The First Sex
The First Sex
The First Sex
THE
FIRST SEX
Penguin Books
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had first tamed and then reeducated man, all pointed to the fact of
a once gynocratic world. The further back one traced man's history,
the larger loomed the figure of woman. If the gods and goddesses of
today are but the heroes and heroines of yesterday, then unques-
tionably the goddesses of historical times were but the reflected
memory of the ruling hierarchy of a former civilization.
The existence of such a civilization would account, as no other
theory could, for the universality of certain customs, rites, and ta-
boos that could not have been disseminated in historical times. It
would explain the similarity of creation myths throughout the world
and would account for the apparent kinship of the mythical gods
and heroes of all peoples. It would explain the worldwide tradition
of the wonderful strangers, the existence of the ancient maps, the
otherwise incomprehensible origin of language, the anomalous gold
mines of Thrace and Kransnoyarsk, the incongruous optical lens of
ancient Nineveh, and the "worked gold thread" found embedded
in a rock deposit that was formed millennia ago. It would explain
the Sumerian seals depicting the true structure of the universe, the
accuracy of ancient calendars and sundials, the ancient mega-
lithic buildings and monuments scattered over the face of the
earth, the Seven Sages of ancient Greece and their evident knowl-
edge of scientific truths later discredited and forgotten, and the
legends of Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, and other wizards of an-
tiquity. And it would account for the universal tradition of a great
cataclysm that once engulfed the world in a holocaust of flame and
flood.
"Chance," wrote Sylvain Bailly, "could not account for such won-
derful coincidences. They must all have been derived from one
common source." 2
When recorded history begins we behold the finale of the long
pageant of prehistory, the pageant of the great lost civilization that
constituted the source of all these "wonderful coincidences." The
curtain of written history rises on what seems to be the tragic last
act of a protracted drama. On the stage, firmly entrenched on her
ancient throne, appears woman, the heroine of the play. About her,
her industrious subjects perform their age-old roles. Peace, Justice,
Progress, Equality play their parts with a practiced perfection.
Off in the wings, however, we hear a faint rumbling—the rum-
bling of the discontented, the jealous complaints of the new men
Introduction <*§ 17
who are no longer satisfied with their secondary role in society. Led
perhaps by the queen's consort, the rebellious males burst onstage,
overturn the queen's throne, and take her captive. Her consort
moves to center stage. He lifts his bloody sword over the heads of
the courtiers. The queen's subjects—Democracy* Peace, Justice, and
the rest—flee the scene in disarray. And man, for the first time in
history, stands triumphant, dominating the stage as the curtain falls.
The deterioration in the status of women went hand in hand with
the Dark Ages that followed this patriarchal revolution as it moved
slowly westward from the Near East, reaching Western Europe only
in the fifth century of our era. In Europe and the British Isles the
last remnant of the great world civilization, the Celts, maintained
the tradition of female supremacy until the fall of Rome, when
waves of Germanic barbarians sweeping down from the northeast-
ern forests met the surge of Oriental Christianity as it spread up-
ward from the Mediterranean. Between these two millstones of
"masculism," the Celts were finally crushed. Yet even in defeat they
managed to preserve the guttering flame of civilization, for "right
while they were being annihilated by the barbarians, the Celts were
civilizing them. . . . The Celts held out against the invading sav-
ages until they had almost ceased to be savages." 3
Yet, despite the Celts, Teutonic-Semitic patriarchy finally pre-
vailed in Europe. Celtic culture was forgotten, the Celtic goddess
religion went underground, Celtic customs and beliefs degenerated
into "pagan" superstitions, and Celtic feminism was condemned as
sinful by the patriarchal conquerors. The implacability with which
Western man has since retaliated against woman serves only to con-
firm the truth of her former dominance—a dominance that man
felt compelled to stamp out and forget. What was "this dark neces-
sity, this envenomed misogyny," that "compelled man to tear down
the hated sex," 4 if not a form of retaliation—of compensation for
his own former condition of servitude, combined with a fear of
woman's eventual resurgence to her former power. "Is it not re-
markable," asks Karen Horney, "that so little attention is paid to
man's underlying fear and dread of women , . ." and that his
hatred should be overlooked even by its victims, the women them-
selves.5
Yet it is man's fear and dread of the hated sex that has made
woman's lot such a cruel one in the brave new masculine world. In
l8 $•» THE FIRST SEX
the frenzied insecurity of his fear of women, man has remade so-
ciety after his own pattern of confusion and strife6 and has created
a world in which woman is the outsider. He has rewritten history
with the conscious purpose of ignoring, belittling, and ridiculing
the great women of the past, just as modern historians and journal-
ists seek to ignore, belittle, and ridicule the achievements of modern
women. He has devalued woman to an object of his basest physical
desires7 and has remade God in his own image—"a God that does
not love women." 8 Worst of all, he has attempted to transform
woman herself into a brainless simulacrum, a robot who has come
to acquiesce meekly in the belief in her own inferiority.
So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that
women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was
once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex. In
order to restore women to their ancient dignity and pride, they
must be taught their own history, as the American blacks are being
taught theirs.
We must repudiate two thousand years of propaganda concern-
ing the inferiority of woman. The pope recently removed the age-
old stigma of the Jews as "Christ murderers," and the United States
has sought by law to destigmatize the American black. But who has
spoken for woman? Who has stepped forward to remove "God's
curse" from Eve?
It seems evident that the time has come to put woman back into
the history books, and, as Mary Wollstonecraft suggested two hun-
dred years ago, to readmit her to the human race. Her contribution
to civilization has been greater than man's, and man has overlooked
her long enough.
Recorded history starts with a patriarchal revolution. Let it con-
tinue with the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope
for the survival of the human race.
Prologue:
The Lost Civilization
Nowhere in history do we find a
beginning, but always a continuation.
. . . How then shall we understand the end,
if the beginning remains a mystery?
—J. J. BACHOFEN
to have been born in a subarctic locale, since the oldest root words
common to all its descendants refer to northern latitudes—reindeer,
spruce, snow, fir, etc. This curious fact seems to contradict the evi-
dence that our present civilization itself originated in the mountain
plains of southeastern Europe and Anatolia. These two contradic-
tory assumptions could be reconciled if one adopted the cataclysmic
theory or the theory of the shifting of the poles as advanced by Im-
manuel Velikovsky, Hugh Brown, and others. Then the plains of
Anatolia could once have been subarctic, and the subtropical fauna
excavated in recent years beneath the arctic ice could have been
grazing in a tropical jungle at the time of some world cataclysm.
Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C., taught the theory of the
shifting of the poles, attributing the belief to the Egyptians and the
ancient people of India. These people also spoke of an ancient race
of red men (red-haired?) who had ruled the world from a now sub-
merged continent6 prior to the last-but-one cataclysmic shifting of
the poles, which they placed in the tenth millennium B.C., and of a
later cataclysm five millennia later, about the time of the sub-
mergence of the Antarctic continent and of the floods of myth and
legend.
The philological fact of one original language is borne out in
myth. The Bible (Genesis 2) says that "the whole earth was of one
language and one speech." Flavius Josephus says that "all creatures
had one language at that time," 7 implying that the beasts also
spoke. Louis Ginzberg says that language came down from above,
complete with an alphabet for writing.8 The Sumerians believed
that language and all *he arts of civilization were bestowed upon
them by a mysterious creature, half human and half fish, who
emerged from the sea and later returned to it. Looking at this leg-
end, the distinguished exobiologist and space physicist Carl Sagan
suggests that this sea creature may have been a visitor from space.9
But that is another story. What interests us here is the world-
wide tradition of a once common language, a tradition found not
only in the Mediterranean region and in Europe, but in Asia,
Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. It is accompanied by indica-
tions of a common source not only for language but for all the arts
and practices of civilization. That this common source antedates
the Egyptian and even the Sumerian civilization is now accepted.
Historians, before the discovery of Sumer, marveled that the Egyp-
Prologue: The Lost Civilization «*§ 23
to be based upon the same map on which the now famous Piri
Reis map is based. When the latter map, dated 1513, was discovered
in 1929, modern cartographers could not believe that it was the
work of either medieval or ancient map makers. It was far too ac-
curate to have been made without certain instruments that were
not even invented until centuries later.
In the 1930's and 1940's, other maps of the thirteenth to sixteenth
centuries continued to turn up, confounding modern science by
their precision. The odd thing about these maps was that on them
the unexplored regions of the medieval world were more accurately
drawn than the parts which had actually been explored in ancient
or medieval times! For example, Mercator's later maps, in which
had been incorporated parts of the world mapped by Ptolemy and
later geographers, were less accurate than his earlier map based
entirely on, the now lost map of remotest antiquity. In one of these
medieval world maps, the Pacific coastline of the Americas looks
exactly as it does in modern atlases. Yet no part of this coast had
been even so much as dreamed of in the Middle Ages. Even Colum-
bus was unaware of the Pacific Ocean.
The mystery of the maps was eventually explained. The original
ancient map of unknown origin had been rescued by the Christians
when they burned the great library at Alexandria in Egypt in the
fifth century and had been taken to Constantinople. There it had
lain until the crusade of the thirteenth century, during which
the Venetian fleet attacked Constantinople and carried off the
map with other loot to Venice, where contemporary cartographers
saw and used it. Where it ultimately disappeared is unknown.
Thus we know the source of the amazing medieval maps. But
we do not know who, or what race of people, drew the original
map on which they were based.
When Gibbon, in the eighteenth century, said of Byzantium
and the great Byzantine civilization that it saved "not a single
work of history or philosophy or literature from oblivion," he did
not of course know of this one piece of parchment so fortuitously
saved—the ancient map which had been copied and recopied
through countless millennia until it ended in Byzantium. And
yet this one map has thrown more light on prehistory and re-
vealed more of the ancient civilization that produced it than have
all the archeologists, historians, and theorists of all the ages since.
Prologue; The Lost Civilization ««§ 25
Who were these ancient mariners who sailed the seven seas
10,000 years before the Christian era? Who were they who mapped
the world with an accuracy never again achieved until the twen-
tieth century of the present era? Whoever they were, there can be
no doubt that their scientific knowledge was equal to our own.
And certainly they had oceangoing, far-ranging ships that were
capable of sailing around the globe. They traveled not only up
and down our own Pacific Coast, which they mapped quite tho-
roughly and accurately, but they also visited the Arctic Circle, the
Antarctic, Africa, Australia, and the islands of Oceania, as we
shall see.13
then we have to begin all over again as children, and know nothing
of what happened in ancient times." 27 "The survivors of each de-
struction," he continues in Critias, "were ignorant of the art of
writing and remembered only the names of their former chiefs
and a little about their deeds. For many generations the survivors
directed their attention to the supplying of their needs, to the neg-
lect of events that had happened in times long past. For inquiry
into antiquity is introduced only with leisure, and when the
necessaries of life are beginning to be provided, but not before." 28
When a modicum of security had finally been achieved and the
people were at last free to explore their own past, little was left
for them to base their history upon save the dim memories, handed
down from generation to generation by word of mouth, of the
names and deeds of long-dead heroes and heroines. These former
leaders became the deities and demi-deities, heroes and heras, of
the new world, and their deeds embodied the mythical record of
their descendants. For, as Peter Buck has said, "the mythology of
today is but the history of yesterday." 29 And "myths are the mem-
ory of real events experienced by the human race," as Bachofen
so presciently observed a hundred years ago.30
"What, after all, do we know of the ancient world so far, to
permit us to adopt an attitude of negation to the deep-rooted
tradition so oft-repeated in the most venerable chronicles that at
a period almost transcending the imagination a civilization of a
high order, from which all the cultures of this planet proceeded,
shone, flickered, and like a shattered sun, cast its broken light
upon the dark places of our star?" 81
Two hundred years ago, the great French academician, astrono-
mer, philosopher, and man of letters Sylvain Bailly wrote in his
History of Ancient and Modern Astronomy: "The only rational
supposition remains that there must have been a great original
nation, now utterly extinct, and of whose history no document re-
mains, who had advanced to a very high degree of perfection in *he
sciences and the arts; who sent colonies to the other parts of the
world; who, in fine, were the instructors, and communicated theh
knowledge to peoples more barbarous than they." 82
Part I
The Gynocratic World
I can't make out why a belief in a
Father-God's authorship of the universe, and
its laws, should be considered any more scientific
than a belief in the inspiration of this
artificial system by a Mother-Goddess.
-ROBERT GRAVES
THRACE V \
1
Woman and the Second Sex
Without a knowledge of the
_S>rigins, the science of history
can come to no conclusion.
—-J. J. BACHOFEN
The Origins
) "When above the heavens had not been formed, when the
earth beneath had no name, Tiamat brought forth them both. . , ,
Tiamat, the Mother of the Gods, Creator of All." So runs the
earliest recorded account of the creation of the universe and of
man.1
In all myth throughout the world, from the sun's rising beyond
the farthest shores of Asia to its setting west of the farthest islands
of the vast Pacific, the first creator of all is a goddess. Her names
are as many and as varied as the peoples whom she created and
who worshiped her as the first principle. In later myth she is re-
placed by a god—sometimes deliberately, as in the case of 'Anat
and Jehovah; sometimes by an arbitrary change in sex but not in
name, as in the cases of Ea in Syria, Siva in India, and Atea in
Polynesia; and sometimes by a gradual metamorphosis from fe-
male to male, as in the case of Metis-Phanes.
In earliest Greek mythology the creative principle is Metis—
female intelligence. She is the creator of all who, like Phoenician-
Carthaginian Tanit, like Tiamat, like Gaia, like 'Anat, creates
the world without a male partner. Originally she was all female.
By the time of Orpheus, however, she had become bisexual—a
hermaphrodite, Metis-Phanes, creator and begetter in one body.
Her final transformation by classical times into all male Phanes
illustrates the ancient concept of the evolution of the human race;
33
34 ^ THE FIRST SEX
The Logos
"Both in agriculture, which was invented by women, and in the
erection of walls, which the ancients identified with the matriarchal
era, women achieved a perfection which astonished later genera-
tions." 41 "From the banks of the Nile to the shores of the Black
Woman and the Second Sex «•§ 4$
Sea, from central Asia to Italy, women's names and deeds are inter-
woven with the history of the founding of cities which became
famous." 42
The worldwide tradition that women first built towns and walls
reflects not only the fact that women were the first civilizers but
that the mysterious megaliths, whose engineering secret was al-
ready lost in early patriarchal-historical times, were the work of
the matriarchal period.
The Greek legend of Amphion, the notes of whose lyre caused
large stones to rise into walls,43 bears out the universal belief
among primitive peoples that these huge stone structures, from
Gizeh to Avebury, from India to Yucatan and Peru, were built
by means of some power long lost to mankind. The Spaniards in
the sixteenth century were told by the Incas that the ancient mega-
lithic ruins of Peru and Colombia were built by a remote people
who merely struck a note of music and the mammoth stones rose
and slid into place. And Herodotus reports that among the Lydians
the tradition was preserved in his time that the megalithic monu-
ments of Lydia had been built by the women of old. Even the re-
markable engineering works of historical Babylon, numbered
among the seven wonders of the world, were credited by the an-
cients to the genius of two queens, Semiramis and Nitocris.44
The Old Testament ascribes the invention of civilized arts to
Tubal-Cain. But who is Tubal-Cain? Cain himself, as we shall
see in a later chapter, is but a symbol of the old matriarchal city
states that were overthrown by the pastoral nomads—the Abels.45
Tubal-Cain postdates him, yet he is oddly credited with inventing
civilized arts that had predated Cain. The mystery's solution lies
in the name itself—Tubal.
The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, under "Tubal," says
that Tubal (in Hebrew Tub-Hal) means "one who brings forth"
— a female—thus giving the name Tubal-Cain a doubly feminine
connotation.40 The Mythology of All Races tells us that the original
of Tubal was Tibir; and in the same volume we find that Tibir,
or Tibirra, was another name of the Sumerian Great Goddess*
Tiamat.47
The Sumerian epic of Tagtug [Tibir] and Dilmun speaks of an
early time "when Tibir had not yet laid a foundation/* a refer-
ence that corroborates the belief that women laid the first founda-
44 $** THE FIRST SEX
tions, that is, of walls and cities, and were thus the first fashioners
of civilized society—the Tubal-Cains of actuality.
Just as the story of Noah and the Ark is borrowed from the
Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, and the creation story from the
Babylonian epic of Enuma Elish, so the entire Cain-Tubal-Cain
cycle in Genesis is borrowed from the epic of Tagtug and Dilmun—
and Tagtug, or Tibir, is Tubal-Cain.48
Here we have a link, if a somewhat tenuous one, of Sumer and
the lost civilization with the Celts. For Herodotus writes that the
Great Goddess of the Celts in his time was known as Tabiti,49
which could have been a Celtic corruption of the older name,
Tibirra, as Tubal was a Hebraic corruption of Tibir.
Athene, a later aspect of the Great Goddess, was credited by the
Greeks with having invented the "flute, the trumpet, the earthen-
ware pot, the plough, the rake, the ox-yoke, the horse-bridle, the
chariot, the wheel, the ship, the art of numbers, fire, cooking, weav-
ing and spinning."60 In other words, woman invented or dis-
covered or first practiced music, ceramics, agriculture, animal
domestication, land transportation, water transportation, commerce,
mathematics, handicrafts, domestic economy and industry. What
else of any use has been invented in the centuries since the end
of the matriarchal era?
out in Rome and her temples were converted to Christian use, her
winged image continued to be engraved on Roman coins, in defi-
ance of the new Christian hierarchy in Constantinople. What could
the beleaguered church then do but adopt her as the "angel of the
Lord," the Archangel Michael? ™
But back to Thrace. From Thrace a later generation crossed over
the narrow Hellespont into Anatolia and established there the "pre-
historic" towns of Catal Huyuk, Mersin, Hacilar, and Alalakh,
among others which have been excavated recently by archeologists.
The knowledge remembered by these matriarchal peoples accounts
for the blossoming, as we have conjectured, of the great Sumerian
civilization, "which never seems to have had a beginning," as his-
torians complain. "Overnight, as it were," writes Thorkild Jacob-
sen, Harvard Sumerologist, "[Sumerian] civilization . . . flashes
into being, complete in all its main features." 17 Their knowledge
ofjistronomy exceeded that of modern man until A.D., 1930 for it
J J T ^ IHe JmrffT
planet, Pluto, and only in 1781 arid 1S3.6 respectively had William
Herschel discovered Uranus, thlTseventh planet, and Urbain Lever-
rier, Neptune, the eighth. Yet on seals dug up at ancient sites in
what was Sumer, our sun is shown with all nine planets revolving
around it. Not only that, but these same seals show other suns than
ours, with other yet undiscovered worlds in orbit around them.18
The sun-centered universe and the plurality of worlds, a belief
that was branded as heresy by the Christian Church as recently as
four hundred years ago, was known to the ancient Sumerians seven
thousand years ago. Whence had they gleaned this knowledge?
Evidence is piling up that Anatolia, which earlier archeologists
had dismissed as a place arid of any traces of an early civilization,
may have been the germinating point of all historical civilizations.
Not only did the seeds of the ancient lost civilization lie dormant
there, finally to burst forth into the great civilizations of Sumer,
Crete, and Egypt, but when these had been destroyed by the pa-
triarchs, the original seed found fallow ground again in Anatolian
Ionia. Thence it blossomed in late historical times into the glory
that was Athens and into the great Celto-Ionian civilization that
ended only fifteen hundred years ago with the coming of official
Christianity and the resultant fall of Rome, the two related events
which ushered in the Dark Ages of medieval Europe.
THE
54 $•* FIRST SEX
not have taught Orpheus the plurality of worlds and true solar sys-
tem which appear to have been the fundamental principles of his
philosophy. Nor could he have gained his knowledge from any peo-
ple of whom history has preserved any memorials, for we know
none among whom science had made s'uch a progress that a truth as
remote from common observation and so contradictory to the evi-
dence of unimproved sense, would not have been rejected, as it was
by all sects of Greek philosophy save that of Pythagoras." 24
Pythagoras, after Orpheus, taught not only the plurality of
worlds, the sun-centered universe, the theory of cataclysmic evolu-
tion, the periodic shifting of the poles, and the spherical shape of
the earth, but also the theory of reincarnation and the immortality
of the soul. Could he have learned all this from Orpheus? And
where had Orpheus learned it if not in Thrace, his homeland, that
land of craggy mountain fastnesses where the scientific knowledge
of the ancient mariners had been preserved when long forgotten
elsewhere.
"Thrace was certainly inhabited by a highly civilized people at
some remote period," writes Knight, "for when Philip of Macedon
in the fifth century B.C. opened the gold mines in that country he
found that they had been worked before with great expense and
ingenuity by a people well versed in mechanics, to whom no mem-
orials whatever were then extant in any part of the known world." 25
Here we have again the gold mines, the mines of the ancient
mariners who scoured the world for gold and who knew more about
our universe than modern science has yet been able to learn. Or-
pheus, the Thracian, passed on his knowledge of the cosmos to Py-
thagoras. Could it have been Orpheus too who let Epicurus into the
secret of the atomic theory? Both Pythagoras and Epicurus were
among the ancient philosophers whose works were deliberately
destroyed during the Dark Ages of Europe when, as Gibbon charges,
the light of learning was deliberately quenched by the Christian
Church.26 Thus over two millennia were to pass before Kepler,
Galileo and Copernicus rediscovered that which Orpheus, Aristar-
chus, and Pythagoras had proclaimed to the ancients and before
Albert Einstein stumbled upon the ancient atomic theory of Epi-
curus. Sir William Harvey, in his discovery of the circulation of
the blood, was only finding anew what the ancients had been aware
of, as Philostratus states,27 The theory of evolution too, twenty-four
Mythology Speaks <s§ 57
Cretan god Poseidon, son of Potnia (the Powerful One), was a bull-
god as well as a fish-god. Plato tells us that Poseidon was the god of
Atlantis and that on Atlantis the bull was worshiped. The first ruler
of Atlantis, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C.
but not by Plato, was Queen Basilea, who predated Poseidon. She
it was, writes Diodorus in his mammoth Library of History, who
brought order and law and justice to the world, after a bloody war
against the forces of evil and chaos. She was a warrior queen, after
the Celtic fashion, a prototype of Cartismandua, Veleda, Boadicea,
and Tomyris.
Queen Basilea became the Great Goddess "of a hundred names
yet only one personality," who was subsequently revered through-
out the ancient world.38 The unimaginable antiquity of this great
queen is illustrated by the fact that she was said to be the daughter
of Gaia, the primeval goddess who in later Hellenic myth created
the world from Chaos, and was thus antecedent to Cronos, old
"father time" himself, who was Gaia's son.
Wherever goddess worship spread, the sacred bull accompanied
it. In India, where the bull is worshiped to this day, the bull cult
was part of the goddess cult that prevailed there until Rama's time.
Apis, the bull-god of Egypt, sacred to Isis, has long been known, as
has the bull-god, the "golden calf," of ancient Palestine and Syria.
This was Moloch, sacred to the Syrian goddess Ea (Tiamat), who
was known and worshiped as 'Anat or Neith among the Jews.
Excavations at Nineveh, Babylon, and Ur, as well as at lesser
cities of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, reveal that the bull accom-
panied the worship of the great fish-goddess, Tiamat, who is often
depicted as a mermaid as on a seal dug up at Nineveh.39 Poseidon
has been identified as a later aspect of this same fish-goddess.40
The bull cult of ancient Crete has been well publicized through
the story of the Minotaur, who represented generations of sacred
bulls kept in luxury in the Labyrinth, and to whom, possibly, cap-
tive youths and maidens were occasionally sacrificed. He was sacred
to the ancient goddess Potnia, prime deity of Crete and later of
Mycenae. The bull and the labyris, the double ax of Crete, were the
symbols of goddess worship and matriarchal rule throughout the
ancient world, and they have been found carved or painted on the
walls of caves of Paleolithic Europe, of temples of Neolithic Ana-
tolia, and at Stonehenge in England, as well as in Bronze Age
Mythology Speaks **% 6i
The Ages of
and archeologists now acknowledge the fact that the "first stages of
mankind were peaceful and constructive" and ask why "barbarism
succeeded the absolute peace of primitive mankind." 15 James
Breasted emphasizes the pacific habits of the early Egyptians. They
were "totally unwarlike," he writes, until they were taught violence
by the invading nomadic Hyksos in the seventeenth century B.C.16
And Sir Arthur Evans vouches equally for the peaceableness of the
ancient Cretans. "The Minoans lived a comfortable life in peaceful
conditions," he writes. "We have found nothing that suggests war,
nothing to imply civil strife, or even defence against foreign
raids." 17'And this condition lasted until the destruction of Knossos
by the great earthquake and fire of the fifteenth century.
Sir Leonard Woolley, in excavating the predeluge city of Ur,
found evidence of a "civilization of an astonishingly high order."
And Cottrell adds, "We know from other excavations from Persia
to the shores of the Mediterranean that these antediluvian peoples
were considerably advanced," 18 and considerably unwarlike. "Cu-
riously enough there were never any weapons," writes Woolley of
early Alalakh,19 and no evidence of human strife or violence has
been found in any of the ancient cities of the Near East until late
in the third millennium, when the patriarchal nomads first invaded
the "sown lands of the Fertile Crescent." 20
The prehistoric occupants of Britain, says Massingham-, had no
frontiers, no fortresses, no weapons, and no warrior class, for they
needed none.21 And August Thebaud, who firmly believed that
nothing good could come from "paganism," reluctantly admits that
the prehistoric, pre-Christian Irish had reached a "very high degree
of civilization" in which peace and tranquillity seemed to prevail.22
"Of old, throughout all countries, religion possessed certain
things in common, which belonged to the creeds of all nations, and
were evidently derived from the primitive tradition of mankind.
Such were the belief in a golden age, and in the fall from a happy
beginning," wrote Thebaud in 1878.23 And G. Eliot Smith, the
anthropologist, wrote in 1924, before the more recent archeological
revelations: "The careful analysis of all the available evidence seems
to point clearly to the conclusion that the world once really enjoyed
some such Golden Age as Hesiod describes." 24
More and more, archeology is proving that there was indeed a
The Golden Age and the Blessed Lady **§ 67
out princes" have always adored; "for then we had plenty, and were
well, and saw no evil," 30 whereas Jehovah had brought evil times
"and nothing but misfortune." 31
The Hebrews, like peoples throughout the world, long remem-
bered the golden age and its Great Goddess; for in the Age of Dis-
covery the tradition was found to have survived among the primi-
tives who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization for
thousands of years. Among the remnants of a forgotten influence
retained among savage tribes that surprised and mystified our Eu-
ropean explorers were the universal belief in a lost paradise similar
to the Garden of Eden of Judeo-Christian myth and the belief in
the primacy of a Great Goddess who was creator of the world and
mother of all the gods.
the repressed desire of the Western races, which is for some form
of Goddess worship, . . . finds satisfaction at last." 37
In recent months, a French artist38 and an American clergy-
man39 have written books in which they explain world history
as the working out of a master plan by some space hierarchy to
create a perfect race in our galaxy, using earth as a laboratory. Ac-
cording to this hypothesis, several experimental races have been
planted here only to be destroyed eventually as failures. Among
such failures were the preadamic peoples who were wiped out
before Eden and the race of Adam (earthman) destroyed in the
Flood. The re-created postdiluvian race was scheduled for destruc^
tion around the beginning of our era, and Jesus, a spaceman, was
sent to warn the worthy of their impending doom. All evidence,
writes Paul Misraki, points to the intended destruction of the
human race around the middle of the first century A.D. But then
something happened to change the ordained plan. Earthman was
reprieved at the last minute and given a second chance. What
happened? According to Misraki, the "death" of Mary happened.
About the year 50 C.E., Mary was returned bodily to the superrace
from whom she had come and at once began to plead for man's
reprieve. At her request the "end" was postponed and is still being
postponed through Mary's continuing intercession—wherefore the
appearances at Lourdes, Fatima, etc.
This hypothesis accords well with that of many distinguished
scientists—Agrest, Shklovskii, Sagan, Freeman J. Dyson, Thomas
Gold, to name a few—that the main line of humanity was planted
here at different intervals in the past by a colonizing race from
some distant star. According to this theory, the planted race has
been held back and degraded by interbreeding with the indigenous
types, the products of evolution via the apes, of whom Neanderthal
man was one result.
