Woman, Church & State - Matilda Joslyn Gage

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regarded as property, the sale of daughters as a legitimate means of family income, or their destruction at birth looked upon as a justifiable act. Under the Patriarchate, society became morally revolutionized, the family, the state, the form of religion entirely changed. The theory of a male supreme God in the interests of force and authority, wars, family discord, the sacrifice of children to appease the wrath of an offended (male) deity are all due to the Patriarchate. These were practices entirely out of consonance with woman’s thought and life. Biblical Abraham binding Isaac for sacrifice to Jehovah, carefully kept his intentions from the mother Sarah. Jephtha offering up his daughter in accordance with his vow, allowing her a month’s life for the bewailment of her virginity, are but typical of the low regard of woman under the Patriarchate. During this period the destruction of girl children became a widely extended practice, and infantile girl murder the custom of many nations. During the Matriarchate all life was regarded as holy; even the sacrifice of animals was unknown.[47] The most ancient and purest religions taught sacrifice of the animal passions as the great necessity in self-purification. But the Patriarchate subverted this sublime teaching, materializing spiritual truths, and substituting the sacrifice of animals, whose blood was declared a sweet smelling savor to the Lord of Hosts.

      Both infanticide and prostitution with all their attendant horrors are traceable with polygamy,—their origin—to the Patriarchate or Father-rule, under which Judaism and Christianity rose as forms of religious belief. Under the Patriarchate woman has ever been regarded as a slave to be disposed of as father, husband or brother chose. Even in the most Christian lands, daughters have been esteemed valuable only in proportion to the political or pecuniary advantage they brought to the father, in the legal prostitution of an enforced marriage. The sacrifice of woman to man’s baser passions has ever been the distinguishing characteristic of the Patriarchate. But woman’s degradation is not the normal condition of humanity, neither did it arise from a settled principle of evolution, but is a retrogression, due to the grossly material state of the world for centuries past, in which it has lost the interior meaning or spiritual significance of its own most holy words.

      Jehovah signifies not alone the masculine and the feminine principles but also the spirit or vivifying intelligence. It is a compound word indicative of the three divine principles.[48] Holy Ghost, although in Hebrew a noun of either gender, masculine, feminine, neuter, is invariably rendered masculine by Christian translators of the Bible.[49] In the Greek, from whence we obtain the New Testament, spirit is of the feminine gender, although invariably translated masculine. The double-sexed word, Jehovah, too sacred to be spoken by the Jews, signified the masculine-feminine God.[50] The proof of the double meaning of Jehovah, the masculine and feminine signification, Father-Mother, is undeniable. Lanci, one of the great orientalists, says:

      Jehovah should be read from left to right, and pronounced Ho-Hi; that is to say He-She (Hi pronounced He,) Ho in Hebrew being the masculine pronoun and Hi the feminine. Ho-Hi therefore denotes the male and female principles, the vis genatrix.[51]

      Kingsford says:

      The arbitrary and harsh aspect under which Jehovah is chiefly presented in the Hebrew Scriptures is due not to any lack of the feminine element either in His name or in His nature, or to any failure on the part of the inspired leaders of Israel to recognize their equality, but to the rudimentary condition of the people at large, and their consequent amenability to the delineation of the stern side only of the Divine Character.[52]

      The Hebrew word El Shaddai, translated, “The Almighty” is still more distinctively feminine than Iah, as it means “The Breasted God,” and is made use of in the Old Testament whenever the especially feminine characteristics of God are meant to be indicated.[53]

      The story of the building of the tower of Babel and the subsequent confusion of language possesses deep interior significance; the word (Babel) meaning “God the Father” as distinct and separate from the feminine principle. The confusion which has come upon humanity because of this separation has been far more lamentable in its results than a mere confounding of tongues.[54] In the earliest religions the recognition of the feminine principle in the divinity is everywhere found. “I am the Father and Mother of the Universe” said Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.

      An Orphic hymn says: “Zeus is the first and the last, the head and the extremities; from him have proceeded all things.” He is a man and an immortal nymph i.e. the male and female element. The Sohar declares “the ancient of the ancient has a form and has no form.”

      The Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, is a distinctively feminine principle—the Comforter—and yet has ever been treated by the Christian Church as masculine, alike in dogmas propounded from the pulpit, and in translations of the Scriptures. A few notable exceptions however appear at an early date. Origen expressly referred to the Holy Ghost as feminine, saying: “The soul is maiden to her mistress the Holy Ghost.” An article upon the “Esoteric character of the Gospels” in Madam Blavatsky’s Lucifer (November 1887) says:

      Spirit or the Holy Ghost was feminine with the Jews as most ancient peoples and it was so with the early Christians; Sophia of the Gnostics and the third Sephiroth, Binah (the female Jehovah of the Cabalists,) are feminine principles “Divine Spirit” or Ruach, “One is She the spirit of the Elohim of Life,” is said in Sepher Yetzirah.[55]

      An early canonical book of the New Testament known as “The Everlasting Gospel” also as “The Gospel of the Holy Ghost” represents Jesus as saying, “My mother the Holy Ghost, took me by the hair of my head up into a mountain.”

      The word sacred simply meaning secret, having its origin as shown at the time when knowledge was kept hidden from the bulk of mankind, only to be acquired by initiation in the mysteries, so also the word holy simply means whole, that is, undivided. In its ignorance, unwisdom, and fear of investigation, mankind has allowed a division of the two divine principles, male and female, to obtain firm hold in their minds. Prejudice, which simply means prejudgment, a judgment without proof, has long ruled mankind, owing chiefly to that bondage of the will inflicted by a tyrannous self-seeking priesthood. But we have now reached a period in history when investigation is again taking the place of blind belief and the truth, capable of making man free, is once more offered. It is through a recognition of the divine element of motherhood as not alone inhering in the great primal source of life but as extending throughout all creation, that it will become possible for the world, so buried in darkness, folly and superstition, to practice justice toward woman. Not legislation but education will bring about the change; not external acts but internal thought. It is but a few years since the acknowledgment of a feminine element even in plants was regarded by the church as heretical. Yet though still perceiving but partial truth, science now declares the feminine principle to inhere in plants, rocks, gems, and even in the minutest atoms; thus in some degree recognizing the occult axiom “As it is above, so it is below.”

       Table of Contents

      Celibacy

      While the inferior and secondary position of woman early became an integral portion of Christianity, its fullest efforts are seen in Church teachings regarding marriage. Inasmuch as it was a cardinal doctrine that the fall of Adam took place through his temptation into marriage by Eve, this relation was regarded with holy horror as a continuance of the evil which first brought sin into the world, depriving man of his immortality.[1] It is a notable fact that the expected millennium of a thousand years upon earth with its material joys has ever had more attraction for Christians than the eternal spiritual rapture of heaven. Many of the old Fathers taught that “the world is a state of matrimony, but paradise of virginity.”[2] To such extent was this doctrine carried it was declared that had it not have been for the fall, God would have found some way outside of this relation for populating the world, consequently marriage was regarded as a condition of peculiar temptation and trial; celibacy as one of especial holiness.

      The androgynous theory of primal man found many supporters, the separation into two beings having been brought about by sensual desire. Jacob Boehme and earlier

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