The Original Sin of Patriarchy

The Birth-Giving Father

Image by Dreamstime

The other day, I was reading an essay that made it sound like the patriarchal control of women went all the way back through eternity, as in, men have always been terrible, aggressive, perpetrators of rape culture. Hairy cavemen. 99.9% of the essay was brilliant and supportive of the feminine, and that man is beautiful. And I love that, but even he could not pull out of the orbit of our men-are-just-bad mythology.

Men have not always been horrible. I mean, when on this timeline did history start? And are we going sideways, too? History’s not a straight line, regardless of how many timelines you had to color in middle school. And there isn’t only one culture: Ours. Not even today, at the apex of colonialism’s damage.

And then yesterday, I read a post by a man with three letters after his name, in philosophy, not any form of feminist theory or gender studies, who undertook to ‘splain that misogyny isn’t the problem we think it is. That’s the objectification of women. Then he spilled many words painstakingly (like we were toddlers), showing that objectification leads to misogyny rather than recognizing it’s a chicken or egg thing. Has he ever read a book on feminist theory, or only written one? Sigh. Because he was well-meaning, I was fine moving on from that until… until he said: “Human society is inherently patriarchal. It always has been.”

Well. For a mythologist, them’s fightin’ words.

Maybe men have been terrible throughout the history of father religions, but there were, and are still, matrilinieal, matrilocal, and matrifocal cultures, and men in those cultures support and respect women, so no. Men aren’t always the terrible, violent rapists we find in Western culture. Nothing natural about it. It’s acculturation. Period. There are around 160 matrilineal cultures on earth right now, so the biological argument: That’s just the way men are… does not hold. And before colonization, there were many, many more. And those cultures count.

It’s only the way men are in father-cultures. And even here, some men are beautiful.

Then I read, Eve Was Framed by Betsy Chasse, and I was so grateful, a bell chimed in my soul. Ding, ding, ding. It trined (in the astrological sense) with all the research on Gnostic creation mythology I’m doing for my second novel, which I’m eyeballs deep into right now.

Can you imagine a Gnostic woman accused of witchcraft during the Hartford Hysteria about 40 years before Salem? I can. And do. I like to say the best magical realism starts with an improbable premise that becomes possible and then morphs into a mirror of the problems we are facing today. In this case, the way we trend toward judicial murder without the separation of church and state.

Anyway, that’s the goal. The narrator of this drama is Norea, who in Gnosticism is the daughter of Eve, Mother of the Living (because she “gave life” to Adam by awakening his soul). She is the daughter of Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who is the daughter of Barbelo, the Womb of Everything. Now, that’s a lineage, and because of it, Eve is purity itself, and not created out of some rib. Even in the Bible, there are two stories of how Eve came to be. That’s what happens when you overlay new stories on top of older ones. Inconsistencies. They just didn’t have Track Revisions back then.

Here’s why the Christians who won the war for the religious imagination went on a killing spree of the Gnostics et al and burned their books. In Gnostic Christian mythology, Eve is raped by the false god who runs this earth. They call him the Ruler. He hates Eve’s purity and wants to defile her. We all know how rape isn’t about sex. It’s really about power, especially over innocence, so that tracks. As a result of this rape, Eve conceived the twins, Cain and Abel, and that’s how we get the races of rulers (aka billionaires, shareholders, politicians, and their assorted minions) who rule us today, and the whole f*cked world we live in.

But the twist? Eve was so pure that she could not be defiled by his act. Instead, the Ruler was. That boomerang effect should be common sense. I only wish ordinary women could keep their souls intact, and the rapist would be defiled. But we live in the world of the Ruler, the Upsidedown, and unfortunately, 98% of the time, the rapist goes free, and the woman embarks on the decades-long journey of healing her soul.

After Cain and Abel, Eve went on to conceive a son, Seth, and a daughter, Norea, through loving intimacy with Adam. Anyway, it just tickles me that Eve and Adam had a daughter, and that’s why I chose her as my narrator.

In those early centuries AD, there were over 200 Christianities, with wildly different mythologies, before the one we have today gained the power to kill off competitors by accusing them of heresy (believing the wrong story). Can you imagine being put to death over your mythology? I can, and as a heretical writer, I do, imagine it… all the time.

How It All Started (according to me)

The founding fathers of our patriarchal religions wanted to convince people that the masculine was the creator of life. I think of them as the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross. They had to overcome an objection so foundational, so simple, so clear, and obvious that the average mark was immune: But life comes through the mother.

How could a Father become the Creator of Life, while women all around you are performing the real-life miracle of giving birth? It’s pretty obvious who does the work of creation - the gestation and travail. It’s a miracle every time. That’s why you see so many womb-tombs in pre-patriarchal cultures. They recognized that the earth is our mother (God), and when someone died, they were curled into the fetal position and reinserted into her womb in order to be reborn. It just makes logical sense. And these mounds and earthworks are enormous. People had more time when they weren’t slaving away to hold off the very real risk of their children’s starvation or lack of medical insurance for the Rulers, I mean, shareholders.

