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The Chalice and the Blade

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Author Topic: The Chalice and the Blade  (Read 346 times)
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Heather Delaria
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« on: May 26, 2007, 04:49:42 pm »

DAVID L: A new book I'm working on deals with a crucial aspect of this consciousness, moral sensitivity. I believe it sheds light on this basic question about the separation of religion and sex, spirit and nature. I'm taking a new look at the founders of the scientific study of moral sensitivity-Immanuel Kant, Marx, Engels, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, moving into current times, including the key work of Carol Gilligan, Marija Gimbutas, and Riane bearing on moral sensitivity.

Out of this is emerging a new theory of moral sensitivity as an organic process. In other words, moral sensitivity has mainly been seen in terms of socialization, or conditioning-something imposed upon this lower organism. We are seen as animals who have to be stuffed with this moral sensitivity which comes from some higher mysticism. What I'm showing is that moral sensitivity arises out of the organism, developing through evolution. What I'm convinced will be part of the consciousness of the twenty-first century is this understanding that morality, that moral sensitivity, is not an "add-on." It develops out of nature. It also has sexual roots. Freud actually had this insight, but typically, as a captive of the dominator system, he and his insight were completely screwed up and distorted--the whole Oedipus complex thing, the primal hoard, killing of the father, and so on.

RIANE: I think that if we talk about sexuality, the Oedipus complex, we see that Freud very accurately described the dominator psyche--or rather, the male dominator psyche. Unfortunately he went around saying it's the human psyche, and people believed him.

Now we're moving away from that. Maslow and a lot of feminist psychologists emphasize human growth needs, not so much what Maslow called defense needs. And believe me, in a dominator system defense needs are central. It's constructed so that there is constant war, even between the female and male halves of the human species. If you can't even trust the person you have the most intimate relationship with, how in the world are you ever going to have a harmonious relationship with people of a different color, or of a different belief system?

Sexuality has been distorted, beginning with this idea that woman is an object. Unfortunately, we see that in both Eastern and Western cultures. I can't stress this point enough in terms of twenty-first century spirituality, and it's hard for some people who have been very attracted by some of the Eastern disciplines, precisely because some of that old partnership core is, like a thread, still a little bit more visible. But look at Buddhism. Look at Hinduism. Look at how dominator-oriented those systems really are. Not all of the sects, of course, but, for example, this whole idea of the Zen master who beats his disciples to "enlighten" them-it really is a dominator approach. Not that there haven't been survivals of ancient partnership-oriented wisdoms in Eastern traditions. But superimposed on them are dominator religious teachings.

In Hinduism you have the caste system, and its justification of brutality by claiming that it's your karma to be of the lower despised caste and to suffer at the hands of the higher castes. If it's your karma, why change society? It's just a way of maintaining a dominator system. Like the Judeo-Christian idea that an inscrutable male God has decreed that we suffer in punishment for disobeying his orders and that all that matters is salvation in a far away heaven, rather than what happens here on earth. If you can't change misery, oppression, and exploitation because it's divinely ordained, why bother? That's how these religions have been used against us.

Getting back to sexuality, I think one of the great tasks for the twenty-first century is precisely the reclamation of our uniquely human sexuality, which is not only reproduction-oriented, it is also pleasure-oriented, ecstatically oriented, as in what we today call the pleasure bond.

It's very interesting that when you talk to women, they're often still hanging on to this earlier view of sexuality. It isn't this idea of conquest or scoring, as in the dominator male model of sex. It's the intimacy, the bonding, the sense of connectedness that they want. The ancients recognized that this intimacy, and this pleasure, were divine gifts, the gifts of the Goddess. To them sexuality was sacred.

Contrast that with the dominator view that equates sex with men's domination and humiliation and possession---and often brutalization and even killing-of women, with the dehumanized images of women and of women's bodies in pornography and advertising. Small wonder there is so much male violence against women! And this of course is not unrelated to the dominator religious teachings that women (and sex) are evil, that really "good" or saintly men do not have intimate sexual contact with women and the dominator ideal that "real" men only do so when they're clearly dominant, and thus won't be tainted by the inferior "feminine."

RMN: Do you feel that polytheism is more generally associated with the feminine principle, and monotheism with the masculine principle? How do you think this applies to the dominator/partnership model?

RIANE: I don't think that polytheism is necessarily more associated with the feminine principle. But let me try to untangle something about the feminine and the masculine principle first, may I? In my work I stress that the way we define masculinity and femininity is to a very large extent an artificial construct that has arisen primarily out of a dominator society.

We are just beginning to understand, for example, that this idea that the yin, the feminine, is passive and pallid is nonsense. One of the themes in earlier religion was the fire, the shamanistic fire of the priestesses, and the active creative sexuality of the Goddess. In fact some of the Hindu Tantric tradition has that in it still.

The idea that there is no contemplative element in the masculine, no caring element; that to be masculine is to be assertive, aggressive, and conquering is also a distortion.

So talking of the feminine and masculine principle is useful at this point because people make certain associations of clusters of human qualities with them. But I'm hoping that--as a new consciousness for the twenty-first century really develops--we will find other names for these qualities that are essentially gender-neutral qualities, like being active or passive, or being caring and nonviolent or aggressive and violent.

Monotheism, as we have known it, has been basically, "My God's better than your God, and if you don't believe me I'll kill you." That is very much associated with the dominator system. But I think it's a mistake to describe the earlier religion as a polytheistic religion, because it was more of what I would call--Campbell used the term--synchronistic. I deal with this in The Chalice and the Blade in the chapter on the Legacy of the Goddess. Everybody had a different Goddess, and she had many manifestations, many aspects of the divine. She could be the Creatrix, the grandmother or crone. She could be the Mother Goddess. Or she could be the maiden. But there was also an underlying commonality.

Perhaps in Catal Huyuk the Goddess had her own name. In the Balkans, where UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas has done her excavations, they also worshipped the Goddess and she had many of the same attributes, although they may have called her by different names. So I think that the whole distinction between polytheism and monotheism is again a construct of the dominator system. Because what we really have here is a basic recognition of certain universals, but also a recognition of, and respect for, diversity.
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