The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ of Hammurabi, for instance, carefully distinguishes between five grades of temple women and protects their rights to continue in the worship of their mothers. It also makes a clear division between sacred women and secular prostitutes – for it is an interesting assumption embedded in the very phrase ‘ritual prostitute’, that somehow these people did not have the real thing.

      They did, of course; and the perennial commercialism of the true ‘working girl’ comes through strongly in one recorded anecdote of the most celebrated courtesan of the Egyptians, Archidice. The fame of her sexual skill was so great that men ruined themselves for her favours. One suitor, rejected because he could not afford her price, went home and dreamed that he had enjoyed her instead. The enraged Archidice took him to court, alleging that, as he had had the pleasure of sex with her, he should pay her normal fee for it. The court admitted the legality of her claim, but after much debate finally adjudicated that as the client had only dreamed he had enjoyed her, she should dream she had been paid.⁴¹

      Poets, priests, queens, mothers, lovers, athletes, soldiers and litigious courtesans, as the first individual women emerge to take their place in human history, they present an impressive spectacle. No one had yet told them that women were physically weak, emotionally unstable or intellectually ill-equipped; consequently they throng the annals of Minoan Crete, for example, as merchants, traders, sailors, farmers, charioteers, hunters and ministers of the Goddess, in apparent ignorance of the female inability to perform these roles that more advanced societies had yet to discover. At every level women made their mark, from the brilliant Aspasia, the courtesan-scholar-politician who partnered Pericles in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., to her contemporary Artemisia, the first-known woman sea-captain, whose command of her fleet at the battle of Marathon was so devastating that the Athenians put a huge bounty on her head; sadly, she survived the Persian wars to die of love, throwing herself off a cliff in a passion of grief when rejected by a younger man.

      These were real women, then, vividly alive even at the moment of death: women who knew their strengths. These strengths were recognized in the range of social customs and legal rights known to be women’s due from a mass of historical evidence: physical and sexual freedom, access to power, education, full citizenship, the right to own money and property, the right to divorce, custody of children and financial maintenance.

      The value placed on women in the legal codes and customs of the day traced back to their special female status; and this derived directly from their link with, and incarnation of, the Great Goddess. Though localized, since every country, tribe, town or even village had its own version of ‘Our Lady’, she was universal. To her worshippers, after so many thousand years, she seemed eternal:

      I am Isis, mistress of every land. I laid down laws for all, and ordained things no one may change . . . I am she who is called divine among women – I divided the earth from heaven, made manifest the paths of the stars, prescribed the course of the sun and the moon . . . I brought together men and women . . . What I have made lam can be dissolved by no man.⁴²

      Was this the challenge man was driven to take up? For where was man in the primal drama of the worship of the Great Mother? He was the expendable consort, the sacrificial king, the disposable drone. Woman was everything; he was nothing. It was too much. Man had to have some meaning in the vast and expanding universe of human consciousness. But as the struggle for understanding moved into its next phase, the only meaning seemed to lie through the wholesale reversal of the existing formula of belief. Male pride rose to take up the challenge of female power; and launching the sex war that was to divide sex and societies for millennia to come, man sought to assert his manhood through the death and destruction of all that had made woman the Great Mother, Goddess, warrior, lover and queen.

       3

       The Rise of the Phallus

       Holy Shiva, Divine Linganaut,

      Heavenly Root, Celestial Penis, Phallus Lord, thy radiant lingam is so large that neither Brahma nor Vishnu can reckon its extent.

      HINDU PRAYER

       He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly,

      Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart, He destroyed her life, He felled her body and stood triumphant upon it.

      King Marduk overthrows the Great Mother in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, c. 2000 B.C.

      Men look to destroy every quality in a woman that will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that brought them forth.

      NORMAN MAILER

      ‘In the beginning,’ writes Marilyn French, ‘was the Mother.’ That mother, as her ‘children’ saw her, is still with us today – her outsize breasts, bulging belly and buttocks, flaring vulva and tree-trunk thighs survive in the familiar figurines found in their tens of thousands in Europe alone. Against this massive, elemental force the human male cut a poor figure indeed. Every myth, every song in praise of the Great Goddess stressed by contrast the littleness of man, often in caustically satiric terms – the illustrated Papyrus of Tameniu of the twenty-first Egyptian dynasty (1102–952 B.C.) shows her naked, over-arching the whole world, flaunting her star-spangled breasts, belly and pubic zone, while the boy-god Geb, flat on the ground, reaches up to her in vain with a phallus that although exaggerated, plainly is not man enough for the occasion. Nor was this the limit of the sexual humiliations the Great Mother would exact. Among the Winnepagos of Canada, a brave who dreamed of the Goddess, even once, knew himself singled out for a terrible fate, that of becoming cinaedi, a homosexual compelled to wear women’s garb and to submit in every way to the sexual demands of other males. There are countless similar examples from widely different cultures of the Goddess’s dreaded and inexorable power: as Robert Graves explains, ‘under the Great Mother, woman was the dominant sex and man her frightened victim.’¹

      For when all meaning, all magic, all life lay with woman, man had no function, no significance at all. ‘The baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns the women,’ declared an Australian Aboriginal: ‘men have nothing to do but copulate.’ Into this vacuum, as consciousness deepened, came envy, the ‘uterus-envy of female-protest within men awed by the apparently exclusive female power of creation of new life’. Resentful of the women’s monopoly of all nature’s rhythms, men were driven to invent their own. In origin, however, these male-centred rituals consisted of no more than attempts to mimic the biological action of women’s bodies, a debt openly acknowledged by many still-surviving Stone Age cultures: ‘in the beginning we had nothing . . . we took these things from the women.’²

      Typical of numerous such imitations worldwide was the hideous Aztec rite of dressing a sacrificing priest in the skin of his human sacrifice. He would then ‘burst from the bleeding human skin as the germinating shoot from the husk of the grain’, becoming both the new life and the one who gives birth by the power of his magic.³ More horrific still was the fate that befell every boy initiate in the Aranda tribe of Australia:

      . . . the ritual surgeon seizes the boy’s penis, inserts a long thin bone deep into the urethra, and slashes at the penis again and again with a small piece of flint used as a scalpel. He cuts through the layers of flesh until he reaches the bone, and the penis splits open like a boiled frankfurter.⁴

      This hideous ceremony, christened ‘sub-incision’ by the white settlers, tormented their civilized minds – what possible purpose СКАЧАТЬ