC, which, at one time, did not even allow Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, Baby" to be played on the air due to all her orgasmic moans in it. Now Morris can at least - for the first time - talk about the social role of female breast display on the air. It was a long time coming - but that is so paradigmatic of agri-patriarchies that I am often surprised that anyone who does any reading at all does not know this, even, for example, someone who does a "sociological" study of, say, "censorship." I can only account for this blindness by using Peter Gilmore's concept of "osmoconsciousness" in the strong and broad sense in which I think it really applies when it does apply.
I admit that some of this is based on what would properly be called "indirect evidence." But the idea that there is no direct or physical evidence of this is an idea purveyed by people ignorant of what they are talking about, with axes to grind of their own. Archaeology is detective work at real physical "crime scenes," analyzing real physical evidence, etc., though I would wager that Tristram Coffin does not practice it this way: he reads, he talks to people, he sits at his desk, he might even ski a little... . And what is really bad: he teaches and gets published.
I would like to point out something that, when the opportunity arises, I point out to every young Satanist I meet (like the late Satanic poet, Andre Soly): these ancient societies are referred to as "tribal," which makes them sound ignorant and primitive, when they are actually as complex as societies based on, e. g. property, instead of kinship and sharing, as they are. Kin recognition is more basic to "the animal" Doc LaVey was talking about. There is kin recognition from wildflowers to wasps, from sea squirts to primates. Kin recognition is fundamental to choosing mates. The entire classificatory system of these "tribal" societies is based on this kin-recognition in complex and elaborate ways in the "clan" system with which you may be familiar. While "territoriality" is certainly correctly listed (by Carleton Coon) for example, as a "limbic," i. e. instinctual behavior, this is not the same as "property," which seems to be a cultural development of patriarchies exclusively. As to your contention that oral traditions are somehow less accurate or magical than written documents, I could not disagree more. If anything, the new profession of "scholar" that came into existence with the beginning of agriculture, unlike, for example, the profession of "poet," which had already existed, discovered that a newfound kind of "authority" came into existence with the existence of writing beyond the kind of authority already carried by the Emperor's or Pharaoh's voice, for example. A lie written in stone is more permanent than a phonic one, and carries more "weight" for the gullible, which is exactly what the patriarchies and these pop authors you refer to are relying on. As Martin Bernal has pointed out, an entire false history of ancient Greece was fabricated by dint of the written word in Nineteenth Century Europe, fabrications that fly in the face of earlier, first-hand and eye-witness accounts which they smugly dismissed! I do agree with you, however, about certain texts being "magical," about their "preserving" something "undiluted," etc. - for example Herodotus. But if you have ever seen Herodotus in the original Greek, instead of in the pompous near-forgery translations made in semi-archaic forms of English that are used to "awe" certain people thus awed, you will see that he reads like he is delivering orally, as if Herodotus could have just stood up and said it all, Jack Kerouac style, which I believe he did or could have done based on the internal style of the speech involved.
The term "goddess" is misleading. These people never did (and still do not) have a concept of a god or goddess in any way related to the idea as it is conceived today. Certain "classics" on this subject, like The Golden Bough and books by certain members of the Frankfort family have done a lot of harm by misleading generations of readers as to how man thought "before philosophy," and these misapprehensions have trickled down into the "common sense" ideas about ancient man of our decades. But in truth, the sun, Earth, and water were all seen by them as "mothers." The sun nourished, gave warmth, and made things grow. The water nourished the growing things. The Earth held the soil from which they grew. The "goddesses" these pop-culture writers seem to focus on were nothing other than these natural things. The concept of an apeiron, however, was identical to Doc's Dark Force in Nature, as were the Far Eastern concepts of Mahakala and other concepts Tani has documented enough in articles. Even in the Kabbala that some Hebrews still keep esoteric and which is identical to Pythagorean and Tantrik thought, I am astonished to find not one single book informing the pop occult culture correctly. But I frequently find many with deliberate misdirections, like calculatedly misleading by the switching of Sephiroth, etc. This might not be surprising since Jewish keepers of this may not want to really tell people they - despise?