For example, the Newark Earthworks here in the U.S., once a vast cauldron of matrifocal cultures, encompasses about 4.7 miles, and Cahokia in Illinois covers 2k acres, to name just two. There are many mounds and earthworks all over the world, but I like to focus on North America, my motherland. From South America to Canada, that’s what she was before the colonizers came. Mother.

People returned to the womb of the mother after they died, because obviously, that’s where life comes from, and if you want to live on (and we all do), well, you have to return to the womb - personally and cosmically. It just makes sense. Some indigenous cultures even claim in their creation myths that people lived underground before they were born into the light of the upper world. Gestation mythology. I love that.

So, say you’re a mythological grift salesman in a matri-focal egalitarian culture where women are revered as the givers of life, and people, after they die, are buried in an earthwomb in the fetal position, because the Earth is our mother, and if you want to be reborn into this world or another, you have to be inside the womb of God for that to happen. Let’s say the landscape is dotted with earthworks, burial mounds, and passage tombs that recreate the vaginal path to the uterus. That’s just how people think.

If you want to capture the religious imagination, say to gain power, you would need a creation myth that runs counter to Nature. How exactly did humanity begin if we weren’t… born? How does a Father become the creator of the world, of all of life, and the destination for the afterlife in one coherent story?

Pretzel Logic: Maleness gives birth.

The Birth-Giving Male is the fundamental flaw, the original sin, if you will, of a patriarchal worldview.

I’m assuming we all know the Official Story: Eve Bit the Apple. So I’ll skip recounting that here. But I will say, that with that story as our guiding compass, we left Boston for sunny Italy and ended up in some Cold War Eastern European country we’d never heard of.

Here’s the trouble with violence as the solution to patriarchal dissent. You can never get them all. There are Gnostics to this day. And someone is sure to take a few of those damned heretical books like The Gospel of Mary, or The Gospel of Thomas, or The Aprocraphon of John, or The Thought of Norea, and seal them in a clay jar, and bury them somewhere, only for them to be unearthed centuries later.

You simply can never get them all. It’s like the first time a sitting Pope called for a crusade against his own people, the Albigensian Crusade, which was designed to do away with the Cathars (who were Gnostic Christians), but some of them ran to the Alps to hide. You just can never get them all. And then they have children, and the whole damn thing starts over. Ad nauseam.

Of course, there were splits and factions within Christianity after the Official Story of the One God being a Father was politically canonized, giving us the 47 thousand or so sects there are now, plus the other two branches of the Abrahamic religions that cover much, but not all, of the earth today. All those competing father-god stories. Honestly, it reminds me of the Tower of Babel.

But those lovely Gnostics wanted to keep the divine feminine and just add an overarching father god, a kind of having-my-cake-and-eating-it-too, that I’m always interested in. Gnostic creation mythology is instructive because you can still smell the mental wood burning as they placed a Christian overlay on what came before, because you know Christianity didn’t start the world, or even restart time, as they tried to have you believe with their calendars (I could write a whole post about calendars) and the burning of whole libraries to the point where we only have about 1% of the literary output of the ancient world. There’s method in that madness.

Like all Christians, Gnostics promoted the idea that the originator of life was a Father, and that this world is BAD or FALLEN, because of a woman. Well, not exactly a woman. A female divinity, Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who became known as the “Mother of the Mistake” - the world around you being the MISTAKE. Of course, that begs the question: Since she was Divine Wisdom, how could she have done something so profoundly stupid?

The answer, of course, is the same for every woman. Disobedience. And obviously, she wasn’t wise enough, being female and all, to understand (or care about) the real-world consequences of her willfulness. That’s a powerful lot of harm heaped upon her head, and every bit as bad as what Eve did, or Lilith, or even Pandora, for that matter, in other patriarchal creation mythologies.

So, here’s the terrible thing Sophia did that caused our FALLEN world of evil, according to the Gnostics: the reason everything is so BAD. She had a baby on her own without a partner or The Father’s permission. That’s the unforgivable sin we are all still paying for to this day. She had a baby without patriarchal permission. And honestly, His rage over that makes more sense than the story that she only bit an apple.

The fault, my dear Brutus, is in her lineage. Sophia’s mother, Barbelo, was a divinity who could also just give birth willy-nilly, without a father. There’s even a word for that in Greek: parthenogenesis, because the feminine gods created that way all the time before patriarchy. What witchcraft is that? The divine feminine can just desire a thing, and it is conceived? Oh, that terrible, terrible word: desire! According to some patriarchs, desire is the root of all evil and suffering. I mean… women are made of desire. Plus, they have desire, and they cause desire. That’s a trifecta of BAD. You probably shouldn’t touch a woman, or look upon her, in case it’s contagious.