Neanderthal man, the brutish caveman of popular fancy, did
not die out but was absorbed by the unevolved races, the planted
colonists, of whom Cro-Magnon man was an exponent. If one
examines the remains of Neanderthal man and compares them with
the remains of Cro-Magnon man, one finds it hard to believe that
they could both have evolved along the same lines and from the
same ancestor. Neanderthal man was short, squat, shaggy, small-
The Golden Age and the Blessed Lady ««§ 71
73
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bear male likenesses, the cornerstones and capstones of all our public
buildings are carved with the names of men only, and all our ar-
chives preserved by chance in subterranean caves will deal solely
with the deeds of men. Records of women's former existence will
be as scarce in the archeological finds of the future as are the
records of men in the prehistoric archeology of today. Eventually
one of our future archeologists will come up with the astounding
theory that Christian era man was able to reproduce himself par-
theno- or anthropogenetically and, like the Amazons of old in
reverse, murdered his female offspring and reared only the males.
Catal Huyuk
In the few years since Campbell wrote those words in 1964, fai
more astonishing proof of Bachofen's theory has come to light
in Anatolia, particularly at Catal Huyuk, "the oldest town known
in the history of civilization."17 Since 1950 archeology has been
busily at work in modern Turkey uncovering incontrovertible
facts that have caused historians to revise their entire concepts of
the remote past of human history.
Among these new facts is the unsuspected (by some) antiquity
of civilized human society. The society of the ninth millennium
B.C.-—more than ten thousand years ago—has now been found to
have been more civilized than many subsequent societies of his-
torical times. Contrary to the recently held belief that Anatolia
had been bypassed by man until the Hittite emergence there in
the second millennium, archeology now reveals that the great
Hittite civilization of historical times "was not a beginning but the
end [author's italics] of a long period of development. It was not
brought' there, but evolved there, as Jean Marcade* writes.18
The recent "discovery of the Anatolian Neolithic has revolu-
tionized the prehistory of the Near East" 19—and of the world.
It has knocked into a cocked hat the popular theory, still accepted
by laymen and still disseminated in the textbooks, that our present
civilization originated in the Tigris-Euphrates valley of Iraq, among
a Semitic people. For, contrary to previous belief, Anatolia was
not "colonized" by Semitic or Oriental peoples from Mesopotamia
and Palestine but was itself the source of these and other civiliza-
tions and was "an important centre in the diffusion of culture"
in the Near East and the Aegean.20 Its people have been found
to have been primarily of Indo-European stock, and pottery found
in northern Anatolia can be traced to European Thrace and the
Danube region.21
Since 1966 detailed reports have been made on three prehistoric
towns in Anatolia: Mersin, Hacilar, and Catal Huyuk. And in all
of them the message is clear and unequivocal: ancient society was
gynocratic and its deity was feminine. At all three sites "the cult
of the goddess was predominant," says Alkim,22 and her predomi-
nance continued throughout the Neolithic and well into the
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Bronze ages, for "in the Bronze age levels the main theme is [still]
the great goddess." 23
James Mellaart, the archeologist in charge of the first digs at
Catal Huyuk, was overwhelmed by the implications of the earliest
revelations there. That the civilization expressed at Catal Huyuk
was woman-dominated, he writes, "is . . . obvious." Mellaart com-
menced his excavations at Catal Huyuk late in 1961, and the work
still goes on. For the ancient city covers more than thirty-two acres
of land and consists of at least twelve levels—city piled upon city
dating back perhaps to the year 10,000 B.C. The earliest radio-
carbon dating available gives a reading of 7000 B.C.—nine thou-
sand years ago—but internal evidence suggests that the city may
have been over a thousand years old even then; and the lowest
levels had not then been reached.
Mellaart's report, written in 1966 before the completion of the
excavations, shows that Catal Huyuk, whatever its name may have
been ten thousand years ago, was not only a matriarchal but a
Utopian society. There had been no wars for a thousand years.
There was an ordered pattern of society. There were no human
or animal sacrifices; pets were kept and cherished. Vegetarianism
prevailed, for domestic animals were kept for milk and wool—
not for meat. There is no evidence of violent deaths. Women were
the heads of households, and they were reverently buried, while
men's bones were thrown into a charnel house. Above all, the
supreme deity in all the temples was a goddess.24
Each of these findings corroborates BachofenY idea of what early
matriarchal societies were like. In his Mutterrecht, published in
1861, over a hundred years before the discovery of Catal Huyuk,
he wrote: "An air of tender humanity permeated the culture of
the matriarchal world, that primordial race of women with whom
all peace vanished from the earth. . . . Matriarchal states were
famed for their freedom from strife and conflict. . . . Matriarchal
peoples assigned special culpability to the physical injury of any
living creature, even of animals." 25 Yet Alkim wonders at the ab-
sence of defensive walls in the earlier levels of Hacilar and marvels
at the apparent lack of violence toward wild animals depicted in
the wall paintings of Catal Huyuk.
Bachofen's belief in the "historicity of myth" thus finds sur-
prising confirmation, for in Catal Huyuk we have the confirma-
«, Archeology Speaks ««§ 79
tion of the myth of the golden and silver ages, when men lived
on the fruits of the ground, drinking the milk of goats, and were
"utterly subject to their mothers."
In the golden age of Judeo-Christian myth, paradise was a land
"flowing with milk and honey." And it may surprise the patriarchal
Jews and Christians of today to learn that milk and honey both
symbolize feminine rule. In masculine paradises, like that of
Islam, wine is served. Milk symbolizes gynarchy for obvious rea-
sons, and honey because the honeybee "represents the feminine
principle in nature. The life of the bee shows matriarchy in its
clearest and purest form," and Aristotle considered bee society
more advanced than that of man.26
"The Greek historians," contrary to the historians of the Chris-
tian era, "realized the important truth that tradition and myth
were based on facts," as A. M. Hocart writes.27 And so in Greek
thought the myths of the golden and silver ages were accepted
as reflections of an actual stage in human history. And now ar-
cheology indicates that the Greeks were right.
Probably of primary interest to the prehistorian, "the tracer of
lost peoples," is the physical proof—"touch-and-handle proof,"
to borrow Jane Harrison's phrase—at Catal Huyuk of the close
connection between the Anatolians and the Cretans. We have long
known that the bull was a gynarchic symbol and that the bulls'
horns were phallic symbols sacred to the goddess. In the excava-
tions of Crete some years ago the sacredness of the bull was made
plain, as was also the popularity of the national Cretan sport of
"bull-leaping," a game in which the players might be injured but
never the bull. Plato wrote, in Critias, that bull-leaping was a
sport popular in Atlantis, and since ancient Crete had been for-
gotten in classical Greece and her ruins were unknown, modern
scholars have wondered where Plato derived the idea. We still do
not know that, but we do know now where the Cretans derived
the idea of bull-leaping—from no other people than the Anatolians
?
of Catal Huyuk.
"We can recognize," writes U. Bahadir Alkim of the University
of Istanbul, "the sport of bull-leaping—one of the favorite themes
of Cretan painting—in wall paintings at Catal Huyuk," nine thou-
sand years ago.28
An important revelation at Catal Huyuk was the abundance
80 §»» THE FIRST SEX
women. It is significant that the gold torques average six to six and
a half inches in diameter, while the bronze torques measure eight
to eight and a half inches. Since the large Celtic male would have
been choked by a six-inch torque, and since the women did not
wear torques, it seems more than probable that the small gold
torque was merely a symbol—a symbol of authority that was buried
with its owner to indicate her status as "head of the family or
tribe."
Powell's alternative hypothesis is that the torques in women's
graves "could have been head ornaments." But this idea is bashed
by the finding with the gold torques of diadems—definitely head
ornaments-—as worn by the little Mycenaean girl and by the Celtic
lady buried at Vix.49 No. The golden torques must have been a
survival of the sacred objects connected with the ancient matriar-
chal civilization, like the lunar ax and the golden cup of Aegina,
Argos, and of Celtic Britain,50 all of which, Herodotus noted,
were sacred relics among the Celts—"golden relics which had
fallen from the sky."
"From the Tigris in Asia to Portugal," writes Bergounioux
of Paleolithic Europe and Asia Minor, "the ritual representation of
the goddess is to be found. , . . In Champagne, in France, she is
shown carrying an ax'*—fifty thousand years ago! C1
And in nearly all these ancient figures of the great goddess of
fifty millennia ago, she "who was the source of everything both
good and harmful," as Bergounioux describes her, is shown wear-
ing "a cylindrical necklace [author's italics]." 62 And what is a
"cylindrical necklace" if not a torque}
The bulls' horns found in the goddess shrines at Catal Huyuk
are, as Alkim says, "prototypes of the 'horns of consecration' shown
in the Cretan palaces of a much later period." 53 And these Aegean
"horns of consecration," writes R. E. M. Wheeler, were no other
than the golden torques of the later Celts of Europe.54
The golden yoke of Herodotus' account, the "cylindrical neck-
lace" of Paleolithic Europe, the bulls' horns of Neolithic Anatolia,
the horns of consecration of highly civilized Bronze Age Crete
and the Aegean, and the golden torque of Celtic Europe were
all one and the same thing—the symbol of goddess worship, of
matriarchal rule, and of female supremacy throughout the ancient
world.
5
Anthropology Speaks
We discern in primitive customs the
remains of an ancient and pure system,
derived from wise instructors, which
has been corrupted by superstitious
and degraded peoples.
—SYLVAIN BAILLY
and from the persistence with which these taboos have lasted—
many into modern life in America by way of Christian codes of
conduct. The most persistent of these taboos is that of incest—a
prohibition decreed by the earliest matriarch to protect herself
and her daughters from the sexual abuse of her growing sons.
counts for the church's habit of burning women alive while merely
beheading or quartering men, was imposed in the gynocratic age
also to protect menstruating girls and to protect all women from
the brutal rages of their male relatives.
Remnants of the belief in the powerful sanctity of woman's
blood are found today not only in the Christian rite of "church-
ing" women after childbirth to destroy the dangerous power in-
herent in the placental blood but also in the customs and taboos
of less "civilized" peoples. It is almost universally believed among
primitives, as among the early Hebrews, that for a man to touch
a woman who is menstruating, who is pregnant, or who is recently
delivered of a child is dangerous for the man. "If a woman have
an issue of blood . . . whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean,"
wrote the author of Leviticus three thousand years ago.
"Nature would appear to have taught the savages of Australia,'
writes Paolo Mantegazza, "that which Moses, the inspired of God,
imparted to the Hebrews for the conserving of their health." 23
Mantegazza fell into the common error of interpreting these an-
cient taboos as safeguards for men, an explanation difficult to
comprehend; for certainly intercourse during menstruation or
pregnancy is fraught with more danger to the female than to the
male. Yet the fallacy persists that feminine taboos were designed
to protect men from the baneful influence of women.
In South Africa, for example, if a man touches his wife during
her menstrual period "his bones will become soft and he will lose
his strength." 24 Even to occupy the same room with a menstru-
ating woman is considered enervating, while the actual sight of a
woman's blood may cause death. A Fan of West Africa "so weak
that he could hardly move was suspected to have become so by
seeing the blood of a woman." 25 And among the Damaras of
southern Africa "men may not see a lying-in woman else they
will become weak and will be killed in battle." 20
"One would never have done," writes Mantegazza, "if he were
to undertake to mention all the peoples among whom the men-
struating woman is looked upon as impure, or if he were to under-
take to give the lengthy list of all the superstitions which still
surround to our own day the act of menstruation, the menstrual
Dlood, and everything that has to do with the mysterious genital
function of woman." 27
92 $»> THE FIRST SEX
"he was met with the jeers of the wedding party and the match
was declared off."31
Aelian wrote of the ancient Sacae that the bridegroom had to
do battle with his intended and subdue her before she would con-
sent to be his wife.32 And modern writers have reported the cus-
tom as surviving in localities as far apart as the Arctic Circle and
South Africa. In the Cape Colony "a Makuana suitor has to throw
the girl in a wrestling match in order to secure her hand," and
she will not consent to be his wife until he has thus proved him-
self.33 Among the Samoyedes of northern Russia, as in Kamchatka
and the Tungus, marriage is not agreed to by the girl until the
suitor "has got the best of her by force." 34
Thus the popular myth illustrated in modern comics of the cave-
man clubbing his chosen bride over the head and dragging her off
by her hair is a very distorted depiction of a once universal cus-
tom: that of sexual selection by the woman of a "superior sire," a
custom which prevailed when men and women were equal in size
and strength.
These customs, says Crawley, contrary to modern masculist the-
ory, "have nothing to do with marriage by capture" or with the
subjugation of women.35 They are manifestations of the right of
the woman to select her mate by combat, so to speak—the very form
of sexual selection that led eventually to the muscular disparity be-
tween the sexes. For, as Lester Frank Ward says, "if the male ap-
pears to excel in size and strength it's because female preference
has weeded out the little weak males in favor of superior sires. She
has sacrificed her original advantage for the good of the race." 3G
Karen Horney understands that masculine muscularity was "an
acquired sex difference," fostered by sexual selection on the part
of the females,37 and the fact that modern men on the whole con-
tinue to be larger and stronger than women is an indication of the
recency of this method of selection. Among the Celts of Europe
young men and women were still equal in size and strength as late
as the first century A.D., as Tacitus says: "The young men marry
late; nor are the maidens hurried into marriage; the same age and
a similar stature is required; well matched and vigorous they are
wed." 38 (Author's italics.) Edward Carpenter sees a deterioration
in the human race since the transference of selection privileges
from the female to the male:
Anthropology Speaks **§ 95
Among most of the higher animals, and indeed among the earlier
races of mankind, the males have been selected by the females
on account of their prowess, superior strength, or beauty, and
this led to the evolution of the race at large of a type which was
the ideal of the female. But when in the later history of mankind,
property-love set in, this action ceased. Woman then became
"property," and man began to select women for the character-
istics that were pleasing to him, and consequently the quality
of the whole race began to be affected. With the return of women
to freedom, the ideal of the female might again resume its sway
and give to sexual selection a nobler influence than when ex-
ercised by males. The feminine influence might thus lead to the
evolution of a more manly and dignified race than has been dis-
closed in these last days of patriarchal civilization.39
Phallus Worship
t£& The original worshipers of the phallus were women. As arche-
ology in recent years has shown, the early peoples in what we have
heretofore called prehistoric times considered the male to have been
ancillary to the female, sexually as well as in all other respects.
There is even evidence that it was woman's sexual preference that
determined the ultimate size of the male phallus.
The recently excavated goddess shrines in the Near East reveal
phalluses of all shapes and sizes. The fact that these, and such phal-
lic symbols as the bulls' horns, are the only masculine touch found
in the ancient shrines indicates that the original worshipers of the
phallus were the women themselves. Phalluses abound, but no
other male element is so much as suggested among the myriads of
representations of women uncovered by archeology, as though to
the women, who were all that counted, the only thing about a man
that was to be valued was his sex organ, made for her pleasure and
fulfillment. "These masculine symbols were seen in relation to the
Goddess, and it was to please her that they abound in her shrines.'* *
Significantly, in Egyptian mythology it was Isis herself, the pri-
mary deity, who established phallus worship. When Typhon mur-
dered her consort, Osiris, and cut him up into little bits, Isis went
about gathering up the pieces. But nowhere could she find the miss-
ing penis. She therefore ordered a wooden lingam to be made, and
this she set up in her chief temple at Thebes. It was for this reason
that all the goddess temples in Upper and Lower Egypt were
97
98 £»» THE FIRST SEX
Male Circumcision
The fact that even in imperial Rome the devotees of the goddess
Cybele were still cutting off their penises and testicles and offering
them at the shrines of the goddess indicates that in early times it
was customary for men to observe this practice in honor of the
Great Goddess. Probably to clean up the shrines, as well as to halt
102 £*» THE FIRST SEX
The foreskin of Jesus Christ was one of the most precious relics
of the Middle Ages. So popular was it that there existed no fewer
than twelve of them at one time in Europe! The Holy Prepuce at
Chartres, however, was the most potent, merely to look upon it
being sufficient to render the most sterile woman fruitful.20 This
was carrying things to ridiculous extremes; but a French philoso-
pher of the nineteenth century carried another foreskin, that of
Adam, to even more ridiculous extremes. This great thinker some-
how arrived at the conclusion that when God put Adam to sleep he
intended only to circumcise him. But when he stood there with
the severed prepuce in his hand, he had a better idea of what to
do with the leftovers. And he made woman, Eve, out of Adam's
foreskin!21
Circumcision of boys is practiced today for hygienic reasons ac-
cruing to the welfare of the boy. Physicians of the nineteenth cen-
tury pooh-poohed the cleanliness motive, maintaining that circum-
cision served no healthful purpose and was merely a barbaric and
useless form of torture.
But recent news items announce that cancer of the cervix in
women may very well be caused by a virus transmitted by uncir-
cumcised men.22 Perhaps, then, the Jews, the Arabs, and Saint Peter
have been right all along. For it was Saint Peter who wanted Chris-
tian converts to undergo circumcision and Saint Paul who did not.
Paul wanted converts at any price, and the prospect of circumcision
had already in Paul's experience cooled the ardor of not a few
prospective Christians. Paul won out, and Christians were not cir-
cumcised.
Except, that is, the Christians of Abyssinia and the Christian
Copts of Egypt, with whom the tradition was too ancient to be
abandoned. So abhorrent to Coptic women was an uncircumcised
male that they burned his bedding and shattered his eating utensils
if by any chance they had entertained one unaware, as Voltaire re-
ports in his Philosophic de l'histoire.2S
On the other hand, non-Christian women of Turkey "prefer
cohabiting with those who retain the foreskin (the Christians) than
with the Jews and Turks, as the pleasure of sexual union is greatly
increased by the friction of the prepuce." 24
Philo reports that the Egyptians knew a disease they called carbo,
of a "very dangerous character, and very difficult to cure, to which
104 $•> THE FIRST SEX
all those who retained the prepuce were peculiarly liable." 25 What
this disease was is unknown, but it may have been syphilis. Syphi-
lis did not invade modern Europe until late in the fifteenth
century, when Columbus' sailors brought it back from the New
World. But in former days, could not the ancient mariners have
brought it back from that same New World to ancient Egypt, where
the doctors were more successful in containing it than were the
doctors of the "enlightened" sixteenth century A.D.?
In the Muhammadan religion, circumcision is a must; and it
was originally decreed not by Muhammad but by Ishmael, son of
Hagar, who was circumcised by Sarah, wife of Abraham, according
to Islamic belief.
Many and varied are the reasons given by earlier travelers for
the strange Eastern custom of circumcision: to prevent masturba-
tion; to prevent libertinism; to render washing more facile, since
Muhammadans are permitted to use only one hand in washing
their genitals; to protect against a worm that likes to breed in the
fold of the foreskin; because the prepuce, if left uncropped, would
grow too long and would interefere with sexual intercourse; and,
finally, because the "prepuce may oppose the free egress of the
seminal fluid in the conjugal embrace, and it is to circumcision that
the great fecundity of the Jews and Arabs is to be attributed." 26
All of these so-called explanations bear the mark of patristic,
masculist logic. The real reason for male circumcision lies buried
in the great mysterious mind of the primordial queen who decreed
it back in the springtime of the world for the sole benefit of the
chosen sex, the women.
Sexual Symbolism
Pyramids, breast-shaped, "rising equally on all their sides and
equally terminating in their apices," are sex symbols representing
the feminine principle in creation—unalterable, immovable, in-
destructible. "Egypt is the land of stereotyped matriarchy," writes
Bachofen, "and its whole culture is built on the woman cult." 32
Breast symbolism in general is rarer than lingam (phallic) or
yoni (vulva) symbolism. Of phallic symbols there are many—the
obelisks of Egypt and the Washington Monument in the District
of Columbia are said to fall in this category. But yoni symbols, the
110 §•> TH*E FIRST SEX
The Mothers
^ Jane Ellen Harrison's remark about the incongruity of the
male adopting the role of mother can be expanded to include the
"inherent futility and ugly dissonance" of the father-god taking over
the role and functions of the mother-goddess. Yet so far have we
come in historical times from the original concept of the deity as
female that, as Mary Daly writes, it would seem less blasphemous to
refer to God as "it" than as "she." *
Perhaps the greatest trouble with the world today is that for
some two or three thousand years, and particularly in the past
fifteen hundred years, mankind has been worshiping the wrong
deity and pursuing the wrong ideals. When man substituted God
for the Great Goddess he at the same time substituted authori-
tarian for humanistic values. Man's relation to God became that
of a child to its father, whose love and goodwill can be won only
by blind obedience and conformity, as Fromm points out, whereas
in the elder world the man-god relationship had been that of the
child to its mother—a mother whose love is unconditional and
whose goodwill can be taken for granted.2
When the goddess of justice gave way to the god of vengeance,
man became harsh and inhuman and authoritarianism replaced
compassion as the law of life. The dehumanization of modern
115
11'6 $•> THE FIRST SEX
the maternal world and the appearance of the new male gods,
the world grew uglier, the idea of destruction more dominant,
and the hope of salvation dimmed." 12
"The relationship which stands at the origin of all culture, of
every virtue, of every nobler aspect of existence, is that between
mother and child. It operates in a world of violence as the divine
principle of love, of peace, of union. Paternal love appears much
later. Woman is the source of all benevolence, all culture, all devo-
tion, and of all concern for the living and grief for the dead." 18
Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many
millennia it was the only kind. When woman, after she had
tamed man, extended her love for her children to include their
father, then perhaps man began to learn for the first time what
love was. At least he learned to appreciate and be grateful for
woman's love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to
return it in kind. Eventually he came to depend on woman's love
as one of the basic necessities of life. Yet she is still trying to teach
him what love really is. For, as Reik points out, when men speak
of "love" they are really talking about "scrotal frenzy." 14
Our modern society, writes Eisler, "is the result of the subju-
gation of an original frugivorous and agricultural population by
hunters who thereafter mainly held the upper-hand. . . . The
hunters, the robbers, the pirates, are the conquerors, the wild
men, who subdued the fruitgrowers all over the world." 15 But
the statesmen, the heroes, the saints, are the fruit growers whose
maternal genes prevailed in the inevitable commingling of the
tribes.
Thus "the masculine character of our civilization has its origin
not in any innate difference in the sexes, but in a preponderance
of force in the male, which is not at all bound up with the ques-
tion of civilization." 16 But it was this force, the acquired muscu-
larity of the inferior sex, that led to the patriarchal revolution
that is still being waged in the Western world and to the continu-
ing decline of civilization. For "so long as force is supreme—
physical force of the individual—society is impossible."17
longing for the old days of feminine authority, the golden age of
queendoms, when peace and justice prevailed on earth and the
gods of war had not been born.
Matriliny
"Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch." 22 She took
lovers, but for her pleasure, not to provide her children with a
father, a commodity early woman saw no need for. Once the rele-
vance of coition to childbirth was recognized by men as well as
by women, the status of men gradually improved. The tribal
queen, or matriarch, then chose a consort, who "acquired execu-
tive power only when permitted to deputize for the queen." 28
When the king was thus deputized for the queen he wore her
robes, padded himself with false breasts and, as a symbol of power
and authority, borrowed the queen's lunar ax, the Cretan royal sym-
bol as well as the emblem of gynocracy throughout the ancient
world. The king continued to hold his position only by right ol
marriage to the hereditary queen, and the throne remained mat-
rilinear even in late historical times, long after the triumph of
patriarchy. "The King remained under the Queen's tutelage,"
writes Graves, "long after the matriarchal phase had passed";24 and
long, long after queens had been replaced by kings, "the king
derived his right" not from his father but from his mother or
wife. "He takes a wife not to beget heirs, for his sons will not
succeed him; he takes a wife in order to gain power," and to
legalize his right to the throne.25
The king was always chosen from outside the royal family,
the succession going from queen to daughter, and "the king's
coronation consisting entirely in his marriage ceremony with the
queen." 26 Kings by marriage eventually sought ways to retain
the throne and devised numerous schemes to this end. Incest within
the royal family became one method, the king on decease of his
wife marrying his own daughter, the heir, or arranging for his son
to marry her, which accounts for the widespread custom of sister-
brother marriages among royal families of historical times.27 The
Romans established the vestal college to contain the heiresses and
to discourage outsiders from attempts on the matrilinear throne
through marriage with the royal ladies. That this ploy did not
always succeed is attested to by the case of the vestal virgin Rhea
122 $•> THE FIRST SEX
eldest son, Artabazanes, who became king but the boy Xerxes, son
of Queen Atossa by a former, unroyal husband.
Candace was the name, or title, of the hereditary queen of
Nubia from the time of Herodotus to the time of Dio Cassius, a
span of nearly eight hundred years. Strabo, writing in the year
7 B.C., describes the Candace of his time, whom he had actually
seen, as "a masculine sort of woman, blind in one eye."80 Strabo
goes on to report that this one-eyed queen personally led ten
thousand troops in battle against the Roman governor of Egypt,
Pubjius Petronius. Candace is mentioned by Pliny the Elder and
by Seneca in A.D. 62. Seneca's Candace is no doubt the one men-
tioned in the Acts of the Apostles, where Philip's conversion of
"an eunuch, a great authority under Candace the Queen" is dis-
cussed. Nubia, ancient Ethiopia, modern Sudan, in ancient times
was a colony of Egypt populated by Egyptians.
It was a Phoenician queen, Dido, who founded the great city
state of Carthage and reigned over it until her death, followed by
a succession of queens descended in direct line from her. Legend
and Virgil say that one of her queen daughters was fathered by
Aeneas on his way to Italy after the Trojan War and that it was
Aeneas* refusal to remain in Carthage and become her consort
that caused the beautiful Dido to throw herself from the walls of
her city. However that may be, the gynarchy of Carthage some cen-
turies later may have been the cause of Cato's obsession with the
idea that Carthage must be destroyed: Carthago delendum est,
with which vow he closed his every Senate speech. Cato was a rabid
antifeminist and was responsible for the Voconian laws of the late
republic which temporarily deprived Roman women of some
of their ancient rights and privileges.40 Temporarily, because the
laws were repealed under the empire and were not reinstated until
the Christian era, but then in a much harsher form.
In modern Ghana, neighbor to ancient Carthage, "like Dido
the queens of the Akan have wielded power since times beyond
memory; and like the Phoenician and Carthaginian goddess Tanit,
the Akan goddess Nyame gave birth to the universe without a male
partner." 41
In Egypt, as in the rest of the ancient world, the throne de-
scended through the female line, the husband of the heiress becom-
ing pharaoh. It was for this reason that brother-sister marriages
were the rule rather than the exception in the Egyptian royal
Mother-Right ««§ 125
family. But the brother reigned only with the consent of the heir,
his sister-wife. Occasionally the legitimate heir refused to give her
Consent, as was the case with Nitocris of the sixth dynasty who,
Manetho tells us, reigned as absolute monarch; and as was prob-
ably the case with the unknown lady of Sakkara whose recently
discovered tomb proclaims her to have been a powerful and
mighty pharaoh in her day.42
Such also was the case with Queen Hatshepsut, daughter of
Thutmose I, who was married first to her older brother and then,
on his death, to her younger brother. During both of these mar-
riages Hatshepsut reigned supreme as pharaoh, and her long and
glorious reign is recognized to have been one of Egypt's finest hours.
Velikovsky very interestingly and persuasively identifies her with
the queen of Sheba who visited Solomon.43 Upon Hatshepsut's
death, her brother-husband ascended the throne as Thutmose III,
perhaps having married his niece, and immediately launched his
country into a series of bloody wars of conquest.
Rawlinson and James Breasted, both of whom should have known
better, consider the reign of Hatshepsut to have constituted an
act of usurpation. Breasted calls her "aggressive" and her seizure of
the throne "an enormity." 44 And Rawlinson describes her as "a
woman of great energy, of masculine mind, clever, vindictive, and
unscrupulous." 45 Yet the evidence for matrilinear succession was
plain and unequivocal even in their day. Both of these Victorian
scholars, bred in the patriarchal tradition of the incapacity of
women, to paraphrase a famous lady,46 were incapable of recogniz-
ing it, naturally assuming that women had always been the non-
entities the Victorian male had molded them into and that there-
fore the Thutmoses II and III had been wrongfully bilked of their
rights by their sister. Twentieth-century scholars, however, have
seen the truth and have openly acknowledged it-—as did the an-
cients.
The very last of the pharaohs, Cleopatra, queen of Egypt in the
century just preceding the Christian era, was also married to her
brother, but it was she who was recognized as pharaoh and abso-
lute ruler of her nation. It was with her that Antony and Caesar
dealt in their attempts to win Egypt over to their opposed causes
in the Roman civil war. And it was she, who incidentally was a
pure-bred blond Macedonian Greek and not the sultry half-breed
which modern sociologists and cinema moguls would have her,
1«6 $»» THE FIRST SEX
who led her fleet at the battle of Actium. Octavian, who won that
battle and for the victory was proclaimed emperor as Augustus,
was the cognatic nephew (on the female side, that is) of Julius
Caesar. And Augustus himself was succeeded years later on the
imperial throne by the descendants of his wife, Livia, his own
agnatic relatives being left out of it.