For example, Hochmah is said to be a kind of male concept. Yet the word itself is female grammatically. (It is true that in modern linguistics grammatical gender is distinguished from the "real" gender of a word's referent - but grammatical gender is important in Kabbala.) Sephira is female singular and stands for Binah which is Sephiroth number two. The rest of the Sephiroth emanate from this dark "female" or "yin" concept. But the rest are Sephiroth - female plural. Hochmah is first to emanate and is correctly number three - yet these are switched. he foremost expert on this, Isaac Myer, explains how and why they got switched: to hide from Christians, and later to deliberately confuse them. Interesting? Even more interesting: try to buy his book! [The orignal one he wrote, which we have a xerox copy of. Apparently, republications are much abridged!] Do you find it hard to believe that people can keep something quiet and in their own group for that long a time? Amerinds do it right now: they tell the New Agers that they are all wrong and ask them to stay out of their business - but they will not tell them what they would have to know to understand anything the right way. This is expected in cultures such as Tani's, too. Yet there are plenty of "teachers" willing to take money from people they regard as stupider than a monkey. (Remember what I said above about this kind of people having a much more "flexible" idea of finding subsistence, like "cheating," for example - no morals, which are a cultural specialty of the societies adhering to rigid forms of subsistence: the agri-patriarchies.) I've seen this with my own eyes and read as much in a journal containing interviews with certain immigrant Eastern Indian "gurus" who had also obtained medical licenses in the U. S. These "gurus" broke a "code of silence" in these interviews, frankly admitting that Americans who paid to learn "yoga" from them were being taught the most rudimentary form of it that is taught in India to people physically disabled in some way or incapable of any "higher yoga." These guru-physicians said that people in America considered well-nourished and healthy are actually in abysmal physical condition, their spines, hearts, respiratory systems, joints, and nerves, for example, being extremely weak when not positively damaged. Several said that the people who come to them for "enlightenment" (from the world of Christian osmoconsciousness) are far too damaged to be fixed, and that what they were teaching them is not fraudulent, however, because it is rehabilitative, which is the best these students can aspire to. Sigmund Freud agreed. Modern neurology has equal much to say about this dualist mind-set sickness prevalent in the West, with hard empirical evidence to back it up.
New temples to unknown goddesses that involved worship on a scale that amazes even seasoned archaeologists are being discovered yearly (see Science News, Mar. 28, l993), including in Sadam Hussein's Iraq, which, of course is the same territory that was the scene of the Western world's first literate, urban civilization (in the late Fourth Millennium B. C. E.) You are not alone in being enamored by the self-importance and literary records and plastic artifacts of the "specialists in learning" whose job it is to help these kinds of civilizations grow, rather than with the fluidly dynamic and adaptable social systems based on kinship and reciprocal obligation that I outlined above that they fear so much. Indeed, during the cyclic and periodic fluctuations of political fragmentation and urban decline, these tribal resurgences leave few records or monuments to receive "historical attention" or "magical admiration," as I said before. But these societies have culture too, and the urban elite you are enamored with, and their products, do not by any means represent the whole. When you revere the "written word" of these ant hills, or when someone else decries the widening "social gulf" between "civilized," artifact-producing elites and exploited populations, you are both missing what is really going on here. The "written word" would also have you believe that Christendom gave the world its inventions and technologies, like chemistry and medicine, and that no forms of writing pre-existed what the class of scholars I mentioned before utilized as part of their system of social stratification and control. There are those outside the scientific community too who have known otherwise all along, and while they might write down words themselves at one time or another, they tend to keep everything inside their own families, shutting out the rest of the world. I refer here to Masons and Eastern Star types. It is only on hindsight that anyone can know that the Founding Fathers of this U. S. A. were almost entirely Masons, and only through one of their own can you know what their "particular sigils" of their American Revolution meant: both that Eye and the Eagle, not to mention the two-point up pentagram used by their women before anyone in the pop-occult world used it. The recent finds and hard scientific methods only tend to prove, over and over again, what these generational people tell in the old, strictly oral form. They spoke the truth and kept it very well hidden. But the Earth itself tends to show and tell - in time, as every archaeologist knows.
One last thing: I forgot to mention one celebrated case of modern matrilineality - not from Europeans, of course, but from an Israeli court ca. 1970, which decided that it did not matter if the father of a child born in Israel was Jewish and a citizen of Israel: if the mother was not Jewish, the child was not a citizen of Israel! This decision came down when I was a student, and Christian and "freedom-loving American patriotic" types found it invidious and abominable, not to mention "racist." Only the Jews could understand it, based as this modern decision was on old Mishnah and Torah law. Many Americans found it outrageous that the court could say that the poor baby - born in Israel no less - and having a citizen for a father - was not an Israeli citizen. Not everyone seemed to know about this case, since it was an internal matter for Israelis, but the partriarchal Christians I met could not even begin to understand it, even if they were intelligent enough to see how far away it is from ideas of citizenship or "status" based on the American Constitution. Imagine if I was born in the U. S., and my Dad was a citizen, but I was not because - my mother was not an Anglo (or whatever). This is pure modern-day matrilineality plus (hovering in the wide limbo between "matrilineality" and "matriarchy").
Phil Marsh