In the Gnostic creation myth, Sophia’s mother, Barbelo, is the deep, deep waters of consciousness, called the Womb of Everything. From that, you’d think she was the creator of everything simply because she gestated everything, and then everything came out of her, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Don’t get ahead of the story.

Barbelo, mother of Divine Wisdom (aka Sophia), is the Androgenous Name (here, Name means divinity), complete and perfect, described as being the “full power of both genders.” Once you introduce The Father into the story, They were demoted from being the self-contained Power of Creation to being the Father’s Mirror Image, a mere reflection of Him.

He male-gazes upon her and sees Himself reflected in the light of Barbelo’s oceanic surface. Only that. Didn’t see Them at all, didn’t see beyond the surface. Didn’t, in fact, see anything but Himself. Typical. To His mind, that makes Barbelo no more than a mirror.

But of course, Barbelo is much more than His reflection. They aren’t reduced at all, just because the Father can’t see beyond surfaces. Plus, Barbelo existed already, or there wouldn’t have been anything to gaze upon, so He didn’t create Them. Plus, They are not inert. No. The waters are alive. They are consciousness itself, the deep, creative ocean from which all of life begins. Science agrees with that.

That poor, mistaken Father. Barbelo didn’t come alive because the Father gazed upon her. We never do. I’m sorry, but it reminds me of the magical thinking my public school students were often guilty of: assuming I lived in a closet in my classroom. If they saw me at, say, Target, they were genuinely stunned. Wait. Cognitive dissonance. A kind of peek-a-boo caused by a lingering developmental stage: thinking that you are the center of everything. If I can’t see you, you don’t exist.

Before all the FALLEN mythologies corrupted this world with patriarchy, Barbelo gave birth to Sophia, and she gave birth to the world, which can’t be a MISTAKE, or BAD, because Sophia is Divine Wisdom. Case closed.

The only mistake here is the idea that God is a birth-giving male, through His Word, or His Thought, or His Gaze, or whatever. You know: that this world is some kind of disembodied mind, I-am-ing and there-for-ing, because He is thinking. But there is no such thing as a birth-giving male, no matter how many times they try to tell you that Zeus gave birth to Athena through his head.

BTW, there is substantial archeological evidence that Athena is a pre-Hellenistic deity, older than Zeus. That’s right. He couldn’t have given birth to her. The same holds true for Dionysus, the prototype for Jesus (that’s another whole essay), who existed before Zeus carved a womb into his thigh so he could gestate him. Pre-Hellenistic. Older than patriarchy, those old usurpers.

Lots of wool has been pulled over lots of eyes, and that’s the Original Sin of Patriarchy, the idea that a Father god created the world and then a female ruined it by giving birth without permission, or eating an apple, or whatever form of disobedience she came up with to resist the patriarchal takeover of the religious imagination.

Too bad her rebelliousness didn’t work. Just look at the state of the world. BAD. All this MISTAKEN belief in Dominionism is killing us. It’s enough to make me think it’s all some terrible form of projection. Shadow work.

But, of all the Christians, I like the Gnostics best. Their creation myth kinda works as a metaphor, the actual job of mythology.

You can see it superimposed on our current political situation. The Ruler, Yaldabaoth, has seven archons under him; they have 12 authorities, plus 49 more androgenous rulers, and 365 demons, one for each day. The whole project is to keep us trapped in materiality (you know, consuming), keep us from seeing the truth of love and all the aspects of the divine. Community, not a dominance Ponzi scheme. Why do Rulers want this? Power, of course. That’s pretty much where we live. The other detail I just love is that the Ruler of this world, Yaldaboath, is blind. That’s just perfect.

Gnostics say that Rulers work night and day to keep you so addicted to materiality that you forget your true nature. They say that because the physical world is BAD, you have to transcend the whole stinking mess to get out - and Rulers won’t let you go. The idea, if you are a Gnostic, is to correct your perception so you can know who you really are as a spiritual being rather than the f’ed up material being you think you are. They call that “being perfected.”

I love that, as I’ve spent so much of my life in meditation, silent retreats, plant medicine retreats, and, recently, a total darkness retreat, so I could realize just that. See, I was wounded so badly by the patriarchal worldview that it took 40 years to heal. Here I am now, though. Free.

And in the end of all that searching, I didn’t transcend this BAD world at all. Nope, that’s backward. Instead, I fell in LOVE with it, which is why I could never really be a Gnostic, even though I think they got so many things right. They got the big one wrong. Here’s where we disagree.

The creator of the universe is not a Father, could never be. The only BAD thing is what people have done to our world through the belief systems that took our Mother out of it. You know, patriarchal domination and all the evils that came from it: war, slavery, colonization, genocide, and now climate collapse, to name but a few.

You can see all that has befallen the world since the patriarchal Rulers took charge, the way their god really is Yaldabaoth, the Blind. That’s not just BAD, it beggars belief. Sophia was right to resist, flat out disobey, and so must we all

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I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

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