Livy tells us that the first Roman tribes were headed by women,47
and Tacitus that the great Claudian imperial family was descended
from a glorious ancestress, Claudia Quinta, whose shrine was
revered in his own time.48 Marcus Aurelius became emperor
through marriage to Faustina, daughter of Faustina the Elder and
Antoninus Pius. The younger Faustina was a great adulteress, but
Marcus Aurelius refused to take the advice of the Senate and
divorce her because, he said, "if I part from Faustina I shall have
to part from her dowry, which is the Roman Empire." 40
It is a sad commentary on the "improvement" in morals intro-
duced by Christianity that only two centuries after Marcus Aurelius
the first Christian emperor, Constantine, boiled his innocent young
wife alive on mere suspicion of adultery. And Constantine's
misogyny is a long leap indeed from ancient Sumer, when it was
decreed that a man caught in adultery must die but that the woman
should go free. "She shall make affirmation of her innocence and
shall return in peace to her house," reads the text, "and her hus-
band shall welcome her," as the law decrees.60
Constantine himself, like Marcus Aurelius, was a beneficiary
of matriliny, having won the empire by virtue of his marriage to
Fausta, the daughter of the Emperor Maximian.
Matriliny prevailed in Europe among all ranks of the people
until the late Middle Ages, when Teutonic and/or church law
finally triumphed over the older Celto-Roman legal system. Henry
Hallam points out that daughters succeeded to lands and titles
on an equal basis with sons as late as the fourteenth century in
France, despite the Salic law of the Teutonic Franks that excluded
females in direct descent.51
Montesquieu suggests that the Salic law has been misread by
modern historians. "If daughters had been generally debarred
by the Salic law from the inheritance of land," he writes, "it
would be impossible to explain the histories, formularies, and
charters which are continually mentioning the lands and posses-
sions of the females."52 It is significant that even under the Salic
Mother-Right «#§ 127
Modern law of the past few centuries has diminished the status
of women even below that of the Teutonic women of the barbarous
Germans of the late Middle Ages and far below that of the Celts,
among whom, as Tacitus wrote, "no distinction of sex was made in
their successions."56 Even among the Hebrews, matriliny pre-
vailed into historical times, as the Old Testament, albeit uninten-
tionally, reveals.
right to father-right. The bull of Tanj ore, then, must have been
extremely ancient, dating from a time before Rama.
Rama, the dissident Aryan, we are told by Fabra d'Olivet, con-
verted India from gynarchy and goddess worship to patriarchy
and god worship about three thousand years before our era.3 Be-
fore Rama all women were regarded as divine beings in whose
province fell law and justice, religion, philosophy, poetry, music,
and all the finer aspects of life. Rama, however, the first patriarchal
hero, resented the power and authority of the women and, unable
to overthrow them in his native land—somewhere in Anatolia or
southern Europe—he departed his country and wandered into
India.
Perhaps Rama came from Thrace, that mysterious center of
the ancient civilization whence Orpheus was later to bring the
long-lost knowledge of the plurality of worlds and the sun-centered
universe and where Philip of Macedon was to find evidence,
in the fifth-century B.C., of a great forgotten technology far sur-
passing anything the Greeks were capable of. If Rama had been
an early rebel against the original gynocracy and had been ex-
pelled from his homeland for this reason, the Rama myth in both
Europe and India would be explained. In European myth Rama
sought to abolish the ancient priestess (Druid) colleges and estab-
lish a male priesthood. In this effort he set up the ram as his sym-
bol and made it the rallying point for his masculist followers. The
Ramites then warred against the people of the bull, the feminist
people, but were defeated; and Rama led his people out of Eu-
rope into India.
Throughout the ancient world the ram became the symbol of
patriarchy, just as the bull was that of matriarchy. It is a curious
fact that according to astrology the age of the bull, the Taurian
Age, coincided historically with the last two thousand years of the
gynarchates—4000 to 2000 B.C., while the Arian Age, the age of
Aries the ram, coincided with the age that immediately preceded
the Christian era, the time of the patriarchal revolution. The Pis-
cean Age, the age of the fish, embraced the Christian era, the two-
thousand-year period from which we are just now emerging, and
it is therefore appropriate that the fish became the symbol of Chris-
tianity.4
But the fish was also the symbol of the Great Goddess, Tiamat,
Ram Versus Bull **§ 135
and of her cities, Ur and Nineveh. May we surmise from this that
a previous Piscean Age, 26,000 or 52,000, or even 104,000 years
ago5 saw the birth of civilization under the goddess? And that an
equally remote Taurian Age had seen the flowering of Atlantis?
For Plato says that in Atlantis the bull was sacred, and that the
Atlanteans performed a bull dance similar to that celebrated in
Crete, where the bull was also revered. Further, the chief city of
Atlantis, according to Plato, was Poseidonia, named for the god
who was son of Potnia, the Great Goddess of Crete. And, of course,
Crete was the last surviving world power of the gynocratic Taurian
Age.
The ram symbolized the patriarchal unsettled society of herders
and hunters—the rejects of the civilized queendoms. It is not by
chance, therefore, that the shepherd analogy abounds in the Old
Testament or that the "golden calf" was the object of such anath-
ema to the prophets of Israel, symbolizing as it did the feminine
power with which the nomadic peoples were at war. Even in the
New Testament the ram analogy is carried on, for Jesus is called
a shepherd and his followers sheep.
It was these Ramites, the nomadic shepherds, as we have seen,
who overthrew the established agricultural communities in the
Near East and ushered in the first historical dark age; and it was
the shepherd kings, the Hyksos, who destroyed the advanced civili-
zation of ancient gynocratic Egypt. It was the shepherd king David
who finally conquered the intellectually superior Philistines. And
it was Abel, the keeper of flocks, who was the real hero in the eyes
of the Semitic authors of Genesis, while Cain, the husbandman and
settled tiller of the soil, was the villain.
In a queer twist of allegory, the Genesis writers allowed the
shepherd hero to be slain by the villain .farmer—in total contra-
diction of the facts. For in history it had been the uncivilized shep-
herds, the Abels, who had slain the civilized husbandmen, the Cains
—not the reverse.
Counterrevolution
Occasionally archeological evidence is found of what appears to
be a counterrevolution, when the Bull, as it were, turns on the
Ram and fights back. Sir Leonard Woolley describes one such inci-
dent in the long Bull-Ram war in his account of the ancient city
1 3 8 §*» T H E FIRSTSEX
from its hierarchy as did the Jewish and Christian religions with
their all-male trinity. For in the Hindu trinity there are father,
mother, and son; and the virgin mother of Krishna, Devaki, is the
second person in the trinity. She is worshiped as "Goddess of the
Logos, Mother of the gods, One with Creation." The prayer to
Devaki reads:
"Thou art Intelligence, the mother of science, mother of courage;
the firmament and the stars are thy children; from thee proceeds
all that exists, Thou hast descended to the earth for the salvation
of the world." 24
with: "In the beginning God [author's italics] created the heavens
and the earth," etc., a close paraphrase of the original account—
yet how vastly different.
"The first four chapters of Genesis," writes Graves, "are an ex-
tremely late literary product." 31 The creation legend, including the
story of Adam and Eve, "was written not earlier than the end of
the fifth century [B.C] by a post-exilic priest who lived in Jeru-
salem, and was based partly on a slightly earlier account penned by
a Judaean prophet," both priest and prophet stealing copiously
from the Enuma Elish. These differing accounts were incorporated
into the final book of Genesis, to the confusion of everyone. In one
account of the creation of Eve, she is created at the same time as
Adam: "Man and woman created he them." In the later account
God creates Adam, then the animals, and finally, as an afterthought,
makes woman out of Adam's rib!
atory cult" among primitive tribes, writes Margaret Mead, "is that
women . . . hold the secrets of life, and that man is perhaps un-
necessary." So "man has hit upon a method of compensating his
basic inferiority" by imitating the functions of women.22
Men go through all the motions of giving birth, of menstruating,
and of penis mutilation to make the penis more closely resemble
the female vulva. In a previous chapter we presented a brief sam-
pling of the evidence for male envy of women. We know of no
comparable evidence in history or in legend for penis envy, no
sacred rituals based on woman's imitation of the functions of the
male, no incident in which women have sought to mutilate their
genitals to resemble man's, and no play-acting in which women
have pretended to produce seminal fluid as men have pretended
to produce menstrual blood.
Sexual envy is exclusively a masculine phenomenon.
Female Circumcision
Modern man's womb envy is most forcefully expressed in his
resentment of woman's pleasure in sex. The famous argument be-
tween Zeus and Hera as to which of them received the greatest
pleasure from sexual intercourse was settled by old Tiresias, who,
having been both man and woman in his time, was deemed best
qualified to judge. He promptly agreed with Zeus that woman's
pleasure was ten times that of man.
Men dislike the idea of women's enjoying sex because it suggests
to them the treasonous thought that perhaps man was made for
woman's pleasure and not woman for man's convenience, as his
ego has made it necessary for him to believe. It is this gnawing
doubt that has motivated man "in a kind of revenge, for so many^
centuries to make woman his slave." 23
The simple fact was, and is, that the masculist man resents the
necessity for sharing even sex with a woman. Thus we have the
paradox of patriarchal man regarding woman as merely a sex ob-
ject and yet wishing to deny her any pleasure in sex. It is significant
that; matriarchal peoples "pleasure" the woman, while patriarchal
peoples "ride" her!
Some time back in the later years of the patriarchal revolution,
some extreme patriarch devised a method of reducing woman's
154 §•* THE FIRST SEX
pleasure in sex without affecting man's. If the clitoris was the seat
of woman's pleasure, as Aristotle said, then away with it! The in-
vention of clitorectomy, or female circumcision, was accredited in
tradition to Gyges, the Lydian. But since Lydia was still female-
dominated in Gyges' time (he had won the throne by murdering
the queen's consort and marrying her himself at her insistence, as
Herodotus tells us), this seems very unlikely. It is far more likely
that the Islamic legend that Hagar, Abraham's concubine and
Ishmael's mother, was the first victim of female circumcision is the
correct one. The odds are that it was a Semitic innovation origi-
nally, as the Arabs became, and continue to be, the most enthusias-
tic exponents of it. "Son of an uncircumcised mother" is the worst
epithet one Arab can hurl at another.
The "reasons" offered by the Arabs for the practice of female
circumcision are as numerous as those offered for male circumcision
by the ancients. The chief reason concerns female chastity. Women
who are uncircumcised, say the Arabs, are oversexed and are there-
fore apt to be unfaithful and unchaste. Sir Richard Burton, how-
ever, who knew the Arabs well in the nineteenth century, says that
the excision of the clitoris and the labia rendered women more las-
civious but far less easily satisfied. "The moral effect of female
circumcision is peculiar," writes Burton. "While it diminishes the
heat of passion it increases licentiousness and breeds a debauchery
of mind far worse than bodily unchastity." 24
The prevention of ardor is another reason cited for female cir
cumcision. It is believed in some quarters that orgasm in women
prevents conception, the heat of her passion serving to destroy the
semen. "She burns," writes Davenport, "and as it were, dries up
the semen received by her from the male, and if by chance a child
is conceived it is ill-formed and does not remain nine months in
the mother's womb." 25
A bizarre reason offered for the practice is that in the women
of Egypt, Arabia, Abyssinia, and adjacent areas, the clitoris grows
so large that it interferes with coition. "From climate or some
other cause, a certain disproportion is found generally to prevail
among them," writes Davenport, quoting one Bruce in his Travels
in Abyssinia. The clitoris if allowed to grow uncropped becomes
as long as a goose's neck, he goes on, "and men have sought to
remedy this deformity by the amputation of the redundancy." 26
The Sexual Revolution «•§. 155
pines, and adjacent islands, "the hymen was ruptured in early child-
hood by an old woman who was employed for this purpose." 1
Among the Toda a man of another tribe comes and stays in the
village and deflowers all the young girls approaching puberty.2
Since in primitive tribes puberty in girls occurs in the ninth or
tenth year, the result is that most girls are deflowered by the age of
eight. This defloration "must take place before puberty [author's
italics], and there are few things regarded as more disgraceful than
that this ceremony should be delayed." 3 Obviously, the hymen
fetish does not exist in the Far East and in the islands of the Pa-
cific, as it certainly would if the hymen and hymenolatry were of an-
cient lineage. The worship of the hymen is restricted to the few
peoples among whom patriarchy was enforced literally with a venge-
ance—that is among the Semitic peoples of the Near East and their
cultural descendants of later Christian Europe.
The hymen is an acquired adjunct. Just as the shape and size of
the penis were the result of sexual selection on the part of prehis-
toric women, so the hymen is the result of a far later pattern of
selection on the part of patriarchal men in historical times. When
the concept of paternity led to notions of father-right and property
rights, men became the selectors of their sex partners, and virginity
in women became a thing of value.
"The virgin's hymen seems to be a late acquisition of human
females, produced by the sexual selective action of the possessive
male," writes Eisler, "after the transition from matriarchal to pa-
triarchal values," wherefore very late in human history.4
The development of the hymen in women, however much men
approved and encouraged it, led to new problems, new taboos, and
new guilts on the part of men in their relations with women.
Woman's blood had always, ever since time began, been danger-
ously taboo. Menstrual and postpartum blood, as well as the venous
and arterial blood of women, was powerfully sacred, a thing to be
avoided at all costs. But now it became necessary to shed woman's
hymenal blood in the sex act. So man was beset on all sides by that
mysterious and dangerous creature, woman.
The forcing by many patriarchal peoples of virgins to give up
their hymens to the god may also have served by way of retaliation
for the mountains of foreskins, penises, and testicles that men had
in times past showered upon the goddess. In nearly all early oa-
l6o §V THE FIRST SEX
Infibulation
The development of hymenolatry led eventually to the infibu-
lation of women and girls. As Eric Dingwall says, "The infibula-
tion of mares has long been known to the veterinary profession,
and there is no difference between it and the means of infibulating
women. The two are identical, and consist of fastening together
the labia majora by means of a ring, a buckle, or a padlock." **
The method of infibulation which Dingwall describes was the
European Christian form—mild and merciful by comparison with
the Semitic form which was practiced in the Arab countries of/
Africa and Asia. According to Mantegazza, it was "one of the first
Christian kings who first introduced the practice of infibulation
into Nubia." 18 Yet after the Crusades, when the idea was brought
back from the East along with the chastity belt, the practice was
attributed to the Moslem "infidels," from whom the Crusaders,
no doubt to their delight, had learned it.
164 §•» THE FIRST SEX
tear apart. When the operation has healed, there remains but a
small orifice for the draining of the urine and the menstrual
fluid, corresponding with the position of the fork.
When an infibulated girl comes to take a husband, the mid-
wife arms herself with a knife, and before the bride is turned
over to her husband, she rips the scar as much as is necessary,
reserving to herself the task of making a larger cut before par-
turition takes place, so that the narrowness of the parts may not
occasion any obstacle to the emergence of the head of the child.
In the Pegu region girls in infancy are sewn up in such a
fashion that there remains only a tiny hole, and when they marry
the bridegroom makes the aperture as large or as small as suits
him, often leaving the threads in place so that when he goes on
a long journey he may draw the stitches together again.22
The advantages are manifold. Not only will the purity of the
virgin be maintained, but the fidelity of the wife exacted. The
husband will leave the wife without fear that his honour will be
outraged and his affections estranged. Fathers will be sure of their
parenthood, and will not harbour the terrible thought that their
children may be the offspring of another, and it will be possible
for them to keep under lock and key things more precious than
gold.28
That the purpose of the belt was not solely to prevent the con-
ception of illegitimate children, however, can be inferred from
the fact that the most common type of the device protected both
the anal and the vaginal openings. The same French firm men-
tioned above, wrote in answer to a customer's request for a cami-
sole de force of the double type:
the bed linen" was universal in Europe at one time and continues
to exist in some peasant communities today. In this rite, the bride-
groom proudly displays to the assembled and eager wedding guests
the bloody bed sheet as evidence of his bride's virginity, as well
as of his successful rupture of it. When hymeneal blood was not
likely to flow naturally, the bride saw to it that the sheet was
spattered beforehand with pigeon's blood, the blood of the dove
having been considered almost indistinguishable from that of the
virgin. (Shades of the Great Goddess and the Dove of Rhea!)80
The ruse of the pigeon's blood may have fooled the trusting
bridegroom, but for the suspicious and sophisticated something
more realistic and drastic was demanded. When the bride or her
mother feared that the pigeon's blood would not suffice, the bride-
to-be, months before the nuptial night, sought to create an ersatz
hymen in place of the missing membrane. In Bran tome's words:
"They take leaches and put them on the part so they suck the blood,
till by their sucking they have caused and leave small embolisms,
blisters full of blood, so that when, come the wedding night, the
gallant husband proceeds to tackle, he bursts these blisters, out of
which the blood pours, making him all bloody, which is a great
delight to both parties." 81
By the nineteenth century, which might be called the heyday
of the hymen, this matter of virginity had assumed such propor-
tions that manuals were published on the art of identifying vir-
gins.
A Dr. T. Bell, in 1821, published for the masculine trade a
book in which he sought to instruct innocent young men in the
very important art of selecting a wife whose "honor" was intact.
After conceding that the only absolutely sure evidence of deflora-
tion was the rupture of the hymen, which, alas, could not be as-
certained in time to avert the fatal step of marriage to a fallen
woman, the good doctor goes on to describe some of the outward
symbols of degradation in women: "It is certain that, in virgins,
the mamma is firm and round and no irregularity of the surface is
visible to the eye. It is not less certain that after defloration its sur-
face exhibits some irregularity." 32 One pities the poor virgins who
had not been blessed with the glorious rounded globes so much
admired throughout the ages by the patriarchs. They must have
resorted to all sorts of tricks to give their sagging, flat, or imma-
Patriarchy and Hymenolatry ««§ 169
MIGRATIONS
of the
GREEKS
Sea
Ionian Sea
V.;. Argo,p&<*U><»w 3
THE ANCIENT
AEGEANWORLD
c. 1500 B.C.
Mediterranean Sea
THE CELTO-IONIAN
WORLD
AND THE MIGRATIONS OF
THE CELTS AND IONIANS
Atlantic Ocean
11
The Pre-Hellenes
In the religious and civic
primacy of womanhood, it [the pre-
Hellenic world] possessed the seed
of noble achievements which was
suppressed and often destroyed by
later developments.
—J. J. BACHOFEN
But since both the Roman and Greek civilizations were ulti-
mately derived from Ionian Anatolia, Mommsen's "Graeco-Celto-
Roman" civilization might more simply and more accurately be
called Celto-Ionian.
The Lycians and the Carians, however, were not the first of the
Anatolian Ionians who colonized Italy. Even before them, and
before Jason and Medea, had come the Lydian Etruscans. Driven
from Lydia by famine in the remote past, says Herodotus, these
people had taken ships from Smyrna (Izmir) under Tyrrhenius, had
gone ashore in western Italy on the Tyrrhenian coast, and had there
established one of the most civilized nations of the ancient world.
"Who could have dreamed," asks Grimal, "of the might of an
empire on the Italian peninsula that rivalled the greatness of
classical Rome—an empire in fact that imposed its political struc-
ture on great Rome itself" and whose culture was the seed of
Roman civilization. When they confronted the Etruscan civiliza-
tion in Latium, the "Latin peoples experienced an evolution
similar to that which transformed the Greek immigrants when they
came into contact with the Cretan civilization on the shores of
the Mediterranean. . . . From all this we see that the chain of
circumstances which led to the Roman miracle was not so different
from that which produced the miracle of classical Greece." 15
Both the Cretan and the Etruscan civilizations had surpassed
the civilizations of Greece and Rome; yet both of these great
predecessors had been utterly forgotten by their cultural descend-
ants, and their very existence had remained unsuspected until
only yesterday. The Hellenic Greeks may have had some excuse
for their ignorance of their Cretan heritage, owing to the long
dark age that separated the flowering of Crete from the flowering
of Athens. But the Romans had no such justification. By the time
Etruscan civilization had begun to languish in the fourth century
B.C. Rome was already well on her way to greatness. There was
no dark age in Italy until the universal darkness of medieval
Europe fell across it in the fifth century of our era. "The oblivion
to which the Etruscans were consigned," writes Grimal, "was due
to human agency, to a kind of conspiracy of silence" on the part
of the Romans.16 The world leaders of the Pax Romana chose to
think of their civilization as sui generis, owing no debt to anyone.
For this reason the Roman historians and poets of the classical
184 §•» THE FIRST SEX
age ignored their Etruscan educators, and Virgil in his great Roman
epic depicted the early Etruscans as semibarbarians, much as mod-
ern historians have pictured the Celts.
The Etruscans contributed to later Rome "its constitution,
its language, arts, customs, and religious practices." 17 And yet for
thousands of years these people were all but unknown.
When Aeneas and his Trojans reached Italy after the fall of
Troy toward the end of the second millennium B.C., they found
there the descendants of the Lydians, the Etruscans—or Tyrrheni-
ans as they called themselves—firmly entrenched and enjoying a
very high degree of civilization.
According to Livy as well as to Virgil, Aeneas married Lavinia,
the hereditary Etruscan princess of Latium, thus becoming king
of Latium, as was the way all kings were made in ancient times.
On Aeneas' death, according to Livy, Lavinia in true gynocratic
style remained as reigning queen, while her son by Aeneas, As-
canius, was forced to leave home and found a new city at Alba
Longa.
The great Julian and Claudian families of later Rome claimed
descent from Ascanius, the son of Aeneas; yet there are no Juliuses
or Claudiuses in ancient Rome. To explain this discrepancy,
Virgil says that Ascanius changed his name to lulus, but Livy says
nothing of this. And it still, even if true, does not account for the
Claudians. The names Julius and Claudius must, therefore, refer
to Etruscan matriarchs, Julia and Claudia, who gave their names to
Roman tribes when Romulus divided up the people into curiae
and named them for the women, as Livy states.18
Tacitus, in the Annals, reveals the existence of a very early Clau-
dia, "Claudia Quinta, whose statue had been dedicated by our
ancestors in the Temple of the Mother of the Gods; hence the
Claudian line had been accounted sacred [author's italics] and
numbered among the deities." 10 No doubt there was also an early
Julia whose name has been forgotten, as would Claudia's have
been except for that one brief passage in Tacitus.
Romulus himself was rightful king of Rome only because of his
mother, Rhea Silvia, an Etruscan princess. To prevent her from
ruling on her rightful throne or from bearing children who would
be the rightful heirs, the usurper Amulius had incarcerated her
among the vestal virgins. But despite all Amulius' precautions, the
The Pre-Hellenes *§ 185
god Mars somehow got to Rhea, and she bore the twins Romulus
and Remus. And so by right of matrilinear succession, Romulus be-
came the king of Rome.
This tale is reminiscent of that of King Acrisius of Argos in the
Greek myth. For this king, to prevent his daughter Danae from
marrying and depriving him of the throne he had acquired through
marriage to the queen, had Danae incarcerated in a bronze tower.
But Zeus visited her in a shower of gold, and she became the
mother of Perseus. Now Perseus is no more mythological than is
Romulus. Although both kings border on the legendary, they were
no doubt actual historical persons, Perseus having reigned in My-
cenae in the fourteenth century and Romulus in Italy in the eighth.
Both legends have been mythologized to conceal their real signifi-
cance: the absolute right of the daughter to inherit the throne and
the machinations perpetrated by her male relatives to deprive her
of this right.
12
The Women of Greece
and Italy
Sex has not \yet] made too great inroads
upon her. She is not merely woman, but a
human being.
—EMILY JAMES PUTNAM
ides) and Apollo over Orestes' revenge murder of his mother. The
Eumenides see no wrong in Clytemnestra's murder of her husband,
for "the man she killed was not of blood congenital." But Orestes'
murder is heinous and unforgivable. "Do you forswear your moth-
er's intimate blood?" they ask and demand the age-old punishment
for the matricide.
Apollo then speaks and voices in his brand-new policy of father-
right, a genetic fallacy that was believed down to the time of the
rebirth of scientific eugenics in the twentieth century A.D.:
The cad! The traitor! Pretending to believe that fairy tale about
her birth from Zeus' head! "Always for the male," indeed! Yet even
in this vital moment she acknowledges that she'd never marry one.
This is probably the first recorded instance of man's use of the
brainwashed enemy to brainwash her fellows. Television-commer-
eial writers and women's magazines have made an art of it.
Yet, although Aeschylus places Athene's treachery back in My-
cenaean times (long before Zeus, actually, and long before the myth
of the strange birth of Athene had been invented), the fact is that
Greek women did not lose their prestige and power until after the
Dorian conquest. Their position even then remained high, until
Rome succeeded in Christianizing Greece in the fifth century A.D.
—sixteen centuries after Orestes' trial for murder.
As a matter of historical fact, Greek women of the classical age
enjoyed rights and privileges under Athenian law that are still
denied women of the United States in these last years of the twen-
tieth century A.D. Among these rights were:
l88 $•» THE FIRST SEX
It was the Christians, not the pagan Greeks, who debated whether
women had souls, as was done in all seriousness at a sixth-century
council at Macon. At this infamous council, incidentally, it was
the Celtic bishops of Britain, the pre-Augustinian, apostolic prel-
ates of Celtic Glastonbury, who saved the day for women, thus
saving the souls of half the human race.
Sparta is acknowledged to have been a more feminist city than
its sister Athens. It was a Spartan lady who, on hearing that the
Spartan women had the reputation of ruling their men, replied
that they also gave birth to men! A fine retort. In Sparta girls and
The Women of Greece and Italy **§ 193
Etruscan Women
When in the sixth century B.C., about two hundred years after
Romulus, the Etruscan princes, the Tarquins, rode into Rome to
visit Lucretia, the Roman wife of one of them, they found her
"employed at her wool, sitting in the midst of her maids." 26 They
were struck by the contrast between this domesticated Roman
matron and their Etruscan sisters and wives whom they had left
behind in Latium "whooping it up" at a cocktail party in true
Cretan style, without a domestic care in the world.
It was this tale, no doubt, and the contrast between the prudent
and prudish Roman matron and the merry wives of Tusculum, that
gave the latter their bad name in Roman society. Everyone knows
what happened to poor Lucretia as a result of this famous midnight
visit of her husband and his kinsmen—how one of her Tarquin in-
laws later returned and raped her, and how she killed herself for
very shame. William Shakespeare tells the sorry tale in The Rape of
Lucrece, as does Thomas Macaulay in Lays of Ancient Rome.
Jacques Heurgeon writes: "In the opinion of the Romans, Etrus-
can women had a rather bad reputation." Yet "the Etruscan woman
was invested in her own country with an authority that was sover-
eign. Artistic, cultivated, interested in Hellenic refinements, she
was the bringer of civilization to her homeland. Finally venerated
in the tomb as an emanation of divine power, she held a privileged
position which recalls that of Ariadne in Minoan Crete." 27
The Etruscan woman was very active, both socially and politi-
cally. In the frescoes and bas reliefs of Umbria she is portrayed
always in the forefront of the scene. Like the women of Mycenae
The Women of Greece and Italy <•§ 195
yny in his great work that accounts for the disappearance of the
entire mammoth history in early Christian times.
It was Claudius' Etruscan mother-in-law, Urgulania, incidentally,
about whom Tacitus writes in the Annals as having had great in-
fluence with the emperor Augustus. During the reign of Tiberius
this imperious old lady had wordlessly sent a dagger to her own
Roman grandson as a hint to him to kill himself rather than stand
trial for the suspected murder of his wife. The grandson, Marcus
Plautius Silvanus, meekly stabbed himself to death with the dagger
—but whether to avoid the trial or out of fear of disobeying his
grandmother, no one will ever know.34
Even into the days of the empire, when the Etruscan nation no
longer existed and when its past greatness had already been for-
gotten by the Romans, the Etruscan dowager still inspired terror
in the Roman male.
Roman Women
We have the authority of Livy that the original Roman tribes,
or Curiae, were named for the women. Romulus, the founder of
Rome in the eighth century B.C., "when dividing the people into
thirty Curiae, called the Curiae after the women's names." 35 There
could be no more convincing proof than this that the Romans were
originally a collection of matriarchal tribes who bore the names
of their mothers. .
Further evidence of the gynarchic social structure of early Rome
is found in the very words denoting kinship: cognate kinship, re-
lationship through the mother, was co-gnatus—born within the
tribe; while agnate relationship, that through the father, was ad-
gnatus-^added to, or born outside, the tribe. This indicates an
active exogamy, when the husbands were added to the wife's tribe
and forfeited by virtue of their marriage all connection with their
own. Roman law of the republic continued this differentiation be-
tween cognate and agnate relationship by legalizing marriage be-
tween cousins and even siblings on the father's side but banning it
between half-brother and sister who had the same mother and be-
tween cousins related on their mother's side. In Rome, one could
marry one's father's niece or aunt or daughter but not one's moth-
ig8 £•» THE FIRST SEX
er's, the belief being that relationship through the mother was the
only tie—that origin in a common womb was the only kinship.
