Розалин Майлз – The Women’s History of the World (страница 13)

With its rise to sacred status, the phallus increased in significance, as well as in size and sanctity. From this epoch onwards, male superiority becomes vested in and expressed through this one organ, as an ever-present reminder of masculine power. By extension, and the extension was limitless, the phallus then becomes the source not only of power, but of all cultural order and meaning. For men, clasping and invoking the penis validated all greetings and promises; among the Romans the testes underwrote every testament, while an Arab would declare ‘O Father of Virile Organs, bear witness to my oath,’ and as a mark of respect suffer any sheikh or patriarch to examine his genitals on meeting.¹¹

Over women the power of the sacred phallus began to make itself felt in a number of ways. In the temples of Shiva, a slave girl specially chosen for her ‘lotus-beauty’ was consecrated to ‘the divine penis’ and tattooed on her breasts and shaven groin with the emblem of the god. Worldwide, both historical records and archaeological evidence confirm women’s practices of imprecating, touching, kissing or even mounting sacred phalluses of wood or stone as a cure for infertility from the ‘phallus lord’, who may well have been also the original recipient of their virginity. In the remote villages of southern France, to the deep embarrassment of the Catholic church, the Provençal ‘Saint’ Foutin was worshipped in all the pride of his priapic magnificence as late as the seventeenth century. This was under constant threat from the women’s habit of scraping shavings from the wooden end to boil into a potion to promote conception; but it was always renewed by the priests, who sustained the saint’s reputation as ‘the inexhaustible penis’ by surreptitious mallet-taps to the other end behind the altar.¹² Perhaps most sinister of all was the Celtic ritual still in use in Wales as late as the reign of Hywel Dda (Howel the Good), 909–950 A.D.. There, if a woman wanted to prosecute a man for rape, she had to swear to the offence with one hand on a relic of the saints, while with the other she grasped ‘the peccant member’ of her offender¹³ – to prick his conscience, perhaps? This reminder that the male organ can be a weapon of war as well as an instrument of love is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the monumental phallus at Karnak erected by King Meneptha of Egypt in 1300 B.C.; its inscription records that the king cut off all the penises of his defeated enemies after a battle and brought home a total of 13,240.

As the date of this episode shows, the rise of the phallus did not mean the immediate overthrow of the Great Goddess. On the contrary it is fascinating to observe how the myths, stories and rituals of her worship were adapted over a considerable period of time to accommodate the accelerating rhythms of the male principal in its thrust towards full centrality. The devolution of power from Goddess to God, from Queen to King, from Mother to Father, took place in stages, which may be as plainly detected in world mythology as strata in rock. In the first phase, the Great Mother alone is or creates the world; she has casual lovers and many children, but she is primal and supreme. In the second, she is described or illustrated as having a consort, who may be her son, little brother or primeval toy-boy; originally very much her junior, he grows in power to become her spouse. At the third stage, the God-King-Spouse rules equally with the Goddess, and the stage is set for her dethronement; finally the Man-God kings it alone, with Goddess, mother and woman, defeated and dispossessed, trapped in a downward spiral which humankind has only recently begun to arrest, let alone reverse.¹⁴

Mythologies are never static, and even to divide this development into phases is to suggest an organizational logic that historical processes rarely possess. Different developments occurred over different times in different places, and even when men had made themselves into kings and held gods and goddesses under their sway, they found it still advisable to honour the old customs and pay the Great Mother her due. ‘The Goddess Ishtar loved me – thus I became king,’ declared Sargon of Assyria in the eighth century B.C.¹⁵

Other records of religious and political rituals in these early kingdoms abundantly testify to the fact that the king’s power, however great, was not absolute; a king of Celtic Ireland had to perform the banfheis rígí, or ‘marriage-mating’, with ‘the Great Queen’, the spirit of Ireland, before he could be accepted as king by the people. For the kings of Babylon, this duty was literal, not symbolic. Their power had to be renewed every year, and was only confirmed when the royal embodiment of the sacred phallus was seen to consummate his ‘divine marriage’ with the high priestess of the Great Mother in a public ceremony on a stage before all the populace.¹⁶

The Great Goddess still had some power, then, and the evidence suggests that the ruling men neglected the due observances at their peril. On the wider horizon, however, an interlocking series of profound social changes combined to shake these early civilizations to their foundations, and the force of events conspired with the new aggressive phallic impetus to drive out the last remaining elements of the power of the Goddess and the accompanying ‘mother-right’. Broadly, these changes arose from the population growth that resulted from the first successful social organization. They derived from the most basic of imperatives, the need for food. Nigel Calder explains the nature of the development that helped to push women from the centre of life to its margins:

From Southern Egypt 18,000 years ago comes the earliest evidence for cultivation of barley and wheat in riverside gardens . . . feminine laughter no doubt disturbed the water-birds when the women came with a bag of seed to invent crops. Perhaps it was a waste of good food and nothing to tell the men about – yet it took only moments to poke the seeds into the ready-made cracks in the mud . . . The women knew little of plant genetics, but the grain grew and ripened before the sun parched the ground entirely, and when they came back with stone sickles they must have felt a certain goddess-like pride.¹⁷

This ‘goddess-like’ control of nature by women continued, Calder judges, for 10,000 to 15,000 years. But from about 8000 years ago, an upsurge in population enforced changes in the way that food was produced. By degrees agriculture, heavier and more intensive, replaced women’s horticulture. Where previously women had worked with nature in a kind of sympathetic magic as her natural ally, now men had to tame and dominate nature to make it deliver what they determined. The new methods involved in agriculture found an equally damaging symbolic echo in the male/female roles and relationships, as a Hindu text, The Institutes of Mana from around A.D. 100, makes plain: ‘The woman is considered in law as the field and the man as the grain.’ Where the Goddess had been the only source of life, now woman had neither seed nor egg; she was the passive field, only fertile if ploughed, while man, drunk with the power of his new-found phallocentricity, was plough, seed, grain-chute and ovipositor all in one.

As planned husbandry and domestication of land replaced casual cultivation, the more the role of the male strengthened and centralized. Paradoxically, this was also true of those groups who failed to produce enough from the land to live on. For those tribes, any shortage or failure of crops brought enforced migration, which also necessarily involved warfare, as groups already established on fertile territory banded together to resist the invaders.¹⁸ Both in the group’s nomadic wanderings and in any fighting which resulted, men had the advantage, as they had superior muscle power and mobility, over women encumbered with children. All women’s earlier hard-won skills of cultivation became useless when the tribe was on the move. Meanwhile, men driven by the darker side of phallicism seized the upper hand through aggression and military organization. As these clashes of force inevitably produced dominant and submissive groups, winners and losers, determining rank, slavery and subjection, it was not possible for women to escape from this framework. Caught between the violence of ploughshare and sword, women had to lose.

There could be only one outcome. However, wherever, and whenever it came in the millennia immediately before the birth of Christ, all the mythologies speak of the overthrow of the Great Mother Goddess. In the simplest version of the story, like that of the Semitic Babylonians, the god-king Marduk wages war on Ti’amat, the Mother of All Things, and hacks her to pieces. Only after her death can he form the world, from the pieces of her body, as it rightfully should be. This motif is astonishingly consistent through a number of widely separated cultures, as witness this Tiwi creation myth from central Africa: