Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00425_Field_The Instrument of the Womb.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 17KB | 65 lines

The Instrument Of The Womb

   The antiquity of man in Europe and along the Mediterranean littoral has early stone age beginnings and is considered to have come to an end with the Heroic Age; an age that saw, as well, the beginning of history.  It stretches across durations of time embracing prehistoric adventures that have given rise to myth and legend, and during which man passes from primeval Savagery through stages of Barbarism that lead him to civilization and the first written history.
   In antiquity man knew a manifest experience of life and, dressed in its time and place, this made of him a composite of life triumphant and the death of dying.  In being he was beauty.
   She had many names, as many as there are peoples over whom she reigned and whom worshipped her:  Great Goddess, Earth Goddess, Moon Goddess, White Goddess, Divine Goddess; a Triple Goddess always, a triad of Goddesses whose three aspects of maiden, matron, and crone, are the antropomorphisms comprehensible as beauty, birth, and death.  Her influence was absolute over peoples whose concerns remained the simple ones of agriculture, grazing, and hunting.
   It is likely that at one time or another the worship of this divinity has occurred all over the world, embracing all peoples who have moved from savagery (typified by hunting, fishing, and the gathering of natural products) to barbarism (typified by cattle breeding and the cultivation of land) and had attained the median or higher level of barbaric development.  Authoritative voices imply that, except for those primeval peoples who have remained in a state of savagery, exceptions to some prehistoric or historic rule of the goddess are rare.  Upon examination of the nature of exception as it applies here, we must consider this improbable unless we are to assume something that has no known historical incidence:  the discernment of the perverse in a primeval people.  We would be wise to assume that early man by the nature of his worship was imbued with a reverence for life that was the poetic fact of his existence and which he made manifest in his sexual and spiritual reverence for woman.
   Basic to antiquity was the family.
   Now if we assume nothing of an earlier state, possibly an extent promiscuity or, possible, monogamy (there is evidence of both) the family was at the earliest consanguine:  that is, it was make up of male and female marriage groups according to the generations.  All members within such a family were mutually husbands and wives.  Latterly the family was Punaluan (from the Hawaiian).  The consanguine family excluded parents and children from sexual relations.  The Punaluan family excluded parents and brothers and sisters from sexual relations by the totemistic partition of the tribe into Gentes (s. gens) and, later, as gentes multiplied by division, into Phratries.  In this wise, the tribe followed the most natural development open to unorganized group marriage.
   Group marriage is to be understood as a marriage of wife groups to husband groups wherein the fidelity by groups was total:  each to each, common to all within the groups.
   In the barbaric setting of the Punaluan family, the members of a gens were those persons who were by its virtue the recognized descendants of one founding mother.  Most simply, it worked this way:  children of the daughters of the gens remained in the gens, being included in the gentes of the women whom their fathers marry.  The gens came naturally to barbaric man in antiquity; maternity being as certain as paternity is not.
   A gens was organized and functioned simply in accord with natural need.  All members of a gens were thought of as being free, although bound to help each other when the need arose.  Marriage within the gens was prohibited.  What property the dead possessed was distributed to members of the gens.  In effect this meant to relatives of the female sex.
   It was in time and place remote and mysterious in every case where a tribe divided into marriage groups and the order of the gens was instituted.  With tribal increase these gentes divided again into two or more gentes, each, however, remaining within embrace of the original gentes which then became a phratry, or super gens.  In time a phratry was composed of several gentes; the tribe, of several phratries.
   Whatever the tribal increase, population still remained a meager thing of disparate centers wherein the fair division of labor was dictated by the nature of the sexes.  Nonetheless, the adoption of the instrument of the gens and phratry and augmentation of the tribe by confederation gave the barbaric order a grandeur peculiar to simple communism.  Everything was used by all and all used everything.  Nothing was earned and, except for personal effects, nothing was owned.
   Things were so ordered in this way in the times of Homeric myth (there were a few exceptions).  This was in perfect accord with Mother Right which was characterized by tracing descent along matrilineal blood lines.
   In the east, in the pastoral lands of grasses and cereals, and of nomadic herds, and increasing productivity, time widely inaugurated a new diet and caused the early slipping into past times of a cherished ritual cannibalism and the magic subsequent to it.
   A ploughshare improved by the smelting of iron so increased population that, later, man entered into walled towers, and invented the alphabet, and epic and Homeric mythology.  Such an increase had moved him from Savagery to Barbarism; now he moved on to the threshold of civilization.  But that is to run ahead of the story.
   The advent of nomadism with the resultant separation of the pastorally inclined peoples from the barbaric generality was the first great division of labor, and occurred when the developing Nomads left the forested areas for the grasslands that were necessary to their existence, as such.  Upon the pastoralist's success and the dynamics of that success, exchange began between individuals for whom cattle was king.  There were no dates for things when elsewhere in Asia men moved as naturally from horticulture to agriculture.  But the new occupation, raising the productivity of nature, greatly enhanced the value of labor.
   In the old order, lands and cattle were tribal property.  Within the tribe, they were the property of the various gens and were administered by the gens.  The spinning loom and the smelting of metals, with the exception of iron, composed what there was of early industry.  It was from this point in man's development that the conceptions of wealth that have come down to us in the present age were first beginning to influence man's behavior.
   It was this surplus of production from agriculture giving labor an increased value that led man to slavery.
   When a people moved out of the forest to lead pastoral lives on the grasslands, herds and the trading instincts of herdsmen began to create and place aggregate wealth in the hands of individuals.  In the pastoral life, property began to be removed from the common hold of many to the peculiar ownership of one.
   Pastoral man was made wealthy by the domestication of herds.
   Agriculture so enhanced the value of labor that captives from wars or raiding, who previously had been slain or else adopted into gens and tribe, became slaves to satisfy another man's need.  Greed thus led to barbarian slavery.  Additionally, it provided the world its first Masters.
   The result of surplus production attending the success of herdsmen and of agriculturists was to introduce slavery and to create a wealth that fell to the man and not in any great part to the woman.  Previously, man had been second in precedence to woman within the matrix of a natural theosophy that guaranteed the human beings it embraced a way of life that seemed endlessly possible, and from which everything flowed in a stream that was as consistent as it was immortal.  In the old order of things, the man had to keep the tools of production and the woman the household goods and hearth; cattle and agricultural produce, like tools, were within the man's province.  He may have pre-empted her here!!  He grew wealthy, she remained relatively impoverished.  Now the shepherd was no longer simple.  He and the agriculturists, who had become a slave-master in an order that divided labor into changeless patterns according to the sexes, returned home and overthrew the goddess of the hearth.
   With his new wealth and power able to change women's hitherto equally meaningful and productive role in life and life's provenience into a secondary one, man set himself in rebellion against the sacred female of mother right.  The hearth, once so symbolically sacred, he left intact:  now symbolic of the helpless woman, it chained her to her reduced importance, gave her a secondary role in life and, later, enslaved her to man's will and lust.  Once the hearth she tended had served as the altar of his sexual and spiritual reverence.
   Up until this time, divinity was vaguely surmised to be the navel immortality whereby women seemed to trick death in a shell game deception that kept life intact along a continuous umbilical route of the egg.  The egg always managing to be precedent to the pursuing knife; and, before knives, the teeth of our human innocence served.
   Death bitten off was its dying for death was undone.  The body that seemed to die did not where the egg rolled out of woman and clear; and it was as egg a woman even when it took the shape of man, for, save for an illusion, it is the female's that is the deathless nature of life.
   She alone was manifest in the provenience of egg and employment of umbilical deception that guaranteed immortal ova, and, a nature making women free of the doubts and fears man is the natural heir to.
   Hers is the myth of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the God of the waxing year who loses the love of the threefold goddess to what we would think of as his alter ego- the god of the waning year.  Only in such a twinhood is man in any sense to be thought of as divine.  Both OSIRIS of the waxing year and SET of the waning year, he is a demi-god.  Woman is divine.  Were man divine, she would be at best a nymph.  Woman loves the infant not the man.
   Thus, she is a deity; and to satisfy both lover and son, she employs alternate murder, for which man calls her false.
   There are no fathers.  Sons and lovers are sacred only by grace of the Mother of all things, the Triple Goddess.  She is their mother, bride and layer-out, a slim lovely woman whose changeling aspects are at different times a sow, a mare, a sheass, a she-wolf, a serpent, a mermaid, a tigress, and a loathesome hag.
   The three fates are a form of the Goddess.  She is the triple muse and the nine-fold muse.  She is sometimes called Cerridwen.  Wolves are sacred to her - eaters of corpse flesh - because their eyes like those of the noiseless cat, who mates openly and eats mice, shine in the darkness; and as the wolves, so pigs are sacred to her; and sacred is the moon and its colors - white, red, and black.  Sacred are many things then, and all beauty flows from the Goddess.
   Moon-derived magic and worship in the Matriarchal Age began poetry whose theme is the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, son and lover of the Great Goddess whom a true poem will invoke.  Thus the poet in love with the truth identifies with Star-Son whom Her love destroys.  For a poet has no poetry without sense of the muse, and his theme might as well read:  the relations of man and woman.  He is rewarded with wisdom and pays with his life for love.
   There were no male gods in Europe to challenge her power.  The story is told in places that she had a lover who was on the one hand the Serpent of Wisdom and on the other the star of life.  Star Son slew his rival twin and won the Goddess' love which consumed him in flames.  From his ashes another serpent was born which laid an egg.  When the Goddess ate the egg, she became pregnant and a son was born to her.
   All the totem societies of ancient Europe were under the aegis of this Great Goddess.  There were no fathers until this revolutionary idea of fatherhood came in from the east and prior to that time, all the female members of one totem society were married in a group to all the male members of another.  A child's maternity alone was certain.
   When man's success in his environment changed the social status, he assumed many of the sacred and profane prerogatives of the woman and declared himself head of the household.  In fact, man may have usurped an earlier traditional female concern and responsibility for agriculture that lacked the later excess of man's patronage.
   Poetry began in the matriarchal age.  Fatherhood meant a mythology tampered with by man.  There is the invention of Thunder child who castrated Star Son and Serpent of Wisdom, becoming the father and marrying the Goddess, begetting male and female divinities on her.
   Another version:  Star Son with his twin, infected with partiarchalism, courts the Great Goddess as Thunder God.  The Goddess gives birth to twins, male and female, who as the morning and evening stars are given the power of poetic enchantment by the Goddess.  Thunder God is the resurrected Star Son, and, later, he is Apollo.
   Quite early in the Heroic Age herdsmen, worshipping a male or a triple male divinity, broke into Greece and overthrew the matriarchy that still prevailed there.  Out of one of these several intrusions and conquests, Apollo rose to precedence.
   His acceptance is really more than it seems.  It is an acceptance of a twinship formed of Apollo and Dionysos together, rather than of Apollo alone.
   The career of Apollo is involved with the Athenians' own great deity, Athena, for she and Apollo share much of the credit (or blame) for the legal and mythic acceptance of father right that allowed the overthrow of mother right.
   That the change over from what preceded it to monogamy meant doing violence to a primeval religious injunction that stated an ancient and traditional right of other men to the same woman can be proven upon recourse to ancient classical literature.  New religious ideas, new deities and their representatives intruding upon the old, drove the traditional out slowly but inexorably.
   Aeschylus tells us in the ORESTEIA of the struggle between mother-right and the rising father-right that supplanted it.  Accordingly:  Agamemnon upon his return from war is by Clytemnestra slain for the sake of her lover, Aegisthus.  Orestes avenges this murder of his father by the murder of his mother.  This act of vengeance is assailed by the three demonic Erynnes, defenders of mother-right.
   Orestes defends his act of vengeance, insisting that his mother should be considered guilty of the murder of her husband and his father.  The Erynnyes regard Clytemnestra's act as expiable; his too heinous for expiation.
   Both Apollo who protects Orestes and Athena who presides over the Athenian jurors are deities of the new father-right.  And, when the Athenian jurors prove to be equally divided in opinion, Athena casts the deciding vote, acquitting Orestes and in favor of father-right.
   Substitution of one order of things for another has often proven unsatisfactory, and has always demanded a great deal of inspiration to apply and to make acceptable the accession of the new over the traditional.
   There is the mythic inclusion in twinship of a resurrected Dionysos with the immortal Apollo.  And it is Apollo who holds up the Gorgon's head to subdue the Dionysiac forces.  Apollonian consciousness is a veil hiding the Dionysiac spirit; and Apollo cannot be divine without Dionysos; who before he took the world as a vine god of wine did so as a god of beer, and before that of other intoxicants, for that is the god that Dionysos is.
   The primitive say Dionysos is the intoxication of narcotic potions.  The Dionysiac imagines himself a satyr and as a satyr sees divinity.  Bespelled, he sees a vision which is the Apollonian completion of his state.  They say, then:  he smiles forth gods; his tears bring men.
   Apollo they call the sunlike.  Ultimately, Apollo speaks with Dionysiac voice.  Together they enhance each other's creations.
   In Greek tragedy the Dionysiac chorus expels Apollonian airs.  The Dionysiac artist of original oneness makes ecstatic music visible to dreamers by means of Apollonian dream influence.  Apollo's spirit saves us from Dionysiac universality.  We have also learned that individuation bears evil in its train.
   The triple muse inspired poets
   who were love priests
   of a triple goddess
   who was
   the instrument of the womb
   of all the world
   that descends to us
   from poets who worshipped
   a triple muse
   and spoke a sacred language.

         Love,

         Harry Monroe

Copyright © 1995 Harry Monroe