Malinowski, the distinguished anthropologist, was oddly sur-
prised when he found this same custom still operating in the twen-
tieth century A.D. in the Trobriand Islands in the remote Pacific:
"They have only one word for kinship, and this is veiola. Now this
term means kinship in the maternal line only, and does not embrace
even the kinship between a father and his children, nor between
any agnatically related people. . . . Thus the line of demarcation
between paternal [agnatic] relationship . . . and maternal [cog-
natic] kinship, veiola, corresponds to the division between those
people who are of the same body . . . and those who are not of the
same body." 36
The very name of the great Claudian family of the emperors
was derived, according to Tacitus, from Claudia Quinta,37 a great
lady of early Rome, not from any "Claudius," as we have seen.
Originally, as among the Etruscans in historical times, Roman
children bore the names of their mothers, and only later in the
republic was the father's name, the agnomen, added. To this day
in many Latin countries, notably Spain and Latin America, chil-
dren bear the family names of both parents, as they once did
throughout the civilized world.
As in Greece, Roman women were the sole educators of their
young children. Tacitus, Plutarch, and Cicero all mention the im-
portant part played by the Roman matron in the education of her
children. Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi ("these are my
jewels") was a typical example; but Aurelia, the mother of Julius
Caesar, and Atia, the mother of Augustus, devoted their lives to
the education of their fatherless sons. It is an arresting fact that
most great men who have left their mark on history have been the
products of feminine rearing. Among certain branches of the Celts,
the education of the boys as well as the girls was entrusted to
academies run by women, who taught not only all the arts of peace,
from philosophy to poetry, but also the arts of warfare, equestri-
anism, swordplay, use of the lance, etc.38
As in Greece, the women of Rome took an active part in all
fields of athletics; and Juvenal, that inveterate scold, is unsparing
in his criticism of women who "join the hunt in men's clothes" and
The Women of Greece and Italy <•§ 199
But the most fitting epitaph for Roman and all pre-Christian
women was written by a Roman poet of the empire, speaking for
all women of all time:
You men may raise all the hell you want to about it!
I, too, am a human being!
Rome. They sought and easily won equality with men, especially
in the intellectual and political fields and in the realm of sex. Their
republican predecessors, Augustus' notorious daughter Julia and
the renowned Clodia, Catullus' beloved "Lesbia," had paved the
way, and from the very first there was never any double standard
in imperial Rome. The older surviving conservatives such as Seneca
and Juvenal might rail at the "new woman" and praise the old-
fashioned virtues of Cornelia and Aurelia, but the new men, like
the younger Pliny, sang with Ovid and Catullus of the charm and
the intellectual beauty of the liberated woman.
"It is certain that the Roman woman [of the empire] enjoyed
a dignity and an independence at least equal if not superior to
those claimed by contemporary feminists." 53 The empresses of the
first three centuries, just prior to the triumph of Christianity,
stand out like beacon lights of resurgent womanhood, reincarna-
tions of the noble women of Etruria whom they numbered among
their ancestors. Plotina shared the glories and responsibilities o£
her husband Trajan (A.D. 98-117) and even accompanied him
throughout the Parthian wars. On Trajan's death it was Plotina
who steered the empire through the turmoil of the succession and
saw to it that Hadrian, Trajan's choice as his successor, entered his
new reign peacefully and without civil war.
Julia Domna, first lady of the empire from 197 to 217, first as
wife of Septimius Severus and then as mother of Caracalla, "in her
son's reign administered the affairs of the empire with a prudence
that supported his authority, and with a moderation that corrected
his wild extravagances. . . . Julia Domna possessed even in ad-
vanced age [she died by suicide at fifty] the attractions of beauty,
and united to a lively imagination a firmness of mind, and strength
of judgment, seldom bestowed on her sex. . . . She applied her-
self to letters and philosophy, with some success, and with the most
splendid reputation. She was the patroness of every art, and the
friend of every man of genius." 54 Thus Gibbon. It is to Julia
Domna that we owe all we know of Apollonius of Tyana, the great
philosopher of the first century and rival of Christ. For it was Julia
who commissioned her protege Philostratus to research and write
his biography.55
When in 217 Caracalla was murdered by the usurper Macrinus
and the empire was plunged into chaos, it was a woman, Julia
204 $•> THE FIRST SEX
Maesa, the sister of Julia Domna who "took the initiative" 56 and
restored order. She deposed the tyrannical Macrinus and placed
her own grandson, Elagabalus, son of her daughter Julia Soaemias,
on the throne in what Gibbon calls "a conspiracy of women, con-
certed with prudence, and conducted with rapid vigor." 57 In Ela-
gabalus' reign, his mother sat in the Roman Senate and held the
office of consul. 58 When Elagabalus was murdered by the Praetorian
guard in the year 222, Maesa again stepped in to guide the empire
through a chaotic interregnum, naming her young grandson Alex-
ander Severus, son of her daughter Julia Mammaea, emperor under
the regency of his mother. 59
Julia Mammaea stands out as one of the great sovereigns of all
time. Like the reign of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt, the reign of
Mammaea in Rome (222-35) marked an era of peace and justice
and prosperity rarely precedented in all of Roman history. While
her son, the titular emperor Alexander Severus was still a minor,
this remarkable woman, niece and daughter of remarkable women,
established a strong democratic form of government over the em-
pire, a government that remained effective throughout most of
the later reign of her son.
Ion and Chadwick, "one could travel from Galatia in Asia Minor
northwest to Scotland and Ireland, and south again to Andalusia
in Spain, without leaving Celtic territory." 2 They were one peo-
ple, with one culture. And everywhere they retained their ancient
democratic institutions and their traditional reverence for women.
They were by no means the barbarians that modern history has
made them out to be. Archeology, combined with the more open-
minded approach of later twentieth-century scholarship, is finally
revealing the ancient pre-Christian Celts as they actually were be-
fore they, like the Cretans and the Etruscans before them, had
become the victims of a "conspiracy of silence," a conspiracy de-
signed to underrate their achievements in order to overrate those
of their conquerors. The conquerors of the Celts were the barbaric
and savage Teutons, the modern Germans, who emerged from their
dense Baltic forests as the Vandals and the Goths in the fifth cen-
tury of our era and aided unwittingly the Christian effort to destroy
both the Celtic and the Roman empires. Together these mammoths
of masculism—Teutonic barbarism and Semitic Christianity—an-
nihilated the ancient civilized world and imposed in its place the
Dark Ages of medieval Europe, from which degrading and retro-
grade experience Western civilization has not yet recovered.
Contrary to the prevalent belief that Western Europe was an
uncivilized wasteland until its colonization by Rome in the last
three centuries B.C., the findings of very recent archeology "indicate
that Europe was inhabited in prehistoric times by peoples of more
advanced culture than has heretofore been supposed. Also, their
achievements had been steadily progressing for thousands of years
even before the Etruscan period [author's italics]." 3
The Celtic age of prehistoric Europe, writes Stuart Piggott, "was
a Heroic Age, akin to Homer on the one hand, and on the other
to Beowulf and the Sagas; and behind it all lay Hesiod's Works and
Days!" 4 That is to say, behind it lay the gynocratic substructure
memorialized by Hesiod, "the poet of the Matriarchies." "Celtic
art was one of the great . . . arts of Europe," continues Piggott.5
The technology of the ancient Celts formed the basis on which
European technology rested until the age of steam, less than two
brief centuries ago. The blacksmiths and the potters of the eight-
eenth century used the same techniques and the same material
used by the Celts of the fourth millennium B.C.6
208 ^ THE FIRST SEX
her knees, blue eyes sodden with constant weeping, golden hair
matted and unkempt, limbs bruised and discolored from whip and
club. Enslaved by law, abused and exploited by her husband, made
sport of by her Christian liege-lord, tricked and soiled by priest
and friar, she has become an overworked, beaten, hopeless object—
prototype of generations of Christian women yet to come! 13
But in the countless millennia before Christianity, this sub-
human slave had been the glory of the world, an object of worship
among her people, a source of awe to the Conquering Romans. As
late as the fourth century A.D. the Roman historian Ammianus
Marcellinus wrote of the Celtic women of pagan Gaul: "Nearly
all the Gauls are of lofty stature, fair, stern of eye, and of great
pride. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand
a single Gaul if he called his wife to his assistance, who is usually
very strong, and with blue eyes." 14 Julius Caesar records that the
Celtic women comprised the joint chiefs of staff of the Celtic
people. "It was for the matrons to decide," he wrote in The Gallic
Wars in 58 B.C., "when troops should attack and when withdraw." 15
And in A.D. 68, Tacitus records that it was the queen, Veleda, of
the Celtic tribe of Batavi, to whom the Roman general Cerialis
had to appeal for the surrender of his flagship, which the Batavi
"had towed up the River Lupia as a present to Veleda." 16
The continuing supremacy of women in Celtic government is
attested by Tacitus; for when this same Roman general, Cerialis,
exhorted the tribes to come over to the Romans, "the lower classes
murmured that if we must choose between masters, we may more
honorably bear with the Emperors of Rome than with the women
of Gaul." 17 From this vignette we can imagine the Romans ap-
pealing to the masculist elements among the Celtic lower classes
in a way that modern Black Power advocates and unscrupulous
white politicians appeal to the racist elements among lower-class
Americans.
In the third century B.C., the would-be conqueror of Rome, the
Carthaginian king Hannibal, had learned to respect and fear the
Celtic women, whose realms he traversed in his march across the
Alps into Italy. In Spain, in Gaul, and in northern Italy he was
accosted by women, with whose permission only he was allowed to
continue his march unmolested. In the treaty drawn up between
the Celts and Carthaginians it was stipulated that: "If the Celtae
The Celts «*§ 211
to share with him and dare with him both in peace and in war.
The yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the gift of arms proclaim
this fact." 23
As mothers, the Celtic women also won Tacitus* approval: "In
every household the children grow up naked with those sturdy
frames and limbs we so much admire. Every mother suckles her
own child and never entrusts it to servants and nurses." 24 "The
soldier brings his wounds to his mother, who shrinks not from
counting them." 25
The feminism of the Celts in the first century A.D. is further
proved, if further proof be necessary, by their religious customs
and by the importance of cognatic relationships. "All the tribes
have a common worship of the Mother of the Gods and the belief
that she intervenes in human affairs and visits the nations in her
care. . . . It is a season of rejoicing, and festivity reigns wherever
she deigns to go. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every
weapon is under lock; peace and quiet are known at these times,
until the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored
to her temple," which is on an island in the ocean amidst a grove
of sacred oaks.26
Sisterhood is sacred, and the children of one's sister are more
highly esteemed than one's own. "Indeed the sororal relationship
is regarded as more sacred and binding than any other." 27
Tacitus had obviously forgotten or was unaware that in his own
country not so long before his time, the same custom had pre-
vailed, the cognatic, or sororal and maternal, bonds being the only
ties that bound.
And these ancient authors are therefore far more reliable than are
their modern interpreters, whose "conscious hostility to the old"
has changed the very substance and texture of ancient history and
ancient society.30
Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C., whose Greek homeland by
his time had succeeded in imposing patriarchy over its original
matriarchy, wrote admiringly of Tomyris, the Celtic queen who
slew the mighty Cyrus the Great, king of Persia. Herodotus saw
nothing "anomalous" in this fact. He does not berate her as an
"unnatural, unfeminine virago," as modern historians have done,
but presents her as a woman of high nobility and integrity.
When Cyrus threatened the Massagetae, "Tomyris, their queen,
sent a herald to him, who said: "King of the Medes, cease to press
this enterprise. . . . Be content to rule in peace thy own kingdom,
and bear to see us reign over the countries that are ours to
govern.'" But Cyrus refused this plea, and Tomyris sent her son
Spargapises at the head of an army to expel the Medes and Per-
sians from her land. The Persians won the ensuing battle and
captured Spargapises, who promptly killed himself rather than
submit to slavery. Tomyris, on hearing that her son was taken
captive, sent to Cyrus saying: "Thou hast ensnared my child.
Restore my son to me and get thee from my land unharmed. Re-
fuse, and I swear that, bloodthirsty as thou art, I will give thee
thy fill of blood."
"Tomyris," continues Herodotus, "when she found that Cyrus
paid no heed to her advice, collected all the forces of her king-
dom, and gave him battle. . . . Of all combats, this was the fiercest.
The Massagetae, under the personal generalship of Tomyris, at
length prevailed. The greater part of the army of the Medes and
Persians was destroyed; and Cyrus himself fell. . . . On learning
that her son was dead, Tomyris took the body of Cyrus, and
dipping his head in a skinful of gore, she thus addressed the
corpse: 'I live, and have conquered thee in battle; yet by thee
am I destroyed, for thou hast taken my son by guile. But thus I
make good my threat, and give thee thy fill of blood." 81
It is most revealing that in spite of Herodotus' factual account
of the death of Cyrus the Great, written within a very few years
of the event, modern historians pretend not to know how Cyrus
died. He died in 529, say the encyclopedias, with slight variations
214 §*> THE FIRST SEX
The wife not only remained sole owner of her own property
after marriage, as in Greek and Roman law before Christianity, but
she also acquired an equal share in her husband's property, which
he could not dispose of without her written consent. Under Celtic
law, women were not only permitted in court, as they were not
under Christian law, but they could represent themselves in suits
at law and sue even their own husbands to recover for debt—a
heinous crime in Christian law. With cause, a wife could divorce
her husband, as in ancient Greece and Rome, and on the separa-
tion she had the right to retain her own property as well as her
husband's dowry and all other marriage gifts. In addition, she could
demand one-third to one-half of all her husband's private wealth.61
The Brehon laws concerning women were soon challenged by
the church and were gradually attrited away in Europe. In Eng-
land, the Brehon laws—at least those that affected and benefitted
men, such as peer-jury trial—were preserved in the English com-
mon law. Martia Proba, a Celtic queen of Britain in the third
century B.C, incorporated Brehonic law in the code she gave her
people, the Martian Statutes. It was on these statutes that King
Alfred the, Great, a thousand years later, based his code of laws,
\the origin of our common law.6^
In Ireland the churchJiad to adapt itself to the people, not the
people to the church. It took thewily Saint Patrick oi the slippery*
tongue to magnify men and diminish women in obedience to the
Christian doctrine. We read in the Senchus Mor, a sixth-century
A.D. revision of the Brehon laws, that "the man has headship in
the marriage union. It is proper to give superiority to the noble
sex, that is, to the male, for the man is the head of the woman.
Man is more noble than the woman." °3
This has the suspiciously Semitic ring of a certain gynophobic
author of the New Testament, where we read: "Wives, submit
yourselves to your husbands, for the husband is the head of the
wife" (Ephesians 5:22-23). And "The man is not of the woman,
but the woman of man; neither was the man created for the woman,
but the woman for the man" (I Corinthians 11:8-9).
And our suspicions of plagiarism are justified when we find, on
consulting the authorities, that the Senchus Mor was penned by no
other hand than that of Saint Patrick himself! 64 The wily dissem-
bler!
; The Celts «•§ ssi
Lugh's death day on the first Sunday in August was called Lugh-
Mass and was a period of mourning among the Celts. The church,
in its expedient fashion, unable to stamp out this pagan festival,
incorporated it into the calendar and called it Lammas, a cele-
bration later combined with All-Saints' Day but still called Lammas
in parts of England, Wales, and Ireland.70
It is an interesting sidelight on religious history that Lugh's
mother, Ethne, has been identified with the Celtic goddess Oestre,
224 ^ THE FIRST SEX
whose spring festival was taken over by the church as the day of the
risen Lord and was called Easter after the goddess, as it had been
called among the Celts since the beginning of time. ii
Cuchulain, the great Irish hero of early historical times, is
believed to have been the reincarnation of Lugh, his soul having
flown as a mayfly into the mouth of his mother, Dichtire. Could '•
Dichtire have been an echo of Dictynna? Dictynna was the patron f \»
goddess of Aegina, and it was from Aegina that some say the Tuatha \J
De Danann first emerged from the mists of time. The island of
Aegina, in the Saronic Gulf between Attica and the Peloponnese,
was colonized in the fourth millennium by Ionian Greeks from
Anatolia; and it was on Aegina that Herodotus saw the golden Yv
drinking cup sacred to the goddess. This golden cup was one of V
the Celtic relics that had "fallen from the sky" in the remote past; .
and Plutarch, in his De Defectu Oracidorum, says that it was still in j
use in Druidic ritual as late as the second century A.nJJL^
Its prototype, an oaken chalice carved in the shape of a trophy
cup, has recently been unearthed at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. The
wine-glass shape of this cup is unusual, if not unique, in early
archeology. Cups with stems but no bases have been found, as
have cups with bases but no stems. Most often ancient cups, like
modern coffee cups, rest on their own flattened bottoms. But the
unique shape of this ninetieth-century (B.C.) chalice from Catal
Huyuk somehow found its way to modern Europe and became the
model for altar cups in the Christian Church.
And it, itself, the sacred drinking cup of the ancient Celts,
metamorphosed into the Holy Grail of Christian legend. The simi-
larity between imaginative depictions of the Holy Grail in medie-
val art and the oaken cup from "prehistoric" Catal Huyuk is start-
ling.78 In popular legend, the Holy Grail was brought to Glaston-
bury in southern Britain by Joseph of Arimathea in A.D. 37. It was
supposed to be the cup from which Jesus had drunk at the last
supper and in which Joseph had caught the blood of Jesus at the
Crucifixion.
There is no historical evidence, even of the flimsiest nature,
that anyone ever saw this cup at Glastonbury. In the sixth century,
however, the legend was resuscitated, and the quest for the Holy
Grail, originating at Camelot in southern Britain, spread, like the
"chivalry" of the Celtic knights of King Arthur, throughout Chris-
The Celts *§ 225
says that Helena was the daughter of King Coel ("Old King Cole
was a merry old soul") and was his heir to the throne of Britain.8
This fact offers further proof that Helena was an early Christian,
for William of Malmesbury writes that King Coel was buried at
Glastonbury, the seat of Celtic Christendom in Britain.9 According
to the same writer, Coel's ancestor the Celtic king Arviragus gave
land to the founding of the church there in the first century A.D.,
and although he himself did not become a Christian, his descend-
ants Marius and Coel apparently did and continued to support
the church into the third century. Helena was born around the
middle of the third century, only five or six generations after the
founding of Glastonbury. "She was the Queen," writes Geoffrey,
"and possessed this kingdom by hereditary right, as none can
deny" 10 Furthermore, "after her marriage to Constantius she had
by him a son called Constantine." n Both of these statements of
Geoffrey have been discredited by later historians; yet John Stow,
of the sixteenth century, a careful and accurate reporter if there
ever was one, seems to accept the royalty of Helena: "As Simon of
Durham, an ancient writer, reporteth, Helena, the mother of Con-
stantine, was the first that enwalled the city of London, about the
year of Christ 306." 12
Legend held, with Geoffrey, that Helena was rightful queen of
Britain; but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship con-
signed her to a very low status, that of a public courtesan. Gibbon
guesses that she was a Dacian courtesan, ancient Dacia having been
where modern Romania is. But why a Dacian courtesan should
"enwall the city of London," he does not explain. Historians, lay as
well as church, have also insisted that Constantine was the illegiti-
mate son of Constantius by this courtesan, Helena, contradicting
the statement of Geoffrey of Monmouth that they were married.
Constantius was a soldier who had come up through the ranks
of the Roman legions to the top of his profession and had been
rewarded by the emperor with the hand of his stepdaughter in
marriage and by being named Caesar of the West. At this time
Rome had two emperors (Augustuses) and two governors (Caesars),
one each for the eastern and western empire. Constantius was
governor of the West, comprising Gaul, Britain, and contiguous
territories. Constantius had already had children by Theodora, the
emperor's stepdaughter, when he met Helena. Yet it was his son
234 $•* THE FIRST SEX
murder their wives. To think that the pagans of old, who did not
know Christ, were so gentle and kind to their wives; and that the
majority of our lords should be so cruel to them." 16 He was think-
ing, perhaps, of, among other "pagans of old," the pagan emperor
Marcus Aurelius, who had refused even to divorce his wife, Faus-
tina, whose crimes made Fausta's seem like mere peccadillos.
Under Roman law, men and women caught in adultery shared
a like punishment—banishment from Rome and confiscation of
part of their property. But whereas the man must forfeit half of
his worldly goods, the woman was required to give up only one-
third of hers. And with both parties there was always the chance
of recall and pardon. Under the later Christian Roman Empire,
"a husband was justified in killing his wife so caught, but he might
kill the adulterer only if he was a slave." 17
The opinion voiced by Will and Mary Durant that "Medieval
Christendom was a moral setback" 18 is universally accepted out-
side the Catholic Church. Yet the Catholic Encyclopedia explains
Constantine's conversion to Christianity in these astonishing
words: "In deciding for Christianity, Constantine was no doubt
influenced by reasons resulting from the impression made on every
unprejudiced person by the moral force of Christianity." 19
The Catholic Encyclopedia fails to mention the fact that Con-
stantine scalded his young wife to death in a cauldron of water
brought to a slow boil over a wood fire—a protracted and agoniz-
ing death indeed. Nor does it mention Saint Helena's part in this
crime. Helena, who was later to find the "true cross" in Jerusalem
and was for this reason to be canonized by the church that she
had established, was idolized by her son Constantine. He conferred
on her the title Augusta, a title once held by the deified Livia,
wife of Augustus Caesar and mother of Tiberius. Constantine also
ordered that all honor should be paid his mother throughout the
empire, had coins struck during her lifetime bearing her image,20
and built a city, Helenopolis, in her honor. All these things be-
speak the tremendous influence this Christian woman had over
her son. I think we need inquire no further into the origins of
Constantine's "conversion" to the new religion.
Yet in the face of all this evidence of Helena's influence over
Constantine, the author of the article on Helena in the Catholic
Encyclopedia, unwilling to grant that even a mother, because she
The Advent of Christianity «#§ 237
tage of the clergy over the laity." :{5 This flight of the intellectuals
to the East no doubt contributed to the flowering of Arabic culture
between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, when only the Moors
and Moslems could boast any geniuses equal to the geniuses of an-
cient Greece and Rome. Christian Europe during these dark cen-
turies produced not one soul who contributed anything at all to
the sum of human knowledge.30
Wherever Christianity went it carried with it the deadly germ of
antifeminism, forcing civil governments to adopt the harsh and
woman-hating laws of the church. Men, of course, accepted the new
ideas more readily than women, who resisted longer and more
tragically than their brothers. Women, as James Cleugh observes,
had been the revered sex in Europe, and "they were as determined
to remain so as the Church was to demote them." 37 Yet their deter-
mination was of no avail. Men had always harbored in the depths
of their subconscious a fear and dread of women, and to turn this
dread into active hatred and contempt became the mission of the
all-male Christian hierarchy.
"Abuse was lavished upon the sex," writes Jules Michelet.
"Filthy, indecent, shameless, immoral, were only some of the epi*
thets hurled at them by the Church." Woman, announced the
Christian clergy, were naturally depraved, vicious, and dangerous
to the salvation of men's souls—a commodity women needed not
to worry about as they were possessed of none. "Woman herself,"
continues Michelet, "came eventually to share the odious prejudice
and to believe herself unclean; . . . woman, so sober compared
to the opposite sex . . . was fain to ask pardon almost for existing
at all, for living, and fulfilling the conditions of life." 38
The miracle is not that the church finally succeeded in its pur-
pose of degrading women. With the might of the empire behind it
at first and the even greater might of the pope behind it after a
while, it could hardly have failed. The miracle is that it took the
church so long to humble the once stronger sex. For it was not
until after the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries and the triumph of Puritanism in the seventeenth that
woman's status reached the low point at which we find it today.
After the church had succeeded in its mission of teaching men to
regard women as brute and soulless beasts, the civil law stepped in
and placed woman in the absolute power of men. Her enemy be-
242 ^ THE FIRST SEX
came her master, and the obscene design of the Christian fathers
was finally and completely achieved.
"Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means
the Christian faith obtained its remarkable victory," writes Gibbon.
"It appears that it was most effectively assisted by the inflexible
and intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived from the Jewish reli-
gion." 3!) And the Jewish religion, as expressed in the Old Testa-
ment, says John Stuart Mill, is "a system in many respects bar-
barous, and intended for a barbarous people." And this barbarous
religion, steeped in woman-hatred and superstition, continues Mill,
is the basis of so-called "Christian morality." 40
15
Mary and the Great Goddess
What ails Christianity is that the old
Mother-Goddess religious theme and the new
Almighty-God theme ate fundamentally irreconcilable.
—ROBERT GRAVES
femininity they at the same time overthrew the female deity and
set up in her place a male-dominated hierarchy of gods and god-
desses. The reason, therefore, for the artificiality and rootlessness of
the Olympian gods, as of the Jewish and Christian God, is that
they are contrived—deliberately invented by patriarchs to replace
the ancient Great Goddess. Thus the only reality in Christianity
is Mary, the Female Principle, the ancient goddess reborn.
It was because of their lack of authenticity that the classical gods
fell to Christianity. Yet not, says Graves, to masculine Christianity
—not to Jehovah or Jesus—but to Mary.
The ancient prevalence of goddess worship, writes Graves, "is
not merely of antiquarian interest, for the popular appeal of mod-
ern Catholicism is, despite the all-male priesthood and the patri-
archal Trinity, based rather on the ancient goddess and the Aegean
Mother-Son religious tradition to which it has reverted in the
adoration of Mary, than on its Aramaean or Indo-European . . .
god elements." 8
"Since it was claimed that the Logos became flesh through a
human mother," writes James, "when the Jewish sect at Rome be-
came the Catholic Church . . . the ancient cult of the goddess
and the young god was re-established in a new synthesis." 9
In short, Christianity succeeded ultimately because it repre-
sented a return to the original goddess worship, which the Olym-
pian gods had temporarily replaced but which had never been
totally replaced in the minds and hearts of the people.
Montesquieu, quoting Cyril's Letters, says that when the people
of Ephesus were informed by the bishop in the fifth century "that
they might worship the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God, they
were transported with joy; they kissed the hands of the clergy,
they embraced their knees, and the whole city resounded with
acclamations." 10
And because of Mary and her identification in the medieval
mind with the primordial Great Goddess of the Celts, Christianity
was able eventually to triumph over the "artificial and rootless"
male gods who had been consciously invented in patriarchal ages
to conceal the Eternal One.
"Can the Eternal One be female?" asks Gide and does not wait
for an answer.11 Yet, it is an interesting fact, as stated earlier, that
it is always the Virgin Mary who is seen in visions—never God,
never the Holy Ghost, and very rarely Jesus. The great Christian
Mary and the Great Goddess <+§ 247
held the world together and had started mankind on its long and
frequently interrupted journey toward humanhood. But medieval
man, in whose memory the Great Goddess still survived, knew it;
and as he chiseled in stone or raised the flying buttresses on the great
cathedrals, he was remembering and honoring her as his ancestors
had of old, with his greatest efforts and his loftiest conceptions.
The most beautiful and reverent sculptures are those of Mary.
The most perfect paintings are of her. And the most tender and
most beautifully executed stained glass windows represent the
mother and child. 19 In spite of the pope and the secular power of
the local padre, medieval man still worshiped the mother of the
gods.
niece Mary, who was the mother of Jesus, her cousins Lazarus,
Martha, and Mary, and a young orphaned girl named Thekla.
They sailed along the northern coast of Africa, up through the
Tyrrhenian Sea, and landed at Marseilles in the year 36. "Marseilles
still gossips," writes Lionel Smithett Lewis, "about these refugees of
two thousand years ago." 21
Marseilles was a great seaport, the gateway to Europe in Roman
times, and from it fine Roman roads led to all parts of the empire.
The established trade route to the British Isles from the Mediter-
ranean world led from Marseilles up through Armorica, and across
the channel to southern Britain. Joseph of Arimathea was thor-
oughly familiar with this route, and Marseilles was chosen as his
place of refuge for the reason that he was well known and highly
regarded there.
For Joseph of Arimathea was a metal merchant, a tin tycoon, with
tin and copper mines in Cornwall and in Somerset in the south of
England. He was in the habit of making frequent visits to these
mines, and he had many friends among the British Celts, of whom
the Celtic king, Arviragus, was one.
Shortly after the arrival of the Jerusalem refugees at Marseilles,
the Apostle Philip visited them there on a missionary expedition.
Soon finding, however, that the people of Marseilles were too so-
phisticated and too Romanized to fall into the Christian camp,
Philip resolved to go farther afield. He decided to go into Britain
with Joseph of Arimathea. And accompanied by Mary and perhaps
Thekla, Martha, and the other Mary, the two men set out for
Somerset in the spring of the year.22
Finding the Celts of Britain hospitable to new ideas, Philip left
Joseph and some of the women there to found a church at Glaston-
bury, which, according to Gildas, they did in that very same year,
37, while Philip accompanied Mary back to Marseilles. There she
later died and was buried.
That is the Marseilles legend. In Somerset and Cornwall the
legend goes back to the childhood of Jesus. In this delightful story,
the boy Jesus had accompanied his great-uncle, the rich merchant
Joseph of Arimathea, on at least one business trip to Britain and had
so won the hearts of the Celts with his bright and questing mind
that they had never forgotten him. Thus when some thirty years
later his mother visited them with Joseph and they learned of the
Mary and the Great Goddess ^ 251
sad fate of the promising boy, they were eager to build a wattle
church in his memory at Glastonbury. Thus did Christianity come
to Celtic Britain nearly six hundred years before Augustine.
Blake's poem "Jerusalem" is obviously based on this lovely
legend:
Domestic Chastisement
) "Last of all, but by no means least, in the heart of the country
the people, the pagi, retained their love of their old festivals, the
worship of their old gods and goddesses of field and fold. They
loved the old ways, and were content to leave the new religion to
the cities."
But the ubiquitous church would not let them be content with
the old ways, any more than it had let the Roman Senate "remain
undisturbed in its error." x Everyone must be baptized with the blood
of the lamb. Everyone, Celtic peasant and Roman senator, must
conform to the harsh new morality and participate in the new
barbarism.
Men were exhorted from the pulpit to beat their wives and wives
to kiss the rod that beat them. In a medieval theological manual,
now in the British Museum, under the word castigare the example
for its use is given as "a man must castigate his wife and beat her
for her correction, for the lord must punish his own as is written
in Gratian's Decretum." 2 "The unnatural restraint of the women
25*
Women in the Middle Ages ««§ 253
every morning before going into the field, in order, he said, that
she would be so busy all day weeping and nursing her injuries that
she would have no time or inclination for gossip.
The church approved these methods of keeping women in sub-
jection and only advised the abused wives to try to win their hus-
band's goodwill by increased devotion and obedience, for meek
submissiveness was the best way to dispel a husband's displeasure.
Rousseau in the eighteenth century was still giving wives the same
advice. Unfortunately, this habit of looking upon women as crea-
tures apart, without the same feelings and the same capacity for
suffering that men have, became so inbred in the thought of the
Middle Ages that it has not yet been eradicated. Most men today
still feel that women can stand more pain, more humiliation, and
more disdain than men can. And male judges and doctors are still
more willing to let them.
Next to beating, the most prevalent form of approved punish-
ment was hair pulling. In convents and monasteries it was the rule
that there should be no form of physical chastisement for novices
and oblates except beating with rods and pulling of hair; "Be it
known," decreed the Custumal of the Abbey of Bee, "that this is
all their discipline, either to be beaten with rods, or that their hair
should be stoutly plucked." 9
Berthold, a friar of Regensburg in the thirteenth century, ex-
horted husbands whose wives were wont to dress their hair "with
crimple-crispings here and cristy-crosties there" to pull it out. "Tear
the headdress from her," he admonished his male parishioners,
"even though her own hair should come away with it. Do this not
thrice or four times only,1' he advised, "and presently she will for-
bear." 10 One would think so, since after thrice or four times she
could have had but little hair left to dress!
A grim and gruesome playfulness was not entirely unknown to
the young married couples of the medieval world. Sir Thomas
More reports a fifteenth-century case of a woodsman who was chop-
ping wood on the village green, where many of the villagers had
gathered to watch him work and to pass the time of day. The re-
partee was brisk and clever, jokes followed fast on each other's
heels, and the laughter was merry. All this jollity brought the wood-
chopper's wife out to join the fun. When her good man had laid
down his ax, the good wife playfully knelt and laid her head on
2^6 $•> THE FIRST SEX
the chopping block, and her good husband playfully chopped it off.
When questioned by the bishop as to the reason for this grisly
joke on his wife, the woodchopper explained that his wife had long
been deserving of punishment because she had been a "scold." As
proof of his allegation, witnesses to the head-chopping testified
that even after the poor woman's head had rolled bloodily from
the body, "they heard the tongue babble in her head and call
'villain, villain' twice, after her head was severed from her body."
This testimony proved the husband's claim of provocation, since,
of course, any woman whose tongue automatically called her hus-
band names after death had incontestably been a scold in life. Sir
Thomas does not say whether the woman's small children witnessed
their mother's head rolling playfully from the blade of their father's
ax.
The woodchopper, needless to say, was completely exonerated
by the bishop. There was one dissenter among the witnesses for the
defense, however, "only one, and that was a woman who said she
heard the tongue not." But since she was only a woman, her testi-
mony was disregarded by the bishop.11
Rheims was riding one day outside the city, attended by his clergy,
when one of the latter, Gervase of Tilbury, saw a fair maid and
rode aside to speak to her. After a few brief pleasantries he sug-
gested "amour," and the virgin, blushing, replied: "Nay, good
youth. God forbid that I should be your leman; for if I were to be
defiled and lose my virginity I should suffer eternal damnation."
The poor innocent, unused to the double talk of the clergy, was
probably only prating what she had been taught in church.
But the archbishop, coming up at that moment and seeing the
angry disappointment on Gervase's face, took the girl's refusal as
insolent defiance of her betters. After all, what would happen if
all young women took their chastity seriously and refused their
favors to the clergy? What would become of priestly pleasures? The
girl still refusing after the archbishop's intervention, the latter
ordered that she be carried with the party back to Rheims, where
she was, predictably, accused of heresy. "No persuasion," continues
Ralph the Chronicler, "could recall her from her foolish obstinacy;
wherefore she was burned to death, to the admiration of many
*who marked how she uttered no sighs, no tears, no laments, but
bore bravely all the torments of the consuming flames." 24
greatly, he then had her impaled through the privy parts, by which
she died." 20
Brantome's gossipy stories of murder and mayhem all concern
gentlemen of the French court with whom he was acquainted but
whom he dared not name. No doubt his more contemporary read-
ers knew of whom he spoke, but to us they remain faceless and
unidentified.
Except for Father Bernardino in the fifteenth and the Abbe* de
Brantome in the sixteenth century, no man spoke out in defense
of women in the Christian era before the late nineteenth century.
The male, however cruel and brutal, was always right, and the
church was ever at his side, ready to support him in the vilest
crimes against the "lesser" sex. "The cruel destruction of women
in the Middle Ages," writes Horney, "has implications of an under-
lying anxiety . . . for woman poses a danger to man." 30 And "the
priest," writes Michelet, "realized clearly where the danger l a y -
that an enemy, a menacing rival, is to be feared in woman, this
high-priestess of Nature he pretends to despise." 31
"The Church has always known and feared the spiritual poten-
tialities of women's freedom," observes Margaret Sanger. "For this
reason male agencies have sought to keep women enslaved, . . . to
use women solely as an asset to . . . the man. Anything which will
enable women to live for themselves first has been attacked as im-
moral." 32
By the twelfth century, writes Roger Sherman Loomis, "the nat-
ural depravity of Eve's daughters was an accepted fact, and woman
had become the Devil's most valuable ally. She was not only in-
ferior, she was vicious; and as Chaucer wrote in the Wife of Bath,
'It is impossible that any cleric wol speke gode of wyves.' " 33
That the churchmen of the Middle Ages even exceeded their
model, Saint Paul, in their violent hatred of women is frighten-
ingly evident in all their writings that have come down to us.
Johann Nider, a distinguished Dominican of the fifteenth century,
describes without any observable degree of compassion or remorse
the torture of a poor old woman whose only crime was her mobility.
"She often changed her abode," writes Nider, "from house to house
and city to city, and this had gone on for many years." Supposedly
this mobility smacked to the church of unfeminine independence,
an anomaly that could not be tolerated. They put a watch on the
Women in the Middle Ages «#§ 263
unsuspecting old lady, and finally one day in Regensburg that for
which they had hoped and waited came to pass. In the hearing of
their spy, "she uttered certain incautious words concerning the
Faith, on which she was immediately accused before the Vicar and
clapt into prison."
On being questioned by the inquisitor, who was none other than
Father Nider himself, "she answered very astutely to every objec-
tion made to her, and stated that she refused obedience to the Pope
in matters which he had ill disposed.'' (One wishes that Nider had
seen fit to name these papal errors!) Here obviously was a thinking
woman, a woman of mental independence and the courage of her
convictions—an anomaly despised and feared by the church. For
these very reasons, she did not have a chance. It was decided that
"she be racked by the torture of public justice, slowly, in propor-
tion as her sex may be able to endure it." In plain words, Nider
ordered that her torture be prolonged as long as possible, as extra
punishment for her sex, her independence of mind, and her un-
womanly "astuteness." Her age was not considered an ameliorating
factor.
"Having been tortured for a while," goes on Nider complacently,
"she was much humbled by the vexation of her limbs; wherefore
she was brought back to her prison-tower where I visited her that
same evening. She could scarce stir for pain," says the good father
with righteous satisfaction, "but when she saw me she burst into
loud weeping and told me how grievously she had been hurt."
When the good inquisitor "induced many citations from Holy
Scripture to show how frail is the female sex" (!) and after he had
threatened her with further torture, the poor old woman "declared
herself ready to revoke her error publicly, and to repent." Which,
as soon as she was able to walk again, she did "before the whole city
of Regensburg." 34
Thus were "pagans" attracted to the banner of Christ and en-
couraged to adopt Christianity in the Middle Ages. Yet children
are taught in school even today to believe that the Christian reli-
gion brought mercy and enlightenment and justice to a world
where people had formerly lived in the darkness of heathendom.
They are taught to believe that Christianity saved the world from
barbarism; yet it actually created a barbaric culture such as the
Western world had never seen before. And most heinous of all, it
264 §•> THE FIRST SEX
Saint Joan
Our Johann Nider, the inquisitor who described so dispas-
sionately the agony of the poor nameless old woman whose limbs he
had broken and whose joints he had dislocated on the rack, was once
permitted to "question" Joan of Arc. And here is what he says of
her:
There was lately in France, within the last ten years, a maid
named Joan, distinguished, as was thought, both for her prophetic
spirit and for the power of her miracles. For she always wore
man's dress, nor could all the persuasions of the Doctors of
Divinity bend her to put aside these and content herself with
woman's garments, especially considering that she openly con-
fessed herself a woman, and a maid. "In these masculine gar-
ments," she said, "in token of future victory, I have been sent
by God, to help Charles, the true King of France, and to set him
firm upon his throne from whence the King of England and the
Duke of Burgundy are striving to chase him"; for at that time
the two were allied together and oppressed France most griev-
ously with battle and slaughter. Joan, therefore, rode constantly
like a knight with her lord, predicted many successes to come,
and did other like wonders whereat not only France marvelled,
but every realm in Christendom.
At last this Joan came to such a pitch of presumption, that
layfolk and ecclesiastics, Regulars and Cloisterers began to doubt
of the spirit whereby she was ruled, whether it were devilish or
divine. Then certain men of great learning wrote treatises con-
cerning her, wherein they expressed adverse opinions as to the
265
266 £»» THE FIRST SEX
Maid. After she had given great help to Charles the King and
placed him securely upon the throne, she was taken by God's
will and cast into prison. A great multitude were then sum-
moned of masters both in Ganon and Civil law, and she was
examined for many days. She at length confessed that she had a
familiar angel of God, which, by many conjectures and proofs,
and by the opinion of the most learned men, was judged to be an
evil spirit; so that this spirit rendered her a sorceress; wherefore
they permitted her to be burned at the stake by the common
hangman.1
"They permitted her." One supposes from this that the common
hangman insisted upon burning her at the stake and that the
churchmen and the most learned men of the canon and civil law
permitted him to have his way. If a male knight had secured the
throne of France for its rightful king and had confounded an
enemy that was "oppressing France most grievously with battle and
slaughter," would the common hangman have had his way so
easily? One wonders.
While no man (save one) rose to the defense of Joan—not even
the king whose throne and country Joan had secured for him—two
women did and were tortured and burned for their trouble.
The one exception to the indifference of her male beneficiaries
to Joan's fate was the original Blue Beard, the infamous Gilles de
Rais. This nobleman had been Joan's lieutenant in her wars against
the English and had developed a strong and steadfast devotion to
her as his leader and captain. He used all his influence to save her
from the flames, but to no avail. When he walked away from Joan's
smoldering pyre, his cause lost, he changed into the fiend he is
known as in history. He was finally arrested for multiple murder,
after having killed by the most horrible tortures literally hundreds
of little girls and little boys for the gratification of his perverted sex-
ual desires. The thing that is interesting about his case is that, al-
though he shared the saint's fate of burning at the stake, his death
had occurred before the fire was lit. As was the case with all male
criminals, he was granted the mercy of strangulation prior to burn-
ing, while Saint Joan, like all women, was burned "quick"—that is,
alive.2
Nider voices only one regret in connection with the entire Joan
affair. And this regret was caused by the escape from the power of
Some Medieval Women *+§ 267
Pope Joan
The attempted relegation of Joan of Arc to the realm of myth
recalls another Joan who has been successfully mythologized by her
church—the Pope Joan. So successfull indeed has the church been
in its endeavor to wipe Pope Joan out of history that the vast ma-
jority of people living today have never even heard of a female
pope. And to those few who have heard of her she is an established
myth, just as the Catholic Church claims her to be.
But is Pope Joan merely a medieval myth? If so, it seems very
odd that the church waited nearly 800 years so to declare her.
Throughout the long centuries from 855, when she died, to 1601,
when she was annihilated and anathematized, Joan was accepted
as genuine. Through all these centuries, says the Catholic Encyclo-
pedia, "Joanna was a historical personage whose existence no one
doubted." 3 The church numbered her among the popes as John
VIII, and erected statues to her among the images of the popes at
Siena Cathedral and at St. Peter's in Rome.
It seems that Joan, a "handsome" young English girl, made her
268 §*» THE FIRST SEX
"Gynikomnemonikothanasia"
The zeal of the masculine historians and encyclopedists in de-
stroying even the memory of great women (which is the intended
meaning of the above word) has rendered the pursuit of feminine
historical research extremely difficult. There are so few names! If
the sense of history demands the inclusion of a female, she is re-
ferred to merely as somebody's wife, or mother, or daughter, or
sister, and is never included in the index. Archeology has recently
revealed the historical existence of once great women whose names
have been as completely wiped from the history books as if they
had never existed.
George Ballard, in the eighteenth century, wondered why so
many of the great women of England had been overlooked by the
historians, while so many lesser men had won lasting places in their
country's annals.8 The oversight is, of course, deliberate. Men have
written history not, as Dingwall complains, "as ifr women hardly
counted" ° but as if women hardly existed. Yet the role of women
in molding history and their influence on the events that have
shaped man's destiny are incalculable. Scholars are aware of this
fact and yet, when they are bound by the necessity for accuracy or
logic to include a woman's name in the unfolding of a national
event, her name is invariably coupled with a belittling adjective
designed not only to put down the woman herself but to assure
Some Medieval Women «•§ 271
their feminine readers that such women are undesirable and "un-
feminine." Thus all outstanding women become in the history
books "viragos" (Boadicea), "hussies" (Matilda of Flanders), "hys-
terics" (Joan of Arc), "monstrosities" (Tomyris), or merely myths
(Martia and Pope Joan).
Arnold Toynbee, whose A Study of History a generation ago was
accepted as a great work of genius but which has now been con-
signed to the dustbin as outmoded and whose philosophy has been
disavowed even by Toynbee himself, voiced the masculist view of
great women in that work. In attempting to explain the dominance
of women in the Minoan-Mycenaean culture of Greece, for exam-
ple, he inadvertently acknowledges the basic equality of the sexes
by explaining that in that "socially unorganized age . . . individu-
alism was so absolute that it over-rode the intrinsic differences be-
tween the sexes"; and this "unbridled individualism bore fruits
hardly distinguishable from those of a doctrinaire feminism." 10
In short, Toynbee is saying, where society has not subjected one
sex to the other, the sexes develop equally: equality of treatment
and of self-expression abolish the apparent inequality—"the intrin-
sic differences"-—between the sexes. But, of course, this is an unde-
sirable state of affairs from the masculist viewpoint. The "a priori
logic," continues Toynbee, of weak woman's "inability to hold her
own against the physically dominant sex" is confuted "by the facts
of history.'* Women were dominant, he adniits—but how could
this have been? How could futile, weak woman ever, in any period
of history, have dominated man, the muscular lord of creation?
Victorian-minded, Biblical-bred Toynbee, a true product of mas-
culist materialism, is pathetically baffled by the conundrum. To
Toynbee, woman's former dominance can be attributed to only one
source, her greater "persistence, vindictiveness, implacability, cun-
ning, and treachery." n
He, like the majority of his nineteenth-century-educated contem-
poraries, had learned well the lesson dinned into Western man for
nearly two thousand years of the viciousness of Eve's daughters and
of "the absolutely incurable infirmities and inferiority of the female
sex," to quote the revered Scottish-English Christian philosopher
David Hume. One wonders how such men as Hume and Toynbee
could ever have brought themselves to mate with such loathsome
creatures!
27^ §*> THE FIRST SEX
Emily James Putnam about sixty years ago wrote of the "ever-
recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent
female." 12 Over two thousand years ago the Roman senator Cato
warned his fellow senators against the insurgent females of repub-
lican Rome: "The moment they have arrived at an equality with
you, they will become your masters and your superiors," he
stormed. And in the eighteenth century of our era, the great Dr.
Samuel Johnson confided to James Boswell that the reason men
denied education to women was that men knew that if women
learned as much as they, they, the men, would be "overmatched." 13
The basic reason for man's reluctance to admit women to the
mysteries of learning is this same fear of "insurgent," or "resur-
gent," woman: if women were to be permitted to roam at will in
the paths and bypaths of scholarship, they might uncover man's
most closely guarded secret, the fact of woman's greater role in the
history of the race and the truth of man's deliberate concealment of
that fact.
The malicious erasure of women's names from the historical rec-
ord began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our
own period.
Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their
names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in
matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought,
and effort to the writing of Middle town, but today it is Robert
Lynd's book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological
discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary
Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet
Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process
is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young
people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the
help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife.
Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates
knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles' oration. Corinna
taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever
heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloi'se,
his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great
medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir
Philip Sidney's Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel
Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to
Some Medieval Women «•§ 273
ing bees. Nor did she disdain to blend all the magnificence of
chivalry with her patronage of the productive arts." She arranged
for tournaments and jousts of arms to be held at Norwich, at which
the nobles and knights entertained the working people with pag-
eantry and feats of equestrianism and swordplay. "These festivals
displayed the defensive class and the productive class in admirable
union, while the example of the Queen promoted mutual respect
between them. At a period of her life which is commonly considered
mere girlhood, Philippa enriched and ennobled her realm." 18
To show their appreciation of their queen, the merchants and
workers of Norwich were later voluntarily to raise among them-
selves the vast sum of 2,500 English pounds sterling to redeem
Philippa's "best crown," which she had pawned in Cologne to raise
money for the Scottish wars.
It was while King Edward and the sixteen-year-old Black Prince
(so called because, although he was blond like all the Plantagenets,
he wore black armor) were engaged at the Battle of Crecy in 1346
that the Scots led by King David Bruce descended from the north
and threatened England. Philippa was serving as regent in the ab-
sence of the king, and "it was now her turn to do battle royal with
a king," and she did not flinch. She rallied her army at Neville's
Cross and, riding among the men on a white charger, she urged
them "for the love of God to fight manfully for their King." They
assured her, as Froissart reports, that "they would acquit them-
selves loyally, even better than if the King had been there him-
self." 19 And the battle was joined. In a few hours it was all over.
The Scottish king had been captured, and his troops were fleeing
back over the border in a complete rout. Philippa was again the
hero of the hour to the English people.
As a result of Philippa's military success, "out of compliment to
the Queen's successful generalship, the English ladies began to give
themselves the airs of warriors." Hats shaped like knights' helmets
became the fashion, and the ladies decked themselves with jeweled
daggers. "The Church was preparing suitable remonstrances against
these fashions, when all pride was at once signally confounded by
the plague which approached the shores of England in 1348." 20
Philippa's second daughter, then aged fourteen, the beautiful
Joanna, was one of the first to die in that terrible Black Death that
was to more than decimate the population of Europe in the next
2 7 6 $*> T H E FIRST SEX
complexion, and the firm texture of his limbs, filled everyone with
admiration who saw him." 25 He can still be seen as the Infant
Jesus in many of the stained-glass windows of medieval churches
and cathedrals in England and on the Continent in the arms of his
mother, Queen Philippa of England.
An odd coincidence is the fact that this good queen, model for so
many depictions of the Virgin Mary, died on the anniversary of the
Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, August 15. And like Mary,
writes Froissart, "when this excellent Lady, who had done so much
good and who had such boundless charity for all Mankind . . .
gave up her spirit, it was caught by the Holy Angels and carried to
the glory of Heaven." 26
Queen Philippa was spared the lingering illness of her beloved
son, the Black Prince, who died "of a dropsy" seven years after his
mother's death. Her husband, Edward III, deteriorated mentally
and morally after her demise, squandering state money on his par-
amour, Alice Perrers, and even ordering all the beneficiaries of his
queen to give over their legacies to Alice.27
"The close observer of history," writes Strickland, "will not fail
to notice that with the life of Queen Philippa, the happiness, good
fortune, and even the respectability of Edward III and his family
departed, and scenes of strife, sorrow, and folly, distracted the court,
where she had once promoted virtue, justice, and well-regulated
munificence." 28
worth, in the twelfth year in which with lawful authority she was
holding dominion over the Mercians. And her body is buried in
Gloucester in the east chapel of St. Peter's Church." 32 Her brother
Edward then descended upon Mercia, and "all the people which
had been subject to Aethelflaed submitted to him . . . and the
daughter of Aethelflaed was deprived of all authority in Mercia and
taken into Wessex. She was called Aelfwyn." 33 And so the little
queen was deposed by her wicked uncle Edward, who had not dared
interfere with the kingdom in Aethelflaed's lifetime.
Aethelflaed is memorable for a remark she is reported by William
of Malmesbury to have made at the court of her father, Alfred,
shortly after her marriage to Ethelred, her future consort in Mercia.
On being asked why she refused the embraces of her husband,
Aethelflaed replied that "it was unbecoming in a king's daughter to
give way to a delight which produced such unpleasant conse-
quences." 34 Yet her daughter Aelfwyn constitutes proof that at
some time this king's daughter did give way to a delight that pro-
duced consequences.
It was a queen, also, who reestablished the civil rights of the Eng-
lish people after the Norman Conquest. The Normans had brought
with them to England in the eleventh century the Franco-Christian
legal system of the continent, a far less democratic and egalitarian
system than that of those two great lawgivers Celtic Martia and
Saxon Alfred. The English chafed at the attrition of their liberties
under the first two Williams—the Conqueror and his son Rufus,
the latter of whom, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "was hateful to
all his people." 35 When William Rufus was mysteriously shot to
death while hunting in the New Forest, his younger brother, Henry,
the first of the Norman heirs to have been bom on English soil,
ascended the throne as Henry I. It was this king's love for a princess
and his willingness to be influenced by her that brought about the
restoration of their ancient liberties to the English people.
This princess was Matilda of Scotland, daughter of the Saxon
heir of England, Margaret the Aetheling. Margaret, fleeing England
after the conquest with her mother and brother, had married Mal-
colm, Macbeth's adversary, and had thus become queen of the Scots.
She had sent her eldest daughter, Matilda, or Maud, to Wilton,
where the English royal family had for centuries sent their daugh-
ters to be educated, and there Henry had seen her. On his accession
280 ^»THE FIRST SEX
to the throne he at once asked Malcolm and Margaret for the hand
of their daughter in marriage—a proposal that met with the ap-
proval of the parents. But Matilda unaccountably refused the offer.
Matilda had remained true to her English roots, and the suffering of
her people under the Normans had deeply impressed and disturbed
her. At the urging of her parents, however, and in the belief that
she might, as Queen of England, alleviate the oppression of her
people, she finally consented to Henry's suit, on condition that he
promise as king to "restore to the English Nation their ancient laws
and privileges, as established by King Alfred and ratified by King
Edward the Confessor." 36
On Henry's solemn oath to accept these conditions, "the daugh-
ter of the royal line of Alfred consented to share his throne." 37
Henry immediately repealed all the astringent civil laws imposed by
his predecessors, the two Williams, and caused a digest of the laws
of Alfred to be made and copies sent to all the towns of England
"to form a legal authority for the demands of the people." 38 Upon
this initial act of good faith on the part of King Henry, Princess
Matilda married him on November 11, 1100.
"Many were the good laws made in England through Maud the
Good Queen," wrote the chronicler, Robert of Gloucester. She
caused regular welfare benefits to be extended to pregnant women
of the poor and founded two free hospitals for the underprivileged,
St. Giles in the Fields and Christ Church. She repaired and im-
proved the roads and bridges throughout the land that had fallen
into disrepair under the Normans. And, as a contemporary chron-
icler wrote:
charter that formed the model and the precedent of that great
palladium of English liberty, Magna Charta. And it was this prin-
cess who refused to leave her gloomy convent at Wilton and to give
her hand to the handsomest and most accomplished sovereign of
his time, till she had obtained just and merciful laws for her suf-
fering country, the repeal of the tyrannical imposition of the cur-
few, and a recognition of the rights of the common people." 40
This good queen, known to generations of Englishmen as Saint
Maud, died in 1118, at the age of forty-one. And with her died many
of the hard-won benefits she had bestowed on her people. For aftc
her death, Henry reverted to type—the Norman tyrannical type of
his father and his brother. In the reign of King John, a hundred
years after the time of Good Queen Maud, when the digest of the
laws of Henry and Matilda was sought, only one copy could be
found. "It was thought that after the death of his queen, Henry I
destroyed all the copies he could lay his hands on of a covenant
which in his later years he regretted having granted. On this one
extant copy, Magna Charta was framed." 4l
Thus Magna Charta, that eminent milestone in human advance-
ment, like the English common law, was a direct descendant of the
Martian Statutes of the Celtic Queen Martia, by way of Alfred the
Great, Edward the Confessor, and the "digest" of Henry and Ma-
tilda. And the ultimate source of the Martian Statutes was the
Brehon laws of the ancient Celts, those determined champions of
liberty and justice. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
the genealogies included in Dorothy Whitelock's edition of it, there
was a great deal of Celtic blood in the royal Saxon line of Alfred,
and so in his direct descendant, Matilda. All the descendants of
Matilda, therefore, derived Celtic genes from her. More Celtic
blood was injected into the English royal line when Matilda's
daughter, the Empress Matilda, married Geoffrey Plantagenet, "the
Provencal Celt." The son of Geoffrey and the younger Matilda, who
became Henry II of England in 1154, was thus more Celtic than
either Norman or Saxon, as were all the "golden" Plantagenets.
The Celtic influence remained a force to be reckoned with, and
the Celts were then and are now by no means a dead or dying breed.
18
Women in the Reformation
Since a woman must wear chains,
I would have the pleasure of hearing
'cm rattle a little.
—GEORGE FARQUHAR
Sidney and not of Philip. The title page of the first edition of the
Arcadia, when it appeared in 1590, clearly indicates that it is the
work of the Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert. It was
only in later editions that more and more of the credit was given
to Sir Philip. In their minor poems there is not much to choose
between Philip and Mary; thus either of them could with equal
credibility have written the Arcadia. But, of course, in English
literature courses today, Sir Philip is the author.
John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century gossip and author of Brief
Lives, says that Mary Sidney was a "Chymist of note," whose knowl-
edge of chemistry won the admiration of Adrian Gilbert, the fore-
most "chymist in those days." n Mary Sidney, Countess of Pem-
broke, was not only a brilliant and learned lady but she was long
remembered for her great charm and beauty. She was the patron
of Ben Jonson and, through her son, of William Shakespeare. Ben
Jonson's tribute to her is still included in all the anthologies, in
some of which, however, it is attributed to William Browne:
Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse—
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learned and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.12
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, who died in 1621,
was the last survivor of a pageant of great and witty, learned and
charming women who graced sixteenth-century England. "There
are no accounts in history," wrote William Wotton in 1697, "of
so many truly great women in any one age as are to be found be-
tween the years 1500 and 1600." 13
And then suddenly, almost at the century mark, the interlude
of feminine resurgence ended. Queen Elizabeth died, Puritanism
reared its ugly head, learning was eclipsed, and women were thrust
back into the darkness from which the Reformation had rescued
them for so brief a time.
had had intercourse with them in their sleep. Many women even
"confessed" to such strange psychic seductions.
"Woman furnishes the soil in which the seed of man finds con-
ditions required for its development," had written Theophrastus
Bombast (Paracelsus). "She nourishes and matures the seed with-
out furnishing any seed herself. Thus man is never derived from
woman, but always from man." 17
So thoroughly was this fallacy believed that a seventeenth-cen-
tury scientist, Count Johann von Kueffstein, was reputed to have
created actual living beings from sperm kept for nine months in
a warm damp place and fed on menstrual blood.18
The most sterile retrogressive move of the century, however,
was the renewed vigor with which female intellect was anathema-
tized. Like the Jewish Christians of the first and second centuries
who on beholding the freedom and power of the Roman women
determined to humble and enslave them, so the Old Testament
Puritans of the seventeenth century now resolved to curb the six-
teenth-century trend and restore women to their proper, God-
ordained position of servitude.
"The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem more than a
hundred years apart in tone and temper," writes Myra Reynolds.
"We turn from the eager intellectual life of the women of Tudor
England, from their full and rich opportunities, and we find that
in the seventeenth century there was no provision at home or in
the schools for any but the most desultory education for girls." I9
The spirit of the great medieval gynophobes, from Saint Clement
to Gratian, was revived. The foremost poet of Puritanism, John
Milton, echoed thirteenth-century Saint Thomas Aquinas, who had
called woman a "monster of nature," in hii lines from Paradise
Lost:
Ah, why did God,
Creator wise that peopled highesv Heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, [Woman]} [author's italics] 20
initiated in the sciences, study books and men, have all imaginable
encouragement: not only fame, but also authority, power and
riches." (Over two hundred years later, Virginia Woolf was to note
the deficiencies in the physical appurtenances of the woman's col'
lege at Oxford as compared to the luxurious comforts in the men's
colleges and write—in A Room of One's Own—"The safety and
prosperity of the male sex, and the poverty and insecurity of the
other!")
"The other sex," continues Mary Astell, "are restricted, frowned
upon, beat. . . . From their infancy they are debarred those ad-
vantages for the lack of which they are afterwards reproached; and
are nursed up in that feminine pettiness which will hereafter be
upbraided to them. . . . No man can endure a woman of superior
sense; and no man would treat a woman civilly but that he thinks
he stands on higher ground, and that she is wise enough to take
her measures by his direction." *
In the same book Astell, with tongue obviously in cheek, advises
wives as follows: "She who marries ought to lay it down for an in-
disputable maxim that her husband must govern absolutely and
entirely, and that she has nothing else to do but Please and Obey!
She must not dispute his authority, for to struggle against her yoke
will only make it gall the more. She must believe him Wise and
Good in all re'spects. She who cannot do this is in no wise fit to be a
wife." 2
Maurice Ashley, with typical male obtuseness, quotes this para-
graph, which he mistakenly attributes to Damaris, Lady Masham,
as proof that even intelligent women agreed with men's ideas of
the role suitable to wives, and "acquiesced in their own inferior-
ity." 3 But it is evident that Astell was satirically pointing out to
women the incongruities and utter absurdities expected of them in
marriage and subtly warning them against it.
Jonathan Swift, although he loved and admired his brilliant and
learned Stella, wrote: "A very little wit is valued in a woman, as
we are pleased with the few words of a parrot." And Samuel John-
son compared a preaching woman to a dog walking on its hind legs:
in either case we ask not how well it is done, but marvel that it can
be done at all. Women were expected to take all these public insults
and belittlements, as they are today, like good sports, never retaliat-
ing and never showing their hurt or anger but smiling bravely and
296 ^ THE FIRST SEX
revival in the 1960's, however, and some of her books are back
in print today.
Anne Royall had not been able to help her ''fallen" sisters, and
the harsh and merciless attitude toward them continued well into
the present century. The Reverend Dr. R. J. Campbell, writing in
1907, asked: "Why do we persecute a woman for surrendering her
virginity? Why do we discriminate against the unfaithful wife
only?" Woman's unchastity, he concludes, is an infringement on
male property rights, and for this reason "we hedge our wives
around with so many penalties and pains that if one offends we
thrust her into the ranks of prostitutes, and persuade ourselves
that this is moral and Christian. . . . As a matter of fact, it is the
meanest, shabbiest, most selfish plan ever devised by selfish man
for keeping his hold on his private property, woman. It leaves the
ordinary woman," concludes Campbell, "a kind of Hobson's
choice: reputable or disreputable dependence on the male sex." 13
With all avenues of reputable subsistence effectively closed
against her by "the malice of patriarchal society," nineteenth- and
twentieth-century woman had no choice and was forced by the
pressure of society into either remaining as an unpaid servant in
the home of some male relative or into marriage with the first
man who was willing to support her. Yet spinsterhood offered even
less inducement than "work." Like the prostitute and the working
woman, the old maid was the whipping boy of society.
"The contempt with which the single woman has been regarded
is different from that bestowed on her fallen sister, but it is no less
real," remarks Campbell.14 While the prostitute was filthily odious,
the old maid was odiously ridiculous.
Jane Austen had written in Emma, early in the century: "A
single woman with a narrow income, must be a ridiculous, dis-
agreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single
woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible
and pleasant as anybody else." 15 But how many "single women of
fortune" were there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
These unfortunate human beings were spoken of publicly as
"surplus women," and they became more and more of a problem
as time wore on. There were movements in the masculine estab-
lishment to "sequester them in institutions . . . where they would
$10 £»» THE FIRST SEX
have their activities, their opinions, and their wealth, if they were
possessed of any, wisely controlled [author's italics] by a policy
beneficient to the nation as a whole." 16 In short, they were to be
looked upon as criminals for the crime of being that frightful
anomaly, an unowned, non-male-oriented female, a satellite out of
orbit.
The one and only reputable calling available to woman was
marriage, and to this blessed and honorable estate she was taught
from infancy to aspire. Her youth was an unbroken frenzy of des-
perate and agonizing fear that she would be "passed over," forced
to live out her life in the shame of celibacy, a surplus woman.
And when she was lucky enough to find her man she was expected
to be eternally grateful, no matter how miserable her marriage
proved to be. "Love in the heart of a wife," advises a popular book
written for the instruction of young ladies in 1847, "should partake
largely of the nature of Gratitude. She should fill her soul with
gratitude to God and to the Man who has chosen her to be his
helpmate for time and for Eternity." 17
And for what was she expected to be grateful?
Late in the nineteenth century, Judge Lucillius Alonzo Emery
of the Maine Supreme Court, wrote: "The whole theory of the
law where it concerns women, is a slavish one. The merging of
the wife's name with that of her husband is emblematic of all her
legal rights. The Torch of Hymen serves but to light the Pyre on
which these rights are offered up." 18
given by the seller, of which the following is a literal copy: 'I, John
Osborne, doth agree to part with my wife, Mary Osborne, and
child, to William Serjeant, for the sum of one pound, in consid-
eration of giving up all claims whatever, whereunto I have made
my mark as an acknowledgement. Maidstone, Jan. 3, 1815.' " 19
Later, reports John Ashton, a young lady was sold at auction at
Smithfield. She was exposed in a halter and the price demanded
for her was eighty guineas. She was finally sold to a celebrated horse
dealer for fifty plus the horse on which he, the buyer, was mounted.
The woman's husband was a well-to-do cattleman from near Lon-
don.
"The custom of wife selling," writes Nina Epton, "appears to
have been fairly common" in the nineteenth century.20
Up until the year 1885, less than a hundred years ago, in Eng-
land a man could still sell his wife or daughter into prostitution.
In that year it was made illegal to sell or kidnap a girl for the
purposes of prostitution until she was sixteen years old. After that
"age of consent" it was still legal. It was only in the 1880's, too,
that the law allowed a wife who had been habitually beaten by her
husband to the point of "endangering her life" to separate from
(not divorce) him. In 1891 the law for the first time forbade a man
to keep his wife imprisoned under lock and key, as a Governor
Yeo, for one, had done to his wife each time he went to sea.21
Even after all these "improvements" in the condition of women,
a wife could still not own her house, her inheritance, or even the
paltry sums she earned at home by sewing, preserving fruits, or
taking in wash. Even the children of her own body were not legally
hers. No matter how wicked and unworthy the husband, he had
complete rights under the law over the children. He was allowed
to banish his wife and live openly with another woman, yet the
children remained his, and their mother could see them or cor-
respond with them only at his pleasure and with his permission. A
woman might inherit a fortune, yet she had no say in its manage-
ment or its disposal. Her husband could, and often did, squander
his wife's fortune on his own pleasure, leaving his wife and chil-
dren in actual want. Yet no law compelled him to account for a
penny of it.
This very outrage was committed against his wife and children
in the latter nineteenth century by the Duke of Queensberry, who
312 $•> THE FIRST SEX
was the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, friend of Oscar Wilde. The
duke banished his wife from the ducal mansion, took unto himself
a series of paramours, lived like a sultan on his wife's money, and
refused to contribute a shilling to the support of his family. The
duchess and her children lived in actual poverty while the duke
squandered the fortune his wife had brought him at their marriage,
and no voice was heard to rise in protest in all of official or legal
England. The result was that young Lord Alfred grew up with a
consuming hatred for his father and a passionate love for and
protectiveness toward his mother.
At least in the case of the duke his children had been allowed
to live with their mother, a blessing denied Prince Albert of Saxe-
Coburg, the consort of Queen Victoria. His mother had been repu-
diated and banished by her husband, and young Albert, to his
lasting grief, had grown up in ignorance even of her whereabouts;
and by the time he reached manhood she had died of want. Prince
Albert, like Lord Alfred, had been deeply affected by this trau-
matic experience of his childhood and, again like Lord Alfred,
he hated his father all his life and could never speak of his beauti-
ful and tragic young mother without tears in his eyes.
Yet if two such great and influential "gentlemen" as a Saxon
kinglet and an English duke could get away with so much open
cruelty to their wives, for how much worse crimes must the ordi-
nary husband have gone uncensured. As Mill writes:
The power [of men over women] is a power given not to good
men, or to decently respectable men, but to ail men: the most
brutal, the most criminal. . . . Marriage is not an institution
designed for a select few men. Men are not required as a pre-
liminary to marriage to prove that they are fit to be trusted with
absolute power over another human being. . . . The vilest
malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom
he can commit any atrocity except killing her—and even that he
can do without too much danger of the legal penalty. How many
men are there who . . . indulge the most violent aggressions of
bodily torment towards the unhappy wife who alone of all per-
sons cannot escape from their brutality; towards whom her very
dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, with a no-
tion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing, to be
Not Quite People—The Nineteenth Century **$ 313
power over women had the same harmful effect on the males of the
species? Why has not absolute power corrupted them absolutely?
Or has it?
"The effects of patriarchal marriage," wrote August Forel at the
end of the nineteenth century, "are deplorable and very immoral.
The patriarch abuses his power, and patriarchism degenerates
into atrocious tyranny on the part of the head of the family, who
must be looked upon as a god." 27
If a mere two hundred odd years of slavery had so deleterious
an effect on the character of black men as sociologists say it did, why
haven't fifteen hundred years of slavery had the same effect on
women? Perhaps woman has avoided complete inner degradation
because she has an instinctive knowledge, an intuitive memory, of
her original and still basic superiority; for even among blacks,
it is the women, the stronger sex, who have managed more readily
to retain their dignity, their integrity and their self-respect.
21
The Prejudice Lingers On
Men, in general, employ their reason
to justify their inherited prejudices against
women, rather than to understand them and to
root them out.
— M A R Y WOLLSTONECRAFT
women on the whole are satisfied with their status, that only a
few unnatural women feel "deprived and imprisoned in modern
society." "We hear, therefore, on this subject from only a very
small segment of women who are truly not typical," opines Oden-
wald.3 But it is hard to say how the good doctor knows what is
typical and what is atypical among women. It is well known that,
as Bertrand Russell observes, "so long as women are in subjection
they do not dare to be honest about their feelings, but profess those
which are pleasing to the male." 4 Especially is this so when the
questioner is a male; and it is hard to imagine any woman giving
an honest answer to a masculist of Dr. Odenwald's ilk.
when women were engaged in leading the human race toward true
civilization.
Today's newspapers are full of the heroic deeds of women—the
earliest editions, that is to say. By the second edition the woman's
name has been replaced by that of a male. In the evolution of news
as of myth, as Bachofen points out, the hera is rechristened with a
masculine name, while the male villain is given a feminine name.20
Or, if the name remains, the heroine's deed has been diminished to
the status of a lucky, but freakish, accident.
Recently a "skyjacker" was disarmed by an airline stewardess
over Florida. The first edition of the press gave the stewardess full
credit for her act of courage. By the second editipn, however, the
male pilot was sharing honors with her, and by the time the news
weeklies appeared, the pilot was the hero of the incident.
"The heroic deeds of women are seldom recorded in books or
periodicals," observes Dr. Georgio Lolli.21 Male editors, with their
preconceived notions of female timidity, brush these stories aside as
having some explanation other than courage. And male judges in
granting heroism awards automatically eliminate the names of girls
and consider only the boys. The Carnegie Foundation awards an-
nual medals for bravery to civilians who display selfless courage.
In looking over their annual lists one is impressed by the vast ma-
jority of men's and boys' names. The preponderance of male recipi-
ents does not jibe with the preponderance of women heroes whose
names appear in the early editions of local newspapers.
It all boils down to the fact that in the eyes and minds of the
masculine judges, boys are heroes and girls are not. If a girl per-
forms a heroic act it is an anomaly, a freak episode. One can only
ask: how many times must an anomaly occur and recur before it
ceases to be an anomaly? Odenwald, in his curiously antifeminist
book, admits that "women in the past have taken their stand at the
barricades and have carried, literally and figuratively, their men on
their backs. But when they have done so, everyone agreed they were
exceptions [author's italics]." 22 How long must exceptions be re-
peated before they become the rule? The doctor goes on: "When
they do so as a regular thing today, however, more and more people
ask, 'Well, why not?' These people are saying there should be no
clear distinctions" In other words, says Odenwald, women have
The Prejudice Lingers On ««§ 321
Woman's Image
Men and women stand on opposite sides of a one-way window
(if we may borrow an image from Ernest Bornemann). On the mir-
ror side stands the man, seeing only his own strutting and gesticulat-
ing self reflected back at him, unaware that there is anything on
the other side. On the transparent side, however, stands the woman,
observing clearly the man in all his posturing but unable to see
or realize herself.
It is thus not too remarkable, perhaps, with what patience and
lack of bitterness women look upon their own image as it is paraded
and parodied daily and hourly in all the communications media,
from newspapers to television. What is remarkable is the insensitiv-
ity of the men who create and publicize this image of woman, "an
image that perpetuates contempt for women by society and by
women for themselves." 28 The callous lack of consideration for the
The Prejudice Lingers On **% 323
feelings and dignity of one half the Amercian public on the part of
the broadcasters, writers, entertainers, and newsmen is approached
only by the incomprehensible insensitivity of adults who openly,
and in the presence of little girls, commiserate with the parents of a
baby girl, while congratulating the parents of a boy.
"The false image of women prevalent today in the mass media" 29
is insulting and degrading to women, whether or not such is its
conscious intention. Mrs. Virginia Knauer, the President's Adviser
on Consumer Affairs, was recently introduced in a television inter-
view as "a fifty-five-year-old grandmother" and was then asked by
the male interviewer if 'anybody at tne White House listened to
her!" Just imagine that the interviewee had been Henry A. Kis-
singer or Robert H. Finch, or any other of the President's male
advisers. Would he have been identified as a fifty-five-year-old
grandfather and then rudely asked if anybody at the White House
listened to him? Why is a woman's grandparenthood newsworthy
and interesting while a man's is not? And why do male interviewers
feel free to insult women officials and treat them with less respect
than men officials? When Betty Furness became the first Adviser
on Consumer Affairs, the news commentators branded the appoint-
ment as "window-dressing." Why?
It appears that any woman who exposes herself to an interview
with a male newsman takes a great risk of having her dignity af-
fronted, if not her very motives questioned. Even Senator Margaret
Chase Smith is not immune from the patronizing jibes, veiled in-
sults, and implied contempt of some male interviewers. And why
do they nearly always call her "Mrs." Smith, while all male Sena-
tors are correctly addressed as "Senator"?
The news broadcasts rarely miss a chance to humble and belittle
women, from female jockeys to visiting foreign officials. Yet tele-
vision commercials and entertainment programs are even more
offensive. Women in commercials are invariably either sex objects
themselves or are engaged in sex-worshiping some condescending
male. The TV-commercial wife, like the "good little Maxwell
housewife," is invariably a cringing, husband-dominated, brainless
sap. The most revolting example of this is embodied in the com-
mercial for some deodorant, in which the depraved little wife, who
wishes only to tell her husband that he has body odor, simpers and
squirms, and giggles timorously, assuring him whimperingly, "I'm
324 $•» THE FIRST SEX
your wife. I love you. I'm on your side!1* Is she afraid he'll haul
off and belt her one? It would seem so; but perhaps submissiveness,
debasement, and abject humility on her part will soften the blow?
In entertainment programs and in television drama "the woman
is always subservient to the male. She is never portrayed as a serious
partner or a breadwinner. TV tends to demote women." 30 Cretins,
albinos, and mongoloids must be treated with respect by the tele-
vision scriptwriter—but not so the American woman. She may be
portrayed with impunity as stupid, grasping, selfish, fiendish, scat-
terbrained, unreliable, ignorant, irritating, and ridiculous—and no
one says a word. Women are supposed to take it all like good sports
•—or like outsiders whose feelings are of no account.
On those serials purportedly dealing with the future, women, if
they have any place at all, are invariably menials, performing slavish
services for the all-important males. In Lost in Space, still being
run and rerun and reviewed by ever renewed generations of chil-
dren, the mythical difference between boys and girls is exaggerated
to laughable proportions.
The office secretary, in motion pictures as well as on television,
is portrayed as the servant of her boss—required to make and serve
his coffee, administer, his pills, attend to his personal shopping,
brush his clothes, and even to straighten his tie and put his hat on
his head. And through it all she is depicted as abjectly worshiping
him and gratefully accepting the most condescending and incon-
siderate treatment from him. That this is a faithful representation
of the role and duties of the modern American female secretary
and is even part of her training in business school is attested by
the group of disillusioned British secretaries who recently left our
shores, indignant at the expectation that they would double as
valet, nursemaid, and butler to the American executive.
Even more devastating to feminine pride and dignity than the
image of herself as an idiot and a menial is the stereotype of young
women as "sex kittens" or "playboy bunnies," a demotion even
from the nineteenth-century image of young women as household
pets and playthings. Men seem to believe that women like to be
thought of as sex objects, that they like to be ogled, mauled,
patted, grabbed, pinched, and whistled at. Too many women pre-
tend that this is true, that they are flattered to be whistled at by
truck drivers. But this, like so many pretenses of women, is a lie
The Prejudice Lingers On «#§ 325
In the eyes of man there are two kinds of women: the sex
object, and "the other." The class of the sex object includes wife,
mother, mistress, and the mass of nubile young women who may
become wife, mother, or mistress. For this class of women men have
a tolerance that conceals even from themselves the underlying fear
and hatred that all men feel for all women.
"The other," the class of the non-sex-object, includes all un-
married women over forty, nearly all intellectual women, and
above all, all women who are not primarily male-oriented. To the
masculist these women have no human rights, no reason for exist-
ence. They are expendable. They are allowed to exist only if they
accept their inferiority in a "womanly" way, asking nothing of life,
expecting neither justice nor consideration, and proclaiming the
shame in their sex that Saint Clement of Alexandria said all women
should feel. "Every woman," said this pillar of the early church,
"should be overwhelmed with shame at the thought that she is a
woman."
And this Clementine philosophy has dominated the thought of
Western society for nearly two thousand years. The belief is in-
nerent in every phase of modern culture, in our customs, our atti-
tudes, our educational values, in our very laws. In spite of the
327
328 $•> T H E FIRST SEX
various student movements, white girls complain that they are as-
signed by the white boys to subordinate jobs such as addressing
envelopes, making coffee, and serving as sex conveniences.
It is thus obvious that in Western society, at least, the cult of the
inferiority of women is a product of our Judeo-Christian teaching
and is neither natural nor innate in the human species. As a mat-
ter of fact, it is the very reverse of nature's usual arrangement. In
nature, the female is the all-important pillar that supports life, the
male merely the ornament, the "afterthought," the expendable
sexual adjunct. Observe with what care the female of all species
is protected and sheltered and preserved by nature. It is the female,
according to naturalists, biologists, and human geneticists, who
is given the protective covering, the camouflaged plumage, the
reserve food supply, the more efficient metabolism, the more spe-
cialized organs, the greater resistance to disease, the built-in im-
munity to certain specific ailments, the extra X chromosome, the
more convoluted brain, the stronger heart, the longer life.2 In
nature's plan the male is but a "glorified gonad." 3 The female
is the species.
If the human race is unhappy today, as all modern philosophers
agree that it is, it is only because it is uncomfortable in the mirror-
image society man has made—the topsy-turvy world in which na-
ture's supporting pillar is forced to serve as the cornice of the
architrave, while the cornice struggles to support the building.
The fact is that men need women more than women need men;
and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman depend-
ent upon him economically as the only method open to him of mak-
ing himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would
not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries
a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive. For
fifteen hundred years Western man has rationalized his enslave-
ment of woman on the grounds of her "sexual role," the fact that,
as Roy Wilkins said recently, "God made her that way," that God
himself handicapped her by assigning to her the childbearing func-
tion. This widespread belief, shared by modern masculists of both
sexes, is based on two false premises: first, that all women must be
and will be mothers; and second, that feminine functions are neces-
sarily handicapping and crippling.
33O !»• THE FIRST SEX
attempt to denigrate and brush under the rug the whole business
and, with it, woman herself.
Such denial of personhood creates strain and tension in its vic-
tims and leads inevitably to feelings of insecurity. Primitive people,
as well as apes and monkeys, reared in an atmosphere of constant
tension also develop menstrual and childbearing difficulties that
are unknown to them in their natural habitats. When women
are once again treated and valued as persons and not as sex ob-
jects, when their selfhood and dignity are given the same considera-
tion as are man's today, their "female handicaps" will disappear.
Certainly Tomyris, Hiera, Artimisia, Camilla, Veled.a, Boadicea,
Cartismandua, and Joan of Arc were not handicapped by their fem-
ininity in the most masculine of pursuits, that of war. To the an-
cients, feminine valor and heroism were not considered anomalous
or freakish. Nor did they look upon creative and intellectual women
of the breed of Aspasia, Sappho,5 Corinna, and Nausicaa as anoma-
lies. It is only in modern times that Western man has placed the
"biological barrier" in woman's way. It was only after "the Church
had gained a stranglehold . . . that woman, debarred from the
priesthood and despised as the intellectual inferiors of their fathers
and brothers, could nurse no aspirations beyond a husband, many
children, and a Christian death." 6 Woman must be a sex object, a
breeder, a mother, and no more because, in the dogma of the Chris-
tian Church, God made her that way.
The pagan philosopher Plato, over two thousand years ago,
wrote: "The difference in the sexes consists only in women bearing
children and men begetting them, and this does not prove that a
woman differs from man in other respects." 7 In Plato's time and
for long before in enlightened Greece, boys and girls received iden-
tical educations and prepared for identical lives of the mind.
In denial of all the aspersions on women's intelligence, it has
long been observed that girl children are mentally quicker than
boys, that they walk and talk earlier in life, learn to read and write
sooner, and mature earlier. So obvious is this that today there is
serious discussion in education circles of starting boys a year or two
later in school so that they will not be outstripped by the girls. In
the nineteenth century this very precocity of girls was held against
them as constituting proof of their inferiority: ape babies and the
offspring of African savages, went the argument, matured earlier
33? §*> THE FIRST SEX
than white children; and white human beings were certainly more
intelligent than apes and African savages; ergo, male human beings
were more intelligent than their feminine opposites.
When it was later found, after girls were again allowed to go to
school with their brothers, that this female precocity persisted
through all the school years, it was explained that girl students only
seemed smarter than boys because, being smaller and manually
more dexterous, they were better at reading and writing, and being
more "docile" and submissive, they were better students. But this
early superiority, parents and educators were assured, would vanish
in college, where the "deeper" intellect of the boys would reveal
itself. This worked fine through all the years when only the boys
went to college. Everybody was convinced that even though sonny
was a blockhead at sixteen compared to sister at fourteen, as soon
as sonny got to college and sister dropped out of competition, sonny
would come into his own.
Then, after the First World War, when sister also was allowed
to go to college, mirabile dictu, sister was still smarter than sonny
even in college. So now, how to explain that? After a few trial bal-
loons, psychologists and educators came up with an answer: girls
were better students in college because, having no ambition (!),
they were willing to apply themselves to all their subjects equally.
But just wait, they said, until graduate school. Then male intelli-
gence and male aptitude for abstract thought would manifest them-
selves. We now bolster this belief by making it as difficult as possi-
ble for girls to go on to graduate school and advanced degrees
—except in home economics and social work, where there is little
male competition.
Yet a study published by the National Manpower Council of
Columbia University in 1967 says, "Women . . . account for three
out of five [college students] with ability to graduate, but do not."
Of the high ability group, of whom women constitute nearly sixty
percent, only one woman out of three hundred, or three-tenths of
one percent, goes on to acquire, an advanced degree. Even before
this point, however, seventy-five percent of the brainy women have
been left behind at the high school gate. The same study revealed
that a higher percentage of girls than of boys capable of college
work graduate from high school each year. "But of this [gifted]
group, one-half of the boys and only one-quarter of the girls enter
Woman in the Aquarian Age «•§ 333
Woman, on the other hand, is the ally of nature, and her instinct
is to tend, to nurture, to encourage healthy growth, and to preserve
ecological balance. She is the natural leader of society and of civili-
zation, and the usurpation of her primeval authority by man has
resulted in the uncoordinated chaos that is leading the human race
inexorably back to barbarism.
Buckminster Fuller, on a television broadcast in 1968, shocked
his studio audience into nervous giggles when he suggested that
society might be saved by restoring women to their age-old leader-
ship in government while men confine themselves to their gadgetry
and games. This is excellent advice, and its heeding may constitute
the last hope for mankind. Only masculine ego, an acquired char-
acteristic and not an innate one, stands in the way of a decent so-
ciety, dedicated to humanitarianism and characterized by the fem-
inine virtues of selflessness, compassion, and empathy.
When man became enamored of his own image, the masculine
defects of arrogance, conceit, pugnacity, and selfishness were trans-
muted into virtues by the alchemy of his own self-love; while their
opposites, humility, gentleness, patience, concern, were debased
into faults characteristic of the "weaker" sex.
When man first resolved to exalt the peculiarities of his own sex,
muscularity and spiritual immaturity, he adopted the policy that
reality meant tangibility and that what could not be seen or
touched did not exist. "Anything that was imperceptible . . . to
his senses was declared a doubtful or fictitious pseudo-value," as
Pitirim Sorokin says.13 By discrediting the mystic power of woman
man cut himself off from.the higher things, the "eternal verities"
the sense of which had distinguished him from the lower animals.
By crushing every manifestation of supersensory or extrasensory
truth and worshiping only sensate matter, man made of himself a
mere biological organism and denied to himself the divine ray
that once upon a time woman had revealed to him. Woman as
magician, she who had allowed him to see himself with a rudimen-
tary halo and a faint aura of immortality, now had to be declared of
no value.
Her animal body, however, remained a necessary adjunct to the
new physical man, and he set about to remold her from his own
base material into a mere biological organism like himself—a fit
mate, a help "meet" for him—his biological complement. Through
Woman in the Aquarian Age <•§ 337
under the just guidance of a beneficent deity and where laws are
enforced by persuasion and goodwill rather than by force and co-
ercion.
In Critias, Plato says that the goddess Athene "tended us human
beings as a shepherd tends her sheep—not with blows or bodily
force but by the rudder of persuasion. Thus did she guide her mor-
tal creation." ir> During the golden and silver ages of goddess-rule,
writes Hesiod, "men lived without cares, never growing old or
weary, dancing and laughing much; death to them was no more ter-
rible than sleep." Contrarily, after the demise of the goddess, "the
optimistic conception of the next world, in which [mankind] had
believed in resurrection in the bosom of the Great Goddess, gave
way to a gloomy pessimism. . . . With the retreat of the primitive
maternal world and the appearance of new male gods, the world
grew ugly. . . ." 1<J
The rot of masculist materialism has indeed permeated all spheres
of twentieth-century life and now attacks its very core. The only
remedy for the invading and consuming rot is a return to the values
of the matriarchates, and the rediscovery of the nonmaterial uni-
verse that had so humanizing an influence on the awakening minds
of our ancestors. Physicists of many nations are today gaining a
new understanding of this invisible world as they discover almost
daily some new phenomenon of nature that cannot be explained by
our accepted laws of physics. There is, apparently, a physics of the
supernatural whose laws modern man has been totally unaware of
and to which he is only now becoming attuned.
It was the knowledge of this other world, possessed by the women
of old and utterly discredited by later materialistic man, that gave
early woman her power over man.
INTRODUCTION
1. The cognitive minority is a group of people whose view of the world differs
significantly from the one generally taken for granted in its society. It is this
minority, considered offbeat by its contemporaries, that nearly always foresees
the true knowledge of the future. The term "knowledge" always refers to what
is taken to be or is believed to be "knowledge." The use of the term is strictly
neutral on the question of whether socially held knowledge is true or false. It
represents only that which has always been believed or that which it is socially
acceptable to believe. True knowledge is derived from a body of facts that will
not go away, no matter how these facts may be interpreted or misinterpreted by
the establishment. True knowledge is always a generation or two ahead of the
disseminators of what is known as knowledge—that is, socially accepted knowl-
edge.—With acknowledgment to Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (New
York, Doubleday, 1969).
2. Sylvain Bailly, A History of Ancient and Modern Astronomy (1776), as quoted
in Vol. II Alexander Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, Universal History, (Boston,
Jordan & Wiley, 1846), p. 356.
g. Geoffrey Ashe, The Quest for Arthur's Britain (New York, Praeger, 1969), pp.
235. .«3&
4. R. J. Cruikshank, Charles Dickens and Early Victorian England (London, Pit-
man, 1949), p. 150.
5. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York, Norton, 1967), p. 136.
6. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (Manchester, England, Labour Press,
1896), p. 28.
7. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York, Brentano's, 1930), pp.
168-69.
8. Anne Biezanek, All Things New (New York, Harper and Row, 1964), p. 98.
12. As quoted in Theodor Reik, Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, Farrar, 1964),
p. 70.
13. Peter N. Buck, Vikings of the Pacific (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
*959)> P- 73-
14. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York, Grosset & Dunlop, 1963), p. 342. The
genetic symbol for the female— $ —is the ancient symbol for the moon-goddess—
her cross surmounted by the full moon.
15. Hesiod, Works and Days, as quoted in Plato, Republic, in The Works of Plato,
trans, by Benjamin Jowett, Bk. V (New York, Tudor, n.d.), p. 205.
16. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II (New York,
Hurst, n.d.), p. 297; Harold Mattingly, Christianity in the Roman Empire (New
York, Norton, 1967), p. 72.
17. Shklovskii and Sagan, op. cit., pp. 459-60.
18. Ibid., p. 461. Since Venus is a new planet, as Immanuel Velikovsky theorized
(Worlds in Collision) and as recent Venus probes seem to indicate, and had
not yet appeared in the sky in Sumerian times, it is possible that the ninth
planet was Hypotheticus, the lost planet that once orbited our sun just beyond
the orbit of Mars and which is now represented by the thousands of planetoids,
or asteroids, that pursue the same orbit today. (See Dandridge Cole, Islands in
Space. Philadelphia, Chilton Books, 1964.) It is possible, as Velikovsky writes,
that this hypothetical planet was destroyed by the comet Venus on its way
to its present position and its metamorphosis into planethood. This comet may
have struck earth, also, in its passage through space, thus causing the shifting
of earth's axis that resulted in the world catastrophe of historical times. It
could well have caused, too, the slowing down of the earth's rotation on its
axis as well as of its revolution around the sun, thus accounting for the shorter
day and shorter year of Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Mexican
(Toltec and Mayan) calendars. It is impossible that the Sumerians and Egyp-
tians, at any rate, could have been wrong in their measurement of diurnal and
solar time, knowledgeable as they were in astronomy and other sciences that
modern man is just beginning to learn.
19. Herodotus,8 The Histories, Bk. VII, trans, by George Rawlinson (New York, Tudor,
1944). P- 3 9-
so. Ibid., p. 214.
Si. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (London, Penguin, 1965),
p. 65.
28. Ibid.
23. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England (London, Allen and Unwin, 1952), p.
344-
24. Knight, op. cit., p. 34.
25. Ibid. Similar mines were discovered in the eighteenth century in Krasnoyarsk,
Siberia, by a team of "antiquarians" commissioned by the Empress Catherine
the Great of Russia. "There were ancient mines discovered which had been
wrought in some former period, of which there is no account or tradition. Near
Krasnoyarsk they found ornaments of copper and gold; some of them adorned
and embossed with figures of exquisite workmanship. There is a curious cir-
cumstance which evidences the prodigious antiquity of these mines. The props
are now petrified, and this petrifaction contains gold. So much time has there-
fore elapsed since these props were erected that nature has gone through the
tedious process of forming metals; and the same course of time has entirely an-
nihilated every vestige of the towns and houses in which these miners must have
dwelt, for we must suppose they dwelt in towns. But of such towns and edifices
not a trace remains." (Author's italics.)—Alexander Tytler, Lord Woodhouse-
Jee, Universal History, Vol. II (Boston, Jordan & Wiley, 1846), p. 360.
This puzzling lack of dwelling places is reminiscent of the ancient mines and
megalithic fortlike structure at Zimbabwe in Rhodesia, where the lack of dwellings
Notes «#§ 345
has led archeologists to conclude that the mysterious gold miners and builders of
ancient Zimbabwe were visitors and not inhabitants of the country in which they
mined for gold. Where they came from, or when, and whither they carried the
gold they mined, remains a mystery, as does the identity of the ancient miners of
Krasnoyarsk and of Thrace.
26. Gibbon, op. cit., p. 312.
87. Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana, trans, by J. S. Phillimore, Vol. II, Bk. 8 (Lon-
don, Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 233.
28. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, rev. ed. (New York, Norton,
1966), p. 224.
29. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. I (New York, Braziller, 1957), p. 113.
30. "Druidism," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.
31. Porphyry, "The Life of Pythagoras," in Moses Hadas, ed., Heroes and Gods
(London, Routledge, 1965), pp. 105-28,
32. Ibid., p. 112.
33. Geoffrey of Monmouth, op. cit., p. 65.
34. Robert Graves, On Poetry (New York, Doubleday, 1969), p. 13.
35. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, as quoted in Hadas, op. cit., p. 39.
36. Not only were Morgan le Fay, Morrigan, and Morgana Celtic fairy queens, but
Queen Medb or Mav, "the greatest personality of the Irish Heroic Age," as Dil-
lon and Chadwick dub her, after her quite natural death became a fairy queen
of the underworld—the fairy queen, Queen Mab, in fact. Celtic heroes from
Cuchulain to Arthur had affairs with fairy women, most of them to their sorrow
but some to their great benefit. As an example of the latter, Marie of France
tells a beautiful lay of a fairy queen who greatly assists her mortal lover, Sir
Graelent of Brittany. (See The Lays of Marie de France, trans, by Eugene Mason.
London, Dent, 1911, pp. 148-62.)
37. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, Farrar, 1948), p. 115. Apollonius
Rhodius said that these were the oaks that Orpheus' music had caused to dance
down from the Pierian Mount.
38. Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (New York, University Books, 1968), p.
112.
39. Andre Parrot, Nineveh and the Old Testament (New York, Philosophical Li-
brary, 1955), p. 24.
40. Spence, op. cit., p. 185.
41. A. B. Cook, Zeus, as quoted in Guthrie, op. cit., p. 147, n. 38.
42. Guthrie, op. cit., p. 115.
43. Leonard Cottrell, Realms of Gold (New York, New York Graphic Society, 1963),
p. 163.
44. Guthrie, op. cit., p. 115.
45. Spence, op. cit., p. 42.
46. Ibid., p. 182.
47. Ibid., p. 183.
48. U. Bahadir Alkim, Anatolia I, trans, by James Hogarth (New York, World,
1968), p. 65.'
49. Spence, op. cit., p. 183.
5. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, Harper, 1956), p. 55.
6. Graves, op. cit., p. 36.
7. Terence G. E. Powell, The Celts (New York, Pracger, 1958), pp. 162, 177-78. This
fact renders the etymology of "pixie," the little dark men of faerie, from "Picts"
ludicrous and impossible. The Celts were large and blond.
8. Stuart Piggott, ed., The Dawn of Civilization (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1961),
p. 224.
g. Graves, op. cit., p. 36.
10. The people of the Golden Age at the time of the patriarchal Zeus revolution in
Thrace had ascended to the upper world and had become minor gods and god-
desses; whereas the people of the Silver and Bronze ages were consigned by the
Iron Age Dorians to Hades—all on account of "their refusal to pay due honor
to Zeus and his Olympians."—Erwin Rohde, Psyche, Vol. I, trans, by W. B. Hillis
(New York, Harper, 1966), p. 73.
11. Jane Ellen Harrison, "Themis," in her Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Reli-
gion and Themis (New Hyde Park, New York, University Books, 1962), p. 498.
12. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York, Grosset & Dunlop, 1963), p. 95. In
the third century A.D. another woman, Julia Soemias, was to sit in the Roman
Senate and "was placed by the side of the consuls, and subscribed as a regular
member the decrees of the legislative assembly."—Edward Gibbon, The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I (New York, Hurst, n.d.), p. 148.
13. Virgil, "Eclogue IV," in Poems of Virgil, trans, by James Rhoades (Oxford, Eng-
land, Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 401-2.
14. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans, by H. A. J. Munro (London, Bell, 1929),
pp. 1-2.
15. H. J. Massingham, Downland Man (New York, Doran, 1936), p. 351.
16. James Breasted, The History of Egypt (New York, Scribner's, 1912), pp. 135, 17.
17. Arthur Evans, as quoted in Massingham, op. cit., p. 101.
18. Leonard Cottrell, The Land of Shinar (London, Souvenir Press, 1965), pp. 123, 126.
19. Leonard Woolley, A Forgotten Kingdom (London, Penguin, 1953), p. 116.
20. G. Ernest Wright, Shechem (London, Duckworth, 1965), p. 17.
21. Massingham, op. cit., p. 217 ff.
22. August Thebaud, Ireland Past and Present (New York, Collier, 1878), p. 71.
23. Ibid., p. 68.
24. G. Eliot Smith, as quoted in Massingham, op. cit., p. 352.
25. E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (New York, Praeger, 1959), p. 250.
26. Theodor Reik, Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, Farrar, 1964), p. 76.
27. Robert Aron, The God of the Beginnings (New York, Morrow, 1966), pp. 10-11.
28. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York, Ktav, 1968).
29. E. O. James, The Ancient Gods (New York, Putnam's, i960), p. 91.
30. Reik, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
31. James, The Ancient Gods, op, cit., pp. 91-92.
32. Ibid., p. 40. Such was the case in Greece, Egypt, Phrygia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine,
and Canaan.
33. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York, Knopf, 1926).
34. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1935), p. 59.
35. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (Manchester, England, Labour Press,
1896), p. 28
36. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess, op. cit., p. 260.
37. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, Farrar, 1948), p. 391,
38. Paul Misraki, Les Extraterrestress (Paris, Plon, 1962).
39. Barry H. Downing, The Bible and Flying Saucers (Philadelphia, Lippincott,
1968).
40. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans, by W. Adlington (London, Heinemann, 1915),
PP- 545-47-
41. Ibid, p. 551.
Notes •<•§ 347
39. As quoted in Leonard Cottrell, The Land of Shinar (London, Souvenir Press,
1965), p. 116.
40. Ibid., p. 113.
41. Jacques Heurgeon, Daily Life of the Etruscans, trans, by James Kirkup (New
York, Macmillan, 1964), pp. 94, 95.
42. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk, op. cit.t p. 207.
43. Stone, op. cit., p. 108.
44. Bergounioux, op. cit., p. 57.
45. G. E. Mylonas, Ancient Mycenae (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957),
pp. 147-48.
46. Heurgeon, op. cit., p. 95.
47. Terence G. F. Powell, The Celts (New York, Praeger, 1958), p. 72.
48. Ibid., pp. 72-73.
49. Ibid.
50. "Plutarch, in his Defectu Oraculorum, mentions golden cups as part of the
ritual furniture of the second-century (AJ>.) druids of Ireland."—John A. Mac-
Culloch, "Celtic Mythology," in Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of All Races, Vol.
Ill (New York, Cooper Square, 1964), p. 15.
51. Bergounioux, op. cit., p. 50.
52. Ibid.
53. Alkim, op. cit., p. 68.
54. As quoted in H. J. Massingham, Downland Man (New York, Doran, 1936), p. 313.
16. James G. Fraser, The Golden Bough (New York, Macmillan, 1958).
17. Herodotus, op. cit., Bk. II, p. 115.
18. Ibid.
19. John Davenport, Curiositates Eroticae Physiologiae (London, privately printed,
1875), p. 80.
20. Goldberg, op. cit., p. 69.
21. Theodor Reik, The Creation of Woman (New York, Braziller, i960), p. 152 n.
22. Newsweek, 72 (17), 72 (Oct. 21, 1968).
23. As quoted in Davenport, op. cit., p. 82.
24. Davenport, op. cit., p. 85.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 84.
27. Pierre Grimal, In Search of Ancient Italy, trans, by P. D. Cummins (London,
Evans, 1964), p. 236.
s8. Ibid., p. 237.
29. T. Bell, Kalogynomia (London, Stockdale, 1821), p. 71.
30. Ibid.
3 1 . Ibid.
32. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans, by Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 89.
33. Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans, by William P. Dickson, rev.
ed., Vol. I (New York, Scribner's, 1903), p. 21.
34. Ibid., p. 122.
35. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. I (New York, Braziller, 1957), p. 16.
36. Wright, op. cit., p. 35.
37. Herodotus, op. cit., Bk. II, p. 114.
38. Wright, op. cit., p. 38.
39. Herodotus, op. cit., Bk. II, p. 93.
40. Goldberg, op. cit., p. 123.
41. Ibid.
42. Theodor Reik, Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, Farrar, 1964), p. 76.
43. Bachofen, op. cit., p. 89.
44. George Rawlinson, Ancient Egypt (New York, Putnam's, 1887), p. 92.
45. Bachofen, op. cit., p. 94.
46. Ibid., pp. 104-5.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. The pre-Victorians, however, knew that the Sphinx was female, for the first edi-
tion of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771, describes the great
Sphinx as "a monfter . . . with the head and breaft of a woman, the claws of
a lion, and the reft of the body like a dog."
CHAPTER 7—Mother-Right
1. Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis
(New Hyde Park, New York, 1962), p. 495. Mary Daly, The Church and the Sec-
ond Sex (New York, Harper, 1968), p. 139.
2. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, Bantam, 1963), pp. 35-36.
3. "Constantine," in Charles G. Herberman, ed., Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910 ed.
So sacred had fetal life become among the Christians by the tenth century, that
in the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (973-1024) a woman who
miscarried, whether by design or by atcident, was condemned to death at the
stake. (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. II.
New York, Hafner, 1949, p. 60.) The justification for this atrocity was that the
Notes ««§ 351
sex of the fetus could not be determined before birth, whereas the sex of the
mother was indubitably inferiorly female. And an unformed male fetus was, of
course, more valuable than a living woman. A recent article in Look magazine
(November 4, 1969) quotes a woman whose life was risked by the medical profes-
sion in order that her fetus might live as asking why the doctors considered the
fetus' life "more important than mine." Why, indeed.
4. Cf. Henry Hallam, A View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages, Vol.
I (New York, Appleton, 1901), pp. 84-85.
5. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, Farrar, 1948), p. xii.
6. Doris Faber, The Mothers of the American Presidents (New York, New American
Library, 1968), p. xiii. Sigmund Freud ("A man who has been the favorite of
his mother retains for life a confidence of success that often leads to real suc-
cess") Collected Works, Vol. IV. London, Hogarth Press, 1952, p. 367.
7. Ibid., p. xv.
8. Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis
(New Hyde Park, New York, University Books, 1962), p. 495.
9. Ibid., p. 497.
10. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, trans, by Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 80.
11. Ibid.,p. 81.
12. Sybille von Cles-Redin, The Realm of the Great Goddess (Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 53.
13. Bachofen, op. cit., p. 79.
14. Theodor Reik, The Need To Be Loved (New York, Farrar, 1936), p. 149.
15. Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf (London, Spring Books, 1949?), n.200, pp. 218, 220.
16. Georg Simmel, as quoted in Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York,
Norton, 1967), p. 55;
17. Harrison, op. cit., p. 494.
18. John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1912), p. 490.
19. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. I (New
York, Hafner, 1949), p. 108.
20. Ashley Montagu, "The Natural Superiority of Women," in The Saturday Review
Treasury (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1957), p. 473.
21. Montesquieu, op. cit.
22. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. I (New York, Braziller, 1957), p. 12.
23. Ibid., p. 13.
24. Ibid.
25. Bachofen, op. cit., p. 141.
26. A. M. Hocart, Social Origins (London, Watts, 1954), p. 76.
27. That sister-brother marriages were an exclusively royal or upperclass prerogative
in the ancient civilization is indicated by the fact that in Polynesia today "sister-
brother marriages are permitted only among the few aristocratic families."—
Peter H. Buck, Vikings of the Pacific (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959),
p. 264.
28. E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, Vol. II (London, Watts, 1930), p. 132.
29. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
1964), p. 292.
30. Ernst Curtius, The History of Greece, trans, by A. W. Ward, Vol. I (Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1871), p. 94.
31. Polybius, as quoted in Morgan, op. cit., p. 298.
32. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion (New York, Doubleday,
1955). P- " 5 -
33. Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, trans, by Samuel Putnam
(Baltimore, Maryland, Eugenics Publishing Co., 1935), p. 215.
34. Buck, op. cit., p. 309.
352 §•> T H E F I R S T SEX
35. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York, New American Library, 1964),
pp. 76-77.
36. As quoted in Bachofen, op. cit., p. 71.
37. Ibid.
38. Herodotus, The Histories, trans, by George Rawlinson, Bk. I (New York, Tudor,
»944)>P-36.
39. As quoted in P. L. Shinnie, Meroe (New York, Praeger, 1967), p. 46.
40. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 85.
41. Basil Davidson, Old Africa Rediscovered (London, Gollancz, 1959), p. 69.
42. Leonard Cottrell, The Land of Shinar (London, Souvenir Press, 1965), p. 113.
43. Immanuel Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos (New York, Doubleday*, 1952), chap. III.
44. James Henry Breasted, History of Egypt (New York, Scribner's, 1912), pp. 270,
269. Yet Breasted acknowledges (p. 266) that "the one valid title to the crown"
that Hatshepsut's father, Thutmose I, had was through his marriage to Queen
Ahmose, who was Hatshepsut's mother. Also, that later Thutmose III claimed
the throne solely by virtue of his marriage to his sister, Queen Hatshepsut,
daughter of Queen Ahmose. These facts certainly prove the fact of legal matri-
liny in Egypt, yet Breasted still calls Hatshepsut's wresting of power from her
brother-consort an "enormity."
45. George Rawlinson, Ancient Egypt (New York, Putnam's, 1887), p. 173. He also
calls her "one of the greatest of sovereigns" (p. 187).
46. Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York, Morrow, 1949), p. 103.
47. Livy, Roman History, trans, by J. H. Freese et al. (New York, Appleton, 1901),
p. 16.
48. Tacitus, Annals, trans, by A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb. (New York, Modern
Library, 1942), p. 186.
49. Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbe* de Brantdme, The Lives of Gallant Ladies (London,
Elek Books, 1961), p. 76.
50. Cottrell, op. cit., p. 162.
51. Hallam, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 37, 73, 108, 200.
52. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 285.
53. Ibid., p. 284.
54. Ibid., p. 285.
55. Tacitus, Agricola, trans, by A. J. Church (New York, Modern Library, 1942), p.
686.
56. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Philadelphia, Jewish Publica-
tions Society, 1909), p. 203.
57. Ibid., p. 287.
58. Ibid., p. 288.
59. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York; Grosset and Dunlap, 1963), p. 80.
60. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, Random, 1939), p. 78.
61. Demosthenes, as quoted in Morgan, op. cit., p. 296.
62. Joseph Gaer, The Lore of the New Testament (Boston, Little, Brown, 1952), p.
13.
63. Ibid.
4. The Aquarian Age, upon whose threshold we now stand, will be "inimical to
man," as Macrobius prophesied in the early days of the Piscean Age. The "new
morality" of the Aquarian youth of our day perhaps bespeaks a return to
matriarchal mores too long suppressed by the materialistic patriarchal values
that have prevailed for the past two thousand years in the Occidental world. The
Aquarian Age of the next two thousand years will seen an end to patriarchal
Christianity and a return to goddess worship and to the peaceful social progress
that distinguished the Taurian Age of four millennia ago.
5. The Grand Precession of the Equinox requires 26,000 years, slightly more than
2,000 years for each Zodiacal Age.
6. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans, by Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 80-81.
7. Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews (Philadelphia, Woodward, 1825),
p. 11.
8. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Philadelphia, Jewish Publi-
cations Society, 1909), p. 112.
9. Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf (London, Spring Books, 1949), p. 34.
10. Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (New York, Doubleday, 1955).
11. Eisler, op. cit., p. 33.
12. Ginzberg, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 166.
13. Eisler, op. cit., p. 29.
14. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. II (New
York, Hafner, 1949), p. 47. The concept that man was the rightful exploiter
and murderer of his fellow beasts was so new and revolutionary that the patri-
archal writers of the Old Testament felt it necessary to inject it as propaganda
into the first book of the Bible. This cruel canard is rivaled only by the myth
of Eve's disobedience in the lasting damage it has wrought, in the price it has
exacted in man's rape of nature/and in the inhumanity toward and exploitation
of the weak that has resulted from it.
15. Leonard Cottrell, The Land of Shinar (London, Souvenir Press, 1965), p. 101.
16. Ibid.
17. Leonard Woolley, A Forgotten Kingdom (London, Penguin, 1954), pp. 167, 112.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Herodotus, The Histories Bk I; trans, by George Rawlinson (Tudor, 1949), p. 93.
20. The Ramayana, trans, by Romesh Dutt (London, Dent, 1899).
21. As quoted in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (New
York, Norton, 1967).
22. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Hafner, 1947), pp. 7-9.
23. P. Donaldson, as quoted in Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New
York, Brentano's, 1920), p. 176.
24. Edouard Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. I (New York, McKay, 1913), p. 117.
25. H. J. Massingham, Downland Man (New York, Doran, 1936), p. 109.
26. C. F. Keary, The Dawn of History (New York, Scribner's, n.d.), p. 22.
27. Theodor Reik, Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, Farrar, 1964), p. 100.
28. Contrary to the impression gleaned from the Old Testament, the Canaanites
were a highly cultured people, from whom the less civilized Hebrews learned
much. "Their poetry had a high standard; their language, alphabet, style, and
rhythm were inherited by the Jews," as were their "ethos of social justice" and
their predilection for religious prophecy.—Immanuel Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos
(New York, Doubleday, 1952), p. 196.
"The traditions, culture, and religion of the Israelites are bound up inextri-
cably with the early Canaanites. The compilers of the Old Testament were fully
aware of this, hence their obsession to conceal their indebtedness.—Claude F. A.
Schaeffer, as quoted in Velikovsky, op. cit., p. 192.
The myth of the passage through the Red Sea, when the waters were rolled
back to allow the refugees to cross, is found in a Canaanite text of the fifteenth
354 $•* T H E F I R S T SEX
century B.C., at a time before the Exodus when the children of Israel were still
in bondage in Egypt.—R. Dussaud, as quoted in Velikovsky, op. cit., p. 190. The
foregoing extracts give some idea of the reliability of the Bible as history. Yet
historians until quite recently based historical world chronology on the Old
Testament!
29. Reik, op. cit., p. 101.
30. "The Enuma Elish," trans, by William Muss-Arnolt, in Assyrian and Babylonian
Literature (New York, Applcton, 1900), pp. 282-83.
31. Robert Graves, Adam's Rib (New York, Yoseloff, 1958), p. 12.
32. Theodor Reik, The Creation of Woman (New York, Braziller, i960), p. 59.
33. Reik, Pagan Rites in Judaism, op. cit., p. 69.
34. Graves, op. cit., p. 8.
35. Ibid.
36. According to an ancient Celtic poem, Eve was of the primeval race of Hermaph-
rodites, the self-perpetuating, bisexual females to whom Plato alludes in the
Symposium:
She was self-bearing,
The mixed burden of man-woman.
She brought forth Abel
And Cain, the solitary homicide.
—As quoted in Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, Farrar, 1948), p.
134-
37. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, Farrar, 1948), p. 215.
38. Edouard Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. I (New York, McKay, 1913), p, 251.
39. Graves, Adam's Rib, op. cit., p. 13.
40. Ibid.
41. Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language (New York, Holt, 1951), p. 234.
42. Ibid.
43. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Philadelphia, Jewish Publica-
tions Society, 1909), p. 97.
44. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York, Norton, 1967), p. 112.
45. Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, and Themis
(New Hyde Park, New York, University Books, 1961), p. 500.
46. Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief, the Evolution of a Myth (Madison, Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1947), p. 62.
47. Harrison, op. cit., p. 500.
48. Jacquetta Hawkes, The Dawn of the Gods (New York, Random, 1968), p. 285.
49. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (New York, Norton, 1966), p. 81.
50. Ibid., p. 80.
51. Ibid., p. 62.
52. Ibid.
53. A. J. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (London, privately printed, 1901).
54. Ibid., p. 16, 30.
55. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. I (New York, Braziller, 1957), p. 117.
56. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans, by Joseph Gavorse (New York,
Modern Library, 1931).
57. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, Tudor, n.d.), p. 652.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf (London, Spring Books, 1949). p. 200, n. 85.
5. Herodotus, The Histories, trans, by George Rawlinson, Bk, I (New York, Tudor,
1944), p. 74.
6. John Davenport, Curiositates Eroticae Physiologiae (London, privately printed,
1875), p. 36.
7. Crawley, op. cit., Vol. II, p . 69.
8. Ibid., p. 67.
9. As quoted in Crawley, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 74-75.
10. Crawley, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 72.
11. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, Jewish Publications So-
ciety, 1909), p. 166.
18, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. II (New
York, Hafner, 1949), p. 47, quoting Porphyry.
13. Eisler, op. cit., pp. 36-41.
14. As quoted in Franz Hartman, The Life of Paracelsus, sd ed. (London, Kegan
Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1841?), p. 78.
15. Eisler, op. cit., p. 200, n. 185.
16. As quoted in Davenport, op. cit., p. 35.
17. Eric John Dingwall, The Girdle of Chastity (London, Routledge, 1931), p. 3.
18. Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind (Baltimore, Maryland,
Eugenics Publishing Co., 1935), p. 117.
19. Dingwall, op. cit., pp. 108-10.
20. Ibid., pp. 109 n., n o n .
21. Ibid., p. 4.
22. Mantegazza, op. cit., pp. 118-19.
23. Dingwall, op. cit., p. 13.
24. As quoted in Dingwall, op. cit., p. 43.
25. Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbe de Brantdme, Les Vies des Dames Galantes (London,
Elek Books, 1961), p. 86.
26. Ibid., p. 87.
27. Ibid.
28. Dingwall, op. cit., pp. 118-19.
29. Ibid., p. 120.
30. "The belief that young pigeon's blood resembles the vaginal discharge is uni-
versal."—Richard Burton, Love, War, and Fancy (London, Kimber, 1964), p. 149.
31. Bran tome, op. cit., p. 244.
32. T. Bell, Kalogynomia (London, Stockdale, 1821), p. 196.
33. As quoted in Davenport, op. cit., p. 36, and translated by Davis.
34. Bell, op. cit., p. 197.
35. Ibid., p. 198.
36. Ibid., pp. 194-96.
37. Ibid., p. 230.
38. Ibid.
39. Davenport, op. ciif, p. 34.
40. Ibid., p. 35.
41. As quoted in Ibid.t p . 37,
42* Ibid., p. 32. (
43. Ibid., pp. 33-34.
44. Ibid.
3. Herodotus, The Histories, trans, by George Rawlinson, Bk. I (New York, Tudor,
n.d.), pp. 36-37.
4. Ibid., p. 37. It is interesting that the great stone works and engineering marvels
of historical Babylon, which were numbered among the seven wonders of the
ancient world, are credited to the genius of two women, the queens Nitocris and
Semiramis.
5. John M. Cook, The Greek in Ionia and the East (New York, Praeger, 1963), p. 62.
6. Herodotus, op. cit., p. 65.
7. Herodotus, op. cit., p. 64.
8. Ibid., Bk. VII, p. 385.
9. Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana, trans, by J, S. Phillimore, Vol. II (Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1912), p. 20.
10. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, trans, by Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 107 and 107 n.
11. As quoted in Immanuel Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos (New York, Doubleday, 1952),
p. 200,
12. Herodotus, op. cit., Bk. I, p. 61.
13. Virgil, Aeneid, trans, by James Rhoades, Bk. VII (London, Oxford University
Press, 1921), lines 801-17, p. 178.
14; Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans, by William P. Dick son, Vol. I
(New York, Scribner's, 1903), p. 422m
15. Pierre Grimal, In Search of Ancient Italy, trans, by P. D. Cummins (London,
Evans, 1964), pp. 195-96.
16. Ibid., p. 164.
17. Ibid., p. 163.
18. Livy, Roman History, trans, by J. H. Freese, A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb
(New York, Appleton, 1901), p. 16.
19. Tacitus, Annals 64, in Complete Works of Tacitus, trans, by A. J. Church and
W. J. Brodribb (New York, Modern Library, 1942), p. 182. Cf. Virgil, op cit.,
Bk. VII, lines 712-13, p. 175.
17. Plato, Republic, trans, by W. H. D. Rouse (New York, New American Library,
1956), p. 253.
18. Plato, Republic, in The Works of Plato, trans, by Benjamin Jowett (New York,
Tudor, n.d.), p. 182.
19. Plutarch, The Life of Pericles, trans, by John Dryden (New York, Modern Li-
brary, n.d.), pp. 200-1.
20. Benson, op. cit., pp. 57-58, quoting Athenaeus, who quotes Herodicus the Cra-
tetian.
21. Plutarch, The Life of Alcibiades, trans, by John Dryden (New York, Modern Li-
brary, n.d.), p. 238. "Even as she, Hipparete, stood there before the court, her
husband Alcibiades picked her up in his arms and carried her away. He just
picked her up, with a kiss to stop the mouth that was about to recount his
naughty ways, and ran off with her. She loved him, and knew he loved her, and
her freedom was dust and ashes in her mouth compared to his real presence. So
she lived with him the rest of her life."—Benson, op. cit., p. 108.
22. As quoted in Edouard Schure, The Great Initiates, trans, by Fred Rothwell, Vol.
II (New York, McKay, 1913), p. 92.
23. Plutarch, The Life of Lycurgus, trans, by John Dryden (New York, Modern Li-
brary, n.d.), p. 60.
24. Schure, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 156.
25. Hawkes, op. cit., p. 285.
26. Livy, Roman History, trans, by J. H. Freese, A. J. Church, and W. J. Brodribb
(New York, Appleton, 1901), p. 67.
27. Jacques Heurgeon, Daily Life of the Etruscans, trans, by James Kirkup (New
York, Macmillan, 1964), p. 96.
28. J. A. Cramer, A Geographical and Historical Description of Ancient Italy, Vol. I
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1825), p. 153.
29. Heurgeon, op. cit., p. 86.
30. Livy, op. cit., p. 57.
31. Heurgeon, op. cit., p. 87.
32. Bloch, op. cit., p. 58.
33. Heurgeon, op. cit., pp. 95, 96.
34. Tacitus, Annals 2:22, in Complete Works of Tacitus, trans, by A. J. Church and
W. J. Brodribb (New York, Modern Library, 1942), p. 157.
35. Livy, op. cit., p. 16.
36. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion (New York, Doubleday, 1955),
p. 225.
37. Tacitus, Annals 4:64, op. cit., p. 182.
38. Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick, The Celtic Realms (New York, New American
Library, 1967), p. 153.
39. Juvenal, Satires VI: 246, as quoted in Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient
Rome, trans, by E. O. Lorimer (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1940), p. 92.
40. Martial, Epigrams XI:53, as quoted in Carcopino, op. cit., p. 91.
41. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 22.
42. Ibid., p. 21.
43. Ibid.
44. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 60.
45. Plutarch, The Life of Alcibiades, op. cit., p. 238.
46. Juvenal, Satires VI: 224, as quoted in Carcopino, op. cit., p. 99.
47. P. Donaldson, as quoted in Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New
York, Brantano, 1920), pp. 175-76.
48. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II (New York,
Hurst, n.d.), p. 298. See also Harold Mattingly, Christianity in the Roman Em-
pire (New York, Norton, 1967), p. 75.
49. James Cleugh, Love Locked Out (New York, Crown, 1963), p. 9.
50. Paul was not only an epileptic all his life but, worse, he was a leper, according
Notes ^ 359
68. As quoted in Lionel Smithett Lewis, Glastonbury, the Mother of Saints, A.D. 37-
1539, 2d ed. (London, Mowbray, 1927), p. xv.
69. As quoted in Ibid., p. 77.
70. John Edward Lloyd, "The English Settlement," in Walter Hutchinson, ed.,
Hutchinson's Early History of the British Nations (London, Hutchinson, 1940),
pp. 97-124.
71. Herodotus, op. cit., p. 222.
72. Graves, The White Goddess, op. cit., p. 249.
73. Powell, op. cit., p. 120.
74. Graves, The White Goddess, op. cit., p. 249.
75. Herodotus, op. cit., p. 37.
76. Graves, The White Goddess, op. cit., pp. 249-50.
77. See Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of All Races, Vol. I l l (New York, Cooper
Square, 1964), p. 15.
78. See James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York, McGraw-
Hill, 1965), p. 93, illustration.
79. "The Grail was a genuine Celtic myth, with its roots in the mysteries of Druid-
ism."—Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (New Hyde
Park, New York, University Books, 1967), p. 603.
80. The Mabinogion, trans, by Charlotte Guest (London, Dent, 1906), p. 37.
81. See Chapter 4, "Archeology Speaks."
82. James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York, McGraw-Hill,
^S). P- 77-
10. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. II (New
York, Hafner, 1949), p. 45.
n . Andre Gide, Theseus, trans, by John Russell (New York, Vintage Books, 1958),
P-79-
12. Graves, On Poetry, op. cit., p. 431.
13. G. G. Coulton, ed., Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I (New York, Macmillan,
1910), p. 232 n.
14. Rousseau, op. cit., p. 117,
15. As quoted in Harold Mattingly, Christianity in the Roman Empire (New York,
Norton, 1967), p. 72.
16. As quoted in Mattingly, Ibid., p. 74.
17. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York, Grosset, 1963), p. 429.
18. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York, Random, 1931), pp.
19. Philippa of Hainaut, the much-beloved consort of King Edward III of England,
with her infant son Edward, the Black Prince, at her breast, is said to have been
the model for most of the sculptures and paintings of the Madonna and Child
after the twelfth century throughout Europe.
20. Joseph Gaer, The Lore of the New Testament (Boston, Little, Brown, 1952),
pp. 260-61.
21. Lionel Smithett Lewis, Glastonbury the Mother of Saints, A.D. 37-1539, 2d ed. (Lon-
don, Mowbray, 1927), p. 74. In support of this tradition, Cardinal Baronius found
an ancient manuscript in the Vatican Library which tells of Joseph, Lazarus,
Mary, Martha, and others unnamed sailing in an open boat to Marseilles and
landing there in 35 \.u.—Ibid., p. 2.
22. William of Malmesbury quotes Freculphus, bishop of Lisieux in the ninth cen-
tury, as having recorded that Philip the Apostle came to France and then went
on to Britain to preach, later sending twelve persons under Joseph of Ari-
mathea, "his dearest friend," to convert Britain.—Smithett Lewis, op. cit., p. 3.
23. Smithett Lewis, op. cit., p. 74.
24. Ibid., p. 75.
25. John of Glastonbury, quoted in Ibid., p. 74 n. In Mallory it is Sir Galahad, not
Arthur, who is descended from Joseph.
26. Geoffrey Ashe, The Quest'for Arthur's Britain (New York, Praeger, 1969), p. 56.
Also cf. "Arthur put on a leather jerkin worthy of so great a king. On his head
he placed a golden helmet with a crest carved in the shape of a dragon; and
across his shoulders a circular shield called Pridwen, on which there was painted
a likeness of Blessed Mary, Mother of God, which forced him to be thinking
perpetually of her."— Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
(London, Penguin, 1965), p. 217.
9. Custumal of Lanfranc's and Anselm's Abbey of Bee, in Coulton, ed. op. cit.,
Vol. IV, p. 100.
10. Berthold of Regensburg (Ratisbon), Sermons (1250), in Coulton, ed., op. cit., Vol.
Ill, p. 65.
11. Thomas More, Dialogues, in Coulton, ed., op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 166-67.
12. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans, by John Payne, Vol. Ill (London,
privately printed, 1886), p. 61.
13. Petrus Cantor, Verbum Abbreviatum, in Coulton, ed., op. cit,, Vol. I, p. 32 n.
14. Raymond de Becker, The Other Face of Love (New York, Grove, 1969), p. 104.
15. Ibid., p. 106.
16. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans, by Thomas Nugent, Vol. II (New
York, Hafner, 1949), p. 60.
17. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, Tudor, n.d.), p. 717.
18. James Cleugh, Love Locked Out (New York, Crown, 1963), p. 91.
19. Ibid., pp. 91-92.
20. Bernardino of Siena, Sermons (1427), in Coulton, ed., op. cit., Vol. I, p. 229.
21. Cleugh, op. cit., p. 288.
22. Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, Vol. II (Philadelphia, Woodward,
1826), p. 79.
23. The Christian fathers, says Robert Graves, were "grateful even to [the Feminist]
Hesiod for describing Pandora as 'a beautiful evil.'"—Robert Graves, Five Pens
in Hand (Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries, 1970), p. 94.
24. Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicle of Ralph, Abbot of Coggeshall, in Coulton, ed.,
op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 29-32.
25. Cleugh, op. cit., p. 97.
26. Francis Maziere, Mysteries of Easter Island (New York, Norton, 1967), p. 30.
87. Pierre de Bourdeille, Abb£ de Brantome, The lives of Gallant Ladies (London,
Elek Books, 1961), pp. 9,13.
28. Ibid., p. 24.
29. Giovanni Boccaccio, as retold by Brant6me, op. cit., p. 429.
30. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York, Norton, 1967), p. 113.
31. Michelet, op. cit., p. x.
32. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York, Brentano's, 1920), p.
*79-
33. Roger Sherman Loom is, "Introduction," in Thomas of Britain, Tristram and
Isolt (New York, Dutton, 1967), p. xvi.
34. Johann Nider, Formicarius (1438), in Coulton, ed., op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 213-15.
35. Michelet, op. cit., p. ix.
7. Plato, Republic, in The Works of Plato, trans, by Benjamin Jowett (New York,
Tudor, n.d.), p. 182.
8. National Manpower Council, Womanpower (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1957), p. 208.
9. National Broadcasting Company, Today Show (May 30, 1968).
10. Richard L. Evans, ed., Dialogue with Erik Erikson (New York, Harper, 1967),
p. 44.
11. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (Manchester, England, Labour Press,
1896), pp. 83-84.
12. John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (London, Oxford University
Press, 1912), p. 452.
13. Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (New York, Dutton, 1941), p. 312.
14. Ibid., p. 315.
15. Plato, Critias, in The Works of Plato, trans, by Benjamin Jowett (New York,
Tudor, n.d.), pp. 381-82.
16. Sybille von Cles-Redin, The Realm of the Great Goddess (Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 53.
17. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, trans, by Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 85-86.
Index
Abelard, Peter, 272 Ancient Peoples and Places, 75
Abortion: and matriarchy, 116; right of, Ancient wisdom, 54-59
in classical Greece, 188; legal, in early Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 278^81
Rome, 199-200 Annales Medicates et Physiologique, 156
Abraham, and circumcision, 102; and Annals (Tacitus), 184, 197
matriliny, 128 Anne, Queen, 120
Adam and Eve myth, and patriarchal Anno Domini dating, origin of, 232
revolution, 142-44 Aniiuario Pontificio, 268-69
Adamnan, Saint, 221 Anthon, Charles, 189
Adams, Abigail, 304 Anthropology: and primitive family and
Adams, Henry, 248 origin of taboos, 86-88; and crime of
Adultery, under Roman law, 236 incest, 88-90; and sanctity of woman's
Aelian, 94 blood, 90-93; and physical strength
Aeneid (Virgil), 182 and sexual selection, 93-96
Aeschylus, 186 Antifeminism: of early church, 201-2,
Aethelflaed, 278-79 231; among females, 325-26. See also
Agamemnon, 186 Christianity; Patriarchal revolution;
Age of Reason, and condition of women, Paul
294 ff. Aphrodite, 191
Ages of man, 63-65 "Apollonian" man, 69
Agrest, M. M., 15 Apollonius of Tyana, 203
Agriculture, woman as inventor of, 40 Aquarian Age, women in, 327 ff.
Alalakh, 53; and matriarchal counter- Aquinas, Thomas, 238, 291
revolution, 138 Arabs, and female circumcision, 154-57
Albert of Saxe-Coburg, 312 Arcadia (Sidney), 272, 285-86
Albion, 217 Archeology: and proof of Golden Age,
Alcibiadcs, 192 66-67; and Great Goddess, 73-75; and
Alexandria, Christian pillage of library matriarchal theory, 75-76; and Catal
at, 240 Huyuk, 77-81; and ancient tombs, 81-
Alfred the Great, 220, 277-78 85
Algonquin Indians, and equiarmed cross, Arctic Athabascan, and equiarmed cross,
5» 5»
Alkim, U, Bahadir, 77, 79-80, 85 Argonauts, Jason and the, and breast
Allen, Grant, 303 fetish, 105-7
Altamira, cave paintings in, 45 Aristarchus, 56
Amazonism, birth of, 114 Aristoclea, 193
Amazons, 49 Aristophanes, 61, 190
America in Midpassage (Beard), 272 Aristotle, 57; on abortion, 188
American secretary, image of, 324 Ark, as female symbol, 112-13. See also
American Revolution, and rights of Sexual symbolism
women, 304 Aron, Robert, 67
Amphion, legend of» 43 Art: woman as creator of, 45-46; birth
Anastasius, 269 of, 73; and Great Goddess, 73-75
Anatolia, 53, 76-77; as early civilization Artemis, 191
center, 47; and origins of Mycenaeans, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, 180
178; and gynarchic civilizations, 179 Arundel, Sir John, 260
Ancient mariners, 23; and evidence of Arviragus, 233, 250-51
lost civilization, 25-29; in Thrace, 56; Arian Age, 133-35- See also Ram
in Lydia, 179. See also Atlantis; Lost Ascham, Roger, 285
civilization Ashley, Maurice, 295
Ash ton, John, 311
371
372 INDEX
Aspasia, 180, 191-93, 272 in, 128-30. See also Hebrews; Old
Astarte, 51 Testament; Paul
Astell, Mary, 294-95 Birth control: Plato on, 188; in ancient
Astronomy, ancient, 53 Rome, 199-200
Atalanta myth, 93 Black Mass, 243
Atea, 33,51,337 Black woman, and lack of identity prob-
Athene, 44, 61, 179, 337-38. See also lem, 328
Great Goddess; Zeus Blanch, Stephen, 269
Athens, overthrow of matriarchy in, 186. Blandy, Mary, 301
See also Greece Blessed Lady myth, 68-73. See also Great
Ada, 198 Goddess; Mary
Atlantis, 23; and sacred bull cult, 60. See Bloch, Raymond, 196
also Ancient mariners; Lost civilization Blood, sanctity of woman's, 90-93. See
Aubrey, John, 286 also Taboos
Augustine, Saint, 221-22, 238 Blood taboo, hymen and, 158-63
Aurelia, 198 Boadicea of Britain, 214-15
Aurelius, Marcus, 126, 236 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 261
Australia, penis mutilation in, 37-38 Bohl, F., 82
Authoress of the Odyssey, The (Butler), Book of Judges, and cruelty to women,
272-73 259
"Autochthonous" theory of local evolu- Boswell, James, 272
tion, 47 Bradford, John, 297
Ax, curved double, as sex symbol, 111. Braithwaite, Richard, 292
See also Sexual symbolism Brantome, Abbe de, 166-67, 235-36, 261-
62
Bravery, as male virtue, 321
Babylon, the Jews, and patriarchal revo- Breast fetish, 104-9. See also Fetishes
lution, 140-42 Breasted, James, 66, 125
Bacchae, The (Euripides), 38 Brehon laws, 219-22
Bachofen, J, J., 19, 33, 36, 47, 73, 75, 109, Bridget, Saint, 221
115, 118, 135-36, 148, 177, 212, 320 Brief Lives (Aubrey), 286
Bacon, Anne, 283-84 Briffault, Robert, 42, 87, 248
Bacon, Francis, 284 Britain: founding of, 54; queens of and
Bailly, Sylvain, 16, 29, 63, 86 social reform, 277-81. See also Celts;
Ballard, George, 270, 296 England
Bardashes, and North American Indians, Bronze Age, 64-65
100 Brown, Hugh, 22
Baring-Gould, Sabine, 50, 76, 270 Bruce, David, 275
Basilea, Queen, 60, 113-14 Brutus, 54-55
Bastian, Adolf, 47 Buck, Peter, 29, 51, 88, 123
Beard, Charles, 272 Buffon, Georges Louis, 163
Beard, Mary, 272 Bull: as sex symbol, 110; and patriarchal
Beardsley, Aubrey, 317 revolution, 133 ff. See also Sexual sym-
Beauvoir, Simone de, 151, 229, 318 bolism
Becket, Thomas a, 258 Bull leaping, 79
Bede, 232 Burton, Sir Richard, 154, 156-57
Burton, Robert, 147, 257
Bell, T., 109, 156, 168-70, 306-7 Business enterprises, female ownership
Benedict, Ruth, 69, 123 of, 303-4
Bennett, John, 302 Butlei, Samuel, 272
Bcrgounioux, Frederic-Marie, 83, 85
Berman, Louis, 96
Bernardino of Siena, 253, 258 Caecelia of Oxford, 303
Berosus of Babylon, 49 Caesar, Julius, 210
Bible: and origins of language, 22; and Cain and Abel myth, and patriarchal
beginnings of civilized art, 43; matriliny revolution, 135-37
Index «*§ 573
Creation, earliest mythical accounts of, Druids, origin of, 48-49; and sacred bull
33 ff. See also Enuma Elish cult, 61
Crescent, as sex symbol, 110-11. See also Dudley, G. R., 214
Sexual symbolism Du Guesclin, Bertrand, 273
Crete: and sacred bull cult, 60; suprem- Duran, James, 302
acy of women in, 177; grandeur of Durant, Will and Mary, 236, 239
civilization in, 183
Critias (Plato), 28-29, 79, 338
Cro-Magnon man, 71 Ea, 33
Cuchulain, 224 Earth in Upheaval (Velikovsky), 136
Curtis, Edmund, 221 Ecclesiastical History (Mosheim), 269-70
Curtius, Ernst, 122 Eclogues (Virgil), 65
Custwnal, 255 Education, for women, 332; in ancient
Cyrus the Great, 213-14 Rome, 199; in Celtic civilization, 221;
in sixteenth century, 283 ff.
Daly, Mary, 115 Edward, the Black Prince, 274-76
Dana, 217-18 Edward III, 273, 275-77
Dante, 248 Edward VI, 284
Danviers, Elizabeth, 285 Effeminacy, and priesthood, 99-101
Darwin, Charles, 19 Egypt: mythology and phallus worship
Davenport, John, 154-55, 17°~71 in, 97-98; and circumcision, 102, 154-
David, King, 122 55; as land of stereotyped matriarchy,
Deborah, and Biblical matriliny, 129 109, 112; matriliny in, 124-25; matri-
Decameron (Boccoccio), 256 archal counterrevolution in, 138-39
Decretum (Gratian), 252 Eighteenth century, and condition of
De Defecter Oraculorum (Plutarch), 224 women, 294 ff.
Defloration, practice of deliberate, 158- Eisler, Robert, 119/136-37, 159, 162
63 Elizabeth, Queen, 120, 285
Democracy, in matriarchal societies, 116 Ellis, Havelock, 300, 316
Demosthenes, 130 Elmham, Thomas, 269
DeVore, Irvcn, 41 Embrun, France, phallus worship in, 99
Diana, 54 Emery, Lucillius Alonzo, 310
Dichtire, 224 Emile (Rousseau), 34, 139, 297-98
Dickens, Charles, 274 Emma (Austen), 309
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiq- Emotional strength, superiority of wom-
uities, A, 189 an's, 319-20
"Diffusionist" theory of evolution, 47- Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 76
48 England: Phillipa and wool industry,
Dillon, Myles, 206-7, 216 274; witch hunts in, 287-88. See also
Dingwall, Eric, 163, 270 Britain; Celts
Diotima, 193 En Italie (Fleury), 166
Division of labor, prehistoric, 40 Enuma Elish, and Genesis, 141-42
Divorce: right to unilateral in Greece, Ephesians, and cruelty to women, 259
188; in Roman Empire, 201; Celtic, Epictetus, 97
220 Epicurus, 56, 192 < '
Dodds, E. R., 59 Epton, Nina, 311
Domestic violence, 252 ff, Equiarmed cross. See Celtic cross
Domna, Julia, 203 Erasmus, Desiderius, 283; and education
Donaldson, P., 201 for women, 285
Dorians, 64-65; and Zeus and Athene Erikson, Erik, 149
myth, 144-47; conquest, and overthrow Erinna, 193
of Greek matriarchy, 178, 187 Erinyes, 186
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 312 Eros, 191
Droit du seigneur, 160-61 Etruria, reverence for women in, 83
Druidism, as common religion of archaic Etruscan civilization, 183-84; condition
civilizations, 48 of women in, 194-^97
Index «•§ 375
Polonus, Martinus, 269 Reik, Theodor, 38, 67, 119, 141-42, 151,
Polybius, 122
Polyhistor, 49 Religious customs, Celtic, 212
Polynesians, matriliny among, 122-23 Reproductive role, female, and servitude,
Pope, Alexander, 76, 296 33O
Porphyry, 58 Republic (Plato), 28, 191
Poseidon, 51, 60 Reynolds, Myra, 291, 296
Potnia, 51, 179 Rhys, John, 48
Powell, T. G. F., 84-85 Richards, J., 293
Powell, Terence, 26, 64, 206, 217, 219, Rights and privileges, of Grecian women,
230 187-88
Powell, Thomas, 291 Robert of Gloucester, 280
Powys, John Cowper, 321 Rohde, Erwin, 76
Pre-Christian women, in Celtic-Ionian Rome: male circumcision in, 101; tribes
world, 173 ff.; the pre-Hellenes, 177 ft.; and female leadership, 126; and burial
in Greece and Italy, 186 ff. of Etruscan heritage, 183; women of,
Predestination, and women, 289 197-205; and persecution of Christians,
Pre-Hellenic women, 177 ff. 231; Constantine's march on, 234
President's Commission on the Status of Romulus and Remus, and founding of
Women, 315, 325 Rome, 184-85
Priesthood, and castration, 99-101 Room of One's Own, A (Woolf), 295
Primordial sexual envy, 39 Roosevelt, Franklin, as "mama's boy,"
Proba, Marda, 220, 277 117
Property rights, patriarchal peoples and, Roper, Margaret, 284-85
n 6; in classical Greece, 188; and Celts, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 21, 34, 139, 239,
219 243' 255.297-98
Prostitution, as nineteenth-century alter- Royall, Ann, 307-9
native to marriage, 306-9 Rufus, Gaius Musonius, 201
Protestant Reformation, and condition Russell, Bertrand, 316
of women, 282 ff.
Proverbs, Book of, and cruelty to wom- Sackville-West, Victoria, 127,189
en, 259 Sacred bull cult, 59-62. See also Ram;
Puritanism, and condition of women, Sexual symbolism
241, 286-93 Sagan, Carl, 22
Putnam, Emily James, 186, 272 Salic law, matriliny and, 126-27
Pythagoras, 22, 56-58, 192 Sanger, Margaret, 149, 252, 262
Sappho, 193
Queens, natural superiority of, 119-21 Satires (Horace), 102
Sautuola, Marcelino de, 46
Quinta, Claudia, 126, 184
Savill, Agnes, 173
Saxony, Christian, law and cruelty to
Rais, Gilles de, 266 women in, 253
Ralph of Coggeshall, 259 School of Philosophy at Alexandria,
Ram, as symbol of patriarchy: Taurian pillaging of, 240
and Aryan Ages, 133-35; C a i n an( * Schott, Joseph, 322
Abel, 135-37; matriarchal counterrev- Schure", £douard, 143, 193
olution, 137-40; Babylon and the Jews, Scientific knowledge, ancient, 55-57
140-42; Adam and Eve myth, 142-44; Scotus, Marianus, 269
Zeus and Athene myth, 144-47. See Secretary, image of American female, 324
also Sexual symbolism Seeck, Otto, 248
Rama, and Indian patriarchy, 134, 139 Seltman, Charles, 36, 46,177
Ramayana, 139 Semiramis, 43
Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare), 194 Seneca, 265
Rawlinson, George, 113, 125 Serjeant, William, 310
Reason in History (Hegel), 21 Seven Sages, 57-58
Reflections on Marriage (Astell), 294-95 Severus, Alexander, 204-5
Index 381
Sex, and Puritanism, 288-89 epics, 43-44; myth, 49; astronomy, 53;
Sex customs, primitive, 37-38 and Celtic cross, 48-53
Sex myths, female, 317 Sun-centered universe, theory of, 56-57
Sexual envy, 150-53 Swift, Jonathan, 295
Sexual guilt, rise of, 162 Swift, Stella, 295
Sexual revolution: the need to punish, Symonds, A. J., 146, 190-91
148-50; penis envy vs. womb envy, Symposium (Plato), 34
150-53; female circumcision, 153-57. Synesius of Cyrene, 240
See also Patriarchal revolution
Sexual sadism, in patriarchal system, Tabiti, 222
148 ff. Taboo of Virginity, The (Freud), 161
Sexual selection, by women, 93-96 Taboos, sexual, 86 ff., 158-63
Sexual symbolism, 109-14 Tacitus, 48, 94, 184, 197, 206, 210-12, 2l6,
Shakespeare, William, 194 231
Shifting of the poles, theory of, 22 Tagtug and Dilmun epic, 43-44
Shubad, tomb of, 81-82 Tailtean games, 223
Siculus, Diodorus, 60, 123 Tau, as female symbol, 110, See also
Sidney, Mary, 272, 285-86 Sexual symbolism
Sidney, Philip, 272, 285-86 Taurian Age, 133-35
Silver Age, 64 Teutons, 207
Silvia, Rhea, 121-22; and founding of Thales, 58
Rome, 184-85 Theano, 192-93
Simmel, Georg, 149 Thebaud, August, 66
Sioux Indians, and equiarmed cross, 51 Thecla, 273
Sister priority, 127 Themis (Harrison), 245
Sister worship, 88-89 Theoclea, 192-93
Siva, 33 Thomas, Saint, 249
Sixteenth century, and rebirth of femi« Thomas, Henry, 239
nine intellectualism, 283 ff. Thrace, 53; and lost civilization 49, 54-
Skinner, John O., 322 59
Smith, G. Eliot, 66 Tiamat, 33, 43, 49 ff., 60, 134-35, 14^
Smith, Margaret Chase, 323 337. See also Great Goddess
Smith, W. R., 51 Tibet, and Celtic cross, 51-52
Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 139 Timaeus (Plato), 28
Social reform, women and, 277-81, See Timothy, Book of, and cruelty to
also Royall, Ann women, 259
Socrates, 191-92 Tembaugh, Clyde, 53
Song of Deborah, 129 Tomyris, 213-14
Sorensen, Theodore, 325 Torah, as original Judaic goddess, 67
Sorokin, Pitirim, 336-38 Torques, in Celtic graves, 84-85
Sparta, freedom of women in, 192-93 Toynbee, Arnold, 214
Spengler, Oswald, 69 Tracy, Martha, 301
Sphinx, as female symbol, 113-14. See Travels in Abyssinia, 154
also Sexual symbolism Treatise on the Lord's Prayer (Erasmus),
Spinsterhood, as nineteenth-century al- 285
ternative to marriage, 309-10 Tuatha De Danann, 48, 217-18
Stephen, Saint, 249 Tubal-Cain, 43
Stendhal, 319, 321; on female geniuses, Tullia, 195
333 Tylor, E. B., 90, 122
Stern, Curt, 35
Stone, J. F. S., 83 Uallach, Lady, 221
Stow, John, 217-18, 233 Unilateral divorce, right to, in classical
Strabo, 102, 105, 123-24, 160,181 Greece, 188
Strickland, Agnes, 214, 273, 277, 280 Unwed mothers, and nineteenth-century
Study of History, A (Toynbee), 271 prostitution, 306-9
Sumerians: origins and language, 22; Urgulania, 197
INDEX